Jon Stewart on "should Muslims be allowed to build their mosques in the neighborhoods of their choosing?"

This post is archived at http://www.jennamcwilliams.com/2010/07/08/jon-stewart-on-should-muslims-be-allowed-to-build-their-mosques-in-the-neighborhoods-of-their-choosing/
Sometimes Jon Stewart is just so on.

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turns out Gallagher has become an evil clown.

This post is archived at http://www.jennamcwilliams.com/2010/07/08/turns-out-gallagher-has-become-an-evil-clown/.
 

The Seattle newspaper The Stranger is a free alternative newsweekly, so I suppose that explains the strident anti-conservative tone of a recent piece about the aging comic Gallagher.

The primary target of this piece is Gallagher himself; the author describes Gallagher as "a paranoid, delusional, right-wing religious maniac," then offers up some pretty convincing evidence:

Gallagher is upset about a lot of things. Young people with their sagging pants (in faintly coded racist terms, he explains that this is why the jails are overcrowded—because "their" baggy pants make it too hard for "them" to run from the cops). Tattoos: "That ink goes through to your soul—if you read your Bible, your body is a sacred temple, YOU DIPSHIT." People naming their girl-children Sam and Toni instead of acceptable names like Evelyn and Betty: "Just give her some little lesbian tendencies!" Guantánamo Bay: "We weren't even allowed to torture all the way. We had to half-torture—that's nothin' compared to what Saddam and his two sons OOFAY and GOOFAY did." Lesbians: "There's two types—the ugly ones and the pretty ones." (Um, like all people?) Obama again: "If Obama was really black, he'd act like a black guy and get a white wife." Michael Vick: "Poor Michael Vick." Women's lib: "These women told you they wanna be equal—they DON'T." Trans people: "People like Cher's daughter—figure that out. She wants a penis, but she has a big belly. If you can't see your dick, you don't get one." The Rice Krispies elves: "All three of those guys are gay. Look at 'em!" The Mexicans: "Look around—see any Mexicans? Nope. They'll be here later for the cleanup." The French: "They ruin our language with their faggy words.

Holy crap. With hate speech like that, Gallagher deserves as much disgusted critique as writer Lindy West can dish out. But she doesn't stop there; the audience, she explains, are "rabid, frothing conservative dickwads" who lap up Gallagher's racist, xenophobic rant. Okay, so the question becomes: Is West responding in kind? Is she unloading hate speech on the group she dislikes in a similar way to Gallagher's anti-gay, anti-liberal "act"?

First, I want to make clear that while all hate speech is abominable, hate speech that targets marginalized groups is more abominable than hate speech that targets dominant groups. Why? Because of power and inertia. Marginalized groups--the LGBTQ community, for example--in lots of ways exist at the mercy of dominant groups--in this case, the heteronormative community. "Should we give them the right to marry?" "Should we pass laws to protect them against anti-gay violence?" "Should we let them claim each other on their tax returns?" It's taken for granted that American society needs to decide what rights to "grant" gays. The alternative would be to assume that the LGBTQ community already has the same rights as everyone else, and laws that violate those rights need to be struck down.

Power. Inertia.

So calling a language "faggy," advocating "girly" names to avoid giving daughters "lesbian tendencies," finishing up an act by, as West describes it, smashing a plate of fruit cocktail and an Asian vegetable mix and announcing "This is the China people and queers!!!"--way more abominable than calling Gallagher's appreciative audience "rabid, frothing conservative dickwads." It's an audience, as Gallagher himself points out, filled with white people, and the risk of getting beaten, killed, or legislated against for being a conservative white person is fairly low relative to the risk that goes along with being gay, African American, Mexican, or any of the other ethnic and cultural minorities against whom Gallagher is stirring up the pot of hatred.

Which makes West's response understandable but still not quite okay. I say this as someone who absolutely adored this article, who is aghast that hate speech like this attracts any audience whatsoever, and who has the same impulse to rage against anyone who would even chuckle at Gallagher's diatribe (which, by the way, doesn't even seem particularly funny).

Anyway, you should read the whole article, which is fairly short and extremely well crafted, then let me know what you think.

twinning injustice, one social structure at a time

This post is archived at my new site, making edible playdough is hegemonic. Go here: http://www.jennamcwilliams.com/2010/07/02/twinning-injustice-one-social-structure-at-a-time/.

My sister, who just finished absolutely destroying her first year of law school, recently announced an interest in pursuing criminal prosecution. Once I overcame my instant misreading of her announcement (don't blame me; I'm not a morning person), I figured out pretty quickly that my twin sister and I are pursuing vocations that spring from the same moral impulse. To wit: I must serve and defend people who have suffered or will suffer at the hands of others.

It's just the name--prosecution--that throws us off, makes us think prosecutors are out to punish the bad guys. In certain respects, of course, that's exactly what prosecutors do--that's exactly the power we confer to them. But the public interest in punishing the bad guys is an outgrowth of a deeper public impulse: To maintain the social order, to protect our citizens from injustice and victimization, to fight for the good guys.

Protecting people from injustice and victimization. Fighting for the good guys. That's pretty much what I like to think I'm doing, too, by working in the service of working class kids and kids who are deeply undervalued and underserved by a system that is not designed to help them. I work in defense of those kids. And another way to frame that work is to say that I am a public prosecutor, building a case against a system that's criminally unjust, criminally cruel.

But here's where I think Laura and I part company: I believe we need to demolish the social order. I believe that the public education system is deeply, perhaps fatally, flawed, especially for poor kids and minorities, and I believe we need to work to tear it down. That's the wheel I'm throwing my shoulder against.

Though we haven't explicitly talked about this, I'm pretty sure my sister believes the criminal justice system is similarly deeply, deeply flawed (see here, here, here, and here)--but it seems to me that her stance is something like "this is the best system we have right now, the only system we have, so we need to use it to protect the innocents and the victims."

I'm all, fuck the Man and the horse he rode in on! And my sister's all, yyyeah that's nice but lookit all these victims who need protecting and defense right now. And I'm all, Yes! And let's muster up an army made up of those victims and march with them right to the gates of hell if that's what it takes! And my sister's all, um, okayyy but this woman was raped and that guy's son was murdered and this woman was stabbed by her partner and what if we put aside the anger and try to take care of the people who need us right now?

