So you know what makes people like 8 billion more times more likely to not think you’re an asshole? Stumbling through “hello” in their first language. (Shocking, I know.) I entered Senegal with the impression that this language was, for most people, French. It’s not. Instead, it’s Wolof–and now that I know how to appropriately greet people in it* people are substantially less likely to glare at me. Success.
As far as I know, Senegal is unusual in rejecting the colonial language in favor of a native language for the lingua franca. Though there are of course other major languages in Africa in general and in countries specifically (like Swahili and Hausa), countries like Kenya use the colonial language in public discourse in attempt to appear forward-looking to the west. Continue reading →
Today was my first full day in Dakar. (I got in yesterday, but after two days of more-or-less nonstop plane travel punctuated by actually falling asleep without conscious input, I think that yesterday does not count.)
The day was filled with the sort of awkward smalltalk that punctuates any first-time gathering of college kids. It was like the first few weeks of college, except that everyone talked about wanting to go into development. I don’t, and have neglected to mention that I am in fact an anthropology major. Some of the folks seem to hold us in disfavor.
My new commute to school (at least for the moment) involves jaywalking across a large highway. It is every bit as fun as you can imagine. (ie, not really at all. It is mostly terrifying.) Continue reading →
Today, I had a frustrating discussion about sexual assault.
It started out relatively well. While driving somewhere, I was riffing with a friend about the fact that Senegal—where I will be going soon—has something of a street harassment problem. We joked that this had something to do with the country’s French colonial past. (Paris has a by all accounts more physically agressive street harassment culture.)
I joked that I was going to try to mimic the Senegalese response, which I find amusingly direct—a few months ago, I spoke to a graduate student who does research there and she noted that Senegalese women often go with a blunt “Nah, you’re ugly” in response to marriage proposals.
There is of course the more evasive route suggested by my guidebook, which is to murmur “maybe next time” in Wolof, which is apparently a culturally-accepted way to brush someone off politely. I said that in reality I would probably use this response, since I’m not that confrontational. (I could also go with the American response of pretending to understand neither French or Wolof and wandering blankly past.)
Another passenger in the car, who was a friend of my friend and who I had just met, said, “You don’t want to give them false hope or make them angry. That’s a good way to get raped.”
I responded that statistically, that’s untrue. Most sexual assaults involve alcohol and disorientation. He said he disagreed. I gave up and another passenger in the car changed the subject.
But seriously? I am so tired of having to pretend that random boys get an input on the likelihood of someone trying to assault me by virtue of their Having Feelings on the issue.
Are you Senegalese? No.
Have you been to Senegal? No.
Is the threat of sexual assault something that you have to negotiate in your daily existence on a college campus? No.
So no, your feelings about my likelihood of suffering a violent crime in a Scary Foreign Country with Scary Dark Men do not, in fact, get to be treated as more than the baseless, victim-blaming bullshit they are while I am giving you a ride in my car.
In fact, here is a comprehensive list of ways to increase your likelihood of “getting raped.”
Be around a rapist when he decides to rape you.
There we go.
But, since we’re talking about Feelings, here are mine on how to increase your likelihood of getting punched.
Be the sort of clueless asshole who brings up rape in the car of someone who’s driving you.
Refuse to back down.
Refuse to deal in things like “facts” or “lived experiences.”
See, sharing our Feelings can be super productive. I’m glad we had this talk.
A few nights ago, my sister and I attended the Atlanta portion of the 2012 Tour de Nerdfighting. For those not in the know, this was a promotional event put on by John Green as part of his promotional tour for The Fault in Our Stars. In addition to the book reading and after-speech signing that is sort of standard at these events, this particular presentation included sock puppets, Hank Green (John’s brother) singing a song about quarks, and an 876-person audience getting rickrolled by two guys from the internet.
John Green talked to my sister about the Mountain Goats, though she thought he was talking to her about mountain goats.
It was pretty cool.
I enjoyed The Fault in Our Stars, which is a well-done book that manages to combine very sad things with very funny things in a way that is neither callous nor overly-emotional. It’s about two kids, ages 16 and 17, falling in love for the first time after meeting in a support group held in the Literal Heart of Jesus. Both of them have cancer. They’re also really funny, in a way that only literary teens can be. They’re also empathetic and selfish and worried about their parents in the way that actual teens are. You should read the book, if you haven’t.
Though I found some of my fellow book event attendees a trifle overenthusiastic (which, given that they’re in the intended age range for young adult fiction and I am not probably just means that I am crotchety and old now), everyone there seemed like good people. I don’t think I was that friendly and open and enthusiastically weird at 15, and so it’s cool to see people who are. Young adult book events are like incredibly friendly concerts. They’re their own little fandom community come to meat space.
