As these creased and dog-eared magazines get passed back and forth at our family dinner table I had my brilliant wife (a real scientist) on hand for questioning.

“So is this telomere stuff for real?” I asked her.

“Mmm-hmm,” she said with a shrug. “It looks that way.” So there you have it, from the seat of authority.

Let’s refer to the Science journalist here:

Telomeres are repetitive sequences of DNA that prevent the ends of chromosomes from unraveling, much like the plastic tops on the ends of shoelaces. As cells divide and replicate, telomeres get shorter and eventually can no longer prevent the fraying of DNA and the decay of aging. Recent studies have found a link between living to 100 and having a hyperactive version of telomerase, an enyzme that keeps telomeres long.

If you’ve got long telomeres on your chromosomes then genetically speaking this is beneficial and improves your chances at living a long life. But what factors determines telomere length?

The results of some very interesting new research (cf. Science vol.336, pg.539) suggest that telomeres in sperm cells are proportional in length to the age of the man. Thus the older the father is at conception, the longer the telomeres of his offspring. The researchers found that this effect extended to grandfathers as well, passing on their telomeres to their son’s children but not their daughter’s children.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that older dads have great genetic advantages. In fact as we age our gametes are more likely to contain mutations, so there are definitely some benefits to having younger parents. But I couldn’t help but be prompted to reflect how reproductive advantages of older men might have had an impact on the organization of society.

Certainly when it comes to mothers, experience pays serious dividends in terms of reproductive fitness. As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy writes in Mother Nature, among primates first time mothers are generally less successful but since mothering is learned behavior this can improve with time. Thus:

Given a choice between two sexually swollen females, male chimps invariably choose the older one. It is interesting to speculate why men in some societies differ from other primates in this respect, placing so much emphasis on youth. One reason, I suspect is that these men are in a position to monopolize access to their mate and to literally possess her long-term. (186)

So human sexuality, as we can observe it today, is always already in the context of patriarchal relations. This may even extend to the cultural valuation placed the beauty of youth, which is desirable not because young people make better parents but because young women yield long term benefits for older men.

On the theme of “interesting to speculate” we might question whether older men hold some benefits in terms of the reproductive fitness of younger women. There is after all this ubiquitous pattern, seen around the world, of older men shacking up with younger women. This is readily observed in the age difference between spouses, with the male partner typically older than the female partner. What is the basis for this? How far back in human history does this pattern extend?

One outcome of this pattern is that from the beginning of the affinal relationship the male is in a privileged position as the elder. Of course, there are other factors that may be more relevant than the age difference of the spouses when it comes to understanding household micropolitics. For example, there are social and cultural reasons why a woman might choose an older man to be her mate. An older man might have command of more economic resources, or he might have more clout and authority in the community — things that can make a big difference when it comes to raising offspring to reproductive maturity.

Now perhaps we can count another “pro” in the advantages of older male spouses: longer telomeres. Because men and women have different reproductive strategies, a man who can sire children well into his maturity can have additional opportunities to enhance his fitness unavailable to his shorter lived peers. And this trait of longevity may be passed down to his offspring, and his son’s offspring.

We spend some time doing kinship diagrams. I show them my family and lead them through exercises where they chart their own families. Such diagrams are passe I guess, but for me they hold quirky charm not unlike the lost art of diagramming sentences. I can throw them up pretty quickly on a white board and we use them in class to help visualize social relationships.

Students find patrilineal descent, which flows from fathers to offspring, to be somewhat intuitive. After all they behave in a similar way to our tradition of passing down surnames and students can anticipate how patrilineality might coincide with a a socio-economic system that favors powerful fathers and husbands. But matilineal descent which flows from mothers to offspring are strange to them, its illogic manifest most clearly in the responsibilities for discipline granted to resource providers such as uncles and brothers, with weaker bonds ascribed to biological fathers.

Matrilineality seems exotic to students, but in fact some examples of it can easily be found in one of the most ancient charter documents of “Western Civilization.” Bereishit (Genesis), the first book of the Torah (Old Testament).

I don’t know if you’ve ever just sat down and read a whole lot of the Bible. My knowledge of it is fairly limited. I am familiar with Genesis which is distinguished by its engaging mythic narratives that rewards rereading. These incredibly evocative and powerful stories caught the imagination of underground cartoonist R.Crumb and inspired him to complete a fully illustrated Book of Genesis. The Crumb illustrations, thick and fleshy, help out to humanize the characters especially for people who aren’t already familiar with the stories.

Now granted, what I’m about to do is not the usual way one reads Genesis. I’m only doing this in order to make some points about matrilineality, not to claim some sort of religious insight.

 
Overview

Some scholars estimate that the Old Testament was first written down in 1000 BCE. Prior to that the stories almost certainly existed as oral traditions, so their true age is unknown. According to some they may have roots in ancient Summerian myths. Genesis covers a lot of ground that is outside our scope. What we’re focusing on here is the middle portions of the Book which follows the lives of one family all descended from a man named Abraham.

As you might guess the stories mostly focus on the men of the family: Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Joseph. Simply put there are not very many female characters. But if you read Genesis from the point of view of the few females that are there some remarkable similarities to matrilineal kinship patterns arise.

I already told you I’m not a Biblical scholar, okay?

 
The original love triangle: Sarah gives Hager to Abraham

Abraham’s wife, Sarah, cannot have children and so she gives her slave girl, Hager, to her husband. Predictably this ends in tragedy as Sarah grows jealous of Hager for giving birth. She chases Hager off, but she promptly returns after an angel of the Lord directs her to do so.

Later there is a miracle and Sarah does conceive despite her old age. This son is to be Isaac. Ultimately Sarah instructs Abraham to banish Hager and his first born son Ishmael. This is the mythic fission of the Abrahamic religions as Ishmael becomes the ancestor of many Islamic prophets, including Mohammed. The line that issues from Sarah through Isaac becomes the Hebrews. So the Muslims and the Jews have the same father but different mothers!

In fact Abraham outlives Sarah and after her death he has many other wives. And although children by these women are descended from Abraham, Abraham’s wealth and God’s blessing go to Isaac. Thus the chosen people, the Jews, are – following a matrilineal pattern – the descendents of Sarah. Others who are the descendants of Abraham by other women are excluded.

 
Rebekah’s Bride Price

In the next story Abraham wants to find a suitable wife for his son Isaac. He doesn’t want Isaac messing around with any of the local girls, so he sends one of his servants back to his homeland to the family of his brother, Nahor. The servant returns with Rebekah, technically Isaac’s first cousin once removed. What’s interesting to us in this context is how he acquires her.

So Abraham’s man makes this long journey until he finally arrives at Nahor’s compound. There’s this pretty young woman at the well and she shows her hospitality by drawing water for him and his camels. Abraham’s servant is impressed with her kindness and gives her gifts which she immediately takes back to show to her mother and brother.

Laban, Rebekah’s brother, is intrigued that there’s some rich stranger on the outskirts of town giving gifts to his sister so he goes to check it out. It’s the brother that negotiates the terms of marriage for his sister, the father is nowhere mentioned. Abraham’s servant pays Laban and Rebekah’s mother with more gifts and they reciprocate with a feast in celebration of the arrangement.

This is very much in keeping with matrilineal kinship patterns because the brother is in a position of authority relative to the sister and the bride’s mother is the recipients of the bride price. For those familiar with the patrilineal tradition of the father giving away the bride this is an interesting reversal.

 
Shit gets too heavy for Jacob

In the next story Rebekah gives birth to twins Esau and Jacob.

