Portfolio Rejects

So it's time once more to try and go get a job, doing art or something else.  Meaning time to look over my drawing folder and see if I think any of it is fit for the eyes of potential bosses.  None of this is, to my mind.

This won't do on account of how it's sexy fanart. Plus the 

anatomy seems weird, like her neck is too bendy or something?  

Probably worth a redraw.

Unfinished, plus it doesn't really demonstrate the compliant spirit 

I associate with successful employment.

This is a picture of a developmentally-unfortunate dragon.

WHEN I LIVED IN THE PALACE

Remember when Ursula was talking about how she used

to live in Triton's palace? I wanted to see her young and dangerous years.

ZIEGFELD GIRL

This one is a bit nude, plus I think I can do the lighting better now.  Redraw!

YAY FOR DOLLS

Surely you cannot submit paper dolls, particularly paper dolls 

you've made of yourself or anime characters.

STRIPER

I'm worried that this one (of popular Shadowrun 

were-tiger Striper) is racist, and also about the lighting again.

Potential employers must never know that I routinely fill

character commissions for D&D friends.

Much pride still in my Doom emoticon set,

but it is possible to notice that the anger balloon

is pilfered from...I think a Sailor Moon game?

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.

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.  

But I'm Not Bitter Or Anything

The day after Columbine, which hit geographically close enough to home that lessons were canceled for the day in favor of having everyone sit in homeroom and watch the red-faced teacher publicly buttonhole the goth kids to ask them why they were being so weird and whether they had plans to blow us all up, an unusual thing happened to me.  It was at lunch, in the cafeteria, where because I had transferred to the school in the third of the three years one spends at middle school, and because I had zero social skills or charisma and was so unfashionable that dogs bark at me as I halt by them, I usually sat in a far corner with two Jehovah's Witnesses, Kevin, a sad roly-poly bullying victim I could never politely get rid of, and Erica, a girl who would alternately hit me and try to touch me up.  It was this day, sitting there, when one of the popular girls approached the table. 

I've seen Mean Girls and I'm still not quite sure I have a handle on what "popular" means.  It doesn't seem to mean that many people like you; I guess it's meant to have something to do with occupying a coveted spot in the hierarchy.  There were some girls I liked and wished I was their friend and considered popular, though whether they were or not I will never know.  There was Michelle, who was chubby and had cropped dyed-black hair but wore lots of eyeliner and jewelry and had an amazing singing voice.  She was supposedly "easy" but then as now that designation didn't make a lot of sense to me and simply served to lend her a mystique.  And there was Jennifer, who was a plain-faced sport billy and student council member who was unfailingly nice to everyone.  This was neither of those girls, but some other person who, because I've never committed her name to memory, I'll call Claire Bennet. 

I had a class with Claire, in which she mostly distinguished herself with a sneering air towards the idea of knowing anything, and a Palinesque smugness when presenting her class projects that I assume came from how secure she was in the knowledge that nothing she did academically would affect the real parts of her life.  She was also quite mean to both teachers and students.  To my knowledge, before she approached my table, I had never personally interacted with her and had no indication that she was aware of my existence.  I was basically aware of our different positions in the hierarchy, hers being "popular" and the most common appellation I'd heard for myself being "dirty", as in "why would you want to hang out with the dirty kids".  So when she approached me I already disliked her and doubted her intentions. 

It transpired that, following the massacre, Claire was having some kind of crisis of conscience that was prompting her to try and stop the next school shooting by reaching out to the down-and-outs and inviting them over to her table and presumably at some point re-enacting the makeover scene from films.  It had clearly not occurred to her that I would consider spending time in her company as anything but a longed-for privilege, and she reacted with a sudden shower of invective, cursing me and my sort, when I gave her the kind of brush-off she would have given Kevin if he'd asked her out.  She flounced off back to her table, and while I'd like to think she took with her the idea that maybe not everyone wanted to be her, it was probably more along the lines of confirmation that the unpopular deserve every bit of it. 

This is all to say that the scene in The Breakfast Club where Molly Ringwald calmly tells Anthony Michael Hall that the reason he would not diss her to his friends is that "you look up to us" and Hall responds by laughing, crying, and telling her "You're so conceited" seems to be erring a bit on the side of saying that the popular kids are comfortable and settled in their self-images, while it's the nerds who are insecure and over-emotional.  I suppose if Hall had maintained an autistic affectlessness while Ringwald called him diseased and told him she hoped he'd shoot himself in the face with that flare gun, the ending where the outcasts are starting to become just a little more popular wouldn't have seemed like a happy one.

