Aesthetic of the Week; or, In Which I Go All Cultural Critic on Your Ass

(Photo: Sandro Michahelles for The New York Times)

If we can have quotes of the day (a habit I’ve somewhat fallen out of, but something I enjoy all the same), why not aesthetics of the week? I present you with the most engrossing article I’ve read this week, from the New York Times, about a theater program at an Italian prison:

As a sound-system blasted a cha-cha-cha, the men began to dance. Wearing outlandish costumes with oversize hats and wigs, and boots with 15-centimeter heels from a Milanese store that caters to drag queens, they strutted and pranced.

But this was no ordinary cast of actors. The performers were convicted criminals serving anywhere from five years to life in a maximum-security prison for crimes as varied as armed robbery and murder.

“Theater is surreal, it’s all fiction,” one inmate, Dorjan Cenka, originally from Albania, later mused. Dressed completely in white with heart-shaped red lips, Mr. Cenka was trying on his costume for the latest show by the Compagnia della Fortezza, the theater company named after the Medici-era fortress that houses the Volterra jail where the convicts are imprisoned. It would be his first time on stage and he confessed to being a little nervous. “I’m shy, I don’t like to speak in public,” he said. With a sway of his hips, he swished his Marie Antoinette-era skirt, the powdered wig on his head tottering. “I’m doing this to get over my resistance.”

The current show — “Alice in Wonderland, a Theatrical Essay on the End of a Civilization” — is loosely based on Lewis Carroll’s masterwork, but the text weaves in soliloquies from other authors, in this case Shakespeare (predominantly Hamlet) but also Genet, Pinter, Chekhov and Heiner Müller.

The article goes on to describe the production in question, which reminds me more than anything of a certain show that was all the rage in the mid-60s, rather cumbersomely entitled The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. Marat/Sade is a play-within-a-play, wherein the pathetic spectacle of the asylum inmates who lumber through a stylized narrative about the French Revolution is of course a metaphor for the oppressed masses everywhere; wherein the paragraphs of nihilistic hedonistic rhetoric that the Marquis de Sade stops the inmates’ performance to intone are rendered absurd by virtue of the fact that he, too, is behind bars, and it is only the indulgence of the asylum’s director that permits him to have written a play in which the raving and neglected actors shout, “We want our rights, and we don’t care how/We want our revolution now!”

Punzo’s production is a really cool thing, I think; at the risk of sounding patronizing, I think it’s wonderful, and a pleasant change from the American prison system, that inmates should be exposed to experimental theater and that Punzo’s workshop setup has gotten the prisoners involved in the dramatic process and inspired many to become actors when they’re released. But the beautiful and yet seemingly haphazard drag, the postmodern attitude weirdly like something of a different decade, and indeed the appearance of Punzo himself in costume (looking for all the world like Patrick Magee’s de Sade in the excellent Marat/Sade film adaptation), are all reminders of the pathos overriding the whole affair. Perhaps that was Punzo’s intention—it’s pretty natural for a production inspired by Hamlet, Genet, and the others—but it’s weird to think that the locked-in-the-asylum metaphor of Marat/Sade is, in the Italian prison’s case, entirely literal—it’s just that the deliberate madness of the former has been replaced with the nature of the latter’s theatrical style. If themes of madness don’t exist in Alice in Wonderland and Hamlet, I certainly don’t know where they do—and although I’ve only read about five pages of Our Lady of the Flowers (and, when I was in high school, sat in on an upper-division seminar about it at Berkeley, but that’s a story for another day), the circumstances of the queering and dramatizing of a strange version of prison life seem positively Genet-esque as well. What, then, is the role of actual prisoners—men who have been convicted of real-world crimes, such that they have been removed from the real world—in all of this? What does Punzo’s program say about the role of prison, and what does it say about the inmates-turned-cast-members who are no doubt far less inclined to shoot their mouths off about mid-20th-century experimental theater than this 19-year-old American know-it-all?

