Deeply Problematic

Stalking is Hilarious on Parks and Recreation

2011-03-09T11:40:00.001-05:00

Trigger warning for description of intrusive, stalking, and generally disrespectful behavior.

Andy Dwyer stands naked with a bouquet of yellow flowers in Ann Perkins' beige-toned room, looking to the right. Ann's bedroom is visible to his right, and bookcases are on both sides of him.

One of many qualities I love about Parks and Recreation is its complete lack of rape jokes. It's a safe space from the kinds of quips about sexual assault that pepper other favorites of mine, 30 Rock and The Office. Though Aziz Ansari has been known to tell a rape joke or two in his solo act, Tom Haverford's sleaziness is mostly benign. Sex is not made into a big production, and consensuality is an assumed responsibility of all the characters.

But not all of performances of romance on Parks and Rec are consensual; a major second-season plotline showed Andy Dwyer intruding on Ann Perkins in deeply personal and problematic ways. Andy's stalking, harassment, and unwelcome attention directed at an ex are not taken seriously, as a thing that hurts people, particularly women. After Ann dumped him and kicked him out of her house for taking advantage of her, he did not find another place to live and respect her distance. No, he persisted in bugging and (by some definitions) stalking her: living outside her house in a pit, showing up naked at her house, and harassing her and her new boyfriend.

I hate to write this, because I love Andy. I think that Chris Pratt may actually be the funniest person on the show; his line readings and facial expressions never fail to crack me up. He is generally a very sweet and well-meaning character, and I like that someone who is explicitly not traditionally smart is shown to be of great value. I love the growth of consideration in his character. I love him and April. I just love him.*
*I did not love the cissexist gag with him in the first episode of this season, but I will talk about that a little later.

But I do not love the way that he treats Ann and her new boyfriend Mark after she dumps him, nor do I love the way that the show frames his actions as cute, affectionate, and distinctly nonthreatening. Andy's continued harassment and monitoring of Ann is not violent, but a big man following someone around and refusing to leave a former partner in peace carries the baggage of domestic violence; just because Andy is a "nice guy" does not mean that he cannot be violent. This refusal to take Andy's creepy and unwanted attention as a seriously flawed pattern of entitled behavior that goes beyond his goofy, ditzy personality reflects a cultural desire to re-frame a scary and dangerous pattern of behavior disproportionately targeted at women as an affectionate and romantic way of showing concern.

Stalking and other harassment through unwanted contact is not a joke only in Parks and Rec; indeed, stalking is rarely taken as seriously as it actually is. Stalking is actually a criminal offense that describes a campaign of fear, of forced unwanted contact or constant watching of someone's activities. It is a very real violation of a person's sense of safety and privacy, and it happens to at least eight percent of all women in the US - but it's vastly underreported. It is not a cute thing to do, and it is not something that everyone participates in, but you wouldn't know that from stalking behavior's defanging in online culture and romanticizing in popular media from Say Anything to Twilight. This form of abuse is, like many other, framed as either anonymous online attention or uptight bitches rejecting the honest appreciation of men.

Ann's concerns about Andy are frequently delegitimized. In the episode "Beauty Pageant", where Ann discovers Andy's home in the pit right outside her house* with her new boyfriend Mark Brandanowitz, he not only laughs it off, he informs her that he invaded her privacy by peeking in her medicine cabinet, and then pressures her to invite Andy into her home to share dinner. This is framed as Mark showing compassion for Andy rather than completely disregarding Ann's feelings, and it's typical of the tone of that arc; another episode, Kaboom, features Andy misunderstanding a text from Ann and showing up naked at her house - because flashing unfriendly ex-girlfriends is totally charming and harmless.
*This storyline also has some classism issues, given that homelessness is treated as a joke.

Andy's harassment of Ann continues after he moves out of the pit and gets a job at City Hall, and coincides with Tom Haverford's ongoing and frequently rejected advances. Andy begins to pester not just Ann but her new boyfriend Mark in an obnoxious fashion; trying to "trick" her into dating him by winning a game of pool against Mark or to humiliate him by mentioning STI medication that he pretends Mark requested from the shoeshine stand (absurd but also ableist). Eventually, after a few talking-tos from Mark, he desists and refocuses his attention on April, whom he has treated with a great deal of respect and deference. Only when a man becomes involved in and begins protesting this unwanted attention does Andy stop; he sees no reason to desist in harassing Ann before Mark steps in. Ann, the target of this unwanted attention, goes completely unheard by her friends unless she is backed up by a man. She even responds to his advances belatedly, kissing him at the end of the season. In this way, Parks and Rec validates his unwanted attention and makes it seem like it was actually wanted after all.

The show is not exactly endorsing Andy's actions; by my standards of critical humor, some instances of this pass. Mark occasionally recognizes his actions as bad, but they are only bad insofar as they are an annoyance to him. Ann's reactions to Andy, though, are never validated; they are framed as unreasonable or ignored by characters who are not Andy. Occasionally Leslie expresses shock or mild concern, but being a rather self-centered character, Ms. Knope usually then turns the conversation back to herself - she doesn't really hear Ann's concerns when she hires Andy for a dinner party. Other jokes make it clear that Andy is being a doofus, thought they do not meet my critical standards linked above; in "Beauty Pageant", he says that "there's all kind of creepy people in this neighborhood"; though his action is not reinforced by others as uncool, it's still a tacit recognition of his unsavory behavior.

However, I don't find mild and barely-expressed disapproval to be quite enough in this case. This joke runs throughout most of the (stellar) second season, and it is almost never taken seriously. When Leslie Knope engages in her own creepy and intrusive behavior by photographing and surveilling Mark and Ann on a date, she comes close to facing criminal charges, and she never does it again. But unlike Leslie, Andy never faces any kind of real critique or danger because of his actions. No one calls him out other than Ann, and no one backs her up when she calls him out.

No, Andy's entitled attitude towards Ann is worse than Parks and Rec wants it to be. His pattern of behavior reaffirms the often-romanticized image of a nice guy as one who doesn't respect clearly set boundaries; Andy's stalking is seen as affection rather than menace, as stupidity rather than disrespect. It's shown as annoying and silly and goofy, and that does not reflect Andy's serious violations against a woman he professes to care about. It's not rape, but it's part of the conditioning that creates rape culture - it suggests that women should see continued harassment and monitoring from ex-lovers as romantic rather than threatening, and that these actions are nothing to get really concerned about.

One or two of these jokes would not have phased me much, particularly given my liking for Andy. I would take it as more reflective of his benign and adolescent inconsideration than a reflection of how society frames unwanted contact from former romantic partners. As individual jokes, they suggest the growth of a stunted man stumbling on his way to some form of maturity. But taken as a pattern of unwelcome behavior that strongly resembles stalking, it looks like a man threatening his ex-lover to achieve that growth. Andy's behavior is not precisely evil, but the show's affectionate attitude towards the unwanted contact he forces on Ann and its framing of his behavior as endearing seems entirely too light an approach to a subject as fearsome, cruel and misogynist in practice as stalking.

I am thankful that Parks and Recreation has left this story behind in its third season, and I hope that this framing does not return. But this will always be a stain on Andy's character for me: a reminder that the nicest of guys can turn menacing on a dime, and a sign that even my favorite shows will trivialize serious issues and participate in a culture that denies women agency and privacy.

Hermione Granger and the Failures of Feminism

2011-03-01T17:03:00.000-05:00

Hermione Granger is JK Rowling's feminist presence in the Harry Potter series, and she is a triumph. Hermione is a wonderful feminist character: smarter than anyone, brave and shrewd and assertive and just. As a Muggle-born witch, Hermione faces marginalization because of her birth and sex, but her concern about oppression extends beyond her own experience. Chally Kacelnik at Bitch wrote that Hermione "cares about social justice, as particularly embodied in her commitment to house elf rights where most of the wizarding world wouldn’t think twice about their status".

But Hermione is not just a reflection of the wonderful things about feminism. In her work on behalf of the equality of magical people, Hermione often flaunts her human privilege and unintentionally enforces the oppression of the house-elves, giants, goblins, trolls, and centaurs she claims to support. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in particular, Hermione ignores or minimizes house-elf and non-human magical beings' opinions and autonomy, though she claims to have their best interest at heart. With SPEW, Hermione participates in the grand feminist tradition of devaluing, disregarding and silencing oppressed classes while centering herself and her opinions on their marginalization.

Hermione is not wrong to advocate for the rights of house-elves. Her interest in their oppression was ignited when she saw high-ranking Ministry official Bartholomew Crouch abusing his house-elf, Winky, at the Quidditch World Cup. Hermione identified this particular injustice while she was herself vulnerable to the rioting of the Death Eaters. On page 139 of Goblet of Fire, in response to Barty Crouch's dismissal of Winky, Hermione said: "The way they were treating her!... Mr. Diggory, calling her "elf" all the time … it was like she wasn't even human!" Though her outburst is brave, there is still an exercise of privilege here; she makes humanity the norm and standard for deserving fair treatment. However, Hermione does correctly identify the endorsement of abuse and mistreatment of house elves from magical humans who thought that it was their right to mistreat and neglect elves; she thought outside herself in a situation where she was personally in great danger. This is a just and good impulse delivered, as with many of her well-intentioned acts, without a whole lot of inconsideration and privilege.

Speaking out against her peers' devaluation of house-elves is a brave move befitting the best parts of Hermione's character. Hermione faces a lot of discrimination and danger because of her marginalization as a Muggle-born and a woman (though the latter is played down in the magical world, as I hope to discuss in the future) in the series. But in forming SPEW, she uses her oppression as license to act as an authority, as a leader for folks who experience oppression she did not. This is a grave mistake common to people of privilege in social justice movements: she centers and prioritizes her skewed and unsuitable vision of what house-elf protection means over the concerns of house-elves; in return, the elves reject her leadership and seek their own glory.

The formation of SPEW in Goblet of Fire is rotten at its core because it is led by a witch rather than an elf. A movement for the advancement of an oppressed class must be centered on and led by members of the oppressed class. Supporters can play a helpful and even vital role, but as with Hermione here, they can also be hurtful. Hermione fails to understand that as an ally, she must remain in a supportive role, promoting their protection and welfare without dominating the conversation. Though it is repeatedly demonstrated that house-elves have autonomy to an extent and have powerful magic of their own, Hermione considers them lesser creatures who need protection. When Ron compares the discrimination against trolls to that against elves in book four, she says that “goblins don't need protection”. This is a condescending and presumptuous idea that reflects her own biases and her own assumptions about the powers and possibilities of a race of creatures she doesn't bother to credit.

When Hermione formed SPEW, she crossed a boundary many feminists (including myself) find themselves on the wrong side of. Hermione goes from defending an oppressed class to appropriating their struggle. She goes from promoting the worth of Winky and Dobby to ignoring the wishes of the house-elves at Hogwarts. While trying to advocate for the equal rights and fair treatment of house-elves, she engages in rhetoric and behavior that devalued their autonomy and existence.

Had Dobby started SPEW and Hermione supported it, this would not be a problem - but Dobby's voice and contributions seem to matter little to Hermione except as an example of how some elves do want freedom. She devalues his often-successful support of Harry by saying that “Dobby's plans aren't always that safe” on page 388 of book five, attributing a human error of Lockheart's to Dobby. Her devaluation of Dobby, the only elf who actually wants what she seeks, is reflective of her erasure of the wishes and words of all house-elves.

But SPEW in and of itself is downright harmless when compared with Hermione's malicious actions towards house-elves in the name of their protection in Order of the Phoenix. In this book, Hermione finds that house-elves do not regard her as their glorious liberator witch, better than all the other witches. Dobby and many other house-elves directly tell her in books four and five that they do not want or need her help, saying “they do not care for clothes” on page 385 of book five. They could care less about her vision of their liberation; they are happy where they are, in a place where they feel safe and where their work is appreciated, where they do work they enjoy.

When Hermione realizes that house-elves are not sufficiently appreciating and participating in the movement she so helpfully designed for them*, she decides to remove them from their homes and employment by force. In the HP universe, house-elves are set free when they are given clothes. So, Hermione decides to take up knitting so that house-elves can be freed, by her ignorant definition. Hermione's past-time - her hobby - is trying to eject house-elves from their lives against their consent.The house-elves roundly reject this; those who find her clothes refuse to accept her direction of their life and simply avoid Gryffindor castle. Once again Dobby proves a knowledgeable and enthusiastic foil to Hermione's plans, even as she's trying to make him her justification. Dobby tells Ron and Harry, “[other house-elves] find them insulting” on page 385 of book five, but he is happy to take the clothes he loves for himself, having already gotten his freedom and needing no help from some human girl. This complete erasure of the explicitly expressed wishes of the house-elves is the most striking and most hateful example of Hermione's bossy nature; the assertiveness that serves her so well throughout the series she uses here to violate the safe space of the creatures who have done nothing but support her.

*Big sarcasm here.

House-elves - who want to work for no pay and at time desire enslavement - are not parallel to actual people who experience real oppression. House-elves are a problematic metaphor for actual oppressed people because the eagerness of the house-elf to be servile robs actual people of their very real agency. Furthermore, the larger spectrum of non-human beings are often used as points at which to explore oppression. Rowling also examines privilege through magical humans, obviously, but her more nuanced exploration of inequality is often focused on non-humans: this is rather dehumanizing to the actual people who experience the exploitation and discrimination she metaphorically describes. While goblins and giants push back actively against human oppression and privilege, Rowling's focus on house-elves creates a straw oppression that adds depth to Hermione without raising too many difficult questions about the many different forms oppression can take.*

*This is a bigger issue than a single paragraph can really acquit, and one I haven't totally grasped yet. Apologies for the lack of nuance.

Hermione did not only exercise her human privilege against house-elves, but also against giants, centaurs, and goblins. When Firenze is hired as a teacher in Order of the Pheonix, Hermione reacts by saying she “never really cared for horses” on page 599 of book five – a serious insult to Firenze, who is frequently called “horse” or “nag” as a slur by those who seek to de-legitimize his authority. She is less obvious about her devaluation of giants: she assumes that Grawp, Hagrid's brother, is unable to learn English, and mocks his attempts along with Ron and Harry.She frequently speaks out against giant and half-giant oppression, which is valuable - but again, that doesn't really make up for anything. She uses another creature's perceived stupidity as a slur, calling Pansy Parkinson “thicker than a concussed troll” in book four. Her transgressions against non-elf non/part-humans are less aggressive and more rhetorical, but they are still there.

To Hermione's credit, she seems to recognize the error of her ways and correct her actions without abandoning her efforts. She never discusses abandoning SPEW, but her mentions of it taper off after Order of the Pheonix. When Kreacher tells her not to touch him while telling of Regulus Black in book seven, she respects his space. Though Kreacher invokes her oppression by calling her “Mudblood”, she does not make it all about her, but instead continues to listen to his story; she recognizes and vocally critiques his mistreatment and devaluation by Voldemort. In her after-Hogwarts life, JK Rowling said that she went into magical law and advocated for laws to protect Muggle-borns and non/part human magical beings. This is an appropriate use of her privilege; she has prioritized non/part human being oppression as she does oppression she experiences firsthand, making a difference through existing power structures without invading spaces and conversations that are not hers to inhabit.

Hermione's exercise of oppression is not immediately apparent. She herself is the most major character who experiences the focal point of oppression in the books: as a Muggle-born, she is in constant danger because of her birth. She is also a woman, and though sexism seems to be a less-than-significant problem in the magic world, as a girl raised partially in the Muggle world she is acutely aware of sexism, and she frequently counters Ron and Harry's sexism. But she confuses the authority with which she speaks on these experiences with authority on all oppression, and uses that confidence to silence house-elves. Like many of us who experience and fight both sides of inequality, she uses her privilege to enforce another form of the system of oppression that implicates us all, kyriarchy.

Why I Expect More from Parks and Recreation

2011-02-28T20:31:00.003-05:00

As much as I love television (and you know I love me some television), I don't often push shows on my friends. I'll casually recommend an episode of 30 Rock or a show like Party Down, but I don't mention it again. I'll make a Hank Hill or "that's what she said" joke, but I won't make them all the time. People have different tastes, and I can't make them like something, right?

But I tried to make all my friends like Parks and Recreation.The closer of my friends, I conned into coming over to my house and watching several season two episodes on Netflix. The rest of them got spammed on their facebook feed. One quote or another is always my GChat status (currently: "It's your basic dogs playing poker, with an everything's on fire theme"). And my dear fiance's begrudging acceptance of it as pre-bed or during-dinner watching eventually turned him into a somewhat enthusiastic fan.

I'm a Greg Daniels nerd - two of my other very favorite shows are The Office and King of the Hill - so it's natural that I would get real enthusiastic about his most pro-woman creation. And what's more, I can actually like it from a feminist perspective, which is quite rare for me. Almost every show I like is in spite of its political implications, including the occasionally socially insightful shows cited above. But Parks and Recreation is awesome. I love all the characters and the relatively diverse cast. There are few jokes predicated on the marginalization of people (though there are definitely some).

And best of all, there's Leslie Knope. Knope is someone I actually like, rather than tolerate, guiltily identify with, or laugh at. She is funny, and she's good, and she's many of the things I am at my best: competent, hard-working, respectful. She's a big feminist, too, and it's framed not as a flaw on her part, but as a part of her enthusiasm for herself and others. Sady Doyle articulated this better back in April of 2010 at Feministe:

You [Leslie Knope] have only the most cursory understanding of what “feminism” means. It’s “feminist,” for example, for ladies to do well in politics, and so in your office you have several inspirational pictures of female politicians, selected with no regard for their actual politics whatsoever. Clinton, Condoleeza Rice. Madeline Albright, Margaret Thatcher. I could probably find a Palin picture in there somewhere, if I had TiVo and HD. You just love ladies! You just want them to do well! That’s “feminist,” right?

And yet, although you have no understanding of the theory, your practice is continually good. You are the girl who can’t fake it: You see the entire world as an intrinsically fair place, where people who do well are rewarded, and so you just continually act out of this understanding that everyone is a person deserving of respect, and you should try really hard and be really nice, and then you will of course become President, because that is how things work, in this just and moral universe we live in. Even though everything and everyone continually informs you this is not the case, AT ALL, you keep acting on principle and only on principle, because that is who you are.

Leslie Knope, and the rest of the characters on the show, are good people who despite their various privileges try their best not to hurt people, except for Jerry. They try, for the most part, to treat people with respect and care, except for Jerry. They make mistakes and need to apologize sometimes, even to Jerry. It's a show I can watch where people won't make lots of jokes about rape, or make a lot of jokes at the expense of people with disabilities. Parks and Recreation is, in short, something of a safe space for me.

But despite this honest faith effort to not hurt people with their comedy, the writers, producers, and performers still have some major ongoing issues that I begin to notice after the nth time rewatching the amazing second season on Netflix. Stalking is a humorous plotline, a sign of affection rather than a threat. Heterosexuality is a norm that goes mostly unchallenged. Fatness is depicted as unhealthy and gross. Cissexism and essentialism are often present as punchlines. Knope frequently trumpets her feminism through ~~slut-shaming whorephobia~~ shaming of sex workers (edited for a more specific and non-ableist term), and the show presents this uncritically. These are just the major threads that I've been able to articulate; there are also issues with racism, sexism, and other branches of the kyriarchy.

Upholding social injustice shouldn't be surprising from a show that revolves around the functioning of a branch of government. Government is generally about upholding existing systems of power; while the Pawnee parks department involves some deviation from norms, they uphold them just as frequently. But I trust Parks and Rec. I trust Leslie Knope. I engage critically with things I love - that's how I express my appreciation for it as a story and as a piece of comedy. And so, I will speak my truth of the flaws of this show even as I continue to be a huge freaking fan. I expect more and hold them to a higher standard.

But I wanted to take a moment to explain my deep love of the show the show. Because if there's one thing I've learned about writing about television on the internet, if you say one thing or another's not funny, people will take that to mean you hate everything about the show and erase all the awesome things you've said about it. And I want to be able to point out how much I really love it, because, as I've already said like five times already, it's basically my favorite show ever.

Where have I been? South by Southwest, Beyond the Panel, Hell Yes Happy Dogs

2011-02-28T17:42:00.002-05:00

Hello readers! It has been a while since I rapped at ya - specifically, since January! This does not mean that I'm abandoning Deeply Problematic or any such stuff. It means I've been busy preparing lots of different things!

Most exciting of these things is my upcoming speech at South By Southwest! Longtime readers may remember pleas that y'all vote for my proposal, titled Dealing with Internet Drama in Feminist Discourse, back in August of 2010. In late January, I got the news that my panel had been accepted! And I was like, "WOOO!"

I've asked the funny, fabulous, insightful Garland Grey of Tiger Beatdown to join me for this Core Conversation, and he accepted. And so, we've been chatting up a storm, getting ready to do this thing in.... less than two weeks!

If you are attending SXSW, please shoot me an e-mail - we may be arranging a meetup for various feminist readers across the Internets. If you would like to help me out with the various expenses of the trip - SXSW isn't covering expenses beyond a badge - it would be much appreciated. I also need a new computer - I have been on a netbook for two years and I am starting to get some chronic headaches from the eyestrain of a tiny screen. Click here to donate, but, you know, no pressure.

Other news! I've published several more interviews for my Bitch series Beyond the Panel since last we spoke:

More to come from that series very soon!

If you've been missing my daily writing, you might want to check out my tumblr. I post original and pretty raw (i.e. not heavily edited) writing there just about every day. I've also started a very silly stress-relief blog, Hell Yes Happy Dogs, which is all pictures of happy dogs. Here's a sample:

[A happy white brown-spotted pitbull running in the grass! By maplegirlie]

Expect a whirlwind of posts about Parks and Rec, more on Harry Potter (if you missed it, check out my previous post on the topic), and various other things in the next two weeks!

Harry Potter and the Neutrality of Fatness

2011-01-26T10:00:00.012-05:00

This post is based just on the books. I have not seen the movies. I'm assuming a certain familiarity with the books, but have included links to wikis where-ever necessary.

It doesn't need to be said that JK Rowling has exercised a lot of power over the imagination of millions of fiction lovers, young and old, in the last decade. I would not be surprised if the Harry Potter series turns out to be the longest lasting and most consequential work of literature from the turn of this century. And she has often used her wide audience to decry injustices. In “For Girls Only, Probably”, she states eloquently, “is 'fat' really the worst thing a human being can be? Is 'fat' worse than 'vindictive', 'jealous', 'shallow', 'vain', 'boring' or 'cruel'?”. This post on her website is not perfect – there is some troubling devaluation of thin bodies and ableism around eating disorders – but in places, it's a very well-articulated argument against the veneration of thinness.

In re-reading her Harry Potter series, I was initially discouraged by her explicit early associations between fat and evil and fat and lazy and fat and unhealthy. But as the series progressed and Rowling found her voice, I found an interesting evolution of her attitude towards fatness. Though there are very dim notes in her characterization of fat bodies (the Dursley family in particular), Rowling usually presents fatness as neutral and natural – some bodies are fat, some bodies are thin, and none are worth less for it.

In the early Harry Potter books, I was initially struck by the rampant sizism in her description of the Dursley family. Rowling echoes tired media tropes when she reduces prominent fat characters to one-dimensional comic relief, using many other harmful stereotypes in the process. Harry's cousin Dudley is dehumanizingly described as “the size of a young killer whale” and “a pig in a wig”, and his uncle Vernon is “beefy”. Petunia, too, is targeted because of her size: her thinness is as grotesque in characterization as Dudley's fatness. Their size is also explicitly connected to harmful stereotypes about fat people: Dudley is lazy and eats in an exaggeratedly unhealthy fashion, and he uses his size to menace people up through book five. Dumbledore, the most authoritative character in the series, even describes Dudley's appearance in book six as “abuse”.

However, these insults are softened considerably in the later books (the above quote from Dumbledore notwithstanding). After book five, Dudley's body is no longer a point of mockery, but a sign of his maturation and growth as a person – though he is still big, his size is connected to his physical ability and activity in boxing, rather than his laziness. This is tempered by Rowling's portrayals of Horace Slughorn and Hepzibah Smith. The size of both are painted in exagerrated terms, and in both fatness is connected with luxury. Neither depiction connects fatness with lack of health, which is something, I guess. But neither are particularly positive: both are slightly grotesque because of their fatness, and Smith's lack of beauty was noted several times. Aside from this, the later books treat people of size much better. I believe this is because of Rowling's growing awareness of the impact of her words; the social relevance of the series grew considerably in the later books, and I hope that Rowling reread these early characterizations and cringed and changed.

Though the early books in the series are more frequently plagued by sizism, there are some positive depictions of fatness early on. Most radical and normative of these (to me) was the presence of the Fat Lady as the guardian of the Gryffindor common room. The Fat Lady is a minor character most often used for texture comic relief, but she is still a major presence throughout the first six books. Like many peripheral characters, she is given a good deal of shading throughout the books; she is friendly, dependable, and sometimes a little bit irritable. Though fatness is her distinguishing characteristic, it is not a judgement on her value or attractiveness; much like the bloodiness of the Bloody Baron or the state of Nearly Headless Nick's neck – though I will note that it would have been nice if she'd gotten an actual name, like Sir Cadogen. She is fat, and she is funny to the reader. But what's funny are her quips in replies to students seeking entry – not her size. Most appealing to me is the use of fat as a neutral adjective in its application to her. She is fat, and that's how she's distinguished, and that's okay.

