What's wrong with this article? Marriage and Taxes, part 2

Especially in light of my critique of 'marriage'-centric social organization, check out this article from CNN.com:

"Study: Single parents cost taxpayers $112 billion":

Divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing cost U.S. taxpayers more than $112 billion a year, according to a study commissioned by four groups advocating more government action to bolster marriages.

hmm...what's wrong with this so far? (hint: it's something to do with the premise of the article)

Ok, I'll tell you.

1. It implies that divorcees and parents who are unmarried are not 'taxpayers.'
2. Thus, it positions those not divorced or single parents--married people, single people (aka not-yet married), and married parents--as the 'ideal taxpayer-citizen'

And that's just the first paragraph.

Next:

Sponsors say the study is the first of its kind and hope it will prompt lawmakers to invest more money in programs aimed at strengthening marriages.

Could it possibly be that our social and economic structures heavily favor married parenting, and that's what needs to be investigated, rather than 'strengthening marriage'??

Two experts not connected to the study said such programs are of dubious merit and suggested that other investments -- notably job creation -- would be more effective in aiding all types of needy families.

...which is good, especially since I heard on NPR recently (I can't find the show reference! aah!) that divorce and income are correlated (and ya know, 'the sanctity of marriage' etc. is of utmost important to preserving 'traditional' --read: patriarchal capitalist --values).

There's more:

Scafidi's calculations were based on the assumption that households headed by a single female have relatively high poverty rates, leading to higher spending on welfare, health care, criminal justice and education for those raised in the disadvantaged homes.

Right, because there's a natural connection between single mothering and poverty, apparently, so we need to fix the 'single mothering' rather than, say, the 'feminization of poverty' or the socio-economic structure that perpetuates single-parent (mother) poverty.

See, there's two problems here with our socio-economic structure:

1. The assumption of two parents present and sharing a home. The model used to be male breadwinner/female domestic servant. Now, women are 'allowed' to have economic independence but continue to bear the homemaking burden.
   
2. Women are paid less money, plain and simple.
   

So in a single-parent family where that single parent is a woman, she's doubly screwed economically.

At the end of the day, the article--along with the study and those who commissioned it--assumes the natural and neutral center of American life (ought) to be marriage and specifically, married-parenting. Further, they conclude that we should tell people how they should structure their networks of association in their life because it would cost less in government expenditures and because they are deviating from some sort of arbitrary 'normal'. Sure marriage is the norm in American society; that doesn't make it natural. It's still an arbitrary primary structure of social relations.

Sure sounds like life, liberty, and all that jazz to me!

cross-posted to The Reaction

see my part 1 here

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Thoughts on the Tyrrany of Marriage at Tax Time

I've seen a few articles over the last few days about taxes and inequality for lesbian and gay couples, due to the inability to get married, as well as straight couples who aren't married. Mostly, they are addressing the economic inequality faced by cohabitating queer couples who are legally unable to marry (in 49/50 states). Also, any tax allowances made for couples in civil unions at the state level don't apply to federal taxation.

I thought I would take this opportunity, then, to give a mention to what many times is overlooked in the Andrew Sullivan version of same-sex marriage advocacy (see his Virtually Normal): that economic dependencies and living arrangements are not internal to intimate relationships. In other words, just because the majority of economic relationships are intimate ones as well does not mean they have to be, and does not mean they are necessarily correlated conceptually. The way our social, economic, and legal policies have shaped the meaning of intimate and economic life informs the way that we think about structuring life. Take away those institutional expectations and rewards, and new possibilities are opened up for organizing the fulfillment of a variety of needs-- and perhaps in more productive ways.

In full disclosure, my Master's thesis involves gender norms as they are produced in marriage and through the interconnection of marriage, economics, legal decisions, liberal political theory of the founders, and citizenship, so my thoughts are referring to a body of research that cannot in any way be meaningfully replicated here.

I simply pose a few questions to chew on:

• Why do we assume intimate relationships must also involve economic dependencies and domesticity? Or rather, that if they don't, they are less socially valuable, are less fundamental to society than those who do.
• Why do we assume that the skills and qualities of an intimate couple are what makes the best or proper parents? This is especially relevant when oftentimes it is friendships, not intimate relationships, that end up being the life-long ones.
  
