Kitsch Magazine: Fall 2014

kitsch vol. 13 no. 1

FEATURING: A CONVERSATION WITH DANIEL HANDLER (A.K.A. LEMONY SNICKET)

inside: THE PROBLEM WITH “STRONG WOMEN” CAPITALISM ‘S CO-OPTING OF FEMINISM

thankfully blessed: AN EXPLORATION OF “BASIC BITCHES” FASHION’S CASTE SYSTEM: the unbearable whiteness of wealth

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llege, haca Co or It d n a y it ed co ll Univers ot review at Corne blication was n niversity, Ithaca d te a c pu n lo ll U anizatio f Corne on. This dent org of this publicati s or opinions o tu s t n e tent olicie pend the con ct the p tatives. an inde gazine, responsible for express or refle nated represen a m h c s kit cessarily eir desig d and is produce y, nor does it ne College, or th b d approve

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in this issue 5 6

Letter from the Editor The Dos and Don’ts of Body Postive Anthems 8 Cocaine: A Cure for Social Media Fatigue 9 In Defense of the Pumpkin Spice Latte 10 Not What Kind of Girl? A Review

12 13 15 18

19 23 26 28 31

35 38

42

44 46

On the Plaza Office Space: Masha Raskolnikov Listening to Swift in Shithaca Booty in a Hopeless Place: Tinder in Ithaca Theatre at Cornell Genderlect: The Power of Language Fashion’s Caste System The Problem with “Strong Women” Thankfully Blessed: An Exploration of Basic Bitches The Politics of Lipstick The NFL and the Rise of Social Justice Sports Journalism The Illicit Interview: A Conversation with Daniel Handler TFA: The White Girl’s Burden The Craft of Being Martha

48 50 53 56 58 60 62 66 68

It’s Not a Scandal, It’s a Sex Crime A History of the Gay Joke Marilyn Monroe: The Fetish Manic Pixie Dream Girls: A Retrospective Marvel’s Not-so-Improved Avengers The Secret Life of the American Moonchild The Bechdel Test Revisited Kris Kidd and 21st Century America The Dawn of the Female Superhero

70 71 72 73

Fiction by Ariella Reidenberg A Poem by Dave Shaw Fiction by Scott Chuisano A Poem by Anna Brenner

MEET THE EDITORS editor in chief kaitlyn tiffany

managing editor mo rahman

“I am happy that the boy bands are happy.”

“Canadians are generally better.”

“Orange is the new cat.”

zooming in editor yana lysenko

zooming out editor katie o’brien

art editor thelonia saunders

“This notebook says only, Pacific Rim: The Musical” zooming out editor nate coderre

“Foamhenge: where a foam’s a foam...” bite size editor alyssa berdie

“butt buddies”

“crunchy leaf time holla”

watch & listen editor aurora rojer

“Occupy Facebook with pictures of Steve Buscemi” head copy editor arielle cruz

“i voted.”

design editor karen tsai

“Don’t be a sesquipedalian.” watch & listen editor anna brenner

“Struggling to find the ukulele chords to my 6th grade masterpiece.”

editor emeritus

“a gnome is a knome”

“That’s what I want you to make me feel like, baby, a white woman. A white woman who’s getting out of your Mercedes-Benz and going into Gucci to buy me some new drawers because you wrecked them. Just fabulous.”

Another line of Hilton Als’ which I will never forget comes from his response to the criticism that was shoveled at Lena Dunham’s Girls when it first aired. In a short piece for the New Yorker, he stated that he was worried about white people, who are “attacked for that which they cannot help — their whiteness — and that which they can help — their whiteness.” This concern is left unexplained, but if I were to hazard a guess I would say that Als sees America as becoming overwhelmed by the idea of identity. We are unsure of the appropriate proportions for our shame and for our righteous anger — who is to blame for how white I am, how much I have? who is to blame for how female I am, how much I don’t have? — and we are unsure of whether we have been created or if we are creating ourselves.

Every member of the kitsch’s fall 2014 editorial board is, by chance, either white or a girl. The white girl is, collectively, the identity that we know best. We went to middle school with white girls; we were raised by white girls. Our celebrities are white girls; our professors are white girls. And we are interested in exactly what this means.

To this end, Sean Doolittle and Aurora Rojer examine the corrupting power of white feminism, in examinations of Marilyn Monroe fetishism (p. 53) and the “strong, independent woman” stereotype (p. 28), respectively. Curious about what it means to write and speak as a woman, Katie O’Brien looks at the gendered conventions of language (p. 21), Emma Court looks at representation through the lens of the Bechdel Test (p. 62) and the recently retracted “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” trope (p. 56) and Yana Lysenko enters the office space of Cornell professor Masha Raskolnikov (p. 13) in order to learn about “how women and their bodies and their smells are all on the verge of being monstrous in a sexist society.”

There usually isn’t a clear image for the issue until about this time each semester (four days before deadline), but now that it’s all coming into focus it is obvious that most of our ideas for how to write about white girls were related to talking about the way that they are seen. Melvin Li explores the term “basic bitches” (p.32), who it describes, and to what end; I muse on the politics of lipstick and how the application of makeup can become an act of self-empowerment (p.36); Alejandra Alvarez deconstructs our unexamined disdain for white girl celebrities, including Shailene Woodley and Anne Hathaway (p.60), and Arielle Cruz takes the road less travelled, looking at how pornography shapes sexual imagination and fantasies of womanhood (p. 64).

When The New York Times reviewed Als’ 2013 essay collection, White Girls, they called it not a masterpiece but an overwhelming “orgy — or gluttony — of insights.” Als’ collection contained portraits of Marshall Mathers, Scarlett O’Hara, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Pryor’s sister, Michael Jackson, Truman Capote and André Leon Talley, among others, all of whom he considered “white girls” in one sense of the term, or another. Truman Capote declared himself the best woman author of his generation, in Als’ mind. Scarlett O’Hara sadistically demanded the love and admiration of the black men whom she “had the power to lynch.” Marshall Mathers is like a white girl in that “he never claimed whiteness and its privileges as his birthright because he didn’t feel white and privileged.”

Though the Times meant it as a criticism, here at kitsch there is nothing we like better than an insight orgy. White girls, in our conception of them, are often but not always literally white and female, but rather, they are those who affect a certain privileged delicateness and a quietly simmering sense of indignation — culturally longed for and culturally despised. What follows is our portrait of them.

— Kaitlyn Tiffany, Editor in Chief, Fall 2014

letter from the editor

The DOs & DON’Ts of BODY POSITIVE ANTHEMS

BY Alyssa Berdie ART BY Thelonia Saunders I have two questions: Have you heard the new pop hit, “All About That Bass” by Meghan Trainor? I’m assuming the answer is yes. Next, have you heard the song “Body Love”

by Mary Lambert? I’m assuming the answer is no. “All About That Bass,” is being labeled and praised as the body positive song our generation of young women has been needing by popular media. Unfortunately, this is so false.

If you break down the lyrics of the song, you will find the many flaws that are being heard all over America (and I’m sure elsewhere). Lyrics such as: “Cause I got that boom boom that all the boys chase” and “Yeah, my mama she told me don’t worry about your size. She says boys like a little more booty to hold at night.” These lyrics continue to perpetuate the societal notation that women’s bodies are acceptable only under the standards of what men like. Therefore, male acceptance is crucial to a female’s self-worth and body image.

Additionally, Trainor isn’t “fat” or even above a size that isn’t

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still considered sexually attractive by popular culture. This isn’t the body positive anthem for the women who are a size eight and above. It’s an anthem for the women who aren’t a size two or four, but are simply above the impossible standard of what is constantly seen Photoshop-ed in magazines. It’s for the women who have big boobs and a big ass, or in Trainor’s words, “…all the right junk in all the right places.” So what seems like a body positive message is actually an extremely exclusionary song for a very specific woman. No flat-assed size sixes or small breasted size twelves. And of course, even if you do fit the Trainor standard, if a man isn’t chasing you then her statements no longer apply to you.

Let’s not forget the most problematic lyrics in the song: “I’m bringing booty back. Go ahead and tell them skinny bitches that. No, I’m just playing. I know you think you’re fat but I’m here to tell ya every inch of you is perfect from the bottom to the top.” First of all, Trainor is not “bringing booty back,”

just like Iggy Azalea and Miley Cyrus didn’t usher in an “era of big booty” (why Vogue, why!?), big booties have always been here. Big butts, as Kara Brown of Jezebel perfectly states, are a “trait that has been present and celebrated in black and Latino communities in America since basically forever.”

Trainor isn’t bringing booty back because it’s been here for decades, and she is only aiding the new white-washed “Big Booty Era” that completely excludes women of color.

Secondly, I find it disappointing that Trainor would choose the word “bitches” as opposed to, I don’t know … any other word. This is completely counter-productive. As women we need to take a stand against the words that have long been used to demean us — words like “slut,” “whore” and “bitch” and stop using them against other women. The more we use it against each other the more okay it is for men to use it against us as well.

Trainor made a statement in an interview with Billboard in regards to “skinny bitches,” saying it was a “simple joke,” and in the end she was acknowledging the struggle skinny women have as well. Though I’m glad to hear she wasn’t intentionally skinny-shaming, as blogger Jenny Trout says, “Saying what you really think, followed by ‘just kidding,’ is the most passive aggressive move on the planet… it’s a chance for the speaker to say whatever they want while forcing the target of the insult to accept what’s being said in good humor.” If you are writing a song to empower and spread body-positivity to all women then there is no reason to call out a group and put them down. Simply, Trainor insults literally all women in just two lines of her song.

Songs like Trainor’s “All About That Bass” give young women and girls the wrong idea of what it is to love your body.

Heteronormative and misogynist messages wrapped in

“Heteronormative and misogynist messages wrapped in pastel music videos and catchy pop beats are not what we need in our already heteronormative and misogynist media.”

pastel music videos and catchy pop beats are not what we need in our already heteronormative and misogynist media.

Like me, you might want to say, “Well at least songs like this are starting a dialogue of what is really feminist and body positive.” However, what we need to realize is that there are songs and other media attached to amazing artists that are actually about body positivity for all women (and even men).

These songs send powerful feminist messages that should be flooding our popular culture, but of course these songs don’t make it to the mainstream.

If you’re unaware of who Mary Lambert is, she is the featuring artist on Macklemore’s “Same Love.” Though I’m sure you forgot about her after Macklemore became the straight savior for all gay people (thank you Macklemore, I can finally be myself because you said so!). A fun fact about Lambert is that she is actually gay. Lambert is a 25 yearold singer-songwriter, spoken-word poet, gay rights activist and feminist goddess from Seattle, Washington. Lambert does not fit into the impossible media standards or Trainor standards for women and has been a voice for plus sized women for years. Her latest EP “Welcome to the Age of My Body,” features incredibly powerful, inclusive body positive songs. Though you can argue that “Body Love” may only target the size eight-plus woman, that’s okay and very different from the exclusionary message in “All About That Bass.” Lambert doesn’t attack, or even mention skinny women. She isn’t putting anyone down for the body they have. She is simply singing to and for the women whose bodies have been continually ridiculed and even hated in our popular culture.

If you’re still not convinced, here’s a peek: You are worth more than who you fuck You are worth more than a waistline You are worth more than beer bottles displayed like drunken artifacts.

You are worth more than any naked body could proclaim in the shadows, More than a man’s whim or your father’s mistake You are no less valuable as a size 16 than a size 4 You are no less valuable as a 32a than a 36c Your sexiness is defined by concentric circles within your wood It is wisdom You are a goddamn tree stump with leaves sprouting out Reborn So why isn’t Lambert in our popular culture? Why is “Body Love” not the song you hear on the radio 40 times a day?

Perhaps it’s because artists like Mary Lambert and her song “Body Love” are going against the heteronormative, misogynist popular beliefs that surround our popular culture.

Possibly it’s because the music itself isn’t being made to have a catchy beat, and lyrics that play on repeat in your head — instead her music is made to have a message. Mary Lambert, herself, is a queer, tattooed, plus-sized woman preaching for women to love themselves, no matter what mold they fit into.

And that is just too much for pop-culture to swallow. It’s not cute enough. It’s not skinny enough. But it could be what changes our popular culture. It could be what saves many young women from depression and even suicide. So if you want to hear an insanely powerful song with a strong body positive message, try “Body Love.” ♢

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COCAINE:

THE CURE FOR SOCIAL MEDIA FATIGUE Do you find yourself getting exhausted after hours spent scrolling through your various newsfeeds every day? Do you have piles of money lying around in yellow bags with thick black dollar signs on them, just like that emoji I know you’re thinking of? Have you ever been curious about cocaine (like, just a little curious? Not enough to be concerning, but like, enough)? And finally, do you ever wish you could check your social media accounts continuously throughout the day, never once stopping to take a probably much-needed break?

If you answered yes to all of the previously listed questions, prepare to have your mind blown with something having to do with blow!

Recently, while sitting atop my piles of money, not unlike Scrooge McDuck in the critically acclaimed animated series Ducktales, I was catching up on social media and suddenly became aware of how severely fatigued I was. You’re probably thinking that I was tired after climbing my mammoth mountain of money, but that cannot be the source of my exhaustion. I climb that mountain every day and it’s actually the only form of exercise I enjoy.

That’s when I realized that I was so tired from looking at all of my social media! It was exhausting and it wore me out. Some mornings I could barely get out of bed. I spent hours scrolling through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine, Snapchat, mindlessly absorbing myriad boring, cringe-inducing posts about pumpkins, lattes, and pumpkin spiced lattes until my eyes felt like they were going to bleed. I thought, “I wish there was something I could do to increase my newsfeed stamina.” It was only after looking at Instagram, staring at all the pictures, reading everyone’s various posts about how they “literally can’t” and how they’re “#overit” did I realize that I, too, literally couldn’t anymore and was becoming #overit.

My thumbs were getting tired. Carpal tunnel was setting in. I was slowly but surely becoming unable to continue. Had I reached my social media breaking point? It felt like it, but I was not about to accept that. I needed something to kick me back into gear. And just entertaining the idea of possibly no longer being connected to my social media induced a sense of fear that I can only assume is similar to how people who fear clowns feel about the latest season of American Horror Story.

I was about to give up. I could feel my knuckles starting to fail me.

But then I scrolled through Tumblr one final time, and that’s when

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a satirical suggestion for ithacan millennials

BY Sydney Morin ART BY Karen Tsai

I saw it. Glowing before me was a sponsored postBY — KAREN you know,TSAI that ART new thing that Tumblr does where the Illuminati running it post anything of significance on your feed? — posted by “Cocaine.” It was a text post (I guess you can’t upload a picture of hardcore drugs? #LAME) that read “Get that extra bump you need to blow through life.” What an adorable play on words!

It was like the gods of Tumblr had sent me a message. Actually, it was like they sent me a direct message on Twitter, which is unanimously agreed upon by social media scholars to be the most direct method of communication. I had never tried or purchased cocaine before (#LAME), but I’d only heard great things about it from all of my peers who also have a surplus of moneybags.

I read the comments on Cocaine’s picture.

“It’s super expensive but, like, what isn’t these days, lol!”

“I’ve heard it’s really addicting but, like, so is gluten, lol!”

“Apparently ‘coke-nose-bleeds’ are the hottest trend this fall … lol! #BuhbyePumpkin.”

I was hooked already and I hadn’t even done it yet! Next, I commented on Cocaine’s picture and said that I would like to purchase some. A few minutes later, a plastic baggie filled with white powder was delivered to my doorstep (because that’s how the Internet works). I acquired the substance just in time. I was falling asleep with my phone glued to my face (#LAMEST). Since I had never dabbled in the world of cocaine before that moment, I guesstimated the correct amount to take. I did this by emptying a Pixy Stix straw, filling it up with cocaine, and then pouring that directly into my throat. The result of this felt like I had emptied four to five hundred regular Pixy Stix into my throat. ALSO MY BRAIN STARTED THINKING ONLY IN CAPS-LOCK. My knuckles rose from the dead, my thumbs furiously scrolled through my feeds, my eyes demonically twitched from the abundance of cocaine pumping through my blood. All was well!

After suffering from only minor panic attacks, health problems and unstoppable twitching, I can confidently recommend using cocaine to boost your social media stamina with a solid two thumbs (shaking uncontrollably) way up!

IN DEFENSE OF PUMPKIN S P I C E L AT T E S

BY Emma Court It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was Pumpkin Spice Latte season. And this year, it came early. For aliens, unicorns or those fictional persons who have never been to a Starbucks, a quick primer on this all-too-important subject: The acronym is PSL, it’ll set you back four bucks at the very least, it tastes like a pumpkin pie in a cup and it’s only acceptable to love ironically.

Think of it as the autumnal Skinny Vanilla Latte — beloved by a certain sushi-loving, Lululemon legging-wearing segment of the population, ungenerously termed “betches.” It is best consumed after a SoulCycle class, on the streets of Park Avenue or while shrieking “Eh mah gawd, is it Thanksgiving already?”

If you’re in the not-so-profitable business of judging people by their coffee drink of choice, then you know that ordering the Pumpkin Spice Latte merits a latte of hate. But lest you dismiss PSL critics with, in the words of the ever-wise Taylor Swift, “haters gonna hate hate hate,” I’ll admit there are a few reasons to crash on the caffeinated beverage. For one, a lot of people really love PSLs, which is a good reason to hate it. Not to mention, in the ultimate trick of Halloween season, there’s no pumpkin in the darn drink, just the spices used in pumpkin pie — I guess Spice Latte didn’t have the same ring to it. And, oh gosh, apparently it’s got a lot of chemicals in the mix there too. Not to mention Starbucks promotes it on its website with the slogan, “The days are getting shorter. And better.” Can you say leaf it alone? Hipsters everywhere are offended by the ubiquity of the PSL and its popularizing of burnt orange, which was supposed to be their thing this year. Plus, over 29,000 people have tweeted about it — 140 insipid characters, typically followed by #pumpkinspiceeverything, one of the most revolting hashtags of all time. Is it too much to ask that your hashtags actually mean something? Can you say #soover #pumpkinspice?

ART BY Karen Tsai

But let’s step outside the pumpkin mania that has overtaken every form of social media and every coffee shop and magazine cover.

Clear your head. Take a deep breath, and a deeper sip of the PSL I know you have in your hand. The delicious pumpkin-y sweetness, that kick of cinnamon, the sprinkle of nutmeg (maybe some cloves too), topped off by some light and airy whipped cream. It’s all the taste of the holiday season without the yearly, much-agonized choice between the kids’ or the adults’ table, obligatory chitchat with family members about how quickly those college years fly by, the overstuffed stomachs, postmortem about who made the best food and debating whether the turkey was just a little dry. Forget #pumpkinspiceeverything, forget the 300 Instagrams of coffee cups captioned “Pumpkin Spice season <3” and forget that you could pay for your college tuition if you got a dollar each time you heard the letters PSL. It’s just a delicious drink, it makes you happy and it lets you know that it’s autumn. Admitting that wasn’t so bad, was it? And if liking things other people like makes you basic, so be it. But hey, if anyone calls you out for drinking it, cover the letters PSL with your hand and tell them it’s just coffee. Black, of course.

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NOT

WHAT KIND OF

BY Kaitlyn Tiffany “There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman. As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren’t needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter.”

So begins Lena Dunham’s much-anticipated memoir. Sure, this introduction by Dunham is a little self-important and not entirely self-aware — there aren’t many who would argue that Dunham lacks the “gravitas” to write a memoir. Love her or hate her, I’m certain she could have published this book just about anywhere, and received similar in-the-millions advances to do so. She is a central part of American culture as it stands. But, she is right — to write as a woman is a political act, as Roxane Gay so famously stated in 2011. In her landmark essay for HTMLGIANT, Gay proposed that the reason for Congress’ actions in 2011 which sought to limit the reproductive rights of women and their ability to make decisions regarding their own bodies was at least in part rooted in the fact that stories of women’s experiences are still not readily available in mainstream culture. It’s not that women aren’t writing them, or that they aren’t writing them well, but that our culture still doesn’t place a high value on them. We still don’t consider them universal and important, but rather niche and occasionally intriguing.

The cover of Dunham’s memoir is styled after Nora Ephron’s trademark book cover aesthetic, and there is a dedication written to Ephron as well. Ephron, although perhaps best known for her romantic comedies starring Meg Ryan, is also a towering example of graceful radicalism. In 1972, she penned the essay, “A Few Words About Breasts,” for her column in Esquire, asserting that femininity was entirely a performance,

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GIRL?

taught as early as “in grammar school, in the fifth and sixth grades, [when] we were all tyrannized by a rigid set of rules that supposedly determined whether we were boys or girls.”

She talks about faking her period to seem more womanly, about knowing that the way that you looked down at your fingernails had to be one way for girls and one way for boys and about wanting more than anything in the world to grow breasts that would eradicate the androgyny she so despised in her appearance. Other columns include a lambasting of her alma mater, Wellesley, for creating “a generation of docile and unadventurous women,” a piece on vaginal douching, which has since been removed from the Esquire archives, and a evisceration of Women’s Wear Daily, which prompted threats of a lawsuit. Ephron’s feminism was deeply personal and aggressively political, and it was, like Dunham’s, a little bit selfish and not especially reaching at times.

It’s best to isolate the book from what you know about its author and read it simply as a coming of age tale. Its candor is at times shocking and at others,incomplete.There is a detectable tendency to hide behind jokes or quirky synopses of uncomfortable events, which Dunham even manages to acknowledge later in the book when retelling the story of a traumatizing sexual experience that she had initially glazed over in her capacity as a self-dubbed “unreliable narrator.” Sometimes this is a defense mechanism, other times it feels like an affectation.

So many criticisms of Lena Dunham are entirely valid, and I can list them here: Number one being that it seems damnnear impossible that a person could be raised in Manhattan, schooled at a liberal arts institution and belong to that great big community of artists and yet still not cast one person of color, one person of non-Aryan-whiteness, in her supposedly realer-than-Real-World television show. Despite her claim that

A YOUNG WOMAN ON WHAT ANOTHER YOUNG WOMAN “LEARNED” Girls is meant to represent a bunch of struggling Millennials, what it largely portrays is a bunch of barely-employed people who somehow still get to live in totally gorgeous apartments.

This fall, when she faced massive backlash for neglecting to offer compensation to the local talent acts who would perform with her on her book tour (tickets to which were 38 dollars a pop, not to mention her 3.7 million dollar book advance), she offered apologies which were polite enough but 1) offered via Twitter and 2) seemed to explain the oversight by essentially saying, “Yeah, I forgot not everyone is rich and only does work for fun.” Her book does nothing to address these criticisms (although the latter wouldn’t really have been possible, chronologically), and barely even acknowledges that her work has been received divisively at all, excepting for some stray comments about the issue of her own nudity on the show and this line: “One student warns me that there is a protest planned outside my lecture tonight, though she can’t seem to explain exactly what it’s about.” I suppose that’s her prerogative.

In any case, you should parse the bullshit to get to the surefooted relationship talk with parents, siblings, and significant others. Dunham claims that her mother invented the selfie with a photography project in the ’80s in which she photographed every part of her body and face relentlessly for months, saying, “My mother understood, implicitly, the power of it. See these hips, these teeth, these eyebrows, these stockings that bunch and sag at the ankles? They’re worth capturing, holding on to forever. I’ll never be this young again. Or this lonely.

Or this hairy.” After chapter upon chapter of semi-abusive, or at least totally idiotic, boyfriends, Dunham settles into domestic bliss with a special dude and says, “I have written many sentences about how the first time we made love it felt like dropping my keys on the table after a long trip.” She

explains that the best relationship is the one in which the other person encourages you to sleep — convinces you that “your day was rich enough and now it is time to wind down.”

Dunham is more elegant when she’s raging instead of dancing — against the fact that no one but her parents believed that her male teacher was inappropriate towards her, against the boyfriend whose prose belied “an essential disdain for womankind that was neither examined nor explained,” against the men in powerful positions in her industry who talked down to her, against men who used her bed and her body and yet could still not summon the ability to treat her like a human being. Because we’re past the point of excusing anyone’s actions based on “the culture they were raised in,” Dunham expresses the appropriate anger towards individuals, assigning these actions of sexism, abuse of power, and basic indecency to actors and sparing them no shame.

In 2000, Dave Eggers changed the game of memoir forever with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius — the might of the work coming not least of all from its assertion that a person who had never written a major work, nor done anything of significance in the public eye, nor possessed anything like a true human interest story, might be justified in writing his own autobiography before he had written anything else. Eggers’ parents died within months of each other in the early ’90s, leaving him, a college student, to raise his younger brother.

Eggers and his brother, he says, spent those years “greedily cartwheeling, toward everything we [were] owed.’’ Not That Kind of Girl is, of course, written by a celebrity. But it is written by a woman who has made her fame by telling stories that are not-so-subtly about herself. Regardless of any other criticism you have of Dunham — that counts for something. ♢

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The Ugly Truth: The Naughty Rom-Com is made Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: with a mimosa with Malibu, Katherine Hiegl’s Malt liquor with a dash of bong tears over her failed career, and cherry jello. water Marissa T. ‘15 Aurora R. ‘17 Slumdog Millionare: A drink that turns the rich poor and makes the poor feel rich! $10,000 campari, cardamom-infused vermouth and Russian standard vodka stirred with fresh orange wedges and topped with soda.

Borat: Distilled kumis — which is fermented horse milk as well as the national beverage of Kazakhstan — spilled on the tile floor of a McDonalds, sopped up with old tighty-whiteys and then wrung out into an Uncle Sam tophat.

Liz C. ‘14 Zach Z. ‘15

“IF YOU WERE GOING TO INVENT A COCKTAIL INSPIRED BY THE FIRST RATED-R MOVIE YOU SAW IN THEATERS,

WHAT WOULD BE IN IT?” Pulp Fiction: Farm-style Tropicana orange juice with a dash of cocaine (but it’s really heroin), served without a straw. Garnish with the Book of Genesis. Alternatively, overpay for a milkshake.

Passion of the Christ: Red wine, vinegar, and like, a little bit of blood.

Kaitlyn T. ‘15 Forgetting Sarah Marshall: A coconut cordial with white whisps of quaalude powder. And sliced pineapple on the rim (a courtesy for your rebound).