Another strong positive depiction of fatness throughout the series is Molly Weasley. Her plumpness is neutral to positive; she is described warmly, and her size is part of her appeal as a mother figure. Mrs. Weasley's constant busyness as a member of the Order of the Phoenix and a mother of seven are also a counter to the connection of fatness and laziness. The association between fatness and maternal qualities is not exactly trope-busting, but it's positive nonetheless – full-time motherhood and fatness are often devalued, so I was happy to see them embraced in this series. Mrs. Weasley is also an opportunity for Rowling to explore sizism; she is negatively described as “fat and ugly” by Draco Malfoy, and this is seen as a part of his distasteful and hateful character.

The Weasley family as a larger unit does a great deal to disassociate size from health and eating habits. Ron, who is described as slender, eats a huge amount of food, particularly sweets; he is always eating Chocolate Frogs and Cauldrons and reaching for yet another helping of treacle. This gluttony from a thin rather than a fat character is a helpful counter-example to the blatantly sizist descriptions of Dudley Dursley mentioned above. When Mrs. Weasley is described as “thinner”, it's not seen as a triumph of weight loss but instead a sign of her ill health. This characterization of thinness is repeated throughout the series; it's also applied to Tonks and Lupin, particularly in book six. Lupin's thinness throughout the series is a sign of his inability to gain employment because he is a werewolf. Tonks' size is a matter of illness – she is sick for love with Lupin. Women losing weight for unrequited love is a well-worn cliché. But both of these examples present thinness as not a matter of will or a matter of morals, and that contributes to Rowling's disassociation between thinness and health and worth in her later books.

“Fat” is not quite the right word for Hagrid, but he is certainly relevant to discussions of size in this series. The clearest description of him as “twice as tall and three times as wide as a normal man”, which suggests that he is fat as well as tall. Again, his size is seen as neutral and just a fact of who he is. Unlike Dudley, his size is not threatening – he is one of the sweetest characters in the series. Like Mrs. Weasley, he receives discrimination for his size: Professor Umbridge and others openly question his competence because of his size. Though the discrimination that he receives is more about his birth and not solely his girth, his oppression is relevant to sizism.

The magical intersection of fatness and part humanity also brings about my favorite writing of fatness in the series by far: Madame Maxine, headmistress of Beauxbatons. Maxine is, explicitly, both huge and beautiful. She is introduced alongside the most emphatically beautiful woman in the series, Fleur Delacour; in many writer's hands, this would be an opportunity to achieve comic relief through making fun of the fat lady. But Maxine's comparative body is presented as complementary to Fleur rather than contrasting. Maxine's attractiveness and polished presentation are consistently emphasized alongside her size (she is described as “handsome” and “well-dressed” repeatedly). Her comparative size is not a point of mockery, but a fact of her existence.

Though there are problems with Rowling's depiction of both ends of the size spectrum, the Harry Potter series is generally successful in communicating that there are not defined relationships between weight and health, or weight and beauty. In general, Rowling treats both fatness and thinness as neutral adjectives that imply different things for different kinds of bodies. This is not a radical act, but for a writer with the audience of Rowling, it is a positive and a productive one.

Beyond The Panel at Bitch Magazine: An interview with RJ Edwards of Riot Nrrd

2011-01-25T10:00:00.003-05:00

I have an apology to make! I came down with a cold last Thursday and I forgot to let y'all know about my awesome interview with RJ Edwards of Riot Nrrd! [trigger warning for misgendering on Tuesday's comic] You should also check out my two-part interview with them!

Why I am an able-bodied person with disabilities

2011-01-19T10:00:00.024-05:00

In the past couple of years, I've become more acutely aware of the discrimination I receive because of my anxiety, OCD, and ADD. The non-neurotypical parts of my brain impact my work, my health, and the way I interact and the way I'm perceived. Knowledge of the ableism I receive has helped me to better deal with the challenges I face because of my disabilities, and has improved my perception of myself. Instead of trashing myself for being lazy or crazy, I've learned to love and live with the parts of myself that aren't up to kyriarchal codes.

However, I am not quite comfortable with the unqualified identity of “person with disabilities.” Because I benefit from ableism, every day.

While my mind may not be up to code, my body and its ability level are. Though my fatness puts me outside the ideal, my body faces no barriers and brings me no unwanted attention based on my ability level. There are no spaces that I cannot access because of my form of movement. I do not receive stares or unwanted questions because of my disabilities. I do not have to worry about the content of my food and what ingredients might attack me. These are only a few of the experiences I can have without fear of retribution because of my able-bodied privilege.

No, the form of my disabilities, their presence in my mind and not my body, has been a major privilege for me, and so I'll use it as a qualifier. This is also described as "passing privilege", and that is certainly part of it - I am passing as a person with full able privilege. But it's also a reflection of a specific privilege and ability level that my body has, that my mind does not.

This is not universal: many people who experience mental illness that is not visible or physical face extra stigma; many have to undergo additional scrutiny to prove their disability, and others are seen as “fakers”. I am certainly vulnerable to this, but I have not had many of these experiences so far. Able-bodied as a general term to describe all people with disabilities can silence people who have non-physical disabilities. Savannah Logsdon-Breakstone, the director of advocacy at Autism Woman's Network, wrote, “Us[ing] "PWD" and "non-ablebodied" interchangeably.[erases] of broad swaths of the population with disabilities, from those who have mental health disabilities, to those with developmental disabilities...Additionally, for a number of PWD we live in communities that only think non-ablebodied people are "really" disabled.”

I am not saying that my disabilities have no relationship to my body; they are intimately connected, and in some cases, my disabilities do have a big impact on my ability level. Care of my body through exercise and the eating of awesome food is a major part of my mental self-care. I cannot take birth control because of my disabilities, which has an impact on my physical expression of sexuality. Taking time to combat intrusive thoughts can monopolize my spoons. My trichotillomania causes splotchy skin and ingrown hairs. Disabilities impact my body. But though I must constantly work with and on my mind's quirks, my body is by comparison a intermittent and faint challenge.

It took a long time for me to recognize that I have disabilities, that I am hurt by ableism. The sometimes weary functionings of my mind give me my share of trouble; I face obstacles that are presented not by my disabilities but by the insistence that bodies and minds must live up to a certain standard. This is why I will continue to describe myself as a person with disabilities.

But, it is dishonest to omit mention of one of the major ways my body is normalized by society – alongside my whiteness, cisness, and relative size privilege, to list a few. I need to take responsibility for this facet of my privilege. My disabilities and the advantages given me by ableism are not mutually exclusive; they are both part of my experience of ableism in a kyriarchy.

Beyond the Panel at Bitch: Interview with Danielle Corsetto

2011-01-13T19:00:00.001-05:00

Head on over to Bitch to check out my interview with Danielle Corsetto of Girls With Slingshots!

On another note: if you're eager for new non-comic content from me, you don't have long to wait! I am polishing up pieces on Harry Potter, leggings, language, and Parks and Rec for your reading enjoyment.

Beyond the Panel at Bitch: Interview with Dorothy Gambrell

2011-01-06T20:00:00.001-05:00

Today at Bitch is the first entry in my new series on webcomics, Beyond the Panel. In this installment, I interviewed Dorothy Gambrell of Cat and Girl. Check it out!

Check back in January 2011!

2010-11-29T16:39:00.000-05:00

Hi there folks!

Apologies for the lack of communication. As is probably obvious, I am on hiatus, and I will be for the rest of this year.

The purpose of this time off is to take care of myself, reflect on my writing, and focus on my professional and personal life. My job is super-busy right now, and I just got engaged to my longtime partner, so I don't have much time to devote to blogging at this moment.

I will be back in January 2011, at which time I'll explain my absence in a little more depth. In the meantime, I am writing lots of stuff for here and elsewhere.

If you need to reach me, my email is deeplyproblematic@gmail.com. Thanks for reading, and I will see you soon!

Stacy Blahnik killed; Philadelphia Daily News reduces her to trans status and beauty

2010-10-13T12:42:00.006-04:00

Stacy Blahnik, a thin woman of color with long straight hair, lies on the floor and looks into the camera. She wears a white shirt and jeans. Image from House of Blahnik.

Edit 10/14: This post originally appropriated the words of Helen G and attributed them to a cis woman. This is an act of centering the voices of cis people yet again, and I apologize. There's more at the end of this post, but go here to read Helen's explanation of why this is so very wrong.

Trigger warning for degendering language

Stacy Blahnik, a 31-year-old woman who lived in Point Breeze in Philadelphia, was found dead by her boyfriend at their home on Monday evening. Blahnik is survived by her partner, her dogs, and many friends and colleagues.

Blahnik was known locally and nationally as an activist and mentor with the House of Blahnik. She held a position of leadership, the "Overall Mother", and focused on the emotional and sexual health of those in the community marginalized by race, sexuality, and gender identity. From their website:

The Undeniable House of Blahnik, a ballroom focused community based organization founded in 2000 by African American and Latino gay and transgender persons whose primary goal was to form a social network of progressive, supportive, and creative individuals dedicated to developing and garnishing the talents and gifts of the “ballroom” community. Our mission is to positively affect the social development of our members and to provide nurturing spaces for self-expression, and personal and professional growth.

The cause of death has yet to be announced, and some suspect homicide. A large bald white man was seen leaving her place on the day her body was found.

Details on this case are scant. Initial reports claimed that she was found with a pillowcase around her neck. Police later denied that and said that there were no signs of trauma on her body. Given that trans people face a rate of violence twice that of cis people, it is certainly more than likely that her tragic death was violent in nature.

Her death has been remembered and reported by police and media not with respect for her life as she lived it, but with incorrect information borne of bigotry and and sensationalism. This ABC news report has done an excellent job of giving basic information on the case that does not degender or dehumanize Blahnik, but it did so only at the urging of the Transgender Foundation of America. The police report and this report from Philadelphia Daily News reporter Stephanie Farr are both stunning and typical examples of how trans women are treated by the forces of cissexism.

Blahnik is referred to with male pronouns and a name she did not use. She is dehumanized from the very start, when "transsexual" is used as a noun, rather than "woman". Her clothing at the time of her death - the clothes she was wearing in private - are heavily highlighted to sexualize her death. Throughout the Daily News piece, her beauty is referred to again, and again, and again. Her body gave other women complexes! She got attention on the street! These are not compliments, but transmisogynistic exploitation of her gender and appearance.

This sexualization is not only reflective of Blahnik's gender, but also of her race. Black women have long been seen as hyper-sexual; women of color are frequently reduced to their shape and appearance and sexual attractiveness.

Two good posts on Blahnik's death and the media coverage of it have already been written. From Helen G* at Questioning Transphobia:

[I]t’s because of a legal system which is too busted, and those who run it too bigoted and transphobic, to allow for the possibility that, although some women may well be trans, that’s no reason to dehumanise them by denying appropriate documentation. By the look of it, the local PD in this instance is another one which has yet to make that great leap forward into the 21st century, where trans women are treated like the humans we are.

From Monica Roberts at TransGriot:

That means Stacey's name should not have been placed in quotation marks, since once again, she was obviously living publicly as a woman and your interviews with her neighbors should have established that.

Blahnik's life is not worth covering to reporters, and her gender is exploited for shock value. Farr, aided by the police report, focuses not on Blahnik's death, not on the circumstances of her case, not on her life and time, but instead upon the womanhood that she so clearly views as questionable. This is ground in with the very last line, which misgenders, objectifies, and trivializes a life lost: "'Whatever she was - transvestite, man, woman - she didn't deserve to die like that,' one man said."

Blahnik was a positive influence in the lives of many: her neighbors, her boyfriend, the people she worked with and for. She should be mourned and remembered for her life well lived: her good work, her relationships with her loved ones, and her considerable contributions to her community.

ETA: Please check out and share Lilith von Fraumench's open letter to the Philadelphia Daily News as well.

*Originally mis-identified as Helen Boyd, who is a totally different person. Apologies, and thanks to Queen Emily on tumblr for alerting me to my mistake.

ETA: I made a huge and very harmful mistake when I posted this yesterday by attributing Helen G's work to a cis woman with a history of appropriation.

I deeply regret my actions and apologize to Helen G.

My act of verbal violence was a part of the long cis tradition of taking trans voices and issues and appropriating and centering them around cis voices. It was careless and cruel.

Furthermore, I apologize to her and to my readers for not identifying my error and apologizing for my attack on her sooner. Both are indications of carelessness and unexamined privilege on my part. I will refrain from posting about trans issues for a while as I struggle to understand and atone for my actions.

Here is Helen G's explanation of why what I did was so wrong.

I also apologize to Kinsey Hope, whose expertise and friendship I selfishly used for my own learning experience.

Turkish women attacked at third European Transgender Council; police harrass, degender victims

2010-10-12T11:32:00.001-04:00

The logo of Transgender Europe. The graphic is a cog-like circular design in yellow, and the letters TGEU are in blue.

Two weeks ago, Transgender Europe held the third European Transgender Council in Malmo, Sweden. The Council hosted over 200 delegates from thirty-five countries, and it offered a number of worthwhile speakers, workshops, and other activities. But cissexism cast a shadow over this event when random transphobes attacked two Turkish delegates; police degendered and harrassed the targets rather than protecting them.

On the evening of September 30, the first night of the Council, the two women went to eat at a restaurant. As they entered the building, a couple of bystanders began yelling slurs at them. These two men invited several more passersby to join them. When the women emerged, they were attacked physically, with fists and eggs, by a crowd of men.

The attack was apparently motivated not only by cissexism but also by racism. Turkophobia runs high in Europe and has for hundreds of years.

After the incident was reported to the authorities, the police on duty did not do their job and seek out those responsible for the hate crime. Of course not. They further penalized these activists for their nationality and their gender by referring to them with incorrect pronouns, questioning their right to be in Sweden, and otherwise humiliating them. The delegates described their treatment as "".

The hosts of the conference are understandably enraged, though not surprised:

“There is no safe space for transgender people in Europe. Last night's attack showed once more that transphobia and racism are not only a problem of certain countries in Europe. Transphobia is everywhere”, says TGEU Vice chair Julia Ehrt.

“We express our solidarity with our activist friends. We are sad and angry and call upon the police to do everything to persecute the perpetrators,” says Dr Carsten Balzer from the “Transrespect versus Transphobia Worldwide” TvT- Research project..

The largest European Human rights event on transgender issues deals among other topics with hate crimes and violence faced by gender variant people. In the last 30 months 33 transgender people were reported of being murdered in Europe according to TGEU's TvT-project. 79% of trans people are subject to negative comments, harassment, physical and sexual abuse and violence according to the European Hate Crime Study published by Press for Change last year.

In the US, Public and police mistreatment of trans people, particularly trans women, is often egregious and violent. Duanna Johnson was ~~killed~~ brutally beaten at the hands of police, and countless women have been sexually assaulted by officers.

But such abuse is not limited to the shores of my homeland. Women around the world are hassled, violated, raped, and murdered, and that hatred is intensified if they are trans. When they are also a member of a marginalized nationality, they are even more vulnerable to the violent agents of the kyriarchy. And like many marginalized people, the police offer no recourse but instead another avenue of victimization. Organizations like Transgender Europe and the brave activists who populate them are vital to dismantling the global system of racism and cissupremacy that endorses and encourages such treatment.

sources 1, 2, 3

Institutionalized racism on the court and in the classroom at Mullen High School

2010-10-07T14:22:00.000-04:00

Last February, spectators chanted racist slurs at black players in a game between home team Mullen High School and opponents Overland. These slurs were not isolated and they were not stopped; officials allowed this harassment to continue throughout the game. No disciplinary action was taken against the students and parents who participated in this hateful cheering.

Why am I writing about this, a year and a half later? This is, to be sure, an awful act motivated by discrimination and hate. But such instances are infinite - why report on it now?

The admission of this action endorsed and grew an environment in which acts of systematic and individual racism are permitted and encouraged by race-privileged figures of authority. Recently, one of Mullen's most popular teachers, Timothy Thornton, was fired for a persistent pattern of racism after student Tyler Brown reported him to officials. According to students and confirmed by his own admission, he:

told racist jokes
used the n word as a slur, without critical context
broadcast his obsession with the KKK to his students
and just in case you thought that it was just talk, he bragged about giving students of color lower grades

He, of course, insists that he meant no harm by using his position of authority. He was just having fun. He is sure that it all would have been okay if he would have clarified that "he meant no harm by saying the things he said." Because intent makes everything okay! Because he's not racist, really! Because it's just a "stupid mistake"!

And of course, many students and parents have swelled up beneath him to clamor for his reinstatement:

Thornton's termination has fueled impassioned responses from the school and community at large, with a majority expressing outrage that a veteran and well-liked teacher should be fired for "a silly mistake," as one person suggested on a local news website. Students protested the decision by marching outside the school, while a number of alumni are said to have written letters to school administrators challenging the firing.

While Thornton enjoys this groundswell of support, the student who reported his egregious conduct is being vilified. He and his family are accused of playing the race card and of conspiring with black community activists to get the teacher fired. No one has bothered to speculate what possible gain Brown would realize by sharing the details of his teacher's racially motivated conduct.

Tyler Brown's reward for his bravery is harassment and suspicion. His treatment represents the other half of the creation and perpetuation of toxic racist environments: the silencing, second-guessing, and harassment of the people who actually receive racism. Brown is being punished for protecting himself in a real way. Instead of doing their job and protecting students from this kind of discrimination, school officials have left it up to their charges to do their jobs and call shitty teachers out.

This is how institutional racism is nurtured and weaponized in individual situations. Let one incident of racism go past without controversy or comment, and the school administrators feel like they've dodged a mine. But once that act of blatant hatred is past, another one trespasses...and another, and another. With every subsequent incident, white folks inclined towards active oppression realize that they're not going to see consequences - after all, no one else has - and so they push their oppression just a little bit further and a little bit further, and get a little more popular for it. With every subsequent incident, these people grow the power already granted them by the kyriarchy into something even more monstrous. And of course, the school administrator wants to remain neutral. And so, they get away with it and get away with it, and the environment gets more and more toxic, and the racism gets more and more acceptable.

This is how kyriarchy silences students and encourages racism through education. These little things don't just add up, they multiply. Thornton's racist offenses towards his students got worse and worse, and Brown's attempts to counter his discriminatory acts only amplified the hate he received.

My major source for this post is Rhonda Hackett. A couple of the details I found in her opinion piece (specifically, that Thornton gave students of color lower grades) could not be found in my other sources for this article.

Why I use that word that I use: Fat

2010-10-05T12:01:00.001-04:00

A speech bubble. Inside is a question mark in quotation marks.

The word fat holds a great deal of sway in the popular imagination. Everyone has a particular and often arbitrary standard for what fat means, where it begins and where it ends. In most cases, fat as an adjective is applied in an unambiguously negative way (e.g. "Mariah Carey got fat") , and denied in an unambiguously positive way ("what are you talking about? you're not fat at all, you're gorgeous!"). But as with the bodies it describes, "fat" is for my purposes value-neutral and relative: not necessarily good, not necessarily bad, and dependent on the context in which it exists.

Fat is an adjective used to describe size. Fat is measured by width or depth rather than height - I am fat because my hips are 47", not because my height is 5'11". Applied to humans, it usually means being large or upwards of the "normal" BMI. Applied to other nouns, it usually refers to abundance of mass. Its antonym is thin, referring to slightness is size. Fat is itself a noun; it is defined in this sense as a kind of bodily tissue.

Fat can be a positive word. It can denote a positive abundance: in health, in size, in finances (e.g. a fat wallet). Fat is often a sign of health; when I regained the weight I lost from anxiety (disability 2) and came back from thinness to fatness, it was a clear sign that both my body and mind were recovering from a severe and prolonged illness. In many bodies, fat is beautiful and attractive. Fatness is associated with fullness and a lack of want. Roundness, softness and other lovely textures are often associated with fat. The noun form of fat can be positive too: fatty tissue is essential to the human body.

Fat can be a negative word. In non-living nouns, it can refer to an overabundance borne of selfishness and greed - outside of bodies, there is such a thing as too big. It can also be negative in certain bodies, though not all of them: since I came back to my normal weight, I have slowly gained more weight because I've been overeating, overdrinking, and leading a sedentary life. Fat is not the cause of my lack of health, but in this case it is a symptom, a correlation. As Michelle of the Fat Nutritionist wrote, Health at every size ... does not mean that one individual can be healthy at every size."

Fat is a relative term. It changes based on intent, identity, and context. I am not read as fat in every situation - next to my fatter father, I look thin, but next to my thin mother, I look fat. Christina Hendricks and her alter ego Joan Holloway are likely not fat in a room of people who look like most of America, but relative to other actors, she is most definitely fat.

Fat is most often used as a slur, to insult an aspect of person's (usually a woman's) size and imply that their beauty and health are lesser. It can also cover a range of practices that discriminate against people of size: at the doctor's office, on the street, in the dressing room. When I am called fat as an insult, it is a form of discrimination, also known as sizism. Though such critics are not slandering me, they are attempting to devalue me based on my size.

As a fat person, I reject the definition of fat tainted by slurs, but not on the basis that I am not fat: instead, I reject that I am more lazy, less beautiful, less healthy, less worthwhile because I am fat. Its application as a slur is a demonizing misapplication by the arbitrary tastes and forces of the kyriarchy. Its sting makes it all the more powerful a word to apply to my own body with confidence and pride.

Fat is, as with everything, subjective. Its use is usually meant to communicate hatred, but that's not how I take it. Fat is an adjective, as neutral as red or blond, that has been perverted to mean something that it is not. But its application can and should be claimed for our own. In this space and in many other feminist blogs, fat is not necessarily anything: it's not necessarily unsightly, it's not necessarily unhealthy, and it's not necessarily the same for every body.

--

The use of fat as a positive descriptor is not a new one. As long as I've been even marginally active in online feminist discussion - close to ten years now - I've seen arguments for fat as a neutral to positive descriptor. This is not the first time I've written about fat as a neutral adjective, either.

Kate Harding, one of the most influential and widely-published women in the Fat Acceptance movement, put it like this:

[I]t’s important to me to reclaim the word “fat.” It’s not a bad word. It’s not intrinsically insulting. All it tells you is that this person has more visible fat on her frame than a thin person does — and since in my case, that’s the plain truth, I don’t have any problem with being described that way. I have a problem with people who would describe me that way with the intention to wound, but not with the word itself. I’m short, I’m blond, I’m pale, I’m hourglass-shaped, I’m fat. Some of those characteristics are more desirable in this society than others, but all any of those words tell you is what I look like. Not what I eat, not how much I exercise, not whether I’m healthy, not how strong my moral fiber is — hell, not even what my natural hair color is.

Tasha Fierce, writing for Bitch this summer, wrote about the place of the word in moving forward with fat acceptance:

“Fat” needs to be reclaimed and turned into a value-neutral descriptor, this is true. But “fat” is currently such a nebulous concept that it’s really going to take the elimination of euphemisms to describe it for it to coalesce into a firm identity, and we’re going to have to lay all our cards on the table when it comes to size privilege. We’re also going to have to convince fat people to call themselves fat, which in today’s fatphobic society is a somewhat scary thing when you’re not wholeheartedly dedicated to fat acceptance. We’re so used to defending ourselves from the word “fat” that euphemisms are comforting. Yet in order to move forward, we’ve got to face our fears.

September 2010 in review

2010-10-01T14:15:00.000-04:00

It's the close of another good month here at Deeply Problematic! Blogging is rough to get through sometimes, but right now, I'm feeling very good about the work I do here. I'm lucky to have such a terrific, engaged readership.

My fundraising drive was a huge success! Thanks to those of you who donated. Your help was a huge boost; you're an essential part of what's driving me to continue to write here. A donation button is still up on the left sidebar - help is appreciated, but not necessary at the moment.

I've got guest posts up at Feministe and Don't Call Me Sybil right now. If you're coming over from there, welcome!

Mark your calenders for October 13. I'll be a guest on Healthy Place Mental Health TV show. I will be discussing OCD and my experiences with it, which you can read about here.

If you're on social networking doohickeys, you can support Deeply Problematic and interact with other readers there, too! I post new articles, pictures of cute things, and inane/brilliant thoughts at Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.

Here are this month's top posts:

Top posts of September 2010

1. Wikipedia's main page mentions nine men for every one woman
2. Trans student not homecoming king because of Mona Shores High School cissexism
3. Why I use that word that I use: Kyriarchy, kyriarchal, and why not patriarchy
4. Disability and Comics: How Questionable Content's Faye and Hannelore normalize disability
5. Women in Questionable Content: Women-run businesses and Bechdel-passing friendships

Most commented in September 2010

1. Josh Eastman arrested for paying child to recite racial slurs on YouTube video - 35 comments
2. Wikipedia's main page mentions nine men for every one woman - 30 comments
3. Trans student not homecoming king because of Mona Shores High School cissexism - 9 comments
4. Paperwork & homework, anxiety & ADD: institutionalized and internalized ableism & Hundreds of children with disabilities die in Bulgarian state facilities - 6 comments
5 .A feminist reading of Achewood, part one: disability and Roast Beef & Why I use that word that I use: Problematic - 5 comments

Thank you so much for your support!