Twin brothers Esau and Jacob are like perfect opposites. Esau is big and burly, he’s covered in manly body hair and is a successful hunter. Jacob is a mild mannered kind of guy, he spends a lot of time indoors working with his mom. The parents play favorites too. Isaac has a taste for game so he loves the first born Esau best, but Rebekah loves Jacob and together they hatch this elaborate plan to divest Esau of his father’s inheritance and God’s blessing.

Once Esau discovers what Jacob is up to, that he has successfully stolen his father’s blessing, he is pissed. He threatens to kill Jacob, which we have to suspect would be no match – this big strapping hunter against mama’s boy. What do you do when things get too hot around the patrilineage? Go take refuge with your mother’s brother!

As members of the same matrilineage Laban graciously receives Jacob as if he were his own son. Laban also appears to be the primary property owner in this land and is probably overjoyed to have gained a new employee for his ranching operation.

 
Jacob scores a threesome
So Jacob goes to work for his mother’s brother while things cool off back at his dad’s place. Laban asks him “What should your wages be?” when Jacob really has his eyes on Laban’s daughters (his first cousins). There’s Leah who has pretty eyes and then there’s Rachael, who has everything else.

I really like how Crumb draws her with some va-va-voom!

Jacob strikes a deal with Laban. He will work for seven years to pay Rachael’s bride price.

Seven years pass, the wedding is held and Lo! That’s not the woman I thought I married! Are we to take it that the bride’s face was veiled? At any rate it seems Laban has pulled a fast one on his nephew.

Laban feeds Jacob a line about how it is their tradition that the younger daughter should not be married before the elder and he swallows it. Still his love for Rachael is so great that he’s willing to work another seven years to marry the other sister! This double cross comes back to haunt Laban in the next story.

Now Jacob is nestled in real tight with this matrilineage. Having married sisters this insures that all of his children from either wife will be on the same team.

 
The sisters side against the father

It seems like things are going pretty well for Jacob now. After overcoming some trickeration from his uncle/ father in-law, Jacob’s wives are blessed with many children. He even seems to benefit from a little sibling rivalry between the sisters as they give to him their handmaiden’s much as Sarah gave Hager to Abraham.

By this point in the story Jacob has been in Laban’s house for many years and the fact is not lost on him that his labor is making his uncle wealthier at his own expense. Not unlike the plot to defraud Esau of his inheritance Jacob conceives of an elaborate conspiracy to fleece Laban of his flock and then flee back to the land of his father, Isaac. And just as he needed his mother Rebekah to execute the last heist, he needs the assistance of Leah and Rachael. When he shares his plans with them Jacob finds he has no trouble at all turning the sisters against their father.

So the plan is put into action and Jacob looks to make off with most of Laban’s herd. When Laban discovers the deal is going down he runs out into the field to try to put a stop to it. With Laban out of the house Rachael sneaks back in and steals some of his household idols. This only infuriates Laban more and Jacob gives him permission to search their tents to recover his idols unaware that his own wife has taken them.

Then there’s this fascinating scene where Laban storms into Rachael’s tent. Taking the idols and hiding them under some blankets Rachael sits down on top of them and pretends to be on her period. Laban retreats. The matrilineage has succeeded in appropriating the domestic gods.

 
Dinah is raped and the matrilineage sides against the father (again)

Like I said there’s not a whole of stories in Genesis with prominent female characters, but there is one more that will serve our purposes here. After Jacob deserts Laban and reconciles with Esau he becomes a successful patriarch and keeper of flocks.

Being that he’s married to sisters all of his offspring would belong to the same matrilineage. Here we are interested in how Dinah’s brothers react to her assault by Shechem Prince of the Hivites

Not cool Shechem. You’re supposed to marry the girl and then take her virginity. Not the other way around!

Hamor, his father, knows he son has screwed up and so the two of them head out to Jacob’s camp to tray and make amends. But in the story Jacob the father of Dinah “keeps his peace” and instead her brothers take charge.

I love this scene because its like something right out of Levi-Strauss. Here are two groups of men engaged in politics using women as a tokens of exchanges.

Dinah’s brothers have other ideas, however. Remember, these guys are Hebrews. Its unacceptable to them that Shechem would be uncircumcised. Eew, gross! There is no way you are touching our sister. Unless… snip snip.

Have you guessed that this is leading up to an elaborate conspiracy whereby one group exacts revenge on another? Good for you! The brothers convince Hamor and Shechem that they will exchange women and build up their alliances if they have all the men of their village circumcised simultaneously. Then while the Hivites are convalescing from their wounds Dinah’s brothers come in and KILL THEM ALL!!

When Jacob hears about this he is pissed.

Guys, he seems to be saying, you’re making me look really bad here. But its too late. The matrilineage has sided against the patrilineage yet again.

I hope you enjoyed this. My plane is boarding so I’ll have to leave it here. Happy Mother’s Day! I love you mom!

This is a true labor of love, rendered mostly in Adobe Flash, by the artist and cartoonist Nina Paley. Paley has made the complete feature available for free under a Creative Commons license. Now that the music rights have cleared for Annette Hanshaw’s soundtrack the film is also available on DVD and if you like what you see there’s merchandise for sale so appreciative audiences can support the artist.

The story unfolds in multiple layers, each taking place at divergent moments in history and represented with its own animated style. We begin in present-day San Francisco, portrayed here in squigglevision, with the couple, Nina and Dave, in domestic bliss. Dave’s sudden departure for a new job in India foreshadows the impending end of their relationship. Paley juxtaposes this with the epic myth of Sita and Rama, presented as gouache paintings come alive. Interrupting or narrating the story is a third form, a trio of shadow puppets commenting on the myth. These characters exist out of time. Finally the signature sequences are done with computer animation as a cartoonish Rama and Sita act out their story with Sita singing the words of Annete Hanshaw’s blues. Although visually set in the myth the audience is experiencing creative expressions from the early twentieth century America and encouraged to note the similarities between the two.

“I never knew how good it was to be a slave to one who means the world to me,” she sings.

We learn from the mythic segments that Rama is noble and good, the embodiement of righteousness. The ideal man. The shadow puppets explain to us that Rama’s father, Dasharatha, had planned on crowning him king until one of his scheming wives, Keikeyi, invokes an old debt to force him to banish Rama to the forest instead. Sita, his devoted and beautiful wife follows him. Meanwhile the evil king of Lanka, Ravana, is persuaded by his sister, Suruphanaka, to steal Sita away.

Even with her husband gone Ravana cannot violate Sita’s chastity. Later, aided by his half monkey sidekick Hanuman, Rama finally discovers Ravana’s castle, slaughters his demons and wins Sita back. However Sita has now lived in another man’s house and Rama, having avenged the insult of having his wife stolen, no longer desires her. She must prove her purity to him first in a trial by fire, but before the pyre can harm her gods descend and spirit her away.

With her purity beyond dispute Rama returns to his kingdom to accept his rightful position as king. Then in a chance encounter, Rama observes one of his subjects, a laundryman beating his unfaithful wife. He scolds her: “Do you think I am like Rama?” Now the king feels his wife’s reputation is costing him the loyalty of his subjects, so he banishes her even while she is pregnant with his sons.

Back in the real world Nina follows Dave to India, but the passion of their romance is gone. When she receives an invitation to attend a conference in New York City Dave dumps her by email. In an utterly humiliating scene Nina tearfully begs Dave to take her back when obvious he’s the one doing her wrong.

