Kariann

Can't wait.

“The evidence for the most part comes from records of court proceedings, where people’s spoken language was recorded verbatim; from pornographic books, where obscene language went hand in hand with obscene doings; or from dictionaries whose editors were brave enough to include bad words. Let’s take fuck, for example. Around 1790, a Virginia judge named George Tucker wrote a poem in which a father argues with his son the scholar, “‘G—d— your books!’ the testy father said, / ‘I’d not give ——— for all you’ve read.’” According to Jesse Sheidlower and Geoffrey Hughes, the third ——— is replacing “a fuck,” producing the first recorded example of the modern teenage mantra, “I don’t give a fuck.” This poem didn’t see the light of day until a scholarly edition of Tucker’s work in 1977.”

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The modern history of swearing: Where all the dirtiest words come from - Salon.com

History can be so fun sometimes!

(via kgoldschmitt)

“

“We like to believe in Brazil that we live in a peaceful, happy place, when the truth of our existence is far more complicated,” she said. “It’s like we’re Narcissus gazing into a pool of sewage.”

Rio’s public security officials acknowledge that they have faced a sharp increase in the number of reported rape cases, which surged 24 percent last year to 1,972 in the city.

”

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Rapes in Brazil Spur Class and Gender Debate - NYTimes.com

So terrifying. I desperately want to read a better analysis of the situation in Rio… All reports are terribly superficial.

(via kgoldschmitt)

While pregnant teens are being shamed for making bad choices in the US, a new ad campaign in Britain is tackling the other side of the spectrum with an arresting image of a pregnant old woman. The campaign, sponsored by the pregnancy testing company First Response, purports to warn young women that their childbearing years are numbered.

The average British woman bears her first child at age 30, 5 years later than American women. In the name of “provok[ing] a debate about how old is too old to have a baby,” First Response Get Britain Fertile had make-up artists transform 45-year-old British TV presenter Kate Garraway into a cartoonishly ancient-looking pregnant woman.

Yet even as First Response claims there is a lack of awareness about the female biological clock, they tout a survey by YouGov finding 70 percent of British women believe having a baby in her 40s would be too old. Women were also quite clear about their motives to wait: two-fifths said they would delay having a child until they have financial stability, while over a third said the cost of childcare is a deterrent. Another third said they would wait until they found the right partner.

Nevertheless, First Response has decided the solution to the trend of women waiting longer to have children is to criticize them, prey on their fears of aging, and exploit social disgust for even moderately sexual old women.

Get Britain Fertile ambassadors Garraway and Zita West insist that they are not trying to push women into a panic over their ticking fertility clocks. Yet the campaign, which officially launches June 3, would do well to extend beyond the caricature of the old woman. Thus far, First Response has not suggested they will explore ways to bridge the vast disparity between the average cost of raising a child — roughly half a million dollars in the US, not including college tuition — and the employment prospects of the average 25-year-old couple. In the US, the average college-educated 20-something earns $45,000 a year, while their unemployment rate is far higher than their older counterparts. Highly-educated young people are also increasingly finding it difficult to find jobs that match their very expensive education. In the UK, two-fifths of all unemployed people are younger than 25. Nor does the campaign touch on the UK’s childcare costs, which are the second highest in the world.

Rather than address these real fiscal issues young women explicitly say are keeping them from having children earlier, Garraway writes that women are simply being too picky about settling down with the right partner: “I’m not suggesting for a minute that you settle for the first half-decent man who comes along – every woman has the right to hold out for Mr Right – but you may find that really addressing your feelings about having a family means the man you thought was Mr Right comes in a different form. I suppose the word for it is mindfulness.”

This advice ignores the far higher divorce rates among people who married younger than 30. In the UK, the divorce rate hit a 40-year low last year as couples delay marriage til age 30 or later.

It is true that pregnancy is riskier for women in their 40s, and studies suggest that the risk of autism rises if either parent is over 35. But the Get Britain Fertile campaign launch coincides with a “fertility breakthrough” that would make women undergoing in vitro fertilization 3 times more likely to have a baby. While the current average success rate is around 25 percent in Britain, new time-lapse imaging could raise it to 78 percent.

As technology allows women to have more and more control over their reproductive decisions, efforts to dictate the correct time and methods women should use to get pregnant are growing more common. A recent Singaporean ad campaign took a similar approach with a series of patronizing leaflets using fairy tales to depict women’s waning fertility. Jezebel compiled the lengthy laundry list of things pregnant women are often told they must or must not do in order to successfully bear a healthy child.

First Response’s and other fertility campaigns will probably have little impact on the birth rate. But they will perpetuate the insidious notion that women, and women alone, are to blame for any reproductive troubles they may have.

Florida teen Kaitlyn Hunt, who has been charged with a felony for having a sexual relationship with her younger girlfriend, has rejected a plea deal that would have included two years of house arrest and having to register as a sex offender. A statement released by her lawyers argued that she is being selectively prosecuted for having been in a same-sex relationship when she turned 18:

Our client is a courageous teenager who is choosing not to accept the current plea offer by the State of Florida.

This is a situation of two teenagers who happen to be of the same sex involved in a relationship. If this case involved a boy and girl, there would be no media attention to this case. [...]

If this incident occurred 108 days earlier when she was 17, we wouldn’t even be here. [...]

Along with Kaitlyn and her family, we are going to fight to have the law changed so no other teenager finds themselves in this same position created by the State of Florida and prosecuted unfairly.

Kaitlyn’s father, Steven Hunt Jr.,  explained this week that the charges seem to stem entirely from the parents of her girlfriend, who knew of the relationship, but waited until Kaitlyn turned 18 to object. According to Hunt, “Kate has offered to permanently cease contact and leave the state if charges are dropped, but that offer has been rejected by the prosecutor and the girlfriend’s parents.”

