Debbie says:

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After this post goes up, Laurie and I will both be at WisCon, in Madison, Wisconsin, one of our two annual breaks from blogging. So we’ll be back sometime next week.

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Benjamin Rosenbaum’s has things to say about writing and gender. Rosenbaum has been trying to write a novel that uses extrovert/introvert as the genders, and still uses he/she as the pronouns. He’s been running into trouble:

See, I figured I’d created wholly new genders for this future society. Bail and Pale; extravert and introvert; a Kirk gender and a Spock gender, if you will. I’d divided up the pie of gender anew, replaced our gender ideology of “hard” and “soft” with a different one of “fast” and “slow”.

I made the Bails “she” and the Pales “he” (mostly because invented pronouns are hard to pull off, on a line level, at novel length) — but this was, I thought, a relatively arbitrary assignment. It could be inverted just as easily. The point was partly to destabilize the reader, to make them aware of their assumptions, of how they inevitably read “she” and “he” through a certain filter — and then to keep upending that. And this part of the experiment did, I think, have some moderate success.

But. As noted — there was also a good deal of fail.

When I began revisions for the third draft, I tried flipping the genders, making Pales “she” and Bails “he”. (It’s actually not as trivial to implement this as you might think; it’s not just a search-and-replace. This is because, annoyingly, “her” maps to both “him” and “his” — you have to decide, on a case-by-case basis, which one you mean. Similarly, “his” maps to both “her” and “hers”. It took a day of fiddling, but finally I had everyone’s gender swapped).

I suggest you do the experiment sometime, with something you’ve written. It’s mind-blowing. Maybe particularly because I’d set myself up for a fall, by imagining I’d written Pale and Bail outside our associations of gender.

The same characters, with the same in-world genders, taking the same in-world actions, read totally differently in terms of reader sympathy. I’m hard put to say more without spoilers, but actions which, when Fift was a “he”, seemed rash but self-evidently necessary, somehow suddenly, now that Fift is a “she”, seem bizarre and selfish. Shria’s Bailish sexual forwardness, when she was a “she”, seemed provocative but also stimulating, attractive; now that he’s a “he”, it seems predatory and gross. Switch the pronouns on “proud, rebellious teenage male” and you get “mentally ill teenage girl”; switch the pronouns on “manic pixie dreamgirl” and you get “asshole”.

Author Kameron Hurley, writing at A Dribble of Ink, speaks directly to Rosenbaum’s problem:

I often tell people that I’m the biggest self-aware misogynist I know.

I was writing a scene last night between a woman general and the man she helped put on the throne. I started writing in some romantic tension, and realized how lazy that was. There are other kinds of tension.

I made a passing reference to sexual slavery, which I had to cut.  I nearly had him use a gendered slur against her. I growled at the screen. He wanted to help save her child… no. Her brother? Ok.  She was going to betray him. OK. He had some wives who died… ug. No. Close advisors? Friends? Maybe somebody  just… left him?

Even writing about societies where there is very little sexual violence, or no sexual violence against women, I find myself writing in the same tired tropes and motivations. “Well, this is a bad guy, and I need something traumatic to happen to this heroine, so I’ll have him rape her.” That was an actual thing I did in the first draft of my first book, which features a violent society where women outnumber men 25-1.  Because, of course, it’s What You Do.

Hurley’s quote above is part of a superb article challenging what she calls the “women, cattle and slaves” narrative. Really, you have to read the whole thing, but I’m going to quote some additional choice bits to encourage you to do just that:

I’m going to tell you a story about llamas. It will be like every other story you’ve ever heard about llamas: how they are covered in fine scales; how they eat their young if not raised properly; and how, at the end of their lives, they hurl themselves – lemming-like- over cliffs to drown in the surging sea. They are, at heart, sea creatures, birthed from the sea, married to it like the fishing people who make their livelihood there.

Every story you hear about llamas is the same. You see it in books: the poor doomed baby llama getting chomped up by its intemperate parent. On television: the massive tide of scaly llamas falling in a great, majestic herd into the sea below. In the movies: bad-ass llamas smoking cigars and painting their scales in jungle camouflage.

Because you’ve seen this story so many times, because you already know the nature and history of llamas, it sometimes shocks you, of course, to see a llama outside of these media spaces. The llamas you see don’t have scales. So you doubt what you see, and you joke with your friends about “those scaly llamas” and they laugh and say, “Yes, llamas sure are scaly!” and you forget your actual experience.

***

Half the world is full of women, but it’s rare to hear a narrative that doesn’t speak of women as the people who have things done to them instead of the people who do things. More often, women are talked about as a man’s daughter. A man’s wife.

I just watched a reality TV show about Alaska bush pilots where all of the pilots get these little intros about their families and passions, but the single female pilot is given the one-line “Pilot X’s girlfriend.” It wasn’t until they broke up, in season 2, that she got her own intro. Turns out she’s been in Alaska four times longer than the other pilot and hunts, fishes, and climbs ice walls, in addition to being an ace pilot.

But the narrative was “cannibalistic llama,” and our eyes glazed over, and we stopped seeing her as anything else.

