Bee & Barr & The Nuance of Language

I was one of the liberal snowflakes who cheered when Roseanne got her cushy ABC sitcom snatched away for using old-school ethnic slurs for the millionth time. I woke up today to a Twitter firestorm over Samantha Bee (of Full Frontal with fame) referring to Ivanka Trump as a "feckless [redacted]" in a recent episode. The redacted word was the c-word, in case you don't know.

Naturally, conservatives are calling for her termination and the cancellation of her show, because, in their eyes, to let the comment slide would be a double standard. Here are my thoughts, from a 20-year-old idiot whom you did not ask!

First of all, we can't really call it a double standard even nominally. Bee and Barr are coming from two different networks, TBS and ABC, respectively. ABC is one of the biggest broadcasting corporations in the world. TBS, while obviously extremely powerful, doesn't have the same clout. More to the point, ABC's programming is usually marketed more towards families and universal audiences, while TBS's content--at least its original programming--is usually adult-oriented, and rarely has the sanitized, people-pleasing vibe as ABC. To that end, the Roseanne reboot was a sitcom, and Full Frontal is a comedy news show in the style of The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight, both of which have long been known for coarse language and political controversy--frankly, it's part of their branding. But perhaps the most important point to be made in the discussion about technicalities is that Bee used that phrase during her show, as part of a scripted comedy act in an exaggerated persona, while Barr's horrific commentary was presented on her own time, on her own Twitter account, where she is, ostensibly, her real self.

Now that those topics are out of the way, let's address the severity of the comments themselves. Barr's slurs were issued in a conspiracy theory Twitter thread with some of her equivalently unhinged followers. From what I can gather, the thread was more about far-right political lunacy than outright racism, but Barr decided to kick it up a notch and make what she called a "joke" in "bad taste," describing Valerie Jarrett, a former Obama aide, as an ape. There are loads of articles on the history of these racist comparisons--white people calling black people apes is nothing new--but suffice it to say, this comment was more than just a dogwhistle. It was practically a mission statement. Channing Dungey, the current and first black American president of ABC, did not stand for it. There's a lot to unpack about why Dungey would even allow Roseanne a platform in the first place (most likely that her bigotry could be tolerated until it interfered with the bottom line), but that's not what I'm here to talk about.

Bee's comments were, as I mentioned earlier, a part of a tirade against Ivanka Trump for not doing more to affect her father's policymaking. She was specifically critical of the younger Trump's hypocrisy; on the campaign trail, she frequently spoke of her intention to support mothers and children, and to give the older Trump her opinion when she felt it was necessary to his political actions. In light of the horrors perpetrated by ICE against immigrant families, Ivanka's true alignment is rendered in perfect clarity: it's her family she wants to protect, and families like hers. Not poor ones, and not brown ones. This isn't new information, but after she posted this absolutely "tone deaf' tweet, it reminded all of us how much she could be doing, and how much she's letting everyone down. Bee criticized her for posting the photo ("that's a beautiful photo of you and your child, but let me just say, from one mother to another, do something about your dad's immigration practices, you feckless c***!") and made jokes about the President's unhealthy, seemingly sexual obsession with his own daughter ("put on something tight and low-cut and tell your father to f***ing stop it").

Looking at the controversial quotes in context, it's easy for me to make my mind. The two are not equivalent. We're kidding ourselves if we think they are. Bee and Barr are both comedians, but "comedy" is not a catch-all excuse for every time a professional stand-up gets themselves into hot water. Barr's comments were made on her own time, lack critical thinking and nuance, rely on old-hat racism, and are coming from a place of ignorance and hatred. Bee's comments, on the other hand, were made for a network, for a specific purpose, and contain the one-two punch of shock value and intelligent critique (note the use of the word "feckless"--had she merely called Trump a c*** the joke would have considerably less merit) that turn a simple schoolyard taunt into a solid political burn.

Bee using the c-word on her television show was definitely a risk. The risk is reminiscent of when black people use the n-word. In trying to reclaim it, in leveling against one another in endearment or in insult, marginalized communities are gambling on their own degradation, i.e. the possibility of another community co-opting the word and using it for its original intention. All of this is to say: there are definitely male comedians (and men in other professions) who will probably point to Bee and say that if she can use it, anyone can. And they'd be wrong, but they'd probably still make the point.

I stand with Samantha Bee, and I stand with TBS, and I stand with ABC for firing Roseanne and canceling her pandering, pathetic reboot. Here's hoping she's not any ballots any time soon.

Third Time's The Charm

Hello again, it's been a while.

