o hai conservative movement

Jason Mattera, spokesperson for the Young America’s Foundation, thinks I “whine[d] like a little girl,” and writes about it. I disagree:

Looks like Jason Mattera can’t handle a little criticism. After I wrote this piece about how he and his organization denied me entrance to the YAF conference after previously accepting my application, he responded on the YAF blog. In the process of calling me “this girl” who “has quite the imagination,” he misstated or distorted so many facts that it would be pointless to correct them all. After all, while I am an ethical journalist who would never dream of fabricating quotes or making anything up, no one recorded our conversation at the YAF registration desk, and at this point it’s my word against his. But regardless of who said what, Mattera’s tone in his post demonstrates that he‘s the one who’s crying like a baby, even as he attempts to demonstrate his power and authority over a younger, female adversary.

Well, at the risk of disappointing Mattera, that’s not how this works. I don’t cry. And, as I told Mattera in person on Tuesday, and subsequently wrote in the above post, if the conservative movement thinks it’s going to regain its power by trying to publicly silence and intimidate a single progressive intern, it is most gravely mistaken.

I look forward to seeing what happens next. I do so enjoy being a part of the vast left-wing conspiracy.

QOTD (2009-08-05)

Embedded in Salon’s interview with writer Hannah Friedman is a perfect expression of what’s wrong with life skills/health classes in our schools, when Friedman is asked whether it’s an issue that she doesn’t condemn the drug use she portrays in her young-adult book:

I talk in the book about the research I did when I first started experimenting with marijuana. I really educated myself. I talk about the pros and cons, and I think I portray educated experimentation.

When I was in the DARE program, there was a very cartoonish characterization of drugs. Everything was bad. They showed videos of a joint and a heroin needle chasing kids around a playground. So when I saw people smoking marijuana, and they weren’t evil or violent, I came to doubt all of that information. If you teach abstinence-only sex ed and kids see that some of their experiences are contrary to what they learned, they’re going to think that everything that was taught to them was wrong. It’s dangerous to give kids half-truths.

Yes yes yes yes yes. It seems to me that whereas there’s a broad consensus on the left that abstinence-only sex ed doesn’t work, fewer people are criticizing the DARE program’s propagandistic approach to drug education. After my eight years in the California public schools and now, in college, it’s pretty easy to see that DARE didn’t work, or at least not for most people. Anecdotally speaking, I’d say that most of my peers have drunk alcohol underage or smoked pot. Some of them have tried hallucinogens, or cocaine. Scare tactics in fifth grade didn’t stop that, often for the reasons Friedman explains very well: DARE teaches that there is this amorphous entity called “drugs,” and they’re all very dangerous and very evil and very scary. If you get a little older, see a few more things, and realize that weed isn’t as dangerous as speed (rhyme intentional), you’re probably going to get curious and smoke a joint or two. Or several.

Plus, hell, this is teenagers we’re talking about. They’re going to try things out—particularly weed and alcohol, and possibly prescription drugs, because that’s what’s available to them. It doesn’t matter whether these things are illegal, and it doesn’t matter whether kids have been brainwashed against them. Just as abstinence-only sex ed doesn’t teach kids about contraception but neglects to realize that kids will invariably have sex anyway, abstinence-only drug ed thinks that by telling kids that all drugs are unilaterally bad, they can avoid having to tell you more nuanced information about safety that you otherwise have to learn through life experience and self-education. That’s not a good way to learn when you’re playing with mind-altering substances, and it makes kids careless.

I won the DARE essay contest at my elementary school, with a rhyming acrostic poem. It’s a pretty embarrassing artifact, but when I rediscovered it in a folder of my old schoolwork a little while ago, I was struck by the fact that the prevailing sentiment of the poem is “drugs are bad. Resist peer pressure.” Apparently I didn’t learn much about different kinds of drugs, what they look (or smell) like, what their effects are, which ones have significant risk of overdose, that sort of thing. By the time you’re in high school—or maybe even middle school; I led a sheltered life—those are pieces of information that are going to become very relevant. As Friedman indicates through the frankness of her memoir, it’s naïve to pretend that adolescents won’t run up against a situation where drugs (including alcohol) will seem very tempting indeed. And so it’s time life skills caught up.

