Monthly Archives: April 2010

An Open Letter to Glee

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Dear Glee,

Before we begin I’d just like to note that everything I am about to say is out of love. Despite your many issues, your awesome musical numbers, over-the-top plot lines, and winning sense of humor make me love you, Glee. However, we do need to talk because if this relationship is going to continue… you’re going to have to make some changes, some big changes.

This last episode killed me. First off, the good: you continued with the Mercedes and Kurt wanting more spotlight plot line that has been a long time in the making. The bad? Pretty much everything else. The whole episode read like a bad after school special; Mercedes went from being bad-ass and confident to starving herself all in a matter of five minutes. I understand the power that fitting in can have over someone… but eating disorders generally do not come on and then leave that quickly. I mean, two scenes after she developed her disordered eating she was in the nurses office (after passing out) and having a conversation with Quinn that magically “cured” her disorder. IT DOES NOT FUCKING WORK THAT WAY. Depictions like this fuel all of the misguided (but wonderfully intentioned) attempts to get ED sufferers to just “snap out of it” and “realize they’re beautiful” so they can eat healthfully again. I wish it was really that easy. Furthermore, I’m so worried that after this episode Mercedes and Kurt are going to be pushed to the background so we can focus on Will, Finn, Quinn, and Rachel like always while Mercedes, Kurt, Artie, Tina, and all of the other non-white and non-straight characters play second-fiddle backup to the true main characters. This is not cool.

I applaud your attempt at creating a show with a real social message and real diversity… however, I feel its important to let you know that you are failing at that goal. Your plot-lines still revolve around the heterosexual, conventionally pretty white characters first and foremost and the “diversity characters” second. Thus, each episode that does focus a little on these characters, like the one we saw last night,  feels like an obligatory “extra special” episode rather than the norm. This is tokenism, and it is not much better than outright exclusion.

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Belated Day of Silence Recap

Posted in Queer Issues by

I’ve been putting off writing this for a long time because I failed and started talking around 1:30, after only four hours of silence. I had a good excuse – someone who I rarely see anymore had come to visit, and I didn’t want to waste a chance to hang out by not talking at all – but Ive still felt awful about blowing it for the last few days. Still, feeling guilty isn’t going to help anyone so… we’re just going to move on.

I did a whole presentation in silence for my History of Social Thought class. It was a power-point presentation about a social thinker, I choose Kathleen Hanna, that covered their lives and their beliefs with special attention paid to the ways in which their life experiences may have influenced their beliefs.

Even though I didn’t manage to uphold the day fully, I think the observations that I made during my silence are still worth sharing. This presentation gave me a unique opportunity while experiencing my silence; specifically, it gave me an immense appreciation for the people who did speak. Allow me to explain: the method I had come up with for presenting in silence involved relying upon the voices of my classmates to help relay information by taking turns to read my slides aloud. I created some additional slides specifically about the day of explain the Day of Silence to them, and encourage them to participate while also explaining that, by being my voice today they were also supporting the movement.

Although many people in my class choose not to participate, I felt incredibly supported by the few students who read for me. So much so that, once I sat down, I couldn’t stop thinking about what this feeling might translate to in real life. It was this experience that reinforced my commitment to being a voice for those who are silenced on the other 364 days each year. Its not enough to just tape up my mouth and educate the people who give me confused looks one day a year; instead, I have to use my voice however and whenever I can to speak for those who are silenced for whatever reason.

That feeling that I got when the people around me rallied to say the words that were in my mind, but could not pass through my lips… that’s the feeling that I want for everyone, because that feeling is what leads to a world where people don’t feel silenced, a world where everyone knows that it is safe to speak up there will be other voices ready to join in and strengthen their own. That’s the world I want, and I appreciate the Day of Silence for providing a way of getting a little bit closer to that world each year.

Shhhh… Its the Day of Silence :)

Posted in Queer Issues, Take Action! by

Last year I stayed silent for the whole day*, marking the longest time I had ever spent conscious without making a noise (seriously.) This year I plan to up the ante by doing a ten minute class presentation without saying a word (thanks to one incredibly amazing and supportive professor’s encouragement of my crazy schemes & some seriously lucky timing.)

How do you plan to spend your Day of Silence?

*Can I just say, it is so weird (in a good way) to be able to go back and read my reflections on this same event from last year. This blog has been amazing for me for many reasons, among them is the ability to watch myself grow as a feminist, an activist, and a person. I don’t even remember so much writing these words… but reading them was so inspiring. I had so much more passion and energy then, I was so much more ready to DO SOMETHING… where did that go? I hope I can get it back. I wonder what this year’s reflection will look like to me next year…

Liveblogging Ann Coulter

Posted in Politics by

The Situation so Far: It was announced a few weeks ago that Ann Coulter would be coming to speak at my college. In response Feminists United and PRIDE decided to protest her presence; however, we wanted to go about this protest in a way that wouldn’t feed into the Ann Coulter media machine. We had to think outside of the box. Luckily our adviser had an awesome idea… we would give away “Ann-ti Coulter” Buttons, asking for a donation of a dollar per button, and donate all of the money to a worthy organization (we choose the ACLU.)

Today is the day it all goes down & so far we have raised $300 with the buttons!

