Hannah Gadsby Doesn’t Like Art

Okay it’s reached a point where I have to say something. Every person who adds their name to the growing list of people applauding Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix comedy special “Nanette” makes it more and more necessary for someone to offer a rebuttal. I don’t like being a public contrarian. I’d rather let people have their fun if I don’t like something. But there’s a difference between not liking something and having a strong oppositional relationship to its core thesis. And let’s be clear: “Nanette” has a very assertive central thesis. It’s 40% fine stand-up, 60% TED Talk about the futility of art, comedy in particular. And I care too much about art to take that shit lying down.

I can say this about Hannah Gadsby: she’s good at what she does. It is an expertly crafted show. She even manages to point out just how she’s manipulating her audience while she successfully pulls it off. Bravo. But all art is emotional manipulation, so this is in no way unique to stand-up nor is it necessarily, as she asserts, abusive. It’s a power that the audience grants you, a trust that you will drive their emotions safely to their destination. What you do with that power determines whether it’s abusive or not.

And I would argue that Hannah Gadsby definitely abuses that power here.

To invite an audience to a comedy show only to indict them for expecting you to make them laugh is a move brash enough to be punk if she were to embrace the anger behind it enough to properly alienate us or allow for catharsis. But she disguises her discomfort with her own anger in false assertions about art, comedy, and mental and emotional health. I care too much about those things to allow for the emotional resonance of “Nanette” to cloud critical thinking about its substance. 

Now, that emotional resonance is real. This is not an indictment of anyone who found her story compelling or helpful to hear. 

But let’s talk about her assertions. 

1. Comedy is about manufacturing and releasing tension. Sure. Not exactly particular to comedy. All storytelling, even the type she switches to halfway through, is about manipulating tension. Dynamics keep things engaging. That’s why we watch.
2. Comedy only gives you a beginning and a middle, stories give you a beginning, middle, and an end. Bullshit. The type of bullshit that sounds good but means fuck all. Every form of storytelling is fiction. Every form of expression is incomplete. Every narrative that has ever existed is an artificially truncated window that shows us what is relevant to its author. There is no such thing as the end of a story. 
3. High art and low art are qualitative distinctions. As someone personally invested in the low arts of animation, comics, and illustration, and who has spent years of her life rigorously studying object performance, melodrama, and clown, I just have to say, kiss my ass. I’m not surprised that Hannah Gadsby’s art history education left her feeling that there’s veracity to this idea, but I am disappointed that she never, in all her soul-searching about her role in comedy, never questioned it. I know I’m fortunate to have gone to an elite art school embedded with a history that celebrates lower art forms, because I get that it’s rare. But that counter-narrative has been there for a while, and in comedy it asserts itself in pieces like Tig Notaro’s “Live,” in which she decided to embrace what comedy can be rather than rejecting it on its face, and worked out the injustice of cancer on the fly with her audience. She invited us into that pain with comedy. And, like the guy in the audience said, it was incredible. It didn’t fix her cancer. It didn’t right any wrongs. Art can’t do that. But it can make living with cancer easier. And it can make dealing with a friends’ death to cancer easier, as it did for me. It was one of two brutally honest expressions of the reality of cancer that I have ever found in a pop culture media saturated with cancer-porn (the other, by the way, is “A Monster Calls,” a low art children’s book). And Tig expressed that while still doing her job and being so funny I cry every time. So yeah, I reject absolutely the idea that comedy, being a lower art form, can never express the truth of a story.  Go fuck yourself. 
4. Anger and tension are inherently bad. As someone who has recently had PTSD panic attacks because of my inability to express my anger, fuck you very much. Anger doesn’t disappear because you don’t want it anymore. Because it poisons you. Because it distorts you from the inside and all you want is to find joy and some fucking peace again but you can’t because you’re trapped inside your head and it’s so rage-filled that you can’t breathe. Yeah, I relate. But nobody’s ever once helped me by telling me my anger is something I should let go of. No. When that anger is tightly locked around my sense of self, acting as a last defense, I can’t let it go. Instead my anger is something I have to exorcise from my body every so often. I’ve learned over many years of therapy how to do this constructively and not destructively, and oddly enough one of the constructive ways is through comedy. Maybe not stand-up, though I know people who have started stand-up as a coping mechanism, but in the sense that comedy is always about finding the ways in which our experiences are ridiculous, and in our darkest moments, a little perspective shift toward the absurd can be a fucking lifeline. 
5. Picasso is unimportant because he was a misogynist asshole. This one may seem petty to harp on comparatively but here’s the thing: I actually thought while watching “Nanette,” “you know what, I should thank god every day that I live in a post-Cubism world.” I’m legit super glad about that. You should be too. Because the effect that Cubism had on the discourse around art allowed for the opportunity of myriad new voices to engage in it. Because just because Picasso held a kaleidoscope up to his dick doesn’t mean the advent of the kaleidoscope isn’t fucking important. Point it at something more interesting. Pick a different viewfinder. Stop wasting my time.
6. All of this is why she has to quit comedy. Look, Hannah Gadsby can quit or not quit. I want her to do what’s best for her. I left acting because I knew what it required of me would break me psychologically, so I get it. I get trying to find another way to tell your story. And I get the injustice of having to do that when what is breaking you is bullshit. It’s bullshit that people don’t think women are funny. It’s bullshit that people expect non-cis-het-white-men to perform their otherness for them. It’s bullshit that we are othered at all. It’s bullshit that women are discounted if they don’t align with hetero-male desires. It’s all bullshit. But that’s not comedy’s fault. Just like it wasn’t acting’s fault that part of being socialized female is not believing you deserve to take up space, and so standing on stage and demanding attention was excruciating for me. It sucks. It’s not fair. I wanted to be an actor and I can’t. But if I were to say the reason is that all acting is lying—that it’s all bullshit; it’s all curated and rehearsed and blocked; even the most realistic and moving performances are a big fat lie, and therefore it’s an art form inadequate to express the truth of my story—If I were to make that claim, I hope to hell all my theatre peeps would come out of the woodwork to tell me to stop disrespecting their field, and I’d hope at least one person in my life might tell me to stop being so precious about my damn story. No. It’s simply unhealthy for me to tell my stories that way. So I don’t. 

