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Africa, African History, Apartheid, biography, Biography as Craft, Book Review, Born a Crime, Born a Crime: Stories From A South African Childhood, Father-Son Relationship, fathers, Feminism, history, Hitch-22, Humor, Jim Henson: A Life, Jon Stewart, library card, Masculinity Studies, memoir, mothers, Politics, race, racism, Racism is not logical, Satire, sex, Sexual politics, Sexual Rhetoric, South Africa, The Daily Show, Tolstoy, Trevor Noah, Tyler Public Library, violence, What Mothers Give Their Children
I’m pretty sure my mother is using me for my library card.
Ever since I started working for the Tyler Public Library my eyes have opened to the pettiness of local government, and the pain that can sometimes be public service. The Tyler Library is a significant one: we have one of the few full time Genealogy/Local History rooms that is open full time in East Texas. Along with that we serve a wide variety of people who come in looking for books, DVDs, access to computers and the internet, and a regular series of public speaking events in which people come to listen and watch professionals talk on topics ranging from Rose growing to the future of 
Nuclear Arsenal Diplomacy on the international stage. The problem with the library, like almost every library I’m sure, is funding. Because only the city of Tyler’s taxes go to fund us, people who live within the county but not the city have to pay a membership fee. My reader may be wondering what this has to do with my mother or Trevor Noah’s wonderful autobiography Born a Crime. I’m sorry, I like to talk, but I’m getting to it.
My mother lives in Smith county but she lives in a small town called Noonday which barely caps 400 people. She then, like many people in Smith county, complain about the fact that their tax dollars are being taken but they still have to pay to use the library. In her defense, she understands the money situation since I’ve explained it to her, but often I have to smile and carefully explain to patrons that the county refuses to pay us and therefore we have to charge a fee to stay in the black. Few people really understand this because of the unspoken maxim that I agree with in principle: Libraries should be free.*
But my mother likes to read and I like my mother, she’s got good taste in music and pays my cell phone bill, so I decided to arrange a system in which I would check out books that she wants to read and loan them to her. The system has worked so far, but as I noted from the start I think she’s enjoying this arrangement because every time I see her she’s asking for another book.
This little anecdote though does serve a purpose because as I noted before this essay is my response to Trevor Noah’s autobiography Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. I didn’t know about Trevor Noah at all until he got in trouble for an offensive tweet, and to be fair that was really only because he was taking over for Jon Stewart on 
The Daily Show and people were looking to disrupt the institution at this supposed moment of weakness. Stewart left, Noah began, I stopped watching for a while. It wasn’t that he wasn’t funny, it just that he was new and I’m one of those obnoxious people who has to settle into things slowly. Still I enjoy The Daily Show and Noah himself has begun to really demonstrate that he’s made The Daily Show into his own and so I’ve become a regular watcher again, and in fact, in the last few months I’ve come to adore Trevor Noah as a comedian, and even more as a writer and Born a Crime is largely responsible.
I checked the book out from the library (my desk is literally right next to the New Books area) and read the first two chapters knowing instantly that my mother would love this book. I know it sounds ridiculous or absurd to suggest that I have anything in common with a celebrity (especially one who’s seemed to have a far more interesting and eventful life than I have), but reading these first two chapters I realized that Trevor Noah and his mother had a relationship that mirrored the relationship my mother and I have. A strange closeness that fortunately isn’t Oedipal.
I told her to read just the first two chapters.
I didn’t get the book back for a week.
Noah’s biography took me completely by surprise because I’ve read the autobiographies of comedians before, and most of them, if I’m being charitable, aren’t worth reading. It’s not that they aren’t funny, it’s just that most of them are just opportunities to track their individual development and show where they’ve come from. I know there’s merit and real humanity in such works, but the problem is too often these books are also just a chance to rap and ramble about everything and anything that comes into their heads. Noah’s book is different however, because his story chronicles not just his awkward puberty and childhood, it also tackles the issues of race, political corruption, domestic violence, crime, and poverty while still managing to be entertaining and well written. Trevor Noah’s very existence was a crime because, growing up in South Africa during apartheid, being the child of a black woman and a white man, he was a crime against the state.
