November 2008 – Feministe

“Dirty Driving”

HBO usually has a variety of great documentaries every month, and this month the one that caught my eye just happened to take place in Anderson, Indiana, a very blue collar area within an hour of my home. Anderson, like many manufacturing towns in the Midwest, is steadily heading towards the likes of Flint, Michigan: struggling, dying, devastated. But like many Midwestern areas, if you ask Anderson’s residents, they’re struggling but on the up-and-up, aiming to be positive despite the loss of jobs, staying afloat by focusing on family and other interests.

“Dirty Driving: Thundercars of Indiana” is about the struggling Midwestern middle class and the hobbies that take the place of work and career when industry dies, in this case the individual innovation that is a forefront in Indiana’s racing culture. When the auto manufacturing plants that pumped small towns full of money up and left, they also left behind the driving culture that so infects the workers that once populated their lines. In “Dirty Driving,” laid-off workers and their car-fanatic families remove all their ambitions from job and career and put all their knowledge and passion for the industry into their junk cars to race at the Anderson Speedway, talking shit and fighting over their victories and losses as the cameras roll.

Shameless Self-Promotion Sunday

Post a description of something you’ve written this week, along with a link. And happy Thanksgiving!

How not to bomb your neighborhood deli

I went into the deli near my subway station in Harlem earlier this evening to buy a beverage and a pack of cigarettes. As I was paying, I heard someone yell “Go! Go!” and saw someone run in through the doorway and back out. At the same time, a flaming can of gasoline crashed into the middle of the store, about a yard away from me. Everyone in the room kind of stared in horror for a second, and I think I dropped my purchases as I backed away. The can had a burning rag stuck in it, and was leaking all over the place, so the flames started to spread quickly.

Some employees tried to douse the fire but only succeeded in spreading it further, and one man ended up running out of the store with his leg ablaze. I ducked behind a rack of potato chips in time to hear a loud “POP” as part of the can burst, sending more burning fluid all over the place. I decided that it was a Very Bad Idea to stay put, so I circled around the small room and made for the door. Unfortunately, there was so much burning detritus by this point that there were thigh-high flames in the way, so I decided to just run right through them. I made it out with just some gasoline burning itself off of my sneakers.

Nobody seemed to have any idea what the hell was going on, although one man said he saw “some crazy old guy” and there was general suspicion that it was a disgruntled patron of the deli. It’s a muslim-run establishment, but it didn’t seem to be a hate crime on the surface of it — just another crazy night in New York. I used my remaining adrenaline to help smother and stomp out the flames as they dwindled, and only the gas can was left burning by the time the fire department showed up. The most important part of the whole incident was that nobody really got hurt. Fortunately, it was a very amateurishly constructed gasoline bomb, and there were a bunch of locals around who were all very eager to help. Or try and help — please note that flammable garbage, racks of snack cakes and buckets of water are among the things you should NOT pour on a gasoline fire. On the plus side, I guess your average gasoline isn’t really designed to explode like movies would have you believe — at least not when it’s in unpressurized liquid form and puddling on the floor. It just burns a bunch, so you have to avoid getting it on you.

I am now 5% better at “running through fires,” something which I used to be fairly afraid of doing. I guess I think of this kind of thing as a learning experience, and the last year has been chock full of them. A little over a year ago, I was in a group of people who got pepper-sprayed by the NYPD for questioning their detainment of a young black man. Not long after, I was stalked and harassed all the way uptown from Times Square by a psycho loser who got mad when I wouldn’t give him my phone number, and only ran away when I went to get a subway station manager. Then in the spring, I managed to get mugged and scraped myself up trying to chase down the punk who robbed me.

I’ve lived here for over ten years now, and although I had one roommate who was mugged, I’ve never had such a spate of crazy semi-violent and violent incidents. It’s probably just the luck of the draw, and New York does tend to get a rowdier sometimes (moreso in the summer, but sometimes around the holidays) but who knows? Maybe things are getting worse, maybe they’re not. What crazy things happen in your neck of the woods?