Oh Young Conservatives.

I was registered to attend parts of the Young America’s Foundation’s National Conservative Student Conference, but when I got to the venue this afternoon, their spokesperson wouldn’t let me in because I work for part of a progressive think tank. I don’t know whether to be irritated or highly amused. This is what happened:

I had barely told the people working registration my name when Jason Mattera, YAF’s spokesperson, came running up.

“Who are you with?” he asked me.

After some miscommunication, we established that he was asking where I’m an intern, and I replied that I’m an intern here at Campus Progress. There was an awkward pause.

“Sorry,” Mattera said.

“What do you mean, ‘sorry’?” I asked. “I received an email confirmation that said I was registered. I don’t see what the problem is.”

Mattera explained that the problem was that I’m a Campus Progress intern, and that since I’ve been liveblogging the conference all morning, I wouldn’t be allowed in, since blogging isn’t allowed at YAF’s conference (despite the fact that attendees have been tweeting about the conference all day). I told Mattera that struck me as bizarre, and a little bit like censorship. He suggested that I tell this to my “friends in the White House, and maybe they’ll pass a law to make us let you in.” Mattara is, apparently, unaware of the fact that it is Congress, not the White House that passes laws. Politely deciding not to embarrass him further, I instead pointed out that Campus Progress’s National Conference welcomed attendees of all different viewpoints and encouraged them to blog and tweet about the conference—some did.

Mattera told me this was “comparing apples to oranges … this is a conference for conservative students.” In fact, the two situations are kind of the same thing, and it’s YAF that looks bad. Campus Progress sponsors a conference with progressive themes, and yet it includes students who hold a wide range of views, and it certainly doesn’t turn students away on ideological grounds after previously confirming their registration.

I asked Mattera why his organization was so desperate to keep students with different viewpoints out (okay, I used the word “censorship”), and his response was that I could watch the livestream online. It seems strange that Mattera is willing to broadcast the event to the whole Internet but won’t let registered interns in to the event.

“Well, if this is what the conservative movement is doing to attract young people, I’m not sanguine about its future,” I said.

Mattera laughed at me, and then replied, “Goodbye—oh wait, here, have an Obama fist bump.” I refused his proffered fist, and he added, “Why don’t you move to Canada?” He seemed to think this suggestion was hilarious. (The fantastic thing about Mattera’s parting shot is that I do, in fact, have dual citizenship with Canada, have lived there, and will actually be going there in just under three weeks.) I turned and walked back into the elevator.

If there are young conservatives reading this, I really hope Jason Mattera doesn’t represent how you address your political ideology.

Hair and Hippies and Gender Panic; or, Today’s Nibble of Rambling Cultural Criticism

This morning I’ve been mulling over the cultural significance of the huge cultural controversy that hair length engendered in the late 1960s. I’m sure this has been commented on many times before, but on personal blogs that have about 30 daily pageviews, you’re allowed to reinvent the wheel.

Anyway, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, as fashions started by the hippies entered the mainstream and major events like Woodstock, the Newport Folk Festival (which turned 50 this week), and the anti-Vietnam protests brought the countercultural aesthetic into the public eye, they caused a furor among many older and more conservative people who didn’t know how to react to styles that favored jeans over suits and ties for men and dresses for women; young men who wore their hair long and young women who wore their hair short. One of the most frequent tropes that comes up in conversations about the ’60s kids is a shouted question, either from an older person or a little kid: “Hey! Are you a boy or a girl?”

