Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 913

Is Jesus’ birth worth celebrating? The dark subtext of the nativity scene

Most Americans, even many who are not very religious, look forward to Christmas as a time to celebrate warmth, friendship, generosity and good cheer. Familiar festivities weave together stories and traditions from many cultures, which makes it easy to find something for everyone. But maybe it’s time to look a little closer at the Christmas story itself. The birth story of the baby Jesus is heartwarming and iconic—the promise of new life and new hope in a time of darkness. It has inspired centuries of maternal art and is the best loved of all Bible stories. It also has a darker subtext, especially for someone like me—the mother of two daughters. In the story, an angel appears to a virgin girl, announcing that she will conceive a baby boy. Her fiancé Joseph decides to stick with her only because her baby bump is of divine origins. The author of Luke makes a point of telling us that he refrains from sex with her till after the baby Jesus is born. All of this emphasis on Mary’s sexual history, or rather lack thereof, sends a message that can be shaming and harmful: Only an unbedded, unsullied, unused female—a virgin—could be good enough to birth a perfect child, the son of God. Virginity Equals Purity Girls who have sex are soiled. That may not be the first thing that comes to mind when we see a picture of Madonna and child or hear a Christmas carol, but the message is clear all the same, and the fact that it is subtext may make it all the more insidious for young women. Mind you, Christianity is not the only religion that has assigned such extraordinary status to the pristine vagina or, conversely, treated female sexuality as something lesser or tainted. For example, Buddha’s mother Maya, called the “best of all women,” becomes pregnant after a god in a dream enters her womb from the side. Adding insult to injury, Buddhism tells us that a “Bodisat leaves his mother’s womb erect and unsoiled, like a preacher descending from a pulpit or a man from a ladder, erect, stretching out his hands and feet, unsoiled by any impurities from contact with his mother’s womb, pure and fair, and shining like a gem placed on fine muslin of Benares.” — Mahapadana-sutra, Digha ii. 12 In the Ancient Near East, the birthplace of Christianity, some cultures saw the woman’s body as a vessel for a baby, which grew from the seed of a man or sometimes a supernatural being, much as a seed might grow in the earth. In this way of thinking, heroes and powerful men must have come from divine seed, and claims of a sexless conception underscored their supernatural origins. The Pharaoh Amenhotep III, Perseus, Romulus . . . even Augustus, Pythagoras, and Alexander the Great all were the subject of miraculous birth claims. Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe The enormous value that patriarchal cultures and religions place on female virginity has roots in biology. We’ve all heard the saying, “Mama’s baby, Papa’s maybe.” From time immemorial men have sought to control female sexuality to ensure that the children in which they invest their time, money and life energy are their own; and also to maximize their own offspring. Male animals of some other species do the same. For example, when a new male lion comes into a pride, he may kill all of the cubs from the previous male, which brings the females into heat so that he himself can mate them. Man’s Instincts Become God’s Edicts In the tribal, herding cultures of the Near East a young woman’s sexuality—her ability to produce purebred offspring of known origin—was an asset that belonged to her father. In the Hebrew Bible’s legal code, a rapist can be forced to purchase the goods he has damaged and to then keep her as a wife. A woman’s reproductive capacity is also valuable booty of war. In the battle between the Israelites and Midianites, for example, God’s messenger instructs that the Israelites are to kill all of the women who have been with a man but to keep the virgin girls for themselves. (These and other horrible references here.) Culture and religion transform biological urges into legally binding prescriptions from God himself. Once that happens, patterns that may have started for practical or biological reasons take on a momentum of their own, and we see this in the history of the Virgin Mary. The Sexless Union of Israel and Rome The earliest sects of Christianity disagreed with each other about when and how Jesus became uniquely divine. Some believed that he was adopted by God at the time of his baptism or resurrection. But as Christianity, with its