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Does GoldieBlox Break the Box?

9 Jun

 

After its Kickstarter fundraising campaign (see above) proved to be a success, GoldieBlox is here and available for retail.  Designed by an engineer appalled at the 1 to 10 ratio of female to male professionals in her field, the toy is the latest in a series of efforts across the West to combat the gender gap and get girls excited about scientific concepts from the earliest possible age.  Questioning the stereotype of women as “naturally” less competent in math, science and visual-spatial thinking is always admirable.  But does GoldieBlox really amount to anything more than simply painting science pink?    

Parents who want to conscientiously ensure their daughters feel every option is available to them will probably already have bought them Legos and Erector Sets.  But parents and relatives and neighbors who rely more on tradition when picking out presents may be swayed by the color-coding GoldieBlox employs.  As in: “I need a present for a cute girl.  Look, this is pink and cute.  I’ll take it.”  Having worked in early childhood education as well as social justice, I wish every adult responsible for stocking a child’s toy box would be conscientious enough to consider the value and purpose of their every purchase—or at least read the picture book all the way through—before heading to the cash register.  But plenty of adults who want to make kids happy don’t share my interest in kids’ things.  They truly appreciate age recommendations on the boxes, and the pink and blue color-coding.  It is these adults and their beloved little girls who will benefit tremendously from the GoldieBlox expansion of the world of pink into the realm of engineering. 

But why do we need to color code anything to let people know which gender it’s for?  Do we need to rename it GoldieNASA to get more women to work there?  Last year, when Bic introduced pens for women (“Easy glide – feel the smoothness!”), its Amazon page almost crashed under the weight of sarcastic reviews:

 

No Good For Man Hands

 

And then there were the appropriate reactions in November to the Honda She’s, a car marketed to women in Japan with special light and air-conditioning features to prevent wrinkles.  Feminists asked:

 

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Indeed, the most offensive aspect of the pink-is-for-girls mentality is the antiquated belief that women need a softer, daintier, less intimidating variation of the standard, which was built for men by men.  Any woman who stops posing for a portrait and approaches that standard is an accident waiting to happen!  Right?

Pink cars and laptops and cell phones and building blocks trigger my gag reflex because they seem to be so obviously marketed as the deviation from the more serious male standard.  But is it fair of me to assume this?  Would GoldieNASA really be so bad?  A friend who works as a software engineer and buys so many Hello Kitty products I suspect he accounts for half of Sanrio’s market share would say no.  He agrees with me that Barbie and the Disney Princesses inappropriately introduce pre-schoolers to sexual self-objectification and viciously narrow beauty standards.  He is both irritated and concerned about those of any gender identity who think they should use their vulnerability to get what they want.  But his kitchen cupboards are brimming with cups emblazoned with pink hearts and daisies and butterflies.  He would love to work at GoldieNASA.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the color pink or with girls and boys, and men and women, being cute.  In fact, trashing the color pink and all things marketed at girlie-girls is often motivated by a powerful misogynistic tradition: the belief that things for girls are dumb and frivolous because girls are dumb and frivolous.  This is usually why boys and girls watch films and read books marketed to boys—like Harry Potter or Star Wars or every Pixar film but Brave—while only girls watch films and read books marketed to girls.  Some misogynists and feminists uphold this disparity by uniting in their belief that twirling around in ball-gowns is silly because it’s not a skill needed by the average adult in modern life.  Indeed, it is not.  But then neither is sword-fighting.    

For this reason, it is imperative to teach kids that the value of a toy or story derives from its content, not its color.  Within this lesson lies the truth that there is more to being a girl than dressing up and being cute, just as there is more to being a boy than being stoic and winning every competition.  Every child should feel every option is available to them because the most innovative minds approach the world with the least reliance on tradition.

GoldieBlox will have succeeded when it is ubiquitous in any child’s room because it will signify that adults are picking their purchases based not on color but on this simple rubric:

 

 

 

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Who Should Have To Expose Themselves?

5 May

(Via)

 

If you live anywhere in the West, you know this transphobic joke.  Girl and guy go to bed.  Guy wakes up and finds out somehow that his lover was not born a woman.  The moment of realization is sketched out across his face in excruciating slow-motion, and then he runs away in horror/vomits his brains out/gets very, very, very angry.  The message? 

1)      A trans woman isn’t a “real” woman, she’s a freak.

2)      His being attracted to her somehow makes him less of a man.

3)      Most importantly, he’s been duped.

Feeling duped is the bedrock of transphobia.  Those who feel indiscriminately upset at the very idea of transsexual and/or transgender people usually say something along the lines of, “They’re deceiving people!  I’d be pretty pissed if I found out my girlfriend/boyfriend had had a sex change.”  This feeling is usually enshrouded in the myth that transitioning into the opposite sex is done capriciously, just for laughs and the thrill of going undercover.  This mentality never ever acknowledges the fact that many transsexual and transgender people feel as uncomfortable in the body they were born in as cis people would feel in a body they were not born in.  And it fosters the view of cis people as victims of trans villains, ignoring that trans people in the United States have a suicide rate 26 times higher than the nationl average and that worldwide one trans person is murdered every three days.

This all too common belief that trans people are deceptive, and maliciously so, has now reached new heights as two trans men in the U.K. have been charged with and convicted of sexual assault.  Their accusers claimed that the men’s failure to disclose their gender at birth before they slept with them was a form of fraud and thus the consent the women gave to sex was under false pretenses.  I am in no position to make a final judgment about these two specific cases.  Perhaps they involved many other factors revealing coercion and predatory behavior.  I cannot speak for the defendants or the accusers.  But I can and will speak out against the widespread belief that the freaks of the world are obliged to warn everyone they know about their atypical features and histories before they dare try to get close to someone.

My husband thought I must have been in a car accident years ago when we met for the first time at a birthday party.  I was wearing a sleeveless top exposing the lavender scars that traverse my upper arms.  I know I told him soon after, on our first date, about my long medical history, but that was because we were having an intellectual debate about the role of the media and I decided to use my childhood experiences as an example.  I decided to do so because I liked him and trusted him in a very special way.  It was not because I felt that anyone I was interested in romantically “deserved” to know.

What do potential sex partners deserve to know?  Do they deserve to know I had my calf bones removed?  Do they deserve to know I had my tonsils out?  What if I had been born deaf and had a cochlear implant?  What if I used to weigh twice as much, or half as much, as I do now?  What about veterans or cancer patients who have lost body parts normally only seen by sex partners?  Is it fraudulent of a cancer survivor to wear a prosthesis that would suggest she still has both breasts?  

Indeed, the moment I read about the British cases, I was immediately reminded of a poem by Robert Hass about a woman who is abandoned at her doorstep by a young admirer after she tells him she has had a double mastectomy.  “I’m sorry.  I don’t think I could,” he mumbles before he turns his tail and runs.  I do not know what it is like to be a cancer survivor or transsexual, but surely many of us know what it is like to fear being rejected for something we never had much of a choice about.

In reponse to the British accusations of sexual assault, law professor Alex Sharpe has asked, What if a potential sex partner appears white but is in fact of mixed race – is a failure to map out your entire family tree grounds for prosecution?  Of course not.  He points out that individuals are not legally obliged to reveal to sex partners that they are bisexual, married, divorced, have a past criminal record…  The list is endless, and thus he argues: “Given that we all have gender histories but only some of us (transgender people) are required to disclose them, there appears to be a good basis for arguing that a legal requirement to disclose gender history constitutes discrimination contrary to Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights.”

Of course, any counselor or psychologist will tell you that trust, openness, and honesty are necessary for a healthy relationship and true intimacy, but the right to privacy and personal dignity are also necessary for any community founded on justice.  And there can be no genuine trust when certain people reveal personal information only because society’s hang-ups about gender, sexuality, or atypical bodies demand they do. 

Everyone is entitled to their sexuality.  No one should ever be pressured into a heterosexual, homosexual or pansexual relationship.  Open and honest dialogue about this is essential.  But the more we blame minorities for upsetting our delusions of normalcy just by being who they are, the more we tell jokes implying that any normal person would be disgusted by their physiology, the more we insist that their identities are a perversion of ours, the more difficult we make it for them to be open and honest with us.

 

 

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Who You Telling To Wear Makeup?

28 Apr

fashion show(Image by Alex Craig used under CC license via)

 

While chatting with colleagues over coffee this week, I ended up “outing” myself as a dwarf who’s had limb-lengthening.  (Experience has taught me some people notice right away when they meet me that something is up, while others go a long time without the slightest idea, especially in the wintertime when my scars are hidden under sleeves and pants.)  We arrived at this topic by discussing fashion—and the recent scandal in Sweden that’s left me almost speechless—and then beauty and self-confidence.  Several of my colleagues pointed out that every person they know who’s undergone cosmetic surgery never struck them as unattractive before the fact.  Only an idiot would think that there’s only one kind of beautiful nose or mouth or whathaveyou.  And only a jerk would tell someone to have cosmetic surgery.

As you may have guessed, I agreed wholeheartedly.  But what about telling someone to wear makeup?

This week, a man writing to Slate’s Dear Prudence advice column confessed he feels simultaneously guilty and helpless about the fact that some of his female friends are unlucky in love because “their looks are probably the only thing holding them back.”  Prudence tends give good, progressive advice, but this time, instead of telling him the ladies should move in less superficial circles, she suggested he pair them up with some similarly “average-looking” male buddies.  She then added, “If the problem with your female friends is not their intrinsic looks but the fact that they dress like schlubs or never wear makeup, then a guy’s perspective that they aren’t doing everything with what they’ve got could spur them into action.”

Ugh.  Say what you want about clothes, but the makeup debate is as messy and gunky as makeup itself, which is why I’ve avoided it up until now.  But am I the only one who thinks telling someone to start using makeup is entirely different from giving them your opinion about the way they dress?

Everyone, from my partner to my grandmother, rolls their eyes at certain fashion choices and, as I’ve said before, anyone who denies they ever do it is lying.  It betrays a pathetic insecurity to trash others’ dress for the sake of your own self-aggrandizement—e.g. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that!”—but it is fair to say what just isn’t your cup of tea.  We can snark a little about someone’s clothes, hairstyles, accessories, headgear or makeup style (if they have one) without too much malice because someone is probably snarking about ours.  No one on earth dresses in a way that is universally attractive because there is no such thing as a universal beauty standard.  And as the saying goes, there is no arguing taste.  Someone thinks this is kick-ass, and someone else thinks it’s sloppy:

Captain Jack Sparrow

Someone thinks this is dreamy and someone else thinks it’s one big yawn:

Jason Straatmann Actor Japan Suit Tie Cufflinks Model

Someone thinks this is sexy and someone else thinks it’s garish: 

Untitled

People find beauty in this:

Traditional Korean dance

Or this:

Ethiopia, Mursi woman

Or this:

Bollenhut-Gutach

Or this:

4601942293_27f40e0122_o

Or this:

Namibië, oktober 2008

Or this:

 
And that’s just a tiny sample from around the world. There is even more variation across time because, as Oscar Wilde said, “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”  I think some of my friends, like some of the subjects above, have a great sense of style, while others do not.  They in turn probably think the same about me.  But if any of them thought I should wear makeup more often than I do—which is almost never—and told me so, they wouldn’t be my friends.  But what if they’re my supervisors?      

In January, a study featured in The New York Times revealed that (American) women who wear makeup are considered more competent and more likable in the workplace.  A panel of stylists and professors made various points about this that basically all boiled down to, “It’s a choice.  If it makes women feel more confident, they should go for it.”  But if the study indicates that their confidence would result from garnering more positive attention for their looks, then their lack of confidence without makeup would result from a fear of not getting attention for their looks. 

Many modern women, especially lipstick feminists, repeat, “Empowerment is all about being free to choose!”  There is truth in this.  I know guys who were bullied in school for wearing concealer or plucking their eyebrows.  Women meanwhile are often forced into a nearly impossible balancing act wherein no makeup = plain Jane, but too much = slut, and kudos to anyone who refuses to play that game.  Good girl culture, as well as the results from the study, assert that “less makeup is more – you should look like you’re not wearing any.”  This rule seems potentially problematic to me because it is insidious.  If someone gets used to just slightly “improving” their face every day, it is more likely they’ll feel insecure without these improvements.  I occasionally enjoy wearing heavy makeup bordering on the outrageous (like glitter), but it feels like a mask and everyone knows it’s a mask.  When it’s so obviously part of a costume, there’s not much danger that I’ll start considering it an inalienable component of myself.  But the subtle makeup seems to be a lot harder for people to let go of.  I know women who refuse to be photographed without their makeup on—and you probably do, too—and if that doesn’t sound like an unhealthy insecurity, I don’t know what does.

