In today's installment of my on-and-off thoughts on boudoir photography, we'll talk about planning out your concept for a boudoir set.
I find it useful to think of the shoot as a series of pictures telling a very simple story, and of the clothes and props as signifiers that move the story along. Building your photo set around a story concept helps keep it focused and cohesive, and the narrative gives a natural flow to the sequence of pictures.
What that story should be is, of course, up to you. I usually build mine around specific clothes or accessories that I want to show off, which tends to reduce my self-consciousness because I think of it more as showcasing the clothes than myself. But you could just as easily build it around occasions (wedding, birthday, anniversary) or character concepts (Salome, Mata Hari, or just you as yourself -- but "yourself" as a consciously developed character).
Once you settle on a concept, the next step is to build it out using props. There are two main points to consider here: (1) the visual impact of the props (picking pieces with contrasting colors, textures, and purposes helps the pictures pop); and (2) how the props convey your story through symbolic shorthand.
For example!, if you were doing a bridal set, the obvious props would be the wedding veil (sheer fabric and lace can be used for lots of interesting visual effects and light/shadow contrasts, e.g., light falling through a window and being filtered through the veil onto skin), the ring (his and hers; the classic wedding photographer's two-rings-stacked shot can be redone over skin, or you could play around with the man's ring by holding it poised over puckered lips, impaling it on a stiletto heel, whatever works for you), a bouquet of flowers (visual contrast with color and texture, gives you something to play with/tease/shred), and so forth. All of those props are immediately recognizable as wedding symbols, and all can be used to center photographs.
If you wanted to do a character set -- let's say you wanted to play Mata Hari -- then you might pull together some turn-of-the-century Orientalist jewelry and a coin-draped dancer's bra, silk scarves, jeweled slippers, a worn satchel full of maps and papers to be caught rifling through. Theda Bara eyes, vamp lips, something gilded in the hair. The story: Mata Hari spying on a sleeping lover's work, and undressing to distract him after being caught peeking at the reports tucked into his satchel.
And if you wanted to just be yourself, then you'd pick through the symbols and signifiers of your own life (or your shared life together with the pictures' intended recipient), drawing on whatever you felt was both sentimentally significant and visually striking. A college sweater from back when you were boyfriend/girlfriend, a kitschy gift from an early date, a grandmother's cherished heirloom necklace. Whatever speaks to you.
Don't feel limited to lingerie. I've never once in my life done the standard bra-and-panties thing, and I don't see any reason that anyone else should feel bound to that either (of course, if you want to do it, that's a different story entirely!). Pick clothes you feel comfortable in. If an oversized T-shirt or a silly hat with novelty stockings is more authentically you, then do that. The point, after all, is to convey some aspect of your own personality, not to come off as an assembly-line Generic Widget o' Sex.
Couple of quick practical notes:
-- be careful about clothes or accessories that are likely to mess up your hair or makeup if they have to be pulled over your head.
-- if you're wearing stockings, bring an extra pair in case of runs.
-- if you have painted nails or toenails, bring the polish in case you need to touch up big chips.
-- there's a reason so many classic strip dancers and burlesque performers like to use scarves and feathered fans in their dances: you can do a lot with those big swirly splashes of color and sensual textures. While you needn't use a pair of peacock fans in your set, the basic premise might be worth considering: what would be fun to drag and drape over skin?
-- you can get a lot of miscellaneous props cheap on eBay; this is particularly useful for background stuff like colorful glass bottles, weird taxidermy, etc. It's fun to poke around looking at all the bizarre stuff for sale, and sometimes you get good ideas browsing through the listings.
-- keep in mind that the camera won't show the entire studio, so you really only need to build out a tiny part of the background behind your pose. I think it's better to have one or two strong symbolic pieces than a whole bunch of clutter (remember, you're the center focus, not the props, and you don't want to distract from that), so in general I'd recommend just picking out a few minimal signifiers per scene. If you need more than that, you're probably looking at a location shoot rather than a studio shoot anyway.
-- finally, although it's not really a prop-prop, it's often prudent to bring a little bottle of juice or a few pieces of candy to keep yourself from flagging. Even a mini shoot takes a few hours, and holding poses can be more challenging than you might expect. It's a good idea to have a light snack on hand, although I would recommend something compact and calorie-dense so you don't have to worry about whether the bulk will show in the pictures (at my very first shoot we stopped for pizza halfway through, which was a BAD IDEA; take it from me, you do not want to house half a pizza and then immediately go take a bunch of pictures with nearly-no clothes on).
Next up: what to expect at the actual shoot.
Tuesday, January 31, 2017
On My Uncle and the Internet
(crossposted from Facebook)
Lately I've been thinking a little about my uncle, and about the strange ripply reflections of the internet, and how we know and don't know the people in our lives. There isn't really a point to this post so you can skip it if you're not into navel-gazing right now. That's all this is.
Anyway, my uncle: I don't actually know him very well. He was often around when I was little, but I never got the impression that he was especially at ease with kids (also, it will surprise you to learn!, I was a particularly difficult brat as a kid [and now, yes yes]), and then we moved away, so I never really saw him once I got older. And now I live on the opposite side of the country and don't have much occasion to talk, so we fell out of contact and I figured that was that.
From half-remembered and maybe-inaccurate family stories I have the impression that my uncle lived a life that could have made a rich novel. A difficult childhood, an escape to the Army, exotic adventures and searing experiences as a young man, then outwardly quiet years beset by subdued heartbreaks later. Whether this is true, I don't know; family stories often aren't. But that's always been my vague understanding: that there *are* stories there, a lifetime's worth, or at least the possibility of them.
In my head, in these stories, my uncle is one of those middle-American protagonists beset by inarticulate yearnings and frustrations, reaching for elusive things never quite to be grasped, experiencing enormous events with immediacy and at close range, never with historical remove. I think of him this way not based on real knowledge, but because of its absence: it's easier to fill a personality you don't really know with watercolors. It's harder to draw strong lines with confidence when you don't even know their contours.
A couple of years back he reached out to friend me on Facebook. It was a surprise, but a welcome one. I thought: oh, now maybe I'll finally get to know who this person is, and instead of having this cloudy Updike knockoff in my head, I'll come to know a real personality.
Except that never happened.
A funny thing about Facebook (all social media, really, but especially FB, with its pictures/words, long/short versatility) is this: it reflects who people are in ways they intend and ways that they don't. Yes, it's a curated version of your life, but what people choose to include and what they omit is telling; whether they construct themselves primarily in pictures or words is telling; whether they present themselves in their own original selves or repeat what others create is telling.
At its best, you hear insights and thoughts from people you'd never otherwise talk to (or not in such depth), and you see glimpses of textured and colorful lives. People like to complain about dinner pictures, but I think they're fascinating: what people eat, how they prepare it, what they think worthy of presentation (the dish itself or the values it represents? a complicated showpiece meal or an everyday family dinner?). At its best, all these lives make a brilliant and unique mosaic.
At its worst... you wonder whether the person *has* an interior life of their own, or how unpleasant it must be to dwell there. If all that's shown is seething resentment packaged up into grotesque and inaccurate pictures, and other people's borrowed chants of anger repeated over and over again -- if those are the pictures that person chooses to make the wallpaper of their mind, and the interior world where they choose to live... then that's an ugly place to be.
Social media giveth, and social media taketh away. Through the internet I've met many wonderful, reflective, brilliant people whose thoughts I respect and enjoy. Facebook lets you peek inside people's heads, sort of, and that's often a curious and wonderful thing.
But other times it isn't. Other times you feel like you know someone less than you ever did before.
Sunday, January 29, 2017
Choosing a Boudoir Team
I'll probably be posting about boudoir photography a lot in the next
few days or weeks; for various reasons I've been thinking about it a
fair bit, and since this is my blog I can just ramble about whatever I
want AND NOBODY CAN STOP ME AHAHAHAHAAA.
But before I launch into all of that, I want to preface it by saying: it's not just vanity. I think that sometimes, for some women, it's hard to conceive of spending that much time and money on pictures of yourself. It can feel like a frivolity (which, sure, it kinda is; certainly I'd never argue it's a necessity), or like a needless vanity.
I'd like to gently push back against that idea. First, as I said earlier, I think a gift of boudoir pictures can be a deeply romantic gesture: it's a symbolic and literal giving of the self, and an expression of both intimate confidence and intimate vulnerability. It isn't all about you; in the context of a relationship, it can be a significant gift to share.
But also, I'd argue that vanity can sometimes be a good thing.
