In-Your-Face Hyperbole is not Actually a Thing

11 Jun

Over the past few days I have been shocked by how active the women who are supportive of the Men’s Rights Movement (MRM) are.  I would say that the majority of comments on my blog and interactions on my normally silent Twitter account have been from women.  I knew they were out there but I didn’t know they were so chatty.  All the power to them but I just had no idea.  You really do learn something new every day.  There is one lady, named Suzy, who has been a very avid commenter on my blog the past few days and I was hoping to maybe engage with something that she sent me yesterday.  Also, I might engage with a few other comments.  Here goes.

On Monday I wrote a post all about the conference being organized by Paul Elam of A Voice for Men (AVfM) in Detroit and the protest that was organized by my friend Emma in an attempt to get the DoubleTree Hotel, where the conference is scheduled to happen, to cancel it.  One commenter was very upset by the goals of this protest and wrote me this:

obviously you don’t think this group has a right to their opinions if you’re shutting down attempts to express them. I don’t identify with men’s rights or any political group but I am 100% against the idea of shutting down a conference of speaker. You’re an asshole

I actually do think the group has the right to their opinions and I am pretty sure that I stated that clearly in both of the posts I wrote concerning this issue.  What this commenter is saying, it seems to me, is that the MRM has a right to their free expression of their opinions but I don’t have the right to speak out against them?  Am I getting this right?  So, maybe this commenter is actually only 95% against the idea of shutting down a “conference of speaker?” I know that my blog doesn’t qualify as a conference, per se, but I do think that my ability to speak out against the conference, and in support of my friend, is somewhat important.  I also think that the DoubleTree is a privately owned business and therefore can choose to not host things if they think it will put other guests at risk or, more realistically in this age of capitalism, if it will impact their bottom line which it very well might.  For what it’s worth I know I won’t be staying in any Hilton-owned properties any time soon.

Anyway, back to Suzy.  Yesterday she sent me this following comment in response to a response I made to another comment:

What you call “violent and hate-filled,” we call “in-your-face hyperbole.” Before Paul started using it, many people struggling to address men’s issues were silenced and ignored for DECADES. Now that we use it routinely the public is finally beginning to notice that the Men’s Human Rights Movement exists, so I think you are mistaken when you say, “The only thing it achieves, in my opinion, is to make the issue itself seem less important, less real.”

What it actually achieves, is to bring the issues out into public view where well-funded feminists can no longer control the discussion. If you sincerely care about gender equality, you would warmly welcome the honest perspective of the other half of the population, wouldn’t you?

I just… okay.  I don’t actually know how to proceed from here.  I have been trying very hard to stay even keeled and respectful and all that but this was honestly one of the most absurd things I have ever received.  It is partly absurd because it seems to me that Suzy did not actually read any of the things that I wrote but instead went into my posts with an idea of who I am and what I think and responded to that.  The other part of the absurdity is maybe more complex but an interesting thing, I think, and applies to people outside of the MRM.  It really boils down to this:

The idea that all publicity is good publicity is simply wrong.

People aren’t talking about the MRM because they have been suddenly awoken from decades of ignorant slumber, but instead because a lot of the things said by the MRM are incredibly offensive and actually counter-productive to their movement.  Hyperbolically proclaiming that October be called “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” does not raise awareness about the very real issue of domestic violence against men, but instead calls attention to the misguided tactics of Elam and the MRM.  That was what I was saying when I wrote that “the only thing it achieves, in my opinion, is to make the issue itself seem less important, less real.”  And, if Suzy had really read my comment she would have seen that I expressed the fact that I think that same thing applies to feminists.  Making jokes in support of violence against anyone, men or women, does not advance the goals of your cause which is, supposedly, to end such violence.  All it does is distract people from the issue at hand and get them to dismiss your comments as the rantings of women-hating, misogynistic individuals.  And guess what?  That is precisely what has happened!

What I am trying to say is that the way in which people express things is actually important, it does actually matter for the outcome.  I think that you would find that there are more sympathetic ears out there than you may at first assume.  But when you approach an argument in what you call “in-your-face hyperbole” what you really end up doing is ending the conversation.  The second someone comes at me with some bullshit about “Bash a Violent Woman Month,” is the second I completely dismiss anything that person says afterwards. Period. End of story.  And that is one of the major reasons a lot of people are angry about this conference.  It isn’t that there is nothing to talk about, it isn’t about the content of a lot of the issues the MRM wants to discuss and bring to light, it is the social media and the insane number of hateful comments floating around the internet.  Not least of which was the comparison that Dean Esmay made of myself (or maybe Emma? I’m sort of confused.) to George Wallace.  I mean, please.

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Just a Few Words on Doxxing

10 Jun

So over the past 24 hours or so I received quite a number of nice comments from my friends on the internet.  So thank you all for sharing your opinions with me.  A special thanks goes to the individual who sent me a link to this article about a woman in Washington who was diagnosed with PTSD after experiencing extensive online bullying.  This Twitter user was concerned about the effects of online bullying on my delicate psyche and advised me to be sure to get to a psychiatric hospital stat.  See?  (Mostly I was hoping to show off the fact that I learned how to embed a Tweet in my blog.  I still have a few kinks to work out, clearly.)

I just want to let @QuayBangz know that here in New York we have access to all sorts of top of the line medical facilities!  That being said, I think I will be okay but thanks so very much for your concern.

I also was hoping to address a comment I received from Jonathan Taylor of the website “A Voice for Male Students.”  He pointed out a few concerns he had about my post so I was hoping to address one of them in particular.  In his well-organized list of points* he said the following:

Emma’s email address and picture were all publicly available before the AVFMS article. Doxxing is when someone exposes private information that others have taken pains to hide. This is not the case here, where she voluntarily and of her own initiative provided all the information to the world. Gathering information together that another person has given you is not the same as doxxing.

Actually, according to a Wikipedia entry on doxxing,

Doxing (spelling variant Doxxing) is an abbreviation of document tracing, the Internet-based practice of researching and publishing personally identifiable information about an individual.  The methods employed in pursuit of this information range from searching publicly available databases and social media websites like Facebook to hacking and social engineering. It is closely related to cyber-vigilantism, hacktivism, and cyber-bullying.

And then here from the Economist:

The term “dox” (also spelt “doxx”, and short for “[dropping] documents”) first came into vogue as a verb around a decade ago, referring to malicious hackers’ habit of collecting personal and private information, including home addresses and national identity numbers. The data are often released publicly against a person’s wishes.

So, providing her photograph and email address, even though it could be easily found on the internet, does in fact fall under the umbrella of doxxing.

