The Basement

Something is dripping in the basement again. She can’t recall why she went down in the first place, and fumbles for a light switch while the noise grows in the darkness. The air is heavy and musty, with a sharp coppery, metallic note, which surprises her, because it seems like half the household staff is in and out of the basement on a regular basis; for all that ventilation, she’d expect it to be fresh as a daisy. The switch clicks in her hand, but nothing happens, and after flopping it back and forth a few times, she shrugs and gives up. Hopefully she’ll remember what it was she needed later.

Poppy’s been valuing art collections for twenty years, but she’s never seen anything quite like the holdings at Reed Manor. She uses ‘holdings’ advisedly to describe the sprawling collection, which almost seems to be growing by the day as she attempts to impose order. The vague description of the collection led her supervisor to suggest she’d be in and out in a week, but it’s already been three, with no sign of stopping. She’s the fourth valuator who’s attempted to tame the collection. No one seems to know what happened to the other ones, as she discovered when she asked the sullen staff for copies of their notes.

Stellar paintings are stacked up against the walls, while priceless sculptures are carelessly tossed in the corners of the ballroom; this, Poppy thinks, is a collection that’s been hoarded through generations. There’s no way one person could possibly have accumulated this much art in a single lifetime. And it’s all depictions of torment and depravity, which makes for pleasant viewing as she attempts to restore some sort of order, sifting the wheat from the chaff.

It’s winter and she’s trapped indoors, even when she longs to poke through the gardens and explore the village. Driving rain and snow alternate, creating an icy slick that was almost her undoing every time she attempted to step outside the front door. After the first week, she gave up, wandering the dim corridors for hours and attempting to catalog along the way, ignoring the hostile glares of the staff. On her first night, she could have sworn someone hissed ‘you’re not wanted here’ as she unpacked in the chilly shadows of her rooms.

Considering how many of them there are, she’d think that the rooms would be in better condition, but they’re heavy with dust, drapes rotting from the hangers. The plumbing groans and screams when she turns it on in the morning, and every shower is an adventure in avoiding the fall of spiders which always plummet from the taps before the water starts flowing. A heavy, dark smell hangs over the whole house. She can’t quite put her fingers on it and she’s almost gotten used to it by now, but at first it made her wrinkle her nose and gag. Like the house itself is dying, walls streaked with water stains and dark blotches.

Sliding her feet into icy sheets at night, she casts a bitter thought in the owner’s direction now and then. He can’t even bother to be there when she’s working, probably off in the tropics somewhere. A wealthy heir, of course, who views art primarily as an asset to be bought and sold. He just wants to know how much he can milk out of it.

Shaking her thoughts off and treading heavily back up the stairs, unwilling to venture into the depths of the basement without light, she frowns at the door, which someone must have closed after her. Every time she’s been down there, she’s told them to leave it open, and it’s always closed and latched when she returns from her peregrinations in the bowels of earth. Fortunately it gives if she kicks it, which she does, bursting into the kitchen, where the cook stirs something foul-smelling on the stove and shoots her a filthy look.

‘Sorry about that,’ she says. ‘I thought the door was on the latch.’

‘Got to close it, you know. Otherwise there’ll be a draft.’

‘Yes, of course.’

She wants to ask what’s for dinner but thinks better of it, smelling the miasma in the kitchen. There will be time enough to pick over it later when a lemon-faced maid slams it on the table in her rooms. She’s been reminded that the staff doesn’t want to go to any ‘special lengths’ for her and that means no seat in the silent, chilly dining room with the ghoulish paintings of medieval torture scenes on the walls and the heavy silver candlesticks that look like they probably require two footmen to lift.

The cook shoots a meaningful glance at the growing darkness outside the window and Poppy gets the message. Closed for the winter, the house isn’t lit at night except when absolutely necessary, and the servants often ‘forget’ to leave the lights in the hall on for her. At night, she’s confined not just to the house, but to her rooms, which are on the opposite end of the house from the rest of the staff. She suspects someone has disconnected her bell; the pull in the corner has a weak, floppy feel like it’s forgotten what it’s like to be connected to something.

Regretting that she ever took the job, and ruing the stubbornness that makes her refuse to leave, Poppy follows the hall to her room. The windows have blown ajar again, blasting snow across the floors, and she struggles to shut them with numb fingers, wondering why no one’s closed the shutters to stop the fingers of the wind from ripping her windows open. She barely has time to pull out her notes from the day before the maid arrives, dropping a tray on the scarred table with a clatter. The soup sloshes against the sides of the bowl, spilling out across the tray in a greasy smear, but the maid doesn’t apologise.

‘Set it out the door when you’re done,’ she says, her voice a harsh croak, and then she vanishes silently. Poppy toys with the spoon, wondering if she should forgo dinner altogether, but her stomach rumbles, and she gives in to the inevitable. The dripping noise seems to follow her as she eats and slides the tray out for the maid to retrieve on noiseless feet. The house is fully settled in winter gloom by then, and she cocks her head, listening to the sound, and wondering if she ought to check the basement again. If something is leaking, after all, it could damage the art.

One foot in front of the other, Poppy walks unsteadily into the darkness…

31 October, 2011 – 10:42 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in fiction | Tagged |

Voice Recognition Software and Writing Voice

Like many people who write for a living, in the last few months I’ve come up against a wall. Not writer’s block; my brain is chugging along just fine. No, the wall is a purely physical one: Years of typing, years of writing tens of thousands of words every week, has caused a repetitive stress injury. It started in my wrists and hands, which coiled into gnarled claws every morning, so much so that sometimes I couldn’t fully straighten my fingers for 20 minutes or more, and it crept up my right arm and into my rotator cuff, which has turned into my own personal ring of fire.

