Fair housing and its discontents:
The new rules are meant to reinvigorate it. Under the initiative, HUD would provide local governments with information on “segregated living patterns” and “racially or ethnically concentrated areas of poverty.” To encourage action — whether new affordable housing in affluent areas and zoning rules to promote integration or better services in poor neighborhoods — the agency would offer grant money. “We know where you live matters,” said current HUD Secretary Julian Castro. “Children who live in good neighborhoods do much better than those who are stuck in poverty.”
Housing advocates are thrilled with these changes. But how will white Americans react to an active effort to integrate their neighborhoods? Past experience suggests that they’ll resist.
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Meredith Talusan on Fun Home and gender:
In the novel, both Alison and Bruce clearly express a gender nonconformity that only gains political and social recognition from others through their same-sex attractions. They do so in the context of an American legal and social system where homosexuality is the form of gender-nonconformity that has proven most difficult to repress, because physical and romantic desire is such a cornerstone of Western subject formation. Its resilience has helped homosexuality become the site of activism, albeit at the expense of the wider collection of gender-nonconforming identities that transgender and nonbinary people inhabit. Conflating sexuality and gender expression makes Americans uncomfortable, as the delicately negotiated terrain of sexual politics has tried to demarcate a line between the two. But this line was erected for specific purposes that benefit binary (or binary-presenting), cisgender gay people at the expense of transgender and nonbinary people. This is a line permitted by a heterosexist regime that has now come to frame homosexuality as merely a variation of itself, as evidenced by the jubilant and self-congratulatory reaction around the legalization of same-sex marriage in the U.S. As the poetry collective Darkmatter recently asserted, “in order for ‘homosexuality’ to become de-pathologized, gender nonconformity had to become re-pathologized. Gayness had to distinguish itself from trans: ‘We are not freaks like them.’ The modern gay subject only emerged in distinguishing him/herself from gender nonconformity.”
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Hi duckies! Our good friends Jaya and Matt, who are bringing you such fabulous #content this week and next, are in the process of working with their People on their Dad Magazine book, and if you are in the Philadelphia area, you may be able to help them out!
We need Philadelphia area dads (or dads who are willing to get to center city Philadelphia), roughly age 50 and up, for a half-day session on August 7th. Anyone who’s interested should send a headshot/photo, email address, phone number, and a brief intro/bio to [email protected]. Dads of color highly encouraged!
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I liked this interview with Mindy Kaling. I have also noticed that even though almost every living person eventually loses their mom, if I know someone has lost their mom, I’m there for them:
Is it easy to talk about your mother?
I talk about my mom with my father a lot. We take turns being the one that is sad. My dad will be reminiscing about her, and then I’ll have to be like, “OK dad, come on”. It’s good to have my father there because for every sad thing, he remembers a funny thing about mom too.
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Alexis Coe informs me that this is a really big deal for historians and archivists and librarians, so it is a big deal for us.
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This article gets it absolutely right (Jamelle Bouie in the link roundup TWICE today, go you Jamelle.) It almost doesn’t matter WHAT happened in that cell (no, it still matters, of course.) Bland is dead because of the police fucking up this traffic stop):
Which is all to say that—official account notwithstanding—we don’t know exactly how Bland died. But we do know how she got to jail to begin with. A minor traffic stop. And what’s clear from the evidence is that, while Bland’s ultimate death was a tragedy, her stop and arrest is a scandal, a testament to biased procedures and troubling problems in American policing. In thedashboard footage of her arrest released on Tuesday, Trooper Brian Encinia sees Bland—a black American woman from Chicago who had come to Texas to take a job at Prairie View A&M University—in her vehicle, speeds to catch up with her, and pulls her over after she fails to signal a lane change.
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The opening of Beowulf may be DIFFERENT than you THOUGHT:
In a new paper, Dr George Walkden argues that the use of the interrogative pronoun “hwæt” (rhymes with cat) means the first line is not a standalone command but informs the wider exclamatory nature of the sentence which was written by an unknown poet between 1,200 and 1,300 years ago.
According to the historical linguist, rather than reading: “Listen! We have heard of the might of the kings” the Old English of “Hwæt! We Gar-Dena in gear-dagum, þeod-cyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!” should instead be understood as: “How we have heard of the might of the kings.”
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The Atlantic has a list of 100 stories, some of which are not actually good, some of which are amazing, some of which are new to me (not these two, though, which are straight-up perfect)!
THE NEW YORKER / This Old Man by Roger Angell
“Decline and disaster impend, but my thoughts don’t linger there. It shouldn’t surprise me if at this time next week I’m surrounded by family, gathered on short notice… to help decide, after what’s happened, what’s to be done with me now. It must be this hovering knowledge, that two-ton safe swaying on a frayed rope just over my head, that makes everyone so glad to see me again.”
MEDIUM / On Kindness by Cord Jefferson
“…rather than the pain of her youth hobbling her such that more pain was all she had left to offer, she decided early in her life that her sorrows were evidence of too much heartache in the world as it was.”
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Why I Deleted Your Band’s Promo Email
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
Oh dannnnng it, I am in Philadelphia, but will not be a dad probably until the 14th or later!
Oh wait, I am also not 50 or up, nvm. Sorry friends, I can’t help in any way.
Email anyway!
Will you take twins?
(Serious question – my dad’s a twin, and my cousins and I are trying to convince them to take their picture together.)
I don’t see why not! Email Blair!
Get a cool beard and hold out for the Hipster Dad sequel my friend!
I feel like this is probably a legitimate reason to induce early labour.
I apologize in advance for the AVALANCHE of Philly-area Dad headshots I’m about to send Jaya and Matt. (I have a lot of family.)
I’m picturing studio glamour shots with lots of soft lighting and gazing into a distance.
Also, my husband will probably wonder why I’m taking pics of him this weekend.
My dad just moved to center city. I’m going to beg him to do the thing. He’s a libertarian! He’d be perfect for Dad Magazine.
I should prolly save this for open thread later, but I live in Lafayette, LA and have for basically my whole life and I am safe, but I am not okay.
I am so, so sorry. And so angry for your town.
Thank you. I am still stuck on “terribly sad.”
I think this is one of those scenarios in which BOTH the linkroundup AND the openthread is perfectly appropriate.
*internet hugs as desired in your direction*
I’ll take all the hugs you’ve got, thanks.
Sending lots of good thoughts to you and Lafayette.
Thinking of you and your town.
Sending love and hugs your way.
I am so so sad for you, and your friends and loved ones, and everyone else in your town. We’re here for whatever you need, in whatever thread you want to post in. *hugs*
[[all the hugs]] what a horrifying thing to have to deal with! Open Thread will be full of cats and books if you need distraction.
I am so sorry. No town, no people should have this happen to them.
Lafayette is a wonderful town, btw.
Thanks everyone for the support. I just found out that the wife of one of my middle/high school classmates was in the theater and is in ICU now. Please keep them in your thoughts/prayers/good vibes.
(((all the internet hugs)))
All prayers for your friend and your community.
Another Lafayette born and raised toastie over here. Jillian was an amazing artist. I danced to her band the Figs at Festival International just a few months ago. So many memories at that theater. I am angry and hurt this happened (again).
Oh flueudelivre87, I’m sorry. What a terrible thing to happen. ::hugs::
*Many internet hugs*
I am here for the hwæt discussion! I’ve got to go read the paper first, but I already have peeves with the article. Well, just one peeve: “Since then it has variously been translated as “What ho!” “Hear me!” “Attend!” “Indeed!” and more recently “So!” by Seamus Heaney in 2000.
