The GROWTH Issue

WASH. U.’S PREMIER JUSTICE & DESIGN MAG

GROWTH ISSUE #018

1ST QUARTER

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FALL ‘18

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Letter from the Editor Dear Reader,

President Lauryn McSpadden

Editor-in-Chief Swetha Nakshatri

Art & Design Editor Kimberly Clark

Senior Editors Emily Alpert Anna Konradi

Treasurer Alicia Zhang

Thank you for picking up this copy of ISSUES. This is a bit of a transitional time for us, with a brand new design team and a set of fresh writers. We hope you appreciate the creativity and love poured into this issue. As we grow and evolve, we at ISSUES wanted to explore growth more broadly. Therefore, our theme for this issue is GROWTH, in its many forms. When flipping through this issue, you will see growth imagery in the form of greenery, ruminations on a most unusual form of currency, a wishful harkening back to the Flower Power movement, and so much more. Our contributors have taken the time to reflect on what growth means to them and we hope this issue will drive you to do the same.

College is a time of great growth in our lives. For me, college has meant tackling the question of what meaningful growth is. Does getting older mean emotional growth?

On that front, sometimes it feels as though I’m regressing. Maybe we all are. As I’ve grown older, I find that it is harder to make me laugh, harder to make me wonder, harder to break out of my own cycle of worries. I find that more is required to please me, both in quantity and quality. I find myself asking more of others and myself. Is this what growth is?

I have always been a rather compulsive journaler, or rather a chronicler of my disorganized thoughts, somehow convinced that somewhere in those ramblings would either be a stroke of genius or something of a reassurance. In thinking about this theme, I spent some time flipping through old journals, trying to understand who I was and how I’ve grown.

There is a shift around the beginning of college, where the insecurity and loneliness come to a head and dominate most of the entries. I had thought growth was a pathway to self-assurance, to confidence, to greater ease in social interactions. Somehow the opposite seemed to happen. Can you grow as your fear increases? Is fear essential for growth?

A friend from high school has maintained the dedication of sending a weekly email about her experiences, musings, and what she finds interesting in the corners of the internet. I recently went back into the archives (this project started as a daily email during our junior year of high school) and found a treasure trove of what used to be a running diary, one which reflected my own fear of freedom and growing up. These fears were particularly evident at the beginning of college, the time when we’re all worried that perhaps we’re doing everything wrong and that we’ll never be enough to become the people we want to be. The worrying has faded, but it almost feels as though it will be impossible to restore the lives we had before. It seems like too much has changed, that perhaps we’ve grown too much. When did we start placing so much value on being well-educated rather than learning? Is growth reading news articles instead of novels? Is growth having 500+ LinkedIn connections rather than one good friend?

Issue 18 December 2018 Washington University in St. Louis Photo on cover of Gabrielle Nagel taken by Anna Konradi

We’re all growing up. Things are changing. Maybe there’s a time when our insecurities about learning enough and doing enough are just replaced by learning and doing.

When we no longer chronicle our worries or wait for genius because we’re too busy living.

Maybe that’s what growth truly is. But who really knows?

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Swetha Nakshatri

04 The Growth of “Whiteness” by Emily Stegmeier 07 Growing Pains by Emily Alpert 10 Eden by Laney Ching 12 Period Politics by Swetha Nakshatri 18 Illustrations: Finding Growth Within Yourself by Laney Ching 22 Flower Power Plummet by Genna Torgan 24 To Show the Soul by Elissa Mullins 28 Illustrations by Sophie Devincenti 30 Photographs by Anna Konradi 31 Succer for Succulents by Emily Alpert 34 Tulip Mania by Anna Konradi 36 Mission Statement

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In this ISSUE

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The Growth of “Whiteness” What does it mean to be “White?”

Written by Emily Stegmeier

Whiteness means you won’t be causelessly followed in a store. Whiteness means you aren’t commonly asked “What are you?” and your achievements are never delegitimized, assumed to have been “handed to you” for the sake of diversity. Whiteness ensures that your last name is that of your family’s, not of the white man who bought your ancestors as property.

Whiteness is representative of emptiness in regards to pigmentation. Whiteness is a lack of color, a homogenous, unitarian cultural ideal. Rather than glamourized whiteness being a celebration of individuality and cultural differences, it is a way for society to erase individuality and cultural differences for supposed social acceptance. after that complacency is a great crime in and of itself.

These dwarves are privileged to know complacency as they do. The dwarf named Sneezy, for example: He sits around moaning all day and night—“Snow, my clouded head! The tissues, Snow!” Snow White, of course, having been fully deceived into taking on a maternal role for the dwarves, tends to Sneezy as if he is her child –and not only that, but as if he is plagued with a great and terrible disease. The dwarf Sleepy (who I like to call Lazy) sits idly back as he watches Sneezy moan and Doc play God. He sees it all, albeit through lids half-shut, and watches his brothers victimize Snow White.

America’s definition of whiteness has shifted, consequently affecting the life chances of everyone in its path.

Historically, “Whiteness” was a privileged identity granted only to Northern Europeans, for Eastern and Southern Europeans were viewed to be “‘undermining the purity’ of the American stock3. Those in power employed negative stereotypes to further their nativist agenda. The widespread images of the greedy Jew, the insanity-prone Irish alcoholic, and the mafia-tied Italian kept these ethnic groups locked in a lower economic and social stratum as they were labeled “nonwhites.” As other non-European groups immigrated to the United States, the boundary of whiteness shifted to accommodate all Europeans, excluding instead peoples from Asia and Africa. Just as before, this idea of “whiteness” was questioned by those who were light-skinned but not “white enough” to be white. The discipline of anthropology thus first emerged as an attempt to scientifically justify racial difference, dividing humans into distinct racial categories with different inherent capacities for reason and intelligence. This pseudoscience worked to provide legitimacy to the legal deprivation of rights to any non-European. Groups like Middle Eastern and Asian immigrants argued to be granted “white status” on the basis of their skin color, even though they were largely culturally dissimilar to the prototypical “white” American. Here, racialized science struggled to enforce discrete boundaries

05 between the societally constructed classifications of race that have been used to both empower and oppress ethnic groups for centuries. The perpetual struggle to attain white status is rooted in a desire to attain the systematic benefits associated with whiteness.

To be white in America means that you are guaranteed a voice. Whiteness has historically been conflated with cit-

“To be white in America means that you are guaranteed a voice.”

izenship, a prerequisite for many expressions of agency within our country. In our past, citizenship was required to vote, own property, or have the right to the legal system.

In the infamous Dred Scott v. Sanford Case, a Black man was denied the right to sue for his own freedom because, as a former African slave, he was not a citizen. Depriving nonwhites of the ability to pursue legal action renders them powerless against injustice and oppression. Today, many scholars describe the current, less-overt silencing of Blacks as akin to a “New Jim Crow.2” This is seen in the mass incarceration of Black males in America. According to the Sentencing Project, African-Americans are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated as whites2. Because Black men are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement (often for the same crimes whites frequently commit undetected), their political voices are often silenced. For instance, 1 in 13 Black men have lost their right to vote due to felony convictions, as opposed to 1 in 56 whites 2, leaving the opinions of nonwhites largely underrepresented in the political sphere.

