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Tag: culture

  • Taking Exception

    The Exceptions, Unaccepted

    Hey, folks.

    I want to talk about being exceptional.

    Going in I want to be clear up front that I think most of us are exceptional and the majority of those are exceptional in some positive, constructive, beautiful, and powerful way.

    There’s a back side to all of that, though, that has become particularly visible in the wake of the rise of “participation trophy” parents and the embarrassed children they blamed for their silliness. A lot of folks who frankly aren’t nearly as exceptional as they think strutting around being aggressively average, that sort of thing. Folks who like to throw how exceptional they are around in situations where it has little or no relevance in an attempt to exert their will on some unsuspecting maitre d’ who does not, indeed, know who you am.

    Being “exceptional” means you’re an exception to some things.

    That means you don’t get to throw a fit when you realize the world wasn’t made for you. I mean you can complain and get up and change it if you want, but just sitting around whining because you’re outside the mainstream and the world was made for those inside of it isn’t going to accomplish anything.

    You’re an exception. Own it. Expect that you will be the exception, but only when it is as inconvenient as possible to you, and never when you could really use a little magic.

    Stop trying to mainstream your exceptionality, that’s the exact opposite of being exceptional by definition.

    "When you're an exception, you're harder to rule." Photo of Temilola Ftoyinbo-Aqueh. She's standing in a wild area with a large fallen tree trunk behind her extending from foreground at right to the background at center-left, with the subject standing in front of the background terminus of the trunk and looking slightly upward while standing and facing to the left of the viewer. She's wearing a dark blue short-sleeved blouse top of no particular description otherwise, and khaki pants. Her left thumb is hooked in her left pants pocket, with the rest of her fingers hanging below.
    When you’re an exception, you’re harder to rule. Meet Temilola Fatoyinbo-Agueh by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC-BY 2.0

    Expect that the world is not made for you, and when that is more than a personal inconvenience and rises to the level of being symptomatic of a larger social ill, then by all means stand up and say something. Use whatever thing at which you’re exceptional to make the world around you a little better.

    Being What You Are

    Rise to it. Be exceptional. I don’t mean be exceptional by showing up every time there’s a flooded drainage ditch so you can show off your big truck, I mean show up to do the work without worrying about the reward.

    That’s how we got baby changing stations in a few men’s bathrooms, finally (and how we got them at all to begin with). It’s also how we mitigated the worst of the AIDS crisis (but only after a whole lot of people died for no good reason). It’s how we’ve won incredible advances in civil rights and elected the first people in our nation’s history to the our two highest executive offices who weren’t white men, over the last fifteen years.

    You can’t just sit around constantly complaining about how broken everything is and how it doesn’t work for you, when you’re also basking in the pleasures and privileges of being exceptional.

    You have to bring solutions, you have to be able and willing to separate your own interests and your emotional attachment to them as your interests from whatever work you’re doing that may relate to those interests, you have to be willing to accept that you’re fallible and have probably been wrong at least once in your life that you’re still unaware of.

    You have to accept that the price of being exceptional, by whatever laws of the universe you happen to believe in (or none at all, it’s still observable reality) is the obligation to apply your exceptions to the benefit of others. Failure to live up to this obligation tends to end poorly one way or another for those who do so. I’m an atheist; I don’t pretend to know why that is or assert some higher omniscient power who is carefully doling out punishments and rewards. I just observe that it is so.

    “Noblesse Oblige”

    It’s tough for most people out here right now. If you think of yourself as “exceptional” in some way, you’re getting some kind of break on that. A break you can use to help others alleviate their own pressure.

    There’s an old joke/parable/aphorism about a guy who falls into a sinkhole maybe twenty, thirty feet deep, breaks his leg, and can’t get help from the priest or kindly old lady or doctor or millionaire walking by. Then some ragged hobo jumps down into the hole with him and says, “Listen, I’ve been here before; I know the way out. Follow me.”

    That is your obligation as a person of exception. Noblesse oblige can be a pretty arrogant and toxic conceit, but it very much applies here if you are indeed somehow “exceptional,” and most of you are, somehow. (And not in any self-deprecating “yeah I exceptionally SUCK” kinda way either!)

    If you’re exceptionally intelligent you owe it to the world to help them understand the things you do and they don’t…and you owe it to yourself to try to find a way to do it with tact so everyone doesn’t hate you for doing it. This was one of my blessings and curses; “gifted child.”

    Gifted Child – A Digression

    This is a conversation I don’t like having, so I’m going to say up front that people who brag about IQ scores and standardized test results are stupid and insecure. (That said, there’s a whole lot of internet trolling that amounts to “what makes you think you’re so smart?” “Well, years of exceptional results on various standardized aptitude tests.” “STOP BRAGGING!” You can’t beat stupid.)

