Helen Palmer Geisel was attending a dinner party hosted by the Johnstons. As the host hugged her, she turned to him and exclaimed, “You don’t know how I needed that!”.

He had suspected her remark was in relation to the increased workload at Beginner Books, a publishing company that she co-founded with her husband, Ted Geisel. Or perhaps, he wondered, there was a more sinister reason. Perhaps her remark was a cry for help, a sign of her increasing loneliness and unhappiness after an almost 40-year marriage that was bound by obligation, rather than love.

Two days later, the Geisels’ longtime housekeeper stumbled upon Helen’s dead body in the bedroom of their La Jolla residence.

A prescription bottle that originally contained one thousand capsules, was now filled with just seven hundred and six. A letter, directed to her husband, was found near her lifeless body. “I didn’t know whether to kill myself, burn the house down, or just go away and get lost,” it read. The morning after, members of their inner circle gathered around the house to comfort the new widower.

Their neighbor and friend, Audrey Stone Dimond, had placed herself in front of the window at the Geisels’ ocean-front property and affixed her gaze into the blurred horizon—perhaps ridden with guilt that their affair, not yet exposed—had contributed to Helen’s untimely demise. Or perhaps she was anticipating the agony that would accompany the accusations of moral corruption that were sure to follow; despite everything, she still loved the man and wanted to be with him.

In less than a year, Dimond divorced her husband, sent her children away to boarding school, and did indeed fulfill her utmost desire—Ted Geisel and Audrey Dimond were married.

The suicide letter that Helen wrote for Ted had been signed off with their secret code. A make-believe law firm named “Grimalkin, Drouberhannus, Knalbner, and Fepp.” If such a playful and rhythmic bouncing of words sounds familiar, it’s most likely childhood nostalgia resurfacing. Helen was the uncredited and largely unknown writer responsible for nurturing the creation of one of the most influential authors and artists of the 20th century.

To the world, he’s an American icon, but to countless children all over the world, he’s better known simply as “Dr. Seuss.”

A published author herself, she was once widely regarded as his “chief editor, chief critic, business manager and wife.” For interviewers who had an exclusive with Dr. Seuss, their go-to question is why a famous (and married) children’s book author doesn’t have any of his own.

“You have ‘em, I’ll amuse ‘em,” he quipped in interviews with The New Yorker and Los Angeles Times—an understandably evasive answer to a perhaps overly personal question.

But behind closed doors, in particular in a conversation he had with his niece, Margaretha “Peggy” Dahmen Owens, he dropped the decades-long façade and revealed, “It was not that we didn’t want to have children. That wasn’t it.” In The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, the entire book was dedicated to a seven-and-a-half year-old named Chrysanthemum-Pearl.

In an interview with Robert Cahn for The Saturday Evening Post, Ted explained he created an imaginary daughter as a comfort to his wife. This came in particularly handy for after-dinner conversations at their house, when the guests commenced their braggart statements pertaining to their offspring or grandchildren. He would proudly declare that Chrysanthemum-Pearl could “whip up the most delicious oyster stew with chocolate frosting and flaming Roman candles!” and “carry one thousand stitches on one needle while making long red underdrawers for her Uncle Terwilliger!”

For years the name of Chrysanthemum-Pearl had appeared on the Geisel Christmas cards, but then so had Norval, Wally, Wickersham, Thnud and a dozen other fictional infant-like characters. In a conversation between close family members, it was revealed that in the fourth year of their marriage, Helen had been hospitalized in New York due to worsening abdominal pain. The doctors couldn’t diagnose the underlying cause and thus made the swift decision to remove her ovaries, rendering her incapable of ever having her own children; she was thirty-three years old.

Peggy Owen’s son—named Ted after her famous uncle—recently shared his mother’s favorite photograph of Helen with me. Her deep chestnut brown hair is delicately curled in bunches, bordering her warm, softly featured canvas. Her pale blue eyes offer an agreeable gaze, flanked by an authentic, radiant, all-teeth-showing smile—the sweetness intensified by the red hue of her lipstick. To say that Helen was like a mother to Peggy is an understatement.

Peggy’s own biological mother had died when she was only seventeen years old, and the Geisels had welcomed her into their home when she first moved to California. Two years before Helen’s death, Dr. Seuss had dedicated the book, I Had Trouble Getting To Solla Sollew, to her with the inscription, “For Margaretha Dahmen Owens, with love and thanks,” as a token of appreciation for her staying with them while his wife was ill. Helen had struggled for more than a decade with partial paralysis fromGuillain-Barre syndrome, a rare autoimmune disorder where the immune system attacks your healthy cells, which leads to weakness, numbness and tingling.

Two years before Helen’s death, he wrote Peggy, “. . . Yesterday Helen was pretty depressed, but today she’s got her sense of humor back. Besides two baths, she today started Occupational Therapy . . .  starting with lessons on how to dial telephones, unbutton buttons, brush teeth, comb hair, and a first stab at writing.” He solemnly continued,

“Helen sends her love and wants to thank Al for loaning you to us. And so do I. I don’t know how I would have got thru the past two weeks without you. And I can think of no one I have ever met that I would rather have been with during this period. You really took care of everything (including my spirits) . . . and when you left, you left me better organized than I have been since the Spanish American War. Someday I’ll do something for you.”

Before her health had deteriorated, Helen was a talented writer and businesswoman. She graduated from Wellesley College with honors in 1920 and thrived in an environment where the curriculum was focused on languages, literature, and even economics. After graduation, she enrolled in Oxford University, an institution that awarded women degrees for the first time only four years prior to her arrival. Unbeknownst to either of them, Ted Geisel was to also attend Oxford after he graduated from Dartmouth.

In 1925, a young American girl sitting behind a doodling Ted peered over his shoulder and was surprised to see how little he was paying attention to the professor. After being in several lectures with this student, she concluded that he always just seemed to be immersed in his own little world.

A year earlier, she had arrived at Oxford with her widowed mother. Standing at five foot three inches, Helen Marion Palmer, Ted recalls Helen possessing a “certain grace” that was distinctly unique to the other women at Oxford. One day, as she watched Ted illustrate John Milton’s Paradise Lost, she insisted he was on the wrong career path. “What you really want to do is draw”, she said. Her judgment solidified by glancing at another one of his pages, “That’s a very fine flying cow!” University of Cincinnati graduate, Joseph Sagmaster, was also attending Oxford and had introduced the pair having known the both of them personally.

Years later, Ted Geisel would dedicate the book Yertle the Tertle to his friend; legend goes that this honor was perhaps bestowed upon Sagmaster because he introduced Geisel to Helen back at Oxford. Sagmaster himself said this was, “the happiest inspiration that he had ever had.” Their swift romance had all the trappings of Ted’s impulsive nature, with a sharp dash reminiscent of an old Hollywood film. After racing back to Oxford before curfew, Ted proposed to Helen in a roadside ditch after he had taken too wide of a turn on their two-horsepower motorcycle and had accidentally toppled them over.

“So, we became engaged,” Ted said, but for a time it was their secret. Geisel granted his first Saturday Evening Post interview with Robert Cahn, revealing why he became Dr. Seuss, the simple reason he draws the way he does, and the undeniable effect his wife, Helen, has had on his career. Two years ago, a republished article from 1957 had appeared, in which Cahn wrote how the famous author “depends at all times on the level headedness of his wife, Helen” to pull him out of predicaments where his impulse has inevitably led him. Separately, Ted’s sister Marnie had always talked of how Helen had been “a great help to him in his work”.

Around the beginning of 1957, Ted had trouble finishing his Christmas-themed book.

The whimsical tale had featured the “bad old Grinch” who “would try to stop Christmas from coming to Who-Ville.”

In a bid to protest commercialization, the Grinch plotted the sinister mission in destroying any gifts, ornaments, trees and fixings that the Whos had planned for their beloved annual holiday. Then arrived the stumbling block. He wondered how he could wrap it up without injecting a pathetically sentimental ending.

“Helen, Helen, where are you?” shouted Ted from his secluded den into the living room. He planted a sketch and a verse into her lap and continued, “How do you like this?” She shook her head and he was distraught. “This isn’t it. And besides, you’ve got the Papa Who too big. Now he looks like a bug.” Ted rebutted, “Well, they are bugs” to which Helen added, “They are not bugs. Those Whos are just small people.”

Later that fall, How The Grinch Stole Christmas was published.

Seventeen years earlier, he had struggled with another book, Horton Hatches The Egg. At the time, the Geisels were living on Park Avenue in New York City. As Germany began to occupy France, progress on the book was immediately put on hold. Instead, Ted began sketching brutal images of Adolf Hitler, and the benign elephant affectionately named Horton, was momentarily consigned to oblivion. The sudden priority shift didn’t seem to bother Ted, who was quoted as saying, “I didn’t know how to end the book anyway, so I began drawing savage cartoons.” He continued, “I had no great causes or interest in social issues until Hitler.” The conception had originated from an earlier sketch that Geisel had drawn which superimposed an elephant over the branches of a small tree.

He then spent countless days trying to figure out how Horton could have entangled himself in such a way. At that point, Helen swooped in with her creative wit and began brainstorming ways to bring Horton down. In Ted’s words, her pivotal contribution was in the climactic lines that follow the hatching of the egg on which Horton sat on for 51 weeks. Then, suddenly, in an epiphany-like state, Helen and Ted cheered, and cheered and cheered some more.

“My goodness! My gracious!” they shouted. “MY WORD! It’s something brand new! IT’S AN ELEPHANT-BIRD!” Ted claimed his wife is a fiend for a story line and that every idea and every line is worked and reworked until the two of them are happy, coiling into a tight bind their decades-long literary partnership and elevating her contribution as being paramount to everything he’d ever published at that point (14 books in total, including, And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, Thidwick The Big Hearted Moose, If I Ran The Zoo, Horton Hears A Who! and The Cat In The Hat). In 1959, Helen once told interviewer Peter Bunzel that “Ted doesn’t sit down and write for children. He writes to amuse himself. Luckily what amuses him also amuses them.”