So my junior year at USC is wrapping up, which means it's high time I tell you what I've learned. This has been a peculiar year for me, a year of things slowing down, a year of watching things happen to and for other people, a transition in which it felt like everything took place only in hindsight. People told me how hard sophomore year would be, so I severely underestimated junior year's difficulty. I put in more effort than I probably needed to in some of my classes. I put a lot of pressure on myself to attain a perfect GPA, for no reason other than personal pride. I set expectations for other people that they could never meet.

But I also pushed myself, socially and academically and professionally. I learned things about myself. I made new routines and laid groundwork for my future. I did heavy lifting now so next year and the years afterward will hopefully be a little less stressful. I made some great new friends, a feat I thought was impossible this late in the college game. And as always, I learned a few tips and tricks that I hope will help you out--rising juniors, college hopefuls, adults who are overcome with nostalgia just reading this, and everyone in between.

1. I'd like to see the good in everyone, and for the most part, I've gotten better at doing that. But some people are toxic, or predatory, or abusive, and they don't need me defending them. Sometimes you have to listen to your gut, to the red flags being posted at every mile marker, to the stories about what that allegedly good person has done to hurt other people. Just because someone is good to you, that doesn't make them a good person.

2. If being somewhere makes you uncomfortable, you are allowed to leave. Does the party give you bad vibes? Time to call that USC-sponsored free Lyft. Is someone in your session making comments that make you feel unsafe? Maybe don't write with them again, or at least don't go alone. Is a first date going south fast? Make up an excuse and hightail it to your best friend's place. Don't worry about being polite. Don't worry about being nice. Get the hell out.

3. Clean your room. When I get stressed by schoolwork or sessions or any of my other obligations, I tend to let my apartment turn to chaos. After I do my laundry, clean my shower, wash my dishes, put my clothes back in the closet and my books back on the shelf--you get the picture--I feel a lot more calm, and like I can tackle whatever tasks I have ahead of me. Now, if you've got two papers and three charts due tomorrow, maybe skip the cleaning for today and get your work done. But if you're mostly done with your schoolwork and you have a couple hours to spare, clean your room. If you live in a shared space, clean the common areas, too. Your roommates will thank you.

4. Throw your own parties. I don't know about my peers the same age or older, but junior year is the year I started feeling like an old lady at parties. I can't hang out in a sweaty, loud house with a few dozen (or couple hundred) freshman and sophomores and expect to have a good time. Most of my friends feel the same way. Our solution? Apartment parties. Keep the attendance to close friends only. Eat snacks. Play music you know you like at an appropriate volume. Or if you feel like going out, hit a restaurant in downtown. Eat outside so you can laugh as loud as you want. I felt so much pressure to go out my first two years of college, pressure that I mostly put on myself because I didn't want to "miss anything." You've done enough. You aren't missing anything.

5. You can change your mind. After two years in college, you may think you know who you are and what you want. Or you may have no idea. Both are okay, and both are temporary. We still have so much time to become who we choose to be.

6. Stand up for yourself. It's hard. I know it is. You don't want confrontation. You don't want to be marked as "difficult," especially if you're in a small community like Thornton. And you never know if you're picking your battles right. But kid, you never know if you're right until it's over. I've said it before in this post, but listen to your gut. Speak out about what you think is right, whether it means sticking up for your friend or getting political or just getting a little bit loud if no one is listening. You're a grown-up now, even if you don't always feel it.

7. Enjoy the last year you get turned away from bars. I'm one of the youngest of my friends, and almost everyone has already turned 21, at least among the people in my class or older. It upsets me sometimes to watch them go out without me, even though I don't care about drinking or dark rooms or loud music. I mainly just feel bad about not being able to go to people's gigs. And there's also the philosophical underpinning of feeling "left behind," however irrelevant or false. But here's the truth: sometimes I get nostalgic for high school. Yeah, that's right, the years I felt miserable and outcast and stressed out and misunderstood. Because in my memory, it's blurry and watery like a photo on a disposable camera, warm and soft and not as bad as it seemed. Even though I was powerless, even though I was lost. Eventually, being 20 will be a distant memory, and the feeling of being turned away from bars and clubs will just be something I laugh about. Something I miss. If you're 20, or 19, or any age that's too young to drink in the U.S., just enjoy it. Blow bubbles and go to the park and eat cookies and go to sleep early. You can still do all that stuff for the rest of your life, but you get the picture. Be a kid. Soak it up. It doesn't last.