As Wynton Marsalis describes it, the blues is down home sophistication and it shows in Hanshaw’s numbers. This is a truly adult musical form. “What wouldn’t I do for that man,” she croons as the cartoon Rama literally walks on Sita or sits on her back to drink tea so devoted she is to him. While held captive by Ravana she sings, “Daddy won’t you please come home.” And when Rama rejects Sita after the rescue its, “You love to see me cryin’. I’m left alone singing the blues and sighin’.”

Annette Hanshaw in her vocal performances is really like another character in the story, one which shares with Sita certain idealized qualities of womanhood – a point hammered home by the Betty Boop like proportions of Sita the blues singer with huge bosoms, a tiny waist, and flirty eyelashes. They are both women who define themselves through their romantic relationships with men, in particular men who are blameless. Through all the hardships Rama puts Sita through her devotion to him remains unwavering just as the woman portrayed by Hanshaw’s lyrics continues to love her man no matter how mean he might treat her. Paley clearly identifies with both of these characters. Even as Dave treats her like dirt, she can’t bare to let him go. “Am I blue? You’d be too.”

It is only through the shadow puppets that Paley can bring herself to criticize her own behavior. These characters are really my favorite part of the movie. Depicted in royal or mythological garb the shadow puppets are voiced to sound like modern South Asian Americans and they comment on the myth of Rama and Sita from an alienated, “born confused” perspective. Throughout the feature they interrupt the proceedings to explain the myth but just as often they bicker among themselves, offer competing versions of the story, screw up, questioning the characters’ motivations and cracking jokes at the authority of myths and the powers they hold over our lives.

Late in the movie, Nina calls Dave to beg him, “Please take me back.” This time the puppets stop the action in the modern world outside of mythic time. They explain how as unfair as it might seem that Rama is remembered as a benevolent king while he treats Sita so badly it cannot be that Sita is without fault. After all she’s the one who keeps putting up with his behavior. They make her unquestioning devotion, a virtue under patriarchy, into a character flaw. “Listen he doesn’t like you! You’ve got to move on. C’mon!” That’s her mistake. You shouldn’t love someone who treats you so badly. As Hanshaw sings, “Love had its day. That day has passed. You’ve gone away,” Sita the cartoon character literally cries a river.

Sita Sings the Blues makes clever use of irony, crossing over between multiple timelines to give us a portrait of women – across cultures and through time – being mistreated by men and not having the sense to do anything but put up with it. While the patriarchy of ancient Hindu myth may be readily apparent to us and their congruence with early American popular culture unsettling, Paley urges women to be cognizant of its unconscious internalization. Our romantic proclivities are part of tacit culture.

In the fairy tales we all know so well and which Disney re-presents for our children time and again the man comes to the rescue of the fair maidens whose only aspirations, like Sita, is to be the perfect mother and wife. Such stories contribute to our socialization and enculturation, reflecting the values of the societies that reproduce and repeat them like a broken record playing the blues. This time around, Paley seems to be saying, women need to save themselves.

At these parties, people were not necessarily dressed, and I defy you to tell the difference between a naked prostitute and any other naked woman.

Gayle Rubin, in her famous essay “The Traffic in Women”

Marx once asked: “What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other. A Negro is a Negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations. A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It becomes capital only in certain relations. Torn from these relationships it is no more capital than gold in itself is money or sugar is the price of sugar.” One might paraphrase: What is a domesticated woman? A female of the species. The one explanation is as good as the other. A woman is a woman. She only becomes a domestic, a wife, a chattel, a playboy bunny, a prostitute, or a human dictaphone in certain relations.

[h/t to Aaron Bady]

Alison Bechdel crashed the party on American literature’s main stage with Fun Home (2004) a stunning graphic memoir about coming of age, coming out, and discovering her father’s own closeted gay identity. It received rave reviews and was featured at the top of a number of end of the year best book lists and, with the close of the ’00s, reappeared on some best of the decade lists. And rightfully so, there wasn’t a more monumental nonfiction comic book in a decade that will be remembered for an explosion in top notch comic output. There hasn’t been a more significant comic memoir since Maus (1986).

My own encounter with Fun Home began on the Eastern Band Cherokee reservation as I was conducting the ethnographic field research for my dissertation. I was cast in a theatrical production as a soldier in Andrew Jackson’s army and one of my fellow Indian killers was a bohemian epileptic artist named Pat working his way back to Florida from Knoxville. Like Capote’s villain from In Cold Blood he traversed America’s highways with a library in his trunk: Zizek, Baudrillad, and a borrowed copy of Bechdel’s novel.

After I settled in Newport News I discovered Fun Home in the stacks at my public library and got hooked on Bechdel’s beautiful ink lines, hyper-literary self reflection, and slightly neurotic gallows humor. I was anxious to get my hands on more of her work and I soon learned I had a lot of catching up to do. Before achieving celebrity status Bechdel was already a star in the gay and lesbian community for her biweekly strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, first published in 1983. A nearly 400 page retrospective was released in 2008 as The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For.

Our story begins in 1987 and the dykes, a tight knit cast of regulars, are late 20s to early 30s. There’s Mo, a moral hypochondriac who is always in such a tizzy over Republicans, U.S. militarism, the melting ice caps, or capitalism that she hardly has the will to score a date. Lois is a horny free spirit, casually jumping from relationship to relationship and bed to bed. She shares a house with Ginger, a grad student in literature with a persistent fear of commitment, and Sparrow, who staffs a women’s crisis center and is always caught up in therapy-speak. Then there’s Clarice and Toni who are in a serious long term relationship and upwardly mobile, they’re the first to get a house and the first to have kids. But domestic bliss doesn’t last long and soon their relationship is in trouble.

Their lives, always dominated by their politics and their relationships, are frequently hilarious. In a five lesbians in a VW Bug on their way to a march in DC kind of way.

As a non-lesbian, non-woman I found there was a lot for me in Dykes. All the women are smart, engaged, and driven by their passions which makes for really interesting characters by any measure. Frequently academics provides a backdrop to their lives as Clarice completes law school, Ginger graduates and becomes a lecturer, and Mo starts dating Sydney, a Women’s Studies professor. There are the familiar humiliations of romance, dating, cheating, moving in together, young parenthood – as Dykes cycles through these topics they always seemed fresh to me. No doubt because lesbians live these experiences with a degree of political consequence I don’t have to confront. Finally, much of the story plays out in the ‘90s – my salad days – and so I was rewarded by a bit of nostalgia too. I’ll come back to this last point later.

This reading experience was accompanied by a sense that a lot of the subtext was over my head. For one this is a book about lesbians. It is not a book about women. It is not a book about gays. They’re all lesbians and there is a gap between what I can recognize of myself in this other and what it’s intended audience finds. It’s an intentional inversion of what has been known as the Bechdel Test and I’ll fess up that it was disorienting, albeit in a good way.

As one critic pointed out Dykes to Watch Out For is a chronicle of lesbian history in America over the past two decades as trends and debates (not to mention electoral politics and their consequences) have consumed the community. “Alison Bechdel has put her finger squarely on the Dykegeist,” she writes. Do I have to tell you I don’t know what the Dykegeist is? (It sounds awesome though. Dykegeist!)

Taken as a whole the book is rich in its themes and topics. Here I’ll mention just two that resonated with me: the fall of the independent book store and ambivalence over the mainstreaming of queerness.

Since I was a child I have loved bookstores. There was a moment in time, growing up in Austin, that the city was awash in independent and used bookstores. As soon as I had my license I was driving from one to the next, browsing the stacks and drinking coffee. Life for the Dykes revolves around books too, their community is built around Café Topaz and Mad Wimmin Books where Mo and Lois work. Mad Wimmin hosts their poetry readings, it’s their third place.

