Épisode Deux

Here is Something That Happened to Me Today

I’m smart.

Hey, hey you

I have a job now. And my job is to get you to this exciting website to learn about cool volunteer opportunities if you’re in Hamilton, Ontario during July.

When You’re Instrinsically NSFW

Awwwww...

SALLY AVERT YOUR EYES! YOU'LL BE TURNED TO SALT! VIIIIIILE! SIN! SiiiIIIIIIIIIiiiiN!

So about a month ago there was a Huffington Post*…post that’s been the talk of the town. Now, I don’t really watch Modern Family (maybe seen two episodes), and a lot of people are pointing to one of the men being characterized as really uptight and adverse to public displays of affection, but if that were the case, how is less offensive that a character is SPECIFICALLY WRITTEN to conveniently avoid showing something regarded as controversial on television, but which would be such a ho-hum part of coupled life that its absence is conspicuous? Not to mention that ‘tetchy’ and ‘uptight’ are part of some unflattering gay stereotypes. Also others bring up the fact that the couple weirdly doesn’t show affection in private either. Shying away from showing a same gender couple demonstrating normal non-sexual affection is on the same continuum as forcing people back into the closet.

The fact is, a lot of people regard same sex displays of affection as intrinsically more jarring, sexual or inappropriate than the same acts performed by opposite sex couples. This is probably an echo of a long history of calling queer people deviants and perverts. I hesitate to identify myself as bisexual** because then whenever some people look at you they just think SEX SEX NAUGHTY HOT SEX. But you have to do it or else you’re just presumed heterosexual. You know, normal, and not particularly kinky unless you decide to perform a knot demonstration at the company picnic.

I know a lot of my friends –even my more progressive friends– wouldn’t blink at the top photo of my Davefriend and I pecking, but would do a bit of a double take at Jeremy Ames and Taka Ariga doing the exact same thing. I admit that I do it sometimes, when I encounter same sex affection when I’m not expecting it, and I’m working to stamp it out, because double taking at people going about their business is rude.

I think my surprise is partially because deep down I have some ingrained voice telling me it’s unusual which is dangerously close to not normal. I certainly don’t want to be in the same intellectual galaxy as those who wrote in to the Washington Post to gripe about this picture even being shown. When gay marriage was legalized in D.C., the Post reported on this big news story on the front page, and yes, included this big, color photo of the two men celebrating the decision. Aside from the overt homophobia, and visceral horror, at something so tiny (and kind of boring even — I’ve kissed my grandmother that way), I noticed a couple remarks or thoughts that I’ve heard from people that nominally support gay rights.

One was, keep it on the inside of the paper where I can avoid it, or essentially ‘okay, you have to report on it but do I have to SEE it’. This is a cousin of ‘don’t flaunt it’. This is a cousin of ‘keep it in the bedroom’. This is a cousin of Bill O’Reilly screaming “WHY DON’T YOU SHUT UP ABOUT YOUR SEX LIFE” at a gay teen on his show talking about how he was bullied after coming out of the closet. This is just enforcing the closet. Subconsciously, people equate just living their lives with a sort of exhibitionism. Dave and I aren’t seen as rubbing anything in anyone’s face. We’re taking a snapshot at a party. I doubt anyone would read anything sexual into it, because it was a peck. The object isn’t arousal, it was me showing Dave that I think he’s neat and I’m happy with him. But Jeremy and Taka are perverse, I guess. If only there were a place to shut them away, where we wouldn’t have to be aware of their nasty, over-the-top pecking. Maybe a closet? People who say ‘I don’t have a problem with gay people, I just don’t want to see it because gross, yuck, keep it awaaaaaay,’ mean that they only have a problem with identifiably gay people. Oh, I see, much better.

The other remark I saw was a woman complaining about her children possibly seeing this ‘disturbing’ image. This could be another care of equating the same act with dirty, dirty sex in one case, and normal, chaste affection in another. Sometimes, though, I wonder if it’s an echo of the previous generation’s bigoted equating of gay men and pedophilia. Either way, a lot of people, even nominally progressive ones, feel a need to keep identifiably queer people away from their kids, because queer people are intrinsically not ‘family-friendly’. This is willfully ignoring reality. QUEER PEOPLE HAVE FAMILIES. Children have gay parents now. Children need to have their own real families affirmed and reflected in the media, not made invisible and naughty and something to talk about in soft voices. Even beyond the children we** raise, what of the children and youth that belong to our community as one of our own? When I hear WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN in regards to the supposed ills of gay marriage, gay adoption, allowing gay people to think they’re equal, I think WHAT ABOUT OUR CHILDREN. If you ask any queer person how they felt growing up, they talk about some measure of bullying and traumatic experiences, being rejected by their own parents or silently wondering if their families hate them from inside their closets. Queer-identified teens are two to three times more likely to commit suicide than their straight peers. Disproportionate amounts of queer youth are kicked out of their homes and turned out on the street. There is far more concrete damage caused to children from a society that regards them as intrinsically nasty and unequal, than from seeing two men kiss.