This is despite the research suggesting that the Anglo Saxons made little use of the exclamation mark or indeed much other punctuation beyond the full stop or the occasional semi colon.” Which … yes a modern translation might make range of a whole world of punctuation that was not in the repetoire a thousand years ago. I do not see why that’s a problem, actually.
Also, as soon as I read that I said to myself, “To the corpus!” So that settles what I will be doing with my Friday.
Edit: Link to the paper on the author’s personal site: http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/georg…
Get ready to linguistics rrrrrrumble!
What?! I mean… sure, I believe that the Anglo-Saxons did not use exclamation marks much or at all. They also didn’t use the word “So!” or “Indeed!” That’s kind of the point of a translation.
Absolutely, although to be fair, now that I’m reading the paper itself, I think that perhaps what was meant to be called out was OE editions that stick in an exclamation to indicate that they’re on team interjection, rather than the ME translations themselves that then heed that advice.
Hmm, well, fair enough in that case. Anyway, I like Heaney’s “So,” but I could have sworn it was followed by a comma and not an exclamation point — if it’s “So!” I actually don’t like it as much.
I thought Heaney had followed it with a full stop.
Is this going to be like the fullstop/comma debate about the Declaration of Independence? Please say yes!
The Seamus Heaney translation is absolutely perfect with the exception of “So!”
It’s as if [unidentified Saxon skald] was pitching The Awl.
I feel like my pitch, or really just suggestion to the world, would be to replace all instances of hwæt with “heyyy ladies”.
can we…just….do this? Please?
I did not go the Ph.d route just so that I would have the freedom to say this.
Beowulf should properly be translated as follows:
Stop
Wait a minute.
Fill my cup put some liquor in it.
We have heard of the might of the kings
And now I’mma tell you about that shit.
Oh, ow, I choked on my food. You are amazing.
THIS IS THE BEST TRANSLATION.
All those other posers can suck it.
Thanks, you guys! It really just writes itself (still to the tune of Uptown Funk):
This Geat
That ice cold
Michelle Pfeiffer
That wine min
This one, for them hood Geats
Them good Geats
Straight masterpieces
Stylin’, while in it
Livin’ it up in the mead-hall
Got Chucks on with Saint Laur-helm
Got kiss myself I’m so pretty
I’m too hot (hot damn)
Called Beowulf bearn Ecgþeowes
I’m too hot (hot damn)
Make a dragon wanna retire man*
I’m too hot (hot damn)
Say my name you know who I am**
I’m too hot (hot damn)
Am I bad ’bout that money
Break it down
*had to leave to as is
**Beowulf is min nama
ilu
You are amazing and also can I please share this with every person I know?
Thanks! Please do!
Marry me you goddess
I also agree with this and if I were rich the first thing I would do is hire a bunch of guys who are really good at freestyle to adapt Beowulf in to a modern colloquial dialect, rather than pretending that the ancient Angles had some kind of super fancy dialect that they used only for their oral epic poems.
I mean, if you have the cash, please see my résumé above.
I do not have the cash, at the moment I can only employ freestyle skjalds on a volunteer basis.
For exposure, you mean.
Also, I think it’s pretty interesting the idea that you might use an exclamation point in the middle of a sentence as something other than a full stop — to me, the sentence “How! we have heard of the might of kings”, as something like “HOW we have heard of the might of kings” or I guess “Panic! At the Disco” makes perfect sense to me. In some ways it becomes a kind of poetic license to control the shape and sound of the line, rather than a specific semantic tool meant to convey a particular quantum of information.
Actually, this got me thinking of the Supremes Stop in the Name of Love or perhaps more acurately Stop! In the name of Love https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPBkiBbO4_4
I mean that “stop” might not be extra-clausal, but it sure does earn that exclamation mark in my book.
Another very good example! I think we tend to treat punctuation to much like computer instructions — especially, and I guess this is kind of a weird thing to say, but especially people who translate texts primarily from a literary as opposed to an oral standpoint. I have a background in classical theater, and for me it sometimes seems that I have a completely different idea about punctuation than everyone else I know does.
(Also, look, I admit that I use too many commas, I could chill out with the commas a little bit.)
Whatever. Commas for ever, commas for everybody! <3 commas
I am picturing you with a little sack full of commas, distributing them to the masses.
‘A comma for you, a comma for YOU, FOUR commas for YOU, greengrocer!’
Yeah, I read that and was like, “Well, it was a spoken story before it was written down, so I’m not sure what punctuation marks have to do with it at all?”
Heh heh, I love a good Beowulf translation argument, though. May this one rage for decades.
Wassail! Drink Ale!
Or, less douchily, hell yes, I’d drink to that!
Shame Edit: I’ve been watching a lot of Tales from the Green Valley… that’s really the only defense I can offer for the outburst above.
So have I!! Also The Edwardian Farm .
Yessss! I think the last time we talked about this, I hadn’t finished Edwardian Farm, but now I have seen them all and it was well worth every second.
What an odd criticism to make. They didn’t use commas either, so modern translators had better forget about using those! Just throw a punctus elevatus or two in to make it authentic.
Yes, I feel like it’s the Michael Pollan argument about eating what my Grandmother would recognize all over again: just because astronaut ice cream had not yet been invented when she was born, does not mean that I should be deprived of that particular culinary experience.
I just want to know who’s been translating it as “What ho!”
I also want to know whether that guy was handed a replica of the Sutton Hoo helmet to hold for the photo shoot, or if he showed up with it.
Yesterday’s “Hwæt” thread on Metafilter produced this gem of a comment:
“What ho, Hrothgar,” I said as I popped the old brightly-forged boar-shape down on the bench. “Why so harrowed?”
“Oh, Brightraven,” he signed. “You know I’ve been just desperately in love with Ecgtheow for weeks now. But what with the devouring of one’s hoard, folk clamoring for rings, and the general decay of time and all that, I’m in absolutely no position to pop the question.”
“Quite so,” I said, having no little acquaintance with dragonish aunts of my own.
“So I’ve had to rusticate here at Heorot Hall just to tide me over until the next allowance comes in. Doesn’t agree with me at all; in fact I’ve been trying to sell the place for years. And I found exactly the right folk too–complete cave-dwellers, you know, but obviously an enormous hoard somewhere. The thing is, the lady’s son is an absolute terror. Runs around like he owns the place, blood-besliming the benches and devouring the staff. I’ve lost three retainers this week alone. I say, Brightraven–can’t you lend me that champion of yours, just to get me out of this fix?”/blockquote>
That made me happy. <3
I didn’t so much LOL as snicker in a really undignified way: I feel like a schoolboy waiting for the marm to give me a good wrapping on the knuckles now, but it was certainly worth it.
dragonish aunts of my own
Comedic gold. What (ho) more could I ask? The blue bird of happiness sure has not thrown in the old towel today.
This is everything I wanted.
I was going to say, it must be Bertie Wooster.
I always took “hwæt” to mean “yo, check it”.
Maybe the skalds used “hwæt” the way the scruffy balladeer on Firefly sings “Jayne~~~! Jayne~~~!” at the beginning of “The Ballad of Jayne Cobb”, to get everybody’s attention in a noisy mead-hall.
