COUNTERPOINT the wellesley college journal of campus life december 2018 volume 51 issue 4
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SUBMISSION POLICY The magazine accepts non-fiction submissions that are respectful, are submitted with sufficient time for editing, and have not been published elsewhere. The magazine does not accept poetry or fiction submissions. We encourage cooperation between writers and editors but reserve the right to edit all content for length and clarity. Email submissions, ideas, or questions to the Editors-in-Chief (senglis2 or myang5). The views expressed in Counterpoint do not necessarily reflect the views of the magazine staff or the Wellesley community. Counterpoint does not solicit specific pieces from students, rather we publish the pieces that we receive each month and do our best to publish all appropriate submissions that we receive.
Images: Isabella Garcia ’22 (cover), rawpixel on Unsplash (left)
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Inspired by Sarah Chang's meme on Wellesley Memes for Grade Deflated Feminist Teens, we carefully considered the nature of each media-related organization. Happy holidays!
COUNTERPOINT E D I TO R I A L S TA F F Editors-in-Chief
Samantha English ’19 Midori Yang ’19
Managing Editor
April Poole ’19
Features Editors Staff Editors
Seren Riggs-Davis ’21 Marina Furbush ’21 Katie Madsen ’19 Lucia Tu ’19 Ashley Anderson ’21 Natalie Marshall ’21 Eleanor Nash ’21 Sage Wentzell-Brehme ’21 Navya Chawla ’22 Esther Choe ’22 Tiffany Chu ’22 Sara Clark ’22 Stella Ho ’22 Vivian Nye ’22 Parker Piscitello-Fay ’22 Sarah Shepley ’22 Alex Swerdloff ’22 Deana Weatherly ’22 Zaria George ’22
D E S I G N S TA F F Layout Editors
Roz Rea ’19 Sarah White ’19 Marinn Cedillo ’21 Tiffany Chu ’22 Zaria George ’22
THE WELLESLEY COLLEGE JOURNAL OF CAMPUS LIFE DECEMBER 2018 Volume 51 / Issue 4
CAMPUS LIFE MIRANDA TRAN
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POLITICS FRANCESCA GAZZOLO
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Vanessa Ntungwanayo ’21
Publicity Chair
Cheryn Shin ’21
Secretary
Corinne Muller ’21
Treasurer
Vanessa Ntungwanayo ’21
TRUSTEES Olivia Funderburg ’18, Allyson Larcom ’17, Hanna Day-Tenerowicz ’16, Cecilia Nowell ’16, Oset Babur ’15, Alison Lanier ’15, Kristina Costa ’09, Kara Hadge ’08
TROUBLED: NORTHERN IRELAND, THEN AND NOW
IDENTITY SOPHIE CLEGHORN
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ON GRATITUDE
EMILY WITHEROW
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LESSONS UNLEARNED
SEREN RIGGS-DAVIS
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TELL ME I'M PRETTY
A R T S & C U LT U R E APRIL POOLE
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B U S I N E S S S TA F F Historian
IT'S NOT YOU, IT'S THE WAY YOU'RE BEING MADE TO THINK
OUR SOCIETY LOVES DEAD GIRLS—BUT DOESN'T SEE THEM AS PEOPLE
F E AT U R E S COUNTERPOINT STAFF
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BEST WELLESLEY HITS
COUNTERPOINT STAFF
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POLL: THANK U, NEXT
COUNTERPOINT STAFF
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CROSSWORD: #20GAYTEEN
CAMPUS LIFE
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et’s start with walking to class.
The worst thing I can do is leave the building without my earphones. They’re not special; they’re my second pair, as the first suffered a fraying at the jack from overuse. But they’re important, because what’s more annoying than walking to class without some jaunty tune playing? If I were in my room, this would not be an issue, of course. Just press play and listen away. Later, I might decide to take a shower. You can’t forget your shower shoes—they’re the most important. Less important is my phone...but sometimes I take it anyway. I can hardly hear the dulcet tones of a podcaster under the spray of water, even as it rebounds off the tiles. An audiobook is even more muddled, so I rarely bother to put one on. The only option left is music…or silence. Would it be so bad to shower without hearing the confusion of muffled voices and sounds, especially as the water surrounds you? Or maybe you’re not the type to shower with music. Perhaps you play music when you study or when you sit on the LoMo in traffic. The urge to fill “empty” space is an
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indicator of a larger problem: attention deficiency. The way we occupy our time impacts how we structure our future time. That is simple enough. If I train myself to listen to music every time I shower, every time I step out the door for even a minute, I will do the same in the future. But what if it’s not just your will at play? Technology can adversely affect our behavior if we let it. As YouTuber CGP Grey notes in his audiovisual thinkpiece “Thinking About Attention—Walk with Me,” social media companies that profit from your attention deliberately construct their platforms to capture your time. He asks, “Who among us has not opened
counterpoint / december 2018
an app, looked around, seen everything new, closed it, then, immediately opened it to check again?” That is the result of intentional programming. Grey argues, “What headlines will get you or people like you to click? Which posts will get you to engage? Which videos will keep you here the longest?” Willpower can only go so far when even the medium is working against you. The ease of access to varied content— the tap of a finger and you can see your friends’ latest travel photos, a new YouTube video, etc.—only exacerbates the problem. When I walk to class with earphones in, I’m not alone in my own mind; I’ve allowed something external to occupy my attention. Grey says, “I worry this is creating an attention-deficit society...to end up with a brain so used to having its time and attention captured and consumed that even if you step away briefly, you’re left with a mind unable to be on its own, to be idle, to reflect.” This concept is by no means new. Human attention has long been a soughtafter commodity. Your time is valuable, so thinking about how you spend it and how others manipulate your choices is not a new task. The reason Grey’s video struck me
