June 2007 – Page 4

The One I Feed

(I’ve been having some long conversations about the experience of eating disorders–living with them, surviving them. This post is just a few of those thoughts written down.)

I am a slave to my Netflix queue. At some point, and I’m not exactly sure what happened, a series of rules developed that I seem to be completely unable to break. The most inflexible rule is that when a movie is added to the queue, it cannot be moved. New releases are allowed to go up to the top, but everything else has to start at the bottom and work its way up to the first position.

Two examples: I rented Letters from Iwo Jima, which I thought was great, but forgot to add Flags of Our Fathers, its companion piece. Instead of putting Flags up at the top, so it could be timely, it’s down around #150 between a documentary about the Amish and the Grey Gardens series. And a year ago, I had the urge to watch the original Manhunter, the one with Brian Cox as Hannibal Lecter. It’s finally moved up to #54. Can’t juggle the Netflix queue. Can’t be done. I can’t prove this, because I won’t shuffle movies around to find out one way or another, but I think the Angel of Death will float down from blackened parted skies to smite the firstborn if I go in and put Raging Bull ahead of the second Bridget Jones movie. I’m sure everything will be fine, but what if it isn’t?

I just don’t want the responsibility, is all.

An unfortunate side effect of this is that when I reserve lesser-known indie films, by the time they arrive in my mailbox, I have no memory of renting them, why I decided to rent them, or even have the faintest idea of what they’re about. Sometimes it’s a nice surprise, like when I received Half Nelson, and sometimes not so good, like when I discovered I’d selected Man of the Year*

Last week I was sent The Bridge, and after the kids went to bed I put it in. I didn’t read the synopsis on the DVD jacket to see what it was about, or anything (this is not one of the rules, however. Although it could be. That’s exactly the kind of thing I would do to myself.) It turned out to be a documentary of the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, with lots of opening footage of fog and the views of it from around the city and shots from the ground of tiny people beetling back and forth across the walkway over the bridge. After a few minutes of this, with a narrative dryly going on about it being a tourist attraction and such, one of the tiny people, a middle aged man in a kelly green shirt, sat on the ledge, crossed himself, and slid off the rail into the water below.

I picked up the DVD jacket.

The Bridge is a documentary based on the factoid that the Golden Gate Bridge is the number one place for suicide and suicide attempts in the United States.

Filmmaker Eric Steel, inspired by an article he read in the New York Times magazine about suicides off the bridge, so for a full year he had cameras mounted on all four sides of the bridge and they filmed nonstop, replacing the film in the camera every hour. Of the 24 suicides in 2005, Steel filmed 23. 19 appear in the final cut.

In a few of the cases, when the deceased were recovered and identified, he interviewed the surviving family members. He didn’t tell either the families or the bridge officials exactly what he was doing. The officials thought he was shooting a “day in the life” project about the bridge, and while the families obviously knew they were talking about their loved ones’ suicide, they didn’t know he’d filmed their deaths and planned to show it.

The boundaries in this film, they were crossed.

His intention, which he made very clear, was to tackle the issue of suicide and the impact that it has on friends and family. He did not intend for the film to be Faces of Death 6, and it isn’t. On the contrary, in the special features section of the DVD, his camera crew is interviewed, and every one of them lunges for the opportunity to let it be known that they reported any suspicious behavior they saw to the Bridge Authorities, and stressed that they would never have just quietly filmed someone they strongly felt was going to jump. At least six people were pulled back from the bridge by authorities after receiving a tip from the crew. I have no idea whether the crew felt guilty and defensive about their part in it, but some of them sure acted like it.

One of the issues raised by the film, despite the morally dubious ground it treads, is the lack of a suicide barrier on the bridge. Until recently, Bridge authorities have cited lack of funds and aesthetics for the reasons why they have not erected a barrier. According to Bridge spokesperson Mary Currie, they have people patrolling the walkway, looking for potential jumpers. With an average of 24 suicides a year – 1 every other week – it seems woefully inadequate.

The Bridge is nothing if not compelling. Steel interviewed one of the few known survivors of a suicide attempt off the bridge. Kevin Hines, a 25-year-old with severe bipolar disorder, leaped off the bridge in September of 2000. The fall broke his back, but he lived and made a full recovery. Hines, now a counselor for suicide prevention, is a big supporter of the film, seeing it as an opportunity to address his crushing depression and his current, carefully regulated behavior that helps keep him more stable. A photographer, who was on top of the bridge shooting photos of the boats below, reached over and yanked a young woman from the rail as she was about to jump. The scene is caught by Steel’s cameras as he pulls her to safety, and sits on her chest to wait for assistance from the Bridge Patrol as she struggles and tries to bite him. In the interview, the photographer still seems dazed by what had happened.

