Kembra Pfahler on Horror and on Feminism

kembra

Kembra Pfhaler, as photographed by Christelle de Castro.

I’ve had this interview of Kembra Pfahler saved in my Pocket for months now. I go back over it often, and remind myself to ask myself: am I a feminist? Am I doing all I can to improve the position of women and girls everywhere, and not just the ones I agree with? Am I living and working and being in a way that encourages reason and discourages hysteria? Pfahler gives the most wonderful sound bytes, like this one:

I ask myself, “Am I a feminist? Am I a woman of independence and high esteem? Am I getting sucked into the system of despair that tries to brainwash women into thinking they are this or that?” I want to perpetuate a positive paradigm of visibility for women, despite what feels like backsliding and a sort of crass alternative greed — the greed that makes us isolate, and think about art careers instead of art.

I am inspired by her inquiry. I am inspired by women who are proud to be women, while also recognizing that we got the short straw in this world. I am inspired by women who are proud to be women and are equally proud to by angry about that injustice.

The link to the full interview, conducted by Io Tillett Wright is here. What do you think of Pfahler? Do you identify with a feminism that seeks to disrupt and subvert existing structures, or do you value an approach that seeks harmony and non-agression instead? Don’t let me paint a false dichotomy here- what does your feminism aim to do, and what’s it strategy if it’s neither of those things, or some combination of others?

Much love,

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August 12th, 2013
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The Other Side of Truth-Telling is Freedom

A few weeks ago, I lamented on Facebook that my biggest wish for my undergraduate career was to have a black professor before graduating.  There are no professors of colour in my department at the university I attend. All are caucasian, and 77% are male. Yes, I counted. I recount every time a new faculty member is hired. The gender ration has changed since I started my degree, but the race issue hasn’t. Walking down the hallways of my department has for many years, been an exercise in the practise of being other.

I felt self-concious posting about my Undergrad Wish, since no one wants to be that black girl, obsessed with race and seeing injustice everywhere. But it needed to be said and I felt so much freer for saying it.

A good friend responded to my post with with Dr. Naila Keleta-Mae’s TEDxUWaterloo talk about the power of telling your truth. Dr. Keleta-Mae is one of the very few black professors at my university. Even more important than her race though, is Dr. Keleta-Mae’s message: the secrets we keep will hold us captive much more strongly than the risks of living in accordance with your truth. That message transcend all markers of identity and experiences.

My secret was a small one compared to all the others out there: I’m usually the only black person in my classes, and I think that has to do with the fact that I study the arts, humanities and classics. I worry constantly about stereotype threat. I also worry constantly about forgetting a part of who I am as I move through a space whose standards of success preclude the parts of me that don’t fit neatly into very male, very white world of analytic philosophy. It’s not a huge secret, but it was mine and I have never, ever felt comfortable discussing the lack of racial diversity in my program at my university.

Her performance is emotionally intense at all times, oscillating between intense hope and intense despair, and that sweeping visceral wave of emotion that comes from watching a person radiate from their soul, setting you free by proxy. I had to pause it more than once is catch my breath, or just play solitaire for a few minutes, detach from it all. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

In the meantime, I’ll be here, looking for more role models like me, so I don’t have to question if people like me are allowed to enjoy the things that I do.

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August 7th, 2013
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That’s What She Said…About the Art of Sleeping Alone

I love sleeping alone. It is one of my great joys in life to be disturbed only by my own whims. Or, as Sophie Fontanel puts it in her piece in the New York Times :

By giving up sex, I abandoned all this pretence. During the 12 years I didn’t have sex, I learned so much. About my body, the role of art in eroticism, the power of dreams, the softness of clothes, the refuge and the importance of elegance. That I can take more pleasure while watching Robert Redford shampooing Meryl Streep’s hair in “Out of Africa” than being in a bed with a man. Sometimes I took pleasure just by staring at men’s necks. Sometimes, just by listening to a voice. It was libido, trust me. It was desire. But society doesn’t recognize this kind of felicity. It’s too much! I’ve learned that most people mainly want to prove that they are sexually functioning, and that’s all. Strangely, people are ashamed to admit that they are alone in their beds, which I discovered is a huge pleasure.

Read the full piece here.

