Kitsch Magazine: Spring 2018

kitsch

pop culture, politics, college, etc.

Pornographic Math and Magic If || Cannibalism in the Kitschen || Goodnight Moon: College Edition || 12 and a Die-Hard PETA Supporter || My Life with Body Horror || More than an Age Gap

M Andrew Peiser

the vol

Anna Lee

Social media editor

Watch & listen editor

Nadya Mikhaylovskaya

Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson Co-editor-in-chief

Elise Cording

Stephanie Carmody

Design editor

Zooming in editor

Assistant zooming in editor

Madeleine Galvin

Annika Bjerke

Sarah Chekfa

Assistant design

Art editor

Bite size editor

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Jessie Brofsky Co-editor-in-chief

Abigail Mengesha Zooming out editor

Sesha Kammula Social media editor

E

team 2018

WRITERS

spring

ARTISTS

art by Alex Basler

Alex Basler Olivia Bono Annika Bjerke Chrissy Chen Amanda Cronin Manon Elise Gros Kathie Jiang Leo Levy Jeff Sondike Ali Sugarman Magic Sun

Jessie Brofsky Stephanie Carmody Elise Cording Nathan Chazan Sarah Chefka Malvika Dahiya Annie Fu Anna Godek Virginia Gresham Abby Eskinder Hailu Allegra Hanlon Kathie Jiang Jack Jones Molly Karr Jeffrey Kim Sesha Kammula Lukas Keel Luby Kiriakidi Anna Lee Erin Lynch Elia Morelos Andrew Peiser Arianne Seenauth Kristen Walsh

advisor funded by

michael koch student activities funding commission

letter from the editors

Fried, boiled, raw, braised, rotten, or juicy, meat is many things to many people. Meat can be appealing–in his Mythologies Barthes calls meat “part of the same sanguine mythology as wine,” but perhaps the steak which he describes no longer holds the same bloody sway over a cultural imagination which worries about the connections between red meat and cancer, between animal suffering and chicken nuggets, and between meat production and the health of the whole planet. While perhaps the cultural myths of meat have moved beyond Barthes’s sanguine steak, meat, as Maggie Nelson writes in her book The Art of Cruelty, still contains “the spectre of our eventual ‘becoming object’–of our (live) flesh one day turning into (dead) meat.”

In this issue of Kitsch, writers have explored meat–and the myths which it both inspires and is packaged by–on the table, on the body, and throughout and across cultures. Annie Fu explores the strangely gendered marketing of thanksgiving turkeys, which are perniciously figured as female even to the present day; in “Cannibalism in the Kitschen,” Abby Eskinder Hailu considers a number of cases of cannibalism, and the suite of emotional, symbolic, and legal valances which different cases of cannibalism have invoked across history. In “The Morals of Meat,” Erin Lynch looks at how meat has snuck into the center of our diet, and how the global climate has undoubtedly suffered as a consequence. But as Luby Kiriakidi argues in “Mainstream Eating Habits as Self-Imposed Theocracies,” often what we’re all eating is zealously dictated by others. And as she demonstrates, it really doesn’t have to be.

Kitsch is not just meat–for example, in “Meet and Greet,” Stephanie Carmody brings us to meditate on the strangers that become the familiar edges of our lives. Elia Morelos, in “¿Pues ya qué?: rooting myself in Ithaca,” takes a candid look at her own journey to Cornell, struggling with an impossible question: “How do you explain to someone how it feels like to not belong in a place that accepted you and to not belong in the place you come from?” And for better or worse, we’ve included some of our Instagram content (follow @kitschmag).

Of course there is much more to both Kitsch and meat, and much more in the coming pages than we can describe here. But before turning the page–or if you’d prefer a meat pun, before cutting in–we must thank everyone who worked to make this issue possible: to our writers, editors, and artists; to Joe Shelton at the QMC Group; to the money at the SAFC– thank you, thank you, thank you. And to our readers: thank you, and bon appetit.

jessie and nathaniel

in this issue...

On the plaza Insta Poetry an ode to she-flesh 2018 S.C.U.M. Manifesto Pornographic Math and Magic If Welcome to the Valley Goodnight Moon: College Edition Food for Thought: fish are food, not friends

6 8 9 10 11 12 13 21

Black Panther: more of Marvel’s meat and potatoes?

My Life with Body Horror More Than an Age Gap: statutory rape in popular media Beef Rap: how beef between rap artists undermines their activism Not so Black and White: chess and gender politics

22 24 26 28 29

¿Pues ya qué?: rooting myself in Ithaca Slay that Interview: all you need to be is the juiciest tenderloin Meet and Greet: who are all these people on campus?

Fresh Meat Real Friends Mainstream Eating Habits as Self-Imposed Theocracies: thoughts from an unorthodox sinner 1911 prints from “Whaling Fishing/ The Blacksod Bay Whaling Co. Ltd

30 32 34 36 38

The Morals of Meat: reconciling cultural symbolism with environmental awareness 12 and a Die-Hard PETA Supporter: my first misguided foray into PETA’s online activism and vegetarianism Cannibalism in the Kitschen Feminist Body Hair is a Privilege Only White Women Can Afford Gender Politics of a Thanksgiving Turkey Tonya Harding: a shining American star Some Meat on Your Bones: the delicate and dangerous dance of linking body weight with personality

40 43

44 46 49 52 54 56 58

“No circumstances.”

-Asher, ‘21

{on the plaza}

“I don’t

‘20 .” -Matt,

ould think I c

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, no d o fo re a o s n ’s ow e c r e a i n th In Ind e h “ W rces. na, ‘21 u a reso d.” -Ari e sacr

“If Jessie asked me and said please.” -Sarene, ‘18

“If I was starving” -Erin, ‘18

ne.”

-Tuy e

n, ‘2

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red a c I e n o e d som e l l i k y e h t “If ‘20 , e n i r a M .” about 6 • bite size

e, ‘20

“If I was really hungry.” -Franklin, ‘19

“If there is severe harm being threatened” -Erika, ‘18

“No

igh.” -Jo

“If I w a death s starvin g to ” -Jinm o, ‘21

If it benefits someone in some way. Are we talking about chewing or eating the entire thing? Anything valued at $50 or more.” -Aariz, ‘21 “Pro b star ably ne vati on.” ver. Ma -Ken y ned be extr eme y, ‘2 1

ve a h on’t

“I d

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“If I got into medical school and/or it ate my homework.”

-Sean, ‘18

“My pet? If I was about t o starve. . .if me or the d it were og? Yeah, pr o v ided I had s way to kill i ome t.” -Will, ‘21

“None.”

-Pranav , ‘21

lly a e r a hat’s T ? ny t a e m p y o s eat m wrong on I d l u o ’s “ Why w estion. That qu weird anonymous ”levels.

“If I were starving, probably nothing else. If the economy collapsed I’d probably eat them before my brothers. They’d be nasty.” -Grayson, ‘21 bite size • 7

instapoetry by “kitsch”

follow @kitschmag for more

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an ode to she-flesh partially-found, intentionally bad poem

by Sarah Chekfa

you found her at the butcher’s shop. brazenly raw, impudently you feel the dumb heat in your eyes. your head throbs at the audacity of her. she knows what you’re trying to do. you red, so stubbornly sinewy. think to yourself: this fucking bitch is making this difficult on at first, you salivated at the thought of carving her up, purpose. she knows her end is near. she’s trying to protract breaking her down to her irreducible parts. but she was the inevitable. so condescendingly, nauseatingly free that she began to you smirk to yourself, nervously. fine. scratch the raw plan— offend you. you didn’t want to be sick. the cooking route it would be. you you considered her brazen deadness impudence. didn’t she wouldn’t let her win. you wouldn’t relent. you’re too hungry care that you had all the power? you were the consumer— to give up now. your ego needed to be satiated, and only she would suffice. all she could ever be was the consumed. she would be tough to break down. how to break her down? so you tear into her. gashing, slashing, lacerating. curing, grilling, baking, searing, scorching? no, she’d take too long to steeping, marinating. cutting her up, dulling her down. cook. you’d try her raw. into the pressure cooker, 450 degrees fahrenheit. you’d burn the obstinacy out of her. she would be yours the way you you google: how do i eat raw meat? wanted her: beaten down, muted, subdued, defenseless flesh.

“While meat-loving foodies may swoon for steak tartare or yukhoe, eating raw beef dishes like these or even rare cooked seconds lapse. you glance at the clock, impatient. minutes go by. an hour and a half passes. she must be ready now. beef can potentially make you very sick.” it was time. she was finally yours. you plate her, conscientiously, with the cold, exacting deliberateness of a serial killer.

“Thoughtful presentation leads to a more enjoyable meal.”

“It is about recapturing the visceral primeval thrill of devouring flesh fresh from a kill.” but once you bit into her, you realized you had gone too far. her rawness was gone, yes, but in its place stood an empty, tin-like aftertaste. you had burned the tender insolence out of her, but at what price? she was ruined now. consuming her did not satisfy you. in her own way, she had won. even in her post-dead state she had stolen the pleasure right from your coercive, gluttonous grasp. surely, there had to be some way to reverse your mistake. how could you fix this? you couldn’t let her win. you google: “How to Save Overcooked Meat So Your Dinner Isn’t Ruined?”

“Unfortunately, once you overcook a piece of meat in the pressure cooker, there’s no going back.”

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by Ali Sugarman, Jessica Brofsky, & Virgina Gresham

Pornographic Math and Magic If

by Molly Karr art by Chrissy Chen

I do not understand why people watch porn. It is different than acting, the superior art. Porn is actual. It is concrete—it is, like, really happening. There are insides and outsides and absolute touches on skin and little flakes of saliva. There is payment and dye jobs and oopsie daddy issues and steroids under tanned skin and contractual safe words.

In acting, you know, the kind performed on waxed wooden floors in black box theatres in exchange for seven years of MFA’s and overdrawn credit, there is this thing called the magic if. So whatever emotion you have when on stage, whatever you need to be, there’s an emotional key to access it. You don’t need to exhaust memories and eat them till they dry up in the corners so that you can make tears on command for Ophelia. That’s stupid. That’s what people think acting is.

The if takes you anywhere—I’m not a queen, but what if I was suckled at the breast of one and grew up in rubies?

I’m not a male cat that’s died and come back to haunt his

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owner and then falls in love with his owner’s ex girlfriend, but what if I had four paws? How would it feel to walk on them? (That’s a ten-minute college troupe production, no doubt). I’m not these things. I am an actor with an additional if in the equation—and some debt, I suppose.

But porn. Ew! It’s just filthy subtraction. Right? It is the minus of the ifs and multiplied by stress and sweat.

Figuring out how many seconds of time we can get focused on you in your contract, how much you can physically take before industry calls cut. It’s the fourteen year olds finding sliding softs and lubricants and things that are impossible behind red velvets and sugar lips. Mothers who want their husbands to lose their bellies watch worlds through glazed glass of police officers and find that their hearts still beat to the rhythm of fingers on skin. And that one couple that likes to watch it together and eat dark chocolate and red wine. Sharing a secret that pushed most away.

Do they go on auditions too? Good thing we are just actors with ifs.w

Welcome to the Valley

by Sesha Kammula art by Annika Bjerke

The popular bitmoji app started as a cartoon. The pictures were cartoon representations of the individual makers and could be edited to have silly characteristics.

However, the more recent updates have started to feel less like cartoons. The app is a fun way to express oneself without sending photos, but over time the pictures have gotten more realistic. It’s creeping, slowly but surely, up the curve toward the uncanny valley.

The uncanny valley is an aspect of the hypothesized correlation between an object’s appearance and human affinity for that object. As objects grow to resemble humans more and more, human emotional response to those objects is generally more positive. However, at a certain point, the positive emotion changes to one of uncanny (a feeling of strange and unsettling familiarity.) It’s been used to describe dolls that blink, certain prosthetics, Ted Cruz,

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and many other things teetering on the edge of realistic.

Theories proposed to explain this phenomenon include an evolutionary aversion to pathogens, an ingrained fear of dead bodies, and a learned mental definition of “human.”

What all these theories have in common is a violation of an expectation. They involve a promise of familiarity. So why do we keep getting stuck here?

Objects made in human likeness are as old as art itself.

The human form inspires people to this day, and rightly so. However, the detail and precision with which faces are replicated now far surpasses classic art. Commitment to realism has leapt forward, and the goal of perfectly replicating the human form is looming. But the valley is steep. It seems as though the question is “when” rather than “if” we will come out on the other side, but one has to wonder how long we will stay at the bottom. w

by Luby Kiriakidi

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Food for Thought fish are food, not friends

by Sesha Kammula art by Annika Bjerke

When I was younger, the only movie my family owned on DVD was Finding Nemo. I’ve probably accumulated days of time where I was glued to the screen, internalizing three key messages: 1. Just keep swimming 2. P Sherman 42 Wallaby Way Sydney 3. Fish are friends, not food As I grew, some messages sat better than others.

Just keep swimming is an idea I hear repeated in every environment, from school, to work, to relationships, to movies. It’s a constant reminder to persevere with a cute tagline. Typing this, I can hear Ellen’s voice in my head. I can also hear her repeating an address that I learned before I learned my home address. The difference now is that I know it’s most likely not a real dentist’s office, and I have yet to meet a dentist who collects their office fish themselves.

However, the last iconic message has not aged well.

Bruce, the ringleader of what I imagine is a group of friends bound only by circumstance and geography, brings Marlin and Dory to a club meeting where they learn that the sharks are trying to change their image. They recite a pledge that culminates with the classic “fish are friends, not food.”

Let that sit.

can have a better relationship with other aquatic life.

As a story told from Bruce’s perspective, Finding Nemo becomes a sinister reminder that to conform is to be complicit in one’s own subjugation. Why does Bruce feel the need to change his image? Because no one accepts that his way of life is not inherently evil. Marlin is not terrified of Bruce, but rather is terrified of Bruce’s lifestyle. The sharks starve themselves to be able to mingle with the supposed polite society. Unless they abstain from feeding on fish, they are shunned, pushed to the edges of society.

When Marlin and Dory fight over the diver mask they find, Dory is smacked in the face, and a trail of blood leaves her nose. As soon as Bruce smells the blood, his eyes turn black, and he snaps. He has repressed his instincts such that, when they do come through, he is an extremist. He is no longer able to determine whether the fish are friends or food.

At the end of the movie, we see Bruce in the reef for the first time. He has presumably regained Marlin and Dory’s trust after The Incident, and is following the program. This physical ostracizing from the suburbs of the ocean is telling.

It is a constant reminder that the sharks do not belong when they are themselves. They do not belong unless they pretend to be something they are not. The open ocean is considered a cold and unforgiving place by most, but perhaps the most unforgiving place is the reef itself. w

These three sharks are changing their behavior because they want to change their public image. They are rebelling against millions of years of evolution because they feel like they don’t fit in. They deny their most basic instincts so they

zooming out • 21

Black Panther more of Marvel’s meat and potatoes?

by Lukas Keel and Jeffrey Kim art by Olivia Bono

Since the release of Iron Man in 2008, Marvel Comics has dominated the blockbuster movie market. To date, Marvel’s cinematic universe has earned a little over $14.6 billion in global box office revenue, and across their 18 titles they average a Rotten Tomato score of 83.4%.

With projects like Avengers: Infinity War still in production, there is little reason to expect Marvel movies’ incredible popularity will lessen. However, the franchise’s commercial success hasn’t always translated into critical reception. The recent installments have been particularly poorly received.

Many call the franchise stagnant and repetitive, or, as Noah Berlatsky of The Guardian puts it, “the fast food of big-budget action: predictable, convenient, bland.”

Marvel’s most recent installment, Black Panther, has done something to break this pattern. Compared to its predecessors, it has received critical acclaim. It has franchise high scores on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic; Rolling Stone gave it 4 stars, and the Verge called it “the grown up Marvel movie we’ve been waiting for.” This raises a question–is

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Black Panther something greater than the blueprint, or just more of Marvel’s meat and potatoes?

In order to compare Black Panther to its predecessors, we should first establish the Marvel blueprint. Across the franchise three elements have been highly consistent– the narrative arc of the films, their tone, and the way they characterize their antagonists.