I’ve actually been watching the Marat/Sade film in bits and pieces over the past week, so I was particularly struck by its resonance when I first read this article a few days ago. One of the most prevalent tropes in Marat/Sade is that de Sade’s dialogue or songs or stage directions will cross a line of permissibility, or one of the inmates-turned-cast-members will lapse in self-control, and the director of the asylum, who is de Sade’s primary audience, will leap up in anger and urge that de Sade be less controversial—which, since this is the Marquis de Sade as dramatic character we’re talking about, doesn’t usually work out too well. But it makes me wonder about this production in the literal, non-metaphorical world, and the article the NYT has written about it. Where is this struggle between artistic authority and institutional authority in a world where the institution applauds the artist? What does it say about the transgressive nature of art? And does it mean that the position of the inmates has changed—or are they still pawns in the hands of institution and artist, live bodies to be manipulated in advance of some sort of goal?

HRC, fact-check your action alerts please. Thanks.

When the hell did I turn into a political blogger?

I just got an HRC email expressing unqualified joy:

Dear Emily,

I have great news to share: the Senate has passed the Matthew Shepard Act!

The bill will soon be on its way to President Obama’s desk, where he’ll get a chance to make good on his promise to sign it.

This vote came on the heels of tremendous pressure from radical right-wing groups that used every trick in the book.

They called the bill the “Pedophile Protection Act,” among other outrageous claims. They dismissed the barbaric hate crime that took Matthew Shepard’s life as a “hoax.” They flooded the Senate with hundreds of thousands of letters and calls.

But your calls, emails, and financial support for our work helped make sure the truth prevailed in the end. Without you, this victory for equal rights would not have been possible.

And then it goes on to ask me to call my senators and thank them. Which is fine, but there are a lot of problems with this email that misrepresent the current state of hate crimes in the Senate. First of all, the Matthew Shepard Act did not pass as a standalone bill, as this message indicates; it’s an amendment attached to the FY2010 defense authorization bill, which, because the Democrats cut a deal with the GOP to get the amendment passed, also features amendments introduced by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) that do some good things and some bad things but overall make the hate crimes legislation much less clean-cut. And this, according to the Washington Blade, is what Sessions had to say about the legislation, which has now been substantially impacted by him:

Prior to the vote on the amendments, Sessions spoke out on the floor Monday against the measure, which he called a “substantial overreach by Congress.”

“The bottom line is there’s nowhere near the evidence needed to justify this legislation,” he said.

Sessions said the measure provides protections for classes that “don’t have clear meanings,” and identified gender identity as such an unclear category.

“I’m not sure this is good legislation,” he said. “I think legislation ought to be crisp and clear.”

Sessions said existing hate crimes statues providing protections for race and other categories were enacted because of a substantial body of evidence showing that black people were being denied civil rights. He said LGBT Americans aren’t facing problems in a similar way.

“Gays and lesbians have not been denied access to basic things like health, schooling or the ballot box,” Sessions said, adding that gay people “have no difficulty in approaching government officials.”

Sessions also quoted a May 13 posting by gay blogger Andrew Sullivan, who called the concept of hate crimes “a hard-left critique of conventional liberal justice and the emergence of special interest groups which need boutique legislation to raise funds for their large staffs and luxurious buildings.”

“This is a gay man expressing his opinion,” Sessions said. “No doubt he takes these issues very seriously.”

Oh, well then. Because we all know that Andrew Sullivan speaks for the entire LGBT community.

Furthermore, there’s this whole matter of funding for F-22 fighter jets. The defense authorization bill currently contains funding for these planes that are apparently a waste of money; the President has said he’ll veto the bill if it retains the F-22s. The Senate scheduled to vote on an amendment stripping the funding today, and that Blade article I quoted from above said, “two sources familiar with Capitol Hill have told the Blade that a Democratic Congress wouldn’t send to a Democratic president a defense bill that he would veto,” but neither of these things is exactly a done deal. There’s a very real chance that the President could veto the bill, and then we won’t have hate crimes at all.

So, HRC, why don’t you make an effort to get in touch with reality and feed your email list information that paints the situation more accurately. As far as I can tell, the best thing to do for hate crimes is to see that the Senate gets rid of the F-22 funding, whether through this amendment or somewhere before the bill gets to Obama. And while I’m not an expert in national security or anything, getting rid of the F-22s is probably a good thing for the defense budget in general as well.

