Say:

I've written a few politically-oriented blogs in my blogspot account, and I scored a C on my Criminal Law midterm (yessss).  I have a legal memorandum due Monday that I don't want to start.  I've reached that plateau in the school year where I just don't give a--

I turn 21 on November 6th.  I'm going to a casino midnight of that day, and then I'll celebrate with alcohol some later time.  I'm not planning to get trashed because I don't want to go that far, honestly.  Not while I'm staying home.  Is it sad that I don't want to have sex because it freaks me out and ugly people do it?  If porn needs to be banned for any reason, it should relate tangentially to its newfound equal opportunity.  Everyone with a wee-wee or a hoohah (or both) should not be in front of the camera.  Seriously.  *shudder*

And maybe I'm being immature but...*convulsion*  I am not joining the ranks of people who do that.  The fluids and the noises...!  How do people...I mean...I can hardly masturbate without laughing at myself.  I feel great and then I feel so dumb.  Even when I fool around with my boyfriend (no offense, boyfriend), I'm into it in that moment, but afterwards I just...wonder what the hell I did, why I did it, and why I have to do it. 

I feel like a 12-year-old, so I'll stop here with the sex reflection.  But I do want to reproduce my most recent class experience.

Shifting Objectifications Solve Nothing -or- How to Oppress a [White] Woman

While the title of this post does connect indirectly to the discussion over at nubian's blog, it also relates to an experience I had in my Contracts class today.

Two key points:

1. Objectification isn't cool, regardless of who uses it.
2. Objectification isn't cool, regardless of whom is objectified.

Point 1 is exemplified in that comment thread about Jessica Valenti's new book, Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters. (The comment thread on Feministing's pretty interesting as well.) Using another form of objectifying women to promote something good is still objectifying and commodifying women's bodies. You're using the body part of a woman to market your product. Period. It doesn't matter if you're marketing jewelry, alcohol, guns, feminism, world peace, or Jesus. If you use the body part of a person or the image of a person to sell or to market something, you're using that person as a means to accomplish your own ends. As Kant would say, "That's pretty fucked up." Doesn't matter how much you have in common with the person, either. So, how do you singlehandedly oppress a woman and make her cry? You explain to her that using the tools of the patriarchy to dismantle the patriarchy make you no better than the patriarchy. In other words: you wrong and you ain't special. Besides, shouldn't we question why subversion is powerful and what exactly makes it powerful? What powers are we using, people? And if they're identical to the powers used against us, do our intentions/motivations really matter in the end?

Point 2 happened today in Contracts class. I swear, when our professor gets laid, his personality improves. Today he exchanged cake for giving correct answers in class. (Okay, his new weirdness could link to drugs, but HE HAD CAKE!) Today's class introduced the subject of damages for breaching a contract. We went over the fundamentals of two ways to compensate damages for breach: expectancy and reliance. My notes describe the difference thusly:

Reliance damages measure the difference between post-K (where you are now) and pre-K (where you were before) situations. Expectancy damages weigh the difference between expected results (where you would have been had no breach occurred) and actual results (where you are presently).

First, he proclaimed that he wanted to avoid anything that would anger feminists. Since Sullivan involves a "professional entertainer" suing for a botched nose job, our professor switched the facts. He transformed the plaintiff into a male seeking ab construction surgery. Then he "regrettably" drew a scale on the board from 1-10, corresponding of course with any infamous beauty/sexiness ranking scale.

Mr. Sullivan's abs before surgery rated as a 5. However, his "5" abs weren't raking in the sexist chauvinist female pig ladies (and I'm quoting), so he decided to go under the knife to obtain Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise abdominals (ranked 11 on his scale o' sex). After surgery, poor Mr. Sullivan's abs failed the cut and have sank to a rating of 1. Ouch.

So on this scale, he illustrated the difference between expectancy and reliance. Using the expectancy scale, Mr. Sullivan would collect a hefty penny because the difference between an 11 rating and a 1 rating is a whole fucking lot. To illustrate the reliance rating, our professor then waded deeper into the pool of stupid: he equated Mr. Sullivan's ability to woo women with their level of intoxication at the first meeting. Yes, he went there. He argued that before the operation, Mr. Sullivan only needed three beers to distort the woman's judgment enough in his favor. However, after the botch job, Sullivan will require many more beers for women to ignore his newly created potbelly, so to speak. So his reliance calculations would determine the difference between his post-op situation (1 rating) and his pre-op situation (5 rating).

