Fashion has always been used to send messages, or to exhibit social status or wealth. In many cultures, black at a funeral shows you’re mourning, just as a bride in white at her wedding represents purity. Victorian women wore corsets to exemplify their high societal stature. During the Vietnam war, military uniforms were worn first by veterans, and then by non-veterans, as a form of protest. And recently, during Melania Trump’s notorious visit to detention camps, where she donned an Army-inspired jacket with the phrase “I Really Don’t Care Do U?” scrawled across the back, the same item spread a completely different message.

But perhaps no item of clothing has gone through as many semiotic changes as the bell bottom jean. The pants have been worn for their practicality, to make a political statement, simply for the sake of fashion, and, when they were shamefully out of style, not worn at all. These days, the humble flared pant seems to be enjoying something of a moment: Forever 21, the Mecca of all things trendy and popular, currently has a laundry list of bellbottom options on their site. The comeback of bellbottoms coincides with an intense political climate, and a particularly involved generation of youths. This year, bell bottoms were especially popular at Coachella—a festival where the main demographic is millennials, people roughly aged between 21 and 35.

For lack of a better word, bell bottom pants are loud. When you wear bell bottoms you can’t help but take up space, and people can’t help but notice you. In a time when young people feel unheard and underrepresented, it’s important for them to be seen.

Bell bottoms are so aggressively associated with the sixties and seventies, it’s nearly impossible to imagine their origins have un-hippie roots. According to Encyclopedia.com, bell bottom pants have actually been traced back to the 17th century, when wide-legged pants were intended to be practical uniforms for boat workers. The pants were then introduced to sailors in the U.S. Navy in 1817, and they still rock wide leg pants to this day. The extra loose fabric offered by bell-shaped legs serves as a safety measure—in the instance that a man fell overboard, he could easily take his pants off and allow the wide bottoms to inflate with air and used as a life preserver.

Messy jobs on board a ship, like washing the decks, also meant there was a need for a pant that could easily be rolled up and kept out of the way of water (a problem you know all too well if you’ve ever tried getting a pedicure in skinny jeans). Of course, sailors think of wide-legged pants in terms of practicality, and it wasn’t until the 1960s that bell bottoms started being rocked as socio-political symbols. 

While the fifties were (and still are, for some reason) remembered fondly as being a time of good old American wholesomeness, sixties’ fashion defied those virtues completely. Youth countered the buttoned up, conservative look of the decade before and opted for clothing that made a statement. 

The bell bottom pant worked as a symbol for two reasons. Politically, a lot was happening in the late sixties and early seventies that warranted the younger generation to sharply retract from the mainstream. The biggest offender was, of course, the Vietnam War—a war that left the country incredibly split in terms of opinion on whether or not the US should even be involved and, to make matters worse, this young generation was still being drafted and forced into the war they so despised. Naturally, this left people angered and upset, and if the fifties represented post-World War II, buttoned-up patriotism, then the decades that followed turned completely against it. Instead of opting for the fitted pencil skirts of the more conservative generation prior, young people chose to literally wear their distaste for the current social climate on their sleeves. Thus, bold pieces like wide-leg jeans were adopted—defying the mainstream as a statement against the very unpopular involvements of the government.

Of course, sailors think of wide-legged pants in terms of practicality, and it wasn’t until the 1960s that bell bottoms started being rocked as socio-political symbols.
Click To Tweet

Fashion historian and educator Sarah Byrd hesitates to impart too much power on singular fashion choices, such as choosing to wear a bell bottom pant. Even though clothing has a very physical effect (like I said, they take up space), Byrd explains that “many factors go into the things we wear at any given time as a consumer: what’s available, your cultural lens, how you feel that day. Like the people wearing the clothing, it’s a nuanced and complicated statement.”  

But what is often forgotten about bell bottoms is their role in popularizing unisex (or simply, gender nonspecific) styles. Brands like Levi’s made flared jeans for both men and women (marketed separately, though they may as well have been the exact same pant) and they became a part of typical wardrobes for men and women alike.

Perhaps the greatest example of this gender non-conformity is Sonny and Cher. The duo didn’t have traditionally gender-specific personas on stage: Cher’s contralto vocal range often hummed below Sonny Bono’s softer singing voice (and the fact that Bono was four inches shorter than his wife played into their almost “gender-swapped” stage presence). And at the time, they both were known to wear bell bottom pants during performances. Increasing access to color TV allowed people like Sonny and Cher to wear brightly colored, eye-catching outfits, showing their fans that one style could be fit for them both.  

The previously harsh contrast between male and female threads began to blur, which also coincided with a boom in other social movements. The Stonewall Riots had just happened in 1969, launching the LGBT Movement into action full-force. The adoption of bell bottoms into the contemporary style of the flamboyant sixties and seventies paralleled this movement. Not only were they marketed toward both women and men, but they were also regularly in the style lineup of pop icons. David Bowie, Elton John, Liberace, and their contemporaries were redefining how (specifically men) dressed and represented themselves.

Even Elvis Presley, whose style adhered to traditional gender roles through the 1950s, found himself in bell bottoms. Previously, he was an all-American man who was drafted to war, donned suits when he dressed up, and despite his somewhat eclectic taste, managed to maintain his rugged, womanizing demeanor. But he adapted the newfound fluid style in the sixties and seventies, often wearing his iconic wide-legged, bedazzled jumpsuits. For many, seeing pop stars in gender-fluid clothing meant feeling comfortable with their own sexuality.

It meant that maybe men don’t have to dress traditionally masculine if they don’t want to, and women aren’t bound to skirts and dresses. It forced the general public to come to terms (or at least, more so than before) with the fluidity of it all. Instead of adhering to strict, specifically gendered clothes (ladies in skirts and men in suits) bell bottoms jeans were made for everyone. Even the straightest, greased up American man was now sharing pants with Liberace. 

Sarah Byrd agrees that the exposure of trends by means of the celebrity has always had an impact on fashion. She points out that in the early twentieth century, the fan culture around celebrities gave birth; theatrical actors and performers were followed and documented in magazines, just as celebrities and influencers are on social media today. Byrd explains: “In many cases [the celebrity] serve to ‘normalize’ more avant-garde styles to the public.”

Even the straightest, greased up American man was now sharing pants with Liberace.
Click To Tweet

In a 1969 New York Times article, writer Judy Klemesrud discusses a conversation she overheard between two teenage girls on the New York City subway, regarding what they planned to wear to an upcoming Janis Joplin concert. From their conversation, she learned about the role bell bottoms played in teenage fashion:

There are the ‘safe’ fashions that can be worn without scorn anywhere. For the girls: bell-bottom blue jeans topped with an antique fur coat (never a new fur coat!). For boys: bell-bottom blue jeans worn with a suede fringed jacket.

Klemesrud notes the irony that the “rock crowd,” which shouts about individuality, tends to “march to the same drummer” when it comes to fashion.

But one could argue quite the contrary. Young people do tend to dress like each other or, in the case of the Joplin-loving girls, dress like one of their idols. The music one enjoys and the people one idolizes are clear reflections of their own ideologies. When someone mirrors a celebrity trend, it can also be an association with what the celebrity stands for.

A lot of current trends continue to ignore gender-made style, again seen in the ever-popular “boyfriend jean” and even the male romper. But more importantly: bell bottoms are back, and their resurgence in the midst of an unsettled generation is similar to that of the sixties and seventies.

On one hand, one could question whether the resurgence of the bell bottom is actually a conscious link to the seventies. Perhaps the revival of styles is the natural ebb and flow of the fashion world; in a May 1980 article for the New York Times titled “How Pants Shape Up: Something for Everyone; Question of Acceptance” Bernadine Morris writes:

…Any fashion loses its punch after a bit of exposure, and women who had felt like pathfinders when they first donned a pair of pants to go to lunch or to work were to discover the same sense of adventure when they returned to a skirt or dress. To stimulate the interest, trousers changed their shape over the decade, passing from straight-legged to low-flared or bell-bottomed.

But on the other hand, the popularity of bell bottoms once again could have a connection to the seventies, whether it’s a completely conscious connection or not. Byrd points out that millennials are not old enough to have “originally” worn the style and therefore have enough distance to romanticize the references into a narrative that suits their current culture.

While not everyone who dons bell bottoms in 2018 is trying to boldly demonstrate a political opinion, it makes sense that the trend would return in such politically radical times. Though unquestionably stylish, sporting a pair of bell bottoms echoes  an interest in the social climate and acceptance of an evolving revolution. After all, clothing is never just clothing.

As a devoted William Morris fan, it’s been a delight — in part — to see Morris & Co prints brought to high streets across the world by H&M and rendered instafamous. Morris’ beautifully stylized depictions of nature are almost ubiquitous now.

These mediaeval-inspired designs were originally produced for Victorian wallpapers and home textiles, and their imposing yet delicate grandeur established Morris as one of the 19th century’s most famous textile designers. Now the popularity of this clothing collaboration has launched his work into the international spotlight. But just what tradition is being celebrated by H&M marketing his work as iconically British? Just what are we losing when we strip an artist’s work of its political context?

In addition to being a poet and designer, Morris was also a revolutionary and friend of Marx and Engels. He was an idealist who argued that craftwork and cooperation would make wage labour obsolete and, far from being simply the “iconic [nineteenth Century] British wallpaper and fabrics brand” which H&M proffers, Morris’s company was run on collective principles and managed by his daughter May at a time when women were rarely afforded such power.

Capitalism has done to William Morris what it always does best to political creatives: de-politicized his legacy for profit. Admittedly his household designs have long been mass-produced and on sale in museums and homeware shops. But at least the mugs, coasters and tea towels were affordable symbols of affinity with Morris. They were often marketed within the confines of the designs’ history and therefore, by and large, did not so fully erase his politics.

Just what are we losing when we strip an artist’s work of its political context?
Click To Tweet

H&M presents his maximalist, repeated homages to the natural world as emblems of British tradition and nostalgia, when in fact Morris used mediaeval aesthetics not to celebrate Britain, but rather as a protest in advocating pre-industrial values. The press, however, has followed H&M’s marketing wash, instead of looking to Morris’s actual political legacy.

Vogue termed it “another British heritage brand”; The Guardian, too, echoed the “heritage” language.

How does capitalism’s own tradition of depoliticization play out when consumers are clothed in imagery taken out of context but also place, having originally been created to celebrate home?

H&M is curating a selective history which conjures nostalgia for a Victorian era of Empire. They launched their Morris and Co collaboration with a campaign video boasting a grainy, faux ’70s aesthetic.