Her husband agreed and also remarked at his own disbelief surrounding the conclusion, especially considering the absence of forethought during the writing process. “Ninety percent of failures in children’s books come from writing to preconceptions of what kids like. When I’m writing a book, I do it to please Helen and me. But when it finally comes out, I take one look and think, ‘Oh, my God!’” As with most successful writers, Ted was eventually approached by Hollywood. For first-time screenwriters Helen and Ted Geisel, their synergistic collaboration had materialized into an original screenplay titled Design for Death, which chronicled the events leading to Pearl Harbor. It went on to win the 1947 Academy Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary.

However, despite their well-deserved high-caliber Hollywood accolade that many spend years trying to obtain, they were driven away by “disillusionment with the film industry” and instead proceeded to make The Tower in La Jolla their permanent home.

The Cat In The Hat was published through the company they co-founded with Phyllis Cerf at Beginner Books (an imprint of Random House). Helen had, perhaps in an act of defiant independence, used her maiden name to publish numerous titles under the Beginner Book banner over the years, including A Fish Out Of Water, I Was Kissed By A Seal At the Zoo, Do You Know What I’m Going To Do Next Saturday? and Why I Built The Boogle House.

During her tenure, she had displayed her natural business acumen by heading up as Vice President at Beginner Books until her sudden death in 1967. Harry Crosby is a 96-year-old award-winning author, historian, and La Jolla resident whose parents knew the Geisels. In addition, he had spent some time on the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego with Helen. “She was a wonderful woman,” he told me. “I mean, really, she was very intelligent, and she was very generous and polite.”

In the background of the phone call, Harry’s wife can be heard nudging him to add that there has been, “nothing written to show how important she had been in getting her husband into all of those positions and getting his stuff accepted.” He continued, “he became as well-known as he was, certainly in large part, because of her assistance.”

“Dear Ted, What has happened to us? I don’t know. I feel myself in a spiral, going down down down, into a black hole from which there is no escape, no brightness. And loud in my ears from every side I hear, ‘failure, failure, failure…’ I love you so much…I am too old and enmeshed in everything you do and are, that I cannot conceive of life without you . . . My going will leave quite a rumor, but you can say I was overworked and overwrought. Your reputation with your friends and fans will not be harmed . . . Sometimes, think of the fun we had all thru the years . . . “

Her unconditional love and devotion to her husband was palpably apparent in her written suggestion to falsify reasons behind her death. Her concern—even at the edge of suicide—was to protect his wholesome image to friends, family, and most importantly, the millions of readers all over the world who have come to know and love the paradoxically elusive and magnetic Dr. Seuss. Most newspaper clippings from the date of her death chose to omit the details surrounding her suicide—The New York Times, from an article dating October 24, 1967, noted that “she died in her sleep.” It wasn’t until years later that the truth surrounding the circumstances surfaced and family members—including Ted’s former mistress and second wife Audrey Geisel—began to confirm it. Carol Olten, historian at the La Jolla Historic Society remarked to me, “suicide was a taboo subject back then.”

Nowadays, when accomplished authors, fashion designers, artists or other public figures exit the world through an act of suicide, their namesake artifacts inherently carry a heavier weight of fleeting significance, arguably even more so than when they had been alive. The day after Alexander McQueen’s death, retailers reported a 1400% increase in sales. Similarly, sales had increased by 600% the day after Kate Spade’s suicide was announced. In an over-simplified and economic sense, it’s a practical display of supply and demand. Years after Sylvia Plath’s death, scholars are still dedicating themselves to her work in order to dissect and apply speculative theories on the beloved author. In 2013, The Smithsonian reported, “…cultural fascination with her continues to burn brightly despite—or perhaps because of—her premature departure from this world.”

Perhaps the posthumous and rapid consumption of these works represents a greater human condition: that we, despite modern society favoring atomization and individualization, have an embedded desire to commemorate a person or a group of people who symbolizes a positive impact on the wider community, expressed through groundbreaking contributions in the arts, humanities or sciences. Conversely, it can be safely said that most, if not all humans, have an intent to leave a similar mark when our inevitable mortality arrives.

When I asked a long-time La Jolla resident and bookstore owner, Laurence McGilvery, on whether or not he had any memories of Helen Palmer Geisel, he told me over the phone that she had the most “seductive gaze he’d ever encountered.” The comment caught me off guard and I was confused—the description he gave was inconsistent to other accounts I had stumbled upon at that point. I asked him if I could continue this conversation over e-mail considering my Australian accent can be a little incoherent at times. Over e-mail, he quickly corrected himself, “The first Mrs. Geisel! I was remembering the second. It was Audrey who looked up at me on our first and only meeting with the most seductive gaze I ever had encountered.”

He doesn’t recall ever meeting Helen, although her husband, Ted, frequently visited his bookstore. Thirty years after Helen’s death, Audrey Geisel (who has recently passed away) had given University of San Diego, California a multi-million-dollar donation that assisted in the library’s extensive renovations. As a token of their appreciation, the library—easily one of the most recognizable buildings in San Diego thanks in part to its unique Brutalist architectural design—was renamed after her and her second husband, Ted Geisel. With an additional lump sum gift in 2015 came a new café inside the library named, “Audrey’s.”

Five miles south, at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, lies a small library embedded in its white-walled corridors and in plain black text it reads, “Helen Palmer Geisel Library.” Much like her own demeanor, the space is unassuming, subdued and notably humble. A lack of online search results questioned its existence, but the Communications and Marketing Manager at the Museum had affirmed that there was indeed a small library dedicated to her. No other information could be found pertaining to the library’s namesake. Helen’s work and her contributions to the creation of Dr. Seuss couldn’t be efficiently exploited through marketing campaigns after her death.

Not only was Helen’s death swept under the rug, but that feat could have only been made possible if she publicly claimed title to his revolutionary success, which she never did. Years earlier, with a keen observation over a young Ted Geisel, she nurtured and fostered a man with an undeniable talent that was yet unbeknownst to anyone else but her.

When evidence of his potential came to light to the young married couple, she had effectively made her life legacy about choice, sacrifice and unconditional love. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the choice to stand by her husband’s career and fade into the background was not an easy one.

Dr. Seuss Enterprises has been successfully running their multi-million-dollar global portfolio almost 30 years after the beloved author’s death, thanks in part to his second wife, Audrey Geisel, who passed away this year. She was known for her stringent control of licensing partnerships and fierce protection over their intellectual property. Her unrelenting clutch of some of Ted and Helen’s work—coupled with expertly tailored marketing and public relation campaigns—assisted in a generally accepted wholesome and sunny legacy of the famous children’s book author. It’s only in recent years that his sordid minstrel past has unsurfaced and Geisel’s work has come under fire for racist cartoon depictions.

But even with his arguably sordid personal life and problematic societal stances, his legend and life remain largely unsullied and the Dr. Seuss juggernaut rolls along, celebrated year after year, bookshelf by bookshelf. And that’s in no small part to the sacrifices of Helen Palmer Geisel; her contributions have affected the lives of millions of people all over the world, and have sprawled across three generations.

Their niece, Peggy, called her death “her last and greatest gift to him.”

A woman sitting on a toilet in a wedding gown next to a litter box. A woman, naked, lying on a settee. A pregnant woman dressed in a bathing suit. A woman pumping breast milk. A woman lying next to a small child and a cut-out skeleton. And 61 more photographs featuring the same woman in a range of states of undress, most featuring the subject’s face either cut from the frame or obscured.

This is what makes up Michael E. Northrup’s Dream Away, published last month to acclaim from the New Yorker and the Guardian, among others. The experience of looking at the work is a little unnerving: Vogue Italia acknowledged the discomfiting nature of the images, saying “you’re not sure you’re allowed to but nonetheless you can’t look away.” That seems to be the point.

The woman in Dream Away is Northrup’s ex-wife, and the pictures were taken over the course of their relationship — they met in 1976, married in 1978, and divorced by 1988. The domestic intimacy of the images is all part of the 1960s snapshot aesthetic that Northrup himself has expressed affinity for. A commercial artist as well as art photographer, much of his work over the past decades has played with this style of image-making, while also experimenting with light and flash. He’s certainly quite successful at making the viewer feel like they are getting a long glimpse at private moments.

But it is nearly impossible to look at the works that make up Dream Away and not think about the relationship between the photographer and the photographed. Looking at the photos allows the viewer into an intimate relationship, a marriage that is now over.

Thing is, in the discussion of these “arrestingly intimate” images, there appears a comment from the artist that might give one pause. “She hasn’t seen it yet,” he says in an interview with Sleek, “if she likes it that would make me immensely happy, and if she doesn’t, that’s her problem.”

Looking at the photos allows the viewer into an intimate relationship, a marriage that is now over.
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Though there’s no mention in any of the articles about what the woman in the photos might think about being in said photos, a quick Google search reveals that his ex-wife did, and perhaps still does, have a problem. Back in 2013, in a short email exchange published on a photography blog, Northrup writes about how his wife had asked for these images not to be published. Northrup asked for permission and received a no in response. On Twitter, Alexandra Schwartz, who wrote the piece about Dream Away for the New Yorker, revealed that Northrup received a refusal for an initial edit and that this is a new set of photographs. But that doesn’t indicate permission.

Before continuing, it should be said that this is not an attempt to suggest that the book should not have been published and that its existence is somehow illegal. It’s more a question of what it means to ask someone a question, not receive the answer you want, and then move ahead. What are the ethics of producing this type of work? And what does it say about the relationship between a male photographer and a female subject?