So here’s the thing about it.  Doxxing is not illegal, at the moment anyway.  The law is always a few years behind technology so it will be interesting to see how we deal with these sorts of issues in the coming years.  That being said, even if doxxing were illegal, I doubt that Mr. Taylor’s publishing of Emma’s photograph and email address would make waves considering the extreme ways other people doxx those who they are intimidated by.  But I also think that most of us on the internet, and especially intelligent individuals like Mr. Taylor seems to be, are able to follow the potential chain of events through to their logical conclusions.  If we have been blogging long enough, we are more or less aware of who our audience is.  I don’t have a very broad readership so most of the people who consistently read my blogs are people I know, or people who know people I know.  (Except for all the people who read this post about my dad which I am still super perplexed by.)  Even still, I try to err on the side of responsibility.  What I am trying to say is that Mr. Taylor is aware of who his readers are.  He has a very detailed Mission Statement and explains in detail The Nine Values that all posts associated with his site will adhere to.  This is part of the description of those Values:

The goal of advocacy is not to win per se, but rather to win over. We do so by demonstrating to the world in our words and actions how our values differ from those with whom we disagree, and how our values make the world a better place to live. To that end, for those officially affiliated with this website, these Nine Values are not suggestions which we may accept or dismiss as the mood suits us, but rather a code of conduct reflecting the high standards by which the quality and integrity of this website will be maintained and the degree to which we will be successful.

The thing is that I have spent only the better part of the last week scrolling through various MRA (or MHRA as some prefer to call it) websites and on just about all of them have encountered a lot of hateful words and misguided articles.  I would bet a fair sum of money that Mr. Taylor is perfectly aware of the tendency of the more radical people associated with his movement.  He knows they read him.  He knows the opinions that they have and the ways they express them.  I think it would be safe for me to assume that, by posting Emma’s email address on his own website, he would inspire less “principled” people to respond in kind and I think that was entirely irresponsible.  By Googling Emma, I discovered her email on various MRA websites calling her all sorts of names that I prefer not to repeat here.  It is all well and good to adhere to your own standards, but that sort of goes out the window when you let other people do your dirty work for you.

I don’t know.  We’re all adults here.  Mr. Taylor and his supporters, as I have said before, are welcome to their own opinions and the nonviolent expression of those opinions.  I am guaranteed this same thing, as is Emma and her co-activists in Detroit.  But I also think there should be a reasonable assumption that people won’t hit below the belt, as it were.  That being said, feel free to email me at franklyrebekah@gmail.com if you feel so inclined.  We can engage in an adult conversation there.  I might quote you here, but no matter how available your email address, home address, place of employment or photographs are, they will never appear on this site.

*This was not intended to be sarcastic in the least.  He sent me a comment with numbered points which I really appreciated.  I love listing things.

The term “dox” (also spelt “doxx”, and short for “[dropping] documents”) first came into vogue as a verb around a decade ago, referring to malicious hackers’ habit of collecting personal and private information, including home addresses and national identity numbers. The data are often released publicly against a person’s wishes. – See more at: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/03/economist-explains-9#sthash.NJlPdAi

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Detroit and the International Conference on Men’s Rights

9 Jun

All comments of an abusive or hateful nature will not be approved for publication on this blog.  If you wish to engage in some friendly debate, feel free.  Also, you are welcome to email me at franklyrebekah@gmail.com with any questions or concerns.

In this edition of “I Did This So You Don’t Have To,” I am currently sitting on the bus en route from D.C. back to Brooklyn with about 12 open tabs all having to do with the men’s rights movement (MRM).  I have gone down the rabbit hole.

Over the past few days, I have been watching from my home in Brooklyn, and my friend’s home in D.C., as some interesting things happened in Detroit, where my friend Emma lives.  For a little back story, a few weeks ago Paul Elam from A Voice for Men (AVfM), a men’s rights website, helped to organize the first ever International Conference on Men’s Issues which was to take place towards the end of June at the Hilton DoubleTree in Detroit.  A group of concerned feminist-citizens in Detroit, Emma included, created a petition and organized a peaceful protest and march to get the DoubleTree to cancel the conference.  They were successful in gaining recognition for their cause which is no small feat. In response, Paul Elam took to the internet to blame the “radical gender ideologues” who made it their mission to “silence (his) efforts to address issues affecting boys and men.”  He then created his own petition to call on the “city of Detroit to take note. Radical feminists have corrupted the idea of gender equity. They have transformed it into a Marxist agenda of oppressive control, including the silencing of all opposing views.”

Alright.  I agree that AVfM and its readers absolutely have the right to their own opinions and to express those opinions as they see fit, barring, or course, threats of violence and the like.  By extension, those holding opposing views, myself included, absolutely have the right to express our opinions (also barring threats of violence and the like), including, but not limited to, the right to put pressure on a business to disallow an openly misogynistic group from holding a conference in its facilities.  I think it is important to point out that throughout the organization of this protest, which was done on a public Facebook page, Emma and her co-organizers fostered conversations concerning how to offer a safe space — physically and emotionally — for any person participating in the protest who might find the rhetoric consistently used by AVfM triggering or intimidating in some way.  They discussed the possibility of a counter-protest and prepared all attendees accordingly.  What ended up happening was that a few representatives for AVfM showed up at the protest and, reportedly, followed at least one woman to her car and snapped a photograph of her license plate. A few others took photographs and video of the protest in, what it has been assumed, was an effort to identify and subsequently doxx the attendees.

Personally, I think doxxing is weak and totally fucked up and should only be used in very specific circumstances.  Also, it gives me the willies.  But doxxing is an approach that AVfM is no stranger to.  On May 31st, A Voice for Male Students, which is associated with AVfM, published a letter addressed to Emma that included a photograph of her, her personal email address, and information about her occupation in an overt attempt to put pressure on the Detroit Public School system to deem her a threat to the education of young boys and subsequently fire her.  To me, that reeks of intimidation and threat and, if the school system were to take seriously the phone calls and emails received at the urging of this letter it would, in my mind,  be considered the “silencing of all opposing views.”

But I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised by all this.  Paul Elam, after all, once declared that October should be “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” and said

“I’d like to make it the objective for the remainder of this month, and all the Octobers that follow, for men who are being attacked and physically abused by women – to beat the living shit out of them. I don’t mean subdue them, or deliver an open handed pop on the face to get them to settle down. I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won’t fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles.”

Because obviously the way to gain attention for the very real issue of domestic violence against men and boys is to urge those victims to act violently as opposed to, I don’t know, working with feminists to help destigmatize the problem and gain more public attention and funding to combat it.  Of course, Elam will say that this was all tongue in cheek.  He will say that he told people that he wasn’t serious.  But,

“Not because it’s wrong. It’s not wrong. Every one should have the right to defend themselves. Hell, women are often excused from killing someone whom they allege has abused them. They can shoot them in their sleep and walk. Happens all the time. It’ll even get you a spot on Oprah, and cuntists across the cunt-o-sphere will be lionizing you.”