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July 31st, 2013
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What Jesus and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Have In Common

From episode 188 of This American Life, entitled “Kid Logic”. It’s a beautiful episode, and I find the entire thing arresting. It was this story in particular that has been haunting me for a long, long time now. The following is an excerpt taken from the transcript archives of This American Life. It is the kind of story that stands on its own, but also dances beautifully with the rest of the characters on the show. Listen to the whole episode here, but this particular story is the one that most needs to be told.

It all began at Christmas two years ago, when my daughter was four-years-old. And it was the first time that she’d ever asked about “What did this holiday mean?” And so I explained to her that this was celebrating the birth of Jesus. And she wanted to know more about that. We went out and bought a kids’ bible and had these readings at night. She loved him. Wanted to know everything about Jesus.

So we read a lot about his birth and his teaching. And she would ask constantly what that phrase was. And I would explain to her that it was, “Do onto others as you would have them do unto you.” And we would talk about those old words and what that all meant.

And then one day we were driving past a big church and out front was an enormous crucifix.

She said, who’s that?

And I guess I’d never really told that part of the story. So I had to sort of, yeah, oh, that’s Jesus. I forgot to tell you the ending. Well, you know, he ran afoul of the Roman government. This message that he had was so radical and unnerving to the prevailing authorities of the time that they had to kill him. They came to the conclusion that he would have to die. That message was too troublesome.

It was about a month later, after that Christmas, we’d gone through the whole story of what Christmas meant. And it was mid-January, and her preschool celebrates the same holidays as the local schools. So Martin Luther King Day was off. I knocked off work that day and I decided we’d play and I’d take her out to lunch.

We were sitting in there, and right on the table where we happened to plop down, was the art section of the local newspaper. And there, big as life, was a huge drawing by a ten-year-old kid from the local schools of Martin Luther King.

She said, who’s that?

I said, well, as it happens that’s Martin Luther King. And he’s why you’re not in school today. So we’re celebrating his birthday, this is the day we celebrate his life.

She said, so who was he?

I said, he was a preacher.

And she looks up at me and goes, “For Jesus?”

And I said, “Yeah, actually he was. But there was another thing that he was really famous for. Which is that he had a message.”

And you’re trying to say this to a four-year-old. This is the first time they ever hear anything. So you’re just very careful about how you phrase everything.

So I said, “Well, yeah, he was a preacher and he had a message.”

She said, “What was his message?”

I said, “Well, he said that you should treat everybody the same no matter what they look like.”

She thought about that for a minute. And she said, “Well that’s what Jesus said.”

And I said, “Yeah, I guess it is. You know, I never thought of it that way, but yeah. And it is sort of like ‘Do onto others as you would have them do unto you’.”

And she thought for a minute and looked up at me and said, “Did they kill him, too?”

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July 29th, 2013
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That’s What She Said…About A Girl’s Self-Esteem

From The Beheld:

The narrative we spin for girls is that they’re doomed to look in the mirror and not like what they see—that the dogpile of unrealistic images of women’s bodies and idealized femininity hits them so early on that by the time they reach puberty, the best we can do is damage control.

Yes, but the other part of this is that you can in fact be a young woman with high self-esteem. You just have to be OK with being full of yourself, cocky, shallow and selfish in order to do so.  It’s been pointed out before, but the great irony of Dove’s “real beauty” campaign is that while Dove is working at helping women realize how beautiful they are, their parent company, Unlever, has dozens of other brands whose bottom lines all depend on Dove’s marketing campaign to fail. If we assume that we shape our economy, and our economy in turn shapes our lives, we can conclude that much of the world’s livelihoods requires that you feel at least insecure enough to want to buy products to fix yourself.

Caitlin from Fit and Feminist says it well:

The reality is that the things these advertising campaigns want us to experience – physical power, self-esteem, accomplishment, self-love, a sense of self-worth – these are things that cannot be purchased.  It does not matter if you have more money than George Soros and the Koch brothers combined.  The emotional states these advertising campaigns are trying to arouse in us cannot be bought, not if we want them to count.

Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.

Read the rest of the piece here: My Own Private Beauty Myth on The Beheld.

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July 26th, 2013
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Addendum on Why I’m Single

I'm saving all my love. For me.

I’m saving all my love. For me.

