Sophianotloren

Originally posted 2015-05-24 19:26:49. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

brazil xposed source: droolingfemme.

• Two of Britain’s top creatives have teamed up to make one of the most extravagant erotic brand films ever — a frenetic two-and-a-half-minute film for London adult retailer Coco de Mer.
  Ad of the Day: Adult Retailer Makes Probably the Craziest X-Rated Ad Yet (AdWeek)

• This Friday the news hit that 3.5 million personally identifiable records were leaked from systems belonging to the adult oriented website, AdultFriendFinder. The really interesting part wasn’t so much the tenting of fingers and overly ravenous bystanders but, more so the number of people cringing behind their monitors across the vast expanses of the Internet.
  The human cost of the Adult Friend Finder data breach (CSOnline)
  See also: Adult Friend Finder confirms data breach 3.5 million records exposed (CSOnline)

• What you won’t find [on PornHub], despite the fact that in book form it has sold over 100 million copies and as a film has made more than $500 million, is contract porn. But now, with its release on DVD, Fifty Shades of Grey — maybe the only movie ever made that’s understood the appeal of a woman looking at a man across 12 inches of hard-wood conference table and murmuring “no anal fisting” — puts contract in the light it deserves (glowing, above the Apple logo). It’s not so much that with Fifty Shades, porn has gone mainstream; it’s that with Fifty Shades the mainstream has been revealed as porn.
  50 Shades of Libertarian Love (The Los Angeles Review of Books)

• In 2006, Oprah Winfrey cancelled an appearance on her show by Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, the parents whose 15 children had made them famous not just to fellow evangelical Christians but to the secular world as well. Only now is Discovery beginning to acknowledge the likelihood that eldest son Josh Duggar molested all but one of his five younger sisters.
  The Web Has Known About Josh Duggar for Years. When Did TLC Find Out? (Defamer)

• Sex and robots: The concept of AI—specifically of the foxy, sexualized persuasion—has permeated pop culture for a very long time, most recently exemplified with Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. And should these AI rise up, what kind of role would sexuality and sexual identity play in their existence—if at all? Hopes&Fears corralled a group of varied experts to weigh in through a group panel discussion to see what the future holds for us, the AI… and our respective crotch parts.
  Artificial Sexuality: a roundtable discussion on screwing robots (Hopes and Fears)

• Federal agents arrested a State Department employee flying out of Atlanta this week and charged him with running a massive, repulsive “sextortion” racket using U.S. State Department computer access. He stole sexually explicit photos of young women from their Internet accounts, threatened to release personal information on them and their families (or cause them to lose their jobs), and then blackmailed them for more sexual photos and videos. He phished, hacked and terrorized hundreds of women with the aid of his government computer access.
  State dept. worker accused of ‘sextortion’ has hearing in Atlanta (AJC)

• Simone Steenberg and Lolo Bates, both photographers studying at the London College of Fashion will be curating a fashion photography show, called Pink Pistols, at Doomed Gallery in Dalston London opening June 18th 2015, about celebrating and exploring the female body and showing unconventional fashion photography.
  “Pink Pistols” A fashion photography show celebrating and exploring the female body (C-Heads Magazine)

• “The mainstream video game industry, replete as it is with violence simulators and power fantasies, is a shrinking violet when it comes to honestly portraying intercourse. Sex [in video games] is treated like a Fabergé egg, a delicate treasure with incalculable value but no other purpose than to look nice on a shelf and point out to friends. In the God of War series, sex is a reward mechanic that churns out points in exchange for quickly mashing buttons. But you never see the sex, you just hear it!”
  Let’s Talk About Sex (in Video Games), Baby (The Mary Sue)

• It’s the yearly article where someone discovers the used panty trade and tries to make the topic seem… not used.
  Inside the Thriving Online Market for Women’s Dirty Underwear (VICE)

• “In real life, almost every article about sex dolls (a term I’m using interchangeably here with “love doll,” even though not everyone who owns such a doll does so for sexual purposes) has stated that the market for such dolls is almost entirely male—but not entirely.”
  The Human Side of Sex Dolls (LadySmut)

• Ever wonder what it’s like to see a penis ejaculate into your face while dressed to the nines in the South of France? Well then Gaspar Noe’s Love might be for you. Despite several instances of tastefully lit fellatio, and a 3D image of a large penis’s sperm cascading towards the audience, Gaspar Noé’s Love proved to be the dumbest movie screened so far at Cannes — as well as the most soporific.
  Cannes’s 3D Porn: High Heels, Tuxedoes, and Midnight Money Shot (Daily Beast)

• Controversial op-ed: “To paraphrase Janet Mock: Trans people aren’t ‘passing’ as men or women. We’re being. Out of all the words in the transgender lexicon, “passing” is the one I hate most. And that’s no small feat.”
  Op-ed: I’m a Trans Man Who Doesn’t ‘Pass’ — And You Shouldn’t Either (Advocate)

• A first-person essay about male bisexuality.
  Learning to Embrace Sexuality’s Gray Areas (NYT)

• They were supposed to be enforcing the law. Instead, the FBI alleges, a pair of rogue FBI agents ran a sex-for-hire stable, staffed with illegal talent. One DEA source told The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity that the incident is a slap in the face for the agency.
  DEA Agents Ran Jersey’s Sleaziest Strip Club (Daily Beast)

The post Sunday Sex Reads: AdultFriendFinder breach, Ex Machina, libertarian porn appeared first on Violet Blue ® :: Open Source Sex - Journalist and author Violet Blue's site for sex and tech culture, accurate sex information, erotica and more..

