season of the bitch

I’ll write more when I get back, but some stories simply must be shared.

Today (Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day) I volunteered at the Day of Service event in D.C. at RFK Stadium. We coordinated about 13,000 people making care packages for the soldiers serving overseas. Included in those 13,000 were Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Hilda Solis, and Freddy.

Freddy is from Savannah. Actually, he was born in Jasper County, South Carolina, which is between Savannah, GA and Hilton Head, which regular readers know is where my family lives, and where I lived for a while.

Freddy grew up there when it was still segregated, and he couldn’t go to the beach in Savannah because it was whites only. He went to the beach on Hilton Head because there was no one else there to care who swam there.

Now, 50 years later, rich people from around the world swim and play golf there. My parents live and work there. I went to high school there.

The last time Freddy was in D.C.was 40 years ago, to hear Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr give his “I Have A Dream” speech. He was living in New York, and took the bus down.

Now Freddy lives in Atlanta, and came up to see Barack Obama get sworn in.

It was an absolute honor to work with him today, to hear his story and be a part of it.
(Pictures soon)

This morning, I’m getting up and heading down to Maryland to stay with some friends before the inauguration on Tuesday.

I’m recovering from a cold, so I sat home yesterday watching the whistle stop tour on TV. I didn’t go down to catch Barack here in Philly, but I watched him since.

I love the symbolism of the train tour. As matttbastard said, it’s like they’re symbolically doing away with the last 40 years. Plus, trains are cool.

The Obama campaign always understood the importance of symbolism, of performance. Yes, the president has lots of serious things to do, but one of his most important jobs is to stand for us, to represent us, and to reach out to us.

I love Michelle Obama, and Dr. Jill Biden.

And I love listening to Barack. I know he’ll screw up over the next four (eight?) years, but I hope he never screws up to the point where I get sick of hearing his voice. I hope I never forget how I feel now, how I’ve felt over the past couple of months knowing that we did it, we put the Bush era behind us, and how I’ve felt over the past year working for a candidate that, though he pissed me off at times, I actually trusted to do the right thing.

I’ll be in DC today, Monday and Tuesday, and will be twittering away, so feel free to follow along.

“You proved once more that people who love this country can change it.”

Well, Barack, I started trying to change this country long before I felt any love for it. And I’m finally starting to have a bit of faith in it.

Ms. Pop Feminist has, as always, an interesting take on the Bitch magazine “bailout,” which sounds so much stranger after the rash of bailouts of the financial sector. She makes excellent points about the way the campaign was conducted, the nature of print, and the nature of the Web, and I wrote her a small novel in return, which I’m reprinting here, since it was giant, and rather interesting.

As always, I love you for your willingness to put shit out there.

And here, you’re absolutely right.

The death of old media is in part the death of our need to be talked at. I say this with three print copies of The Nation next to me (home of several of my fave “public intellectuals,” including Naomi Klein and Barbara Ehrenreich).

A friend and I were discussing the lack of liberal public intellectuals a few weeks back. It was in the context of television and how well the conservative movement has done in funding think tanks and providing “experts” for television.

But especially in the feminist movement, you’re quite right that the desire to conserve print is the desire to conserve some form of authority. One that we simply don’t need.

Blogging is not journalism, but neither, for the most part, is what Bitch does. It’s also opinion writing.

The largest problem that I can see with the move to the Web is that it is harder to monetize. Much as I hate the word, the fact remains that Virginia Woolf’s argument from “A Room of One’s Own” remains true. I’m broke, I have to work to make a living, and that leaves me less time for actual journalism, blogging, reading, research, and creative work. If I cannot make money doing any of those things, then I have to find another way.

But rather than clinging to print as the last way we can make money (sort of) as writers and therefore dedicate ourselves to being if not public intellectuals, at least stimulators of the discourse (yeah, that sounds pretentious too, but I can’t think of a better word), we need to be figuring out how we can make a living as writers and artists in a world that gets its media primarily over the Web.

1. I Put a Spell On You - Nina Simone

2. Sweedeedee - Cat Power

3. Only Lovers Left Alive - The (International) Noise Conspiracy

4. Enjoy the Silence - Tori Amos (originally Depeche Mode, yes)

5. Hungry Wolf - X

6. What She Said - the Smiths

7. Hunter - Bjork

8. Natural’s Not In It - Gang of Four

9. Perfect Day - Lou Reed

10. DLZ - TV on the Radio

and I give you this video, because Morrissey is at once a wanker and awesome, and this is the only time I’ve ever found him sexy.

There’s some good discussion over at Ren’s about the term “Sex positive.”

I am with her (and many of her commenters) that the term sucks. It’s limited, it’s vague, it doesn’t describe what it’s meant to. And yes, it implies that those who don’t identify as such are “sex negative.”

Me being the kind of person I am, that’s the least of my concerns. But I don’t know if I’ve ever really called myself “sex positive,” inside my head. If forced to identify my feminism, I’ve done so. My tag cloud testifies to it. But it doesn’t always feel that way, or make a lot of sense.

Ren said:

The One Thing I truly do care about is helping or encouraging other people, especially women, to say what they do and do not want or like, doing what they do like and not doing what they do not like, and being okay with doing that.

Ginmar commented:

Whatever a woman does, I want her to be safe, respected, protected by the law, and happy. How do you sum that up in one economical little phrase?