On Facebook, I described my blog post “This is Why I’m Single…Because I’m Black?“  as the one in which I “eschew the role of the pathetic single girl…and instead adopt the role of the empowered single girl with few options.” I was then asked to expand on this. I originally had it as an addendum at the end of the original post. This really needs to be in its own space though. I had a lot to say in post script.

In which I was the Pathetic Single Girl

You see, single women are usually characterized as “Loser Protagonists“- in all but the most exceptional of story lines, single women usually have their character development anchored on the acquisition of a romantic partner. Said target is usually a heterosexual, able-bodied, wealthy, white male. Single females anchored not on romance but on a career or *gasp* personal development, are usually written (off) as spinsters, who leave their jobs and go home to a cat and some cold pizza. You can be single as many characters/real people are, but you’re not allowed to enjoy it and single-ness is always depicted as problematic.

I bought into the role of Pathetic Single Girl for a very long time. PSG is an easy role to play as a woman, because as a woman, a lot of your perceived worth hinges on whether or not anyone (usually a man) sees you as worthy of wanting. PSG is not interesting enough to date, so she is not interesting period, and her character is often also repressed or depressed or just plain boring. Women are taught that they have little to no agency in being single, they are single because they are unwanted. The story normally says that no one wants her because she is not attractive enough, usually for whatever pursuit is distracting her from the man-hunt. Sometimes she gets to be quirky, and with enough quirks she can become a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but MPDG usually isn’t single. Your relationship status at any given moment is a referendum on your entire personhood.

I’m really over this. I cannot tell you the number of times I have sat scrolling through my Facebook friends list, wondering why none of those friendships ever turned into romance. I am serious. I would literally spend hours combing through my life, wondering where my storybook romance was, wondering why I never got a Lizzie/Gordo, best-friends-turn-into-lovers dénouement before my happy ending. My previous conclusion was that I was literally too fat and boring and had too few accomplishments for anyone I knew to ever find attractive.

In Which I Become Empowered But Have Few Options

I decided that I was spending too much time sitting around and waiting for life to happen to me. What I needed to do was pick the person I was attracted to, and then proactively become the kind of person they’d want to date. Foolproof! Until I went to go find my crush…

I spent even more hours trying to figure out who I was attracted to than I ever did wondering why no one liked me. It dawned on me, for the first time, that perhaps my relationship status was not due to flaws in my personality, but to the very practical reason of not wanting to date anyone I knew. Imagine! Perhaps I wasn’t good enough for anyone, but it seemed as though no one was good enough for me either. Or, they were good enough for me but not available, which is wonderful because I want the people I care about to have the kinds of relationships they find fulfilling. Or, they were in fact good enough for me, but I just didn’t particularly feel like dating them. For no good reason!

I assumed my vagina was broken, since it clearly couldn’t muster up the motivation to do anything about this “problem”. This was the time in my life when I thought I was asexual. (Long story short, I’m not.)

A friend once pointed out that I don’t give off any romantic vibes. This is true. I very rarely feel romantic when I’m talking to someone interesting. I am not thinking of dating them, I am thinking of inviting them out for coffee so I can pick their brain and maybe work on a project with them. I am someone who (at least now, I didn’t always!) really, really, really enjoys the way her life looks. I refuse to give up what I now have for just anyone. Or, as it seems from the evidence of this year’s adventures, anyone at all.

Can I be honest here? I am fickle and enjoy the excitement of being able to bounce from friend to friend and then go home once I’m tired. By being organised with my time, I have each one of my needs for intimacy met in one way or another. I love Star Trek, and have many friends I can share that with. But not all of my friend who love Star Trek also like watching Community. And I have friends who like Star Trek and Community but not comic books, or philosophy, or spending lots of time making elaborate meals on weeknights. And then of course, there are the friends with whom I share a strong physical attraction, and not much else. It works the other way around too- friends who like philosophy but not Community don’t want to hear me ramble on about it, so I save those conversations for those who care. And I’m sure the people with whom I share a physical connection and not much else are as excited to see me go as I am about having my whole bed to myself.

If a friend moves to the other side of the country to pursue a new career, you show up to their going away party, help them eat the food in their fridge, and then wave goodbye. When a partner wants to move to the other side of the country, you have to seriously consider a major lifestyle change. I really, really, really like my current lifestyle. My search for companionship is less of a search and more of a an option I’m open to if it would be genuinely better than what I’m up to right now. And so far, no one has presented me with that option.