I’m going to try my hand at “live-blogging” or an approximation thereof by blogging our progress through out the day and then blogging my response to her speech as soon after it occurs as possible (unfortunately no laptop in the event because my crappy Dell is not discreet or really that portable anymore.) Check back to this post for updates through out the day!

11:35am: Some awesome people came in to get buttons, one guy had a handmade “Fuck Coulter” tee shirt on. It’s a little more inflammatory then the message I have been communicating all along but still, more power too him. It gets frustrating sometimes, trying to be the reasonable middle-of-the-road one; constantly advocating for open dialogue and so on. Sometimes I wish I could just let my anger out like that…  even though I know it’s not a productive way of starting a dialogue. Still, it was an awesome shirt.

12:49pm: Unrelated, but… all I have had to eat today is a ring-pop (blue, so my mouth is now blue), two oreo cookie balls (oreos mixed with cream-cheese, which sounds & looks disgusting but tastes like cookie dough), and a Hi-C Juice Box. Breakfast of champions? (Anyone know how to get blue off one’s teeth?)

3:18pm: I wish there was more to say… this live-blogging thing seems like a fail. I made more buttons about an hour ago because we were running out. We’re going to try giving them out outside the event which should be interesting. I’m really proud of the amount of dialogue that this campaign has managed to spur so far. Aside from some name-calling on facebook (from both sides) and some poster ripping down (from random people against Ann Coulter) we’ve managed to remain fairly calm and civil. I’ve had some interesting conversations with people organizing the event about Coulter’s way of speaking – some of them even agreed with my take on her “style” as an overly offensive one that relies heavily on name-calling with little attention to substance. Check out the school newspaper articles about the event for an idea of the dialogue!

April 8th, on Page 2

April 1st, on Pages 4 & 7

March 25th, on Page 7

8:32pm Well, that was “fun.” First things first, to set the scene: We walked in to a group of very well dressed people mulling about the lobby outside of the theater. We were the first recognizable Ann-ti Coulterites in the room, worse than that, we were surrounded by women who looked just like Coulter from behind; skinny with long blonde hair. It was unsettling, since I kept “seeing” her out of the corner of my eye even though I knew there was no way she’d be outside mingling before the event. I felt a bit awkward for a moment in my rainbow skirt, with my rainbow nails, and three Ann-ti Coulter pins but then three students quickly came up and asked  if we had any pins left and I was put at ease. My grandma was also a big help, since she was here to support Coulter… it made me feel a bit at ease to be with someone who “fit in” as silly as that sounds.

After passing through a metal detector (which the pins set off, causing a bit of a headache for security all night) we entered into the auditorium to discover the first three rows were roped off. As people finished trickling in I realized that those rows were reserved for the middle-aged Republicans that the club had outsourced to attend the event. I have nothing against middle-aged people or people who don’t go to Ramapo attending our events (clearly, as I was sitting next to my pro-Coulter grandma who I had invited to the event!) What I do take issue with is the intentional packing of the front three rows with off-campus people, thus, synthetically creating an environment that does not match up with the buzz that existed on campus. There were plenty of Ramapo students on both sides of this issue who wanted tickets but didn’t get them, I’m sure they wouldn’t appreciate the way this was handled. (Though, I do understand that the College Republicans received major funding from outside organizations and this was likely one of the conditions they had to abide by in order to receive those funds.) Shouldn’t a college event be, primarily, for the students of that college?

Anyways, be back shortly with the actual speech!

8:55pm One of the College Republicans introduced Coulter by making the claim that bringing her here promoted diversity because “diversity is about more than the color of our skin or our religion, its about your ideas and beliefs as well.” I actually agree with that statement. However, inviting a speaker who often uses racially charged, homophobic, anti-semetic etc. insults  to silence the people who has an opinion that differs from hers is not a way of promoting diversity. There are many Conservative speakers who manage to conve their different views in a way that promotes open dialogue and real conversation… real diversity of opinion, if you will. Ann Coulter? Is not one of them. When you silence a student asking a valid question by calling him “gay boy” you can’t be one of them. Sorry, College Republicans… good try.

Coulter started her speech by telling us, “to hear my remarks in English please press or say one now.” Ha. ha. This was a relatively tame (albeit annoying if you, like me, believe more than one culture can happily coexist in a country) beginning, which was immediately followed by a comment about how glad she was to be here, and not in Canada. (I so called that joke.)

She then launched into what felt like fifteen-ish successive Bill Clinton sex scandal jokes (because apparently its still 1995) interspersed between comments like the following:

(Full disclosure, I may have misplaced a word here or there. I’m waiting to see if I can get a recording but all recording devices were banned from the event. All of these quotes are from the notes that I took as faithfully as possible; everything in quotations represent her actual words, the rest is very careful paraphrasing because I was writing by hand and I don’t know shorthand.)

It seems like Barack Obama wants to be the first and last black president. (In regards to his unpopularity after pushing the Health Care Bill through.)

The issue I take with this remark comes not from her conclusions about the bill but, rather, from the assumption that Obama’s actions be they good or bad somehow reflect upon an entire group of people. I don’t believe in race as anything more than a social construction anyways, but really? Even if you do you have to recognize the ridiculousness of a comment like this.

What follows IS paraphrasing and triggering so, fair warning if you click the cut!

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