This, of course, is part of the thematic content of the “American tribal love-rock musical” Hair, whose title song is spurred by naïve inquiries from an older woman, who initially mistakes one of the more effeminate male characters for a woman. In the ensuing song, the whole cast revels in the idea of long hair and the sense of liberation from society’s conformity it suggests—and since the musical is named after that celebration of a fashion statement, it makes it seem as if it’s the hair length that’s driving the show’s hymns to sex, drugs, and peace as well. But what’s interesting is how the whole hair issue is inextricably entwined with a gender dynamic—it’s pretty clear that many people objected to the long-hair-for-men trend because it did blur the distinctions between gender roles and create a situation that made it more difficult to gender individuals. Gerome Ragni and James Rado (the writers of Hair) recognized this in an interesting way: the woman who is confused by the androgynous male character and sets off the title song is really a man in drag, who throws open his fur coat at the end of the song to reveal that he’s just wearing shorts underneath. (It makes me, anyway, wonder what sorts of insecurities someone might have that they would be so obsessed with trying to discern someone’s gender and be made so anxious when that’s more difficult.)

It’s weird that a movement and culture which was, in point of fact, relatively gender-normative and even at times misogynistic (look at the sexual objectification of women by SDS members, or the gendered factionalization of the gay liberation movement, or the fact that it took until the late ’70s for second-wave feminism to really take hold) should have spurred so much cultural anxiety about the blurring of gender definitions, but I think that is as indicative as anything else of the omnipresence of gender issues in our society: if we are going to have a cultural panic about something, it might as well be gender and we might as well assume that the root of a generation’s cultural shift is gender, even when it isn’t.

However, Hair the musical subliminally introduces an important point here: in some ways, I think, the ambiguous gendering introduced by the hair problem provides an excuse for the homoeroticism evident in the relationship of the two main characters, Berger and Claude. And so it is they who can be transgressive and dance sexually even as they treat cavalierly the women in their life—one of whom is pregnant, but they don’t know by whom, and one of whom gets cruelly cast aside by Berger like the yellow shirt which gets used as a symbol of their relationship. While this rambling probably doesn’t make a lot of sense to someone who isn’t familiar with Hair (though you should be! Read the book, or go see it if you’re able! The Broadway revival is awesome), it does demonstrate how androcentric the so-called “sexual revolution,” and all the questions of gender of this period, were. The crisis of masculinity caused by the draft and those who dodged it, male-centered gay liberation, the way that women were used by people like the men in SDS… all this evidences the advances made in the freedom of masculine sexuality seemingly almost at the expense of feminine sexuality.

Which, I suppose, goes a long way towards explaining why the virgin-whore dichotomy is still so dominant in our culture.

Princeton History Department Pride

Yes, the pun on “pride” was sort of intended, because the reason I’m so excited is that I just read Steven Epstein’s laudatory review in The Nation of Margot Canaday’s new book The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. I took Prof. Canaday’s class spring semester, and what we learned about “Gender and Sexuality in Modern America” turned my world upside-down. I think it was partly because I realized for the first time that the inclusion of LGBT narratives and experiences and cultures in the world of academe was legitimate. I know that seems self-evident and a rather silly realization for a queer kid to come to, but it was inspiring to me. Now I find myself in the position of putting the gears in motion to study LGBT history in the Princeton history department. I may not be so much interested in the legal/legislative/federal issues that she addresses, but when I finally settle on a thesis topic, I’ll have part of Prof. Canaday’s thesis—that homosexuality and the state are inextricably linked—to thank. Without her class, I don’t think that I would have come to the conclusion that the study of American history and culture necessarily incorporates the study of sexuality.

The Importance of Things That Are Not Politics

I had two conversations today about, basically, why I’m not interested in making a career in politics or political journalism or Washington, and because of the way my social life looks today I suspect that I might have more of this type of conversation later on. So I figured some of this bore rehashing and explaining, because here in Washington I feel sometimes as if it’s very difficult to justify an interest in anything other than politics and policy and government. What follows may seem unbearably personal and navel-gazing, but I do believe it’s relevant and something that deserves to be unpacked, so please bear with me.

