Category Archives: movement

Post-Labor Day Links

Debbie says:

The whole world is talking about the release of nude celebrity (women)’s photos and everyone has a different take on it. In the Atlantic article at the link, Jessica Valenti spins it (accurately) as violation and discusses it in terms of consent. In California, Representative Jackie Speier moves to the context of revenge porn, and is sponsoring Federal legislation against the practice (eleven states have already adopted anti-revenge-porn legislation). I’ve also seen conversations about the NSA and privacy, and how that linkage is not generally being made.

Really, it all comes down to one thing: our bodies are not appropriately used as entertainment, they are not appropriately used as currency, and they are not appropriately used as vengeance. Until we can develop a culture in which all bodies, and especially women’s bodies, are appropriately used, be very thoughtful about who has custody of your nude photographs, and how you trust the people who have them.

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Hijabs, like all covering choices, raise the question of “what’s underneath?” In this three-year-old photo essay, Francisco Guerrero spoke to and photographed several Malaysian Muslim women who wear the hijab some but not all of the time.

Screen-shot-2014-08-21-at-10.11.29-AM-300x186

Guerrero said:

“What most of these women wanted to express is that wearing the Hijab was mostly their personal choice and this would vary depending on the social context. One of the women explained it by comparing it to wearing one’s ‘Sunday best’ when going to church of more formal family occasions.”

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Here’s another years-old essay, this one by renowned historian Tony Judt. Judt died in 2010, not long after it was published. It’s as evocative a description of severe immobility disabilities as you are ever likely to find.

With extraordinary effort I can move my right hand a little and can adduct my left arm some six inches across my chest. My legs, although they will lock when upright long enough to allow a nurse to transfer me from one chair to another, cannot bear my weight and only one of them has any autonomous movement left in it. Thus when legs or arms are set in a given position, there they remain until someone moves them for me. …

During the day I can at least request a scratch, an adjustment, a drink, or simply a gratuitous re-placement of my limbs—since enforced stillness for hours on end is not only physically uncomfortable but psychologically close to intolerable. It is not as though you lose the desire to stretch, to bend, to stand or lie or run or even exercise. But when the urge comes over you there is nothing—nothing—that you can do except seek some tiny substitute or else find a way to suppress the thought and the accompanying muscle memory.

But then comes the night. …

I am then covered, my hands placed outside the blanket to afford me the illusion of mobility but wrapped nonetheless since—like the rest of me—they now suffer from a permanent sensation of cold. I am offered a final scratch on any of a dozen itchy spots from hairline to toe … and there I lie: trussed, myopic, and motionless like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts.

***

Fashion in the discount stores makes a whole lot of sense … if it comes in your size. Plus-size fashion blogger Chastity Garner Valentine is starting a boycott of Target’s new Altuzarra line:

Dear Target:

For so long, I loved you.  I always went above and beyond in our relationship.  I’ll visit you to get a couple of items and more than a couple hundred dollars later and a cart full of products, I have left giving you way more than I ever planned to. No matter how much I give, you never seem to appreciate me.  All I want is the clothing you offer all your other regular sized customers, but you always leave me out.  With that being said, I have to end this relationship.  It’s you, not me and for my own well-being and my self dignity I have to sever ties between us. 

This may seem a little dramatic, but the recent release of the photos of Altuzarra for Target collection has me feeling slighted. … Literally 50 pieces of beautiful (and I mean beautiful) affordable clothing and none of it will be remotely close to the size that I wear. The collection consists of deeps hues of burgundy, fabulous snakeskin prints, and fall worthy silk-like maxi dresses…enough to make any fashion lover lust.  My heart sinks.  You have once again made me feel like a second-class customer and because of that I’m going to have to discontinue my relationship with you altogether.

You go, Chastity!

***

Did you know that men’s and women’s bathing suits used to cover just about exactly the same amount of skin?

… the fact that the man in the ad above is covering his chest is evidence that there is a possible world in which men do so. I can see men in bikinis. Likewise, women go topless on some beaches and in some countries and it can’t be any more ridiculous for them to swim in baggy knee-length shorts than it is for men to do so.

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My instant reaction to this nasty story was “Well, this will make the news when she commits suicide.” I hope I’m too cynical in this case.

A New Jersey middle school is refusing to allow 13-year-old Rachel Pepe to return to her school unless she dresses and identifies as a boy.

Actually, I hope her family finds a way to get her out of that school and into someplace where she can find some respect. Like yesterday would be good.

***
I enjoyed this essay by Dave Smeds about the beauty of karate.

As a muse, competition is flawed. It requires a person to measure his or her skill using an external gauge. That has always felt false to me. If I do well in a session of jiyu kumite (freestyle sparring), is it because I was great, or was it because my opponent’s performance sucked? Do I deserve credit in those instances when I just happened to be the player who was bigger, stronger, faster, or younger? If I do poorly, is it because I slipped up and used lousy technique, or was I simply matched up against a stronger, faster, younger opponent against whom I didn’t really have a chance?

If I’d hadn’t found a way to measure my progress that I could believe in, a way that felt real to me, I would’ve quit.

Beauty was what hooked me.

***

We all know that computers are transformative tools, and here’s an especially dramatic example.

Nobumichi Asai (leading a team of high-tech folks) used projection mapping and real-time face tracking to transform and retransform this model’s face. I think the work is fascinating, and I cannot help but note the named artist/scientist and the un-named model. I hope she was well paid, and that she enjoyed the process.

Sources: Feministing, io9, and Sociological Images, plus assorted other blogs I read.

