On the beach (Chatham, Mass.)

So it’s been a busy couple of months in the Clutterbuck-Cook household!

Hanna and I got married, all legal and everything, two weeks ago at one of our favorite neighborhood cafes. The morning ceremony was followed by a tasty breakfast of brioche and lattes which in turn was followed by the two brides going home and promptly falling into a deep, zombie-like trance for the rest of the day! Even low-key weddings take a surprising amount of energy to coordinate and execute.

In addition to getting married, I’ve also accepted an unexpected promotion from Assistant Reference Librarian to Reference Librarian — complete with minions! — at my place of work. Even though I’ve worked at the Massachusetts Historical Society for five years (as of October 12th, in fact!), this is a new position with new responsibilities that will keep me busy for the next six months to a year as I get my feet under me (thankfully I’ve got a crack team working with me, so I can’t complain!).

And I’ve decided to renew my dedication to being an historian and writer as well as a librarian, a decision that means making some difficult decisions about where to spend my non-work research and writing time. I want to keep reading and reviewing books, I have a couple of history projects underway, and along with a group of internet friends have organized a writing group to keep morale high.

All of these things mean less time for blogging, and as I’d already started to feel over-extended in terms of {blog posts I wanted to write x time it takes to actually write them \ available hours in which to focus on writing per week} it seems like a good time to rethink and consolidate my writing/blogging commitments.

Suffice to say, I’ve decided that as my two-year anniversary at Harpyness rolls around at the end of this year, I’ll be bowing out from this space. It’s been a great couple of years writing here, engaged in conversation with y’all, and I wish you well wherever you may go from here.

Back in July, I unexpectedly scored an advance review copy of Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men; and the Rise of Women (Riverhead Books, 2012) through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program. It arrived last week and I had every intention of saving it for vacation … but instead read it over the course of two afternoons. In part because it’s a pretty breezy read once you’ve got the gist — and mostly because I was so irritated by it, I found it hard to put down.*

In the event you’ve been in a media blackout since July 2010, Rosin originally wrote an article for The Atlantic under the same sensationalist title (a title which she apologizes for as the book dedication; perhaps that’s when you should rethink your marketing strategy?). Said article was one of a rash of journalism-lite pieces proclaiming the 2008 recession a “he-cession” and suggesting that as male unemployment rose it was women who stood to gain in both economic opportunity and political and social power. “The End of Men” painted a bleak picture of a future “matriarchy” in which high-powered, controlling women run the world while their college dropout loser husbands hang out with soiled toddlers ignoring the responsibilities of grown-up life. The End of Men is essentially a book-length elaboration on this apocalyptic vision of an upturned gender binary that — rather than creating space for more egalitarian, gender-independent relationships — merely reverses the stark hierarchy of the most aggressive patriarchal society.

More articulate and knowledgeable bloggers than I have refuted Rosin’s sketchy use of data and anecdote to paint this hysterical vision of what 21st-century hetero relationships may look like, and how the changing global economy might contribute to their reshaping. I’m not going to mimic more comprehensive efforts elsewhere. What I want to talk about instead is how crippling Rosin’s framework of oppositional, binary gender is to her observation and analysis, how profoundly it shapes her interpretation of what she sees in the world. Because this, more than anything, got under my skin and made me feel kinda sleazy for even paying The End of Men the time of day.

But I am giving it the time of day because — as Jill points out in her meditation on Naomi Wolf’s latest venture into the world of publishing — however frustrating and discrediting I find Rosin’s framework, it continues to be a compelling one for many people across the political spectrum. Rosin continues to be a respected left-of-center talking head on issues of children and education, on feminism, on parenting, on sexuality, on gender. And yet she is writing from a perspective drenched in the gender binary, seeing a world in which men stand in one corner, women in the other, locked in a zero-sum competition for power, prestige, and material resources.

And it’s important to ask how truthful this interpretation of the world is, how useful it might be in helping us move forward, and what Rosin’s framework causes her to overlook and leave out (in the event this post is tl;dr for some of you, my answers to these three questions are: not very, not hardly, and some pretty crucial things about humanity — for example, uh, that same-sex couples exist and don’t fit into her tidy framework of hetero couples in perpetual struggle for dominance).