Skinny white women prance through what looks like the Scottish Highlands, a brook and a cottage to their backs. They wear silk scarves, maxi dresses, pussy bow tops: demure looks paired with classic jumpers and jeans. Then, in a move which reinforced the capitalistic juggernaut that is H&M’s marketing, the company then gathered influencers for “paid partnerships” at the Morris-decorated mansion Standen House.

This manipulation fits within fashion’s long history with the commodification of radical craft and the history of Morris prints is simply a case study of how mainstream consumerism subsumes radical aesthetics.

Two previous uses of Morris designs for clothing aimed to pay tribute to his anti-establishment politics by linking them to subcultural styles.

The first was in the ’60s when autodidact designer Mary Quant — inspired by Mod fashion and the sexual revolution — made a mini-skirt suit in Morris’ “Marigold” print. The second instance occurred in 2017 when fashion house Loewe released a capsule collection approaching Morris through punk style. 

However, both fell into the consumer culture trap where radical social movements were transformed into fashionable commodities for companies to profit from.

The aesthetics of subcultures — like punk for example, which communicates a rejection of the status quo and an alternative belonging — also resided within the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Arts and Crafts movement (of which Morris was a leader) in their distancing from Victorian production and values.

When aesthetics designed to be imbued with a certain meaning are donned as decontextualized fashion statements, those meanings are signaled without an actual affinity for movement, without a desire to belong or perpetuate the aesthetics’ accompanying ideals. This transformation — problematic in itself — is the process of reincorporation which leads to meanings being written over at best and bastardized or erased at worst.

William Morris’ creations were inspired by his belief in ordinary people’s value and rights
Click To Tweet

Looking at the H&M collection, we can see nods to this lineage of aesthetic spin-offs, although they don’t directly mention the homage.

Their ’60s-esque mini dress uses the same print as Quant’s mini-skirt suit and their “Pimpernel” trouser suit recalls George Harrison in a “Golden Lily”-patterned blazer or John Lennon in “Chrysanthemum.” 

Morris’ politics inspired some subcultural affinity in the 20th Century but the sartorial trickle-down of these styles is mere commodification.

The anti-establishment message has disappeared when a mainstream brand like H&M calls him “iconic.” yet simultaneously ignores the radical politics he stood for. Indeed, when the company talks about “tradition,” they don’t even mean this tradition of subversive reuse. Instead, they invoke an abstract, white, and classist British status quo of countryside leisure.

Returning to the bigger picture of how fashion commodifies art, the connection between Morris’ radicalism and subcultural fashions like mods and punks is fitting — but not for the reasons the fashion houses intended.

Dick Hebdige, scholar of subcultural style, coined a term for the way capitalism seizes subversive aesthetics and turns them into a “fashion,” therefore making them apolitical, mainstream and profitable: “reincorporation.”

In his book Subcultures: the Meaning of Style he argues that youth movements develop their own style which puts across their criticisms of the existing order. The mainstream culture, however, incorporates their subversions within its own pre-existing world-view. In this way, the deviant meaning is lost. This sort of commodification happened to the styles of teddy boys, mods and rockers, hippies, skinheads, punks, etc., but it also happens today when far older styles with a political message are brought into vogue.

William Morris’s natural imagery — inspired by mediaeval styles because it sought to evade capitalism — now adorns the high street as season-appropriate florals.

Paying attention to the intended meanings behind art and design is important, especially when corporate fashion aims to depoliticize and commodify those visions’ intentions. Fashion is political, and the imagery it recycles, especially so.

William Morris’ creations were inspired by his belief in ordinary people’s value and rights; his words still appear on trade union banners today. Dismantling the homogenizing consumerism of fashion means celebrating the hidden radical histories erased by corporations, whether those be the politics of class, race, gender or sexuality.

So when you next see someone in that instafamous H&M x Morris & Co. maxi dress, they are — arguably — an inadvertent, living homage to a Victorian anti-Capitalist aesthetic and to those who sought revolutionary in the ’60s and ’70s.

There’s a thin line between buying pleasing patterns and communicating affinity of ideals, but if we celebrate and talk about these hidden histories we foster a critical eye and a celebration of the subversive role fashion should be allowed — and continue —to play.

In New York, I imagine it’s Christmastime. My uncle hunched over the counter making homemade pasta noodles for lasagna, my aunt stealing a few slices of salami of her freshly made antipasto, and the smell of penne alla vodka permeating throughout the air. I was nostalgic for my aunt’s famous rainbow cookies, and not just because they were better than any bakery, but because I had learned how to make them with her, side by side with my little cousin.

I am not Italian. But my family is.

In Honduras, I wake up slowly to lazy roosters singing their morning anthem. I spend a good part of the day cleaning and then I go across the street to have lunch. Suyapa is in her beachfront restaurant listening to the news on her radio. Her two girls are sharing a hammock. One is reading, the other is vigorously texting. I greet everyone and then I order my usual: pescado frito con tajadas. I sit at my favorite table where the sand meets the sea and wait for my order to be ready.

I am Honduran; they are not my family. But they look like they could be.

My earliest memory of food is eating oatmeal and drinking agua de sandía (watermelon water). With legs sprawled out on the hotel couch and curious eyes, I anxiously awaited each morning for room service to bring my breakfast. I ate a variation of this meal for the next 40 days. My mom and I were in Tegucigalpa waiting in a hotel across the park from where our lawyer was finalizing the adoption papers. At two and a half years old I didn’t know that my life was about to dramatically change, but I knew that this woman was taking care of me and I felt loved.

My second earliest memory of food is hiding it. When I got to my new home in the United States, I still hadn’t kicked the habit I’d picked up in the orphanage of hiding leftovers to make sure I had enough to eat. It didn’t take long to see that this behavior wasn’t necessary. I wasn’t afraid my mom wasn’t going to feed me.

As I grew up, my mom made sure I maintained a relationship to the food of my birth country. She learned how to make arroz con pollo, enchiladas, and other different kinds of Latin American food. I didn’t know that she wouldn’t always use the exact ingredients and would improvise. Later, when I traveled in Honduras, I could taste the difference from my mom’s arroz con pollo. But at the time, I didn’t remember what food from my country tasted like.

I grew up with homemade meals, meticulously customized birthday cakes (as per my request), and I learned how to cook early. I felt at home in the kitchen. Each recipe either came from the Joy of Cooking or my mom’s treasured wooden box of family recipes. Each night I would roll up my sleeves and stand side by side with my mom, making lasagna, stuffed mushrooms, and minestrone soup and meatballs (my mom put raisins in hers and marked them with X’s with a knife so I didn’t accidentally eat any. Raisins weren’t my favorite.) This was my food.

I didn’t remember what food from my country tasted like.
Click To Tweet

It wasn’t until I was told I was different from classmates (in less than nice words) that I felt different. How could I tell my mom that kids at school told me that she wasn’t my real mom and my family wasn’t my real family and my real family didn’t want me?

Instead, I spent the majority of my childhood feeling bad and embarrassed for being adopted.

Each time I looked at a family picture, I could see I looked different than everyone else. I hid them all. I even shoved the screen printed pillow cover of my three cousins and I in the back of my closet. I loved that pillowcase; I loved my cousins; we had gotten it done when we went to Storyland one summer. I only kept my yearbook photos and one of me and my mom hung up on the wall above my piano. At least when I was in a picture with just my mom, I could have a reason as to why I looked different. It would be a lot easier than explaining why all of my family members were white and I wasn’t.

Our family tradition was to go to New York for Christmas. I was always so excited to go to New York because I grew up in Maine and never had experienced seeing so many people of color. In grocery stores, I’d trail behind Spanish speaking families and wish they knew me somehow. I’d peer into their carts, searching for Latin American food, in hopes that would give me a clue as to who I was and where I came from.

In high school I asked my mom if we could eat food from Central America. I wasn’t expecting to find Honduran food where I grew up, but to our amazement we found an authentic El Salvadorian restaurant in downtown Portland, Maine. They welcomed me with warm eyes, but when they caught a glimpse of my mom trailing behind me they treated me less warmly and didn’t give my mom the time of day. I didn’t ask to go again.

Finally, I graduated high school early and left to study abroad. Despite my mom’s attempt to cook Latin American foods, and my attempts to find Latin American culture in my hometown, I had lost my birth culture’s identity. I wanted to reclaim it.

I did not travel to Honduras at first. I wasn’t ready. I spent time in Costa Rica through an exchange program but I wanted to experience more. My mom’s best friend hosted a Peruvian woman and asked if I could stay with her family once she returned to Peru. I didn’t end up staying with that host family, but instead found a girl in my class whose family hosted students regularly. They had two daughters around my age and a son who was a few years younger. Our connection was instantaneous. We enjoyed the same music, laughed at the same things and found joy in each other’s company. I grew up as an only child and I found something I had always wanted: Siblings and a family that looked like me. Well, kinda. And food that I would have eaten if I grew up in my own country. Well, kinda.

I learned how to cook la comida de la selva side by side with my Mamita, a woman I met through a girl I went to school with, whose family would become my family. I remember one morning waking up to the smell of juane de arroz. The kitchen was joyfully flooded with rows and rows of hojas de bijao (banana leaves), waiting to be filled with rice and tied with string. I tied for hours with my brothers and sisters. I had never been so happy to do such a monotonous task.

I am not Peruvian. But they are more than my host family. They are my family.

After graduating from college I traveled to Asia. I learned how to order food in each country I lived in. I devoured the sizzling street food of Bangkok. I eagerly awaited to have Pad Thai in On Nut Market and finished my meal with mango sticky rice. In Seoul, I shared Korean BBQ with coworkers and filled up on pork buns at least three times a week. On visa runs I would go to Vietnam and eat fresh Bánh mì in a trance and have the same expression on my face when I had my daily serving of Bai Sach Chrouk in Cambodia.

I didn’t grow up with any of these foods. I am not Thai. I am not Korean. I am not Vietnamese or Cambodian, but I saw how food brought people together. I felt how I was welcomed into their culture, and into their homes. I was gracefully cocooned within a culture of food and with people who shared the love of food and people.

Despite my mom’s attempt to cook Latin American foods, and my attempts to find Latin American culture in my hometown, I had lost my birth culture’s identity. I wanted to reclaim it.
Click To Tweet

Eventually I made it back to Honduras. I wanted to remember the food of my motherland. I wanted to smell baleadas from blocks away and instinctively know that that was the food of my homeland; that it was mine. That I belonged to Honduras and Honduras belonged to me. I had seen first hand how food seamlessly brought a culture together—I wanted to be woven back into my own culture.

