Robert Spitzer’s Reparations: Noted Reparative Therapy Advocate Repents

What do you do when you’re lying awake at night, close to 80, thinking about the harmful repercussions of one of the more despicable acts of your career? If you’re Doctor Robert Spitzer, apparently you decide it’s time to do the right thing and write an apology to the people you harmed. Which is a great credit to Spitzer, who apparently didn’t want to die with this hanging over him.

In recent years, we’ve seen a number of deaths of prominent people with troubled pasts who, from all evidence, died unrepentant to the end. Adrienne Rich, for example, contributed to trans-exclusionary radical feminism and said or directly supported a number of truly hateful things about trans women. She didn’t write an apology letter later in her life; because she didn’t feel the need? Because she felt she’d reformed and didn’t need to provide proof? Because she still believed those things? Because she didn’t know the harm she caused? We’ll never know, because she died without telling us, and that knowledge soured the commemoration of her death for many people.

Spitzer built a towering career in the field of psychiatry, becoming a key member of the establishment. Critically, he was also involved in the reclassification of homosexuality, arguing that it was not a psychiatric disorder after he met with gay activists. This capacity for change, and demonstrated interest in constantly evolving, proved to be his undoing later when he encountered the ‘ex-gay’ community, which does consider homosexuality a psychiatric condition. He ended up supporting reparative therapy, also known as conversion therapy, over the protests of his colleagues, who expressed grave concerns about the study methodology he used and the repercussions of his endorsement.

Published 11 years ago, the study didn’t even meet the standards he himself set and enforced over the course of his career. It was an embarrassment, and it was heavily criticised by advocates all over the world. Meanwhile, proponents of conversion therapy used it to bolster their argument, even in the face of studies showing that such ‘therapy’ can be deeply harmful and contributes to serious psychiatric risks for LGBQT people, especially youth.

In May, he couldn’t take it any more.

I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy.

It can take tremendous courage to apologise, even when it is unequivocally the right thing to do. When you occupy a position of tremendous power and clout like Spitzer did, it is easy to attempt to sweep your past under the carpet and pretend you don’t need to be accountable for it, to close your ears to the criticisms of your work and focus on moving forward. He was clearly haunted by the study, but it still took him time to work up the nerve to apologise so clearly and crisply, to take full responsibility not just for faulty study methodology, but also for the direct harm he caused to the gay community.

It was an acknowledgement that psychiatric malfeasance can have real, serious consequences, especially when it comes from a heavily weighted authority. Spitzer was trusted as a source of information because he was known for his rigor, attention, and focus. The fact that he published his flawed study in the first place is truly bizarre, and it’s tragic that it took him 11 years to recant it and express his clear opinion on the matter.

In this media landscape, there’s tremendous pressure to repent immediately and issue apologies for any identified wrongdoing, whether or not someone has really internalised the nature of the problem. Spitzer undoubtedly endured considerable public pressure, but didn’t give in, even though he knew his work was continuing to harm people, and that the misinformation he supported was being used in very dangerous ways. It’s hard not to be angry about that—furious, actually, at the thought that he was willing to let people suffer and in some cases die because of the study.

But it’s also hard not to respect him on some level for seriously weighing, thinking about, and internalising the discussion about his work so he could issue an apology that actually meant something because he genuinely felt that way. At 79, he was at an age where many people would have assumed they weren’t going to hear from him on the matter, whether he’d repented or not. He could have gone to his grave without saying a word, both perpetuating the study and tainting his legacy as a trailblazer in the field.

But he chose not to. Instead he woke up one night, finally compelled to speak, and spoke. Clearly, articulately, and without weasel words or slipperiness. He didn’t attempt to evade responsibility and he didn’t couch his statement in qualifiers. He said what he had done was wrong, and articulated why, and expressed regret. He modeled the kind of apology I admire most: One that’s genuine and rooted in an actual understanding of the issues, rather than a desperate attempt to backpedal and distance from something without really comprehending what the problem was.

Spitzer demonstrated flexibility and the ability to learn new things when he met with the gay community and decided that homosexuality was clearly not a mental health condition. That took time too, and was ultimately widely heralded as a significant social advance for the gay community. He demonstrated flexibility again with this study when he took the time to really consider it and the criticisms brought against it, and decided to eat his words. It shows that even someone who appears entrenched can change.

31 July, 2012 – 10:26 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in LGBQT | Tagged , |

Enough With the Infographics Already!

Everywhere I look, there are suddenly infographics for everything. I think they started becoming especially trendy in 2011, but 2012 is shaping up as The Year of the Infographic. Why say it in text when you can say it with an infographic? The meme has spread like wildfire across the Internet, to the point that it seems like half the time when I click on an article expecting a discussion and thoughtful analysis of information, instead it’s just an infographic with two lines of text about the source of the information. No commentary, and no attempt to contextualise the information in the infographic for the viewer.

There are a lot of reasons I really dislike this trend, and one of them was embedded right in the last sentence of the last paragraph: the viewer. Infographics are a visual presentation of information, which makes them inaccessible to people who can’t access or process information visually. That might be because of blindness or low vision, but also a result of cognitive impairments. Others may not be able to load infographics on slow connections or phones.