Details, details, right? Laura and I agree that the world is all effed up, and we agree that we are therefore bound to the work of un-effing up things. The rest is just planning.

This I Believe: informed citizenship and informed citizenry

Here's an inalienable right for you: the right to informed citizenship.

Citizenship, the informed kind, has two distinct angles to it. The first is the personal: We, all of us, have an absolutely inalienable right to the information that allows us to act in a civic and socially responsible way, and Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The second is the social: We, all of us, have an absolutely inalienable right to live in a society populated by informed citizens. We have a right to live among an informed citizenry, and any policy, law, or practice that restricts this right exists in opposition to a free and functional democracy.

In America, we embrace the right to informed citizenship; or, more accurately, we shout our support of informed citizenship up to the very rafters. Then we give Big Business a million incendiary devices to burn down that house.

There are explosives, like the recent SCOTUS decision knocking down campaign finance laws and giving corporate lobbyists unfettered access to our legislative and executive branches (and, by extension, the judicial branch as well).

Then there's the kindling, the petrol, the oxygen that keeps the fire blazing. Among the most powerful of these is the news paywall, which sequesters off information to which citizens have an absolute right. In theory, paywalls are no different from their precursors, subscription fees and newsstand prices. But two things have changed--our model of citizenship, and our access to circulated information--since those pre-internet days.

For example: In 1990-1991, during the first Gulf War, news was circulated fairly evenly across multiple platforms. An American who didn't want to pay for a newspaper could still gather information through television and radio. She could walk into a library and read the news for free. Certainly this wasn't a utopian ideal of a free press on every street corner, but the news that enabled a citizen to act was available through multiple outlets.

Today, the speed and reach of internet news sources make them by far the dominant news circulation platform. Indeed, the speed and reach of internet news are part of why a new model of citizenship is emerging. If there was ever a time when it was possible to measure civic engagement by looking at voter turnout on Election Day, that time is long past. Today's civically engaged citizen is the one who is aware of Facebook's abominable approach to privacy and has made decisions about how (or whether) to use Facebook as a result of this knowledge. Today's informed citizen may not know how many electoral votes are needed for a candidate to win the presidency, but she knows how to find that information when necessary. She votes on Election Day, sure, but she also votes with her feet and her eyeballs and her fingertips, constantly making informed decisions about how to parcel out her energy and time, when to dance along with corporate and political influences and when to resist, when to leave the dance floor entirely.

Paywalls make it harder for an informed citizen to stay informed, which in turn restricts my right to live among an informed citizenry. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the news that sticks is the news that spreads--via blogs, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and news aggregating sites like Boingboing. News that's stuck behind a paywall is news that can't spread and is therefore news that dies.

And that's not all: I believe that news paywalls are likely to have long-term effects on citizenship, as well, since I agree with James Seddon's point in his recent Wired article that young people who grow up without unfettered access to local news are likely to grow up without a sense of social and civic connection to their communities.

I recognize that the current business model for print journalism isn't working. I recognize that newspapers need to do something if they want to try to save their jobs. But in America, the eight-year reign of Baby Bush notwithstanding, we don't let business interests trump fundamental human rights.

I'm rooting for newspapers, I really am. I hope they survive this challenge. But news paywalls are in direct opposition to our fundamental right to informed citizenship, and my message to the print media folks is this: Find another way.

VozMob: a neat project working in support of immigrant rights

I just got back from a work-related meeting in Arizona, and I'm therefore feeling a need to counteract my willingness to visit a state whose newly passed anti-immigration law is one of the most deeply and overtly mean-spirited, evil-minded, and willfully ignorant pieces of legislation I can imagine.

Here's a neat project I heard about while I was in Arizona: VozMob, or Voces Moviles, which I was introduced to by Ben Stokes, in comparison to whom I feel woefully inadequate. Here's the description of this effort to give voice to undocumented immigrants and day laborers, according to the VozMob website:

Voces Moviles (vozmob) es una plataforma para que trabajadores y trabajadoras inmigrantes en Los Ángeles puedan crear historias sobre sus vidas y comunidades directamente desde sus teléfonos celulares. Vozmob le ayuda a la gente lograr una participación más amplia en la esfera pública digital.

Here's a rough translation into English:

Mobile Voices (VozMob) is a platform for immigrant workers in Los Angeles to create stories about their lives and communities directly from their mobile phones. VozMob helps people achieve wider participation in the digital public sphere.

According to Ben, one of the goals of this project is to fight bigoted, anti-immigrant rhetoric of the sort exhibited by the site daylaborers.org, whose members drive around looking for groups of immigrants, then taunt them, call them names, and otherwise antagonize them by engaging in incredibly juvenile and embarrassing behavior. When the targets of their abuse respond in anger, someone takes a picture and tosses it up online, using it as proof positive! that immigrants are rapists and murderers!

This is a beautiful project, one that appears to do real, important work in supporting immigrants' ability and willingness to name and claim their experiences.

principles for ethical educational research

I've been thinking lately about the burden of speaking for others.

Because I'm an educational researcher, and speaking for others is the heart of what we do. We walk into a classroom, watch some things happen for a little while, then make decisions about which stories are worth telling, and how, and why, and to whom. And this is precisely what we're supposed to do. This is precisely why we head into the classroom in the first place: to tell stories about what learning looks like.

But it can be such a heavy burden, this speaking for others. You know the burden is heavy when the simplest challenge is finding a way to represent what happened in a way that everybody would agree is reasonable and accurate. But that's not where our responsibility ends, because no research findings are politically or socially neutral. Every representation of research is an articulation of a belief system; it's an expression of a worldview; it's a document that leads people to act in ways that can help or hurt the populations we hope to represent.

And the burden gets heavier for researchers working with marginalized, oppressed, or disenfranchised populations, since speaking for these groups can so easily fall into a reproduction of the oppression that rains down on them from all around. Paulo Freire warns us against the "false charity" that so often comes from members of dominant groups who wish to help the oppressed:

False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the "rejects of life," to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands--whether of individuals or entire peoples--need to be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.