Much of Marvel’s standard narrative arc is just the typical blockbuster version of the hero’s journey. However, a few specific tendencies separate Marvel’s movies. They often open with a significant flashback followed by an apparently unrelated action sequence which introduces the film’s central conflict. For example, Captain America: Civil War opens with a memory scene about Tony Stark’s parents, followed by the action scene that sets up the Sokovia Accords. Marvel heroes are often supported by an important ally, who enters the movie as something of a sidekick, but displays growth in the film’s climactic moment by saving the hero. This is Peter’s friend Ned in Spiderman: Homecoming, Pepper in Iron Man III,

and Baby Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy II.

One of the great strengths of Marvel’s movies has been their tone. Humor is the biggest draw of Ant Man and Spider Man: Homecoming, splashy color palettes help build the world of Thor: Ragnarok, and Guardians of the Galaxy’s 70’s soundtrack develops a heartfelt quirkiness that does a lot to endear the movie to audiences. Across the franchise, comedic dialogue fills the gaps between action sequences, and a selfdeprecating tilt to the humor protects the movies from D.C.’s downfall–taking themselves too seriously. Consistently, they are upbeat, fun, and idealistic, tying them tonally to their comic book source material.

Marvel villains, on the other hand, tend to be one dimensional, motivated purely by the need for power or destruction. These villains’ ideologies–to the limited degree that they are even explored–are objectively evil, and in direct opposition with those of the hero. Hydra wants to destroy the United States, Lokki wants to take over the world, Dormammu wants to end time itself. The films spend little energy contextualizing the villains’ motivations or developing

“Black

Panther may set a new aesthetic high point for Marvel, with sleek CGI, gorgeous costuming, and a badass score produced by Kendrick Lamar, but it still fits a lot of the superhero blueprint.” their relatability. We have no idea what shaped Stane’s drive for power, or who Red Skull was before Hydra. The films conclude by rejecting their beliefs as morally indefensible.

The villains show no growth, and if the hero learns something, it’s from an ally. Tony Stark grows profoundly in Iron Man III because Pepper pushes him to change, not because he learns anything from his conflict with Killian. Because the movies have generally invested so little in them, Marvel’s villains, excluding Lokki, have been painfully uninteresting.

Consequently, the movies present little in the way of moral dilemmas for the hero and audience to grapple with.

Not all of Marvel’s films conform to every element of this blueprint. Thor: The Dark World, with an intense grayscale color scheme and painful lack of comedic relief, is tonally distinct from the rest of the series. But, the pattern is well enough established that Marvel has earned the repetitiveness critique. It is worth asking, however, whether

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this repetitiveness has really hurt the films. It may be that there is value in familiar, predictable storytelling. In fact, according to the social psychologist Robert Zajonc’s well documented mere-exposure effect, we prefer familiarity in almost every aspect of our lives. This makes sense, since we find the unknown frightening and predictability comforting.

Perhaps the same is true of our movie tastes. Besides which, a light hearted tone and a righteous superhuman on a hero’s journey makes for very entertaining escapism. Perhaps that’s all Marvel movies are trying to be.

Black Panther’s arc and tone are pretty typical of Marvel.

The movie opens with a flashback about T’Challa’s father, then an action sequence which raises one of the movie’s central questions–whether Wakanda should do more for the wider world. Shuri, Nakia, Okoye, and Ross all display growth in helping to turn the climactic fight, and the narrative fits the hero’s journey. The tone is a lot of Marvel’s typical humor, much of it provided by Shuri’s sisterly digs at T’Challa, electric colors, and the usual glitzy action sequences. Black Panther may set a new aesthetic high point for Marvel, with sleek CGI, gorgeous costuming, and a badass score produced by Kendrick Lamar, but it still fits a lot of the superhero blueprint.

Erik Killmonger, however, is far from Marvel’s typical villain. With a screen-stealing performance by Michael B. Jordan, a righteous cause, and an “I am Killmonger” shoutout from Kendrick Lamar on the song “Paramedic!,” Killmonger might be the biggest badass in the movie. And, unlike any of the Marvel villains before him, he’s ideological. His actions are motivated by the belief that Wakanda is privileged by its natural resources and that it therefore owes a responsibility to use this privilege for the betterment of oppressed black people around the world. This ideology is strengthened by the time the film spends on Killmonger. Through flashbacks the audience explores his background, helping us understand his motivations and relate to his cause. So, while Killmonger does some objectively evil things in the movie, like needlessly killing Zuri and destroying the heart-shaped herb, the audience understands why he does them–he’s grieving for his father.

This context is so significant, and Killmonger’s ideology so strong that people are writing “Is Killmonger right?” articles online. In the conclusion of the movie, T’Challa himself accepts it in part, deciding to spread Wakanda’s influence to the wider world. A hero being so influenced, even convinced by a villain, is unique for Marvel, and it is significant when considering the purpose of the film. The ideological conflict between Killmonger and T’Challa presents a dilemma to the audience, a dilemma with real-world implications, and because the film concludes with T’Challa accepting a different answer to that dilemma, at least in part, it compels the audience to consider doing the same. Perhaps this means Black Panther achieves more than escapism and more than the familiar, repetitive Marvel blueprint. w

My Life with Body Horror

by Nathan Chazan art by Leo Levy

I’ve long been taken with body horror as a subgenre of cult filmmaking. I grew up in Toronto, the home of David Cronenberg and brutalist architecture, so a lot of movies and works that might have been obscure and obtuse elsewhere were readily accessible for me. I had the fortune of having at my disposal not only blogs and forums but video stores, libraries and movie theaters. There is a level of engagement that one gets from a good chat with a friend about the chest cavity scene in Videodrome that gives one a different sort of connection than even the more high-end fanzine. I don’t find it especially conceited for me to say that my attachment to and intellectual curiosity toward certain horror films is more genuine than the practised zeal I’ve heard some professional enthusiasts of the genre espouse.

“There

is a magic to seeing an anxiety we have on screen, that frightens us on one level, but in fact is fundamentally soothing.”

In Cronenberg’s films, for instance, the buildings fascinated me. Scanners is an engaging film on its own, the kind of movie you go to see to watch a guy’s head explode.

However, for a resident of the brutalist capital of the world, the film is a scenic tour-de-force. The aforementioned iconic head explosion takes place in a dark seminar room with concrete walls that must be a room in a University of Toronto building–a stairwell they go into afterwards is the spitting image one which leads to U of T’s Varsity swimming pools, a space I remember vividly as a child. The outrageous corporate intrigue and psychic warfare careen through shitty malls, subway stations, and concrete behemoths, spaces so

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beautiful, so cavernous, so unsuited to human interaction that they could be called socially inept. Could I be walking through the hallowed halls of the scanner war? Is my head going to blow up next?

I had a realization recently while watching the newest Godzilla movie that my interest in body horror may in fact be an expression of a part of my psychology I have often neglected. The film’s version of Godzilla hunches his arms to the side of his body, a motif inspired by the original Godzilla suit actor’s attempt to make his arms tinier and more dinosaur-like. This painfully hunched body got me thinking about my own slouch, which curves my body down much like the giant Japanese lizard and has contributed to my attimes-excruciating back pain. I have sometime felt ashamed to acknowledge my slouch in the past, but its causes are much deeper than poor posture. For much of my childhood, I was a short, skinny boy, but not long before puberty hit I

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found myself shooting past five feet in height and packing on pounds. I was thick, I was big, and I was loud. I never quite adjusted to this change in scale. I was often harassed both verbally and physically for having breasts. I became, I believe, dysphoric, disconnected from and ashamed of my massive body. I wanted to be small again, I wanted to pull out this little pure boy-self from the swamp of a man he was drowning in.

A vivid image of Lamberto Bava’s gloriously italo oozefest Demons comes to mind. The movie takes place inside a movie theater, and in a pivotal scene, one of the first victims bursts out from behind the silver screen, shrieking with MTV virtuosity. The frightened filmgoers look on as the unlucky woman undergoes a painful transition to demonhood. Her back arches up, her hands and feet stretch out into claws, fangs pushing out her mouth knock out her teeth, emitting green goop as deepening moans turn to snarls. This is supposed to be scary, but the impression I am provided with is a little different. The ghastly practical effects of the transformation are so dramatic, yet so meticulous. The camera documents every shift, every pop, every growth in the demon woman’s body. One is left in awe of what has been created, amazed by the bodily ruptures simulated by the film crew. In other words, the horror scene becomes a fetish: a visceral, obsessive celebration of the human body’s involuntary distortion.

This is where I think body horror may have become a liberating mode for myself. As I struggled with this problem of too much body, I watched with glee the transformations of other bodies–mutations, growths, cleavings, joinings. All the fantasy, the goopy, stretchy stuff, could be scary, but it was mostly just wonderful to me. Because what you tend to see in a great body horror movie is not necessarily a body being destroyed but a body being expressed. Visual effect contortions meant to elicit fear or abjection instead become reassuring. Not only could a disgusting body–whether my own or, say, the salaryman’s in Tetsuo: The Iron Man–be beautiful, the abjection could be poetic, could reveal something true about someone, something good about their soul. It was through horror that I came to feel more at home in my skin.

Recently, I watched the new season of Twin Peaks with a friend of mine. The show features a super-amnesiac character, Dougie Jones, who has not only lost his memory but much of his personal agency and command of language. He learns words, concepts, and gestures by repeating and imitating things that other people–somehow oblivious to his condition–say and do in front of him. My friend has depression and a close relative in her family had recently had a debilitating stroke, so I had wondered if this character might be painfully similar to her experiences. Dougie is a man who wakes up one day to find that his mind has stopped working–how would this play to someone who regularly finds her mind and body stuck in one place? It was in fact intense for her to watch at times, but rather than being painful for her, watching the show was deeply satisfying. For her, Dougie Jones became a reflection of her struggles, a distortion to be sure but one that communicated something back that was meaningful to her, and that meaning became reassuring. Perhaps the violence of body horror satisfies a similar feeling for myself. There is a magic to seeing an anxiety we have on screen, that frightens us on one level, but in fact is fundamentally soothing.w

More than An Age Gap statutory rape in popular media

by Anna Godek

The fall of Woody Allen may finally be upon us. As the #MeToo movement progresses and the reckoning for abusive men in Hollywood (and hopefully abusive people everywhere) continues, there has been a re-evaluation of Allen’s famous 1979 film, Manhattan. It’s about time: the movie features a “romance” between a middle aged man (Allen) and a 17-year-old girl (Mariel Hemingway). Hopefully Hollywood’s newfound critical lens will spur more conversation about media that romanticizes statutory rape and ultimately reduce the prevalence of this harmful narrative trend.

Perhaps it bears repeating that statutory rape is a serious crime. It is just as abusive as any form of rape, and the adjective applied to it doesn’t make it a lesser form of abuse. When a rape is classified as “statutory,” the harm is not based on the absence of consent, but rather on the younger person’s inability to truly consent in the first place.

Some situations are inherently abusive and non-consensual such as instances when someone is drunk or incapacitated in some way or when one individual involved is a child and the other is an adult. This has to be said because it can be easy to forget when we are watching a glamorous and romantic movie, even if we would still (hopefully) be bothered by the situation in real life.

Despite the abuse it portrays, Manhattan is uncritical of the relationship between Allen and Hemingway’s characters.

No one at any point worries or suggests that maybe an adult man shouldn’t date a teenager. There is no guilt or questioning of the issue, but, considering that Woody Allen actually “dated” teenagers in real life, this total erasure of the situation’s abusive nature isn’t surprising. Despite the film’s flagrant glorification of statutory rape, many people still insist that it should be judged on some other artistic merits that make the portrayal of rape excusable; judge it on “aesthetics,” they say. And yes, while filmmaking techniques and aesthetic are part of what determines a movie’s quality, moral issues still matter. Just because Manhattan has some artsy shots of New York City, it doesn’t excuse its romanticization of predatory behavior. The content of a movie isn’t separate from its aesthetics; on the contrary: the two are inextricably linked.

Manhattan is far from the only movie that has a blind spot when it comes to statutory rape. The recent critical darling Call Me By Your Name focuses on a “romance” between a 24-year-old and a 17-year-old. Surely in the age of #MeToo, when we’re actually paying attention to sexual abuse in all its forms, a movie like this wouldn’t go uncriticized? It has, though, for the most part. Many reviews raise no issue with

“It can be easy to forget when we are watching a glamorous and romantic movie, even if we would still (hopefully) be bothered by the situation in real life.”

the adult-child dynamic, calling it “erotic” and “sensual” and a “sumptuous love story.” A much needed counterpoint comes from Cheyenne Montgomery of the Boston Globe; “it falsely romanticizes an exploitative relationship between a grown man and a teenager,” she says, speaking as a survivor of statutory rape.

Why has this been overlooked in public discourse of the film? One reason might be that the general paucity of LGBT films makes viewers eager for any representation even if it is flawed. But a need for representation shouldn’t lead us to lower our standards such that we equate rape with romance.

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A similar effect was present in the widespread praise for Blue is the Warmest Color (2013); critics saw no fault in a film which features a “romance” between a 15-year-old girl and a woman in her twenties. Like many movies that frame statutory rape as romance, Call Me By Your Name coats its abuse in a glamorous veneer. Everything is beautiful in this film—Armie Hammer is beautiful, Timothée Chalamet is beautiful, the recreation of 1980s Italy is beautiful. How could there be rape

shows like Gossip Girl and Dawson’s Creek. Both shows fail, as Call Me By Your Name fails, to show that teenagers cannot enter into consenting relationships or sexual encounters with adults, especially teachers, who should be looking out for the best interests of their students. Yes, high schoolers often fantasize about their teachers or other adults, but the visual actualization of such relationships is dangerous, especially

hiding behind this stunning cinematography? But no amount of superficial beauty can rectify the film’s legitimization of an abusive relationship.

Critics have defended Call Me By Your Name on the basis that the age of consent in Italy at the time the film takes place means that the relationship it depicts isn’t illegal.

However, legality and morality are not the same thing, and just because the law fails to protect children, it doesn’t mean that there is nothing wrong with an adult having a sexual relationship with a teenager. Legal loopholes don’t change moral reality.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of other examples of statutory rape portrayed as romance in media. Pretty Little Liars features a student-teacher relationship and fully glamorizes what should be seen as exploitation and abuse— the two even got married at the end of the show! The studentteacher pairing is troublingly common in popular teen TV

when the target audience is teenagers themselves.

I know what you’re thinking: Hey, can’t we separate movies and TV from reality? Does media really affect us that much? I’ll admit that, yes, the question of how much media reflects or affects society doesn’t have a clear answer, but it isn’t made in a vacuum. Movies don’t come out of a void; the people who make them are members of society and their ideas had to come from somewhere. Is it really so much of a stretch then to say that it’s concerning how many films and TV shows seek to make romance out of statutory rape?

Additionally, media has an influence on our lives whether we want to admit it or not. It can reflect and shape our values as a society, and if we keep letting movies where sexual relationships between adults and children are romanticized slide by without criticism, we may find ourselves normalizing and even accepting real life abuse. w

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Beef Rap how beef between rap artists undermines their activism

by Kristen Walsh

Tupac vs. Biggie. Meek Mill vs. Drake. Jay-Z vs. Nas. “Beef” has been a prevalent trend in rap history. The notion of “beef” has been a big commercial pull in hip hop; consumers feed on drama. The media loves to cover petty feuds in the industry, but their tendency to highlight fights between rappers obscures discussion of greater issues. In other words, beef is bullshit.

Celebrities’ personal lives are constantly making headlines. Because of that, popular media can sometimes overshadow more salient, controversial issues with gossip.

The sociopolitical identities portrayed in hip hop are inconcealable, and from its humble beginnings, hip hop in more recent times has become a voice for social change.

As much as we tend to feed on the drama of celebrity lives, drama and feuding among celebrities are trivial matters.