“Hwæ~~~t! Hwæ~~~t!” [sings song]
They can have my beloved Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf when they best me in single combat. That is the best, most poetic and beautiful version of Beowulf ever. It is up there with the Lattimore Iliad in my book (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun; puns are the ur-Dad-joke).
I think it makes sense, but maybe awkwardly worded. Punctuation (or lack thereof) gives more flexibility to sentence structure, right? So without commas, we would write lists differently than, say, “I ate cheese, bread, and fruit.” We’d probably say “I ate cheese and bread and fruit” to indicate that there are three things in the list.
So, somebody translating a comma-less sentence “I ate cheese bread and fruit” could either view it as a list of three things, or, recognizing that commas are uncommon in the language, translate it as a list of TWO things, fruit and cheese-bread.
Similarly, a written work in a language with little recorded use of exclamation points would be unlikely to begin a sentence with an interjection like “What ho!” without making it explicit that it is an interjection.
Yes, but then if you don’t have written conventions for marking an interjection, like say exclamation marks or italics, how do you make it explicit?
And, why would you make something explicit that might be obvious to your audience? A lot of these poems got their start in the pits of oral tradition, which I kind of imagine like the farm leagues or arena football in this metaphor. Someone who’s transcibing something that everyone has already heard might take some short cuts or leave out some obvious things, just be cause they’d be obvious to them then, but not us now.
I suspect sarcasm will be something that future linguists will have to argue over. Like, if this author was being sarcastic, why didn’t they just use the winky emoji? Well, Zorga, they did not have winky emoji yet in 1919, but from context we have to asume that they would have used a winky in this telegram, were that an option then.
“We can tell Mallory is being sarcastic in this line, because she’s praising a man, and the rest of her body of work suggests she would never do that.”
May we all live to see this day.
Personally, I’m on the side of “Y’all! Y’all. Seriously, this is some real shit about kings, pay attention.”
This is the Orange is the New Black translation.
I would very much read that.
I got to say about Sandra Bland — and this, I know it’s irresponsible to speculate, and I am not trying to say, “this is what happened, this is the deal” &c., because especially now that the investigation has been bungled by a bunch of bumbling fucking rubes, no matter WHAT the truth is, it’s going to look completely suspicious — I don’t have a lot of problem believing that this was suicide.
From my personal experience, if I imagine myself, like I was about to start a new job that I was really excited about, that I was really happy about, then I get pulled over for essentially no reason, I get assaulted for basically doing nothing but saying that I’m annoyed, I get thrown in jail; (and Sandra Bland knows the score here, she knows that she’s black, she’s more likely to get charged with a crime (she’s in jail now after a scuffle, she can be charged with resisting arrest and assaulting an officer, she knows that in Ferguson the police beat a man and then charged him for getting blood on their uniforms — this is to say nothing about the possibility that maybe, heavens forfend, she had smoked pot, thus delegitimizing her entire existence in the eyes of the public); so, I think I’m likely to get charged with a serious offense, my friends don’t step up to post bail, not only am I likely to miss my first day of work, but I’m likely to lose my job completely; if I have to spend a month or two months or three months in jail I’m going to lose the apartment that I painstakingly researched, that I was excited for along with the new job, on top of all of that I get locked in a cell by myself with nothing to do and no one to talk to and nothing to think about except how literally every corner of my life is utterly and completely fucked for no god-damn reason…
That sudden reversal, combined with a sense of pervasive hopelessness that…no matter how good a spot I was in, that would eat at me and badly.
And the reason that I think this is important is not to forgive the police at all, who are at the very least guilty of destroying a life by negligence and casual cruelty, and it’s a crime that they’ll never be held accountable for it — the reason that I’m pointing this out is because we have such a hard time talking about systemic racism, and it’s because of how insidious it is. You don’t need Jim Crow laws, you don’t need a klansman in a white hood, you don’t need someone shouting racial epithets.
All you need is an asshole cop who’s just a little more likely to lose his temper at insolence from a black woman, a police force that’s a little more willing to believe his story and help cover for him, a justice system that’s a little bit more likely to convict and a little bit harder on a black woman — any of these things might be survivable on their own, but they’re never just on their own, they’re chained together and omnipresent and until you look at how all of these sometimes subtle, extra-legal differences add up together you can’t even see the way that our society is ordered to destroy black lives.
This is the important point about the possibility of suicide, I think, which is that Waller County, Texas didn’t need a conspiracy of racist murderers to destroy Sandra Bland’s entire life.
Agree to this. It’s upsetting me to see wild conspiracy theories (Buzzfeed was spreading one about her not being alive in her mugshot, which is just… insensitive on top of stupid) when the basics of the arrest and treatment are appalling enough — almost more appalling because of how insidious this is.
I would say that it IS more appalling. A conspiracy to cover for a racist murderer has a number of actors who are clearly behaving in illegal and immoral ways; it’s easy to say, “well, just fire those guys, send them to jail, problem solved.” I think that’s one of the reasons that makes it more appealing; the real evil here is bland and undramatic, and there’s never going to be any catharsis in destroying it.
Thank you so much for this, so well put and just ugh everything is horrible.
I agree, and in addition I think people neglect the degree to which humiliating another person is a very violent act with consequences for them, and Sandra Bland was clearly humiliated by the police officer in addition to being wrongly arrested. I have not seen anyone say this except, actually, in a backwards way the police department itself, which said Encinia did not follow their “courtesy and respect” policy. Disrespecting someone else, let alone actively humiliating them by yanking them out of their car, threatening them, and banging their head on the ground making them cry in front of you (as you can hear in the audio) are acts of major humiliation when done to an adult person. And humiliation is very very corrosive, especially for someone already in a fragile state of mind. I wish we had better language for the ways we do and don’t show each other respect in this country. (That plus the job and life consequences that may have followed could in combination have seriously contributed to her death).
I agree that this is a very important point, and it’s intimately associated with depression: depression is often a kind of anger that is turned inward into self-loathing; humiliation provokes anger, and when that anger cannot be directed outward (a situation specifically engineered by the cop in question: in response to Bland’s perfectly ordinary and harmless expressions of anger, seeks to stifle those expression by escalating the confrontation until she surrenders in submission) it turns inward, and that can be disastrous for someone with a history of depression.
Also, there’s depression, and then there’s depression combined with a lifetime of living in a racist system, being constantly assaulted by the awareness that you’re considered inconvenient at best, and dangerous at worst. One of those two things is bad enough; the confluence of those two things covers the spectrum from exhausting to horrifying to deadly.
As Harvey Fierstein said after Robin Williams’ death, “Please, people, do not fuck with depression. It’s merciless. All it wants is to get you in a room alone and kill you.”
Being black AND a woman AND struggling with mental health issues? Depression was just fucking WAITING to get her alone in that cell.
Yeah I feel like a lot of times regular people don’t really understand how depression works — how it’s never really gone, and at some level you’re always spending a certain amount of cognitive energy keeping it in check. “She didn’t seem suicidal” doesn’t really mean anything; it is always, always there.
I had the same thought. If it is a suicide that in no way lets anyone off the hook – they’re just as responsible for her death even so. Driving someone to suicide by doing undeniably awful, unjust things does not fall into some morally neat category where you can pat yourself on the back for it not being murder.