Things get tight financially in the mid 1990s when cutthroat capitalists like Bunns and Noodles and Bounders Books and Muzak (not to mention Medusa.com) start to cut in on their bottom line. Somewhere along the way Mad Wimmin starts selling vibrators and lube – not sure how that happened, but I’m thinking Lois was involved… not all the strips are in the collected volume, you know. But it’s too little too late and by the early 2000s Mad Wimmin Books is out of business. Just like all those beautiful stores where I wasted my youth. Just like the wasteland of Newport News with its big box stores, one after another.

And of course I bought this book from Medusa.com which is, ironically, making Bechdel’s characters accessible to a wider audience (like straight, male anthropologists living in military towns in the south) not to mention preserving them for future generations of lesbians to rediscover. From the very beginning of the series the author demonstrates a keen awareness of how the mainstream cuts both ways for gays and lesbians. Like in a 1987 strip when at a Gay Pride parade Mo frets over its undercurrents of conservatism as the freaks are joined by Catholics, a men’s choir singing Yankee Doodle, and one group proudly waving a banner that reads “Le$bian Investment Bankers.”

Bechdel writes in her introduction to the Essential Dykes that her goal was always to speak the unspeakable, to depict the undepicted for a community that was starved for representations of itself. “Once you speak the unspeakable… it becomes spoken! Conventional. Boring! Have I churned out episodes of this comic strip every two weeks for decades merely to prove that we’re the same as everyone else?”

By my reading what is revealed in the changing position of queer folk in contemporary American society is the great diversity of this group. Their lack of political consensus is matched by the lack of consensus among racial groups or along class lines. This all comes to a head for the Dykes in a most interesting way as Ginger must confront an outspoken conservative in the classroom, Cynthia, who then comes out to her. This is after George W. Bush’s reelection and just as frequently the two are feuding over ideologies as the elder woman is taking the younger woman under her wing, inviting her over for Christmas dinner when her parents excommunicate her, and writing her letters of recommendation when she wants to join the CIA.

A word about the art. It begins as, shall we say, competent. Some characters and panels simply fall flat. Yet even at this early date Bechdel’s greatest strength is the ability to convincingly create a racially diverse cast and make it look easy. But the emotional depth is limited and some of the characters just look kind of dumb. Gradually the style becomes more confident until sometime in the early 1990s when everything clicks and the strip takes on beautiful sophistication. By the middle of the decade Bechdel’s art is nothing short of sublime. This is the style she would use in Fun Home, but the memoir adds ink wash for shading whereas for the strip everything is accomplished with pure black and cross hatching.

Comparisons worth making: Like Doonesbury or For Better or For Worse, Dykes follows a large cast through time as they age and mature. Time flows in this strip and often enough it is marked by popular culture and presidential politics. Unlike Doonesbury, which I read as more satirical, the political editorializing is closer to the surface in Dykes. Politics for Bechdel is a tragedy (played for laughs – black humor), for Gary Trudeau it is a farce. If there is a true political ancestor to Dykes it would be Sylvia, which is unabashedly feminist and pretty damn funny too. Unlike For Better or For Worse, which follows the foibles of a family and their extended social network, Dykes is full of hot sex. Plus foibles and family.

Late in the book Lois and Mo see each other in the supermarket. Mo is trying to chose between fair trade raw cane sugar and organic raw cane sugar. “Eat pesticides? Or exploit workers?” she thinks when Lois appears and says, “Hey, you look kind of like a very good friend of mine, only older.” Time passes and the artist marks it with lines under their eyes. With parents that die. With cancer. With babies that become teenagers. But to reverse the flow of time one need only turn the pages from left to right and all your friends are young again. There’s a great seduction in that.

…

The curious can view this video where Bechdel clicks through some slides, most of which are featured in the book, for about 20 minutes. Superfans can stick around for the next 20 minutes or so as she takes questions from the audience.

Why Thin is Still In

In her new documentary, Picture Me, Columbia University student Sara Ziff chronicles her 4-year rise and exit through the fashion modeling industry, zooming her personal camcorder onto supposedly systemic abuses—sexual, economic, and emotional—suffered by fashion models.  Among the many complaints launched in the film is an aesthetic that prizes uniformly young, white, and extremely thin bodies measuring 34-24-34” (bust-waist-hips) and at least 5’10” in height.  It’s an aesthetic that many of the models themselves have a tough time embodying, pushing some into drastic diets of juice-soaked cotton balls, cocaine use, and bulimia—in my own interviews with models I discovered similar, but not very common, practices of Adderall and laxative abuse.  It’s also an aesthetic that has weathered a tough media storm of criticism, set off in 2005 with the anorexia-related deaths of several Latin American models, and which culminated in the 2006 ban of models in Madrid Fashion Week with excessively low Body Mass Indexes (BMI).  And yet, as a cursory glance at the Spring 2011 catwalks will reveal, thin is still in.  In fact, bodies remain as gaunt, young, and pale as they did five years ago, and it’s entirely likely that in another five years, despite whatever dust Picture Me manages to kick up, models will look more or less the same as they do now.

What’s the appeal of an aesthetic so skinny it’s widely described by the lay public as revolting?  As a feminist sociologist, I know the usual suspects:  capitalist and patriarchal forces that damage women’s self-esteem; an industrialized economy of abundance that affords upper-class bodies distinction not through corpulence but slenderness; our cultural value on self-control and restraint.  Perhaps all of these social forces operate simultaneously as models walk the catwalk, but we can’t understand what kind of gaze imagines the female form at “size zero”—and to what ends—without researching fashion’s tastemakers.

When I interviewed modeling agents and clients in New York and London, I wanted to learn how they make potentially problematic decisions to hire—or overlook—certain models.  What I found was a lot of empathy with critics like Sara Ziff, but also a lot of fear.  As workers in a cultural production market, bookers and clients face intense market uncertainty when selecting models; after all what counts as beauty and fashionability are continually in flux, and by definition, a model’s value is a subjective matter of taste.  When choosing models for high-end catwalks, campaigns, and fashion magazines, I found that clients’ choices of models tended to be isomorphic.  That is, they choose looks that they expect everyone else to choose too.  They widely perceive that white-washed ultra-skinny models are most likely to be types chosen by their peers, and to deviate from this tried-and-tested formula would be to risk professional status by being “out of fashion.”

Like any culture industry, fashion modeling should be thought of as an institutionalized production system, where the goods produced – the models – are embedded in an historically-shaped and market-driven network of agents, designers, and casting directors.  Every actor in the system tries to match what she expects will complement the demands of cooperating actors, and they make these predictions based on past records and experiences.  Agents are trying to supply what they think will go over well with designers; designers produce shows they predict will appeal to magazine editors; editors favor the kinds of images they think will resonate with readers’ tastes.  Ask a designer why they book skinny models: because that’s what the agents are providing.  Ask an agent why they promote skinny models: well that’s what the designers want.  And so on.

I was in London conducting interviews with casting directors and designers in 2006, at the height of the media furor, and the only thing that did seem any different backstage of Fashion Week was simply the amount of skinny models talking about skinny models.  At one show casting in London, I listened as photographers and models discussed the size zero media attention; they came to the conclusion that the issue was a ludicrous and lame attempt to sell papers, and that the matter would soon die down, in the words one casting director, “They’ll just go back to normal and the girls will continue being thin.  They have to, for the clothes.  It has to be a certain size.”