But unfortunately, I didn’t have a magical moment. I didn’t taste something that flooded my brain with memories of my birth family and culture.

Nothing tasted familiar.

My taste buds didn’t invite me to dance or throw a homecoming party for me.

I didn’t even like baleadas.

That was until I saw on the menu that they served agua de sandia and arroz con pollo.

In that moment I was not Honduran or Italian. In that moment I was me. A collection of my lived experiences.

My feeling of home comes from the people I surround myself with and the food that unites us. Home is not a place on a map, where I grew up, or even where I was born. Home is a feeling.

And food, was another language of love.

In Pakistan, and in my native language Urdu, woman translates into Aurat, which comes from the Persian Awrah, meaning “parts to be protected.” Literally, too, in my present Muslim, closed-knit, patriarchal society, women like me are guided—by their fathers, husbands, brothers, sons—to be protected from threats against their body and family honor.

While these men encourage “Western” trends to an extent—like education at reputable schools, recreational sports, or even temporary employment—cultural traditions halt these prospects after marriage. You are born, our men tell us, to marry fast, and vouchsafe both yourselves and your future daughters under our protection.

Because culture is reinforced by practice, and because most girls in my family and neighborhood were married off at nineteen or twenty, naturally I grew up understanding that my life would turn out to be largely the same.

And like most families around us, my family was also wary of sending their daughters abroad for higher studies. Local education until we reached marriageable age seemed sufficient. My sister and I were taught that there were enough boys in the house to look after the family distribution business; thus, for us, a long-term career wasn’t a priority. I would, instead, have to marry well, and learn how to manage my in-laws’ household.

My father, Baba, maintained from my birth that our culture was different from the “West’s.” He was adamant that we both expand our horizons and maintain our own set of traditional values. While our family travelled every summer, to Europe or the U.K., my parents were their own Pakistani selves there. At eight, I shuffled awkwardly behind Mama, who wore a traditional, full-length shalwar kameez, while Baba—his trousers religiously hitched above his ankles—stood in line to buy tickets at Disneyland Paris.

Baba never reacted to the half-naked foreigners around us. He took it as a means to educate his daughters. “People dress and live differently here,” he’d explain. “They value independence over family. We don’t. See everything, Mehreen. Gain exposure. But always stay true to your culture.”

I was fully clad under his protection, yet embarrassed. A part of me was enchanted by the liberation around me, by how the women we met—at somber restaurants, glittering hotel receptions, crowded tours—could have the authority to choose what to wear, where to work, how to live, all by themselves. Baba didn’t notice when, in our rented car trips around Germany and France, I’d roll my pants up into shorts and sit smugly on my seat. Or at least, with his eyes in the rear-view mirror, he pretended not to.

You are born, our men tell us, to marry fast, and vouchsafe both yourselves and your future daughters under our protection.
Click To Tweet

Baba’s “exposure” showed me that there were opportunities for women in cultures different from ours. As we visited bookstores abroad, my mother, beautiful and passive, introduced me to Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton’s works, books she had reveled in herself throughout childhood. On car trips around the glittering lakes of Lugano and Lucerne, I read about Matilda’s victory over Ms. Trunchbull, Sophie’s adventures with the BFG, Anne and George’s explorations of Kirrin Island in The Famous Five, and this new, literary world seemed to unravel before me.

I was captivated, and yet saddened by the realization that, unlike these characters, I wouldn’t ever get to have the same liberties as a Muslim, Pakistani girl. Still, to my eight-year-old self, societal boundaries seemed malleable and time-bound, and I continued my readings in the hope that when I grew up, I’d have equal opportunities to pursue my dreams as the boys my age would have too.

Funnily enough, my resolution didn’t waver with time, and three years ago, at eighteen, with my reasonable grades and no marriage proposals, I began to think of a career as a writer. On a high after finishing A Hundred Years of Solitude one night at 4 a.m., I decided what the hell—I wanted to write well, with expertise and precision. But first, I wanted to study great literary works in depth, maybe at a good university, maybe even…abroad (Pakistani universities don’t offer a degree in English).

My mind began to spin wildly. Why not apply abroad to the best institute, maybe to Oxford or Cambridge? You won’t get in anyway, I told myself. But the vertigo continued. What was the harm in trying?

I was captivated, and yet saddened by the realization that, unlike these characters, I wouldn’t ever get to have the same liberties as a Muslim, Pakistani girl.
Click To Tweet

So a week later, when everyone was fast asleep, I switched my computer on, dimmed the study lights, and hastily applied to Cambridge. A month later, when I got the call that they’d like to interview me, my eyes nearly popped out. I asked Baba to take me to Cambridge for the interview. He downright refused, but he didn’t reprimand me for secretly applying, or punish me for it. Baba was relatively open-minded compared to the System. After seeing the tears in my eyes and my relentless persistence, he agreed—with a condition: if I did get in, there was no guarantee that I’d actually go.

We trod the Cambridge grounds in a cold December wind amid rustling fallen leaves. There were six other girls for the interview—from Paris, Singapore, Brazil, and the U.K. We discussed The Weeknd’s latest music, and Netflix’s Stranger Things. I was excited, confident, and thoroughly comfortable. The interviews, each thirty minutes long, turned into more of a literary chat. Two interviewers sat opposite me on mahogany chairs. We discussed my personal statement, analyzed Mansfield and Keats, made jokes about how the lack of sunlight affected our literary mood. When I was free to go, I felt satiated. Content. I knew I’d tried.

Two months later, while browsing through my junk email, I opened one that confirmed my unconditional offer from Cambridge. I fell off my chair howling. I was ecstatic, dumbfounded, but at the same time there was a touch of melancholy: I remembered Baba’s condition.

I approached Baba, whose eyes glittered with pride at the sight of my admission letter, while his head shook into a firm, “no.”

I felt crushed, ashamed, angry. I’d hoped that maybe Baba would, by some miracle, relent. I’d come too far this time, for my writing career to remain intangible—a mere dream left unlived. “Don’t you know it’s CAMBRIDGE?” I argued. “People don’t go for financial reasons, and you’re stopping me because of what the people in our community will think?” Baba’s response was always, “I supported you as much as I could, Mehreen, and I’ll continue to do so of course, but every culture has its conventions.” With a glance at Mama who stood silently in the bedroom corner, never intervening, I wailed that he was enforcing obsolete, draconian values on his daughters, and burst into tears.

After numerous arguments, I discovered Baba was more stubborn than I’d expected him to be. At times, I felt desperate enough to imagine myself grabbing my passport and running away. I envisioned Baba’s voice breaking on the other end when I’d eventually call him from Cambridge. In my mind, he’d take it on himself for exposing us to that “Western” culture, and would finally give me his blessing (and the university’s tuition fees).

Yet I admit, I’m glad I didn’t run away. Cambridge or not, it wasn’t worth leaving my family. Baba tried to make amends with hugs and gifts, which I accepted. He was still my father after all.

Four months after I’d received the Cambridge offer, a “good” proposal came. His name was Ali. He was well-established, twenty-six (six years older than I was), and according to my family, a genuine guy. Knowing I wouldn’t go to Cambridge, and still bitter with my family for their treatment of me, I hesitantly accepted. I wanted a new start, a different environment, some time to heal—even if it was under the “protection” of another man. Two years later, last August, Ali and I entered an arranged marriage.

Every culture has its conventions.
Click To Tweet

Post-marriage, I learned to love and respect Ali for his easygoing nature and his unwavering care for me. He was open-minded, more so than Baba, and was comfortable with my having a writing career, even if I were to attend fiction writing workshops both locally and abroad. Inevitably, we discussed the Cambridge topic, and I confided how big of a blow that was to my career. “Why so?” he replied, his gentle brown eyes unfazed and soothing. “You want to be a writer, and you can be. Cambridge isn’t the end game.”

“But…but the networking—” I spluttered. The contacts! The teaching! How could I be a writer without all that?

Ali insisted that I was making it about Cambridge, not about my writing, which is what really mattered. As he spoke, I tried to listen. Virginia Woolf didn’t go to Cambridge. Shakespeare wasn’t well educated either. Maybe I would have to work harder than other people, put in more years, enroll in a local university…but that didn’t mean I couldn’t be a writer.

With time, I learned to empathize with my family and their decision, accepting that Baba was only a product of his environment. Both he and Mama were firm in their orthodox beliefs. Keeping their girls home was a plea to help safeguard their own culture in an alien world.

Yet I can feel hot winds of change around me. Pakistani society is learning and developing from the globalized importance of education and independence. With events like Malala’s Educate Girls campaigns, and #timesup, the current generations—including myself and Ali—yearn to give space and independence to each other and teach our offspring the same.

But of course, Cambridge is an opportunity lost that I still regret. Sometimes when I’m staring at the computer blankly during writing sessions, I long for the warmth of ancient fireplaces, the rusty smells of centuries-old libraries, the meandering and brilliant discussions with tutors, communal meals with my peers…

Keeping their girls home was a plea to help safeguard my parents' own culture in an alien world.
Click To Tweet

Then, I look at pictures of Ali and me, hand in hand at our wedding, while Baba stands with an unabashed smile in the background. I tell myself that Cambridge was my road not taken, and life deals you cards that you to learn to manage instead of getting depressed over. In my case, my gender and cultural values obstructed me from having the same opportunities as boys my age did. I can either hate it and run from it or confront it and hope for change.

Still, I realize that in this time and society, I need the blessings of men around me in order to establish myself. These men might be supportive and kind-hearted—like Baba, and Ali—but I yearn for the freedom, the authority, and independence that women like Jane Eyre, Jo March and Hester Prynne craved, albeit in different shades and tones than my own longings. And, every time I pick up my pen, I take on these societal structures can only be altered by awareness and exposure, which come from lots and lots of reading. And writing.

For now, as students my age savor their goodbye hugs and farewell parties before leaving for universities abroad, I glance at a crisp, white letter on my right—my Cambridge acceptance—then at the wedding ring on my left hand.

And I know I won’t be among them.

Brazil holds the world’s highest LGBTQI murder rate. Here, a LGBTQI person is brutally murdered or commits suicide every 19 hours. Every. 19. hours.

Among such crushing hostility, it would appear there should be little room for LGBTQI artists to exist at all. The reality, however, is quite the opposite: the queer music scene of Brazil is exploding.

The current aural landscape is comprised of incredibly diverse performers whose work ranges from rap, rock and R&B to soul, indie music, Brazilian funk and even K-pop.

