Leave Angelina Alone

On Tuesday, the New York Times published an op-ed written by Angelina Jolie on the subject of her recent pre-emptive double masectomy. And then everyone went nuts. In at least three different ways.

Some of the crazy was entirely predictable and almost too cliche to even mention, except that objectification of women is still a very serious problem, so I'll mention it. Over at Public Shaming, you can get a round up of all the awful people offering condolences to Brad Pitt on the loss of Angelina Jolie's boobs. Do I need to break down why this is wrong? One, it's Jolie's body, not Pitt's. He doesn't actually own her. They're not his boobs. If you're going to offer condolences, offer them to *her.* But (and this is two), maybe think twice about offering condolences at all. Because, you see, Angelina Jolie is not merely a pair of breasts. Honest. There's a whole body attached to those breasts, and a head and a brain and AN ENTIRE PERSON with complex thoughts and feelings and the ability to make choices. She made a choice. She exercised her agency, and lamenting the pieces she lost to retain that life and that agency is pretty despicable.

Just a brief tangent, because I find people that feel like they have the right to hold forth on other women's bodies to be hilarious in their rationalizations for why they get to opine at all: I do wonder what the "Natural Beauty!" criers will have to say. Jolie did elect to have reconstructive surgery after her masectomy. But, like, is that wrong, Natural Beauty Aficionados? She's now got not-natural breasts. Should she not have done that? Or is it ok because she just went back to the way she was? But isn't natural supposed to be totally natural? Oh, right, except for all the false eyelashes cleverly and permanently glued on your eyes and the impossible skin care routine for the dewy-fresh look and 6 hours a day at the gym to tame whatever your natural body shape is into a perfect temple of "Natural" Beauty Male Gaze Aesthetics.

Wait, but now I really do want to know what the Natural Beauty Aficionados have to say. Please, define "natural" for me. Because I'm pretty sure you don't actually mean "However a woman finds herself." Pretty sure without that reconstructive surgery, none of you'd find Jolie attractive anymore. BUT WAIT. Those aren't real, so she's not attractive anymore anyway. CATCH-22. Getting sick means you're a worthless person, right? Yeah, maybe you should just not talk about "what's beautiful." It always backfires, no matter how nice you think you're being because guess what? Beauty isn't everything. So quit making it everything. Just. Shut. Up. Women do not need your validation.

But, there were other kinds of crazy. There was the ubiquitous, seemingly endless stream of commenters that wanted to talk about the fact that most women don't have access to and can't afford even the test for the gene mutation that Jolie found she had, much less the treatment option she chose.

"Can we talk about how most women can't afford to make the same choices she did now?" I feel like I heard 100 times in about an hour. "The choices SHE made." Maybe I'm just projecting, but there seemed to be a petulant quality to the question, a grudge held. But what I don't understand about this is that Jolie up-front and matter-of-factly acknowledged that most women don't have access to the gene test. And she said we have to do better.

So, yes, guys: We can talk about this. LET'S TALK ABOUT THAT. Jolie kick-started that conversation for us! Someone pat that woman on the back! I get that she's pretty and rich and a celebrity and so that makes it really hard to give her credit for anything because everything is just so easy for rich, pretty celebrities, but the woman has spent three month having her breasts removed and reconstructed because there was an 87% chance she would develop breast cancer (which she watched her mother die from) and maybe, JUST MAYBE, we could cut her a little slack and give her credit for proactively managing her health, being open about her decisions and what they mean to her, AND ALSO advocating for every woman to have the same access to healthcare she does as a result of being rich (and pretty and a celebrity)?

It can't be that hard. I know everyone wants to hate rich, pretty people. But even rich, pretty people are just people. So maybe try to contain your jealousy and treat her like a person? Just a thought. Maybe you could try it.

But maybe my favorite bit of insidious, awful misogyny that got flayed out there in the world for everyone to see were the "This is such a distraction!" people.

