You Don’t Speak Japanese?
Setting: a Japanese restaurant during the dinner rush. At the crowded sushi bar, customers are eating, drinking, staring into space, looking at the menu, or talking to each other and the sushi chefs. Pizza Diavola is sitting at the bar, reading The Economist and waiting for the check. Next to her is a white man, who in earlier periods would have been described as “bluff” but nowadays is called “hearty,” “outgoing,” or “loud,” depending on your mood and relation to him.
Pizza Diavola: reads about Britain and the EU constitution. Charlemagne is making a confusing argument about pro- and anti- EU British nationalism and pro- and anti- British EU nationalism.
Out of nowhere, Bluff Man suddenly turns to Pizza Diavola
BM: How do you say, “That’s enough, I’m satisfied?”
PD turns to Bluff Man and looks at him blankly.
PD: I don’t know.
Ignoring PD, BM blithely and loudly continues.
BM: Is it, “[however you say, 'That's enough, I'm satisfied,' in Japanese]?”
PD continues to look blankly at BM.
BM: Do you speak Japanese?
PD: No.
PD turns back to her magazine.
BM jumps back and pulls an exaggeratedly startled face, as if he’s been run over by an entire freezing truck full of cold, cold ice.
Dear Sir,
I would like to point out a few things. I realize that I have pale skin, black hair, and brown eyes; am short of stature; use chopsticks correctly; and I was eating at a Japanese restaurant. However, none of these things imply that I am ethnically Japanese. Even if I were ethnically Japanese, that would not imply that I spoke Japanese. Even if I did speak Japanese, that would not imply that I am receptive to being interrupted at dinner without so much as a by your leave to act as your personal English to Japanese translator. In fact, even if I spoke Japanese fluently, I can tell you right off that being stereotyped as a Japanese-looking person, who must therefore know Japanese, being rudely interrupted at dinner while I’m reading, and being expected to perform translation services for you just because you think I know Japanese and assume that I would therefore be happy to be your human dictionary, guarantees that I will not spit out Japanese translations for you.
You have pale skin and dirty blond hair. Remarkably, I didn’t assume that you knew French, German, Czech, Romanian, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Danish, Norse, Irish, Flemish, Scots, Welsh, Hebrew, Finnish, or Greenlandic. Remarkably, I didn’t assume that you like baseball, football, beer, barbecue, hunting, or any of the stereotypical behaviors associated with being American. Remarkably, I didn’t act upon any number of baseless stereotypes to interrupt you at your dinner to demand information from you.
In the future, please think before you speak and ask yourself, “Am I making an assumption about PD’s language abilities based on her skin color and appearance? Is that right? Is that even logical?” If you do decide that I must know Japanese because you think I look like a Japanese person, ask yourself, “Am I expecting her to translate phrases for me even though I’m interrupting her while she’s clearly engaged in reading something? Do I have any right to expect translations from a complete stranger?” If you do decide that you’re entitled to your translation and that I’d be thrilled to be your human dictionary, then ask me politely to be your human dictionary. Better yet, think on this:
1. Not all black-haired, brown-eyed, pale-skinned people are Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, or of whichever ethnicity developed the cuisine of the restaurant you’re at.
2. Not all black-haired, brown-eyed, pale-skinned people know Japanese. Or Mandarin. Or Korean, Taiwanese, Cantonese, Thai, Vietnamese, or any of the 2,269 languages spoken in the continent of Asia.
3. Many people dislike being judged based on their appearance.
4. Most people dislike being interrupted by complete strangers when they’re reading or having dinner.
Sincerely,
Pizza Diavola
I would like to point out that I do not look Japanese except superficially, in that all black-haired, brown-eyed, pale-skinned people are assumed to be whatever ethnicity the observer thinks they are: Japanese in Japanese restaurants, Korean in Korean restaurants, Chinese in Chinese restaurants, etc. I would also like to point out that anyone who expects me to speak any language for them is going to be disappointed, because I dislike being asked to perform on command by entitled idiots. I would also like to point out that of the four languages of which I have speaking knowledge, and of the five languages of which I have reading knowledge, the Asian language is at the bottom of both lists. Sorry to disappoint you, but I can speak English, Latin, and Italian better than I can Korean, and I can read all of those and Ancient Greek better than I can Korean, ferchrissake. How’s that fit into your stereotype-based paradigm?
