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“He’s a Fucking Maniac:” Rape, Black Metal, and the Fetishization of Illness

Posted on Wednesday, October 12, 2011 by Brad Nelson

Content Warning: This post contains descriptions of sexual assault, extreme violence, and fetishized concepts of mental illness. 

On January 10, music writer Christopher Weingarten encouraged metal fans to “throw [their] Leviathan and Twilight records in the trash.” Pitchfork’s metal critic, Brendan Stosuy, retweeted the invocation, endorsing it.

Less than nine months later, on September 2, Stosuy deemed the new Leviathan record, True Traitor, True Whore, “one of the best metal records of the year.” The album, which will be released on November 8, is “intense, expansive, claustrophobic, strange, and maddeningly beautiful.” Jef Whitehead, musician and tattoo artist, is the singular architect of Leviathan, part of a long tradition of one-person black metal bands reaching back to Varg Vikernes, who alone formed Burzum in 1991.

Stosuy interviewed Whitehead for his column, Whitehead’s first interview in nearly 10 years.

Stosuy’s first question to Whitehead is “Do you feel like your name’s been sullied by the charges of earlier this year?”

(Continued)

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On Blogging, Threats, and Silence

Posted on Tuesday, October 11, 2011 by s.e. smith

Content note: This post includes excerpts of threats and abusive language.

I got my first rape threat as a blogger when I was on Blogspot, so new that I still had the default theme up and hadn’t even added anything to the sidebar. I can’t even remember the pseudonym I was using then, and I probably had about 10 hits on a good day, seven of which were me compulsively loading the page just to make sure it still existed, and the other two of which were probably my friends. I wrote a post about some local political issue or another, expressing my misgivings, and a reader kindly took time out of his day to email me.  (Continued)

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World Mental Health Day and political pain.

Posted on Monday, October 10, 2011 by Emily McAvan

It’s World Mental Health Day today, which aims to “raises public awareness about mental health issues. The day promotes open discussion of mental disorders, and investments in prevention, promotion and treatment services.”  That’s a big huge umbrella, but I’d like to talk about something I’m intimately familiar with: depression.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention in March this year put out a study that estimates that 1 in 10 Americans is depressed.  Who is depressed?

This study found the following groups to be more likely to meet criteria for major depression:

  • persons 45-64 years of age
  • women
  • blacks, Hispanics, non-Hispanic persons of other races or multiple races
  • persons with less than a high school education
  • those previously married
  • individuals unable to work or unemployed
  • persons without health insurance coverage

There’s a lot of reasons for depression, and I don’t want to state that any one thing is determinative of depression, but I do want to note a couple things.  One is that the psychology profession – and its pop-psych disciples who disseminate information more widely – often transcendentalise depression as an innate, biological condition.  It’s an individual condition, not a structural one.

While I do of course agree that there’s biological predispositions, I think that the above list makes the point quite clearly: depression is also political.  Living in a world in which you have fewer opportunities as a result of being valued less, yes that takes a mental toll.  There’s no statistics there on depression among GLBT people, but as far as I know, those too suggest a greater-than-average propensity towards depression too.  Facing classism, sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism (and any combination thereof, plus I’m sure others I’m forgetting), on a day-to-day basis in everything from institutional biased policy to personal interactions, that leaves its mark.  Some psychologists have a name for this process: “minority stress.”

The personal is the political has been a truism of feminism since the second wave, but we often forget what that truly means.  All too frequently we create a false dichotomy between body and mind, forgetting that we are bodies and minds in space, bodies and minds in culture, bodies and minds constrained and disciplined by capitalism and the nation-state.  The inequality of poverty – struggling to survive – is depressing, and as workers, most of us fundamentally alienated under capitalism, which has a continual cost it enacts upon our psyches and bodies.  When my partner and I go to the pain management specialist, most of the other patients are working class men, gritting their teeth through the constant pain their professions have caused them (and this too links to mental health).