I wasn’t necessarily responsible about working ergonomically for many years, and as I made adjustments to my working habits, I also started working much more, which seemed to balance things out. I might have been working better, but I was also working harder, so my hands didn’t thank me for it. I can’t stop writing; not just in the sense that it’s what I do for a living and I need to eat, but also because it’s important to me, and it’s not something that I could live without. This, of course, forces me to consider alternatives. How can you write when you can’t write?

The obvious solution is voice recognition software, which I’ve been experimenting with, and ultimately struggling with. Justine Larbalestier wrote about this subject and the way that the software changed her writing voice:

This software does not learn. Instead it tries to school me. I have had to change the way I speak so it can understand me. Slower, with more precise diction, like I am impersonating a robot. I do not feel like myself when I use it.

I’ve been experiencing the same problem. Speaking in neutral, slow tones isn’t the way I express myself and I do feel very robotic when I try to dictate. It also changes my sentences, which as we know tend to be wandery and flowery, with lots of excess punctuation. Dictation software clips my sentences, because it cannot understand complex ones. Friends say they can always tell when I dictate my email because it turns into a series of short, sharp, crisp sentences. Aside from the issue that the software often doesn’t understand me, doesn’t know the words I know, it changes the way I write, forcing me to muffle my voice in order to get the words out at all.

And dictation is also just not how I work. I’m not an oral communicator, I have trouble gathering and expressing my thoughts orally. I can dictate in short bursts, as ideas explode into my head, but then I freeze up. I want my hands on the keyboard, which is so much a part of the process, for me. I want to feel the keys clacking under my fingers as I think about the way I want to express something. I want to type sentences out and then delete them, to skip back over words to fix one that doesn’t work for me, I want to see words slowly seeping across the page. Dictating makes me feel stiff and alien, and my writing is, simply, not as good.

I’m not using dictation software right now. If I had, this would have taken three times as long and it would have been half as good. So I type, even though I feel the tingling in my arm as I do it, the twinge that spreads across my shoulder, the dull ache in my lower right arm. I know that what I am doing is bad for me, but I cannot stop, and I cannot seem to find an alternative.

There’s a long tradition of suffering for art, often wrapped up in some very romantic ideas about artists injuring themselves for the sake of beauty. I don’t really buy into that; I don’t think that suffering makes art better, or that people should be driven to destroy themselves to create things of beauty, or functionality, or anything else, for other people. Despite my beliefs, though, I find myself trapped in this tradition, of injuring myself for other people (though of course ultimately the core of writing is for the writer, an imperative, to stop writing is to die). I don’t know how many more years my arms will last, before I finally really do become incapable of writing because they’re so painful and my fingers are so dysfunctional.

I think, too, about how many artists who suffered for the sake of creation died alone and in obscurity. Once they were no longer able to create, they fell out of the public eye and lived in poverty. We don’t even know where some of them were buried. They were useful as long as they were producing, and kept producing even though it hurt because they had that internal drive to, and needed to, in order to survive, only to find that survival wasn’t actually guaranteed. I wonder, when I am finally unable to pick a keyboard, if I will be able to train myself to use dictation software even though it feels so very stiff and awkward and wrong, or if perhaps technology will have progressed to the point that some better alternative would be available.

Even if the technology is available, I wonder how it will change my writing voice, how the loss of my hands would also take my voice away, and what that might mean or look like, precisely. When we talk about means and ways of communication, this is what comes to mind to me, more and more, as I attempt to coax my hands into uncurling for one more morning, just one more day, just one more essay, just a little bit further, and wait with dread for the day that I wake up and they are frozen despite all my pleas.

30 October, 2011 – 11:03 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in health | Tagged , , |

Challenged Books: Harry Potter

One series pops up over and over again on banned and challenged book lists from 2000-2010: Harry Potter. Most of the challenges surround the presence of witchcraft and magic, although some have involved the more mature content in the older books. Certainly individual parents seem to have done considerable soul-searching over when their children should read the later books in the series, and may exercise their personal judgement when it comes to introducing their children to the books. These individual choices reflect thoughtful consideration about what is appropriate for a specific child, though, rather than an imposition of values on an entire school’s or library’s worth of readers. Especially in the early 2000s, the series became a lightning rod of book challenges and discussion that highlighted a growing shift in the reasons for challenging library materials.

Prior to the late 1990s, a lot of book challenges focused on sexual content, bad language, and ‘moral’ topics. Books were deemed inappropriate for children because they contained mature subjects. Many of these challenges were rooted in the Christian morality that dominates public thought in the United States, but they were not made on explicitly religious grounds. Many were also very politically conservative, which speaks to general social divides. With Harry Potter, though, came a change, with explicit challenges very much backed in Christian belief and surrounding the religious content of books.

The positive depiction of witchcraft and magic was deemed pagan by many Christian book challengers, who claimed that the books corrupted children and sent out harmful messages. This after decades of books featuring magical storylines being accepted without qualm. Harry Potter was certainly bigger than many of these, so it attracted more attention, but these challenges also came about at a time of increasing conservative evangelism in the United States, and a rise in being very outspoken about evangelism.

Religion-wise, I’ve always read Harry Potter as fairly neutral. There really isn’t very much religion in the books, and magic is not really framed as a religious or sacred act. It’s just a power that some people have and others do not, and it’s a thing that people do. Certainly moral and ethical issues come up, with divides about good and bad uses of magic, but these are not rooted in religious faith either. They’re based on how people should treat each other, how people should behave, socially. Voldemort is evil because he harms people, not because of whatever religion he does or doesn’t have. It’s a form of secular magic, in a long tradition of books in a similar vein, and apparently, this bothered many book challengers.