Together, artists like Gloria Groove, Linn da Quebrada, and Pabllo Vittar have founded a brand new paradigm in Brazil’s music scene. The moment they dared to go up on the stage, a revolution began. And there’s no turning back.

“You Either Resist Or Die”

Refusing the second option, five rappers from the edges of São Paulo decided to found Quebrada Queer; they self-describe as the first LGBTQI cypher in Latin America.

Cyphers — singing as a group — have become very popular in Brazil’s music scene. For Quebrada Queer members, rapping as a cypher is their weapon against invisibility and prejudice.

“Once we gathered, we became the first openly gay rap group in Latin America,” says Guigo, a member of Quebrada Queer. “We are queer, black, peripheral artists, singing one of the most homophobic music genres of all. And that means resistance and representation.” 

Only a month ago, Quebrada Queer (‘quebrada’ is São Paulo slang for ‘periphery’) launched its very first single, “Pra Quem Duvidou” (which means, “For those who doubted”). Turning the traditional rap aesthetics upside down, the music video has already amassed over half a million views on YouTube.

“It’s fucking cowardice/To say it’s opinion, when it’s homophobia!/ (cut this shit) They threaten to kill my fellows/ When did it all get lost?/Can you see how contradictory it is to kill in the name of God?” demand the lyrics of “Pra Quem Duvidou”.

Guigo believes it’s time to kick in the doors that have always been closed; being celebrated in these traditionally excluding systems, however, is a whole different story. But Quebrada Queer is ready to fight: “We want to make sure that future queer artists will be welcomed with a red carpet,” says Guigo.

“Half Drag, Half Rapper”

This is how Gloria Groove defines herself. And it is this exact same duality that deftly puts Gloria — a 23-year old queer singer — beyond any stereotype: “When I sing, I can be girl and a boy. This makes my music unique.”

Groove is exemplary in her versatility, signing a whole range of genres from Soul to Trap, to R&B and Brazilian funk music. In her latest R&B single, “Apaga a Luz” (“Turn off the light”), Groove explores her vocal duality, singing both as a “male rapper” and a “female queer”.

Launched in 2016, Groove’s very first hit, “Dona” (“Owner”), is a sarcastic criticism to how queer people are portrayed in society: “Oh My Lord / What animal is that? / Nice to meet you, my name is art, darling”.

Groove is considered one of the most influential queer musicians in Brazil: her hottest hits, such as the Brazilian funk track “Bumbum de Ouro” (Golden butt) and the Reggaeton-like song “Muleke Brasileiro” (Brazilian dude), are present on every dance floor across Brazil — not just within the LGBTQI community.

But behind all the humor and glamour involving Groove’s music, her lyrics are an effort to shed light on the oppressive and dangerous reality of being queer in Brazil. “My music hopes to signify the existence of thousands of LGBTIQ people—our music becomes a platform of love and self-acceptance.”

Gender Terrorist

Linn da Quebrada is another performer who is busy proving rap can be queer as hell.  Once a Jehovah’s Witness, the singer believes she has broken free from an “overdisciplined, self-repressed body,” to finally belong to herself.

The 28-year-old artist — who helped to found an NGO for trans people in São Paulo — calls her last album, “Pajubá” (2017), the “transgender Lemonade”. Highly politicized, the afro/Brazilian funk/vogue album “Pajubá” sounds as rough as the battlefield they find themselves warring on.

“Transvestite faggot/ of a single breast/ the hair dragging on the floor/ And on the hand, bleeding, a heart,” says “Bixa Travesty” (Transvestite Faggot), one of the most lacerating songs from the album, depicting the everyday violence against trans people in Brazil.

Calling herself a “Gender Terrorist,” Linn da Quebrada believes this boom of queer musicians in Brazil can work as a fundamental game changer: “Haven’t we been harmless for too long? Maybe it is time for us to scare those who are afraid of losing their position of power.”

Trans Pop Star Changing The Course Of History

Coming from one of the poorest states from Brazil (Maranhão, in the Northeastern region), Pabllo Vittar has taken LGBTQI representation to a whole new level. This month, Vittar became the first Brazilian artist to put land all the songs from one album — “Não Para Não” (Don’t Stop), Vittar’s second and latest album — on Spotify’s Top 40.

Having debuted in the music market with a well-humored parody of Major Lazer’s “Lean On,” Vittar’s career skyrocketed in late 2017, when she recorded with Brazilian singer Anitta and Major Lazer himself.

A constant victim of fake news (rumors ranged from Vittar being the new owner of Apple to the artist being canonized by the Vatican!), Vittar says the album aims to soften the dark days in Brazil.

A couple of weeks ago, Vittar broke professional relations due to political reasons. She was the sponsor of a shoe brand whose owner publicly supports Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right newly-elected president known for controversial LGBTQI-phobic statements.

Hacking The Process With Art

Like Vittar, Rico Dalasam doesn’t hesitate to speak out against political regression now, when Brazil’s democracy is under serious attack. Along with Brazil’s most prestigious rappers, Dalasam, an openly gay and black artist, recently signed a petition against Bolsonaro, which alleges the presidential candidate represents a “mortal threat” against poor, marginalized people from Brazil.

Having recorded “Todo Dia” (Everyday) — one of the greatest hits from Carnival 2017 — with Pabllo Vittar, Rico Dalasam currently sings about being a black, gay, peripheral man in society.

For him, Brazilian queer music arises as an art of emergency, from the need to narrate a silenced story: “queer art is unbeatable, it is relentless in the pursuit of finding a way out, in hacking this oppressive process,” he says.

Queer Invasion Of The Indie Scene

Following quite a different path from pop star Pabllo Vittar is the “As Bahias e a Cozinha Mineira” band. More popular in the alternative music landscape, “As Bahias” stands out for their politically engaged rock and MPB (a generic term used to refer to Brazilian popular music) songs. The band is composed of three cis male instrumentalists and two transgender vocalists, Assucena Assucena and Raquel Virgínia.

Placing the trans issue at the core of their lyrics wasn’t exactly what Assucena and Virgínia had been looking for. However, the transgender vocalists couldn’t see any other option: “being silent about this issue would feel like denying something that is in eruption inside me,” says Virgínia.

Having started her career in music as a cis man, Liniker self-identifies now as a trans black woman and activist of the LGBTIQ rights. One of the most prestigious singers from the contemporary R&B and black music scene in Brazil, Liniker highlights the importance of taking sides. “This is the moment we have to resist through art. We can’t stay in the margins any longer.”

Find more amazing queer artists who are transforming the music culture of Brazil right the hell here:

Lia Clark

Aretuza Lovi 

Mulher Pepita

Johnny Hooker

Jaloo

“I’m not a feminist because I don’t hate men.”

“I don’t need feminism. I actually like cooking for my husband.”

I used to agree with a lot of statements like this. I thought feminists were only doing harm to themselves and others, and I proudly proclaimed that I was not a feminist.

What changed my mind was learning that a lot of what I thought feminists believed was false — including the idea that gender oppression only affects women. Some of it was just myth, things that anti-feminists said feminists believed. Some of it was taking the words of one or two feminists and assuming they spoke for the whole.

Nobody can speak for all of feminism, including me — and I especially can’t speak for how a/gender minorities besides cis women experience feminism. But I did learn over time, through getting to know more people who identified as feminists, that the things I thought were basic and fundamental to feminism were exaggerations, or belonged only to some more fringe groups.

One of the biggest misconceptions about feminism is that it’s a movement for women, by women, and made up of women in opposition of men. In truth, not only should feminism should benefit everyone, as it works to dismantle all systems of oppression, but it shouldn’t be based on this binary gender thinking in the first place. Not only men and women exist, and they’re not opposites in a binary.

But a lot of the ways in which anti-feminists conceptualize feminism is based on this untruth about women versus men. And in order to address those specific misconceptions, I’m going to speak from that place. Non-binary people may recognize themselves in these experiences as well, but those experiences (especially insofar as erasure is concerned) are unique, and I’m not qualified to speak on them.

I’m not here to say that all women should call themselves feminist. There are good reasons not to, including the ways feminism has failed to be intersectional and meet the needs of people of color, trans and gender non-confirming people, and others.

But if you are anti-feminist and agree with some of the quotes that I started this article with, I’d ask you to read on and consider that the truth about feminism might be more complicated.

‘Feminists are just playing the victim’

“Sure, sexism used to be a problem. But now women have reached equality: We can vote, we have the same access to jobs and education as men, we’re allowed to dress how we want, and are considered equal partners in relationships. Western feminists are just whining, nit-picking, and enjoying feeling victimized instead of appreciating the freedoms we have.”

There’s a lot of truth in this argument: Women have come a long way, baby.

As a woman, I’d rather live here and now than almost any other point in history. And I’m not denying the struggles that many girls and women around the world face, or claiming that mine are equal to theirs.

But it’s not true to say that sexism is dead. We may have slain the giant dragon of institutional sexism, which insisted that women fill an inferior role in the world, but there is still a hornet’s nest of sexist culture that lives on.

And while I’d rather be stung by a dozen hornets than be eaten by a dragon, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have a right to complain about the stings.

When I’m in a professional meeting with men, I often have to fight to get my voice heard — and if I talk as much or as confidently as the men do, I may get labeled “bossy” or “shrill.” When I leave the house, strangers feel free to comment on my body, which makes me feel unsafe and exposed. Men I meet tend to evaluate me first as a sexual object, and only second (or never) as a competent or interesting human.

These things make a difference.

They don’t make it impossible for me to have a good job, to go about my day, and to have the kinds of relationships I want, but they do make it harder. Any one thing by itself would be no big deal, but in time they add up.

Just like you can brush off one hornet sting, but if you got stung every day, multiple times a day, all over your body, you might start to get really, really bothered by it.

Now, when I talk about the ways sexism hurts me, I’m not whining or making things up. I don’t think of myself as a victim, and I don’t actually enjoy complaining. I’m also not saying I’m not glad I have the freedom to vote, to apply for any job I want, and to be viewed as a full legal human.

I’m just saying that I’m still hurt by sexism, and that I want the world to be better for myself and other women.

‘Feminism says women are weak’

“Women may have a few obstacles that men don’t, but feminism actually insults women by acting like they’re not able to overcome those obstacles. It encourages women to be sensitive and thin-skinned instead of being tough and going after their goals. Women don’t need feminism. We’re strong enough to succeed on our own.”

