My Words Trickle Down

*deep breath*

I've been putting off writing about this since November, because it's upsetting to me. But I need to get it out (and I think, scary as it is, I need to leave this entry public). So here goes.

( Cowboy capitalist job bullshit under the cut )

In a discussion about the evolution of language over on aberwyn's journal, someone posted a link to this article, which calls for a complete retirement of the phrase 'chink in [one's] armor' -- indeed, the word 'chink' altogether -- because of the association with its racial slur homonym.

The author, Huan Hsu, discusses a recent controversy over an ESPN headline which used the phrase "A Chink in the Armor" to describe Taiwanese-American rising star basketball player Jeremy Lin. I say "controversy", though I never actually saw any of it (I don't really follow sports news); I'm not sure what controversy there could be. It was obviously offensive, it was pointed out, and ESPN took it down, apologised, and suspended the writer responsible. However, let's take a closer look at exactly why it was offensive -- and why I'd argue that it is not, as Hsu suggests, anything inherent to the word 'chink' itself. That is, it's offensive because it is using the ordinary meaning of the word 'chink' to deliberately invoke the racial slur.

Headline writers seem to be drawn to puns like bees to nectar (or flies to shit, depending on your level of cynicism). For the most part this is pretty harmless, but the thing about puns is they create a joke, and if you're making a joke you need to be, y'know, self-aware and sensitive enough to not be offensive. You need to bear in mind who or what you're making fun of with your double meaning. Compare, for instance, the flurry of "Santorum Surges from Behind" during the ex-senator's recent presidential bid: in that case, the butt of the joke (heh) is Santorum himself, and the winking double meaning refers to the disgusting redefinition of his name in response to his rampant homophobia. Whereas the winking double meaning in "A Chink in the Armor" is "LOL Asian people amirite?" Besides, much more simply: when you make a pun on a racial slur, you are using a racial slur.

That's really all there is to it. There is one good reason to avoid using that phrase, namely that it's clichéd and tiresome. But that 'chink' is a homonym of a racial slur should not disqualify it from use entirely. Plus it's avoidance is apparently leading to horrendous abuses of both language and logic like "a kink in the armor" -- which just sounds rather, um, painful. Ouch.

Checking my email this morning sent me into a bit of a rage. See, I'd opened up the latest in the unending stream of clicktivist emails I get as punishment for signing their petitions elsewhere on the internet. I often get upset when I open them, although to be fair, my rage is usually directed mostly at the content. This one, however, contained good news. It was even subject-lined "Finally, some good news" (though I could swear they've used that exact phrasing before, for previous victories on the LGBT front). From AllOut.org, this is the actual opening paragraph -- bolding and hyperlink theirs:

"Earlier this month, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon delivered an incredibly powerful speech at the U.N. in Geneva. It's not every day that a major world figure speaks out forcefully in defense of equality. But most people didn't even hear about it.

Why? Because a handful of delegates stormed out of the meeting in protest and their story - that gay people should be denied human rights - dominated the day's news.

But we are about to change that. Our friends at the U.N. just let us REMIX Ban-Ki Moon (complete with a dance beat chosen by the team at All Out). Will you take just 2 minutes to listen to this incredibly inspiring speech and share with your friends and family? When someone like Ban Ki-Moon speaks out, it makes a difference - but only if people hear what he has to say: [youtube screengrab, also a hyperlink]"

Do you see the problem here? This is news I actually appreciate -- and even that I might not have gotten through other sources. Ban Ki-moon made a pro-LGBT speech on the floor of the UN. That's pretty great (even if the actual speech turned out to be cursory and talking-pointy). BUT, the email makes such a point of trying to make me feel all ~*~*active*~*~ and ~*~*virtuous*~*~ for the mere act of watching a video on the internet that I feel disinclined to even watch it at all.

