April 2015

COUNTERPOINT the wellesley college journal of campus life april 2015 volume 43 issue 6

E D I TO R I A L S TA F F Editors-in-Chief Oset Babur ’15 Hanna Day-Tenerowicz ’16 Alison Lanier ’15 Staff Editors

Gabrielle Van Tassel ’16 Chloe Williamson ’16 Laurel Wills ’17 Olivia Funderburg ’18 Allyson Larcom ’17 Kathryn Sweatman ’17 Anne Meyers ’17

Co-features Editor

Jayne yan ’16 Charlotte Yu ’17

B U S I N E S S S TA F F Treasurer

THE WELLESLEY COLLEGE JOURNAL OF CAMPUS LIFE APRIL 2015 Volume 43 / Issue 6

POLITICS ROSE T.

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Alice Lee ’18

D E S I G N S TA F F Art Director Layout Editor

COUNTERPOINT

Cynthia Chen ’18

M E N TA L H E A LT H PAULINA STERPE

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FIXING FUCKBOYS

ANONYMOUS

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YOU’RE A SPECIAL FUCKING SNOWFLAKE

ANONYMOUS

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SO WHERE IS THE PROBLEM?

C O N T R I BU TO R S Rose T. ’16, Paulina Sterpe ’15, Katelyn Campbell ’17, Alison Lanier ’15

Cover image: Orli Hakanoglu ’16 (ohakanog@wellesley.edu)

TRUSTEES Oset Babur ’15, Alison Lanier ’15, Matt Burns MIT ’05, Kristina Costa ’09, Brian Dunagan MIT ’03, Kara Hadge WC ’08, Edward Summers MIT ’08

SUBMISSIONS

Counterpoint invites all members of the Wellesley community to submit articles, letters, and art.

Email submissions to cnowell@wellesley.edu and hdaytene@wellesley.edu. Counterpoint encourages cooperation between writers and editors but reserves the right to edit all submissions for length and clarity.

SUBSCRIPTIONS One year’s subscription: $25. Send checks and mailing address to:

Counterpoint, Wellesley College 106 Central Street Wellesley, MA. 02481 Counterpoint is funded in part by the Wellesley Senate. Wellesley College is not responsible for the content of Counterpoint.

THE NEED FOR ISRAEL: A PERSPECTIVE

A R T S & C U LT U R E KATELYN CAMPBELL

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DOES MY APPALACHIA OFFEND YOU?

ALISON LANIER

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WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO MY BLACK WIDOW MOVIE?

CAMPUS LIFE COUNTERPOINT STAFF

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MONTHLY POLL: ARE YOU TIRED?

CROSSWORD COUNTERPOINT STAFF

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FLOWERS ’N’ SHOWERS

POLITICS

The Need for Israel: A Perspective

Dear Reader,

We’re excited that you’ve picked up this issue of Counterpoint. It’s filled with perspectives, emotions, thoughts, and reflections from students all over campus. We’re in awe of the courage exhibited by every person who shares their work with the Wellesley community, and we hope you appreciate their words as much as we do. Let’s keep the discussion respectful, provocative, and progressive. Maybe even vaguely subversive. To this end, we’d like to remind you that the author of every piece featured online and in print is able to read your comments on anonymous and named forums.

On another note about the pieces in this issue, we’d like to ask you to take notice of the various trigger warnings included at the beginnings of some of the articles. Many of our authors have bravely chosen to share deeply personal experiences with us, but we want to make sure that you, our audience, feel comfortable flipping through these pages. If you have any reactions or questions about a piece that you would like to pass along to the author, we ask you to direct those comments to us at obabur@ wellesley.edu, alanier@wellesley.edu, and hdaytene@wellesley.edu. We’ll get your message to the author, and, should they chose to respond, hopefully help you get a conversation going!

Looking forward, we want to ask our seniors to start thinking about pieces to contribute to our May issue. Articles are due on May 8th, the last day of classes. This is your space to reflect, ramble, criticize, and pay homage to your time at Wellesley—we want all of it.

Love, Your Friendly Neighborhood Editors

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counterpoint / april 2015

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nalyzing any issue calls for multiple, varied, and nuanced perspectives. Our tendency to unite over our similarities, like hobbies, political opinions, music tastes, and sports teams, sometimes causes exposure to views similar to, rather than at odds with, our own. I recognize that my perspective is just one of many.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an issue that spurs polarization. For a country barely visible on the map and home to only a tenth of a percentage of the world’s population, Israel gets a surprising amount of attention and discussion. As a Jewish student, whenever the topic of Israel comes up, other students always expect me to have an opinion. To add to the discussion, I’d like to share my own family history and how it has shaped my view of Israel.

I was born in Russia, not as a Russian but as a Jew. My birth certificate marks my nationality and ethnicity as a Jew, although some of my family members have lived in Russia for centuries. Even if I were to convert and light candles for Russia with the Orthodox Church patriarch, my birth certificate would still label me as a Jew, because of a line labeled “ethnicity” in my parents’ documents, in turn because of a line my grandparents had on theirs.

For centuries, my ancestors moved from place to place attempting to avoid religious and racial persecution, sometimes unsuccessfully. Around the end of the eighteenth century, they ended up in the Russian Empire. These last 200 years were not the most fortunate for my family. My paternal great-great-

B Y R O S E T. grandparents were killed in a pogrom over a hundred years ago. The families of both of my paternal great-grandmothers were murdered by Nazis in Babi Yar, Ukraine. Not a single relative survived in the Latvian town where my maternal great-grandfather was born. My family isn’t an outlier: ninety-five percent of all Latvian Jews didn’t survive the Holocaust.

This is why many European Jews have few distant relatives – they are the descendants of the few survivors. Experiences such as my family’s are not unusual around the world, and that history plays an integral role in the collective experience of the global Jewish community.

A hundred years ago, Jews in the Russian Empire were told, “go back to your Palestine.” After the creation of Israel, officials, employers, and neighbors would use every opportunity to recommend that my grandparents and parents “go to their Israel.”

It is because of this Israel that universities hesitated to accept Jews.

Who knew if a Jew would get a Soviet education and then go to his/her Israel to disclose secrets of Soviet rocket science?

The revealing of potential Israeli spies was—in Soviet eyes—incredibly difficult, since any Jew around could turn out to be one.

The careers of Soviet Jews were also absurdly tied to Israel. A Jewish friend of my mother’s was expelled from university for secretly learning Hebrew. She luckily managed to obtain permission to leave for Israel. Her father was consequently fired from his naval engineering job, in case he would try to pass Soviet ship models to Israeli enemies through his

Image: emptymind.org

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

daughter. Her mother, a school principal, was also fired, but for a different reason.

The administration determined that she was unsuited to be educating children, since she had raised a traitor daughter.

The words “Kikes—your place is in Israel!” appeared on her parents’ door.

Soon the jobless parents also decided to apply to leave for Israel, but were denied permission. The official told the father, “Your ships are still sailing.”

“And how much longer will they be sailing?” asked the father.

“Until they sink” was the answer.

The parents understood that there was no way out of the USSR for them, but at least their daughter in Israel could finally get her education, regardless of her Jewish background.