Gadsby makes reference in the special to a classic anti-female joke that I happen to love. Her version involves crowd work around lesbians not laughing at jokes about lesbians, but the version I learned was this: “How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” Pause. “That’s not funny.” 

But it is! Because feminists can’t take a joke! Because the constant threat of male violence is real for us and we’re a little touchy when people try to invalidate our anger at that by telling us to lighten up! It’s funny! 

But no, it actually is funny. It’s funny precisely for the reasons I just said. It’s funny precisely for the reasons Hannah Gadsby points out: the joke is a trap. Because if you don’t laugh, you prove the point. It’s a perfect encapsulation of what it feels like to be marginalized. 

That’s why I laugh, anyway. But not everyone laughs for those reasons. And I get it. That’s scary. It’s scary to put something painful and personal up on stage and not know why people are laughing. Because comedy is personal. We can’t be told to laugh. We can’t be scolded into mirth. But what Gadsby does in response to this scary prospect is to abdicate her role as comedian and instead try to lecture us and make us feel what she wants us to feel. And if we don’t, we prove her point. It’s a trap. 

There’s nothing I resent more as an audience member than being told how I’m supposed to feel about what I just experienced. If I can’t be inspired by Hannah Gadsby’s confessional second act because I’m too distracted by how angry her false assertions are making me, the “clapter” holds she punctuates her performance with do a good job making me feel like it’s a moral failure on my part and not the result of her disrespecting the craft I had the audacity to expect her to practice in her stand-up comedy special.

Sorry, I must have skipped a dose. Just kidding, I can feel all this while medicated.

If you found her story moving, great. I'm all for it. If you found her willingness to tell it inspiring, fucking beautiful. I'm glad people are connecting with her experience. But I personally hope the future of comedy is filled with people who like comedy, who don’t think it’s fundamentally inadequate, and who have the buoyancy of spirit to look at the darkest stories in our lives and ask, “what’s funny about this?”

An Open Letter to Nick Robinson

Dear Nick Robinson,

I was a huge fan of yours until about 24 hours ago, when I read about the allegations of sexual harassment leveled against you that resulted in you being fired from Polygon. The McElroys, Chris Plant, Russ Frushtick, and you are staples in my home, almost a part of the family. It's a weird fame, the type that you all have, because your appeal is based so heavily on who you are--your personalities. So more than with other types of fame, knowing your work makes me feel like I know you personally, even though we've never met. And I liked you. A lot. Which is why this is so upsetting.

From your statement, I'm optimistic that you're honestly engaging in some soul-searching right now, and I appreciate that, I really do. As a woman, I can honestly say that the end of your statement was gratifying to read, because sadly the truth is that most men in your position would not offer even half of what you did. But don't get complacent and pat yourself on the back too much, because that's a pretty low bar.

I'm going to try to be patient here, because I know from experience that if I were one of the women you harassed, I would simply tell you to stop feeling sorry for yourself. But my hurt and anger at this situation are entirely a sympathetic response to the women involved because similar things have happened to me. Similar things have happened to every woman you know, which is why every woman on the internet seems to have an opinion about you right now.

So here's the problem. You categorized your behavior as "flirting." It wasn't. And right now you are the poster boy for GG MRAs in their efforts to show how absurd these silly progressive social strictures can be. "Nick Robinson Fired from Polygon for Flirting on Social Media" is the top Google news result for "Nick Robinson Polygon." Do you get what that headline is doing? How it's building on your inability to call what you did harassment in order to cast doubt on women's testimony in general? If you are really searching for a way to start making amends, start there. Try to correct that narrative. That would be huge.

But the hurdle here is that I don't believe you think it was harassment. Because you thought it was flirting. And maybe it was. To you. And no, I'm not basing this assumption, that the women did not receive it as flirtation, on hearsay about what was actually contained in those DMs. I'm basing it off of what I know and understand about being a woman in certain spaces, from my long experience of being a woman who has occupied many different spaces.

So let's talk about Twitter. Twitter can bring out the best and the worst displays in human behavior, just like any forum on the internet. But it occupies a particular place in the world of online harassment. The vastly public nature of it, as well as the anonymity and brevity with which things are expressed through it, make it ripe territory for bullying and intimidation. And it has been used against women in this regard since it's rise as the platform-of-choice for social media. 

And here's the thing. You should know this. Or at the very least, women that you met through your work at Polygon had every reason to expect that you did. Until recently, you worked at a website that came out strong in support of the women targeted for attack by GG. Women who were attacked primarily through Twitter. By means of doxxing, rape and death threats, and coordinated assaults, the women interested in video games, and especially those interested in making the gaming world more open to them, were stripped of their sense of personal--physical--safety. 