It isn’t worth the time behind bars, he alleges.  But, if you do decide to take him up on his advice then

“you are heroes to the cause of equality; true feminists. And you are the honorary Kings of Bash a Violent Bitch Month. You are living proof of just how hollow ‘don’t fuck with us,’ rings from the mouths of bullies and hypocrites.”

So I don’t know, guys.  Paul Elam has the right to his opinions.  But I would argue that we, as feminists, have an obligation to all people to stand up to this sort of hate-fueled rhetoric. So I am really proud to call Emma my friend and really amazed at the effects of the protest and petitions she and her fellow feminist activists put together.  It’s a small step but it’s a step nonetheless.

And let us remember, just as a small aside, that feminism, at its best, isn’t only about the rights of all women, but of all people.  So let’s use this as one more step towards attempting to make the movement as united and inclusive as possible.

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The Failure of Success

31 May

Okay, so back when I wrote this post about West Virginia that barely anyone read (and really, who can blame you?) I said that because of the nature of my new job, I would be writing a lot more about the environment.  Well, as bad luck has it (2014 is not the Year of the Rebekah as I had hoped) my job fell through.  Well, I don’t know if “fell through” is really the right way to describe it.  Maybe I’ll tell you the story when you’re a little bit older.  The reason that I mention this is that I have decided that, job or no job, I am going to write some stuff about the environment anyway so take that!

Also I am totally avoiding writing about Elliot Rodger and #YesAllWomen because every time I start to write about it (which now is three separate occasions and, likely, counting) I either end up feeling sick to my stomach or crying in the bathroom.  I am clearly not emotionally prepared for that whole thing.

So, right now I am reading Dan Barber’s new book The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food.  I am only about 50 pages in and already it is so good and I pretty much wish it was long enough that I could read it on and on and on for the rest of my life.  Seriously.  Has that ever happened to you?  It’s like, you read this book and it is so enthralling that you just want to read it on a continuous loop or else have it be like a million pages long and still somehow manage to be interesting?  Well, it’s happening to me now and I am really happy about it.  Do you guys know who Dan Barber is?  So he’s a chef and he owns Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns.  He also was an early advocate for the farm-to-table food movement that has become a central tenet in the whole locavore thing that’s been happening recently.  So the thing that is extra cool about Barber, I think, is that he is one of those people that is always looking to expand his knowledge and improve upon the way that his actions effect the world around him.  If you want to see what I am talking about, and also what got me interested in reading his book in the first place, you should read his New York Times op/ed piece from this past May 17th called “What Farm-toTable Got Wrong.”  It’s actually an excerpt from the book I am reading now! The basic idea of his article, and of the entire book, is that the locavore idea that “eating local can reshape landscapes and drive lasting change” is actually wrong.  Barber says,

“For all its successes, farm-to-table has not, in any fundamental way, reworked the economic and political forces that dictate how our food is grown and raised. Big Food is getting bigger, not smaller. In the last five years, we’ve lost nearly 100,000 farms (mostly midsize ones). Today, 1.1 percent of farms in the United States account for nearly 45 percent of farm revenues. Despite being farm-to-table’s favorite targets, corn and soy account for more than 50 percent of our harvested acres for the first time ever. Between 2006 and 2011, over a million acres of native prairie were plowed up in the so-called Western Corn Belt to make way for these two crops, the most rapid loss of grasslands since we started using tractors to bust sod on the Great Plains in the 1920s.”

What the hell happened?  I mean, obviously there are the social, geographical, economic (etc, etc, etc) constraints that impact most people’s abilities to eat the way they might like to.  And, of course, a lot of people either don’t have access to information, are not interested in making a fundamental change to the way they eat, or do not see a connection between what they buy and what impact that has to the world all around us.  (I know I am totally oversimplifying, and I know there are things that I am not delving into here, but I think maybe I will save that for another day since I think I might be writing about this stuff more often.  Oh, lucky you.)  But the thing that Barber points out is that the way that we engage with the idea to eat more local is fundamentally flawed.  In Barber’s words,

“The larger problem, as I came to see it, is that farm-to-table allows, even celebrates, a kind of cherry-picking of ingredients that are often ecologically demanding and expensive to grow.  Farm-to-table chefs may claim to base their cooking in whatever the farmer’s picked that day…but whatever the farmer has picked that day is really about an expectation of what will be purchased that day.  Which is really about an expected way of eating.  It forces farmers into growing crops like zucchini and tomatoes (requiring lots of real estate and soil nutrients) or into raising enough lambs to sell mostly just the chops, because if they don’t, the chef, or even the enlightened shopper, will simply buy from another farmer.”

So I read that and I had this moment of all these different thoughts.  I will list them here in no particular order:

(1) God damnit.  Seriously, Barber?  Sometimes it feels like no matter what we try to do we are still doing the wrong thing! (At this point I threw a pillow.)

(2) Well, duh, why didn’t I think of this before?  The entire system of everything is based on an understanding of supply and demand and so of course the farmer is going to try and figure out, based off the knowledge of people’s eating habits, what those people are likely to buy and then grow food accordingly.  It makes sense to plant nutritionally-needy plants if that is what people are going to purchase because it is better to actually sell things than to be that asshole farmer* at the farmer’s market with some cow peas or some shit** that no one wants to buy.

(3) What now?!

Luckily for us (or, I guess, right now for me and whoever else is reading this book) Barber does not just complain and act all gloom and doomy.  He (sort of) presents solutions.  The solutions, at least so far, are buried in pieces of information.  What is good for the environment and for agriculture is good for us. But the agriculture that we rely upon now is inherently flawed.  The idea that Barber seems to be espousing is that we work with nature, rather than making it work for us.

So the part of the book that I am reading right now is all about soil.  One of the ways’ that Barber gets into this discussion is a look at the way his own restaurant runs.  He put, over the years, so much energy into trying to run as sustainable and responsible a shop as possible (including eliminating menus and instead telling people of the ingredients available that day) and yet he completely missed thinking about one of the central ingredients in any kitchen:  wheat!  He discovered that every day he was using pounds and pounds of white flour in all manner of food preparation and that white flour has practically nothing in common with actual wheat at all.  It is so bastardized that to eat plain, white flour is practically like eating a handful of chalk.  It’s awful and gluey and flavorless.  But wheat wasn’t always this way!  It used to have its own unique flavor.  And not only that, it used to be perennial and have a super intense root system to match, a root system that more or less allowed the plant to take care of itself.  In its place we planted acres upon acres of the drought resistant “Turkey Red,” an annual with puny roots that need to be fertilized by farmers because the plant cannot feed itself.  Wes Jackson, one of the farmers whose knowledge Barber cites in the book, had this to say upon analyzing a life-sized above and below ground photograph of an old wheat variety versus the Turkey Red:

Pointing to the annual wheat, “Of course, this wheat won out.  Sixty million acres of puny roots that we need to fertilize because it can’t feed itself.  Puny roots that leak nitrogen, that cause erosion and dead zones the size of New Jersey.  This wheat won out, but what you’re looking at is the failure of success.” (Italics mine.)