Very, very rarely, I see the information in an infographic presented textually as well, but at this point such sightings have become unicorns. There’s not even a token attempt at including blind and low vision readers. Usually there’s no alt text at all, or utterly unhelpful text like ‘graph12.jpg’ or ‘solitaryconfinementchart.’ Which means that a chunk of the potential audience is just cut out from the start: They can’t access the information, and therefore can’t process it, think about it, and participate in the conversation. They certainly can’t take the information away with them and apply it in new settings; for example, when they sit around the dinner table that night, they can’t say ‘I got some very interesting information on unemployment statistics today,’ because they didn’t get that information.

Furthermore, the visual presentation of data can be very susceptible to manipulation, both intentional and unintentional. Designers of infographics can put a great deal of thought into information handling to advance a specific agenda, and that may not be identified by viewers, even those who are alert to the way visual data can be manipulated. Pie charts are particularly prone to this problem, and they pop up in infographics a lot. When you present data visually and do so dishonestly, the viewer can come away with inaccurate information and not be aware of it. Viewers may also have trouble understanding some of the information presented, and when no contextual text is provided, the information isn’t clarified for their benefit.

When an infographic is done badly, it can do an equally poor job of conveying the information. The designer may end up making a point opposite of the one intended, or may confuse viewers so much that they’re not clear what the point of the information is. Especially when only a few points of data are presented, people might reasonably wonder why it wasn’t a text article, or wasn’t presented as a single (described) chart with information to accompany text. People shouldn’t be doing graphical presentations just because they think they look neat, but rather because they are the best way to depict information, and because they add value.

Viewed on its own with no context, a infographic can be of varying uses. I’ve seen a few good ones, but even those limit the information to visual access only, with no attempt to put the data in text form, let alone add some context for thought and discussion. This is great for people who prefer visual information, or settings when visuals are the best option, but it’s critical to offer two options: visual, and text, for the benefit of anyone who might be reading1. An infographic can be a fantastic tool if used responsibly, but they usually aren’t, and I’m tired of seeing them everywhere.

Memes like this tend to catch on, sweep the Internet, and then quietly vanish again. While the infographic has a long history and will always be a part of information presentation on some level, right now, it’s big. That means that people need to start thinking more closely about whether an infographic is appropriate, and how to present it effectively. Yeah, that requires more work to go through the data, come up with text and image versions, and make sure it’s presented logically. But ultimately, it’s a better service to readers and viewers.

If the genuine goal is to give people information and provide them with a jumping-off point to more data and critical discussion, the onus is on the creator to serve the data effectively through its presentation, rather than clouding, manipulating, or muddling it so badly that it’s less an infographic and more a falseographic. Ample scholarship has been produced on the visual presentation of information, so there’s really no excuse for doing infographics badly at this point, especially with the interconnected nature of resources online.

At all these conferences where people discuss media and information, a few workshops on proper infographic use and presentation would not go amiss, because many media outlets have apparently eschewed all responsibility when it comes to handling visual information. And that’s a crying shame, because often the information embedded in infographics is fascinating, important, and critical for the audience.

  1. And hey, guess what, text as part of a picture doesn’t count, because screenreaders can’t pick it up and it won’t load when people have image display off. ↩
30 July, 2012 – 10:44 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in commentary | Tagged , , , , |

Are You Watching Luther?

I was blissfully unaware of this series until I stumbled across it on Netflix while taking advantage of a trial free account to greedily watch as much television as humanly possible, and I’m really glad I found it. In addition to being extremely irritated with everyone around me for not telling me it existed. Seriously, people, when you know about good television, you are not allowed to hide it from me. That’s extremely rude. I’d like to point out that I’m always telling you about the good television I watch, and I’d appreciate a little reciprocity here.

Luther is a crime drama from the UK, revolving around Detective Chief Inspector John Luther, played very deftly by Idris Elba. What really intrigues me about Luther is that it is involves a police officer’s fall into corruption, and shows how easy it is to do terribly wrong things on the track of doing the right thing. It’s not your simple cops are good, criminals are bad setup. Luther doesn’t set out to break pretty much every rule imaginable in the quest for justice, but he does, and over time his sense of appropriate justice also becomes warped, making it harder and harder for him to distinguish who is on his side and who is an enemy.

The series has the tight, short seasons characteristic of UK television; we’re introduced to Luther as he’s brought back on the force after a suspension, and he meets a woman accused of killing her parents. She gets off clean even though he knows she did it; and she knows he knows. It’s the start of a beautiful friendship. Alice is, in many ways, the only person who really gets Luther, even though she often expresses it in monumentally inappropriate ways. She’s a deep, true, and loyal friend.

More than that, though, she’s also the person who sets up a moral ambiguity on the show that can be difficult for viewers to reconcile. On the one hand, you want to see her appropriately tried and punished for the death of her parents, but on the other, you have to admire her execution of a nearly perfect crime and her ability to evade accountability. She sneaks her way into your heart as well as Luther’s; I’m actually rather attached to Alice even though she’s committed a horrible crime. Like other characters in the series, she is not crisply good or evil and thus easy to compartmentalise. She demands that you like her and feel empathy for her even when you’re reminded of what she did.

