Saw a real jaw-dropper this morning from Randa Jarrar at Salon:
Google the term “belly dance” and the first images the search engine offers are of white women in flowing, diaphanous skirts, playing at brownness. How did this become acceptable?
I guess she means images like this:
This, according to Jarrar, is unforgiveable:
One of the most awkward occurrences for me when I go out to an Arabic restaurant is the portion of the evening when the white belly dancer comes out. This usually happens on weekends, and I’ve learned to avoid those spaces then, but sometimes I forget. The last time I forgot, a white woman came out in Arab drag — because that’s what that is, when a person who’s not Arab wears genie pants and a bra and heavy eye makeup and Arabic jewelry, or jewelry that is meant to read as “Arabic” because it’s metallic and shiny and has squiggles of some kind —
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“It’s Arab face,” my friend Nadine once said, pointing at an invitation from a white acquaintance of hers. The invitation was printed on card stock and featured the woman and a dozen of her white friends dressed in Orientalist garb with eye makeup caked on for full kohl effect and glittery accessories. We wanted to call these women up and say, “How is this OK? Would you wear a dashiki and rock waspafarian dreads and take up African dance publicly? Wait,” we’d probably say, “don’t answer that.”
Well, if a white woman wearing a dashiki and dreads is not ok, than neither is this, I guess:
That is Misty Copeland, the first African-American soloist with American Ballet theatre.
Given classical ballet's European roots, is Ms. Copeland doing "white face"? Is she dancing "in drag"?
Maybe she shouldn't be allowed to perform with one of America's top ballet companies. Maybe she should be publicly shamed.
Of course, if you're going to do that, you had better start with original, evil "white face" promoter-
After all, authentic ballet should always look like this:
And never this:
That's the Tokyo Ballet shamelessly "appropriating" that icon of White European Culture: Swan Lake.
Or as Jarrar puts it in her essay:
These women are more interested in their investment in belly dancing [or ballet] than in questioning and examining how their appropriation of the art causes others harm. To them, I can only say, I’m sure there are people who have been unwittingly racist for 15 years. It’s not too late. Find another form of self-expression. Make sure you’re not appropriating someone else’s.
OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!
As a white woman who studied classic dance for over 20 years, I feel so, so- HARMED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Marvel Studios and Disney's Iron Man 3 has blasted into the stratosphere overseas, opening to $195.3 million from 42 markets to beat last year's global blockbuster The Avengers, which debuted to $185.1 million internationally.
Am I the only American who finds this embarrassing?
I think back to the 1988 Tom Hanks movie Big, in which a 12-year-old makes a wish at a fairground to be turned into a adult. If Big were made today, it would be called Small and center on a grown man wishing to be a 12-year-old.
Adult culture in this country is dying. In it's place we've been given fairy tales with dirty words and bunny suits in super-grande sizes.
Increasingly, we aspire to nothing.
I first noticed the decay in 1990. That was the year that compulsory school figures were officially dropped from international figure skating competitions.
Does anyone remember school figures? They gave the sport its name. For generations, figure skaters were required to trace intricate figure-of-eight patterns on the ice as the ultimate test of technique and concentration. Specators were hushed. Music was not played. Faces did not smile.
Then figure skating hit TV bigtime. First the Olympics, then other international competitions were broadcast. Female figure skaters competed to become America's Sweetheart, jumping and twirling in dazzling, (figure-free) "long programs" accompanied by dramatic music.
Compulsory school figures did not broadcast well. They were quiet. Technical. They required a deeper understanding of the sport.
The viewing audience turned up its nose. School figures were boooring. They were irrelevant. Bring on the big jumps! Show us some pretty costumes!
And school figures were dropped. The "short program" was developed to take their place- another opportunity to watch twirling and leaping and listen to lush music. Yay!
"a fictional story that is presented in comic-strip format and presented as a book."
That's right: comic books for grownups. Why bother trying to understand an author's metaphors and create an image in your head when you can just stare at brightly colored cartoons that explain it all for you?