Oh, Hell–Superbad
Most of you probably already know what I think of Superbad, the movie that came out last summer: it’s the perfect example of how misogyny and rape culture are so deeply part of our cultural landscape that the movie is seen an innocent, hilarious take on completely normal high school shenanigans. Bianca Reagan has a great post on how Superbad is an example of humor that gets its laughs from misogyny:
I could go into detail about how my assertions about the movie were correct: almost every female character was depicted as a potential sperm receptacle; every main character was a white male, and almost every supporting character was white; almost every person who speaks in the movie was white. But those realities only served to set up a context for my disgust.
…
Almost every verbal insult spewed in the movie involved attacking the other person’s masculinity by accusing them of not having a penis, being a gay male, being a woman or being a vagina. The loathing of anything female became more palpable as we learned about Bill Hader’s character’s ex-wife, who was an actual whore when he married her. But it was Jonah Hill’s “Seth” who took the cake by openly lusting for his best friend’s mother; repeatedly calling Becca “a bitch” because she told their elementary school teacher about his penis drawings; and losing his mind when the adulterous stranger Seth was grinding on menstruated on his leg. The people who created this movie–the directors, the writers and the producers–clearly have a simultaneous hatred, fear and ignorance of women, quite possibly due to their respective painful adolescences. But I repeat: you all are grown men now. Don’t just regurgitate your teenage fantasies on to the screen. Reflect on your thoughts and feelings with an adult mindset, then film them.
… Misogyny is acceptable and encouraged in our media because it’s “funny.” … For many of the viewers–both men and women, both boys and girls–that movie is reality. To them, all girls dress like prostitutes and therefore should be ogled; girls are always naturally lubricated; girls are stupid enough to believe that a pre-pubescent teenage boy is really a 25-year old Hawaiian man with a singular name more unbelievable than Sting, and will then inexplicably have sex with said boy; girls love to get drunk, strip for you, and offer you “blow-Js”; and, if you fail to get a girl drunk to have sex with her and tell her this, she’ll probably still be your girlfriend, even if you have no redeeming qualities. [emphasis mine]
The whole post is really good and worth reading. My take on the movie has more to do with its rape promotion and Bianca Reagan goes wider into how it relates to misogyny generally.
The movie is stuffed to overflowing with fearful, casual hatred of women, but the part that took my breath in sheer anger and amazement that this movie could get a national distribution deal was that it promotes rape:
Here is the premise of the movie: two teenage boys hatch a plan to acquire alcoholic beverages so that they can get two girls drunk and have sex with them.
Here is an excerpt from Section 261 of the California Penal code:
261. (a) Rape is an act of sexual intercourse accomplished with a person not the spouse of the perpetrator, under any of the following circumstances:
* (3) Where a person is prevented from resisting by any intoxicating or anesthetic substance, or any controlled substance, and this condition was known, or reasonably should have been known by the accused.
The driving plotline in the movie is that Seth is trying to get Julie drunk at her party so that he can fuck her, and then, once he’s fucked her, she’ll “have to be [his] girlfriend” and he’ll be able to fuck her the whole rest of the summer. A summer full of sex–rock on, dude! Except, well, no, because Seth repeatedly insists that he has to get Julie drunk to fuck her: he tells his friend Evan this when Evan says that Seth should just tell her how he feels; he even tells this to Julie flat out at the party, when he’s drunk. He says something like, “This was my last chance! I had to get you drunk to fuck you, so I could make you my girlfriend for the summer! You’d never fuck me otherwise! You’re–you’re gorgeous, and I’m not.” Of course, in the idealized, Seth-centric world of the movie, Julie says that getting her wasted and raping her isn’t Seth’s only chance, and the end of the movie implies that they get together. But anyway, the implications of the entire plotline are staggering:
That Seth wants to get Julie drunk so he can fuck her implies that she doesn’t want to fuck him, so he needs to get around that rejection, or, to phrase it differently, her denial of consent. He needs to get around that rejection by putting her in a state where she’s unable to refuse or consent. That’s rape. That’s Seth saying that he wants to fuck Julie and he deserves that sex, whether or not she wants it, whether or not she enjoys it or is sober during it. The only thing of importance is his pleasure and Julie isn’t a person in her own right, just a vehicle for giving him the sex he thinks he has a right to.
