Debbie says:

These super-fabulous street art posters have been showing up in Philadelphia and New York. The artist is Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, who also has a Tumblr called Stop Telling Women to Smile.

Fazlalizadeh lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant (a famously low-income, mostly African-American and Hispanic) neighborhood in New York, where she got sick of being constantly cat-called, so she took action.

She also gives artist talks and uses those, like her art and her web presence, to get people to think about the meaning behind, and the effect of, street harassment. The posters prompt discussion, including responses written on the posters themselves, for example (as seen at the first link above) “a cocky woman who blows a guy off isn’t that attractive, no matter how good you look,” and “Relax!”

So, she’s touching a nerve.

Who knows? Maybe in a year or two, Fazlalizadeh will not have to “dodge cops in the cover of darkness” to get her posters into the world. I’d like to see them as public service announcements in bus shelters and train platforms in every English-speaking city in the world.

Debbie says:

At WisCon this year, I moderated a panel (suggested by and including the brilliant s.e. smith) called “When ‘Love Your Body’ Is Not Enough.” The concept was to explore how the “love your body” message can be empowering to some subset of people, and can also be perceived as a trap, or a judgment, to other people who are unable to, unwilling to, or uninterested in loving their bodies. One thing we discussed was that any time a simple slogan is treated as a complex life imperative, there will be people who are marginalized by not fitting the simple paradigm.

Now, the eminent Ursula K. Le Guin has weighed in on exactly the same topic, though her focus is aging rather than body love or body hatred per se. Taking as her jumping-off point Robert Frost’s “The Ovenbird,” she asks, “What to make of a diminished thing?”

With all good intentions, people say to me, “Oh, you’re not old!”

And the Pope isn’t Catholic.

“You’re only as old as you think you are!”

Now, you don’t honestly think having lived 83 years is a matter of opinion. …

To tell me my old age doesn’t exist is to tell me I don’t exist. Erase my age, you erase my life — me.

As we expect from Le Guin, she cuts right to the heart of the matter. Any denial of an individual’s lived experience is erasure. This is no different from Samuel R. Delany’s clear explanation to the “colorblind” that “If you can’t see something that threatens my life daily, you can’t be my ally.” Le Guin’s version might be more like “If you can’t see the ways I am diminished from what I was, you can’t see me.”

Where another 83-year-old might embrace “You’re only as old as you think you are,” Le Guin does not. And in any event, telling someone, “You’re only as X as you think you are” is always telling them what they are from your perspective. The essay goes on to discuss respect in a way somewhat new to me:

Respect has often been over-enforced and almost universally misplaced (the poor must respect the rich, all women must respect all men, etc). But when applied in moderation and with judgment, the social requirement of respectful behavior to others, by repressing aggression and requiring self-control, makes room for understanding. It creates a space where appreciation and affection can grow.

Opinion all too often leaves no room for anything but itself.

People whose society doesn’t teach them respect for childhood are lucky if they learn to understand, or value, or even like their own children. Children who aren’t taught respect for old age are likely to fear it, and to discover understanding and affection for old people only by luck, by chance.

I think the tradition of respecting age in itself has some justification. Just coping with daily life, doing stuff that was always so easy you didn’t notice it, gets harder in old age, till it may take real courage to do it at all. Old age generally involves pain and danger and inevitably ends in death. The acceptance of that takes courage. Courage deserves respect.

I don’t usually think of “respect” as a form of reinforcing privilege, but Le Guin is right–that’s probably the way it’s most often used. Think “respect the judge” as applied a courtroom. To her named effects of “repressing aggression and requiring self-control” I would add “encouraging attention.”

Here’s Le Guin one more time:

I recommend studying the ovenbird’s question long and seriously.

There are many answers to it. A lot can be made of a diminished thing, if you work at it. A lot of people (young and old) are working at it.

All I’m asking people who aren’t yet really old is to think about the ovenbird’s question too — and try not to diminish old age itself. Let age be age. Let your old relative or old friend be who they are. Denial serves nothing, no one, no purpose.

