When Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In, came out I didn’t have much to say. I just scribbled a short comment on my personal blog about the fact that capitalist feminism is being presented as “the neutral” and everything else outside this paradigm needs to be qualified. Instead of writing something myself (which I couldn’t do as I was dealing with some pressing stuff), I recommended people read two pieces that more or less articulated what I would have said, had I written about the book (in fairness, my writing is a lot more fragmented and less articulate so read this statement as: what I would have said, had I been as articulate as these two women). Namely, I thought that both Sarah Jaffe at Dissent and Melissa Gira Grant at The Washington Post were expressing many of my ideas around Sandberg’s book.
She’s antiabortion, and a photographer. He thinks flag burning is more offensive than book burning, but he would never date a law enforcement officer. He says jealousy is healthy in relationships. He ‘don’t got good pix right now’ and he’s just here for some casual sex. She’s got a warm smile and says she’ll fill this out ‘real soon.’ He writes that he’s caretaking a friend’s pot farm, and oh, by the way, do you have a car? He’s very horny. Always. She likes salsa dance and karoake.
I don’t know why I feel myself compelled, pulled back to these tiny, carefully-structured narratives day after day, fascinated by them. They are little biographies of the ordinary and the hungry, people looking for something many of them will never find, because it exists only in their minds. Sometimes I think about messaging them.
‘Why are you okay with book burning?’ I want to ask. ‘Can you explain the logic behind thinking that a girl having sex with more than 100 people is not okay, but it’s fine if it’s a guy?’ ‘Why do you think there are circumstances in which someone would be obligated to have sex with you?’
My hand hovers over the keyboard, but I wisely move away. (Continued)
The emails have been arriving steadily. Subject line: ‘Thought you might be interested in this’ ‘Have you seen NPR’s story on disability?’ ‘Thoughts on this?’ ‘Saw this, thought of you’ ‘WTF is wrong with this story?!’ ‘Wait, how much of this is actually accurate?’ The content is sometimes just a single link, to This American Life’s six-part series on disability in America, picked up by Planet Money and All Things Considered. Sometimes there are a few lines of commentary, but not usually.
In a nutshell, the series tells listeners that the number of people on disability in the United States are skyrocketing, and that this is due to some sort of stealthy scheme to work the system.
And people on all sides of the political divide, but especially the right, are eating it up, despite the flood of stories attempting to counter the numerous factual, ethical, journalistic, and social problems with this story, how it’s reported, and how Chana Joffe-Walt chose to interpret the data available to her. It’s quite clear that she went looking for a particular story and conclusion, and she got exactly what she wanted. In the process, she contributed to familiar hateful rhetoric about disability in the United States, and what it means to be disabled. (Continued)
Posted on Wednesday, March 27, 2013 by Flavia Dzodan
The internet loves Jon Hamm’s penis. Women, I am told, heterosexual women, that is, cannot stop gazing Jon Hamm’s penis. Even feminists seem to love Jon Hamm’s penis! The penis is courted by underwear manufacturers to showcase their “product”. The penis is said to be too big for clothes! So much so that it needs airbrushing! It’s like a penis for every woman’s taste, a penis of mainstream appeal, a penis, if you will, to end all man hating feminist penis envies!
It so happens that said penis is also attached to a human being: a cisgender, white, heterosexual, conventionally handsome, successful man. Namely, the penis belongs to Jon Hamm. And Jon Hamm is not happy with all the attention his genitalia is getting. Anna Klassen, at the Daily Beast, reports:
Jon Hamm would like you to focus on his face please and stop thinking those dirty thoughts. In a Rolling Stone interview posted online Wednesday, the actor asked everyone please to stop talking about his penis. A New York Daily News report claimed that the producers of Mad Men asked Hamm to start wearing underwear because his “impressive anatomy is so distracting” in the season’s tight pants. Hamm acknowledged that “most” of the comments about his package are “tongue-in-cheek,” but called them “a little rude.” “But when people feel the freedom to create Tumblr accounts about my cock, I feel that wasn’t part of the deal … but whatever.”
