Small Town Wren

One of the first and, to date, one of the most-bitter fights Daniil and I have ever gotten into had to do with something most people would probably raise an eyebrow or two at. It was a bitter, drawn out affair that resulted in somewhat of a compromise. To this day, though it only occasionally comes up, we struggle and butt heads about it.

You see, when I met him, he was not registered to vote. While some might not care, to me this was an issue of great and dire importance. It still is. He finally caved and registered right after last year’s elections (sigh). The compromise was he very adamantly insisted that though now he was registered and I should be happy, he would never, never, ever exercise his right to vote. And, as far as I know, he hasn’t.

And this still troubles me. Perhaps even more so than it did a year ago. Why?

I’ve noticed–and I’m not the only one–that politics is become a lot more like TMZ every day. And no one seems to care. We happily swallow up Trump’s birtherism, giggle about Jon Kyl’s ‘non-factual’ statements, and snicker about Rep. Weiner’s…well…weiner. And while we process what is happening with these news bits, we simply move on without, well, doing anything.

But then things like this happen:

They happen and we don’t notice because there’s nothing entertaining about it, and we want to be entertained. LZ Ganderson wrote on CNN:

It shouldn’t really matter which side of the fence you stand on regarding abortion: that tone, that rationale, has no place in the debate. That more people, more women, were not angered by DeGraaf’s statements only highlights just how little we are paying attention to lawmakers.

He’s right. We’re not paying attention, and crazy whackadoo lawmakers have figured that out. As long as political news coverage is actually entertainment in content, these politicians can do and say whatever they like. My 4th grade teacher always said that who you are is the person you are when no one is watching.

No one is watching what’s going on. No one is watching and the masks are coming off. And since no one is watching, no one notices when they change the law in ways we don’t like, to reflect values we don’t believe in.

I am shocked and horrified that it’s okay, politically and socially, to say things like that, to say that you should plan ahead for rape. I’m upset this isn’t more news worthy. I’m ashamed that we could stand for it in this country.

Politics isn’t entertainment, people. It’s real life, and it has very real consequences. And sadly, punishing women and making the lives of women more difficult has been a common theme of late (or almost forever, really). But it’s not just women, it’s happening to the poor and to the brown, too. It’s only going to get worse if we continue to view politicians the same way we do celebrities.

As a side not, it was pretty ingenous of DeGraff to sugges his wife and daughter would “never need an abortion” if they were raped. Last time I checked, ‘never need’ was not synonymous with ‘I will forbid’.

I didn’t watch the Super Bowl. Is anyone surprised? And while the internet is all abuzz about how misogynistic the Super Bowl Ads were this year…I’m not going to discuss that either. Yes, shocking! How could I possibly resist the intersection of media and gender?

Because Riese over at Autostraddle wrote the most amazing takedown of Taylor Swift and the Grammys. That’s how. And oh boy, it touches on virgin/whore complexes, and copycat songwriting, and the perpetually perceived purity of childhood. And she’s got awesome charts and awesome comparison pictures between Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga, and has quotes like this:

Let’s bring it back around to the lady that obvs should’ve won: Lady Fucking Gaga. Lady Gaga is viscous hungry sex in hellfire. She’s more theatrical than Broadway and every night she sings in romantic open fists. Lady Gaga opens her dress, extracts her gut, assembles it in shapes splashed in sinister glitter and then shatters her dangerous violent diamonds onto the piano and screams FIRE and it sounds like bad romance. She wants your ugly, she wants your disease, and she’s everything Taylor Swift will never be. Punks don’t win awards, they eat awards.

Yeah. I don’t need to talk about the Super Bowl. Or anything else. Just go read it.

The Batavia Public School’s Twitterfeed often sends alerts about things from the school time capsule. These unknown ladies were the 1907 Girl’s Basketball Champions of some unknown championship, either the last or second to last ever achieve this mysterious title before Illinois banned girls competitive sports in 1908. Which is incredibly sad, especially considering the Batavia Boy’s basketball team didn’t win a title until 1912. I also find it somewhat offensive that the 1912 banner still hangs in the Batavia High School gymnasium, but there is nothing to honor these girls for their 1907 accomplishment.

These ladies look capable, determined, healthy, and fun to me. It’s a shame that some organization of men decided their delicate lady bodies had to be protected from the horrors of athletics. While I’m not a big sports participant, I can only imagine how these women felt when they were told they could no longer play.

I first picked up The Beauty Myth three years ago. I was writing a paper for a class, for The Anthropology of Gender & Sexuality taught by Nia Parson. It was a great class, and the first time where I was inspired enough to engorge myself on outside sources for a final paper.  I ended up writing a treatise on intersection, third wave feminism, and abortion rights. It was a great paper. I shared it with the group of shamans I was observing later in the year when they started getting grumpy about the right to choose.

The only problem is I never finished it.

Some books have that problem with me: I just can’t get them read. American Gods is a book I’ve started at least a dozen times and as much as I love reading the first 100 pages, something always comes up and I can’t finish it.  With The Beauty Myth, life happened. A series of catastrophic events in early 2008 left me unable to do much else but cry and feel sorry for myself.  I had read what I needed for the paper with the intention to finish it at my leisure during the following semester. It has languished on my shelf ever since.

No more. While generally I would say I have never bought into the monolithic beauty myth, I think I am at a point in my life where I need to read it again (and actually finish it). It’s an important text and it will be good for me and the goals I am working toward right now. The whole strong woman thing.  And, in general, I need some non-textbook reading to happen in my life.

I love my friend David. So much so that I’m the only person who actually calls him David. He’s one of those friends who always knows spot-on exactly what you need. This is what he gave me tonight: