Friday, December 14, 2012

Thursday, December 13, 2012

If I ever have a daughter, I will tell her all of these things

Check out "10 Things I want my daughter to know before she turns 10" by Lindsey Mead Russell, which I was turned onto via feministing

My favorites are #1, 7 and 9:

"1. It is not your job to keep the people you love happy.  Not me, not Daddy, not your brother, not your friends.  I promise, it's not.  The hard truth is that you can't, anyway."

"7. You are not me. We are very alike, but you are your own person, entirely, completely, fully.  I know this, I promise, even when I lose sight of it.  I know that separation from me is one of the fundamental tasks of your adolescence, which I can see glinting over the horizon.  I dread it like ice in my stomach, that space, that distance, that essential cleaving, but I want you to know I know how vital it is.  I'm going to be here, no matter what, Grace.  The red string that ties us together will stretch.  I know it will.  And once the transition is accomplished there will be a new, even better closeness.  I know that too.

9. There is no single person who can be your everything. Be very careful about bestowing this power on any one person.  I suspect you are trying to fill a gnawing loneliness, and if you are you inherited it from me.  That feeling, Woolf's "emptiness about the heart of life," is just part of the deal.  Trying to fill that ache with other people (or with anything else, like food, alcohol, numbing behaviors of a zillion sorts you don't even know of yet) is a lost cause, and nobody will be up to the task.  You will feel let down, and, worse, that loneliness will be there no matter what.  I'm learning to embrace it, to accept it as part of who I am.  I hope to help you do the same.

but it's worth reading the whole thing.

One Direction continues to send worst messages

I was pleasantly surprised when I heard some lyrics from the first few stanzas of One Direction's new single "Little Things" - about (obviously) all the little things that the teen heartthrob loves about his lady friend, even if she doesn't necessarily love them about herself. Her quirks are what make her special!


First, I was excited about:

You've never loved
Your stomach or your thighs,
The dimples in your back at the bottom of your spine
But I'll love them endlessly

(lyrics) 

 Hey, that's kind of body positive!  Girls are allowed to have curves!  He loves your body exactly as it is!

But then ....

You never want
To know how much you weigh
you still love/have to squeeze into your jeans
But you're perfect to me


Because it's somehow endearing for a girl not to know her own weight?  Her weight anxiety is cute!
And then things really took a turn for the worse with this gem:

You'll never love yourself half as much as I love you

Well, that's right out of the abusive boyfriend handbook.  They try to save themselves by saying:
 
 If I let you know I'm here for you
Maybe you'll love yourself like I love you, oh.


but the damage is already done; the message is that the girl will always need her One Direction boy as the source of her self-esteem/self-worth.   The message of this song is an excellent follow-up to One Direction's last hit, "your low self-esteem is attractive"

 Pop songs sending shitty messages isn't anything new, but One Direction is notable in that their two big hits so far send these messages: 1) Ladies, it's attractive when you have low self-esteem, and 2) and because of your low self-esteem, you'll always need me. It's a double-win!

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

The Worry Pile: Bad Solutions

Here's something to rev our engines on the ol' life stress express: bad solutions are bad even after we realize they're bad solutions.  Bad solutions to big societal problems tend to be the sorts of solutions that a whole bunch of people thought were good once upon a time.  (DAMMIT.)  This sort of ideological turnover happens all the time--take DARE programs dropping units on hard drugs after concluding that they're not age-appropriate; a recent spate of evidence that preschool may be the single most lucrative educational investment a state can make in its citizens, not to mention the best guarantee of future personal success and satisfaction; research in Malawi pointing to the failure of abstinence-only and condom-centric AIDS prevention programs, and the much greater efficacy of measures like convincing women to sleep with men their own age instead of older men; or the sex-positive feminist movement's push for a sexual compact built on "enthusiastic consent" over the conventional "no means no" narrative that can make anything that isn't explicit refusal seem like a kind of permission for unwelcome sexual advances.

We embrace mistaken solutions all the time, and here's one problem: whole movements grow up around their implementation, only to find that they're unwanted when a more provably effective practice comes along--or when it's determined that no comprehensive 'solution' is needed in the first place. 

Why worry?  First, activists stay active.  Take the Temperance movement, which to the best of my understanding finally managed to flame out on its own eighty years ago--in name, anyway.  Don't those same bedrock principles continue to motivate our country's anti-drug strategy, even so far as to have birthed the current nutty marijuana situation, where the federal government still refuses to give any formal or informal assurance that growers and sellers in Legal Pot states won't be arrested for a trade that's explicitly permitted and regulated by their state's laws?  Sure, the Protestant ethic, blah, blah . . . I guarantee you the modern temperance movement codified total abstinence and proscription of drugs in the public sphere in a way that no quantity of Sunday sermons and readings from the book of Judges could have done.  Its echo surely carries twelve-step addiction programs, which may not actually work better than other kinds of treatment, say the numbers.

But here's the really questionable guacamole in our problem burrito: activists are also members of a culture.  Push their preconceptions aside, and they start to feel disenfranchised.  And beneficiaries of the bad solutions (because, of course, 'bad' doesn't equal 'totally useless'--it can just as easily mean 'less effective than an alternative') will be outraged to see their savior philosophy besmirched; just try to explain the statistics to someone who has succeeded in a twelve-step program.