I was born after the fall of the Soviet Union. University acceptance caps for Jews had been eliminated, diplomatic relations with Israel had been established, and the engineer whose ships still sailed had reunited with his daughter in Israel.

However, some things didn’t change.

My grandfather taught me that if someone were to call me a “zhidovka” (the Russian equivalent of “kike”), I must punch them in the nose, since weak Jews will get beat up more. Fortunately I

didn’t get teased in school, but I learned rather early on that Jews don’t fit in.

My preschool classmate found out I was Jewish and asked, “But why aren’t your eyes like slits?” This four-year-old had probably never met a Jew, yet she knew they were somehow different. So, naturally, I learned about Israel at a young age.

Cultural and political norms in the USA are very different from Russia, but the topic of Israel still unavoidably comes up as soon as my Jewish identity enters the conversation. This doesn’t surprise me. For centuries, my ancestors have repeated “...next year in Jerusalem,” a phrase traditionally said during two Jewish holidays. It’s a country where my relatives and friends live, having left the places where they were never considered to belong. It’s a part of my Jewish identity.

So, as many of my peers expect of me as a Jew, I do have an opinion on Israel. I support it as a country of refuge for Jews, necessary given centuries of prayer for it and centuries of unceasing anti-Semitism.

However, contrary to popular terminology, my pro-Israel stance does not conflict with my pro-Palestine stance.

Opinions on the conflict are commonly divided into definite camps of “pro-

Palestine/anti-Israel” and “pro-Israel/ anti-Palestine,” which perpetuates the misconception that being pro-Palestine is equivalent to being anti-Israel and that being pro-Israel is equivalent to being anti-Palestine. As a student who is both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, I believe it is impossible to be truly pro-Israel without being pro-Palestine. It is my belief that working to improve conditions for Palestinians, including promoting equal rights, strengthening an independent democratic government, and developing the economy, must be top priority for anyone interested in helping to secure a stable and happy future for both peoples.

An analogy that comes to mind is two people lost at sea on a raft, neither large nor comfortable. They can wage war and try to throw each other off, risking sinking the raft. But one can only hope that instead they will find a way to make peace, survive, and thrive together.

Rose T. (rtriless@wellesley.edu) does not plan to rock the raft. counterpoint / april 2015

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MENTAL HEALTH

FIXING FUCKBOYS

survivors on college campuses know their assailants. Crying. Thing is, though, this was a huge wake up call for me. Having sex with people you only sort of trust is risky and, while that doesn’t excuse or justify what happened, my choices put me in a situation with someone who didn’t respect my boundaries, and I figured that out the hard way.

I was sick of sleeping around. I wanted the kind of sex you have with your partner after you have the talks about how you don’t want to get pregnant and have no STIs: trusting, respectful, probably a little rough, but you both like that and know you’re both going to cuddle the shit out of each other afterwards so it’s all good.

I wanted that kind of sex with fuckboys.

Yes, fuckboys. I was just hoping and praying that the next time would be different and the perfect guy would fall (perhaps literally) into my lap. I was having loads of recreational sex for all

BY PAULINA STERPE

I

have recently discovered (that is to say, I’m no longer in denial) that I have very a specific taste in men: I’m attracted to assholes. It’s magnetic, really.

I’m drawn toward men who hate women.

With my admission of my somewhat perverse preference for not-so-harmlessdouchebaggery, I’ve started to question a lot about my choices thus far as a twentyone-year-old woman.

I consider myself a feminist (I mean, I go to Wellesley), but I like men who consider me to be little more than a conquest: the irony is not lost on me.

What does this mean for my love life going forward? I happen to have met a guy who is not my usual type. He’s very nice and acknowledges that I am smart, caring, and lovely, and he appreciates me for more than my body and my blowjobs.

I am hugely out of my comfort zone with him simply because he’s nice. Mind you, I almost didn’t give him the time of day at first. So, I asked myself: “Paulina, what is so alluring about an asshole? What are you trying to achieve by pursuing him?

Do you hate yourself and prefer a man put you down so you can blame him, instead of being accountable for your own emotions?”

With questions like these, I opened Pandora’s box. What followed was a

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clusterfuck of emotions and hours and hours of self-reflection, not all of which were in vain. I’ve learned a few things.

Actually, I’ve learned a lot. Perspective is a beautiful thing. This awakening has been a long time coming. So, I guess this is my story.

From the get-go, I’ve made questionable choices about the men I’ve decided to sleep with. In high school, I made up my mind that I wanted to lose my virginity to an old childhood friend and propositioned him via AIM (oh, the good ol’ days). He said: “I’d be honored,” and the rest was history. After a two-year dry spell (I was a sophomore, he was a senior, so he went off to college), I had a camp romance with an Englishman.

He was a real piece of work: immature, broody, emotionally unavailable, but that accent, man… We had a turbulent summer, which led to a turbulent longdistance relationship—throughout which, I should mention, I had a bit of a sexual awakening and slept my way through Harvard (a German exchange student and a light-weight rower), MIT (my former ballroom partner and a Chi Phi), and Babson (Mistake 1 and Mistake 2)—which led to a turbulent breakup in December 2011.

After periods of cold, radio silence

interrupted by bouts of fervent WhatsApping, he bought a plane ticket to visit me during my Wintersession abroad in Rome in 2013. Long story short – like, really short – he lied to me about having chlamydia because he was pissed off about our situation. Flashback to summer and fall 2012, I dated this Babson guy who cheated on me with an old fling then lied to my face about it. I was smart and figured it out, but not smart enough to dump his ass and certainly not smart enough to stop sleeping with him even after he dumped me. I went abroad in fall of 2013 feeling like I had been chewed up and spit out by men (not to mention the one night stands along the way) and came back in the spring thinking it was time to start to put all of that behind me. Instead, what began as a consensual hook up took an unexpected turn for the worse, and I felt the need to reevaluate what I wanted my sex life to look like.

I never expected to become a statistic.

And that really sucked. One out of every six women will experience attempted or completed rape at some point in their life. Check. Eighty percent of women are under the age of thirty. Yep. Sixty-eight percent of assaults go unreported. Uh-huh.

Seventy-five percent of survivors know their assailants. Cringe. Ninety percent of

Image: www.vi.sualise.us

Trigger warning: sexual assault

the wrong reasons. I would go from one extreme to another beginning with “Yes, I want this and this is fine,” and ending with “Why did I sleep with him? Did I really want to do that?” without being fully aware of why I was having such a huge change of heart. It just didn’t occur to me that casual sex wasn’t getting me what I wanted.

I was approaching college hook up culture all wrong. I would hop into bed with someone and just assume they would realize that I was actually a fucking awesome person that they should keep around for a plethora of reasons completely unrelated to fellatio. I desperately wanted these fuckboys to like me for me and that simply wasn’t going to happen.

So, what did you do about it? Thank you for asking! How kind! Let me tell you: I spent a lot of time in therapy talking about why I felt I needed to sleep with men to

validate myself. I also explored why I went for assholes in the first place. The answer is simple, really: an asshole is a project and I wanted to fix him. It would be such a fucking huge achievement for me personally if were able to sway him out of his douchebaggery. This is clearly my type-A at its extreme: I’m a fixer. I would love to take the credit for stopping this guy from treating women (me) like they were disposable. And he would worship me for helping him see the light.

The thing is, I don’t hate myself at all.

I love myself. I think I am a great person and I deserve the respectful, trusting relationship I’ve wanted all this time.

My love life was a shit show because all I wanted was some TLC and I didn’t know how to get it in healthy, safe, and satisfying ways. Involving myself with assholes was a brief high in which I’d feel somewhat heroic before admitting defeat: I can’t change anyone that much. In theory it was exciting and risky, but in practice it left me angry, vulnerable, and hurt.

I’m less hurt now. I’ve been working on having mentally safe sex. Every day I give a little hug to that part of me that screamed “Please, pleaaase like me!” Every day I have more patience and forgiveness regarding the choices I made. Every day I am thankful I no longer need men who hate women.

Paulina Sterpe ’15 (psterpe@wellesley.edu) now has better hobbies than fixing fuckboys.

counterpoint / april 2015

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MENTAL HEALTH

Trigger warnings: extremely detailed descriptions of sexual assaul, self-harm, and suicidal ideation.

O

nline, in classes, in campus discussions, we tend to get a lot of exposure to accounts of sexual assault. And it’s only because I am at Wellesley, coddled in the college’s motherly embrace, that I’m able to get through them.

The problem with all of these articles and stories is that I feel like I should be able to relate. But I can’t. I can understand the anonymity you’re forced to take on while someone else uses you. I can understand the desperate choking of fear in your throat when you don’t know whether you’ll scream first or die. I know what it feels like to have someone you know and trust touch you, and how all of a sudden every rib in your chest points inward and stabs your lungs. I don’t know sexual assault by rough hands; I know sexual assault by smooth, frail ones.

There wasn’t forceful shoving or powerful fingers gripping my neck, but rather a movement of an overbearing mass, folds of cellulite resting on my suffocating lungs. My narrative seems so different from what I’m hearing, so I don’t know how to align myself with others.

But I shouldn’t have to relate. I get to be a unique fucking snowflake, just like my mama said. And don’t worry about relating to my story either—you’re a fucking snowflake too.

As you sift through the narratives circulating at Wellesley, it’s men, men, men who commit these acts. Men do

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You’re a special fucking snowflake commit these acts. I won’t lie to you. But I didn’t get it for a while. In a sea of all these stories, I felt like I was drowning: how could a woman do this to another woman? But let me reassure you: a man, a woman, a non-binary individual— anyone has the capacity to do this to another person. I didn’t have bruises. My experience wasn’t violent, so was it real? I know that might sound stupid. Of course my experience counts, blah, blah, blah.

But when you’re so confused, so doubtful, so horrified and embarrassed about what happened, about what you allowed to happen, then you’d rather pass it off as “not real.” There’s no one to corroborate my story but my assailant, so I’m back at square one, confusion straining my mind until I feel my brain wringing its figurative hands, trying to figure this out.

The first time I found a narrative close to mine was in porn, tucked under the label “mother daughter.” When it comes to sexual assault people wonder how we turn to our families and tell them? How would they console their mother? How did I console my mother?

One day in the car on the way to church, my older sister forced me to talk to my mom about what had happened.

In the same breath, my sister reassured me everything was going to be okay. For me, consolation and confrontation were simultaneous. I loved my mom and it hurt me to see her heart break about what she had done to me when she was drunk.

But I hated my mother—the woman who has made me doubt myself. I consoled my mother by sitting still in the front seat of the car, dead to the world, as odious confrontational words dripped from my lips. The space around us got so small.

Words and words and exhaled breaths and hot air just started filling up the car, and I had to roll down the window. Her raspy voice got lost in the fresh burst of air. That cold bite of wind through the window was the only thing I could feel. The gentle air soothed me, but my mother’s scolding voice cut through it. I rolled the window back up. Why did it seem as if my mother, my assailant, didn’t know this happened?

If it wasn’t real, how did I still feel her hot, sticky breath on my neck sometimes? If it wasn’t real, then what was this space in my mind, this gap in my memory, this widening hole in my heart?

I passed so many years debating with myself. Just spinning myself deeper and deeper into my own hesitant narrative.

This wasn’t assault. I can barely remember the whole night—just fingers and lips and saliva slipping down my neck; details poke sharply out of blackened memory. I remember vomiting, my shaky legs barely carrying me to the bathroom. I remember being disappointed that I didn’t throw up that much, like I couldn’t cleanse myself of this experience, and it just settled in the nauseous pit of my stomach. I could only dry heave and dry heave until I finally fell asleep on the porcelain. I remember

Image: www.evolvemovement.com

BY ANONYMOUS

waking with a crick in my neck and slipping quickly into bed. I remember my dad knocking softly on my door, poking his head in, sliding through the doorway and ripping my heart into scraps. Telling me in a stern voice that my mother was upset with me; that I needed to behave myself today. And then he slid right back out. It all rushed back to me. I know we use that expression a lot—“it all rushed back to me”—but I was hit by a wall of water, the details of the night rolling over me like the deadly ripping force under a massive wave. It trapped me in my bed. I couldn’t move if I wanted to.

I felt nauseous again. My mind shuffled together a priority list for what I should feel. In an overwhelming surge, the thought of seeing her angry again and not knowing how to get out surfaced.

I blame my dad. I blame him for everything. Everything could be my fault.

But I blame him. He sent me to her room that night. He told me I had made her angry before I left for my friend’s Bat Mitzvah. He told me I should tell her about my night. He’s the one who defends her. He’s the one who still loves her. He’s the one who holds my family together in his hands. I’m in the left hand, and she’s in the right, and he holds my family over the precarious crack between his cupped palms.

When it happened again, when I hadn’t been the one to make her mad, I thought it might not have been my fault.

Pointing fingers is normally simple right?

“I said no.” It’s clear. It’s easy to pretend it is. But it isn’t. No one wants to think this happened to them. No one wants to say people are capable of this. It’s easier to say it was me. It’s easier to say I made her mad. It’s easier to say I made her drink. It’s easier to say I got the doctors to switch her drugs. It’s easier to say I’m the

root of her mental illness. There’s more agency in blaming myself. Because then, then I had a say in what happened, I had some control. I didn’t bend pathetically to someone else’s dominance. Somehow, when it’s my fault, I’m less vulnerable and everything that happened is easier to swallow; it makes more sense. And after all of that: how could it still be her fault?

She’s sick. She didn’t know the new drug they had her on would do this. She’s frail.

She’s unwell. She didn’t know. I’ll never blame my mom.

Can I still blame her for what she did considering her mental health? Sex and mental illness weren’t things we ever talked about in my house. I’m sure many of you snowflakes can relate to that. But even a child notices when she finds her mom having a panic attack in her closet. Even as young kid I knew my mother changed after the birth of my little sister. There are black spots in my childhood where my mother was not present because she was in a mental health facility recovering from postpartum depression. And it’s not something that goes away. It’s etched forever in the lobes of her brain. The medications they put her on for lupus, a poorly understood immunodeficiency disease with fun mental health side effects, enflames this nocturnal part of her brain. There’s also the relationship she has with her own mother. There aren’t simple explanations.

So when I hadn’t been the one to make her mad, when it happened again, I still tried to blame myself. I had started wearing thongs. I had annoyed my sister, who had made my mom mad that day.