Over 270,000 people have signed a Change.org petition started by Hunt calling on Assistant State Attorney Brian Workman to stop Kaitlyn’s prosecution. The ACLU of Florida has condemned the prosecution, pointing out that it’s “a life sentence for behavior by teenagers that is all too common” and that “one cannot seriously maintain that Kaitlyn’s behavior was predatory.”

By Margaret Redlich

When I studied The Great Gatsby in college, we spent an entire class period on the character of Meyer Wolsheim–.  From the multiple descriptions of his oversize nose and atrocious dialect (“gonnegtions”), it only took five minutes for the class to determine he was supposed to be Jewish, and someone involved was terribly racist.  The question then became, was the racism from the author, Fitzgerald, or the narrator, Nick Carroway?  An added complication, if Gatsby was conceived by the author as Jewish, but not known to be Jewish by Carroway, does that mean that Fitzgerald was not racist? Or at least less racist?  With five minutes left in the class period, one of my classmates said that she had an uncle named “Gatz” (Gatsby’s birth name) and he was Jewish, so the class voted for Gatsby as Jewish and thus the narrator as the racist.

In the recent film, director Baz Lurhmann leaves Gatsby’s origins open to interpretation.  The character of Meyer Wolfsheim is still presented as Jewish, but only in name.  The dialect is softened and Carroway’s voice over narration is not included in this scene.  Luhrman also makes an effort to soften elements of the character’s appearance and personality; instead of two molars used as cufflinks and discussed in detail, Wolfsheim has one used as a tie pin, which is only mentioned in passing. As to the reaction of other characters to Wolfsheim: in the novel Gatsby is happy to see him leave; In the film, he is happy to see him arrive.  These are easily understandable alterations, necessary to make the scene palatable to a modern audience.  Less easy to understand? Luhrmann’s decision to cast a Desi actor to play the role.  Even stranger, Amitabh Bachchan, after 40 years of Indian superstardom, decided to make The Great Gatsby his American debut.

The parallel between Jewish and South Asian fears was called “recycled anti-Semitism” in an article by Abdul-Azim Ahmed from the journal South Asian Popular Culture.  He was discussing the BBC show, Citizen Khan, but the same idea can be applied to the use of Bachchan in Gatsby.  Luhrmann, in interviews, acknowledges that “Fitzgerald draws the character in what some might say is a very broad, anti-Semitic manner,” but says that he saw Wolfsheim as representing “the ‘other’, the underworld.” And his goal in casting was to find someone “really exotic.”  In justification, he cites for instance the casting of Omar Sharif as the Jewish gambler Nicky Arnstein in Funny Girl (1968).  He says that, to the audience of the 60s, Sharif conveyed the same amount of “exotic” that Jewish meant in the teens and twenties.

In the 60s, Omar Sharif represented the danger of the almost-white other, playing everything from Russian in Doctor Zhivago (1965), to Arab Lawrence of Arabia (1962), to Jewish in Gatsby.  Now, South Asians to some degree are taking up that role.  Anil Kapoor in 24 played the president of a fictional Arab country.  Ben Kingsley just played “The Mandarin”, an Arab terrorist with a Chinese name.  And now, Amitabh Bachchan is playing Jewish in Gatsby.

Of course, this isn’t the first time Luhrmann has brought an Indian influence into his films.  Luhrmann first included a Bollywood artist in Moulin Rouge, with some success.  He sampled the song “Chamma Chamma” in the middle of his epic finale number, Hindi Sad Diamonds.  In the credits and on the subsequent soundtrack release, he credited the singer, Alka Yagnik, and the songwriter Sameer, but he slighted the composer, Anu Malik. Malik was so insulted that he was still bringing up the slip in an interview over two years later.  When Luhrman discusses Moulin Rouge as a musical, he talks about Stanley Donen and George Sidney, Hollywood masters of the genre.  What Luhrman says he got from Bollywood was the message of “love and spirit’, and that is what he carries through his life and his work.

In interviews from the early 2000s, when Moulin Rouge was released and Luhrmann’s Bollywood connection first gained notice, Luhrman said he and his wife went to see a Bollywood movie on impulse while on a research trip to India in 1993 and were swept away by the emotions of the characters- and of the audience.  But he had not yet met members of the Bollywood film community.  In 2010, he went on a motorcycling trip from Jaipur to Bombay accompanied by his artist friend Vincent Fantauzzo. In Bombay, Fantauzzo and Luhrman participated in an art show, attended by starlets and industry hangers-on.  He and his friend then made a pilgrimage to Jalsa, which is Amitabh Bachchan’s large family compound outside the city.

As Bachchan tells it, the artist Vincent Fantauzzo was “doing some work for him” and brought along his friend Baz. An international artist working for Bachchan isn’t unusual:  as part of the recent celebrations for Bachchan’s 70th birthday, there was an exhibit of 70 works by 70 leading artists inspired by him.  Luhrmann and Fantauzzo did in fact collaborate on a portrait of Bachchan coming out of their visit, which was exhibited at a Hong Kong art festival and later sold to raise money for an Indian charity.

In a recent interview, Bachchan contrasted this experience with the attitude of Danny Boyle when making Slumdog Millionaire. Boyle merely had his office call to ask for legal release of images, which resulted in Bachchan politely ignoring his film. Bachchan has been honored by kings, so I imagine he expected a little more respect. Lurhmann approached him with an appropriate amount. Luhrman went to Bachchan’s home and spoke with him personally, following up with regular phone calls and discussions. Luhrman has stated that if Leonardo DiCaprio is a Prince, then Amitabh Bachchan is “the king.”