Rosin waffles in the text over whether gender difference is borne of nature, nurture, or a combination of both — but in the end this doesn’t much matter to her thesis. Whether innate or learned, the women and men who populate Rosin’s world are the tired stereotypes of gender complementarity — with, if we’re lucky, a feminist twist. Women are barrelling ahead learning how to combine “feminine” and “masculine” traits and take over the world, while men (unwilling or unable to adapt, it’s unclear throughout the text which theory Rosin favors) are left unmoored and impoverished. In Rosinland (seriously: is she living in the same country I am?), the men are universally intellectually closed, emotionally stunted beings who shuffle through life under the thumb of high-powered wives and girlfriends who organize and circumscribe their lives — and then ditch the dudes when their economic success leads them to greener sexual pastures. Or, if they had the poor judgment to get married before economic disparity set in, the couple falls into a routine of wifely overfunctioning and/or spousal abuse by a resentful husband.**

Here’s the thing. Because Rosin is determined to make this a story about gender – and specifically, how men are losing at life while (because?) women are winning — she utterly fails to approach her research with awareness of how her beliefs about gender color her interpretation. Not only does she fail to deliver an account “unincumbered by assumption or ideology” (as the flap copy would have us believe), she doesn’t even fess up to the assumptions and/or ideologies that shape her narrative. We all bring bias and belief to our project of making meaning, and thus it is irresponsible for anyone to approach such a nexus of cultural-laden ideas (gender, power, marriage, work) and not acknowledge the particular lens through which they approach their research.

Gender is, as many a feminist pointed out, a valid category for analysis. The gender we’re assigned at birth, and how the world around us responds to that gender, is absolutely part of what shapes our lives. The fact that Rosin can write a whole book using the lens of gender is a victory for feminist theorists, activists, and scholars the world over. My frustration with Rosin’s argument isn’t that she chooses to focus on gender — it’s that she seems to understand gender to be the category of analysis. Like feminists who act as if the sisterhood is the ur-category trumping race, class, sexual orientation, nationality, time, space, and possibly black holes, Rosin hop-skip-jumps from anecdote to anecdote attributing every marital friction, educational or economic woe, asshole behavior or informant viewpoint back to … gender.

The strange beings who populate The End of Men appear to have no inner life or motivation beyond fulfilling (or overcoming) the fact of their gender. Religious beliefs or social justice values? A sense of how, as an individual, the person wants to shape a meaningful life? What sort of parent they want to be, where their creative passion lies, none of this matters. The only value any being in Rosinland seems to possess is monetary, and whether their monetary fortunes go up or down seems to be a question of how skillfully they perform gender. The women who populate Rosinland are a breed of Amazonian high-achievers whose interest in people with penes seems wholly dependent on their material utility (and possibly their genetic matter and/or ability to provide fucks on a somewhat regular basis). She actually invokes Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s embarrassingly racist Herland as a literary example of the world she believes we’re charging toward.

And cites it as a victory for the feminist agenda. Once again, I failed to get that memo.

Because Rosin thinks women only want men for their economic assets*** she is obviously puzzled by the couples she encounters where women are (for example) pursuing advanced degrees while their partners are content with a quieter life. In Rosinland, deliberately picking a low-key job in order to have time to go fishing with your buddies, play video games, or (gasp!) be a stay-at-home dad are sneer-worthy life choices.

Excuse me for living, but men are hardly the only ones to value friendships and leisure time, fandoms and family over a high-paying career that might bring in over $100k per year but demand eighty hours per week in return. I kept waiting for The End of Men to take me on a tour of hetero relationships that have found equitable footing (I know a number of them!), where the partners actually, you know, care about one another as people rather than monitoring their significant other for how well they’re fulfilling a prescribed social role. Yet in Rosinland these relationships do not exist.