And Iamcuriousblue said:

That said, I do think “sexual liberal” or “sexual libertarian” is actually a more accurate term for this school of thought. (”Sex radical” often gets used, though I personally don’t like the one-upsmanship implied by “radical”.) Of course, for people want something to get their back up over something, I’m sure the implication of calling the other side “sexually conservative” or “sexually authoritarian” will be brought up. But then again, that’s precisely the critique that many of us are making of restrictive forms of sexual moralism, both from the religious right and secular left.

So: sexual libertarian? Kristin also said it, and I like it. I already consider myself a pretty hardcore civil libertarian, and so this fits right in. It defines a little more practically what we actually believe, without really defining ourselves as against anyone, or defining anyone else as “negative.”

Some of us just want to be left alone, and for others to be left alone. Others find the whole subject fascinating, and like to talk about it–more than we should, maybe. But I think what we all want is for people to be able to explore and enjoy their sexuality in a world where they’re supported and not ostracized for their choices.

I’m still recovering from driving home for the holidays, and am drowning a bit in things I need to get done, but I have a few things up at other places that I wanted to cross-post here in case anyone was interested.

My piece on Gaza, at GlobalComment, which took me far too long and far too much agonizing to write.

I’m an American Jew, and when I state that fact, I invite a wealth of assumptions, not all of them anti-Semitic in nature. Renee Martin recently addressed the conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, so I don’t have to (though I would like to note that Modern Mitzvot has a very good point too).

Daniele Archibugi pointed out that upcoming elections in Israel and Palestine most likely have something to do with the timing and force of the Israeli attack. But being in the U.S., I have to see it through the lens of the election we just had, here, and one of the Republican party’s favorite anti-Obama attacks.

And on a slightly lighter note, I’ve found the definitive piece of Bush-era fiction, and it’s a comic.

I picked up DMZ #1 way back in 2005 and reviewed it for Best Shots (wow, I’ve been doing this way too long). Since then, I’ve read and dropped many other monthly comics, but DMZ has stayed on my pull list. I’ve given it as a gift, made my professors read it, and flogged it mercilessly on this very site.

But aside from being an excellent story, it’s a story that at its core is about all the major questions of the Bush era.

DMZ picks all of us up and drops us into the middle of a war zone. But Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli (and some excellent guest artists) transfer that war back home, to a place we all know. New York City is the most familiar landscape in America even to people who haven’t been there, and it was the central point of the crises we’ve dealt with in the last eight years…

DMZ holds us all responsible for the failures of our government under Bush. No one gets a free pass. Each time you think you know who Wood is pointing the finger at, you find it twisting around to point squarely back at you.

I promise to write something for you guys soon. I miss you.

Just a few scattered thoughts and questions:

*Do you really think love is something we’re trained to expect? How would we know what it was, and be so sure about it, if it were simply a learned behavior?

*Women get accused all the time of being the ones who want romance, but the most swooningly romantic, ridiculous songs I can think of were all written by men. (I say this as I listen to Morrissey crooning “To die by your side would be a heavenly way to die.”)

*Is there such a thing as a feminist heterosexual love story? As in, a film/book/TV show where the sole purpose is for the heroine to get together with the hero that won’t elicit criticism for sending the wrong message?

*How old were you when you first fell in love? I was 18. And if you’re like me, that’s the one you’ll never quite forget.

*Tell me a movie that encapsulates the way you see love. Mine is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

I wonder if I’d have disliked the Twilight books more if I hadn’t been fully prepared by a rather irate segment of the feminist blogosphere for them to be horrifically, offensively sexist.

If I’d just stumbled onto the books and read them, would I be reacting with revulsion instead of “It’s not that bad”?

What’s really starting to get on my nerves, though, is the constant refrain of “I haven’t read the books, but here’s my take on them.” I’m a critic by trade, a rather overeducated one, and so I’ll stand by anyone’s right to read and critique a text. If you read the Twilight books and hated ‘em, great.  However, when you haven’t read the text, I think at some point you lose your right to be snotty about it.

Comic fans are quite used to others’ elitism. We get it all the time, the teasing cracks from our friends who aren’t comic folk, the people who look at you funny when you tell them you were at the comic convention or that the best book you read last year was a trade paperback (notice I didn’t use the term graphic novel).

We even get elitist with each other. I’ve been told several times that I’m not a true comic fan because I don’t really read superhero books. Others get told that they’re stupid for insisting that superhero books can be as good as indie graphic novels. We get called out for reading too much Marvel, too much DC, or too  much indie.

My post on how elitism, feminism, and romanticism interact in the response to Twilight finishes up at Blog@Newsarama.

EDIT* To add to what I said there, yes, Twilight’s “message” that your boyfriend is your be-all and end-all isn’t the greatest for teenage girls. But teenage girls are not idiots, and they’re quite aware that Twilight is not reality. No one’s claiming that teenagers shouldn’t read Romeo and Juliet, or Wuthering Heights, two texts that Meyer makes reference to many times in the Twilight books. No, she’s not Shakespeare, but I simply didn’t find anything more antifeminist in these books than many other things on the market.

It’s teen escapist fiction. Overwritten and giggle-inducing, but not nearly as terrible and offensive as I’d been led to believe.