Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 181

Papua New Guinea’s ‘Illegal’ Detention Center

Papua New Guinea’s five-judge Supreme Court ruled Tuesday the migrant-detention center on Manus Island for people seeking asylum in Australia was illegal.

Here’s part of the ruling:

Both the Australian and Papua New Guinea governments shall forthwith take all steps necessary to cease and prevent the continued unconstitutional and illegal detention of the asylum seekers or transferees at the relocation centre on Manus Island and the continued breach of the asylum seekers or transferees constitutional and human rights.

Those who oppose Australia’s policy to detain and process migrants offshore welcomed Tuesday’s court decision. But Australian Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, in a statement, said: “People who have attempted to come illegally by boat and are now in the Manus facility will not be settled in Australia.” And, he said in a TV interview: “The decision of the Supreme Court in PNG is a matter for the PNG government.” Dutton’s remarks were a reiteration of a longstanding Australian policy.  

Around 850 people who’ve tried to migrate by boat to Australia, in violation of that country’s laws, are held in the Manus Island detention center, which opened 15 years ago as part of Australia’s “Pacific Solution,” under which migrants trying to reach the country were held on various Pacific islands. Australia is Papua New Guinea’s largest aid donor.

The Manus facility is run by private contractors, and conditions there have been the subject of protests by migrants. A 2014 protest turned into a riot, which ended with the death of a 23-year-old Iranian migrant. Two guards were later charged with his murder.

The Bloody Fight Over Bangladesh’s Secularism

The debate over Islam’s role in Bangladesh has devolved into machete attacks against secularists and religious minorities in homes and on the streets of the overwhelmingly Muslim nation.

On Monday, Xulhaz Mannan, an editor at the country’s first LGBT magazine, was hacked to death in his apartment at the hands of several men who posed as couriers. One other person was killed and another injured in the attack in Dhaka, the capital. Mannan, a leading gay-rights advocate, also worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Although no group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, assailants in previous deadly assaults—including on journalists, minorities, and secular activists—have claimed links to ISIS. The government has, however, dismissed those links, saying ISIS does not operate in the country of more than 150 million people, more than 90 percent of whom are Muslim.

On Saturday, Rezaul Karim Siddique, a university English professor, who his attackers said was an atheist, was killed with machetes near his home. Authorities say they believe Siddique was targeted for his cultural activities, which included editing a literary magazine and founding a music school. A fellow university professor told The New York Times, “He was a purely academic person, but he was a progressive and secular person.” He is the fourth university professor killed by Islamist militants in recent years.

On April 7, a law student who had posted his secular views online was attacked with machetes and shot dead in Dhaka. The 28-year-old wrote, “I have no religion,” on his Facebook page, along with other secular-themed posts. Late last year, four so-called “atheist bloggers,” who were on a list circulated by Islamist groups, were killed with machetes, as well. Several other religious leaders and foreign workers have been killed in recent months.

Bangladesh is a secular country in principle. After gaining independence from Pakistan in 1971, following a bloody nine-month conflict, the constitution was written to include secularism as one of its main tenets. But Lieutenant General Hussain Muhammad Ershad, the country’s military ruler through the 1980s, approved new constitutional amendments in 1988 that declared Islam the country’s official religion.

While the Bangladesh Supreme Court in 2010 reinstated secular protections in the constitution, Islam remains the country’s official religion. Last month, the Court refused to hear a challenge to that law, effectively enshrining Islam’s place in the constitution for the near future.

One of the men who filed the petition to remove Islam as the official religion of Bangladesh said the amendment to the constitution led to more violence. “It changed the whole atmosphere of the country,” Serajul Islam Choudhury told The New York Times. “It gives a kind of impunity to those who act in the name of Islam. People have over the years gotten away with a lot in the name of religion, and it has led us to last year’s murders.”

Bangladesh’s attorney general, Mahbubey Alam, maintains there’s no connection between the amendment and increased killings. Indeed, some in the country have blamed the increase in violence on Bangladesh’s political environment. Islamist parties have enjoyed wide—though not universal—support in the country ever since its birth in 1971. Last November, Bangladesh was on high alert after it executed two leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami, the Islamist party, who were convicted of war crimes during the war of independence.

Then there are internal political considerations: Critics blame supporters of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which has promoted Islam’s official place in government, for the recent spate of attacks. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, the leader of the ruling Awami League party, said the opposition had created an environment that justified attacks, including on a visiting Japanese farmer and Italian aid worker last year. ISIS claimed responsibility for both incidents, and has boasted of other attacks in Bangladesh through its online English magazine, calling it a “revival of jihad.” Still, officials in Bangladesh have said on multiple occasions that ISIS is not operating inside the country.

Although it may be unclear if ISIS is present in Bangladesh, what is clear is that there have been more attacks against religious minorities and secularists in the past several years. As the BBC reports:

Nobody knows how many radical Islamist groups are operating in the country, but one security source estimates there are 10-15 groups in existence. Over the past year, the police have arrested more than 100 people, suspected of being involved with different Islamist groups. They have also arrested around 20 people, including a British citizen of Bangladeshi origin, who were allegedly trying to “establish contact with Islamic State.”

Political instability may not allow the government to fully go after militants, even as attacks continue. When Bangladeshi officials attempt to tackle religious extremists, they risk possible violent retribution. Indeed more attacks could be on the way. Imran Sarker, a widely known blogger who led secular protests in 2013, told the BBC his life was threatened on Sunday. He received a phone call, he said, from someone who said he would be killed “very soon.”

