The reiterated support by the Anoka-Hennepin school district of its so-called “neutrality policy” toward issues of sexual orientation is a veiled endorsement of violence-inducing homophobia, and a national embarrassment to Minnesota’s outstanding public school system. I am a proud product of that system, having attended the Edina public schools for all 13 of my school years and graduated from Edina High School in 2002.

Anoka-Hennepin superintendent Dennis Carlson extols his own moderation: “I do take a middle-of-the-road approach, and I don’t apologize for it,’” Carlson has said. “If I’m getting an equal amount of hate mail from the left and right, I feel like I’m on solid ground.”

One can hardly argue that moderation and parity would be admirable qualities in an educational leader, who is professionally enjoined to please many at once. Moderation—real moderation, not a spineless aversion of eyes from the complicated or uncomfortable—would be a boon to the mess in which the district is currently embroiled.

Carlson, though, is no moderate, nor is his district’s stance on homophobia.

To stand aside and proclaim indifference while children suffer is cruel and hardly neutral. It is a tacit agreement that the educator’s watch is limited to the simple when education itself is a primer on complex thought.

The truth is a bully’s motivations are mostly irrelevant: a zero-tolerance approach to violence and hatred requires no disclaimer of neutrality. If a teacher saw a student being beaten on the playground, would any teacher let his intervention be shunted by the aggressor’s motivations? What’s more, would any school district proclaim neutrality toward bullying motivated by ethnic or religious intolerance?

The separation of issues of sexual orientation from other bullying motivations nods to the fact that homophobia is still more acceptable in Minnesota than other prejudices. And to ignore the specifics of homophobia, though zero-tolerance should mean just that, is to commit a disservice to the young people who are victimized by it.

As the suicide of Tyler Clementi alerted the nation in 2010, the current crisis of queer youth in America is quite simply a matter of life and death. According to a recent study published in Pediatrics, GLBTQ teens are five times likelier to attempt suicide than straight teens.

The mental health calamity facing queer youth today is urgent, it is dire, it is real, and any leader who eschews the fight to end it has blood on his hands—that of nine GLBTQ teen suicides in two years.

Muzzling teachers and administrators from supporting GLBTQ students amounts to a harrowing isolation of queer youth from the resources they need most: adults who are allies, who will ensure that no education is disrupted by contempt or ignorance.

A policy mounted on false neutrality around sexual orientation disabuses students of their right to safety. It leads to thoughts of desperation and hopelessness, the parents of suicide.

As such, a neutrality policy is criminally far from neutral. It is, as the suit by the National Center For Lesbian Rights and the Southern Poverty Law Center against the Anoka-Hennepin school district contends, a civil rights violation of some of Minnesota’s most vulnerable students. And it is a gross perversion of the Minnesotan values—the community, tolerance, and neighborly love of the “nicest” state in the union—that I cherish.

Laurie Thompson, chairwoman of the district’s Parents Action League, which circulated a petition in support of the “neutrality” policy, alleges that the district’s policy “honors the rights of all parents to discuss with their children these issues based on their own values and beliefs.” I salute Ms. Thompson for her advocacy of parent-child dialogue on sticky social issues, including homosexuality.

The question I pose to her, though, is this: what good is that dialogue between the hours of 7 am and 3 pm? Will it protect the child who endures shoves and slurs in the hallway? Will it give that child recourse to demand the respect she deserves?

I assert: it will not. Parents are essential, but they are not enough. Thus, we must rely on the institutions parents trust to protect their children to shoulder some burden of a student’s social and civil education. The results of failing to provide that education, as Tyler Clementi, Justin Aaberg, and too many others silently testify, are catastrophic.

The post Minnesota “Neutrality Policy” on GLBTQ Teen Harassment Is Anything But appeared first on The Faster Times.

If you’re a mom with a blog, though, I’m going to assume you already know about Sister Mischief. Here’s why.

During my book-pushing TFT hiatus, a widely circulated article in the Wall Street Journal decried the emergent darkness in young adult fiction. According to Meghan Cox Gurdon, YA literature is now a phantasmagorical “hall of fun-house mirrors”, rife with “kidnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings.”

The argument that representing dark themes in YA provides more solace than despair to its target audience has already been well-articulated, so I need not reiterate the conviction that the considerable number of teens who have experienced some modicum of trauma in their lives might appreciate the literary assertion that they are not alone.

Unsurprisingly, no one summarized the argument better than Sherman Alexie, whose 2007 YA novel The Absolutely True Story of A Part-Time Indian won the National Book Award. Returning to the WSJ, Alexie retorted: “I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.”

What struck me about the WSJ debate was not whether or not YA veers into a damaging darkness; rather, it was the allegation that mothers are unaware of, or disapprove of, the current YA offerings. It was striking to me because, in my own experience promoting a YA novel, mothers have been some of the most ardent and vocal harbingers of what’s new and what’s next in the genre.

All you have to do to verify this is join a YA discussion on Twitter. One blogger who reviewed Sister Mischief tweets “Uh oh, one child has bitten the other. Summer squabbles. Until later!!” Another follower self-describes as “Writer — Young Adult fiction, short fiction, and blogs. Wife, mom, reader, football fan, news junkie, coffee addict.” Or another: “Campaigner, linchpin, concierge, reviewer, evangelist, book goddess, trail blazer. Wife, mother, musician, photographer.”

So, though I don’t doubt that many mothers out there are bemoaning the lack of good things for their children to read without indulging themselves in said reading, much more visible to me have been the mothers who are recommending books to their children. Mothers who don’t just screen what their kids are reading through a dust-jacket blurb, but who are requesting galleys, blog-reviewing new books widely, tweeting like gangbusters, and setting trends in the genre.