This is how rocket scientist Yvonne Brill gets an obituary about her beef stroganoff, later edited to wonder how she could be both a great mom and a rocket scientist. How a software engineering professor of my acquaintance gets introduced as “she makes great tiramisu” while her male colleagues are being introduced by their specialties in the field.

Nearly forty years ago, Samuel R. Delany was writing about the same struggle. In a long thoughtful essay from 1975 (not available on line) called “The Scorpion Garden,” (in The Straits of Messina, a Delany essay collection), he says:

Having constructed a scene in a book where a man and a woman must have a physical fight and the woman win, rereading it three days later I notice that I have written the whole six pages without a single declarative sentence beginning with the pronoun She followed by an active predicate! (Needless to say, there are many such sentences that begin with He.) All through the scene, although he occasionally reels from her blow or the like, she never actually hits him.

If deeply committed writers have been struggling with these problems for the nearly 40 years since 1975, and are still struggling, what does that say about everyday discourse? Media representation? Comparable storytelling issues involving people of color, disabled people, any marginalized group?

I am deeply grateful that Rosenbaum, Hurley, and Delany (and many others) are traversing this road and sharing their obstacles with us. Seeing how hard they work to defy the omnipresent cultural narrative is inspiring. Embedded cultural expectations are not permanent, but they last an awfully long time, and I believe it’s effectively impossible to see from inside the culture whether change is happening or not. But if it is, these are the people helping make it happen.

Laurie and Debbie say:

Having a product called “Sexcereal” is funny enough.
Seriously promoting it as being full of foods that make you sexy is funny enough.
Having different versions of it for men and women is funny enough.

But honestly, the folks behind Sexcereal are in the wrong business. Hollywood pays big bucks for people who can be this hilarious:

Once upon a time, not that long ago, before there were drugstores on every block, when you wanted something to nourish or heal you, you simply walked into the woods and gathered the plants, herbs and spices that after thousands of years of human trial and error proved their medicinal worth. That’s the purpose of food and that’s what SEXCEREAL is – a food with purpose.

Forty years or more ago, the mother of one of Debbie’s friends used to say that in the days of hunter-gatherer societies, between harvesting food and avoiding predators, people probably weren’t thinking about multiple orgasms. Besides, we thought the purpose of food was nutrition and satisfying taste.

It isn’t clear that the makers of SEXCEREAL know this, but the history of breakfast cereal is tied to the history of promoting sexual abstinence. In the late 19th and early 20th century, men whose names are still household names today (Graham, Kellogg and Post) created corn flakes and grape nuts as part of a health food craze tied to the Seventh Day Adventists, who are also celibacy advocates.

While the name of our cereal, SEXCEREAL, may be utterly progressive to some, shocking to the more puritanical, SEXCEREAL is really just a simple throwback food product and concept. We did our research, collected the ingredients and put them together in a pouch and created a cereal that nourishes you both north and south of the equator.

*ahem* “north and south of the equator”?

The name of the cereal is … well, not subtle, but neither progressive nor shocking. Perhaps “silly.”

SEXCEREAL is the world’s first gender-based cereal, because men and women are biologically different and therefore often require different nutrients to keep us functioning well where and when it counts the most.

Men and women may be biologically different in some minimal ways, but nutrition is not one of them. As we’ve written before, even major worldwide sports organizations have been forced to admit that there is no scientific way to tell who is a man and who is a woman.

SEXCEREAL is also a cereal-celebration of love and intimacy, the ties that bind, which is a great soundtrack to any breakfast. How often can you celebrate just protein and fiber? Of course, with SEXCEREAL, you can do that as well.

Do they mean a soundtrack to breakfast like Meg Ryan’s famous faked-orgasm-in-restaurant scene in When Harry Met Sally? Or the cheerful crunch of two people preparing for the big sex event? Or are we “celebrating protein and fiber” in the sense that Catholics celebrate mass?

Don’t buy SEXCEREAL; nominate their copywriters for comedy awards.

Thanks to Robert Gonzales at io9 for the pointer.

Laurie says:

As I said in my blog War Photographs: Disturbing Images

I’ve been thinking about beautiful photographs of dreadful things for a long time. They make me viscerally uncomfortable. I’ll look at the front page of a newspaper and react positively to a beautifully composed photograph, and then I realize it’s of fighters shooting guerrillas and someone is dying in the corner of the photo and I react with quick anger. Not all of this kind of work is beautifully composed, but I’m reflecting on the work that is. There are many exceptions.

I’m still thinking about it. These are beautiful and exquisitely composed photographs from another sometime war zone. The one on our Mexican border.  These are disturbing in subtler ways: some of them only obvious in their backstory.  You need to know what they are to understand the disturbing connections. People are dying by these walls.
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A section of the controversial US-Mexico border fence expansion project crosses previously pristine desert sands at sunrise on March 14, 2009, between Yuma, Arizona and Calexico, California. The barrier stands 15 feet tall and sits on top of the sand so it can lifted by a machine and repositioned whenever the migrating desert dunes begin to bury it. The almost seven miles of floating fence cost about $6 million per mile to build. (David McNew/Getty Images)

From The Atlantic’s In Focus:

The border between the United States and Mexico stretches 3,169 kilometers (1,969 miles), crossing deserts, rivers, towns, and cities from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. Every year, an estimated 350 million people legally cross the border, with another 500,000 entering into the United States illegally. No single barrier stretches across the entire border, instead, it is lined with a patchwork of steel and concrete fences, infrared cameras, sensors, drones, and nearly 20,000 U.S. Border Patrol agents. As immigrants from Mexico and other Central and South American countries continue to try to find their way into the U.S., Congress is now considering an immigration reform bill called the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013. The bill proposes solutions to current border enforcement problems and paths to citizenship for the estimated 11 million existing illegal immigrants in the U.S. Gathered here are images of the US-Mexico border from the past few
years.
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A suspected drug trafficker stands, caught in the weeds on the bank of the Rio Grande River at the US-Mexico Border, on April 11, 2013 in Mission, Texas. (John Moore/Getty Images)
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Mauricia Horta Fuentes, 36, stands for a portrait along the fence marking the US-Mexico border in Tijuana, Mexico, on June 23, 2012. Fuentes, who lived and worked in the United States for years, drove up to a roadblock in Escondido, California, in September, 2008, on her way to pick up kids from school. Since then she has been cut off from her children, and has been forced to create a new life in her old country. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)
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U.S. Border Patrol agent Sal De Leon stands near a section of the US- Mexico border fence while on patrol on April 10, 2013 in La Joya, Texas. (John Moore/Getty Images)

I don’t have conclusions about this conversation I’m having with myself but I expect it will express itself at some point in my work. (The fuller conversation is in the blog linked to above.)

Debbie says:

[cross-posted from Geek Feminism]

No marginalized group can move forward without allies, and all of us have the opportunity to be allies as well as need allies. So it behooves us to look at what high-integrity, committed ally work looks like. And that’s why I want to tell you about my brother.

When David Notkin’s son Akiva was about two years old, he was fascinated by all games played with balls. (At 15, he still is.) We were on a family vacation together when David and I walked with the toddler past a ping-pong table, and Akiva instantly wanted to see what was up. I asked David why he thought Akiva was so much more interested in balls and ball games than his older sister Emma. David said, “I don’t know. We treated them exactly the same; it must just be something about him.” Having heard this from dozens of parents over the years,and rarely having found a response which had any constructive effect, I just let it go.

Years later, unprompted (if I recall correctly), David told me that he was no longer sure that was true. He had started to spend time with and pay attention to the serious feminists who advocate for more women in technology and the STEM fields, and he had done some listening and some reading. He said, “I think it’s perfectly possible that we responded to Akiva’s interest in balls differently than we would have if it had been Emma.” I had, and still have, very little experience with anyone changing their mind on these topics.

Melissa McEwen at Shakesville differentiates between what she calls the “Fixed State Ally Model” and the “Process Model,”

In the Process Model, the privileged person views hirself as someone engaged in ally work, but does not identify as an ally, rather viewing ally work as an ongoing process. Zie views being an ally as a fluid state, externally defined by individual members of the one or more marginalized populations on behalf zie leverages hir privilege.

The kind of shift that David made about his son’s interest in ball games is as good a step into the Process Model as any.

In this flash talk, given at the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Summit in Chicago in May of 2012, we see more commitment to process in ally work.

In this talk, David says nothing about what women want, how to bring women into the field, or really anything about anyone except David. instead, he describes the reasons to take another step on an ally’s journey, and advocates a way for teachers and professors to take that step, by voluntarily stepping into a learning situation where they are in the minority. As he says in the opening frame, he’s in a room full of brilliant women. As he doesn’t say, he knows he has nothing to tell them about being female, or being female in the computer science world, or anything else about their lives. What he can share is his own efforts to understand what it’s like to be marginalized, without taking on the mantle of the marginalized.

The NCWIT talk came in a deceptively optimistic period for David; he had spent the end of 2010 and virtually all of 2011 in cancer treatment, and his scans were clean … until June. In February of 2013, a few months after David’s cancer had spread and he had been given a terminal diagnosis, his department held a celebration event for him. Notkinfest was a splendor of tie-dye, laughter, and professional and personal commemoration. I hadn’t really followed his trajectory as an ally and mentor to women and people of color, and I was amazed at how many of the speakers talked about his role in making space for marginalized groups.

Anne Condon, professor and head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia told a longer story about Mary Lou Soffa, (Department of Computer Science, University of Michigan), who couldn’t be there. Dr. Condon said,

Mary Lou is a very prestigious researcher in compilers and software engineering, and probably the most outspoken person I know. Once a senior officer from a very prominent computing organization proudly unveiled a video about opportunities in computer science. Now in this video, all of the people profiled were white males, except for one little girl.

Mary Lou in true fashion stood up and she did not mince words as she told this senior official what she thought of that video. When she was done, there was total silence in the room. And then one voice spoke up, questioned the choice of profiles in that video and spoke to the importance of diversity as part of the vision of this organization.

And that person was David Notkin.