That Seth thinks he can “make” Julie “his girlfriend” is a classic tool used to get acquaintance rapists off the hook. He’s a predator banking on the fact that after the rape, Julie will think it was consensual; that she asked for it; or that if she stays with him, she can pretend it wasn’t really rape. All of these are understandable responses to trauma; after a violation of your body and person, there’s a desire to deny it. And Seth, with his talking of “making” Julie “his girlfriend,” is trying to exploit that vulnerability to entrap Julie. During the movie, he kept using the phrase, “make Julie my girlfriend.” It was extremely disturbing because it states the coercion outright. He’s not asking her to be his girlfriend, he’s not persuading her, he’s not wooing her, he’s making her, regardless of what she thinks or wants. Her desires and independent personhood are not relevant to him.
I hated this movie so much. I couldn’t believe the sheer, unadulterated rape promotion message, I couldn’t believe that rape was portrayed as a normal shenanigan for teenage boys, I couldn’t believe how the three schlubby male characters felt they were entitled to gorgeous girlfriends for sex purposes, just because they were male and they deserved hot chicks to bang.
The one exception to the overwhelming disgust I had for this movie was Evan, who is the nice boy who respects the girl he has a crush on, wants to be straight up and tell her how he feels, and doesn’t jump to take advantage of her when she’s drunk. However, he’s portrayed as a loser for these beliefs and his best friend Seth constantly makes fun of him, telling Evan to just fuck Becca already, she’s a horny slut who’d be a really good fuck. Becca also gets drunk at the party and comes on to Evan, doing a striptease, trying to get him to fuck her, and insulting him when he says it’s not a good idea because they’re drunk. The message here is that nice boys who think of girls as people and respect them, don’t try to rape them, and don’t think of them solely as things to fuck, are losers that will never get laid. They’ll be mocked by their friends and by the girls, who apparently don’t respect boys who won’t fuck them when they’re drunk. The message is that girls don’t deserve such consideration anyway, since they–or Becca, at least–want to have sex when they’re intoxicated and can’t give consent.
I said this in a comment on the post, but it’s worth repeating: “I hate this movie so much, and how it’s specifically targeted at adolescents who don’t know much better because they’re certainly not getting reliable sex ed and or being taught respect for their partners at school. I hate how it’s popular and how it could even be produced–who financed this film? Who produced it? Who brokered the national distribution deal? Among all those people, why didn’t a single person notice how incredibly misogynist, rape-promoting, and vile this movie was?”
Chicken Stock
Stock is a handy thing to have on hand, be it chicken, vegetable, beef, or some mishmosh of leftover vegetables and meat bones. I suspect that’s how it originated, as a way to extract every last bit of flavor and nutrition from food: boil some water with the bones from yesterday’s meat and the leftover fluffy tops of vegetables and voila, that’s another meal squeezed out of your food! I don’t need it often, but when I want to try a soup or a risotto or something else that requires stock, it’s nice to be able to pull some out of the freezer. Canned stock is usually laden with preservatives, chemicals, and tastes too salty, and although it’s cheaper in terms of cash than making stock from scratch, that’s because the costs are hidden from the consumer and passed onto the population at large as externalities. Food politics aside, though, I like making things from scratch. There’s just something comforting and fulfilling about making a risotto from start to finish, and having a pot slowly simmering on the stove for hours gives the kitchen a warm, homey feel.
Stock recipes vary by cuisine, with each cuisine using it for different dishes and using different ingredients based on what’s indigenous to the area. The recipe I usually make is an Italian one from the excellent cookbook Pasta Fresca, by Viana La Place and Evan Kleiman. Quite frankly, it’s a bit on the sweet side and is a funny brown color rather than being perfectly clear, but I suspect that’s because I didn’t put enough salt in and was too lazy to strain it more than once.
Utensils:
Stock pot, 8-10 qt
Spoon, to skim off the scum and fat
Colander or sieve, clean dishtowel, and big mixing bowl to strain the stock
1 2-3 pound whole chicken, with feet if possible
1 pound chicken backs and necks
Water
1 carrot, trimmed of its leafy top (or not)
3 stalks celery, trimmed (or not)
3 sprigs parsley
2 cloves garlic, peeled
1 bay leaf
salt to taste
freshly ground black pepper or a few peppercorns
On the meat:
1. If you buy meat often, one thing you can do is get a whole chicken, eat the breasts/thighs/wings/whatever, then toss the neck, back, and other bones in the freezer until you want to make a stock. In the long run, it’s cheaper than buying meat pre-cut, as you get more meat with the bones as a bonus.