Images: pexels.com (left), scstockshop.com (right)
it’s not you, it’s the way
you’re being made to think
BY MIRANDA TRAN was because at the time I watched it, I was on the outs with someone—one-sidedly, of course. I doubt they really knew, but I had hardly allowed myself the mental space to process our interactions. While there are clearly productivity-related ramifications to attention-deficiency, I would argue that there is also a mental-emotional cost. Why think about the reason you are upset if you do not have to? The question now is, how do we combat this? (1) The most important step is to understand our behaviors: what influences our habits? When we go on social media, we’re presented with content specifically
curated for our tastes (or what an algorithm thinks we want, anyway). Every refresh brings us new content meant to keep us here. If we accept that external factors influence our behavior, it hardly makes sense to rely on something as mysterious as “self-control” or discipline. To resist the degradation of our attention, we have to set ourselves up for success, not failure. (2) Having a reason is just as important as knowing what affects us. Without an end goal in mind, we cannot act meaningfully. If we want to spend less time on our phones, is it because we want to be more productive? Do we want to spend more time with friends around us rather than online? (3) Finally, with these two points in mind, we can try to shape systems to develop good habits while having realistic
expectations as an audience. Make the environment work for you, not the other way around. Something like Apple’s Screen Time, which can restrict when and for how long you can use an app, is one example. In this case, the restriction forcibly modifies behavior. But should you find yourself on YouTube at 2 a.m., you shouldn’t beat yourself up for it. We have less control of our actions than we think, especially when it comes to social media that is structured specifically to keep us on it as long as possible. We cannot be cognizant every second of every day. Therefore, we have to rely on systems to help us build better habits. At the end of the day, will you see me around campus without my headphones in? As likely as not.
Miranda Tran ’19 (mtran3@wellesley.edu) wouldn’t say no to being a productive robot. counterpoint / december 2018
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POLITICS
TROUBLED
Northern Ireland, Then and Now BG YA ZFZROA LNOC E S C A
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It started as a civil rights movement. Catholics in Northern Ireland had been treated as second-class citizens since the partitioning of the island in 1920. Housing and job discrimination, disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, and police profiling of republicans had simmered for decades beneath the veneer of a proudly British Ulster. But on the the heels of the U.S. civil rights movement and student revolutions around the world, Catholics in Northern Ireland wanted to change the game. So they marched. page 6
counterpoint / december 2018
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The island of Ireland was invaded by the English in 1169 and remained a colony for over 700 years. Irish independence was and is an improbable story: the Irish people were subjugated and stripped of their land, language, and culture for centuries, and right when Gaeldom appeared to be breathing its last breath, they took back their freedom. In the mid-nineteenth century, after the devastation of the Great Famine—wrought, in no small part, by the British government—Irish nationalists began to push for home rule. Successive prime ministers promised to give Ireland her own parliament but never delivered. The cry for freedom, crescendoing since 1845, was heard round the island. A bloody guerrilla war ended in 1922 with independence, but there was a cost: six counties in Ulster, majority Protestant and Loyalist, would remain part of the United Kingdom. Today we know these six counties as Northern Ireland.
Images: The Irish Times, Belfast Telegraph, alchetron.com, PA Wire
Content warning: descriptions and images of violence
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In the late 1960s, when the civil rights train was rolling at full speed, some Protestants shuddered at the idea of conceding to the demands of Catholic activists. Reverend Ian Paisley gave a voice to these people. Before the Irish Republican Army (IRA) returned to power in the North, Paisley convinced loyalists that the civil rights marchers were bloodthirsty, heathen rebels hell-bent on unification at the expense of God’s chosen people. When the IRA did re-enter the scene, Paisley channeled Protestant vitriol into a violent counter-revolution. The Ulster Volunteer Army and Ulster Defence Association—both loyalist paramilitaries— were formed from the ranks of Paisley’s young supporters, and by the mid-1970s, Northern Ireland was in all-out war. Paisley remained a member of the British Parliament until his death in 2014.
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The IRA had borne the standard for Irish independence in the 1920s, but its numbers had dwindled since Ireland achieved statehood. The organization was focused on political aims rather than violent revolution, and young nationalist rebels itching to take up arms felt betrayed. In 1969, several members walked out of an IRA meeting to form the Provisional IRA—commonly known as the Provos. Suddenly the world was turned upside down: the nationalist struggle was no longer a song of civil rights; it was a rallying cry to unite the island of Ireland by force. Northern Ireland was at war and no one was exempt from the bloodshed. Three thousand five hundred human lives were taken in these events, known as the Troubles, from 1968 to 1998. The majority—many of them civilians—were killed by members of the Provisional IRA.