In any case, it doesn’t sound like they are “free to choose,” as lipstick feminists advocate.  As I’ve written before in explaining my choice to have my limbs lengthened, we should be free to make complex decisions about our bodies without others making snap judgments about our motivations.  Anyone who does is a coward.  But it is also cowardly of us to voice hatred for our natural faces and simultaneously deny that this has any impact on others.  In the words of philosopher Arthur W. Frank, “When we make a choice, we confront others with that choice.”  The freedom to choose diminishes when a strong majority bends in one direction, because majorities create social pressure.  In a society that literally rewards women who wear makeup—i.e., with higher salaries—it is undeniable that many do so in order to win these rewards, ultimately playing by the rules under the guise of empowerment.  The cosmetics industry, like any industry, always aims to make their customers feel that they cannot live without their product and so they too have embraced the slogan of “Empowerment!”  Leading The Onion to smirk, “Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does!” 

It would be obnoxious of me to assume that every woman with a compact in her purse does it to acquiesce.  I know and admire self–confident women who love putting on bright red lipstick and self-confident men who wish they could, too, without being gawked at.  Primping can be fun.  Painting your skin certain colors can make you feel fine and refreshed, like slipping into a brand-new top or getting a new haircut.  Or brushing your teeth after a hangover. 

But it’s not quite the same thing, is it?  Once again, it’s a mask.  A friend of mine who loves dressing up but hates wearing makeup recently said, “I guess, ultimately, it’s weird looking in the mirror and seeing something that doesn’t look like me.  I don’t really like makeup on other people either though, so perhaps it’s a general class of trying to hide oneself that bugs me.”   

Indeed, that is one of my many reasons for rarely ever using cosmetics, why I graciously declined friends’ offers to do me up on my wedding day, why I cringe at the idea of anyone pressuring women into it.  I also like being able to rub my face without having to worry about smudging.  I’d rather spend the money on a million other things.  My partner hates the taste of cream, gloss or powder—“Kissing someone wearing foundation is like kissing a sandbox!”—and I must say I don’t blame him.  Most importantly perhaps, I don’t understand why our culture believes that women’s faces require some paint in order to be attractive but men’s faces don’t.  If I can’t compensate for the plainness of my natural face with my charisma, then no one should be able to.

Of course, almost all of us conform to our culture’s beauty standards to some degree.  I’ve worn concealer for blemishes and plucked my eyebrows to make them even, but I feel a strong attachment to my scars and so I’ve kept them.  I don’t always like my face—don’t we all have those days when we look in the mirror and just feel yucky and dissatisfied?—but even if I thought putting on some modern Western style of makeup would make me look “better,” it wouldn’t look like me.  Experience has also taught me that a dissatisfaction with one’s looks is almost always rooted in something more substantial: feeling not very fit, feeling overtired and stressed, feeling lazy because there’s been too much or too little to do.  And even if it’s not, I often feel very satisfied with my face, so on a bad day why not simply walk away from the mirror, focus on something a little more profound than my appearance, and have confidence that the feeling of self-satisfaction will return?

As psychologist Nancy Etcoff wrote in The Times:

Women who feel that makeup use is obligatory but unwanted, that it requires a forced confrontation with the mirror when they’d rather put their attention elsewhere, do not feel more confident after using it.  Research suggests that women can feel objectified by makeup, and for such women, any potential advantage may be offset by the emotional labor of wearing it.

And, in an excellent article on weddings, Ariel Meadow Stallings of Offbeatbride.com writes:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the pursuit of authenticity versus the pursuit of attention.  The first feels very internal, like you really have to look with-in yourself with a lot of introspection and thought to determine what’s important … while the other feels very external, like you’re hunting for other people’s eyeballs.  And why does one seem like so much fun, while the other seems like so much work? …

I guess it comes down to this: Attention gives you the cheap high of other people’s energy focused at you … but authenticity gives you that deep, long-lasting satisfaction of knowing that you’re on the right path and you’re doing the right thing.  While the quick high is more fun in the short run, the deep satisfaction is ultimately more filling.

This is why it is fine to wear makeup but wrong to tell someone else to.  Not only is it a ludicrously presumptuous, boundary-crossing thing to say—like telling someone to switch careers or leave their spouse—but it’s vacuous because it has nothing to do with matters of justice or morality.  It is sheerly a matter of beauty standards.  The worst thing about beauty standards is that they create peer pressure based merely on taste.  The best thing about them is that, as seen above, there are millions of them, and they are constantly changing.  If humans are capable of thinking the lip-plate is attractive, then surely we are capable of thinking a woman without makeup is attractive. 

Women and men should feel free to smear their faces with whatever they wish or go without, to pluck their eyebrows or leave them be, to shave any body part or refrain.  (Bearing in mind doctors have recently explained the cringeworthy risks of shaving certain parts.)  But the moment they say that someone should do the same in order to feel better or lure lovers or advance their career, we have a problem.  And it’s not physical.

 

 

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Picking & Choosing Our Tragedies

21 Apr

World travel and communications recorded on Twitter

(Image by Eric Fischer used under CC license via)

 

What a week.  A suicide bomber in Pakistan killed four people.  A fertilizer plant explosion in Texas killed at least fourteen people.  Sixteen people died in a goldmine collapse in Ghana.  President Obama and members of the U.S. Senate were sent letters laced with poison.  A journalist in Mexico was assassinated, presumably by agents of the drug wars.  At least 65 people died in terrorist attacks in Iraq.  More than 150 people just died in an earthquake in Szechuan.  And after two young women and a little boy were murdered by bombs at the Boston Marathon, it felt surreal if not uncomfortable to see my last post about America’s inexperience with bombs at home emblazoned across the blog.  But what to say? 

For most of the week, we had no trace of a motive for the Boston bombing.  And now that one suspect of Chechen origin is dead and his brother is in custody, we still don’t have anything we could officially call a reason.  Polemicists on the right and left are using the event as “evidence” for the necessity of their own political agendas, arguing that we should have used drones, or that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should face a military trial, or that we need more surveillance cameras everywhere, or that the two suspects seem more like the psychotic teens of Columbine than terrorist operatives.  As John Dickerson observed in Slate yesterday:

We need more restraint and less wild guessing. Free-flowing debate in the search for meaning is a part of these moments and a part of the human condition, but … In these fast-moving times when the only thing that is certain is that the first piece of news has repeatedly been wrong, perhaps those lawmakers and pundits who want to be part of the final conversation should (paraphrasing Mike Monteiro) follow the Quaker rule: Be meaningful or be quiet. 

Of course, we all like to think ourselves meaningful.  But so far, with no official motive, the only irrefutable point any politician has made thusfar came from the Ambassador from the Czech Republic, who urged the media to note that Czechs and Chechens belong to two different countries located over a thousand miles apart.

Distance and borders matter, obviously, since none of us are equally horrified by every single one of this week’s tragedies.  But why?  I had friends in the Boston area who were stuck at home during Friday’s lockdown.  (Two were hoping to be allowed out in time for them to make it to the annual birthday celebration of their late brother Bill, whom I wrote about at this time last year in a post on grief.)  But I’ll hazard to guess that most of those glued to the news updates from Boston did not have loved ones there.  The story dominated the headlines across the ocean in Germany, in France, in the U.K.  Everyone seemed to be watching. 

The simplest reason for this is that people are naturally empathic, upset to see others upset and, in the words of the Czech ambassador, “It was a stark reminder of the fact that any of us could be a victim of senseless violence anywhere at any moment.”  But dead people in Pakistan and Iraq no longer serve as reminders of that fact.  They instead represent our ability to compartmentalize, to exile certain tragedies to a semi-numb region of the mind, either because they seem too frequent for us to commit to or because we want to believe there is some crucial difference between Us and Them, protecting us from their fate.  It’s not malicious of us to compartmentalize in this way—to tear up upon sight of the beautiful little boy in Boston while not even checking to see if any of the victims in Iraq were children—but it’s not fair either. 

And so I stared down my last post about World War II bombs, feeling inexplicably uncomfortable, wondering whether it was callous of me to not say anything about the tragedies going on in my old home country, yet knowing World War II would never have happened had my new home country not embraced a dangerous idea of what makes a country “home.”  Borders are always bizarre.  In a digital age, distance is all in the mind.  I’ll never be able to rationally explain why some things feel “close to home” and others don’t.   I’ll always care more about the safety of those I know personally than those I don’t, but I’ll never be completely comfortable with this fact because ignoring our common humanity is what builds borders and facilitates cruelty.  I’ll always tear up if you show me a picture of an innocent victim.  I’ll always try to remember to ask why we are shown pictures of some victims, and not others. 

Or, as a friend in Boston observed during the lockdown, “It is so hard to be inside on this gorgeous, beautiful spring day.  Minor problem, but reminds me how lucky we are most of the time to feel safe outside our homes.”

 

 

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Who Gets Stuck in the Friend Zone

24 Mar

Love for all!(Image by Matthias Ripp used under CC license via)

Well, I finally sat down and saw The Phantom of the Opera a quarter of a century after everyone else.  (If you don’t know the story, this parody sums it up pretty well.)  I won’t say what I thought of all the songs songs songs because I’m bound to alienate half my readers either way, but by the second to last scene, I was hollering at the screen: “Girl, you’d better not go for that swaggering bully in the mask!”  But then she ripped the mask off and he couldn’t stop crying and I was up to my eyelids in Kleenex, wailing: “If only he hadn’t killed so many people!  (And talked to her instead of stalked her… )  Now he’s just another disfigured guy stuck in the Friend Zone!  But his pain is reeeeeeeeal!”

This week, the word “Friend Zone” has been entered into the Oxford English Dictionary.  Many of my favorite feminists are not pleased.  Because the term is generally thought to be something only straight, bitter men complain about (see these Urban Dictionary definitions), many argue that it’s a misogynistic trope.  Lamenting the Friend Zone sends the message, however subliminally, that spending time with a female is pointless unless you gain access to her naughty bits.  Because who would want to be friends with a woman?! 

Such a bleak view of women is certainly a problem among many men.  In the words of John Mix Meyer, “Girls are not machines you put kindness coins into until sex falls out.”  Nice for the sake of nice is respect.  Nice only for the sake of getting laid is not.  As I’ve said before, cross-gender friendship could use a lot more support in books, film, and mainstream society.

But I’ve also used the word “Friend Zone” before because I don’t believe it refers only to this one chauvinistic idea.  Unrequited love isn’t fun for anyone.  Lots of women have been stuck in the Friend Zone, too.  Many people are expected by pop culture to always end up there, because society deems them asexual, and it could be helpful to examine why.  Almost every adult on earth craves love and sex, and we are all trying to figure out what attracts those we deem attractive. 

Men who sigh, “Girls don’t like nice guys,” need to get over their narcissism.  But there are others who wonder in earnest why the Friend Zone seems so jam-packed with quiet guys who genuinely respect women.  In stories of every genre, from classic literature (Madame Bovary) to modern literature (Freedom) to dime-a-dozen bodice-rippers (The Bridges of Madison County), bored heroines look past their straight-laced suitors to the tall dark stranger who’s not exactly famous for his fidelity or his feminism.  Love triangles always make for good drama, but when the heroine more often than not decides that the devoted sweetheart belongs in the Friend Zone and the unpredictable bad boy belongs in bed, many scratch their heads and repeat, “Why do girls always go for jerks?”  Or, as The Mr. T Experience sings, “I have some problems… but even Hitler had a girlfriend, so why can’t I?”

The answer often depends on the situation, but there are two fundamental, heteronormative traditions that prop it up:

The Macho Stereotype – Any guy who isn’t strong and independent to the point of being daring isn’t a “real man.”  Obeying the rules, doting on your wife, and being mediocre is emasculating.  Hence the double standard men are held to in real life: they are always expected to focus more on their success and autonomy than their emotional fulfillment.  Sociologist Stephanie Coontz has pointed out that the inordinate importance of independence to male worth is why homeless men arouse so much more disgust than homeless women.

The Gentler Sex Stereotype – A nice girl can see the diamond in the rough.  A man with a nasty wife is hen-pecked and pathetic, but a woman with a bad boy just might be the only one who understands him.  From a conservative standpoint, it’s virtuous of a woman to be so selfless and forgiving.  From a liberal standpoint, it’s the thrill of conquest and her extraordinarily open mind that keeps her trying.  

A man’s worth is defined by his success, albeit many women accept broad definitions of success.  Western romances across the ages assert that special girls who search for the softer side of the bully or the bad boy will find it: Beauty and the Beast, Wuthering Heights, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, The Music Man, Guys and Dolls, Bonnie and Clyde, right up to Fifty Shades of Grey.  Pop culture reiterates ad nauseam how much men love the chase, but this trope shows that scores of women do, too.  For the starry-eyed heroine, it’s a challenge to stray from the disapproving masses—or her parents—and become the One Special Woman who can tame the beast and bring joy to his lonely life.  The higher the risk, the greater the reward.  The reward is knowing that she is deeper, different from those other girls who swoon over bland perfection.  Hence even America’s most famous feminist, Lisa Simpson, has looked past loyal, bespectacled Milhouse for Nelson, the schoolyard bully from a broken home.  

By far the most horrific result of this romantic tradition is the fact that too many women in real life endure abuse, or worse. Pop culture sometimes concedes this and still has the audacity to romanticize it.  My high school did a production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel the same year Time magazine declared it the Best Musical of All Time.  After wife-beater Billy Bigelow dies in an armed robbery, his widow tells their daughter, “It is possible, dear, for someone to hit you, hit you hard, and it not hurt at all.”  You see, truly devoted wives know that offering yourself up as his punching bag is a way to show your love and nurture him as he struggles with his demons. Only a selfish bitch would leave him when he needs her most.