Luhrmann’s respect spills out into the way Bachchan’s character is presented in his film.  Wolfsheim is introduced with a dramatic spin towards the camera in a barber’s chair.  In his small scene, he is the center, both of the frame, and the conversation. As he told the Indian news source AVS during a brief red carpet interview at the New York premiere, when asked if any on set knew who he was, “No, but I did.”

Filming it this way was also a canny decision on the part of the director since, even across cultural barriers, Bachchan still effortlessly dominates the camera.  On the red carpet, the screenwriter Greg Pearce mentions this effect, saying that although they may have never heard of him before, as soon as Bachchan appeared on set, “the legend grew.”  In terms of the narrative of the film, this presentation works to support it.  Meyer Wolfsheim is pivotal to the plot.  Without Wolfsheim’s money and support, there would be no Gatsby.  And Wolfsheim is a character aware of his own power and importance.  It makes sense to showcase him during his time onscreen.

But to say that the meaning of Bachchan’s casting is only related to Luhrmann’s message for the audience, is to ignore Bachchan’s own agency in the matter.  Bachchan not only agreed to take the part, his first outside of India, he wouldn’t even accept payment for it.  So, what motivated him?

In 2009, there were two brutal attacks on Indian students in Australia.  Sravan Kumar Theerthala was stabbed in the head with an ice-pick while Rajesh Kumar suffered burns from a bomb attack.  These incidents were part of a larger pattern in Australia of hate crimes labeled “curry bashing”.  The situation was worsened by the police response, which focused on advising students not to be “soft targets.”  Don’t speak your native language in public, hide your accents, don’t be seen using expensive electronics.  In other words, don’t look like the Orientalist ideal of a wealthy and weak Asian. Luhrmann said that the reason he and his friend went to India in 2010 is because “We were rather disgusted with the situation (in Australia). Vincent’s wife is Indian and around Christmas we decided we had to do something.”

When Bachchan agreed to meet with Luhrmann, it was a gesture of courtesy towards a fellow artist,  but it was also a political statement.  Bachchan’s own close friend, Bal Thackaray, the head of the jingoistic Shiv Sena group, had just called for a ban on Australian cricket players in Bombay because “[o]ur boys are being stabbed, burnt at, and shot at in that country” and therefore it was wrong for Indian cricketers to play with them in harmony.  Bachchan’s agreement to work in Australia at that moment in time, and to work for an Australian, was a very big deal.

Bachchan may be playing a stereotype. Luhrmannn may have cast him because, as a South Asian, he is “really exotic”.  But, at the same time, their collaboration is a moment of two people reaching out across barriers and trying to find peace through art. As Luhrmann says, it is a “gesture of friendship between our two countries”

Margaret Redlich is a graduate student in Media and Cinema studies at DePaul University and host of a weekly Bollywood movie nights.

A Florida family says their 18-year-old daughter was charged with a felony and expelled from high school as a result of a consensual, same-sex relationship with another student.

Kaitlyn Hunt started dating a female classmate at the beginning of the school year when she was 17 and the girl she was about three years younger. According to an account posted to Facebook by Kaitlyn’s mother, in February, shortly after Kaitlyn turned 18, she was arrested on felony charges at the behest of her girlfriend’s parents. The specific crime was “sexual battery on a person 12-16 years old.”

Kaitlyn’s mother believes the charges were motivated by anti-gay animus:

They were out to destroy my daughter, they feel like my daughter “made” their daughter gay. They are bigoted, religious zeolites [sic] that see being gay as a sin and wrong, and they blame my daughter.

But Kaitlyn’s problems did not end there. Her girlfriends’s parents appealed to the school board and had her expelled from Sebastian River High School. Kaitlyn’s mom reports that the State Attorney, Brian Workman, has offered Kaitlyn a plea deal of “of two years house arrest and one year probation.” Kaitlyn has until next Friday to accept the plea deal or face a trial.

The family has started a petition calling on the state attorney to drop the charges against Kaitlyn.

Me: Gay marriage in Brazil!
Anon Friend: WIN!!
Me: Why aren't more people talking about this? It's one of the most masculinist countries... It's also really Catholic.
Anon Friend: Because Angelina Jolie had her breasts removed.
Me: I guess they were intimidated by Argentina. Rivalries...
Anon Friend: Also, most Americans don't care about Latin America
Me: Unless they are talking about "illegals"

History has been made in Brazil today, as the National Council of Justice has voted 14-1 to support a resolution stipulating that same-sex couples should be able to receive marriage licenses throughout the entire country. In 2011, the Brazilian Supreme Court had ruled that it was unconstitutional to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, but up to this point, local jurisdictions could decide whether to offer the freedom to marry — 12 states and the federal district had already started doing so.

The council’s decision, which will be published sometime in the coming days, advises that no notary can refuse to perform a same-sex marriage. The ruling could, however, be appealed to the Supreme Court. Previous guidance had suggested that Congress needed to pass a marriage equality law, which it is considering, but Minister Joaquim Barbosa suggested this was “nonsense.”

Pending the implementation of this ruling, Brazil will become the 15th country to offer nationwide marriage equality, joining Uruguay and France, who passed laws just last month.

The lines at Disney World are awful, we can all agree, but the lengths to which some people will go to bypass them are worse. Wealthy Manhattan parents are reportedly using a service that typically assists disabled children around the theme park to drive their non-disabled families around in a "handicapped" scooter, allowing them to skip lines by up to two hours.

It sounds like something out of a "Modern Seinfeld" episode. But in this case, the horrible people are real. And they're spectacularly crass.