You should be proud of yourself. You should consider yourself worth admiring. Few of us suffer from too much self-confidence, and taking a measure of pride in yourself is, in my view, a good thing. If it motivates you to get a little more exercise, eat mindfully, and avoid self-destructive habits, then I am all for vanity. And I feel pretty strongly that women who own their sexuality and are possessed of solid self-esteem are more likely to assert themselves in relationships and less likely to settle for partners who don't afford them the respect they're due, so I'm all in favor of whatever helps strengthen that, too.
YOU CAN BE VAIN. IT'S OKAY. I GIVE YOU PERMISSION.
So! With that out of the way, I'd like to start walking you through the process, with some thoughts on how you might maximize your chances of having a good experience and getting some nice pictures.
In my previous post on boudoir photography, I talked a little about what I think the overarching goals of the art form can be: empowerment, exploration, and capturing a sense of one's unique sensibility, whether that's playful or sultry or anything else you like. But I didn't really say much about how you actually do that.
First (and foremost!): Find a boudoir team that is experienced, approachable, and versatile.
The best teams have a gift for bringing out each woman's individual personality, rather than trying to airbrush them all into the same artifice.
In Philadelphia, I opted to work with Lori Mann and Aleksandra Ambrozy in part because I saw that talent for showcasing diverse beauties demonstrated in their portfolios. Lori's blog post Rockin' Her Curves celebrates a plus-sized model -- but more than just the complimentary words and pretty pictures, I appreciated how the set was put together. It shows a team that knows how to bring out the lady's best features and portray her with poise and confidence.
The poses flatter the model: the first is soft and reflective, framed to emphasize her upper body, while the second (reposted above) arches her body, pulling her back and arms upward in a series of curves that elongate her figure. The lingerie is thoughtfully selected: that black lace garter has a broad band which wraps around the model's hips instead of cutting in, and the leopard-print motif (brief, blanket, and heels) suggests a fierce and sassy air, which the model's facial expression and black gloves accentuate.
Put together, what you see is a plus-sized lady whose pose and outfit indicate a retro-kitten playfulness, but with an underlying fierceness; whose clothes, framing, and positioning flatter her figure without hiding or making excuses for anything; and whose makeup, softly smoky but not hard-edged or overwhelming, completes the overall picture of a woman who's firmly in charge of herself but more than ready to have fun.
That's a lot to pack into two pictures, but it's there, and it celebrates a lady with an ever-so-slightly untraditional look. She doesn't look like every other model on the internet. She looks like herself.
I was similarly impressed by Aleksandra's blog post on a fall wedding where the bride wanted a classic look that didn't compromise her freckles. I can't think of a truer expression of "letting your natural beauty shine through" than, literally, letting your natural beauty shine through instead of covering it under a thick layer of makeup -- and that's exactly what Aleksandra did, and the effect was absolutely beautiful. Again and again on her blog, I saw a great talent for finding just the right blend of color and texture to bring out each woman's natural beauty, and an impressive fluency with lots of different looks and complexions.
Based on that, I was pretty confident they'd be able to do whatever wackiness I wanted to try. Ideally, your prospective photography team (and "team" is important; a big part of this is having professional makeup and hair, not just the photographer) will be able to do the same.
Next time, we'll talk about settling on a look and planning out a set.
But before I launch into all of that, I want to preface it by saying: it's not just vanity. I think that sometimes, for some women, it's hard to conceive of spending that much time and money on pictures of yourself. It can feel like a frivolity (which, sure, it kinda is; certainly I'd never argue it's a necessity), or like a needless vanity.
I'd like to gently push back against that idea. First, as I said earlier, I think a gift of boudoir pictures can be a deeply romantic gesture: it's a symbolic and literal giving of the self, and an expression of both intimate confidence and intimate vulnerability. It isn't all about you; in the context of a relationship, it can be a significant gift to share.
But also, I'd argue that vanity can sometimes be a good thing.
You should be proud of yourself. You should consider yourself worth admiring. Few of us suffer from too much self-confidence, and taking a measure of pride in yourself is, in my view, a good thing. If it motivates you to get a little more exercise, eat mindfully, and avoid self-destructive habits, then I am all for vanity. And I feel pretty strongly that women who own their sexuality and are possessed of solid self-esteem are more likely to assert themselves in relationships and less likely to settle for partners who don't afford them the respect they're due, so I'm all in favor of whatever helps strengthen that, too.
YOU CAN BE VAIN. IT'S OKAY. I GIVE YOU PERMISSION.
So! With that out of the way, I'd like to start walking you through the process, with some thoughts on how you might maximize your chances of having a good experience and getting some nice pictures.
In my previous post on boudoir photography, I talked a little about what I think the overarching goals of the art form can be: empowerment, exploration, and capturing a sense of one's unique sensibility, whether that's playful or sultry or anything else you like. But I didn't really say much about how you actually do that.
First (and foremost!): Find a boudoir team that is experienced, approachable, and versatile.
The best teams have a gift for bringing out each woman's individual personality, rather than trying to airbrush them all into the same artifice.
In Philadelphia, I opted to work with Lori Mann and Aleksandra Ambrozy in part because I saw that talent for showcasing diverse beauties demonstrated in their portfolios. Lori's blog post Rockin' Her Curves celebrates a plus-sized model -- but more than just the complimentary words and pretty pictures, I appreciated how the set was put together. It shows a team that knows how to bring out the lady's best features and portray her with poise and confidence.
The poses flatter the model: the first is soft and reflective, framed to emphasize her upper body, while the second (reposted above) arches her body, pulling her back and arms upward in a series of curves that elongate her figure. The lingerie is thoughtfully selected: that black lace garter has a broad band which wraps around the model's hips instead of cutting in, and the leopard-print motif (brief, blanket, and heels) suggests a fierce and sassy air, which the model's facial expression and black gloves accentuate.
Put together, what you see is a plus-sized lady whose pose and outfit indicate a retro-kitten playfulness, but with an underlying fierceness; whose clothes, framing, and positioning flatter her figure without hiding or making excuses for anything; and whose makeup, softly smoky but not hard-edged or overwhelming, completes the overall picture of a woman who's firmly in charge of herself but more than ready to have fun.
That's a lot to pack into two pictures, but it's there, and it celebrates a lady with an ever-so-slightly untraditional look. She doesn't look like every other model on the internet. She looks like herself.
I was similarly impressed by Aleksandra's blog post on a fall wedding where the bride wanted a classic look that didn't compromise her freckles. I can't think of a truer expression of "letting your natural beauty shine through" than, literally, letting your natural beauty shine through instead of covering it under a thick layer of makeup -- and that's exactly what Aleksandra did, and the effect was absolutely beautiful. Again and again on her blog, I saw a great talent for finding just the right blend of color and texture to bring out each woman's natural beauty, and an impressive fluency with lots of different looks and complexions.
Based on that, I was pretty confident they'd be able to do whatever wackiness I wanted to try. Ideally, your prospective photography team (and "team" is important; a big part of this is having professional makeup and hair, not just the photographer) will be able to do the same.
Next time, we'll talk about settling on a look and planning out a set.
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
On Inclusive Beauty
Lately, in thinking about romance and boudoir and trying not to think about current events (any more than I have to), I've been mulling over the inclusiveness of beauty.
In modern romance writing, there's been a real push toward including different types of characters. Old-school romances typically centered around impossibly gorgeous (and always white, and always able-bodied) women, with chiseled hunks for heroes and giant showers of money raining down upon them from the heavens. And you can still find some of those stories here and there, but they're nowhere near as common as they used to be.
Modern romances, more often than not, feature heroines who probably wouldn't feature as Maxim cover models. Lots of them have to work for a living, and they aren't always financially secure, let alone rich. They tend to represent a broader swath of ages, races, and physical and psychological traits. (In particular, because it pushes back against a common crutch, I want to commend Courtney Milan for including a black heroine in her Regency historical "Talk Sweetly to Me." It's such a common misconception that historicals can't have minority characters that this excuse even gets trotted out to "explain" why fantasy worlds can't have minorities in pseudo-medieval settings, because that wouldn't be "historically accurate." In actuality, of course, true historical accuracy would include characters from cross-cultural exchanges [all these historicals include exotic silks, teas, and spices, so why never any people from their cultures?], and it's good to see cracks starting to appear in the old whitewashed wall that artificially excluded them.
Plus it's just a good story with smart dialogue and witty, appealing characters. None of the rest would matter a bit if the story weren't any good. But it is!)
I think this is good, and I also think it's maybe uniquely important as it comes to romance.
Representation in fiction is always important. It's important that people get to see versions of themselves reflected on the page and on the screen, and that these versions be recognizably human, not just Morgan Freeman as Long-Suffering Saintly Martyr Mk. 239872394. (There's a time and a place for that too, but the time and place was "the '80s.")