I’d argue that, in part, they don’t exist because Rosin completely failed to talk about queer people. At all. Not a single lesbian, gay man, bisexual, transgender, genderqueer, poly, or kinky individual appeared in the pages of her book. In Rosinland, the only option is heterosexuality — it has to be or her theory of gender relations would fall apart.

Yet even if she’d been up-front about focusing on heterosexual relationships and how economic factors shape the family decisions and interpersonal dynamics of straight people, I could have pointed her to at least half a dozen straight couples I know where the interpersonal dynamics are hardly over-determined by the size of each individual’s paycheck. Newsflash: there are other reasons people enter and remain in relationships.

Hands-down the creepiest aspect of The End of Men was the way in which Rosin ha so completely accepted the neoliberal assumption that the worth of a human being begins and ends with their worth as worker.

Ultimately, The End of Men is a book that uses a lot of paper and ink to say very little that is original or useful. It regurgitates tired stereotypes about (straight) women and men, invites us to fear women’s rising professional success and greater social autonomy, and is confusingly vague about how we have landed in this dreadful gendered mess. Rosin insists that men aren’t incapable of putting on their grown-up pants and succeeding in this new “feminized” economic landscape — except that her references to evolutionary psychology and discredited “brain difference” studies undercut this assertion. And while she pays lip service to gender policing and social expectations that penalize men and women for gender non-conforming behavior, she is worryingly blithe about structural constraints on individual autonomy. For example, in a chapter on female executives, she argues that these women have succeeded because they “will themselves to ignore [sexism] so they can get their work done” (197).

In Rosinland, the only real obstacle to women’s success is their own self-doubt.

I would argue that The End of Men is actually a book that revolves around Rosin’s fear of women’s equality — or at least her belief that as women make social and economic gains it is their responsibility to ease the terrible shock their hard-won equality is causing the men. The women of Rosinland are judged harshly — the text repeatedly uses words like “overbearing,” “domineering,” “matriarchy” — for taking on assertive, leadership roles in both the workplace and in their personal lives. Yet we are also held responsible for cajoling, bullying, manipulating, requiring, or otherwise hauling reluctant men into the new “matriarchal” world order. In a penultimate chapter on the rising economic power of Korean women^, for example, Rosin relates an anecdote about a woman who spent two decades pushing her husband to help her with household chores and now that he’s finally “taken the hint” she’s set to work on her son.

While I obviously have no problem with women expecting equality in the domestic sphere — regardless of the sex of their partner! — what I think is fascinating-yet-troubling about the way Rosin shapes her anecdotes is that it is always the woman who lays down the law for her man to follow. While simultaneously bending over backwards to make adaptation seem palatable to men who (because of their caveman brains?) are lost in a woman’s world, disconsolate and suffering. At times, Rosin even seems to be suggesting that in order to encourage men to become more gender-independent (less wedded to outmoded notions of masculinity) we have to create special male-specific pathways for them to get there — i.e. gender-segregated educational opportunities. Surely if the future we want is one in which both women and men can thrive as people, the very last thing we would want is to suggest by the very shape of our educational system that women and men were fundamentally different beings?

In my estimation, The End of Men ends up using the supposed explanatory power of gender to account for seismic changes in the global economy that need to be grappled with in a much less reductive way. It is not enough to argue that the prevalence of women in the workplace equals the success of women (much less the success of feminism) if the reason women outnumber men in our economy is that they tend to hold jobs in the service and retail industries — jobs that rarely pay a living way, are thin on benefits, and usually exact harsh penalties for workplace organizing. It’s not the triumph of feminism that labor women, as a class, used to perform for free (childcare, eldercare, housework) is now outsourced to others who, in turn, must outsource their own care-giving responsibilities.

The story Rosin ought to be telling is a story about the erosion of workers rights, about the increasing identification of citizen and self with the wage-work we perform, about the poisonous effect this has on our interpersonal relations, about the way neoliberal capitalism fails to account for the care we provide to one another that can’t be reduced to work-for-hire. Yet her beliefs about gender cause her to look no deeper than a tired old tale of male vs. female.

I can only hope that her work will inspire others to do better.