Carousel was written in 1956, but the trope is still going strong. The final film of the Twilight series lead NPR’s Linda Holmes to observe:

When a saga popular with pre-adolescent girls peaks romantically on a night that leaves the heroine to wake up covered with bruises in the shape of her husband’s hands — and when that heroine then spends the morning explaining to her husband that she’s incredibly happy even though he injured her, and that it’s not his fault because she understands he couldn’t help it in light of the depth of his passion — that’s profoundly irresponsible.

Yes, we’re all having a good yuk over the unhinged quality of it all.  And yes, it’s a movie with a monster baby… But romanticizing an intimate relationship that leaves bruises and scars is a particularly terrible idea in a film aimed at girls. Talking about this is tiresome, but then so is putting it in the movie.

Indeed.

But attraction to the forbidden is not always dangerous.  Sometimes the bad boy is just misunderstood.  There is a powerful romantic tradition of fine ladies risking wealth and status for true love.  (See Aladdin, Titanic, Robin Hood, Moulin Rouge, Lady and the Tramp, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Pirates of Penzance, The Pirates of the Caribbean.)  There are also classic tales of heroines opening the gates to social progress by debunking their families’ horrid prejudices when they fall for men outside their race/nationality/religion/species.  (See Pocahontas, South Pacific, Fiddler on the Roof, The Little Mermaid.)  The heroines of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Angst essen Seelen auf stare down the racial tensions of the era in which the films were released.  Meanwhile, Cyrano DeBergerac and the Phantom of the Opera both find out—albeit too late—that their beloveds would have looked past their disfigurement and loved them back. 

Since then, we’ve seen heroines end up with men with disabling injuries (often from war), while a handful go for guys who are congenitally disabled or disfigured.  As noted recently, Peter Dinklage’s romantic roles are possibly, finally breaking dwarf men out of the Friend Zone.  Great art obsesses over the blurry border between right and wrong, friend and lover, beauty and banality.  These compassionate heroines who try to understand the “bad” boys and the rejects help us deepen our perceptions of attractiveness.

It’s worth noting that the Phantom and Cyrano compensate for the supposed repulsiveness of their disfigurement with the sexiness of their genius.  They are supercrips.  Granted Gothic tales love to examine the complexity of blinding light draped in darkness.  I like a study of conflicting traits as much as the next starving liberal arts grad.  But it’s a ludicrously ableist tradition that only gives disabled superheroes a shot at intimacy, restricting ordinary disabled men like Quasimodo or the Seven Dwarfs to the Friend Zone.  And it’s an absurdly lookist tradition that restricts almost all of our disfigured and disabled women there.

Can you name a famous heroine who’s disfigured or physically disabled?  (Can you name a famous actress who’s visibly disabled, for that matter?  I might be able to, but I’d have to check Wikipedia to be sure.)  In the old days, disabled and disfigured girls might arouse sympathy (see Helen Keller), but the women were hags.  Period.  If women who were merely not conventionally attractive ever dared to step out of the Friend Zone and into the dating game, they were annoying.  Really annoying.  And they were swatted away like flies.

Nowadays, love stories try to speak to women’s insecurities about their looks with quirky retellings of the Ugly Duckling or Cinderella.  The heroine perceives herself as unattractive, moaning, “Is it because of my [thighs/eyes/nose]?!”  (Rather than cursing, “That shallow jerk stuck me in the Friend Zone!”)  But we eventually see that she truly is a knock-out and it’s just a matter of finding the right man who will wipe the soot off her face, pay for a makeover, or simply remove her glasses.  Children’s films are getting a little better: Shrek and The Princess and the Frog feature heroines who are green-skinned for part of the courtship, though their Otherness is not quite as realistic as the Phantom’s or Quasimodo’s.  We’ve yet to see a heroine reveal a real-life physical disability and see her hot lover swoon.

And why not?  Francis Bacon said, “There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.”  I’ve overheard countless guys say, “Chicks dig scars.”  Which is true.  Lots of chicks got scars, too.

The popularity of a story is by no means an empirical examination of our values.  Most people I know are so much deeper than pop culture gives us credit for.  And there is a lot more to many of these stories than the tropes I just reduced them to.  But it would be daft to pretend that they have nothing to do with our collective psyche.  Every one of us treasures those romantic moments we experienced that were “just like in a movie.”  Our most popular books and films simultaneously reflect and influence what we tend to think is hot.  And when it comes to opening our minds, fiction is often the best messenger.  We look to entertainment for escape and to art for enlightenment.  The most powerful stories provide both. 

When I attended a lecture at the Network of Disabled Women in Berlin two weeks ago, there was a debate as to whether reality TV shows and documentaries help or harm perceptions of disabled women.  Good documentaries smash stereotypes by providing facts and figures, but the over-representation of disabled women in such reports combined with their invisibility in love stories, detective stories, and silly sitcoms suggests that they exist solely as objects of study.  They are there to satisfy our curiosity, but we’re rarely asked to root for them the way we root for Rapunzel or Bridget Jones.  We never follow them on a journey dripping with passion.  We should. 

The Oxford English Dictionary’s newborn definition of “Friend Zone” reads: “a situation in which a platonic relationship exists between two people, one of whom has an undeclared romantic or sexual interest in the other.”  It doesn’t say it’s exclusively a problem for men.  And good for them.  To me, the term will always evoke the potentially destructive idea that certain “types” of people don’t ever need or deserve intimacy.  And we’ve got to keep questioning it.  Children, animals, and self-proclaimed asexuals automatically belong in the Friend Zone, along with your clients, patients, and students.  The disabled, the disfigured, the elderly, the ordinary, and the unsuccessful do not automatically belong there.  I’m counting on all of us, the storytellers and the lovers, to recognize the word so that we can recognize the problem.

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The People You Meet When You Talk About Human Suffering

17 Feb

 plastic crowd

(Image by Boinink used under CC license via)

 

Not all disabled people are innocents.  I would hope this comes as no surprise.  But in the wake of Oscar Pistorius’s alleged murder of his girlfriend, some are going to the other extreme.  In a bizarre article titled “The Disability Pedestal,” Slate writer William Saletan lists various disabled people who have allegedly committed similarly heinous crimes.  He cites anger over their disability as a frequent motive.  Which evokes the stereotype of the evil freak who kills in order to compensate.  That stereotype is at least as old as wicked witches, and as modern as the albino villain of The DaVinci Code.  Do we really need to feed it? 

And if there is truth to the commonly held belief that disability renders people more likely to lash out at others, then shouldn’t we be investing in a solution?  Saletan doesn’t offer any statistics on how many disabled people commit crimes out of self-pity, but if it’s really so endemic, then we should do something about it.

But I don’t think that’s what he meant.  While never going so far as to declare disabled killers a social problem, Saletan does argue that some see their disability as “just another card they can play,” and that both they and we need to realize that it all comes down to individual responsibility:

Equality isn’t about being special.  It’s about being ordinary.  People with disabilities aren’t above sin or crime.  They’re just like the rest of us…  You run your own race.  You make your own decisions.  Most people with prosthetic legs don’t shoot their lovers.  Most guys who survive testicular cancer don’t run doping rings in the Tour de France.  Something about beating cancer or overcoming a birth defect tugs at our hearts. It paralyzes our judgment.  We don’t want to believe that people who have accomplished such things can do evil.  Most don’t.  But some do.

I know plenty of disabled people who are jerks and nothing about the Pistorius case compels me to think of him as anything but one.  The stereotype of the poor, innocent, helpless, asexual, naïve invalid needs to go.  Yet I’m not comfortable with Saletan’s rather Ayn Randian assertion that compassion impairs judgment.  What impairs judgment is an inability to see someone as more than just a disability.  We should all be smart enough, deep enough, big enough to be humbled by the extraordinary difficulties someone has endured and to simultaneously call out their faults—or crimes—for what they are. 

Having a disability does not automatically make you a brave person or a good person or someone who deserves to be liked.  But disabilities almost invariably cause pain, and equality should not aim to rid us of our impulses toward compassion.  Was my judgment “paralyzed” when I met a girl in the hospital whose body was hot-pink with third-degree burns and immediately thought, “Man, I shouldn’t whine so much”?  Lots of my fellow patients at the hospital turned out to be the sort of people I couldn’t stand.  But almost every one of them had had experiences I could only try to imagine.  Refusing to excuse a disabled person should not preclude trying to understand the privileges we enjoy that they do not.    

To be fair to Saletan, I must admit it’s strange to find myself arguing this way because I am often fed up with discussions of disability and psychiatric disorders that devolve into self-pity and melodrama.  (See Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook… )  But firing off judgment can lead to snap judgments, and focusing our political energy on ranting about the whiners can lead to a cynical, soulless view of humanity.    

It just goes to show that we still have a hard time as a society figuring out what exactly to do with human suffering.  In my experience, four personality types exacerbate this problem.  (I’ve assigned gender randomly):

Mr. Comfort Zone – “I’ve Suffered, But You Don’t See Me Complaining!”  That guy who only sees society through his own lens.  He refuses to recognize any privileges he may enjoy, insists that everything balances out in the end and/or that the system is really rigged against people like him thanks to our oppressive PC culture.  He has a point that self-pity is counterproductive, but his refusal to acknowledge that anyone could have it harder than he does is the epitome of selfishness.  His refusal to explore the possibility of institutionalized chauvinism is intellectually lazy.  And his campaign for self-reliance loses all credibility the moment he blames minorities for his hardships. 

Ms. No Time For It – “It’s Sad Others Suffer, But I Don’t Like to Think About It…”  That lady who avoids political or social issues like the plague.  She wants to “stay positive” and “talk about cheerful things,” like the weather and her favorite TV shows and recent purchases.  She has a point that complaining too much about the world’s problems can wear you down, but she often contradicts this by complaining about mundane problems, like those trashy people who live around the corner and that snobby celebrity who had affairs with three different men, all of them friends of her husband, can you imagine how nasty you’d have to be in order to do such a thing?  In refusing to discuss politics, she ignores how much of her world view is determined by politics; i.e., what is considered “beautiful,” what it is considered “normal,” what is “controversial.”  She doesn’t realize that her ability to avoid certain “political” issues is a privilege. 

Mr. Oppression Olympics – “My People Have Suffered the Most!”  The activist who thinks the only rights worth fighting for are his own.  He may have a point about the unique nature of the discrimination he’s faced, but he ludicrously believes the more you’ve suffered, the more justice you deserve.  He secretly harbors prejudices about other minorities and this might be revealed when he thinks one of them might be taking time, funding, or attention away from “his” group.  He also refuses to acknowledge any privileges he may have.

Ms. Cry Wolf – “Can I Get Attention for My Suffering?”  The whimpering waif who takes the phrase “Talk about your feelings” to the extreme, turning almost every political discussion into a personal therapy session.  She secretly, or perhaps subconsciously, thinks belonging to a minority is enviable because it grants you sympathy and excuses for why you can’t do something.  She has a point that repression can be dangerous, but she goes overboard by crying, “OPPRESSION!” at any call for modesty or good manners.  She lists her problems in order to attain solace and praise, rather than revelation. 

We’re all prone to feel like these people in certain situations.  As a teen, I often slipped into Ms. Cry Wolf around boys I liked, hoping my saying, “I’m having such a hard day I could just cry!” would get them to be exactly as kind to me as I desired.  During my limb-lengthening procedures, when girlfriends would moan about not being thin enough while I was struggling against my painkillers to keep food down, I felt like Mr. Comfort Zone, wanting to tell them to shut up and be grateful.  In college, I felt like Mr. Oppression Olympics when students would raise their fists for feminism and LGBT rights but squirm and change the subject if I brought up disability rights.  And when it comes to certain matters of injustice—like what’s been going on in the Congo for the past five, ten, fifteen years?—I continue to be Ms. No Time For It, clicking past the headlines to the latest news about Stephen Fry or Jack White. 

Most people I know have had these feelings at certain points.  But we should be wary of acting on any of them, especially in the political sphere, because they’re all counter-productive.  There’s no progress in self-pity.  There’s no progress without empathy.  As I blog about disability and disenfranchisement, I agree with Saletan that I should never, ever be comfortable with the idea of myself as a victim.  But I also never want to be so hardened that I can’t be moved by human suffering.  Because that’s not really the point of trying to get along with the rest of the world, is it?

 

 

Note: This post was inspired by Crommunist’s The People You Meet When You Write About Race

 

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Props to The Observer for (Finally) Doing the Right Thing

20 Jan

a bit of controversy surrounding the transgender flag: san francisco (2012)A little background: A while ago a British journalist named Suzanne Moore, who specializes in women’s rights, made an offhand transphobic comment in an article about body image:  “We [women] are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual.”  There was an ensuing backlash from many in the trans community, especially on Twitter.  Her friend and fellow writer Julie Burchill penned a column in her defense titled, “Transsexuals Should Cut It Out,” which appeared last week in The Observer.  Without ever saying what exactly the trans activists in question had said to Moore that was so horrific, Burchill just called them names: “A bunch of dicks in chick’s clothing… bed-wetters in bad wigs… trannies…  They’re lucky I’m not calling them ‘shemales.’  Or shims.”