    When I talk about being a “gifted child,” as was the standard term at the time, I don’t mean I took a couple of watered down “AP” courses that don’t even rise to the level of standard-level classes forty years ago. I mean I was one of the kids in the 70s that psychologists and education specialists spent a lot of time being fascinated with and subjecting to an entertaining array of testing and observation as a young lad.

    I don’t like going in to it because it’s almost impossible without sounding like you think you’re “better than,” and that’s rarely the case – certainly it isn’t with me. I was a godawful human being in a lot of ways for most of my teen years and early adulthood, into my early thirties, and being a “genius” has definitely brought more cost than benefit thus far – it’s probably a good thing for all of us I was only broken and not evil.

    It’s really not a value or character judgement. Some folks have a knack for auto mechanics or agriculture; I have a knack for understanding things. Some people are taller than me, too, or shorter. You probably play better basketball than I do. It’s just not about “better,” and that’s part of the point of the article; we’re all exceptional somehow and most of us have something unique and wonderful to offer the world, without a bunch of ego-serving artifice like participation trophies.

    One thing you eventually learn – and usually the hard way – when you’re in a position like that is that you can never, ever, ever count on being the “biggest one in the room,” no matter what the test scores say, and chances are in that room of ten thousand people there may only be one or two who have a greater capacity for learning, innately, than I do…but there are nine thousand nine hundred of them who are better and smarter than me about something.

    So about little John Henry The Gifted Child Who Never Lived Up To His Potential: If you put stock in such things – and at the time they did, currently there’s a more nuanced understanding and some issues have been found with execution that tend to reinforce biases of economics and prejudice against girls as well as cultural, ethnic, and economic minorities – my “IQ” was around 150, give or take five or six points depending on which day of the week I took the test and what kind of mood I was in (and I took a whole bunch of ’em). That’s not an internet quiz result, that’s straight up Stanford-Binet & WAIS/WAIS-R & similar batteries and evaluations, administered by qualified professionals.

    By way of comparison, average is around 100. The real “big brains” of history are estimated in the 200+ range – DaVinci, Newton, Leibniz, J.S. Mill, Einstein. You run down and find folks like Decartes and Michaelangelo around 180-ish, until you get down into my neighborhood (say 140-160) where you find folks like Ben Franklin, Paul Allen, Emerson, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, FDR, Napoleon. A little lower and you start finding people such as Hillary Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Lincoln, Eisenhower, Washington and the like around 120-130.

    Typically people start being referred to as ‘geniuses’ somewhere close to 130 or a bit higher.

    In 1983 in 7th grade I pulled a 650 math and 710 verbal on the same SAT taken in the same room with several hundred high school juniors and seniors. According to the numbers that placed me in the top 0.02% of test results – and that’s the old school SAT with essays and page after page of Miller Analogies.

    Put practically that means if you put me in a room with ten thousand people, statistically I’ll be one of the two “smartest” people in it (and the other will likely be DaVinci). There’s a reasonable probability that your UNIT tests and DATs and other more modern intelligence tests that started coming out in the 1990s were developed or refined in part using data that originated with me and certainly with some of the roughly 1.4 million human beings on this planet who could properly be said to be “like me” in this regard, and all the tests and observations we went through in the 70s and 80s.

    School personnel wanted to jump me twice – in first grade they wanted to put me in fourth, and in 8th grade they wanted to make me a high school junior taking a couple of college courses on the side. My folks said no, using the excuse they didn’t want me to be socially maladjusted (hah!) but mostly because it was a lot of hassle and some money and they didn’t want to.

    So yeah, if you’re from that time or were there and remember those feel good news stories you used to see like ‘Third Grader Earns Fifteenth Doctorate?’ That was almost me, except I was from a deeply dysfunctional home. There’s a ton of writing I want to do about that whole experience.

    I’m not that obnoxious neckbeard who’s constantly jumping in to conversations with “well, actually…” and “not all men!” and the like.

    I’m the person that guy thinks he is.

    The “advanced placement” kids of the 90s and 2000s and now are basically dealing with the ideas developed around people like me fifty years ago, which were then extended outward and more toward the mainstream and neurotypical (or at least the perceived ideals therein) as yet another way to stratify and define kids before they’re old enough to even know they’re individuals. There’s an aspect of the whole “participation trophy” thing here, too, but again that’s not the kids’ fault.