A feminist reading of Achewood, part one: disability and Roast Beef

2010-09-30T21:24:00.002-04:00

Ray Smuckles of Achewood by Chris Onstad jumps over a wheelchair with a ball and chain attached, saying "DAAAAAAMN!". He has a martini. From this strip.

I’ve been reading Achewood since late 2006, and it’s one of my favorite distractions - I can spends days in the archives, re-reading my favorite arcs. It’s weird, literate, layered, moving, dark and hilarious. One of its central figures, Roast Beef, experiences depression which often enough to limit his ability. Cartoonist Chris Onstad’s handling of disability and its intersection with poverty is nuanced and funny. But Onstad otherwise ignores or sneers at disability and accessibility, befitting the comic's scoffing tone in matters of social justice.

Roast Beef’s depression is a major theme of his character and the strip. At the outset of his appearance in the Achewood universe, he expresses the wish to commit suicide repeatedly, though he has not mentioned past his first year in the strip. His actions and words (in a distinctive smaller font) are often explicitly steered by his low opinion of himself; depression is a simple fact of him. While sadness is a constant in his his characterization, the portrayal of his disability is far from static: his emotions are fluid, dependent on context, an advantage at time and a palpable pain at others. He is quite competent at computer programming (link to molly heaven) and garage sale management, and uses his depression to great effect in a business venture. It is something he combats and works with regularly. Roast Beef is often, as Dorian might put it, "depressed but otherwise fine."

Punchlines are subjective in Achewood - many things could be funny, innocuous, offensive, or just peculiar to each reader. And Onstad incorporates disability into humor without making Roast Beef in an amorphous punchline. His disability is there, neither definitively tragic or definitively a punchline. Beef's most serious challenges come and go and come; seasonal affective disorder is a source of melancholy when Beef struggles to eat, and, when he finds effective management, comedy and sexuality. (Beef is also just about the only character with a consistently healthy sex life, which is pretty transgressive). There is little shame in Onstad's depiction of Roast Beef, who is in many ways the moral center of the strip. His depression is not a plot device but a facet of his character, present even when not crucial.

Furthermore, Onstad takes care to show how Beef's disability has intersected with his lack of class privilege and history of abuse to amplify his poor opinion of himself. Roast Beef was raised in a low-income household with an abusive mother and grandmother. His background is usually presented in a fairly tragic light - while Achewood makes jokes about most things in life, its treatment of Beef's upbringing is fairly serious, even heavy-handed at times. His lifelong friendship with overprivileged Ray often throws this into sharp relief: Ray's upbringing has led to a lifetime of continuing wealth and overconfidence, whereas Beef has continued to struggle with poverty and feelings of worthlessness. It is clear that Beef's troubles are directly related to a lack of privilege, though I don't think that the connection to systematic oppression is articulated, and Onstad's association between class and happiness is quite problematic. However, the intersection is generally well-thought-out and sensitively handled - especially in comparison with the rest of the strip.

Unfortunately, beyond Beef's disabilities Onstad either ignores or makes a point of mocking disability and accessibility. Physical disability is mostly ignored, except for a few one-off jokes (one which juztaposes disability and dancing as if they never go together). But the most direct depiction of disability besides Beef comes in this horrible little comic, titled "Handicap Access" (transcript here). In the comic, Roast Beef and Ray, wearing tuxes, address the lack of accessibility in the comic. They then jump over wheelchairs and wheelchair ramps, and make fun of braille (which is conflated with Morse code), transcripts, captions, and speech output.*

This comic is intended to offend, satirizing not ableist resistance to accessibility but requests that websites become accessible. There are several points at which disability is presented as a joke: wheelchairs, wheelchair ramps, braille, captions are all presented as ridiculous requests. The wheelchair even has a ball and chain on it. Satire is a staple of Achewood, but it's more often expressed through silliness, e.g. Roomba Cinema. "Handicap Access" is supposed to be satire along the lines of the Fuck You Friday - abrasive and mean. But Fuck You Friday makes fun of the little frustrations of life - things like upselling at fast food joints, not major issues that impact health, mobility, and livelihood. Disability issues are presented as trivial and not worth serious consideration; in this installment, accessibility is a concept considered only long enough to be scoffed at. Achewood is not a political strip, and as I said, it takes many things lightly. But devoting a whole strip directly to mocking the concept's worth is mean-spirited and, well, ableist.**

Achewood is not a strip that is concerned with social justice; it looks at the world with a darkly comic and often flippant eye. The strip's attitude towards issues to social justice is not friendly, as evidenced by "Handicap Access" and the whining, selfish, self-righteous Pat. Onstad has written a multifaceted and worthwhile depiction of disability in the central character of Roast Beef. But his sneering attitude reminds the reader that Achewood is not a strip that gives a shit about equity, social action, or really any points of view that threatens the kyriarchy.

Check back soon for more Pat-esque analysis of gender and race in Achewood.

*Ironically, Achewood is actually more accessible than the much friendlier Questionable Content - every single script has been transcribed.
**A qualifier: This was back in 2005, when strips were posted several times a week and have a lot less weight than they do now. I am probably being a little hyperbolic about the weight of this strip in determining Onstad's attitude.

Rejecting normalacy and objectivity in feminist writing

2010-09-29T15:58:00.000-04:00

Objectivity is a keystone of journalism that extends to institutions like Wikipedia; the idea that we can somehow remove our selves from the things we think about and the contexts we exist is a bizarre USian fantasy akin to the classist racist American dream. It has its unpragmatic value: it hopes that just the facts will be enough, and that those recording those facts will report them without considering themselves, focusing on only the subject at hand.

But for my writing, commenting, and reporting? Objectivity and neutrality are not constructive mantras. I am a feminist writer, and I am not here to give my readers the party line: I am not here to give them the objective and irredeemably kyriarchal point of view. Instead, I focus on giving people basic facts and then making it clear what I think about it. I try to make my perspective, my biases, my point of view crystal clear - not obscured.

Objectivity is functionally a way to reflect and uphold and insist upon what is normal and okay and what is excluded: what is not normal and not okay. There are too many facts about any given situation to be able to divine a clear and central set of descriptions and explanations in any depth. And even then, seemingly small things like pronouns can betray a supposedly objective point of view.

Worship of objectivity shores up our idealization of what is normal, for normalcy often represents antifeminist points of view. When navigating the combustible waters of social justice, normal is a term tainted beyond any utility. In a world where some bodies are less and other bodies more, where bodies can be wrong and right, normal implies an objective standard that all other bodies must live up to.

--

Normal is perhaps not a necessarily oppressive rhetorical term. In non-political, humorous, or other less than explosive genres of writing, it's neutral by nature: all it means is regular. Standard. Unthreatening.

Normal as a concept is one that I put to great use in negotiating my own body. Having an idea of what is normal, what is usual for me helps me create peace and calm with myself and my body. The weight at which I feel most comfortable, at which I feel normal, is not normal according to BMI standards. My periods, too, have become normal in their inconsistency. Whereas most menstruating folks have fairly regular cycles that last about 28 days, all I know about my cycle is that it will usually but not at all always be longer than 35 days and completely irregular. Though this departure from the normal period was a little disconcerting in my first few years of bleeding and anxious after I got regularly sexually active, once I got to know my cycle my own norms became apparent, and comfortable.

But in most cases, normal is used to reinforce what we are taught by the kyriarchy: that we are somehow not measuring up, that we are mediocre, that we are too much, that we deserved it. Normal creates false ideals: points that if we can just manage to hit, we'll get it right, we'll get all the benefits of kyriarchy and win the whole damn game. But it's a rigged system; hitting those preordained marks comes at a great personal cost because few people are made or allowed access to the tools to comfortably hit all those marks.

Normalization is a form of oppression that reaches into just about every branch I experience: age (when should I get married? am I too young? when will I get mine and start earning significantly above the poverty level) fatness (how fat is too fat, am I the right kind of fat, why aren't my boobs bigger, why do I have these rolls) sex (I should have had sex earlier, am I not a feminist if I like this kind of sex), presentation (this skirt is too short this skirt is too short). Normalacy is the creator of wants inside us that declare too much! or too little! It is the concept that makes us feel less than adequate, or too adequate, or just plain not quite right. It creates internalization by making us believe that we too will grow up to live up to these arbitrary measures (and if we don't, we're failures, too).

Our experience and education, kyriarchal or otherwise, seeps into and colors our every adjective, pronoun, article. These oversights in the name of avoiding bias, in the name of being neutral and objective, of not hurting anyone, of being ...appropriate, are the doers of evil. Truth is individually experienced; relying on such subjective measures as "normal" reinforces hierarchies of bodies. As a writer, I try to look directly at that which misinforms me rather than continuing to ignore it.

Trans student not homecoming king because of Mona Shores High School cissexism

2010-09-27T02:14:00.004-04:00

High schools have long been a bastion of gender policing, most recently punishing Constance McMillan* and Alexis Lusk for their sexuality and gender. And now, at Mona Shores High School, the cissexist administration is using homecoming as an excuse to champion the gender binary. Oak Reed was voted homecoming king recently by his classmates and friends. Since he is trans, school officials decided that that simply wouldn't do.

Assistant Superintendent Todd Geerlings said the issue is simple: The ballots gave two choices -- vote for a boy for king and a girl for queen...And, in school records, he said, Oakleigh is still listed as a female..."They told me that they took me off because they had to invalidate all of my votes because I'm enrolled at Mona Shores as a female," Oakleigh said.

Oak and his friends are understandably upset. He was surprised because school administrators and teachers had already given him the basic respect of treating him as his actual gender. "They let me wear a male tux for band uniform, and they're going to let me wear the male robe and cap for graduation...[Teachers] call me Oak, and they say, he, him, his."

His classmates, the ones who elected him in the first place, have intensified their support of their king. One student, Nick Schrier, started a Facebook group called "Oak Is My King" protesting the school's decision (click on the link to join!). The group suggests writing letters to the local paper and wearing shirts proclaiming their support of Oak on the day of the game. "It's the senior class that votes for their representative," Reed said. "What they did was taking away the voice of the senior class."

The article profiling this incident is at first benign, but actually another example of cissexism masquerading as objectivity. The reporter avoids referring to Oak's very clearly stated gender through pronouns; Oak is constantly referred to either by his first name or as "the teen". Alone, this would be troublesome. But especially in conjunction with pained references to Oak's prior name and surgery plans, it betrays a cissexist denial of Oak's gender as truly his on the part of the reporter.

An arbitrary popularity contest is far from the biggest struggle facing trans people today. But this is an excellent example of how cissupremacy and the kyriarchy are regularly perpetuated: by making sure that the genders of trans people are seen as less legitimate and less real than the genders of trans people.

Also see Monica at TransGriot's coverage.
*Originally mis-identified as Candace.

Woman brutally beaten for being trans; San Antonio media and police dismiss it

2010-09-24T14:08:00.001-04:00

Trigger warning for description of violence against trans women .

A woman was brutally beaten this week for being trans. Media coverage has been scant, and little information has been released by the police, but here is what has been released: an unnanmed 24-year-old woman went on a date with a man with whom she had some kind of "arrangement". When he found out that she was trans, he thoroughly beat her around the face and left her at an apartment complex. She had to knock on a stranger's door begging for help to get medical and police attention.

The San Antonio police department are investigating this crime not as the hate crime it pretty clearly is, but as aggravated assault. This could have something to do with the fact that the Texas hate crime law excludes trans people (but of course, protects sexual orientation). But as John Wright of the Dallas Voice points out, "the new federal hate crimes law passed last year does protect transgender people and presumably could be used in this case. If the man beat the victim because she is transgender and not cisgender, then yeah, we’d say that’s a hate crime."

This act of cissexism in the face of horrific violence is part of a pattern of transmisogyny in the San Antonio police department. In February, officer Steve Nash raped a trans woman, and a similar incident happened in 2005 in the same department. Monica of TransGriot described the assault:

In San Antonio, one of the four cities profiled in the September 2005 report, veteran police officer Dave Gutierrez was convicted and sentenced on January 19 to 24 years and four months in prison for raping and assaulting then 21 year old transwoman Starlight Bernal during a June 10, 2005 traffic stop.

The most major coverage of the assault on this 24-year-old was also heavily flavored by cissexism. The title refers to her not as a woman or trans woman, but as a "woman who used to be a man". Furthermore, the man didn't "assault" or "beat" his victim; he "snap[ped]". Snapping at someone infers an overreaction to provocation. There was no provocation - she was just who she is. This was not an overreaction - he's a bigot who committed an act of hateful violence.

Furthermore, the first line of the report is about the man "was in for quite a surprise" - it does not mention the violence he committed. A surprise is a funny misunderstanding. He reacted to a human being's existence as a woman with severe violence - not, "oh my goodness, what a misunderstanding!" These linguistic choices shift the focus from the violent act to the woman's trans status and minimize her attacker's abhorrent actions.

To KENS 5, it's not about violence being perpetrated on an innocent woman - it's about how to make it relateable, and even funny. They're using the harmful trope of trans women as deceivers. Their language does not intent to inform their viewers of a vicious act of violence, but to satisfy their own sense of her as an other, and to comfort cis viewers that yeah, she's weird and icky. Even though a woman was beaten, that's not the focal point, that's not the shocking thing. As always with media coverage of trans women, the most important thing is what's in her pants, and how weird their trans status is, and how sorry they should feel for her poor attacker who was just pushed too far after his big surprise.

Source

Update: Cara covered this in a little more depth at The Curvature.

Hundreds of children with disabilities die in Bulgarian state facilities

2010-09-22T17:07:00.001-04:00

Massive trigger warning for description of neglect and abuse.

A recent report revealed that 238 children with mental and intellectual disabilities were killed by neglect.while in the care of government institutions in Bulgaria over the last ten years. This epidemic of death and abuse is evidence of how the kyriarchy devalues of young and disabled lives through ableism and ageism, both in Bulgaria and the rest of the world.

These 238 now-dead child humans suffered horrific abuse and neglect through a terrible variety of instruments. 23 of Bulgaria's 26 state-run homes (currently housing 1,350 children) were implicated. Thousands other certainly suffered abuse untold, but some gruesome reports have been recorded.

134 children were starved.
31 children out of those 134 children died.
17 children were not allowed to move; their caregivers tied to them wheelchairs and beds.
90 children were not allowed to move through chemical restraints and tranquillizing drugs.
81 children died of unspecified neglect.
6 children died of freezing and drowning.
36 children died of pneumonia.
13 children died from poor hygiene.
84 children died of exhaustion.
11 children died because they were taken to the hospital, but too late.
149 children died because they were not taken to the hospital at all.
27 children were raped.
2 children died because of direct physical violence.
15 children died for no immediately apparent reason.

And these are only the recorded cases of abuse, the recorded rapes, the recorded deaths. There are surely many more children dead and wounded by these institutions who were just not noticed.

This inspection was conducted by the Bulgaria Helsinki Commission, a non-governmental human rights watchdog organization. “These children don’t die because of their disabilities - they die of things that no one should die of,” said Margarita Ilieva, head of BHC's legal department. "What we are aiming at is not retribution. We need prevention."

--

There's never a whole lot to say about these cases.

My list organization above seems overly grim, but this is the grimmest thing I've read in some time. Bulgaria has targeted people marginalized by age and disability, decimating the children in its care. The individual caretakers, the directors of these institutions, and the government as a whole are responsible for horrible abuse. And they are very far from unique, very far from alone in the international community. My own government is responsible for permitting acts of abuse, rape, violence, and death not unlike what I detail above.

Ableism and ageism are lethal forces enforced by government institutions. I have no theory to back up or expand on that except that hundreds of children are dead because they had disabilities.

sources: 1 2 3 4 5

Paperwork & homework, anxiety & ADD: institutionalized and internalized ableism

2010-09-21T14:42:00.002-04:00

The world has a tendency to view things as valid only if they are backed up by papers and documentation. This is true of history - documents in Latin and Greek are much preferred to oral histories - and to real people. Social security cards and birth certificates confirm we exist. Grades and diplomas confirm we're smart. Medical histories and proper insurance confirm that our bodies are worth care. And though I'm a writer, I've consistently failed to get official elements of myself on paper has always been a challenge I fail. Whether it's homework or paperwork, my ADD and anxiety make filling out the forms that determine my worth as a human a daunting, stressful task at best and avoided until near-disaster at worst.

When I was a teenager, I never ever did my homework. Ever. My parents encouraged, bribed, punished, diagnosed, medicated, but throughout junior high and high school, my grades never rose above a C. More than anything, I really wanted to get stuff right, and get good grades, but I couldn't. And much the way I hated myself for being too large and not sexy enough, I also hated myself for being too lazy and not smart enough .

Ignoring homework until I was about to fail was not a sign of poor work ethic - it was a sigh of a disability and internalizing ableism. I did very well in college and I work basically all the time now - I really like work, a lot, these days. I'm not lazy, though I constantly berated myself for laziness, even after I was diagnosed with ADD.*

Now past the days of homework, I'm over hating myself . But I'm not over my disabilities, and the paperwork at every junction of adult life is a challenge that often feel insurmountable. I cannot sustain my attention to finish up more than one page of paperwork at a time, so, I do it immediately or put it off. If I don't get it done immediately, my anxiety explodes and keeps me from looking at, thinking about, or working on it.

While I finally force myself to fill out my name, social security number, and other apparently relevant details,, I'm constantly berating myself: why didn't you get this done earlier how do you know that's right what if you make a mistake what if you lie what if you get in trouble what if what if what if. Filling out forms for anything - taxes, student loans, health insurance - becomes almost unbearable, something to be procrastinated as long as humanly possible no matter how crucial it is.

Adult life with official forms papers and documentation is not accessible or accommodating to my disabled self. I have little recourse, respite, or understanding. As with the homework I didn't do, my problems with paperwork are read not ad a societal fixation on over-documentation, but as a problem with me. Completing forms in a timely fashion is framed as a virtue, so difficulty completing such work is framed as a flaw. Paperwork's not too frustrating, encumbering, confusing: I'm too lazy, worthless, careless.

---

The tyranny of forms is not, of course, limited to this particular axis of disability: paperwork also works on behalf of cissexism and race and many other axes. It's a force of the kyriarchy in more than one way. Nor am I the first to point out the disabling effects of ADD/ADHD; this writing is particularly inspired by a couple of posts:

Whether or not you have a diagnosis, most neurotypicals will assume that your symptoms are a moral failure – that things don’t get done because you don’t care enough to get them done. That you forget things because you don’t care to remember them. That you get distracted from doing something because you don’t care to apply yourself to it. But these are all far from the truth. ADHDers do care, but wishing won’t change neurology. We can develop coping skills, but those only work so far. - Lisa Harney, ADHD Isn't Trivia

I never intend for things to get this way. I ignore something for one day, and pretty soon it's eighteen days later and I still haven't done it. Then my responsibilities become wrapped up in so much guilt and helplessness that I have to ignore them because I'd rather feel good about myself. -Allie Brosh, Procrastinator

Also check out Kinsey and Isabel on the topic.

---

Paperwork is a form of institutionalized ableism. Paperwork keeps folks who have issues with anxiety, ADD, and likely other disorders from living, from working, from getting the care we need to treat that which disables us. It makes paperwork a daunting, insurmountable task - and its incompletion perpetuates guilt and sends it further away from actually getting done.

Paperwork is to a certain extent necessary, and to advocate its end is not helpful. Society is, as always, very concerned with its own existence, and how to best document it. And so, I can't advocate for its ends - I can only explain how I experience it as problematic. Furthermore I must admit that I don't know how to accommodate this problem beyond simple suggestions - less complexity, more available and non-shaming assistance with forms.

I don't exactly know what to do. I just think that functioning should be less contingent on how well we fill in forms; I think our basic rights to exist and live and be healthy should be less dependent on whether we have our papers in order.

*Not ADHD - I've never had hyperactivity.

Katie Gilliam verbally attacked with racial slurs; Destin, FL police couldn't care less

2010-09-08T13:46:00.000-04:00

At the end of the work week, Katie Gilliam wanted to relax. She went to the Wal-Mart she frequents three to four times a week to unwind with a manicure and pedicure. But her tension skyrocketed when she returned to her car, parked in a disabled spot. Under her windshield, she found an admonition to obey the speed limits accompanied by a racial slur.

Feeling shocked, frightened, and threatened, she locked herself in a car and called the police. “I was scared. I remember telling the dispatcher that ‘I was going to do whatever I had to do to protect myself.’ ”

Upon arrival, the police found some pretty solid clues as to who was stalking and harassing Ms. Gilliam. Security tapes showed "a white male in a white Ford Explorer pull up next to her vehicle and place something on the windshield." The note was left on paper that had a State Farm policy number. Both of these are clear indications that this man was not too careful about not being caught, and, with a couple of hours of police work, could easily be apprehended.

But what did the police decide to do in light of this clear threat against Ms. Gilliam?

Nothing.

They told her that if she wanted to find her stalker, she could do it herself:

When The Log contacted the Sheriff’s Office Tuesday, public information officer Michele Nicholson said the complaint was originally filed under criminal mischief, but since no damage had actually occurred to Gilliam’s vehicle, the incident would be treated “more like a harassment issue.”

“There are currently no leads, since the video footage from Wal-Mart didn’t provide a good shot of the person and they could not be identified,” she said.
Gilliam didn’t buy that answer.

“There was a State Farm policy number on the envelope,” she said. “They can start by calling them. I am not going to do the sheriff’s job for them; I am a taxpayer.”

After she was informed of the envelope of the identification number, Nicholson said there was no reason to contact the company and proceed because the “case was not criminal.”

“Because of the way the statues read, there is nothing for us to pursue,” she said, adding that Gilliam was free to pursue civil action against the perpetrator if she could identify him.

Gilliam is not overdoing it when she calls this act terrorism later in the article. The writer of the note has stalked her enough to know things about her; how she drives, her race. He is targeting her: he is making her to feel uncomfortable, terrified, and unsafe because of her status as a woman of color with disabilities.

Gilliam is not imagining things; her recipient of racial harassment grew out of a social and individual need to terrify and stalk women at marginalized intersections. Her harasser's note was not benign, not an isolated incident: it implied that she was being watched, that if she didn't play nice, didn't drive the right speed, she would be subject to further harassment, and possibly violence. It violated a space that she clearly regarded as safe and turned it into a space fraught with terror, with no protection.

The police's blase response is a reflection of institutionalized racism on more than one level. The officers on the police force are not willing to take a taxpayer's fear and discomfort seriously because of her marginalized status; they completely erase the potential danger she may face by pursuing the person who is threatening her with vile slurs. The law makers they hide behind have declined to write laws protecting citizens from attacks based on race or disability from criminal law. Furthermore, they apparently don't have very strong laws against stalking or harassment, a crime that disproportionately affects women.

The police of Destin, Florida are sending a clear message by dismissing and minimizing Ms. Gilliam's complaint. They are clearly stating that the lives, safety, and comfort of people of color, people with disabilities, and women are not valuable, not worth police time; they are giving stalkers and harassers who target people on the margins carte blanche to do as they please without repercussion.

Related reading: Domino's Pizza delivered with racial attack on Carla Robinson

source

Faye's history of lady instrumentalists [part six: Gretta Cohn, Stefanie Drootin, Azure Ray/Maria Taylor/Orenda Fink, Jenny Conlee, Petra Haden]

2010-09-05T12:29:00.005-04:00

Hello, dear readers! I apologize: this one is going up late - but never fear, your weekly supply of female instrumentalists is here in the nick of time.

Think you might be in need of some more real heroes in your life? Check out the series archive: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Gretta Cohn is (in the music world) best known as the cellist for the band Cursive, performing with them from 2001-2005. Cohn contributed significantly to Cursive's sound at the time. She also collaborated prolifically with other indie rock bands at this time, guesting with The Faint, The Good Life, Rilo Kiley, Thursday, Tilly and the Wall and Maria Taylor among others. After she left the band she moved to New York, where she continued to focus on collaboration with other artists as well as pursuing other interests. She is currently a radio producer and her website is largely a radio documentary blog.

Neat Trivia: She was a playable character in the online arcade game Emogame 2 (fun to play, and witty wrt music and sometimes politics, but also contains a lot of misogynist, pointless humor, just fyi).