(Oh, really?  They’re lucky you don’t use the most dehumanizing terms you can think of?  Even though you just kind of did…  But I guess every member of every minority really should feel grateful to anyone who refrains from attacking their freak qualities with the worst slurs.  And in that case, thank you, Julie Burchill.  Thank you for not referring to people with dwarfism as midgets or Paralympic athletes as cripples.  I know the temptation is always there to vomit in disgust at people who are physically different and it takes a will of iron to keep the insults from dribbling out.  You are truly strong.  Anyone less magnanimous than you would mouth off.  You have shown yourself to be the paragon of generosity.  I for one am now going to get up every morning and feel grateful there are people like you saintly enough to walk down the street and not spit at those of us who truly belong in the circus.)

The Observer received a barrage of emails and commentary from horrified readers and promptly demonstrated that a small group of thoughtful citizens can indeed change the world when it pulled the column from its website.  The editors have issued this apology (emphasis mine):

This clearly fell outside what we might consider reasonable. The piece should not have been published in that form. I don’t want the Observer to be conducting debates on those terms or with that language. It was offensive, needlessly. We made a misjudgment and we apologise for that.

A newspaper shouldn’t reject writing that merely argues against trans rights or any sort of human rights.  As awful as bigotry is, dialogue between opposing sides is the only way to change minds and spur progress.  But any publication looking to host productive debate should always be able to discriminate between substantive reasoning and a pointless list of pejoratives.  I wouldn’t oppose printing Burchill’s piece because her argument was chauvinistic, but because she failed to be civil and because she wasn’t even addressing the trans activists’ stance.  She was simply snarking about their bodies.  And I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: If you can’t make your point without trashing traits your opponent has no choice about—their gender identity, ethnicity, biology, sexuality, or class background—then your argument doesn’t have a leg to stand on.  At worst, it’s abuse, and doesn’t even belong in high school.  (Indeed, that’s what anti-bullying policies are all about.)  At best, it’s meaningless.  (Would anyone try to convince the world to depose Saddam Hussein by ranting about the ugliness of his moustache?)

Upon first discovering Burchill’s piece last week, I assumed the only reason the editors would publish such an uninhibited temper tantrum was because they’re a business and believe feuds sell papers.  It is a relief to see now that they do not want their readers thinking that’s the kind of business they’re running.

Unsurprisingly, The Telegraph and others have bellowed, “CENSORSHIP!” and—you can see it coming a mile away—“PC police!” and have joined up with Burchill in republishing her piece.  They apparently have no qualms about profiting from the attention a semi-famous writer’s bad manners will grab.  Which is why it is so important to commend The Observer.  A week ago, I was deeply depressed by their descent into yellow journalism.  Their current endeavors to wipe off the self-inflicted stains are better late than never.

 

(Via)

 

 

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“ ‘I Am So Sorry’ Is A Start”

23 Dec

Last week 20 children and 7 women were murdered as I was celebrating my birthday.  Hearts leapt into throats and the urge to hug the little ones in our lives pushed the tears further down the cheeks.  As you absolutely undoubtedly know, the Internet has since been inundated with debates regarding gun control, violent video games, and even gender roles.  Amidst all the vitriol and special snowflake lecturing, it’s the lackluster discussions of psychiatric disorders that seem the least helpful.   

Too much of what has been said about mental illness has been too simplistic, too unscientific, too dismissive of the fact that accurately diagnosing a deceased individual often requires years of research.  Liza Long’s piece “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother” is brazenly presumptuous and fraught with problems, while most of the outraged responses obscure their excellent points with a few too many personal jabs at her.  Of course everyone wants to know as soon as possible why 20 children were chosen as targets, but in this quest our commitment should be to accuracy, not promptness.

Although much of my work is in disability rights, I rarely write about mental illness or psychiatric disorders.  I have family members who are mentally ill and many friends who work in psychiatric fields, but I do not know nearly enough about it to speak with any authority and all too often hearsay is copy-and-pasted as fact.  Genuine concern is sometimes obscured by sick fascination.  The term “mentally ill” is a gigantic umbrella that covers everything from paranoid schizophrenia to anorexia nervosa to hypochondria.  Those with psychiatric disorders make up what is perhaps the most misunderstood and diverse minority on earth.  Casually tossing out easy-reading explanations before the news cycle gets bored and moves on usually does them more harm than good. 

I’ve been reading as much as I can about the complexities of Asperger’s syndrome, schizophrenia, psychopathy, and the countless articles reminding everyone that most mentally ill people are far more likely to be the victims of violence rather than the perpetrators.  I plan on getting my hands on a copy of Richard J. McNally’s What Is Mental Illness? in the new year.  Meanwhile, I can only hope that news readers and viewers do not perpetuate the media’s easy-answer approach to something as complex as medicine.

And while filtering out the less helpful material, I found two beautifully honest pieces by Rev. Emily C. Heath and Linton Weeks about what to say to grieving parents.  People in bereavement are traditionally not classified as minorities, but fear, misconceptions, and snap judgments usually surround them.  (I wrote earlier this year about what loss has taught me about the complexities of grief and the prejudices I used to hold against it.)  As we continue the debates aimed at preventing future tragedies, we should learn how to deal with what this tragedy has done to those closest to it.

 

 

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Degenerates, Nazis, & the U.N.

16 Dec

(Via)

 

A reaction to last week’s post about the U.N. Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities sparked a behind-the-scenes discussion about whether or not I should allow name-calling in the Painting On Scars comments section.  I like to engage with almost anyone who disagrees with me, but online I know I also tend to only comment on sites that have strict no-drama policies because discussions can become pointless and boring really, really fast when there’s nothing but insults and exclamation points.  I ultimately decided that, for now, any rude behavior speaks for itself: Commenters can name-call all they want regarding people they dislike or say absolutely nothing, because in both cases they’re not going change anyone’s mind.

That said, I will always tell any supporters if they adopt tactics I want to have nothing to do with.  And it’s important to call out invectives that are particularly malicious in a way some might not be aware of.  The comment in question last week referred to the U.N. as “a bunch of degenerates, throat cutters, and other trash.”  Using the word “degenerate” in a discussion about disability rights is exceptionally insensitive, if not mean-spirited.    

The first time I read the word out loud to a friend here in Germany, his eyes shot up and said, “Be very careful with that word.  It immediately makes everyone think of the Nazis.”  And by “Nazis,” he meant the actual, goose-stepping, genocidal nationalists who tried as best they could to make sure disabled people either died off or were killed off.  Not “Nazis” in the Internet-temper-tantrum sense of “anyone I disagree with.”  The word also evokes the brownshirt term “degenerate art.”  Modern German sensitivity to the term is the result of looking honestly at the nation’s history of ableism.

Action T-4 was the first genocide program ordered by the Nazis, calling for the extermination* of those deemed by doctors to be “incurably sick.”  Between 200,000 and 300,000 disabled people were killed, though many were used for scientific experiments first.  *And by the way, I DETEST any use of the term “euthanasia” in this context.  “Euthanasia” literally means ending life to end pain, and for this reason I find it applicable where patient consent has been given or where pets are concerned.  But to imply that what the Nazis did to disabled citizens was anything other than murder is to dehumanize the victims.

The forced sterilization programs of disabled people in Nazi Germany, meanwhile, were modeled after American laws.  The very first forced sterilization law in the world was introduced in Indiana in 1907, and 30 states followed suit.  The Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s eugenics program in 1927 and it remained on the books until 1974.  Oliver Wendell Holmes summarized the Supreme Court’s decision thusly:  

It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…  Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

The Nazi poster featured above focused instead on the expense: “It costs the German people 60,000 Reichsmarks to keep this genetic defective alive.  Fellow German, that is your money!”  After World War II, the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial and the resulting Nuremberg Code discouraged ableist politicians from openly promoting eugenics on either side of the Atlantic.  But it wasn’t until 1981, the year I was born, that the disability rights movement in West Germany came into full swing and sought to combat ableism head-on. 

Almost every human rights movement is said to have a trigger moment when oppression went a step too far and the people fought back.  For the American Civil Rights movement, it was the death of Emmett Till.  For the gay rights movement, it was the Stonewall Uprising.  For the German disability rights movement, it was the Frankfurt Travel Ruling of 1980, brought about by a woman suing her travel agency for booking her in a Greek hotel where a group of Swedish disabled guests were also vacationing.  She claimed that having to see and hear disabled people had ruined her trip and the judge agreed with her.  Protests exploded across the country and the next year, which the U.N. had declared the Year of the Disabled, several West German disability rights groups organized and formed agendas.  They used the U.N. events to draw attention to the dire situation of disabled citizens in the country.

Two years later, the Green Party entered the Bundestag for the first time and was the first to voice support for disability rights as a human rights issue.  The Greens were born out of the 60s student movement in West Germany.  The movement was famous for protesting what most young activists across the Western world opposed at the time: the Vietnam War (and war in general), traditional gender roles, consumerism, pollution, etc.  But first and foremost, the West German 68ers were young people demanding the nation come to terms with its dark past, decrying that an overwhelming number of the nation’s leaders and officials were former Nazis.  Their commitment to human rights was inspired by an unfaltering awareness of how horrific things can get.  Their actions led to the passing of anti-discrimination laws and an amendment to the German Constitution in 1995, modeled after the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Another result of the students growing up and entering the government came in 1983 when conscientious objectors to the draft were no longer required to argue their motivations before a board for approval. This made it far easier for young men to opt for a year of community service in lieu of military service.  By 1991, half of those drafted became conscientious objectors.  For over 30 years, scores of German 19 year-old boys worked with mentally ill children at the Red Cross, in nursing homes, as assistants for physically and mentally disabled teenagers, and for Meals on Wheels.  This has created generations of men who often speak fondly of the experience and who are usually less fazed by disabilities or dependence, demonstrating a tolerance and openness that seems extraordinary for their age. 

The draft was discontinued last year and since then the community service option has been suspended.  Military debates aside, I agree with conservative politicians who have called for preserving the community service requirement and expanding it to women because it is an excellent government tool for combating both ableism and social segregation on a personal level.  Ableism is still a tremendous problem here in Germany, but in three generations, the country has changed from one of the most ableist societies on earth to one of the least.   The word “degenerate” signifies humanity’s capacity for cruelty and sensitivity to the word signifies our commitment to never repeat it.

To be fair, the word in last week’s comment was not aimed directly at disabled people but at the U.N. members working for disability rights.  And frankly, I’m a little insulted.  Because if anyone’s a degenerate here, it’s me. 

I am scientifically a mutant by virtue of my fibroblast growth receptor gene 3.  (Yes, yes, my genetics professor explained that technically all of us are mutants, but mostly just in boring ways… )  I am a semi-invertebrate now that pieces of my backbone were removed six weeks ago.  And I don’t take the last empty seat on the subway and request my friends slow down to my pace when walking for nothing.  So if anyone’s gonna go calling the organization that sprang from the Nuremberg Trials and founded the Universal Declaration of Human Rights a bunch of degenerates, they gotta get through me first.  I’m a degenerate living in Germany and proud of it.

 

 

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Universal Disability Rights – Remind Me Again Why We Don’t Care?

9 Dec

 

Well, I was going to write about how conservatives are sometimes more open to discussing issues faced by disabled people than liberals are.  Then on Tuesday, all but eight Republican senators voted against the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, making sure the United States distinguishes itself as one of the few nations on earth that will not commit to protecting disabled rights.  Appeals by the likes of the World Health Organization, the American Psychiatric Association, and senior Republicans (and disabled veterans) John McCain and Bob Dole were to no avail.  So I’m not in the mood to write any sort of tribute to conservative ideals this week.

Supporters of ratification like Dole and John Kerry argued that the United States would be leading the world, since much of the Convention was modeled after the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.  Opponents argued that this is exactly why ratification is of little importance.  We already have the ADA and we don’t like the UN, so who cares?  But By refusing to ratify the Convention, the United States is undermining its authority, ultimately saying, “Too bad!” to the disabled citizens of other countries that will also abstain, where ableism is sometimes deadly.  (Do we need to talk about the thousands of medical conditions that are still thought to be works of the devil or punishment by God in far too many cultures?)  But this is not just a matter of the United States choosing whether or not to officially lead the world.  When it comes to human rights at home, complacency can be devastating.

 In many respects, the U.S. is not coming out on top.  According to an OECD 2009 study of 21 developed countries cited by the World Bank and WHO last year, disabled people of working-age are more likely to live below the poverty line than non-disabled people in every country but Norway, Sweden, and Slovakia.  This likelihood is highest in the United States, Australia, Ireland, and Korea, and lowest in the Netherlands, Iceland, and Mexico.  According to WHO, the discrepancy between the employment rates of disabled and non-disabled citizens is twice as high in the United States (35 percentage points) as in Germany (18 percentage points).  And in the U.S., the risk of violence against people with disabilities is four to ten times higher than against people without disabilities. 

