what about misconception care?

While I could say any number of serious things about this article, all I can think is come on, preconception care?

hello, Gorgias

This Salon article - one of the ones you need to watch an ad to see, but worth it anyway - is all about rhetoric, sophists, and philosophers.

you have to ask why

There's this idea that seems to be ambling around the feminist blogs whenever people start talking about appearance culture. You might see it in the comments on I Blame the Patriarchy (it's probably in this comment thread somewhere), and I don't know where it comes from. To summarize: "Individuals decide who they want to please (and yes, there’s no reason it has to be men), and that.. is a healthy part of social existence. In other words, the problem isn’t pleasing people."¹

Ok. I'm going to try not to dump my irritation too heavily on this particular person's head just because he's got a convenient summary. But let's review. It's true, most of us like making other people happy at least some of the time. However, I think we can agree that pleasing people usually means fulfilling their desires. The one thing we can all agree on - Puritans, post-modernists, neo-Aristotelians, feminists, Marxists, maybe everyone except modernists and the occasional Third-Wave feminist - is that desire is not neutral. People want things for all sorts of reasons. Maybe it was on TV a lot when you were a kid.² Maybe you had a secret crush on your 3rd grade music teacher who always wore that kind of shoes. Maybe you're color-blind and like really really bright colors because you can see them. Maybe desires for sugar and sodium were evolutionarily advantageous to our primate ancestors. Desire comes from a lot of different places, and so when we think about pleasing other people - about our desire to fulfill other people's desires - we need to think critically about where that need to please comes from, and where the specific desires we want to fulfill come from.

It is my belief that most women's desire to 'look pretty' comes at least partly out of patriarchal bullshit on one side or the other. Kugelmass does say that there's a problem "that women are expected to do more to please men than vice versa," but I don't think he gives this problem enough attention. In fact, women are required to put vastly more effort into their appearance than men. There's the time spent picking out clothes so we look just sexy enough (but not too sexy! then we're asking for it!); even professional clothes are a lot more work for women. There's the grooming regimen: at the bare minimum, shaving legs and underarms a couple of times a week, skin care and moisturizing, styling hair, haircuts every 6-8 weeks or fairly maintenance-intensive long hair, and most women add on at least a few other things, like nails or eyebrows or make-up (in some places and jobs, these are required). There are the shoes, and anyone who's ever tried to find comfortable, professional women's shoes knows exactly what I'm talking about. Ah, you say, but women are free to reject these 'requirements' - they really are, at least mostly, about choosing to please other people. You yourself just ignore a lot of these so-called requirements.

That's true, I don't, but I'm under no illusion that I don't pay a price for it. There are a number of office environments - including some of the most prestigious and best paid - where I couldn't work looking like I do. There was a New York Times article in the last year or two in which women on Wall Street talked about how they resent the brutally uncomfortable shoes which they feel they must wear in order to keep their jobs, but which damage their feet permanently. Some of the benefits of meeting the requirements of conventional femininity are just things I'm personally prepared to do without: I'm queer - right now I'm dating a woman, but my queerness means that there are a number of straight guys who just aren't really dating options for me, and that includes most of the ones who care about all the beauty shtick; I don't want to work on Wall Street, or for a high-powered legal firm, or in most office environments; I'm willing to accept the incidental damage it will almost certainly to do to my career. This shit is coercively enforced, and while you can opt out of the work, you pay a price.

So that takes care of why women want to do their pleasing in this particular way; let's talk about why men (or heteronormative culture) enforce these particular standards. Hint: it's not handed down with our genetic code. There are a lot of specific standards, but let's look at three that have particularly elegant patriarchal implications.

1. Shave off your body hair. This makes women look young (pre-pubescent, ick) and powerless. Nuff said.

2. Wear high heels. This makes women actually physically powerless, because we can't run or move freely; it also damages women's feet. Compare to the tradition of foot-binding in China or corsetry in the Victorian era - it's just not that different.

3. Be skinny. There's much to be said here, but what always strikes me about the obsession with thinness is that women aren't supposed to take up physical or metaphorical space.