To a lot of people, Jeremy and Taka’s kiss seems more like a display than mine and Dave’s, more like flaunting, and even progressive people are made uncomfortable, even if moments ago they pecked their opposite sex partner goodbye. Some will even demand to be protected from it. It’s a sort of “benign” discrimination a lot of people engage in, and see as justified and harmless. Examine your feelings, though. Is what you’re asking fair? And why are you asking it? Kissing doesn’t need to be a political act, if society doesn’t make it so.

*Note: Normally I avoid HuffPo due to their need to swaddle a child rapist in the finest silks and serve him soft cheese and caviar round the clock.
**I identify as bisexual, but I am monogamously with Dave at the moment.

Updates

Working on a bigger post. Applying to job after job after what I thought was a sure thing slipped through my fingers. Drawing, drawing, drawing. I have some comic scripts written, but I don’t have the skillz to implement them yet. Tired from yesterday, a little hot. But I have stuffs to do, so I’m happy.

Internets and Sensitivity: Lions and Trollers and Bears Oh My

*use of the r word*
I’ll start by saying that I follow and comment on a host of progressive, mostly feminist, blogs and websites. I like engaging about identity issues and marginalization. I like it too much; my comments are turning into novels. I should probably blog about it, but the idea brings up issues I have with my selective sensitivity.

I used to hang out on 4chan and it made me an ugly and callous person. I try to limit my time on SomethingAwful because I could start to see it seep into the way I think after I’m there for a few hours in a row. I’m a big believer of being aware of what can inform your perspectives or attitudes. It can be insidious. I remember having a light switch go off when I watched this short (it’s 17 minutes long, watch it) film on black models and read this article supposing what it would be like if black women were white women. I didn’t find black women particularly attractive, or thought about what I expected them to look like to be considered attractive, and I viewed that as a personal quirk. I’m kicking myself about it now, because of course for centuries European features were viewed as beautiful and the media I consumed would probably reflect that. Hell, when I lived in Peru I knew all the models and actresses where probably all plucked from Miraflores and looked nothing like the people around me. I mean, I always knew that the media sold a particular kind of beauty but I didn’t think of it in racial terms, at least, I didn’t think of how it would apply to black women. I realize now how profoundly ignorant that is, and how cultural forces got under my skin without my realizing it. I also realize how the incredulity I feel is part of my privilege, that I am allowed to not be conscious of the situation of other groups of people and I can feel surprised at bigotry.

So I’m trying to reclaim a degree of control on how I perceive and react to things. Specifically, I want to control my sensitivity to things. I got off /b/ because I realized it blunted my empathy. Partially I got into social justice blogs in an attempt to be more aware of others’ suffering. It’s maybe a weird transformation that I used to call myself a /b/tard and now I cringe to even see that word. One day I walked around on campus and I found out that a word I had used myself and that I wasn’t particularly aware of before -retard- became pointed and jarring to my ears. I developed an acuity to it by listening to those that are hurt by the word, including some real life and internet friends, and deciding to listen for it and imagining how it might feel. So now automatically I twinge a bit at its public use.

*trigger warning this paragraph for gore*
But! I also deliberately sought out gory images for a while because I thought I might work in the health field and I wanted to get used to seeing such things so I wouldn’t fall to pieces. My aunt is a doctor, and she worked in an emergency room in South Africa for a time, where she saw a lot more stab and gunshot wounds than she was used to seeing in Canada. She showed me a video of a young man who had an six-inch knife sunk to the hilt into his eye, and showed the doctors having to use a hardware hammer to chip it out. I had numbed myself to his physical pain (and I think he had too; my aunt told me there was no anesthesia but the man didn’t cry out and his eyes were glazed over with what looked like shock) but if anyone had made a cruel remark on his social situation or race I would feel a twinge.