I, I, I had to have done something to deserve this. The next time it happened, I felt hopeless. It was painfully more real, and I watched it unfold with incredulity, frozen. I had lingered too long. It wasn’t

easy to escape. I love my mom, but she wasn’t a person. She was a sum of animal parts; the swinging arms of a bear, the tongue of a giraffe wobbling drunkenly out of her mouth, spewing spit over my face and breasts. I was ashamed that I let it happen again.

When it happened yet again, I felt like a protector. I hope one day you feel bigger than you are, like I did. I hope you have the strength of mind to mentally die for a while. My eyes unfocused. When she charged with her rhino legs and waved her head like a lion, I stepped toward my mother. In the same moment I stopped thinking, I dropped out of myself and I felt a thousand times taller than I am, endowed with a heart a thousand times bigger than mine is. Trembling fear knocked my giant heart forward in my chest. And I hope you get to feel your oversized heart shoved up against the inside of your ribs, because it feels goddamn amazing. I had all my siblings’ lives housed in my mammoth heart.

Even if my dad had been home, even if my older sister wasn’t in her room with tears streaming down her face, even if the stars had aligned and I hadn’t been there—I don’t mind that I was. Maybe if I travelled to the hideous bottom of my mother, my siblings would never have to and they might salvage some part of this night. But I was still ashamed that I let it happen again. She wasn’t a person. I cannot stress that enough—this wasn’t my mom. These arms weren’t intended for this. This tongue wasn’t made for this.

Her hard breath saturated with alcohol shouldn’t bead like this on my neck, coiling unforgettable noises into my ears.

This wasn’t a mom, let alone mine.

Apart from the one time I had a panic attack when my mother came in to ask me how I was handling recent family counterpoint / april 2015

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If we’re in a car can she really do anything?

Who will be driving? If I’m driving…I’m obsessing over how to love my mom without showing her that it’s killing me.

After, when I’m back at Wellesley, all the pent up hatred I have from being with her laps over my body in slow waves. I just want to scream and stomp and cry. I just want to fling away the guilt over hating my mother and then the guilt over loving my assailant. I want it to fly away like a curse finally cast out of my body.

Well, despite my silent screams and my desperate silence, the world keeps turning and my mother will have an innocent drink or two. And we’re all happy—celebrating. I’m shuffling around the room keeping thickets of people between us. She’ll saunter up to me, as I’ve failed to keep us separated from each other from across the room, and laud me on my academics, proffering me up to other relatives. She’s proud of me. We’re a happy, successful family, you see. I can’t tell anyone what’s going through my head; I can’t tell anyone why I’m distant. We all love her: we wouldn’t want to believe it. I couldn’t pit a sickly woman’s family against her. Or a more terrifying thought: would they even believe me? She’s such a good person—she couldn’t do this. I can feel the words strangling me as they catch in my throat. And that night I’ll bury myself under a mountain of blankets so you can barely tell there’s someone in there, and I’m begging some higher power

that I won’t hear the doorknob turn.

As much as I would love to get up and simply lock the fucking door, I’m stuck. I feel like an old-Hollywood asylum patient strapped to the bed, knowing I’m about to be torn apart mentally. Every part of me is flexed, tensed, or shaking.

Some nights, she’ll come in and touch me in ways that, in any other circumstance, might be conceived as motherly. My body will unfurl and I lie out straight waiting to see what she wants.

She’ll come in slurring words about how beautiful all her babies are growing up to be; she’ll slobber a kiss on my forehead.

And I’d give anything not to be beautiful right then. But it’s sweet, really. And the thing is, she’s being a mom. Who misses childhood goodnight kisses? Your mom at the foot of your bed should bring comfort – not terror. The thing is, there’s not a pattern for how it starts, so I don’t know if she’ll cross the line or even if I’ll ever let it happen again. But honestly, where is that goddamn line? Doesn’t your mom get some sort of claim over your body?

The body she pushed out of herself? Your mother has power over you. Respect thy mother. Listen to your mother. Mother knows best. With my mother being sick a lot, this power dynamic was especially ingrained in us. Sometimes I’m mad that I’ll obey her, something small like rolling up a window when she scolds me. But I always do it. And I know why - come on, you know why too- she’s my mother, and you do what your mother tells you. So, how could I fight it? I should trust her.

“Trust me.” And because she’s my mom and I’m a child—and I’ll forever be her child—I’ll always be stunted and obedient around her. And the thing is, maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m wrong about this whole thing. Maybe what happened wasn’t what I thought. Maybe I should just trust her more.

After an hour or so I collapse under my own defeated weight. My arms are heavy, my hair falls across my face, my heartbeat

Image: Wellesley College image archives, blogspot.com

deaths, I was put together. But the person I was in high school had a flattened personality from being squished under my mother’s thumb. I never thought about what happened, I never questioned her movements. I existed, that was it—I took up space.

So what’s it like being home? Well, there are nights where I’ve felt safe for so long that it’s jarring to realize I’m not.

Where I wake up at home trapped in my own suffocating bell jar—home, where life just continues to unfold? Where everyone I love still hugs me, breathes on me, and the moisture from their breaths sends a shock down my spine, making me flinch. I avoid going home. But when I can’t escape it, the lead-up is excruciating.

A large part of my mind is preoccupied with returning to a space where I was a shade of who I am now, such a large part of my mind that I can’t form linear sentences. Only a few sharp words cut through the curtain. I’m irritable and focus on insanely specific tasks. An itchy column of uneasiness houses itself between my lungs. And I have this twitch.

Frequent panic attacks take on a special flashback quality. I’ll find myself in my closet, unsure how I got there. I get my ass up, I smile at the sunshine, but midclass, mid-anything, there’s a part of my brain mapping out floor plans of rooms I’ll be in with her, and how many people are going to be there with us. How much time will I spend alone with her in the car?

slows, and my stomach relaxes. Anything could happen and I couldn’t give a fuck.

I’m just another layer in the sheets. After an hour of rattling inside my caged body, nothing, not even her thick drunken voice, could send a shiver down my spine.

And in the morning I’ll just claw the dead girl out of my skin and fill myself with someone better, someone new, someone who has never been fucked or fucked someone, someone who doesn’t know.

I haven’t used the word “survivor.”

It’s just a label to clump you with other people and to try and give you some semblance of agency, as if you’ve survived a natural disaster. I survived a hurricane, I survived a tsunami—I survived sexual assault. But this disaster isn’t natural; this isn’t built into the human condition.

People don’t treat people like this. And calling us “survivors” is a weak attempt to group us together. All of our stories are

so different. I don’t relate to these people.

Sure, we’ve all seen a shitty side of life.

But we are such a large group. Tying us together through this experience is like binding us to Prometheus’s rock. We all just watch each other’s livers get clawed out and we’re supposed to relate to each other on how that feels? And sometimes that’s good, sometimes it’s validating to watch someone else’s liver get clawed out and realize you aren’t the only one missing an organ. Then in a fit of hopefulness you pledge to regrow your livers together. But sometimes, you remember the dread and pain of re-growing your liver only to have it clawed out again in the morning. And besides, we’re all snowflakes. The only narrative similar to mine is listed in porn.