That is what Twitter is to women. An opportunity to speak in a public forum yes, but one that carries with it great personal risk, especially if said woman makes a habit of challenging men and male structures with their words. That is not a risk that men, especially straight white men, like yourself, undergo when writing 140 characters off-the-cuff. So while for you, there may be no difference between how you engage with women on Tinder, versus how you engage with them on Twitter, and you may therefore believe that your messages were evidence of "flirtation," can you see how a woman on Twitter might not experience it as such?

So let's go back to the Polygon brand, which seemed to signal a break with the boys' club tradition of most gaming sites. Again, being tied to Polygon granted you the benefits of that brand when meeting female fans, and female gaming industry professionals. In addition, the nature of the media you produced for Polygon made viewers and readers feel that they knew you, fair or not. All of those assumptions would lead a reasonable woman to expect that you had an appreciation for the power differential between a man engaging on Twitter, and a woman engaging on Twitter. And you betrayed that trust by crossing a line. 

Much like many fans of yours upon hearing of these allegations, myself included, the women you contacted on DM most certainly felt disillusioned with the type of person they anticipated you would be. On Twitter, that's a very alarming situation for a woman to find herself in--not knowing the type of man they are speaking with, not knowing how dangerous it is for them to turn you down, or even for them to accept--and while most would probably assume you wouldn't doxx them, or post the pics they might send you without their consent, they also probably thought you wouldn't DM them with requests for nudes, either. Do you get how those "flirtations" might not feel like flirtation?

You were right to point out the power differential involved in being a games journalist with a popular platform, and propositioning women who work in that industry, or engage in it as fans of your work. That's another level to this. But start with the basics. Start with the power dynamics of being a man in an obscenely sexist culture, propositioning women in a public sphere that has been used countless times to demean and attack them. Requests don't feel like requests a lot of the time. The circumstances can change ever-so-slightly, and suddenly it feels like a demand. 

The patriarchy isn't your fault. But how you benefit from it is your responsibility. Because those benefits come at the cost of women's ability to safely and comfortably exist as whole human beings in public spaces. On Twitter, our lives could be threatened, we could be forced to relocate, change jobs, take out restraining orders, just for offending the wrong guy. You may know that you're not that guy, but we don't. All we know is how you treat us, and if your first act of "flirtation" is one that places us in a precarious position, we at best know that you are oblivious to how that makes us feel. 

The MRA voices are screaming hypocrisy at me right now in my head because you're the one who lost his job because of what women said about you on the internet. But note how I said "the wrong guy" above. Just one. That's all it takes for the troops to mobilize and the fire to rain down. It took many more accounts than that to lose you your job, yet one statement from you and the narrative is yours to set. So set it straight. Be brave and don't try to protect yourself. Trust me, it's the Internet. There are more people ready and willing to protect you than the women you harmed.

I would sincerely prefer that you grow and be better than that you suffer and grow bitter. Otherwise, I wouldn't be writing this. It's a hard thing when you are stripped of the benefit of the doubt, and it can feel like a never ending struggle to get it back. Be patient. Struggle. 

Sincerely,

A good good feminist girl.

The Trauma of Westeros

[SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU ARE NOT CAUGHT UP ON "GAME OF THRONES," PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK]


Game of Thrones is traumatic. In the books and in the show, trauma plays a huge role in how characters function (or don't), and how the worlds are shaped. As a work of fiction, the audience vicariously experiences many of these traumas (a number of them happen off-stage, or in the past). What reader didn't put the book down after the Red Wedding, curse George R.R. Martin, and stew in their sense of injustice before returning? (Seriously, I want to know)

But the constancy of danger and uncertainty in the series has meant that no characters have had the chance to reflect on their experiences. Which is one of the reasons the show in particular, although to a lesser extent, the books as well, has been heavily criticized for its depictions of rape--the structure of the storytelling never allowed for audiences to witness the effects of that trauma, only the sick satisfaction that the act itself, as with other acts of violence depicted in fiction, provides us with. It's dangerous to do that. It promotes a voyeuristic association with violence. And that has real-world effects, not in the individual sense, but en masse. For as plodding as we might think the pace can be at times, it's safe to say that very few characters ever get to feel secure enough to deal with their trauma.

Until recently.

It's why the scene last season, between Sansa and Baelish, was so essential to Sansa's character development. She forces him to confront his actions. To acknowledge what was done to her, and his knowledge that it would happen. In one of the best lines ever written on the show, and masterfully acted, she says, "I can still feel it. I don't mean in my tender heart what he did still pains me so. I can still feel what he did, in my body." It is so frank, so honest, so undiluted in its ownership of her experience, and in her knowledge of what that meant, that I was able to forgive the showrunners their responsibility for what was done to her. Well, forgive but not forget--I've got my eyes on you, showrunners.

Likewise, Danaerys has a speech to Jon Snow in the third episode this season, enumerating the wrongs done to her, a nice mirror to the exhaustive list of her titles and deeds. At the end of it, she asserts her faith in herself as being the one thing that kept her going through it all. It's been a while since we saw Dany vulnerable, and it's easy to believe, with her unprecedented power amassed, that she has forgotten what it felt like to be sold, raped, beaten, enslaved, and targeted by assassins. But she hasn't. No person could. And as Missandei and Grey Worm pointed out to Tyrion in Mereen, there's a vast difference between understanding and knowing.