Directors Shouldn’t Abuse Actors For The Sake Of ‘Brilliant’ Art
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Northrup’s personal, written admission of his ex-wife’s refusal was then accompanied by a hearty helping of reasons why, as an artist, he has a right to publish his images: “I have a copyright lawyer here who says my first amendment rights trumps her rights to privacy as long as I meet some requirements.” He then expresses the opinion that he is “the creator” and “in the art world, once you pose with the understanding of the intentions of the photographer, then you’re giving rights.”

Reflecting a problematic view that if a woman says yes to one man in one circumstance, that should do for all men and if circumstances change, Northrup continues that since his ex-wife posed naked for another photographer and that photo has circulated without complaint, he should have no problem. Reading argument after argument — at one point Northrup says that his ex is “immoral” for denying his request for permission — it is hard not to feel that this is the attitude of a man who feels that he has a right to more than just a photograph. In the ensuing discussion (all amongst men, it should be noted), it is suggested consistently that the photographer’s rights trump that of the subject.

Max Houghton is a professor of photography at the London College of Communication, and she runs their master’s program in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography. She has spent a great deal of time thinking about the issues around photography and the representation of women both in images and in the field in general, recently publishing  Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now alongside Fiona Rogers. When asked about Dream Away and the issue of consent, “for me,” she says, “it is about this absolutely outrageous sense of entitlement.”

“I really hated the way that he brought up the fact that she posed for other people naked,” she says. “I detested the fact that he used that as if to say she’ll show herself anywhere. It just is not relevant. The guy literally thinks that he has the divine right because they were once married to do whatever he wanted.”

The female voice is pushed aside or silenced and the male project becomes all-encompassing. For Northrup, this isn’t work that has come out of a relationship between two people. This isn’t a creative partnership, perhaps like that of Emmet and Edith Gowin, which Houghton provides as a comparative example of photographer husband and photographed wife. “Close human relationships can be the most beautiful places to explore intimacy and what that is. It can be consensual,” Houghton explains. “But these things can change over time. Even if it is the male with the camera, with the power, with the framing, with everything, it’s not necessarily problematic from the word go.”

This is about an absolutely outrageous sense of entitlement.
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Instead, Northrup’s ex-wife simply becomes a vehicle for Northrup’s creative practice. “I’m also not sure why the concern is so heavy to the side of the subject instead of the photographer,” he complains, in the comment section of photographer Jin Zhu’s no longer active blog that took him to task for his perspective. “If I publish, she looses [sic] nothing. I would not publish images that I thought might damage her situation. And if you llook [sic] at the images I think you’d have trouble finding anything demeaning in them. If I don’t publish I loose [sic] 10 years of part of my life and the ability to share my work. I loose [sic] my freedom of speech.”

But we still do not have his ex-wife’s opinion in all of this, the simple fact of whether or not she’s okay with her often nude body being displayed in public. Considering this, it’s not hard to understand why so many images cut chunks of his ex-wife out of the picture. When she has a voice — a voice that denies his request for permission — she becomes a hindrance, an immoral denier of his free speech, of his art, of his solo “creation.” This attitude requires that he see her as nothing but an object, and he does, stating that the photographs don’t even display his ex-wife at all. They “have [her] likeness but that is only through the illusion of the photo.”

When she has a voice — a voice that denies his request for permission — she becomes a hindrance, an immoral denier of his free speech, of his art, of his solo “creation.”

No matter how much Northrup would like to pretend otherwise, the photographs in Dream Away did require two people to be made. Northrup can choose which photos to include and audiences can argue whether or not the photos are defamatory (which has occurred online), but this leaves out the other person — the one who was photographed repeatedly for a decade starting over 40 years ago. Northrup does not, in any discussion that he has had online, seem to recognize his own privileged position as artist, as photographer. Reflecting what has become a familiar men’s rights refrain, he sees the woman as being all powerful simply for denying him that which he feels entitled to.

Northrup complains that his ex-wife doesn’t have a good reason for questioning his publication of these photographs, but what is his reason for insisting? And why is it any more valid?

Beyond this, however, is perhaps an even wider question: What societal forces have allowed Northup to feel entitled and justified in his defense of his work? He clearly does not recognize the power and privilege that he holds as the man behind the camera. As Houghton puts it, “anyone can make a nice image these days, really. And so we do need to be asking more of people who choose to call themselves a photographer, an artist, a creator. If you are going to use those terms, they are loaded terms, they are privileged terms, and so what are you doing to earn that privilege?”

“But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.”
― Caged Bird by Maya Angelou

It’s rare, but sometimes a film will touch my heart so deeply that I’ll spend days living with the characters in my head.

When I watched A Suitable Girl, a women-of-color-made documentary we’ve covered this week on The Establishment, my heart wept. I spent that night curled up in bed, covered with goosebumps, a mountain of balled up tissues by my bedside.

I was reminded of Aditi, my college friend who got engaged right before our final exams, getting accepted into one of the hardest degree programs in the country, but who had exchanged any career aspirations for an engagement ring.

I was reminded of myself, the raging feminist, who cried each time I was rejected by prospective suitors for being too tall, too fat, too modern.

And then, I went to the place I always try to block out for my sanity. I thought of my mother. The woman who had her wings clipped when she married a stranger at 21.

But it’s not just women in South Asia. And it’s not just in the context of relationships. Here, in my work on gender equity advocacy in America, the same themes of judgment, shame, and oppression keep showing up. Just this week, I’ve had two requests to coach modern, professional American women on how to be “likable.” I attended an all-day conference in Seattle which urged women to ask for more money because… the wage gap. I’ve said the words “impostor syndrome” until I was blue in the face.

But what if? What if we stopped judging all womxn by their ability to snag a man and be liked?

What if we told more womxn that we are more than enough, with our large hips, and melanin-filled skin, and our loud, bossy, opinionated, dominating, angry voices?

Would the world fall apart? Or—dare I hope—would it rise up to meet us and the space we demand to take up?

With love + solidarity,
Ruchika Tulshyan
Founding Editor

The Problem With ‘Cancer Miracles’

By Sascha Cohen

Early stage patients have a very good shot at curative interventions, remission, and long life spans, but for many of us — those with cancer that hides out for years before making itself known, or is repeatedly misdiagnosed, or mutates into a treatment-resistant subtype, or simply spreads very quickly — it’s too late for a miracle.

By definition, the cancer will win, and not the long-suffering patient, unless they get hit by a bus first.

Fantasies that tell us otherwise are dangerous and insulting, and they don’t only come from Hollywood.

The idea of the “miracle cure” represents a conglomeration of media mythmaking, mainstream religious tropes, New Age spirituality, pseudoscientific quackery, and good old-fashioned commercialism.

Meet The Filmmakers Highlighting The Complexity Of Modern Marriage For Women In India

By Madhvi Ramani

Being able to tell a story of marriage in India through the lens of women directors has immense consequences on the storyline.

Oscar-winning ‘The Big Sick’ and ‘Meet the Patels’ are two recent documentaries showcasing arranged marriages in South Asian communities; both, and others like it, have been criticized for presenting women of color as caricatures.

In multiple films on the topic, women of color are an afterthought to be pitied — far from being the protagonists.

Want to learn how to build a powerful brand while embracing intersectional feminism AND conscientiously monetizing? Sign up for Everyday Feminism’s “How to Build Your Online Feminist Hustle” workshop.

Building A Better Breast Pump Should Be Everyone’s Hackathon Challenge
By Marya Errin Jones

On April 27–29, MIT Media Lab will host its second Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon.

The aim of the hackathon, the first iteration of which took place in 2014, is to bring technological equity to the table, to develop improved lactation devices, to fight the stigma of breastfeeding, and to brainstorm services that better support women who want to breastfeed their babies in a society that often shuns the practice.

Centered on collaboration over competition, the hackathon brings together top CEOs of women’s health companies, teams of doulas, mothers of color, and LGBTQ parents and families to help generate better solutions for the breast pump.

Why does this matter? For far too long, we’ve seen that when engineering teams aren’t diverse, only certain people’s problems get solved.

For 17 Years, Vanessa Potkin Has Been Exonerating The Wrongly Imprisoned

By Erica Commisso

The Innocence Project attorney Vanessa Potkin planned to stay at the organization to help exonerate the wrongly accused for just one year. She’s been doing it for 17 years and counting.

In addition to fighting for individuals, the Innocence Project seeks to reform the justice system through education, in order to prevent future injustices and wrongful convictions.

Lead image: Unsplash/ Warren Wong

Meet The Filmmakers Highlighting The Complexity Of Modern Marriage For Women In India

In ‘A Suitable Girl,’ an all-women-of-color team shines a light on the invisible lives of women in India.

Still from ‘A Suitable Girl.’ Courtesy of Smriti Mundhra

It t took me a great deal to explain that this is not under pressure; this is what I have chosen,” Amrita emphasizes while trying on her wedding shoes. She’s a cosmopolitan woman based in Delhi, India who is speaking to the camera about having to reassure her friends that she is happy about getting married. She just introduced herself to the audience as someone who has “complete freedom.”

She does, however, declare that her parents started looking for a groom for her and insisted on her giving up her career, as soon as she completed her MBA.

The contradiction comes to full focus on Amrita’s wedding day, when her expression darkens amidst the bright colors, music, and noise of the festivities, spilling into silent tears.

The moment is just one of many that reveal the complexity of marriage in A Suitable Girl, a documentary that debuted at the Tribeca film festival and was just brought to the masses on Amazon Prime.

The film, made by a creative team entirely comprised of women of color, follows the fate of three women as they search for a groom and ready themselves to leave their parent’s homes to get married, across two metropolitan cities in India.

“Having women shoot the film, especially in certain situations, was really critical because we were dealing with a very sensitive, very vulnerable time in these women’s lives,” says Smriti Mundhra, who co-directed the film with Sarita Khurana.

Both directors are South Asian, but were raised in the United States, which meant they could instantly build a rapport with their subjects. As such, the protagonists did not have to worry about being judged, or having to be presentational. At the same time, the directors were able to observe from a slightly outsider perspective, not having lived in India themselves.