Luther starts to fall down a rabbit hole as the series progresses and the things, and people, he loves are taken away from him. A corrupt officer on the force entangles him in a horrible mess with devastating consequences, and it puts Luther on a collision course with the law. In the quest for justice, he’s willing to stop at nothing, even if it means playing by the rules of the other side. Murder is not beyond him.

Luther is dedicated, with the kind of pure and fiery energy that people might consider obsessive and frightening, and the show elegantly shows how dangerous it can be. Even when operating on the side of right, handling horrific crimes and dealing with serial killers, Luther makes decisions with serious ethical consequences and he is not always on the right side of ethics. His drive to solve the crime at any costs can be devastating for the people around him and he’s often reluctant to acknowledge or accept the consequences of his action. After all, he’s got his man, yes?

Sometimes his desire for justice contributes to corruption, whether it’s stealing files or revealing the location of someone in protection. He’s so bent on defending the people he perceives as helpless and bringing killers to justice that he sometimes loses sight of the larger picture, and his superiors are well aware of it. It’s one of the reasons they like having him around, but it’s also one of the reasons he needs to be kept on a short leash, because he gets out of control easily.

Luther has a short and aggressive temper. He’s often shown throwing things and screaming, and sadly, the show often depicts this as acceptable, the price that has to be paid for working with a genius. Even when he’s terrifying the people around him, he’s solving crimes or making some sort of major breakthrough, so it’s excusable that he’s breaking glass and putting his fist through doors; even when it happens in a loaded context, like his ex-wife’s home when they’re there alone and she’s clearly concerned for her personal safety.

Obviously Luther is supposed to be the hero of this piece, and the series has held strong to making it clear that he is flawed and comes with his own set of problems. Where they have fallen down in some places, however, is in making it more clear where the line between problems and acceptable behaviour lie. The moral ambiguity of some of his corrupt actions, particularly his abuse of power, is delicious and raises important questions for viewers; how far would you go to catch a killer? Do you think Luther goes too far?

His violence and aggression, however, are far less ambiguous, and don’t need to be treated as gently as they are in the series. I fear that any attempt to hold him accountable for it in the context of the show would come off heavy-handed and might serve to martyr him—look at the poor, brilliant detective forced into anger management! Much could be done, however, with the framing of those scenes, to underscore the fact that they are dangerous, frightening, and not okay.

‘I would never hurt you,’ he says to Zoe in one scene. As he’s destroying furniture and screaming. Sticks and stones hurt people, but so do naked displays of violence. It’s okay to admit that, especially when working with a flawed hero.

29 July, 2012 – 10:50 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in television | Tagged , , |

A Study In Contrasts With Intense Friendships On Television: Partners and Sherlock

There will be not one but two intense platonic friendships on television this year, which is really exciting in a pop culture landscape where romantic connections or growing romantic connections seem to be the order of the day. Looking at pop culture and never seeing yourself gets immensely frustrating after a while, and the general lack of representation of aromantics and asexuals is really irritating; when we do show up at all, it’s often in a highly negative context. We are the socially suspect, the serial killers, the people to be feared because there’s obviously something broken and wrong with us.

BBC’s Sherlock features an update of Doyle’s classic for the modern era, with a more emotionally complex and deep friendship between Holmes and Watson. The two men complement each other in a way that might look on the surface like a romantic relationship—to both fans and other characters—but what they have is a platonic friendship. And one that is unapologetically and unambiguously so. It is a friendship that is not going to change; they are not going to pull a U-turn and suddenly create romantic involvement, because that’s not what the relationship is about.

Unlike almost every other show on television, where two closely connected people must either be having sex, or planning on having it, or intended to have it at some point by the creators. So many beautiful friendships have been absolutely ruined in pop culture by the decision to force characters into a sexual relationship because creators seem to think that’s what audiences want and relate to. It seems safe to assume that this won’t happen with Holmes and Watson, though, given Watson’s very heteroness and Homes’ asexuality, or at least strong leanings that way. He just doesn’t seem to care about sex, let alone romance, and doesn’t feel the need to justify or explain it.

It’s refreshing and somewhat relaxing, honestly. I’m so tired of getting into friendships and loving characters and identifying with their partnership only for it to devolve into yet another romantic relationship after a night of heated, messy sexuality. These endless reminders that people can’t be friends, that friendships aren’t enough, are a constant refrain in pop culture.

CBS, meanwhile, is running with a buddy comedy, Partners, which would fit into the usual stack of such shows except for the fact that it’s being explicitly billed as a show about friendship and the deep friendship that can exist between two men. Their relationship has, viewers are informed, outlasted any of their romantic attachments, exhibiting real staying power and lasting attachment in a connection that is not romantic or sexual in nature. It’s unfortunate that CBS seems to be playing this for comedy, though; the copy says it’s ‘almost like a weird marriage.’

Right, because being in an intimate relationship that is not sexual or romantic is ‘a weird marriage.’ Certainly people have never been in marriages like that historically and there’d be no reason to marry a close friend on the basis of emotional compatibility and shared interests. Obviously, such a connection would be laughable. As indeed it will be, CBS promises, because everything will go topsy-turvy when one of the men decides to propose to his girlfriend. Clearly his marriage will trump his friendship, right?