It seems to me that false charity emerges when a person becomes too confident that she knows and understands the needs and interests of the oppressed groups she hopes to represent. False charity can therefore look like an awful lot of things: Research focusing on vocational education for poor kids. (Why would we dare to assume working class kids wouldn't want to go to college?) Research showing working class kids are capable of doing college-level work. (Using college readiness as our measure of 'success' allows policymakers to continue to make decisions that assume that college readiness is the most important goal, thereby continuing to marginalize kids for whom college is neither desired nor possible.) Research documenting the learning trajectories of immigrant students. (We're at a cultural point at which nearly anything that's said about immigrants, especially in America, can be twisted to hurt the very populations it's intended to help.)

I've been working in a small alternative high school populated primarily by lower class and working-class kids. I've seen miracles happen in this school for many of its students, and I've met graduates of the school who talk about their time in the school as the most powerful and important educational experience of their lives. Sitting in a classroom in this school, or walking down its halls, or talking to its students, reminds me of how powerfully transformative an education can be. I wish you could all spend a day at this school. You would walk out joyful, hopeful and optimistic about the future of our children. You would walk out with a renewed faith in human beings.

But you won't get the chance to visit this school, because the school board decided to shut it down. I probably don't need to tell you that I think this is a mistake. I further believe that the decision to close this school was motivated by a deep cultural prejudice against poor kids. We don't often say it out loud, but we hold a cultural belief that a child's value is largely determined by the likelihood that she will go to college; our culture is embarrassed by its children who are poor, who live in rented houses or youth shelters or foster care, who are not college-bound. Our society is built on the backs of these kids; we need their labor to keep our society running--and this need only embarrasses us all the more.

It's the job of researchers who work with marginalized populations to represent their research in a way that not only serves the best interests of those populations but also helps to rewrite the cultural narrative that keeps these populations oppressed. It's not easy work, simple work, or quick work, but it's necessary work.

With these things in mind, I want to offer a set of principles for educational research that I hope can help guide researchers in our work with marginalized populations--and maybe our work with all sorts of learning populations.

1. We exist in the service of the communities we work for. I have to believe that when we forget this, it's on accident. But we must never, ever forget that our work should first of all support the needs and interests of both the learners and the educators working inside of our chosen learning communities. This means that we have to actually talk to the learners and educators to find out what they want, and we have to take them at their word and not, for example, guess that if they knew more about the world they'd want something different.

2. We exist to serve the needs and interests of the communities we work for. It is not our job to decide whether a community's interests are good or right; it's only our job to work in service of those interests. If a researcher can't get behind the stated needs and interests of the members of her chosen research community, then she needs to find another community to research.

3. It's our job to represent our work in ways that support ethical decisions by policymakers and external stakeholders. Educational researchers serve as an important bridge between learning communities and policymakers who make decisions about the futures of those communities. One of our most essential roles is to represent research findings in a way that is clear and useful to policymakers while also representing to those policymakers findings that support the needs and interests of the communities we serve. I'm not saying this is easy. I'm just saying it's essential.

4. All educational research is social activism, and all educational researchers are social activists. There is no such thing as politically neutral educational research. Let me say that again: There is no such thing as politically neutral educational research. All statements of research findings are statements of a belief system about the role of education, and all researchers must therefore do research that both aligns with and serves to articulate that belief system. Further, all researchers must make their belief system clear, to themselves, to the communities they work for, and to policymakers who make decisions about those communities. They must always ensure that their belief system aligns with the needs and interests of the communities they work for, and if there is a conflict then the community's interests always trump the belief system of its researchers. If the ethical conflict is irreconcilable, then the researcher must find another community to represent.

Here I want to crib a quote from Jim Gee, who laid out his own set of principles for ethical human behavior in his book Social Linguistics and Literacies. After describing these principles, he made this declaration:

I would claim that all human beings would, provided they understood them, accept these conceptual principles. Thus, failing to live up to them, they would, for consistency’s sake, have to morally condemn their own behavior. However, I readily admit that, should you produce people who, understanding these principles, denied them, or acted as though they did, I would not give up the principles. Rather, I would withhold the term ‘human’, in its honorific, not biological, sense, from such people.

This declaration was made in the second edition of Gee's book; if you own the third edition, don't bother looking for the quote--for reasons that are unclear to me, he removed it and instead simply asserts that we really shouldn't bother trying to change the minds of people who disagree with these ethical principles. I want to call for a return to the stronger language. Given the incredibly high stakes of public education in America, we don't have time for politeness. We're in a fight for the very lives of the students we serve, and it may be that too much politeness is what got us here in the first place.

against 'tolerance'

I want to share with you a beautiful piece of prose I encountered via Out Magazine. The essay, "Riding in Cars with Lesbians,"  by Helena Andrews, is the memoir of a woman who grew up with a pair of painfully abusive mothers. Though they mainly directed their abuse at each other, the scars crisscrossing the writer's emotional terrain are evident everywhere you look. Here's an excerpt:

A 99-cent store dry erase board saved my life. I’d never given the thing much thought before using it to slash manic slaps of marker onto our Frigidaire. The grown-ups were in the living room arguing during the commercials, trading insults to a soundtrack about sunglasses. Frances, we need to talk about this. My name is Geek, I put ’em on as a shocker. Do whatever you want, Vernell, leave me out of it. Man, I love these Blublockers. I hate you. Everything is clear. Keep your voice down. They block out the sun. Why? Helena knows what a bitch you are. Oh, yeah, I gotta get me some.

I also love this piece because it presents a clear-eyed picture of an abusive household that happens to be headed by a pair of lesbians, though really, the author treats the gay issue as a secondary thing. Sure, the teenaged daughter is embarrassed to have two mothers--but her embarrassment is depicted as on par with the range of things our parents can do to embarrass us. A trashy car, embarrassing wardrobe choices, the fact of a mother and a stepmother with no father in evidence--it's all approximately equally embarrassing.

We need this sort of narrative.

We need people who can talk about members of the LGBTQ community in terms as human as those we've traditionally reserved for mainstream (straight) people. Gays are neither the vile, depraved and hellbound pedophiles that religious and far-right political groups would like you to believe; but neither are we the perfect angels who only have missionary sex at night with the doors locked and the lights out, who want nothing more than a house in the suburbs and our allotment of stock options and children, who pray to the Lord Our God each night before we go to sleep. Like most people in the world, most LGBTQ people fall somewhere in the middle of the continuum. Sometimes we want to act up and act out; sometimes we want  to toss up our queerness like a flaming red mohawk:

And sometimes, like my friends Elaine and Nancy, we just want to get married:

And sometimes, as in Helena Andrews' essay, we're far less generous and kind than we wish we could be. Sometimes we can't help but talk shit about our partners, even in front of children. Sometimes we're mad enough that we can't help but take a swing or two, even at the people we love.

