Film critic David Edelstein, whom I am about to drag into gender politics whether he likes it or not.
I like David Edelstein’s film reviews so much that I read them even for movies I know I will never watch, which is why I ended up reading his review of Spring Breakers in the first place.
In the review, Edelstein bravely plunges into the shark-infested waters of feminist politics, by painting the movie Spring Breakers as a textbook example of pervy middle-aged men co-opting feminist liberation. The movie features “three starlets from the Disney entertainment megaverse” (Venessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, and Selena Gomez), and Edelstein says that all three “are obviously there as a gesture of defiance — an attempt to free themselves from their Mouse patriarch overlord and the shackles of corporate teen celebrity.”
So how does that jailbreak go? Well, here’s the second paragraph of the review:
It’s also among the perviest movies ever made — although by spelling out why, I fear I’ll only make some people want to see it more. Spring Breakers opens with a montage of bouncing bare boobs and buttocks barely squeezed into bikini bottoms, the camera gliding up the lengths of young girls’ thighs — see what I mean? That skeevy guy down the street just grabbed his raincoat and headed for the multiplex. The point is that Korine isn’t a passive voyeur. He moves in-in-in on those hot bods — up, down, all around the town. A friend whispered, “The camera is like a giant tongue.” You can almost hear the slurping.
As I said: these are treacherous waters. One of my favorite stories about the politics of porn (I’m going to use that term broadly in this piece, and Spring Breakers seems to have the spirit of porn confined to a “hard-R” rating) is from the Penny-Arcade Expo. One year, there were a bunch of booth babes (attractive women hired to staff convention booths) and the folks at Penny-Arcade didn’t kick them out. They got a torrent of angry mail accusing them of being sexist for allowing girls to be objectified. The next year they asked a particularly over-the-top booth babe to go inside a school bus (it was part of the display, you can imagine why) to keep the convention floor more family-friendly. They got another torrent of angry mail accusing them of being sexist for treating women’s bodies as something to be hidden. Penny-Arcade artist Mike Krahulik wrote a disgusted post asking feminists of the world to please decide what he’s supposed to do, because no matter what he does someone yells at him for being sexist.
So: does porn exploit women or empower them? I don’t know if it was Edelstein’s intent to make a statement on that general question, but he comes pretty close to it:
The Roku 3 has a lot of improvements over previous generations, like the headphone jack integrated into the WiFi-based remote, but for me there is one improvement that stands out above all the rest: the Roku will let you search for a show across all your “channels” (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) That’s a subtle but incredibly important feature that really changes the nature of the device. Check out the review at The Verge for more.
So, yeah. This really happened. It’s part of real-life now.
Incidentally, this is the second-best real-news story of militarized animals after the Beast of Basra. In that story, Iraqis claimed that giant, man-eating badgers had been released by the British Army near Basra. The rumors prompted UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer to issue an official response including (and this is a real quote): “We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.” That quote comes via the BBC, which cited experts who believed that the nightmarish creatures were probably native honey badgers. (Honey badgers are their own Internet meme, in case you didn’t know. The linked video includes lots of swearing.)
Writing for the Atlantic, Matthew Obrien points out the rather terrifying data on long-term unemployment in the United States.
The gist of this chart–and of the article–is that once a worker has been unemployed for more than 6 months they become virtually unemployable. Companies don’t even want to consider them. As a result, the high unemployment rate during the current Great Recession can permanently increase poverty in our nation because it has led to people having no job for extended periods of time. That’s all true, and it’s all scary. But at the end, Matthew makes an erroneous assumption. He writes:
It’s what economists call hysteresis, the idea being that a slump, left untreated, can make us permanently poorer by reducing our future ability to do and make things.