James R. ‘14 Katie O. ‘16

ON THE PLAZA Arielle C. ‘15

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The Hangover Pt. II: Two parts Vodka, four parts tomato juice, one part 7-Up, two parts rum, two parts gin, one part tequila, one part Blue Curacao. Garnish with a dash of pepper, lemon wedge and celery stick. (This is an average Bloody Mary, but for when you’re hungover and want to blackout again ASAP)

Black Swan: The Black Swan is basically a White Russian, except for instead of coffee you use Adderall, and instead of cream you use a dash of lake water. Garnish with a spine-feather.

Griffin B. ‘16

Office Space:

MASHA RASKOLNIKOV

BY YANA LYSENKO Masha Raskolnikov is, in her own words, a “lesbian, Russian-Jewish, feminist academic” who teaches medieval literature and feminist and queer literary studies in the Cornell English department. In this semester’s Office Space, she sits down to talk about the powerful medieval woman, “female monstrosity,” and her own experiences with feminism and gender issues.

kitsch: How did you find yourself working in the Cornell English Department?

Masha Raskolnikov: I’ve now been here 12 years, which is such a long time. I was a grad student at Berkeley, and there was a job list, and in those days, it was fairly plausible to apply for 10 jobs, and have a reasonable chance of getting one of them. It was really thrilling to actually get the job, and I spent the first few years here pretty sure they had made a terrible mistake. But I feel like that’s how most women feel when they get put into any position of something resembling authority, or accolades. You feel like “I managed to fool them once, but they’ll figure it out soon.” kitsch: You describe yourself as a “lesbian, Russian-Jewish, feminist academic.” How does that description apply to what you do?

M.R.: I’m a first-generation immigrant, and I came to this country from Russia through Canada when I was six and a half. We were intensely poor throughout my life at home, and when I got to college, I thought I was going to make it on my own and not ask my parents for any money because I really wanted to be that independent person. So I ended up basically starving for two years worth of college because I would not spend any money. I didn’t even talk to my parents about how hard I was making it for myself, and because they were from another country they didn’t actually understand that I needed more money than I had. I feel like being gay comes up in my teaching all of the time, and I’m not worried about being out about that, but the fact that I grew up really poor and I couldn’t afford my textbooks or even notebooks is something I wish I could talk about more. I still did great in the end, and still went to graduate school and became a professor, but the struggles I went through in the process really shaped what I do now.

I do what I do partially because I believe in it so much. When I was younger I really thought that just the right theory, the right critique of popular culture, or the right critique of Chaucer would just bring the system which we call “patriarchy” crashing down, like a critical lever. I no longer have quite that faith.

Today I was teaching Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” and it’s a text that makes me feel tremendous hope. I remember believing “if people could just read this essay, we would have a better world.” For years I said having a job at Cornell means having a sort of bully pulpit — people will listen to me because I teach at an Ivy League institution and I can try to change the world from that vantage point. I don’t quite believe that anymore, but I still love it. kitsch: How do you find a connection between medieval literature and female sexuality?

M.R.: There’s a fantasy that you go to the European Middle Ages and that you’ll get a completely isolated purity of whiteness with no contact at all with the world beyond that. Sometimes, as a teacher, I come across students who come in thinking they’re going to escape questions of race and sex because they’re taking a class on the Middle Ages and they think it’s going to be about the idealized white male, but I talk about very powerful women who were perhaps surprising in some ways but at the same time very common. In the Middle Ages, the woman was sometimes allowed to be the most powerful person in the room. Sometimes she could be the queen. So they were not always quiet. There were many women who made their living as writers and there were powerful women who were not of the upper classes who seemed to have pushed and gossiped their way into positions of power in an extraordinary way. kitsch: Since you were a student, how have things changed in regards to studying literature and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies?

M.R.: I was an incredibly nerdy undergraduate, and I thought you needed to be really cool to be a lesbian. And I was too chicken to go to the lesbian support group because I thought everyone there was too pretty, and I would never fit in. I very much aspired to be gay, but I wasn’t sure I could actually manage to pull it off. I don’t think that’s how people feel about being gay now. Despite being super nerdy, I was also a peer sex educator for some of my time in college. We spent a lot of

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time trying to figure out if there was a god, and at the same time trying to figure out what made us come. Nowadays, you guys are deeply frightened by the economy in a way that kind of cuts your wings a bit. Students don’t let themselves have as much intellectual pleasure because they’re so worried about their GPA. At the same time, I was a student in a time when kids were being cut off by their parents for being gay, and I think it still happens, but maybe, hopefully less. And we experienced a lot of violence and danger in a way that I don’t think you guys do. kitsch: You’re also teaching a class called “Body as Text: Pleasure as Danger.” Could you describe that course and what motivated you to teach it?

M.R.: The “Body” class is deeply personal, because it gets people thinking about their own bodies, and what it means for them to be human beings who inhabit flesh, and that’s incredibly important. It may be my favorite course. I sometimes teach about transgender identity in literature and transgender autobiography and self-representation. It has a unit on metamorphoses, a unit on racial science and a unit on the monstrousness of femininity. It’s almost nonstop fun for me.

We talk about how women and their bodies and their smells are all on the verge of being monstrous in a sexist society.

Women can be monstrous in a disempowered way. One of the main research topics I’ve been addressing recently is a critique of the word “feminization.” A lot of the time, when we say feminization, we’re saying that a male character is disempowered in this moment in a Shakespeare play or in a novel, and because they’re disempowered, we’re going to call it “feminization,” implying that a woman is always weak. So when I talk about female monstrosity, I’m talking about the sheer, raw, powerful female bodies themselves, and that’s a joyful concept. Part of the class is when we do transgender women, because that’s a form of empowerment that may not always be so obviously addressed. These women who are not considered female at birth achieve these great levels of female power. In the course, we read an academic text by a trans woman called “My Words to Victor Frankenstein” which is like a citation of the monstrosity discourse but for the purposes of theorizing the

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non-natural femaleness that this female asserts. kitsch: How have students responded to this class? Are they used to questions of feminism, sexuality, and the body?

M.R.: I get a bunch of different students: Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies students who are very used to the kind of questions we raise in the course, English majors who are all over the place in terms of what they’re interested in, and I do get pre-med, non-English students, and I often teach to them in a certain way. My fantasy is always that I will make someone be a better, more compassionate doctor, or anyone who does something that I don’t do. That’s one of the great things about being a teacher. You have effects on the world that you don’t ever even know about. You just throw these things out there and you hope for the best.♢

LISTENING TO SWIFT IN SHITHACA HOW TO LOVE AND HATE YOURSELF AS AN IVY LEAGUE WHITE WOMAN

BY KAITLYN TIFFANY She’s been bullied into feminism, but doesn’t quite know how to express it. She’s come into money, but doesn’t know how to be excited about that without alienating her middle class fans. She wants to be politically liberal, but she knows that conservative parents are the only people left in America who buy copies of CDs for their children. Two years ago, in this magazine, I wrote 3000 words calling Taylor Swift a feminist’s nightmare and “an absolute landmine of horrible when it comes to the status of womanhood in America.” Though I stand by what I said, I can’t stand by how I said it, which was as if I was 100 percent better than her — a feminist’s dream.

Now, four weeks before I graduate from Cornell and wander off into the real world as an Ivy-educated white woman, I’m trying to grasp some perspective on the brand of feminism that I espouse through my words and actions, trying to be more self-aware when it comes to talking about my place in a structure of power and privilege and lack of these. There are things to love and things to hate, much like there are things to love about the brand new “feminist” Taylor Swift and things to hate about how she practices that.

A FEMINIST ORIGIN STORY First of all, when Taylor Swift told The Guardian this summer that she is now a feminist, her justification for being late to the party was as follows: As a teenager, I didn’t understand that saying you’re a feminist is just saying that you hope women and men will have equal rights and equal opportunities. What it seemed to me, the way it was phrased in culture, society, was that you hate men. And now, I think a lot of girls have had a feminist awakening because they understand what the word means. For so long it’s been made to seem like something where you’d pick against the opposite sex, whereas it’s not just about that at all. Becoming friends with Lena — without her preaching to me, but just seeing why she believes what she believes, why she says what she says, why she stands for what she stands for — has made me realize that I’ve been taking a feminist stance without actually saying so.

There are a lot of things to notice about this justification. Her reference to Lena Dunham, is I think, something that most women

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our age can relate to: Feminism is, unfortunately, something that still needs to be taught and it is not something that we learn naturally from the world around us. Some of us stumbled across feminism on Tumblr last year, some were lucky enough to have parents who would teach it to us from the start. And many, many women, perhaps even most women, are asked (explicitly or otherwise) by another woman whom they love or maybe just respect, to think seriously about feminism. It’s like the best kind of missionary work there is. I learned feminism from a terrifying person whom I hated for a time, but always respected, and who harassed me on Tumblr until I accepted that not all women experience sexism in the same way and that some experience it on top of racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia and myriad other factors that I can not possibly claim to understand. I also learned feminism from 30 Rock and my high school English teacher, both of which asked me to look at culture and its products with a critical eye. I learned feminism from the former editor in chief of this magazine, who relieved me of my inclination to judge other women. I learned feminism from opening my eyes and feeling frustration boil in my stomach whenever I walked down a street at night and felt nervous, and when I was talked over in class, and when my prom date called me a “cunt” in front of all of my friends, and when I joined another publication on this campus and noticed that the entire staff was white boys and that this was disconcerting to no one.

“FEMINISM IS, UNFORTUNATELY, SOMETHING THAT STILL NEEDS TO BE TAUGHT AND IT IS NOT SOMETHING THAT WE LEARN NATURALLY FROM THE WORLD AROUND US.” What’s not okay about what I just said, or about what Taylor Swift said, is that the reason that we didn’t feel the need for feminism until later in life is because of the ample privilege we had, due to no merit of our own, granted to us at birth to alleviate the blow of being a woman in male-dominated society — we are white, we are educated, we grew up in nice suburbs with nice things and nice neighbors and no fear. In Mindy Netiffee’s brilliant poem, “For Young Women Who Do Not Consider Themselves Feminists,” she responds to a hypothetical young girl’s assertion that she has never personally experienced discrimination, saying, “That’s great … that’s really great. That you feel no solidarity with the women who have no voice, no power, no safety, no light, or freedom to drive a car, or walk down the street by themselves at night, no right to protect their own children.” Not needing feminism personally is not an excuse for failing to recognize how desperately it is needed by billions of others. The price of privilege, and it is so very little, is that you have a responsibility to be excruciatingly and vigilantly self-aware — you have to make a choice to dedicate energy every single day to using what you have to create a more equitable system. You are not allowed to claim that you weren’t paying attention or that you didn’t know what was going on. Taylor Swift and I both learned that later than we should have.

However, we shouldn’t forget that, while there are nearly 11 million hits when I search “Taylor Swift feminist” on Google (and one on Twitter, please check out the glory that is @FeministTSwift), there’s no chance in hell that male artists of a similar age and audience are being asked so insistently about whether or not they are feminists and whether or not they believe their music has a feminist message. There are about four million hits for “One Direction feminist,” most of them blog posts written by feminists who are defending their affection for the group, and not one of them (as far as I can tell) links to an interview in which the group is asked directly about their politics.

A CAPITALIST ORIGIN STORY As far as the way that Taylor Swift practices her feminism, I can’t pretend to know that much about how she lives her day-today life. I can say that 1989, her fifth studio release, featured very little of the pettiness of her other work, and certainly didn’t endeavor to blame another woman for her problems (with the exception of “Bad Blood,” which is three-minutes of sing-whining at Katy Perry for stealing some back-up dancers, but that was professional rivalry and therefore, maybe, acceptable?)

However, her recent decision to remove her entire catalogue from Spotify’s streaming service raises some questions about Taylor Swift’s readiness to defy class barriers and inequality. Swift has, for her last few releases, “windowed” the album, a very common and understandable choice to make the album available for purchase via physical copies, iTunes, Amazon and Google downloads, but not available for streaming on Spotify or similar services until a couple of months later. She has also been notorious for the vigilance with which her media team patrols the Internet and removes illegally posted and downloadable versions of her music — also understandable.

But with the October 2014 release of 1989, Swift launched a campaign against her music appearing on the Internet in any capacity and publicly expressed her distaste for the business model of streaming apps like Spotify saying, “I’m not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists and creators of this music. And I just don’t agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free.” This statement echoes sentiments that she expressed in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal this summer, saying, “Music is art and art is important and rare. Important and rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.”

This choice is tragically misguided for a variety of reasons, not least of which being the fact that Spotify does in fact pay close to 70 percent of their revenue back to the “writers, producers, artists and creators” of the music that they stream. In an effort to

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sway Swift back onto their offerings, Spotify flattered her with some statistics: Of Spotify’s 40 million users, “Nearly 16 million of them have played her songs in the last 30 days, and she’s on over 19 million playlists.” They also casually reminded her that streaming apps like theirs go a long way in protecting artists from the out-and-out piracy that ran rampant in the first decade of the 2000s and that top artists like her are compensated upwards of six million dollars per year for the use of their music.

As I wrote in the last issue of kitsch, “Haunted,” the right to create, own and experience art is already a right that is reserved primarily for the elite — or at least for the middle class and upper middle class. The price for admission to even such mainstream cultural events as movie theaters and concerts or possession of popular music and films has risen in excess of inflation since the early ’80s, making the cut-off in income which permits access to art higher and higher. Swift has tens of millions of fans in the United States alone, and given her broad appeal and palatable image, it’s safe to say that her fan base is as close to a representative sample of the younger population as any contemporary artist’s is likely to be — if 20 percent of American children live in poverty (according to the U.S. Census Bureau in 2012), then it’s safe-ish to say that 20 percent of her fans do too.

Shamus Khan, who is basically my fourth favorite person in the world, wrote for The New York Times that today’s elites are significantly different than the elites of the past, who sought to create a culture based in the expensive and academic appreciation of fine art that would exclude the lower classes and the uneducated. Today’s elites are “omnivores,” or, consumers of art who pride themselves on the range of their taste, the broadness of their music library and the sweeping, multi-faceted nature of their cultural knowledge. “By contrast,” he notes, “those who have exclusive tastes today — middle-class and poorer Americans — are subject to disdain. If the world is open and you don’t take advantage of it, then you’re simply limited and close-minded.”

Spotify democratizes access to one art form and makes it possible for anyone to cultivate diverse tastes in music for the low, low price of “listening to an ad once in a while.” But in Taylor Swift’s conception of the music industry, music should be “rare and valuable” and paid for only by those who can afford “rare and valuable” things. Removing the option of listening for free and paying only to download makes for low-income consumers who are forced to choose the artwork that they are permitted to access much more cautiously — which of course, benefits artists like Taylor Swift whose appeal is so mainstream as to be ubiquitous. If you can afford to buy one album in a year, it’s likely to be Swift’s and not Frankie Cosmos’.

Further, Swift purports to stand up for the rights of musical artists as a group. But the problem with Swift’s opt-out is similar to the problem with Sheryl Sandberg’s popularly derided “lean in” strategy — it’s a stance that only a privileged person can afford to make. In the music industry, most artists can’t afford to sacrifice those millions of listeners indefinitely in an effort to negotiate a paycheck. Though Swift’s album went platinum in just one week, it was the only album to go platinum this year, and one of only three albums that sold over 500,000 copies. Most artists can’t afford the massive overhead of a Swift album, and record shoddy singles from the road because touring is the only aspect of the music industry that has remained consistently lucrative despite the advent of digital media. Swift is an anomaly, not the future of music.

A WHITE GIRL LOVE STORY Swift inspires both love and hate in most every educated white woman I know, not least because we secretly want to be her.

In his experimental essay collection in 2013, for which this issue of kitsch is named, New Yorker theatre critic Hilton Als writes extensively on the “white girl” as the most envied identity in America. He portrays drag as the ultimate act of American identity formation, and looks longingly at white women saying, “Wasn’t she — whoever she was — everything the world saw and wanted? … Did I love her or want to be her? Is there a difference?” But in Als’ portrait of America, white women are also the most selfdespising of groups. They hate themselves for sharing the skin color of their oppressor. Taylor Swift embodies both of these impulses — I want to be what she is (look like her, dress like her, hang out in SoHo like her), even at the same time that I hate what she stands for.

I hate Taylor Swift’s last minute feminism, her refusal to take a real stance on anything important even while knowing how much cultural power she wields, and her noxious complicity in the capitalist system. At the same time, I am obsessed with her entire wardrobe, her flawless “red lip classic thing” and her opulently fun music video for “Blank Space,” in which she sprints around in ball gowns and then takes a Beyoncé-style stroll down a spiral staircase, all black lace and confidence. When Anisse Gross of The Rumpus reviewed Als’ essay collection she attempted to consolidate what he meant by “white girls,” saying “The white girls he writes about are sometimes white and sometimes girls, but always ‘white girls.’ Catch the drift? Being a white girl isn’t about being born white in a woman’s body. It’s a state of mind, a way of acting, the pose of privilege.” And I love and hate Taylor Swift because she is, so very privileged. But like all other white girls, her privilege is, in ways, merely a “pose” — it ignores so much about the complicated place of white women in society. It pretends that it has been given the exact piece of the pie it wanted even when women are still marginalized, and marginalized further by race and marginalized still again by class and by sexuality and by so many other things.

So if you’re going to listen to Swift in Shithaca, it should be with an awareness of what exactly you’re using her for — ”Blank Space” is a hilarious video and Swift makes a brilliant deranged Barbie doll; 1989 and Red are both so fun to mine for Gyllenhaal and Styles mythology; a heartbreak empathized with is a heartbreak cured. All I’m asking for is self-awareness — let’s be white girls who recognize our privilege and our oppression, let’s never make excuses for not understanding the complexities of the systems of inequality we live in, let’s feel 22 and capable of anything but complicity. ♢

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WE FOUND BOOTY IN A HOPELESS PLACE TINDER IN ITHACA

BY Mo Rahman I’m not opposed to hookup culture; in fact, if you’ve got a good grasp on safe sex, I say go for it. But I only say this because hookups are rampant on a college campus, and it’s really more so something I’ve gotten used to and accepted than something I’ve actively wished for. So imagine my surprise when Tinder suddenly became the prevalent mobile platform for “meeting” people at or outside of Cornell — air quotes to signify that meeting is not where it ends, if you’re lucky. Did we really need that? If you’ve been living under the cavernous seclusion of the Olin stacks for the last two years or so, Tinder is an app that connects to your Facebook profile. You can swipe right or left — yes or no, respectively — and if the potent gods of Tinder find two people who have an inevitable attraction to each other (two swipes right), there’s a match! What could go wrong?

There’s always a caveat, or a few, or a lot when it comes to the Tinder game. How do I know? Well, I’ve joined, of course. I’ve been on Tinder for approximately seven months, and it’s been nothing but a whirlwind, really. While I’ve spent a large portion of that time meticulously trolling poor, unsuspecting perverts, I’ve got a few noteworthy anecdotes that may provide some kind of epiphany about Tinder. Or it may not. Just stay with me.

I’ve only been on two Tinder “dates” — let’s use that term loosely. The thing with the first guy was pure serendipity. He didn’t go to Cornell or IC, nor did he even live in this town. We opened by teasing each other and somehow along the way, we realized how compatible our humor was and consequently, how compatible we were. I resisted. I went through a Kübler-Ross type of thing and finally landed on acceptance; he convinced me to go on a date.

First things first, I was not about to get murdered. Not know-

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ing the protocol for a Tinder date, I decided to go as safe as I possibly could, with the slightest hint of romance (sigh, life of a Millennial): midday at Stella’s. My rule was that he had to leave before midnight because sex was not going to be part of this already skewed equation. I had not anticipated our little rendezvous to actually last until midnight. It did.

No, we did not start dating. The reasons were many-fold, ranging from the kind of relationship we were each looking for to the weirdness surrounding how we met. I consider this a Tinder success nonetheless. Romantically, Tinder failed me, sure. But I found a friend, which is more than I anticipate even from face-to-face encounters. No comments on my social anxiety, please and thank you.

My second date, though equally friendly and compatible, was someone who was not looking for anything on Tinder. He liked the way I came across in my profile and in conversation and, consequently, wanted to meet me. It seemed we were both looking for the same thing: a story. We had a great time but neither of us chose to take it any further, so that was the end of it. I’ve recently deleted my Tinder profile, so any means of contact between us has ceased to exist. Womp. Don’t worry; I’m not a pool of emotions. I mean, I enjoyed the couple of hours we had from the nervous intro to the awkward cessation — i.e. he asked to drive me home, I made a murder joke and then hopped on a bus. It was still a great couple of hours.

These are not the stories that define my Tinder experience.

In fact, there’s so much more that I’ve experienced, mostly tied to the concept of discomfort. This generalized feeling is really something that’s existed within the realm of Ithaca, at least for me. If you take a look back at my (truly motivating) anecdotes, you’ll come to the sudden realization that my two best experiences were outta town townies — and yes, Cornellians, townies exist outside the realm of the 14850. Now, that’s actually a pretty good overarching theme, she says, allowing readers to know that she planned nothing whilst initiating the writing process. Tinder in Ithaca has been a creepy experience, to say the least. I’ve run across government officials, frat boys telling me to sit on their faces (“SOMF” — when did that become a thing?), and college alums who’d booty call me after leaving the bars and realize that they had peaked years ago and that those glory days weren’t comin’ back the easy way. That’s not the end of it; the list is extensive.

A couple of months ago on a trip to Montreal, I realized that the discomfort, though in part due to the whole “I’m on a hypersexualized phone app” thing, is mostly seated in Ithaca. I had one Montrealer (yep, that is what they are called — I Googled it) message me as I was driving back home asking how I could possibly be 400 miles away, and then proceed to chat with me anyway until I deleted my profile. We chatted for weeks. A long distance extravagant courtship with a French Canadian — sure, I’ll sign up.

Tinder out of Ithaca was different than I anticipated and I suppose that’s the big takeaway from this experience. I certainly did not find love nor did I have any sort of existential revelation, but when I set my geographical boundaries a little farther than the scope of this little college town, Tinder wasn’t too bad. So hey, maybe give it a try.♢

THEATRE AT CORNELL

A SELECTION OF FIRST-PERSON ACCOUNTS

BY ANNA ALLISON BRENNER

As strange as it may sound to all you bio majors and engineers, the determining factor for my choosing Cornell was its theatre department.

Now, before I continue, I do have to mention that my other option for college was Johns Hopkins, which, despite its incredible writing program (another thing I was interested in), only offered a theatre minor. And, as I wanted to major in both English and Theatre, I knew that any place that just offered me a minor was not going to cut it.

So here I am, pre-frosh Anna: I’ve just mailed in my acceptance of Cornell’s acceptance. I’ve sealed my fate as a prospective English and Theatre double major. Except, according to this hot freshman Theatre major I’ve been talking to via Facebook, the Department has now shifted away from Theatre, Film and Dance towards something called “PMA”: Performing & Media Arts. But he assures me that it’s fine, that I’ll still be able to study exactly the same things I would’ve under the old Theatre major. That, perhaps, this departmental shift is even better because I could take film or dance classes and they’d still fulfill my major requirements (if I played my cards right). That this really just added flexibility into my scheduling. That it also is incredibly helpful considering the Department’s recent budget cuts — Wait, I’m thinking, budget cuts?

Budget cuts. $1 million to $2 million annually, according to an article published in the Cornell Chronicle in 2010. And they were set to take effect just as I started my freshman year.

Great, I thought. Just great.

When I got to Cornell, I assumed I’d be auditioning for shows at Risley, Cornell’s student-run theatre. I mean, why wouldn’t I? They were putting up Little Shop of Horrors and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog, to name a few. The year before, they’d done Avenue Q. Risley seemed like the place to be, in regards to performance.

But after performing at Risley’s Musical Theatre Night the first weekend of freshman year — more like after being coerced into

performing at Musical Theatre Night by two upperclassmen — I was then coerced into auditioning for Adding Machine, a musical I’d never heard of that was going up at the Schwartz in its 450-seat main stage theatre. Simply put, I didn’t really know what to expect.

For one, I was a freshman; I was just getting my land-legs in the world of college, and auditioning for a show that rehearsed for four hours a day, six days a week, seemed downright insane. Second, what was this musical? And why was a student directing it? What about all of the faculty? But I wasn’t going to get cast — I mean, I had literally just gotten to Cornell. They had to have had, like, at least twenty people who were better than me, and this was only a seven-person cast. Someone else would get it. Right?

I got cast. The show ended up being one of the most challenging, rewarding and eye-opening opportunities I’ve ever had. I had the chance to work with a professional stage manager and professional set, props, sound, lighting and costume designers; I took Equity breaks and went to my first costume fittings; my director even wanted me to make my own choices (gasp!).

When the show was over, I continued working in the department as a playwright and, later, as an assistant director. Because of Adding Machine, professors (and students) in the Department knew who I was, which meant there were a lot of people asking me to audition for things, or to submit my work to the departmental dramatic writing competition (Heermans-McCalmon; Google it!).

To top it all off, my director, my castmates and my friends who lived in Risley, were all older than me, and were more than happy to give me my advice — regardless of whether or not I asked for it.

Because of them, I was able to navigate the Cornell theatre world with (relative) ease. These are the classes you must take, they said.

These are the professors you should avoid. These are the shows you should audition for.

My theatre experience at Cornell has been incredible — and all thanks to a few strokes of luck. Had I not lived in Risley, I would’ve never auditioned for Adding Machine. Had I not auditioned for Adding Machine, I never would’ve met my director, my castmates,

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“ONE PROFESSOR PRETTY MUCH I CLEARLY HAD NO IDEA WHAT I WAS APOLOGIZED FOR HER SARCASTIC [FOR A TWO-ACT MUSICAL] AND or the departmental designers, and, because of them, I ended up doing literally every other show I’ve partaken in as an actor, writer or director for the first two years of my college experience.

Needless to say, not everyone has been this lucky — at all. To pass my Cornell theatre experience off as the everyman’s Cornell theatre experience would be ridiculous and, to many, downright wrong.

Which is why, when asked to write an article about theatre culture at Cornell, I interviewed a few people with varying experiences, all of whom are very involved in the theatre scene, some of whom are actual PMA (or Theatre) majors. This article will, by no means, serve as a comprehensive guide to theatre at Cornell, but it will, at least, present a few images of our time as students here.