What PSG lacks, and the reason I am no longer her, is a robust sense of self that is independent on her perceived romantic viability.

I am not lonely. I am not bored. I am not sad and unfulfilled. I am not single because no one wants me. And even if no one wants me right now, I don’t want anyone either, so we’re all on the same page.

My current options (see original blog post about Eligible Bachelor #1) don’t represent that step up right now, and I’m happy to wait. Of course, my presence on the online dating sphere seems to indicate otherwise. In truth, I only long on once a week or so, and poke around. It is an idle curiosity about what’s “out there”, a message to Lady Probability and Lady Chaos that I would enjoy partnered romance at some point, but I’m also really busy right now, so don’t rush things.

I’ll find my imzadi one day. But until cuddling on the couch is a true upgrade from being able to go come and go as I please, I’m just happy…being me.

Much love,

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July 24th, 2013
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Racism Reading List

A friend shared Tim Wise’s anti-racism reading list with me today. Why I did not know of this bibliography until today is a mystery of the universe. Thank you friend!

Even more maddening is that I haven’t read any of these books. A part of it is certainly out of stereotype threat- I worry sometimes about discussing race as often as I’d like, because a part of me is afraid of being on of those black girls. That’s nonsense though. Let me stop doing that. Let me read these books about race, and think about what it means to be black beyond just the melanin in my skin and the nagging feeling that I seem to have to work twice as hard to get half the results. This bibliography- awesome, awesome stuff.

Here it is, click, click click!

Would you guys find it valuable if I made a bibliography of the sources of this blog when I write about race, gender, etc.?

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July 23rd, 2013
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Currently Reading: So Good They Can’t Ignore You

so good

I started the book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You,” by Cal Newport this morning, and am about 50 pages from finishing. I dropped everything to read it. I’ve been texting all of my friends suffering from similar existential career crises to go buy this book. It is putting me at ease about my future and my potential. Most importantly, it’s helping me understand what I need to do right now. I’ve been reading self-help and career books for so long that I’ve gone numb to the entire genre. “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” is the first thing remotely related to self-help that has resonated with me in a very long time. You guys, Cal Newport’s book is that good. Amazon summary:

In this eye-opening account, Cal Newport debunks the long-held belief that “follow your passion” is good advice. Not only is the cliché flawed-preexisting passions are rare and have little to do with how most people end up loving their work-but it can also be dangerous, leading to anxiety and chronic job hopping. After making his case against passion, Newport sets out on a quest to discover the reality of how people end up loving what they do. Spending time with organic farmers, venture capitalists, screenwriters, freelance computer programmers, and others who admitted to deriving great satisfaction from their work, Newport uncovers the strategies they used and the pitfalls they avoided in developing their compelling careers. Matching your job to a preexisting passion does not matter, he reveals. Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.

What makes this book worth reading is that it builds a compelling argument that you should take very seriously if you want a career that is meaningful to both you and the world: “follow your passion,” is terrible advice if what you want to is meaning in your work. What you need to do instead, is what  Aristotle championed all those years ago:

Where your skills and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation.

This idea has been enumerated for millennia, but I don’t think it’s ever been done in a way that backs up the claim with so much reproducible evidence and so many fun case studies. Then, after debunking the myth of a pre-existing passion being the key to career satisfaction, he then goes on to outline the things that actually do lead to a deeply meaningful life.

Issue with the book: gender. It’s not until ~halfway through the book (page 123 of 273 in the hardcover edition if you include the appendices) that we get our first story of a successful woman. For 123 pages, the only women who are mentioned in his abundant case studies were all examples of failures in their attempts to follow their passion. When we finally do get an example of a successful woman, she’s actually the most interesting case study in the book thus far. Successful Woman #1 in the book has a wonderfully detailed story and gives concrete example after concrete example of not just her successes, but her setbacks. Her story is more robust than the others, and it would have been nice to have more of such case studies earlier in the exposition.