  
Lyrics Excerpt: Cut it out!| Your self-inflicted pain | is getting too routine | the crowds are catching on | to the self-inflicted song| Well, here we go again | The art of acting weak| Fall in love to fail | to boost your CD sales

It's Saddle Creek day on Deeply Problematic! Stefanie Drootin is the bassist for The Good Life, which was formed as a side project to support songs that didn't fit into Cursive's repertoire; they are a well known band within that scene. Before and during this endeavor, she also played with other Saddle Creek or Team Love bands (Bright Eyes, Azure Ray [and Orenda Fink and Maria Taylor separately] and McCarthy Trenching), as well as She and Him. Most recently she and a friend, Chris Senseney, under the name Tin Kite, recorded an album together. In a quote she says, “I had my eight-month-old baby strapped to my body during the entire recording. We recorded most of it live and didn’t stop takes if he cried or if a truck drove by.” AWESOME. Listen to some of that on her Myspace page (linked with her name, above) - or, check her out with The Good Life below.

Lyrics Excerpt: You've got a new friend. | You've got a new friend. | Likes to go to movies. | Likes to drink red wine. | Sounds familiar, better hold on tight: | a film school drunk can be so hard to find.

Maria Taylor and Orenda Fink met at the age of 15 while both attending the Alabama School for Fine Arts, and fronted a band called Little Red Rocket, which released two albums in the late 90's and draw comparisons to Veruca Salt. Fink plays guitar; Taylor plays guitar, piano and drums. Both are better known for their dreampop two-piece band, Azure Ray, which began in Georgia and relocated to Omaha, NE to work with the music scene there. Azure Ray was active from 2001-2004, when they broke up to work on solo projects and side project Now It's Overhead. (However, the band reformed temporarily for "5 or 6 shows" in 2008 and are now releasing another record.)

Now It's Overhead, out of Athens, GA, features both women, as well as Andy LeMaster and Clay Leverett, and was originally a studio project to produce some of LeMaster's old work and grew into a full-fledged band. The band has toured as support for REM and Idlewild during respective US and UK tours.

Orenda Fink has released three solo albums, as well as albums with bands O+S and Art in Manila; Maria Taylor has put out four solo albums; both collaborate with other artists including Moby, Joshua Radin, and Bright Eyes.

Lyrics Excerpt: I'll be alone but maybe more carefree | Like a kite that floats so effortlessly | I was afraid to be alone | Now I'm scared thats how I'd like to be

Stepping away from the tangled webs of Nebraska indie music for a moment!

Jenny Conlee, notably of the Decemberists plays almost any instrument you've ever thought of (hammond organ, accordion, melodica, glockenspiel, piano and keyboards just according to Wikipedia - and also sometime backup singer). There isn't a ton about her, but she's also collaborated with a number of other bands in the Portland area, and before she was in the Decemberists she played piano for Calobo. She also currently plays keyboards, glockenspiel and accordion for Casey Neill and the Norway Rats, and is in the acoustic band Black Prairie.

Re: the video - I believe the violinist on this is their sometime member Petra Haden - an extremely accomplished musician in her own right. She's been a member of several bands and has collaborated with dozens of bands from indie to poppunk to death metal.

Lyrics Excerpt: We are two mariners | Our ship's sole survivors | In this belly of a whale | Its ribs are ceiling beams | Its guts are carpeting | I guess we have some time to kill

And that, my friends, brings us to the end of our adventures in lady instrumentalists. Did I miss something? Was it terrible that I didn't include _____? Should I do another one? Enjoy this series? Hate it? Leave your thoughts!

I know I'm going to miss writing it!

Also, if you feel inclined to support Deeply Problematic, it's always much appreciated!

Wikipedia's main page mentions nine men for every one woman

2010-09-02T18:25:00.000-04:00

The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs from many different writing systems. A registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation.

I just love Wikipedia. I think it's one of the greatest things to happen because of the Internet. It's a source of information that's free to all, that's relatively reliable and in-depth, that's fairly transparent in its editing and resources. Most of the pictures I use in my posts are from Wikimedia Commons. While I often warn students I tutor against using it, it's a great place to get general information on a topic, start research, or just productively procrastinate by learning new things.

The main page, the face that Wikipedia puts out to the world, is a good starting place for browsing and procrastination. I went to that main page at 1 am on Tuesday the 24th of August to look for a female name for some fiction I've been working on.

But to my dismay, I didn't find a single lady on the entire front page. Not one.

Wikipedia, our Library of Alexandria, considered the accomplishments of women so insignificant that they did not merit any mention. Not in the Featured Article, or In the News, or On This Day (profiling history), or Did You Know (highlighting new articles). To look at Wikipedia's main page on August 24, 2010, you would think that men made and did everything, and women had nothing to do with anything.

Was this lack of representation of the ladies a one-time thing, I wondered? Or is this a pattern, a reflection of institutionalized systematic oppression of women known as the patriarchy and more broadly, the kyriarchy?

To answer this question, I looked at ten Wikipedia main pages from the past year, and counted the number of women and men who were mentioned by name.* I used archive.org's Wayback Machine for eight of these pages (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.) For the final two, I used the August 24 main page that kicked this project off, and today's page. After studying these ten pages, I found:

15 women appeared total, an average of 1.5 women per page. There were no women for the May 20 and October 27 page, and no more than three women on any other day.
130 men appeared total, an average of 13 men per page.
That's a proportion of almost 9 men to every 1 woman.

Nine men to every one woman on a portal that represents the greatest easily accessible store of knowledge is outrageously disproportionate and unacceptable. Wikipedia's under-representation is prime representation of the fact that women are still to this day oppressed, ignored, erased, and marginalized.

From a systematic point of view, it's not totally Wikipedia's fault: the world has been dominated by men, and that's reflected in the records we keep and the people we commemorate. Men still dominate every aspect of society from culture to news to sports to politics and everything in between, and they have since time immemorial. And that's a big part of why Wikipedia, an organization devoted to preserving records and making information accessible, focuses so heavily on men.

But it's not completely about history. Women make up only 13% of Wikipedians (Wikipedia editors, the people who research, write, edit, and maintain these pages - and full disclosure, I was an editor for a few years) - a proportion strikingly similar to the number of women represented on its main page. Men focus on men - upon promoting and constructing articles about people like them. Thus, the main page editors have less women-focused articles to promote to the main page.

But it's not just about the proportion of male to female volunteers. Wikipedia's main page editors could find more pages about women, could promote more woman-focused articles as in need of construction in their editor portal. They could highlight news about women, and new articles about women.

But they don't. Because they don't care about the representation of women. Because they don't care if they're replicating existing power structures, structures which likely favor them. Because they focus on being objective - and as so often happens, objectivity just means a perpetuation the dominant, male, kyriarchal point of view.

But what should Wikipedia do to remedy its chronic, sexist under-representation?

First, this isn't a problem that starts with the main page. If Wikipedia wants to make its content less focused on men, it should promote and foster the growth and comfort of female editors like Lise Broer (who contributed several of the featured pictures in my review) .
Second, they should make sure that there is always a woman on the main page of Wikipedia. Not including any women on any given day is an act of erasure, pure and simple.
Third, they should focus on promoting articles about women for development and construction in their editor's portal, consistently asking editors to spend their time on articles about women. More good articles about women will make more articles about women suited to the high quality expected for pages on Wikipedia's main page.
Finally, they should attempt to slowly bring up the proportional representation of women until at least 40% of all the named individuals on the main page on any given day are women.

Facts, information, history and current events were and are not made solely by men, but you wouldn't know that by looking at Wikipedia's main page. Kyriarchy is invested in seeing itself duplicated and perpetuated, and where better to perpetuate the idea that men are the really important people in society than in one of its most authoritative and accessible sources of widely disseminated information? The world is subjective, and Wikipedia's main page editor is choosing to represent a view of the world that is disproportionately focused on men; their reluctance to highlight women is sexist and patriarchal, not objective.

Further reading:
Wikipedia's Gender Gap
Is Wikipedia A Victim of its Own Success?

*Focusing on just men and women is more than a little bit reductive - and since I'm looking at the main page in English, it's US-centric and Western-centric. Men oppressing women is far from the only form of oppression. But I've got time constraints, so I focused on the under-representation that I first noticed. If this post proves popular, I'll return for another look on other axes.

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Why I use that word that I use: Problematic

2010-09-01T19:01:00.003-04:00

A cartoon speech bubble with a question mark in quotation marks inside it.

Unlike the previous entries in this series, problematic is not an unfamiliar term for most feminists - in fact, it's a cliche. I named this blog after a professor who overused the phrase "deeply problematic". My intent with my title was humorous, but these days I use it earnestly, frequently. and without irony. Problematic is not a specific word, but it's an excellent way to briefly and broadly note the universal fact of imperfection.

Problematic is an adjective that admits plural flaws. It is applied to nouns that are not perfect to point out that they are not perfect. Problematic suggests a series or pattern of problems - it states that there are more issues with whatever it's appended to than can or will be immediately recognized.

Problematic is a diagnostic, general term - a term for introductions. A term to point out a fact that is true of all - that it's not perfect, that it has problems. Problematic sets a critical tone when used broadly, indicating that all is not well and that some of what is not well will be identified and articulated in the following paragraphs.

Problematic can be a qualifier. It acknowledges that something is not perfect without going in depth. In praise of media, individuals, or actions for their social values, noting that they're problematic denies blanket endorsement to the less virtuous acts of the subject of praise. Simply noting that X is problematic allows for legitimate dissent to praise of X. It reminds the reader that even the things we like are created in a kyriarchy, and thus even those things we like will reflect some of the oppressions we fight.

Use of problematic as a qualifier can be a cop-out - a way to avoid critique rather than a thoughtful acknowledgement of legitimate concerns. But a well-placed link or short elaboration can remedy this without breaking word count limits. (Example: "Though Glee has problematic elements, particularly on the axis of disability, I find the relationship between Kurt and his father to be anti-homophobic.")

Some folks have described problematic as "lazy" or obfuscating. It is neither, when used correctly. Any term can be used in a thoughtless or confusing way. Problematic is just not a word for specifics.

Problematic is a universal term - it is simple, and applies to literally everything. Pointing out that something is problematic is value neutral. Perfection is a cruel farce; everything has problems,even if we personally cannot see or articulate them. Describing something as problematic is just explaining that it is imperfect, of nature. And sometimes that is as a radical as saying that marginalized groups are human, too - it's a clear fact and commonality, but it's sometimes forgotten.

Problematic is a broad word and one that can be applied to everything. Problematic is a part of this blog's name because it opens up the subject matter to critique of unlimited sources - from news to media to language and everything else, since everything is problematic. For my purposes, it's an admission of guilt - that this space, too, is deeply problematic.

--

Feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith utilized this term globally in her book, "The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology". I have not read the book, but I found this description of her work and use of the term to be helpful:

Problematic is a term used by ethnomethodology and put to effective use by Dorothy Smith to describe as a problem of interest that which is normally not seen as a problem because it is taken for granted. Smith argues that, “the everyday world is problematic”. She argues that the everyday world is neither transparent nor obvious. That social relations are organized from “elsewhere”.

By bracketing one's own membership in the world a researcher makes the commonsense and taken-for-granted world problematic.By making the everyday and ordinary problematic a researcher is able to uncover the structure and dynamic of the everyday.

Did you like this post? Want to see more simple, straightforward definitions of social justice lingo like problematic, kyriarchy, and cis? Donate to Deeply Problematic! Here's 10 reasons to give $10 today.

This and other "Why I use that word that I use" posts are a 101 space - if there's something that you're not getting, you have greater room than usual to ask basic questions.

Josh Eastman arrested for paying child to recite racial slurs on YouTube video

2010-08-31T17:33:00.003-04:00

Racism has flourished on the Internet. YouTube is particularly infested with this form of oppression where videos like "sparkling wiggles" present blatant racism and viral videos like Antoine Dodson smack of cultural tourism. These videos do not only perpetuate and nurture racism in humor - they encourage others to seek fame through active oppression. One such candidate for hateful celebrity, Josh Eastman of Bridgeport, CT, went so far as to actively indoctrinate a neighboring child into racism - and he's not the only one.

Eastman recorded and posted a video called "Swearing Kid" in which an eight-year-old boy swears and hurls racial slurs while being coached from off-camera. When the boy's mother caught wind of this video, she was appropriately horrified by this apparently uncharacteristic behavior from her son, who claims that Eastman paid him $1 for his grim performance. She called the police, who picked Eastman up and held him on an $2,500 bond on charges of impairing the morals of a child. Eastman said:

"If they didn't like the video they could have just asked me nicely to take it off, and I would have taken it off. They didn't have to go call the police and have me arrested for it."

Eastman felt comfortable paying their child to spew hate and promote it to the general public without asking, but he apparently expects the consideration and courtesy of a polite phone call when the offense is against him. Nice.

Racism is evil regardless of context, but training and tutoring the next generation of racists takes especial involvement in the kyriarchy. It communicates to both the children starring and the white viewers of these awful videos that they are entitled to spread racial hatred around; it harms the people of color they will interact with in childhood, adolescence and adulthood.

Eastman didn't see the problem with this; he claims that the child was known for such language, and describe the video as "fun and funny". But even if Eastman didn't teach him those slurs, even if he didn't pay him a dollar - such a small sum, representing his valuation of people of color - even if he didn't indoctrinate this child into the gleeful use of racist language, Eastman was teaching the child that racism is funny, that hatred is worth reward, attention, and praise.

Though Eastman will likely stop his practice of this particular brand of hatred, this video was not an isolated incident. While searching for this and the "sparkling wiggles" referenced above, I found a huge number of other children being encouraged to say racist things by friends, family, whomever. Many of these videos, including Eastman's, are taken down by YouTube administrators, but more simply pop up in their place.

The children in these videos are not learning the ideals of the postracist society the US sometimes brags of; instead, these young people, the douchebags like Eastman capturing their learning experience, and the people who watch, enjoy, and send on these videos are actively promoting and perpetuating white supremacy.

source: one two three four five six seven

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Pledge drive update and top content of August 2010

2010-08-31T12:54:00.001-04:00

A thermometer, or vial or whatever, showing monetary donations in the amount of $100, $200, $300, $400, and $500. It is filled up with red ink to roughly $425.

First off, pledge drive status! I've gotten donations from 22 people ranging from $3 to $100 thus far, and at $423 I'm over 80% of the way there! $77 more dollars, and I will quit bugging y'all about it. Click here to donate, or click on the button below:

Thanks to everyone who has donated so far. I'm feeling quite positive about the state and direction of the blog in large part knowing y'all value my content enough to support the blog.

As with 2009, August 2010 has been a huge month for Deeply Problematic! Hits this month were twice that of July, and up a good deal from this time last year. Thanks for reading, twittering, tumbling, and linking it up in various places.

Top posts:

1. 17-month-old Roy Jones brutally murdered for acting like a girl
2. Domino's Pizza delivered with racial attack on Carla Robinson
3. Women and bodily functions: poop
4. Women in Questionable Content: Women-run businesses and Bechdel-passing friendships
5. Why I use that word that I use: Kyriarchy, kyriarchal, and why not patriarchy

Most commented:

1. Why I use that word that I use: Cis, cissupremacy, cissexism and Women and bodily functions: poop - 16 comments each
2. Fat is an adjective, not an attack and Domino's Pizza delivered with racial attack on Carla Robinson - 12 comments each
3. Women in Questionable Content: Women-run businesses and Bechdel-passing friendships - 10 comments
4. 17-month-old Roy Jones brutally murdered for acting like a girl - 9 comments
5. Women in Questionable Content: sexuality and identity - 8 comments

Unlike last year, I do not seem to be burning out! Instead, I'm looking forward to a fruitful and productive September. Thanks for reading.

Faye's history of lady instrumentalists [part five: Skin, Jenny Lewis, Alison Mosshart, Meg White]

2010-08-29T09:00:00.002-04:00

Hi everyone! Faye, popping in, with your weekly boost of female instrumentalists.

Have you not been getting your recommended supply of awesome ladies? Catch up: (1, 2,) 1, 2, 3, 4!

So, today's blog is slightly abridged as I am dealing with some pain issues. This might turn out to be a blessing in disguise, though, since I don't have to write as much and you guys get less rambling AND two blogs for the price of one! So bear with me :)

The first artist I wanted to talk about, Skin, is actually way better known for her talents as a vocalist, but she also plays guitar (not frequently on tour, however). She's probably best known for her work with band Skunk Anansie, which she dubbed a "clit-rock" band (a take off on their "britrock" designation), diving into feminist/socio-political topics lyrically with a punk and metal musical background. The band was together from 1994-2001. Skunk Anansie got back together starting around 2009, touring and releasing a greatest-hits album and are now set to release a new album, Wonderlustre, on Sep. 13, 2010. In the interim, Skin worked as a solo artist, releasing Fleshwounds and Fake Chemical State. Her solo work was slightly more starker and more introspective, and received a lukewarm reception from longtime fans -- however, in my opinion it's still awesome.

On that front, I've chosen one of her solo pieces to embed, but I encourage you to check out Skunk Anansie's music if you haven't heard of them before.

Lyrics Excerpt: Plain devil | Be careful | I can spit on your charm | Silly baby | Stone crazy | Can't you hear the alarm

Jenny Lewis is amazingly multifaceted: she started out a child/teen actress, and then formed the band Rilo Kiley with friends in 1998. (She is also known primarily as a vocalist, but plays keyboards, guitars, harmonica and bass on various projects.) Rilo Kiley began with a folk-country sound and moved toward a more indie rock sound on later records, which also emphasized Lewis' voice and presence more. They hit major success in 2004 and were picked up by a major label in 2005, opening for acts such as Coldplay. She also has a very prolific solo career: in 2004 Lewis was invited to cut a record for Conor Oberst's independent label Team Love, and, with The Watson Twins, subsequently released Rabbit Fur Coat, which had more of a soul edge to it. She also put out an album (on her own) called Acid Tongue and has a side project with her boyfriend Johnathan Rice called Jenny and Johnny which plans to release an album in 2010. Throughout her career she's also guested on a somewhat astonishing list of other bands' albums.

Lyrics Excerpt: There's blood in my mouth 'cause I've been biting my tongue all week | I keep on talkin' trash but I never say anything | And the talkin' leads to touchin' | and the touchin' leads to sex | and then there is no mystery left

Alison Mosshart is best known for singing lead vocals -- is there a weird trend today?? -- in The Kills (where she was known as VV) and The Dead Weather. She also plays acoustic guitar as well as percussion at times in The Dead Weather, and has played keyboard. She started her career in 1995 in the punk rock band Discount and formed The Kills in 2000; after meeting Jack White and Jack Lawrence through The Raconteurs, she joined their budding supergroup The Dead Weather in late 2008. (Like Jenny Lewis, she's sung with a lot of other bands, from Arctic Monkeys to Placebo.) She's sort of a perfect blend of our first two women of the morning - prolific, connected, and hardcore.

The vid I chose isn't a fantastic one in terms of quality, but it is one of the best that shows her as a guitarist. However, if you'd like to see an awesome medley of over 10 years of her influence and involvement in punk/alt rock, allow me to point you here.

Lyrics Excerpt: You know I look like a woman, but I | Cut like a buffalo | Stand up like a tower | But I fall | Just like a domino

Last but most certainly not least - and a good segue from Alison Mosshart - is Meg White of White Stripes fame. Meg plays drums! While she has sung once or twice, and plays timpani, guitar and organ as well, she is most memorable as a drummer. She began playing with Jack around 1997, while they were still married (he took her last name) and they started the band shortly thereafter.

Here's where I go on a small rant: I actually get very frustrated sometimes on Meg White's behalf. A lot of people don't understand that just because her drumming is simplistic and "primal", it doesn't mean she lacks talent as a drummer. Her role in the White Stripes is to keep the beat, to frame the melody, and to set the standard for the sound. This is true whether that framework is a simple metronomic one-two-one-two pound that might as well be on a pot, a marching war-like drumroll on snare, or a complex beat that slowly increases in speed (all of these are present in various White Stripes songs). And this is what she does! In a band like The White Stripes that not only conceptually (by examining innocence, simplicity, family, nostalgia, and to some degree storytelling and ritual) but musically (blues and punk) places value on a lack of pretention, her performance is exactly what is called for. But as she puts it, "That is my strength. A lot of drummers would feel weird about being that simplistic."

Lyrics Excerpt: I had an opinion that didn't matter | I had a brain that felt like pancake batter | I got a backyard with nothing in it | Except a stick, a dog | And a box with something in it

Next week, we'll be wrapping up this series with -- women who play more instruments than seems remotely plausible! A dischordant yet melodic, networking indie-folk extravaganza! And more things that sound like they're pulled from sideshow headlines!

I am VERY open to suggestion -- and continued posting, let's face it, I like this series! -- so if there's anyone you'd like to see PLEASE don't hesitate to let me know. :D

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Awesome alert: Liu Wei plays piano with his toes in China's Got Talent

2010-08-27T15:39:00.001-04:00

Liu Wei, photographed from above, playing an upright piano.

Awesome Alert is a regular feature in which I feature awesome stories of marginalized folks that come to my attention through Google Alerts.

Liu Wei is a Chinese pianist and composer competing in China's Got Talent. Wei, whose arms were amputated after electrocution at age ten, plays the piano beautifully with his toes. He forgoes prosthetics, and says that the only thing he cannot do that he would like to is drive. "For people like me, there were only two options. One was to abandon all dreams, which would lead to a quick, hopeless death. The other was to struggle without arms to live an outstanding life," Liu said to the judges last week on America's Got Talent.

In the video below, Liu Wei goes through his day, brushing his teeth, eating, and surfing, sometimes using his toes. After the video, he talks to the China's Got Talent judges and plays Mariage D'amour to great applause:

There's a lot to critique about how the media and show portray his accomplishments; many of the articles I consulted for this post framed it in terms of a "heartening [tale] of overcoming adversity" and a "sob story". This trope takes the focus off the accomplishments and talent of folks with disability like Wei. Wei's not there to compete and accomplish something, but in these stories, he's there primarily to move the audience to tears.

And there's something of that to the clip from China's Got Talent - one of the judges suggests that there's nothing he has to say because Wei's so inspiring. That's not the reason Wei should be getting acclaim - he should be praised because he's a good goddamn pianist. China's Got Talent apparently regularly features performers with disabilities, and that's to be commended, but I wonder how many of the performers are framed in a condescending or exceptionalizing way.'

In any case, Wei is an excellent pianist who hopefully has many years of continued success and accomplishment to look forward to.

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Women in Questionable Content: size and bodily functions

2010-08-27T00:50:00.000-04:00

Faye, in comic 1562, with her hand on her hip and a jaunty expression on her face. She is wearing a pink shirt that says "PRETTY PRETTY PRETTY".

It should be clear, at this point in my review of lady characters in the long-running webcomic Questionable Content (QC) that I am, with some exceptions, a fan of how Jeph Jacques approaches his women characters. Faye, Dora, Hannelore, Tai and Marigold are particularly thought-out and relateable characters depicted with respect, attention, and interest. Jacques' approach to fatness and bodily functions is equally refreshing. While QC's portrayal of different sized bodies is in many ways narrow, it is in other ways full and realistic: these women poop and fart with the best of them, and their level of fatness does not correspond to their level of health or percieved beauty.

Body size and shape is a major focal point in the world of Questionable Content; more specifically, Faye's body is of particular concern to pretty much every character heavily involved in the universe. She is explicitly fat, according to herself and others (though the phrase retains much of its stigma in Jacques' use). She is also the central point of romantic and sexual attraction for most lady-loving characters; Marten, Sven, Dora, Tai, and Angus have all repeatedly expressed admiration of her plump pulchritude, and she too seems to like her body as it is. Both Faye and the other fat character, the recently-introduced Marigold, reflect a realistic level of insecurity about their size, but such comments are usually countered - not with denials that they're fat, but with denials that they are anything less than lovely.

Faye's physical health, while not a locus, is not assumed to be terrible because of her fatness. When thin Penelope tricks her and Dora into going to the gym (a problematic move that I read as a reflection of Penelope's proselytizing qualities than of any messages the comic is trying to send), it's suggested more for her mental health rather than her weight - ableism is no better than sizism, but it is different. At the gym, Faye bests skinny Dora in a run-off, subverting the trope that skinny people are automatically healthier than fat people (though there's some ageism later in the strip). Later, Faye eats ice cream, says she doesn't care about losing weigh, and explicitly praises her own size. Fat is not moralized in QC; it's not ascribed to anything in particular except body shape.

Reinforcing the transgressive aspects of size in QC are constant denials that Faye is actually fat. Because she is seen as attractive and because she is on the smaller end of fat, reviewers frequently dismiss or claim not to see her fatness. Faye does tend to fluctuate in size, as most people do, but that's more a signal of the evolution of Jacques' drawing style than of weight loss. As usual, fat is not seen as a descriptive term but rather a negation of any healthy or negative qualities.

But while I generally take a favorable view of size in QC, it is not without its problems. Fat in the QC universe is definitely on the small end of the spectrum; RJ of Riot Nrrd Comics characterized it in our interview as "like the Dove real beauty stuff, where it's good to be chubby! But only chubby enough." For a comic that is often known for its portrayal of diverse body types, the standards of what constitutes attractive is pretty narrow, and not just on the axis of size; this is, as I've discussed in the past, completely about cis people, and it is, as I plan to discuss soon, almost completely about white people.

