Melissa Gira Grant on how trafficking courts are just stop-and-frisk for women of color:
Nearly 70% of defendants facing prostitution charges in the Brooklyn trafficking courts are black. For loitering charges, 94% appear to be black. (The group sent monitors and used open records to track 364 cases in Brooklyn and Queens, where 58% of defendants are Asian, over nine months.)
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LOVED Jaya’s new piece:
A while ago I wrote this piece about growing up biracial, which is technically true. My mom is white and my dad is Indian. Though that technicality immediately got murky. As soon as the piece was published, some people argued with my definition of biracial. Indian didn’t count as another race, because they were Aryan, or maybe Caucasian (a classification with a weird, gross history). I could look it up right there on the internet, and with that newfound information, I should probably start calling myself “bicultural” to be more accurate, OK?
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Jenny Diski on her mother/daughter-like relationship with Doris Lessing (the piece gets into Jenny’s own mother’s sexual abuse of her):
Sometimes, for lack of a solution, I thought I’d simply call her ‘my mother’, but that made me so inordinately uncomfortable, ‘mother’ and ‘my’ being more than doubly cringeworthy, that even now I feel the need to reiterate that she wasn’t really my mother. We never spoke about it in more detail than the Auntie Doris joke, but she must have had a sense of it because when my daughter was about a month old and lying on the carpet in her flat, Doris said, out of the blue, in the awkward, clipped and embarrassed tone she used for any discussion of our relationship, which I very well recognised by then: ‘Do you want her to call me grandma? Or some sort of thing like that?’ I took it for the kindly and difficult gesture it was, but awkward and embarrassed myself by her manner, I said I thought ‘Doris’ would be the best name to call her. In any case, I said, ‘she’s got two grandmothers, even if one is invisible – please god.’ I was quite taken by surprise at the thought that all along while I was trying to figure out how to refer to Doris, I actually had a real mother to call my own. But having thought that, it seemed irrelevant.
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On being a hero and not a princess:
Being a girl successfully wasn’t just acting — it was acrobatics. Get attention, but don’t seek it out too much. Dress acceptably, but don’t look like you’re trying to copy anyone. Know the lyrics to popular songs, but don’t let anybody know that you memorized them deliberately. My daydreams were still about doing things, saving people, but I started obsessing about how I was perceived. Instead of movie scenes keeping me up at night, it was all the ways I’d embarrassed myself that day. Being a girl wasn’t about doing right, it was about not doing things wrong. Not being loud, not having hair on your legs, not tripping, not taking up too much space or time. I had to make myself smaller, neater, less annoying. It was a negation. The terror of humiliation was paralyzing and didn’t square with the way I had thought about myself before. I had considered myself prepared to face the fires of Mordor, but it was becoming clear that if one of the orcs happened to make an offhand remark about the length of my gym shorts I’d get a stomachache and have to go home.
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Okay, everyone keeps telling me this Elon Musk piece is great so I’ll get around to it.
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EARLY MISANDRISTS (sent by a reader):
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How are people enjoying The Mindy Project this season? I am enjoying it greatly, as Danny and Mindy are my OTP, and they are both terrible in their own ways, so. Like, people are all “Danny’s a jerk,” and I’m all “MINDY IS A FUCKIN’ MONSTER.”
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You KNOW I hate being told to eat seasonally against my will, but a lot of these look really good.
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
Jaya, you perfect sunflower, that piece was amazing.
I think the girl on the 2nd row, left side may be surreptitiously flicking off the camera, and she is giving me life this morning.
the girl front and center is making me feel things.
I am in love with their collars. #bigcollarnoheart
That picture there is why it’s best I never had children because I would TOTALLY have re-created that image with my kid and their friends. That is, if my kids even HAD friends after me pulling so many stunts like that. I imagine other parents would avoid our family like the plague.
Oh, that grammy is so cute.
Loved the Funkhouser piece on being a hero: “I knew how to like and want and protect things, but I didn’t know how to be liked and wanted and protected.” That resonated like a big ol’ gong. Excellent piece.
I once dressed as Robin Hood for Halloween, after I was old enough to know better, in junior high. I even brought a bow with me to school. People were still confused, somehow.
Damn. I wish I still had that bow.