Nonwhites were also barred from accessing affordable housing. After WWII, many government programs financially supported the suburbanization movement, but only afforded these benefits to whites. Loans with low interest rates and generous repayment plans made home ownership a reality for many Americans. However, Blacks were excluded from these benefits through both formal and

informal means. Formally, legal measures such as redlining and restrictive covenants worked to maintain white homogeny in desirable neighborhoods. Redlining entailed The Home Owner’s Loan Corporation, a federal agency, creating color-coded maps of metropolitan areas “to evaluate the risks associated with loans made to specific urban neighborhoods 4, 51.” These maps heavily favored racial homogeny, assigning a low risk rating to exclusively white neighborhoods. In contrast, “Black neighborhoods were always coded red; and even those with small Black percentages were usually rated as ‘hazardous’” and thus assigned the highest risk value4, 50. From these maps, the Federal Housing Administration only provided loans to “low risk” areas, an indirect but substantially racialized practice. This meant that the families who could afford to live in areas most eligible for FHA loans were the ones least in need of the financial support. Beyond HOLC loans, these “Residential Security Maps” were obtained by banks and private corporations, effectively institutionalizing disinvestment in these minority areas. Further, Blacks “were systematically excluded from most skilled trades and nonmanual employment” leaving them “consigned to a low economic status that translated directly into poor housing 4,20.” In addition to their economic inaccessibility due to low job opportunity, houses in these white areas were often bounded by restrictive covenants, binding documents endorsed by the Federal Housing Administration that require the home to only be sold to whites for the foreseeable future. These covenants were deemed an essential “means of ensuring the security of neighborhoods 4,54.” Breaking these covenants was punishable by law. If these formal deterrents did not dissuade minority entrants, hostility and violence finished the job. The first minority families into a white neighborhood typically faced verbal or physical violence and often even “had their houses ransacked or burned” in efforts to preserve neighborhood integrity and deter other minority residents from the area in the process4, 30. Often, privileges of whiteness are granted disparately to members within the same ethnic group. This is largely in response to an individual’s ability to “pass” as white. Passing is largely influenced by an individual’s visible attempts to conform to the mainstream behavioral and appearance standards of the white majority. One must actively attemptto mask any sense of “color” or cultural distinctiveness in order to adhere to the “ideal” of white culture. In today’s society, where overt displays of racism are not as socially

06 acceptable, more discrete mechanisms work to maintain the status quo. For instance, white, traditional standards of beauty and dress are the “default” and the standard of professionalism within our society. In many corporate environments, Black women do not have the privilege of being able to wear a natural hairstyle, for their natural state of being is deviant from “professionalism.” Thus, Black women often have to hide their racial status in order to attain economic opportunity and avoid professional punishment. In Mary Waters’ Ethnic Options, she explains how white individuals have the luxury of choosing the degree to which their ethnicity affects their life. Ethnicity tends to be a subset of identity for whites, present at the discretion of the individual on holidays and in the private sphere.

For those not donning the label of “whiteness,” ethnicity is infinitely more consequential. For instance, African Americans are hindered by their ethnicity in the job application process, “for African-American names get far fewer callbacks for each resume they send out” as compared to white applicants with identical qualifications1. Blacks have historically been denied jobs and economic opportunities explicitly, but now upon disguise of their roots and assimilation to white culture they have begun to elevate in social status to emulate that of the white majority.

The meaning of “whiteness” has evolved since its inception, but its fundamental quality as a justification for exclusion while simultaneously representing the core of American identity has not. The privileges and blissful ignorance that accompany whiteness have been bestowed upon an ever-changing population, and the exact dimensions of such privilege has varied largely based on an individual’s social location.

1. Bertrand, Marianne, and Sendhil Mullainathan. “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination.” The American Economic Review, 2003, https://cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Bertrand_LakishaJamal.pdf.

2. “Felony Disenfranchisement.” The Sentencing Project, www.sentencingproject.org/issues/felony-disenfranchisement/.

3. Kelkar, Kamala. “How a Shifting Definition of ‘White’ Helped Shape U.S. Immigration Policy.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, 16 Sept. 2017, www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/ white-u-s-immigration-policy.

4. Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Harvard University Press, 2003.

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Growing Pains Written by Emily Alpert

Take the SATs or the ACTs. Apply to college. Graduate high school. Go to college. Get good grades. Score your first internship. Do it again until you graduate. Get a full time job. Be an adult. These are the milestone expectations expected of us by parents, professors, future employers.

The markers exist for our benefit, to ensure our academic and professional growth and success.

Make friends. Just kidding, go to college and make new friends. Get a life partner. Marry them and have kids. These expectations, while not academically based or professionally based, still act like checkboxes in our lives. These are the expectations of our parents, peers, family members. Rather than worrying about our own relationship with ourselves, these checkboxes are put in place regarding our interactions with others. While some of these goals are centered around human beings being social creatures, a lot of them ignore that these steps should not be goals with a timeline but rather a natural progression of our growth in our relationship with ourselves.

So do checking off these boxes really correlate with our growth and development? Rather than a deep and true method of implementing growth, these boxes are superficial and lack information about the relationship with the self.

People only seem to care about the outside markers that detail professional and interpersonal growth. But what about my personal growth?

It’s time to rebel against these boxes. I have to start taking control of my own life and decide what has

made me grow as a person.

I’ve been recently struggling with how I’ve grown as a person. I don’t know if college has made me mature more or if I have just appeared to grow when in reality I haven’t whatsoever. Having grappled with this concept, I’ve come to the conclusion that being in a setting where I have to “take responsibility” has not made me grow as a person.

Rather, interacting with people who I have not interacted with previous to entering college has led me to grow. The thing is, I don’t even know how much I have grown as a person. I can think of a couple of areas in which I would like to grow or have grown.

Specific Area #1: Acknowledging when I’ve done enough

As a college student, I am aware of late nights spent studying, writing papers, and doing homework. I’ve never really been aware of the need to pull an all-nighter to finish work. Still, plenty of people I have talked to almost boast about their lack of sleep. While I understand the necessity of such an occurrence, it still baffles me that academic requirements are often so rigorous that people feel this need to stay up all night to do work, or that they brag about it.

Confession #1: I have yet to pull an all-nighter at college for an academic reason. The one time I pulled an all nighter was for my 6 AM flight home for fall break last year.

08 Confession #2: I have stayed up until three or four in the morning a few too many times in my college career to be healthy.

The first time I stayed up until four in the morning was because of Physics homework. The day the homework was due I decided not to attend chemistry lab because I felt that I would act unsafe around chemicals. Because I had gotten such little sleep, I did not get the chance to fulfill my responsibilities as a college student by attending a class for which attending the lab and doing the experiment was essentially my entire grade. While other late nights have not necessarily ended up in me shirking my responsibilities as a student by missing classes, they have definitely negatively impacted my performance. So, I came up with a solution for myself.

Solution #1: Don’t stay up past two in the morning if you can help it.