Granted, All Out's whole platform is awareness-raising. But I recently found myself [finally getting around to] unsubscribing from Amnesty International's similar clicktivist emails because they were all written in that same content-thin, patronizing register. AMNESTY FUCKING INTERNATIONAL, whose work I respect, whose projects I support, and whose news I would actually like to hear about, if only they would write to me like a literate, thinking adult. Friend @[redacted] over on Twitter used to work for clicktivist petition generator 38 Degrees, and writes "I helped draft/proof 38 Degrees emails... I was crap at it. Just couldn't let myself write like that. They're always so thin on information and full of supposedly emotive blah. They run emails through a sentence complexity checker." I do not even know if that last sentence is a joke or not. And they ALL FUCKING DO THIS. It's like every organization that gets big enough has the same marketing hacks come 'round to tell them how.

Finally, once I'd finished bashing my half-formed rage onto Twitter, I decided I might as well go ahead and watch the video. Only I was so distracted by the distracting bolding in their email that I'd missed the fact that this wasn't just a link to the speech, it was a "REMIX ... complete with a dance beat[!]" This would have been a terrible thing to do to Ban Ki-moon, if it actually were what it implied. Instead it was taste-offensive in another way: an over-slick intersplicing of Ban's speech with emotive images of homophobic violence and soundbite-capture text quotations (complete with powerpoint word-swoosh sound effects), overlaid with music I guess you might dance to if you went to clubs that played documentary soundtracks.



No wonder God hates fags.

Or: why we still need feminism.

This article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/12/twitters-tales-of-sexism makes a good point, I think. It's about how the author made some offhand twitter comments about What Has Feminism Done For Us? (answer: loads), and got treated to a deluge of replies about just how bad things were back in the Bad Old Days ... and also some that she describes as "surprisingly recent". The takeaway message, I think, is this:

"Worse things happen to women every day including rape and domestic violence, than being snubbed or ignored. These horrors indicate the continuing vast inequality between the sexes. No, it's not the worst thing in the world, but that doesn't mean you can pretend it's not happening."

Little (and "little") things, irritating things, things that "don't really matter", all contribute to an atmosphere of oppression, even when they are not, themselves, inherently oppressive.

__________

Meanwhile, yesterday, Twitter was trending the hashtag #ididnotreport, which is/was a mixture of people sharing their stories of unreported sexual assaults alongside the "small", "insignificant", "everyday" sorts of sexual harassment that is a part of many women's daily experience, and all women's lifetime experience, but which is generally ignored, and certainly de-emphasised, by the wider culture.

Discuss.

Having listened to Maddy Prior & June Tabor's album 'Silly Sisters' several times at work the other day, I found myself with their version of Geordie stuck in my head -- only, annoyingly, I couldn't remember all the words, so had just snippets. Thinking to exorcise it through fuller knowledge, I opened up a songbook, Rise Up Singing, that I knew to have a version of it, to scan the lyrics.

Now, I am no stranger to folk music; I'm well aware that there are about a bajillion versions of every song, especially older ones, and that they vary considerably in both words and music. This, however, was a broader divergence than I ever would have expected. The very story changes dramatically! The basic story of a man called Geordie being condemned, and then his wife coming to beg for his life is the same, but they diverge in almost evey other aspect. And I know they are supposedly the same song, as well, since the songbook lists the 'Silly Sisters' album as an example recording!

In Prior & Tabor's (which turned out to be this version, originally transcribed by Robert Burns), Geordie was a nobleman framed for the murder of another. His lady rides to court and is told his life will be spared if she collects a ginormous ransom, which she does, and so buys his freedom. In the Rise Up Singing version -- as in most other, especially English versions, it turns out -- Geordie is a poacher, and when his wife comes to beg for his freedom, she is turned away, and he dies. Talk about alternate endings!

A musician, identified only as 'Ian' in this Mudcat thread describes his own recording of the song as "an English song about a disproportionate punishment for a crime which evolved from a Scottish song about a frame-up". The Scottish versions do seem to generally pre-date the English ones (though they also seem to have become less common), and I guess changing the condemned man to reflect a common-ish crime in your area, for which the punishment is widely seen as vastly unjust, does make a sort of sense. As, given the former, does having him actually die rather than get ransomed at the last minute. But at this point, is it even still the same song? Could there have been some other English song (or several) that got morphed into this one because the tune was catchy and the story was distilled and familiar?