But it's uniquely important as it comes to romance, I think, and the reason for that is bound up with the fraught and confusing thing that it is to be a woman in This Dumb Country, where you are bombarded from a very young age with images of an idealized and unattainable beauty that most of us never begin to approach. With conflicting and impossibly complicated messages about sexuality, with varied stripes of shame for having a female body, with -- if you're lucky -- the conscious awareness of all the ways in which you're expected to Perform Being a Woman, and the penalties that society is more than ready to impose if your performance falls the slightest bit short.
And then, maybe, a nagging sense that pretty clothes and painted nails and all of that might be frivolous and restrictive and hearkening back to prescriptive femininity, sure... but they're also kind of fun, at least once in a while, and is that so wrong?
So there's all this stuff about how having a female body is shameful and gross and weird, but also you should put it on display because it's beautiful, but also you can't put it on display because that would be attention-seeking and/or playing into the hands of the Patriarchy, and also it's not perfect enough to be displayed anyway, and and and. And then on top of that, when it comes to sex and relationships, you have to consider how the other party reacts. What does your partner find sexy? Because that's all shaped by cultural influences too, and very few people are willing to speak frankly about it (especially early on in a relationship), so pretty much you get to run through that whole entire maze again, but this time wearing somebody else's glasses.
No wonder all my female friends -- yes, every single one of them -- go a little bit crazy about this stuff. No wonder every teen and 20-something woman I know, no matter how gorgeous, is secretly and agonizingly self-conscious about some perceived flaw. Some of us grow out of that with time and experience, but I think every woman goes through it in youth, and many stay in it forever.
In this context, the inclusivity of representation in romance is invaluable. Because what it says is that you don't have to be conventionally beautiful to be desirable. That's the true heart of the fantasy: not that you can be cookie-cutter beautiful (which no one would believe, because we all know it isn't true; standard beauty definitions are about exclusivity, not inclusivity), but that you can be uniquely and irresistably desired. That in the eyes of at least one lover, you can be wanted, and you can be wanted as nothing else in the world is.
What romance is really about is not beauty. It's about desire. It is that sense of wanting, of being totally accepted and appreciated even after revealing all your weaknesses. And when that comes as a celebration of individuality, then I believe it's enormously empowering to women, because it says that you are not inadequate, but unique. That you are not a lesser version of some other thing, but a whole version of yourself, and that what you are is worth wanting.
So how does this tie into boudoir photography? At its best, I think, boudoir photography reaches for the same goals: celebrating uniqueness, appreciating difference, and reassuring women that they are attractive and desirable because of their own individual selves. At its best, it allows women to express their personalities and explore their sexuality in a controlled setting, where they can try out different visions of sensuality and have final say over which, if any, of those images they want to be lasting. The choice is yours and the control is yours.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that boudoir photography doesn't always achieve that lofty goal. There are some boudoir photographers who seem, judging by their portfolios, to push every woman into playacting the same porno-doll role, which is in my opinion not great. (NB: If that's what you want to do, do it! More power to you! But if every woman in the portfolio is made up the same way and wearing the same outfit and posed in the same position then I start to think that maaaybe what I'm seeing is less the women's vision than the photographer's, and that I'm not so into.)
But there are others who have a great talent for bringing out and showcasing the uniqueness of their subjects, and if you can find one of those teams, then I think it can be a really worthwhile experience in (literally!) getting to see yourself as a creature of desire. In stepping out of your own skin and looking through different eyes and seeing your own kind of beauty.
And I also think that's why it can be a profoundly romantic thing: because if you choose to put yourself before the camera's eye, and if you choose to keep those images, then you're memorializing the flaws as well as the beauty. Should you give those images away, you are (again, literally) making a gift of your self, and there is bound up in that a level of trust and vulnerability. Maybe a lot, maybe just a little, but always something.
Next time I'll talk in more concrete terms about some of the ways in which I think you can (hopefully) achieve some of those goals, but that's more or less my mission statement for what I think they are: empowerment, exploration, and the celebration of individual beauty in the manner and extent that each woman chooses for herself.
In modern romance writing, there's been a real push toward including different types of characters. Old-school romances typically centered around impossibly gorgeous (and always white, and always able-bodied) women, with chiseled hunks for heroes and giant showers of money raining down upon them from the heavens. And you can still find some of those stories here and there, but they're nowhere near as common as they used to be.
Modern romances, more often than not, feature heroines who probably wouldn't feature as Maxim cover models. Lots of them have to work for a living, and they aren't always financially secure, let alone rich. They tend to represent a broader swath of ages, races, and physical and psychological traits. (In particular, because it pushes back against a common crutch, I want to commend Courtney Milan for including a black heroine in her Regency historical "Talk Sweetly to Me." It's such a common misconception that historicals can't have minority characters that this excuse even gets trotted out to "explain" why fantasy worlds can't have minorities in pseudo-medieval settings, because that wouldn't be "historically accurate." In actuality, of course, true historical accuracy would include characters from cross-cultural exchanges [all these historicals include exotic silks, teas, and spices, so why never any people from their cultures?], and it's good to see cracks starting to appear in the old whitewashed wall that artificially excluded them.
Plus it's just a good story with smart dialogue and witty, appealing characters. None of the rest would matter a bit if the story weren't any good. But it is!)
I think this is good, and I also think it's maybe uniquely important as it comes to romance.
Representation in fiction is always important. It's important that people get to see versions of themselves reflected on the page and on the screen, and that these versions be recognizably human, not just Morgan Freeman as Long-Suffering Saintly Martyr Mk. 239872394. (There's a time and a place for that too, but the time and place was "the '80s.")
But it's uniquely important as it comes to romance, I think, and the reason for that is bound up with the fraught and confusing thing that it is to be a woman in This Dumb Country, where you are bombarded from a very young age with images of an idealized and unattainable beauty that most of us never begin to approach. With conflicting and impossibly complicated messages about sexuality, with varied stripes of shame for having a female body, with -- if you're lucky -- the conscious awareness of all the ways in which you're expected to Perform Being a Woman, and the penalties that society is more than ready to impose if your performance falls the slightest bit short.
And then, maybe, a nagging sense that pretty clothes and painted nails and all of that might be frivolous and restrictive and hearkening back to prescriptive femininity, sure... but they're also kind of fun, at least once in a while, and is that so wrong?
So there's all this stuff about how having a female body is shameful and gross and weird, but also you should put it on display because it's beautiful, but also you can't put it on display because that would be attention-seeking and/or playing into the hands of the Patriarchy, and also it's not perfect enough to be displayed anyway, and and and. And then on top of that, when it comes to sex and relationships, you have to consider how the other party reacts. What does your partner find sexy? Because that's all shaped by cultural influences too, and very few people are willing to speak frankly about it (especially early on in a relationship), so pretty much you get to run through that whole entire maze again, but this time wearing somebody else's glasses.
No wonder all my female friends -- yes, every single one of them -- go a little bit crazy about this stuff. No wonder every teen and 20-something woman I know, no matter how gorgeous, is secretly and agonizingly self-conscious about some perceived flaw. Some of us grow out of that with time and experience, but I think every woman goes through it in youth, and many stay in it forever.
In this context, the inclusivity of representation in romance is invaluable. Because what it says is that you don't have to be conventionally beautiful to be desirable. That's the true heart of the fantasy: not that you can be cookie-cutter beautiful (which no one would believe, because we all know it isn't true; standard beauty definitions are about exclusivity, not inclusivity), but that you can be uniquely and irresistably desired. That in the eyes of at least one lover, you can be wanted, and you can be wanted as nothing else in the world is.
What romance is really about is not beauty. It's about desire. It is that sense of wanting, of being totally accepted and appreciated even after revealing all your weaknesses. And when that comes as a celebration of individuality, then I believe it's enormously empowering to women, because it says that you are not inadequate, but unique. That you are not a lesser version of some other thing, but a whole version of yourself, and that what you are is worth wanting.
So how does this tie into boudoir photography? At its best, I think, boudoir photography reaches for the same goals: celebrating uniqueness, appreciating difference, and reassuring women that they are attractive and desirable because of their own individual selves. At its best, it allows women to express their personalities and explore their sexuality in a controlled setting, where they can try out different visions of sensuality and have final say over which, if any, of those images they want to be lasting. The choice is yours and the control is yours.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that boudoir photography doesn't always achieve that lofty goal. There are some boudoir photographers who seem, judging by their portfolios, to push every woman into playacting the same porno-doll role, which is in my opinion not great. (NB: If that's what you want to do, do it! More power to you! But if every woman in the portfolio is made up the same way and wearing the same outfit and posed in the same position then I start to think that maaaybe what I'm seeing is less the women's vision than the photographer's, and that I'm not so into.)
