Hypatia's Girl cautiously returns to blogging, and begins quietly without all that swearing and shit

My Master’s thesis was born, like a phoenix, in a fire.  A fire that did not, directly, consume anything in my life, but took rather the worldly possessions of two good friends of mine. Including, in the case of one friend, all of the documentation that proved that he was, in fact, who he claimed to be.  There are all these interesting moments in life that offer a chance to suddenly confront an aspect of privilege that had heretofore been obscured.  The loss of a friend’s ability to politically appear, however briefly, was such a moment.  The privilege that I carry with me in my wallet filled with plastic and paper and my name and my picture and a host of other numbers and letters that are somehow me-as-I-am-politically, or digitally, was not one I had thought of before.  I was never worried that the systems of politics that arch over everything we do as a community would be unable or unwilling to recognize me.  Realizing that such a lack of recognition could be possible left me wondering about identity and the construction of the person by the state.  (We might ask how much of this precise thought was rolled into my actual thesis, but let’s not)

The text message I got this morning was of a similar kind of privilege check.

Hypatia's Household Goes to the Movies and Hypatia's Girl Swears Off Pop Culture

That's it.  I'm done.
I'm over dude culture so hard.  I'm sure that life is really scary if you're a dude and all with women who do things like leave you and aren't super duper excited that you've impregnated them and want you do things like ZOMG hyphenate YOUR last name with hers JUST BECAUSE YOU GOT MARRIED.  It sounds fucking awful.

So Hypatia's Household was restless and went to see a movie.  We went to see Hot Tub Time Machine.  How could you possibly go wrong with a movie whose premise is there is a hot tub, and it's a time machine.  It has John fucking Cusack, for fuck's sake.  How do you fuck it up?

You make the whole movie an extended joke about homophobia, non-consensual sex, how fucking hard it is to be a dude and then you throw in some racism (just a smidgen).

What I learned from Hot Tub Time Machine:
Dudes are sad when their women leave them.  But sad only in a kind of plot point so that we know that John Cusack is kind of sad, it's hard to be him.  But it's WAY more sad when his high school girlfriend breaks up with him, WHEN HE'S 40 AND SHE'S ACTUALLY STILL A TEENAGER. Also it's not fucking creepy IN THE SLIGHTEST when you find out that you're married to a woman THAT YOU ACTUALLY ONLY KNEW FOR LESS THAN 2 HOURS.

(Black) dudes are sad when their women ask them to give up their dream of being a mediocre singer and are really emasculated when they have to sacrifice their identity, THEIR PERSONAL SENSE OF SELF by CHANGING THEIR FUCKING NAME WHEN THEY GET MARRIED by hyphenating with hers.  THIS, DUDES, IS THE WORST THING EVER, but it's probably ok if she changes her name to yours without hyphenating at all, in fact, it's probably fucking emasculating if not, because, apparently LIFE IS FUCKING SO HARD FOR DUDES.  Also dudes are sad when their women cheat on them.  But not so sad that they talk to the women about the email they broke into to find out about the cheating. And I'm assuming this is harder for Black dudes, because we all know how fucking pushy ALL Black women are.  For reals.

It's totally NOT AT ALL A RAPEY THING TO DO to get a woman drunk to sleep with her.  Nor is it at all to be remarked on that you INTENTIONALLY KNOCK HER UP.  AGAIN, when YOU'RE IN YOUR 40s AND SHE'S A TEENAGER.  Also, it's fucking HIGH MOTHERFUCKING COMEDY to make jokes about nonconsensual sex, so long as it's dudes blowing each other.  And it's NOT RACIST AT ALL to trot out "once you go Black, you won't go back" or that black dudes ALL UNIVERSALLY BECAUSE THEY'RE SO FUCKING SEXUAL LIKE THAT have REALLY HUGE COCKS.