I find the Green brothers interesting on a professional level, as they have managed to both create successful careers with multiple income streams facilitated by the internet. But on a more personal level, they seem like good people. I like that good people exist in any space, and I am even happier that they can sell out an auditorium so that it is full of enthusiastic, weird, friendly people who like what they’re saying. It’s a good sign.
So, today I got a note from Bank of America telling me that—as a result of some suspicious charges—my debit card had been suspended. I had to call them to get the card reinstated.
I assumed that something in my last week’s worth of purchases (all sort of odds and ends to prepare for my trip to Senegal this week) had tripped the algorithm. My money was on the three transactions that I managed to have take place at REI last week, despite having never spent money on fitness gear before.
Once I worked my way through the many painful phone menus involved in getting to the right customer service robot, the system read the suspicious charges to me. The REI charges were not among them. In fact, none of my unusual travel charges were. Instead, my card got flagged for these three purchases:
$8.56 spent on pizza at 10:30 last night.
$8.93 spent on grocery store mini cheesecakes at 10:00 the night before.
$25.00 spent at a CVS the night before that. (Which was very nearly $45.00, but they were out of Genie Bras in my size.)
Bank of America flagged me for buying food—and in the CVS case, acne medication—late at night. Along with being massively embarrassing (mini cheesecakes are not a food that screams “dignity”), these purchases are completely within the realm of normal for me. I have been to all of these stores before. I usually spend about $10 when I get food and about $25 when I go on a CVS binge.
What I have not ever done is spend $100 at REI, then get refunded $50, then spend $26, then get refunded $26. That transaction (having to do with some confusion about what mosquito net I needed) happened the same day as the CVS debacle, and BoA did not bat an eye at it.
The algorithm it’s applying to my account is one that makes sense for my parents. It is not one that makes sense for a physically inactive college student with poor impulse control and a deep love of cream cheese. Conveniently, as Bank of America has every possible bit of information about me, it knows which one of those two demographics I fit in.
So, the moral of this story—for those of you seeking to commit identity fraud—is to buy some really sweet and easily resold luggage at REI. However, avoid groceries. The bank might catch on.
Recently, a friend of mine who just returned from a semester abroad in Capetown sent me a link to Gurl Goes to Africa. The site is basically a Failbook for peoples’ pictures from their study abroad experiences in various African countries. I’ve been trying to decide how I feel about the site.
On the one hand, some of the material showcased—the photos of white Americans quite literally riding on the backs of Africans—are cringeworthy. Folks should know better than to a) do that and b) photograph and post it without massive context provided.
A lot of the photos aren’t that offensive, but are of the “starving African child with white person” genre—they’re aid brochure photos. And I do think that the comments on the photos (many of which are along the lines of “I couldn’t tell which one was you! lol”) deserve to be critiqued.
However, I think the site conflates the two and assigns them equal degrees of offensiveness when they’re not there. Should we question why photos of children are the dominant narrative for peoples’ study abroad experiences in various parts of Africa? Of course.
But—and I say this as someone who will no doubt take photos of her host siblings—not all photos of children are racist holdovers. Some are just the acknowledgement of the existence of children in the location that one traveled to. Photos of random street children (or other peoples’ kids) are offensive, but photos of people you know who happen to be children aren’t, at least to me.
What becomes an issue is when that’s all you photograph. However, because of the Failbook setup of the blog, the photos are all from individual contributers. I have no idea if this is one photo of a person’s host brother, or one of eighty photos of the Poor African Children.
The other issue that bothers me a little bit is that the blog is aggressively mocking women. White American women make up the majority (like 90%) of the people made fun of in the posts. The blog’s name makes fun of women travelers specifically. There are some men featured, but if the blog’s intent is to make fun of the Africa as Country view (as well as the Africa as Location for Anti-Consumerist Fantasies of the Wealthy view) then men and women can be more equally lampooned. I find it uncomfortable that there is page after page after page just of women being somewhat cattily made fun of. It implies a view that men aren’t as silly as these Gurls are.
My suspicion is that the blog author just particularly dislikes photos of Americans and African children (legitimately problematic) but that as a result of women being more likely to interact with children when traveling, the photos are skewed.
The behavior and viewpoint that the blog is satirizing deserve to be made fun of. But the way in which it’s done makes me uncomfortable. Am I just being oversensitive?