*Andi Zeisler recently commented that Katie Roiphe’s anti-fans can’t stop obsessively reading everything she publishes; I have had a similar relationship with Rosin since reading God’s Harvard (2007).

**Except in Rosinland women are the greater physical threat — based on a handful of sensationalist accounts of female aggression a la Mean Girls meets Monster. This is such a troubling misuse of anecdata I can’t even.

***She totally buys into the sexual economy theory of hetero relationships, even citing Mark Regnerus’ Premarital Sex in America to support her argument.

^Her handling of race gives me the no feeling on a number of levels, but her chapter on the “gold misses” of Korea is especially troubling in the way it uncritically recapitulates stereotypes about Asian women and the cultures of Asia. Also note that African-Americans appear most explicitly in the chapter on the increase in female violence and in references to “matriarchal” society.

Cross-posted at the feminist librarian.

Every time a progressive justifies abortion, one of those horrid ‘lamenting the preborn killed by pinko commie scum’ websites gets another set of animated sparkling angel wings and a dreadful midi.

Private medical procedures do not require justification. As soon as you act like they do, you open up a line of conversation that is better left closed; you’re creating an opening where there wasn’t one before, and it’s one that directly harms the people who need access to abortion services. As soon as you start talking about why people have abortions, you set up a tiered world of ethically justified abortions versus others. You tell patients getting abortions after rapes, for example, that they will be supported and no one blames them for making a private medical decision, while leaving patients getting abortions for ‘bad’ or ‘selfish’ reasons with the impression that you are judging them.

Abortions don’t come in kinds or flavours, unless you want to talk about specific differences between individual procedures related to the stage of the pregnancy and the best procedure for the patient’s needs. There is no such thing as an ethically justified root canal versus an ethically ambiguous root canal. There’s just a procedure deemed medically neccessary after examination and discussion between doctor and patient, and a decision made on the basis of all available information.

You can talk openly about having a root canal. And you don’t need to justify it. ‘I just wasn’t ready to have a cavity.’ ‘It was causing an infection that could have killed me.’

Read the whole thing here.

Duality

Perhaps I hold people to impossible ideals,
I tell them, something is wrong with your
personality, (you’re a drinker, you’re
too dependent, or I think you have
a mother/son fixation). This is usually
followed by passionate lovemaking,
one good long and very well meaning
embrace, and then I’m out the door.

In daylight, I’ll tip my sunglasses forward,
buy a cup of tea and think of the good
I’ve done for the world, how satisfying
it feels to give a man something to contemplate.
The heart is a whittled twig. No, that is not
the right image, so I drop the heart in a pile
of wood and light that massive text on fire.

I walk the streets of Brooklyn looking
at this storefront and that, buy a pair of shoes
I can’t afford, pumps from London, pointed
at the tip and heartbreakingly high, hear
my new heels clicking, crushing the legs
of my shadow. The woman who wears
these shoes will be a warrior, will not think
about how wrong she is, how her calculations
look like the face of a clock with hands
ticking with each terrorizing minute.

She will for an instant feel so much
for the man, she left him lying in his bed
softly weeping. He whispers something
to himself like bitch, witch, cold hearted
______, but he’ll think back to the day
at the promenade when there was no one there
but the two of them, the entire city falling away
into a thin film of yellow and then black,

and how she squeezed his hand, kissed him
on his wrist which bore a beautifully healed
scar, he will love her between instances
of cursing her name. She will have long
fallen asleep in her own bed, a thin nude
with shoes like stilts, shoes squeezing
the blood out of her feet, and in her sleep
she rises above a disappearing city, her head
touching a remote heaven, though below her,
closer to the ground, she feels an ache at the bottom.

Ms. Brown routinely described herself as a feminist, but whether her work helped or hindered the cause of women’s liberation has been publicly debated for decades. It will doubtless be debated long after her death. What is safe to say is that she was a Janus-headed figure in women’s history, simultaneously progressive and retrogressive in her approach to women’s social roles.

While I admire many things about Helen Gurley Brown’s publishing career and her seemingly boundless sociability and energy, there is no doubt in my mind whether she helped or hindered the cause of women’s liberation. Her message—and that of Cosmopolitan—has always been very clear.