Hebrew roots, adapted to the cultures of the Roman Empire, the story of a supernatural, sexless birth won out. It beautifully merged the god-man tradition of the Empire with Judaism’s obsessive and multifaceted focus on purity—pure bloodlines, pure foods, unblemished bodies, monotheism, unblended fabrics, and, of course, virginity. The Roman Catholic Church took the last of these new heights, turning Mary into a perpetual virgin for life and then for all of eternity, and eventually making vows of sexual abstinence a requirement of monastic life and the priesthood. Actress Julia Sweeney, in her funny, tender monologue, Letting Go of God , describes an encounter with two fresh-faced Mormon missionaries. Finding herself incredulous at some their beliefs, she pictures door-to-door Catholics enthusiastically endorsing the faith of her childhood: If someone came to my door and I was hearing Catholic theology and dogma for the first time, and they said, “We believe that God impregnated a very young girl without the use of intercourse, and the fact that she was a virgin is maniacally important to us . . .” I would have thought that was equally ridiculous. I’m just so used to that story. Aphrodesia or Death “Maniacally important” may be a quirky Julia Sweeney turn of phrase, but it contains an oversized grain of truth. The Catholic pantheon of saints and martyrs is peopled with females who, with Mary as their model of virtuous womanhood, valued their virginity (and their chaste yet semi-sexual devotion to Jesus) more than their lives: St. Agatha, in an attempt to break her virtuous resolve, was handed over to Aphrodesia, “an abominable woman, who, together with her daughters, publicly professed immodesty.” St. Lucy, “was yet very young when she offered to God the flower of her virginity.” St. Barbara’s “father, carrying out her death sentence, beheaded her himself, and in turn, legend says, was consumed by a fire from heaven;” and St. Ursula, was martyred on a prenuptial pilgrimage with 11,000 other virgins! The glories of female virginity have spawned tributes ranging from paintings to pilgrimages and poetry to place names. Christopher Columbus christened the Virgin Islands in honor of St. Ursula and her untouched entourage, while the State of Virginia was named after England’s Elizabeth, “The Virgin Queen.” Virginia remains a popular girl’s name in the U.S., along with a host of variants such as Ginny, Ginger, Gina, Lagina, and Gigi. All of these mean chaste, fresh and maidenly—virginal. Promise Rings and Purity Balls Protestant Christianity is a rebel offspring of the Vatican, and even though the Protestant reformers rejected the cult of Mary, Catholicism’s supreme value on female chastity was deeply imbedded in their DNA, where it persists to this day. Among the more quixotic manifestations are purity balls and promise rings through which a young girl can pledge her maidenhead to her father for safekeeping until such time as he should hand it over to a mutually agreeable young man. The image of a girl in a white dress dancing with her daddy, like a beautiful painting of Madonna and child, may evoke a feeling of sweet nostalgia. But rituals and icons like these are artistic residual of the ancient Near Eastern culture in which women (along with children and slaves and livestock) wereliterally possessions of men. As writer Jessica Valenti outlines in her book, The Purity Myth,they are the bright surface of a dark, deep cultural current that denies and shames women’s sexuality. A woman used is a woman soiled. A woman raped is a woman ruined. A girl who explores her body with a boy is a licked lollypop. A divorced woman shouldn’t get married in white. Only an unbedded and so unsullied female—a virgin—could be pure enough to birth a perfect child, the son of God. Beyond Virginity How can sex-positive people who also enjoy Christmas affirm what it means to be fully female, including the physical pleasures of the female body, not merely its reproductive potential? How can all of us teach our daughters that their bodies are wholesome and beautiful, whether or not they have been molested or assaulted or have had sexual experiences of their own choosing? How can we help to break down the harmful virgin-whore dichotomy, with the only alternative being asexual motherhood? Some Christian theologians have returned to emphasizing the earliest Christ birth narratives, in which Jesus came into the world in the normal way. Two Church fathers, Origin and Justin Martyr, mention sects of Christians who believed Jesus was the natural son of Mary and Joseph. The Apostle Paul and even the writer of Luke appear to have held this perspective, and