Pink

I love pink. It looks like health, spring, rosebuds and the cheeks of babies. Of all the decorative items in my apartment, I would approximate that forty percent are pink. Pink tapestry on the wall, pink glass votive holders, dusty pink velvet upholstering my dining chairs, pink stripes and spots on the leaves of my houseplants.

I have enough pink clothing to assemble an entire fuchsia outfit, hat-to-shoes. I did it one time in order to try to get excused from a jury. It didn’t work, so I sat at the day-long trial dressed like punk Barbie. The defendant, accused of assault with a deadly weapon, gave me a big smile as he entered the courtroom.

If he wanted his own pink outfit, he was out of luck, because in America, men don’t wear pink. That’s the only rule we have for colors. Everyone else can wear any color they please, but for half the population, sorry, no pink.

You might argue that there are other rules for wearing colors. You can’t wear a white dress to a wedding if you’re not the bride, and if you live in a neighborhood with gangs, your high school won’t permit you to come to class in red or blue. You can’t dress your baby girl in blue—unless it is a blue flowered dress with ruffles, in which case you can. A few limited rules…but when the guest leaves the wedding, or the student leaves the neighborhood, or the girl gets past the age of about two years old, then they are all free to wear any color without earning any concerned glances or snide comments.

Baby boys, on the other hand, are never dressed in pink clothes. There are plenty of flowery blue baby dresses, but there are no rugged boyish pink baseball jerseys covered in pink dinosaurs or pink fire trucks, because boys just don’t wear pink, period.

We all know the rule is arbitrary. At the beginning of the century, pink was the color for boys, a variation of aggressive red, while tranquil blue was appropriate for girls.

Still, like all our bizarre cultural mores, it seems only natural that pink is not for boys. A recent study tried to demonstrate the naturalness of this association, claiming that women have a greater innate preference for pink than men do, all the better for performing primitive women’s duties like finding ripe berries and determining if a child has a fever.

The methodology of this study was widely considered unsound, but it’s easy to see where they got their hypothesis. Little girls seem to love pink as soon as they love anything, just like all my friends’ sons have been obsessed with trains and garbage trucks since they were old enough to point and squeal. Pink was one of my favorite colors (second to red) when I was little, until mid-elementary school, when I decided that green better represented the non-frivolous person I wanted to be. But pink worked itself back into heavy rotation in my clothing during graduate school, when I didn’t care whether I was frivolous anymore.

For the first two years that I studied martial arts, I avoided wearing anything pink to class. I was often offered pink gear: We have pink boxing gloves made especially for women!

I didn’t want any part of it. I had seen women who wore pink boxing gloves, and there were two types of them. The first type were martial arts newbies who wanted to show that they were still cute and feminine, even thought they were learning to fight. That type made up approximately ninety-five percent of the pink-gloved girls. The other five percent—meaning maybe two women I knew of—were straight up badasses who could easily take out a man twice their size. They wore pink as war paint, a challenge to anyone who dared to view them as cute.

I knew I wasn’t that second type of woman, and I didn’t want to be the first type, so I avoided all pink. Not just in my equipment, but also in any clothing I wore to my martial arts schools, including my training clothes and my street clothes. I didn’t want my male training partners to think of me as female, so like a baby boy, I wore blue, grey, orange, red, anything but pink.

Eventually I got so used to avoiding the pink shoes and t-shirts that make up a good percentage of my wardrobe that I forgot I was doing it. One day, a male classmate made a comment about pink being my favorite color. How did he know, I wondered?

“It’s a joke,” he explained. “You’re not the kind of girl who wears pink.”

“I’m not?” I asked, surprised. Why would he think that? Then I remembered: because I never wore it to class. Like the self-monitoring prisoners in Foucault’s panopticon, I had enforced the masculine no-pink rule upon myself.

After that, I started wearing pink all the time. I would wear my pink motorcycle boots to and from class, and pink t-shirts when I trained. I wasn’t scary enough to become a type-two pink-gloves girl, but I was secure enough to stop pretending I was a boy.

Lately, though, the boys at one of my kickboxing schools have taken to wearing pink. It started with some bright pink kickboxing shorts that the school was selling. They only came in sizes so tiny that none of the women could fit our curvy hips into them. They sat unpurchased in the display case until the very small, but decidedly male, Thai teacher started wearing a pair.

Of course, being a non-American, he probably didn’t believe that pink was a girls’ color. In Thailand, pink is traditionally associated with Tuesday and recently has been worn to show support for ailing king Bhumibol Adulyadej.

Whatever his own associations with the color were, leading class in his pink shorts, he was like the type-two pink-gloves girls, a tiny badass fighter daring you to look askance at his shorts so he’d have a reason to kick your head off. Soon he began adding more pink to his outfit: pink t-shirt, pink hand wraps, pink ankle supports.

Then all the boys at the school started wearing pink. The school purchased multiple shipments of pink handwraps to keep up with the demand. I suppose they are using the color to show that they are type-two scary men like their teacher. Or maybe they just think it's pretty.

Coke Chunhawat

Christmas

Generally speaking, I’m a pretty privileged American. I am white, I’m able-bodied, I have a good education, a professional career, all the things that get me an invitation to participate in mainstream American culture.

But then, once a year, that culture engages in a month-long ritual that I have absolutely no part in. It starts in late November, as the decorations appear, and the stores launch their special sales and promotions, and every commercial on TV tries to convince some other viewer that something not normally thought of as a gift (a power tool, gold coins, a lottery ticket, a donation to a charity) would in fact be just the right gift to bring a glow to his loved one’s heart.