A conversation about the things that we value women for, the inequities of the healthcare system in the US, and a discussion of the fact that human genes inside of human bodies are patented is a "distraction?" Fucking really? Private corporations are patenting our genetic material and barring us from access to life-saving information, and now there's a floodlight on that, and still this is a "distraction?" Look, I get that maybe none of these issues are your pet issues. We all have the things we care about more than other things, even broad-spectrum activists. I, for example, rarely blog about things that aren't related to feminism or compassion. But I still pay attention to other things, even ones I have only a tenuous grasp on. I still think they're important. I don't call them "distraction" when they push my pet issues to the background for a day or two. I lend my tiny voice to support them and the people that know about them.

Try returning the favor. I don't know why you would be so dismissive of a woman's lived experience, and the actual life-or-death choices that is healthcare in our country. I don't know why you'd be so dismissive of a spotlight on the reality of corporate power, patent law, and blocking the free-flow of information. I suspect it's because you don't like Angelina Jolie, or you don't like celebrity culture, and that's fine. But *this* is still not a distraction. It's a serious conversation that Jolie graciously started for us by sharing a series of experiences that she took great pains to hide from prying eyes while they were happening because they were PAINFUL, both physically and emotionally. That's an act of generosity that you could try to respect. At least a little. At least enough to keep your mouth shut if you have nothing nice to say.

Check your biases, world. And think about why you're heaping so much hate on a woman that's doing her best to navigate between her privilege and her life. Maybe you don't agree with all her choices, but they're still hers to make, and she's not doing a horrible job of it.

Misogyny at the Oscars

So, I'm real late to this party by internet standards, but I got involved in a facebook argument about this, and this morning I wrote this as a salvo in that argument (don't judge me for getting into facebook arguments, ok? Thanks.) and I decided I might as well just put it up here no matter how late to the party I am. 

Seth MacFarlane at the Oscars did not, as Victoria Brownworth and a lot of other people claim, “rip the status quo a new one.” And if you think he did, you probably grossly misunderstand both the status quo and the concept of satire. Ironic hipster racism is still racist, and ironic juvenile misogyny is still misogynist. Let’s start with the boob song, since that’s pretty simple to understand as it’s really just straight-up misogyny, as opposed to discussing dear Miss Wallis, which is a horrific intersection of racism and misogyny.

So, like, Seth MacFarlane sang a song about seeing women’s boobs, and you want me to believe that his point was that we strip female nudity of context and simply gawk at it. How did he do this? He did this by… stripping female nudity of context and simply gawking at it. Oh, wow, that’s some real clever satire there. I mean, the edginess of taking the status quo and just… regurgitating it. God, someone please explain to me how edgy and awesome it is to use the status quo on a billion-person platform, and how it’s so subversive to the status quo. My poor, feeble female brain must just be not getting it.

No, really, I’m waiting. Explain to me how vomiting up the status quo of a misogynist culture that objectifies women’s breasts regardless of context is subverted by replaying the trope of objectifying women’s breasts regardless of context.

See, the thing about satire is that it’s supposed to do that: subvert the status quo. So, whatever MacFarlane did, it wasn’t satire.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the boob song, for two very distinct reasons. One was the inclusion of Jennifer Lawrence.  Setting up a dichotomy, a competition, if you will, between those whorish actresses that have done nudity and those awesome pure ones that haven’t is part of misogyny 101: divide and conquer. Get women to police their own behavior, and each other’s behavior. Get them to think they are each other’s enemies. Then they’re a lot easier to exploit.

BUT THE REALLY BIG PROBLEM WAS SCARLETT JOHANSSON. The inclusion of Ms. Johansson in that  song basically wipes out any attempt at saying MacFarlane had any sort of point about double standards for women in film. Wanna know why? Scarlett Johansson has NEVER (I repeat, never!!) bared her breasts on film. She’s never done it. MacFarlane’s seen her breasts because someone hacked into her phone and stole and then published private pictures she took of herself.

Please, go ahead and tell me that she shouldn’t have taken the pictures. That the existence of the pictures means she’s a slut that deserves whatever happens to her. I will laugh and then I will put you on my private mental list of probable rapists, because if you can honestly say with a straight face that anyone deserves such an invasion, you probably think women that wear mini skirts deserve whatever happens to them, too.