The gender issue, better expressed by a Goodreads commenter than I could possibly say it (emphasis mine):

One thing the book overlooks, and that is gender expectations. Female academics, as in so many professions, are expected to be ‘nice’. Avoiding the emotional caretaking aspects of a workplace is essential for women who want to develop career capital, but paradoxically it is difficult to succeed by using the same work strategy that male colleagues use. Example: working as the lone female staff member on one programme, colleagues constantly referred students to me to deal with their life crises: abortions, family deaths, miscarriages, failing papers. A respected mentor told me to my face how much he admired how well suited I am to this. Reality = I’m not. I am not qualified or suited to counsel a student after a miscarriage. Why would I be? Because I also have a uterus? And I don’t want to. I do not want to take on a bottomless well of other people’s emotional issues. At the end of 2010 I spent nearly three hours a week (!) referring an endless stream of students to the appropriate care provider (also mopping up tears before students could calm down and listen to me). That’s more time than I spent on writing journal articles in the same period. When, at the beginning of the next semester, I gave my colleagues copies of the phone numbers and weblinks for the appropriate university resources, and asked them not send students to me any more, I was called a “cold bitch” by a colleague. I have no solution for this, and Newport doesn’t address it. If you have one, let me know.

I’ve been following Newport’s work for years and I’ve read all his books except How to be a High-School Superstar. He does a fair job of balancing gender in his writing overall, both in his books and his blog Study Hacks, so this was a little disappointing. Not disappointing enough to detract from the value of his thesis and arguments though. Women do need to keep the aforementioned point in mind as they move forward with the fantastic premise of “So Good”- what comes easily to men, and is often touted as universal amongst them, are traits that are often weaponized against women, and used to subordinate and undermine them in their work.

If you were to read through the entirety of Newport’s blog archives, you wouldn’t find much new information in this book in terms of this claim that “follow your passion” is bad advice. I can make this claim, because I have in fact read every single one of the posts on Study Hacks. What’s new in this book, and what makes it worth reading even if you follow Newport’s blog, is that he’s never really synthesized all of his ideas like this. It’s all in bits and pieces on the blog, and it’s been evolving over a very long time. “So Good” pulls it all together manifesto style, and it’s obvious that this is the culmination of many, many years on the subject of “why do some people lead remarkable lives, while so many others do not?”

This is the Amazon link for the book. I do not make anything if you purchase it through this link, though after reading “So Good” perhaps I should explore the option of being so good at posting links that someone would want to pay me for it?

Much love and happy reading,

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July 22nd, 2013
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That’s What She Said…About Literary Women

From The Atlantic, in “It’s Frustratingly Rare to Find a Novel About Women That’s Not About Love”  by Kelsey McKinney:

“Great” books, as defined by the Western canon, didn’t contain female protagonists I could admire. In fact, they barely contained female protagonists at all. Of the 100 Best Novels compiled by Modern Library, only nine have women in the leading role, and in only one of those books–The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark–do the leading women strive to do more than find a husband or raise their children. Statistically, one percent of the Best Novels are about women doing something other than loving.

Read the whole thing here.

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July 17th, 2013
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That's What She Said
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This Is Why I’m Single…Because I’m Black?

Actually, it’s because I do not reply to messages like these, and I get a lot of them in my online dating misadventures:

this is why i am single

Text reads: “So the first time my younger brother met a black person, he asked him ‘Tresor why are you one big freckly?’ …your name totally reminded me of that.”

My user name has absolutely nothing to do with my race, it was an abstraction he’s made with evidence…actually, there was no evidence to “remind” him of anything, other than my pictures which do not hide my race.

I also don’t respond to “you’re [actually] a really pretty black girl,” or “I’m not usually attracted to black women, but you’re actually really smart [for a black girl],” and other such attempts at flirting.

What was going through this guy’s mind when he was trying to break the ice with me?

Should I adjust my dating strategy to accommodate my race? It appears to be holding me back. I’m also guessing that I’m not helping my case by being fat. If I lost 50lbs, do you think that would negate the race issue? That way, I could circumvent peoples’ assumptions and become both the smart black girl, and the hot black girl.

If so, how?

If not, why not?

What is this guy even trying to say to me?

Discuss.

In the meantime, I will be here, pondering what life would be like if I could move through the world without constantly having features of my identity marked as “other”.

Much love,

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Addendum

There is am addendum to this post here. The topic is slightly different from that above, so I’ve move the discussion into its own space.

 

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July 16th, 2013
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