"You can't go to Disney without a tour concierge," one rich mom said, according to the New York Post. "This is how the 1 percent does Disney."

Well, gross. This is, above all, a problem of basic human decency. But it is also a problem of black markets -- or legal markets extended illegally (or extra-legally) to people who shouldn't qualify.

The official Disney VIP Tour includes guides and premium fast passes for between $300 and $400 per hour. That's much more expensive than a $130-per-hour disability service afforded by Dream Tours Florida. There's a very simple explanation for the price difference: The VIP tickets are priced to where the rich will pay (and also to weed out all but the richest families to keep the service exclusive); whereas, the disability tour company sees all families with a disabled person as consumers. So these rich families reportedly using Dream Tours Florida aren't benefiting from a peculiarly effective and peculiarly cheap service, precisely because neither the service nor the price is intended to serve wealthy families. They're benefiting from a service they don't deserve at a price far below where the real luxury market for fast passes has settled.

Markets in everything, you might say. Sure. Regulation (and retribution) in everything would be good, too.

We've reached out to Dream Tours Florida and will report back when we hear.

“

I am truly sick, at this late date, of people wanting to have it both ways: calling for protected bike lanes and a bike-share system, demanding that cops step up enforcement when it comes to cars, and then blithely salmoning up a major thoroughfare and expecting everyone look the other way.

It makes all of us look terrible and it’s a real hazard. Same goes for blowing through a stop sign or red light, or blocking the crosswalk when you’re impatiently waiting for the light to change. Not to mention shouting at pedestrians to get out of the way when they are crossing legally. I saw someone yell at an old lady the other day. Seriously?

”

- Sarah Goodyear, “Cyclists Aren’t ‘Special,’ And They Shouldn’t Play By Their Own Rules," The Atlantic 13 May 2013.

“

I came to this film thinking of Steven as ‘an Asian fetishist’ and of Sandy as ‘an opportunist.’ Having spent a little while getting to know them through Lum’s lens, I saw their nuances. Parts of their relationship — their fights, their daily interactions, their worries — became incredibly human, completely relatable to an outsider.

Except I feel like there should be a ‘but.’

This narrative still doesn’t sit well with me. The way Steven thought about Asian women — stripping them of their individuality, layering on pre-conceived ideals, replacing people with types — was challenged when he met Sandy, a real person with layers of her own. They might make the relationship work, yes, and I might even want them to. But in that case, their road to happiness feels marred with potholes that still need to be examined and considered.

”

- Kat Chow, “’Seeking Asian Female’ Takes A Close Look at a Fetish,” NPR Code Switch. (via kgoldschmitt)

areyouoverityet:

What is interesting, is that the Frida Kahlo venerated by American feminists is a very different Frida Kahlo to the one people learn about in Mexico, in the Chicano community. In her country, she is recognized as an important artist and a key figure in revolutionary politics of early 20th century Mexico. Her communist affiliations are made very clear. Her relationship with Trotsky is underscored. All her political activities with Diego Rivera are constantly emphasized. The connection between her art and her politics is always made. When Chicana artists became interested in Frida Kahlo in the ‘70s and started organizing homages, they made the connection between her artistic project and theirs because they too were searching for an aesthetic compliment to a political view that was radical and emancipatory. But when the Euro-American feminists latch onto Frida Kahlo in the early ‘80s and when the American mainstream caught on to her, she was transformed into a figure of suffering. I am very critical of that form of appropriation.

Coco Fusco on her Amerindians piece from 1992 with Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Brass band multitasker (by thewatchvideos63)

dearrintheheadlights:

this

Marketing v. Reality

Naldo - “Amor de Chocolate” (CLIPE OFICIAL) (by Naldo Benny)

It’s not quite as aggressively science fictional as her phenomenal video about a droid auction-slash-rock-concert for “Many Moons,” which she released more than four years ago, but the video for Janelle Monae’s excellent collaboration with Erykah Badu “Q.U.E.E.N.” is a reminder of just how important her contributions to science fiction—as well as to music—have been since she broke out onto the national scene:

Monae is hardly the first musician to situate her musical persona in science fiction. Psychadelia gave us Jefferson Starship. George Clinton has a long and deep engagement with spaceship iconography and science fiction more broadly. On “Roses,” a caustic anti-love song with no other particularly science fictional elements from his The Love Below album, Andre 3000 entreated the woman being addressed in the track to “come back down to Mars.” When you read music as narrative fiction, locations beyond Earth and times far removed from ours are common settings. But in a few short years, and across multiple songs and videos, Monae has created a particularly coherent universe full of robots sold as luxury goods to decadent, exceedingly well-dressed droids and rebels, institutions that house revolutionary figures, some of whom can walk through walls, and electrifying musical performances.

And the coherence of her music video universe isn’t the only thing striking about Monae’s ouvre, or that marks her as a science fictional thinker. As I wrote on Wednesday, Hollywood tends to portray technology and our loss of control of it—or misuse of it—as a major factor in the creation of radically altered future. Monae’s music videos frequently operate from the premise that cultural tools are at least as powerful as technical or physical ones.