One change I have actually tried to incorporate into my schedule this year is a bedtime. I have a flexible bedtime of eleven at night to one in the morning. This way, I have a homework time deadline to ensure that I get in bed at a decent time, especially because staying up late is not

In eleventh grade, I had to read a short book on how to write. It was a standard small book that all students taking Advanced Placement English Language and Composition had to read at my high school. One important piece of advice that the book stated was to learn when to finish working on a project. Sure, there will always be a way to make a project better. Of course the project will never technically be “done,” especially if this project is a paper. But in the end, you have to be comfortable and confident enough in your skills to stop revising at a certain point. If not, you’re just going to drive yourself crazy trying to make a project perfect. Oftentimes I struggle with this in regards to time management. I’ll have limited time to write a paper or put together a project and will run out of time to adequately read through the piece ten times and revise it. So, what I have to work on is realizing that sometimes three times are enough. Sometimes, I just have to let my work speak on its own. By realizing when to stop working on something, not only will I be less stressed, but I will have learned to trust myself and to trust my abilities.

Specific Area #2: Acknowledging my mistakes and trying to remedy them.

Before coming to college, I had a tendency to ignore all my mistakes or try to push off my responsibility for my mistakes onto other people. Even now, I sometimes catch myself doing the same thing. It almost happened the other day. My friend made a sign to hang in our room, and I accidentally got it wet because the sign was no longer on the wall but on the microwave. I put my pesto tortellini on the sign because I had no other room, and I thought the tortellini would not get the sign wet. After I realized it had gotten wet, my first instinct was to say it was my friend’s fault for taking down the sign.

Even so, I quickly changed my thoughts and decided that the blame was my own and that I should apologize. Sure, it was a small sign and a small issue, but I have to start getting into the habit of self-policing my thoughts and taking responsibility for my actions, starting with the small ones.

I have taken steps to live a healthier life and to take control over some unfortunate situations I have gotten myself into this year. always the answer. Further, I have started acknowledging, especially for exams, that anything I study past one in the morning is not going to stay in my brain very well and will probably end up hurting me, because I would not be getting a good night’s rest beforehand. Since imposing this bedtime on myself I seem to have stopped procrastinating as much. I also have slept more.

Solution #2: Realize that sometimes there is nothing more you can do about a project or paper.

Specific Area #3: Take control of my future

I don’t have suggestions how to take control of your own future. As a student, I’m still trying to figure out

09 how to take control of my life and my future. This area of growth is an ongoing learning curve for me. While I said that growth is measured by academic, professional, or social success, it should also be measured by personal maturity and growth. Personal growth often involves realizing that the future is going to happen and in order to grow as a person, you have to take charge of it. One part of my life I want to change is the feeling that life is passing me by. I sometimes feel as if I have no say in what I am doing, and that I am just following a predestined path.. Regardless, I feel like I am not doing enough to actively pursue my future. So, in order to help myself take responsibility for my actions, I’m taking charge of my academic wellbeing. That doesn’t necessarily mean checking off every box. I want to approach my future in a way so that I enjoy it. Despite my focus on my academic future, I should spend time making valuable connections within and outside of Wash U. In doing so, I will take charge of my future and my present while trying to progress toward my professional goals.

While becoming a mature individual often occurs outside of the professional and academic realms, sometimes bettering yourself to succeed in these realms makes it such that you mature as a person. By taking charge of your academic and professional life, important lessons in responsibility, time management, communication, and stress management are often learned. In writing this article, I realized that I have grown in that way. I have taken steps to live a healthier life and to take control over some unfortunate situations I have gotten myself into this year. I have also realized the importance of taking charge of my future and bettering my present to give myself more opportunities later on. I have made efforts to interact with people in more meaningful ways and to engage in activities that I actively enjoy while also bettering my future. Still, not everything has to be about the future. Sometimes growing as a person means realizing that the “now” is just as important as the “next”, and that sometimes growth involves taking time for yourself to rest. I am proud of how far I have actually grown since coming to college over a year ago. I still have a lot of growth to go, and I can’t wait to start.

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Eden Daydreaming of you intertwining with me Blossoming and curling into each other Hugging the thorns, the curves.

The kinks and curls That interlock Like interlaced / weaving fingers.

Could this bed of flowers flourish without the critical hand of the gardener? plucking and picking away at each imperfection?

Embrace each shrub and weed, each as beautiful as the ephemeral flowers that come and go like a dream.

Written & Illustratwd by Laney Ching

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Period Politics:

The Growth and Evolution of Female Activism Surrounding Menstruation and the Dignity of the Female Body in Hindu Culture

Written by Swetha Nakshatri

013 Every society has established ideas of acceptable cultural practices, incorporating an institutionalization of beliefs, storytelling to provide models of prescribed actions, and the systematic marginalization of minority groups in order to resist growth and change. World religions have similar methods of behavioral compartmentalization. Uniting millions of people under a belief system, religion often forms a society’s collective understanding of right and wrong. Traditionally, the treatment of women by male-centric religions has distorted spiritual society’s view of femininity, establishing the savior as a masculine figure, while regarding women as the source of all sin. This presents itself as justification for the inferior treatment of women. In the Hindu religion, reinforced by social and religious forces, there is an imposed embarrassment associated with puberty and female sexuality. In particular, menstruation has been a source of shame since Vedic times, with menstrual taboo leading to the inhibition of feminine mobility and a restriction of activity that prevails even as women begin to establish social roles outside of domesticity. Although menstrual taboo is so deeply engrained in cultural norms that many Hindu women still largely follow ritual actions, attitudes toward female sexuality as a pollutant have slowly started to evolve, as young, progressive women have begun questioning and actively resisting the shaming of their bodily processes. Modern Indian popular culture has also worked towards the erasure of shame and the acceptance and even celebration of one of the body’s essential processes, hoping to reverse a taboo entrenched in the collective mind of a culture.

Hinduism is one of the least strictly organized world religions, with no systematic times of practice and a loose interpretation of beliefs based on region, family, and caste.

However, there are universal concepts, most importantly notions of purity and pollution7. The staunch belief in the centrality of purity for living an auspicious and morally sound life first manifested itself in the hierarchical structures of the caste system, separating humans and their right to decency by an abstract impression of their purity.

Caste purity also evolved into discussions of the purity of sexuality and the female body, particularly in its power over male sexuality and its potential threat to patriarchal society. Purity has been presented as a characteristic that must inherently be maintained by women, providing an avenue for shame and gendered violence based on these ideals. This has extended to the establishment of a taboo surrounding menstruation, equating menstruation with pollution. Conceptualizing the ideal of purity allows for an understanding of the spiritual reasoning for menstrual taboo. There is intentionality behind purity in Hindu spiritual culture and the menstrual cycle is messy and often

unpredictable, making it easy to brand as impure and use as justification of the restriction of female rights.

Menstrual taboo has Vedic origins, stemming from mentions of femininity in seminal Hindu texts such as the Rig Veda. In Hindu texts, a woman’s body is presented as a source of impurity, first asserted by myths that continue to be a part of Hindu learning. From a cultural standpoint, mythology has a crucial role in the spiritual understanding of common practices. According to activist Janet Chawla, myths provide models for social behavior and establish actions as taboo by passing teachings on for generations.