What emerges is an intimate, nuanced look at the invisible lives of women.

Explains Mundhra:

“There are so few opportunities, for women of color especially, to fully explore the breadth of our experience without interjection from either patriarchal culture, even as that manifests in the film industry, or Western culture, so it was really important to us to tell this story and do this work on our terms.”

Being able to tell the story through the lens of women directors has immense consequences on the storyline. Oscar-winning The Big Sick and Meet the Patels are two recent documentaries showcasing arranged marriages in South Asian communities; both, and others like it, have been criticized for presenting women of color as caricatures. In multiple films on the topic, women of color are an afterthought to be pitied — far from being the protagonists.

A Suitable Girl eschews this narrative, choosing to explore the modern arranged marriage process for educated, working women, without going in with preconceived ideas or trying to manufacture a story to suit Western misconceptions.

Instead, the filmmakers embedded themselves in the lives of Amrita (described above), who gives up her career and cosmopolitan Delhi lifestyle to live with her husband’s family in a small town 400 miles away; Dipti, a Mumbai schoolteacher in her early thirties who is struggling to find a husband; and Ritu, an economist who works for Ernst & Young in Mumbai and has no interest in getting married, but is visibly pressured by her mother Seema, who happens to be a matchmaker.

The result? Over 700 hours of footage, shot over the period of four years.

What sets the film apart from most other documentaries: It has a particular emotional, if subtle, form of storytelling.

The process continued for another three years of editing:

“Our editor would find moments that might not have been evident for a man, such as a look, a feeling — something — that showed what was going on within. We left a lot of big, sensational stuff on the cutting room floor, because this film is about the inner lives of women, so we used those moments to tell the story.”

This makes sense when portraying a culture where women are expected to be “softly spoken” and accommodating — their individual needs and wants often silenced. It’s also what sets the film apart from most other documentaries; it has a particular emotional, if subtle, form of storytelling.

The audience is devastated to see Dipti lying on her parent’s sofa in silence, deflated by the match-making process, frustrated when Amrita looks up at her Western clothes packed away on a shelf out of reach in her new closet full of saris ––because that’s how her father-in-law prefers it––and pained along with Ritu when she is standing in the kitchen learning to cook from her domestic helper instead of joining her family who are enjoying practicing a dance to perform at her wedding. It is perhaps she, the economist, who has the most clear-sighted and astute understanding of marriage — it is, underneath the music, romance, and festivities, a social arrangement that will require her to play a certain role within its structure.

The documentary provides a fascinating portrait of modern India, where old and new clash. Dipti, the most shy of the trio, turns to internet matchmaking sites, while Ritu’s mother Seema consults a face-reader to determine the eligibility of matches for her daughter, by showing him photos of prospective grooms on her smartphone. Professional photo shoots go hand in hand with special religious ceremonies and blessings to aid in the search for a partner. The women we expect to choose their life partners themselves are matched by their parents, and those we don’t fall in love through their own choosing.

Unlike many other films in the genre, A Suitable Girl does a stellar job in presenting nuance on a topic that has long been misunderstood and misrepresented in the West.

The documentary provides a fascinating portrait of modern India, where old and new clash.

However, despite the surface of modernity, old, patriarchal structures remain strong, and these are reminiscent of similar structures in the West. For example, the way Dipti is judged by other men to be “too heavy” reminds us of how women’s bodies are objectified and judged everywhere. Countless other echoes between India and the West follow — the commodification of women, their invisible work and emotional labor in society, the curbing of their freedom and economic potential — which makes the documentary a thought-provoking watch for people of all cultures.

As Mundhra explains:

“I think that this type of coming-of-age experience — this idea of trying to find space for your own voice, and your own life and identity in a society that has decided that for you — is something that a lot of women can relate to.”

That is what makes the documentary so effective. As we follow these women, we get to know them as people and become invested in their stories.

Each woman is an individual and each of their experiences is different, despite the film’s common theme of portraying the marriage process in India. Perhaps the most heartbreaking story is Amrita’s, who feels like she has lost her identity since getting married.

As the documentary ends, we see the reality of her new life––a world’s away from the party-loving, self-described shopaholic Amrita we first met.

She talks about never wanting to lose her identity after getting married. But now, more than 80% of people she regularly encounters only refer to her in relation to her husband, likely never knowing her name, she tells the camera. “I do have a name,” she says. “You can call me Amrita.”

By bringing the invisible to light, A Suitable Girl ensures we never forget.

Looking For A Comments Section? We Don’t Have One.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/why-would-anyone-ever-want-to-be-a-wife-b48d81d097c4/ Tue, 20 Feb 2018 00:25:39 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2993 Read more]]> To become a wife is to become complicit.

By Katie Schmid

The wife is dead; long live the wife.

The wife has died and everyone comes to gather at her corpse to participate in the communal ritual of grief by which her body becomes a public monument. The dead body of the wife retains heat, a brick building that has soaked up the sun. People begin to rub up against it to warm themselves. A wife is a technology of pleasantness that all may enjoy.

“Her stroganoff was unparalleled,” says one person, leaning into the body of the wife and letting out an involuntary moan as the heat eases a shoulder pain. A dead wife is better than a rubdown with Icy/Hot.

Another man lies face down next to the body of the wife, such is his reverence for it. “I hear she followed her husband from job to job for eight years,” he says.

The body of the wife has expanded now and the mourners swarm. A man curls into her palm. Just before he falls asleep, he whispers, “She was an excellent mother. Amazing, given that I heard she also pioneered several advancements in some kind of science.” [1]

It is the woman who is gendered first, who is seen as the exception to maleness, the one who exists in the category of not-male. [2] It is the woman who finds her “natural” state in marriage, as wife. Marriage is, in the popular imagination, something that a man must be coaxed into, as a wild animal must be coaxed into a cage with a bit of meat. The woman is happy to be the meat and thus, through a series of coaxings, also known as “feminine wiles” or “nagging,” she entices him to accept his cage. (For more insight into the deployment of “feminine wiles” aka “harpyism” aka “bitching,” “being a real c word,” “the use of mysterious titpowers,” “that Cold War thing she does,” and “shrill whining only the dog can hear,” please see every sitcom ever made.)

But why is this the popular narrative when, in fact, the state of marriage, for men, increases their happiness and wellbeing? Research has shown that masculinity as it is socialized in the United States is a life-threatening condition, produced via aggressive policing in homosocial environments, characterized by violence and limited emotional expression, one popular solution for which is the salutary prescription of taking a wife. [3]

Wives are a technology of health. In the popular imagination, a man’s reward is the wife, who cultivates his emotional silence like a beautiful garden, imbuing it with worth and meaning; as a gardener who has for months sung and coaxed a bloom into being, the wife thinks she can feel the plant emoting back at her. The wife has been taught to make even the harshest ground bear fruit. The wife has been taught to look at an apple seed and call it an apple. [4]

The man is allowed his “essential” maleness, and this maleness is not seen to be threatened by the state of being a husband, provided that the man can make jaunts into homosocial environments, doesn’t accidentally become a stay at home dad, and doesn’t become mysteriously drawn into the yonic terrorhole of his wife’s vagina [5] such that he begins enjoying interior decorating, couples’ retreats, and “I” statements during arguments.

Contemporary culture is thick with images of reluctant, “feminized” husbands. We internalize the narrative of the horrors of the man who has been infected by marriage — we inhabit the logic and call it truth. This “feminized” man is a monstrous creature forged in the fires of a wife’s shrewishness. We can see this logic at work in every Judd Apatow movie ever written: A white, blond ice queen inflicts her will onto an equally monstrous 40-year-old frat boy, who slouches, cowers, and grows hair as his primary occupations. By the end of the movie, after several fights, an equal or greater number of bong hits, a montage of his manscaping, and several ironic deployments of the word “cunt,” the transformation is complete — the chastened man becomes a husband. For her part, the woman in such a romantic comedy displays very little emotional range [6] — she is angry, she is a font of tears. These emotions are part of the man’s journey to “mature masculinity,” but they’re also part of the fun. A wife’s misery is the highest comedy.

In the popular imagination, the state of being a husband is seen to be an attractive accessory to masculinity, a cravat or a particularly lush sock that decorates a man’s essential maleness, which has been painted on his body like a Ken doll’s underwear. Perhaps marriage-as-accessory is not entirely accurate, for the marriage is not purely decorative. Instead, there is a utility to the thing that is overlooked — it is the wife who allows him to escape the stranglehold masculinity has placed on his person. Studies of the sexual scripts of middle-aged men show that men do experience expanded emotional and sexual understanding as a result of moving from the locker room to the marriage bower, though this comes thanks to new narratives of women’s sexuality (in part due to the work of the sexual revolution and the Second Wave) rather than men’s. A corresponding revolution in the image of heterosexual male sexuality and gender performance does not seem forthcoming, and heterosexual men currently continue to be socialized to experience male sexuality as predatory, until such time as they find themselves in a relationship with a woman, who does that good emotional labor and provides him with a new paradigm. And still, men by and large view these more egalitarian practices in their relationships with woman as existing solely in their relationships, unable to incorporate them into conceptualizing their performances of masculinity outside their relationships. [7]

We can hear it in the ways that marriage is seen to enhance a man’s character and soften him: He becomes more sensitive, he’s “opened up,” his “rough edges have been worn down,” he is seen to have “settled down” after “sowing his wild oats” (sexual metaphors for men are always either confusingly of the naturalist bent, or incredibly violent). These metaphors are often employed in tribute to the wife, as though the man were stupid or not capable of it in his pre-husbanded state, as though transformation of the man into the husband was the job of the wife.