It’s true that some women are capable of overcoming every obstacle that sexism puts in their way. We have women heading up corporations, pioneering scientific discoveries, and this past election, a woman came incredibly close to being elected the next president of the United States.

Powerful, successful women like Oprah Winfrey, Sally Ride, and Melinda Gates prove that women can do anything men can, even with the added burden of institutional sexism.

But the strength of these women, while I admire and celebrate it, shows off a part of the problem.

Women can achieve just about every success men can, but they have to be stronger, tougher, and usually more qualified than their male counterparts. They need to be thick-skinned enough to shrug off harassment. They need to walk a fine line of being assertive without being judged “bossy” or “bitchy.”

Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, for the last several years, between 20 and 25 have been women — around 4–4.5%. Those 20+ women are impressive, and their achievement shouldn’t be underrated, but that percentage is discouraging.

Less than 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women: If that doesn’t show that sexism is still making it harder for women to reach the top of their field, what does it show? I simply don’t believe that men are, on average, 19 times better at corporate leadership skills than women.

Similarly, many women in scientific fields have talked about the barriers that keep them from advancing, and often that keep them from staying in the field at all.

Sexual harassment is a huge problem in the academic world, and causes many women to leave promising careers because they can’t handle the dehumanization, and because their work is taken less seriously than their sexual potential. Many women stay in STEM fields anyway, and achieve great things, but many other women, just as capable, have to leave.

Feminism doesn’t say that women are weak: It just says that, to succeed in any given field, women shouldn’t have to be so much stronger than the men they’re working with.

‘Feminists hate men’

“Feminists treat men like they’re the enemy: They say all men are rapists and misogynists, just trying to keep women down. Feminists aren’t content with gender equality. They want to put women in power and oppress men, just like women used to be oppressed.”

I admit that I often feel frustrated with “men” in the abstract these days. Having been harassed, belittled, and taken advantage of by so many men, I am a little wary when meeting a man I don’t know.

However, there are also a lot of men I love, respect, and trust. I don’t hate “men,” as such — I hate toxic masculinity.

Toxic masculinity is the set of rules and expectations we have for male behavior — including how men are supposed to treat and think about women. Toxic masculinity is what tells men it’s not okay to cry, and it is okay to catcall women. Toxic masculinity is what tells a man that his worth is in gaining power over others, and that it is shameful to have a woman beat him at anything.

Toxic masculinity hurts men.

Men are pressured to be high achievers and always competing with each other, which creates stress. The expectation that they will always appear powerful and in control makes it hard for men to ask for help. They’re shamed and ridiculed for stepping outside the bounds of “acceptable” masculine behavior.

All of this makes it harder for men to get through the world.

Feminists don’t want to destroy or oppress men: They want to destroy toxic masculinity, to let people of all genders see how damaging it is to all of us.

‘Feminism means rejecting traditional gender roles’

“Feminism is for women who want careers, who don’t like makeup and shopping, who want to be the boss in their relationships. Women who like being homemakers, being traditionally feminine, and having their partners take the lead don’t need feminism — and feminism often looks down on those women.”

It’s true that feminist movements tend to be headed by people who don’t feel the status quo suits them. It’s also true that some feminists look down on conventional ways of being feminine — and that’s a problem.

There’s a thing we call “femmephobia,” which is the attitude that anything traditionally associated with women is inferior.

It’s the reason keeping up a home and taking care of children isn’t viewed as a “real job.” It’s the reason books, movies, and music that tend to be enjoyed more by women are seen as fluff.

People all over the gender and political spectrums can fall into femmephobia. Sometimes feminists do a good job of questioning why “girl stuff” is considered less valuable and worthwhile, and sometimes we fall into the trap of looking down on it.

What’s important to me, as a feminist, is not steering clear of traditional femininity. It’s getting rid of the assumption that women should be feminine and men should be masculine.

There are definitely some people that do fit very comfortably into the roles their culture put them in, and that’s great for them! Obviously, there are also plenty of people who don’t.

Housekeeping and childrearing are skills just like any other, and some people — of any gender — find that work interesting and rewarding (I’m one of them!).

I want to see a world where those skills are considered valuable for anyone who wants to pursue them. I also want to see a world where makeup, fashion, and beauty are respected as the arts they are.

Even submissive or “follower” relationship roles, which might seem at first glance to be obviously an inferior position, aren’t necessarily so. Many people feel happiest and most comfortable playing first mate to someone else’s captain, and doing that well is a relationship skill all its own.

I’d like to see a world where people are free to find the balance of leader/follower dynamics that work best for them, whatever their gender.

Feminism isn’t about flipping the script of gender roles, where women are powerful and in charge and men are submissive. Feminism is about increasing the freedom we all have to find the roles that fit us best.

Changing my view of what feminism meant was a little scary for me — it was comforting to tell myself that women had achieved equality, and that any issues I might experience with sexism were just isolated, one-off events.

Eventually it became clear to me that that just wasn’t true. All the little moments of sexism I experienced were connected, and other women faced more intense and constant discrimination that came from the same source.

We still had a steeper hill to climb than men — and while I didn’t want to believe that at first, in the end, I found it a source of strength.

I don’t like or agree with every feminist, but I find strength in the fact that we have experienced some of the same struggles, and are still working and succeeding. When I get tired and frustrated, there’s a whole community of other feminists to support and encourage me.

Most importantly, I find strength in knowing we’re committed to making the world a better, easier place for each other and the women that come after us.

This article originally appeared on Everyday Feminism and is republished here with permission.

“If host and executive producer Donald Trump behaved toward female staffers of the Trump Organization the way he does on [The Apprentice], promoting women for sexy stunts and ignoring or rewarding the sort of treatment women have received from male Apprentice candidates over the years, he’d be setting himself up for sexual harassment lawsuits.”

flickr/TaraChill and Wikimedia Commons

By Jennifer L. Pozner

NBC giveth, and NBC taketh away.

We have the Peacock to thank for the ascension of a POTUS nominee whose campaign melds the sleaziness of Jersey Shore with the bigoted pandering of Duck Dynasty. For 11 years and 14 seasons, NBC’s The Apprentice groomed the nation to believe that a billion-dollar-losing, vendor-stiffing narcissist with multiple bankruptcies on his corporate record was the gold standard of American wealth, success, and business leadership. Worse, the series aggressively normalized statements and actions that meet the legal definition of gender and race-based workplace discrimination. As I wrote in my book, Reality Bites Back:

Now it seems NBCUniversal, specifically their fluffy infotainment show Access Hollywood, may be the Gaslighter-In-Chief’s undoing. Since the infamous 2005 hot mic video surfaced on Friday, capturing Handsy McGrabsalot boasting about getting away with sexual assault to giggling bro Billy Bush, GOP leaders have been scrambling to distance themselves from the top of their ticket, as if they hadn’t had evidence all year of exactly how misogynistic (and racist, xenophobic, and willing to incite violence) their nominee truly is.

Voters appear to be fleeing, with polls indicating major fallout from the tape, especially among women (prompting Trump trolls to create a #RepealThe19th hashtag campaign), although the biggest impact seems to be within the party. The day after we heard Trump brag that fame gives him a free pass to “just start kissing” women or to “grab them by the pussy,” Politico obtained an internal Republican National Committee email indicating that the RNC was at least temporarily ordering “a hold/stop on all mail projects right now. If something is in production or print it needs to stop” — a potentially devastating blow in light of the candidate’s weak get-out-the-vote ground game. By Monday, House Speaker Paul Ryan held a phone briefing to tell GOP pols that he would never again campaign for Trump, and that he will (and, he tacitly implied, they should) focus entirely on down-ballot races so that Clinton doesn’t have a Democratic Congress when she takes the Oval. Fifteen Republican senators and representatives (and counting) called for Trump to drop out of the race, and “at least 57 Republican national lawmakers and governors say they will not vote for Trump,” according to Slate.

Can anyone blame them? (Actually, Samantha Bee and John Oliver can, for good reason, and it’s deeply satisfying to watch them do so.) In most normal election cycles, any one of Trump’s unhinged “gaffes” — calling Mexicans rapists and criminals, telling African Americans their communities are festering hellholes, courting a bromance with Vladimir Putin, retweeting white supremacists, refusing to renounce the endorsement of a KKK leader, and so on — would have torpedoed his campaign.

Instead, despite these embarrassments being central to his presidential bid, they weren’t enough to keep the Republican leadership from endorsing him, nor could they prompt rank and file primary voters to select another nominee. Fissures began to form toward the end of the summer, though: Trump caused a growing backlash from a newly critical press by making assassination threats against his opponent, encouraging Russia to spy on the U.S. government, and attacking the Gold Star parents of a Muslim American soldier who died defending his country. Yet, still, the GOP stood by their man, continuing to endorse and campaign for Trump/Pence even while mouthing face-saving opposition to his comments. In this light, the Access Hollywood tape is almost a gift to Paul Ryan and other key GOP leaders who never liked Trump but were too mercenary and soulless to officially, substantively oppose him — until now.

Had the Access Hollywood footage been simply “lewd” — as grossly mischaracterized by headlines in outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, The Hill and other outlets — America would have listened to Trump and Bush sizing up Arianne Zucker’s legs and Nancy O’Dell’s “phony tits,” doused ourselves in a nation-sized vat of Purell, and moved on. After all, we’ve been well-acquainted with the candidate’s misogyny throughout the year, from menstrual hysteria about Megyn Kelly to inciting violent harassment of female journalists, from attacking a former Miss Universe winner on Twitter at 3am and encouraging us to check out her (non-existent) sex tape, to disgracing the presidential debate stage to bashing Rosie O’Donnell. None of that was enough to cost him party support or substantively derail his momentum.

So, why was Donnie & Billy’s Fun Time Gropemobile finally a bridge too far for the media, for voters, and for the GOP? Because the tape wasn’t simply offensive or vulgar — it showed a presidential candidate proudly relaying his strategy for engaging in criminal sexual acts against women. In doing so, it held up a disturbing mirror into the violence women endure every day in this country, and not only did we not like what it reflected, it made us feel profoundly unsafe (so much so that “America’s Therapists Are Worried About Trump’s Effect On Your Mental Health,” according to Politico).

Luckily, many media outlets contextualized this well, with unusually unambiguous reporting and analysis. The Atlantic properly named Trump’s comments as describing “illegal behavior,” “non-consensual kissing and grabbing of women’s genitals.” “Rape Culture Is Running For President,” The Stranger warned. The Daily News indicted, “How Donald Trump and Billy Bush abet assault.” We can expect feminist outlets like Bitch, Dame, and Vox to go hard on this story, but when even lad mad Esquire is running headlines like “As of Today, a Vote for Trump Is a Vote for Grabbing Women ‘By the P*ssy’” (subhead: “Vote your conscience”), we’re clearly at a turning point.