To be a good doctor, you have to strike a weird balance of sensitivity and insensitivity. A good doctor couldn’t freak out or become overwhelmed by the extreme pain of others, yet she should be aware of it. She should seek to minimize and understand her patients’ pain, but not to flinch from inflicting necessary pain. You have to be Dorothy, empathetic yet strong. To me, a lot of social justice bloggers have a similar job. They have to be conscious of, and expose, the subtler forms of oppression. It’s also probably best that they not only recognize the oppression, but feel a little stab of soreness at its recognition, so that they can inject passion into their writing and advocacy. Like how I feel about the aforementioned “retard”. But somehow, even when doing the work of feeling empathy at the little things, you must also be strong enough to handle overtly bigoted trolls. Periodically, one of the bloggers will show us a glimpse of the backstage of their blogs, and it is plenty heinous. Renee will show us her hate mail I’ll hear about people starting up parallel hate blogs. Sometimes it will cross over into real life stalkers and phone calls. The amazing Sady Doyle and Amanda Hess write about the sorts of issues that lady bloggers particularly can face. So I guess my question/source of contention is “How do you develop a thick skin to all the harassment and trollery while still being necessarily sensitive to subtler forms of oppression?” Maybe, like doctors, and the way I’ve developed my own sensitivities and numbnesses, it is just a question of practice. Just going out and doing the work, day after day until you’re inured and responsive to the appropriate things. My practice of deconstructing social issues only in safe spaces with like minded people (that know all the jargon) has made me sensitive to trollery. Beyond that it has blunted my debating skills. I have become a bit mystified with how the other side thinks so I can’t engage with them so well on certain issue. I’ve probably become too dependent on moderators to shield me from the worst of it with their own minds and bodies. Because, seriously, they are amazing and I don’t know how they do it. I don’t want to become a full time dedicated ISSUES BLOGGER OF GREAT PITH AND MOMENT, but these things cross my mind and I’d like to be able to talk about them.

I have an idea kicking around that I’ve been thinking about for a while. Maybe I’ll go ahead and write up a post and see how that goes. The proposed topic is homophobia, and I’m actually fairly practiced at shutting down objections to that, so I feel I can do it. I’m pretty small, so I think unless a big antagonistic website links to unleash their hordes upon me, I’ll be okay. That seems to be a big source of the swarms of gnats that’ll plague a site from time to time. Some hostile big blogger will link to you and essentially say “Fly my pretties, fly! Get them and their little dogs too!” But you guys stop them and fight them off! So, here’s to the Dorothys of the world. You are good and brave and true.

Audience of One

I used to have a friend I interacted with mainly by internet. The mode of discourse changed the way I engaged with the world. It started off with my usual social trickery, digging around for funny links and pulling out trivia to make myself seem well rounded and fun. I was developing a big fat internet crush on this friend-of-a-friend who really only existed as lines of hilarious, engaging text. Meeting him in real life made it worse, and I developed some habits in that mess, some good, some bad.

Bad: -Staying up till 2 am with 4 hour conversations; not good for the school or for the sleep. These are things that I still struggle with.
-All sorts of navel gazing and armchair psychology.
-Many kinds of drama and uncertainty.

Good: Learning to observe.

My removed crushly buddy, whom I met in person a total of 5 times, liked analyzing people and situations. He had a journalist’s mind for detail. Words, facial expressions, tones. Usually he’d conjure up funny things that happened to him, sometimes significant things. His study of human behavior seemed fruitful to me. He knew exactly what to say to make me feel glad, self confident, or valued, even when he just had some text and pauses to suss out tone. I started doing it back. Everyday on the bus or at the mall or at school I’d pay close attention to my surroundings. If someone looked interesting or said something interesting, I learned to watch them closely without looking like I was. I would think of their intentions, their emotions, and I would amuse myself by thinking of beautiful analogies or metaphors. I would think of sarcastic comments . (For a man arguing with a Muay Thai instructor that “Asians can’t fight because their fists are smaller” I thought “do you understand the concept of a bullet?”) I would gather these impressions, repeat them for memory and wait gleefully all day to unload. They were a big, heavy sloshing bucket I’d carry around with me until I could talk to Guy, trying not to spill anything, ready for me to dump out and nourish our conversation. I’d tailor the stories to him, the snippets, edit them down, rephrase them all day until I knew I’d make him laugh or at least act impressed with my insight. I’d map out and rehearse imaginary conversations with him, perfecting pacing. I looked forward to his feedback for hours. “I have lots of words today,” I’d tell Dude. I’d enjoy the end part a lot because it was tied to his approval and the associated crushiness.

What I found, however, was that I was starting to like the beginning part most of all, the going into the world with my bucket and collecting my words, and not just because I was getting gems for Chap. Growing up, I was a sullen little girl with bad posture. I didn’t like other people. I looked down at the ground and mumbled, wanting to curl up, wanting to disengage. My favourite part of the day would be disappearing under my bed covers with a book. I still get like that at times. It’s been a lifelong process shaking my shyness and moroseness off. The practice of getting words for Man did a lot to lift my forehead up, to look at the world and soak up its details, its people, to empathize. It got me out doing things and fully participating in them, ostensibly to impress Lad but I began to cherish the words and the details for myself.

