Identity

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    [post_date] => 2020-09-18 14:09:54
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    [post_content] => Women are seeing their basic rights rolled back in the era of rising authoritarianism exacerbated by the global pandemic.

For the past several decades, the world maintained a shallow consensus, propped up by international human rights law, that women and girl's rights matter, that it was important to educate them, protect them from violence, and give them the means and opportunities to make a living outside the home.

Although global mainstream discourse and rhetoric around women was nominally positive, even liberatory, women and girl's material realities still suffered. Among the 1.5 billion people living on one dollar or less a day, the majority are women and children, a phenomenon the sociologist Diana Pierce calls the feminization of poverty. Women and girls make up 70 percent of trafficking victims, according to a 2016 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report. As the #MeToo movement has shown, even in allegedly egalitarian countries, women and girls still commonly experience sexual assault and discrimination. Just this morning, Amy Dorris accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her, making her the 26th woman to level allegations against him.

Women and girls are perpetually gaslit about the glaring disconnect between the dignity they are told they possess from birth, and its continuous violation. Far too many women and girls aren't afforded basic rights to begin with. Is it any wonder that a new wave of grassroots, intersectional feminism is growing all over the world, particularly among younger generations of women who broadcast and amplify their activism on social media. The Chilean protest song, Un Violador en tu Camino, A Rapist in Your Path, became a viral feminist anthem against rape culture and personal, state, and institutional complicity.  

Now amidst the global COVID-19 pandemic, women are bearing the brunt of the impact. They are losing their jobs at a rate disproportionate to that of men; globally, domestic violence has risen to crisis levels, even as women are forced to shoulder the burden and stress of caregiving and child rearing. Now, with so many school districts having opted to go online, women have had to take on homeschooling as well. 

Many states have overtly regressed on women's rights.  This week major U.S. media outlets published shocking allegations of mass hysterectomies having been performed without informed consent on detained migrant women in a privately run ICE concentration camp in Georgia. The allegations emerged after Dawn Wooten, a nurse at the camp, filed a whistleblower complaint. As one detainee said, "I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp. It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies." Reports of women being raped in the camps are widespread and ongoing. In a federal lawsuit filed in May 2020, a Mexican woman said she was sexually assaulted and impregnated at an immigrant detention facility in Houston hours before she was deported to Mexico.

Last year, the Department of Justice's Office on Violence Against Women narrowed its definition of domestic violence to felonies or misdemeanors, in a move similar to Russia's decriminalization of most non-lethal forms of domestic violence in 2017. In recent months Turkey and Poland have been threatening to leave the Istanbul Convention, an international treaty on domestic violence. 

We're in an era of chest-thumping authoritarians, (Trump, Duterte, Modi, Xi, Putin, Erdogan, Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, MBS, Kim Jong-Un) who, despite their diverse religions, ideologies, and geopolitical backgrounds, are universally patriarchal. Women's subordination is a given, and deviations are punishable with cruelty. Fundamentalist religions, men's rights movements, and incels have fueled misogynist terror and aggrieved men's reactionary backlash against women's empowerment. Their growing political success is costing women their lives. 

Misogyny is key to understanding the male entitlement powering the global trend away from feminine-coded social democracy and toward toxic masculine authoritarianism. 

I use the definitions of feminist philosopher Kate Manne, who, in her books Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny and Entitled, makes an important distinction between sexism and misogyny. Sexism, she writes, is the "theoretical and ideological branch of patriarchy: the beliefs, ideas, and assumptions that serve to rationalize and naturalize patriarchal norms and expectations—including a gendered division of labor, and men’s dominance over women in areas of traditionally male power and authority." 

Misogyny, she says, "should not be understood as a monolithic, deep-seated psychological hatred of girls and women. Instead, it’s best conceptualized as the “law enforcement” branch of patriarchy—a system that functions to police and enforce gendered norms and expectations, and involves girls and women facing disproportionately or distinctively hostile treatment because of their gender, among other factors."

The focus is thus flipped from perpetrator to victim. Rather than concern ourselves with men's intentions, which are easily denied and impossible to prove, misogyny is the hostile treatment women and girls experience when they step outside gender roles or are perceived to. 

Separating sexism from misogyny is necessary to understanding the current attacks on women's rights. As Manne noted in a recent  interview with Isaac Chotiner for The New Yorker, "There is this somewhat new phenomenon of men who believe women are perfectly competent and will take advantage of their talents, but who will smack them down if they try to assert their authority over a patriarchal figure." 

Misogynists who happily exploit women's talents while still maintaining patriarchal order are everywhere. Look at Trump and Ivanka, or Erdogan and his daughter, Sümeyye Erdoğan Bayraktar. Their idea of women's rights is a bouquet of flowers, a refrigerator, and a demand to have more babies, but only if you're of their preferred ethnic or religious group. 

At the same time, women, once empowered, never forget what power and respect look and feel like. Absent sexism, misogyny grates more harshly, and brutish patriarchal power plays become more transparent. Women are organizing locally and sharing their struggles online. They're speaking out like never before, whether it's the women who brought down Harvey Weinstein, or the Turkish feminists sharing black and white photos on Instagram. 

What exactly is being rolled back, and how do we fight it? 

For decades, women have been fighting for recognition and protections in international laws. 

The first major international treaty on women's rights, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) was adopted in 1979. In 1995, Hillary Clinton famously said, "women's rights are human rights, and human rights are women's rights" to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China. In 2014, education activist Malala Yousafzai became the youngest person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, after the Taliban shot her in the head as punishment for advocating the right to education for Pakistani girls.

In 2012, the Council of Europe passed a groundbreakingly progressive treaty on gender violence, the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, commonly known as the Istanbul Convention. 

The Istanbul Convention was held in response to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) 2009 ruling in Opuz v Turkey, which found that Turkish authorities failed to protect Nahide Opuz from her ex-husband's years-long abuse, even after he stabbed her repeatedly and murdered her mother. Turkey hosted the convention, and became the first country to sign and ratify the treaty on March 12, 2012. Since then, 45 countries and the EU have signed. 

Two sections of the treaty stand out:

    
 	
  • Article 12.1 of the Istanbul Convention says, "Parties shall take the necessary measures to promote changes in the social and cultural patterns of behaviour of women and men with a view to eradicating prejudices, customs, traditions and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority of women or on stereotyped roles for women and men." 

      
 	
    • This article commits parties to undoing patriarchy in their respective cultural traditions, social norms, and interpersonal behaviors, which the treaty identifies as the root cause of domestic violence. 
      • 

    

    • 
 	
  • Article 12.5 says, "Parties shall ensure that culture, custom, religion, tradition or so-called “honour” shall not be considered as justification for any acts of violence covered by the scope of this Convention."
    • 


Another direct shot at patriarchy and organized religion. At the root of toxic male entitlement is the idea that male honor is more valuable than a woman's life. Look at Trump directing Bill Barr's Department of Justice to take over the defamation case brought by columnist E. Jean Carroll, who alleges that the President sexually assaulted her and then called her a liar.  

It is these attacks on patriarchy that have triggered the misogynists. Turkish feminist Feride Eralp, who recently was interviewed for The Conversationalist about the anti-femicide protests in her country, calls this the anti-gender movement. 

Erdogan’s government, said Eralp, had established a pattern of announcing extremely controversial policies regarding women's freedoms and equality in order to “gauge public reaction.” If the reaction is overwhelmingly negative, the government postpones until public memory fades, only to re-introduce it. “It's an incredibly frustrating government tactic, because it [makes it] impossible to achieve lasting gains." 

In 2016, for example, the government tried to pass a law that would give amnesty to male sex offenders if they agreed to marry their underage female victims. Widespread public outrage led to the tabling of the legislation, but the government continues periodically to reintroduce it with slight changes. "It's the same with the Istanbul Convention," Eralp said. 

Turkish women have been protesting rising rates of femicide for well over a decade, demanding that the government  implement the Istanbul Convention—and that it enforce the law that specifically protects women from domestic violence. Recently, Polish and Turkish women protested in solidarity with one another against their respective governments, and the ultra-conservative Catholics and Islamists who are lobbying to preserve "traditional family structures," aka free labor, at the expense of women's lives. 

Eralp argues, however, that unlike grassroots women's movements, the Turkish men importing these new formulations aren't seeking solidarity with other men, but rather want to adopt effective tactics to keep women in their place. This is a cynical move by ultraconservative men who are taking advantage of Erdoğan's weakening political position to backtrack on women's rights, she argued. Turkish ultra-conservatives have adopted "pro-family" anti-LGBTQ tactics from their Catholic neighbors that Americans will be familiar with: white Evangelicals have long stoked moral panic among conservatives about feminists, single mothers, abortion, and gay and trans rights.

Gains for women in America are being erased in law, too. Decades of legal advocacy efforts brought about a series of legal breakthroughs in recognizing domestic violence as a basis for protection in asylum law in the United States, only to have them dashed in 2018 by Jeff Sessions. Betsy DeVos's Department of Education's new rule undoing protections for campus assault victims under Title IX went into effect last month, to the delight of men's rights groups. 

Abortion rights are perpetually under attack, as conservatives gain seats in federal courts, and acts of misogynist terror, whether its intimate partner violence or mass shootings, are increasingly common. Anti-semitic QANON supporters are obsessed with human trafficking conspiracies, while the President is trafficking thousands of children across the border in front of our eyes.

The picture is bleak, and the struggle will be hard. But as we have reported—and will continue to report, here at The Conversationalist—women everywhere are strengthening their own sense of entitlement - their right to life, to bodily autonomy, to political opinions -- to being a full human being independent of men. Women and their allies are motivated, organized, and pushing back in new, creative ways at the grassroots and institutional level. 
    [post_title] => Revenge of the patriarchs
    [post_excerpt] => "There is this somewhat new phenomenon of men who believe women are perfectly competent and will take advantage of their talents, but who will smack them down if they try to assert their authority over a patriarchal figure."  — Kate Manne
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Revenge of the patriarchs

by Anna Lind-Guzik

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    [post_date] => 2020-09-17 16:30:03
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    [post_content] => The curious case of the Russian grassroots movement that borrows racist and alt-right language from America to advocate for the rights of white anti-Putin protesters.

As a Black woman who is an historian of the Soviet Union and Russia, the Black Lives Matter movement has put me in an interesting position. The ongoing demonstrations taking place across the United States illuminate the depths of the physical, spiritual, and emotional violence that African Americans and ethnic minorities experience. The Trump administration’s response is callous and includes the use federal power to violate the protestors’ first amendment rights. In Russia, meanwhile, while responses to the protests have ranged from empathy to victim-blaming, one hashtag caught my attention: it is called “Russian Lives Matter.”