I cannot tell you how fucking OVER I am of the pop culture meme that ZOMG IT'S SO HARD FOR MEN OUT THERE.  Dudes are just trying to be all dudely, and like THOSE FUCKING WOMEN WITH THEIR - well I'd say needs, but hot shit, owing to the movie's utter lack of character development of ANY of the characters, I'm not actually certain what WAS the fucking problem besides those dudes just generally being kind of huge fucking jerks.  And really, if you're a huge fucking jerk, LIFE SHOULD TOTALLY SUCK FOR YOU.

I literally cannot remember enough of the movie to do justice to how annoying it was.

But you heard it here first, kids, Hypatia's Girl is officially throwing down the gauntlet on PEOPLE NOT FUCKING GETTING IT.  I don't think that it should be hard to not be a giant douchecanoe.  This common-sense radical will be there, loudly asking you why you are a douchecanoe.  Oh, you think rape jokes are funny, huh jackass?  Why is that?  Oh, yeah, black guys have big cocks? Why are you such a racist piece of shit?  Could you please detail me the ways in which you are not ACTIVELY MAKING LIFE WORSE FOR EVERY SINGLE FUCKING PERSON EVER by not being an active, informed, committed feminist/anti-racist/queer-ally?  Because, dear world, frankly none of this shit ought to be hard any more.  We should fucking know better.  And I, for one, am 100% out of patience with this shit.

Rust Belt Love Letter

This town is empty.  An exoskeleton of despair slowly decaying around an already forgotten corpse.  The sign in the bar, You will do better in Toledo, more mocking than not, or perhaps . . . Perhaps more deluded, the fading grand dame in her mansion, wearing the dress she wore to her last cocktail party, 40 years ago, the glass in her necklace chipped and missing, the fabric of her green satin stained and moth-eaten, tattered around her dry body.

I walk from 14th and Monroe past empty buildings, faded signs and flyers torn but still stubbornly clinging to glass-front shops.  You can look inside and see the remnants, a chair, a shop counter, a piece of bad art.  You can also see the dirt that covers everything, the leaves and animal droppings.  This is an image of a world after a war.  The reclamation of Chernobyl, the monuments to Dresden, the Rust Belt in the 21st Century.  We have lost and the population here, what's left of it, knows that.  Even the graffiti is faded.  Either no one left to claim space of their own, or nothing left to claim.

This is a town of tragedy.  No great, visible tragedy, no sharp divide between what was once and what is now, but rather a town composed of those small quiet tragedies that build the foundation of our impoverished society.  This is a town of can't-pay-my-bills and repossessions.  This is a town of cut-backs and a fading tax base.  A town filled with people so forgotten that they've become invisible. 

I cross the streets of downtown at 9:30 on a workday morning and I cross them in the middle of a block.  I could walk down the center of the street.  Laying heel to toe down the cracked and faded lines with no fear of traffic.  The buildings, surely large and grand in the booming days when they were built, lurk awkwardly around me, windows like the eyes of the dead, half-shuttered, sometimes broken.  They whisper apologies to me as I navigate the cracks and craters of the sidewalk, the parts of the street where the asphalt has been missing so long the bricks beneath are worn and crumbled.  They politely pull out of my way down narrow paths.  Or sit silently, staring over my head, searching for the horizon.  I ignore them.  Am silenced by their obvious decay.

This is a town of tragedy.  Of scratched-off lottery tickets littering the gas station parking lot.  The billboards are all for the lottery, or cheap lawyers, Planned Parenthood and those "crisis pregnancy centers."  There is one near the crumbling grand apartment in which I live that implores me to "erase the hate."  It stands in an empty field, its edges torn, the red bleeding pink into the white.  Paper and trash, bottles and cups and broken liquor bottles have gathered beneath it.

A woman wearing a knit cap with Obama's hope logo on the front asks me, politely, for a dollar as I cut through the gas station parking lot, picking my way carefully around broken glass and those lottery tickets.  I tell her I don't have one.  I wish I did.