It's not okay to behave badly, but it's okay to acknowledge that gays could be better or worse people, depending on the day or the circumstances. It's okay to acknowledge that gays are decent people, beautiful people, sometimes heroic people, but mostly gays are just average people who are trying to live their lives as fully and kindly and with as much joy and love as they can.

I'm not a fan of the notion of "tolerance," mainly because I believe it suggests that the people who are supposed to be "tolerated" must be proven to be acting "tolerably." That's not equality; that's patronizing. That's a power differential that favors the status quo. That's charity, handed out to the trembling hand held up in supplication. That's a stunted revolution that permits only the most limited type of dancing.

I prefer multiplicity, openness, dialogue. I prefer that we strike down the cultural narrative of gays as a monolithic group walking together in lockstep, especially since that narrative is not borne out by the truth of "gay culture." I prefer--I propose--that we craft a new narrative, one that presents members of the LGBTQ community as exactly as diverse, as variable, as perfect and flawed, as everyone else in the world.

best. live performance. ever.

I just got back from a show starring the Indigo Girls, with a special appearance by a band I'd never heard of. The group is called Girlyman, and they are drop-dead fantastic. They knocked us all absolutely dead, and it was obvious that the Indigo Girls, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, had a great deal of respect for these guys.

Here's a vid of one of their recent songs, "Young James Dean." In the live performance, they also had a drummer, JJ Jones, who added a nice kick to their sound. You might want to consider checking them out if they come to a town near you.



The Indigo Girls have a strong following in the gay community, and it was interesting to sit for all those hours inside of a room loaded with people who not only accept difference but embrace it, people around whom you know you're safe, you know you're valued, you know you're part of a group whose interests align with yours. Well, okay, that wasn't really the interesting part. The interesting part was what happened after the performance, when the Indigo Girls' fans spilled out into downtown Bloomington. My friends and I hung around, hoping to catch sight of the band when they left, and as the rest of the audience dispersed they were replaced with drunk or drinking Little500 celebrants passing by the Buskirk-Chumley Theater on their way to one bar or another. Drunk, obnoxious, loud.

If you're someone like my friends and me, you retreat a step when the scene changes like this. You tense up a little bit and start looking around at your surroundings a little more. You get in your car and lock the doors. You remember that things that lots of people take for granted--personal safety and respect for boundaries--are not givens, and that even expecting to be treated with basic human respect can be a risk that's not worth taking.

It takes the surprising experience of suddenly feeling safe to realize how rare those moments of safety and security are for people who live outside the mainstream. This fact is well worth our sadness, our outrage, and our disgust.

Transgender Basics, via NYC's Gender Identity Project

"It is so painful to live a lie...and it's so freeing to be true to yourself. And we should be applauded for that. We should not be persecuted for that, we should not be discriminated against and denied services, housing, jobs, for that. We should be celebrated, and we should be valorized."

how to make like an ally

You read Sady Doyle's blog Tiger Beatdown, right? Everybody reads Sady Doyle's blog Tiger Beatdown. If you've never been to this site, may I suggest you leave my blog immediately in order to immerse yourself in the glory and ladyrage that is Tiger Beatdown? Here, I'll even do something I never ever do: I'll give you a link to her blog that takes you directly away from my blog and deposits you at her blog, which if you haven't read her blog is actually where you belong anyway.

Today I want to direct your attention to the most recent Tiger Beatdown post, which is about feminist allies and offers a nice description, in the person of one Freddie de Boer, of how not to be an ally. Freddie, it appears, is Sady Doyle's enemy in the worst way: He explains that, as a feminist man, he's tired of being silenced by feminist women who purport to have more right to speak about sexism than he does!

Well, Sady gives ol' Freddie a glorious smackdown, which I'm sure he has already interpreted as yet another example of why we shouldn't let ladies speak their minds. In the middle of her smackdown, Sady offers up what I consider to be most excellent advice for anybody who wants to serve as an ally to a marginalized group. I'm going to include an abridged version of her advice below, though this should in no way hinder your intention to read the entire post in its gorgeous entirety.

Sady writes:

A common phrase, which just about every ally has ever heard or been instructed to heed, is, “if it’s not about you, don’t make it about you.” That is: If someone is describing a gross, oppressive behavior that some people in your privileged group engage in, then there is no reason to get defensive unless you personally engage in that behavior, in which case you need to stop complaining about your hurt feelings and focus on how quickly and completely you can cut that shit out. And rushing to the defense of people who do engage in the oppressive behavior, even if you don’t engage in it, is not acceptable, because you’re showing solidarity with your privilege, rather than with the people who are being hurt or oppressed. There is no better way to announce that you seriously don’t care about racism than to leap to the defense of some racist-ass people and ask people of color to stop talking about them in such a critical tone, for example.

To illustrate what the ally behavior Sady describes above actually looks like on the ground, I want to tell a story about my friend Adam, in whom I recently--and unexpectedly--found an ally.

I have a history of being a woman, and I also have a history of being involved in romantic relationships with women. I talk about the first thing all. the. effing. time. I haven't done much talking about the second thing, though I'm proud to announce that I'm getting better at talking about it.

I was out with a group of friends a few nights ago and decided to talk about it. Specifically, I decided to talk about my tendency to judge people who affiliate with organizations that make it their business to try to keep gay people as unhappy and unable to live freely and without risk of personal or psychological harm as possible. (I do not accept ignorance or political apathy as an excuse, in case you were wondering.) Uproar ensued around the table, which was filled with people who to my knowledge did not have any history of dating people of the same gender. Everybody wanted to weigh in on whether I was right or wrong to judge others. Everybody wanted to weigh in on whether I was being closed minded. Which was fine with me, really. These guys are my friends, and they seem to like me an awful lot, and I wasn't mad or upset or anything. I was interested in learning how each of my friends (some of whom belong to their own marginalized--or even doubly marginalized--groups) understood the notion of marginalization. I was intensely interested in fighting about this issue for as long as they were willing to fight.