2. Bones: both local butchers and the meat counters at grocery stores have backs and necks on hand, and they’ll bag some up for you if you ask. Even the Shaw’s in New Haven, which is not an upscale Shaw’s, had marrow bones, and they were helpful and nice when I wandered in last year saying, “This cookbook says I need…marrow bones? For…beef stock?”
3. If you don’t want to deal with a whole chicken, you can make up the weight with odds and ends: more necks and backs, wings, etc. This is what I did, and it’s a lot cheaper than buying a whole chicken.
On the vegetables:
You can trim them of their leafy bits if you like, but if you don’t have another use for them, I figure you might as well toss them in as not. Rinse them well, making sure to get all the dirt off the skin and out of the crevices, particularly the celery. There’s always dirt on the bottom of my celery.
Wash the chicken carefully, rinsing out any blood that remains in the cavity, and gently pull off the extra fat attached to the breast and tail areas. Place the whole chicken and necks in a soup pot. Cover with water so that it is 4 inches above the chicken and bones. Bring to a boil, and carefully skim off all the scum as it rises to the surface. When there is no more scum, add all the remaining ingredients, lower the heat, and simmer, partly covered, for at least 1 hour, or 2 hours for a richer broth. The more slowly the broth bubbles, the clearer the soup will be. Strain the broth, reserving the chicken and vegetables or discard them, if desired. Either use the broth immediately or refrigerate it for later use. If you do refrigerate it, remove the fat from the top when it has congealed.
Straining the stock: stick the big mixing bowl in the sink and place the colander or strainer in or above it, lined with the clean dishtowel. Slowly pour the stock into the colander; go too fast and it’ll overflow. Once it’s all transferred, strain it back into the pot, and again if you want the stock extra-clear. Store in medium-sized tupperware, which thaw more quickly than large ones and have the added benefit of being about the right amount of stock for one meal (for me; I cook for one person). I stuck out a tupperware of stock to thaw last night, and it was mostly melted with a sizable chunk of ice floating in the center this morning. It had to be heated for the risotto anyway, so I dumped the whole thing into a pot, covered it, and turned the heat on low to gently warm it through.
Making stock is usually a weekend project. It doesn’t require much attention, but it takes time and a relatively uncluttered stove top and sink. Once it’s done, however, I have enough tupperwares of stock to last for months, depending on how often I use it.
Sappho has nothing on this
OMG. I can’t read the NYT anymore. I just can’t–not their op-ed section, at any rate, and not their Style section, either. The op-ed page, aside from Bob Herbert and the board editorials, are full of crap writing that’s often just imbecilic, disgusting vitriol, poorly researched and poorly argued to boot. The Style section relies on sexism to prop it up. Dining & Food is still decent, but it’s the only section of the NYT I read these days. Time to delete the NYT bookmarks on my toolbar and start reading the BBC and The Economist in earnest.
I wrote a poem at work today:
O, fruit sublime
O, succulent flesh divine,
How I wish you were mine!
I want you, I need you,
I can’t help but eat you–
OM NOM NOM!
“Ode To A Blood Orange”
*bows* I’ll be here all week, thank you!
Alma Mater? Not So Much
Yale Women’s Center to sue fraternity for harassment? – Feministing.
Yale Daily News (YDN) article here, “Misogyny Claim Leveled At Frat”, and Yale Women’s Center op-ed here, “Women’s Center calls Zeta Psi’s behavior ‘inexcusable’”
Members of the Yale Women’s Center board threatened to initiate legal action Sunday after discovering a photograph posted on Facebook.com depicting 12 Yale students affiliated with the Zeta Psi fraternity posing in front of the Center with a sign reading “We Love Yale Sluts.”
The picture made its rounds through e-mail inboxes around Yale’s campus Sunday night, enraging some members of the University community offended by what they perceived to be its misogynistic overtones. The men photographed in front of the Women’s Center are Zeta Psi “pledges” — students attempting to join the fraternity.
…
Former Women’s Center Public Relations Coordinator Jessica Svendsen ’09 said she found a group of men chanting “Dick! Dick! Dick!” in front of the Elm Street entrance to the Center, which is located in Durfee Hall, shortly before midnight last Tuesday. Frightened, she decided to take a detour through the Center’s Old Campus entrance, she said.
“I stopped even before I got to Durfee, because I recognized that as a single woman facing 20 to 25 frat boys, I wasn’t going to be able to enter the Women’s Center,” Svendsen said. “This was my first experience knowing that misogyny does happen at Yale — and right in front of the Women’s Center door.”