Most commonly, we use “denial” to talk about things we don’t want to admit about ourselves, or face in ourselves. Le Guin is using it to talk about things we don’t want to hear from others, know about others, look at in others because we don’t want to see ourselves mirrored in them. This applies to aging (and youth), to fat, to disability … the list goes on.

A lot can be made of a diminished thing; in the end, each of us–if we live long enough to diminish–get to make our choices about that, choices constrained by not only age but class, race, and other social status markers, as well as our own personalities.

I’d rather have a diminished Ursula Le Guin in the world than a great many people I can think of at the apex of their strength and power. May she live and diminish as long as works for her.

Lynne Murray says:

Debbie pointed out this New York Times article by Tara Parker Pope, where transcripts of doctor patient appointments showed the doctors’ comparative lack of engagement with fat patients when compared with their interaction with normal weight patients:

In conversations with patients of normal weight, the doctors offered simple comments to show concern — for example, “I’m glad you’re feeling better” to a woman who had experienced hot flashes. When a normal-weight patient had trouble getting an appointment with a specialist, her doctor shared her concerns. “I agree with you,” the doctor said. “That gets extremely frustrating when that happens.” …

While such expressions of concern and empathy are not remarkable on their own, what was surprising was how absent they were in conversations with overweight and obese patients.

And statements like these are no small thing. Studies show that patients are far more likely to follow a doctor’s advice and to have a better health outcome when they believe their doctor empathizes with their plight.

I have always been the patient doctors don’t want to see. Even before I open my mouth, my body size marks me as “noncompliant.” Once I started to resist weight loss advice, I became “the patient doctors avoid if at all possible.”

My first experience in requesting non-diet-oriented medical care came back when I had insurance in the 1990s. I brought The NAAFA Healthcare Bill of Rights (from the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance) to an appointment. The first mistake I made was not giving it to the doctor before the appointment. When she started her diet spiel, I realized the flyer was in my purse and started to get off of the table, clad only in the flimsy paper covering. The doctor, a petite woman, literally stepped back in fear of being assaulted by a large, mostly naked, noncompliant patient. I gave her the flyer and she abandoned the diet talk. After that she managed not to ever to see me again.

She also took a certain kind of revenge for my having frightened her. When I developed extreme pain in my hands, arms and back at my job, which was all-keyboarding in a word processing center, she recommended only one week of leave. The specialist she referred me to intervened and I managed to get six weeks of disability to recuperate.

Fast forward 15 years, during which time I was self-employed and uninsured. The next doctor I saw at a local free clinic refused to accept that my maintaining a stable weight for 15 years was a good thing. She suggested that losing weight was the only solution to my arthritis, particularly my knee problems, even after I told her that decades of attempting weight loss had inevitably been followed by gaining back more than I had lost. So how did she propose to drastically reduce my already minimal food intake? Her view was that I was either mistaken or lying about what I eat. Essentially she stated that I must be doing something wrong or I wouldn’t be so fat.

She said “If what you say is true about what you are eating, you need to look into portion size and break it into several small meals.” She didn’t address, or maybe didn’t believe what I said about always regaining weight. This doctor wanted to share her eating disorder with me in the guise of treatment. The only reason I continued to see her was that I needed the clinic’s help. For my next appointment with her I both mailed in advance and brought in the Health At Every Size® manifesto, recommended by Linda Bacon, complete with citations to studies supporting the HAES approach.

She avoided seeing me at all during the appointment. Nurses at the clinic conveyed the necessary information to her and prescriptions to me. Mercifully she went on maternity leave and didn’t return. At my next appointment I actually saw another doctor. I could see the HAES materials in my file on the counter, but we didn’t discuss the subject. She simply said, “Aside from mobility problems and blood pressure you seem to be pretty healthy.” And we let it go at that.

