Standing Tall in NV

Me: *sits with family*

Melissa Newman-Evans - “9 Things I Would Like to Tell to Every Teenage Girl”

“The world is trying to kill each and every one of you, and if you do not hold each other up, no one else will.”

(Article photo is of the aforementioned “Elf on the Shelf”, taken with him between two very tall buildings.)

Excerpt from article:

Children who participate in play with The Elf on the Shelf doll have to contend with rules at all times during the day: they may not touch the doll, and they must accept that the doll watches them at all times with the purpose of reporting to Santa Claus.]

This is such a good article though

The argument Pinto makes is that the story and the doll normalize 24-hour surveillance in the mind of a child, which makes them susceptible to more passively accept police-state surveillance as adults.

“I don’t think the elf is a conspiracy and I realize we’re talking about a toy,” Pinto told The Post. “It sounds humorous, but we argue that if a kid is okay with this bureaucratic elf spying on them in their home, it normalizes the idea of surveillance and in the future restrictions on our privacy might be more easily accepted.”

It’s based in a theory that was developed by Jeremy Bentham and popularized by Michel Foucault in which students, prisoners, factory workers and others were thought to function better (for whatever value of better) in a system called a panopticon, in which an individual is potentially under surveillance 24-hours a day, but never actually KNOWS whether or not he or she is being surveilled. 

Pinto said she’s not the first person to be troubled by Elf on the Shelf’s surveilling. She’s said parents routinely contact her to say they changed the rules of the game after it made their families uneasy. And many kids, she said, often intuitively feel like spying and being a tattletale is wrong.

“A mom e-mailed me and told me that the first day they read the elf book and put the elf out, her daughter woke up crying because she was being watched by the elf,” Pinto recounted. “They changed the game so it wouldn’t scare the child.”

In addition to the problem of normalizing surveillance in the mind of a child, this also forces the child into a situation where they never feel like they are free to simply be themselves; they are forced to be “on their best behavior” at all times, unable to relax and make mistakes and do the job of growing up and being a child, because they never know if the elf is spying on them, ready and waiting to report back to Santa Claus that they’ve been bad.

(I don’t have a bad doctor, by the way.  She’s all right, she just has too many patients and not enough tools for treating them. Which I can empathize with.)

The rage that white men have been expressing, loudly, violently, over the very idea that they might find themselves identifying with characters who are not white men, the very idea that heroism might not be particular to one race or one gender, the basic idea that the human story is vast and various and we all get to contribute a page - that rage is petty. It is aware of its own pettiness. Like a screaming toddler denied a sweet, it becomes more righteous the more it reminds itself that after all, it’s only a story.

Only a story. Only the things we tell to keep out the darkness. Only the myths and fables that save us from despair, to establish power and destroy it, to teach each other how to be good, to describe the limits of desire, to keep us breathing and fighting and yearning and striving when it’d be so much easier to give in. Only the constitutive ingredients of every human society since the Stone age.

Only a story. Only the most important thing in the whole world.

The people who are upset that the faces of fiction are changing are right to worry. It’s a fundamental challenge to a worldview that’s been too comfortable for too long. The part of our cultural imagination that places white Western men at the centre of every story is the same part that legitimises racism and sexism. The part of our collective mythos that encourages every girl and brown boy to identify and empathise with white male heroes is the same part that reacts with rage when white boys are asked to imagine themselves in anyone else’s shoes.

and also

… Imagine how over time that rage would harden into bewilderment, and finally mute acceptance that people like you were never going to get to be the hero, not really.

I WOULD SAY THIS IS JUST HYPERBOLE BUT THEN THE FUCKING WHITE ASSHOLES SAY ITS OK FOR THEM TO TAKE OVER A FEDERAL BUILDING WHILE ARMED AND COMMIT A TERRORIST ACT, ESSENTIALLY, BECAUSE AT LEAST THEY’RE NOT BLACK

DO WE REMEMBER THE WALL TO WALL COVERAGE OF A BURNING FUCKING CVS?!

DONT FUCKING TELL ME WHITE SUPREMACY ISNT REAL. I AM SO FUCKING TIRED OF YOUR SHIT WHITE AMERICA WHAT THE FUCK.

i mean trans people who don’t pass. trans people who don’t try or want to pass. trans people who can’t attempt to pass for safety reasons. 

trans people who don’t have dysphoria. trans people who aren’t binary, or have a “made-up” identity. trans people who use “weird” pronouns or neopronouns. trans people who are gender non-conforming. 

trans people that aren’t skinny. trans people who aren’t white. trans people who aren’t straight. disabled trans people and mentally ill trans people.