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Bobby Sands was a Provo. In 1977, he was imprisoned for bombing a furniture store and wounding a police officer. Sands ran for office from his jail cell and won a seat in Parliament at the age of 27—a seat he never took. Instead, beginning in March 1981, he and his fellow inmates went on a hunger strike, demanding that the British government treat them as political prisoners rather than common criminals. After 65 days without food, Bobby Sands died in his bed. Though Sands is a controversial figure—he was a member of a paramilitary responsible for thousands of murders—many nationalists revere him as a savior. His mural on Falls Road in Belfast reads: “Everyone, republican or otherwise, has their own particular role to play…our revenge will be the laughter of our children.” Make of that what you will.
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On January 30th, 1972, thirteen unarmed civil rights marchers were shot and killed by British forces. The army had been deployed to keep the peace in an increasingly hostile environment, and the civil rights marches were considered illegal under emergency powers. But laws passed in times of crisis don’t justify moral counterpoint / december 2018
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POLITICS failure. The whole world turned their heads to watch the violence in Northern Ireland, and they would continue to watch for another 25 years. We sing a requiem for these men and women every time we say “Bloody Sunday.”
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Images: Irish News, Francesca Gazzolo ’20, Ben Kerckx
On April 10th, 1998—Good Friday—the fighting formally came to an end. The leaders of the British government, the Irish government, and the Northern Irish political parties signed their names to an agreement that still stands today. It created a forum for dialogue between the Irish and UK governments, guaranteed equal treatment to all citizens regardless of religion, and cemented Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom, unless and until a majority of Northern Irish people should decide otherwise. Splinter groups of republican and loyalist paramilitaries still exist, but their actions don’t raise alarm—all the major players have laid down their arms. Northern Ireland is, as much as it can be, at peace.
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The Peace Wall in Belfast is an odd but beautiful place. Once the checkpoint between the Catholic and Protestant sides of the city, the wall is a testament to the divisions that remain, though there is no legal restriction of movement. Colorful murals of civil rights leaders, socialist revolutionaries, and Irish nationalists are splashed along Shankill Road, which thirty years ago was a good place to get yourself shot. There is no overt endorsement of violent republicanism, but perhaps there would be if nationalists had won the war. This is a living wall—a symbol that the struggle in Northern Ireland, though it may not be an armed one, is far from over. page 8
counterpoint / december 2018
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of their crimes every time we passed Shankill. But the pride he had for his own people and culture bounded from his heart like the beating of an Irish drum. The Black Cab Tour is far from unbiased, but so is history, and the history of this city is a living one. The wounds are still fresh.
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The Protestant side of Belfast dons darker colors. Officially, this side “won,” though there were no winners in this unholy war: Northern Ireland remains, to this day, part of the United Kingdom. Nationalists are forbidden from flying the Irish tricolor, and vocalizing support for the IRA might lead to a very stern police questioning. Meanwhile, loyalists on Shankill Road proudly display images of their paramilitary leaders (some might call them serial killers) and the gunmen who keep the statelet safe. “Land Of The Free Because Of The Brave,” one of their murals reads. This particular banner reminds you of the death that stalked these streets just a few years ago; wherever you stand, the gun barrels of the faceless militiamen point directly at you.
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Belfast is famous today for two things: the Titanic Museum and the Black Cab Tours. In a vintage black taxi, a Northern Irish tour guide (mine was named Stevie) drives you through the city and tells you their story. These are people who lived through the violence, usually Catholics. They show you the physical traces of the Troubles, old laminated pictures of protests and riots, and the rainbow glimmers of hope that live in the Peace Wall. I witnessed a nationalist spirit still very much alive. Stevie was angry at the loyalist glorification of colonial violence, as he was reminded
Northern Irish nationalists feel a kinship with many colonized nations, most notably Palestine. On the Peace Wall, the Palestinian colors are nearly as common as orange and green. The historical comparison is far from perfect; the threads of race, religion, ethnicity, land, war, and empire weave together very different tapestries in these nations halfway across the world, but the ideology of anti-colonialism and self-determination binds the hands of these revolutionaries together. counterpoint / december 2018
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POLITICS
Unfathomable tragedy exists alongside indescribable beauty in Northern Ireland. The Giant’s Causeway, a huge basalt rock formation on the northern coast of the island, is Ireland’s only UNESCO World Heritage Site. Celtic legend says the causeway was made when the warrior Fionn mac Cumhaill ran away from a Scottish giant. The giant ran after him but was thwarted by Fionn’s wife and forced back across the sea. The giant’s sprint destroyed the causeway, separating the two islands forevermore. Regardless of the geological reality, I think the Giant’s Causeway is the most beautiful place in Ireland. It was the place my soul felt most at home.