Sabrina Ratté’s Flower, courtesy Art F City’s GIF of the Day (via artfcity.com)

This week, France’s faux prehistoric cave, Palmyra’s importance, does color exist, dangers of selfie sticks, and more.

 The world’s eyes are focused on the ancient city of Palmyra in the Syrian desert, which was overtaken by ISIS fighters this week. As worries increase that the fundamentalist members of ISIS will destroy the ruins, a number of interesting articles about the historical site have been published, including “5 reasons why Palmyra’s ruins are so important” by Carolina Miranda:

“Visually and architecturally, there are very few sites in the Roman world that have this much architecture in tact,” says Mulder, who lived in Syria for 12 years. “Palmyra has been out there in the middle of the desert and hasn’t been subjected to intense urbanization. It puts Rome to shame … That’s what makes it so amazing. You can essentially walk into a 2,000-year-old city.”

“The Romans really built on a scale in the Eastern provinces that was unprecedented anywhere in the Empire,” she adds. “In archeology, there is only one other place that takes my breath away in the approach, and that’s probably [the ancient city of] Baalbek, in Lebanon.”

And “The Ironies of ISIS at Palmyra: What would Zenobia Say?” by Michael Collins Dunn:

There is an irony in the Islamic State’s latest conquest: that a movement not known for its respect for women finds itself in possession of a site associated with one of the strongest female figures of antiquity. Second in fame only to Cleopatra (but unlike her, not in the shadow of a Caesar or an Antony), Queen Zenobia of Palmyra challenged Rome, ruled both the Levant and Egypt until he Emperor Aurelian brought her to heel.

 The US Ninth District Court ruled that there’s no copyright for an individual performance in a much bigger production, according to Clancco:

This week, the full panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found in Google vs. Garcia that an actress portrayed in the film Innocence of Muslims, Cindy Lee Garcia, did not hold copyright in her performance. The 2012 film, which led to protests and attacks in several Islamic countries because of its insulting content, included a dubbed over version of five seconds of a performance Garcia gave in response to a casting call for a different film, an action-thriller titled Desert Warrior. Last year, a three-judge panel of the 9th circuit issued a preliminary injunction which required YouTube and Google to take down any version of the Innocence of Muslims which included her performance, based on a finding that Garcia would likely prevail on her claim that her performance was independently copyrightable. The full panel has now reversed that holding, and YouTube can post the film.

 France spent $75 million rebuilding a prehistoric cave for tourists:

It was the official public opening of the Caverne du Pont d’Arc, one of France’s most-hyped tourist attractions, a $75-million “mini-me” replica of a real cavern whose contents upon their discovery two decades ago were hailed as “the Sistine Chapel of the prehistoric world.” The replication project spanned almost eight years from conception to completion. And this day, groups would be entering its gloom with guides every four to six minutes, the intention being to pump 4,000 visitors through its twisty topography by closing time that evening.

… The Caverne is, in fact, entirely man-made, housed not in the ground but in a climate-controlled, circular building, clad in thrusting, angular mortar forms and plunked atop a pine-forested hill like a faux paleolithic Parthenon.

… Another drawback is the Caverne’s relative compactness. The overall site, spanning 28 hectares, encompasses numerous interpretive zones, a restaurant, gift shop, temporary exhibition spaces plus an impressive cinema/gallery depicting the human life, flora and fauna of the prehistoric Ardèche. The cave simulation, however, is barely 40 per cent of the area of the original’s 9,000 square metres. Such compression no doubt eliminates the “boring bits” of the original but, like a Reader’s Digest condensation, it’s at the expense of much of the sense of drama.

 The 1,500-year history of the Hagia Sophia’s transformation from a church to a mosque to a museum:

During the time of the Byzantine Empire, all ceremonies and religious meetings were held in Hagia Sophia. Its dome had collapsed several times throughout history and was later rebuilt with lighter material. It became renowned considering that it was the biggest dome in the world. Those who saw this brilliant place of worship, which had a mighty lighting and acoustics, could not hide their astonishment. The Russian delegates who visited Hagia Sophia in the 11th century said they felt like they were in the sky.