UPDATE: Kerry Eleveld, whom I trust on all matters LGBT Washingtonian, says things look good for the Levin-McCain amendment, which would strip the F-22 funding. That’s very encouraging, but it would still be unwise to count any chickens.

I don’t think that word means what you think it means…

Despite working with political bloggers, and being friends with political bloggers, and once having been a political blogger, and following a lot of political bloggers on Twitter, I don’t usually do these political-blogger-style posts where I take apart something someone wrote on some other political blog and explain why I find it really problematic. Well. Let’s just say that this time Courtney Martin’s latest article at the Prospect drove me to it. So, because I just can’t do these things in a mature fashion, get ready for a rant.

Martin’s article is titled “Lessons for Feminists from Sarah Palin,” and as soon as I figured out that’s not a sarcastic title, I knew I was going to get irritated by it. My fears were confirmed when Martin begins thus:

When Palin parachuted onto the national scene, she landed smack dab on the fault lines of gender and politics, shaking contemporary feminism to the core. Now that the dust has settled from her oh-so-sudden resignation, it’s time for feminists (the alive kind, of course) to pick our jaws up off the floor, take a deep breath and really think through what we’ve learned from her year or so in the spotlight.

Um no. That actually didn’t happen. She set feminism back decades because the GOP paraded her as a forward-looking, anti-sexist candidate, while simultaneously marketing her as a Mom, with a capital M, a provincial woman who—oh yeah—just so happens to be governor of Alaska. Not threatening at all, right? Nope, nor was the way they made her into a sex object, doing nothing to reject the cartoons of Sarah Palin naked but for animal-skin draperies, the Sarah Palin calendars and action figures, even the Sarah Palin-inspired porno that made the rounds of the internet during the election season. And Palin herself, with her strong pro-life stance, is no more in the feminist tradition than Phyllis Schlafly, another woman who took an active political role to support a platform that was decidedly anti-feminist.

So, now that we disagree on that premise, Ms. Martin, what have we so-called “feminists” learned from the soon-to-be-ex-Governor of Alaska? Oh, right, apparently that buying into a commercially-marketed notion of “femininity” or “what a woman should look like” is… feminist? This was the part of Martin’s article that I had the most problems with:

Sarah Palin appeals to a broad need among contemporary American women who want to be leaders and demonstrate their intellectual strength, but also maintain their allegiance to traditional notions of femininity. Both her RNC address and her resignation speech were filled with this subtle duality and bold permission for women everywhere to flex their muscles while painting their fingernails.

Feminism has never been about limiting anyone’s gender identity or expression — quite the opposite — but unfortunately the media have been largely successful in spinning it that way. There are women all over the country who believe feminists are anti-femininity, that women who value piety or sell Mary Kay or give their daughters Barbies are automatically disallowed from the “F club.” Sarah Palin’s feminist flip-flop during campaign season — first telling Katie Couric that she was a feminist, then telling Brian Williams that she wasn’t — certainly didn’t clear things up.

Feminists need to get better at explaining that, in fact, feminism is opposed to anything that narrows human beings’ choices around gender identity and expression. Whether you are Sarah Palin and you want to wear a perky ponytail while standing by your “dude,” or you’re Rachel Maddow and want to wear thick black glasses while standing by your partner, we defend your right to do so. Femininity is not feminism’s enemy. What we’re against is blinding following traditional gender roles. What we’re for is self- and societal analysis that leads to conscious choices about self-expression — male or female, conservative or progressive, hockey mom or butch dyke. We simply must get better at saying that aloud, in public, and getting women across America to hear us.