The people making the argument that it's cool to want to please people - Kugelmass included - seem to ignore the actual content of what it takes to please others, putting the beauty ideal in the same category as cooking your friend dinner once in a while or remembering your Mom's birthday. It's different, and it's different because the desires we're trying to fulfill are social, and systematically oppressive to women. Maybe the worst part is that I really believe that appearance culture is a collective action problem. Here's what I said on Bitch, Ph.D.'s blog:

As long as most people try and get as much as they can from it - by trying to be as conventionally attractive as they personally can - all the flack from it continues to fall on people who can't conform (fat folks, butch women, short men, people with less money). This, I think, is where Twisty's point about femininity being a survival strategy comes in: even if you identify as femme/femmey, even if you actually get some personal satisfaction out of wearing low-cut shirts/high heels/lace underwear, being femininely attractive still gets you cultural approval that other folks don't have access to and makes it harder for those folks to fit in (or survive) by reinforcing our messed up norms about attractiveness. So you have to weigh what you need to survive or feel ok in your own skin or your own life against the social effects, just as you do when you buy groceries and have to choose whether to spend another few dollars on having it be organic so you feel better about yourself or a little less money so you can make it to the end of the month without being broke. For each decision, it's about whether it's going to make your life better, and whether it's going to make the world a better place for you to live in.

You can't just say that pleasing people is fundamental to being social. You have to ask why you want to please those particular people, why you want to do it the way you do, and what effect it has around you.

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1. From Joseph Kugelmass, who introduces his post by saying "I really don’t want to fight a bunch of different battles when it comes to gender. I want to fight just one battle, for equality of the sexes. Which is why I’m sorry to report that I find I Blame The Patriarchy alienating, and have to respond to the latest post there." Sorry dude, you don't get to decide that there's only one feminist battle. Also, hey, you find I Blame the Patriarchy alienating? No way! You and 97% of the human race! And Twisty, she does not care. It's part of why she's cool.
2. In a fascinating bit of correlation, women who watched a lot of Disney movies growing up have notably more conventional ideas about gender than women who did not. (This from the prestigious journal, 'some chick in my grad school class.')

yes

“I came to teaching to touch lives and educate and be this enchanting artist in the classroom,” she says, “and I have done nothing but lose 10 pounds in a month and develop a disgusting smoking habit. These kids need something much greater than anything I can give them. They need a miracle — and they need a miracle like every day.”

so far

I've been pushed, shoved, and lifted out of the way, ducked around, called dyke and bitch, had my hair and shoes insulted, been told to quit, that nobody likes me, and that "I will hurt you," had my stamp, stamp pad, coffee mug, clipboard, transparencies, marker, pencils, and wallet stolen, been full-on cussed out 7 times by 3 people, been sorta cussed out at least every other day and usually a couple times a day, had my fingers slammed in my classroom door, had paper balls and pens thrown at my head, and had the plexiglass window in the door to my classroom broken out of its frame. And this is just what I remember.

Joy

You know what's awesome? Being the only one in the house so you can play Lucinda Williams loud at 8:35 AM. You know what's even better? Eating apple crisp and drinking tea and looking at the sunny October morning while you do it.

medium picture

Go read this now.

As self-obsessed and miserable as I am right now, thinking about the future of the country in light of the basic realities of one part - just one part - of our general situation can make me even more miserable.

Then sign up to give time or money to elect Democrats this fall. Not that it'll change much, but even changing a little is so, so, so worth it.

vampyros lesbos

I have a gay transgender vampire in my 2nd period class.

And that is the least of what's happened to me today. Absolutely the least of my worries.

tips

1. For straight teacher/educators who want to support queer teachers/educators: don't tell your kids you're straight. I realize queer-friendly straight role models are important, but it'd be nice if not denying you were gay didn't automatically mean you were.

2. For people who post in women-seeking-women on craigslist: don't mention your last relationship, the eighteen criteria any woman you date absolutely must meet, how lonely you are, or how much craigslist sucks. In fact, don't provide any meta-context for your ad at all: just talk briefly, amusingly, about how cool you are and how you'd like to meet someone for x pleasant, non-threatening activity.

3. For publishers of math textbooks: putting the section on solving equations after you've already been working with equations for 5 sections is dumb.