I had the same thought–she sees everything she’s worked for, everything she’s actually achieved, shot to pieces in a second, and she’s smart enough to know just how screwed she now is. What really gets me, though, is that this happened because she pulled over (without signaling) to let the asshole pass her in the first place–like you’re supposed to do when you see a cop or a fire truck speeding behind you, on the assumption that they’re on the way to address a real emergency.
Thank you. This has been nagging at me as this story has developed as well. In addition to the idea that, “Well she seemed so happy and hopeful! She couldn’t possibly have committed suicide!” is something that strikes me as a simplistic, pervasive, and problematic misconception in society in general. (Which is not to cast judgment on her family and friends who have made such statements, just a broader general observation.)
For anyone who needs this today:
http://sulagnamisra.com/post/124879502082/nightli…
Nightline gives Channing Tatum a Care Bear and Matt Bomer is incredibly excited about it (June 25, 2015)
This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.
Channing Tatum loves care bears? *I* love care bears!! We should be best friends.
Re: Sandra Bland – it feels wrong and icky to pay attention to conspiracy theories, but I’ve been seeing it ALL over tumblr, and… does anyone think there is any credibility to the rumors that she was already dead in her mugshot photo? Especially now that it’s been ruled a suicide, which seems so incredibly unlikely, something about this just seems off. The transcript of the arrest is just horrifying in its escalation, and that makes me more inclined to believe that she was dead long before her supposed suicide.
I don’t think there’s any credibility to this. For it to work, too many people would have to have been in on it, and the likelihood of a conspiracy being successful decreases exponentially the more people who are involved in it.
Yeah that conspiracy theory’s dead wrong. Bland made a phone call to a friend while in jail (she left a voice mail), which would have occurred after she was processed and, ergo, after her mug shot.
Thanks to both of you… I have been feeling a lot more emotional lately than I’m used to, and it’s been easier than normal to get swept away by strong emotions, so this was very helpful to re-focus on facts instead of feelings (even though it just feels AWFUL that so many people have been dying by or near the police lately).
Yeah, well, it doesn’t help at all that the police have gone about this investigation so badly that all kinds of conspiracy theories look pretty plausible.
The dangerous thing about spreading that conspiracy theory is that it will enable apologists for the police to suggest that every challenge to their lie is just another conspiracy theory. But it’s also telling that so many people would not be surprised in the least if police murdered a black woman and posed her body for a photograph. We know them to be capable of sinking to that level.
Jon Burge managed to torture black people for yeeaaars and nothing ever happened. So I dunno, man.
Another, and Another
What must it be like
to be the policeman’s natural prey?
To have your death explained away
as just another day at work?
Days of waiting for uniforms full of anger
demanding respect not earned
bearing the power of a state unconcerned
with a single woman’s life
Men of privilege, but little control
Men with quotas to fill
swaggering men with licenses to kill
hands on guns, to remind you
And the rest of us, where are we?
‘law-abiding’ civilians?
cowed, we would rather pay millions
than admit we were ever in the wrong
guuuuuyyysss a friend just posted this article by a Male Feminist who’s Really Worried that his Grill-Hogging means he’s a Victim Of The Patriarchy, and the thing is, I kinda wanted to punch him the entire time? The whole “ewww-I-kind-of-hate-my-own-jerkiness-but-boohoo-maybe-it’s-the-patriarchy-and-not-me-BEING-A-JERK-oh-well” thing?
Am I being a bad feminist, y’all, or is this dude really as insufferable as it seemed while reading?
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/20…
I didn’t get around to reading this because toastie twitter pointed me to this amazing response and it was 100x better than any original article could be.
on the other hand, I have totally had this conversation with my sweetie re: who gets to build a campfire whenever we go camping. Buuuut without invoking The Patriarchy or, like, publishing it in Slate.
Okay that was great.
Note the subtle Schoolhouse Rock reference at the end there.
“I hate how much I love to grill. It’s not that I’m inclined to vegetarianism”
Grilled veggies are actually the best. Charred scallions, yo. (I speak as an omnivore.)
Grilled bell peppers are freaking glorious!
Grilled CORN! And grilled fruit! I had a grilled peach salad at a restaurant the other day and my mind was blown. I mostly enjoy the apartment life but that grilled peach made me want a little yard or grill-safe deck so badly.
I had never before even conceived of something like grilled peach. The very thought of it fills me with wonder and awe, and not a bit of fear.
Grilled peach and ice cream. The power is yours.
Grilled peaches with vanilla ice cream are summer perfection
A broiler is just an upside-down grill!
I used have a little cast-iron pan with a ridged bottom that worked pretty well as a grill-type thing, although I didn’t get a chance to try peaches on it before the ex took it when he moved out (…MEN).
They are really quite easy, and relatively inexpensive, to purchase on your own. You don’t have to show proof of couplehood or anything.
I…know that? I’m not waiting around for a man to grill for me, it just hasn’t been my priority to replace this expensive kitchen item I rarely used, and I wanted to give an example of apartment-friendly grilling.
Oh, I didn’t mean it like that–just, never deprive yourself of delightful cooking implements! They can be had for relatively cheap.
Oh, gotcha! Unfortunately, one of the other things he took with him was his half of the rent payment, so it’s been a bit tight financially. But I’ve finally accepted that I need a roommate, and a new grill pan might just be one of my consolation prizes.
Yes, and then you will be well armed to give him the wallop he so richly deserves the next time you run into him.
HELP requested re: grilling pans
I think we have one somewhere in the house, but it’s been a while since I saw it, so it may have moved to Fort Lauderdale with my twin stepsister. The thing is, though, when we definitely did have it, I tried to use it a couple times, but it didn’t seem to be any different from a regular iron pan. Is there a trick to make it all grill-like? Is our glass-top stove as horrible and crappy as I’ve always said it is, and the grill pan just doesn’t work as well with it?
I just found out that you can grill pierogies and I’m dying to try it. Grilled pierogies with grilled asparagus and grilled chicken for dinner but it’s been storming nonstop all week at cooking time, so there’s no chance of pulling out the actual grill (also it’s a charcoal bucket type, which I hate using because it’s terrifying, unlike my dad’s gas grill that doesn’t wobble).
I don’t know if the glass top has anything to do with it – mine’s a pretty crappy coil stove, so I can’t confirm either way. I think your best chance is to get it really hot (which I hesitate to recommend because it always freaks me out, but that’s literally what stoves & pans are designed to do, so it’s probably fine and I’m just being paranoid).
Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Now all I can think about is grilled sweet corn and I don’t have any AT THIS VERY MINUTE and everything is terrible.
Grilled garlic scapes are wonderful!
Oh, I have never tried this and now I want it so, so much.
I made it like three or four paragraphs in before my eyes started to roll involuntarily, and I had to stop reading so my eyeballs wouldn’t pop right out of my face.
But this dude sucks, both in general and as a “feminist.”
“No longer mere Ph.D. students, we have become bros.”
no you were already a bro
it’s okay though, just please get over yourself without making me handle your Feelings
Honestly I would love to read a good article about the masculinity of grilling as compared to other kinds of cooking but he was just not very interesting.
yeah that was my main problem, it wasn’t “hmm why is this kind of cooking perceived as more masculine?” you’re right, it was all about his Feeeelliinnggss and that weird, “maybe if I write an article about my conflicted feelings people will forgive me for any douchiness because I’m so Self-Aware,”
also he never changed at the end of the article? Just all “oh well, hopefully I’m not as much of a jerk as I thought while clinging onto these tongs.”