But let’s talk about Quvenzhane Wallis now. MacFarlane turned a nine-year-old black girl into a sexualized object to make a joke about George Clooney’s dating habits. I don’t give a fuck what you think about her, or Clooney, or his dating habits. HE TURNED A NINE YEAR OLD GIRL INTO A SEXUALIZED OBJECT TO MAKE A JOKE ABOUT A VERY POWERFUL MAN. Worse than that. He turned a nine-year-old black girl into a sexualized object to make a joke about a white man.

Is there a better way to telegraph to someone that they don’t matter? Again, honestly asking. We’re going to just completely ignore the fact that you’re a person and reduce you to a thing so we can make a joke about this other guy, who is immensely powerful and is the one we actually care about. You, you mean nothing. You’re less than nothing. You, nine-year-old black girl, can be ridiculed globally for all we care. That white man over there is the one that matters.

The thing about comedy is, if you’re going to claim it’s socially conscious and progressive and edgy and groundbreaking, is that it has to reverse power relationships. MacFarlane objectified the person who was probably the most powerless in that entire theater to make a “joke” (and I use that term loosely) about one of the most powerful. Miss Wallis is going to spend her entire life being turned into an object and being sexualized so that *someone else* can do something to her, both in real life and on film. MacFarlane does not get “props” for kicking off that process way ahead of schedule and on such a big stage.

You can claim all you want that everything MacFarlane has done has been done before by other people. What you don’t get to do is follow that up with, “So why be mad at him?” Because that IS, in and of itself, why people that don’t like to see other people objectified are mad at him. We’re mad at him in EXACTLY the same way we’re mad at ALL THOSE OTHER PEOPLE that do it. Because whether you’re the first person to do it or the last, doing it at all is still wrong.  It’s not funny. It’s not cute. And the fact that he was using jokes that have all been made before by other people in other ways proves that MacFarlane is not edgy or original or even a good comedian.

He’s not satirical. He’s not subverting the status quo. He’s supporting it. As evidenced by the fact that all those tired, clichéd, trite jokes resulted in a big boost in the target demographic: 18-45 year old white men. The ones with the power. The ones that "really matter."

RADICAL

At some point in human history, being "radical" became a bad thing. Radical is an epithet. It's an insult. It's meant to convey dangerous ideas, a lack of gravitas, some kind of fundamental unseriousness about solving problems. The stigma of radical is such that people bend over backwards to avoid identifying with any sort of radical ideas. I don't understand this. If you believe a thing, watering it down in the name of moderation seems like the worst thing you can do. We live in a time and a place wherein our governance is by compromise. If you come to that compromise having already compromised yourself, how will anything ever change?

Last month, I got a tattoo. It might seem strange, to some, that two years after #wiunion, after Act 10 was passed, after Scott Walker survived the recall election we forced, after Act 10 was upheld on a second appeal, I would choose to get this symbol tattooed on my body. It doesn’t seem strange to me. It isn’t strange to me because for me, this fist is a symbol. It is a reminder of that time, absolutely, and it is tied to it, but it is a symbol of something much larger. #wiunion was my moment of radicalization, and I chose this tattoo because I don’t want to forget it. I don’t want to forget what it was like to stand up with 200,000 of my fellow human beings and demand to be heard. I don’t want to forget what it was like to be ignored anyway.

I’ve always been liberal. I was raised in a very liberal, post-Vatican II Catholic church. My parents are liberal: my mother is a state employee who was directly impacted by Act 10 and former steel mill worker from Gary, IN; my father is a borderline socialist that spent large swaths of the 60s protesting the Vietnam War.

But me? I no longer consider myself simply “liberal.” I’m not a Democrat. I’m something else. I’m a radical, wild-eyed and imbued with a sense of purpose. And that change occurred during the Madison uprising.

I remember, on February 11, 2011, after Walker introduced Act 10 that my mother came home. It was a Friday. She was angry. But she was also tired. “No one but us will care,” she said to me. On Valentine’s Day, hearings on Act 10 were being held. The unionized teaching assistants at UW-Madison marched from the University to the Capitol and delivered hundreds and hundreds of Valentines to Governor Walker. “Don’t break our hearts. Don’t break our unions.” I was on Twitter. I saw. I went home to my mother after work, and I said to her, “I think you’re wrong. I think people do care.”