Fans defend graphic novels by pointing out that they often cover dark, adult subjects. But graphic novels do that by reducing the subject to a series of simple line drawings accompanied by short, punchy text. Once a subject has been that simiplified, you have left adult territory.
By 2009 the New York Times had announced a new series of Graphic Books Best Seller Lists to appear alongside their venerable fiction and nonfiction Best Seller Lists.
Well, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I guess.
Of course, if you would rather enjoy your graphic novel adventures without slogging through any boooring, irrelevant words, you could try another previously kids-only activity: video games.
The average American gamer is about 37 and has played for 12 years...This isn't something kids outgrow.
According the article, many gamers spend up to 40 hours per week playing. When Skyrim director Todd Howard addressed a Los Vegas convention last year, he asked the crowd:
"What can games give you that nothing else can?"
He answered the question himself:
"Pride in something you did."
Have we really come to a place where a 37-year-old man's chief accomplishment is slaying digital dragons for 40 hours a week? Call me an old fogey but I remember when men that age aspired to start families, build a business or take over the family farm.
Not FarmVille. A real farm.
Have all our goals become virtual? Maybe we should stop chiseling "rest in peace" on our gravestones in favor of something more appropriate.
How about "game over"?
Graphic novels and video games pretend to expand the imagination but in reality they stunt it. Gamers have the illusion of choice, but they are really choosing from options pre-determined by the game designer. Likewise, graphic novels do not "free" the imagination from having to construct of world from an author's words; they chain it to a single, pre-determined image.
It's like the old saying about giving a man a fish versus teaching him to fish. Rely on someone else's imagination for too long and you may discover you no longer have one of your own.
Hollywood is another enthusiastic promoter of endless adolescence. From The Day the Movies Died, a 2011 GQ article by Mark Harris:
... the degree to which children's genres have colonized the entire movie industry goes beyond overkill. More often than not, these collectively infantilizing movies are breeding an audience—not to mention a generation of future filmmakers and studio executives—who will grow up believing that movies aimed at adults should be considered a peculiar and antique art. Like books. Or plays.
Harris lists some of the movies in development in 2011:
With that in mind, let's look ahead to what's on the menu for this year: four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on an amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons. One sequel to a comedy. An adaptation of a children's book. An adaptation of a Saturday-morning cartoon.
We are training ourselves to live in a perpetually juvenile mindset: a candy-colored world populated by heroes and villains, where superpowers are required to vanquish evil.
That is no way to approach actual problems. It's just an escape from them.
But then, actual problems are booooring. They're irrelevant. Bring on the dragons and skating girls!
If you didn't understand what I've been getting at, let Craig Ferguson explain it all for you:
When Susan Patton originally published this essay in the Daily Princetonian, everyone assumed she was sending an anti-feminist message. They thought she was telling Ivy League girls to nail that MRS degree first thing, or else face spinsterhood.
Feminists everywhere howled in protest.
I experienced the screeching as background noise. I'm a married woman decades past college and decades past dating, trying to scrounge money for a new axle boot and some medical bills.
"Not my reality," I thought.
This morning, while waiting for a repairman to show up and (hopefully) fix our washing machine, I found Ms. Patton's essay and read it.
I was wrong. This essay is part of my reality- and everyone else's. Ms. Patton might have thought she was offering dating advice to the young ladies of Princeton, but in the process she accidentally hiked up the skirts of the Oligarchy and gave the rest of us quite an eyeful.
For example:
I am the mother of two sons who are both Princetonians.
She actually says this with a straight face. Apparently mankind has evolved beyond mere homo sapiens to a new and superior genus: Homo Princetonius.
The superiority of this new genus is an awful burden to its females:
Smart women can’t (shouldn’t) marry men who aren’t at least their intellectual equal. As Princeton women, we have almost priced ourselves out of the market. Simply put, there is a very limited population of men who are as smart or smarter than we are. And I say again — you will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you.
Of course, once you graduate, you will meet men who are your intellectual equal — just not that many of them. And, you could choose to marry a man who has other things to recommend him besides a soaring intellect. But ultimately, it will frustrate you to be with a man who just isn’t as smart as you.