Sunday night's episode, "The Spoils of War," gave us more of this reckoning. For the first time since her father was beheaded, Arya felt safe, not because she knew she could survive whatever attack might befall her, as with the previous three episodes, but because she knew she would not be attacked. She's had her list of wrongs down pat for a long time now, but she's never been in a place where she could reflect on how those wrongs have changed her. In three excellent scenes, we see her go from laughing with her sister about her list of names as though it's still a childish wish, having that illusion broken by Bran's knowledge of her actions in front of Sansa, and trying her skills in combat practice with Brienne. We've seen Arya spar before, but we've never seen her win. And even though she enjoyed her training with Syrio, she still came out of it bruised and scolded. But this time, she walked into the scene with confidence, she chose Brienne because she saw her as an equal, refusing the offer to spar with the Master of Arms because he was beneath her skill level. And it was glorious. Not just from a cinematic perspective, not just the choreography and the pacing, which were all thrilling, but in the fact that, for the first time since Syrio Forell died, we see her joyful. She's not defiant, she's not angry at her opponent, she's not running on vengeance. She is where she always wanted to be as a child, doing her form of needlework in the grounds of Winterfell. Arya had her sense of self stripped from her in so many ways over the course of her journey, from being shorn and disguised as a boy, to playing a cupbearer for Tywin Lannister, and of course, to being "no one." At the end of the last season, we see her reclaim her name, but until she arrives home, she has had no reason to live save vengeance. And as useful a tool as that has been for her survival, it is yet another force that serves to strip her of herself. When she smiles at the end of the bout, it is perhaps the first time since Jon gave her Needle, or Ned agreed to grant her tutelage, that she's felt appreciated for who she really is.

You can't talk about trauma in the series without talking about Theon. Years of physical mutilation and psychological torture have transformed him, literally and figuratively. And as the showrunners rightfully pointed out when discussing the end of the second episode, where he abandons his sister to Euron, that's not something you just get over. And while it may be tempting to shake our heads and demand that he remember himself (a wholly unsympathetic response that reflects our cultural attitudes toward victims of abuse), Theon has a problem that Sansa, Dany, and Arya don't, namely that he wasn't exactly strong or admirable to begin with. Reclaiming himself isn't so easy when that person isn't someone he wants to be anymore. His situation is perhaps one of the best examples of the failures of retribution. If what you wanted from Theon was for him to learn, and grow, and be a better man, what was done to him has made that more difficult, not less. 

But Sunday night's episode did something new. And yes, it involved a dragon. This show has never made war look particularly fun; especially as it's progressed, the battles have become far more brutal. Battle of the Bastards especially so, with the sheer mass of bodies piling into a barrier, the penning in Jon and his men, the near-trampling of Jon under all of their limbs. But this. This was different. Because of Jaime Lannister. 

Never has the show straddled the audience's allegiances like this before. Jaime's one true despicable act in the entire series was shoving Bran out the window at Winterfell (the rape in Baelor's Sept being a grey area, not because it wasn't a rape, but because it wasn't supposed to be--showrunners, I'm still watching you), and we have come so far with him that it seems highly doubtful that, given the same scenario now, he would do it again. Yes, sleeping with his twin sister is gross, but at this point, it's a quaint vice compared to everything else. And we know he truly loves Cersei, all the more pity for him. 

And Jaime is one of two characters in the show who know how horrific fire can be (the Hound is pretty familiar with it as well). He watched Brandon Stark burned alive in the throne room by the Mad King. He killed the Mad King to protect the citizens of Kings' Landing from the same fate, and that act has been an albatross around his neck ever since. And here he is, the focus of the first real dragon battle we've seen.

Well, it's not exactly a battle, is it?

It's no accident that the moments leading up to the slaughter are spent between Jaime, Bronn, and Dickon, talking about the difference between what Dickon thought war was, and what it actually is. It smells different, for one. But the Lannister attack on Highgarden was not really a battle, either. Jaime took no pride in it, and Dickon, full of dreams of nobly facing a menacing host, instead found himself cutting down ill-equipped men he had known by name.

And then you hear the Dothraki. 

And then the dragon. 

And then Jaime watches as twenty Brandon Starks are cooked in their armor. 

What must this battle smell like, we are left to wonder as we watch the smoke curl and blacken the air. 

And as much as we have been frustrated alongside Danaerys as Tyrion's plans have quickly fallen apart, the directors don't let us feel her triumph untainted. We have been reminded again and again that the people would not forget if she set her dragons on Kings' Landing and all it's citizens, and faced with the results of a single dragon attack on enlisted soldiers at arms, we know why. We may desire Dany's victory, but we experience the slaughter with Jaime. We see him, surrounded by his worst nightmare, the air thick with the ashes of his dead soldiers, his determination to kill Dany building as he remembers Aerys. 

But Jaime fails, saved from Drogon's fire by Bronn, and he fades into the water, weighted down by all his Lannister gold. He'll be back, of course, and only then will we see how he deals with the memories of the men he saw reduced to char and ash in an instant. 

The wars of Westeros are seated in a history we have mythologized much like Sansa at the start of the series: legends of valor and honorable battles. But this felt more like modern warfare. The horrors of napalm, and airborne raids, the atomic bombs that cast shadows of the dead on the ground. It's the end battle of "The Last Samurai" (the only part of that movie worth a damn, even though Tom Cruise is still in it), except this time our broader sympathies lie with the ones doing the mowing-down. It begs questions of us that we should be asking of ourselves every time we see our bombs exploding on the nightly news. Where are the victims? And after what they've seen, is it really reasonable to expect a peaceful laying-down of arms? Or are we just fostering the rage of a generation of victims, determined to make the slaughter end by taking up arms against us, regardless of the odds?