The speaker list at Notkinfest, aside from Dr. Condon, included somewhat of a Who’s Who in increasing diversity in computer science, including:

• Martha Pollack, soon to be Provost for Academic and Budgetary Affairs, as well as Professor of Information and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, who has received the Sarah Goddard Power Award in recognition of her efforts to increase the representation of and climate for women and underrepresented minorities in science and engineering.
• Tapan Parikh, Associate Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and the TR35 Humanitarian of the Year in 2007. (check out his TedX talk on representing your ethnic background).
• Carla Ellis, member and past co-chair of CRA-W, the Computing Research Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research , past co-chair of the Academic Alliance of NCWIT. On her web page, Ellis says: “In my retirement, I will be pursuing two passions: (1) advocating for green computing and the role of computing in creating a sustainable society and (2) encouraging the participation of women in computing.”

Notkinfest was David’s next-to-last professional appearance. Here’s what he said at the open reception:

It’s important to remember that I’m a privileged guy. Debbie and – our parents, Isabell and Herbert, were children of poor Russian Jewish immigrants, and they were raised in the Depression and taught us the value of education and how to benefit from it.

Mom, especially, taught us the value of each and every person on earth. I still wake up and – You know, we have bad days, we have bad days, but we have plenty to eat and we have a substantive education, and we have to figure out how to give more back. Because anybody who thinks that we’re just here because we’re smart forgets that we’re also privileged, and we have to extend that farther. So we’ve got to educate and help every generation and we all have to keep it up in lots of ways.

When I spoke at his funeral, not three months after Notkinfest, the main thing I did was repeat that plea.

Laurie says:

I saw these remarkable 19th century glass sculptures in a New York Times article In Pursuit of an Underwater Menagerie by C. Drew Harvell.

I was particularity struck by them both as a photographer and as an artist who makes very detailed carvings in jewelry and sculpture. They exhibit the combination of vivid life and fine detail that are rarely found in the same work. If I ever speak at Cornell where the collection is housed I’ll feel very lucky. (The closest I’ve ever gotten was Vassar and that was awhile ago.)

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… enchanting and impossibly rare jellyfishes of the open ocean; more common but equally beautiful octopus, squid, anemones and nudibranchs from British tide pools and Mediterranean shores.
They are the work of an extraordinary father-and-son team, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. Leopold Blaschka (1822-95) was a Czech immigrant to Dresden, in what is now Germany; on a trip to America in 1853, his ship was becalmed and he was enchanted by a spectacular display of bioluminescence from a type of jellyfish called a siphonophore.
He decided to study the jellyfish more closely and create their likenesses in glass. His first works were a set of anemones for the Dresden Natural History Museum in 1863, inspired by the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse’s “British Sea-Anemones and Corals.”
Leopold’s son, Rudolf (1857-1939), was a keen natural historian in his own right, and an ardent aquarist, or aquarium keeper. He followed his father’s lead, expanding in biodiversity to reach the edges of the animal kingdom.

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…The marine biodiversity recreated by the Blaschkas is a phantasmagorical view of life in the oceans. For they were artists as well as keen natural historians, with an eye for the forms that would enchant in glass and that were too rare or fragile to be seen readily. They were also superb teachers, eager to share the wonders of nature with students.
Their favorite subjects were the ephemeral, translucent, bright forms of the Cnidaria (anemones, jellyfish, corals), unshelled mollusks (nudibranchs, octopus and squid) and brilliant tentacled worms. Some of their most brilliant creations are of the different species of cephalopods, like the ornate octopus.

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Looking at these is making me plan to visit the coastal tidal pools here in Northern California to see the originals again.

Lynne Murray says:

In August of 2010, I posted here about feminist artist Brenda Oelbaum’s work turning diet books into papier mâché models of the Venus of Willendorf.

Now Brenda is bringing her vision to the larger stage with “a national ad campaign to take down $66 BILLION Diet Industry.” She calls her project “DUMP THE DIETS! a Fight for Freedom from self-loathing.”

As Brenda puts it:

Think about how many diet ads you see on a daily basis, and see for yourself how much the diet industry is really spending on making you feel bad about yourself.

It’s time to invest in some positive messages!

We are tired of measuring our worth on a bathroom scale! We are not a number and neither are our children. We are beautiful and can be healthy at our current size.

We are all unique and valuable.

NOT EVERY DIET BECOMES AN EATING DISORDER,

BUT EVERY EATING DISORDER BEGINS WITH A DIET!

Brenda plans to post her message by purchasing ads in national publications right beside the ads and articles with product placement to sell the diets.

She can’t do it on her own, of course, one artist versus a billion dollar propaganda machine is too much of an unequal contest. But Brenda is now mobilizing crowdsourcing to help fund her Dump the Diet ads where the general public can see them. She reports:

I have already placed ads in several magazines that will appear the first two weeks on May in honor of “No Diet Day,” May 6th. Now I need you to turn this grass roots effort into a movement.

Part of what resonates with me and many others about Brenda’s work is her brilliant use of the physical substance– the paper that composes diet books–to build a mental structure to help us heal the deep hole diet books have carved in our souls.