    That whole “common core math” thing? That’s a ham-handed attempt to teach people who aren’t walking around with a brain and a half how to math like people who are…written by people who aren’t and who don’t understand the internal thought processes that make things “normal” people struggle with seem so obvious to someone like me that we can barely break them down far enough to describe. (Like the reality that profit motive is always a conflict of interest and therefore probably shouldn’t be a part of socially critical infrastructure systems like health care and criminal justice…) I recognize the behavior it’s reaching for, it’s just not quite getting there because the people who designed aren’t the people who think that way – I am, that’s why I can see it.

    Unfortunately, it’s not the people who think that way, who design the curriculum; it’s the people who study the people who think that way and then try to interpret, describe, and explain it without being able to actually think that way themselves. A bit like if I were explaining a Matisse – I’ve got words to describe it all day long, but I couldn’t recreate it on a bet.

    If you’re exceptionally talented at some creative art, you owe it to the world to give them the beauty you’re capable of – or the pain – so they can find the places within themselves those feelings exist and explore them and utilize them and, when necessary, survive them.

    Not only that you owe it to all those poor souls who feel the same tempests and trials and terrors you do but lack your exceptional skill at communicating it and sharing it; you let the lost souls of the world know they’re not alone.

    If you’re exceptionally wealthy you owe it to the world who doesn’t have a lot of wealth to do what you can to help people out; nobody EARNS a billion dollars, ever – more to the point nobody EARNS their way to being that far outside the top of the bell curve economically. At best one skillfully manipulates one’s self into such a position without violating too many ethics too egregiously along the way if they’re lucky and even care to try and act ethically.

    Why do you “owe” this? Because without other people doing the same for you – usually without any idea who you are or will be or even that you, as an individual, exist – you would not be here. There isn’t a man, woman, or child alive on this planet whose existence is not predicated on millions of other men, women, and children paving the way for them. Tell yourself otherwise if you choose; that just means you’re also an arrogant liar who’s capable of successfully lying to themselves.

    Getting There

    Most anyone reading this or likely to or even able to is exceptional in at least several different ways simply for that fact. You’re literate, you have access to a computer, etc.

    If we really want to reach that shiny, peaceful, prosperous, progressive future that we’ve all dreamed about and hoped for and seen on the covers of the sci-fi novels, it is absolutely up to each and every one of us to be at our most exceptional to the greatest benefit of those around us at every possible turn.

    Is it possible to get it right every time? Of course not. But you work toward it. You strive, you don’t write it off as an impossible dream, only one that won’t be reached immediately and may never be so completely, but you can’t let that stop you because by definition that’s what striving means, it’s taking on the risk – and sometimes the reality! – of failure, learning from it, picking yourself back up and moving forward having done your best to improve yourself for the experience – if by no other means than not making the same mistake again.

    That’s how we get there.

    I haven’t always been a good human being, and I’ve never pretended to have been. But that hasn’t stopped me from getting better. Not as in somehow “cured” but as in improving in the ways that are important to me, like not being the abusive jerk I was until I faced the reality that I was making choices and started striving to choose better when I was around thirty. Sometimes I’ve failed, sometimes I’ve succeeded. Sometimes I’ve succeeded in ways that look like failures from the outside. Sometimes I’ve failed in ways that looked like successes. You keep moving, you keep trying, you keep breathing and doing your best.

    We all need to be doing that, right now, together. We need to be supporting each other in the acknowledgement of each of our individual human fallibility and failure and loving each other in spite of and sometimes because of it.

    We’re all pretty exceptional, and the list of people whose only exceptions are negative is pretty short. We owe it to ourselves, each other, and…well, the entirety of what we know as “reality” to use those exceptions together to create the best reality we can.

    The other option is having less than the best reality that we can…and why would we choose that?

    How do you find ways to use the things about you that are exceptional to help other people?

  • Can’t You Take A Joke?

    The ongoing discourse about “cancel culture” and how to “take a joke” provides a chance to reflect on our continuing evolution.

    All humor is based in pain. Much of it, in the pain of others. As Mel Brooks famously said, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

    Humans are always evolving as emotional and social creatures, always learning more about ourselves as individuals and a group, always moving forward. This means that some things lose their humor over time, again among individuals and in the culture at large.

    One of the shifts we’re currently seeing is away from the schadenfreude of humor – the taking delight in someone else’s harm, rather than laughing with them and thereby at least in part at ourselves.

    Consider the movie “Airplane!” There are three classic scenes in this movie, which still are funny in my opinion but would never get filmed in 2022: the “jive dudes,” the little girl with the coffee (“No thanks, I take it black. Like my men.”), and the panicking passenger getting the crap beat out of her. These scenes still play funny to me, and from what I see online people in 2022 watching them still laugh, if with a bit of cringe at the little girl.