Considering the many criticisms against the show, shooting this scene from Jaime's perspective may just be the most morally responsible decision the showrunners have ever made. 

"The Handmaid's Tale" and the Virtue of Waiting

I was excited but hesitant to watch Hulu's "The Handmaid's Tale." The book holds a place of near-reverence for me, and told as it is from the internal perspective of June/Offred, I was worried it might rely too heavily on voice-overs to cover the lack of communication between the characters. I have rarely been so happy to be wrong. But watching the first episode the other night, amid all the perfunctory horrors it imagines, there was one scene that gripped me in a deeply personal way. Offred is still June, ushered into the back of the class where she is to be reeducated. And she winces as the woman next to her mouths off. She is keenly aware of the danger she is in, and you can see that awareness playing out on her face, the internal monologue of "shut up shut up shut up" never escaping past her eyes, which stare straight ahead, waiting. 

In October of 2015, I was abducted at gunpoint, forced into the passenger seat of a car, and driven for the next two hours around the city of Chicago, then down to Hammond, Indiana, all with the gun digging into my side from the young woman in the back seat. I had a lot of time to think about risk. 

They wanted my money. That was very clear. And as little of it as I have, I was not willing to risk my life for money. So I kept my eyes forward, my tongue quiet, and I waited until I felt the fight would be worth fighting. 

I waited while the young man driving told me he would leave me stinking in an alleyway, waiting for the moment his actions would reflect his words. I waited at every traffic light, when looking to the window for just a moment was met with a further dig of the gun in my side. I waited while parked outside of convenience stores, as he went inside to try the cards he took from me that I knew wouldn't work, and she stayed behind to make sure I didn't try anything. I waited while they got on the highway, and while they drove me across state lines, never telling them they had just committed a federal crime because the last thing I needed was for them to get desperate. I waited as the woman argued that they should drop me off, and as the man leered at me and said, "no, she's cool." I waited as they parked in an alleyway. I waited as I eyed the houses on the street, hoping I would never see the inside of one. I waited as they got out and discussed what to do with me behind the car.

And I am extremely fortunate that the moment I waited for never came. That when they abandoned me in that alley, in a strange city, with no possessions, part of me was still waiting for the risk that would be worth taking.

In dealing with the psychological aftermath of my abduction, I often doubted the wisdom of my willingness to wait. Everyone told me that it was the best choice I had, the smartest move, but sadly the only thing that could convince me of that was learning that they had attempted to do the same to another woman days after, who resisted at the outset, and her resistance was met with a clock to the skull and a hospital stay, whereas I came out with psychological trauma and a few bruises. I hate that I found solace in another's misfortune, but I did. And I hate that reassuring myself that I made the right choices implies that she made the wrong one, which I don't believe.

I had not thought about the extreme anticipatory fear of those hours of my life for a while until I watched "The Handmaid's Tale," and seeing June's face, I remembered that feeling. It wasn't a full flashback, which I haven't had in about a year, but it was the type of memory that lives in the body. You feel it, rather than view it.

But there is a key difference. The threat I faced that night was a one-time occurrence, and the reason I faced it had little to do with my identity, and more to do with coincidence. And yet here was a woman displaying the same level of terror, evincing the same desperation to the internal struggle between the desire to fight and the desire to endure, for reasons that had absolutely everything to do with her status as a fertile woman. And in that lies a palpable warning.

That sort of risk assessment, of waiting for the risk worth taking--waiting until the scales balance, and what you risk is equal to what you could prevent--is something all marginalized groups experience on a daily basis, sometimes to lesser degrees, and sometimes not. That is not an exaggeration. Ask any POC how they feel when approached by police. Ask any trans woman how they feel when forced to enter a men's restroom. Ask any woman walking home alone at night. 

These are the more extreme moments, the ones where the fear is life or death, and they get the most attention precisely because of that extremity. But there are literally countless other scenarios where we risk less than our life. Where the cost of fighting is social or professional reprisal, and depending on circumstance, those things can be worth the risk or not. I say "literally countless" because they are. We live in a world shaped by misogyny, racism, homophobia, bi-phobia, transphobia, ableism, and ageism. And as much as fighting against those ideologies is the admirable thing to do, we also have to find ways to live in this world. To find joy. To find love. And success. And comfort. And it is inevitable that in order to do so, we will have to make some compromises. We will have to pick our battles. And wait.

But the injustice of this reality is compounded by the fact that when we do choose to fight, every moment we waited is used against us. Either as evidence that we must be lying, a tactic often used in cases of sexual assault or harassment, or by considering our resistance as an overreaction to a singular event, erasing the history of endured slights that came before. 

What "The Handmaid's Tale" does that is so viscerally terrifying is heighten the stakes for these smaller moments of injustice until every word uttered, every facial expression, every move made, carries with it the risk of life or death. It is why it feels so relevant, and bone-chilling. As women, the extreme fear of male violence is remembered in our bones, while the general atmosphere of being devalued and dismissed is often repressed for the sake of sanity. Imbuing the latter with the memory of the former gives us a sense of just how little distance there is between our current situation and the dystopia the story imagines. And that distance is paved by those who wait. 

