Peace Circle

Even if we may not like it, technology has shaped how we relate to the world. So, too, has it created new ways to curate and create art.

Australian artist Leonie Barton didn’t begin her ventures into art because of technology — but the rise of platforms like Instagram have allowed her approach to ephemeral art to flourish. Beginning in 2014, Barton began her “One A Day” project; the objective was, and continues to be, simple: Each day during a walk, she would commit no more than 50 minutes to creating art out of whatever objects she found outside. Sticks, petals, stones, and bits of plastic — the last the only object Barton does not leave behind — are organized into a work of art that may be blown away the moment that she walks away. But that isn’t the point: It’s the act of creation that matters. While the project itself doesn’t require technology, the ability to share posts preserves Barton’s designs and arrangements long after they cease to exist.

The Establishment spoke with Barton about her inspirations and designs, and what she hopes to accomplish with the “One A Day” project.

Sarah Galo: How did you get into art?

Leonie Barton: It sounds cliched but I didn’t really get into “art.” Making things or drawing was something I just did a lot of as a child. I grew up on a river and spent the majority of the time outside roaming and exploring. I was always off on my own, collecting things to construct with, back at my secret places.

Drawing was what I did when I had to be inside. My brother and sisters had all left home by the time I was 5, so these were all good ways to occupy myself. When we eventually moved to the city, the drawing stayed but the natural elements went. I did art at school until I left at 16. Art school wasn’t on the agenda; life happened, and I went into the film industry. I didn’t really revisit art until my kids were at school and I opened an art supplies store so I could have studio space. I sold the shop in 2010 because I could never paint there. I just kept dabbling from then on, but after I visited Namibia in 2012, with only a sketchbook and a camera for company, I was determined to stop talking about it and really commit to being an artist everyday. I set about finding a day job that would allow me to paint for a living and that could sustain any creative projects I wanted to take up, like the last year of ephemeral art.

Sarah: What is the “One a Day” Project?

Leonie: Like any other “One a Day” [venture], it is a daily commitment to a task for 365 days. In my case, it meant going outside, regardless of the weather, my location, or circumstances, and creating an ephemeral art work, using only the materials I found in the moment, usually from the ground, using no tools or props, and then leaving it behind for others to experience. I documented each day by photograph and posted it to social media as confirmation I had completed the daily task.

Sarah: What are the inspirations behind your project?

Leonie: Shona Wilson was the artist who suggested I take up the challenge. I came across Shona’s project three weeks before she finished her year, and I just loved the concept of creating some art that would give me permission to engage in some of my favorite pastimes. I could go for a wander outside; I could forage and collect, which I had always done anyway; and I could do it all no matter where I was in the world, and it didn’t require me to buy any art supplies or be a consumer. I sent Shona a message to tell her how much I had enjoyed her project and that I was sorry to have come across it so late. She said I should go and do my own. So I did. I resisted going back through her project, as well as ignoring other people’s suggestions to look at other great ephemeral artists before her. I did that when I was painting and it put me off. This time, I was determined in this instance to find my own voice and style.

Sarah: Do you have an ultimate goal with the project? Do you see it as an extension of a personal philosophy?

Leonie: I had very different goals at the start of this project compared to the goals I have now.

In the beginning, it was about completing a task and making a commitment, as I had never been a great finisher before. It was about not having to make “perfect” artwork, as in my other creative pursuits, where I got way too hung up on it being perfect. I’m quite anal. Because this way of working can be so random because of what you find, it can’t be perfect. Done is way better than perfect. It was about taking some time out for me: away from my job, my house, my kids, my own life.

But now, it’s become very much about reminding myself and other people to slow down and pay attention to what’s around them. Nothing is going to last, so we need to notice it now. Everything perishes in the end, even us. I think we are becoming more and more detached from our immediate surroundings and too busy looking at screens. I want to remind viewers that there’s beauty in the world that needs protecting; we are, after all, just caretakers of it, for the generations to come.

Sarah: On your Instagram, you mention that the works are left behind after being photographed, except for plastics. Could you explain your approach?

Leonie: Initially I left the works behind so I could teach myself not to be attached to them, thus helping with the “perfect” hang up. Then, because I was always constructing them in public spaces, it became about surprising somebody if they came across it, if it hadn’t already blown away or washed away by the tide. Then I started posting a wide context shot to give a perspective on materials and scale of the artwork. This then led to people using it as a location finder, and a group of people used it as a location hint, so they could find them on their own walks.

As I live in a small community, it became a game of hide and seek. I still get messages from people that ask about the art pieces. I can’t leave the plastic ones behind, I have to bin them (so I tend not to do those anymore). I’m a keen follower of the “Take 3 for the Sea” project, where everyone is encouraged to pick up three pieces of rubbish when they go to the beach or other waterway. But it’s a good principle to have every time you are outside generally. I really like that my artwork eventually returns to where it has come from or been created with.

Sarah: What is the relationship between technology and art?

Leonie: Technology makes art available to most people, it inspires them, discourages them, educates them, provokes and challenges them.

Sarah: Do you think this project would have been possible before social media?

Leonie: Would I have been prompted to do it? Perhaps not at the time that it happened, because that was where I came across Shona. But because I was starting to investigate the art world, perhaps I would have come across masters. But before social media, nobody would have ever known it existed. In fact, I would have just continued on doing it as I always have done, not photographing it, and without thinking the world might like to take a look at it.

Sarah: Do you have any advice for young women who are hoping to enter the art world?

Leonie: If you can help it, don’t look toward anyone else’s work. Find your own voice. Be prepared to create hundreds of artworks to be happy with one. Practice practice practice. More than likely, nobody is coming to discover you. If you believe in your work, you must go out and show the world.

***

All images: instagram.com/leoniebarton

(Credit: Adam Davis)

In honor of the premiere of United Shades of America, we’re re-posting this interview with W. Kamau Bell from The Establishment’s own debut in October. You can catch Kamau “as he explores the far corners of our country and its various groups and subcultures” on CNN tonight at 10 p.m. EST.

Known for his biting social commentary and criminally short-lived TV show Totally Biased, W. Kamau Bell is a comedian based in the Bay Area. Soon to host United Shades of America on CNN, he also co-hosts the “Denzel Washington is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period” podcast with fellow comic Kevin Avery.

I sat down with Kamau to talk about his life back on the West Coast and in the stand-up scene, and his hopes for the future of comedy.

Kamau Bell On Twitter

Kamau: I’m not on Twitter much. I’m like, “I don’t have the time to tweet this” — which is a crazy thing to say because it’s 140 characters. But it’s like, I don’t have the time to think of all the possible ramifications of this tweet. You can spend a half hour sitting there trying to figure it out. Then you tweet it, and nobody retweets it, and you’re saying, “Why did I spend all this time?”

And then you tweet, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe vanilla ice cream is tasty?” and it’s “AAHH WHAT ARE YOU SAYING ABOUT VANILLA?”

On Being A Black Comedian In A White, Male Environment

Kamau: Because I live outside of LA and NY, I’m not in that comedy backroom conversation — I’ve been in it, when I came up. But now the only time I feel like I’m in that “oh this is comics being . . . comics” environment is when I’m going to comedy festivals.

For example, I just did the Bentzen Ball in DC, it’s a great festival — those people know what they’re doing. The first night I was there I was not performing and I just went to a show — Tig [Notaro] was hosting, Janeane Garofalo was there, Bill Burr was there, lots of great comedians. So I just started hanging around the thing and I had this weird sense of loneliness.

Sometimes I’m like, “It’s weird that we all have ‘comedian’ on our W2 forms,” because I do feel different from other comedians. In a way I imagine Ani DiFranco and Iggy Azalea; they both say “musician” on their forms but nobody really lumps them together the way we lump comedians together. You don’t go to a show and say, “First I’m gonna see Ani DiFranco and then Iggy Azalea.” I mean, that would be quite a show. And that doesn’t mean either one of them [is better] — you can like who you like. But with comedy, there’s that sense that we can all be together.

The next night I was on the Blaria show, hosted by Phoebe Robinson and Jessica Williams — they were on stage for five minutes and I was like, “THIS IS THE BEST SHOW I’VE EVER SEEN.” It was speaking to me in a way that comedy doesn’t speak to me that often. It doesn’t mean that what happened the night before was bad, it just means that I was sort of missing that sense of connection, that “we’re all in this and we’re coming at this from the same angle,” in a way that white male comedians feel quite often. They think that’s just comedy. Then when they go “Blah blah blah blah racist, offensive, sexist statement” and somebody goes, “ahem” they go “Well that’s what comedy is!” and I’m like, “No, that’s what your comedy is. I’m not trying to take away your comedy, but let’s just know that your comedy is in a box. It’s not all comedy. It just happens to be a big box, because America. Hashtag white people.”

On The Inherent Adolescence Of Comedy

Kamau: Part of the reason why you become a comedian is because you are living in a bit of arrested development. My daughter right now is four, and if you just take any of her books and swap out all of the real words with “pee pee” and “poo poo,” she’ll be on the floor. I recognize that, and I do it for her, even though my wife’s like, “ugh god,” because it makes me laugh to see her laugh like that. That’s in me, to have that sophomoric humor — that’s what got me into comedy, saying the things that are not supposed to be said.

This is a long way of saying, I’m always gonna laugh at pee and poo jokes. It doesn’t mean I’m gonna tell them. But I might one day tell one good one.

On Bad Comedy In The Age Of Social Media

Kamau: I don’t think we should get rid of bad comedy. I don’t want to ever be put in a position where I’m afraid of making a bad joke, and that can happen sometimes in the 21st century. You don’t want to reveal something about yourself personally that might actually be problematic. Trust that I’m trying to reveal something about myself. And that doesn’t excuse it. You can be offended by what you are offended by. I don’t want to take that away from anyone. Just don’t take away my right to be a bad comedian.