I also have personal experience with the doctors described in the New York Times article, doctors who have been proven to provide sympathetic care for lower weight patients behaving very differently toward fatter patients. One friend had a doctor who had treated her with such sensitivity and concern that she felt he had saved her life. She wanted me to be able to have the same experience and even offered to pay the “concierge doctor” fees for his services. As it turned out money was not the problem. He simply refused to see me. Based simply on my friend’s description of me, including my weight, he recommended gastric bypass surgery.

In the New York Times article quoted above, Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Yale-Griffin University Prevention Research Center, notes:

In dealing with patients who are overweight … doctors often show the same biases and prejudices as the culture at large. The problem may be compounded by the fact that doctors are trained to deal with immediate medical problems that have specific solutions, like a pill to lower blood pressure or emergency treatment for a heart attack. But obesity is a far more complex problem that isn’t easy to solve, and that can be frustrating to doctors.

“When we can’t fix what is broken we tend to behave badly,” he said.…

Dr. Katz said his grandmother, who was obese, was so tired of physicians’ negative comments about her weight that she stopped going to the doctor altogether, even when she developed a breast tumor. When she finally sought treatment, she had advanced-stage breast cancer and died in her 50s.

“Every time she went to the doctor for any reason, they wagged a finger at her and talked about her weight,” Dr. Katz said. “We need to understand that the stakes are very high.”

The solution, he said, is better training so that medical students and doctors understand the complex nature of obesity as well as their own (perhaps subconscious) biases. Yale, for one, offers a continuing education program for doctors on compassionate and effective lifestyle counseling for patients.

“I think a lot of them are compassionate and don’t realize this is going on,” Dr. Katz said. “The antipathy for obesity is really rooted in our culture. We should expect better from doctors and train them better.

Even a small weight gain can put a patient “over the line” as far as doctor empathy is concerned.

At Fierce Fatties, bronwenofhindscroft writes about her husband’s first encounter with one doctor. Bronwen’s husband had gained 20 pounds in three years after a knee injury slightly curtailed his still impressive physical activities:

Those 20 pounds were enough to bring his BMI up three points and put him into “OMG YOU’RE GOING TO DIE TOMORROW!” range.

The doctor came in and, right off the bat, told him that he was “obese,” and needed to lose weight, first and foremost. If he didn’t, dire things would happen….

This leads many fat people to to mistrust the medical establishment and dread doctor visits. The physician bias against fat patients has been shown to exist as early as medical school.

The problem goes beyond doctors. The NAAFA newsletter points out:

A study by the Yale Rudd Center now shows that bias can be a two-way street, with patients being biased against physicians who are viewed as carrying excess weight.

Respondents reported more mistrust of physicians who are overweight or obese, were less inclined to follow their medical advice, and were more likely to change providers if the physician was perceived to be overweight or obese, compared to normal-weight physicians who elicited significantly more favorable reactions. These weight biases remained present regardless of participants’ own body weight.

In a post entitled “What to Say at the Doctor’s Office,” Ragen Chastain at Dances with Fat offers some wonderful boiled-down-to the essence Doctor Cards containing an explanation of Health at Every Size and a request for “shame free health care”–I love this phrase! The cards also offer some useful phrases to use at during office visits and citations to research to clearly make the point that science backs up the HAES approach.

I love her credo:

I believe that everybody of every size should be treated with respect.

I believe that it’s impossible to tell somebody’s health based on their weight.

I believe in giving people correct information and affordable options for eating and movement.

Doctors seem to share fatphobia with the rest of the world; this results in an unhealthy habit of discounting whatever fat people have to say, and thus translates into fat people getting treated at least as badly in the medical system as anywhere else.

Debbie says:

I was browsing something else the other day when I saw a sidebar headline that said, more or less, “Michael Douglas reveals that oral sex caused his throat cancer.” I didn’t click the link at the time.

Today, I find Jessica Luther saying “We need a better way to talk about cunnilingus.”