Despite its name, RLM does not seek solidarity with BLM. The Russian version calls out police violence committed against anti-government protestors. To be clear: police also target ethnic minorities, such as migrants from Central Asian countries like Uzbekistan, but RLM advocates specifically for ethnic (i.e., white) Russian citizens. The largely overlooked element in the Russian Lives Matter movement is its “borrowing” of American racist and alt-right language.

While a Twitter search for the hashtag Russian Lives Matter brings up a few responses in support of the demonstrations in America, many more regurgitate the Kremlin’s messaging, which mirrors the right-wing American response—i.e., that protestors are criminals and looters, and that the demonstrations are contrary to the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr. The latter is a popular argument in both the United States and Russia, with the right using it to dismiss the validity of the contemporary struggle for civil rights—not realizing that Dr. King was murdered for his perceived radicalism.

In the United States, the right describes Black Lives Matter protests as riots, planned violence, and “poison.” This language is meant to portray the movement as anything but what it is—i.e., one that demands accountability and reform of the public institutions that maintain the racist status quo.

Many Russians deny that racism exists in their country. Alina Polyanskikh, a Russian television presenter who is Black, described her experiences with overt racism, and with those who deny its existence, in a recent blog post. When Afro-Russian blogger Maria Tunkara posted on her social media accounts about her experiences with racism, she was threatened and even investigated by the prosecutor in St. Petersburg. Popular Russian memes about the American protests compare African Americans to apes and call them thugs; the vilest make fun of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of American police.

My first reaction to these images was disgust, then sadness. They reminded me of my first experience with racism in Eastern Europe, when in spring 2011, I spent a couple of weeks in Varna, Bulgaria, volunteering at an orphanage for Roma children. On one of our first visits, the children (a range of elementary-aged kids) encircled me and called me a “n----r” and “monkey” to the tune of “Ring Around the Rosie.” I was mortified and deeply hurt; seeing my reaction, one of the kids ran off to tell the orphanage director, who made the other children apologize. I did not understand how children in Bulgaria knew the racist slurs that whites had directed against me when I was growing up in southeast Texas in the 1990s and early 2000s. Now, almost ten years after my experience at the orphanage in Bulgaria, I see the people who inhabit the corners of the Russian-language internet using the same slurs.

American ideas of racism and the racist undercurrent of conservative populism have a transnational impact that is now felt in Russia. As Natalia Antonova wrote in the early months of the Trump administration, many American racists see Russia as a “white man’s paradise” where there is no political correctness, no vocal ethnic minority demanding rights, and no legal protections for the LGBTQ community. An exploration of the connections between American and Russian white supremacist groups provides further insight into this phenomenon.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) Hatewatch initiative has documented the close relationship between white supremacist groups in Russia and the United States. In 2018, members of League of the South, an Alabama-based white supremacist group, launched a Russian-language version of their organization’s website. Michael Hill, the League’s leader, said that Russians and American white supremacists have in common “real, organic factors such as shared blood, culture, and religion.” This idea of a shared culture or blood is a dog whistle for a shared white race.

The SPLC also examined the “strange alliance” between Russian Orthodox monarchists and radical white Evangelicals in the annual meeting of the World Congress of Families (WCF). The WCF is an ultra-conservative religious group; its goals include promoting anti-LGBTQ legislation. Participants in the group include far-right and nationalist groups across the United States, Europe, and Eastern Europe, all committed to white supremacism. In this case, Russia reflects American racist ideology.

Claims of a shared culture and religion notwithstanding, the image of a “white paradise” is belied by the numbers that illustrate its ethnic diversity. Russia is home to hundreds of ethnic minorities that speak over 100 languages. It has not seen the mass protests against racism that spread across Western Europe since the murder of George Floyd, but Afro-Russians, Africans, and Central Asians who live in Russia have spoken out and led discussions about their experiences of racism and prejudice.

These discussions can complicate our understandings of how racism assimilates into the relatively unique context of Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space. Russia does not have a history of institutionalized racism against people of color (POC) like those of the United States and the former imperial states of Europe. This is not to erase the treatment of Jews, and people from the Caucasus and Central Asia who had long been targets of institutional racism and oppression in the Russian empire. In fact, the Soviet Union did not track race in its censuses. People were classified by their nationality; thus, their race was not even a possibility of official identification. This fact lends itself to current understandings of racism and prejudice in Russia.

In contemporary Russia, POC are called racial slurs, denied housing, violently beaten, and sometimes killed. Acquaintances from Russia and Ukraine have posited that these documented cases of racism are manifestations of xenophobia—i.e., that POC are not trusted or are not treated as equals because they are outsiders. But this logic illustrates the greater issue. It shows that people who have dark skin, even if they were born in Russia or are permanent residents, are still excluded from the dominant concept of who is Russian.

There is a Janus-like dichotomy when it comes to Western media portrayals of Russia. Some American conservatives see Russia as a paradise for white heterosexuals, while some American liberals see Russia as an authoritarian regime plotting to destroy U.S. democracy. From my own relatively unique position, I see in Russia a mirror of the United States.

The language and logic of racism in Russia, particularly toward Black people, is not an organic development. Throughout the Soviet period, African American and African people visited, studied, and lived in a country with relatively few incidents of race-based violence (although one African student was murdered in 1963). Even the use of racist language was different. Central Asians were called “chornyi” (black) as a slur, but Blacks were called “negr” (similar to “negro,” but without the negative connotations the word carried in the U.S..)

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian lexicon of racism has absorbed elements from America. If Americans and Russians can take away any lessons from this development, it is that anti-racist forces in both countries need to engage with one another and build alliances. Because the forces of white supremacy certainly have.
    [post_title] => Russia as a mirror of American racism
    [post_excerpt] => Some American conservatives see Russia as a paradise for white heterosexuals, while some American liberals see Russia as an authoritarian regime plotting to destroy U.S. democracy. From her own relatively unique position as a Black American who studies Russia, the author sees in Russia a mirror of the United States.
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Russia as a mirror of American racism

by Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon

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    [post_date] => 2020-07-16 17:35:36
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    [post_content] => As a child, I viewed his alcoholism as a personal affront; I didn’t realize he was in a lot of silent pain

For most of my life, I thought my dad was kind of an asshole. He was a very angry guy; and by the time I was in high school, he had also started drinking a lot, which didn’t make his fits of rage any better. I thought he was abusive, and that my mother and I were victims. I changed my mind when something similar happened to me. 

I’ve always had fairly bad anxiety, but, throughout my 20s, I was good at managing it in healthy ways. When I turned 30 last year, however, something broke. I found myself downing a bottle of wine every night even though I didn’t even want it, walking to the deli at 4 a.m. to buy beer even though my mind was screaming at me to turn around. I’ve had a much more privileged life than my father, whose childhood was much more difficult than mine, and I don’t carry quite as much anger around, so the consequences were relatively mild. Most of my drinking binges ended with me just falling asleep; the next morning I went to work as usual, but felt tired and depressed. I also often found myself on the receiving end of that mixture of pity, anger, and disgust that I used to direct at him. 

“What is the matter with you?” concerned friends, asked, clearly frustrated. “Why can’t you just get it together?” I stared blankly at the wall. I did know how to explain it. I just couldn’t. 

If someone tried to take the bottle away, I felt a wave of rage unlike anything I’d ever experienced before, as though they were stealing something precious that was so clearly mine. I’d lash out, verbally, then self-isolate. My roommate said that, in those moments, I acted like a “wounded animal in a cage.”  

It had never occurred to me that my father’s drunk rages were reactive rather than intentional. Now I understand what it feels like to see revulsion in someone's eyes—how it can make you feel even lower when you thought you were already at your lowest. 

As a child, I viewed his alcoholism as a personal affront; I didn’t realize he was in a lot of silent pain. One morning when I was 15, I came downstairs to find him sobbing in the living room. Big, heaving sobs. The sight threw me off completely. I had never thought of my father as someone who cried. I sat next to him and asked him what was wrong, thinking someone must have died.

In between sobs, he finally managed to get out, "I don't understand why I don't have any friends. I thought money would make it all go away." 

My father was a Soviet Jew, one who grew up in a room in a communal apartment with peeling wallpaper and a mossy bathtub in the hallway meant to serve five families. He had no father and was raised by an alcoholic mother. When he was a little boy, he got caught under a bridge in the Neva river and almost drowned. He thought that his anxiety could be cured with a middle-class income, middle-sized car and a middle-sized house with a middle-sized garage. But it couldn't. 

I interviewed an alcoholic in recovery a few months ago who said, "No one knows how alone an alcoholic truly is." I get that now. When I'm having one of my episodes, I'm not quite sure what to do. I know I'm supposed to ask for help, but I also know I'm liable to get mean-spirited and verbally aggressive. It seems safer for everyone to self-isolate. I lie in bed and think about how I’ve turned into my father, pushing everyone away and then crying about being alone. 

Thanks to a lot of therapy and yoga and self-care last fall, I managed to start the year off strong and get by OK during quarantine. I was mostly mindful about drinking, but I had my dark days. I’m convinced, at this point, that while alcohol isn’t the solution, it also isn’t the problem. My alcoholism is different from my father’s; I go months on end drinking “normally,” and then I’ll have a self-destructive few days where I drink without eating, a condition colloquially called “drunkorexia.” The real problem for me—as far as I can tell— is wanting to hurt myself and believing that I deserve to be hurt. Drinking on an empty stomach and taking pleasure in throwing it all up is just one of the ways to make that happen. 

I've been getting together with my father's AA group a few times a week since we started reopening. They hold nightly Zoom meetings, but I find the small groups that gather at the beach to be the most helpful. I sit there and listen to them try to convince me, successfully, that you can lead a richer life without alcohol. I sit there and let them tell me, over and over again, that asking for help is not a weakness, but a strength. I don’t tell them that I’m a journalist and that I’ve written hundreds of stories on this very topic, because I know that they aren’t telling all of this to me as much as they are to themselves.

I also just really like them. I’ve never met anyone more compassionate and willing to be vulnerable than alcoholics in recovery; it's like they've already lost everything and have nothing left to lose. It's a testament to the power of a strong support system. I also think there’s nothing more inspiring than watching a bunch of burly Russian men, in their Armani jeans and leather jackets and gold chains, start sentences with phrases like, “I think that my anxiety comes from…”

It always pains me a bit to hear my father say, "One of my friends from AA used to be a surgeon." 

