Message from a Boy (Harassing a Lady)

Yesterday, at about four, I revived my OKCupid profile. Within hours, I received a proposition from a man asking if I'd ever thought of being with "a couple? How about a couple of writers?" which, hey, you do you, dude; however, you are twenty-two years older than me, so no thanks.

At eleven o'clock I got this:

My reply, with my face for reference.

Here's the thing, I don't expect much from dating sites. I've been on three dates in my life. I've done a lot of chatting-that-goes-nowhere. Whatever. All in good fun. And I go back and forth about officially disclosing my disability on my profile. I get more messages if I don't, but it's such a huge part of me, that often I do.

I fall into the category of rabid feminist. I will defend other women's--and men's, and nonbinary folks'--rights to do whatever they want with their bodies in a safe space. But I have a hard time identifying with the issues of unwelcome sexualization other girls face. It never happened to me. I wasn't just a girl to my guy friends in high school, I wasn't a girl at all. Not one they'd consider dating. Not a deeply romantic person with with nascent desires, just like they are. (Full disclosure: I did get asked out once, by my best friend. We had one date. No bases involved.)

So, I don't get the "hey sexy" messages on OKC. I'm sure this makes me lucky, in the realistic scheme of things. For someone raised in thee contemporary world of hypocritical beauty expectations for girls/women, it is perversely disappointing. My body is not sexualized. It is also not fetishized,in the way of other disabled people. It is desexualized.

And I've grown accustomed to that. I try not to hold myself to beauty standards my body can't attain. I like make-up, and having long, pink-streaked hair. My face is my face, I do with it what I can. Most people I know seem to understand that. Believe it or not, I'd never gotten a message like this before. Dumb luck, I guess. Or maybe it's that I've usually lived in metropolitan areas, where people had better things to do than abuse a disabled girl on the internet. The fact that this guy doesn't like it isn't what bothers me about this message--at least not consciously. What bothers me about this message is that he bothered to send it. It bothers me that a self-identifying nerd, who has interests similar to mine, decided to waste his inbox allowance on this. He's not a neckbeard--he's pasty, but not unattractive. He has a good job. Works for the Navy. And yet.

And yet. Our society has such little acceptance for desperate--no, for DISABLED--appearances, that it is okay to say things like this. The shouts and slurs that used to be given whenever disabled people went out the door have now been moved inside, and online. This is not a positive development. But it is also not this particular bastard's fault. Our city has a smalltown mentality, but it's not small. I doubt he's ever seen me in real life. He probably doesn't have much experience with people with disabilities--some of our schools mainstream better than others, after all--perhaps all he knows how to do is express his knee-jerk reaction to the unusual. But it is the fault of society that enforces beauty standards so intensely that a guy not only can't see past the superficial, but must also scream his discomfort to the heavens.

I can take this. It's nothing I haven't heard, or thought, before. Not all disabled people can. Next time you're going on about being sexualized by MRA assholes, please remember your comrades who are desexualized, as well. Remember us. Speak of us. Fight with us.

Otherwise, the predators will have free reign over yet another oppressed group. No one wants that. Right?

The Raven Boys as Modern Marauders

Why I Shouldn't Have to Defend Taylor Swift

Power and Privilege on ABC Family's The Fosters

I’ve seen plenty of criticism claiming that the writers and creators of The Fosters aren’t aware of the degree of privilege their characters hold. I’ll concede that, to a point, particularly given this tweet by Bradley Bredeweg, the executive producer. If everyone involved in the show truly grasped the power dynamics at hand, Brandon and Callie would not be acceptable. But, fear not Braillie shippers, that’s not what I’m here to talk about. 

I think the show has done some interesting things with privilege, particularly in the way it shifts. Similar to real life, no one on the show has a static level of privilege. Take Lena, for example. In many ways, she is highly privileged. Comfortable income, middle-class lifestyle, highly educated. However, she’s also a member of both a racial and a sexual minority. She is the one who shares the most stories of being discriminated against, and she experiences outsider status in her family due to having light skin. The these different levels of privilege allow her to be ignorant at times—her praising of Timothy edges on problematic what with the sitar joke—and somewhat judgmental when it comes to dealing with people who do not inhabit the privileged part of her world—Callie at Juvie, Daphne—but also to be vulnerable in other ways. 

Stef’s privilege is different than her wife’s. It is implied that she comes from a more blue-collar background than Lena. She also has white privilege, which the show demonstrates subtlety, such as when she comments that she “[doesn’t] understand why Dana [Lena’s mother] stresses [Lena] out so much.” This plays as an in-law joke, but once we see that Dana stresses Lena out, at this juncture, because of the way she talks about Lena’s light skin, it casts a different light on Stef’s comment—she doesn’t understand, because this has to be explained to her. However, she lacks privilege in being a woman on the police force, and coming out as a lesbian late in life, both which are things she struggles with explicitly.  

