Dead Wild Roses

Encroaching on Transgender Territory? – Jaden Smith

June 21, 2016 in Feminism | Tags: Encroaching GNC'ers, Jaden Smith, Radical Feminism, The Independent, Trans Ideology? | by The Arbourist | 26 comments

My eyebrow arched with considerable alacrity while reading the title of this opinion piece from The Independent

(‘Jaden Smith as a new face of womenswear might seem progressive – but he’s on transgender territory.’) While reading and fighting the loss of my irony meter (boundaries not being respected…) said brow remained frozen in place at how amazingly silly the authors points are. Let’s get started.

“So, it’s been announced that 17-year-old Jaden Smith, son of American actor Will Smith, is to be the new face of Louis Vuitton clothes. To be more specific, the womenswear section. And I didn’t even know they had an old face – clearly I’m out of the fashion loop.”

[…]

“Jaden seems to be up for this gender-neutral, equal clothing rights thing which allows men to wear women’s clothes without any fear of ridicule. But there is another, more important issue afoot.”

Another important issue? Hmmm… Considering that a major fashion label is promoting gender non-conforming behaviour, this issue must be very important indeed.

“There’s a reason why men wear men’s clothes and women wear women’s clothes, and why they are generally so different. OK, I know women have been wearing trousers for decades but they’re usually a femme version of the male equivalent – and I’m not talking about unisex clothes like jeans and t-shirts.

I’m talking about basic clothes norms that depict which gender is wearing them, even in the modern world. Stereotypically, men wear trousers and women wear dresses and skirts. That’s the ‘norm’ and it’s more than that – it’s a uniform.”

The argument for why gender norms are good for you is about to be made. Please keep in mind that gender is a hierarchy designed to distinguish the dominant class from the submissive class and that said gender hierarchy is toxic for both women and men.

So the author states that clothes have a normative value in distinguishing between the two biological sexes.

“When you get out of bed in the morning the most important thing you have to do all day is tell the world what your gender is, because from that, everything else flows.”

Really? I thought the most important thing in the world is my first cup of coffee. Coffee addiction aside, I might suggest that the most important thing in the world is agreeing to be kind to those around you, and trying to a creative, productive member of society. Following a codified notion of gender would seem to be in sync with the sexist stereotyping feminists have fought against (and continue to fight against) for decades.

“You may think that your job is to be an office supervisor or a stockbroker or police officer but these are all human constructs. Deep down your real job is to reproduce, and showing other humans your gender is the first step on that path.”

Wow. Gender essentialism for $500 please Alex. Reproduction takes place on the idea of sexual attraction – specifically heterosexual attraction. We invented this thing we call gender on this basis and from this sprang the constructed societal norms we expect women and men to perform. These constructed roles are not written in stone, nor are they necessarily correct.

“So, to help make it plain for anyone to see which gender you are, you put on a uniform. Men put on trousers and have men’s haircuts, and women put on dresses and skirts, feminine tops and tights and women’s shoes to show their femininity and declare to the world that they are female.”

None of these ‘declarations’ are necessary. Society, as a whole, can generally identify male bodies and female bodies without the gendered stereotypes mentioned here. Again, the author sounds as if perpetuating these stereotypes is somehow beneficial to society.

“They have women’s hair-dos and they put use cosmetics to make themselves look nicer and more presentable and to reinforce the female uniform a bit more.”

Really? Compulsory femininity for the winz? I can’t even…

“Male-to-female transgender people rely on props like clothes, shoes, make-up and hairstyles to create the gender identity they want to portray to the world because most of the time their bodies alone are unable to do that. There are a few lucky ones who don’t have to do a thing to put across a female persona, but most trans women have to work hard at it.

The danger for trans women is that if wearing what are traditionally women’s clothes becomes the norm for men too, then trans women will no longer be able to rely on these props to help them display a female gender identity – and for many, that could be a serious problem.”

Read those two paragraphs carefully. The author is defending the harmful hierarchical system of gender and gender roles. Quite the conservative stance, no? Gender non-conforming behaviour (going against the system that is bad for all of us) is being portrayed as a threat to those rely on traditional gendered roles to express themselves.

If your inner rad-fem isn’t blowing a lobe by now, then Huston, we have a problem. But wait, it gets better.