This cultural phenomenon starts out subtle and easy to ignore. By mid-December, though, it is all anyone can talk about. It is on everyone’s mind: “Are you ready for it? Have you finished your shopping?” People bring desserts to their workplaces and have parties to celebrate its impending arrival.

And then this fervor builds to a climax, and the day arrives. Everything goes abruptly quiet. Streets are empty, stores are closed, an eerie silence reminiscent of Superbowl Sunday overtakes the city centers and shopping districts.

Then it’s all over, gone as enigmatically as it arrived, and I reacquaint myself with this culture that has seemed so alien and bizarre for the last month, my culture, once again.

Christmas isn’t even a religious holiday anymore, numerous snotty high school acquaintances of mine used to inform me. Why don’t you Jews just give it up and celebrate it already? It’s the same question that gets asked of every minority whose minority status is based on a behavior: Why can’t lesbians just suck it up and marry a man? Why can’t left-handed people just use their right hand? Why can’t those Muslim women stop wearing that crazy veil?

From the outside, the question makes sense: why not celebrate Christmas? It’s fun, it’s festive, there are presents; what’s the downside? But people don’t just start celebrating holidays they have never celebrated before. Who would be the first member of my family to declare, This year, we’re getting a tree and buying a bunch of ornaments for it! This year we’re going to sing Christmas carols and putting up tinsel! This year, Santa’s coming for the first time!

My family has never done these things, and they don’t hold any meaning for me. The Jews I know who celebrate Christmas do so because they have Christians or former Christians in their families. I do know a few Jewish people whose families just love holidays and so decided to put up a tree or some decorations, but they’re a rarity. Religious Jewish people abstain from holidays celebrating Jesus on principle, but the rest of us view Christmas about like Kwanza or Ramadan, just with a lot more publicity: just fine, but not something that belongs to us.

When I was in high school, I worked at a Jewish gift and book store. When customers would ask us if we were open on Christmas, my boss would arch her eyebrows and say, “We call that day December 25th.” This was meant to answer their question: that day is not a holiday around here.

The message wasn’t always received: “So, are you open on December 25th?” people would ask.

“Unless it’s the Sabbath,” she would reply.

Although I worked at the Jewish bookstore, my family was not very religious. We didn’t go to synagogue when I was growing up. My parents sent my sister and me to a secular Jewish Sunday school at the Jewish Community Center, meant to enhance our sense of Jewish identity. There we learned about Jewish history, holidays, and ceremonies, but not about what we should believe or what God—or G-d, as my teachers called him—wanted us to do.

Before Sunday school, I didn’t always know what it meant to be Jewish, but I learned early what it meant to not be Christian. When I came home from preschool one day excited for Easter, which we had been informed was taking place that weekend, my parents had the grim duty of telling me that we did not celebrate that holiday.

“Why not?” I asked, disappointed at the thought of the candy and Easter eggs I would not be receiving as predicted by my teachers.

“Because we don’t believe in Jesus,” my father said.

Jesus. I had heard that word before. I was pretty sure it referred to something important.

“What if I do?” I asked.

“You don’t,” said my mother.

Not only did Jews inherently not believe in Jesus, but all the other characters associated with Christian holidays. I had to learn to remember that some kids were pretty sensitive about their delusions. In second grade, I got kicked hard in the leg by a third-grade boy because I said that Santa Claus didn’t exist. But he’s eight, I thought to myself, baffled that someone could be so naïve at such an advanced age.

Now that I’m old enough not to miss the presents and desserts, I still feel like I miss out on something because of Christmas. My teaching semester ends about two days before Christmas Eve. This has usually been a dreaded time of year for me. I have all the free time in the world, but all my friends are out of town or occupied with visiting family. I’m too tired to do something useful like clean my apartment or write the syllabi for my spring courses. It would be a great time to go shopping for some clothes…but no, it’s two days before Christmas, a horrible time to try to shop for anything. It’s dark, usually raining, horrible weather to go for a run or a hike. Whenever I get my annual jury duty summons, I defer it to December 23rd. If they want to hold a trial that day, I’m there; it’s the most useless time of the year.

This year, I had several invitations to Christmas parties. They were all with people I like a lot, and would have been fun enough, so I wondered why I didn’t feel like going. Then I realized: I have started to look forward to not doing anything on Christmas. Just like the Superbowl, it’s a rare chance to withdraw from the stream of our cultural calendar, to enjoy the meditative pleasure of disconnection and focus on ourselves. So maybe I do celebrate Christmas after all.

Palo Alto

In a city of the future, it is difficult to concentrate.

—Radiohead, “Palo Alto”

During my first year in California, when I was nine, a group of local parents wrote and produced a theater piece called Perfect Palo Alto. It was a series of skits that lovingly mocked the eccentricities of my new home: Every single adult here works in computers! Our city is populated with well-to-do ex-sort-of-hippies! We’re all really liberal, overeducated, and self-righteous!

This is a weird place, I thought. No one would have ever written a play like that about Framingham, Massachusetts, or Nashua New Hampshire, the most recent cities I had lived in. What would you even say about those places? We’re a suburb of Boston! We have a big mall! And what practical New England parent would ever decide to write that play, much less be seen by their children and peers performing in it?