Four of the kids—Jesus, Mariana, Callie and Jude—have experienced a change in privilege. For Jesus and Mariana this happened at a young age, but the effects are still visible. While Mariana seems to be a spoiled, middle-class girl at the beginning of the show, it’s revealed that this illustrates how much she’s changed since her adoption, but also changes as she confronts her biological mother. I think we’ll continue to see her journey in this regard over the next season. Lexi seemed to be her only connection to Latin@ culture, and her hair in the promo suggests that she may be acting out against it, perhaps in light of the ostracizing she is now encountering at her—highly affluent, mostly white—school. She’s still young enough to be trying on identities, and coming to terms with the different layers of herself.

I have plenty more to say in terms of Jesus and Jude—oh, Jude, there are so many cool ways your life could go—but this is getting long, and I want to move on to Callie. Callie has the unique position of being explicitly aware of her new privilege, and of the bullshit factor involved in that. I imagine there’s plenty of rough stuff in her background—I want to know how she got her cartilage piercing, just because of the negative associations piercings seem to have on this show—but by the time she gets to Girls United, she’s in a good place. The other girls are quick to call her out on that.* They make her realize that by leaving The Fosters, she is intentionally making her life harder, and the show highlights this in that conversation between her and Brandon where they both realize that she doesn’t have to be in a position to worry about buying a kitchen table at the age of fifteen. This theme is continued after she leaves Girls United, and this is where I’m resting my hope for next season. 

Callie has gained privilege at the Fosters, and that means more than just that she’s disdainful of her classmates. It means that she understands the power that comes with privilege, which she is learning to use for good. Rather than making it easier for herself by distancing herself from the foster system, she immediately figures out how she can help other foster kids. And she doesn’t do this in an unintentionally condescending way, as Stef or Lena might. It’s a give and take, and when she does take on the judgmental point of view with Daphne, she is proven wrong. I foresee her doing more to bridge the gap between the world she inhabits now, and the world she used to inhabit to improve things for other foster kids. There’s real potential there, I think.

Overall, I really love the diversity in The Fosters, mostly because it’s more than diversity. Every characters’ background affects their life and relationships in a realistic way. None of them are perfect, not even Saint Lena. And even minor characters, like Wyatt, are layered. He’s less economically privileged than most of Anchor Beach, and ends up homeless/living with Daphne, at which point he’s clearly in over his head at that point. Arguably, the most privileged character introduced is Liam—his family golfs recreationally, Callie describes the house as the best they’d had, and she has a lot of guilt for losing that placement until she comes to grips with what happened—but the power he has because of his privilege is highly negative. On the other hand, the show doesn’t shy away from showing the result of that power. I think the result of that pre-trial hearing will be another huge motivator for Callie becoming a force for change.

I realize I haven’t addressed the white boy in the room, here. Brandon’s privilege, his arrogance, and the tendency he has to not act like he was raised by two wonderful ladies and an okay-guy are the show’s biggest failure, in terms of privilege. I’m also not thrilled about the whole injured-hand thing, because it’ll either give him more manpain, or humble him in a contrived way. So. I’m going to have to wait and see before I can really address him in terms of the generally successful ways the show deals with privilege.  

*The diversity of the girls’ backgrounds, the way their privileges collide, is explored very well on the Girls United webseries, and I hope the main show goes there soon. 

Originally Posted June 11th, 2014 Updated to reflect Season Two

Lost on the Couch

I've basically been on Couch Rest for the past six months. For those who say that is an exaggeration, they did not live with my. My roommates, and now my mother, can confirm. Couch and bed, that's me.

It's all been medically necessary. Starting some time in June, I got a sore on my leg that came from a fluid pocket, and not anything I did. That's the only good part about it. It drained crazy fluid and took two surgeries to close. The second one, on November 17th, required a month in the hospital post-op, and it might have been longer had the holidays not come. Also, during the July to November period, I had two MRSA infections--one from the surgical site, one from a fall. And I'm still having residual pain from my back surgery, from which I'm now over a year out, and he's not sure where that's coming from--basically I've been a hot mess.

Because of all the health problems, which basically meant I was paying way, Way, WAY too much to live on my couch, I've moved back in with my mom. I planned to do this all along, just six months from now when my lease was meant to ran out. I'm not going to stay here longer than two years, which should be long enough to pay stuff off and decide where I'll end up. Until then, my basic needs are met, and maybe I'll be sick less.