I suspect we can look forward to exhibitions of naked jealousy that are supposed to be funny and amusing, rather than tragic. The idea that it might be possible to be in multiple intimate relationships is probably slightly outside the ken of CBS and their creative teams, which means someone has to go. And the person going is clearly just being silly, instead of devastated by a friendship ended by social norms (and narrowminded creative teams).

Two different intense friendships with two very different messages. The Holmes-Watson dynamic is strengthened by the things both men get from outside the relationship and their friendship isn’t weakened or threatened by, for example, the fact that Watson dates women. In Partners, the friendship is torn asunder by the development of romantic attraction to someone outside the relationship, and it’s yet another reminder that intense friendship isn’t ‘real,’ and that deep emotional connections are primarily sexual and romantic in nature. Once your practice friendship is over, you can graduate to an adult relationship.

Seeing depictions of genuine friendships where one might expect to see romantic connections in pop culture is rare. The idea of media that revolves around friendship rather than romantic attraction is even more unusual, which makes it all the more exciting. Sherlock is first and foremost about a complicated relationship between two men and the things they do together, the emotional connections they develop, and the mysteries they investigate. Partners, on the other hand, is based on the premise of a friendship but will very quickly turn into something else.

I was struck in Sweethearts by the depiction of a deep friendship between two people whom readers might expect to develop a romantic attachment. Rather than falling in love with each other, though, the characters shared intense emotional experiences and grew a powerful bond with each other that forever shaped their lives; but they still weren’t romantic, and they weren’t interested in having sex with each other. This type of connection appears frightening to creators, given how rarely it comes up. Is the bogeyman under the bed really the idea of a best friend so ‘best’ that the relationship is viewed as equal to or even greater than a romantic or sexual relationship?

28 July, 2012 – 10:21 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in pop culture, television | Tagged , , |

Have Your Cake and Eat It Too: Profiting From the Subprime Crisis

The same firms that sent the economy into a tailspin with subprime lending practices and activities bordering on the illegal are standing to reap a profit from those very actions, on the backs of US taxpayers. Which tells you a lot about the US economy, and about the state of regulation in the United States; these companies have learned essentially nothing and haven’t even been effectively punished for their role in the crisis. They’re not just getting off with a slap on the wrist, they are actually making money from their poor financial decisions, thanks to the government’s continued support.

Firms involved in exploitative lending and real estate speculation preyed on scores of people in the United States with limited financial literacy and a poor understanding of real estate and finance. People were tricked and sometimes coerced into taking out loans that were entirely inappropriate for their means and abilities, and they lost those homes, along with everything they’d invested in them. For each of those foreclosures that’s become a statistic, there’s a former owner, and a lot of those former owners were individuals pursuing what they thought was the American Dream and trying to do the right thing, attempting to get themselves well positioned financially so they could be comfortable and leave something to their families.

Those same companies are turning right around and ‘investing’ in foreclosures which they can convert to rentals. It’s an interesting shift from banks struggling with huge inventories of foreclosed homes they can’t manage properly and trying to figure out how to unload them without taking massive losses. Now they’re turning into yet another commodity that can be bought and sold, with even more opportunities for exploitation, unless regulators are willing to step in and put things in check.

Being a landlord is not illegal; owning large numbers of properties and managing them as an investment is not illegal either. Speculation that drives up property prices also isn’t forbidden by law, although it’s what a lot of these institutional investors are doing when they come in to buy blocks of homes for the purpose of creating rental units. These put prices out of reach of people who live locally and might be trying to participate in the economic recovery, which means home ownership rates stay low overall.

And, of course, high ratios of renters tend to drive property values down, for a variety of reasons. People who own the homes they live in tend to take better care of them and to be more invested in their communities, in contrast with renters, who have fewer incentives to engage with their homes and neighbourhoods. Institutional landlords can be slow when it comes to responding to tenant complaints of issues, even in the case of urgent health and safety problems like damaged wiring or flooding. Deferred maintenance often falls far behind. Rental units can have high turnover, which can contribute to less safe neighbourhoods and a lack of community cohesion.

Rental rates are also going to climb, which puts even more pressure on low-income communities. When real estate values get depressed, rentals often increase in price, and that’s going to skyrocket with an institutional investor at the helm. These firms have even less motivation to keep people in their homes when tenants can be shuttled in and out of rentals quickly, and every reason to milk as many bucks as possible out of their victims. With a large property management company at the helm, the owner of the property doesn’t even have to deal with the day to day details; an institutional investor just has to show up to collect the cheques.

It wasn’t bad enough to rip communities apart with subprime loans intended to prey on people who were ill-equipped to handle that kind of financial responsibility. The same lenders have to come back when they’re done to tear communities apart again just as they’re trying to rebuild, by snapping up as many usable units as possible and keeping them out of the hands of people who might occupy, restore, and maintain them. All for a profit which may be short term and could be the start of yet another speculative bubble, but the investor doesn’t care. These companies are betting on the chance of getting in while they’re ahead, and getting out before the market collapses.

Leaving communities picking up the pieces yet again as they struggle with the aftermath. How many times will regulators allow this to happen? The writing is on the wall in this case; speculators are swarming and there’s a very real danger that can be easily identified and addressed. Whether regulators choose to act in time or not is in their court, and they would do well to remember that they are the ones who will be held accountable later if they don’t take steps now. We can see the writing on the wall as well, and the public is less tolerant of lax regulatory activities than it once was, having learned this lesson at hard personal cost.