I will never officially endorse a candidate or a party on this blog.  Despite obvious political trends at the macrocosmic level, personal experience has shown me that people of all political stripes believe in universal human rights and I never wish to alienate anyone over issues not directly related to equality.  But shame on every single senator who blocked the Convention.  No one has ever protected human rights on an international scale through isolationist policies.  In a world where people with dwarfism still have little hope of employment outside the circus, people with albinism are persecuted, surgeries are performed without consent, and a diagnosis of mental illness is thrust upon LGBT people and denied people with clinical depression, international cooperation is crucial.  Otherwise, human rights disintegrates back into its inconsistent old self and becomes nothing more than a matter of privilege.  

 

 

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Biology and “The Imprecision of Stereotypes”

16 Sep

 

This week the British newspaper The Telegraph asks:

Ever wondered why men can’t seem to tastefully decorate a house?  Or have a tendency for dressing in clothes that clash?  And why, for that matter, can’t women seem to hack it at computer games?  Now scientists claim to have discovered the reason: the sexes see differently.  Women are better able to tell fine differences between colors, but men are better at keeping an eye on rapidly moving objects, they say.

Professor Israel Abramov and colleagues at the City University of New York reached their conclusions after testing the sight of students and staff, all over 16, at two colleges…

The authors wrote: “Across most of the visible spectrum males require a slightly longer wavelength than do females in order to experience the same hue.”  So, a man would perceive a turquoise vase, for instance, as being a little more blue than a woman who was looking at it too.

Abramov, professor of cognition, admitted they currently had “no idea” about how sex influenced color perception.  However, writing in the journal Biology of Sex Differences, he said it seemed “reasonable to postulate” that differences in testosterone levels were responsible…

Men can’t perceive colors as deftly as women can.  That’s why all the great Western painters like Van Gogh and Cézanne and Leonardo and Picasso and Renoir and Monet and Munch and Vermeer and Kandinsky and Matisse are female.  And all the major fashion designers of the last century like Hugo Boss and Karl Lagerfeld and Gianni Versace and Giorgio Armani and Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren were women.  Oh, wait. 

Maybe the study meant to say testosterone only triggers color ineptitude when male ears register the words “home decorating.”  Or that male color perception improves when money is involved. 

Or maybe The Telegraph author was exaggerating just a bit.  Tacking jazzy headlines onto reports of scientific studies are all the rage these days, no matter how much they distort the findings.  In June, Medical Daily ran an article under the title, “Racism Is Innate.”  Innate means, according to my biologist father, “present at birth,” so this seemed like a call to toss all those No child is born a racist buttons onto the trash heap.  Except that anyone who bothered to read the article would discover that the study simply concluded that brain scans of adults show simultaneous activity in the centers that process fear and emotion and those that differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar faces.  The idea that fear of the Other can be neurologically mapped lends itself to a great deal of speculation and debate, but nowhere did the study claim that racism is present at birth. 

Such truth-stretching borders on mendacity, yet it pervades the science sections of so many newspapers.  Scientific studies are supposed to be free of bias, but the news media is severely biased toward publishing whatever will grab readers’ attention.  As several researchers have pointed out, differences between the sexes are currently considered a much more interesting discovery than no difference, so publishers often remain silent on an issue until they find a study that provides the juicier headline, no matter how numerous the contradicting studies are.  When the market is left to decide, it chooses salability over comprehensiveness.

Such an irresponsible approach to science results in a gravely misinformed public.  I can’t tell you how many people have repeated the claim that our modern Western female beauty standards are “natural” because a round waist resembles pregnancy and triggers the male fear of cuckoldry.  No one seems to remember that several cross–cultural studies discredited this idea years ago.  But how can anyone be expected to remember something the media chose not to promote in the first place? 

And forget about waiting until the study is corroborated.  In 2007, The Times ran a headline claiming that women are naturally drawn to the color pink because of our savannah foremothers’ need to gather berries while the men hunted.  The Times published the study without consulting any historians, who eventually pointed out that pink was considered a manly color as recently as 1918 until fashion trends changed.  Oops.

This doesn’t mean that we should, as Mitt Romney has demanded, “keep science out of politics.”  Science is impartiality and corroboration and the best method we have for sorting facts from wishful thinking—for preventing our emotional, egotistical needs from weakening our objectivity.  To me, science is the most humbling force in the universe because it demands we always admit what we do not know.  It prevents hasty conclusions based on flimsy evidence, gut feelings, and political agendas.  It questions crude stereotypes and discovers more complex structures. 

But according to pop science reporters and the researchers they choose to spotlight, nearly every single modern joke about the differences between men and women stems from millennia-old evolutionary adaptations.  (Indeed, the Telegraph article claims that the female proclivity for detecting color helped our foremothers with gathering berries.  Always with the damn berries… )  As stated in the graphic below, such reports all too often suggest that prehistoric society on the African savannah looked just like something Don Draper or Phyllis Schlafly would have designed:

Men hunt, women nest, and every macho social pattern we see today has been passed down to us from our prehistoric ancestors.  Even though historians find that these patterns, like our racial categories, are barely more than two centuries old, if that.  And that the gender binary is far from universal.  Misinterpreting scientific findings is just as dire as ignoring them. 

When it comes to what women and men can and can’t do, neuroscientist Lise Eliot notes, “Expectations are crucial.”  When boys and young men grow up in a culture that mocks their supposed incompetence in all things domestic (“Guys don’t do that!”), it comes as no surprise that only the most self-confident will pursue any interest they have.  Meanwhile, studies show girls perform as well as boys do in math and science until they reach puberty.  Maybe the onset of menstruation paralyzes our visual-spatial intelligence because we’ve got to get picking those berries, or maybe girls pick up on the not-so-subtle message that guys think coquettish beauty is more important than nerdy brains in the dating game.  (For more details on the sexism faced by aspiring female scientists, see Cordelia Fine’s excellent book, Delusions of Gender.)  In her research, Dr. Eliot finds only two indisputable neurological differences between males and females:

1) Male brains are 8% to 11% larger than females’.

2) Female brains reach maturation earlier than male brains. 

All other neurological studies that find major differences between the sexes are studies of adults: i.e., the people most shaped by their culture and society.  Only cross-cultural studies of adults can isolate nurture from nature.  In any case, Eliot is a proponent of neuroplasticity, the idea that the pathways and synapses of the brain change depending upon its environment and the neural processes and behaviors it engages in.  In other words, painting or gaming from an early age or frequently throughout your life will condition your brain to do these tasks and related ones well.  It explains why the gender roles of a given time and place are so powerful—why mastering unfamiliar tasks is an uphill climb for men and women but also why countries committed to equality have the narrowest gender gaps. 

“Plasticity is the basis for all learning and the best hope for recovery after injury,” Eliot writes.  “Simply put, your brain is what you do with it.”  For more, see her brilliant parenting book, Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps—and What We Can Do About It.   

But I’ll never believe that a neuroscientist has all the answers.  I live in a country that showed the world the dangers of hastily trying to trace all social patterns back to biology.  As a result, the media here in Germany is usually much more reticent to casually toss around arguments like those in The Telegraph or The Times or Medical Daily.  Natural scientists have made discoveries like neuroplasticity and limb-lengthening that are crucial to progress, but social scientists have discovered that equality and empathy are crucial to any society that values peace and respect over power and greed. 

Or, in other words.

 

 

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Germany Rules on Male Circumcision

26 Aug

Justice(Image by Viewminder used under CC license via)

We’ve been waiting all summer for this decision.  On Thursday here in Berlin, the German Ethics Council ruled that male circumcision is legally permissible without a doctor’s order, but several conditions must be met:

    • Both parents must be in full agreement.
    • All possible risks to the procedure must be explained in full detail.
    • Local anesthetics must be an option.
    • The procedure must be certified by a medical professional.

Some of these requirements, especially the last two, go against what some fundamentalist religious leaders mandate.  Why all the fuss?  In Europe, where female genital cutting is illegal, male circumcision is only common in Muslim and Jewish communities.  Last year, a German court in Cologne ruled that the circumcision of an underage male constitutes aggravated assault and battery, and the debate has been raging ever since.  It has split the nation into two parties: Those that see the procedure as cosmetic at best and mutilating at worst, carried out on patients too young to give consent, versus those that believe any ban on age-old rituals and tribal markers constitutes religious and/or ethnic persecution.  That the ritual German lawyers sought to ban is a Jewish custom makes it a particularly sensitive case here.

When we hear stories of female genital cutting in Africa, Westerners are generally horrified.  But few in the United States understand that many Europeans gape at our 60% rate of male circumcision and consider it to be of course not quite but almost as cruel.  “How on earth could parents do that to their baby boy?!” is the reaction I get from the vast majority of Christian and non-denominational European males I talk to.  They are much more prone to believe studies citing the problems it can cause—for example, a supposedly higher rate of dyspareunia for women who have intercourse with circumcised men—than studies that downplay such fears.  I usually admit to them that, because it is so very common where I come from, I’d never given it much thought beyond those pop culture jokes about what looks better.

Which just goes to show how powerful cultural customs and values can be.  Both female and male genital cutting involves groups that say we should protect the parents’ right to choose what they think is best for their children without government interference, while the others say the government should protect children from procedures that offer no medical benefit before they are old enough to decide for themselves, regardless of what their parents want.

I’ve written before that as someone who’s undergone limb-lengthening, I know how complex decisions about body alteration can be.  Determining an appropriate age of consent for surgery can be even more complicated.  But also due to my experience, I wince along with Jessica Valenti when parents choose procedures for their children that offer no real medical benefit.  While discussing circumcision, my European friends argue that patients should reach the age of consent before undergoing any procedure that, unlike limb-lengthening, does not become more medically complicated with age.  Should courts ever rule this way, this will inevitably lead to bans on juvenile nose-jobs like the one Valenti cites.  But then what about ear-piercing? 

Years ago, I was a panelist at a conference called “Surgically Shaping Children” at the Hastings Center, a think tank for bio-ethics, where we addressed elective procedures such as limb-lengthening on dwarfs and determining a gender for intersex children.  After a two-day debate and a resulting book, we concluded that the best way to prevent parents from making decisions that could be damaging to their children is to keep both the parents and their children as informed as possible about every issue that’s at stake: medical facts, cultural identity, individual identity, and agency.  The German Ethics Council’s ruling also implies that such comprehensive understanding is necessary. 

I think a ban on circumcision would have created more cultural resentment than understanding.  But the scientific community, and society as a whole, should take the place of the legal system in helping parents understand all the complexities of altering a child’s body without a medical purpose.  There may be no easy answer, but the discussion has got to keep on going.

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Fighting the Good Fight or Feeding The Ego?

19 Aug

Body Art Chameleon“I know so many men and boys and trans individuals who wear dresses for so many different reasons, and they do it a lot more than mainstream movies, TV, and advertising suggest.” 

I felt my fingers tremble just a tiny bit as I typed this sentence last week.  Not because of the subject matter.  Not because of the point I was trying to make.  Because of the “I.”  Was that word going to drive home my point, or derail it?

Studies show personally knowing someone who belongs to a minority group increases the likelihood that you will have empathy for that minority.  If you have a family member who is gay, you’re less likely to oppose marriage equality.  If you know someone with dwarfism well, you’re less likely to see their medical diagnosis whenever you look at them.  GLAAD emphasized the political potential for all this in a brilliant meme last fall.  Urging LGBT individuals to talk openly about their partners and love lives at the dinner table with the same frequency as their straight family members, they called it, “I’m Letting Aunt Betty Feel Awkward This Thanksgiving.” 

Truly caring for someone with a different perspective often—though, sadly, not always—inspires us to try to understand their perspective and this enhances our own.  Letting others know that They are not so different from Us because we know and care deeply about many of Them can effectively break down barriers.  And, when discussing social injustice, it’s always best to ask someone with personal experience, lest we unwittingly make erroneous assumptions.  But, of course, just having friends who belong to minority groups doesn’t solve everything. 

As I wrote about knowing men and trans people who wear dresses to elucidate that They are actually Us, I cringed at the idea of flaunting my loved ones’ Otherness for the purposes of my blog.  By inserting myself into the statement, there was a risk that some would think I was trying to prove my open-mindedness.  I’ve bragged like that in the past, especially when I was an egocentric teen.  (You know, back when you practiced writing your name over and over?)  And my own Otherness has been flaunted a few times by friends and acquaintances seeking attention for their open-mindedness.  It’s a serious problem in the social justice movements.  

In Black Like Me, the author tells the story of a New Yorker he encounters who has come to the South to “observe” the plight of the black citizens.  “You people are my brothers,” the New Yorker insists.  “It’s people like me that are your only hope.  How do you expect me to observe if you won’t talk to me?”  Although the man’s opposition to segregation was morally correct, his overt self-regard and patronizing disgust at his brothers’ “ingratitude” makes it one of the most cringe-inducing scenes in the book.

