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What is the right size for a clitoris? Pharyngula (2010-06-30):
I don't know. They seem to come in a range of sizes; when they're as large as a small male penis, I suppose it might be unexpected, perhaps a little confusing, perhaps a little ambiguous to people intolerant of the idea that the human form is found in intermediate shapes....
Dr. Dix Poppas has attracted special notoriety for his sexually abusive experiments on the girls that he sexually mutilates. Of course, the more basic issue here is the non-consensual surgical sexual mutilation forced on girls by doctors and anxious parents, in the name of patriarchal Genital Correctness exercised at the point of a scalpel. Which is alarmingly common, and a far wider problem than the special case of Dr. Dix Poppas. There's every reason to say something about the special awfulness of this child rapist in scrubs; but the notion that mutilating girls' clitorises for seeming "too big" (for what purpose?) to adult observers could ever possibly be ethical medicine -- rather than what it is, pointless medical torture in the service of carving patriarchy into a girl's skin and flesh.
"Although I may disagree with their views, many crisis pregnancy centers are forthright and respectful. Unfortunately, some take a more underhanded approach to lure in women seeking abortions by using tactics that should be illegal," Representative Maloney said. "An unintended pregnancy is an especially difficult time to encounter deception, and deceptive practices should be outlawed. Women shouldn’t have to face the added stress of deciphering whether or not the clinic they choose offers legitimate medical services."
Senator Menendez said, "This legislation would simply help ensure truth in advertising related to reproductive health services. Women's reproductive health choices are very personal decisions, and they should never be influenced by deception or pressure."
I agree with Scott that it’s stupid that conservatives claim to be against “special rights” when it comes to gays and lesbians, but all for bona fide special rights for conservative Christians. However, I have to say that I don’t think it’s completely disingenuous of some conservatives, at least, to think that legal gay marriage is a “special” right for gays. I think there’s a solid number of Republican men who think, “Hey, I want to marry a dude but I can’t, because everyone would totally think I’m gay! It’s not fair that these gay dudes get to do it!” However, outside of the closet cases that populate so much of the Republican party, I have to admit that the nonsense about “special rights” is exactly as disingenuous as Scott claims.
The case in question was one where Hastings Law School prevented an on-campus group from barring gay students who wanted to join. The law school had a policy where all clubs were required to have open admission, and there’s also a question of the federal funding that school groups had access to. In essence, conservatives want to say that religious freedom means that religious groups---at least Christian ones---should have special rights. To my mind, this shows how shallow conservative claims are that they’re faithful to the original intent of the Constitution. The Founders made it exquisitely clear that their definition of religious freedom was one where the government showed no favor towards religion, and was separate from it. Giving religions special rights is a form of establishment. It’s as contrary to the original intent as you get.
Also funny is how conservatives haven’t quite picked up on the fact that all-comers policies for school clubs means that wingnuts could, if they want, join gay rights groups, Muslim student associations, black student associations, feminist groups, etc. Granted, the problem there is that they’d probably get bored quickly and leave, in contrast to this situation at Hastings where the student who tried to join the Christian group was also Christian.
Of course, I have to point out the irony of conservatives defending the right to have closed groups that receive federal funding while screeching at the same time about how private individuals shouldn’t be able to run a private listserv using their own resources.
I shamelessly stole this picture from Angry Asian Man. Why? Because it is hilarious. Sorry Phil!
Phil, of Angry Asian Man, had a chance to screen The Last Airbender last night, which seems like a good idea considering how much hullabaloo has surrounded the film. Here’s an excerpt:
the last airbender: this movie could boycott itself
I have seen The Last Airbender movie. Let me be clear: I did not pay to see it. But the screening opportunity came up, so I watched it — I’ve talked about the film enough, I figured I should at least see it for myself. And now I share my observations with you:
My one-word review via Twitter, immediately after watching the film: joyless. Overall, The Last Airbender completely lacks soul, and suffers from a painful inability to inspire any kind of fun or awe throughout the entire movie. I thought I’d at least enjoy the visual effects, but that fails to impress too. Even setting aside the problematic racial politics, this is just not a good movie.