Yesterday, I finished re-reading Franny and Zooey. This is the third or fourth time I’ve read the book, which I found early on in high school. I relate to it the way that a whole slew of folks relate to Catcher in the Rye, which Salinger is of course much better known for.
For those who haven’t raed the book, it follows Franny Glass, the 20-year-old youngest sibling of a large family of kids who spent much of their childhood performing on a radio quiz show called It’s a Wise Child. After reading a book taken from the room of her beloved eldest brother (who committed suicide several years before the book takes place), she attempts to pray without ceasing. Disillusioned by college, she has a nervous breakdown. The rest of the book consists of the next-oldest sibling, her 25-year-old brother Zooey, talking her out of her breakdown.
I always took more to Franny than to Holden Caulfield. I suspect that I would like him more if I reread Catcher in the Rye now, but when I first read it I was too close in age to him not to find him annoying. Franny was enough older than me that I liked her. True to form, now that I am the same age that she is, I see why Zooey is annoyed by her breakdown even as I have spent much of my time at Emory struggling with the same disillusionment.
In class this semester we talked about the structure of rites of passage. We focused on two models—one from van Gennep, and one from Lincoln. I think it’s interesting how the two Salinger books follow the two models.
Van Gennep‘s three-part structure for rites of passage (separation, liminality, incorporation) works incredibly well for many male initiation rituals. Professors love to use the example of fraternity hazing to illustrate the model, and to van Gennep’s credit it works very well. However, it doesn’t work for a lot of women’s rituals, which often depend on individual biological realities (like when a specific girl begins to menstruate) and focus on the girl’s relationship to her family, rather than her peers.
Lincoln‘s model attempts to find a more universal pattern from women’s rituals. In it, women’s rituals follow the model of seclusion, metamorphosis, and emergence. The woman’s ritual takes place alone or within her family home, rather than with the other girls of the village.
Neither model is universal, and there are plenty of cultures which violate the “correctly”-gendered model or conform to neither, but they are useful frameworks. It wasn’t until this year that I realized that Catcher in the Rye follows van Gennep’s pattern and Franny and Zooey follows Lincoln’s.
It was interesting to have my coursework so directly impact my interpretation of a book that I love. Buddy Glass, the narrator, asks whether the story is a mystical story or a love story, but it is of course also a story about a very American rite of passage. We talk a lot in my anthropology classes about how Americans lack rites of passage, and I think that Salinger shows two very American rites of passage in these books.
One of my favorite things about owning a Kindle has been the freedom it gives me to take various Very Old Books from Project Gutenberg or Google Books and carry them around with me. Instead of raising my class level, this has mostly been a way for me to discover very strange vintage erotica (terms for genitalia from an era other than your own are inevitably hilarious) and read pulp fiction.
In attempt to class myself up, I recently pulled The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes off of Project Gutenberg so that I’d have something to read during the break. In it, I discovered a Holmes story with which I was completely unfamiliar: “The Adventure of the Yellow Face.”
In it, a distraught husband comes to Holmes trying to find out why his wife has been hanging out at the next door cottage at 3 in the morning and then not telling him about it. (This is acknowledged by pretty much everyone as a valid cause for worry.) Holmes thinks that she’s hiding her lunatic first husband from Atlanta upstairs, Jane Eyre style. Happily for everyone, Holmes is wrong on pretty much every count.
Instead, it turns out that while hanging out in Hotlanta, the woman married a black man and had a child with him. The person hiding in the attic is the woman’s mixed-race daughter. Understandably, she thinks that having a secret mixed-race kid might not go over super well with him, given that it’s Victorian England and these things are Frowned Upon. What happens next is d’aw worthy.
“…when [Munro’s] answer came it was one of which I love to think. He lifted the little child, kissed her, and then, still carrying her, he held his other hand out to his wife and turned towards the door.”
The story is kind of crazy on multiple levels: the husband basically seems to adopt the kid, the woman’s interracial marriage is treated as not particularly troublesome outside of what other people think of it, and Watson (with whom the reader is presumably supposed to identify) is happy to see that the family winds up all together. That is some progressive short storying!
The story isn’t perfect, of course—the fact that the woman’s first husband is African American is seen as detracting from his otherwise intelligent-looking features, and the daughter is darker skinned than her father because (according to the characters) that’s what happens in mixed-race kids. So, not great! But given that a) positive views of mixed race marriage/kids are rare in literature, particularly of the classic sort and b) it was Victorian England, I’m going to give them a pass?
I do not understand why this is not taught in high school English classes when kids are doing books like Huck Finn (or whatever other book the teacher picks as the Race Book). It’s an unexpected view of race given the time period, and raises uncomfortable questions about how our own time period looks at race in fiction and in personal relationships.