Limiting speculative activity can help communities rebuild and develop strong regional ties that keep money local. Community support can increase safety and quality of living on a local level, which is great, and these same strong communities are less likely to be prone to the financial problems that caused the market collapse in the first place. If the United States is truly on a path to rebuilding, it needs to commit to doing so one community at a time—not by allowing major corporations to exploit people by taking what they want until their communities have gone dry.

27 July, 2012 – 10:46 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in economy | Tagged , , |

You Don’t Have to Get It To Respect It

As marginalised people push for social acceptance, respect, and equal rights, one common theme that comes up again and again in resistance is the idea that people need to ‘get it.’ People just want to learn, they say, they just want to be educated, and they come demanding information to help them ‘get it.’ This is often done with the best and most honest of intentions in mind; these people really do want to help, and they think they can help and are helping with this attempt to ‘get it.’ Once they learn, after all, they can go on to educate other people, spreading a big warm happy fuzzy chain of ‘getting it’ that will lead to full social equality.

I always feel that this falls short of the mark, because we don’t need to get things to respect them, and basing acceptance on the need to comprehend or understand something is inherently flawed. This came up recently in a lively discussion with friends about open relationships. The range of opinions and experiences went from people in active open relationships who loved them to people who were radically opposed to them after damaging personal experiences. When asked for my opinion, I said I didn’t really have one; I know they are a thing people do, and as far as I am concerned, if everyone’s a consenting adult and all information is on the table and there are no troubling power dynamics and no harm is being caused, what people do is not my business.

It’s not my place to judge open relationships, in other words. But, someone pressed me, did I ‘get them’? I failed to see how that was relevant, I responded, because the question here isn’t whether I personally understand them1, but whether I can be aware of them and respect them. I don’t need to ‘get’ open relationships any more than a cis person needs to ‘get’ what it means to be trans or I need to ‘get’ what it’s like to be a woman of colour.

In other words, if I haven’t experienced something, I don’t need to demand that people who do experience it explain what it’s like in order for me to support them. So much experiental knowledge is impossible to convey; I cannot explain what it is like to be genderqueer, for example, although I can certainly try. I often struggle for words in the end because I don’t know how to articulate something that is inside of me, that is part of me, that is simply part of the construct of my mind and body. Likewise, a gay man can’t really explain what it’s like to be gay, other than to say ‘I like men.’

This thing, with the getting and the respecting, sometimes seems to be at the roots of a lot of conversations that go horribly wrong. The person who demands understanding about something that is hard to understand is going to be as frustrated as the person trying to articulate that something cannot be understood unless it’s an experience. And what many people seem to miss in these conversations is that when you are demanding that you need to ‘get’ something to be on board with it, you’re singling it out as abnormal and weird. You are actually demanding a justification for its existence, not supporting someone whom you’re claiming to want to work in solidarity with.

You’re saying that your support for someone’s existence is contingent on that person’s ability to articulate a defense for that existence. And you’re reinforcing the idea that social approval is required for full inclusion. That someone cannot, for example, hope to be safe as a trans youth unless society ‘gets’ what it means to be a trans youth. Rather than just accepting that yes, some youth are trans, and that should be respected, and resources should be available to help them.

It is frustrating to learn that an experience cannot be summed up in a tidy package for you. That a queer woman cannot explain how or why she is queer or what queerness is like. That a trans man cannot justify his existence as trans, just that he knows he is transgender. That a nonbinary couple in an open relationship can’t express how their relationship works in a way that satisfies you, because their relationship works on a deep emotional level that cannot be summarily put forward in words. It just works for them.

That doesn’t mean you need to ‘get it.’ Nor does it mean it would work for you.

There’s a key difference between being curious about something because you think it might describe you and you want to learn more, wondering if perhaps it applies to you and your experiences, and needing to have curiosity satisfied before you are willing to support people. I love talking to people who are gender questioning and want to know more about my experiences as a genderqueer person, and I try to answer their questions as best I can, although I’m not always articulate as I would like to be. But I don’t feel the need to justify my existence to people who are asking me about it primarily for the purpose of determining whether they want to support me.

That battle has already been lost. I don’t need to get you to support you any more than you need to understand me to support me. I don’t need to comprehend something for it to be allowed to exist, although if it causes harm, I’m most certainly going to learn about it and comment on it.

  1. For the record, I do; they actually make perfect sense to me, because the idea that one person should be another person’s everything is troubling and flawed. Some people may prefer the open model to have all their relationship needs met, and some people may actually find it deeply beneficial. ↩
26 July, 2012 – 10:25 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in gender |

Does My Disability Pride Scare You?

Nondisabled people are often extremely uncomfortable around expressions of disability pride and culture. The very idea that disability confers membership in a specific community, and is about more than a particular physical, cognitive, or intellectual impairment, seems deeply frightening and sometimes alienating. Disability is viewed as inherently isolating, an unrelenting tragedy; that people might not only accept it but take pride in it, and find fellowship and community through it, upends everything people think they know about disability, totally changing the paradigms people are accustomed to.