Dear sixth-grade art teacher who firmly told me no, I was not allowed to make a Robin Hood hat for the Renaissance festival because the Robin Hood hats were for boys, and I had to make the squishy donut hat with the veil instead: it is one of the great regrets of my life that I did not stage an all-out sit-in-style protest of your idiocy. I’d rather have no hat at all than the one you made me make. I can only explain my compliance by saying how taken aback I was by your attitude. I thought that since you were a female Cub Scout leader, you would understand.
I identified with this piece so hard.
“Being a girl wasn’t about doing right, it was about not doing things wrong.” To this day I struggle with the idea that I should try to repress my earnestness, waste my time worrying about whether anyone notices how the backs of my thighs look (guess what: almost no one does), and constantly check myself so that I’m not “too much.” Doing those things constantly doesn’t come naturally to me and, frankly, is exhausting.
Exactly. That sentence put into words something I have never known how to say. I am constantly worrying that I’m doing something wrong.
Flashbacks to the time I went to a costume party dressed as a Smurf.
I dressed as Harry Potter for Halloween when I was 10, and I remember being so embarrassed by how confused people were that I wasn’t Hermione instead. I wanted to be the main character!
I once dressed up as Jesus complete with painted beard. I think I was 6 or 7? Much mocking ensued. But man when I was 6 I thought Jesus was supercool.
I loved it, too. I wonder, in retrospect, how many girls who dutifully dressed like princesses felt like this underneath.
Oh man, and her last paragraph described pretty much every halloween of mine I can remember. I had a tendency to dress as things that made no sense to anyone. I went as Elanta from Enchantress from the Stars one year. Shocking that no one recognized that one.
I adored that book when I was growing up! What did your Elanta costume involve? I don’t remember any particularly distinguishing costumes, but I did read it a long time ago.
I don’t think there was a particularly distinguishing outfit! I went with a black leotard, leggings and a sparkly cape from my dress-up box, plus some sort of gold costume jewelry medallion. I dimly remember the medallion being canon, but the rest may have been made up.
!! Elanta! Oh my goodness I haven’t thought about how much I loved that book in like, 15 years. <3
I dressed as Maverick from Top Gun a couple of years ago for an Halloween party. I wore a button down olive colored dress that looked exactly like a flight suit except with a skirt, aviator sunglasses, flight suit patches INCLUDING A NAMETAG, and my Dad’s dogtags and people literally couldn’t get it. I guess boobs (to which the nametag patch was affixed) just threw the whole thing off.
That sounds like an excellent costume!
I went as Christ Knight form Real Genius a few years back. No one knew who it was (I also had a name tag) and my date was disappointed that I wasn’t slutty. (We didn’t go out again.)
I went as Eowyn, and was seriously dismayed when my costume was universally interpreted as “princess.”
Yup, I went as Eilonwy to much the same result. Never appreciated how similar those names are before…
Uuuuuugh not having your costume recognized is THE WORST. I once put together a costume that was half post-apocalypic punk, half 50’s bad girl that I called MAD MAXINE and even though I explained it to, like, twenty people, only two of them got the reference and only one of the two thought it was funny.
SOUL-CRUSHING I TELL YOU.
I did the same thing! Even with a moustache penciled in, people thought I was Peter Pan. Assholes.
There was a year I went as Luke Skywalker, post-ROTJ, and it brings a pleased tear to my eye that it was just the post-ROTJ bit some of my friends weren’t quite sure of.
Bacon-Latticed Apple Pie!!!!
the granny-voicemails just made my Friday. nothing can go wrong now! *nothing!*
(knocks on wood)
Love the Grandma VMs. How nice to have a normal Grandma. Mine used to cut clippings out of the newspaper of girls/women who had been brutally murdered and dismembered and mail them to me when I was away at college. Because we all know an unsupervised woman away from home w/o a father’s protection is one step away from becoming a dead prostitute.
Mine used to tell me that “only sluts wear tank tops.” I was eight. Thanks, granny!
“Only prostitutes wear black.”
“Only prostitutes have pierced ears.”
No, I don’t contact that part of the family more than once a quarter. I look fabulous in black and you should see my earring collection.
My mom once expressed hesitation at extra ear piercings, because she didn’t want me to look “like a streetwalker.” Which is pretty funny coming from a very permissive hippy-type. (I have seven ear piercings, though I wear none anymore (unrelated to street-walking).)