"He used to be a surgeon," he repeats, with gusto. When I hear him say this, I realize just how low he considers himself in society because of his drinking problem. I try to explain to him that alcoholism affects people from all walks of life, that the most intense alcoholism that I've ever encountered has been from people "at the top." Fellow journalists. My friends at Oxford. Anyone I've ever dated in finance. He doesn't really get it. To him, alcohol abuse makes you a degenerate, and that's that. 

But I'm really happy that, for once in his life, he feels like he has real friends. And I hope, for once, that I can be one of them. Because I do believe healing and forgiveness are possible, and I do think that compassion is one of the best tools we have as human beings. I think it’s not that difficult to love and accept someone, with all of their flaws, if you get where they’re coming from. All you really need to do is listen and try to understand. 
    [post_title] => My alcoholism taught me to forgive my father for his own drunken rages
    [post_excerpt] => Raised by an alcoholic father prone to drunken rages, the author thought she was nothing like him. But when she turned 30, she suddenly became a binge drinker. The experience of recognizing her alcoholism and learning compassion at her father's AA meetings helped heal their relationship. 
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My alcoholism taught me to forgive my father for his own drunken rages

by Diana Bruk

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    [post_date] => 2020-06-18 20:24:45
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    [post_content] => Father's Day elicits painful and happy memories about a now aged father.

The words that best describe my father all start with the letter “r”: rogue, rapscallion, renegade, rascal.

Also: Rage. I have been scorched many times by his verbal outbursts; for years at a time, I’ve just had to keep my distance, emotionally singed by the last blast. I have wished often for a father who was calm and consistent. Someone for whom I could find the right Father’s Day card.

My father has four children by four women. I’m the oldest, the only child of his first marriage to my mother, an American he met in the south of France and married a few months later in her native New York City. He took her to his hometown, Vancouver, where they had a glamorous life: they opened an art gallery, and she modelled part-time. Later, they moved to London.

The second oldest is a half-sister I’ve never met and someone, for decades, he didn’t even know existed; I’ve spoken to her once by phone. The next oldest, who I know, is ten years my junior, a successful entrepreneur. The youngest, a man 23 years my junior, is the only child of his second marriage. None of us ever shared a home and only the two half-brothers have a relationship. The two not raised by my father resent those who were.

I lived with him from the age of 14 to 19. My parents had divorced, and my mother’s mental illness became overwhelming. I moved into his home with his girlfriend; she was too old to be a sister, too young to be a mother, and a tough cookie who, at 28, didn’t really know what to make of an unhappy 15 year old. He was often far away for a month at a time, filming, leaving two ill-suited young women alone to make it work.

When he was home in those years, though, he made up for it, and gave me a lot of time with him, alone. We skied and played squash and went for long walks in the country. When I was bullied at school, he tried his best to help me. Our Christmases were lavish. We played Scrabble for hours in front of the fire, the cat scrambling our letters as we drank tea and ate chocolate cookies.

This was the mid 1970s. Second-wave feminism was blooming and he never once, then or later, pressured me to be conventionally pretty or to follow the traditional path of marriage and motherhood. I’ve always appreciated that. Being smart, talented and competitive mattered most to him. He raised me, basically, as a boy — to be fearless, intellectually confident, eager to explore the wider world.

The summer I was 15 we drove across Canada together, just the two of us. We slept most often in a tent, once awakened by a farmer looking down on us from his tractor.

That road trip is one of my happiest memories. We drew, took photos and played endless games of 20 Questions as we drove across the tedious prairies. We dipped south into the United States and attended a pow-wow in one of the Dakotas, where a bag of sugar and some meat were left at our tent door, a welcome for everyone there. That’s typical of the best of my father — always curious, always seeking the next adventure.

That’s the part of him, still healthy and living alone at 91 in the countryside, that I still like and admire. Through his travels making documentaries, I glimpsed tantalizing bits of a larger world. He brought me home bits of it: badges from the Tokyo 1964 Olympics, a caribou rug and sealskin gloves from the Arctic, a woven Afghan rifle case. Much as it was difficult being left alone with his girlfriend—later his wife—I knew he loved his work and understood that his long absences were the price we paid for that. His pursuit of adventure and career influenced me profoundly in my choice of career; I became a journalist, digging up my own stories to share.

But those loving teenage years came to an abrupt end when, in my sophomore year of university, he abruptly sold the house and told me, without warning, to find a new place to live; he and his girlfriend were going to live on a boat in Europe. I was on my own for good, with some money from a grandmother but not a dime from him for tuition, books, or living expenses. Long before the internet or cellphones, the only way to contact my father was by poste restante.

That year was disastrous. I slept around, starved for male approval and attention. I was attacked in my ground-floor apartment where I lived alone, at the back of an alley in a dicey neighborhood—a place no attentive or protective father would have allowed. My grades, previously straight As, plummeted. I moved again and again until finally, that summer, I found safe shelter on the top floor of a spacious house on a treelined street in a much nicer neighborhood, in a sorority filled with other women, one of them my best friend.  Life calmed down and took a turn for the better.

That was the summer I started writing for national magazines, which was exciting but also a source of tremendous pressure.

I was running on fumes when my father sent me a ticket to join them on their small boat in France and I mailed a long letter explaining how fragile I was. Attending university full-time, while also freelancing, had been exhausting. I was thrilled to be taken seriously by national magazine editors, but was emotionally raw, barely a few weeks after having been grabbed through my bathroom’s low open window and hit on the head while bathing. The assailant took off and I never reported it.

My father never got the letter—so he had no idea. And he never welcomed weakness and fear.

That visit ended very badly, with a shouting match in a French parking lot at midnight. I was proud of my writing success which, somehow, he found dubious. Why, he raged, would anyone take me, then just turned 20, seriously?

Well, why not?

I had arrived desperately needing a relaxing break but, as usual, I disappointed him for reasons that made no sense to me. He wasn’t paying for university or any of my living costs and I didn’t need him financially. I sure didn’t need him emotionally if this was to be my lot.

For the first time in my life I stood up to him and flew home early.

They came back and re-settled in a small town 1,200 miles away from me, and I tried again, in my mid-20s, another summer vacation visit. They now had a son who was five or six.

There was another explosion of rage at me, and my father flung a heavy glass goblet into a metal sink, shattering it. I didn’t leave that time. Why was he always so angry with me? I rarely spent time with him and his second family, and had become a successful young journalist any parent would normally take pride in.

In the decades since, I’ve been the brunt of his anger —verbal, never physical—too many times. There’s never an apology, just the assumption this is the price of admission to our relationship. He’s had quieter arguments with my husband. After each one, we withdraw for months or years and hope he’ll be civil the next time.

He was wonderful at our wedding in 2011, terrible when I got breast cancer in 2018. He came out to support me at a successful event I organized, elegant in jacket and tie, beaming with pride – then a few years later excoriated me in front of others for a minor mistake.

He was cordial in our most recent conversation, just before his birthday. Relieved, I enjoyed it and wondered how many years we even have left to mend fences for good before it’s too late.

But, let down too many times when I really needed his help or support, I never know what to expect and learned not to rely on him years ago.

I keep trying because he’s my only parent.

Because his own father, a self-made businessman who died before I was born, was apparently very tough—and who knows what he learned to become?

Because I just do.

People wonder why I persist and so do I—how can a woman who considers herself a feminist keep tolerating such abuse?

I don’t have a tidy answer.

I just know that one day I won’t miss his anger—but I will miss the best of him.
    [post_title] => A daughter reflects on a volatile father who brought out her best and hurt her the most
    [post_excerpt] => I have wished often for a father who was calm and consistent. Someone for whom I could find the right Father’s Day card.
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A daughter reflects on a volatile father who brought out her best and hurt her the most

by Caitlin Kelly

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    [post_content] => The dynamics of gentrification among the middle class are complicated, but Covid-19 has brought some painful clarity.

On January 24, the day I went into labor, only two people in the U.S. had been diagnosed with the coronavirus that still had no name. That afternoon, I stumbled out of our Brooklyn apartment building under the watchful eyes of whichever neighbors happened to be in the courtyard or peering out their windows at that moment. In recent months, as I started growing more and more rotund, neighbors who had generally offered no more than a passing nod in the elevator or by the front gate began holding doors for me, inquiring about my pregnancy, and telling me tales of their own. I started to enjoy shifting my distinguishing characteristic in the building from my whiteness, which marked me as a gentrifier in a borough of gentrification, to my belly, which marked me as a beleaguered woman in a world of beleaguered women.

The demographics inside my 120-unit apartment building on the border of two Brooklyn neighborhoods—one already thoroughly gentrified, another well on its way—reflect the demographics on the street. In the building, longtime black residents get replaced, vacancy by vacancy, with mostly white, highly educated newcomers like myself, whose rent-stabilized apartments are still a bargain at twice the price many of the older families are paying.

The dynamics of gentrification among the middle class are complicated, particularly in a city like New York, where racial differences persistently track onto income levels and health outcomes, and whole communities get displaced by predatory developers. My also-white partner is an artist and I’m a graduate student. As far as annual income is concerned, many of the longtime residents are probably in better shape than we are. But as is playing out so blatantly during this crisis, social class isn’t just about income. This lesson has never been clearer than from where I write this, perched under a skylight at a friend’s childhood home in Connecticut, where we have been hiding out for the last six weeks.

We spent the first four weeks of my son’s life in the normal self-isolation of new parenthood. The news about the spread of the virus was ominous, but felt distant. Family visited, friends brought food. The only visitors we restricted were my aunt and uncle, who had returned in mid-February from a cruise in the Far East. All others were welcome, as was the friendly up-close cooing of our neighbors. When I was finally able to move around again after a few weeks of what is euphemistically referred to as postpartum “discomfort,” I delightedly walked down the block to my favorite coffee shop and down a couple more to another, just because I could.

But soon the three of us came down with a cold and again began receding from the world. It was just as well, because days later, on March 4, a Covid-19 cluster surfaced just north of the city. As we monitored our temperatures and the baby’s cough—which is one of the saddest and scariest sounds I have ever heard—and gradually nursed ourselves back to health, the city got sicker and sicker all around us.

A neighbor posted to the building’s invite-only Facebook page, which is populated almost exclusively by the building’s gentrifiers, expressing concern for elderly residents and for the woman who cleans the hallways and takes out the trash. Ideas were circulated about how to help: sign-up sheets, phone calls, pros, cons.

At the same time, discarded latex gloves started littering the streets and sidewalks like a dystopian second autumn. At first we spotted just one or two each time we took the dog out for a walk, but soon there were scores of them clustering in slow-moving eddies.