But there are others who have a great talent for bringing out and showcasing the uniqueness of their subjects, and if you can find one of those teams, then I think it can be a really worthwhile experience in (literally!) getting to see yourself as a creature of desire. In stepping out of your own skin and looking through different eyes and seeing your own kind of beauty.
And I also think that's why it can be a profoundly romantic thing: because if you choose to put yourself before the camera's eye, and if you choose to keep those images, then you're memorializing the flaws as well as the beauty. Should you give those images away, you are (again, literally) making a gift of your self, and there is bound up in that a level of trust and vulnerability. Maybe a lot, maybe just a little, but always something.
Next time I'll talk in more concrete terms about some of the ways in which I think you can (hopefully) achieve some of those goals, but that's more or less my mission statement for what I think they are: empowerment, exploration, and the celebration of individual beauty in the manner and extent that each woman chooses for herself.
Thursday, January 19, 2017
(crossposted from Facebook; originally posted December 11, 2016)
The Reassuring Patriarchy of Old Movies (or: a real long post on The Cake Is A Lie, 1950s cultural hegemony edition)
In addition to watching a ton of action movies, I watch a lot of old movies.
Like action movies, old movies can provide a remarkable insight into some of what’s happening today. You don’t even have to go that far back; whenever somebody tells you that the ‘80s and ‘90s were less racist or sexist than the Year of Our Lord 2016, pull up Major League (1989, where undressing the effigy of a [scheming, manipulative, looks-driven] woman who presumes to run a sports team is considered just comeuppance for her sins) or 48 Hrs. (1982, where the hero angrily calls a woman a “dyke” and later uses her as a human shield because she had the temerity to turn down his crude and unwanted advances) and bask in the sheer unadulterated sexism and hostility toward uppity women that permeates both films.
Keep in mind that these are mainstream blockbuster *comedies,* explicitly geared toward things that the broadest possible swath of the American public would find to be funny and not offensive, and wildly successful in that regard. Those attitudes used to be not only totally normal, but fine fodder for loljokes. If you didn’t think that was funny, welp, that was why everybody used to think feminists were humorless scolds, because *obviously* that stuff is harmless comedy.
Except it isn’t, and now when you watch the “funny” ways that men trivialized and undercut women back then, it is downright painful. Cringeworthy. Because, contrary to the oft-repeated misperception, we haven’t actually gotten more racist or sexist in modern times. We’ve gotten more race- and sex-*conscious,* but that’s the opposite thing. I’m serious: rewatch some ‘80s comedies and see what they tell you today about what the world was then.
Anyway, I like using old(-ish) movies as primary documents because most people have seen them (so it’s less painful than asking people to read and analyze Procopius for historical insight on old-school sexism), and since they’re broadly mainstream fiction, nobody needs to be put on the spot for *personally* holding those attitudes (we’re not saying *you* were a racist sexist dick, we’re saying Nick Nolte’s fictional character in 48 Hrs. was a racist sexist dick! …that millions of people in American audiences were happy to applaud), but at the same time there’s no denying that these *were* mainstream attitudes. If you try to use Latasha Harlins or Mark Fuhrman to talk about 1990s racism, people who feel threatened will try to push those aside as extreme outliers (not untrue!), but talk about Falling Down (1993) or even Olympus Has Fallen (2013, twenty years later!) and the mainstream appeal of some real iffy racial caricatures can hardly be denied.
I got to thinking about this again when I read Edsall’s NYT piece on how Trumpies got a morale boost from their guy winning, not because of any specific policies or programs they thought he’d enact, but purely on the basis of feeling like their identity as disinherited white people was validated and maybe they’d get to be back on top again. I linked this once already but I’ll link it again since I’ll be talking about it here: http://www.nytimes.com/…/…/trump-voters-are-feeling-it.html…
Block quote:
Then I got to thinking about how you square “the 1950s were better” with “I’m not a racist,” and this is where I landed:
It’s safe to say that most Trump voters either weren’t alive during the ‘50s or have nostalgia-fogged childhood memories that are about as accurate as my memories of watching Robocop as a 10-year-old (turns out Batman is not actually in Robocop, in case you were wondering), and that most of their impressions about what life was like in the ‘50s come from the pop culture of the time. Because what we *actually* know about the ‘50s is that it was a time when the civil rights movement started gaining steam, despite various efforts to stomp it down (blacks won the right to be admitted to white universities in 1950, and Brown v. Board got started in 1951 before the decision came out in 1954, spurring violent resistance by white segregationists in the latter half of the ‘50s and into the ‘60s). We know that the ‘50s were when housewives hit peak usage of Valium, Librium, and other tranquilizers to cope with the stifling, perpetually smiling lives of birdcage domesticity they were expected to lead.
But we also know that’s not how the decade was portrayed in contemporary movies, and it’s really interesting to watch Old Movies with a careful eye toward what, exactly, is idealized in their depictions. Because it *is* a world in which white people (specifically white men) are on top, but that’s not the entirety of its appeal.
First off, recognize that Old Movies (which is my personal shorthand for “Golden Age Hollywood movies made from roughly 1934 [with the advent of the Motion Picture Production Code] through 1960 via the established studio system”) are all about escapist fantasy. “Shall We Dance” (1937, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) posits a transatlantic ocean liner where the guests wear full evening dress, all tuxedos and ankle-sweeping silk gowns, to potty-walk their dogs. “42nd Street” (1933, Busby Berkeley vehicle) gives you a bunch of starving chorus girls in the depths of the Depression who nevertheless all own luxurious fur stoles and designer dresses. Realism has no place in these movies. They’re all about getting to escape to a beautiful world inhabited by beautiful people for a couple of hours.
And in the 1950s, the nature of that beautiful world changed sharply.
‘30s movies, especially pre-Code movies, can be surprisingly daring. The costumes are revealing, the innuendos are scandalous, and the plotlines are frequently ones that you’d have a hard time getting away with today (e.g. in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1933 pre-Code comedy “Design For Living,” the happy ending is a menage a trois: the heroine ends up living happily ever after with *both* of the male leads, and abandons her husband to do so). Female characters in ‘30s movies are often smarter, stronger, and more ruthless than their male counterparts; Barbara Stanwyck in “Baby Face” (1933) is a straight-up Nietzchean power fantasy where the heroine uses, crushes, and coldly casts aside a series of men in her relentless march to the top via sex. She never gets punished for her sexuality and she never expresses any regrets about any of the guys she drives to ruin. She straight-up *wins* that movie, and she does it without any apologies.
By the ‘50s you don’t see that anymore. The economic exigencies of the Great Depression and WWII (which empowered women to work outside the home and achieve some financial independence) are gone, and in their place you have a suddenly anxious wave of American men who want their jobs and social status back. They’re insecure and they don’t want to see strong women getting the better of male characters on screen. They want to be reassured of their primacy, and the movies change to reflect this.
Gone are the quick-witted and relentlessly competent heroines of His Girl Friday (1940) and The Lady Eve (1941). In their place we have Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield creating the new archetype of the dumb blonde in movies like Some Like It Hot (1959) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), in which they play vapid, gullible, childish beauties who are overtly sexualized but also infantilized. These are women who can’t manage themselves, let alone their male rivals. They *need* to be shepherded through life with a kindly but firm hand, and they’re always ever so grateful for the help (barring the occasional petulant pouting fit). And it’s that gratitude, I think, that’s really the key part of the fantasy. It’s not enough that women have to be subordinate to men; they have to *welcome* it, to be shown as actually grateful for the loss of control. The fantasy is (as ever) that they *want* it, and it’s really what’s best for them anyway.
This same fantasy exists with regard to minority characters, although on this front there isn’t the same dramatic change from the ‘30s to the ‘50s, because nobody was ever portraying black or Asian characters as getting the better of white people. Rather, they’re mostly invisible — they simply do not exist in the moneyed and glittering parties and restaurants that these movies revolve around, except occasionally as performers or waiters; that any minority could ever be an educated professional, love interest, or (maybe above all) *club member* is utterly unimaginable — and when they do appear as menials (bootblacks, train porters, domestic servants), they’re invariably servile, with huge exaggerated smiles and head bobs to convey just how childishly happy they are with their low-status positions. And non-Christian religions, other than the rare token Jew, simply don’t exist. They are elided from the world, scrubbed out of the comforting uniformity of churches and Christmases.
It’s the same thing. It’s the same comforting fantasy that everyone who isn’t a white Christian *wants* to be in those marginal roles, they’re happiest there, they’d only be miserable and afraid if they had to compete with white men, so best we just keep them down below where they’re content. Or erase them altogether, otherwise.
