Social Commentary

We’re elaborately taught how to relate to ourselves as gendered beings. It’s been a long time that people have been building on the critical observation that there’s no natural connection between pink/girl or boy/blue, yet kids continue to be the targets of aggressive marketing that creates profitable niche interests—a collection of stereotypes from which gender binarized consumers are “free” to choose—and of subtler gender conditioning (as my friend Ember is finding out, swaddled babies, though indistinguishable, are praised as pretty or strong depending on how parents advertise their sex). I’ve mentioned how a lot of kids are skipping the closet and, consequently, finding themselves at the forefront of advocating respect toward sexual difference. What about trans youth? There’s been increasing attention to “gender creative” or “gender independent” kids as social space opens up in which to discuss, rather than repress, their behavior. Could these terms reflect a reluctance to apply the concept of transgender to youth of a certain age because of its association with sexual identity (I am thinking specifically here of the historical, medical roots of trans-related descriptors in the West that have stemmed from the word "transsexualism" coined as "transsexualismus" in the early 1900s by Magnus Hirschfeld and later "trans-sexual" by Harry Benjamin in the 1960s)? Conversely, does the usage of the trans label problematically continue to lump the T in with the LGB? (Not that the B gets much visibility, either).

A few posts ago, in Slut Shaming and the Empowered Young Woman, one reader commented on the way that asexuality is written out of a lot of the most visible debates on what it means to be mature, empowered, and sexually self-aware. She also observed that asexual feeling, identity, and relationship practices are so nonexistent in pop culture that it’s almost impossible to know where to begin analyzing it. In her high school experiences as well as in mine, dating was one of the biggest status symbols you could achieve, and it was fairly well assumed that dating was the gateway to rounding those bases and scoring a home run, as it were. (I’ve never been too clear on that base analogy, and the fact that it doesn’t really seem to translate for GLB people isn’t its only problem.) As The New Goodnight Kiss documents, for some young people, sex has become a lot more openly casual than what I remember. But that activity still has a lot to do with teenaged pecking orders, even as it may also have to do with fulfilling experiences of sexual freedom or the development of positive relationships for some young people. So what about asexuality and youth culture? How do kids learn to associate certain values with being sexual and not being sexual?

For a lot of people, the idea of a sleepover conjures an image of wholesome youthful fun. In a culture that assumes that close friendships are usually same-sex, these occasions represent something platonic. At the same time, from an early age, a disproportionate degree of social anxiety and moral panic manifests around the bedroom, the nighttime, and the ambiguous meanings of the verb “to sleep.” Why so much parental concern over making sure that, as their kids grow older, they aren’t sharing any of these activities with others of the “opposite” sex (as though there is an opposite to a person’s experience of self!)? What about the queer kids?

I've touched upon the construction of autistic masculinity and the construction of autism as inherently masculine a few times already in this series. In this post, I'd like to take a little bit of a closer look at the relationship between autism and masculinity.

PETA isn't content to restrict its sex-sells messaging to the porn site, either. The latest campaign features a woman walking down the street in her bra and underwear in a neck brace, a result of rough (like, put your head through the wall and land you in a neck brace rough) sex with her newly vegan boyfriend. Is this a PSA for sexual assault? No. It's PETA's attempt to shock us into adopting a vegan diet (or making our partners eat vegan, thus giving them the skills to leave us neck-braced and dazed enough that we forget to wear clothes to the grocery store). Because PETA thinks we should want sex to end in a neck brace, I guess?

Offensiveness of this ad aside (read more about the ways it normalizes violence against women in this post from New Black Woman), this and other similar PETA spots are just plain fucking lazy (heh). Next time they might as well skip the ad altogether and instead make a SEXXX PORN BOOBS VEGETABLES HOT BRAS word association game. Oh, wait...

After seeing the headline "Catholic School Board Raises Concerns Over Teaching Homosexuality in School" the other day, I got to thinking that there’s still a lot of confusion about "inclusive" education. Teaching homosexuality!? What exactly does that mean? Here's my take on the question based on the headlines in my home province of Ontario, a supposed bastion of mythic Canadian "tolerance."

So I was watching Glee the other night, waiting desperately to see if Brittany and Santana would show some sign that they were still together. As I tried to peer into the minds of Glee’s creators and discover their subversive intent in having the lesbian character Santana dance to a song with romantic lyrics about boy/girl love with the gay-in-real-life Ricky Martin, it hit me: TV is not activism. I mean, critiquing TV can be activism, but TV programming itself exists, by and large, in the service of profit, not activism. In recognition of TV’s persuasive powers over “impressionable youth,” there is a long history of the “after school special” and the “very special episode” of family sitcoms. But the structural inequalities and relations of rule responsible for the most urgent cultural problems of our time run way deeper than the politics of media representation.

Happy Valentine's Day!

I have a pathetic affection for this holiday. Sure, it's a grossly problematic event dedicated to perpetuating the cultural ideal of heterosexual monogamy via capitalistic consumption. But—thanks to social conditioning too relentless and insidious for me to resist—I'm actually a sucker for the popular idea of romantic love. As sheepish as I am to admit it, a holiday dedicated to the idea of "love" (minus the focus on material consumption) is actually okay by me. And of course there is an infinite variety of different kinds of love and relationships to celebrate today: altruistic love for one's fellow human beings, kinship relationships, friendships, platonic romance, self-love, et cetera.

In this case, I'm going to invoke the ideas I brought up in a previous post about "finding autism" in popular fiction, and dedicate a little Valentine's love to a few fictional ladies who might be on the spectrum. 

Eleven years ago, an article in Wired magazine helped establish the reputation of Asperger's as "the geek syndrome." As the condition has become more prominent in the popular imagination, it has acquired a close association with computer technology. One could write a whole book on the relationship between Asperger's and cultural fascination with and anxiety about technology, but here I just want to begin to question and deconstruct that relationship. 

Some big news broke recently involving the so-called "honor killing" of four women close to where I live, and the media coverage has just been troubling to say the least. A father, his eldest son, and his second wife have been convicted of first-degree murder in the slaying of three of their daughters and his first wife.

The fact of Geeti Shafia, Sahar Shafia, Zainab Shafia, and Rona Amir Mohammad’s deaths is an unmitigated tragedy. But its political meaning for the Western states whose resources are being funneled increasingly into surveillance and policing (domestically, through immigration and border services, and through imperial wars) is not self-evident.

Nor, perhaps, is its connection to the topic of youth, sexuality, and education, but let me tell you what I think about that.