Headlines forecasting calamities bled into each other across all our devices, the drumbeat growing louder and closer, and the warm exchanges we had been having with neighbors gradually fizzled into a mutually fearful, distanced dance when negotiating doorways in common spaces. The streets began feeling empty. Normally coveted parking spots opened up as people with means packed up and drove away. At the same time, the building’s Facebook page went curiously quiet. Had the other gentrifiers left the premises?

Since we had no country house to flee to nor the means to indefinitely rent one, we figured we would just stay put. We signed up for new internet service that week; if we were going to stay, we were going to do it with high-speed broadband.

But what might have been even more contagious than the virus so many were fleeing was the panic it induced. When close friends also with a newborn and also without a country house announced their decision to flee the city, we finally accepted that the postpartum back-to-work routine we had so meticulously planned and were started to look forward to implementing had become obsolete. So had the need for a new internet provider. The elevator, which we needed to ride up and down twice a day with our 12-year-old dog, started to feel like a death trap. High-touch zones like the front doorknobs seemed to glow, radioactive. The day Governor Cuomo finally announced the closure of public schools, I started feeling desperate. We tapped into our networks, learned that a friend’s parents had left behind an empty house in the suburbs when they decamped months earlier to the Virgin Islands, and that they would let us have it. Two days later, we made our first of several car trips to the midcentury house on a wooded road which would become our temporary home.

After hearing that we were leaving, friends in our building who had been planning to ride it out decided that they would follow suit. As they wheeled their suitcases packed with dried beans and all-season clothing through the lobby, a young black resident standing with a friend by the elevator muttered after them: “Have fun in the Poconos.”

Our friends, who are also white, weren’t going to the Poconos, and we weren’t going to the Virgin Islands. But what difference does it make? Whether their family’s empty suburban condo or our friend’s empty suburban house, we have options because the people in our communities have options. And the fact that neither we nor our friends are even paying for our temporary housing only underscores the inequality of our opportunities.

Packing up the car in front of the same neighbors who saw us off to the hospital just two months earlier is not an experience I will soon forget. As we crossed one bridge out of the city and then another, leaving the dimmed skyline behind, we found ourselves arguing about the dynamics of our departure. Ethically speaking, by most accounts, fleeing to an empty house with two weeks’ worth of groceries was the best thing to do. Three fewer people in the building means three fewer disease vectors, and three fewer hospital beds to take up if we fell ill. Our presence helped no one and was only a risk, and a potential resource drain.

And yet. Leaving behind the neighbors whose outpricing our presence only accelerated felt like a betrayal. Not that anyone seemed sorry to see us go. Maybe, just maybe, some felt a certain satisfaction at being right: that we might be friendly, we might move secondhand furniture ourselves out of our 15-year-old Honda, and we might hold doors whenever there isn’t a pandemic, but at the end of the day, we have choices, and many of them do not. The virus itself might be equal opportunity, but the crowded conditions and impossibility of remote working are not.

Maybe in the end it’s just as well the Facebook group never really integrated. If our good intentions didn’t bear fruit, at least their transience could go largely unnoticed. Except, that is, by those of us who spoke and then fell silent.
    [post_title] => Escaping pandemic Brooklyn? You're probably white, even if you have less money than your Black neighbors
    [post_excerpt] => As we crossed one bridge out of the city and then another, leaving the dimmed skyline behind, we found ourselves arguing about the dynamics of our departure.
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Escaping pandemic Brooklyn? You’re probably white, even if you have less money than your Black neighbors

by Ilana Sichel

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    [post_date] => 2020-05-08 03:51:34
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    [post_content] => Want to stop a conversation cold? Tell someone you haven’t spoken to your mother in a decade. Then tell them you’re her only child.

The annual Mother’s Day frenzy culminates with the actual celebration this Sunday, with a sentimental blizzard of flowers and cards that included, in pre-pandemic times, restaurant tables often filled with happy mothers and daughters celebrating their love for one another.

On social media, there will be endless tributes to mothers who have died, recently or decades ago, still much missed and deeply mourned.

That won’t be me.

My mother died suddenly this year, at 85, sitting in her nursing home armchair watching television—in a city a seven-hour, cross-country international flight from me.

I hadn’t seen her in years nor tried to re-connect. I knew better, even though others repeatedly urged me to, including my father, 50 years divorced from her but lately back in touch.

“You’ll regret it!”

“What if she dies?”

“Just go!”

“You never know…”

But they didn’t know the full story.

Every year I sent her a Christmas card filled with the past year’s news, but never received a reply, not even in 2018, the year of my early-stage breast cancer, surgery and radiation. When she had had a mastectomy decades before, I’d flown from New York to Vancouver to get her back home and re-settled.

A few years ago, she told my best friend, a local who went to visit, to tell me to stay away.

How does one end up so estranged?

More easily than you’d think.

Yet no other relationship carries as much emotional freight as the mother-daughter bond.

The very word, mother, is a verb as well as a noun, implying loving attention, an open heart and arms, a ready ear. A welcoming place to run back to whenever you need comfort and solace.

But that’s just not everyone’s experience.

She left my father when I was seven. I was sent to boarding school, and every summer to camp, my battered blue trunk shuttling between them. I shared rooms for years with four to six other girls, summers in a raw wooden bunk, winters in a brown metal bed.

At school, we were shouted at routinely by ancient housemothers, women who’d been widowed or never married, old enough to be our grandparents, to whom we were nothing more than a name on a checklist and someone to discipline, but never to hug or console.

I saw my mother on weekends and holidays. She did throw great, lavish birthday parties for me, with cakes and sparklers and lots of my pals.

There were adult years when she and I got along well, and even traveled together, with adventures in Fiji, Peru, Costa Rica and Colombia as I flew in to visit her, mid-journey. She had inherited enough money to travel as long as she liked and lived frugally. Later, I visited her home in British Columbia a few times.

But her alcoholism worsened, and her bipolar illness blitzed my life repeatedly, usually without warning. That meant hospitalizations, worldwide, and I learned to dread the inevitable phone call detailing the latest mayhem – when, manic and acting out wildly in public, she landed in foreign jails and hospitals or trashed her rental apartment, sometimes many time zones distant.

At 19, living alone and attending university full-time in downtown Toronto, I had no idea what to do. You really can’t turn to someone in your Chaucer seminar and ask for that kind of help. My father, also away traveling the world with his soon-to-be second wife, showed no interest.

And talking about any of it, rough enough for me to handle privately, felt like telling tales out of school. Who could possibly understand, sympathize or help? She would just keep doing whatever she pleased anyway, consequences be damned.

The worst moment for me was when she ended up in a locked London psychiatric ward. I had just finished the happiest year of my life, on a Paris-based journalism fellowship. Her illness, a trio of frosty English doctors told me, could be inherited, while offering me no advice or comfort. I was a young, ambitious journalist with a growing career, now terrified my mind was potentially as susceptible. In a small, highly competitive industry, I couldn’t risk anyone wondering if I would be next.­­

Her weary friends gave up.

Her three American cousins, living many miles away, fed up with her late-night calls and wild-eyed visits, gave up.

No one really knew what was going on but me.

I had fled her care after a terrifying manic breakdown that occurred when I was 14, when we lived in Mexico. She drove a van carrying me and two others down a major highway with the headlights turned off, ending up crashed in a ditch at midnight in a city we’d never seen before. For two weeks it fell on me to care for a friend who’d just arrived from Canada to visit.

A few weeks later, I returned to Canada and moved in with my father and his girlfriend. I never lived with my mother again.

No one ever discussed her illness with me, or offered me tools to cope with it, even though I knew the name of her psychiatrist. Later in life, I intellectually accepted that mental illness is an illness, but at 14, I was too scared and angry at having been so endangered. Nor was this the first time I’d been subjected to a manic breakdown; she had one when I was 12 when we stayed at a friend’s house. I awoke to find a massive potted plant spread at the bottom of the stairs --- but remember nothing after that. I have some gaps in my memory, likely protective.)

Yet, for decades, like a broken robot, I did keep visiting her, hoping, naively and childishly, for the kind of mother so many others took for granted – healthy, loving, reliable, attentive. Too often, I endured another drunken rage.

So, I too, gave up.

Only in the weeks after her death, that little flickering pilot light of hope for eventual reconciliation finally extinguished, did I realize that I’d won more than I’d lost.

Without her, I’ve created and navigated a successful life, living and working in five cities and three countries. A life filled with loving friends, a strong marriage and a successful writing career.

No one taught me how to dress or apply make-up or cook or any of the skills mothers traditionally pass on to their daughters, let alone how to handle finances, work or relationships. I learned, even as a teenager, to rely on a few others, happy to help me out when needed.

The more I figured stuff out, most of the time successfully, the more self-confidence I gained. I didn’t need a lot of direction or advice.

I learned to challenge authority – or, more crucially – not genuflect to it in the first place. Would my mother disapprove of my choices? She’d never even notice. That itself offered  substantial freedom when I see so many women miserably buckling, sometimes deep into middle age, under the weight of their mothers’ disapproval --- of their bodies, their partners, their work or their parenting.

And I learned to celebrate my own triumphs.

When I graduated university, all of which she’d missed while traveling, she refused to attend my graduation, even in a huge hall with thousands of others, because I’d also invited my father. So, I asked him to stay home; when I called her back, she’d already committed to the graduation of a friend’s daughter instead.

So, friends became my  closest family.

The Christmas Eve my mother threw her gifts around my living room in a drunken rage, I fled the next day to a friend’s home in Pennsylvania, racing from my New York home down the highway to a place I knew for sure --- never having met his parents -- would be calm and kind. As usual, the homes of others were my refuge.

When I married for the second time, a friend stood in as my witness and helped me with  the last-minute primping every bride craves before heading down the aisle. For decades a friend 10 years my senior welcomed me into her home, year after year, whether I was single, divorced, re-married.

The world, I learned, is full of other mothers.

 
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On Mother’s Day, I feel no desire to pay tribute to my mother

by Caitlin Kelly

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    [post_content] => A few months into his year of reading female authors, he developed a feminist spidey sense.

Inspired by television producer Shonda Rhimes’s manifesto Year of Yes, a friend spent 2017 saying ‘yes’ to every challenge thrown her way. In the same spirit, I decided that 2018 would be my year of reading women. My friend starred in a local production of the Wizard of Oz, and became pregnant with her first child. The shifts in my life were less dramatic, but notable nonetheless

I was proud to call myself a feminist, but had started to realize that my tastes did not reflect my politics.  I believed in equal pay, in sharing domestic responsibilities, in righting historical wrongs; but when I got home after a day at the office, I would put on a Kamasi Washington record, pour myself a glass of Eben Sadie wine, and read the new Murakami. If I looked up, I would see an apartment decorated with art by men, with the exception of a lone Louise Bourgeois multiple. I needed a re-education.