I wrote this post on Helen Gurley Brown in 2009, not long after I founded the Pursuit of Harpyness with four other like-minded feminists. There are many, many, many glowingly positive tributes to Gurley Brown running all over the internet today. This isn’t one of them.

This weekend, sarah.of.a.lesser.god sent me a link to an article about the of the first biography of Helen Gurley Brown, founding editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. As you might know, Cosmo is a favorite anti-feminist punching bag of the Harpies; its writing is painfully stupid and it promotes all kinds of Bad Thinking about body image, sex, women’s roles and gender relations. The fact that Cosmo‘s readership skews very young –high school and college age women–makes their pandering of Bad Ideas that much more pernicious.

We have not yet weighed in, however, on Helen Gurley Brown herself, and Sarah was deliberately waving a red flag to the feminist bull with that link, as I absolutely despise HGB and she knows it (that is, sarah.of.a.lesser.god knows it. HGB is likely still unaware, but if y’all want to forward this post to her, feel free.)

The author of the biography, Jennifer Scanlon, is a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College and she thinks there’s a place in women’s history, and even feminism, for Helen Gurley Brown:

“Many second wave feminists wrote her off as no more than the female equivalent of Hugh Hefner,” notes Scanlon, who is an expert in consumer culture. “I’m arguing that she was an early practitioner of the second wave who also laid the groundwork for what people are considering feminism today—the so-called third wave, lipstick-friendly feminism you see typified in Sex and the City.

I’m not buying that HGB was part of the feminist movement at all. Not for a moment. And I don’t think  Professor Scanlon really is, either.  You’ll notice that she takes great pains to specify “what people are considering feminism today.” Not actual feminism, mind you, since that Sex and the City lipstick “feminism” has about as much in common with 1960s second-wave feminism as the “krab” in my California roll has in common with the real crustacean.  

Ironically:

Scanlon found an untapped wealth of information on Brown at the Smith College Archives, which houses her papers, along with many other notable women of the 20th century, including Smith alum Gloria Steinem.

Gloria, honey, I’m sorry. Hopefully they keep them in a bio-hazard bag far, far away from yours.

Professor Scanlon is entitled to her opinion, of course, but I, for one, am perfectly ready to declare Helen Gurley Brown an Traitor to Womanity. Yes, she made money and founded a media empire, but she did it on the backs of other women, women who were desperately searching for independence and empowerment and who deserved much, much better than HGB’s shitty, retro, destructive, anti-woman vision of society.

Consider the following:

• HGB only paid lip service to financial independence for women. In reality, she was all about transactional relations with men. 

“Brown was famous for advising women on how to leverage the social-financial contract between the sexes. “She had some interesting schemes,” says Scanlon. “One was, if you go out with a man who is from out of town, get him to pay for your taxi ride home. Have him give you the cab money, let the taxi take you one block, then jump out and take a bus.”"She felt that women should never pay for dates,” adds Scanlon. “She was aware that men were the ones who earned the money and felt they should be willing to spend it; she maintained that women should reciprocate as they saw fit.”

The word “reciprocate” in that context kinda gives me the dry heaves. In the 1960s, women were just starting to earn their own way in the world.  And yet, here’s HGB, saying women should still be soaking men for as much cash as we can get.  Not “pay for your own bus ride” or “split the check” or “let him pay for dinner but make it clear he has no right to expect sex.” Nope, in her world, men have the money, and us clever gals use our feminine wiles to get a piece. Gender equality FAIL.

• HGB is all about Thin Privilege. Her sick views on body image helped launch thousands of eating disorders and made stick-thin figures the prevailing standard of beauty.

Ever seen an issue of Cosmo with its ridiculous photoshopped covers?  Ever read its gazillion articles about crackpot diets and rapid weight-loss tips?  Then you know what I’m talking about.  For that we can thank the editorial sensibility of HGB, the woman who once famously said that she loved having diarrhea because it took off a couple pounds and who told the New York Times: “Letting your body get sloppy is inexcusable.” In that same article she reports that her ideal weight is 95 lbs, so we can safely assume that we’re all “sloppy” by HGB’s standards.