“But trans people should be aware that well-known faces like Jaden Smith are starting to encroach on our territory. They’re starting to wear the trans uniform without actually stating that they are transgender, and they’re claiming it for themselves under the guise of gender-neutral fashion.”

Yep, Jaden Smith is encroaching on trans territory because he’s not conforming to the gender hierarchy. His gender non-conforming behaviour challenges the socially constructed norms of what is for men, and what is for women a.k.a actions that subvert the norm as opposed to the author’s defence of supporting the toxic gender hierarchy.

“All of which begs the question: where does that leave us?”

Reading further that question is quite clearly answered in the article from the ‘other side’ of the story:

“Jaden Smith isn’t wearing a dress because he wants to identify as female; he’s wearing a dress because he rejects strict gender norms. And if someone identifies as something other than ‘male’ or ‘female’, and they feel comfortable and happy in doing so, then I struggle to see why we should support that sort of expression being stifled.”

[Source: The Independent – Point]

[Source: The Independent – Counterpoint]

Lateral Discrimination Or, “No No No, take your other left!”

June 20, 2016 in Science, Social Science | Tags: Cognitive Science, Lateral Discrimation, Maps, Spatial Awareness | by The Arbourist | 8 comments

Lateral awareness, or the ability to discriminate left from right is an acquired skill. Most people have it by age 10 and most people start to lose in after age 50 (good times). Lateral awareness, of course, falls on a spectrum and here are the results so far:

“A recent survey of 800 people found that 9 percent of men and 18 percent of women report a problem with left-right discrimination. And when 290 undergraduate medical students from Ireland were tested on laterality using a series of stick-figure images, more than half of them had trouble, scoring less than 77 percent (the test had 144 questions). Both of these studies found that women struggled more than men; one of the world’s leading researchers on this subject, Dr. Gerard Gormley of Queen’s University Belfast, became interested in the subject because his wife often mixed up her left and right. (She’s a righty who also mimes writing to set herself straight.) The studies also found that lateral awareness did not affect intellect—although in practice, spatial reasoning troubles can make you feel like a doofus, in fact they do not indicate inferior intellect. (Phew!)”

Truth time gentle readers! I’m pretty good with left and right, but the cardinal directions always send me for a loop – especially when travelling South. Everything just feels wrong as I’m navigating through the directions. I keep hoping that my sense of unease will diminish, but as of yet, no luck. Successfully navigating to a school across town is the first victory of the day, getting attendance is the second. Once those hurdles have been overcome, the easy part of the day, teaching ambivalent children can begin.

My google map experiences are one thing, but getting mixed up as health care professional can have obvious deleterious consequences.

“However, the field under the most pressure to avoid lateral confusion is medicine. In the dentist’s chair, there’s money wasted when hygienists x-ray the wrong tooth. It’s even worse when a left-right-disoriented dentist pulls one or more teeth from the incorrect side of the mouth. It’s even more serious in general surgery: A 2011 report estimates that there are 40 wrong-site surgeries done weekly in the U.S., and many of those involve mixing up a patient’s left and right. This is a devastating problem: If a doctor removes the healthy kidney and not the cancerous one, the results can be fatal. Wrong eye? Now we have a fully blind patient.

Healthcare professionals work in tricky circumstances that make laterality harder. For them, distinguishing left from right almost always requires rotation. During a consultation, a patient is often sitting up, but that same patient is likely lying down during the subsequent procedure. The doctor or nurse’s perspective in the operating room could then change if he or she moves around the room while the patient stays stationary.

In addition, in medical situations—and in the transportation and aviation industries—there’s often time pressure and a bustle of other things going on. A 2015 study of medical students found that distracting people with sounds impacted their ability to tell left from right, and interrupting them with cognitive tasks made matters even worse. This is why the second item on the WHO’s Surgical Safety Checklist asks if the surgical site is marked—ideally by someone not distracted, and well in advance of the pressures of the operating suite.”

So, when at a hospital and if conscious make sure you talk to your surgeon and have them mark the procedure beforehand. Just to be safe.

“That leaves us with our mnemonic devices. Some wear a wristwatch. Others make a capital “L” with their fingers. But it’s been shown that people who use mnemonic devices, particularly in a medical setting, are those the most likely to make mistakes. Our tricks fail, in other words, and practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect.”