The next morning, we sat at the table drinking coffee. We decided that instead of going to work, we would drive to Madison. I knew the hearing had gone all night. People were camped in the Capitol. We went to see. We went to see, and to be heard. We live in a democracy, both of us thought, and we have a right to be heard. Two hundred thousand people stood outside the Wisconsin State Capitol one day weeks later, all thinking the same thing. “We have a right to be heard.”

Inside the Wisconsin State Capitol Rotunda, February 15, 2011.

Over the following months, through the capitol occupation, through the fleeing of our Democratic senators over state lines, through the passage of Act 10 in the middle of the night in a vote so fast that not even all of the bill’s supporters managed to get their votes registered, I learned. You could say my eyes were opened. You could say I developed a sensitivity to oppression, to oppressive tactics, and to the silencing of people. When Wisconsin’s historically open Capitol building was closed, I cried. When Wisconsin’s incredibly strong, deliberate open meetings laws were violated in favor of back-room dealings, I seethed.

While all of this was going on, Egypt was in the grips of the Arab Spring, growing out of Libya and Tunisia. Through the internet, I found people deeply involved in those events. That fall, Occupy hit America, and that, too, was a thing I watched, and cheered, and lent my voice to, and supported.

I came out with one crystal clear idea in my head: People over everything. People over profit, people over national interest, people over faith.

People are more important than profit. If your profit demands that hundreds of millions of people live in poverty and wage slavery to it, your profit is wrong. If your profit demands that you be exempt from environmental standards designed to protect all of us, your profit is wrong. If your profit demands that we lock up an ever-increasing number of people for nonviolent crimes for their entire lives, your profit is wrong. If your profit demands that the freedom of the internet be curtailed, your profit is wrong. Money is a means to an end, and not an end. Money itself is not a good reason for anything. And I will fight to strip these profits falsely earned on oppression and human misery.

People are more important than national interest. If your idea of national interest demands that you create an apartheid state and consign millions to fear and abject poverty, your national interest is wrong. If your national interest demands that people be surveilled at all times “just in case” they’re doing something wrong, your national interest is wrong. If your idea of national interest cheers the automated killing of children and adults because it makes you feel “safer,” your national interest is wrong. People everywhere are people, and no person is inherently better because of the geography of their birth or the blood in her veins. And I will fight to smash a state that purports to do any of these things in my name and that builds its concept of safety and power on oppression and human misery.

People are more important than faith. If your faith demands that women be kept covered from head to toe and kept at home, your faith is wrong. If your faith demands that little girls have their clitorises cut off so that they don’t fall into “sexual temptation,” your faith is wrong. If your faith demands that women not have basic bodily autonomy, your faith is wrong. If your faith demands that men and women that love differently than you love be relegated to second-class status, that they be harassed and hounded and even murdered, then your faith is wrong. God forgives. God loves. And if you cannot forgive, and if you cannot love, your God is false and your faith is wrong. And I will fight to make sure that your faith does not have the power to spread its oppression and human misery through secular laws.

I have become radicalized. All of these many, many wrongs are other faces of the wrong done to the people of Wisconsin. There is nothing I will not question save that one crystal clear idea that’s been indelibly burned into the whorls of my brain matter: People over everything. There is nothing I can look at without straining to see how it fits into the systems we have constructed to control each other over millennia. There is no document and no institution that I hold sacred. There is only that one bright light that’s burned away everything else: People over everything.

I have become a radical, and the thing that led me to it was #wiunion. And for that, I will be forever grateful. Two years after the Madison uprising, I realize that I am forever changed. And it’s a good thing. For that, I had its symbol inked into my skin.

Female Privilege: The GOP, the War on Women, and Class

Let's talk about privilege.

priv - i - lege (n): a right, immunity, or benefit enjoyed only by a person beyond the advantages of most.

There's the now-ubiquitous take down of white male privilege explained in gamer terms (that I love, for the record, and I don't even play video games). And honestly, public discussions of privilege generally center on white male privilege, and for reasons well and good, but there are other types of privilege.