He just doesn’t really acknowledge why he might be having these feelings? Like, lots of women feel conflicted about the kitchen and the domestic sphere, because historically it’s been used (and is being used for many) to oppress and limit. For me, I’ve thought about whether I like cooking because I want to, or because I want to earn the approval/acceptance of others.
But what are the societal downsides of a man getting into grilling? “Haha you’re being such a man!” I understand it might be galling if you’re sincere about it and enjoy cooking overall, but men also are adulated for dominance of professional kitchens, so … it’s very strange he just skims over all of this.
Or like, he could just admit that he enjoy doing masculine coded things sometimes? Because that’s okay!
FEMINISM DOESN’T REQUIRE YOU TO STOP GRILLING BUT IT WOULD LIKE YOU TO WRITE FEWER SELF-INDULGENT THINKPIECES
^CAN WE GET THAT ON A T-SHIRT PLZ
I continue to contemplate opening a redbubble with Toastie comment-based products. But how would the revenue-sharing work?
Could we send it back to the Toast and call it an offset for using Adblock for a month or something if you buy a certain number of items?
*STANDING OVATION*
Oh god, this is going to lead to a recursive series of self-indulgent thinkpieces about self-indulgent thinkpieces on Slate, isn’t it?
Isn’t that all that Slate is now?
And, like, if you don’t want to crowd women out of pictures at barbecues, just stop doing that! Maybe even subtly point out that other people are doing it! “Ok, hold on, Katrina, you’re almost out of the frame. Everybody smoosh together so we’re all in the picture!” Nobody cares about your angst, bro.
I was a little frustrated because there was a good outline of some of the coding around grilling (like public versus private culinary spheres being generally coded as masculine and feminine, respectively).
Also, the part briefly mentioning “in other parts of the world, women tend the grill” would have been much more interesting. Tell me more!
Yes! There were some good bits in there but he did not go in depth enough.
OH GOD I saw that headline a few days ago and thought “nah”, and then had a creepy feeling just now and clicked through and dude, I KNOW THAT DUDE, the dude who wrote that. He’s an okay guy, actually. I’m guessing this article is the freelancer’s “dog-days-of-summer-what-the-hell-am-I-gonna-write-oh-I-know-something-fluffy” article, which every writer ever has resorted to at some point.
That said, I’m not reading past the byline, ’cause his “problem” is not relevant to my interests.
Lol also that suggested Slate article – “Do Lesbian Chefs Have a Special Way of Cooking?”
I mean obviously. Everything a lesbian chef cooks is done while scissoring with another lesbian chef.
Found this this morning: http://www.askamanager.org/2015/07/letting-new-pa…
As the lovely commenters have already pointed out, the best way to make your workplace family-friendly is to provide decent m/paternity leave, not force babies on the rest of the workforce. OP tried to defend the policy but people are bringing up too many good points.
From the Forbes article linked to in the comments:
In our experience, having the baby in the office … gives new parents a built-in support system of coworkers, willing to scoop up a baby if mom or dad needs to jump into a meeting.
Ha ha ha haaaaaaaa nope.
What!? NO
That’s why we need quality daycare. Babies in offices are too distracting
Also ugh offices are boring and depressing places. Why defend putting a poor baby in there instead of advocating for a nice, developmentally appropriate care situation?
Once during my maternity leave I got special permission to come to a meeting of my small, friendly, baby-loving childcare nonprofit. Before the meeting even started my two-month-old managed to poop so hard it shot out of the leg of his diaper and oneise and landed all over my dress (the very dress I am wearing as I write!). I had to leave immediately and change; I was a biohazard. Imagine if that had happened to one of my allegedly “willing” coworkers while I was elsewhere?
At my previous job, my manager would often bring her baby in to work if she just needed to come in for a short time, because it was a small company and she basically couldn’t afford to pay herself maternity leave. Both she and her baby were super well behaved, and I am generally pro-baby and baby-friendly, but it was SUPER disruptive. And she was a baby who liked to sleep! I can’t imagine it with a baby who was more full on, which many babies are. I like holding and watching babies just fine, and I was perfectly willing to help out because, supporting women in difficult situations, etc, but it was NOT an ideal situation and definitely meant everyone in the office got less done on those days. Not. Ideal.
Making everybody in the office deal with the babies is maybe a good way to make the point that m/paternity leave is everybody’s problem, though…
Unless they put all the crying babies inside the CEO’s walled, doored corner office it’s not gonna make that point to the people who matter.
Nobody puts baby in a corner (office)!
CEO walks in the next morning, babies have taken over the company, mandatory milk & nap breaks once an hour is now company policy
I, for one, welcome our new Infant Overlords. I am totally here for mandatory milk & nap breaks.
+1 to nap and milk breaks
There was an article linked in comments that said it’s a great idea because your coworkers would be willing and able to “scoop up” your precious newborn and take care of them when they got fussy! I cannot even detail the numbers of ways that is a BAD THING TO SAY AND BELIEVE AND EXPECT AHHHHHH!
I KNOW! And as the very apt commenters over at AAM pointed out, there is probably going to be a gender disparity in who is expected to “scoop up” the children. Bad for both women (who can hate kids and not be ogres!) and men (who can love kids and not be creeps!)
Sigh. And always, there’s that comment saying “That’s not true! All the men line up first at my office to coo at babies!”
Seriously, I’ve been in a few situations now where my fertility was discussed and it was *very* gendered, and this is only the beginning (I’m turning 30 next month) and it’s already The Worst. It’s always about me as a body, and never about me as a person.
Like, if I really wanted to talk about babies with you *all the time* and kept mentioning how I really want a baby, I’d get why you’d think I want babies. But if I don’t, you’re just looking at me as a walking womb. I talk about a lot of things but none of them seem to stick the way the one time I called a baby “cute” does. Weird, huh.
And I get irritated at people who express surprise men talk about fathering socially, especially when they’re *fathers.* Of course they talk about their babies. Being a dad is a huge part of their lives now. Totally, good for them, but we never say “good for moms for talking about mothering!” It’s condescending towards both moms and dads.
I love telling parents “you’re such a good mom/dad/parent” but always based on what they’re doing and not what gender they are.
Not to mention the idea that people would be okay leaving their child in the care of their coworkers!
“When they get fussy” is exactly the time I am least interested in scooping up other people’s babies. I want to hold your baby when it is being adorable and give it back to you when it cries. Sorrynotsorry.
And that’s the best thing about other people’s babies!
Once while I was working in retail, a woman came in with her baby in a carrier and just left it on the counter at the front while she did her shopping. And this wasn’t a huge store or anything, but it was definitely big enough that we couldn’t see her from the front (and therefore she couldn’t see the baby) for most of the time she was shopping. And she didn’t even say anything to us! It was just so bizarre, and I was really uncomfortable with the responsibility she was putting on us, and I would be so pissed at any coworker who tried that.
(Is there a reason people use m/paternity leave instead of just parental leave, which seems much less awkward and, happily, more inclusive as well?)
Well, in Canada maternity and parental leave are technically different: maternity leave is only available to the biological mother and is considered a short-term medical leave to allow her to deal with the medical complications of carrying a kid, while parental leave is available to any parents caring for the kid. That said, I’ve still heard people refer to “paternity leave” which is not actually a thing here.
Thanks for the explanation!
. . . except in Quebec, which has all three. (Amusingly, a woman whose wife gave birth has the normal access to paternity benefits, which are exclusive to “spouse of the woman who gave birth”.)