8. Make time to read. I was a voracious reader as a child. I've fallen in and out of rhythms with reading over the years, not because I didn't feel like it, but because I didn't think I had time. This year, I've been setting aside a lot more time to read books. Reading makes you wiser, calmer, more observant, more empathetic. And if you're a writer of anything--songs, poetry, prose, screenplays, anything--reading will make you better at it. Some of my favorites: The Idiot by Elif Batuman, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

9. Text your friends out of the blue to tell them you love them. Sometimes I just text my good friends or my family telling them everything I love about them. It might be motivated because I know they're going through a hard time, or it might just be that I haven't seen them in a while and I feel the need to remind them that I'm here, that I always will be. It always brightens their day, and it always brightens mine. Tell the people in your life that they matter to you, and not just on birthdays or holidays or anniversaries. Let them know on a random Tuesday in March that you heard a song or saw a dog and it made you think of them.

10. Pretty isn't everything. Like many people, I can get fixated on my physical appearance. I become consumed with Pretty, an elusive force or beam of light, if only I could harness it, if only I could channel it, if only I could become it, then all my problems would be solved. I wouldn't be sad because pretty people aren't sad. I wouldn't be stressed because pretty people don't have to be stressed. I would get where I need to be in my career because pretty people get ahead. Right? Right? Wrong. It turns out that beautiful people also have depression and anxiety and self-doubt. It turns out that you are probably more beautiful than you think. Stop chasing pretty (and this is not targeted at a specific gender, either, this goes for everyone). Chase ambition and hard work. Chase honing your craft, chase being kind, chase being strong and badass. I swear to God if you do you'll start glowing. You'll be that beam of light. You will become that force.

11. You have time. The toxic combination of a rise in youth culture and the ubiquity of the Internet can make millennials and Gen Z feel like you have to be rich and hot and famous and brilliant and an activist by the time you're 18 or you're a failure. Like being in your 20s and still working on yourself means you're all washed up. It's not true. I promise. I'm 20 and I forget it sometimes myself, but I know in my heart that it's a lie. Across every single field, with the exception of maybe professional athletes and Olympians (and even then there are people who break the mold), you're not supposed to be at the top of your game until at least your mid-30s, and probably even later than that. Doctors have years of med school and residencies, lawyers need several years as associates before they make partner, professors don't get tenure until lots of publishing, most chefs work for years as line cooks before they open their own restaurants--you get the picture. If you're 20 or 25 or even 30 and you're still not where you want to be, relax. You still have time. Life's not even half over. You'll get there.

12. You are not alone. If you're young like me, I'm sure you experience days where you feel like you're the first person in the world to go through your particular brand of trauma. That everything you are feeling is happening for the first time in the hurricane laboratory of your heart. But it's happened before. I'm not saying you're not special (although special is overrated). I'm just saying that someone else has been through it. Someone else is probably going through it now. If you were looking for a reason to go on living or some sign from the universe that tells you it's gonna be all right, this is your sign.

So that's all I've got for you this time. In a year, I'll be preparing to graduate, and hopefully I'll have learned a few more things about myself in the world. Until next time, friends. To the graduating seniors: bon voyage. To the classes coming up behind me: buckle up. It's gonna be a bumpy ride.

This Is Exactly What It Looks Like

Perhaps the most recent advertising controversy was low-budget fashion giant H&M releasing an image of young black boy modeling a sweatshirt bearing the slogan "Coolest Monkey in the Jungle." The Internet, as it often is, was outraged. Celebrities chimed in, breaking contracts with the company (Diddy purportedly offered the boy a contract with his own line). But of course, the hot-button topic quickly unraveled, seeing backlash from those who didn't see the problem and from those who did. Rachel Dolezal, most famous for wearing blackface and presenting herself as a black woman when, in fact, she's white, released a hoodie that reads "Coolest Prince in the Hood," positioning it as the "woke" alternative to the offensive article in question. Of course, the Venn diagram of "people offended by the H&M hoodie" and "people who are offended by Rachel Dolezal" is approximately a single circle, so a negative response ensued. Then, to top it all off, the young model's mother stated that she is fine with the hoodie, and thinks the surrounding controversy has been blown way out of proportion.

Because the social media news cycle functions at such a breakneck pace, this has already been more or less forgotten. But it will be replaced by another problematic advertising campaign (the Dove campaign in which certain shots make it look like their soap is designed to turn you from a black woman to a white one? The Pop chips campaign where Ashton Kutcher dons brown face?) and we'll have the same debates. It boils down to this: the side in defense of the contentious images will claim that "it's not what it looks like."

And I'm here to say, once and for all: visual content is what it looks like. Literally.