Challengers claimed that the books sent bad messages to children, which of course leads me to review the series again to see if I’ve missed anything. I see friends supporting each other, providing assistance and sticking with each other through hard times. I see people resisting bullying and abusive behaviours, I see people demonstrating compassion. Characters forgive each other, they lend helping hands, they clearly believe in behaving charitably and responsibly towards others. These are lessons that I feel are very much in keeping with the stated aims of Christian morality.

Of course, the books also push people to accept difference. Characters interact freely across social and class divides. People with giant blood, or werewolves, are disdained by society, but our characters accept them and make them part of their lives. For that matter, there’s a narrative of resistance to slavery and oppression, seen through Hermione’s dealings with the elves. Resistance to oppressive social structures is presented in a positive light in Harry Potter, and, again, I feel that this is in keeping with the core roots of Christian morality based on Christ Himself.

But, magic. And, of course, many of the conservatives mounting challenges to Harry Potter don’t actually have Christian morality. They subscribe to a version of Christianity that celebrates and enforces oppression. They believe that social inequality is not their problem, and that some people should be ostracised from society, should be allowed to remain in a state of oppression. They believe that difference is badness, and thus don’t want their children reading books that challenge those views. These challenges aren’t coming from a position of concern about exposing children to, say, character death. They’re about the issue book nature of Harry Potter, that the series attempts to advance a narrative of social equality wrapped up in the trappings of magic.

Challenges to the books have slowed in recent years and I think there’s going to be a steady downward trend as other books attract attention and start wooing generations of young readers. The history of opposition to Harry Potter, though, is important because it created a legacy. Successful or not, these challenges were fodder for conservative evangelists to exert greater control over the content taught and handled in schools, which had implications far beyond the walls of the library. Similar challenges are mounted to teaching certain subjects in science, and to providing children with education about sexuality and health. These challenges have very serious implications for a generation of children growing up with inadequate education as it is, compounded by the fact that their teachers are hamstrung when it comes to certain subjects.

I understand the difficulties of attempting to raise children in line with conservative evangelical values. The desire to not have other values pushed on children in school. But the insistence on pushing those values on everyone else is equally offensive. Children don’t have much of a choice when it comes to where they go to school and what they learn, and their parents may not be able to seek out alternatives if their children aren’t getting an adequate education. Schools are not religious institutions, and do not have an obligation to promote any religious doctrine or lack thereof. The rise in conservative dominance of school curricula is deeply troubling, and the warning signs were present in those Harry Potter challenges, and the way they were handled.

29 October, 2011 – 10:17 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in Harry Potter | Tagged , |

Mental Health Parity Laws: Fighting Stigma?

Insurance companies in the United States are notorious for their poor mental health coverage. It’s gotten to the point that mental health parity laws have been passed, demanding that insurance companies handle mental health benefits in a manner consistent with benefits related to ‘medical and surgical’ needs1. Several recent suits in California and elsewhere have highlighted this issue, both making people more aware of mental health parity laws, and underscoring that insurance companies continue to discriminate against mentally ill patients.

The divide in coverage between what I’ll call, for our purposes, mental and physical health2 illustrates a larger cultural divide in the way people think about illness and disability. Disability is often framed as something embodied; the very name implies this. A disability is something physical, not mental. The brain is something different. The mind/body divide is stark, when it comes to the way people talk about disablility; many people with serious mental illness do not consider themselves disabled because this thing is in their minds, not their bodies, and they don’t ‘count.’

This is not to say that all people with mental illness should identify as disabled. Clearly there are some people who have considered it and don’t feel comfortable with that identity, and there are others who don’t experience mental illness as disabling, and I am not interested in forcing labels on people. But I sometimes encounter discussions about mental illness and mental health conditions that people describe in ways that sound disabling to me: ‘I can’t work,’ ‘I have trouble sleeping,’ ‘I can’t complete basic tasks,’ ‘people in my workplace discriminate against me.’ Yet, they declare that they are not disabled. They say they don’t need accommodations, although if you say ‘would it help if you could go to work two hours later,’ and they say ‘yes, it would,’ and you say ‘well, that would be an accommodation,’ a little lightbulb goes on.

In the hierarchy of disability enforced both within and without the disability community, there’s a clear divide between physical disabilities and mental illness, along with cognitive and intellectual disabilities. But it’s mental illness in particular that is often declared not to be a disability—mentally ill people don’t need accommodations, they don’t experience discrimination, they don’t experience disabling events. As some people with moderate to severe mental illness know, none of these claims are actually true, but they’re often internalised, making it difficult to identify mental illness as something that may potentially be disabling for some people, who could potentially benefit from accommodations.

Which brings us back to mental health parity laws. Through such legislation, insurance companies are being asked to consider mental health conditions as equivalent to physical health problems. If you have bipolar disorder, the coverage limits must be the same as those if you have breast cancer. Insurance companies cannot deny coverage to anorexic patients who need to be hospitalised, just as they must provide coverage to patients who need feeding tube insertions because they cannot swallow.

There is a small part of me that wonders if this could, perhaps, pave the way to breaking down the brain/body divide when it comes to talking about disability. The brain is part of the body. Things that happen in the brain affect the body, just as things that happen in the body affect the brain. Brains matter too! What about the brains? There’s a lot of resistance in some areas of the mentally ill community to identify with the disability community, a reminder that many people still consider disability a bad thing; ‘I may be mentally ill, but I’m not disabled.’ This really leaves people who have both mental illness and physical or other disabilities out in the cold.