Oddly, this recording by Ewan MacColl seems to combine elements of several versions, but seems mostly drawn from this one, known as Gight's Ladye. Geordie's wife is still a noblewoman of some sort, but Geordie's crime is poaching. She isn't turned away out of hand, though, and goes through with the begging for ransom money as in the other Scottish versions. However, it seems to me that her success in this is left ambiguous while the narrator is distracted by telling the tale of her verbal harrassment by a bawdy lord. Though, granted, my impression of ambiguity could merely be from an inferior understanding of Scots; it's certainly not ambiguous in the 'Gight's Ladye' version given on Mudcat. But why this "Bog o' Gight" stuff? Well, a little googling proved illuminating: 'Bog-Of-Gight' is an old name for Gordon Castle, and the earliest historical event to be associated with this song/set of songs was the story of a George Gordon, who would have been lord of said castle at the time -- although the actual events of his life, at least as given on Wikipedia, don't quite line up with the song, and they CERTAINLY don't line up with the 'Gight's Ladye' version, though at a stretch they could be described by Burns' 'Geordie'.

So what is going on here? It seems unlikely that an earl -- who'd have his own hunting preserves, after all -- would be brought up for poaching. Yet the 'Gight's Ladye' version preserves an awful lot of specific names and places, far more than Burns' 'Geordie'. Could the crime have been changed to make the song more populist in one area, while in another the events were recorded more faithfully even as the names all dropped away? It's nearly impossible to tell. Though for those who feel like making minute comparisons between versions (woefully void of any information about where or when or how they were collected), it turns out Wiki has transcriptions of all of Child's collections.

Meanwhile, a few thoughts on the Burns/Child A version. In it, Geordie is framed (or blamed for the death, anyway, regardless of guilt), and his lady, upon receiving the news of his captivity, rushes to Edinburgh with all of her men. Later on, after she's made her tearful case to the king, but before the aged lord suggests a fine instead of death, we get this verse, which on first listen seems to break the pattern of the story considerably:

The Gordons cam and the Gordons ran,
And they were stark and steady;
And ay the word amang them a'
Was, Gordons keep you ready.

Then we see the king's advisor suggesting that a fine might be the wiser course of action. Because this lady brought a freaking army with her to "beg" for her dearie's life. Conclusion: the 'fairest flower o' woman-kind' is a lot more badass than you might expect.

Oh right this thing. I will finish! Probably.

Day 29 – A book everyone hated but you liked

I figured for this I'd try the same 'compare my ratings to the average ratings' Goodreads trick that I used to find the 'most overrated book'. Turns out the answer is Freeze Frames, by Katharine Kerr (oh hai). Which I guess is not so surprising, since it's got a weird structure and even her fan group has divided opinions -- but I love that kind of stuff.

However, Freeze Frames has already been an answer, so in the interest of non-repetition, I'll give you Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Which I know, obviously loads of people love, given its enduring popularity and all, but in my little world, it was one of the books that all the first year English students had to read, and none of them seemed to have anything good to say about it. I guess I can see how it would be annoying to analyze, but as I was only reading it for pleasure, I thought it was a lot of fun. Although I was pretty glad to have my English student friend's discarded copy with the annotations, to catch all the inside jokes therein.

Upcoming Day
Day 30 - Your favorite book of all time

I was born in the '80s, which means I was a child during the '90s. I remember them, but with the perspective of a child; I saw things on the news; I overheard grownups and parroted their opinions. I didn't start to become politically aware in my own right until the early '00s, and didn't start to become an 'activist' until midway through university, by which point the "Coalition of the Willing" was deeply entrenched in Iraq. My first exposure to the broad Left, then, was the Stop the War movement. (I was also involved, actually rather more heavily, in an Injustice of the Day student campaigning group, but as they were mostly of an age with me, they didn't have the depth of campaign experience that is relevant for what I want to discuss here.)

StW, or at least my acquaintances within it, seemed to be made up mostly of anti-nuclear activists, longtime pacifists (obvs.), socialists (or at least sellers of The Socialist Worker), and the regrouped remnants of the anti-globalization movement. Most of these, having found common purpose, seemed to share a collective scorn for the 'Identity Politics of the '90s', which had so divided and derailed the movement from fighting the real enemy: capitalism, neoliberalism, the military-industrial complex. My memories of the '90s include an awful lot of people emphasising their racial, gender, and sexual identities, and terms like 'political correctness' and 'affirmative action' were forever on everyone's lips; and so I took these older campaigners at their word -- their narrative certainly made a lot of sense, and helped me explain to myself how I could have reached the age of 18 without knowing that living socialists existed in the West, or how academics like Fukuyama could write bullshit like "The End of History".