As in, “Wow, Derek really has opened up recently, and I think that’s all on you, Fran; he used to be a sucking black hole of rudeness and defensiveness.” Often, this kind of discourse sets up a logic wherein the wife is responsible for representing the husband to others (“I’m sorry Hank’s grumpy, he isn’t feeling well today. Due to masculine socialization, he frequently sulks when there’s inclement weather”), and is, thus, responsible for his behavior in public. Consider how radical Audre Lorde’s musing on emotional labor looks, in light of this cultural expectation:

“…I do not exist to do his feeling for him. Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly ‘inferior’ capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear.” [8]

Though in many ways women are still said to exist “to do his feeling for him,” to give him the practices and thought processes so that he might think himself out of the trap. To be fair, it is hard for a man to see his masculinity, much less theorize it, existing as it does in the form of covert, constricting nude Ken doll underpants. It is the wife’s job to delicately peel off the nude underpants, though she herself wears a choking pair of nude shapewear.

Who, then, theorizes wifeliness with the wife? It is, of course, other wives. It is a peculiar phenomenon of marriage as it is socialized in the West that wives wife for their husbands, and wives also wife for other wives. Wives, once they have got the hang of wifing, tend to wife all over the place. Paradoxically, the very condition of wifeliness is predicated on curtailing a wife’s attachment to anything outside of the marriage, particularly if that thing threatens heterosexual monogamy. The condition of wifeliness is a technology meant to usher the unattached woman out of the dangers of being single. Wifeliness curtails the possibility of bonding between women, with its queer potential and oracular possibilities. Take, for instance, Clarissa Dalloway and Sally Seaton — one day, they’re kissing in gardens and composing political tracts in the attic. Everything is possible; they might be about to join the Bolsheviks. The next thing Clarissa knows, it’s 30 years later and Sally won’t stop bragging to her about the virile boys she’s birthed. It is the great tragedy of Mrs. Dalloway that Clarissa feels everything is possible with Sally, because there is no map for what they are to each other, but when next they meet, they are wives, and their prophetic potential has been subsumed into the language of wifedom.

It is no accident that the language at the heart of descriptions of these types of relationships rests in the unknown. The queer power at the heart of many types of relationships between women is profound and unrealized. Adrienne Rich theorizes:

“Woman identification is a source of energy, a potential springhead of female power, curtailed and contained under the institution of heterosexuality. The denial of reality and visibility to women’s passion for women, women’s choice of women as allies, life companions, and community, the forcing of such relationships into dissimulation and their disintegration under intense pressure have meant an incalculable loss to the power of all women to change the social relations of the sexes, to liberate ourselves and each other.” [9]

Consider Toni Morrison’s Paradise — the black womanist magic at the heart of the relationships amongst the women who live together at the convent. One by one, each woman comes to the convent to gather her strength apart from the world. A kind of power grows at the heart of their relationships with one another. It is so alien, such an affront to the known world, that the townsmen come and destroy it. It imagines another world. It is therefore destroyed by ours.

Every loving relationship between women is fed by an economy of care, the tools of which have been formed within heterosexist patriarchy, but which are profoundly antithetical to patriarchy. “Woman-identified,” a Second Wave term Rich uses, is meant to describe relationships between women that are undefined by patriarchy and exist, as much as they are able, in resistance to it. Rich draws upon Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” to define the erotic energy at the heart of “woman-identified” relationships between women as existing on “a lesbian continuum” where the erotic is “diffuse” and generative, a creative force, and springs up from “the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, or psychic.”

These pockets of anti-marriage wifing crop up between wives, who turn to each other to repair one another. It is a betrayal. It threatens the very heart of the institution of marriage, which is hostile to all that it cannot contain.

The wife is a technology that winnows potential. To become a wife is to move from the state of being something unknown or threatening into a state of intelligibility, to move from anti-meaning (a place of resistance) to stasis (a place of deadness). To even acknowledge the extent to which wives already wife for each other is a threat not only to the state of marriage, but to the state.

The state of wifeliness can determine the existence of both allegiance to nationhood (in the form of access to contingent citizenship) and the existence of state-acknowledged personhood (in the form of access to civil rights). Wifeliness is a lens through which the great eye of the state may focus on the individual. To deny someone the ability to become a wife has traditionally been a line of demarcation between those kinds of relationships the state considers sufficiently human, and those kinds of relationships the state does not wish to understand. [10]

The condition of wifeliness has often been exploited by the state to achieve state’s ends. Think of the mainstreaming of LGBTQ rights into marriage rights and the state’s continued marginalization of the myriad other queer relationships and families. Think of the practice of some slave owners allowing a contingent kind of informal marriage in order to answer abolitionists’ charge of the cruelty of separating families. [11]

It is the wife who is the symbol of nation. In the West, traditionally, the body of the white wife is the foundation of empire; the progenitor of nation whose purity is the battleground upon which all wars are fought. It is the reason Emmett Till was murdered. The wife is a technology of supremacy inextricable from white heterosexist supremacy. To become a wife is to become complicit.

The wife is dead; long live the wife. It begins again every generation with a fictive exceptionalism: Our marriages will be different. There is no language and no framework for a feminist marriage trying to solve the problem of emotional labor. To place the burden of making the marriage egalitarian onto the choices of the individual parties involved ignores the hateful, rotting boards of the building the couple willingly enters into. There is a wound at the heart of every heterosexual relationship. There is a wound at the heart of marriage itself. To pretend otherwise places more burden and invisible labor on the already burdened wife. Why would anyone ever want to be a wife?

Notes

1. Loosely taken from The New York Times’ obituary of Yvonne Brill.

2. Simone De Beauvoir. Post-structural feminism is helpful here. Judith Butler: “If one is a girl to the extent that one does not want a girl, then wanting a girl will bring being a girl into question; within this matrix, homosexual desire thus panics gender” (Judith Butler, “Melancholy Gender: Refused Identification,” in Gender in Psychoanalytic Space: between clinic and culture, ed. Murial Dimen and Virginia Goldner (New York: Other Press, 2010)). We can see this logic in the way (dis)ability is produced, in part, by public spaces that take a certain kind of body as “neutral” and “normal,” but thereby create the non-“normal” body as disabled (Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor, Examined Life interview series, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0HZaPkF6qE (Accessed April 04, 2016)). The term “natural” is a logic of power that attempts to produce subjects, but then hides that production of subjects by pretending that their adherence to a law outside of them in fact originates in their bodies.

3. Michelle Adams and Scott Coltrane, in “Boys and Men in Families,” note that the state of adolescent maleness as it is currently socialized is detrimental to men’s health: “In 1996, for example, 2,110 suicides in the United States involved youth under the age of 19, 80% of whom were male,” while “…married men are less depressed and have lower rates of mental disorder than do married women.” From Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities, ed. R.W. Connell, Jeff Hearn and Michael S. Kimmel (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2005).

4. “When you are hungry/learn to eat/whatever sustains you/until morning” (“For Each of You”) Audre Lorde, The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000).

5. Vaginas are whirlpools from which you may never return. The sirens of the Greek myths who lured sailors to their doom enticed them into the ocean, which everyone knows is an endless void, which everyone knows is a vagina. All vaginas lead via a network of oceanic tunnels to The Great Vagina, aka Terrible Nothingness.

6. A now famous New Yorker profile of Anna Faris revealed that movie studios require that a woman is reduced to tears within the first 10 minutes of the romantic comedy genre, in order to ensure that she is likeable.

7. In “Beyond the sex machine? Sexual practices and masculinity in adult men’s heterosexual accounts,” authors Chiara Bertone and Raffaella Ferrero Camoletto assert that much is to be gained by men from their interactions and heterosexual relationships with women, especially in the expansion of emotional and sexual scripts for men, but that this does not help the man construct a less restrictive conception of masculinity: “…the intimacy script allows him to redefine his sexual positioning in couple interaction, but not to construct a sense of self based on a new model of masculinity: he only distances himself from a masculinity which he keeps defining as predatory.” The authors assert that sex role changes occurred because of the “…sexual revolution, which were based on a collective redefinition of female sexuality and femininity, but even when activating a change in how men experienced sexuality, [this] lacked a corresponding collective redefinition of masculinity.”

8. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, (Berkeley: Crossing Press Feminist Series, 2007).

9. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” in Feminism and Sexuality, ed. Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

10. See, for example: the way the ability to wife has become the primary aim of the mainstream LGBTQA movement, thus eliding the concerns and civil rights of less mainstream members of the movement. Michael Warner, in The Trouble With Normal, attempts to envision a world where marriage is only one part of a larger push toward civil rights in the gay movement: “Is it possible to have a politics in which marriage could be seen as one step to a larger goal, and in which its own discriminatory effects could be confronted rather than simply ignored? […] It would have to say that marriage is a desirable goal only insofar as we can also extend health care, tax reform, rights of intimate association extending to immigration, recognition for joint parenting, and other entitlements currently yoked to marital status. It would have to say that marriage is desirable only insofar as we can eliminate adultery laws and other status-discriminatory regulations for sexuality. […] Above all, a program for change should be accountable to the queer ethos, responsive to the lived arrangements of queer life, and articulated into queer publics.” Of course, as Warner acknowledges here and elsewhere in the text, to extend these rights beyond marriage would change the nature of marriage, and would involve widespread acknowledgement that “legal” marriage is a controlling function of the state, rather than the sacred bond it is regularly cast as. Such acknowledgement does not seem forthcoming.

Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999).

11. Tera Hunter and Michael Martin, “Slave Marriages, Families Were Often Shattered By Auction Block.” Interview by Michael Martin and Tera Hunter. NPR. (Accessed April 04, 2016.)

New Film, ’D.I.Y’, Celebrates Commitment, Wedding Coiffures, And Queer Love

What does marriage mean when you’re gender fluid and loathe the patriarchy?

Sometimes love is pegging.

Marriage is a fucking doozy. Those two syllables carry with them a positively dizzying array of socio-cultural conundrums; marriage sits at the red-hot heart of our, ahem, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy (some reports place the value of the U.S. “wedding industry”—otherwise known at the wedding industrial complex—at $55 billion). And things are only getting weirder—just look to the emergence of WedTech if you want to feel sad/confused for a while.