So after a day of cake sharing, objectification of males, objectification/denigration of females, and a strange streak of quality teaching, our professor calls it a day. We all pack to leave, and my friends realize that my [white] female friend is fuming at this lesson, to the point that she is physically trembling with anger, and she leaves the room immediately after the conclusion of class. I was pissed off as well, but after the last time I became angry about something that affected me deeply, I now try my hardest to focus on the lesson and to let the stupid fade to the background. (This is the same friend that I referenced as an anti-racist sympathizer in my post.)

A few of my friends (of course) did not understand what the big deal was. I mean, he did it with guys! Come on! He left women alone! What's the problem?! Specifically, what is HER problem?! I explained as plaintively and as calmly as I could that it does not matter who is the target of objectification -- objectification is wrong. It is also condescending to think that feminists speak out against patriarchy because they want to establish an equally wrong matriarchy in its stead. Of course, they all just scoffed and rolled their eyes at the whole situation. We Kwazy Lib'wals Wif Owr Kwazy Ideaz.

I referred to this instance in my title as oppression of white women because I found it strange that I did not have as visceral of a response as my friend did. If it were a racist matter, I would have been upset. If it were a racist and sexual matter, I would've cut somebody. But just sexist? Especially a sexist stereotype that's lumped more heavily on the heads of young white women and glosses over other women? Not so much. I wondered why that was.

I think I became jaded after a Philosophical Issues in Feminism undergraduate course where perspectives of women of color emerged nowhere in the curriculum or the discussion unless one of the five women of color made a tangential comment about it. The end-of-term discussion really fucking pissed me off after hearing all these white women around me talk about how ending sexist treatment "trumps" ending racist treatment. Good thing a section of me is saved; I guess the rest of me can go to shit in other ways.

I raised my hand and made the point that eliminating sexism will not be successful until we eliminate racism, homophobia, ablism, transphobia -- we have to tackle all the oppression-laced -isms and cooperate. My white female classmates then informed me that I would unfortunately have to wait until their problems were solved. One of them explicitly turned to me and said, "Yeah, but that stuff can come after we're done with sexism, you know?" As a way to placate me. I don't know how I resisted punching her in the face, especially since I was running on a half-hour's worth of rest for the second day in a row. I remember how livid I was, and I wrote very sloppily on the course evaluation that more course readings written by women of color need incorporation into the course.

So I guess as long as people felt comfortable spitting on different aspects of my identity, I tried to write off my disconnect as an ability to develop affinities and responses to individual violations of them as I please. Today, however, I realized that insulting one part insults the whole being. I can't accept that or tolerate it. The difficulty starts here.

Here's a poem called "Against Coupling" by Fleur Adcock:

I write in praise of the solitary act:
of not feeling a trespassing tongue
forced into one's mouth, one's breath
smothered, nipples crushed against the
rib-cage, and that metallic tingling
in the chin set off by a certain odd nerve:

unpleasure. Just to avoid those eyes would help-
such eyes as a young girl draws life from,
listening to the vegetal
rustle within her, as his gaze
stirs polypal fronds in the obscure
sea-bed of her body, and her own eyes blur.

There is much to be said for abandoning
this no longer novel exercise-
for now 'participating in
a total experience'-when
one feels like the lady in Leeds who
had seen The Sound Of Music eighty-six times;

or more, perhaps, like the school drama mistress
producing A Midsummer Night's Dream
for the seventh year running, with
yet another cast from 5B.
Pyramus and Thisbe are dead, but
the hole in the wall can still be troublesome.

I advise you, then, to embrace it without
encumberance. No need to set the scene,
dress up (or undress), make speeches.
Five minutes of solitude are
enough-in the bath, or to fill
that gap between the Sunday papers and lunch.

This article is interesting and painful.  
In some ways it glides superficially over basic human interaction and understanding, and in other ways it reveals a gaping wound that not many people want to confront.  The wound will probably never heal, either. 

Race Wasn't an Issue to Him, Which Was an Issue to Me
By KIM McLARIN

Published: September 3, 2006

HIS name was Jerry. A nice man, late 40’s, funny and smart, divorced with two grown children, a social worker who had dedicated his professional life to working with troubled kids.

He was also — let’s be honest — the first to come around. He was the first man after my own divorce to raise an eyebrow, to take an interest after my ex not only moved out but moved on. Funny and smart and dedicated to troubled kids is all admirable, but in truth I would have said yes to a drink with a four-foot gaptoothed troll had one smiled my direction. The self-confidence of a 40-year-old divorced mother of two is a shaggy thing.