• What is marriage a (presumed) life-long relationship, characterized by economic dependency/support, cohabitation, emotional reliance, sexual fulfillment, and potential parenting partnership? Why do we assume that one person should be responsible to fulfill all these needs? And that we should assign civic identities and rights based on the collapse of these relationships into one?
• In what ways does the emphasis on marriage and coupling, especially in the same-sex marriage rights movement, neglect and further marginalize those who espouse other arrangements than the life relationships collapsed into one?
  
• Does the emphasis on same-sex marriage in LGBTQ advocacy render even more invisible and produce second-class citizens of queer folks who do not replicate heterosexual relationship norms of marriage/domestic partnerships?
• Finally, what is the function of marriage as a civic identity?

This last one is actually the question my thesis addresses, and it is a complex one. But thinking about it, and the other questions I pose, should make us question why our society rewards structuring both "private" and "public" spheres of life in terms of marriage and coupling and their affiliated expectations.

Sure, same-sex couples should have the same rights as heterosexual couples. That's not where my argument is centered. I'm just not convinced that so many rights should be allocated based on intimate coupling, and the assumptions that go along with it (see bullet #3). I personally advocate that civic identity should not be premised on intimate relationships or on the way one structures one's relational life. I see a value in affording certain benefits for those who are in economic dependencies, but that those dependencies should be unrelated to intimate life.

Further, we can begin to think about the other possibilities for living than the only one provided to us when we shake the assumption that marital coupling is and should be the center of social organization. Hell, it may even allow us to think of ways to resist consumerism, financial strains, the emotional stresses of work-family balances. Sustainable living and embracing the Slow Movement become more practical and plausible ways to live. The dirty commie idea of communal living or intentional communities as a shared approach to solving certain daily needs can be more commonplace. But this is a threat to aggressive capitalism by solving problems and meeting needs outside of the capitalist marketplace and reducing consumption. This too, of course, threatens the tax base by creating fewer discreet households by redefining 'household'. Shaking the emphasis on the individualistic and atomistic ideal of marriage and coupling as the ultimate conflation of relationship needs can indeed challenge 'rugged individualism' that has harmed values of community and shared responsibility. Indeed, for me, challenging the place of marriage as the civic identity par excellance is deeply politically progressive.

Thus, I argue that aggressively advocating (same-sex) marriage (or alternatively offering rights to "marriage like" relationships) tends to imply that the marriage-based structure of rights and privileges is just fine "as is" (and I'm not even going to broach the gender normativity still (re)produced in marriage). Instead, I'd like to advocate for different solutions, beyond marriage.

recommended reading: Michael Warner's Trouble With Normal (on my amazon recommendations)

cross-posted to The Reaction

see my part 2 here

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Thesaurus.com Says 'Female' is Equivalent to 'Weaker'

Both feministing and Jezebel reported this week that a Thesaurus.com entry has shown up for the word "weaker" where the only two entries are "female" and "lady." The entry has been removed so you can view the screenshot here.

My guess is this was supposed to be some sort of a joke, since not only have those two synonyms been removed, but if you look up "weaker" in Thesaurus.com, there is no entry for it, period, only for "weak." From looking at the site, though, it doesn't seem to be user-generated so if it was a joke, it was an "inside" one or a hacker--I hope.

Not only am I bringing this up because it is so blatantly sexist, not to mention completely unproductive, say for a student needing a real synonym, but because this connects a great deal to my previous post about gendered-language and the denigration of the female that is encapsulated by the term pussy, but also because language politics in terms of gender/sexuality has been popping up in the news. A couple weeks ago, weakness was aligned with femininity in the recent commentary on Obama's bowling performance, and Christopher Hitchens' characterized (gay male) Andrew Sullivan as acting like a 'lesbian' in order to insult him.

This Thesaurus.com incident proves how deeply embedded these associations are in our culture-- whether it goes to show that woman is "officially" connected to the meaning of "weak" or that a hacker understood this cultural connection and attempted to embed it into institutional discourse.

The synonyms they provide for the "weaker" synonyms "female" and "lady" are seems to be taken from the actual entries for various woman-related terms. And as long as we're talking about language and thesaurus.com, lets do some word analyzing.