Female privilege, for example. Now, you must understand before you decide to crucify me that "female privilege" and "white male privilege" are not exact correlations. The kind of privilege I am going to talk about with regard to women is not the all-encompassing power of cultural superiority that white men hold. But still, there have traditionally been some privileges afforded one by being (white and/or wealthy) female. These privileges fall generally under the condition of "immunity" rather than "right," but that doesn't preclude them from being privileges, as you can see, from the above-quoted definition.

It's a political truism that there are two kinds of freedom: freedom from and freedom to. Generally, people don't specify which they mean because (in my extremely humble opinion) the people that yell the loudest about "freedom" usually mean "freedom from" and that's a rather inferior sort of freedom, don't you think? I think so. I mean, I'd much rather have the freedom TO go where I please than have the freedom FROM men yelling at me on the street. It is more important to me that I be able to set my own goals and accomplish them, which requires a more or less absolute freedom of movement, than it is to never encounter something unpleasant. That's how I parse the difference between freedom to and freedom from.

(N.B. - Ideally I'd have both, but I am, despite my unflappable optimism, a realist, and getting both is a little greedy so I'll take the freedom to, thankyouverymuch. And do whatever I can do ensure that maybe my great-great-great-great-great-granddaughters will have both.)

However, that's how I value-weight things. I am not the only person, nay, nor even the only woman in the world. And women have, since time immemorial, enjoyed a particularly privileged position when it comes to "freedom from." There are concrete examples, like street harassment: only going out with a male chaperone is a pretty effective way to not have dudes cat-calling and/or trying to grab parts of your body.

But the female privilege of freedom from extends much farther than such concrete examples, as privilege is wont to do. The privilege of freedom from is the freedom from all sorts of unpleasantness. Let's face it, everyone, the world is a pretty awful place. Navigating it is hard work. Making decisions, weighing options, walking the tightrope between self-care and caring for others: these are difficult, draining things. They are difficult and draining things for everyone, regardless of gender. But women have had the privilege of avoiding these things, by letting men make such decisions for them. The privilege of women has long been the freedom from having to chart a course through the universally-determined awfulness of the material world.

Sexism is, at its core, a belief that women are not capable of doing this. Women are not capable of making decisions, weighing choices, wielding power, and navigating the world. Because they are not capable, they must be protected, given freedom from having to do these things. That explains men that want to limit women's choices.

But what about women? They must realize that they're capable of choosing things for themselves, they must realize that they are capable of navigating the world. They must. Particularly high-power, high profile women, women like Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin and Nikki Haley, they must realize that the perception that women can't do the things they have done is wrong. So why do they (and hundreds of thousands of other women) align themselves with a political party that is dedicated to legally limiting women's choices? This is the question of the hour! Everyone is asking it!

Here's my take: privilege. It's not that these women are stupid, or self-loathing, which are the two explanations I see advanced most often. No, they are neither. What they are is deeply, deeply aware of their female privilege. We're at, you might say, a tipping point. Feminism has advanced to the point where women can indeed become Ann Coulter and Nikki Haley and even Hilary Clinton. But it has not advanced so far that actual equality is achieved, and thus, female privilege is preserved.

The option of retreating from the world, of ceasing to navigate it's awfulness and messiness, still exists for women of a certain class. The option of being protected and deferred to still exists. Women like Coulter and Haley and all the others are scared of losing that privilege.

At the Republican National Convention this year, there is something called the Women's Pavilion, organized and presided over by GOP women, where salon services and feminine hygiene products are available, and where women can meet to talk to other women "in ways women can relate to." The whole thing strikes me as redolent of a harem, minus the sexual overtones. Women winking over what the men say and speaking to each other in a coded, female-specific language; women occupying a place where men are forbidden; women assigned a specific sphere of influence. Even the name, "pavilion," calls up images of ladies sitting on comfortable chairs and shaded from the sun that might damage their complexions whilst they chat idly over lemonade. This is the privilege of women: a space "just for them," a language all their own. But, of course, by virtue of gender-exclusionary practices, nothing will get done in this women's pavilion. There will be lots of talk and no action. No decisions will be made, only communication, only translation.

Because the privilege of women is the freedom from decision-making. In an interview with Mary Anne Carter, organizer of this women's pavilion, a telling quote turns up:

I would think that the current healthcare bill that may or may not be repealed — I don’t want to call it ‘Obamacare’ but I can’t remember the name of it — is potentially a serious war on women, allowing women to make their own healthcare choices.