This is a town that makes me feel my privilege.  I am only passing through here.  I am walking back from dropping off a second copy of an application to a Ph.D. program in philosophy at the post office.  I am the transient.  Putting in my two years, joking about the emptiness, the meaning of You will do better in Toledo.  This stretch of street lined with trash and brown grass, the half-hearted flutterings of litter in the still-icy March wind, this is not my home.  I walk up to my apartment and stare out at the tops of buildings, at the sky still gray despite the sun.

Oh, Toledo, I cannot love you.  I would only bruise my heart on your bricks, cut my lips on your broken glass.  My fingernails seem to always have dirt underneath them in this town.  Cigarette smoke and exhaust in my clothes.  Glass from my broken car window in my shoes.  You are a sliver in my heart, Toledo, a symbol more than a city.  You are the Tower card of a Tarot deck.  Loss and despair.  I pile what has been lost here, all of the losses here, in the parts of my heart where you would sit.

I come home and consider starting to pack.  Leaving months from now.  To go somewhere else.  I cannot see the future in Toledo.  I cannot imagine days outside of these.  I've tried.  I don't pack.  Instead I memorize the way the street looks right now.

Common Sense Radicalism, Gay Marriage and the Weirdness of Marriage in General

Gay marriage: How the census will count gay marriages and couples in 2010

Before I talk about the 2010 census count and why it's kind of awesome, but also kind of fraught, a little political defining is necessary.

The more I think about it, the more I am willing to actually code myself in a non-tongue-in-cheek manner as a common sense radical.  The unfortunate thing about this willingness, is that in that serious coding, I should probably come up with some sort of definition.  Because, really, what could make a philosopher happier than creating new definitions, preferably using words people use anyway.

Video killed the Prop 8 arguments

Apparently we won't know if that's true.

I'm really confused about the rhetoric here.  For some background - California had gay marriage for about 30 seconds, during which the Apocalypse happened, dogs and cats lived together, fire and brimstone rained from the skies and children grew up without having repressive gender identities drilled into them from birth.

How I became a protest organizer in two days, and why you should too!

It started simply enough.
I have kind of a reputation as being . . . opinionated?  A staunch, social justice oriented feminist?  Consistently livid about something or other?  Hypatia's Girl is angry after all.
And so it started simply.  A facebook chat message pointing me toward a link on someone's page with the request that I keep it on the radar.  The link was to an announcement that Rep. Bart Stupak was coming to my university to talk about the Great Lakes.  Stupak! In my university!
See, I'm angry about the Stupak-Pitts Amendment.  Deeply, deeply angry.  Much of that stems from coming to the realization that the anti-abortion forces aren't necessarily synonymous with "pro-life."  That is, if their sincere desire were to curb the incidence of abortion they would be doing things other than limiting access to abortion, and other reproductive services.  A sincere, honest and moral goal of reducing the incidence of abortion would be informed by knowledge about why women choose abortion, largely unplanned pregnancy, and what can be done to reduce the numbers of unplanned pregnancies.  See, reducing the numbers of unplanned and unwanted pregnancies would, almost by definition, reduce the number of abortions.  So genuine, sincere, honest, moral pro-lifers do not spend their time trying to limit women's access to reproductive health options, they instead work to increase people's access to contraception, sexuality education, rape prevention and they try to better the situation of women and ease the burden that motherhood very really represents for a woman.  The latter approach shows a genuine concern and empathy for women as actual human beings.  The Stupak-Pitts Amendment is a petulant example of the overt misogyny that has characterized (Sen. John Kyl, I'm looking at you) the entirety of the health care reform conversation.  It is an insincere and uninformed platitude toward the minority of the country who do not believe that women are people.  But more on that later.  In short, I was angry.
And so I thought, you know what, Stupak has a lot to answer for, and I bet I'm not the only one who has questions about this amendment he and his little friends in the House have attached to my health care reform (!).  So I reposted the link.
And then I thought some more.  Facebook is a fantastically flexible medium.  You can do all sorts of things on Facebook.  Like create events.  And so I started an event page, initially just dispersing it to my local friends, a little community action is always a good time.
Initially the invites were limited, no more than 20 of my nearest and dearest (although primarily nearest geographically) friends.  However, there are all sorts of groups and organizations on the Facebook, populated by people who are empathetic and concerned, sincere, ethical, good people.  And they took the event and reposted it, and invited their friends, and so on and so forth.
We, combined, invited something like 140 people.  That felt good.  Clearly, they were not all going to come, however perhaps 30 people were people I knew.
And since there are these lovely organizations and groups on the Facebook, when I realized that it could potentially be larger than just the Phil Dept and some Ann Arbor friends hanging out with some crudely drawn signs, awkwardly in the College of Law, but instead real live strangers could be there, I decided to ask for help, a little guidance.
I really needed the help when I realized that I could get media coverage.  Some nice concise talking points.  So I asked for help from the local Planned Parenthood (please give them lots and lots of money), and got the help I needed.  Did you know that anyone can just write up a press release and email it to a news organization?  Or just call up a local news organization and say - "hey, um, I just wanted to let you know that there is going to be a protest at the College of Law tomorrow at 8am, opposing Stupak."  There are people sitting at news organizations right now just waiting for you to call them.  This is amazing.
And then I just posted the event everywhere on the Facebook I could think of.  And harassed like-thinking friends into doing the same.  And made signs.
And then I went to soccer and was up far later than I intended.  And tried to sleep.