THE ALUMNI The first two people I contacted once I began writing this article were Larry and David, close friends of mine who both graduated last year and were instrumental in my involvement in theatre over the past two years. I assistant directed for both Larry and David on one or more of their projects, and both are embarking on professional theatre careers, as a director and composer, respectively. Both entered Cornell in 2010, just as the budget cuts were announced, and experienced the full gamut of the transition from Theatre, Film and Dance to Performing & Media Arts, and how that affected the theatre scene at Risley and throughout campus over the course of their college careers. kitsch: Did you enter Cornell knowing you would be majoring in Theatre (or in Music, as is David’s case)?

Larry: I first visited Cornell intending to apply Early Decision for Architecture, which I’d been studying for years, but when it became clear that program would allow almost no time for me to pursue my real passion, I stopped working on my portfolio and applied to study Theatre. I had already fallen in love with the school, so I continued Early Decision.

David: Nope. I had always loved it, but when I chose to come to Cornell, I thought I was choosing to keep it as a hobby, and pursue a science like Psychiatry or Neurobiology. kitsch: David, what ended up drawing you to pursuing Theatre / Music here?

D: I got to Cornell and started taking music classes, but stayed

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away from the Schwartz Center because I decided that if they didn’t like musicals, I didn’t like them. After doing one musical with the Melodramatic Theatre Company my freshman year, I was pretty upset with how musicals were both regarded and executed on campus — and it really pissed me off! Because musicals literally gave my life meaning as a child.

So, the next semester, I decided to direct a musical at Risley Theatre. It was a janky production; there was no real set design.

Our lighting cues were essentially “on” and “off” and it was super stressful because none of us knew what we were doing. But also it had heart, and I got kind of hooked on making musicals happen, especially because everyone in the show really got something out of the experience.

Then, I got rejected from the College Scholar Program and considered transferring because Cornell shits on theatre, and Cornell Theatre shits on musicals, so I just felt like shit. But then my friends were like “NO, DON’T GO! DO ANOTHER SHOW AT RISLEY!” And then I did, and it sold out, and the rest (as they say) is history.

My junior year, musicals were suddenly a thing, and there were like three happening at once. It was madness! kitsch: Larry, what struck you about the theatre community at Cornell when you got here as a freshman?

L: What was instantly shocking about theatre at Cornell was the amount of funding available for student work, at any level, even for a first-semester freshman. I was able to mount a production of [a Shakespeare play] that cost over 2,000 dollars without much trouble at all. At a more traditional Conservatory or BFA program, a young director’s highest aspiration might be a 50 dollar Black Box production in his or her senior year.

[In regards to the community itself,] back when I entered Cornell in 2010, the theatre community was very distinctly divided into the pre-professional Schwartz community (the serious Theatre students) and the amateur, extra-curricular Risley community. Overlap between those communities was encouraged but uncommon, and casting was a bloodbath at the Schwartz, where the professionalism was truly impressive. As the Department underwent changes, it had to draw very consciously from the “extra-curricular” crowd for its productions and started making efforts to appear less intimidating.

Now there is almost no divide, for better or for worse.

There was a clear progression of classes to take at the Schwartz,

LAUGHED IN MY FACE AND TOLD ME DOING ... AND I DON’T THINK SHE EVER EMAIL, EVEN AFTER I WON AWARDS SHE SAW THE PRODUCTION.” and it was much harder to jump into the flow at any random time in your Cornell career. Freshmen could get cast in a main stage in small roles, as the Schwartz was still producing shows with casts upwards of 30 actors. I was cast as Si Crowell and Dead Man #2 in the Schwartz production of Our Town, and that was a huge privilege and source of excitement. There wasn’t such a diva mentality as we now find because it was understood that you had to work your way into the meaty roles. A huge source of pride for me was that I was one of three actors called back for the lead role of George Gibbs, which went to an extremely talented Junior, rightfully so.

I think we’ve lost a lot of the apprenticeship nature of the theatre industry.

kitsch: Interesting. So why did people start going to Risley to do shows?

L: Risley started gaining momentum partially because of the 1.5 million dollar budget cuts from the Department of Theatre, Film and Dance, which meant there was significantly less work happening in the Schwartz, but also because of a few young directors and designers that started mounting larger, more fully-produced productions at Risley, bringing the skills and professionalism they were gaining from work at the Schwartz up to North Campus. kitsch: David, thoughts?

And I don’t think she ever apologized for her sarcastic email, even after I won awards [for it] and she saw the production.

Now, the flipside of all of this is that my musical did happen, was successful and I do technically have the Schwartz to thank for it.

THE DOUBLE-MAJOR-NO-MORE Next, I spoke to Peaches, a fellow junior PMA major, about her theatre experience at Cornell. I interviewed her at a cast party for a production she was involved in, and she was glad to respond, Blink-182 blaring in the background the entire time. kitsch: So, Peaches, what can you tell me about your theatre experience here at Cornell?

Peaches: Well, the thing that I didn’t expect is I came here double majoring in biology and PMA, [and now that I’m here, I know that I have to do theatre for the rest of my life.] See, biology and theatre was the double major I decided on when I was 13 years old. I was like, “You know? I really want to be an actor, I really hope that it happens, but if it doesn’t, I really hope that I have something else.”

And then I came here, and I met so many amazing people who have changed my life — cast members and student directors, but also faculty — and I realized that I could never be happy as a biologist; that my passion is theatre, and that I have to do it.

D: You want to know the truth about the theatre culture at Cornell?

I think it’s the only university theatre scene where, in my opinion, its And I think I learned that because I did a lot of things beyond the greatest successes have come from working in adverse to the very theatre community — I never lived in Risley, I met so many other people who do so many other things — and it really made me decide department that teaches it. that theatre is where my heart is. And I’m really glad, in fact, that I I don’t know if Larry would agree, but I think that the single most came to Cornell for theatre, as opposed to a conservatory, because we driving force behind every successful theatre artist at Cornell has get a really good academic experience, and we get to experience so been trying to overcome the profound incapability of the department. many different things, and we have to read so many different things Whether the university or the department are to blame for that is and meet so many different people who are into so many different really up for debate, but I’m pretty sure that Theatre is the only things — and, well, it’s made me so well-rounded as a human being. academic discipline at Cornell where those in the know will sooner It’s given me the experience to know that I want to do theatre for look to students for leadership and guidance than faculty. There are the rest of my life. some exceptions, I think. I have a lot of respect for Bruce [Levitt], Ed And it’s also given me enough experience to help me be a better [Intemann], Kent [Goetz], and the other designers. actor. To know and hear so many different stories, and meet so However, several other faculty members simply don’t believe in the many different people, and hear so many different things. It’s just capability and drive of their students. [One professor] pretty much an amazing experience, and so I think that, the theatre community laughed in my face and told me I clearly had no idea what I was at Cornell is really — they’re all really wonderful people, and they’ve doing when I informed her of my plans to write a two act musical. helped me become really well-rounded.

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THE ACTOR OF COLOR

I ran into Laura at dinner one evening and overheard her discussing the difficulties of being an actor of color at Cornell. It seemed that her experience was drastically different from many of my other friends’ and so, I set out to interview her about what the theatre scene here is like from her perspective. kitsch: Did you always know you were going to major in PMA when you got to Cornell? And, if so, why did you choose Cornell?

Laura: Yeah, I knew that I would do PMA when I got here, but I’d also planned on double majoring in Bio. I made this deal with my parents that I would look for schools that had strong science and performing arts departments with good connections with alumni. kitsch: Cool. In your opinion, what do you think is the PMA Department’s biggest issue?

L: There is an obvious lack of opportunities for students of color in this department. It is true that the sizes of the shows, a result of budget cuts, plays into this, but that is not as pressing as the fact that the shows chosen are not those traditionally played by a diverse cast. The students see this and are either discouraged to the point of not auditioning at all, leading to the department thinking that they don’t have the students to produce a diverse show, or they audition for shows not traditionally cast diversely (e.g. The Glass Menagerie) and don’t even make it to callbacks. This leads to these same students feeling as though there is not room for them in the major to gain experience in performance and deciding to change majors. It also does not seem as though the department, upon being notified of losing students, is fazed at all.

kitsch: I see. And how would you describe theatre culture / the theatre community here at Cornell?

L: Small, limited, basically a clique, which only worsens the aforementioned issues.

[But, in regards to things I do like about the community here], mainly within Risley theatre, I have been part of productions in which the cast is open and accepting of new talent as well as returning friends, which helps to form strong communities and lasting relationships.

[Something I dislike, though, is the sense of] returning talent being so set in their ways and those who they normally work with refusing to fully or genuinely welcome new talent.

— After talking to Laura, I couldn’t help but wonder what Larry, who was, perhaps, the most involved in the department out of us all, would have to say about her allegations of the lack of opportunities for students of color. When I brought the issue up with him, he essentially said that while he understood Laura’s concern, one also must remember that both the Schwartz and Risley had attempted very diverse plays in the past — plays, such as A Raisin in the Sun, that required students of color — and that those shows had difficulty finding enough people to audition and, thus, ended up either pulling from Ithaca College’s students or simply getting cancelled altogether (as was the case with Risley’s Raisin). Furthermore, he continued, the same director who’s doing The Glass Menagerie this year did the same play in the early ’90s and casted a black Amanda;

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so, clearly, while this director was responding to the feel of his auditionees when considering them for a callback (to cast, say, Laura from Menagerie, one would have to be vulnerable, yet mature — so you wouldn’t want to call back an actor that exuded strength for the role), and this feel would inevitably play into an actor’s visual aesthetic, it didn’t (directly) have to do with their race (although race does play a role in one’s aesthetic, yada yada yada). Finally, although this year’s Schwartz Center season does not include any shows with a specifically black cast (or a specifically Asian cast, or a cast specifically of any demographic, really, besides Menagerie, which is a classic and is, yes, typically played by white people), it does include shows that are extremely open-ended in regards to casting: one could do almost anything with Blood Wedding depending on one’s “take” on and vision for the piece; the same could be said of Paula Vogel’s Mineola Twins, produced in October of this season, which was just so damn bizarre and impossible to play in a college setting that one must be experimental with the piece. And, while

“THEATRE AT CORNELL IS COMPLICATED, AND WHILE IT CAN BE ANGERING OR ANNOYING OR DOWNRIGHT TERRIFYING, IT CAN ALSO BE REALLY REWARDING.” Menagerie has a cast of only four people and Mineola only really needs three (although the Schwartz production had many more), big-cast shows like Blood Wedding provide a chance for more people — and, ideally, more people who are younger or don’t typically get cast — to gain experience and get the performance opportunity they crave. Thus, while he understood Laura’s concern, he thought it somewhat uninformed: There were, in fact, opportunities for students of all races (although it was difficult; yes, the theatre establishment traditionally does cater to white people; and no, there aren’t ever enough roles to go around), but, beyond this, getting cast isn’t a right but both a privilege and a stroke of luck. You can be the most talented actor in the world, but if you aren’t right for the part or the production, then you’re not going to make the cut; and the only way to prepare students for the real world of theatre and casting — the real, crazy world — is to cultivate that understanding.

When I brought Larry’s comments about Laura’s comments up with another friend of mine, Lily (who was not interviewed for this article, but is a fellow PMA major with feet in both the theatre and film sides of the department), she, in turn, said that while she understood Larry’s argument, she still did think Laura was right, and that there aren’t enough opportunities or open-mindedness in regards to casting in the department, and —I could go on forever.

The bottom line is, theatre at Cornell is complicated, and while it can be angering or annoying or downright terrifying, it also can be really rewarding. It is the downfall of our social lives as well as its savior. It gives us a tight-knit group of friends, but also quarters us off from the rest of campus — even, in some cases, from friends and fellow theatre geeks who simply aren’t in the same production as we are. And, yeah, theatre and theatre culture here has its problems.

Sure. But when I look back on my college experience, I know that I won’t really be thinking about how little sleep I got, or how much we drank or even how awful the weather was. I’ll be thinking about the shows. I’ll be thinking about the people. ♢

GENDERLECT

BY KATIE O’BRIEN When we learned about the Declaration of Independence in grade school, we were not asked to question the phrase, “All men are created equal.” And it’s unlikely that those watching the moon landing on TV in 1969 were retorting indignantly, “Excuse me? What about womankind?” in response to Neil Armstrong’s famous quotation. These phrases were not meant to be exclusionary — generally the word “man” used in contexts like these is understood to mean “people.” “Humankind” is more acceptable to use now and sounds much better than mankind (though the origin of the word ‘huMAN’ is self-explanatory), but it can sometimes be difficult to get around using “man” in a broad, abstract way (e.g., “Man’s eternal quest for truth”). This is just one example of a history of gender bias in the English language.

In the same vein, “he” had long been used in formal documents as the default to refer to all genders. Many states — about half, from what I gather — have laws requiring that new legislation be written in gender-neutral language. Some states, including New York and Washington, have gone back and revised their old laws and state constitutions to reflect gender neutrality as well. When Washington made this change in 2013, Liz Watson, Senior Counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, was quoted in Governing, saying, “Words matter. Words help shape our perceptions about what opportunities are available to women and men. This is one piece of a much broader effort. Words alone are not going to achieve all of the things that need to happen, but this is one easy part for us to do.” Gender-neutral language in official documents matters because language is

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“Words matter. Words help shape our perceptions about what opportunities are available to women and men. This is one piece of a much broader effort.

Words alone are not going to achieve all of the things that need to happen, but this is one easy part for us to do.” a reflection of culture, and when language erases everyone but the male gender, it reinforces social inequality between men and women.

pronoun rather than “he” or “she.” While “they” as a singular pronoun has been around since Middle English, somewhere along the way it became grammatically incorrect in the guidebooks, and for some So the country is definitely getting better about avoiding use of reason, people who cannot conceive of the idea that anyone could the masculine form as the default in laws. And it’s been standard be something other than male or female become grammar purist in the vernacular for a while — in colloquial speech, we are in defenders of the English language when confronted with the idea. the habit of using “they” when gender is ambiguous, and in for- Proponents of gender-neutral language have also created new mal writing, “he/she” is accepted. Luckily for English speakers, we personal pronouns, such as “ze” rather than “he” or “she” and “hir” don’t have to worry about nouns reflecting gender as well — oth- rather than “him” or “her,” which would be very useful if they beerwise, it would be a lot more difficult to eliminate gender bias came standardized and slipped into mainstream usage, but that has from our grammar. For example, in Spanish, a group of male friends yet to happen. The use of these alternative pronouns does not yet would be “amigos.” A group of female friends would be “amigas.” come naturally to most people, and the groups of people who use But a group of 10 girls and one boy would be “amigos.” It is a lot them may be outside the mainstream consciousness, even though harder to escape the masculine form as the default form with there are enough where that shouldn’t necessarily be the case. But this construction. And in English, when we say something like “I language is fluid, and new words get established when they are inhung out with my friend last night,” the gender is left unknown. vented and catch on — we can even see this in action now thanks to But in Spanish, the speaker would have to choose either “ami- the Internet. So there’s really no reason why we can’t establish and go” or “amiga,” disclosing the friend’s gender and making it a fac- standardize a third, gender-neutral personal pronoun if enough tor in the statement, whether or not it was relevant information. people see the value in such an addition to accept and promote it. But this would likely present challenges due to both opposiHowever, Spanish has an advantage over English. In English, it is tion from more intolerant groups, and flat-out indifference from impossible use a verb without assigning a subject: You can’t just the unaffected majority. However, the ability to refer to people in a say “runs”; you have to say “he runs” or “she runs.” But in Spanish, the gender-neutral way is valuable for more than just those outside the subject is inherent in the verb, so to say someone runs, it is sufficient binary, as exemplified by the actions of a Swedish nursery school. to simply say “corre,” leaving the gender of the subject unknown. In English, we can be vague by saying “one runs,” but there is no stan- Sweden, a more progressive country when it comes to gender dard way to refer to a specific person and leave the gender ambig- equality than the U.S., recently added a gender-neutral personal uous. This is an issue for people who are born intersex — about 1 pronoun to their national dictionary: “Hen” to accompany the femin every 1500 to 2000 — as well as for those who do not identify inine “hon” and the masculine “han.” “Hen” has been around since as male or female. That the only personal pronouns we have are the 1960s, but its entrance into mainstream usage came in 2012 “he” and “she” perpetuates the idea that gender is a rigid binary when a nursery school decided to start using “hen” for all children, and that all individuals conform to one or the other. While “they” to avoid identifying them by gender. Obviously this is was a conis often used in everyday speech to avoid assigning a gender when troversial decision for some who believe the schools are trying to the subject is unknown, some choose to use “they” as their personal deny biological sex differences, or question why it is beneficial,

THE POWER OF LANGUAGE 24

and there has been some angry backlash. But the idea is that by not distinguishing students by gender in their learning environment at this young, impressionable age, the teachers can help avoid teaching gender stereotypes to young children. Inspired by a 1998 Swedish law that schools must create equal opportunities for girls and boys, the teachers at the nursery school decided to film each other in order to examine their interactions with the students, The New York Times reported. The teachers found that there were many disparities in how they handled each gender. For example, they tended to comfort girls for a longer time when they were crying, while they were more likely to tell a boy to stop. If a girl was doing something dangerous, like climbing a tree, they tended to tell her to stop but would not do the same for boy. The nursery school implemented changes to ensure that all children were treated equally, which included adding male teachers to the all-female staff, using “hen” for both genders, opting to simply call everyone “children” or “friends” instead of “boys and girls,” and avoiding steering children of a particular gender to any particular type of toy: It is equally accepted for girls to play with trucks as it is for boys to play with a toy kitchen. Now there are several other Swedish nursery schools whose official policy is to use “hen,” and teachers often choose to follow suit even if it is not official policy. As a result of the term being publicized, “hen” is becoming more and more frequently used in Sweden in everyday speech.

“That the only personal pronouns we have are ‘he’ and ‘she’ perpetuates the idea that gender is a rigid binary and that all individuals conform to one or the other.”

How language develops as biased in favor of men can be better understood through Muted Group Theory, which states that because language is tied to culture, and because men have historically had more cultural power than women, men have had more power over the development of language — resulting in a language that is biased toward expressing the male experience (leaving women/non-males as the muted group). The theory originated with anthropologist Edwin Ardener, who noticed that cultural documentations normally excluded the voice of women and other marginalized groups. The communication theorist Cheris Kramarae interpreted this research in terms of language, arguing that men have had more influence over language and use language to maintain their position of social power. Some examples: Words like “bitch,” “slut,” “whore,” and “cunt,” are derogatory terms

exclusively applied to women, with words like “gossip,” “whine,” and “bitch” (as a verb) to describe their speech, and “chick lit,” “diary,” and “romantic” to describe their writing. These words reveal a linguistic invalidation of the female experience. And while male genitalia are associated with strength and power, their lackthere-of is associated with weakness — when a man is seen as being weak or “feminine,” he is told to “grow a pair,” and called a “pussy,” while an act of bravery is called “ballsy.” (Which brings to mind a quote frequently misattributed to Betty White, actually from a joke by comedian Sheng Wang: “Why do people say ‘grow some balls’? Balls are weak and sensitive. If you want to be tough, grow a vagina. Those things can take a pounding.”) Enough said.

As an additional example of gender-bias in language, certain negative terms are disproportionately applied to women in positions of power. A Pantene commercial from about a year ago showcased this: A man in charge is called “boss” while a woman is called “bossy;” an assertive man is called “persuasive,” an assertive woman, “pushy.” A man devoted to his work is “dedicated” but his female counterpart is “selfish.” It’s hard not to recognize the truth to this, and it’s backed in research: Linguistics PhD student Nicolas Subtirelu found using random samples from the Corpus of Contemporary English that the word “bossy” is almost three times more likely to be used in reference to women than to men. And with only a fraction of women in high-up positions of power as men, you have to wonder if it’s self-fulfilling: If a little girl is referred to as “bossy” as a negative trait, rather than being praised as a natural leader as a little boy might be, will she be less likely to seek positions of power as she gets older? It is exactly gendered associations like this that the aforementioned gender-neutral Swedish nursery school seeks to avoid ingraining in young children.

The documentary Miss Representation exposes how media portrayals of women as valuable for their beauty and sexuality, rather than for their leadership abilities, leads to the under-representation of women in positions of power, citing the statistics that the U.S. is only 90th in the world for the representation of women in government, and women hold only three percent of prominent positions in the mainstream media. Yet according to Caroline Heldman, a professor of political science, “Little boys and little girls in equal numbers when they’re seven years old want to be president of the United States when they grow up, but if you ask the same questions when they’re 15 you see the massive gap emerging.” The media reflects cultural values in the same way that language does, and the media’s “limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls” contributes to their under-representation in powerful positions. Gender-biased language does the same: With language that is grammatically structured to use men as the default, with female as the only linguistic alternative to male, and with words that disparage specifically female power and assertiveness so commonplace, patriarchal culture is reinforced, the reality of anyone outside the gender-binary is erased, and female ambition is devalued and discouraged.♢

THE POWER IN LANGUAGE 25

Fashion is art, but it is also a commodity. As an expressive form of capitalism, it depends on sales, which leads to creative decisions that, while still interesting, fundamentally must appeal to a target audience. But who exactly is this target audience? Today’s Western fashion powerhouses have not outright declared that everything they do is for the rich white woman, but within the marketing and design of their white imaginations, we almost forget about any realm of diversity within the predominantly whitewashed fashion world.

The oppressive fashion industry founded itself upon a racist and classist society; one that, with an increased fight for diversity and equal representation, still refuses to change itself. It exists as a historical legacy of the whitewashed early 20th century depictions of wealth. European high fashion of the 20th century started (and continues) to exist primarily for the bourgeois white woman — the only woman who could initially care about looking modern.

The boom of European commoditized art inspired by the new textile industry and the new European obsession with photography as a mechanical art, marked the turn of the 20th century, especially in Paris. Suddenly, fashion became something that allowed for expression of wealth, power and taste through clothing. The bourgeois woman was unchallenged in her fashion choices, her clothing incomparable in quality, cut and design.

Designers had the freedom to play with material artistic expression, but beyond the studio, in the consumer’s world, expensive clothing existed to separate the wealthy woman from the working-class simplicity surrounding her. The Victorian woman, the female silhouette and the Gibson Girl were gone. The flapper was coming.

The ’20s may have marked a revolution in fashion — a fashion that progressively would grow to incorporate the non-aristocratic woman — but it still sought to honor only the woman who could afford to be a walking art exhibit. The cutting-edge of clothing, of short skirts and sequins, built itself as an industry that would again acknowledge only the wealthy European upper class as it had in the fashions before it. Today’s high fashion, in its artistic

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sense, has not changed. The styles have changed and the models have changed, but the fashion labels still dictate what Western culture deems fashionable and with these assertions, they stubbornly refuse to move beyond wealth and white supremacy.

Obviously, marketing to the rich white woman with images of rich white women has been a successful strategy, as companies like Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Burberry have attested to with their multimillion dollar profits. The system works for them so, economically speaking, they see no need to change it. The mainstream fashion industry — and by that, I mean the fashion that projects itself in Fashion Week, popular magazines like Vogue, and every corporate clothing advertisement — is still hopelessly white. Runway critics extensively complain about the height and weight of runway models as issues that promote unhealthy behavior in young girls. While important, the emphasis on these discussions overshadows the other critical problem: That a tiny percentage of fashion media features any women of color.

Until just a couple of years ago, it was rare to find even one black model on the runway. In 2008, Jourdan Dunn became the first black model to walk a Prada runway in over 10 years. There’s little encouragement now, in 2014, when models of color in a show can still be counted on one hand. White models made up 79 percent of the runway shows at New York Fashion Week with similar statistics in Milan, Paris and London. In fact, since 2010, the Fashion Week representation of black runway models alone has dropped from eight percent to six percent. It’s difficult to say that the issue of equal racial representation is improving when even impersonal statistics show a clear step backwards.

Fashion label Jacquemus was praised by media at Paris Fashion Week this season for its fun-loving, quintessentially French style.

Vogue described the Spring 2015 Ready-to-Wear collection as an “inclusive and unpretentious fashion moment filled with collective memory and fun.” A bold statement to make considering that not a single woman of color was featured in the collection.

Maybe Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair don’t consider it their

FASHION’S CASTE SYSTEM THE unbearable WHITENESS OF WEALTH

BY YANA LYSENKO

place to comment on the problems with Fashion Week in terms of its blatant inequality and refusal to change the system. Yet they’re perfectly comfortable addressing issues of model age, weight and height. In 2012, U.S. Vogue editor Anna Wintour wrote a letter that was featured in the magazine declaring that they would now impose strict rules to ensure model safety and health. By this she means that no model under 16 years old would be featured in any issue of Vogue and that they would guarantee what she calls “the responsibility of fostering a climate where a vital and healthy physique is lauded and encouraged.” She also added that these new rules would help Vogue work toward “empowering women of

“THE LACK OF REPRESENTATION IN MARKETING, EITHER ON THE RUNWAY OR PRINTED IN A MAGAZINE, DEPENDS LARGELY ON THE WAY THE WESTERN WORLD SEES BUYING POWER.” all shapes, sizes and ages.” Model age and health was a problem to fashion media, and controversies about underage model employment still persist, yet the difference here is that the industry worldwide is making an effort to eliminate the issue. We can’t say they’re doing the same about racial inequality and misrepresentation when no initiative has been taken to project models of color.

Perhaps this is because there has been no public outcry on it, or because we are so hesitant to criticize designers, as if they are the

prophets of all future style and aesthetics. Black supermodel Joan Smalls has responded to this, saying: “People hide behind the word aesthetic. They say, ‘Well, it’s just that designer’s aesthetic.’ But when you see 18 seasons in a row and not one single model outside a certain skin color … ?” Such justifications are why there still is no unified social movement to break out of the racism in fashion. When we find companies still employing the “token girl” strategy and refusing to hire more than two or three models of color for runways or publications, it’s clear that something is preventing the fashion industry from marketing people of color in fashion to the public.