There isn’t any power in being a survivor for me. I’ve died, and I’m stronger dead. Being dead means I can’t feel or see or know when anyone is around. I may have survived what happened, but I’ve since destroyed many versions of myself.

And every time I fall back, I kill some narrative, someone that could’ve been, again and again. Every Benadryl I push into the back of my throat, until my entire mouth is an aggressive fluorescent pink, blacks out some part of who I was.

Every time I’ve knocked myself out only to wake writhing in my bed, I’ve shaken some new person into being. Sometimes I find myself with my knife in my hand and a bloody leg, laid out with biblical phrases, carved into my skin, varying in cynicism—can’t wait until “respect thy mother” fades. Some mornings I wake to my skin crawling with fear and my body raked with hatred, and I force a new person to take over the rotten cavity in my skull. When I’ve marred the body I’m in, when I’ve lived too long with my thoughts, I simply wriggle out of it. I’ve lived lifetimes.

I’ve done so many things since, fallen apart in so many ways. I am not my sexual assault case. I’ve only left scraps of that version of myself. I am not what

happened to me. I am whoever I woke up this morning to be. I am not the sum of my circumstances. I’ve built myself from the ground up, very carefully. But building isn’t easy, when I’ve made my foundation the shaky distinction between my mom and my mother. There’s my mom, the woman I love and care about and there’s my mother—the woman who did this to me. And that distinction is vital to me, that distinction tips me in favor of survival. She’s not an alcoholic.

She loves me. I love her. The people you love, the people you think you know well, can do this too.

So, my dear snowflakes: I speak to you from the other side, from a new body filled with someone fresh. I don’t care what your narrative is, I don’t care who did it.

I don’t care. The only thing I can bring myself to give a shit about is you. Because none of that shit matters just you and whether you can still find the uniqueness in your snowflake self, and realize that it counts too. Whoever it was—a stranger, a close “friend,” a relative, a man, a woman, a non-binary individual, someone you were dating—the list goes on and fucking on because it doesn’t matter who did it— it just matters that they did. Whatever it was—harassment, abuse, a gropey hug—it doesn’t matter—it just matters that someone exploited your right over your own body. And it happens too often.

Too many people have become empty bodies taking up space. Too many people know too much about what it’s like to be at the bottom of another person. Too many crowds watching livers get clawed out. Too many people shedding bodies as they become cages. And don’t worry about being able to relate; you’re a fucking snowflake.

For questions about anonymous articles, please contact the Editors-in-Chief.

counterpoint / april 2015

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MENTAL HEALTH

So Where Is the Problem?

Trigger warnings: self-harm, suicidal ideation, mentions of eating disorders

I

t has been confirmed, far and wide, that I am mentally ill. I have the documentation, the professional opinions, the prescriptions, and the personal history to back it up. It doesn’t take a PhD to see that I’m “crazy.”

Early one morning my sophomore year, I awoke to a loud knock on my door.

I stumbled blindly out of bed to answer it, my eyelids drooping from lack of sleep.

Standing there, I found a campus police officer and a tall man in a black hat. They were concerned that I was suicidal, citing a worried phone call from my RD, who had received a concerned message from a student late the night before. The strangers at my door told me I needed to undergo psychological evaluation at the Stone Center immediately. Dumbfounded, I asked if I could walk there after putting on real clothes and ingesting some caffeine.

“No,” the man in the black hat said, “you have to go right now. You can ride with her,” he gestured toward the police officer, “or you can ride with me.” Begrudgingly, I chose the latter option, and off we went.

I’ve experienced varying degrees of suicidal ideation since I was twelve or so, and this morning I was, admittedly, on the worse end of my spectrum. I refused to admit this, however. Going to the hospital would stress me out, it would stress my family out, and it would interfere page 12

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with my intricately structured schedule.

Going to the hospital was not an option.

And besides, I didn’t need help—I had it under control. After making me sign their standard paperwork, the Stone Center let me go.

Later that day, I self-harmed for the first time in about six years. I didn’t want help.

At the urging of friends, I halfheartedly started seeing one of the Stone Center’s therapists regularly. She didn’t get me. At all. After three appointments punctuated by awkward silences—not the kind of silence therapists are trained to dish out, but silence because this woman just did not understand what I meant, nor did she have any idea what to tell me—I stopped going.

Toward the end of the semester, my eating disorder got out of control, and I spent the summer as an inpatient at an eating disorder center. That summer was a time of validation and hope. For the first time in my life, I had words for all of the strange miseries that had clouded my life for as long as I could remember.

Not only that, but I also had a supportive and incredible community of peers who understood exactly how I felt: we’d all been to the same dark places inside ourselves.

I had a treatment team there, complete with a primary therapist, family therapist, dietician, psychiatrist, and a small horde of other psychologists. When I came

back to Wellesley in the fall, I started seeing a therapist in Cambridge once or twice a week, going to Health Services for checkups every two weeks, and attending a weekly eating disorder support group at the Stone Center.

But around the end of the semester, my depression started getting worse again. My therapist told me to seek out one of the Stone Center psychiatrists to see about getting my meds adjusted. I called the Stone Center the next day to ask about making an appointment with a psychiatrist. I know several people who have had an easy time doing this, so I figured it would be manageable, if a bit bureaucratic. It wasn’t. The receptionist brashly informed me that no one could make an appointment with one of their psychiatrists without being referred by a Stone Center counselor. When I limply protested that my legit actual real world therapist had insisted that I start seeing a psychiatrist again, the receptionist repeated her unhelpful monologue: No one can make an appointment with one of our psychiatrists without being referred by a Stone Center counselor. Never mind that I know several people who did not have to comply with this requirement. Frustrated and unheard, I hung up.

After that, I gave up for a while. From time to time, I would fume to myself about why in the hell the Stone Center would make seeing a psychiatrist such a bureaucratic obstacle course; didn’t they

Image: www.hitwallpaper.com

BY ANONYMOUS

of all people understand that it’s already a huge and difficult step for a mentallyill-person to reach out for the help they need? Depressed people do not have the energy for bullshit bureaucracies. My mood continued to darken, and I relapsed into self-harm again.

My therapist told me that I should spend some time in a partial hospitalization program at a behavioral health center over winter break. I complied, and I tried, but it wasn’t all that helpful. I saw my therapist and my psychiatrist from the summer several times before going back to school—they agreed that I needed to find a psychiatrist at Wellesley.

After returning to school in the spring, I called the Stone Center again, and got the same discouraging answer. It doesn’t matter, apparently, how many other mental health professionals suggest the need for a psychiatrist—if they don’t work at the Stone Center, they don’t count.

Several weeks later, I called yet again.

This time, instead of trying to advocate for myself in the face of the system that refused to help me, I decided I’d just do what they wanted me to and see what happened.

I made an appointment with a Stone Center counselor. It was the same counselor I’d been dragged to for suicidal ideation one year before. She was patronizing and, still, didn’t understand my case at all. She seemed more like a simpering mother than a therapist. After

I flashed her lots of reassuring smiles and affirmed again and again that, yes, self care is important, and yes, mental health comes first, she scheduled an appointment for me with a Stone Center psychiatrist in about a month. Had so many people gone through this months-long, tedious process that the psychiatrist was that busy? I wondered to myself. It seemed unlikely. The counselor informed me that it was also a requirement (apparently) that I continue seeing her as long as I was seeing the psychiatrist—I guess one to two meetings a week with my regular therapist wasn’t enough? No one else that I’ve talked to has had to follow this rule; no one else that I’ve talked to has even heard of this rule.