So the fact that Jerry was also white I noted but decided to file away for now. Why worry about it right out of the gate? Yes, race had been an issue in my marriage — not the issue perhaps, but an issue nonetheless. What I did not know was whether race arose as a problem because I am black and my ex is white or because I am a person who grapples with race and he is not.

That my ex does not grapple with race he would not dispute; he does not care to read, think or talk about it, and he wondered why I did. My ex believed I always went looking for race, but I didn’t; race came looking for me.

And when it did, I would stand and call its name: when officials in our inner-ring suburb talked about closing our “borders” against a wave of nonresident students sneaking into our schools; when a white woman at my gym reached up, uninvited, and petted my locks like she was petting a dog; when my sick mother received one level of medical care and my ex’s sick sister received another. At such times he tried to understand my feelings, but he did not share them, and even talking about it made him uncomfortable.

It’s a dividing line as real as any in America — those who grapple with race and those who do not. But like most dividing lines, it’s impossible to tell on which side a person stands by looking at them, or at least that’s what I thought at the time. So why get ahead of myself with Jerry? Why dig for land mines when I may not make it past the way he slurps his beer?

We met for drinks. Sparkwise, I felt little, but we ended up talking and laughing easily for more than an hour. I told him I was a writer; he told me his five favorite books and how they had shaped his life. He told me he had gone to a seminary as a boy but eventually left the Catholic church; I told him I’d been raised a Pentecostal but mellowed into Methodism as an adult. We talked about our children, travels, mutual love of the blues and mutual dislike of the cold, and then he said he would like to read my books; he thought he would like them. I said he well might not.

“How do you deal with it when people you know don’t like your work?” he asked.

I quoted a playwright whose name I could not remember who admitted in an interview that he told his friends if there was a choice between being honest and being kind in talking about his work, they should choose to be kind. “Don’t value your opinion over my feelings,” the playwright said.

Jerry nodded. “Some people use honesty like a weapon.”

“Like a switchblade,” I said. “Like a bayonet. They slice up your heart with all these ugly, hurtful words and then, while you’re bleeding on the floor, they hand you a Band-Aid: ‘I was only being honest.’ ”

“Honesty is overrated,” Jerry agreed.

SO the following day, when he e-mailed his attraction, I tried to be both honest and kind. No spark, I wrote, but he was great, good company. If he was looking for “the one,” I was probably not going to be her. But if he simply sought intelligent dinner companionship some Friday evening, I’d be more than game.

Not a bayonet, I thought, but a butter knife. And still it hurt.

“Ouch,” he replied, and disappeared.

By the time he resurfaced a few months later, I had suffered through two terrible blind dates, joined an online dating service, carried on several e-mail conversations that died, actually talked on the phone with a few men, met three for drinks, backed away carefully from each, then canceled the service.

A few of these men were black, the others white, and in no case did I find anything remotely resembling chemistry. In fact, so utterly lacking in connection were these encounters that it made me appreciate anew how rare is connection. In the face of human isolation, race seemed to retreat a little.

So when Jerry called again, I decided to let the spark thing coast, because at least he and I could talk. “My wounds are licked,” Jerry said. “Have dinner with me.”

“Why not,” I said. Maybe, in time, the spark would come.

We talked and laughed for four hours, then necked like teenagers in the parking lot in the rain. The next day we e-mailed and text-messaged each other. It was all so much fun, such a heady relief after the months of loneliness.

But then, on our third date, things changed. First, he was late and I was irritable. Earlier, I’d had a frustrating discussion with several white undergraduates in my Literature of Slavery class. All semester I had struggled to teach them to think critically about race and slavery and history, to have them challenge their assumptions. They insisted, for example, that racial divisions were as old as time and that the myth of African inferiority preceded slavery, not, as I suggested, the other way around. And they argued that racial genetics were more than skin deep, whether I wanted to believe it or not. How else to account for the way black athletes dominate some professional sports?

That evening, when I shared my frustrations with Jerry, he wondered if the students didn’t have a point. “What about all those Kenyan marathon runners?” he asked. “Isn’t it possible there’s some genetic reason for that? Isn’t it possible blacks are just better athletes than whites?”

A PERFECTLY innocent question. Yet something small and painful flickered inside my chest. Logically, if one accepts a genetic physical superiority of blacks, one must also accept the possibility of intellectual superiority in whites. Did he not consider that notion? Did he reject it out of hand, or subconsciously believe it? And if I wondered these things aloud would he, like my ex, judge me bitter or oversensitive?

I mentioned an essay I’d given my students in which the anti-racism advocate Tim Wise suggests that no one brought up in America can claim to be free of racist indoctrination, that doing so only perpetuates the crime. “What Wise says is that we all must recognize and confront the legacy of the past,” I explained.