The lack of representation in marketing, either on the runway or printed in a magazine, depends largely on the way the Western world sees buying power. American women, for example, actually control most of the market economy, accounting for 85 percent of all consumer purchases (including products labeled as “targeted for men”). On the other hand, black consumers in America contribute only eight percent to the American market economy, and Hispanics, roughly one percent more. This buying power grows every year as minority consumers spend and earn more, but the marketing has not changed to address this increasing influence. Nielsen, a consumer analysis news company, published these statistics, also adding: “While 81 percent of blacks believe that products advertised using black media are more relevant to them, only three percent (2.24 billion) of 75 billion dollars spent on television, magazine, Internet and radio advertising was with media focused specifically on black audiences.” There’s a clear correlation between racial media representation for marketing and increased sales by that racial group. In other words, when white media projects only white people, sales are higher for white people, and since the majority of the fashion world is white, there is no break from the bourgeois tradition of racial purity in fashion consumerism. When designers speak of a so-called “aesthetic” and exclusively feature white women for this aesthetic, they are projecting their own fantasies of only white women wearing these clothes. Refusing to feature women of color represents these companies’ fear of alienating the white woman and appealing to a demographic different from what they have deemed exclusively necessary to their profits.♢

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the pr o b l e m w it h “ s tr o ng w o m en ” capitalism’s co-opting of feminism

BY Aurora Rojer ART BY Aurora Rojer

What does it mean to be a feminist today? Or even a female role model in general? Check with Beyoncé, Buzzfeed, Upworthy, Thought Catalog, or Cosmopolitan — they can all agree on one thing: It’s all about being a Strong Independent Woman. In some ways, this sounds good. Feminism infiltrated the mainstream, and now girls want girls to be stronger and more independent! Progress! But as Nina Power describes in her book One-Dimensional Woman, “If the contemporary portrayal of womankind were to be believed, contemporary female achievement would culminate in the ownership of expensive handbags, a vibrator, a job, a flat and a man — probably in that order.” What was once a struggle for equality for all has become a consumerist brand.

Feminism: So you too can have the power to buy.

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...WE CAN

BUY IT!

The Strong Independent Woman is often qualified by her remarkable quality that she “don’t need no man.” This lack-of-manneeding can take the form of the vibrator, as Power suggests. Rather than engage with another human being, women should pay money for a machine that will produce an orgasm sans snuggling and pillow talk. But if women are to engage in intercourse with a fellow human being, our hook-up culture champions the women who can go out and get what they need without any emotional ties. This is the modern woman, perhaps even more so than the vibrator consumer.

But what is with this fear of needing someone?

Carol Deppe, a scientist and writer, asks, “Is independence even a virtue? It seems to me that to be truly independent I would have to love and care about no one, and be loved and cared about by no one. And I would have no one to learn from and no one to teach. It’s a depressing image.” Feminism in its truest sense argues that men and women are equal. I would argue that men and women both need people, of any gender. People need people. We need love and support and hugs and jokes. Being independent sounds nice, but when we tell girls that they should want to be independent, it only makes them feel bad when they find themselves needing someone else. This is wrong! Needing others and having others need you is not a sign of weakness; it is a sign of being human.

Before sexual freedom, economic freedom was the crucial struggle for women. Firstwave feminism in the 19th and early 20th centuries focused a great deal on employment and women’s property rights.

When divorce meant a woman lost her children, house and spending money, it is no wonder why it was seldom practiced.

To be tied down like that is certainly not gender equality. However, it is important to note that while many middle class and upper middle class women were housewives at this time, such was not the case for the working class; the Industrial Revolution allowed for many women to get jobs in factories and the like, for better or for worse.

Lowell Massachusetts was an industrial powerhouse in the United States, producing textiles with new machinery and organized mass production, and the majority of the workforce was made up of women. By working in a factory, the Lowell Mill Girls achieved economic independence from their fathers and an alternative to marriage.

However the work was hard and the

conditions were grim; they worked 12 to 14 hours a day in a loud, stuffy room filled with dangerous machines. Housed by the factory in boarding houses, these women developed a supportive community. They were also intellectually driven, pushing themselves to expand their minds even though their bodies were exhausted from their fartoo-long work day. They read voraciously, exchanged ideas and attended lectures.

The Lowell women were unhappy with their conditions, seeing that they were no way for human beings to live. Through discussion, study and solidarity, they saw that though they had no power as individuals, as a united force, they could make an impact.

The Lowell Mill Girls went on strike in 1834 and 1836. In January 1845 they started their own union called the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. They ran it by themselves, holding elections and meetings, organizing other female workers, setting up other branches and organizing fairs, parties and social gatherings. These women fought for shorter workdays and better pay as a matter of personal dignity; they saw themselves as humans who deserved a life outside of the factory.’

Their collective action is in strong contrast to Sheryl Sandberg, author of Lean In and the New York Times Bestseller brand of feminism. Rather than uniting women to fight for equal wages, Sandberg puts the onus on each individual; if you aren’t making enough money, it’s because you haven’t demanded it. But this sort of thinking is not a reality for the vast majority of working women. Walking into an office

“IS INDEPENDENCE EVEN A VIRTUE? IT SEEMS TO ME THAT TO BE TRULY INDEPENDEN T I WOULD HAVE TO LOVE AND CARE ABOUT NO ONE.” 29

and putting your stilettoed foot down only works when you are already in a high-powered, difficult-to-replace position. As feminist scholar bell hooks explains, “there was never and is no simple homogenous gendered identity that we could call ‘women’ struggling to be equal with men. In fact, the reality was and is that privileged white women often experience a greater sense of solidarity with men of their same class than with poor white women or women of color.” Sandberg reduces feminism to a struggle for gender equality within the existing social and economic systems. But as these are systems that also actively oppress groups other than women, is this really the fight that should be taking place? The point of the feminist movement is to have a movement of women working towards mutual advancement, not one woman clawing her way to the top.

Independence itself is a flawed concept. Strength, on the other hand, is merely incomplete. Strong women — those whom we are supposed to look up to, are the ones in the top of their fields. We smile with pride when we hear of a female CEO or Prime Minister or neurosurgeon. But as feminist writer Jessica Valenti puts it, the idea that women should celebrate other women because of their positions of power suggests that all women want is ... another woman. In this sense, assimilation is the goal; as described by Jessa Crispin, “the markers of women’s and feminism’s success — money, power, high-level employment — are the same markers as men’s success.” But is it really women who clawed their way to the top of what hooks calls our “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” who deserve our adoration?

Role models should not be chosen for their general power. Supervillains often have as much power as superheroes; the difference lies in what that power is used for. Similarly, women in power should not be applauded simply because they “got somewhere.”

“Feminism is not a brand of self-help . . . in this corrupted, capitalist form, feminism has become little more than a justification for narcissism.”

The question is what they use their position for — good or evil. Of course, it is rarely as simple as that. But to say that a woman CEO is a hero just because she climbed the capitalist ladder means for young girls that their dream should be to do the same; they should fight for some small, token role within the system rather than fight the system and its fucked-up nature itself.

Feminism is not a brand of self-help, despite what Sandberg and others like her would have us believe. In this corrupted capitalist form, feminism has become little more than a justification for narcissism, where women can explain away every self-serving decision they make with “because feminism.” hooks defines it instead as “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression.” With this definition comes the understanding that it is not enough to have more women in high-paying jobs; the fight is not just for rich white women, or just white women or just women at all; the challenge is to end oppression for all.

So what should women be doing? I think that strong women should use their strengths to help others. This can be through delivering babies or fighting for important legislation or teaching a classroom of children how to read. It can be as simple as putting dinner on the table for your family or as complicated as finding a cure for a disease. But whether you are a housewife or a chemist, a lawyer or a teacher, you should give love to those around you. They need not be a husband or a child, but they can be. Feminism is not a race to the top. It is accepting all people as people and thus deserving of equality and rights. The battle is not to place as many female CEOs as we can, but to improve the lives of as many people as we can. ♢

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THANKFULLY BLESSED EXPLORING “BASIC BITCHES”

BY MELVIN LI ART BY KAREN TSAI One evening at the first marching band rehearsal of the semester, one of our freshman recruits took advantage of her 10-minute break and began video chatting with a friend in the middle of Schoellkopf Field. She was aware of how ridiculous she looked; after she was finished, she trotted over to us and proclaimed: “I’m so basic!”

I looked up. “What’s basic?”

“It means ‘stereotypical white girl,’” she replied.

I thought at first that she had made up the term. To me, “basic” meant “plain,” “normal” or “default.” Most of us also know that “basic” refers to anything with a pH over seven. It’s the name of a 2003 film starring John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson.

It’s a cigarette brand, a programming language and even a language in Star Wars. But a stereotypical white girl? I had never heard the word basic used in that way before, and neither had most of my friends.

Over the next few weeks, however, I realized that the definition of a “basic girl” (or “basic bitch,” depending on your preference) was more complex than I had imagined. Being “basic” is far more than being unintelligent. On the contrary, “basicness” has nothing to do with one’s grades, although there may be a negative correlation between the two. Instead, a girl’s “basicness” depends on her lifestyle, snacking choices, dress and social habits. For those of you with many hours to waste, take a quick trip to BuzzFeed and you’ll find dozens, if not hundreds, of characteristics, behaviors and hobbies that might make a girl “basic.” For those of you with little time left, keep on reading; I have compiled a brief guide to help strongly acidic individuals, such as myself, understand the “basic bitch” phenomenon down to its very roots.

So without further ado, let us begin with the basic question (no pun intended): What is a “basic bitch?”

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“A ‘Basic’ Girl’s Exploits cause no shock, warrant no double takes, and fail to elevate the pulse of even a single available male.”

THE STANDARD DEFINITION To date, there is no perfect definition of a basic girl. There are only several adjectives and phrases that come close to accurately portraying her, never capturing her completely.

What is now considered to be the Standard Definition (SD) of “basic bitch” is also known as the Internet Definition (ID), since most information on “basic bitches” originates online. This definition is only applied to girls who genuinely hold stereotypical basic values, which are absolute social conformity and advancement, academic mediocrity, vapid consumption, promiscuity and sensual stimulation, be it mental or physical. Going by the Standard Definition, if you’re a sorority chick with between 500 and 1200 Facebook friends who’s taking 14 credits per semester and going to bed in colorful socks surrounded by green apple orchard scented candles, you’re a pretty “basic” bitch.

As with most things on Urban Dictionary, the SD is an extremely hateful insult to use on a girl because it implies that she is an artificial brat who spends every moment of the day trying to appear desirable, both mentally and physically. Supposedly, everything she buys, every song she listens to and every beverage she sips is selected in a way that maximizes her social appeal. Most “basic bitches” truly enjoy their pumpkin-spice lattes (PSL) and Chipotle gift cards, but to the most devoted basic girls, personal gratification is always secondary to social desirability.

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Typical attire for “basic bitches” may include the good old norts (Nike shorts) and Uggs combo at lunch, or putting on a fresh infinity scarf for a selfie before class and then leaving it on for the rest of the day. Yoga pants are usually a dead giveaway, and it’s common “knowledge” that the “basic” girls who wear yoga pants to class probably have never been to an actual yoga class. “Basic” girls tend to be very brand-conscious and will often ignore self-preservation instincts to follow all the latest trends. Here in Ithaca, any girl walking around in a North Face jacket, TOMS shoes or sundresses past November is seriously “basic,” especially if she complains about the cold. Other favored outfits among “basic” girls are the vest, sweater, skinny jeans and riding boots combo, as well as anything worn with black leggings and rainbow sandals. “Basic” symptoms extend to a girl’s living quarters as well. If a girl decorates her room with specially scented candles for every change in season, or Instagrams the fake Marilyn Monroe quote hanging above her bed, you can officially label her a “basic bitch.” And of course, if a friend takes a perfectly beautiful picture of autumn leaves for her cover photo and then spends five minutes filtering the living hell out of it — get your “basic” net ready.

True “basic bitches” are never referred to as “basic” in public, for their behavior gives them away so immediately and consistently that no one feels a need to actually call them out. According to Noreen Malone of New York Magazine, one of the most important hallmarks of a genuinely “basic” girl is that she “fails to surprise us.”

Going by the SD, a “basic” girl’s exploits cause no shock, warrant no double takes and fail to elevate the pulse of even a single available male. To reference The Matrix, spotting a “basic” girl is like being in

HISTORY

“eventually, females made up the majority of people who used the term and committed ‘ ba s i c c u s at i o n s. ’ ”

According to BuzzFeed contributor Saeed Jones, the term “basic bitch” had actually been around for over a decade prior to its mainstream popularity, initially referring to any unsophisticated person. In 1984, the band Klymaxx released a hit single called “Meeting in the Ladies Room,” which included the line, “I’d hate to come down to their level and become a BW / a basic woman but if they don’t stop it’s gonna get scandalous.” It’s not clear what the band defines as a “BW,” but this is one of the first recorded instances of “basic” referring to a woman.

The roots of the term as we know it date back to a controversial 2009 YouTube video by male comedian Lil Duval, which lists dozens of stereotypes associated with working class black women. Duval rails against behavior such as “singing any Beyoncé song all day,” having “five kids with three baby daddies” and stepping into night clubs “with those fresh heels on, toes done and the back of your ankles ashy.”

negative phrase. This would culminate in 2011 when The Game released a song titled “Basic Bitch,” which criticized unattractive urban working class women who frequent nightclubs with “fake bag, fake ass and she beggin’ for Patrón.” At this point, the phrase “basic bitch” usually referred to desperate prostitutes who wore knockoff heels and clothing in an attempt to make quick money at nightclubs. It was often used interchangeably with the word “ratchet,” which refers to pathetic, ghetto-sprung divas with unpolished heels, dyed hair, torn leggings and cheap purses. Many feminists spoke out against the “basic” label, stating that it was a term invented by men to further the sexual objectification of women, but the phrase’s popularity continued to rise among both genders.

The term slowly gained popularity in the hip-hop scene over the following two years. Lil Wayne released a song called “I Am Not a Human Being,” in which he insisted that he was not “basic”: “I got my foot on the line I’m not racin’ / I thank God that I am not basic.” At the end of his song “Hard in the Paint,” rapper Tyga also defends himself from the term, saying, “Don’t compare me to no basic bitch.” Both songs helped transform “basic bitch” from a generic insult to a decidedly

That same year, female musicians began including the controversial term in their work, despite claims that it was misogynistic. The most notable example of this was Kreayshawn, whose debut single and viral hit “Gucci Gucci” contained the refrain: “Gucci Gucci, Louis Louis, Fendi Fendi, Prada / Them basic bitches wear that shit so I don’t even bother.”

This song marked a turning point for the meaning of “basic,” as

love; no one has to tell you, you just know it.

Recently, the term “basic bitches” helped lead to the use of “acidic” to describe all the human females with non-basic characteristics, “Acidic bitches” is more or less identical to “bad bitches,” and refers to independent individuals who aren’t readily swayed by fashion trends, popular culture and fitting in. There is nothing shameful about being acidic, and if your friend ever tells you that the pH of the room plummets when you walk in, just tell her that drain cleaner hurts a lot more than vinegar.

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Kreayshawn specifically attacked women who wore expensive designer clothing and cosmetics. When asked to describe a basic bitch, Kreayshawn replied: “You can smell a basic bitch from a mile away. You can smell that bitch’s perfume. A basic bitch is just someone who likes what’s typical to like. The radio puts stuff on the radio that they think is typical and you should like it, and that’s something a basic bitch would like. She likes those normal brands and wears them all the time because that’s some basic shit.”

Young women increasingly began using “basic” on each other as an insult, breaking the male monopoly on the word. A few bold girls even began referring to themselves as “basic” as a form of self-deprecating humor. Eventually, females made up the majority of people who used the term and committed “basiccusations.”

From 2011 onwards, the concept of “basic bitches” gradually evolved to what it is today: White, mainstream, somewhat affluent young women who seek to advance their lives by buying the right products, listening to the right music and socializing with the right people.

This shift in definition is better demonstrated by the April 2014 CollegeHumor video “How to Tell if You’re a Basic Bitch,” which is perhaps one of the most mainstream occurrences of the term to date. BuzzFeed has also helped spread awareness of the term, publishing over two dozen articles, quizzes and surveys with the keywords “basic bitches” and “basic white girls” that same year. In fact, most BuzzFeed articles about basic bitches were published in 2014, proving that the basic bitch phenomenon is still breaking into new territory to this day.

WHY DO WE SAY IT? WHAT DOES IT REALLY MEAN? “Basic” is not as derogatory as it was during its early hip-hop days. But with such a negative definition online and a history so entrenched in the urban working class, why has the label “basic bitch” become so widely used among girls today? Why do so many girls jokingly refer to each other and themselves as “basic” when sources online tell us that no girl wants to be associated with the term? All over the Internet, articles embracing the “basic” subculture are spreading almost as quickly as articles that attack it.

Indeed, there are some scientifically proven benefits to being “basic.” Ella Ceron, author of “9 Scientific Reasons Why You Should Embrace Your Inner Basic Girl” on Thought Catalog, states that “basic” girls are much healthier and happier than the people around them precisely because of their basicness.

Sure, those avocado toast Instagrams and #fitness hashtags may look ridiculous online, but these eating and exercise habits will definitely benefit your health in the long run. Taking selfies with pumpkins or sorority squatting in front of bonfires means that you’re probably spending plenty of time outdoors, which of course is better than sitting alone on your behind all day typing up articles like this. Even blind conformity, the most important element of basicness, has its advantages; eagerness to embrace social trends gives “basic” girls access to valuable social capital not available to antisocial misanthropes, according to Ceron.

But these factors alone can’t account for the sudden widespread usage of “basic bitches.” There is one more force at work here

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— popularity. As more and more people began to use the term “basic bitch,” its meaning lost its specificity. Back in 2009, “basic bitch” simply meant “stereotypical, inner-city, unoriginal ratchet girl at the club.” As more people began to use it, the label’s meaning changed to “stereotypical rich girl who overspends on clothing and cosmetics,” and then to “stereotypical white girl.” But girls today often use the term on friends who don’t exhibit any of the above characteristics. You don’t have to be ghetto to be basic anymore. You don’t have to be rich. You don’t even have to be white — BuzzFeed even has a guide to Hong Kong “basic bitches!” The only thing any of the definitions have in common is “stereotypical,” so the best way to be “basic” is to behave “stereotypically.” But how? This depends on the era, nothing more.

The 2004 film Mean Girls is a perfect demonstration of how an object’s original meaning can be lost as its popularity rises. When Tina Fey wrote the film’s screenplay, she was satirizing the “queen bee” phenomenon, the rise of those charismatic, aggressive, manipulative, wealthy alpha girls who often dominate school settings. As the film’s popularity exploded, however, many young women failed to recognize it as satire and began idolizing characters such as Regina George, instead of mocking them as Fey had hoped. Fey later said in an interview: “Adults find it funny. They are the ones who are laughing. Young people watch it like a reality show. It’s much too close to their real experiences, so they are not exactly guffawing.” Today, rather than serving as antagonists to the heroine Cady Heron as Fey intended, the Plastics are arguably the most popular characters in the movie.

This “Mean Girls effect” can be similarly applied to “basic bitches.” Since “basic” girls are, by definition, unaware that they’re “basic,” they stop being “basic” the moment they call anyone else a “basic bitch.” Therefore, as more and more girls use the term, the number of true “basic” girls in the universe must be declining. As Michael Reid Roberts of The American Reader put it: “Arguably this means that the more people become familiar with the word, the less useful it becomes; there are literally less basic bitches to name.

Anyone familiar with the term knows that actual basic bitches are not important for the word’s use, though; the basic bitch names an absence, a vacancy, a phantasm.”

Just like the meaning of “hipster,” the meaning of “basic” has evolved with the times; only for “basic” it happened over the last few years instead of over decades. “Hipster,” which now describes a broad range of affluent white Millennials in gentrified neighborhoods, once specifically referred to lovers of jazz and bebop in the ’40s. Similarly, with time, “basic bitch” has grown to become an umbrella term for any girls who do anything that might be considered typical. It’ll be a while before the Urban Dictionary Standard Definition of “basic” falls out of use, but among friends, “basic” is as harmless as “stupid” or “ridiculous,” at least for now. Despite all our documenting, researching and debating, we still may never know what “basic” will mean next. #blessed #thankful #tbt. ♢

the politics of lipstick PERFORMING FEMININITY FROM GARBO TO BOWIE

BY KAITLYN TIFFANY ART BY THELONIA SAUNDERS

The French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” has become so ubiquitous as to be nearly meaningless. But in the 1940s it was revolutionary — it implied that gender was created by society, and it therefore freed women not only from the idea that they had to conform to femininity, but also from the fear that they were supposed to have been born already knowing how to “perform” it, and that they had somehow failed. This idea of gender performance was articulated more clearly in Judith Butler’s 1990 Gender Trouble, which defines gender as an illusion created by the constant acting out of the conventions of that gender — obscuring the contradiction and instability that is inherent in any person’s identity and gender identity specifically.

Makeup has always been something I’ve used as little of as possible — I like lipstick because it’s obvious, and it implies a lot more effort than it actually takes. I wear purple eyeliner to feel like Zenon. I wear mascara to try to make my way-too-squinty eyes look a little bit less so. But there’s a certain amount of shame in taking this utilitarian approach — why don’t I know how to do better? Who was supposed to teach me and when was I supposed to learn? It feels important, like a rite of passage, because it is one of the most heavily ritualized, commonplace forms of

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performative art and identity confirmation that human civilization has ever dreamed up.

Everyone is aware of the basic cultural connotations of lipsticks — dark red lipstick is seductive, pale pink is girly and innocent, matte is matronly, black is goth. But I’d like to imply that there is and has been a politics to lipstick — not just in the sense of “Lipstick Lesbians” or Riot Grrls who wrote “slut” on their bellies with Revlon, the ways the symbol was wielded deliberately — but in the sense that lipsticks’ connotations are not inherent to the colors, but were cemented as the lingering after-effect of the once politically-charged statements these shades could make. Makeup, after all, is not just a performative art, a ritual, a means of improving one’s image, or even a type of costuming — it is a demonstration of identity.

Take for example, Mad Men’s Betty Draper and Peggy Olson — one a housewife, the standin for millions of similar women during the show’s ’50s to ’60s time frame, and the other America’s prototypical early businesswoman, a subverter of post-war gender roles. Betty Draper is never seen without perfect, bright red lips, as was en vogue. These lips were symbolic not only of compliance to the neverstronger patriarchy, an acknowledgment of the fascination with women’s mouths and oral sex, but it was also used as evidence of a woman’s ability to be perpetually pristine, like their homes, families and blemish-free lives. Red lipstick is messy, red lipstick is obvious when it runs outside the lines, red lipstick gets on things — but not if you are perfect, not if you are Betty Draper. Peggy Olson doesn’t wear much makeup, but her big break comes during a focus group for a lipstick advertisement — ”mark your man,” is Peggy’s suggested tagline. She suggests that lipstick be mutated from something that you use to label yourself as feminine into something that you use to claim ownership.

According to Dr. Camilla Power, an anthropologist at the University of East London, cosmetic body art was “the earliest form of ritual in human culture.” Crayons, made from red ochre mineral pigments and associated with the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa 100,000 years ago, were the first evidence of the deliberate creation of cosmetics. Lipstick as we know it, however, was not invented until many thousands of years later, probably by ancient Sumerians who crushed gemstones and decorated their lips and eyes. Ancient Egyptians extracted red dye from fungi and created the shimmering effect of lipstick with the pearlescent substance from fish scales,

and in the 1800s, in Mexico and Central America, lipstick was colored by extracted carmine dye from the cochineal insect.

This information does not imply that the makeup used by early civilizations had any political or cultural connotations, gendered or otherwise — only that it existed and it was ritualized. The earliest example of culture taking a stance on what makeup meant when used by women is probably the Bible, in which Jezebel, the false prophet, is known for wearing heavy makeup and is described as “painting her eyes.” In fact, the Bible describes her applying makeup in the moments before her death, which occurs when she is thrown out of a window into a courtyard, and eaten by stray dogs.

Here begins the history of makeup as belonging to the transgressors — the women, the queer folk, the others. Painting your face is a form of deception, maybe, or perhaps inappropriate self-celebration, if you belong the category of “Other.” In Film Noir, Professor William Luhr points out an inconsistency in American collective memory — why do we associate dark red lipstick with the femme fatales of film noir, when almost all films noir were in black and white? “Considered from the vantage point of the 21st century,” he writes as explanation, “memory and its distortions are important components of film noir as we have come to know it … the color is meant to resemble that worn by glamorous seductresses in films noir and by this, indirect, symbolic path, recall film noir’s exotic, transgressive aura.” The original femme fatale, in fact, the German actress Marlene Dietrech, was nominated for an Oscar in 1930 for her performance in Morocco, a film in which she dresses androgynously in various reinterpretations of a tuxedo and kisses a woman. She was open about her bisexuality and also stated, atypically for the time, “I dress for myself. Not for the image, not for the public, not for the fashion, not for men.” As a genre, film noir focused on the sexual motivations for human actions and gender roles as they evolved through the middle of the 20th century, and it was particularly fascinated with a woman’s capacity to use sex as weaponry. Today, seductive red lipstick is still associated with this era when sex was depicted as downfall, and sexual identity as cloaked in shadow.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago recently opened an exhibition of over 100 artifacts from the life of David Bowie, entitled David Bowie Is. The exhibition features the expected — album covers, handwritten lyrics, guitars — as well as the unexpected — his coke spoon, his manifesto for The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men and a tissue blotted with lipstick, dated 1974. The

tissue would have been collected at the height of Bowie’s career, during the time when he used his androgynous alter-ego Ziggy Stardust to completely subvert the definition of what it was to be a rock star — a definition which had mostly included effervescent masculinity.

Stardust was the impetus of the United States’ entire glam rock era, affectionately referred to as the time “when boys wore lipstick,” mostly of atypical colors like purple, orange, lime green and those famous ’70s metallics. In the cover art for 1970’s The Man Who Sold the World, Bowie wears what he calls a “man’s dress,” which he wore during his entire first U.S. tour. If today’s pop culture is criticized for betting on the sure thing — Katy Perry, blockbusters, another white guy on late night television — the ’70s glam rock era represented one of those rare moments in which pop culture can succeed at being progressive. Gender-bending and gender play were sold en masse, providing models of non-normative performances of gender and sexuality that served as a crucial respite from the rampant conservatism of the ’60s. These performances are now commonplace as a result — see Jessica Lange’s Dietrich/Bowie hybrid perform “Life on Mars” in this season of American Horror Story, or the Tony-awardwinning revival of 1998’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a tribute to glam rock and a crucifixion of gender binaries, which cropped up this year and made a star of one glitter-soaked Neil Patrick Harris (once again), or one of the yearly iterations of Rocky Horror Picture Show in essentially every city in the United States.

Look for their shades of orange on Solange Knowles, look for punk’s purples on Lorde (and in her “Pure Heroine” shade for MAC!).