The most famous hip hop beef in history has been about lovers, cities, and talent. Ultimately, these things don’t really speak much to larger issues that many hip hop artists discuss in their music like poverty, discrimination, and crime. Black voices and identity are inseparable from hip hop and rap music. While not every artist focuses on this aspect of identity, the ones that do deserve hype for their message, not their status. The rap industry is largely centered on popularity and media power, and giving so much coverage to shit talk and dirty looks takes away from the more important issues at hand. Even an artist like Kanye West—with all his talent—gets unspeakable coverage for his ongoing feud with Taylor Swift. The strong political messages in Yeezus (2013), however, are overlooked in circles outside of niche music critics. Song titles alone on this album are enough to tip people off at Kanye’s frustration with the often white-centric media. “Black Skinhead” for example is a song about frustration with race relations in pop culture. One exemplary lyric from this song is: “Claiming I’m overreacting/ like them black kids in Chriaq bitch” in a reference to the downplay of youth homicide in Chicago. “New Slaves” is but another song with strong political messages in its discussion of mass incarceration and the stigma against poor black people in contrast to the desire for endorsement of wealthy black people. Kanye is just one of the significant names in the industry that have spoken on social inequality. MF Doom, Mos Def, and Biggie have also been known to release music criticizing the pettiness in the music industry and the media’s insatiable appetite for beef. Popular media doesn’t sell weighted issues the way they do petty drama, so we can’t expect pop media outlets to do much for social change. The sociopolitical climate surrounding hip hop and its rich history offers many more discussions than whether Drake has a ghost writer or not.

“Beef Rapp,” off of MF Doom’s album, Mm...Food, satirizes the claims that rappers often make about being “hard.” Doom made his career off of being a wordsmith and his lyricism shines through in this song. He picks apart the claims made about prison in this song. A big part of the beefy rapper persona is a past prison sentence. Doom calls out all of the fake claims through the lyrics, “They know they wouldn’t be talking that bologna in the bullpen/ So disgusting, pardon self as I discuss this/ They talk a wealth of shit and they ain’t never seen the justice.” Doom claims that those who have been to prison wouldn’t talk to the same degree about it and that taking on a persona that reflects the reality of others is marginalizing. He implies that beef never serves true justice and criticizes it through cleverly pulling in medical and food references to paint beef in a negative light. According to Doom, starting beef is dangerous. It can taint a career by overshadowing past work. Even more insidiously though, Doom could be drawing parallels to gang culture. The song is sprinkled with double entendres that imply violence in beef, and while this violence isn’t usually present for celebrities, if we look at the civilian level, starting beef in gang culture could mean the end of your life.

Another significant artist to discuss the underlying issues in the media portrayal of beef is Mos Def, especially in his song “Beef.” Mos Def addresses the issue of “beef” most explicitly. He expresses his concerns, particularly those surrounding the black community. This is super important—artists can be very impactful on their listeners, and the more issues are talked about, the more people become aware. From mass incarceration, to drug abuse, to health problems, Bey hits it all. Artist voices can touch a lot people, and if media outlets worked on popularizing messages like so, a lot of progress could be made.

As hypocritical as it may seem, Biggie also had instances of advocating against the beef trend. Biggie and Tupac had one of the most notorious hip hop feuds of all time. It was so significant that it is still talked about today. Despite this, Biggie has more than one song discussing the bullshit that is beef. Most of his qualms stem from the fact that many in the rap industry have not experienced the hardships they lay claim to. More than that, Biggie tries to stress that real beef is settled, once again highlighting the misconceptions that the media portray in terms of what beef is.

Beef has commercial value, but the sociopolitical implications of the media’s conception of beef invalidate greater hardships. There is a lot of bullshit in beef, and the artists who highlight this are important components to spread social awareness.w

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Not so Black and White chess and gender politics

by Jack Jones art by Olivia Bono Chess first came to me in the same way that Legos and Playmobil sets did: a group of characters, familiar and reassuring in their clear, hierarchical order. When I played with my parents’ chessboard, I made up stories about the pieces just like I did with those other toys, gave them names and personalities, moved them around the board to act out fantasies of medieval politics and warfare— probably generously cribbed from Disney’s Robin Hood.

Even if I treated the pieces like toys at that time, my parent’s large, elegant set communicated something more profound and elusive than the other medieval games of my childhood. A chess set always seemed to me like a vessel of some sort of ancient wisdom, an unsolvable puzzle; and this impression has really only solidified in the years of playing the game since. But if not only the games but the pieces themselves—their arrangement, their relative abilities, their shapes—communicate a system of power relationships, what system do they describe?

Chess as a political and social analogy is a fascinating combination of a deeply encoded and traditional power hierarchy with strangely subversive messaging about power relationships. The king is the most important piece on the board; while the other pieces are given relative numerical values by chess players, the king is not at the top but literally out of this hierarchy, with no assigned value. For computer chess programs, the king is sometimes given an arbitrarily massive number (like 1,000,000,000) to indicate the degree to which its importance is above the rest of the pieces.

But the reason that the king is valued so highly is that it is the key to the game and simultaneously so defenseless that its techniques consist mostly of hiding and running. At best, it can corner the opponent’s pieces with the help of other, generally more powerful pieces. All the other pieces—the rooks, knights, bishops and the queen—possess more threatening abilities than the king; and the pawns, the peasantry, are weaker than the king when alone but, in groups, are one of the most formidable forces on the board.

And, of course, the relationship between the king and queen is nearly a total inverse of traditional, patriarchal gender roles—all the more stunning when one remembers that chess has been played in India since around the seventh century, and in Europe since the ninth. The queen is the only clearly female piece on the board, and she is by far the most powerful, literally combining the powers of the two next-most powerful.

She flies from one end of the board to the

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other; she attacks, pins, forks and takes, while the piece that is nominally her husband and ruler stays near his starting position, sometimes forced to stumble slowly out of danger or to cower behind another piece. The queen is the king’s protector and champion, and the king is a damsel in perpetual distress.

Of course, this is all of little practical importance in the playing of the game; as far as the competitive outcome, it is how the pieces can move that matters, not who they are or what they represent.

It is fascinating to think about what this game teaches, however, especially to children learning the game for the first time. The ambiguous politics of the chess set—a feudalistic power structure with a powerless, cowering patriarch whose wife is the aggressive warrior—simultaneously reinforce and deconstruct the fairy tales and Disney movies that evoke its world of castles, knights, and monarchs. w

¿pues ya qué? rooting myself in Ithaca

by Elia Morelos art by Annika Bjerke

My homegirl called me up on FaceTime a few days ago— first time I had seen her face in months—and asked me how I have been dealing with New York and if I had lost my mind yet.

Shit’s rough out here, bro, I said, laughed, and we moved onto whatever news was going down in the Pacoima. Two thousand miles away from Ithaca, friendships are fading, couples are expecting children, friends are being swallowed alive by the workload that they’ve taken on, and my brother is entering high school. My friends and I cover the insecurity that brewed within us upon entering college by laughing, making fun of how rough our essays are coming out or how badly we bombed our tests the other day. When my brother calls, I never tell him about how things are shaping up out here. I don’t mention how many times I’ve bit into my tongue clean during class, tasting the copperness of pennies, to stop myself from saying something that would incriminate me, isolate me, make it clear that I was not the other students around here. I don’t describe how much my stomach dropped first semester when I realized the small differences that accumulated beyond what part of the Valley we’re from, but also how much money our parents made, if we can afford that plane ticket back home for break, and if we went to public schools or not. I want him to apply to college, so I tell him about how interesting my classes are, how beautiful the weather is out here, how much I miss them back home, how I keep exploring new interesting places around campus.

Something never sits right with me, though.

How do you explain to someone how it feels like to not belong in a place that accepted you and to not belong in the place you come from? To say that you worked your whole life to get here and that you’re ready to move back at any given time, if it weren’t for how stubborn you were, or the fact that this is your only way out? To know that people back home and back at the rancho think you’ve forgotten where you come from, who your gente are? To know relatives believe you’ve forgotten the language that connects you to your mother, your father, your abuelos, tios, tias, primos, tu propia cultura? El asco you must feel at the taste of rice and beans with your newly acquired tastes?

Back home my mom can count the amount of people that tell her that she’s blessed. They say she’s lucky she

doesn’t have to deal with bad kids, kids who don’t care about education, because education is number one in her home.

And this much is true. I enrolled in preschool earlier than was allowed, doubled up on ESL classes so I would stop stuttering over simple words other students would understand, took on too many advanced courses to fill up the gaps I had in high school, spent my summers at the community college twenty minutes away from me instead of sleeping in. And I looked real nice when I did that like the students on those brochures advertising college to poor Latinx students trying to make it out of the barrio and into gringolandia. However, when they told my mom that she should thank la Virgencita and Jesucristo y San Juditas for making sure we followed the right route, they placed a label onto my being that I’ve seen on others coming from similar backgrounds, all trying to make it to an out-of-state school. With this label, the only thing that was visible was that I took more than ten AP classes and that I volunteered at X and Y on the weekends. The only thing visible was that I got accepted to some good schools — no one could see years of classism behind me, years of discrimination behind me, years of teachers and friends and adults all around telling me that college was a lost cause for me because, honestly, children of Latinos and children of immigrants don’t make it to college.

But it happened. I wrote my common application essay, copy and pasted, expanded on a few thoughts and sent them out. The acceptance first came in a nice email, then in a nice folder. I visited the campus, got lost in between the store and the slope, saw the gorges, and was ready to sign off on the next four years right then and there. Didn’t matter that I was moving from a city with eighty-one thousand people to one with thirty thousand, or that the shops around here were less commercialized than the ones back home, or that the cars speeding down University Ave were BMWs. Back in Pacoima it’s puro Dodge and Toyotas, the slickest cars I’ve ever known, fresh paint on them and the bumpers shining.

Some looked so run-down they should be in a junkyard, pero their radios still worked beautifully, playing different corridos y bandas. I never posted it up on Facebook, never even wore that Cornell 2021 shirt until the summer. I didn’t want to be proud of something that could still be taken away from me, even as I signed the housing contract and woke up late to

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pre-enroll into my classes over the summer. I guess it just felt like someone was playing a joke on me and that one day someone was going to pop out laughing, and I didn’t want to be on the receiving end.

Coming to a campus so far away from home was bound to be a shock for me. Hell, even driving to Granada Hills or Burbank continues to be a reality-check: seeing how quick the roads become nicer, how greener it all looks, how upright and neat and big the houses are once you cross that district line, how my mom rolls up the windows so no one hears the voice of Irma Serrano crooning when she picks up my

“She tells me, ‘mija, cuando ya te gradúes, solo voy a poder hablar en inglés en esos rumbos. When you graduate, I’ll only be able to speak English around those parts.’ And being at Cornell felt like holding my breath for the longest.” brother at his predominantly white school. She tells me, mija, cuando ya te gradúes, solo voy a poder hablar en inglés en esos rumbos. When you graduate, I’ll only be able to speak English around those parts. And being at Cornell felt like holding my breath for the longest.

It’s hard for me to encapsulate how I feel in a few words, but it is easier for me to do it in Spanish. It reminds me of the streets back in Pacoima, where Spanish flows from our tongues with fickleness, not as fluent or assured as the tongues of our parents and our aunts and uncles, but surer of themselves than that of a non-speaker. It muddles itself with English and reminds us of how white-washed our roots have become, how close we feel to Mexico or Guatemala or the Dominican Republic, pero how alienated we feel at the same time­— spread across the US with some sort of skewed identity, still tied to the lands that our ancestors hailed from but so far away from them as well. Spanish is a reminder of when my brother and I would chase down the elotero after school, the sun beating against our backs and a few quarters to our names, putting cheese on our Flamin’ Hot Cheetos after school, filling ourselves up with tamales and pozole and other delicacies our family makes in abundance come

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Christmas, stuffing our oven with pots and pans to get rid of the clutter.

Estoy cansada, I tell my mom almost every time she calls.

De que?

Pues, de todo.

It’s easy to think that you, a first-gen-applicant, got anywhere that’s out of the barrio by luck or even by the boxes you check off. Even easier to think this way when you have everyone on sites like CollegeConfidential and Facebook saying that one or two Latinx and Black students that get into a decent college is by luck, like their name was picked out of a hat; they don’t shed light on what these students powered through or ask if their mental health reached a limit but they had to keep it under guise because if you pray enough, you’ll relax. My mom tells me make the best of what’s happened.

It doesn’t matter if you think you belong here or not—you’re here, so that’s that. When I fly back in three weeks, I’ll meet up with my friends who spread themselves across California to study to open more doors than their parents are able to, and we’ll let the sweltering sun lick our skin as we take in the sound of roaring traffic in the freeways next to us, the ringing bells of the paletero selling his raspados y elotes to the neighborhood kids, and the next summer hits, ignoring the weight of summer jobs and summer internships and our first-year GPAs. I’ll fold these memories up, put them in my Snapchat Memories, store them in my phone’s camera roll and my computer’s drive, and look at them when I feel that same feeling creep around next year; I’ll remind myself that I already paid more than a thousand dollars to get here just in plane rides, that the TCAT feels somewhat similar to the Metro, regret those late nights at Uris. I’ll find some new memories to put in my library so that one day I can melt the memories I have of home with the memories I have here and feel an inkling of belonging. w

Slay that Interview all you need to be is the juiciest tenderloin

by Arianne Seenauth art by Annika Bjerke

Interviews are supposed to be a time in which you can prove yourself and demonstrate how you can apply your skill set—or so they say.

After we arrived, as I took a few deep breaths before leaving the car, my mom turned to me and said, “You’ve got this. Just relax.” But amid all the nervousness, being told to take a deep breath, smile, and relax in order to portray a facade of calmness is the worst. I read once that sometimes classical music is played in slaughterhouses to supposedly reduce the stress levels of animals before they’re killed and to increase the quality of the meat. When someone tells me to relax before an interview, I can relate to the poor cattle listening to Debussy’s Clair de Lune awaiting their imminent doom.

I walk into the reception room, hands sweating so much I fear I’ll smudge the ink on my resume. “Please take a seat; we will be with you in a moment.” I sit down trying to make myself seem as comfortable as possible but I know the pressure is on. “Oh no. My hands are clammy. I can’t shake an interviewer’s hand like this! If she shakes my clammy hand she’s going to feel uncomfortable and I’ll be uncomfortable and we’ll both be uncomfortable and I’ll never get a—” My thoughts are interrupted by the phrase, “The interviewer will see you now.” I see her walking towards me, and I slowly rise from my seat and extend my arm to shake her hand. I brace myself to be picked apart like a cut of juicy tenderloin.

Marinate yourself: time to impress I remember being in the car with my mom on the way to

a college interview, nervously and incoherently babbling as I constantly sought to validate myself and feed my ego as I anticipated being scrutinized. “I have strong extracurriculars, right? I’m a busy person. Do you think my interests are unique?

Are they adequately highlighted in my resume? Mom, do you think they’ll like me?” My poor mother half listening, half wanting me to shut up before she missed the turn, nodded adamantly.

Being told to “sell yourself” to an interviewer is something that never really sat well with me. The whole idea of having one person, who is ultimately human and affected by biases, preconceptions, and prejudices of all kinds, holding a large amount of power over one’s future, especially in college and job interviews, makes me question if there really is an effective way to sell oneself. After all, it’s impossible to read the minds of interviewers and know exactly how best to appeal to them or disprove their biases. When going to interviews, we are also forced to be cognizant of societal biases, of the influence of racism and sexism and classism, and the pressure to alter our appearances to fit the image of a company. Living in a time in which stereotypes are highlighted in media and women are portrayed as less equipped to handle the same jobs as men, biases can rule the hiring process of many fields. Maybe it’s not even possible to truly have control over an interview, and we are all at the mercy of the mood and perceptions of a particular stranger.

We constantly scrutinize ourselves and our pasts to highlight or even exaggerate what we imagine the ideal candidate of a job looks like to someone we have never

“When someone tells me to relax before an interview, I can relate to the poor cattle listening to Debussy’s Clair de Lune awaiting their imminent doom.”

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met before. We tend to think about how we can frame a past experience to meet the needs of a noted competency rather than focus on what the experience meant to us personally. Being forced to check boxes of requirements creates a mechanical process in which we lose aspects of our personalities. Some companies require workers to hide tattoos, have natural colored hair and no piercings, all of which can be a deal breaker in an interview. Knowing this makes me put more pressure on myself to seem perfect in the eyes of the interviewer and always seek perfection in what I say and how I appear, walking on eggshells as I scrutinize them as they scrutinize me. I analyze their gestures, expressions, reactions, and general body language in an attempt to piece together what they think of me.