I’ve been depressed on and off for most of my life, and I’ve done all the usual treatments and some have been literally life-saving.   I don’t doubt the effectiveness of psychiatric treatment or medication for some or even most people, but I do think that we should be cautious about accepting provisional political facts as unchangeable conditions.  Knowing this, as I do, doesn’t mean that you can magically wave your hands and depression will go away.  Knowing your depression is constructed doesn’t remove it, just as your house doesn’t disappear because you know it’s made of bricks.  And it doesn’t mean that you are personally responsible for your depression if you’re not out there fighting every political fight.  Nor does it mean that depression would totally disappear from the world if we somehow managed to remove all the capitalist and ideological factors I’ve discussed.

But it does mean that there are political answers (treatments, if you will) as well as medication and therapy, and I think there’s something worthwhile about naming an enemy you can fight, too.

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MY FEMINISM WILL BE INTERSECTIONAL OR IT WILL BE BULLSHIT!

Posted on Monday, October 10, 2011 by Flavia Dzodan

Now picture this: me screaming the above. Angry. VERY ANGRY as a matter of fact. Screaming this at my computer screen. Screaming it at nobody and everybody. At you. You, person I might have never heard from who might have not even commented on this blog or any of the other publications where I can be regularly found scribbling my discombobulated ideas. Even though we never met before, I AM ACTUALLY, SCREAMING AT YOU RIGHT NOW. MY FEMINISM WILL BE INTERSECTIONAL OR IT WILL BE BULLSHIT!. And I am screaming this because I want to convince you, I want to get it through you that this is not a choice or an abstract concept or an intellectual exercise. I am not screaming because well, you know, I just discovered intersectionality and OMG SO COOL GUYS. YOU NEED TO READ THIS. No. My feminism NEEDS to be intersectional because as a South American, as a Latina, as someone who knows certain parts of the Global South intimately by virtue of being a Southerner, as an immigrant living in Europe, as a woman, I am in the middle of what I like to call the “shit puff pastry”. The shit puff pastry is every layer of fuck that goes on above me, below me, by my sides, all around me. And in this metaphorical puff pastry with multiple layers of excrement, I am the dulce de leche that is supposed to make it palatable so that someone else, more specifically the kyriarchy, can eat me.

And here’s the thing: while I am screaming at you, I am also asking, nay, DEMANDING that you scream with me. And I am asking that you become as angry as I have been this past week. Because without anger and without righteous indignation and without the deep, relentless demand for change, my feminism, YOUR feminism, everyone’s feminism will fail. It will be bullshit.

This past week I’ve been screaming this a lot. Because I like to play “connecting the dots” (s.e. smith ipse dixit) as a matter of political practice. I play “connecting the dots” even though sometimes I might not get a properly outlined landscape but the equivalent of what my 1 year old niece playing with a bunch of sharpies on the coffee table would produce. Which is to say, sometimes, the pictures I draw when I connect dots might not make sense or might be inaccurate or might have missed a few dots to be totally accurate. But I am willing to pay the price of not making sense sometimes if I do eventually get it right. I would rather sometimes come across as far fetched than miss the landscape that the shit puff pastry provides. And these past few days I’ve been playing connect the dots more often than usual. Hence my anger. Hence my disappointment with feminism. FEMINISM! I AM DEEPLY DISAPPOINTED IN YOU. To the point that I even considered ditching the label altogether. And if that happened, I would use a new label that pretty much sums up my politics: Flame-throwerism. Wherein I set feminism on fire and with its ashes I fill my cats’ kitty litter box and let them pee on it. That’s how angry I’ve been at feminism this week. Kitty litter levels of outrage.

(Continued)

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The Percentages: A Biography of Class

Posted on Saturday, October 8, 2011 by Sady

1. Bleach

My first connection to magazines, maybe my most immediate, is the smell of bleach.

My father worked in a printers’ shop; it was a trade my mother had gotten him into, when she worked at a newspaper. It worked for him, kept him going, and it was a step up; before she got him in, he’d been mowing lawns at golf courses. I did visit him at work, once or twice; after everyone else was gone, when it was his night to have me but he still had to finish some things. I did see him putting pages together. And he brought me things from work to play with, when I was little: a little booklet full of different swatches of color that I could flip through, which I now realize were colors of ink, and a notepad with “Doyle” on it, personalized, which he thought was cool. But I never knew much about his work, or what he did, really. It wasn’t something he talked about when he was home. So mostly, bleach is what I remember. He’d come home, after work, and take out a jug of bleach, and put it on the edge of the kitchen sink. And then — so that he didn’t “look bad,” he told me, “so he could take girls out on dates” — he’d use it to scrub the ink stains off his hands.