Disability is a complex social and political identity, and disability pride is only one aspect of disability culture. Not all people with disabilities participate in the disability community, let alone get involved with pride movements, and they are not wrong or bad people for not being interested. They’re simply different people, who experience disability in their own way; there is no hierarchy here, no one right way to ‘do’ disability that everyone must follow in order to be considered a member of the club. All people with disabilities deserve dignity, the right to be treated as human beings, respect from the people around them, no matter what their personal relationship with disability may be.

For some of us, our personal relationship includes membership in our own community. It is a place with a common language filled with jargon and slang and argot that are ours alone, and sometimes specific to particular impairments, not just disability in general. Spending time with wheelchair users with paralysis can be a very different experience than hanging out with autistic people, just as being in a group of mixed disabilities will also result in a different experience, because these people are all individuals and they share varying commonalities.

It is this language, this commonality, that can contribute to what I think of as ‘crip space,’ the place where you can relax because you are around other disabled people. Living with disability can make you an object of constant scrutiny in the case of people with evident disabilities, or can create struggle for people with less apparent disabilities who continually need to weigh the risks and benefits of ‘passing.’ To come out is to be able to request accommodations and articulate the problems with a situation that might not be readily apparent when everyone is assuming all participants are nondisabled. To come out is to expose yourself to considerable risk and stress because suddenly you are disabled and everyone needs to look.

To relax with people with disabilities is to fall into your own space and your own environment. Nondisabled glimpses into that space can be scary because nondisabled people aren’t meant to be there. We make jokes. We are sarcastic and sometimes bitterly sardonic. We use reclamatory language and tease each other and do all the things that nondisabled people think they aren’t ‘allowed’ to do. And they’re right—they aren’t allowed to do them, because these are things reserved for crip space, things that need to be negotiated with individual people with disabilities on their own terms. One person may identify as a crip, another may not, especially outside crip space, where it is not so easy to navigate the world.

With membership in a community based on marginalisation can come a certain sense of pride. We are surviving. We are doing things. We are holding fast to each other. We are a community, and we will work together, we will fight together, we will live together. For the disability community, where life and death are not hypothetical matters, these bonds can be especially tight. We are the ones who have fought to free ourselves and each other from institutions, who have lobbied to protect people from abusive ‘carers,’ who have rallied ’round people in need to make sure they get the treatment they need to stay alive.

And some of us do take pride in that. We are unashamed of that and it scares nondisabled people, this pride, this happiness, this fierce joy in crip space and, yes, sometimes this fierce joy in being disabled. Which isn’t to say that all people are always happy about disability all of the time, but that some people do not brood over how disability is a tragedy and they long for a cure. Some people are more focused on their lives and on sharing time with people they love and respect; which means sometimes they’re loving their bodies and minds and ways of being, and other times they’re frustrated and wanting to cry because something isn’t going right and feels like things will never go right.

Just like nondisabled people, except that for us, these emotions come with occupying loaded bodies and minds, with carrying the weight of society on our shoulders in addition to processing our own emotions. Under those conditions, it’s hardly surprising that we would gravitate towards each other to build support networks and friendships, to be proud, and that sometimes we would enter rooms you can’t go into and close the door, a reminder that there are spaces we need to be in that are not for you, because they are not your spaces.

That this bothers and troubles so many people says much about contemptuous attitudes when it comes to disability. How could we possibly have a common community, a shared language, our own goals and priorities that differ from those of the mainstream? How could we possibly have our own political and social goals, our own interests, our own place in the world? Surely, disability must be a world of living in a bubble and longing to break through it to the outside world, right?

25 July, 2012 – 10:08 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in disability | Tagged , |

Bully Politics

In May, information about Mitt Romney’s schooldays surfaced, indicating that he had a history of bullying as a youth. This sparked a great deal of discussion about Romney’s actions and his fitness for the Presidency, as well as speculation about whether he’d reformed. Some people even questioned whether he had really been a bully, despite the fact that his behaviours were precisely the sort of thing schools would identify as bullying today, such as pinning down suspected gay students and forcibly cutting their hair because their gender presentation is displeasing.

The response to the story about Romney tied in with a larger narrative about bullying in US society, and explained why this country continues to have such a bullying problem. Youth are told to look to adults as authorities and sources of information, and in this case, adults effectively told youth that abusive, horrid behaviour wasn’t really bullying, and that you could do hateful, nasty things and go on to be a Presidential candidate, especially if you are a white young man from a wealthy family.

Bullying is rife throughout US politics, in forms small and large. And if adults can’t stop bullying each other, it’s hard to see how youth can be asked to do the same. The biggest adult bullies are the same ones who were bullies as children, and they have concentrated their wealth and power to get what they want, when they want it, even when this involves being abusive and nasty. These are the people who spread scurrilous rumours, who force legislators with integrity into corners, who rip the heart out of legislation and demand that it be passed, who line up and steal the lunch money, so to speak, from the people of the United States.

These are also the same people involved in policymaking on a more local level. They are the school administrators and the heads of social services and all the other people who are supposed to create safe and supportive environments for children. And some absolutely do; there are most certainly people who act with the best concerns of children in mind and who are focused on fighting bullying. But then there are others who not only model the behaviour, but actively engage in it, like bus drivers who pit children against each other in fights or who scream and yell at children on their routes.