My wounds from years of diet go so deep and are so constantly vulnerable to re-infection that they need to heal from the inside, one layer of healthy tissue at a time, in a process remarkably similar to ripping out the pages of the diet book and pasting them onto a paper-mâché sculpture.

The cult surrounding diet books, ads and programs builds its strength upon the American dream of changing oneself through hard work. The desire for success via self-improvement strikes such a chord in our national consciousness that it can be easily echoed and then evoked to twist personal goals into impossible dreams of magical physical transformation.

But no matter how much money we spend chasing the dream, change can only work if it is based on actual possibility. Dieting does change our bodies, but not the way we wish and dream for. Instead the result is the opposite! Weight cycling and eating disorders are the predictable and proven results for the vast majority of those who follow any and every diet plan. Ragen at Dances with Fat defines it well:

[L]et’s talk about what “dieting” means (so that we can avoid the “It’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle change!” discussion.)  Dieting occurs when someone gives their body less food than it needs to survive in the hope that it will eat itself, thereby becoming smaller.  Call it a diet, call it a lifestyle change, if you are starving your body hoping that it will eat itself resulting in intentional weight loss, congratulations you are on a diet.  (You are completely and totally allowed to diet, I’m just saying let’s call it what it is.)

Turning a fat person into a permanently thin person is essentially impossible, which makes it the perfect scam for the con artist–a gold mine. Once the hook is set, the infinitely exploitable sucker will buy variations on one useless diet or another for decades if not for the rest of her/his lifetime. Those who engage in this Long Con have sold billions of copies of such “Create Your Own Eating Disorder” books, not to mention all the diet-oriented paraphernalia that accompany them.

Brenda’s use of the Venus of Willendorf as the sculpture made from diet books strikes at the very heart of fear and prejudice toward larger bodies. These statues once represented goddesses–abundance, fertility and largesse. Now they are objects of ridicule. And by extension, those of us whose bodies resemble the goddess have also become targets for abuse, commands that we starve ourselves (seriously, “just stop eating” is a popular insult often yelled at fat women), and sometimes even violence.

One of the beautiful subtexts and ironies in Brenda’s work is using the pages of diet books to create a fat figure, just as the dieting process itself is now proven to stimulate long-term weight gain–creating a fat or fatter figure.

Brenda’s work shows bravery worthy of a goddess–I adore the picture of her, resolute, nude, surrounded by towering walls of diet books. Passionate, committed individuals banding together can have a profound effect.

The Willendorf Project is a wise investment toward growing a wiser future.

Debbie says:

Sorry we’ve been slow to blog this month. Laurie took a vacation and Debbie was dealing with a death in the family, but we’re both home now and blogging regularly until WisCon, when we traditionally take a week’s break.

One of the stories we’ve been meaning to get around to is the inimitable Margaret Cho‘s experience in a Korean spa. Cho is a Grammy- and Emmy-award nominee, a TV star, a stand-up comic, an actress, and much much more.

Korean spas are wonderful, and they hold a special place in my heart. I have been going to the jimjilbang since I was a little girl in Korea. You can have a bath and a scrub and a sauna and usually a meal and other spa treatments if you like, and aroma is special because there’s a huge swimming pool, a state of the art gym and a golf range on the top floor.

I went this morning, had a gorgeous swim in the pool, then went downstairs to have a soak, scrub and sauna. As soon as I walked into the locker room, I felt uncomfortable. I guess I should mention here, Korean spas are, uh — well, clothing optional is not the right thing to call them. It’s more clothing non-optional, in that everyone is naked.

Perhaps I do get stared at a lot because I am a heavily tattooed woman, but I am also a Korean woman, and I feel I have the right to be naked in the Korean spa with other Korean women. I don’t feel shame that my skin is decorated. My tattoos are my glory. I am happy in my skin and I am not sure what to say when others are not happy with my skin.

I walked around from pool to pool, and I kept getting dirty looks from the ladies there. They would talk about me very negatively in Korean, and I just spoke loudly in Korean –- not back at them, but nicely –- saying “ahhh Jotah!” which means “this feels good” –- really at no one -– but just to show that I could understand what they were saying and they weren’t getting away with anything.

Apparently, one thing she knew to say when others are not happy with her skin is “ahhh Jotah!” “This feels good” may very well apply to more than just the sauna. From what she says, it at least generally applies to her own feeling, living in her gloriously tattooed skin.

After a while, the manager came out to talk with her, deeply embarrassed and fully aware that she was talking to one of the most famous Koreans in America.

She tried to explain that in Korean culture, tattoos are very taboo and my body was upsetting everyone there. I told her I was aware of that, but that I really wanted to enjoy the spa and my treatments and I was going to pay for them, just like everyone else there (it’s pricey, by the way). She asked if I could please wear something, anything -– a towel or something –- and cover myself so that I wouldn’t frighten anyone with my body.

In the end, she leaves, tense and unsettled and–so out of character for Margaret Cho–nearly speechless. Here’s how she ends her essay:

I guess it comes down to this -– I deserve better.