Noah’s book often explores the sheer absurdity of apartheid in small segments between the chapters of the book. One passage which is one of my mother’s favorites, discusses the labeling of Chinese South Africans as black. He explains:
Apartheid, for all it’s power, had fatal flaws baked in, starting with the fact that it never made any sense. Racism is not logical. Consider this: Chinese people were classified as black in South Africa. I don’t mean that they were running around acting black. They were still Chinese. But unlike Indians, there weren’t enough Chinese people to warrant devising a whole separate classification. Apartheid, despite its intricacies and precision, didn’t know what to do with them, so the government said, “Eh, we’ll just call ‘em black. It’s simpler that way.”
Interestingly, at the same tie, Japanese people were labeled as white. The reason for this was that the South African government wanted to establish good relations with the Japanese in order to import their fancy cars and electronics. So Japanese people were given the honorary white status while Chinese people stayed black. (75).
I still can’t read this passage without cracking up. The stupidity is just mind-boggling. Then again the United States Constitution originally labeled black people as three fifths of a human being so I suppose it’s important to remember that racism is a worldly stupidity rather than just a regional one.
One of the joys of reading Noah’s biography is the fact that, as a comedian, his retelling of one of the most truly despicable institutionalized race segregationist policies never becomes dramatic, hyperbolic, or soul-crushingly depressing. Instead of levelling on and on about the atrocities of apartheid, Noah tries constantly to present the small absurdities in his life while observing how they would relate to the wider national community. And in this right, I would argue, Noah succeeds far better in demonstrating the ineffectiveness of apartheid, because while concerted political efforts were what ultimately brought down such an odious system, it’s the power of subverting the institution through laughter that a real victory is achieved.
If you can laugh at something, it’s difficult to take it too seriously.
There so many levels to Noah’s biography in terms of race. One of the most prominent is also one of the hilarious and tragic scenes in the book. Noah describes his early infancy when his mother and biological father tried to take Noah outside for activity.
Where most children are proof of their parent’s love I was the proof of their
criminality. The only time I could be with my father was indoors. If we left the house, he’d half to walk across the street from us. My mom and I used to go to Joubert Park all the time. It’s the Central Park of Johannesburg—beautiful gardens a zoo, a giant chess-board with human-sized pieces that people would play. My mother tells me that once, when I was a toddler, my dad tried to go with us, and I ran after him, screaming, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” People started. He panicked and ran away. I thought it was a game and kept chasing him. (27).
This passage is funny upon first reading, but by the second or third time I’m reading it I wonder (while still laughing) the pain of not being able to even be seen in public with your child.
Before I start the maudlin crap though I really do want to acknowledge how well written this biography is. I’ve observed before that it can be difficult to find truly great biographies. A.N. Wilson’s Tolstoy is always the first that comes to mind, Che: A 
Revolutionary Life by Jo Lee Anderson comes next, Jim Henson: A Life by Brian Jay Jones (Also look up his George Lucas), Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens, I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai, and recently I’ve begun Life by Keith Richards. This list may seem to contradict my statement before about the scarcity of truly great biographies but in fact it only reinforces it. These books are products of a careful craft (pardon the alliteration) that tries to leave the reader with a real sense of the person under discussion, and rather than try to chronicle every detail of a person’s existence, it instead tries to offer the heart and personality in all its beauty and flaws.
Reading Born a Crime I feel like I know Trevor Noah’s personality, rather than just his facts.
And if I can offer one last sentiment, what is beautiful about the book for me is how much I come to recognize that the pair of us do have one thing in common: we grew up under strong women. The impression of Born a Crime that lingers for me is how Patricia Noah helped shape Trevor into the man he became. One quote is enough to see this because I return to it over and over again:
I grew up in a world of violence, but I myself was never violent at all. Yes, I played pranks and set fires and broke windows, but I never attacked people. I never hit anyone. I was never angry. I just didn’t see myself that way. My mother had exposed me to the books she never got to read. She took me to the schools that she never got to go to. I immersed myself in those worlds and I came back looking at the world a different way. I saw the futility of violence, the cycle that just repeats itself, the damage that’s inflicted on people that they in turn inflict upon others.
I saw, more than anything, that relationships are not sustained by violence but by love. Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them. My mother did that for me, and with the progress I made and the things I learned, I came back and created a new world and a new understanding for her. 
After that she never raised her hand to her children again. Unfortunately, by the time she stopped Abel had started. (262).