Though there’s a weird non-historical tidbit thrown in that was noticed by @HG_Masters (bold mine):

When the Turks besieged Istanbul, the Byzantine people took shelter in Hagia Sophia, which had lost all of its previous glory. They prayed and waited for a miracle from The Virgin Mary, the patroness of the Istanbul. However the Holy Virgin was on the Turks’ side.

 Malcolm Harris asks, “does color exist?“:

Color perception is an ancient and active philosophical problem. It’s an instance of the wider category of sensory perception, but since the color spectrum fits on a single line (unlike, say, touch and taste), it has always been of particular interest. In her new book Outside Color, University of Pittsburgh professor M. Chirimuuta gives a serendipitously timed history of the puzzle of color in philosophy. To read the book as a layman feels like being let in on a shocking secret: Neither scientists nor philosophers know for sure what color is.

 Graphic journalist Dan Archer recently spoke with several community members in Baltimore about the unrest there since Freddie Gray’s death:

 “Texts From Hieronymus Bosch” by The Toast’s Mallory Ortberg:

what do you think heaven looks like
oh
i don’t know
peaceful, and green, and –
do you think dozens of terrified nudes have to flee inside of an egg to escape the fanged mermaids 
i
i’d have to check with a theologian
but i don’t think so

 This is a Pizza Hut ad, but the absurdity of its commentary on selfie sticks is funny enough to post here:

 Four types of opinion pieces Adam Gopnik won’t read:

1. Any piece about a sudden new national crisis of confidence, our precipitously plunging morale, or America finding itself at a unique crossroads.
2. Any piece about how all of France has adopted some custom or cultural more of ours or that urges all of us to adopt some French custom or cultural more.
3. Any piece assigning credit for something to the person or politician who happened to be around to get the credit, while missing the reality that it was an earlier politician or administration who actually did it.
4. Any piece arguing that a momentarily popular movie or television series completely explains—or, worse, has inspired—a new or current political trend.

 “Things We Heard in Line for The Obliteration Room” by Rebecca Bates:

Woman: “Did you see that selfie show?”
Man: “I was with you when you went.”
Woman: “No… The other selfie show.”
Man: “Was that selfie exhibit also by—”
Woman: “The OTHER selfie exhibit!”

 LOL:

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

Wow.

John Forbes Nash Jr., the Princeton University mathematician whose life story was the subject of the film “A Beautiful Mind,” and his wife of nearly 60 years died Saturday in a taxi crash on the New Jersey Turnpike, police said.

Nash was 86. Alicia Nash was 82. The couple lived in Princeton Junction.

The Nashes were in a taxi traveling southbound in the left lane of the New Jersey Turnpike, State Police Sgt. Gregory Williams said. The driver of the Ford Crown Victoria lost control as he tried to pass a Chrysler in the center lane, crashing into a guard rail.

Elizabeth Cotten had an unlikely musical career. As a left-handed young girl she taught herself to play her brother’s banjo. Then she bought a guitar from Sears Roebuck at 11 and proceeded to play it Jimi Hendrix-style, upside-down. After getting married at 17 she basically gave up playing guitar for 25 years, except for occasional church performances. Quite at random, she was hired as a maid by part of the Seeger family—working for Pete Seeger’s dad and the children of his second wife. She picked up the guitar again, and blew everybody’s mind. Mike Seeger (Pete’s half-brother) started recording her and the sessions were made into an album from Folkways Records—Folksongs and Instrumentals with Guitar. Her signature tune “Freight Train” became hugely popular among the folk musicians of the revival of the late 50s/early 60s, being covered by Joan Baez and Bob Dylan among many others.

She started to tour and perform with big names, released another influential record in 1967, Shake Sugaree, and kept touring and playing till the end of her life (January 5, 1895 – June 29, 1987). Her unusual picking style was greatly admired, because it’s totally awesome! People have worked out alternate ways to play the songs that don’t involve playing the guitar upside down and backwards. (John spent two weeks learning “Freight Train” when we were on Martha’s Vineyard last year, causing our children to, in extremis, institute a strict “no Freight Train” policy. Happily, though, now it reminds us of my aunt’s house and all being together with my siblings and cousins, and beach plums, and the creek with its perfect flat wet stones, and the cold Atlantic, so grey.) Her music is distinctive because of the bass lines—the strings sounding the lowest notes were at the bottom of the guitar and so she picks out distinctive tunes on them. The highest string being on top, she sometimes treats the guitar like a banjo—since that’s where the high-pitched drone string is. I just learned reading the wikipedia article that she wrote “Freight Train” at 11!

Her voice is wonderful, but many of her best songs are instrumental only:

I’m having trouble choosing here, “In The Sweet By and By” is beautiful…some songs are painfully short, like “Mama, There’s Nobody Here But The Baby” or “Ain’t Got No Honey Baby Now.” [Which I can’t find a working video of :/ ] 56 seconds? NO. Although Harry Taussig plays a killer version on steel guitar. I’ll close with the topical “Take Me Back to Baltimore.”