Jacques' focus on Faye and Marigold's breasts is also a little disconcerting. The size, quality, and loveliness of their mammaries is constantly remarked-upon. Breasts are a constantly sexualized quality in all women, but particularly in fat women, and Jacques falls into a trope by strongly associating Marigold and Faye's beauty with their breast size.

The depiction of fatness in QC has what I believe to be a net positive impact. But what I really like about Jacques' handling of female bodies is the fullness of their functioning. The women in Questionable Content, without exception, talk without shame and positively about their experiences of pooping and farting and burping and menstruating. From the fourth comic on, women use bodily functions as a source of humor and conversational fodder. Most male authors fetishize women's bodily processes, but Jacques handles it with humor and honesty.

Faye is a central figure (once again) in most discussions of the digestive system. She likes to poop and she likes to talk about it. Her frankness about her functions is both familiar - she talks a lot like me and my friends talk about such matters - and strange - few fictional females talk discuss such things. She is also the emblem for frequent farts and burping as communication. While Faye is the most enthusiastic potty mouth, she is far from the only one - Tai, Dora, and Hannelore have all been involved in toilet related gags.

While pooping is not the only function discussed in QC, it is the most prominent, and that brand o function discussion sometimes excludes processes usually identified with women. Pooping and farting so dominate the body humor that periods rarely get any airtime. Periods, of course, are not uniquely feminine and they are not universal to all women. And it is occasionally mentioned in strip dialogue. But the cis women in QC, so given to discussing the messy workings of their body, would likely discuss menstruation a little more often than they do.

Jacques' depiction of women of size as attractive is neither singular nor revolutionary. And his focus on bodily processes may be a little bit juvenile. But in the media of a kyriarchy, there are still stiflingly few representations of fat women as beautiful, and the inner workings of women's bodies are oppressed. Faye, Marigold, and the other women centralized in QC are full-sized and fully-realized, and while this is far from unique, it's still quite rare, and a treat to watch as they develop.

This is the last post in a series on women in Questionable Content. Part one and two are here. I've also written on disability in QC. I'm planning on writing on race and QC at some point in the near future - though not for a couple weeks at least, these are always surprisingly exhausting. (A special welcome to people from the QC forums! Y'all have been my second-biggest link provider of this month, so thanks!) Check back next weekish for a review of my other favorite webcomic, Achewood.

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TelevIsm at Bitch Magazine: Farewell, or, I don't respond to things I don't respond to.

2010-08-26T15:38:00.000-04:00

An illustration of a smiling television against a pink background, with hearts above it. From Robert Couse-Baker on Flickr

Critique is an act of love and admiration for a show: it says that I think it's good enough to champion, strong enough to withstand critique, deep enough to dissect. Other viewers who enjoy these shows notice these things too, and want a space to consider and discuss them. My enjoyment of these shows often reflects my privilege—I can watch cissexist, racist, heterosexist, sizist, classist humor without feeling personally threatened, and often without even noticing it. Unpacking what is wrong with these shows helps me unpack my own privilege.

Read the rest here.

Today concludes the biggest chapter in my writing career thus far: my final post for Bitch. Writing there has been so wonderful, and I'm sad to see it draw to a close (which is why I put it off so long!). Bitch is, like everything else, not without its problems, but I've had a fantastic experience there on just about every level.

The full archive of my posts are here.

Vote for RMJ's SXSW presentation!

2010-08-26T13:10:00.000-04:00

Hey y'all, sorry about the lack of analytic content in the last couple of days. I am getting a couple of new pieces ready for later today.

I know I've been asking for a lot of help lately, and y'all have REALLY, like REALLY, come through - more on that tomorrow. But today, I'd like to ask you for a little more help in another arena. My presentation,"Dealing with Feminist Drama in Internet Discourse", is currently up as a part of SXSW's PanelPicker process, and voting ends tomorrow. If you could take a few minutes to do the following, I would really appreciate it.

Step One: Register for SXSW or sign in.

Step Two: Give my panel a thumbs up.

Thanks so much! Also be sure to check out and vote for these awesome panels recommended by the fabulous Racialicious.

10 reasons to donate $10 to Deeply Problematic

2010-08-25T13:09:00.000-04:00

A thermometer, or vial or whatever, showing monetary donations in the amount of $100, $200, $300, $400, and $500. It is filled up with red ink to roughly $150.

Last Monday, I asked for donations to help support my work here at Deeply Problematic. And I've been quite pleased with the response! A lot of readers have shown me that they think my work is worth compensating, both by donating and by retweeting, reblogging, and sharing. Thank you to everyone who has helped me so far - your encouragement means a great deal.

But I am still many many dollars short of earning my rent and other bills. So I'm setting the bar high, and pushing on with my donation drive until I reach my goal: $500.

$500 is a lot. It's a huge amount to me. $500 basically takes care of my living expenses - my share of the rent, electric, Internet, and insurance. If I know that I can come to y'all in times of need, $500 will get me through rough spots that come with the flexible career that allow me to spend so much time here and keep my sanity.

$500 is a lot, but it's also not too much. I have, according to my sources, hundreds of regular readers. 50 readers contributing $10 would get me to my goal. Eight wonderful individuals have contributed already, in sums larger and smaller, totaling $145. If another 36 contribute just $10, I will be easily be able to pay my rent at the quickly-approaching end of the month.

This is not just a short term investment in keeping my lights on. It's a long term investment in Deeply Problematic: it ensures that I won't be tempted to quit when the going gets rough again. And most of the money you donate will go towards making this a better blog - paying writers, getting a new design, new commenting, donating to other blogs, etc.

Click here to donate, or click on the button below:

Still not convinced? Here are ten solid reasons to donate ten dollars to Deeply Problematic today:

10. Because we need a new commenting system. Blogger comments ain't cutting it.

9. Because you want to see more exclusive guest posts like Garland Grey's. And maybe, possibly, regular contributors to this blog that are not RMJ.

8. Because we need a new site design.

7. Because I've put a lot of money and time into this. Deeply Problematic did not just happen, and it's not just a labor of my love. The design, site URL, and moderation and maintenance all cost money. But it's also a labor of love: in the 10 months I've actively spent writing at Deeply Problematic, I've spent conservatively 25-30 hours a week on writing and maintaining this blog.

6. Because you need more posts, more often. If I know people are paying for this, I'm going to put a lot more time into this.

5. Because work by women often goes unpaid, and women are expected to be grateful just for the attention. I do appreciate the attention, but we all have to get paid somehow.

4. Because at Deeply Problematic, I focus not just on language, and media, but real people facing the consequences of the kyriarchy.

3. Because I'm so damn good at illuminating problems in language and offer productive solutions to your word dilemmas.

2. Because I offer a unique point of view on the media images we are all fed on a daily basis.

1. Because you think my voice and my words are worthwhile, and you want to strengthen that voice and keep me writing here.

Convinced? If you have a little spare cash, whether it's $10, $5, or $100 (sigh!), please give a little and help a blogger out:

raw url: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=7218870

Thank you for your time and monetary and non-monetary support.

Domino's Pizza delivered with racial attack on Carla Robinson

2010-08-23T18:48:00.002-04:00

Stacks of red and blue Domino's Pizza boxes. On the side of these boxes are the words "Take A Fresh Look". From Wikipedia.

Trigger warning for description of race-based harrassment.

Ordering a pizza should be a pretty uncomplicated and stress-free occasion. That's the point of delivery pizza: not having to cook, having it hot and ready for you when you want it. And most consumers can expect that their relatively low-maintenance meals will be free from the stress and degradation of harassment on the basis of race.

But for Carla Robinson, that was apparently too much too ask. On Friday, she ordered two large pizzas for delivery from her local Domino's in Apex, NC. After the driver left, her ten-year-old niece brought the receipt to her attention. The receipt read "N*GGERS DON'T TIP".

On its own, this would be reprehensible and disgusting, particularly considering that a young child was exposed to such vile and hateful language. But what happened to Robinson after the initial attack compounded the atrocity.

Robinson promptly reported this action to the manager, who was responsible enough to fire the culpable employee. Instead of accepting fault for their actions and moving on, the former employees continued their campaign of hatred by calling Robinson to further demean and intimidate her:

“They were saying basically the same stuff that was on the receipt. They were saying 'N-this, you got me fired, you did this, you did that,' just being real ugly to me, just being real mean,” Robinson said. “I’m thinking it is 2010, it's never good to do that. You can't do stuff like that anymore.”

Domino's is not exactly the organization to blame here; this is the act of one racist individual and it seems that the organization responded promptly and appropriately, accepting fault and offering an apology for their employee's actions. But though this is the act of one lone individual projecting their racism rather than systematic racism affecting millions, it is still very indicative of the racism that white America thrives on.

When social justice writers talk about how our kyriarchal society is far from post-racial, we often point to less obvious manifestations of white people continuing to get the edge over people of color: through housing policies, through standardized tests, through drug law. Racism is often presented as below the surface for many well-meaning white people, something we just don't think about because of our privilege, something we have to look hard to see in our actions and in the actions of others.

But this is very far from reality, both in acts unconscious and conscious. Individual acts of terrorism through blatant racism, as Robinson experienced, are a clear indication of the devaluation of non-white people in the US. People of color do not only experience institutional and systematic racism: they experience targeted attacks and harassment based specifically on their race. Robinson's supposition that in 2010, people will have the good sense to not attack others based on their race is not unreasonable, but sadly, it is too optimistic.

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Trigger warning for comments.

Why I use that word that I use: Kyriarchy, kyriarchal, and why not patriarchy

2010-08-23T13:00:00.001-04:00

A cartoon speech bubble with a question mark in quotation marks inside it.

Kyriarchy and kyriarchal are handy words in intersectional feminist and social justice language. They define the uneven distribution of basic rights broadly; they show that privilege and power injustices do not only exist in the case of men benefiting at the expense of women. Kyriarchy goes beyond patriarchy to recognize the way systems of inequality work together to hurt everyone.

Kyriarchy are the structures of domination working together as a network - not just one group dominating another. Its branches include but are not limited to racism, sexism, cissexism, heterosexism, ageism, and ableism. In a kyriarchy, our kyriarchy, this kyriarchy, different forms of supremacy on different axes are independent and interdependent.

Kyriarchy gets at the nastiness of privilege by implicating all of it: Almost everyone holds unfair advantages and disadvantages granted by the kyriarchy based just on who they are.

Kyriarchal describes actions that promote the kyriarchy. It is the adjective form of kyriarchy; it describes actions (and other nouns - words, attitudes, habits) that back up, reflect, or otherwise contribute to existing power structures. It can refer to an individual exercise of privilege, or it can refer to actions that reinforce an intersection of oppression.

If you're not familiar with kyriarchy, you may know the second-wave word it modifies, patriarchy. Patriarchy and patriarchal are staples of feminist lingo; it's a common way to refer to sexist actions and systems.

So why do I prefer kyriarchy to patriarchy?

Patriarchy is a strictly defined term: it's just about sexism. And that has its uses. But focusing on only sexism can undermine our understanding of how colossal and all-encompassing the functions of privilege are. Feminism is not just about sexism, because women as a group are not solely oppressed on the axis of sex. Used overbroadly, patriarchy defines social power as belonging to only men, and denies the oppressive advantages that women can hold.

Kyriarchy is more descriptive of the approach I try to take to feminism. The word considers all parts of the oppressive structure we live in evenly - no one oppression is worse or better or more important than another. We are all subject to kyriarchy, and we all benefit from kyriarchy; we all share the burden and the blame in different measures and proportions. (The previous statement may not be universal, but it's close.) But with patriarchy, only men are profiting and only women are subjugated; only women are acquitted of responsibility and only men are admonished.

In intersectional discussions, patriarchy is usually too narrow: patriarchy puts the emphasis on solely sexism and erases other experiences of injustice (particularly the various oppressions men bear). Kyriarchy allows for the complexity of abuse that this world can bring down on al l bodies; it allows for both how we suffer from and participate in its tyranny.

--

Kyriarchy is not my word; it was coined by radical feminist theologian Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza. In her book, Wisdom Ways: Introducing Feminist Biblical Interpretation (published by Orbis Books in New York in 2001), Schussler Fiorenza defined kyriarchy as:

Kyriarchy – a neologism coined by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza and derived from the Greek words for “lord” or “master” (kyrios) and “to rule or dominate” (archein) which seeks to redefine the analytic category of patriarchy in terms of multiplicative intersecting structures of domination…Kyriarchy is best theorized as a complex pyramidal system of intersecting multiplicative social structures of superordination and subordination, of ruling and oppression.

The best explanation of kyriarchy I've read comes from Lisa Factora-Borchers of My Ecdysis, who studied with Schussler Fiorenza. In her post, Factora-Borchers writes:

When people talk about patriarchy and then it divulges into a complex conversation about the shifting circles of privilege, power, and domination -- they're talking about kyriarchy. When you talk about power assertion of a White woman over a Brown man, that's kyriarchy. When you talk about a Black man dominating a Brown womyn, that's kyriarchy. It's about the human tendency for everyone trying to take the role of lord/master within a pyramid. At it best heights, studying kyriarchy displays that it's more than just rich, white Christian men at the tip top and, personally, they're not the ones I find most dangerous. There's a helluva lot more people a few levels down the pyramid who are more interested in keeping their place in the structure than to turning the pyramid upside down... So when we talk about woman asserting power over other womyn, we're talking kyriarchy. When you witness woman trying to dominate, define, outline the "movement" or even what an ally should be - that's the kyriarchal ethos strong at work.

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This and other "Why I use that word that I use" posts are a 101 space - if there's something that you're not getting, you have greater room than usual to ask basic questions.

Faye's history of lady instrumentalists [part four: L7, Kittie, Emilie Autumn, MSI, Cobra Starship, Neon Trees]

2010-08-22T09:00:00.001-04:00

Hi! Faye here, your friendly neighborhood ~~Spiderman~~ co-mod! I've been doing a series on female instrumentalists for the past several weeks over here at Deeply Problematic. Missed a few? Catch up: [part one, part two, part three] -- or, see where this whole thing started!

L7 is a really important female band; I think of them as alternative metal, but they're as much associated with the grunge scene. A heavy guitar 'grind' and bold riffs form the basis of much of their sound. They were formed in 1985 by Donita Sparks and Suzi Gardner, who shared electric guitar and vocals, and were joined by Jennifer Finch and Dee Plakas on bass and drums respectively. (Greta Brinkman, Gail Greenwood, and Janis Tanaka have also played bass for them.) At the 1992 Reading Festival, Sparks, in response to the crowd slinging mud at the band, removed her tampon on stage and threw it back at them. On the other end of the spectrum (or not, possibly), the band formed Rock for Choice, a pro-choice group which still organizes benefit concerts. Their songs have been on at least twenty compilation records, and soundtracks including Natural Born Killers, Foxfire, and Tank Girl. For all practical purposes the band is defunct, but they definitely left a lasting impression while they were around.

Lyrics Excerpt: We turn the tables with our unity| They're neither moral nor majority. | Wake up and smell the coffee | Or just say no to individuality.

Kittie is an awesome heavy metal band. To be honest, metal isn't really my thing, but I'm always impressed when I listen to Kittie. The band formed in 1996 when Mercedes Lander (drums) and Fallon Bowman (guitar), were respectively 12 and 14 years old. Lander's sister Morgan joined as lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist, and bassist Tanya Candler played with them as well until leaving in 1999 to finish high school. The band has gone through several lineup changes since then (their longest-lasting members have been Talena Atfield and Jennifer Arroyo on bass, and Tara McLeod replacing Bowman on guitar). They've enjoyed major success since their first album, Spit, debuted in 1999. The band has five albums out and continues to headline tours today.

Lyrics Excerpt: She's led to believe, that it be ok| Look at your face, scarred in dismay| But times have changed, and so have you| I think I'd rather crucify then learn

Emilie Autumn is a wonderful violinist, pianist, harpsichordist and singer. She identifies as asexual (though not aromantic), has bipolar disorder, and is a survivor of sexual assault and abuse and speaks out on these subjects. Her music ranges from fantastical to deeply personal in theme, and her style has also varied - symphonic ballads, jazz-infused piano/cabaret, gritty industrial goth-rock, all with an amazing amount of skill. Unhappy with her experiences and the loss of integrity she was expected to endure when breaking into the industry, she created her own record label, Traitor Records. She has also written an creative autobiography, worked in costuming and all manner of other artistic endeavors.

(Electric violin solo - original composition)

Mindless Self Indulgence (or MSI) is a band that describes itself affectionately as Industrial Jungle Pussy Punk (they have no real genre; it might be synthpunk and has influences from dance to ska to reggae to punk). Their musical creations are fairly tongue in cheek, ironic and usually blatantly offensive in some way. Kitty (Jennifer Dunn) is their drummer and was webmistress/designer for the band. Their first bassist, Vanessa Y.T., is strangely unmentioned in histories of the band, but obv. important to early recordings. Their second bassist, Lyn-Z (Lindsey Way, nee Ballato) is a fan favorite because of her crazy onstage antics. During her audition for the band - after having just learned bass and knowing she couldn't ace it on musical talent alone - she downed a hidden vial of Bacardi, lit a match off a friction strip glued to her bass, and breathed fire all over the ceiling. It worked! And the rest was history. (Media moment: here's a great interview with her in which she talks about what it's like being a woman in the industry.)

Lyrics Excerpt: All the problems |Make me wanna go | Like a bad girl | Straight to video | Little darling | Welcome to the show | You're a failure | Played in stereo

Cobra Starship has had two female keytarists. They started out a very odd supergroup, and their first keytarist, Elisa Schwartz, was with them for their first single, the theme song for Snakes on A Plane (which might tell you something about how seriously this group takes itself...) However, while they kept their sense of irony and tongue-in-cheek playfulness - their stated goal is to "make hipsters learn to dance" - they became a legitimate pop-punk/dance-pop band and continued to make music, and Schwartz was replaced by Victoria "Vicky T" Asher on keytar. She's pretty awesome: she was a film major at NYU, has worked with Terry Gilliam and Michel Gondry, directed commercials and music videos (for CS and others), as well as working as a solo musical artist and in other bands.

Lyrics Excerpt: Hey Mr. DJ | You gotta put a record on, yeah | We're gonna bury this town tonight | We're gonna dance all night

 The band Neon Trees is an AMAZING synthpop band out of Provo, UT. Although they've been big for some time in that scene (they were named Band of the Year in SLC in 2009) they got exposure first touring with The Killers in 2008 and then with 30 Seconds To Mars this past spring, around the time their album Habits dropped. Their show is energetic and upbeat, inspiring dancing and clapping, with influences from new wave and electronica all the way to arena rock and MoTown. Handling the drums with gusto is the talented Elaine Bradley, who does some of the backing vocals as well. Unfortunately, because they're so new, there isn't a lot of info on her: I can tell you that she lived in Chicago at one time (presumably not when she joined the band), has an amazing military jacket that tends to reappear in videos, nearly always wears something sparkly and is a HELLA good drummer.

Lyrics Excerpt: Here we go again | We're sick like animals | We play pretend | You're just a cannibal | And I'm afraid I won't get out alive | I won't sleep tonight

Next time: we take it down a notch - or do we really? - with some of the women from the contemporary indie/folkrock/blues/what century is this, again?/twee/acoustic rock scene.

Do you like these posts? Is there anything you'd like to be seeing? Please comment! We love to hear from you! And please, please consider helping keep Deeply Problematic on the web with a greatly appreciated donation, if you can!

Ferocious links

2010-08-21T13:28:00.000-04:00

RMJ has a not particularly feminist piece on Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift over at Overthinking It: Blonde Luck: Statements Through Hairstyle

The shelf life of a blonde pop star can vary wildly. Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga are already seeing new competition crop up from the likes of dirty blond Ke$ha. Lady Gaga has proven adept at changing her hair style and color to keep up her fan’s attention-deficient interest, but her flashy hair might change too often to make a lasting impact. Taylor Swift’s safe, consistent beauty and unchallenging songs have won her fans, but will her fans be as loyal to her as she is to her curls?

Joshua Holland: Immigrant Detainees Sexually Assaulted

The American Civil Liberties Union is investigating allegations that female inmates at the T. Don Hutto immigration detention facility -- a for-profit prison in Taylor, Texas, operated by the Corrections Corporation of America -- have been sexually abused.

Tasha Fierce: Size Matters: Bigotry's Last Stand?

Many times I've heard fat cisgendered women, mainly fat white cisgendered women, suggest that fatphobia is the "last acceptable form of bigotry." For women without multiple oppressions, I suppose that statement could be correct. But for those who are living at the intersections of many marginalized identities, nothing could be further from the truth.

Kinsey Hope: It's so strange...

Sometimes I fall back on my bed and stare at the ceiling and go, “wow, I’m a girl.”

Joan McCarter: Hundreds of Iraq Vets Misdiagnosed, Left Hanging

At the height of the Iraq war, the Army routinely fired hundreds of soldiers for having a personality disorder when they were more likely suffering from the traumatic stresses of war, discharge data suggests.

Renee Martin: Racism Masquerading as Comedy at David Hasselhoff's Roast

There is a large difference between the jokes that men like Mooney make and these White comedians using Blackness as an insult. Just because Black comedians joke about the Blacks and the Black community, does not give White comedians the right to take the same or similar tone and claim that is is all comedy and in good fun. You cannot erase race, it is omnipresent. Comedy used like this is nothing more than an excuse for people to engage in racist behaviour.

Please leave your links in the comments!

Google Doodles omit the 19th amendment, and other women-focused anniversaries.

2010-08-20T17:29:00.002-04:00

Google is pretty powerful. I spend approximately all of my waking hours under its watchful eye; it records my searches, my emails, my working documents, my Facebook alerts, my life, basically.

Sure, there are pieces of it I resist: Google Desktop will not leave me the hell alone no matter how many times I click "cancel", and I never got into that creepy Buzz thing. But it's always open, always there, and I'm very far from the only one. Google is the information station for most of the world, and it has a heavy role in shaping our view of the world.

One small way in which it wields its influence is through Google Doodles, the alternate logos on the search homepage that celebrate anniversaries, holidays, and birthdays of famous and influential individuals. And when it celebrates those individuals, they are overwhelmingly male. Shelby Knox wrote on this at Feministe earlier this summer:

Because we’ve lived with the myth that men created the world and everything good in it for long enough. As long as men get to designate who and what in history is important, young women will continue to learn that all their sex has contributed throughout all of history is their wombs. If we can’t see ourselves as the inventors, artists, revolutionaries and creators that came before, how the hell are we supposed to fashion ourselves into the modern versions? Schools certainly aren’t doing a very good job in this department and since it processes over a billion searches a day, Google plays an increasingly important role in how and what young people learn.

As you probably heard, there was a pretty big anniversary on Wednesday: the 90th anniversary of the 19th amendment granting women in the US the right to vote. This victory was not for all women, as many writers noted - many if not most black women could not vote. But it was certainly a landmark event in women's rights.

How did Google commemorate this landmark event?

The Google homepage. At the bottom is a small checkmark reading: 90th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment

Impressive.

Now, perhaps this is not something that needs its own logo. I think it does, but that's just my value system.

But looking at the pattern of the anniversaries Google has commemorated, it's clear why they didn't consider it worthy of a logo.

Google has had 29 logos celebrating anniversaries of non-birth events - you can see the list I compiled in the comment section. The doodles that commemorate anniversaries and event are less specifically celebrating men than the birthdays that Shelby Knox deftly deconstructed above. But they are in almost every case celebrating accomplishments of men: lunar landings, telescopes, works of art and entertainment, architectural innovations.

I should note that many if not most of these anniversaries are not US-centered. But many are, and there's no reason not to celebrate a woman focused achievement with a US Doodle.

But still, while they're not all about the US, none are about celebrating an event or accomplishment identified with women. Nor are other stigmatized classes celebrated - these are also mostly focused on cis, heterosexual, upperclass, white accomplishments (I am not a history expert, so please correct me if I'm overreaching here).

There's no anniversary of the birth control pill, or of Stonewall, or of the Million Man March. Google focuses on celebrating events that are uncontroversial, that everyone can agree are important. And "everyone", as usual, means people of great privilege, and importance is measured by kyriarchal values.

Is this omission of a logo, by itself, a big deal? Not really. Is this, in and of itself, an indication of the HORRIBLE SEXISM OF GOOGLE OMG? No.

But taken in context of Google's history of highlighting male achievements, its larger kyriarchal point of view in choosing doodles, and its politics, its minimization of this very recent important landmark in women's rights is another indication of Google's disregard for women and other marginalized folks.

The Dangerous Lives of Sissies: How RDCA’s Ad Campaign Hurts Gender Fluid Children

2010-08-19T13:25:00.000-04:00

This is a guest post from Garland Grey. Garland Grey is a writer from Texas, a contributor to Tiger Beatdown, and the owner of garlandgrey.com.