A month later, the day finally came for me to meet with the psychiatrist—let’s call her Jean Walsh. Everything I said was met with suspicion and invalidation. She didn’t believe me that I was depressed, or that I had struggled with debilitating obsessive compulsive disorder. She accused me of abusing my Zoloft—like, really, who the fuck even does that? I imagine Zoloft would not be a very exciting drug to abuse. I was getting plenty of sleep, she said, so where was the problem? I was eating enough, she said, so where was the problem? I wasn’t actively self harming, she said, so where was the problem?

I left the Stone Center feeling worse than I’d felt in months. Obviously I didn’t have any problems. I supposed the only

reason I couldn’t function was because I was pathetic, weaker than everyone else, less capable than everyone else. An incredible and persistent support system was the only thing that kept me from harming myself that day, and just barely. I felt absolutely worthless.

When I met with my therapist a few days later, she told me than Jean Walsh had called her to discuss my case. She told me that Jean had questioned her aggressively, saying that she “didn’t really see any depression” in me, nor did she detect any OCD. When my therapist tried to give Jean her diagnoses of me—major depressive disorder, as well as chronic depression, OCD, anxiety, anorexia in partial remission—Jean interrupted her, talking over my therapist rather than listening to her. I opted not to meet with Jean Walsh again.

I am a passionate advocate for mental health on campus, and I frequently encourage people to visit the Stone Center, but the Stone Center has failed me. My case has fallen through the cracks.

It doesn’t take a PhD to see that I’m “crazy,” but the Stone Center bureaucracy somehow missed that fact altogether.

I don’t ever want anyone else to feel as invalidated and shut out of the Stone Center as I have; no one should ever have to feel foolish for seeking help.

For questions about anonymous articles, please contact the Editors-in-Chief. counterpoint / april 2015

page 13

ARTS & CULTURE

D o e s M y A p p a l a c h i a O f f e n d Yo u ?

S

everal weeks ago, I was chatting with a good friend when our conversation turned to my home state of West Virginia.

For those with whom I am even tangentially acquainted, it is often glaringly obvious that I am passionate about the people and landscape of West Virginia and Appalachia at large. Even during the academic year at Wellesley, I am very involved in West Virginia politics and hound the state’s NPR affiliate’s social media to keep up with local news.

Given my closeness with this friend, I was genuinely shocked when she interrupted our conversation with the question: “Wait, why would you want to move back to a place that’s so backward and conservative?”

I paused for a moment before delivering an undoubtedly knee-jerk and diplomatic response and then changed the subject to something less personal. In spite of my situational pacification, however, I began to ruminate on the meaning of the

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unintentionally insensitive question my friend posed, as well as the motivation for my less-than-lionhearted response.

I am a ninth-generation West Virginian. My parents were the first in their families to go to college and to make their livings outside of the coal mines; however, their success was far from predestined. My mother grew up in a family of six during a long series of strikes in the northern West Virginian coal mines during the 1970s. My father’s parents struggled to make ends meet as coal’s profitability began its slow decline in southern West Virginia.

My parents have worked very hard to be able to purchase their own home and create a stable life for our family, but are not so privileged that paying for Wellesley, even with generous financial aid, is not a significant burden. Nonetheless, I am fortunate to have grown up in a household that never struggled to feed me. I am also fortunate that I had access to transportation, to good

public schools outside of my immediate district, and to have been made aware that opportunities, like those offered at Wellesley, were available to me regardless of my geographic origin or class. I am humbled in my privilege by the fact that I am only one generation removed from the coal mines, and that I grew up alongside distinct human evidence of the War on Poverty’s failure. Despite stereotypes, I am endlessly proud of my family’s heritage and am inspired by stories of triumph on the part of relatives past. This pride, however, was long suppressed by years of classism-facilitated shame.

Following my high school graduation, I had no intention of ever returning to West Virginia. Four years as a transfer student at my county’s very wealthy, AP-magnet high school had left me beaten down and ashamed of my family’s lack of “good breeding.” Despite having an academic performance that earned me acceptance to Wellesley, I often felt culturally incompetent in comparison to students

Image: www.quarriesandbeyond.org

B Y K AT E LY N C A M P B E L L

in my classes, some of whom spent most of my sophomore year wondering aloud about what a piece of “white trash” from Elkview (a very working class suburb of Charleston) was doing in AP Chemistry.

Especially after a bout of administrative harassment during my senior year, I was ready to start over, hoping to leave my past identity behind in favor of something slightly more cosmopolitan.

I had always imagined leaving West Virginia to find a broader intellectual community into which I could be absorbed and within which I could learn the ways of the elite in order to shed my Appalachian “gruffness.” I believed Appalachian practices to be subordinate to academic, Northeastern “culture.” In doing so, I was participating in a larger system of classist oppression than I realized at the time.

Within days of my arrival at Wellesley, the culture shock set in and I realized how misguided my attempts to assimilate into what I thought was the ideal Northeastern academic culture really was. Throughout orientation, I had many of the typical “Where are you from?” conversations, and I was appalled by how many times I had to explain that West Virginia is indeed a separate state from Virginia, and that we do indeed have schools capable of producing students who are academically competent enough to be admitted to Wellesley. I began to respond to the offers of pity and “comfort,” that I still often receive after disclosing that I’m from the Mountain State, with spirited affirmations of my own heritage, spouting off the names of successful West Virginians like a broken record (Jennifer Garner, Don Knotts, Chuck Yeager, Sylvia Burwell…).

Despite these frequent acts of affirmation, I often felt cripplingly ashamed of my heritage. Ashamed that I still generally prefer canned fruits and vegetables to fresh (because that’s what

my parents, and I, grew up eating).

Ashamed that I know what a tipple is, and that I have a certain affinity for the coal towns that most outsiders see as eyesores.

Ashamed of my inability to blend in because of fear of leaving out all of the people at home, for whom I often feel like an ambassador. Ashamed that, as a result, I bring up West Virginia in every class.

Through my academic work at Wellesley, I have come to realize that both the questions and responses offered by my peers and my accompanying shame are reactions to a system that assumes that culture belongs only to the upper echelons of the socioeconomic ladder.

Such a system seeks to render working class culture, as well as the working class at large, invisible by asserting that their culture is invalid because it doesn’t carry a high enough price tag. By making the working class invisible, the upper class is better able to avoid the “inconvenience” of systems of inequality, ignoring hard truths, like the fact that most of McDowell County, West Virginia (which is a mere five hour drive from our nation’s capital) has not had clean water in fifty years.

I am the descendant of eight generations of hard-working Appalachian people. I am the granddaughter of one of the strongest coal miners in the northern West Virginian coal mines, who, when asked how he threw his back out, responded: “Well, I was lifting a battery, but it only weighed 250 pounds.” I am the great granddaughter of moonshiners who built houses with the CCC. I am the daughter of a man who taught me how to change the oil in a car while drinking Early Times whiskey and chewing on homemade deer jerky.