Beyoncé’s Lemonade and the Sacredness of Sex

Beyoncé and Jay Z got engaged on Jay Z’s birthday, and to celebrate, Beyoncé took her new fiancee to see naked women dance. At Paris’s cabaret club Crazy Horse in 2007, she has said she watched the synchronized striptease with a particular kind of awe. “I just thought it was the ultimate sexy show I’ve ever seen,” she later recalled, “and I was like, ‘I wish I was up there, I wish I could perform that for my man.’” In 2013, she fulfilled that dream by returning to Crazy Horse to film the stupendously sexy music video for “Partition,” a song about giving a blow job in a limo.

It’s the kind of story from which you can pull a few competing narratives about Beyoncé—and about gender, sex, and pop music more broadly. From one popular angle, her co-ed cabaret celebration is a tale of empowerment: a tale of sex-positivity and feminism that bolster a traditional monogamous marriage. But from other angles, it’s the opposite of radical: a story that’s, at base, about women straining to please men. There’s the meta reading, which points out the fact that superstars like Beyoncé are like those Crazy Horse dancers writ large, shimmying to the amazement and jealousy of a global audience. In almost any interpretation, you run into one of pop culture’s abiding beliefs: Sex is power.

That belief has long been part of Beyoncé’s art. So, too, has been the belief that hard work, profit, intelligence, family, love, God, friendship, fame, regional loyalty, racial pride, and awesome clothes are also legitimate ways to feel good and attain some degree of control over the world. Still, as is the case with many female stars, some people are unable to see anything but sex when they look at Beyoncé. Bill O’Reilly got mad about “Partition” for being too explicit. On the other end of the ideological spectrum, bell hooks called Beyoncé “a terrorist, especially in terms of the impact on young girls.”

That sort of criticism, by all rights, should be harder to make about Lemonade, the album she released alongside an HBO film on Saturday night. It represents a landmark on a few levels—its release method, its racial politics, and its appearance of confessing to Jay Z and Beyoncé’s deep marital troubles. Under all of those things is an elaboration on the vision of sex that Beyoncé, filtered through popular culture, has often been seen to stand for—and that shift is reflected in the album’s lush but comparatively less-than-immediately-gratifying sound. Here, being hot is not necessarily liberating. Sex is serious, sex can harm, and sex does not reliably do the things that society has said it can do. Feeling yourself is not enough.

* * *

Five songs into Lemonade, there’s a song called “6 Inch” that can’t help but recall the Crazy Horse anecdote. It rides a deep, electrifying bass line very similar to the one that powered “Partition,” but the song itself is queasier and more gothic. With the help of The Weeknd, Beyoncé salutes a stripper dancing in six-inch heels for money but not for “material things” nor, the implication goes, to appease any one man. Beyoncé likely sees her global pop-star hustle in this stripper’s 24/7/365 labor, but the comparison with her personal life is murkier. After singing about a female performers’s detachment from those she performs for, the goosebump-inducing outro has Beyoncé gasping for her lover: “Come back, come back, come back.”

The album up until that point has obsessed over the idea that the fierceness of her body and brain should have secured her husband’s loyalty as surely as it has secured her an unwavering fan base. The first song, “Pray You Catch Me,” is a sonic sculpture of voice, strings, and piano, with Beyoncé weaving a wrenching melody as she describes feelings of mistrust. In the accompanying film, Beyoncé recites Warsan Shire’s poetry about subjecting herself to total denial—of sex, of food, of mirrors—and still feeling the gnawing need to ask, “Are you cheating on me?” After she voices that question, she strides into a city street and begins wrecking shit with a baseball bat.

That demolition derby scene—yes, she drives a truck over parked cars—accompanies the album’s second song, “Hold Up,” a midtempo, reggae-influenced gem about every premise of Beyoncé’s career being seemingly undermined. She “kept it sexy” and “kept it fun” and yet has still been betrayed; at one point, she raps, “I always keep the top tier, 5 star / Backseat lovin’ in the car / Like make that wood, like make that wood”—a mishmash of references to previous Beyoncé masterpieces of raunch, including “Partition” and “Drunk in Love.” The subtext is that her confident-and-sexy routines were in part about keeping her man mesmerized—and now it turns out, to her horror, they didn’t fully work.

“Don’t Hurt Yourself” brings in Jack White and samples Led Zeppelin to stir up blues rock over which Beyoncé howls about using her body’s power for revenge. “You can watch my fat ass twist as I bounce to the next dick,” she threatens. Then comes “Sorry,” whose layers of electronic ticktocking don’t sound all that dissimilar from the Justin Bieber hit of the same name but whose lyrics are anything but penitent: “Suck on my balls,” she says. The playful melody that accompanies her call to flip the bird has the makings of a top-40 chorus, but there’s a glassy-eyed distance to the song, a purposeful malaise. The accompanying video segment is labeled “Apathy.”

Lemonade is a vision of a life after superheroism, a life lived once the limits of #Flawless have been located.

The other side of “6 Inch” represents a turning point. With country guitar and jazz horns, “Daddy Lessons” spins a fable about a father who raised his daughter to be tough—and warned her to avoid men like him. It’s the start of Beyoncé taking a long view on her marriage, seeing it as part of a long tradition of damaged families. When men are told to play women and women are told to perform for men, why would any one woman’s efforts to perfect herself ensure a stable relationship? What is putting a ring on it next to historical forces?