Sadly, the comments to the YDN article and op-ed are filled with frat boy apologists and misogynist, anti-feminist comments. They’re worth a read, if you’re looking for something stomach-turning.
I hope to god that the Women’s Center does something beyond op-ed and getting the administration involved, because historically, Levin’s administration is complete crap at stepping up to these issues. If they can get the lawsuit off the ground, perhaps it’ll force people into taking the harassment and misogyny seriously. This incident is both, no two ways about it–to stand in front of the Women’s Center in a large body (it’s a small space) with a sign bearing a sexist slur, yelling at people who pass by and deterring women from going into the Women’s Center, is harassment outright. Those who deny say that it’s just a joke or just drunken antics. That’s an excuse, and not a particularly good one–a joke can be harassment, particularly when it’s predicated on intimidating and slut-shaming people.
The campus has a civilized veneer most of the time, but this, the annual racist chalkings on Columbus Day, the defacing of a sign to paint homosexuality as a sin and N.O.G.A.Y.S. on National Coming Out Day 2006, the Yellow Fever and anti-Asian articles in the Herald and Rumpus in 2006, and other events show that it’s only a veneer. What’s more, people generally dismiss these events and the victims–the queers, the Asians, the women, the Native Americans–are dismissed as overreacting and deserving what they got, because the ruckus they raise makes everyone else uncomfortably aware of the ugliness. The university–the student body, the administration, the faculty, the alumni–likes to pretend that misogyny, racism, homophobia, and classism couldn’t possibly happen within its posh, intellectual, educated boundaries, and so it shoves them underground and silences the victims. It’s a stupid, ignorant approach that reinforces said prejudices by not punishing the perpetrators and not airing all our filthy laundry out in the air, to avoid openly discussing why these events happen, what they are, and how we can prevent them in the future.
Fortunately, as an alumna, I have somewhat more power than I did as a student. Until Levin commits to acknowledging that this event was outright harassment and that the university will not tolerate it, I’m not giving them any money. He cares a great deal about the university’s PR, and so I hope you’ll contact the President’s Office and urge him to condemn the misogyny in this frat ’stunt’ and support the Women’s Center:
President’s Office
Yale University
PO BOX 208229
New Haven, CT 06520-8229
Email: presidents.office@yale.edu
Telephone: (203) 432-2550
Fax: (203) 432-7105
President’s Office student affairs contact:
Nina Glickson
When I was a student, I used to hate that the university ended up in the media all the time, mostly because the issues that popped up in the press were really stupid ones–Alexei Vayner, students having shower sex in Calhoun, soap dispensers in the bathrooms–and surely national news outlets had more important issues to spend their column inches on. Hopefully, this event will come to their attention as well and force Yale into taking actions for progress.
35th anniversary: Roe v. Wade
[OMG. I had a long post on being pro-choice written up and then WordPress ate it. *Tears hair out*]
Today is the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade and National Blog for Choice Day.
I am pro-choice because women should have the right to self-determination over their own bodies.
That is what it all comes down to for me: I don’t think that anyone, be they the government, a church, family, friends, police, or doctors, should be able to make decisions about my body. They should not be able to interfere with my decisions. My body, my choice. To do otherwise assumes that someone else has the right to control my body; that I am not intelligent enough to make my own decisions; that someone else knows better than I do how I ought to live my life, and my opinion doesn’t matter; that I don’t have the right to the flesh I walk in. All of these ideas are completely untenable to me. For a society of equals, a precondition is that all people be considered equal to one another, and as long as someone else can deny me jurisdiction over my body, because I’m female and pregnant, we will never be equals.
To deny choice means that you think you have the right to decide what happens to someone else’s body and life.
To deny choice means that because someone is pregnant and female, you think you know what’s best more than she does–she is your inferior.
To deny choice means that you are denying women their intelligence, their desires, their self-knowledge, because they are pregnant.
To deny choice means that you force a life-changing event and your own morality on women that you’ve never met.
I am pro-choice because I support a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy; to keep a pregnancy and give up her child for adoption; to keep a pregnancy and keep her child.
I am pro-choice because I recognize that I know myself, but I don’t know anyone else, and so how can I make decisions for other people?
I am pro-choice because even if I were God and knew all things, that still wouldn’t justify interfering with someone else’s life and forcing my morality, my decisions on her.