In reality, however, the problem is not just a slump left untreated. It’s a slump maltreated. That maltreatment in this case has been the extension of unemployment insurance basically without limit. This sounds compassionate, but economists have known since at least the 1970s that the direct result of extending unemployment benefits is that people are unemployed for longer. Two studies (both from the 1990s) make this point:
Sharp increases in the escape rate from unemployment both through recalls and new job acceptances are apparent for UI recipients around the time of benefits exhaustion. Such increases are not apparent at similar points of spell duration for nonrecipients. Second, our analysis of accurate administrative data from 12 states indicates that a one week increase in potential benefit duration increases the average duration of the unemployment spells of UI recipients by 0.16 to 0.20 weeks. – “The impact of the potential duration of unemployment benefits on the duration of unemployment” (Journal of Public Economics) Link
In this paper administrative data from the unemployment-insurance (UI) system are used to examine the distribution of unemployment spells. Hazard plots of the data reveal a strong clustering around the benefit exhaustion point. – “Unemployment insurance and the distribution of unemployment spells” (Journal of Econometrics) Link
In plain English: economists have known since the 1970s that the more you extend unemployment insurance the longer people remain unemployed. Why do we have a huge crisis with people remaining unemployed for 6 months or more? In part, at least, it’s a direct, foreseeable, and well-known effect of extending unemployment insurance. This problem is not merely caused by the Great Recession. It’s also caused by political pandering on the part of politicians in passing policies that sound nice but which lead directly to catastrophe.
I didn’t think about this when I picked Monday for my weekly posts at Times And Seasons, but I realize now that that posting on a Mormon blog on Mondays provides too many opportunities for alliteration to be ignored. I’m thinking “Monday Morning Mormon Madness”. Too much? I’m paralyzed by the overwhelming potential.
In any case, here is my latest offering. It’s called “What the Chruch Is Not For“, and it represents my attempt to find a 3rd way between the TBMs (true-believing Mormons) and liberal/intellectual crowd. Not that I’m the first, of course, but I hope y’all will find my particular take on it interesting.
One of the things that has kept me from my usual blogging schedule this week is the passing of my wife’s grandfather, Charles H. Eades, Sr.
It seems like everyone in my wife’s family is named “Charlie” in honor of this man (including at least one girl), and it’s not hard to see why. He had an infectious smile, gentle love for everyone, and he was a war hero to boot. Of course I knew that Charlie served in World War II, and I asked him to tell me about it one day, a few years ago. I quickly regretted doing so, however. Although I was respectful, it was immediately obvious that what I saw as history was still living, breathing reality to Charlie. All I learned from that discussion was that he had landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day, that he lost a lot of close friends, and that the pain was still fresh, more than six decades later.
Today, at the viewing held in his honor, there was an article from the Southside Sentinnel for Veteran’s Day, 2010. I learned a little bit more about Charlie. I learned that he joined the Army National Guard before Pearl Harbor, that his landing boat was sunk before it reached the beach on D-Day, that “some men” made it to shore, and that out of the 12 howitzers in his battalion, only one got on to the beach. It was assigned to another unit, and Charlie became an infantryman. I also learned that in addition to Omaha Beach, Charlie (this time back in the artillery) took part in action during the Battle of the Bulge. The article quotes his perspective on the extremely violent opening to the movie “Saving Private Ryan”. Charlie said simply: “It was exactly like that.”
I only knew him for the last 8 years of life, but I loved the man I knew. He had so much love for his kids, his grandkids, and his great grandkids. When my wife and I got married, he walked her down the aisle. For that alone, I would have thought he was a great man. Learning how much pain and sorrow he had to face and overcome in his life only deepens my admiration for him. He lived a great life, and I’m honored that I was able to see even a small part of it.
I’ve had a lot of crazy things going on that have put a temporary squeeze on my blogging. Have no fear! I have some great pieces I’m working on. (He said with great humility.) But due to family and professional things and also the Snowquester, I am a little behind my own goal for posting.
And I was about to go to sleep without posting anything at all, but the Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster (nearly 11 hours so far) has grabbed my attention.
Senator Paul is filibustering the nomination of John Brennan to serve as CIA head. The problem is not with Brennan. It’s with the Obama Administration’s murky stance on using drones to assassinate Americans even far away from the battlefield. I’ve been following that legal discussion for some time, and the gist of it is that the White House says that they will only exercise that authority if there’s an “imminent” threat to America, but then they defined “imminent” to basically mean “whatever we feel like”. Real issue? Yes.
I’m as cynical as the next guy. There’s no question that Paul has an eye on 2016. Now Senator Ted Cruz is acting as his wingman–asking “questions” that involve just reading Tweets about #StandWithRand (trending at #1 on Twitter, I think), and there’s no doubt that Cruz is riding some coattails. This is politics. Cynicism goes without saying.
But the reality is that I love this symbolic gesture. I love that it’s an old-school filibuster, the kind where they actually stand up and talk the whole time. I love that it’s a legitimate and serious civil liberties concern that is behind it. And yeah, I love that it’s the GOP standing for something. For once.
