Click on the cartoon to see it bigger. Happy Labor Day!
Found these via my Flist on LiveJournal last week and thought to share them with you. First up is an awesome short film (I guess that’s what it would be called) of Djimon Hounsou reading Binyavanga Wainaina excellent essay “How Not to Write About Africa“.
via Delux
And now for something completely different. I am aware that Glen Beck is unbalanced and unhinged, but as I don’t watch live TV that much, I only get glimpses and often forget just how insane he seems. Then people put up videos like this and I watch in amazement all over again. At least this one is of Keith Olberman making fun of him:
Glen seems to be painfully unaware of Greek sculpture and art. Also, he seems to think that someone can be a communist and a facist without having a split personality. I mean, seriously, people like this just sort of lump in all groups of people they consider “evil” and then accuse you of being all of them at once. Like, “OMG you are in the Nation of Islam AND the KKK!!!” The ignorance, it is staggering.
via rozk
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This. For the win.
Incidentally, if you haven’t seen Der Untergang, I highly recommend it. It’s a masterful portrayal of the pitiful, puny end of the Third Reich — in many ways, the sort of end a megalomaniac like Hitler must have despised. I hope so, anyhow.
The first thing that we are going to need to know, is, what exactly is Intersexuality?
Then we are ready for the history behind sex testing. Transgriot starts off with Gender Drama at the 1936 Olympics
Robert Ritchie, John Reynard and Tom Lewis continue with Intersex and the Olympic Games
In the following 30 years, the sporting media speculated that several other female athletes had DSDs because they possessed physical attributes which would generally be associated with the male sex. Still without formal gender verification, these rumours remained as such, fuelled by the media who were fully aware that there would be never be any scientific evidence to disprove them. Thus, journalists reported that genetically male Eastern Bloc athletes were binding their genitals and competing as females. Gender controversy also surrounded Irina and Tamara Press, two Russian sisters (Figure 2) who were dominant in a variety of female track and field events during the 1950s and 1960s. They won 26 world records and six Olympic gold medals.
As media hype [eyeroll] reached fever pitch, compulsory gender verification in the form of a gynaecological examination was introduced prior to the 1966 European athletics championship. In these so-called ‘nude parades’, athletes were forced to stand naked in front of a committee and were subjected to an inspection of their external gentalia. 243 women attended for examination and no abnormalities were reported. Neither of the Press sisters attended and they were never to appear in athletic competition again. Their absence was widely interpreted as evidence they both possessed abnormal external genitalia. It is still not known whether the Press sisters deliberately misrepresented their gender or, as seems more likely, they both had a DSD.….
Notably, gender testing in athletics has never identified an individual deliberately misrepresenting their gender.11,12 Testing has, however, created controversy and embarrassment for a significant number of female athletes competing, often unknowingly, with some form of intersex disorder. Indeed, there is no evidence that female athletes with DSDs have displayed any sports-relevant physical attributes which have not been seen in biologically normal female athletes.6,12 MORE
Need a couple of examples of athletes who have been fucked over by this ridiculous system? I am so glad you asked! Thats a man:Ewa Klobukowska, Erika Schinegger, Maria Jose Martinez Patino, Santhi Soundarajan More on Santhi Soundarajan.
But there is more to it than that, although, frustratingly, I missed my chance to present it to you. There is an essay that was online up to last week. It is one of the best essays on the history of this topic that I have read, The Olympics: The Early Days of Gender Testing, by Patrica Nell. Unfortunately, she has taken it down. It is in her anthology, though, and I for one think that that essay alone is worth the book price.
Let me give you a hint. Pay attention to the bit on the Cold War
Sociological Images out with a great post The question of Caster Semenya’s sex
If you were to try to decide what qualifies a person as male or female, what quality would you choose?
I can think of eight candidates:1. Identity (whatever the person says they are, they are)
2. Sexual orientation (boys dig girls, vice versa)
3. Secondary sex characteristics (e.g., boobs/no boobs, pubic hair patterns, distribution of fat on the body)
4. External genitalia (e.g., clitoris, labia, vaginal opening/penis and scrotum)
5. Internal genitalia (e.g., vagina, uterus, and fallopian tubes/epididymis, vas deferens, seminal vesicles, prostate, etc)
6. Hormones (preponderance of estrogens/androgens)
7. Gonads (ovaries/testes)
8. Chromosomes (XX/XY, the SRY gene)Most of us assume that these criteria all line up. That is, that people with XY chromosomes have testes that make androgens which creates a penis, epididymis, vas deferens etc… all the way up to a male-identified person who wants to have sex with women. We also assume that these things are binary (e.g., boobs/no boobs), when in reality most of them are on a spectrum (e.g., hormones, also boobs, likely sexual orientation).