In Baratunde Thurston’s fantastic memoir, How To Be Black (just out this year), the author asks writers and activists about white people’s fear of being called racist.  damali ayo, the author of How To Rent A Negro and Obamistan! Land Without Racism, says it best:

It shows our values as a culture when somebody says, “I don’t want to be a called a racist.”  Really what they’re saying is, “I want you to like me.  I don’t want to not be liked.  I want to still be okay with you.”  They don’t mean, “What I really want is to know and understand experiences of people of color…”  That would be great.

And so, it just shows that, as I always have said, we are operating at this third-grade level of race relations.  And it’s that third-grader that goes, “Please like me, do please like me,” versus “Can I understand?”

We all want to be liked and we all want to do the right thing.  But the the third-grader mindset can’t help but focus more on the former.  It is evident in common phrases like:

“We were the only white people there!” 

 “I’ve always wanted a gay friend!” 

“I think I’m [bisexual/learning disabled], too, because I [kissed a girl once/have difficulty concentrating]!” 

“I’m not prejudiced!  I have so many [nonwhite/foreign/LGBT/disabled] friends!”

Of course, in certain contexts and worded differently, these statements would not be offensive.  What makes them offensive is the need to let others know all about us, the belief that our support for equality deserves praise, the patronizing (and unjust) view that minorities should be grateful for our lack of prejudice.  We can note that we were the only white people in a group in order to spark a dialogue about social segregation, or we can flaunt the experience like a medal from the Liberal Olympics.  We can worry that having a homogeneous circle of friends will limit our perspective, or we can believe that racking up as many minority friends as we can is proof of our expertise on all minority issues.  We can try to empathize with someone labeled “different” because of their sexuality or biology in order to remove stigmas and barriers, or we can try to seek the attention they are getting for ourselves.  We can respond to accusations that we have offended by trying to understand why someone would be hurt, or we can respond by listing our liberal credentials.

This depends primarily on the individual.  Someone who likes to brag about their open-mindedness usually brags about most things they do.  This personality trait seems to be particularly common among educated elites—parodied so well at Stuff White People Like—because elite education frequently fosters competitiveness.  (Taking the time to count your degrees, count the books you own, count the minority friends you have…)  Competitiveness is anathema to selflessness.   But while bragging about the number of books we own is silly because we’re obviously missing the point of reading, bragging about the number of minority friends we have is grave because we’re missing the point of human rights.

Do we donate to charity privately because it makes us feel better to spend the money on someone else?  Or do we hope that others will notice and admire our sacrifice?  Then again, drawing attention to the work we’re doing is usually important if we want to advertise the cause and urge others to join.  That’s where things get murky.

A while back, within a few months of each other, two friends stood up to ableism and told me about it after the fact.  A guyfriend came fuming to me about his teacher who had used the word “midget” and who had then insisted, despite my guyfriend’s protests, that it wasn’t offensive at all.  A girlfriend told me that a mutual acquaintance had said something crass about my dwarfism and that she had told him to back off repeatedly because she wouldn’t tolerate such bigotry in her presence.  The first friend focused his story on the offender’s behavior.  The second focused her story on her heroic defense.  People who want to understand the problem more than anything tend to focus their feelings on the injustice they encountered.  People who want to be liked more than anything tend to focus their feelings on their performance.

This shouldn’t ever deter anyone from working for equality and social justice, from celebrating diversity or from spreading awareness.  Open minds should always be highly valued.  But to paraphrase the recent words of the Crunk Feminist Collective, by not being racist—or sexist or homophobic or lookist or ableist or transphobic—we’re not doing anything special.  We’re doing what we’re supposed to do.

 

 

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Interpreting History Part I: Count Me Out

29 Jul

alter ego(Image by Bob May used under CC license via)

 

Anytime my partner and I don’t know what to do or say, one of us asks, “What’s in the news?” and we dive into a political discussion.  So it’s no surprise that we’ve become somewhat embarrassingly addicted to Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom.  The news media has been (unsurprisingly) critical of a show founded on the idea of chastising the news media.  Feminists have been (sometimes rightly) critical of its portrayal of women.  The show has almost countless strengths and weaknesses, but I find myself still obsessing over the brilliant, captivating opening scene that kicked off the series.  If you can’t this clip, it basically boils down to a flustered news anchor named Will McAvoy overcome with disgust at the state of the nation and nostalgia for the 1950s and 60s: “America’s not the greatest country in the world anymore,” he sighs.  “We sure used to be.”

We stood up for what was right.  We fought for moral reasons.  We passed laws, we struck down laws for moral reasons.  We waged wars on poverty, not poor people.  We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors.  We put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chests…  We cultivated the world’s greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy.  We reached for the stars, acted like men.  We aspired to intelligence.  We didn’t belittle it.  It didn’t make us feel inferior…  We didn’t scare so easy.     

“Nostalgia” literally means “aching to come home.”  It’s the temporal form of homesickness, time rather than place being the source of pain.  We all do it.  It can be oddly soothing at times to be in awe of another era, especially the one you were born in.  But Will McAvoy should watch Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris for proof that nostalgia is an ultimately futile pastime that every sad sack of every era has hopelessly indulged in.  (If “things were better back in the day,” then how come every generation says this?)  But since McAvoy’s nostalgia is an earnest, political battle cry, heaping laurels on the good old 1950s and 60s when the leaders of the day did their job right, I’m more inclined to have him watch Mad Men.  Or just open up the 1960 children’s illustrated encyclopedia I found at my great aunt’s house, which states, among other things: “The Australian aborigine is similar to the American negro in strength, but less intelligent.”  Didn’t scare so easy, indeed.     

The problem with nostalgia is that it is far more emotional than intellectual and thereby lends itself to inaccuracy all too easily.  America was indeed doing great things sixty years ago.  And reprehensible things.  We hid our disabled and gay citizens away in institutions, asylums and prisons.  We enforced the compulsory sterilization of mentally disabled and Native American women.  We took decades to slowly repeal segregationist laws that the Nazis had used as models.  We maintained laws that looked the other way when husbands and boyfriends abused their partners or children.  In short, we handed out privilege based on gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, physical and mental capabilities with far greater frequency and openness than we do today.  Perhaps we were the “greatest country in the world” compared to the others.  (Europe and East Asia were trying to recover from the devastation of World War II, after all, while other nations were trying to recover from the devastation of colonialism.)  But McAvoy’s wistful monologue is much more a comparison of America Then with America Now.  And that is hard to swallow when considering that a reversion to that society would require so many of us to give up the rights we’ve been given since then.   

Am I “another whiny, self-interested feminist” out to bludgeon the straight, cis, WASPy male heroes of history?  Am I “just looking to be offended”?  No, I’m struggling.  Next to literature and foreign languages, history has always been my favorite subject.  And pop history always touches upon this question:

“If you could go back to any period in history, which would it be?” 

From an architectural point of view?  Any time before the 1930s.  From an environmental point of view?  North America before European contact.  From a male fashion point of view?  Any period that flaunted fedoras or capes.  From a realistic point of view?  No other time but the present.  Because if I am to be at all intellectually honest in my answer, there has never been a safer time for me to be myself. 

Last year, I read The Lives of Dwarfs: Their Journey from Public Curiosity To Social Liberation by Betty Adelson.  Despite my love of history, I hated almost every minute of it.  Lies my Teacher Told Me by James Loewen had helped me understand how so many black American students feel uninspired by U.S. history and the figures we hold up as heroes because so many of those men would have kept them in shackles.  But it wasn’t until I read The Lives of Dwarfs that I understood how nasty it feels on a gut-level to face the fact that most of history’s greatest figures would more likely than not consider you sub-human. 

With the exception of Ancient Egypt, my own lifetime has been the only period wherein someone with dwarfism could have a fair chance of being raised by their family and encouraged to pursue an education and the career of their choice, as I was.  At any other point in Western history, it would have been more probable that I would have been stuck in an institution, an asylum or the circus (the Modern Era before the 1970s), enslaved by the aristocracy (Rome, Middle Ages, Renaissance) or left for dead (Ancient Greece).  Of course inspiring cases like Billy Barty show that a few courageous/decent parents bucked the trends and proved to be the exception to the rule, but that’s what they were.  Exceptions. 

I am fortunate to have been born when I was and for that reason, nostalgia for any other period in time can never be an intellectually honest exercise for someone like me.  The moment someone says, “Yeah, well, let’s not dwell on odd cases like that.  I’m talking about the average person,” they’re essentially saying, “Your experience is less important than mine.”

Everyone is entitled to have warm, fuzzy feelings about the era in which they grew up.  If any period can put a lump in my throat, it’s the 1970s.  The Sesame Street era.  The boisterous, primary-colored festival flooded with William’s Doll, Jesse’s Dream Skirt, inner city pride à la Ezra Jack Keats, and androgynous big hair all set to funky music can evoke an almost embarrassing sigh from me.  Donning jeans and calling everyone by their first name, that generation seemed set on celebrating diversity and tearing down hierarchies because, as the saying goes, Hitler had finally given xenophobia a bad name.  Could there be a more inspiring zeitgeist than “You and me are free to be to you and me”? 

 

But I’m being selective with my facts for the sake of my feelings. 

Sesame Street and their ilk were indeed a groundbreaking force, but it was hardly the consensus.  Segregation lingered in so many regions, as did those insidious forced sterilization laws.  LGBT children were far more likely to be disowned back then than today—Free To Be You And Me had nothing to say about that—and gay adults could be arrested in 26 states.  The leading feminist of the time was completely screwing up when it came to trans rights.  Although more and more doctors were advocating empowerment for dwarf babies like me, adult dwarfs faced an 85% unemployment rate with the Americans with Disabilities Act still decades away.  And Sesame Street was actually banned in Mississippi on segregationist grounds.  When the ban was lifted, its supporters of course remained in the woodwork.  We have made so much progress since then.  It would be disingenuous for me to ignore that simply for the sake of nostalgia. 

To be fair to Sorkin, it’s a hard habit to kick.  We have always glorified the past to inspire us, no matter how inaccurate.  Much of American patriotism prides itself on our being the world’s oldest democracy, but we were not remotely a democracy until 1920.  Before then, like any other nation that held free elections, we were officially an androcracy, and of course we didn’t guarantee universal suffrage until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  That my spellcheck doesn’t even recognize the word “androcracy” signifies how little attention we afford our history of inequality.  But we have to if accuracy is going to have anything to do with history.  A brash statement like “We sure used to be [the greatest country in the world],” as a battle cry for self-improvement is asking to be called out on the inanity of this claim. 

Everyone is entitled to appreciate certain facets or moments in history, just as everyone is entitled to look back fondly upon their childhood.  Veracity falters, however, with the claim that not just certain facets but society as a whole was all-around “better.”  This is never true, unless you’re comparing a time of war to the peacetime preceding it (1920s Europe vs. 1940s Europe, Tito’s Yugoslavia vs. the Balkans in the 1990s), and even then the argument is sticky (Iraq during the insurgency vs. Iraq under Saddam Hussein).  In the words of Jessica Robyn Cadwallader, concealing the crimes of the past risks their reiteration.  Whenever we claim that something was socially better at a certain point in history, we must admit that something was also worse.  It always was. 

But such a sober look at the past need not be depressing.  It reminds me how very grateful I am to be alive today.  My nephews are growing up in a society that is more accepting than almost any other that has preceded it.  That is one of helluva battle cry.  Because what could possibly be more inspiring than history’s proof that whatever our missteps, things have slowly, slowly gotten so much better?

 

 

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When It Comes to the Sexes, Ignorance Is Bitterness

1 Jul

 

“Men and women can’t really be friends, can they?”  In the wake of Nora Ephron’s passing on Tuesday, there’s been a revival of this When Harry Met Sally question.  And you can probably guess what my answer is.  With no disrespect intended to the late feminist, I’m really hoping this is one of her contributions to pop culture whose staying power will erode with time.  It’d be easy to dismiss it as no big deal, nothing more than a cute gimmick, but an excellent NY Times piece from earlier this spring asserts what I have always suspected: Our society’s lack of faith in cross-gender friendships signifies its traditional lack of faith in men and women being able to understand each other.  And that’s a big deal.

According to tradition, men and women view each other as the Other and only meet for the sake of mating and family, hence the cultures wherein women were banned from being seen with any man who was not their husband or relative.  Western pop culture promotes vestiges of this in its assumption that any regular contact with a member of the opposite gender will lead to you falling for them, especially if you’re a guy.  As Jeff Deutchman writes in this several-volume Slate article, “It’s called having no standards.”  When Harry Met Sally says, Fine, maybe as a guy you don’t fall for every woman who crosses your line of vision, but it’s your only motivation for maintaining a friendship with one, and attraction will always poison friendship.  Oh, puh-lease.