It’s a system that has not only held up the straight, cis, white, thin, and beautiful as the potent ideal of love, but has actively shunned those outside of these parameters. Weddings are, in short, a painful reminder of the sanctioned discrimination that runs rampant in our country, tangling gender, class, identity, and sexuality in a morass of white lace and marzipan flowers.

But, and I write this whole-heartedly, weddings are also a potent symbol of commitment — physically, emotionally, legally, and otherwise — and I deeply respect those humans who want to take the plunge.

So we find ourselves—torn. We are where we are. Society still showers the legal union with a heaping host of benefits, and people still want a killer party with all their favorite people honoring their brimming love-cups and dogged devotion to making someone’s life happy as hell . . . even as the oppressive shadow of Marriage looms large.

I believe the reappropriation of this historically fraught ritual is a powerful thing—and the heart wants what it wants. But it’s also so goddamned complicated and I see so few stories trying to explore it . . .

Which is why I was genuinely thrilled to learn about D.I.Y.—a film about a gender-fluid couple deftly wrestling with their pending nuptials and what the hell it all means in this day and age.

Written by actors and dear friends Sarah McCarron and Yuval Boim (who, incidentally, are both gay), D.I.Y. is one of a handful of films vying for a chance to pitch the Duplass Brothers, the actor-writer-director-producer team behind Safety Not Guaranteed, The Skeleton Twins, and most recently Room 104 on HBO.

The Duplass Brothers partnered with Seed&Spark—a crowdfunding and streaming platform dedicated to championing diverse storytelling in film and TV—on the Hometown Heroes contest. The top 10 projects that reach their green light and have the most support by October 13 will get to pitch The Duplass Brothers and win up to $25,000 in cold, hard production cash.

Making Room For Diverse Voices With The Duplass Brothers

The Establishment got a chance to pick the bawdy and brilliant minds behind D.I.Y., a film that has been two years in the making and is gunning to wrap up by spring 2018. Here’s what they had to say about queer love, authentic storytelling, and why humor can lance psychological blisters.

Why center the story around marriage? Why is this issue at the red-hot center of race, class, gender, and our collective societal understanding of love…?

Yuval Boim:

D.I.Y. is a film about love. It’s about two humans hellbent on protecting their love from oppressive social norms and defining for themselves what it means to be committed to one another.

Marriage is something with which almost everyone interfaces, whether they are married or not. We are living at a time when we are watching our institutions lose their meaning—including the office of the presidency—which is both terrifying and threatening. But it’s really important and healthy that institutions change, evolve, and grow to serve as wider swath of humanity. Certainly the passage of Marriage Equality — which so many traditionalists view as threatening — is a massively important evolution in civil rights.

How do we define and forge for ourselves the meaning of the institutions governing our intimate relationships?

We’ve known so many couples whose relationship has not survived the process of getting married. As a point of inquiry, it’s valuable to investigate why? It might be that marriage is a flawed oppressive tool of the state and failure to survive it is a sign of health. Or it might be that conflating marriage with an idealized myth of eternal romantic love is a set up.

We are interested in what real love looks like — the gritty day to day process of discovering each other anew each day — secrets, neuroses, warts, and all — and recommitting to that love.

Sarah McCarron:

In film history, especially in the classic rom-com narrative, the notion of “marriage” or “getting married” is often an endgame — a kind of prize hung out as a symbol of resolution, a restoration of order, or a marker of success. We hear the wedding bells . . . and the story is over! All have survived!

D.I.Y. is an inverted rom-com. Through this trope, we wanted to smash this notion that the wedding is the end—or worse—that it is evidence of having won something. What happens when two individuals attempt to plan their most perfect, unique, personalized wedding ceremony, but come to realize they have very different notions of what marriage even is or should be? How does a relationship predicated on love survive the institution of marriage?

Why Should You Become An Establishment Member For $5 A Month?

Linking marriage to love is actually a recent thing we humans have started to do! For most of its history, marriage has had nothing to do with love. Marriage is an ancient social, economic, and often religious rite — and it is still the primary way to transfer wealth. Marriage is also culturally universal — which is amazing to consider, and indicative of marriage’s function as a tool of the state. As contemporary couples invoke marriage as a way of forging a life together predicated on love, we simultaneously invoke these huge deep cultural, economic, and political forces that have sway — consciously or unconsciously — on a couple’s domestic life together.

We really wanted to Josh and Matilda’s invocation of the institution of marriage to examine the ways it also “legitimizes” their love, and how they become unwittingly entrenched in a chess game of alliances across a chasm of the class divide. (That they weren’t even aware existed between them.)

Marriage is culturally universal — which indicative of marriage’s function as a tool of the state.

What is the role of humor in this film? What can humor do to serve the story or lance psychological blisters around “serious” issues that you’re tackling in ways that more classic “drama” cannot?

Yuval:

It was very clear for us from the beginning that this was a comedy. Talking about class and gender and social justice can sound heavy. But when you have characters painting themselves into corners in the name of these things, and doing stupid, painful things to each other, we laugh because we recognize ourselves in their actions. It helps to break down barriers. People can enjoy it on the surface, because there’s physical comedy and funny dialogue. But hopefully, if we do our job well, the motor underneath—the societal machine that the characters are trapped in—gets revealed.

Sarah:

My great uncle (who was a radical rabbi and renowned orator) always used to say “if you want people to hear the truth, first you have to make them laugh.” I’m not insinuating this film has some claim staked on the truth — but we are as writers interested in investigating truths.

If we can laugh at the rituals, roles, and institutions we hold precious, we prevent them from having too much power over us. The most threatening force to a genuine oppressor is getting laughed at. Josh and Matilda are clowns and clowns have a long history dramatically as truth-tellers. Fools, jesters, mischief makers disrupt the status quo.

Because they believe in themselves with such conviction, they’re blinded to the punches thrown at them and able to continually keep getting up and recommitting to love. If they didn’t, it would be a tragedy. In many ways, clown and tragedy are inverted versions of the same dynamic — willful humans determined to make it. The power of laughter, though, is profound in its capacity to make it safe for audiences to contemplate and reflect on what they’ve recognized. Laughing is a truth-teller.

We don’t laugh unless something hits a chord of truth. And in the laughter something opens up — perhaps a new possibility for how things could be.

Clowns have a long history as truth-tellers.

Do you believe art can serve as a vehicle of societal change?

Sarah:

Absolutely. This conviction could be naive and idealistic if we define societal change vaguely as “making the world a better place.” And the reality is art can be super elitist and prove itself insufficient in the face of the challenges experienced by the least advantaged in our culture.

But, societies are comprised of individuals, and in the intimacy between art and receivers of art, minds and hearts can open. Art’s power to reflect the reality of personal circumstances and awaken individuals to a call to action is profound. If/when I start to feel cynical, I lean on one driver: Fascists hate art.

Look at Pussy Riot. Look at Ai Weiwei. If art did not serve as a vehicle for societal change, the powers that be would never be threatened by artists such as these.

When I start to feel cynical, I lean on one driver—fascists hate art.

Yuval:

Art creates spaces. Literal and aesthetic. These can be spaces that allow us to feel included and represented, and thus feel safe. Or these can be — just as important — spaces to question the establishment, in perhaps more radical ways.

How do your personal identities intersect with the portrayal of this gender-fluid couple? What are your thoughts on authenticity with the writers behind certain stories? Is fiction “better” if those creating it have lived the experiences they’re portraying?

Yuval:

I identify as a gay man. So personally this aspect of my character is not so autobiographical. But for me, the process of writing and acting is about empathy. About projecting myself out of the limitations of my own self, and expanding my capacity to connect with others.

Sarah:

I am married to a woman, but I have had sexually fluid relationships my whole life. I relate very much to Matilda’s position of finding someone she wants to commit her life to, which doesn’t necessarily mean it negates any other identities or precludes sexual fluidity.

This is a story about a couple who happen to be a man and a woman — though they could easily be with a partner of the same sex. So what becomes important is their personal dynamic — and thus the gender roles are really illuminated. Neither fall into either prescribed gender role. Matilda fucks Josh from behind with a strap-on, and they both love it. No explanation required. Needs are met. It’s funny we’ve had folks be confused, asking “wait are they gay?” and wanting to put the characters in that box. Why is it that just because a man might like to have sex in his ass, he needs to be gay?

Any good writing should be a prism that includes multiple perspectives on the theme. If a writer is only allowed to write from their experience or perspective, the writing’s capacity is limited in its potential to illuminate the limitations of all of our perspectives. This is why I love to write in collaboration — and why we are interviewing real people. To serve as a digestive aid to funnel the varying views of marriage into the script in a way that allows them all to be represented. In great writing, everyone is right. And everyone is limited. The writing itself illuminates the whole.

Sarah, you say that: “Getting the right to marry could be viewed as a a way for folks to assimilate into an oppressive and dominating patriarchal culture.” I have many queer friends who feel this way. It’s like, “Why the hell do I want to fight to be part of system that systematically rejected me and my love of another human…?!” It’s decidedly complicated as hell, but I’m curious why you made the decision to get married yourself as a gay woman…!

Sarah:

What happened was, Elysa proposed. We definitely saw it as an oppressive institution, and I have very few models of a healthy marriage as compared to the number of marriages that prove the institution to be a set-up. But also it opened up this huge YES in my body. What was I saying yes to? An inquiry for the ages. I was saying yes to HER. Saying yes to being of service to our relationship for the long haul. To fostering her growth alongside mine, to loving every part of her, and to creating a safe secure commitment through which we could struggle into our best selfs and accept all the ways in which we fall short. Like a tomato plant stake. You know those cylindrical cages that prevent tomatoes from getting really big and out of control? I feel like that’s what I was saying yes too. A structure we could plant our tomato in for optimal health.