    Oh stewardess, I speak jive.

    If you tried to put the jive dudes over as original work in a script today it would be shot down. Appropriation, patronizing, othering, racism – is it? or is it a joke on racism? or simply a bit of fun with caricatures of cultural difference, and the ‘racist’ aspect is something we’re superimposing because the men are black and they’re using a parody (they made up the lines) of what was called “jive” in the 70’s and we’d now call “African American Vernacular English” after figuring out “ebonics” wasn’t cutting it? – and great white hopes, portrayal of black men as incapable of communicating “properly.”

    If my job is to vet project content for the probability of negative publicity I’m all over this, here in 2022.

    Nobody – nor nearly nobody, I haven’t seen anyone take it on – is trying to “cancel” that retroactively, but if you tried to put it through a studio today they’d never let it pass…and it quite likely *would* create a bunch of rancor on social media as people debated whether Mrs. Cleaver was really an avatar for white supremacy.

    The argument has merit, although I’m not sure you could really bring it home conclusively. You could make it strongly enough to cut the scene today using today’s values and mores, is the point.

    This is the evolution of humor. We understand in 2022, because of 42 years of discourse between that scene and now, that while there is still humor there it’s also important to hold the ugly part to account and talk about it and understand it and maybe it evolves into something where perhaps if someone rebooted it today it’s more the white stewardess who couldn’t understand “jive” that’s the butt of the joke, something to mitigate the implication of punching down in the original.

    I’m not trying to kill or cancel that scene, but I’m trying to say that humor, like all creative expression, *evolves* and when it evolves it’s generally because enough people finally figured out that the pain contained within some humor is a weapon, not a release; that people can truly be hurt by our words and portrayals of our perceptions of them so maybe we should try a little harder to not be dicks.

    When I hear comedians, especially people like Bill Maher and Dave Chappelle who have been to some extent taken as progressive thought leaders, going on and on about “cancel culture” and “nobody can take a joke anymore” even as they crap all over everything people liked about them, what I hear is people who have become lazy, complacent, and selfish. They want to coast on EZ mode, doing the same routines (or at least sticking to minor variations on the same proven themes) over and over, while the audience is moving forward without them.

    Humor is an expression of pain, and there are ways we can joke and reflect on being human and feeling pain, without inflicting it. With that said, those ways are going to change and shift and evolve too, and maybe something that’s pitch perfect today will be seen in twenty or forty years as almost criminally obscene, for better or worse, right or wrong.

    Three words makes all the difference

    Our job as people is to make sure we’re honest enough with ourselves to, in those moments, own our errors and do our best to set them right. Some of that has to do with the nature of our harm perception in retrospect; it’s hurtful but does it do harm? It’s hurtful to sexualize a pre-adolescent girl for humor, but was she harmed by it? Traumatized? (Did she even get the joke? And by the way, is it funny or not? Why?) What about the social impact, do we think there was a spike in human trafficking of little white girls to Africa in response to the coffee joke? (Let’s not forget the racism in play here, too.) The most likely reasonable answer to those questions is “no.”

    Oh, just remembered the whole bit with Peter Graves and “have you ever seen a grown man naked?” Have to include that one, in this discussion. (Similar to the ubiquitous racism in two of the clips above, that one catches the casual homophobia prevalent at the time too.)

    The entire humor in both of those bits is the uncomfortable, inappropriate tension. That’s the whole thing about it that makes you laugh. But it is too inappropriate to even tell the joke, in the light of our evolving understanding?

    These kinds of questions are *always* in play. For instance I’m not sure George Carlin’s routine about the n-word is something he’d have done in the last decade of his life because we evolved to understand that word is hurtful coming out of a white mouth and directed at a black person, regardless of whether it’s “meant to be” or not. Carlin being a linguistic genius and also a bit of a trickster god on it, may have still done the bit…but I’m not sure. I think he would’ve put a great deal more thought into whether the joke (or the deeper points behind it) would be obscured or mitigated or negated by his use of that word, and most importantly whether his work could be used to “punch down.”
    I’m glad to have cultivated an audience that seems to have a pretty good instinctive grip on where the lines are and why.

    When you stick to principle – “don’t punch down” – you’re less likely to make even an honest mistake, one borne of naive ignorance rather than malice, that hurts someone, and less likely to be whining about getting “canceled” while you’re selling out venues and appearing on every late night talk show. It’s still not easy mind you – knowing when you’re punching down is a function of empathy, which is also always evolving and refining – but it’s a good basic principle, and if you keep it in the back of your head while you’re doing your thing you’ll probably avoid saying anything you’ll wish later that you hadn’t.

