Monday, December 31, 2018
Political Apology of a Lingerie Model
In the middle of this summer, I was booked to shoot for a new lingerie brand. The rate was on the low side (about 60% of industry standard pay per hour), but I’m a fresh college grad reluctant to turn down good money, so I agreed. The day before the shoot, the casting director contacted me and said that they couldn’t pay me, but would be able to offer trade. (Instead of money, would I accept compensation in bras?) That really doesn’t cut it, but I conceded. I had already committed, and didn’t want to develop a reputation as difficult or flaky that would injure me in the long run. Plus, she emphasized that the founders didn’t have two pennies to rub together, and as the editor of a magazine run entirely on volunteer labor, I sympathize with the underfunded. They couldn’t pay for a makeup artist, so I would do my own makeup beforehand. I brought my own jeans. I would be in and out in two hours.
When I got there, I was stunned to find that they had rented an enormous, beautiful studio for multiple days and many thousands of dollars. The place was littered with technicians strapped with expensive, bulky video equipment, which also surprised me. There was a makeup artist with an assistant and a full kit, a hair stylist, a clothing stylist, and catering that cost twice my day rate. Later that evening, the French supermodel Camille Rowe was flying in to be photographed for the launch. The makeup artist leisurely redid my entire face, and over two hours had passed before I even started shooting.
I took some quick, run-of-the-mill photos before moving to video—which no one had told me I was expected to do. I was shoved into a too-small bra because they didn’t have my size, and positioned on a solitary stool, lit so my face acquired the beautiful, highly-detailed stoicism of a Time magazine cover. I was asked to state my name and bra size—confidently, looking directly at the camera, as though I had overcome some challenge—and then interrogated about my inevitably vexed relationship to my breasts and the modern bra market. Every question was a leading one: “Isn’t it horrible that…?” “Don’t you wish…?” And nearly every one was completely asinine, treating complicated feminist social problems with simple capitalist remedies. No, my life has not been marred by traumatizing bra shopping experiences. I like the two bras that I own and I bought them painlessly on the Internet. No, they’re not particularly uncomfortable. I can’t speak to the epiphany I experienced when you told me my “true size,” because your system of measurement is just as arbitrary as everyone else’s. No, I don’t understand how a new bra will somehow shield me from the wandering eyes of men I don’t want while attracting the men I do. I don’t understand how it’s possible to be sexy “for myself.” (I’m sure the videographer’s botox and lip fillers were “for herself,” too.) And I definitely don’t see how the freedom of movement I’m supposed to gain with a more comfortable bra remotely simulates the real freedom I desire.
Of course I did not say these things; I dissimulated, I think rather badly. At the end of the video, I had to rhapsodize about the superiority of this too-small bra I’d worn for a total of ten minutes to every other bra I’ve ever used, and describe how I’ve been rescued from the sexual oppression of men and bra-makers, which (surprise!) makes me look and feel hotter than ever. The final question was, simply, “How do you feel?” I begged myself not to say “liberated” or “unburdened,” which created an awkward pause. So I blabbed, “I feel independent?” and scurried out red-faced. I have yet to receive my payment in bras.
I have made a small career in the industry of creating advertisements for female consumers, which means that I have broader knowledge of the stuff of buzzy fashion startups and social media influencers than I’d like to admit. The baffling cocktail of feminist problems packaged in pro-capitalist solutions typified by this lingerie branding is nothing new, and has only proliferated in recent years. But this shoot felt like a particular violation; even worse than the egregious labor practices and obvious abuse of my work was the expectation, without my consent, that I was to narrativize my experience as a woman, using my own name, in such a way as to suggest that the real struggles of women against patriarchal oppression could be alleviated, magically, by buying a bra that costs more than ninety six percent of those purchased annually by American women. Speaking under beams of hot studio light, ineptly attempting to strike the perfect balance of elegance and false bravery culminated in a scene so extreme in its failure to approximate genuine social good that it toppled into bathos.
I refuse to participate in “brand partnerships,” which require people (overwhelmingly women) to use their identities on social media to market brands and influence the consumer behavior of their followers in exchange for promotion and free product. I still field requests for this regularly. A particularly ridiculous proposition I received last week was from a company that sells loose leaf tea that supposedly “enhances female intuition, self-reflection, and witchyness.” I am constantly receiving targeted ads from high-end cosmetics brands, urging me to bite the bullet and give myself “what I deserve.” The hugely popular women’s luxury coworking space The Wing recently held an event promoting the American Express Platinum credit card veiled as a day of “Extreme Self-Care.” Even the fifteen-year-old teen star Jojo Siwa is versed in the argot, insisting that her pricey and coveted line of technicolor hair bows is a “symbol of power, confidence, believing-ness.” The supermodel Emily Ratajkowski, who trumpets her identity as an activist, feels compelled to designate her every move (usually her frequent and “controversial” displays of nudity) as a feminist act. Defending a video in which she massages herself with oiled spaghetti while gazing hungrily at the camera, she wrote on Instagram: “Being sexy is fun and I like it…Feminism is about the choices we make, and the freedom we have to make personal choices without judgment or retribution.”
I am grateful for the fact that I am just one of many to condemn the utter bastardization of radical feminism that has dominated the fourth wave, where tag lines like “the woman’s choice,” which originated in battles over health and marital legislation, now defend arguments like Ratajkowski’s: that women should be free to do whatever they want without judgment or retribution because their gender identity inexplicably transcends the capacity for destructive behavior. Critics often call it “lifestyle feminism.” Lifestyle feminism was first discussed by bell hooks in Feminism Is for Everybody, where it denoted a feminism so drained of any commitment to radicalism or self sacrifice that it becomes merely aesthetic—serving a decorative function in atomized lives.
by Sophia Richards, Politics/Letters | Read more:
Image: uncredited
When I got there, I was stunned to find that they had rented an enormous, beautiful studio for multiple days and many thousands of dollars. The place was littered with technicians strapped with expensive, bulky video equipment, which also surprised me. There was a makeup artist with an assistant and a full kit, a hair stylist, a clothing stylist, and catering that cost twice my day rate. Later that evening, the French supermodel Camille Rowe was flying in to be photographed for the launch. The makeup artist leisurely redid my entire face, and over two hours had passed before I even started shooting.I took some quick, run-of-the-mill photos before moving to video—which no one had told me I was expected to do. I was shoved into a too-small bra because they didn’t have my size, and positioned on a solitary stool, lit so my face acquired the beautiful, highly-detailed stoicism of a Time magazine cover. I was asked to state my name and bra size—confidently, looking directly at the camera, as though I had overcome some challenge—and then interrogated about my inevitably vexed relationship to my breasts and the modern bra market. Every question was a leading one: “Isn’t it horrible that…?” “Don’t you wish…?” And nearly every one was completely asinine, treating complicated feminist social problems with simple capitalist remedies. No, my life has not been marred by traumatizing bra shopping experiences. I like the two bras that I own and I bought them painlessly on the Internet. No, they’re not particularly uncomfortable. I can’t speak to the epiphany I experienced when you told me my “true size,” because your system of measurement is just as arbitrary as everyone else’s. No, I don’t understand how a new bra will somehow shield me from the wandering eyes of men I don’t want while attracting the men I do. I don’t understand how it’s possible to be sexy “for myself.” (I’m sure the videographer’s botox and lip fillers were “for herself,” too.) And I definitely don’t see how the freedom of movement I’m supposed to gain with a more comfortable bra remotely simulates the real freedom I desire.
Of course I did not say these things; I dissimulated, I think rather badly. At the end of the video, I had to rhapsodize about the superiority of this too-small bra I’d worn for a total of ten minutes to every other bra I’ve ever used, and describe how I’ve been rescued from the sexual oppression of men and bra-makers, which (surprise!) makes me look and feel hotter than ever. The final question was, simply, “How do you feel?” I begged myself not to say “liberated” or “unburdened,” which created an awkward pause. So I blabbed, “I feel independent?” and scurried out red-faced. I have yet to receive my payment in bras.
I have made a small career in the industry of creating advertisements for female consumers, which means that I have broader knowledge of the stuff of buzzy fashion startups and social media influencers than I’d like to admit. The baffling cocktail of feminist problems packaged in pro-capitalist solutions typified by this lingerie branding is nothing new, and has only proliferated in recent years. But this shoot felt like a particular violation; even worse than the egregious labor practices and obvious abuse of my work was the expectation, without my consent, that I was to narrativize my experience as a woman, using my own name, in such a way as to suggest that the real struggles of women against patriarchal oppression could be alleviated, magically, by buying a bra that costs more than ninety six percent of those purchased annually by American women. Speaking under beams of hot studio light, ineptly attempting to strike the perfect balance of elegance and false bravery culminated in a scene so extreme in its failure to approximate genuine social good that it toppled into bathos.