My grandparents used to call me every time a college-aged woman went missing, just to let me know I was probably going to get murdered for being away from home. I think they meant well, but…just no. I feel your pain. 🙁
Your parents shouldn’t waste money sending you to university when your brothers need to go instead. Yep, thanks Grandma.
I don’t know if anyone has mentioned it before, but here is a pretty correctly-furious breakdown of the Texas Circuit Court’s ruling on Texas’ abortion restrictions:
http://wonkette.com/562303/federal-court-saves-te…
Man, I am definitely starting to worry about how straight-up dumb judges seem to be.
Unrelated, but I think I’ll be out and about for open thread time: my baby is growing teeth! She seems to be jumping right in, with all four canines. I really hope they are nice and big by halloween, and she grows no others before that. I will have the best baby vampire ever!
Photos of just her mouth, please! With the adorably squishy cheeks.
I will do my best.
Well now I really miss my grandmothers.
Mindy Project spoilers in this comment.
MINDY IS A HORRIBLE PERSON. LEAVE POOR CLIFF ALONE, YOU CAN AFFORD A REAL LAWYER. I mean, Cliff got his, but STILL.
I still like the show, but Mindy is the new Michael Scott, for real.
I love the fact that she is allowed to be awful but also sympathetic at the same time. I also love Mindy and Danny together. Danny is the first boyfriend that has made any sense. The other ones always seemed so forced.
I don’t know… My problem with this season so far is that I don’t really think they have that much chemistry. I guess I bought it in the past, but when I re-watched the 2nd season I realized they don’t have any chemistry. And then I realized that Mindy is annoying enough that I don’t know that she’d have chemistry with anyone!
She really is awful! But the supporting characters are the BEST and the reason I keep coming back.
I’m starting to be really in love with Adam Pally. Like full-on love, beyond liking his character.
Have you seen Happy Endings? GREAT show, and Adam Pally is wonderful in it. (uhh Youtube might help if you want to check it out…might…)
Oh my god she is simultaneously the best and the worst. I don’t know what to do with my feelings about her. (and I love that there’s a woman on TV that I can say that about).
I love Mindy and Danny, no matter what awful things they do because they are adorable, Chris Messina is just so effortlessly charming and the way he kisses makes me weak in the knees.
DAMN GIRL
I SEE WHAT YOU MEAN
God love that tiny little sex beast. I could crush his pelvis but it doesn’t stop me from wanting to let him GET IT.
Tiny little sex beast! Perfect description! I like how he is equal parts that and Cranky New York Grandpa. The combination is odd and impossible to resist.
The glasses!!!! Improbable swoon.
And lest we forget this fabulous happenstance:
not totally sure what’s going on there, but it’s making me want to watch the show tbh
You’re not the only one.
The phallic beer bottle!
I was never close to either of my grandmothers–to one I was The Unfavourite because I wasn’t blonde and blue-eyed and also I looked like my grandfather, her late, hated, husband, and so while she fawned over my other cousins I was the reject–and the other one lived with us for years but had Alzheimer’s for most of that time and usually thought I was my mom. Really I would have given just about anything to have a grandmother who left adorable supportive voicemails on my phone and thought I hung the moon. Oh dear, now I am mopey.
I’m sorry you lost the grandma lottery. It is not at all the same, but you are one of our Favorites here at The Toast.
One of mine died when I was still in single digits, and the other…well, I had something appear online this week that got some very slightly rude comments (which I was nonetheless stung by), and I made peace with it by noting that my own grandmother had said much worse to my face, so these jokers didn’t need to take up my brainspace.Would have been nice to have a grandma in my corner, but the one I had at least thickened my hide a bit.
Hey so I was sleepily perusing the Link Roundup as usual and there was a paragraph that looked familiar… and then I SHRIEKED because it was mine. Thank you for linking to my Archipelago piece! You guys are my everything.
I dressed as a pirate one year. An awesome, jaunty pirate, with a sword and a face tattoo. I have zero regrets.
I also have clear memories of dressing as Hobbes once, and people insisting I was Tigger. I was not amused. Nor did I bounce.
ETA – this was supposed to show up in reply to Girl Named Jack. Intense Debate needs to get its act together. 😛
I’m currently super anti-pumpkin because this country has decided to ruin it for everyone, but those pumpkin cornbread muffins look DELICIOUS. And the apple pie biscuits.