But Adam, who I believe to be a straight white man, did something I didn't expect: He acted as my ally. He participated in the conversation, but he mainly did so to help me to clarify my stance and open up space for me to speak. He did this so gracefully and so intelligently that I assumed he agreed with me but only later realized I actually don't know his opinion on my stance toward people who affiliate with anti-gay organizations. I don't think he ever weighed in.

Adam is a classmate, and he's near the end of his graduate career. In class, he's kinda pushy and extremely talkative; he tends to dominate discussions and it's sometimes hard to get a word in. But on the other hand, he knows an awful lot about his field and has a lot to say about it.

So I know Adam can dominate a conversation, which means that in Friday night's discussion, he chose to stand back in order to give me more room to speak.

This is Adam:

Adam knows a thing or two about how to listen. Adam is an ally. I didn't thank him on Friday night, so Adam, consider this my thanks.

Marilyn Musgrave tries to quash health care reform

Former U.S. Rep Marilyn Musgrave is the kind of politician I was born to hate.

Musgrave built her career out of an anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-empathy and anti-compassion platform. Before she was soundly trounced by Democrat Betsy Markey in 2008, Musgrave was featured on multiple worst-politicians lists. This profile in Rolling Stone explains that

Musgrave does not believe in the separation of church and state. She entered politics in 1990, running for her local school board on a crusade to end sex education as part of the curriculum. By the time her tenure was over, the schools taught "abstinence only" -- and offending passages in health textbooks had been blacked out. During her eight years in the Colorado legislature, Musgrave continued her moralizing, overcoming two vetoes by the governor to pass a state ban on gay marriage.

Once in Congress, Musgrave introduced a constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriage -- which she calls "the most important issue that we face today" -- nearly a year before a Massachusetts court approved civil unions. "She doesn't like the idea of one gay person," says Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts. "So obviously the idea of two of us hanging out makes her very unhappy." For her opposition to gay marriage -- as well as her push to legalize concealed weapons -- Musgrave received an endorsement from the KKK in May.

Let me emphasize: Marilyn Musgrave was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

Did I mention that she was thumped by Betsy Markey in 2008? Upon her loss, Musgrave disappeared from sight, never officially conceding the election, never congratulating her opponent, never answering reporters' requests for comment about her loss.

Now Musgrave has resurfaced as the Director of a project called "Votes Have Consequences," an effort by the Susan B. Anthony List to scare politicians out of voting to fund reproductive health care services. Specifically, this group is trying to scare politicians out of voting for any health care bill that covers a range of procedures including abortion. Here's how 700 Club-affiliated blogger Dave Brody explains it:

The Susan B. Anthony List will be targeting certain members of Congress who are out of step with their district on the life issue. No specific Congressmen have been identified yet but the group plans to launch an aggressive TV, Radio and print campaign against them very soon. They don’t want to wait until 2010. They believe the issue needs to be addressed right away because pro-life groups have all too often taken a back seat approach to getting involved early in congressional races.

Priorities, folks. Let's talk about priorities.

Nearly 46 million Americans are living without health insurance. About 8 million of those uninsured are children. And each year, 45,000 Americans die for lack of health insurance. Even if you're a cold, cruel, apathetic person who doesn't care about the human toll of our crumbling health care system, you can appreciate the financial drain of dealing with so many uninsured citizens. If you're uninsured, you avoid expensive doctor visits. You don't get physicals. You don't deal with health issues when they first emerge, and if they get bad enough that you need medical care, you wait until you can't delay any longer and then you take yourself to an emergency room. At this point, more care--more expensive care--is generally warranted.

When it comes to our health care system, we're in full-on crisis mode. That's why the effort of Musgrave and her ridiculously named Susan B. Anthony List to quash any reform simply out-Herods Herod.

Blog for International Women's Day: A call to end 'horizontal violence'

This blog post is part of the call from Gender Across Borders for blog posts written in response to the theme of this year's International Women's Day.

About a month ago, I posted a review of And Then Came Lola, a film that ran as part of my city's LGBTQ film festival.

In my review, I criticized what I saw as a heteronormative portrayal of lesbian sexuality: to wit, the more traditionally feminine a character was, the more heroic she was; and any character who stood outside of traditional notions of femininity was either a bad guy or played for laughs. I expressed concern that in treating sexual desire as the exclusive right of the traditionally beautiful, this film reinforces negative stereotypes of lesbians and of women more broadly.

Well. As you might imagine (and as I might have expected), I received lots of responses to this post, including a disproportionate number of personal attacks delivered in comments below the review and in personal emails. It was suggested that maybe I have a problem with lesbians, that maybe my own prejudices are clouding my judgment, that maybe I take myself too seriously. In fact, more commenters wanted to talk about what was wrong with me than about the content of my review--about whether I had a point worth discussing.

As we celebrate International Women's Day with the theme "equal rights, equal opportunity: Progress for all," I want to call for progress within the communities that comprise the women's rights movement. We know that one highly effective strategy for doing away with a political point that threatens the status quo is to twist it into a question of personal character: She's just a man-hater. He's just a pedophile. She's a hypocrite, a bitch, a traitor. We know this strategy is effective because it's been used against us time and again. Yet we're still so likely to pull out exactly this strategy if a member of our community says something we don't agree with or don't want to hear.

In lots of ways, it's not really our fault. This is a divide-and-conquer tactic built right into the fabric of our culture to maintain the subtle balances of power. It's also a tactic that has, for many members of minority groups, been highly effective in helping them to gain a voice, position, power. If you're not an official member of the dominant group (which in America is largely comprised of middle- and upper-class, educated white men) you can always cozy up to the dominant group by acting in ways that show whose side you're on. This is why we hear that women are so often each other's worst enemies: If you're a smart, ambitious, driven woman you can lessen the threat you pose to the status quo by helping to smack down other smart, ambitious, driven women.

But, wow, talk about trading off long-term change for short-term rewards. The Brazilian revolutionary Paulo Freire calls this "horizontal violence": oppressed peoples "striking out at their own comrades for the pettiest reasons." If you want a seat at the table, it may very well be faster and less painful to ingratiate yourself instead of shoving your way in; but on the other hand, you have no power to keep yourself at the table once you get there. If the dominant group ever decides you're not docile or pretty or respectful or interesting enough, they can pull the table away.