Palo Alto, I came to understand, was a weird town that prided itself on its weirdness. It was like that kid who makes sure to do everything on purpose to be as bizarre as possible; and, not surprisingly, it was filled with kids like that. Everyplace I went seemed haunted by a strange hippy heritage that traced back to the Sixties. Grace Slick and Joan Baez both went to my high school. My favorite coffee shop, Saint Michael’s Alley, used to be a hangout for the Grateful Dead when they were still the Warlocks. Only back then, the coffee shop had been housed in a different building, one that had long since been converted into the Varsity Theater, where you could watch Rocky Horror or Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation and imagine Jerry Garcia having a smoke there back when he looked like a Chasidic Jew.

The town reveled in its iconoclasm, the college-town in the midst of the Silicon Valley, the town only twenty minutes from San Jose that considered itself a steadfast satellite of San Francisco (an hour’s drive).

When my economics and government teachers explained the difference between liberals and conservatives, they would always say, “Conservative voters tend to be more prevalent in wealthier areas. Where we live is an exception, though.”

And was it ever an exception. Growing up in Palo Alto, Republicans were like polar bears; I’d only ever seen one on TV. Before an election, every front yard sign, every bumper sticker, every snide comment from an adult seemed to be preaching to a city-wide choir: Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton. A few of my fellow students claimed doggedly to be Republicans, in what always struck me as an Alex P. Keaton style act of contrarian rebellion. I never met a real Republican until I went to college—at U.C. Berkeley, a school I chose over a small liberal arts school primarily because I had heard there were Republicans there and I wanted to confirm that they really existed.

Palo Alto’s demographic and social weirdness, when I was growing up, seemed to stem from the fact that people mostly moved there for the school district. At a time when California’s schools were in a fast decline, Palo Alto’s schools were consistently rated amongst the highest in the nation. These schools kept the property values sky-high for the small, single-story, space-efficient tract houses that pervaded most of the city.

In nearby Atherton, every resident lived in a mansion, but they shared a lackluster school district with neighboring Menlo Park. This incongruity used to strike me as odd, until I realized that many affluent areas don’t care about the quality of their public education system, since the residents would all be sending their children to private schools.

But in Palo Alto, all of my friends’ parents were like mine: they had sunk all of their money into a small, expensive house so that they could send their children to a top-ranked public school. So while I grew up in a town with a high average income and high property values, no one I knew ever seemed to have much money. We all had parents who carefully budgeted, who fretted over the money we spent on clothes and food, who considered every purchase seriously: Do you really need that?

Thinking back, I realize that our parents could have been living in bigger houses, driving fancier cars, not worrying about every dollar, if they had chosen to live in cheaper cities with lesser school districts. Palo Alto self-selected for people who valued education—public education—over every other luxury in life, and that was what made it truly a town of weirdos.

The values of our parents seemed to have rubbed off on most of the students I knew. Certainly the interest in education did. Grades were so high that my school could not publicize class rankings for fear of keeping us from being admitted to universities. My 3.6 GPA put me in the 68th percentile of my graduating class.

But our view of money seemed to come from our parents as well. In a city with one of the highest real estate prices per square foot in the country, no one wanted to be seen as rich; instead, students tended to brag about how poor they were. Having a lot of money, or spending it frivolously, was something to be ashamed of. In my high school, it was considered horribly uncouth to have anything expensive or new. I knew one very rich kid whose parents bought him a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday, and everyone mocked him behind his back. He was one of the handful of people I knew who had a new car at all; most of my friends, like me, did not have a car, and none had a car manufactured after the Seventies. At the high school across town from mine, the newspaper ran a “Wreck of the Week” column featuring students boasting about the decrepit state of their vehicles. There seemed to be an acute understanding that we had not earned the money we spent on clothes or cars, and that wasting your parents’ money didn’t make you cool; it made you a spoiled brat.

This rule probably did not hold amongst the small crowd of “popular” kids, but no one cared about them. While they held some sway in middle school, by high school, they could no longer manage to lord despotically over the masses, hopelessly outnumbered as they were. All the horrors I hear reported from other high schools—the football players and cheerleaders and game days and school spirit—were all reversed at my school. Sporting events were under-attended, with teachers begging us to show up. School spirit was for losers. I never once heard a girl admit to being a cheerleader without an embarrassed disclaimer: “Actually I’m a cheerleader. But it’s just because I’m really into dance.”

I moved away from Palo Alto at what ended up being the dawn of the dot-com era. When I applied to college, I had visited the internet one time. By the time I graduated, my father was asking me whether I might want to put off the Ph.D. program I had just been accepted to and make a bunch of quick money as a tech writer, just like every other jackass with an English degree.

Whenever I came back to visit Palo Alto, every other car was a BMW or Jaguar, and there was a new yuppie restaurant in the place of each quirky old diner or bookstore I used to love. Saint Michael’s Alley had been converted from a grungy coffeehouse to a stylish gourmet brunch spot. The Varsity Theater became a Borders bookstore. All the eccentric little corners were swept clean, as if the weird haunted hippy town of my youth had never existed.

During those boom years, when I would visit my mom, I used to go for a run around my old neighborhood—a run that took me past Steve Jobs’s house, an unassuming neighborhood landmark—and each time, I would pass at least four houses knocked all the way down to their foundations. They were about to be built up again from scratch, now taller and with basements and bloated out to the far edges of their lots.