Things went sour with Fella in ways that I don’t want to detail to all and sundry, but he has left me with my word gathering and handling process. I still write or interact in a very ‘instant messaging story for Gentleman’ way. I have a bunch of predetermined little stories or impressions or jokes or images to whip out at parties or to talk to friends. I have about eight sketchy bus stories. I have a man who does sit ups in his driveway with a giant erection. I have me driving through cornfields with a scubadiving buddy and her 26-year-old beardly fiancee in the backseat playing Yesterday on a recorder. It’s all very disjointed and short term. I don’t have many narratives that encompass more than two days. I have a hard time evaluating movies or books as a whole, I just think of them as a collection of individual scenes and the good ones stick out (That’s probably why I like Wes Anderson. I think if I was any sort of holistic, serious critic I’d probably hate him). I’m very open to changing the subsequent steps in my word-handling. That is shifting all the time and I wouldn’t mind a different end product. The first part, the gathering, that I refuse to let go. I don’t do it as often as my shmoopie isn’t long distance, so we don’t do daily phone calls, and also he’s with me for a lot of the time so telling him stories about things he’s been present for is redundant and silly. The impetus is blunted without a flesh-and-blood audience, or rather, a solid back and forth, a discussion with a real person. But sometimes I’ll go out and collect the words for myself and my journal. I have a little voice that will take in all my words, sort through them, and offer gentle criticism, if I work a bit to call it up. There’s a source of vigor and energy now, and it’s something I can draw from when I need it. Sometimes I’ll go out at 6 am to watch the world wake up and take pictures. Sometimes I’ll take the bus even if I don’t need to. Sometimes I’ll shut up and look at my conversation partners’ faces. A lot of the time I’ll feel trapped in my head, and my thoughts start to rip each other apart like battery hens driven insane by being packed too tightly to move. But sometimes I’ll be at peace.

I drew this

I’ll probably tweak the colouring a bit. I intend to use this for a future project, so expect to see that happy smog-choked sun again in the future. Especially if you live in Los Angeles.

She Blinded Me With Science

So it’s been a couple months. Whatever mice and cockroaches might have been following me must have passed away by now. I guess the new readership must be spiders as this thing is covered in cobwebs.

Anyways, I’m reneging on all scheduled promises. I feel strict promises are silly when my readership is so low and I have other things in my life. If I just write what and when I feel like, and something comes of it, then that’s great. Otherwise forcing myself to write crap to nobody feels like laying on the accelerator while my wheels spin in frictionless mud. Maybe I’m lazy. I tell my anyone who pokes around that I have ‘motivation issues.’ It’s probably an excuse, but beating myself up over it exacerbates the problem. So, what draws me out of retirement? This SMBC reminded me of a few perceptions and goals I had.

When I was younger, I fancied being a photojournalist. I wrote (poorly) for the school website, joined photography and poured over National Geographic. I’ve always been a voracious reader, though as I age I seem to go more for articles and editorials over novels. I cultivated an abiding interest in the natural sciences through my field work out in BC and talented biology teachers slipping me tidbits of information. ‘I will be a science writer!’ thought bright eyed and bushy haired Jill.

At 21, I am much less enthusiastic about that goal for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, it’s become increasingly clear to me how the internets are choking the life from print journalism and arguably journalistic standards, but I won’t get into that here. Perhaps I’ll make a later post. I am also at a bit of a loss for how one breaks into that business without industry contacts, and hem and haw about journalism school. Most importantly, I learned a thing or two about the specialty of ‘science journalism’.

As I got more formal training in how science works, and the world of uncertainty it worked in, I realized how holding to its sort of accuracy would result in terrible headlines. Scientific models strive to be predictive and probabilistic. Bookies would make good scientists. Science observes the cosmic horse race, teases out the factors that effect how the horses run, and the magnitude of those effects, and finally comes up with odds. Some factors will be linked, or only true given certain conditions. For instance, how many foals a horse has had would most likely only be significant for mares than for stallions. Also, whether a horse is a mare or a stallion will by itself influence how the animal runs. All these conditions and coefficients don’t translate into snappy sound bites. “For the average person,” writes Andrew Weaver in his popular climate change book Keeping Our Cool, “the scientific jargon translates into gobbledygook. Getting a yes or no answer from scientists is almost impossible.” So the following happens:

In this way, the media twists science the way it twists everything else, with oversimplification and sensationalization, but it seems like a more heinous sin in this case. Science is supposed to offer an objective truth into how the natural world works. I feel many people think that science is hard to spin in a newspaper. They expect scientists to uncover simple fundamental truths like ‘a causes b.’ If a didn’t cause b, they couldn’t print that, that’s a baldfaced lie, right? People put a lot of stock in their experts in white coats. Beyond this, an unfamiliarity with the scientific publication process might lead journalists and their readers to be confused as to who is an expert in their field. Most people don’t read peer-reviewed academic scientific journals to keep abreast of advancements. It’s unreasonable to expect everyone to have the time and knowledge to read things written in specialist language only experts can understand. The popular media is expected to translate and contextualize major new breakthroughs. So a lot is taken at face value.

Andrew Weaver describes what happens when the Times Columnist (of Victoria, BC) which claims an expert said “a rise of five metres [of the water in Victoria harbour] by Christmas is a very real possibility.” Weaver, a trusted climate expert at the University of Victoria who has done extensive work for the IPCC wasn’t taken in by the alarmist claims. “What concerned me most about this article was that it was on a page boldly labeled SCIENCE with a scientific looking map” He shortly received calls from several panicked local residents, and had to calm them down.

Another problem, according to Weaver, “has been the failed application of the ethical obligation of journalists to report balance.” A lot of the time, balance means bringing in one proponent of one view, and one proponent of the opposite view, and to allow them equal airtime. This has arguably led to increased legitimacy for climate deniers, and causes confusion about the state of consensus in the scientific community. Here’s one person with scientific sounding credentials saying that climate change is real and caused by human activity, and here’s another person with scientific sounding credentials saying that it’s not real, or if it is, not caused by humans. So this issue must not be settled right? They’re uncertain about it (and here the poorly understood concept of scientific uncertainty compounds the problem) aren’t they? Must be a vigourous scientific debate going on among the leading experts. Here Weaver quotes Ross Gelbspan, an editor and reporter in his book The Heat is On.

“The professional canon of journalistic fairness requires reporters who write about a controversy to present points of view. When the issue is of a political or social nature, fairness –presenting the most compelling arguments of both sides with equal weight — is a fundamental check on biased reporting. But this canon causes problems when it is applied to the issue of science. It seems to demand that journalists present competing points of view as though they had equal scientific weight, when actually they do not.”

Overall, Weaver doesn’t blame the mistranslation on science reporters themselves, as they are often covering science stories “off the side of their desk.” He continues “Some may have been political correspondents in an earlier life, but company reorganizations and seniority issues bumped them to the science portfolio” I’ll add here that most journalists don’t write their own headlines, so the sensationalistic aspect may be out of their hands.

All this is taken from the first chapter of Weaver’s book, called “Global Warming in the News,” and although he enumerates some common obstacles to accurate scientific reporting, he closes with an optimistic remark.

“I have enormous respect for the work journalists do… I have only met a small handful who I believe are more interested in using their stories to influence public opinion through the assertion of their own ideological principles than they are in trying to represent the facts accurately. I have noticed a very significant shift in the reporting of global warming over the past two years, a shift away from ‘he said, she said’ to a more accurate, less sensational approach.”

If that’s true, that’s obviously a good thing. But the flaws Weaver has identified in scientific reporting are glaring. The twinkle in my eye I once had for becoming a popular science reporter (and living the artsci dream) has become more of a determined hard glint. I kind of want to save the field. The idea of most people being shunted into scientific reporting bothers me, that it’s somehow less prestigious or a bad career move. I would love to see a resurgence of public interest in science. I would like to see some qualifications put in place so only people who want to get that job will. I would like to see a class in journalism schools covering basic scientific concepts like scientific uncertainty and the scientific method, to avoid misunderstanding what is meant. The ill-defined standards for balance and determining who’s an expert bother me too. Most well-respected publications have a written code of journalistic standards and ethics. They would do well to include a special, well-defined section for scientific reporting.

I don’t know how we would achieve these things. I suppose the most I could expect to do is to be excellent in my own science reporting, were I to take that career path. Journalism’s becoming increasingly fluid, and it responds to a mostly unscientific public, and I’m suggesting increased rigidity. I could dream of becoming the editor of a major newspaper or president of an influential journalism school. We’ll have to see if those institutions mean anything by the time I get there.

Hello friends

This week my Davefriend is visiting from Winnipeg, and I have various appointments including a job interview I’d really liked to do well in, so that I’ll no longer have to work such long hours. No Thursday Recommended Listening this week.