If you’re interested, and if you read this post soon, watch the live feed here: C-SPAN. (If C-SPAN sold commercials I bet they’d be really excited by this random spike in traffic!)
I don’t know if this is going to be a watershed moment in politics or not. Probably not, but I’ve got a cool feeling watching the feed. (A feeling that was dampened by some disgusting accolades for Ayn Rand, but which remains nonetheless.)
Why don’t I like it? Well let me start out with some context: I was bullied as a kid. Since I’m not really sure how to quantify the extent of my bullying (do we have a Richter scale or something I could use?) I’ll just describe it.
I had no problems in elementary school. I had lots of friends and we all got along. But towards the end of 5th grade I remember things started to change. My friends started to get really worried about middle school and making sure they were prepared for it. They all started listening to mainsteam music on the radio, watching Saturday Night Live or late-night talk shows, and caring about their clothes and their language. I had no interest in any of that. I’d heard that they still had dodgeball in middle school, and so I was satisfied that we’d all have a good time. I completely missed out on the sense that I was supposed to be studying hard for the next level of social challenges. I was like the kid who really has no clue how important and hard a final exam is, and doesn’t even really grasp how hard everyone else is studying for it. Before 5th grade was over, the changes were minor, but when middle school started it was like I was from the wrong planet.
All of my closest friends from elementary school successfully made the transition to becoming the cool kids in middle school. I didn’t even know there was a transition to be made. They didn’t want to sit with me in class, eat lunch with me, or be seen in public with me anymore, and I didn’t know why. Not understanding the jokes or what clothes to wear didn’t phase me, but suddenly finding myseld discarded by my friends hurt. I tried to catch up, but I never got it right. I put too much gel in my hair one day, trying to make something of it, and the teacher happened to call me up to the front of the room for some kind of spelling bee practice. For some reason she put her hand on my head and recoiled, “What’s in your hair?” she said loudly. I was mortified as the class erupted into laughter, but not as much as when I realized she actually expected an answer. What happened to my hair? I don’t know, I was trying to look like kids on TV but I had no one to ask about it. I tried to make up a story about the bottle breaking that morning, but she kept inquiring–laughing the whole time–if I got too much stuff in my hair why didn’t I just wipe it back off?
As if I had a good answer for that.
I was the second-shortest boy in middle school, and usually the second-smartest. That’s not a good place to be. The shortest kid, Thomas, was under the constant watchful protection of popular girls who thought he was adorable. No one messed with him. The smartest kids got teased a bit, but they had some ammunition for return fire. I had nothing.
I remember vividly how my eyes would flicker from the floor to the faces around me as I scurried through the halls–head down–trying to avoid being tripped. My constant vigilance meant that I would usually be able to hop over the attempts without even stopping, but not always. Then I would fall, it would hurt, and everyone would laugh. Sometimes people stole my stuff, other times they vandalized it. Once, while I was in gym class, someone pulled small bits of jeans through the air holes in the locker and then cut them off, so that when I got back and changed my pants were basically Swiss cheese. My parents complained to the administration about that one, but were told that only nice kids went to that school, so surely I must have done it myself for attention. Once, in an effort to try hard enough not to be noticed in gym, I dove for the volleyball. We were playing inside, and I missed and then slid a few feet before cracking my head into the wall. The gym teacher, sitting in a tall chair at the height of the net, pointed and led the class laughing at me, tossing in a few quips about “using your head” and such. I even had my own run-in with social services, much like what was described in the video, although thankfully I was never actually taken out of my home.
So how bad does that bullying compare? I don’t know. I figure it was pretty bad, but it’s not like I think about it on a daily basis. It didn’t determine the course of my life.
The Governor’s School for Government and International Studies was in this building when I attended.
Part of that is probably because when I found out that I could go to a magnet school for other nerds instead of going on to high school with the folks from my middle school, I leaped at the chance. I didn’t know anything about the magnet school other than that they only took a few kids from the middle school, but that was enought. By that point I would have done pretty much anything to escape from those kids. Luckily, the high school ended up being awesome. Most of the kids had been bullied, I think, and none of us had any interest in perpetuating that kind of social environment. As I remember it, there were no cliques and everyone was free to mingle with everyone else.