  • International Women’s Day: Wendy O. Williams

    When it comes to glass ceilings, there are those who break them…and those who smash through them happily chewing the glass as they go.

    Happy International Women’s Day, 2022!

    I somehow manage to not remember this until it happens every year, but in a happy little bit of accident International Women’s Day, March 8th, is also my daughter Amber’s birthday, so happy birthday to her!

    Back in the late 70’s and 80’s when we were all strung out on cocaine and wearing animal prints and most of the guys in rock music had more makeup and hairspray than most of the girls which was definitely a violation of norms at the time, one woman stood above so many other incredible trailblazers to permanently destroy the idea that women had to be nice and soft and innocent and pure.

    A self-described “marginal nymphomaniac and terminal exhibitionist,” Wendy O. Williams was unabashedly foul-mouthed, aggressive, and dominant. In a time when the concept of a “strong” or “empowered” women was parsed socially to mean “masculine” or “aggressive” in popular culture, in the mold of Grace Jones or Brigitte Nielsen, Wendy O wasn’t just opening doors, she was smashing walls…and she was using your face for a hammer while screaming in a voice that sounded like a torch singer gargling razor blades.

    It’ll look strange to the youngsters of 2022, to see this woman in what seems to be a weird take on a fairly typical cheesecake video, but in 1984 this was (sometimes literally) the bleeding edge of female empowerment. This was the woman who wrapped notorious womanizer Gene Simmons around her finger so tightly she got his entire band to work on her album plus one of the guy who had already left!

    Of course I’m playing glib with Simmons’ reputation, but there can be no doubt that Wendy O. had a very special place in Gene’s heart, and he pushed hard for her, and good for him. It’s a little funny to see photos of the two of them back in the day, with the normally “Mr. Dominant/God Of Thunder” just about giggling at this amazing human being. (Kiss later took on a song of slightly disputed provenance which they’d given to Williams, “It’s My Life,” and recorded it as a single for their late 90’s album “Psycho Circus.” However even then it ended up being cut from the album and remained unreleased until their 2001 box set. I had a false memory of this being a much more successful KISS song than I thought, but it turns out not to be the case…which is actually a little weird, it’s a high-quality pop-commercial-arena-rock and they did it well.)

    Fun fact: she did her own stunts in this.

    Many of the bios you’ll find online now will tend to suggest that there was a lot of manufactured hype behind Williams and her band the Plasmatics, but don’t let the ability to see through that now in ways people just couldn’t and didn’t forty years ago skew the picture. It was theater macabre, in the grand tradition. Sledgehammers and shotguns and chainsaws casually being thrown around by a mohawked blonde woman wearing nothing but electrical tape on her nipples, patent leather bikini bottoms, and a sneer, sawing and hammering her way through guitars, televisions, and Cadillacs on stage.

    It would be easy to blow her off from our perspective 40 years later as just another exploited woman in the age of hairbands when women in rock music were still largely relegated to the dressing rooms. In a world of nordic metal and buzz-saw punk you’d probably get kids laughing at you for even suggesting there was anything “metal” or “punk” about Wendy and the Plasmatics, but in the early 80’s this woman was the definition of “punk rock girl.” The now-largely-forgotten doors she broke down stayed open for eventually millions of girls and women to walk through whether as musicians or anything else they wanted to be.

    There are a million bios of Ms. Williams out there and I don’t want to recreate them. There are also a million pre-fab hot takes on a million prominent women, every one of them well-accomplished and worthy of praise, and I don’t want to try to recreate that either.

    Instead on this International Woman’s Day, I’d like us to think about the women who weren’t doctors or physicists or poets or dancers, who weren’t comfortable and whose success didn’t necessarily fit neatly into pre-established but traditionally male-dominated paradigms like academia, science, and business.

    Ms. Williams’ long and, if you believe the image, surprising list of laudable personal behaviors and beliefs is exhausting – a committed vegetarian since the 60s, didn’t use drugs beyond some experimentation as a teenager, huge advocate for animal rights, anti-establishment rabble-rouser…her idea of a safe sex PSA in 1984 (when we barely knew what AIDS was, had only just begun to understand how it worked and what HIV was, other than a death sentence) – and this is no fooling – was “if it doesn’t taste good, don’t take it home and sleep with it.”

    So speaketh Mama Wendy

    One of the things that set Williams apart even from so many other women who own and leverage their sexuality for popular appeal is that she never left you with the impression she was coming out on stage wearing nothing but shaving cream (a set piece that got her arrested twice, which was the beginning of the electrical tape) to get anyone off but herself. She wasn’t “trying to get your attention,” she was taking it, and doing so for her own pleasure and satisfaction and amusement and fulfillment. She wasn’t out there showing you her chest because you wanted to see it, but because she wanted to show it to everyone. Whether they wanted to see it or not wasn’t taken into consideration…and the overtones there about consent weren’t an accident on her part, even if we didn’t really have the language in 1984 that we do now to say that.