I don’t know what my deal is, around class, but it starts here.

 

2. Kitchens

Living in Ohio is cheaper than living in New York. My first stepfather worked the night shift at a grocery store; it wasn’t understood that we were doing poorly. My best friend’s mother worked the deli counter at a different grocery store. You could live on that money. The woman across the street sold equipment and moonshine at rodeos, and wasn’t married, and some kids in the neighborhood weren’t allowed to play with her kids, because the understanding was that she’d used to strip. The understanding was also that her husband had committed suicide; this always came hand-in-hand with the stripping rumors, was believed by the nice church-going ladies of our block to be connected somehow. If women were not good women, their men would die: This was the lesson here. So, not all of us had office jobs, or the education or background required to get them. But we had our own houses, we were suburban, the idea that we weren’t firmly middle-class would have been an insult to us. Of course we were. Everyone was.

(Continued)

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In the name of safety: the multi-national anti immigration industry and their billionaire profits

Posted on Friday, October 7, 2011 by Flavia Dzodan

I am a Non Western, South American immigrant in a society that is increasingly determined to get rid of those like me. Media constantly reminds me that we are practically non human. That our rights should be eroded further in the name of safety. Politicians build careers using the rhetoric of hatred against those like me. I was punched in the face, I was elbowed in the stomach on two different occasions by two White Supremacists who objected to my looks and my speaking another language with a friend. Racial slurs were hurled. And still, I know I don’t have it as bad as others. In the grand scheme of things, I am privileged. I am a documented resident. At least, I am not one of the thousands currently in detention camps awaiting deportation. Then my life would be under the control of a corporation that actually makes a profit out off the lives of those who are dehumanized the most. If I was undocumented, my life would be in the hands of someone like this guy, featured in The New York Times this past week:

Nick Buckles, the chief executive of G4S, would not discuss the company. But last year he told analysts how its “justice” business in the Netherlands blossomed in one week after the 2002 assassination of a politician with an anti-immigrant and law-and-order agenda.

“There’s nothing like a political crisis to stimulate a bit of change,” Mr. Buckles said.

That’s what undocumented immigrants are: a bit of political change. Except that the security guards working for the company that Mr. Buckles represents had a big degree of responsibility for the gruesome death of eleven asylum seekers who were awaiting deportation in a detention center at Schiphol Airport in The Netherlands on Thursday, October 27thof 2005. Apparently, the kind of change Mr. Buckles aims for does not include preserving the wellbeing of people whose only crime was to seek an opportunity to better their lives. When detainees raised the alarm and cried for help, when flames were taking over the detention center, the guards working for Mr. Buckles’ corporation ignored them. They were left to die. Nine men and two women. Their bodies now an “opportunity for corporate growth”.

(Continued)

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We Are Many, They Are Few: You, Too, Can Make A Difference

Posted on Tuesday, October 4, 2011 by s.e. smith

I’m haunted by the Kelly Thomas case.

For those not familiar with it—and you may be familiar, for reasons I shall discuss shortly—Kelly Thomas was severely beaten by Fullerton police officers at a bus stop in July. Witnesses, including passengers on a bus pulling into the lot, thought he had been killed on the scene, but it actually took five days for him to die. His injuries were so severe that his father didn’t recognise him at first when he arrived in the hospital. He was homeless, and had a history of schizophrenia, and both of these things were clearly factors in the incident.

Cases like this take place across the United States. Not necessarily exactly like this; police do not show up at bus stops and beat unarmed homeless men to death. But they do shoot people with mental illness, routinely, and sometimes in questionable circumstances. Just this weekend, the case I wrote about here recently ended, as many predicted it would, when the search teams shot the suspect. At the press conference, the sheriff made it evident that he was confident it was a legally justified shooting, and it will probably be ruled as such, just as so many other police shootings of mentally ill people are.