4. For principals of public schools: I'm probably better than nothing, but not much. I'd take half my current salary for half my current workload, no problem.

5. For my students: if you want to learn some math, you eventually have to do some math problems. That's how it works. You also have to come to class and do your homework. 9th graders, this goes double for you, because even if you've already been in a room where someone talked about it, you didn't learn it then.

6. For myself: if you haven't been hungry for two weeks and have therefore been getting your sustenance mostly from yogurt, fruit, toast-with-peanut-butter, and ice cream, and then suddenly eat a full dinner followed by pizza for lunch the next day even though you're still not hungry, and you're really stressed out and feeling like crying before you have the pizza, you shouldn't be surprised when you get a migraine.

7. For the creators of Algeblocks and the fabulous college professor/7th grade math teacher who gave me a set: you are both incredibly awesome and should know it.

This message, like my lessons, was brought to you by the extraordinary Gardener, who has been lovely to me the last few weeks, and the amazing Mathematician, who has been feeding me dinner and math advice since it all started.

also, Political Schmientist: my classroom still looks much as it did when you left, except someone wrote "ASS" on Lundberg.

at the last minute, extra work!

we are not there yet. we will never be there. I hate everything.

sometimes, things actually are inspiring. especially when you're in survival mode.

My dear friends (yes, you are my friends not merely CMs),

This is the low point of Institute. Week 3 has the most dues dates, the highest stress levels, the fewest hours of sleep and the most frustrations of any week at Institute. You can do it!

Week 3 is NOT indicative of the life of a teacher. You are learning to teach. It is difficult. That is why most ed. preparation programs require years of student teaching. We do it in 5 weeks. There is a lot to learn in 5 weeks. You can do it!

The life of a teacher is not one of day-to-day survival. It gets easier. You will have time for your friends, significant others, favorite TV shows, and life outside of teaching. You NEED a life outside of teaching. The life of a teacher is not Institute life. You can do it!

I have already seen so much skill, knowledge, talent, and drive in each of you. If I didn't think you could do it, then I would have told you by now. It is unjust to make you work this hard if it is hopeless. You will all be good teachers, but it may not happen over night. Be patient. Take one step at a time. You can do it!

Look out for one another. This is our Institute family. We have made it too far to let any our family members struggle alone. Be there to empathize and to add a little sunshine to a teammate's day. Plan a cheese steak social or two. You can do it!

Lastly, I wouldn't get out of bed every morning if I didn't have 16 great colleagues. I wouldn't live this lifestyle for 5 weeks if I didn't believe that ALL of you will achieve success with your students over the next two years and beyond. I wouldn't encourage you to teach if it meant you had to be a martyr and live everyday like a day at Institute. You don't. I do it because y'all are the good teachers that my students need.

I'll be in my room with the door open after the movie.

-S.

summer

Summer smells like sweet corn and stone fruit, clean dirt and rain, sweat and cedar.

This summer also smells like permanent markers, sharp nerves and chalk, stress, raw onion, white cheddar popcorn. And tonight, a little like sweet corn.

I am going to make it through this summer if it kills me.

this is criminal

Michael Lewis, an eighth grader who was expelled from Baker Middle School for fighting, said he had not gotten into similar trouble back in New Orleans. "You can't really hardly communicate with other people" in Baton Rouge, he said. "I don't know why they have such a grudge on us. They just do."

If it were not for the hurricane, Michael said, he would be enrolled. "I love school," he said. "There's no place I would rather be, during school hours, than school."

Mr. Cowsar said Michael had asked to join his group, whose efforts to become an official charter school have faltered. The group lost financing for the two teachers it had in the fall, and it had only a couple of volunteers to handle about 15 children ages 4 to 14. There was no room for Michael.

Michael said he had wanted to go to summer school, for which parents must pay in some districts. At any rate, he said, his mother did not have time to sign him up. "I want to stay in a child place," he said, "but life keep putting me in a man's place."¹

There are kids like him everywhere. Most of them aren't as eloquent. Either way, it breaks my heart. When a kid like this can't get a decent education even when he tries, something is terribly wrong.

March 19, 2007: Now that I'm a teacher, all I have to say is: I don't feel the same way anymore.