Faith, without a map

Mirrors Edge - Faith looks over the City

Hi Feministe — it’s been too long! My non-digital life has been a little frenetic in recent months. I won’t go into an extensive personal update, but suffice it to say that I managed to lose my job, but then I landed about six other jobs (I’m still a game designer). Also, one of my cats was diagnosed with lymphoma, but now it looks like he might just have bad digestive problems. Also, my old laptop literally melted itself, but I got a great deal on a new Sager. Along the way, we all managed to elect our first black president, gay marriage returned yet again as the hot topic to argue about in queer and progressive communities, and the economy melted down badly enough that the financial-sector people around here have started angrily nickel-and-diming the deli guys for not putting enough butter on their bagels. But you know all of that already.

I thought I’d give you all an update on a recently-released video game we talked about this summer. No, not Fat Princess — that one hasn’t been released yet. I mean Mirror’s Edge, which I brought up as an example of a game with a strong female protagonist. I just finished it, and I gotta say… yep, strong female protagonist! That’s not what makes the game interesting, however. SFPs have been a dime a dozen in games and movies and TV shows for some time, and video games have featured them all the way back to Samus Aran of Metroid and Lara Croft of Tomb Raider.

Lara Croft, who also has a new game out, is a classic example of the tricky ambiguities of video game protagonists. She’s smart and capable and tough, but she’s clearly a sex object for the mostly-male audience of her games. She explores ancient ruins in short-shorts and somehow swims in arctic oceans wearing wetsuits that show a whole lot of her bare (and freezing) ass. More than one dry academic paper has been written about how Lara Croft’s not really a feminist character because she’s a sexpot marionette for game-playing puppetmasters. I tend to think the subject-object relationship between player and game avatars is a lot more complicated than just “you are the avatar” vs. “you are jerking the avatar around on strings,” and interestingly Lara’s cup size has dropped significantly over the years, but that’s another story. I’m not going to get into the history of Tomb Raider or try to define what makes a feminist protagonist. I’m going to tell you what I found interesting about Mirror’s Edge.

If you pray, or if you send good thoughts

Send them to India tonight.

A Boy’s Life

This article in the Atlantic about transgender children is really interesting, but for all the (often legitimate) worry about how to handle kids with “gender identity disorder,” I can’t help but think that we’d all be better off if our understanding of maleness and femaleness weren’t so straightjacketed. A lot of little kids like to cross-dress; some don’t feel at home in the gender roles they’re being pushed into. Some of those kids will grow up to identify as trans, or as a gender other than the one they were born as; some won’t. Seems to me it would be a lot better if we had a culture that allowed for greater gender fluidity, so that kids (and, hell, the rest of us) could just be themselves without being labeled “disordered” or freakish or wrong.

Most of the parents in the article seem to be doing the best that they can in a society that organizes itself into fairly rigid ways of classifying people, so this isn’t an indictment of them. It’s an indictment of a society that only allows for two genders; that insists “femaleness” and “maleness” are about what colors you like and whether you wear skirts or pants; and that can’t seem to grasp gender fluidity beyond the idea that someone “trapped in the wrong body.” And it’s an indictment of a medical culture that “treats” patients by reinforcing stereotypical and misogynist gender roles:

Dear Ayn Rand Lovers,

For you.

xo Jill

Florida Adoption Ban Deemed Unconstitutional

Great news! A 30-year-old ban on adoption by gay individuals and couples has been struck down by a Florida circuit court and ruled unconstitutional.

A Miami-Dade circuit judge Tuesday declared Florida’s 30-year-old ban on gay adoption unconstitutional, allowing a North Miami man to adopt two foster kids he has raised since 2004.

In a 53-page order that sets the stage for what could become a constitutional showdown, Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman permitted 47-year-old Frank Gill to adopt the 4- and 8-year-old boys he and his partner have raised since just before Christmas four years ago. A child abuse investigator had asked Gill to care for the boys temporarily; they were never able to return to their birth parents.