This passage is beautiful to me because it perfectly summarizes the home I was raised in, or at least the philosophy that governed it. Both of my parents grew up in homes where physical abuse was not controversial, it was just a common means of discipline. I was raised by parents who disagreed with that idea, who instead wanted their children to see that violence doesn’t check anything, all it does is inspire more of itself. Violence becomes a kind of cancer eating at the people who perform it and suffer from it until there’s nothing left. If anything, this passage seems like the most important in the entire book because ultimately this biography centers on Noah and his mother.
The relationships between mothers and sons can be complicated, because if men profess too much admiration or devotion to them the accusation of Oedipus complex becomes a loud prison sentence. Anyone who needs much evidence of this simply look to the “Martha” controversy 
of Batman Vs Superman. But mothers are important for a young man’s development because she becomes the first relationship. Mothers, the good ones anyway, teach their sons emotional strength and then eventually how to interact with the world. They teach them the proper ways to speak and act towards women. They teach them about the importance of family. They teach their sons love, and what that word really means against the supposed images and representations of it that crowd the media. This last lesson is important, the most important, because as Noah’s biography demonstrates that love is what helps develop people into the individuals they are and instills in them their ideals and moral constructions.
I had a wonderful mother who encouraged me to create and love rather than destroy. That guidance has led me to where I am today. Likewise, Noah had a loving mother who suffered and endured a pain that would break most people, but through it all endured and taught her son that essential quality.
Born a Crime isn’t just a story about racism, it’s a testament to a mother’s love for her son. And his success is only further proof that she probably deserves some kind of official “Mom of the Year” award, because you don’t get shot in the head and live through that and not receive any kind of accommodation. Spoilers.
*Writer’s Note*
Since writing this essay one of the library staff explained, rather effectively, that nothing in life is “free,” and in fact if you look at the way libraries work since their founding, they are most certainly not free. Books, internet access, and DVDs don’t magically appear from thin air and so libraries have to receive fuding of some kind, usually from taxes and grant funding. I’m writing this out because this attitude of “Libraries should be free” is bullshit and it needs to stop being perpetuated.
**Writer’s Note**
All quotes from Born a Crime were taken from the Spiegel & Grau First edition hardback copy.
***Writer’s Note***
For the record I don’t mind if my mother uses my library card. Shegave birth me and continues to support me financially, philosophically, emotionally, intellectually, etc., and reads whatever I write here. She also, from time to time, recommends great books. So thanks Mom, you rock. Love you.
members of Alpha Chi, an academic fraternity that spans the entire United States. Students from chapters all across the country came to give lectures and presentations from virtually every field. Lecture topics could range from Pre-Med students discussing the nature of telomeres in DNA to discussing the Indian Boy in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For my own special I brought in a lecture about Mark Twain’s No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger which was rather eventful given the fact that one of my slides dealt with blackface and one of the moderators in the room was black. It was a fun couple of days when I wandered through the streets of Chicago (feeling the mean bite of “The Hawk”) with a few friends and a man name Jim Koukl.
don’t see how the boy could reach high enough. The people said he done it with a milk bucket. The constable fetched the biggest bucket in the town and made the boy stand on it, but he still lacked a foot. So the Justice of the Peace says the whole case looks fishy to him, and they turned the boy loose for lack of evidence 
(pronounced Mizz-ur-ee or Mizz-ur-uh depending on what part of the state you’re from). This region is probably familiar to the reader who has ever watched the film Deliverance and believed that that is a good representation of entire South of the United States. For the record Deliverance took place in Georgia, however it has unfortunately come to embody the imagery of the “hillbilly” who is in fact not a gap-toothed lunatic who enjoys raping people in the woods. Well, okay, there’s probably one of those out there, but I promise you that ass-clown is in the minority. Also ass-clown was probably the wrong word to use there and now I’m going to have nightmares.