These moments in my family’s history are part of a larger cultural quilt of our collective experience. They are tinted with the traditions of the West Virginian working class, and infused with the fire

of a centuries-long struggle for security and happiness. I cherish the stories of strength that come from my family’s past; however, the culture at Wellesley and at other academic institutions would have me believe that these are stories about which I should be ashamed.

Quite frankly, I could care less if your coat came from Canada Goose or the sale rack at Walmart. Whether you snack on canned green beans or crackers smeared with brie, it’s no concern of mine so long as the products you consume make you happy. That said, it is no one’s place to silence another person’s practice or experience because it does not align with a prescribed norm. The devil’s in the details, y’all, and the implications of microaggressions matter.

To answer my dear friend’s original question about why I’d like to return to West Virginia, I’ll say this: for all of its mistakes, West Virginia will always be my home. Its people are kind and considerate, and share a common culture, as well as the experience of growing up in rural Appalachia, with me. Regardless of political affiliation, most West Virginians want the best for everyone else, which is an idea that is as un-backward as they come. If I have to spend my whole life trying to find a political middle ground, then so be it, but I know that a life in a liberal metropolis is not one that would ever make me happy or comfortable.

Intimidation on the basis of class is all around us—it is too big to be ignored but not too strong to be addressed. At Wellesley, we are in a position to re-define the terms surrounding discussions of culture, and we mustn’t waste it. It’s time.

We’ve waited long enough. Let’s talk.

Katelyn Campbell ’17 (kcampbe2@ wellesley.edu) is ardently Appalachian and takes her coffee with a side of grits.

counterpoint / april 2015

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ARTS AND CULTURE

WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO MY

Black Widow I

counterpoint / april 2015

Marvel pinwheeled and backpedaled, flouncing around interview questions with Comic Book Resources as the company president, Kevin Feige, tried to dismiss the dropped project. Curiously vague catchphrases characterized this exchange, which Time’s (female) culture correspondent Eliana Dockterman picked up in a tellingly acidic article, “Marvel President Tries to Explain Lack of FemaleSuperhero Movies.”

Among these scattered excuses, there were such gems as “I think it comes down to timing, which is what I’ve sort of always said, and it comes down to us being able to tell the right story,” and “I hope we do it sooner rather than later.

But we find ourselves in the very strange position of managing more franchises than most people have.” Or, as Screen Rant paraphrased, “Marvel is Too Busy to Make a Female Superhero Movie.”

It’s a foregone conclusion at this juncture, despite dismay from fans and from critics, that Black Widow is not in the works. Nicole Perlman, the first woman to pen a superhero screenplay for Marvel, revealed on Twitter that she’d written about six pages of a Black Widow movie, but the idea never got off the ground.

Marvel’s production schedule through 2017 is public, and it doesn’t include a single female-led superhero film. Perlman was one of the writers behind Guardians of the Galaxy, but Collider points out that we don’t really know how much of Perlman’s Guardians script actually made it to the screen after James Gunn swooped

in for his own re-write.

The factor sitting at the fulcrum of this ugly, conspicuous hesitation is exactly, as the company’s president put it, a matter of “timing.” Timing is terrible. But not for any of the very sound reasons Feige surely intended to define for his interviewer.

Rather, the time for an exciting, groundbreaking female superhero movie has passed because the timing for exciting, groundbreaking superhero movies is over.

Avengers 2 may be looming in May, an explosive summer blockbuster, but the expectations for it begin to feel more and more generic. Avengers 3 is confirmed for May 2018, but the waves of associated sequels give a strong indication that this title might be the last gasp, barring a true revitalization of the superhero craze, for Marvel’s main film franchise.

There’s nothing standing in the way of Marvel’s telling the “right story”— now, or last year, or the year before— other than Marvel’s own insecurity. That insecurity comes from how Marvel sees their demographic. The question circles inevitably back: the demographic for comic books is stereotypically male, isn’t it? Never mind that most moviegoers, in the general sense, are female. And as endemic and persuasive as that insecurity is, or as flawed, even admitting a single Black Widow movie into the wave of Phase One releases, the cheerful boys’ club of super men movies, would have been a decisive statement by Marvel.

But, now, the superhero trend is winding down. It’s more a genre

Image: www.comicsalliance.com

MOVIE?

n the tidal wave of superhero movies since Spiderman and Blade Runner swung and slashed their way into the mainstream, the presiding trend among these titles has been men. Man of Steel, Batman Begins, Iron Man, The Amazing Spiderman—and to the credit of critics and consumers, the masculinity-touting trend hasn’t gone unremarked. In a flurry of online headlines and excited blog posts last summer, fans and online contributors rallied around news of a potential Black Widow movie. That news had grown out of long-suffering internet rumors, and the fan response was enthusiastic. As Forbes put it, “the drumbeat is getting ever-louder for said film to get made as Marvel’s first female-centric superhero film.”

Of course superheroines have had the stage in the past: there were 2005’s sexheavy Elektra and Halle Barry’s atrocious 2004 attempt at Catwoman, both femaleled movies that stumbled and flopped on lackluster scripts and frankly poor plots. They also, notably, came before the current Marvel-fueled superhero craze.

And it’s a craze that has now produced more than a decade’s worth of big-name blockbusters, while smoothly avoiding putting a superheroine back in the starring role.

Cinema Blend, Screen Rant, Variety, and Time have all confirmed, as of last autumn, that whatever hope was lodged in that “news” of a Black Widow movie was not quite as substantial as it seemed.

The definitive term “green-lit” had been misapplied by internet followers, and page 16

BY ALISON LANIER

than a vogue. The hoard of superhero blockbusters is now in the phase of regurgitating sequels rather than stoking hype. Case in point: Marvel has shut down their writing program, a popular idea mill where entry-level screenwriters toyed with new, innovative ideas for the company. That’s where, incidentally, Perlman became the only woman to pen a screenplay for the company.

Instead of a continued, massive influx of rapid big-star titles, Marvel is slimming down, now proliferating more new titles on television: Agents of Shield, Agent Carter—and streaming online, in a new deal with Netflix—Daredevil, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, and Iron Fist.

That Netflix deal will conclude with a miniseries, bringing together the heroes of the disparate shows into one mass-cast miniseries, The Defenders.

If that sounds suspiciously like a replication of both the form and the success of the Marvel movies on a smaller, less expensive screen, it’s because the model—single-character narratives to ensemble-finale—is nearly identical.

Marvel is shying away from dumping massive bankrolls on titles that belong to a trend nearing the end of its natural life.

Ant-Man is hardly the most promising successor to Marvel’s tradition of iconic characters, and Perlman’s Guardians of the Galaxy, while based on a comic book, veers away from the genre altogether.

DC Comics is trailing a little behind, but the company is definitively headed in the same direction. Trying to cling to the genuinely good Hollywood cinema that was Nolan’s Batman sequence, DC is hanging on by its fingernails—and it’s hanging on with uncertain movies like Man of Steel, which couldn’t decide if it was a Hallmark movie or a J.J. Abrams lens-flaring Star Trek sequel. While the upcoming Superman-Batman mashup movie is already drawing preemptive online groans, DC’s shining but short film

reboot has every sign of taking itself too seriously and ending too soon. Instead, we have The Flash, Gotham, and Arrow, male-lead TV franchises that play on the same formula as the films: white men in seedy but carefully realist settings, touting mediocre-to-bad clichés.