Advertising, television, and film are all visual mediums. They have internal context--the narrative of the images and sounds they're presenting--and external context--the sociopolitical narrative of the environment in which they air. Similarly to how words and symbols (the n-word, the Confederate flag, the swastika) can't exist in a vacuum, divorced of their perverse and traumatic meanings, so too must ads, TV shows, and movies function with the weight of their ideological predecessors. In essence: everything is happening all at once. We'd like to think that what we say and do is only happening in the year we're in (2018, in this case, which still sounds like a fake year from The Future), but in fact it's also happening in 1918, and 1818, and all the years that came before this one. Human beings assign meaning to things, and just because we assign new meanings doesn't mean the old ones immediately go away. I think a lot of the people on the side of "it's not what it looks like" think that slavery and the Holocaust and the suffrage movement and Stonewall all happened, like, a thousand years ago. In reality, it's only been the last 150 years that all of those things ended. In the history of humankind, that barely registers as a blink of an eye.

Speaking of eyes (ugh), as I was saying before, this controversial content is defined by how it looks. While "Coolest Monkey In The Jungle" is a fun, whimsical hoodie design on its own, you can't have a young black boy model it in a year where hate crimes are on the rise for the second year in a row. Ashton Kutcher darkening up his complexion and attempting a deeply offensive accent to play a Bollywood director (also--to sell chips? Who the %^@# came up with that one?) may not have been intended to hurt people, but it came in an era where brown people were (and are) still not represented, underrepresented, and misrepresented in the media. That Dove ad, when put into its larger context, clearly didn't have racist intentions. But if you can pull a couple of sequential screenshots from an ad campaign and make it look like a #woke soap company is trying to sell black people skin whitener, then you need to fire your marketing guy.

Just as there are SO many non-racist Halloween costumes for you to choose from, there are SO many non-racist ad campaigns you could come up with. When ESPN anchors debated whether their network's real-life fantasy draft mimicked a slave auction (black athletes standing on a stage and being more or less auctioned off to a mostly white audience), the conservative commentator offered the same plea that every other conservative offers in these arguments: "It's not what it looks like."

But that's the thing about a picture. It's got a lot of jobs. But its first job is to be is what it looks like.

On "Cat Person," As A Real-Life 20-Year-Old Girl

Disclaimer: this post will discuss heterosexual romantic relationships between young cis women and older cis men, because a) that's the relationship described in the story, and b) those are the only relationships I have personal experience with. If you are trans or identify outside the binary, or your sexual orientation is not heterosexual, and you have thoughts about how other genders and sexualities interact on age differences, please reach out to me and tell me your stories. I'm always trying to learn more!

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person

^ Please go read it if you haven't.

The Internet was taken by storm this past weekend by "Cat Person," a short story by Kristen Roupenian that was published in The New Yorker. Because I am liberal scum, I am a paid subscriber to the publication, but I didn't know about the story until Sunday evening, when Kumail Nanjiani tweeted about it and I had to have a look for myself.

I was absolutely mesmerized. I am a reader, but I'm much more partial to physical books than digital ones. I can sit for hours with a paper book and be totally immersed (provided, you know, that the writing is good). But even a brilliant piece read from a screen can lose my attention, regardless of length, purely because of how easily distracted I am by my glowing box of diversions--other articles or stories, YouTube videos, Spotify, or the four to five Word documents I've got open at any given time, full of my own fledging novels or poems. With "Cat Person," I started reading and didn't stop until I was finished. I will admit that I took brief pauses after certain moments, moments that articulated thoughts I've had so vividly I had to take a break just to let them sink in. It was dizzying.

Despite the visceral discomfort we all feel when reading this story, nothing criminal happens. That's what's so crazy about it. It's just...gross. It's a little bit off. It's the uncanny valley of a sexual encounter. She's 20, he's 34--legal but creepy. She consents because she doesn't want to summon what she believes is the requisite amount of politeness and tact to say no--legal but upsetting. Their sex is at once almost an empowering one-night stand but also almost a case of sexual assault. It walks the line so finely and so articulately, most female readers can immediately drum up an occasion of their own that eerily reflects this one, whether they want to or not.

Being 20 is by far the most confusing age I've experienced yet. Really, I'd say from 18-25 or so, being a woman is complex in a way that being a girl never was. When you're under 18, you are a minor, protected by the law (ostensibly) and only engaging in romantic and sexual relationships with people who are also minors (except under awful circumstances). While the question of assault still looms large, and far too many young girls are plagued by predatory behavior that permanently traumatizes them, society has purportedly made strict rules about who young people are meant to date--each other. Over the age of 25 (this is just me projecting, as I haven't gotten there yet), many women have started living on their own, supporting themselves financially in some capacity, and thinking about marriage and kids as a possibility, even if it's not an immediate one.