Ditto in the UK – partners of women who gave birth get paternity leave, regardless of their gender. Parental leave is a separate thing.
Here is an explanation of all four types of leave (mat, pat, parental, adoption), and how they play out in Quebec:
http://www.rqap.gouv.qc.ca/travailleur_salarie/ty…
(It isn’t mentioned here, but the father is also entitled to 5 days off, 2 paid/3 unpaid.)
I’m still reading the comments, but OP seems super set on this policy, even when people mention vaccines etc. I’m hoping as I scroll there’s a realisation moment!
Also out of all the other options: flexi-time, parental leave, day care partnerships nearby or on-site etc., I don’t know why the babies in the office idea still appeals – it sounds like a logistical nightmare!
Also OP has added in the comments that:
” Model policies written on the issue state that if after taking the infant to a separate area designated for such, the infant cannot be calmed within a half hour, the employee must take the infant home and use personal/sick/unpaid time to do so.”
Which is just riddled with issues.
hahaha i’m sure SO many offices have safe, appealing baby-calming rooms and certainly wouldn’t just be like “what, we put a chair in the ladies’ room.”
WHAT omg no. That is like, the opposite of family-friendly, good freaking god.
How on earth can the OP still think that babies in the office are a better solution than any of the other alternatives that were mentioned? The lengths some companies will go to in order to avoid offering real benefits is just astounding.
Oh man the vaccine conversation. She is insistent that most adults must be up to date on their vaccines, and going on about probabilities. It’s like she’s never heard of this massive anti-vax movement going on right now (not to mention all the other issues brought up).
Oh my god the OP in the comments just seals this entire thing for me in consistently refusing to acknowledge the other commenters LEGITIMATE concerns about the policy & just saying, “Well dozens of other companies have enacted this policy & it appears to be effective on a completely superficial level so!!”
I read it the first day when there were about 800 comments within a few hours, essentially all saying HELL TO THE NO. The OP seems to have a real cognitive blind spot about parental leave, among so many other things – she mentioned that she comes “from the perspective that extended maternity/paternity leave is highly unrealistic. I couldn’t just leave my job for a year and expect that it would go unfilled”. I find that perspective itself pretty unrealistic given that the rest of the world has established extended parental leave that works just fine,
Because the job doesn’t go unfilled! We hire someone on contract (or a secondment and then their position is filled with a contract or secondment -eventually summertime gets hired on contract for a year.)
aaah hey I’m too late to edit my previous comment but HUGE TRIGGER WARNING for discussion of infertility/miscarriage in the comments!! Most commenters are handling it well but there’s one person being wildly insensitive about it.
Hadn’t scrolled all the way through when I originally posted, hoping no one was caught off guard.
Funny that she brings up how non-disruptive dogs are in dog-friendly workplaces, because I’ve worked in a lot of dog friendly workplaces and have seen a lot of the issues raised in that thread be a problem. Especially at one place where somehow one of the young, female support staff members got drafted as a dog sitter when people were going to outside meetings and she told me she found it incredibly disruptive and frustrating. But no, that would never happen with babies!
Also: if you need to go to a meeting and have a dog, you can put your dog in the car or tied up in the shade outside with some water for an hour and the dog will be fine. If you did that with a baby, you’d be arrested, so you’re more likely to pressure a coworker (peer or worse, underling) into taking care of baby while you work.
Among, like, 1,000 other reasons that pet-care and childcare are not at all comparable.
I take my tiny dog to work, and if I have a meeting, she goes in her crate, covered with a blanket, in the file room, which is almost never visited.
I wouldn’t leave my dog in the car. Unless the weather’s perfect, that’s an iffy piece of advice. But in a crate or if there’s a safe outside space and it’s not too hot, sure.
Nooooo that is my nightmare! I am a Monster who Doesn’t Like Babies, I can barely handle it when someone has their baby in the office for 20 minutes to visit and takes it out as soon as it cries. I mean, I get that that’s MY issue, cause it’s just a little bit of time and other people enjoy it, but it seriously kind of ruins my whole day? SORRY I DON’T LIKE BABIES. No, not even yours which is the cutest. No, not ones I am related to. Not any babies.
It is VERY WEIRD being the only person in the office who is not thriiiilled to see a baby. I feel hella awkward. The thought of having to put up with that all day every day for months at a time is just….I would quit. 100%, I would quit my job that I like with no backup just to escape that incredibly awkward situation.
I found that piece about Fun Home kind of upsetting you guys. I get that the concept of homosexuality being a manifestation of cross-gender identification is very important to the author and something that she feels to be true about herself, but she seems to be extrapolating from that that sexual identity and gender identity are part of the same thing for everybody. It’s frustrating because I want to agree with her because her end goal of acceptance of all forms of gender identity and expression is 100% great but her approach is to invalidate the experiences and identities of any number of queer people for whom sexual desire and gender identity are completely unrelated. The entire premise is so flawed! I could go on and on about this but I’m going to stop myself now and watch some cute animal videos or something.
I am totally with you! If you don’t want to be drawn back into this conversation, I totally understand, please allow me to contribute this cat video instead: http://toushindai.tumblr.com/post/123028428370/no…
As for my own experience, I’m bisexual and cisgender, and one of my first experiences of actually knowing that I’m cisgender as opposed to the idea of “cis by default” (which is totally legit for some people!) is when I read an article about the idea that non-straight people got like, hormone baths in the womb at a pace that made them more like the “opposite” gender, that might be a misunderstanding on my part bc I’m not a science person but it really bothered me because I’m not bi because I’m more masculine, I’m bi because I’m me. And as I was coming out to myself I tried to do the whole masculine look and it just… it feels like a costume. Her premise is definitely flawed. It’s frustrating.
My experience with my sexuality and gender identity is absolutely in line with yours, and it frustrated me to no end. I read about the same concept, including the finger length thing that relates to in utero hormone exposure. I spent years being like, “oh well if I’m bi, that must mean I’m more masculine/genderqueer/something else that isn’t cisgender”, so I shied away from femininity. I thought I was supposed to be more masculine/androgynous due to all the testosterone I got in utero that allegedly made me queer???
It took me until like a year or two ago to figure out they weren’t inseparably linked, and the argument presented in that article is just doing my head in because as it turns out, gender identity and sexual orientation are in fact separate things for me. It is indeed frustrating.
Thank you, you put that into words much more eloquently than I could have. Like, yes, trans/genderqueer/third gender rights need a much larger place in the national conversation. There’s no doubt about that. But to say that they apply to every queer person ever just confuses the issue (and seems kind of old-fashioned almost; like the “lesbians just want to be men and gays just want to be women, so they’re confused” idea).
This especially bothers me because I’m a bisexual woman and I never feel “gay enough” to fit in lesbian circles because I’m pretty feminine. Just….the piece has valid ideas, but I don’t think the author laid them out very well.
Can I ask where your username comes from?
Haha, it’s from a Tamora Pierce book (The Will of the Empress). Daja turns out to be a lesbian, and I was going of the “friend of Dorothy” expression.
I WAS RIGHT
I love those books!!
Wait, there’s was a standalone book about Daja in which we find out she’s a lesbian? How did I not know this? Thank you for improving my Friday (and the future time when I get round to tracking it down and reading it.)
It’s not stand-alone; it’s about the whole Circle of Magic group. There’s a hot second where Daja mentions that this girl she knows is “more than a friend.” Not much, but it blew my high school mind….