I am pro-choice because I have the right to bodily autonomy and the right to decide what decide what I do with my body. Everyone has that right; everyone should have that right, regardless of being female, male, pregnant, not pregnant, queer, heterosexual, married, single, religious, atheist, transgendered, cisgendered, poor, rich, ethnic minority, white, and any other markers you want to slap on.
For me, bodily autonomy is the reason I’m pro-choice. After the various social reasons for being pro-choice, that’s the bedrock logic I fall back to. You can argue with facts, figures, and logic, but many anti-choicers will fall back to “It’s immoral/it’s killing a life/it’s murder,” and that’s their unfalsifiable position. Autonomy–the right to decide what I will do with my body and my life–is mine. At the end of the day, when we’ve finished slinging arguments at each other, I will look an anti-choicer in the eye and say, “Tell me you have the right to decide what I do with my body. Tell me you know better than I do how I ought to live my life, and that you have the right to impose that on me. Tell me you’d let me do the same to you.”
It’s been 35 years since Roe v. Wade, and the idea that women, particularly pregnant women, are individuals with the right to self-determination over their bodies is still controversial. All of the Republican candidates for president are anti-choice, with positions ranging from support for a Constitutional amendment banning abortion to anti-choice with exceptions for rape and incest. These people think they have the right to decide what I should do in a pregnancy, and in the case of health-of-mother, rape, and incest exceptions, that they have the right to dictate when it’s socially appropriate for me to have an abortion. In Gonzales v. Carhart (April 2007, 05-380 ), Justice Kennedy wrote that women are stupid/ignorant/not fully informed about partial-birth abortions, and so in order to protect them from the regret they may feel after the fact/consequences of their decisions, the state ought to ban partial-birth abortions. In his opinion, he wrote,
While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained. … Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow.
…
It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form.
…
It is a reasonable inference that a necessary effect of the regulation and the knowledge it conveys will be to encourage some women to carry the infant to full term, thus reducing the absolute number of late-term abortions. The medical profession, furthermore, may find different and less shocking methods to abort the fetus in the second trimester, thereby accommodating legislative demand. The State’s interest in respect for life is advanced by the dialogue that better informs the political and legal systems, the medical profession, expectant mothers, and society as a whole of the consequences that follow from a decision to elect a late-term abortion.
What are the “consequences that follow from a decision to elect a late-term abortion” and how do they affect “society as a whole?” What that opinion says is that if a woman is pregnant, everyone gets a say in what happens to her pregnancy–except her. Her authority over her own body–the flesh she inhabits–and her desires are not relevant. A pregnant woman’s body is not her own.
35 years from now, where will American society be regarding abortion? Will we have moved toward a society where women are considered people with the right to decide what they do with their bodies? Or will we have moved backward? I hope that in the future, abortion will not be controversial, because it is predicated on women being considered rational actors entitled to make decisions about their lives. You never know, though, and mere hope is not enough.
Some better reading:
Feministing’s fabulous roundup of great posts
Jill at Feministe: 10 Reasons to Support Reproductive Justice
Salon.com: “Salon asked leading feminists to talk about the court case that changed their lives, and why it matters more than ever.”
NARAL: Blog for Choice–Why it’s important to vote pro-choice
Tamora Pierce: Why Vote Pro-Choice?
The Curvature: Why Vote Pro-Choice?
Things To Do…But, Mojitos!
There is a list of things to do that is several bullet points long. However, I met up with a friend for “a cocktail” at Street, a New American restaurant at Polk & Broadway in San Francisco’s Russian Hill, after my Federal Income Tax accounting class. “A cocktail” shortly turned into another cocktail and then another–it’s funny how getting another seems like a better and better idea the more you have–and so now I need to get to sleep before an 8 A.M. conference call tomorrow.
So I wanted to post and say
(a) Amy, the bartender at Street, is quite nice and a kickass bartender;
(b) the Cabbie that drove my friend and me home is also an artist, or an art show organizer. I have an email and a card, because he said he was organizing an art show (he does oil painting) and I said, “Oh, wow! That sounds really cool!” Should I email him re: the show?
(c) I’m buzzed. 2 mojitos and a margarita. I’m happy with the world. Note to self: go back to Street for a proper dinner one of these days, since I’ve only ever been there for drinks…
Violence in advertising?