I find it increasingly hard to define, to pin down, to identify disability, because it is a complex social and cultural identity. But this I know: Disability is not a bad thing. It’s just a thing, that is, that can result in incredibly varied lived experiences. And, often, it can be a thing that requires accommodation for people to achieve their full potential.

All people deserve accommodations. And when you frame disability in terms of accommodations, suddenly it starts to apply to some mental health conditions, in some cases, which is precisely why mental health needs to be thoroughly covered by insurance companies, to ensure that people with mental illness can receive adequate coverage through their insurance plans. And it is precisely why discrimination against people with mental illness matters, because it is a form of ableism, and a civil rights issue.

I know firsthand how disabling mental illness can be, and how interconnected my mind and body are; as someone a mixture of disabling conditions, I am familiar with both sides of this coin, and sometimes I have trouble differentiating between them. There’s not a point where my mind ends and my body begins, there are no parts of me I can turn off and on. I am a whole organism, a complete entity, and to deny that sometimes my brain harms me, and sometimes people harm me because of my brain, would be a disservice to myself.

Again, this is not about demanding that everybody with mental illness instantly start identifying as disabled, not least because many people do not experience mental health conditions as disabling. A disability identity is not something that should be forced on anyone, ever. But it is a question—where does the mind end and the body begin? Why do we keep reinforcing the hierarchy of disability with claims that some disabling conditions are more ‘real’ than others? Why is it that cerebral palsy, for example, is widely socially accepted as a disabling condition even though people with CP experience a wide range of symptoms, and some necessarily don’t experience disability or identify themselves as disabled, while depression is socially often not considered a disability, even though some people with depression find it disabling?

The stigma against mental illness plays into the same stigma that surrounds disability, and yet the two communities sometimes seem deeply divided. Mental health parity laws are a small chip at the armor, there, and they make me wonder where else we could chip away; can we start talking, for example, about employment discrimination against people with mental health conditions?

  1. Apparently mental health is not a medical need? ↩
  2. Obviously this is an extremely simplistic split. Some mental health conditions cause physical symptoms and vice versa, mental and physical health interact, etc. ↩
28 October, 2011 – 10:01 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in disability | Tagged , , |

Outsourcing? Lax US Labour Laws Attract Overseas Companies

Outsourcing has been the great bogeyman of discussions about jobs of late, with complaints that the United States is sending jobs overseas. There’s a reason, of course, that many US companies like to work overseas. It’s because of lax labour laws and a lower cost of doing business. It’s far cheaper for Apple, for example, to exploit Chinese workers than it is to pay for fabrication of its products in the United States.

Overseas labour is cheap and disposable, and we directly profit from it by paying artificially low prices for consumer goods produced in harsh conditions that wouldn’t be legal here. And sometimes aren’t legal in their home nations, either, but the factories are located in economic incentive zones with relaxed regulations that attract overseas investment.

However, it’s not just the US that ships jobs elsewhere to take advantage of inexpensive labour. Overseas companies are doing the same thing in the US, sending operations here because we have fewer working protections and thus can lower the costs of production. Both BMW and Ikea, to name two recent high profile examples, have established plants in the United States to take advantage of a lax labour climate. The law facilitates the exploitation of US workers, and these companies are happy to flock to US shores.

An Ikea plant in Virginia recently made headlines with rampant discrimination and union-busting tactics. It took national media attention to exert enough pressure for workers to finally win, voting to unionise in August after considerable pressure not to. It’s a good thing they did, because the conditions in their factory were, well:

Though company factories in Sweden produce the same bookcases as the plant in Virginia, the Times notes that “the big difference is that the Europeans enjoy a minimum wage of about $19 an hour and a government-mandated five weeks of paid vacation (while) full-time employees in Danville start at $8 an hour with 12 vacation days” — and that doesn’t count the one-third of Danville workers who are paid even less because they are subcontracted through temp agencies. (‘Ikea Joins the Race To the Bottom With Its Treatment of US Workers‘)

In California, BMW attempted to cut jobs after receiving bailout funds; funds which, presumably, should also have included job creation. The situation attracted the attention of the National Labour Relations Board, which started investigating after workers claimed the company was firing long-time employees with good wages and benefits with the goal of replacing them with low-wage workers who would, of course, cost less.

The peril of outsourcing looms over many discussions about labour and jobs in the US, but people aren’t talking about the way the US attracts some outsourcing of its own. European companies love the business climate in the United States. We have far fewer worker protections, allowing them to access a source of cheap, and often desperate, labour. Like companies in the US, they threaten the states they work in, suggesting that if a state doesn’t like their practices, they can pack up and go elsewhere. Faced with the prospect of jobs in poor conditions or no jobs at all, states acquiesce, and these companies enjoy luxury treatment while US workers labour in worse conditions than those provided in European plants.

Meanwhile, these companies get to say their products are made in an industrialised country, so they aren’t engaging in the kind of labour abuses people think of when they see a ‘made in China’ sticker. And, to be sure, the kind of worker exploitation happening here is different than that of companies working in Mexico, Taiwan, Thailand, China, and other nations desperately trying to attract overseas investment. There is no suicide epidemic at the Ikea plant, workers for BMW aren’t being asked to sign no suicide contracts to retain their jobs.

But this is exploitation, of workers in a nation with a regulatory climate less stringent than that of the company is based in, working in regions where local governments are willing to relax regulations to ensure that companies stay put. Because those governments need the jobs, the tax revenue, the investment. They hope that these factories will help build and strengthen their communities, will provide some social benefits even if the working conditions are less than ideal. Consumers in Europe may not be aware of the circumstances surrounding the production of their goods, or, like consumers in the US, they might not care enough to do something about it. Since they demand cheap prices and manufacturers keep delivering, nothing changes.

