Category Archives: Personal

The Female Corps(e)

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The dressing room has a brightly lit pedestal, and we look back at ourselves from three walls. We stand on it and twist our shoulders and hips, crane our necks, examining ourselves from all sides as infinite, increasingly crooked copies of ourselves list sideways and disappear into the murky darkness of the mirrored mirrored mirrored reflection.

We’ve all done it; fourteen-year-old girls and married women and middle aged women and old women do the anxious, preening dance that the mirrors inspire. But our gaze is always critical – how does the cloth fall? Does it show too much? Does it cover the right things? Is it really me?

The perfected female form – handed down to us through fine art books and museums from the Ancient Greeks – is a sculpted, smooth, white body without a head.

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perfection, discarded.

This paragon of beauty reminds us that our bodies are just objects: mere vessels for that which truly makes us human.

The eyes are the windows to the soul – it is no wonder then that the mannequins in the storefront have smooth, anonymous faces.

But that’s no different than the statues in the museums, their features weathered away by time and rain and nature, making lepers of the ones that still have heads. Otherwise, smooth, marble shoulders sweep up into elegant stumps, and we make eye contact with empty space.

Historically, young English lords made off the easily carried heads of the statues in Greece—the pillage of the Classical by the Romantic—and doing so, took with them whatever expressions those statutes might have made, the rest of us have to make do with what was left.

Friends, family, sales associates are always quick to remind us: the lights in the dressing room are unnaturally unflattering. But the critical gaze, the self-critical gaze, the critical self-gaze, knows every imperfection. We seek them out and itemize them, exacerbate them, magnify them, and when we gives them voice, we are met with confusion and incomprehension from our audience. There is nothing that will more quickly imbue us with a sense of alienation, of insanity, than attempting to explain our physical imperfections. Our audience—those same friends, family, sales associates—will always assure us that our flaws are either not as noticeable as they might appear, or that they cannot see those things that are so obvious to us. But we know they are there.

One of the two, either the eyes or the audience, has to be lying. Which to trust?

We know to doubt our own vision of ourselves, just as we are not as smart as we think we are, as commanding as we hope to be, or as confident as we pretend, we must equally not be as ugly as we imagine. But if we are not ugly, then how come the clothes never fit? How come we cannot find pants or shirts or sweaters that flatter our bodies? Our audience must be lying, because clearly we were made wrong, a store full of clothes none of which fit like they should, someone must fit into them…

If only it were easy for the secret to reveal itself: we are all built wrong, or rather, our bodies, as imagined—smooth, white, hard, all angles and swooping curves, no softness, no quiet surrenders to gravity or time, limited by musculature and tendon flexibility—are beyond the alchemy of elastic underwear, liposuction, gym memberships, early morning work outs, calorie counting, and anorexia. Our pathetically human flesh can never compare to life-like marble. We can only glitter in the sun with the help of expensive, mass manufactured powders, salves and elixirs that promise that lit from within glow.

All we can do is catalogue all we see when we stand on that pedestal and hope for the time, money, and energy to manufacture our best selves; rigid, stony perfection, on a box, inside a little velvet rope enclosure with a sign that says Please, do not touch.

 

Brexit, globalization, nationalism, xenophobia

My natural reaction, when trying to formulate a counterargument to the blatant racism, xenophobia, and blind populist nationalism peddled in Britain in favor of the (successful) Brexit, is to reach for something equally totalizing and outrageous.

I’m not going to crawl into the muck with Boris Johnson (or, on this side of the Atlantic, Donald Trump) and justify his arguments based on some fantastic imagining of the “British People” or some other similar fever dream of historic, national and/or cultural purity.

This is the same government that last year wouldn’t allow the Scots to leave the UK, despite their concerns and desires to remain a part of the EU regardless of whether the Brits made the choice to exit the economic union or not. “There is no history of Scotland acting independently of the rest of Britain” people responded then.

So I have no qualms about reaching into history and saying that the British have no philosophical leg to stand on in their fears about open borders when they made it their policy to forcibly pry open the borders of nations and cultures around the globe in the name of their “British Empire”.