You guys, that blew my mind.  That line “the failure of success” really summarizes so many of the things I have read about agriculture and the environment over the past 10-15 years.  Sure, we have figured out how to grow more, faster but at what cost?  This idea that, as Barber says, we set out to “conquer rather than to adapt.”  When Europeans came over to North America and violently took the land from those who had lived here for generations, the land they took boasted some of the most fertile soil in the entire world.  Fast-forward to the 1930s and we had one of the biggest environmental disasters in our history:  the Dust Bowl.  That is what happens when we completely denude the soil to the point that there is nothing to hold the topsoil in place.  It simply just blows away.  It’s also what happens when we bend the environment to suit what we perceive as our “needs.”  I am going to quote just this one last thing before I go back to reading the book because I am so incredibly excited to learn more things!  Nature has a way of taking care of itself and yet we fight against it.  We insist on planting monocultures, on developing these insane new weed and pest resistant plants that only, over time, require more and more chemicals to make them grow.  And all the while we ignore what nature is telling us: treat the cause instead of the symptoms.  Don’t spray plants because you see an infestation of beetles, figure out what caused the beetles to come in the first place because pests and “weeds,***” as I learned, tend to attack sick or stressed plants.  If we mother our plants well, they will not attack.  And that requires a certain kind of worldview.

“It helps if your worldview includes the belief that nature knows best.  A plant suffering from an infestation of pests is not a shortcoming of nature; it’s a plant you’re not mothering well.  Either the nutrient balance in the soil is wrong or your crops aren’t being rotated properly or the variety cultivated is wrong for the area — or any one of dozens of other possibilities.  Your job is to figure it out.  Since the chemical farmer has the option of spraying the problem away, he tends not to bother.”

Okay so maybe I am not quite done.  I know I’m not a farmer and I know that it is not an easy life and that figuring out problems and addressing them is difficult and expensive.  I am not judging.  But what I am doing is reading this book and thinking about my life beyond my own purchase of food (which, honestly, I am now feeling is not nearly as responsible as I had previously believed) and to include everything else.  The root cause of so many of our problems is that we are addicted to the quick fix but the thing is that, more often than not, that approach simply causes a higher number of even more complicated problems down the line, problems that we seem to completely ignore, maybe not as individuals but as a species.  Look at what we are experiencing now, environmentally.  The world is actually dying.  Years and years of doing things, and completely ignoring the impacts, have led us to where we are.  Beyond continuing this book, and hopefully writing more posts resulting from what I learned, I don’t really know what to do.  To be honest, I feel very tempted to buy some crazy weird (AKA naturally occurring, unadulterated) variety of wheat and try to make bread.  I’ll let you know how that goes.

*Environmentally speaking probably the smartest farmer of all.

** Cow peas are actually not “some shit” at all but you know what I mean.

*** I learned the actual definition of weed!  Well, according to this one farmer’s Agronomy 101 class: a weed is “anything that grows where you don’t want to it grow.”  Seriously, how ridiculous.

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Goodbye, New York Road Runners

23 May

You know what I don’t like?  When people say “I’ve been doing _________ since before it was cool.” It’s like, okay great.  I’m happy for you.  Way to make everyone else feel like an asshole.  That being said, I do get some portion of the sentiment behind it.  And so, obviously and as I am wont to do, I started thinking WAY too deeply about the statement and have decided that it can be interpreted in a few different ways:

Way #1: When I was doing ______ there weren’t as many people doing it, so it wasn’t as crowded/expensive/over policed/over saturated.

Way #2:  Now that everyone is doing ________ I feel sort of like a poser doing it even though I have been doing it forever and that fucking sucks.

Way #3:  Some combination of the aforementioned two ways.

Okay, so, now that we have out of the way, I would not say that I have been running long distances since before it was cool because, really, running still isn’t cool exactly.  And I also haven’t been running for that long and I really think to even almost get away with such a statement you basically have to have started doing whatever thing that you’re complaining about everyone else doing for at least like, 75% of your life. I have only been running for just shy of 50% of my life and also I don’t take myself all that seriously so, you know, statement off limits.  Anyway, all of this being said, something has been happening to running and I do not like it one bit.

One of the things that I have always loved about running is that even though it is an individual sport, there is so much support amongst the running community.  This is part of the reason why that stupid viral Facebook letter to an overweight runner made me so darn angry.  I have just always found that more than anything else, runners want other runners to have good races.  We all know the work that went into training for endurance events and we all know what it feels like to have a bad day.  You know, for your legs to feel like led, to have to shit halfway through, to be sick, or crampy, or have an ill-timed injury.  You never, ever want to see a fellow runner limping through a race, or a training run, unaware of whether or not they will be able to finish or if the nagging pain in their hip, their foot, their quad means a few months off.  And this is not only true amongst us amateur athletes.  The pros in the sport are just as supportive of one another.  Take, for example, the support that Meb Keflezighi got from Ryan Hall and the other US runners at Boston this past year.  And that is only one example of many.  It was the loss of that sort of camaraderie among runners that made this year’s Brooklyn Half Marathon so…upsetting.

I had decided before running this race that it was going to be my last race with New York Road Runners (NYRR).  I’m not going to go into all the problems I have with this organization, especially since I have talked about the intense price increases over the past few years on this blog before.  I just think that in an effort to ride the wave of popularity that running has been experiencing over the last number of years, NYRR has forgotten about all the people who have kept them afloat for decades.  I don’t know, maybe I am just being grouchy but I really think that all the extra bullshit that accompanies a lot of the NYRR races these days really take away from what is so great about running:  it’s simplicity.

I guess it is partially that along with its new found popularity, running has been the latest to fall at the feet of Big Business.  People spend hundreds of dollars on watches that they don’t know how to use; they fall prey to ridiculous trends about appropriate sneakers without doing research into the benefits and possible problems of wearing them; they spend so much money on races just because the bib pick-up involves a “pre-party” AKA some lame music playing in the background and a bunch of companies hawking their wares.

The thing about it, and I suppose this isn’t entirely NYRR’s fault, is that capitalism does not bring out the best in people.  There is no “team” in capitalism.  It is every woman, man and child to her/himself.  Capitalism, to me, is largely what our national obsession with individualism is born from.  The attitude that goes along with people needing to have the newest gadgets, the nicest clothes, the trendiest sneakers is the attitude that leads to the terrible fucking race that I ran in Brooklyn.  Honestly, I have never seen so many people literally push through other people to get ahead.  I have never seen so many people cross in front of waves of runners to get to water stations without verbally letting people know or even checking over their shoulders.  I have never seen so many people leave water stations and drop their uncrushed cup in the middle of the road, a big runner no-no because it rolls around and can trip one of the thousands of people who come behind you.  When you run a race, you always check your surroundings, you always communicate with other runners, and you really always crush your damn cup and throw it off the course.  Sure, running is something that is individual.  You aren’t relying on other people in the same way as you might in a soccer match or a relay.  But you are not doing it alone.  You are running a race along with hundreds, maybe thousands, of other people and you have to respect that the race is not just yours, it is everyone’s.  All the other people running trained hard, paid the price, woke up at 4:30 in the morning and your pushing, your cutting off, and your not crushed cup could really make a difference not only in their time, but in their safety and their enjoyment.