M. Night Shyamalan attempts to adapt the entire storyline of season one (Book 1: Water) into this movie (the first of a planned trilogy). Having seen and enjoyed the animated series, I’m aware that this is no small feat. Unfortunately, overall, the plan fails. It’s supposed to be epic, but the whole thing feels clunky, rushed and at times incomprehensible. You might not have to boycott this movie — it’s so bad, it could boycott itself.
Not having ever seen a single second of the cartoon, I’m in no danger of stumbling into theatres for this one. My “boycott” of Last Airbender carries little water — I would never have been interested in seeing the movie anyways.
That being said, I do support the “boycott Last Airbender” movement that’s circulating the Internets — mainly because M. Night Shyamalan is proving himself to be a downright idiot. After catching wind of the Racebending.com-led boycott, Shyamalan lost his ever-lovin’ mind in a recent interview.
Here’s Shyamalan’s full rant on the subject of race and The Last Airbender:
Q: There’s been a lot of controversy regarding the casting and how all the heroes are being portrayed by Caucasian actors, while all the villains are all being portrayed by non-Caucasians. How do you respond to those who are saying that The Last Airbender is racist?
M Night Shyamalan: ‘Well, you caught me. I’m the face of racism. I’m always surprised at the level of misunderstanding, the sensitivities that exist. As an Asian-American, it bothers me when people take all of their passion and rightful indignation about the subject and then misplace it. Here’s the reality: first of all, the Uncle Iroh character is the Yoda character in the movie, and it would be like saying that Yoda was a villain. So he’s Persian.
And Dev Patel is the actual hero of the series, and he’s Indian, OK? The whole point of the movie is that there isn’t any bad or good. The irony is that I’m playing on the exact prejudices that the people who are claiming I’m racist are doing. They immediately assume that everyone with dark skin is a villain. That was an incredibly racist assumption which as it turns out is completely incorrect.
There are four nations, and I had to eventually make a decision about what nationality each of them are. What happened was, Noah Ringer walked in the door – and there was no other human being on the planet that could play Aang except for this kid. To me, he felt mixed race with an Asian quality to him. I made all the Air nomads mixed race – some of them are Hispanic, some of them are Korean. Every monk you see in a flashback, in that world, are all mixed race because they’re nomadic. I felt that really worked as a culture. OK, so that’s one-quarter of our world population. The second group is the Fire Nation; when Dev was cast as Zuko, I said, OK, I have to cast an Uncle Iroh that looks like his uncle. We’re going to go from Indian/Persian to Mediterranean, all that group with all its darker colors including Italians.
So now we’re at one-half of the population of the movie which is not white.
Moving on to the third group, which is the Earth kingdom (which is the biggest kingdom in this fictional world): I liked a bunch of the people who happened to be Japanese, Korean, Philippine, so I decided to make the Earth kingdom Asians. Now we’re at three-quarters of the world. Now I have the brother and sister left. If you don’t have an edict of “don’t put white people in the movie” then the Water tribe can be European/Caucasian. So that’s how it ended up.
Here’s the irony of the conversation: The Last Airbender is the most culturally diverse movie series of all time. I’m not talking about maybe one Jedi, maybe one person of a different color – no one’s even close. That’s a great pride to me. The irony of this statement enrages me to the point of … not even the accusation, but the misplacement of it. You’re coming at me, the one Asian filmmaker who has the right to cast anybody I want, and I’m casting this entire movie in this color blind way where everyone is represented. I even had one section of the Earth kingdom as African American, which obviously isn’t in the show, but I wanted to represent them, too!
And I fought like crazy to have the pronunciation of the names to go back to the Asian pronunciation. So you say “Ahng” instead of “Aaang” because it’s correct. It’s not “I-rack,” it’s “ee-Rock.” I’m literally fighting for all this. And who’s getting blamed? ME! This is incredible. And so it’s infuriating, this stigmatization, that the first word about the most culturally-diverse movie of all time is this accusation. And here’s the irony of it, this has nothing to do with the studio system. I had complete say in casting. So if you need to point the racist finger, point it at me, and if it doesn’t stick, then be quiet.
