Historiann

Last night at the University of Northern Colorado, I attended a screening of The Line,a film by Nancy Schwartzman about rape and the line of consensual versus nonconsensual sex.  In it, she tells the story of her rape several years ago by a man she had gone to bed with–a fact that attorneys and anti-rape advocates explain would have made her case very difficult, if not impossible, to prosecute.  She had engaged in consensual sex–but she did not consent to anal rape, and she cried and screamed throughout the attack.  The climax of the film is an interview with her rapist recorded via a hidden camera–his face is obscured, but it’s fascinating to watch him squirm and writhe and desperately trying to convince her that everything that happened that night was consensual, and that they had “hot sex.”

The part of the film I found most disturbing was when Schwartzman told her friends what happened–and her friends told her that it happens to everyone.  What else did she expect?  That’s just the way it is, and she really should get over it because that’s how it happens sometimes.  After all, she consented to some sex acts.  In other words, they told her that rape is clearly on the continuum of how heterosexuality operates.  They read her actions as complicit with the rapist–whereas there was never any ambiguity for Schwartzman.  As she related in the Q and A session after the movie, she cried and screamed and repeatedly begged the rapist to stop during the rape, and then went home and wrote in her journal “I was raped last night.”  When even her friends told her that what had happened to her wasn’t rape, she bottled it up and tried to forget it. Continue Reading »

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Does this washtub make me look fat?

Yesterday, Michelle Obama announced the “Let’s Move” initiative to end obesity in children.  And, as I mentioned in my previous post, I just finished reading Kathleen Brown’s Foul Bodies:  Cleanliness in Early America (2009), which is a fascinating exploration of ideas about cleanliness as well as the technologies and somatic experiences of cleanliness (or its absence) and how they change over time from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries.  I haven’t had the time to do a lot of reading on “Let’s Move,” but I’m already struck by how rhetoric about obesity today tracks with the same concerns 200 years ago about civilizing American bodies through cleanliness, and children’s bodies in particular.  It’s really uncanny.

Brown makes the point that nineteenth-century bourgeois reformers identified the clean body as a site of virtuous citizenship.  But of course clean clothing and clean bodies, and the means and ability to achieve them, were above all a marker of one’s class status, since it was only the middle-class who could afford to do laundry weekly (and/or have a “hired girl” in to do it), and only the wealthy who had running water, bathtubs, and the means to travel to fashionable spas for soaking in and drinking up healing mineral waters.  Brown also tracks the convergence in the later eighteenth century and early nineteenth century between discourses on spiritual or moral cleanliness, and bodily and household cleanliness.  Early in the nineteenth century particular attention was paid first to children’s bodies as an index of their mother’s moral worth, and then later in the century as the bodies of poor and/or immigrant children came into contact on a regular basis with the bodies of middle-class and even elite children in public schools. 

If we replace the words “unclean” with “fat,” and “cleanliness” with “thinness,” we’ll come very close to the rhetoric and language of the “Let’s Move” campaign.  Here are a few selections from Brown’s book with the relevant substitutions from page 327:  Continue Reading »

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"Deborah," Alex Prager, 2009

Over at The Daily Beast, Rachel Wolff informs us of two exhibitions of photographs by L.A.-based artist Alex Prager opening in both New York and L.A. this winter.  Check it out–and be sure to click through the gallery of Prager’s “living dolls.”  There are samples from two series by Prager–”Weekend” and “The Big Valley.”  (I thought the photos in ”The Big Valley” were more interesting.)  Wolff writes:

In many ways, Prager’s women—draped in faux fur, coolly smoking cigarettes—are metaphors for Los Angeles itself, which the artist has called “a strange picture of perfection… with a sense of unease under the surface of all this beauty and promise.” It’s an easy metaphor (and one we’ve seen before) but there is a certain allure to Prager’s images. They recall the roleplay and self-imposed artifice of Cindy Sherman’s film stills; they offer a user-friendly antidote to the sort of palpable grit embraced by other female artists living and working on the West Coast (Katy Grannan and the duo Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn among them); they’re pretty, private, and self-referential—the sort of thing you’d want to hang in a bedroom instead of over the couch—but nonetheless macabre, especially given the recent demise of pretty young things Brittany Murphy and Casey Johnson.