Shocker: Journalists At Work

All of which led to a something we haven’t seen in far too long: a journalist practicing actual journalism while moderating a presidential debate. Town halls have traditionally been among the most lightweight debates, yet the first question CNN’s Anderson Cooper posed on Sunday to the GOP’s nominee was as dark as they come: “You called what you said ‘locker room banter.’ You described kissing women without consent, grabbing their genitals. That is sexual assault. You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?”

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Trump did not understand that. His response flipped through every page in his well-worn abuser’s handbook:

• First, he denied a thing the entire country watched him say on tape (“No, I didn’t say that at all.”)
• Then, he tried to make his inquisitor seem confused and wrong (“I don’t think you understood what was said.”)
• Next, he trivialized bragging about behavior meeting the legally definition of sexual assault as nothing worth getting upset over, just boys being boys (“This was locker room talk . . . it’s one of those things.”
• After a perfunctory fauxpology, he implied that concern over his sexual violence — which, to be clear, is concern for women’s safety — is a useless distraction from “more important and bigger things” (“ISIS chopping off heads . . . drowning people in steel cages!”)

To his credit, Cooper didn’t let him dodge the question. It is extremely telling that Trump couldn’t even bring himself to deny the rapey behavior he was clearly so proud of on the tape until Cooper asked him a fourth time if he had ever forced sexual acts onto women without their consent:

“Cooper: For the record, are you saying that what you said on the bus 11 years ago, that you did not actually kiss women without consent or grope women without consent?

Trump: I have great respect for women. Nobody has more respect for women than I do.

Cooper: So for the record, you’re saying you never did that?

Trump: Frankly, you hear these things. They are said. And I was am embarrassed by it. But I have respect for women —

Cooper: Have you ever done those things?

Trump: — And they have respect for me. And I will tell you, no I have not. And I will tell you, that I’m going to make our country safe and we’re going to have borders which we don’t have now. People are pouring into our country and they’re coming in from the Middle East and other places. We’re gonna make America safe again, we’re gonna make America great again but we’re gonna make America safe again and we’re gonna make America wealthy again . . .”

This was a remarkable moment in journalistic history. As I tweeted Sunday night:

In 50 years, all we’ll remember about this #debate was a journalist asking POTUS nom if he committed sexual assault. Bravo, @andersoncooper.

???@jennpozner

(I suppose we’ll also be talking about the moment when one candidate promised to imprison his opponent like a two-bit dictator, but that’s another story.)

I wasn’t being facetious with that “bravo”; as a media critic, I couldn’t have been more grateful. The anchor’s willingness to hammer Trump on sexual assault was relevant and newsworthy, but unusual in contemporary presidential debates — as was moderator Martha Raddatz, ABC’s chief global affairs correspondent, pressing Trump for anything resembling accurate or rational comments on foreign policy in response to his incoherent rambling about Syria and Russia.

Cooper and Raddatz performed a real service, infusing journalism back into the dog and pony shows we’ve come to expect from these stages. Presidential debates increasingly resemble public relations exercises for politicians, rather than news-breaking opportunities for reporters to help Americans understand if candidates’ campaign rhetoric actually matches their legislative records, plans, and promises. As illustrated by the Commission on Presidential Debates recently coming out against real-time fact checking, the CPD is beholden not to American citizens but to the Republican and Democratic Parties. The result has been moderators lobbing mostly softballs, or sleeping through their task — as NBC’s Lester Holt seemed to do in the first Clinton/Trump debate — turning what should be illuminating, critical forums into glorified press conferences where candidates recite practiced soundbites and voters fail to learn anything new about their policy agendas or readiness to lead. (Or, in Trump’s case, given the freedom to creepily stalk his opponent across the stage and dry-hump a chair in front of the moderators, Ken Bone, and millions of horrified viewers.)

The impact of this should not be underestimated: approximately a third of undecided voters say the debates will be a major factor in the way they cast their ballots. In that light, relegating journalists to the role of glorified PR flacks shortchanges Americans and threatens the health of our democracy, keeping us less informed than we need to be to make credible decisions about whom we want to hold immense power over our collective futures.

The Least NBC Can Do

NBC has suspended Today Show anchor Billy Bush — likely indefinitely — for his role as Trump’s smirking, complicit hug pimp on that Access Hollywood bus. By benching Billy — the Bush cousin who makes Dubya look like a proud Mensa member — NBC sends the message that he bears responsibility for encouraging Trump’s sexual assault strategy, and for helping him degrade Arianne Zucker in their workplace in 2005. But when will the network reckon with their own responsibility in saddling America with the Trump reality star-who-would-be-POTUS juggernaut?

Here’s how they can start: They can release raw footage from The Apprentice’s 14 seasons, which reportedly captures Trump using the N-word, as well as sexually harassing female contestants and staffers on and off camera. At this stage in the election, those tapes are the political equivalent of forensic evidence, and the American people deserve access to them. Undecided voters, especially, have a right to view tapes that could help them evaluate if they want an N-word spouting sexual harasser in the White House. UltraViolet and MoveOn petitions have garnered more than 115,000 signatures pressuring NBC and MGM Studios (which owns the series) to release the tapes. Instead of doing the right thing, NBC claims it cannot release any footage and is referring calls to producer Mark Burnett who, stand-up guy that he is, is said to be threatening legal action against former staffers if they release the tapes, possibly with a “$5 million leak fee.”

Having documented nearly a decade of abject racism and misogyny in scenes that actually made it on-air on The Apprentice, I have no doubt that the years of material left on the cutting room floor may be at least, if not more, damning than those few minutes captured on the hot mic in 2005. As I wrote in Politico last year, after Trump claimed Fox News primary debate moderator Megyn Kelly “had blood coming out of her wherever”:

“Just like early adopters in technology shape user experiences well into the future, so did Donald Trump and his partner, Survivor producer Mark Burnett, help to create and solidify two of reality TV’s most bigoted tropes: that women in general are intellectually inferior to and less competent than men, and that African American women in particular are irrational, angry, lying bitches who can only get ahead by ‘playing the race card.’”

NBC and Mark Burnett are partially to blame for the rise of a candidate who poses such an unprecedented threat to our democracy that not one major newspaper has endorsed him — including Southern outlets that have previously only ever endorsed Republicans, and outlets that never endorse at all yet felt the urgent need to denounce Trump as resoundingly unfit for the office of the presidency. (To the best of my knowledge, this kind of consensus among news outlets has never happened in modern American history.) With less than a month until Election Day, the network and the producer owe those tapes to the American people.

After profiting from The Apprentice for 12 years, it is literally the least they can do.

***

On Wednesday evening, after I filed this story, the New York Times reported that two women have come forward to accuse Trump of sexually assaulting them in exactly the ways he bragged about the tape. One woman was a 22-year-old receptionist at a real estate company in Trump Tower when she says he kissed her on the mouth; this was 2005, the same year he told Billy Bush his game plan with “beautiful women — I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.” The other incident took place several decades ago. Jessica Leeds was 38 when a flight attendant bumped her up to first class and she found herself seated next to Trump, who “raised the armrest, moved toward her and began to grope her.” She told the Times that “Mr. Trump grabbed her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt. ‘He was like an octopus,’ she said. ‘His hands were everywhere.’ She fled to the back of the plane. ‘It was an assault,’ she said.”

Additionally, People just published a first-person story by one of their own writers, describing Trump attacking her while she was at the Mar-a-Lago to report on his and pregnant Melania’s happy marriage, pinning her against a wall and forcing his tongue down her throat. With all three stories emerging less than a week since the Access Hollywood tape surfaced, I can’t help but wonder if we are at the beginning of a Cosby-esque avalanche.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/the-real-reason-women-love-witches-647d48517f66/ Wed, 20 Jul 2016 14:58:36 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=1949 Read more]]> It’s not about broomsticks or cats. It’s about power.

The sleepovers I attended as a little kid all followed a similar pattern: We would have dinner, retreat to the family room to watch whatever movies had been rented for us, consume enormous amounts of soft drinks, and then, riding that sugar high, stay up into the wee hours of the morning giggling over anything and everything. This routine continued until shortly before we hit puberty, at which point our sleepovers took a darker turn. As soon as the rest of the family was in bed, we would abandon the family room and whatever embarrassingly babyish movie had been provided for our entertainment and instead make a beeline for the basement. There, in the chill darkness lit by a single dangling lightbulb, we would try to do magic.

Our forays into the dark arts never went further than the most standard of supernatural party tricks: daring each other to do Bloody Mary, asking the ouija boards about our futures, taking turns levitating each other using the old light as a feather, stiff as a board game. Sometimes we tried to cast spells or make voodoo dolls of our frenemies; one girl had an older sister who was Wiccan, and we would pore over her books and notes whenever we got the chance. We lit pink candles and chanted the names of boys we liked, hoping to magically persuade them to like us back. Altogether it was all pretty harmless, although at the time those sleepovers hit that perfect sweet spot between thrilling and terrifying.

I realize now that my friends and I weren’t alone in our attempts to practice witchcraft. In fact, most of the women I’ve talked to have had similar experiences — in some senses, it almost feels like a girlhood rite of passage. Certainly the tradition has a rich history. To pick a very famous example, consider the story of Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, whose accusations of witchcraft sparked the Salem Witch Trials. Ten-year-old Betty and her older cousin Abigail would meet up with other young girls in Salem to practice what they called “little sorceries.”
Most of their activities centered around divining who their future husbands would be, because for a 17th century girl, the greatest indicator of how your life would play out was who you married and what social status you achieved through that marriage. To find this out, the girls used a form of ovomancy, or egg magic, called a “Venus glass,” which worked by dripping the white of an egg into a glass of water. By watching the shape the egg white took, the girls hoped to find clues about their futures.

While fortune-telling might seem to be at odds with the conservative form of Christianity practiced by the Puritans, the truth is that folk magic or, as they called it, “white magic,” was frequently (if secretly) practiced by women in early American Puritan communities. In fact, when Betty and Abigail began to experience strange fits and other signs of bewitchment — signs which appeared, interestingly enough, shortly after they’d been playing at sorcery — one of the first remedies tried was a bit of folk magic called a witch’s cake. This cake — which was suggested by the girls’ neighbor Mary Sibley — was made of rye flour mixed with urine from the afflicted girls. The cake was then fed to a dog with the hope that the dog’s behavior would somehow reveal the identity of the person bewitching the girls.