Like every affluent place, Palo Alto seems culturally improved by economic downturn. The bloated houses still stand, but I don’t see so many knocked down when I visit now. The roving crowds of dot-com twenty-somethings in cocktail attire no longer swarm University Avenue in search of mates. Palo Alto still makes me a little sad, seeing it from the outside, its sanitized plazas and former-dives where my teenaged friends used to write on the walls with Sharpies. Still, that is only from the outside. I have a lot of hope that the high school kids are still traipsing around like lost hoboes somewhere I never go, that young Grace Slick is there writing scandalous songs, hidden away somewhere my respectable grown-up eyes can no longer see.

Empire Building

I never used to be able to stand A Prairie Home Companion. I would turn on the radio and there, like a cartoon hound dog with his mouth full of mud, would be the voice of Garrison Keillor, singing some old standard song that he had slightly rewritten the words to or telling some nonsensical rambling story about some mildly dysfunctional couple in Minnesota.

What is this, I would ask myself, quickly changing the channel. And why would anyone listen to it?

Then about a year or two ago, I suddenly became fascinated with the show. I would listen every week, waiting to hear what extremely similar thing would happen. Would a cowboy meet up with his old flame…again? Would a Midwestern expatriate writer have a guilt-ridden phone conversation with his provincial parents…yet again?

Once you embrace the logic of A Prairie Home Companion, it’s easy to get sucked in to the bizarre parallel universe it depicts. The show’s audience seems to love the predictability of it, the comforting if illogical repetition. They laugh hysterically at the same joke about Lutherans every week. They love the twisting personal narrative, often told in the second person (and right about then is when you realize…) that always ends up with the same song about rhubarb pie. They chuckle as Keillor inevitably finds himself romantically attached to a much younger, much more attractive woman, and even on the radio they can tell she’s out of his league. And when the show is over, they can even go on the show’s website if they want to delve more deeply in to this make-believe world where not only are all the children above average, but where the red states are full of old lefties and everyone loves gospel music and spoken word poetry and choirs performing the native folksongs of former Soviet Bloc countries.

Predictability like this brings a certain comfort with it. That’s why people enjoy sitcoms, or watching the same Saturday Night Live characters play out variations on the same gag week after week. The joke ceases to be funny and instead becomes soothing like a lullaby.

That’s how I found this alternate prairie reality, a strangely calming bizzaro-world. Each time I heard that Keillor had written an offensive article in a magazine (why gay people shouldn’t get married; why Jews shouldn’t write Christmas songs), I would go look it up, eager to see what new levels of curmudgeonry he had achieved. And because he existed in a half-reality where it was never clear whether Keillor spoke as himself or some sort of parody of himself, the ridiculous beliefs he espoused were more quaint than upsetting.

The more I read and the more I listened, the more I thought: I want an empire. Not a big, scary, hegemonic empire like Rome or the USSR or McDonald’s. Just a small, self-contained empire with a legion of devoted followers who are willing to celebrate my every bizarre whim as utter genius, to lovingly embrace my foibles, to delight at the same joke for years and decades on end.

I have been admiring a number of these small empires lately, and the one I really want isn’t Garrison Keillor’s, but Dan Savage’s. Like Keillor, the sex-advice columnist and gay rights activist has his own brand of logic and language, including a number of acronyms for concepts that are so fundamental to his reasoning that they require shorthands. A good lover is GGG, “good, giving, and game,” which means that you had better let your boyfriend suck on your toes if he enjoys it, no matter how boring or gross it seems to you. If you don’t, Savage will urge him to DTMFA, “dump the mother fucker already.” These abbreviations are so well-known to Savage’s audience that they often misuse them in incorrect and even disturbing ways, forgetting what they actually stand for:

I love my boyfriend but he’s moving out of the country in two months and we’re going to break up then. Should I stay with him for these last months or DTMFA?

I’m a mother of a twelve-year-old son, and I’m doing my best to raise him in a GGG manner.

As these terms suggest, Savage’s advice and opinions follow certain well-worn paths. Like Keillor’s audience, Savage’s devotees, including myself, know what to expect from him. Yet I read and listen to him with a voracious appetite that speaks to either the comfort of the familiar or perhaps some sort of subliminal brainwashing. And I have come to realize that many people I know are equally brainwashed.

For example, when I visited my sister recently, I started to mention something that Dan Savage had said on his podcast. I started summarizing a phone call that he had taken and responded to.

“To save time,” my sister interrupted me, “you can just assume I’m familiar with every episode of Dan Savage’s podcast.”

Sometimes I wonder if the men who rule the empires I admire ever get sick of them—sick of the routines, the predictable logic, the cute terms and sayings? Does Garrison Keillor ever wake up and think, I don’t ever want to sing that song about rhubarb pie again? Does Dan Savage ever get sick of having to talk about sex every single day? Does Ira Glass ever get sick of saying, And what happened next was truly bizarre, as though this is the first time he has ever narrated a bizarre occurence? As successful as they have been in building up their own recognizable brands and selling them to adoring audiences, do they ever get horribly, nauseatingly sick of themselves?

This is the reason that I would be a horrible emperor, not to mention a horrible CEO, middle-manager, public relations officer, or cheerleader; I would get horribly sick of myself. To be a representative of something, to be an unceasing champion, is a really draining job, one that requires a kind of confidence and perseverance that I don’t have a lot of. This is part of the reason I admire the people who are able to maintain an empire, because I appreciate how grueling it is to be the leader of a cult of personality.