Um, wow. Wow. And I’m not just speechless with outrage because I have a huge crush on Rachel Maddow. Way to use loaded language that makes it seem as if the Rachel Maddows, the butch dykes, the women with “partners” instead of “dudes,” the women who aren’t into Barbies or nail polish, are the ones who are somehow limiting feminism. And oh, Ms. Martin, way to skirt around the word “lesbian.” I know you think that our butch ways are ruining everyone else’s freedom of expression, but first of all, don’t stereotype the dykes and lump gender identity in with gender expression in with sexual orientation; second of all, it’s a little more challenging to subvert gender and sexuality paradigms on a daily basis than it is to put on some makeup or be a hockey mom. I don’t think Sarah Palin’s right to be in a women’s restroom has ever been challenged; moreover, I think it’s important to remember that Palin doesn’t support same-sex marriage or other forms of LGBT equality. She doesn’t want feminism or whatever it is she stands for to allow women a full range of choice and expression. Why, Ms. Martin, should we interpret her time in the public sphere in that way?

But I think the central issue that troubles me about these grafs is that stereotypical straight suburban soccer moms and butch dykes (and please, Ms. Martin, leave it to the butch dykes to decide whether they want to be called “butch dykes”; that’s kind of a loaded term) are somehow opposite sides of some sort of Spectrum of Feminism. It’s the conflation of sexuality and gender and presentation and assuming that they somehow equal a political identity—when that is far from the case.

And then we come to Martin’s conclusion:

It may have made feminists squirm to see that the movement’s fight produced a moment ripe for a soldier like Sarah Palin, but from another vantage point, her candidacy (and more importantly, Hillary Clinton’s) prove we’ve won certain battles. Women are taken seriously as political candidates. Plain and simple.

[…]

Despite all that, I feel thankful that she inadvertently pushed feminists out of complacency. We were obliged to clarify where we’ve won and where we’re falling behind, who we’ve brought into the fold and who continues to see feminism as an elitist, anti-man, femininity-rejecting posse of miscreants (thanks, mainstream media).

I really don’t think anyone took Sarah Palin’s candidacy seriously. I didn’t take her seriously. The mainstream media didn’t take her seriously. The blogs didn’t take her seriously. The GOP base, who fetishized her wild Alaskan exoticism, didn’t take her seriously. The folks who made that porno certainly didn’t take her seriously. Any idea that women are taken seriously in political races as candidates and not as woman candidates is a total joke. Hillary Clinton’s campaign demonstrates that, as do the Sotomayor hearings. Palin was ridiculed and sidelined in a different way from Clinton or Sotomayor, but she was ridiculed and sidelined nonetheless. And speaking as a feminist, if Sarah Palin “pushed” me “out of complacency,” it was to realize that we can’t let retrograde family-values conservatism define what women’s role in society is. I think we probably had forgotten that in the wake of the Schlafly/ERA debacle; it’s a lesson that’s probably new to feminists of my generation who became aware of the world during the Clinton years. I don’t think the past six months have been successful for feminism at all. We’ve seen Michelle Obama, a strong and independent career woman who also managed to raise a family, become the World’s Most Famous Mom. And while motherhood is awesome, it sucks that all she can do is support her husband in his full-time job. The media’s treatment of Hillary Clinton has been appalling, as has the media’s and the Senate Judiciary Committee’s treatment of Sotomayor. It’s hard to be a woman in politics. It’s hard to be a woman in journalism. It’s hard to be a woman in academia. And I really don’t think Sarah Palin’s candidacy changed that, or that reaching out more to family-values conservatives will continue to change that.

Martin ends her article by saying, “No matter who [Palin] claims to be, we need to keep pushing ourselves to clarify who we are.” Well, I don’t think this is nearly as difficult as Martin is making it out to be. Feminism is about choice and independence and acceptance of all kinds of woman, and it has nothing to do with implicitly lumping women into categories as either suburban (straight, femme) moms or The Great Lesbian Menace. It has nothing to do with defining categories, and it certainly has nothing to do with political candidates who make their daughters’ teenage pregnancies a publicity bid for the pro-life movement; who oppose what, as far as I can see, are most of the platform planks of the mainstream liberal feminist movement.

I have no idea how Sarah Palin identifies herself, but I have a hard time believing that her party would express its support for the feminist movement. I’m all set to embrace Palin, but until she and her party embrace me, my absolute non-femininity, and my understanding of what it means to be a feminist, there is no fucking way I’m celebrating the Governor of Alaska’s contribution to The Movement.