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Where are we now? That depends on who you ask. A driver for a Black Cab will give you one answer, a member of a Protestant evangelical church will give you another, and a student at Queen’s University will give you yet another. As a history student who studied abroad in Ireland and deeply loves this country, here is my answer: the scars are still there. But they’ll heal—someway, somehow. Maybe, someday, Ireland will be united again. The Catholic population in the North is growing, and Brexit is making UK membership less and less attractive. But no one wants to return to the horrors of the ‘70s and ‘80s. No one wants to go back to bullets and bombs and unmerciful, unavoidable, unrelenting fear. I signed my name on the International Wall alongside thousands of other visitors from across the globe. My signature is accompanied by an affirmation of “solidarity + peace” and a poorly-drawn Irish tricolor. In the words of my Palestinian friend, I hope for “a just peace.” But that decision must be left to those who live here, the people who have been at war on-and-off for 800 years now: the English and the Irish, and those who find themselves somewhere in between. Francesca Gazzolo ’20 (fgazzolo@wellesley.edu) loves Ireland with all her heart but is excited to come back home to Counterpoint.
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counterpoint / december 2018
Images: Francesca Gazzolo ’20 (left), unsplash.com (right)
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On
IDENTITY
BY SOPHIE CLEGHORN
I
can still feel the cool stone as my girlfriend pressed the rock into my hand three weeks ago. Gratitude, it said, perfectly engraved in the stone. She looked at me earnestly and told me that she had received it at the end of a course on mindfulness and that she wanted me to have it. I hate to confess this because it reveals the ugliest, smallest part of myself. But when she smiled at me and waited for my reaction, I felt horrified. It seemed like some kind of message, a gentle way of telling me to be grateful for once in my life, to get some perspective and stop feeling bad for myself. The reality of the situation is that my girlfriend is the most loving, supportive person I have ever had the privilege of knowing. She simply wanted to share a token with me that meant something to her—and I knew that. It wasn’t her voice I heard sending the message, it was my own. I have a gratitude problem: any time someone tells me to be thankful, to appreciate what I have, it sends me spiraling. Why can’t I be grateful? Why can’t I be satisfied with what I have? Why can’t I appreciate the life I have and stop wanting to run away or change everything? Why can’t I be happy? Will I ever be happy? Was I made
to be happy? I lose track of the purpose of gratitude entirely. I take even the most well-intentioned nudge toward gratitude and turn it into a chastisement. I realized this as I sat in my plane seat the Monday before Thanksgiving. While searching for my headphones in my coat pockets, my fingers instead brushed against cool stone. I pulled the rock from my pocket and held it flat in my hand, ignoring the sideways glances from the old man to my right. Gratitude. Here I was, flying home to be with my family on a day meant to center on just that—gratitude. I cried the entire way through security, cried through two flight delays, and nearly sobbed when I made eye contact with one of the security dogs in the terminal at Logan. More than anything, I wanted to be home. I wanted to hug my mom and pet my dog and sit on my old bed. These were things I had taken for granted my entire life. The past three months—my first months of college—have been lonely, exhausting, confusing, painful, and at times outright devastating. There are moments when I miss home so much, I feel it in my bones—like the ache of my shins when I was a child as my body struggled to grow. Yet at the same time, the past three
months have been the most educational, reflective, and fruitful of my life. I came to Wellesley knowing practically no one, eleven states from home. I have found something humbling in that. For me, gratitude sometimes means appreciating my ability to get out of bed or calling my girlfriend without crying because I miss her so much. Things that may have been small before—a note from my roommate, a text from my sister—can feel like the best gifts in the world. I am slowly learning how to be okay and how to be grateful for that, even if okay is not great or even good. I have hit rock bottom and somehow found a way to keep going; I have felt like I was drowning and learned how to swim. I have learned what gratitude means at its most basic definition—the appreciation of the bad and the good, the cloud and its silver lining. Not punishing myself for the bad days and basking in the good. Recognizing the pain for what it is—growing pains. And I plan on standing taller in the new year.
Sophie Cleghorn ’22 (scleghor@wellesley. edu), after so many growing pains, has only reached the towering height of 5’1”.