“Only worth it if I get laid” may be the rule for a Hollywood character, but it is a very bleak view of the other gender.  Friendship may be impossible if you are set on maintaining that view, but in that case, too bad for you.  And everyone else around you.  I’ve seen friendships survive unrequited love, illicit feelings, romantic trysts and break-ups, and go on to rival any sisterhood or buddy bond in depth.  Men and women can sure as hell be friends, and I don’t mean friendly chit-chat at dinner parties.  I mean call-up-and-confide-your-deepest-fears, ask-for-advice-on-your-most-serious-problems, make-you-laugh-in-a-way-almost-no-one-else-can friends.  Instead of Harry and Sally, they embody Jerry Seinfeld and Elaine Benes, or Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew, nurturing an allegiance that says “So what?” to any sexual tension, past or present.  They are anathema to the “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” folklore, just as international relationships are anathema to racist myths. 

It is true that men and women are culturally conditioned to think and behave differently, just as Germans and Americans are culturally conditioned to think and behave differently, as are New Yorkers and Texans, Berliners and Bavarians, Long Islanders and Upstaters.  But there is always far more variation in the thoughts and behaviors within cultures than across them.  Our traditional categories ignore this, suppressing any details that throw themselves into question, no matter how critical.  Arguing against male-female understanding by emphasizing the traditionally recognized differences is disingenuous because it relies on an extremely narrow, heteronormative perspective. 

Social conservatives often cite hormonal and genetic differences as wedges between men and women, straights and gays, but such arguments are cherry-picking the facts to prop up the antiquated gender binary.  In a New York magazine article on transgender children appearing last month, a theory presented by Dr. Jean Malpas breaks down the concepts of sex and gender into not two but four parts, visually represented on a stick-figure:

  • Biological Gender: your chromosomes and genitals.  Indicated on the stick-figure’s crotch.
  • Sexuality: your romantic attraction to others.  Indicated on the stick-figure’s heart.
  • Gender Style: sometimes called Gender Expression, your preferred self-presentation in matters such as fashion, posture, speech patterns and hobbies. Indicated by a circle around the outside of the stick-figure’s body.
  • Gender Identity: your innate sense of being male or female or androgynous, regardless of biology or style or sexual interest.  Indicated on the stick-figure’s brain.

We are so much more complex than Harry and Sally, and so much deeper than they give us credit for.  Just as an international relationship requires at least one if not both partners to be bilingual, a cross-gender friendship requires at least one if not both friends to be intellectually curious, empathic and uninterested in the stereotypes they have been taught regarding both their own gender and someone else’s.  Indeed, the author of the Slate article claims that cross-gender friendships work best between individuals who are “less gendered.”  (Guys who are unafraid to enjoy movies like The Joy Luck Club, no matter the risk of looking effeminate; women who are unafraid to make asses of themselves, no matter the risk of looking unladylike… )  Bonding over common experiences is easy.  Considering a different point of view despite cultural pressures signifies genuine respect, the very sort needed to fuel any kind of progress.  This is why having close friends of all kinds of gender identities, styles and sexualities can be so awesome. 

Friendship, unlike politics, requires the participants to not just listen to each other but hear what the other is saying.  As a woman who wants a career, I am still expected to juggle it with almost all the responsibilities of childcare because mothers who focus more on their success than their family are negligent.  Many guyfriends are sympathetic to this, while pointing out to me that with or without a family, they are expected to focus more on their success than their emotional fulfillment.  Discussing such ambivalent feelings with friends of the same gender identity can be very helpful, but peer pressure can impede it.  Discussing such feelings with a romantic partner is very important, but it carries the burden of how these feelings will affect the relationship.  Discussions that take place outside of a romantic relationship are more likely honest than resentful because the problem can be identified without having to be solved right away.  That’s what friends are for.   

But it receives little support from tradition because Harry and Sally insist that straight men and women are doomed to fall in love, and traditional notions of love have very little to do with respect.  In passionate romance, possessiveness trumps respect, and while overt jealousy may now be seen as uncool, the tendency for men and women to break off along gender lines at parties seems to correlate directly with the number of monogamous couples.  Pursuing a new friendship with a man your husband doesn’t like—who isn’t gay—can still be judged as inappropriate.  But it’s a double standard, because many men and women strongly dislike their partners’ same-gender friends, yet to try to quell such friendships would be seen as Yoko Ono tyrannical. 

As partners, we should understand that cross-gender friendships more often indicate open minds than loose morals.  Navigating the complexities of life-long commitment is where men and women need to be able to understand each other most.  People whose primary or only close communication with the other gender is through their partner are more likely to assign misunderstandings to their partner’s entire gender.  (“Women are incapable of being on time!”  “Men can’t be trusted for the life of them to buy Christmas presents!”)  The more opaque we consider the Other to be, the less likely we are to try to understand their perspective, as well as the perspectives of those who don’t fit into our stereotypes.  It’s no coincidence that the cultures that place the most restrictions on male-female interaction afford the fewest freedoms to women and LGBT individuals.

But things are getting better.  Cross-gender friendships are more accepted now than ever before because men and women of all gender identities are communicating and understanding each other at record levels.  Not only are new mothers freer to nurture an identity outside the home, but new dads are more likely to hug their children and tell them they love them now than at any other time in modern history.  Attraction and the possibility for it will probably always complicate relationships—and politics and life—to some degree, but open dialogue continues to prove that the Other is never as impenetrable as we have been told.  In the words of researcher Kathryn Dindia, “Men are from North Dakota, women are from South Dakota.”  Our friendships are both the cause and the result of this.

 

 

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Body Image Part III: Mirror Etiquette

17 Jun

mirror(Image by Trixi Skywalker used under CC 2.0 via)

 

After picking apart the unhelpful things we often say about others, I now move on in the third installment in the Body Image Series to the unhelpful ways in which we talk about ourselves…

 ***

Two moments in the Wonderful World of Body Image:

ONE: A woman sitting in the waiting room at my surgeon’s office reveals a leg perfectly tanned, as well as dotted and streaked with fresh scars from an Ilizarov fixator.  Our surgeon walks by on his way to radiology and flashes her a grin: “Lookin’ great there with that fixator finally off!”  She calls after him without a hint of joking in her voice, “Yeah, but God!  What am I supposed to do with these hideous scars?!”  She has about a quarter as many scars as I do.

TWO: One of my mom’s oldest friends flips through a photo album with me from back when she and Mom were my age.  Every other photo of herself elicits a moan:  “God, look how fat I was!  Omigod, look at that tummy.  Ick, what a fatso!”  In every photo, she was thinner than I’ve ever been, save for my limb-lengthening years spent on heavy painkillers.

Trashing one’s own body in front of others is so commonplace in Western female culture, I’ve yet to meet a single woman who hasn’t done it at least a dozen times since puberty, if not yesterday.  But it should come as no surprise that whenever you talk about something as self-centered as your body image, your listeners instantaneously have a self-centered reaction, wondering how they fare in your line of judgment.  If you hate it on yourself, why would you think it looks good on others?  (Indeed, there are scores of studies showing that mothers who vocally criticize their own bodies have daughters with unhealthy body image.)  This is why trashing your own body is perhaps the most impolite, if not irresponsible, of all our social customs.

Eating disorder survivor Chloe Angyal has given us the revolutionary battle cry: “There is no right way to hate your body.”  This has to be true if we believe that everyone is beautiful in their own way­.  If we can’t swallow it, it means we can’t let go of competing with others.

In 2002, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon declined the invitation to be photographed for People magazine’s List of 50 Most Beautiful People, arguing that fitting the magazine’s criteria for the list shouldn’t in any way be considered an achievement: 

I don’t give a shit [about it] … I only take pride in things I’ve actually done myself. To be praised for something like that is just weird.  It just felt like somebody calling and saying, “We want to put you in a magazine because the weather’s so nice where you live.” 

I know only a few women who would pass up the opportunity to be rewarded for their looks as he did. 

Women usually trash their bodies in front other women not out of malice but because we are culturally conditioned to build close friendships by sharing our most personal feelings.  The (liberal) mantra, “Don’t bottle it up inside!” is a constant hammer to the floodgates.  And so we hear: “I can’t be seen without my makeup!”  “Why can’t my gray hair grow in evenly?”  “I’m so fa-a-a-at!”  Yet with all this sharing of body-oriented self-hatred, no one manages to make each other feel better. 

If I say, “God, I talk loud on the phone,” or “Yuck, you can tell I had no time to brush my hair!” anyone who disagrees with the complaint can say so, and anyone who agrees can tease: “Eh, we’ve gotten used it.”  If, deep down inside, my self-deprecation was a circuitous check to see if I really am that bad, I can consider if the teasing is a reason to try to change my habits.  Life is, after all, about learning how to be both a happier and a more tolerable human being. 

But bodies are different.  Any choices we have about changing them are limited, and they are entangled in visceral feelings about our attractiveness.  If I say, “Ugh, my dwarf cheekbones are so low!” or “My nose is so ugly!” no one should agree with me out loud.  Even if silently they do.  (I didn’t notice how low they were, but now that you point it out…)  The only acceptable confirmation of these statements must come in the form of protesting praise: e.g. “I love your nose, it reminds me of [insert name of famous and attractive person here].”  Otherwise, etiquette demands protesting the statement altogether: “No!  Your cheekbones aren’t low at all!”  This may or may not be a lie, but in any case, it supports the idea that low cheekbones are something to lament.  Anyone who wouldn’t think the cheekbones in question are low because theirs are lower suddenly feels paranoid, if not miserable.  So all this body trashing is an obstacle to honest sharing, rather than a path to it.    

And to complicate matters more, some share their deepest body image issues with each other and then use them against each other when feeling competitive.  (“I can’t believe he went for that fat/bony slob!”)  Anyone who obsesses about her body secretly knows how harshly she herself judges the bodies of others in moments of weakness (“At least I don’t look like that!”) and fears that others judge her the same way.  This is, of course, a chicken and egg scenario: maybe the self-hatred comes from judging others or maybe the judging others comes from self-hatred, but in any case, the only end to the cycle is to stop trashing bodies, both others’ and our own.

During my limb-lengthening procedures, my friends at the hospital would commiserate about all the things our bodies were going through.  (“Are your legs getting hairy, too?  The doctor says it’s because of the increased blood-flow caused by the healing.”  “Can you see inside your leg when they remove a pin?”  “Would you have your torso lengthened if you could?  I wonder how that would work…”)  But our complaints never touched on our looks.  Even in therapy group, all our venting was about pain, nausea, restrictions on movement, living away from home, dependency on others, or the procedure taking longer than it was supposed to.  All our jealousy was directed at those who had less pain or a quicker recovery.  Perhaps it was because we had enough to worry about trying to reach our physical therapy goals, keeping infections at bay, forcing ourselves to eat, and constantly trying to get comfortable.  Or perhaps it was because so many of us were pre-pubescent kids not yet initiated into the adult world of body competition.  Or perhaps beauty standards are automatically less restrictive for groups with true body diversity.  In any case, the woman in my surgeon’s office—who looked to be anywhere between 30 and 45—was the first patient I heard complain about what the procedure did to her looks.

We all want to be attractive, but the only way to avoid insulting others is to expunge everything that makes beauty a competition.  The editors at Offbeat Bride ban all discussions about weight loss or body insecurity on the forum, and I don’t think anyone has suffered as a result.  Celebrating more progressive, inclusive and creative beauty standards can be helpful—more on that next week—but minimizing the attention and importance we afford our lookist insecurities should be a goal, if anything because all this self-scrutiny is fantastically vain.  As Peggy Orenstein has said, mainstream girlie-girl culture too often mistakes self-absorption for self-confidence.  The most self-confident women I know obsess over their bodies at about the same low frequency self-confident men do.  And like the men, they don’t bristle or burst into tears at any form of affectionate teasing.

A healthy ego owns its fears instead of demanding others allay them.  Pointing out our own supposed imperfections can be constructive as long as it’s intended to elicit nothing but giggles, with no hint of fishing for compliments, of shaky self-esteem, or of competition.  In our high school yearbook, a friend listed under his Wishes For The Future, “Smaller ears, bigger teeth.”  And so I threw “Tiny Teeth!” back at him whenever he would shake his head at me and sigh, “Once again, you smile and your eyes get all thin and pointy!”  The harder I laughed at him, the pointier they got.      

As said before, when we tell our loved ones how beautiful they are, it’s a testament to the sum of their parts, to the combination of their perfections and imperfections.  When we’re mad about someone—not just attracted to them, but truly mad about them—their beauty makes them entrancingly divine and their flaws make them adorably human.  Perfect lips enveloping crooked teeth create the tension and contrast that makes the human body a work of art. 

Two moments in the Wonderful World of Healthy Relationships:

ONE: A friend is leading a seminar about American immigration and heritage.  “People from Scandinavia tend to be blond-haired and light-skinned, but they tan.  People from the British Isles are so pale, they look like they just crawled out from under a rock.”  She smiles at me.  “You’re British, aren’t you?”  My laughter is drowned out by my classmates’.

TWO: A friend was told by her fiancé: “You have such huge eyes and a round face.  It’s like Thomas the Tank Engine.”  She prints out a photo of the train and mails it to him while he’s away on a business trip, so that he won’t forget her.

 

 

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Lessons in Grief

22 Apr

(Image by Stephen Alcorn © 2003 http://www.alcorngallery.com)

 

Humans are afraid of many things, but death probably ranks the highest.  Whether embracing the pragmatic/repressed approach that insists we keep off such upsetting subjects or delving into the artistic/philosophical fascination with all things morbid, almost no one talks about the realness of grief.  It’s too much of a drag.