But these criteria don’t always line up and sex-linked charactertics aren’t binary. Examples of “syndromes” that disrupt these trajectories abound (e.g., Klinefelter’s syndrome). And all kinds of practices, including surgeries, are sometimes used to force a binary when there isn’t one (e.g., intersex surgery to fix the “micropenis” and “obtrustive” clitoris and breast reduction surgery for men).
If these criteria don’t always line up, then we have to pick one as THE determinant of sex. But any choice would ultimately be arbitrary. MORE
Indeed. As links, Where’s the Rulebook for Sex Verification?
HHMI BioInteractive website takes you inside a gender test, with lots of information along the way. (Click particularly on the brief history of gender testing link.)It felt pretty creepy and invasive to me, though, so be warned. The Gender Test
The Third Lane: Intersex and the Modern Athlete contains more info about the different variations in our bodies that challenge the binary that society has, until now, clung stubbornly to.
Because of society’s assholishness in dealing with this issue, it is very hard to find a good list of intersexed athletes currently competing, or having competed until recently. That said, here are a couple:
Edinancni Silva, Brazilian judo, Sarah Gronert, Tennis (That headline writer needs to be hit with several clue by fours, by the way. It was the best article I could find, however. sigh. ) Rob Newbiggen, boxer Just decided to transition to female, hopes to get a female boxing license. You all have anymore to add?
Finally, have you noticed something with these athletes so far? One of their biggest problems come when they beat their opponents…and the opponents promptly accuse them of being men. (by the way, seriously, do read the articles. because they will state that there is NO scientific evidence that any intersex athlete has any advantage over their other competitors.) For a case of tragic schadenfreude, see Nigerian gender chickens coming home to roost: The case of Intersex football (what you all call soccer) striker Bessy Ekaete Boniface
Thats it for today, folks! Next week: Transgender female athletes.
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American Women Athletes Part Two: How intersex athletes are punished by the gender testing system
The following post contains an extended discussion of Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Inglourious Basterds. There will be spoilers. If you haven’t seen the film, please enjoy this short video from the 1968 Mel Brooks film The Producers. Otherwise, feel free to click below.
Really, Pat Buchanan? Really?
Why, when Paris fell, did Hitler not demand the French fleet, as the Allies demanded and got the Kaiser’s fleet? Why did he not demand bases in French-controlled Syria to attack Suez? Why did he beg Benito Mussolini not to attack Greece?
Because Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps.
Hitler had never wanted war with Poland, but an alliance with Poland such as he had with Francisco Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy, Miklos Horthy’s Hungary and Father Jozef Tiso’s Slovakia.
Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939, he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France. And he had written off Alsace, because reconquering Alsace meant war with France, and that meant war with Britain, whose empire he admired and whom he had always sought as an ally.
Now, this is not the first time that Pat Buchanan has expressed the opinion that Hitler is a tragically misunderstood figure who only killed about 14 million Jews, homosexuals, Roma, people with disabilities, Russians, Catholics, and other people who committed the sin of being not-sufficiently-Aryan because the Allies were mean ol’ bullies. In Buchanan’s mind, Hitler was simply going about his business, taking over Czechoslovakia because they only gave him the Sudetenlandand he wanted a better view of Hungary, and invading Poland because they wouldn’t agree to let Germany have Gdańsk, when suddenly, wham-o!, the Allies decide to fight him, simply because they had an alliance with Poland. The nerve! Then, what choice did he have but to commit mass genocide on a breathtaking scale? I mean, it’s pretty much the obvious course of action, am I right?
