Thanks for the Pall, Construction Worker

I sashayed out the door like I own the place and headed downtown to enjoy the weather, maybe pop in and say hello to Hilary, return some books, perhaps hit the bakery. To enjoy a rare stretch of time with obligations to just be outside and do some ambling. The days that I can do this seem to fall few and far between now. I have too much work to do to leave the house at all, or I can’t leave for long stretches because something might happen, or because I spend the whole time fretting because I am convinced that there is something I am forgetting, an obligation, a responsibility, a something.

It started out so well. It was a lovely, sunny day, the kind of day that comes to mind when you think about summer, and what summer is, and what it should be. Warm enough to feel comfortable, but not hot, with a hint of  a breeze coming off the ocean. The tide is high, so it just smells fresh and clean and salty, not dirty and bitter and sour. Not like rotting dead things, like it sometimes does in the summer as the seaweed bakes above the high tide line.

And I was thinking about nothing in particular and swinging my arms and perhaps muttering to myself, as one does, and seeing how the neighborhood gardens were growing. I was wholly in myself and enjoying the moment, the day, the fresh air, the sense that nothing is hanging over me. Everything was so beautiful, you see.

And then I passed the construction site. I tried to ignore it, at first, I really did, but they were so very loud and their voices rang so very clearly down the street and I shrank into myself and felt very small and alone. The middle of the day, no one is around but me and the construction workers, commenting on my body. The whistling. The hooting. The words I can’t bring myself to repeat because, really, you’ve heard them. You can imagine.

You know how it is, as you debate whether to speed up, or to keep your pace and pretend that nothing is happening. As you ask yourself if you should retort back crisply, or say nothing as well. As you clench your fists by your sides and try not to let the rage, the frustration, show. You know how it is because it happens everywhere and it happens all the time and sometimes it seems like it will never end. You know what they said because they’ve probably said it to you or you’ve heard it said. Those words are like barbs sinking into your skin.

People say that this is flattering. I don’t understand why. This is not a celebration of my body, the cataloging of its parts and exactly what people want to do with them, the leering. The moving towards me in ways that I do not read as friendly. I read them as statements of power and control and ownership. People say that this is a compliment, to be shouted at by people who want to make their opinions about you known. As though, what, you are so very tempting that even though you are a stranger, they want to make sure that you are aware of your temptingness? How is this a compliment?

They say, too, that if you don’t like it, you shouldn’t dress so provocatively. (Jeans and a scoopneck tee, if you’re curious.) That it’s no big deal, really, they don’t mean anything by it. They must mean something by it, if they do it, because otherwise why would they? I think they mean exactly what I think they mean, which is that they view me as something not human. An object, perhaps. A piece of meat. Something to be used up and thrown away.

They want to exert their power but they don’t have time because they are busy busy with the construction so instead they will shout at me, make me feel unsafe on my own street, remind me that at any time, at any place, the threats will always be present.

Can you run? I think not.

They say that it’s harmless, but when I reached the end of the block, I was trembling and covered in a cold sweat and my heart was racing and I was feeling that warning flutter that says everything is out of synch. And it was a bright, bold, sunny, beautiful day, but I felt like the sky darkened. As though a pall had been pulled over my head, and suddenly I didn’t want to do any of the things I had thought I would do downtown.

I shuffled to the library, head down, and I dropped my books off at the counter and I didn’t even have the energy to look at the new arrivals shelf or get my holds, I just turned around and left, slunk home along the back streets so that I wouldn’t pass the construction again, and I stripped off my clothes and wrapped myself in boxer shorts and an undershirt and sat and stared at my four safe walls for a while. My beautiful prison.

30 June, 2010 – 10:34 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in social justice | Tagged , , |

Impatient Timpani

Bernice Yeung at East Bay Express: Can Health Care Treat Crime?

Health care and violence prevention may not seem related, but Alameda County is betting there’s an important connection between the two.

Jay Barmann at SFist: Mehserle Said ‘F*ck This’ Before Shooting Oscar Grant

In the Johannes Mehserle trial [Thursday], a witness testified that a frustrated Johannes Mehserle shouted “Fuck this” before reaching for his gun and shooting Oscar Grant in the back that fateful New Year’s morning.

Beth Slovic at Willamette Week: Señor Smith

Knowingly hiring undocumented workers is a violation of federal law. Perhaps most important, during a year when Smith is seeking re-election, it is at odds with the senator’s public statements on the explosive issue of illegal immigration.

Amy Scattergood at LA Weekly: Chefs With Tattoos

Cooks turn to tattoos as a preferred expression of individualism, a form of rebellion against kitchen environments that demand conformity.