In Which I Defend Canada

I’m sitting right now in my local coffeeshop, which has its TV permanently tuned to CNN (though they will occasionally change to ESPN if there’s a big sporting event on, but that’s somewhat besides the point). On CNN just now, there was a commercial expressing opposition to federal health care reform, suggesting—and you’ve heard all this before, I know—that if Congress and the White House so much as lay a finger on the status quo of American health care, we’ll all be forced into a system where we’re forced to wait for months for awful-quality care and we won’t have access to specialized surgical procedures or anything like that. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the specter of SOCIALISM—and we know, because this is “Canadian-style healthcare,” and no one likes Canada. Right?

Now, I’m a firm supporter of health care reform that includes a public option, and I just so happen to have some pretty socialist tendencies myself. But reasonable people of goodwill, etc., and our democracy means people are free to pay to have their commercials that disagree with me aired on CNN. I don’t even know who the group was who sponsored this commercial, and I don’t really care. What angers me is the implication that “Canadian-style healthcare” is automatically a bad thing, and that a shot of the Canadian flag waving would be enough for red-blooded Americans to call up their Congressmen and -women and urge them to oppose health care reform. I strongly doubt that anyone who would be persuaded by a commercial like this has lived in Canada, been through the Canadian health care system, or has any basis on which to suppose that the Canadian health care system is bad—other than that, well, it’s Canada, so it must be.

Americans often take this dismissive attitude to other countries, too—we’ve seen it with regard to France, of course, and anywhere else that you can diss socialism, like Scandinavia or the Netherlands or Germany (the UK is exempt because of World War II). But it particularly bothers me when Americans regard Canada as inferior just for the sake of it being Canada, because I’m a citizen of both countries. I’ve spoken here before about why I’m a proud American, but I’m a proud Canadian too. I love my second country for its multiculturalism, its laid-back attitude, its breathtaking Great North scenery, its cities where the legacy of British and French colonialism meet 21st-century high-tech North American development. I have spent maybe four or six weeks out of every year in Canada since I was born. When I go through customs at the Vancouver airport and present the guard with my American passport and the card that certifies I’m a Canadian citizen too, I’m reminded that being American does not mean a forced acknowledgment that every other country is inferior to the United States, that there are things to love about wherever you call home, and that there’s no reason why there needs to be an either/or.

I wish Americans who will be persuaded by a commercial that says health care reform is bad because it is Canadian would take the time to visit Canada. I wish they’d be won over, as I have, by all the cultural institutions of a country that is sometimes more similar to western Europe than it is to the rest of North America, but that is no less wonderful. And I wish that Americans who will be persuaded by such a commercial would realize that world hegemony and an aggressive foreign policy are not an acceptable replacement for a higher standard of living, a dedication to human rights and civil rights, and a respect for all the country’s citizens when it comes to deciding which countries are great and which are to be ridiculed.

hilzoy

This is going to seem impossibly myopic with regard to the political blogosphere, but today is hilzoy’s last day blogging—at the Washington Monthly, at Obsidian Wings, and period. I’m a fairly recent hilzoy convert, but ever since my mother (who is a far better politico than I am) pointed out her smart takes on news and politics, I’ve been a devoted fan. A philosophy professor in real life, she brings a sense of the academic to her posts, which are measured when they need to be measured and passionate when they need to be passionate. Her colleague at the Washington Monthly, Steve Benen, pays better tribute to her blogging career than I can:

Hilzoy isn’t just one my favorite bloggers, she’s one of those bloggers who, on a nearly-daily basis, makes me think, “Damn, I wish I’d written that.”

Every blogger brings certain talents to the process, but Hilzoy offers a rare combination of skills — she’s clever, knowledgeable, and almost preternaturally insightful. She’s brought an unrivaled compassion, wisdom, and care to her work. Perhaps most important, Hilzoy is a genuine class act, whose blogging has made a real difference.