I can almost hear David Attenborough's voice, can't you? Ah, the perils of life in the jungles beyond the Princeton Preserve! So dangerous for the breeding female.
Susan Patton assumes that there are no intellectually "worthy" people outside the Ivy League. Women who don't choose mates there are, in her eyes, diluting the species.
But don't take my word for it. Read Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist and Harvard graduate:
Her betrayal consists of being gauche enough to acknowledge publicly a truth that everyone who’s come up through Ivy League culture knows intuitively — that elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.
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Thus the importance, in the modern meritocratic culture, of the unacknowledged mechanisms that preserve privilege, reward the inside game, and ensure that the advantages enjoyed in one generation can be passed safely onward to the next.
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This article hints at the mechanisms used to keep Ivy League campuses populated with the "right" people:
Over the last thirty years, America’s test-prep companies have grown from almost nothing into a $5 billion annual industry, allowing the affluent to provide an admissions edge to their less able children.
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Others cut corners in a more direct fashion, as revealed in the huge SAT cheating rings recently uncovered in affluent New York suburbs, in which students were paid thousands of dollars to take SAT exams for their wealthier but dimmer classmates.7
Oligarchies serve their countries poorly because they function by blocking true ability in favor of promoting the "right" people. The result, after a brief while, is an entrenced, all-powerful elite equipped with mediocre abilities at best.
As one NYT commenter put it:
What grinds my gears is when they assume that their life of privilege qualifies them for public office. They often think that they've worked hard to get where they are, and I'm sure many did. But many others are blissfully unaware that doors don't swing open automatically for just anyone. These are the people who don't understand the difference between being broke and being poor. Ann Romney's remark that raising five boys qualified as a difficult job was a case in point. Try doing it while working part time at Wal-Mart.
In the end, Oligarchies can't solve problems because they are too busing serving themselves.
Convicted rapists Trent Mays and Ma'lik Richmond burst into self-pitying tears in an Ohio courtroom on Sunday after they were sentenced to jail time for sexually assaulting a teenage girl.
They were joined in their sobs by CNN hosts Poppy Harlow and Candy Crowley. Poppy Harlow bemoaned:
“two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students,” who “literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart.”
"What's the lasting effect, though, on two young men being found guilty in juvenile court of-- rape, essentially?"
Let's take a step back and look at how Poppy and Candy framed the situation for a moment. The two rapists are presented as helpless and passive. They were "found guilty" and could only watch as "their lives fell apart."
A viewer unfamiliar with the trial might assume that Mays and Richmond were innocent scapegoats, hounded and railroaded into jail time by a mob.
And observe how Candy downgrades the charge-- suddenly it's "rape, essentially." Not "real" rape, not "rape-rape," but some kind of abstract, theoretical concept: how many assaulted, passed-out girls can fit on the head of a pin?
Language counts, ladies. You make your living in journalism; you know that.
But the issue is bigger than CNN's warped tea-and-sympathy coverage. The problem is not that Candy and Poppy's reactions were over the top; the problem is that they were run-of-the-mill.
Tony Farmer was a 6'7" basketball star at Cleveland's Garfield Heights High School. Sportscasters called him a "blue chip recruit" destined for Division I stardom.
He was also a violent, jealous lover.
In August 2012, Farmer was sentenced to 3 years in prison for kidnapping and felonious assault. Farmer's girlfriend had broken up with him in April 2012. After she rejected him, he confronted her in the lobby of her apartment building and forced her into the parking lot, where he screamed at her and dragged her by the hair. When she escaped back into the lobby he pursued her, pinned her in the corner and kicked her in the head 4 times.
The entire assault was captured by security cameras. The evidence was so overwhelming that Farmer pled guilty.
Like Mays and Richmond, Farmer did not expect to go to jail. Like them, he was a local sports hero. He was being courted by some of the most prestigious basketball programs in the United States.
His mother told the judge Farmer was a good kid who had "made a bad decision." (Gee, my li'l sweetums dragged a woman by the hair and kicked her in the head 4 times- those darn kids!)
