tone it down

For the moment, let's turn our focus on the notion of a person being "attention-seeking."  This is the concept we draw on when we sigh "he just wants attention, ignore him", or sneer "shut up, you attention whore."  We might describe Lady Gaga this way, or Louis Spence, or a small child--anyone shrill or grating.  It's a catch-all term of abuse for anyone whose behaviour is outré in a way that people consider otherwise unjustifiable.  This is a term of discipline, meant to evoke shame.

This first started niggling at me when I was seventeen.  My high school's yearbook committee had planned a page devoted to photos of couples kissing (which was dumb), and administrators had excised a photo of a pair of my lesbian classmates from the final product while preserving the rest of the page (which was dumber).

The message was clear: the school didn't see our relationships as valuable or meaningful in the same way as our heterosexual classmates, but rather as obscene. The administrators advanced two arguments in their defense: first, that the young ladies involved would benefit from not having a permanent record of a relationship they might later characterize as a youthful indiscretion (a courtesy not advanced to a straight couple who had vowed on the page that they would be "still together ten years from now" but who had broken up between the taking of the photo and the yearbook printing); and second, that any further debate over the fairness of this decision would distract other students from their important studies.

Naturally, we organized a kiss-in.  That is to say, we called up the local newspaper and tv news and told them that all the high school students would be kissing each other in a variety of gender permutations out on the school lawn one afternoon.  The form of this protest was considered.  It held up as ludicrous the idea that being photographed kissing your girlfriend might be shameful, and demonstrated that failing to value us queers as students was going to be more distracting than just treating us like everybody else.  It referenced the golden era of American protest, and it had a hook to draw in the media (hot teen sex lawn).  We did get a good amount of coverage, and although we had to add our own lesbians to the yearbook that spring, they made damn sure to acknowledge the existence of queer students in the following years.  It was also, incidentally, the first time I ever kissed someone.  A successful protest all around, I would say.

So it was with some dismay that I read a letter in the paper (an early form of online commenting!) the next day, admonishing the editors for deigning to attend the protest, grousing about all the "giggling bisexuals" on the local news, and generally complaining that it was clear that all the protestors wanted was attention.  Well, yeah.

The more I considered it, the more of a mystery it became to me.  Attention seems like such a Maslovian need--would we sigh "ugh, what a food whore" when we see a starving man?  "She's only doing that because she's looking for a sense of security and belonging in a group."  Attention is how we understand ourselves to have a reciprocal social connection with others.  Not being attended to frequently by people in your life fucks with your sense of self.  Ask a homeless man, charged with the task of soliciting permission to survive from every passerby, how dehumanizing a lack of attention can be. 

Then I started looking at whom the epithet was directed--first, children and reality show subjects.  Second, trolls and bullies.  And thirdly, women in the public eye, queers of all stripes, and people of color who complained of institutionalized racism.  People it's not applied to include parents, reality-show creators, the owners of sports franchises, and straight men in general (hard to be attention-seeking when your gaze is constantly subjectified). 

So.  The framework that's being encoded in the pejorative use of "attention-seeking" is that some people have an excessive desire for our finite attention, like small children, and that ignoring them will serve both to punish them for their bad behaviour and to help them grow up into strong, capable straight white men who dress conservatively.  This is untenably paternalistic, and I reject it.

There is, however, one instance in which I support the diabolization of attention-seeking, and, spoiler warning, it's when corporations do it.  I am profoundly annoyed whenever I see a corporate blog post end with an exhortation to "join the conversation!" or "tell us what you think!"  It's a lazy and useless attempt at online community-building, one which attempts to shunt all the work of fostering a discussion space onto commenters.  Moreover, it's one part of a creeping systemization of creatives working for free (not, as I wrote initially, "pro bono") to make profits for corporate stockholders--regard the ads you see regularly nowadays which ask you to produce content for more advertising campaigns, presenting this as a fabulous creative opportunity rather than a pure scam.

It's really getting to the point where capital is in such a strong negotiating position that it can demand years of free service from a worker before paying him, that he may prove a faithful and uncomplaining employee.  We can fight this, but we need one thing.  Workers of the world: get attention.

You're Doing Gender Wrong

I enjoy watching pop videos, I guess.  I'll certainly watch them for hours until I've had my fill.  Sometimes I even like the songs.  But mainly I enjoy watching brief linguistic and visual spectacles on the Semiotics Channel.  Take Mike Posner--if you listen to his lyrics, he just sounds like a classically-trained date rapist.  Classically-trained in date rape, I mean, not music.  But the videos for his odious songs are great!  "Cooler Than Me" has him stealing sunglasses off hipsters and looking into different film universes through them, and in "Please Don't Go" the emotional pain of a breakup causes the world to fragment and artifact around Posner like a badly-streamed video.  And every week produces a new guilded turd of similar caliber. 

Generally these days UK pop videos are fashion shows whose central themes alternate between a kind of Babestation Lite and personal affirmations that you are, in fact, okay to just be yourself, even if maybe you don't look and/or fuck like the video people.  So basically music television has become women's magazines, with all the conflicting messages about women's roles that that implies.  I'm open to the idea that young women may be in need of someone to tell them that becoming the world's most lifelike Realdoll is only one of the many things they can aspire to, of course.  I'm just not sure that message is best delivered by a writhing professional dancer with no skirt or trousers.

One style of video I have come to find especially grating is the specific claim, made over and over again, that women are in fact just as good as men and can achieve anything they want.  This was a brave sentiment in 1961; the fact that it's still in heavy rotation in 2011 would seem to imply that it hasn't really soaked in, despite the very different material conditions of first-world women these days.  These songs--Jessie J's "Do It Like A Dude" is the one in current rotation, but previously we had Alexandra Burke's "Broken Heels", a couple entries in the genre from Beyonce, and basically Pink's entire oeuvre--they appear to stem from a sense of inadequacy at not being male, a kind of "penis envy", if I may coin a phrase.  And the answer in the videoverse is to do what men do, but sexier. 

This approach misses out one of the major conceptual gains of the feminist movement, aside from how it got pretty much everyone to agree that there was some historical point at which women were getting a raw deal (currently debates tend to rage about whether we should be locating this point in the past or the present).  The gain I'm referring to is the capacity to question the gender binary.  Rather than attempting to slavishly duplicate men's lives, only with killer heels and bouncing a baby on the hip, we could use feminist intellectual tools to stand back and ask whether the mass of men have it so good today that women ought to expend their energy on catching up. 

Also of note: I am apparently so straight these days, or Jessie J's hoodie-playsuit and wacky gurning antics are so terrible, that I didn't notice that the backing dancers for her number are largely delicious-looking Afro-Carribbean butches.  J, much like Lady Gaga or myself, identifies as bisexual, so I guess I'm meant to feel some kind of solidarity.  I don't.  Also they keep mentioning that she has a heart condition.  The phrase "save your breath" springs to mind.

My beloved, let's get down to business

Can it really be so?  Have I actually decided I have something to add to a discussion of that hyperinflated term, empowerment?  Well, yes, I'm afraid that time has come.  Strap in. 

What put me over the edge this time was watching Music, Money, and Hip Hop Honeys--which I dearly hope will have the distinction of being the only show produced by the BBC to feature a presenter asking a sexual assault victim to explain how her clothes influence rapists and jurors.  What happens in the show is, one of the women (who refer to themselves as 'video girls') gets quite bubbly and animated when she puts on revealing clothing, so the presenter concludes that, far from feeling exploited and unhappy and used while performing sexually, some women find it empowering. 

Then the presenter discovers that most women performing in videos don't get paid, and that they have shockingly unrealistic expectations that they are about to be 'discovered' while gyrating, and that being so discovered would make them super-rich.  She concludes that, while some video girls may feel empowered, the power actually rests with the people making all the decisions that affect their lives, and that this power relationship is not substantially affected by their gyration. 

That seems to cover the ways I generally see "empowerment" used in discussion.  So what I want is to tease out some of the meanings and assumptions when different people talk about empowerment.  I made a chart. 

As Twisty classically pointed out, the term has been co-opted by advertisers, tied firmly into the ideals of consumption.  At some point, "empowerment" was decoupled from the actual substance of power in capitalist society, namely the ownership of money and property, which is handy because open discussions of wealth do not benefit capital.  So the main way empowerment's used today is to describe feelings. 

Now, I am sick to death of empowerment discourse which is about personal feelings and not substantive measures of social power (i.e. money, i.e. redistributing money more evenly among existing humans, i.e. people pissing and moaning about the status quo but if you try and change it suddenly you're a communist).  Personal feelings pay for jack shit. 

Moreover, it seems that people who want to talk about feelings of empowerment are happy to imply that individual empowerment is simply collective empowerment at a smaller scale.  Individual empowerment is plainly not the secret to collective empowerment: I may gain a great deal of personal power by marrying a billionaire, but that does fuck-all for the rights of any group I purport to belong to.

What also tends to happen, as is very much the case in Hip Hop Honeys and in Twisty's worldview, is that empowerment then becomes the disempowered individual's responsibility, neatly removing oppression from the equation.  Anyone who comes to the table pre-empowered--whether by an accident of birth, lucrative work, or bald calumny--will be treated as though power is their birthright, while anyone trying to get somebody's boot off his face will have to prove both faultless and meritorious to be granted the right to occupy the ground he's being crushed into.

Mostly, though, "empowerment" is used to talk about women and sex.  What kind of sex would empower women?  What kinds of acts would sexually empowered women get up to?  What positions would be most empowering for them?  Would it be more or less empowering if the women were very attractive and young?  Would adding additional young attractive women to a sex act make it more empowering?  These questions and so many more like them have been discussed in tedious detail in the media for some reason. 

The position of third-wave feminists, if I may generalize, has tended to be that THEY are deeply afraid of a woman's pleasure, and as such every orgasm amounts to sticking it to The Man, even when you obtain it quite the other way around.  But this association of pleasure with power is problematic.

One of the themes of this blog is that pleasure is, at best, limited in its capacity to change power relationships: there's a lot of pleasure and peace in complying with society's plans for your ilk.  And unlike Homo Economicus, we often do things to get along, or to impress a lady, or to be sociable, or to have self-respect, which may not garner us or our identity-politics group greater social clout.  Making empowerment a stand-alone measure of whether an action is morally positive collapses a bunch of relevant factors into a black-and-white caricature of human lives, emotions, and social relationships, which I guess explains why it's so widely used.  

Blood & Salt

The things that managed to interest me about Salt (a largely unremarkable entry into what, to me, will henceforth always be the Jack Bauer genre) are, unsurprisingly, gender issues, courtesy of Angelina Jolie.  By the IMDB's account, Tom Cruise was originally attached to play the part of Evelyn Salt, but backed out when he discovered the film would portray him married to the Marxist from The Counterfeiters.  The part was subsequently rewritten for Angelina Jolie, which seems to have mainly involved changing the pronouns.  I approve!  Jolie is a fine actor and high in essential charisma, though I always wish she'd get back up to her Gia weight because right now the way her robust head is set on that tiny, ropey neck makes her look like a spoon.* 

But imagining each scene as it would play with a man of equal height also allowed me to imagine I might be observing something about the culture, something I could later use as a jumping off point for gassing about gender equality in a blog entry.  So: I believe that Tom Cruise's torture scene would have been longer, and I believe the discussion I had in the car driving home wouldn't have been about whether crashing a van into a police car would have snapped Cruise neatly in twain.  I believe, too, that I can back up my belief with comparisons to pretty much all the other 24-style action thrillers, which depict with loving detail the suffering of their leads.  To keep this fairly brief let's just take it as read. 

It would be usual to follow this line down a regular feminist argument: women are presented in media as weaker than men in their ability to withstand pain, when in fact blah blah childbirth, oorah.  I feel that, besides being the kind of bullshit that social conservatives use to argue that men and women may have their separate spheres, but each is of equal importance and equally fulfilling, this argument is just missing something.  I can't truly blame anyone for missing it, because, pardon me for getting all Morpheus here, we're soaking in it.   What we've become blind to by its constant naturalization in basically all media is violence against men, aka "violence". 

Men are constantly situated in media as the ideal subjects of violence.  I'm not saying there's not also an agenda running in some Hollywood films of punish-the-feminine; that would be a silly claim.  But we perceive depicted violence against women as particularly brutal against a backdrop of near-constant violence against men.  Salt, for example, kills somewhere between twenty and a hundred men in her film and I think kicks a lady cop in the chest, but the villain is unforgivably evil because he shoots a female attaché after shooting a dozen equally defenseless dudes. 

A conversation about how men have it kind of rough is uncommon in feminist circles, though I know so many women with interests in genders outside their own.  Primarily, if one brings up the fact that men are more likely to be the victims of violence than women and that this is normalized and celebrated in media, it is viewed as an attempt to undercut and equate violent victimization of men with dehumanization and control of women, drawing attention away from this important subject.  Fair enough, but who's going to stand against systematic, socially-approved gender-based violence if not feminists? 