I will miss hilzoy’s voice on the web because she reminds me that an academic in the humanities has every right to comment on current events, and can sometimes bring a valuable diversity of perspective to the conversation. She reminds me, too, that a woman may infiltrate the boys’ club that is the political blogosphere, and earn its respect. And she helps me to remember something I learned back when I was a dorky 14-year-old outcast writing and editing at h2g2: on the internet under a pseudonym, people will listen to a voice that is intelligent and reasonable and engaging, no matter who you are, where you’re from, what you look like, how old you are, or anything else. Hilzoy has been an academic first and a blogger second, and she doesn’t take a position to get more clicks or to get picked up by a paper or magazine or website with a better name. She maintains her integrity and says what she thinks like all the best denizens of ivory towers.

I’ll miss hilzoy dearly as a role model, but I’ll remain reassured that there’s a place for woman humanists in political discussion.

Princeton Theses

The awesome thing about Princeton requiring a senior thesis of all its students is not just that I’m really, really excited about the opportunity to write one. What’s even cooler, in a way, is that there’s a database hosted by the Mudd Manuscript Library (the library that houses Princeton’s archives) where you can look up the thesis of any Princeton alum. My colleague and I wasted some time today looking up some of the interesting ones, and here are some theses we discovered, many of which are quite entertaining:

Samuel Alito ’72: “An Introduction to the Italian Constitutional Court”
Hilary Bok ’81: “Action and Moral Courage”
Joshua Bolten ’76: “Judicial Selection in Virginia”
Ethan Coen ’79: “Two Views of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy”
Jonathan Safran Foer ’99: “Before Reading The Book of Anticedents: Intention, Literary Interpretation, and the Hypothesized Author”
Sally Frank ’80: “Strategies and Tactics Used by the Women’s Movement to Create Radical and Reformist Change”
Peter Hessler ’92: “Dead Man’s Shoes and Other Stories”
Katrina vanden Heuvel ’81: “American Victims: A Study of the Anti-Communist Crusade”
Elena Kagan ’81: “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933”
Josh Marshall ’91: “Virginia during the Nullification Crisis”
John McPhee ’53: “Skimmer Burns”
Ralph Nader ’55: “Lebanese Agriculture”
Jared Polis ’96: “Paradigm Shift: Politics in the Information Age”
David Remnick ’81: “The Sympathetic Thread: ‘Leaves of Grass’ 1855-1865”
Anthony Romero ’87: “Colombian Migration and Political Participation in the United States”
Donald Rumsfled ’54: “The Steel Seizure Case of 1952 and Its Effects on Presidential Powers”
Eric Schlosser ’81: “Academic Freedom during the McCarthy Era: Anti-Communism, Conformity and Princeton”
Brooke Shields ’87: “The Initiation: From Innocence to Experience: The Pre-Adolescent/Adolescent Journey in the Films of Louis Malle, ‘Pretty Baby’ and ‘Lacombe Lucien'”
Eliot Spitzer ’81: “Revolutions in Post-Stalin Eastern Europe: A Study of Soviet Reactions”
Paul Volcker ’49: “The Problems of Federal Reserve Policy since World War II”
Meg Whitman ’77: “The Marketing of American Consumer Products in Western Europe”

My personal favorite? Nader. What on earth inspired him to write on Lebanese agriculture?

I do think it’s interesting, though, that many of these people stuck with their thesis topic for their entire careers. I wonder whether the same will happen to me—though that certainly makes picking a topic all that much more stressful.

(UPDATE: Now that my parents, my high school teachers, and a world-famous blogger have all reminded me of Nader’s Lebanese heritage, I feel obliged to concede that his interest in Lebanese agriculture was entirely rational and justified.)

Rearranging Journal Entries

Allen Ginsberg wrote a great many of his poems simply by arranging the thoughts he recorded in his journal into poetic lines. “First thought, best thought,” was the mantra he learned from his guru, and so he essentially wrote down things as they entered his head.

Well, I think this only works out well for Allen Ginsberg. If I tried it, this is what would happen:

A man ran down the street in one direction; he’s now come back in the other
Riding a bicycle.
Is he training for a triathlon?
I half expect him to come back again
Swimming, except for the obvious point:
There is no water on the street.

Um yeah. I don’t think so.