Menstrual taboo stems from the central dramatic event of the Rig Veda, in the episode where Lord Indra, the king of the gods, severs the head of Vritra, the demon of waters, thus releasing wealth and prosperity2.The presentation of this story has interesting implications in its relation to femininity, as women are rarely mentioned in the Rig Veda.

However, Vritra is known in terms of matronymics, inadvertently linking femininity and evil, with scholars such as Chawla theorizing that Vritra is representative of pre-patriarchal social formations. When Indra killed Vritra, a Brahmin, he was overcome with sin and guilt and rather than accepting it, distributed the bad omen to a group of women who were desperate to have children, thus giving them the gift of child birth as well as the menstrual cycle. This reappears monthly as the guilt of the murder, making the blood cursed2. This mythological curse is used to justify the treatment of menstruation as a taboo, as menstrual blood is considered threatening, representing the slain enemy’s polluting blood.

A major question remains. How do modern women react to such a blatant rejection of their femininity and an inherent label of impurity? This concept of menstrual blood as the incarnation of demonic blood reflects back on the idea of female sexuality in modern Hindu society, presenting it as similarly threatening and polluting. This has led to restrictive cultural practices and societal prescriptions on what menstruating women are allowed to do. These were first explicitly referenced in Chapter 5 of the Dharmashastras, but have presented themselves as challenges for modern women attempting to reconcile their religious beliefs and progressive ideals. The Dharmashastras, the treatise on how to live a holy life, presents a comprehensive list of prohibited behaviors for menstruating women, stating “she shall sleep on the ground; she shall not sleep in the day-time, nor touch the fire, nor make a rope, nor clean her teeth, nor eat meat”2. These sentiments have extended to present-day, as women are still treated as unclean while menstruating. Menstruating women are presented with an extensive list of unacceptable activities, such as entering kitchens or temples, bathing, having sex or sleeping in the

014 same room as their husbands, and touching others1. This compromises the dignity and independence of a woman, once again restricting her to adherence to a system created by an outdated patriarchal society. A prevalent idea is that women who violate these rules of menstruation cause misfortune. All of these factors work toward “leading girls to associate their own bodies with curse and impurity”3.

Modern women have a distorted view of their bodies and sexuality based on practices and ideas derived centuries ago. Menstrual taboo works to undo all of the progress

A major question remains. How do modern women react to such a blatant rejection of their femininity and an inherent label of impurity?

being made by South Asian society to reverse years of sexist discrimination.

Indian society has begun embracing progressive ideas, abolishing the legal power of the caste system and fighting against traditions such as dowry. Yet menstrual taboo remains. In a series of surveys, researchers Soumya and Sequira Leena at Manipal University asked females aged eighteen years and above about their adherence to menstrual restrictions. Results suggested that menstrual taboos are so deeply engrained in cultural norms that many of these rituals are likely followed more strictly than laws, even by young, educated women. This study used a questionnaire presented to young women in the Udupi district of Karnataka, with a variety of backgrounds and education levels. The majority of the girls, despite being brought up in a time when the cult of domesticity has largely been eliminated, had very traditional concepts of menstruation and sexuality. Of the Hindu women interviewed, 100% did not apply kumkum (a religious marking), visit temples, or attend religious functions. Even in the home, 92% did not enter the prayer room6. This corresponds to the prevalent guilt associated with femininity, as many young women have been taught that menstruation is an unholy state and therefore interacting with god during this time would be sinful. Nothing about modern progress has worked to counter that myth, creating a dichotomy between the “equal woman” and the inherently “inferior woman,” that many have learned to accept.

While religious constraints are the most strictly

followed, a plurality of women also change their daily lifestyles based on their menstrual cycles. Of the survey population, 66% eat special food, 57.74% sleep in a separate room, and 66.19% do not wear new clothes6. When asked, many women stated that they continue these practices in order to avoid conflict, even if they are critically aware of the inherent gendered violence and inequality these traditions support. When it comes to modern women, there is a sense of institutionalization of these taboos, which has led even the most progressive women to be affected by the guilt, shame, and silencing. Additionally, many of these taboos have become internalized and thus voluntary, presenting a contrast that must be addressed in future work regarding the socialization of cultural norms. Many women following promising lives with opportunities for education either largely believe in the validity of menstrual taboo or are too frightened of societal repercussions to enact change. However, in some ways, there is evidence of loosening of taboo around less spiritually based activities. For example, modern women are more likely to bathe, interact with men, and continue working outside the household6.

Contributing factors likely include heightened recognition of hygiene and the economic need for women in the workplace. Although the idea of menstrual pollution seems to legitimize the spiritual inferiority of women due to the construction of religion as tainted by female sin, modern women have begun to extract their social roles from their religious roles. Perhaps, the next step will be the secularization of sexuality and the body.

Many educated women have begun to question the validity of menstrual taboo, both in social and religious realms. While this may not have effected change in behavioral practice yet, this demonstrates the beginning of an evolution surrounding the way that modern women have begun to view themselves and their own bodies. As women have become more educated, they are more easily able to understand that their new role as productive members of the market economy and their status as pollutants are not compatible. Therefore, many challenges have begun to be raised, most subtly through the increased rejection of traditional menstrual attitudes. A study done by investigators at Central Michigan University used a sample population of 67 female students at a university in southern India using the Menstrual Attitude Questionnaire and a knowledge test regarding the menstrual cycle4. Their attitudes toward menstruation suggest a similar shift toward a more progressive view. In fact, this questionnaire found that young Indian women overwhelmingly view menstruation as a natural process and less debilitating than even the American women surveyed. Additionally, when asked, they were much more likely to deny the negative effects of men

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This resistance has largely been spearheaded by social media and the ability to disseminate the atrocities of menstrual taboo.

More women have been active participants in resisting, a direct contrast to the suffering in silence that most women have historically endured.

016 struation, instead accepting the symptoms as an expected consequence of the bodily process4. Despite the negative effects of socialization, many women have begun the process of reconciling their social progress and their bodies.

Another more explicit shift in the modern Indian woman’s view of menstruation has begun in the form of feminist and legal activism. The aim of these dissenters is to attack centuries of stigma, freeing the monthly cycle from social and religious implications. Modern Indian women are the direct source of this activism, with many of their efforts focusing on the restriction to mobility, particularly in religious spaces. Due to the idea of menstruation as ritually polluting, menstruating women are not allowed to pray or enter places of worship during their cycles, alienating women from their connection to God. A temple in the state of Kerala called Sabrimala, housing an eternally celibate god, does not allow women from ages of ten to fifty to enter the temple, a form of exile based solely on gender1. However, women have recognized the irrationality and gendered violence of such institutions, as “religious constructs and myths that have been carried forward by religious institutions that perpetuate wom en’s social segregation” make it difficult for the modern Hindu woman to reconcile her faith and her body8.

This mobility restriction culminated in a public interest litigation filed by the Indian Young Lawyer’s Association in 2006, suing for entry to the temple, citing human rights violations and sparking a national debate that remains unresolved. A bus to the temple that denied a woman’s right to travel with her children and elderly mother sparked a protest in which five female protesters boarded the bus and refused to leave, eventually detained and charged by the local police8.