It's that hazy area in between, where, in the words of professional adult adolescent Britney Spears, "I'm not a girl, / Not yet a woman." If we're still in school, we're college or grad students; otherwise, we've just recently entered the workforce. Many of us have never been in real relationships (cue Adele singing Hello, it's me). For those of us under 21, we can't even go into bars. And yet! There are men in their 30s, 40s, 50s (need I go on?) who are pursuing us romantically. I made the rookie mistake of setting up an OkCupid profile during my freshman year of college, mainly just to see if it was any better than the tragic hookup wasteland of Tinder, and I was propositioned by multiple men over the age of 30. One 58-year-old man messaged me asking me out, making him older than both of my parents. I shut down the profile pretty quickly after that.

Most girls are told from a young age that we mature faster than boys. Science backs it up (I think, but you can Google it). Therefore, at 20, when we are, by the legal definition, ready to date fully grown men, there's some appeal. Theoretically, the maturity gap is rendered moot by the age difference. These guys--these men--have money, jobs, stability. They don't share a house with seven roommates. They don't wear flip flops to dinner. They don't hook up with your friends, because they don't know your friends, because they're 30. I've never been on a date with a 30-year-old (and I hope I won't for at least a few more years), but this is the kind of bare minimum paradise I imagine awaits me on the other side of 25.

Despite all these clear perks, there are drawbacks. A 30-year-old man is gonna know exactly what he wants from a relationship, physically and emotionally, whereas a 20-year-old girl has no idea. Sex and love mean very different things to those two people. And the power is going to lie with the man, 99% of the time. His gender and his age position him above that woman, no matter how smart or sexually experienced or physically strong she may be. Of COURSE there are exceptions. But the danger comes when we as young women assume we are the exception, when of course, categorically speaking, we almost certainly are not.

I have friends who have gone out with older men. In most cases, they were not scarred for life, physically or psychologically. They just didn't work out, because one or both parties realized that they were just too far apart in experience to have a lasting relationship. I have wound up in conversations with men at social events where neither of us realized the age gap. Twice I found myself flirting/chatting with men in their late 20s as an 18 and 19-year-old, respectively, and both times when they found out my age, they politely ducked out of the conversation. I was hurt--I'm legal (sort of), what's the problem--but in hindsight, these were just good dudes. They weren't trying to tangle themselves up in the type of gray-area sexual encounter described in "Cat Person," and they definitely weren't looking for a relationship with a girl who still had the word "teen" in her age. My total lack of life experience was prohibitive. I am so glad that these men found my age disqualifying instead of titillating.

There's one other fascinating aspect of "Cat Person" that has been touched on decidedly less than I'd like in the thinkpieces I've read so far. I'm talking about Margot's perception of herself. While she and Robert have sex, she becomes most aroused when thinking of herself through his eyes, as a young, thin, beautiful girl that he was grateful to have in his bed. It's the kind of thinking that has attacked my psyche in the past. In practice, I am horrified every time an older man makes a pass at me in public or yells something lewd at me from a car. I feel violated and scared. But in theory, when I think about what I represent to them, this beautiful object that they will never have...I feel...powerful? As insane as that sounds? While I've established that older men will always have greater agency in sexual encounters with younger women, there is a weird sort of synthetic power that comes with being a young woman in a society that teaches women their greatest assets are their beauty and their youth. I have struggled with self-esteem about my looks my entire life, but even at my lowest moments, I am still a 20-year-old girl, and that alone makes me appealing to a disturbing subset of older men. Some dark corner of my mind derives pleasure from that. It's a thing that I've never admitted and that I've never heard any of my female friends admit. But seeing it in "Cat Person" has me wondering if anyone else in my demographic experiences the same thing. If so, what does it mean? What do we do with it? Do we try to rewire our thinking to avoid these infrequent but very real thought patterns? Or do we accept that we are not saints, that our more insidious feelings are just a part of being human?

I don't have answers to these questions, and I don't have a surefire way to avoid unsatisfying or unsettling sexual experiences in the future (if you do, WTF and also who are you?!). What I do know is that "Cat Person" represents the type of fiction I'm always dying to read. It exposes us, it challenges us, it forces us to confront what we think we know about people, forces us to admit that we might be wrong, not just about others, but about ourselves.

I Am Scared And Nauseous: An Incomplete List

1. literally everything about the president, everything he says and does and stands for. but he's gonna reappear on this list many times more specifically

2. the fires currently eating my hometown/current place of residence

3. maybe we're on the brink of nuclear war with North Korea?!

4. hurricane-damaged areas of the US still reeling

5. Nazis are back?!

6. pretty stoked about all the powerful predatory men being taken down by brave survivors but also I'm genuinely terrified about the possibility of backlash because as far as I can tell when men are publicly humiliated they tend not to take it well

7. we've had about eighty gazillion mass shootings this year and no one will do anything about gun control

8a. the tax bill that just passed raises taxes on literally everyone except for people with private jets. like even regular rich people are paying more taxes you have to literally be a sultan who drives a car made of gold to benefit from this tax bill

8b. they snuck in a bunch of CRAZY CRAP like anti-abortion stuff and other seriously problematic cuts to healthcare

9. A KNOWN PEDOPHILE/SEXUAL ASSAILANT MAY BECOME AN ACTUAL SENATOR IN AN ACTUAL US STATE

10. I have a lot of finals tomorrow

11. boys????? still sending me mixed signals???? in this economy???