On The Need For Forgiveness For Problematic Comedians

Kamau: I look at my act from like five years ago and 10 years ago and there are things that are on record that I’ve said and done that I wish I could scrub but I can’t. Having said that, part of that was growth. I wasn’t a 42-year-old dude with two kids.

I think that a lot of what happens in stand-up comedy is that the biggest part of the population is dudes in their late twenties without kids or family obligations. So you can step on stage and say all the crazy shit you want because at the end of the day you’re just going to the diner and the bar, and then home to your Xbox. Nobody’s going to look you in the face and say, “You realize now that you said that we can’t pay the mortgage?”

That responsibility doesn’t make you a lesser comedian. The more context you build around comedy, the better it is. Louis CK admitted he got funnier when he had kids. When people see him before that, he was more absurdist.

Ijeoma: I think it’s interesting, because a lot of comedians get backlash for things they’ve said in the past, like if you look at when Trevor Noah was announced for the Daily Show . . .

Kamau: Yeah! And he’s like the best version of a dude who’s in his late twenties. He was a famous dude, but he was also 25, traveling around the world, on his phone, trying to get some.

Ijeoma: Sliding into people’s DMs.

Kamau: <laughs> Yeah, I’m sure, I’m sure there are some people who can tell some stories. But he wasn’t building himself toward the Daily Show. He was building a career and it ended up being the Daily Show. When that happened with Trevor Noah, I was like, “You know, let’s not all pretend that in 2009 we knew that everyone was going to go through all our tweets.” That doesn’t mean you can’t be offended. If you are offended, please be offended and say something about it. But there’s also a context there.

Ijeoma: It seemed like there was a war. There were people who were like, “Trevor Noah is transphobic. Trevor Noah hates women.” Then there were others saying to them, “You are what’s wrong with comedy. You are destroying comedy. Why do you hate freedom?”

Kamau: <laughs> There’s a space in there! There’s a space where we can talk about these things without putting up middle fingers.

Ijeoma: I would love to see more celebrities say like, “Yeah, I said that thing. And it was really fucked up. And I’ve learned, and I don’t say that anymore.” We all have to be able to take responsibility and move forward.

Kamau: Especially if we’re going to keep living on social media. If we’re going to keep doing that, we’re going to have to develop some sort of tiered forgiveness system. Or else we’re going to lose everybody. If you go through everybody’s tweets — especially people like us who went on Twitter when it was like a demilitarized zone! There’s no rules! And suddenly I have a social media profile and these things that tell me what my social media rating is.

With Trevor Noah, I was like, this is just a young person who’s trying to figure this out. And he’ll either figure it out or he won’t. If he reveals himself to continually be transphobic or continually be misogynistic on the show, well, he won’t have a job very long. I do think however, Comedy Central probably should have gone through his tweets before they hired him. But I don’t think that anybody understood at that point that Jon Stewart was the liberal pope, and everybody wanted to have a say in who the successor to the pope was.

If we’re going live in front of each other like this, nobody’s life is clean enough to survive a thorough comb-through. At what point do you have to throw the artist away, or at what point do you have to feel ashamed for liking the artist? Or do you just keep your mouth shut when that person’s name comes up?

Ijeoma: So how do you reconcile that? How do you reconcile that, say, a black woman in the room deserves to feel as safe as a white dude in the room. How do we balance that?

Kamau: I’d say she needs to feel safer. The outsider should feel more welcome than the insider.

Ijeoma: How do we balance that in a role where you’re pushing boundaries?

Kamau: I think these are questions my kids are going to have a better answer for. I feel like we’re in the middle of a sea-change. Maybe we all pull the plug on social media. It’s clear that it’s not actually working the way that it feels like it’s working. Maybe we go, “You know, we’re not mature enough for this yet.”

You can keep up with Kamau on his website and on Twitter.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/are-we-witnessing-the-death-of-san-franciscos-revolutionary-spirit-54328986f403/ Sat, 23 Apr 2016 17:45:58 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=8631 Read more]]>

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By Emma Bushnell

Once on a flight home to San Francisco for a visit from college in Boston, I sat next to an anarchist couple in their sixties. They were dressed all in black with matching fedoras over long, grey hair, and came armed with giant sketchpads. They were warm, happy people, who spent the trip sketching and encouraging each other. When not drawing, they turned their attention to me, and we chatted, pleasantly exchanging conflicting political and artistic ideals. They told me they admired my studies; I said I admired their sketches. I don’t believe any of us were lying.

Ten years later, in the English class I now teach at Brooklyn College, we were discussing Colson Whitehead’s “City Limits.” The conversation was animated — New York natives and transplants alike connected to Whitehead’s meditation on the changeable nature of the five boroughs. As we considered the many ways in which the city was re-inventing itself now, one student, a native of Bed-Stuy, said her parents were selling their house. She added, with a bemused shrug, that “I guess now people want brownstones in Bed-Stuy.”

I remember having this reaction on the phone with a friend a few years after my interaction with my anarchist seatmates. Then, she had told me they were building condos in a squalid area of downtown that had been re-branded as “SOMA.”

“SOMA?!” we had both laughed in disbelief. Calling that stretch of empty warehouses, urban crime, and homelessness near the train depot by a trendy acronym seemed like nothing more than a crude marketing ploy. And yet, only a few short years later, those condos, like the Bed-Stuy brownstones, were selling for millions of dollars; the tech takeover of San Francisco had begun in earnest.

Unlike New York, San Francisco has a somewhat parochial history. Each new group entering the city can be singled out, and conclusions can be drawn about that population’s contribution to the texture of the city as a whole. To name but a few, there were ‘49ers in the gold rush, the beats, the hippies, the gays, and now the techies. And then, of course, there have been influxes of various ethnic and immigrant groups that have played a significant role in shaping the city.

Something many of these movements had in common was a flocking to a city where thought could be freer, conventions more challenged. One need only skim through the great chroniclers of San Francisco — John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, William Vollmann, Gary Kamiya, Armistead Maupin, Amy Tan, Rebecca Solnit — to glean that the allure of San Francisco is not any one promise or movement in particular, but a revolutionary spirit that the city has always abided, one ideal after another.

It would take a much longer essay than this to really delve into the various transplant movements in San Francisco and how each was received and embedded in the city’s existing culture. But if we consider only a few of the most instantly recognizable ones, it’s easy to see how each vociferous counter-culture was able to change the city’s dialogue and image while remaining somewhat insular. Where were the hippies? The Haight. The gays? The Castro. The beats? North Beach.

I present this cordoning off as a mere fact — not to say that those challenging the status quo should keep themselves to themselves, but that one of the ways San Francisco has been repeatedly successful in accommodating strong-convicted and sometimes conflicting viewpoints is that each has been able to stake out its own little space without being forced to conform or compete with its neighbors.

In many ways, it makes a lot of sense that the tech movement has its roots in the Bay Area. Where else but San Francisco would a corporation take pride in thinking “different,” or bright young dropouts be accepted as pioneering geniuses instead of family screw-ups? On its face, startup culture seems a natural fit for the city’s other transplant movements — it claims to buck convention, be curious, and create a community of like-minded people.

But, as we know, the tech community has not “merely” gentrified “SOMA” and contributed its new voice to the larger conversation in San Francisco. With its attendant wealth and heady feelings of power, the tech boom is not-so-slowly colonizing the entire city, driving out whole communities and stamping out the possibility of pushback to its ideals from other populations. The harm of the tech takeover is not that this movement has turned out to be more square, nerdy, or moneyed than the city’s other revolutionary movements, but that under the guise of “improving” the city, it is literally bulldozing physical space for living, debate, and the exchange of ideas, thus ridding the city of its generations-long ability to support its local residents and receive non-conformers. The Tenderloin, a hub for cutting-edge social programming since single room occupancy hotels were established for family-less sex workers after the 1906 earthquake, is now the subject of myopic open letters accusing it of being a blight on the sort of San Francisco the tech industry desires.

The tech takeover is also fundamentally changing a city that, not so long ago, was considered an “island of diversity.” Startlingly, it’s projected that by 2040, San Francisco County will have a non-Hispanic white majority — jumping from 42% in 2013 to 52% in 25 years. The percentage of Asians is expected to fall from 34% to 28%, and the Latino population from 15% to 12%. The city’s already-declining African-American population, currently at just 6%, is expected to remain about the same. How will these shifting demographics further erode what once made the city great?

On a plane a few weeks ago from New York to San Francisco, I chatted with my seatmate, a nice woman from Long Island on her way to visit her son, who works in tech. By the time we had reached cruising altitude I knew about his education, his career goals, and the current housing hunt he and his fiancée were on for a place to accommodate their planned family of four.

This was a genuinely kind woman who spoke well of her son. A man who is, by her account, successful and in a happy relationship, and she is rightly proud of him. But our conversation introduced no viewpoint I had never encountered before, and was merely a way to idly pass time talking about nothing but the particulars of one’s own success. It brought in stark relief my experience 10 years ago, when the topics of conversation had been public funding for the arts, the difference between a democracy and a republic, and anecdotes about Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The contrast makes me wonder how often in the future I will encounter fellow travelers like that couple, and be confronted with people who think differently than I do and talk about subjects I do not normally consider. Or if whether, someday soon, they’ll disappear from planes to San Francisco altogether, when there is no longer a single neighborhood at the flight’s destination willing to keep them around.