But it comes down to not wanting to crawl through the filth on my belly, like a worm, because to try and argue with the xenophobic, racist, nationalist rhetoric is to justify its existence, is to make some game out of acknowledging its validity. It is not valid, it is not reasonable, and more than all of that, it is not something that can be met or answered with rationality, logic, or consideration. It is fear mongering, and it is lies.

So I’m sorry if history seems irrelevant, if the past is not dictum for the future, if people have no interest or consideration for how the choices made before them might weigh on the choices they face now. I’m not going to address your concerns about people who have no interest in assimilating, in becoming British or European or Western coming and working in your restaurants, and your homes, and your country, until I’m met with equal consideration of the plight of economic migrants and economic refugees and solutions to keep children in the Global South from starving. Making an exception only for refugees of war is to fail to address the cause of which mass migration and the open borders of globalization are merely a symptom.

We will all come to regret where we are finding ourselves. The populists will take us for all we’re worth, and the rich will pluck what little we have left from our unhappy, clenched fists.

Gone Home: the return to photography

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Circumstance has returned me to a favored pursuit. I spent the last few months producing graphic art pieces for a 2D design foundations class at RISD, which had me stretching my creative limbs in the realms of pencil, paper, glue, and paint. The basics of design, other than practice, in the form of line, shape, space, color, pattern, repetition, and perspective were familiar strangers, and have since become intimate friends.

My cousin’s college graduation, and the prospect of a new commercial project, have returned me to the loving arms of photography. In the process I’ve developed a new (and psychologically more efficient) method of organizing my photography, and have extended my autodidact explorations into the open source software Darktable and studio lighting.

Graduation, Brown University. June, 2016.

I’ve been playing with color editing and WB correction. Additionally I spent a significant quantity of time figuring out how to edit my little logo in Inkscape so that it would have the right kind of transparency when transformed into a watermark (as well as how to save a vector graphic into the right directory using the Terminal so as to be able to access the file in Darktable).

Much of the fun has just been in having a camera in my hands again. I said to Eric after our photoshoot, that really, all photographers have a fetishistic streak in them.

Eric, fashion photoshoot. June, 2016.
Eric, fashion portrait. June, 2016.

The photographer enjoys the simulated power of aesthetic creation. To take a photograph is to reproduce reality (badly) and to convey the aesthetic quality of a moment–I do not believe that the photographer has any real claim to the beauty of a photograph. Photographs can be either effective, affective, or forgettable. The power of the photographer is in that aspect. Though perhaps that is the entirety of what all artists can lay claim to. Words are beyond the individual command of one person, but placement is everything, in language.

In a roundabout way, I’m picking a fight with the concept that photographs are “made” rather than “taken”. The act of depressing the button that fires the shutter and the light captured in the split second is recorded–that is a process of taking a piece of reality and keeping it for yourself. That is the moment when someone’s soul is stolen–captured along with the light inside the camera. When you enter the developing room, or perhaps the editing software suite, when you begin cutting out bits of reality, adjusting the colors and contrast and the depths of reality, that is when you might begin to “make” a photograph.

I am not, however, a student of photography. I am a student of journalism. My approach to reproducing reality, to laying claim to the experience of the world, is to denounce ownership. My personal expectations are that should I have done my job well, the product looks like the world itself: recognizable, strange, complex, illuminated, and indistinct.

I also need to remember the most important rule of photography in the rest of my life: you can never capture the whole thing. The art of photography is the art of framing. It is pulling the audience along and standing them in a particular spot, and showing them something specific.

The Expendables: death and gender on TV Tropes

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TV Tropes could easily place amongst the greatest contemporary tools of media criticism, especially with regards to portrayals of sex, gender, and sexuality. After all, TV Tropes is the place to go for a quick summary of ambiguously gay or hide your lesbians (or even the old favorite heterosexual life partners). But the combination of crowdsourcing, obsessive fan behavior, and the increasing prevalence and acceptance of media criticism as both academic and entertainment practice have banded together to identify any number of tropes and catalogued examples across media (literature, film and television, graphic novels, videogames, et. al.). It is the collective documentation of the nagging suspicions and memetic discoveries that plague any regular consumer of narrative media.