In short, it comes down to preference. I’m interested in history, in things that aren’t happening right now. I try to keep up with the events that happen every day, but I find it exhausting, and I don’t think it always gives me the perspective I’d like to observe longer-term trends and patterns. I think I can help inform what’s going on every day by providing the historical context, and that’s something I want to do as a professional historian when I grow up. Somewhat secondarily, I’m interested in doing cultural history, and while I find political history interesting (I’m currently a research assistant on a really cool project that has much more to do with politics and Washington, and that’s fun), it’s not my main research interest. It’s not what I want to write my senior thesis on, for example, or eventually my dissertation. And mostly I think that’s okay—I think it’s okay to agree to disagree on what is most interesting; we do that on a daily basis. I also don’t follow sports or television, and I don’t have a lot of qualms over the fact that I don’t find those things very interesting.

But here in Washington, where I work (albeit in a very small insignificant capacity) in progressive political journalism, I am inclined to feel that the stuff I write about in this space, in particular, is quite uninteresting, quite insignificant, and quite irrelevant. I see this break down along a line I can almost gender: I feel as if the world which values an understanding of policy and political science and academic political theory is concrete, physical, quantitative, precise, aggressive—masculine. And I feel as if the world I inhabit of queer theory and social history and literature and countercultures is wishy-washy, abstract, irrelevant, and sort of “soft”—feminine. I know what sexist territory I’m running into by breaking things down that way, but I’m doing so because I think it goes a long way towards explaining why I get the sense that educated Washington society values one and not the other. It’s no secret that “masculine” things are valued more highly over “feminine” things in our society, which is a perfect example of why our society is sexist and that’s something anyone who does gender studies could tell you (though of course gender studies falls into that “insignificant” realm that I feel my stuff falls into). So it doesn’t seem like that illegitimate of a claim to make. But it sucks.

Of course, if I feel insignificant, it’s because I am, but not for systemic reasons. For example, if I don’t want to make a career in political writing, my friends in progressive political journalism don’t want to make a career in academic history and cultural studies. Why should they read my blog? Why should they link to it on their blogs? It doesn’t have anything necessarily to do with sexism or with politics or with how the rest of the world perceives academia. It’s just that what I do doesn’t really pertain to what they do. And that’s okay too.

Or is it? Because what I came away thinking after the two conversations I had today is that political journalism and academic history/cultural studies have more to teach each other than we might otherwise think. Both professions live in worlds which are at risk of being dreadfully out of touch with the real one, and I think we’re all aware of that. But that means we have a moral imperative (I believe) to try to engage with the larger population of the country, to write things that will be relevant and meaningful and comprehensible to people outside our immediate communities, to try to address the issues that other people are facing and not just the ones that we face. I very much want to go into academia, for example, but if I can’t find a way to make whatever I choose to focus my academic career on relevant and interesting to a wider audience, I’m going to have to find another line of work. Likewise, I believe that if a political blogger’s blog is incomprehensible to someone who doesn’t have the same depth of knowledge of current events that the blogger does, that person is doing something wrong.

And as much as we have to engage the outside world, I think that we specifically have to engage each other. The connections between politics and history are very strong even when you’re not studying political history, because a knowledge of the development of the country’s social landscape is necessary to assessing the motivations of political factions and the impact of policy upon the world outside of Washington. “Continuity and change” is the mantra of history, and for someone like me who’s interested in modern history, that arc of flux and stability runs right up to the present, where a map of the cultural and ideological layout of the country is an imperative.

So, in short, I don’t think I’m wrong to do what I do, and I don’t believe it’s less legitimate than what my friends do. I’m glad that I have friends who do different things, because it means we can have interdisciplinary communication. I hope that all us college kids with our different career tracks don’t grow up and bury ourselves so far in our towers (ivory for me, digital for my political blogger buddies) that we cease to acknowledge each other’s relevance and importance.

Piece of Cultural History Hilarity of the Day

Wow, we’re really capitalizing on this “of the day” meme, aren’t we?

From the blog of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library:

This is the binding on a recently acquired copy the Scholar’s Arithmetic, or, Federal Accountant, a textbook published in 1814 at Keene, N.H. by John Prentiss “proprietor of the copy right.”… The book is still in its original binding as issued. In this case the decorative paper is marbled paper, whose color and pattern results from laying the paper over oil pigments floating on water. Again, wear and age allow us to see what was once hidden by blue pigment. There are blocks of print separated by wide margins, signaling this sheet to be several pages of text imposed for book printing. There are 31 lines per page with a page number centered in brackets over the middle of line one. Layout is the same on both front and back covers.