counterpoint / december 2018
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IDENTITY
Lessons Unlearned don’t know what they teach you here in the in U.S., but Canada, just like America, had Japanese internment camps during the Second World War. Before 1945, about 22,000 Japanese Canadians lived in the westernmost province of British Columbia, most of them Canadian citizens. During the war, 21,000 people were removed from their homes and “relocated” to internment camps further inland. In Canada, they were treated more harshly than in the U.S., as Canada separated families, seized personal property, and auctioned it off without civilian consent or knowledge. This is part of my family’s history. I am Japanese. But I may not look like it. Some days—most days—I do not feel like it. But this cultural estrangement is not my choice. I have looked for my inheritance among Hollywood movies and
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history books; lingered over silk kimonos hoping that one of the threads would lead me back to Kyoto; joined martial arts because I thought that being able to count to ten in Japanese might bring me a little closer to my nana. My family’s history was taken from me in 1942. You see, my nana lives in a country that abandoned her. Worse, she lives in a province that was frightened of her. She knows this, feels the sting of rejection across her cheek as surely as she feels Vancouver’s sea breeze in her hair and hears the shouts of her grandchildren playing outside. She remembers her mother’s tearful breakdown in the middle of Hastings Park racetrack just as she remembers sitting on her father’s shoulders at night while he sang about the otsukisama, the majesty of the moon. She felt the hostility spit from the downturned petal mouths of
counterpoint / december 2018
her neighbors, as venomous and virulent as the oil-spill hatred flowing across cobblestone streets on the other side of the world. In Poland, Austria, Germany…and Canada. My country hung signs addressed “to all persons of Japanese ancestry…” condemning them because their homes were too close to their homeland, because an ocean was not enough, because the enemy lurked behind frosted waves and flowered curtains. Housewife, fisherman, boy scout—they were all complicit by no fault except for their skin, their eyes, their tongue. First, it was Hastings Park. Drive past it today and you might see an amusement park called “Playland” with multi-colored flags waving at you. In 1942, though, over 8,000 Japanese Canadians knew it as a home of wooden slats, straw-covered stalls, and the stench of animals. Once
Images: pier1.com
I
B Y E M I LY W I T H E ROW
the fairgrounds filled, they were sent to Tashme Internment Camp and other work camps where imposing mountains stood as their guards. The cold, the heat, my nana remembers—everything hurt. The sound of airplanes filled the spaces between trees, drawing eyes up and away from bare wood and dirt. Fathers and sons were sent to work in fields and orchards. But as Nana told me about the road camp her father was sent to, when they were told “No work, no pay”, the men answered, “No pay, no work.” She told me that we will honor them by remembering them as they were. My nana only recently returned to Japan. She did not become a fisherman’s wife, she became a teacher. She changed her name from Sachiko to Shirley, married a hakujin, white person, and her stories were diluted even as she tried to pass them onto my father. I feel this loss in my bones. I am part of the Sansei, third-generation Japanese, and I am lost in so many ways. I live inland, far from the roiling ocean that once hid innocuous fishing boats and imperial Japanese submarines. I eat more
poutine than I do rice. But when I went to Japan, I found that my freckles formed the same constellations as the schoolgirls’ beside me, and saw reflections of my skin, my eyes, in the pool of Tokyo subwaygoers. This story might not be mine, any more than it is yours, but it changes those who hear it. Ever since my nana sang me this lullaby, I have tried to keep my eyes open. Because when they close, all I can see are empty homes with idle swing sets and cherry tree stumps, their front lawns skewered with “FOR SALE” signs. I can hear the echoes of children crying, swaddled by rings of sharpened metal and snow drifts piled to the heavens. When I raise my hand and ask my teacher why we don’t spend time remembering, he says that we are remembering, in our way. I say that our way is not always the right way, and that our history class should be evidence of that. He shrugs, and continues teaching about the Holocaust, about pogroms, about Indigenous residential schools, about the subservience and oppression that we package into neat
boxes, tie ribbons of faded apologies onto and call history. But history exists so we can learn from it. And we should be alarmed when human beings are herded far from their homes, dehumanized, separated from their families, relegated to stalls and cabins and tents. Nationalism is wrong when it is used as a shield against dissidence and as a justification for discrimination. Governments are wrong when they target their citizens and build fear-wrought fences between their people. We have seen this before. We know how this ends. Emily Witherow (ewithero@wellesley.edu) is a Canadian exchange student learning how to reconcile her love for her country with her knowledge of its history.
counterpoint / december 2018
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T
oday is December 1st, 2018, which means I’m six months single. On June 1st, I broke up with my boyfriend. It was a surprise for both of us. We saw our relationship as long-term, there were no noticeable problems between us, and we definitely enjoyed our time together, so a break up was the last thing on his mind or mine. Among many things, what changed and ultimately led to our parting of ways was that I realized I didn’t love myself, and I was using romantic relationships as a way to mask my own insecurity. I thought that the more people who loved me, the more valuable I was, and I used my romantic partners to affirm things I wanted to hear about myself but didn’t actually believe were true. Obviously, this pattern was unhealthy—for me and for the people I dated. Truth be told, I’ve never dated someone for longer than four months, and it’s because every one of my relationships has gone the same way. There would be a first impression where I’d project a completely false version of myself in order to seem more interesting than I believed I was. Then, if we’d start dating, I’d continue the façade and take on the role of entertainer in the relationship, usually to avoid revealing my real self by projecting humor instead of being vulnerable. Over the next few months, I’d use the relationship to feel better about myself. When I made jokes, they’d say I was funny. When I wore makeup, they’d tell me I was pretty. When I listened to their problems and supported them, they’d say I was compassionate. When I talked about Wellesley and my academic interests, they’d tell me I was smart. This went on until I started to view page 14