DC’s Wonder Woman movie has been rumored—a carrot dangled in front of fans’ noses—for years now. While it is on its way to screen, the project did manage to lose its director recently, over “creative

recent years—with the most consistent representation of super-powered straight white guys saving the straight white girl— but maybe audiences are tired of seeing that. Onward, to television!

And mysteriously, miraculously, on the small screen, we suddenly have a female-centric narrative. Agent Carter follows Captain America’s love interest from the first film, Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), as she struggles through the mire of dismissive male agents, who “treat her

differences”—one more stumbling block on the way to cinemas. The character will debut in the Superman-Batman movie, which already ties the potential success of that female character to her two, more film-worn male cohorts. For now, DC and Marvel are making their moves on network TV and Netflix.

Smaller screen, fewer risks: it makes sense. The days of enthusiastic response to every superhero movie are over.

Marvel may have made some of the most profitable and visible movies of

like a secretary.” A hard-hitting, bruteforce, stunningly dressed protagonist, her red lipstick takes up a deserved amount of screen time beside explosions and clever digs at openly misogynistic coworkers.

Carter isn’t doing any of Black Widow’s backflips in skin-tight black body suits, but she’s emotive, clearly feminine, and unapologetically stylish. The show doesn’t make any effort to masculinize Carter in order to make her appear “tougher.”

At the same time, her numerous action sequences feature her body-slamming, counterpoint / april 2015

page 17

face-socking, and otherwise fighting in a very bodily, very manly style. And let’s not forget that, in part because she’s a woman, she can’t make any of her aboveand-beyond work known to her viciously demeaning office. If Marvel had set her up in front of a Beyoncé-style “FEMINIST” backdrop, their message couldn’t have been clearer.

And why Peggy Carter? The actress may be an obvious choice for a standalone series—she’s simply phenomenal— but the character certainly isn’t. A pretty, super-patriotic American blonde—not at all the beloved screen rendition of today—Carter first appeared in Marvel comics in 1966. There, she is not an agent but a French Resistance fighter who, after briefly serving as love interest to the comic-book Captain, gets amnesia and is whisked away to Virginia, where she lives a quiet life while her unaging Captain goes battling on.

The self-conscious shift in character is jaw-dropping: Marvel has rebranded the character as the complete feminist bundle.

While the show still fails to represent other aspects of diversity, Marvel has rather conspicuously decided to “change” their marketing demographic to women viewers.

It’s an egregiously obvious test run: Marvel asks, do people want to see a woman protagonist? And a test is exactly how it’s been enthusiastically greeted by fans.

Calls resound on social media to watch the show legally, to prove its popularity.

Legal viewing would give Marvel numbers, show Marvel that a female-led story can be successful. Presumably future female superheroes would then take their rightful place in equal stance and number alongside their male counterparts. But that aspiration feels like running to pick up the phone after it’s stopped ringing.

Marvel, noncommittally, is testing out a second-tier female protagonist on the tailend of a dying trend. Television is a “safe” testing ground. And if the test goes well, page 18

counterpoint / april 2015

the likelihood is that any superheroine would find herself either confined to television or launched, in blockbuster form, alongside Captain American 3…or 4.

Quietly, other tests are underway too: Perlman has been given the go-ahead to write a Gamora comic book series, which will kick off later this year. An all-women comic-book series, A-Force, is also “in the works,” according to the company.

So while a quiet ripple-shift is underway there, the change remains confined to Marvel’s less expensive sectors, far from the big-risk market of blockbuster cinema. Because, apparently, a female lead qualifies as a big risk.

This is not a question of how women should be portrayed: Black Widow’s emotional depth and actuallycomplicated-female-backstory is not undermined by the fact of her skin-tight body suit, nor does Agent Carter’s manly fighting style lessen her positive feminine representation. If anything, both of these deceptively typical feminine and masculine traits make for different, but equally hard-hitting, characters. Variety in representation is not a bad thing. But the bottom line is, inescapably, representation.

In a genre that is so staunchly a boys’ club, the first blockbuster superheroine would not be significant because we could look forward to her social-justice Oscar speech.

No, the first blockbuster superheroine would be significant because, then, superhero movies would be one more boys’ club, where women are not an aesthetic side note, an afterthought, or a risk. And the audiences for superhero movies are some of the most massive for any Hollywood hit; superhero representation is, definitively powerful representation.

Optimistically, female superheroes could be the next big new idea that Marvel uses to reinvigorate its box office presence. But that, considering Marvel’s exceedingly evasive track record with

female protagonists, feels like a stretch.

Agent Carter comes along conspicuously behind the tide, and with the sad fact of its lackluster ratings, it isn’t going to be a ninth-inning home run for female representation. Rather, it only reestablishes that Marvel is too insecure to abandon its boys’ club marketing image. Maybe things will change after the company announces additional plans past 2017.

And in fact, there’s some light after the all-male 2017 sequence: Captain Marvel, with a script to be co-written by Perlman and Inside Out’s Meg LeFauve, was announced only very recently for 2018. Details are sparse; rumors are numerous. A kick-ass female character, yes…entirely out of left field. A strange, sudden character to get her own movie after the Black Widow title fizzled out on its way toward production. Keep in mind, Captain Marvel is no more guaranteed than Black Widow, although I’ve got all my fingers crossed. Captain Marvel was initially supposed to make her debut in the Avengers sequence, but was written out. So, we’re likely looking at the origin story of a female superhero, written by two female screenwriters.

But I’m not convinced: this big-news, women-fronted movie looks a lot like a stumbling ploy to follow up the feminist test-run of Agent Carter. We’ll have to wait until July 6, 2018, on the far side of Avengers 3, to find out if Perlman will help deliver us a second well-developed female character in the Marvel Universe, beside Black Widow—a successful superheroine—the way Guardians didn’t with Gamora. Maybe superheroes are changing their exclusionary tune. But so far, all we’ve been given is potential, rumors, and promises, which have so often fallen through before.

CAMPUS LIFE

MONTHLY POLL: ARE YOU TIRED?

See more detailed poll results and breakdowns of responses from each major online at wellesleycounterpoint.org!

Does your major come with a side effect of sleeplessness? Which major is the most sleep-deprived? We asked Wellesley students about their majors and how much sleep they get on an average night. Here’s what they said:

Alison Lanier ’15 (alanier@wellesley.edu) won’t be pre-ordering her Captain Marvel ticket anytime soon. counterpoint / april 2015

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CROSSWORD

Flowers ‘n’ Showers

Across

Down

4. Recently spotted in Tishman 5. Think colonialism.

10. The shortest duke 11. City in western Mass 14. Please don’t name your child this 15. Class of 2015, and also the kind of shower that is not conducive to May flowers 16. 2015 Commencement speaker <3 17. This lone shower will be destroyed in June

1. Come here to bathe in goose poop 2. Lives in Tree, USA 3. A rad 2016er (currently at Oxford) makes the swickest __________.

6. Blaze it 7. The most honest flower 8. Found outside Pom and Caz 9. Peter’s username 12. Love is in the air! No, wait, it’s _________.

13. Don’t be one