A mild panic set in after I made the decision, in December 2017, to spend the coming year reading books by women. It was similar to the one I felt a year later, when I decided to give up alcohol for lent. But I quickly rationalized the project. There was exceedingly more worthwhile literature in the world than I could ever read. By limiting myself to women, I argued to myself, I would not jeopardize the quality of my to-read list; I would just change its focus. And if, after all, it was a big disaster, I could revert to my sexist ways in 2019.

In the publishing industry, conventional wisdom holds that men do not read books by women. The evidence, however, suggests that this perception does not reflect reality, although Joanna Rowling did yield to the suggestion that she might sell more books if she styled herself as J.K.. I knew I was not unique in failing to live according to my ideals, but this knowledge was not validating. I wanted to change, and I believed I could. Research has shown we can reprogram our subconscious: decorating one’s work or living space with images of successful African Americans, for example, is shown to decrease implicit anti-black bias.

I decided that the books I would read over the following year could be in any genre, and on any topic. I would make exceptions for reading related to my work or studies, and for long-form journalism in periodicals. But that was it. Even if a favorite male author published a new title, it would have to wait until 2019.

January was a few days away, so I had to figure out how to begin. I read a New York Times list of best art books of 2017, which recommended the novel Autumn, by Ali Smith. That seemed as good a place to start as any, so I ordered a copy. It was magnificent.

Finding books was, as you might imagine, easier than I had anticipated. We can often identify gender from a name. When in doubt, the dustjacket will typically provide clarity; even if there is no author portrait, a bio will refer to ‘her city of birth,’ or ‘his fifth novel.’ I did occasionally get it wrong: Tracy Daugherty, who authored a biography of Joan Didion, is a man.

I became far more acutely aware that newspapers and magazines review fewer books by women than by men. While I could have guessed this prior to my year of reading women authors, I had never given it much thought. I was discovering the patriarchal pattern that determines what we read, and when. Perversely, this pattern actually turned my experiment into a pleasurable game — a big feminist where-is-Waldo, if you will.

Nowhere was this game more challenging than in airport bookstores. I had struggled to find books while in transit even before 2018, but now I was forced to be open to unfamiliar authors and genres. As a result, some of the highlights of my year originated in airports. I read my first fantasy novel, The Shining Girls, by Lauren Beukes. I liked it so much I followed with Zoo City. On a particularly long intercontinental flight I alternated between watching The Handmaid’s Tale on the inflight entertainment system and reading two books — Margaret Atwood’s Freedom and Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s classic Women Who Run With the Wolves. I am still astonished to have discovered the latter in the tiny bookstore of my hometown airport.

A few months into the year, I started to develop a certain vigilance, a feminist spidey sense. I imagine it is second nature to many women, but it was new to me.

During a visit to Amsterdam I visited a well-known feminist bookstore called Xantippe and asked the salesperson for a recommendation. She directed me to Grand Hotel Europa by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer. A man. Not wanting to appear to second guess the store clerk, whose age, appearance, and occupation gave her a natural authority on matters of gender and literature, I mumbled something about the book’s heft, and asked for other suggestions.

Despite shelves largely filled by women, the next two recommendations were also written by men. At this stage, I quietly suggested I had walked into this book store on purpose. It was an awkward moment. When we regained our composure, we discussed the salesperson’s experience that men don’t read women, which had prompted her suggestions. She also insisted I read Pfeijffer at some point, because it really was that good. I left with a new novel by Eva Meijer.

What my encounter at Xantippe alluded to, of course, was that there is no such thing as women’s literature. Yes, non-fiction with feminist under- or overtones had become one of my staples: I read and internalized the voices of Roxane Gay, Joan Didion, Terry Castle, Sisonke Msimang, Zadie Smith, and Maggie Nelson. They gave me a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the range of female experiences in our sexist world, in a way that only the written word can.

Yet many of my most exciting discoveries were novels. Among them were Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, which won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize; Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Call Me Zebra, winner of the 2019 PEN/Faulker award; and The Parisian, the stunning debut of 27-year old Isabella Hamad. Any lingering suspicion I had that women restrict themselves to certain themes or subject matter was put to rest by the depth and range of these three writers.

It turned out that my rule did even not even preclude me from reading about dead white men. One of my other airport bookstore finds was a biography of Seneca, by Emily Wilson.

While it is, in all respects, a classic biography, Wilson is more attuned to the gender dynamics in Seneca’s life than most male biographers would have been. Something similar had happened for me. The spidey sense I first noticed about halfway through my year of reading women had, towards the end of the twelve months, become a program that ran permanently in the background of my consciousness. I instinctively played where-is-Waldo, extending it to other domains, too. I started looking for women in jazz. Female wine makers. When reading the news, I was more likely to notice a byline. I searched out women in politics.

I am now well into year two.  While I have recently cheated — I succumbed to the overwhelming marketing for Sapiens, and did eventually read Pfeijffer’s Grand Hotel Europa — I still read women almost exclusively. They enrich my life. They give me a broader horizon. And slowly but surely, they are chipping away at my subconscious sexism. The slight sense of dread I felt when first conceiving the experiment is now a source of embarrassment. To quote feminist icon Diane Lockhart, “I realize it’s alright that the world is crazy, as long as I make my little corner of the world sane.” One book at a time.
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His year of reading women

by Joost Bosland

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    [post_date] => 2019-08-30 16:29:20
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    [post_content] => When I was 12 years old, a lonely black femme male child, I read The Bluest Eye in a single night. Every character was in me or a reflection of my life.

Toni Morrison gave me a blueprint for the meaningful exploration of love and trauma. She accomplished this by centering her narratives on the lives of black femmes, people like me, whom society has traditionally devalued. As a result of this precise focus, Morrison’s body of work surpasses identity politics; it heals us from within the deep darkness of our society and elevates us to its bright but colorless peaks.

I spent my early childhood in a  single-parent home full of affirmation and stability. But when my mother descended very suddenly into the thick of her addiction, my life changed radically. Today, drug addicts are called victims of the opioid crisis, and there are empathetic national calls for resources to be invested in finding a therapeutic solution for them. When I was a child in the 1990s, people like my mother were called crackheads and super predators. The only solution offered to them was a well-trained beast called the prison industrial complex. Later, I would learn that the well-trained old beast was excited by a charismatic young presidential hopeful I saw playing saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. That beast chased and found my mother: she was incarcerated when I was 12 years old, and I entered the worst period of my life.

I was sent to live in a group home for teenage boys, a house full of strangers and staff supervisors that would come and go based on work shifts. It was cold and did not feel like a home at all. School was no longer the fun, curiosity-inducing place of learning that it once had been. Instead, it was a place where bullies of all genders were waiting around every corner to hurl a fist, or to yell the insults “nigger” and “faggot.” I suffered from both the fists and the insults because I was a black femme male child. Socially isolated, I floated through each day finding solace in the hope that my mother would soon be free and my life would return to normal.  

My English teacher became my unlikely savior. Mean as a rattlesnake, she was a stern-faced, pale white woman with piercing eyes and a manner of speech so acerbic that she terrorized even my bullies into silence, thus safeguarding me from their venom at least while I was in her class. One day she arrived in an unusually good mood, holding a cloth bag that contained copies of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I understood that she’d had to fight for permission to teach this book, which she distributed with the admonition that it was a treat for which we should be grateful. 

That night I sat in my room and read this book with an enthusiasm I hadn’t felt since I devoured Gertrude Warner’s The Boxcar Children, years earlier. Every character in The Bluest Eye was within me or a reflection of my life. I didn't know the word “transgender,” but I strongly believed my life would have been much better if only I had been born a girl. So I identified with Pecola, the violence-damaged, impoverished foster girl who escapes into a fantasy world; but instead of longing for blue eyes to make me beautiful, I longed for female genitalia. I come from a color-struck family so I was my mother’s “dream high yellow child” and treated with care and protected as such. I was Maureen, the light-skinned black girl, and Claudia, who comes from a poor family. I had aunts that were Miss Marie, the overweight and kind prostitute, and a few that had upper-class aspirations like Geraldine. My step father was Cholly, the destructive man who lives on the margins of society.  I finished the book and rushed back to class, flushed with enthusiasm. By the end of the semester, I had read Beloved and Song of Solomon. That experience sparked a lifelong love for Toni Morrison and the characters in her novels. I was anchored in the humanity of Pecola, of Sethe in Beloved, and of the women of the Convent in Paradise. 

I understood the pathology of Pecola’s request for blue eyes because I was bombarded with the same ideals of eurocentric beauty. My advantage was in being born later, by which time there was a well-established counter-narrative: James Brown had been singing “I'm Black and I'm Proud” for decades; Beverly Johnson and Naomi Campbell had appeared on the covers of glossy magazines and modeled haute couture at the Paris fashion shows; and Dorothy Dandridge had broken down barriers so that Angela Bassett could show me what’s love got to do with it. I was surrounded by beacons of light, from Grace Jones to Oprah, so I did not aspire to any attributes of whiteness. I identified with Pecola because she wanted something very badly, but as a child dealing with dysphoria without understanding the bio-psychology of transgenderism, I did not understand the pathology of my own desire. I was told was that I was delusional, mentally ill, and that I needed prayer. 

After finishing The Bluest Eye, I wondered if the happy ending for Pecola was being lost in the delusion that blue eyes would make her more beautiful. My 12-year-old heart was full of empathy for Pecola; I felt that, had she been given time and care before trauma ravaged her, she would have learned to appreciate her own beauty. It was this insight, gained from reading Toni Morrison’s great novel, that made me appreciate my own humanity before I had to face questions about my trans womanhood. My rock-solid belief that I was a human above all else centered me; I had no doubt that I deserved empathy and dignity while I figured out the rest of my identity.

Beloved tells a story of complicated motherly love that is different from the romantic image sold by Hollywood. Sethe saves her daughter, named Beloved, by making a horrible, complicated decision for which she suffers intense emotional trauma. My mother was raised by her abusive schizophrenic grandmother with her four cousins. Although she was the color of peanut butter, she was the darkest girl. Her childhood was filled with physical and sexual abuse all rooted in religion and the color of her skin. She felt that her mother had abandoned her, which undermined her self-esteem and made her feel out of place in the world. So when I was born, a high yellow blue-eyed curly haired infant, she treated me like a baby doll. She said “I just could not believe that something so beautiful could come from me.” She showered me with praise and adoration and told me that no one would ever hurt me, that nobody would ever take her from me. She was overprotective. She was loving. She was the perfect mother. So for all of my childhood I was certain that a mother’s love could never be broken — that it was the strongest thing in the world. I was thus completely unprepared emotionally for her fall into drug addiction and jail. 