Now, I enjoy very much the privilege of being considered unhittable.  I've only been punched once, in the fourth grade, and I doubt there are many men who can say the same.  But it seems to me that the protection I enjoy from being considered an appropriate target for violence isn't based on a recognition of my human dignity, but rather on a societal calculation of the value of protecting me as a resource.  Men's value is calculated differently, and so they are naturalized as the targets and perpetrators of violence.  While they are overrepresented as CEOs and politicians, so too are they overrepresented as the homeless, prisoners, and soldiers.  The Expendables, as opposed to Precious.

So one of the things we could do to increase gender equity in the affluent West is increase assaults, robberies, and carjackings against women, and of course by women.  We could get comfortable with the idea of more women being homeless and more women being exploded and shot fighting for us.  We could accept that whatever men are experiencing is the gold standard for what should be considered human, and strive always toward getting women to experience the same shit.  Or we could acknowledge that men are disproportionately the victims of violent crime, stop viewing and portraying that as perfectly reasonable, and try to, you know, decrease violence, particularly state-sponsored violence, against them, just like we campaign and rail against violence toward women.  That's the option I like. 

* It is wrong to focus on women's appearances in this manner.  Terribly, terribly wrong.

On The Perils Of Representation

 I borrowed this PSA poster--yes, let's say borrowed, I am definitely one day going to return to that university and replace that poster--from a bathroom stall at a university, because I think it is a poetic bit of propaganda.  It allows for a fair depth of deconstruction, which I like in an image.  Before reading on, I suggest you familiarize yourself with the ideas of literary and film criticism, particularly the concept of a "reading" of a text.  I don't want to have to delete a bunch of comments going "you're wrong because that's not what the creators meant" like I did when I said Disney's The Little Mermaid was about interracial relationships. 

So: what are our elements?  Black hand, money, white hand, disease.  I say that this will extend to metaphors about black people, white people, commerce, and all varieties of malady.  So: White imperialists come to black nations with the promise of enriching commerce, but instead blight them with poverty and disease.  Or a corruption affects all commerce, poisoning black and white alike.  Or the green bugs are not pathologies, but the "germ" of new life, created by the flow of currency.  Or money is germy.  Or black people are germy.  Note that this last (and maybe the first if we're being picky) is racist.  Indeed, there are several racist readings of the text of this image, even without getting into the positioning with respect to the viewer and who is accepting what and so on. 

Let us consider two hypothetical images like this, one with two black hands, and one with two white hands.  Because race, like most human categories, has a marked and an unmarked (or default) status, only one will appear to the casual observer (particularly a casual observer from a default category) to be dealing directly with race.  This problem is a Known Issue with race.  What are some of the proposed solutions (i.e. ways to avoid being called racist while portraying non-whites in media) and what are the possible drawbacks to each one?

• Always ignore race
Maybe a noble thought, but the problem is that people can't actually do this.  Largely it boils down to ignoring the fact that everyone in your portrayal is white due to the consequences of some unstated assumptions.

• Harp on race constantly
Annoying and exhausting for anti-racists, racists, and people who feel that not much caring puts them more in the former group than the latter.  Leads to films like Crash. 

 • Be black
Wait, hear me out.  In media contexts, people from marginalized groups tend to be granted more latitude to express opinions only on the matter of their specific group's relation to the mainstream, on the grounds that people from marked categories are likelier to be expert on these subjects than people from default categories.   More comprehensibly, on tv, black people get to talk shit about black and white people and no one except racists or academics or racist academics will really take exception.  Of course, there is a firmly-established political culture dedicated to catering to upset racists, so this is still a bit dicey.  Other possible drawbacks: society won't just let you become black for some bullshit reason.  And, I don't know if this is true, but I heard somewhere that there are disadvantages to being black in America that outweigh the notional pleasure of knowing that you could still potentially be on tv if you use the word "nigger" extensively. 

 • Tokenism/Diversity Checklist casting
Regardless of their level of racial savvy, pretty much everyone can tell if you're doing this.  The impulses that drive this style of character creation (a bid for universal appeal) usually also preclude fully humanizing any characters, and because the desire to have "one of each kind" of cast member need not spring from any actual political awareness, it's easy for it to be accompanied by a bunch of racial stereotypes or for Ma-Ti to not really have any good powers. 

 • Use only white people
Don't...don't actually do this, as a strategy or otherwise.  Besides being patently inhumane, people do eventually notice, and then you either have to justify it (questionable) or change (difficult).   