***

Lead image: flickr/Ricardo Villar

]]> https://theestablishment.co/a-brief-history-of-women-in-slapstick-comedy-eced4cc59456/ Sat, 23 Apr 2016 15:20:18 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=8635 Read more]]>

“Whatever vicissitudes she may undergo, from being dashed out of her carriage to having her head shaved in a fever, she comes out of them all with a complexion more blooming and locks more redundant than ever.”

When Melissa McCarthy’s latest comedy, The Boss, recently hit theaters, the reviews were not kind. But even the harsher critics are willing to admit that there’s something special about McCarthy — and not just because she’s probably the only person who can rock that severe mom haircut with so much conviction. If you watch the trailer for The Boss, you’ll see another unique talent on full display:

Did you notice McCarthy flail against that limo door, or smack into the living room wall? These may be simple jokes, but the fact that a woman is making them is significant. While the history of physical comedy is stacked with male legends — Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Peter Sellers, Jim Carrey — it’s much harder to rattle off a list of women renowned for their pratfalls. Look at any round-up of all-time great slapstick stars and you might find one lady on the list. Physical comedy montages and tributes are even more gender-imbalanced.

Beautiful women in romantic comedies are expected to fall to make themselves endearing, sure, but slapstick is rarely an actress’s main shtick, thanks to a standard that TV Tropes has brilliantly dubbed “Beauty Is Never Tarnished.” The website quotes George Eliot, who wrote in Silly Novels by Lady Novelists:

The idea is that facial contortions or falls make a woman, at least for a moment, less beautiful and graceful. Such moments are not conventionally feminine, which still makes many people uncomfortable, even in modern times. Just consider Tina Fey’s infamous story in her book Bossypants about an offhand comment Jimmy Fallon made to Amy Poehler once in the SNL writers’ room. After Poehler made a dirty “unladylike” joke, Fallon — who was, as Fey put it, “arguably the star of the show at the time” — squirmed and said, “Stop that! It’s not cute! I don’t like it.”

Of course, Poehler whipped around and delivered her cathartic comeback, “I don’t fucking care if you like it,” but that squeamishness at a woman who peddles bawdy, indelicate humor helps explain why physical comedy “greats” are almost always men. Since funny ladies must also be hot, and falling on your face or crossing your eyes is decidedly not, physical comedy just isn’t the easiest sphere for women to break into.

Thankfully, these actresses — some of whom have defied the “beautiful woman” conventions in other ways, too — didn’t let that stop them. And in wiping out, they’ve helped to wipe out damaging ideas about “appropriate” gender roles.

Plus, they’re just funny. Enjoy.

Lucille Ball

If you tuned into I Love Lucy at any point during its six-year run, you might’ve seen Lucille Ball tumbling out of a hammock. Or desperately clenching her cheeks to hide all that candy. Or awkwardly prancing around a vat of grapes. Although the show is incredibly retro in a lot of ways — Desi’s persistent “Lucy, I’m home!” is one example — there’s something radical about watching a woman in a 1950s TV show whose biggest assets are her elastic face and cheerful clumsiness, not an immaculately starched dress.

Joan Davis

When NBC executives needed a sitcom to compete with the CBS hit I Love Lucy, they called in Joan Davis. Davis had started her showbiz career at the age of 7 when she entered the vaudeville circuit. There she developed a knack for slapstick that landed her silly bit roles in movies like Thin Ice (above) and eventually, a string of radio shows. Her big television break, I Married Joan, didn’t prove a match for Lucy, but like Lucille Ball’s hit, it toyed with the traditional ’50s sitcom wife role by presenting a vivacious goof who was infinitely more interesting than her husband.

Carol Burnett

Carol Burnett experimented with all kinds of comedy styles and comedians over 11 seasons of The Carol Burnett Show, but much of it skewed physical. In fact, her skits sometimes played fast and loose with the “Wouldn’t Hit a Girl” component of the slapstick double standard TV Tropes defines — just watch the “Butler and the Maid” sketch, which sees Tim Conway repeatedly slapping her on the boss’s orders. (Of course, she slugs him right back.) Recurring characters like Nora Desmond and Stella Toddler took frequent nosedives, and no matter the sketch, you could always count on Burnett to sell it with an exaggerated facial expression.

Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams

Laverne & Shirley was a milestone in TV female friendship. The girls worked together, lived together, and ditched horrible dance partners together. To heighten the single girl hijinks, Marshall and Williams frequently delved into physical comedy, and as one (admittedly quite biased) fan noted, the pair conjured some of Lucille Ball’s spirit. The above clip shows that Marshall and Williams also shared their idol’s affinity for space-age slapstick.

Molly Shannon

Molly Shannon arrived at Saturday Night Live right as the reign of the so-called “bad boys” (Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, David Spade, Rob Schneider, and Chris Farley) was coming to an end. And while the prospect of following Farley in the physical comedy sphere would scare off plenty of new SNL recruits, Shannon leapt right in with trademark characters like Mary Katherine Gallagher, the nervous Catholic schoolgirl constantly jamming her fingers into her armpits, and Sally O’Malley, the brassy 50-year-old who liked to “kick, stretch, and kick.” Both these ladies and other Shannon creations were thoroughly unconcerned with grace. What they wanted was attention, even if the popular high school boys or cocky wiseguys watching didn’t think they deserved any. They did, and they got it.

Amy Sedaris

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As her Strangers with Candy stint proves, Amy Sedaris is not afraid to mine grotesque facial expressions for laughs. When her character Jerri Blank wasn’t horrifying teens with tales of her dark past, she was crossing her eyes and warping her lips into a deranged frown. It was all in the service of spoofing after-school specials, but Sedaris can do more than merely pull a face. She also displayed comedic acrobatics in her Second City days with Stephen Colbert, and did some committed fake humping in the middle of a so-called Shondaland obstacle course.

Leslie Jones

McCarthy’s Ghostbusters costar also knows how to use physicality for laughs. This was most brilliantly on display in her recent “Naked & Afraid: Celebrity Edition” sketch with Peter Dinklage, where she shimmied, twisted, and perched her pixelated body for maximum comedic effect. Jones may be best known for her brash stand-up and Weekend Update desk bits with Colin Jost, but she’s been picking up more slapstick-heavy skits on the show (the ninja sketch with Russell Crowe comes to mind) and seems poised to display her physical comedy chops even further in Ghostbusters this summer.

Amy Poehler

Amy Poehler isn’t often singled out for her physical comedy chops — although her most famous character, Leslie Knope, certainly had her moments. But she deserves a place in the conversation for the fearlessly funny work she did at Saturday Night Live in the last weeks of her first pregnancy. She’s been praised most often for her performance of the Sarah Palin rap, but she’s no less committed in the fake perfume ad for “I’m No Angel,” where she never once drops her sexy smirk as she waddles over to Josh Brolin’s cowboy in a crowded bar.

Melissa McCarthy

No one watching Gilmore Girls in 2001 could’ve anticipated that Sookie St. James would move on to a lucrative career in expletive-laden physical comedy. But ever since Bridesmaids, Melissa McCarthy has been one of the most recognizable faces of modern slapstick. Her characters are bold oddballs who don’t let a bridal store couch or a set of stairs stand in their way — and if someone happens to laugh at their pratfalls, that doesn’t diminish their self-confidence. They’ve got it in spades.

Welcome to Make Your Face, a makeup tutorial series with a simple mission: makeup by you (me) for your (my) own entertainment, Establishment-style.

My local Michaels Craft Store is remodeling, so a bunch of stuff is on sale. This was 99¢!

The smaller one makes for better Vermeer verisimilitude, but look at the size of that thing! The choice is obvious.

You can purchase an iMagic flash palette on Ebay for, like, $10–15.

Start with the highlights.

Here is a stupid personal aside: my eyebrows are naturally really, really blonde, SO much blonder than the hair on my head. I enjoy my invisibrows when I’ve got my hair bleached and I highly recommend bleaching your eyebrows, actually — it’s awesome! BUT. Since I dyed my hair black, my eyebrows look a MILLION times more plausible if I not only color them in with powder every day but ALSO dye them so the little sprigs of hair don’t look like this weird invisifuzz dusted over some black lines drawn on my forehead.

Since I hit the brow dye I’ve realized that: 1. I like having visible eyebrows to make skeptical expressions with and 2. that it’s tough to cover up glorious raven’s wing brows with makeup! Even in this faded, half-grown out state it’s impossible to make ’em disappear without more work than I really want to do, so. Just make sure to smush a bunch of paint in there.

Girl’s got noticeably bright lower waterlines.

Steps 3–17 are: look at a picture of the painting really closely and try to copy the color placement! (You will fail because you have zero patience and he was Vermeer, but try anyway!)

So Bob Ross right now.

Clean off extra color before blending!

Basically, this:

Corpse with a Pearl Earring? Naw, girl.

Lips!

Blot.

Suddenly remember your neck!

T-shirts make for really excellent turbans.

See?

Too short.

Just right!

Make sure everything’s tucked in properly.

Then apply a white highlight to the lip.

A little red in the center, and. . .

IT’S TIME!

This thing is seriously freakin’ heavy.

But SO worth it!

‘We always hear the voices from this place.’

By Harriet Paintin & Hannah Kirmes-Daly

“My parents came from western Armenia (modern-day Turkey). They lived there but they had to flee and come here. It’s our territory but the genocide happened and we were thrown out of our land. 1.5 million Armenians were killed, just because we are Christians. That’s why they wanted to destroy us.”