As a teenager who did not understand the concepts of addiction and self-medicating to sublimate emotional pain, I felt betrayed and abandoned by my mother. Morrison’s novel Beloved helped me to understand that a mother’s love can manifest in a plethora of ways when she lives in a world of violence. Sethe, the runaway slave who kills her own child rather than see her returned to bondage, does the best she can to love and protect the children she has later. She is of course deeply traumatized, which hobbles her ability to nurture her living children. By analyzing Sethe’s response to having been given a second chance at mothering, I could see my mother through a completely new lens. I didn't want to haunt my mother like the ghost of Beloved. My mother is still battling her addiction, but I can see her humanity and love her, while holding her accountable for her decisions. We are on a journey of healing.

In a black trans woman’s life, community is intrinsic to survival. In 1997, when I was on the cusp of my life as an activist, I read Paradise. The novel is about a  black community led by men who turn their rage on a group of ostracized women who have found refuge in a place called the Convent. Three years after reading that novel, I won a First Amendment right victory when I successfully sued my high school for the right to attend the prom in the gender-affirming attire of my choosing. I began my matriculation as the first openly trans woman who was forced to live in a male dorm at the HBCU Jackson State University in the deeply conservative town of Jackson, Mississippi. 

I could not have survived those ordeals without the help of community. I owe my emotional well being to the black and or femme community; to my white feminist English teacher, who gave me the phone number of the ACLU, which helped me win my case in high school; to the gray-eyed Alpha Kappa Alpha at the college admission office who waived my out-of-state fees so that I could afford to be admitted; to the tall, dark dean of students who protected me from expulsion after I got into a fight with a bully during my sophomore year of college; and to my natural hair Aunt Georgia, who filled my refrigerator with food when I had no money. I owe much to the black young femme students, male and female, who showed me love and support while I went through the perils of being first to do what I was doing. Like the women in Paradise who found refuge in the convent, I found a safe haven in the black femme community. Because of them, I knew that I would never be alone and that somebody always had my back, and that I would survive because I had a safe place to be. 

Toni Morrison’s characters are complex and unique. By focusing in her novels on the least among us, Ms. Morrison transcended identity barriers. Her stories help me heal and grow my relationships with myself, my family and my community. She will continue to be beacons of light for generations to come.

 
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    [post_excerpt] => The insight I gained from reading Toni Morrison's novels made me appreciate my own humanity before I had to face questions about my trans womanhood. 
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Toni Morrison’s novels taught me to see the world through a lens of compassion

by Diamond Stylz

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    [post_date] => 2019-08-02 17:50:22
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    [post_content] => Can an authentic apology from a perpetrator heal the wounds caused by sexual assault? 

In her new book The Apology, Eve Ensler — best known for her groundbreaking play Vagina Monologues and for her activism in the movement to end violence against women — imagines her now-deceased father apologizing for having abused her sexually when she was a child. In a podcast conversation about the book with comedian and writer Marc Maron, Ensler observes that while the #MeToo movement has exposed the endemic abuse perpetrated by powerful men, we have yet to see many, or any, of those men make a serious commitment to accounting for their behavior. With this book, she tells Maron, “I thought to myself, maybe I could write what I want to hear, maybe I could write the words and what it would sound like and look, so it could be a possible blueprint.”



It seems that the #MeToo movement has reached a plateau. The consequences for the perpetrators are stuck in limbo as society searches for the means to effect necessary systemic change. As Ensler says to Maron, “We’ve broken the silence. But now men have to do their part of this or we’re not going to move forward.”

Almost none of the prominent men exposed and demoted by #MeToo has offered a real apology — let alone an act of contrition. Charlie Rose, Louis CK, Russell Simmons, James Toback, and Kevin Spacey all issued statements laced with puzzlement, self-pity — or, in Toback’s case, outright hostility. Others verged on the satirical: celebrity chef Mario Batali sent a mass e-mail apology that included the postscript: “In case you’re searching for a holiday-inspired breakfast, these Pizza Dough Cinnamon Rolls are a fan favorite.” The writer Geraldine DeRuiter won a James Beard Award for an article in which she frames her experience of following Batali’s failed recipe as a satirical allegory for his non-apology.



Quite a few of these men tried to fast track a comeback, circumventing both apology and expressions of contrition. Charlie Rose approached feminist editor Tina Brown with the idea that she produce a program with him interviewing prominent men who had been toppled by #MeToo (she declined). Louis CK received a standing ovation when he appeared unannounced to do a stand up set at New York’s famous Comedy Cellar, only a few months after he acknowledged that he had on several occasions stripped naked and masturbated in front of female comedians whose nascent careers were predicated on his goodwill. And last October The New York Review of Books published a 3,000-word, first person essay by Jian Ghomeshi, the disgraced Canadian former radio show host. The CBC fired Ghomeshi in 2014 after learning that the Toronto Star was about to publish an investigative report detailing credible accusations that he had for years battered women during sexual encounters, and had abused women who worked for him. Titled “Reflections from a Hashtag,” the essay is redolent of narcissism and self-pity. It begins:

Not so long ago, I spoke to hundreds of thousands of listeners across North America every day on a public radio show. These days, the closest I come to public performance is at a neighborhood karaoke bar in New York. Even that can have its perils.

Ghomeshi was oblivious to the rather obvious contradiction in having been granted the platform of one of the most prestigious publications in the English language from which to proclaim that he had been silenced.



Reaction to the essay was swift and negative, rising to a crescendo of outrage after Ian Buruma, then editor of the NYRB, made some egregiously tone deaf remarks in a follow-up interview conducted by Isaac Chotiner for Slate. One line in particular lit up the internet. In response to Chotiner’s observation that several women had credibly accused Ghomeshi of having punched them in the head during sexual encounters, Buruma responded:

The exact nature of his behavior — how much consent was involved — I have no idea, nor is it really my concern.

For Buruma, apparently, the fact that a Canadian court had declined to convict Ghomeshi of rape based on existing jurisprudence was the only relevant consideration. His response indicates that he is not at all interested in issues of morality, in the feelings of women. Nor does he address the question of whether or not jurisprudence is equipped to provide justice to women in cases of sexual assault that do not meet the legal definition of rape. Buruma seems not to know (or perhaps does not care) that Ghomeshi acknowledged, in a first-person essay published on his Facebook wall, that he committed many violent sexual acts on women. Ghomeshi claimed they were consensual “rough sex,” but his essay does not include the viewpoints of the women who accused him of assault.

Is being fired from their jobs and socially marginalized sufficient punishment for these men? There are those who say yes, and who further assert that women who demand punishment that goes beyond sanctions are indulging in gratuitous rage. In response, feminist journalist Rebecca Traister offers this observation in an essay published for New York magazine's The Cut:

Today, there’s quite a bit of blowback at these guys on social media. Which makes it crucial to point out that irritation — or flat-out rage — at the men attempting professional comebacks after having been credibly accused of sexual harassment and abuse isn’t necessarily about a punitive urge to see them forever in purgatory.

The goal, in other words, is not to seek eternal damnation for these men, but rather to see them doing the kind of work that would actually change the paradigm. So far, none have accepted this challenge.

There is, however, at least one recent example of a famous man who did offer a considered apology to the woman he had assaulted.

Late last year the journalist Zainab Salbi interviewed Devin Faraci, once an influential film critic who was editor in chief of birth.movies.death, for a PBS television series called #MeToo, Now What? Today, Faraci earns his living making coffee at a Starbucks; he resigned his editorship after a woman accused him of sexual assault. Separately but in the same episode, Salbi also interviewed Caroline Contillo, Faraci’s accuser. Caroline told The Conversationalist that PBS had informed her they would do a segment on Faraci with or without her involvement.

Faraci’s fall predated #MeToo by about one year, and he truly brought it on himself. A self-proclaimed feminist, he tweeted his disgust at the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which Donald Trump boasted of having committed sexual assaults on multiple women, by “grabbing them by the pussy.” In response to Faraci’s comment, Caroline Contillo fired off a tweet, in which she accused him of having done the same thing to her. Within days of the ensuing Twitter storm, Faraci, who acknowledged a severe alcohol problem that causes him to black out and often precipitated bad behavior, apologized and resigned. But just one year later, he was quietly rehired. This premature attempt at reestablishing his career elicited a cascade of negative reaction, and Faraci resigned for a second and final time.

Here the story deviates from the script: rather than licking his wounds angrily as he searched for another way to make a professional comeback, Faraci entered a 12-step recovery program. He now seems committed to a process of transformation and to making an authentic apology.

[caption id="attachment_1275" align="alignnone" width="300"] Devin Faraci (screencap)[/caption]

While Salbi’s separate interviews with Caroline and Faraci are short and somewhat superficial, they do provide insight into the impact of sexual assault and the power of a sincere apology. A victim who receives an acknowledgement of wrongdoing and a heartfelt expression of contrition from the perpetrator can experience a powerful physical and emotional response. In the interview, Contillo tells Salbi that while the assault itself was terrible, a “larger psychological pain had lodged itself” in her body.

Caroline Contillo highlights one of the less understood effects of trauma — that it invades the body and stays there, long after the physical act. Ensler says the same thing to Maron: that when a victim receives an apology that carries empathetic recognition by the perpetrator, it causes a physical reaction. Contillo said that Faraci’s apology provided relief not only because she could let go of the pain, but because she now felt that she was “living in a culture that suddenly seemed to care about” women who had been sexually assaulted or preyed upon.

Faraci offered his considered apology as part of a 12-step program. He said he had been eager to offer it sooner but was counseled to wait for that stage of the recovery process (step nine of the 12 steps); he decided “to trust the process.” In Alcoholics Anonymous, as in other frameworks for personal transformation, an apology is valued for its sincerity. Absolution is a nice bonus, but it is not the motivating factor.

In an email to The Conversationalist, Contillo writes, “My acceptance of his apology was an indication that I believe he could change — not evidence that he has.” But she does seem to feel that PBS coerced her to participate in the #MeToo program by telling her that the interview with Faraci would be broadcast with or without her participation, and that Faraci overstepped by failing to inform her before publishing a blog post about his apology and her having accepted it. Contillo says that she is not “optimistic that any deep-seated transformation has taken place.” But perhaps she would feel differently if PBS had approached her with more compassion, and if Faraci had consulted her before publishing his blog post.

“Does a sincere apology hold the key to transformation?” Contillo wonders.