Wolff calls the images ”living dolls,” not because they’re perfect–far from it, in most cases.  Continue Reading »

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Today Katie Roiphe tells us she desperately wants to be slapped around and ravished by Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and John Updike and asks why the rest of us are so uptight about their portrayal of sex, and Mary Daly dropped dead. 

Yes, that’s the same Katie Roiphe who told us back in the 1990s that rape statistics on college campuses were the invention of Women’s Studies departments and their fixation on technicalities like “consent.”  Hey, Katie–I really don’t want to know why you need so desperately to reassure men and lecture other women that rape is a figment of their imaginations, but please:  it’s “The Morning After” already.  Get over it–and find some new material. Continue Reading »

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I watched Rachel Simmons’ A Girl’s Life last night on PBS.  It offered four in-depth profiles of girls from different class and ethnic backgrounds facing four different major challenges in adolescence today:  body image, cyber bullying, violence among girls, and academic achievement.  Interestingly, there was no discussion of sexuality whatsoever–neither homosexuality nor heterosexuality.

My one word review?  Meh.  Longer version:  the show’s four main subjects and interviews with other groups of girls were interesting and their stories poignant, but I didn’t think that their stories were framed in terribly interesting or useful ways.  This is clearly a matter of taste and disciplinary training, but I thought that framing the stories around a theraputic model–using sociology and psychology, primarily–made the show rather limp.  (Then again, PBS’s marketing of the show is aimed at parents of girls, and suggests a somewhat more serious and specific self-help-program-for-your-daughter-and-you than Dr. Wayne Dyer or Suze Orman offer during those endless pledge week marathons.) Continue Reading »

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(WARNING:  NSFW or small children.)  This guy has it exactly right:  Santa, or Satan?  I’ve long thought that the Santa in the Rankin-Bass claymation “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was a major-league jerk (or d!ck, or d-bag, as this video suggests.  H/t to commenter Mother of ALL for sending it along.)  Also, Donner is clearly a Hockey Dad who’s guaranteed to get evicted from the arena at least once a season.

I grew up watching this animated feature, I usually catch it when it’s on broadcast TV during the “Holiday Season,” and I’ve really wondered about the piling on by the adult figures in the first half of the show.  Then again, it’s probably on balance a good show for children, because it features a major hero in gay history, our pal Hermie, the aspiring dentist!  Hermie, Rudolph, and all of the “misfit toys” are clearly stand-ins for disabled, gay, fat, immigrant, or for any kid who gets teased about something on a regular basis.

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Baa Ram U. hit the front page of the Denver Post this morning with an article about the ban on guns that Public Safety and the President’s Cabinet have recommended.  The students disagree, although the article does a very poor job of actually talking to students or showing any proof of this beyond the assertions by leaders of the Associated Students of Baa Ram U.  (I’m not saying they’re dishonest, I’m saying that the reporting for this story is lazy.)

The ASCSU student senate tonight is likely to pass a resolution that asks CSU president Tony Frank to keep current policy, which adheres to the state’s concealed-weapons law. It allows someone with a concealed-weapons permit to carry a handgun almost anywhere on campus.

Only in residence halls are weapons forbidden.

Frank will weigh the ASCSU vote in deciding whether to form a different weapons law for the university, said CSU spokesman Brad Bohlander.

Currently, 23 states allow public campuses or state systems to decide their own weapons policies, with nearly all choosing to be “gun-free,” according to the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

CSU is one of the rare exceptions, deciding in 2003 to follow the state’s concealed-weapons law. The ASCSU points out that concealed weapons have been allowed at Blue Ridge Community College in Virginia since 1995 and at Michigan State University since June.