That, I suspect, is why the pop culture of the ‘50s has such a strong pull for white people who’d prefer not to consider themselves out-and-out racist or sexist today: because the lure of that idealized world is that everyone else *wanted* to be subservient, and that was the happy and natural order of things. Because there wasn’t any overt conflict or unhappiness, it was (and is) easy to tell yourself that there wasn’t any racism or sexism or xenophobia, either. After all, nobody was *complaining.* Everybody was just happy! Why can’t we just have that again!
Well, obviously, because it was a lie. Because in the actual real world, lots of women *aren’t* happy to just be vapid sex toys, and lots of minorities *aren’t* thrilled to bob their heads and smile along subserviently without saying a word, and non-Christians do actually exist. And that was why the ‘60s were what they were: because the ‘50s were a lie, and a lie so pernicious and hateful and hurtful that in the end it had to be broken by sustained and sometimes violent resistance.
But the lie persists. The fantasy persists. And the great fantasy of the ‘50s, the thing that was so reassuring to a wave of insecure Americans then and remains reassuring to the same insecure population today, wasn’t just that you could *have* a white patriarchy, but that you could have one where everybody else was totally happy to stay in their places. Where you could, at least if you were in the right part of the audience, remain happily oblivious to the invisible threats and coercions that kept the smiles on everyone else’s faces. Where you could pretend those smiles were real, and not have to care that they weren’t.
That’s what the movies of the ‘50s were selling. That’s what a lot of people, for very similar reasons, would like to buy today. Primacy and cultural dominance, but a cultural dominance where you don’t have to feel like you’re being mean (or racist! or sexist!) to get it. You’re not stepping on anyone else to get on top. They’re just lying down in the mud on their own.
The Reassuring Patriarchy of Old Movies (or: a real long post on The Cake Is A Lie, 1950s cultural hegemony edition)
In addition to watching a ton of action movies, I watch a lot of old movies.
Like action movies, old movies can provide a remarkable insight into some of what’s happening today. You don’t even have to go that far back; whenever somebody tells you that the ‘80s and ‘90s were less racist or sexist than the Year of Our Lord 2016, pull up Major League (1989, where undressing the effigy of a [scheming, manipulative, looks-driven] woman who presumes to run a sports team is considered just comeuppance for her sins) or 48 Hrs. (1982, where the hero angrily calls a woman a “dyke” and later uses her as a human shield because she had the temerity to turn down his crude and unwanted advances) and bask in the sheer unadulterated sexism and hostility toward uppity women that permeates both films.
Keep in mind that these are mainstream blockbuster *comedies,* explicitly geared toward things that the broadest possible swath of the American public would find to be funny and not offensive, and wildly successful in that regard. Those attitudes used to be not only totally normal, but fine fodder for loljokes. If you didn’t think that was funny, welp, that was why everybody used to think feminists were humorless scolds, because *obviously* that stuff is harmless comedy.
Except it isn’t, and now when you watch the “funny” ways that men trivialized and undercut women back then, it is downright painful. Cringeworthy. Because, contrary to the oft-repeated misperception, we haven’t actually gotten more racist or sexist in modern times. We’ve gotten more race- and sex-*conscious,* but that’s the opposite thing. I’m serious: rewatch some ‘80s comedies and see what they tell you today about what the world was then.
Anyway, I like using old(-ish) movies as primary documents because most people have seen them (so it’s less painful than asking people to read and analyze Procopius for historical insight on old-school sexism), and since they’re broadly mainstream fiction, nobody needs to be put on the spot for *personally* holding those attitudes (we’re not saying *you* were a racist sexist dick, we’re saying Nick Nolte’s fictional character in 48 Hrs. was a racist sexist dick! …that millions of people in American audiences were happy to applaud), but at the same time there’s no denying that these *were* mainstream attitudes. If you try to use Latasha Harlins or Mark Fuhrman to talk about 1990s racism, people who feel threatened will try to push those aside as extreme outliers (not untrue!), but talk about Falling Down (1993) or even Olympus Has Fallen (2013, twenty years later!) and the mainstream appeal of some real iffy racial caricatures can hardly be denied.
I got to thinking about this again when I read Edsall’s NYT piece on how Trumpies got a morale boost from their guy winning, not because of any specific policies or programs they thought he’d enact, but purely on the basis of feeling like their identity as disinherited white people was validated and maybe they’d get to be back on top again. I linked this once already but I’ll link it again since I’ll be talking about it here: http://www.nytimes.com/…/…/trump-voters-are-feeling-it.html…
Block quote:
In their widely covered 2015 study, “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century, ” Anne Case and Angus Deaton, economists at Princeton, found a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013.
This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround. The midlife mortality reversal was confined to white non-Hispanics; black non-Hispanics and Hispanics at midlife, and those aged 65 and above in every racial and ethnic group, continued to see mortality rates fall. This increase for whites was largely accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis. An important approach to depression in the psychological and evolutionary literature has been to view it as an evolved response to “involuntary subordination,” to being displaced from dominance.
This is exactly what happens when you have to accept a subordinate position on a status ladder because you lost your job and can’t find a comparable one.
[…]
Going into the last election, nearly three quarters (72 percent) of those supporting Trump said that American society and its way of life had changed for the worse since the 1950s, according to an Oct. 25 survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute.
Then I got to thinking about how you square “the 1950s were better” with “I’m not a racist,” and this is where I landed:
It’s safe to say that most Trump voters either weren’t alive during the ‘50s or have nostalgia-fogged childhood memories that are about as accurate as my memories of watching Robocop as a 10-year-old (turns out Batman is not actually in Robocop, in case you were wondering), and that most of their impressions about what life was like in the ‘50s come from the pop culture of the time. Because what we *actually* know about the ‘50s is that it was a time when the civil rights movement started gaining steam, despite various efforts to stomp it down (blacks won the right to be admitted to white universities in 1950, and Brown v. Board got started in 1951 before the decision came out in 1954, spurring violent resistance by white segregationists in the latter half of the ‘50s and into the ‘60s). We know that the ‘50s were when housewives hit peak usage of Valium, Librium, and other tranquilizers to cope with the stifling, perpetually smiling lives of birdcage domesticity they were expected to lead.
But we also know that’s not how the decade was portrayed in contemporary movies, and it’s really interesting to watch Old Movies with a careful eye toward what, exactly, is idealized in their depictions. Because it *is* a world in which white people (specifically white men) are on top, but that’s not the entirety of its appeal.
First off, recognize that Old Movies (which is my personal shorthand for “Golden Age Hollywood movies made from roughly 1934 [with the advent of the Motion Picture Production Code] through 1960 via the established studio system”) are all about escapist fantasy. “Shall We Dance” (1937, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) posits a transatlantic ocean liner where the guests wear full evening dress, all tuxedos and ankle-sweeping silk gowns, to potty-walk their dogs. “42nd Street” (1933, Busby Berkeley vehicle) gives you a bunch of starving chorus girls in the depths of the Depression who nevertheless all own luxurious fur stoles and designer dresses. Realism has no place in these movies. They’re all about getting to escape to a beautiful world inhabited by beautiful people for a couple of hours.
And in the 1950s, the nature of that beautiful world changed sharply.
‘30s movies, especially pre-Code movies, can be surprisingly daring. The costumes are revealing, the innuendos are scandalous, and the plotlines are frequently ones that you’d have a hard time getting away with today (e.g. in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1933 pre-Code comedy “Design For Living,” the happy ending is a menage a trois: the heroine ends up living happily ever after with *both* of the male leads, and abandons her husband to do so). Female characters in ‘30s movies are often smarter, stronger, and more ruthless than their male counterparts; Barbara Stanwyck in “Baby Face” (1933) is a straight-up Nietzchean power fantasy where the heroine uses, crushes, and coldly casts aside a series of men in her relentless march to the top via sex. She never gets punished for her sexuality and she never expresses any regrets about any of the guys she drives to ruin. She straight-up *wins* that movie, and she does it without any apologies.
By the ‘50s you don’t see that anymore. The economic exigencies of the Great Depression and WWII (which empowered women to work outside the home and achieve some financial independence) are gone, and in their place you have a suddenly anxious wave of American men who want their jobs and social status back. They’re insecure and they don’t want to see strong women getting the better of male characters on screen. They want to be reassured of their primacy, and the movies change to reflect this.
Gone are the quick-witted and relentlessly competent heroines of His Girl Friday (1940) and The Lady Eve (1941). In their place we have Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield creating the new archetype of the dumb blonde in movies like Some Like It Hot (1959) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), in which they play vapid, gullible, childish beauties who are overtly sexualized but also infantilized. These are women who can’t manage themselves, let alone their male rivals. They *need* to be shepherded through life with a kindly but firm hand, and they’re always ever so grateful for the help (barring the occasional petulant pouting fit). And it’s that gratitude, I think, that’s really the key part of the fantasy. It’s not enough that women have to be subordinate to men; they have to *welcome* it, to be shown as actually grateful for the loss of control. The fantasy is (as ever) that they *want* it, and it’s really what’s best for them anyway.