Generally, TV Tropes has felt like a haven of good humored, progressive commentary in a sexist, and heteronormative (as well as increasingly violent and vitriolic) media culture. At their best, discussions or critical engagement with representations of gender and sexuality in film and television (the bread and butter of TV Tropes, as one might guess from the website title) are sent into the void. At their worst, in the course of addressing these questions, women–and only women–are chased out of their jobs and their homes by threats of violence, stalking, and public smear campaigns. Meanwhile, possibly due to TV Tropes’ public and semi-anonymous set up (by no means a neutral or objective system, as shown by WIKIPEDIA), has allowed the identification and dissemination of critical tools for addressing the stilted gender representations pervasive throughout the media industries.

On a recent visit, after an unnecessary character death on Hawaii Five-0, I was searching for the article on stuffed into the fridge to send to a friend. This particular trope is close to my heart. It refers to the death or assault of a (usually female) character for the sole purpose of motivating another (usually male) character. It may seem like an unnecessary term, after all, everything in a story happens to motivate the characters so that the narrative can move forward and evolve. But, as the article explains, this particular form of plot development is so easy as to be considered “lazy writing”. Or, in a more political context, it can be considered “institutionalized sexism.” The characters being victimized are usually female and, for the trope to be applied, are not developed enough for the audience to feel pain on their behalf, instead, the audience is empathizing with the impact the event has had on a more developed, more central, usually male, character.
We do not mourn because the victims are dead or violated. We mourn because their death or violation has caused emotional distress to their husband/brother/boyfriend/uncle/male associate.

All of this sets the stage for the disappointment I felt in seeing the link to Men are the expendable gender. The gist of the entry was that, actually, the death of female characters (prominent, recurring, anonymous, or otherwise) is played for emotional effect. Male characters, especially the nameless and often faceless ones, get their tickets punched more often and to less emotional effect, therefore proving that male lives are valued less female ones.

There is nothing, superficially, wrong with this argument; with only the facts presented above, the conclusion is not unreasonable.

Unfortunately, the argument is an outgrowth of the sexist logic that already governs our commercial narrative media. First, because of statistics. Second, because of the implicit sexist assumptions. Third, because of the explicitly sexist arguments put forward.
Statistically speaking, of course there would be more male deaths on television, and in film, because there are more men on television and in film.

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From the New York Film Academy blog, November 2013.

It is impossible to make a value equivalency between the genders when they are not equally represented. In terms of pure visibility, male lives are valued more highly, because they are represented as existing in all capacities (as captains, doctors, engineers, plumbers, heroes, villains, extras, red shirts, science officers, Pirates, etc). Meanwhile women can only be found when the lack of diversity would be otherwise overwhelming, or when someone needs to die, so that the hero can go kick some bad guy ass. It matters more when you kill a woman, because there are so many fewer of them (about 1 to every 2.25 men, according to the New York Film Academy). It is, in fact, possible to make films that barely feature women at all (see: The Eagle, a film of which I am actually quite fond).

However, the actions of the film industry operate on an implicitly sexist logic, one unaddressed by the author(s) of the expendable gender entry. Men are the human “default”. Women are cosidered a deviation from the norm. When male extras die, the audience is seeing the death of “people”. They are undistinguished, and undifferentiated, it is true, but we are seeing large scale violence, not the interpersonal kind. The emotional impact of those deaths depends entirely on how you, as an individual, view the redshirts or the henchmen, and if the death of innumerable, anonymous people is something you find affecting.

The death of a woman, by contrast, is the death of the Other, the death of something we treat as different from the death of “people”. (See: Men are generic, women are special.) At this point, the author(s)’s argument takes an explicitly sexist turn. Furthermore, the choice of evidence–or, more accurately, assumptions–is more pernicious than willful ignorance of pure statistical probability. It concerns what the difference between the male “default” and the female “Other” is determined to be.