April 24 marks the anniversary of what is known by many, and denied by some, as the “first modern Holocaust.” Between 1915 and 1917, as many as 1.5 million Armenians were summarily executed by factions of the failing Ottoman Empire. Today, the diaspora is spread across the world, and lives, identities, and communities have been constructed in the aftermath of the genocide. Only a handful of survivors remain who can tell their stories of surviving the massacres and death marches, but the memories resonate in the minds of the Armenian population; songs, stories, and a strong sense of injustice have been fiercely preserved through the generations, maintaining culture and remembering grief.

In order to understand how the echoes of this tragedy linger on, we travelled to Armenia, hitchhiking from village to village seeking out spontaneous encounters with everyday people. We were particularly drawn to meeting musicians, to hear how these stories and memories are transmitted, from one generation to the next, through song.

April 24 marks the anniversary of what is known by many, and denied by some, as the ‘first modern Holocaust.’

After hitchhiking across the border with an off-duty border guard, we were immediately confronted with the lived reality of the effects of this tragedy. Observing snow-covered peaks in the distance and a plateau of wintery grass, sprinkled with the beginning of spring flowers, we exclaimed, “What a beautiful country.” But the border guard contained our enthusiastic praise; he told us that this mountainous region only came to be inhabited at the time of the genocide, when people fled from the plains in fear. “We are not mountain people. We came to this place 100 years ago — our culture is not in the mountains.”

At a gas station in a small village with an audience of old men in dark coats and hats, we took out our musical instruments and sketch books to catalyze curiosity and interactions. When we were met with enthusiasm and interest, we asked if anybody knew of any musicians in the village. One man replied excitedly, surprised and proud that outsiders had shown such an interest in his culture.

“Yes, yes I know one musician! He plays traditional music, but also modern music. Do you want to meet him?”

Anatolia and his family greeted us warmly, albeit slightly bemusedly when we turned up on their doorstep, and ushered us into the house. As he set up his old Yahama keyboard in the corner of the bedroom, his wife and daughter carried in a table and laid out a spread of raspberry juice, coffee, and sweets. He began his performance, looping drumbeats and orchestration as the accompaniment for the melody, the volume set slightly higher than comfortable for the small room, his voice strong and full of emotion. Afterwards he explained proudly:

“These songs are about our heroes, for all the heroes of this region who were fighting against Turkey. After the genocide there was a war; they still wanted to come to Armenia. These heroes saved what was left of Armenia after the genocide, 100 years ago. They are old, traditional songs, but I play them in a modern way. It’s important to keep singing these songs; I don’t want these things to be forgotten. It’s a way to keep these songs alive for younger generations.”

Back at the gas station, we put out our thumbs for the next ride and within a minute we were picked up by Arman and Dimitri. As soon as we showed an interest in learning about their history and culture, they took us to the center of the village, to a war memorial with the names of soldiers from the village etched into stone. They earnestly pointed out the names of their family members among the list of those who had fallen. It was a small village, beaten by the years, but the monument next to the new church under construction seemed to be a source of pride, and a gentle reminder that this life did not come easily.

A bottle of vodka for the men and a bottle of Armenian wine for the ladies later, and off we went into the mountains. We talked under a clear blue sky, with thick snow on the ground and a fourth-century church in the distance. Eventually, they brought up the subject of the genocide.

“People in your country . . . What perceptions do they have about the Armenian genocide?”

Roma Women Balance Tradition With Feminist Values

I replied carefully, explaining that at the time, people who knew about the atrocities were very concerned, but that today the events had all but slipped from the general consciousness. I told them that this was one of our reasons for coming to Armenia, to find out about what happened and ask what lessons could be learned from history. More and more, we’d come to understand the importance of memory, and to never forget, but also that history repeats itself, time and time again.

Dimitri looked down at the floor and said quietly, in a strained voice, “We should just move forward and forget about it. In my family, there were 25 people and only one of them survived.” The pain was still clearly etched on his face.

To distill the heavy, morose atmosphere that had fallen upon us, we toasted to new friends, long life, and world peace.

Holding up his shot glass, Dimitri said, “I’m very happy that we met each other. This glass may be small but my heart is big.”

The mood had lifted, and the two men broke out into song, their strong voices rising from their throats to the cloudless sky, their eyes full of intense emotion and passion.

“It’s about our homeland, from the time when we were still in Turkey, in western Armenia. We always hear the voices from this place. Our grandfathers are buried in the cemeteries there, and we can hear them calling us.”

Later that evening we gathered with friends, relatives, and neighbors around a table piled high with fresh, home-cooked food. After more toasts and vodka, the men broke out into song, a drum and an accordion appeared, and the evening passed in music, dance, and warmth.

For Armenians, the genocide signifies not only the loss of Armenian lives, but also the loss of a huge part of their land. A few days later, two women took us up a hill near the Turkish border, where we could see the vast arid landscape of Eastern Turkey spread out before us. Mount Ararat, where Noah’s ark is said to have rested during the biblical floods, rose in the distance — a symbol of all that used to be Armenian.

Anna, gesturing to the view before us, said, “You see that river there? That’s the Turkish border. Before the genocide, all of this used to be Armenia, and Mount Ararat was ours. This land is ours, we feel it in our blood. My 7-year-old brother was asking questions about places in Turkey that used to be Armenia, even before we explained anything about it to him — how do you explain genocide to a small child?’

Maria squinted in the sunlight as she looked at us. “I don’t have a problem with Turkish people, in fact many Turkish people helped Armenians to escape during the genocide.” She sighed. “The problem is governments, it’s the same story everywhere. A government did these terrible things to our people, and took our land.”

Billboards line the roads of Yerevan, serving as a reminder of the tragedies of a century ago, while proclaiming the dangers of denying such events. While calling for international recognition of the tragedy faced by their population, the Armenian state reinforces a national identity built on foundations of loss and collective grief. Our journey through rural Armenia showed us just how much this is also maintained at the personal level; through songs and stories, the memories of the past linger throughout the generations, and the genocide of over 100 years ago is carried into the memories and the identity of young Armenians today.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/prince-was-the-patron-saint-of-black-weirdos-5952ec408872/ Fri, 22 Apr 2016 03:36:35 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=8684 Read more]]>

flickr/Scott Penner

By Ijeoma Oluo

I remember it clearly, my white mother talking to her black friends as my brother and I, six and four, played underfoot.

“These kids need to be around you, I’m afraid they won’t learn how to be black.”

I understand now, as an adult, what my mom was saying. My white mother was concerned that she would not be able to raise two black kids fully in their blackness, on her own. Many black children raised by white parents do indeed suffer from being cut off from their heritage, from feeling different and erased.

But hearing those words, at six, I felt adrift. I walked over to the always-on television, and turned it to MTV where Prince was guaranteed to be on within minutes.

By six, I was already an awkward, bookish kid and by four, my brother was already a highly sensitive, creative weirdo. These were our personalities then, and they are our personalities today. But for many people we encountered, our very personalities were a sign that our “blackness” had never fully developed.

To kids at school we weren’t “really black.” Older black folk shook their head at our weirdness, “This is what happens,” they would say, “when black kids aren’t raised right.” White people saw us as black, but as the stereotypical idea of black that they were comfortable with — so they didn’t see us at all.

And at an early age, my brother and I both desperately wanted to prove ourselves to our community, but we didn’t know how. We were who we were, and we were made to feel like we were broken.

But even at six, I had an idea that there might be a place for us. I didn’t know where Lake Minnetonka was but I knew it was home. Watching a black man in lace and ruffles and leather slide across the screen in complete confidence was a revelation to me. He owned the screen and the stage, and he was so damn weird. Everything that my brother and I were told not to be as black kids, he was. He was sensitive, he was flamboyant, he was sexy, he was bold, he was as feminine as he was masculine. He lived in a place where nobody questioned why his voice didn’t sound “black enough,” he lived in a place where nobody asked why a black dude would love rock n’ roll, he lived in a place where nobody told him to “toughen up” the way they were always telling my brother, he lived in a place where he could wear heels and lace and eyeliner and nobody told him to “be a man.”

And nobody questioned Prince’s blackness. Not a single person.

The same people who bullied my brother and me for not being “black enough” sat next to us to watch “Purple Rain” time and time again. The same people who just this week were pulling up pictures of my once blue hair and lighter skin in order to revoke my “black card” are likely listening to “Let’s Go Crazy” today and mourning the loss of an undisputedly black man who defied all their norms. Prince was my safe haven at six; he helped give me the confidence to be who I am today.

Prince was, and is, magic. He got the entire world dancing and singing along to a music that defied genre, played by a man who defied every constraint placed on black and male identity. He was a beacon for all of us who were told that we must cut out a part of ourselves in order to fit. I never considered a world without Prince, it did not seem possible that a man made of art and beauty and sex and the boldest chords and the brightest colors could ever die.

Prince will live on, in the hearts of every music lover in the world, and in the defiant existence of black weirdos everywhere.

So many of us exist, as we are, because of him.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/the-battle-for-the-future-of-autism-advocacy-dc247a721484/ Thu, 21 Apr 2016 16:49:43 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=8573 Read more]]>

“Some people on the spectrum may not want a cure and may choose to advocate for themselves. Others who live with the serious medical conditions and other challenges that often accompany autism rely on Autism Speaks to advocate for them. A vital part of our mission is to speak about and address the needs of the broad community and to provide support to those who are seeking our help.”

APL classroom (Credit: Academy for Precision Learning)

To read Autism Acceptance Month stories by #ActuallyAutistic writers, check out “My Inability To Make Eye Contact Does Not Need To Be Fixed,” “How Autism Awareness Goes Wrong,” and “No, I’m Not ‘Glamorizing’ My Autism,” and stay tuned for more stories throughout the month and beyond.