So, Michael Douglas mentioned cunnilingus in an interview (and whether he *should* have is a different post) and everyone blushed, giggled, and immediately stopped making eye contact with everyone else. Or they said “gross” and acted like they were embarrassed for him.”

• I wish Douglas good luck with his health; he has been through hard times and is still undergoing regular check-ups for recurrence.
• Of course we don’t have a good way to talk about cunnilingus. We don’t have a good way to talk about any kind of sex, pretty much, and the ways that please women are lowest on the list. Douglas may (I hope!) be moving us further along the trail blazed by Lorena Bobbitt in 1993, when she cut off the end of her husband John’s dick and forced the national news to learn how to say “penis” on television.
• I think Douglas absolutely should have talked about this. I didn’t know about the link between oral sex and oral cancers (and I’m pretty well informed about these things, which means lots of other people also don’t know), so good on him for publicizing it. Also, despite what headlines you may have read, he absolutely did not say that oral sex caused his throat cancer: he said it might have done so, which is accurate.
• It also means he goes down on his lovers, which not all (heterosexual) men do, and not all (heterosexual) men who do will admit, so good on him for that.

Digging a little into the link between oral sex and oral cancer immediately leads to HPV (human papillomavirus) as the cause. I was already aware of the link between HPV and cervical cancer, and wrote here several years ago about some of the controversy surrounding HPV vaccination.At least one study seems to show that oral sex in the presence of HPV not only causes oral cancers, the presence of HPV also vastly increases a person’s likelihood of surviving oral cancers when they happen.

Two vaccines against HPV exist; both are generally only effective in people young enough not to have been exposed to HPV. Both are owned and marketed by Big Pharma, which has a vested interest in making them mandatory. (Why did so-called conservative Texas governor Rick Perry support mandatory HPV vaccination? Whose pocket was he in?) Both are better tested in teenage girls than in teenage boys, though there is data indicating that they may be effective with boys as well.

Vaccines in general are surprisingly (and indefensibly) controversial in the United States in the 21st century. The HPV vaccine would almost certainly be controversial even in the days when vaccination was taken for granted, because it implies to parents that their children might *gasp* be sexually active. I continue to believe, as I did in 2007, that I would encourage a pre-teen daughter to get the vaccine; I would do some more research before encouraging a son to do the same (and a son might only be able to depending on where he was living at the time).  I’d also like to see more data on the link between HPV and survival of oral cancers.

The more transparent we can be, the more we can talk about sexual behaviors in a calm, reasoned manner, the better off we are. We’d probably have better ways to talk about sex if we didn’t wait for movies stars and knife-wielding abused wives to open the dialogue, rather than paying attention to scientists and study results. Similarly, we probably wouldn’t wait for the movie stars and knife wielders if we had better ways to talk about sex.

Debbie says:

Sesali Bowen at Feministing has an interesting take on “the male gaze.” The term, which Laurie and I have often used, came into prominence nearly forty years ago:

In her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Laura Mulvey … stated that women were objectified in film because heterosexual men were in control of the camera….

The male gaze occurs when the camera puts the audience into the perspective of a heterosexual man. It may linger over the curves of a woman’s body, for instance. The woman is usually displayed on two different levels: as an erotic object for both the characters within the film, as well as the spectator who is watching the film. The man emerges as the dominant power within the created film fantasy. The woman is passive to the active gaze from the man. This adds an element of ‘patriarchal’ order and it is often seen in “illusionistic narrative film”. Mulvey argues that, in mainstream cinema, the male gaze typically takes precedence over the female gaze, reflecting an underlying power asymmetry.