He was partially right.  Designers cut samples based on standardized measurements of size 2 or 4, and when they’re in a pinch days before showing a collection, alterations are the last thing they want to deal with.  But sample size clothes are not born out of thin air; they are measured, cut, and made.  When you ask a designer why they make their samples in those particular dimensions, they do it because that’s “the way things are done.”  Like the QWERTY keypad, we end up with a certain working order of things because over time conventions get locked-in, and it becomes easier to not change them, even if we don’t like them.

This puts model managers like Melissa Richardson, co-founder of London’s now-defunct Take 2 Models, in a tough spot.  Being the mom of a teenage girl herself, she isn’t keen on recruiting 14-year olds into the business, though their bodies are often well-suited for sample sizes.  Yet she still does it, she once told the BBC:  “Because other people do, and if I don’t, I lose out of it.”

Of course it’s possible to imagine a more just world of fashion modeling, where pre-pubescent girls with bony limbs are not used to market adult women’s wear.  That world exists; it’s in your everyday mail-in catalogues and commercial advertising, and in posters for designer’s affordable diffusion lines, which are aimed at the mass market.  It’s at the couture and high-end collections where size zero models are put to work.  Designers’ high-end collections make relatively small profit margins, but they drive the brand images that are sold in product-licensing agreements on diffusion products—the sportswear items, the handbags, the high heels, sunglasses, and scented candles—where the real money is made.  High-end fashion models, known as “editorial models,” are essentially branding vehicles, and they are chosen principally for their unattainability; they aren’t relatable to the every-day shopper.  That’s the point.

In the commercial world you are more likely to see those healthier, over-18 models.  It is also, importantly, where you’re more likely to see some ethnic variety in models, for those concerned with the conspicuous absence of black models in high fashion.

The commercial realm is also, you probably guessed, regarded as the less prestigious end of the fashion market.  And here’s a lesson from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on the field of cultural production:  as a general rule, the credit attached to any cultural product tends to decrease with the size and the social spread of its audience.  Hence the lower value, perceived or real, attached to commercial models.  Visually, we can picture fashion models as grouped along class hierarchies and their corresponding dress codes; there is the blue chip “editorial” model in Prada and Gucci on one board, and the commercial middle classes donned in Target on the other.

Designers report having a personal aesthetic vision, one that just so happens to be their designs hanging on a thin woman.  In the words of one London casting director, who said to the laughing amusement of models at his casting, “you know, it’s really hard to find size 12 or 14 girls that are fierce, I mean they’re all just–” and here he puffed out his cheeks and raised his eyebrows, vaguely resembling the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man.  “It doesn’t look good,” he concluded.

Indeed, “fierce” as defined by the high-end editorial field of fashion is an institutionalized aesthetic of female beauty built upon an elite sensibility of unattainability.  What could actually put a wrench in this aesthetic isn’t more media coverage of the issue, but Sara Ziff’s larger goal to unionize fashion models.  With a functional union, in the vein of the Screen Actor’s Guild, to regulate working conditions and to keep tabs on ageist and racist practices, I think it’s possible for models to wrestle some control over a work process that as presently arranged puts them at the mercy of the whims of their agents and clients.  And that is something worth picturing.

In her now classic 1989 paper on language and political economy, Judith Irvine talked about situations where language doesn’t merely index political and economic relations in the way that accent is linked to class in Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” but where speech acts are themselves a form of political and economic economic activity. Her example is that of the Wolof griot “whose traditional profession involves special rhetorical and conversational duties such as persuasive speechmaking on a patron’s behalf, making entertaining conversation, transmitting messagesto the public, and performing the various genres of praise-singing.” She discusses how while not anyone can be a griot — you have to be born into the right caste — it is the “most talented and skillful griots” who “earn high rewards and are sought after by would-be patrons.” Irvine then goes on to discuss not just the verbal skill of the griot, but “cases where a verbal statement is the object of exchange.” It is worth quoting this discussion in full:

Recently there appeared a cartoon in the New Yorker magazine, entitled “Flattery getting someone somewhere” (M. Stevens, 28 July 1986). “You’re looking great, Frank!” says a man in business suit and necktie to another, perhaps older, man with glasses and bow tie. “Thanks, Chuck! Here’s five dollars!” Bow Tie replies, handing over the cash. The joke depends, of course, on the notion that the exchange of compliments for cash should not be done so directly and overtly. We all know that Chuck may indeed flatter Frank with a view to getting a raise, or some other eventual reward; but it is quite improper in American society to recognize the exchange formally, with an immediate payment. A compliment should be acknowledged only with a return compliment, or a minimization, or some other verbal “goods.” If it is to be taken as “sincere,” it is specifically excluded from the realm of material payments.

Some cultural systems do not segregate the economy of compliments from the economy of material transactions and profits, however. It is doubtful, for example, that the cartoon would seem funny to many Senegalese. With a few suitable adjustments for local scene, the transfer it depicts is quite ordinary. There is, in fact, a category of persons-the griots-specializing in flattery of certain kinds, among other verbal arts. The income they gain from these activities is immediate and considerable, often amounting to full-time employment for those whose skills include the fancier genres of eulogy.

I remembered this article because something I read made me wonder about the claim that it is “quite improper in American society to recognize the exchange formally, with an immediate payment.” It was a piece in the Washington Post by sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh entitled “Five myths about prostitution.” The second of these five myths is that “men visit prostitutes for sex.”

Often, they pay them to talk. I’ve been studying high-end sex workers (by which I mean those who earn more than $250 per “session”) in New York, Chicago and Paris for more than a decade, and one of my most startling findings is that many men pay women to not have sex. Well, they pay for sex, but end up chatting or having dinner and never get around to physical contact. Approximately 40 percent of high-end sex worker transactions end up being sex-free. Even at the lower end of the market, about 20 percent of transactions don’t ultimately involve sex.

Figuring out why men pay for sex they don’t have could sustain New York’s therapists for a long time. But the observations of one Big Apple-based sex worker are typical: “Men like it when you listen. . . . I learned this a long time ago. They pay you to listen — and to tell them how great they are.” Indeed, the high-end sex workers I have studied routinely see themselves as acting the part of a counselor or a marriage therapist. They say their job is to feed a man’s need for judgment-free friendship and, at times, to help him repair his broken partnership. Little wonder, then, that so many describe themselves to me as members of the “wellness” industry.

So here we seem to have a situation where Americans do pay to be told how great they are. The difference, of course, is that this activity is illegal, and it is private. While a woman at a Japanese hostess bar may be paid to listen and make complements in a public setting, in the US this activity seems to have been relegated to the private sphere – between the man and his griot.

Without a locally based understanding, rooted in a history of Malawi and a grasp of its cultural politics, we cannot comprehend what is at stake in the case. Discussions that frame the case as Malawians opposing westernisation tell only a very partial story.

Read more.

(via Ennis)

The idea behind Manpacks — which appears to not be a joke — is simple: you sign up for their subscription service, and every three months they will send you fresh tshirts, socks, and underwear. The site describes itself as ‘girlfriend approved’ and touts its service as ‘more efficient’ than shopping for clothes, and ‘easier’ because you ‘don’t have to think about it’. I am fascinated by what this says about contemporary masculinity in the US.

What does it mean that a business believes that men are willing to pay to have someone clothe them, and that they are unable or unwilling to decide for themselves that their underwear, socks, and tshirts are too dirty to continue to wear?  To a certain extent the site reflects a sort of passive consumerism in American culture that critics of consumerism have rallied against for decades — the penetration of very basic personal and household reproduction by the market, the obsession with convenience, and so forth.