I brought the first Korean American family to television. I have influenced a generation of Asian American comedians, artists, musicians, actors, authors -– many, many people to do what they dreamed of doing, not letting their race and the lack of Asian Americans in the media stop them. If anything, I understand Korean culture better than most, because I have had to fight against much of its homophobia, sexism, racism –- all the while trying to maintain my fierce ethnic pride. I struggle with the language so that I can be better understood. I try to communicate my frustrations in Korean so that I can enhance my relationship with my identity, my family, my parents homeland.

I deserve to be naked if I want to.

Everyone deserves to be naked if they want to; you don’t have to be a national heroine, you don’t have to be able to prove your cultural heritage, you don’t have to justify yourself. You do have to be in a space where it’s appropriate for you to be naked. You do have to be respectful of the people around you. And that’s where the complications come in to Cho’s story.

Why do Korean women in America go to the Korean spa? They don’t just do it to get clean. They don’t just do it to watch golf in the sauna. Every woman there is probably there for a different set of reasons, but a common one, perhaps more important than getting clean and warm, probably would be finding a familiar space, a space that feels safe in a strange and often unwelcoming country, a space that feels like home.

Into this protected space comes a figure of confusion. She’s Korean, she’s tattooed all over, she’s clearly at home with the culture of the spa and the language of the customers, she’s both polite and transgressive, both appropriate and inappropriate. Beyond a doubt, the right thing to do is to make her welcome, to look past the tattoos to the woman who is also looking beyond a bath and a scrub to a place where she can be Korean, where she can escape the maelstrom of the outside world. No doubt there were women in that spa who envied or admired her tattoos, who wanted to look at them more closely, who wanted to connect with her.

But bullies and mean girls come in all flavors: all ages, all races, all genders. And unless someone is brave enough in the moment to push back against the meanness, it usually is louder and more powerful than the impulses to kindness. The curious and the kind and the accepting usually sit back and wish they knew how to counter the cruelty. Sometimes they even play along to feel protected themselves. And everyone loses. It’s easy to sympathize with the discomfort of the clientele; what’s hard to accept, what made Cho so unhappy, is how they dealt with their discomfort.

Cho was not acting disrespectfully; she was in a space made for her, which she knows how to navigate. She brought her whole self to the spa, and was told that an essential part of her was unwelcome. The most disturbing part of the story is the role of the management; they had an opportunity to come down on the side of inclusiveness and welcoming, to invite Cho to stay naked and tell their other customers (however you do this really politely in Korean culture) to suck it up and let the painted lady stay. And the saddest piece is that they were so “friendly and apologetic” as they made Cho unwelcome that she overtipped them hugely, because she didn’t want to upset them.

She deserves to be naked if she wants to. The women in the spa deserve to have a place where they can be in their own cultural framework. In many situations, not everyone can get what they want–and it’s just about always better if the people with the situational privilege are the ones who give something up. Privilege is dangerously addictive, however, and hard to acknowledge, let alone release. 

Lynne Murray says:

I recently tried once again to read George Orwell’s 1984.

As always, I got a few chapters in and had to stop because it was so depressing that I couldn’t live in Orwell’s evocation of mind-controlled totalitarian world for a minute longer. One thing I did get out of the experience was adding one more time reading the early chapters including the Two Minutes Hate scene. Early in the book the hero, Winston Smith takes part in his office’s mandatory daily group hate ritual, an exercise in bonding and mind control.

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against own will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.
1984, George Orwell

Reading this reminded me of all the rituals that aim hatred at fat people and how deeply they are engrained.

Hate speech would seem to be something that progressive, counter-cultural internet-savvy folks visiting a mellow, inclusive site called Live Love Grow would want to avoid. But on October 22, 2012, when Issa posted “21 Things to Stop Saying Unless You Hate Fat People,” she found that far from worrying about contributing to the hatred of fat people, commenters to her blog were darn proud to hate fat and fat people. After four days she was forced to conclude:

While originally I welcomed comments on this post, 4 days and 400 comments later I’m pretty much over it. Almost no comments are making it through moderation. Some positive comments will still trickle through, but if you are hear to argue, explain, or even just take a tone I don’t like, I probably won’t approve your comment. You might think you have something useful to say, but trust me, I’ve heard it all before, explained myself till I’m blue in the face, and I just don’t care. There’s a whole wide world of fat acceptance writing on the internet for you if you would actually like answers to your arguments and questions.

Hate speech with one target has a lot in common with other hate speech for any targets, but official recognition has given the stamp of self-righteous legitimacy to a very large percentage of the population that hates and fears fat.

In an April 8, 2013 Psychology Today article, Deborah Schurman-Kauflin, Ph.D., psychologist and student of criminal and deviant behavior talks about the permanent damage to our society done by encouraging fat hating bullies:

When this mentality is pervasive, it is used to justify any and all harm against the target group. This technique has been employed throughout history as a means to control and subjugate. You may think that this statement is extreme. However, objectifying a group always leads to discrimination against those people.

… If you don’t believe that the bullying of the overweight constitutes hate speech, then simply substitute black people or gays in place of the derisive things said about fat people. Just switch any other group name into such statements as “they are lazy and stinky,” and the hateful nature becomes apparent.