Although the intentions behind the witch cake were noble, when Betty’s father, the Reverend Samuel Parris, found out about it, he took to his pulpit to denounce Mary Sibley, calling the witch’s cake “diabolical.” Mary Sibley immediately confessed and repented; had she not, she would likely have been among those convicted and killed for witchcraft. From this story and the story of Betty and Abigail and their friends practicing divination, we can conclude two things: firstly, that charms and spells and other types of folk magic were commonly used even in strict Puritan communities, and secondly, that no matter how “white” the magic was, the women who performed it were always suspected of evil.

In the 300 years that have elapsed since the Salem Witch Trials, our preoccupation with witches hasn’t waned, although thankfully it has grown less deadly. We’re just as fascinated by witches as our ancestors — perhaps even more so. Certainly the past few years have seen a resurgence of witchesin pop culture.

These days, the terms witch or witchy cover a broad spectrum of things — it might mean someone who practices witchcraft (who may or may not align with a particular pagan or neopagan religion), but then again it might not. In some ways, 2016’s version of “witchy” might seem to refer to more of an Instagrammable aesthetic choice than anything else — wearing dark lipstick and crystal pendants, growing cute kitchen herb gardens, and arranging household altars of dried flowers and animal skulls. It’s tempting to write these things off as being merely superficial affectations, but to do so would be a grave underestimation. Beneath all that glossy packaging hums the same idea that has tantalized girls for millennia: the fact that to be a witch is to be a woman with power in a world where women are often otherwise powerless.

To be a witch is to be a woman with power in a world where women are often otherwise powerless.
Click To Tweet

On some level, all of the contemporary trappings of witchiness tap into that desire to feel powerful. Black or dark purple lipstick might currently be in vogue, but on some level they subvert traditional feminine beauty standards and the ability to subvert or reject the status quo often confers a sense of power. To grow your own kitchen herbs and have some knowledge of herb lore are powerful in the sense that the ability to provide for yourself — even on a small scale — is a type of power. And, of course, the idea that setting out a particular arrangement of objects in a particular way with the intent of influencing real-life events is a type of power.

According to Ayşe Tuzlak, who has a PhD in religion and specializes in gender and ritual in the ancient world, it was women’s inability to obtain power through established means and their subsequent attempts to access it through other channels that informed western ideas of what it meant to be a witch:

“European Christian women in late antiquity and the Middle Ages were generally barred access to institutional power, and thus women who expressed their religiosity in unapproved ways, or in ways that were ‘too feminine’ by the standards of the culture, were branded as witches or heretics. The institutions of that time and place had certain assumptions about appropriate behavior for men and women, and what was considered real Christianity and what was not. Thus the people who had a vested interest in those institutions began to pay neurotically close attention to anything that looked ‘too feminine,’ and expanded the significance of feminine symbols — like the broom, an ordinary domestic tool — to include dangerous associations, for example flying at night to secret meetings. Because if a woman looked like she was seizing spiritual power that wasn’t hers by right, then everything “feminine” about her because suspect and morally charged.”

Witch is a highly gendered term, and like most such terms, its masculine counterparts — terms like wizard, warlock, sorcerer, or mage — do not quite mean exactly the same thing. This is not to say that witches are never men, or that men have never been killed for practicing witchcraft, but rather that the vast bulk of those accused of being witches have been women.

Witch is a highly gendered term.
Click To Tweet

Tuzlak explains that just as the term slut — a term so gendered that people will often say man-slut if they are using it to refer to a man — says more about how a woman is viewed than it does about her sexual history, so too does the historical use of witch tell us more about how well a woman fit into contemporary gender roles than it does about her actual use of magic:

“I tend to see ‘witch’ as a social category imposed upon a woman who doesn’t fit acceptable religious categories. Which is why I usually put words like ‘witchcraft’ in scare-quotes; for me the word ‘witch’ is kind of like the word ‘slut,’ in that it’s a way to mark a woman as unacceptable and Other, rather than an objective measure of her religion or her sexual behavior. Just as you can’t tell how much sex a woman actually has by how often she’s called a slut, so also you can’t really tell anything about a woman’s religion based on whether a priest or a neighbor calls her a witch. And some women who have lots of sex or heretical opinions might pass under the radar because they can perform social acceptability in other ways.”

Given all of that, what exactly does witch mean? The term walks that tricky knife’s edge of a slur that has been reclaimed by some of the people it might be used against. How do we figure out how to balance the fact that witch is both an accusation that has been historically deadly to women, and also an identity that many find empowering? For Tuzlak, the answer lies in understanding the place the witch has traditionally occupied in cultural hierarchies:

“I tend to understand things in terms of power structures and insider/outsider status with regard to institutions. So, to use our own culture as an example, if someone offers me drugs in a carpeted office, neatly groomed, wearing a white lab coat, with a name tag that says Dr. Something on it, then I will probably assume that that person has my best interests at heart and that the drugs he or she is giving me are going to help me (even though none of those things are necessarily true). If someone wearing a hoodie offers me drugs in an alleyway out of a baggie, I will likely assume that the drugs are ‘just for fun,’ and that the person is dangerous and not especially committed to my well-being (though none of those things might be true either). There are lots of shades of grey between these two extremes of licit and illicit, too — the friend of a friend who can get you weed, the naturopath who advertises in the back of a new age magazine, your auntie who’s just really good at helping pregnant women with their morning sickness, the not-quite-legal-but-never-really-busted dispensary, the friend who’s not taking Lyrica any more and gives you the rest of her scrip when you’re hard up.

“Assuming we’re talking about ‘real’ witches here (i.e., not just someone who’s accused of witchcraft by an inquisition, but a local wise woman or healer), I see the witch’s work as falling on a similar spectrum. She is clearly not offering the ‘official’ help that a physician or priest would, which brings with it a lot of risks, but which also allows someone to work outside a system that doesn’t necessarily offer her what she needs. I think the ‘witch’ in this sense is a crucial contribution to the social health of a culture, especially a culture that is under the heel of powerful institutions that do not take women or other marginalized groups seriously.”

And yet it’s hard not to notice that as much as the idea of the witch subverts traditional gender roles, it also, in some ways, upholds them. This is especially apparent in our modern take on the witch, especially when it comes to the Neopagan movement, a set of modern pagan religions of which Wicca is the most well-known. Many practices and beliefs in various sects of Neopaganism can be very rigid and cis-normative in their treatment of gender, and this, of course, has the unfortunate consequence of perpetuating gender stereotypes. As Tuzlak puts it:

“The image of the ‘witch’ can be both liberating and oppressive to women, very often at the same time. The history of modern witchcraft makes gendered language very hard to escape. Keep in mind that most of the primary branches of Neopagan practice were shaped by men, which means that Gardnerian/Alexandrian/Crowleyan constructions of masculinity and femininity arise out of very conservative views on gender, in line with the assumptions of 19th-century English esotericists and the medieval/early modern texts they were working with. As a result, a lot of introductory magic textbooks talk in a very uncritical way about the ‘masculine’ sun and the ‘feminine’ moon, ‘masculine’ fire and ‘feminine’ water, and so on. That said, Gardnerian and Alexandrian branches aren’t all there is, and there were smart, badass, complicated women like Helena Blavatsky, Dion Fortune, and Doreen Valienteinvolved even in the earliest stages of modern witchcraft, and in the past few decades there has been a move to make Neopaganism more intersectional and queer.”

It’s not hard to understand why witches and witchcraft continue to hold sway over women — especially young women on the cusp of adulthood who are faced with a world that refuses to take them seriously except as sexual objects. Not only has witchcraft historically offered women power that they might not otherwise be able to access, but witches offer girls and women an alternative role model to the ubiquitous young, beautiful Disney princess. A witch can be any age; a witch does not need to be conventionally attractive; a witch does not wait for a prince charming, nor does she rely on anyone but herself. Given that, the witch’s appeal is easy to appreciate. Tuzlak theorizes that young women’s attraction to witchcraft goes beyond even that and taps into our deep-seated need for ritual:

“Both boys and girls can be badly wounded by traditional Christian or Anglo-American gender roles, especially if they’re queer or trans or otherwise ill-fitting to those roles, and girls are going to suffer more acutely if the family is more reactionary in its politics. Magic is an unofficial shortcut to a feeling of spiritual power and belonging when legitimate methods have been closed off to you, and that happens to girls more often and more traumatically than boys in our culture. But I think that magic appeals to a lot of people who feel like they’re out of place in their local religious or social landscape. I don’t think Christian rituals (at least in many white/mainline/evangelical/Protestant churches — Christianity is very diverse and I do not like generalizing) serve young people very well, and I don’t think they serve young girls well in particular, which is another reason why young people find ways to fulfil their ritual needs elsewhere. There are so few formal, public rituals that recognize and affirm girls.”

It’s impossible to say where witchcraft will go from here or what “witchy” will look like a century or two from now. What seems certain is that as long as our society remains invested in hierarchical power structures that function by excluding certain groups of people, then those outsiders will continue to look for other things that fulfill their needs. And so long as the tradition of the witch exists, those who struggle to find legitimacy in traditional power structures will almost certainly be drawn to witchcraft — whatever that word or practice might mean to them. Because as much as we might try to define what a witch is or what she does, the truth is that the term is much broader than any one definition can contain. Or perhaps it is easier to simply say that a witch is someone who, when faced with a brick wall, learns to dig a tunnel. A witch is a survivor and witchcraft is a means of survival in a world that does not always value your life.

SONY DSC

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/when-selfies-are-a-radical-act-9dc6dcedb44d/ Fri, 22 Jan 2016 06:00:57 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=9174 Read more]]> The language against selfies has taken on a lot of the tone that is often leveled at “feminine-coded” behaviors: too vain, too superficial, too much, too occupying of our visual space.

By Sarah Galo

The Internet, we’re often told, is eroding society. We can’t communicate as well; we’ve become increasingly visual with short attention spans; we’re killing print and content quality with digital media. But while it’s true that we have more information presented to us on a daily basis than our grandparents likely had in a month, it’s absurd to claim that we’re taking steps back as a society because of the Internet itself. It comes across as a collective tsk-tsking by older generations, whose very own innovations led us to this point in time.

When I think of the possibilities the Internet presents, I think of journalist Rachel Syme, who has taken over my Twitter timeline numerous times in the last year with streams of retweeted selfies and plenty of her own. Syme is behind “SELFIE,” an interactive, seven-part series on the much-maligned social media fixture that seeks to defy existing stigmas.