On International Women's Day, I'm calling for more attention to the long revolution, for more attention to the difficult and complicated work of building a movement based on solidarity, mutual respect and support, and making room for a variety of voices, interests, and needs. I'm calling for more attention to the ways in which we hurt each other, diminish the voices of our comrades, use any power we gain individually as a weapon against others who would like a little bit of power too.

I'm not calling for an end to disagreement or conflict within the movement toward equality; disagreement is useful, and conflict is inevitable. But I am calling for more introspection, for more thought put into why and how and where we disagree, into why and how and where we try to silence each other in the exact ways we find so despicable when it comes from outsiders to our communities and movements. I'm calling for all of us to examine our own behavior, our own attitudes, our own understandable struggles with power, beliefs, and attitudes about ourselves and about others who have joined with us to fight for progress and equality. I'm calling for more public generosity and private compassion. I'm calling for it from myself most of all, starting now and henceforth; but I do hope that you'll join me.

Update: My sister Laura, a law student in Boston, wrote a response to this post that addresses the gender politics of law school. You can read her breathtaking examination of her experience here.

Blog for International Women's Day

Monday, March 8, 2010, is International Women's Day, and Gender Across Borders is helping to get the word out by asking people to blog on this year's theme: “Equal rights, equal opportunity: Progress for all.”

Find out more at Gender Across Borders. Sign up to blog for IWD here.

I take it back about Daniel Tosh.

I have, on this very blog, previously lauded the comedic genius of Daniel Tosh. Specifically, I have tried to encourage my readers to watch his Comedy Central show, Tosh.0.

I don't know if I've changed or the show has, but I recently decided to boycott Tosh.0 because of its disturbing tendency toward humiliating vulnerable people and groups. Tosh's genre of comedy focuses on exploiting cultural stereotypes for humor and societal critique, and if this is your chosen genre you have to be aware of the fine line between humor and bullying.

Tosh has become a bully. He picks on traditionally marginalized populations, including ethnic minorities, women, people with disabilities, and the LGBT community. Which isn't in itself offensive--except that he does it in such a way that these people's words and actions are twisted and used against them as weapons of ridicule and humiliation. Then, to deepen the humiliation, these moments are compiled and broadcast in a show whose very design is intended to silence the people who are the targets of ridicule: in the format of a tightly edited program featuring only the views of Daniel Tosh and his crew. Even when Tosh invites guests on his show, producers make editing decisions clearly designed to humiliate the guests in every way possible.

If this were a stand-up show, audience members could respond, could heckle or boo or applaud: They could have a voice. Even a TV program can find creative ways to toe the humor-bullying line and avoid silencing the targets of its ridicule. Part of what I thought was so fantastic about Tosh.0 in its first season, for example, was that Tosh was as likely to ridicule himself as he was to ridicule others. This is one strategy for diffusing the power differential inherent in giving one person a broadcast platform through which to humiliate other people. On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart ridicules politicians but also bring them on as guests, treating them with respect and deference.

Comedy is hard. Every comedic act is an act of creativity; it's the creativity, the cleverness, that action or phrase that subverts our expectations, that surprises us and makes us laugh. We also laugh, sometimes, at crude, vulgar, and sometimes even cruel actions. This is why so many comedians mistake vulgarity and cruelty for cleverness, even though they're so often worlds apart.

Letter from a Bloomington high school student to the students of Aurora Alternative High School

Today, the Bloomington Herald-Times published a guest column written by Victoria Ison, a student at Bloomington High School North. The column is framed as a letter to students at Aurora Alternative High School, which is slated for closure at the end of this school year as a money-saving measure.

This piece, like almost all of the Herald-Times' content, is not available to the general public, as the paper has made the foolish decision to erect a paywall. Yet another lesson to learn from the ongoing issue of budget cuts across the MCCSC school system is that more access to information is better than less access, and in times like these, the Herald-Times' paywall begins to look increasingly obstructive. Forcing people to pay to access information about issues that directly affect them is a barrier to civic engagement, plain and simple, and the Herald-Times should be ashamed of itself.

On a related note, I've decided to run the entire text of Victoria Ison's letter below.

Please be aware that Ison is a high school student and that this column addresses a difficult and emotionally charged issue. On the Herald-Times site, several readers posted what I consider to be cruel and hurtful comments in response to Ison's post, and I'm not going to let that happen here. Whatever you think of her columnn, Ison should be commended for her honesty and willingness to present her ideas on a complicated debate.


COMMENTARY
Opinion: Aurora students impress a student who doesn’t know them
March 3, 2010


To the students of Aurora Alternative High School:

We’re pretty much the same ages, you and I. I don’t really know any of you, but that’s not uncommon; there are thousands of youth in this community, after all. If you went to North, I might know you. Or I might not. There are a lot of kids.

But now, I need you to forgive me.

You see, before the budget crisis — or at least, before the public was aware of the budget crisis — I didn’t think about you very much. Hardly at all, actually.

Sure, I saw articles in the newspaper at times. You were involved with Martin Luther King Jr. Day volunteer activities. You stuffed a bus and wrapped gifts for Fairview kids. Your Facebook page popped up in my Newsfeed.

But I didn’t become a fan. You were far away — if not in miles, in accessibility. My everyday life was a blur: home and school and back again. You never crossed my mind. Then I saw the name of your school on the proposed list of our district’s budget cuts. And still, I gave it just a passing glance.

It wasn’t until the Tuesday night board meeting that I thought any more about you. I was sitting there with my teacher/mother, listening to the public comments and half-heartedly taking U.S. history notes. Occasionally, I would look up and look around, noticing the appearances of the various impassioned speakers.

I was surprised to see you there. I was surprised by some of your hats, your earrings, your fashion statements. I was most surprised to see your tears.

Some of you got up and spoke. Eloquently. Emotionally. It was so evident that you were fighting for something you believed in, something you needed.

You talked about being “broken,” about being hurt. You talked about needing an escape, wanting to run away. You talked about having to attend any other high school — including my very own North — with measures of overwhelming dread.

I didn’t want to listen to you.

I didn’t want to see your pain and have to admit my ignorance. I didn’t want to have to struggle to try not to judge you.

Because I was. I was sitting confidently in my seat, wearing my track team sweatshirt, doing homework for a class that I have an A grade and a zillion friends in, judging you.