It’s something of a joke among those who live in close quarters with me that I tend to dress in uniforms. This probably comes from the same part of me that can spend a month watching 6 seasons of a foreign TV show, twice, without tiring of it basically being the same show each week. I am comfortable with routine.
The most recent iteration of the uniform was a blazer, a scoop neck t-shirt, jeggings, red shoes, and a large scarf. Because all my shoes are red and all of my t-shirts are the same thing in different colors, this allowed for a variety of outfits with pretty much no effort. Plus, I always had a built-in blanket for cold classrooms. It was a win win.
Recently, however, I’ve moved away from the blazer-scarf-jeggings power look. I got tired of having a sweaty neck all of the time.
Without meaning to, I have settled in to a new uniform. For the past three days (I really wish I was exaggerating for effect, here) I have worn one of my two pairs of skinny jeans, one of the same scoop neck tees, and a tweed jacket that looks like a stole it off a very narrow-shouldered male archaeologist. The jacket is reversible, so if I tire of the tweed* I can revisit my elementary school uniform and wear some khaki instead.
The uniform, combined with my short hair and a non-expression that I am told makes me look very angry, tends to make me look sort of like a teenaged boy. I think that part of it is me making myself as unnoticeable as possible using the things over which I have control over for when I go to Dakar. I can’t control being white and American, but I can confine myself to earth tones with the best of them.
But I think even without the trip abroad, I’d be moving in that same direction. There was a period in high school where my wardrobe was hyperfeminine, as was my hair—there were a lot of sundresses and pincurls and pencil skirts. Without me noticing, my wardrobe has shifted from red into blue into grey and brown over the last semester.
I spent so much of this year being anxious whenever I spoke in class and hoping that I would be sort of ignored. Of course, I still raised my hand in class and pretty much never shut up**, but I felt bad when I did. It was a really weird combination of feelings and impulses, and I think that the move into more muted colors and more androgynous cuts of clothing had something to do with it.
But, even as my clothes become less colorful, I am struck by how I feel when I’m wearing them. When I’m channeling Agyness Deyn with some combat boots and the punker jacket, I feel powerful in a way that sundresses and heels didn’t necessarily make me feel. It’s superficial, but there’s something to be said for the knowledge that you could kick some ass in your clothing.
The weather now is similar to what the weather will be when I go abroad. All signs point to me keeping more or less this uniform while I’m there. I’m interested to see whether my feelings about power and clothing stay the same while I’m traveling. I suspect that they will not.
This got to be much more serious than I intended. Because what I originally wanted to share about the jacket that makes up the main part of the new uniform is that it’s reversible, it’s tweed, and it cost me $6.95.
I am the queen of thrift stores.
* I will not tire of the tweed.
** I thirst for external approval like a vampire for blood. Blame magnet school.
Since moving off oral contraceptives*, my face has exploded in oil. I wear foundation and pressed powder on a day-to-day basis, and within ten minutes everything I’m wearing is an oil slick in the middle of my face. I look like I am perspiring from my nose.
Add this to the fact that my skin is pale and shows discolorations easily, and you get shiny skin with very red, very noticeable blemishes. This is only exacerbated when I pick at them, which is a disgusting, unhelpful habit that I nonetheless find soothing**.
The end result of this is that I really, really hate my skin. And it makes me feel like a terrible feminist.
I know, realistically, that oily skin is not the end of the world and is not any reflection on my personal hygiene habits or on me. I know that actual human beings have actual human pores and the fact that I do too should not bother me the way that it does. I know that most of my friends are women, which I do not date, and so the fact that my skin is in various states of hot mess does not change the way that most folks around me are going to think about me. (I hope.) I know that my skin has nothing to do with my ability to be interesting, or funny, or intelligent.
As much as I know all of these things (and I do!), I hate my skin with a visceral sort of disgust if I think about it too much.
I want to be the sort of person who can go all Amanda Palmer and just tell the beauty standard to go fuck itself while I let my pit hair grow and shave of my eyebrows. But I’m very clearly not. This leaves me with a sense that I have failed twice: once, by having bad skin, and twice, by being bothered by it.
This is not a healthy way to relate to my face.
I am curious whether going abroad will change my attitude about my skin. Not in a mystic-journey-to-a-place-where-people-are-so-above-that kind of way, but in a will-be-walking-lots-and-eating-better-and-not-spending-so-much-time-in-the-mirror kind of way. Until then, I am holding off on any feminist epiphanies. Because, truth be told? I still really hate my skin.
Dances With Nerds 