However, I am starting to grow skeptical of my activist elders. I know that, for all intents and purposes, I just wasn't there in the '90s, and therefore can't really comment on what it was like, but when I see things like discussions about women's safer spaces within the occupy camps repeatedly derailed by comments like "let's not let this movement get bogged down in identity politics like the protest movements in the '90s did", I start to wonder. Did they? WERE the '90s a time when anti-capitalists laid down their ideologies in order to focus on the colour of their skin or the composition of their genitalia, as the mainstream narrative would have us believe? Or was it simply that women, people of colour, and queer people of all acronyms looked around them and saw that the broad left, just like the rest of society, was silencing their voices and their concerns, patronizing them, and telling them that their problems would be dealt with after whatever other big problem they were protesting had been solved? The '90s, after all, saw the rise of the anti-globalization movement, in opposition to the towering capitalist globalization movements coming out of the most powerful world government and inter-government agencies of the day (and now), as well as the same old pacifists and hard-bitten anti-nuke campaigners and all the other "yes that's what I've been saying all along" fringe activist movements that are always with us. They clearly weren't a time when no one was focusing on ideology. But, you know, what do I know. I was only a kid; I wasn't really "there".

Oh right so the Book Meme! Oh man I got so close to finishing and then forgot about it... but I am a very diligent and dedicated blogger (ahem), so I will finish anyway.

Day 28 - Favorite Title

So, um, speaking of being a diligent and dedicated blogger, I'm just gonna refer you to this whole entry here: http://dustcoveredcurios.wordpress.com/2010/04/13/very-old-science-books/

Upcoming Days
Day 29 – A book everyone hated but you liked
Day 30 - Your favorite book of all time

Cross-posted from my less personal blog. If you want to link please use this one: http://mhuzzell.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/rape-culture-and-the-occupy-x-protests/

Like many feminists, I've been incredibly dismayed not only at the flood of reports of sexual harassment, assault and even rape in the Occupy camps, but also at many of the Occupiers' responses to them. It is, of course, completely unacceptable for the camps to distance themselves from women who have been raped, and to shame and chastise them for even thinking of taking action to protect themselves in the way that they've been taught to their whole lives -- namely, calling the police. And it is absolutely shameful that so many of these incidents have been intentionally downplayed or even hidden by the protesters in an attempt to keep the movement from "looking bad" (as if it didn't look worse to simply ignore the sexual harassment problems).

However, I have also been disappointed by the response of some of those who have been similarly appalled by the situation. Sadly, many of the articles and commentaries voicing a strong critique of the sexual safety within the camps, and the camps' responses to them, have proposed the same dead-end solution: end the occupations.

This response seems kind of bizarre when you compare the situation to many analogous ones, which don't involve protests. If someone is sexually harassed or assaulted within a company, for instance, no one expects that company to be dissolved; they expect the perpetrator to be dealt with and the organization itself to continue. Or at more physically similar events -- say, a large outdoor concert, or one of these music festivals the kids are all so fond of these days -- when someone is raped or sexually assaulted, the situation is dealt with, and the show goes on. And in ordinary life, if, say, one person rapes another in a dark alley, WE BLAME THE RAPIST, NOT THE DARK ALLEY. Or at least we should, because blaming the physical situation is really, really uncomfortably close to blaming the victim h/erself.

Furthermore, it is not clear to me what, exactly, ending the occupations would accomplish other than muffling the voices of thousands of rightfully angry citizens. The sad truth is that, in a misogynistic society such as we live in, any situation in which women are placed in vulnerable positions, in crowds, and especially where they are sleeping in relatively exposed places, many will take this opportunity to sexually assault them (and some men, too). I am not a fatalist; I do not think this is in any way 'inevitable', nor do I think that the fact that it does happen is an excuse for allowing it to. However, it is important to acknowledge that it does, and that these atrocities are not unique to the Occupy camps. People are sexually assaulted all the time -- at concerts, at festivals, at parties surrounded by friends and acquaintances. And no one would argue that this is a reason not to have concerts, or festivals, or parties; nor should they.