general humor of a people who lived and made a life in the woods of Ozarks. The reader may wonder what value such stories have to the general culture given the fact that most of them are nothing but stories about people fucking, talking about fucking, or horny priests, prostitutes, or men measuring their dicks. I suppose this concern is a fair criticism and the first story from the collection doesn’t necessarily help that much:
highlighting. Before my teacher assigned us A Midsummer Night’s Dream to read in class she covered the myth of Piramus and Thisbe, and I was already familiar with the book because I had read Romeo & Juliet the year before and we had gone over the myth. To those who don’t know there are two warring families with a son and a daughter named Pyramus and Thisbe respectively. The pair fall in love but can only communicate by sending messages through a crack in the wall that separates both families. Eventually overcome with lust Piramus arranges to meet Thisbe and tun away with her. She says yes, but of course because this is myth everything goes wrong. Thisbe spots a lion and runs away dropping her sash, Pyramus comes upon it later and spots lion tracks. Believing his lover is dead he drives his sword into his side, and when Thisbe discovers him slain by his own hand she removes the sword and kills herself with it.
stories of young lovers winding up embarrassed or mocked by the community they live in but the final component is everything. Pissing in the Snow feels communal while the reader actually reads it, and in fact the only real way to read it is out loud. These are recorded stories by average everyday people who had these stories memorized, who lived with these stories that had most likely been passed down by generations. Their earthiness and near-constant crudeness reveals a people who lived and interacted with sexuality without any kind of real shame, and while some would suggest that this is wrong, Pissing in the Snow shows a people who wouldn’t really care about this response.
lived off the land and would know the proper way of breeding livestock, would eventually come to see sex as something funny and absurd, but ultimately uniting because in the end these stories helped shape a community’s, as well as a region’s, attitudes about sexuality.
Given what the Vagina Monologues are actually about, and given the fact that Family Guy has, in the last few seasons, done little to actually help its own reputation as being a den of refuge for sexist humor this cringe isn’t entirely unwarranted. Still the image of a woman’s waist, clad in just a pair of pink panties doing stand-up, was actually pretty funny and a great opportunity to observe the real originality of the early seasons of the show. Whether Family Guy is sexist or not is for the YouTube comment sections, the point is watching that show exposed me first to the idea that The Vagina Monologues was a performance that had something to do with Vaginas and, most assuredly, feminism in some form or capacity.
She had only touched herself when she was washing in the shower, but never with conscious intention. She had never had an orgasm. At seventy-two she went into therapy, and with encouragement of her therapist, she went home one afternoon by herself, lit some candles, took a bath, played some comforting music, and discovered her vagina. She said it took her over an hour, because she was arthritic by then, but when she finally found her clitoris, she said, she cried. This monologue is for her. (23-4).
Frankie receives a vibrator as a gift (I think it’s a Hitachi wand) and she sprains her wrist.
equation.
Calling The Vagina Monologues feminism is of course fair, but it’s also limiting for at stake is not just whether women are allowed to talk about their genitals as much as men. The Vagina Monologues are the community of women recognizing one another, recognizing their differences, and at the same time finding themselves unified by the very fact they each possess the same, and at the same time not so same, set of genitals. Each woman forms a relationship with her vagina the same way a man does with his penis, and by having a venue from which to talk about their relationship women are able to find one another.
and looking at the girl on the magazine I felt an overwhelming urge to be “close” somehow. I knew it was bad looking at this, but I stole it under my shirt and snuck off to my room. Once the door was closed I opened the magazine and studied each picture. It was a collection of centerfolds from the late 90s to the original founding of the magazine. There were lots of beautiful women in all manner of poses, and while the breasts were nice to look at what I’ve never been able to let go of is the impression of seeing a woman’s vulva and pubic hair. I didn’t know what a vagina, a vulva, or pubic hair was, but I did know one thing for certain: I liked it.
and by the time Naomi Watts and Laura Herring wound up in bed together the scene wasn’t really all that out of place, though my teenage hormones made it a bit of a distraction. The reason I bring up my father is that for a moment there was an event in which a grown man and his teenage son were sitting in the dark, watching two women fuck on the screen, sitting on separate couches unaware of what the other’s expression was.