In June 2014, the feminist beauty and fashion blogger Arabelle Sicardi published the first installment of a six week project entitled “Most Important Ugly,” in which she photographed men and women who identified as queer, transgender or as persons of color and talked to them about the way that makeup had influenced how they performed these marginalized identities. “I believe makeup is magic,” she wrote in the project’s introduction, “For so many people, it’s intimidating and scary and suffocating and heavy with the weight of expectations and failed fantasy. I was definitely one of those people for a long time. But somewhere along the way (read: my mall goth days at the age of the 13), I learned that blue lipstick could make boys recoil and make me look like an alien from Farscape. And so, I decided to change my tune.

I would paint myself up into a witch who could protect myself. Duochrome eyeshadow that looked like spacetime, ice queen pink lips that were as cold as my attitude.”

One of those photographed for the project, an

Asian-American woman named Melissa, chose to emulate the make-up worn in Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, the last part of a South Korean revenge trilogy in which the female protagonist is asked, “What’s with the red eyeshadow?” and responds, “I don’t want to look kind-hearted.”

A queer woman named Becca chose to mesh a Maybelline mustache, a “nod to John Waters [her] favorite trash king” with the gold and blue eyeshadow that reminded her of watching her mother apply her makeup in the ’80s. A black woman named Indigo wore simple gold flecks on her cheeks and red lipstick, as well as a chilling grin, meant to make her appear “Cold and wicked and overjoyed, the archetype of our favorite villains and anti-heroes, the qualities of so many wonderful ignored girls in culture who were taught they were not enough for too many reasons.” Sicardi dubbed her the paragon of the project’s thesis: “Indigo uses make up as it please her, not how it pleases others. I think that was the end goal of the project — to internalize your desires and willpower so much that the thought of doing otherwise is just bizarre.”

In my photo on the editor’s page, I am wearing my father’s jeans and my boyfriend’s sneakers.

When I wear them I feel compelled to wear red lipstick — what is more fun than contrast? Dress me up like a boy and paint me like the pretty picture of Taylor Swift — androgyny has been a quiet contributor to the way I have styled myself ever since that accidental bowl cut I received at age eight, which ruined my pre-fourth grade summer soccer season, and ever since I did not hit puberty in any way until college. Sicardi concludes at the end of her project, “You can confront and manage your insecurities by acknowledging the hold they have on you, and warping them. I guess that is considered ironic, some kind of camp humor, but really I just think it’s the best way of managing things.”

Sicardi’s project serves as case in point for the argument that lipsticks have an inherent politics to them. Each participant in her project interpreted his or her own anxieties and insecurities about his or her physical appearance through the lens of popular culture, gender norms, racial stereotypes and culturally-embedded ideas of beauty that have been knocked down and rebuilt throughout the course of human history. The fact that this diverse and disparate group of people all felt that their anxieties could be conveyed through makeup must count for something. And today, lipstick is not only the boldest makeup, that which when it is there is most clearly noticed, it is also one of those archaic identifiers of femininity that has been reclaimed by those whom it once oppressed, and joyfully appropriated by those whom it used to exclude.♢

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THE NFL

AND THE RISE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

SPO R T S JOURNALISM

BY NATE CODERRE The 2014-2015 NFL season is ending in much the same way it does every year: Some perennial contenders are living up to expectations, underdog teams are emerging and the playoff races are starting to heat up. Injuries and penalty flags still pose constant threats to every fan’s mood. But the narrative of the NFL in 2014 has drastically diverged from its typical news cycle: Recurring scandalous headlines have been a cloud over the national experience of the game and created an unavoidable blemish on the league’s reputation.

The league’s year from hell starts, of course, with the now infamous elevator scene that took place this February in an Atlantic City casino.

The news/gossip titan TMZ released a video showing Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice dragging an unconscious Janay Rice (then Janay Palmer) out of an elevator. Many sportswriters expressed their frustrations that Commissioner Roger Goodell gave Ray Rice a paltry two game suspension while drug offenders like Josh Gordon were suspended for a whole year (Gordon’s punishment was later reduced as part of a new drug policy/obvious PR move). Her limp

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body made the impact of domestic violence on victims the first thing on America’s mind.

However, the indignation wasn’t sustainable until TMZ leaked a second video showing Rice actually striking his fiancé. This new video mobilized the sports-viewing public, showcasing the power of a newly influential block of young internet sportswriters who freely deliver their opinions on social and political issues.

In most domestic violence cases in the NFL, fans would discover their favorite players were arrested by clicking on a one-line link in the corner of their favorite website, or by watching the last few minutes of SportsCenter. They would be annoyed about how that affected their fantasy football team for a few weeks, but ultimately would be relieved when they inevitably learned that the NFL was going to be lenient. This video changed the way the public reacted because it was able to actually see the physical damage that domestic violence inflicts on its victims. The brutality of Rice’s actions was undeniable, and the transparent attempts to save the

league’s reputation only made it more obvious how complicit the league had been with the epidemic of domestic violence among its players. Goodell’s sudden attempts to express moral outrage about the situation only showcased how cold and calculated previous responses were.

The new wave of public opinion has already proven itself to be a powerful social force. The backlash was so strong that even Anheuser-Busch, one of the league’s most important sponsors, released a statement criticizing the NFL for its actions. Major corporations have been willing to pay premiums for decades to associate themselves with the NFL because its viewership has remained high and stable. Anheuser-Busch isn’t likely to break its profitable partnership with the NFL any time soon, but even the fact that the statement was made shows how greatly the NFL’s reputation has been damaged and how strong the new backlash was.

To understand exactly the nature of this new, socially aware consciousness of the sports fandom, I think it’s prudent to compare this situation to the other major social issue that rocked the sports world this year. In the wake of the Donald Sterling fiasco, the public made it easy for NBA Commissioner Adam Silver to make a decision by putting enormous pressure on the league to strip Sterling of his ownership. Donald Sterling was the Los Angeles Clippers basketball owner until racially charged recordings of his conversations with his girlfriend V. Stiviano were leaked to TMZ. The nature of Sterling’s wrongdoings made his banning inevitable; he had offended a majority of his players, the league and many fans with his racial tirade. He even explicitly attacked Magic Johnson, a beloved Hall of Fame player and an ambassador of the league.

The Clippers’ players united against him by warming up for their next game with their shirts inside out, obscuring the Clippers’ logo. Fans mass-produced various unofficial Clippers T-shirts, some simplistic (“Fuck the owner”) and some hopeful (“Sterling Out, Equality In”). Thousands of sports journalists and bloggers wrote articles condemning Sterling, and virtually every living basketball

“The modern era of increased information and discussion has given us a pulpit to voice our socially conscious concerns about our favorite sports, and we have an imperative to do so.” legend gave statements echoing the sentiment. Perhaps most importantly, Twitter was set aflame for weeks on end with a unified message of equality.

So what changed with this fresh Sterling scandal? And how does it relate back to the Ray Rice situation? As Bryan Curtis of Grantland argues, the way that popular opinion on sports issues develops has changed in the wake of the expansion of social media. According to Curtis, a block seems to be forming among the young, left-leaning sports fans that dominate Twitter. They are having a profound impact on sports media, which is attempting to heavily integrate Twitter into their reporting. (Watch SportsCenter for 20 minutes; they will almost assuredly put up a bunch of fans’ tweets.) This is politicizing sports columns, a notion that had once been considered taboo. After the Seahawks beat the 49ers in the playoffs last year, the national discussion centered mostly on conservative reactions to Richard Sherman’s emotional rant (a lot of older media people called him a thug) and what they said about the state of race in America.

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“our national discussion of domestic violence should include consideration of the power imbalances that enable players to perpetrate these acts of violence and the culture of masculinity that emboldens them to do it.”

The simple fact that Twitter maintained a collective interest in the Ray Rice story has improved coverage by creating a demand for information and politicized sports writing. This in turn has solidified a sports fan ideology which convinces a wider audience of sports fans to demand social justice from the major sports leagues. The NFL’s deplorable response to domestic violence has extended the length of our discussion about this issue by inspiring sports sites to continue to talk about it. Modern news sites like Bleacher Report have moved away from the old local newspaper model to a new kind of reporting which employs hundreds of relatively unknown writers to create instant content about every major team instead.

They increase their volume by reporting on Twitter reactions and stray comments that would not normally constitute news. This new type of website promotes click-bait articles that pander to the younger public that advertisers crave. This includes allowing their writers to editorialize reports on even the most innocuous pieces of news. These practices certainly open up new debates about what journalistic standards should be in the new Millennium, but I think that allowing writers to take stances on social issues will ultimately do more good than bad as long as readers remain discerning.

Unfortunately, the Donald Sterling incident has another, less positive lesson to teach us. The feel-good movement when Silver decided to take the Clippers away from Donald Sterling was a pretty superficial statement against bigotry. Sterling had control of the team for over 30 years; he was an abysmal owner and was accused of racial hatred on more than one occasion. Elgin Baylor, former Clippers GM and a Hall of Fame player filed a wrongful termination lawsuit on the grounds of race and age-based discrimination, claiming, “And when he finished, Donald said something that was very shocking to me. He said, ‘Personally, I would like to have a white, Southern coach coaching poor black players. And I was shocked. And he looked at me and said, ‘Do you thing that’s a racist statement?’ I said, ‘Absolutely. That’s plantation mentality.’”

never intervened on the matter and Elgin dropped the racial claims from his lawsuit, eventually having the rest of his lawsuit shot down by a jury. Even more despicably, Sterling’s real estate company spent years participating in housing discrimination and settled in court twice, once in 2003 (undisclosed) and once in 2009 (2.73 million dollars), for sums that hardly infringe on his company’s net worth.

In a 2003 deposition, one of his property supervisors explained his patterns of discrimination, including claiming that black people smell and Mexicans just sit around and smoke and drink all day. Once again, Silver’s predecessor, David Stern, did nothing to intervene with the situation.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the NFL has a similar history with implicitly condoning grave social injustices. For example, Ravens linebacker (and Rice’s teammate) Terrell Suggs has had a history of domestic violence, including punching his fiancé, dragging her alongside of a car and pouring bleach on her and her son. This all led up to a 2012 court mandate for him to give up between seven and nine guns because authorities had reason to believe that the mother and child’s lives were in danger. As you can probably guess, the league never suspended him. Sports writers have ridiculed Goodell this year for the way he has handled domestic violence, but the league has quietly accepted domestic violence since well before he was in charge. For example, former Tennessee Titans cornerback Samari Rolle hit his wife on Valentine’s Day 2005 and signed a sixyear deal worth 30.5 million dollars three weeks later. Rolle plead guilty for assault, but the NFL only fined him a game’s paycheck, refusing to even suspend him. That same year, the 49ers made a trade for Willie Middlebrooks, a player who had just plead guilty to misdemeanor assault. Middlebrooks spun the issue by saying, “The 49ers did their research and found out that Willie is a highcharacter guy who was in a bad situation.” The list of injustices goes on at a sickening length, both before and during the reign of Goodell, yet fans have been unable to sustain their outrage long enough to demand accountability.

Baylor also said that players complained to him that Sterling brought women into the locker room to look at their “black bodies.”

These accusations further support Baylor’s claims of a plantation The NFL’s situation differed from the NBA’s because none of mentality, as only someone with such a mindset would objectify football’s prominent figures had a personal stake in standing up black men in an attempt to impress his social contacts. The league against domestic violence. Sterling’s statements were an affront to

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a majority of the league’s players, and the national community of racial equality that the league had cultivated over its existence. The league’s leaders would not have allowed the situation to resolve in any other way and the story would have remained in the public consciousness as long as it took. The NFL has no such leaders to sympathize with women, and therefore the league’s manipulations needed to have several layers to keep the conversation trending.

Should the general public have actually needed this unlikely series of events to occur before they took up arms about domestic violence? The first Rice tape circled the Internet for a few days, but the discussion largely stopped without the outrage reaching frenzy. How have we been so unsympathetic to domestic abuse that we forget about these crimes after the players get slaps on the wrist? Why do we need to see it happen for us to condemn the perpetrators? Why haven’t we been persistent enough to demand change all along?

it.

Second, the NFL needs to find a way to hold teams accountable for their reactions to these crimes. When 49ers player Ray McDonald had a violent altercation with his pregnant fiancé, he called the 49ers security director, ultimately getting a local officer who had previously done security work for the team to come over as the first responder. The case against him was thrown out for lack of evidence (McDonald’s fiancé didn’t end up cooperating). Just hours after the Rice incident occurred, the Ravens organization began a private campaign to convince Goodell to be lenient, while simultaneously lying to the public about the lack of police cooperation. More likely than not, they would have had a support system similar to the 49ers if there wasn’t visual evidence. There has to be some way for the NFL to restrict the way teams can respond to charges against its players. It is impossible to say exactly how much the 49ers and McDonald were able to pressure the victim, but having the first responder be so clearly biased against her must have contributed to feelings of isolation from the San Francisco community and law enforcement as a whole. Domestic violence is hard to prosecute in comparison to other violent crimes, but disentangling the team as much as possible from the legal process would go a long way towards improving its outcome and making it easier for the league to apply its new minimum suspensions.

This seems to be the limitation of the power of social media: It requires constant reminders to maintain attention. Despite the intensity of the public outburst, the NFL lost virtually none of its viewership this year, which suggests that the NFL has already begun to turn its narrative away from the off-field controversies.

Remaining a fan of the NFL is not an evil in and of itself, but we cannot let ourselves lose sight of the injustices that the league has allowed to go on. We must continue to pay attention to this story It is not the responsibility of the NFL to rid our society of domestic and to pressure the NFL into making changes. The NFL Player’s violence, but it is incumbent upon us to make every effort to do Association is attempting to get Ray Rice reinstated, arguing so. The NFL is a profit driven entity with no moral compass, so we

“it is not the responsibility of the nfl to rid our society of domestic violence, but it is incumbnet upon us to make every effort to do so. The nfl is a profit driven entity with no moral compass, so we need to leverage our power as viewers in order to give them an abiding interest in it.” that the NFL violated labor laws by enhancing his punishment (obviously the idea of him coming back is disappointing, but the player’s association is doing its job). With it, we have new evidence that Roger Goodell has lied to the public multiple times. And while much of the sports media has been covering it, the groundswell of support from Twitter has lost its momentum. People are simply moving on to other news stories.

As someone who isn’t an expert in the complexities of NFL franchising laws, I can only see two changes that the public needs to agitate for in hopes of eventually causing broader change. First, Roger Goodell simply must be fired. There is plenty of evidence that he knew all about the details of the incident when he initially gave Rice the two-game suspension, and has since repeatedly lied about

need to leverage our power as viewers in order to give them an abiding interest in it. We can have a significant impact on the rates of domestic violence within the NFL community, so we must hold it accountable for the actions of its players. The new policy (six games for the first offense, banishment for the second) will not completely do away with the issue, but a history of sustained enforcement of these new rules will go a long way. What’s more, our national discussion of domestic violence should include consideration of the power imbalances that enable players to perpetrate these acts of violence and the culture of masculinity that emboldens them to do it. The modern era of increased information and discussion has given us a pulpit to voice our socially conscious concerns about our favorite sports, and we have an imperative to do so. ♢

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The Illicit Interview

BY KAITLYN TIFFANY ART BY THELONIA SAUNDERS Daniel Handler, who was born on the same day that bikes were first permitted on the Golden Gate bridge, is the author of four novels under his own name (including one described by his publisher as an “incest opera”), as well as 23 under a fake name (including three that were turned into one movie, starring a little-known actress named Meryl Streep).

Handler is best known for the children’s series A Series of Unfortunate Events, which he wrote and narrated between the years 1999 and 2006 (otherwise known as “the editor of this magazine’s formative years”) under the name Lemony Snicket, a pseudonym derived as a bastardization of Jiminy Cricket, “exactly the kind of overly moralistic, cheerful narrator” whom Handler despises, for the purposes of discretely acquiring materials from conservative political organizations.

Due to a combination of aggressive Twitter activity and unprofessional behavior that was, luckily, considered charming, kitsch was able to sit down (a phrase which here means, “conduct heavily-mediated communication from a great distance, at great risk but with much excitement”) with Mr. Handler to talk about A Series of Unfortunate Events, its impending television adaptation and the many frustrations of love and careers in writing.

“Most things written about him are not true, but this is.” kitsch: Are you going to be answering these questions as Lemony Snicket or as Daniel Handler? Maybe you could alternate. I thought it was funny when Willem Dafoe did that in Spider-Man. Daniel Handler: I am Daniel Handler, though doubtless I will be played by Willem Dafoe eventually, someday. kitsch: My dad is the type of dad who only reads Malcolm Gladwell and biographies of white comedians. He is an engineer employed in a rather vague capacity by the United States government and a utilitarian, though he has fallen for the ruse of professional sports to a degree. Recently I compelled him to read Dave Eggers and he was medium into it. What books would you recommend for a person like that?

D.H.: Hmm. Peter Omer’s Love and Shame and Love is a great novel and about the politics of a previous generation. Also about Chicago.

So he might like that. I just read a fun book about a drunken sailor, McGlue by Otessa Moshfegh, which has the advantage of being very

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short. I like recommending short books to people because, really, how could they complain? kitsch: A Series of Unfortunate Events was quite heavily inspired by gothic literature and the All the Wrong Questions series deals mostly in the mystery genre. Can you talk a little bit about your interest in genre fiction? Are there any other genres you’re interested in writing in?

D.H.: I’m of the opinion that all fiction is genre fiction. I am investigating a genre now but I will not reveal what it is. But someday I would like to write a medical romance — something with a brave and sassy nurse perhaps. kitsch: When I was seven, I was given as a Christmas present my first two novels — The Secret Garden and The Bad Beginning — I blame my Aunt Patty for creating an avid reader and a conspiracy theorist. Do you remember the first novels that you read and who is to blame?

D.H.: My first grade teacher Mrs. Parrot handed me Beezus and Ramona by Beverly Cleary, which was my first chapter book, I think.

But it was the librarian at the West Portal Branch of the library who gave me The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. That was really the gateway drug. kitsch: Do you watch American Horror Story? The new season, Freak Show, reminds all of us at kitsch of The Carnivorous Carnival and we hope that you love Jessica Lange as much as we do.

D.H.: Jessica Lange will forever be the heroine of King Kong — ”Put me down, you male chauvinist pig ape!” — and Poison Ivy. kitsch: Who are your favorite competitors and/or dead people who also wrote children’s books? (You should know that if you reference Barbara Park you will trigger an extended weeping session for me.)

D.H.: My favorite children’s book was written by Dino Buzzati, who mostly wrote moving and angry political novels for adults. But I try not to be competitive. I don’t worry about what writers to beat — I concentrate on what I can steal from them. kitsch: I have to tell you, my boyfriend was skimming Reddit instead of listening to me talk the other day, and there was a thread asking “What book series should be adapted into a TV show?” and A Series of Unfortunate Events was the top-rated comment and both of us literally convulsed with joy at the thought of it. And then it came true! On my birthday! Anyway, the real question is, how much creative involvement do you think you’ll have with the adaptation, and how does that compare to your involvement with the film?

D.H.: I am still exhausted from coordinating all this to happen on your birthday. Netflix found that request of mine odd. I’m sure they will find future requests of mine odd, too. I was eventually fired from the Lemony Snicket movie; we’ll see what happens here. kitsch: Related: Who do you imagine the audience being for this show? Most of the original A Series of Unfortunate Events readers are now in their 20s, I’d imagine. Do you think they’re going to aim for them or for a younger demographic? Do kids use Netflix? I don’t even know.

D.H.: I don’t think about audience that much. But if I must, I imagine a family with children of assorted ages ranging from first grade to graduate school. They make popcorn and pull out the sofa bed and lounge around watching something interesting on television. They have some flecks of Japanese seaweed that they sprinkle on their popcorn. Those are the families I’m after. kitsch: Related: Would you be willing to use Netflix’s helpful “Viewing Activity” feature to tell us the last five things you’ve watched on Netflix?

D.H.: My Netflix viewing is top secret, as we are currently watching things directed by people who might direct the Snicket series. But I’ll take this opportunity to recommend five films: Lair of the White Worm, Paranoiac, Happy Endings, Saboteur, Careful. kitsch: Do you know how frustrating The Beatrice Letters were for 12 year olds who were neurotic and had lots of free time? I am asking on behalf of all of them but especially on behalf of me.

D.H.: Love is often frustrating, particularly at 12. kitsch: This year you awarded the first Lemony Snicket Prize for Noble Librarians Faced with Adversity. Can you talk a little bit about how you decided to establish this prize? Would you tell me about the best librarian you ever knew?

D.H.: The idea for the prize was actually my editor’s. She said something along the lines of, “You have some extra money. You should give it to a librarian.” And I said, “Yes of course! But maybe I should let the American Library Association choose, instead of just giving it out randomly.” And the American Library Association said, “Yes of course.” As for the best librarian I ever knew, that’s a little like talking about old girlfriends. They were all splendid. I was in need of them. It worked out fine. kitsch: At kitsch, we are incapable of thinking of anything to do with our lives besides becoming writers. Do you have any advice for us?

D.H.: Read a lot. Write things down. Don’t drink too much. Be kind to your friends and people who might turn out to be your friends.

Marry someone sensible. kitsch: For when you are trapped in an elevator, what one card trick, two jokes and three memorized poems do you keep on hand?

D.H.: The punchlines are “It’s only a hobby” and “Fat.” The poems are

by James Schulyer, Robin Robertson — this is the one that makes people cry — and Dorothy Parker. The card trick is indescribable, but professionals have been amazed by it. kitsch: As a girl child, I found your books to be among the rare few that had a variety of interesting and complicated female characters, as well as the rarer few that didn’t treat children like they were stupid. That’s not a question, just a thank you.

D.H.: You are very kind. You seem like an interesting and complicated female character yourself, if you don’t mind my saying so. ♢

A CONVERSATION WITH DANIEL HANDLER

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THE WHITE GIRL’S BURDEN Educational equality is a hot topic right now. Schools are failing, and everyone from Bill Gates to Rahm Emanuel has an answer for how to fix them. I went to public school for my entire K through 12 career so, naturally, I too have opinions on the myriad issues in this complicated system. Yet, again and again, the conversation boils down to one thing: bad teachers.

Just look at TIME’s most recent cover story: “Rotten Apples: The War on Teacher Tenure.” Sure, I had a few duds in my day, but the number of dedicated, intelligent, hardworking and even life-changing teachers far outnumbered the “dead weight.”

Indeed, I felt so inspired by some of the teachers who opened my mind, pushed me to work harder and filled me with a love for learning, that I realized somewhere along the line that I would like to do the same for others. As an aspiring teacher, I have of course been asked repeatedly whether I plan on applying to Teach for America. My answer is no, and this is my reason why.

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that these preparations are unnecessary since TFA would accept only the cream of the crop. Because the program is so competitive, according to Kopp and other TFA proponents, the recruits are already intellectually superior and thus needn’t be bothered with extensive training. Darling-Hammond, however, points out that as the best and the brightest, TFA recruits are natural learners, and that “people who learn effortlessly and have had no training in how to deliberately create learning strategies often find themselves at a loss as teachers. They can’t remember how they learned, so they cannot construct a process for teaching others.” Raw IQ scores do not translate into better teachers.

Even more important than training to be an effective classroom teacher is experience. Study after study has shown that teachers improve tremendously with experience, particularly in their first few years of teaching. But TFA only requires a two-year commitment — 50 percent of recruits leave after two years of service and 80 percent leave after three. This leaves little time for them to gain experience, and as soon as they do, they leave, ushering in new untrained and inexperienced recruits. As Bryn Proffitt, a high school teacher from Durham, North Carolina, explained in an article in The Herald Sun, the teaching profession is “not community service … It’s something that people learn how to do. It’s something that people get better at as they go forward and it’s something that people who make a long-term commitment to continually get better at over the course of their careers.” Teach for America is completely counter to the idea of teaching as a career; instead, the program encourages college grads to put in some “community service” time before moving on to more lucrative endeavors.

“The teaching profession is not community service. It’s something that people learn how to do [and] get better at. ”

First, Teach for America corps members attend a five-week training program as opposed to the 11 to 24 month masters and certification program typically required for traditional teachers. Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford, explains that the TFA training is insufficient, as it provides no instruction in child development or learning theory and little hands-on teaching experience. She goes on to explain that “none of TFA’s recruits, including those hoping to teach elementary school, take courses before they enter the classroom in such things as how to teach reading.” I doubt that recent college grads can dive right in as a primary instructor for already-underprivileged students and teach a class of 32 of them how to read. We just don’t learn how to teach basic literacy skills in our Marxist-Feminist theory classes.

Despite the lack of training and experience in their recruits, any TFA supporter will trot out a few studies showing that their teachers perform just as well, if not better, than other teachers (though nearly all of these studies show gains only in math and science). In fact, there are plenty of studies that show the opposite is true. However, because on both sides these studies are based entirely on standardized test scores, it’s debatable how much stake it is appropriate to place in them. Education is about more than just a number, and I find it easy to believe that teachers who have little training or experience fall back on simply teaching to the test. Indeed, if there is one thing that all those with rigorous enough transcripts to get into TFA have in common, it is that they know how to handle tests. That is not to say that all TFA teachers teach to the test, merely that any claim that the teachers are “just as good” simply because they get similar results on tests should be taken with a large grain of salt.

The training program for TFA was created by its founder, Wendy Kopp, just months after she received her own Ivy League diploma. She had never examined, much less attended, a teacher training program. However, she assured naysayers

Questionable results for Teach for America teachers would perhaps be acceptable if these teachers were only used as an emergency stopgap measure to fill severe teacher shortages, as the program was initially created to do. However, TFA has

TEACH FOR AMERICA

BY Aurora Rojer long since moved past this intent. Since 2008, states and municipalities across the country have cut their budgets for education. As a result, around 500,000 teachers have been laid off. This indicates that there is no shortage of teachers, but rather of positions. Yet, in cities such as Newark and Chicago huge rounds of teacher layoffs have been immediately followed by expanded contracts with Teach for America.

As a result of One Newark, the complete overhaul of the Newark public school system written by State Superintendent Cami Anderson (TFA alum), one-third of the Newark teaching staff will be laid off in the next three years. It is important to note that these teachers are not being reviewed individually; schools that were shown to be underperforming (which translates into those serving poorer minority children) are being shut down and their entire staff is being fired, regardless of individual effectiveness, experience and training. Shortly after the announcement of One Newark, the Walton Foundation (that’s the Walmart fortune) announced on its website that it will be supporting the “recruitment, training and support of nearly 370 Newark area [Teach for America] teachers over the next two years.” Teach for America is no longer filling in desperate teacher shortages; it is replacing those who dedicated their careers to education.