The album’s film, more explicitly than the album itself, roots this idea of emotional inheritance in black identity. Malcolm X sermonizes about the disrespect paid to black women, mothers show photos of sons killed by police, and Beyoncé vows that “the curse will be broken.” The imagery on display proposes that progress will come from black women drawing strength from one another and more black men being made to feel themselves capable of living the kinds of lives that society has told them they can’t live.

The songs themselves for the most part foreground a narrative about a personal struggle mastered through willpower, forgiveness, and discussion between wife and husband. The airy, fluttering “Love Drought” is a portrait of tentative reconciliation, with Beyoncé repeatedly trying to stow the nagging question of “What did I do wrong?” This is not about I—it’s about we, working to “move a mountain.” From there comes an arc of redemption: The shockingly raw piano ballad “Sandcastles,” whose video features Jay Z nuzzling Beyoncé; the uneasy sound collage of “Forward,” where James Blake’s distorted voice personifies the muddle of co-dependence between fallible people; and the stomping gospel rock of “Freedom,” in which Kendrick Lamar raps about the turbulent social backdrop against which the album’s story has unfolded.

Sex finally resurfaces again on “All Night,” the glorious summit before the celebratory “Formation” plays things out. The title itself evokes “Drunk in Love,” the instrumentation is modern Motown, and Beyoncé alternates between excited tumbles of words and a wry, high croon for the chorus. After waiting “some time to prove that I can trust you again,” she promises, “I’m gonna kiss up and rub up and feel up / Kiss up and rub up and feel up on you.” It might seem like an ordinary description of making up after a fight. But notably, this is physical affection that results from a relationship working correctly, rather than physical affection that tries to make that relationship work correctly. It is sex as a sign of love and mutual respect, not an enforcer of those things.

* * *

Any devotee of Beyoncé would tell you, though, that she has always portrayed sensuality as an extension of emotional connection, and that she has frequently sung about the give-and-take involved with romance. The erotic fantasy of “Partition” did, after all, bleed into a song about jealousy that might have been the germ for Lemonade. But pop music is not a documentary art form. It almost inevitably distorts its subjects, playing up extremes, underlining all the parts of an artist’s message that suggest an ability to transcend reality. Past works by Beyoncé capitalized on this fact, reliably making listeners feel like superheroes for a few minutes at a time.

Lemonade does not reject that mentality, but it does work on a subtler level, actively avoiding giving the impression of invulnerability. It is a vision of a life lived once the limits of #Flawless have been located, and of a society built not on individual fabulousness but by relationships where trust has been secured through negotiation. There are still extremes here in the songs that vent anger, hurt, and eventual relief; the music, perhaps more than ever, is creative, assured, and frequently catchy. But when it comes to making people dance, which is to say when it comes to making people think of sex, which is to say the most immediate and potent kind of pop appeal there is, she holds back.

The irony is that in withholding, Beyoncé pays tribute to the sacredness of sex. The suspicion of infidelity is what sets off the pain she must work through on the album because, in the context of her current life, sleeping with someone is no small thing. “God was in the room when the man said to the woman, ‘I love you so much. Wrap your legs around me and pull me in, pull me in, pull me in,’” Beyoncé says during one of the video album’s spoken-word segments. “Sometimes when he’d have her nipple in his mouth, she’d whisper, ‘Oh my God.’ That, too, is a form of worship.” The religious comparison confirms sex’s power—but suggests it’s a power that can serve something greater than any one person.

Stephen Curry, Wounded Warrior

The Golden State Warriors’ Stephen Curry will sit out the next two weeks after he slipped in the fourth game of the Western Conference playoffs against the Houston Rockets.

Thanks 4 all the prayers & messages. Can feel all the positive energy. God is Great! All things considered I’m Gonna be alright! #DubNation

— Stephen Curry (@StephenCurry30) April 25, 2016

An MRI revealed Monday a sprain to Curry’s medial collateral ligament, one of the knee’s four largest ligaments. In a video clip of the slip, Curry’s leg can be seen gliding out from under him as he guards Trevor Ariza in the first half. As Curry tries to plant at the top of the three-point line, his left leg slides forward and he smacks his right knee on the court. He falls to the ground and grabs his knee, then winces as he stands back up and heads almost straight for the locker room. It’s believed Curry slipped on a wet spot.

Curry returned after halftime to test his knee, but he couldn’t play on it. Golden State went on to beat the Rockets, which made them 3-1 in the best-of-seven series for the first-round of the Western Conference playoffs. Curry missed only three games in the regular season, but he sat out both the second and third games against Houston because of an ankle injury. Curry’s absence will give the Rockets a better chance at a win, but to advance to the next round they would need to carry all three of the next games.

The Dolphins of Arizona

Cetaceans near Scottsdale? It’s happening.

The second-largest theme park operator in Mexico, Ventura Entertainment, will open its first “dolphinarium” in the United States in July. The attraction, operated by Ventura’s subsidiary Dolphinaris, is located in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, and will provide similar swim-with-dolphins activities the company offers at its five locations in Mexico.

The facilities have drawn criticism from animal-welfare activists, who say the desert of a landlocked state is no place for dolphins, social and intelligent marine creatures that can swim up to 100 miles a day. Local protesters have organized a demonstration, “Empty the Tanks,” which will take place in Scottsdale next month. More than 100,000 people have signed an online petition against the “dolphinarium.” The petition says that Arizona summers, characterized by abundant sunshine and dry conditions, could negatively affect the dolphins’ health.

Dolphinaris explains on its website that “the well-being and the appropriate attention of the dolphins under our care is our absolute priority. We satisfy every physical and behavior need, including supervision of natural behavior of the species and reproduction programs.”

The attraction is located near OdySea, an indoor aquarium that opened last year and houses sharks and other ocean dwellers, but not whales and dolphins. “You need larger facilities for that and there’s a lot of controversy, and there’s no need,” OdySea CEO Amram Knishinsky said in 2014.

Public opinion of tourist attractions that feature marine creatures has increasingly soured since the 2013 documentary Blackfish, which investigated the captive orcas living in SeaWorld, the U.S. chain of marine mammal parks. Last month, SeaWorld announced it would end its orca-breeding programs and eventually cease its well-known performance shows.

Can the Front-Runners Sweep the East?

When Hillary Clinton delivers her primary-night remarks on Tuesday after five Eastern states have voted, she’ll be speaking from the Philadelphia Convention Center, a key staging ground for the Democrats’ nominating convention that will occur exactly three months from now. It won’t be the same stage where she expects to formally accept the Democratic nomination—that’s the Wells Fargo Center a few miles away—but it’s close enough for a practice run.

The location and the evening’s results, Clinton hopes, will amplify a signal her campaign has been sending for the last week: The primary race with Senator Bernie Sanders is over, and it’s time to focus on the general election. Clinton is strongly favored to win the two biggest states that will vote on Tuesday, Pennsylvania and Maryland, and to grab a majority of the 328 delegates at stake between them. Sanders could fare somewhat better in Connecticut and Rhode Island, polls show, and it’s anyone’s guess how tiny Delaware will vote. Barring a major surprise, Clinton will end the night closer to clinching the nomination, and Sanders’s already infinitesimal odds of catching her will grow slimmer.

How will Sanders react? The Vermont senator isn’t expected to concede regardless of Clinton’s margin, but Democrats will be watching closely to see if he dials back his attacks on the front-runner as she widens her lead. His advisers have appeared publicly torn over what Sanders should do. The campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, has talked about an all-out effort to finish strong in the primaries and then persuade hundreds of superdelegates to flip their allegiance heading into the convention in Philadelphia. Another senior adviser, Tad Devine, has repeatedly hinted that Sanders might “reevaluate” his position after the Eastern states vote on Tuesday. Whatever Sanders does, expect Clinton to skip any criticism of her primary rival and focus her attacks on Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

While the same five states are holding Republican primaries on Tuesday, the GOP candidates have already begun to look beyond the Northeast and toward the winner-take-all Indiana primary on May 3. In part, that’s because Trump is heavily favored to sweep on Tuesday, with polls giving the front-runner a large lead over Cruz and John Kasich in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. But it’s also because there aren’t as many delegates up for grabs as you would think. Pennsylvania has 71 delegates, and all but 17 of them will go into the convention unbound regardless of who wins on Tuesday.

The big news on Monday was the announcement of a deal in which Kasich agreed to divert resources from Indiana in exchange for Cruz forgoing an aggressive push in Oregon and New Mexico later in the spring. The stop-Trump pact could help Cruz overtake Trump in Indiana, but it comes long after GOP bigwigs like Mitt Romney urged the candidates and their supporters to act strategically instead of allowing Trump to divide and conquer his way to the nomination. Nevertheless, Trump reacted angrily on Monday, first by accusing his rivals of “collusion” and then by making fun of the way Kasich eats.

The presidential contests on Tuesday will get most of the attention, but the more dramatic races are playing out in Democratic primaries for the Senate. In Pennsylvania, Katie McGinty has the support of the entire party establishment, including an endorsement from President Obama. But she is struggling to hold off the better-known former congressman, Joe Sestak, who defeated the late Senator Arlen Specter in a 2010 primary before losing to Pat Toomey. McGinty and Sestak are battling to take on Toomey again in a race that is key to the Democrats’ chances of retaking the Senate.

In Maryland, Representatives Chris Van Hollen and Donna Edwards have been running against each other for nearly a year in a campaign to replace the retiring Senator Barbara Mikulski. Ideologically, the race is a reflection of the Clinton-Sanders fight. Edwards is a favorite of progressives while Van Hollen has a longer record of deal-making and is close not only to the Obama White House but to party leaders like Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a Baltimore native. The president hasn’t endorsed in the race, but the White House intervened to defend Van Hollen against a super PAC ad that suggested he was soft on gun control. Polls since that flap have shown him pulling into the lead, so an Edwards victory on Tuesday would be a surprise. Whoever prevails is expected to capture the Senate seat easily in November, given Maryland’s blue tilt.

As establishment favorites, both McGinty and Van Hollen should be helped by the strength of Clinton in Pennsylvania and Maryland—two big, diverse states that have favored her over Sanders and his grassroots army. The Republican establishment, on the other hand, should have a more disappointing night with the likelihood of a Trump sweep. On both sides, Tuesday’s Eastern Primary is looking like a front-runners’ night.

Game of Thrones and the Paradox of Female Beauty

Warning: Season 6 spoilers abound.

It’s the scene the entire Season 6 premiere of Game of Thrones—and in some sense the series up to this point—has been building toward. There stands the Red Woman, Melisandre, the goddess behind so much of the show’s deus ex machina, in her bedroom. A fire crackles. A candle flickers. Music, at once sharp and flat, plays. Melisandre, regarding herself in a foggy mirror, unbuttons her dress. It falls away. All that remains is her necklace—a choker made of metal, completed with a red stone. The tension builds. The notes swell. She gazes at herself. We gaze along with her.

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A Fairy-Tale Ending for the Game of Thrones Premiere

And then—a gong rumbles into a dramatic crescendo—she is transformed: An old woman, naked, stares back in that mirror. Melisandre’s glossy red hair has been replaced with sparse, white strands. Her eyes have sunken; her breasts have sagged; her back has hunched. The camera lingers on her naked body; we linger, too. She seems small and shriveled and weak. More than that: She seems sad. Melisandre slowly folds her frail body into her bed. She covers it with a blanket of animal furs. She sleeps.

So: The Red Woman is also an old woman! The scene is, all in all, the most satisfying type of plot twist: the kind that is shocking and also that you kind of anticipated the whole time. George R.R. Martin’s books, after all, have long suggested Melisandre’s age; the show based on them, for its part, has teased audiences with her very big secret. Outside of the Winterfellian world, too, there have been hints. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop points out, Carice van Houten, the actor who plays Melisandre, has for years given interviews suggesting that the character is much more than 100 years old—and a fellow actor has mentioned, off-handedly, that she is in fact closer to 400.

Through the candlelit cliffhanger, viewers saw something that is almost never depicted on television: the naked body of a very, very old woman.

But the shock-not-shock of the big plot twist was only partially due to the revelation that Melisandre is not what she seems (a revelation, as Spencer Kornhaber notes, that is a longstanding trope in fairy tales). The greater surprise—the real, visceral shock of the big reveal—was the manner of the revelation: the way the show announced the Red Woman’s age via its light-flickering, tension-building, music-accompanied strip show. Through Game of Thrones’s candlelit twist-cum-cliffhanger, viewers saw something that is almost never depicted on television, or for that matter in movies or in most other visual media: the starkly naked body of a very, very old woman.

In that, Game of Thrones is tapping into another kind of trope, and a much more pernicious one: the woman who has not only pretended to be something other than she is, but who has pretended to be more desirable than she is. The woman who has appeared to be young and beautiful in a society that treats those things as interchangeable—and a women who is in truth, according to that society, neither. A woman who fully embodies the regressive notion of “feminine wiles.” Melisandre, earlier in Game of Thrones’s TV run, seduced Stannis Baratheon. She tried to seduce Jon Snow. Her character has repeatedly used sex to get her way. And now we learn that she has done all that while being the one thing the culture beyond Game of Thrones’s universe has deemed antithetical to sex: an old woman. Twist!

George R.R. Martin, in the books, has a notably distinctive word for Melisandre’s particular brand of magic: glamor. “Call it what you will,” the Red Woman tells Jon Snow in the most recent Song of Ice and Fire book, A Dance With Dragons. “Glamor, seeming, illusion. R’hllor is Lord of Light, Jon Snow, and it is given to his servants to weave with it, as others weave with thread.” Later on in the same book, Arya Stark’s mentor offers a similar explanation, this time with “glamor” as the instrument, rather than the effect, of the magic:  

“Mummers change their faces with artifice,” the kindly man was saying, “and sorcerers use glamors, weaving light and shadow and desire to make illusions that trick the eye.”

Martin is employing the historical definition of glamour—as a brand of magic that specializes in deceptive appearances. Which is also to say: a brand of magic that has long been associated with the feminine. Up until the 19th century, the writer Virginia Postrel notes, “glamour” suggested “a magic spell, an illusion cast by Gypsies and witches.” It suggested artifice and duplicity, particularly when it came to sex. “When devils, wizards, or jugglers deceive the sight,” went a 1721 glossary of poetry, “they are said to cast glamour o’er the eyes of the spectator.”

In that sense, the thing being revealed in Melisandre’s big reveal is much more than age, and much more than simple artifice. It is deception in the name of seduction. Melisandre’s illusion is an extreme form of the kind of practical magic that many mortal women are expected to engage in, every day: to do everything in their power to appear young and beautiful, for as long as they possibly can. But her reveal—and the schadenfreudic delight the show takes in its pans, in every sense of the word, of her body—also suggest the other side of the Melisandrian trap: the judgment women will face for the effort. To attempt to appear youthful is to conform to one social expectation and to violate another. It is to assert and to acquiesce, both at the same time.

So Melisandre’s reveal—the public artifice versus the private reality—is also the sort of thing that is called to mind when, say, sitcoms make jokes about the horrors of women being seen (by men) without makeup. Or when Us Weekly gleefully revels in catching stars in the same state. Or when a Redditor responds to a before-and-after picture of a woman wearing makeup with the comment “This post shows to not trust one’s looks.” It is tied to the retrograde assumption that women—via makeup and hair dye and Spanx and the Bombshell! After Dark Lace Add-2-Cups Push-Up Bra and what have you—ritually and routinely deceive by way of pretending to be something other than what they are.

George R.R. Martin is employing, in his books, the historical definition of “glamour”—as a brand of magic that specializes in deceptive appearances.

Which is also to say that the discord of that jarring goooong in Melisandre’s age-reveal is uncomfortably harmonious with the culture beyond Game of Thrones—one that is awkwardly negotiating what “graceful aging” actually entails. It’s a culture in which the privileged have access to plastic surgery and Botox and anti-aging serums and potions. A culture in which shows like Younger explore what age actually means when technological advances have made one’s actual age less immediately obvious, and in which shows like Cougartown and Hot in Cleveland and their many, many counterparts wrestle with the complicated collisions of “women” and “age” and “sex.”

It’s also a culture that found a character on another of last night’s HBO season premieres, Veep, firing an employee with the explanation that “you’re as useless to me as a 40-year-old woman.”

The “woman” there, coming from the guy it did, was redundant. Because what Melisandre’s reveal also suggests is how gendered aging—that otherwise extremely universal human activity—has become. If you enter “old woman” onto thesaurus.com, the dictionary first helpfully suggests, as a synonym, a “female marriage partner,” or “bride”; a few clicks away from that, though—if you’re trying to find a word for an older woman on her own terms, rather than a guy’s—you get “bag,” “battle-ax,” “biddy,” “crone,” “harpy,” “shrew,” and “vixen.” You get the whiff of the same thing Game of Thrones suggests with its gong-and-fire-laden presentation of Melisandre’s real, wrinkled body: the suggestion that age is not just a stage of life, but a state of mind. That age—for women, at least—is a personality trait, and a distinctly negative one. That an “old woman” is only slightly removed from a harpy/shrew/vixen. (Thesaurus.com on “old man,” on the other hand? Suggested synonyms include “head of the house,” “parent,” “lord,” and “patriarch.”)

So while the final scene of “The Red Woman” was subtly orchestrated on a human level—“maybe it was the sad, tired expression on her face or how suddenly vulnerable she looked,” my colleague Lenika Cruz points out, “but the unexpected pathos I felt for her outweighed any revulsion”—the assumptions it made were more revealing than the Big Reveal itself. She’s old! the episode shouted, triumphantly. She’s been lying the whole time! it suggested, teasingly. And, with that, the show that has reveled in all manner of boundary-pushing imagery, from the violent to the sexual, found a new way to shock its viewers: to present them with woman who is at once naked and old.

The Killing of a Western Hostage in the Philippines

One of four hostages abducted in the Philippines last September has been killed hours after a Monday deadline for a $6.5 million ransom expired.  

The al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf group kidnapped four people from a resort on Samal Island in September 2015. The hostages—John Ridsdel and Robert Hall, both Canadian; Marites Flor, a Filipina; and Kjartan Sekkingstad, a Norwegian––all had appeared in a video asking their governments to secure their release. Earlier Monday, Abu Sayyaf demanded a $6.5 million ransom and threatened to behead a hostage if the money wasn’t delivered by 3 p.m. When that deadline passed, a severed head was dropped into the town center in Jolo. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confirmed that Ridsdel had been killed. Filipino authorities have not officially identified the victim. Reuters reported:

“We are being very careful, we can't say whose head it was,” army spokesman Major Felimon Tan told reporters, adding that tests would be carried out to identify the victim.

Residents found the head in the center of Jolo town. Tan said two men on a motorcycle were seen dropping a plastic bag containing the severed head.

The president of the Philippines had asked that Canada not pay the ransom, saying it was the only way to stop the kidnapping industry. The hostages were thought to be held about 500 miles from the resort where they were taken, on Jolo Island.

Abu Sayyaf operates mostly in the southern Philippines, which has become a stronghold for the Islamist group in a predominately Roman Catholic country. The group emerged in the early 1990s and grew to notoriety for its mass kidnappings. After an intense government offensive to stop Abu Sayyaf, the group had severely weakened. But these latest kidnappings, and the beheading, indicate the group’s capabilities.

The Killing of an LGBT Journalist in Bangladesh

The editor of Bangladesh’s only LGBT magazine has been killed in a brutal attack in the country’s capital.

Xulhaz Mannan, the 35-year-old editor of Roopbaan, was killed in an attack Monday, according to news reports. The Dhaka Tribune, citing local police, reported armed assailants killed Mannan Monday after entering a home on the second floor of a six-story building in the Kalabagan area of Dhaka. Another person, a friend of Mannan, was also killed. The Guardian, also citing police, reported there were six attackers, and that two other people were seriously injured. Both publications and others say Mannan was “hacked to death,” but the nature of the weapon or weapons used has not yet been confirmed.

From The Dhaka Tribune:

Parvez, 18, security guard of the house, told the Dhaka Tribune that five to six youths identifying themselves as courier company officials came to the house around 5pm mentioning that they have brought some parcel for Xulhaz.

He said: "But half an hour later, I heard shouting and shooting sound from the flat and went to look into the incident."

“The assailants then attacked me with knives,” said Parvez with heavy wounds on his eye.

Roopbaan, the country’s first and only magazine aimed at gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals, was launched in 2014. At the time, The Dhaka Tribune ran a story about the new publication that kept the editor anonymous:

“We are super excited!” said the editor, terming the initiative “a major leap forward” for the country’s LGBT community.

“The main reason for this publication is to promote love,” he continued, “promoting love and promoting the right to love. The audience for love is huge and that’s who this is for.”

The magazine was not sold on street newsstands “for fear of inflaming tensions and sparking a backlash against the gay community,” explained NDTV, an Indian television network. Homosexuality and same-sex relationships are illegal in Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority but secular nation; in 2010, the country’s Supreme Court restored the status of secularism as a basic tenet in the constitution after its removal over three decades earlier.

A street parade known as the “rainbow rally,” which was organized by Roopbaan members to mark the Bengali New Year, was canceled earlier this month over permit issues. But Islamists had posted online threats against the event.

Bangladesh has seen a recent rash of fatal attacks by suspected religious extremists against individuals who express secular views. This weekend, Rezaul Karim Siddique, a 58-year-old English professor, was killed in Rajshahi by machete-wielding militants who claimed to belong to ISIS; they accused him of “calling to atheism.” Earlier this month, Nazimuddin Samad, a 28-year-old student who regularly wrote against religious extremism on Facebook, was attacked with machetes and shot in Dhaka. Others have been threatened. Last year, four bloggers who identified as atheists were killed in near identical attacks in the country.

Selling Queerness: The Curious Case of Fun Home

“What would happen if we spoke the truth?” Alison Bechdel asks midway through her critically acclaimed graphic memoir, Fun Home. It’s a fitting question to ask in a story that hinges on the idea that things left unsaid can have as much weight as those let out in the open. In Fun Home, Bechdel delves into the troubled, often secret-filled relationship with her late father, a closeted gay man whose death she concludes wasn’t an accident, but suicide. Unaware of how her father was struggling with his sexuality, Allison was coming to accept her own queerness—a complicated dynamic that plays out with humor, pathos, and wit in the pages of the novel.

Fun Home has since made the leap to the stage, first as an off-Broadway musical adaptation before launching to Tony Award-winning, mainstream fame. If Bechdel’s heavy themes and light-hearted tone remain intact in the performance itself, the way her story has been marketed has undergone a calculated shift to ensure it reaches the broadest audience possible. And that has naturally meant downplaying the more controversial elements, such as queerness and suicide. In its year-long run as a musical, Fun Home has offered a timely case study for how producers and marketers successfully tap into the universal aspects of potentially polarizing stories—but at the risk of perpetuating the idea that LGBT issues still don’t belong out in the open.

First published in 2006, Fun Home emerged as a critical darling and a cult favorite, in part thanks to the loyal fanbase for Bechdel’s long-running Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip. When the book was adapted into a musical in 2013, it saw rapid success at the Public Theater and became a critical sensation once again, named Best Musical by the New York Drama Critics’ Circle and a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Drama. After several reruns by popular demand, word came in fall 2014 that the show would move to Broadway. At the new venue, the 700- to 800-seat Circle in the Square Theater, the show’s capacity had more than doubled, and it needed to reach more people. Fun Home’s producers decided it necessitated a rebrand—a job that went to SpotCo, the marketing agency that has worked on hit shows such as Hamilton, The Book of Mormon, and School of Rock.

Greenwald said the marketing team jokingly referred to the show as a “lesbian suicide musical.”

Selling Fun Home on Broadway meant balancing two aims: making it appeal to as many people as possible without misrepresenting the story’s spirit or substance. Two years after receiving the project brief for Fun Home, SpotCo’s co-founder and chief strategy officer Tom Greenwald recalled the main goal for marketing the show: “Make sure that it’s never ever associated specifically with the ‘plot or subject matter,’” he said, “And make sure that people realize that it’s a beautiful, universal, family story of self-identification, reflection, and ultimately, hope.” Not an easy task for a show that Greenwald said the marketing team jokingly referred to as a “lesbian suicide musical.”

The rebranding largely played out through the visuals and the taglines used to promote the show. After Fun Home arrived on Broadway, newspapers, social-media feeds, and the streets of New York City lit up with colorful advertisements selling it as a fun, feel-good musical. One initial poster featured the show’s logo—a rectangle house with Bechdel and her father as cut-out figures inside the “O” in “Home”—with a small tagline underneath announcing the arrival of “A NEW BROADWAY MUSICAL.” After lavish critical praise, that was changed to: “NOT JUST A NEW BROADWAY MUSICAL. A NEW KIND OF BROADWAY MUSICAL.” And finally, after a total of five Tony wins, the slogan said nothing but “WINNER! BEST MUSICAL 2015 TONY AWARDS.”

Of course, “a new Broadway musical” is very far from “a different Broadway musical,” let alone “a queer Broadway musical.” Despite a wide range of shows with LGBT characters, from Rent to Priscilla, Fun Home is the first musical on Broadway with a lesbian protagonist. The show’s all-female writing team was also the first of its kind to win the Best Original Score Tony Award. All of these notable achievements were lost in the attempt to garner as broad a viewership as possible—a sign of how difference is given room to breathe, but only in the margins.

SpotCo

As for the design of the show’s posters, the new versions moved away from Fun Home’s previous, slightly ominous red-white-blue color scheme. “We wanted to make sure it felt warm, as opposed to cold,” said Greenwald, who added that they also wanted to capture a vintage look since Fun Home is set in the 1970s. I search the logo for traces of queerness, maybe hints of the Stonewall Riots, the 1969 protests that ignited the modern gay-rights movement. The cut-out characters in the letter “O” come across as playful and serene, and while the color scheme is quirky, its range is too narrow and shades too deep to justify any real parallels to the queer flag. The cheeriness isn’t a total misrepresentation: Bechdel’s memoir is fun, but it’s also morbid and sad.

In an effort to tout the most universal aspects of the story, the marketing comes close to diluting it.

The musical’s branding marks a major departure from the cover of the book version. (Greenwald said Bechdel has overseen and approved the creation of all the new visuals, but they’re not her work, save for the character cutouts.) The cover of the paperback, for one, is much darker than the musical’s promotional materials and bears a gothic, Addams Family-type font for its title. The effect of a name like Fun Home is quite different when it’s accompanied by muted shades than when it’s paired with a cheery color scheme—the former captures the work’s conflicted essence, while the latter masks it entirely.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The print and online advertising campaigns for Fun Home have continued the taciturn trajectory of the branding. Review quotes like “It speaks universally about big things that matter: life, love, family surviving,” or “Fun Home occupies the place where we all grew up, and will never be able to leave. WE’RE HOME,” give nothing away of the actual plot, but they seem more secretive than most teasers. This month, SpotCo debuted a new TV commercial for Fun Home that will be shown across America as the show kicks off its U.S. tour this fall. The 30-second ad features a voiceover that says: “Welcome to a musical about a family that’s nothing like yours—and exactly like yours.” Again, in an effort to tout the most universal aspects of the story, the marketing comes dangerously close to diluting it.

Still, the show has made it a priority to champion LGBT rights. Each performance ends with an appeal for donations to the non-profit group Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. The cast has sung at an LGBT center for senior citizens. The marketing team meticulously chose its partners, including Spotify, Uber, and Yelp—all companies that support LGBT rights. Further, the show’s content is anything but subdued: There’s a passionate lesbian scene, and although the story has a darker tone in print, the musical is as upfront as the book. Greenwald said that, ultimately, no Broadway show—especially a Tony-winning musical like Fun Home—can limit itself to only one kind of audience, because it will fail to address people of all backgrounds. “There is absolutely no reason why a 70-year-old straight male can’t be as emotionally fulfilled at this show as a 25-year-old LGBT person,” he said.

This fear of Fun Home being pigeonholed is a real and serious one that has been echoed by others in the industry. Hamilton’s producer, Jeffrey Seller, has discussed the challenges faced by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s previous Tony-winning musical, 2008’s In the Heights. “We were saddled in some ways with perceptual difficulties with rap music and racism,” he told The New York Times. “It became known as ‘the hip-hop musical,’ and that unfortunately limited the audience. It deserved to run longer, and I believe it would have if not for that issue.”

For a queer story like Fun Home, traditional advertising may simply be a matter of survival—of finding the critical and commercial success it deserves within an imperfect system. And yet there’s no ignoring the way advertisers are complicit in perpetuating flawed, deep-seated views in society. Though more progressive commercials appear to be on the rise, gender, racial, and gay stereotyping are still rife in ads. By sidestepping the story’s more divisive subjects, Fun Home advertisements are potentially slowing the embrace of proudly queer voices and perspectives.

“There is absolutely no reason why a 70-year-old straight male can’t be as emotionally fulfilled at this show as a 25-year-old LGBT person.”

Last month, the novelist Garth Greenwell criticized the mainstream branding of queer lives in the broader context of American society. He acknowledged that gay people have finally attained some degree of widespread acceptance and legal rights—all of which is important, but nonetheless came at an enormous cost. “And that cost was a marketing campaign that took queer lives and translated them into values that could be appreciated by people who are disgusted by queer people,” he said. This meant presenting a queer life that looks like the most acceptable kind of straight life: “a monogamous relationship centered on the raising of a child.”

Suddenly the way the musical’s branding emphasizes ideas of family and home makes a lot more sense—yes, those subjects are present in Bechdel’s story, but they’re also the most palatable to people who might otherwise be unreceptive to a work that explores gay themes. The trend in attitudes toward LGBT people is one of growing tolerance, but media coverage tends to focus specifically on acceptance rates of same-sex marriage—figures that are not entirely representative of change. The National Bureau of Economic Research reports that there’s significant systemic error in the data on the LGBT population: “We find substantial under-reporting of LGBT identity and behaviors as well as underreporting of anti-gay sentiment ... even under anonymous and very private conditions.”

Still, there is some hope that Fun Home can help change minds. The U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, took 17 of her fellow ambassadors to see Fun Home last month, including several who represent countries like Russia and Namibia where homosexuality is a crime. Most of them didn’t know anything about the show, except that it had won the top Tony Award, but Powell said later in an interview with Seth Meyers that they were “blown away by the show.” She added:

Sometimes when you come at your fellow ambassadors frontally on the importance of LGBT rights … they can end up in a defensive posture. But if you bring them into a show where you watch a young girl grappling with her first crush, and … seeing life played out forward, rather than as a matter of politics or ideology, it can be easier to create more of a sense of empathy and community.

In this light, perhaps, the benefits of Fun Home’s publicity campaign appear to outweigh the negatives. Maybe what matters most is that the marketing for the show works—that it draws in the crowds to watch a show that meaningfully expands audiences’ perceptions of how gay people navigate life, love, and personal relationships. The musical is recently reported to have recouped its initial investment of $5.25 million and is on solid financial ground at last. To what extent that’s thanks to the show’s advertising or other factors is difficult to measure. If the marketing that works in today’s age is one that obfuscates rather than clarifies, or shies away from difference, then that’s a reflection of society at large. When important works like Fun Home reach the masses against the odds, they’re helping to change that.