    Another of rock’s more forward-thinking leading female lights, Chrissie Hynde, once said “Remember you’re in a rock and roll band. It’s not ‘fuck me,’ it’s ‘fuck you!’” Wendy O. Williams strapped on a sneer and said “Both sounds like a lot of fun, along with some exploding sedans…” Sometimes compared to later trashpunk icon GG Allin, the comparison doesn’t hold up. Allin was a doped out self-absorbed nihilist. Williams was a hyper-theatrically inclined hedonist with a penchant for violent imagery and a lifelong habit of deliberately challenging of “traditional female behavior” at every turn, going back to getting arrested for sunbathing nude on the town common at fifteen…in 1964.

    After the noise and hype had died down significantly and the unprecedented expressions and behavior she created became its own mainstream, Ms. Williams in 1991 declared herself “pretty fed up with people” and moved with her longtime partner Rod Swenson into a geodesic dome house they built together in a small town in Connecticut. There she worked rehabilitating animals and at a local food co-op.

    Beginning in 1994, her lifelong depression combined with the fundamental conflict between her theatrical, hedonistic personality and the more pastoral existence of a post-fame middle-aged small-town animal caretaker and grocer in Connecticut led her to several suicide attempts, the last of which was successful in 1998. Unlike many high-profile (and low-profile for that matter), Williams went to great care to make certain it was known her decision came after many years of long consideration and contemplation, and was not a spur of the moment act prompted by an acute mental health crisis. In one of her suicide notes, she wrote:

    The act of taking my own life is not something I am doing without a lot of thought. I don’t believe that people should take their own lives without deep and thoughtful reflection over a considerable period of time. I do believe strongly, however, that the right to do so is one of the most fundamental rights that anyone in a free society should have. For me much of the world makes no sense, but my feelings about what I am doing ring loud and clear to an inner ear and a place where there is no self, only calm.

    Long before that, though, Williams was quite clear about her approach to her art and her purpose in performing it:

    “We’re not out to pick fights. But then the essence of what we do is shaking up the middle class; I think if you don’t do that with your music, you’re just adding to the noise pollution.”

    With her music and so much more, Wendy O. Williams was absolutely the most genuine of pioneers in the women’s movement while functioning almost entirely outside of it as she did nearly every other movement, group, club, cabal, trend, bandwagon, style, or cause. On this day of international celebration of women and their unique contributions to our world and our cultures, let’s those of us who live on the fringes remember the lady who shredded those fringes from an old pair of cut-off shorts around 1978, the incomparable Wendy O. Williams.

    I would say “may she rest in peace,” but I’m pretty sure she’d rather be chainsawing a guitar in half on stage.

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  • Drugs, Sex, and Rock & Roll

    [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jNt7ZGCW-o[/embedyt]

    The Problem

    Sweet’s “Fox On The Run.”  Perhaps the distilled essence of what we now call variously “glitter rock” or “glam rock” or “power pop.”

    Another great song that’s gonna get canceled as soon as the “woke” folk read the lyrics.  You can find ’em yourself if you want, but allow me to summarize:

    “[verse 1 & 2]Hi, I’m a rock star.  Yes, you’re a female indicating you want to have sex with me, or at least you’re a female in my general vicinity and that’s close enough because it’s 1974 and we still think “leaving the house” constitutes consent.  From a distance in the dark, you appeared to be a female of legal age to have sex (note well:  that’s not 18, this is a UK band from the 70’s; “underage” is 15 and under, not 17), but now that you’re up close you’re clearly too young and [chorus] you have to go.  [Verse 3 & 4]  Hi, it’s years later and I’m still a rock star.  You’re still a female and you are again indicating you want to have sex with me.  I remember you from when you were too young, but now you’re old enough and you’ve clearly been around a bit and had some fun…and I liked you better the other way, that is to say ‘innocent,’ that is to say ‘underage.’  [Chorus] Bye, Felicia.”

    So let’s take this one thing at a time.  First, I think it’s about time we had a clear, open, and straightforward conversation about sex in popular culture.  That conversation goes like this:

    FFS, people. POPULAR MUSIC IS ABOUT SEX. GETTING LAID. DOING NAUGHTY THINGS. BREAKING RULES. DOING THE NASTY. ROCKING. AND. ROLLING.  Even when it’s not, it is.