Yeah, so mnemonic devices are out. Pretty bleak picture eh? :/ While I was reading this, I thought of the common practice of turning down the radio while looking for parking or following directions. We often see on the internet people making fun of the practice, but as this study indicates loud noises/distractions hinder our ability to make left/right distinctions. So perhaps the radio-muters might just be on to something. :)

[Source:JSTOR Daily]

The DWR Sunday Religious Disservice – Pick Your Battles

June 19, 2016 in Religion | Tags: Decisions, god, Milk or Genocide, Religion, The DWR Sunday Religious Disservice | by The Arbourist | 14 comments

And no, religious friends, you don’t get to follow up with the working in ‘mysterious ways’ dodge either.

Socialization & Patriarchy

June 18, 2016 in Culture, Social Science | Tags: Gender Roles, Patriarchy, Sinfest, Socialization | by The Arbourist | Comments closed

Tatsuya Ishida creates the internet comic Sinfest. Sometimes his insight hits the proverbial nail on the head.

The DWR Friday Choral Interlude – CHANTICLEER: Oy Polná, Polná Koróbushka

June 17, 2016 in Music | Tags: CHANTICLEER, Oy Polná, Polná Koróbushka, The DWR Friday Choral Interlude | by The Arbourist | Comments closed

Korobeiniki” (Russian: Коробейники, lit. Peddlers) is a nineteenth-century Russian folk song that tells of a meeting between a peddler and a girl, describing their haggling over goods in a veiled metaphor for courtship.

The song “Korobeiniki” is based on a poem with the same name by Nikolay Nekrasov, written and printed in the Sovremennik magazine in 1861.[1] Due to its increasing tempo and the dance style associated with it, it quickly became a popular Russian folk song.[2]

Korobeiniki were peddlers with trays, selling fabric, haberdashery, books and other small things in pre-revolutionary Russia.[3] Nekrasov’s poem is a sad story about the love between a peasant girl, Katya, and a young peddler. They meet each other in a rye field at night where he has promised her a good deal on the goods he carries, before they are sold in the market at day. Only the night knows what happens between them in the rye field, but she is not so simple and does not take any of the goods which he offers her. What is the point, she figures, to have all that without him – her first and only love? She takes only a small turquoise ring, as a memory, and he promises to marry her when he comes back from his commerce trip. He continues his journey and she waits for him with caution. His business goes very well and he makes a lot of money, but on the way back he is killed and robbed by a forest ranger whom he asks for directions. So he never comes back to marry Katya. The song is the beginning of the original poem; it only recounts Katya’s first meeting with the young peddler when their relation is getting off to a happy start.

Virginia Woolf – On Literature

June 16, 2016 in Feminism | Tags: literature, Patriarchy, The DWR Feminist Quote of the Day, Virginia Woolf | by The Arbourist | 4 comments

“Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer! We might perhaps have most of Othello; and a good deal of Antony; but no Caesar, no Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, no Jaques –literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.”

— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own)

Why We Need to Stay Connected to Reality – Nick Turse

June 15, 2016 in Culture | Tags: Community, Corporate Captialism, Culture, Individualism, Nick Turse, Tom's Dispatch | by The Arbourist | 18 comments

Our society is being influenced negatively by the consumerist culture that we, collectively, have taken our hands off the tiller and have let the market decide what is best for us and our cultures.

The idea that we can consume our way to happiness, well-being, or even a more just society would not compute without people being constantly conditioned to believe that individuality is end-goal of life. The power of community and people working together has been the dynamo that has pushed our societies forward for the benefit of everyone (well except for the status-quo) and it is this power that has been waning since corporate capitalism has kicked into high gear under the guise of neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism undermines community, collective action, and critical thought it is a stupefying tonic – that when served to the masses – creates a calm disquiet that grinds societies away, but in return keeps people isolated, fixated on themselves, and most importantly: manageable.

This piece by Nick Turse is a preface for a America’s disconnect between its citizenry and the army said citizenry supports. The dissonance is palatable as one reads the article. What should concern you is that the disconnect described has been carefully and intentionally cultivated. A feature of our current system, and most certainly not a bug .