As in the Steubenville case, the team coach attempted to intervene, calling Farmer "a good kid."
Farmer himself played what must have seemed like a trump card, telling Judge Pamela Barker "I'm really not a bad kid," and explaining that he had to complete his senior year at Garfield in order to claim a basketball scholarship.
When the sentence was announced, Farmer, like Mays and Richmond, started bawling. He then collapsed on the floor.
Later, during an interview, Judge Barker said what Candy Crowley, Poppy Harlow and many other people need to hear:
"There's nothing in the sentencing guideline that talks about him being a basketball star and being able to go forward when obviously I think she's been very traumatized by this whole situation."
When asked about the consequences to Farmer's future, Judge Barker said, "The opportunities that were lost, I would just say that he lost them."
>
Is our national obsession with school sports creating an uber-entitlted, conscience-free class of predators?
When I first heard that Netflix was producing a new series starring Kevin Spacey I was thrilled. Mr. Spacey is one of the great actors of his generation. The opportunity to watch new work from him-- and a supporting cast of first-class actors-- via streaming media sounded too good to be true.
Unfortunately, it was. After viewing all 13 episodes I have finally lost patience.
House of Cards is a well-produced, well-acted orgy of ugly female stereotypes.
I mean 'orgy' in both the literal and metaphorical sense: None of the recurring female characters have any worth or importance apart from their male sexual partners. This is made clear by repeated sex scenes where male domination and control take the place of respect or affection.
As the lead in House of Cards, Kevin Spacey portrays Francis Underwood, the ambitious Majority Whip of a fictional U.S. Congress. Let's take a look at the women in his world:
Zoe Barnes- Played by Kate Mara, Zoe Barnes is a young journalist who vaults into bed with Underwood to advance her career. When that sexual arrangement sours, she changes her nightly booty call to a new young boyfriend-- and promptly begins manipulating him for the sake of her career as well.
A young hottie sleeping her way to the top. How original.
Claire Underwood- Claire (played by Robin Wright) is Francis Underwood's wife. She runs a high-profile charity that Underwood uses to lure and reward potential campaign donors. In return, Underwood occaisionally steps in to boost turnout at important fundraising events. The price for his support is pretty high: in addition to hiring, firing and lying at his command, Claire is expected to put up with his fondling of Zoe.
Claire's compliance is not perfect. At one point she abandons Underwood and runs off to spend a week with an old lover. But after just a few days she begins to complain about her lover's footloose, low-income lifestyle. When Underwood messages her about a new political crisis she leaves her lover without even a good-bye.
She can choose between men, but she can't choose independence.
A long-suffering wife who craves the status and material security of her husband's career. How modern.
Christina Gallagher- The character of Christina Gallagher (played by Kristen Connolly) exists to love dissolute politician Peter Russo. She warms his bed and runs his office. She walks out on him briefly at the start of the series, but when he pledges to reform she promptly resumes her proper place in his bed.
Christina Gallagher has no personal ambitions, hobbies or friends. The first time we see her she is having sex with Russo. The last time we see her she is grieving his death. I hope Ms. Connolly has a good agent, because her character has just become irrelevant.
A loyal handmaiden stands by her man. How unexpected.
Gillian Cole- Gillian Cole (Sandrine Holt) works at Claire's charity. She had an affair with a married man and is now pregnant. She has decided to keep the baby. The peak of her character's storyline is a catfight with Claire, who accuses her of hiding behind her pregnancy to avoid conflicts at work. Gillian quits and sues Claire's organization for discriminating against working mothers.
A self-righteous single mom bravely decides to go it alone after berating her soulless, childfree boss. Wow, never heard that one before.
Rachel Posner- Rachel Posner (played by Rachel Brosnahan) is a young prostitute. Her character is kept in play by Underwood's henchman Stamper, who uses her to trap and destroy Russo. Stamper's relationship with Rachel becomes a miniature of Underwood's marriage: Stamper sets her up in a nice apartment, finds her a respectable job and intervenes when her job security is threatened. (Her new boss demands sexual favors. Not a shock for this show.) Meanwhile, Rachel becomes less and less comfortable with her role in Russo's downfall.