    I’m so, so, so, SOOOOOOOOOOO sick of living in a culture where we all pretend very loudly to hate sex on social media and in public, where we all act like nobody’s got any kinks or hangups, and absolutely every single person waited until they were a happily married adult before engaging in sexual congress for the purposes of procreation only, when we all know better and just don’t admit it.

    THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU LET MRS. GRUNDY MAKE THE RULES.

    Everybody lies about sex.

    It’s bullshit. Just another facet of that same old big picture where some old white guy goes ‘NO’ and we all go “hhhokay” and from now on that’s the rule and we all have to cooperate with it (or pretend to) on pain of shunning. BULLSHIT.

    You know what else? If you DON’T like sex THAT’S FINE TOO. You don’t HAVE to. Those of us who do might feel like maybe you’re missing out, but in the end it’s your business and nobody else’s.  There are WAY more than enough folks who are into it procreationally to cheerfully accommodate and fully staff a population of those who are into it more recreationally, or not at all!

    And guess what? As long as we’re not putting our hands on anyone who can’t give or hasn’t given informed consent for our hands to be on them, it’s FINE. It’s all FINE. And we nearly all do it. The very fact of something being forbidden or taboo or socially risky is commonly what tends to turn people on about it; I’m telling you, we’re not as different as we think we are and you’re probably not nearly as big a pervert as you think, relatively speaking.

    Feathers vs. Chickens

    With that in mind it’s not unreasonable to say every damned single one of us has SOME kind of kink. All a kink is, is something that you find sexually pleasurable that, generally speaking, falls outside the range of “strictly one man, one woman, missionary position, no funny talk or spank and tickle.”  Your kink might be oral once a year, that guy over there’s kink might be the only way he can really enjoy himself is with six Armenian jugglers.  Long as he can find six Armenian jugglers who consent, I fail to see any problem with that at all.

    That’s where the term “vanilla” as used in communities related to kink comes from – because some folks like vanilla ice cream, and some folks like rocky road or black cherry or mint chocolate chip.  Some folks might like them all on alternating days, or at the same time, and as long as the ice cream is cool with it, it’s all good.

    And some folks might not like ice cream at all and that’s cool too.

    Heck, your kink might be simply the wonderful feeling you get from being intimate with someone you love.  Destigmatize that word “kink” in your head a bit, it’ll do you good.

    We have seen incredible growth in our understanding of human dignity and interpersonal respect, in my lifetime.  Things I did in my twenties I wouldn’t do if I was twenty now, because back then we didn’t really know the less egregious stuff was as bad as it manifestly proved to be.  That’s good change – that’s GREAT if you are (or present as) female.

    But it sucks if you really are just a person who was part of the context of groupies and nobody’s checking ID’s at the afterparty and all that stuff, never set out to hurt anyone, never got pushy or shitty with someone when you got told no, didn’t take advantage of anyone when they were passed out or otherwise so incapacitated as to be unable to give meaningful consent, did your best to be respectful and decent, and twenty, thirty, thirty-five years later you’re supposed to feel like an asshole because you *should have* known in 1991 that when a woman walks up to you and offers you free drugs and sex after a gig, she’s probably got serious issues and may need immediate help.

    No, in 1991 the expected and entirely common response to that situation was “let’s party,” and frankly I think it’s well worth discussing it with the participants of the time on the “female side” of that conversation before we go assuming all or even most of them feel or in fact were abused, exploited, or assaulted.

    Kill Your Idols

    The simple reality is that not all our heroes are all we wish they were, and we’re coming to grips with that.  We haven’t yet developed a clear and consistent standard to retroactively apply – what Kevin Spacey did was a million miles away from what Al Franken did…but they both paid the same price, didn’t they?  Because Spacey was an active predator whose behavior wasn’t even acceptable under the morals of the time and place it happened, whereas Franken is guilty of incredibly tangential and minor involvement in a bit of ribald humor typical of its time and place, and has expressed regret and even self-loathing at the idea that he participated in anything that genuinely hurt anyone.  It was “all in fun,” and in that time and place there wasn’t anything abnormal or really even mildly offensive about it, as evidenced by the clear and unmitigated enthusiasm and fun being had by the woman Franken’s accused of sexually assaulting visible in the tape of the incident.

    I think these errors of scope and scale, the refined discernment that truly must become a part of this process of recursively examining our past in the every-increasing light of new knowledge and wisdom, will sort themselves out in time.

    I just hope we can remember how to enjoy an old pop song with a good hook – and this one’s on the same heap as “You’re Sixteen” and “Only Sixteen” and all of the other work, in many cases full of beauty and talent, that stands as an uncomfortable and inconvenient reminder of the reality that as recently as thirty years ago it was still socially acceptable enough for a thirty year man to write a song about having the hots for a minor to have it become a hit.