There is a food safety scandal sweeping Europe since the second week of 2013. Every week has brought more chilling details of how tainted our food production is and how we, as consumers, have our agency removed by fraudulent corporations that show utter disregard for our autonomy and right to choose what we eat. The scandal has been mostly focused on mislabeled food products containing horse meat while they were (probably still are) sold as beef. The responses to the scandal have ranged from baffling to downright complicit, with numerous “experts” bringing up the “silly” cultural taboos behind eating or not eating a certain product. At the Globe and Mail, one such expert says:
“It is completely irrational,” says Pierre Desrochers, who teaches food-policy courses at the University of Toronto, when I phone to ask him about the origins of culinary taboos. Prof. Desrochers grew up eating horse in Quebec, and it was quite nice. “What’s the difference between a horse and a goat?”
Europeans commenting on internet sites (from Gawker to local news sources) are similarly nonplused, their responses best summed as “who cares? horse is delicious anyway! I eat horse” etc
The issue, however, isn’t about “enjoying” horse meat or merely about being fed a type of meat without one’s knowledge. This is also about food sovereignty and our right to decide for ourselves and our families what we consume. This is, undisputedly, a feminist issue.
Posted on Wednesday, February 27, 2013 by Flavia Dzodan
I sit here typing and deleting, typing and deleting, again, another try. I keep thinking I need to go back to writing, to thinking out loud, to sharing because at this stage in my life, this is the only thing I know how to do.
I take a breath and I type.
I was once an illegal alien in The Netherlands. I was once pregnant. I was once reported to immigration services by a Dutch woman who knew I was both illegal and pregnant. I was once detained. I was once denied medical care while in a deportation center. I was once deported. I had a miscarriage (the baby was dead, I had a botched clean up procedure in an understaffed and badly maintained hospital in a suburb of Buenos Aires). I am now sterile.
That was fifteen years ago and this is now.
There, I typed it. That’s my story in a nutshell. And it’s the most difficult thing I ever typed in my life.
Posted on Tuesday, February 19, 2013 by s.e. smith
The media and the Internet are abuzz with the shooting death of law graduate and anti-domestic violence advocate Reeva Steenkamp in South Africa last week, an event made all the more prurient to many media consumers by the fact that the accused, her boyfriend, is a Paralympic and Olympic athlete with an international reputation. As the commentary spews on, over and over again I see the statement that he was a role model, icon, or hero, and I am driven to ask this: whose hero was he?
I am told he was a hero to the disability community before his ‘fall from grace,’ as though shooting your girlfriend multiple times in the head and neck after a history of domestic violence with her and other women is a ‘fall,’ rather than a ghastly crime for which you should be severely punished. This presumes that the disability community is a collective entity that thinks and moves in lockstep, which isn’t the case; for some disabled people, Reeva Steenkamp’s boyfriend undoubtedly was a role model, but to others, he was just an athlete. A very talented athlete performing at the peak of his game, because very few people qualify for the Olympics and Paralympics, but just an athlete. Full social integration to me means that disabled people are measured by their accomplishments and deeds, not their disabilities.
Posted on Monday, February 4, 2013 by Garland Grey
[Trigger Warning: Discussion of rape and the motivations/tactics of rapists.]
If you missed the Beyoncé Bowl (alternatively: The Super Knowles) it was perfect. Beyoncé used her extensive catalog of hits, her once-in-a-generation talent, and her staggering genius to put on a show none of us deserved. Her opening and closing act was a little bizarre and elaborate, with two groups of men adorned in ostentatious masculine costumes squabbling over scalar dominance, ultimately abandoning the struggle once time had run out, which I think symbolized the futility of all human endeavors in the face of death? I don’t know, I don’t have the strongest background in modern dance.
At some point during the evening, the German company Audi debuted a PSA arguing against bodily autonomy, with some pretty transparent product placement snuck in. You may view it below:
Posted on Thursday, January 24, 2013 by s.e. smith
The cover of “Vogue Italia” has an important face on it this month: Chinese model Fei Fei Sun, who is the first Asian model to appear on the cover of the magazine. I’d note that US and British editions have yet to feature an Asian woman on their covers, although US “Vogue” did do a spread featuring Asian models in 2010.
Writing on the “Asia Major” spread that ran in the US, Samantha V. Chang said: “How I wish I could have seen the Asian models of today staring back at me from magazine pages or television screens when I was a Korean-American teenager in the Midwest, wrestling with foundation shades of ‘bisque,’ ‘honey,’ and ‘sand’ in my local Walgreens.” Diverse representation in fashion is important, folks.