But the site is clearly also about masculinity — the founders “believe in working *with* human nature, rather than fighting against it. Encouraging men to more regularly shop for underwear is not the answer.” Despite their claims that the site fosters ‘self reliance’ (by not having to wait to receive socks as gifts) and that men are ‘fully capable’ of buying underwear, but that they do not because it is a low priority, I find the overall message here one that men have trouble keeping track of their cleanliness or appearance.

On the one hand, such an idea is about masculine power and privilege: effortless comfort, not having to deal with the burdens of everyday life, the idea that you are entitled to (or should be able to purchase) a solution to all of the mundane problems in life so you can get on with the real business of living. But too often in contemporary American culture masculine privilege has flipped over into infantilization as men come to see themselves as incapable of even the most basic tasks, reliant on mothers, girlfriends, and of course the market to provide for their needs.

I see Manpacks as part of this broader trend in American society — one that resonates for me particularly as a teacher. It is now widely accepted that men struggle more and more in school, caught between learned helplessness on the one hand and peer pressure to appear effortlessly successful (when, that is, academic success is considered a good thing at all) and women have outpaced men in education and earning (although we still have a long way to go before full gender equity is achieved).

As a professor living in Honolulu who only distantly remember what ‘socks’ are, I imagine myself to be in a different demographic than twenty-somethings who expect a free ride out of life and tons of sex with scantily-clad women who love their choice of light beer. Am I wrong to find something sinister and enfeebling about Manpacks, or did they just catch me checking my Twitter feed at the wrong moment?

Exactly one year ago this week, my first book, Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution was published. The book, based on fieldwork conducted between 2000 and 2007 with Tehrani youth, looked at ways in which the discourse on sexuality was changing and how these changes in sexuality were linked to a larger social movement as articulated by the Iranian youth themselves. When I began reading the reviews of my book (not recommended for the thin-skinned first time author), my stomach churned. “Is sexuality really political?” some reviewers asked, “do the sartorial changes in youth fashion or behavior have deeper reaching impact?” others wrote, “how deeply do these sexual behaviors penetrate Iranian society?”, “could sex unseat the Mullahs?”  while still others asked (on Savage Minds in fact) “is ‘pretty’ the new protest?”. When I talked about my research with my students, some of the same questions came up. At first, I was frustrated, angry even. What part of my clarifications and caveats had readers and students missed? Then I realized, my mistakes were twofold: 1) I had conflated the idea of a sexual revolution (think sexual revolution a-la 1960s Greenwich Village) with the social movement that was inspiring young people to lobby for social change, and 2) I was describing only a few appendages of a larger “body that was then searching for a head” (as Robin Wright has said) – which it found this past summer in presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mussavi. But let us start with the first problem.

The phrase “sexual revolution” or enqelab-i-jensi (in Persian) was one that came organically from my interlocutors, and was not one that was placed on them by me or any other academic or journalist. Young people and their parents would talk about a change in the discourse around sexuality and heterosexual and heterosocial relations. This was referred to as their sexual revolution. Thus, when talking about “Iran’s Sexual Revolution” the focus must remain on the phrase ‘sexual revolution’ without detaching the words to ask “is sex revolutionary?” Sex, in itself, is not leading to a revolution. Neither I, nor my interlocutors were trying to claim this, however, a “sexual revolution” refers to a revolution, or perhaps more accurately put, a change, in the way in which we think, act, or talk about sex. To that end, young people and many others in Tehran had achieved their goals in that sex was talked about and thought about in different ways than it had been in the decades before. What is important to note, however, is that this sexual revolution was just one part of a larger movement that my interviewees referred to as a sociocultural revolution or enqelab-i-farhangi. This social movement encompassed behaviors such as pushing the envelope on Islamic dress, sexual behaviors, heterosocializing, driving around in cars playing loud illegal music, partying, drinking, dancing, the list goes on to include basically, young people doing what they aren’t supposed to do under Islamic law. But, many people ask, don’t youth everywhere do these things? What sets youth in Iran apart from their counterparts say in Texas? The answer is this: 1) the stakes are much higher – in Iran, you could get arrested for engaging in these behaviors and the consequences could include long term imprisonment, lashings and other abuse, 2) engaging in these behaviors are often a step for many to becoming politically active. Everything in Iran is political and politicized. The regime in power has politicized Islamic dress, certain types of music, even certain websites. Those violating its rules are harassed, punished, sometimes forced to leave the country. Many young people in Iran have become inspired to engage in political activism through their involvement in these social movements.

This leads us to the second problem, the body looking for the head. During the time I conducted my fieldwork in Iran, a generational shift was taking place. The momentum was building for something, but none of us could quite put our finger on what. Young people seemed to be coming together, deploying 21st century tools around them such as the internet, facebok, Twitter, and seeking to organize through networks around the world. But no one knew exactly what they were organizing for, and what kind of social/political movement they were constructing. What we knew was this: the majority of Iran’s population – urban, educated youth – was disenchanted with the regime. Whether they came to this sentiment through their frustration at not being able to wear what they want, socialize with who they want, prey how they want, or engage in civic society the way they want, they had all come to the conclusion that the current regime was: 1) not representative of them, and 2) was not always acting in their interest. “Why don’t they work on solving this horrible unemployment problem instead of cracking down on what we wear?” asked one of my interlocutors, articulating a sentiment shared by many young Tehranis with whom I spoke. People were frustrated. Educated, restless, youth began turning to the tools they had around them, honing their skills, looking to communicate their sentiments to each other and the world around them through blogs, music, films and a presence in cyberspace. Those of us writing about this large body of Iranian youth focused on different appendages. Some wrote about Iranian bloggers and the blogosphere (Alavi 2005), some looked at music (Levine 2008), some, astutely, tried to look at larger social change amongst the youth (Molavi 2005, Khosravi 2007) For me, I wrote about the sexual revolution, just one part of a larger movement for social and political change.

This past summer, in June of 2009, the body of social change that had been searching for a head finally found one: the fraudulent election of Ahmadinejad, and the figurehead of Mir Hossein Moussavi. Young people (the same ones that spoke of sexual and social revolution a few years ago) began organizing, pouring into the streets in an organized fashion, using their bodies and strategically deploying technology such as camera phones, twitter and facebook to both organize and to speak to the Iranian regime and the rest of the world. Earlier today thousands of protesters marched the streets of Tehran, pumping their fists into the air and chanting “Coup! Government resignation”. Some wore green (to indicate their allegiance to Mir Hossein Moussavi) many did not. Up until now, much of the recent media depictions of the situation in Iran paint a picture of a stolen election, and a discontented public demanding a recount at least, and the installation of their preferred candidate. While the election has presented frustrated Iranians with a catalyst and a reason to protest, what we are witnessing in Iran is not a simple protest over election fraud. Rather, disenchantment with the regime, and the desire to mobilize a civil rights type movement in Iran has been building for many years, encompassing, but not limited to movements such as the sexual revolution, internet revolution and . This election, the overt nature of repression and fraudulent behavior has given many people the window they were looking for to mobilize a movement that goes beyond election politics. While some protesters are in fact expressing frustration at the election fallout, many are asking for an entire overhauling of the system. Would they be happy if Moussavi were installed? Perhaps. But many want more than this, they want to change the system of Islamic jurisprudence, and fundamentally, they want their rights back. While some might see the protests as “calming down” or “dying down”, the reality is that people have tasted the sweetness of voicing their discontent, and they have no plans of backing down easily. We need to listen to the calls made by the chanting protesters, “Coup! Government resignation”.