Maybe I was just running around a shitty group of people but it really made me sad.  It made me remember when I ran the New York City Marathon, yes also organized by NYRR, back in 2006.  I was going through the Queensboro Bridge and there was a blind man running near me.  The bridge was dark so it became a little difficult for runners to see other people, especially if you weren’t running near the sides.  Without saying a word, a whole group of runners created a protective circle around this man, making sure that the darkness and other runner’s inability to see as clearly would not impact his race or make him unsafe.  It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen and really made me proud of my community.  In that moment, it was like everyone was running the race together and our achievement was entirely dependent on the achievements of those around us.  At the Brooklyn Half this year, it was everyone for themselves.

Maybe part of the reason for this was that in an effort to, I don’t know, make more money, NYRR allowed way too many people to run the Half.  There were over 25,000 people that ran the race this year, meaning that for a lot of us, we were completely jammed up for the first 8 miles.  When you have a race of that size, you simply sacrifice some of the other things:  in my opinion the enjoyment, but certainly the speed.  (And don’t even get me started on the fact that they gave us half-filled dixie cups of water at the end of the race rather than full bottles.)

I just think that what NYRR is helping to usher in is a complete change in the attitude that surrounds running and that is decidedly not cool.  I don’t know.  I run races because it’s fun, it’s nice to have a goal and it helps me place my running squarely within an equally motivated and supportive group of people.  That feeling is gone from NYRR races and so I am bidding them a not-so-fond farewell, taking my $20 stopwatch and keeping my fingers crossed that those pushers, those cut off-ers, and those cup non-crushers don’t follow me.

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Doc Says…

20 May

Alright you guys, here’s the thing.  I am in a bit of a holding pattern at the moment which means that what is going on inside of my head right now is something akin to a hamster running round and round on her exercise wheel.  She isn’t getting anywhere, isn’t really doing anything, just sort of trying to pass the time in her little glass cage until she gets the opportunity to run around the room in one of those awesome plastic balls.  Remember those?  I had a hamster when I was little and I was always sort of afraid that one day I would put her in the ball and she would somehow escape my room and go rolling right down the stairs.  Then the ball would pop open right in front of my cat, Sassafras, and bye bye hamster.  Anyway, I digress.  It’s really not that bad.  The holding pattern, I mean.  I have been spending a lot of time in the garden with my mom and have been reading the New York Times from cover to cover almost everyday.  I am pretty up to speed on the Times view of the world and what they think is worthy of their precious space and what is not.  I read about El Nino today so that was sort of a blast from the past.

Anyway, none of this is to the point.  The point is that since I am in a holding pattern I have decided to publish a comment I got back in the day when all that bullshit was happening on my blog.  Remember all that bullshit?  Well, I sure do.  Anyway, I got the following comment (posted here in italics) on the post called “Rebekah vs. Rob, (Documented) Battle #2”  I have changed nothing about the comment, nor have I omitted anything, so any spelling or grammatical errors are not, for once, mine.  Just keep in mind that the non-italicized part is just me adding my trademark snark which I am sure that this individual, who calls himself “Doc,” would have a thing or two to say about.  If he hadn’t unfollowed my blog promptly after posting this comment that is.

I’ve been following your posts for a couple months now, since I was told there was a blog that detailed my local watering hole. I’m not a regular but I do come in with some frequency so it is fun for me to read the goings on and see if I can picture who it is you’re talking about. I must say I’ve noticed the tone of your posts has gotten very snarky and downright mean. Are you sure being a bartender is the right career for you? 🙂

I very much enjoyed his use of emoticon.  Nothing breaks up criticism like a good, old-fashioned smiley face!

Your recent post regarding “Hal” however has picqued my psychological background radar.

Ooh! Psychological background radar!  Do continue!  (Also, for the record, I have changed the alias “Hal” to the subject’s real name, Rob, after he sent me various mean emails from anonymous email accounts.  I figured if he wasn’t willing to put his name on his behavior, then I would.)

This is, if I’m reading correctly and if this person is who I think he is (and I’m fairly certain it is) now the 3rd post he’s been prominently featured in. I’m reminded of that old adage, “There’s a thin line between love and hate.” Your borderline obsession with this man leads me to believe that there is more to your feelings than blind hatred. Honestly, I think I know who he is, and he’s nowhere near as bad as you paint him to be.

Doc has got me there.  I think that Rob WAS featured in a fair amount of posts.  There was his appearance in Tip #12 after he snuck his own booze into the bar  and then there was the following visit when I told him I wouldn’t serve him and he stayed at the bar for hours afterwards, trying to get other people to buy him drinks, and also asking my coworker out when his fiance was sitting like 4 barstools down.  I can’t actually find the third one because I don’t keep an inventory of my blogs like some anonymous commenters seem to.

When he’s in the bar by himself or with one or two friends, I’ve had conversations with him and found him to be perfectly interesting and charming.

Here’s the thing that I have noticed about misogynists:  they tend to be perfectly nice-seeming to other men, who they view as their equals, but when it comes to their dealing with women it is a totally different ballgame.  I would like for “Doc” to be called a cunt, a word that I find extremely violent, by the same person on more than one occasion, and to have that person attempt to physically intimidate him at his workplace, and then tell me dude is “perfectly interesting and charming.”  Just sayin’.

I have seen him act loud and start chants etc., but usually only when he was with a large group of men, and really, isn’t that how most men in a large group at a bar act?

I hate to break it to you but no, that is not how most men in large groups in bars act.

He’s nowhere near the devil you make him out to be. And you lose all credibility when you say he’s unattractive. He is, objectively, a very good looking man.

Personally, I think that levels of attractiveness are more a subjective, than objective, thing.  For example, Adam Levine was voted People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in 2013 and I sort of think he looks like a ferret.  And I do not like ferrets.  Also, what does my taste in men have to do with my credibility?  Nothing, that’s what.

In reading your posts about him, I notice the following keywords pop out at me when you’re writing of him: Wit, good looks, intellect, excellence, sexiest, awesome-est. All words used by you in your posts. Granted you’ll reply that this is how he thinks of himself, but it’s interesting how one’s psyche projects itself. Could it be that deep down you really have feelings for this man?

This, friends, is the result of pop-psychology 101.  I would very much like access to this person’s reading list.

This may be something you want to confront within, because otherwise your anger is irrational and concerns me.

I LOVE CONCERN TROLLING!