And I am sorry.

I am sorry for being self-absorbed into oblivion, for not noticing your pain or having empathy for your problems. Before you spoke, I didn’t realize that high school could be such a terrible kind of place. I didn’t realize that teenagers — people my own age — could feel hopeless like you said you did. I am sorry for anything I’ve done to make North such a hard place to be.

I am sorry for fitting in and forgetting you.

I need to make it up to you, and I need you to tell me how. Your school is going to be inside my school’s building next year. If you want to be left alone, I’ll understand. But know I’ll still be thinking about you, wondering about you, rooting for you. You’ve impressed me with your passion, humbled me with your tears. There’s no forgetting you now.

And if you’re willing, well, our schools are going to be much closer now. And we’re pretty much the same ages, you and I. We should be friends.

Victoria Ison is a junior at Bloomington High School North and a former biweekly correspondent for The Herald-Times “In School” section. She can be reached at victoria.ison@gmail.com.

I made a t-shirt.

In case you're wondering why, go here and here and here. (Also here and here.)

I'm thinking about selling the shirt and donating the proceeds to Aurora Alternative High School, a public school of choice in the Monroe County Community School Corporation. Recently, in what I consider to be a cruel, short-sighted and deeply inequitable money-saving decision, the school board decided to shut the school and funnel its students into one of the district's large public high schools.

Also, the board decided to boot all elementary and middle school librarians. Keep the libraries open, but get rid of the librarians. Smart choice, that. This way, the kids who have been exposed to reading and books at home will still have access to all the books they could want, while the less lucky kids who haven't received support for reading at home will just walk right on by. And nobody benefits from the guided support for accessing online and electronic information that librarians and media specialists have gotten so good at offering.

Fantastic.

on homophobia, classism, and the politics of rape: Don Belton and Bloomington's Pride Film Festival

I want to talk about Don Belton.

Belton, you may remember, was the Indiana University professor who was found stabbed to death in his home on Christmas day. He was the gay Indiana University professor; his killer, ex-Marine Michael Griffin, has not only confessed but has explained his motive for stabbing Belton:

The former military man told police that Belton, who was openly gay, sexually assaulted him in front of his girlfriend, while they were both intoxicated on Christmas Day. And because the assistant professor of English refused to "show remorse," Griffin stabbed him to death, according to court documents.

Bloomington's LGBTQ community was hit fairly hard by the news of Belton's death. In part, this is because Belton was well liked; and in part, this is because the killing repeats the old message that nobody wants to be reminded of: It's (still) not safe to be gay in America.

A web site was built and called "Justice for Don Belton." Vigils were held. Press releases (here, here) were circulated mourning Belton's death and noting the loss to the IU community. And this year's Pride Film Festival, an annual LGBTQ event held in downtown Bloomington, has been dedicated to Belton's memory.

All of this for someone who has officially been identified as a perpetrator of sexual assault.

If this were a hetero situation, and the killer were a woman who claimed to have killed a man after two incidents of sexual assault, there would be no vigils. There would be no websites. There would be no film festival dedicated to the dead man's memory. And rightly so: After centuries of struggle, we have finally started to evolve into a society that does its best to side with the alleged victim in cases of sexual assault. We aren't a society that does its very best, of course, and you know, we sort of keep having to have the same conversation every time it comes up: Rape is not about sex. It's about power. And women who accuse a man of literal rape have been subjected to metaphorical rape by a court system that embraces a blame-the-victim mentality. And so on. But we're trying, and we're getting better at having these conversations.

And of course this isn't a hetero situation, and the gender, power, and sex issues don't map. We pretty much don't believe that Belton was a rapist or that Griffin was a victim; we believe--and, to be clear, I believe--that Belton was brutally murdered, and that the motive was homophobia. Homosexuality is a deep threat to heteronormative culture, to the status quo. It's dangerous and terrifying and the most insecure among us believe it must be blotted out. With violence, if needs be.

Belton's death is a reminder that no matter how far we've come, we're still a society that cannot guarantee the safety of its marginalized members. Bloomington was recently named America's 4th gayest city by the Advocate, which confuses me but let's go with it for now. And this year's Pride Festival,
which is deploying at the Buskirk-Chumley theater this very weekend, has drawn hundreds, if not thousands, of beautiful, joyous, and celebratory LGBTQ and LGBTQ-friendly community members. But all it takes is misreading one person, or showing up at the wrong bar at the wrong time, or acting a little too gay, or even just holding your partner's hand in public; and the Great Lie starts to unravel. It's not safe to be gay in America. It's not even always acceptable to be gay in America.


This isn't to say the reaction of the LGBTQ community to Belton's death is completely ick-free. There is the issue of classism. Part of the reason we don't believe Griffin is that Belton was so cultured. He was well educated. He was a writer. He was a professor, for godsake. He couldn't have possibly raped someone. I mean, just look at his picture:

Here's Griffin, an ex-Marine, 23 years old:

Leaving aside issues of race--not because I think we should leave those issues aside, but because I'm not qualified to talk about race--we craft a narrative around Belton and Griffin, and it's a narrative that points to deep class assumptions that hover above issues of gender and sexual orientation. It's the same sort of narrative that frames, for example, the story of Tiger Woods and his multiple mistresses ("Cocktail waitresses! Pancake servers! Why's Tiger rooting around in the trash?!?"), our attitudes toward celebrities ("Britney Spears--you can take the girl out of Hicksville, but...."), and the political decisions that undergird our social structure.

It's easier and simpler to use Belton's murder as a touchstone for conversations about the state of gay rights in America. In fact, this story, like all stories worth telling, is far more complicated and multithreaded. Like all stories worth telling, the work of interpreting the details is far less clearcut than it seems upon first blush.

RIP Howard Zinn

Best known, I suppose, for his A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn was a relentless force for change. He fought for the poor, the underclass, the underprivileged, and the underheard.

In his 2002 book, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times, Zinn describes his own awakening into an awareness of the deep inequities built into American society. He writes:

As I began to realize, no pitifully small picket line, no poorly attended meeting, no tossing out of an idea to an audience or even to an individual should be scorned as insignificant.

The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, are precious catalysts for change.

Howard Zinn was 87 years old, Even so, the time we got to have him seems pitifully brief.