Words have meaning. That is why totalitarian countries have propaganda ministers. The public can be manipulated by word choice.

“The Weight Hate, How hate speech against overweight people is more dangerous than you think,” Psychology Today April 8, 2013 by Deborah Schurman-Kauflin, Ph.D. in Disturbed

In “The Seven-Stage Hate Model: The Psychopathology of Hate,” FBI behavioral analyst Jack Shaefer, Ph.D., provides some answers on why hatred is such a popular and self-reinforcing group activity. Shaefer dissects seven stages in the progress from hate speech to murderous violence:

Not all insecure people are haters, but all haters are insecure people.

Hate is the glue that binds haters to one another and to a common cause. By verbally debasing the object of their hate, haters enhance their self-image, as well as their group status.

… [T]he more often a person thinks about aggression, the greater the chance for aggressive behavior to occur….

Time cools the fire of hate, thus forcing the hater to look inward. To avoid introspection, haters use ever-increasing degrees of rhetoric and violence to maintain high levels of agitation.

“The Seven-Stage Hate Model: The Psychopathology of Hate,” Psychology Today March 18, 2011 by Jack Schafer, Ph.D. in Let Their Words Do the Talking

The hatred has been building a long time. Over the past few decades I have witnessed a concerted and product-oriented effort to ramp up anxiety over body size. A resurrected 1954 Life Magazine article describing the excruciating humiliation a fat woman recently made the internet rounds. It is rightly described by psychotherapist, activist and journalist, Dr. Charlotte Cooper as “vintage fatophobia.”

As Cooper also shares, almost immediately after the LIFE article resurfaced, Rebecca Weinberger re-imagined the story in empowering terms. Weinberger links to the original article (so I don’t have to!) but she begins by explaining how she has reframed it:

To introduce this a little more: I was really sad for Dorothy, that woman in the re-issued LIFE article that I posted yesterday who had been ridiculed for 60 years in fat-shaming photos. So I made her a different life – fat, queer, femme, … feminist, poly, she likes tight dresses and picking up strangers, and is often frustrated by how she’s looked at when she goes to the gym and the lack of plus size clothing. So basically, I made her a version of me. I’m done, and I’m really excited about it, with all the photos from the new and old articles captioned and telling a story.

Cooper puts this in perspective:

This amazing and fairly tiny intervention has reminded me that we may be subjected to a thousand instances of fat hatred every day, and more, it runs through us like blood; but within that hatred there are opportunities for radical transformations that are simply done and amazingly effective. With their expansive activist imagination, The Fattening has done a great job in putting fat people into the picture and shown how essential it is that we tell our own stories. I can see this form of activism taking off in other directions.

How can we maintain and take back out humanity? It ain’t easy but it can be fun. No one is going to invite us to seize a chance to re-write our stories to confront fat hatred, but every time we take the chance, it makes it easier to see and grab the next one.

Laurie says:

I met José Ramón Lerma for the first time in 2004 when he bought two of my photographs at an exhibition of my work. We became friends. Later he acquired more of my photos, and I have a marvelous painting of his on my wall. José was in his seventies when I met him and one of the things that impressed me the most about him was the way he continued to grow and develop his art. He was passionate about his painting and his politics and was working intensely most days. He has worked in varied mediums over time but there is always the powerful sense of his talent and expression. Check out this online gallery for a sense of his work.

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Easy Living 2005

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Last week I went to the opening of a 60-year retrospective of his own work and of his 43-year collection of other artists work at Art Zone 461 in the Mission in San Francisco. It’s there through May 5th. It was wonderful to see him there in the midst of his art and all the people who appreciate it so much.

This the quote from Rilke he chose for his artist’s statement:

After all, works of art are always the result of one’s having been in danger of having gone through an experience all the way to the end to where no one can go any further – Rainer Maria Rilke, 24 June 1907 (writing about Cezanne’s painting)

It resonates very strongly for me.

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Nude 1954

… a sixty-year retrospective exhibition for Bay Area artist José Ramón Lerma.  Primarily considered an abstract expressionist, he studied at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA, now the San Francisco Art Institute) during its heyday of importance as the center for West Coast Abstraction and associated movements like dada, beat, funk, pop, surrealism, collage and constructions.  Lerma experimented fearlessly across genres and avoided categorization.  Pure and not simple, Lerma is an artist who recognized, appreciated and participated in the historic Bay Area and California movements starting in the 1950s and continuing through today….

José Ramón Lerma was born in Hollister in 1930.  He received a scholarship to the CSFA in 1948 and began classes in 1950.  Serving in the Korean War from 1951 to 1953 interrupted his schooling.  He resumed studies at CSFA from 1954 to 1958.  The artist commented on his early years at the school as having, “…the most impact on my life and art.  The art world of the fifties was free of the market and its temptations.  There was a certain purity about it.”