In later books, she has an actual relationship story! The Will of the Empress. A book that actually I did not like much, for completely unrelated reasons–but the relationship is there.
Commenting because I found myself kind of lost by this, like “I think I need to print it out and get a highlighter and a pen lost”.
I also agree that her end goal of acceptance of all forms of gender identity and expression is 100% great but I’m kind of confused about how she wanted us to get there?
So really I’m saying: Hey I am confused, and a big fan of Alison/Fun Home (possibly an influence on my reaction) and my first inclination is to respectfully disagree with this piece but I am not sure that I understand it sufficiently to disagree, anyone wanna help me out?
I think a big part of the argument, which has some validity to it, is that the strides that have been made in gay rights have been based on framing homosexuality as a mirror to heterosexuality. Like, gay men and women are cisgender and want to live the same lives as “normal” straight people (marriage, children, etc), with the one small difference being same-sex attraction. But where she loses is me is where she seems to suggest that it’s not possible to be cisgender and gay, that being gay immediately puts you somewhere in the middle of the gender identity spectrum. I have problems with viewing gender identity as a spectrum in the first place because that reinforces the binary and I really have a problem with placing sexual orientation as something that affects one’s standing within gender identity. Like somehow the two spectrums are sliding scales wherein the farther one slides toward the gay side, the farther they slide away from their assigned gender.
What’s so frustrating about the article is that there are some really valid points about how the discussion of trans/non-binary identities get sidelined by the emphasis on (for lack of a better term) white bread gayness, but I disagree so strenuously with the majority of her beliefs, both on an intellectual level and based on my own experience of being a non-binary person who identified as a cis-by-default for a long time because of the very idea that my sexual orientation negated my feeling of genderqueerness.
I want to clarify that the gay rights stuff is by no means a bad thing in my eyes. It’s more of a kind of unfortunately necessary foot-in-the-door tactic. Step one on a path to showering mainstream society with every flavor of gay and queer stuff that we can find. We don’t want to spook all the terrified white grandmas right away if we can ease them into it bit by bit!
Also I don’t want to suggest that the link between gender identity and sexual orientation doesn’t exist for some people. I’m sure that it is absolutely true for the author and I’m glad that she’s able to see something of herself in Fun Home. It’s just not the case for everybody and I think it’s generally a bad idea to use your own experience and identity to make sweeping generalizations about something as complicated as gender.
Thank you. Yeah I think my confusion kind of came from a different place because I am not cis, and though I realize that what she was saying seems to leave cis people out and doesn’t seem true for them, I was really wondering about what she is saying to butch ladies. I am very certainly butch and dude looking and I felt like she was saying (to Alison/ or people like me) that we are really a “man on the inside” or something and for me that isn’t true.
I dunno, it is totally possible that I am reading that wrong.
I think the underlying issue is her argument actually relies on gender conformity (to sexual orientation) to work. For gay identity to necessitate expression of trans identity, it must be impossible to people of the same gender category to be attracted to each other. The heterosexist understanding that only men are attracted to women, and only women are attracted to men, must be in place.
If this is not true, there is no requirement for a gay person to express a trans identity, for they can legitimately identify with the gender they were assigned while also being attracted to a person who identifies with the same assigned gender category. I think part of the reason the argument feels so strange is that it relies on viewing gender as set dichotomy (man=attracted to women, women=attracted to man, so gay man= female gender and gay woman=male gender), which is supposed to be the everything the argument is trying to advocate against.
I’m kind of struggling with it myself. I think I could have used more of a close-reading approach, though that’s a lot easier for a writer to do with a book than a stage show. The only part of the musical I’m really familiar with is “Ring of Keys,” which is quoted approvingly in the article as a joyful expression of gender nonconformity and which, as the author points out, is the standout song of the show, the one that got performed at the Tonys and everything. After reading the article I’m still not clear what, specifically, the rest of the show does with gender nonconformity. There’s this sentence toward the end: “If there’s one thing that Alison learns from her father Bruce’s suicide, it is that it’s best to suppress her desire to comprehensively identify as a man if she wants to have women as objects of desire and express masculine traits within acceptable social parameters.” And I’m just…not sure that’s true. It’s not a thought that I got from the book. And the book seems at odds with, or at least not entirely at one with, the idea that homosexuality gets to be socially accepted and normal if it’s modeled on heterosexuality.
You’re not alone! I also found it super confusing, to the point where I couldn’t finish it, and I wasn’t sure if that was just because as a cis hetero woman I don’t experience these kinds of pressures in the same way? I don’t generally think that “I am a woman” and “I am sexually attracted to men” are really linked. Certainly they are culturally and socially linked, but I don’t feel like for me, personally, these two things are inseparable. I would love for the world to be more accepting of gender nonconformity and sexual and gender identities of all kinds, but this feels contrary to how I think of my own identity, and to how many of my friends speak of their identities to me.
Yeah I had a mixed reaction to it, too. I found discussion of inversion historically shallow… although Bechdel plays with it using Proust, it has a much more complex history. The author criticizes “a gay rights movement that sacrificed the rights of people who did wish to make a more comprehensive cross-gender identification” but misses, I think, the pain inflicted by *necessarily* conflating gender nonconformity with homosexuality. (See, for example, “The Well of Loneliness”!)
I also disagree with the author’s reading of Bechdel’s description of herself as an “unusual woman,” which the author says is “centered on her desire for other women.” But it seems to me equally or more likely that she’s talking precisely about her gender nonconformity here–she doesn’t say anything about a desire for other women, just her experience of being an “unusual woman.”
I mean, overall, I love that people are talking about gender and sexuality and Fun Home, and are pushing us all to think about how to not trap ourselves again in painful little boxes of acceptable expression. But I found this essay overly invested the tired turf battles between trans & butch, and between gender & sexuality more broadly.
Totally. And I’m tired of having to ask where the bi folks are, but how can you even try to square this outdated linking of gender and sexuality with the existence of bi, pan, and ace people?
I just read the sentence about the “self-congratulatory” response to the Supreme Court decision, and my eyebrows went aaaaaaaaall the way up.
See, I get the idea of framing homosexuality as a version of gender nonconformity. Not in order to conflate sexuality with gender identity (which I agree the author does do, later on), but to approach the idea which she articulates later, that “homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny are all shades of the same violent drive”. And this part- “The desires of boys and girls are often policed even before they express overt sexuality, and the policing is usually tied to behaving in ways that are atypical of their gender” – I think ties into that argument really well. I know a kid whose favorite color when he was.. 4? 5? was purple, and his favorite music growing up was Kelly Clarkson, and he started taking dance classes at 8 or 9. This really, really, REALLY means nothing about him. And yet it still got policed (or more accurately, negotiated) to hell and back because of what it MIGHT mean, re: his sexuality.
I think when I started reading the article, I was reading “gender nonconformity” as a separate idea than “gender identity”, which is something that the article really confuses and loses the threads of. But if we can think of something as trivial as an 8 year old boy liking Kelly Clarkson as gender nonconformity, I’m okay with the idea that my liking other women might also be a form of gender nonconformity, because it’s something women aren’t “supposed” to do. But to me, that doesn’t mean my gender identity is or has ever been in question, and to claim otherwise would honestly feel like I was trying to appropriate trans ppl’s oppression for my own.