Tuesday Linksday

Debbie says:

The “it’s all about me and my feelings” club has a new self-elected president, Jen Caron:

A few weeks ago, as I settled into an exceptionally crowded midday class, a young, fairly heavy black woman put her mat down directly behind mine. It appeared she had never set foot in a yoga studio—she was glancing around anxiously, adjusting her clothes, looking wide-eyed and nervous. Within the first few minutes of gentle warm-up stretches, I saw the fear in her eyes snowball, turning into panic and then despair. Before we made it into our first downward dog, she had crouched down on her elbows and knees, head lowered close to the ground, trapped and vulnerable. She stayed there, staring, for the rest of the class.

Because I was directly in front of her, I had no choice but to look straight at her every time my head was upside down (roughly once a minute). I’ve seen people freeze or give up in yoga classes many times, and it’s a sad thing, but as a student there’s nothing you can do about it. At that moment, though, I found it impossible to stop thinking about this woman. Even when I wasn’t positioned to stare directly at her, I knew she was still staring directly at me. Over the course of the next hour, I watched as her despair turned into resentment and then contempt. I felt it all directed toward me and my body.

Of course, we don’t know how the black woman felt. Jen Caron doesn’t know how the black woman felt. She made an awful lot of assumptions based on an amazingly small amount of information.

I thought about how that must feel: to be a heavyset black woman entering for the first time a system that by all accounts seems unable to accommodate her body. What could I do to help her? If I were her, I thought, I would want as little attention to be drawn to my despair as possible—I would not want anyone to look at me or notice me. And so I tried to very deliberately avoid looking in her direction each time I was in downward dog, but I could feel her hostility just the same. Trying to ignore it only made it worse.

The xojane column is called “It happened to me,” so I guess it happened to Jen Caron. Personally, I’d rather know what happened to the nameless black woman. As Hamilton Nolan says, writing about Caron’s essay on Gawker,

JEN CARON: Hey there. Can you articulate your experience to me?

NEW YOGA STUDENT: Who are you?

***

Neither Laurie nor I knew about this particular 19th century photography fad, in which the person’s head and body are photographed separately, but in the same photograph. A contemporary brochure at the link calls it “ladies and gentlemen with their heads floating in the air or in their laps.”

This is a side trail in a long and complex art tradition of headless portraits and photographs, and I also appreciate seeing how seriously photo-manipulation proceeded Photoshop by well over a century.

***

Jenna Wortham has an interesting take on one corner of available contemporary technology which she finds useful.

Period-tracking apps are exactly what they sound like — simple menstrual calendars that help you keep track of monthly cycles as well as symptoms like mood fluctuations or headaches. The market is flooded with them — iPeriod, PTracker, Clue, Period Diary — and nearly every woman I know uses one.

They are the rare corner of the trendy quantitative self and health movement that has resonated with me, largely because they provide  useful insights into my life, how I’m feeling and what’s going on with my body. As much as I’ve enjoyed apps and wearables that give me information on the number of steps I’ve taken in a week, the number of calories I’ve magically managed to burn or how much sleep I’ve gotten, I often question the accuracy of the data and struggle with figuring out how to use that information to reshape my daily behavior and habits. But nothing has been as exciting or revealing as tracking my menstrual cycle.

I’m too old (and too app-ignorant) to be aware of this particular technology, and I think it’s fascinating. According to Wortham, these are not about (or not only about) fertility tracking, but are helping a new generation of women recognize and respond to menstrual cycle changes.

Obviously, this is not going to appeal to–or work for–every woman. Not every woman has periods. Not every woman has a smart phone. Not every woman who has periods and a smart phone cares. However, Wortham convinced me that it’s good for some women, and that’s good enough for me.

***

Technology in women’s lives can be useful, or it can be appalling. Rob Bricken at io9 is suitably appalled:

Japanese lingerie maker Ravijour has developed a bra whose clasp will only open when its wearer is experiencing true love.

How does it do this, you ask? Through a built-in heart rate monitor and a special phone app (also possibly magic and/or bullshit). In case you’re worried about your phone wirelessly unhooking your bra every time you go for a jog, don’t you worry…

I mean, sure, even if the bra was smart enough to distinguish between your heart rate rising due to romantic versus physical causes, I guess you’d run the risk of the bra flying open during dinner if you happened to be eating with your true love, and I have no idea how a woman could take the bra off without the help of their soulmate, but isn’t that a small price to pay to keep your breasts locked away from those who might not appreciate them fully?

I have nothing else to say.

***

Finally, technology can take us so far away from useful information that it would be ludicrous, if people didn’t seem to take it seriously:

What could possibly be wrong with this study design?

The hypothesis here was that making people feel shorter than their normal height would increase feelings of paranoia.

To test this, the researchers—bless them—built a virtual reality version of the London underground station, and a train that travels between stations. Sixty women who had paranoid thoughts within the previous month experienced this virtual world (differences have been shown in how gender affects height perception, so the researchers thought they’d better stick to one gender this time). They each went through the virtual landscape twice, and the researchers altered some people’s heights the second time to make them about 10 inches shorter. After each run through, participants completed measures of social comparison and paranoia.

So we have: a virtual reality locale, a quite small pool of research subjects who are known to have paranoid ideation, a limitation to one gender because “differences have been shown in how gender affects height perception,” and (apparently) no control group. And The Atlantic, a reasonably reliable magazine, is reporting this study as if it demonstrated anything?

I suspect that feeling smaller does make (many? most?) people feel more nervous. But I could not be less interested in how an untested virtual reality system affects a deeply skewed small group under unexamined conditions. When, when, are we going to get journalism that challenges this kind of pseudo-science?

Aside from my most usual sources: Feministe, Feministing, io9, and Shakesville, Lynn Kendall brought us much amusement with the small/paranoid link, and I would never have found the headless portraits link if Charles Pierce hadn’t pointed out Ann Althouse’s tribute to Pete Seeger (Althouse blogged the headless portraits link on the same day).