So, reflecting on the questions “is pretty the new protest?” or “could sex unseat the Mullahs?” some might say no, but a macro look at the situation reveals that this is all part of a process. It is unclear what the future will hold for Iran. What I do know is that these avenues of pushing for social change are roads that lead to networks pushing for political change. I don’t know what the outcome of this post-election aftermath will be, but what I do know is that I need to look more at the big picture, and I need to learn to ask bigger and better questions.

The Henry Louis Gates Jr. affair (“gatesgate”) seems to be some kind of national rorschach test. Gates has portrayed it “as a modern lesson in racism and the criminal justice system.” Or as put more eloquently by Stanley Fish: “The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?” (Fish also ties this question to the media frenzy over Obama’s birth certificate.) But others have seen it as a class issue: “He isn’t outraged because he feels he was the victim of racial profiling by the police… He’s outraged because he was the victim of class profiling.” Rush Limbaugh takes a similar approach, as does the National Review. Or even (albeit much less convincingly) gender: “would any of this have happened if the major players had been women?” (Um, don’t you watch COPS?)

But it doesn’t stop with class/race/gender. It is also an issue of civil liberties: “the thing about all of this that creeps me out the most is that so many people are willing to defend this officer who…arrested a guy because he didn’t like his attitude.” Or, “professionalism“: “By telling Gates to come outside, Crowley establishes that he has lost all semblance of professionalism. It has now become personal and he wants to create a violation of 272/53 [the statute authorizing prosecutions for disorderly conduct].”

As mentioned above, most mainstream right-wing pundits seem to be taking the “elitist” tact on this case, but some go even further, arguing that it is reverse-racism: “All he has is a collection of prejudices about the group to which the officer belonged: white police officers. And based on that collection of prejudices, Gates leapt to a conclusion — this police officer is a racist.” Others on the right seem eager to reduce the story to a personal narrative, emphasizing how the cop, “James Crowley has taught a class about racial profiling for five years…”

I don’t get the impression that it is a case which has attracted quite as much attention outside the United States, certainly not here in Taiwan, but I could be wrong. I’d be very curious to hear from our readers how this incident has been portrayed elsewhere.

(Thanks to Carole McGranahan for pointing out the “personal narrative” angle.)

UPDATE: Charles Blow has more on the different experiences of race in the United States and how they affect how one is likely to interpret this story:

Whether one thinks race was a factor in this arrest may depend largely on the prism through which the conflicting accounts are viewed. For many black men, it’s through a prism stained by the fact that a negative, sometimes racially charged, encounter with a policeman is a far-too-common rite of passage.

UPDATE: Another “professional” frame, this one saying that shooting someone for asserting their constitutional rights (instead of obeying immediately) is, in fact, what one should expect from a well-trained police officer:

He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it where God did not intend. And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own.

UPDATE: Over at anthropoliteia, a blog devoted to the anthropology of policing, Jeff Martin says this is a teachable moment:

To focus discussion of the event onto the cultural dynamics by which larger issues are made relevant to social action, we can usefully borrow Marshall Sahlins’ concept of the “symbolic relay,” i.e. symbols which are deployed to “endow the opposing local parties with collective identities and the opposing collectives with local or interpersonal sentiments.

Whereas Radly Balko says “If there’s a teachable moment to extract from Gates’ arrest, it’s that arrest powers should be limited to actual crimes.” And Tenured Radical says that what he learned living in an integrated neighborhood “is that white people put black people in danger every day.” Meanwhile, the police released a recording of the phone call to the police placed by the white neighbor.

So, when you see this woman with red fingernails, she’s not just risking arrest for holding that sign, she’s risking it for the shade of her nail polish.

It relates to a Juan Cole piece, “Class v. Culture Wars in Iranian Elections” in which he pointed out that “the Iranian women who voted in droves for Khatami haven’t gone anywhere…”

I don’t know enough about class and gender politics in Iran to say much about this. The fact that the women in these pictures often conform to Western notions of glamor, including fair skin, had struck me in the media coverage about the elections, but I hadn’t thought about it beyond that until I read Jezebel and Juan Cole’s posts. What do you think?

UPDATE: Thanks to Gregory Starrett for mentioning Pardis Mahdavi’s new book, Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution. Here is an interview with her:

Ultimately, I don’t think I’ll teach it because I already have too much sex on the syllabus, but I thought I’d mention it here since it’s open access — in fact “Intersections”:http://intersections.anu.edu.au/, the journal it appeared in, is all open access, and it looks like it has some nice stuff in it if you study gender and sexuality in the Asia-Pacific (I don’t, so I’m just guessing). But I just thought I’d share.

(Photo by oltremara)

Sensemaya has a great post about the semiotics of gender identification in bathroom signs, in which bathroom signs are divided into groups according to how they depict gender: coital metaphors, genital shapes, body shapes, comparative urination, gender transference from animals to humans, reference by material possession, direct portrayal, culturally specific references, arbitrary/conventional symbolism, etc. With pictures, of course.

(via Alanna Shaikh)

I promised that the next post would be about emergency contraception in Egypt, but I couldn’t resist first writing about EC more generally and describing debates about EC in the U.S.

From rape treatment to mainstream contraception

For more than four decades, medical researchers have known that there are methods you can use after sex to prevent – not terminate – pregnancy. Emergency contraception (EC) was first researched in the 1960s by physician-researchers trying to find a way to prevent pregnancies in survivors of sexual assault. They experimented in giving rape survivors high doses of regular oral contraceptive pills (OCPs). Later it was established that inserting a copper-bearing IUD after sex was even more effective at reducing pregnancy risk.

Remember that this was during the pre-Roe v. Wade era so there were political reasons for looking for a way of preventing pregnancy, rather than expecting to be able to resort to abortion, for women who got pregnant after sexual assault. But of course there are also enduring religious and public health reasons for wanting to find ways to prevent pregnancy, rather than end it with abortion.

Increasingly, knowledge about this contraceptive technique filtered out to a wider public and in the 1970s through the 1990s, there was an underground movement of women and doctors spreading the word about do-it-yourself emergency contraception. You just take several pills from a regular pack of birth control pills within 5 days after sex.

(There’s a website run by Princeton University’s Office of Population Research that tells you exactly how many pills to take depending on what brand of Pill you’ve got, and as far as I can tell, this website was actually the first health information website on the Internet.)

Even though this form of contraception has been known for decades, it’s only in the past ten years or so that emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs) have become more widely known and marketed as a contraceptive option for all women, not just rape survivors. There’s been a global movement to introduce “dedicated products” worldwide and to lobby for them to be made available without prescription. (A “dedicated product” is when emergency contraceptive pills are packaged and marketed specifically for that purpose. Activists have long argued that this is an important improvement on the DIY culture of cutting up packets of pills because it increases awareness of EC and lends the method popular legitimacy.)

EC is an intrinsically liminal technology

I spent 5 years or so following debates over EC in the U.S., before I decided to look at EC in Egypt. I think there are three curious properties of EC and EC users that make this a particularly interesting technology to study.

1. To paraphrase Victor Turner, EC is “betwixt and between.” Classified as a contraceptive, but used after sex, it is often confused with medication (aka medical) abortion. The hormonal version consists of higher doses of the same drugs used in regular daily oral contraceptive pills. Another version of EC that has been tested (but is little used outside of China) is mifepristone, the same drug that is used to induce early abortions (also known as RU486 or the “French abortion pill”), but at a much smaller dose than what is required to terminate a pregnancy.

These properties contribute to EC being imagined as simultaneously more than a contraceptive and less than an abortion. This makes EC particularly fertile ground for debate and contestation. During U.S. debates, there were a lot of attempts by opponents to classify the method as an abortifacient, not contraception, even though medical authorities define it as a contraceptive.