Allowing women to make their own healthcare choices, instead of having them dictated by a husband or a father or a doctor or even (in a pinch?) the government that is run by men is the real war on women, for those that are terrified of losing their female privilege. Having to take responsibility for those kinds of things, those things that happen in the real and awful and terrifying and messy world is a pretty scary thought. It's much easier to rest on female privilege, on the perception of the fairer and weaker sex, on the idea that women need a space and a language all their own, on the construction of the general world as male and therefore outside your purview.

Women have historically been great enforcers of gender roles. We shame and punish each other for being sluts, for breaking the rules, for doing what women aren't supposed to do. Why? Because we all know that we're capable of managing our own lives, but some of us really don't want to have to. The world is awful and living is hard.

The problem is, of course, that not all women have the option, the luxury of relying on the female privilege that is largely the demesne of the wealthy. And setting public policy for the comfort of the wealthy has never worked out indefinitely for any culture. But still, that doesn't stop people from clinging to their privileges with terror-hardened fingers.

Who Deserves to Die?

A year ago, during the awful lead-up to and then even more awful execution of Troy Davis, I started thinking about the death penalty. And now, as Texas sets itself to execute (another) cognitively deficient man, I'm thinking about it again.

What is a "death penalty?" Killing someone for a crime committed. Lots of people find such punishment appropriate: "An eye for an eye," goes the refrain of the religious who support it; "Some people just can't be trusted," say the less Biblically minded. In essence, a death penalty is a judgment of irredeemability. Killing someone for a crime necessarily means that society has judged that person incapable of rehabilition; they will never be a functioning member of society, and therefore must be removed from it so as to prevent further harm.

You might be able to guess that I am not a supporter of the death penalty. I find the idea of judging someone beyond redemption a horrific display of hubris and privilege that leaves me sick to my stomach. Of course, as soon as I start to talk with anyone about my moral objections to the death penalty, they'll inevitably come up with one scenario or another for which I have no good rejoinder. The expense of keeping people behind bars (if we quit locking people up for years for non-violent offenses, the cost of locking up violent offenders would be much more tolerable), the danger to other members of the prison population posed by certain offenders (sociopaths are a thing I really have no solution for), the inherent inhumanity of a lifetime of isolated confinement in an 8 by 8 space (a point made eloquently to me by a man that vowed to get himself shot before being locked up again; I think he meant it, too).

I don't have practical solutions to these issues. All I have is the absolute conviction that killing people is wrong. And it is just as wrong to kill someone that has killed someone else as it is for that person to kill someone else in the first place. The practical issues of human beings being awful to each other are messy, but the morality of it is crystal-clear to me: killing people is wrong. Full stop.

So what does it say about us, as a society, that we have authorized the state to validate our own worst impulses and kill people? What does it say about us that we suffer a governing principle that does not demand of us to better ourselves, but rather allows us to close our eyes and stop up our ears like children frightened of something in the dark? Because desire to hurt another being always stems from fear.

It says nothing flattering about us, to be sure. It says we will suffer stagnation. It says that we, as a culture, refuse to move beyond fear and reactionary retribution.

And I can't help but draw corollaries between state-sponsored execution and vigilantism and mass murders. We continue to grant the state this power of life and death over its citizens because we will not let go of the idea that we ought to have the power of life and death over each other. The different, scary Other deserves to die, and we will be the instrument of death if no one else steps up, it is our RIGHT to extract pounds of flesh and harvest souls.

Yes, I know that generally sane, well-adjusted people don't tend to be the ones that take up arms and kill people. But that's the point, isn't? Generally sane, well-adjusted people don't do that sort of thing. Generally sane, well-adjusted people don't kill other people. So why are we, collectively, killing people left and right? We must not be generally sane, or well-adjusted. Perhaps we should do something about that.

A culture that continues to hold that there are people that deserve to be killed will continue to breed Loughner's and Holmes' and Page's.