Thing I’ll Never Do Again, a book I bought partly because I had begun Infinite Jest but also because a friend of mine had bought the book before me and raved about it (he was a creative writer but one of the smart ones who tried to push himself creatively in what he read and wrote about) and after he and I lost touch I encountered the book again at a friend’s house while I was watching her dog. The cover strikes you immediately, largely because it’s comically grotesque, with a little boy with an obscenely large head licking his chest while steam pours out from his ears. I wonder at times if I compromise whatever artistic credibility I have when I write things like this, but the book is most certainly worth your time and money if only because you’ll be able to freak out your mother and girlfriend (or boyfriend, we’re open minded here at White Tower Musings) for a month with the cover. Once you get bored with that you can read about watching television or else how David Lynch is a genius, but the movie is Dune is absolute swill.
during three specific quotes. Wallace says in section 10 of the essay:
way The Shining or Psycho were(though I did jump when the grotesque homeless man first appeared). These films are genre based films, specifically horror, and the fundamental aspect of horror is that once the first experience is done it is possible to overcome the experience and, possibly, even laugh at it later. A great example of this is the Paranormal Activity films and just about any Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street movie. The films of David Lynch are not horror films however for even after you have processed the experienced there is a discomfort and emotional awareness that doesn’t leave the viewer. David Lynch as a director has probed into the viewer psyche and, if I may use a grotesque metaphor here, effectively licked the inside of their skull leaving a lasting membrane the viewer can still feel decades after the fact.
quality of the dialogue, the regular deployment of grotesques as figurants, the precise, painterly way screens are staged and lit and the overlfush, possibly voyeuristic way that violence, deviance, and general hideousness are depicted—these all give Lynch’s movies a cool, detached quality, one that some cineastes view as more like cold and clinical. (167).
Played by Naomi Watts the narrative, such as it is, follows Betty as she encounters a woman known as Rita who has suffered a terrible car crash and can’t remember who she is. Betty recently moved to Los Angeles and many critics and fan of the film have noted that she comes to embody the standard naïve outsider hoping to make it big in L.A. Most of this is certainly true, for Betty freely helps Rita after her accident and by the end of the film she has seemingly been destroyed as she eventually buys into the grotesque realities of the Hollywood system. She’s an aspiring actress, and when the plot flips, and Rita is revealed to be a successful actress, betty is left a shriveled waste of malevolent intent. It’s not enough that she has failed, she has exploded because of her kind nature.
Diane attempting to construct a narrative in which she’s actually the sympathetic character who’s just a victim of abuse and manipulation. What is important to note however is that this structure does not make it difficult to watch Lynch’s film, in fact it only informs it more. Betty is either the victim of evil, or else a perpetrator of it, and at a certain point there isn’t much of a distinction. At least, as Wallace suggests, in a Lynch movie.
film-watching are both “passive” exercises you “receive” the medium rather that “actively” generating some part of it yourself, there has arisen an “elitism” coupled with bullshit morality in our society and so film makers who explore violence will always suffer the wrath of people who are bothered or disturbed by violent or perverse content. Lynch’s movies freely employ violence, this is a fact, but not to the level that it becomes pornographic or gratuitous. As Wallace wrote, whatever violence exists within his universe the acts performed and recorded do not provided a kind of malignant catharsis, nor are they designed to be employed as black humor. Death, pain, destruction, and murder just are.
Trying to explain that something just is, doesn’t fit into the narrative structures that human beings live their lives by. In the Judeo-Christian faith that was I surrounded with as a young man, acts of evil or monstrosity were performed because there was an evil supernatural tempter swaying the will of human beings in the form of The Devil. As I got older, and received more education, I learned that human beings’ motivations could also be swayed by economics, there are financial reasons for evil deeds because people are greedy or hungry. Adding a bit more complexity to this sexuality becomes a factor in the compelling of people to violence, for sex inspires passions that blind people to reason and so a lover may be drawn into a fit of violence after he catches his boyfriend in bed with two other men, or a wife may kill her husband’s mistress because she won’t share him. These are examples of causes and effects that fit narratives most people would recognize and be comfortable with, but Wallace brings up an important point when he notes that violence in David Lynch films aren’t about narratives because in Lynch films narratives are contorted, twisted, and may not even be real.
either by their own force of will or by outside influence. Looking at Mulholland Drive this last impression of evil seems more and more relevant for ultimately every character falls prey to the evil forces that seem to occupy the city of L.A. Betty and Adam both are human beings trying to fulfill a narrative of their own life until outside forces, evil forces, eventually corrupt their will and force them into paths they don’t desire or can live with in the case of Betty.
what is a Lynchian moment? A teenage boy watching an erotic moment in a movie with his father most likely doesn’t satisfy that idea, but on some level I believe it does. Wallace defines it as best he can for the reader:
do), and even Clarence. Let’s not talk about Teen Titans Go! however, it’s still too soon.