2. Another reason why this technology is ambiguous is because its mechanism of action – the way it works inside the body to prevent pregnancy – is hidden from view and essentially unknown. Scientists postulate that that EC may work through three mechanisms: inhibiting or delaying ovulation, preventing fertilization by altering the tubal transport of sperm or egg, or preventing the implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus. It’s the last possible mechanism of action that is fiercely contested, because even though medical authorities define pregnancy as beginning with implantation, some religious interpretations define the beginning of life at fertilization.

But basically no one knows for sure. You can prove a post-fertilization effect of EC either way, because there is no clinical evidence in humans that can either prove or disprove whether EC actually might have a post-fertilization effect. Why? Basically because you can’t figure this out without cutting up women. There are studies in the monkey and the rat (that show no post-fertilization effect), but the extent to which these can be extrapolated from to describe what’s going on in human reproductive tracts is unknown. So the chance that EC has a post-fertilization effect can only be statistically modeled and indirectly inferred. It is this peculiar characteristic of EC that further lends itself to imagination about the inner workings of a woman’s reproductive tract when the medication is taken.

You can see this in the public hearing the FDA held when considering whether to make ECPs available over the counter or not. First, consider the testimony of Carole Ben Maimon, the CEO of Barr Pharmaceuticals:

“Plan B works like other progestin-only oral contraceptives and prevents ovulation. Plan B is an oral contraceptive, not an abortion pill. The direct evidence is highly in favor of the fact that the primary mechanism of action, if not the sole mechanism of action, is prevention of ovulation.”

She was clearly at pains to make the point. NOT AN ABORTIFACIENT. In contrast, here’s what Judie Brown, the president of American Life League, said in her testimony:

“Emergency contraception, first of all, is not contraception. So-called emergency contraception can by definition abort a child before that child implants. A human being beings at conception, not implantation. …If a human zygote cannot implant, he or she will die. This means that the pills act to prevent pregnancy by aborting a child…”

3. The third characteristic of this technology to consider here is that we don’t know much about EC users. There are structural reasons why there are very few qualitative, in-depth studies of the characteristics of users of EC. With many medical technologies, access to the technology is mediated through a specific point of entry into medical bureaucracies, and researchers can take advantage of this to study users of the technology. So if, say, you want to study people using in vitro fertilization (IVF), you stake out an IVF clinic and find a cooperative doctor that will let you talk to her/his patients. But with EC, there’s no one easily identified point of access. Some women go to their doctor to get it, but it’s not like there are doctors who specialize in EC like there are with IVF. You can get it from your family physician or from your gynaecologist. Some women get it straight from a pharmacist. Other women borrow a friend’s pack of pills and cut it up.

That’s part of the reason why it’s hard to find people who are using it. The other is that use is relatively rare. An individual woman’s need for EC is predicated on non-consensual sex or a contraceptive accident, so it’s unpredictable. Many women have never used EC. There have been a few large scale demographic studies of user populations, but very little qualitative description of the sexual and contraceptive experiences of individual users.

The result has been a great deal of speculation about the characteristics-and morals-of women who use (or need) EC and the men they had sex with. The debates about making EC available over-the-counter revolve around the imaginations of users: who is using it, who they’re having sex with, and why they need EC. Basically, in the FDA debates over EC, 2 poles of sexual behavior were theorized:

1. An exploitative male sexual predator, either a teen playboy who will use access to ECPs to convince women to engage in unprotected sex, or an adult sexual molester who will administer the pills to his victims to cover up his crimes. In this imagination of EC use, women are cast in the role of weak sexual gatekeeper whose ability to say no will fall apart in the face of new technologies.

Consider, for example, the testimony at the FDA hearings from Robert Marshall, a state legislator from Virginia. He said:

“One name that should be on this NDA [New Drug Application] is Hugh Hefner. Playboys, adolescent adult males are going to be the primary beneficiaries of this.”

Or Susan Crockett, a pro-life Bush-appointed representative on the FDA advisory board reviewing the EC application:

“Making ECs available would be a welcome tool for adult sexual predators who molest family members, children of friends or students. They could keep a stash in their bedroom drawer or their pocket to give their victims after committing each rape.”

2. The other archetype of EC user advanced at those FDA hearings was the image of a responsible, condom-using woman in a committed relationship with an equally responsible man. Eight members of the National Organization of Women (NOW) spoke at the FDA public hearing describing their own personal experiences using EC after consensual sex. In those accounts, 6 described a contraceptive failure, and 6 described the women being in a committed sexual relationship.

Btw, Kimala Price has a great piece in Anthropology News discussing these archetypes and mythologies of EC users.

In considering the kinds of sexual encounters that are portrayed as typical in this debate, it’s also interesting to consider what portrayals of sex are *absent*. First, there’s no mention of non-heterosexual, non-penetrative sex, but we’ll bracket that off since this is a debate about contraception. Also absent is any depiction of:

● Consensual sex under the influence of alcohol, or
● getting “caught up in the heat of the moment” – i.e. no contraceptive used in the first place.

Much of the testimony from the NOW representatives described needing EC after a condom broke, but what about people who have sex without a condom in the first place? Don’t they have the same right to contraception as women who use condoms?

Incidentally, research strongly supports the idea that neither of the two poles of hypothetical sexuality portrayed in this debate are the face of “typical” American sexuality or, especially, of unintended pregnancy. A lot of people have consensual, unprotected sex, and these are the people who are overwhelmingly those who end up with unintended pregnancies.

But note that also absent in these two polar versions of the archetypical EC user is the possibility that women might be the exploiters, rather than men. The highly gendered portrayal of sexual encounters in the anti-EC position is revealed if we try a little thought exercise: can we imagine an alternative scenario in which the roles are switched? Imagine an older woman, figuratively hopping with STDs, who is trying to seduce a younger man into having sex without a barrier contraceptive by whispering into his ear, “Don’t worry, baby, you won’t be stuck paying child support payments for the next 20 years – I’ll take Plan B tomorrow morning.”

So that’s what EC debate has looked like in the US. What about elsewhere?
Debates over EC have taken strikingly different forms in the different countries in which it has been introduced, shaped by the social, cultural, religious, and political contexts. For example, in Latin America and Catholic-dominated countries, debate has often centred on EC’s mechanism of action and the moral status of a just-fertilized egg. In contrast, in most of the Muslim world, mechanism of action has not been a key issue, in part because of Islam’s very different religious interpretations of when life begins.

Now that I’ve set the stage by describing what EC is and why it’s such fertile ground (no pun intended) for societies to debate sexuality morality and when life begins, in the next posting I’ll talk about emergency contraception in the Arab world and in Egypt.

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In this post I’ve summarized work I’ve done with several colleagues: Angel Foster of Ibis Reproductive Health, who is both a medical anthropologist and a physician; James Trussell, the director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University; and Joanna Erdman, a legal scholar who is the co-director of the International Reproductive and Sexual Health Law Programme in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto.

Further reading:

1. Wynn LL, Trussell J. The social life of emergency contraception in the United States: disciplining pharmaceutical use, disciplining women’s sexuality, and constructing zygotic bodies. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 2006;20:297-320.

2. Wynn LL, Trussell J. Images of American sexuality in debates over nonprescription access to emergency contraceptive pills. Obstetrics & Gynecology 2006;108:1272-1276.

3. Wynn LL, Erdman JN, Foster AM, Trussell J. Harm reduction or women’s rights? Debating access to emergency contraceptive pills in Canada and the United States. Studies in Family Planning. December 2007; 38(4):253-267.