theshamedynamic

This morning NPR actually blew my mind.  Thomas Piketty, a person I had never heard of, is now my hero.  Why, you ask?

Piketty is a French economist, and France’s government was going to honor his achievements with an award called the Legion of Honor.  He turned it down.  Why, you ask again?  BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT SHOULDN’T BE DECIDING WHO IS HONORABLE!

this guy, right here. hell yeah.

I fist pumped in my car, shouting “hell yeah!”  Because that’s awesome!  Here is a dude who is practicing what he preaches, actually acting on his ideals and beliefs!

Me being me, I had two thoughts occur after hearing this story.  Posers are the scourge of the punk rock scene; as SLC Punk put it, “they’re people who dress like punks but do it for the fashion!”

People who don’t actually act in line with what they’re presenting to the world, people who pretend to know or be something they’re not.  Posers.  And Piketty is the ultimate anti-poser.  Seriously, Green Day just got inducted into the Rock and Roll hall of fame.  For a band that calls itself punk (even though we all secretly know they’re terrible), that is super fucking lame.  Hall of Fame?  Punk is about blowing that shit up, about destroying all of that.

Secondly, the reason PIketty totally rocked my socks off has to do with a study in psychology on conformity.  A dude named Asch did a (now) famous experiment after World War Two, when most social psychologists were trying desperately to understand how “normal” people had done such extraordinarily evil things.  He put a man in a group of “confederates” (people working with the researcher), then showed the group pictures of lines with different lengths and asked them to decide which lines were the same lengths.

The group insisted the wrong lines matched, and here’s the thing – the man placed in the group usually went along with it (about 75% of the time).  It’s SUPER hard to go against the group, even when you know that what you’re agreeing to is wrong.

So props to you, Piketty. You’re a man of ideals, with the courage to go against what most people would probably accept.

Sexualizing women’s bodies is the bread and butter of most American media and commercial advertising.  No, really.

See? WTF!

Sexual objectification is complex, but usually detectable through these seven signs:

1.  The image only shows parts of a (sexualized) person’s body

2.  Sexualized person presented as “stand in” for an object

3.  Sexualized person shown as interchangeable with other(s)

4.  Image affirms the sexiness of violating the body of someone who cannot consent

5.  Sexual availability is the defining characteristic of a person (emphasis mine)

6.  Sexualized person is shown as a commodity – something that can be bought or sold

7.  Sexualized body used as a canvas

(Activity: go through any magazine, and you’ll see 99% of it is sexualized bodies, mostly female bodies.  I dare you.)

Pregnant bodies are traditionally viewed as “other“, as un-sexual, as something we must not find sexy.  This is also a reasoning used to scorn and degrade fat bodies; the only two kinds of bodies we’re not allowed to find sexy are big and bigger.

A fascinating study from a few years ago posits this position comes out of a fundamental rejection of female bodies taking up too much space – to be feminine is to be small, delicate, chaste, virginal, juvenile.  Plus, pregnant women are women who have (gasp) had sex, obviously, which is also a rebellious act.  We looooooove small, skinny, wealthy white women – just look at celebrity magazines touting easy ways to lose your baby weight FAST, showing (white, rich) women whose only weight is in their belly.  The fuck?

Pure garbage.

Whatever your feelings toward pregnancy, I’m confident we can agree about the overarching sexualization of women and girls has negative effects on our culture (and produces lazy, shitty music and media).  With this in mind, I present this balls-awful Joe Boxer ad I saw yesterday (I don’t watch a lot of TV, don’t judge).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N94ES_HI-K8

What the fuck is this shit?  You’re sexualizing female pregnancy to sell me a shitty pair of pajama pants?

Women have a right to feel however they want in whatever bodies they have.  The media needs to stop telling us what to do and how to do it.  STOP!

As embarrassed as I am to admit it, I listened to a Casualties song on the way to work today.

I’m sorry.

Never my favorite band, the Casualties earned my ire (and the ire of the all powerful internet!) after allegations surfaced about poor conduct by the lead singer of the band.  But that is not the subject for today.

What my shuffle came to this morning was a song called “Diehards.”  Here, this is the video for it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjOkJCWZqzU

For those of you too cool or respectable to watch YouTube in the middle of a Thursday afternoon, let me sum up by restating the song’s chorus “We are punx!”

I was thinking of how much punk connects with identity in those who listen to it (or are “in the scene”, as it were).  It’s part of the reason punk is viewed as a musical phase, something people grow out of listening to.  It’s got a dress code (yes, even your weird proto-hippie crust band) and a general code of conduct.  Even when punks punx disagree about what’s important, we generally have some similar values and ethics.

So, you’ve got your cred.  You stud and paint your own leathers, you taught yourself to (badly) play the drums, you drink the finest malt liquors (or not) and you rent a room in a house with ten other like-minded people.  Now what?

Punk was started by groups of people who were so frustrated and angry with the system as it stood, they created identities, art and culture in opposition to mainstream culture.  One of the clothing labels I’ve seen most often is “No Future.”  There’s a million songs about how there’s no future for us, that life is for the young…so what happens when we grow up?  What happens when we’re 30 and 40 and 50 (and 80) and our backs hurt from stage dives, our teeth are rotten because we can’t afford health insurance, we’ve got fifty bucks under the mattress because we don’t trust the banks and can’t hold a job?

See: Shane McGowan, former lead singer of the Pogues

It’s always hard to change your identity (there’s even a branch of therapy specifically devoted to it, called narrative therapy).  Anyone who’s come out as LGBTQI, anyone who’s made a life in a different country, or even gotten a divorce, can tell you about the anxiety, fear and disillusionment that comes when you change an integral part of who you are.  We don’t have to be conformists or buy into the capitalism, consumer driven bullshit to live meaningful punk rock lives.  You might never be Joe Strummer, trying to make changes from the stage on down.

I believe our only hope is to channel the rage, disillusionment and innovative creativity present in our music and culture, and put it to work.  It doesn’t really work to say “fuck the system” if you can’t create a better system (as Ben Harper sang, “what good is a cynic with no better plan?”).  It doesn’t matter if you think the world is unjust if you coast through that world.

Okay, so you care about (issue here).  What are you going to do about it, punk?

Last night I watched 22 Jump Street with a friend.  Ashamed as I am to say it, I loved the first movie – it changed my opinion of Channing Tatum (handsome lunk) for the better.

In this movie (SPOILER ALERT), Doug (Jonah Hill) and Brad (the hotness) are put into a state college to ferret out a dangerous drug and supplier.  It’s presented in much the same way as the plot of the first movie.

In the course of their undercover work, Doug meets a woman who he likes (surprise!) and in the course of hanging out and making friends, has sex with her.  It is presented as consensual and positive (although, hilariously, he states “I’m not the hit it and quit it type; I’m more the hit it, keep on hitting it, on a physical and emotional level, type” after she tries to kick him out).  When he gets back to the police station, as an excuse for not having new information about his case, he explains he “got laid” and got high fives from his colleagues, including his boss, Ice Cube.

On parents weekend, he learns Ice Cube is the father of the girl he had sex with.

He made this face, right here, for at least 5 minutes.

Hilarity (kind of) ensues; Ice Cube is angry, throwing things around, glaring at Doug, sending threatening text messages (including “you’re a dead man “Doug”).  This drove me kind of bonkers, but I couldn’t figure out why.

It came to me this morning.

Fuck you, Ice Cube.  You create and encourage the kind of environment where women are conquests, prizes to be won, marks to be taken.  You are a part of a place where high-fiving for getting laid is acceptable and encouraged.  You broke your scary, angry boss exterior to support a conquest, yet when it’s your daughter suddenly it’s not ok?

You want different things for your daughter, but support systems and attitudes (in a workplace where you hold power to make changes and form attitudes about sex) that ensure things won’t be different.  If you’re okay with a sexual escapade, with it being a conquest rather than an intimate, meaningful encounter with another human being, you’re okay with your daughter being less than a person.  It is NOT okay for you to be angry and upset when your underlings act in accordance with your values.  It is NOT okay to punish your daughter and those around you with your anger, when you created the very environment needed for him to “get laid.”   (Is there a reason we don’t see many female officers in this space?)

You can’t pick and choose who you treat like a person.  You can’t decide women are meaningless and worthy of a high five, then realize you’d like your daughter treated as a whole person with hopes, thoughts and dreams.

And by the way?  Your daughter’s sexual activity is none of your damn business.  Her purity and virginity are no longer selling points or your property to oversee.  If she is a whole person, she gets to decide who she has sex with.

It made me mad because this sort of behavior, being fine with treating human beings like shit unless you know them personally, is normal.  It is everywhere.  It’s the dude talking about bitches, unless it’s someone’s sister and they say “not cool, bro, that’s my sister.”  Like your personal relationships with women are the ONLY THING MAKING THEM WORTHY OF RESPECT AS WHOLE PEOPLE.

If you’re going to be that angry, stop enforcing these sexist, patriarchal attitudes.

(P.S. This is made worse by Channing Tatum’s insistence on calling out the drug dealers for calling him a “faggot”, yet dies laughing about the sexual conquest and only refers to women as “hot” and calls other people “pussies” all the time.  God damn it!)

When I was a child, mom used to take me (and later, my little sister and me) to church. We were raised Lutheran, and raised in a very small church; my confirmation class had three people in it, including myself. I continued attending church until I graduated from high school, mostly because it was normal in our house and because I was a part of the choir, which I loved.

I stopped going to church at age 17, and haven’t been since, with unfortunate exception for religious funerals.

One sermon that still sticks with me, one of maybe five, is one of the talents. In this sermon, we were told god gave three people talents (money), and given two weeks to grow these talents. One person buried their talents, one person lost his, one person invested and doubled their original gifts. God was said to love the latter two most of all, because they worked to do something with what they were given

However, this morning I was watching some documentaries (my solution for boredom during my bouts of insomnia), including one (mediocre) called “The One Percent” and one (outstanding), “The Black Power Mixtape”, thinking about privilege.   In a lot of ways, privilege is like the old story of talents.

Your skin color, your class at birth, your family of origin – these are things over which we have no control. We do have control over what we do, especially those born into privileged classes, racial strata etc. If you are born white, you can’t change and decide to be born black. You can choose to use your privilege to give opportunity to people who may not otherwise have a voice.

People who think this way need to burn for justice. We need to speak louder, use our place and our voices to amplify those marginalized by oppression. We need to remember our history and learn the lessons of Malcolm X, of Attica prison, of the Soledad brothers, of Angela Davis, of bell hooks. This is not anti-American. This is pro-American people.

When our time here is done, and we are asked what we have done to make this world better with our privilege and talents, how will you answer?