Pretty
their opinions of me as ordinary and empty, and I would come to the same realization each time: no matter what they thought of me, I still didn’t love myself, and whomever they were flattering for her humor, beauty, compassion, or intelligence was not me. She was someone else whom I’d crafted only to get praise in the first place. Six months ago, I confronted that same glaring realization all over again, the iceberg I couldn’t ever seem to steer away from that was responsible for sinking every single one of my relationships. I was exhausted, broken-down, unhappy, and I hated myself, exactly like I had felt many times before. However, the difference in this breakup was that I knew my own selfloathing was causing my ultimate pain. It was just easier to see this time around because I had people around me who were more than willing to point it out—and I thank God for them. Over the summer, I served on two different missions through Cru, a Christian college campus ministry. I spent my summer growing my relationship with God, sharing the gospel with anyone who was willing to hear it, serving the community of Dorchester, and working through many of my personal issues that I had brought along with me. On the first mission, one of my friends confronted me about my boyfriend and told me that I should break up with him. Initially, I was annoyed and offended, and I believed he was saying this because my boyfriend wasn’t a Christian. Now, looking back, I recognize there was more to it than that. I wanted to grow in my relationship with Christ, but I regularly traded my values
counterpoint / december 2018
BY SEREN R I G G S - D AV I S as a Christian for my own pleasure in my relationship, and I often compromised my spiritual morals to accommodate my boyfriend’s wants. Additionally, the relationship was clouding my mind and prevented me from completely pursuing Christ and effectively serving my community, and it didn’t take a genius to know that I was terribly insecure. When I finally realized this, I followed their advice and broke up with my boyfriend. The next thing I did was radical, speaking as someone who has been boycrazy since birth and has had her wedding planned on Pinterest since her freshman year of high school. Following my breakup, the same friend challenged me to be single for a year in order to pursue a deeper relationship with Christ, but also to learn how to love myself and find contentment in my singleness. I don’t know if it was my exhaustion with him repeatedly encouraging me to do this, or if it was my exhaustion with all of my failed relationships that made me say yes, but on June 1st, I committed myself to being single for a year. The past six months have been extremely trying, yet equally as rewarding. The time has involved a lot of retraining my brain to value my opinion of myself and God’s opinion of me over the judgements of others. I’ve learned that my identity isn’t in who I date, how well I play my instrument, what my GPA is, how well I write, how liked I am, or the job I get after graduation. My identity is in knowing that I’m loved by a God who says that I’m worthy and important, despite my flaws or accomplishments—and I never have to prove myself to anyone, including my family, my friends, or even God Himself.
Images: picsart.com
Tell Me I'm
IDENTITY
I don’t even need to prove to myself that I’m worthy. My self-worth is only reliant upon the truth that I exist and I matter. And I’m deserving of love from myself
because if I don’t love myself unconditionally, who will? At Wellesley, we preach a whole lot about self-love and self-care without always knowing what that means. Self-love is not conditional, and it’s not something we practice a few times a week when we feel like we need a break from all the stresses of school and our personal lives. Self-love is deciding to value yourself regardless of your mistakes, your achievements, your possessions, your performance, the way you look, or the opinions of others. It’s
deciding to give yourself grace when you don’t feel like you deserve it, and it’s doing what you know is best for your personal growth despite the discomfort or pain it might take to get there. Self-love looks a little bit different for everyone, but we’re all capable of loving ourselves, no matter how unattainable that love may seem. It’s certainly worth the work and the wait. Slowly, I’m learning to love myself. Six months ago, I thought I was ugly, unintelligent, selfish, and didn’t belong in Boston. I’m thankful to God that I now see all of those things for the lies that they are. Over the past seven days, every time I’ve looked at myself in the mirror, I’ve really thought I was beautiful. And when I missed several classes last week, I knew that
it wasn’t a reflection of my work ethic or my capability as a student. I gave myself grace instead of criticism. When I wasn’t able to support a close friend the way I would have liked to, I believed that I was still a compassionate person and had confidence that I wasn’t selfish for taking care of myself. Last Thursday night was the first time I believed that my aspirations could become my reality. I realized that I’m capable of achieving the future I want and that God actually has something incredible in store for my life. This December 1st, for the first time in my life, I didn’t want a boyfriend. It took half a year to convince myself, but I really do believe that singleness is a
gift. I don’t have to fake it to myself, my family, or my friends. I believe that there is power in singleness, and that I’m able to love myself, God, and others better because of it. I believe that my singleness is not what makes me valuable, but it allowed me to realize that I am valuable. And singleness, or even being alone with myself, is no longer
scary or unattractive to me because I love who I am. I know I still have six months left to go, but if six months becomes six years, or even sixteen years, I just might be okay with that. Seren Riggs-Davis ’21 (sriggsda@wellesley. edu) can’t wait to watch Love Actually this holiday season because Hugh Grant and Colin Firth are both total babes.