"female":

noun-amazon, babe, beauty, broad, cutie, dame, doll, dowager, duchess, femme, filly, fox, gal, gentlewoman, girl, lady, madam, mama, matron, petticoat, pinup, seductress, she, siren, sis, skirt, temptress, tomato, wench; adjective-changeable, child-bearing, delicate, effeminate, effete, fair, feminine, fertile, gentle, girlish, girly, graceful, ladylike, maidenly, matronly, modest, muliebral, oviparous, petticoat, pistil-bearing, pistillate, pure, refined, reproductive, sensitive, she-stuff, shy, soft, tender, twisty, virgin, vixenish, weak, womanish, womanlike

vs. "male":

noun- ape, beefcake, boy, bruiser, buck, bull, chap, dude, father, fellow, gent*, gentleman, guy, he, he-man, hunk, jock, john, macho man, papa, stud, tiger, tom, wolf; adjective-macho*, manful, manlike, manly, potent, virile

Notice anything? Perhaps an emphasis on sexual appeal in terms of being female and sexual action in terms of being male? Perhaps mostly terms of confidence, self-identity, and positivity for male while female terms are largely relational (not individual), object-like, or negative.

Looking closer at these listings for each...

• Most of the entries for female and male regarded adults. However, while "girl" is among the 12 listings for "female," "boy" is not listed among the 14 listings for "male." I suppose there's a significant difference between a boy and a male, whereas between a girl and a female, not so much.
  
• Curiously, "men's movement" and "misogynist" is part of "male" while women's movement is absent from the "female" listings.
  
• "Drag queen" is under the "female" listings (not male).
  
• "Matronly," and "daughter" are part of female, while "family jewels," "virile," and "male pattern baldness" are in the listings under "male" (though male pattern baldness is notably not part of the definition of male), rather than "fatherly" and "son."
  
• There is a separate entry for "gigalo" under the male listings, but not "prostitute" under female. Maybe that's because pinup, seductress, temptress and vixenish are all definitions of "female," and "call girl" is one of the first listings under the search for "girl."
  

So how about looking at "girl":

babe, baby doll, bird, blonde, bobby-soxer, boytoy, broad, butterfly, canary, chick, coed, cupcake, cutie, dame, damsel, daughter, deb, debutante, doll, female, filly, gal, jail bait, lady, lassie, mademoiselle, maid, maiden, minx, miss, missy, mouse, nymph, nymphet, piece, queen, schoolgirl, she, sis, skirt, spring chicken, teenybopper, tomato, tomboy, virgin, wench, witch, woman

vs. "boy":

buck, cadet, chap, child, chip, dude*, fellow, gamin, guy, half-pint*, junior, lad, little guy*, master, punk*, puppy*, runt*, schoolboy, shaveling, shaver*, small fry*, sonny*, sprout*, squirt*, stripling, tadpole*, whippersnapper*, youngster, youth

Looking at the girl/boy listings, of which there were 50+of each...

• In the first few for "boy" were such listings as "boy wonder," "office boy," "mama's boy," "playboy"--one for boy's employment, one for a non-boyish boy, one for a boy's intellectual genius, and one for a man's (active and selfish) sexuality.
  
• In the first few for "girl" we listings like "girl Friday," "bachelor girl," "call girl," "cover girl"--one for girl's employment, one for her marital status, and two for her (passive) sexuality.
  
• Note that tomboy (the arguably female equivalent of mama's boy) is part of the definition of girl whereas mama's boy it outside of the definition of boy itself. This here reveals how ingrained how threatening troubling gender roles is for hegemonic, heteronormative masculinity in a way that it isn't as much for girls...so long as they are also "reproductive" and "pinups."
• Several of the terms for girl referred to sexuality, while the terms for boy simply referred predominately to youth. Even further, the sexual terms are those of the ubiquitous male fantasy of girls' sexuality: virgin and nymph, whereas the sexual terms related to (adult) "female" tended to cluster around her dangerousness: temptress, seductress.
• The boy is primarily a young man, whereas "girl" seems to have a discursive function of its own, producing a sexualized and appearance-oriented image of young femininity that will be coupled with being wifely and motherly as an adult female.
  

You might be thinking, "it's just Thesaurus.com...what's the big deal?" Well, Thesaurus.com and Dictionary.com are heavily used and are considered reputable sources. And words mean things. Language shapes thought, and what we are able to think. So long as we overload terms for female with passivity, sexualization, objectification, and motherhood, and male with activity, active sexuality and prowess, we will continue to think of men and women in these terms. Think about it--what do we call a woman who's sexually active--slut, loose, whore? What do we call a passive male sex object? Um, hunk...maybe? Or meaty? And of course juxtapose those terms with "delicate," "weak," and "sensitive," and maybe now we're seeing this isn't just an issue of a word or two.