My dad is an incredible guitarist, and plays steel 12-string bottle-neck slide, though he removes the second string from the highest two strings, making it 10-string. He also picks in this style—and we are big fans of Ry Cooder who is a master at it. When I was a kid we always had music playing. My godfather played the fiddle and we had plenty of other random musicians at parties, which, in South Carolina through to the late 70s were always two- or three-day affairs. We had a whole crew of Hell’s Angels camped out in the back yard one time. My brother and I would sing, folk songs like “Froggy Went a-Courting.” That’s happiness for me, standing on the front porch catching lizards on the screen, listening to live music and the leathery sounds of the palmetto pushed by the wind, live oaks tossing their heads and their festoons of Spanish moss, my feet slowly blackening with the super-fine dust of mildew that settles inevitably on the grey floor of any screen porch, the sky and the hydrangeas planted around the base of the house and the screen porch ceiling all alike powder-blue, the smell of salt water and marsh and endless joints burning mingled into a perfect sweetness. High tide. Got to be high tide at 2 p.m. with a summer thunderstorm blowing up far across the river. Not low tide and with all hanging breathless and hot, and the mud flats on the sandbar across the river stinking in the sun. Eating cold boiled peanuts and watermelon and drinking sweet tea. Perfect. Except now I’m homesick!

Let’s say you care about the exploitation of nail salon workers. Rather than just decide to change your habits and not get your nails done or do them yourself, which does nothing to alleviate the workers’ plight, what can you do. Let me direct you to two similar statements. First, our own valued commenter Karen24:

1. Don’t use acrylic nails. Most of the health problems have been traced to the really nasty chemicals in fake nails, especially the particulates. So, just don’t.

2. Don’t go to the super cheap salons. Here in Texas, $15 is about the minimum for a manicure and $25 for a pedicure. Anything below those numbers should be suspicious.

3. Look around the place first. Does it look clean? Is there an overwhelming chemical smell? Most states — except apparently New York — require salons to be ventilated. Complain to the state board if the place is stifling. Cleanliness is a matter of customer safety, but also indicates that the salon owner is invested in keeping the place open and cares enough to follow cleaning rules. A clean salon is also an indication that the owner is hiring experienced and licensed operators. Having a license is no guarantee that the worker isn’t being exploited, but it does mean she has completed the state requirements and can get a job someplace else pretty easily. (One of the problems with the New York system is its use of apprentices, who have to work at one salon until they complete enough hours to qualify for an individual license, meaning the operator can’t leave without losing all her accumulated hours.)

4. Notice the names of the operators and notice whether the same ones are at the salon over a period of time. High turnover usually indicates that the salon owner is doing something wrong.

5. Be aware of your state’s regulatory bodies and file complaints if anything looks off. I’m not aware of any state that doesn’t have a labor board or agency regulating cosmetology, and all of ‘em should have a website that instructs consumers how to file complaints. (New York’s is terrible; but it does exist.) Note that in most states the labor board and regulatory authority are different agencies. File a complaint if anything looks like a problem. There is of course no guarantee that your complaint will lead to anything, but it is absolutely certain that nothing will happen if you don’t complain. Texas at least accepts anonymous complaints and will investigate them.

6. Tip generously, in cash.

Personal grooming is a delight, and the democratization of little luxuries like mani/ pedis is a genuine achievement. We can, with little effort, make sure that the people who provide these luxuries get to enjoy them as well.

Second, Liza Featherstone:

Support workers’ groups. For example, Woodside-based Adhikaar organizes in Nepali-speaking communities and has been educating workers and consumers on health and safety problems faced by nail aestheticians. The group presses for policy changes on its own and as part of the NY Healthy Nail Salons Coalition. Adhikaar’s website explains how to donate or volunteer — its fundraising gala is on June 4, so there is plenty to do.

Pressure politicians. Contact your City Council representative and ask her (or him) to support a bill introduced earlier this month by Public Advocate Letitia James to improve the health and safety working conditions of nail salon employees.

Contact Cuomo’s office, too, and praise him for responding so quickly, but pressure him to do more than create a task force. Adhikaar and the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health are calling on the governor to increase the number of health and safety inspectors dedicated to this industry.

Demand nontoxic salon products. If your neighborhood salon won’t switch to nontoxic polish and remover, take your business to any number of organic, toxin-free salons around the city.

Tip big! Adhikaar advises at least 20%, but remember that tip theft is also common. Tip in cash and directly into the hands of the person who helped you, so the boss won’t steal it.

And, don’t forget that this isn’t the only exploitive industry in our fair city.

Of course, Featherstone’s advice is largely New York based, but the principles are universal. Engaging in any of these actions will play a small role in improving the lives of workers, certainly much more so than withdrawal. Each of us can only do a little bit, with a few exceptions who can do more, but collectively we all matter if we are aiming for the same or similar goals. This is what consumer support of workers’ movements is about.