In the intervening decades, the term has been used for many media other than cinema, including advertising, news, and, in Bowen’s current essay among other places, music. After starting with Beyoncé (and referencing Tamara Winfrey Harris’s excellent article about her), Bowen goes further:

Sex work and workers (not to be confused with victims of human trafficking) immediately come to mind when thinking about women’s participation in the male gaze. These are women who often make a living by understanding and perfectly pleasing the male gaze (and sometimes the male body). I find sex workers and other women in the broader entertainment industry to be strikingly similar in this regard. Feminist support of sex workers rights does not bring into question their relationship with male gaze. Instead, we legitimize their (very real) work of performing for a male gaze. We don’t get to pick and choose when and whose sexual expression/freedom we support. When feminists support sex workers or movements like “Slut Walk” or demand that women be able to define their sexy and have bodily autonomy we don’t stipulate: …unless said autonomy pleases, supports, or reflects the male gaze.

And what if a woman finds herself wanting to be dead center in this gaze? Is it ok for women to want to be desired by men? As a fat, black, hip hop feminist, I realize that my exclusion from what is considered “beautiful” is rooted in Eurocentric, fatphobic, and racist ideals. But I can’t honestly say that I wouldn’t be thrilled if I had a smaller waist and bigger booty. And not because some men and women are not already attracted to me–they are–but just because I think that hip to waist ratio is more attractive. Does that make me a detriment to the feminist movement?

Bowen is clearly right that sex workers survive by pleasing the male gaze, and that feminists (including me) who support sex workers are not (and should not be) critiquing that aspect of their work. I see a real difference between naming and calling out the male gaze itself and criticizing the people whose lives are guided by how the male gaze works. I don’t have to support capitalism to support people who live by cashing a corporate paycheck; that’s what I do.

Furthermore, I think most women want “to be dead center in this gaze,” because we are creatures of our culture.  If that’s not ok, then feminists are in the disturbing position of failing to support most women–a losing strategy if there ever was one. We don’t have to equate wanting to please the male gaze with approving of the male gaze. To a substantial extent, we want what we’ve been trained to want. That’s not our fault, but it doesn’t mean we can’t feel into another way of being.

Readers who know hip-hop better than I do will want to look at the part of the article that specifies particular women artists and their relationship to the male gaze, before getting to Bowen’s conclusion:

Firstly, the male gaze is a product of capitalism. So it has the capacity to make even the most traditionally beautiful women feel like shit about themselves. The perfect woman to satisfy this gaze does not exist. And secondly, my experiences with men as friends, lovers, and family have shed light on the fact that they themselves are not as bound to the standards established by the gaze as one would assume. These ideas are only rooted in my own experiences, but, for me, they have made it easy for me to go on about my life without thinking about pleasing the male gaze.

Everything she says is true, but she doesn’t go back and tie up the threads. The sex workers whom she describes as making a living “by understanding and perfectly pleasing the male gaze” are also in the group who (usually) feel like shit about themselves. They may in fact be (nearly) perfectly pleasing the male gaze (which is probably just as cruel as we think it is, but is nowhere near as nuanced and specific as we think it is), but they may be going home and crying because they don’t feel like they are pleasing the male gaze enough, or at all, or they are pleasing the wrong male gaze. They may feel guilty or dirty or ashamed of pleasing the male gaze. This can be true if they are making good money, but is even more of a trap if sex work isn’t working for them economically.

Similarly, the men who “are not as bound to the standards established by the gaze as one would assume” are having a related problem. Many men have told me and Laurie about their own conflicted reactions when they respond to women who are not  “dead center” in the gaze. They can be afraid it makes them less as men. They can be afraid to admit to themselves or others that they are stepping outside the standards, or ashamed if they do demonstrate their divergence publicly.

The “male gaze” is not something which all men cooked up to poison the lives of all women. Instead, it is something the (generally) men who decide what we get to see–in cinema, in advertising, in music–use as a club on everyone else, people of all genders, sex workers, office workers, and manual laborers. And these gatekeepers of the male gaze, if you could confront them about it, would say, “Well, we just give people what they want,” and disclaim responsibility.

No one owns or takes responsibility for the male gaze, and yet almost everyone is affected by it.

Debbie says:

______________________________________________

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.

___________________________________________________

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.