Whenever we’re on set, it’s crazy, I love it. We’re in our cafeteria, it looks like the United Nations in there! And you’re not supposed to be thinking about this because it’s so diverse. And again, this is what really frustrates me, when we get to the second movie (hopefully), since its based in the Earth Kingdom, suddenly the movie will seem entirely politically correct Asian, and the accusers will feel like they won. YOU DID NOT WIN! YOU DID NOT WIN! That’s not what happened, you were wrong. As you can tell, it’s a frustrating thing. Look at the movie poster with Dev Patel in it. I’m not understanding … he’s not politically correct?
I could go on for half an hour on that subject … in the end it’s like that saying, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
At the basis of this, a fascinating thing, it didn’t even occur to me until the first mention of this came up: The art form of Anime in and of itself is what’s causing the confusion. The Anime artists intentionally put ambiguous features on the characters so that you see who you want to see in it. It’s part of the art form. My daughter looks identical to Katara; I saw my family in that series when I was watching it, I saw them in the faces. I’m sure that every household feels the same way in that they see their own families in them. It’s a fascinating thing about how people perceive it. If there’s an issue with why Anime does not put particularly specific Asian features from the PC Asian types that people think should be there … take it up with Anime animators. It has nothing to do with me.’
Let’s parse this out, shall we?
First of all, no one claimed that M. Night Shyamalan was “the face of racism”. For the most part, race activists have questioned the casting of The Last Airbender, specifically asking why the casting agents specifically sought out a Caucasian actor to play the role. They want to know why Katara and Sokka are also played by white actors, and why the Fire Nation (which is war-mongering and violent) was re-cast as dark-skinned. Personally, I don’t think Shyamalan was being racist — I think he was oblivious to the larger implications of his attempts to be racially inclusive while still have White leading characters. Shyamalan’s not guilty of being racist, he’s guilty of being kinda dumb on this one. That being said, a lot of this sounds like Shyamalan’s having a Kanye West moment: he’s pissed he’s not being recognized by race activists for making “the most culturally diverse movie series of all time”, so he’s doing the film director equivalent of stealing the mic from Taylor Swift.
"I'm really happy for you, Taylor, but I just had to say, I had one of the most culturally diverse movie series of all time."
I really have no comment on whether or not Dev Patel’s character in the Avatar series is a hero or a villain, having never watched the cartoon. I know that the Fire Nation — the primary villains of the trilogy — are cast as the Big Bad, and they are brown. Can you have not-so-bad bad guys who are brown? Sure. But that doesn’t get around the visual of the Big Bad whom the hero is fighting being inexplicably brown-skinned (particularly when they are light-skinned in the cartoon). And guess what — it’s not racist to question the perpetuation of a Hollywood trope that casts minorities principally as villains (redeemed or otherwise).
Someone please tell me how a non-mixed race person can have a ”mixed race” feel. Please? Is M. Night Shyamalan arguing that Noah Ringer can pass as ethnically ambiguous? ‘Cuz I really don’t buy that. And, as for whether or not Ringer is ”the only human being on the planet” who could play Aang — Phil is skeptical of that statement.
If Last Airbender 2 comes out, and most of the cast is East Asian because the Earth Kingdom is East Asian, I will not call that a victory. I DID NOT WIN! I DID NOT WIN! (Wait, do we ordinarily get trophies for this kind of thing? Did mine get lost in the mail or something?) I’m familiar enough with the cartoon’s storyline now to accept that if the second movie has a bunch of Asians in it, it’s because M. Night Shyamalan is sticking to his wacky racial casting thing with the four Nations in the storyline. We’re not that stupid, Mr. Shyamalan. But here’s one thing I don’t get (and maybe folks familiar with the cartoon can clue me in): how is it that three of the Nations (Air, Water and Fire) can be cast as cultures sharing a similar race or skin colour (mixed race, Native, and “darker” respectively, according to Shyamalan), but than there’s somehow room in the Earth Nation to include both East Asian and Black people? From an anthropological point of view, from an evolutionary genetics point of view, from a sociological point of view — that doesn’t make sense.