Hiiiii

madeleinerosca:

Guitar Lessons with the Doof Warrior.

Swiped from www.funnyordie.com

 
When streaming players boast about their huge numbers of channels, I’m generally even less impressed than I am by the “wealth” of offerings on the grossly overpriced wasteland that is cable TV. I have absolutely no use for thousands of impossibly granular channels like The Christian Comedy Channel, Firewood Hoarders, NRA Women,...

The Green Berets (1968)

Screen: 'Green Berets' as Viewed by John Wayne:War Movie Arrives at the Warner Theater

By RENATA ADLER

Published: June 20, 1968

"THE GREEN BERETS" is a film so unspeakable, so stupid, so rotten and false in every detail that it passes through being fun, through being funny, through being camp, through everything and becomes an invitation to grieve, not for our soldiers or for Vietnam (the film could not be more false or do a greater disservice to either of them) but for what has happened to the fantasy-making apparatus in this country. Simplicities of the right, simplicities of the left, but this one is beyond the possible. It is vile and insane. On top of that, it is dull.

The film, directed by John Wayne and nominally based on a novel by Robin Moore, has no hero. It is vaguely about some Green Berets, led by John Wayne, trying to persuade Wayne's idea of a liberal journalist (David Janssen) that this war is a fine thing for Vietnam and for America. The movie has human props taken from every war film ever made: a parachute jump; an idea of Vietcong soldiers, in luxury, uniform, champagne and caviar, apparently based on the German high command; a little Asian orphan named Hamchunk, pronounced Hamchuck but more like Upchuck than anything; battle scenes somewhere between "The Red Badge of Courage" and "The Dirty Dozen"; a pathetically dying dog.

There is inadvertent humor: "He's dying," a Negro medic says, thoughtfully spooning Jim Beam bourbon down the throat of an elderly Oriental. "Poor old thing can't even keep his rice down any more." What is clearly an Indian extra in a loincloth somehow straggles in among the montagnards. A Vietcong general is dragged from a bed of sin (which, through an indescribable inanity of the plot, the Green Berets have contrived for him) with his trousers on. He is subsequently drugged and yanked off into the sky on a string dangling from a helicopter. A Green Beret points out to the journalist some American-made punji sticks (the movie is obsessed with punji sticks): "Yup," the Green Beret says, "it's a little trick we learned from Charlie. But we don't dip them in the same stuff he does."

What the movie is into is another thing entirely. What is sick, what is an outrage and a travesty is that while it is meant to be an argument against war opposition—while it keeps reiterating its own line at every step, much as soap operas keep recapitulating their plots—it seems so totally impervious to any of the questions that it raises. It is so full of its own caricature of patriotism that it cannot even find the right things to falsify. No acting, no direction, no writing, no authenticity, of course. But it is worse. It is completely incommunicado, out of touch. It trips something that would outrage any human sensibility, like mines, at every step and staggers on.

The first Green Beret comes on speaking German, to show his versatility in languages. When the VC have just been sprayed with flames, a Green Beret is asked about his apparent affinity for this kind of thing. "When I was a kid," he says modestly, "my dad gave me a chemistry set. And it got bigger than both of us." When the VC, nonetheless, win the Special Forces camp in hand-to-hand combat, a soldier calls in air support. "It'll only take a minute," he says, like a dentist, as the VC are mowed down from the air. The journalist, "the former skeptic about the war," the press kit synopsis chooses to say at this point, "leaves to write about the heroic exploits of the American and South Vietnamese forces."

The point is that Wayne is using spoken German, lunatic chemistry sets, machine killing of men who have won fairly hand-to-hand, without apparently noticing that this is not exactly the stuff of which heroic fantasies are made. This is crazy. If the left-wing extremist's nightmare of what we already are has become the right-wing extremist's ideal of what we ought to be we are in steeper trouble than anyone could have imagined.

Hovertext: WHY DOES EVERYONE LIKE RABBITS?! GUYS!

 I'll be taking questions on Twitter today!

The worst kind of liberalism is responding to a story of oppression by deciding to do your own nails instead of going to a nail salon so you as a consumer can feel guilt-free. Never mind that such an action actually takes money out of a worker’s pocket. It’s not about changing the system or placing pressure on the state to intervene. Nope, this can be solved by me taking care of myself. Now that’s activism!

Obama’s Twitter Debut, @POTUS, Attracts Hate-Filled Posts

When President Obama sent his inaugural Twitter post from the Oval Office on Monday, the White House heralded the event with fanfare, posting a photograph of him perched on his desk tapping out his message on an iPhone.

The @POTUS account — named for the in-house acronym derived from “President of the United States” — would “serve as a new way for President Obama to engage directly with the American people, with tweets coming exclusively from him,” a White House aide wrote that day.