And when "mama's boy" is an anomaly of "boy" while "tomboy" is part of the definition of "girl," we have some serious heteronormativity in our language. And when nymph and virgin, doll and cutie are the way we think of young girls rather than simply being not-yet women, some light is shed on our incredible social problem of girls' sexualization and the sexualization of the young and vulnerable (even if legal) in general. And why is there no term for an intelligent girl, like we have for "boy wonder"....just "cover girl"?

When we can't think without words, when we understand that words do not simply reflect our thought but actually shape it, we can begin to understand that they're not just words.

*for more of the same, check out dictionary.com for "woman" and "man."

cross-posted to The Reaction

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R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe "Outs" His Bandmates as "Heterosexual"

This is brilliant, and nothing less than I would expect from Stipe and R.E.M., who recently stated he's a "queer artist." This seems to me to be a response to his frustration over needing to "come out"; his lack of doing so had been read as "cowardly" rather than about one's sexual and intimate life being irrelevant and no one's damn business.

The coming-out parody that he performs is not with the point of criticizing "coming out," which for may queers is an important act, especially considering the history of queer invisibility. Rather, this parody reveals culture as heteronormative in that heterosexuality is assumed unless said otherwise and unless marked properly. It operates in a similar fashion that following up the question, "When did you first realize you were gay?" with "When did you first realize you were straight?" does.


In our culture we have a compulsion to know one's sexuality identity, which we presume tells us the "truth" about an individual, the "truth" of their sex acts, and allows us to render people's action, speech, and beliefs more meaningful due to the centrality that sexuality plays in how we conceive identity. Sexual identity becomes the way we can be explained and understood. (See Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality vol. 1, summary here)

This was especially evident in the J.K. Rowling/Dumbledore is gay incident this past fall. The announcement upset people because his sexual identity as gay was not made explicit in the text. Rowling's after-the-fact "revelation" of Dumbledore's sexuality operated less like a "coming out." Instead it underscored the cultural assumption of heterosexuality as the "default" sexuality, showing it to be normalized and exnominated. The personal lives of the book's adult characters were almost never discussed, yet this only became an issue because Dumbledore happened to be gay and therefore his personal life became of the utmost importance in making sense of his character. In the books, there was no lover, no obsession with musical theatre, no use of the word "fabulous!" I'm exaggerating of course, but what I'm indicating is that there was no overt way that the text produced him as gay. There was also no "coming out" moment in the text and he was not introduced as "gay" in the character's initial introduction (to the dismay of some gay activists). Of course, after the "revelation" people went through the texts and tried to re-read his character, with this "truth" in mind, and could thus "produce" him as gay.

I mean, look at the photo used to illustrate the BBC story, the caption "R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe in performance":



If that isn't an example of imposing a system of interpretation onto bodily acts that produce and understanding of gender and sexual identity, I don't know what does.

This complusion to know and distinguish genders and sexualities by making meaning of bodily acts really reflects back onto heteronormative culture and how fragile and vulnerable its own construction is.

This isn't to deny the value of "coming out"-clearly visibility of queer individuals as successful and caring people, present in every aspect of society is part of what is needed to disrupt social stigmas and assumptions. But I also think what Stipe is doing here is important too, and provokes a much-needed conversation about recent centrality and importance of sexuality to/as individual identity.

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Taco Bell Promo: Problematic? Yes. Misogynistic. Not Really.

Feministing recently posted about a new Taco Bell Promo, calling it "misogynistic." Since then I've seen a bit in the anti-feminism segment of the blogosphere, up in arms because "the feminists are at it again!" bitching over nothing because our abundant gender equality makes it so we have nothing else to complain about.

To be honest, I didn't think the ad was misogynist (as in perpetuating woman-hate), and I just moved on to reading the next feministing story. But me not classifying it as misogynistic doesn't mean it isn't deeply problematic.

The whole promo is this: you can "pretend" you are a fashion photographer by taking still images from digital video footage of a model on location (who happens to be in the current SI swimsuit issue, to be discussed further down). Yes, you read it right. It's really that stupid.

But, it's also problematic.


This report from MarketingVox hits the nail on the head:

SI and Taco Bell promoted the site with online ads on MTV.com and ESPN.com, as well as other sites with a large male audience.

• Whether or not men are the largest consumer "category" of Taco Bell (thereby justifying addressing its advertising to men) is inconsequential. Promos like these that directly and unapologetically target and reward heterosexual men treat all other customers as irrelevant. That there are more customers from one demographic group than another does not justify acting like the others don't exist.