• HGB thinks sexual assault can be quite delightful, especially in the workplace.

From Time: “Writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, Brown fondly recalled working at a Los Angeles radio station during the late 1940s and early ’50s. Her male co-workers, wrote Brown, played a “dandy game called ‘Scuttle’ . . . they would select a secretary, chase her down the halls . . . catch her and take her panties off. Nothing wicked ever happened.”

According to the author, everyone enjoyed the pursuit and “no scuttler was ever reported to the front office. Au contraire, the girls wore their prettiest panties to work . . . Alas, I was never scuttled.” Brown professed shock that modern girls would disagree with her notions of what constitutes a playful professional pastime.

Jesus Motherfucking Christ in a handbag. What is wrong with this woman? “Nothing wicked?” That shit is illegal. I ran this magazine clip by my buddy Anonymous Prosecutor, who wrote back “In New York State we call that “forcible touching”, a misdemeanor, but if the woman is panty-less, and the forcible touching continues, it’s felonious sexual assault. At any rate, I can’t believe she thinks that’s okay.”

• HGB says if your husband cheats, even if he fucks your best friend, it’s your fault for not fucking him enough:

Also from the Times: Mrs. Brown is secure enough to recommend in “The Late Show” that older women take a fresh look at their friends’ husbands as potential lovers. “Husbands are a source of supply. I never feel guilt about the wife, if she can’t keep him at home.”

Ah yes.  Men can’t be expected to exercise simple self control. They’re entitled to sex and it’s the wife’s job to provide them with it. If she’s not, feel free to swoop right in there, even if she’s your best friend. Don’t feel guilty!  That man deserves sex–because he’s a man!–and you’re actually helping by providing it.

• HGB wants you to…EWWWW:

“Spread semen over your face, [it's] probably full of protein as sperm can eventually become babies. Makes a fine mask—and he’ll be pleased.”

Or you could use a fucking moisturizer.  I kinda suspect from this that HGB might have a secret sideline in bukkake films. I actually ran this “beauty tip” by my current not-boyfriend to see if it would, in fact, “please” him to help me apply a jizz-mask instead of my usual Neutrogena one.  He looked horrified and stammered: “You mean you’d just leave it on there? Gross!”

I could go on.  No, really, I could!  Google has so much of Helen Gurley Brown’s subversively anti-woman bullshit in its caches that if I wanted to mine it all, we could be here for days, that is, if we didn’t spontaneously combust from righteous womanly outrage.  Suffice it to say that while I’m not above picking up Cosmo to pass the time at the salon, I absolutely draw the line at lauding Helen Gurley Brown as a participant in the women’s movement.

Yes, she’s got something to do with feminism, alright, but only in the sense that Budweiser has something to do with Alcoholics Anonymous.

Do you like beards? I like beards. But I know plenty of women who don’t. Most adult men I know don’t have beards. Which is weird, when you think about it. Because beards are a biological signal. A signal that says, “I am a sexually mature male, ready for mating. I have excellent genes and will impregnate you with fine children. Mate with me ladies.” They are the human equivalent of peacocks’ tails.

…

I know we shouldn’t get exercised about subheadings, which are generally not written by the author (and certainly not by the scientists). But, I give you: “Tightening one’s belt in a recession is usually considered prudent, but women may be advised to do the opposite after a study found that in tough times stressed men turn to larger ladies for comfort.” Oh no, we thought we were supposed to be thin, but now we might have made ourselves too thin for boys to like us! Let us cry hopelessly into our pillows ladies.

Seriously. Go enjoy the whole thing!

In the lightweight round, Katie Taylor of Ireland won, bringing home Ireland’s first gold medal since 1996. Taylor is incredibly popular in her homeland and reaction in her hometown of Bray was explosive. The most exciting response—even if you don’t speak Irish— was the teary and breathless call by Raidio na Gaeltachta’s commentator Seán Bán Breathnach, who proudly sings praises comparing Taylor to historic and modern Irish heroines like Grace O’Malley, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Maud Gonne, and Mary Robinson. (If any Harpies are Irish speakers, I’d love to know what else he was saying).

