Lyrical Cardigan

So there’s a known thing in the study of human psychology/sociology/what-have-you where men are known to, on average, rely entirely on their female romantic partner for emotional support. Bonding with other men is done at a more superficial level involving fun group activities and conversations about general subjects but rarely involves actually leaning on other men or being really honest about emotional problems. Men use alcohol to be able to lower their inhibitions enough to expose themselves emotionally to other men, but if you can’t get emotional support unless you’re drunk, you have a problem.

So men need to have a woman in their lives to have anyone they can share their emotional needs and vulnerabilities with. However, since women are not socialized to fear sharing these things, women’s friendships with other women are heavily based on emotional support. If you can’t lean on her when you’re weak, she’s not your friend. To women, what friendship is is someone who listens to all your problems and keeps you company.

So this disconnect men are suffering from is that they think that only a person who is having sex with you will share their emotions and expect support. That’s what a romantic partner does. But women think that’s what a friend does. So women do it for their romantic partners and their friends and expect a male friend to do it for them the same as a female friend would. This fools the male friend into thinking there must be something romantic there when there is not.

This here is an example of patriarchy hurting everyone. Women have a much healthier approach to emotional support – they don’t die when widowed at nearly the rate that widowers die and they don’t suffer emotionally from divorce nearly as much even though they suffer much more financially, and this is because women don’t put all their emotional needs on one person. Women have a support network of other women. But men are trained to never share their emotions except with their wife or girlfriend, because that isn’t manly. So when she dies or leaves them, they have no one to turn to to help with the grief, causing higher rates of death, depression, alcoholism and general awfulness upon losing a romantic partner. 

So men suffer terribly from being trained in this way. But women suffer in that they can’t reach out to male friends for basic friendship. I am not sure any man can comprehend how heartbreaking it is to realize that a guy you thought was your friend was really just trying to get into your pants. Friendship is real. It’s emotional, it’s important to us. We lean on our friends. Knowing that your friend was secretly seething with resentment when you were opening up to him and sharing your problems because he felt like he shouldn’t have to do that kind of emotional work for anyone not having sex with him, and he felt used by you for that reason, is horrible. And the fact that men can’t share emotional needs with other men means that lots of men who can’t get a girlfriend end up turning into horrible misogynistic people who think the world owes them the love of a woman, like it’s a commodity… because no one will die without sex. Masturbation exists. But people will die or suffer deep emotional trauma from having no one they can lean on emotionally. And men who are suffering deep emotional trauma, and have been trained to channel their personal trauma into rage because they can’t share it, become mass shooters, or rapists, or simply horrible misogynists.

As a man, I understand how toxic men are forced to be to each other. And men are incapable of teaching ourselves that friends can be, well, friends instead of very polite acquaintances.

But I should have thought of something: mothers.

Women who are raising sons do have a responsibility here. It’s not okay to teach your son that boys don’t cry, and it’s not okay to support your son’s father sending that message either. It’s not okay to teach your son that being a man means not complaining, not hugging, not touching. Hug your sons. Hug your teen and adult sons. 

Don’t tolerate your sons talking smack about friends who show emotional vulnerabilities. Don’t tolerate boys who are friends of your sons doing it in your house, either. Your influence over that proto-man will shape who he is for life. Do your best to shape him into a good man who won’t be broken on the wheel of toxic masculinity. 

fucking christ I am sobbing

The video she references at the beginning of this one, aka “Getting a Man 101″ is hysterical.

She also raises & discusses some very good political and social points (without losing her amazing sense of humor) like in these videos here and here.

SHINE BRIGHT LIKE A SVETA: The struggle is real.

www.cloudandvictory.com

Dialogue: Exposing the Rhetoric of Exclusion through Medieval Manuscripts

By Kristen Collins and Bryan Keene, originally published on the Getty Iris

We invite your thoughts on an exhibition-in-progress at the Getty that addresses the persistence of prejudice as seen through lingering stereotypes from the Middle Ages.