As for anime, jaehwan over at bigWOWO had some discussion about how Asians view the race of anime characters. In short, anime is not “ethnically ambiguous”; the anime art style was originally inspired and influenced by Western animation (specifically Disney). Asians in Asia don’t consider the characters in anime to be White because of the size of their eyes — that would assume that Asians universally see ourselves as small-eyed people (we don’t). In the case of most anime, the minimalism of the facial features provides little racial or ethnic information, and anime style involves large eyes primarily to make characters cuter — since a larger eye-to-face ratio reminds most people of babies.
Sufficed to say, many characters in anime are Asian — which can be determined based on their darker eye and hair colour, and the context of the story). By contrast, Caucasian characters tend to have blonde or red hair, and blue or green eyes – as with Asuka in Neon Genesis Evangelion. So, M. Night has it wrong: anime isn’t ethnically ambiguous, they just don’t provide the racial indicators that Western audiences are familiar with, so Western audiences tend to project a “White default” assumption onto what they perceive as racially ambiguous art styles.
As I said, I am unenthused about The Last Airbender. I’m not going to see it, but I really wasn’t going to see it anyways. But I’m definitely disturbed by how M. Night Shyamalan is showing his true, and kind of self-absorbed asshat, colours.
"Yo! I'm really happy for you, M. Night, and I'ma let you finish, but I just want to say that you might be one of the biggest asshats of all time."
Earlier this month, Time Magazine reported (here) on the off-label use of the steroid dexamethasone to treat prevent fetal development of ambiguous genitalia:
The early prenatal use of dexamethasone, or dex, has been shown to prevent some of the symptoms of [congenital adrenal hyperplasia, known as] CAH in girls, namely ambiguous genitalia. Because the condition causes overproduction of male hormones in the womb, girls who are affected tend to have genitals that look more male than female, though internal sex organs are normal. (In boys, in contrast, the condition leads to early signs of puberty, such as deep voice, body hair and enlarged penis by age 2 or 3.) But while the prenatal treatment may address girls' physical symptoms, it does not prevent the underlying, medical condition, which in some severe cases can be life-threatening, nor does it preclude the need for medication throughout life. * * *
Research has also suggested that affected women who were treated with dex in the womb show more typical gender behavior than other women with CAH; the latter group tends to behave more tomboyishly and express little interest in having children.
The American Academy of Pediatrics and other professional groups object to the use of dexamethasone because the pregnant women receiving the drug are not part of supervised clinical trials. Predictably, ethicists raise concerns about informed consent -- were the pregnant women told that the dexamethasone was prescribed "off-label"?
Over at the Hastings Center's Bioethics Forum, commentators are drawing attention to a claim by pediatric endocrinologists that administration of dexamethasone in utero "will reduce the well-documented behavioral masculinization," including stereotypically "male" "childhood play, peer association, career and leisure time preferences in adolescence and adulthood, maternalism, aggression, and sexual orientation." (The paper, by pediatric endocrinologists Saroj Kimkarn and Maria New, appeared here in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.)
The Hastings Center commentators say, "[W]e do not think it reasonable or just to use medicine to try to prevent homosexual and bisexual orientations. Nor do we think it reasonable to use medicine to prevent uppity women, like the sort who might raise just these kinds of alarms."
-Bridget Crawford
Almost a year ago, I did this post The People and their cultures: POC and the movies And now, on the eve of the gut-churning insult in every way that is the movie adaptation of The Last Airbender, I come again. Doubtless, you have seen the commercials. Aren’t the CGI effects pretty? And its going to be in 3D! And Lord knows that people have prioritized CGI effects over fucked up cultural messages embedded in the story before, hello Avatar! Let’s not do it this time. Please, do not allow Hollywood to make money on this character representation FAIL of a film.
I have been following the saga on the website racebending lj and website which have led the way in fighting against the BS in this movie, and seems to be on its way to taking on the BS in other movies like this as well. They have been doing very good work, and I got a lot of my links from their websites.
To bring it home, lets start with Face Painting, an absolutely GORGEOUS breakdown of the racial issues with this travesty of a film.
In her paper “Levels of Racism: A Theoretic Framework and a Gardener’s Tale,” Camara Phyllis Jones (MD, MPH, and PhD) postulates that there are three levels of racism: internalized, personally-mediated, and institutionalized.
Internalized racism is how one personally feels about race and its meaning, though they may not necessarily act out on these underlying and internalized assumptions it most definitely affects them at the subconscious level (eg. “It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights-if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different.” – Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye).