This same fantasy exists with regard to minority characters, although on this front there isn’t the same dramatic change from the ‘30s to the ‘50s, because nobody was ever portraying black or Asian characters as getting the better of white people. Rather, they’re mostly invisible — they simply do not exist in the moneyed and glittering parties and restaurants that these movies revolve around, except occasionally as performers or waiters; that any minority could ever be an educated professional, love interest, or (maybe above all) *club member* is utterly unimaginable — and when they do appear as menials (bootblacks, train porters, domestic servants), they’re invariably servile, with huge exaggerated smiles and head bobs to convey just how childishly happy they are with their low-status positions. And non-Christian religions, other than the rare token Jew, simply don’t exist. They are elided from the world, scrubbed out of the comforting uniformity of churches and Christmases.
It’s the same thing. It’s the same comforting fantasy that everyone who isn’t a white Christian *wants* to be in those marginal roles, they’re happiest there, they’d only be miserable and afraid if they had to compete with white men, so best we just keep them down below where they’re content. Or erase them altogether, otherwise.
That, I suspect, is why the pop culture of the ‘50s has such a strong pull for white people who’d prefer not to consider themselves out-and-out racist or sexist today: because the lure of that idealized world is that everyone else *wanted* to be subservient, and that was the happy and natural order of things. Because there wasn’t any overt conflict or unhappiness, it was (and is) easy to tell yourself that there wasn’t any racism or sexism or xenophobia, either. After all, nobody was *complaining.* Everybody was just happy! Why can’t we just have that again!
Well, obviously, because it was a lie. Because in the actual real world, lots of women *aren’t* happy to just be vapid sex toys, and lots of minorities *aren’t* thrilled to bob their heads and smile along subserviently without saying a word, and non-Christians do actually exist. And that was why the ‘60s were what they were: because the ‘50s were a lie, and a lie so pernicious and hateful and hurtful that in the end it had to be broken by sustained and sometimes violent resistance.
But the lie persists. The fantasy persists. And the great fantasy of the ‘50s, the thing that was so reassuring to a wave of insecure Americans then and remains reassuring to the same insecure population today, wasn’t just that you could *have* a white patriarchy, but that you could have one where everybody else was totally happy to stay in their places. Where you could, at least if you were in the right part of the audience, remain happily oblivious to the invisible threats and coercions that kept the smiles on everyone else’s faces. Where you could pretend those smiles were real, and not have to care that they weren’t.
That’s what the movies of the ‘50s were selling. That’s what a lot of people, for very similar reasons, would like to buy today. Primacy and cultural dominance, but a cultural dominance where you don’t have to feel like you’re being mean (or racist! or sexist!) to get it. You’re not stepping on anyone else to get on top. They’re just lying down in the mud on their own.
(facebook crosspost; originally posted January 10, 2017)
American "Socialism" and Meritocracy
There really is very little conflict between what Americans think of as "socialism" (which isn't really socialism, but generally translates to "a robust social welfare package and safety net") and individual achievement. I would argue pretty strenuously that you can't have the latter without the former, in fact, and that the modern-day GOP actively undercuts any semblance of real meritocracy at every opportunity.
This is going to be obvious to a lot of you, I realize, but let's spell it out all the same: If you're born into poverty in the U.S., you're running with a parachute in the marathon of life.
Your mother will probably have worse prenatal care and baseline health, putting you behind the ball before you're even born. Once out, you will probably eat less nutritious food and learn less healthy dietary and exercise habits. Your home environment is more likely to be polluted, deprived, and dangerous. You will probably go to underfunded public schools (or, if you're even unluckier, predatory scammer schools of the type Betsy DeVos holds so dear), and you will almost certainly have no chance to go to private school. These effects will compound year after year.
Your friends and family will likely be poor, which carries a whole raft of consequences. These range from higher incidences of adverse childhood experiences (even things as small as your parents arguing nastily in front of you because of money stress, or the embarrassment of being the dirty kid at school because nobody had time to bathe you and there weren't any clean clothes in the house), which have been shown to cause lasting and observable brain changes, to simply not having a lot of books around the house or anybody with the free time, subway tokens, or gas money to take you to the library.
If you do beat the odds and break out, you will need time and practice to acquire the manners and social capital you weren't born with, and every failure will cost something. You're likely to be less adventurous about switching jobs or moving to new places, because you don't have a cushion to fall back on if things go wrong. You may find it harder to sustain relationships, due to lack of good role models and the psychological scars of those childhood experiences (which, again, leave lasting changes ranging from outsize stress responses to poor impulse control: might not be enough to get you locked up, may well be enough to make it hard to maintain a stable relationship with a stable person). And you will, again, find yourself in the position of having to float your extended networks more often than being floated by them.
If you are born into affluence, you can flip a whole lot of those factors. Maybe not all of them, and not every time, but all those probabilities tilt toward you instead of against you.
If you're born *rich,* you can be an outright mediocrity and succeed. You can be an utter drug-addled psychotic failure of a person and live in luxury your whole life. Generational wealth will carry you along. And that is just how the GOP, in its current iteration, wants things to be.
Socioeconomic inequality has a number of negative effects throughout society, ranging from increased death rates from preventable ills to (seriously) lower rates of patent applications, suggesting that inequality stifles creativity both among artistic types and among inventors of a more practical bent. It's not great!
We've never had a particularly strong social safety net in the U.S., and our government is not (contrary to rhetoric) all that active in redistribution -- and it's become far less so now than it was in generations past. We are way behind the world average on that front. But to the extent the government *does* play a little bit of Robin Hood, taxing the rich to give back to the poor, many of those harms are mitigated. Not cured (because all we're doing is opening the door a little wider for individual agency to matter, which means some number of those individuals are going to make garbage dumbass choices*), but mitigated.
And if you care about individual meritocracy and fair competition, then it really needs to be about individuals and merit and fairness. Not tilting the playing board so people keep winning just because their grandparents won, even though they themselves are garbage at the game. And not keeping good, talented people hobbled because we're too spiteful or shortsighted to give them a fair chance.
(* -- an important thing to remember here, btw, is that individuals are not isolated. You give the junkie clean needles because maybe he'll kick the habit and maybe he won't, but either way society doesn't need his girlfriend to get AIDS. You don't kick people off welfare for dirty piss tests not only because it's a waste of taxpayer money to do those tests [although it conclusively is], but because their kids don't need to starve just because they got born to a parent who's using. You give free contraception to teenagers not because we *want* them banging, but because they're going to be curious or lonely or thrillseeking or [in the real world, much as we might like to pretend otherwise] trading on their bodies for food and a warm place to stay, and none of that needs to end up in STDs or babies.
Individual choices have consequences beyond those individuals, and sometimes they're not truly free choices. Any real and effective social policy should be clearsighted about that, as much as possible.)
American "Socialism" and Meritocracy
There really is very little conflict between what Americans think of as "socialism" (which isn't really socialism, but generally translates to "a robust social welfare package and safety net") and individual achievement. I would argue pretty strenuously that you can't have the latter without the former, in fact, and that the modern-day GOP actively undercuts any semblance of real meritocracy at every opportunity.
This is going to be obvious to a lot of you, I realize, but let's spell it out all the same: If you're born into poverty in the U.S., you're running with a parachute in the marathon of life.
Your mother will probably have worse prenatal care and baseline health, putting you behind the ball before you're even born. Once out, you will probably eat less nutritious food and learn less healthy dietary and exercise habits. Your home environment is more likely to be polluted, deprived, and dangerous. You will probably go to underfunded public schools (or, if you're even unluckier, predatory scammer schools of the type Betsy DeVos holds so dear), and you will almost certainly have no chance to go to private school. These effects will compound year after year.
Your friends and family will likely be poor, which carries a whole raft of consequences. These range from higher incidences of adverse childhood experiences (even things as small as your parents arguing nastily in front of you because of money stress, or the embarrassment of being the dirty kid at school because nobody had time to bathe you and there weren't any clean clothes in the house), which have been shown to cause lasting and observable brain changes, to simply not having a lot of books around the house or anybody with the free time, subway tokens, or gas money to take you to the library.
If you do beat the odds and break out, you will need time and practice to acquire the manners and social capital you weren't born with, and every failure will cost something. You're likely to be less adventurous about switching jobs or moving to new places, because you don't have a cushion to fall back on if things go wrong. You may find it harder to sustain relationships, due to lack of good role models and the psychological scars of those childhood experiences (which, again, leave lasting changes ranging from outsize stress responses to poor impulse control: might not be enough to get you locked up, may well be enough to make it hard to maintain a stable relationship with a stable person). And you will, again, find yourself in the position of having to float your extended networks more often than being floated by them.