As curators in the Getty Museum’s department of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, we are interested in how books, and museum collections more broadly, can spark dialogues about inclusivity and diversity. Our manuscripts collection at the Getty consists primarily of objects from Western Europe, which can present challenges when trying to connect with a multicultural and increasingly international audience. 

We are striving to make connections between the Middle Ages and the contemporary world—connections that may not be immediately evident, but are powerful nonetheless. Museums are inherently political organizations, in terms of the ways that collections are assembled, displayed, and interpreted. This year’s meeting of the Association of Art Museum Curators addressed how institutional narratives and implicit bias can skew ideas of history and culture in ways that exclude minorities and gloss over the shameful aspects of our past. Groups such as the Medievalists of Color, the Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages, the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, and the Society for the Study of Homosexuality in the Middle Ages, among others, are applying similar lines of inquiry, seeking to decolonize and diversify the field of medieval studies. We stand with these groups.

We were also inspired by Holland Cotter’s call to arms, as he exhorted museums to tell the truth about art, “about who made objects, and how they work in the world, and how they got to the museum, and what they mean, what values they advertise, good and bad. Go for truth (which, like the telling of history, is always changing), and connect art to life.”

Here is our description of the exhibition, still in draft form:

Medieval manuscripts preserve stories of romance, faith, and knowledge, but their luxurious illuminations can reveal more sinister narratives as well. Typically created for the privileged classes, such books nevertheless provide glimpses of the marginalized and powerless and reflect their tenuous places in society. Attitudes toward Jews and Muslims, the poor, those perceived as sexual or gender deviants, and the foreign peoples beyond European borders can be discerned through caricature and polemical imagery, as well as through marks of erasure and censorship.

As repositories of history and memory, museums reveal much about our shared past, but all too often the stories told from luxury art objects focus on the elite. Through case studies of objects in the Getty’s collection, this exhibition examines the “out groups” living within western Europe. Medieval society was far more diverse than is commonly understood, but diversity did not necessarily engender tolerance. Life contained significant obstacles for those who were not fully abled, wealthy, Caucasian, Christian, heterosexual, cisgender males. For today’s viewer, the vivid images and pervasive narratives in illuminated manuscripts can serve as a stark reminder of the power of rhetoric and the danger of prejudice.

We begin the exhibition with a masterpiece of Romanesque painting, shown above. This manuscript, with its gilded pages and geometric symmetry, reveals the institutionalized antisemitism that formed the basis of Christian rhetoric about the triumph of the Church.

Ecclesia, the personification of the Christian Church, is seen above and to Christ’s right, while the Jewish Synagoga appears on Christ’s left. Often represented as a blindfolded figure, here Synagoga (in red robes) points at Christ, glaring. She holds a banderole representing Old Testament law that proclaims “cursed be he who hangs on the tree.” Below, two additional personifications echo and intensify the antithetical positions of these two figures. In a roundel below Ecclesia, the fair-skinned figure of Life (at far left) gazes calmly across the composition at Death, whose dark complexion and hook nose are seen in caricatures of Jews in other twelfth-century images.

We’d Like Your Comments

We are in the early stages of writing this exhibition, which is scheduled to be presented in the Getty’s manuscripts gallery in January 2018. As we create both the thematic content and the individual object texts—which we will be posting periodically on the Getty Tumblr—we are curious to receive community input. Specifically, we are curious to know any or all of the following:

Your level of interest in an exhibition of medieval and Renaissance art exploring these themes

Comments on the wording of the exhibition description we’ve shared above (as a whole or in any part)

Suggestions for perspectives and points of view we should consider in developing the exhibition

Any and all other suggestions or criticisms

This is the U.S. Geological Survey’s budget justification for 2018. The USGS is a scientific, research-based organization within the Department of the Interior. Meaning, should congress vote to pass Trump’s proposed budget, these are the changes/eliminations/reductions that USGS would have to undertake. 