The combined third/fourth grade classroom at Seattle’s Academy for Precision Learning (APL) is humming with activity. An inclusion-based private school created in 2007 to meet the needs of autistic children in grades K-12, APL boasts classrooms that accommodate a spectrum of behaviors and learning styles. Most children are seated at desks; one small group of students is working together around a table, while another child with noise-canceling headphones is sitting at the back of the room with an aide beside her. The teacher is giving a lecture about the Battle of the Alamo; children are wiggling and talking quietly to themselves. One child occasionally shouts out random words, but only a handful of the classroom’s mix of autistic and neurotypical students seem to notice.

As the teacher explains the Texans’ strategy during the battle, one little boy takes his paper and pencil up to the whiteboard behind her. “I can take better notes up here,” he says, placing his paper on the whiteboard. The teacher acknowledges him and continues her lecture while he meticulously copies down everything she writes on the whiteboard on his own paper. After a few minutes, he returns to his desk, and the teacher continues without pause, as if nothing out of the ordinary has occurred.

Indeed, at APL, none of this is out of the ordinary — it is the typical student experience.

APL’s variety of learning environments is rare. Most schools focus on providing supports to help autistic children access mainstream classrooms instead of changing how teachers educate all children to better support those who are autistic. This common emphasis on mainstreaming autistic children reflects the divide between those who seek to treat autistics with the goal of “normalizing” them, versus autistics who argue that it is society’s expectations, not their autism, that disable them.

The rift between these competing ideologies extends far beyond education alone; its ripples can be felt in every aspect of autistics’ lives, including the scope and focus of research funding, treatment approaches, and public policy strategies. The largest and best-known autism advocacy organization, Autism Speaks, has shaped autism awareness as we know it, fueling the dominant — and problematic — narrative that autism is a malady to be cured.

Autism Speaks’ awareness efforts have succeeded in raising awareness, that much is certain. What’s less certain is whether their particular brand of “awareness” accurately reflects the needs of the population they profess to serve. From autism treatments and therapies to medical research and funding, Autism Speaks’ messaging dominates the conversation around autism. What’s less often heard are the voices of autistic adults who say their autism is central to who they are — and they have no interest in a cure.

Learning While Autistic

Autism is described in medical literature as a developmental disorder defined by impaired social interaction and communication, and marked by restricted or repetitive interests or behaviors. It is considered a “spectrum” condition, with impacts ranging from mild to more severe and debilitating.

Receiving an autism diagnosis can be a lengthy process, and it generally doesn’t occur in a single appointment. Autism is diagnosed by a physician using the criteria established in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), which is based on family and individual history, clinical observation, and the existence of symptoms in early childhood.

After a child is diagnosed with autism, most families are left to figure out the next steps on their own. Most of these families rely on the public school system to provide appropriate supports and services, but many of the students at APL came to the school after their parents became frustrated by traditional educational approaches. For these parents, the school has been a godsend.

Unlike traditional public and private schools, which generally only offer a self-contained special education classroom or inclusion programs that focus on integrating autistic children into a mainstream environment, APL creates space for autistic children to be and act autistic while also integrating behavioral therapy into the classroom. APL’s goal is to have classrooms that are comprised of equal numbers of neurotypical and autistic students. For now, there is about a 1:3 ratio of neurotypical students, most of whom are siblings of autistic students.

Standing in the hallway watching APL’s students participate in their lessons, I see how the program could be beneficial. If autistic children can receive behavioral therapy and academic instruction in an inclusive environment, it seems like the best of every possible world. Before I leave, I ask for tuition information and find myself wondering how I could swing the school’s tuition for my own autistic daughter. APL’s tuition is based on four levels of services, ranging from students who require no supports (neurotypical children) to students who require a dedicated 1:1 aide for all or most of the day: It begins at $11,000 and goes up to $43,250 for elementary school. I start to consider whether selling a kidney to afford third grade tuition is a viable option.

I met Xolie Morra Cogley at APL. Cogley is an autistic adult who is in the process of creating a music therapy program for the school. She discovered APL last year and has been an evangelist ever since. “This is the kind of school I wish I could’ve gone to,” Cogley says.

A few days later, I give Julia Bascom a call to see what she thinks of the program; she’s the deputy executive director of the Autism Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN), a grassroots nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the civil rights of autistic individuals. Like the majority of ASAN’s executives and leaders, Bascom is autistic.

When I explain APL’s concept to Bascom, she isn’t as enthusiastic as I expected. “A 50:50 ratio isn’t inclusion,” she says. “Creating an autistic school and then filling it with neurotypical students to meet an inclusion goal is reverse inclusion.”

Autistics comprise between 1 and 2% of the population in the United States. Based on that prevalence rate, a typical elementary school classroom of 25 children would have only about one-quarter to one-half of an autistic child (for safety’s sake, we’ll round that up to one). Bascom describes an inclusive educational environment very differently from APL’s focus on ratios. “A truly inclusive classroom is where students with and without disabilities are learning the same content at the same time, with the supports all students need to be successful,” she says.

What that could look like in practice is simple. Imagine another fourth grade class learning about the Alamo in a public school general education setting. Most children are reading books about the Alamo that were selected to coincide with their individual reading levels, but one child with Down syndrome who can’t read yet is listening to the book on tape. The teacher is working with a small group of students on a project, and most children speak their comments and questions; however, one non-verbal child is using an iPad to type their responses, while another child who isn’t able to speak or use an iPad points to the correct answer instead. In Bascom’s example of inclusion, there is no need for a specific autism-based program, because the school system itself has become supportive of all students and their individual needs.

Bascom’s dream is to slowly but surely overhaul the education system so inclusivity becomes the norm, not an anomaly. While implementing this newfound level of altered infrastructure seems daunting, she argues this paradigm is not necessarily more resource heavy — in funding or staff — as existing special education programs could be revamped to provide this support-based service model directly to students in general education classrooms.

My autistic daughter attends a Seattle public school and is enrolled in Access, an autism-focused inclusion program that allows children to integrate into general education classrooms (often with instructional aide support). My daughter relies heavily on her aide for emotional support, emotional regulation, fostering self-advocacy, and social-skills building. While my daughter’s experience in a mainstream setting in no way translates to Bascom’s vision, her inclusion in a general education classroom has already altered the classroom experience for all children in a positive way.

For example, when my daughter needed a quiet break spot to calm down, the teacher was surprised when many other students began to use the area, too. Likewise, my daughter needs noise-canceling headphones to occasionally block sensory input; soon the bin of headphones was being used by neurotypical kids who became overwhelmed as well. These adaptations were introduced to the classroom to benefit one autistic child, but they have quickly become a normal part of that classroom’s second grade experience.

Similar approaches to the Seattle Public Schools’ inclusion model are being implemented on a national level through the Schoolwide Integrated Framework for Integration (SWIFT) program, which is funded by a five-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs. The program emphasizes that 30 years of research indicates that all students benefit from inclusive education, including typically-developing children who develop increased empathy and improved social skills by sharing their classrooms with autistic children.

While the SWIFT program is promising, it’s in its early stages. For many families who are still struggling to get their children’s schools to follow an existing Individualized Education Plan (IEP), much less create an inclusive utopia, Bascom’s ideas seem like pure fantasy. Bascom acknowledges that parents often turn to schools like APL because they can’t get the supports their children need from their neighborhood schools, but these schools can end up hurting the populations they aim to serve.

“‘If you put all the autistic kids in schools that are designed for us from the start, then you’re not affecting the scale of change that you need to see in the rest of the world,” Bascom says. “Schools like that fill a need from a lot of perspectives because a lot of kids aren’t getting what they need, but when you do that for [physically] disabled people, historically things deteriorate very quickly.”

Further, when the quality of a student’s educational supports and their resulting progress is dependent on their parent’s income, the success of autistics can become inexorably linked with socio-economic status. The same thing is already true of autism treatments and therapies that are rarely covered by Medicaid, and even a child’s ability to access an initial autism evaluation and diagnosis.

As Bascom suggests, the only reason programs like Access exist in Seattle public schools is because parents forced the school district to implement the least restrictive environment that met their children’s needs through lawsuits — not by abandoning public schools for private schools. Public school education is guaranteed by law to all students, regardless of their abilities, and it’s free (unlike APL).

From a public policy perspective, providing better access to schools, treatments, and therapies that meet the needs of all autistics takes priority over serving the needs of a few more economically advantaged children.

The Autism Definition Divide

While the medical community considers autism a developmental disorder, the DSM-5 definition of autism bears little resemblance to many autistics’ descriptions of their autism.

At its heart, the difference between Autism Speaks’ and ASAN’s concepts of autism is that Autism Speaks sees autism as a set of symptoms and deficits, whereas ASAN and Cogley see their autism as an integral part of who they are. It is a distinct neurology and a specific way of being a person.

When I ask Cogley what’s good about being autistic, she says, “I’m an artist, I’m a musician, I’m an outside of the box thinker. I love in a different way and I have a different sense of what things are in life.” Cogley doesn’t deny that her autism also comes with legitimate challenges, but she says many of those challenges are symptoms that can be treated and cured without erasing her autism itself. “Those things aren’t the autism. The autism is the beautiful parts of who a person is. Autism makes me me.”

But for parents, whose children may be struggling more with autism’s associated challenges than Cogley does as an adult, that knowledge isn’t always enough. Rebecca Kerl is a Seattle mother with three children, all of whom are autistic. She says she believes their autism is an integral part of who they are, but that hasn’t always made parenting them easy. Her oldest son, for instance, flew into such a severe rage when he was entering puberty that she feared for his safety. “He was literally running through the house screaming. He seemed like he was trying to get out of his own skin. I remember him screaming, ‘Get me out of here! Get me out of here!’ and my heart just broke for him,” she recalls. Believing strongly in neurodiversity, as Kerl does, isn’t necessarily enough to equip parents for the daily physical and emotional challenges of parenting a child with autism.