In the video for “Many Moons,” Cindi Mayweather, an android who Monae presents as an alter ego, gives an electrifying performance at an auction of extraordinarily expensive androids. Her music, which makes reference to a wide range of social and political issues, is initially treated as dance music for frenzied, regimented revelers. But when her performance literally shorts her out, what was intended as a classy backdrop to an ugly transaction disrupts it. The musician becomes an activist through her passionate dedication to her performance. In the introduction to “Q.U.E.E.N.” a voiceover explains that visitors are at a museum where revolutionaries who disrupted society with music have been archived for public consumption. They’re resurrected by a record snuck into the facility, which frees Monae’s character to ask questions that begin in the personal, like “Am I a freak for dancing around? / Am I a freak for getting down?” and move to the political: “I asked a question like this / ‘Are we a lost generation of our people?’ / Add us to equations but they’ll never make us equal. / She who writes the movie owns the script and the sequel. / So why ain’t the stealing of my rights made illegal? / They keep us underground working hard for the greedy, / But when it’s time pay they turn around and call us needy.”

Monae isn’t the only person with the idea that cultural power can create dramatic inflection points in the evolution of the future. Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit From The Goon Squad culminates in a concert by an artist who begins the book as an extraordinarily broken man and reemerges as a children’s musician. The concert starts as a marketing gig for one of the characters in the novel, but it turns into an astonishing experience that united two generations, one similar to the Millenials, and the one that followed, who have embraced digital communication but rejected drug use and tattoos. It’s an amazing conclusion to the novel in part because it’s strikingly different from much of what we see in science fiction in a number of ways: it’s set in the near-future instead of far off, it’s hopeful instead of apocalyptic, and it’s collective and artistic instead of individual and technological.

To a certain extent, the place where Egan ends is the one from which Monae blasts off. Given Monae’s extraordinarily precise sense of visual style, the concepts she’s pulled together and expressed with directors with a range of visual styles, and the way her lyrics would fit in larger narrative settings, I’d love to see what planet she’d land on if she had the opportunity to tell stories over 120 minutes instead of six of them.

JodyDigger/flickr

Marissa Mayer took a lot of flak when she nixed telecommuting at Yahoo yet built a private nursery for her own baby next to her office, on the heels of her earlier statement that she intended to work through a meager two-week maternity leave.

This week, however, she announced a decidedly family-friendly policy for Yahoos who become parents: doubling paid maternity leave for mothers (from eight to 16 weeks) plus granting eight weeks for fathers. New parents also can expect to receive a gift of $500 to welcome baby and spend on things like groceries, babysitters, house cleaning, and laundry.

The policy sends the message that Yahoo seeks to keep up with its Silicon Valley peers—especially Google and Facebook—in the competition to hire and retain top talent. It also signals that Marissa Mayer realizes not every working parent, even super-smart Yahoo engineers, possesses her super-human drive, so Yahoo will try to be one of those great places to work—for both moms and dads of newborns.

Related Story

Marissa Mayer's Job Is to Be CEO

The dad part of the policy merits notice. It appears Mayer absorbed one key response to Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg's command for women to "lean in" to their jobs and careers. Dads need to lean in at home and share diaper duty, said mothers, journalists, and scholars. That would encourage equally shared parenting particularly and gender equality generally.

The new Yahoo policy holds potential not only to change a father's behavior during the eight weeks he spends with the baby while on paternity leave, but also to inch the country toward parity between the sexes in parenting. Catherine Rampell, in The New York Times, explains how a family-friendly policy can potentially change social expectations and norms about acceptable "father" and "mother" behaviors:

One area where there seems to be a lot of potential is paternity leave, which still has a stigma in both the United States and Europe. To remedy this bad rap, countries like Sweden and Norway have recently introduced a quota of paid parental leave available only to fathers. If dads don't take it, they're leaving money on the table. In Germany and Portugal, moms get bonus weeks of maternity leave if their husbands take a minimum amount of paternity leave. All these countries have seen gigantic increases in the share of fathers who go on leave.

This might not sound like such a big deal, but social scientists are coming around to the notion that a man spending a few weeks at home with his newborn can help recast expectations and gender roles, at work and home, for a long time. A striking new study by a Cornell graduate student, Ankita Patnaik, based on a new paid paternity-leave quota in Quebec, found that parents' time use changed significantly. Several years after being exposed to the reform, fathers spent more time in child care and domestic work—particularly "time-inflexible" chores, like cooking, that cut into working hours—than fathers who weren't exposed to the reform. More important, mothers spent considerably more time at work growing their careers and contributing more to the economy, all without any public mandates or shaming.

Even more important, fathers' heightened engagement with their newborns ignites a process of role evolution. In other words, change behavior first and changes in expectations follow—not just wives' expectations of husbands but husbands' expectations of themselves. New roles are "enacted" this way and, at a social system level, new norms emerge. Dads doing more at home—even taking charge—becomes accepted and then expected. All because an employer like Yahoo offered—and dads took—a few weeks of paternity leave.

The Florida legislature passed a bill this week to impose new obstacles on challenging the death penalty in a state with the greatest number of exonerations. The bill’s intent was to shorten the time inmates wait for execution by imposing time limits for appeals and post-conviction motions, but DNA and other evidence often emerges years after a crime is committed – a concern that didn’t seem to faze Republican proponents of the bill who said swift justice is “not about guilt or innocence”:

“Is swift justice fair justice?” asked Democratic party Senator Arthenia Joyner, a Tampa attorney who voted against the bill. “We have seen cases where, years later, convicted people were exonerated,” she said. […]

But Republican Senator Rob Bradley said, “this is not about guilt or innocence, it’s about timely justice.” Frivolous appeals designed only for delay are not fair to victims and their families, he said. [...]

“Only God can judge,” Matt Gaetz, a Republican who sponsored the bill in the House of Representatives, said last week during House debate. “But we sure can set up the meeting.”