The United States was once a very strong nation for labour. Activists fighting for better working conditions brought about sweeping, important changes that reshaped the landscape of this country. In recent decades, this has shifted, as the country becomes increasingly anti-union, less interested in protecting the rights of workers and more interested in making sure corporations stay wealthy. Hard-won battles have been subject to quiet erosion behind the scenes as workers enjoy fewer protections, and some workers even regard unions as the enemy.

Anti-union propaganda warns workers that the union will take all their money, exploit them, trap them. When workplaces get set to unionise, employers bring on the big guns, the misleading information, the threats, and workers vote the union down because, based on the information they have, it would be bad for them. Who wants to give up their paycheques to those big bad unions? And the cycle perpetuates itself, making it extremely hard for unions to regain ground where it’s been lost. The unionisation at the Ikea factory was a rare victory, and I hope it portends something for the future, that US workers are going to start fighting back against exploitation, that maybe we won’t be such an appealing company to outsource to if our workers can find their dignity again.

27 October, 2011 – 10:44 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in economy | Tagged , , |

Punishing Women Through Disposable Fashion

Professional women developing careers know that ‘clothes make the woman’ and they need to maintain a ‘neat professional appearance’ if they expect to get ahead in this world. It’s a constant reminder, from dress codes at the office to fashion tips on career sites for women. There is an expectation, a demand, that working women dress fashionably. Not necessarily at the height of fashion, as runway looks wouldn’t be, as they say, work appropriate, but certainly neatly, elegantly. Dress codes are a snarled tangle to navigate when you’re supposed to be demure, but not drab, neat, but not flashy.

And when fashion for women evolves extremely quickly. Women need spring, summer, autumn, and winter wardrobes. If they live in regions with temperate climates, they can get away with some blurring around the edges, but otherwise their garments need to be seasonally appropriate. Not in the sense that they provide appropriate protection from the elements, although of course that’s an issue, but specifically in the sense that they mesh well with the seasons. Springy dresses. Autumn sweaters. A professional woman’s wardrobe needs to be well stocked so that she doesn’t get accused of dressing out of season. She can’t distract people with a heavy sweater too early in the fall, or an inappropriately bright and perky skirt in February.

It’s not just season by season, but also year by year. Fashion for women is constantly changing, extremely rapidly, and a dress that looks good one year may not be so the next. Women are often told to build up collections of classic, timeless pieces, but many of these are expensive and it’s not possible to fully stock a wardrobe with them. That old advice about how you ‘just need a few good pieces and accessories’ is not actually easy to follow when people will ask why you’ve worn the same trousers twice in a week. Which means that they have to buy cheap, disposable garments in order to be able to fill out their wardrobes so they dress for work, even if they hate those garments and what they symbolise. Even if they know those garments are going to look out of date in a year.

The garment industry has created disposable fashion because that way, it can sell more clothes. It wants rapidly changing fads and it wants people to feel forced to constantly update their wardrobes to keep pace. Because this makes money. And at very high profit margins, thanks to the exploitation of garment workers who produce the cloth, the finished clothes, the accessories at very low wages and in grueling conditions. The industry forces women to be complicit by making timeless garments produced in ethical ways unaffordable. $100 or $14 for a scarf? You choose, ladies.

Women are scorned for picking the $14 scarf but it’s not that simple. Clothing, good clothing, solid well constructed beautiful timeless clothing, is expensive. Not everyone can afford the out of pocket expense, and shaming women, shockingly, is not going to make them more able to afford nice clothes.

In effect, the industry is punishing women for profits. Young women and women in the lower classes who are trying to establish careers for themselves face an unpleasant bind, when it comes to clothing. They need to build wardrobes but have limited capital to do so, and must, consequently, buy into the disposable fashion industry. And run the risk of wearing something a few too many times, of stretching something past its trend expiration date, and being censured for it.

Following dress codes becomes a very special nightmare, of course, when you are fat. Even disposable fashion often isn’t available for you, plus size garments come with a fat tax, and you’re faced with a limited array of options which may not necessarily be to your tastes. You are punished for your body, whether it’s in the dress code about not showing inappropriate cleavage, an impossibility when even a nun’s habit would look risque, or at the clothing store, where nothing on the rack will fit you and you’re forced to order online, through retailers with such disdain for their fat clientele that they don’t even bother to stock their brick and mortar stores with clothes that will fit fat people.

Fashion can be such a beautiful, fun, exciting, awesome, interesting thing. Women’s fashion is so delightful because of all the colours and the shapes and the textures, the many, many ways women can dress, the wider swath of options. But it’s also punishing because of those very things, the constant updating, the insistence on keeping women on their toes with the next fashion trend, the next big fad, the next thing you will have to buy to be smart and current and up to date. You cannot show up in the office with outdated clothes and that traps you in the fashion industry’s treadmill.

The cost of wardrobe development for professional women is an issue, and it can be a barrier to career advancement for some women. The schlubby faculty member is the one who will be bypassed for tenure, no matter how brilliant her work is, no matter how impeccable her credentials. The less than polished junior partner in the law firm will never make a senior position, not with her shoes looking like that, honey. The clerk with the slightly frayed cuffs and the ill-fitting skirt from last season won’t be considered when there’s a vacancy for manager, because obviously, she doesn’t quite have what it takes. After all, if these women really cared about their jobs, they’d take the time to dress professionally, right?