Gustavo Arellano at the Orange County Weekly: Santa Ana Unified School District Blames Disabled Student for Her Molestation by School Worker, Demands She Pay Their Legal Bills! (content warning: molestation, sexual assault, ableism)

In a June 1st filing in Orange County Superior Court, school districts lawyers tried to dismiss the lawsuit using 40 separate affirmative defenses, known in the real world as “excuses.”

30 June, 2010 – 10:15 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , |

True Blood: It Hurts Me Too

Content warning: This post contains discussions about True Blood through season three, episode three, ‘It Hurts Me Too.’ It also discusses violent sexuality that occurred in said episode. If you’d like to skip it, you can read ‘Glee and the Great Dichotomy,’ today’s feature post.

I don’t think I want to do a True Blood writeup every week, but two things happened this week that I want to touch upon: The direction that they are taking Tara Thornton, and That Scene at the end of the episode with Bill and Lorena. For the benefit of those who don’t want to read about/discuss That Scene, that will be the second half of this post so that you can read about Tara and then move on.

So, Tara. Let’s talk about Tara, because I am not at all happy with the way that they are shaping her character. She was introduced as a kind of troped character with a streak of potential, and I had inklings of hopes for her. Let’s not forget that we are introduced to her reading a book on the job and that in the first few episodes of the show, she often carried books, after all. She seemed like a character who could potentially grow and develop in interesting directions, breaking out of the double-trope box that a lot of Black women on television find themselves in.

I started getting more and more uneasy last season, and this season, that unease is settling in more deeply. Tara appears to be turning into the best friend who always has inappropriate boyfriends and needs rescuing. Franklin is clearly Bad News Bears, no matter what his deal is, and I’m deeply troubled by the way that Tara seems to be headed.

I liked the initial depiction of grief and distress over Eggs. I thought it was honest, and a nice departure from conventional depictions of grief where a character is sad for an episode and then gets over it. Alan Ball does have some experience here, what with Six Feet Under. Even the decision to turn to Franklin for casual sex didn’t trouble me that much, because, well, that is one response to grief. It is valid. It does happen. But I feel like Tara is being turned completely helpless, in need of rescuing and shepherding by other characters, and I am not liking this at all. I feel like this is a common trap that female characters end up in, the sidekicky best friends, and it feels untrue to Tara, who seems like a strong, resourceful character.

I also see a lot of Tara-hate going on, with people calling her character ‘needy’ and ‘whiny’ and I assume that this is going to escalate this season. Whatever is going on with her and Franklin, I think it is going to end in tears and recriminations, and I can’t wait for people to start referring to her as whiny over it.

Now, for That Scene. My reading on this scene appears to be pretty different from that I’m seeing in other discussions of this episode. I agree that it’s gratuitously violent and horrifically misogynist and disgusting. It really does, as I was telling Annaham last night, put a whole new level on ‘hatefuck.’

But, I think it’s pretty obvious that Lorena put the whammy on Bill in that scene. Are we forgetting that Makers have total control over their children? That she can literally order Bill to have sex with her, ‘release’ from last season or no? Who wants to bet she had her fingers crossed on that one? I’d agree it’s a rape, but not of Lorena—of Bill. He is not consenting in that scene and it’s pretty clear to me that the violence is the expression of his lack of consent. I personally would have preferred, uhm, a less misogynistic way of expressing that. He could have been wooden and toneless, he could have cried through the scene, he could have been as passive as possible, there were lots of ways to depict that. That would have conveyed both that he is being forced, and that he is really, really unhappy about it. It also would have allowed the show to retain his humanity, which seems to be what they are trying to do, given that it is an overarching theme of the show. Having him do what he did was completely alienating and disgusting. I don’t really see how the show, or Bill, is supposed to come back from that.

Lorena is a character who is stripping Bill of his humanity, and maybe that’s what they were trying to enforce with that scene, that the dynamic between the characters is so toxic that it can only express in violence and dehumanisation. The scene made me deeply, viscerally uncomfortable, though. There would have been other, healthier ways to depict that. Bill is, when you get down to it, an increasingly dislikable character for his actions on the show, and if the series plans on including one of the scenes from the book this season is based on, he’s going to become even more unlikeable, real fast, in a couple of episodes. True Blood would not be the first show to have a character who is fundamentally wrong as the lead, but is it a good move? Will the show be able to walk the line, or will we end up with a fetishisation of the character instead of a condemnation?