This incident shows that modern women are growing to use their bodies and the feminine space they occupy as instruments of resistance. In April 2016, after protests and threats of forcible entry, the Mumbai High Court upheld the right of people to enter temples and other places of worship regardless of their gender identity8. This looks to allow the evolution of dissenting attitudes to manifest itself in tangible challenges to menstrual taboo. Although women are largely still denied their rights without much resistance, progressive movements have started to transform way that modern women view their own power over their bodies, giving them a space to actively question the patriarchy.

This resistance has largely been spearheaded by social media and the ability to disseminate the atrocities of menstrual taboo. More women have been active participants in resisting, a direct contrast to the suffering in silence that most women have historically endured. Many modern women have refused to allow misogyny slide. When the chief of the Sabrimala temple made a comment stating that women would only be able to enter the temple if a scanner

could detect their purity at a given time, women turned to social media, with a campaign entitled #HappytoBleed, posting pictures with sanitary napkins8. This turned the source of oppression into a source of freedom, as women used “the sanitary napkin itself as a tool of protest against the sexist and misogyny practiced against them”8. Another widespread campaign, #RedAlert, had women from around India mailing used and unused sanitary napkins to the manager of a firm that strip-searched its female employees in order to determine who left a used napkin in the bathroom8. The use of social media campaigns allows for women who have previously been silenced to speak out about the small-scale injustices that have worked together to make it impossible for women to fully integrate into a non-domestic life. This all began with a shift in passive attitude and the recognition that the power that historical precedent has had over women has made it difficult for modern women to resolve the tension between their progressive ideals and femininity. For years, there has been religious, social, and governmental intrusion into what ultimately remains a private issue. However, the urban elite and educated have begun the agitation, which must be translated into the rejection of activities associated with menstrual taboo and a spread to rural communities, where religion and spiritual culture still have a stronghold on beliefs about human rights.

In popular culture, traditional spiritual ideas of menstrual taboo are increasingly at odds with campaigns aimed at destigmatizing puberty and the female body. Aditi Gupta, in what started as a class project, started Menstrupedia, a comic book turned into a website dedicated to educating girls about puberty and menstruation, tackling topics such as sanitary pads, menstrual hygiene, and bodily changes. With easy-to-digest information in the context of an older sister educating her younger sister and her friends, Menstrupedia not only tackles taboo, but the misinformation that follows.

In previous studies conducted on Menstrual Hygiene Day, researchers found that only 2.5% of girls in school in South Asia knew that menstrual blood came from the uterus. Since then, according to TIME, Menstrupedia has been implemented into the curriculum of more than 70 schools in India, translated into over 10 languages, and accumulated almost 40,000 likes on Facebook. Men have also gotten involved in toppling the patriarchy, with the “Menstrual Man” Arunachalam Muruganantham founding Jayashree Industries, which focuses on the sustainable production and use of sanitary napkins by women in rural communities. Almost 10,000 women have been employed as a result of the efforts and more than 3 million women use these pads. Muruganantham’s story was the subject of the 2018 Bollywood film Pad Man, which grossed over 100 crore rupees and sparked the #PadManChallenge, with major Bollywood superstars shar-

017 ing photos of sanitary napkins on social media to combat taboo.

When considering menstrual taboo in context and how modern women respond to it, an understanding of religious and social tradition is essential. The Hindu religion and its value of purity is so at odds with the menstrual cycle that at times a reconciliation seems impossible. For modern women, religious tradition forces them to confront their occupation of space and the validity of their struggle. However, there has been promise.

Recent events and surveys have demonstrated that while activity restriction remains a reality, attitudes have started to shift and a willingness to resist has been growing. This has led to legal wins, but more importantly has provided progressive women with a framework to begin understanding and accepting the political power of their periods and bodies.

Periods are powerful. The question now comes to whether that power is ignored or is used to challenge entrenched gender norms. •

References 1.

Bhartiya, Aru. “Menstruation, Religion, and Society.” International Journal of Social Science and Humanity 3.6 (2013): 523-527. Print.

2.

Chawla, Janet. “Mythic Origins of Menstrual Taboo in Rig Veda.” Economic and Political Weekly 29.43 (1994): 2817-27. Print.

3.

Garg, Suneela and Tanu Anand. “Menstruation Related Myths in India: Strategies for Combating It.” Journal of Medicine and Primary Care, 4.2 (2015): 184-186. Print.

4.

Hoerster, Katherine D., and Joan C. Chrisler, and Jennifer Gorman Rose. “Attitudes Toward and Experience with Menstruation in the US and India.” Women & Health 38.3 (2003): 77-95. Print.

5.

Leena, Soumya and Sequira Leena. “A Descriptive Study on Cultural Practices about Menarchy and Menstruation.” Nitte University Journal of Health Science 6.2 (2016): 10-13. Print.

6.

Nagarajan, Vijaya R. “Threshold Designs, Forehead Dots, and Menstruation Rituals.” Women’s Lives, Women’s Rituals in the Hindu Tradition. Ed. Tracy Pinchtman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 85-103. Print.

7.

Prasanna, Chitra K. “Claiming the public sphere: Menstrual taboos and the rising dissent in India.” Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity 30.3 (2016): 91-95. Print.

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Illustrations: Finding Growth Within Yourself

Illustrated by Laney Ching

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Flower Power Plummet Written by Genna Torgan

023 What happened to non-violent resistance? To spreading love through embracing the earth and one another? To lifting each other up through the power of peace?

This was the reality of the ‘60s and ‘70s, but is no longer the case. Our means of resistance have turned rotten and we have forgotten what it means to be human, to feel genuinely in times of hurt and havoc. We are putting up a fake front as we hide our vulnerability behind a screen. Focused more on the material aspects of life, we forget to care for one another in times of need. Why have we closed off our hearts and free spirits and turned to aggression?

We are losing our Flower Power: our ability to use peace and love, not violence, to advocate for a cause or protest a policy. Our souls and bodies have forgotten what it means to fight with love, leaving love’s power in promoting peace and nature behind. We need to remember the flower’s simplistic essence: to grow but stay grounded.

More colorful than ever as a society, how are we backtracking away from the Flower Power movement, managing to find a fight in every attempt at peace, love, and happiness?

Unwilling to hear and listen, and so quick to put our guards up, we think we’re protesting others. In reality, we are just protesting against our own vulnerability. By breaking down the walls each of us have obliviously put up, we can start to see people from a clearer perspective, from their point of view.

Lately, the flowers have been forgotten and the thorns on the stems have become the center of attention. The positivity of the petals has fallen into the past and we need to find a way to plant a new seed that will transfer the positivity to the present.

Working together, blooming together, is the key to improving as one. Now more than ever, it is crucial that we grow as a cohesive unit, blocking the hatred and bringing the peace.

We need to return to the time of the Flower Power, and band together to establish a world full of color, happiness, unity, beauty, and the power of the people.

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To Show the Soul Written by Elissa Mullins

We made a blanket fort in the living room. We prepared fun things, “trip-toys”: green play-dough, bubble mix in a purple plastic jug, a mini yellow notepad for drawing, writing. Beautiful things, too, and soft things: the sapphire necklace his parents had given me as a graduation gift; a teddy bear wearing a green WashU t-shirt. We hooked up our phones, loaded with playlists of experimental jazz and psychedelic rock, to the large speakers by the TV. We gathered water; the LSD tabs; the MDMA crystals. We took the acid first.