I’m sure that if you choose to reply you’ll merely launch into more vitriol, but to that I would merely reply, “Me thinks the lady doth protest too much” 🙂

Shakespeare quotes give everything validity! Also, emoticons!

And if he is who I think he is, wasn’t he involved with your good friend and boss for a while there? I could have sworn I saw them in an embrace more than a time or two. Cue the Gin Blossoms: Hey Jealousy….

Blog comments now come complete with soundtrack from the late 80s.

That’s the end of my comment analysis.  The thing is that I would have discussed this comment with the commenter had I known who he was but, of course, anonymous email addresses.  I wonder what his pop-psychology books have to say about that.  “This individual thinks his opinion is necessary but is not confident enough in himself as a critic to stand behind his words.  He is afraid of the social fallout associated with publicly, and confidently, airing his complaints.”

And, now I can send that comment into the trash where it belongs.  And this, friends, is the beauty of having your very own blog!  You can publish, and trash, comments as you see fit!  No democracy here!  This is a Rebekah-ocracy and thank goodness for that.

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Timothy Egan: Do Not Silence the Students

16 May

Oh, Timothy Egan, what were you thinking?  Were you thinking?

Today in The New York Times, the regular columnist Timothy Egan wrote an op/ed called “The Commencement Bigots.”  He starts the piece out with this:

“It’s commencement season, cell-phones off please, no texts or tweets.  Even with a hangover from debt, alcohol or regret, grads across the land may be lucky enough to hear something on the Big Day that actually stays with them.”

I wish I had been so lucky.  The class who graduated before me got a rather amusing speech by Dr. Ruth (you remember her, right?) and we got stuck with quite possibly the most boring graduation speech in the history of graduation speeches.  It was Henry Kaufman who basically gave an economics lecture.  It lasted for the better part of an hour and I am pretty sure came straight out of a book. No preparations necessary, just grab a volume from your library and read about balance of trade, fiscal policy or some shit in the most monotone voice you can muster.  It was terrible.  I just asked my dad what he thought about it and he said,

“Oh, that guy?  That guy was an idiot.  I did not like that guy.  Not only was he boring and an idiot, but he was a has been!  He was big in the 80s!”

I don’t know about all that but I do know that I was bored to tears.  Egan documents a similar experience of the graduates of Stanford in 2009 who had to listen to Justice Anthony M. Kennedy give “an interminable address on the intricacies of international law, under a broiling sun, with almost no mention of the graduates.”  Much better, Egen thinks, were the addresses by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon in  2005 (“If you can’t learn to ‘construct meaning from experience, you will be totally hosed'”), Steve Jobs, also in 2005, at Stanford (“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life”) and Stephen Colbert at Knox College in 2006 (“The best career advice I can give you is to get your own TV show.  It pays well, the hours are good, and you are famous.  And eventually, some very nice people will give you a doctorate in fine arts for doing jack squat”).  As much as I would have loved to have had Stephen Colbert speak at my graduation in place of Mr. Gloom and Doom, I wouldn’t exactly call his advice sage.  But I guess that’s not Egan’s point.  What is his point?  Well, basically that college students should shut the fuck up and appreciate who they get because the person could be, gasp!, boring.

Okay, that’s not exactly what he said.  What he said was that protesting college students are akin to censors who do not want anyone to come speak to them and “spoil a view of the world they’ve already figured out.”  He cites a few examples.  First up was Condoleezza Rice who was slated to speak at Rutgers University but canceled “after a small knot of protestors pressured the university.”  Next up were the bigots (his word, not mine) of Smith College whose concerns about the International Monetary Fund’s part in “strengthening of imperialist and patriarchal systems” caused Christine Lagarde, chief of the IMF, to cancel her prepared speech.  Egen opines about the loss these students will suffer by not hearing one of the “world’s most powerful women” share her insights over (and this he seems to spit) “concerns about the patriarchy.”  This was followed by my absolute favorite line in the entire piece:

“Evil men — we’ll show ’em.”

Here is the thing about it.  It certainly is a shame that students won’t get the opportunity to hear Rice and Lagarde speak.  I agree wholeheartedly with Egen when he says,

“Give me a brisk, strong, witty defense of something I disagree with over a tired replay of platitudes.”

But is the appropriate way to back up that highly logical statement to call those who disagree with it bigots?  I am sure that the people who heard Colbert and Jobs and Wallace speak, especially given that the latter two men are no longer with us, will remember those commencement speeches for a long time to come.  I am sure those graduates, and the attending staff members, friends and families consider themselves incredibly lucky.  But I also think that a person who holds the privilege of writing for a paper as respected as The New York Times should take a little more care before calling college students opposed to the legacies or the mechanisms through which university-chosen speakers make their mark a word as loaded as bigot.  That’s quite a punch to throw.  I also think that, perhaps, a privileged white man should think twice before he belittles a group of women’s concerns about the patriarchy – it is very real and is something they will have to contend with every single day of their lives.  This rings especially true for Smith students who are of color or are members of the LGBT community.

Egen urges these horrible censors to consult Rutger’s student mission statement which reads,

“We embrace difference by cultivating inclusiveness and respect of both people and points of view.”

Egen, perhaps, should have taken his own advice before writing this ill-conceived column.  It is true, that we should embrace inclusiveness and respect different points of view, but doesn’t that include respect for those who disagree with the appointment of certain speakers?  Doesn’t that include those who feel that by sitting quietly in an audience while someone who represents institutions or policies they find incredibly damaging and problematic acts as the exclamation point on their college experience makes them somehow complicit?  Shouldn’t we celebrate the fact that students in our universities are able to question these institutions and speakers and see results?  It is a shame that these women, and Attorney General Eric J. Holder who was also mentioned in Egen’s piece, did not get the chance to speak because of protests, but I do not think that means that we should shame and silence students.  Instead, we should encourage them to continue to protest because it is an active civilian population that is the best way to keep the government in check, to question policies, to support minorities and underrepresented groups, to fight voter fraud, to stop rape culture, to tell the IMF that we do not approve of the way they operate, to let Condoleezza Rice know that she will be held accountable by the population for her roll in the Bush administration, and so many other things.  We need this and by calling active student bodies bigots, we are telling them that their dissent is unwarranted, unnecessary and unacceptable and that is a real shame.  Isn’t it also possible that encouraging a more active population would result not only in better leadership, but also in better preparing our leaders for dissent and criticism?  The thin-skinned should not be in positions of power and, honestly, I am sure they have experienced far worse than some protests by a small group of soon-to-be college graduates.  Their ability to cancel in the face of such limited disagreement is a luxury that is silly.