Although, I haven't stopped sneezing since I got here, so WHO THE HECK KNOWS?

I haven't been totally unproductive in that time. I wrote the posts on media you'll be seeing here, and I've been revising an MS. No huge news on that front, but things haven't been totally static either.

Media I have recently become obsessed with: In the Flesh, White Collar, The Raven Cycle books, The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer, Gravity Falls (hush, I was in the hospital, ok), BBC's Our Girl, The Oxford Time Travel novels by Connie Willis, The Queen's Thief series, The Wars by Timothy Findley, and Gabrielle Zevin's The Storied Life of AJ Fikray (I read it three times last year....).

What'd you guys get obsessed with last year?

Why I Love The Fosters's Callie Jacob

My marathon rewatch of The Fosters has me thinking about Callie’s character, and I’ve been struck on how nice she really is. She’s not at all the callous, oft-times cruel, beat-down-by-the-system foster kid we get a lot in media, and that’s so refreshing.

Hold on, I hear many people say, she called Stef and Lena “dykes” in the first episode! Well, yes. She did. But Callie does very little without reason, particularly at this point in the series, and that reason is easy enough to understand once you accept the way that her primary motivation is manifesting at this point. She wants to protect Jude. In the pilot, that means she has to get to him, and in her mind that means she’ll quickly be leaving this home—where they clearly don’t have enough room for two more kids—and probably the system for good. She can’t get attached, because the last time she got attached was Liam. Talk about betrayal. So, she shuts herself off. She insults everyone, but her put downs are generic—if sassy—and I bet anything she picked them up from people she found dislikable in other homes. And even when she’s being cold, her niceness shines through a little. Something in the way she reminds Brandon and Mariana about what will get them in trouble with their moms. It’s not just that she quickly adapts the title “moms” without any indicator of her earlier homophobia, its in the way that she tries to protect the people who have been her foster-siblings for all of twelve hours, in spite of what she’s suffered at the hands of other foster siblings*. She doesn’t want anyone to get into trouble for her.  

Once Jude is safe, her attitude does a total one-eighty. She’s still guarded, but she’s polite. I was struck particularly by her reaction to hearing that Mariana’s friend Kelsey has gone to rehab. She says, “I’m sorry to hear that.” Kelsey framed her and could have gotten her sent back to Juvie, but Callie is polite about her. To me, the fact that it’s a canned response says even more. It says that at some point, probably her first ten years, Callie was raised to say the kind thing. For all that her father drank, we don’t have evidence that he was violent, and I think her home life may have been pretty loving and peaceful—making the shift to the system a huge shock. 

Callie’s nice-but-protective persona continues through the season. Her relationship toward Mariana becomes trusting and protective—think of her helping Mari down the steps at the party—almost like her relationship with Jude. And that’s the thing. Throughout 1a, we see that Callie only allows herself to acknowledge two types of love—the kind she feels toward Jude, which leads to self-denial, and the kind enacted by Liam, which she comes to view as corrupt.

And here’s where I may lose some Braillie shippers, so let me say first that the way Callie’s perception shifts after this realization is what first causes her to reject and run from The Fosters, because she no longer knows how to accept walls-down, unconditional mother-love, but the way she tells Stef and Lena she loves them at the end of 1b, even when she thinks Donald is going to take her and Jude away, is a mark of the loving, kind, Callie she’s finally learned to let show even if it means accepting sorrow as well as joy.

Back to Liam. I do not think Brandon is comparable to Liam. I don’t think he’s the anti-Liam, or a proto-Liam, or the nouveau-Liam. Still, if you are 100% pro-Braillie, you may want to get off the train. 

I’m not against Brandon. I think he’s very privileged**. I don’t think he truly understands who Callie is now. I do think he loves the person she let him see. I think she will be the supportive, world-wise (comparatively) sister that he needs if things play out the way I hope they will, but I think their romantic relationship was ultimately toxic, primarily because it was not what Callie ultimately needed.

There are undeniable parallels between her relationships with Liam and Brandon, and those are there for a reason. They’re both older, privileged, loved boys who showed Callie affection. It’s easy for her to accept this from Brandon, at first because she only thinks it’s wrong because it got her kicked out of the best foster home she and Jude had ever had. Then she realizes that what Liam did was wrong, and not her fault. And it’s important that this is the point where she begins to accept Brandon’s feelings, because it’s important that she sees that he is not Liam. He is not manipulative.*** He is genuine. His affection for her is the guileless love The Fosters all give in different ways, but it’s close enough to what she knows—what she has had in the past—for her to accept.