Speaking of hating on female characters, I also see a lot of people hating on Lorena. I personally love her. Not the character herself, but how she is played. In the books, she’s not really a very active character. She is just sort of on the sidelines as a cartoon villain. The decision to turn her into a real character that plays a role, an ugly sickening one, is, I think, a really good one. People say that she’s ‘flat,’ but she’s not flat, she’s cold. She is inhuman. She is evil. That’s the whole point. Lorena gives me the heebie jeebies every time she is on screen and she is supposed to do that. She is supposed to provoke revulsion. It would be preferable if that expulsion didn’t have to express itself on screen in the form of horrific violence against women, and I’m pretty unimpressed with Alan Ball for that particular decision.

Related reading: The Feministe True Blood roundtable and the Racialicious True Blood roundtable.

29 June, 2010 – 6:15 pm | By s.e. smith | Posted in social justice, television | Tagged , , , |

Glee and the Great Dichotomy

So. Let’s talk about Glee now that we’ve had a bit of breathing room without new episodes being crammed down our throats every week.

The argument that I most commonly see used to ‘explain’ the show to people like me who don’t like it, or people who like it but don’t like the depictions, is that Glee is meant to be satire. In fact, a lot of the things I said about Arrested Development yesterday are also said about Glee. We aren’t meant to laugh at the depictions and the jokes. We are meant to read them as critiques of the society we live in. Glee is holding the mirror up to society and demanding us to explore our own complicity.

Why are some folks not reading Glee that way? Why are some folks feeling like the show is not meeting the standard when it comes to presenting oppressive concepts in a way that is meant to deconstruct them?

I think that there are a couple of things going on here, and one of them is Glee’s stated intent. For the most part, I’m not that interested in creative intent. I am interested in how I read a show, and in the embedded messages it contains. This is whether or not the embedded content was intentional. In fact, I think it’s more telling when that content wasn’t meant to be there and ended up there anyway, illustrating how much of this stuff becomes internalised for us.

However, I make an exception in the case of Glee because the show is claiming to be doing something revolutionary. It’s congratulating itself for breaking down stereotypes and confronting social attitudes. Every week, it claims to be, well, ‘a TV show dedicated exclusively to the idea of inclusiveness and acceptance for all.’ That’s Ryan Murphy, talking about Glee. And the show is being widely referred to as living up to these values. It is winning awards for it. That means that I hold the show to a higher standard.

And, to my eye, there are two things going on here. One is that Murphy’s brand of humour is very particular. Some people like Murphy’s humour. Others do not. Many have pointed out that Nip/Tuck also has some extremely troubling content, which suggests that Murphy has kind of a bad track record here. It’s worth exploring that when considering how shrilly Murphy is presenting Glee as some sort of groundbreaking show. For me, I don’t find his humour enjoyable. I feel that it is oppressive and exploitative and it is very clear, to me, that oppressive things on the show are intended to be read as amusing. Not that oppressive things are presented and then taken down, but that they are presented without comment or actively praised.

Which brings me to the second problem with Glee, an issue that I noticed getting bigger and bigger with the last few episodes of the season. And that’s that the show does not have a very consistent tone. Indeed, one could safely show that the show is all over the place, and this is making the situation worse, in my opinion. If Glee could settle into being an earnest and fresh-faced teen show that is trying to teach people lessons, I would respect that. Hell, The Secret Life of the American Teenager is basically that, and I watched a few episodes on a recommendation from a friend. Not my cup of tea, not something I’m that interested in, but it is a genre, and some people like that.

Some people like their saccharine life lessons presented in nuggets of clear and crisp learning experiences. Kurt’s dad lecturing Finn on his language use. Mercedes accepting and embracing her size. And I note, casting my eye back on previous Glee reviews, that I consistently singled out these scenes to discuss because at the same time that they got a lot of praise from the media, they made me really uncomfortable. These Serious Learning Experiences feel totally out of place because they are bracketed by ‘parody’ that would be more accurately described ‘exploiting people in marginalised bodies to make people laugh.’

These moments don’t fit in with the tone of the show. Glee is presenting itself as snarky, fun, biting satire. And, for the most part, that is what it is trying to be. I don’t read the satire the same way that I do on Arrested Development because I feel like it doesn’t quite take the next step of satirising itself; when Glee does get meta, it’s usually to be snide about the people who criticise the show, as seen with some of the comments Mercedes makes about her characterisation. But that is what it is trying to be, and that’s why these Serious Learning Experiences feel so stilted and awful.