On Giving Offense

Recently, somewhat to my chagrin, I have adopted the word "retarded" into my daily vocabulary.  I don't consider this in any way laudable, and I don't intend to advance a defense of my practice.  Just because I enjoy something, that doesn't make it right, is the basic theme of this blog.  What I'm interested in is interrogating what gives the word its appeal to me and its offensive punch.  As for me, I like its sort of Southern US drawl...what're yew, some kine a ree-tawrd?  I also like (if I can move beyond that word association without insulting the South more than is absolutely necessary, as they have their own problems, the poor dears, and besides, the South seems to hate being labeled an intellectually deficient region almost as much as they hate being compelled by judicial fiat to treat fairly the people they had planned to treat like shit) how it is basically the way anybody who doesn't think much of education or curiosity (e.g., a Southerner) calls somebody stupid.  It's a word you might get a slap for saying as a child, which makes saying it at this point in my life kind of giggly and exhilarating. 

As to offense, well, thereby hangs a tale.  A certain portion of a word's offensiveness is tied to its meaning, but obviously not all, or else Richard Herring would genuinely have been censured as much by the BBC for saying "clacka-lacka-dack-dack" as if he'd said "cunty-cunty-cunt-cunt".  There are ways to refer to taboo subjects long and turgid enough to dissipate all but the most histrionic of hurt feelings, and cruel and ugly ways to phrase nice sentiments.  The offense content of swears, slurs et al., then, is mainly the implicit contract that one party ought to intend to give offense, and the other party should be courteous enough to take some of it.  People are always renegotiating one side or the other of this bargain for any term sufficiently charged with vigorous feeling--hence your reclamation efforts, your refusals to let a word "define me", your PC thuggery, your South Park episodes. 

Now, the word retard, as you probably know, is similar to the words moron, idiot, fool, simpleton, imbecile, and cretin, in that it was once advanced as a neutral term for someone with a cognitive  impairment but rapidly increased in pejorative use until its proponents abandoned it and jumped onto a new, more passive term.  Inasmuch as disabilities will likely always carry some stigma that will stick to words used to describe them, this is pretty much a treadmill for disability advocates, which sounds exhausting and disheartening.  "Retarded" is fresh enough as a term created to provoke an outpouring of sympathy that its use as a synonym for "stupid" still carries a shocking and painful sting. 

I should say, here, that like "retarded" I also have a history which does not reflect well on me.  Until I was around seventeen I had a hysterical fear of being perceived as having Down Syndrome by strangers.  I would examine my face in the mirror to make sure that no inadvertent expression would make me look slow.  I knew a couple kids in grade school who seemed to have greater than average learning disabilities--Wayne, my childhood boyfriend for around a week, who manifested an obsession with Chuck Norris before it was ironic to do so, and Michelle, an obese girl with cornrows, who could only discuss the band TLC.  They evoked a certain horror in me, particularly Michelle, whose overuse of ketchup at lunch created in me a longtime aversion to the sauce.  I tried my best to avoid them until they switched schools, just in case. 

In middle school, as a desperately fat, charmless, and unpopular child myself, I was often the remainder of any group-formation exercise, and would as such be placed by the teacher with the autistic or Down's kids.  Rather than risk displaying any kind of warm human fellow-feeling, which frankly I still have yet to develop, I treated them with an arms-length minimal politeness that I'm sure did not endear me, particularly to the autistic ones.  It was essentially a manifestation of my fear that the one thing I believed I had over the other kids, my freakish smarts, would go unrecognized or be stripped from me, and then I would have no way to feel superior (and therefore good about myself) at all. 

I don't mean to conclude with the suggestion that calling things retarded decreased my anxiety around being, if I may slightly misuse the term, socially deprived.  That was resolved instead by finding people who would tolerate me and help me build feelings of worth that wouldn't be so brittle as to shatter if someone didn't think I was smarter than them.  Today, I don't believe too much empathy can damage me, and if someone regards me as a pariah for believing that everyone deserves to be treated with respect and kindness, whether convict or miner or immigrant or ned or misogynist or paedophile or suspected Lockerbomber or bipolar or Israeli, well, I don't think that person is very nice, but I try to see where they're coming from. 

I still use that word, though.