Throughout childhood, you do things to seek your parent’s approval and avoid their disapproval. But when you are a gender noncomforming child growing up in a hetero and cis normative household, their disapproval is not about the things you have done but about what you are. My brother once flooded the downstairs bathroom by stuffing rags into the sink and turning on the taps. He caught hell, he was punished, he cried, tensions ran high, he apologized, and was welcomed back into the fold. He was still a valued member of the team, his input was still appreciated, operators were still. standing. by.

But not me. My sin was too great. I couldn’t apologize for being queer. I couldn’t promise not to do it again. And the entire landscape of childhood seemed treacherously constructed to march me through a series a manhood tests which I would fail. Skinning a deer? No thank you. Playing football? Yeah, if I had been coordinated and the other boys didn’t always aim for my head. Picking out clothes? “What do you mean they don’t have it in turquoise? We’re going to need to talk to someone about this.” My mother wanted me to pick out clothes from Bugle Boy: dull, uninspired shirts with Dragons or Ray Guns or Racecars on them. These clothes were perfect for the boys in the Sunday circular, who stood in several dynamic action poses to communicate that they were active boys. Holding a piece of sports equipment they seemed to stare off panel, deciding which of the dainty girls in This Summer’s Hottest Fashions they would take as their future bride.

I wasn’t anything like these boys, and I was punished for it. I could be scolded for crying, which I did “at the drop of a hat.” I could be yelled at for dressing the way I wanted. For dyeing my hair hot pink. I catalogued expressions of distaste and disgust: the slight downward moue of irritation, the head shake meant to convey how much wasted space I was by volume, the animated features yelling at me for one thing but saying it was about another. Once one of my mother’s tubes of lipstick went missing for a week and I was harangued and interrogated to the point of exhaustion - I would have preferred to skip that.

All of this makes me lucky. I survived. Not all of us do. Some of take our own lives. Some of us develop dangerous coping mechanism that lead us into adulthood. Some of us are murdered. Like Lawrence King, who was shot by another classmate for having a crush. Or Roy Jones, the 17-month-old that was beaten to death in an attempt to “make him act like a boy instead of a little girl.” 17 months old. Roy Jones had 17 months on this earth before it was decided he should die for not being masculine enough.

This is my past, but also my present. So when I see posters like this I experience a molten rage that flows under the surface of my skin.

In the picture, a small boy stands in a pair of red high heels. At the bottom left is a stylized pictograph of a person doing a high kick, the name of the company, and the little boy’s sentence: Karate lessons. Which he has earned for playing in his mother’s shoes. Which is something most boys do at one point. He looks like he is having a grand old time, experiencing the unsophisticated pleasure of breaking boundaries. Hearing the satisfying thwack thwack of a shoe that is far too big for his feet hitting the floor.

What he is doing is making him happy and harming no one. The trains will run on time, water will continue to be wet and fat free, the pillars of society will hold. He is only daring to try on a different gender role, he is deprioritizing his masculinity. But modern masculinity is something which must be constantly reinforced, reasserted, proven. By stepping into a woman’s shoes, he risks seeing his gender as not something to be defended, but something he can create himself. With a pair of shoes. Or a bracelet. Or a tube of his mother’s lipstick, which, in all fairness, didn’t go with any of her outfits.

But what really angers me is that a series of people looked at this photo: a photographer, a graphic artist, marketing teams, the owners of the Karate School, and they all thought the same thing: this will scare men into enrolling their children in Karate. Am I against martial arts? Not in the least. My friend Harold was in Taekwondo in middle school, and I really wanted to join. But as it happens martial arts is expensive. There are costumes to buy, appointments, enrollment fees - it wasn’t possible for me. And that hasn’t changed. Martial arts is still expensive. So some of the fathers with gender noncomforming children will not be able to send them to martial arts lessons as a form of gender boot camp. But they will turn the page of a magazine and see something that makes them more hostile to their child. Whose life is already to the saturation point with gender policing.

The lives of gender noncomforming children are dangerous. And because of a Miami advertising agency named “Zubi” and RDCA in Key Biscayne, those lives have become more endangered.

Did you know that Deeply Problematic pays guest posters like Garland Grey? Consider throwing a couple bucks our way.

Women in Questionable Content: sexuality and identity

2010-08-18T19:47:00.004-04:00

Dora hugs Tai. From Questionable Content #1596, by Jeph Jacques

Questionable Content, the long-running webcomic by Jeph Jacques, is pretty hetero-centric. It puts consistent emphasis on relationships between cis men and cis women - I would list all of the pairings of this description in the comic if it wouldn't double the length of this piece. But it is not heteronormative; though Jacques' focus is on typical heterosexual romantic drama, he makes an effort not to erase other sexualities. Though it has major flaws, Questionable Content (QC) is generally very considerate of different sexualities and identities in developing its universe.

While the central relationship of Dora and Marten is heterosexual, not all members of said relationship are quite so straight. Dora is openly bisexual - a fact that has long been established in the script. She talks about being attracted to women, including, uh, Marten’s mom, (a sex worker) and her friends (which gets a little creepy sometimes). Her identification is presented completely with stigma or marginalization; her relationship with Marten does not make her bisexuality less real, and her attraction to women does not negate her partnership with Marten. Furthermore, their relationship also brings them in contact with Marten’s dad, who is getting married to a nice younger man. It would have been nice to see Dora actively pursuing or dating women, but that’s partially a comment on the male-centric world of the first 600 strips, before their relationship began.

The other major non-hetero character in QC is Tai, Marten’s lesbian boss who goes to “Smif”. Tai is a petite young woman with a lot of energy. Her characterization as a young lesbian at a cis* women’s college rings true to me: she is having a LOT of fun and going through a LOT of drama. (She’s also the only major character that can be read as non-white, but I'm planning another post on that in the future.) Like Dora, her sexuality is mostly treated in a matter-of-fact, everyday manner. Her love of women is not her only interest: she is also a lover of crappy romances, a deejay, a Harry Potter nerd.

But her interactions with other characters are often very centered around her sexuality - her ongoing flirtation with Dora, her discussion of her polyamory, her bonding sessions with her subordinate employee Marten. Dora's bisexuality is truly a detail that, in proportion to her appearances in the strip, is not mentioned all that often, whereas Tai's presence usually (though not always) comes with an allusion to her sexuality.While this is understandable in a comic about romance, there is an element of tokenization to her character - like she is the character’s out there wacky queer friend. This is particularly underscored by her lack of a last name, something only one other (white, hetero, male) character lacks.

Tai is one of two promiscuous female characters in the main cast, the other being Raven (who is not featured much these days but could always return). In portraying sex work and promiscuity, Jacques takes a no-shame, sex-positive approach to open sexuality - while still depicting internalized and externalized slutphobia.. Though Raven is occasionally slut-shamed by the acerbic Faye, she is generally quite happy and proud of her life; in responding to Faye's guilt over her commitment-free sex with Sven, Raven once quipped, "I just realized fucking is fun and it's stupid to feel bad about it!"

Jacques does not, however, show all sexual relationships to be healthy or good. His portrayal of Tai's polyamory was seen as flippant by some, though Jacques made a strong effort to temper his portrayal and apologize. There’s a strong degree of judgement in his writing of Sven, Dora’s brother and a lady-magnet singer songwriter who has a rather disastrous friends with benefits relationship with Faye. Jacques’ gender switch in moralizing promiscuity is somewhat transgressive: Sven is shown to be hurting himself and others with his libido, whereas Raven and Tai are basically having fun.

Less active sexuality is usually validated as well. Hannelore exists completely outside of the romantic interactions of the rest of the cast. She is sexual to an extent - mentioning attractions to men - but it’s not something she particularly wants to act upon. Marigold is similarly inexperienced, but it’s a comment on her lack of self-esteem rather than her worth. Additionally, validation of her attractiveness and social worth usually comes from her female friends rather than male interests. As I discussed in my analysis of disability in QC, Faye’s reticence to get involved romantically is framed as a valid choice, and one that she is, in her own way, moving out of.

Cis characters completely dominate the QC landscape, but Jacques' mentions of trans people vary from decent to very flawed. In one strip, Marten asks respectful questions about Tai’s gender identity, to ensure that he is not being disrespectful and uses the right pronouns. The strip is careful and considerate without being heavy-handed. It would be nice if Jacques depicted a trans person instead of just having cis characters talk about trans issues. And there is some broken language, though this strip was written when "MTF and FTM" were still considered politically correct terms. But there is not much cissexist about this particular strip, which is pretty rare for media about trans identities written by a cis person.

Ryan, a trans man and longtime QC reader who lives in the area fictionalized in QC, said that strip was true to his experiences: “A lot of people who met me right when I had started T used female pronouns and I was too shy/polite to correct them, but immediately switched when my voice started cracking because they picked up on [my transition.] At work, everyone who can see my schedule knows that I am trans, but not one person has ever said anything disrespectful to me. I am respected more in the back room of a grocery store versus [a civil rights organization] in Virginia.”

But some other mentions of trans folks have been less respectful; in other strips, trans identities are reduced to punchlines. In one strip directly after Faye begins seeing Sven after a long period of sexual inactivity, Dora comments: “Two weeks later, Faye’s fucked all the straight men in town and has moved on to the transsexuals.” This construction excludes heterosexual trans male identities - in Dora's framing, there are straight men and then there are trans men, who cannot be heterosexual. Ryan took a kinder view of this, saying that the comic had "context specific humor...the idea of Faye sleeping with a trans man in Northampton is not that far fetched at all and probably very likely if she started sleeping with a lot of men.".

But the reader can't really tell if it's intended to refer to trans men, because trans people here are robbed of their sex. They are not trans men or trans women or non-binary people - they are "transsexuals", and as far as Dora's concerned, that's all they are. Transsexual, an adjective, has been turned into a noun that completely erases their gender and personhood.

This is not the only instance in which Dora marginalizes trans identities - though she's well-meaning, cissexism seems to be a realistic part of her characterization. In one strip, she demonstrates jealousy by worriying that Marten wants "a girl with a penis". While I think there are some not-awful aspects of this ("girl" and "penis" are not framed as mutually exclusive) this is not a positive depiction. It's still exoticising and othering trans identities. Marten's flippant "with the right hormones..." joke is also not the worst joke that's ever been made about trans people, but it conflates trans masculine and trans feminine identities, and thus undermines them.

Questionable Content is a very well-meaning comic - it is clear that Jeph Jacques does not actively want to hurt, exclude or marginalize people in his depiction of sexuality and gender. In contrast with other big comics such as Achewood or Penny Arcade, Jacques gives a shit about not hurting people. And though his portrayal of diverse sexualities is pretty successful, his depiction of trans identities is mixed - he is sometimes considerate and sometimes harmful.

Related reading:

Women in Questionable Content: Women-run businesses and Bechdel-passing friendships
Disability and Comics: How Questionable Content's Faye and Hannelore normalize disability
Interview with RJ of Riot Nrrd Comics, in which QC and Jacques are discussed
Comics and disability: XKCD and dyslexia, Natalie Dee and Tourette's syndrome

Check in later this week for yet another post on women in Questionable Content. The next post will focus on body and bodily functions.

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Why I use that word that I use: Cis, cissupremacy, cissexism

2010-08-18T16:52:00.001-04:00

A question mark in quotation marks in a speech bubble.

Cis, cissupremacy, and cissexism are words I use a lot when I'm discussing trans people - people whose gender or sex does not match the gender or sex forced upon them by their doctors and parents at birth. Cis and related terms are newish, and they are not very familiar terms to many, so I am offering a simple definition of these three terms and an explanation of why I use them.

Cis means that someone is not trans. It is a neutral way to say that someone's gender or sex is the same as the gender or sex their doctors and parents assigned them at birth. It is an adjective or prefix attached to a noun. Most of the population is cis, and receive certain rights and privileges that trans people do not simply because they are cis.

Cissexism is the positioning of cis identities as better or more real than trans identites. Cis does not refer strictly to gender performance, but gender identity. There are a wide range of cis identities, some traditional and some not traditional, and while cis people often experience sexism or heterosexism based on their performance, their identity still privileges them over trans people.

Cissupremacy refers to the system of oppressing trans people and privileging cis people. Trans people often challenge assumptions about gender and sex just by existing, and thus face a lot of discrimination from cis people who want to make sure that trans identities continue to be seen as lesser. Cissupremacy ensures that trans people face harassment, discrimination, and violence in social, domestic, professional, legal, educational, and cultural spaces (to name only a few) simply for being trans. Cissupremacy also ensures that cis people do not face this brand of hatred; cissupremacy often gives cis people full reign to enforce their prejudice against trans people without punishment.

I say "cis" instead of saying "not trans" because I want to show readers that cis people have gender identity, too. If you self-identify with the gender or sex you were assigned at birth, you are on the cis spectrum and receive cis privilege. Trans identities are marked, and marking trans but not cis identities is a way of othering trans people and showing that they are not right. If I call cis women just "women" or "normal women" and always call trans women "trans women", that says that trans women are not real, regular, or normal women. Cis identities are no more or less legitimate than trans identities, and referring to them as cis reinforces that idea.

Cis is not a word I made up, nor is it an academic word. It was first used in 1995 in Internet communities by trans man Carl Buijs. Julia Serano popularized the term in her book Whipping Girl. She writes:

"[A]s a scientist (where the prefixes “trans” and “cis” are routinely used), this terminology seems fairly obvious in retrospect. “Trans” means “across” or “on the opposite side of,” whereas “cis” means “on the same side of.” So if someone who was assigned one sex at birth, but comes to identify and live as a member of the other sex, is called a “transsexual” (because they have crossed from one sex to the other), then the someone who lives and identifies as the sex they were assigned at birth is called a “cissexual. "

Serano learned this word from Emi Koyama of eminism.org. She writes:

"By using the term "cissexual" and "cisgender," they de-centralize the dominant group, exposing it as merely one possible alternative rather than the "norm" against which trans people are defined. I don't expect the word to come into common usage anytime soon, but I felt it was an interesting concept - a feminist one, in fact - which is why I am using it".

Lisa Harney has written extensively on language and cissexism, and Questioning Transphobia is an excellent resource if you're new to words like this. In a post entitled "How to Check Your Cis Privilege", she wrote:

Many people who are known for expressing the most transphobic views in public, react very badly to the term “cisgender,” claim that it is a slur, that it is imposing gender on them. It’s none of these things – it simply means “someone who is not a transgender person.” ... This is an othering tactic – by claiming that “cisgender”, “cissexual”, or “cis” is an offensive slur, you’re saying outright that you’re unwilling to allow trans people to stand on equal footing with you. That you’re normal and they’re deviant. That you require the right to name trans people as other, but that trans people have no right to name you as privileged and oppressor. That it is normal to assume that not being transgender is the natural way to be, in the same way that not being gay or lesbian is assumed in straight society."

Did you like this post? Want to see more simple, straightforward definitions of complicated social justice lingo? Donate to Deeply Problematic, or find other ways to support this site.

This and other "Why I use that word that I use" posts are a 101 space - if there's something that you're not getting, you have greater room than usual to ask basic questions.

ETA: Check out the comments for some necessary expansion and critique from Sunset and pokemontaco.

Court order restoring trans woman Christine Ehlers to her job ignored

2010-08-17T18:07:00.002-04:00

Vandy Beth Glenn has been valiently fighting a battle for her job over here in the States, but over in South Africa, Christine Ehlers is fighting a battle against work-related cissexist discrimination. Ehlers was a saleswoman at a South African steel plant, Bohler Udderholm. She was fired explicitly because of her trans status:

“It was also determined in discussion with management that the position is distinctly for a male employee and the applicant (Ehlers) [has] already got distinct female features that create a difficult situation…. In the end, the employer has to protect its business and may demand a certain standard of acceptability from its representatives in relation to its customers.”

How, exactly, is any job specifically for male employees in 2010? This isn't about Ehlers' competence at her job; it's about using sexism (only men can do this sales job!) to enforce what's actually cissexism (trans identities make cis people uncomfortable). They go on to say that they "feared" her and provided some slim anecdotal evidence of her personality missteps that sound to me like reasonable reactions to harassment and misgendering. Their fear was based not on some threat posed by Ehlers but instead their hatred and distaste for her trans status.

Judge Ellen Francis reacted completely appropriately to this disgusting act of discrimination by ordering Bohler Udderholm to give Ehlers her job back with back pay and benefits. But her estwhile employer is apparently passionate enough about preserving cissupremacy that they've decided to ignore the order of the court just to keep a trans woman from coming into their environment:

"I arrived at 8am and they made me wait until 9am before they saw me. They gave me a letter saying that they had not received a copy of the judgment and until the board has seen it I cannot return to work. I am feeling deflated and totally dejected," Ehlers said.

This is patently ridiculous; I don't believe for a second that they were unaware of the widely reported ruling. Furthermore, Ehlers' lawyer says that Bohler Udderholm's lawyers were with him when he got the verdict. Bohler Udderholm is so committed to devaluing trans identities that it's facing contempt of court.

The workplace is a fraught place for trans people; the harrassment and prejudice they face on a daily basis is particularly harmful because it's often backed up by the courts. But even in the rare event that the judicial system is actually able to do its job and prevent (rather than enforce) discrimination, systematic cissexism still runs rampant.

sources: one, two, three

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Interview with RJ of Riot Nrrd Comics: Part Two

2010-08-16T17:30:00.004-04:00

Image description: A panel from a non-narrative Riot Nrrd strip. In it, a person wearing glasses and short hair instructs a dog to "Subvert the dominant paradigm...."

Today, I’m posting the second part of my chat with cartoonist RJ of the webcomic Riot Nrrd, launched in December. Part one is here.

RMJ: How would you characterize the humor and relationships in Riot Nrrd? I'm impressed with it because it always fulfills my conditions for critical humor.

RJ: One important thing about my humor is that I try not to dehumanize anyone. Some people don't realize that you can, in fact, formulate jokes that don't dehumanize anyone. I get pretty enraged when people try to defend humor that's openly based in putting other people down, because often the stance they take implies that you're robbing the world of something important if you try to censor that kind of humor, that political correctness hurts humor. I don't want to censor; I want people to take the responsibility to not use their work to hurt anyone, to alienate anyone or to further an idea that their existence is worth mocking. I want them to realize that it's lazy, and there's no goddamn joke there if there's no prejudice there.

A lot of webcomics have no intention of putting people down with their jokes, but do so offhandedly because they live in a kyriarchy. So they might not have a fat character or a trans character or a person of color or a person with a disability that they set up to be the butt of a joke, but they incorporate fatphobia or transphobia or racism or ableism in a joke because they don't think of that kind of thing as hateful humor. They call someone a "crazy bitch" or "retarded" or "lame" or make a joke questioning a character's sexuality or use sexual violence as a gag or make reference to a stereotype about Muslims or assume that everyone's cisgender. I was reading a pretty popular webcomic today, that used pornography about "trannies" to embarrass someone. And they might not think of that as being disrespectful towards trans people, but I sure do. And those kinds of things slips in sometimes, even in my favorite webcomics that are so not about putting people down.

The relationships, well, I have a lot more relationship stuff in the works. I haven't really gotten into it, but Maria and Wren have been friends since childhood and Sam's a newer addition to their dynamic, which I think shows a bit. And romantically, I have stuff planned for all of them. Romance drama, I think I'm influenced a lot by Joss Whedon there. I think it's important to have romantic relationships that are complicated and imperfect and sometimes flat-out bad. I'm not planning on killing anyone off, but I want relationships that speak to how things tend to work out in the real world, which is often cute, but not idealized.

RMJ: How do you think RN has evolved since its beginning?

RJ: The art has definitely improved, haha. It's pretty painful for me to look at some of the earlier strips, but I know what I'm doing now will get painful to look back on, too. And I think I'll improve by leaps and bounds when I get a desk. I draw the thing with my tablet on top of the box it came in on my couch, with my laptop in my lap.

I also don't talk about Joss Whedon as much. He was important to hit first because he's so close to my heart but also does things that so contradict what he's trying to put forth. And the characters are a little rounder, Sam especially I've given some room to grow. She was kind of a brat in her first appearance and I think I've worked on her being a person that's proud and outspoken but ultimately kind.

And I do think, at the beginning, I was invested in getting in as much commentary on nerd culture as possible, because I thought people would like that best, and I feel less pressure to do that now. There's more story than commentary, and that's fine with me.

RMJ: Since this is a comic about a comic, meta is gonna be there. How do you approach it?

RJ: Well, my characters don't express any awareness that they're in a comic, and I think I'll keep it that way. I also thought about giving Wren some kind of consciencey sidekick, which I think is a useful device a lot of comics use, but I decided doesn't fit in in their universe. They are very much in our world, except their town and college are just made up, but they're essentially living in the town I went to college in and going to the college that I went to. For "The Heartbreakers", which is the name of the comic they make - I avoided revealing that name for such a long time because I hoped I would think up a better one. And that's my approach to the story-in-story in general, I avoid revealing too much about it because, there's a reason I'm making this comic and not that one. I remember one of my friends at the very beginning told me, "you're making a comic about making a comic, that's funny", and, I got a little concerned, I knew that's what I was doing but I didn't think of that as the central concept. I don't really intend to be meta. I want making this comic to be a natural thing for these characters to do. I don't want that to be a joke in itself, but I guess it kind of inherently is.

RMJ: Interesting response. I would have thought you'd be a little more interested in meta, given the interest in Whedon (whom I am not personally familiar with but believe is a big meta person?)

RJ: Yeah. He self-references a lot. He's very aware of whatever genre he's using. I don't know. I might end up using that. It just doesn't seem that important to me right now, and certainly not a central feature.

RMJ: What do you have in the works for Riot Nrrd ?

RJ: I have an arc planned for the rest of their summer which I hope will be really funny, because it tickles the hell out of me. And then they're going to college which will raise so many new situations and issues, but I'm most excited for this new character that has been bouncing around in my head since I first thought of the comic. It's a genderqueer character and I'm going to try really hard to now totally play favorites with, because I'm just so excited to have a genderqueer character existing in a comic, or any medium. I can't think of any character that identifies that way, except maybe Lois in Dykes To Watch Out For (more on DTWOF here!), but I haven't read them all so I'm not sure. As a genderqueer person myself, especially, I'm just so ready to introduce them, it's killing me. And all the characters get new romantic complications that I'm interested in exploring. That stuff is so fun (as QC proves regularly).

I feel awkward plugging my merchandise, but I'm excited about it, and I think other people will be excited about it when it comes out, and also it would be magical to have some kind of income coming from RN, since I'm jobless otherwise. I've gotten a few requests for a few different t-shirts, but I'm working on one right now, the Team Bella shirt. [Edit: These shirts are now available for pre-order!] I'm making one today in my partner's basement with a homemade silkscreen, haha. Depending on the number of orders I get they may all be made in the basement by hand, if I get enough I'll get them done professionally, I could get small number made somewhere, maybe, but I want somewhere sweatshop-free. There'll be pre-orders happening for that in the next week or so, I'll make a post about it on my tumblr account. And if people are interested in my other art, I'm probably making some bearded lady pinup linocut prints. But that's more if I ever get around to it.

Riot Nrrd updates on Tuesday and Thursday and can be found at riotnrrd.com. Read more about RJ and the comic here, or find them on twitter and tumblr.

To support Riot Nrrd with a donation, click here. To support Deeply Problematic with a donation, click here. Check back tomorrow for another installment in my ongoing analysis of the webcomic Questionable Content, with relevant quotes from RJ!

Some support, please.

2010-08-16T16:55:00.002-04:00

Image description: Common reverse of small size $1 Silver Certificates(Series of 1928-1934) and $1 United States Notes (Series of 1928). From Wikipedia.

Writing here to an interested, engaged, and varied audience is a privilege. Not in the sense that I usually talk about - conferred upon by society, unwarranted. But in the sense that it’s an honor to talk to and with so many interesting, varied, vocal people. You take my thoughts seriously, and that’s something I take seriously.

But it’s also a sacrifice. I do not work full-time right now, nor do I work full-time during the school year, when more regular paid hours are available. I am in a lower-paying, more-flexible field in large part because I want the time to work and write and blog.

Last year, I had to quit blogging when I went back to work. The stress of writing for and managing a blog got to be too much. I’ve taken steps not to do that again. Thanks to Faye, I’m able to step away when I need to. I’ve limited my participation on social-networking sites. But money is necessary, and I will have to take some time away from blogging to work.

I want to find time in my schedule to write here while still paying my bills on time. So I’m coming to you today to ask you to help support my work in ways monetary and otherwise.

The best way to ensure that I continue writing her regularly is to click this PayPal donation button, which will be on every post I publish this week:

raw url: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=7218870

This is not the only way to support me, but it is the most powerful. Women's work is often expected gratis, and I think my work here is worth financial support, worth my time. The bank account support I get will most decisively determine how often I’ll be posting in the coming months. Posting here takes away from the time I spend on work that supports me and my partner and our two kitties. And right now is a time of need for me because I am not working even half-time - August is a gap month for me when there’s not a lot of paid work out there. If I know my readers are willing to help me out, I can more generously budget for time spent on this blog.