---

1. from The New York Times

give up

I can't keep my mouth shut about politics, which is how the Political Schmientist and I ended up having a full-volume conversation about the risk of American fascism at 11 pm in a campground in a national park in Utah. I'm sorry to anyone I kept awake that night.

This article by the Apostropher says much of what I would like to say.

"There is no war on terror. There never has been." He points out that the forces supposedly arrayed against the United States are incapable of toppling the rickety governments of countries whose populations sympathize with them, and have as much chance of bringing down the United States as of breaking up Mars to mine it for its iron.

He also points out something important: this is a war about resources. We are, as far as I can tell, nearing a historical point at which water and oil, among others, will become extremely valuable. The government of the United States is trying to ensure that those resources, so vital to the way we live right now, continue to be available to us, and cheaply. That's why we're not being asked to sacrifice materially.

Bitch, Ph.D. describes our options as, "We can go down fighting, or, you know, we can sink the money and manpower into finding ways not to go down." Personally, I don't know if there are ways for us not to go down. We may already be totally screwed. What I do know is that if we wish to stop this resource war, if we want a chance to live in a world that is not scrambling and killing over oil and water, we - we Americans - need to stop using so goddamn much. We need to give up our SUVs, our elderly Volvo station wagons, our golf courses, our imported bananas, our cheap vacations: we need to give up the way we consume resources.

It may not be enough. There are 6 billion people on this planet, and we may not be able to give up enough. But unless we try, we are making demands on our world that will require a vast and violent scramble for resources. We have to try.

I don't need to tell you what the chances of this actually happening are. I'm not even trying myself.

living in hope

Part of the reason I'm grumpy today is that I have the overwhelming sense that the world is going to hell and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. The New Yorker article about Iran,¹ the NYT Magazine article about abortion in El Salvador,² the Duke lacrosse case all contribute to that feeling, but it started in a conversation with my dad.

My dad went to Harvard in the late 60s and early 70s, and so did his best childhood friend. He sums up his time there by saying that when he got there, you had to dress for dinner; when he left, there was co-ed skinny-dipping in the Adams House pool. It sounds flip, but it wasn't, really. It meant that Harvard had liberalized, that it was going to be a democratizing force, educating women and people of color and poor people and rich white men all together and helping make a new world.

It didn't, of course. My sister's going to graduate from there in two months, and she talks about it as a place full of social climbing, personal greed, and privileged ambitious people who feel they deserve their privilege.

My dad's kind of upset about this. I think it's because he had an image of Harvard that's idealized in a way I can imagine my image of Swarthmore becoming idealized. He remembers having amazing intellectual conversations. He also was part of at least one sit-in, which I found out about when I found the t-shirt with a red fist on it in his closet. The Harvard student body doesn't go in for that sort of thing anymore, as far as we can tell.

Anyway, all this got us talking about how, in that time, people believed in the power of sit-ins and activism and marches in a way that we don't. That I don't. I went to a lot of protests in college, but more because I couldn't think of anything useful to do than because I thought we would change anything by marching. All those strategies have been worked around and worked into the category of normal disruptions and don't constitute the kind of major challenge they used to be. It's what I think Foucault says in Discipline and Punish³ about challenges and repression getting sucked into the social order.

So I said to my dad that I couldn't think of anything to do that would actually address the problems I see in the world. Nothing that would actually do any good. I have no faith. He went into a speech about how, first, as humans we need some hope and we need to feel like we're doing something, or why not go be a ski patrolman?⁴ And second, the basic problem is campaign finance.

I don't know about the second. The first, though, is exactly the problem I'm having. My dad seemed to think that I was giving up hope and not doing anything; the problem is more that I feel that exact need and can't figure out how to direct it. When I was a high school activist - and a pretty effective one, considering - I felt like my choices, once I saw the injustice of the world, were to either accept that injustice (which meant defeat) or to fight it. Fighting was the only choice that had hope. These days, I'm having trouble mustering up enough hope to go on fighting.

On this day of all days⁵ I got an email from an old high school friend who just left his job as a union organizer, donated his car and all his savings to charity, and founded a religious activist center called the Burning Bush: Center for the Working Poor in L.A.⁶ I can't think of a more profound choice to live in hope than that.