Longtime readers already know what I think about guns on campus.  They sure as hell don’t make me feel any safer!  But, it doesn’t really matter if guns are “banned” or permitted in classrooms, labs, libraries, and various public spaces on our campus.  Continue Reading »

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Photo by the Associated Press

Via Corrente, Sociological Images notes the use of the word “flesh” to describe the color of the dress Michelle Obama wore to the State Dinner at the White House last week (at right.)  I guess someone didn’t get the memo that that old Crayola color was changed a long time ago to the less racist (but no more accurate) word “peach.”  (I personally would never eat a peach the color of that particular crayon.)  Sociological Images notes that “[t]his is what happens when white people are considered people and black people are considered a special kind of people, black people.  ‘Flesh-colored’ becomes the skin color associated with whites and darker-skinned peoples are left out of the picture altogether.  We see this all the time.  Bandaids, for example, are typically light beige (though they rarely call them ‘flesh-colored’ anymore), as are things like ace bandages.”

By the way:  that’s an awesome dress worn beautifully, and it’s more accurately described as “champagne,” not (pasty) “flesh.”  Aside from the racial implications, “flesh” is just an unlovely and unflattering word.  Continue Reading »

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I was lounging in bed drinking coffee and reading the paper this morning about Attorney General Eric Holder’s recent announcement that several of the 9/11 masterminds would be put on trial in New York, and learned a startling new fact, courtesy of a New York Timesstory by Mark Mazzetti that was excerpted in The Denver Post:  Khalid Sheik Muhammed (“KSM” in National Security shorthand) is only 44 years old!  Yegads.  He’s younger than the President, but looks about half a generation older.  (This photo helps underscore the reasons why so many men shave their beards off when they start turning gray.)  I’m sure his attorney will want him to have a makeover before the trial and to dress him in a western-style suit–but my guess is that he’s going to stick with the full-on jihadi look.

I guess living in caves on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and/or in the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is a very aging lifestyle.  Continue Reading »

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Jeralyn Merritt at TalkLeft has done some exemplary analysis of Health Care Reform and the Stupak amendment added this weekend to the  health insurance reform bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives Saturday night.  Examples:  see here, here, and then she asks, “How About Pre-Natal and Birth Care for Pregnant Undocumented Women” in the U.S. who will necessarily give birth to U.S. citizens?  She links to a Mother Jones story that explains exactly how odious this particular poison pill is in “Stupak is a Radical Change:”

Mother Jones: Why Stupak is more radical than you think.

The two parts to the Stupak amendment:

The Stupak amendment mandates that no federal funds can be used to pay for an abortion or “cover any part of any health plan” that includes coverage of an abortion, except in cases where the mother’s life is in danger or the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest.

Part 1 is just the Hyde Amendment. But, part 2?

Where pro-lifers won big was on the second part, which could significantly limit the availability of private insurance plans that cover the procedure. That’s because Stupak’s amendment doesn’t just apply to the public option—the lower-cost plan to be offered by the government.

The House health care bill will also provide subsidies to help people and small businesses purchase plans on an exchange. This represents a lucrative new market for insurers: anyone earning less than $88,000 for a family of four qualifies for assistance, as well as certain small companies. But to gain access to these new customers, insurers will have to drop abortion coverage from their plans.

That’s A-OK with the forced pregnancy crowd, who are apparently unfamiliar with how private health insurance works now:  we all pay into a big pot, and then we make claims–and yes, those claims are sometimes to cover abortions and all sorts of other medical procedures of which you may or may not approve.  There’s lots of money from premiums paid by people of all political persuasions–pro-choice, pro-life, anti-immigrant, pro-immigrant, etc.–and it all goes to cover services provided to everyone.  It’s stupid for people get all excited when it comes to their pooled tax dollars, as opposed to their pooled private insurance dollars.  What’s next?  So-called “pro-lifers” will demand that their municipal and state taxes not pay for roads driven on or library books checked out by citizens who differ in their political views? 

Oh, and the Stupak amendment contains one of those “life, rape, or incest” qualifiers, which is the biggest load of hot, steaming B.S. ever.  Continue Reading »

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