Tracking data like this is difficult if not impossible, but I’d be willing to wager these moms and other grown-ups are driving YA sales as much or more than teens themselves (plus, where do teens get their book-buying money, anyway?), and recent press would tend to support the theory. Even Flavorpill, that old hipster chestnut, published a list of “The 10 Best Young Adult Books for Grownups.”

There are two interesting things to know about contemporary YA fiction. One: YA is the only sector of the literary industry that is both making money and growing this decade. If you don’t believe me, believe the 30% upswing in YA sales during the peak year of the Great Recession, 2009. Last year the LA Times called the aughts “the golden age of YA literature.” Two: YA is uniquely female-driven.

Synthesizing these two facts, one might reach the conclusion that women spend money on entertainment that takes their interests into consideration. Enough money, in fact, to keep an entire genre in the black during the worst economic climate in recent history.

(Do you hear that faint whooshing noise? It’s the sound of the entire American mainstream film industry ignoring the above comment.)

Especially in the absence of other entertainment that caters to their interests, it’s not hard to imagine why some adults, especially mothers, flock to YA. When you’re covered in kid puke, haven’t had sex in five months, and are in the middle of explaining where babies come from to a five-year-old who throws wet Cheerios in your face in response, the simple escapism of reading a first-kiss story might be blessedly necessary.

So, while you may not follow her suggestions on the topics of jeans, how to find a boyfriend, or what is and isn’t acceptable Facebook usage, it may very well be time to ask your mother what she’s reading.

The post Your Mom Reads More YA Than You appeared first on The Faster Times.

The Twilight phenomenon has pervaded media chatter for way longer than I want to hear about it by now, and while many have vetted, bemoaned, and dissected the complicated sexuality of the ballad of Bella and Edward, few have done so in the greater context of Twilight’s paramount position in popular young adult fiction. Twilight, and the vogue of vampires that has produced an entire YA subgenre, “paranormal romance,” reveals a subtly toxic sexual messaging still being slipped into the literature young American women are consuming en masse.

Full disclosure: I am a recovering teenage girl with a YA novel, Sister Mischief, coming out on July 12. In the early stages of conceptualizing SM, I realized that writing the book was a way of putting my money where my mouth was: giving young people access to candid, high-quality literature is important to me, so I figured I should try to produce some.

Inevitably, at least once a week, I’ll provide a description of my book (“It’s an interracial gay hip-hop love story for teens,”) to a stranger and they’ll ask, “Does it have vampires in it?”

“No,” I’ll reply. “It has suburban Midwestern lesbian rappers in it.”

It’s possible that Sister Mischief sourced from a frustration, amidst the furor of Twilight, of wondering where the queer YA heroines were, or the Black or brown ones, or the ones willing to call themselves feminists, or to aspire, or achieve. These were the dynamic, whole heroines I would have loved to—needed to, in fact—discover at 14 and 17, and the ones I’d want my younger sisters and daughters to find. I didn’t believe that becoming vampire bait was the best aspiration we could offer them.

Even before Twilight, though, I witnessed a particular lack of great books for smart girls, with some notable exceptions: Judy Blume, Rita Mae Brown, Maya Angelou, Lois Lowry, Anne Frank, and Betty Smith first come to mind. The ranks of smart, strong heroines have swelled in the decade or so since I was a young adult reader—a decade in which YA fiction has consistently outsold Grownup fiction—but Twilight has eclipsed the massive strides in candor and breadth YA has made in the 2000s.

Since Twilight’s first movie release in 2008, the most prominent, visible YA heroine in the world has been a lily-white, painfully thin, virginal, kind of limp-looking victim type, and I’m pretty effing sick of her. Teenagers in America today are surrounded by (tortured, sunken-eyed, carnivorous) images of sex, but too few of them do anything to educate teenagers about positive values surrounding sex: how it might make them feel, how to identify and fulfill their desires, what constitutes safety and safe experimentation.

And in that, I feel, the Twilight phenomenon fails at a high-stakes game. I’m a believer that sex education, whether it comes in classrooms, on screens, or in paperback form, should provide a lot of information and no judgment. Aimed at young female readers poised on, or perhaps who have already stepped off of, the precipice of sexual discovery, Twilight preaches mixed messages: you’re free to desire, girls, but you oughtn’t fulfill it. It’s dangerous down there.

The desperation by other publishers and authors to generate undead material–the “paranormal romance” phenomenon–speaks to the YA literature and film industry’s eagerness to feed girls these images of usurped agency and physical weakness—which could be construed as a backlash to women’s recent, forceful surge into the workforce. In a way, Twilight’s model of torturous love strikes me as a new method of self-mutilation: a compulsive, exaggeratedly romanticized need to be rescued, or the 21st century’s answer to corsets and fainting couches. It also seems a particularly white, suburban sensation, which resounds with an undercurrent of self-mutilation which, though increasingly less so, has historically also been primarily white and suburban.

There is one non-subversive subversion Twilight makes amidst its thinly veiled abstinence-only education: rather than positioning its romantic leads in the traditional sexual struggle of boy doggedly pursuing and girl piously resisting (though it does frequently require Bella to be threatened by violence and saved by Edward), Meyer gives Bella an open infatuation with Edward the vampire, and tasks him with resisting her advances. They can’t have sex for fear he’ll lose control, induct her into his undead ranks and she will, in turn, become a sexual villain without control over her own desire.

Gail Collins of the New York Times has rightly noted, “Maybe the secret to her success is that in [Meyer’s] books, it’s the guy who’s in charge of setting the sexual boundaries.”