well, there it was. In my madder moments I would imagine the pets asking me to leave on Cartoon Network because they wanted to watch Adventure Time, but that’s revealing information my wife will need for the committal. After a while we would come home, either together or separately and over time we found that, after a long day at work and school, it was nice to just sit down and watch an episode of Gumball or Clarence. The shows were designed for kids, but the humor was often smart in these shows and so they became a staple. One show in particular however I resisted for reasons I honestly don’t know.
book Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal and so looking at Steven Universe and my recent upsurge in watching the show it seemed like a good time to throw my hat into the ring if I can use an over-used yet still effective visual metaphor.
anthropomorphic feminine humanoids that are, in the most basic explanation possible, rocks. A Gem’s main body is a single gem that contains their spirit, energy, and soul and from it they are able to manifest a physical body which assumes different personalities depending on the gem which can run from pearls, amethysts, diamonds, rubies, paradot, lapis lazuli, quartz, jasper, etc. and within this society is a rigid class system which assigns “roles” to gems given their stone. The Crystal Gems are the last of a rebellion army that tried to fight this system and their former leader, a gem known as Rose Quartz but often referred to as “Rose,” has been remade after falling in love with a young human named Greg Universe. Steven is their “son,” but he’s also Rose for on his stomach he bears her quartz. The show then, is about the Crystal Gems raising Steven along with Greg and often encountering gems from the Home World who are in constant effort trying to defeat them.
obvious example of the character Garnet who is in fact a “fusion” of two smaller gems named Ruby and Sapphire. Now it’s important to clarify the misinterpretation, that many casual viewers including myself early on made about what “fusion” actually is. The Gems in Steven Universe, while they don’t possess any kind of sex, do exhibit feminine gender presentations and even use female pro-nouns when referring themselves or others. This by itself wouldn’t be so terribly interesting since we’re living in a period of Third-Wave Feminism and so seeing more and more female representation in cartoons isn’t that shocking. It’s refreshing and fun to watch, but not necessarily shocking. Many have objected to Steven Universe however for the show relies on Garnet as well as other gems “fusing” which many see as sex, when watching the show regularly clearly demonstrates something far more important.
but I try to avoid being an asshole to the best of my ability and so when somebody tells me they don’t like something I try to avoid doing it. They became J—- instead. I’ve censored their name because I don’t wish to “out” them. J—- remains such a crucial part of my life, not just because he was the first person I came out to as Bi, but because he introduced me to Jack Halberstam.
and aunts and uncles and grandparents. But now, children are apt to have many adults in their life, adults, moreover, to whom they are not even related. […] What would happen if we actually began to incorporate this version of the family into our mainstream representations? (22-23).
There are all sorts of different families, Katie. Some families have one mommy, some families have one daddy, or two families. And some children live with their uncle or aunt. Some live with their grandparents, and some children live with foster parents. And some live in separate homes, in separate neighborhoods, in different areas of the country – and they may not see each other for days, or weeks, months… even years at a time. But if there’s love, dear… those are the ties that bind, and you’ll have a family in your heart, forever. All my love to you, poppet, you’re going to be all right… bye-bye. 
Universe have demonstrated that particular model is not only not always efficient, sometimes it just doesn’t work for everyone and so different family models emerge. This is not to suggest that heterosexual people are doomed to suffer unnecessarily in their relationships and that only Queer people will find happiness. While I am bisexual, I married a woman because I loved her and so far it’s not only worked, it’s given me what I needed psychologically, philosophically, personally, etc. My success in the heteronormative model of relationship however should never be looked upon as “the norm” because my wife and I are far too odd to ever be called normal (just to put it in perspective I’m an atheist who spends most of his time reading and talking to himself and my wife reveres “Ceiling Cat” …Google it).
the marriage narrative, but looking back to Steven Universe there is one point Halberstam notes that is pressingly relevant:
actresses from different racial and ethnic background. These achievements are important, but more important is the fact that Sugar pointed out earlier which is that young children who are queer finally have a voice and a presence on T.V. Steven as a character is raised not only by queer women, but also in a queer family structure that satisfies, as far as my reading is concerned, Halberstam’s model of Gaga Feminism, for while gems and characters may form relationships, the topic of marriage is largely left out. Marriage isn’t important or necessary because the energy relationship sustains and nurtures Steven. The best part is despite all the weirdness in his life, or perhaps even better, because of the non-stop weirdness, Steven is a kind soul who only wants to help people.