And yet, Teach for America purports to be committed to putting an end to educational inequality, claiming that “poverty is not destiny” and that they are “committed to closing the achievement gap.” As noble as the goals sound, the theory behind it is upsetting. If displacing career teachers with minimally trained and inexperienced recruits is considered a step along the way to closing the achievement gap, then behind TFA rests the assumption that Teach for America corps members are somehow superior to traditional teachers, and that 20-somethings imported from ivory towers have a better idea of how to save poor inner-city children than the adults who have lived and worked in their neighborhoods for much longer. This is what Darling-Hammond calls a “frankly missionary program.”

Privileged students from prestigious institutions are raised on the belief that they are the best at everything. Of course they can do better than someone who chose to teach for a living. And if this is not the case — if these fresh young recruits are taking the jobs of real teachers even though they are no more, or maybe even less, effective — then what are they doing, and why?

Perhaps TFA is just misguidedly paternalistic, hoping to solve a

problem that runs far deeper than teacher quality anyway. And yet, there are signs that something more nefarious is at play.

The non-profit is funded in large part by Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, the Walton Foundation (as previously mentioned), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli Broad Foundation and a sizeable number of billionaire hedge fund managers.

TFA is adored by the rich and powerful. These are the same rich and powerful pushing for non-unionized charter schools, to which Teach for America supplies a steady stream of cheap and cheaper labor. And because these bright-eyed recruits never stick around for very long, there is little chance that they will try to organize and form a movement to protest the often-criticized working conditions of these schools. Further, TFA has a “first placement” policy which means that recruits must accept the first spot they are offered, giving them no choice “but to work for wages and benefits far below those negotiated by the local teachers union at traditional public schools in the same area,” as explained by Chad Sommer in an article for Salon. In taking these jobs, Sommer continues, “TFA is lowering wages, reducing benefits and worsening the working conditions of teachers.”

Teach for America as an idea is, I find, insulting to teachers; the idea that someone can do what you do (but better) without your training and experience simply because they have youthful vitality and missionary vigor. But more important than the insult is the actual damage it causes. Teachers’ unions are some of the last bastions of organized labor in this country, and the corporate class, those funding Teach for America, has much to gain by privatizing education and remaking the teaching profession into one that is temporary and low-paying. Teach for America enables this degradation, which in turn degrades public education as a whole. That is why when I teach, it will not be for TFA. ♢

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THE CRAFT OF BEING MARTHA

BY Maura Thomas ART BY Maura Thomas

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WHAT YOU KNOW

idea (my excuse to exploit the hot glue gun, but whatever).

On July 16, 2004, Martha Stewart stepped out of a Lower Manhattan courtroom charged with a five-month sentence at a low-security prison. She and her former stockbroker, Peter E. Bacanovic, had been accused over two years prior of conspiring to hide reasons behind a stock sale of ImClone Systems. An assistant testified in court that Stewart had sold nearly 4,000 stocks of her own after receiving word that the company’s top executive was making a hefty profit selling shares himself. The media mogul’s image was from this day altered — could we ever again trust the lifestyle queen again?

WHAT YOU (PROBABLY) DIDN’T KNOW

For most Millennials, Martha Stewart has a kind of domestic omnipotence: her name permeated childhood households as a collective reference point, an incomparable icon (the Hillary Clinton of DIY?). Across the country The Martha Stewart Cookbook garnished bookshelves, while reruns of The Martha Stewart Show were left playing on the kitchen television.

With each pie baked, with each homemade bunting cut and each Christmas garland painstaking woven, a new creation was born into the collective consciousness of the Martha Stewart world; that is, a world where following a set of highly detailed steps can yield a well-crafted result for anyone with an adequate store of time and patience. And, even if you and your mom weren’t fanatics (like me and mine), Stewart’s name still induced a halo of organizational vibes and creative energy. Personally, I would return home every December to leaf through several well-worn copies of Martha Stewart Living in search of one more cookie recipe or holiday place card

What did Stewart’s rise to prominence look like, considering her level of cultural permeation? After receiving her bachelor’s degree in history at Barnard, Stewart became a stockbroker on Wall Street. She then went on to develop a catering business in Westport, Connecticut in 1972. Her work first won her recognition among friends, and soon grew into an ideal springboard for growth. Through relentlessly weaving her selfimage and the face of her business, Stewart climbed an everhigher reaching ladder of success. She has since built a media empire, the eponymous Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, with her own business smarts and dedication to a seamless aesthetic. A quick search on YouTube will send back dozens of her Lifetime specials, one of which introduces her first “Good Thing” — the simple ideas which form the backbone of Martha methodology. Currently, she maintains two magazines, Martha Stewart Living and Martha Stewart Weddings and, as of October 2014, she has published 83 books. The Martha Stewart Show, which featured cooking and crafting with celebrity guests ranging from Snoop Dogg to Robin Williams, combined with other regular appearances on TV and in public, won her an ever-increasing circle of friends, recognition and power.

Stewart also continues to adapt in the face of a changing business and technological environment, and to appease her increasingly twenty-something demographic (really!). Stewart

LESSONS ON LIVING FOR MILLENNIALS, MOMS AND MORE recently launched American Made, an annual conference and competition in New York for young entrepreneurs and crafters.

The conference is replete with lectures, craft sales and receptions.The whole thing is made to feel like an organizational dream. The new generation of Etsy crafters, vintage clothing entrepreneurs and microbrewers is looking for a model of career success, and they are finding it in the woman posing on the covers of their mothers’ old magazines. Martha Stewart is now 73, and she sits atop a multi-million dollar enterprise.

WHAT MARTHA CAN TEACH US When Stewart walked out of federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia on March 4, 2003, was she different? She emerged in a grey and blue crocheted poncho, with her hair its typical shoulder-length blonde. Camera crews documented her return from the prison back to her farmhouse. In general, though, the press was good press — I’ll call the aftermath “the poncho effect.” Immediately after her release, Lion Brand Yarn, the country’s biggest yarn company, received hundreds of emails asking for a pattern for the garment, which, as it turned out, was crocheted by one of Stewart’s fellow inmates. She featured the garment on The Martha Stewart Show not long after, and began selling her own version (proceeds to charity) online. The poncho is now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. A business and press opportunity was born from the ashes of scandal — per typical Martha Stewart fashion.

Stewart is quick to treat her time behind prison walls lightly.

To me, it is completely mystifying that the recovery of not

only her company, but also (and more importantly) her own credibility, could have come so quickly after her release. When asked about which comforts she missed while in prison, she told CNN, “All of us asked the guards everyday for a cappuccino ... just as a joke…They had their cups of coffee and stuff, and so I get here and I have a spot for a cappuccino machine, but it didn’t work! So, I didn’t have any cappuccino.” For Stewart, normalizing prison is easy. The Martha Stewart golden medium is the middle ground between accessibility and awe, and she knows better than ever how to achieve it. Omnimedia’s shares even shot up when she was hidden away in Alderson. The throne was not only awaiting her return, it was being kept warm.

So why should you care about a woman who crafts, cooks and manages her own media company, while still retiring by night to her Bedford, New York farm to spend a few moments with her two French bulldogs, Francesca and Sharkey? Of course, this life sounds fantastic, albeit exhausting. The real answer, though, is more complex and more fascinating by an apparent paradox. By monopolizing things like crafts, cooking and lifestyle solutions, Stewart has ignored, and perhaps brought some focus to, the cultural stigmas surrounding women’s gender roles as homemakers, first as a traditional cultural standard, and second as the embodiment of the ensuing counter-belief that said “strong” women should dissociate from traditional practices in order to be taken seriously. When women believed and were taught that being successful meant being successful like men, and pursuing “male” careers like finance and engineering, Stewart demonstrated that to be successful as a woman was just to be successful — in whatever way she damn well pleased. ♢

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IT’S NOT A SCANDAL IT’S A SEX CRIME

BY KATIE O’BRIEN

RESPONSES TO THE CELEBRITY NUDE PHOTO HACK When more than a hundred celebrities had explicit photos stolen from their iCloud accounts and circulated all over the web in September’s disgustingly-named “The Fappening,” news outlets like CNN called it a “scandal.” Jennifer Lawrence, the media’s chosen face of the event, had the perfect response to the flagrant violation of her and the other victims’ privacy: “It’s not a scandal, it’s a sex crime,” she told Vanity Fair.

In a column for The Guardian, Jessica Valenti called Lawrence’s response to the hack “a righteous, hell-yes moment for our feminist times” and “the end of the ‘shamed starlet.’” She pointed out that in 2007, when Vanessa Hudgens had nude photos of her published, she had to issue an ashamed apology to her fans, saying, “I am embarrassed over this situation and regret having ever taken these photos.” A Disney Channel spokesperson also commented, “Vanessa has apologized for what was obviously a lapse in judgment. We hope she’s learned a valuable lesson.” While Disney was obviously trying to protect itself from bad PR and from scandalized parents banning the channel due to “bad role-models,” there was no mention of the fact that Hudgens obviously never meant for the pictures to be in the public eye, and that she was the victim of a huge violation of her privacy. Valenti goes on to say that Scarlett Johansson resisted this “shamed starlet” narrative in 2011 when a hacker stole photos from her email account with her response: “I know my best angles. They were sent to my husband. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not like I was shooting a porno. Although there’s nothing wrong with that either.”

But Lawrence’s response was as biting and unapologetic as can be: “It’s my body and it should be my choice” was splashed across the cover of Vanity Fair. “Anybody who looked at those photos, you’re perpetuating a sexual offense. You should cower with shame.” Apparently, her

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shaming had its intended effect: Some of the perpetrators expressed their remorse on 4chan and Reddit, admitting they were “assholes” and “pervert[s] who did a bad thing.” While I agree with Valenti that Lawrence’s response was totally spot-on and really satisfying, a feminist “hell yeah” moment that shows a progressive trend, and while mainstream media outlets were, for the most part, overwhelmingly supportive of the victims of the hack, a visit to the comments section of any article about the hacking proves to be extremely demoralizing for this moment of victory. User ‘Jim,’ interchangeable with a whole score of random people spewing their opinions all over the Internet, commented on an ABC article, “Only an imbecile takes photos of him or herself naked, saves them to the cloud and then calls it a sex crime when they get hacked and shared. That’s just plain stupid [sic].” This reaction reveals the same blaming-the-victim mentality that is so strongly tied to rape culture. The mentality that the women who had their photos stolen and circulated have no one but themselves to blame is exactly the same type of gendered rhetoric that plagues rape victims. As Lena Dunham put it, “The ‘don’t take naked pics if you don’t want them online’ argument is the ‘she was wearing a short skirt’ of the web. Ugh.” As many have pointed out, when someone’s credit card information is leaked or stolen, we don’t shake our heads and say they should know better than to use their credit card.

In further parallel to rape culture, the hack also seemed to cause confusion as to the nature of consent. Jennifer Lawrence received some criticism for her revealing poses in Vanity Fair. Business writer Bruce Kasanoff wrote a LinkedIn article entitled “Why Jennifer Lawrence’s Breasts Confuse Me,” which questioned why Lawrence would pose half-naked in Vanity Fair while complaining about her naked photos being spread across the web, concluding that she was being hypocritical and sending mixed signals. The article has since been deleted after receiving widespread criticism for equating voluntarily posing for a professional magazine photoshoot with having intimate photos only ever meant for one other person’s eyes stolen from a private, passwordprotected account and spread like wildfire.

It’s also important to remember that while “The Fappening” received a ton of publicity, every day, non-celebrity women have their photos published online as “revenge porn” — sexually explicit photos published online without the subject’s consent, often by a vengeful ex and accompanied by personal information. But the everyday victims of revenge porn, who are mostly women, do not have the same clout as celebrities to do something about it — the FBI certainly does not regularly involve themselves in such

“BOTH THE HACKING OF CELEBRITIES’ ACCOUNTS AND THE PUBLISHING OF PHOTOS SENT IN CONFIDENCE ARE ACTS INTENDED TO PUBLICLY SHAME WOMEN AND MALIGN FEMALE SEXUAL AGENCY.” cases. And Reddit took down /r/TheFappening due to bad publicity and the threat of legal action, but /r/photoplunder, a subreddit apparently dedicated to posting pictures of naked women without consent, is still there for all to see.

But at the very least, the hack has hopefully brought attention to the broader issue. Posting explicit photos of people without their consent online is a pervasive problem. It can cause emotional distress, sexual shame, trust issues and personal and professional consequences. And it is, like Lawrence said, a sexual offense, and should be treated as such. Legally, revenge porn inhabits somewhat of a grey area, in that, in the majority of states, it’s not technically illegal — you can cite copyright law or harassment to try to get it removed, but these cases usually slip through the cracks. Since 2013, 12 states have expressly outlawed revenge porn, and similar bills were introduced in many other states, but failed to pass or are pending. But the recent drive toward action shows that this issue is getting more recognition as the devastating crime it is. This month, Luke King became the first person in Britain to be incarcerated for circulating revenge porn after he made an explicit picture of his ex-girlfriend his profile picture on WhatsApp. He will spend 12 weeks in prison according to the guidelines of pre-existing laws, and a new law in the works in Britain would allow people who share revenge porn in any way, whether online or physical, to be jailed for up to two years.

So while “The Fappening” provided a spotlight on the issue of revenge porn in a way that will hopefully spur some change that makes it easier for victims to get their photos taken down and bring the perpetrators to justice in the future, it was also a great reminder of the blatant sexism in which the whole issue is rooted. While it’s not true that only women are victims of revenge porn — Dylan Sprouse and Josh Hutcherson had explicit photos circulated online — it is true that there are not the same personal repercussions, scandalized reactions, and media frenzy around instances such as these. Rachel Kramer Bussel wrote in TIME, “Male nudity simply doesn’t cause the same moral panic that female nudity does.”

Both the hacking of celebrities’ accounts to steal and distribute private photos, and the publishing of photos received in confidence are acts intended to publicly shame women and malign female sexual agency. I’m not saying that anyone who looks at photos published in this manner does so intending to violate another human, but after the hack, there was a widespread double-edged response of “well, I know it’s wrong, but I’m still going to look at them,” which just isn’t okay. This mentality creates a market for stolen property and sexual exploitation, and perpetuates an attitude toward female bodies and sexuality as public domain.

Revenge porn needs to be illegal, and we need to stop looking at it.♢

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A HISTORY OF THE GAY JOKE

NO HOMO, YES HOMO, MAYBE HOMO

BY Zachary Zahos

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“Laughing at women, blacks or LGBT people (or anyone who is not the most square combination of white, straight and male) without letting the other side have their say and be defined by something besides their Other-ness, breeds intolerance, and that is the last thing we need these days.”

Who are we laughing at? The best jokes target our weaknesses or the folly of life itself; the punch line kills because it so goddamn true. The funniest people tend to be neurotic creatures because they are so aware of the truth of things, and how the unexamined life is not worth living, and yet how the examined life precludes much living at all, and so on.

More often, however, comedy aims lower. Instead of looking within, the comedian looks out and finds other people funny just ... cuz. Just cuz they are different. Humans are ridiculous beings who deserve to be laughed at, incessantly perhaps, but it’s no good when comedy begets, and perpetuates, an arena of us versus them, where the “them” is a demographic of the population already at a disadvantage. Laughing at women, blacks or LGBT people (or anyone who is not the most square combination of white, straight and male) without letting the other side have their say and be defined by something besides their Other-ness, breeds intolerance, and that is the last thing we need these days.

American comedy films have long depended on the “gay joke” as a kind of cheap currency. Since most of these movies feature a predominantly male cast, and since they involve men doing dumb and occasionally revealing things, the gay joke slips in as a kind of nervous tic, a preemptive “no homo.” The gay joke serves to diffuse any awkward tension, yet that tension is often exacerbated by said joke and thus messily smothered over with even more gay jokes.

There are a million examples to choose from, but how about a sampler from the average Cornell student’s teenage years: Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen’s famous “You know how I know you’re gay?” bit from The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which is answered by, among other lines, “Because you like Coldplay”; all the yelling and gross-out faces as Rob Corddry bends to give Craig Robinson a blowjob because the former lost a bet in Hot Tub Time Machine; Vince Vaughn’s infamous “Electric cars are gay” pitch from The

Dilemma, which director Ron Howard and the studio executives behind the film were surprised to hear was in poor taste.

Some of these gags may very well be funny — your mileage may vary, as they say. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with being offensive, since comedy is all about pushing buttons through shock and discomfort. But the aforementioned jokes strike me as too easy: same ol’ gay panic peddled by the same ol’ straight dudes who couldn’t think of a better joke. It’s like they assume no gay guys are watching their stuff — I mean, if the material is this weak and if you take Paul Rudd out of the picture, why would we?

Yet there are two funny, weird, super popular films this year that have set a new course for gay jokes in American comedies, and they are Neighbors and 22 Jump Street. Each stars two similarly mismatched leading men: Seth Rogen and Zac Efron in Neighbors, Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum in 22 Jump Street. Jonah’s earlydecade slim down aside, the dynamic remains uncool paired with cool and schlub rivaling hunk. More so than mainstream comedies before them, these films not only entertain but also play with the hardly latent homoerotic tension between their two leads and other male characters.

Neighbors passes a lot of time in a fraternity house, where Zac Efron and Dave Franco’s bros reign, and just about every second of that time contains some sort of gay innuendo. Michael Scott’s “bros before hoes” mantra unites these guys through all sorts of phallic antics: flaunting their erections, “crossing swords,” fondling baseball bats, casting their penises into dildos (to raise money!), literally fisting each other during a hazing ritual. When Efron and Franco come to blows after the latter screws the former’s girlfriend, they both grab each other by the balls until Franco spaces out and deploys what he calls his “blessing and a curse”: arousing himself fully and spontaneously. Cue the “Eww gross!” from Efron, who lets go and flips out, being too insecure

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“it’s a good place to be where two of the biggest movies of the year insist on the notion that we all are, at least a little, gay and isn’t that a funny, freeing thing?”

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to let such a marked sexual act from another man stand, even if he promotes and practices such acts in front of his brothers at all other times.

This all comes at the notable expense of substantial love interests for the sexy young guys, who both fight over the same girl but don’t seem to care about her in any of the other scenes.

Call that a symptom of hook-up culture, which the movie also satirizes, like when the girl tells of how she and Efron met, “I saw him. He saw me,” and after a beat, Rose Byrne’s character responds, “How romantic.” But with shirtless Efron leered at from so many different angles, and with so many possibly gay characters (from “Assjuice,” the pledge who swears he was awake when a brother stuck his comically large dick in his mouth, to Hannibal Buress’ oddly flirtatious policeman) in play, Neighbors courts queer readings and not only acknowledges but actively caters to its gay audience members.

22 Jump Street, on the other hand, sits its two male leads down for a couple’s therapy session, which derails only when the two undercover cops reach an epiphany regarding their case that the therapist mistakes (or does he ... ?) for rekindled intimacy. The film toys with gender and sexuality norms far more cleverly and confidently than your average bro comedy. Even heterosexual relationships, often coded as normal, get flipped on their head, like when Hill’s character blinks and pouts on a morning “walk of shame” from his girlfriend’s place back to his dorm.

Meanwhile, the film parades around Channing Tatum in a football uniform and then in a sleeveless shirt, which I know makes a lot of women and men quite happy. When Hill and Tatum get spotted while eavesdropping on drug traffickers, neither hesitates to make it look like Tatum was just giving Hill a blowjob in the middle of the library stacks. When one of the drug goons calmly reports that it’s “just a couple of faggots,” Tatum lets loose: “Did you just call us faggots? It’s 2014, asshole, you can’t fucking use ‘faggot.’ ‘Gay’ is okay, ‘homosexual’ maybe, and if you know the person, you might be able to call them ‘queer,’ if they have a great sense of humor. But I don’t.” He speaks for all the allies out there who are overwhelmed by the ever-changing LGBT vocabulary at their disposal and want to do their best to respect it, to precious, know-it-all ends.

22 Jump Street loses some points for its caricature of trans people, in the form of Rob Riggle’s incarcerated criminal who, after getting his penis shot off in the first film, has been surgically bestowed a vagina and forces Dave Franco’s character (there he is again), also in prison, to have sex with him. It feels, well, cheap, unlike the rest of the movie, which goes for broke with the selfreferencing irony and genre satire. It may be too eye-rollingly clever, and Neighbors, perhaps, could have inserted an open, operating gay relationship into its frat house, but both films throw a whole lot of gay into their ironic situations and leave the true nature of things (who is straight in this?) up for grabs.

We aren’t there just yet, but it’s a good place to be where two of the biggest movies of the year insist on the notion that we all are, at least a little, gay, and isn’t that a funny, freeing thing? ♢

WORDS BY Sean Doolittle ART BY Thelonia Saunders

MARILYN MONROE THE FETISH

“To all the girls that think you’re fat because you’re not a size zero, you’re the beautiful ones, it’s society that is ugly.” — MARILYN MONROE Marilyn Monroe is, inarguably, one of the most beautiful women of all time. More importantly, Marilyn Monroe is a role model for independent, strong women — a champion of positive body image, objector to slut shaming and symbol of today’s modern feminist movement.

Sure, the above quote is a little trite, but Monroe’s message rings true, doesn’t it?

Well, it would, if Marilyn Monroe had ever said that.

The term “size zero” wasn’t even introduced until 1966, when British fashion model and very, very small person Twiggy burst onto the scene with her delicate frame and scary-big eyes, creating a need for extra-petite vanity sizes. Of course, Monroe had been dead for four years by this point and, save any possible Ouija board séances, could not have made these remarks.

So what gives?

A short Google search for “Marilyn Monroe quotes” will provide you with so many pithy observations and witty aphorisms, including this particular quote, that you may mistake her for Oscar Wilde. You’ve probably seen some of them on Pinterest, Facebook or Tumblr: “Well-behaved women rarely make history,” “Give a girl the right shoes and she can conquer the world,” “If you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.” Not a single one was ever uttered by the beloved Monroe, but each has been consistently labeled and passed around as a Monroe-ism. She has garnered a place in the pantheon of celebrities that seem to attract a shocking number of misattributed quotes, joining the likes of Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill and Mark Twain.

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Frankly, it’s absurd to think that Monroe said even one of the many quotes associated with her. Did she have a Hallmark greeting card writer script her each and every exchange? Do you honestly believe she would spontaneously drop bombs like “We are all of us stars, and we deserve to twinkle” during a press junket? That sounds like something only Matthew McConaughey would say during an awards show after getting completely toasted.

I grant you that I may sound a little nitpicky. Does it even matter who really says a quote? The message is still worth hearing, isn’t it? Even if Marilyn Monroe never said those things, they are still Monroe-isms — things she could have said or that you could plausibly expect her to say. Monroe the woman has become so entwined with her popular image that the two have become indivisible. She has been reduced to a stock character persona that we can generalize self-fulfilling life quotes from. It is no longer about whether or not she truly said or did something anymore; all that matters is that the quotes and anecdotes associated with her are “in character” with her name.

How many Marilyn Monroe movies have you seen? Easier question: How many Marilyn Monroe movies can you name? Personally, my answers are two and four, respectively, and I’m guessing that’s above average in both cases.

And yet, nearly everyone has a passing familiarity with the life and career of Marilyn Monroe. Or at least they think they do.

The thing is, we don’t know Marilyn Monroe. We hardly know Marilyn Monroe the actress, star of several hit movies in the ’50s. (If you haven’t seen Some Like It Hot, you’re missing out on one of the greatest farces of all time). We know Marilyn Monroe the icon, her dress billowing as she steps over a subway grate. We know the flirtatious Marilyn Monroe, whispering “happy birthday, Mr. President” in a husky, seductive voice. We know the hair, the beauty mark and the smile. We know the ”quotes.” We know Marilyn Monroe as a concept.

As Patrick Bateman might say, there is an idea of Marilyn Monroe, some kind of abstraction. But the real Monroe simply is not there.

There is nothing wrong with not knowing more about Marilyn Monroe. I mean, she lived and died long before our time. Maybe you never saw one of her movies because you just never got a chance, or maybe you just don’t like black and white movies (*gasps*). There are hundreds of actors that you probably know of but never really know about. You may recognize Clark Gable or Vincent Price or Elizabeth Taylor, but only a small minority can claim real expertise in their film catalogues. In the case of Monroe, however, the problem doesn’t lie with the public’s general lack of familiarity. It lies with the rampant appropriation of Marilyn’s image — the cult of Marilyn — to justify one’s behaviors and actions.

“MONROE THE WOMAN HAS BECOME SO ENTWINED WITH HER POPULAR IMAGE THAT THE TWO HAVE BECOME INDIVISIBLE. SHE HAS BEEN REDUCED TO A STOCK CHARACTER.” Have you ever seen a Marilyn Monroe poster in a girl’s dorm room? Maybe you have one in your own room, right between Audrey Hepburn from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and some M. C. Escher bullshit. That’s pretty much the female equivalent of the douche with a Scarface poster, Sports Illustrated pinups and some more M. C. Escher bullshit. I’m (mostly) kidding, but my point is that many people use Marilyn Monroe’s image as shorthand to express themselves. What is it that they think they are expressing, anyhow?

Like I said before, Monroe has come to symbolize a specific brand of female empowerment across the nation. Of course, she deserves the kind of respect that any individual is entitled to, that’s human decency. But to place an often-

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troubled actress on a pseudo-feminist pedestal because she died at the peak of her tabloid wave? The dude does not abide.

Around 2010, blogger Sady Doyle coined the term “Liz Lemonism” to refer to a brand of privileged feminism championed by “a certain variety of coastal citydwelling, well-to-do, heterosexual, cisgendered women,” like Tina Fey’s 30 Rock character and, if I may say so, many students in Ithaca. Doyle states that Liz Lemonists cherry-pick feminism in a way that suits their own needs while ignoring the greater aims of feminism. For instance, a Liz Lemonist “doesn’t do anti-racism, disability activism or trans-ally work to any huge extent, but she does do ‘body image’ (and oh, does she ever do ‘body image,’ without taking much note of the fact that as a white, abled, cisperson she conforms to the beauty standard, and benefits from conforming to it, in more ways than she will ever let on).”