If you are born into affluence, you can flip a whole lot of those factors. Maybe not all of them, and not every time, but all those probabilities tilt toward you instead of against you.
If you're born *rich,* you can be an outright mediocrity and succeed. You can be an utter drug-addled psychotic failure of a person and live in luxury your whole life. Generational wealth will carry you along. And that is just how the GOP, in its current iteration, wants things to be.
Socioeconomic inequality has a number of negative effects throughout society, ranging from increased death rates from preventable ills to (seriously) lower rates of patent applications, suggesting that inequality stifles creativity both among artistic types and among inventors of a more practical bent. It's not great!
We've never had a particularly strong social safety net in the U.S., and our government is not (contrary to rhetoric) all that active in redistribution -- and it's become far less so now than it was in generations past. We are way behind the world average on that front. But to the extent the government *does* play a little bit of Robin Hood, taxing the rich to give back to the poor, many of those harms are mitigated. Not cured (because all we're doing is opening the door a little wider for individual agency to matter, which means some number of those individuals are going to make garbage dumbass choices*), but mitigated.
And if you care about individual meritocracy and fair competition, then it really needs to be about individuals and merit and fairness. Not tilting the playing board so people keep winning just because their grandparents won, even though they themselves are garbage at the game. And not keeping good, talented people hobbled because we're too spiteful or shortsighted to give them a fair chance.
(* -- an important thing to remember here, btw, is that individuals are not isolated. You give the junkie clean needles because maybe he'll kick the habit and maybe he won't, but either way society doesn't need his girlfriend to get AIDS. You don't kick people off welfare for dirty piss tests not only because it's a waste of taxpayer money to do those tests [although it conclusively is], but because their kids don't need to starve just because they got born to a parent who's using. You give free contraception to teenagers not because we *want* them banging, but because they're going to be curious or lonely or thrillseeking or [in the real world, much as we might like to pretend otherwise] trading on their bodies for food and a warm place to stay, and none of that needs to end up in STDs or babies.
Individual choices have consequences beyond those individuals, and sometimes they're not truly free choices. Any real and effective social policy should be clearsighted about that, as much as possible.)
Reflection on a Mammogram and a Senate GOP Vote
(crossposted from Facebook; originally posted January 12, 2017)
I had a mammogram today. (Before you get all worried, I'll just say now that it's nothing serious.) The timing, coming as it did only a few hours after the Senate GOP voted to revoke health care from millions of others, is really the only reason I'm making this post.
In early December I noticed a lump in my right breast. I called my primary care practice and scheduled an appointment to have it looked at about a week after I got back from our holiday vacation.
Within 48 hours of that preliminary exam (and it could have been in 24 hours, but I had to schedule around jury duty), my PCP got me in for a mammogram at Jefferson, which is a top-of-the-line hospital with top-of-the-line imaging equipment and, conveniently, about a 15-minute walk from my front door. I had a mammogram and an ultrasound back-to-back, and two hours after walking into the imaging center I was back out and on my way to work, secure with the knowledge that the lump was a benign cyst and I don't have cancer.
Total cost to me: zero dollars.
There is a three-tier health care system in this country. If you're lucky enough to be on the top tier, with good insurance, your health care is gold-plated. The best in the world.
If you're on the bottom tier, you can go broke and then die in the street. Or, maybe, in the ER, where they can't send you away (and they can't send your catastrophic bill to anyone, except maybe to taxpayers).
Obamacare made something in the middle possible for millions. Maybe not gold-plated Cadillac coverage, but a damn sight better than "hand over every last penny and thanks, go die now." That's almost certainly going away now, thanks to a bunch of awfully clueless or awfully selfish voters and last night's midnight vote from the gang of maniacs they voted into office.
I didn't have cancer. It cost me nothing but two hours of my afternoon to learn that. A lot of other people don't have cancer either, but they do have lumps (like mine), and they'll have to live in uncertainty, because they won't be able to afford peace of mind. And a lot of people do have cancer, and it's going to cost them everything, because some of their fellow citizens couldn't stand to give up a little bit to help them. Not even the time to educate themselves about what they were really voting for.
I had a mammogram today. (Before you get all worried, I'll just say now that it's nothing serious.) The timing, coming as it did only a few hours after the Senate GOP voted to revoke health care from millions of others, is really the only reason I'm making this post.
In early December I noticed a lump in my right breast. I called my primary care practice and scheduled an appointment to have it looked at about a week after I got back from our holiday vacation.
Within 48 hours of that preliminary exam (and it could have been in 24 hours, but I had to schedule around jury duty), my PCP got me in for a mammogram at Jefferson, which is a top-of-the-line hospital with top-of-the-line imaging equipment and, conveniently, about a 15-minute walk from my front door. I had a mammogram and an ultrasound back-to-back, and two hours after walking into the imaging center I was back out and on my way to work, secure with the knowledge that the lump was a benign cyst and I don't have cancer.
Total cost to me: zero dollars.
There is a three-tier health care system in this country. If you're lucky enough to be on the top tier, with good insurance, your health care is gold-plated. The best in the world.
If you're on the bottom tier, you can go broke and then die in the street. Or, maybe, in the ER, where they can't send you away (and they can't send your catastrophic bill to anyone, except maybe to taxpayers).
Obamacare made something in the middle possible for millions. Maybe not gold-plated Cadillac coverage, but a damn sight better than "hand over every last penny and thanks, go die now." That's almost certainly going away now, thanks to a bunch of awfully clueless or awfully selfish voters and last night's midnight vote from the gang of maniacs they voted into office.
I didn't have cancer. It cost me nothing but two hours of my afternoon to learn that. A lot of other people don't have cancer either, but they do have lumps (like mine), and they'll have to live in uncertainty, because they won't be able to afford peace of mind. And a lot of people do have cancer, and it's going to cost them everything, because some of their fellow citizens couldn't stand to give up a little bit to help them. Not even the time to educate themselves about what they were really voting for.
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
Pearls and Entitlements
(political stuff, cross-posted from Facebook)
January 15:
January 15:
I've
decided to wear pearls to the protest march. Mostly because it makes me
laugh (1. who wears pearls to a protest? ME THAT'S WHO; 2. I like the
idea that even the kinds of ladies who routinely wear pearls are going
to protest this monstrosity because YES EVEN WE ARE DRIVEN TO THE
STREETS HERE; 3. it amuses me to have pearls and most emphatically *not*
clutch them, because actually we will be taking more direct action,
thanks for your concern).
But also it's worth remembering that pearls are a beauty born of deep and lasting irritation coalesced around a heart of stone. Believe them hollow at your peril.
January 14 ("Answering the Rhetoric Against Entitlement"):
But also it's worth remembering that pearls are a beauty born of deep and lasting irritation coalesced around a heart of stone. Believe them hollow at your peril.
January 14 ("Answering the Rhetoric Against Entitlement"):
Today
I want to talk a little bit about how the rhetoric against
"entitlement" undermines the common good of the American people.
I didn't realize until this election how deep the resentment against "entitlement" runs in some quarters. I also didn't realize until one of my friends sent me an article on it (I *think* it was Aaron but I don't totally remember, and sadly I've failed to find the link again) how pernicious this actually is, but once it don don'd me, it was like the hidden picture in a Magic Eye suddenly came into view.
The gist of the now-lost article was that "Bill Gates doesn't need a Social Security check, but it's important for the political viability of the Social Security program that he gets one." In other words, it's important for universal-good programs to *be* universal. To be politically enduring, they must be entitlements -- yes, that loaded word -- that every American *is entitled to* by simple virtue of citizenship.
Obamacare is what happens when a beneficial program isn't a universal entitlement. Even though Obamacare has unquestionably done a great deal of good for the country (and for all of us in it, whether we're directly in the program or not; all of us benefit from a healthier and more secure society), it's open to attack because it's *not* universal. Not everyone has access to the same benefits across the board (in part due to different states implementing the program differently), and not everyone sees it as part of your basic right as a citizen.
Because it's not universal, it can be attacked as a charity program that benefits only part of the populace. Some people don't get (or "need") it at all, and some of those who do get it receive wildly varying benefits. People have different incentives to participate in the program or not, and they're put at odds with each other instead of being united in protecting a universal good.
And charity programs are always vulnerable to attack. Charity often carries with it a whiff of begrudgment and pity; those who give it may resent the gift (especially if it's undertaken out of obligation rather than any real wish to help) and those who receive it may feel ashamed. Charity also often comes with strings: if you aren't sufficiently worthy (or if I just plain don't like you that much), then you don't deserve the help.