So what you get is a bunch of real people who suddenly a) feel trampled upon and b) are completely in the way of a social good that often needs to be comprehensive to be curative.  We've got limited money and time to implement new attacks on social ills.  If universal preschool access ever becomes a reality in the U.S., isn't it likely that some remedial elementary, middle and high school programs will take a budget hit as a result?  Education spending isn't exactly the Bob Hope of pet causes on Capitol Hill, so something's getting the axe.  And why not the money sink that you know won't help nearly as many children *now* as a broader, more economical policy could help five, ten, twenty and a hundred years down the road?

As I mentioned before, the "enthusiastic consent" standard is getting a bigger and bigger push from sex positive feminist writers.  And although it isn't generally pitched as a replacement for "no means no," that's what it is.  A major argument for the change goes like this: "no means no" puts too much responsibility on the woman (and, more broadly, on any participant in sex) to constantly be refusing things, which a) limits her ability to express or focus on expressing what she actually does want, b) makes every instance of partial, implicit or unclear refusal, or clear dissatisfaction without express refusal, a potential inroad for a sexual predator, and c) casts the man (or sex partner) as an agent whose only goal is sex, who has no real decision-making agency apart from seeking sex and recognizing refusal thereof, and who probably wouldn't like to refuse anything himself, given the chance.

In other words, "no means no" is disempowering.  Roll that around your braintubes.  "No means no" is disempowering.  Relatively speaking.  It's an okay way to do things, but worse than an alternative.

Did you clench up just a little, reading that?  Would an assault victim clench up worse?  Can "no means no" be a part of the enthusiastic consent philosophy, or is it just vestigial now?

When your car won't start, you rev the engine for a while and then you take it to a mechanic.  You don't *keep* revving the engine while it's being towed.  How long do we keep handing out the condoms in Malawi?  How long before the feds stop raiding pot dispensaries?  At what point does it become socially acceptable to abandon a bad practice?  And at what point do we collectively realize that we're taking way too long to admit our mistakes?
An e-mail to my cousin, after "Selected Shorts" at the Symphony space and a subway ride to Penn:

-----

All I was driving at was that I don't think Pixar sequels usually turn out very well.  But damn, if someone could do a good "Incredibles" sequel, I would worship that person.  I think the problem is that a truly good "Incredibles" sequel could only involve the characters continuing to age, becoming more complicated, and dealing with more adult situations--kinda like every other superhero movie in the universe should already be doing, but somehow isn't.  It never ceases to bother me that superhero movies are pretty much solidly sixty years behind comics in terms of the depth of the stories they tell.  NYARGH.  I actually think "Incredibles" is already the deepest, most adult superhero movie that's maybe ever been made.  There are some serious, dark, deeply conservative, almost fascist (or anarchist) arguments being made by that movie, and creepily, you can see where the characters are coming from as they stare down the barrel of a gun.  Mrs. Incredible on the island, admonishing her kids *not to take time to think or doubt* if they found themselves in danger ("And doubt is a luxury we can't afford anymore, sweetie. You have more power than you realize. Don't think. And don't worry") cuts particularly deep.

Oh, and "Batman"-wise, I was so happy to find out from you that the New Yorker had trashed "Dark Knight Rises" (I couldn't remember if it had trashed "Dark Knight" too, so I looked, and oh boy yes.  Side note: I LOVE ANTHONY LANE and I'm so happy you do to--but the "Dark Knight" review, at least, was written by David Denby.  Sigh.  Side side note: look up Anthony Lane's "Star Wars Episode 1" review if you ever want to get a schadenfreude/sadism kick that'll last you through the day.)

But seriously, most reviewers of "DKR" loved it, just like most reviewers of "TDK" loved it.  The difference is that people sincerely worshiped the second movie (wrongly, I think, but hey) whereas my theory is they only loved the third one because they felt they should.  And that came out in these weird little moments in each fawning review where they'd suddenly mention something like, "sure, maybe it's too long and badly written and kinda incoherent, BUT..."  It was like watching the zeitgeist realize it had a pimple on the day of its high school photo.

Thanks so much for taking me to the Symphony Space!

Love,
Sam

Friday, December 7, 2012

Big business: the real beneficiary of "government handouts"

In case you haven't been following, last week, many fast-food workers in NYC participated in a massive walk-out as part of  "the biggest effort to unionize fast-food workers ever undertaken in the United States"

Fast food restaurants, like other big businesses, pay their workers insufficient wages and taxpayers are supposed to make up the difference.  That isn't fair to the people who work hard at their (seemingly) awful jobs and still need government or non-profit help to make ends meet (something for which they will be shamed by most of society), and it isn't fair to regular taxpayers who, by footing the bill, are essentially lining the pockets of multi-millionaires.

Anyway, I just thought this video and the campaign is a great reminder that, despite all of the shaming that people receiving government support endure, the real beneficiaries of "government handouts" are big businesses.  We, as taxpayers, should be demanding that they pay a living wage.  Which is exactly what these workers are doing.

Sign the petition.