(Continued)

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Cupcakes are evil

Posted on Friday, September 30, 2011 by Emily McAvan

Everyone loves cupcakes, right? Sweet, portable, frosted cupcakes. Good for childhood birthday parties and swish grown-up ones too, after that minute or two when they were apparently A Thing for hipsters and foodies and foodsters and people who never got over Sex & the City. Whether Red velvet or devil’s food, or just a plain iced cupcake, a cupcake is the perfect treat.

Pinky Pie certainly loves cupcakes. Sing it, Pinky!

[a song by the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic character Pinky Pie, sung while she bakes cupcakes:

“All you have to do is take a cup of flour,
Add it to the mix!
Now just take a little something sweet, not sour,
A bit of salt–just a pinch!

Baking these treats is such a cinch,
Add a teaspoon of vanilla.
Add a little more, and you count to four
And you never get your fill-a~

Cupcakes, so sweet and tasty~
Cupcakes–don’t be too hasty,
Cupcakes~ cupcakes, cupcakes, CUPCAKES!”]

It’s hard to imagine the universally beloved cupcake being used for evil. But that’s just what conservatives have been doing lately.

(Continued)

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I Wrote A Letter To Gene Lyons

Posted on Thursday, September 29, 2011 by Sady

Yes, it’s true! I am also putting up two posts a day, apparently. Because, long story short: This is really racist and sexist. And it deserves a response. And it’s getting a response, from a lot of people. That response deserves your attention. My letter is quoted below, with only three edits. All of those edits were for the purpose of adding links, or embedding a link rather than simply quoting the HTML.  Because: I don’t know Melissa Harris-Perry. At all. But I know that people shouldn’t have to deal with attacks like the one just written by Gene Lyons, as a common result of having done their jobs.

—

Hi Gene —

Basically, I never do this. And I’m sure it’s not the most professional thing I’ve ever done. In fact, I have to make it clear that I’m speaking purely for myself here, and not for any publication I work with. But I too have published at Salon, and have the greatest of respect for them, and I have to ask: What on Earth were you thinking with that piece on Melissa Harris-Perry? And don’t say it wasn’t about her. It clearly was. Calling on her looks and simultaneously calling her stupid — “an attractive woman seeking fame and fortune by saying silly things” — was the purest sexism I’ve seen in quite some time. How could your opinion on the looks of a female colleague possibly be relevant to a published piece? Similarly, your opening paragraphs were some of the most racist vitriol I’ve seen from a progressive in recent years. You claim that Harris-Perry is somehow intimidating people into giving her tenure — oh, no, a scary black person! And another implication that she’s stupid, which this time has racist as well as sexist overtones — and is somehow comparable to the KKK, and that her idea that people of color (er, especially scholars who study race) might have a keener understanding of race than your average white person is somehow obfuscatory or dishonest, something to be glossed over with a “yadda, yadda.”

(Continued)

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Professor Journalism Asks: What Was “The Worst Groping” Of The Year?

Posted on Thursday, September 29, 2011 by Sady

Good morning, everyone! It’s time for us to play a game. A game of Choose Your Own Adventure!

Let’s say you are a journalist. No, really! You are getting your work published, and getting paychecks for it, and everything. It’s very exciting for you. You wear a little porkpie hat, with a card that reads “PRESS” in it, and you talk really fast and say “chief” a lot, and you are always wondering how that whiz kid Peter Parker manages to get all the cool shots of Spiderman. Normal journalist stuff, in other words! Very usual. But today, Journalist, you have a problem. You are writing a long piece on “privacy,” and people’s private sexual lives, and for some reason you have included accounts of politicians sexually harassing women, and also one of the year’s biggest sexual assault cases, in your list of “sexual things covered by press recently.” Indeed, all of the politicians and public figures whose privacy you are concerned with are male. Which is not really a huge thing in and of itself, except: You also included sexual assault on your list of things that were sexual.

I don’t know what happened, Journalist! Maybe you were drunk again! Maybe your porkpie hat was too tight! Maybe you were worried that everyone would notice that, when you take your glasses off, you look exactly like Superman; it’s a common problem! But anyway, now you have to write a segue from your poorly framed argument into your main point. And for some reason, the best you can come up with is the following sentence: “Arguably the worst groping of the year was committed not by any boorish pol but by the umpteen commentators grasping for reasons these incidents should be covered.” Yikes! DO YOU:

(Continued)

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