There is something thrilling about walking into a building, seeing people you don't know, standing there with signs.  All because you all agree that something needs to be done, and someone needs to have some answers ready.  It's really, really cool.

And I wander into the building and am greeted by lovely women and men with signs and stickers and flyers and t-shirts.  And we organize ourselves near the entrance to the conference, where Stupak will shortly be speaking.  The director of conference very nicely approaches us to find out what our plans are, and I do my best to reassure him that, seriously dude, I'm from MI, I want the nice conference on Great Lakes water issues to go well.  However, Stupak needs to be confronted by the terrible things he's done.  We just want to hold our nice signs, hand out some information, and ask a question or two, if that's cool.  And it was.  And then the TV cameras showed up.  And I found myself giving a couple of interviews, trying to stay clear and coherent, hit the hightlights, speak in soundbites.  You know, behave well.

The middle bit of the protest I missed, because just as Stupak started talking and some of us went into the room, I had to duck out and run off to teach a quick class on feminism, then it was right back to stand in for the Q&A (we got one question off, and about a half an answer back).

What I really want to stress in this post is a: people are wonderful, wonderful beings.  Very helpful and caring.  People out there do care.  And we can use our social media, the vast amount of technology that we (privileged ones) can take for granted, to bring us together.  And b: you can organize a protest very quickly.  Mostly because of (a).  And if you can, and it's a cause you care about, do it.

I bravely wade into the server/diner war

100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do (Part 1) - You’re the Boss Blog - NYTimes.com



I worked in restaurants for years. Long, tortuous, evil years filled with all the misery that one would assume is found in working as a server. Worse, the restaurant that I worked at for the longest time was a place known for its salad bar and frequent foibles of the franchisees getting sued for some form of sexual discrimination/harassment or another. Good memories. It's not that I hated every minute of it (just most), but it did give me a particular perspective on the service industry.

Why a lack of school funding will bring down the American Empire

Hawaii schools to move to four-day week in state cost-cutting measure | World news | guardian.co.uk

So there are a few problems with this strategy, long term and short term. And several implications in terms of race, class and gender. But basically, we're shooting ourselves in the collective foot. I mean, I can foresee nothing but the END OF THE DAMN UNIVERSE if we continue down this path. Seriously, there'll be horsemen and zombies and WHO KNOWS WHAT ELSE.

The problem of language

I have a lot of interesting conversations. It's kind of a hobby of mine. As in, it kind of replaces breathing for me most days.

The conversation I had on Friday (just before seeing Capitalism: A love story) and the spirited debate I'm in right now seem related to me. And seem related to another item that's been in the news recently, that is actually the reason why I really for really wanted to start a blog, and did!, this time.