 • Stop depicting humans
This can backfire pretty easily.  Certain suites of characteristics you might wish to portray with a non-human character, George Lucas, are already associated with poisonous racial stereotypes and whether or not you meant them that way everyone will assume the worst.  Also, people generally need to be involved at some stage, whether in voice, character design, general aesthetic, writing, or premise, and any of these people can have unexamined racial biases or ignorance that make their way into the final product. 

 • Alien casting method
Maybe you know the story, but the scriptwriters for Alien supposedly specified that all the characters were "unisex", and encouraged the casting of actors of whatever gender to play any of them, except Ripley, who was definitely going to be a dude.  While a favored technique of mine, this can only work in situations where race and gender are genuinely interchangeable, and as such is limited in its capacity to tell stories in which these are meaningful dynamics. 

 • God, this is tricky.  What would Solomon do?  

 Oh goddamit it Solomon.

Experiments in Headlessness

This is my favorite skirt.  It's made of heavy brown jersey, constructed quite simply with a waist yoke and a long, slightly wrapped drape.  According to the label it's made by "Lux" and is largely polyester and rayon. 

I got it at a charity shop in Tacoma for $4, about six years ago.  The only thing I know about its former owner is that she put it in the dryer: the jersey is heavily pilled.  I suspect she was as short as me, or shorter. 

I wear this skirt approximately every day when I'm in my house.  I like it because it is slightly glamorous and romantic to go about in a long skirt instead of sweatpants or jeans, and because it occludes my legs, which I consider overly sexual.  I've seen a few similar skirts in online Islamic clothing stores, and that feels slightly glamorous and romantic, too.  However, going up and down stairs in this skirt is a constant worry, especially when I am carrying something. 

I've worn it outside the house a few times, but I don't usually because it drags along the ground, and it is heavily pilled, and because it is special to me and I find I derive psychological benefit from armoring my precious self with less personal clothes when I go out in the world. 

I also like, though I almost never take advantage of, the transformative potential in such a simple garment with so much fabric.  I occasionally use it as a coverup after a shower. 

I am resolved to create more of my own clothes and buy less, to be a few threads less-entangled in consumer capitalism.  One of the things I will do when I'm comfortable sewing and serging jersey fabrics is make dozens of copies of this skirt in varying lengths and colors.

if green pears you like

If I consider it logically, I don't think I'm particularly fashion-forward. I'm the wrong size and shape for a fashionista, runways bore me, I'm afraid of shoes over 3" high, and, most damning of all, I come from an area deep in the irradiated middle of a certain gauche continent.  Nevertheless, it is often my experience that I will fix an object in mind and hunt it fruitlessly for weeks, finally settling on something overpriced and merely similar, only to find a few months later the discount racks flooded with that selfsame object, now a full-on trend.  Interpreting this as some kind of uncanny knack for fashion would be akin to taking my stereo turning on during a thunderstorm as evidence of the existence of ghosts who hate lightning and love Tori Amos.  Still, I'll try my hand at a few predictions. 

INEVITABLE TRENDS
• Steampunk: all the kids who were going to be goth will be this for the next fifteen years, which is a palette-shifted form of goth with brown standing in for black, gold for red, and gears for spiders.  All the kids who were going to be ravers will be werewolves, I guess?
• Head scarves for young muslimahs, but also for non-Islamic punkas protesting the interminable culture wars and girls-gone-wildism. 
• Drag--it will be fashionable for men to dress feminine, and men who refuse will be considered gay. 
• Increasingly obvious factory mistakes in clothing, from "raw edge" hems through "contrast crease details" on prints, right up to the point where workers' fingers are fashionably serged into ruching.  Also look for the return of clothes which are just square, unfinished bolts of cloth, sold as "the universally-flattering sari look".
• A haircut that's, like, a kind of reverse Travis Bickle, with a strip shaved jauntily up the middle and the rest of the hair longer
• Ironic swastikas; ironic yellow stars
• Tooth embellishment; neck tattoos
•All 20th-century decades' retro, always, simultaneously, forever

 GONE FOREVER
• The big platform tennis shoes of the 90s.  I miss them. 
• Anything that takes a great deal of sewing and tailoring to construct 
• Lipstick
• Being "white"
• Ties for men
• Most hats and gloves
• Pubic hair.
• All vintage clothing, eventually, unless it is sealed in lucite
• Clowns; panties
• The concepts of decency and privacy