Personally-mediated racism maintains social-structural barriers, the result of assumptions held by people or a community (eg. “This town was so much better before those goddamn ___ moved in. It’s their fault the town’s economy has gone down so much”).
Lastly, institutionalized racism is racism at the highest infrastructural level, in which policy is dictated by racial assumptions and discrimination (eg. South Africa’s long history of Apartheid in which black South Africans were politically and legally segregated from whites, spearheaded by the South African Nationalist Party from 1948 to 1994).
Herein this last level of racism lies Paramount Studio’s greatest offense of reinforcing institutionalized racism within the Hollywood business. MORE
Another take on the subject is offered here:These are my colors
Two years ago, a group of my friends introduced me to Avatar: The Last Airbender, an animated television series by Nickelodeon that first aired in 2005. By the time I was sitting on the floor of my friend’s cabin, clustered around the screen with my friends, it was almost time for the series finale to air. I watched two or three episodes from the end of season three, and then I went home to start from the beginning, because this was a show unlike anything I’d ever seen on North American television, and I couldn’t wait to see more.
Here was a fantastical Asian world, full of well developed and delineated countries, each with a distinctive culture and a carefully developed mythology born from real world Asian traditions, art forms, myths and religions. Here was beautiful Hànzì adorning the walls of temples and restaurants. Here was the food I loved best from my childhood, eaten with chopsticks by the heroes of the show.
And here were the Heroes: Brave, noble, beautiful, strong, and Asian.
On July 1st, Paramount’s live action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender opens in theatres across North America.
Do not see this film. Do not pay to see this film. Do not give this production any of your hard earned money, be it through ticket sales, merchandise, or the eventual DVD sales. And here is why:
All of the principal cast members are White.
Or almost: when the cast of the movie was originally announced sometime in 2009, the four main characters Aang, Katara, Sokka and Zuko, were all cast as white kids. An uproar occurred from the outraged fans–Asians and non Asians alike–because how, in 2009, could such a blatantly racist, discriminatory casting exercise in old school Hollywood whitewashing be justified? High budget Yellowface slated for release in 2010? It seemed almost too ridiculous to be true.
And so, Paramount responded by re-casting for one role. They re-cast Dev Patel, a young Indian actor, as Zuko. None of the other lead roles were re-cast.
Zuko is the villain. A villain, mind you, who switches sides and joins forces with the heroes to defeat the ultimate villain of the story, who just happens to be Zuko’s father.
So now, we’ve gone from a completely whitewashed cast of heroes (supported by faceless, dark-skinned background noise otherwise known as extras, otherwise known as collateral damage, otherwise known as set decoration on par with that exotic vase from somewhere no one cares about in China), to a whitewashed trio of heroes who will eventually show our poor, misled brown child the light so that he can help them save the world from the rest of The Evil Brown People.
If you can’t see why this story is now deeply disturbing and problematic, if you can’t imagine how this could be damaging and wrong, then we are going to have problems.MORE
M. Night Shylaman has for whatever reason decided to be the token POC face spouting and thus trying to legitimize the racist Fail on this, and he has sure as hell been doing his job. (seriously? Ethnicities are NOT Interchangeable WTF!!! Random Black people all up in a narrative is NOT your get-out-of-racism card! And Evil POC in the movies? AINT FUCKING IRONIC) But don’t get it twisted. M. Night Shylaman has decided to work with constraints placed on him by the very white, very middle and upper class, very racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, cissexist…in short very goddamn problematic; Hollywood decision-makers. And this is about them, those producers, casting directors and everybody who took a fucking property and ripped out the guts of what made it successful, what made it true, what made it unique, what made it so special to so many minorities; because they once again decided that only ablebodied, misogynist, het, cissexist white males deserve to see their culture being reflected and respected and validated in entertainment. The rest of us, women, racial and disabled and lgbtaqi minorities? We don’t matter. We are adjuncts to the great white male, and our stories? Don’t get to be told. And if by some rare chance our stories do get to be told? Able-bodied, het, cissexist White people (for the most part) are going to buy them, make movies out of them, and replace us with themselves, just to make it goddamn clear that only they matter in this universe and there will be very very few things that minorities of any type will get to have and hold and enjoy.