Other parents of children on the autism spectrum struggle to accept the concept of neurodiversity at all. Instead, they look to therapies and treatments to help reduce or eliminate the challenges of autism. If offered a cure for autism, many of them say they would take it for their child in an instant.

Autism Speaks views autism similarly. All but one of the key players in the organization are parents of children with autism; none of them are autistic themselves, although Lisa Goring, the organization’s executive vice president of programs and services, notes there is more than one autistic adult on their national board. Their agenda is clearly shaped by their own experiences and is largely focused on supporting parents as they navigate a difficult diagnosis. These experiences are an often overwhelming whirlwind of therapies and treatments, insurance battles, endless paperwork, IEP meetings and arguments with schools, children who can’t use the bathroom or live independently, and meltdowns that can turn violent. When I ask Goring how Autism Speaks reacts to autistic adults who say autism is their identity, her tone sharpens. “We view autism as a disorder. It affects 1 in 68 children,” she says. “That’s their prerogative. If [autism] is their identity, that’s up to them.”

The organization is in a thorny position. There is no denying that having a family member with autism can be stressful; some studies have even found that mothers of autistic children show similar stress responses to combat soldiers and they are more likely to experience depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) than mothers of neurotypical children. But approaches that treat autism like a disease can be equally traumatic for the autistic person.

Autism may be an identity for some autistics, but it creates higher supports needs from parents, teachers, and even society at large. When I ask Goring how Autism Speaks straddles the tenuous line between supporting parents who want a cure and respecting autistics who view autism as their identity, she says: “‘It’s challenging at times and it needs to be a balanced scenario. Our goal is to try to help mitigate some of those challenges [autistics and their families face] to the best of our ability, but our goal is also to help highlight some of their strengths.”

Beyond ‘High And Low Functioning’

In the hallway of APL, as Cogley and I sit on long wooden benches — flanked by massive windows with students and staff talking and laughing as they walk by — it’s difficult for her to communicate. She experiences frequent tics that include repetitive throat clearing and stuttering, and her frustration and embarrassment are palpable.

Cogley was invited to speak and perform with her band, Xolie Morra and the Strange Kind, at a TEDx talk late last year after appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live in 2014. Watching Cogley struggle to speak, I wonder how she was able to perform on a stage in front of thousands of people. I have stage fright myself, and I assume hers must be worse than mine, but she smiles and shakes her head when I ask her about it. There is a barrier between her and the crowd when she’s on stage, she explains, and that barrier allows her to perform without the type of stress that I feel when I go on stage. It’s actually easier for her to go on stage in front of hundreds of people than it is to speak to me in a busy hallway.

Cogley hasn’t always been able to perform. After suffering from severe health problems that eventually required surgery a few years ago, she suffered dramatic side effects from the common medications she was prescribed. Her stuttering and tics became so severe that at times she entirely lost the ability to speak. As she recounts the experience of having her thoughts race and her mouth unable to form words, she begins to cry. “I know what it’s like to be to the point where you can’t talk. I had to re-learn how to talk,” she says. “I know what it’s like to have all of these thoughts in my head, but not be able to get a word out.”

Cogley’s history makes it clear that the difficulty of living with autism in a neurotypical-optimized world may change over a lifetime — or even over the course of an hour. At the beginning of our interview, her tics are ever-present, making communication challenging for her. As we continue speaking and she begins to relax, they nearly vanish, only to resume when a new person joins our group.

What some people refer to as “low-functioning” autism, now categorized by the DSM-5 as severity level 3, is often equated with being non-verbal, whereas “high-functioning” autism, or severity level 1, is what people imagine when they think of Asperger’s syndrome — quirky, but socially awkward. If Cogley can be nonverbal or highly verbal, and everything in between, how does she fit into those neat diagnostic boxes?

The answer for Cogley and many other autistic adults is that they don’t. “The labels of high functioning and low functioning are actively unhelpful,” Bascom says. “They don’t give you the specific information you need to know about someone’s needs.” The types of information people need to know about autistics are rooted in their individual support needs, not an artificial functioning distinction. “It’s useful to know if the person can talk, live alone, or what their impairments are, but a functioning label doesn’t give you that,” she says. “[Speaking in terms of support needs] can take a little bit longer, but it gives you a more accurate description of what’s going on.”

Shifting the focus from levels of impairment to support needs is based on the idea that every autistic has their own spectrum of functioning that varies across skills and abilities: an idea that is central to ASAN’s mission. This perspective — which focuses on acceptance or the celebration of autism rather than searching for a “solution” — can be a startling one for a generation that has come of age in the Autism Speaks-inspired era of “Light It Up Blue,” which seeks to find a cure.

The “C” Word

There is no treatment or “cure” for autism today, but Autism Speaks is dedicated to finding one. The vast majority of the organization’s research funding supports the search for a cure, even though no one really knows what a cure might look like or whether autistics would want one if it became available.

The debate over the ethics of curing autism is by no means academic. New studies emerge on a weekly basis that support the idea of autism as a complicated, multi-factored disorder that can be triggered by a variety of genetic mutations or exposure to hormones or toxins while in utero. As this vast array of causes and contributory factors is identified, it’s not surprising that researchers want to find ways to treat, cure, or even prevent them.

Recently, scientists at MIT discovered that when they turned off a rare mutation in the shank3 gene that creates autism in mice (and a very small percentage of autistic humans), the mice’s brains regained almost entirely neurotypical function even when the mutation was reversed as adults. While scientists emphasize that this discovery is still light years away from providing a cure for autism in humans, there’s no denying the possibility may exist as science progresses. This could mean that someday children and adults with autism could undergo genetic modifications or treatments targeting specific genes to essentially “turn off” their autism.

From the get-go, using the word “cure” raises the hackles of autistics who view autism as their identity. “Autism is every aspect of autistics’ cognition or sense of self,” says Bascom, who is herself autistic. “When you talk about curing autism, you’re talking about fundamentally changing someone. It’s a very clear way to communicate that you’re not valuable in and of yourself, and that’s a really difficult thing to hear.”

Bascom says there are few autistics who are looking for a cure for their autism — although most would gladly accept a cure for commonly co-occurring conditions like epilepsy, anxiety, and depression.

Many parents of autistic children (and Autism Speaks) see it differently. These families want their children to experience fewer hardships and less pain. They view autism as a medical disorder their children have, not an integral part of their identity. Much like ADHD, anxiety, or depression, which can all create distinct changes to brain chemicals and neurological functioning, these families view autism as a medical disorder that can and should be treated and cured. “We don’t want people to struggle if they don’t have to,” Goring says. “We want to be able to really help people live lives that are meaningful to them.”

It was clear as I spoke to Goring that she didn’t want to talk about a cure. When I broached the subject, her press representative quickly cut short the interview. She offered to connect me with another person at Autism Speaks, and I sent her a couple of questions later that day. A few days later, I received a reply from CJ Volpe, chief of communications at Autism Speaks:

Volpe’s reply reinforces Autism Speaks’ conception of autistics who advocate for themselves as being less severely impacted by autism than others. I wonder how Volpe’s clear distinction between groups of autistics holds up in the face of the autistics I’ve met: Bascom serves as executive director of ASAN but can’t live independently, and Cogley is sometimes non-verbal but also gives TEDx talks in front of a crowd. If these “functional” distinctions begin to break down when I talk to two autistics, it’s hard to imagine their applicability to an organization representing autism as a whole.

Despite Volpe’s insistence that the organization respects autistics who do not want a cure, he goes on to say: “Looking toward the future, Autism Speaks has launched a genetic research project, MSSNG, which seeks to identify the many forms of autism. The goal of this research is to pave the way for the development of personalized medicines and treatments.” Personalized and gene-based medicine is the wave of the future, but it also implies that Autism Speaks supports genetic modifications that could one day entirely erase autism.

One of the problems with the search for an autism cure is that in practice it tends to ignore the real-life needs of autistics. Of the more than $1.3 billion spent on autism research between 2008–2012, only 2.4% went to research on services and supports, while the amount dedicated to investigating the needs of autistic adults was only 1.5%. This overwhelming focus on finding a cure prevents autistics from getting the help they need right now as the bulk of the research money goes to highly-controversial cures that simply don’t exist today. “The idea of a cure has a huge impact on how people talk about autism and how they treat autistic people,” Bascom says. “A cure is often used to justify not investing in the supports autistic people need.”

In the future, as more treatments or even cures become available, Bascom worries that autistic symptoms may become perceived as a sign that someone is too poor to access the treatment or cure. “When progress comes, it doesn’t get distributed evenly at all,” Bascom says.

By contrast, many parents worry that letting go of the concept of a cure will leave autistics without support. There’s no guarantee that the cure-driven funding that exists today would be diverted into autistic support needs. Rather, much of it could be shifted from autism to another disease that’s viewed as curable and poses a public health crisis. After all, if autistics say they are happy being autistic, should research dollars and public health funding be devoted to their care and support?

ABA: Child Abuse Or Proven Autism Treatment?

There are no current treatments for autism itself, but there are a variety of treatments available to lessen or reduce the symptoms of autism. These treatments include occupational therapy, physical therapy, counseling for mental health concerns, and behavioral therapies. While opinions vary dramatically about how to treat autism, one of the most frequently-prescribed and controversial methods is applied behavioral analysis (ABA).