Beau Sia is a Chinese-American performance poet. In her history of the New York poetry slam movement, author Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz wrote:

Beau Sia took Maggie Estep’s pop culture reference-heavy work to the next level, bouncing across the stage, frenzied and electrified. His work was confrontational, hilarious and unapologetic. Sia was a firebrand who seemed determined to smash the prevailing stereotypes of Asian-America, the ones that painted Asian-Americans as being meek, passive and voiceless.

WE ARE HERE

i

Ms. Gabriella finally speaks her mind
First I don’t like so much that “flying squirrel”
thing. They are rodents, you know, like rats;
they carry diseases and even though
I know y’all find them cute, me, I prefer
“queen”, “woman”, or just “amazing”.
And, second, all y’all well-thinking folks
who don’t like the way some of those
tv commentators been dogging me
or expressing their doubts,
talking about how I can fall apart
so easily and all of that;
or making it look like I done
stole something from somebody,
please don’t worry about me,
cause trust me, I can’t hear them
while I am doing my thing. Mostly,
all I hear is a lot of noise and me
calculating every move in my head.
Third, I know some of y’all really wanted
Jordyn to win since she was
world champion and all, and even
if she lost at the trials, and all,
and to be honest I wanted it, too,
cause I like Jordyn—who wouldn’t?
But here’s the problem, I came
to beat her, really–I came to beat
everyone of these nice amazing
girls up in here, and more, and my mama
came all this way to see me win,
so just let me have this, ‘k?
And last thing: some of you’all need
to know how hard it is to go everyday
with your head on straight, everyday
concentrating about each move, each leap,
each hand position, the way the body
has to obey my imagination, I have to stay
hydrated, have to keep my blood sugar up,
and every night I go to sleep trying to hear
myself think, trying to push back the pain
in my bones, trying to keep it together.
I know, its been a while since
and the perm is slipping away,
and I could do one ponytail instead
of two, or take some time to look
all pretty like Madam C. J. Walker
would want. But I have to tell you,
all y’all Hair Police, just be glad
I remembered to brush my teeth
and wash my behind each morning, ‘cause
the fact is that this little lady had a few
golden things on her mind all week.

ii

the day the races begin
One hallelujah
Two Mek dem come now
Three but we talawa
You might imagine that with the world
staring at this island, calculating
the genius of its runners, the whole
world scrutinizing; the great powers
flush with wealth, with arrogance
with the need to dominate, that
perhaps because of all this pressure,
these twelve, these nimble
youths from a spot of earth so tiny,
so basic—you might imagine
that fear, or worse, the resignation
to inadequacy, might overtake them,
shake them, break them into tremors.
But these are the unruly first off
the slave ship folks, the maroons
commanding mountains and hills
subduing an empire of violence.
These are the people of Garvey,
Bogle, Bookman, Nanny, Manley, Marley;
a people who never got the memo
to think themselves too small
to breathe expansively in this world,
a people defying scale, who expect glory
as if it was promised them.
So you might imagine fear might
haunt them while they wait. Fear,
okay, perhaps enough to make
the heart leap as it must; but unbelief
or doubt? Never, not this crew,
not this crowd of fluent bodies, music
in their bones and skins, who move
with the bearing of contained explosions.
One hallelujah
Two Mek dem come now
Three but we talawa

The New York Times on Wojdan Shaherkani, the first female Saudi Olympian.

The Washington Post on Kayla Harrison, who overcame years of sexual assault by her first coach to win gold in judo. 

The Guardian on women’s boxing, the first year this “bastion of masculinity” has been a medal sport at the Olympics (Did you know that until 1998, the British Boxing Board of Control denied women boxers licenses on the grounds that PMS makes us too unstable? Yeah, fuck those guys.)

And for a delightful interlude of hetero objectification, thanks to Jill at Feministe for linking to 33 Things To Love About Men’s Water Polo.