Glee is straddling a divide, and it’s doing it very badly. It cannot make its mind, flipping desperately between two very different modes. The show is trying to take itself seriously, and instead it just comes off as clumsy. I think that I might, actually, like the show if it could pick a consistent tone, clean house a bit, and stop taking itself so fucking seriously. The problem with Glee is that it presents these representations not in a way that challenges the viewer, but in a way that affirms it, and then it tries to insert Life Lessons, some of which are really bad lessons to learn, like ‘wheelchair users should just accept that they will never be dancers and move on with their lives.’

And this is why I get frothy with rage at people praising Glee. Because they point triumphantly to the Learning Experiences to negate the arguments being made by the show’s detractors. And the point that they are missing is that these Learning Experiences convey some very harmful and problematic attitudes sometimes. I criticise the show both for the humour, and for the serious, especially the Serious Learning Moments with Artie that, in my opinion, reinforce everything terrible I can imagine about disability.

That’s Glee’s problem, for me. The show cannot decide what it wants to be and it puts the onus on the viewers who challenge it. People can say they like it ‘despite the problematic content’ because of the way the show is positioning itself and being celebrated for it. They can feel comforted by familiar social attitudes that they wrap around themselves like a warm blanket while assuring themselves that they are fighting the power.

Either Glee is engaging in one of the longest payoffs ever with some of these representations, or it’s a pile of self-important shit that, aside from being problematic television, is just bad television. Raising the question of why Fox renewed it for, not one, but two seasons.

29 June, 2010 – 10:26 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in television | Tagged , , , , |

Salacious Bassoons

Scott Henry at Creative Loafing: The Atlanta Way not always best

But letting corporations take the lead in civic matters isn’t an all-purpose solution. The planned Center for Civil and Human Rights is an example of a great opportunity misplaced — literally.

Matthew McDermott at Treehugger: Commercial Hunting Just One of Many Problems Facing Whales: Oil Exploration, Pollution, Fishing Nets

At another presentation, Reuters reports on the many other hazards whales face–from noise and chemical pollution, to being caught up in fish nets, to climate change–and how these issues have been sidelined of late in the public discussion around whale conservation.

Anthea Lawson at The Guardian: Comment is free: West’s financial system must stop flow of dirty money

Many of the poorest countries could lift their populations out of poverty with their natural resource revenues. One of the biggest things stopping them is the willingness of the international financial system to accept looted funds.

Clare Murphy at BBC News: Major deficiencies in artificial feeding, inquiry finds

A catalogue of problems were uncovered while reviewing questionnaires and case notes from England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the “Mixed Bag” report found.

Marc Perton at Consumerist: Brits May Challenge Visa’s 2012 Olympics Exclusivity

In fact, thanks to a contract between Visa and the International Olympic Committee, Visa has been the only credit or debit card allowed at the Olympics since the Seoul games in 1988.

29 June, 2010 – 10:07 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , |

The Things I Like, and How I Like Them

Today, I’m going to try an experiment.

People constantly complain that humourless feminists don’t find anything funny, and don’t find anything enjoyable. That we spend all our television viewing hours staring sourly at the screen and scribbling down notes so that we can remember all the things we meant to be angry about later.

The fact is, there are a lot of things in this world I like, I just don’t talk about them very much because I’ve found that talking purely about why I like things is much harder than talking about why I don’t like other things. By which I mean: All of the analysis I post is about things I like1. And I like doing analysis. I do. I like talking, for example, about some of the themes and imagery in Battlestar Galactica, just to pull a random show I like to write about out of my head.

And I have argued in the past and will continue to argue that analysis is a critical part of liking something. My enjoyment of things is deeper for analysing them, for exploring them, for really thinking about them. For considering the ways that they impact me. But that’s not the same thing as saying that I like something, and articulating why I like it.

I like Arrested Development. A lot. It’s one of those things that I put on when I am feeling grim and I watch a few episodes and I feel better. It is a show that feels like a fresh rain after a series of muggy and disgusting days. I like it because it makes me happy. But, it’s a show that relies on a lot of things I hate. It contains -isms out the wazoo. Casual ableism, racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Why, then, do I like it? That’s what I would like to explore today, because I think that trying to articulate what it is about Arrested Development that I like, not despite the content but actually because of it, might help me better understand what it is about shows like Glee, that rely on a lot of the same techniques, that I don’t like.

Writing at Bitch Magazine, RMJ of Deeply Problematic discussed the depiction of othering jokes on television, and what has to happen for such jokes to fight oppression, rather than reinforcing it. She got at a really key point in her post, which is that when social justice activists talk about depictions on television, the problem isn’t the depiction. It’s not the joke. It’s how it is presented. I can see an act of horrific sexism on a television show and see it as a feminist act if it is presented in a way that clearly conveys the real intent to the reader.