In our current political crisis, I have found it hard to sort through the outrage. I have tried to focus on actions rather than words, in an effort to maintain sanity. The strange thing is, there have been so few tangible, legislative actions taken by this administration, so little done, that it ends up feeling like I am sticking my head in the sand. But as of writing this, the House has voted yes on a bill that classifies sexual assault as a preexisting condition, as though an act of violence perpetrated against a woman is her responsibility. The distance between fights worth waging and those that justify endurance is closing. It begs the question, what exactly are we waiting for?

On the Internalized Misogyny of Women's Nobility

We were looking at a Judy Chicago piece in my art history class. It was replete with imagery celebrating the vagina, vulva on a dinner table, daring the viewer to cry "obscenity!" and expose a double standard long at play: women's bodies are the pinnacle of artistic subject matter when depicted longingly by a male artist, but when a woman depicts her own body, it is vulgar. We talked a lot about mother-goddess archetypes, and I raised my hand to say, "but a pedestal is also a prison." It was a pithy statement that covered all manner of sins: from the codes of chivalry to the focus on a woman's reproductive capacity as the source of her power. But there is another pedestal women stand upon that is subtler, and more ingrained in the attitudes of even the most defiant women among us: the concept of female nobility.

It is the idea of endurance, of bearing the burden, the steadiness of composure in difficult circumstances, and the mythical transformation of lemons into lemonade. Nevertheless, she persisted. But persisted in doing what, precisely?

To be able to make the best out of a bad situation is certainly an admirable quality, but seeing it as the embodiment of women's strength is as stifling as any other gendered confinement. Because it demands a passivity to women's labor. We work regardless. We smooth things over. We placate. We excuse. We enable.

To hold one's head aloft in a sea of injustices is noble, and stoicism is part of this kind of nobility. Yet it is not essential. Nobility of purpose will always be more admirable than nobility of demeanor.

I would further argue that there is a fine line between a noble demeanor and graceful demeanor. Nobility is the defiance inherent in maintaining one's integrity regardless of circumstance, not the silencing of grievances, nor the pat apologies for the inconvenience of one's existence.

But I am thinking of nobility of purpose on this day. Yesterday was International Women's Day, and in a statement against the devaluing of women's work, there was a national women's strike. To highlight the value of women in our society, women across the nation sat out in order to offer a glimpse of what life without women would be like.

And some conservative women have scolded those who partook in the display by citing the noble strength of women to tough it out. They call the participants whiners. The privileged women who can "afford" to take time off of work, like it was a vacation. Like it wasn't a sacrifice they deemed worthy for the sake of the cause.

Don't get me wrong, there are certainly women who fall into the category of privileged who stayed home. But assuming that the ability to participate is necessarily a privilege is itself a privileged position. You are talking about work as though everyone has a 9-5 job, rather than service industry professionals, say, with flexible schedules. You are also assuming that people did not budget for their absence by sacrificing a sick day or a vacation day. Or that, barring those options, they took the financial hit because the work of women's rights was worth the burden of the extra financial stress. And aren't they then noble for their ability to carry on regardless of the cut in their pay? No, I suppose not, since it was a burden they chose for themselves, rather than one men have demanded they carry.

Because the thing about admiring women's ability to persevere, and lauding that as the ultimate expression of women's power, is that it inextricably ties a woman's power to the inequality she must endure. If nobly shouldering the burden of injustice is our most admirable quality, what happens if that burden is eradicated? Is a CEO less powerful because she didn't have to endure sexual harassment? Is a teacher less noble if she gets paid a decent wage? This is a problem we don't seem to have with doctors, by the way. But when care-taking is a predominantly female field, the sacrifice of pay is considered necessary to maintaining the nobility of the work. 

And so battling for equal pay, equal opportunity, and a work environment free of sexist hostility is considered "whining." Because we are refusing to grin and bear it, and instead are daring to suggest that requiring women to bear a burden men do not is unjust. If a child complains because she has on one occasion been given a smaller portion than her brother, it may be fair to call that "whining." But if a child recognizes a pattern in which she continually is given less than her brother, she is calling out an injustice. 

So let me come back to the nobility of purpose. What is the purpose of stoicism or gentility in regard to inequality? Whom does it serve? In general, we ascribe nobility to that which demands sacrifice on our part for the sake of others. There are certainly women who chose not to participate yesterday because they felt the sacrifice would unfairly burden their students, or their patients, or their families. And I've got words for anyone who chastises those women. But this was a very particular protest, utilizing a very particular tactic, and there is a great irony in the fact that the more the loss would be felt, and therefore the bolder the statement, the more shame is heaped upon the woman who chose to participate. But what about in a broader sense, because the women criticizing this protest don't just criticize this one, but in fact condemn all of them?

What does it mean to smile through the gendered disrespect, the sexual harassment, the devaluing of our work? Is it truly noble? Whom does it serve? It certainly serves ourselves, because it is always easier to go with the flow than it is to disrupt it. And it serves the comfort of those who participate in our subjugation. Forgive me if I fail to see the nobility in that purpose. To speak out against disrespect, harassment, and the devaluing of women's work is to sacrifice your safety and security, perhaps your job and your privacy, for the sake of the women who will come after you. To demand equal treatment is not selfish; it is a far more dangerous path than patient endurance, and the benefits may never be felt by those who do, but we have faith that our efforts may benefit future generations. I find a great nobility in that purpose, and a great strength in the women who engage in it.