Walking a Tightrope

Every relationship has rules. There's a sort of standard set of them (monogamy, financial sharing, modicum of care) that is the basic template for modern, American relationships. Individual couples work out the details of their particular relationship and apply variations of these rules, or chuck them completely and start from a blank slate, building as necessary.

Many relationships break down when the rules aren't followed. Many others break down because the rules were never explicitly defined, and so one party or another violates them unknowingly or someone starts pushing for a defined set of rules which is often casually referred to as "labeling" the relationship and the other person freaks the fuck out because defined rules mean they have to follow them, too, and not having any rules to follow is so nice.

I've got very little problem chucking the basic template and building from scratch. Most things in my life are negotiable. I don't have a great many strong convictions about anything (although, to be fair, the few things I do have strong convictions about are pretty much iron-clad and you will never get me to negotiate on them) so I'm willing to compromise a great deal.

What I have a hard time dealing with is uncertainty, or operating without a defined set of rules. I am a person that needs to know where the lines are, and why they are there, and how important each one is. This is equally so that I don't unintentionally cross any boundaries, and so that if I do cross a line, I know what the likely outcome will be. I like to rebel with purpose, you see. If I'm going to set something on fire, I will be very careful to pick the thing that will produce the exact impact I'm going for.

I really do weigh things that carefully; it's the natural consequence of being a worrier. I calculate risk with an internal scale that is so finely calilbrated it distinguishes between 6 hours of sleep and 5.5 hours of sleep; between a margarita and a manhattan; between $20 and $25; between "I love you" and "I am in love with you."

But all this calculation depends on data, on having the information necessary to weigh risk, and so in relationships with undefined rules, I have no data on which to make decisions. This is how I get hurt. When I don't know what I'm leaping into, I tense and hit the ground hard and shatter. When I can see, I can relax and roll with the punches.

Maybe what I'm supposed to be learning right now is how to roll with punches while blind. Maybe what I'm supposed to be learning right now is the value of the undefined, the freeing nature of letting go of risk calculation, the joy of floating even if there's a 100-foot waterfall just up ahead pulling you inexorably toward the precipice.

Mostly it feels like walking a tightrope without a net, and falling every other step. I'm not ready for this. I need some rules to work with, I need some data on which to make decisions. I need to calculate whether the tightrope is worth walking.

The Incredibly Fucked Up Classism of The Dark Knight Rises

I saw The Dark Knight Rises last night (and stayed up far, far beyond my bedtime, so if this is muddled I'm going to blame mild sleep deprivation and not my own flawed analytic skills, mmk?) and good God, someone has the most fucked-up sense of class consciousness ever.

Honestly, that was the over-arching thought in my mind as I left the theater. I initially assigned this incredibly convoluted, nonsensical world view to Christopher Nolan, and I still think that it's largely him, but he is working with characters and stories written by other people, so it might not be entirely his fault that nothing makes a whole lot of sense.

There's a fascinating little vignette near the end of the film as lightly (nightsticks, the occasional handgun) armed cops that have been being held underground for months escape and march through the streets to confront legions of heavily (automatic rifles and machine guns) armed revolutionaries that have all the power. The sense of existential vertigo is startling and almost nausea-inducing if you've been paying attention to the news. Who has power? Who should have power? How do you take power and keep it without becoming the thing you took it from? The symbolism is both stark and gradient.

This movie is both cartoonishly comic and simplistic, and simultaneously jumping on the trend of heroes as anti-heroes, or at least complex beings living in unbearable tension. Character sketches of the four main characters, with particular emphasis on class, go something like this:

Billionaire playboy/superhero.
Billionaire female investor/CEO.
Working-class female cat burglar.
Escaped male convict.

What's fascinating in Nolan's universe is the interplay of these four main characters. Both the big hero AND the big bad are wealthy elites. Both of their sidekicks are decidely neither wealthy nor elite. Both the big hero and the big bad espouse "helping humanity" rhetoric. Neither one of them does nearly as much good as they could if they weren't so fucking self-absorbed.

(Don't argue with me. Batman is a megalomaniac. I mean, it's cool to watch him play vigilante, but he is absolutely an incurable narcissist.)