The author(s) argue that the value of female human existence comes from their ability to produce offspring. “In purely biological terms, men are more expendable than women because in the event of near-extinction, one male and ten females can produce ten times the offspring of one female and ten males.” This argument is part of the sexist philosophy prevalent in many internet communities, and has encouraged the violent reactions to female critics.

You may be familiar with its kissing cousin: “There are no girls on the Internet” (here on TV Tropes, or Know Your Meme). Though it hails from the early days of the internet, it was 4chan, a undisputed bastion of incivility and child pornography, that codified it for the present generation. Many would argue that any major association with 4chan so fundamentally undermines legitimacy that it neither bears repeating nor address. However, the cross pollination of 4chan with more legitimate communities, like reddit or imgur, mean that it has participated in the codification of cultural and social norms and behaviors online. “No girls on the internet” (or “Tits or GTFO”) appears without fail when a unique female perspective is articulated in an Internet forum, comment section, or message board.

At its most fundamental level “No girls on the Internet” asserts that women are accustomed to receiving preferential treatment in social and intellectual arenas because of their sex. Specifically: because people (read: men) wish to sleep with them, women are given undue respect, attention, or concurrence in social situations.

In an ironic twist, the people who say that sex appeal is a means of getting others to submit to your opinions, are often the very same ones who will threaten to come to a woman’s house and rape her for daring to express an opinion with which they disagree, or if she wins in a video game.

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(a softer world: 914)

To say that female lives are more valuable because of their ability to produce offspring is to reduce the woman, as a social, political, or narrative actor, to a walking uterus, perhaps with some caregiving abilities. (Nevertheless, more sympathy or nobility is bestowed on single fathers than single mothers.) The argument attempts to naturalize the view of women as sex objects by tracing their “Otherness” and their social value to their reproductive abilities, while simultaneously, couching the assumption in biological/evolutionary, and therefore presumably “scientific” or “objective,” terminology.

The larger effect of the argument is how it undercuts the potential for women to be seen as rational, independent agents, particularly with regards to public political and/or social transformation. It supports a reductive view where “women’s issues” are limited to topics like birth control (or not), abortion (or not), child support (or not), rape, and domestic violence. This largely ignores that women also have a stake in how poverty, access to healthcare, the rising price of college tuition, the stock market, fair trade goods, the second amendment, the price of oil, and the deaths of family members and beloved family pets are addressed. (It performs a further occlusion of male investment in “women’s issues,” by implying that men have no stake in the debates about BC/abortion/child support/rape/domestic violence, et. al.)

Most disappointing is that of course we know men are the expendable gender, there was a major motion picture about it. It starred Sylvester Stalone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jet Li,  Dolph Lundgren, Jason Statham, Terry Crews, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, and Randy Couture. The second one had a slightly different cast, the third another different one again. Yet, all of these men can be “expendable” and we will still know their names. But the girl who is raped or killed at the beginning of the Criminal Minds, or Law and Order (any of them), or CSI (any of them), or the death of the girlfriend or wife or sister or mother that propels the hero into action, can be nameless, and faceless, and the actress will be quickly or easily forgotten.

Which leaves the question less about who is or isn’t expendable, but who will be mourned by the audience, and who will be remembered for their participation.

(This essay is limited to a binary gender system, but there is so much more to be said on the propagation and reification of the gender binary by the media establishment.)

Hustle: a eulogy for well-reasoned madness

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how much loyalty do you owe a short-term employer?

 

It is difficult to think about labor precarity – the way in which the new “unshackled” working class has been liberated from regular hours, job security, benefits, and solidarity, in the name of flexibility – when I don’t pay rent, buy my own food, or retain sole responsibility for paying back my student loans. I have a job, and the potential for advancement with the organization that has employed me. I have access to healthcare through my mother’s employer, and eventually through my own. For the moment, whatever money I make goes towards my savings or coffee and pastries.  

And yet, I return to the idea. I watch my friends find paying work. Some of them have regular hours and the expectation of career advancement with their given employer or in their field. They already take on new responsibilities, they become more involved. Other friends drift through the employment landscape applying whatever skills they have to whatever work finds them, regardless of fulfillment, enjoyment, or faith in the work they are doing.