It’s every adolescent girl’s paradox of a fantasy: the safe predator. Edward tries to save Bella by denying her, but then, later (SPOILER ALERT), they finally have sex, and she is rewarded by confinement to bed rest while pregnant with her precious little half-succubus.

Maybe there are ways to reconfigure the power complex of America’s vampire fascination: YO! reports, for one, that one 18-year-old author has written a vampire series with a fanged female. But Twilight’s popularity suggests that the biggest teen phenomenon in America is intent on fetishizing young women and their virginities, preaching the same purity myth in new pale-faced package.

It’s a resistance to this mixed messaging that led to my choice to include sex (and drugs and profanity, in the further interest of realism) in my YA novel. Its two protagonists, a white and a South Asian girl, are in love and sexually active with each other, and two supporting characters are a butch, sexually aggressive straight girl and a self-described “thinking Christian” who has chosen to wait until marriage to have sex. How the book will be received remains to be seen, but it was important to me to write one in which every character wasn’t white, straight, Christian, or rich.

I made these choices because I think they more accurately reflect a spectrum of sexual lives, especially, among teenage girls—and because I wickedly wanted to write a book that girls would read with flashlights under their covers. I wanted to be a woman in her twenties telling women in their teens, directly and candidly, that female sexual desire is healthy to feel and explore, in their interior lives and with partners they trust.

In by far the best cultural analysis of Twilight so far, Caitlin Flanagan wrote in the Atlantic Monthly:

“The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window…This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.”

There is a permanent sanctity to those books that mean the most to us in the early moments of realizing who we are; it was a clarifying moment when I discovered that every book I loved as a child featured a little girl who wanted to grow up into a woman writer. As we imagine those young figures poised with flashlights under the covers, stealing reading moments in the backs of buses and cars, pondering, wondering, those of us who supply their material must imagine them wholly—as vivid, diverse creatures with complex ambitions and desires, who deserve to be presented with choices about who they might wish to become.

The post No, There Are No Vampires in My YA Novel. appeared first on The Faster Times.

Instant messaging has always been a bit of a shadowboxing act. What does our status really say about us?

Let’s pause for a brief retrospective. AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), released to non-AOL clients in 1997, introduced the “Buddy List”, the “screen name”, and the “direct connection.” Users learned that IMing differed from emailing in that, for the first time apart from gaming, it introduced the possibility of a virtual state of being, a personal avatar to appear either on- or offline. For the first time, to be “online” was, in fact, to exist, at least in the perception of those who might wish to chat with you. AIM allowed three possible states of virtual being via the Buddy List: online and present, online but away, or offline.

The “away” feature delivered an automated message of your choice to a would-be interlocutor, but only after she IMed you, introducing the hovering moment of wondering whether your desired conversationalist would respond to your “hey!” with a reciprocal “hey,” inviting conversation, or an auto-response “at lunch” or “fighting with my mom” or “learning to shave my legs, brb” deflection. (Do I betray my age in the late nineties too easily?) More extremely, there was AIM’s “block” function, which prevented an buddy-non-grata from seeing you online or sending you chats, but this was reserved strictly for the aftermath of bad breakups, and even then, ignoring probably remained a more potent snub than blocking.

For the Mac user, iChat followed AIM in 2002, and operated similarly: when online, your status could be conveyed through a green “available” dot, a red “busy” one, or a yellow “idle” one, but you could carry on a conversation whether you were displaying a green or red signal. iChat, as I found it, served its purpose—to coordinate cigarette breaks from the library and invitations over for a beer—dutifully, but hardly reinvented the instant messaging model.

Then, in 2005, began the mixed messages of Gchat.

Gchat quickly replaced iChat as the instant messenger of vogue, bringing with it a host of new features. Again, users could display a green “available” signal, a red “away” one, or involuntarily, a yellow “idle” one. A status message could be added regardless of your availability; away messages were no longer sent as a response to prospective chatters, but displayed until you removed them, whether you’re actually available or not. Like AIM and iChat, you could block an unwanted chatter; newly, you could also remove them from appearing in your buddy list without blocking their chats.

Gchat upped the ante on virtual communication’s complexity with no accompanying etiquette manual. For one, you’re online as soon as you open your Gmail inbox, and for as long as your email remains open in the browser. You can disable the chat function, but the default action is to keep it open, conflating email and IM communication.

Flummoxing the casual conversationalist yet further, Gchat offers a fourth state-of-being option, the gray “invisible.” To go invisible means just that: when invisible, you can see all the people on your chat list, with their simpleton red, green, and yellow dots, but none of them can see you. You can chat others, but they can’t chat you—unless you chat them first.

Even mid-conversation with a gray ghost, if the non-invisible party happens to close accidentally the chat window, he’s out of luck until the phantasmic correspondent IMs him again, re-opening their uniquely controlled conversation.

The subtler cues Gchat has added also offer a new communicational vernacular. When I open a window to IM a perpetually red-buttoned friend, Gchat reminds me: “Jessica is busy. You may be interrupting.” Neither green nor yellow buttons present such a prompt: is an available or idle person not busy? Might I not interrupt them?

My default status is red, as is that of many of those with whom I Gchat regularly. My aunt makes me convert to green before she can feel comfortable chatting with me—“It’s so forbidding!”—and confesses her “fear of rejection” at sending me messages when my status is red.

I’d be tempted to toss her commentary into the abyss of the generational divide if I didn’t feel the same way: many people are constantly red, yet frequently respond to messages while “busy.” Am I breaching their virtual personal space, then, if I chat them despite the mnemonic that I may be interrupting? Then, if the “away” chatter accepts the invitation to chat with me, am I obligated to ask explicitly if he is busy, or may I assume that, by virtue of responding, he welcomes the conversation?