counterpoint / december 2018
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ARTS & CULTURE
Content warnings: murder, sexual assault adie’s sister was murdered. And she knows who did it. When Courtney Summers’s young adult novel Sadie begins, Sadie’s surrogate grandmother, May-Beth, has appealed to the cops and the press that Sadie has gone missing to try to get help and attention for her disappearance. What she doesn’t know is that Sadie is on a quest to avenge her sister Mattie’s murder after the cops gave up on solving the case. Sadie goes to great lengths to avenge her sister’s death—risking her own life, living out of her car, and abandoning everything to hunt the murderer down. As poor young girls, living alone in a trailer, without parents to advocate for them, Sadie and Mattie fell through the cracks in their lives and in their deaths. The book intertwines two storylines: Sadie’s as she hunts down her sister’s murderer, and journalist West McCray’s as he records an investigative podcast trying to find Sadie. The two storylines mirror each other so that the reader hears Sadie’s story along the same trajectory that West follows. The interwoven timelines show the intensity of Sadie’s quest for her sister’s killer, the heartbreak and trauma that has followed her throughout her life, and the dehumanization of Sadie through West’s initial cynicism about her story. The novel alternates between prose chapters of Sadie’s narration as she hunts down Mattie’s murderer and “episodes” from West’s fictional investigative podcast—edited to sound like actual podcast excerpts—as he follows Sadie’s trail. The podcast form entwines the story with current technology and pop culture
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in an innovative way. When listened to in audiobook format, it sounds like a real podcast with an introduction and theme music in each “episode” or chapter. Speaking as someone with extensive true crime podcast experience, the book really emulates the form well. The interviews feel real, and the voice actors do a stellar job with accents and emotions. To heighten the realism of the podcast segments, the sound mixing of slamming doors and imperfect recordings are spot on. Sadie is a book that is conscious of both current technology and the popular form
as a commodity, but to see her as her own person. Investigating Sadie’s disappearance is a wakeup call for West and the reader that even though Sadie may be “another missing girl,” she’s not just another missing girl. The comparison between Sadie’s harsh reality and West’s easy one is stark and to the reader, West feels like another person poised to let Sadie down. He gets to fly home while looking for Sadie, has his trip paid for, and is using her story for his career, but still complains when his boss assigns him to the task. And it’s obvious to the reader that while grandmother-figure
of podcasts such as Serial and Up and Vanished, which have similar forms and sounds to West’s podcast in the novel. While I usually prefer physical books, I think that it does a disservice to Sadie to only read it in print and not listen to at least the podcast chapters. I would argue that the book is meant to be read in audiobook form. Sadie recognizes the rise of true crime podcasts and criticizes the way that they often commodify crime victims, especially missing or dead girls. Over the course of the story, multiple people challenge West not to view Sadie
May-Beth, tried to help Sadie, ultimately the only person who was there for her was herself—and it took her disappearing to get another person on her side. Sadie and Mattie never have more people on their side than they do after Mattie dies and Sadie goes missing, and that’s one of the real tragedies of their story. If someone else had cared for them before, their story could have been different. In Sadie, Courtney Summers dissects issues around sexual violence, true crime, and specifically societal obsession with dead girls. She highlights the way this
counterpoint / decemeber 2018
Images: okchickadee.com
Our Society Loves Dead Girls
But Doesn't See Them As People BY APRIL POOLE fixation dehumanizes these girls until they’re, as West says at the beginning of the book, “just another dead girl.” We see a fictional example of the erasure of individual girls through West’s words and the police’s lack of effort in the investigation into Mattie’s death. Despite this, we notice that while people are often riveted by the stories of missing and dead girls, this oversaturation of tragic stories—from the 24-hour news cycle and the rise of true crime media—leads to a loss of compassion for individual victims. Through the eyes of West, we watch this dehumanization when he initially brushes off the story of Sadie and Mattie as just another small-town tragedy. There are a lot of ways to interpret Sadie. It’s a critique of the way our society both fixates on dead girls and dehumanizes them. It’s a critique of what it takes for men to understand that women are people too. It’s a critique of the cavalier way we treat sexual violence; the way that men forget that women are people too; the way that women are forced to fight for themselves because no one else will fight for them. It’s all of these things and more—it’s a critique, a battle cry, a recognition of these girls. It’s a searing indictment of male power and the privilege of not having to be afraid, of not understanding the way that women are victimized by society and the way that they have to advocate for themselves. The commodification of Sadie and Mattie’s story reflects our society’s treatment of missing and dead girls, a fictionalized representation of a real-life phenomenon. One such example is the use of Tara Grinstead’s disappearance for the podcast Up and Vanished by host
Payne Lindsey. At the beginning of the first season, Lindsey states that he was inspired by podcasts such as Serial, so he went looking for a case that he could use to make a similar true crime podcast, and that’s how he stumbled upon schoolteacher Tara’s disappearance. It wasn’t compassion for the victim, or hearing about the anniversary of her disappearance that inspired him, but rather his desire to make a popular podcast. A second example is the famous Jon Benét Ramsey case, which has fascinated the United States for the last two decades. As a child beauty pageant contestant and beautiful little white girl, JonBenet’s murder captured the nation’s attention. As it remains unsolved, it’s still a major topic of true crime discussions. There have been at least four documentaries about it, as well as several TV specials and interviews. In her death, JonBenet is no longer a child but a subject of national fascination and the basis of money making ventures that capitalize on her death. Both stories mirror Sadie’s tale: these women’s deaths were used for profit, diminishing their tragedies. Our society loves talking about dead girls. To be crude, there is something titillating about them for people; they’re lucrative machines. On the other hand, there can be positive effects of calling attention to these cases—renewed attention can lead to new developments in the case. In the Tara Grinstead case, they even solved her murder! Sadie tells a powerful story of the lengths a girl will go to for her family and the way our society commodifies and dehumanizes dead girls, while providing
an interesting exploration of the rise of true crime television shows and podcasts. The book appeals to fans of podcasts such as Serial and Up and Vanished, as well as those who like books that delve into the darker side of human nature. Sadie’s story is not for the faint of heart, but it’s an important and necessary pushback against our treatment of dead girls. It shines a spotlight on the line that true crime walks between honoring and aiding victims while fetishizing their lives and deaths. Most of all, Sadie is a battle cry for all of the girls our society has forgotten, all of the girls who have been swept under the rug, and all of the girls whose tragedies have been eclipsed by their commercial value. Sadie reminded me to look at true crime with a critical eye, and make sure that I’m remembering and honoring the victims when I engage with true crime media. I hope that people read this book and reconsider the way they think about dead girls, and confront our society’s consistent dehumanization of them.
April Poole ’19 (apoole@wellesley.edu) is not ashamed of reading YA books, and wants you to read them too.
counterpoint / december 2018
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Staff
2350
page 18
thank u, rekt
Science Center Renovations
Lost & Found
My One Card ft. My Other Jacket Pocket
What Do You Mean?
The A-/B+
Somebody That I Used to Know
My First Year Friend Group
Do You Think A Depressed Person Could Make This?
My Final Paper ft. Ben Wyatt
Another One Bites the Dust
Dining Hall Dishes
Tower Court Steps
The Chainsmokers
Leave Me (Like That)
The Peter (Davidson)
Look What You Made Me Do
Grade Deflation
Broken Inside
Every Dorm On Campus
Don't Rain on My Parade
Marathon Monday ft. My Soggy Sign
No Tears Left to Cry
No One at Wellesley
counterpoint / december 2018
Images: WELLESLEY MEMES FOR GRADE DEFLATED FEMINIST TEENS (left), cloudfront.net, pitchfork.com, officialcharts.com (right)
FEATURES
POLL
Which Ari are you? Other 0.9% Mean Girls Ari 8.4%
Legally Blonde Ari 38.8%
13 Going on 30 Ari 31.3%
Bring it On Ari 20.7%
First Wives Club Ari • Victorious Ari
How would your ex describe you? ex? what ex? 6.6%
Other 3.1%
Do you identify as queer? Other 1.3%
Maybe 1.3%
"one taught me patience" 32.0% Yes 58.5%
No 38.9%
"one taught me love" 36.0%
"one taught me pain" 22.4%
bold of u to assume i have exes • you can't have an ex if you've never dated • All my love has been unrequited lol • one taught me all three • I’ve loved and I’ve lost • one taught me gay • one taught me nothing • one taught me not to fuck with the wrong girl or i will trample on your self esteem and every drop of masculinity you own counterpoint / december 2018
page 19
Images: vecteezy.com
CROSSWORD
#20gayteen
ACROSS 2. Although this beloved Brooklyn 99 character came out as bisexual before 2018, her pride in her sexuality was featured in many episodes that aired in 20gayteen 3. Drag queen who delivered the death drop to end all death drops on RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars 3 6. Janelle Monae released this album, along with one of the gayest music videos of all time 11. Popular Cartoon Network show finally delivered on a long-awaited gay romance plotline during its finale 13. Winning the award for most bizarre phrase in the English Language, this actress was hailed as a “heterosexual queer idol” 14. Musical performance that ended with a lesbian kiss during the Thanksgiving Day Parade 15. Now iconic film that became the first bigbudget gay teen romance to smash the box office 16. DC show that aired two seasons in 2018 features a black lesbian character 21. The term for abundant blue, purple, and pink hues that were featured in Janelle Monáe
music videos 25. Yorgos Lanthimos-directed Period Drama featuring a lesbian love triangle 26. This artist dropped the iconic wlw anthem “Pussy Is God” this past November 27. First openly gay man from the U.S. to win a medal at any Winter Olympics 28. Former Disney star came out as bi, though we’d all been knowin’ DOWN 1. Fan favorite character Petra on this popular show had a female love interest introduced this season 4. Author and trans activist __________ is a producer of “Pose,” a show centered around trans people of color living in NYC in the 80s 5. Claimed that him and Tyler the Creator have been boyfriends for his whole life 6. The Iranian-American, bisexual, historically women’s college alum that directed The Miseducation of Cameron Post 7. In July, this bisexual Chicago rapper released a new EP titled “Be Yourself ” 8. Show rebooted by Netflix with an all-new Fab Five
9. This Love, Simon actor came out as bi during production of the movie, and captured all of our hearts 10. This trans artist dropped her first EP “Turn Off the Light, Vol. 1” 12. Next year’s LGBTQ slogan 17. This incredible music artist and icon came out as queer AND announced a pregnancy this year 18. Former Juno star who got married to her wife in 20gayteen 19. Kim Davis, a homophobic county clerk notorious for denying marriage licenses to queer couples, lost her seat in this state this past November 20. This gay artist dropped his new album Bloom (complete with a song about bottoming) 22. The royal groom in the British monarchy’s first gay wedding 23. Kehlani and _______ caused some major buzz after they made out on stage during a joint concert 24. First openly gay Native woman elected to Congress 25. Lead actress of multiple blockbuster movies revealed that she is in a loving relationship with Janelle Monáe this year