Until it comes into conflict with her primary motivation: protect Jude. This happens, and she runs. But once she runs, it becomes clear that the Fosters aren’t going to reject Jude, whatever she does. Her primary motivation, the trait that defines how she interacts with people, has been taken out of her hands. Again, she closes off. Again, her character shines through—she is kind to Cole, explicitly stating a belief that underscores her arc, “what is right isn’t always what is easy.” 

Because that’s the thing. It’s easy for her to latch onto Brandon. She latches onto him while she’s at Girls United, because it’s easy. She isn’t expected to protect him, or to have a relationship she’s never had before with him. She doesn’t really have to open up to him. (What does she tell him that can’t be found in her file? The file that Lena says early on shouldn’t define her?) However, once she begins to reveal what she needs—not necessarily from him, but from someone—it’s clear that he’s not ready to provide that. And that’s okay. A sixteen-year-old kid in his position should not be expected to have to prioritize having a kitchen table over killer speakers. But Callie would, if she went into independent living. It wouldn’t be outlaws in love—the show tells us that within the first five minutes, and hits it home in “The Honeymoon.” it would be Daphne’s Kraft Dinner. Some teenagers can make a go at that, but it doesn’t tend to go well on this show, and I highly doubt it would go well for Brandon, even if he and Callie were MFEO. But this isn’t about Brandon. It’s about Callie. What Callie needs in order to be that kind, sassy-and-sweet girl we see glimpses of in passing.

To become that girl, Callie needs a family—parents. She doesn’t realize how much until she lets herself truly remember her mother in “Padre.” Once she does that, once she remembers everything, truth that isn’t in her file, and reveals it to Stef—not Brandon, not even Jude—when she allows herself to be comforted, to be mothered, she really opens up. It’s spelled out—literally, wonderfully—in the next episode. She takes care of remembering Jude’s “secret birthday,” in a way that symbolizes the hiding, secreting, and squirreling away treats and food for him, the way she’s done for six years, and then she shares it with their family. She’s beginning to give over the reins.

It’s not a perfect handover. She still lies to Stef and Lena—almost all in the name of protecting Jude, occasionally Brandon^—but I think the depth of her true emotions can be seen in “Don’t Let Go.” At the point where she tells Stef and Lena that she^^ loves them, she thinks that Donald is going to take her away. And yet, instead of shutting herself off, she opens up. It’s a sign that she knows they will always been in her life, but also a tip-off that she doesn’t want to leave. I think she’s unconsciously afraid of leaving, for her own sake. She doesn’t want to leave them. And it’s not just because with them she doesn’t have to pull strings to make sure Jude is safe or protected. It’s because she is safe and protected. They take care of her, without manipulation, prodding, or condition. And because of that, she can be genuine, kind, and loving. The girl her mom raised. 

Now, I’m excited to see the way in which those traits allow her to become the woman she’s growing to be. I imagine in the next season her protectiveness will allow her to step up in the face of Brandon’s injury, helping Stef and Lena with the younger ones, but I also think she’s going to rely on the moms to help her navigate a lot of life and social issues she missed out on by moving constantly and closing herself off. I see them encouraging her to plan for a future she didn’t think she had. And maybe it will involve channeling that love, protection, and kindness into helping other foster kids understand that they deserve all the types of love that the world has to offer, too. 

*Some of this may be that she feels culpable for getting Liam “in trouble,” At this point she think it was “her fault,” and she writes about him under the heading of guilt, which may stem from more than just getting herself and Jude sent away from the Olmsteads.

**I want to do a post this week on privilege—everyone’s, not just Brandon’s—and the role it plays in the show.

***Or, at least, it’s not the calculated manipulation of a pedophile, it’s the unknowing manipulation of a privileged teenage asshole, but he does occasionally show signs of actually having been raised by Stef and Lena, and I’m hoping the future gives us a redemption arc of sorts. (Not because of his injury, i hate redemption by injury, just by means of being a person.)

^Part of me wants to say this is residual fear left over from the whole Liam thing, which is a reflection not on Brandon, but on the horror of Liam and the system.

^^And Jude, she still tends to mask true emotion behind Jude

Originally Posted May 31st, 2014 

Revival

Hi all! I haven't disappeared, I've just been going through some medical things that have made it hard to keep my social media active. I promise to give you all an update on my life this week. Also, to get myself in the habit of blogging here, I'll be making more media analysis/review entries. Some will be older entries that have already been posted to Tumblr, but they'll all be relevant to current events/media. This platform is just better for archiving and discussion, so I want as much of my work here as possible.