Psychologists most likely have an explanation for this behavior, but for my own part children learn early that narratives are how they shape their identity and eventually find a mate to share their life with and the model that parents establish for their kids at a young age helps them formulate what they understand an ideal mate to be. Queer families may be a recent phenomenon, but as time continues on it’s likely that they’ll become far more prevalent and as such Queer parents, and queer kids, can use a television program like Steven Universe because it offers the same story but with a new face.
e seen at least 100 sexual images I was surprised and then at the same time not surprised. Films always seemed to have sex in them (I’m thinking of American Pie and that infamous flute), books like Tropic of Cancer or For Whom the Bell Tolls would contain descriptions of sensuality, advertising was brimming with sex based imagery, and Family Guy, my favorite television show, relied regularly on sex for jokes. Pornography then was really just the core media from which every aspect of visual culture was derived.
Jameson may not be the President of the United States (yet, if Trump can run now anybody can), neither is she a diplomat nor an accomplished public orator, but her voice and body has been part of many individual’s personal sexual experiences, and also their reading habits. Including mine.
This passage may in fact hold some kind of feminist statement though I recognize immediately just writing that puts me in a precarious position. A cisgender man, even if he is bi-sexual, writing about a pornstar’s memoir and arguing that it’s a feminist document, or contains feminist sentiment, reeks of bad apology and by that I mean it sounds fucking pathetic and sad. Many men before, some of them good writers but most of them just terrible, have attempted to make the argument that a woman starring in porn can have a feminist position, but when you’re making the argument with your dick in your hands it’s a little difficult to take that argument seriously. Even if I don’t watch Jenna Jameson videos regularly, I do believe this passage has some feminist argument behind it.
of them is acceptable. I’ve written before that I don’t care much for the word slut. It’s not a pretty word linguistically, it’s almost always used as a pejorative term, and the individuals who typically use it usually seem to possess a holier than thou stance in their approach to life. Slut is used as a weapon to reduce women rather than raise them but at this point the contester emerges.
players when she was a teenager. She says no and describes the attack, and just to be clear I won’t repeat the attack here because I refuse to out of general principle. What is important is her reflection on the experience and why she told Howard no:
revealed that almost everyone’s browsing history held some dark sticky gem. Those readers eager and desperate to read a tragic story were horribly disappointed, while those readers eager to read about sex got their money’s worth while also reading about a woman who possessed a strength which defied an industry which has, and continues to do so, leave many women defeated, used, or destroyed.
Sex workers face a real stigma in our society because their work exists within the double standard. People like and enjoy sex, and they enjoy watching sex, however because no one wants to acknowledge their sexual desire sex workers are typically dehumanized, cast as sluts and perverts, and receive verbal and sometimes physical abuse. Reading Jenna Jameson’s biography in many ways is an act that liberates the reader from this behavior because it forces the reader to acknowledge that she is actually a human being. Pornstars are people, living breathing people with their own personalities, dreams, ambitions, desires, and problems and the sooner society acknowledges this then there can be real progress in combatting the stigma that leads to negative behavior that these people typically have to suffer from the self-righteous or sexually frustrated who usually make their lives miserable. It also helps society by letting people admit freely that they consume pornography as a product, thus opening public, and honest, conversations about sex and whether or not the porn that is being produced honestly conveys a healthy sexual response and behavior.
short time ago) everywhere:
was the girl every guy wanted to get, and the boys who watched the film figured that because they were dorks like Roger that meant that they “deserved” a girl as equally attractive.
piano dropped on his head and no that isn’t a joke. It is but it isn’t, does that make sense? Down on his luck and struggling with alcoholism Eddie’s hired by R.K. Maroon, head of Maroon pictures to take photographs of Roger Rabbit’s wife. He discovers that Jessica Rabbit is playing Patty-Cake with Marvin Acme (the hand game, phrasing, though it really is just patty-cake) and when Roger Rabbitt find out he goes nuts. When Marvin Acme has a safe dropped on his head everybody looks to Roger, especially a character by the name of Judge Doom. The film follows Roger and Eddie as the two of them try desperately to prove Roger’s innocence and figure out “who dunnit?” Signs point originally to Roger, then Jessica, then R.K. Maroon, then finally to Judge Doom played by Lloyd.