26 October, 2011 – 10:22 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in gender | Tagged , , |

Higher Education, But Only for the Wealthy

There was a time when people believed that higher education should be available to people of all social classes. Along with exclusive private colleges and universities, public establishments were founded, to make it possible for anyone, theoretically, to be able to go to college. The California State University/University of California systems, for example, were meant to increase access to education, to improve quality of life in California, to create a functional public education framework that would make it possible to educate members of the professional class.

Education, you know, can be a tremendous tool for social change as well as an opportunity out of poverty traps. While education is not a golden ticket that will magically transport people to a better world, it can be a very, very useful means to an end, a valuable thing for people to have access to. People trapped in the lower classes have trouble climbing out because they lack the tools to do so, because they live in a society that actively works to keep them there, and education can be a form of escape hatch.

We are reminded, repeatedly, of the value of a degree. There are stark earning differentials between high school diplomas, bachelors, and postgraduate degrees, highlighting the monetary value of education. Having a degree can make you more employable, can create more access to work, can increase your chances of making good wages. Menial labour does not pay well, does not come with benefits, and does not require a degree. Positions that require degrees pay more and come with better chances for something else, something larger, something better. You need education to get to that.

So it’s dismaying to see that education is increasingly out of reach for people in the lower classes, and for some of the middle classes as well. There’s a complex confluence of circumstances going on to push people out of the higher education system. Starting, of course, with rising costs. Even public schools are getting extremely expensive, to the point that they are cost prohibitive. It used to be possible for middle class families to pay cash for tuition, for lower class students to get financial aid to cover relatively low per-unit costs. This is no longer the case.

Along with rising costs have come falling aid—these issues are not new to you, I discuss them all the time, but they are sinister and troubling and they appear to be increasing. Even as society becomes more aware of the fact that college is more expensive and there’s less money for college, nothing is happening to change that. Colleges argue that they have to increase costs to pay operating expenses, that they need to increase enrollment to raise revenues, while funding shrivels because of the economy, and the government cuts grants and other funding programmes because austerity measures are in place and it’s time for ‘shared sacrifice’ which of course involves the lower classes first.

Student loans are not a solution to college expenses. Aside from the fact that it may not be possible to get enough loan coverage to pay for a degree, graduating with extremely high student debt is not sustainable. Already, recent graduates are struggling with high debt and the fact that their valuable degrees still don’t earn enough to make their monthly loan payments. This is a problem that will grow worse, not better. Saddling college graduates with debt they cannot possibly hope to discharge is really nothing short of inhumane, and yet people pretend that this kind of financing is acceptable because college is an investment and those loans will pay for themselves. Cold comfort for people struggling with tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

And, of course, there are all the class barriers to college admission that seem to be mounting by the day. There’s the expectation that applicants have long lists of extracurriculars, some of which cost money, while others require time. These are things that are not available to all students. Schools claim to consider this issue, to balance different life experiences, but they often fall back on the argument that lower class students are not prepared for school and thus wouldn’t make good students.

It’s true, many students coming from poor backgrounds aren’t prepared for school. Because they attend underfunded districts with inadequate programmes, they may need to work while in school, to care for family members. They do not have access to the things that middle class students do. Outreach attempts to counter that, to create a mechanism to get students ready for higher education, but it’s another example of charities doing the government’s job, and they cannot be everywhere. They cannot provide the level of coverage needed. They cannot, functionally, replace the public education system.

Some middle and upper class students aren’t prepared for college either, something people seem reluctant to discuss. Students from all classes don’t understand how to write essays, how to research, how to cite sources. There’s a plagiarism epidemic in US colleges and universities and a lot of that plagiarism isn’t malice, it’s lack of understanding about how to do academic work. So forgive me if the claim that lower class students are inadequately prepared doesn’t ring quite right to me, when middle and upper class students are just as likely to plagiarise, to demonstrate inadequate preparedness for higher education, illustrating that we have a problem throughout the education system, one that is exacerbated in areas where people lack advantages because of their social class.

Education should be freely available to all who want it. The fact that it is not, that public education was once available and now it is very hard to access, is indicative of deep problems within the United States. Is this the kind of world we want to build, where a poorly educated lower class builds wealth for the upper classes? Apparently, it is.

25 October, 2011 – 10:05 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in economy | Tagged , |

Laying Some History On You: The Chinese Laundry

Laundry has become indelibly associated with the Chinese-American population, but many white people do not probe more deeply into why that is. There’s a reason that so many Chinese labourers worked in the laundry industry in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the story behind Chinese laundries is actually quite fascinating; should this post pique your interest, I’d highly recommend this list of resources on the subject. The association between laundries and the Chinese communities has its origins in racism, but where the story went from there opens up other narratives that aren’t often discussed, as Chinese labourers organised in and around laundries to resist discrimination and protect their rights.

Early Chinese immigrants to the United States faced an uphill battle when it came to seeking work. They were excluded by law and by custom from numerous jobs, and many found themselves facing empty hands in the supposed land of plenty. As a result, they started turning to laundry work, first in California and later in other regions, like New York City. Chinese men didn’t have very much experience with laundry, but they took it up as an occupation because nothing else was available, and started to build thriving businesses. As other avenues of employment were closed to them, laundries became an important source of income, and later, of organising.

Running a laundry was not an easy business. Racist laws excluded Chinese from property and business ownership in some regions, which required, in some cases, exploitative partnerships with whites. The laundries themselves were hot and crowded, with grueling working conditions that were hard even on workers who were extremely strong and accustomed to long hours. Needless to say, labour protections like limits on overtime and required breaks weren’t present in Chinese laundries or any other businesses of the era, so workers had harsh conditions to contend with while also dealing with a constant tide of racism from their unwelcoming and hostile communities.