Following on a discussion I had about Bob Herbert’s kickass op-ed in the NYT today, I have a question for you:
In the 2007 season, America’s Next Top Model ran a “Crime Scenes Victims” show, where the aspiring models were shot in poses presenting them as murder victims. WARNING FOR TRIGGERS: GRAPHIC VIOLENCE. You can see ten images from the show here. The first one is arguably the least disturbing–I saw it and thought, what with the lighting and the palette, that it was a Hell atmosphere with the model as demon or whatnot. Then I realized that she looks dead – look at the emptiness in her face, the limpness of her limbs. The ones following the first photo are increasingly violent and brutal.
Do these images glamourize violence against women? Are these images, in the context of modeling and advertising, using violence against women to sell products? Do these images eroticize violence against women? Do these images eroticize dead, drowned, stabbed, raped, discarded, broken, poisoned women? Are these images misogynist?
I’m interested in your honest responses and reasoning. One person I talked to said no, that it was obviously art and not misogynist, because art can’t be misogynist (or racist or classist). It can provoke discussion and critical thinking about misogyny, but anything that’s art isn’t misogynist. For a variety of reasons, I’m not sure I’d call this art, but leaving aside the issue of whether it’s art or not, I’d argue that art can indeed be misogynist. Being art doesn’t give something a pass on being misogynist, racist, or otherwise problematic. Do you think these photos portray glamourizing violence against women in a way that prompts critical discussion–”Gee, that photo points out how violence against women is glamourized to sell clothing in mainstream fashion advertising! That’s awful!”–or does it simply portray violence against women as glamourous?
ETA: I’m asking about the images specifically, not taking into account the comments the judges make on them. I think those comments definitely prove that violence against women was glamourized, eroticized, and seen as beautiful in the shoot:
On model pushed down the stairs: “I think Sarah is the classic example of someone who isn’t typically pretty, but translates amazingly well on film.” – “translates amazingly well” = looks good dead
On model shot with a gun: “The reason why this shot works so amazingly well is the positioning of your body. On top of that, the background, the way it’s lit — that’s one of those shots that if I took all that away from you, then how great would you look?” – The background is the spray of blood behind the model’s body. The positioning is that of a person that’s been shot through and then collapsed onto the ground. “If I took all that away from you” – she looks beautiful in this shot only because she’s been shot through and slumped onto the ground, dead.
On a hanged model – “All the other girls managed to have some sort of spark even in this sort of morbid situation. I think I look at you in this picture, and you actually just look dead. One of the simplest things, like acting dead, can be the most challenging. The problem is that you didn’t do anything. You just gave up and thought that that was being dead.” – “You look too dead! The other girls managed to have some sort of spark–look pretty, sexy, or appealing, while being dead/electrocuted/pushed off a building/shot/stabbed/organs hacked out of her body–and shame on you for looking horrifically dead instead of sexily dead!”
Also, I realize that this is old news and the episode aired sometime early last year. However, I’m still interested in it and it’s the first thing that readily came to mind when I thought about the glamourization of violence against women in fashion advertising. Well, this and the recent Target ad. I don’t consume enough mainstream advertising to know much about it, so what do you think? Does advertising use depictions of women in glamourized violent or pornographic situations? Brownie points for links!
Links Roundup
Just popping in to say that work is eating my life lately, so I haven’t been able to chat with people, answer email, post, or even read my flist. This ain’t going to be much of a post, either, because tomorrow’s a jam-packed day beginning at 5:30 A.M.
First of all, Hillary Clinton won the New Hampshire primary and I cannot begin to tell you how ecstatic I am. A feeling of triumph has been burning inside since I heard the news and it only gets stronger with each passing day; with seeing people freak out over ‘OMG A WOMAN WON–BUT SHE IS UNELECTABLE–AHHHHHH NOOOOOO A WOMAN!’; with every sexist insult I get during the daily course of working and living; with the knowledge that these primaries are groundbreaking. They represent change, they represent advances, they represent an African-American person and a woman storming across the country and saying, “We will not be held down.” They mean that America is slowly progressing to a more enlightened society and the institutional barriers of sexism and racism are being ground down. Change is slow, but it’s happening and the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries are something I can hold in my heart for strength the next time I feel discouraged and wonder what the point is in standing up and speaking against sexism, against racism. I can’t begin to articulate how much Clinton’s victory means to me.
And now, links:
McEwan at Shakesville: on the “Iron My Shirt” incident. I’ll excerpt a bit of Clinton’s speech:
When everyone had settled down a bit, she said, “As I think has just been abundantly demonstrated, I am also running to break through the highest and hardest glass ceiling.”