I refuse to participate in “brand partnerships,” which require people (overwhelmingly women) to use their identities on social media to market brands and influence the consumer behavior of their followers in exchange for promotion and free product. I still field requests for this regularly. A particularly ridiculous proposition I received last week was from a company that sells loose leaf tea that supposedly “enhances female intuition, self-reflection, and witchyness.” I am constantly receiving targeted ads from high-end cosmetics brands, urging me to bite the bullet and give myself “what I deserve.” The hugely popular women’s luxury coworking space The Wing recently held an event promoting the American Express Platinum credit card veiled as a day of “Extreme Self-Care.” Even the fifteen-year-old teen star Jojo Siwa is versed in the argot, insisting that her pricey and coveted line of technicolor hair bows is a “symbol of power, confidence, believing-ness.” The supermodel Emily Ratajkowski, who trumpets her identity as an activist, feels compelled to designate her every move (usually her frequent and “controversial” displays of nudity) as a feminist act. Defending a video in which she massages herself with oiled spaghetti while gazing hungrily at the camera, she wrote on Instagram: “Being sexy is fun and I like it…Feminism is about the choices we make, and the freedom we have to make personal choices without judgment or retribution.”
I am grateful for the fact that I am just one of many to condemn the utter bastardization of radical feminism that has dominated the fourth wave, where tag lines like “the woman’s choice,” which originated in battles over health and marital legislation, now defend arguments like Ratajkowski’s: that women should be free to do whatever they want without judgment or retribution because their gender identity inexplicably transcends the capacity for destructive behavior. Critics often call it “lifestyle feminism.” Lifestyle feminism was first discussed by bell hooks in Feminism Is for Everybody, where it denoted a feminism so drained of any commitment to radicalism or self sacrifice that it becomes merely aesthetic—serving a decorative function in atomized lives.
by Sophia Richards, Politics/Letters | Read more:
Image: uncredited
1MDB and Goldman Sachs: A Pioneering Twist on Third-World Corruption
Goldman Sachs, which has survived and thrived despite countless scandals over the years, may have finally stepped in a pile of trouble too deep to escape.
There’s even a Donald Trump angle to this latest great financial mess, but the outlines of that subplot – in a case that has countless – remains vague. The bank itself is in the most immediate danger.
The company’s stock rallied Thursday to close at 165, stopping a five-day slide in which the firm lost almost 12 percent of its market value. The company is down 35 percent for the year, most of that coming in the past three months as Goldman has been battered by headlines about the infamous 1MDB scandal.
Just before Christmas, Malaysian authorities filed criminal charges against Goldman, seeking a stunning $7.5 billion in reparations for the bank’s role in the scandal. Singapore authorities also announced they were expanding their own 1MDB probe to include Goldman.
In the 1MDB scheme, actors tied to former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak allegedly siphoned mountains of cash out of a state investment fund. The misrouted money went to lavish parties with celebrity guests like Alicia Keys, a $35 million jet, works by Monet and Van Gogh, property in New York, Los Angeles and London, and (ironically) the funding of the movie The Wolf of Wall Street.
The cash for this mother of all bacchanals originally came from bonds issued by Goldman, which earned a whopping $600 million from the Malaysians. The bank charged prices for its bond issuance that analysts believe were suspiciously high – like a massage price that suggests you’re probably getting more than a massage.
Najib lost re-election in May, ending a 61-year reign for his party. National anger over 1MDB was a major reason for his downfall. The prime minister was allegedly central to the scam, which involved luring investors to national development projects that mostly never took place.
His election loss was a turning point. Until that time, international authorities had been unable to obtain cooperation from the Malaysian government, which under Najib insisted no crime had been committed. (...)
“It completely reversed the situation,” says John Pang, a former policy adviser to the prime minister’s office in Malaysia. “Before, you essentially had the victim saying there was no crime. Now, you had the Justice Department meeting with a 1MDB task force in Kuala Lumpur.”
The change resulted in a string of new indictments, suits and prosecutions surfacing in the second half of 2018. At year’s end, Goldman is known to be under investigation in the U.S., Singapore and Malaysia, while 1MDB probes are ongoing in at least 10 countries. Goldman has seen two ex-employees criminally charged in the U.S. since the summer, one of whom pleaded guilty.
What really set Wall Street afire was a pair of fall revelations. On November 8th, the Wall Street Journal reported longtime Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein – who stepped down on October 1st to “pursue other interests” – met on more than one occasion with one of the most infamous figures in the 1MDB scandal, Low Taek Jho, better known as “Jho Low.”
In that same week, Bloomberg reported Blankfein was an “unidentified high-ranking executive” in court filings associated with the case.
In December, outside analysts predicted the bank might need to set aside $1 billion or more for penalties. The company is having ongoing conversations with the Justice Department, but has not discussed numbers yet.
In addition to the Malaysian action seeking $7.5 billion, the company is facing two more class-action lawsuits filed by investors, and a significant amount of negative press.
For all that, the scandal is still not well understood. 1MDB was a twist on third-world kleptocracy, one that exposed a new flaw in the global financial system.
Dictators have always plundered national riches. But they could only steal assets that existed. For instance, in former Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mobutu Sese Seko shifted profits of mineral sales to private accounts. In the Philippines, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos swiped proceeds of sales of sugar, tobacco, bananas, coconuts and everything else they could get their hands on. Saddam Hussein stole oil revenues.
Malaysia is rich in copper, timber and oil. But Najib and his cohorts didn’t have to steal any of those resources.
“He didn’t steal diamonds or bananas. He stole debt,” says Pang. “This is something completely new. And he couldn’t have done it without a bank the size of Goldman.” (...)
1MDB was a sovereign wealth fund, “owned and controlled by the Malaysian government, through its Ministry of Finance,” as our Justice Department put it in one of its court filings.
This fund was ostensibly created for development projects on behalf of the Malaysian people, in areas like “energy, real estate, tourism and agribusiness.”
Over the course of three major bond issues, 1MDB raised about $6.5 billion from investors around the world. According to the U.S. government, about $2.7 billion of that money was misappropriated and “distributed, in part, as bribes and kickbacks” to help keep the scheme going.
Other monies reportedly ended up in the hands of a small group of corrupt insiders close to Najib, who then laundered the cash via one of the great spending sprees of our time.
The key figure was Jho Low, who is currently an international fugitive and allegedly spent awesome sums ripped from the 1MDB pot. The chubby-cheeked Low, tabbed the “Billion Dollar Whale” in a book about the scandal by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope, is said to have used 1MDB funds to become an instant “Asian Great Gatsby,” traveling the planet and hurling cash in all directions, including parties in Vegas and London. The book claims he spent up to $500,000 on single parties that featured performances by the likes of Lady Gaga and Dr. Dre. Low was basically the Malaysian version of Jeff Spicoli hiring Van Halen to play his birthday party.
The idea that a figure as prominent as Blankfein might have granted a meeting to so incautious a figure as Low – who reportedly once used stationary from the Sultan of Brunei to procure seats at the London nightclub Chinawhite – is part of what has Wall Street so shaken. It’s a little like hearing the Pope was taking selfies at the Adult Video awards. (...)
What was in it for the bank? About $600 million in fees. Goldman may have made some of that money on gains while it held the bonds, i.e. not all of that widely quoted sum was a pure fee. Also, the deal was unusual in that the bank purportedly held all the risk on the bonds for a long time, as much as a year in the third transaction.
Still, Goldman charged Malaysia what by all accounts was a beyond-exorbitant price. The Billion Dollar Whale authors asserted the bank earned “two hundred times the typical fee.”
There’s even a Donald Trump angle to this latest great financial mess, but the outlines of that subplot – in a case that has countless – remains vague. The bank itself is in the most immediate danger.
The company’s stock rallied Thursday to close at 165, stopping a five-day slide in which the firm lost almost 12 percent of its market value. The company is down 35 percent for the year, most of that coming in the past three months as Goldman has been battered by headlines about the infamous 1MDB scandal.
Just before Christmas, Malaysian authorities filed criminal charges against Goldman, seeking a stunning $7.5 billion in reparations for the bank’s role in the scandal. Singapore authorities also announced they were expanding their own 1MDB probe to include Goldman.In the 1MDB scheme, actors tied to former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak allegedly siphoned mountains of cash out of a state investment fund. The misrouted money went to lavish parties with celebrity guests like Alicia Keys, a $35 million jet, works by Monet and Van Gogh, property in New York, Los Angeles and London, and (ironically) the funding of the movie The Wolf of Wall Street.
The cash for this mother of all bacchanals originally came from bonds issued by Goldman, which earned a whopping $600 million from the Malaysians. The bank charged prices for its bond issuance that analysts believe were suspiciously high – like a massage price that suggests you’re probably getting more than a massage.
Najib lost re-election in May, ending a 61-year reign for his party. National anger over 1MDB was a major reason for his downfall. The prime minister was allegedly central to the scam, which involved luring investors to national development projects that mostly never took place.
His election loss was a turning point. Until that time, international authorities had been unable to obtain cooperation from the Malaysian government, which under Najib insisted no crime had been committed. (...)
“It completely reversed the situation,” says John Pang, a former policy adviser to the prime minister’s office in Malaysia. “Before, you essentially had the victim saying there was no crime. Now, you had the Justice Department meeting with a 1MDB task force in Kuala Lumpur.”
The change resulted in a string of new indictments, suits and prosecutions surfacing in the second half of 2018. At year’s end, Goldman is known to be under investigation in the U.S., Singapore and Malaysia, while 1MDB probes are ongoing in at least 10 countries. Goldman has seen two ex-employees criminally charged in the U.S. since the summer, one of whom pleaded guilty.
What really set Wall Street afire was a pair of fall revelations. On November 8th, the Wall Street Journal reported longtime Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein – who stepped down on October 1st to “pursue other interests” – met on more than one occasion with one of the most infamous figures in the 1MDB scandal, Low Taek Jho, better known as “Jho Low.”
In that same week, Bloomberg reported Blankfein was an “unidentified high-ranking executive” in court filings associated with the case.
In December, outside analysts predicted the bank might need to set aside $1 billion or more for penalties. The company is having ongoing conversations with the Justice Department, but has not discussed numbers yet.
In addition to the Malaysian action seeking $7.5 billion, the company is facing two more class-action lawsuits filed by investors, and a significant amount of negative press.
For all that, the scandal is still not well understood. 1MDB was a twist on third-world kleptocracy, one that exposed a new flaw in the global financial system.
Dictators have always plundered national riches. But they could only steal assets that existed. For instance, in former Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mobutu Sese Seko shifted profits of mineral sales to private accounts. In the Philippines, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos swiped proceeds of sales of sugar, tobacco, bananas, coconuts and everything else they could get their hands on. Saddam Hussein stole oil revenues.
Malaysia is rich in copper, timber and oil. But Najib and his cohorts didn’t have to steal any of those resources.
“He didn’t steal diamonds or bananas. He stole debt,” says Pang. “This is something completely new. And he couldn’t have done it without a bank the size of Goldman.” (...)
1MDB was a sovereign wealth fund, “owned and controlled by the Malaysian government, through its Ministry of Finance,” as our Justice Department put it in one of its court filings.
This fund was ostensibly created for development projects on behalf of the Malaysian people, in areas like “energy, real estate, tourism and agribusiness.”
Over the course of three major bond issues, 1MDB raised about $6.5 billion from investors around the world. According to the U.S. government, about $2.7 billion of that money was misappropriated and “distributed, in part, as bribes and kickbacks” to help keep the scheme going.
Other monies reportedly ended up in the hands of a small group of corrupt insiders close to Najib, who then laundered the cash via one of the great spending sprees of our time.
The key figure was Jho Low, who is currently an international fugitive and allegedly spent awesome sums ripped from the 1MDB pot. The chubby-cheeked Low, tabbed the “Billion Dollar Whale” in a book about the scandal by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope, is said to have used 1MDB funds to become an instant “Asian Great Gatsby,” traveling the planet and hurling cash in all directions, including parties in Vegas and London. The book claims he spent up to $500,000 on single parties that featured performances by the likes of Lady Gaga and Dr. Dre. Low was basically the Malaysian version of Jeff Spicoli hiring Van Halen to play his birthday party.
The idea that a figure as prominent as Blankfein might have granted a meeting to so incautious a figure as Low – who reportedly once used stationary from the Sultan of Brunei to procure seats at the London nightclub Chinawhite – is part of what has Wall Street so shaken. It’s a little like hearing the Pope was taking selfies at the Adult Video awards. (...)
What was in it for the bank? About $600 million in fees. Goldman may have made some of that money on gains while it held the bonds, i.e. not all of that widely quoted sum was a pure fee. Also, the deal was unusual in that the bank purportedly held all the risk on the bonds for a long time, as much as a year in the third transaction.
Still, Goldman charged Malaysia what by all accounts was a beyond-exorbitant price. The Billion Dollar Whale authors asserted the bank earned “two hundred times the typical fee.”
by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Sunday, December 30, 2018
Saturday, December 29, 2018
Athletes Don’t Own Their Tattoos. That’s a Problem for Video Game Developers.
When LeBron James bounds down a basketball court, he is both a transcendent athlete and a prominent palette for dozens of tattoos. His mother’s name, Gloria, rests on a crown on his right shoulder and his forearms bear a portrait of his son LeBron Jr. and 330, an area code for his hometown, Akron, Ohio.
Although those tattoos have personal connections, they may not truly be his.
Any creative illustration “fixed in a tangible medium” is eligible for copyright, and, according to the United States Copyright Office, that includes the ink displayed on someone’s skin. What many people don’t realize, legal experts said, is that the copyright is inherently owned by the tattoo artist, not the person with the tattoos.
For most people, that is not a cause for concern. Lawyers generally agree that an implied license allows people to freely display their tattoos in public, including on television broadcasts or magazine covers. But when tattoos are digitally recreated on avatars in sports video games, copyright infringement can become an issue.
“Video games are an entirely new area,” said Michael A. Kahn, a copyright lawyer who represented the designer of the face tattoo on the boxer Mike Tyson. “There is LeBron James, but it’s not LeBron James. It’s a cartoon version of him.”
Electronic Arts, a game developer and publisher, recreates more than 100 tattoos in its FIFA and UFC games, including the colorful sleeve on the right arm of the soccer star Lionel Messi and a heart-eating gorilla on the chest of the fighter Conor McGregor. Yet only a handful of players in its Madden football games are depicted with their real-life ink.
Spokesmen for Electronic Arts did not respond to requests for comment. The company faced a copyright infringement lawsuit after the cover of the game NFL Street included an illustration of the running back Ricky Williams and some of his tattoos, but the artist withdrew his claim in 2013.
Players’ unions, many of which license the players’ likenesses to video game publishers, and sports agents have advised athletes to secure licensing agreements before they get tattooed. Artists have an incentive to sign rather than pass up a client who could be a billboard for their work.
Gotti Flores said he has spent at least 40 hours tattooing the N.F.L. receiver Mike Evans, one of the few players with tattoos in Madden. He was surprised, he said, that he had to give permission for his work to be reproduced in the game.
“Really it didn’t even matter to me,” said Mr. Flores, who signed a waiver for no compensation. “It was dope to have my tattoos on there.”
Not all tattoo licensing happens so amicably.
Although those tattoos have personal connections, they may not truly be his.
Any creative illustration “fixed in a tangible medium” is eligible for copyright, and, according to the United States Copyright Office, that includes the ink displayed on someone’s skin. What many people don’t realize, legal experts said, is that the copyright is inherently owned by the tattoo artist, not the person with the tattoos.For most people, that is not a cause for concern. Lawyers generally agree that an implied license allows people to freely display their tattoos in public, including on television broadcasts or magazine covers. But when tattoos are digitally recreated on avatars in sports video games, copyright infringement can become an issue.
“Video games are an entirely new area,” said Michael A. Kahn, a copyright lawyer who represented the designer of the face tattoo on the boxer Mike Tyson. “There is LeBron James, but it’s not LeBron James. It’s a cartoon version of him.”
Electronic Arts, a game developer and publisher, recreates more than 100 tattoos in its FIFA and UFC games, including the colorful sleeve on the right arm of the soccer star Lionel Messi and a heart-eating gorilla on the chest of the fighter Conor McGregor. Yet only a handful of players in its Madden football games are depicted with their real-life ink.
Spokesmen for Electronic Arts did not respond to requests for comment. The company faced a copyright infringement lawsuit after the cover of the game NFL Street included an illustration of the running back Ricky Williams and some of his tattoos, but the artist withdrew his claim in 2013.
Players’ unions, many of which license the players’ likenesses to video game publishers, and sports agents have advised athletes to secure licensing agreements before they get tattooed. Artists have an incentive to sign rather than pass up a client who could be a billboard for their work.
Gotti Flores said he has spent at least 40 hours tattooing the N.F.L. receiver Mike Evans, one of the few players with tattoos in Madden. He was surprised, he said, that he had to give permission for his work to be reproduced in the game.
“Really it didn’t even matter to me,” said Mr. Flores, who signed a waiver for no compensation. “It was dope to have my tattoos on there.”
Not all tattoo licensing happens so amicably.
by Jason M. Bailey, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Harry How/Getty
I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon.
Holiday parties were right around the corner, and I needed a cover story. I didn’t feel like admitting to casual acquaintances, or even to some good friends, that I drive a van for Amazon. I decided to tell them, if asked, that I consult for Amazon, which is loosely true: I spend my days consulting a Rabbit, the handheld Android device loaded with the app that tells me where my next stop is, how many packages are coming off the van, and how hopelessly behind I’ve fallen.
Let’s face it, when you’re a college-educated 57-year-old slinging parcels for a living, something in your life has not gone according to plan. That said, my moments of chagrin are far outnumbered by the upsides of the job, which include windfall connections with grateful strangers. There’s a certain novelty, after decades at a legacy media company—Time Inc.—in playing for the team that’s winning big, that’s not considered a dinosaur, even if that team is paying me $17 an hour (plus OT!). It’s been healthy for me, a fair-haired Anglo-Saxon with a Roman numeral in my name (John Austin Murphy III), to be a minority in my workplace, and in some of the neighborhoods where I deliver. As Amazon reaches maximum ubiquity in our lives (“Alexa, play Led Zeppelin”), as online shopping turns malls into mausoleums, it’s been illuminating to see exactly how a package makes the final leg of its journey.
There’s also a bracing feeling of independence that attends piloting my own van, a tingle of anticipation before finding out my route for the day. Will I be in the hills above El Cerrito with astounding views of the bay, but narrow roads, difficult parking, and lots of steps? Or will my itinerary take me to gritty Richmond, which, despite its profusion of pit bulls, I’m starting to prefer to the oppressive traffic of Berkeley, where I deliver to the brightest young people in the state, some of whom may wonder, if they give me even a passing thought: What hard luck has befallen this man, who appears to be my father’s age but is performing this menial task?
Thanks for asking!
The hero’s journey, according to Joseph Campbell, features a descent into the belly of the beast: Think of Jonah in the whale, or me locked in the cargo bay of my Ram ProMaster on my second day on the job, until I figured out how to work the latch from the inside. During this phase of the journey, the hero becomes “annihilate to the self”—brought low, his ego shrunk, his horizons expanded. This has definitely been my experience working for Jeff Bezos.
During my 33 years at Sports Illustrated, I wrote six books, interviewed five U.S. presidents, and composed thousands of articles for SI and SI.com. Roughly 140 of those stories were for the cover of the magazine, with which I parted ways in May of 2017. Since then, as Jeff Lebowski explains to Maude between hits on a postcoital roach, “my career has slowed down a little bit.”
Let’s face it, when you’re a college-educated 57-year-old slinging parcels for a living, something in your life has not gone according to plan. That said, my moments of chagrin are far outnumbered by the upsides of the job, which include windfall connections with grateful strangers. There’s a certain novelty, after decades at a legacy media company—Time Inc.—in playing for the team that’s winning big, that’s not considered a dinosaur, even if that team is paying me $17 an hour (plus OT!). It’s been healthy for me, a fair-haired Anglo-Saxon with a Roman numeral in my name (John Austin Murphy III), to be a minority in my workplace, and in some of the neighborhoods where I deliver. As Amazon reaches maximum ubiquity in our lives (“Alexa, play Led Zeppelin”), as online shopping turns malls into mausoleums, it’s been illuminating to see exactly how a package makes the final leg of its journey.There’s also a bracing feeling of independence that attends piloting my own van, a tingle of anticipation before finding out my route for the day. Will I be in the hills above El Cerrito with astounding views of the bay, but narrow roads, difficult parking, and lots of steps? Or will my itinerary take me to gritty Richmond, which, despite its profusion of pit bulls, I’m starting to prefer to the oppressive traffic of Berkeley, where I deliver to the brightest young people in the state, some of whom may wonder, if they give me even a passing thought: What hard luck has befallen this man, who appears to be my father’s age but is performing this menial task?
Thanks for asking!
The hero’s journey, according to Joseph Campbell, features a descent into the belly of the beast: Think of Jonah in the whale, or me locked in the cargo bay of my Ram ProMaster on my second day on the job, until I figured out how to work the latch from the inside. During this phase of the journey, the hero becomes “annihilate to the self”—brought low, his ego shrunk, his horizons expanded. This has definitely been my experience working for Jeff Bezos.
During my 33 years at Sports Illustrated, I wrote six books, interviewed five U.S. presidents, and composed thousands of articles for SI and SI.com. Roughly 140 of those stories were for the cover of the magazine, with which I parted ways in May of 2017. Since then, as Jeff Lebowski explains to Maude between hits on a postcoital roach, “my career has slowed down a little bit.”
by Austin Murphy, Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
Friday, December 28, 2018
How Vaping Giant Juul Explains Everything That's Wrong With Our World
Twelve years ago, e-cigarettes couldn’t be found in America. Three years ago, Juul didn’t exist. But last Friday, Marlboro manufacturer Altria bought a 35 percent stake in the vaping juggernaut for $12.8 billion. The deal values Juul at $38 billion, a similar market capitalization to that of Target, MetLife, Delta Air Lines, and Ford. Fifteen hundred Juul employees split a $2 billion dividend as a result, becoming instant millionaires overnight.
Juul was an inviting target for Altria because it has captured close to three-quarters of the total e-cigarette market, according to Nielsen data, up from only 2 percent in 2016. Revenues for Juul increased almost 800 percent from 2017 to 2018, with its most explosive growth happening among teenagers. While e-cigarettes don’t contain cancer-causing tobacco, they do hook users to a drug that’s hard to quit. By one measure, nearly 20 years of falling cigarette use among 12th-graders has been wiped out by the rise of Juul.
The return to nicotine addiction among adolescents is happening alongside the rapid-fire monopolization of a brand-new market. While traditional tobacco companies all tried their hand at e-cigarettes, there was no legacy of dominant players in the sector and no major barrier to rivals. The fact that an industry established a decade ago so quickly whittled down to one dominant player, which an incumbent cigarette giant then bought into, suggests that our Second Gilded Age is a monopoly-creation machine.
Juul devices look like thumb drives and can be recharged in a USB port. Users insert “pods,” which contain as much nicotine as a pack of cigarettes. Flavors include traditional tobacco styles like menthol, but also mango, fruit, cucumber, and creme. The vapor is odorless and evaporates quickly. The company maintained an active social media presence promoting vaping, with fan accounts driving the virality even further.
You could say that Juul just built a better mousetrap, but all of Juul’s elements seem designed to appeal to teenagers, who can conceal the devices easily, take quick puffs at school or at home, and enjoy the dessert-like flavors. Because the prices are fairly high — $20 a device, and $30 for a four-pack of pods — Juul’s spread has been largely limited to affluent teens. But “juuling” has become a verb, a sure sign that the brand has taken over a market.
And while juuling isn’t as dangerous as smoking tobacco, it carries its own health risks while delivering a highly addictive substance that a savvy company can translate into overwhelming profit. Instead of the original intent to convert adult smokers, Juul appears to be tapping into a generation of new nicotine users. (...)
For Altria, the play is clear: Use Juul as an escape hatch if declining cigarette sales continue, and perhaps as a gateway back into cigarettes, as addicted teens chase a nicotine fix. It wasn’t the only cigarette company with the idea; Altria beat out British American Tobacco for Juul in a bidding war, according to the Financial Times. Another escape hatch is marijuana. Earlier in December, Altria also took a $1.8 billion stake in Cronos, a Canadian cannabis grower, seeking to capitalize on legalization efforts. Similarly, AB InBev, the maker of over 500 beer brands, just reached a deal with cannabis company Tilray to create pot-infused drinks for the Canadian market.
Juul was an inviting target for Altria because it has captured close to three-quarters of the total e-cigarette market, according to Nielsen data, up from only 2 percent in 2016. Revenues for Juul increased almost 800 percent from 2017 to 2018, with its most explosive growth happening among teenagers. While e-cigarettes don’t contain cancer-causing tobacco, they do hook users to a drug that’s hard to quit. By one measure, nearly 20 years of falling cigarette use among 12th-graders has been wiped out by the rise of Juul.
The return to nicotine addiction among adolescents is happening alongside the rapid-fire monopolization of a brand-new market. While traditional tobacco companies all tried their hand at e-cigarettes, there was no legacy of dominant players in the sector and no major barrier to rivals. The fact that an industry established a decade ago so quickly whittled down to one dominant player, which an incumbent cigarette giant then bought into, suggests that our Second Gilded Age is a monopoly-creation machine.
This is not how markets are supposed to work. Regulators had — and still have — multiple opportunities to prevent both concentration in the e-cigarette market and profiteering off children. But competition authorities have taken such a hands-off attitude toward the economy, that we’re on the verge of witnessing Big Tobacco co-opt the very sector that was supposed to kill it off.
When launched in 2015, Juul was another of Silicon Valley’s attempts to “disrupt” an established market — in this case, cigarettes. The company, based in San Francisco, positioned itself as a savior for public health, because unlike cancer-causing tobacco sticks, vaporizer devices distribute nicotine without tar or other carcinogens. In fact, the original intention of e-cigarettes when patented by a Chinese pharmacist in 2003 was to convert tobacco users. Juul claims it “has helped more than one million Americans switch from cigarettes.”
By the time Juul came on the market, the major cigarette companies were all experimenting with their own e-cigarettes. Lorillard acquired a brand named blu, which at the time was the market leader. Altria acquired Green Smoke and launched its brand MarkTen. R.J. Reynolds created Vuse. British American Tobacco had a brand called Vype. There were also numerous other competitors, including Ruyan, E-Swisher, Logic, and NJOY. But because America has effectively abandoned competition policy, it took only two years for Juul to take over the market. Altria, in fact, discontinued its own e-cigarette brands this month, prior to taking a stake in Juul. (...)
When launched in 2015, Juul was another of Silicon Valley’s attempts to “disrupt” an established market — in this case, cigarettes. The company, based in San Francisco, positioned itself as a savior for public health, because unlike cancer-causing tobacco sticks, vaporizer devices distribute nicotine without tar or other carcinogens. In fact, the original intention of e-cigarettes when patented by a Chinese pharmacist in 2003 was to convert tobacco users. Juul claims it “has helped more than one million Americans switch from cigarettes.”
By the time Juul came on the market, the major cigarette companies were all experimenting with their own e-cigarettes. Lorillard acquired a brand named blu, which at the time was the market leader. Altria acquired Green Smoke and launched its brand MarkTen. R.J. Reynolds created Vuse. British American Tobacco had a brand called Vype. There were also numerous other competitors, including Ruyan, E-Swisher, Logic, and NJOY. But because America has effectively abandoned competition policy, it took only two years for Juul to take over the market. Altria, in fact, discontinued its own e-cigarette brands this month, prior to taking a stake in Juul. (...)
Juul devices look like thumb drives and can be recharged in a USB port. Users insert “pods,” which contain as much nicotine as a pack of cigarettes. Flavors include traditional tobacco styles like menthol, but also mango, fruit, cucumber, and creme. The vapor is odorless and evaporates quickly. The company maintained an active social media presence promoting vaping, with fan accounts driving the virality even further.
You could say that Juul just built a better mousetrap, but all of Juul’s elements seem designed to appeal to teenagers, who can conceal the devices easily, take quick puffs at school or at home, and enjoy the dessert-like flavors. Because the prices are fairly high — $20 a device, and $30 for a four-pack of pods — Juul’s spread has been largely limited to affluent teens. But “juuling” has become a verb, a sure sign that the brand has taken over a market.
And while juuling isn’t as dangerous as smoking tobacco, it carries its own health risks while delivering a highly addictive substance that a savvy company can translate into overwhelming profit. Instead of the original intent to convert adult smokers, Juul appears to be tapping into a generation of new nicotine users. (...)
For Altria, the play is clear: Use Juul as an escape hatch if declining cigarette sales continue, and perhaps as a gateway back into cigarettes, as addicted teens chase a nicotine fix. It wasn’t the only cigarette company with the idea; Altria beat out British American Tobacco for Juul in a bidding war, according to the Financial Times. Another escape hatch is marijuana. Earlier in December, Altria also took a $1.8 billion stake in Cronos, a Canadian cannabis grower, seeking to capitalize on legalization efforts. Similarly, AB InBev, the maker of over 500 beer brands, just reached a deal with cannabis company Tilray to create pot-infused drinks for the Canadian market.
by David Dayen, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Two Years Later, I Still Miss the Headphone Port
Two years ago, Apple killed the headphone port. I still haven’t forgiven them for it.
When Apple announced that the iPhone 7 would have no headphone port, I was pretty immediately annoyed. I figured maybe I’d get over it in a few months. I didn’t. I figured if worse came to worse, I’d switch platforms. Then all of the other manufacturers started following suit.
This, of course, isn’t a new annoyance for me. I’ve been hating headphone adapters on phones right here on this very website since two thousand and nine. For a little stretch there, though, I got my way.
It was a world full of dongles and crappy proprietary audio ports. Sony Ericsson had the FastPort. Nokia had the Pop-Port. Samsung had like 10 different ports that no one gave a shit about. No single phone maker had claimed the throne yet, so no one port had really become ubiquitous… but every manufacturer wanted their port to become the port. Even the phones that had a standardized audio jack mostly had the smaller 2.5mm port, requiring an adapter all the same.
Then came the original iPhone with its 3.5mm headphone port. It was a weird recessed 3.5mm port that didn’t work with most headphones, but it was a 3.5mm port! Apple was riding on the success of the iPod, and people were referring to this rumored device as the iPod Phone before it was even announced. How could something like that not have a headphone port?
Sales of the iPhone started to climb. A few million in 2007. Nearly 12 million in 2008. 20 million in 2009. A tide shifted. As Apple’s little slab of glass took over the smartphone world, other manufacturers tried to figure out what Apple was doing so right. The smartphone market, once filled with chunky, button-covered plastic beasts (this one slides! This one spins!), homogenized. Release by release, everything started looking more like the iPhone. A slab of glass. Premium materials. Minimal physical buttons. And, of course, a headphone port.
Within a couple years, a standard headphone port wasn’t just a nice selling point — it was mandatory. We’d entered a wonderful age of being able to use our wired headphones whenever we damn well pleased.
Then came September 7th, 2016, when Apple had the “courage” to announce it was ditching the 3.5mm jack (oh, and also by the way check out these new $150 wireless headphones!). (...)
And I’m still mad about it.
Technology comes and goes, and oh-so-often at Apple’s doing. Ditching the CD drive in laptops? That’s okay — CDs were doomed, and they were pretty awful to begin with. Killing Flash? Flash sucked. Switching one type of USB port for another? Fine, I suppose. The new USB is better in just about every way. At the very least, I won’t try to plug it in upside down only to flip it over and realize I had it right the first time.
But the headphone jack? It was fine. It stood the test of time for one hundred damned years, and with good reason: It. Just. Worked.
I’ve been trying to figure out why the removal of the headphone port bugs me more than other ports that have been unceremoniously killed off, and I think it’s because the headphone port almost always only made me happy. Using the headphone port meant listening to my favorite album, or using a free minute to catch the latest episode of a show, or passing an earbud to a friend to share some new tune. It enabled happy moments and never got in the way.
Now every time I want to use my headphones, I just find myself annoyed.
Bluetooth? Whoops, forgot to charge them. Or whoops, they’re trying to pair with my laptop even though my laptop is turned off and in my backpack.
Dongle? Whoops, left it on my other pair of headphones at work. Or whoops, it fell off somewhere, and now I’ve got to go buy another one.
I’ll just buy a bunch of dongles, and put them on all my headphones! I’ll keep extras in my bag for when I need to borrow a pair of headphones. That’s just like five dongles at this point, problem solved! Oh, wait: now I want to listen to music while I fall asleep, but also charge my phone so it’s not dead in the morning. That’s a different, more expensive splitter dongle (many of which, I’ve found, are poorly made garbage).
None of these are that big of a deal. Charge your damned headphones, Greg. Stop losing your dongles. The thing is: they took a thing that just worked and just made me happy and replaced it with something that, quite often, just bugs the hell out of me. If a friend sent me a YouTube link and I wanted to watch it without bugging everyone around me, I could just use whatever crappy, worn out headphones I happened to have sitting in my bag. Now it’s a process with a bunch of potential points of failure.
When Apple announced that the iPhone 7 would have no headphone port, I was pretty immediately annoyed. I figured maybe I’d get over it in a few months. I didn’t. I figured if worse came to worse, I’d switch platforms. Then all of the other manufacturers started following suit.
This, of course, isn’t a new annoyance for me. I’ve been hating headphone adapters on phones right here on this very website since two thousand and nine. For a little stretch there, though, I got my way.
It was a world full of dongles and crappy proprietary audio ports. Sony Ericsson had the FastPort. Nokia had the Pop-Port. Samsung had like 10 different ports that no one gave a shit about. No single phone maker had claimed the throne yet, so no one port had really become ubiquitous… but every manufacturer wanted their port to become the port. Even the phones that had a standardized audio jack mostly had the smaller 2.5mm port, requiring an adapter all the same.
Then came the original iPhone with its 3.5mm headphone port. It was a weird recessed 3.5mm port that didn’t work with most headphones, but it was a 3.5mm port! Apple was riding on the success of the iPod, and people were referring to this rumored device as the iPod Phone before it was even announced. How could something like that not have a headphone port?Sales of the iPhone started to climb. A few million in 2007. Nearly 12 million in 2008. 20 million in 2009. A tide shifted. As Apple’s little slab of glass took over the smartphone world, other manufacturers tried to figure out what Apple was doing so right. The smartphone market, once filled with chunky, button-covered plastic beasts (this one slides! This one spins!), homogenized. Release by release, everything started looking more like the iPhone. A slab of glass. Premium materials. Minimal physical buttons. And, of course, a headphone port.
Within a couple years, a standard headphone port wasn’t just a nice selling point — it was mandatory. We’d entered a wonderful age of being able to use our wired headphones whenever we damn well pleased.
Then came September 7th, 2016, when Apple had the “courage” to announce it was ditching the 3.5mm jack (oh, and also by the way check out these new $150 wireless headphones!). (...)
And I’m still mad about it.
Technology comes and goes, and oh-so-often at Apple’s doing. Ditching the CD drive in laptops? That’s okay — CDs were doomed, and they were pretty awful to begin with. Killing Flash? Flash sucked. Switching one type of USB port for another? Fine, I suppose. The new USB is better in just about every way. At the very least, I won’t try to plug it in upside down only to flip it over and realize I had it right the first time.
But the headphone jack? It was fine. It stood the test of time for one hundred damned years, and with good reason: It. Just. Worked.
I’ve been trying to figure out why the removal of the headphone port bugs me more than other ports that have been unceremoniously killed off, and I think it’s because the headphone port almost always only made me happy. Using the headphone port meant listening to my favorite album, or using a free minute to catch the latest episode of a show, or passing an earbud to a friend to share some new tune. It enabled happy moments and never got in the way.
Now every time I want to use my headphones, I just find myself annoyed.
Bluetooth? Whoops, forgot to charge them. Or whoops, they’re trying to pair with my laptop even though my laptop is turned off and in my backpack.
Dongle? Whoops, left it on my other pair of headphones at work. Or whoops, it fell off somewhere, and now I’ve got to go buy another one.
I’ll just buy a bunch of dongles, and put them on all my headphones! I’ll keep extras in my bag for when I need to borrow a pair of headphones. That’s just like five dongles at this point, problem solved! Oh, wait: now I want to listen to music while I fall asleep, but also charge my phone so it’s not dead in the morning. That’s a different, more expensive splitter dongle (many of which, I’ve found, are poorly made garbage).
None of these are that big of a deal. Charge your damned headphones, Greg. Stop losing your dongles. The thing is: they took a thing that just worked and just made me happy and replaced it with something that, quite often, just bugs the hell out of me. If a friend sent me a YouTube link and I wanted to watch it without bugging everyone around me, I could just use whatever crappy, worn out headphones I happened to have sitting in my bag. Now it’s a process with a bunch of potential points of failure.
by Greg Kumparek, TechCrunch | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Thursday, December 27, 2018
Those Left Behind When #LoveWon
My partners and I were not the only queers, though, for whom gay marriage fell short of the Promised Land. More than many realize, a hefty share of the LGBT movement’s radical potential was lost or traded away so that they could say #LoveWon. For instance, in 2012, queer Minnesotans enjoyed a unique success when activists beat back an attempt to ban same-sex marriage in their state constitution, becoming the only state ever to defeat such an initiative at the ballot box. However, queer studies scholar Myrl Beam paints an instructive and troubling picture of the victory.
In his essay “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”, Beam describes what he calls the “love pivot”: in 2012 gay marriage activists across the country shifted from arguments emphasizing equality to arguments emphasizing love. According to focus group research funded by the major national players in the marriage movement (primarily the organizations Freedom to Marry and Third Way), a “focus on discrimination and equality simply did not resonate with straight voters.” Or, in the words of political strategist Richard Carlbom, “when you talk about equality people STOP listening.” Instead, activists were told to play up their life-long dreams of getting married and their desire to fit into the straight marriage mold—regardless of how authentic those desires were.
On the ballot in Minnesota that same year was another constitutional amendment proposed by conservatives, this one requiring a picture ID to vote. Although anti–ID law organizers sought to link the opposition to both initiatives, and gay marriage activists recognized that measures which limit voting tend to work against progressive causes in the long term, the gay marriage lobby made a strategic decision to take no stance on the ID campaign—in Beams words, “in the hopes of attracting some Republicans.” Even without marriage activist support, the ID initiative was defeated, but Beam’s point is that a narrow focus on same-sex marriage isolated queer activists from other progressive causes, while simultaneously requiring that they play down their own (righteous) outrage about the discrimination they face because, as it turned out, few voters cared. And indeed, Minnesotan gay activists discovered that their marriage-rights coalition simply was not interested in giving money or time to other issues of significance to broader matters of LGBT rights, such as safe schools and employment non-discrimination. As Beam puts it, “for movement organizations attempting to shift to other issues in the wake of marriage, many donors did not shift with them.”
Beam’s essay is one of the many compelling works collected in a trio of books put out this summer by Routledge in its After Marriage Equality series. All three were coedited by scholars Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis, Angela Jones, and Michael W. Yarbrough, the team that also organized the After Marriage conference in 2016, from which these books are drawn. Topics in the books—including immigrant rights, welfare reform, grassroots organizing, and polyamory—are all approached through the lens of how legal same-sex marriage has changed the terrain of the battlefield.
Although many of the collected pieces are critical of gay marriage—at least as an end in itself—there is no party line the contributors are asked to toe. Beam’s argument about the limits of love as an organizing strategy contrasts with an article by sociologist Mignon Moore that examines how same-sex marriage can, in certain contexts, be used to advance more radical queer issues. Moore and her wife were central to the 2012 “love pivot,” as one of the carefully selected same-sex couples in Freedom to Marry’s national advertising campaign. While Moore shares some of the broader progressive concerns about the marriage equality movement, she sees it as “a vehicle through which people, and particularly people of color, could begin to talk about LGBTQ issues with their family members and individuals in their racial and ethnic and cultural communities”—a start, in other words, rather than a conclusion. (...)
Moore’s point is a critique of (or perhaps an elaboration on) the idea of “homonormativity,” a word that wends its way through After Marriage Equality. Homonormative political strategies argue that queer people deserve rights because they are similar to heterosexuals, rather than challenging how rights and privileges are doled out in society generally. Both the “love pivot” and the quest for same-sex marriage as a whole could be called homonormative, as both focus on being “like” straight people. But what is considered normal in the United States has racial overtones—“normal” being something like a straight white suburban couple with a home and children—so Moore’s visibility as a married black lesbian mother is difficult to caricature as homonormative, even if she is making something of a bid for mainstream acceptance.
Full disclosure: I also have an article in the After Marriage series, a transcript of a panel I led on polyamory and family diversity. As a committed pervert, I cannot say that the movement for same-sex marriage has done much for me, other than transform many free summer weekends into jacket-and-tie obligations. But snark as I may, marriage has offered many people I know the opportunity to celebrate their love, start their families, protect their investments, adopt their partner’s children, get citizenship, and receive myriad other benefits, tangible and intangible, that come with offering up your most intimate relationships to the state. Still, I remain unconvinced that doling out tax privileges based on whom we screw adds up to good governance. Even if we accept at face value that the neoliberal state has an interest in promoting relationships of care—because these absorb the greatest costs of child rearing and help keep us off the streets, out of hospitals, and generally less dependent on government services—it can only be explained by recourse to tradition that these relationships must be heterosexual, romantic/sexual, and limited to two individuals. Otherwise, the state’s interests can be equally satisfied by: an opposite-sex couple, a same-sex couple, three elderly adult siblings, or eight adults and three children living in an old Connecticut mansion. I am not against marriage, I just see it as an inefficient, lazy, and unnecessarily limiting definition of the kind of relationships that the government has a vested interest in supporting. As a religious institution, it seems like a hoot; as a civil institution, it is a relic of a time when all people were expected to live one way, worship one god, and die young.
In his essay “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”, Beam describes what he calls the “love pivot”: in 2012 gay marriage activists across the country shifted from arguments emphasizing equality to arguments emphasizing love. According to focus group research funded by the major national players in the marriage movement (primarily the organizations Freedom to Marry and Third Way), a “focus on discrimination and equality simply did not resonate with straight voters.” Or, in the words of political strategist Richard Carlbom, “when you talk about equality people STOP listening.” Instead, activists were told to play up their life-long dreams of getting married and their desire to fit into the straight marriage mold—regardless of how authentic those desires were.On the ballot in Minnesota that same year was another constitutional amendment proposed by conservatives, this one requiring a picture ID to vote. Although anti–ID law organizers sought to link the opposition to both initiatives, and gay marriage activists recognized that measures which limit voting tend to work against progressive causes in the long term, the gay marriage lobby made a strategic decision to take no stance on the ID campaign—in Beams words, “in the hopes of attracting some Republicans.” Even without marriage activist support, the ID initiative was defeated, but Beam’s point is that a narrow focus on same-sex marriage isolated queer activists from other progressive causes, while simultaneously requiring that they play down their own (righteous) outrage about the discrimination they face because, as it turned out, few voters cared. And indeed, Minnesotan gay activists discovered that their marriage-rights coalition simply was not interested in giving money or time to other issues of significance to broader matters of LGBT rights, such as safe schools and employment non-discrimination. As Beam puts it, “for movement organizations attempting to shift to other issues in the wake of marriage, many donors did not shift with them.”
Beam’s essay is one of the many compelling works collected in a trio of books put out this summer by Routledge in its After Marriage Equality series. All three were coedited by scholars Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis, Angela Jones, and Michael W. Yarbrough, the team that also organized the After Marriage conference in 2016, from which these books are drawn. Topics in the books—including immigrant rights, welfare reform, grassroots organizing, and polyamory—are all approached through the lens of how legal same-sex marriage has changed the terrain of the battlefield.
Although many of the collected pieces are critical of gay marriage—at least as an end in itself—there is no party line the contributors are asked to toe. Beam’s argument about the limits of love as an organizing strategy contrasts with an article by sociologist Mignon Moore that examines how same-sex marriage can, in certain contexts, be used to advance more radical queer issues. Moore and her wife were central to the 2012 “love pivot,” as one of the carefully selected same-sex couples in Freedom to Marry’s national advertising campaign. While Moore shares some of the broader progressive concerns about the marriage equality movement, she sees it as “a vehicle through which people, and particularly people of color, could begin to talk about LGBTQ issues with their family members and individuals in their racial and ethnic and cultural communities”—a start, in other words, rather than a conclusion. (...)
Moore’s point is a critique of (or perhaps an elaboration on) the idea of “homonormativity,” a word that wends its way through After Marriage Equality. Homonormative political strategies argue that queer people deserve rights because they are similar to heterosexuals, rather than challenging how rights and privileges are doled out in society generally. Both the “love pivot” and the quest for same-sex marriage as a whole could be called homonormative, as both focus on being “like” straight people. But what is considered normal in the United States has racial overtones—“normal” being something like a straight white suburban couple with a home and children—so Moore’s visibility as a married black lesbian mother is difficult to caricature as homonormative, even if she is making something of a bid for mainstream acceptance.
Full disclosure: I also have an article in the After Marriage series, a transcript of a panel I led on polyamory and family diversity. As a committed pervert, I cannot say that the movement for same-sex marriage has done much for me, other than transform many free summer weekends into jacket-and-tie obligations. But snark as I may, marriage has offered many people I know the opportunity to celebrate their love, start their families, protect their investments, adopt their partner’s children, get citizenship, and receive myriad other benefits, tangible and intangible, that come with offering up your most intimate relationships to the state. Still, I remain unconvinced that doling out tax privileges based on whom we screw adds up to good governance. Even if we accept at face value that the neoliberal state has an interest in promoting relationships of care—because these absorb the greatest costs of child rearing and help keep us off the streets, out of hospitals, and generally less dependent on government services—it can only be explained by recourse to tradition that these relationships must be heterosexual, romantic/sexual, and limited to two individuals. Otherwise, the state’s interests can be equally satisfied by: an opposite-sex couple, a same-sex couple, three elderly adult siblings, or eight adults and three children living in an old Connecticut mansion. I am not against marriage, I just see it as an inefficient, lazy, and unnecessarily limiting definition of the kind of relationships that the government has a vested interest in supporting. As a religious institution, it seems like a hoot; as a civil institution, it is a relic of a time when all people were expected to live one way, worship one god, and die young.
by Hugh Ryan, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: Cary Bass-Deschenes
Wednesday, December 26, 2018
Bastard: Neither of My Parents Was Exactly Who I Thought They Were
Life is just a shock to the system.
It turns out that the man I have spent 50 years believing to be my father is not my father.
It turns out that the man I have spent 50 years believing to be my father is not my father.
My mother lied to me about who my father is. My father is Bob Adelman, the photographer, who most famously caught Martin Luther King Jr. in profile having a dream on the Lincoln Memorial. You know the shot. You know many of Bob’s pictures. When they say something is iconic, they just mean everyone knows it. Bob was early for history.
I too chanced young upon the world. When my first book came out, I was 27 years old. Prozac Nation changed the way people see mental illness, and it changed the way publishers see memoirs. The New York Times Book Review called me “Sylvia Plath with the ego of Madonna.” I was a hashtag before there was Twitter.
My mother had an affair with Bob Adelman when she was working at Random House. I was born in 1967.
I knew Bob all of my life. When I was 4, Bob gave me a print of his photo of protesters being hosed down in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. He gave the same shot to Martin Luther King, who was shocked “that beauty could come out of so much pain.”
I never found it remarkable that I had received such a sophisticated present when I was not yet in kindergarten. I got a lot of attention. My mother took me everywhere. I had table manners. I had big eyes and thick bangs. People played with my long chocolate hair. I was used to adults. I thought I was one of them.
I thought I was important. My mother says I was the center of attraction.
Bob Adelman’s adopted daughter, Samantha, was my playmate on the Upper West Side until we were 6, when she moved to Canada with her mother. There was that playground in Central Park at 97th Street with the monkey bars and chipped-paint yellow seesaw we loved.
We lived a block apart. Was that a coincidence?
Bob’s marriage split up when his wife found out he’d gotten another woman — my mother — pregnant. Did Bob’s ex-wife know I was his daughter when I went to her apartment for SpaghettiOs?
Bob was at my wedding in 2015. He gave me $5,000, which stunned me at the time, but now I see why: Bob is my father.
I reported Bob’s death to the New York Times.
It was March of 2016. Branka, his Serbian yoga-instructor girlfriend with blonde curls, called me crying right after he died. I emailed Trish Hall, op-ed editor at the paper, to make sure there would be an obituary. I told her Bob was the father of my childhood friend.
The first article I published, in Seventeen when I was 16, was about my father, Donald Wurtzel, the father I always knew.
My mother divorced him when I was 2. I saw him once a week, but eventually it was less than that.
Donald Wurtzel was not so much wrong for me as wrong for anyone. He relied on pills to get by. He was hard to reach.
He was not much of a father, and when I was 14, he disappeared — disconnected telephone.
His mother, my grandma Dorothy in Coney Island with plastic covers on the sofa and wing chairs, would not tell me where he was. She lived her life in linoleum. She was used to the brutal architecture of Trump Village, a lower-middle-class complex built by Fred Trump. Was she looking at the Cyclone when she told me he loved me?