It’s a celebration of those who take selfies and the meanings behind the act, a historical record of female photographers who have only existed as footnotes in the histories of men, and a gathering together of our current cultural landscape. At a time when we are encouraged to embrace the “being chill,” Syme’s essay reminds us not only of the joy of focusing on the minutiae and excitement of a singular topic; her words explain the satisfied feeling of having captured one’s true self in a selfie.

Like Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album,” which can be seen as the embodiment of all the tension and disorder of the late 1960s, Syme’s “SELFIE” is destined to be the go-to essay for understanding our modern milieu.

Sarah Galo: Walk me through your process for “SELFIE.” How did you come up with it?

Rachel Syme: I started thinking about writing something about selfies when the Kim Kardashian coffee table book was coming out. I had written a fair amount about the power of Kim Kardashian as an image maker and way to understand modern celebrity, and I felt like there was something powerful to say about her iconography in conjunction with the publication of Selfish.

As I started to work on that piece, I realized that the number of selfies were growing exponentially on every platform, and the practice was much bigger than just any one celebrity or trend piece; it was a movement, a phenomenon, a new language. I started probing my own reasons for taking selfies, and as I did that, I realized that they were as varied as the reasons for speaking, or writing, or expressing myself — that there were so many different places that my own selfie-taking/posting were coming from — and I started to wonder if that might be the case for others.

So I started reporting, asking people to send me their selfies and the stories behind them, and what started to come in were all these extremely moving, enlightening, heartfelt, funny, and wildly divergent stories. That’s when I knew this was a bigger piece than just a book review.

Sarah: Did you know it was going to be a super big project when you began?

Rachel: The idea to write a kind of mini-book in seven chapters came as an organizing principle for all these wild thoughts I was having — a way to rein them into some kind of recognizable structure. Because, you will find, when you start thinking about selfies and self-representation, there is no endpoint. It’s theory, it’s art history, it’s sociology, it’s criticism, it’s pop culture, it’s linguistics.

You can really do deep dives on nearly every subject, beginning with the selfie. People ask me how I got 10k words out of the subject, but the truth is, I made myself stop writing at a kind of arbitrary point so we could publish. I could have gone on researching/writing for months and months — I didn’t include half of the things I wanted to! It’s such a rich subject, and I have a feeling we are just at the beginning of the field of selfie studies.

Sarah: Selfies can appear to be a “selfish” activity, as you note early in “SELFIE.” You write: “Maybe they are lonesome and hungry for connection, projecting their own lack of community onto this woman’s solo show, believing her to be isolated rather than expansive.”

I know I definitely felt that way when I first took selfies back in high school . . . What unique space do selfies occupy in Internet culture and the wider visual culture? Do you think taking offense at selfies (and to an extent, ambition, as you note) is uniquely coded toward women/gender-nonconforming individuals?

Rachel: The gender breakdown of selfie-taking currently skews far more female (or gender non-conforming), and so a lot of the language against selfies has taken on a lot of the tone that is often leveled at “feminine-coded” behaviors: too vain, too superficial, too much, too occupying of our visual space. I started to really think about the ways selfies are derided (beyond the calls of narcissism, which will always follow them around) when a pair of announcers at an Arizona Diamondbacks game started making fun of a group of sorority sisters who they caught all taking selfies on the jumbotron camera.

What was bizarre is, moments before, the announcers had asked people in the stands to send in fan photos, but then when they zoomed in on this group of women, the tone suddenly turned disdainful — and it became clear to me that there was something very wrong in the way some people are talking about selfies.

Certain people seeing themselves with affection, outside of the systems in which those people are usually seen, can start to feel threatening (or at least troubling) to those in positions of power, and in this instance — and in many instances — that threat is expressed as jokes by men about women and their selfies.

I found that there are many reasons women (and those who are non-binary) take selfies, and very few of them are for the admiration or attention of men — it is much more about communicating with the wider world about how you want to be seen, which is an ambitious act in itself. And there is nothing that throws people off more than a person with the ambition to take up space when they have not come up through traditional cultural channels.

Sarah: Do you think selfies are a way of escaping the male gaze? Are we still enacting it in a way John Berger describes in Ways of Seeing: “The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight”?

Rachel: I think selfies are all about the gaze, but not necessarily just the male one — they are asking everyone to gaze upon us, and in turn, they are about gazing at others with curiosity, desire, ardor, and interest. I still speak to a lot of people who bring up “objectification” as if it is the original sin, that if a woman turns herself into a vision, a surveyed female, then she is somehow abandoning herself, that she is somehow deciding that her looks are her only currency, that her face is her only asset, etc.

But I have found that selfies are introducing a totally new way of seeing that doesn’t necessarily turn people into objects, but rather avatars — whether that is dangerous or not, we are still finding out. But these avatars get to have adventures, to go off and speak for you, to collect and fact-find information. And part of taking selfies is interacting with others’ avatars, seeing what they have to say.

So on the one hand, we are using our images as currency, but I am not sure we are necessarily doing so for the benefit of any one particular gaze, if that makes sense. I think the male gaze can actually be undercut by selfies, because there are many communities of selfies built around inclusiveness and protection from the kind of gawking, lascivious eye of that gaze. Selfies are actually making a lot of people confront how they are seen in the world by that gaze, and then working online to try to create a better way of seeing.

Sarah: I love that you devoted a section to the women who have come before us and experimented with self-portrait. You wrote: “So many women’s stories were erased (and will never be recovered) because they didn’t have access to private image-making.”

How do you go about finding the hidden histories in our everyday actions?

Rachel: I am a historian at heart — I am writing a book about events that happened almost 100 years ago now to explain our current day — and so I am always looking at modern actions through a transhistorical lens. I think you have to — there is so much humanity in recognizing our history, and we lose so much by not linking back to the past.

So for me, seeing selfies in terms of women and historical self-portraiture was natural. I am always collecting these little stories of women of the past when I read and storing them in my kangaroo pouch for later — the three I wrote about were women I have been interested in for some time; I think I read my first biography of Clover Adams about six years ago now.

I found that there are many reasons women (and those who are non-binary) take selfies, are about communicating with the wider world about how you want to be seen.
Click To Tweet

For me, diving into history is the most exciting way to write about the future, because it is all connected. You cannot understand the value of selfies in our culture if you don’t understand what it might have been like to dream of having the power and freedom that selfies give us . . . but not being able to due to technological, social, or even misogynistic restrictions.

And for me, the image that really stuck in my head throughout this whole project was of my ancestors, and how I wish I had their selfies. I still wish that all the time — what would my great-grandmother Rose have wanted me to know about how she wanted to be seen, how she felt when she was alone, what stories her face in those moments might have told me? Selfies are diaristic, and even that simple aspect alone should redeem them — don’t you want your future grandchildren to know how you saw yourself, but also to know how others interacted with your image? You are creating, like I wrote in the piece, an artifact and a gift. Even if you don’t know it yet.

Diving into history is the most exciting way to write about the future, because it is all connected.
Click To Tweet

Sarah: I couldn’t help but be reminded of Joan Didion’s “The White Album” as I read, partly because your essay is about a kind of storytelling, and because you reference so many cultural placeholders and news events as a way of anchoring the piece in 2015. Were there specific authors you looked to for inspiration when writing “Selfie”?

Rachel: Thank you so much! I mean, god bless Saint Joan. She’s always on my shoulder somewhere. I read a lot of Sontag in relation to photography, and then a lot of historical narrative about women and seeing — I really got a lot out of reading Marsha Meskimmon’s The Art of Reflection, about the history of women and self-portraiture, and out of reading some feminist critiques of visual culture and capitalism, such as Sheila Rowbotham and Virginie Despentes. But I also kept John Berger around for reference a lot and read a lot of my favorite modern writers to try to marinate in their words — Maggie Nelson, Rebecca Solnit.

I was reading Jessa Crispin’s new book of essays, called Dead Ladies Project this fall as well, and found that much of her generous and elegant historical writing made me feel certain that I wanted to include the women of the past in the final piece.

I like a great deal of writing that is out now, but I also felt scared that what I was doing felt a little different than a lot of the things I read — at times it felt a little too political (or as the kids would say it, a bit too full of fire content), a little too sentimental with regard to the themes of empowerment, a little too long, a little too romantic about what I think asserting one’s humanity can achieve.

But when you feel those things — that a piece of writing might be swerving into something that scares you, that’s when I find you have to keep going, have to keep pushing into the scarier place. Because I had never written anything like this before, either. So I sort of stumbled through the dark to get to the end, and when I emerged, I felt like less of an impostor than I did going in. And that is sometimes all you can hope for!

Sarah: On a more technical level, do you think “Selfie” is representative of the potential of digital journalism? It’s a marvel of inclusion, allowing others to contribute to your overall thesis, and I think that’s what makes it so powerful.

Rachel: I owe a lot to my editor at Matter, Mark Lotto, who is one of the only editors I have worked with who runs an online publication and feels excited about all of the things that means, rather than what it excludes. I find a lot of editors working online run their sites like print magazines — and often very good print magazines — in that they attach words to images with a headline and then press publish, and that’s the article.

I have never seen the web that way — why would we just want to reproduce the experience of print online — and so I am so happy to be working with someone like Mark who doesn’t either. For me, the web is a marvel — I love Twitter, I love Tumblr, I love the lightning pace of discovery on it. If you are someone with a curious mind, or at least one that likes to see links between things, then the web is a candy store. You can have ten tabs open and they all somehow relate to each other, and that’s where the big themes begin to emerge.

Web journalism that feels isolationist — that doesn’t reach out and connect to the larger world — doesn’t take advantage of the best part of the Internet, which is that it is a hyper-connected place. For the selfies piece, I couldn’t have written it in a vacuum. It is about a social act, and so the reporting had to be social. I had to ask people for their selfies, for their stories, to be included in the piece.

It wouldn’t have made sense without all the other faces — I wish it had felt even more like there was an Instagram feed dropped into the middle of the piece. And the response has been so amazing — I’ve gotten a ton of selfies via email, Insta, DM, etc, and I think that is because the piece is meant to reach out — just as selfies do — and have adventures beyond itself.

The potential of digital journalism is as radical as the potential of selfies; and it is all a process of experimentation. I was so lucky to get to try something new with this, and it has sent my mind spinning into so many new directions about where digital writing can go (and where I want to take it ) next.

All images courtesy of Rachel Syme