Vulnerable young hooker with a heart of gold. This is creative genius.
If you removed the female stereotypes from House of Cards it would make a long series very short. Every time an independent female character appears she is hustled off the show after just a few scenes. Recurrent female characters are reduced to 3 simple activities: screw, sob and scheme.
In the first episode Underwood says of his wife, "I love that woman the way a shark loves blood." That description made no sense to me until I watched the rest of the series. All the women in Underwood's world are wounded prey, desperately treading water while the male sharks circle.
After Jovan Belcher shot the mother of his child, Kasandra Perkins, multiple times with a legally registered handgun, NBC sports commentator Bob Costas had this to say:
I suppose Mr. Costas would have preferred that Belcher slashed her throat instead.
This is not a time for an anti-gun rant. Guns had little to do with this.
When a man or woman kills their partner, guns don't make them do it. Or knives. Or hammers. Or cars. They kill because violence is their way of controlling the people they "love."
And they will use whatever tool comes easily to hand.
Police records are now emerging that show Belcher had a history of violence and control issues with women. (His final words to Ms. Perkins were "You can't talk to me like that.") The Chiefs have already admitted that they "were bending over backwards" to accommodate Belcher's domestic problems and had put him in counselling.
At the end of his sermon, Costas quotes sportswriter Jason Whitlock: "If Jovan Belcher didn't possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would be alive today."
That is incorrect. Dangerously so.
If Belcher habitually used intimidation and violence to control his girlfriends it's statistically likely that eventually he would kill one, whether he had a gun or not. Instead of being shot, Ms. Perkins would have bled to death from multiple stab wounds, or become comatose from head trauma, or drowned in a bathtub, or been strangled by ligature.
Banning guns won't stop domestic violence. Banning guns simply blames the gun instead of the abuser.
That doesn't solve anything or help anyone.
There are plenty of gruesome ways to die. A man like Belcher would simply pick another.
While the rest of us shout about guns and look the other way.
Unlike some well-paid pundits this week, I'm not going to wring my hands and squirm with distress about the anti-muslim schlock "film" currently in the news.
For those who might be interested, here is my opinion:
1. This film did not cause any violence.
A film is an inanimate object. I cannot shoot a gun or set a fire. It can't even "cause heads to explode"- that is a figure of speech.
Violence is caused by human beings who decide to shoot a gun or set a fire.
2. The maker of this film should not be prosecuted by the U.S.- or extradited to any country where he is subject to prosecution- simply because he made a crude video that insulted a religion.
The United States gives everyone freedom of speech. It does not rescind that right just because someone outside the United States pitches a hissyfit.
3. This film is not the equivalent of shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre.
Shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre can create a panic reaction, a stampede of people fleeing to safety. Fleeing a fire to save one's life is the exact opposite of setting a fire to exact revenge.
4. The issue is not a 'clash of cultures.' The issue is national sovereignty.
The moment the United States government agrees to suppress any form of free expression in response to violence or threats of violence from other nations, it has abdicated its sovereign right to create and enforce laws for its own people. It has instead surrendered that right to foreign entities.
5. The best answer to bad speech will always be more and better speech, not suppression of speech.
Don't like the film? Don't watch it. Or better still, write a scathing review of it. Or, even better, produce your own film to answer it. Start a blog and offer to host editorials, reviews and videos that skewer it.
6. If a film is accusing your religious or ethnic group of being violent, protesting that film violently is really stupid.
You may as well shoot yourself in the foot. Not only will such behavior confirm the stereotypes in the film, it will discourage reasonable people from sympathizing with you. Want to win friends and influence people? Present your objections to the film in a calm and rational way. This tactic works surprizingly well.
I guess that sums it up. This is how I feel about the situation, and I don't picture that changing anytime soon.
And the only fires I intend to set will be the ones I build in my fireplace as autumn nears.
(I can't shoot anything, because I don't own a gun.)