That was the wrong post to look st the day of Kol Nidre.
Have an easy and meaningful fast!
Those early misdandrists are just awesome! Ha.
Jaya’s piece is great. I also read the previous one… both really well written. But wow, unbelievable, what people feel they’re entitled to believe about one’s ethnicity or race. Honestly.
Overheard by me in a local hotel, earlier this year:
LADY GUEST: Where is the pool?
HOTEL CLERK: Down that hallway.
L.G.: Thanks! Hey, where are you from?
H.C.: Lowell (city down the road in Mass.)
L.G.: No, I mean where are you FROM?
H.C. (confused): Lowell.
L.G.: No, where are you originally from? Are you Mexican? Arab? Hispanic?
H.C. (hesitantly): My family came from Cambodia back in the 70s.
L.G.: A-ha!
I wanted to apologize to the hotel clerk. Not everyone is that kind of obnoxious jerkwad.
APPLE PIE BISCUITS. ::attempts to eat screen::
Is signalboosting allowed in the comments section? If not, my apologies!
Friends of the Toast Mikki Kendall and Jamie Nesbitt Golden are raising money to support Hood Feminism! If you’d like to help, you can go to this link: http://www.youcaring.com/other/help-hood-feminism…
It’s such a great site, and those two are amazing writers with really important things to say– consider supporting if you can!
That picture’s great! There’s a picture of my grandmother when she was in high school where she’s making *exactly* the same expression as the girl in the pointy lace collar without a cigarette, and I thought for a split second it was her. (It’s not, sadly.)
Man, I feel Jaya’s piece so much. I’m applying to grad school and the ethnicity section is giving me a mini existential crisis. My dad’s white and my mom’s latina, and I’m afraid that if I check “yes” to the “are you of hispanic/latino ancestry?” question, they’ll see my super German last name and think I’m lying. They probably don’t even care, but ugh. And there’s a part of me that recognizes that it’s a privilege to be able to pass as a vaguely ethnic European white person, but then if I roll with that it feels like I’m slapping my mother’s family in the face. I don’t even know, you guys. *throws self away*
I get you, because I had the same existential crisis when I applied to grad school. The only thing that made me feel even vaguely comfortable in this scenario is that it’s my dad who is Latino and my mom who is a Midwestern farm girl descended from generations of stern German immigrants, and I have my dad’s last name.
I would say that admissions people do care because, depending on the field you’re in, they will be utterly delighted to be able to count you as an underrepresented minority and it’ll make your department look more inclusive and such. (Which is its own sort of squickiness, but I feel like deciding to play by their rules and work it if you got it is central to the grad school experience…)
I found myself really connecting more consciously with the Hispanic side of my heritage as a result of deciding to check “yes” on that box, because I guess I had some need to “prove” to people that no, I really wasn’t kidding, this was who I was. I wish I had more opportunities to speak Spanish where I live now, though. Then my Spanish might not actually suck so much.
So basically, checking that box has indirectly led to me really leveling up in cooking black beans and rice.
I also really appreciated Jaya’s article, from a slightly different perspective. I’m not biracial, but I am “bicultural” (no sticky in-betweens for me) — that is, my mother is a white immigrant from the former Soviet Bloc and my father is American. I “pass” as “all-American” (i.e., European-origin white person) most of the time, and I certainly recognize that as a privilege, but with that “passing” comes the erasure of a really significant part of my identity. And I know this is totally whining, but I HATE HATE HATE it, and Jaya’s article was just…great.
Me too. I’m a quarter native, and I’m never sure if I “count” as biracial. Like, my dad is biracial, but me? Does it matter that I look white? And that most of my family on the reservation are dead now? When I was in high school the First Nations Counselor wanted to talk to all the kids listed as having First Nations heritage. When the teacher called me over the counselor immediately said “oh, no, sorry I must have the wrong person”. I did end up meeting with her after I figured out who she was, and she ended the meeting by chiding me for being “ashamed” of my heritage because I didn’t go to a lot of cultural gatherings. It took me a while to realize why my dad got so pissed off when I told him, but now I wonder if she ever realized the connection between those two things.
The books with Jenny as a character are my very favorite ones. Love love love Doris Lessing.