This is, needless to say, completely and utterly blinkered. Matt Yglesias does a nice job of summarizing:
[I]t’s perfectly clear that Hitler did want to invade Russia. The need for a German-Soviet war to obtain lebensraum was long at the center of his thinking. That’s whyGeneralplan Ost was prepared in the early years of the war and called for German occupation of vast swathes of Soviet territory. The answer to Buchanan’s riddle of how Hitler intended to invade Russia when Russia and Germany were separated by Poland is, of course, that Hitler intended to conquer Poland, the very thing that Buchanan is perversely trying to deny he intended to do.The real question for Buchanan is why, if Hitler had no intention of marching through Poland into Russia, did he follow up his conquest of Poland by breaking the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and invading Russia? The answer, of course, is that Hitler wanted to conquer Eastern Europe and the western USSR from the beginning.
The answer, of course, is that Pat Buchanan wants to believe Adolf Hitler was misunderstood, and wasn’t an enemy of America and the West, because deep down, he finds much of what Hitler stood for to be admirable. He’s anti-gay (not homophobic; he doesn’t fear homosexuals, he wants to eliminate them), he’s racist, he’s sexist, and he’s deeply, offensively anti-Semitic. He has trafficked in Holocaust denial, going so far as to refer to “group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics” from those suffering from “so-called Holocaust survivor syndrome.”
I know, I know, Godwin’s law says that I can’t say Pat Buchanan is a Nazi sympathizer. So I’ll just quote the man himself:
Hitler was also an individual of great courage, a soldier’s soldier in the Great War, a political organizer of the first rank, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him…Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.
—Patrick J. Buchanan, 1977
So Pat Buchanan is an avowed admirer of Adolf Hitler who once claimed that nobody was gassed at Treblinka because “Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody.” This is not news. We’ve known this for thirty years. And yet he keeps showing up on MSNBC, over and over and over again.
I frankly don’t know what it would take for Pat Buchanan to lose his job at this point, although he most certainly should. Decent societies may let anti-Semites speak, but they don’t invite them to dinner parties. But in a way, I’m glad he sticks around. One can draw a bright line from Buchanan’s 1996 Presidential run — when he won New Hampshire and threatened Bob Dole for the nomination — straight through to the teabagger movement today. When Pitchfork Pat called on his supporters not to wait for orders from headquarters, but to mount up and ride to the sound of the guns, he inspired the worst elements of the right. He is the voice of a large segment of the Republican Party. And he is a supporter of the worst human being to live in the last two hundred years. And those two things, sadly, are not in conflict.
Via Angry Asian Man, a great article that makes a point about the ineffectiveness of protests about racism in mainstream Hollywood films. Basically, if we don’t patronize the good portrayals created by our own filmmakers, we’re unlikely to see much change in the racist dreck being cranked out by the Hollywood factories, because they pay attention only to money.
But then, the conversation turned to the work of Asian American filmmakers. And it turned out he had not paid to see any of the following films in the theaters—Better Luck Tomorrow, Saving Face, Finishing The Game, The Motel, In-Between Days, The Debut, Journey From The Fall. In fact, he couldn’t think of one Asian American indie he had paid money to see theatrically—the closest he came was the last Harold and Kumar movie, which hardly counts as an independently produced Asian American film. He was talking passionately about how we need to force Hollywood to change and show respect to our community, but even he admitted he had not done much to support our artists and our work.
Unfortunately, this brother’s story is not isolated. And herein lies the problem—it’s great that we’re willing to speak out when we see something that offends us. But until Asian Americans as a whole are willing to put down our money to support the work of our Asian American filmmakers—nothing will change.
It’s a good point. But something about it bugs me.
Because it assumes something that I’m not sure is true, and feeds into a bigger problem. What Phillip suggests is that if Asian Americans just go and view more Asian American films, this will show Hollywood there’s a significant demand for positive portrayals. The same reasoning, IMO, underlies African Americans’ patronization of black films (and African American Interest books, and so on) — we’ve taken to heart the racist rationalization that if we don’t make it ourselves, and go see it ourselves, we can’t expect the mainstream to follow suit.
Except… African Americans have been making it ourselves, since the Sixties. We’ve been going to see those films, too, enough to create several blockbusters, catapult several African American filmmakers to auteur status, and launch a few subcultural film/theater movements.
But has all this success — all this proof that we will support our own — really changed anything in Hollywood? We’re still getting slapped in the face with grotesque stereotypes, and “allegories” for the black experience of racism that Fail miserably. (I’m kind of dreading Cameron’s much-hyped Avatar, ya’ll. Looks like yet another “what these people need is a honky” derivation.) There’s still only one black male per generation permitted to reach A-list status — first Sidney Poitier, then Denzel Washington, lately Will Smith. And more often than not that black male is paired with a non-black female, out of the apparent belief in Hollywood that one black person on screen is tolerable, but two — especially if they’re showing love for one another — is just too damn many. (BTW, name a current black female A-list actress. Go on, try. Good luck with that.)