Besides paying me, this also goes directly to the upkeep of this blog. I pay Faye to mod and write, and I plan on paying future guest contributors. It helps me start other blogs I'm thinking about, and will help me upgrade the look of my page when necessary. I also try to contribute to other writers when they ask for it and support other causes.

If you value the content of this blog, and if and only if you are in a place where you can drop $2, $5, $10, $15, whatever you can spare without endangering your comfort, safety, or security, I would really appreciate it and it would really help me continue to write here regularly.

But of course, not everyone can. And if you can't, or don't want to, show your support with dollar bills, there are other ways to help me out:

Become a fan on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter or Tumblr, or subscribe on Google Reader: These help me demonstrate my readership and following to potential publishers so I can get paid to write elsewhere.
Engage in the comment section and help other readers get a different point of view from my limited perspective.
Tell your socially minded friends about Deeply Problematic - post it on Facebook, RT my links on Twitter, reblog me on Tumblr, share it on Google Reader, mark it with StumbleUpon or Delicious. More readers beget more readers, and more readers mean it’s more likely that I find paid writing work or get tips here.

And if you don’t do any of these things, for whatever reason? I still appreciate your taking the time to read this, and still value your readership. I’m not just here to get paid, I’m not just here to start a writing career. I’m writing publicly to reach people, and I’m writing for the public so I can be read. And that’s what you’re doing, and that’s really all I need from you.

Faye's history of lady instrumentalists [part three: Smashing Pumpkins, Hole, Paz Lenchantin, Bif Naked, The Distillers]

2010-08-15T09:00:00.005-04:00

Hi guys! For those of you who've been reading along, welcome back! For those just "tuning in", we've been doing an (incomplete) history of female instrumentalists, starting with the 70s and working up (part one, part two).

Let's dive right in!

Every bassist the Smashing Pumpkins have ever had has been a woman, most famously D'Arcy Wretzky, who was with the band from its inception in 1988 until 1999. She was followed by Melissa Auf Der Maur until their breakup in 2000. Ginger Pooley and Nicole Fiorentino (also recently in Veruca Salt) have toured with the band since it reformed. The Smashing Pumpkins' music - although shifting in style - is pretty epic in scope, influenced somewhat by arena rock and shoegaze, with a lot of overdubbing and an emphasis on atmospherics. Many bands since have cited them as an inspiration. (Side note, this video is a semi-stripped down version of Cherub Rock, but it's also part of a great playlist where you can hear a lot of their songs in their album versions.)

Lyrics Excerpt: Freak out | And give in| Doesn't matter what you believe in | Stay cool | And be somebody's fool this year | 'cause they know | Who is righteous, what is bold | So I'm told

Melissa Auf der Maur brings us to another important band of the era - Hole, for whom she played bass from 1994-1999. Although often grouped in with grunge (or sometimes riot grrrl because of their politics), the band was initially heavily influenced by punk, noise rock, and no-wave: intentionally abrasive, and lyrically often nihilistic and provoking or at least questioning of society. Courtney Love, who has been the only continuous member of Hole, obviously sings, but she also plays guitar as well. A ton of women (eight in total) have been members of Hole over the years as instrumentalists, (Trivia: Kim Gordon produced their first album, Pretty on the Inside.)

Hole have a thousand songs worth listening to, but I actually picked a cover they did of the Fleetwood Mac song Gold Dust Woman -- shout out to another band with female instrumentalists.

Lyrics Excerpt: Rock on -- gold dust woman| Take your silver spoon | And dig your grave | One less challenge | Pick your path and I'll pray

Paz Lenchantin is an enormously talented pianist, violinist, bassist and vocalist who has been in a ton of bands, but most notably A Perfect Circle. She has been in a number of other projects: one was a shortlived all-female supergroup with Melissa Auf der Maur, Samantha Maloney (also of Hole at one time), Radio Sloan as well as Lisa Leveridge, Dvin Kirakosian, and Emilie Autumn, called The Chelsea, which seems to have taken on the form of Courtney Love's companion band for a few shows.

(The live version of Judith by A Perfect Circle that I picked to show off her skills is definitely a good one, but it's not as COOL as their official video, in which Lenchantin takes exactly the time she has during the guitar breakdown to braid her hair and then get back to being a rock star.)

Lyrics Excerpt: Pray to your Christ, to your God | Never taste of the fruit, never stray, never break, never | choke on a lie even though he's the one who | did this to you, you never thought to question "Why?"

Bif Naked is a singer who also often plays guitar and bass on her albums (though not on tour). She is AWESOME - she's also a spoken word poet, vegan, straight edge, martial artist, and she blogs about politics, recovering from breast cancer and other things on her website (linked above). It's ridiculously hard to find good vids of her that aren't just slideshows of her face - this one's nabbed from a TV show so it skips partway through.

Lyrics Excerpt: Just a moment of weakness | I should examine my head! | Just a moment of weakness | I never meant a word I said

And last but not least: Brody Dalle was the frontwoman of LA punk band The Distillers, formed in 1998 (it's hard to believe that's 12 years ago now). Although they went through a number of lineup changes (other female members included guitarist Rose "Casper" Mazzola and bassist Kim Chi), Dalle was responsible for writing/co-writing every song on the band's three albums as well as lead guitar and vocals. Her voice is raw and a bit love-it-or-hate-it, but if you're into oldschool female-fronted punk -- or you never considered being into oldschool female-fronted punk -- they're well worth a listen. Plus they write songs about suffragettes! She's currently fronting the band Spinnerette.

Watch out for her demanding a female mosh pit for the first few seconds of this video.

Lyrics Excerpt: Oh, it's set in 1848 | in the crush of New York State | and the thing about destiny | is it never ever makes mistakes

Here's a good transition into next week, which takes us more into the present day (with a few exceptions) with a motley group of hair metal, heavy metal, industrial/goth, and electro-dance-pop artists, all of whom are pretty sweet. Anyone I'm missing? Let me know!

Exciting links

2010-08-14T14:16:00.000-04:00

Here are a few things around and about the Internet I thought y’all might enjoy.

My bodily functions posts on scratching and poop have proved popular. Along those lines, here’s Amelia: Mammally Factual:

I’m trying something new. I’m growing out my armpit hair.

And Cat on bath products: Meaningless string of adjectives here:

Few necessities of modern life confound me more than buying toiletries. I can see why people develop brand loyalty, because how else are you supposed to know what you want? I'm forever spending thirty minutes in the hair care aisle at Rite-Aid, debating between two brands of shampoo, trying to figure out based on the packaging which one is most likely to turn me into Jennifer Aniston.

Abagond: Confirmation bias

Before I knew what it was called, I called it the Texas Cowboy Hat Effect. Texans are stereotyped as wearing cowboy hats even though few of them do. Yet if you drove across Texas you would remember the few who did wear cowboy hats and forget the many who did not. That is confirmation bias.

Rebecca: “Transgender Dog on NBC LA”

1. The dog isn’t trans. I have yet to see evidence that dogs have any sort of gender identity. Rather, it sounds as if the dog is intersex, having “intermediate or atypical combinations of physical features that usually distinguish female from male.” Transgender != intersex.

Dorian: Wedding Bells

Privileging marriage–whether same- or cross-sex–is privileging one kind of relationship above others, and above people who aren’t in relationships, but still trust each other intimately. And that is something I have a great deal of trouble with. I feel, to put it bluntly, that it’s really messed up.

PhDork: Here Comes The Trash

The thing, however, that I found the most problematic this time was the absolutely enormous amount of waste that this not-immodest celebration entailed. I know that weddings are expensive, but I’m not even most concerned with the financial waste in this case (although it is troubling), but the literal stuff-going-into-the-landfill garbage. Food waste. Boxes and plastic and paper waste. Fabric and decoration waste.

Alyx Vesey: Applying the spirit of the Bechdel Test to dance songs

So I hope to draft a list where drunk behavior and hookups aren’t mentioned. I haven’t come up with a snazzy handle, but the idea is there. I came up with Sly and the Family Stone’s “Dance to the Music,” ESG’s “Get Funky,” Pet Shop Boys’ “It’s Alright,” Out Hud’s “One Life to Leave,” and Hot Chip’s “Over and Over,” among others.

remery: invaluable albums--no doubt's tragic kingdom

i just remember being mesmerized. i had no idea what was going on or who this woman was with her bangs and her red lips and maybe she was pretty? but she wasn't trying to be, and that was the puzzling part of it for me.

Interview with RJ of Riot Nrrd Comics

2010-08-13T12:12:00.004-04:00

Image description: RJ of Riot Nrrd's avatar, a cartoon person with spiky hair in a green shirt.

Today, I’m posting the first part of my chat with cartoonist RJ of the webcomic Riot Nrrd, launched in December. I asked to interview them because I was impressed with the comic’s balance of social consciousness, character development, and humor. They were a delight to talk to, and I’m excited to share their awesome comic with my readers.

Riot Nrrd updates on Tuesday and Thursday and can be found at riotnrrd.com. Read more about RJ and the comic here, or find them on twitter and tumblr.

RMJ: So tell us about yourself.

RJ: I grew up in this little New England town with not a lot of diversity and not a lot of stuff to do. ...I doodled on everything. I always liked art but I almost failed out of an art class in high school because I did everything so slowly. I do a lot of things slowly and not technically the correct way. I hold my pens funny and I play the guitar all wrong. Then I got to college, for writing, because I love storytelling. And I started taking women's studies and anthropology classes and my brain exploded. I was already a feminist because Lisa Simpson was a feminist and she was my hero. But by the end of college, I really felt that social justice was my field more so than writing was. And that's where I am right now, just out of college and figuring out what I want to do. I started the comic in December and it's been my only "job" since May. And the universe keeps telling me this is what I should be doing. Though it told me to be a librarian, too, and that hasn't worked out yet.

RMJ: It's hard to find a single branch that you want to extend into a career, especially as a creative person in this economy. What inspired you to do the comic?

RJ: My original idea for making my own comic was the comic that the girls are writing, about the roller derby superheroes. At my old job I was researching female superheroes (I worked with my school's women's center and we did a topic-based newsletter, and the topic of that one was strength), and I had a class about women and healthcare and that's where the idea for an exploitative medical corporation came from. So I started drawing the characters you see in Riot Nrrd #25 in the margins of my notes constantly. But I have nowhere near the technical skill to draw an action-based comic. I didn't want to let go of those characters, so last year I realized a more slice-of-life type comic was something I could handle and developed Wren, Maria, and Sam to be the creators of my original idea.

I read a lot of blogs, social justice blogs and nerd blogs. And the thing that I was always the most excited to read was thoughts about that intersection, about race in sci-fi or queerness in comics. I think Racialicious especially had these posts about comics and other nerd culture stuff that I would just eat up, and I tried to seek out more and was disappointed that there wasn't more about that.

I realized I wasn't the only one at this intersection. All the queer people I know play Magic: The Gathering and watch Buffy. I feel like there's so many of us, not just queers but all sorts of marginalized folks, who are also nerdy and there's not as much out there for us as there should be, and I wanted to create something to fill that hole.

RMJ: What would you say are your goals with this comic? What are you trying to communicate?

RJ: Well, the comic is certainly a space for me to critique and challenge a lot that I see as wrong or lacking within different material, but I didn't want to make a political cartoon, just straight message. I like storytelling. I like characters. I think sometimes I don't integrate as much nerd stuff as other webcomics on the topic, but it's equally important to me to treat these characters well and tell their stories. It's important to me to create webcomics where nobody gets shit on, no matter what your identity or background is, you don't have to worry about being the next punchline.

I'm influenced by Dykes to Watch Out For more than any "nerdy" webcomic like Penny Arcade. I want to create characters that people can see themselves in, which still includes them being geeks. Someone commented once that they liked that my characters don't all agree with each other on everything, and that's something I definitely took from Allison Bechdel. It lets one explore issues in a fuller and more honest way. Wren's a little Mo-like, cynical and says the wrong thing sometimes but is really earnest and human. I put Mo in the background of one of the earliest Riot Nrrds, number 8 I think?

RMJ: I’m so glad you brought up Bechdel - she was on my list of topics to discuss. Your comic really reminded me of how Bechdel strove to be inclusive and represent multiple points of view. She definitely didn't do it perfectly, but she always worked to cover different sites of oppression in an ethical and honest way.What and who are your influences besides Bechdel?

RJ: : I think after her would be Jeph Jacques, who writes Questionable Content. Foremost, my comic is shaped like his. I like the way it reveals itself slowly that way, you're only looking at one panel at a time. And I'm inspired by the way Jeph Jacques is constantly improving, really noticeably so. I remember wondering, 'do I really have the skills to make a webcomic?' And I looked through the QC archives and thought, 'yeah, I can do this. It's ok to start where I am and get better as I go'.

There are other comics and cartoonists that I like. Girls With Slingshots is one I read religiously and is good and constantly getting better on inclusion. But as far as influencing Riot Nrrd, Bechdel and Jacques are the big ones.

RMJ: Apparently we are fairly copacetic in comicing tastes! QC is another favorite of mine. I'm also impressed by how he tends to respond to critique.

RJ: He had a great response when some readers raised some questions about how he was representing polyamory.

Check back on Monday for part two of this interview! Topics will include: humor, meta, Whedon, and Riot Nrrd's future. In the meantime, why don’t you check out my posts on discussion topic Questionable Content:

Disability and Comics: How Questionable Content's Faye and Hannelore normalize disability
Women in Questionable Content: Women-run businesses and Bechdel-passing friendships

Women in Questionable Content: Women-run businesses and Bechdel-passing friendships

2010-08-12T19:00:00.002-04:00

Image: Characters from the webcomic Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques. Clockwise from top left: Hannelore, Dora, Marigold, Faye, Tai, Cosette

Check out other entries in my review of Questionable Content: Women in Questionable Content: sexuality and identity; Disability and Comics: How Questionable Content's Faye and Hannelore normalize disability

Questionable Content is rare for a work about women written by a man. Whereas many women in works by men centralize their hetero sexuality, their male bosses, or their something something to dudes, Questionable Content (QC) writer Jeph Jacques focuses on women-only spaces, women-run business and complex friendships between women, and his strips regularly pass the Bechdel test. Though QC’s protagonist is male, the women are fueling the plots and relationships that make up the strip to strip action of the comic.

The action in QC centers around a small business owned and operated entirely by women. The Coffee of Doom is owned by Dora Bianchi and is entirely staffed by the other female characters: Faye Whitaker, Penelope Gaines, Raven Pritchard, and more recently Claudette and Hannelore Ellicott-Chatham. These women are shown to be competent and effective at their job, though they do slack off. It’s not a challenging position, and it does reinforce the idea that women belong in the service industry, but it’s a convenient setting that is realistic for a group of 20somethings.

In an inversion of patriarchal valuation of personality characteristics, the signature attraction of the shop is its employee’s snark. The Coffee of Doom (hereafter CoD) baristas are known and publicized for their witty, haughty putdowns. Whereas women (particularly in service positions) are typically expected to be pleasant and rewarded for docile compliance, the professional requirements for the women in the central setting of QC are quite the opposite.

Women are not only put in authority positions at the CoD, but also at the male protagonist Marten’s place of employment. Tai is a small, lesbian, “Smif” student who hires Marten for recognizing iambic pentameter. Tai is a fun character with whom Marten discusses a lot of tricky subjects, usually fairly respectfully. They discuss gender fluidity and trans men with a fair amount of respect, though the comic has othered and marginalized trans women on a few occasions. And speaking of marginalizing trans women...

Though I didn’t go to Smith, I did attend an all-cis-woman institution, and I really like Jacques’ portrayal of all-women “Smif”. Tai, Cosette, and Lydia are the main representatives of the Smith corollary in QC’s Northampton. There’s a lot of parties, a lot of gals loving on gals, a lot of smart women. The stuffy trustees who pretend not to know what’s going on also ring true. The women at Smith are cis, class, and for the most part race privileged women having fun and occasionally studying - pretty close to what I remember.

Beyond these two strongly women-identified and operated examples of effective business, female characters in QC are shown to have a wide variety of skills and talents. Faye is a talented sculptor whose major patron and advocate is Dora. Hannelore has turned her disability into employment through a one-woman counting business. Marigold is self-employed, though we’re not yet sure how.

Older women in the QC universe are also places in positions of respect and authority - even in marginalized industries. Marten’s mother is a famous fetish model and pornographer. Her accomplishments are presented with minimal stigmatization - there is no slut-shaming or pearl-clutching when her occupation is revealed. Furthermore, she is regarded with respect and admiration by Marten’s friends and girlfriend. And in another area of the sex industry, Dora and Faye have a lovely experience at a woman-run sex shop. Hannelore’s mother, a wheeling and dealing business mogul, is the closest thing to a villain in the QC universe, an intimidating figure who demands respect.

Beyond business acumen, female intelligence is always respected, sometimes in surprising and transgressive ways. Penelope is proudly literate and intelligent, but her predecessor at CoD, Raven, was a stereotypical ditz - coming up with silly answers to simple questions, with a malapropism for everything. But her exit was evidence of her intelligence - she went to study advanced physics - and in retrospect stupidity looks more like effervescence.

Female friendships are also highly valued in the QC universe. They are usually not centered around men, but around work, interests, or each other. Marigold and Hannelore’s social anxiety made up major arcs around strips #500 and #1400. Both women strike out partially of their own volition, and both were encouraged by other women to value themselves. Hannelore particularly helped model healthy social behavior for Marigold, though there was a side of judgement for her sanitary habits.

However, Dora’s comments are sometimes disturbing to me. She frequently teased Faye for her weight, and seems to occasionally sexually harass Faye - commenting on her ass and boobs, occasionally groping her. It’s playful, to an extent, but given her thin privilege and status as her boss, her comments have a slightly sinister edge.

Jacques’ Questionable Content universe is populated with independent, interesting women; women who work for and employ other women, women with talent and intelligence. Though his writing of these character is not particularly diverse - all of these women are white, cis, and middle class - it’s productive, and contributes a cartoon vision of women not usually found in the male-dominated world of webcomics.

Check out the second installment of Women in Questionable Content, focusing on sexuality and gender identity:

Women in Questionable Content: sexuality and identity

Vote for RMJ in PanelPicker SXSW 2011!

2010-08-12T12:03:00.000-04:00

Hey y’all! I’m really excited to announce that I have a panel proposal in South by Southwest’s Panel Picker contest! The title of my proposal is “ Dealing With Internet Drama In Feminist Discourse”. Exciting, right? I would really like to attend SXSW, so if you’d like to help me, please click on the link below to vote for my panel!

Click here to vote for RMJ!

Women and bodily functions: scratching an "inappropriate" itch

2010-08-11T17:06:00.002-04:00

Scratching one’s balls is a common and accepted pastime for cis men in casual contexts, public or private. You won’t see many men adjusting themselves at their wedding, or at their inauguration, or coronation. But when hanging with friends, watching TV, chilling, it’s not a big deal. Men with cis privilege can do it without being chided or thought disgusting. Balls need adjusting sometimes, and that’s understood.

But vaginas itch too, and it’s not okay for women to relieve their genital prickles when they’re just chilling. Vagina is made of skin, and it’s skin that sometimes gets irritated. For me, it’s particularly bad when I shave off my bush, as I occasionally do - the two weeks after I quit shaving are usually filled with mid-conversation trips to the bathroom just to scratch. Chilling with friends is supposed to be relaxing, but as with many spaces in this kyriarchy, women have additional pressures and requirements to live up to.

I didn’t notice this disparity until my very clever friend remery scratched, apologized, and complained about it one day, but it’s true: as with many bodily functions, cis women only feel free to attend to pressing bodily urges when they are in cis women-only spaces. If we are in the middle of a conversation with a cis man, we must excuse ourselves so they’re not confronted with the horror of our ladylike hands scratching our precious flower.

But though balls are safe for cis men to scratch, not all people with testicles are quite so free to soothe themselves. As with many of the itches of inequality, people who are trans experience particular and intensified scrutiny in attending to their prickling private parts. Genital policing is not just socially awkward for trans men, women, and nonbinary people; any extra attention to the contents of their underwear can be dangerous, particularly since bathrooms are a contested space where trans people receive extra scrutiny rather than the relief of privacy. Trans women particularly have no recourse for this cissexism, since they do not usually get into the “women-only” spaces referenced above, where scratching lady bits openly is okay.

I’ve never seen a woman scratch her bits with men around, so I have no idea what the reaction would be in a mixed-sex social situation. But I do know what the reaction is when those most overwatched, overpoliced, overexposed women - celebrities - scratch themselves in public:

The animated picture [since removed] above, of pop singer Christina Aguilera scratching herself while wearing tight clothing, is described with distaste and slight disgust in the attending text. Scratching balls as a concept has 65,000 fans on Facebook, and describes the practice as "natural pleasure that is every mans god given right to enjoy at home and in public!" The image of men watching TV with their hands in their pants is familiar because of characters like Al Bundy. But scratching vagina just elicits the adjective “gross”.

Christina Aguilera is being judged because she’s a woman attending to her needs in a way the kyriarchy doesn’t like to see. Though there’s much emphasis and judgment placed on our bodies, an awareness of the needs of our bodies is more than the kyriarchy can handle.

As a woman, my body is supposed to be without functions or needs. There is a huge culture of shame and stigmatization around discussing the processes that are a natural part of our body - my menstrual cycle, my bowel movements, and my sexuality are all things that are supposed to happen for the most part alone, something I shouldn’t talk about.

Though our bodily fluids and urges are often beyond our control, we must keep them clamped down so that we can remain appropriately feminine: scratching, pooping, and bleeding are gross, and if we discuss or attend to them, we are gross.

Ke$ha and Rolling Stone treat rape as a joke

2010-08-10T14:55:00.001-04:00

Image: A piece from Rolling Stone entitled "3OH!3's Summer of Love". A picture of the band is on the left. The text of the piece is posted in the comments.

Ke$ha, noted pop singer, appropriator of native culture, and false ally of trans woman can apparently add maker of rape jokes to her CV, according to this month's Rolling Stone (to which I am suddenly getting a subscription I didn't particularly want). During the recording of her current hit with Nat Motte and Sean Foreman of 3OH!3, “My First Kiss”, Motte said “She called Sean a little bitch and told [producer] Dr. Luke she wanted to rape me.”

I’m not going to question Ke$ha’s use of a slur against women to describe a man; bitch is her word to re-claim, I suppose.

But rape is not funny. Making a faux rape threat doesn’t show how outrageous she is. All it shows is that she is only concerned with impressing men by utilizing violence as humor recklessly.

Rolling Stone’s printing of this as a hilarious joke is particularly disturbing because it suggests that sexual violence against men is so unlikely as to be hilarious. Sexual violence is done to men, and it’s not hilarious. As Cara wrote:

The increasing pop cultural change from women victims as the butt of rape jokes to male victims is only indicative of a shift in cultural attitudes towards gender, but not towards the normalcy and acceptability of non-consensual sexual conduct in general. When rape is still being portrayed as normal, no matter who the victim, rape culture is being heavily reinforced — and it’s not just the butt of the joke who is affected. It is a danger to us all, and it is the absolute last thing that needs to be heard and repeated in a rape apologist society in which we live.

Ke$ha is an artist who strives for frivolity and irreverence. That’s fine; I don’t mind frivolity. I even like Ke$ha, because I don’t exactly have impeccable taste in music.

But rape is not frivolous and rape is not irreverent. Ke$ha and Rolling Stone think that sexual violence are a laughing matter, and that’s reprehensible.

Obama's masculinity policed in Rolling Stone illustration

2010-08-10T11:39:00.001-04:00

According to Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson, the earth must be protected by a now-dead climate bill. I can get down with that. I can agree with that. They have a pretty smart article about it, but the picture used to represent it is not so smart.

In the above illustration by Victor Juhasz, Obama cowers next to a feminized Earth, with pronounced lips and a 1950s-style bikini body, while a hulking personification of oil companies piping smoke kicks sand on them.

This is straightforward sexism, as Rolling Stone seems to specialize in. The implication, the humor, of this cartoon lies in Obama's emasculation and failure to protect Earth. Earth is in need of protection and thus is feminine.*

It's meant to evoke the 1950s Mr. Universe type ads, which were, guess what, sexist - that whole phenomenon was a great example of the patriarchy hurting men, too. It’s not critiquing the ad for its outdated sexism - it’s copying it without critique of anyone but the sufficiently masculine oil companies and the insufficiently masculine President. If this were Mad Men, I might would give them a pass, but Rolling Stone is not a source that I trust.

There's not a ton more to unpack, frankly. The sexism here is pretty blatant: women are in need of protection from hulking men, and if other men fail to adequately protect them, then they are failures for their substandard masculinity.

Climate control and environmental issues are a big deal. But protecting the environment is not a measure of Obama's masculinity: it's a measure of his effectiveness as a President. Men having to measure up to certain measures of masculinity is unfair and a product of sexism, and women are not there to be protected. Climate control has nothing to do with sexism; Rolling Stone has imbued the issue with sexism where there is no relevance or cause.

*The reason for personifying Earth as female is not solely tied to sexism, I must admit. Earth is often personified as female, i.e. Mother Earth, and these reasons tend to be more pagan-feminist from my point of view (I could be wrong, not really an expert, just wanted to give credit where it's due).