And that is what Arrested Development does for me. It presents these dreadful things and they are presented in a context that is clearly, obviously, evidently satirical. The show is a comedy, and the comedy is in examining these people and how ridiculously awful they are. And, to some extent, the show also turns the mirror on the viewer and asks people to examine the role of -isms in their own lives. The Bluths are clueless and privileged and infuriating and they are supposed to be. I like Arrested Development because it is both funny and subversive.

Arrested Development crosses lines sometimes. I will be the first to admit that. Sometimes, jokes that are oppressive are clearly meant to be read as funny by the viewers. No show is pitch perfect and my liking it doesn’t excuse or negate that fact. But, overall, Arrested Development has a very consistent tone. It’s clear, to me, what the show was trying to accomplish and what kind of statements were being made. I, as a viewer, feel like I am on the same page with the satire.

I don’t watch a lot of comedy. It’s not a genre that really endears itself to me, for a variety of reasons. I have a weird sense of humour and I don’t get a lot of comedy. Not because I am a humourless feminist who is unamused by exploitation of people for laughs, but because I just don’t understand it. I don’t get why some things are meant to be funny. Arrested Development, though, I get. Sometimes, watching comedies, I feel like jokes are being made at my expense, but I don’t feel that way watching this show. I feel like I’m sitting around the table with friends, having an eyebrow raise and a laugh, and it feels good to me, as a viewer.

I tend to like shows that are dark and rather bleak. That depict the human condition in ways that are unflinching, and sometimes cruel. Six Feet Under is one of my all time favourite shows for that darkness. It’s a show that drags you to the edge of the abyss and forces you to look in. Sometimes I hate the characters. I want to scream at them. Sometimes I ache for them. Their struggles reflect my own experiences.

There are definitely light moments in Six Feet Under, many of which have to do with the absurdity of human experience. More commonly it is sometimes so intimate and intense that I need to pause and take a breath, need to pull back a little bit because I am so immersed in the characters and their lives. It’s a show that demands my attention and makes me focus.

What I like about Six Feet Under is that the characters are allowed to be unhappy, the stories unresolved, and the show feels very true to life for me; The Bluths are true to life too, but in a totally different way.

Something I note about both Six Feet Under and Arrested Development is that neither show is trying to teach viewers anything. Both depict human life, but it’s not presented in a ‘here is your teachable moment’ kind of way. It’s presented in a ‘you can take this or leave this’ kind of way. You can watch these shows and you can make observations, or you can not, and just enjoy the shows for what they are: good entertainment.

Is this where Glee is falling short? Let’s explore tomorrow.

  1. With the exception of discussions about Glee. I don’t like Glee. I keep writing about it not because I think  it’s important to discuss (it is), not because I like talking about representations in pop culture (I do), not because people ask me to write about Glee (they do), but solely and specifically to spite all of the people who try to shut me up. It may not be very politic of me to admit that, but I’m feeling crisply truthful today, so, there you have it. ↩
28 June, 2010 – 10:59 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in television | Tagged , , , , |

Mauve Fuscias

Dominic Holden at The Stranger:  New Money in the Gay Ghetto

Look at these queer kids. They’re earnest and smart—so earnest and so smart that you’d give them lots of the city’s cash to start a clubhouse and community center for queer youth, right?

Rich Connell at the Los Angeles Times:  L.A.’s red-light camera program exempted from Arizona boycott

Los Angeles’ red-light camera program was temporarily exempted Wednesday from the city’s contracting boycott of Arizona prompted by that state’s new immigration enforcement policy.

Grist: BP’s most ironic ads ever

If you go back far enough, you’ll find they’ve been positioning themselves as a shiny, happy company for decades — even before their 2000 brand shift when they merged with Amoco, took over Arco, and famously changed their tagline to “Beyond Petroleum.”

Travis Lupick at Straight.com: Vancouver photographer describes horror of Gulf of Mexico oil spill

“As soon as you get out there, it fucking punches you in the gut,” Krug told the Straight. “Unless you are out there near the source, up in the air, it is hard to really imagine the scope [of the BP oil spill]. It is from horizon to horizon and way, way beyond.”

Lauren Smiley at SF Weekly: Worlds Apart

So what do you do when the law won’t permit you to be with the most meaningful person in your life?