But it took only a few minutes for Mr. Obama’s account to attract racist, hate-filled posts and replies. They addressed him with racial slurs and called him a monkey. One had an image of the president with his neck in a noose.

The posts reflected the racial hostility toward the nation’s first black president that has long been expressed in stark terms on the Internet, where conspiracy theories thrive and prejudices find ready outlets. But the racist Twitter posts are different because now that Mr. Obama has his own account, the slurs are addressed directly to him, for all to see.

Within minutes of Mr. Obama’s first, cheerful post — “Hello, Twitter! It’s Barack. Really!” it began — Twitter users lashed out in sometimes profanity-laced replies that included exhortations for the president to kill himself and worse.

One person posted a doctored image of Mr. Obama’s famous campaign poster, instead showing the president with his head in a noose, his eyes closed and his neck appearing broken as if he had been lynched. Instead of the word “HOPE” in capital letters as it appeared on the campaign poster, the doctored image had the words “ROPE.”

The accompanying message said “#arrestobama #treason we need ‘ROPE FOR CHANGE.’ ” It was addressed to @POTUS by a user calling himself @jeffgully49, who has posted other images of Mr. Obama in a noose, and whose Twitter profile picture shows Mr. Obama behind bars. “We still hang for treason, don’t we?” his post said.

The writer, Jeff Gullickson of Minneapolis, subsequently posted on Thursday that his reply to Mr. Obama had earned him a visit from the Secret Service at home. Reached for comment, Mr. Gullickson responded by asking in an email how much The New York Times would pay him for an interview.

...

How could the nation have survived such a horrible outcome?

It’s a good thing for pop music, honky-tonk feminism, and Canadian tax collectors that McDonald’s pays lousy wages. If the food stores paid their frontline workers enough to survive on, Shania Twain would still be working there, a shareholder claimed at the company’s annual meeting this week.

The unidentified man, who said he’d been a McDonald’s investor since 1990 according to BuzzFeed News, used a Q&A session to rattle off a list of successful celebrities like Twain, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Hollywood star Sharon Stone who had worked in a McDonald’s earlier in their lives. “I’m sure if they were making $15 an hour, they’d still be working at McDonald’s,” he said, as thousands of current McDonald’s workers protested outside.

No Shania Twain? Where would horrible country radio have been in the late 90s without her? Nashville would have had to find some other cookie cutter to sing vapid songs that make a mockery of a once great tradition of music (and one that is still great on the margins).

God, we should force McDonald’s to raise its wages to $15 just to prevent future Shania Twains from reaching country music stardom.

Last month, after seven years, I resigned from my job teaching high school English.

When I started teaching, I imagined I was going to be like Mr. Keating. Except a woman. Academic, iconoclastic, warm, challenging. I’d wear glasses and corduroy and teach only in the autumn, bathed in yellow light. My memory of Dead Poets Society, a movie I’d watched almost every weekend for most of tenth grade, was murky and romanticized enough that I’d managed to remember only the atmosphere and had completely forgotten key plot points. Like the suicide of one of Mr. Keating’s students, Neil.

At the school where I worked my first year teaching, the film appeared in the sophomore curriculum as a study of Romanticism and Realism in a unit about coming-of-age. I eagerly anticipated screening the film for my class, remembering how it had made me feel an intense but vague love of literature and academia. As we watched it together, though, I noticed other things that had escaped my fifteen-year-old self’s attention.

In the first exchange he has with his students, Mr. Keating grants them students permission to compare him to Abraham Lincoln. “You can either call me Mr. Keating, or, if you’re slightly more daring, ‘O Captain My Captain’,” he tells the boys on their first day, conducting class in a hallway surrounded by photographs of long-dead Welton alumni. Later, Neil comes to Mr. Keating’s faculty dorm suite seeking advice for how to deal with his father’s rigid expectations and cold demands that he give up acting and become a doctor. Neil asks about the framed photograph of a beautiful woman Mr. Keating has displayed. Mr. Keating explains that he can’t be with this woman, the love of his life. She is in London and he cannot leave Welton. Watching this scene as an adult, a teacher myself, the obvious question was, Could he not teach English in London? It’s hard to imagine a career more geographically flexible than teaching high school English. While Mr. Keating encourages his students to seize the day, he lives in his high school dorm, mythologizing the teacher he’s become.

After Neil’s suicide, the school administration convinces some of the boys in Mr. Keating’s class to come forward about the ways in which their teacher is responsible for Neil’s suicide and other dangerous and rebellious behavior recently observed on campus. Hoping to appear to have addressed the cause of Neil’s death swiftly and harshly, the administration forces Mr. Keating to resign in disgrace. As he is escorted from the classroom, his students stand on their desks, saluting him as “Captain” one final time. Even students who didn’t seem to be in his inner-circle, who never read poetry at night in the woodland cave or attended Neil’s theatrical debut as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream stand. Those few who remain seated are the boys we’ve been primed to disdain (the priggish, rule-loving conformist Cameron, for example, is the student who proudly cooperates with the administration, blaming Keating to escape censure himself).