And the scenes of suicide themselves, particularly when contrasted by the reminiscing of their families, do drive home the tragedy of it all, as well as the point that something extra needs to be done to help people in similar situations, and quickly.

Unfortunately, according to Bridge authorities, there was also a spike in the number of leaps once word about the film began to get out. Celia Kupersmith, CEO and general manager of the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District said, “I don’t think it’s just his movie,” Any sort of press coverage of this phenomenon here causes people to get ideas.”

Although I remain deeply conflicted about the movie – watching 19 suicides in 90 minutes is hands down horrific, it did raise some serious discussion about depression, effective methods of suicide prevention, and what, if any responsibility do the Golden Gate Bridge officials have to make the bridge safer.

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*Why? Why would I have done this? The mind reels. I actually accused my husband of sabotaging the Queue, although he would never do this and doesn’t even know the password. Here’s my review of the movie, real quick: It’s exactly what you’d expect it to be. Exactly, and I don’t care who you are.

P.S. – This is my last guest post. Many thanks again to Jill and piny for not saying a word while I posted about gonorrhea, boobs, suicide, John Waters teaching sex ed to today’s youth, pooping clowns, junkies painting pictures with their own blood, and pot. Happy trails, kids!

In the interests of the community.

I conducted an impromptu interview with one of those men who visit the Dyke March to take candid photographs of topless and lightly clad women who may or may not be kissing. His photographs are for historical purposes. They are definitely not for him to jerk off to–in fact, that suggestion made him rather indignant. They will be transferred to his own private archive and will not be uploaded to a website of any kind (whew!). Perhaps someday they will become a book. His goal is to record the community and its transformations over time. He has no prurient interest whatsoever. His documentary eye seems especially attracted to the bare skin of nubile lesbians only because he has a scholarly interest in tattoos and their symbology.

I Wouldn’t Want To Live Like That! Meh, On Second Thought…

“Misery can only be removed from the world by painless extermination of the miserable.”
-Gerhard Hoffman, Nazi propagandist in defense of direct medical killing of all those possessing serious medical disorders

Those first few years of having Systemic Lupus Erythematosus were pretty challenging. Before that I was just “sickly”, but knowing that it was a lot more serious than that shifted my weltanschauung entirely. I still didn’t understand how fortunate I was. Though it was the worst form of lupus, I didn’t experience any of the organ failures that are so common among people with SLE. It was bad enough for me to have significant health difficulties but none of them reached the life-threatening level. So, issues like end-of-life care and custody of my daughter weren’t much more than abstractions that most people my age are happy to put off until we’re much older.

Then along came the cancer and all of that changed. From the moment I was diagnosed, I had all of these decisions that needed to be made because the situation was life-threatening even before I knew it was there. Because my cancer is rather rare, the doctors had to consult with other physicians around the United States in order to see what could be done to give me the best achievable outcome. I would need radiation therapy right away, followed by surgery as soon as the team of doctors could be organized to do it. Even then, the likelihood of me surviving the surgery was not very good.

How do you deal with news like that? At the local cancer support center, we have a special support group for people who are terminally-ill. In those meetings we’ve talked about how each of us reacted and from those conversations it seems that people basically, deal with it like everything else. If you’re a person who is prone to go out and toss back a few stiff drinks or go to the gym and smack a punching bag around, then I suppose that’s what you’ll probably do. I don’t know if I’d say that there’s any one way that a person should react even though I think that some options are definitely better than others. You just do what you need to do to cope while your brain has time to process the next few actions that will need to take place.

Girls on the Stand

A guest-post by Scott Lemieux.

stand

For those interested in reproductive freedom, I can’t recommend Helena Silverstein’s new book Girls on the Stand strongly enough. I’ve written about Silverstein’s work before, and it’s very important. While many pro-choicers are able to talk eloquently about the importance of reproductive freedom, and its importance to women’s equality, there is much less discussion of how abortion regulation actually works. This is particularly important when it comes to regulations, like parental notification and consent statutes, that are carefully constructed by the forced pregnancy lobby to appeal to otherwise pro-choice voters.