I didn’t realize this at first, so when I first started I stuck with the kids who played Magic: The Gathering. Gradually I started playing ultimate frisbee every day during lunch instead and met a new group of friends, but I still viewed the better-dressed kids with suspicion and fear. Eventually the negative reinforcement training from middle school faded, however, and I realized that they were just kids, too. By the time I was a senior I was completely at ease talking to kids who wore kilts or khakis.
As I learned to talk and relate to everyone, I came to learn that although bullying hurts so do a lot of other things in life. Kids get cancer, their parents get divorced, they regret losing their virginity, they have eating disorders, they become alcoholics, their girlfriends have sex with their best friends, they get raped, they are forced to have abortions they don’t want, their parents kill themselves, they go into withdrawal trying to quit cocaine cold-turkey. None of those examples are made up. I saw them all, and a lot of them more than once. I know at least three girls who were raped, for example. I had a friend who used to keep a razor blade in his mouth for self-protection in his neighborhood and a friend who lived out of her car while working full-time and going to high school to try and pay the mortgage for a house she was too busy to ever live in.
One of my close friends–a guy who’d endured a lot of similar bullying with me all the way back to our middle school days–hung himself in his closet a couple of weeks before his birthday. I remember my last conversation with him vividly. We were on the bus on the way home, and we were debating (as we often did) and I was happy because he had seemed so depressed for such a long time, and he seemed his usual, animated self that day. At least he did until the end of the conversation.
I don’t remember how we got there, but I remember that I felt like I had some kind of insight into what had changed i him over the months and years. “The thing about you,” I said, “Is that it’s not that you lack passion for things. It’s that the only thing you’re passionate about is nothing.” He stopped laughing then, and paused before he responded. Then he told me that I was right. It was a low note, and I was a little worried, but the bus had arrived at the local high school. We got off and went to the individual buses that would take us home and I didn’t think much more of it until I got a call later that evening that he had committed suicide. As far as I know, I was the last person to talk to him. I went to school the next day thinking I’d be OK, but when they announced it in my first class I lost control and started sobbing. There were kids just huddled together in the halls all day, and I can’t tell you how many new prescriptions for anti-depressants my friends got over the next few months.
Bullying hurts, but so does a lot of life. Somewhere along the way I stopped thinking that getting tripped in the halls was such a bad thing. I’m not saying that that is all bullying ever is, of course, and I’m not claiming to have suffered worse bullying than anyone else. I’m just saying that I don’t really like the idea of defining yourself around it. Does bullying scar kids for life? It probably does. So do a lot of things. While we’re at it–and this won’t make me a lot of friends–I think that the kids who do the bullying are doing it because they, too, hurt. Everyone hurts. Not just sometimes, but most of the time. What’s worse, a lot of the time we don’t know why it is that we’re in pain. Loss, disappointment, loneliness, fatigue, fear… all the varieties of pain are compounded by confusion.
If you were bullied as a kid and it hurt: I’m sorry. That sucks. But don’t go around thinking that your life is miserable and everyone else is carefree and happy. For as long as I let them, a lot of the kids in my high school seemed to want to confide in me. My parents would often hand me the phone (before there were cell phones) with a weary, “Another patient is on the line.” Finally I sort of stopped making myself available because it was more than I could take, but as long as I was willing to listen the one constant thing was this: everyone has a tragedy. No exceptions.
I don’t want kids who are bullied to think that what is happening to them makes their lives somehow surprisingly worse than others. It reminds me of the importance in not showing fear when a little child comes to you with a playground injury. Part of your job, in comforting them, is to remain calm. If they see the adult freak out at the sight of blood, then of course they will be terrified. I’m worried that turning bullying into some national cause is going to end up doing the same thing. I don’t want the pain and hurt of being bullied compounded by confusion or some terrible myth that people who aren’t bullied lead happy, carefree lives. They don’t. Some folks have it worse and some have it better, but getting bullied really has nothing to do with how bad your life is. There are so many other things that cause people to suffer. Bullying is just one variety, and it’s not anything special.
Mexican law enforcement have captured a truck-mounted cannabis-howitzer used to launch 30-pound packages of marijuana over the border fence into the US.
I don’t know that there’s really anything I can add to the humor here, except this. If you go to the story, you can see that a related headline is “1.5 tons of marijuana found in lettuce truck”. I’ll let you add your own punchlines.