At its core, ABA is a behavioral therapy that uses a system of positive rewards for desirable behavior and lack of response or punishment for undesirable behavior. ABA can be used to address everything from obvious behavioral concerns like meltdowns and physical aggression to subtler challenges like maintaining eye contact, turn taking, conversational engagement, and reciprocity. ABA is one of the most scientifically-vetted and recommended therapies to treat autism, but it’s also incredibly expensive; many insurance companies don’t cover the treatment, which runs more than $100 per hour for as many as 20 hours per week. Families frequently encounter lengthy waitlists even when their insurance covers the cost of therapy.

When my daughter finally became eligible for an ABA program late last year, after two years on multiple waitlists, I hesitated over whether to enroll her. Many autistic adults liken the program to child abuse; Ole Ivar Lovaas, the UCLA psychology professor who developed ABA in the 1970s, initially relied on electric shocks delivered by cattle prods to reinforce appropriate behavior. It only gets worse from there. Lovaas began his career by co-authoring a paper with George Rekers, of sexual identity and gender non-conforming “treatment” infamy. Rekers, who is a founder of the conservative and vehemently anti-homosexual Family Research Council, has used his research to argue that homosexuality can be “cured” by conversion therapy. (He also may or may not be gay.)

The paper Reker and Lovaas published together was the case study of a little boy, Kirk Andrew Murphy, whose mother became concerned he was gay when he began playing with dolls and engaging in other “girly” activities. Using a system of positive rewards for engaging in “masculine” activities and negative rewards (including beatings by his father) for pursuing “feminine” interests, Reker and Lovaas claimed Murphy had been “cured” of his homosexuality and held him up as a conversion therapy success story. Murphy grew up hiding his homosexuality to avoid punishments and, after years of increasing self-hatred, he committed suicide at age 38. Conversion therapy for minors is currently banned in four states and the District of Columbia.

Whatever Lovaas’ intentions might have been, there’s no argument that his methodologies were horrific and many autistics remain deeply suspicious of ABA therapy. Referring to Lovaas’ involvement in conversion therapy, Bascom notes that “we seem to have decided as a society that that’s not okay, but as an autistic, I can’t decide why [conversion therapy] is not okay, but ABA is.”

That said, Bascom concedes modern ABA often bears little to no resemblance to the program’s undeniably troubling roots. Because ABA is frequently the only autism treatment covered by insurance (42 states and the District of Columbia currently mandate that insurers provide at least some degree of ABA therapy), there are many practitioners who bill their services as ABA who aren’t practicing traditional ABA. These treatments, which can focus on things like teaching children adaptive strategies for reducing anxiety levels, coping with sensory pain, and identifying negative feelings and implementing positive methods of processing them, are rooted more in cognitive behavioral techniques than traditional ABA.

It’s pretty obvious that using cattle prods on children is unethical; most parents would never enroll their child in such a program. But modern ABA’s seemingly-benign treatment goals, such as teaching autistic children to maintain eye contact through the use of positive rewards, may still conceal troublingly autism-unfriendly beliefs. Autistics, Bascom emphasizes, often don’t make eye contact for a reason; it can increase anxiety levels and make them feel extremely uncomfortable. “Whether you’re teaching us to make eye contact by slapping us when we don’t or giving us an M&M when we do, they still have the same goal,” Bascom says of such programs. “The end goal is a child who is indistinguishable from their neurotypical peers and we don’t think that’s ethical or acceptable.” She cautions parents to be mindful of the treatment goals they choose and to ask themselves these questions: Does it help? Is it something my child needs? Will it help them be a more self-determined person?

This is another area where some autistics and Autism Speaks diverge. Autism Speaks funds a variety of research studies into developing and validating ABA therapy techniques. On the ABA section of their website — which notably fails to mention Lovaas, his early methodology, or his ties to conversion therapy — the organization notes that some preschool children who experience two or more years of early intervention with ABA therapy “acquire sufficient skills to participate in regular classrooms with little or no additional support.” Conformance to neurotypical expectations seems, at least in part, to be a goal of Autism Speaks’ ABA funding.

The Problematic (And Lucrative) Conceptualization Of Autism As Tragedy

Autism Speaks has long come under fire from autistics who are offended by what they describe as fundraising efforts that are rooted in fear and pity, rather than respect for autistics. The group Boycott Autism Speaks, for instance, says the organization “routinely dehumanizes autism for personal gain.”

The organization, of course, sees it differently. They believe it’s possible to both respect autistics and fund research into a cure for the disorder. Still, it is undeniable that there is a consistent message from Autism Speaks that autism is a tragedy; in fact, in a 2013 letter, Autism Speaks co-founder Suzanne Wright painted a dismal and frightening picture of autism, calling it a “national emergency.”

This conceptualization of autism as tragedy has been integral to both Autism Speaks’ messaging and its success drumming up financial support. The organization has grown into a behemoth in just over a decade, pushing autism from the fringe to the center stage of disease awareness. At least somewhat owing to the organization’s awareness efforts, autism rates have increased from 1 in 166 in 2005 to 1 in 68 today. While Autism Speaks relies heavily on the idea that the prevalence of autism itself has increased, the scientific jury is still out. Many scientists point to a mixture of different data collection methods and increased awareness to explain at least some of the leap.

Regardless of whether autism prevalence is increasing, ASAN worries that portraying autism as a dire diagnosis is problematic for autistics. “When the message of autism awareness becomes one of stigma, dehumanization, and public hysteria rather than one of civil rights, inclusion, and support, we face a grave threat to our efforts to be recognized as full and equal citizens in our communities,” the organization notes in a position statement on its website.

Many of the problems with Autism Speaks could be resolved by the organization adopting more inclusive attitudes and practices, such as ensuring autistics are included among its leaders, and abiding by ASAN’s guiding principle: “Nothing About Us Without Us.” Autism Speaks has been resistant to these criticisms, and has continued to operate without a single autistic among its executive leadership. When I ask Goring about the issue of representation, her response is curt: “All of our jobs are open for anyone to interview. There are board members at the national level who are on the spectrum.”

Despite the controversy surrounding the organization, Autism Speaks’ messaging dominates the media. It is currently in the midst of a multi-year ad campaign that features somber music and parents speaking in subdued tones about their children’s challenges. When my neurotypical 8-year-old daughter first heard one, she turned to me and asked why they thought autism was such a bad thing. “Autism isn’t bad,” she said. “It’s not like it kills you or something. I hate those autism ads.”

Cogley takes a different view of Autism Speaks and even the radio ads in question. She emphasizes that the words in the ads aren’t problematic, just the sad music and voices. Even changing to more upbeat music could have made the ads more positive and respectful of autistics while still acknowledging the challenges parents face. She believes there is less of a divide between these organizations than many think. “The hang-up isn’t necessarily what they are trying to do, the hangup is the wording,” she says. “We all have the same intention, we just don’t realize it.”

***

Reflecting on Bascom’s thoughts on the dangers of encouraging conformity, I begin to wonder what’s so wrong with trying to fit in. We all try to conform to at least some degree, and there are positives to feeling like we belong with our peers. If inclusion is about creating a system that works for everyone, instead of constructing an artificially inclusive environment like APL, autistics will never have anything but the experience of being a minority group. As someone with a rare disease myself, I know that it sometimes feels good to be surrounded by people like yourself.

ASAN recognizes the value of bringing autistics together. Each year, they host 15–18 college students in Washington, D.C. for a weeklong summer leadership academy called Autism Campus Inclusion (ACI). ASAN begins each session by announcing they are in an “autistic space,” where everyone in attendance is autistic and free to stim or behave however they need to in order to feel comfortable. “[When they hear that] their bodies just relax and you can hear a sigh go through the room,” Bascom says. “For many, this is the first time they have been in a space with other autistic people, and there is this delight and a sense of homecoming.”

Blessing the technology that allows me to tear up during phone interviews without anyone being the wiser, I realize these rare moments of being surrounded by other autistics is the only time autistics experience the same privilege I do every moment of the day.

This sense of belonging is what APL has the potential to offer, too. “For me, the most positive things about autism don’t happen in isolation; they happen with other autistic people,” Bascom says. “When I am in a staff meeting and everyone at the table around me is stimming in some way, it feels like home.”

***

Lead image: flickr/Philosophographlux

]]> https://theestablishment.co/dear-tufts-administrators-who-expelled-me-after-my-sexual-assaults-25d109c464f6/ Thu, 21 Apr 2016 16:18:43 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=8578 Read more]]>

It’s 5 a.m. I didn’t take Ambien the night before since I’m running low and unsure when I’ll get a refill. I don’t love it as much as I used to, anyway; it still helps me fall asleep, but it no longer provides the nightmare-free slumber it first provided.

Motivated by suspicions of his infidelity, I find public forum posts my boyfriend made online. My heart drops when I read the series of posts he made to tell the other members about me and our dating life. My blood runs cold as I see the MRA-style quotation marks around “rape case” in one of his first posts about me. They joke about me lying and falsely accusing him of rape. He joins in. I cry myself to sleep; the man who says he loves me thinks I’m a liar, too.

***

I rush into the accountant’s office, late for my morning appointment. Mornings have been a lot more difficult these past few months. The nightmares and depression have worsened since I was humiliatingly laid off in January and now I have the humiliating breakup to handle, too. When we start crunching the numbers, I realize that I don’t have everything I need to file that day. If I hadn’t had to hoard my ADD meds in the wake of losing my insurance, I know I would have had my shit together. Then, the appointment gets even worse: Thanks to my dad negotiating to settle my defaulted private student loans for less than was owed, I am going to owe Uncle Sam about $10,000. I groan. I only am able to keep calm as the accountant tells me about tax payment plans by telling myself I will get my chance to cry alone in the car as I drive back home.