underappreciated he is as an actor. Playing Judge Doom the man manages to outperform almost everyone apart from Hoskins, the pinnacle point being his brief monologue explaining why he wants to destroy Toon-Town and all cartoons period:
billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it’ll be beautiful. 
characters intermingle?
defined the term quagmire. His relentless efforts to capture the Roadrunner to satisfy his hunger always take place on the American highway, specifically the western plains of Utah and Colorado with its steeps and canyons. Bugs Bunny, still history’s greatest winner, came to embody the idea of America and what America stood for. It wouldn’t be until Jim Henson created Kermit the Frog that Americans would have a non-human that so embodied the American spirit. I may be gushing now, but all that I am attempting to convey is the fact that generations of young people grew up watching Loony Tunes and Disney movies, and so in many ways cartoons constitute a greater reality for people of my and previous generations than their own government or elected officials.
is not a political film by any means, but this small clip is a reminder of the power that power holds over people.
parachute and finding a tire instead. It’s a cheap gag, and will make you laugh, but in that moment the world is reduced to a memory and philosophic opportunity.
perception and discourse around the female body. Miley then will most likely be recorded because of her tongue.
herself, fascinated by the recurring image of her tongue stuck out. Simply Google image searching the name Miley Cyrus reveals several images of this action after the first few lines, and should the reader search “Miley Cyrus Tongue” they’re greeted with an entire page. Cyrus has explained in an interview with Barbara Walters that this sticking out of her tongue is simply her trying to cope with always being watched or stared at by cameras since she doesn’t know how to smile. It would be enough to leave it there, but alas a great portion of the population possesses a not-so-well-hidden perversion in trying to understand and dissect the sex lives of celebrities and as such Miley’s Tongue has become a discourse that is worth exploring.
would confirm every bad stereotype about Millennials, but upon deeper reflection I really began to think about it. Writing about tongue’s would have to involve discussing sexuality, and when approaching the topic of the public’s fascination with celebrity bodies this actually becomes something relevant, as well as something which has been done before.
instances of “the IT girl,” Miley is unashamedly queer.
sometimes mislabeled as the Cole Porter hit “Anything Goes,” and if the reader is confused do not feel bad for both this gender identity and sexuality is often poorly represented in cinema and television so understanding will not always be direct. Pansexuality, like all sexuality, is nuanced and for each person there are preferences and fetishes. Simply put: the Pansexual person does not hold one gender as desirable, but in fact believes that any human being they encounter can be sexy regardless of sex, gender, or sexuality. For lack of better clarification I’ll let Cyrus speak for herself:
attention, and while Cyrus hasn’t made any public comment about pronoun usage this does complicate all the talk about her tongue.
tongue can’t be a penis because that would be an aspect of gendering her. To get a clearer perspective of this the reader should consult Judith Butler’s seminal text Gender Trouble in which she explores her thesis that gender is a performance rather than the innate biology. Looking at the way human beings gender bodies she notes:
over breasts. The reader most likely has a friend who often shares photos or videos of women breastfeeding in public and being scorned or else told to go somewhere else (it’s me, I’m your friend that does this, it’s an important issue). The reason for this is because our society has over-sexualized women’s breast to the point they have negated their original purpose. Breasts by design are meant to produce milk and feed babies, yet the rhetoric of pornography and advertising has inundated the public at large with the paradigm (sort of a standard of behavior or ideology) that breasts are sexual objects and “the bigger and less saggier the better.”
The reader should give a damn because Cyrus’s tongue is being sold and mass marketed as a phallus. Miley Cyrus’s body has become a discourse and corporate product, and the sexual rhetoric around her becomes problematic. I will try to look at both interpretations.
sheathe and massage the penis in intercourse […]. (23)
semester while you’re finishing up your core with a gender studies class, but the way we talk about sex and gender at large does matter. Miley Cyrus by her own admission isn’t a lesbian, but neither is she straight, but because the public at large is still catching up to the nuance of sexuality and gender expression a discourse has emerged because she stuck her tongue out during a few dozen pictures. Looking at these images casually it’s easy to simply write Cyrus off as a lesbian, but it’s also incorrect. Just as it’s incorrect to assume that that the only way two women can have sex is through tongues because that’s the closest thing to a phallus besides a finger.