So, the world is threatened and destroyed by two people of the same class. Both have help from the underclass. And really, that's where the characterizations get interesting. Before I get to gushing about the incredibly fascinating, human portrait that is Selina Kyle (and you can call me a whatever-you-want, but she was absolutely the best/most interesting part of this movie, I don't care what sort of purist opinion you've got because I've never read a comic book in my life), a few notes on Bane.

An escaped convict that we find out lost his face after protecting a six-year-old girl born in a prison, he's set up for most of the movie as the villain. It's only at the end that we find out, despite his self-consciously pseudo-Stalinist rhetoric, that he's actually been acting on behalf of that wealthy lady investor, who turns out to be the kid he saved from some hell-hole prison. So, at sort of the last possible second you realize most of his rhetoric was empty (and there are some truly hilarious/cringe-inducing/exasperating visuals, including a scene straight out of Marat's French Revolution with Cillian Murphy inexplicably holding court atop a pile of desks; the gold-velvet upholstered Regency wing chair made me sigh/sob/choke all at once) and so maybe you don't have to be terrified of people advocating for a world in which the few do not live large on the blood and tears of the many.

But, most people won't think that far, and clearly the savior is a billionaire and the villain cloaks himself in "people's revolutionary" garments and then proceeds to pretty much destroy everything, so that's the message most will take. Sigh. Christopher Nolan, fuck you.

Still, the actual villain is herself an elite and monied woman. And Bane did, years ago, save her from a pretty desperate fate at the cost of his face. He clearly does believe quite strongly in the idea of caring for others, no matter the cost. He just goes about it in spectacularly bad fashion, acting out of an implied love for the (beautiful, innocent) girl (who is very beautiful but not at all very innocent) who leads him astray. (I am not going to begin a feminist critique of this movie until I've seen it several more times.) Human beings make mistakes; maybe that's why we should be trying to make sure no one human being has the power to make mistakes that will destroy everything? Just a thought. Although I can't say definitively that it's one Nolan had. But maybe he did. Who knows. Anyway, it's just pop-culture, right?

But Selina Kyle. Selina Kyle is a goldmine of nuanced super-hero characterization. She wants social and cultural change. She can taste it. She is acutely aware that the world she lives in is stacked against people like her. And she steals. The implicit suggestion of her as a Robin Hood figure (steals expensive things from fabulously wealthy people, but lives in a small apartment in a crappy part of time; has a big-sister relationship with a young woman) is touching, but she consistently deflects it. She's equally repulsed by the wealth of Wayne's world and attracted to it. In that sense, she's a good allegory for most of us in relation to our economics: horrified at and covetous of excess.

In the final analysis, she (literally) saves Batman's life because she can't just abandon him. Clearly, there's sexual and romantic tension there (but I'm not writing a feminist critique until I've seen it WAY MORE TIMES) but I like to think at least some of that is her own morality. She believes in helping her fellow beings, so she helps, at risk and cost. And in the end, when she's being inexplicably squired around Italy in luxury by Bruce who was suppposed to have lost all his money, what came to my mind was a bitter comment she directed at him an hour earlier in the film: "You people don't even go broke like the rest of us." Maybe she's betraying her ideals, maybe she sold out, as was suggested to me in a rather incoherent phone call as I walked home from the theater at 2 am, but she, like Bane, is human, and makes mistakes, and if we're going to give him the benefit of the doubt about his motivations for being such an evil monster, she certainly gets the same consideration considering she hasn't actually done anything on his level of maliciousness. Yet. That yet is implied, of course: once you're living the high life it's hard to disentangle yourself from its siren song. As long as temptation exists, you have to fight it.

What is undoubtedly most fascinating about this film as a dissertation on class and class consciousness is the interplay of these four characters: the ways in which they are the same and the ways they are different, the way those similarities and differences were grafted on by external conditions or consciously chosen. Bane and Selena could maybe have, with different choices, ended up in each other's shoes; so, for that matter, could Wayne and Tate.

And that's why, despite all the heavy-handed, trite, simplistic SUPERHERO COMIC OMG shit, it actually is a pretty complex movie. If you're bothering to think about it. Or, overthinking it, as I'm sure I am. Then again, the real world is pretty simple on the surface, too, which is why so many people are convinced they have it figured out: they just ignore the pieces that don't fit.