Related information:

• here's an obituary from the LA Times
• here's an obit from The Boston Globe, including Noam Chomsky's take on Zinn's legacy
• here's video of Howard Zinn's 2005 talk, "The Myth of American Exceptionalism," at MIT
• here's a short remembrance from History is a Weapon, which describes itself as "a left counter-hegemonic education project."

george w. bush reaches one rotting hand from the grave

I believe campaign finance reform is the most important issue in contemporary American politics. The unfettered ability of corporate and interest-based groups to maintain or remove politicians is the reason behind every evil, bigoted, and short-sighted law our legislative bodies pass. It's the reason behind the slow pace of the political machine. It's the reason so many Americans feel there's no point in voting since they don't really have much of a say in who wins anyway. (And they're right to feel so.)

Now the Supreme Court of the United States has cleared the way for lobbyists and Big Business to grab even more control of our laws and our land by ruling, 5-4, to overturn previous campaign finance reform laws limiting the amount organizations could donate to political candidates.

President Obama said the ruling was "a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans."

Obama is right. This is a dark, dismal day for American politics. The Supreme Court's ruling has plummeted us back into the cesspool of corruption that we've spent a century trying to clamber our way out of.

The Bush administration, with its installation of a pair of corrupt, rightwing and deeply shortsighted justices, can claim its credit for this ruling. History will label the Bush tenure the last bastion of an era of brazen corruption, greed, and reckless narcissism. For those of us who loathed George W. Bush and his lackeys from the get-go, this cannot come soon enough.

It also won't feel anything at all like sweet revenge. We're all mired in the shit now, regardless of who we voted for.

I'm kind of appalled by Clay Shirky

You may have read Clay Shirky's recent post, "a rant about women." You may also have read, heard, or participated in the chaos and conversation that sprung up around it. And rightly so, given this representative chunk of Shirky's post:

Remember David Hampton, the con artist immortalized in “Six Degrees of Separation”, who pretended he was Sydney Poitier’s son? He lied his way into restaurants and clubs, managed to borrow money, and crashed in celebrity guest rooms. He didn’t miss the fact that he was taking a risk, or that he might suffer. He just didn’t care.

It’s not that women will be better off being con artists; a lot of con artists aren’t better off being con artists either. It’s just that until women have role models who are willing to risk incarceration to get ahead, they’ll miss out on channelling smaller amounts of self-promoting con artistry to get what they want, and if they can’t do that, they’ll get less of what they want than they want.

There is no upper limit to the risks men are willing to take in order to succeed, and if there is an upper limit for women, they will succeed less. They will also end up in jail less, but I don’t think we get the rewards without the risks....

And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.

There are enough smart people out there responding to this piece that I don't need to add more noise to the cacophony. But I do want to speak up as a dues-paying member of Women Who Run With The Arrogant Self-Aggrandizing Jerks And Sometimes Behave Like Arrogant Self-Aggrandizing Jerks Themselves.

Did I mention I'm a dues-paying member?

Because it's not easy to self-promote. It's not easy to stand up and say things that might be seen as stupid--or worse, dismissed because they come from a woman. It's not easy to announce to people "You should listen to me because I am awesome and the work I do is also awesome." It's not easy, in part because it takes extreme confidence (or at least something that looks to other people like confidence) to stand up and ask for attention, respect, recognition; and it's also not easy because the backlash is often so great, and simultaneously so subtle, that it sometimes feels like a one-step-forward, two-steps-back kind of deal.

My experience, in academia anyway, is that the tradeoff is this: If you want respect, authority, and platforms for broadcasting your ideas to a wider public, you have to self-promote; and if you succeed in gaining respect, authority, and platforms for speaking it's often at the cost of personal and professional relationships.

Let me say it more clearly: If you're a woman and you want to be heard, especially in academia, you have to knock on every door, announce your presence to everyone, and holler your qualifications at everyone in earshot. And if you do it right, people will hate you.

It will be harder to get daily work accomplished, because your colleagues will be stiff and formal with you. Male colleagues will challenge your knowledge and authority, and if that fails they will simply demean you in front of others. Female colleagues--and this is the really painful part--will shrink from you because in speaking so loudly, you've drowned out their voices. Some women, in an attempt to ally themselves with the people in charge, will also attempt to challenge and demean you.

(Another way to gain respect and authority, by the way, is to ally yourself with the people in charge, who in this case are primarily white guys. The backlash that comes out of this type of effort, though, is that you risk losing your place at the table the minute you misbehave. Then you have to come grovelling back, apologizing with downcast eyes, and take what scraps you can.)

Sure, men who self-promote risk hostility and resentment--but it's a different kind of hostility and resentment than what women experience. As members of the dominant cultural group, men who self-promote may be seen as a threat to specific people, but they certainly don't represent a threat to the established social order.

Women who are aware of the social positioning of women as a non-dominant group (and not all women are aware of this positioning, which is fine but sort of sad) develop a complex relationship to the decisions they make in crafting their public personae. They may engage in the kind of "arrogant, stupid" behavior that Shirky says is the best way to get ahead, but they do so knowing that some people (including, apparently, Shirky) will see this as "behaving more like men." They may choose to self-promote far less aggressively than Shirky would probably find useful, and to either accept that they will have trouble getting heard or find platforms for speaking where less self-promotion, less arrogance, is perfectly okay.

Or--and this is what lots of women, including me, do--they may adopt multiple identities, more identities, with more complicated politics, than those that men choose or are forced to adopt, in order to manage the competing demands on their behavior. This is not, lest I be misunderstood, the kind of identity cultivation that allows people to say "I have multiple identities! I'm an academic, and I'm also a mother, and I'm also a sister, and I'm also a friend." This is something much more complicated: It's "I'm this sort of academic-mother-sister-friend in this type of context, and I'm this sort of academic-mother-sister-friend in that type of context, and I'm this sort of academic-mother-sister-friend in that type of context with this person removed" and so on.

I don't quite know how to end this post, except to say that lots of people I like and respect think that Shirky is right on the money. And to add that my opinions are mine alone and not necessarily representative of all women, and that--and this is really important--I'm speaking from a position of relative privilege, since I'm a white, well-educated woman. I'm also thin, young, and not in any way physically disabled. I can't imagine how much more complicated this gets for someone who's even one step further removed from the dominant group than I am.