White business owners resented the success of Chinese laundries, and embarked on subtle discrimination campaigns along with the not so subtle. The case of the Yick Yo laundry brought this issue to a head in San Francisco. The whites in the community lobbied for a law insisting that laundries be situated in brick buildings for safety. On the surface, nothing about this law was discriminatory. It was brilliantly framed as a public safety issue; we see the same sort of cleverly racialised legislation in the United States today, where seemingly innocent laws actually target minority groups. Necessary, you see, for public interest.

Chinese business owners decided to fight back. They argued that the law was inherently discriminatory, and won, illustrating that Chinese residents could and would use the court system to enforce equal rights in a society that was determined to deny them. This 1886 case was an early example of a civil rights battle carried out in the courts, and like much of the history of Chinese people in the United States, it’s been largely erased. The Yick Yo laundry case was important, and played a critical role in shaping Chinese-American activism, but it’s apparently not considered relevant in history classes that discuss civil rights in the United States and the hard-fought battles by minorities to take what they should have been freely given in the ‘land of opportunity.’

This case was cited in others, became the grounds for other forms of resistance, and it’s largely faded from memory. History repeats itself now as growing numbers of US states pass racist anti-immigrant legislation which has a chilling effect on nonwhite communities and people of colour, all while claiming to be in the interest of public safety. Employee verification programmes, for example, clearly target Latino workers in particular, just like the law banning wooden laundries. Workers are organising against them, as are advocacy organisations, and it’s an uphill battle, just like it was in 1886 for Chinese labourers fighting for their rights.

The Yick Yo, though, was not the end of laundry organising among Chinese residents. To take just one of many examples, across the country in New York City almost 50 years later, laundry workers organised to protect their rights and fight racial discrimination. New York attempted to legislate laundries out of existence and when the established Chinese community and social network failed them, laundry workers took matters into their own hands to assert their right to work and do business in the city. The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance won, marking another important battle that, again, has gone largely unrecognised. As a labour organisation, it was later involved in political activism and commentary within New York’s Chinese community and abroad, and it played an important role in the community’s history.

These are stories that are not often told; many white people are familiar with the link between laundries and the Chinese community, and stereotypes about these connections endure, but people don’t explore to find out why this link developed, nor do they learn about the community organising that surrounded Chinese laundries. They certainly aren’t provided with information about the history of Chinese laundries in school, or in texts on this era. A symbol of racist exclusion became a tool for resistance in communities determined to carve out a place for themselves in the world, and to force the United States to live up to its own stated values about liberty and justice for all.

Oddly, Chinese laundries are both symbols of oppression, and of freedom. An example of how people persecuted on racial grounds forged communities, built connections, and held their ground. Laundries helped Chinese workers join the labour movement, they became grounds for key civil rights cases, and today they’re nothing more than topics of jokes and stereotyped depictions of Chinese people in the media.

24 October, 2011 – 10:29 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in race | Tagged , , |

A Year of Record-Breaking Severe Weather

2011 has been a tough year in the United States. Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, flooding. By June, only halfway through the year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was warning that this year was breaking records, and more serious weather events followed. There’s been a lot of discussion about what this means, and where it is going to lead, hindered by the fact that there is much at stake, here, and many people have a vested interest in forwarding particular narratives.

Weather is tricky stuff. Over time, climates naturally shift and change. It’s not uncommon to have years where weather is just odd; wetter, drier, or whatever it is, it’s more intense than usual in a fluke of events. 2011 might be such a year, one where everything seems to hit at once. Severe weather can tend to breed severe weather, which means that disruptive cycles intensify themselves until things return to an even keel. It could be an aberration, one of those things that just happens, sometimes, and the weather in 2012 could return to more stable conditions.

Or it could be evidence of a climate shift. Which is also natural. Over time, climates do indeed undergo significant natural changes. What is desert does not always remain desert, rainforests are not always rainforests, and so forth. It’s entirely possible that the rise in severe weather is indicative of a naturally occurring shift, because the climate is not static, and it does evolve over time. Perhaps things are just changing, and that is the way it is.

Of course, there’s also the possibility that this change is not natural, and that human activities have influenced the rise in severe weather. There’s certainly evidence to point that way, from earthquakes linked to frakking to worries about desertification caused by farming practices. Climate change is, people are growing to recognise, a thing that is happening, and the source of the controversy is about the origins. Understanding the origins is, of course, critical to figuring out how to respond to it. If humans are causing the problem, it’s possible we may be able to slow or reverse it, that we could moderate our behaviours to limit their impact on the environment. These suggestions seem very threatening to people who want to deny that this is a problem, even in the face of years like this one.

Severe weather is a sign of something. If it continues to be this severe or the intensity increases, this would seem to suggest that a real shift is happening, rather than a one-time anomaly. And it’s clear that people need to respond to it. People can debate over the causes all they like, and it’s obvious that a cause determination is important, but it’s also time to start talking about how we are going to handle this weather, now that it is here. No matter how it arrived, it’s impacting human lives, and that makes it an issue that needs to be addressed on the ground, not just in the pages of research publications.

Some communities are clearly not ready for this weather, and increasingly, we may be facing a reality that they may need to be abandoned. How much money do we want to invest in repeated recovery from natural disasters? How many times can a city flood before we decide it’s time to stop fighting the elements? Communities in low-lying areas around the world are under threat from rising sea levels and heavy weather, and often the stance is to attempt protection, to save them. Maybe it’s time to start talking about where to move those communities to, about how to adapt, socially, to make space for climate refugees.