What is this text? Closely reading one portion reveals a surprise.

[18]

[service] under these good people; and after
[supper] being showed to bed, Miss Phoebe,
[who ob]served a kind of reluctance in me to
[strip and go] to bed, in my shift before her, now
[the maid] was withdrawn, came up to me, and
[beginnin]g with unpinning my handkerchief
[and gow]n, soon encouraged me to go on with
[undressi]ng myself; and, still blushing at now see
[ing mys]elf naked to my shift, I hurried to get
[under th]e bed-cloaths out of sight. Phoebe
[laugh’d] and was not long before she placed

Racy stuff, indeed. One library describes books with comparable decorative papers as “Bound in boards covered with a marbled sheet from a suppressed edition of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. [Boston?, ca. 1810]”

I checked a text of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (more popularly known as Fanny Hill), and yep, that selection is from the same hilariously tacky 1749 pornographic novel. It was involved in a huge obscenity to-do at the time of its publication and an unexpurgated version wasn’t published until after the 1960 Lady Chatterley trial, which overturned British obscenity law. It was first published in the US in 1821 (though not unexpurgated until a 1963 landmark Supreme Court case), so I’d be really interested to know the story of the paper used to bind the textbook the library blog is talking about. How did an underground edition come to be produced, I wonder?

If you don’t read any of the various blogs maintained by the Princeton University Library, I highly recommend you check them out. The librarians aren’t always the most adept at writing in a snappy blog style, but they put up great pictures and facts about items in the collection. I’ve met a few of the librarians in Rare Books and Graphic Arts, and they’re wonderful people—I’m so glad that they’re reaching out to the wider community with their blogs.

Self-Promotion Never Got This Shameless

But it’s for a good reason: I’ve cracked the mainstream media! Yeah, I know, it’s only the website of the New York Times‘ “Ed Life” summer supplement, but my photo of the oven on Firestone Library’s B floor was one of the finalists in a competition they held for essays and photos about kids’ college experiences:

I love finding instances of surrealism in my daily life, and what could be weirder than an oven hanging out in Princeton’s collection of law-related books?
——————–
Emily Rutherford, Princeton University, class of 2012, history major

Ladies and gentlemen and non-gender-identified individuals, it is very gratifying indeed to see your name in print at nytimes.com.

Princeton and LGBT Community

Last Thursday night, I was talking with another Princeton student whom I’d recently met. We were agreeing that we didn’t really fit into the institutional/established Princeton LGBT community (Pride Alliance, LGBT Center, and all the events and discussion groups that surround them). We were coming, I think, from quite different places personally and in terms of our relationships to labels of queer identity, but nonetheless neither of us felt like those groups are really the right social place for us. This is hardly the first time I’d had that conversation: a couple weeks ago, I had it with a person who isn’t out, and so their relationship to the institutional LGBT structure is necessarily complicated. Frequently, I have it with friends who are out, and whose relationship to queer identity is, I suspect, as overtly uncomplicated and yet internally complicated as my own. And so I sit down to dinner at a dining-hall table made up entirely of queer folks, none of whom are involved with the institutionalized community; I organize protests with networks of straight allies who don’t participate in LGBT campus life; I know far too many students who even in college, in New Jersey, in 2009 are in the closet. And I would very much like to do something to change this, to create a more cohesive community for all these people—and myself. But I’m not sure what should be done.

I’ve been learning a lot, recently, about the struggles in the ’70s to firmly establish a Gay Alliance of Princeton, and the vandalism and harsh words and hostile atmosphere met by the students who bravely did so. An oft-consulted source of mine who was at Princeton in the ’70s and ’80s has been telling me stories about what she knew of the place of GAP on campus, and I learned that there are three boxes on GAP and its successor organizations in the University Archives—it’s interesting stuff, and I’m thinking of doing some aspect of my independent work about it. But what confuses me, I think, is how we got from a small and much-fought-against organization struggling to be a place for gay students on campus in the days of gay liberation to an unquestioned LGBT Center, administration support for LGBT students, a freshman orientation program that emphasizes diversity and acceptance, and finally the first inklings of progress on gender-neutral housing—and yet still leave so many students out. The fact of closeted Princeton is a powerful reminder, I think, that we still have so far to come, farther perhaps than many other universities do. When a university finally has an LGBT Center, I shouldn’t hear its students telling me that they are afraid their friends will see them going into it.