I totally believe so. I had hoped to talk on the PBS show more about that, and my work with the Zen Peacemakers, who do reconciliation work. But I quickly realized when I was on set that it wasn't really going to be about that. I do hope that story gets told: that when we can face a seemingly intractable situation of harm without turning away and without jumping in to fix it with a transaction, shifts can happen.

The power of Eve Ensler’s book is that it offers real insight into how to engage with what the perpetrator did while finding a way toward reconciliation and healing. The father she conjures is fully human, even as he speaks to her about his monstrous acts. Without excusing his behavior, Ensler draws from the depths of empathy to understand how a father could do such harm to his daughter. She shows the darkest interiors of human behavior, but also finds the source of the hurt and anger that cause it. In writing the book, Ensler experienced what she calls the “alchemy of the apology.” In her conversation with Maron she says that it “changes the chemistry of your own being.”

It starts to release things that have just been stuck there — and not knowing…and searching…why did this person do this to me?”

Maron’s own reaction to reading the book seems almost to be an incarnation of that alchemy, of exactly what Ensler intends the book to do. Throughout their podcast discussion he is clearly grappling in near-agony with toxic masculinity, as he experiences it and as he observes it in others. He is unpacking the issues in real time, with Ensler as his interlocutor-slash-therapist. For Ensler, the conversation with Maron is an opportunity to see the book’s effect on a male reader. That is why, although The Apology is a brutal account of what her father did to her when she was a child, it also offers, as Ensler describes it “a bridge.” She asks:

“Do we want to keep punching at each other or do we want to stop violence; to build a world where women feel equal and free and safe and men feel really good about that, [so that] they feel like we are all in the same story?”

While #MeToo raised awareness significantly of the pervasiveness of predatory male misbehavior and its corrosive effect on women, the road to change is paved with many obstacles. If we are to uproot this pervasive, toxic behavior from our society, we will have to embark on a painful but necessary transformative process that includes truly sincere, well-considered apologies from the perpetrators to their victims, with no strings attached. One of the positive effects of the heightened awareness that comes with #MeToo is that now we know what we need to do; the issue is finding the will to do it. Ensler’s The Apology provides the roadmap to change. Devin Faraci and Caroline Contilllo's experience shows the direction this process can take. Certainly, transformative justice is a tricky thing to achieve. Society does not usually reward those who undertake the painful process, while establishment forces like lawyers and public relations agents caution their clients against it. But if we are truly committed to changing the status quo, then we must also commit to the process — painful though it may be.
    [post_title] => When 'I'm sorry' is meaningful: seeking transformative justice in the age of #MeToo
    [post_excerpt] => As the #MeToo movement struggles to define adequate punishment for perpetrators of sexual violence, a new book explores the power of a sincere apology.
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https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/drafthouse-caught-firestorm-as-devin-faraci-breaks-silence-1039241
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When ‘I’m sorry’ is meaningful: seeking transformative justice in the age of #MeToo

by Yael Friedman

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    [post_date] => 2019-06-28 16:16:18
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    [post_content] => Even peaceful, prosperous Canada is not immune from the populism that thrives on tribal anxiety and prejudice. 

Last week Quebec, Canada’s second most populous province, passed a law that bans public employees from wearing religious symbols at work. Known as Bill 21, the law would force public school teachers, police officers, Crown attorneys, and judges who wear hijabs, turbans, or yarmulkes, to choose between their religion and their profession.

Quebec is not the only democracy to enforce this type of ban in the name of separation of religion and state: France bans Muslim women from wearing a burqini to the beach or a headscarf to teach in public schools; and Turkish law prevented women who wore the hijab from working as public servants or even attending university until 2013.

But Canada’s international reputation is, not unjustifiably, one of tolerance and acceptance. The federal government has pursued a policy of multiculturalism since 1971, and more recently Prime Minister Justin Trudeau set a widely lauded example when he opened Canada’s doors to over 25,000 Syrian refugees.

Across Canada, Quebec’s new law is controversial at best. Legal scholars have suggested that it violates Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, while the city of Brampton in the neighboring province of Ontario has voted to support a legal challenge against the law. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Quebecois — beyond the multicultural city of Montreal — approve of the new law. 

Why do Quebec attitudes toward multiculturalism and religious practice differ so starkly from those held in the rest of Canada? The complex answer is found in Quebec’s post-World War Two history.

During the 1960s Quebec underwent a radical social transformation known as the Quiet Revolution. In a single decade, the once impoverished and largely agrarian province transformed itself from a society dominated and controlled by the Catholic church, which overwhelmingly dictated public mores and laws, to a modern, staunchly secular province that rejected religion and its institutional power. Between 1960 and 1970, Quebec’s birth rate declined from Canada’s highest to its lowest; and its once heavily attended churches are now used as restaurants, gyms, and performance spaces.

The process of secularization applied to all of the province’s public institutions, from its schools and universities to its hospitals and welfare system. It was accompanied by a resurgent national identity that rested on the twin pillars of the French language and secularism. Quebec is today a prosperous middle class society with a comprehensive social welfare system administered by the province rather than by the Church.

Sixty years later, many in Quebec see Bill 21 as the next necessary step in that evolution and an extension of that same social project. But nothing could be further from the truth.

The Quiet Revolution was a peaceful social movement that forever altered Quebec’s political and social landscape. It allowed the French-speaking majority to establish its primacy on the political, social, economic and cultural stage at both the provincial and the federal level. But the current movement is not about promoting the rights of the majority. Rather, by seeking to establish secularism as part of Quebec’s national identity, the provincial government is sacrificing the rights of the province’s minorities. A movement that was once about positive self-affirmation is now simply a reactionary rejection of others.

Ignoring its critics and refusing to debate, the government’s center-right Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ), led by Premier François Legault, rammed Bill 21 through the legislature by preemptively invoking Section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is a rarely-used override power often referred to as the “notwithstanding” clause. In other words, the CAQ circumvented both the Quebec and Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, thus preventing the new law from being struck down in court for the next five years. It also shut down debate by invoking closure, and by introducing last-minute amendments that outline surveillance powers for the ministry and rules of enforcement.

The secularism championed by Quebec’s Quiet Revolution stemmed from a deep-rooted and understandable desire by the French-speaking majority to rid itself of the Catholic Church’s asphyxiating control over the government and reaffirm its proud transformation into a modern, secular French-speaking state. In sharp contrast, Bill 21, a far more restrictive form of secularism imported from France, is primarily motivated by Quebecers’ antipathy for religion — primarily non-Christian faiths. This is not religious neutrality: it is religious persecution. The overwhelmingly white French speakers of Quebec are succumbing to anti-Muslim prejudice.

The populist CAQ tapped into this prejudice during the November 2018 election campaign; it now bases many of its legislative decisions on people’s fears rather than on facts.

Bill 21 is a response to the zeitgeist. The fear of Muslims that started with 9/11 spread to Quebec, bringing with it the impression that the government was making too many concessions to religious minorities. In 2006, Quebec created a special commission to study the “reasonable accommodation” of cultural minorities’ religious practices, in response to the perception that religion was making a comeback in the public sphere. In 2013, the Parti Quebecois, the nationalist party that ascended to power on the back of the Quiet Revolution in the mid-1970s, attempted to implement their questionably named Charter of Quebec Values, which sought to ban “ostentatious” religious symbols. The initiative failed miserably and the party was defeated by the Liberals. In 2015, Quebec’s Liberal government introduced their own version of secularism in Bill 62, which would prevent Muslim women wearing a burqa or a niqab from receiving government services. That, too, failed.

In 2019, Premier Legault’s government decided to circumvent the democratic process and put an end to long-standing debates on how to accommodate cultural minorities, by basically not bothering to accommodate them at all. His party’s goal is a homogeneous public face.

Legault, who denies that systemic racism or Islamophobia exist in Quebec, readily admitted in an interview with Radio Canada, Canada’s French-language public broadcaster, that Bill 21 “was a concession to people who are a little racist and don’t want to see religious symbols anywhere in public.” In a follow-up televised interview with the English-language CBC, Legault side-stepped the question of whether he felt empathy for a public school teacher who would have to remove her hijab if she wanted to keep her job. 

Exclusionary populism is defined by pandering to irrational fears and “solving” non-existent problems. Quebec has seen no incidents of religious proselytism or registered any complaint of bias by a public servant wearing a visible religious symbol. And yet hate crimes against Muslims have increased. Only three years ago, Alexandre Bissonnette entered a Quebec City mosque and gunned down six worshippers. 

In a brazen display of hypocrisy, the same Quebec government that demands concessions from people who wear visible religious signs has decided that schools and hospitals will not have to remove the crucifixes from their walls because they’re classified as “heritage” items. Private schools, most of which are Christian, are also exempt from Bill 21. In the meantime, a crucifix still hangs on the walls of the National Assembly and most schools and city streets are still named after Christian saints. 

Despite the CAQ’s insistence that the new law is meant to further Quebec’s commitment to secularism, a recent poll clearly points to prejudice against Muslims as the main motivator. Numerous French-language columnists and TV shows routinely discuss the “Muslim invasion” and a need for Quebecers to reassert themselves “before its too late.”

Meanwhile, Quebec’s largest French-language school board has announced that it will not apply the religious symbols law until it studies it further. The English School Board of Montreal has also said it will not comply with the law, although the government insists that it will not accept any delays. Civil liberties and Muslim groups have already vowed to challenge the bill and have filed an injunction in Quebec Superior Court, where a hearing is scheduled for July.

Bill 21 might feel like a win for the Legault government and its supporters, but it has created a divisive and contentious social climate. The legislation has been met with many legal challenges and by stinging criticism around the world. It could lead to a brain drain, as people who feel unwelcome in Quebec decide to live elsewhere. The CAQ might soon discover this “win” is more akin to a smugly defiant Pyrrhic victory.

In many ways, the legislation is an unfortunate manifestation of increasing concerns over immigration and its impact on Quebec’s national identity. But populism, which often seeks to provide simplistic solutions to complex problems and encroaching fears, is all the rage these days and certainly not unique to Quebec. From Brexit in the U.K., to The League in Italy, to Trumpism in the U.S., to Marine Le Pen in France, homogenous majorities struggle to come to terms with increasing diversity and religious plurality. In a 2005 opinion piece for The Times, Salman Rushdie writes:

In the age of mass migration and the internet, cultural plurality is an irreversible fact. Like it or dislike it, it’s where we live, and the dream of a pure monoculture is at best an unattainable, nostalgic fantasy and at worst a life-threatening menace.