Any good writing should be a prism that includes multiple perspectives on the theme.

Yuval, your character is a bit meta in that he is studying gender and the nature of marriage within the film. And then the film actually features real interviews. Can you talk a bit about your decision to include these “documentary” elements — also, did you learn anything surprising from these conversations?

Yuval:

The idea to include interviews with real people first came to us when we were shooting at Steve and Ruth Reiman’s house in Joshua Tree. We were so inspired by the story of their marriage, that we wrote them into a scene. Then we thought, wow, we could invite other people to share their story, and that could shape the narrative of the film.

Narratives can and do organically emerge from the actual bodies in the room, and we see our work as a dialogue. An investigation which creates a conversation.

We were interviewing a couple who has been committed for 14 years and don’t believe in traditional marriage. They talked about the judgment they receive from friends and family, and I was so moved I started crying in the interview. We were also taken aback by people’s desire to share their stories. Many of the couples we interviewed, some of which were strangers, traveled from out of town to come speak with us, because they felt they finally had a platform in which to tell their story.

And that was like, wow. We are doing something that is touching a nerve.

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Beauty Is A Preposterous, Frivolous, Amazing Gift We Give To One Another

The experience of beauty I share with my friends is a bulwark in a world full of bullshit, a bastion against very real everyday horrors.

Already looking but pre-feeling beautiful on my wedding day, when my father decided to snap a photo of me standing beside a garbage can.

Five years ago today, I walked into a crowded room and everyone stared at me. “She looks BEAUTIFUL,” gasped some blessedly effusive person seated to my left.

Now look dudes, I’ve seen my share of rom-coms and I’ve been to a hell of a lot of weddings based on them. I know the narrative in a traditional-ish Man + Woman tale of matrimony is supposed to go…

and then her nerves vanished when she looked deeply into the eyes of her groom, waiting for her at the end of the aisle. She floated on an ebullient cloud of true love to join hands with her new husband, blissfully unaware of the eyes of the onlookers dazzled by her passage . . .

or something like that.

There’s some truth to the cliche, I think: catching and holding my now-husband’s gaze did make me feel a bit steadier, helped me walk through the sensation of leaping, clawing nerves to meet him in the center of that ballroom to take our vows, but still! The voice from the left, that exclamation from a woman who just couldn’t or wouldn’t withhold verbal appreciation of my wedding day aesthetic, swept me into the center of the room with head high as if my heart weren’t pounding out of my chest.

I don’t know which of my friends or family said it, but I love her. I’ll never think of that moment without feeling the sharp, pleasant pang of sincere compliment, and I still believe that her pronouncement *made* me beautiful in that moment. Perhaps I already glowed from the vantage of outward eyes — I better have looked good, given all the time I spent on my makeup that morning — but it was in that instant that I felt it. “Beautiful.” It echoed in my brain, and that warm, lovely feeling stayed with me throughout the night.

After my brother’s recent wedding ceremony, my dad wrote a little Facebook post that made everybody (or at least definitely me) cry. In it, he made a salient point that, being extremely lucky in the lottery of in-laws, I hadn’t much considered: the legal and sentimental bond of matrimony goes far beyond the two people in the dress(es), tux(es)…or whatever the amazingly Offbeat Bride ensemble(s) they choose to wear for their commitment ceremony.

Marrying somebody is marrying his/her/their entire network of love and acquaintanceship. On a familial level, this becomes pretty apparent as a marriage progresses: your spouse’s family can become, quite literally, your family — you gotta coordinate holidays, you gotta take on pain and part in interfamilial conflict, you gotta go to all the parties. You’re one of the crew now, for better or worse, in sickness and in health.

My Hot-Pink-Loving Santa Claus Father Taught Me What Beauty Is

But when it comes to the wedding day itself, your literal and metaphysical family functions more as a (much-beloved) background, a surrounding tableau of smiles and well-wishes that renders individuals near-anonymous en masse. The people who help you battle anxiety and withstand the enormous pressure of that metaphorical multi-person embrace to survive your “special day” and provide a ceremony worthy of memory are a select group of trusted confidantes: your ride-or-dies, your chosen family, your friends. And especially, if you’re a woman (the woman writing this essay, anyhow): your female friends.

I looked beautiful at my wedding five years ago because Jane taught me how to style my hair in finger waves. I looked beautiful at my wedding because, on the morning of, Lauren said “Jenn, get the hell out of the kitchen. Go do your makeup and I’ll wash the dishes.” I looked beautiful because Hannah, bless her most noble of hearts, attended to my excited, nervous mother all day prior to the ceremony, fetching wine as needed and refusing to allow her to call me about anything potentially anxious-making until the vows had safely been said.

I looked beautiful because Beka offered to make the run to pick up the photo collage that was to-be-displayed by the guest book; I looked beautiful because Lindy literally slapped my father-in-law’s fingers when he attempted to snatch a surplus of hand-made favors from the limited amount available.

When it comes to the wedding day itself, your family functions more as a (much-beloved) background, a surrounding tableau of smiles and well-wishes that renders individuals near-anonymous en masse.

I looked beautiful because I’d received bachelorette night hugs from Bethany, Jen, and Lindsey, who’d all traveled from out of town to be there, because I could hear Kaylan’s laugh ringing before I even walked into the ballroom, because Chenoa wore cowboy boots and Jaime accidentally wore a transparent dress to attend my nuptials.

I looked beautiful because I myself, my own super-best friend, spent a lot of time and effort in consultation with all of the above-mentioned women choosing a dress, making my own jewelry to wear for the ceremony, styling my hair, designing and applying my makeup. I looked beautiful because of the effort and influence of a lot of women, and I felt beautiful because of some woman’s exclamation upon observing the fruits of my enterprise. I mean, damn, I know I’ve repeated the word 78 times in this paragraph alone, but it’s just apropos: what a beautiful, beautiful group of women I know. What a beautiful night!

Recently I’ve been thinking about this form of feminine labor, the way my friends and I utilize our bonds of trust to uplift one another during times of celebration or difficulty. It looks a bit different from the models of adult female friendship I observed growing up, but functions so similarly! I have never made a dish to bring to a church potluck or a loved one in bereavement, but I have packed up every mascara I own and sprinted for the faces of friends who are enjoying accomplishment or suffering heartbreak, eager to provide them with the loveliest self-image I can assist in creating. When Hannah married, I spent more time perfecting the makeup of the mother of the groom than decorating my own face (myself, as a sister, being not nearly as important a figure in the resulting photos).

When Lauren, who typically doesn’t wear makeup, was wed last month, I went to painstaking effort to give her the natural-but-OOMPHED aesthetic she envisioned for the day. When Beka received some bad news that rattled her self-esteem, all I could think to do (besides make dumb jokes and help her through a bottle of champagne) was to whip out some shiny shadow and take a photo that, in its gorgeousness, would make plain the absolute ridiculousness of her rejection. Beauty is my gift to them all, a process-based undertaking that serves to offer both me and my friends reassurance and joy.

How To Make Your Face Look Superb For Your Soulmate’s Seoul Wedding

It’s frivolous, I know. Do any of us need to look or feel pretty? We shouldn’t really, I guess. Not like we need to eat. Do any of us need to be married? Discounting depressingly legit reasons like religion-enforced patriarchal tradition and financial dependence, and good ol’ HEY YOU ANCIENT SPINSTER-style societal pressure—of course not!

Nonetheless, I celebrate both on June 30: my marriage, and the experience of beauty I share with my friends. Both are, for me, bulwarks in a world full of bullshit, bastions against very real everyday horrors that would sap my spirit unto death. I need strong bonds with other humans in order to survive, and those I share with my husband and closest women friends sustain me.

“Beauty,” as a process, is not meaningful to me as a dreary prescribed practice of daily maintenance, but functions as more of a spiritual ritual by which I create and reify the relationships that give my life meaning.

Would my wedding day have been as significant if Lauren hadn’t offered to clean my kitchen so I could spend more time on my makeup? Would hers have been as meaningful if she’d been married in her usual bare face, minus my cosmetic wizardry? Well…of course, in the sense that we would both still now be legally bound in commitments to spouses we trust and adore. But would the ceremonies have been *quite* as special, as perfectly personal in lasting memory? I think not.

The last words I heard from another person besides my husband on my wedding night came from the mouth of another friend, a slightly different tone than whoever’d gasped “She looks BEAUTIFUL!” Justin and I had just retreated to our honeymoon suite and slammed the door. We stood leaning against it, grinning stupidly at each other, when we heard the elevator outside DING!, disgorging a load of women who’d closed out the dancing following our wedding.

Do any of us need to be married? Discounting depressingly legit reasons like religion-enforced patriarchal tradition and financial dependence, and good ol’ HEY YOU ANCIENT SPINSTER-style societal pressure — of course not!

“But,” issued an appreciative voice from the elevator, bellowing down the quiet hallway, “did you see Lauren’s boobs?” (Reader, I did. On that particular night and always, they looked excellent.) “Did you SEE THEM?!” My newly minted husband and I both lost it, cackling until we couldn’t breathe, laughing until the clamor of other voices faded into the still of night. I knew again then that I’d made a perfect choice of partner: someone who would never begrudge me the feminine frivolity I cherish in my friendships, someone who delights in myself, my body, my family, my friends, and the absurd ways in which we express our affection for one another.

On June 30 it feels right not only to celebrate my love and ever-increasing appreciation for my partner-in-life, but also the women whose blurted words definitively punctuated our ceremony, the friends who saw us to the point of marriage and beyond. Beauty (and boobs, apparently) have bound us all in a broader web than I was even capable of conceiving when I said “I do” on that swelteringly hot evening in 2012, and five years later? All of those loves shine more brightly than ever. How beautiful is that?!