***

I muster the energy to leave my house for the first time in five days. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I’ve run out of Ambien and I have some speaking gigs coming up. I can’t be a good speaker if I haven’t slept. As I pull up to the drive-thru pharmacy window, I turn down the car radio that’s playing my latest media interview talking about the portrayal of survivors. My prescriptions should be ready, but there is a problem with my health insurance — an increasingly frustrating, regular occurrence since the layoff. Medicaid doesn’t cover Ambien so I sucked it up and bought a plan I can’t afford through the Obamacare exchange. The pharmacist doesn’t have the info for it. I hand her a print-out, but she says that the insurance card I brought is incorrect. They won’t be able to fill one of the prescriptions. “What can I do? I’ve been out for a while.” I hope the pharmacist doesn’t notice my voice cracking and the tears welling up in my eyes.

***

I wake up after getting only an hour of sleep to catch a flight — one of many flights that I take during the month of April to share my trauma with strangers around the country. I sleepily click through to an article giving an update about a survivor who was also betrayed by her school’s administration. The similarities in our experiences were heartbreaking, but one stark difference hits me sharply in the heart; her life is moving forward. She’s pursuing a career in medicine.

I try to hold down the bitterness rising within me as I struggle to lift myself up from bed. My childhood bed. In my parents’ home. Because I cannot afford to live outside the home like a “real” adult. I feel a pang of jealousy as I think about my own stagnant life: unemployed, in debt, living at home with my parents, and possessing a college degree earned six years late from a different institution than I’d intended to graduate from. Not exactly the portrait of success. My own dreams of pursuing law were long destroyed since Tufts decided to kick me out. Now I financially scrape by through sharing my trauma on different stages year after year. I wish there was more to my abilities, but I take this privilege of being a paid public speaker and thank my stars for this one option.

The cab pulls into the airport; the sun hasn’t even risen. I psych myself up for a potential (often racist) government-sponsored scalp massage at TSA. It’s almost ironic how much personal invasion I have to endure to go to and from some of these speaking engagements addressing boundary violations.

Happy Sexual Assault Awareness Month to me.

***

Dear Tufts administrators present during my time on campus,

Do you ever think of me?

I often think of you. I wish it weren’t this way, I promise. I feel like that ex-girlfriend who just won’t admit to herself that “He’s Just Not That Into You.” But as you can see from the scenarios above, even the most mundane life events — paying my taxes, reading an online article, going to the pharmacy — are seemingly forever tainted by your decision to force me off your campus almost seven years ago. I reported my sexual assaults to you and you did nothing. And then, instead of recognizing my floundering GPA as a cry for help, you chose to use it as an excuse to refuse to provide me academic accommodations and ban me from your school when I was a mere one year away from finishing my undergraduate degree.

I have to ask, how do you sleep at night? (I’m sure you do it much better than me.) How do you remain silent and go through your day-to-day knowing that you have failed numerous survivors who’ve lived on Tufts’ campus?

How do you function knowing that students entrusted to your institution suffer from your ignorance and reluctance to do the right thing?

I don’t know why you chose to be a part of Tufts’ community. I chose it because as a high school senior, I was drawn to the school’s supposed commitment to both academic excellence and being good citizens. Obviously it’s been easier for you to talk the talk than to walk the walk. Seriously, how can you claim to want to create “informed, ethical, and engaged” citizens when you fail to properly engage with the problem of campus sexual assault or treat survivors ethically?

Your collective failure to assist me — a young, Black woman trying to recover after abuse — reaffirmed how I feared the rest of the world saw me: not valued. After having my body abused and my self-worth diminished by another student, your institutional refusal to do anything implied that you agreed with him.

Your message was clear: What happened to me didn’t matter; I was not worth helping.

After being raped and in an abusive relationship, I felt like I had lost almost everything: my friends who ostracized me and then graduated on time, the confidence that I was intelligent and a good student, my dreams of studying abroad, and the hope of experiencing a healthy romantic college relationship. I had one last thing, though, that you took away from me: finally earning a degree from the college that I chose as a naive 16-year-old high schooler.

It’s amazing how much power the administrators occupying Dowling Hall have over the lives of thousands of students who pass through the Medford/Somerville campus. I now really get why civil rights laws like Title IX exist: your knowledge and apathy toward crises like the impact of gender-based violence prevent education from becoming anything close to “The Great Equalizer.” That’s why I am completely unsurprised that the Department of Education chose you as the first school officially declared in violation of Title IX for sexual violence — and you subsequently tried to back out of the voluntary resolution agreement with the government to improve your response to sexual misconduct.

While I didn’t receive a degree from your fine institution, I did learn an invaluable lesson: that being a good person does not protect me from being unfairly harmed by others. And as your apathy toward my abuse and years of struggle afterward shows, being good doesn’t guarantee that others will help when they serve as witness to my harm. I would tell you more about how much of my spirit you have broken, how every time I’m mistreated by someone I know and trust I think about the administrators who, frankly, ruined my life. But I know better than to expect that you’d actually listen to me almost seven years after you turned your back on me.

I now know better than to expect the best from people.

Happy Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

No love,

Wagatwe

***

Images courtesy the author

By Monica Busch

If you haven’t heard, R&B singer Chris Brown is planning to release a documentary chronicling his life, rise to fame, and subsequent infamy following his 2009 assault on then-girlfriend and Grammy award-winning singer Rihanna. The documentary, dubbed Welcome to My Life, does not have a release date, but Brown Tweeted the trailer earlier this week.

In the trailer, Brown’s rapid rise to fame is recounted, along with his early days dating Rihanna, which is described as “magical.” He is also lauded by artists like Usher, Jennifer Lopez, and Jamie Foxx as essentially being a gift to the modern entertainment industry. But before very long, suspenseful music builds and Brown remarks that he “went from being kind of like America’s sweetheart to Public Enemy №1” following his assault on his ex-girlfriend — the altercation that left the pop star’s face peppered with bruises, as seen in the now jarringly familiar photo of her face following the attack.

“I felt like a fucking monster,” Brown says. “I was thinking about suicide and everything else. I wasn’t sleeping, I barely ate. I was just getting high.”

The trailer ends with Brown promising that, despite doubts that some may harbor, his career is far from over.

If this sounds like a gross way of capitalizing on his indiscretions and a sneaky attempt to not quite take ownership of his actions, it’s because a bird that waddles and quacks is often a duck. While both Chris Brown and Rihanna have been largely quiet about the 2009 altercation aside from heavily coded lyricism, Chris Brown’s narrative has varied wildly from remorse to forgetfulness. One minute he says the night of the assault was a blur, the next he says it wasn’t. What is certain, however, is that choosing to address this one event in the first trailer for a documentary that one expects will cover his entire life is an intentional way to draw viewers in by making his violence the focal point.

Despite attempts by his mother, Joyce Hawkins, to downplay her son’s violent and aggressive reputation — one that far exceeds the infamous battering — Brown’s name is rarely uttered in the media without Rihanna’s close behind. While Rihanna’s victimization should not be — and is not — her identity, Chris Brown’s flagrant disregard for a woman’s physical and emotional well-being certainly should follow him. Rightfully, it does. Wrongly, he’s attempting to monetize his record in a way that requests sympathy from viewers.

Any trauma a perpetrator of domestic violence experiences from public shaming cannot reasonably exceed the trauma experienced by the target. But what else can be inferred from a trailer that, by highlighting Chris Brown’s depleted social standing and resulting stress, necessarily implies a juxtaposition of his sinking fame with the ever-growing success of his ex-girlfriend? Emphasizing how bad the aftermath was for Chris Brown is only marginally removed from victim blaming since, after all, Rihanna is the physical being around which his trauma resulted. In the clips, he makes the tragedy of being beaten up entirely about him. It’s like Brown is silently asking, “Couldn’t we/she/everyone have gone a little bit easier on me?” It’s like he’s saying that intentionally causing harm to another human being was just a simple lapse of judgement and self control that he doesn’t deserve to suffer for anymore.

Of course, the response should be that he is an able-bodied male who knew what he was doing when he put his girlfriend in a headlock and proceeded to beat her, but unfortunately we live in a society that continuously pardons and pities offenders of — specifically — violence against women. This, of course, is not new.

Take, for example, the Steubenville rape case trials in 2013, when CNN came under fire for lamenting the ruined futures of two teens convicted of raping an underage girl. Or the litany of sports figures and media outlets that said former Ravens running back Ray Rice should have been allowed to re-join the NFL, even after video surfaced of the player attacking his then-fiancee in an elevator. Or, take the 48 Hours special on Lauren Astley, a Massachusetts teenager who was murdered by her ex-boyfriend: While the coverage is arguably mostly narrative, the title — Loved to Death — is quite an introduction to a story about breakup violence.

Some may argue that Chris Brown served out his punishment via probation and community service, but the question is not whether he deserves to continue working or making music — that’s an argument for a different time. The question is whether he should be able to profit off marketing his life story as a tell-all about a high-profile domestic assault case that has the potential to not only re-victimize his ex-girlfriend, but also could be told through a medium that will not result in his monetary benefit.

Chris Brown is capitalizing off of his own violent acts — commodifying the actual, literal pain he inflicted on a person he was in a romantic relationship with. Usher remarks in the trailer, “If you truly love Chris Brown, then you felt everything that has gone on with him.” But combatting domestic violence is about prevention and trauma care, not spinning one’s life in some attempt to spring back into public favor by pandering to voyeuristic consumerism. It’s not about feeling what Chris Brown has felt, it’s about not excusing what Rihanna felt.

***

Lead image: YouTube

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