28 June, 2010 – 10:09 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in interesting | Tagged , , , , , , , |

I Believe In History

I can tell you precisely the moment when I was bitten by the history bug. When history went from being something that I was abstractly interested in to something I was passionate about. Nay, enthusiastic about. It came to life for me and became something that would, well, it would become a life-long love. I don’t ever see myself not loving history and not leaping to take advantage of chances to delve into historical artifacts and events. I don’t see myself ever not squeeing with delight

It was a hot October day and I was in Salem, Massachusetts, wandering through the house of Rebecca Nurse, one of the women persecuted during the Salem Witch Trials. Her house is maintained as a historical museum and it has some replicas of artifacts from the era. You can also take a few steps to the family cemetery right next to the house. I was in Rebecca Nurse’s house, and I realised that although I’d spent years reading that people were shorter in the 17th and 18th centuries, here I was in the house of someone from that era, and it felt like a house made for me.

For context, I am around four feet, eleven inches tall. And this house felt like, well, it felt like a home. Modern houses I enter, everything is slightly off kilter. It’s not a lot, I am not that short, but it is just enough. Counters are slightly too high. Doorknobs are slightly out of place. Handles are not quite where I would want them to be. It’s like someone magnified the house by 107%, just enough to throw me off, but not enough that I feel totally disoriented. After all, I am used to it at this point.

But Rebecca Nurse’s house, everything was just right. It was where it should be. And the people with me were all very tall, and they were clonking around and tripping on the stairs and hitting beams with their heads. It was a Goldilocks moment for me. That dry information in textbooks, that people used to be smaller, came to life for me because I was there and, well, I’m small. And I always felt too small for the spaces around me, but finally I took up the right amount of space.

Later, I had an opportunity to actually look at original records from Salem. And it was another lightbulb moment for me. Something I had viewed in facsimile, something I had read synthesized by countless others, was suddenly right in front of me. I could read it for myself. I could draw my own conclusions. It was like watching a door that I didn’t even know was there suddenly snap open, and just walking right through it.

I realised in a way I never had before that history is a living, breathing thing. I know it sounds kind of silly, but it was something that had actually happened. And it also made me realise the dangerous of filtering history through others. Of allowing others to read and report on history, instead of seeking out the information for myself. Of letting stories only be told from one perspective.

And it made me realise the value of keeping and preserving records. Things that might not seem so important or interesting now could be fascinating later, as I’ve realised looking through subsequent original source documents relating to other historical events. You really do never know when or what might be relevant, how material might be used. And people who preserved things ensured that even if stories weren’t told at the time or official publications were incomplete, that the information was out there. It was available. For people who were willing to look for it and sift through it, it might provide an entirely new perspective that had not been considered before.

I’m not a historian. In college, I went on to focus on anthropology, specifically studying military culture and the anthropological aspects of warfare. Which is, in a sense, related to history, and it also involves going through original source materials. But I never forgot the lessons I learned in Salem that day, and I continue to apply them to my daily life. Because history matters. It is important.

I believe in history. This sounds tremendously cheesy, but it’s the truth. There are all sorts of things there for the finding. And I think that one of the biggest flaws we face as a society and that individual movements face is a lack of history. An inability to incorporate historical perspectives. An unwillingness to think about history.

History is loaded. History is scary. History, all of it, sometimes reveals unpleasant things. It erodes the images we have of icons, it causes our visions of perfect societies to crumble. This, the ugly truth of history, must be brought to light and explored. We need to talk about it. We need to contextualise it. When we don’t, we do a disservice to history and ourselves.

If we do not, for example, talk about the intersections between the eugenics movements and the women’s rights movements, those deep roots of racism and ableism that lie under some feminist ideologies, we aren’t going to understand why racism and ableism continue to be problems with the feminist movement. History has real impact and it resonates; the things that some people fought for continue to be fought over today. ‘Feminists’ believed that ‘idiots’ shouldn’t reproduce and diluted versions of that belief, that ideology, that line of thinking, trickled down to modern day feminism. The whitewashing of feminist idols ensures that people have to dig to find the roots of this thinking. The concealment means that it isn’t readily apparent and feminists express shock and surprise when, well, people point out that this was a fact, and bring out original source materials to prove it.

History is like the ocean. If you turn your back on it, a sneaker wave might just get you.

27 June, 2010 – 10:38 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in history, social justice |

From the Deep

Read the first part of this story, ‘Giorgos and the Octopus,’ if you feel so inclined.

The story of Giorgos became common fodder in the kafenia. As people softly clicked their backgammon tiles to and fro and drank ouzo and cried ‘ai gamisou‘ at each other in a good natured way and snacked on mezze, they would talk about the octopus. Unbelievers who had not witnessed the Battle in the Harbour for themselves would demand a retelling of the story, even while clicking their tongues and nodding to indicate disbelief and skepticism. Occasionally, someone would be accused of outright embroidery of the story, and a round of gesticulations and shouting would break out.