I will have a longer essay on the book soon at my other home at The American Prospect online. But to give you a flavor of Silverstein’s work, let me quote from her 2004 article “Religious Establishment in Hearings to Waive Parental Consent for Abortion,” which details the extent to which judges force young women — contrary to several provisions of the Constitution — undergo religious counseling before obtaining a judicial bypass:

Other judges argue that to be well-informed a minor must receive counseling not only from those who work at abortion clinics, but also from those who oppose abortion. Interviews with those involved in the waiver process reveal that at least four judges in three Alabama counties condition waiver grants on the receipt of pro-life counseling from a crisis pregnancy center called Sav-A-Life. In these counties, Sav-A-Life counseling has become a routine component of the judicial waiver process. As a judge in one of these counties explained, to determine whether a minor satisfies the criteria for obtaining a waiver of consent, there are several factors involved, there are agencies that need to be involved to counsel with and talk with this person. They used to be called Sav-A-Life, maybe it’s the same now. She has to talk to them about what her options are. There is a hearing that has to be conducted; the burden is on her to prove that she has considered medical, emotional, psychological issues …

A second judge explained that he, along with one of his fellow judges, “will want [the minors] to have been to Sav-A-Life, to see what there is to help them make the right decision.” Asked whether proof of a minor being well-informed depends on such a visit, this judge replied, “I would say yes, but normally rather than simply deny, when that’s happened in the past I’ve said go to Sav-A-Life, and the girl did go to Sav-A-Life, and I granted the waiver. But they know we’re going to ask that so they’ve been to Sav-A-Life before the hearing.”

And what is this Save-A-Life organization? You can probably guess:

The largest crisis pregnancy organization in Alabama, Sav-A-Life, Inc., was established in 1980. Providing “positive alternatives to young women facing unplanned pregnancies,” this non-profit organization offers free pregnancy tests and guidance on how to pursue alternatives to abortion. 145 Like other crisis pregnancy centers (“CPCs”), branch offices of Sav-A-Life frequently offer assistance with such things as maternity clothing, baby clothing, toys, diapers, formula, and other child-rearing accessories.

Sav-A-Life’s mission is unambiguously religious. A self-described “non-denominational, Christ-centered ministry,” Sav-A-Life’s mission, according to the most recent version of the organization’s Web site, “is to establish and equip Pregnancy Centers in order that communities will be reached for Christ and that abortion will be made unnecessary and undesirable in their region.” Sav-A-Life aims to accomplish this through “a commitment to evangelism and Biblical Truth.”

What’s scary is that judges abusing their power to force minors to undergo ideological and religious counseling is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the grossly arbitrary implementation of abortion regulations, and the effects on young women are frequently awful. Silverstein demonstrates this through both case studies and systematic data, and the conclusions are chilling. People interested in women’s rights should definitely read it — the more people who know how these laws actually work the better.

Maggie Gyllenhaal Does Not Give a Flying Fuck What You Think.

maggieandbaby

Christian Fundamentalists Hate America and Want Us All to Die.

Three organizations for self-loathing Gays have decided to band together to collectively lower the IQs of children across Maryland by petitioning the school board to keep the Education part of Sex Education out of public schools. Specifically, they seem to be objecting mainly to the idea that will be floated past Baltimore 8th and 10th graders – that gay people are human beings worthy of the same rights, respect, and dignity afforded to straight people.

But they have a problem with condoms, too, of course. Just so the straights don’t feel totally left out, I suppose.

But flea, you cry, your title seems a bit inflammatory – just because they want to keep Americans sexually ignorant, broke, and so desperate that fighting in an endless war seems like a good idea if it allows us to provide health insurance for the too many children we’re forced to have, doesn’t mean…no, wait, you’re right. Never mind.

See? I knew you’d come around.

And it’s Baltimore! Baltimore! I splutter with rage at the missed opportunity to have the single greatest sex educator ever teach Baltimore’s youth about sex. I mean, he lives right there, and he’s being ignored? Get the fuck out of here!

john waters

I can assure you, if I ruled the world, this oversight never would have happened.

We need to stop being so incredibly stupid. I’ve reached the point where I’ve become completely inarticulate with frustration and have taking to just flailing my arms around the room and spluttering. How low do we have to go before people realize how pervasive the damage religious fundamentalism is when it horns its way into politics and forces its unique brand of misery on the rest of us?

Jillian, a frequent commenter over at Sadly, No pointed out that really, what it all comes down to is class. The fundies in charge don’t live by the rules they exact and they have no intention of doing so. The Alpha women will keep shaming poorer women to keep them housebound, railing away at the evil of the 19th Amendment from their spacious offices in Washington, and the Alpha men will keep blowing each other, and only the rest of us who are living hand to mouth are going to chafe under legislated stupidity.

Our government isn’t going to help educate us stay safe and healthy as far as sex goes. They’re just not . They’ll pet and coddle their tokens that are sufficiently deluded enough to help them*, but the rest of us are on our own.

Just as an example of how the endless War on Sex tears apart safety issues on every level, consider this link that was sent to me today by Camera Obscura.

Called “When Sex Toys Turn Green,” the article addresses the safety issues surrounding jelly vibrators.

Because the fundies won’t tell you, I will: Throw away your jelly vibrator and spring for one made out of silicone. The cute little pixie at your local sex toy store was telling you the truth – silicone really is a better material for sex toys. Jellies, while very soft and flexible, are also very porous. Very, very porous. The pores in the material easily trap bacteria that can be difficult to remove. Don’t you ever, ever share a jelly vibrator, and if you’re doing it now, please stop. Or at the very least, put a condom on it. Silicone is virtually pore-free, making it very easy to sanitize. And dildos made from 100% silicone can be put in the top rack of your dishwasher, assuming you live in the kind of household where you won’t have any ‘splaining to do. You can also sterilize silicone toys. Toys don’t have to be sterilized prior to insertion into the Magic Kingdom, your underpants aren’t sterile, after all, and they’re pressed up against your dainty bits all day. (tampons aren’t sterile either. I know. It’s true, though.) But if you’re polyamorous or just like to be on the safe side, silicone rules. Best, many silicone toys are made in the U.S.A., and you can buy comfortably knowing the products are made with non-exploitative labor. And silicone doesn’t have phthalates, the plastic that makes jellies, and shower curtains, and lots of stuff you haven’t thought about but evidently it’s so ubiquitous we’re peeing out phthalates because we’ve been breathing the shit in. Enjoy that new car smell, kids!

We don’t know what longterm damage phthalates do, if any, and we’ll never see a law passed regulating the kinds of materials sex toys can be made of – hell, you can make a dildo out of Froot Loops and batshit, and the government won’t care. Why? Because sex toys aren’t supposed to be used as sex toys, just like condoms aren’t supposed to be used as condoms, because sex toys are “novelties” only. Just for a tee-hee at Spencer’s Gifts, is all. If you have the inclination and the social consciousness and the curiosity, the information is out there. But for the overwhelming majority, they won’t even bother to investigate, because there’s no political future in encouraging sexual awareness and education, so the information has no consistent advocate. Therefore, most people just don’t think it’s important.

Until enough of us decide that it’s offensive to insist on sexual ignorance, not just of children and teens, but of adults, too, it’s not going to get any better.

Stupidity never helped anybody.

And apropos of nothing, I really miss Divine.

divine
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*No seriously, you need to read this week’s Savage Love if you haven’t already. Savage’s answer to the second question, where he flays 18-year-old Tyler Whitney, a GOP activist working as a webmaster for fiercely antigay Presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, and who heads up an organization called, “Go Back Into the Closet!”, turns out to be gay himself. What gets me is the wagging finger of Bay Buchanan, tut tuting us because his sexuality “is a personal matter” that has “nothing to do with the campaign.” I really wasn’t just being crass when I said the religious right thinks it’s okay for the male Alpha fundies to blow each other.

Friday Random Ten – the Freudian edition

1. Miles Davis – Autumn Leaves
2. The Mountain Goats – Love Love Love
3. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Crow Jane
4. Spoon – I Could Be Underground
5. Bright Eyes – When the President Talks to God
6. Bill Evans Trio – All of You (Take 3)
7. Benjy Ferree – The Desert
8. Ray Lamontagne – Trouble
9. The Pogues – A Pair of Brown Eyes
10. Guided by Voices – Back to the Lake

This week’s video: Diana Krall does Joni Mitchell.

A little Prince is always good for Friday:

And some Erik B and Rakim should cheer things right up:

Australian PM: No porn or alcohol for the backwards natives

I’m all for preventing child sexual abuse and I’m no fan of pornography, but this strikes me as incredibly problematic:

Alcohol and pornographic material are to be banned in some indigenous communities in the north of Australia after a report claimed “rivers of grog” were fuelling the sexual abuse of children.

Announcing a series of surprise measures in parliament yesterday, Australia’s prime minister, John Howard, said children under 16 in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory would face compulsory medical examinations. More police officers would also be drafted in to help maintain law and order in the remote communities, including searching public computers for x-rated material, he said.

Illegal Immigrants: Kind of like goats, but maybe smarter

Or so says Trent Lott:

Sen. Minority Whip Trent Lott, R-Miss., was talking to reporters Wednesday about the immigration bill, when he said, “If the answer is ‘build a fence’ I’ve got two goats on my place in Mississippi. There ain’t no fence big enough, high enough, strong enough, that you can keep those goats in that fence.”

“Now people are at least as smart as goats,” Lott continued. “Maybe not as agile. Build a fence. We should have a virtual fence. Now one of the ways I keep those goats in the fence is I electrified them. Once they got popped a couple of times they quit trying to jump it.”

“I’m not proposing an electrified goat fence,” Lott added quickly, “I’m just trying, there’s an analogy there.”

Trent Lott is kind of like a pig, only dumber. I’m not saying, I’m just saying — there’s an analogy in there somewhere.

Month: June 2007