Her words were drowned out by a cheering, now-standing crowd.
“That’s one of the things I love about it,” she said. “It’s never predictable.”
Good debate in the comments at feministing: on how incredibly fucked up it is that people are claiming the “Iron My Shirt” jackasses were plants from the Clinton campaign. Here, here, here, and here.
On a related note, the coverage of and response to Clinton’s campaign is incredible. She’s too emotionless and unfeeling. No, she’s too emotional and irrational. No, she’s pretending to be too emotional, which means she’s too emotionless and unfeeling. She’s playing the gender card by talking about the rampant sexism she’s faced, which doesn’t actually exist. Etc. To which I’d like to say, WHAT THE HELL? Jesus. Pick a story and stick with it!
Fecke at Shakesville: Angry Women Back Clinton – possibly the best thing I’ve read all week. Wait, no, it’s the best thing I’ve read all week. All year. No ‘possibly’ about it.
Some will criticize this as misguided identity politics, but they’re wrong. Oh, it’s identity politics — women in New Hampshire and throughout the country recognized that Clinton was being attacked as a woman, and came to her defense. But it’s far from misguided.
Clinton may win the nomination, or she may lose; right now she’s probably the front-runner, but that could change tomorrow. Either way, she’s blazing a trail that more women will follow. When the media and her opponents ramped up hatred against her because of her gender, women recognized that the trail she was cutting would be filled with pitfalls and mineshafts if the bile was not addressed. And so they addressed it. Women who could write, wrote. Women who could speak out to friends, spoke out to friends. And in New Hampshire, women who could vote, voted for Hillary Clinton.
And that’s why she won tonight; because women recognized that, at least for tonight, their future was inextricably bound up with Hillary’s, and that, at least for tonight, they needed to send a clear message that misogyny and sexism just won’t work anymore. Clinton may yet lose — there are plenty of legitimate reasons to oppose her. But if she loses, it won’t be because she was too emotional, or because she reminds someone of their ex-wife. It will be because she loses on her merits as a candidate. That’s as it should be, and it’s why our country should be grateful to the angry women who rallied to her, angry women who were angry for a righteous reason, angry women who accomplished something grand.
I really can’t understand the objections I’ve heard to both Clinton and Obama that go like this: “I would love to vote for a woman/black man, but I just don’t think the rest of the country is ready.” Translation: I’m not a sexist/racist — I’m just willing to let those assholes own my vote.
Do people really think it’s going to be any different, any easier, if we have an African-American and/or female candidate next time around? 20 years from now? 50? Do we really think that if we just let our culture progress a little more, with a few more white male leaders shepherding it along, someday America actually will be unequivocally ready for such a change, and race and sex won’t be huge, historic issues the way they are today? Seriously?
Somebody’s got to go first. And without wanting to rule Edwards out prematurely, the way things are looking right now, somebody will be going first this year, whether it’s a black man or a white woman. Which means bigotry and hatred are going to be inescapable, defining issues throughout this campaign and — if all goes well — throughout our next president’s term(s) in office. We can’t avoid that. It will not go away if we just wait a little longer to vote for a person of color and/or a woman. Whoever goes first, whenever it happens, will have a hard and lonely road to walk. That’s the problem with voters having clearly based their decisions on race and gender for over 200 years, even if we’re only getting around to talking about “identity politics” now.
One day, you’ll get actual commentary and thought out of me rather than links. But, um, probably not soon, the way work is going. So I shall post these and run away!
P.S. Harding’s post at Shakesville expresses just how I’ve been feeling about the whole ‘unelectable’ thing. Why is Clinton unelectable? Sure, lots of people hate her. But why bow to them? Why admit defeat without even fighting? Why give in and give up rather than standing for your principles and saying, “No, you’re wrong, and I will goddamn prove it.” Principles and ideals are to be held with all the strength of your convictions. To give up without a fight, merely for some soundbyte, is to lack conviction. To not vote for a female candidate because you think misogynists and anti-Clintonites hate her; to not vote for an African-American candidate because you think racists hate him, isn’t giving us a few more years to become more progressive as a nation. It’s betraying your ideals and it’s telling the misogynists and racists that they are right, because no one’s challenging their beliefs. It’s not progressive or strategic at all; it is a simple failure of conscience and cowardice.