---

1. By Seymour Hersh. Summary: Bush wants to go to war with Iran and change the government there. No one else thinks it's a good idea, politically or militarily.
2. It's illegal. Period. And the ban is enforced. Bitch, Ph.D. has the stunning quote: forensic vagina inspectors.
3. Which I haven't read, like most people who talk about Foucault. Also, did you know he used to be a big figure in the SF leather scene?
4. My dad was a ski patrolman, and he quit because he felt like he was just having fun and not doing something to make a difference. Oddly, that resembles my position now.
5. Before I get too cosmic about this, I should point out that it's the first day in a week that I've checked my email.
6. For those keeping track at home, this is the acquaintance who burnt all the teachers and the administration on all the activist clubs his senior year by advocating intensely for condom machines in the bathrooms, leaving us unable to find teacher sponsors for my last two years there. He also read Saul Alinsky in high school and was as dedicated (and mostly effective) an activist as I have ever met; so were his older brothers. The condom machine campaign was basically cover for a successful attempt to get a peer sex ed program in our high school. Finally, he's the one who thought I had no sense of humor because I didn't think his sexist jokes were funny. While my high school memories of him are slightly bitter, every time I've run into him since high school has been pretty awesome, and I've liked him a lot.

a better account of the emotions

The Hipster Monk once sent me a pretty awesome interview with Martha Nussbaum in which Nussbaum argues that one of the biggest problems with modern political theory is that it provides an inadequate (and basically non-existent) account of the emotions. This article on Alas, a Blog reminded me of it.

That's all I have to say right now. I'm kind of grumpy.

intentions

In the same year that I took that class on genocide - the same year in which the US went to war in Iraq - two eminent persons came to Swarthmore to argue publicly about whether we should support that war. They were Mark Danner, arguing against war, and Leon Wieseltier, arguing for it, and what I remember is being in the big main-stage hall, listening to them. Mark Danner is only about 6 years younger than Leon Wieseltier, and they are both younger than both of my parents, but somehow the impression I have in my head is of a grand old man arguing with a younger, well-spoken but less impressive Mark Danner. It's partly because Leon Wieseltier has this wild head of white hair, and partly because Mark Danner looks young and is short. Wieseltier is also one of the most articulate people I've ever heard - he's The New Republic's literary editor - and the combination of that and the general impression meant that even though I agreed with what Danner was saying, Wieseltier seemed far more persuasive that evening.

But he was wrong. He and Danner are both good people, people of conscience, people who, like me, wanted to see Saddam Hussein out of power but weren't sure they trusted Bush to do it. The difference was that Wieseltier looked at that problem and decided that, regardless of the means, regardless of the instrument, Saddam Hussein was a genocidal tyrant and removing him was the right thing to do; he argued that we were all bound to support the goal of getting rid of him, despite our fears about what would come after. Danner, like me, thought that war itself and what would come after might be so devastatingly bad for Iraq, the Middle East, and the world that we could not in conscience support Bush in going to war, not when we knew that his intentions and plans were so different from what would actually need to happen to create a tolerable postwar situation in Iraq.

If you ever wanted proof that intentions matter, this is it. What's happening in Iraq right now is a disaster, and it's because the people running this war had the wrong intentions. Their intentions shaped how they went about this war, and because of those intentions as much as anything - because of the way the war as been waged - Iraq is a chaotic, terrifying disaster, the US has negative international credibility, the US military is engaging in torture, and both the Middle East and the world as a whole are less stable.

genocide

The war in Iraq has entered a bloodier phase, with the killings of Iraqi civilians rising tremendously in daily sectarian violence while American casualties have steadily declined, spurring tens of thousands of Iraqis to flee from mixed Shiite-Sunni areas.

The first thing I thought of when I saw this article - even before I read it - was this class I took my senior spring. I had been planning to take a class about moral decision-making and political theory, but it was a lot like the amazing seminar I'd taken the semester before, and in the first week of classes, I heard about a directed reading¹ on genocide. I went, and I felt this sense of responsibility, like even though it meant studying all of these incredibly horrific things, I couldn't possibly not take it. For the rest of the spring, I would periodically walk into the Hipster Monk's room and scream, because the things I was reading about were so horrific. The Political Schmientist is studying human rights violations in grad school right now, with some emphasis on sexual violence, and I think she's having a similar experience.