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what’s your side hustle? etsy? journalism?

But some of the unease comes from watching the junkies at the bus depot hustle people for money, time, or acknowledgement. Because it’s not just the junkies anymore. Everybody hustles these days. I find headlines in my inbox about how a “side hustle” is both healthy and integral to the modern worker’s lifestyle. From all sides, incoming workers, especially in semi-creative industries, but also far too many others, are expected to perform hope labor; unpaid labor done with the expectation that it will attract paid labor.
For example: this blog, promotional photography done for friends and acquaintances, or the physical and mental labor done for a retail start up.

Locally – in the flesh – I get paid in trade. Usually food, drink, or artwork; but never a monetary equivalency, never contractual, rather a semi-valuable expression of gratitude. In the wider world my work, such as the words you read right now, is done for nothing. If time is money, then my time is literally without worth. A penny for your thoughts? Instead, tell me what you’re thinking and, if I like it, maybe I’ll give you something next time.

With some disappointment, I’ve discovered I know how to hustle. I know how to tell people what they should do for themselves, that benefits me. I can look you in the eye and tell you that not only do I know how to do what you need, but I can do it better, and more besides.

I’ve started to hustle my friends, not secretly, not covertly, but hustle all the same.

hustle-- chatThe hustle is carrying business cards, even when you don’t have a business. It’s constantly thinking over which organizations you are connected to, which business owners or capital holders you know, and which movers and shakers you have access to.

I’ve never enjoyed sports or board games. Both require a competitive edge, a desire to get one over on the other guy, that has never really appealed to me. Even if I know how to hustle, I don’t think I’m going to be making myself into a shark tank capitalist any time soon. My knee-jerk reaction to people who need to get a foot in the door, or an edge, or at the very least, a seat at the table (I don’t know that I can help anyone get skin in the game, yet), is to see if my hustle can get them there. A co-worker is looking for an internship? I might know some local business owners who would be interested in the extra help, but let’s see if the local women’s networking group – “networking,” in other words, organized hustle – might have some better opportunities. I know some people, I can get us an invitation.

The hustle is a hard game. No one hustles if they can help it. You hustle when you need to get ahead, or need to catch a break and you don’t have any other way of getting it. The hustle means every relationship can be a means to an end. I hustle my close friends. I hustle old bosses, and friendly acquaintances. I hustle at parties and in bars.

The hustle is the long arm of free market capitalism. Our present capitalism believes in “human capital,” or the ability of the worker to exploit themselves, and has made the demand that workers be ready, at any moment, to start the hustle. The magic of the “side hustle” (perhaps meant to be “side” to your job, if you have steady employment, but maybe it’s the “side” to your main hustle, the hustle that feeds and houses you for the moment, without guarantee) is that it gets you used to hustling.

Hustling isn’t new. People have always had to hustle, some more than others. Artists, anyone in sales, journalists, writers, freelancers of all types, academics – just to name a few – have always had to hustle for attention, for patronage, for customers, for publication, for funding, for airtime and column space. We like to believe that the fastest growing sectors are in technology, an employment avenue with job security and benefits, liberated from the hustle, but in fact, the sectors adding the most jobs are almost entirely in service industries. (See the numbers from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.) We are getting more food service workers, more home aides, more nurses, more retail associates, and more customer service reps, far many more than we are getting new code monkeys.

The service industry is institutionalized hustle. Your barista, sales person, home aide, or babysitter are paid to care. They remember your name, your order, your birthday because feeling special will keep you coming back. You pay them, not for the product (the coffee, the clothing, the medicine) or even their expertise, but for the service experience they provide. You pay them to smile, to ask how you are, to remember your milk preference, and offer gift wrapping. With home aides and nannies, you pay them to take time and care away from their own loved ones and tend to yours in your stead.

Through all this capitalism doesn’t just shape our social and political circumstances, but reaches all the way inside us and plays around with the way we think.