]]> https://theestablishment.co/the-establishment-i-promised-him-the-space-to-fuck-up-3fa33c8c084f/ Mon, 16 Jan 2017 17:08:16 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2032 Read more]]> I thought we were past this bullshit where we gave any legitimacy to the “other side” — the side that doesn’t respect my humanity.

Back in December, there were some interesting developments as people sought to ease the pain of America’s latest and most heinous gaffe — the election of the tangerine nightmare that is days away from representing our country. The development I heard and saw most often was the desire for “both sides” to meet and discuss our differences, to reconcile. These entreaties sparked a discussion between me and my significant other (S.O.) that caused a discernible rift in our relationship.

It’s something that we are still working to heal.

I’m not going to lie; the discussion sucked. Needing to have the discussion sucked. It sucked because I promised him the space to be wrong as he learns more about racism and oppression. I promised him the space to fuck up and grow from his mistakes. I promised him that I would continue to help him address and dissect his cultivated white supremacist education… and it sucked.

It sucked because there is a huge space between making that promise and delivering that promise, and it is filled with pain, self-doubt, and heartache.

It sucked because he didn’t see how he was wrong. It sucked because I thought we were past this bullshit where we gave any legitimacy to the “other side”—the side that doesn’t respect my humanity. The side that thinks I am subhuman. The side that is actively fighting to keep me in a space where white people can use, abuse, and discard me at their discretion. The side that is fighting to ensure their perceived superiority. A side that he was raised to think is the way things are supposed to be.

But he’s white and white people have controlled the narrative of who deserves equality and who doesn’t for hundreds of years. And apparently, it takes more than seven years with me for him to understand that it’s a lie. And immoral. And dehumanizing. And a violation of my personhood; my humanity; my life.

He doesn’t understand how dangerous everything is right now.

It all started with Trevor Noah and Charlamagne the Sucka’s December 7th radio interview.

I’d been irritated at Trevor for his New York Times op-ed, which had been published earlier in the week, and decided he wasn’t about shit. In fact, I’d written an essay a couple of weeks earlier that went live the same day as his op-ed about exactly what Trevor was doing — legitimizing and doing the work for white supremacy.

He’d done this work by inviting right-wing media figure Tomi Lahren — a documented racist — on his platform, and then going out of his way to be nice and accepting of her. By having her on his show, that nasty little hatemonger gained access to an entirely new audience. His op-ed explains why he thought that bullshit was the right thing to do. But for him to willingly share his following with an active and vocal, intentionally ill-informed white supremacist is baffling to me, and I’ve been openly and actively vocal about what bullshit this was.

Then Charlamagne, a personality I’ve never paid any attention to, started being a Tomy-ite, all while conveniently claiming on Twitter that Black women don’t do exponentially better shit than that vapid, racist shit storm Lahren.

It made for a week where Black women found themselves being attacked and delegitimized by Black men who claimed their attacks were fair. Isn’t it interesting how “fair” is about letting someone who shouts ignorant, informed, racist shit access to your audience while elevating their media profile? Bene Viera said it best in her essay for The Frisky:

“Thanks to black men, Tomi Lahren has been all the buzz in media for over a week. She didn’t have to do anything but cozy up with black men and let her mediocrity and proximity to them do the work. The way she hustled these fools reminds me that 13% of black men voted for Trump. As much as things change they remain the same.”

As much as things change, they remain the same.

My relationship with my significant other has changed a lot over the past seven years—from his complete avoidance of talking about racism to him becoming active and vocal in speaking against it.

But then he posted that interview between Noah and Charlamagne—two agents of whiteness—as though it’s totally fine to have two black men advocate for racists. My S.O.’s reason: “Nothing will get better if the two sides don’t talk to each other and that’s what they were talking about.”

Two sides, he said. What two sides? The side that says “Hey, we’re all human and deserve equal rights and protections under the law” vs. the side that says “White people have run this shit and if you don’t like what we’ve allowed you to have you can leave…or we can kill you, and understand that we’ll do both.”

I’d told my S.O. that Noah and Charlamagne’s whole “nothing’s going to change if both sides aren’t talking” stance ignores the hundreds of years that Black people have fought to get this far. It ignores that many, many white people don’t want to have these conversations at all. It ignores the propaganda machine that operates expressly to devalue the needs of Black people; the systems that exist to actively destroy any cohesion and make every day a fight for survival.

It ignores the escapes, the hiding, the building, the destruction, the casual, unjustified murders of Black people. It ignores the violent and homicidal rampages enacted by white people on Black people who were doing nothing more than living their lives. It ignores how every fucking way we push back against this is somehow a problem.

Becoming An Agent Of Whiteness
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It ignores the fact that many white people participate in the destruction of Black people, both explicitly and implicitly, including him. And yes, he needs to continue working on himself and the white people in his life to destroy this shit. And it’s not going to happen in his lifetime, but he still fucking needs to work on it. Always. Just like I do. Like many Black people do. Like we must do because this is about the right to our humanity and our survival.

I shared my personal experiences of racial discrimination with him and he said that there are white people who experience the same discrimination, bias, and threats of violence. Really? REALLY? Who? His response was that he could find someone online. Somebody online.

So, nobody he knows? Nobody he can call on the phone? Because I can invite 30 people over today who can tell him about the racist shit they’ve had to deal with. The threats. The discrimination. The inequities in the law and social imbalance.

And this is always my question for white people: Who the fuck can you call who’s experienced racism from Black people? Who do you know? Who was assumed to be a bad influence and removed from classes as punishment? Who had their privileges revoked because they were NEAR an altercation? Who had their teachers, professors, counselors assume they didn’t understand the lesson, accuse them of plagiarism, tell them not to aim high because that success wasn’t meant for someone “like them”? Who do you personally know who lived on toxic land surrounded by white adults who would threaten to kill them for entering their neighborhood?

I don’t need to read a fucking essay to understand what racism is and how it works. I live it. And I know I’m a goddamn privileged exception with my Ivy League education and high-paying job. I KNOW this. And despite all this fucking white approval, I still deal with racist co-workers and racist systems that explicitly deny me entry to certain circles. I still work for unqualified white men who somehow “earned” their place despite having zero experience. I still know that an interaction with police or some angry white person with a gun can result in my death, and that my corpse will be blamed for my murder.

But you got a fucking YouTube video. Get the fuck outta here.

I don’t need to read a fucking essay to understand what racism is and how it works. I live it.
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This is the shit people in interracial relationships skate past. These discussions where you have to look at the white person in your life and realize this motherfucker is a white supremacist in denial. My S.O. has on more than one occasion admitted that he thinks this way and he’s trying not to. He’s trying. But all the information he’s getting from white sources are feeding that belief system and he’s fucking up.

He’s hit his white supremacy reset button and that is a motherfucking problem.

While he no longer says that racism isn’t real and no longer claims that he doesn’t benefit from racism, he still seems to think that racism isn’t as dangerous as it is. He seems to think the people on the “other side” have the right to fight to oppress Black people and other people of color without repercussions. He seems to think that their fight for dominance is not problematic. That it’s okay for them to fight to keep Black people beneath them and under their control.

He doesn’t accept that the white people fighting to maintain this oppression don’t think I’m equal. He doesn’t grasp that there is a large part of the country that thinks he married a beast and is dirtying himself by being with me.

He doesn’t accept that these people do not want to be at a table talking to me. They don’t think I have anything worthwhile to say.

And he believes that I’m being mean when I acknowledge this. He’s trying to protect them and their hate that he doesn’t quite interpret as hate. To him, it’s just a difference of opinion.

How did we get back here? How does the man who is astounded at the recent mistrial in South Carolina despite video evidence, who donated and supported Standing Rock and was outraged by the media’s silence about it, say these things to me? Believe these things?

Did he lie to me about knowing these things aren’t real? Did he lie to me about understanding that “reverse racism” isn’t real? And why is he making my conversations about racism about his feelings? Why is he trying to tell me to soften my stance about the shitty things white people do?

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Right now, in this moment, I feel like I’ve wasted years of my life. Do I hate myself? I must hate myself to put myself through this.

Can I trust him? I’m starting to wonder…again.

Is this worth it? I honestly do not know, and whether I love him is irrelevant. I’m aware enough to know that loving a person doesn’t mean they are healthy for you.

White people, if you are truly in this shit, in this fight for supporting and enforcing equal rights, you got a lot of fucking work to do. You got a lot of self-reflection, analysis, and introspection ahead. It’s going to hurt. It’s going to reveal some very hurtful things about yourself, and you’re going to backslide because it sucks feeling like a shitty human. But this is your chance to work on changing that about yourself.

If something I’m saying hurts you, fucking examine that shit. Ask yourself why. If something I say makes you feel defensive, stop and ask why that is. Take the time. Do the work. Understand your reactions to people of color when they talk about racism, white supremacy, and white privilege. Learn why you fight so hard to deny it.

White people, if you are truly in this shit, in this fight for supporting and enforcing equal rights, you got a lot of fucking work to do.
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If you are about anti-racism work, this is a huge part of it. Embrace the pain that is fighting for the rights of everyone. Do the self-care so that you can stay in the fight. This is your time to fight for the rights of everyone.

People of color, this is the shitty ass work of being with a white partner. This is the knife’s edge you will find yourself perched upon as we establish our equality.

They will try to make us doubt ourselves. Don’t let them.

They will try to undermine us. Fight them.

They will try to dismiss us. Understand and believe that you are right and deserve to be here, fighting for your rights, and that if they can’t see that, theyare the problem.

We will hold our ground and make them bend. Our humanity is not in question. Our self-worth is not conditional. Our rights are not up for fucking debate.

There are not two sides to establishing my goddamn humanity and I will under no circumstances pretend that there is. I will not have a conversation to debate my rights. I will not remotely entertain the idea that you are worth listening to. I am human. White people, you either work the rest out or go join your brethren who are working so diligently to deny my humanity.

Either way, get the fuck away from me.