Roasting the meat: get grilled It could be that interviewers grill their prospective employees, students, volunteers, or whatever it may be, in order to see who can handle the pressures of a hard job, but this leads to some panic. In my case, a lot of panic. I remember doing a phone interview in which the interviewer, before I could finish my sentence, interjected abruptly with “Why?” after almost everything I said.

“My favorite piece of art is Guernica by Pic-” “Why?”

“Theatre is very important t-” “Why??”

“I would join a volunteer group th-” “WHY???”

It was a nightmare. Needless to say, I was quite flustered, and the interview didn’t go as well as I had hoped.

Group interviews can be even worse. There’s something sadistic about group interviews in that the interviewer watches as a group of people battle for a position. I went to a group interview once for a volunteer position in a hospital with two other people. I remember constantly trying to “one up” the other people in the group without being consciously aware of it. When one person talked about overcoming an obstacle that demonstrated their determination, I wracked my brain for some sort of parallel I could make in my own life that said, “Hey, I’m determined too!” In retrospect, I realized it’s easy to question yourself and your own credibility when facing others who are attempting to present their best selves just as you are. Constantly seeking to validate myself just reiterated the idea that I saw myself as a commodity whose value was determined by the interviewer rather than as an asset to be gained.

What can we do?

I often leave interviews feeling not like I have proved myself to be valuable to an organization or institution but as if, by constantly framing myself to most adequately appeal to them, I’ve sold myself. We are scrutinized because there is a mold we have to fit in, because interviewers want to make sure we have the exact qualities they deem acceptable for a certain job or position. However, this stifles the humanity and individuality of the process. How can one truly convey their best assets while being roasted? The whole process is so anxiety inducing for me because there is so much pressure to be who the organization wants you to be, not necessarily who you are. There is an assumption that based on one limited experience, a stranger can determine if a candidate is fit for a position, but what if we focused more

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on eliminating the bias and extra pressure of the interview process? Interviews shouldn’t be based so heavily on hasty first impressions. Although candidates must demonstrate that they are fit for a job, it’s much more telling of what kind of a person they are to have someone explain what an experience meant to them rather than how it conveys that they have strong communication skills or how they are a team leader as required on the job listing. It would bring more humanity and personalization to the whole process. If we are more cognizant of our biases and are better equipped as a society to handle them, especially in job settings, we can fight the urge to think we fully understand certain aspects of a person based on a preconceived notion and short interaction. This will also take the pressure off of candidates to appear perfect in the interviewer’s eyes. If we view ourselves as humans who don’t need to be validated by others to know our worth, and if interviewers focus more on the individuality of the candidate rather than solely the specific requirements they meet to secure a job, the process can be more humanized, and interviews would be a lot less stressful. w

Meet and Greet who are all these people on campus?

by Stephanie Carmody art by Magic Sun

One of my favorite movie quotes is from the cinematic masterpiece Sing Street. Set in the 1990s, a coming-of-age Irish schoolboy runs into a mysterious, older girl who he’s immediately struck by. Their first run-in prompts him to write a song about her titled “The Riddle of the Model.” He asks his friend to read the lyrics after, and his friend does while looking dubious. He asks him: “What does ‘her dangerous eyes’ mean?” The schoolboy responds after a moment, “When you don’t know someone, they’re more interesting. They can be anything you want them to be. But when you know them, there’s limits to them.”

As students at a populated, private university, we run into fascinating faces from all walks of life. As a result, we all have our versions of the “girl with dangerous eyes.”

Perhaps it’s the way someone dresses, or some anecdotal story someone shares in class that first sparks our attention.

These momentary hints into someone else’s life, and nothing more, create the inevitable sense of intrigue. We pass so many people each day that we can’t help but wonder—who are they and what’s their story?

At home, I keep a gold etched journal for poems or sketches, but I started a new section where I jot down quick stories and appearances of people who are memorable and “dangerous” in their own ways.

The first on my list was dated as one of Ithaca’s first snow days. The December snow was new and exciting, not the sleet it is now. I was walking home after a late review session, so the time would have been around midnight. The sky was pitch black but as I got closer to my house, I saw flashes of light. Normally I would turn around, but I continued in the direction, as my house had to be at the other end. A few steps later, and I saw the flashes were coming from some figure under a lamppost, except the figure was somewhat distorted because they had a towel wrapped around their head. As I approached, she let out a yell: “You scared me!” I was taken aback, “No, you scared me!” We both laughed at the weirdness of the scenario and then I continued my walk home. It wasn’t until later that I realized the flashes were coming from her camera. It was a real camera too—one of those sleek, professional Canons with a wide-angle lens. She was a photographer who ran out to capture a first snowfall.

Despite having just showered, hair dripping from the steam,

she ran outside in barely even a coat and started snapping pictures at midnight.

Other entries range from frat boys who walked from the back of the bus to the front, making it their priority to thank the bus driver; a guy who picked up a dropped water bottle and ran a block to give it back to the owner; or a girl I passed on the sidewalk who absolutely rocked floral booties and a bedazzled, denim jacket (can’t tell if I wanted to be her friend or be her).

“We pass so many people each day that we can’t help but wonder—who are they and what’s their story?”

These people I write about intrigue me, but that is because I know so little about them; we’ll recognize each other on the street, maybe say hi when we pass by, but that’s about it. I’m able to romanticize and interrupt however way I want. It is a story of my own creation based on few facts. The people who prompt these daydreams are “fillers”—temporary figures who float in and out of life at unpredictable times, lasting much longer in thoughts than in reality.

I have a love-hate relationship with this “passerby phenomenon.” On one hand, we pass so many people every day who are exciting, especially on a campus this size. On the other, we are teased by possibilities, just out of reach of the tangible. Are these people destined to be “fillers” our entire lives? That is, as much as we conjecture about them, do they have any real significance?

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Here’s a scary thought: we’re constrained to become friends with people only at the right opportunities and contexts and people we pass occasionally don’t fit in with those standards. Despite being interested in others, we’re limited to becoming best friends, sharing secrets and staying up all night with those we sit next to in class, meet in orientation, or live with as roommates. Stated by one of my friends, on this runner who passes by her house every once in a while during his daily routes: “He’s nice and we’ll wave but I wouldn’t say hi. I don’t see him enough to form a stable relationship.” We make an effort to get to know others when it

when life rarely holds open the doors for such occasions?

On campus each day we pass so many people, each with a fascinating story. Yet we often don’t greet; we pass in a caffeinated frenzy, rushing to our next class, eyes on the TCAT that just left, too focused on ourselves. It’s easy to find someone intriguing, conjecture about their lives in the moment, and then forget them as we continue throughout our day. Yet, every once and a while, when someone “dangerous” intersects our path—shouldn’t we greet? Who knows how many more intersections there’ll be? Just as soon as that “dangerous” person flickers into your life, they’re gone. Maybe

“When you don’t know someone, they’re more interesting. They can be anything you want them to be. But when you know them, there’s limits to them.” benefits us, and the idea of a temporary relationship is often not incentive enough to get to know others. In choosing these kinds of relationships, we gain security and permanency but lose the possibilities of meeting extraordinary people.

There’s always the question of “what if?” One of my friends who had this crush on a guy in her residential building said they just smiled and opened doors for each other. It never turned out to be anything, but she said, “I loved seeing him around. He brightened up my day, I don’t know why.”

You never know quite the impact you have on others. When someone says “hey” or they smile, it’s not necessarily an end of conversation. People can be genuinely interested in others but not have the opportunity or the right timing for it to be natural; they might be too shy or just not sure what to say to someone they barely know (heaven knows I relate).

Yet, aren’t these excuses to not greet or take it further limiting?

Why should we wait for the perfect opportunity,

35 • zooming in

that person you’ve passed is a complete bore or doesn’t live up to the image you created for them. Or maybe they exceed all expectations. Yet, you’ll never know until you take a risk, until you truly greet.

The most dangerous thing is not knowing. w

Fresh Meat

by Allegra Hanlon art by Amanda Cronin

It was the very first orientation week of college. Nerves were flying around the dorm room as you and your roommate got ready for your first real party. The word on your floor was that that night’s party was at “one of the really good frats.”

So you had to look hot. If you didn’t look hot enough, then the guys at this frat wouldn’t pay attention to you and then you might not get into a good sorority and your social life would be over – at least according to your roommate, who seemed to already know everyone on the top two floors of the building.

In the end, you both wore black bodycon dresses with push-up bras underneath and a flannel on top (for the trying-not-trying look). A couple of hours and three shots of Svedka later, you stood just inside a large fraternity house that you would have mistaken for a giant lodge save for the endless gaggles of girls in similarly short, tight black dresses just outside the door.

It was unbearably hot in there – not just because it was still summer outside but because of the bodies pressed against you, boys and girls in cutoff shorts and sweaty skin, trying, just barely, to move to the rhythm of Drake blasting through the speakers. You got on your tiptoes and looked around but you couldn’t find your roommate or her friends that you came with, so you found an opening in the crowd and escaped into an even darker hallway separate from the room designated as a dance floor. You leaned against the wall for a second and closed your eyes, thankful for the sudden rush of air cool in comparison to the cramped dance floor, for the darkness that embraced you. You listened to the sounds of people talking in the other room until suddenly, they were in

the same space you were and their laughter died abruptly as you heard some guy say, “Yo, fresh meat.”

Your eyes snapped open, and there were four guys at the other end of the hallway ogling you, and you desperately regretted having worn a dress that barely covered your body.

You had tied your flannel around your waist because it was so hot, but now you anxiously pulled your arms through its sleeves and wrapped it around you as the group of guys approached.

“Hey beautiful, what’s your name?” one of them asked as he sidled up alongside you. He had intense, bright blue eyes and a shock of wavy blond hair, the kind that was just perfectly styled enough for you to know he must’ve spent time on it, but his eyes looked glassy and he reeked of beer. Before you could a n s we r, another g u y

appeared on your other side, and your head began to spin, finally beginning to process the alcohol you drank at the beginning of the night.

“Damn, girl, you must be a freshman, because no senior around here looks like that,” he said with a smirk, and as you looked at him, the only feature you could confirm was dark, curly, curly hair. You knew this because the curls that bounced around his face as his eyes moved from your chest down to your legs kind of reminded you of the springs on a trampoline.

“Fresh meat,” someone behind him said, and you didn’t have to see him to know just from his voice that he was practically smacking his lips.

In those moments, somewhere inside you, with your propped

zooming in • 36

whatever way necessary and cooked to the liking, molded and trimmed according to whatever said boy might want.

Why is that? What is it about freshman girls that upperclassmen find so appealing? Who even came up with the phrase “Fresh Meat”?

My theory goes back to the centuries-old ethos of innocence and purity. In Paradise Lost, the epic 17th century poem by John Milton based on the bible, the concept of lust was centered around Adam and Eve and the fact that God basically condemned all women to have periods and for birthing to be painful because Eve seduced Adam into eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.

For many men, the idea of a young woman as innocent, as yet unblemished by other potential suitors is attractive.

Desirable. The Middle Ages saw the advent of chastity belts, which were specifically meant to prevent women from having sex and to control their “promiscuity” while knights went away on battles or pilgrimages. In 1934, Fortune came out with the earliest polling questions about sexual attitudes, and over 50% of men considered it “unfortunate” for young women to have sexual relations before marriage.

Today, this fascination extends to college culture, where guys like to be the “first” before anyone else to take away that innocence.

It comes perhaps from a patriarchal culture teaching men that women’s bodies are something to they are entitled to, something to be dominated and used as they please. When I was in 8th grade, I found a list –a point system – that awarded boys certain points for the sexual advances they made on other girls. Kissing a girl on the cheek was worth half a point. A kiss on the lips was one point. A makeout session on a school trip was a whopping five points. If you had sex you could win the game. This idea of “scoring” with women has been replicated even on Cornell’s campus with fraternity Zeta Beta Tau’s Pig Roast, where the rules were simple: new members earned points for having sex with overweight women, and in the event of a tie, the victory went to whoever had slept with the heaviest women.

Obviously, not all men in general, or even upperclassmen in particular are out to take advantage of girls, freshmen or otherwise. But there is something to be said for the fact that the expression “fresh meat” even exists. It means that there are groups of people, of upperclassmen, that historically scope out freshman girls on campus. And it’s a big enough group of people for the phrase to be a part of pop culture – the Netflix show Fresh Meat deals with the travails of six freshmen (boys and girls) at a university in England as they learn to adjust to life in college.

“It’s the idea of fresh faces,” I was told by another senior when I broached the topic with him. “Potential upgrades

37 • zooming in

from the current scope of people on campus.”

Fresh are the faces of freshman – innocent, unscathed by stolen drunk kisses and dark moments in closets that later spread rumors like wildfire and brand them with labels like slut, nasty, whore, that render them “tainted” and undesirable.

The film Easy A is a good example, as Emma Stone’s pretended flings, no matter how secret they were meant to be, lead to brutal ostracism meant to be comparable to that of Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. Of course, it’s important to point out that Emma’s easiness actually makes her more desirable to the guys in her high school – but that’s because her reputation as easy came with the very real expectation that she would in turn also fulfill the sexual desires of whoever asked her. An inexperienced freshman in her first year of college, therefore, is expected to be innocent, doe-eyed and pure, and, as a result, easier to pressure into having sex.

I’m not sure what the solution might be to this spirit of conquest, of control that promotes young freshmen girls as cattle, eager-eyed in their guiltlessness, new to the type of slaughterhouse that some of these college parties become. But I do think it starts with a conversation.

Not just the one I’m trying to facilitate right now by writing this article, but an actual conversation at a party. One where yes, an older guy comes up to a freshman – perhaps during O-Week. But instead of his eyes dipping to her chest, measuring her worth as he wonders how many other guys she’s been with and whether she’ll amount to a decent story for his friends in the morning, his eyes stay on her face, where they’ll talk like human beings. Sounds like a nice guy, right?

Maybe the start to a solution is a conversation rather than a fuck, a “how are you doing” rather than a “wanna sleep over,” because us women are so much more than our bodies, and maybe it takes conversations like those for other guys to see that.

At some point, we’ve all been fresh meat – whether as the youngest person on campus, or the newest member of our sports team, or even as the incoming analyst for your new job next year. If you’re not “fresh meat” now, you surely will be eventually, because it’s the cycle of life, and each and every one of us has experienced some sort of dehumanization. That doesn’t mean it’s acceptable. Or even desirable.

I can tell you that most, if not all, of my female friends would be far more inclined to spend time with a guy if, instead of approaching her like fresh meat, he approached her as a fresh name, a fresh mind, a fresh person to meet and have a great time with.

After all, fresh meat eventually goes bad. w

Real Friends

by Elise Cording art by Olivia Bono

“How many of us are real friends? Callin just to ask you a question, just to see how you was feelin. How many?” –Kanye West

I’m acquainted with probably more than a hundred people at Cornell but can count the number of real friends I have on one hand. When I sit down and think about the people in my life at college, I realize I have a lot of “friends”: those people I see semi-frequently, get along with and enjoy having in my life, but truly don’t know or really care that much about. It’s not that I don’t want to know or care about them—we just haven’t invested in each other’s lives enough to take the time and effort to divulge our personal histories, remember all the details, and keep up with each other’s everyday lives. Like Kanye West says in his song “Real Friends,” I wouldn’t call them up just to see how they were feeling, and neither would they. Especially in college, people are always coming and going in my life, but in any season of it, I can only ever name a couple of real friends—the ones who seek my friendship as much as I seek theirs, who’ll choose to spend their time doing nothing with me just to hang out, who remember the little details of where I’m from and what I care about, and who give a damn about how and what I’m doing in my daily life no matter how busy theirs is.

They’re the ones I have to remember to appreciate and hold onto, by being a real friend back.

While it’s sad that these friends not “friends” aren’t easier to come by, I don’t think my situation is especially abnormal, seeing that an inescapable part of the college experience is living in the world of “me.” Unless you are from Ithaca or came to Cornell with lots of friends from home, you probably left familiarity behind to “go it alone” in college. With family and community obligations significantly reduced, you now have the freedom to choose how to spend all of your time, and more often than not, you’ll make those choices based on what serves you best. After all, without your family around, who’s going to take care of you besides you?