Or, conversely, the friend who is constantly green yet rarely has time to chat: she’s in class, she’s in a meeting, she’s buried in work. Why green, then? Isn’t that exactly the message red intends to convey—I’m here, online, but I don’t have time to talk? The explicit action of green or red is either to invite or to discourage. Do we simply forget the status we convey once ingrained in its habit, or are these pepper-hued boundaries actually so permeable?

Another friend remains permanently invisible because to her, she tells me, being visibly online yet not chatting people feels like walking into a room only to ignore everyone in it. Just the fact of being visible instills a sense of obligation. As her interlocutor, I’m struck by how invisibility as a default status informs what happens when the invisible person vivifies into red or green: if someone who most often defers conversation through her invisibility deliberately makes herself visible, does her action not suggest an active desire, a choice, to chat, and if so, does the obligation then fall to her or me to initiate a conversation? What if she displays herself as red rather than green when she is visible?

Has catching up with one’s friends ever been so complicated?

Put simply, our Cycloptic green, red, yellow and gray eyes may communicate more about us than our chats themselves, yet they can be surprisingly difficult to interpret. They don’t actually convey a code of propriety—a clear invitation or prohibition—to another chatter.

We’ve mined the propriety of smartphones in meetings, of responding to a Facebook overshare, of texting and driving, of the Twitter feud—yet how will a definitive instant messaging protocol be established? For now, like drivers at dark intersections, the traffic lights beside the names of the others on the superhighway are all we have to guide us.

The post The Curious Etiquette of Gchat appeared first on The Faster Times.

The public and largely digital response to Tyler Clementi’s suicide last fall has been extensive and at times inspiring. Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project (I’ll call it IGB) has, in particular, become a locus both of popular praise and of critical dissent. While IGB models bright futures for some queer youth, its critics rightly observe, it fails to address intersectional identities—queer people of color, primarily—and instead models a white, affluent, educated, and, one might even argue, heteronormative model of advancement.

Or, as Jasbir Puar interpreted in the Guardian: “Savage embodies the spirit of a coming-of-age success story. He is able-bodied, monied, confident, well-travelled, suitably partnered and betrays no trace of abjection or shame. His message translates to: Come out, move to the city, travel to Paris, adopt a kid, pay your taxes, demand representation.” Indeed, there are many, too many, whom Savage’s model of queer advancement excludes.

Tavia Nyong’o made a similarly compelling argument in “Bully Bloggers,” critiquing the role of the “salvific wish” that underlies Savage’s premise: “the fantasy that if we just regulate our own conduct and affairs properly, we can somehow save our people through the example of our moral fortitude.” Citing the literary theorist Candace Jenkins, Nyong’o translates the black salvific wish to Savage’s queer one, explicating “the burden to be a role model and savior for the race” as equally damaging to either demographic.

The radical-leaning critiques of Savage’s endeavor are relevant and well-founded. No, we do not do enough to value intersectional identities, and yes, it is doubly harder to be a gay black teen than a straight white one. The progress narrative, the bootstraps story, the “burden of being a role model and a savior”, as Nyong’o puts it, does not tell the whole truth of complex identities, and we should be doing much more to provide compassion and resources for those whom those narratives misrepresent.

These critiques get us halfway there, noting insightfully that the current resource models for GLBTQ teens in crisis are insufficient, but suggesting precious little by way of alternatives. Is a suicidal teen really going to turn to an obscure blog that cites Jenkins and Eve Sedgwick for solace, or, in the unlikely event that they do, find the solace they seek there? Is a depressed teen going to comprehend what “hegemony” or “heteropatriarchy” or “salvific wish” means, or how those terms affect them? Let me be absolutely clear: I am not discrediting the intelligence or curiosity of teenagers. Teenagers, poised on the precipice of becoming, hormonal, confused, hungry for the next thing and anguished in their liminality as they are, are not the problem.

We—and by “we”, I mean we intellectuals, all we with a microphone or a WordPress account, we of the advanced degrees and overdeveloped vocabularies—WE are the problem, or at least we are not the whole solution. It’s important to critique mainstream models of success; radicals push the center farther left, as I noted in my column on Tina Fey. It’s incredibly important to create more space within the academy for race and queer theory and for those who espouse them. But it’s also really fucking important—a matter of life or death about which we can no longer claim ignorance—that we do more than that.

Six months later, I want to write that Tyler Clementi did not die in vain—that with his death, America received the wake-up call it so badly needed to realize that GLBTQ youth is in a kind of psychological calamity, adrift without resources in a teenage holocaust of bullying in their schools and through their computers. Not to mention on the streets, where nearly half of all runaway youth are GLBTQ.

To write that Clementi’s death was not “in vain”, though, would be an unconscionable misstatement on my part. Every time a queer youth kills him or herself, in fact every time anyone takes their own life, regardless of age, race, or orientation, it is in vain. In vain because of the potential wasted, the pain unsalved, the hope destroyed. Suicide is, by definition, a life taken in vain. On our watch.

Which is why, fully cognizant of the fact that GLBTQ teens in crisis are even less likely to turn to my work than to Nyong’o’s or Puar’s or femmephane’s, I’m calling for new ideas. Over the next weeks I’ll be collecting interviews from some of the badass queers in my own life about how we can do more, and do better, and I’d also encourage all of you—whoever you are, reading this—to leave your ideas in that democratic and problematic idea-sharing space we call the comments box.