"Moonlight"

SNL had a sketch a few weeks ago where Aziz Ansari was being interrogated because he didn't love "La La Land." It was a good bit of observational comedy about how seriously we treat these debates about cultural touchstones. But there was a kernel of ugly truth in there with all the levity. Aziz mentions "Moonlight," and his interrogators stop in their tracks to say, "Oh yeah, 'Moonlight,' so important," seconds before admitting that they haven't watched it because it'll be "a whole thing." 

"Moonlight" is important, and that shouldn't be overlooked, but it is first and foremost an excellent film. You can make a bad film with an important story, but it's still a bad film. You can make an acceptable film with an important story, and it often gets lauded as better than it is because of its importance. I don't mean to criticize that practice too strongly, because it's usually operating from a desire for social good, and it usually targets a wider audience than film critics or filmmakers. But "Moonlight" is a near perfect film (I say "near" as a habit of trepidation, not because I can find any specific fault with it). But again, perfection isn't itself a helpful adjective, because you can perfectly execute a standard film formula, and it will never transcend the trappings of what is expected. 

What I want is for people to see it. And in that respect, focusing on its import or describing it in terms of its brilliance don't work. Importance is why I didn't read "Crime and Punishment" until I was 26. Greatness is why I didn't watch "Casablanca", or "Citizen Cane,"  or "Taxi Driver" until I was an adult. And yes, I rank "Moonlight" alongside these seminal masterpieces. But focusing on significance places the work in a canonical, and through that an historical context that makes potential viewers feel that they have to prepare themselves for "a whole thing" before watching it. That watching it will be like taking cough syrup: important but ultimately unpleasant or unenjoyable. 

But when I finally read "Crime and Punishment," I devoured it in three days. Because it's so good. And what makes a good story but compelling characters, compelling questions, and the hovering of dire consequence? All of which "Moonlight" has in abundance.

I mean, I get it: watching a film about growing up as a gay black boy in a world where dealers are the role models sounds bleak. And in many ways it is dark, and hard. But I've rarely seen a film reward that difficulty with such a beautiful expression of hope and love and kindness. And to anyone holding off on watching it because they've heard someone tell them how much they cried, and somewhat understandably assume it's a depressing slog, I would like to set the record straight. It is ultimately not a sad movie, but a beautiful one, and the sadness it contains is essential to the beauty it expresses.

One of the things that is so remarkable about the film is how it defies expectations, not in the sense that it subverts tropes as a gimmick, or for effect. Rather, it insists on honesty, and it just so happens that the truth about the life it describes is not what films and the culture at large would have us believe. 

Mahershala Ali talked about why he wanted to be a part of the film, and he said that the character of Juan felt real to him, like people he knew: dealers who were in the game for survival, but were also kind, multifaceted human beings who valued family and honest connection. The scenes between him and Chiron are scenes of exquisite love and care, simple and real. The scenes between Juan and Paula, on the other hand, are battles that highlight the inescapable damage of the drug trade. Both of these things are true, and holding onto the whole truth is something the film does in a way rarely seen on screen.

There is an expectation we carry into the film as an audience, based on the premise, that sense that this is gonna get bad. That anticipation hovers over the film, and the character of Chiron. The threat of violence represented by the bully character of Terell isn't just violence, it's rejection. There is a tantalizing homoeroticism in the way his character is filmed, a teasing and mocking sense of encouragement. And it is clear that responding to that encouragement will result in violence for Chiron. 

So in that context, how is Chiron supposed to respond to Kevin? The scene between the two of them on the beach is as suspenseful as any psychological thriller. Tenderness and kindness and encouragement of Chiron's homosexuality are embedded in this validated suspicion. So when Kevin leans in, when they touch, everything up until the moment after they first kiss, the possibility of violence is tangible. But Chiron learns, and we as an audience learn in that moment that rejection isn't the only outcome. Tragedy isn't the whole story. 

I don't want to give too much away, not that I think the film can be spoiled, but it does operate on a process of discovery that I would be loathe to interrupt. I will say that these elements are carried throughout the whole of the film, and the ultimate arc is one of acceptance and validation, one so masterfully expressed that I dare you not to cry from relief. The world may be dark and bitter, but "Moonlight" reminds us that the light can still shine through.

I Tried to Be Nate Silver for a Day

If you're a liberal on the Internet, you've probably seen something like this pop up on your feed in the past couple of days:

The narrative implication of this is simple: Cory Booker and the other Democrats who voted against the amendment on the budgetary agreement introduced by Klobuchar and Sanders did so because they are in the pocket of Big Pharma. 

Statistically, however, these numbers are meaningless. They don't even provide evidence for correlation, let alone causation, because the subset of information is so targeted that it cannot imply a trend. 

So I decided to contextualize the data to see whether a more accurate picture still reflected that narrative. 

The first thing I will say is that, in this instance, making a rudimentary case for a narrative around a single data point required the compilation of 600 data points in six different sets. 

These sets were as follows:

Senator's name

Party

Total money raised overall

Total money raised from within the Pharmaceutical Industry 

Total of those donations coming from individual donors

Total of those donations coming from PACs

I compiled all of my data from OpenSecrets.org, a nonprofit site dedicated to compiling data on campaign finance. If I had the time and money of Nate Silver, I would have created a metadata analysis to take into account the accuracy of the data, as well as to provide a more thorough compilation. Some of the current Senators don't have applicable data sets because the information has not been updated yet to reflect their status as new members. The data also does not reflect Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, or his Democratic party status.

So let's start with breaking down the Democrat "nay" votes.

First off, the Occupy meme uses the gross amount, in dollars, raised by each senator from the pharmaceutical industry from 2011-2016. While this certainly highlights the amount of money that gets spent on political campaigns, especially when the only comparison we are offered is that of our own personal finances, it does virtually nothing to suggest influence. So I calculated the percentage of total funds raised by a candidate that come from within the pharmaceutical industry. The same list of names now looks a bit different.

Booker’s place in the grouping falls substantially, as you can see.

But of course, one of the major problems with the Occupy meme is its targeted data set, so lets expand that for some context. This is the same measurement (% of overall funding that comes from the pharmaceutical industry), but for all of the Democratic senators:

Now, certainly five of the eleven senators in question are clustered where you would expect them to be, but Booker is behind all of them, and even behind Klobuchar, the cosponsor of the amendment in question. And Cantwell’s opposition vote makes next to no sense if money is the only factor.

But let’s check these against the same figures for the Republican senators, just to see what happens:

The average is higher, but not by much, though the highest percentage from any Democrat is well below the highest two percentages for any Republican. More interesting is that every single one of the votes that broke with party line falls below the party average. That’s not the case for the Democrats.

But breaking these numbers down further, it’s important to take note of how much of what is being considered as “Pharma” money is coming from individual donors who happen to work in the industry, versus PACs that generally represent the interests of investors and CEOs.

Here we see all but two of the “nays” riding above the average. Booker, again, has fallen lower on that list, and is in fact one of the two below the average. Cantwell is just a mystery. Now, compare that with the Republican percentages:

The average is much higher, including two senators who got all of their pharmaceutical donations from PACs—but again, one number doesn’t tell you much of anything, because those two senators got well below the overall percentage of their funds from the industry, and Murkowski voted for the amendment. But the senators who broke party line are pretty evenly spread across the map here, which is not the case for the Democrats.

But let’s finish by putting these two calculations together:

Now, there is a case for correlation here. Six out of the eleven votes are clustered above average for both percentiles. Four of the remaining five are clustered above one of the percentiles, Booker among them. Booker, it should be noted, also falls closest to Klobuchar in the graph, yet Klobuchar, again, cosponsored the amendment. And someone needs to ask Cantwell what she was thinking, because if she’s supposed to be beholden to her money, she’s doing it wrong. But then again, so are Whitehouse, Wyden, Manchin, Blumenthal, and Schumer, who all fall in the top right quadrant, where you would expect all of the "nays" to be, yet they voted "yea." They should take a lesson from the Republicans:

Every single "yea" falls below the average % of funds from the industry.

It’s interesting that in terms of money influencing votes, the weight of each data set is different between the parties. The Democrats’ “nay” votes cluster above average on the scale of how much of their pharmaceutical money comes from PACs, while the Republicans’ “yea” votes cluster below average on the scale of how much of their overall funds come from the industry at large. Which would suggest that in looking for the ways money influences politics, PACs mean more to Democrats, and overall money means more to Republicans…

BUT…

THIS IS JUST ONE VOTE…

THIS IS JUST ONE POSSIBLE REASON FOR ONE VOTE…

This is one very rudimentary glimpse at the data immediately surrounding one particular narrative about one single vote. You would have to look at every vote related to pharmaceuticals, break down all of the data into these sets again, compile all of them, and see if the pattern remains in order to BEGIN making the case for causation. Then you would have to take that data and compare it to data from other industries—control groups—to see if the pattern is unique to the pharmaceutical industry. Until then, searching for a particular pattern to support a particular narrative will only serve confirmation bias.

I don’t have the time or money or access to do that analysis properly. If you want to do it yourself, or bug Nate Silver, go ahead. But as grateful as I am that Sanders has pushed the issue of campaign finance to the fore of Democratic voters’ minds, he has also pushed a very simplistic, zero-tolerance narrative: all money from within an industry is the same, and any money a candidate receives from that industry is the reason for their vote. There are simply too many outliers to say that conclusively. 

Let me try to put this another way. If we were to go back in time, before the vote was cast, and predict the outcome based on these assumptions:

money from Pharma will influence the vote

the better indicator for how Democrats are influenced by money is % from PACs

the better indicator for how Republicans are influenced by money is overall % of funds from the 

industry

Your chances of being right would be 37.5% for Democrats and 100% for Republicans.

And you wouldn’t have guessed Cory Booker.

I don't do this type of work normally. I'm an artist. My politics are usually emotionally-driven. Although I have always been good at math, and I find math comforting and beautiful. And part of me has wondered for the past couple of days why I did this. Why I felt compelled to research the numbers and follow them in this way. I mean, I like Cory Booker--his ideas on education notwithstanding--but I don't particularly have a deep need to defend him. So why do this? Especially if, going into it, I know that I'm not going to pull enough data to make a conclusive case? 

Perhaps because I wanted to show just how much data you could compile and still be unable to make a conclusive argument. 

There is a stereotype about Democrats: that we are excellent at eating our own. I think it is part and parcel of the liberal ideals, and as such, not easily avoided. But with a fight like we have never known looming before us, it is time to close ranks. We need our ideals to hold us together, not tear us apart. Which certainly does not mean we shouldn't voice our dissent, but the tactics here weren't corrective, they were punitive. And they were reckless with the numbers, reckless with the pain and the fear that this election has caused, and reckless with our anger at the state of our campaign finance system. We are not just fighting against an oppositional party, we are fighting against the slip into a post-truth, post-fact, post-critical-thinking world. We must insist on the truth, at all costs, even at the cost of a comfortable, simplistic narrative that makes it easy to spot the bad guys.