But I think this heightened “me-mentality” in college sometimes leaves friendship on the wayside. We get caught up in how to create the best, most productive lives for ourselves that accomplish all of our goals within the limited amount of time we have to work with. (Since we all know that “busy” is part of the definition of being a Cornell student, and our parents aren’t paying all this tuition money for us to

not “succeed.”) So instead of a friend being someone who you regularly give to (in time, effort, and love), they can become someone who you aim to take from—how can they make your life more successful and happy?

Perhaps all friendships are formed selfishly to a degree.

Sociality pools resources and helps us get by in the animal kingdom. But whether it’s helping your social status, your grades, or your feeling of self-worth, the goals of friendship at a high-pressure college seem more self-centered than they used to during childhood, causing me to believe that we now treat friendship more like a commodity than a relationship.

Maybe it’s because the stakes in life are higher now (we have increasingly more consequences and longer-term effects from making mistakes) or that there are so many options for people to choose from in college, allowing us to elect friends more according to our personal needs and desires rather than simply circumstances. Whatever the cause, the way we practically live out friendship during this stage of life seems to revolve mainly around its use-value, rather than its intrinsic value as a partnership of give-and-take.

Now you may argue that friendship comes in many different forms, and even though a certain friendship may not be as intimate as others, that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth keeping. To that, I remind you of the assignments you may be procrastinating right now by reading this, the dirty laundry you should’ve done a week ago, and your mom, who you were supposed to call yesterday. Throw in keeping in touch with friends from home, and you’ll realize your capacity for maintaining a large number of meaningful connections while in college is pretty small. You may be able to have many “friends,” but not the ability to turn them into real friends.

The reality is we simply don’t have enough time or energy to prioritize all of the people in our lives who we may want to. Of course it’s important to show kindness to everyone you meet, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with continuing to interact with anyone whose company you enjoy or learn from. But creating meaningful relationships takes work, and as college students, we need constant reminding to not spread ourselves too thin. Being a real friend means making someone else a priority. So do you choose to prioritize your time maintaining a larger number of less intimate connections or a few close ones? Maybe you’re a vibrant social butterfly who drinks multiple cups of coffee a day and can do it all

zooming in • 38

(keep thriving), but I for one, get exhausted simply trying to remember to show all the people I care about that they matter in my life.

Why do we need meaningful, intimate relationships that require so much investment in the first place? I think it’s safe to say we’re all facing loneliness, trying to make it at a stressful university in that awkward life phase where no one is physically caring for us anymore and we aren’t yet caring for other humans of our own. Many of us struggle with maintaining mental health. (Ithaca winters and prelims, am I right? Seasonal depression is real, as well as anything else you may be going through.) We need real friendship, full of care and love, in order to survive, to stay grounded and sane. We need somebody who can validate our existence, celebrating our joys with us and getting us through hard times. Otherwise, in the midst of all the inevitable personal failures and curveballs life throws, it can appear a lot less clear whether each of our lives matter in the grand scheme of things. Having even one dependable person around who you know without a doubt truly cares about you can be your lifeline, a reminder of your inherent value and connection to the world even during the toughest of times, and that’s worth more than ten “friends” combined.

So break the cycle of being just a “friend” to others.

Choose a handful of people who matter most to you and give them your time, your energy, your love and concern, rather than trying to befriend everyone you meet and keeping them as low priorities or superficial fulfillments in your life. Make your friends important—keep up with the nitty gritty details of their lives, ask about their families, take care of them when they’re sick. Value those people for who they are, not for what they can give you. If you’ve chosen carefully and given yourself freely, they will reciprocate. You may not have a hundred friends, but you will have a few special people you know will actually call “just to see how you was feelin.” And

hopefully you’ll end up leaving this place with more than just a diploma—with real friends who’ll still care for you through the thick and thin of years to come. w

“I think it’s safe to say that we’re all facing loneliness, trying to make it at stressful university in that awkward life phase where no one is physically caring for us anymore and we aren’t yet caring for other humans of our own.”

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Mainstream Eating Habits As Self-Imposed Theocracies thoughts from an unorthodox sinner

by Luby Kiriakidi art by Annika Bjerke

Food. If we’re not talking about the weather, we’re talking about food. To eat is to live. Food is culture. Food is family.

Food is love, faith, hope. Food is self. You are what you eat. So how do you identify? Food is a secular religion.

The Ancient Greek verb διαιτάω diaitо̄ means: “to live a certain way of life.” Life in all of its multifaceted aspects.

Yet, what comes to mind when someone says, “diet?” What else if not dread? For, ever since The Fall of Mankind from the Garden of Self-Acceptance long, long ago, since Eve bit into that doughnut from the Tree of Deep-Seated Dissatisfaction, we only know “a way of life” as “a cycle of public, ritualized, restricted eating followed by occasional or not so occasional secretive, uncontrollable binging and omnipotent guilt.” We

and women, but women especially. We ladies cannot take up too much space. Our sexiness and competence are measured by golden ratios of our boobs to our waist to our butt to our thighs, and that gold standard is as malleable year to year, season to season, as genuine gold earrings in the fidgety fingers of a guilty eater who was so bad yesterday.

It’s uncomfortable to live with such standards. It’s rare not to experience body dysmorphia or eating disorders, or know someone who suffers in this way.

With my fluctuating weight in college, I could see how “body thoughts” were so very closely attached to “food thoughts.” When I felt stressed, tired, or scared, there was always delicious, warm food to make me feel strong and

“I’m a vegan.” “I’m vegetarian.” “I have a peanut allergy.” “I’m gluten-free.” “I don’t eat dairy.” “Seriously, I have a peanut allergy.” “I quit sugar.” “I’m on a juice cleanse.” “Will you please put your sack of nuts away? I could die!” are a sinful species that loves to identify with diets.

Many of these declarations focus on the lack of something, a deprivation of sorts. When you are what you eat, and there’s just too much of you, something has to go.

This is a strong message that society slams daily upon men

big enough to conquer whatever there was to tackle. When I relied too much on this comfort, I felt guilt about my increasing size, and I associated any sort of eating with guilt.

I repented by setting a goal weight and saving my happiness and self-acceptance for the coming of that glorious number.

zooming in • 40

Body Positive Cornell organized student-athlete meetings that I took part in when I recognized I needed to change my mindset. These discussions helped me reclaim my body and challenge the limitations of societal standards of beauty. I recognized how I measured my self-worth to my physical appearance and how I compared, measured, and grew jealous of other women around me. I saw how I would even compare what was on my plate in comparison to my friends’ plates in the dining halls. It was time to drop the competition and adopt compassion. I said screw it to guilt and plans of deprivation and decided that my body is enough, that I am enough, and that when it comes to food, I need to listen to my body: eat when I’m hungry, what I’m hungry for, and for however much I’m hungry for.

From being my harshest critic to becoming my own best friend, I accepted my body and myself. I treated others with kindness and admired rather than envied the beauty of the people around me. I always carried all-sorts of food on me to constantly fuel my hunger, guilt-free. I equalized all food and chose what my body told me to eat. My body settled into a comfortable weight whose number I was ignorant of because I stopped weighing myself and started measuring my life in more meaningful ways.

Take that, society! I reclaimed my relationship with food and am all the better for it, happily ever after.

Not quite. This was not full-rebel mode, you see.

While it’s nice to be a rule-breaker and eat outside of social-mandated meal structures, I found myself constantly thinking about food, as each morning, I prepared my overflowing lunchbox with countless plastic containers, each box designated for one of the six or seven small meal breaks that divided my days.

Time is precious, and I found a majority of mine dominated by food. I wanted to create a life that brings in the earlier Greek definition of a diet. I wanted to eliminate constant thoughts about food and instead devote myself to what I truly hungered for in life, like learning languages (Ancient Greek, ahem) and writing a thesis (on Ancient Greek, ahem ahem). Did I mention that I’m a Classics major?

Then, I found a solution. A new identity. And you’re not going to like it.

What was my mantra now? Was it one of the usual gotos, “I don’t eat meat,” “I don’t eat gluten,” or “I don’t eat sugar?” More like, I don’t eat .

Hear me out.

The true sinning began last summer while visiting family in Athens, in the corners of the vacant makeshift guest room, in several incognito tabs of my phone. Untracked searches of, “What is intermittent fasting?” “Intermittent fasting for women” “IF for athletes” “IF and ketogenic diet.”

Always checking that the coast was clear, I did research, read testimonials. I began to experiment, choosing a day to not eat but instead to read extensively, work on a project, or go exploring outside, with a water bottle in hand. Whenever my Greek grandmother said it was time for dinner though, I would obediently give in and eat, even if I was, to my surprise, not hungry. This was an offer I could not refuse, not even the Ancient Greek etymology of the word for diet could save me. To deny her cooking would be to deny her love, her

41 • zooming in

toils in the kitchen, and attempts to talk about the benefits of not eating would incite a threatening, “what are you, stupid?” expression on her loving, smiling face.

Anyways, I could not imagine admitting that I was trying to fast, because on the lips of a woman, that is too easily equated with, “I am unsatisfied with my body.” I saw the fine-line between the assumption of dissatisfaction and the assumption of an eating disorder, I saw that fasting was heretical to female bodies. I progressed too much from my past dark mental cloud to bring that kind of attention to myself, to cause concern.

But the thing is, I wasn’t concerned for myself at all. I trusted myself. Later that summer, I talked to someone whom I regarded highly, who shrewdly preached about IF and the ketogenic diet, who had done it long-term and reaped the benefits. I wanted in.

So, staying hushed, I slowly converted from eating the recommended three meals a day and snacking every ten minutes, to eating once or twice a day.

The What, When, How Much of my new faith: What:

Mostly plant-based. Lots of veggies

drenched in olive oil. Some protein. Few carbs.

Little to no sugar.

When: Sometimes once a day. Sometimes several times a day. Still listening to hunger, which became less demanding and frequent.

How Much: ideally, until fullness is reached.

It was easy. The new religion, the new me, came with happiness, productivity, and so much energy.

Until I lost weight.

Remember when I said it’s uncomfortable when your body doesn’t fit the ideal beauty standards?

It’s scarier when it suddenly comes pretty damn close.

I felt less powerful. I saw the changing judgements people placed on me. I realized why many people who lose weight become scared and go back to food for safety.

I didn’t change my “diet” for weight loss or transformation, but I had to deal with this change as a side-effect. I started to overeat during my meals. I had a new insecurity to feed, since I now hid a sinful secret, this eating once a day. I’m a studentathlete! I’m body-positive. There’s no need to change my body because Every Body Is Beautiful. I maintained a higher weight because I wanted to prove to myself that I was comfortable with myself by defying social standards of body image. No deprivation here! No dissatisfaction here! I wanted to prove

that no matter what, I always think that I am beautiful.

I wanted to prove that I don’t have an eating disorder.

That was the true fear. I didn’t want people to think I had an unhealthy relationship with food because I chose such an unusual lifestyle. I didn’t want my parents to worry. I didn’t want my friends to worry, or my coaches and my teammates.

I didn’t want Cornell Health nutrition counselors to be on my case. And that hyper-awareness caused me to really worry, and suddenly, there really was something to worry about. I had to reconsider my food-related beliefs once more.

Body Positivity not only comes with Body Acceptance, but Body Ownership. My self-love can be maintained even if I lose or gain weight, even if I want to lose or to gain weight. It’s okay to want or to accept change. That is the privilege of owning my body.

To own it is to nourish it in the way I see fit, convenient, and healthy. Curiously, I found an unorthodox diet that works for me and promotes longevity. And if that lifestyle has a side effect of weight loss, that’s okay. I’m still me, I’m still body positive.

The challenge now is coming out. What do I say at a social gathering when someone inevitably asks, “why aren’t you eating?” Can I tell people that I am fasting? That I choose high fat, low carb foods? That I tend to eat once a day?

How do I address the immediate concern most people unfamiliar with this lifestyle express?

And what if some days I break the rules of my identity in public? What if I choose to have sugar one day, or eat several times? Will I be reprimanded, made fun of? Must I make fun of myself, saying how bad I am, making up an excuse as my fork reaches for some good ol’ pasta?

I owe it to myself to stop dodging the questions, to stop acquiescing to orthodox diet behavior, and to finally speak the truth.

“Hello there! I am a female student-athlete, and to maintain a busy but fulfilling life, I follow a low carb/ high fat diet and I frequently use intermittent fasting.

I don’t want to preach, but I think it’s an awesome way to live. It probably doesn’t work for everybody, but it works for me, and that makes me happy. Oh! You have a different theory on the perfect diet? Great – I would love to hear it. Oh! You couldn’t care less? Great – let’s talk about something else.”

Using my voice sets me free from my fear of social damnation. I am free to practice self-acceptance through thick and thin, and to socialize with a simple glass of water or tea in front of me, much to the irritation of the waiter passing by. Eating disorders are a serious issue, I am not denying that, but if the social shaming of food heresies are a hurdle from achieving a convenient, healthy lifestyle, it is time to open up to differing views.

These are my sins. My confession may alleviate the weight that has been clinging on my shoulders (truly, I already feel the lightness), but it can also inspire others to reexamine the habits that make up their diet: not necessarily just their ties to food, but their overall approach

42 • zooming in

to living. A diet need not be based on deprivation, but on identifying and fueling a hunger for life. w

(The carcass pieces are drawn into buckets) which are hoisted to the meat boilers.

Oil is run off. The entrails and meat are boiled for about 10 hours, and the bones for about 14.

...and comes out as guano

Annika Bjerke

Leslie Hamilton Wilson

1911 prints from “Whaling Fishing/ The Blacksod Bay Whaling Co. Ltd

The meat is passed through a dryer...

Sourced from the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art

section • 43

The Morals of Meat reconciling cultural symbolism with environmental awareness

by Erin Lynch art by Annika Bjerke

“Where’s the beef?”

Meat... You’re right in liking it.”

“Indispensable in every household.”

“The yardstick of protein foods.”

Meat advertisements in the 1950s solidified the role of beef as a staple food constituting an integral part of the American identity. During World War II, the USDA promoted rationing and also subsidized the poultry industry in an effort to conserve red meat for soldiers fighting overseas. The true industrialization of the meat industry took place shortly after the war. As large grocery stores replaced local butcher shops and refrigeration technology became integrated into shipping practices, large quantities of meat began to be preserved and transported across the country. Gradually, small farmers were driven out of business by mechanized farming corporations with the ability to produce large amounts of meat with fewer resources. This industrialization formed the foundation for the development of a meat industry that has degraded global land and water resources and contributed to the unprecedented loss of biodiversity widely considered by scientists to constitute the sixth mass extinction. Unfortunately, old habits die hard, and the stigma of meat as a tangible representation of societal ideals continues to permeate American culture. So the question we must ask ourselves now is how do we conciliate America’s perceived dependence on meat in the era of climate change?

In order to reason through this complex issue, we can begin by recognizing that Homo sapiens are omnivores. As a species, we have evolved in such a way that we have the ability to eat both meat and plants, both of which our bodies can utilize to yield the energy necessary for survival. After all, our own anatomy is that of omnivores. Our short canine teeth stand in stark opposition to the large canines of vegetarian species. Unlike most plant eaters, our digestive systems do not have fermenting vats that allow for the destruction of harmful plant-dwelling microbes, and our intestinal surface area resembles that of other omnivorous species. Lean meat provides the human body with beneficial nutrients like vitamin B, iron, zinc, vitamin E, and magnesium, in addition to high amounts of protein. As a result, the earliest human civilizations adapted to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in which societies were sustained equally by the meat brought home by male hunters and by the berries and nuts collected by female gatherers. Meat provided these communities with the protein necessary to perform physically demanding labor

and sustain a nomadic lifestyle.

Fast forward two thousand years and society has undeniably progressed from the survivalist mentality that prevailed in early civilizations. Our diet has metamorphosed alongside it and has become increasingly dominated by processed foods and genetically modified crops. Throughout much of history, meat has been a luxury only available to the rich. However, in the past century, the prices of fresh produce have risen exponentially, making locally sourced fruit and vegetables an expensive commodity not easily accessible to those living in poverty. This is because over $38 billion in subsidies have been allocated by the US government to the meat and dairy industries, which stands in stark contrast to the only $17 million granted to the fruit and vegetable industry. This has allowed the meat industry to evolve into a corporate giant wreaking havoc on the natural world. Further, advertising has made meat a staple in American culture.