Be proactive: how do we create resources that validate the T along with the GLBQ, how do we role model for the child who finds herself marginalized by both race and gender, how do we provide a truthful optimism beyond growing up and getting out? How do we move beyond criticism into activism? I love this example, spotlighted by Racialicious, of how Tomee Sojourner and the Embracing Intersectional Diversity (EID) Project are refusing to shy away from complexity.

It doesn’t get better for all of us, and Tyler Clementi presented irrefutable evidence that identity-based bullying claims lives. How can we do better to make it better?

The post How Can We Do Better Than “It Gets Better”? appeared first on The Faster Times.

The media still can’t get enough of how beautiful Taylor was. Countless paparazzi shots and movie stills will circulate this week, posthumously cannibalizing Taylor’s gorgeous, fleshy vitality, idolizing her former youth with a few obligatory nods to her appearances in more recent years. “Could anyone as lovely as Elizabeth Taylor also be talented?” the Times asked and answered (“yes”). The assumption implicit in such a question—that beautiful women are brainless, ambitious, sex climbers—is disturbing but hardly surprising.

And indeed, Taylor presided as icon over an era in which women still went to the salon to have their hair set once a week, changed their nail colors to match their outfits, and drove an unprecedented marketing surge of creams and potions money-back-guaranteed to preserve or even restore youthful beauty. I’m reminded of my grandmother, born just over a decade before Taylor, who implored us to find a mobile nail service to replace her acrylics during her final two weeks of dying in hospice. She loved Elizabeth Taylor. Beauty—not just genetic good looks, but aggressively maintained put-together-ness—was a premium in our grandmothers’ generation to a degree the women of mine might never fully understand. Or might we?

I saw Lady Gaga in concert for the first time this week (this is connected to Elizabeth Taylor’s death in only the most purely autobiographical way, I disclaim this from the outset). Gaga is influential, groundbreaking, wholly original—this much is agreed upon. But the question of her beauty has never reached such a consensus. Is Lady Gaga, the former Stefani Germanotta, beautiful? Does it matter whether she is or not? Only insofar is it might be the most remarkable fact of all if an American woman has managed to become famous and successful in the entertainment industry without being beautiful.

Gaga turns 25 this week, a fact she bemoaned onstage at Oakland’s Oracle Arena. She is artificially blonde, strikingly thin, and the bearer of a distinctive face that probably wouldn’t appear in magazines without the talent attached to it. Unlike Taylor, she is a chameleon, constantly self-mutating, iconic not for her adherence to a beauty standard but for her aesthetic deconstruction of it. Gaga treats her own physical presence not as a commodity in and of itself, but as a template upon which to perform innumerable mutations and convolutions; Gaga’s body is her own primary mannequin for the half-fashion, half-fetish feats of art that she and the Haus of Gaga enact. She aggressively maintains a new brand of put-togetherness, one no doubt rife with creams and potions, but aimed toward a totally new result. Lady Gaga and Elizabeth Taylor could never have shared a closet, but they might have spent about the same amount of time getting ready.

Gaga portrays herself as the patron saint of outsiders, allegiant to her queer audience and to the general principles of being a self-appointed Freak, capital F. “I was really bullied in high school, and in junior high,” she told her Oakland audience, her tone warm and confidential. “I used to say to my mother, ‘Mommy, I don’t want to go to school,’ and she would say, ‘You were born a superstar, and one day you will sing and dance onstage for all those who bullied you.’” After this, Gaga sung an acoustic version of “Born This Way.” I’m not too proud to admit I got choked up. But this, too, though it seems genuinely meant, is a construction: Stefani Germanotta was not born in stilettos and liquid liner. Those tools became part of an arsenal from which she would draw to construct the persona of a superstar, who would later reach back and affirm her fans’ natural state of being. Gaga’s is, probably intentionally, a very mixed message about beauty and conformity.

By this point, it’s probably become clear to my reader that I care a lot more about Lady Gaga than I do about Elizabeth Taylor. That’s partially generational—Gaga is my peer, and Taylor my grandmother’s—but also because Taylor reminds me of how nauseated I get from the media’s jerking my attention between worshipping beautiful women and indicting their substance and motives (“Could anyone as beautiful as Elizabeth Taylor also be talented?”). Gaga, by contrast, seizes that attention and smashes it like a sacrificial wine glass at a Jewish wedding. By revealing the very intricacy of its construction, she shines light on the illusion of female “beauty” and challenges at least some of its arbitrary standards—though I certainly still wish she’d eat a sandwich already. Stef, if you read this next time you auto-Google, your next meatball sub is on me.

What reifies the unlikely connection between Gaga and Taylor the most, though, is that they have in common an uncommon work ethic. Taylor made over 50 films in her lifetime. Lady Gaga has been touring continuously since November 2009, or for 483 days. She’s got another 42 to go. Too little attention is afforded to this: the work it takes, the sheer amount of time required not just to perform, but to produce an appearance as performance. Every time Elizabeth Taylor put on her face in the morning, every cigarette Lady Gaga inexplicably glue-guns to a pair of sunglasses, requires a modicum of effort as specific and demanding as building a set or wiring a soundboard. We expect it of women every day of their lives, on- and offstage alike, and of men hardly at all.

So we bid farewell to a faded icon and usher in newer ones; we honor the contributions from each. Elizabeth Taylor deserves to rest in peace. She must have been exhausted.

The post The Common Rituals of Elizabeth Taylor and Lady Gaga appeared first on The Faster Times.

A brief history of advice columnists would certainly include these names: Dear Abby, Ann Landers, Carolyn Hax, Dan Savage, Miss Manners, Dear Prudence. Why are advice columnists almost always women? Are women more likely to write to or read an advice column? In general, what role does gender play in the explication of problems and dispensation of advice?