So, let the students speak.  No, actually, don’t just let them, encourage them.  The best educations, I think, give us the ability to think critically and express our opinions and where is that more acceptable than on college campuses?  I think this country would be a lot better off if we all felt that our voices were heard and that our dissent did not make us bigots.  It’s just too bad that Egen felt the need to use his soapbox to shame a bunch of 21-year-olds.  But, that is his right and I support it, just as I support the university’s right to have Christine Lagarde speak at commencement and the right of the student body at Smith to protest the patriarchy.

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Street Harassment: The Close Proximity Whisper

13 May

Okay, ladies, I’m sure you’ve all experienced this:

You’re walking down the street doing what you always do which is minding your own goddamn business and going about your day when you see a man walking towards you.  You notice him looking but he says nothing, doesn’t exactly ogle but his eyes linger on you a little too long for optimal comfort.  As he gets closer you brace yourself for the upcoming comment, the kissy noises, that terrible clicking sound.  Nothing.  You think you’re home free but then, just as he passes you he leans in and whispers ever so quietly,

“God bless.”

You can feel his breath on your face and the hair stands up on the back of your neck.  You turn around, angry, but he is already halfway down the block making his way to where ever he is headed.  No one around noticed a thing.  He’s in the clear.

If I had to rate types of non-physical assault style street harassment from one to ten, ten being my least favorite, I think that approach would get the crown.  It is worse than the passing car, the obvious stare, the invitations to go out, the whistles from rooftops.  For me, the close proximity whisper is one of the most invasive forms of harassment.  In the United States, we have such an engrained idea of personal space that when someone invades it there is no ignoring it.  That person made the choice to enter into my space, he knew it would make me uncomfortable and he didn’t care.  The feeling of his breath on my skin only adds insult to injury.  It is one step away from him putting a hand on me.  It is infuriating, disempowering, and disgusting.

The close proximity whisper is something that has been driving me crazy for a long time.  I almost forget that it even happens until one day some dude whispers “smile baby” in my ear and I go through the fucking roof.  But he didn’t touch me and there is no opportunity for a strong worded retort, really. It always takes too long for me to register what has happened and by the time I do my only option is to scream like a banshee at some asshole’s receding back.  The reason I thought of this now is that the other night this happened to me only it was on a crowded train and it was terrible.

So I was with a friend of mine and we were heading to Crown Heights to visit his friend at the bar she works in.  When we got onto the train it was relatively empty but we opted to stand.  I have been standing a lot lately.  It’s a thing.  Anyway, we were standing in the little door alcove on the wrong side of the train (AKA the side the doors open on) so every time we stopped somewhere we would split up; he would stand to one side of the doors and me to the other.  We’d reconvene in the middle once everyone got aboard.  When we stopped at Atlantic Avenue the train got swamped.  We couldn’t meet in the middle again so he stayed to his side and I stayed to mine. Right next to me was a really tall (this is all relative considering I am pushing 5’4″) man somewhere in his late forties if I had to guess.  The second the doors closed he leaned over and, right in my ear whispered,

“Are you a mommy?”

It took me a second to understand what he had said.  It was Mother’s Day after all.  I gave him a small smile and said no and then resumed staring blankly in front of me, my left arm grasping the subway poll, my right hand resting on my left shoulder, as much of a protective stance as I could muster considering I had no room to move.  He leaned forward again,

“You look too young to be a mommy.”

I glanced over at him, raised my eyebrows and did a very slight head nod in an attempt to acknowledge he had said something to me without inviting him to say anything else.  A moment later his hand “slipped” off whatever he was holding and hit me in the chest, landing hard on my breastbone.  I instinctively checked to make sure my necklace didn’t vanish — it hadn’t but it wouldn’t be surprising to me if it had because people just love to steal shit from me — and felt thankful I had the foresight to cover my boobs with my arm.  I glanced over at my friend who had been looking at me protectively, not sure exactly what to do and, I imagined, taking cues from my behavior.  The man apologized.  I shot my eyes up to him without turning my body in his direction.  Then, seconds later, as we approached a stop he put his hand on my shoulder, leaned in much to close and whispered,

“Have a wonderful day.”

He was all up in my space.  He was touching my arm.  I thought maybe he was getting off at that stop and felt a momentary rush of relief but the train doors opened and he made no move to exit.  At that moment my friend called over the heads of the half dozen people in between us and asked if I wanted to get off and walk.

Fuck yes.

We got off the train.  I didn’t look back to see the man’s reaction when he realized that I was traveling with someone and that someone happened to be years younger and much more solid than him.  My friend and I talked about it for a minute, him not knowing the man had touched me because he was unable to see through all the people.  From his vantage point all he could see was some guy whispering in my ear and to him, that was enough to want to get me out of the situation. I put it out of my head for the remainder of the night but now I am thinking about it.  And here is what I am thinking.

It is bad enough to have someone whisper in your ear and keep moving but to have that person violate your personal space and continue to stand there is totally fucked.  It put me in an incredibly uncomfortable situation, one that I could not extricate myself from.  It’s like, there I was, stuck with all these people around me and then this guy who was just toeing the line, seeing how far he could push it.  I was bound, in a way, by the manners we as women have been taught.  I didn’t want to sharply tell him to stop, as I normally would if I could walk away, and then be stuck standing next to him, with the eyes of all the other passengers on me.  I didn’t know what their reactions would be, whether they would support me or think I was a loon.  I mean, all he was doing, really, was talking.  And the first touch could easily have been excused as an accident.  I started feeling like the best course of action was to keep my eyes down and my mouth shut, to not draw attention and maybe it would just stop on its own.  (In my personal experience, this reaction never really has the desired effect.)    I didn’t want to have to defend my reaction to a bunch of people who might not support me and then remain there, shamed.  I thought if I just stood there, more or less unmoving, as nonreactive as possible, he would back off but he didn’t.  He just kept toeing the line, kept inviting me into this seemingly innocent, but incredibly invasive, private conversation that I had absolutely no interest in participating in.

It’s a weird thing, to step out of your own tendencies.  I am pretty outspoken about this sort of thing, normally.  Especially when I am in New York.  That might sound like a weird thing but this is my home, I have lived here for a long time and I know when I should say something and when I shouldn’t.  Before I react strongly to a comment, I note the time of day, where I am, whether or not there are people around. At 4am I keep my mouth shut, but in the afternoon, in a parking lot stuffed with cars, I will say my piece.  I take the shock and awe approach.  I am especially good with words when I am angry and I think that the mouth I have takes casual harassers by surprise.  It gives me the chance to tell them about themselves and march off before they regroup and think long enough to come up with something better than “bitch!” But being stuck in a subway car, pinned in place by the sheer quantity of people, can really make you revert back to socialized habits.