    There’s nothing wrong with taking a critical look, just like there’s nothing wrong with taking a critical look at Twain’s use of the n-word in his writing.

    Unintended Consequences

    There is something wrong with pretending that stuff never happened or even that it doesn’t still constitute aesthetically pleasing art of its type.  Not only all of the sort of liberal and sex-positive things I’ve already outlined, but there’s one more much more ominous facet to all of this sweeping under rugs of dirty little secrets:

    It gives cover to predators.

    It drives people who engage in “non-vanilla” but still entirely legal behavior further into the shadows, where it becomes harder for communities to self-police and social stigma makes it much more difficult to prosecute active sexual predators.  Victims of abuse are already afraid to come forward because they’re like to be kink shamed and maybe even arrested by police, especially in same-sex situations because bigotry.

    Making everyone who’s a little kinky feel like Ted Bundy doesn’t solve any problem and makes it much easier for the real Ted Bundys of the world to do their damage, and that’s the end result of all this pearl-clutching.  Making it impossible to talk about sex doesn’t protect anyone, or at least not from much or for long.

    So definitely, hold people responsible.  Let’s not have Gary Glitter raking in millions in royalties from US sports broadcasts after being convicted multiple times of active and predatory pedophilia.  Let’s not just keep on with the “boys will be boys” crap.

    But let’s also make sure we’re keeping a fair and reasoned perspective.  No matter how many enlightened individuals there are, there simply is no reason to fault a person in 1955 for accepting as normal that his wife wasn’t allowed to get credit without his permission, because it was normal back then.  Many of those present at the time fought and even died to help secure the rights and privileges we’re now trying to retroactively condemn them for not supporting.

    Credit Where It’s Due

    It is in fact the very considerations of that guy in 1955, Mr. Joe Slightly-More-Progressive-Than-Average, asking himself whether that normality was really fair that advanced the conversation far enough that you can look back at him in condescension now.  The same’s true of the stuff I’m talking about above; those of us who were “on the ground” so to speak were the ones who by and large explored and defined and brought to life these new ways of understanding, new boundaries, new rules of respectful communication.

    We fought, hard, not just in public rhetoric but in our own heads to resolve that cognitive dissonance between our norms and our values, and to adjust our behavior and make it acceptable.  Sure, not all of us were on board, and not everyone who’s 21 is free from bigotry and sexual aggression now, either, but we – particularly “us” as in people now called “generation X” as well as the hippie segment of the Boomers who preceded us – had to actually *discover* this stuff through trial and error, and genuinely wrestle with the dawning realization that some of our behavior wasn’t acceptable even if she DID say yes, and we needed to make some changes.

    So I don’t want to get into some dumb inter-generational argument, but try to keep all this in mind when you’re standing there, immersed since birth in the values that we made norms, and thinking about getting sanctimonious because we didn’t adhere perfectly to those values before they were even fully developed.  Trust me, your kids are gonna do the same to you, and in retrospect they’ll have just as much cause.

  • Cutting Education Funding Is Wrong (2011)

    Another of those subjects that just refuses to go away because the fascists we’ve allowed to take part in our government know that keeping us stupid is their best weapon.

    The sound quality on this really stinks, I’m afraid, and I don’t know why. Unfortunately all the source video has been lost to the inevitable costs of poverty, but if it’s that tough to hear feel free to DM me via FB or Twitter and I’ll go ahead and transcribe it here.

    What’s interesting about this video to me is that it inadvertently documents one of those “things I never do,” in this case working with Eric Byler and a group of fellow students who eventually called ourselves “Michigan’s Future” (clearly reflective of my traditionally-aged colleagues!) at Western Michigan University to get a resolution passed by the local city council that they would refuse to enforce any attempt at creating an Arizona-style “show your papers” law. I’m pretty bad about documenting the things I do; in this case it turns out that I did, and totally forgot. You also see legendary Kalamazoo city council member Don Cooney speaking at a pro-education rally, among other things; Don turns up again in a documentary I did about the Occupy movement.

  • Land Of The Lost (2009/2011)

    This is where a lot of things started for me. In 2009 I was invited by some “friends” to move to California. Turned out they were expecting me to service the lady of the house, which I was not really up for. When said lady carved my name into her chest, it was time to go. I’ve never told that part of the story until now.

    This video was recorded while I was on the streets in Woodland, CA in 2009, and originally published in 2011. It’s fair to say I’ve never really recovered, and as I write this in 2023 find myself again on the streets. It’s not easy to watch, but the folks who care about that sort of thing aren’t reading this site anyway.