In Which the Whole World is an Old Boys’ Club

Last Thursday, my delightful employers at Campus Progress joined The Nation to host the annual journalism conference, which was awesome for all sorts of reasons. Let’s just say gender equality was not one of those reasons. The majority of the professional journalists who composed panels and led workshops were male, silently speaking volumes about how the profession has failed to keep up with the times in more ways than just the old versus new media issue. Despite high-profile woman professionals who were in attendance, like Katrina vanden Heuvel, Ana Marie Cox, and Dahlia Lithwick, the overwhelming majority of the conversations I attempted to participate in and the people I attempted to introduce myself to were male. Even the students who attended the conference—the so-called future of journalism—played into the old boys’ club dynamic. Partway through the Q&A period following Dahlia Lithwick’s keynote address, I noticed that no women were raising their hands to ask questions. So I asked a question about Lithwick’s experience as a woman in journalism; her response, in a nutshell, was that things have gotten better since she started, but there’s still progress to be made.

Well. I’ll certainly endorse that remark.

I am no stranger to being the only female. In middle school I was the only girl who came regularly to Babylon 5 club meetings. In high school, I was the only girl on the varsity Academic League team, the only girl on the National Ocean Science Bowl team (don’t laugh), the only girl in my friends’ garage band. Now, I am the only female staff writer for Campus Progress. Very frequently, I am the only woman in a given social situation. I have spent most of my life working twice as hard and still doubting myself, when a more aggressive boy won the prize or made the team or got called on in class. I have spent a lot of time being talked over in conversations, a lot of time weighing whether calling someone out for a casually sexist comment would jeopardize my standing as an equal in that person’s eyes. I have spent a disconcertingly large proportion of my life coming to terms with the fact that I am not innately less intelligent than my male classmates and colleagues, that sometimes it’s our society’s gender dynamics that are at fault—not me.

And so my sympathies are with Sonia Sotomayor today, as she testifies before a Senate Judiciary Committee that is entirely white and has only two female members, and which seems to have no problems patronizing her, insulting her intelligence, and insinuating that she is somehow less dispassionate than a white male candidate would be. My sympathies are also with Marcy Wheeler (incidentally, another presenter at our journalism conference!), who yesterday got called out for saying “blowjob” on MSNBC. My sense is that if a man had said “blowjob,” the MSNBC anchors wouldn’t have been so quick to speak for her, saying, “I’m sure that Marcy apologizes,” wouldn’t have been so certain what she is thinking and what her relationship to power is. But I am wary of saying things like this to people’s faces, because I have been told so often that it’s only my imagination that the system discriminates against me because I was born with two X chromosomes.

It’s taken me my entire life to acknowledge the existence of sexism in it, and that’s partly because we women have so few opportunities to hear someone say it. If a woman draws attention to the discrimination she faces, she gets called a man-hater, a “reverse” sexist, a bitch and a cunt. Look at Hillary Clinton; look at Anita Hill. The idea of speaking out against sexism has become so vilified that, to many young women, “feminism” is a dirty word.

Yes, things are changing, but change is a relative term. My college class is the first in Princeton’s history to have as many as 50% women, but it is shocking that it took until 2012 for that to be the case. And two woman Supreme Court justices are very far from being half the population of the Court the way that women are half the population of the country. And if this post is an incoherent rant, that’s just because, after six hours of watching old white men patronize Sotomayor on C-SPAN, I don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t know how to make people understand that I’m not crazy, and that it is hard to be a woman in America in 2009—particularly if you’re a journalist. Or a Supreme Court nominee. Or a high-school student. Huh. I guess it’s kinda hard to be a woman in America at all.

You know how it is when a group of people having a conversation forms a circle, and you really want to participate in the conversation, but you can’t figure out how to maneuver yourself into a little gap in the circle so that they’ll notice you and you can join in? Yeah, that’s kind of how I feel every day. And I can’t help but think that, over the past 55 years, Sonia Sotomayor has felt the same way too.