This cut in particular caught my eye (pg. 52): 

The Smithsonian is a federal agency that receives 60% of its funding from congress, federal grants and contracts. This is an instance where a portion of the funding for the curatorial research positions at the Smithsonian that are supported by the USGS would be eliminated. Not the entire curatorial or collections staff - that would be … insanity. But 11 full time employees (FTE) and $1.6million would be cut from the Smithsonian’s operating budget.

Take a look at the rest of the report. The budget request includes a 16% reduction of the USGS workforce. USGS currently employees 4,923 full time employees. This would be a reduction of more than 800 people - and, again, these are primarily scientific research positions. The federal government employs a lot of scientists (or, traditionally has in.. recent years). 

Pg. 54. 

pg. 57. 

I could go through the rest of the report but if you want to get a sense of which programs are being cut, just ctrl + F “eliminate” and scroll on through. 

What’s so disappointing to me is that the United States has been at the forefront for so many research areas in recent decades. We built an infrastructure that supported not just innovation in a variety of fields, but a system which allowed for long-term monitoring of our planet. Big, comprehensive datasets are invaluable for our understanding of change over time - how we come to know what a place used to be, or look like, and how that’s different from today. This information helps us mitigate problems and anticipate change. 

With the sudden halt of many of these programs, we would be creating gaps in our knowledge base. Like little moments of amnesia, our country’s scientists would be deprived of information which could further progress. And this goes well beyond our borders: the research conducted by USGS and other federal agencies benefits our global partners, our world’s citizens, and future science.

This is a tough road for so many young scientists here in the states; we’re going from a STEM-centric system that advocated for increasing scientific involvement and literacy in our country, to swiftly dumping them in a world where we have eliminated their jobs and have quickly undervalued their credentials. And that’s frightening because the world is not going to stop and wait for us to catch up - the changes happening around our planet necessitate immediate action. At a time when we need science and science literacy more than ever, opportunities for both are decreasing.

You guys, you must stop doing this. You must. We cannot keep yelling at you about it because it makes us so angry, and we are already angry all the time, about real things, like how our lives are turning into a real world Handmaid’s Tale, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haha ha ha ha ha ha. We cannot keep spending our energy being mad at mediocre men for writing mediocre books that inexplicably win awards and that people tell us to read, for some fucking godawful who knows reason.

So men. My guys. My dudes. My bros. My writers. I am begging you to help me here. When you have this man in your workshop, you must turn to him. You must take his clammy hands in yours. You must look deep into his eyes, his man eyes, with your man eyes, and you must say to him, “Peter, I am a man, and you are a man, so let us talk to each other like men. Peter, look at the way you have written about the only four women in this book.” And Peter will say, trying to free his hands, “What? These are sexy, dynamic, interesting women.” And you must grip his hands even tighter and you must say to him, “ARE THEY, PETER? Why are they interesting? What are their hobbies? What are their private habits? What are their strange dreams? What choices are they making, Peter? They are not making choices. They are not interesting. What they are is sexy, and you have those things confused, and not in the good way where someone’s interestingness makes them become sexy, like Steve Buscemi or Pauline Viardot. Why must women be sexy to be interesting to you? The women you don’t find sexy are where, Peter? They are invisible? They are all dead?” He is trying to escape! Tighten your grasp. “Peter, look at this. I mean, where to begin. ‘She could have been any age between eighteen and thirty-five?’ There are no other ages, I guess? Do you know what eighteen-year-olds really look like, in life? Do you know what thirty-SEVEN-year-olds look like, god forbid? And not that this is even the point, but why are these supposedly sexy and dynamic and interesting women BOTHERING with your boring garbage ‘on the skinny side of average’ protagonist? Why did you write it like this, Peter?” 

And maybe Peter will say at last, “I don’t know.” Maybe he will be silent for a long long long time, and then maybe he will say, “I guess it’s scary and difficult for me to imagine the interiority of women because then i would have to know that my mother had an interiority of her own: private, petty, sexually unstimulating, strange: unrelated to me and undevoted to my needs. That sometimes I was nothing to my mother, just as sometimes she is nothing to me. That I was not at all times her immediate concern.”

“I know, Peter,” you can tell him gently.

Sarah Illenberger