12. oH RIGHT NET NEUTRALITY. WE MIGHT LOSE THAT

13. there's a real chance that the president and/or his closest associates colluded with a hostile foreign power to sway the 2016 election, taking it from a competent/experienced politician who literally would have sawed off her limbs for the job and giving it to a bigoted hot-tempered manchild who among other things has: mocked a disabled reporter, not known what clean coal is, said all mexicans are murderers and rapists, said the central park 5 were guilty even though they were exonerated by DNA evidence

14. I have submitted about eight hundred million poems to lit mags and most of them are taking forever to answer but of the ones who have responded I have gotten one acceptance and six rejections

15. sometimes the frat/srat people in my buildings have very loud parties a) on week nights thus disrupting my sleep/study schedule b) and then they don't even invite me ok thanks for the flashbacks to high school

16. I only have like a year and a half until I graduate college with a degree in popular music (what was I thinking) and like I'm probably gonna go to graduate school but the program I'm looking at is only a year and a half and then what???? I am not a pop star yet!!! I am not even pop star adjacent!!!! WHAT AM I GOING TO DO

17. MUSLIM BAN??? yeah that got passed. bet you didn't even notice. but they added north korea (duh) and venezuela (?!?!?) to the list so now the supreme court is like "oh I guess it's not racist/xenophobic/Islamophobic anymore so it's fine!!!!!!"

18. THE LIFE EXPECTANCY OF A BLACK TRANS WOMAN IS 35 YEARS OLD HOW INSANE IS THAT. how are people literally murdered just for existing. black trans women have spearheaded so many of the most important milestones in LGBTQ+ history. and no one is doing anything about this

if you have anything else you'd like to vent about please leave a comment I'm gonna go KEEP STUDYING FOR FINALS WHILE LYING IN THE FETAL POSITION ON THE FLOOR

Coming of Age on the Internet (or; I Miss Adolescence?)

My sophomore year of high school was rough.

Without getting too too personal, it was a difficult transition. I was halfway done with my 7-12 prep school which necessitated a change in campus. I went from being a top dog ninth grader who had a handle on social and academic pressures to being a bottom-of-the-food-chain tenth grader who was struggling in pretty much every subject and felt utterly lost in the social landscape of high school. I have never (read: NEVER) been popular, but freshman year I at least felt like I had a foothold. Tenth grade it was like all the process I'd made completely evaporated. Plus, my older brother went off to college, and it was the first time in my life that my family situation had experienced any upheaval since my little brother's birth ten years prior. I was shaken.

The summer before that school year, a few of my friends stumbled on YouTube vloggers, specifically attractive, college-aged, British boys. I knew what YouTube was back then, but it never really registered with me outside of watching covers of my favorite songs. During the summer of 2012, I not only found Vlogbrothers (John and Hank Green's YouTube channel), but also Jack and Finn Harries, Dan Howell, Marcus Butler, and a whole slew of others. Most of them hailed from the UK, though there were a few from Australia, I think, and South Africa. They were three to five years older than us but barely looked it. They had endearing accents. They made silly skits and answered viewer questions and doled out vague platitudes on Twitter about how all their viewers were beautiful and special, even though we were fifteen and utterly unremarkable and there were millions of us.

The infatuation with these boys lasted all through my sophomore year. I rejoined Tumblr with renewed vigor, I watched their videos every time a new one was uploaded, I posted pictures and GIFs of them on Twitter and on my friends' Facebook walls. We play-fought over who would get to marry who, over which of them we were most like, over which (identical) Harries twin was hotter (you'd think it was Jack but then you'd mature and realize it was Finn. It was the hair. Don't ask). In hindsight, part of my social alienation could probably be attributed to this obsession. The "cool" girls had real boyfriends and real social lives. I had YouTube. I had Tumblr. I had imaginary relationships with boys an ocean away. We could never fight. We could never break up.

When junior year rolled around, I regained some footing (and some sanity). I made new friends, I joined more activities, I got refocused on schoolwork because My God It Got Real. Sure, my YouTube boyfriends could never break up with me, but I definitely dumped them. I stayed subscribed out of laziness, but I watched their videos less and less, until all at once, I wasn't watching them at all. I unfollowed them on Tumblr and Twitter to improve my ratios. I fell out of the loop on their lives.

I grew up.