Every day, more and more of the village would just happen to float in the direction of the harbour as the fleet came in. Wives watched from balconies and kitchen windows, idly shaking out rugs while lifting a hand to shade their eyes so that they could survey the scene below. The old men in the kafenia would amble out in the street, ostensibly to stretch their legs, occasionally peering in a meaningful way in the direction of the harbour.

One day, one of my father’s friends came in on the ferry and was bemused by the flocks of people whom, he assumed, were assembled to greet him. He began making a triumphant entry speech in Swedish, and was sorely disappointed when he realised everyone was looking in the other direction, even us.

‘What,’ he said in German, ‘is going on?’

‘The octopus,’ Anna said. My father nodded. I looked politely confused until Anna translated into Greek for me.

Olaf gave the villagers one look and then settled down to sit on his bag, trusting that all would be explained with time, and filled his pipe with highly malodorous tobacco that required several vigorous puffs to catch on fire before smouldering ominously. The fleet duly came in, a sigh of disappointment went up from the crowd, and everyone drifted off to return to their tasks.

I ran into Giorgos in the butcher shop one day, collecting offal because he’d been told it made the ideal bait.

‘Kalimera, Giorgos,’ I said politely.

He paused in his transaction to peer at me for a moment. My father and I, ‘the Americans,’ had a mythological status on par with Giorgos himself. It was strongly suspected, although rarely stated, that we had access to hitherto unimaginable amounts of unknown wealth, and were choosing to live in a small Greek village for entirely obscure reasons. It was a given, of course, that we knew all the Greeks in the United States, and occasionally someone would pop in our door to ask if we could have someone send some coveted delicacy from the Promised Land, despite our protestations that we really were as poor as everyone else and that anything sent from America would probably be stolen by the postal clerks before it reached Molybos.

‘Would you like,’ he asked me somberly, ‘to come out on my boat?’

Nothing could have been closer to my wildest desire. Not only would I be able to go out with the fleet, something I had been longing to do, but I could spend several hours monopolising the legend himself, and using this to my advantage in the schoolyard. I eagerly assented, and was directed to show up at the harbour early the next morning, which I duly did, neglecting to inform my father of my plans.

Evidently, my father assumed that I had gone to school, at least until school ended and I didn’t come home and Anna informed him that I’d never been there. After trolling the neighborhood, my father finally figured out that I had gone out with Giorgos, through a long chain of informants that led, eventually, back to the butcher’s shop.

I, meanwhile, had the most fabulous, albeit somewhat obscure, time. Giorgos and I went out and he set the boat adrift to scud across the water while he leaned back against the gunwhales and ate bread and olives. I whipped out a colouring book I’d brought along for the occasion, and we sat in companionable silence for an extended period of time. Occasionally another fishing boat would drift by and Giorgos would scramble up to shake his trident menacingly at the water or row purposefully for a few minutes, before subsiding again as soon as the observer vanished.

‘The octopus,’ he explained, breaking the silence, ‘it knows. The only way you will surprise the octopus is if you think like the octopus.’

I nodded.

Occasionally a shadow would drift under the boat and I would point excitedly while Giorgos identified it for me. An assortment of fish, a squid, a clump of seaweed, some rocks. Around what would have been lunchtime, we drifted close to shore and he waded out of the boat to collect some urchins, which we cracked open and ate wet and dripping.

‘I’m feeling closer,’ he said. ‘You think like the octopus, you move like the octopus. You become the octopus.’

‘It reminds me of chasing lambs,’ I said.

He waited politely for me to resume my thoughts.

‘If you charge straight at them,’ I explained, ‘they run away. But if you wait and pretend that you are not interested, eventually they will walk up to you, and then you can catch them.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

We both looked back to shore, where olive groves were passing by, and then Giorgos looked up at the sun.

‘Not today,’ he said, grunting and picking up the oars to row back into the harbor. As we rounded the island to join the rest of the fleet, boats laden heavily with their catch, everyone turned to look at us expectantly, and Giorgos shook his head and shrugged. I could see the villagers all valiantly pretending not to care as the fleet moved into the harbor, the heads turning as the word spread. Not today.

‘But maybe,’ Giorgos said, eyes crinkling. ‘Maybe tomorrow.’

To be continued…

26 June, 2010 – 10:59 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in Food, history | Tagged , , , |

Shhh. We don’t talk about money.