I attend a number of schools that are run by a single person. Each of these schools reflects the vision and energy of its teacher: the flashy muay thai school with the blaring music and assertive display of clothing and equipment for sale; the tidy jiu jitsu school where there are specially designated spots for shoes and water bottles and sweaty students and dry guests; the yoga studio whose bare wooden floors are all business but whose ceiling is decorated with Christmas lights and flying monkey puppets; and the one I relate to most strongly, the kung-fu school treading so lightly in its rented gymnasium that it is only a school when we are practicing there.

Sometimes I see signs that my yoga teacher or my kung fu teacher are tired of their jobs, bored with us, their students, discouraged by the low energy of the class. Perhaps they are not really discouraged at all; perhaps I am projecting onto them the discouragement I feel as a student in a sluggish class, the discouragement I fear they feel because I would feel it in their place.

I know that if my suspicion is correct, if my teacher really is disheartened, bored, uninspired, that he can simply close the school. I have recurrent dreams that my kung fu teacher announces at the end of class one day that he is closing the school. I suppose this isn’t such an unreasonable fear, given that I joined his school after my previous kickboxing teacher closed his school in just that way, except he didn’t wait until the end of class: “This will be the last day,” he said casually, as his students jumped rope to warm up. “I’m cancelling the class. But go ahead and work out on your own today. See you later.” And he walked out the door.

This is the danger of a monarchy: it ceases to exist without the monarch. My uneasiness with devoting myself to a single school that could disappear at any moment must have something to do with why I feel more comfortable with a diversified portfolio of schools, even though my heart is fully invested in one of them.

But more, noting the empires created by my teachers, I often think: I am really glad I don’t have that power or that responsibility. I am a teacher, too. But I could quit my job tomorrow and my school would keep on going without me, just as they did before they ever knew I existed, unaware of me being born thousands of miles away the same year they were being founded, and just as they will after I retire and presumably long after I die.

If the only thing keeping the school alive was my own faith in it—if it ran on my energy alone—I don’t know if I could keep it open. Would I have given up during one of those semesters when all my students were disgruntled and bitter and I wondered what business I had being in charge of them? Would I persevere through those times? Or would I decide the entire enterprise was futile and go find some other way to spend half my waking hours?

Every time I walk into a class and my teacher is still there, I know he could have decided not to be, and I am grateful. My teachers might not be able to imagine how grateful, just as I often imagine my students would hardly notice if I were replaced with some other teacher or a t.v. screen or a robot. And I’m also grateful that, nice as an empire sounds sometimes, I have the security and freedom of not having to be an emperor.

It's a Girl

As I sat on the couch holding Samantha’s newborn baby, her mother came through the front door carrying a small package wrapped in plastic.

“From Vivian,” her mother said, handing Samantha one of those ornate little envelopes that I had only seen on Chinese New Year.

“How much?” Samantha’s mother asked her.

Samantha opened the envelope and showed me the contents: a crisp new hundred dollar bill.

“Very good,” said Samantha’s mother.

She turned to me. “This is a Chinese tradition,” she told me. “When you have a boy baby, is traditional to bring money and meat.” She pointed at the package she was holding. I couldn’t see through the opaque white plastic wrapper to figure out what sort of meat it contained, whether it was chicken or beef, raw or cooked.

“For boy, you give money and meat,” she repeated.

“What if it’s a girl?” I asked. Samantha’s mother didn’t seem to understand my question. Samantha repeated it: “Ma. What do they give you if the baby is a girl?”

“Oh, if a girl,” said Samantha’s mother, nodding her head. “You still bring meat, but less money. Maybe twenty dollars.”

Samantha and I looked at each other and burst into hysterical laughter. Her mom joined us laughing, too. It was a sinister moment of female bonding as we laughed in shared acknowledgment of our lesser worth.

For two women raised in America like Samantha and myself, this laughter is partly directed at the quaint misogyny of less enlightened nations. A daughter is to be celebrated with one-fifth the enthusiasm of a son, we are thinking. How cute!

In America, at the moment of birth, a daughter is worth as much as a son. Nowadays, she could grow up to be anything—almost. As long as she doesn’t want to pilot a submarine or become a philosophy professor, the sky is the limit. Hell, if she’s white and Christian, we now have documented evidence that she could grow up to almost become president of the United States.

This is how I was raised—to believe I could be anything I wanted to be. My father imbued my sister and I with all the high expectations he would have had for a son, buying us erector sets and electrical engineering kits, staying up late doing mathematical proofs with us while we were still in elementary school, expecting us to magically know how to throw a baseball properly because it came naturally to him.

School confirmed this impression of equality for me. The honors math and science classes I took were equally populated by boys and girls, and the girls were often the strongest students. Many of those girls went on to become scientists and engineers. While I have not talked to most of them about their experiences, I don’t get the impression that they had to crack any significant glass ceilings on their way to these positions. The main obstacle they felt was loneliness, as the numbers of their fellow women scientists and engineers dwindled, as women like me and my sister tossed aside our technical aptitudes in favor of more traditionally feminine careers.

The ideology of equality in high schools like mine is why I’m never surprised when my students believe sexism no longer exists.

“Men and women are equal now,” a girl in hot pants and a halter top will say, and her male classmate will nod serenely in his baggy sweats and oversized tee.

If you ask them if men and women are treated the same in our culture, though, their narrative is strikingly different.

“My friend has a twin brother, and he’s allowed to go out whenever he wants and do whatever he wants, but she has a curfew. They’re the same exact age.”