Hypocrisy is a long-established human trait with a copious history, but that makes it no less ugly. It’s hard to take claims of wanting to commit to anti-bullying campaigns seriously when they come from people and organisations known for bullying, or at least tolerance of abusive behaviour in other contexts. Politicians talking about bullying without actually reforming their own behaviours are asking people to do as they say, not as they do, and it’s a profound insult. Youth follow politics. They can recognise predators when they see them. And they know how hollow the words of people like Romney are when they look at their past.

For bullies, there’s no incentive to change because the entire system rewards you. There’s an incentive programme for bullying and they’d be foolish not to take advantage of it, or at least that’s what they think. Even as people gently protest and tell them they should be nice, the people who act like them are rising to power and political prominence. Tell me, who are you going to believe in that situation? The person with the dove sticker in the back window of an ancient Volvo, or the glossy politician with a huge support base?

And for the bullied, the pervasiveness of bullying in politics is a sobering reminder. There’s no point in speaking out or fighting it because it doesn’t get better, because adults engage in the same kind of petty, hateful, and murderous behaviour, and they get away with it. More than that, they’re praised for it and have an opportunity to keep doing it over and over again. When lawmakers who get ahead by pressuring other legislators get elected time and time again, the youth in their districts take note of the fact that bullying pays, and being bullied can be a perennial state.

One might argue that school anti-bullying campaigns are designed to create a new generation of more sensitive people who operate in different ways, but the bullies have not gotten that memo and they are still going strong. People might say that the kind of naked, obvious, truly breathtaking bullying exhibited by Romney doesn’t happen anymore, except that it does. Not all school districts would take action in that kind of situation, especially when it involves a wealthy kid from a favoured family versus another student who doesn’t have that kind of clout.

This is a harsh world we live in, which doesn’t mean we should give up and stop trying to fight bullying. It’s clearly a problem, particularly for youth, and it continues to be fatal despite the best efforts of many advocates working to stop it. But it’s equally important to acknowledge that adults can be just as horrid, and that anti-bullying campaigns shouldn’t stop when people reach the age of majority. That people are responsible to each other as grownups, and owe each other the creation of spaces free from bullying and harassment whether people are in the halls of congress or working together at a library.

Because until youth see an equal commitment to doing as adults are exhibiting to saying, there’s going to be no real incentive to change. Why, after all, stop bullying and lose your edge, only to become a target in the adult world?

24 July, 2012 – 10:53 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in politics | Tagged , |

Notes From the Urban/Rural Divide: Poverty

The Census indicates that over 46 million people live in poverty in the United States, in a wide range of settings. Those statistics tend to slant heavily towards children, people of colour, and people with disabilities, all of whom are particularly vulnerable to poverty. Current economic conditions also make it extremely hard to survive at or below the poverty line, in a market where cheap labour is readily accessible, food climbs out of affordability range, and rental prices rise as the real estate market falls. It’s a tough time to be poor in the United States, no matter where you are.

But where you are matters, when it comes to poverty, because being poor can look and feel very different by location. Approaching poverty as a universal problem with a one size fits all solution would be disastrous policywise, because the experience of poverty is so variable, and it’s not so simple to resolve. Huge numbers of institutional, structural, and social factors contribute to who is poor, why, and how long they remain so. One of the divides in terms of how poverty is experienced lies between urban and rural areas in the United States.

Many people have a specific vision of rural poverty, informed by work like the photographs of Dorothea Lange, or the modern-day Appalachian poverty porn used to paint a particular picture of life for poor people in rural areas. The meth epidemic in the United States has been accompanied with a number of media features providing a window into life in poor rural regions of the US, where meth is a tremendous problem and some of the worst parts of humanity are on display. These images are often used to marginalise rural areas even further by suggesting that living in rural communities means people are automatically poor, and that rural residents aren’t capable of ‘civilised life.’

Dirty children living in trailers, run-down fences, old cars up on blocks in the yard.

The fact of the matter is that the poverty rate in rural areas is higher than that in the rest of the country, and that is inescapable. But it’s important to talk about what form that takes and how it differs from that in urban areas. People in rural areas have access to some resources people in urban areas do not, but the opposite also applies. There’s more room for food production, for instance, and some are land rich and cash poor, allowing them to dedicate space on land they may own or control to food production.

The social net, however, is hugely lacking in rural communities, because there are fewer people to serve. A reduced population means a more limited number of clients, which forces service providers to make difficult choices. The most efficient use of resources is often in urban areas, where programs to provide nutrition education, job assistance, and other tools will go much further because they will reach more people. Consequently, people in rural areas tend to have more limited community-based resources than those in urban areas.

While they may be able to access government benefits, they can have a harder time using them. Long trips may be required to use things like food stamps, or to find a doctor who accepts Medicaid. Community education classes and workshops may be so remote that they are functionally unattendable, especially if people have children, jobs, and other commitments that make it hard to leave. The same kinds of barriers can come up in urban areas, but it’s easier to take action to address them because people are concentrated in densely populated areas, making it easier to organise around them.