As a student I took the standing-on-the-desks scene to be a sign of the boys’ rebelliousness. Something Holden Caulfield, another of my adolescent heroes, would have done. Yet, when I showed the movie to my own students, I thought: phonies coming in the goddamn window!

I can’t decide which interpretation Peter Weir intended. The heavy-handed allusions to various Romantic poets make Whitman’s poem the likely key. If Keating is Lincoln, he’s emancipated the boys from a life of servitude (he even tells Neil “you are not an indentured servant!”—a line that I loved so much in high school that I wrote it down and hung it on my wall, despite the fact that neither my parents nor my teachers had done anything to make me feel remotely indentured to them) and the cost is his own life. The boys, like the speaker of “O Captain My Captain,” stand to salute their fallen hero. Like servicemen, in uniform. Are we supposed to glean something megalomanical about Keating’s cultivation, like the much more overtly nefarious Jean Brodie, of a set of student admirers? Or are we meant to take Neil’s death and Keating’s dismissal as casualties of The System and the boys’ standing salute as a sign that despite the death and the dismissal, Keating has changed lives and leaves a legacy of day-seizing boys in his wake?

On March 31, 2015, the New York State Legislature voted to approve a new education budget that would tie a teacher’s evaluation even more closely to standardized test scores. Much has already been written about the problems with highly incentivized standardized tests, not the least of which involve the impossibility of fairly comparing a teacher of an AP class in a wealthy suburban district to a teacher of struggling students in a high school without adequate resources. Even in my own wealthy, safe, high-achieving district, the ways in which tying teacher evaluations to standardized test scores changes the nature of teaching were both clear and alarming.

What I found even more horrifying, though perhaps not surprising, was the rhetoric around these changes. New York State Assemblywoman Carmen Arroyo defended her vote in support of the bill, saying:

Those teachers that are responsible and are doing their job, those teachers that sacrifice their families and themselves for the children they serve are going to be protected. Those that are not good, better get a job at McDonalds.

To be a good teacher is to sacrifice one’s family and one’s self? About what other professions would this claim be made? Perhaps a soldier? Or the President of the United States? Would anyone say this about her lawyer? Her dentist? Her accountant? Her state assemblywoman? Teaching is important, no doubt, and in some wonderful cases, a teacher can be the catalyst for significant and meaningful change in a student’s life. I did have such a teacher, and it was because of him that I began to see writing and reading as central to my identity, that I went to the college I did, studied literature there, and eventually became a teacher myself. But to say that the path to “being responsible” and merely “doing [one’s] job” is to sacrifice self and family is absurd.

The Mr. Keatings and LouAnne Johnsons (the teacher played by Michelle Pfieffer in Dangerous Minds) and Mr. Hollands (the music teacher who nearly destroys his family by connecting more deeply with his students than his deaf son in Mr. Holland’s Opus) represent the Good Teacher archetype, often presented as the only alternative to the Bad Teacher. The Bad Teacher archetype hides behind support from his union, reads the newspaper with his feet on the desk, lives for summers off, grades arbitrarily, and in some cases, lusts after his underage students.

When I’m asked about the factors that lead to my decision to leave teaching after my daughter was born (fellow teachers never ask this question, but instead offer affirmation), I’m tempted to point to external causes: the unchecked entitlement of parents, spineless administrators, paradoxically lowered standards in a move to ensure all teachers showed “demonstrable” progress with data, increasing demands of paperwork whose only purpose seemed to be covering the school in case of a lawsuit. I can tell stories, and risk growing consumed with rage over any one of these issues. They are real contributors to teacher burnout. But, for me at least, the real reason I knew so clearly that I wanted to leave teaching, while certainly connected to those external causes, is more complicated.

I’m not sure if teaching does demand the Keating-Johnson-Holland kind of sacrifice, but it’s become such a part of our way of validating teachers that parents expect it… students expect it… and it’s become the currency we trade in rather than financial compensation or professional respect or autonomy.

Yes, of course, there are some teachers who fit that other archetype: teachers who live for their summers off, burned-out veterans re-using the same lessons year after year, sloppy has-beens dependent on the support of their union and the job security tenure provides. But most teachers I know want to do their jobs well. Most like to imagine that they’ve changed at least some students’ lives, or at least made the hours spent in their classrooms more engaging. Teaching is by nature easier the better you are at it. If you can control a classroom, think on your feet, respond to questions with confidence, and create an excited and engaged environment, the day-to-day is pleasant and rewarding. Being the kind of lazy, disgruntled teacher that legislators often paint as the strawman in anti-union or pro-Common Core arguments would make the days, even minutes seem endless.