Anyways, what I really did have a problem with was the assertion that the IRL Allison Bechdel should or would identify as some form of trans instead of “butch lesbian” or “unusual woman”, if society were truly liberated? or if she hadn’t somehow ~suppressed that part of herself?? It’s one thing to posit about the fictional Allison, who a trans person might relate to & find parts of their story told through. But I’m suuuper uncomfortable for anyone to be making that call for someone else in their actual life, even if they hinted towards it in an interview once.
yes to this!
on the one hand, cis, gender nonconforming people and trans people have something very significant in common. both groups are policed/punished by the outside world for not fulfilling the roles prescribed to the genders they were assigned at birth.
on the other hand, the internal experiences of gender-nonconforming cis people and trans people seem pretty different.
I mean, obviously I don’t know the internal experiences of anyone except myself, but I think that’s what Bechdel was getting at in the piece quoted in the article. For her, identifying as butch is a way to expand what it means to be a woman (hence the “unusual woman” quote) whereas to be trans would be to position herself as an identity separate from “woman.”
the bigoted rest of the world might not get that there’s a difference, but seriously, just trust that you do not understand the identity of a given person better than that actual person does. each person is an expert in hir own lived experience and is the only one inside hir own head.
Thank you for stating that so well! I don’t at all want to erase her experiences as a trans person, especially since I am a cis lady, but it just felt…off to me. I agree with everyone below that I think there are some good ideas there that got messed up by being stated as General Facts About Life and not specific facts about ONE PERSON’s life. I’m glad I wasn’t the only one a bit nonplussed by it.
I was also bothered by it! I think the big thing about “I’m not claiming that all trans people are gay, but rather that all gay people fall within a gender-nonconforming space whose borders are demarcated by ‘transgender’ in the current Western model” is off to me from my personal position as a pan and genderqueer person. I do feel that my sexuality is inconsistent with the most traditional idea of the gender role I was assigned at birth (silly heteronormativity!), but I don’t feel that it puts me within the trans umbrella–maybe by some people, but not by me. My genderqueerness is what makes me, erm, genderqueer. The author didn’t make any acknowledgement that not everyone’s experience and truth of self is the same, and it threw the whole thing off for me! Also: gender identity and gender expression and gender role are different things, but were not treated as such. I didn’t think it was -awful-, or ill-intentioned, but I didn’t like it.
I also found it kind of prescriptive that the author says Bechdel doesn’t articulate her own experience correctly in her own memoir! The author also conflates the book and the musical and Bechdel’s actual experience, which are three different ways to tell the story. And re the musical, I think an important thing to note is the scene where Small Allison doesn’t want to wear a dress to a birthday party and Bruce scares her by telling her that she’ll be the only one and everyone will judge (projecting his own experience, clearly). He says, a challenge, “but by all means, change.” Alison sings “maybe not right now…” which is a reprise of her mom’s refrain of denial about Brice’s affair ( also fear-based). I thought that was a brilliant scene, in which Bruce basically warns her that being herself in a gender nonconforming way will make her an outcast, because that’s how it was for him, which is his big tragedy and a major theme of the play. So I don’t really agree that the musical whitewashed the issue! It differs from the book in a lot of ways but I thought it was very smart about finding sections of the book best suited for the stage and conveying the emotions of it in a manner that works for the form. I seriously love the musical and it made me think a lot about gender and sexuality and the relationship between them, so I wish to defend its honor!
Meredith here. Sorry to be so late to this lively discussion; I was abroad and didn’t find it until now. I have no intention either of dictating how a person should perceive their identity, whether Alison Bechdel’s or anyone else’s, nor do I intend to discuss gender according to the strict parameters of my own identity. It’s the reason why I explicitly compared the Wetern gender / sexuality divide both to a prior model of inversion as well as the Philippine model of gender interiority, and talked about the fact that until very recently with the introduction of Western-style trans in a Philippine context, gay people there describe themselves as being “women inside,” and there’s an extensive body of literature that discusses this, as well as an entire indigenous history of third-gender identification that isn’t just confined to the Philippines, but to large parts of South and Southeast Asia, among Native Americans, and I’m sure other parts of the world as well.
So the goal of the article is not to “dictate” or “erase” identity but rather to ask readers to rethink their assumptions of how gender and sexuality are conceived as divided in a Western context, and what the social and historical undperpinnings of that are. This is an important part of my and other people’s jobs as critics, and is something that we’re constantly doing, whether it’s me asking people to question their visceral ideas of gender or sexuality, or others asking why many people feel more sympathy for a lion than a black person. The goal is not to erase another person’s conception of who they are or what their reaction should be, but to challenge them to examine that reaction, the ways in which they’re socially conditioned, and how a different model can be more productive in specific ways. I’m not simply talking about how people identify in the abstract, but how the set of identifications that are available right now are literally oppressing trans and gender-nonconforming people in ways that they don’t LGB people, both socially and legally. So I would ask people, as they examine their intuitive notions of how their sexuality interacts with their gender, to also ask themselves why people in other parts of the world think of that relationship so differently, if it’s simply a matter of individual conception of identity. I would also challenge people to examine whether that separation has anything to do with the differential social and legal benefits of being gay/bi/lesbian rather than trans/nonbinary.
What I don’t think many of the replies here account for is that one’s own conception of one’s identity is socially determined, so of course people who grow up in a Western context (as I assume most Toast readers have) are much more likely to conceive of gender as largely separate from sexuality, because that’s the specific ideology of this society. People living outside of the economically and socially-privileged West, and I know this firsthand because I’ve just gotten back from a month in the Philippines, have to contend with Western models because they’re dominant and filter through media constantly, so the article is my small attempt in asking readers to question and challenge their assumptions, just as non-Western people constantly have to do when they compare their local lived experience with media messages all around them.
WHAT’S A GOOD WAY TO CONVINCE A DAD WHO WOULD BE REALLY CONFUSED ABOUT DAD MAGAZINE TO BE IN DAD MAGAZINE????
Tell him it is a photoshoot for Lawncare Weekly.
intensedebate: ‘sorry, you’ve already voted on that comment’
me: click click click click
This comment is the sort of comment I always want to make, but can never quite word properly, quickly enough.
In other words, thank you for continuing to be my IntenseDebate inspiration.
I’m not crying at my desk over that Cord Jefferson piece (which I decided to reread for some reason even though I also cried the last time I read it), you are.
“Most white Americans today are racial egalitarians.”
Aw, that’s sweet of you to say.
OT: Good riddance; I never liked Hulk Hogan anyway!
Let’s set him on fire.
We could do that, but I think not getting attention would hurt him worse than being on actual fire!
Reasonable. Adult. Plan “who?” is go.
The “Why I Deleted Your Promo Email” tumblr: there are some pretty great gems there showcasing music pretentiousness, but I have to say I’m genuinely interested in listening to this:
“I think I was like a 90-year-old man who worked on trains, because some of my earliest songs sound like that.”
I read “tattoo-clad, indie-folk troubador” and I was like NOOOOOOOOO.
Text based adventure game from Stephen Colbert. Absolutely hilarious in every way.
http://colbertlateshow.com/escape-from-the-man-si…
Yup. Just played, can confirm, will cause awkward office giggling.
Omg, thank you so much!
Losing Sparta on the Atlantic list has re-triggered my sleeping Marxist rage.
ROGER ANGELL
Yeah, I’d tap that. (Hey, he brought it up! Not me!)
How is anyone such a beautiful writer.