“I don’t think everyone is racist,” Jerry said. “Maybe racialized. But that’s not a bad thing.”

By now my hands were trembling, so I did not ask what he meant by that. I had the feeling that even if he tried to explain I would not understand. James Baldwin said being black in America is like walking around with a pebble in your shoe. Sometimes it scarcely registers and sometimes it shifts and becomes uncomfortable and sometimes it can even serve as a kind of Buddhist mindfulness bell, keeping you present, making you pay attention.

This is why, among other reasons, I engage with race, but not all black people do. I know several interracial couples in which both people swear race is never an issue, almost never comes up at all. I believe them, but it amazes me. And I know one thing: I can never join that pack.

My ex did not grapple with race, at first because he did not have to, being a white man in America, and later because it frightened him. This difference was a small but steady river that ran between us, and the more he tried to ignore it the more I clawed at the banks, and the more I clawed at the banks the larger the river swelled until, at last, we were engulfed. A black person who grapples with race cannot be with a white person who doesn’t. Whether a black person who grapples with race can be with a black person who doesn’t is a different and unresolved question for me, but on the first point I’m solid.

So when Jerry called and asked if I would meet him for a drink, I agreed, but this time I went only to tell him. We met a bar with billiard tables. He wanted to teach me to play but I said we wouldn’t have time.

“I can’t see you again,” I said.

He blinked with surprise. “Why?” he said, finally.

I used my bayonet: “Because you’re white, and it costs too much for me to date a white man. It cost me to be married to a white man for 13 years. I can’t do it again.”

“That’s ridiculous,” he said, after a minute. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Which proves my point,” I said. “It’s not ridiculous.”

“You can’t be with any white man?”

“No, I don’t think I can.”

I may as well face it. Because, after all, Jerry was a good man who worked with troubled kids and lived his life open to relationships with people of different races. And yet I couldn’t be with him, even though, unlike my ex, he did seem willing to grapple with race.

But he was nearly 50 and his grappling apparently was just beginning, whereas mine started at 5. For nearly 50 years he’d lived in America and yet it surprised him that race might even be an issue for us. There was an innocence in this, an innocence born of being white. An innocence I could neither share nor abide.

“It costs me too much,” I repeated.

We were silent for a minute. Behind us balls clicked and people laughed.

“And now,” Jerry said, “it’s costing me.”

What is your favorite way to relieve stress?

My favorite is masturbation, with sleep coming in at a close second.

(Haha, coming.)

(Haha, sleep.)

I was surfing the web using Stumble, and I found this site showing actual advertisements from back in the day of the fucked up variety.  Apparently, Coca-Cola had this priceless gem before it was pulled:

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1 comment

     What song or lyrics are stuck in your head at the moment?  What album is it from?

Submitted by Lox Ly. 

"Can I get control/do you like me vulnerable/I'm armed and I'm equal/more fun for the people"
--M.I.A., "Bucky Done Gun"

"Yo sé que no he sido un santo, pero lo puedo arreglar, amor!
No sólo de pan vive el hombre y no de excusas vivo yo.
Sólo de errores se aprende y hoy sé que es tuyo mi corazón!
Mejor te guardas todo eso, a otro perro con ese hueso y nos decimos adiós."
--Shakira feat. Alejandro Sanz, "La Tortura"

(Translation:

I know I haven't been a saint
But I can make it up to you!

Man doesn't live on bread alone
Nor do I live on excuses.

We only learn from mistakes
And today I know my heart is yours!

Better save that for yourself
Take that bone to some other dog
And let's say goodbye.)

Look at this beautiful poem.  To me, it's reminiscent of Donne, if he were born in the modern era.  It's called "A Valediction," by Melvin Walker LaFollette:

A crow's harsh dissyllables
Blacken the magic of this shimmering morning,
Adding insult to enchantment,
Making mud of the clean rain.

I could not say goodbye. That is
for friends and rivals, and I am neither.
So I have walked the wet grass we walked in,
The rain only knows which blades you printed.

The rain only knows which trees
You touched, teaching them how to be
Trees; I think that way is best,
For I am a lover of secret rain.

I am a lover of all apple
Trees, even as you; look, how I taste
The sour green apple, rend its core
In a frenzy you would understand

If you were here. But you are not
Here. You are being kissed,
And kissing back, and I throw the hard apple
At the breast of a skittish squirrel.

You are leaving at ten. You have left.
And last night, in the fire and thunder
I prayed for grace, that I might love
The rain only.