My father and I never really reconnected. We tried, and eventually we stopped doing even that. When he died in 2014, I had not seen him since 2001.
I have been working out that relationship all of my life, in writing and therapy and conversation, with cocaine and heroin, with recovery and perseverance, and with my thoughts. I think so much. I can’t stop thinking. It’s all exposed. I don’t have a subconscious.
You can’t surprise me.
But this surprised me.
I have been working out the wrong problem.
Thousands of words on the wrong problem. I have perfected a two-handed backhand to clobber the lob that is coming at me that is: the wrong problem. I have aced the wrong problem.
I too chanced young upon the world. When my first book came out, I was 27 years old. Prozac Nation changed the way people see mental illness, and it changed the way publishers see memoirs. The New York Times Book Review called me “Sylvia Plath with the ego of Madonna.” I was a hashtag before there was Twitter.
My mother had an affair with Bob Adelman when she was working at Random House. I was born in 1967.I knew Bob all of my life. When I was 4, Bob gave me a print of his photo of protesters being hosed down in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. He gave the same shot to Martin Luther King, who was shocked “that beauty could come out of so much pain.”
I never found it remarkable that I had received such a sophisticated present when I was not yet in kindergarten. I got a lot of attention. My mother took me everywhere. I had table manners. I had big eyes and thick bangs. People played with my long chocolate hair. I was used to adults. I thought I was one of them.
I thought I was important. My mother says I was the center of attraction.
Bob Adelman’s adopted daughter, Samantha, was my playmate on the Upper West Side until we were 6, when she moved to Canada with her mother. There was that playground in Central Park at 97th Street with the monkey bars and chipped-paint yellow seesaw we loved.
We lived a block apart. Was that a coincidence?
Bob’s marriage split up when his wife found out he’d gotten another woman — my mother — pregnant. Did Bob’s ex-wife know I was his daughter when I went to her apartment for SpaghettiOs?
Bob was at my wedding in 2015. He gave me $5,000, which stunned me at the time, but now I see why: Bob is my father.
I reported Bob’s death to the New York Times.
It was March of 2016. Branka, his Serbian yoga-instructor girlfriend with blonde curls, called me crying right after he died. I emailed Trish Hall, op-ed editor at the paper, to make sure there would be an obituary. I told her Bob was the father of my childhood friend.
The first article I published, in Seventeen when I was 16, was about my father, Donald Wurtzel, the father I always knew.
My mother divorced him when I was 2. I saw him once a week, but eventually it was less than that.
Donald Wurtzel was not so much wrong for me as wrong for anyone. He relied on pills to get by. He was hard to reach.
He was not much of a father, and when I was 14, he disappeared — disconnected telephone.
His mother, my grandma Dorothy in Coney Island with plastic covers on the sofa and wing chairs, would not tell me where he was. She lived her life in linoleum. She was used to the brutal architecture of Trump Village, a lower-middle-class complex built by Fred Trump. Was she looking at the Cyclone when she told me he loved me?
My father and I never really reconnected. We tried, and eventually we stopped doing even that. When he died in 2014, I had not seen him since 2001.
I have been working out that relationship all of my life, in writing and therapy and conversation, with cocaine and heroin, with recovery and perseverance, and with my thoughts. I think so much. I can’t stop thinking. It’s all exposed. I don’t have a subconscious.
You can’t surprise me.
But this surprised me.
I have been working out the wrong problem.
Thousands of words on the wrong problem. I have perfected a two-handed backhand to clobber the lob that is coming at me that is: the wrong problem. I have aced the wrong problem.
by Elizabeth Wurtzel, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Elizabeth Wurtzel
Tuesday, December 25, 2018
Sleeping Rough in the Mattress Economy
Microtargeting is a remarkable thing. Even casual podcast listeners, particularly those between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, can recite with minimal prompting the key design features of a Casper mattress. And it’s not just Casper—there are plenty of competitors with nearly as aggressive advertising campaigns: Leesa, BedInaBox, Lull, Nest, CloudSleep, Yogabed, Avocado, GhostBed, and more. Only one of these is made up.
Why do so many business and marketing types believe that the model podcast listener—a young, hip thirtysomething who needs a new fix since NPR went down the shitter—is clay waiting to be molded into a mattress buyer? On the surface it makes no sense. This demographic traditionally wants to make purchases that have, bluntly, some show-off value. This is the upwardly mobile, striving, status-seeking social climber. Not too long ago these people were pitched BMWs, Rolexes, and exotic vacations. The kind of stuff that tells the world you’ve Arrived.
How did that segment of the market become a combat zone for, of all things, mattress retail? Well, if you listen to a lot of podcasts, marketing data suggests you stand at the confluence of two powerful trends: high anxiety and lowered expectations.
And that is the magic inflection point, apparently, for treating yourself to a Casper Essential. (...)
The number of online, low-overhead boxed mattress hawkers certainly will undergo a period of sifting and winnowing in the near future, a battle for survival in which only the strong and nimble will survive. Casper was among the first to the battlefield, establishing both a dominant position and a slew of imitators ready to found a company with no employees, take your money, and have a mattress from some factory they have never seen drop-ship you the promise of deep sleep and the banishment of back pain to the land of wind and ghosts.
Young college-educated consumers are supposed to be aiming higher. In the 1980s or 1990s, for example, advertisers would have been throwing higher end, more Exclusive products at urban, cool younger people. These are society’s tastemakers, after all.
But a funny thing happened in the intervening years. Older generations began to salt the earth behind them, doing everything Wall Street and the MBA class could dream up to make labor less secure, jobs longer and harder, and wages lower. As long as only blue-collar employment was on the chopping block, the petit bourgeois was more than happy to play along. Think of the tax cuts! The raging Dow!
Then the reaper came for the rest of us. Slowly it became apparent that manual labor isn’t the only kind that can be outsourced; that unions can be broken in any segment of the economy; that vicious anti-government and -tax politics would coopt nativism to get the working class really enthusiastic about voting for its own destruction; that higher education would vomit enormous numbers of credentialed, debt-saddled people into the economy to drive down wages in what were once middle class professions.
Don’t think of this as a recession; think of it as the market correcting your standard of living.
by Ed Burmila, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Casper
Why do so many business and marketing types believe that the model podcast listener—a young, hip thirtysomething who needs a new fix since NPR went down the shitter—is clay waiting to be molded into a mattress buyer? On the surface it makes no sense. This demographic traditionally wants to make purchases that have, bluntly, some show-off value. This is the upwardly mobile, striving, status-seeking social climber. Not too long ago these people were pitched BMWs, Rolexes, and exotic vacations. The kind of stuff that tells the world you’ve Arrived.How did that segment of the market become a combat zone for, of all things, mattress retail? Well, if you listen to a lot of podcasts, marketing data suggests you stand at the confluence of two powerful trends: high anxiety and lowered expectations.
And that is the magic inflection point, apparently, for treating yourself to a Casper Essential. (...)
The number of online, low-overhead boxed mattress hawkers certainly will undergo a period of sifting and winnowing in the near future, a battle for survival in which only the strong and nimble will survive. Casper was among the first to the battlefield, establishing both a dominant position and a slew of imitators ready to found a company with no employees, take your money, and have a mattress from some factory they have never seen drop-ship you the promise of deep sleep and the banishment of back pain to the land of wind and ghosts.
Young college-educated consumers are supposed to be aiming higher. In the 1980s or 1990s, for example, advertisers would have been throwing higher end, more Exclusive products at urban, cool younger people. These are society’s tastemakers, after all.
But a funny thing happened in the intervening years. Older generations began to salt the earth behind them, doing everything Wall Street and the MBA class could dream up to make labor less secure, jobs longer and harder, and wages lower. As long as only blue-collar employment was on the chopping block, the petit bourgeois was more than happy to play along. Think of the tax cuts! The raging Dow!
Then the reaper came for the rest of us. Slowly it became apparent that manual labor isn’t the only kind that can be outsourced; that unions can be broken in any segment of the economy; that vicious anti-government and -tax politics would coopt nativism to get the working class really enthusiastic about voting for its own destruction; that higher education would vomit enormous numbers of credentialed, debt-saddled people into the economy to drive down wages in what were once middle class professions.
Don’t think of this as a recession; think of it as the market correcting your standard of living.
by Ed Burmila, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Casper
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