Tiger Beatdown

News broke last week that Disney World chose to close its ‘Habit Heroes’ attraction at Epcot Center after taking considerable heat during the soft launch phase. I’m counting this as a significant victory in the war against social stigma, because ‘Habit Heroes’ was basically House of Horrors: Obesity Edition, designed to shame, terrify, and manipulate young visitors. Reading descriptions of the attraction, I was reminded of the evangelical Christian hell houses:

Visitors — up to 12 at a time — enter the 4,700-square-foot attraction through an old, back-alley gymnasium where they meet video superheroes Will Power and Callie Stenics. From there, the buff duo takes them on an action-packed fight against the enemies.

In the first of three interactive rooms, visitors confront (remote) Control Freak and blow up raining televisions. Next they take on Sweet Tooth and Snacker, and wage a food fight with video-arcade style guns that abolish junk food using healthy food as ammunition. Broccoli and apples knock out cream puffs and hot dogs.

Finally, the group upends Lead Bottom in a room where Just Dance-style technology gets everyone moving. (source)

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Pinterest has suddenly exploded in the last few weeks, becoming the new hip social media site everyone’s talking about, now that the shine has worn off Google Plus. Despite the fact that it’s been in existence since 2008, the site was relatively low-traffic until quite recently, when it reached the flashpoint it needed to attract public attention. Along with the usual wild speculation and general quivering over Pinterest has come some interesting, and often frustrating, gender commentary.

Everyone has an opinion on the gender demographics of the Internet and feels obliged to share it, especially when it involves speculating on the makeup of a website that’s garnering media attention. In this case, there’s been a heavy focus on how many women are using the site, and what that implies about the users and the content.

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When I was a freshman in high school, some of my friends started a Gay-Straight Alliance, and I was one of the first people to join.  That year, we observed the National Day of Silence by wearing black t-shirts, printing out those little speaker cards, and refusing to talk all day.  (For some of us who were smack in the middle of our embarrassing teenage gothy-pants phase, only the speaker cards distinguished Day of Silence from, like, a Wednesday.)  Fortunately, we were at a school where all forms of weirdness were nurtured and encouraged, and the concept spread like wildfire among all the baby queers and queer allies.  By the time we were seniors, perhaps a quarter of the student body participated; the GSA printed several hundred stickers and cards to identify participants and supporters, and we ran out of them before the first bell rang.

You could make a persuasive case that our nascent teenage activism caused a serious disruption of the school day—the traffic jam in the hallway around our table alone made plenty of people late for class—yet I can’t remember the faculty being anything but supportive.  Teachers allowed Day of Silence participants to reschedule oral presentations for another day, or give written answers to questions.  At least one teacher even enforced the Day of Silence in her class, turning it into an hour of “work quietly on your own projects” so she wouldn’t have to speak that day.  And if anybody ever expressed discomfort about students showing support for LGBTQ rights on school property, I never heard a word about it.  We were unbelievably fortunate to go to a school where minimizing disruption was considered less important than allowing us to stand up for what we thought was right.

Students in Suffolk County, VA may not be so lucky after next month.  That school district will be taking a vote in March to determine whether they’ll be implementing a new dress code, one which bans clothing “not in keeping with a student’s gender” to the extent that it “causes a disruption and/or distracts others from the education process or poses a health or safety concern,” according to this article. To be clear, they don’t mean “safety concern” in the sense that the clothing is covered in spikes, or made of asbestos, and thus could be hazardous to the student wearing it or to passersby.  They mean that, if a student gets beaten up for dressing weird, the clothing—not, say, the bully—is to blame.

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This is a guest post from the fabulous Annaham! Please note that the post includes some discussions of graphic violence as depicted in the film. 

So here’s my deep, dark, not-quite-feminist secret: I think Lars von Trier has made some great films. Just to be specific from the outset: I’m not here to defend his ridiculous Nazi comments last year at Cannes (why, why, WHY would you think that is an okay thing to say, Lars? WHY), for which he was rightfully blacklisted from the festival indefinitely, or to talk about his totally bizarre and pretty stereotypical approach to disability in most of his work (in the creepy universe of Breaking the Waves, becoming paralyzed means that one’s sex life is OVER FOREVER, and in The Idiots, pretending to be mentally impaired is a way to ultimate “freedom” from societal mores…yeah, there is no way that I am going to defend that), nor to convince you that Dogville, though interesting, wasn’t about an hour and a half too long and majorly laying it on thick with pretension. No: I am here to talk about why some of (though not all—ahem, hi again, Dogville!) von Trier’s women characters speak to me, and why I love Antichrist in particular.

Antichrist is not an “enjoyable” film in the classic sense of the term. But it is powerful. Most significantly, it shows a woman who is struggling with deep emotional pain; one could argue that this film shows too much, that it has an excess of emotion and therefore relegates its leading lady to an essentialist stereotype of what it means to be a woman. At the same time that there has been something of an unprecedented representation of “strong” women characters across different types of media—this differs, of course, by race, class, sexuality, and ability—there has been a disavowal of women characters showing “too much” emotion for a given circumstance.

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I thought I would write about the myth of choice. How when we talk about choice in a feminist context we mean “We want people to have a choice in terms of how and when they get pregnant and if they carry that pregnancy on”. How we want people to have a choice on their jobs, we want them (ourselves) to have a choice in the kind of relationships we establish, how we conduct them, who we associate with, how frequently (if at all) we have sex and with whom. Choice, the magic word that would liberate us from the chains of Patriarchy and set us free to live as fully realized human beings. Except that these choices are not removed from our overall sociocultural contexts. Except that, for some, the choice is between a rock and a hard place.