So basically, African Americans have been doing exactly what Phillip advocates for 50+ years now, and it hasn’t changed a damn thing in Hollywood. Which suggests to me that there’s a fundamental flaw in Phillip’s premise. He’s suggesting that money is Hollywood’s guiding philosophy. I think he’s forgetting the role that racism — some intentional, most aversive — plays in the way Hollywood people think. Money is just the excuse/rationalization that they use.
And to counter this racism, we have to do more than go and view films by demographic, as Phillip suggests. One of the justifications used by the producers of whitewashed films like 21 and The Last Airbender is that PoC aren’t “universal”. That actors of color might be able to appeal to audiences of color, but to really make the leap to broad mainstream (i.e., white) appeal, white actors must be inserted, even into PoC’s stories. This is racist bullshit, yes, but it’s racist bullshit that Hollywood keeps trying to support with numbers which show that PoC actors don’t pull the audiences that white actors do. So does it make sense to urge Asian Americans to go see Asian American films? That actually proves the Hollywood racists’ point — because of course those PoC actors won’t be able to pull big numbers if they’re only pulling an audience from within their respective communities. If only Asian Americans go to see Asian American films in any numbers, and only African Americans go to see black films, and so on, the racists can point at this and say, “See? PoC only appeal to their own.”
And yeah, I get the irony here. The whole reason these demographic-specific film industries have cropped up is because Hollywood has historically excluded us… but they’ll also use the existence of these industries to exclude us further. We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.
But here’s my proposed solution: all of us, regardless of race, need to go and see all good films, regardless of their target demographic. We need to see more Latino/a viewers attending events like the Asian American film festival. We need to see more black filmmakers creating films for that event, and more Asian filmmakers making stuff for black and Latino/a film festivals. We need to see more American Indians behind the camera, and sticking their shit into every festival with “American” in its title, regardless of the racial qualifier that comes before it. And so on.
And we as audiences need to attend all of it. Yes, I mean you, fellow black Americans. Put down that ticket to Tyler Perry’s next monstrosity; he’s gotten enough of our money and hasn’t done shit with it. (Well, except this. But he’s got to do a lot more before I’ll forgive him for all the rest.) Pick up your mouse and find a film by some other ethnic group that’s playing in your area. You can still stick to black people — we still need to support our own, especially given that there’s better stuff out there than Perry’s work. (If you can’t find anything recent, go see some older stuff that never got enough attention.) But in addition to work by African American filmmakers, maybe you can go see a Nollywood film too. Then branch out more. Did you go see Sleep Dealer when I told you to? Lazy ass. Now you gotta go buy it. (Shoulda listened to me, but nooo, you had to be hard headed.)
We still need to protest, IMO, because racism won’t change on its own. But I’m taking Phillip’s point to heart; we need the carrot as well as the stick. We’ve got to support the positive portrayals that are already out there. And that includes work by other PoC, because all this stuff feeds into each other. We’ll get more successful black actors in Hollywood once we prove that Latinos/as will go and see them. We’ll get more Asian actors when we can prove they appeal to black audiences. We’ll see fewer pretendians when audiences start going to see real Indians. And so on.
So. What films by/about another race are you planning to see this year?
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The problem with viewing films by demographic.
Mandolin’s short story “A Monkey Will Never Be Rid Of It’s Black Hands,” previously mentioned on “Alas” when it was honored by storySouth, has now been podcasted by Escape Pod.
Mandolin has said this is her favorite of her own stories, so it’s very worth checking out. (Although I should perhaps warn folks that this is a very harsh story, and includes effects of war mutilations).
For those of you who prefer to receive stories through your eyes, the text of the story is available here.
LOL, thanks!
I want to put that WORDS poster on a t-shirt!
While Bob Hope was indeed an immigrant, white anglo saxon protestant male immigrants are explicitly welcomed by the current shitocracy…
I bet I.C.E. comes back for them later.
@Avvaa: I'm not sure even WASP male immigrants are welcome. There have been several tourists who have been detained because…