Recently I've been having a bit of a nostalgia renaissance (what a phrase). I've been looking at old Facebook posts and old tweets, cringing at my past self and the things I thought would make me seem funny and cool on the Internet. In that vein, I decided to rewatch some of the videos that brought me so much comfort in my younger and more vulnerable years. The main thing I noticed is how young these boys look! At 20, I'm now the same age as they were when I watched them, if not a bit older. I found a Jacksgap video from 2011, which would make the twins 18, and they look like absolute babies, younger than the boys at my university. It's hilarious to me that when I was 15, they seemed like mysterious older men. They were kids. They were trying to find themselves or get attention or some combination of the two. They didn't know any more about the world than I did. The other thing that strikes me is how the videos were kind of...stupid? I thought they were so quirky and witty at the time, but now it all seems so trite and embarrassing. I always assumed that their target audience would have been people their own age, but now it's clear that their demographic was always just a bit behind them. The socially awkward 19-year-old boy seems "adorkable" to the 14-year-old girl who doesn't know any better. Ah, how I was misled.

And yet.

I miss being misled. I miss being a lost 15-year-old. Being a lost 20-year-old is harder. The stakes are higher. Sure, I still live in my hometown of Los Angeles and my parents are always just a phone call or excruciating freeway ride away, but a lot of my consolation has to come from within. The questions I'm dealing with aren't about where I'll go to college or if I'll ever get asked to a dance or how to find the area under a parabola (I've already forgotten all the math I know). I'm figuring out how to get people to pay for and pay attention to the words and music I write, how to forge healthy romantic relationships, whether or not I'm brave enough to live my dream of traveling the world in my 20s, what my role is in the confusing, chaotic terror of the American political landscape. I'm defining womanhood and blackness for myself. And if I achieve the visibility I'm hoping for, I'll be the role model to the teenage girls just a few steps behind me, trying to get a glimpse of What Could Be.

Coming of age on the Internet is a crazy thing. We're the first generation to do it. Our adulthood will be defined by what online fads and jokes we were a part of and which ones we elected to skip. The idols of our generation aren't just musicians and actors, they're the YouTube and Twitter famous. We are the most depressed, anxious, dryly funny, politically engaged, socially conscious generation in human history. We are unprecedented. Which, of course, makes the future sort of terrifying. Yes, at times I wish I could go back to 2012, to unironically (then ironically) saying #YOLO, listening to the hip new pop song "Call Me Maybe," to when the worst thing that a presidential candidate said during a debate was that he had binders full of women. But it's 2017, kids, almost 2018. The Internet babies are voting and buying liquor and going to war. We're graduating and falling in love (for real) and running for office.

There's so much ahead of us. It'd be a shame if we spent so much time looking back that we missed it.

I Am Not Special & Neither Are They

The first time I ever got catcalled I was 15. It was outside a concert, by a man at least twice my age. I don't remember what he said, just the ice cold fear that swam over my body when I realized how he was looking at me. When I was in eighth grade, I read Tina Fey's memoir Bossypants. In it, she dedicates a chapter to how when women are asked when they first felt like grown women, they hearken back to their first incident of public sexual harassment. That night in February 2013, despite the fear that overcame me, for the first time in my life, I felt like a woman. Not like an adult with any autonomy or agency, but like a woman, with a woman's body, a woman's body that men would claim and comment on from that day forward.

These days, I get catcalled at least once or twice a week. Sometimes, it's benign ("hey, beautiful, give me a smile"), sometimes, it's invasive ("nice ass"), sometimes it's direct ("give me a blowjob" - once that was actually screamed at me from a car), sometimes it's just bizarre ("Girl, I wanna take you to South Florida" - yeah, that one actually happened too).

When the harassment started, I was two weeks shy of eighteen, and no boy had ever even looked at me. I was so anxious around them, so inexperienced, so insecure. I was a kid. A prime target.

He lived on my floor. I thought he was the cutest boy in the hall, but I was surrounded by cute boys in the music school, so I rarely thought of him. I heard he hooked up with another girl on our floor. He didn't seem like an option.

The first weekend of the year, two weeks after we moved in, he got stoned out of his mind at a party a bunch of us went to. On the encouragement of a fellow partygoer, he began to aggressively hit on me. We were standing in a circle of all our floor-mates, plus a few strangers, and all I could do was giggle nervously as he leaned into me, as he made comments about my body, the body I still didn't feel like I owned. I had never felt so...physical. So defined by the body that carried the code-red thoughts I was having. After a few minutes of discomfort, I literally ran away. I recognized the symptoms of the panic attacks I started having the previous year--my throat closing, the sound of my heartbeat in my ears like a kick drum, the cold sweats. After hiding on the other side of the backyard for a while, I ran into some of my other friends and slowly reintegrated into the landscape of the party.