I am skeptical, too, about some of the outrage against the anti-police sentiments of many of the Occupy protesters. Personally, I would never condemn someone for calling or going to the police when they felt their safety was in danger, quite simply because that is how we are taught to react, and for most people, reaching for these perceived authority figures is an act of self-defence. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that the police and the courts have an extremely bad track record when it comes to dealing with rape reports -- often harassing survivors so badly that they have sometimes said that the results of making the report were almost as bad as the rape itself -- which is among the reasons so many rapes go unreported. Unless there happens to be an officer on hand to actually stop the assault from taking place, there's probably not much they're going to be able or willing to do to help you. The system of legal redress for sexual crimes is hopelessly broken (if 'broken' is even a term that can apply to a system that has been weighted against the victims from the beginning; that has never brought anything like justice or healing to survivors, delivering only petty vengeance at best, and a humiliating ordeal at worst or in addition). Given this inefficacy, and the fact that many people -- especially long-time activists, the poor, and people of colour -- have either been physically or sexually assaulted themselves by police, or have had it happen to those close to them (not to mention the police violence that has already been inflicted on several of the Occupy camps themselves), it is hardly surprising that many wish to find other ways of dealing with the problem of sexual attacks in the camp communities that they are creating, to develop their own systems of security.

What, then, is the solution? I have to admit, I don't really know. It's easy enough to name the source of the problem: patriarchy, misogyny, and (duh) the perpetrators of sexual attacks themselves. But I have no more idea of how to prevent sexual attacks in the Occupations than in any other area of life. The basic advice seems to be the same: 1) Don't sexaully harass, assault, or rape anyone (simple!); 2) If you witness a sexual attack taking place, INTERVENE -- say something, do something, call for help, call the attacker out on their behaviour, even (or especially) if it is as "subtle" as leering, making inappropriate comments, or using sexually threatening body language and the like; 3) When you see your comrades (or "passers-by" or "free lunchers" who are, like, totally unconnected with the camp, obvs) engaging in sexist language or behaviour, or voicing sexist opinions, CALL THEM OUT ON IT. This last is the more long-term solution, as obviously calling someone out on their sexist language today is probably not going to stop them raping someone tonight, but if complete non-tolerance of sexism becomes the norm, then (and only then) we will have hoisted ourselves out of the rape culture, and THAT will have a serious impact in reducing rape and other sexual assault and harassment.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that, as spaces in which people are trying to build an intentional sense of community and communitarian spirit, the Occupy camps are exceptionally good places to practice this sort of community-based rape prevention. They're certainly better suited to tackle sexual assault problems than, say, a music festival or a concert or even most larger house parties. The first step, though, is for the protesters to acknowledge the problem and tackle it head-on; if they continue to equivocate and distance themselves from those who have been sexually harassed and attacked within the camps, then they will only perpetuate the rape culture of the wider world. They will sow discontent among themselves and, ultimately, the movement will fail. There can be no class liberation without women's liberation. We can't wait until after The Revolution to tackle patriarchy. We have to do it NOW.

Well, shit, there's that book meme. I'd finally managed to sync up with the days of the month, and thought I might finish the thing in such a stylishly congruous flourish, but no -- instead I managed to forget about it, and here I am on the 30th feebly poking out an entry for the 27th. Ho-hum.

Day 27 – The most surprising plot twist or ending

I'm gonna exclude mystery novels from this out of principle, since their surprise endings are usually totally expected. Also not mentioning the ones I proudly figured out before the end. Which leaves me with: Freeze Frames by Katharine Kerr. Brilliant twist, but that's all I'm gonna say.

( Upcoming Days )

But hey, listen, meme, it could be worse. And at least the once-a-day answers, unlike those long-list style memes we all like to pretend we didn't do in high school, doesn't represent a total death of creativity ... I could be saying lots of Things About Books -- and have, in earlier instances. For now, though, we're having an unprecedented heatwave, after a wet, cold and miserable "summer", and I told some friends I'd meet them at the beach.