We lay on the bathroom floor in our underwear waiting for the nausea to pass. The moment came, as it always does, when the nausea was translated out of our stomachs and onto the external world; the afternoon light shining in through the windows shimmered on the shower curtains, and all of a sudden, the movements were no longer just the shadows of the leaves outside the window, waving in the breeze; the whole world oscillated and palpitated and wobbled. Kavi and I looked at each other and giggled until there were tears in our eyes.

We’d fought four days earlier, on the fourth of July.

Serious words had been exchanged: “what ifs” and “maybe nots” and “I don’t knows,” first in anger, and then with great fear and sadness. We were mere weeks away from the day of reckoning, the day when I would depart for St. Louis

and my first semester at Washington University, 181 miles away, while he would remain behind in our hometown, to attend the University of Illinois.

In our quarrelling, we missed the fireworks; we ended the night sitting on a bench in a foggy park in an unknown neighborhood, taking turns drinking out of a bottle of sparkling white grape juice. I leaned my head on his shoulder.

“We’re still candy-flipping on Friday, right?”

My mother and stepdad were out of town, a solid six and a half hours away, camping in Elberta, Michigan. My mom was well aware that Kavi and I would be spending a lot of time at the house in their absence; she was also likely aware that we would be dropping acid, although she was not aware until later that we would be taking acid and ecstasy concurrently. I tell her everything; and in turn she tells me about things like the time she took LSD via eye-drops during a Halloween rager at Southern Illinois University; about how the windowpanes splintered and spiraled into patterns like spiderwebs, like ice crystals; how the neighborhood cat looked really, really weird. I tell her everything, but sometimes not until after the fact; ecstasy, unlike acid, has the potential to leave lasting neurological damage, and we knew it, Kavi and I, and my mom knew it, so I didn’t tell her until after the experience, once I had clearly survived with (as far as I can tell) the majority of my

025 brain cells intact and functional.

I told her all about it as she drove me back to school after fall break, a few months later. At the time, I was in the process of writing a paper for my religion class, on psychedelic drug use as a religious phenomenon. I read her quotations from The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, and from Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, by Sam Harris, a contemporary neuroscientist and philosopher. I lingered on a passage from Waking Up: One thing is certain: The mind is vaster and more fluid than our ordinary, waking consciousness suggests. And it is simply impossible to communicate the profundity (or seeming profundity) of psychedelic states to those who have never experienced them. […] If you are lucky, and you take the right drug, you will know what it is to be enlightened (or to be close enough to persuade you that enlightenment is possible). If you are unlucky, you will know what it is to be clinically insane.

“Mom,” I said, pausing to look out of the window, past field upon field of recently harvested soybeans and corn, all the way to the edge of the world. “It was the most profound thing I’ve ever felt.”

our brains are not built to sustain it. Constant pure bliss is, apparently, not a practical state of mind when it boils down to biological survival.

Nonetheless, it is, in my opinion, worth experiencing at least once or twice in your life.

The four hours after the crystals were absorbed into my bloodstream were the best in my life up to that point.

Our hearts pounded, temperatures rose; palms grew sweaty, and as we put our arms around each other, nothing had ever felt better – a thrill somewhat like the rush of our initial infatuated touches, like the first time we ever held hands, mere 13-year-olds, and yet, beneath the thrill was an undercurrent of ease and comfort, cultivated over years of knowing and holding one another. We lay on a hill and listened to jazz on Bluetooth speakers; the clouds pulsed above us in time to the music, in perfect circles. We got up to dance a couple of times, but just ended up hugging; we walked in circles around and around the hill holding hands.

I do not wish to be disloyal to the countless happy moments I have experienced without the aid of substances; the science simply checks out. There’s no point denying it: never had my brain been so glutted with the chemicals responsible for all of human happiness.

It wasn’t the first time we’d taken either drug – only the first we’d taken them in combination. We first tried ecstasy the summer preceding our final year of high school. We drove out to a small nature preserve half an hour out of town, a place that has been dear to me since I was a very small child, when my mother worked in the visitor’s center, and snuck me orange push-pops out of the freezer behind the front desk.

We parked near the statue of the Sun Singer, a huge naked man with his arms raised, facing the East; we weighed out safe doses. We had it in pure crystal form, rather than small brightly colored tablets stamped with hearts, smiley-faces, and other hippie-dippie signs. The crystals had a slight yellowish tinge that reminded me of the amber-hued rosin violinists rub along the strings of their instruments before playing.

We did our research beforehand: Ecstasy. Chemical name: 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA for short. It is a synthetic chemical, derived from an essential oil of the sassafras tree. Known affectionately as “the psychedelic amphetamine,” it causes the brain, in short, to flood with serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine.

This is not good for your brain. That being said, there are many things that ordinary people do everyday that are not good for their brains, usually because it makes them happy in the short-term. Needless to say, this chemical flood of serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine makes one feel very, very happy. It is virtually impossible to attain this degree of happiness without chemical aid, because

Later that summer, the best four hours were counterbalanced by the worst four. The magic recipe: smooth peanut butter, grape jelly, whole grain bread, and several stalks of Psilocybe cubensis. We had our little picnic at the feet of the Sun Singer, and trekked to the same hill where we’d recently lain, ecstatic, beneath the pulsing clouds.

We spread out a small red blanket, speckled with colorful stars, and sat in the sunshine, waiting.

45 minutes later, Kavi was vomiting, while I lay curled on my side, watching the stars on the blanket mutate and quiver. My fingers looked blue. I’d never felt so alone. He threw up before his body had fully absorbed the shrooms, and his trip was cut off; I was not so fortunate. I ended up vomiting too, but too late to rid my system of the responsible chemical compounds. The July sun blazed hot on my back; the buzzing of insects screamed in my ears. The world rippled in waves. The sky peeled back into a void.

All the trees and plants looked enormous and exotic, like I’d wandered into a prehistoric jungle. I laid my head in Kavi’s lap and cried.

As they say: You do acid. Shrooms do you. My experiences with LSD have all been far more palatable; I’ve done it frequently enough that, at this point, my memories of my first acid trip are blurred, jumbled up with other episodes. I’m still too scared to try shrooms again.

A friend of Kavi’s, another well-seasoned “psychonaut,” once asked: “Why do you think magic mushrooms evolved to do all this crazy shit? What are they trying to tell us?”

026 Kavi’s response: “They’re probably saying, for god’s sake, don’t eat me!”

My first summer back home from college, I guided my friend Brianna through her first acid trip. I gave her a 100-microgram tab; I took 50 myself, so that she wouldn’t feel alone in her experience, but so that I could

be comparatively sober, clear-headed enough to care for her. Unlike ecstasy, LSD is not neurotoxic; it is derived from ergot alkaloids produced by the ergot fungus. The very same fungus may have been responsible for the Salem witch scare – hypothetically, the hallucinations, convulsions, crawling skin, et al. experienced by the so-called “victims of witchcraft” were caused by an ergot-contaminated rye crop. This association didn’t deter Brianna. She was ready to be bewitched.