Victims of hostile climates are already a reality in some regions of the world and they raise some pressing concerns about how to deal with disruptions in dense human populations. People rendered homeless need a place to live, and ignoring this issue is certainly not going to make it go away. The substantial sums of money spent on rehabilitating communities and attempting to protect them from the elements might be better routed elsewhere, into establishing new communities in less susceptible regions. It is, of course, hard to predict where and when severe weather will strike, but if floods, landslides, and other issues keep returning, that’s a sign that there’s a problem that is not going to vanish if the community just tries really hard. There are not enough levees in the world.

Hard choices may be ahead for some communities. It is not a casual thing to suggest that settled areas should be abandoned and allowed to return to nature because they’re too expensive to support. The logistics involved are significant; there are, of course, environmental hazards that need to be secured, structures that need to be salvaged, some sort of mechanism needs to be in place for gracefully decommissioning communities. And these are also homes, the places people live, and may be attached to. Places with generations of history. You do not, in the face of that, flippantly suggest that people close their doors and walk away.

But this is something people may need to consider, and prepare for. If this severe weather is a trend, it’s going to get worse, and disaster recovery will get harder, and people may eventually be in a position where they need to recognise that this is not sustainable. That we cannot keep sinking billions into the same places over and over again, that the climate is creating displacement and it is time to deal with that displacement rather than pretend it is not happening.

23 October, 2011 – 10:10 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in environmental issues | Tagged , , |

Ah, What A Fine Bromance! The Hidden Asexual Narratives In Pop Culture

The bromance, in one form or another, has a long and rich history, an established culture that runs through creative works from books to television shows. Modern viewers enjoy Seth Rogan movies with a bromance at their core just as readers of Sherlock Holmes liked the relationship between Watson and Holmes at the time Doyle started publishing his wildly popular series. Fans of Sesame Street love Bert and Ernie. The list goes on; relationships between two male characters who may live together, partner closely, and share common interests are very, very common in Western fiction.

What’s interesting about these relationships is that they are, of course, a form of asexual relationship, but this isn’t often discussed. Social attitudes about asexuality conclude that asexual people live alone and loveless, without intimate human connections. That we hate and fear sex, of course. The idea of asexual relationships is alien to many people, as evidenced by the fact that there are no serious mainstream words to describe them, because, of course, people think they don’t happen. Asexual partners are dismissed as ‘friends’ or ‘buddies’ when their relationship may run much deeper, and be much more complicated. Such partnerships are also assumed to be inherently subordinate to sexual relationships; if someone is married, for example, but also has an asexual partner, that partner is considered ‘just a friend’ even though the relationship is not like a friendship.

Yet, asexuals can and do form rich, complex, interconnected relationships and some may have multiple intimate partners. Not intimate in the sense of sexuality, but intimate in the sense of the depth of connection. The values shared. The experiences they have together. Asexuals live together in close partnerships. That partnership between Holmes and Watson? Similar to many asexual partnerships. Not friendships. Partnerships. ‘Friendship,’ for some asexuals, doesn’t describe the close connections they have with certain people in their lives, people who are not just friends. But, of course, the idea that any kind of intimate, deep relationship must involve sex means that such connections are routinely written off by society in general.

Bromance narratives, though, show that people are aware of asexual partnerships, even if they don’t quite know what they are, or what word to use to describe them. These relationships go deeper than simple friendship, as viewers and readers and listeners know and are acutely aware. Sadly, the development of a sexual relationship is often framed as the end of a bromance, which sets up an adversarial and unfortunate situation. It also implies that such relationships are transitory waiting periods, that people only experience rich, full lives in sexual partnerships and that the bromance is only a temporary stopgap instead of a relationship in its own right.

It’s rare to see settings where bromances and sexual relationships exist side by side, although there are certainly examples out there. Those examples hint at the reality of life for some people, who get different types of fulfillment from different relationships; who may have sexual partners and asexual romantic partnerships too. Or who have multiple aromantic asexual partnerships. Or any number of other configurations of connection between human beings.

The asexual community is one where the formation of multiple deep connections with people is not necessarily remarkable or extraordinary, and is in fact recognised as a necessity for some people. It is not always possible to get everything you need from one person, and that’s perfectly reasonable. Individual relationships aren’t greater or lesser, just different. They may fill different social and personal needs and can help people feel more well-rounded, with a deep social network of people who are available at different times and for different things.

Commentary on bromance narratives is complex, because they’re an interesting pop culture narrative. They are also one of the few models of deep intimate relationship that is not sexual that are widely accepted and, to some extent, normalised. It’s unfortunate that asexuality has been left out of so many of these discussions, that people persist in framing these relationships as friendships, and that they are still considered lesser than the sexual relationships the characters almost uniformly yearn for. Again, with exceptions; Sherlock Holmes, for example, doesn’t exhibit much interest in sexual relationships and this is in fact why he’s so beloved by asexual fans.

This is not to devalue friendship—not all asexual people think of their relationships as something deeper and other than friendship, and obviously friendships are meaningful and important, and friends provide tremendously valuable things to each other. But, some asexual people need and want a word other than ‘friendship’ to describe how they feel about some of the people in their lives, which demonstrates that something else is going on here, that the bromance is not just a couple of tight buds, but possibly a romantic asexual partnership. The fact that these relationships are so accepted while asexuality is still so stigmatised is fascinating. Many fans of the bromance appear blissfully unaware that they’re talking about asexuality, that thing they hate and fear and dismiss with a sneer.

How long will it take for pop culture at large to recognise bromances for what they are, and to start seriously talking about them? How would people feel if they realised that the relationship they embrace is actually a model of something they claim to disdain?

22 October, 2011 – 10:49 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in pop culture, Sexuality | Tagged , |