The next night, the boy came into my dorm room with a bunch of other people (we were kind of the social room, much to my chagrin). He stayed after everybody else left so he could apologize to me.
"I didn't want to make you uncomfortable," he said.
"I was just really, really high," he said.
"But I do think you're beautiful," he said.
I choked out giggly replies, anything to get him to leave. I remember thanking him. I remember smiling because finally, at long last, a cute boy thought I was beautiful.

It wasn't over. For the next three weeks, he came into my dorm room almost every day with a flimsy excuse. He sat next to me in dining halls. He liked all my Instagram posts, including the hundreds of photos I'd posted before we'd ever met. I remember watching in amazement as my notifications updated, surprised at his boldness. He would untie and retie my shoes, tug at my clothes, play with my hair. I never asked him to stop, just froze and waited for the touch to be over. Sometimes, I think (I hope), I ducked from his hands, only for them to find their way back to me. More than once, he would make me eat or drink whatever he was eating or drinking. I would say no, and he would beg, and beg, and beg, to the point of making the other people at the table uncomfortable, and I would just giggle like an idiot and submit, eating or drinking whatever it was. During one of his many visits to my dorm, he put food directly into my mouth while I was still asking him to stop.

The symbolism was not lost on me. Every weekend, he asked me to go to parties at his frat house, and I would decline. If he didn't listen when I turned down his offer of potato chips, what would happen when something else was on the line?

So how did it ultimately stop? I tried everything. He was the king of doublespeak. He would tell me and my roommates that he "really liked me" and "just wanted to get to know me better." But he would tell his roommates and the other guys on our floor that he was just after me because I was "playing hard to get." A couple times, his roommates told him to back off, and he would reply, "no, trust me, she wants it." I cringe as I write those words.

The only thing that got him to let it go was when he stumbled on some of my tweets. I had written a thread about him, without naming him publicly:

I don't know what came over me, this digital boldness that I so clearly lacked in real life. But while we were eating in the dining hall one evening, he located the tweets and read them out loud. I tried to laugh them off as a "general feminist rant," but I could see his face fall. He knew they were about him.

And all at once, the advances stopped.

My roommates were relieved, partly for my benefit, mostly because they were probably just tired of hearing me talk about it all the time. The girls on my floor gave me daps for my #feminism. The guys on my floor told me to apologize. (??!?!) Yes, they said that our friendly antagonist was upset because "I'd hurt his feelings" and that I should say I was sorry. I recognized even then that apologizing would be absolutely insane, so I didn't. And I don't think we ever spoke again.

Last year I invited a boy up to my apartment. We'd talked all night at a party, a Halloween party where I'd spent most of the night with my shirt half-unbuttoned. I thought maybe he just wanted to keep talking. He didn't.

"Is this gonna happen, or...?" he asked.

"Um," was all I could say.

"I mean...it's 3 a.m.," he said. "And you're wearing...that."

I blamed myself. You did a shot, he could see your bra, you touched his arm like a video vixen, you invited him up to your apartment, what did you think was gonna happen? The panic rose again, the cold sweat, the heartbeat rhythm section, the tightening spiral of my throat.

"We could go to the bed," he said (ew). "Or...I could leave."

"You should leave," I said.

And he did.

He told me he'd text me.

He didn't.

I tell these long-winded stories to express solidarity with all the women harassed and assaulted by Harvey Weinstein and other serial predators like him. But maybe even more importantly, I want to reach out to girls harassed and assaulted by trusted authority figures, by friends, by family. The guys in these story are not special or unique. They are devastatingly average college guys who did a devastatingly average thing. People, but men especially, are so quick to say that rapists and other sexual predators are shocking or rare. But they're just not. I am lucky that nothing serious happened to me. These guys thought I was too much work and gave up. Had they been more determined, our stories might have had different endings.

If you have ever been harassed or assaulted, you are not alone. We believe you. No matter where your story falls on the spectrum, it's not your fault, and it's not okay. I didn't owe that guy an apology. If you spoke out or fought back, you don't owe them an apology either.

If we allow harassment--if we condone the behavior of people who don't listen when we say no--we allow assault. Rape culture is built on the backs of the stories that don't merit expulsion from the Academy, the slippery slope of "it was just a joke" and "why are you being so sensitive" and "it could have been worse." That's why I'm writing this. Because I didn't get assaulted. Because I have stared the monster in the face. Because I felt its breath on my face. Because I didn't know what it looked like, walked by it on the street, said thank you when it flashed its teeth, let it get close, struggled to get away even when I didn't.

You are not alone. It's not okay. It's not your fault. We believe you.

#MeToo