When it comes to the advice industry, the dispensers’ names reveal a lot. Consider the image names like “Dear Abby,” “Dear Prudence,” and “agony aunt” (the British term for an advice columnist) contrive: a maternal figure dispensing time-hewn kernels of insight, a guiding voice nurturing her supplicants toward reconciliation and peace of mind. Pauline Phillips, the originator of Dear Abby, stated that she created the nom-de-plume Abigail Van Buren by combining the names of the Biblical figure of Abigail with President Martin Van Buren.

Phillips’ invocation of Abigail is a particularly revealing one: in the book of Samuel, Abigail, the wife of Nabal, finds herself in a tricky position after Nabal disrespects David. Appeasing David with food, wine, and conversation, Abigail successfully convinces him not to seek revenge on her husband. David replies to her, “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, which sent thee this day to meet me: And blessed be thy advice, and blessed be thou, which hast kept me this day from coming to shed blood….” (Samuel 1:25, 32-33, italics mine) In light of this passage, which also underscores the historical length of the female advice-giving tradition, Phillips’ pen name becomes a hybrid of wisdom and authority, both president and peacemaker.

The frequent use of pseudonym, also, obscures the true identity of the columnist, interjecting a paradigm in the place of a more complex personality. It’s the same reason why your therapist might know every secret you’ve ever had, but you don’t know the names of his or her children: the veil of anonymity allows the guidance-seeker to project emotions onto the figure of the therapeutic figure, usually in a productive way. If you don’t know too much about the healer, it’s easier to let them help heal you without feeling obligated to return the favor.

If it’s inarguable that most advice columnists are women, then, who are the advice-seekers? Again, mostly women. The Faster Times’ own advice columnist, Veronica Mittnacht, hypothesizes that “women are accustomed to talking publicly about feelings, while men often feel that it’s unbecoming. ” Put simply, women are more socialized to discuss what they feel, while men are socialized to keep quiet and solve problems alone.

Emily Yoffe, the third Prudence behind Slate’s long-running “Dear Prudence” column (interestingly, the first was Herbert Stein, a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to Presidents Nixon and Ford, and the father of Ben Stein. Stein did not reveal his identity while writing the column), estimated for me that “upwards of 85%” of her questions come from women.” Yoffe doesn’t seem surprised by this—“women go to doctors far more, too,” she says with a virtual shrug—but also points out an interesting variance in the comments on her columns, estimating that only 60-70% of the comments come from women.

Mittnacht notes a similar pattern. “Most of the questions come from women,” Mittnacht says, “but when I’m talking them over in the office, the men are just as interested as the women in thinking about these problems.”

Though it’s impossible to discern the gender balance of advice column readers, Yoffe’s point suggests that men do read the columns, even if they’re less likely to write to them. “One thing I really like about having an online column is it generates discussion—people agreeing, elaborating, saying I missed the point,” Yoffe says. Especially since Dear Prudence answers questions both via email and live chat, comments are often real-time critical responses to advice, additional suggestions, and the like. So if men are participating in these discussions, that participation suggests not only that men do read the columns, but also that on some level they’re more comfortable with being comment-box critics and givers of advice than they are being its seekers.

All of this is not to ignore what is perhaps the most powerful motivation to read advice columns, if not to write to them: emotional voyeurism. Just like we watch crime shows to experience the thrill of fear in a safe way, we read advice columns to experience the drama of other people’s problems in a safe way. We also read them with mild Schadenfreude: to reassure ourselves that no matter how bad things are, someone out there has it worse. So again, even if men don’t participate as actively in advice discussions, they’re still likely to assuage their own negative emotions by safely experiencing others’ from a distance.

Judging by the range of topics on which most frequently seek advice, the industry isn’t likely to become any less gynocentric anytime soon: when I ask Yoffe what the most common problems people extend to her are, the answers are hilariously female. “Weddings, mothers-in-law, porn-watching by the man in your life, and chewing, humming, burping, and farting by cubicle mates,” she says without a pause. “I actually thought the economy tanking would have a felicitous effect on the wedding questions, but I was wrong.”

The post Is Advice Women’s Work? appeared first on The Faster Times.

Fey’s taken a big swipe at her industry’s glass ceiling with 30 Rock, and also with her work on SNL and Mean Girls, though not so much a flying leap upwards as the methodical building of a ladder. Much like Clinton, Fey’s ladder has led her to become the premier female decision-maker in her field; Fey is the grande dame of mainstream comedy as Clinton is…um, Secretary of State.

However, neither Fey nor Clinton are universally beloved by women. Last year, a widely circulated post on the blog Tiger Beatdown titled “13 Ways of Looking At Liz Lemon” characterized 30 Rock’s target audience using language that might also describe the second-wave-feminist rock of support (Tiger calls it “Liz Lemon-ism”) beneath Clinton:

“…a certain variety of white, coastal-city dwelling, fairly well-to-do heterosexual cisgendered woman, a woman with a comfortable white-collar job that is so very comfortable and so very white-collar that she is free to spend her spare time yearning for, and semi-believing that she could attain, something with more “meaning”…she can tell you that as a feminist she has a right to be Concerned About Porn; she’s Brooklyn not Queens, brunch not breakfast, flirty not slutty, fond of cupcakes and feminist theory but unsure how to make either one herself, and thoroughly incensed about Vajazzling.”