It has become intertwined with the image of the ideal American family, as well as with the idea of masculinity. We see it everywhere, from national hotdog eating contests to Ron Swanson, the epitome of an all-American man: “I call this turf n’ turf, a 16 ounce T-bone and a 24 ounce porterhouse…

I am going to consume all of this at the same time because I am a free American.” In this way, the symbolism affiliated with meat has been integrated into the American mindset, making a radical transition difficult.

Yet, we are living in a pivotal time period in the determination of our planet’s future. Currently, even with advanced carbon sequestration methods, we will not be able to stall global warming for at least 100 years. This projection coupled with the fact that carbon continues to be produced at a higher rate than ever before reads as a sort of death sentence for the natural world. Animal food production is currently the largest single source of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, surpassing the contributions of electricity generation and the transportation industry. The sheer number of animals being raised for meat has increased by a factor of five since the 1960s. This increases the demand for land to raise the livestock on. Deforestation for the purpose of converting wooded areas to farmland contributes large amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere, greatly diminishing the photosynthetic conversion of CO2 to usable O2. As this land erodes, even more carbon is released from the soil into the atmosphere. It seems that humanity is digging itself into a

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with each restaurant order of filet mignon. Cattle have a very low energy return, with only a pound of beef produced for every 16 pounds of grain consumed. Thus, it is difficult to justify pursuing a carnivorous lifestyle when plants use five times less land to produce the same amount of protein in an equivalent quantity of meat. And if that’s not a convincing enough argument against meat consumption, 70% of the world’s freshwater is used for agricultural irrigation, and it takes 25 times more water to produce a pound of beef than a pound of plant protein. Further, the cramped conditions that animals are raised in necessitates the preventative use of antibiotics to stop the spread of disease. Once antibiotics have entered the food supply, they are transported through the food chain, as well as in animal waste. This has led to an increase in antibiotic resistant bacteria strains that are incredibly harmful to human health and have no known treatment. Watching a single documentary on the realities of meat processing is enough to make even a lifelong burgerlover consider vegetarianism.

incomes, government subsidies must be taken away from the meat industry and allocated to the production of fruits and vegetables, thereby lowering the commercial prices of these commodities. By enforcing vegetarianism at a young age, people are more likely to adopt this practice for life without ever contributing to the degradation of the environment due to meat production.

Ultimately, a gradual shift to a human diet with less red meat and more plant protein will improve human health and reduce greenhouse gas contributions to the atmosphere. However, this requires a widespread adoption of new social norms that will likely take multiple generations to instill. Humans have adapted to eating meat, but the next stage in our evolution seems to necessitate a shift toward vegetarianism. It is important to educate people on the impacts of their dietary choices and to make fresh produce more readily available to all income-levels through government funding and land-allocation to the production of plant protein. Most importantly, change starts with the

“‘I call this turf n’ turf, a 16 ounce T-bone and a 24 ounce porterhouse… I am going to consume all of this at the same time

There is no clear-cut answer to this complex issue. Much of it can be attributed to population growth and the growing demand for food that is affordable, which necessitates the development of new mass production methods. People in the developed world eat more animal protein than those in earlier generations, and the average American consumes 209 pounds of meat a year—well over the recommended amount for human health. Meat is integrated into American culture and the human diet in such a way that complete abstinence is an unrealistic goal. Yet, now is the time that a change must be made if we are going to save our planet. Meat intake must be minimized by replacing it with alternative proteins. One such form that has gained popularity in recent years is insect protein, specifically cricket powder, which can be produced sustainably and provides a significant amount of energy to the consumer for very few drawbacks. Even choosing more sustainably-produced meats can have a positive effect.

Purchasing from small farms promotes humane animal practices and minimizes transportation emissions. These farms often raise grass-fed cattle, which have a higher energy return than the grain-fed cattle on industrial farms. Choosing poultry over beef has less impact on the environment and also leads to lower levels of the LDL cholesterol found in red meat, which greatly increases the risk of heart attack and coronary disease. In fact, this cholesterol is only found in food from animal sources, so it is non-existent in a plant-based diet. One person’s eco-footprint is reduced by more than a third through the adoption of a vegetarian diet. This has a greater environmental impact than driving a car each day. In order to make vegetarianism accessible to those with lower

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individual, and a single person’s commitment to reducing meat intake could contribute to a movement that saves the natural world. We should heed the Warning to Humanity crafted by world scientists in the 1990s: “A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.” w

12 and A Die-hard PETA Supporter my first misguided foray into PETA’s online activism and vegetarianism art and article by Kathie Jiang

I’m about to describe a strange chapter of my life: when I was 12 years old with Internet access and a strong sense of righteousness, I chose to abruptly adopt a vegetarian diet. I was raised on an omnivorous diet of Chinese cooking from my first-generation immigrant parents and American restaurant food my whole life up until my introduction to the website of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals–commonly known as PETA–through a Facebook advertisement or an earnest Google search on the subject of animal rights. This is when I fell headfirst into a rabbit hole of the highly controversial animal rights activist organization, complete with sensationalizing articles, controversy-stirring media campaigns, and one-clickto-sign petitions, without the preparation or education necessary to advocate and organize around the polemical issue of animal rights. This is by no means discouraging anyone from advocating for animal rights, leading a vegan/ vegetarian lifestyle, or even supporting PETA. This is just my story of becoming a PETA supporter and vegetarian for the wrong reasons seven years ago.

Founded in 1980 by animal rights activist Ingrid Newkirk, PETA claims to be the largest animal rights organization in the world with an alleged six million followers. The organization is notorious for its highprofile media stunts, often involving images of scantilyclad female celebrities and controversial slogans. These campaigns focus on several main areas of animal abuse in the meat industry, clothing, scientific experiments, entertainment, and the pet trade. The idea that a seemingly

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accredited, global organization was actively advocating, fighting, investigating this widespread injustice towards animals around the world was eye-opening and completely convinced my 12-year-old self, who voraciously read articles with clickbait titles like “Dolce & Gabbana Exposed: Investigation Reveals Rabbits Are Tortured for Specialty Fur” or “Kentucky Fried Chicken Sells Death by the Bucket— Here’s What You Can Do,” each article linking to a PETA petition. Graphic photos of factory farms, skinned animals at fur farms, and animals abused in circuses horrified me, charging me with a burning desire to do something. If you were friends with me on Google Buzz (please tell me I wasn’t the only one to have a Google Buzz account in 2011), then you know I was sharing petitions requesting designer brands to ban fur products or infographics about widespread animal abuse in factory farms every day.

It was PETA’s countless flyers about “How to Start a Vegetarian Diet” that convinced me to go against everything my parents taught me about food. I sat down at dinner one day and told my parents, “I’m not going to eat meat from now on!!” My mom was livid. She was apprehensive that a vegetarian diet would not be sufficient for my growth as an adolescent. Yet, I somehow convinced her to purchase and cook more tofu, mushrooms, and eggs—which she was familiar with—and also substances completely foreign to her from the vegetarian/vegan section of Safeway: “What’s tempeh?” “Tofurkey?” “Are you just going to eat hummus for lunch?” When my grandmother and aunt visited, they tried in vain to instill some sense into me: “If this is something

Vegetarian Diet” that convinced me to go against everything my parents taught me about food. I sat down at dinner one day and told my parents, “I’m not going to eat meat from now on!!” My mom was livid. She was apprehensive that a vegetarian diet would not be sufficient for my growth as an adolescent. Yet, I somehow convinced her to purchase and cook more tofu, mushrooms, and eggs—which she was familiar with—and also substances completely foreign to her from the vegetarian/vegan section of Safeway: “What’s tempeh?” “Tofurkey?” “Are you just going to eat hummus for lunch?” When my grandmother and aunt visited, they tried in vain to instill some sense into me: “If this is something your friends at school put you onto, listen to reason… your health is most important… in the labor unit, the mothers that have the most trouble are vegetarians…” And there was room for concern: I was going to sleep slightly hungry, and I noticed my wrists and calves getting bonier throughout the weeks.

I had jumped onto the vegetarian bandwagon with some but by no means comprehensive knowledge of eating and cooking nutritious vegetarian meals. Although my family and I were conducting thorough research into recipes and plant-based nutrition to accommodate my new diet, we simply lacked enough awareness around vegetarian food that could supply enough nutrients and

protein for a growing adolescent at that time.

The psychological and moral effects of PETA were also pronounced in my pre-teen self: I printed PETA’s posters with catchy slogans such as, “If you wouldn’t eat your dog, why would you eat a pig?” pasted onto a pink piglet in a sunlit grassy field, or “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” strategically printed over a naked A-list celebrity in my binder to middle school. This was before I had encountered feminism, and PETA’s justifications for these ads—to problematize the distinction between animals and humans by substituting women for animals, which I now find comprehensively misogynistic, objectifying, and dehumanizing—led me to take on a “by any means necessary” attitude towards animal rights. I had never read a philosophy book, but I checked out Animal Rights

by Peter Singer from the library and was stunned by his arguments about comparing human rights to animal rights.

I believed these arguments from an acclaimed philosopher would help me defend my dietary and moral choices.

This went on for a year and a half, following me from middle school to my freshman year of high school. I was a swimmer starting in 5th grade, and I continued to swim even when I was a Bad Vegetarian™. But as tryouts for the high school swim team approached in 9th grade, my mother offered me an ultimatum: either eat meat to swim

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on the varsity team, or don’t try out for the team at all.

Knowing that my parents wanted the best for me and that I was most likely just getting by on my protein sources— tofu, mushrooms, eggs, hummus, tofurkey—rather than effectively building the muscles I needed for serious competitive swimming, I caved in. PETA, after all, was not providing the adequate nutritional advice, only introducing me to radical ideas about animal welfare, which I adopted, thinking it was as easy as a fashion trend. As I reintroduced pork, beef, fish, chicken, and other meats into my diet each meal, I was rebuilding my muscle mass to be able to hit the pool several hours each day and compete once a week on my high school varsity team, swimming more intensively than I had ever done before.

As I got busier with high school (or maybe it was my budding addiction to Tumblr), I gradually stopped visiting the PETA website and my interests moved on from animal rights. Today I can look back on this wacky episode that punctuated my entry to adolescence and laugh. I know seven years later I am far more educated on eating a vegetarian or vegan diet, as well as the many ethical flaws and contradictions in the organization of PETA itself.

Why had I not questioned PETA’s sexually objectifying ads of scantily-clad women? PETA translates animal rights activism into a digestible, participatory format with its online presence, but this very format can be a double-edged sword: it gathers many followers across the internet, but it may not prepare them with the adequate knowledge to tackle this widespread, highly controversial issue. This is explicitly obvious to me now, but my 12-yearold self failed to see that PETA, with its shallow treatment of the arguments for animal welfare and how to start a vegetarian/vegan diet, is only a starting point for animal

rights. It is a platform whose media should be examined thoroughly and critically. Whenever I open this Pandora’s Box of memories from my pre-teen and teenage years, I wonder how much it impacted the development of my morality or perhaps my attitudes toward social justice and political issues. It has certainly cultivated in me a skepticism when it comes to large nonprofits that enjoy basking in mainstream media’s limelight.

Incidentally, as a young adult and college student at Cornell, where access to plant-based proteins and accurate knowledge about vegetarian/vegan diets and animal welfare is abundant, I’ve been consuming less meat than any point of my post-PETA years for health and environmental reasons. Although I haven’t fully phased out meat or animal products from my diet, as I haven’t had the time or resources to build a completely plant-based diet (even though I keep that possibility open for my future), I live my days with the small satisfaction that I can still incorporate ideas about sustainable consumption and ethics into my life choices. I know that in order to fully adhere to those moral values, I still have a long way to go.

For some, this may seem like I’m taking a middle road that’s insufficient to address the problem of the unsustainability and immorality of the meat industry. Yet, I know that the path to a comprehensive dietary change, for me at least, requires adequate time, resources, and understanding. That, perhaps, is the strongest lesson I’ve learned from that episode in my young adolescence, looking back at it seven years later. w

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Cannibalism in the Kitschen

by Abby Hailu art by Jeff Sondike and Leo Levy

Cannibalism is when something, partly or fully, consumes its same species for food. It’s a fairly common phenomenon in nature that occurs under a range of circumstances. Sexual cannibalism can occur just after mating, simply because the newly impregnated mother’s nearest post-coital snack is her mate. Intrauterine cannibalism can happen in the womb when only the strongest embryos survive to birth by eating their weaker siblings. Filial cannibalism is when the parents of an animal eat their own offspring if they are too weak to survive until maturity in order to repurpose the nutrients and then produce an even stronger second batch of offspring. In short, nature indicates that cannibalism is a perfectly normal thing but when humans do it, society is thrown for a loop. Most people’s gut reaction to human cannibalism is confusion, disgust, and an instinctive disaffiliation—but some elements of the act can be explained and even be somewhat relatable.

In any cultural or historical context, the act of eating human flesh is not taken lightly. Experts cannot seem to agree on its acceptability or soundness, but it is undeniably a deeply powerful process.

Human cannibalism has largely remained an anthropological debate because it ultimately questions the limits of “cultural relativism.” Some ethnicities and civilizations—both modern and ancient—practice cannibalism, further confusing the matter of its acceptability.

William Arens, an American anthropologist, criticizes academia’s approach to analyses of cannibalism as fraught with racism and religious bias in his book The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. Indeed, the layman’s perception of cannibalism is often loaded with harmful generalizations about race and conceptions of civilization.

Although Aren’s work was impactful in challenging the framework and approaches of anthropologists who study cannibalism, his hypotheses were discarded for being too weakly substantiated. So the question remains: has there ever been a human society that sanctioned cannibalism?

One society that challenges widely held reductionist

ideas of cannibalism is the Wari’ people, located in the Brazilian Amazon. Until the 1970s, the Wari’ tribe practiced mortuary cannibalism as part of the grieving process when a member died. It has been described as an instrumental process that differs slightly from other religious or ritualistic instances of cannibalism. When dealing with loss, the philosophy of the Wari’ was to involve the entire community in erasing physical traces of the deceased’s social identity in order to minimize the sadness felt by close kin. This includes burning the deceased’s favorite hangout spots, possessions, and, of course, roasting and eating the corpse.

Furthermore, this practice relies on the belief in the human and “extra-human” exchange of vitality in explaining the relationship between humans, animals, and spirits. There is a ritualistic timeline of seclusion that the Wari’ once followed; it culminated in an extended hunt carried out by the close kin to feed the entire village and marked the full integration of the deceased into the ancestral community. This signified the return of power from the prey of the spiritual force of death as they became hunters of animal spirits. (In a way, it’s kind of similar to that episode of Friends when on Valentine’s day the girls do a ritual to burn all traces of their exes to break the cycle of “bad boyfriends” and end up meeting cute firemen because of the fire they started in the apartment— but I digress.) The Wari’ don’t consider eating the dead as part of a crucial process to ensure the gods’ appeasement or the universe’s balance. Instead, eating the dead was considered a powerful psychological element of community healing, largely remaining subjective as indicated by its supposedly voluntary abandonment in the ‘70s. Ultimately, the mortuary cannibalism practices of the Wari’ was a personal choice individuals made when carrying out the wider, more important grieving process. The place of a life force within a community or a wider spiritual ecosystem confuses the importance of the body. Perhaps mortuary cannibalism sees the body as a vessel, simultaneously recognizing its utility and disposability through its consumption.

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frowned upon but somehow remains legal. Granted, there are other laws that make it nearly impossible to cannibalize someone, but it’s not as illegal as one would think. The ambiguous legal standing of cannibalism brings us into uncomfortable proximity with the idea that eating human flesh isn’t necessarily wrong, perhaps speaking to the extent of its emotive power.

Among the most obvious recent cases of cannibalism are during situations of extreme necessity, such as famines, shipwrecks, or airplane crashes. The “custom of the Sea” is an unwritten code of conduct dictating what happens in the event of a shipwreck. These laws cover circumstances ranging from mutiny to the procedure of deciding who is to be eaten in the event of a shipwreck. Although they aren’t necessarily codified laws, these customs are strictly adhered to and agreed upon by those manning the ship. They are upheld with the religious spirit of self-sacrifice, with one desperate case being justified by the act of Holy Communion and John 15:13, imploring man to “lay down his life for his friends.” Often, the process of deciding who is to be eaten in the case of an emergency is determined by casting lots, and the instances of blatant murder are gross departures from the custom. Despite the unquestionable non-consensuality of murder, there is still ambiguity involving the role of necessity. For instance, the Essex was a whaleship that

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sank in 1820 after being attacked by a sperm whale. Eight men were rescued after nearly a hundred days at sea and candidly spoke of being forced to cannibalize seven men, two after giving consent while alive and the rest after they had died. Often, in cases like these, the survivors face no legal ramifications for their actions but suffer acute trauma from their ordeals. The key element of consent exonerates them, as in the case of the survivors of The Essex. Of course there are cases of illegal cannibalism such as the story that inspired the novel Life of Pi. Richard Parker, a seventeen year old boy (not a Bengali tiger), was murdered and cannibalized by two men when their yacht was shipwrecked. They killed him after nearly a month of being stranded, reasoning that his deteriorating health, and the risk of abandoning their families were enough to justify his cannibalization. The lack of verbal consent was ultimately damning in the case of Richard Parker’s murderers. The role of consent in driving modern legislature further complicates cannibalism. It seems much more than a perverted tribal practice or an act of pure desperation.

Interestingly, modern courts and advocates of human rights seem to be disinterested with what is done with the dead body, excluding cannibalism from the scope of human rights violations. At times of war, cannibalism often occurs as an arguably very natural mechanism to feed troops and keep the war torn lands from being littered with corpses. During the second World War, some Japanese soldiers ate their prisoners of war, periodically selecting the healthiest men for execution and also for food. When the Japanese generals were tried, there were no international laws pertaining to cannibalism, so they were inculpable in that regard. Instead, they were charged with “preventing honorable burial” because of the way that they discarded the remains of their victims. You’d think that cannibalism would be considered a war crime, or at least a human rights violation; but an investigation led by Amnesty International in the 1980s further undermines the human body’s legal status after death. After decades of brutal civil wars in various African countries, Amnesty International studied various war crimes committed amidst both speculative and proven instances of cannibalism. The controversy of war cannibalism was greatly overshadowed by the more clear-cut war crimes.

The Secretary-General of Amnesty at the time, Pierre Sane, decided that “what was done to the bodies after the human rights were committed, were not under their mandate or concern.” In short, Amnesty’s mission pertaining to war crimes in restoring justice, truth, and reparations does not apply in cases of cannibalism. The qualifier of natural life is necessary for someone to matter, and the differing philosophies of the cannibalistic practices of the Wari’ tribe and Amnesty International’s rulings reflect these profound schisms. What it ultimately means for a person to matter, as defined by either law or ritual, represents a universal desire to express the magnitude of a person’s existence and on occasion, the criteria of mattering has historically not been indiscriminate.

Posthumous cannibalistic practices by definition displace a person’s importance—and even their spirit—from their body.

However, painting such a forgiving picture of contemporary society’s approach to cannibalism is unfair; after all, we are talking about cannibalism. Most people today would

“In much of the modern world, cannibalism is frowned upon but somehow remains legal. Granted, there are other laws that make it nearly impossible to cannibalize someone, but it’s not as illegal as one would think...” instinctively say there’s something wrong with the act.

In discussions surrounding recent cases of cannibalism are the questions of sanity, criminality, and artistic value.

One of the most famous recent cases involves convicted murderer Jeffrey Dahmer who was known for brutalizing and cannibalizing his victims. Although his past was fraught with traumatic experiences and left him with deep psychological issues, cannibalism is not formally recognized as one of them. Indeed, experts have markedly shied away from formally classifying cannibalism as a mental disorder.

However, cannibalism appears as a severe and rare symptom of certain psychotic behaviors. Often these symptoms occur in cases of delusional psychoses that are heavily influenced by their cultural surroundings, such as religious, political and technological norms. As in the case of Jeffrey Dahmer, there can also be a sexual element in which the sufferer’s victim acts as a symbol for their own aversion to sex. This manifests itself in a severely regressive way, reminiscent of the infantile memory of breastfeeding. Arguably, it is when severe detachment from reality occurs that the sufferer returns to their first introduction to a sense of self.

Psychiatrist Sigmund Freud argues that when the infant stops breastfeeding is when it realizes its separateness from its source of food, the breast. Perhaps there is a cyclical relationship between the delicate interactions between eating, self, and trauma. Cannibalism, in cases like Dahmer’s, shows the convergence of acute psychological detachment resulting in a profound realization of self. It’s a significant manifestation of an existential grey area. One eerie case that seems to defy all understanding is that of Issei Sagawa, a PhD student in France, originally from Japan. In 1981, he murdered and cannibalized a woman and was subsequently deemed insane by French authorities and detained indefinitely in a mental institution. He was deported to Japan where doctors deemed him “sexually perverse” but overall sane. Because of technicalities, he remains free and indeed has a significant public following. He has candidly and remorsefully explained cannibalizing his friend in 1981 was to gain some sort of physical vitality which he felt he lacked.

Sagawa’s crime was driven fully by how he identified himself as weak and others as strong, showing that cannibalism can be a difficult reckoning of reality and perception. For the most part, cases of cannibalism involving murder often

culminate in a plea of insanity and are almost sensationalized because of contemporary social understandings and opinions of cannibalism. There’s a mix of pity, disgust, and, above all, shock.

We would expect no less from artists than to jump on this shock factor. Cannibalism has been an artistic theme for centuries but it leaves the public shaken up every time. In 2007, Marco Evaristti, as part of a performance art piece, made meatballs out of his own liposuctioned fat and served it to twelve guests in a nice buttery pasta dish! It was a critique of contemporary society’s unhealthy obsession with weight loss, body image, and food. He stated in interviews that his work was testing the limits of the human body’s sanctity. Indeed when cannibalism is involved in artistic expression, it is often met without any legal repercussions other than “public indecency.” Such is the case with Japanese performance artist Mao Sugiyama who cut off, cooked, and fed to paying, willing participants, at a humble price of $250, parts of his genitals.

The art performance was done in protest of gender inequality and promotion of asexuality and generated publicity as well as controversy. Once the initial shock of cannibalism wears off, the performative qualities are easier to swallow. We then can appreciate, or at the very least begin to understand, the social commentary behind the completely voluntary and deeply psychological act of cannibalism as an artform.

In any context, cannibalism is an intensely emotive process. It seems as though the active and highly intentional nature of cannibalism is profoundly influential in symbolic, ritualistic, and in sometimes unintended ways. Regardless of how cultural, historical, or otherwise extenuating circumstances may affect the acceptability of cannibalism, the act of eating human flesh is something deeply powerful.

Physicality, in a simply existence-sustenance relationship, is a universal experience because everyone has a sense of self and a sense of self-preservation, and cannibalism, in any context, questions both of these senses. The act is either almost like an intentional search for some sort of soul within the body or a reduction of a human life to just a sack of meat.

Ultimately, cannibalism deals with the question of self, and chopping away the outermost parts of our beings forces us to ask—what the hell even are we?w

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Feminist Body Hair is a Privilege Only White Women Can Afford

by Malvika Dahiya art by Magic Sun

My relationship with my body hair is complicated, dynamic, and often difficult. Like many other women of South Asian descent, I grew up confused by my body hair, living in a world where images of femininity, beauty, and even normality were divergent from the body I called home.

Much of my adolescence was spent struggling to mirror the hairless, skinny, and white bodies that I believed connoted attractiveness. To add to my confusion, growing up in Michigan, various cities in India, and Singapore, I found these Eurocentric expectations of beauty inescapable. Wherever I went, it seemed, the ideal of female hairlessness was as stubbornly pervasive as the hair growing unforgivingly on my body. The challenging relationship I have had with my body hair makes it hard to comfortably digest the current mainstream wave of white body positivity. It is a slap in the face to women of color everywhere to see White women declaring empowerment in the same thing they have policed our bodies for.

For Indian women, hair removal is inextricably linked to colonial expectations. The Indian subcontinent has a long and complicated history of being invaded by lighter skinned people, and has since been suffering from a colonial hangover that it has yet to cure itself of. In its modern measure of beauty, South Asia has consequently developed a fastidious obsession with the lack of both melanin and body hair, in conformity with our historical oppressors.

Since I was raised by Indian parents, for whom waxing rather than shaving is the norm, my introduction to hair removal began lying down at the mercy of the Indian waxing lady rather than a hyper-feminized, commercialized, pink razor. In between the violent rips that ruthlessly stripped my legs bare, the waxing lady shared with me her little tips and tricks to maintaining beautiful skin. Regular waxing se aap ka pura tan chale jayega. Regular waxing will rid your skin of its tan–a piece of advice given to me by countless

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Indian parlor ladies extolling the benefits of waxing, from hairlessness to fairness.

This debut to hair removal happened, of course, as I found myself entering puberty–the peak of my body hair insecurities. It felt like overnight, my smooth prepubescent skin had been rapaciously attacked by hair that I could not understand, and could not see in anyone else around me.

My White friends growing up simply did not have hair of my thickness or darkness, and the Indian women I saw around me waxed meticulously. The other primary place where I saw women–the media–was obviously no help either. I suddenly felt like an alien, half-girl, half-man, and this was reinforced by messages around me-mainly by the White girls of my age.

I distinctly remember a White “friend” suggesting to me that I take Nair and apply it on my entire body. Other friends cruelly pointed out the hairs on my fingertips and hands, extending from my wrists, or the light hairs on my lower back when I’m in a crop top, giving me various suggestions on how to remove it. I had a coat of hair, in varying thickness and density, on essentially every part of my body. My eyebrows were two fingers thick, my upper lip clouded by a faint grey shadow of hair–it felt like an unbearable curse.

And the more I tried to resist it, the more the hair seemed to fight back viciously. I tried waxing, shaving, depilatory creams, tweezing, epilating, threading, mixing and matching different methods for different parts of my body–but I simply could not keep up with the rapid growth of my hair. The relentless forces of genetics, puberty, and ethnicity refused to give me what I craved so desperately–to be feminine and normal.

In high school, I developed a skin disease called folliculitis, which essentially caused infections in my follicles everytime I removed body hair. Everytime I waxed or shaved, my skin erupted in boils and red bumps that left dark wine colored scars and ingrown hairs all over my legs, decorating

like polka dots. It was as though my body was protesting this foreign manipulation of its natural state, angry at what was being done to it–fighting this invasion, this colonization, this unprecedented theft of its rightful sovereignty.

I felt like a prisoner of my own skin. While hair seems so easy to fix or remove, an insignificant and controllable issue, this was simply not my reality. And the self-loathing and sentiments of abnormality that haunted me growing up all derived from a violent combination of both patriarchal and colonial forces–a duality that White pseudo-feminists today seem to conveniently forget.

In recent years, body positivity, including body hair positivity, has become a major trend in mainstream feminism.

Bushy, full eyebrows became a trend years ago with Cara Delevingne. Celebrities from Miley Cyrus to Madonna have showed up on red carpets with armpit hair, and some White social media feminists have even dyed their armpit hair different colors! The arguments behind such actions seem fair and innocent enough. After all, any woman defying societal expectations, liberating herself from the male gaze, avoiding the pain, cost and time involved in hair removal, and asserting autonomy by making independent choices about her own body must be on to something.

One of the main issues with feminist body hair is that it is a movement controlled and led by White women at terms suitable to them. Women of color are often excluded from the conversation when it is us who need it the most. Body hair is acceptable when it is delicate, blonde, dancing around a pale armpit with graceful dexterity, careful to never escape a defined area of skin. The manicured suburban garden enclosed by a white picket fence is okay, the mysterious tropical rainforest that grows uncontrollably is not. In other words, White feminists are only fine with body hair that looks like theirs. Many Brown women have hair that exceeds the acceptable boundaries that White women have drawn out.

Our hair is significantly darker, thicker, and exists outside of just the armpit and crotch area. It isn’t pretty, rose-scented or light in color. When we refuse to (or are unable to) remove our hair, we are penalized, shamed and bullied for it, often

by White women. I have yet to see a White body hair positive feminist even acknowledge that some women might have a snail trail, back hair, or stubborn ingrown hairs–hair that is difficult to romanticize and that does not align with Western standards of beauty. In this context, women of color are often alienated and isolated from the feminist body hair movement. We are ignored and invisibilized.

This practice is also dangerous because it is a form of appropriation, white hypocrisy, and frankly, just flat out unfair. White women capitalize on features that we are penalized for. When the Kardashians get lip fillers, wear braids, and have big butts, they are trendy beauty icons, while Black women are mocked and even criminalized for the same- labelled as unprofessional and “ghetto.” White girls in sororities wear bindis to Coachella and fill in their eyebrows, forgetting that they made fun of me for my unruly brows, my strongly scented lunchbox, and my mother’s ethnic clothes.

Women of color do not have the privilege of choosing when we are women of color. We don’t choose when we are or aren’t discriminated against. Our experiences and traditions are not costumes or trends for White women to borrow and

dispose. This appropriation is analogous to the behavior of the Whites who colonized most of the non-White world centuries ago–marveling at the riches and jewels of our lands, looting them, and then mocking us for the poverty that they induced.

For White women to create a body positive movement that is truly transformative, they cannot forget these histories.

It is preposterous for White feminists to believe that their body hair positivity is radical or valid when they fail

“Until women of color can comfortably exist in our own bodies without either punishment or the commodification of our aesthetic by White women in mainstream media, body hair positivity is bullshit.” to acknowledge their role as the Oppressor and blatantly dismiss the significance of intersectionality. It is hypocrisy, appropriation, and yet another way in which women of color are excluded from mainstream feminism because our voices do not benefit white women. White women have consistently participated in the exclusion of women of color in their standards of beauty and have actively shamed us for our appearances–from body hair in Brown women, to natural hair in Black women, to eyelids in East Asian women. Women of color are punished from deviating from the White norm of “beauty” and our bodies are policed in a way that White women’s bodies are not. It is this hypocrisy that makes White women’s claims to body positivity simply laughable.

Until women of color can comfortably exist in our own bodies without either punishment or the commodification of our aesthetic by White women in mainstream media, body hair positivity is bullshit. The feminist body hair movement is yet another reminder that women of color and White women are still playing for different teams. It is a reminder that mainstream feminism was not designed with us in mind.

White feminists seem to have a deep understanding of their oppression without regarding the ways in which they are oppressors (shout out to White female Trump supporters!).

White women are, after all, still White.w

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Gender Politics of a Thanksgiving Turkey

by Annie Fu art by Annika Bjerke

I’m a guest waiting for a piece of turkey at my first AllAmerican Thanksgiving dinner. Everyone is gathered around the table in good fun when I hear a man softly chuckle about “loving a piece of that thigh,” effectively ruining my appetite and my glowing impression of my friend’s uncle Michael. I’ve heard about people using bizarre situations to somehow slip in a joke or a comment personifying their beloved Thanksgiving turkeys—even to the extent of assigning them names and preferred pronouns. Calling the annual turkey by a fun, silly little name like Martha and laughing about how she’s “getting a tan” in the oven is shockingly common across the country—even the White House joins in each year (R.I.P. Drumstick and Wishbone). All the celebrative traditions make it easy to forget about the countless hours we invest in preparing a dry, flavorless animal for a historically questionable holiday. Media outlets also buy into the culture, depicting turkeys as females in TV advertisements that attempt to market them as the poster-children of meat for the sole month of November each year. Complete with sexual innuendos and distasteful overconsumption, America’s annual transition to Thanksgiving season is a period in which harmful gender dynamics become increasingly prevalent in media and, somehow, the most excusable.

The feminization of the vegan movement and the false emphasis on red meat as the only way to achieve the muscular, ideal masculine physique make apparent society’s perception of meat consumption as manly. Meat preparation even turns into a convoluted competition of masculinity: whoever orders the rarest steak scores big points.

Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump somehow found his place in this controversy, sparking internet fury when it was revealed he prefers his steak well-done with a side of ketchup.

“Trump eats his steak well-done with ketchup?? Yeah, a real

man’s man. Why even bother? Order some chicken you pansieass” –Twitter user Jackie Kimble Dixon, a.k.a. @Jacqboo, on February 27, 2017.