The shifting relationship between nationalism, religion, and secularism continues to inform current debates about Quebec’s identity. Unfortunately, the deep-seated anxiety French-speaking Quebecers feel about their demographic future has caused it to justify exercising the same dogmatic social control on people’s appearance and way of life that, ironically, the Church once held.
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    [post_excerpt] => Despite the government' insistence that the new law is meant to further Quebec’s commitment to secularism, a recent poll clearly points to prejudice against Muslims as the main motivator. 
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In Quebec, a new law forces minorities to choose between their religion and their profession

by Toula Drimonis

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    [post_content] => The combination of jokes and storytelling has become a potent weapon in the culture wars

With “Nanette,” her critically acclaimed 2018 Netflix special, Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby inspired an international conversation about the purpose of comedy. During her hour-long monologue, filmed in front of a rapt audience at the Sydney Opera House, Gadsby challenges the idea that comedy is an effective means of dealing with controversial issues. In theory, she explains, comedy creates a connection through laughter; but in practice, it undermines serious discussions and perpetuates toxic norms.

Gadsby grew up lesbian and gender non-conforming in ultra-conservative Tasmania, where homosexuality was legalized only in 1997. Humor was her defence mechanism against fear and shame, but it also kept her from thriving. She has come to realize, she explains in “Nanette,” that the price of self-deprecating humor is her dignity. “I put myself down in order to seek permission to speak,” she says.

Storytelling succeeds where jokes fail, says Gadsby. They can provide answers by integrating marginalized voices in a three-dimensional way that is not just a setup and a punchline, but an arc with a beginning, a middle, and an end.  “What I would have done,” she said, “to have heard a story like mine, to feel less alone, to feel connected.” She adds: “This is bigger than homosexuality; this is about how we conduct debate in public about sensitive things.”

Comedy and storytelling

Several comedians and writers have embraced the challenge of creating films and television series that combine jokes and storytelling to catalyze and reflect new norms.

“Booksmart,” a hilarious and charming new film directed by Olivia Wilde, brings marginalized voices into the mainstream and normalizes them. The film replaces the conventional teen rom-com device of shy boy and awkward girl with two socially awkward teenage girls, best friends, one of whom is straight and the other a lesbian. The girls don't bother to correct the impression of their performatively liberal parents, who believe the girls are romantically involved. On the eve of their high school graduation, they decide to misbehave radically for the first time in their bookish lives, which leads to a series of hilarious misadventures. The girls are precocious and they live in Los Angeles, but they are highly relatable and possess an age-appropriate innocence that transcends their coastal elite status.

“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” an ingenious comedy that has as its protagonist a woman who is obsessed with a man she dated as a teenager, explores mental health seriously and unflinchingly rather than playing it for laughs. It works because the plots are hilarious and the characters compelling. The show manages to combine brilliantly written comedy and story development with a serious agenda — and on mainstream cable television.

Premium cable channels have also been taking some chances with programs about the lives of social groups that were all-but unknown on mainstream television just a few years ago. HBO’s “Insecure,” for example, presents the lives of 20-something middle class African-American women. Star Issa Rae mines her own life in the series, set in Los Angeles. She works for a non-profit while Molly, her best friend since they were undergraduates at Stanford, is a corporate attorney. The series follows Issa’s foundering relationship with a live-in boyfriend, Molly’s awkward dating life, their career hurdles, and all the other universal agonies of fumbling toward adulthood — but presented through a lens that focuses on the unique aspects of the African-American experience in a white-majority society. If the series were about white women, “Insecure” would be a cliché. But because it’s about black women whose life experiences are as recognizable as that of Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer of “Broad City,” it is revolutionary. 

“Crashing,” by and with Pete Holmes, and also on HBO, takes on comedy. Holmes’s character, based on a version of himself, is a white, Christian comedian pursuing his career in New York City’s less-than-earnest comedy scene. In this context, Holmes is the marginal one. Viewers gain a visceral understanding that there is no such thing as “normal,” and that diversity is what makes us human.

As he struggles to make it, Holmes finds himself crashing on the couches of comedians who have achieved a degree of fame and financial success; this is a plot device that brings cameo appearances by pretty much everyone in the business — a true comedy nerd’s delight. “Crashing,” has taken on serious issues, such as addiction — with an amazing performance by veteran comic Artie Lange, who has struggled with addiction for decades. The series includes episodes with angry male comics who refuse to adapt to evolving social mores, as well as new female and non-white voices. “Crashing” was not renewed for a fourth season, which is a real loss for the broader conversation about comedy, especially about its changing landscape. The show upends the notion that sensitivity to new voices and old tropes will spell an end to “funny.” Instead it challenges the older guard to be more creative and opens the conversation to those that have been marginalized, which is a lot of very funny people.

But scripted comedy and the traditional comedy set do pose limitations that underscore Hannah Gadsby’s central points. The characters are ultimately fictional, even if they are relatable and represent more diversity. They reflect real concerns, but they they don’t live beyond the page on which they are written.

Unscripted and stand-up comedy

One of the reasons the stand-up comic seems to offer truth, is that she stands there as herself, connecting with her audience through a combination of vulnerability and sharp insights. Comics tend to be quite open about their personal struggles and often draw on them for material. But the stand-up set is usually a well-honed combination of jokes and short stories. With “Nanette,” Hannah Gadsby shows that comedians now have a much broader range of options in which they can present their work.

Comedy seems to have found its value as storytelling. “Nanette” is one example of this form, but podcasts seem to be the perfect storytelling platform.

Comedy and the podcast

Podcasting has helped the golden age of comedy to flourish. It also offers perhaps the most intimate ways of experiencing entertainment, as a one-on-one experience between the listener and the podcaster. In the case of podcasts hosted by people who allow the listener into their personal lives, a long-lasting bond is created.

“My Favorite Murder,” a true-crime podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff, a veteran comic and writer, and Georgia Hardstark, a Cooking Channel personality and food writer, embodies the way in which comedy can be a valuable storyteller, a medium for serious conversations, and a means to connect. They achieved this unintentionally, as a result of tapping into the zeitgeist.

The format is simple: in each episode, the hosts take turns telling the story of their “favorite murder” – stories that have fascinated them and fed their obsession with true crime, ranging from Jon Benet Ramsey to the Golden State Killer. The retellings are not especially well-researched, with Hardstark and Kilgariff openly relying on Wikipedia, or episodes of true crime shows. The hosts also often mispronounce places and names, and sometimes have a tenuous grasp of history or basic geography. It is their very frank awareness of their ignorance, and their openness to being challenged, that taps into the vulnerability and empathy through which they connect — both to one another, and to their audience.

Kilgariff and Hardstark have also arrived at their podcast with baggage they are willing to unpack. The two discuss their past substance abuse, eating disorders, failure to thrive in conventional settings (neither has a college degree), dysfunctional relationships, watching a parent succumb to Alzheimers, and ultimately, the way both have achieved growth through years of therapy. And it is clear they are sharing themselves in a way that they think will be valuable to others.

Since its launch in 2016, the podcast has soared in the charts, sold out live shows nationally and internationally, and has a cult following of fellow “Murderinos.” Their fans are mostly women, who make up the vast majority of true crime fans. There are as many true crime podcasts as there are comedy podcasts, but with this combination, their talent and chemistry, and ability to connect through their own stories, the duo have captured a perfect medium for an audience that seemed urgently hungry for it. Their new memoir, “Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered,” is an even more candid extension of the themes they have spoken about on the show. And they have bared themselves even more-so, to everyone’s benefit.

The podcast has received thousands of emails over the years with fans expressing deeply personal reasons for feeling connected to and by the show. Between full episodes, MFM releases mini-episodes, with the hosts reading out a select few “Hometown Murders” sent in by listeners (really any true crime story that the listener has some kind of personal connection to). Almost invariably, the listener explains at the end of the show why it touched her, and expresses gratitude.

One listener, who is a sex worker, told the hosts that they are “angels for trying to contribute to the [conversation around] the frequent mockery and stereotyping of violence against sex workers;” another wrote, after telling a story about her dad’s role in helping end a hostage situation, that “I am so grateful for the way you ladies talk and are so open about mental illnesses, it was (my dad’s) own bipolar disorder that led to the end of his life and I’ve always felt a stigma around his disease and death like it was an anomaly and isolate thing when really it’s everywhere and I appreciate your willingness to start an honest conversation;” and one woman wrote in to tell a story and thank them for, “helping this junior lawyer with long hours and unbelievable professional self-doubt.” In the interest of total disclosure, I once wrote them myself with a hometown story and thanked them for sharing themselves in the way they do. They were my loyal and constant companions who kept me feeling connected to the world when I was laid off from my job.

Comedy has certainly grown to include more storytelling, and deeper excavations than throwaway punchlines. It helps that comedians often come equipped with a wide array of dysfunctions they are happy to discuss. Hannah Gadsby was right to question the value of comedy if it was used only as a means of defusing tension. But the medium seems to be expanding. It is becoming an avenue for serious conversations, and for a wider variety of us to connect.  Hannah Gadsby is returning this summer with a new special, “Douglas, we may well get a new verdict from her as well. It will be on Netflix in 2020.
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Comedy’s role as a catalyst for social change

by Yael Friedman

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    [post_content] => While the #metoo movement has led to a reconsideration of how masculinity functions in our society, it’s also important to be aware of when the movement acts to constrain conversations about modern feminism, and how to correct this problem.

Men convicted of gender-based crimes in El Salvador are required to enter a program on masculinity. The program seeks to correct the learned behaviors associated with a culture of toxic masculinity and has produced some promising results. Read more.

At Brown University, a program called called Masculinity 101 hosts discussion groups on what masculinity means, relationship dynamics, empathy with others, and male privilege. Other programs at colleges and universities have tried similar or related initiatives with mixed success. Learn more.

Students in a solutions journalism course at the University of Oregon reported on #MeToo initiatives on and off their campuses, asking tough questions about what works and why, and what doesn’t. It’s thoughtful work on an important subject. Read their stories here.

Journalist Sady Doyle tweeted an interesting thread this week, in which she posits that issues once classified as purely “feminist” are now labeled "#MeToo" issues. Doyle's argument mirrors the thesis that David Klion advances in an article for ANI, in which he points out that #MeToo makes both men and women of the ruling class nervous because it is essentially a labor movement, with women demanding the same salaries and opportunities currently available to their male peers. Click on the tweet embedded below to read the entire thread. 

https://twitter.com/sadydoyle/status/1114289946439897093

And then there’s this: what will history will say about the fact that the first, loudest, and best-funded films about the #MeToo moment all made by men? Read about that here.
    [post_title] => Stage two of #metoo: the pros, the cons & the consequences
    [post_excerpt] => 				Taking a look at how the movement has affected the expression of masculinity and where it will go from here.		
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Stage two of #metoo: the pros, the cons & the consequences

by Jessica McKenzie

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