Things that work in urban areas aren’t going to work in rural areas because the communities are structurally different. They are also culturally different; the rural US has its own culture and social complexities, and these do not map neatly over to urban culture. Especially when you balance the fact that rural people aren’t homogeneous, that some are people of colour, people with disabilities, immigrants, and members of other communities that may have specific feelings about government and charity. Many of those feelings are based on real history and experience, and cannot be taken lightly. Rural people may not necessarily trust doctors, for example, and with good reason, with a history of being used as experimental subjects.

Approaching poverty in the US requires putting together the pieces of an extremely large and complex puzzle. And perhaps it’s time to admit that we’re no longer looking at a single puzzle, that some of these pieces do not fit because they are from an entirely different puzzle which needs to be assembled separately. This is a large country, with a lot of people in it, and those people come from such varying backgrounds and experiences that it is impossible to compress them neatly into one.

Rural poor are not like urban poor. All poverty is not the same, although there are many commonalities between the experience of poverty in both locales. There are also profound differences; the homeless population, for example, tends to be larger in urban areas, because homeless people can access more resources in these locations. People use and think about government and social benefits differently in these areas because of their differing life experiences, and these also vary by region. Poor folks in Northern California are not like poor folks in Georgia are not like poor folks in Vermont.

Any more than poor folks in New York City are like those in rural Texas.

23 July, 2012 – 10:34 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in economy | Tagged , , , |

Book Review: Pure, by Julianna Baggott

This book was recommended to me by an xoJane reader, and I can see why she thought I might like it, since it meets a number of my criteria for enjoyable YA. She and I aren’t the only ones digging Pure, which has attracted some critical acclaim and notice, especially on the indie circuit. Baggott’s imagined an interesting version of the future where nothing is quite what it seems, and there are always layers to dig through to get to the bottom of information. Her characters are forced to reassess everything they think they know in order to find out the truth about themselves and their families.

In Pure, the world is recovering from a series of catastrophic nuclear detonations. Those caught in the explosions have been fused with whatever they were around at the time of the explosions; glass, metal, other living organisms like birds. A strange hybrid of organic and inorganic has developed, where people’s bodies are so entangled with fused objects that they cannot be separated. Those born after the explosions have a profound genetic legacy that cannot be easily overcome, and this has utterly changed the face of society.

Quite literally: Many people have embedded glass and metal in their faces, rusting components of unknown objects around their features. Some are missing limbs and others have sprouted new ones. This is a world where the normative body is one which we, the readers, would consider radically non-normative. Where everyone is broken to some degree and a game of survival of the fittest happens as people struggle to make do post-detonations, in a hardscrabble environment where crops are poisonous and rats are monstrous and deadly.

And where a population of isolated individuals lives in a dome that kept them protected from the explosions, creating their own version of a utopian society. After delivering a message to their ‘brothers and sisters’ on the outside, they retreated into silence to watch from afar. They’ve created a perfect sanctuary, and the people on the outside know them as Pures. The Pures consider everyone else to be wretches; poor wretches, left outside without shelter during the detonations. They teach their own version of history and reality to Pure children, while the wretches fight for every scrap on the outside of the dome.

Yet the dome is not an innocent happenstance, an experimental project that happened to be in the right place at the right time. Its positioning and the placement of the detonations were not coincidental, and it is this that the characters learn about as they meet up with each other—one from inside, one from outside—and attempt to navigate a brave new world together. Along the way, they encounter some of the best and the worst that society has to offer.

This book is very much about a destruction of innocence, as one might gather from the title, for both characters. The Pure has his eyes opened as he starts to question the version of history he’s been sold, and when he ventures out into the outside world, breaking out of the dome to see it for himself, he’s confronted with reality. He finds that reality is extremely ugly and unpleasant, while his innocence marks him as a target for everyone around him. The very things that make him normative are the ones that make him stand out in this world, where flawless skin and intact limbs are cause for surprise and attention, let alone the unusual speed and strength coded into him with the use of advanced medical treatment.

Meanwhile, our wretch is equally confused and troubled; she thinks she’s hardened and jaded but she finds out that society has much, much more to throw at her. She’s going to be forced to learn about herself, and about death, and about the people around her if she wants to survive past the point of majority, and she’s also going to have to rethink the social structures that she thought were fixed and rigid. Everyone could be a traitor, and people she might not expect to help her might end up being her salvation. At the same time her innocence is being crushed, she’s also expected to take leaps of faith and trust people sometimes, even if it goes against her instincts.

Parts of Pure can start to wander, and the language isn’t quite as fluid and rich as I might like it to be, but it is an evocative narrative. Baggott has created a fascinating world here and I love the little details she slips in without being obvious about it. The continual ‘snow’ of falling ash, for example, which pervades the world outside the dome. Accepted as normal by the characters, it isn’t a cause for comment until the Pure encounters it and suddenly comprehends what it is.

She’s good at showing without telling, and allowing readers to draw their own conclusions and fill in between the lines rather than indicating that there’s only one way to read the narrative. It can be hard to do that well, so I have to commend Baggott for that even if the text is sometimes a little sparse in a way that is less deliberately ascetic and more crunched.

What does shine through in this text is the overwhelming sense of growing up in a harsh environment where characters don’t know what they have until it’s taken away. It’s more stark than some dystopian YA, a stripped-down distillation of many of the things wrong with society that may not always be subtle, but is definitely sharp.

22 July, 2012 – 10:17 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in reviews | Tagged , |