There are hardly any real choices. We live in a system where for many people, the choices available are not only limited but framed in a way where we can only chose, from this narrow pool, those options that are barely related to basic survival. And I am genuinely angry that due to recent political developments pretty much all over the West, so many of our basic choices are presented as unnecessary, as undesirable, as the only choices we should have access to.

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I. We Own You

I’m taking classroom driver’s education at the high school, a class that is technically open to the public, although no one seems to take advantage of this. I figure, why pay for classes when I can schlep to a high school at seven in the morning for six weeks.

I am the only member of the public there, and the high school students alternate between looking at me curiously, trying to figure out where I fit in, and ignoring me. I slip into class each day like a ghost and perch precisely in the middle of the room, trying to attract as little attention as possible. I am still in my wrapped in corduroy and lanky hair phase of life. I’d probably be mistaken for a student if the high school wasn’t so small that everyone knows everyone.

The instructor is a veteran and he locks the door precisely at 7 every morning, as he told us on the first day of class. ‘Anyone who’s late,’ he gruffly informs us, ‘will not be allowed in.’ He also tells us that more than three absences will result in an automatic failure. I am terrified.

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Downton Abbey is the best show on television at the moment, is it not?  Or at least, it has the best frocks and hats on television at the moment (sorry Mad Men, you’re so whatever year it was that everyone was into you).  There is romance!  Hats!  It has the glorious Professor MacGongall Maggie Smith!  And Harriet Jones, Prime Minister Penelope Wilton!  And Susan Death Michelle Dockery!  And other people of lesser nerdy significance!  And in less explanation pointy things, it’s generally well scripted, acted and a sterling example of how well the English do period upstairs/downstairs drama.  Anyway, now that we’ve established how amazing Downton Abbey is (and it really is), here is the bit where I tear it apart and make pretty shapes out of it.

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For the past few years, I’ve been coming back to this idea about the danger of treating self-replicating, amoral systems as if they were a fit substitute for governance. The people who defend these systems imbue them with non-existant ethical faculties as if ethical choices were a consequence of their design, rather than a conscience decision to fight for ethical outcomes by people within the system.

Primarily, I am talking about Capitalism. Capitalism is treated as if it were a universal good, as if it could self-regulate or consistently reward individuals for moral or ethical behavior and has been firmly established as the international religion by the only people holding the megaphone. Anyone who questions the “Free Market” isn’t a serious thinker, is fringe, an extremist. Capitalism only works, they explain, when absolutely no restrictions are put upon it or the people who wield it.

This belies the fact that we already check the reach of Capitalism. We put a lower bound on the amount of time a product can take to kill someone. We attempt to hold companies responsible for their actions, and too often we fail dismally. We each accept increasing personal irrelevance on the world stage because a group of billionaires want to strip mine every continent on the planet and retreat to their private islands when the world collapses.

Very few of them are twirling mustaches and stroking cats, but they have been taught to expect that if they want to make money off of it, and it doesn’t kill too many white, able-bodied, straight men with social security numbers people should just mind their own business. These individual choices aggregate; those with power in this system can make their own guilt diffuse and remote enough to squash, abetted by an industry that exists to tell them that they are under attack for their “success” and deserve every ounce of profit they can wring from this life, no matter the collateral damage.

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“You cannot come in with that ugly cow standing over there”.

Said by the bouncer at a posh disco, to my brother, when I was sixteen? maybe seventeen? and trying to enter said disco with a group of friends. I was the “ugly cow” the bouncer referred to.

Summer dresses and lipgloss, and a place to belong. That’s all I wanted. And to be pretty, to be “male gaze approved” pretty. To be seen as pretty. I remember feeling that way since I was fourteen and I was put on my first enforced diet. I didn’t fit any notions of Eurocentric femininity. My hair too unruly, too curly, too dark, too unmanageable. It remained a constant through my entire life. This hair, the tangled curls, the darkness that, more often than not, through its unmanageability so well illustrates the content of my head. The enforced diet was not optional, not a choice. It was a condition to have my Quinceañera celebration. Either I lost the weight, straighten my hair, get the blond highlights or I wouldn’t have my Quinceañera party. And so I complied. I tried to make myself smaller, less noticeable. But I was cursed with loudness, with a big mouth, with opinions. I was a teenage embarrassment. I look back, how could I be considered fat? I wasn’t. I was just taking a space that was not supposed to be for good girls. It wasn’t about losing weight, it was about never reaching adulthood. About not becoming a woman.

And I dreamed. Oh how I dreamed. I would wake up and be beautiful. I would have long flowy hair, naturally blond, and I would wear the summer dresses with grace, and the boy I liked would like me back. He would kiss me, and he would see me, new, without loudness, without the hips I couldn’t help growing, without my dark facial hair that earned me the monicker of “Lobizon” by age twelve. One day, I would wake up and be Lana del Rey. Or you know, someone like her, had she been famous when I was fourteen, more than twenty years ago.

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A couple of Tiger Beatdown related talks in the near future:

I (Emily) is going to be giving a talk in late March in San Francisco as part of this year’s Girl Talk: A Cis and Trans Woman Dialogue.  This year’s line-up includes Julia Serano, Elena Rose (who blogs as Little Light), Gina de Vries, Jos Truitt (from Feministing), Thea Hillman and many more.  It promises to be an amazing night.

The full details:

• Thursday 29th March, 7pm-10
• San Francisco LGBT Community Center – Rainbow Room
• 1800 Market Street between Octavia and Leguna
• Tickets are $12-20, but nobody turned away.

Also, s.e will be talking at the University of Southern California on March 22nd, full details to follow soon.