“How do her parents explain the difference?” I asked.

“They say, You’re a girl and he’s a boy.”

I ask the students why parents would treat their children differently based on their genders.

“They don’t want their daughters to get pregnant,” the students say.

What if their sons get their girlfriends pregnant? Is that as bad?

Noooo, they all shake their heads. Definitely not as bad.

My friend who teaches health told me today that during a discussion of types of contraception, one of these same students volunteered a chastity belt as an option.

“I’m not writing that one on the board,” she said.

“I’m serious,” the student said. “If I have a daughter, she’s never going to be allowed to have sex.”

This is the logic that explains the articles opposing abortion that my students often bring in as part of a debate assignment. Young people need to take responsibility for their actions, the articles say. A young woman needs to learn that if she wants to be sexually active, there are consequences to that decision.

I’ve scanned so many of these articles, and found nary a mention of boys. Articles praising abstinence-only education will laud the positive outcome of far fewer high school girls having sex (or admitting that they do), without ever explaining if this same result was seen in boys; evidently the main goal was to stop the girls from having sex.

These little inequalities and indignities are well-known and obvious, tiresome and uncouth to talk about, so we don’t. No one needs to hear that we still live in a society where women are largely judged on how they look, while men are largely judged on what they can do. If you go out to a bar where men and women are looking for mates, it’s not worth the breath it would take to point out that the men are off-handedly mentioning how they can shoot a gun and they’re working on their pilot’s license and they are an ace at poker, while the women are flashing their cleavage and batting their heavily-mascara’d eyelashes and making the perfect cute face whenever someone points a camera in their direction. If he’s marginally handsome, so much the better, and if she’s really good at playing pool, well, that’s a small enough transgression to be sexy, as long as she’s really pretty.

Only stupid people play out these tired gender roles, you’ll say, and you’ll be right, mostly. I know plenty of women who are considered quite attractive, and whose attractiveness lies in their intelligence and skill—as long as they are also pretty and thin. However, I don’t know any women who aren’t conventionally attractive but who are largely courted for their intelligence, sense of humor, athleticism, or power. There are a million billion trillion men like this, who are funny-looking, with protruding bellies or bad clothing or pockmarked faces or the wrinkles that give them character, who are still considered models of attractiveness, sex symbols, because they are amazing actors or athletes or singers or businessmen.

You’ll say this has less to do with social roles and more to do with whom we are trying to attract. Men are fundamentally visual in their attraction, you’ll say, and women are less so, which explains why gay men are more likely than lesbians are to feel pressure to be good-looking. And you’ll be right, maybe. Maybe if we stopped feeling the need to be so damned attractive all the time, we could accomplish a lot more.

I think this hypothesis could explain the decided lack of femininity in the two recently appointed Supreme Court justices, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. Perhaps they needed to renounce the distraction of feminine self-presentation in order to focus on the achievements that got them to the Supreme Court. Or maybe that's what we need to believe about them. It almost seems that, to be seen as credible in one of the most powerful jobs in the country, women have to present themselves as men. The female mannerisms, the politeness, coyness, flirtiness that characterize femininity all suggest lack of credibility, a lack of focus on what's really important. Women can be judged by what we can do, but only if we are willing to renounce our femininity.

Maybe that’s why my friend and her mother and I laugh so bitterly at the greater promise that the Chinese see in their sons. It is not because the girl can’t grow up to do everything that the boy can; it’s because society won’t find her attractive if she does, and, we are horribly afraid, neither will we.

Going Off the Meds

The first time that I experienced panic attacks, I was seventeen, and I felt like I was living in a horror movie. I would be walking down the street in the middle of the day, when suddenly the light would go all funny. The ominous overture to Carl Orff's Carmina Burana would be playing faintly in the background, except I hadn’t heard Carmina Burana before except in scenes depicting hell in movies. The color of everything would be sickly and wrong and I would feel all the blood in my body drain to my feet, and there would be the presence of some sickly grotesque thing that defied the normal order of the world, some dark thing come from the other side to suck me under.

This feeling would overcome me every few minutes, hundreds of times each day, so that life was rather like creeping my way through the hotel in The Shining, or maybe one of those new homemade-looking horror movies whose advertisements celebrate how “disturbing” they are.

The therapist I saw took me to the psychiatrist to see if he would recommend medication. He shot a dismissive glance at my gaunt figure and tattered thrift-store clothing and said, “If this is still happening in six months, we’ll give you some antidepressants.”

Six months, I remember thinking in horror. If this is still happening in six months, I’ll be dead.

Six months later, the attacks weren’t gone, but through weekly therapy, I was learning to control them, so that I could usually anticipate them and stop them before they got really bad. I learned that I needed to get a full night’s sleep and eat reasonable meals and not wallow in stress or immerse myself in bizarre, alienating music and literature, frustrating lessons, but ones that I suppose my body thought it was high time for me to learn.

Other than sedatives, I don’t think anti-anxiety medication had been developed back then. If it was, I certainly wasn’t offered any. Since that time, I have had several other bad bouts of panic attacks, and I have never been offered any sort of medicine by the psychiatric and medical professionals with whom I have consulted.

From the stories that I’ve heard, that you’ve heard, too, I am an anomaly. Friends, books, TV shows, magazines all tell us that psychotropic drugs are dispensed like corn syrup, an efficient solution to our culture’s wealth of mental disorders that avoids the expense of psychological treatment while providing easy revenue to the drug companies. At times, I have felt cheated—why haven’t they offered me any of these “overprescribed” drugs? Am I not screwed up enough to warrant a healthy dose of that Prozac they’re debating in all the magazines, that Paxil and Zanex that they seem to be prescribing for everyone else I know?

I especially feel cheated when I think of that horribly suffering teenager I once was, and wonder: couldn’t they have given me something? Surely there must have been something, some sedative, some kind of valium or Quaalude or horse tranquilizer that could have calmed down my overactive brain, rather than leaving me to pull myself, with grasping bloody fingers and a year of therapy, up out of that horror movie and into some kind of sane, properly-ordered mental functioning.

On the other hand, when I watch the struggles of the many people I know who have been placed on medication, I feel like I got out easy, relieved and lucky to have not been pulled into a deeper kind of morass—the engulfing cycle of being on medication and getting off of it.

I’ve watched a lot of people try to go off of their medication, and from what I’ve seen, the process of going off of medication for mental illness will in itself make a person mentally ill. I’ve watched some of the closest people in my life shake and cry and wail that they need the medicine, with all the desperation of heroin addicts. I’ve watched people adjust the dosage—just a little more now, now a little less, cut down by half, and if you completely freak out, go back up by a quarter. One friend who struggled with her romantic life went to her primary care physician to get referred to a therapist, and instead got prescribed Prozac; a year later, her struggle was not to maintain a healthy relationship but to get off the Prozac.

Of course, one obvious explanation for the anguish caused by going off medication is that the medication is needed, and that it is the only thing that was preventing the suffering in the first place. Your brain is like any other organ, and if your brain is sick, you may require medicine for the rest of your life, just as you would if you suffered from thyroid or heart disease.

This may be the case for some mentally ill people, but as far as I understand, it is impossible to diagnose conclusively who they are. There is no physical test to diagnose mental illnesses; they are diagnosed by symptom. It is as though I went to the doctor complaining of fatigue and thirst and, based on those complaints, I was assumed to have diabetes and put on a regimen of insulin. If my symptoms abated in a few months, it might be difficult to tell if this was due to the insulin or something else altogether. The only way to tell would be for me to stop taking the insulin, and see if I felt sick again. Except, since my body is accustomed to the insulin, I may feel faint and ill when I stop taking it, and this could be a normal sign of withdrawal, or a deadly symptom of my now-untreated illness, and it may only be my death that provides a conclusive answer.

I don’t mean to insult psychiatry as an imprecise science. I have seen many people I care about treated with drugs that seem to have saved their lives, and I will always be an avid supporter of anybody’s right to stay on a medication that is preventing them from being miserable, numb, non-functional, or delusional. I know firsthand what mental illness can be, and if the path to my own health lay in a pill, I would take it without hesitation.

A few weeks ago, on the second anniversary of the death of David Foster Wallace, I heard several radio programs discussing his life, his writing, and his battle with depression. Wallace had done something that I have seen so many people I care about do: he reached a happy, stable time in his life, and, no longer suffering the symptoms of his depression, he decided to go off of the medicine that he had taken for years.

The people in my life have done this with varying levels of success. A few people I know have actually managed to go cold turkey, and found that the depression they experienced as young adults seemed to have dissipated with maturity. But more often, my friends and family members have found that their depression returned. They may be able to take lower doses of the antidepressants, but can’t seem to go off of them entirely.

David Foster Wallace’s version of this process sends a chill through anyone who takes antidepressants or cares about somebody who does: when he stopped taking his medication, his depression returned full-force, and when he returned to his medicine, it no longer worked, and he committed suicide.

It’s the fear of this very sort of dependence that leads so many people I know to want to get off medication. What if there is some disaster? I don’t want to be unable to function without medicine. Unlike diabetics and other people who have a diagnosable, physiological need for a medication, people with illnesses like anxiety and depression are never sure just how dependant they really are, nor are their doctors. It’s impossible to find out just how dependant you are on antidepressants without risking your life or your sanity.

Now when I watch people I know try to reduce or go off their medicine, I give grudging thanks to that judgmental psychiatrist who did not want to give me medication when I was a teenager. Without a chemical remedy, I had to figure out how to make my own mind healthy. I learned a lot of skills that I have used throughout stressful times in my life, even times when my panic attacks have returned almost as strongly as the first ones I experienced. I have never had to wonder whether I really need a medication, to feel the temptation to turn to it when times are difficult, to try to distinguish anxiety caused by needing medication from anxiety caused by withdrawing from medication. I don’t believe that everyone’s mental health problems can be solved without medicine, but I will be forever grateful to know that mine can, and to have the tools to do it.

The illustration depicts Berkeley's Hate Man. I don't know if he ever went on or off his meds.

Inspirational YouTube Videos

These are the words I most dread at the end of a student presentation:

And now, we’re going to show a video that sums up our topic.

Then it comes: four minutes long, the mournful tones of Sarah McGlaughlin or Suzanne Vega playing in the background, the heartrending images, the atrocious use of punctuation.

As soon as the students announce the video, I cringe. Never mind that these videos are a kind of visual and rhetorical assault on my consciousness, making me violated for having to watch them. If my students had created them, I would still beam with pride. The videos represent the very sorts of projects that we hope the students will create, in fact—their assignment is to create a Powerpoint presentation creatively presenting their research on a social justice issue. They are first-semester college students, many of whom have severe learning disabilities or come from continuation high schools where they were never assigned homework. If their discussions of the issues are a bit melodramatic, that’s fine; we are happy if they simply complete the assignment without having a nervous breakdown or punching one of their group members.

The problem with the videos is that they are someone else’s overly sentimental Powerpoint presentations, posted on YouTube so that anyone with an Internet connection can watch them, absorb their message, overlook their poor organization, research, and spelling, and use them as part of their own presentation on the same topic.

By presenting the videos as part of a researched presentation, the students imbue them with a sense of credibility or authority, as though they count as research. I can envision the students watching the videos and finding them more powerful than the actual data the students have collected; “Hey, guys, I finally found something interesting,” I imagine them saying.

The fact that these videos always appear at the end of the presentations is even more frustrating from the perspective of a writing teacher. Rather than end with their own ideas, findings, and voice, the students give away that platform to someone else, and worse, someone no more informed than themselves. The videos would bother me much less if the students would speak after them, explaining why they had chosen that video and what it meant to them. But instead, the video is given the final word, this anonymous authority rising out of the ether to lend imagined credibility and emotional power.

I have seen the same one about domestic violence several years in a row, a rambling stream-of-consciousness polemic. It juxtaposes a series of distressing images—a woman with a horribly bruised and swollen face, for example—with meaningless statistics, or cryptic bits of narrative, apropos of nothing that came before them—Forty percent of women say they have been abused by a partner; She is afraid to leave him.

Finally one year, I remembered to put a policy about YouTube videos on the assignment instructions: “Your presentation may include no more than one minute of any video that you did not create yourself.”

When presentation day came, one group ended by introducing a video: “We know you said that we shouldn’t have more than a minute of a video, but this one is really good,” they said to me.

Then the familiar music began, and the familiar series of domestic violence images and factoids began again.

I knew that every student in the group had experienced abuse, either in their parents’ homes or at the hands of high-school boyfriends, so I did not want to reprimand them for flagrantly dismissing the assignment instructions. But it saddened me to realize that they believed this cheesy video would be more powerful than their own words, ideas, and experiences. This is what years of schooling has drummed into their head: that if something is worth saying, it has already been said by someone more important than you, and you’re better off using that person’s words rather than your own.

I’ve noticed that many of the power figures at my college also rely on the voices of others to support, or make, their arguments. Our former college president was a great fan of inspirational quotations. They adorned her office, engraved into glass paperweights and printed on postcards. She opened and closed every address with them, relying heavily on the classics: Your playing small doesn’t serve the world, she would say, or The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. They were quotes attributed—verifiably or not—to great writers and thinkers. But I would bet my union-negotiated contract that these quotations were the only things that she, or most of the people who use them, had ever read by these esteemed authors.

The internet allows us to find a wealth of these kinds of dismembered quotations, inspirational words of advice from authors we have never heard of, without even having to leave our house and buy a book of them. My students have recently taken to opening their essays with barely-relevant passages by people ranging from George Bernard Shaw to Anthony Robbins, names that I am sure have no meaning at all to the students citing them.

With YouTube, we do not need to limit ourselves to using the words of published authors or well-known personalities or even people who know how to write. Anybody can put a video on YouTube, and it is possible to find a relevant, if poorly-constructed, opinion piece on any topic at all.

The college president took advantage of this expanded quotation marketplace in a speech welcoming all the school’s employees back to work after summer break.

“Last year, when I talked about leveraging abundance,” she said, “some people asked for specific examples to show what I meant. So this presentation has lots of examples.”

It turned out that these were not, as I presume “some people” (i.e. everybody) had wanted, examples of how colleges had leveraged their abundance, or suggestions as to how we might do so at our college.

No, the examples were YouTube videos. The first was a cartoon positing the premise that “everyone can be an entrepreneur.” Anyone who creates their own business is an entrepreneur, the video explained, whether that business is a lemonade stand, a yoga studio, or a software corporation. “I like the positive spirit of this video,” said the president. “It shows people taking initiative.”

She then showed a video of a nine-year-old boy who had given a motivational speech to thousands of teachers. “Do you believe in me?” he asked them, pointing into the crowd. “I believe in me.” The thousands of teachers applauded wildly.

“This video reminds us to always think of our students first,” said the president.

I imagine that the president used these videos in her speech for the same reasons my students use them: because they are fast, easy, and vaguely reminiscent of something like actual research. Finding original examples of local colleges using innovative strategies to stretch minimal resources (which is what I think leveraging abundance is supposed to mean) would take a lot of time, energy, and thought, not only to find the examples, but to thoroughly understand and explain them.

Don’t get me wrong: I actually love YouTube. I love the poorly-constructed opinion pieces, at least in theory, and often in practice. The democratizing of public expression is one of the best things about the internet. Everyone can express their views and have them read by strangers from around the world. Insecure students like mine can create a project that embodies their research, and then post it for their friends and families to see.

The problem comes when we allow things we find on the internet to stand in for well-thought-out arguments and evidence. With so much information instantly available, we begin to believe that doing research is as easy as shopping for shoes: point, click, it’s yours.

But just like with the shoes, it is easy to ignore the cost we will pay for our ideas, if we want them to be good. As an English teacher and a writer, I am painfully aware that good ideas are not free. We pay for them, not in money, but with our labor—the labor of thought, of real research, of reading real books cover-to-cover and formulating our own ideas about them rather than allowing them to speak for us. It’s a lot of work, but the rewards are worth it: really understanding what it is we are talking about.