Anyway, a lot of times I think back on things and figure out how I could have handled it differently, better.  There’s always something.  But in this particular case, even with the luxury of space and a few days time, I cannot for the life of me figure out how I could have behaved differently.  I didn’t feel unsafe, really.  What I did feel was the society in which I was raised, one that teaches girls to keep quiet.  I thought about all the times people have told me that it is unsafe for me to speak my mind, that it isn’t worth it.  But I can’t stop thinking about how this guy won. How by not telling him what he was doing, I was complicit in it, I was saying it was okay.  Sure, I got off early, sure, it was clear that I didn’t want to be near him, but I don’t know.  It is very possible that me telling him to back the fuck off, as much as he could considering the circumstances, would have set him off, or would have fallen on deaf ears, but I also could have been the first person to say it and maybe, hopefully, the last person he did it to.

Being a woman is hard.

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Nick. monsters. dead? ask him.

9 May

So, this is funny.  Last night I had a nightmare during which my friend Nick was killed by some sort of a monster.  In my awake state, I imagine this monster as being sort of a comical creature — big, green, hairy, lots of drool — and the whole thing being more of a cartoon than anything else.  I imagine that Nick’s downfall was something like him slipping on a banana peel in the midst of his escape from the monster.  In reality, I haven’t had an actual monster nightmare since I was little and had this reoccurring dream that these aliens would come and kidnap me from the top bunk in my brother Aaron’s room.  It was a terrible dream.  I would be in Aaron’s room with him and our friend Matty, playing around.  One of them always ended up cutting their arm on something and they would both leave in search of a bandaid, leaving me all alone in the room.  The second the cut happened my dream self would start to panic; I knew what this meant.  As soon as Aaron and Matty left the room the aliens would land on the front yard in their huge spaceship and abduct me. The thing about it that made it SO horrible was that despite the fact that I absolutely knew this was going to happen, and I became very agitated and afraid and I screamed for Aaron and Matty to come back, I could not for the life of me wake myself up.  I would just have to go through it over and over and over again.  After a while I was almost afraid to go to sleep.  Those aliens were the absolute worst.

Anyway, so last night.  Last night I had this dream that my friend Nick got attacked and maybe killed by a monster.  I woke up mid-dream and scrawled the following thing on a piece of paper near my bed:

“Nick.  monsters.  dead?  ask him.”

So, I asked him and I am sure you will all be pleased to know that he is not, in fact, dead.  He was, however, less than excited about the fact that he may or may not have been killed in my dream and didn’t seem terribly flattered by the fact that my half-asleep self was worried enough about his well-being to write a note to my future awake self to ask him about it.  Can’t win ’em all, I guess.

In other news, I just saw a picture of some of my old coworkers at the bar I used to work at all grouped in front of a cork board that has always held photos and newspaper articles and the likes.  There used to be photos of me on there but I guess someone threw them in the garbage.  I can’t say I am terribly surprised but it is a very odd feeling to be completely erased from a place that you spent so much of your time.  It’s like, 5 1/2 years of my life almost didn’t happen, or people want to pretend they didn’t happen, or something.  People, as a rule, are weird.  Myself included.

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Today I Displaced My Rage Onto a Line of Hair Care Products

7 May

So my mom, knowing my tendency to get angry about things, saved me a super stupid advertisement for the got2be line of hair care products.  Due to recent events that I don’t feel like going into just at the moment, I felt the need to blow off some steam and so I wrote a letter.  Here it is:

To whom it may concern,

I am currently standing at my kitchen counter, looking at a two-page coupon/advertisement for your got2b line of hair products, a line I have used many times. On the left hand side, is the advertisement geared towards women; on the right is that for men. I would like to describe to you, in more detail, what I am seeing.

The advertisement for women is, of course, done in pink and features an overly made-up young woman in a low cut gold halter dress looking suggestively at the camera with her lips slightly parted. In the back, super imposed upon an imagine that I can only imagine is an attempt to associate your product with Hollywood and all of its glitz and glamour, is a dapper man standing in front of a parked limousine, looking at the girl. The tagline – “all eyes on you!” – is meant to promote the three products that hold down the bottom right hand corner of the ad. They are the “Body + Gloss” line of hair products and include the “glistening full blow dry cream,” the “radiance bounce whipped mousse,” and finally the “luminous lift hairspray.” That the bottles are also pink and adorned with stars and sparkles (what woman or girl doesn’t want that?!) is really just the icing on the cake.

On the right hand side of the page is the advertisement for the men’s products, done mostly in yellow. It features a young man with a tall mohawk, the sides of his head shaven, looking like he’s just gotten into some trouble, and indeed he has. The three photographs in the ad are in succession and show him doing a front flip off of a high, graffiti-covered stone wall, only to land on the ground of some east coast city smiling, not a hair out of place. He wears jeans and a grey t-shirt. What allows his hair to stay in place with all this hardcore fun he is having? It’s the “his” line of hair care products like “blasting freeze spray” and the “ultra glued invisible styling gel.” They have the power of, as you call it, “screaming hold.”

The problem with these two different advertisements goes beyond the color of the pages, the names of the products and the styling of the models. What you are selling to young men and women is the idea that men are active and independent and that women are passive and dependent on the approval of men. You are telling young people that men’s hair should be able to withstand a front flip and women’s should be able to impress and, more dangerously, still look good after what is inevitably going to happen once she gets inside that waiting car. You are playing, and not at all subtly, with deeply entrenched gender stereotypes that are not only damaging to the young women and girls that see them everyday but also to the men and boys. You are simultaneously telling women that they should wait for men but also men that they should expect to be waited for. You are telling women that their value comes from their level of sexual appeal but also men that they should only view women through that lens. On the other hand, you are telling men that they are should be more macho, more daring, more athletic and women that this is what they should be looking for in a prospective partner or, more in keeping with this ad, in a date to a party. You are telling impressionable young people that if they don’t fit within this narrow gender framework then they are unattractive and weird.

This might seem a strange bone to pick and, perhaps, if this advertisement was the only of its kind it would not be quite so alarming to me. The reality, however, is that this is only one example of the many ads and images put out by hundreds of companies annually that further reinforce our closed-minded and dangerous ideas of the correct roles of men and women. People don’t just look at these ads and move on, they internalize them and remember them and you know that, that is what you are counting on to sell your products. Don’t be another company that benefits off of the objectification of women and men.

Sincerely

Rebekah Frank

I then received the following lame ass response that made me even more annoyed.  Not only did this person spell the word “research” incorrectly, they also did not sign their note with an actual name which, had it not been for the obvious type-o, would have led me to believe the person responding to me was not a person at all but instead was a robot.  That being said, my well-argued message was clearly thrown in the email garbage.  Anyway, here is the response:

Dear Ms. Frank,

Thank you for taking the time to contact us.

Your comments are appreciated because they help us to understand how we can better serve our consumers.

We appreciate your feedback. We will forward it to our Marketing and Reaserch & Development Team.

Again, thank you for contacting us.

Sincerely,

Henkel Consumer Affairs

I will not be buying anything from this company (not that I really did before anyway) but I will also mean mug their products as I ever-so-slowly pass them by in the aisle at the pharmacy.  Feel my rage, Henkel.

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