In light of “13 Ways” and other similar criticism, it was hard not to read a note of reflection into last week’s episode of 30 Rock, “TGS Hates Women.” In the episode, Liz hires another woman writer after being accused of sexism by a feminist blog called JoanofSnark.com. After discovering that the writer, Abby, acts like a living, breathing inflatable sex doll, Liz launches a bizarre feminist enlightenment campaign on her, leaking a video of Abby pre-porno-transformation onto the web. Inevitably, the joke is on Liz, who learns too late that Abby took on a new identity (perhaps she was modeling herself after Holly Madison or this Wikipedia entry of “A high end sex doll”) to escape an abusive ex-husband.

The intersection that is illuminated between “13 Ways” and “TGS Hates Women” is Fey’s (and Clinton’s) inability to fill the ‘Everywoman’ role. It’s an impossible expectation to be asked to speak for an entire demographic just because you’re the only representative in power. It is as unreasonable as asking Barack Obama to account for all of black America (especially considering his, um, white mom). Standard-bearers like Fey and Clinton-who probably never would have achieved their popular success if they were any less educated, privileged, or moderate-are lionized and aspired to by women who identify with them, but equally ridiculed and dismissed by those whom they fail to represent. Some people love them for widening the public lens to include any women at all. Others yearn for female role models farther outside the current mainstream including, but not limited to, women of color, queer women, poor women, disabled women, or women who are actually fat, rather than fictitiously insinuating that they are on their major network sitcom. Liz Lemon is not every woman.

“TGS Hates Women” could be interpreted—indeed, I am interpreting it—as a direct response to the Tiger Beatdown brand of critique of Liz Lemon and her –ism. Instead of giving us another week of Lemon’s usual attempts to corral the various dysfunctional men in her life, with “TGS Hates Women,” 30 Rock shifts the lens of criticism onto Lemon’s own character in a manner that’s predictably self-loathing but refreshingly self-aware. Lemon herself becomes an incarnation of the incensed critic, the one unwilling to accept the model of female power—in this case, Abby—offered to her.

It’s a clever subversion that Fey performs. In response to critics who, with more than a dash of self-righteousness and condescension, deride her or Lemon for being too moderate, Fey sets Lemon up to fall under the guillotine of her own self-righteousness. Fey radicalizes herself and returns a jab at the “you’re-not-feminist-enough-ers” all with one fell swoop of humiliation.

Through Lemon, Fey also owns up to an ugly but familiar kind of woman-on-woman crime: the snarky, guilt-driven jabs those of us who like to think we’ve made it into the room lob at those who haven’t, or even the Abbys who have. Women have a lot of reasons to be competitive. There’s still less room for women at the top of virtually every profession, we don’t want to be inseminated by no fool, or as Jack points out, “Female jealousy is an evolutionary fact, Lemon. If you try to breed it out of them, you end up with a lesbian with hip dysplasia.” However, it’s the assumption that there’s only one model of female power that proves dangerously conducive to this kind of woman-on-woman crime.

Finally, the myth of Fey/Lemon’s ugliness, like Hillary Clinton’s job title, is a blog post or book unto itself. Before “TGS Hates Women,” I’ve often wondered if Tina Fey honestly believed she wasn’t a total Betty. But when 30 Rock executes a witty, ironic, and typically self-deprecating exposition of the assumption that women can’t be simultaneously successful and sexual, I’m tempted to read it as a sly wink on Fey’s part. She’s debunking the myth that attractive women—like herself (she must know by now)—can’t be anything but ambitious gold-diggers succumbing to patriarchal pressure to be booby and desirable. It’s an affirmation that 30 Rock and its show-within-the-show, “TGS,” are engaging in a discussion generated and perpetuated by women, and a recognition on Fey’s part that she doesn’t speak for all women, and when she tries, she ends up with egg on her face.

Leaders like Fey and Clinton are not radical models of success; women in power are still too rare, but no longer unheard of. Their purpose is to push the center farther left, not to throw it off the charts. Appreciation for the progress they’ve made comes in many different forms—abject worship and incensed critique alike—but we owe it to them all the same, if for no other reason than jokes like “We should at least be elevating women — ohhh, my period! You’re all fired!” just wouldn’t be funny without them.

The post Liz Lemon-ism, “TGS Hates Women,” and The Everywoman Myth appeared first on The Faster Times.

Much-Facebooked this week has been this video of Rep. Jackie Speier (D – CA) righteously calling out her colleagues on the hypocrisy of the assumption that women somehow don’t assign gravity to the abortion procedure; that women, the ones who actually have said procedure, can’t possibly appreciate the vitality of a second-trimester fetus, or else they’d never do something as “cavalier” as have an abortion. Rep. Speier, a Roman Catholic mother of two, revealed that she once terminated a pregnancy at 17 weeks because of medical complications with the fetus. Needless to say, it takes a lot of courage—you might even say it takes balls—to stand up in front of a hostile audience and admit you had a controversial medical procedure.

Planned Parenthood does provide abortions. That’s important, and I’m grateful to Rep. Speier for highlighting the need for that medical procedure. But I think it’s also important to remember that PP provides a lot of less controversial and equally important medical services—prenatal care, birth control counseling, STI screening, and more. In fact, abortions comprise only 3% of PP’s health services, and denying federal funding to Planned Parenthood and organizations like it undermines the other 97% of their medical care, too, which means more clap and shotgun weddings for everyone. I’ve never had an abortion, but I’ve absolutely been the beneficiary of PP’s health care.

When I was 19, I spent the summer in San Francisco working for a now-defunct and ironically named nightlife magazine called Karma. One morning, I woke up and couldn’t pee. I would try to flip the usually unconscious psychological valve that makes me pee, and only a few measly, painful drops would emerge, along with unimaginable burning pain. I was flummoxed. I tried to pee again. I failed again. For days. For five days, I panicked. Certainly I had syphilis, or AIDS. Certainly the Catholic God of my upbringing was casting a scourge on my poon in retribution for the premarital nookie. My student health insurance was on the other side of the country in New York, my roommate was a gay man who was peeing just fine, and I definitely didn’t want to call my parents. I was doubled over in pain and my urine was colors it shouldn’t be. Something had to be done.