At first, she said she felt as though the world were splitting in two – but then she never wanted it to end. She asked me if she would be left craving the high. I assured her that, after 12 hours in a fractaled, wobbly world, she would be quite content to return to sobriety and solid ground.

Near the end of our trip, awake all through the night, we walked out into the early grey summer dawn, down the street to a park near my house, smoking peach-flavored cigarillos and attempting, with relatively limited success, to articulate ourselves. We paused by the fountain at the center of the park, leaning on the railing, looking up at the rusted bronze statue – a Native American with his arms raised to the sky, with a deer and a panther at his side. The statue is titled “A Prayer for Rain.”

“I’m not unhappy anymore,” she said to me, still struggling to find words; her pupils remained slightly dilated. “I would no longer call myself a depressed person.

There will still be the bad times, but… I really needed to know that my brain could do something like that, something other than what it was doing.” The fountain came on as we stood there, cued by some unseen force, and splashed pleasantly. “I don’t think the bad times will feel so permanent now.”

She sent me a thank-you letter a week later, featuring a doodle of me as I’d looked to her during the trip (with my hair bleached-blonde, she insisted I looked like Kirsten Dunst). She wrote: I was so very depressed for a long time.

I wanted to die. I didn’t think I’d get past 15 or 16 or 17. I felt very old. I feel young now, but grown. It’s like a death sentence was lifted off my head. I have a whole life ahead of me. I feel like I was liberated. “You give me far more than God has given me; for through you I possess liberty and the privilege of loving and being loved in this world.”

When it came time to add ecstasy to the mix, Kavi loaded his dose into a gel capsule; I, however, being psychologically incapable of swallowing pills of a certain size, dissolved my crystals into a shotglass of water. This hardly helped, as I’m also terrible at taking shots, but I got the

bitter mouthful down a few minutes after Kavi swallowed his pill, thus timed so that the gel capsule would have time to dissolve in his stomach; the crystals I took were naked and ready to be absorbed into my bloodstream within 15-20 minutes.

We’d been having our fun indoors up to this point; but now I pointed to the window, where the branches of the cypress tree were frolicking and waving to us. Let’s go outside, I suggested. We transferred our source of music to my little blue-grey Bluetooth speakers, and ventured into the backyard. We dragged lawn chairs into the sunlight, just past the fringe of the cypress tree; I reclined, looking up at the endless triangles of branches and the blue sky beyond, while Kavi paced around me in circles, too jittery to sit.

Urban Dictionary’s second entry on “candy flipping” defines it as follows: A mindbending combination of LSD and MDMA known to send users into a euphoric state of bliss. Can result in godlike abilities to manipulate one’s own perception and a near heart-rending sense of compassion for others in close proximity. Can even cause one’s sense of self to blur and mingle with others.

For Urban Dictionary, this is a shockingly well-articulated entry.

Already the garden and the cypress and the sunlight were perfect; and then the MDMA kicked in. It melted into the LSD like butter in a spotless silver saucepan. I caught my breath. Every sense dilated in sync. The pulse of the world accelerated, the music (“Anonanimal” by Andrew Bird) swelled, and I lay looking upward in a spiral of pure color and joy. My dose kicked in a few minutes before Kavi’s, and as I sat there murmuring oh my god, he continued to circle. I’ll be with you in a minute! He kept promising. I nodded and said I know. I know. You’ll know.

At last I grew impatient and caught his hand, and pulled him down into the chair beside me; I think in the moment when I touched him, it clicked for him as well.

We couldn’t get near enough to one another, sitting in the lawn-chairs; we lay on our stomachs in the grass.

We did not need to talk, but we talked anyway. We took out the yellow notepad and my trusty fountain pen; Sun Ra’s “Possession” came on the speakers. Jazz for him, my dear saxophonist; pen and paper for me. Kavi wrote, facetiously, in shaky blue print: drugs r gr8. Less facetiously: I understand you. He looked up and smiled at me, cinnamon skin glowing, and took my hand. A current of energy gushed between us. His eyes were pure gold wreaths around black holes of pupils; their gravity stretched me like angel hair.

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As they say, what goes up must come down; I assume this is in accordance with some law of physics. It is a heartbreaking law.

I’ve never been a religious person. My father came from a family of southern Baptists; my mother from a family of Catholics. They raised me as an atheist. I never thought I’d understand religion. I remain baffled by many of its forms and creeds, but I understand a bit better now – understand what it means to believe that there is a truer, fuller dimension to reality than our quotidian capacities suggest. It’s no coincidence that many cultures throughout human history have used psychedelic substances, such as peyote, as part of religious rituals. The word itself betrays all: Psychedelic. From the Greek root words “ ,” soul, and “ ,” to show, reveal, bring to light.

The roots of these words can be traced, in turn, to the Proto-Indo-European roots “bhes,” to breathe, and “dyeu,” to shine.

I do not advocate drugs as a form of escapism; I’m not proposing that we all check out of reality and become starry-eyed flower children. But I don’t think it’s any more feasible to suggest that heaven is a tangible place where our souls reside for all eternity, than to suggest that a transitory heaven can be achieved by ingesting a few chemical compounds.

As they say, what goes up must come down; I assume this is in accordance with some law of physics. It is a

heartbreaking law.

There is no worse feeling than that singular moment when you realize you are slightly less high than you were a moment ago. You crave more, but the rational part of your mind rightly cautions against it. Then comes the moment when you remember exactly how bad this has been for you – the ecstasy has utterly depleted your stores of serotonin, and it will be a few days before it is physically possible for you to feel happy again. You see it in your companion’s eyes too – the same desperation. It devastates you.

You try to enjoy the rest of the night; you curl up on the couch, holding each other very tightly, and watch most of the Fellowship of the Ring. Elijah Wood’s big blue eyes are full of lingering fractals; New Zealand’s mountain ranges twinkle at their tips.

You cannot fall asleep; you lay beside one another in an exhausted, disconsolate stupor. Near sunrise, lying on your side, you hear him crying quietly into the small of your back. At first you let him cry, pretend you haven’t heard; but then you turn and hold him. At last, you slip into a shallow slumber, nestled close to one another to shield your drowsy eyes from the light of the dawn; neurotransmitters aching; noses touching.

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Illustrations: Illustrated by Sophie Devincenti

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Photographs

Gabrielle Nagel taken by Anna Konradi

Written by Emily Alpert

If you were to ask college students whether they own a succulent, many would tell you that they either do, recently killed theirs, or wish they owned one. If asked why, many would say because succulents are so easy to maintain.

Generally, these plants only need to be watered around once a week. Succulents also require direct sunlight, so simply placing them in the windowsill will suffice, especially because many of them will not thrive in humid weather. The only hard part about succulents, as I just learned, is that there are many different types of succulents and they require care in slightly different ways. Despite this, they tend to all need something similar:, little watering and much sunlight1. Yet, people still often manage to kill their succulents within three months of buying them. And then, people will purchase another succulent to raise (kill).

I’ve never owned a succulent, but I know many people who own one, or six, succulents at the moment. I was always curious about the appeal of them. I understand the whole, “you’re keeping something alive and look! it makes you happy” thing, but my room gets little natural sun, I would definitely forget to water it, and then my happy succulent would be dead. So I asked around about succulents.

I asked my friends about their history with succulents. Specifically, I asked them how many succulents they’ve owned, how many they currently own, how long the succulents they’ve owned in the past have lived, and the succulents’ names. One person’s immediate response upon receiving

the message was “never had one but want one.” I almost expected this response from someone, partially because that is how I have felt in the past about succulents. People see their friends own succulents and see the light that the succulents bring into the room. Along with this light, the sense of calm that the succulents bring make people more susceptible to wanting one. Further, according to people that I asked, succulents make their owners feel put together and in charge of something, so owning a succulent brings with it a sense of responsibility.

I got a variety of responses regarding how long people were able to keep their succulents alive. The amount of time before someone killed their succulent ranged anywhere from within a month to five or six months. Reasons for disposing succulents ranged from the succulents dying to throwing out the plants because move-out meant that they couldn’t bring the plants home. Most people owned multiple plants or want to buy more. Regardless, I’ve heard many interesting stories about how succulents survived in dismal conditions. One person told me that they left their succulent unattended at Wash U. over winter break while they went home and the succulent lived. Without water. For three weeks. Someone else told me that their succulent died because it didn’t get enough sun. When asked if the succulent was placed on the windowsill, the answer was no. What succulents survive through is very interesting. Some survive the dismal conditions that students place them in despite the simple instructions that students are given.

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Succer for Succulents

032 Others thrive on these conditions. And yet, there is a third group of succulents that just dies despite getting taken care of correctly. Despite all of this, some succulents thrive into adulthood.

Addressing the last question I asked my friends, I found out that some of the plants were named and some were not. Some names thrown out included Shrek, Billy Bob Joe, Louis (pronounced like St. Louis, not like King Louis), and Albert. One person even claimed that because their unnamed succulents are still alive three months after purchasing them but their named succulents died within the month that naming succulents kills them. Others disagreed because it meant that the relationship with the succulent was less personal.

Some people purchase succulents because of the aesthetics associated with having a plant in your room. From my experience, I’ve found that people enjoy having plotted plants in their rooms because it adds a sense of color or a cute decoration to pull your room together. People will often place their succulents in specific locations around their rooms not to take care of the succulents, but to make rooms look a certain way. These succulents will pull a room together and make it easy to decorate. Other individuals purchase succulents for the want to take care of another living organism and how easy it is to care for succulents. From what I have seen, when a person owns one succulent, they tend to want to buy more. Why? Is it out of an innate human desire to care for another being? Is it because we feel like we need to care for another organism but feel like we don’t have enough time to do so? Do we have this desire to watch what we care for grow? Is it an evolutionary desire stemming from our dependence on plants for oxygen? Are we trained to want to raise succulents? Or is it simply because we wish to care for another organism and succulents are the easiest to take care of? And if they die, we just buy new ones? Plus, they look pretty.

I personally believe that it is some combination of these reasons. I believe that people purchase succulents because they are cute little plants that require little maintenance to keep alive. Succulents are easy to take care of, so it’s easy to purchase more than one succulent and to keep both of them alive. People then feel joy at their ability to keep these

plants alive and in cute, painted pots. These plants are also relatively inexpensive, so if one of the plants dies, purchasing a new one is not a huge financial burden. Succulents tend to typically be sold for two to five dollars2, especially when they are sold en masse. Further, student organizations sell succulents a lot, and because these organizations buy the plants en masse, they are able to individually sell the plants for a tad cheaper than if a single plant was bought in store. In this way, peoples’ succulent shopping habits are reinforced by the multiple and cheap options to purchase these plants.

But why do we want to cultivate these plants so badly? Is there something within us as humans that encourages us to take care of others? Are succulents really a way to answer this desire? Could this explain why so many people want succulents so badly and continue to buy succulents even after killing them? Or could it be that as college students we want to feel responsible for something that we can take care of? We want to be able to have control over some aspects of our lives and owning and taking care of succulents is a good way to satisfy that want. All I know is that people just cannot seem to get enough of their succulents.

Maybe I should get my own succulent and see what the craze is about.

1. Gingras, Bill. “Cactus and Succulent Care for Beginners.”

Cactus and Succulent Society of San Jose, Cactus and Succulent Society of San Jose, 14 Oct. 2018, www.csssj.org/welcome_visitors/basic_culture.html.

2. “Search Results for Succulents at The Home Depot.” The Home Depot, The Home Depot Product Authority, 2018, www.homedepot.com/s/succulents?NCNI-5.

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But why do we want to cultivate these plants so badly? Is there something within us as humans that encourages us to take care of others?

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Tulip Mania:

The Social Currency of Tulips from Holland to St. Louis

Written by Anna Konradi

035 “Ten-million-dollar baby,” croons the Tulip to the Bulb —And it’s true, the perennial is worth, annually, no less than A single lung, transplanted, a three-tier cake, Four adopted highways, a pair of palm cockatoos, A prize stag beetle, and ten full rides to Wash U— The Bulb is, by all accounts, a glorified storage unit, All brawn and no beauty, the Bulb is the belly of the beast Plant her right—or wrong, for that matter—and watch her Stretch for the sun like she’s getting paid—and maybe She is, but once she sees the sun she falls hard But the sun has many blooms to love, and in The end the Tulip grows weak in her light “Goodbye for now,” says the Tulip to the Bulb The Tulip shrinks, and as she settles into the earth She whispers a story to the Bulb “We were not always treasured so,” says the Tulip to the Bulb “There was a good and kind doctor in faraway Holland Who searched for a currency richer than myrrh He found his answer in the garden—where all answers To men’s woes are found—and scooped her up She was a Tulip, bright and waxy and gold in the light The doctor admired the Tulip as she cupped the sun’s rays He painted a picture of flame and flower—and thus was born Tulip Mania—Bulb and bloom were markers of the Golden Age Such was the craze that the doctor’s garden was raided His Tulips carried away to cradle someone else’s sun As people bought up Bulbs, they became so costly— As costly as precious metal—Tulips as currency And now, centuries past and seas away, we are a Different sort of currency—they pass us from hand to hand And into the earth so that we might shout—loud enough For all to hear—that this is the garden of Eden, that All answers sought are found in our soil, that The wealth of the nation is planted with the Bulbs”

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Our Mission: ISSUES Magazine seeks to raise awareness of the intrinsic link that exists between art, design, and social issues. The spaces we inhabit each day mold our experiences, both by fostering interaction and by building barrier. Using the city of St. Louis as our primary lens, ISSUES Magazine will draw connections between both tangible and intangible aspects of the social environment. With both a print and an online version of the publication, ISSUES Magazine will reach out to a diverse readership, including students of Washington University and residents of the St. Louis region. By utilizing a wide spectrum of media, ISSUES hopes to inspire action as well as awareness about the intersection of design and social justice.

Contributors: Contributors: Emily Alpert Laney Ching Kimberly Clark Sophie Devincenti Anna Konradi Elissa Mullins Gabrielle Nagel Swetha Nakshatri Emily Stegmeier Genna Torgan Olivia Rau

Stay in touch with us: contact us issues.mag.washu@gmail.com read our articles online issuu.com/issuesmagazinewashu @issues.mag.washu