Florida has more people on death row than any other state except California. Since the state reinstituted the death penalty in the 1970s, one fourth of those sentenced to death were later exonerated. The initial bill set strict timelines for post-conviction motions and appeals that would have likely led to the execution of many of these exonereees, who were facing a death sentence for well over ten years before new evidence emerged in their case. But after several amendments, the most recent version passed by both houses states only that capital cases should be resolved “as soon as possible.” The changes may have been motivated by concerns over a legal challenge. A similar 2000 law was struck down by the state Supreme Court as a violation of separation of powers. But perhaps more alarming than the text of the final version is the intent of the legislators who proposed it to facilitate quick deaths without regard to guilt or innocence, particularly in a system rife with error and racial bias.

CREDO's rejected Facebook ad (Credit: CREDO)

When a subsidiary of Mark Zuckerberg’s new political group started airing ads for expanded oil drilling and the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, CREDO Action decided to post an ad of their own calling Zuckerberg out — on Facebook.

This morning, Facebook rejected CREDO’s Facebook ad (pictured right). According to CREDO Action, Facebook initially informed them they rejected the ad because it used Facebook trademarks — specifically, Zuckerberg’s image. Though the image used was fully licensed for creative commons use, a Facebook representative told ThinkProgress that any images of Zuckerberg are off-limits, as he is part of the Facebook brand. The rules governing Facebook brand usage specify “trademarks, names, domain names, logos” but does not explicitly restrict images of Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg’s group, FWD.US, is ostensibly focused on passing comprehensive immigration reform, with long-term goals of expanding scientific research and reforming education. However, the group soon started funding ads promoting oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and constructing the Keystone XL pipeline. In the past, Zuckerberg has called for reducing fossil fuel usage in favor of more clean energy sources. FWD.US defended the ads as a way to shore up vulnerable Republican lawmakers who support immigration reform.

CREDO recently protested outside Zuckerberg’s recent fundraiser with Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ), and decided to launch a Facebook advertising campaign “to make the connection about how political Mark Zuckerberg has become,” as CREDO told Politico. They’re not the only group taking to Facebook to challenge Zuckerberg’s political causes; the Sierra Club also asked members to share a graphic saying, “Zuckerberg promoting dirty fuels? DISLIKE.”

When the National Basketball Association’s Jason Collins came out as gay in a Sports Illustrated article Monday, he became the first active publicly gay male athlete in major American sports. That he was the first publicly out man is important to note, since female athletes have been open about their sexuality since at least 1981, when pro tennis player Billie Jean King was outed in a court case and another pro tennis player, Martina Navritilova, came out on her own. Since then, a number of female athletes — the WNBA’s Sheryl Swoopes, Chamique Holdsclaw, and Seimone Augustus, soccer player Megan Rapinoe, and U.S. Women’s National soccer coach Pia Sundhage, to name a few — have come out of the closet.

Brittney Griner, the top pick in the WNBA Draft, joined that list last week in an announcement that was as nonchalant as Collins’ was bold. Griner had already been open about her sexuality, she said, and it seemed that the reason the public didn’t know that was because nobody had bothered to ask. The separate comings out of Griner and Collins were telling for their differences, both in how they were received but in how they were covered in the media. That Brittney Griner was gay didn’t seem to shock anyone — as far as we’ve come in questioning gender roles, if a woman is interested in sports, tall and physically powerful, or both, those are considered indicators that she might be a lesbian. But when Collins came out, people were shocked, and they likely would have been shocked by any other male athlete coming out, even as we’ve become more accustomed to the idea that there must be gay men in professional sports.

The reason for those differences says a great deal about the way society views sports, masculinity, and sexuality. A man who excels at professional sports and has relationships with women has his work, his body, and his sexuality in alignment with norms of traditional masculinity. He’s seen as physically strong, heterosexual, and athletically gifted. A man who is physically strong and athletically gifted but is sexually attracted to men challenges the notion that there’s a relationship between traditional masculinity and heterosexuality. Being gay, it turns out, doesn’t make a man physically weak and passive.

That assumed relationship between masculinity and athletic ability is precisely what changes the equation for women. It isn’t feminine, in society’s eyes, to excel at sports. Where a man who pursues athletics as a career is conforming to gender norms, a woman—straight, gay, or bi—who goes into sports is defying them. And because heterosexual women are assumed to be feminine, women who excel in male-dominated fields, or who exhibit strength normally associated with men, find themselves subject to having assumptions about their sexuality made on the basis of their bodies or their skills. And the ways in which they diverge from gender norms risk becoming more important to the public than the things those divergences let them accomplish.

When a man like Jason Collins comes out as gay, it challenged every preconceived notion we have about what it takes for men to excel in sports, namely, strict adherence to masculine gender norms. But when a woman like Brittney Griner does the same, it only confirms the idea that a woman who succeeds in athletics does so because she’s breaking with expectations for women, both physically and sexually.

That helps explain why we waited so long for an openly gay man in major American team sports: the fears that he wouldn’t fit in a lockerroom, that he would be perceived as “soft,” and that he would be mistreated by fans were all tied to the perception of masculinity. It explains why Collins pushed back on those in his coming out statement, telling Shaq that he wasn’t flopping because he was gay and that he would still set hard picks and commit tough fouls. He clearly feels he has to affirm that there isn’t a relationship between his sexuality and other signs of masculinity, including physical toughness and aggression.

And it explains why there was so little shock when Griner came out as gay — “she looks like a man!” social media users screamed — but it also highlights a totally different set of problems in women’s sports. Where men’s sports have been slow to see gay athletes come out because they challenge the perception that professional athletes are predominantly heterosexual, women’s sports continue to have problems with out gay women because they fear reinforcing the belief that female athletes are predominantly gay. And while male athletes may face censure if they fall out of conditioning and their bodies fail to live up to the sculpted standards for traditional masculinity, female athletes who get themselves in the shape required to do their jobs get criticized for failing to conform to beauty standards.

What brings Collins and Griner together isn’t that they both came out of the closet in April 2013, but that they are both swimming upstream against the skewed notion that views sexuality and athletic prowess as inextricably linked. For men, that means that being gay makes it impossible to be an athlete. For women, that means that being an athlete, gay or straight, makes it impossible to be a woman. Neither could be further from the truth.

The musician Grimes, at the conclusion of her world tour, has written a terrific post on her Tumblr that’s basically a catalogue of the things she finds exhausting about being a woman in the industry she’s in. I’ve reproduced most of it here because it’s so striking:

i dont want to be molested at shows or on the street by people who perceive me as an object that exists for their personal satisfaction

i dont want to live in a world where im gonna have to start employing body guards because this kind of behavior is so commonplace and accepted and I’m pissed that when I express concern over my own safety it’s often ignored until people see firsthand what happens and then they apologize for not taking me seriously after the fact…

I’m tired of men who aren’t professional or even accomplished musicians continually offering to ‘help me out’ (without being asked), as if i did this by accident and i’m gonna flounder without them. or as if the fact that I’m a woman makes me incapable of using technology. I have never seen this kind of thing happen to any of my male peers

I’m tired of the weird insistence that i need a band or i need to work with outside producers (and I’m eternally grateful to the people who don’t do this)

im tired of being considered vapid for liking pop music or caring about fashion as if these things inherently lack substance or as if the things i enjoy somehow make me a lesser person

im tired of being congratulated for being thin because i can more easily fit into sample sizes from the runway

im tired of people i love betraying me so they can get credit or money

I’m sad that it’s uncool or offensive to talk about environmental or human rights issues

I’m tired of creeps on message boards discussing whether or not they’d “fuck” me

I’m tired of people harassing my dancers and treating them like they aren’t human beings

I’m sad that my desire to be treated as an equal and as a human being is interpreted as hatred of men, rather than a request to be included and respected (I have four brothers and many male best friends and a dad and i promise i do not hate men at all, nor do i believe that all men are sexist or that all men behave in the ways described above)

Her objections break down into a very clear dichotomy. In Grimes’ experience, she’s expected to be one of two things. The men who grope her, or her dancers, or who assume she has no real input in creating her music and that someone else must be behind it—and that they could be that someone else—or who discuss her as if she’s a merely penetrate-able object, or women who treat her like a conveniently-sized clothes rack assume a kind of emptiness to her. Her lack of agency is a plus for them: if she can’t have opinions, she also doesn’t have consent to give that would interfere with people’s actions or fantasies, opinions about her body that would prevent stylists from treating her a blank palette, or a distinct creative vision that might get in the way of other people using her as a vessel for their own musical ideas.

But when she has opinions, the bias is to interpret them negatively. The things she likes are frivolous. If she has political priorities, they get in the way of other people’s enjoyment of her. And if she advocates for herself, she’s interpreted to be trying to take things away from someone else. It’s almost as if what people are objecting to is Grimes having opinions, rather than being a consumer product.

I watched all of Hemlock Grove this weekend and I loved it. It’s not great. Everything Lauren Davis says about it over at io9 is completely true. I still loved it. (And I was right to suspect the cat would not make it into the show named “Fetchit.” Onscreen it was “Casper.”) And part of the reason why is that Hemlock Grove seems uniquely designed for a second-screen experience—and to give those of us deeply steeped in vampire lore and assorted pop culture nerddom a particular thrill.

Hemlock Grove, it seems to me, assumes that one of the joys its viewers will take is in catching all the references. It’s not just that there’s a wolfman and a vampire and a Frankenstein’s monster and a mad scientist and all the other horror tropes. It’s that the wolfman is named Peter, as in Peter & the Wolf, the vampire, whose mom is secretly from Romania, is name Roman, the Frankenstein’s monster is named Shelley, as in Mary Shelley, and the mad scientist is Dr. Price, an obvious nod to Vincent Price. And, sure, sometimes the names are a little too spot on–the fortune teller’s name is Destiny, the werewolf hunter is Dr. Chasseur (French for “hunter”), the first victim’s name is Victim 1… no, just kidding about that one. But the point is that this is a show that assumes you will enjoy it more the more you know what tropes it’s playing with and what sources it’s drawing from, so it tries to leave you plenty of bread crumbs.

This brings me to one of the most quietly extraordinary moments in the show. Here’s what you need to know to appreciate it. One of the recurring images in the show is that of the dragon. People are constantly mentioning dragons. Peter and Roman have themselves a little fake Order of the Dragon. Dr. Chasseur belongs to the real Order of the Dragon. Roman’s mother tells him that he is a dragon. Okay, then, so we join Dr. Norman Godfrey, who has just learned that Lod, LLC wants to buy his share in the family biotech business. And he’s researching the company on the internet. He clicks on the Wikipedia entry for the city of Lod and scrolls down only as far as the section titled “The Arab Period.” If there’s anything relevant to the viewer on that page, it’s not really easy to tell on the TV screen.

But, if you watch TV with another screen within reach, it’s easy enough to call up Wikipedia’s entry on Lod and read, “In the sixth century the city was renamed Georgiopolis after St. George, a soldier in the guard of the emperor Diocletian, who was born there between 256 and 285 AD. Church of St. George is named for him.” St. George is most well-known for fighting a dragon. And, in “The Arab Period” section, we learn that there’s a legend that Christ will slay the Antichrist at the gates of the church of St. George, in that city.