I did what any woman would do: I called Planned Parenthood and made an appointment. Wincingly, I climbed on the bus and got myself there, expecting the Planned Parenthood waiting room of my young liberal-elite white feminist imagination, one in which I would be congratulated for my sex-positive outlook, treated quickly and efficiently, patted on the shoulder, and ushered back out into my carefree pursuit of nookie with a purseful of free condoms.

The waiting room I entered was—not that one. The waiting room I entered was crowded with a few women who looked like me and a lot more who didn’t, staffed by stressed and overworked nurses, and fraught with a miasma of panic like mine. The bowl of free condoms was empty by noon. Nonetheless, a friendly, professional nurse took me into an exam room, gave me a paper gown, and handed me a cup I knew I wouldn’t be able to pee in. I did the only thing I had energy left to do. I burst into tears, alone in stirrups with an empty cup.

A doctor came in and witnessed my pitiable state. Between sobs, I recounted my symptoms: abdominal pain, endless burning, and no pee. The doctor compassionately told me that she was almost certain I had a urinary tract infection. As she examined me to confirm her suspicion, she assured me that UTIs are a minor, easily treatable, but incredibly uncomfortable plight. She gave me a prescription and let me know me that PP had a sliding payment scale and that I didn’t have to call my parents. She instructed me to eat something, pop one of the two giant Cipro pills rattling around in the bottle (“Don’t be alarmed if your pee turns neon orange.”), and promised I’d be feeling better by the afternoon.

The point is this: when I strode back out onto the Civic Center Plaza and bought myself a 10 am hot dog that was nowhere as good as the ones back in New York, I knew some things about my reproductive health that I hadn’t known before. Fear breeds from a lack of information; we feel afraid when we don’t know or understand what’s happening. From my visit to Planned Parenthood, I learned that:

A) I did not, in fact, have syphilis or AIDS, and God was not punishing me. B) The cause of the unbearable discomfort in my tender places was easily treatable. C) Free condoms don’t come free, and D) Very few people go to Planned Parenthood unless they feel in some way scared, alone, underserved, or in pain.

By jeopardizing Planned Parenthood, then, the Pence Amendment most directly impacts people—women—who are already scared, alone, underserved, or in pain. Medical information about reproductive health—medical information about anything, really—should provide a lot of information and no judgment, and that is exactly what Planned Parenthood provided to me when I was 19, scared, alone, and in pain.

The matrix of reproductive health issues that we call choice isn’t just an avenue to abortion. Choice feeds a wealth of medical information based on the premise that women should be able to make informed decisions about their bodies, and Planned Parenthood has arguably done more than any other organization in America to equip women to make those decisions. If you haven’t already, sign Planned Parenthood’s petition here. The price of losing information is too high.

The post Defunding Planned Parenthood Means More Clap and Shotgun Weddings: Why The Pence Amendment Sucks appeared first on The Faster Times.

Carolla’s explanation was that he has twins, and the boy likes boy things and the girl likes girl things. Savage actually agreed, saying that his own kid isn’t anything like him or his boyfriend in terms of what he’s interested in. But to conclude that the different ways girls and boys are socialized has nothing to do with the development of their gender identity seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Kids are born with their own personalities– parents know this, becase if they try to make their kid into what they want instead of what the kid wants, it’s not going to work. But when it comes to gender expectations, the individual kid is going up against some pretty powerful forces.

Author Peggy Orenstein is about to release a book called Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. Jezebel wrote up an event yesterday where the author spoke to promote the book, discussing such things as girlie toys, the color pink, and the learned performance of sexuality.

“When girls are pushed [into sexuality] prematurely… they learn that sexiness is a performance, and don’t learn to connect it with their own feelings,” Orenstein said, adding that this was the crucial distinction between being “anti-sex” and “anti-sexualization.”

The cultural obsession with sex as a public performance, she said, was what was behind psychologist Deborah Tolman’s account of how she asked little girls how they felt, and they answered with how they looked.

The discrepancy between how girls and boys are socialized not only informs the way children act, but the way they think about themselves. If you’re a little kid whose individual personality doesn’t fit neatly into the gender role you’re expected to perform, then you will grow up being constantly reminded, by images, products, and media, that there is something wrong with you. And if you’re a girl who likes girly stuff, you’ve got a different kind of struggle ahead– according to Orenstein, 40% of six-year-olds wear lipstick or lip gloss on a regular basis. That’s a life of wearing makeup, a life growing up believing that that’s just how girls must behave, that you’re less of a girl if your lips aren’t sparkly.

I’m really looking forward to reading this book. I don’t think there’s anything negative about girly girls or boy-power boys. But I think it’s dangerous to use the word “inherent” when it comes to children’s gendered behavior. To do so suggests that little girls who are tomboys or little boys who like makeup (and they do exist, I work with kids and know these types personally) are inherently wrong. There’s an article in the Times today about little girls in Afghanistan being disguised as boys to bring honor and privilege to a family. In contrast, our Western problem seems trivial, based primarily in consumption– what toys should we buy our children, as opposed to what freedoms we will be granted or denied based on our childrens’ sex. But it’s also a reminder that gender is largely a performance. If we let boys and girls in on that secret, and allow them to navigate that terrain freely, I think they’ll grow up to be much healthier men and women.

The post Gender in Children: Performative or Inherent? appeared first on The Faster Times.