Campus Progress National Conference In Brief

My web silence for the past few days has been the result of the 2009 Campus Progress National Conference, three fun-filled, action-packed days of watching famous people give speeches (at the national conference), hob-nobbing with my professional idols (at the journalism conference), occasionally assuming a level of responsibility (at Journalism-in-Action Day and the j-conf), and getting very little sleep. So much has happened this week that I couldn’t possibly begin to summarize it all, but I’ll highlight some of my favorite parts:

Getting my first-ever trophy (at the advanced age of 19—hey, I never did youth sports) on account of being CP.org contributor of the year
Getting @-replied by Ana Marie Cox on Twitter
Being blown away by the hilarity of John Oliver and the intelligence and articulateness of Nancy Pelosi and Bill Clinton
Hanging out with some of my favorite journalists, bloggers, writers, and editors

And embarrassing moments include accidentally knocking over Nation writer Kai Wright’s cup of tea as I ran past him in an intern-tizzy, and making unintentional eye contact with John Podesta backstage at the national conference.

Selected tweets from all three days of the conference are below, but just to prove I was there, here’s a picture of Pelosi speaking:

Continue reading “Campus Progress National Conference In Brief” →

Fixing Sex Ed Classes

Prince Gomolvilas writes at Bilerico:

The YouthAware program and I began developing OutSpoken, a play that explores the many reasons young people feel ostracized in school, at home, and in their communities. Sure, the piece deals with important issues of race, religion, body type, and socioeconomic background in an intelligent way (in my writing, I refuse to force-feed messages or offer pat resolutions because students can sniff didacticism a mile away), but it also looks at sexuality from several different angles.

I remember when I was younger and unable to swallow pills – they had to be hidden in brownies in order for me to consume them. OutSpoken is sort of like that. We found a way to deal with homophobia without scaring off those who might not have been quite ready to deal with it themselves. And schools that wouldn’t give us the time of day before finally started to let us in.

And guess what happened? Students had been ready and willing to discuss these big issues all along. All it took was administrators and parents to get out of the way.

When my mom asked the health teacher at my high school in conservative southern California why sexual orientation wasn’t covered in our health classes, the teacher told my mom that she would like to address seemingly controversial topics, but that it was too risky for her and for her job. But reading posts like this one in the past few days have really made me aware that it doesn’t have to be that way.

I know that my generation is far more accepting of its LGBT members than previous generations, but that doesn’t mean that homophobia and transphobia aren’t still enormous problems in our schools. Believe me. I’m only a year out of public high school. I know. When health teachers are scared to discuss LGBT issues with their classes, that implicitly sends the message that you should be scared of LGBT people, or that being queer is something to hide. Our teachers should be role models of courage and integrity for their students—not of fear and obfuscation. And they should value and teach to all their students and their needs: in a sex ed classroom that doesn’t teach LGBT topics, not only are straight kids not learning to accept their queer peers and queer kids not being told that it’s okay to be gay or bi or trans, the queer kids aren’t learning that they too have to practice safe sex, or that they can suffer sexual harassment instead of being its assumed cause. No kid is learning that gender is more complicated than a masculine-feminine binary, and that it’s okay if you don’t fit a preconceived notion of masculinity or femininity. That’s something I’m just barely starting to learn and accept, and I’ve been immersed in queer issues for years. Can you imagine what it must be like to be a kid who doesn’t have a support system, and the validity of whose existence is not recognized by the school, the teacher, or the other students? That’s isolating. That’s intimidating. That’s depressing. That’s awful.

Enacting legislation that will help LGBT adults is great—and it’s wonderful beyond belief how much effort the House is pouring into ENDA, domestic partnership benefits, hate crimes, and stuff like that right now. But LGBT teens are at such a high suicide risk, such a high homelessness risk, that it’s frankly unacceptable that programs like Gomolvilas’ aren’t reaching all students. Luckily, one great thing about this issue is it’s easy to localize: you can write your high school or your school district and tell them how much you support including LGBT issues in the sex ed curriculum, and I’m of the opinion that it never hurts to tell your own story.

I’m too tired now (it was a long day at the Campus Progress National Conference!), but in the next few days I’m going to write a letter to my former school board, principal, and health teacher, and tell them what a difference it would have made to me if my school had incorporated LGBT issues into its health curriculum, and that it’s something they should consider for the 2009-2010 school year. You can do the same!