MONROE HAS COME TO SYMBOLIZE A SPECIFIC BRAND OF FEMALE EMPOWERMENT. Marilyn Monroe is not a feminist icon; Marilyn Monroe is a Liz Lemonist icon. She had a ton of things going for her: She was American, beautiful, famous, rich, able and white. She also happened to be a lady. I hate to say check your privilege, but come on now. The brand of feminism Monroe inspired applies only to the white women who have the least need for feminism to begin with. If you want a real feminist icon, I’d take a look at Malala Yousafzai, not Marilyn Monroe.

Let’s take a step back to the quote that opened this article, the body-image oneliner that ensures that beauty is within. Marilyn Monroe was, apparently, a size 16.

Today, a size 16 is higher than average for an American woman —“plus-size,” if you will. Monroe was not a size 16. That’s a load of baloney. Monroe’s measurements were 35-22-35. A 22-inch waist! That was below average in the ’50s, and you better believe that’s over 12 inches below what is average today. Combined with her 36D bra size and her weight of 118 pounds, Monroe is decidedly not representative of the average body type. In fact, she’s probably closer to a size four by today’s standards. And yet, Liz Lemonists continue to tout Marilyn’s figure when discussing the issue of body image.

In an article for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jessa Crispin indicts this brand of feminism as she skewers an anthology entitled, Fifty Shades of Feminism.

This kind of feminism, she says, “becomes less a political philosophy and more of a justification for narcissism.” Every decision that each person makes can be explained away with “because of feminism.” Feminism becomes a sort of “filter to assist with the decision-making process,” that allows women to justify any of their choices, even if their decisions are objectively rude. Crispin states that, to these women, “’feminism’ becomes a word to slap onto a choice after the fact, as a way to protect a decision from any criticism.” Feminism isn’t something that should be used to justify what a girl wants to wear in the morning. Women haven’t fought for hundreds of years to wear jeans instead of a skirt. One choice isn’t more “feminist” than the other. Feminism is the right to choose, not the choice itself.

The quotes attributed to Marilyn Monroe exemplify this type of privileged feminism. Instead of concentrating on the root goals of the movement, like equality in education, political power, financial independence, reproductive rights and basic human agency, Marilyn Monroe feminists are concerned with the “window dressing” of feminism, the secondary, superficial goals. You have the right to feel that body image is an important issue, but not the right to feel that it is the only issue. We have a long, long way to go until we can truly say that feminism has succeeded, and we lose progress vying over the comparatively trivial “consolation prizes.”

Feminism is concerned with a fundamental reordering of the power structure. Your right to be a size 16 is important, but it is the smallest concession the patriarchy can make to you. Feminism isn’t about feeling good about yourself, and to use it in this way is ineffectual and detracts from the solidarity that is necessary for it to succeed; it’s about changing society to provide equality for all women, no matter their age, race, orientation, socioeconomic status or religion. ♢

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MANIC PIXIE DREAM GIRLS WORDS BY Emma Court ART BY Aurora Rojer

In the quest for equality, nothing is ever as simple as it first seems, and even the best of intentions often go awry. If you’re not deeply entrenched in the actual problem and deeply thoughtful about what you’re trying to do, it is almost unfairly easy to circumvent, or even aggravate, inequity. We have many ways of referring to this phenomenon linguistically and in our idioms — the road to hell is paved with good intentions, for one — but in the film world, nowhere does this seem more true than with Nathan Rabin’s renunciation this summer of the trope he himself created: the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

In Rabin’s words, “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” Though he came up with the trope after watching Kirsten Dunst’s performance in Elizabethtown — one he describes as a “psychotically chipper waitress in the sky” — Rabin also pointed to Natalie Portman in Garden State as an example of this type of female character: an incredibly unrealistic and one-dimensional character that, as a result, provokes a love or hate reaction from an audience. Rabin tried to point out the patriarchal attitude inherent in the trope, the way it suggests that women only exist for the pleasure of men or to realize male potential, and that, as a result, any film that relies on such an outdated trope is crippled; it’s no coincidence Rabin’s 2007 post rated Elizabethtown a “fiasco.”

But despite Rabin’s intent, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, like the magical creature it is partially named after, seemed to fly — and create mischief everywhere it went. The name was just so compelling; it captured the universal sense of being confronted with a character that’s just, frankly, hard to believe.

For us as audience members, the MPDG moves a little too fast and talks a little too quickly. We are skeptical of her eccentricities, her casualness, her bangs, her constant desire to dance in the rain and her disinterest with the trappings of adult life.

We don’t understand her or her motivations, probably because

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she is such a flat character that her actions and purposes don’t make much sense without the male protagonist in the picture. The MPDG trope resonates because we know women move all too autonomously and determinedly without men, because we understand it as a manifestation of paternalistic, downright egocentric creative impulses and because we know there is a marked difference between the women we see on screens and the women we see in our lives and around us.

It is, at first, counterintuitive to think that defining a phenomenon could do more harm than good. After all, we are a generation born and bred on the ideology of “naming and shaming.” Better the devil you know. This doesn’t hold true for the MPDG — and not because the archetype is untrue. Rather, naming the term has allowed it to be used en masse, often in ways that force a character, by virtue of her quirky or eccentric qualities, to fit the mold. A woman is not a MPDG just because she has big blue eyes, wears mismatched socks, plays the ukulele or because she is in any way different than what we expect women to be. And thus, in a strange twist of fate, a term conceived of as feminist became antifeminist in practice.

In a July 2014 piece in Salon, Rabin renounced the trope he created. In “I’m sorry for coining the phrase ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’” — a piece it’s hard to imagine a clearer title for — Rabin explains, “I coined the phrase to call out cultural sexism and to make it harder for male writers to posit reductive, condescending male fantasies of ideal women as realistic characters. But I looked on queasily as the phrase was increasingly accused of being sexist itself.” He cites the branding of such characters as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Maude in Harold and Maude and Summer in 500 Days of Summer as MPDGs as the first rumblings that the MPDG wasn’t doing what it was supposed to, and says it only got worse from there.

Portraying female characters that were new and different had become a way to be accused of doing more of the same.

Let me be clear: Naming, or pointing to, sexist phenomena in

A RETROSPECTIVE our society are not inherently problematic. The trouble may have all started with the lack of characterization Rabin initially provided for this archetype. His initial January 2007 post was not even about Manic Pixie Dream Girls specifically; rather, it was an Elizabethtown review that created the trope in a tangential rant about unrealistic portrayals of women in films. In total, Rabin wrote maybe a paragraph describing the type, most of it devoted to denouncing, not defining, it.

And perhaps there lies the rub. But in a larger sense, when you coin a stereotype, it becomes an entity as much shaped by its users as its creator. And you cannot train people to wield a trope with care; there is certainly no certification required to participate in the five-ring circus that is online media today. Rabin did not give enough parameters for MPDGs, but even if he did, would that have been enough to prevent it from becoming the monster to his Victor Frankenstein?

Rabin may have issued an apology for the Manic Pixie Dream girl, but it is in fact society that must apologize for her. We have a shameful history of using certain language to dismiss women, and though the language has changed over the years — of late it’s the word “crazy” — the trend is as persistent as it is pernicious. MPDG has become a way to undermine out-of-the-ordinary portraits of women, and although there are certainly complex, nuanced female characters who would never be mistaken for the label, it’s also unfair to allow one term to dog certain female actresses for their entire careers, undermining what they do as antifeminist because they have bangs (think Zooey Deschanel) or have been typecast a certain way (think Zoe Kazan).

Ultimately, the MPDG isn’t the source of sexism in the media, it’s a symptom, and by putting the MPDG in the spotlight, issues of diversity, patriarchal control, and more stay concealed in the dark and offstage. Thus, we bid adieu to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. May she remind us that while language is the greatest tool we have to fight for equality, it is also our greatest hurdle. ♢

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MARVEL’S NOT-SO-IMPROVED AVENGERS The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has done a stand up job of taking the company’s previously B-list names and turning them into commercial gold. If someone would’ve told me that Iron Man would be headlining the biggest films of the decade, I probably would’ve asked, Who? At its onset, Marvel Studios pushed the boundaries, giving films to obscure comic characters. They stretched their roster from the World War II super soldier Steve Rogers (played by the then relatively unknown Chris Evans) to Thor, the Asgardian god of thunder. With a host of well-developed plots, intense action and clever dialogue, the films soared to the top of the box office year after year. The plan was to introduce each hero on his own before throwing them together for a crossover hit, all while introducing more characters, ever adding to their expanding universe. It was genius, a cinematic universe that was new and exciting and bold.

At first, anyway.

Since it struck commercial success, Marvel has fallen into a rut. For over five years, the universe has been led by a slew of buff, tortured white guys. Of its eight solo-led movies since 2008, not one has had a female or hero of color as its focus. Despite the fact that the Avengers’ sole female member, the spy, Black Widow (played by Scarlett Johansson), seems to be the character stitching the Marvel Universe together, jumping from title to title, she has yet to receive her own film. Fans have repeatedly rallied for the MCU to expand its cast’s diversity, or even to appease them with a Black Widow film announcement, but Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige is consistent in his answer: “The timing just isn’t right.” The studio seemed to have found time on the horizon, however, to announce plans for Black Panther, a film focusing on the African king T’Challa, and Captain Marvel, its first female-led feature. Coming nearly a decade since the MCU’s inception, these hopeful prospects are too little too late.

Another exciting update for the non-white-male crowd was the announcement that the second Avengers ensemble piece, Age of Ultron, would be featuring two new faces: Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch, and her twin brother, Pietro, also known as Quicksilver. First introduced in 1964 as the children of infamous X-Men adversary Magneto, Wanda and Pietro are of Jewish and Romani descent, and two of the most powerful mutants in existence.

Two non-white powerhouses and one was a female? It seemed too good to be true. And when casting news got around, that’s exactly

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what it turned out to be. In November 2013, it was confirmed that Elizabeth Olsen and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, two more white actors, would play Wanda and Pietro.

The people behind Age of Ultron — the director, the casting director — made a choice. The twins have been in comics for 50 years and have always been Romani — an Indo-European group that is not white, and has faced (and continue to face) extreme ostracism, persecution and violence for not being white.

Of course, hailing from comic books, the two have been drawn by many different artists who have given them many different features.

Wanda in particular has been subject to many artists’ ideas of what is beautiful, and has, throughout the years, had hair both curly and straight, every eye color and light or dark skin depending on the day, the series and the colorist. When it comes to Pietro, sometimes he has a small nose; sometimes it’s more hawkish.

In the ’60s and ’70s, both Wanda and Pietro were drawn very pale and could pass as white,

BY TYLER BREITFELLER ART BY THELONIA SAUNDERS

but in the last 20 years the trend has been to draw them both with darker skin and features reflecting their ethnicities. The director, casting director and other minds behind Age of Ultron made a choice between all of the different possibilities for depicting these characters, and they decided to go for white-passing Maximoffs, played by white actors.

Adding the Maximoffs to the roster was a perfect opportunity to have heroes of color, played by actors of color, who could have promoted positivity for an ethnic group that gets almost no representation in current films.

The twins’ Jewish heritage comes from their father, who anyone that has seen an X-Men film knows as Magneto. However, since Marvel Studios doesn’t own the rights to his character, a man whose entire motivation was formed by his time in Nazi concentration camps as a child, they won’t be able to explicitly include the influence he has on his children. No big deal though, right? The Maximoff twins could easily be the children of any other Jewish man or woman and have the same heritage and principles driving them forward.

Well, while nothing has been specifically stated on the matter by Marvel, one thing has been

confirmed: as with Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the two are in the care of HYDRA, a terrorist organization hailing from Nazi Germany. What’s worse, according to Taylor-Johnson, the two volunteered to be experimented on and used by the group.

In the film, they face the Avengers as members of the terrorist group. The film’s writer and director, Joss Whedon, has taken two strong, complex, ethnic characters and turned them into troubled neo-Nazi youth. This was a choice that was made and, frankly, it was an uninspired, distasteful and mean one. There are a lot of unburied bodies in Europe of Jewish and Romani children who were killed in the name of furthering Nazi science. There are still a lot of survivors today who carry the memory of those experiments either on their own bodies or in their memories. None of these people ever “volunteered” for experimentation. None of them ever went to the Nazis because they were “angry” and “wanted revenge.”

The MCU is one of the fastest growing franchises in the world, and it’s coming up on becoming the highest grossing film franchise of all time. Shouldn’t it be expanding its diversity rather than appealing to the same old standard? The misrepresentation of the Maximoff twins is incredibly important, chiefly because there is no other representation of their group. By whitewashing the characters, the MCU is taking away every little Romani child’s chance to look up at the big screen and see someone just like them accomplishing something great. By serving them to HYDRA as test subjects, the MCU is pouring salt in the wounds of every family that still feels the pain of the Holocaust, of crimes committed and of lives lost. And by okay-ing this, the big men in charge, from Whedon to Feige, have let their true colors show. Sorry guys, but whitewashing your minority characters to avoid racist implications only makes you more racist.

People love superheroes. They’re a reminder of all that we can accomplish, that everyone is superhuman in their own way. Proper representation in these films could make a difference to one child, or it could change a generation. It could give people a stronger sense of identity, an affirmation of themselves. It could give children someone to look up to, a reason to expand assumptions of their own capabilities, and a reason to reach to achieve more. But while the MCU has come a long way in many aspects, its handling of representation is far from acceptable. I would say I have high hopes for its next phase of films, for T’Challa, King of Wakanda, and Carol Danvers, the strongest being in the universe, but I think by now I’ve learned not to get my hopes too high. HYDRA and Marvel’s writers could be lurking around any corner.

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THE SECRET LIFE OF THE AMERICAN MOON CHILD Though few will let her off the hook for the time she spent as the star of ABC Family’s The Secret Life of the American Teenager, Shailene Woodley has made quite the name for herself as one of Hollywood’s most coveted female leads. From her role as Alexandra King in The Descendants to that of Tris in Divergent and Hazel Grace in The Fault in Our Stars, Woodley’s characters are known for their strong willed, outspoken qualities — qualities Woodley excels at embodying both on and off screen.

However, movie reviews and the YouTube comment section alike feature individuals who express intense disapproval of Woodley as an individual. This is not an unusual phenomenon within actoraudience relationships; every public figure has a constituent of the general population that does not appreciate (or acknowledge) his or her talent, has taken offense to something unscripted he or she said or does not agree with his or her political or religious preferences — the list goes on. But this does not appear to be the case for Woodley’s “haters.” A skim through the feedback pages on various social media sites reveals that many of her opponents cannot pinpoint what it is about Woodley they dislike. So what is it about her that ticks so many people off? Is it the way she talks, the roles she plays, the alternative lifestyle she promotes or a combination of all of the above?

The answer most likely lies in these audience members’ inability to connect with Woodley while she is both in and out of character.

The ensuing sense of hatred these viewers feel towards Woodley is a natural response to her seemingly inauthentic public image.

Great overlap exists between the plight of Woodley and that of Anne Hathaway, who has also taken the brunt of many seemingly unwarranted and hateful comments and criticisms in the past.

A New York Times article entitled “Do We Really Hate Anne Hathaway?” quotes several individuals’ opinions of Hathaway, all of which are just as vague as those lobbed against Woodley: “There’s something about her that just rubs me the wrong way,” wrote one blogger about Hathaway, a statement that parallels one I found about Woodley in the comments section of an article about her that read: “I don’t know what it is, but there’s something about her

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I just don’t like.”

This vague sense of dislike many audience members feel towards Hathaway, and now Woodley, can be attributed to an overarching lack of connection they feel with the characters they are portraying and the lifestyles they are promoting as public figures. The people who claim Hathaway is “not a real person” and equate her to the “princessy, theater-schooled girls who have no game and no sex appeal and eat raisins for dessert,” are the same people who slam Woodley for her alternative lifestyle, which, according to Us Weekly, includes “foraging” for her food, “gathering her own spring water from the mountains” on a monthly basis and making her own toothpaste out of clay. They simply exude an overtly “eager,” seemingly fake personality that just does not sit well with the average moviegoer.

This same average moviegoer then, in turn, begins to call into question the legitimacy of these actresses’ lives. With regards to Woodley specifically, how are we to believe that she is homeless and couch-surfing from friend’s house to friend’s house when she is not on a movie set, living out of a single suitcase and making her own cheese while at the same time we see her appear on late night television in glamorous dresses and travel the world on promotional tours? Consequently, it is possible that many believe Woodley is hypocritical when it comes to the way she juxtaposes her lives as a “self-proclaimed environmentalist” and one of Hollywood’s finest. For these people, the puzzle pieces that make up Woodley simply do not fit.

Or maybe, as a New York Times blogger stated, “we simply don’t find successful, ‘perfect’ people all that likable.” Woodley has certainly been catapulted into successful stardom of late, and because the lifestyle she embodies cannot be sustained by most, even as she promotes it as the superior lifestyle, it is viewed as unattainable, implausible, “perfect” – ergo, immediate blacklist. “Perfect” is used in the sense that any attempt at coming across as such is viewed as implausible from the get-go, as an attempt on the actor’s part to present themselves as anything other than who they really are: human, and thus flawed.

SHAILENE WOODLEY

BY ALEJANDRA ALVAREZ I get it: it is hard to jibe with the whole hippie image, especially when it is being promoted by a member of Hollywood’s elite. I get how it does not sit well with most, how it comes across as artificial, contrived, maybe even as a publicity-stunt, but people need to cool it with the hate. Woodley is a person, just like Anne Hathaway is, and people seem to forget this is the case once the computer or television screen separates us from them and we are granted Internet access and a keyboard. Rather than waste energy scrutinizing the inconsistencies in their images, how about we focus on what these individuals bring to the craft of acting and what they are trying to do with the influence they have garnered as actors: Woodley has taken to the environmentalist platform while Hathaway is a strong LGBT and human rights activist. Let us respect that Woodley, just like the rest of us, is trying to figure out who she is, the only difference between us being the massive spotlight she

is operating under.

Let us try to dissuade our contemporaries from joining the next strain of “Hathahaters,” this time directed towards Woodley, when all these actresses are trying to do is what they love both in character and out of character. You and I both know you’ll secretly want to get your hands on The Fault in Our Stars the second it comes out on DVD — even if that may just be because of Ansel Elgort. But admit it — you do not totally hate Woodley’s part in the movie, okay? We all saw you cry.

But yes, I am going to keep my distance from any clay-based tooth products. Sorry, Shailene. ♢

“because the lifestyle she embodies cannot be sustained by most, even as she promotes it as the superior lifestyle, it is viewed as unattainable, implausible, ‘perfect’

— ergo immediate blacklist.”

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DO OUR MOVIES MEASURE UP? WORDS BY Emma Court ART BY Michelle Savran

There is a world in which women play such minor roles that no more than two are ever named. Anything that happens solely concerns men — so much so that no two women ever talk to each other. When they do, the subject that brings them together is men.

Appalling? And yet, anyone who consumes pop culture knows this world does exist: It’s the world of movies, conceived of and produced by a multi-billion-dollar industry dominated largely by white males at every level, from writer to director to producer. And as Alison Bechdel so aptly called attention to in a 1985 comic strip called “The Rule,” in mainstream movies — the kind most of the world is seeing — women are bit players in more ways than one. What’s come to be known as the Bechdel test has three requirements: A movie has to have at least two named women, they have to talk to each other, and the subject of their conversation has to be something other than men. The Bechdel test is the rare feminist concept that has entered mainstream popular culture, and, as if to prove its creator’s brilliance, Bechdel — a prolific cartoonist and author of several graphic memoirs — won a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship this year.

Perhaps the Bechdel Test has been able to so permeate our national consciousness, or at least the blogosphere, because though it is simple, so many movies fail to meet it. Some of the biggest losers are also the biggest movies of our time, including Avatar, the whole Lord of the Rings series and The Social Network. The Bechdel Test’s underlying agenda is not

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particularly new. As Alison Bechdel herself acknowledges, the call for more complex, nuanced portraits of women is practically as old as writing itself. But the Bechdel Test has made more inroads than most. In Sweden, movie theatres have even begun rating films on how well they met the test.

Think about the last time you saw a movie — or for that matter, watched a TV show or a play, read a book, even saw a commercial — and noticed strong, compelling, nuanced portraits of women, women who laughed and cried and stressed out over the kinds of things real women do. The reality is this: Women talk to each other, a lot, and yes, we do talk about the people that we love, or just like a little, or are wildly or not-so-wildly

“JUST BECAUSE TWO WOMEN APPEAR IN A MOVIE AND HAVE NAMES DOESN’T MEAN THEY’RE REALISTIC OR WELL-DEVELOPED.”

The Bechdel Test Revisited

attracted to. We also talk about our careers, and our mothers, the books we’ve read, our dreams, people we unjustifiably hate, and people we justifiably hate. We talk about problems we see in our communities and ideas we find intellectually stimulating. We pacify each other; we challenge each other, feed each other. And the majority of movies — even some of our favorites, like Her and The Hobbit — deny the complex kinds of experiences that are part and parcel of being a woman, not to mention denying the very existence of women who love other women, women who don’t love anyone, women who love men and women, and women who love without regards to gender at all.

Ultimately, there are stories to be told about women independent of romance and love. That’s not to say all stories about women need to exclude men — in fact many women form relationships thanks to, or despite, men, and I don’t think all the stories about women and men have yet been told — but women certainly must be established as characters independent of men in order to have significant relationships with them. And what’s exciting about the kind of name recognition the Bechdel test has acquired is that the language of and conversation about gender parity has spread beyond feminist activists and bloggers, to the point where creators of television shows are thinking actively and speaking openly about the role women play in their creations. Not passing the Bechdel test has become a form of public shaming, and data analysis performed by Walt Hickey of FiveThirtyEight found that movies

that pass the test may even perform better at the box office.

That’s not to say a movie that passes the Bechdel test is inherently egalitarian. Just because two women appear in a movie and have names doesn’t mean they’re realistic or well developed. Even if they talk about something besides men, that doesn’t mean the subject matter is particularly boundary breaking — American Hustle passes because two female characters discuss nail polish. Some movies simply don’t pass because of the way the plot is engineered — like Gravity, for one, since it would be hard for Sandra Bullock to talk to other women while she was hurtling through space. And the test certainly tells us nothing about how enjoyable the movie is or whether it has artistic merit. In fact, even Alison Bechdel herself doesn’t think that we should see only movies that pass her test: She told The Huffington Post, “I would never watch any television or movies if I only watched shows that passed the test.”

But there is a world — our world — in which women are the main characters. There are many of them, and they talk to each other about all kinds of things: about books and their careers, politics, their love interests, their favorite wines, the quest for an open elliptical at the gym in mid-afternoon.

The Bechdel test is a warning bell, a reminder of the rich and complex lives we and the women around us lead, as much as it is a call to action — to expect more of our movies, to advocate for them to be representative of the world that we live in and to never stop until that is the case. ♢

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LADIES LOVE PORN

BY Arielle Cruz “I finally signed up for a PornHub premium account today. It kept asking me, so I just did it. I don’t know how I feel about it,” he laughed. “I mean I don’t care, it’s not like I won’t use it.

Cameron already has one.”

“No I don’t.”

“Yes you do, don’t even lie.”

Everyone laughed. They continued joking about whether Cameron really had a premium account or not.

This was part of about a five-minute segment of conversation at a friend’s house the other night. Nine guys live in the house, so there is an unspoken, well, sometimes-spoken, understanding that some, if not all, of them watch porn. This is a fact that surprises no one. Guys watch porn. It’s a thing.

What isn’t a thing is women watching porn. That’s just weird.

For some reason, there is a general consensus in the female community that it is something we just don’t do, unless we’re watching it with friends as something silly or educational, or watching it with a significant other or fuck buddy or what have you to get aroused or pick up some new moves. The concept of women watching porn alone in the way that men do is as taboo as well … men watching porn isn’t.

This isn’t to say that women don’t actually watch porn. Of course they do. But for a lot of women it is hard to talk about if they do, because you never know how your admission will be received. What if your friend really is against porn on some moral level and you leave the conversation with a friendship forever changed? Better not to take the risk.

Whenever I have had conversations with friends about porn the conversation has been weird. Not uncomfortable weird, but the kind of weird where we end up talking about it as if we were talking about one of us shoplifting. There are hushed tones involved, secrets being divulged and new limits set for our

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friendship. But when my guy friends talked about it, they were just hanging out in a room with a couple of us girls.

Here’s the thing, though: a lot of women watch porn. According to some ratings from Nielsen in 2007, as many as 13 million or more women watch porn every month. Hell, Oprah even has a list of porn recommendations, a “starter kit” as she’s called it, written by Violet Blue, the author of The Smart Girl’s Guide to Porn. Yes, I said Oprah. The concept that a lot of us still have, that watching porn is uncharacteristic, is completely untrue; we’re just afraid to admit it.

In February, Cosmopolitan published a survey in which they asked 4,000 men and 4,000 women about their porn habits. And guess what? Seventy-three percent of the women they surveyed between the ages of 18 and 24 said they watched porn, and 25 percent said they watched every few days. If the survey is correct, it is women in that lower age bracket who are watching more than older women. Look around, because that’s us.

Of course, women watching porn isn’t necessarily an argument for porn in general. In fact, there are a lot of women who really are against porn and everything it promotes. There are also a number of organizations against porn that are trying to fight the prominence of what they call “porn culture.” They blame porn for violence and for young men’s incorrect assumptions about what sex is, or should be like, in real life. And maybe these people have a point about this. Sex in porn can often be quite different than sex in real life, especially when you break the seal of the weird fetish stuff. There are so many categories of online porn available that they are impossible to count. To quell some of your curiosity, some of the immediate genres that pop up on your standard, free, top of the Google search, sites (eg.

Pornhub, YouPorn, etc) include MILF, Threesome, Big Dick, Teen and Multiracial. There are more, but I think you get the point.

But this problem isn’t unique to porn — it includes popular TV shows’ depictions of sex as well. In Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl, she talks about exactly this concept, “Everything

“Maybe it is this popular perception that porn exploits women that keeps women from admitting to watching it.”

I saw as a child, from 90210 to Bridges of Madison County, had led me to believe that sex was a cringey, warmly lit event where two smooth-skinned, gooey-eyed losers achieved mutual orgasm by breathing on each other’s faces.” This isn’t even taking into account some of the niche Showtime and HBO shows that have gone in and out of popularity over the years for adults and high schoolers alike. Watching Mary Louise Parker and her Mexican-drug-king lover fuck on Weeds was some of the most violent, borderline non-consensual stuff I have ever seen. And I wasn’t even old enough to see an R-rated movie at the time. 90210 and Weeds and Gossip Girl or what have you, in addition to porn, though obviously in a different way, have all contributed to a warped image of sex in the minds of pre-sexhaving individuals. Porn is not singularly to blame in the case of confused expectations.