And don’t you DARE say that its just fiction, or its just stories.
No such thing as *just* fiction
Fiction has very, very real consequences for readers, writers, and cultures. They are cultural transactions, either within a culture or sometimes between cultures. To say that it’s "just fiction" when discussing what does and doesn’t matter culturally and literarily is like saying it’s "just trade" when talking about the economy.
The statement is absurd on it’s face. I can’t think of any other way to articulate how utterly, stupendously, profoundly wrong such a phrase is.
Just as trade can make, break, and shake an economy – so too does fiction with culture. So much of the information and ideas that we carry around with us come from the stories we’re told. The attitudes that so many white folks have about people of color doesn’t simply come from things we’re taught in class or things we’re told. It comes from fiction. From the books and movies we’re handed as kids.
I can give example after example of how people have responded to movies, books, TV shows. People name their kids after favorite characters, or try something they read in a book. People take attitudes away from what they read.
The things we read, even and especially the fictional things, affect us. It leaves a mark on us. Even bad books, boring books, poorly written books, racist books. Many times, especially if we’re making no effort to be aware, we aren’t conscious of the impression being left on us.
Nobody gets away from a book unchanged. Nobody. You are always a slightly different person after every little bit you read. Whether you loved it, hated it, didn’t care – it shifted you, rearranged some of your molecules, shifted the little pathways in your brain.
Fiction shapes the reader, the writer, and the culture. When we commit fiction, we shape and are shaped.
And when we commit fiction that is unexamined, full of the monstrous ideas that have been shaping us, and don’t even know they’re there, we’re shaping the world for the worse. When we read fiction and do not look for the monsters even a little, we are being shaped for the worst and letting it happen.MORE
So, this kid, with his brown skin almost the same shade as mine, his hair in light brown tight ringlets. He looks at this quiet black man next to me and his mind says, "SCARY".
Where did he get this? Say we’re generous and assume the mom didn’t teach it to him, or the grandparents. Say we assume they’re not from New West, they’re from somewhere in Metro Vancouver with even *less* black people. Say all that.
Do you think this kid even understands that when he’s a grownup, skin maybe darker than in its baby stages, people are going to be calling *him* the "scary man"? Do you think he even recognizes that he’s not the hero and never will be? He’s already learned from the media and society that the darker you are, the scarier you are; when will he start recognizing his face reflected back only as villain, as joke fodder, as exotic backdrop? When will he realize that other people — people like me included — don’t see him as white, even in the middle of all his white family?
This is why it matters for kids, for adults, for *anyone* to see themselves in stories. And I don’t mean as nameless creatures with no agency, or as a nation of genocidal warmongers. And there are overlaps with the racefail; there’s the character Teo, whose father builds him a wheelchair after he becomes disabled, who’s also been removed from the movie (to make place for a traitorous Asian character). There’s the elders like GranGran, who has been reduced from a competent and vital woman to a faint ancient-wisdom shadow. There’s Suki and the strong female Kyoshi Warriors, cut from the movie without even a credit.
We’re the scary people on the screen, and we’re the scary people in life — even to a child who’s at least partly one of us. Don’t ever tell me that it’s just a movie.MORE
Now. One of the good things is that they managed to put it up against the Twilight juggernaut, which, I would remind you, has its own racefail with Taylor Lautner. So by definition, it is unlikely that they are going to open well. But a quick googling of reviews reveals that the movie itself aint that good. So if you MUST look at this for trainwreck purposes, consider seeing it at a cheap ticket theatre, or d/l it or something. But while you are at it, and even while you are boycotting it, consider the fate of Dev Patel, a gorgeous actor who took this part because it offered a change from what he was getting offered parts as the terrorist, the taxi driver, the smart geek or any “guy named Raj.”. Even if the movie was good, the race fail, gender fail and all around character representational fail is and will always be fucking wrong. Lets continue to challenge the system at every level, with every fucked up casting decision, so that non-white actors can stop being put in this position, so that kids no longer grow up with harmful, destructive stories, so that society will be a better place for ALL of us, and not just the privileged few.
Why people should not see “The Last Airbender Film” -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman
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