I need a time machine so I can be an old-timey misandrist. Get me a cigarette, sepia tones, a jaunty collar, and a knowing expression STAT.
THIS IS MY CALLING.
Just popping in to say thanks so much for linking to my Elon Musk piece. We are huge fans of The Toast at Aeon—this made our day.
When my then-boyfriend agreed to be Tinkerbell when I went as Peter Pan for Halloween, I knew he was The One.
That princess/hero piece hit me right in my adolescent heart. I’ve never questioned my gender identity except for some abstract philosophical thoughts, but I feel like I am SO BAD at being a girl. For other people, it just seems…easier? Neko Case’s “Man” is maybe the thing that comes closest to describing it.
In possibly related news, I am going to be Tina Belcher for Halloween. (Trying to convince my bf to be Summer Frankenstein.)
AMEN, me too, and yes to all you just said.
One Halloween I dressed as Germaine Greer when she was on UK Celebrity Big Brother. More specifically, I went as the time they had her dress as a german beer girl. Of course no one recognized me because (1) I promptly lost the copy of “The Female Eunuch” I was carrying in a futile attempt to convey the joke, (2) the party was in the US, where Celebrity Big Brother does not air, and (3) not many people in the US know who Germaine Greer is anyway. This led to everyone I encountered saying “Hey, St. Pauli girl” great costume!” to which I insistently replied “No, I’m Germaine Greer!” Cue host of confused looks.
That costume is a serious deep cut into Germaine Greer trivia and I LOVE YOU FOR IT
I went as a Doozer one year. (For the children of the 80’s.)
I went as a Doozer one year. (For the children of the 80's.)
Hello, fearless leader at number 16! http://www.buzzfeed.com/jenniferschaffer/things-a…
I love when my CSA share starts coming up brassicas, I LOVE IT. Brassicas are better than other vegetables, but in-season brassicas are better still.
Kale in tofu scrambles. Kale in squash soup. Kale in spicy black bean soup. Kale on pizza. Kale, just steamed with a little oil and vinegar.
Broccoli and brussels sprouts can come too. Maybe some standard-sized cabbages and bok choy. But kale has my heart.
I love when my CSA share starts coming up brassicas, I LOVE IT. Brassicas are better than other vegetables, but in-season brassicas are better still.
Kale in tofu scrambles. Kale in squash soup. Kale in spicy black bean soup. Kale on pizza. Kale, just steamed with a little oil and vinegar.
Broccoli and brussels sprouts can come too. Maybe some standard-sized cabbages and bok choy. But kale has my heart.
I am a horrible person, because I would find those grandmother voicemails intensely irritating.
(I do not have particularly nice grandmothers. My immediate family is estranged from one, and the rudeness of the other is a running joke among us. Possibly my feelings are warped when it comes to normal relationships.)
That costume is a serious deep cut into Germaine Greer trivia and I LOVE YOU FOR IT
I had a dude demand to know my daughter’s race in increasingly aggressive tones once. And while it was upsetting and weird for me, and my daughter handled it fine by entirely ignoring him, it was also disconcerting to realize that soon the that guys of the world will be aggressively demanding it of her (and my sons) rather than me. I’d really like to be able to put my body between them and that ugliness for a lot longer than I will be able to. Ironically, this attack came the day after I had a talk with my husband about how the kids are probably mostly perceived as white, and how should we handle the gap between how people see them and how they see and understand themselves. The next day: a reminder that not everyone will see them as white, and some of those people will be really freaked out by this.
It is also disconcerting to realize how much ugliness I’ve been shielded from for most of my life. Whiteness is a hell of a drug.
I had a dude demand to know my daughter's race in increasingly aggressive tones once. And while it was upsetting and weird for me, and my daughter handled it fine by entirely ignoring him, it was also disconcerting to realize that soon the that guys of the world will be aggressively demanding it of her (and my sons) rather than me. I'd really like to be able to put my body between them and that ugliness for a lot longer than I will be able to. Ironically, this attack came the day after I had a talk with my husband about how the kids are probably mostly perceived as white, and how should we handle the gap between how people see them and how they see and understand themselves. The next day: a reminder that not everyone will see them as white, and some of those people will be really freaked out by this.
It is also disconcerting to realize how much ugliness I've been shielded from for most of my life. Whiteness is a hell of a drug.