This week Andrew Hacker published an Op-Ed in the New York Times titledIs Algebra Necessary?In it, he argues that forcing all students to tackle higher math is destructive to our nation's overall educational goals. Forcing algebra, calc and trig on students with no mathematical interest or gifts, he claims, is raising the national dropout rate:
The toll mathematics takes begins early. To our nation’s shame, one in four ninth graders fail to finish high school. In South Carolina, 34 percent fell away in 2008-9, according to national data released last year; for Nevada, it was 45 percent. Most of the educators I’ve talked with cite algebra as the major academic reason.
I'm skeptical that algebra alone is the reason behind rising dropout rates. There are too many other factors- most of them social- that have far greater influence on students. I'm also not convinced that giving up on algebra is the solution.
But I do think Mr. Hacker has a point.
I was born in 1963 and so got the dubious 'benefit' of many new-fangled education theories. Among them was the development of special programs for "gifted students"- whatever that means. What it meant to me was that one day, after numerous exams, I was assigned to a special "talented and gifted" class. Everyone in the class had been labelled "gifted." We would spend the next several years taking every subject together, migrating from grade to grade as a group. It wasn't a bad idea, but it did have one fatal flaw:
It never ocurred any of the experts of that era that a kid could be "Talented and Gifted" at some things, but not others. We were expected to be good at all subjects. All the time.
Back to algebra. As part of this group, I had concepts like sine, cosine and tangent thrown at me at age 12. It was a nightmare of angry, frustrated teachers and always being considered the class dummy. As I look back on it, it's now obvious that I was one of a handful of verbally gifted youngsters shoved into the same curriculum with budding math whizzes. I suspect the mathmeticians outnumbered the wordsmiths something like 5 to 1.
By the time I was 14, selected students in my class were permitted to leave campus and attend mathematics and physics courses at the local community college. That was a positive innovation, but it only existed for math and science. At 14 I was already devouring my sister's college textbooks and had mapped out a private Great Literature course for myself that included authors like Hawthorne and Tolstoy. I was more than ready to study freshman composition at the same local college, but it never ocurred to anyone to start such a program.
I was never tempted to drop out of school, but I did exit the TAG program at the first opportunity. You couldn't take the accelerated language courses without the accelerated math courses and I was tired of spending half my academic life in a state of terror.
I had gotten the message: Only Math People are smart.
Reading the comments thread below Mr. Hacker's essay, it looks like lots of people got the same message:
We need smarter people, not dumber.
...dumbing down education to the point where everyone can succeed...
No educated adult should have any difficulty with algebra. It is simply a matter of motivation.
Part of the problem seems to be rampant laziness among Americans. They are always looking for an excuse to avoid doing anything that is the slightest bit challenging.
We are breeding a nation of morons.
It's been over 30 years since I struggled with algebra and we're still calling students lazy morons because they don't excel at math.
I called Republican Senate Candidate Todd Akin as asshat yesterday for saying that a woman could not be impregnated by a "legitimate rape."
I don't normally resort to crude name-calling, but Akin deserved it then and he deserves it now.
But I've since realized that if Akin deserves the asshat title for his comment about rape, so do some other public figures. Take a look at this video:
I hope Ms. Goldberg cringed at the memory of her own comments when she heard Akin's remark.
If she has any decency or self-awareness, I'm sure she did.
Both Akin and Ms. Goldberg chose to slice and dice the definition of rape ("rape-rape" and "legitimate rape") until they could find a way to defend their position.
Akin wanted to justify his hardline anti-abortion stance by saying that "legitimate rape" doesn't cause pregnancies.
Ms. Goldberg wanted to excuse Roman Polanski (who plied a 13-year-old girl with alcohol and drugs, and then assaulted her) by saying that what he did wasn't "rape-rape."
(So- she wanted it. Is that what you meant, Ms. Goldberg?)
In both cases, they were effectively telling millions of rape victims that their assaults might not be "real." In both cases, millions of rape victims were put on notice: If your assault upsets our narrative, we'll call it fake. It's not "legitimate rape". It's not "rape-rape."
Why? Because it's inconvenient. Because we said so.
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