“I can’t tell you exactly why I clicked on the article, but it was probably the title: “The Double-Tap Couple.” To me, a “double tap” is the technique of firing two gunshots in quick succession or employing two strikes in a row, as when U.S. drones or Hamas carry out attacks and then follow-up strikes to kill first-responders arriving at the scene. But this piece was about something very different. The headline referred to the popular app Instagram where you double-tap to “like” a photo.

The article turned out to be a profile of two twenty-somethings, a married couple who go by the noms de social media, FuckJerry and Beige Cardigan. They are, says author David Yi, “micro-celebrities” of the modern age. He is “tall, with a chiseled face, handsome”; she “has big doe eyes with cherub-like cheeks.” They dropped out of college and — first he and then she — became Instagram meme curators; that is, they find photos with wry or funny captions elsewhere on the internet and post them for their millions of followers. “Though both are social media sensations, neither is quite content with what they’ve accomplished,” Yi tells us. She “wants to pursue her first love, fashion, but isn’t quite sure what she’d want to do.” He’s currently cashing in with FuckJerry merchandise — hats, t-shirts, even “Vape juice.”

I read the article to the point at which FuckJerry (née Elliot Tebele) told Yi about his long slog up the Instagram follower food-chain: “It took a shit ton of time to get to, and it took a long time with a lot of work.” I stared at my phone in abject confusion. Something wasn’t right, so I scrolled to the beginning of the article and started again. But it was just the same. Justin Bieber is a fan. Followers include the “Kardashian-Jenner family.” He wears “skinny jeans and vintage Nikes.” She sports a “statement coat and a pair of sparkling Chloe boots.” Then I hit that quote: “shit ton of time… a lot of work.” I still couldn’t make sense of it and began studying the article as if it were a riddle. I read it maybe five times and again and again when I hit those phrases about time and work my brain would buckle.

At that moment, I was nearing the end of a month-long reporting stint in South Sudan and waiting to find out if I’d be able to talk to a teenage girl, a late millennial with more than memes on her mind. She had rebuffed the 60-something man her family had arranged for her to marry and her relatives had displayed their displeasure by beating her to the point of unconsciousness. That conversation never happened, but I’d already logged several weeks’ worth of interviews with shooting survivors, rape victims, mothers of murdered sons, wives of dead husbands. All this in a country where, for firewood and water — that is, the means of life — women walk desperately far distances in areas where they know that men with AK-47s may be lurking, where many are assaulted and violated by one, two, or even five men. In other words, a land where few would consider meme curation to be “a lot of work.”

I’d obviously hit that unsettling juncture where voices from home become dulled and distorted, where you feel like you’re hearing them from deep underwater. I’m talking about the vanishing point at which your first-world life collides with your crisis-zone reality — the point of disconnect. Mark Wilkerson knows it well. He found himself in just such a state, serving with the U.S. Army in civil-war-torn Somalia during the 1990s. That’s where he begins his inaugural TomDispatch piece, a rumination on his journey from soldier to veteran to chronicler of the all-too-brief life of another veteran, in his recent and moving book, Tomas Young’s War.

I eventually gave up on Yi’s article, unsure why I couldn’t understand the life and times of FuckJerry. After I got back to the U.S., however, I signed up for Instagram and took a look at his account and Yi’s story began to make more sense to me, if only in a tragi-comic way. Later in the piece, he writes of his subjects being “caught in the maelstrom” when a competitor is criticized for “stealing” memes. It’s a strange society that produces both meme maelstroms and, in distant lands, lethal ones that leave millions dead, maimed, desperate, or displaced. So before you become FuckJerry’s 9,200,001st follower, let Wilkerson guide you through slivers of two American conflicts, their aftermaths, and the points of disconnect along the way.”

–Nick Turse’s Preface to Batman in a Hospital Bed by Mark Wilkerson @Tom’s Dispatch

The disconnection that Turse illustrates resonates with me enough though to make it the focus of my article, however Wilkerson’s article is also very good, so I recommend following the link.

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Dead Wild Roses

Encroaching on Transgender Territory? – Jaden Smith

The DWR Sunday Religious Disservice – Pick Your Battles

The DWR Friday Choral Interlude – CHANTICLEER: Oy Polná, Polná Koróbushka

Virginia Woolf – On Literature

Why We Need to Stay Connected to Reality – Nick Turse

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