”This is the forum where we try to heal children, find permanent families for them so they can get another chance at what every child should know and feel from birth, and go on to lead productive lives,” Lederman said in court before releasing the order. “We pray for them to thrive, but that is a word we rarely hear in dependency court.”

”These children are thriving; it is uncontroverted,” the judge added.

Moments after Lederman released the ruling, attorneys for Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum announced they would appeal the decision to the Third District Court of Appeal in Miami.

”We respect the court’s decision,” said attorney Valerie Martin, who had argued in support of the ban during a weeklong trial Oct. 1-6. But, she added: “Based upon the wishes of our client, the Department of Children & Families, we have filed a notice of appeal this morning.”

The attorney general’s office had argued that gay men and lesbians are disproportionately more likely to suffer from mental illness or a substance abuse problem than straight people, rendering them less fit to parent — especially children in foster care who already are under tremendous stress.

Yeah, totally no prejudice there!

In any case, it’s very good news . . . and now we wait and see where it goes.

h/t Feministing

I’d do the same thing if I were dreaming about Chuck Bass.

Maybe I’m imagining things, but has anyone else noticed more allusions to female masturbation on TV? On Gossip Girl a couple of weeks ago, the show started with Blair having a sex dream and Dorota (her housekeeper) warning her that “God is always watching” — and Blair telling her to go away, ostensibly so Blair can finish her business. Last week on Grey’s Anatomy — a show which is legitimately terrible at this point — Izzy (spoiler alert!) is having loud sex with her ghost-boyfriend and her room mates (including her real-boyfriend Alex) hear her. Everyone’s confused, and Alex says something like, “She’s flying solo. It’s hot.”

I’m only 25, but growing up I never heard about women masturbating — and I certainly never saw it referenced on TV. Male masturbation, on the other hand, was an assumption — something all men supposedly did, that they could joke and talk about. Female masturbation was gross and weird, something we all denied doing, if we talked about it at all. So I’m glad to see it presented as normal.

In other pop-culture self-love references, Jezebel has the top 10 pop songs about female masturbation. And just because it’s the holiday season and I’m feeling generous, a little Chuck Bass to inspire your dreams tonight. Thanks for the link, Ann!

People who deserve a special place in Hell

I know Thanksgiving is tomorrow and we’ll all be getting extra-thankful, but today I’d like to list a few people who I’m not thankful for.

AIDS denialists. The South African government could have prevented the deaths of 365,000 people, but President Thabo Mbeki’s bought into AIDS denialists’ claims — another “victory” for ideology over science. I’m at least heartened to see that Mbeki’s successor has taken a more progressive track and is fighting the spread of HIV.

Religious fundamentalists who attack schoolgirls with acid. At least ten of them have been arrested. Women who speak out — or little girls who go to school — are threatened, attacked, maimed, raped and sometimes killed.

Brazilian law enforcement, which is targeting abortion providers and women who terminate pregnancies. Some 150 women have been charged with the crime of abortion; thousands of women had their private medical records publicly released; and some of the accused were forced to undergo invasive medical procedures to gather evidence. I suppose, though, that they’re just doing what the Pope says. The “pro-life” nation of Brazil has one of the highest abortion rates in the world; across Latin America, 5,000 women die every year and more than 80,000 are hospitalized after clandestine abortions. And Brazil has the fifth-highest youth murder rate in the world (with four “pro-life” nations beating it out). Not sayin’ that a country’s abortion policies influence the murder rate (this isn’t Freakonomics); am sayin’ that if they really value life, dealing with an obscene rate of youth murder may be a better place to start than arresting women who terminate pregnancies. Just sayin’.

Dudes who take (and get off on) “up-skirt” shots without the woman’s consent.

Army higher-ups who don’t give a rat’s ass about domestic violence. “Honey, we are not going to bring a soldier back who beat on his wife a couple of times or because you feel things weren’t done correctly. He is over there fighting for his life” is not a good enough response.