But whether we like it or not, or morally think that it’s gross or not, our generation is using porn more and more to experiment with sexuality. They (or we?) are sending nude pictures, and taking them, at a higher rate than other generations, and PSAs telling us simply “not to do it” are like an abstinence policy — it just doesn’t really work. Not talking about porn may be worse than just embracing it. In addition to the awkward “When you do have sex, use a condom, son or daughter,” talk, maybe parents need to start having an, “…and if you watch porn, you know, just if you do, just remember that what you’re seeing on your screen isn’t always real life,” talk. We never really had that.

The same Cosmo survey mentioned earlier also found that three out of four men say their preferences for women in real life are the same as their physical preferences for porn actresses. Seven in 10 also said that they watch things that they wouldn’t do in real life. This is compared to a mere seven in 50 women who say they watch things that they wouldn’t do in real life. It has also been noted on some sites that women tend to like watching porn that is more realistic. It isn’t a secret that there is sexism in porn, and as Amy Schumer jokes, no woman wants to see the last minute of porn because we all know what is coming (pun intended) — the guy cums on her face. Some of the women in porn are treated in ways that other women don’t like, and don’t particularly want to see. Though that hasn’t stopped women from enjoying slightly more atypical videos like Gang Bang and “Eiffel towering” (you guessed it, when a girl has sex with two guys at once and consequentially becomes like the top portion of the Eiffel tower. They even talked about it on Scandal.) Men and women are drawn more to slightly different kinds of videos.

According to Buzzfeed, “Threesome” is the second most popular

search for women on Pornhub, with the fourth being “Gangbang.”

Neither of these searches is even in men’s top 20 searches.

That being said, a lot of porn tends to cater to a male audience rather than to a female audience, and some of the porn out there is just terrible to watch. “Sex in itself is not degrading,” as Abiola Abrams stated to Canada’s National Post, but some images of sex can be, and it is those degrading images that are really the problem. In response to this, a sex toy shop in Canada named Good For Her began the Feminist Porn Awards back in 2006. Each year porn actors and actresses, directors, production companies and more make their way to Toronto to watch and talk about more “ethical” porn. Rules for films to qualify are as follows: “1) Women and/or traditionally marginalized people were involved in the direction, production and/or conception of the work. 2) The work depicts genuine pleasure, agency and desire for all performers, especially women and traditionally marginalized people. 3) The work expands the boundaries of sexual representation on film, challenges stereotypes and presents a vision that sets the content apart from most mainstream pornography. This may include depicting a diversity of desires, types of people, bodies, sexual practices, and/or an anti-racist or anti-oppression framework throughout the production. And of course it must be hot!”

In theory, that sounds pretty awesome. The questions now are, are these guidelines enough to make pornography production more acceptable? And is one small movement enough to make any kind of difference in the industry? We will have to wait and find out. But according to a writer at Vice who attended the awards, “Feminist porn is a movement that spends as much time defining itself as it does producing content. This is probably necessary, since pornography, as a whole, is still widely considered exploitative.”

Maybe it is this popular perception that porn exploits women that keeps women from admitting to watching it. But from the sound of this article (and some information from a little further research), there are a lot of production agencies nowadays that work to create porn that isn’t exploitative … fair trade porn, if you will. So maybe the problem with porn isn’t that “it’s porn,” maybe part of the problem for women admitting to watching porn has to do with the industry, and the standards it sets for itself.

One of the best ways to explain this issue is with a genre of porn sites called Porn for Women. What does that even mean?

Gentler porn? As we now know, women watch all kinds of porn from lesbian to gay to Gangbang to Big Dick, so what in the world is porn that is specifically for women? Maybe if women start talking about porn just a little more, and admit that we watch it a little more, we can demand that there be porn that is simply called porn and doesn’t warrant a separate genre — porn that everyone can admit to watching because it is respectful even when it’s “nasty” and exhibits women’s agency even when they are being “had.” Why should we wait for porn to magically be better to admit to watching it? A large percentage of women are watching now, so let’s just stop playing coy with porn. The word has been written exactly 68 times in this article, more than I have probably ever said it out loud in my life. Let’s talk about it. ♢

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WORDS BY KIRA ROYBAL ART BY KIRA ROYBAL

KRIS KIDD 21st CENTURY AMERICA’S pièce de résistance Katana-cut cheekbones, glazed hollow eyes, shimmering purple-gray under eye bags — no, I’m not talking about Johnny Depp circa the Winona Ryder days. I’m talking about Kris Kidd, the “Wi-Fi obsessed wild child always on the hunt for his next fix,” as put by the LA Canvas. He is the 21st-century American pièce de résistance, or at least a really good appetizer — not that he would eat anything anyway.

Allow me to backtrack for a moment. Who is this person, you may ask? Writer, model and photographer Kris Kidd is a native of Norwalk, a suburb of Los Angeles, California. At five feet, 11 inches Kris Kidd stands as an actualized Giacometti sculpture — an emaciated, but recovering, bulimic. The 21 year-old always has a Marlboro Gold cigarette dangling from between his thin lips, a concoction of high alcoholic content in one hand and his iPhone in the other. Over the years he developed an affinity for pills, heroin, and cocaine (Here you can imagine some fusion of Mia Wallace from Pulp Fiction and Laura Brown from The Hours). In his seedier moments, Kidd would not have thought twice about buying Adderall from your hyperactive younger brother — or so that classic analogy goes.

Kidd is, in a sense, the Hemingway of our generation (after all, he believes the best time to write is when he’s drinking).

Only time will tell if his writings become classics, but at the very least, he is an up-to-date Holden Caulfield caricature, providing commentary on the anxieties of our generation

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through the eyes of someone living in and creating today’s youth culture. Kidd began documenting every unpleasant and questionable aspect of his life at the age of 14 with a blog titled Loose Tooth//Lost Youth. Earlier this year, he released, through the Altar Collective, a compilation of Enter the Voidesque autobiographical essays appropriately titled I Can’t Feel My Face. The title refers to “the sensation he gets when he’s high off his ass on amphetamines,” as explained in the short story, “On Writing a Book, or Whatever,” which is not actually included in his book. In it, he tackles highly intimate topics such as loneliness, bulimia and his father’s suicide all while maintaining a snarky, snotty and rather self-centered Los Angeles/big city-inspired tone.

Raised in standardized, suburban “American Dream” contexts, we are often made to feel as if we live in some post-apocalyptic world. I’m not suggesting that a nuclear bomb was dropped, but aren’t the best days supposedly behind us? They had The Beatles and Woodstock. They had had Andy Warhol and CBGB’s hey-day. They had the golden age of space exploration and Stanley Kubrick. What do we have? Instagram? American Apparel? Though we young Americans are the most politically progressive generation, we are also more inclined to trust institutions than both the Baby Boomers and Generation X-ers before us, according to the Pew Research Center. Yet, we are living in the aftermath of the first, second and third waves of feminism, anti-racism and numerous other -isms, lodged between the pressure to continue the resistance and to be

content with our predecessors’ progress. The Millennials are akin to the youth of the ’50s — partly satisfied with the stability and peace offered by the American Dream and partly dreaming of running off to New York City to party, drink and write with Jack Kerouac. We are raised by two generations of revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries, and are expected to not only be individuals but also be the right kind of individuals. “Aim for your dream job, but don’t forget about our future grandchildren; your body is your own, but fergawdsakes a tattoo is not going to help you get anywhere in life; we will always be there to support you, but you need to man-up and deal with your problems.” Millennials are left walking down a road littered with potholes, believing they know what the future holds but also confused as to whether it will be something authentic and memorable.

“RAISED IN STANDARDIZED, SUBURBAN ‘AMERICAN DREAM’ CONTEXTS, WE ARE OFTEN MADE TO FEEL AS IF WE LIVE IN SOME POST-APOCALYPTIC WORLD.” “I am the product of a painfully adequate home — picket fences and red doors and all that shit. I don’t need you to show me any ink blotches because I know exactly what I am, and I did this to myself.” So goes one of the most striking revelations in the first of Kidd’s essays in I Can’t Feel My Face.

Growing up in the suburbs — so close, yet so far from the city — instills a certain type of mindset within a person. Boredom and loneliness brought on from being encompassed by miles of beige houses with falu-tiled roofs are constant obstacles.

There’s no better way to conquer this Herculean labor than to pass the time with Adderall, heroin and plenty of alcohol, not unlike the 1950s greasers who filled their time with smoking, drinking and DIY car racing.

As Kidd asks in the same essay, “Is it still considered heroin chic if I’m actually using heroin? No? Whatever.” Included in this list of fashionable and self-destructive things to do before you turn 27 is “not eating and exercising or eating mounds and purging them.” Los Angeles County is the home of Hollywood, glamour and beautiful people, so join the bandwagon. His essay, “Ko Phi Phi,” delves into the psyche of a bulimic — a manifestation of modern anxiety and the desire to fulfill the role of a “gorgeous body.” Kidd “memorized the best angles in the bathroom mirror from which to see how badly [he has] disintegrated…[He] watch[es] [his] thighs touch, and [he] might scream…” The disease is not solely the stories of girls who do not love their bodies enough and who are negatively influenced by advertisements and models. It is a lifestyle, über alles. In an interview with LADYGUNN, Kidd explained that “Drugs are actually boring,” — their primary purpose is to “make you skinny.”

Outward image — clothing and style — is another crucial

determinant in how one will fulfill the persona that he or she adopts and embodies, especially now that it is more or less standardized due to the growth and accessibility of the mass media. The Los Angeles scene provides “many” options. Are you going to be a washboard abs gym fanatic or an emaciated androgynous James Dean look-alike? Herein walks the skeletal Kris Kidd trying to complement his cozy cocaine-snorting middle class life with elements borrowed from thugs, murderers and warm beer, which he discusses in the “Fruit Roll Ups” essay. Ultimately, he decides people of different backgrounds do not mix as well as portrayed in the movies, therefore becoming an living emblem of Warhol’s commentary on the power of Hollywood: “People sometimes say the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it’s the way things happen in life that’s unreal.”

The most significant and heavy event in Kidd’s tumultuous life was his father’s suicide in the family’s backyard in July of 2009, when Kidd was 15 years old, and he provides paradoxical accounts of it in his book. In “Balloon Animals,” he is “deciding what color [he’s] going to dye [his] hair,” while his father is “zipped into a body bag.” However, in “Between Seasons” Kidd appears more responsive, “kneeling next to [his] father in the wet grass of [their] backyard with [his] hands pump-pumppumping away at his hollow chest.” What accounts for this broad range from apathy and disconnection to an attempt at miraculously reviving a man who shot himself in the head?

Kidd is lodged between two worlds: The glamorous escapism of drugs and glittering city nightlife and the reality of his social relationships. The alcohol, drugs, distorted body image and social media function as a kind of retail therapy; he “shops around” for these to avoid confronting the instability present in his life.

“WE INHABIT A PERFECTLY CONTORTED WORLD AS DESIGNED AND SHAPED BY PREVIOUS GENERATIONS WHO EXPECT US TO UPHOLD THE MERITS AND FIX THE FLAWS OF THEIR SYSTEM.” Kidd is one of the few commentators on our generation who is actually from our generation. He understands what it’s like to place half of yourself within the cyber world and the other half in Warhol’s unreal reality. We inhabit a perfectly contorted world as designed and shaped by previous generations who expect us to uphold the merits and fix the flaws of their system.

This leaves Millennials as suburbanites and commuters to and from the city who value the existence and relationships designed for them, while concurrently searching for the novel and the exciting — an escape, no matter how self-destructive.

Like the youth during the ’50s, we are seemingly complacent and satisfied, we are surrounded by, and embrace, the tragedy and seediness that harbors beneath the surface of the white picket fence American (Internet) Dream.

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THE DAWN OF THE FEMALE

SUPERHERO

BY Tyler Breitfeller ART BY Michelle Savran Who decided that Batman was the cinematic superhero icon of our time? Whose choice was it that Wolverine should be the face of the X-Men or that Iron Man should have three movies before Black Widow has one? Since the first Superman film in 1951, over 70 movies based on DC and Marvel comics have been made. Of those, only three have been female-led. Three — Between DC and Marvel, there are over 350 female superheroes in mainstream comics, but for some reason I can count the ones who have led their own movies on one hand.

Supergirl, Catwoman and Elektra currently hold this distinction, which is most likely, as annoying as it is, because of the male-centered titles that they’re related to. Superman, Batman and Daredevil were all particularly successful at their respective times of release, and film companies thought to take advantage of their popularity.

However, unlike their male counterparts, none of the female-centered films performed exceptionally well at the box office and they have since become scapegoats for female film snubbers across the country. Of course, these are probably the same people that still think a new Batman film every other year is fresh and exciting.

Speaking of Batman, since his big screen debut, the Dark Knight has been the subject of eight feature films, and there is a ninth on the way. Three of them were made in the last decade alone. It’s indisputable that people flock to theaters to see these films, but whether Batman continues killing it at the box office because of his story or simply because Warner Brothers hasn’t given anyone else a chance has yet to be determined.

KATE KANE, NOT BRUCE WAYNE If the company ever does look to expand its roster, I wouldn’t hesitate to vouch for Kate Kane, also known as Batwoman. She has the name recognition that production companies seem to love, and her

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“Giving these women the recognition they deserve would be a big step in the right direction. It would give the next generation of young boys a vision of women being as tough as they can be, and it would help foster a mindset that these ladies shouldn’t be portrayed as side characters in their own lives. ” status as relatively new to comics altogether cements her as a much more modern character than her male counterpart.

Here is a little backstory: Kate Kane is the daughter of a colonel and a captain, and grew up with her parents and twin sister Elizabeth as they moved to a wide variety of towns and military bases. While in Belgium, her family was caught up in a terrorist attack, resulting in the deaths of her mother and sister. Afterwards, Kane joined the Marines in an effort to please her father. It was around this time that she began to come to terms with her sexuality, notably entering into a lesbian relationship with her academy roommate. After being suspected and questioned by her commander, Kane confirmed her sexual orientation and was dishonorably discharged. Her father, despite his military pride, forgave her and congratulated her for being honest with herself. Kane’s father later remarried and, through her new stepmother, she became a socialite in the world of Gotham’s elite.

Now, this all seems like a better coming of age story than half of the cookie-cutter dramas that are released today, and she hasn’t even begun fighting crime yet. Kane is a compelling character with a rich backstory, complex story arcs and thrilling villains. Batman may have Joker, but Batwoman has Alice, the self-stylized High Priestess of Gotham City crime. Kane is not only entertaining; she is also a role model that young girls can look up to. She’s smart, tough, and when hope seems lost, she sets her own path in life. She’s out and she’s proud of it — and while there are various subplots exploring Kane’s personal life and relationships, they never become the focus of her story. Frankly, I think it’s time that Kane has a chance to shine.

Frost’s tale is a bit different. Originally an enemy of the X-Men, Frost grew up abused and manipulated by the men in her life and was forced to do whatever she had to in order to live the life she wanted. She is unapologetic in the ways she uses her cunning, powers and sexuality, and through her not-always-upstanding actions was able to attend university while fighting crime.

Both of these women, although very different, live extremely independent and strong narratives that any audience, male or female, could be inspired by. Female superheroes are incredibly complex and strong characters. They kind of have to be. The fact that I’m even writing this article demonstrates just how much harder women need to fight for their place in society. Giving these women the recognition they deserve would be a big step in the right direction. It would give the next generation of young boys a vision of women being as tough as they can be, and it would help foster a mindset that these ladies shouldn’t be portrayed as side characters in their own lives. The entertainment industry is on superhero overload right now, and it would do society well for the industry to show women kicking as much ass as men.

So why hasn’t anyone done anything about this? Well, the answer lies in the inherent sexism of the entertainment industry. It’s inarguable that comics, from films to cartoons to books, have been and continue to be marketed to males. For example, two years ago, Cartoon Network canceled the Emmy-nominated Young Justice television series. But they didn’t cancel it because of poor ratings; they cancelled it because of the demographics of its viewers. Young Justice was more popular among females in the young adult age range than young males, whom the network had attempted to target, X-WOMEN? and Cartoon Network was not happy about that. For this reason, Even though not many female characters are awarded solo Young Justice was axed after its second season, leaving its story superhero movies, the recent ensemble film trend has led to female unfinished and its viewers livid. Numerous online petitions were characters being given more screen time than ever before, even spread, but to no avail. Cartoon Network and DC Comics were sure if they aren’t directly in the spotlight. The X-Men franchise has about the type of viewers they wanted, and they hadn’t gotten them. the largest supporting female cast, and boasts power hitters like Jean Grey, Rogue, Emma Frost, Kitty Pryde, Storm and, most notably THE DAWN OF JUSTICE in the newer entries, Mystique. While the films continue to focus mainly on the struggles of their middle-aged white male leads, Thankfully, in the time since, it seems DC has begun to change. the women in them don’t just fall into roles as the love interest or Gal Gadot was cast as Wonder Woman and will be portraying damsel in distress, which is certainly a step up from other series. her (the heroine’s first time on the big screen) in the 2016 film However, it should be noted that each of these female powerhouses Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice. DC announced that Gadot could easily shine on their own, and it would do 20th Century Fox will then star in a solo title, which is slated for a 2017 release. well to realize that before they give Wolverine another solo title. Warner Brothers, the production company behind DC’s films, has been searching for a female director to helm the project.

Jean Grey, for example, an intelligent woman and young professor, is (initially) a telepath found by Xavier, founder of the X-Men. It’s debatable what’s more ridiculous — thinking female led films During an emergency mission in space, the team finds their shuttle won’t appeal to a male audience, or thinking that superhero film damaged and Jean pilots it back to Earth, but there is a cost: severe audiences are predominantly male. Regardless, hopefully the radiation exposure. Determined to help her friends, Jean calls out breakthrough of Wonder Woman means times are beginning to for help and is answered by the Phoenix Force, the sum of all life change. Though no plans have been made for other female members in the universe, who is moved by her selfless dedication. The two of the Justice League to show up in DC’s film universe, a television eventually merge their psyches. From that point on, Grey literally series centered on Supergirl is currently in talks. Let’s hope these holds the strongest force in the universe, and struggles to contain two ventures are only the beginning. The superheroine’s spotlight her new powers. Emma Frost, another telepath member of the is long overdue, and I think it’s time that every production company team, houses the Phoenix Force for a period as well. However, from LA to New York realizes just how important these women are. ♢

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The Hangman

By Ariella Reidenberg Marcus and Julia had another fight this morning. “It’s only been three years!” he screamed at her, “We’re not ready for a kid!”

Julia couldn’t stand it when he yelled. She slipped on her pencil skirt and shoes, grabbed her bag, and headed to work. They would talk again when he was calm.

The commute to work was long and dreary for Julia. Usually, Marcus would walk her to the train and kiss her at the steps, but today she trudged through the morning fog alone. Her heels clacked along the asphalt, echoing on the empty street. When Julia rounded a corner, she could have sworn the echo of her heels was so profound it sounded like another pair of footsteps—but when she stopped, the extra steps did too. When she turned, nothing but the fog surrounded her.

On the train, she read the newspaper, flipping through the comics and movie reviews. Apparently there was to be a great thunderstorm that night. When the train arrived at her stop, Julia folded the newspaper and left it where she sat. Stepping onto the platform, she glanced back at the large printed words THE HANGMAN ESCAPES PRISON on the front page. How had she missed that headline?

Julia thought nothing of it as she made her way to work. When she walked through the lobby, everyone was reading the newspaper.

“Did you see this?” the receptionist asked waving the paper as Julia made her way to the elevator.

Julia shook her head.

“Oh, some serial killer who hangs his victims is on the loose—looking for the woman he had a crush on in college!” said the shaken receptionist, “It’s like the Zodiac killer all over again!”

Julia comforted the woman and made her way to the elevator, only to find it out of order. Her office was on the 15th floor. She groaned as she lugged herself to the staircase. Taking off her heels, Julia began her hike up the cement steps.

The lights flickered when she reached the 10th floor. Her bare feet on the cold concrete felt rough.

“Juliaaaaaaaaaa” the walls whispered. She spun around but the stairwell was empty. Julia bolted up the last few flights, breathless. When she reached the number 15, the lights burnt out. Julia screamed and reached for the door handle, groping in the dark. She felt warm breath on the nape of her neck. And then her hands found the metallic doorknob. Julia threw the door open and collapsed into the bright hallway.

The moment she got into her office, she called Marcus. It went straight to voicemail.

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“Honey,” Julia cried into the receiver, “I really need you. I’m gonna take the day off—I’m so scared. Please hurry home as soon as you get this message!”

When she stepped into the hallway, everything seemed normal—the elevators were working again. Julia pressed the round button and counted the minutes until she was home.

The train ride was smooth and the walk home was uneventful, though it began to rain as she reached her front door. Darkness sank into the air when thunderclouds loomed above her. The trees wobbled and bent under the weight of the wind. A dark shadow seemed to sway in front of her bedroom window. Julia was entranced by the swinging pendulum, watching the dark shape spin—until a loud clap of thunder scared her into the house. The power went out in the entire neighborhood; a power line must have gone down nearby.

Julia flew up the stairs to her bedroom, praying Marcus was waiting inside with open arms.

When she flung the door open, there he was in the bed.

“Is that you, Julia?” the deep voice rang out. She felt her way along the wall to his extended arm. Spurts of lightning lit up the room for seconds at a time.

“I’m here, love. Oh god, it was so scary! I was walking—” “Shhhhhhhh.” He interrupted, sweetly, “I’m here now, it’s okay.” Julia always made it a point to make eye contact after a fight, but she couldn’t make out his face in the dark.

“I love you,” he whispered.

“I’m sorry I walked out this morning. If you’re not ready to have kids—” His hands cradled her jaw as he kissed her tenderly. Julia felt safe and relaxed in his arms.

They cuddled in the darkness of their bed. He kissed her shoulder, her back, her neck, and squeezed her tightly. Julia faced the window, watching for bursts of lightning to illuminate the branches outside.

The next flash of lightning highlighted the swaying shape that she saw when she entered the house. Julia squinted to make out what it was, but the darkness only revealed shadows.

As her eyes adjusted, the swinging shape began to look more and more like a body. One last lightning strike revealed the face of her dead husband, cheeks blue, arms limp; hanging from a noose.

swag is for boys, crushing existential anxiety is for men

By Dave Shaw i think i’ve been pretending that the family that lives in the apartment above my apartment is my family 71

Marina’s Dance

By Scott Chiusano

When the Honda Odyssey went it was the start of something. At the time we didn’t know what, because the flares from the good Samaritan who had pulled up next to us on the shoulder were blinding, and Dad was busy folding up the corner of the registration to hide the expiration date in case a cop pulled over to check up on us. We’d been climbing that hill up to I-81 when it gave out, just outside of Scranton and still a good two hours from the city that I hadn’t seen in months.

It gave up, the engine sputtering out like Dad’s coffee machine did when he picked it up with potholders because it had lost the handle. We waited two hours for AAA, dark coming quickly, Dad muttering under his breath about how this was just what we needed and that was the last time he came to pick me up from college, I could take the bus next time and did I really need to bring home that extra comforter, as if that was what had done it. He was leaning on the hood of the car, his arm outstretched, reaching for the highway, and every time a group of cars passed the gust pushed his arm a little forward, and then it fell back into place. He said he liked the way it felt, not to be in control of his movements. I told him that didn’t make sense, it was just the wind, but he ignored me. Mom chalked it up to hunger, lack of food makes everyone in this family grumpy, she said, but I could tell there was something else eating away at him.

Getting a phone call in the middle of the day, especially from my dad, who was still struggling to figure out modern technology, was never a good sign. He called me a few weeks before he was supposed to bring me home from school. When I picked up he said, as always, hey Justin, it’s Dad, because the concept of caller ID was still a foreign one. I was expecting bad news, but he told me he had a funny story, one that I guess could not have waited until the time that I checked in with my parents almost every day. He said he had tried to call his mom the other day to check up on her, but there was no answer. He figured that maybe she had gone out to the grocery store to get her legs moving. He called again around dinnertime, but there was still no answer, and he was starting to get nervous. Mom told him not to worry, that she was probably just watching television and couldn’t hear the phone, but he wasn’t satisfied. After calling two more times with no response, he grabbed the car keys, told mom he didn’t want her to come with him, even if he was in no mental state to drive, and backed the car out of the driveway. Mom said she heard the bottom of the car scrape against the graveled pavement of the alley and cringed, knowing that one day his reckless driving would be the end of that car.

When he got to his mom’s house he didn’t even bother to ring the bell, just stuck the keys in the lock and barged through the door. The television was on in the living room and there grandma was, he told me, sitting on the couch in the same spot as always with her legs crossed and her glasses slipping down the bridge of her nose. She looked up and saw him and gave him the same look she did when he tried to take away her second glass of wine at dinner. “What the hell are you doing here?” she said. Dad was fuming at this point and he said he tried to ask her why she wasn’t answering the phone, but she picked up the remote and turned the volume up on 60 Minutes. “I’m watching this,” she said. “You can stay if you like.” He didn’t stay. Mom told me later that when she heard the gravel-ground scrape outside her window again, she knew everything was fine. Dad 72

came in with his arms waving. Television. She was watching television. The phone? She can’t pick it up? And then he fell into bed.

One week later Grandma had a stroke. That call came at night.

And now we were stranded on the side of the road and the Odyssey was gone and maybe it was because the bottom had scraped the ground one too many times but then again maybe it wasn’t don’t these things happen for a reason is a broken down car a metaphor for a life that’s made it this far and just wants to stop chugging along when it reaches a hill or is all of that bull shit? All we wanted right now was to get home to see her.

Fried

By Anna Brenner Drunk in Chinatown, sixteen: Butchered my knees on pavement next to smashed stir fry and flies and fat trash bags slick with piss.

You laughed beneath the jaundiced street light, your face half-phantom, joint frying your popcorn teeth.

I heard the siren before you saw the cop car strobe red and flung the smoking dope down the alley. I kicked barren beer bottles under the fire escape and you caged my hand in your burnt branch fingers, singed by blunt wraps and cigarette butts and Bic lighters you held

a bit too close, the cop car coming closer, blasting red, white, and blue, blowing out our retinas like fuse boxes.

You are under arrest, they’d intone, for being stupid and sixteen. But the cops split: they had bigger fish to fry.

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