In the health care context, these things are poison. Everyone needs health care, and everyone deserves it. We'd be a whole lot better off if everyone in our society had the kind of coverage that those of us with top-tier insurance get. We'd be a whole lot better off if everyone could get preventative care to prevent catastrophic expenses down the road, and if everyone had the peace of mind that unforeseeable expenses wouldn't demolish their finances, and if everyone felt equally entitled to use that care.
But that means accepting that some level of health care should be universal. That means accepting that yes, there should be an *entitlement.* And this is where the rhetoric against "entitlements" -- the idea that "entitlements" are some ridiculous luxury that only the coddled and spoiled think they should have -- is so harmful. Because it convinces people that they shouldn't ask for these things, that they don't really deserve them, and that the people who *do* ask for them are somehow morally inferior.
That's how you get to the current fractured and fragmentary landscape. That's how you use rhetoric to con the people who'd benefit most into scoffing at the very *idea* that they might deserve to have some basic right to health care as a citizen.
But, in fact, a basic right to health care *should* be an entitlement. And that shouldn't be a word that people are afraid of, because you shouldn't be ashamed to demand what ought to be yours. This idea doesn't come from nowhere; it comes from very rich people spreading it to their considerably less-rich listeners, and playing off old animosities and myths of self-sufficiency to keep their listeners jealously guarding an illusion of independence at the cost of unity and real gains.
Look past the words. Look at the money. Who's creating that rhetoric, who's disseminating it, and who would stand to lose if the great majority of Americans demanded their fair share -- what they are, in fact, "entitled" to?
I didn't realize until this election how deep the resentment against "entitlement" runs in some quarters. I also didn't realize until one of my friends sent me an article on it (I *think* it was Aaron but I don't totally remember, and sadly I've failed to find the link again) how pernicious this actually is, but once it don don'd me, it was like the hidden picture in a Magic Eye suddenly came into view.
The gist of the now-lost article was that "Bill Gates doesn't need a Social Security check, but it's important for the political viability of the Social Security program that he gets one." In other words, it's important for universal-good programs to *be* universal. To be politically enduring, they must be entitlements -- yes, that loaded word -- that every American *is entitled to* by simple virtue of citizenship.
Obamacare is what happens when a beneficial program isn't a universal entitlement. Even though Obamacare has unquestionably done a great deal of good for the country (and for all of us in it, whether we're directly in the program or not; all of us benefit from a healthier and more secure society), it's open to attack because it's *not* universal. Not everyone has access to the same benefits across the board (in part due to different states implementing the program differently), and not everyone sees it as part of your basic right as a citizen.
Because it's not universal, it can be attacked as a charity program that benefits only part of the populace. Some people don't get (or "need") it at all, and some of those who do get it receive wildly varying benefits. People have different incentives to participate in the program or not, and they're put at odds with each other instead of being united in protecting a universal good.
And charity programs are always vulnerable to attack. Charity often carries with it a whiff of begrudgment and pity; those who give it may resent the gift (especially if it's undertaken out of obligation rather than any real wish to help) and those who receive it may feel ashamed. Charity also often comes with strings: if you aren't sufficiently worthy (or if I just plain don't like you that much), then you don't deserve the help.
In the health care context, these things are poison. Everyone needs health care, and everyone deserves it. We'd be a whole lot better off if everyone in our society had the kind of coverage that those of us with top-tier insurance get. We'd be a whole lot better off if everyone could get preventative care to prevent catastrophic expenses down the road, and if everyone had the peace of mind that unforeseeable expenses wouldn't demolish their finances, and if everyone felt equally entitled to use that care.
But that means accepting that some level of health care should be universal. That means accepting that yes, there should be an *entitlement.* And this is where the rhetoric against "entitlements" -- the idea that "entitlements" are some ridiculous luxury that only the coddled and spoiled think they should have -- is so harmful. Because it convinces people that they shouldn't ask for these things, that they don't really deserve them, and that the people who *do* ask for them are somehow morally inferior.
That's how you get to the current fractured and fragmentary landscape. That's how you use rhetoric to con the people who'd benefit most into scoffing at the very *idea* that they might deserve to have some basic right to health care as a citizen.
But, in fact, a basic right to health care *should* be an entitlement. And that shouldn't be a word that people are afraid of, because you shouldn't be ashamed to demand what ought to be yours. This idea doesn't come from nowhere; it comes from very rich people spreading it to their considerably less-rich listeners, and playing off old animosities and myths of self-sufficiency to keep their listeners jealously guarding an illusion of independence at the cost of unity and real gains.
Look past the words. Look at the money. Who's creating that rhetoric, who's disseminating it, and who would stand to lose if the great majority of Americans demanded their fair share -- what they are, in fact, "entitled" to?
A New Project Begins
I never used to post about the books I was writing.
In my previous incarnation (as a fantasy writer under the name Liane Merciel), I pretty much just figured that while people might theoretically be interested in the process of a Big Name Writer like Stephen King or Michael Chabon, it was highly unlikely that anybody was going to care the slightest about what went into me plinking out my own little novels. And who was I to say anything, anyway? I didn't even know what I was doing, and I had very little confidence that any of it was any good.
Fast-forward a few years and a few books and a genre hop and a name switch, and my perspective has changed a little. I'm not planning to write about imaginary worlds in this next project. I'll be writing about New York City in the 1930s and struggling showgirls trying to make it through the Great Depression. My heroes and heroines won't be wielding magic swords and wizardly powers, but feathers and paste and cameras and grit. And their concerns won't be with the fate of the world, but only their own.
Because the stories I'm planning to tell now are anchored more solidly to real history (not that the others weren't, but they were generally about two steps removed from their inspiring events), and because their concerns are more direct reflections of present-day issues like surviving in an adverse economy and learning to embrace and control one's own sexuality (which, for women, was fraught in the '30s and hasn't become a whole lot less so today), it's easier to talk about them in connection with the events and ideas that inspired them.
So that's what we'll be doing here. Along with the more-than-occasional political rant, because the second purpose of this blog is to serve as a repository for some of the things I put out on social media elsewhere, and all that stuff is panicked screaming about where we appear to be headed as a nation in January 2017.
In my previous incarnation (as a fantasy writer under the name Liane Merciel), I pretty much just figured that while people might theoretically be interested in the process of a Big Name Writer like Stephen King or Michael Chabon, it was highly unlikely that anybody was going to care the slightest about what went into me plinking out my own little novels. And who was I to say anything, anyway? I didn't even know what I was doing, and I had very little confidence that any of it was any good.
Fast-forward a few years and a few books and a genre hop and a name switch, and my perspective has changed a little. I'm not planning to write about imaginary worlds in this next project. I'll be writing about New York City in the 1930s and struggling showgirls trying to make it through the Great Depression. My heroes and heroines won't be wielding magic swords and wizardly powers, but feathers and paste and cameras and grit. And their concerns won't be with the fate of the world, but only their own.
Because the stories I'm planning to tell now are anchored more solidly to real history (not that the others weren't, but they were generally about two steps removed from their inspiring events), and because their concerns are more direct reflections of present-day issues like surviving in an adverse economy and learning to embrace and control one's own sexuality (which, for women, was fraught in the '30s and hasn't become a whole lot less so today), it's easier to talk about them in connection with the events and ideas that inspired them.
So that's what we'll be doing here. Along with the more-than-occasional political rant, because the second purpose of this blog is to serve as a repository for some of the things I put out on social media elsewhere, and all that stuff is panicked screaming about where we appear to be headed as a nation in January 2017.
Tuesday, January 17, 2017
Welcome!
This is a blog for miscellaneous thoughts: some related to book research and ongoing projects, others just random things that pop into my heaad or comments on the world. Probably a fair number of them will be political, at least for a while, since I'm starting this thing up in January 2017 and uncertainty about the world we're facing is dominant on my mind (and a lot of other people's, I'd guess). But at least some of them, I hope, will have to do with writing or writing-related things in some way.
Eventually. We'll get there eventually.
I'm calling this little thing "frankly thinking" because it's my feeling that frank speech is overrated and frank thought -- conscious of mistakes, aware of limitations, hopefully with some smidgen of humility -- is not. Less emphasis on frank speech and more on thought might have resulted in a slightly better world today.
But there's always tomorrow, and lots of things to think about until then.
Eventually. We'll get there eventually.
I'm calling this little thing "frankly thinking" because it's my feeling that frank speech is overrated and frank thought -- conscious of mistakes, aware of limitations, hopefully with some smidgen of humility -- is not. Less emphasis on frank speech and more on thought might have resulted in a slightly better world today.
But there's always tomorrow, and lots of things to think about until then.
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