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My Favorite Freida 1994

These statements are remarkably revealing in laying the foundation for Lerma’s career.  They reflect both the influence of his instructors at CSFA and his personal beliefs regarding the traditional gallery.  Lerma rebelled against commercialism and the commoditization of art.  It motivated him to join fellow artist friends who together founded the Russian Hill Gallery in 1959.  Though it closed in 1961, it held exhibitions for beat and abstract artists who previously showed with the early, historic and important artist run San Francisco galleries.  Their names are included in Lerma’s résumé as places where he also had solo and group shows:  The 6 Gallery, East-West Gallery, The Spatsa and, of course, the Russian Hill Gallery.  Infused with history while following a singular path, Lerma’s career mirrors his fierce independence; this anti-establishment stance has, unfortunately, affected his visibility among his peers.  ArtZone 461 Gallery anticipates this show will germinate the seeds of increased visibility and long overdue appreciation for this champion of art historic documentation, experimentation and art creation.
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I didn’t have my camera but a friend took this photo of José at the show. If you’re in the area, go see it. It’s truly exceptional.

Laurie and Debbie say:

Lance Pauker at brobible.com shared a fraternity email on how to talk to Jewish girls, allegedly written for a mostly-Christian fraternity which was paired with a mostly-Jewish sorority for Greek week. Pauker wants us to understand that:

Before the Politcally Correct Priscillas and Sensitive Susies get all hot and bothered, really read this. It is amazing how harmless this is. Abundantly clear the whole thing was done in good fun. For a fraternity, I am astounded that the subject matter is so maturely light-hearted. It’s incredible work while not being awful. This is incredibly rare. Good work guys.

Of course, there’s nothing okay about this kind of stereotypical reduction of a complex group of people to a few oversimplified expectations. We may be far too old to be sorority girls, but we’re both Jewish, we both grew up on the East Coast, and we don’t think this is funny, or (in the words of the original poster) that this is “funny but also serious.”

So here’s a partial reformulation for the sorority girls on how to talk to Gentle boys that might point out some of the problems.

1. HOMETOWN: If from an allowed hometown you are fine.  If not, lie and say you
are from an allowed area.  Note: DC is a toss up area, as is Vermont.

Areas you can be from: New York, New Jersey, PA (only Philadelphia area, sorry
redacted), Massachusetts, Rockville/Bethesda area, Pikesville

Not Allowed Areas: The rest of Maryland (especially rural counties, looking at you redacted), Baltimore, Atlanta, anywhere in the south, Connecticut

1. HOMETOWN: Pick some place that isn’t known for its large Jewish population. Avoid New York, Westchester, Long Island, parts of Boston. Kennebunkport is good if you don’t pretend you know the Bush girls personally.

3. OVERNIGHT/SLEEPAWAY CAMP:  Make up a camp you went to.  Say it was in upstate
PA, NY, or Maine.  Say it starts with “Timber” or ends in “Lake”.  You could
also make up an Indian (redskin kind, not the slumdog kind) name.  For example,
Lack-a-wa-taka or Saska-Rata.

Say you started when you were ten years old, but stopped going when you were 15 in order to play high school sports.  You liked it a lot.  You still talk to your camp friends when you can.

3. OVERNIGHT/SLEEPAWAY CAMP: You didn’t go to camp because you and your friends got used to hanging around in the neighborhood, which was nicer  in the summer when the Jewish kids were in camp. You went to the country club, worked on your tan, and learned to drink cocktails with umbrellas in them.

4. ARE YOU JEWISH? If you are Jewish, say yes.  If you look somewhat Jewish but aren’t, just say you are.  If you are not Jewish and don’t look Jewish, then say: a. No I’m half-jewish but didn’t get bar mitzvahed of anything.  My dad is jewish. b. No, but I’m from a really jewish area.

4. ARE YOU CHRISTIAN? No one will ever ask you this because they will take it for granted. All you have to do is not mention that you are Jewish, and not wear a star of David.

6. MAJOR

-You are a business major or an econ major or a communication major

-You want to “do something with business, maybe finance” or start your own
business

-Alternative 1 to that: Some science major, but you are going to med school to be a doctor (why? because both your parents are doctors)

-Alternative 2: You are a crim major and plan on going to law school

6. MAJOR

-You are a business major or an econ major looking forward to grad school at Wharton.

-Your daddy wants you to go into the family business, but you’re not sure you want to be tied down like that.

-Alternative 1 to that: Computer science, because that’s where the money and the good jobs are.

-Alternative 2: All you really want to do is raise a family and be a good wife and mother.

7. WHAT TO WEAR

-Jeans are definitely preferable to other pants

-V necks are ideal

-Button downs work too, but try to avoid flannel.  Solid colors are a better bet

-T shirts and graphic t shirts with words on them are great

-If you wear a cross on your neck, don’t wear it

-Hats are fine, if they are backwards and snapbacked

7. WHAT TO WEAR

-Skirts are better than pants. If pants, wear a button-down shirt and leave an extra button open at the top.

-Colors bright, but not too bright; noticeable but not flashy. No t-shirts with words or graphics on them unless you get comments on how funny that shirt is from strangers on a regular basis (so you know it’s not obscure).

Or, everybody could just tell people who they are and find out who the other person is.

Thanks to Jezebel for finding this one.