Mid-March of 2015 found me in retreat from the shared social reality; I listened exclusively to mid-2000s pop-punk, and wrote over 3,000 words on the topic of Fall Out Boy as a social phenomenon, as well as their potential role in promoting the acceptability of Lesbian Gay & Bisexual (of LGBT) politics. I stopped going to class, and eventually stopped leaving my room.

After the semester ended, I started seeing three separate doctors whose job is to make sure my brain is functioning “normally” or “better” or some other inescapably normative adjective, and was ultimately prescribed three different types of drugs to regulate various aspects of my neuro-psychological well-being. Migraines [brain lesions, disordered speech, sensory overload, nausea, headaches, … ], depression [anhedonia, disordered sleep patterns, listlessness, irritability, emotional outbursts, … ], anxiety [panic attacks, social dysfunction, antisocial behavior, performance issues, … ], ADHD [executive function disorder, irritability, mood swings, … ].

By November, I could do things that would have been unthinkable in April. Now, I can talk to strangers. I can sell you objects I am sure were made under criminally dangerous and unregulated working conditions in the Global South. I can talk about the uncertainty of the future of my generation; a planet facing global war, a climate changing faster than we can adapt to it, the increased likelihood that the middle class will wink out of existence, and a political system that threatens to grind to a complete halt. I can even meet people from online dating websites.

As a result I stand for 8 hours a day, I make small talk with strangers, I make new friends, and I will sell anything I think you might be willing to invest in, be it $70 champagne-related wall ornament or the joys of Lovecraftian and other Weird fiction.

I am medicated so that I can get out of bed in the morning. More than that, however, I am medicated to perform better in a capitalist society. My mood is artificially enhanced (I don’t stick on the grim predictions that swim through my head) and I am more shallow – not as desperate to peer into everyone’s soul, more able to move beyond “acceptable losses” – than I am naturally. I can still feel echoes of my old anxieties (what if people don’t like me? what if they think I sound crazy? what if they keep participating in the exploitation of the third world? what if they don’t start caring about politics? what if I never find the right words to explain how this all fits together?), but I can swallow them down and bluff or lie or bluster my way through.

It comes down to this: I can smile more easily, I can be thinner and more energetic, I can laugh at your jokes even if they aren’t funny, or compliment your hair. Most of all, when I hustle you, I can make it look like honesty.

Watching this transformation has left me with a very important question: at what point does what we do become who we are? Two decades of outsized empathy, unendurable anxiety, nightmares, and self-consciousness can’t be overwritten. And yet, from inside my own head, I see someone new; a cardboard cutout of a person I don’t trust, who has my name and meets my eyes in the mirror with a smile.

The cardboard cut-out has taught me a very valuable lesson: my inner self isn’t good enough. In fact, the only way to be my best self, is through a medical regimen that alters my perceptions and reactions to help them conform to a construct we call reality. After all, one of the most common complaints addressed to individuals who are promoting the linguistic and social adjustments labeled (derogatorily) “politically correct” is that they need to face up to “reality” or “the real world”. The word “reality” in this context, and in the context of social and economic performance, could be replaced with the term “status quo”. I might see clearly, anxious as I am about labor precarity, social dysfunction introduced when friends become means to an economic end, human capital, and mounting college debt. I might be right when I entertain nightmares of a violent and barren future. But “paranoia” and “anxiety disorder” are much easier problems to fix.

Maybe my kind are just as easily found in bus stops telling you how they found Jesus and asking for spare change, as they are pitching in board rooms and on sales floors. Maybe we all just need anti-anxiety meds and amphetamines, to make sure that we can be relaxed and happy. After all, capital is only concerned with end results – did you surpass the year-to-date sales? – seekers after truth, or at least those seeking respite from the roar of sadness and fear in their heads, get picked up by LEOs for vagrancy and illegal narcotics use, and, if I stop leaving my bed, I’ll probably find myself with them at the psychiatric facility.

But as long as I sleep deeply, after a long day of hustling to pay for my drugs that make life bearable, I won’t have time for nightmares.

(Many many thanks to Sam, Joey, and Eric for proofing this piece, letting me rant, and killing my over abundance of semicolons.)