I do not come from money. I come, in fact, from the opposite of money. But, somehow, I absorbed a trait which is commonly described as ‘very old money.’ I don’t talk about money. I don’t tell people how much I earn, I don’t tell people how much things I own cost, and I am deeply uncomfortable in any situation in which people talk about money and provide actual numbers.

I don’t think that this is an outgrowth of some genteel culture of ‘old money.’ I think that it’s a direct consequence of sexism, because the other people I know who don’t talk about money? Are primarily women. I know lots of old and new money folks who are quite happy to talk about money, at length and ad nauseum, and almost all of them are male. They don’t mind telling me exactly how much they make, how much they paid for a house, how much they think things are worth.

Women, however, are trained to never, not ever, talk about money. There’s a conspiracy of silence around money conversations and it’s extremely harmful.

Let’s take the example of working as a freelancer, which I do. My silence about how much I get paid and my reluctance to talk about my pay or to ask other people about their pay results in situations in which freelancers have no real way of knowing how much they should be paid. Someone recently asked me what I thought a fair price for an article would be and I said ‘I don’t know,’ because I don’t, really. I accept what people pay me for articles, but I have nothing other than my own experience to use as a baseline for comparison. For piecework, is 35 cents a word fair? 50 cents? I have no idea. Literally, no idea. Which is a real problem when a client is asking me for a quote, instead of offering me a set rate, because I don’t know what to ask for.

There are sites where freelancers can and do compare what they make. But often these sites are so broad that they are not very helpful. I need to know what freelancers doing social justice writing are making. What sites are offering to different people; how the payscale changes with experience, reputation, and quality. But I don’t know, because I can’t talk about money.

The reluctance to talk about money has also been documented as a major contributor to the pay gap. Because women don’t talk about wages, benefits, and salaries, they have no way to compare what they are earning to other women (and people of other genders) in the same position. As a result, a woman may settle for an unreasonably low compensation package. Because she’s afraid of talking about money.

Or let’s take a situation in which you are making an arrangement to purchase something with a price which is negotiable, like a house or a car. I can look up comparable sales in the area to get an idea, but when it comes down to it, I don’t really know how much something should cost. And if I ask my friend Leslie how much she paid for her house, she is going to get extremely offended1 because she’s been taught that it’s not ok to talk about money. It’s gauche. It’s icky. This means that I might get an unfair deal on something because I have no way of gauging the reasonableness of the deal being offered.

Women are often ripped off on deals in general, for a lot of different reasons. The different rates paid to auto mechanics on the basis of gender presentation are, for example, notorious. But it’s not just sexism on the part of the provider of services which results in getting a poor deal. It’s also internalised sexism which says ‘oh, don’t call up Sara and ask her how much her oil change was, just pay whatever the nice mechanic is asking.’ The reluctance to talk about the basic prices of goods and services for fear of violating the don’t talk about money rule means that many of us don’t really know how much anything should cost.

Not talking about money is also a problem when it comes to handling taxes. I leave my taxes to an accountant. I do this for two reasons. The first is that I cannot do math and I fucked my taxes up every single year before I finally started going to an accountant. The second reason is that my accountant is up on all the ins and outs of the tax code, so he knows how to help me get the best deal, so to speak, on my tax liability. My payments to him are well worth it because they save me, in the long term, a lot of money.

But for people who do their own taxes, there’s often a reluctance to talk about how much one makes, what’s a deductible expense, and so forth. Some people are undoubtedly paying way more than they should for their taxes because they’re too afraid to ask for help or to talk about cold, hard numbers. That’s why I’m always excited to see people getting together as groups for tax parties so that they can exchange information and help each other out; it’s a flagrant ‘fuck you’ to the ‘don’t talk about money’ rule and it helps everyone involved.

Not talking about money also means that many people have a very poor grasp of class issues. Not really knowing how much people around you make, it’s difficult to compare your financial position. Are you better or worse off than people making the same amount? Are you not getting good financial advice, and as a result not saving as much money as other people who make as much? That person who appears to be doing well, is she actually carrying a lot of debt? Lying awake at night panicking about the mortgage payment? If you make $20,000 a year, how poor are you? This lack of understanding means that people have a hard time thinking critically about issues which involve money; a recent example being the health insurance bill, which places an incredible burden on the middle classes, a burden which is not recognised, because people can’t talk about money and don’t know how to.

And yet, with all of this considered, I still have a hard time talking about money. That’s the consequence of internalised social attitudes.

Shh. Don’t talk about money. It’s not nice.

  1. No one tell her that I can look it up at the County Clerk’s office! ↩
25 June, 2010 – 10:51 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in economy, social justice | Tagged , |