Faye's history of lady instrumentalists [part two: Bjork, The Breeders, Sonic Youth, Sleater-Kinney, Veruca Salt]

2010-08-08T13:37:00.003-04:00

Hi! It's Faye again with your weekly post on lady instrumentalists! (I feel like a radio announcer...)

Last time, we talked about women of the 70s and 80s. Today we're moving on a bit to the 90s in a post of genre-spanning madness! Fewer videos this time, so as to please your eyes AND your ears ;)

Bjork is probably one of the most important female musicans of our era: I was actually introduced to her through my semi-raver guy friend in middle school and later my gf. Her most famous project pre-solo-era is The Sugarcubes; she's more famous for her solo work, which ranges from pop, trip-hop and electronica to African inspired beats and orchestral sounds over the years. She plays a trillion instruments (among them various synthesizers), but sadly I couldn't find any good video of her actually playing. (Still, robot-clones-in-love are pretty awesome to watch while listening too.)

Lyrics Excerpt: All is full of love | You just ain't receiving | All is full of love |Your phone is off the hook | All is full of love | Your doors are all shut | All is full of love!

 The Breeders is a band that was formed in 1988 by Kim Deal while The Pixies, for whom she played bass, were on a post-tour break. They added Tanya Donnelly on guitar and Carrie Bradley on violin, as well as Josephine Wiggs on bass; their lineup has also included Kim's twin sister Kelley Deal (guitar), Cheryl Lyndsey (guitar), and a number of other notable musicians, mostly female. Their music is by turns gritty and atmospheric, and definitely worth a listen. This video is their song "Cannonball", one of their first mainstream hits, off their second album (it's directed by Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth).

Lyrics Excerpt: I know you, little libertine | I know you're a cannonball | I'll be your whatever you want | The bong in this reggae song

Speaking of which: Kim Gordon is another musician everyone should know. She's best known for Sonic Youth, but she also played bass and/or guitar in a number of bands, including Harry Crews (an all female No-Wave/thrash band with Lydia Lunch and Sadie Mae) and Free Kitten, (a collaboration with Julie Cafritz). She's also a visual artist, producer (Hole's Pretty On The Inside), director ("Cannonball"), mother, and fashion designer (in rough order of occurrence).

Lyrics Excerpt: I'm back again in love, I'm back again a dove | where'd you get your light, your smilin' sugar life | another lover's day, another cracked up night | every night I say, the light is coming

Sleater-Kinney was a (riot grrrl? indie? punk?) band founded by Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein in 1994. Their primary drummer was Janet Weiss, and they've also had drummers Lora McFarlane, Misty Farrell, and Toni Gogin. Tucker and Brownstein both played guitar, and Tucker's style, along with their unusual tuning (C#) allowed them to not have a bassist. Their sound drew influence from punk as well as grunge and indie rock, and often experimented with different instruments and arrangements. Lyrically they often addressed political messages, such as feminist and LGBT rights, anti-consumerism, opposition to traditional gender roles, etc. They took an "indefinite hiatus" in 2006.

Lyric Excerpt: Truth is truer in these days, truth is man-made | If you're here cause you want to be entertained | Please go away

Veruca Salt is another alt rock band that can't be missed (moreso because I live in their hometown of Chicago). Louise Post and Nina Gordon formed the band together in 1993. Both played guitar as well as acting as vocalists. Veruca Salt has changed lineups a bunch of times: Gordon left the band in 1998; their second drummer, Stacy Jones, was also from Letters to Cleo and American Hi-Fi, and they've had a number of other women with them through the years. Currently their bassist is Nicole Fiorentino and their drummer is Kellii Scott. Their songs are always good times. This one is "Volcano Girls", arguably their biggest hit, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I picked it partly because it's got good live shots and...partly because I love the aesthetics and the chemistry between Nina and Louise. If you don't want to dance in your chair to this song you may have an anti-dancing gene.

Lyrics Excerpt: Volcano Girls| we really can't be beat.| Warm us up and watch us blow.| But now and then we fail | and we admit defeat.

For next time we're still going to be (mostly) in the mid-90s (...there's a lot of music in the mid 90s! Especially music I listen to!) and the tangled web of bands who know each other. From there it's onward and upward to the present day.

Any comments? Complaints? Favorite songs or memories of these people?

Fat is an adjective, not an attack

2010-08-06T16:35:00.000-04:00

Sara Ramirez, a beautiful fat woman with long black hair, walks confidently in a tight red dress. From Wikipedia.

Fat is just an adjective.

That’s it. It’s a word that describes, subjectively, a physical characteristic. Like big, or thick, or curvy, or beautiful.

It’s not an insult. It’s not definitive. It’s not an argument.

Yet so many people take it that way. To many readers, “fat” is a declaration of war.

When I wrote about Joan from Mad Men, people immediately criticized me, a size-14 woman who identifies as fat, for calling a size-14 woman fat. When Tasha Fierce described the lovely Sara Ramirez as fat, people immediately attacked her for her word choice. Fat is a word that gets people going; those three letters contain all of the sizism and prejudice that kyriarchy force-feeds women. Fat seems to erase any positive description - even if it's paired with beautiful or sexy, many readers will ignore it and focus on fat. If these readers don't see the noun attached to this particular adjective as disgusting or unattractive, it's wrong, and a personal affront.

When I describe myself as fat to my friends, at first they go, “Don’t be silly, you’re not fat!” Because I am attractive, because I am curvy and my stomach appears flat when standing, because I am confident and carry myself with knowledge of my beauty, the attack that most hear when I say fat shouldn’t apply to me.

There’s a certain conception, that fat means one thing and not another. That fat means a certain size and shape that’s beyond bodies like mine. Snarky’s Machine articulated this in the comments at Tasha’s post above:

She has been targeted for her weight, and fat policing and shaming the author because Ms. Ramirez is not a size 20 + is really problematic. Also, isn't the idea of "fat enough" a bit anti-feminist and reductive. Fat is not a destination, it's a spectrum and includes people that other folks might not frame as "fat".Those of us at the chubby end of the spectrum are targeted because of our weight and often feel left out of conversations about fatness because of our "inbetweenie" status.

Now, bodies like mine experience lots of thin privilege. We’re able to see bodies like mine as beautiful, so they can’t experience that specific oppression. And we don’t, not some of it. I don’t experience the same discrimination that women who are bigger, like the author of Living ~400 Lbs, or Marianne Kirby of The Rotund. Though I’m no better or more beautiful than these women, I experience privilege that they do not.

But I do experience stigma and discrimination, and so do famous fat women. Christina Hendricks is stigmatized for being fat: discussion of her body takes up much of the conversation around her, crowding out her subtle and confident portrayal of a woman stuck in a bad place in a bad time. Sara Ramirez is stigmatized for being fat: it may bar her from being as big a star as she could be. America Ferrera is constantly expected to represent all other fat women. Sara Rue needs to lose weight to make it onto tabloid covers (and she's done it several times). These women bear extra weight of oppression and challenge specifically for their weight.

And of course these women usually won’t identify as fat. Fat is not an okay word, especially in Hollywood. But fat is still a word that I’m free to use, like pretty, like gorgeous, like beautiful. It describes bodies that are fat like mine, beautiful like mine.

The fact that they don’t actively identify with a specific adjective or phrase doesn’t mean that I am using it to attack them. Christina Hendricks might not identify as “stunning” but she is. Sara Ramirez might not actively say that she is incredibly gorgeous, but she is.

Fat is not an attack on these beautiful women. It’s an adjective. It’s a way to describe why I find the beauty of Joan Holloway to be powerful. It’s a way to tell others that fat is, actually, okay. It’s a way to take a word that you may see as disgusting and tell you that it’s actually not.

You don’t have to use that specific word to describe Christina Hendricks or Sara Ramirez or America Ferrera. That’s okay. It’s a subjective word, and I use it because it relates to my experience as a fat woman. You can describe women who aren’t small as big, or plus-size, or curvy, or whatever. Or you can not describe their body! That’s okay, too.

But I use fat, because I’m fat. I’m not using it as a descriptive knife: I’m not attacking their body, I’m not attacking my body, I’m not attacking your body. I’m just using a damn adjective.

Blazing links

2010-08-06T13:49:00.000-04:00

Renee Martin: DEATH IN THE FAMILY WE NEED YOUR HELP

On Thursday August 05, I received a phone call to inform me that my 20 year old nephew had died... As a family, we are absolutely devastated by his loss and this is magnified by the fact that we are unable to pay for his funeral. At the side bar you will find a donation box which I have placed to ask for help. I know that I am asking for a lot of money, but even a five dollar donation will go far to help ease the burden of funeral expenses on the family. Please if you can help us, it would be so gratefully appreciated by his mother, father and every single member of his family.

Click here to donate.

Jos Truitt: The Gap wants you to cover up your fat legs:

Gap is explicitly using shame about having a body that does not conform to mainstream beauty standards to sell products. I’m disturbed the company would choose to do this, but I’m also bothered that it’s an idea for an ad that would work at all.

Cara Kulwicki: Emergency Room Allegedly Denied Treatment to Woman Because She is Trans

In mid-July, Erin Vaught went to an emergency room in Muncie, Indiana because she was coughing up large amounts of blood (h/t). While there, because she is a trans woman, she was mocked, humiliated, called names, and outright refused treatment.

Sarah Seltzer: For a Feminist Wedding, Embrace the Word "No"

To begin with, I never had a bride fantasy. Long ago, when my childhood playmates suggested we put on white dresses and "play bride," I'd veto the plan. How boring! I loved imaginary games, but I preferred pretending to be be a fairy, a wood-nymph or a heroine to being someone who merely walks down an aisle. This preference translated into a more blatantly feminist persona as I grew older. At the nucleus of the culture of conformist, materialist femininity I have actively deplored here at RHRC and in my own life lies the wedding world and all its rituals, many deeply rooted in sexism. So even years into a long-term relationship that I knew was for keeps, I was hesitant about rushing into matrimony. Was it selling out gay brethren and friends? Bowing to the status quo? And most of all, would I be able to do it without losing something of my strident self beneath a cloud of frills and lace?

Samia: ay.

What is party culture, exactly? I would say it's a largely white, male, class-privileged, straight and sexist subset of general college culture. Unexamined adoration of this subculture is a) fucking creepy and b) an automatic reinforcement of the dehumanization and shaming of sexual assault victims (as well as victims of other crimes where intoxication is a contributing factor). Seriously, whose "party" is this?

s.e. smith: Push(back) at the Intersections: Defining (and Critiquing) 'Intersectionality'

A common problem I encounter in feminism is the idea that all women experience the same oppressions because they are women, and their shared identities as women override any other identities; this focus on women alone of course ignores other people who can benefit from or work in solidarity with feminism, like people of nonbinary gender. Intersectionality attempts to rectify this problem by underscoring that people can experience separate, overlapping oppressions that all play a role in how they identify, interact with the world, and prioritize their social, personal, and political goals.

As always, share yours in the comments.

TelevIsm at Bitch Magazine: The Bechdel Spectrum

2010-08-05T15:52:00.000-04:00

Over at Bitch Magazine, I've got a post that's already generating some great discussion on the Bechdel test in television that I'm quite pleased with: TelevIsm: The Bechdel Spectrum:

If you’re on a site about feminist response to pop culture (spoiler alert: you are), you have probably heard of the Bechdel Test for movies. Conceived in Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For, the test is simple: to pass, the movie in question must feature a conversation between two named female characters that is not about a man. It’s a good indication of whether or not a film is at all concerned with women, or if its focus is entirely on men. It’s deceptively simple; upon hearing this for the first time, I thought “well, surely almost every film must pass!” But no.

While I am not the movie writer in residence here (check out Snarky’s archive for that!) I’ve found that it’s easily applicable to other forms of media, including television! It’s not a standard I apply to every single episode of every single television show I watch, but more of something that occurs to me while I’m watching. “Oh,” I’ll think while watching Tami and Tyra talk about college on Friday Night Lights. “This episode clearly passes the Bechdel test! Awesome!” The Bechdel test is not a way to tell whether or not a show is feminist—that depends on the viewer’s interpretation of the show and their definition of feminism—but it’s a good way to gauge the development and value of female characters on the show.

17-month-old Roy Jones brutally murdered for acting like a girl

2010-08-04T19:09:00.000-04:00

Strong trigger warning for graphic description of abuse and murder.

A 17-month-old infant assigned male at birth, Roy Antonio Jones III, was killed by his mother’s boyfriend for acting too much like a girl.

Pedro Jones was babysitting Roy Jones (no biological relation) at the Shinecock Indian Reservation. When the less-than-two-year-old baby failed to fulfill his caretaker’s idea of what a less-than-two-year-old boy should act like, Pedro Jones began beating the infant with closed fists all over his body and then choking him. The child went into cardiac arrest, and later died at the hospital.

Pedro Jones has pled not guilty. He also admitted to abusing his victim in the past:

“I was trying to make him act like a boy instead of a little girl...I never struck that kid that hard before. A one-time mistake and I am going to do 20 years...

A tribe spokeswoman said the whole tribe is in mourning, but the child's grandfather said, "He infiltrated my family through our trust, through the heart of my daughter and then stole the life of her child. I hope the justice system turns around and steals his."

All human beings are expected to meet certain gender requirements based on their sex assignment at birth - from presentation to personality, expectations based on genitalia are cruelly enforced. Though everyone’s gender presentation and performance is policed and punished, these standards are applied with particular stringency and violence to trans folks.

Rather than being exempt from these unfair and unforgiving norms, children are especially targeted for rigid gender training, particularly children assigned male at birth like Roy. As Julia Serano has written, femininity is heavily discouraged and punished in MAAB folks; the worst thing a man or boy can be is like a woman or girl. This particularly nasty brand of cissexism is the frequent cause of abuse, in this case fatal abuse.

But this is not just about cissexism; it’s also about ageism and the violence infants and children face for being infants and children. Children who do not meet gender norms (according to whatever always-arbitrary standard imposed upon them) are particularly vulnerable to abusive behavior from adult caretakers.

The context of this child’s cultural history is also vital to understanding the conditions of this terrible tragedy. Native people have been massacred, devalued, and dehumanized by the forces of the United States government’s racism and violence. While violent abuse and death as manifestations of cissexism and ageism are far from unique to Native society, the genocide enacted by the kyriarchy on Native society is one factor in the abuse children like Roy suffer.

Monica wrote the following in covering Roy and Ronnie Paris’ murder at TransGriot:

Homophobia and transphobia feeds into these hypermasculine attitudes,and it has got to stop. We need to have some serious ongoing discussions about gender identity and gender roles in communities of color...We need to slay the hypermasculinity dragon in our community because it's killing our kids.

Roy Jones is the victim of an abusive, terrible man. But Pedro Jones did not act alone; he is an enforcer of the greater social forces of cissexism, ageism, and racism. Roy Antonio Jones III is a victim of the abuse of both his caretaker and the kyriarchy.

Mad Hoc: Christmas Comes But Once A Year

2010-08-04T12:10:00.001-04:00

RMJ and Coca Colo will be discussing Mad Men from here on out every week. Last week, we discussed racial politics and Peggy. This week: Peggy, virgnity, Glenn and Sally, stalking and abuse, Allison, consent, Don.
RMJ: Let's start with Peggy. Is she engaged?
 Coca Colo: No, I don't think so, the boyfriend just made that up last time,  and this episode, she said "I have a boyfriend" 
RMJ: But I thought there was a ring at the end? 
Coca Colo: I actually thought it was interesting, because Freddy told her at the end that if she wanted to marry him, she shouldn't put out , and I thought her choosing to sleep with him was her making the decision she didn't want to marry him. But I didn't see a ring!  Was she wearing it in the last scene? 
RMJ: Screencap is in order:

Image description: Screenshot of Peggy's hand on a man's chest. There is a ring on her ring finger.

Coca Colo: Oh, goodness, I didn't notice that detail! Is that her left hand?
RMJ: I can't tell - I'm a little screwy about right/left :). The viewer is clearly supposed to see it, they wouldn't just have it there for no good reason... 
Coca Colo: I hope she's not marrying him...  It doesn't seem to me that she respects him, nor that she's willing to let him see "real Peggy." Like is she as smart, funny, interested, conflicted, etc. when he's around?
RMJ: I think that she does show him the real Peggy to a certain extent - her work covers her bed - and he doesn't like it.  I'm interested to see what her mother and sister have to say about the dude.  They are probably pushing for her marriage to him  .
Coca Colo: What does it mean if our career spitfire Peggy gets into an unfulfilling relationship herself?  Does that make her truly one of the boys?
RMJ: Yeah, it seemed like it could very well be imitating Don, as she so often does - rushing into an unsatisfying relationship for the sake of having a relationship .
Coca Colo: Well, first of all, I am hoping she's not engaged, and that the last scene was her choosing sex over marriage, for now , like I thought. But, given that you're absolutely right, the hand-on-chest shot seems significant, I'm hoping she comes to her senses before going through with it! 
RMJ: Me too!  ME TOO.  I wanted her to have a little office thing in which she has the upper hand. 
Coca Colo: I know she wants companionship just like anyone else, I know she doesn't want to be alone on New Year's, but she deserves better.  What I love, though, is that she's not a "type" the creators have done a really good job making her complex and real .
This episode really showed an interesting tension in Peggy's life, that we still deal with today.  She wants a fulfilling work life and a fulfilling personal life, and she doesn't feel as though she should have to choose . Freddy thought he had insulted her by suggesting she wanted to get married . But she does want to get married. She just doesn't want to be threatened with spinsterhood if she forgoes Pond's cold cream and instead spreads out her work on her bed.
RMJ: I also think it's interesting how it showed her having to appease and make compromises in both areas - she's clearly better at her job than Freddy, but he ignores her attempts to assert her authority and competence.  And it didn't seem like the dude was a good match for her, but she wants to get married, and she had to negotiate what sex and respect meant for them in that relationship. 
Coca Colo: the whole virgin ruse was indicative of that.

RMJ: I agree. Speaking of the fake virginity thing though, it also reminded me of Joan pretending to be a virgin with Greg. 
Coca Colo: YES. And, likely, everyone else in that era . Which is so funny, because the men were having sex with somebody . The math doesn't work for them to be having all this extra-marital/pre-marital sex, and for all the women to be virgins! 
RMJ: Right? So you throw a little deception in there, and everyone's cool . How long do you think Freddy will stick around? I can't imagine long. I also didn't think Peggy was too mean - he was ignoring and belittling her ideas and she flipped the script on him. 
Coca Colo: I think you're right, it's been pointed out on several of the blogs that he's a huge mismatch with the new "upstart" vibe of the agency. I think Peggy felt bad because she realizes that the world is passing Freddy by a little bit, and that he's as hurt by it as anyone else.  She was frustrated about him not listening, but instead of criticizing his behavior, she (rightly, but meanly) criticized his talent/copyrighting skills . I think she felt bad about that, not about standing up for herself.
RMJ: And I guess that's fair, seeing as she owes him a huge professional debt. 
Coca Colo: And that she thinks, personally, he's a good guy. He's just outdated, and that's a little sad. 
I love when she says "I don't understand your list"  to Freddy about the old actresses. Her facial expressions are fantastic!
RMJ: Yes, I love her! Her lines are so great sometimes: "You're never going to get me to do anything Swedish people do." Elisabeth Moss is awesome.
Coca Colo: One thing I love about the character, is how she can go from super-competent to adorably awkward and out of place from one scene to the next.  That's one thing Mad Men does fantastically well. And we saw that with Don this week. He's gone from the super suave sex machine to an awkward, grasping, overgrown frat boy .
RMJ: Bravo segue! Yeah. He has definitely... fallen far.  The letter from Sally was HEARTBREAKING. 
Coca Colo: Yes. She can be so weird sometime, but that letter really made me love her and feel for her.  The fact that she was protecting her brother, and she was so quietly mature about her dad not being there on Christmas... It looks like they're making Sally a character this season, which wil be interesting to watch.
RMJ: Yes. I'm interested to see where Creepy Glenn goes . I think they're going to develop how she is/is not reacting to her mother's programming. Things could go very, very badly there, I'm afraid.  He's clearly targeting Sally for abuse and intimidation, likely sexual . The secretness of "Stanley",  yhe destruction of her personal property... He's training her for abuse.
Coca Colo: Yes, she's pleased by his gesture, but gestures like that, that involve violence and destruction, generally indicate severely unhealthy relationships--leading to an "you owe me" mentality, stalking, etc.
RMJ: Exactly. It's what Betty taught her to appreciate.  I think it's going to go beyond just unhealthy into abuse and assault.
Coca Colo: Mad Men is interesting, though, because sometimes they step back from the edge with things like this. Instead of following them through. So we'll see whether they just plant that idea in our heads Or actually run with it. 
RMJ:   Interesting, too, how much Glenn's styling resembles Don, and of course Sally looks just like Betty. 
Coca Colo:    This piece basically argues that Glenn's violence, Lee's bullying, and Don's entitlement are all sides of the same coin. We saw throughout the whole episode the level of entitlement he feels toward women .

RMJ: Yeah, I'm not totally sure how to react to it. It's a continuation of a theme. It's interesting that he finally went into the office sexually , because if you'll remember in the pilot, he rejected Peggy's advances. And we've always seen him avoiding office romance in most cases. 
Coca Colo: Yes, and I think he hates himself for it. As do I, a little. I groaned when he reached for Allison .
RMJ: I know.  Did she consent?
Coca Colo: Well, the piece I linked to points out that she says "no" when he first reaches for her,  but then he tries to kiss her again and she lets him  .
RMJ: She said "don't" actually. 
And after he goes in the second time, she grabs him.  And seemed to enjoy it.  Coca Colo: But, I didn't feel like it was non-consensual, I felt like she was excited, because he's DON DRAPER.  
RMJ: I think that there was enthusiastic consent, but it was... I guess it's like with Peggy's fake virginity. Women are taught to offer resistance sexually.  Also, I think that the purpose of the scene with the nurse neighbor was to show that Allison did have a way out. Yes, it's her boss, but she could have left and he wouldn't have stopped her.
Coca Colo: Yes, I think you're right. But she wanted it, because of what she thought it stood for. But it was actually just his desperation.  And then to be handed an envelope of money the next day? Like, wrong time to hand out the Christmas bonus, Don! And, also, sex tip, if you can have intercourse without anyone's clothes coming off, it's very rarely going to be satisfying for her 
RMJ: Ha. Yes.  But she seemed hopeful and interested in progressing with a relationship. After all, he is eligible for marriage.  The whole episode was about the STATUS of sex, and its negotiation.  And it wasn't pretty.
Coca Colo: I don't think she thought it was a relationship, necessarily, since she left afterward to still meet her friends, I think she thought it at least meant that he WANTED her, and that made her feel hot. To be wanted by Don Draper
Coca Colo: But then the next morning, it made her feel so unwanted , so discarded.
RMJ: Yeah, I can see that.  "Should I close the door?" 
Coca Colo: Oh, poor girl. Her acting was great, too.  When she said "Excuse me?"  Oh my goodness.  It's one thing to have random sex. It's another thing to have random sex and be treated like a nobody afterward, like it didn't happen, and you can be so easily erased and forgotten.  Yuck. 

RMJ: And paid off from his personal account, Christ almighty.  
I wonder if Don will see the Betty lookalike professionally , as a psychologist. It would be a nice allusion to his deception of Betty in the first season.   Dude needs help, and it would be an interesting relationship professionally, particualarly with the sexual tension. Like Rachel, but unconsummated.
Coca Colo: I like that she's got some meat going professionally. That would be a big step out of the gutter he's in. But his first act is still to try to reduce her to a sexual object.  "I thought you came to flirt." Of course you did, Don, because you see women as sexual objects . Unless they're not pretty 
RMJ: Well, he doesn't treat Joan as an object 
Coca Colo: Joan and Peggy somehow both get to be treated with respect. But he tried oh so hard to make the psychologist lady feel sma ll. To make her act like a "woman" and not like a colleague questioning his methods .
RMJ: Maybe it's that he has to automatically reduce outside partners? 

Coca Colo: Yes, maybe when they're on his side they don't have to be objects . Unless he's drunk.
So one last thought, did you catch how when they're grousing about integration at the Christmas party,  someone says "If they pass medicare it won't be long before they outlaw private property"? And they complain about the country becoming socialist ?  The more things change the more they stay the same...  I thought it was so funny to hear those sentiments then, when everyone acts like it's new now. Like the tea party is so original!
RMJ: With the segregation talk, it was another nod to Civil Rights without a serious discussion - just tossed in there like the Beatles 45s . Just how we were talking last week, about how racial politics get acknowledgement without serious consideration .
Coca Colo: You're absolutely right. The racial politics are informing the script without being integrated into it. And that can't be sustainable. You can't use integration and racism as a period detail to prove authenticity, like a Beatles album.  It's a whole lot more than that to a lot of people .
RMJ: Exactly.  So I guess we'll see if they eventually address it head on this season...

Tune in next week, and join the conversation in the comments!