• It also assumes that women's bodies are generically understood as THE body that should be objectified-that women's bodies do and should operate as desirable objects for heterosexual men and women alike. The creators might indeed respond by claiming that many women (lesbians too?) will enjoy the interactive site. But this begs the question, if it really is a both-gender activity, then why the heavy promotion on sites with large male audiences? If it is really seen as a gender-neutral activity, then why tailor the advertising of the promo to men as well?

• And it's insulting to and generalizes men as well. It's clear to me that this was thought to be a reward for heterosexual men-something that they would want to spend time doing in the evening, and also taking in the advertising for the new Taco Bell products. This a pretty shallow assumption of how men ideally spend their time and what they find compelling and valuable. And did I say yet that it's pretty dumb?

• Even more blatant, yet also often forgotten, there is an enormous amount of heteronormativity going on here. For even if the justification for the promo is that the Taco Bell audience is mostly male, there is the underlying assumption of the heterosexuality of those men. How else do you explain a promo targeted at men that rewards them with being able to "direct" (yes, the promo is called "Directing Danielle," which is kinda icky) the photographing of a swimsuit model?

Why don't they allow the winner to have a choice of model?, you ask. That would make sense to me. But that would presume that the promo is actually about the interactive activity on the website. But it's about corporate sponsorship. The problem is that the promo is sponsored by none other than Sports Illustrated, who invests more money and energy in promoting (non-athletic) women's bodies for visual consumption than in proper news coverage for female athletes. The mere existence of the swimsuit issue from a sports magazine (!) reminds us that the appropriate culturally-sanctioned use of women's bodies is not athletics, not strength, not aggression, not speed, not size, not bulk, but is being a sexually desirable object, that's small, that doesn't take up too much space, that is passively sprawled out for display, and one that is always, always available

But the Taco Bell promo is not about being able to photograph a model. It's about sponsorship revenue from a "Sports" news magazine that can't seem to realize that strongly advocating women as sex objects for the heterosexual male viewer, the consumer of choice, has no place in a magazine that is supposed to be about sports-women's and men's sports, with readers who are female and male, heterosexual and queer, white and people of color.

No one needs to apologize for finding women attractive, and this criticism does not suggest that finding a person attractive is wrong. But the problem here is the assumption that (straight men) are the center of the world and that women's bodies alone are the ubiquitous symbol of sexuality and beauty. And that's what needs apologizing for.

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A comment on "the best" sex EVER!

In "The 'best' is an enemy of the 'good'" Dr. Charlie Glickman at the Good Vibrations blog writes what I've thought. We should strive for pleasure, not achievement.

It's also important to remember that having good sex is not the same as a) looking "good" having sex, or b) looking like you're having good sex. Said otherwise, what looks good isn't always what is good.

I think a significant aspect of sexual displeasure is in the conjunction of 2 assumptions: that people in porn are having the best sex and that "I don't have sex like that". This is evident in the way we say "fu-k like a porn star" or the periodical Maxim article "How to date a porn star/stripper". The assumption is the actors who are paid to "look like" (whatever that means) they are are having the best sex ever actually are. I'm sure they are sometimes and sometimes they're probably planning the week's dinner menu's while they're continuously and monotonously moaning. The other assumption comes from the first: if they look like they're having the best sex and I don't have sex like that then maybe I'm not having the "best" sex.

And lo and behold, we have magazines that tell us how, in stories recycled on a quarterly basis, to have this "best" sex. And the cycle of culture continues.

What the article doesn't go into are the gender-variations on this theme in magazines. I have been meaning to do research on this by purchasing a year subscription to Maxim and Cosmopolitan (anyone want to fund me?!) and comparing the cover stories and analyzing the ads. Unfortunately, I really need to write my Master's Thesis first. I don't have the statistical proof, so we'll leave it at my observation: women's magazines articles around sex tend to focus on sex that "your man" wants, "your man's" secret desires, how to please "your man"; men's magazines tend to focus on how to get "your girl" (not woman!) to do ---", how to get a hottie to sleep with you, how to convince your girlfriend to let you go to strip clubs. Notice a trend? I'm not saying articles that focus on women's own sexual pleasure don't appear in Cosmo or that Maxim doesn't ever have a story about pleasing your girlfriend, but these are significantly disproportionate to the ones that focus on pleasing men.

Of course, these articles are unproductive besides-they assume everyone's sexual responses are the same and are articulated with heteronormative assumptions about sexual pleasure among heterosexual couples.

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