So, even before we know for certain that Lod, LLC is tied to the Church, anyone who read the Wikipedia entry he or she saw Dr. Godfrey looking at would have a hint that that’s what’s coming, as well as a hint that the Order of the Dragon, and thus Dr. Chasseur, are tied to Lod, LLC.

Usually shows try to keep your eyes on the screen. I can’t think of another show where viewers are rewarded for jumping to the internet to see exactly what a character is looking at. And I thought it was really cool. I felt like I was watching a show that’s not just comfortable with how people watch TV these days (usually with one eye on the computer or on the smartphone), but exploited that knowledge for their viewers’ pleasure.

But then, that leads me to the one outside reference that’s not heavily telegraphed. Peter and Roman spend a not-insubstantial amount of time saying “shee-it” to each other. They stand around saying “shee-it” to each other like we’re just not seeing the parts of their lives where they sit on a couch together watching and rewatching The Wire for hours at a time.  And certainly no one who hasn’t seen The Wire is going to know where it comes from, but no one who has seen The Wire is going to mistake it as a reference to anything else.

I both think it makes no sense (We’re supposed to believe they are such huge a show that went off the air when they were, at most, twelve?), and think it’s a lovely bit of characterization. Why are these two guys drawn together? In some ways, you know they’re drawn together solely because wouldn’t Twilight be interesting if Jacob and Edward mostly ignored Bella and tried to solve crimes together in Bon Temps? (I would be willing to lay money that this was the elevator pitch for the show.) But I like to think that just as Hemlock Grove assumes we’re all busy checking Wikipedia, quoting our favorite shows to each other, and jumping out of our chairs at the sight of obscure references, its characters are too. Hemlock Grove‘s understanding of the way we watch television now isn’t just designed to enhance our viewing experience at home. It’s a means of making us relate to the characters as well.

kgoldschmitt:

Traffic Enforcement Chess. Hope the ticket was worth it!

I spent about 10 minutes this morning jumping down the “Know Your Meme” rabbit-hole…

The latest Dove advertising campaign, “Real Beauty Sketches,” has already garnered its share of well-deserved criticism: That “Dove is owned by Unilever – the same company that owns Axe, king of misogynistic ads.” That “the real take-away is still that women should care whether a stranger thinks she is beautiful.” That the women in the ads don’t look like the women one sees “on the subway, at highway rest stops, in suburban malls.” That the “main participants” are mostly Caucasian, blonde, thin, and young. Etc.

All that is true. But my interest in the ad is pedagogical. For me it is the perfect illustration of what I call the “bent-stick theory of ideology.”

This is the view that ideology is like wearing glasses that distort the world. All we need to do is apply the correcting lens of critique and we will be able to see the world as it really is. Calibrated correctly, our anti-ideological lenses will enable us to see the straight stick we know is there, not the bent stick distorted by the water. Or at least, like a hunter fishing in a stream, we will know where the stick really should be even if we can never truly rid ourselves of the distorting effects of ideology.

In the case of the Dove ads, this is illustrated by the women’s confrontation of the sketches showing them how they see themselves compared with how their friends see them.

Since the picture on the right more closely fits with what the audience sees, the message is clear: the image on the left is a distorted image caused by low self-esteem. These women will need help from their friends and loved-ones to better see themselves as they really are: beautiful.

That Dove wants you to associate their product with this demystification is besides the point. They are like Penn and Teller, magicians who have made a career of dazzling audiences with magic even as they reveal their secrets.

Like Penn and Teller, Dove are doing advertising with clear plastic cups. They are still selling beauty, but they are doing so by associating their product with the “real,” “undistorted,” “inner-beauty” that our friends and lovers see in us but which we ourselves cannot see. Dove isn’t hiding anything from us, so revealing that they are still in the business of selling beauty products doesn’t really get us any closer to understanding the distorted self-images we see from these women’s self-descriptions.

In my discussion of David Graeber’s Debt I wrote:

Marxist ideology is not some kind of “false consciousness” which is simply imposed upon people by the media, it is the product of their lived experience within market based societies. Markets make us see the world in a certain way because markets involve us in certain forms of social action that lend themselves to see the world in a market-oriented way.

I would like to make the same argument for these women. A recent study of attitudes towards female politicians found that any mention of a female candidate’s appearance “whether those mentions are flattering, unflattering, or neutral — has a negative impact on her electability.”

Why might that be? One explanation might come from Bourdieu, who would talk of beauty as a kind of game.  Just mentioning how a politicians look (as Obama did with Attorney General Kamala Harris)  takes them off the political stage and places them on the stage of a beauty pageant.

The critiques of the Dove ad I linked to above all made this point in the sense that they understand that the ad ultimately reinforces the importance of “beauty.” What I want to add to this discussion is to point out that a distorted self-image is a manifestation of misrecognition, not of false-consciousness. What is the difference? False-consciousness would imply that these women are simply deluded as a result of watching too many advertisements (presumably those advertisements made by Dove’s competitors). Misrecognition, on the other hand, is an accurate assessment of the beauty game (even if it mistakenly blames the individual for their inability to win the game). When lined up next to a dozen other women on the beauty pageant stage, the fact that their chin is too pointy or their brow too wide suddenly matters. Our society puts women in that lineup every day, whether or not they wish to be there. What is wrong with the Dove ad isn’t that it is selling beauty, but that it depoliticizing and psychologizing sociological critique in order to do so.

La Révolution française en chansons - Révolution Française:

Gold mine!

kgoldschmitt:

irretrievablynerdy:

absurdlakefront:

Watch the moment Uruguay’s legislature voted for marriage equality this last Wednesday.

I love the drag queen at :36.

That picture is priceless.

Pictures speak louder than words…

By Dome in Karlsruhe, Germany (http://www.domeone.de).