Folks, that's what's on its way to happening in Iraq. The NYT article I linked to doesn't have a lot of the explicit details of violence that are so difficult to read about, but the process it describes is familiar to me. Iraqis are starting to be scared - and apparently reasonably so - to be ethnic or religious minorities. They are leaving their homes to go to places where they will be members of the religious or ethnic majority, despite a long history of fairly peaceable coexistence and despite the major financial costs of doing so. Civilian casualties are increasing, not decreasing, and the focus of the violence is gradually shifting from Americans to Iraqis.² These are warning signs of civil war, and especially of a civil war with the potential for genocide. The situation reminds me a great deal of the former Yugoslavia's disintegration: get rid of a violent dictatorship that overwhelms ethnic tension, then watch as the record of prior coexistence gets drowned in appeals to nationalism/sectarian ideology. Watch people dehumanize "the other side," then threaten them, then kill them, then try to wipe them off the face of the earth. It's not just civil war we're risking in Iraq, it's genocide. I don't know who's at greatest risk for a genocidal campaign, but the Sunni-Shiite violence right now has that potential.

I want to draw attention to one point in this article that hadn't really occurred to me: US training and arms for Iraqi police and military are fueling this conflict.

The migrations are partly caused by the fear of partisan Iraqi security forces, many of them trained by the Americans. The police and commando forces are infested with militia recruits, mostly from Shiite political parties, and are accused by Sunni Arabs of carrying out sectarian executions. One Sunni-run TV network warned viewers last week not to allow Iraqi policemen or soldiers into their homes unless the forces are accompanied by American troops.

It's not really surprising: part of the reason for the Taliban's success is that we armed and trained the people who became the Taliban when we thought we could use them against the USSR in Afghanistan; a major cause of brutal violence and human rights violations in Latin America is the training the US provides to 'friendly' Latin American military forces at the School of the Americas. Every time we arm and train combat forces, it ends up biting us in the ass. The US government has been talking a lot about "Iraqification" - turning over responsibility for security to Iraqis - but that, in and of itself, seems to be increasing the risk of a civil war and thus of genocide. What's surprising is that it didn't even occur to me until today to connect the training and weaponry we provide in Iraq with the results we've had in providing same things elsewhere. There's no reason to think Iraq will be better, which is pretty incredibly depressing to think about.

The worst, for me, is that I can think of absolutely nothing productive to do in response.

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1. At my school, directed readings happened when a student wanted to study something and persuaded a professor to do it. We met slightly less than a normal class, and it was a one-off: it will probably never be offered again, especially since that professor's retiring. That meant it was a lot easier to get it to happen, because it didn't change the whole department's balance of course offerings.
2. The large majority (65%) of attacks are still against Americans and other foreign forces; in September, though, it was 82%.

belated outrage

As I occasionally do, I was narcissistically reading over my old blog posts in an attempt to avoid actually doing something today. I came across the one about the next Bob Dylan, and thought I might mention my total irritation over the UPenn radio station's 885 best albums list, as voted by their listeners. It's a little late, since they finished the countdown in October or November or something, but it still pisses me off. Why? Because of the top 10 albums, exactly zero were not white guys with guitars. You have to go down to #13 to find a white girl with a guitar¹ and #14 to find a black guy with a trumpet². Then it's all white guys with guitars til #23³ and then I get too depressed to keep counting. But of the top 30 "greatest albums of all time" exactly 3 are not white guys with guitars? Are you serious? And of the top ten, 4 are Beatles albums?

Dear XPN Listeners: you suck. I include myself in that, because I didn't vote, and if I had, I probably would have included at least one Bob Dylan album, thus doing my bit for the tyranny of white guys with guitars.

with grumpitude,
North

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1. Joni Mitchell's Blue.
2. Miles Davis's Kind of Blue.
3. Carole King's Tapestry. Which is not one of the 200 greatest albums of all time, let alone #23.

one simple request

please, please, when I ask for a little container of guacamole, don't put shredded cheese on it. please. it's really all I ask.