This week marks both the birthday and the death day of one of my very best friends, Bill Palinski (1984 – 2004).  My life changed forever when he left without warning.  I had lost close relatives and acquaintances before him, but he was supposed to grow old with me.  He was supposed to accompany me through life, doing what he had always done: enthrall me with his superstar adventures, teach me lessons through his wisdom and his flaws, celebrate with me, listen to me complain and cry, and make fun of me the entire time.  Bad things can happen, but you never truly believe it at the most visceral level until one of your closest loved ones is ripped away from you.  He would be supremely annoyed were I to use his death as a source of self-pity, but he would be pleased to know it has helped me understand grief and those it consumes. 

When you’re in bereavement, you constantly feel on edge.  You want to punch strangers on the subway for going on with their lives and not realizing what an amazing person is missing from the world.  You feel constant guilt whenever you try to do something that doesn’t involve mourning your loved one.  Almost everyone, including your closest friends, says something that strikes you as deeply insensitive.  (Sometimes it is insensitive, other times your anger picks targets at random.)  For the first several months, you avoid parties or any social situations where people will ask you “What’s new?” because you’re constantly on the brink of tears and anyone’s problem unrelated to loss seems incredibly petty to you.  Many people like to talk about death in the abstract—the prospect of dying, the politics of war and violence, famous murder cases, existentialism, Halloween, the songs they want played at their funeral—but almost no one enjoys talking about someone you know who died.  And everyone is ready for you to “move on” and “get over it” way, way before you are.  Getting over it is out of the question.  Growing from it is the only alternative to being paralyzed by your newfound proof that bad things can and do happen, and may very well happen again.  The only way to keep ourselves from letting this fact drive us mad is to engage in what bereavement counselors call “healthy denial.” 

And for all the summarizing I just did, grief varies profoundly with different circumstances.  Losing your best friend and losing your mother and losing a child and losing someone to a long illness and losing someone in an accident and losing someone to murder are all very, very different experiences.  People in grief are usually desperate to hear from other survivors, but they never want the different circumstances shaping their grief to be dismissed for the sake of relativizing sorrow.  The phrase “I know what you’re going through” should be used with caution.   

I didn’t know any of this before I lost him.  I always wanted to help others in bereavement, but I was that awkward person who was scared whenever I didn’t know what to say and believed any sort of grieving beyond a few months was probably unhealthy.  Staying away from social gatherings certainly sounded like a bad idea.  I’m sure I said many careless things that were hurtful.  I probably still do when reacting to someone else’s loss.  But I now find it heartwarming, not sad, if they want to tell stories about the person who’s gone.  And I know to let them call the shots.  If they want to talk about it, listen actively.  If they do not, don’t prod.  Only offer advice or philosophy when they ask for it.  Otherwise listen, listen, listen.  As a friend said after a loss, death highlights how often we forget the importance of listening in all aspects of life; how much we prioritize having an opinion ready for any sort of subject we encounter. 

The grieving process takes up to two years, and of course, the pain never goes away.  There’s not a day that goes by without my missing Bill, but I no longer feel guilty when I push tears aside to pursue something I truly believe in.  Time has brought me to this more productive state of mind, but so has his inspiration. 

At his funeral, his sister said, “We’re all going to have to be a bit better than we had planned on being now that he’s gone.  We have to take on some of the good works he was going to do.”  I’ve carried him with me on every adventure I know he would have loved and never got to have: finding true love, taking in the Tokyo skyline, meeting David Sedaris, learning naughty words in Swedish, belting out “Wig in a Box” a hundred feet away from where the Berlin Wall stood, appreciating the beauty in all the wonderful friends I’ve made since his passing who will only ever know him as photographs and stories.  But I have also let him remind me that I rarely have an excuse for not supporting a cause I believe in. 

Alice Walker said, “Activism is my rent for living on the planet,” and no one embodied this as well as Bill.  By the time of his death at age 20, he had been an exchange student to Ireland, a volunteer for exchange students to the U.S., done volunteer home renovation for a poor black community in South Carolina, donated and signed petitions for the Natural Resources Defense Fund, and worked for almost 10 years with the Quakers for peace, non-violence and human rights.  (In trying to summarize all this in a letter of recommendation, a guidance counselor wrote that he did volunteer work to aid poor Quakers.)  He made friends left and right—in every sense—while simultaneously being known far and wide as the coolest of the cool.  To him, being hip was all about a scathing wit (“Oh, Emily, your little dwarf arms just can’t reach!”) and a refined sense of the absurd (a few times he insisted we pretend to fight at parties just to see everyone else’s awkward reaction).  But it was never about being too cynical to care or work for justice.

Okay, he hated the rainbow flag—“Where was I when they voted on that?!”—preferring the sober tones of the Human Rights Campaign logo.  The medium is the message, of course.  But whenever I slump into cynicism, daunted and wanting to do nothing but complain about humanity’s capacity for cruelty, the ubiquity of ignorance and the overwhelming number of flaws in the system, he is always quick to answer: “So?  You’re alive.  You can do something about it.”

 

 

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Today’s Princesses: Teaching Them “That Self-Absorption Is The Same As Self-Confidence”

10 Mar

When I was growing up, I had a hard time remembering that McDonald’s and Disney were not the same company.  I still have a hard time remembering that.  Both aggressively market products few can spend their entire lives resisting because their advertising budgets are unrivaled and because they have mastered the recipes for broad appeal.  Both are aggressively exported to other countries, representing all that is optimistic, colorful, unsubtle and indulgent about America.  Both are harmless in small doses but unhealthy when they attain the monopoly on a child’s life they’ve been aiming for.

I’ve just finished Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture by Peggy Orenstein.  Like Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation, Orenstein examines a corner of our culture that does not take constructive criticism well.  It is because of the magnitude of the pink princess deluge driven by Disney and their ilk combined with their defensive refusal to admit any fault or responsibility—“It’s what every girl wants!”—that her work deserves such a warm welcome.

For any of her failures to perfectly repair the girlie-girl culture in 200 pages, Orenstein offers several impeccable articulations of the problems.  Princess packages are problematic when they impose rote scripts and must-have shopping lists, stifling rather than encouraging creativity.  Sexualization is problematic when the implied goal is not to attain pleasure but to please a man in exchange for being approved of as pretty.  Social networking online is problematic when “the self becomes a brand to be marketed to others rather than developed from within.”  And the Muppets are problematic when, for all their ingenuity, they still can’t come up with more than two female Muppets.  I think I’m going to end up quoting her a lot.

The New York Times praised her book while emphasizing that it is little cause for alarm seeing as most girls outgrow the pink princess phase.  As a former Snow White wannabe, I know this can be true, but I had kick-ass feminists in my life to help me along the way, including a dad who sewed my costumes.  I hesitate to agree with the Times’s assertion that “most” move on.   Orenstein provides depressing figures on the rise of female eating disorders, the recent drop in computer science degrees, the persistent problem of young women equating “feeling good” with “looking hot.”  Even as I tend to surround myself with self-confident, intellectual women who define themselves as much more than their prettiness and their purchases, I regularly encounter those who fit into Orenstein’s figures.  They are the ones whose fathers only gave them credit cards, never engaging them in intellectual discussion, and who now avoid debate like an ugly outfit.  They are the ones who know that appearing pretty means non-threatening, so self-confidence is tossed out for coyness, self-assertion is abandoned for pouting, and wit is relinquished for fawning giggles in the presence of men.  They are the ones who torture themselves over their looks—“I’m so ugly! I’m so fat!”—in order to land a man and then keep him from cheating, spending more of their day unhappy than any other people I know.  They are the ones who have not left the princess phase because they do not know how to. 

Too often criticism of the princess culture is misconstrued as bitter resentment by those who just don’t have what it takes to wow the guys or woo the pageant judges.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  It is sincere concern inspired by the hard evidence of the very real dangers that motivates critics like Orenstein:

There is… ample evidence that the more mainstream media girls consume, the more importance they place on being pretty and sexy.  And a ream of studies shows that teenage girls and college students who hold conventional beliefs about femininity—especially those that emphasize beauty and pleasing behavior—are less ambitious and more likely to be depressed than their peers.  They are also less likely to report that they enjoy sex or insist that their partners wear condoms. 

Depression, eating disorders, STDs, and unwanted pregnancy are nothing to sneeze at.  Meanwhile, a study conducted at the University of Houston found women who identify as feminists demonstrate less hostility toward men than women who don’t.  A Rutgers University study found they are also more likely to be in a relationship and their partners report more satisfaction with their sex lives.  Isn’t that the happily ever after every parent wants for their daughter?      

Sometimes Orenstein’s feminist alternatives to the pink princesses sound soft compared to the roar of her reprimands.  Focusing only on the (admittedly daunting) price of the dolls, she misses a major opportunity to understand the educational, multi-cultural brilliance of the American Girl history series.  Disney’s The Princess and The Frog promotes independence, battles lookism and exemplifies egalitarian romance in all the ways Beauty and the Beast failed to, yet Orenstein’s review of the film was as weak as its box office performance.  Princess Fiona of Shrek is bad-ass and the third film in the series parodies princesses better than anything else it takes a jab at.  However, I wonder how necessary any model of romance—feminist or traditional—is for the preschool set.

Indeed, it is important to distinguish between the pre-pubescent girls and the post-pubescent ladies in books and toy stores, and on the screen.  Sparkles and daisies are innocuous. Unrealistic beauty standards and boy-crazy storylines are not.  The original Strawberry Shortcake and Rainbow Brite were not the cleverest female role models, but they acted their age and thus appropriately for their target audience.  Their cadres of friends were coed.  They regularly outwitted male villains—proving that girls’ problems aren’t limited to cat fights—and the reward was always a happier world, either more colorful or fruit-filled.  Like Hello Kitty, Strawberry Shortcake and Rainbow Brite demonstrated that to be cute is to be round and childlike, not dangerously busty-yet-skinny like Barbie and the Disney Princesses.  But both Rainbow Brite and Strawberry Shortcake have since been redesigned to at least suggest adolescence:     

 

Characters that were not invented first and foremost to sell dolls and costumes are usually a safer bet.  Lilo and her sister Nani of Lilo and Stitch are two of the best female characters in cinema history, let alone the Disney canon.  Meanwhile, Pippi Longstocking is worshipped in Northern Europe by boys and girls alike.  Indeed, wouldn’t a more pro-active welcoming of boys into the princess culture dilute a lot of its sexism?  How about dads reading The American Girls to their sons as often as moms read Harry Potter to their daughters?  Orenstein does recognize the potential for that revolution, citing a Creighton University study that showed half of boys aged 5 to 13 chose to play with “girls’ toys” as often as “boys’ toys,” but only after they were promised that their fathers wouldn’t find out about it.

Like the families relying on fast-food several times a week, many parents find it difficult to resist the pink marketers’ schemes and the peer pressure foisted upon their daughters in play groups.  There is nothing wrong with the occasional indulgence, just as there is nothing inherently wrong with the color pink.  But just as we have demanded healthier Happy Meals and more farmers’ markets, we should demand more varied toys, activities and role models for our children, refusing any monochrome model of girlhood.

 

 

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Welcome to Painting On Scars

4 Feb

 

So you’ve heard that “Kids can be so cruel”?  What a cop-out.  Adults are cruel.  Kids are constantly blunt and sometimes mean-spirited, but they have the chance to grow up.  Turning 30 this year, I realize that I’ve encountered more ableism over the past 10 years than any other time in my life – online, at dinner parties, and during my four years as an undergrad at Bard College when it was consistently rated in one of the Top Ten Most Liberal Schools by The Princeton Review.  If I ever have children biologically, they will each have a 50% chance of inheriting achondroplasia from me.  Whether or not they have achondroplasia, I’m much more concerned about the adults they will encounter in their lives than the kids.

Today ableism – a.k.a. disability discrimination – ranges from the yuk-yuk objectification of freaks, to the sick fascination with medical realities, to personal phobias of looking weak or unattractive, to well-intentioned charity that is truly patronizing.  That this so often comes from those whose own experiences of marginalization would logically render them better candidates for empathy has inspired me to start this blog. 

There also aren’t enough blogs about dwarfism.  There are hardly any blogs about dwarfism beyond childhood.  The community of dwarfs who have undergone limb-lengthening is non-existent, as if we want to pretend we were never dwarfs in the first place.  And feminist blogs for and about dwarfs who have undergone limb-lengthening continue to elude my Google efforts.

While my own experience invariably influences my perspective, I refuse to argue only about issues directly related to dwarfism and limb-lengthening.  Without knowing the word for it, I was raised to believe that if you’re going to support the rights of one minority, you’ve got to support them all.  In the end, they’re all related.

So consider this blog a continued reflection on the issues I addressed in this book.  Or The Most Inclusive, Progressive Forum Ever!  Or just another reminder that whether you’re discussing a sex issue or scar tissue, the personal is inescapably the political.

 

 

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