In most communities, teachers are compensated so poorly and afforded so little respect that in many cases the primary compensation is martyrdom.

The day before my wedding, I sat in a meeting with my department chair and two parents, furious over my refusal to round a borderline grade up. The student in question had “worked hard” in the sense that she was extremely motivated by grades, but was often absent on the days of major assignments and the conversations we had about her writing stalled out over and over again when she would push the paper back toward me and ask, frustrated and impatient, “what should I put in to get my grade up?”

These particular parents were known for this type of meeting. They’d been calling them at least once a year since their daughter was in middle school. Other teachers who walked past the office during my meeting with them later wrote me sympathetic notes that recalled their own such encounter.

The meeting began with a self-described “emotional plea” from the girl’s father. He told me his daughter felt bad about herself because his sister (who I also taught, and for whom my teaching and grading methods did not seem to be a problem) was doing better in school, and said he was sure I could imagine how hard that was on their family. When that did not result in a grade change, the father and mother began to speak together, building their case: I did not work hard enough. I did not spend enough time grading their daughter’s rewritten papers. I was lazy. In particular, they were outraged that I could only meet with their daughter for half an hour at a time after school. Part of the reason these parents felt I should change their daughter’s grade was although I’d managed to meet with her more than ten times one-on-one during the marking period, I had once been unable to meet with her immediately following class because I had to use the restroom.

Although I’d made a increased effort to save some of my emotional energy for myself and my family (I’m sure Assemblywoman Arroyo would be disappointed), during that school year, I was teaching five different courses, four of which I’d never taught before. My days were routinely filled with grading before dawn, rushing to school to meet with a student or two before the first bell of the day rang, teaching my classes, meeting with students during each free period, lunch, and after school until I rushed off to cross country practice, often changing behind the cart of hurdles in the storage shed to save time. I’d get home, cook dinner, do some reading for class, clean up, and fall asleep exhausted.

There was a time when I might have met these parents’ definition of a good teacher. During my first few years, I often stayed at school until seven, grading, helping students with a group project, providing emotional support or advice. I carried my stacks of papers around with me all weekend. I commented on my AP Language class’s blog before and after Sunday night family dinner. I lost sleep obsessing over struggling students, called parents, guidance counselors, school psychologists on the weekends.

Yet, none of this was selfless.

It made me feel important at a time when, single in a suburban area full of families, I felt profoundly lonely. Mattering that much was not just satisfying but thrilling. I used to say, with what I’m sure was somewhat grating earnestness, “I love my job,” all the time.

The resignation letter I wrote to my district’s HR department cites a desire to stay at home with my infant daughter. That’s both the easiest story to tell and the story that’s almost all true about why I left teaching. The other part of the story is that I would have left teaching years ago had it felt socially acceptable to just up and resign from a stable job I knew I did reasonably well and didn’t hate. Instead of leaving, I began to distance myself. I steeled myself against parent complaints and students who didn’t like me. I began to refer struggling students to the appropriate person—i.e., not me—and to make myself less and less emotionally available. Doing this made teaching slightly more sustainable, but it also made it less satisfying. I was no longer compensated with my martyrdom, with obsessive gratefulness of wounded teenagers or appreciation from parents with unreasonable expectations.

At first, this shift was an enormous relief. I even changed schools, feeling that a new start would allow me to feel more professional, less martyr-ish. That I could be removed from the young, inexperienced, desperate-to-connect teacher I’d been. Looking back now, though, I realize that the area between being professional and being burned out is grey.

I do know that now, when I watch my daughter sleep and think about how I’d do anything for her, how I’d stay up all night or cut off my arm or wade through excrement or summon the strength to rip apart a wall to get to her, I don’t feel the same kind of self-importance or thrill that I felt zooming in to check on a student at home or staying late to talk through a traumatic breakup. With Thea, this fierce love is not about me.

***

Image credits: Featured image, image #2. All other images provided by author.

Related Posts:

• Beyond the Wishes of the Genie: Remembering Robin Williams
• Studies Confirm: High School Sucks
• The New York Comics Symposium: Brendan Leach and Nick Sousanis
• Birth Story
• Growing Up: The Rumpus Interview with Michelle Tea

Today, someone whose work I am in awe of — work in curating bizarre and beautiful things in several corners of the internet (some slightly less obscure than others) — made a point of sending their followers to take a look at some of my curatorial efforts (in The Old Reader, in this case.) More than that, they called me a “good friend” — which really made my day. There’s still that cognitive dissonance when somebody “internet famous” knows who I am, before I manage to acknowledge that, actually, my name is known in a handful of places too!

Anyway, if you’re interested in finding more of me, check out the following:

https://instagram.com/sophia_not_loren
http://www.inoreader.com/u/sophianotloren
http://www.last.fm/user/SophiaNOTLoren/tracks
https://sophia-not-loren.tumblr.com