Again, media reflects and fuels these sentiments, with burger restaurants marketing to men year round, as exemplified by Carl’s Jr.’s most infamous commercial featuring model Padma Lakshmi strolling through a marketplace with her boobs out, sensually eating a burger. The commercial ironically concludes with the tagline: “More than just a piece of meat.” To the overarching meat-centric culture of America, the burger is a commodity of masculinity considered more than “just a piece of meat;” it’s not quite as clear if the objectified female models and voices are too.

Meat and women somehow become increasingly correlated during the holiday season. Author Carol Adams explores this idea in her book The Sexual Politics of Meat. She cites a holiday ad for organic chicken in which a perfectly bronzed and toasted chicken struts down a street in little chicken high heels and a skimpy chicken-outfit heading out for a wild chicken night out. Yeah, they actually dressed up a chicken and went through the process of animating it to sway its hips, but how does that weigh against the idea of a packaged chicken carcass depicted as a prostitute in order to convey ideas of edibility and desirability? The idea that this advertisement aired on public television across the nation feeds our widespread and problematic notions of comedy and our desensitization to sexual undertones in the context of jolly Thanksgiving cheer. A cookbook called Fifty Shades of Chicken filled with HD photographs of a man with washboard abs tying up a raw chicken for the oven only serves to emphasize these undertones further. The book mixes areas of culture that should arguably never be mixed, feeding into the idea that the preparation of a turkey during the holidays

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must not only ensure that the turkey looks appealing, but also must go so far as to “imply that [the turkey] wants to be consumed,” even if it means pushing symbols of prostitution and sex onto our family dinner. Far removed from the themes of gratitude and celebration for which it is popularly known,

process, and it begins with a slimy, uncomfortably natural turkey body. In order to make the process funny and familyfriendly, she suggests, we attempt to normalize the process by “sexualiz[ing] and feminiz[ing] dead animals who are going to be eaten or consumed” by way of small comments around

“Yeah, they actually dressed up a chicken and went through the process of animating it to sway its hips, but how does that weigh against the idea of a packaged chicken carcass depicted as a prostitute in order to convey ideas of edibility and desirability?”

Thanksgiving season becomes awash with symbolic sexism in companies’ attempts to maximize income.

How did gender dynamics become intertwined with our meat consumption? Adams argues that our preparation of meat helps explain why the personification of meat is such an accepted, effective method of advertising. Handling of meat, especially during the holidays, is viewed as an entire

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the dinner table or during cooking. Our national media outlets accept the reality that meat is in nature unappealing and animalistic, manipulate this potency to seem desirable to men, and capitalize upon it. This process suggests a twisted reality: that the objectification of women is so relatable for the primary meat-consuming demographic that casually stuffing a turkey is used as a marketing punchline. w

Tonya Harding a shining American star

by Jessica Brofsky art by Manon Elise Gros

“There’s no such thing as truth,” says Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding in the biopic I, Tonya. “Everyone has their own truth.”

Twenty-three years after “the whack heard round the world,” when Shane Stant bashed Harding’s rival figure skater Nancy Kerrigan with a collapsible baton slightly above her knee, after Nancy’s repeated, resounding cries asking why, after the sentencing and the backlash, Harding is rising from the ashes of her own downfall. In expanded, detailed narratives incorporating Tonya’s side—in Nanette Burstein’s 30 for 30 ESPN documentary The Price of Gold (2014), in the THNK94 Museum created in 2015 in the passageway of a third floor Brooklyn walkup, in I, Tonya (2017) for which her life rights cost only $1500, in Sufjan Steven’s song “Tonya Harding” (2017), in the two-hour ABC News Special: “Truth and Lies: The Tonya Harding Story” (2018), countless think pieces and interviews—there still are no answers to Nancy Kerrigan’s whys. Officially punished for hindering the prosecution, everyone still believed she was the mastermind behind the attack on Nancy at the entrance to the Detroit Nationals practice ice—planned and carried out by her abusive ex-husband Jeff Gilooly, her moronic bodyguard, Shawn Eckardt, and hitmen, Shane Stant and Derrick Smith. But her relevance now does not center around her culpability or her innocence. We are never going to know what led to the incident on January 6, 1994. After repeating the story for so long, after endless contradictions that were perhaps, as Tafty Brodesser-Akner writes, “spiritually true” for Tonya in that she started to believe her lines, we can finally categorize her indictment in the realm of post-truth— based not on fact but on feeling. “Everyone remembers the incident differently and that’s a fact,” says Gilooly’s character in I, Tonya. If the movie dissolves truth—complicating it with unreliable narrators and overlaid contradictory actions, with Harding’s abuse by her own mother, her own husband, by the United States Figure Skating Association (USFSA), by the media—it is because there was no truth in the case to begin with.

I wasn’t born until a year and a half after this scandal, but I grew up in its shadow. In competitions Nancy Kerrigan had represented the club I skated for, Colonial FSC, out of Boxborough, MA, and her picture still hangs proudly, framed and signed in the entryway of the rink. Chad Brennan— national competitor, Colonial FSC coach, and the body double for Will Ferrell in Blades of Glory (2007)—was home with a broken ankle at ten-and-a-half years old when he heard the news. After that at the rink and elsewhere, they were Team Nancy. In the myth I was told, a descendant of

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the myth the media spun, Tonya got what she deserved: an excommunication from the world of figure skating.

Famous before the incident for being the first U.S. woman to land a triple axel (at the 1991 National Championships) and for being the best jumper the U.S. has ever seen to this day, she was also rough around the edges: scrappy, powerful, athletic, considered a “tomboy” and “white trash.” She cursed; her hair was unkempt; she wore homemade dresses with tacky sequins; she wasn’t graceful. She was poor; she came from a broken family. As Brennan says, “It’s an elitist sport, and the officials want prim and proper princesses and princes. Tonya didn’t play the part.” And neither did Midori Ito, who was the first woman to land a triple axel in competition and was athletic much like Harding. Neither did Surya Bonaly, a black French skater, who didn’t have the typical slender frame of figure skaters and who dared to do illegal backflips on the ice. The judges, who most likely influenced and were influenced by the Western media’s racist and disparaging perception of her as a non-standard, inelegant figure skater, often skewed her scores. Even though Nancy was also from a blue-collar family, she played the part. Her parents loved and supported her, even remortgaged their house. She had expensive dresses designed by Vera Wang. She got her teeth fixed. She was poised. So Nancy got the sponsorships and Tonya still had broken American dreams.

Before the incident, the image-oriented USFSA and International Skating Union (ISU) tried to hinder Harding’s progress at every turn, manipulating her marks in the unforgivably subjective 6.0 judging system. There was already a lack of truth budding in her scores, at odds with the narratives of her performances. The International Judging System (IJS), formed in 2004 to “cure” the 6.0 judging system, awards technical scores for elements—from their base values and grades of execution (GOEs)—and program component scores for skating skills, transitions, performance, composition, and interpretation of the music/timing. But the judges still tinker with the imprecision of program component scores and GOEs, still load them with bias. This past Olympic qualifying season saw the absurd decrease in outspoken veteran Ashley Wagner’s program component scores, the area in which she excels the most, at Nationals, but the judges and the Olympic committee had their own agenda. The USFSA and ISU had their own agenda for Tonya, too.

A slew of other ‘90s tabloid jokes—like Monica Lewinsky and Marcia Clark (the lead prosecutor in OJ’s trial)—are being retold, their histories retraced in light of their victimization.

Tonya’s fame jumped from love to hate, eventually transforming her into a verb: a form of kneecapping inseparable from the act

“‘I was a liar to everybody but still, 23 years later, finally everybody can just eat crow.’” on January 6, 1994. She was demonized, called every possible name, made into a caricature of a madwoman and America’s punching bag: “You name it, it’s been done to me,” she said.

After the abuse and after beginning a new life as Tonya Price, her association with the Me Too movement revolves around the need for reevaluation, for embracing the nuance of circumstance and identity politics. It revolves around undoing the rigid cartoon-like binary opposition of Nancy and Tonya as if they were Betty and Veronica, or in movie Tonya’s words “a princess” and “a pile of crap”—because “America: they want someone to love, but they want someone to hate.” As if there were clearcut victims and perpetrators, as if that’s how the world works.

I, Tonya may be overly forgiving of Harding in how it nearly exonerates her.

In the documentary Sharp Edges (1986) made by Harding’s childhood friend Sandra Luckow while at Yale, when asked if she thinks Tonya was involved, she answers: “Of course.” She had motivation; she was linked to the perpetrator; she wrote a note with Kerrigan’s skating arena and phone number found in the dumpster behind her house; and at this point, she very well may not know reality from fiction. USFS (who dropped the A), however, still has not commented on the film to condone or criticize it—afraid it will tarnish their reputation. Additionally, amongst the celebrity contestants on Dancing with the Stars this season, according to ABC, are three figure skaters: Adam Rippon, Mirai Nagasu, and Tonya Harding; but USFS lists only two on their website Icenetwork. Within its insular sphere, they have erased her.

Similar to how U.S. Gymnastics ignored allegations of sexual assault against the team doctor Larry Nassar, USFS dismissed accusations of abuse by Richard Callaghan, who coached Olympic figure skaters Tara Lipinski and Todd Eldredge. But with the momentum of Me Too—and the commitment to telling the stories of Callaghan’s victims, and in a different way, the stories of Tonya Harding, of Midori Ito, of Surya Bonaly, and the stories of every scandal USFS has tried to cover up— their institutional erasure of sexual assault and, distinctly, their erasure of persons is becoming more transparent; the movement is opening up a space to see full lives underneath.

“I was a liar to everybody but still, 23 years later, finally everybody can just eat crow,” Tonya told the New York Times. “That’s what I have to say.” We are too late for her

anyway. Skating was her life. It was all she had, and when the Association barred her for life as part of her sentence—not only from competing but essentially from a career of coaching or of skating in the Ice Capades—they took it all away: “a life sentence,” Tonya says in the movie. Tonya was 23 at the time of the incident. It took another 23 years for people to listen, and at that point she wasn’t even asking them to. But her story and her silencing was never just about Tonya; she was always a constellation of truths. w

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Some Meat on Your Bones the delicate and dangerous dance of linking body weight with personality

by Anna Lee

For as long as I can remember—and even before then— I have always been a big person. Not in the metaphorical, take-the-high-road sense, but in the literal sense, in terms of size. I was a nine-pound baby, healthy and blue-eyed and big, the biggest of my family. Growing up, no one ever believed how old I was. At five years old, I towered above all the other kids at our kindergarten variety show. At ten, movie theater clerks questioned my age, thinking I was an older kid trying to get a cheaper ticket. At twelve, friends of my parents would often mistake me for my seventeen-year-old sister.

In other words, when you grow up big, you grow up fast.

You grow up differently from other kids. In reality, I was a normal kid—a high BMI, sure, but healthy: I played sports and ate a well-rounded diet. But compared to the impossibly tiny kids around me, I felt huge. This bodily fact set the course for how I formed a sense of self as I grew up, learning the rules of the limited social roles available for the chubby kid of the group.

In elementary school, I played with the boys. I garnered nicknames like “gentle giant.” I took on the role of “bodyguard” for my best friend. As I grew older I learned a slew of euphemisms for my body type, some meant to be compliments, which evolved with age: “Soft, heavy, healthy, big-boned, big girl, curvy, plus-size, full-bodied, real woman, more to love.”

When kids would call me fat, the one word that (in my mind) could not be rectified, one of my common retorts was: “Well, at the end of the world, you’ll starve before I do.” I had reserves, I would explain. My body, a classmate had told me, would consume itself before collapsing of hunger at the theoretical end of the world. But there’s always a comeback for the fat kid in the class. “Well, you’ll be weighed down and run slower,” they’d say, or something along those lines.

I dreaded when weight would come up in social situations. For some reason, my classmates loved to compare the extraordinary nature of their size – “I’m 85 pounds. Wow, I wonder if Lewis is over 100?” In third grade, my class went on a field trip to a boat in the South Street Seaport. The captain wanted to distribute our weight evenly so that we could all hold onto the ropes. I remember him laughing, saying, “Well, none of you kids are over 100 pounds!”. I stood there quietly embarrassed, hoping no one would bring attention to my size.

When I went to camp the summer after sixth grade, my randomly-assigned bed was a top bunk. I looked at it anxiously, imagining the metal mesh net beneath the mattress sinking so low as to suffocate my lower bunk mate. My mom went over to my counselor, gestured to me, and the counselor nodded. “Alright,” she said, “You can take the bottom bunk.”

As I got to be a pre-teen and my body became increasingly sexualized, I would often hear that guys like a girl with some meat on her bones. I remember my older brother telling me that the guys he knew liked girls who could eat; that if I was ever out on a date with somebody I didn’t have to stifle my appetite. I didn’t have to perform daintiness. I could get the cheeseburger and skip the salad, because it was endearing; it was real. I know he meant this in total support of who I was—a girl who liked cheeseburgers much more than salads.

But I would come to realize that this idea was complicated, because it cast judgement on girls who weren’t like me.

It made it seem like it was cool to eat a lot, and uncool to eat less. So I grew to equate personality with size. Skinny was boring, fat was interesting. Skinny was foreign, fat was familiar. Fat was not just what I was, it was who I was. And it wasn’t always a bad thing—but it was a constant reality.

“So I grew to equate personality with size. Skinny was boring, fat was interesting. Skinny was foreign, fat was familiar.”

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“When

you are big, your body becomes a public

commodity. The world has a way of making you feel like your body belongs to everyone but you.”

I was always careful about what I ate when I ate with friends. I didn’t want to be seen eating more than my friends, for fear that people would think, “See, no wonder she’s fat.”

But I didn’t want to eat less either, for fear that people would notice and think, “See, she has to watch what she eats.” For a while I was ashamed to be seen going to the gym, because I saw it as an admission of guilt—a self-affirmed inadequacy.

A spectacle of effort to change, to shed, to correct what was wrong.

In middle and high school, I relied on my sense of humor to make friends. Middle school was harder because kids were meaner, each one (no matter their size) likely entangled in their own body crises, just trying to find someone else to ridicule. I always tried to be nice to people, so that people wouldn’t have a reason to be mean to me. I knew that if they wanted to be, it wouldn’t be hard. I felt I was skating on thin ice, walking around in a body weighed down by the potential for emotional havoc, insult built-in the skin.

By the time I got to high school, this feeling slightly dissipated, thanks to the people I was lucky to be able to surround myself with each day. But the feeling didn’t disappear completely. As recent as last year, as a freshman in college, a friend I’d made during orientation poked me in the stomach at a party and laughed. I looked at her, hurt and confused. She never gave any explanation, because none was needed. We were both in on the joke, and it was a familiar one.

When you are big, your body becomes a public commodity. The world has a way of making you feel like your body belongs to everyone but you. When walking home from a concert with three of my friends in high school, a man started walking with us, following us for blocks, telling us how he saw us in explicit terms. To my petite blonde friend: “You’re like Cinderella;”; to me: “You’re like a double stuffed sugar cookie.”

In ninth grade volleyball practice, our coach would make us do push-ups whenever we messed up, holding the potential for muscle gain over us as a form of punishment.

She’d say, “Try again. You want to keep those arms nice and slim for the boys, right?” This reinforced the idea that, in my high school and the world, you had to be thin to be desirable.

Any deviation from that was a deviation from beauty.

When I first started writing this article, I was tasked with remembering all the pieces of memories that I would usually try to forget. I found myself scribbling line after line into my notebook, each story reminding me of another. But the anec-

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dotes which I’ve shared here, harmful as they might seem, are actually extremely valuable to me. They made me who I am. Without them, I don’t think I would be as happy with the person I’ve become. I’m not sure if, had I not been a tall, big, freckle-faced kid, I would’ve made the long-time friends I cherish now.

Now that I’m in college, I recognize—as more and more students do—that part of trying to live my best life is eating healthy foods and exercising. I feel pressure to get in shape and stay that way. But as I navigate these conceptions of self and the ways in which my experiences with my body have determined who I am today, I find myself facing a dilemma: does exercising toward a goal of fitness inherently involve a rejection of the self I have grown up as? Does this “meat on my bones” offer a form a protection—whether it be from unwanted sexual attention or inauthentic friendship—that I’m not ready to give up? Can I love myself and yet still crave change? If my body changes, will I still be me?w

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