On the other hand, what bothers me sometimes about the institutional community is that it doesn’t agitate enough. It’s not “out there” enough. I understand that an organ of the university administration such as the LGBT Center can’t do any political advocacy or anything like that; that’s totally fine. So maybe what we lack is a group that is less institutionalized, which can be an alternative to the institutionalized community while still supporting the good work that it does. Like good sociopolitical movements everywhere (she says with tongue in cheek), maybe we just need to factionalize.

I am at Princeton in part because my pre-frosh host took me to a lunchtime event at the LGBT Center and I saw that there was an LGBT Center, and I felt like there was a place for me at Princeton, when everything I’d heard about the place was to the contrary. But I want to make it possible for every student to encounter queer Princeton without going to the second floor of Frist, or enrolling in queer theory or history or politics or theater, or showing up to an event, or even having a gay friend (yes, some kids don’t, or don’t know that they do). The person I was talking to on Thursday disagreed with me about the need for everyone to come out, the need to be confrontational; this person said that was a device that worked for Harvey Milk, but that it’s no longer 1978. To which I say that, yes, it’s been a long time since students vandalized the room of the president of the Gay Alliance of Princeton, but I’m not sure that the current state of affairs is truly helping to build a university community where everyone may be at peace with and confident about themselves.

And so I was thinking about what I can do, about what it takes to come out, and about what those of us who are out can do to help and support our classmates and friends and students and neighbors and fellow Princetonians. I’m turning over the idea of an LGBT-oriented student publication, which as far as I know (correct me if I’m wrong) would be a first for Princeton. If there’s anything I can do to help it is to write and to edit and to organize the doing of it. These blog posts are imported into Facebook, where I am quite sure this particular one will cause a shitstorm from all sides—which is great and wonderful and dialogue is awesome. But if you comment on this post, I would dearly like to hear your opinion about this particular question. Would an LGBT-oriented student publication (all able-bodied contributors, LGBT or not, welcome of course) help matters? Is it worth doing? Would you contribute, or be on the staff, or otherwise help out? And, of course, what form would such a publication take; what sort of content would it include?

I applaud the good work that has been done to change Princeton, from the founding of GAP to the present. But I also want to emphasize that it still isn’t enough, and so all of us have to do our part. It is quite possible that I have been reading way too many essays published in liberation days recently, but as far as I’m concerned, until so many people are out that the need to come out is erased for everyone (and that includes trans and genderqueer and gender-nonconforming folks, by the way), we’re not finished and we can’t be complacent and we all have to do our parts, even in our tiny university community.

Nature, Vacations, and a Sense of Place

I found myself with a sudden deep longing for nature, for woods and wild animals and deep, blue-green ocean. This summer is my first experience living in a city for a decent period of time, and it’s claustrophobic-making after a life of suburbs and small towns and—of course—the experience every so often of rural nature. I’ve come to a love of a natural, rural environment relatively late in life; it took the perspective and life experience of leaving home and seeing some of the world to realize that I do not need an internet connection every second of the day and I need time to read and to go on long walks and to listen to the ocean. It took the self-assurance to realize that my friends will not cease to exist if I drop off the face of the earth for three weeks. And it took the basic calm and slowing-down-ness that a little maturity and outgrowing of adolescence brings to realize that home is a wonderful thing when it looks like this:

Changing my voter registration to Mercer County, NJ, as I did a couple weeks ago, represented the divorce of my North American regional identity from suburban southern California. I’m lucky that I get something of a choice in these matters, and that I do have family roots in British Columbia, Canada. I’m doubly lucky that I’ll actually be there in just under a month.