the virgin birth is now thought to be a late addition to the gospel narratives. Episcopal priest, Chloe Breyer summarizes the long history of Christian debate over the virgin birth in her article, “The Earthly Father.” Even after virgin birth stories emerged, a countervailing illegitimacy tradition persisted for centuries. By the time the Bible congealed in the fourth century, such perspectives were considered heretical, but they have been revived in recent years. Such arguments admittedly go against the current, but they show that belief in a virgin birth—with all that implies about female sexuality—is not necessaryto Christianity or to appreciating many kinds of symbolism in Christmas story. Progressive Christians, do not treat the Bible as the literally perfect word of God but instead understand it as a human-made set of documents containing moral and spiritual insights (and failings) of our ancestors. Secularists, though they may not prize the Bible, understand all sacred texts in this way, which allows us to glean through, keeping the parts that fit and treating the rest as a window into human history and psychology. For those who share this mindset, whether or not they retain some belief in the supernatural, the Christmas story and season offer valuable opportunities to open up conversation with young people about many aspects of humanity’s long moral arc, including perspectives on the female body. Simply leaving youth to internalize negative messages about sexuality or waiting for them to bring up awkward topics is asking them to do our job. The wise parent or aunt or friend tunes in to readiness and explores ideas and values as opportunities arise. Perhaps one of your gifts during this holiday season could be the gift of a conversation. Most Americans, even many who are not very religious, look forward to Christmas as a time to celebrate warmth, friendship, generosity and good cheer. Familiar festivities weave together stories and traditions from many cultures, which makes it easy to find something for everyone. But maybe it’s time to look a little closer at the Christmas story itself. The birth story of the baby Jesus is heartwarming and iconic—the promise of new life and new hope in a time of darkness. It has inspired centuries of maternal art and is the best loved of all Bible stories. It also has a darker subtext, especially for someone like me—the mother of two daughters. In the story, an angel appears to a virgin girl, announcing that she will conceive a baby boy. Her fiancé Joseph decides to stick with her only because her baby bump is of divine origins. The author of Luke makes a point of telling us that he refrains from sex with her till after the baby Jesus is born. All of this emphasis on Mary’s sexual history, or rather lack thereof, sends a message that can be shaming and harmful: Only an unbedded, unsullied, unused female—a virgin—could be good enough to birth a perfect child, the son of God. Virginity Equals Purity Girls who have sex are soiled. That may not be the first thing that comes to mind when we see a picture of Madonna and child or hear a Christmas carol, but the message is clear all the same, and the fact that it is subtext may make it all the more insidious for young women. Mind you, Christianity is not the only religion that has assigned such extraordinary status to the pristine vagina or, conversely, treated female sexuality as something lesser or tainted. For example, Buddha’s mother Maya, called the “best of all women,” becomes pregnant after a god in a dream enters her womb from the side. Adding insult to injury, Buddhism tells us that a “Bodisat leaves his mother’s womb erect and unsoiled, like a preacher descending from a pulpit or a man from a ladder, erect, stretching out his hands and feet, unsoiled by any impurities from contact with his mother’s womb, pure and fair, and shining like a gem placed on fine muslin of Benares.” — Mahapadana-sutra, Digha ii. 12 In the Ancient Near East, the birthplace of Christianity, some cultures saw the woman’s body as a vessel for a baby, which grew from the seed of a man or sometimes a supernatural being, much as a seed might grow in the earth. In this way of thinking, heroes and powerful men must have come from divine seed, and claims of a sexless conception underscored their supernatural origins. The Pharaoh Amenhotep III, Perseus, Romulus . . . even Augustus, Pythagoras, and Alexander the Great all were the subject of miraculous birth claims. Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe The enormous value that patriarchal cultures and religions place on female virginity has roots in biology. We’ve all heard the saying, “Mama’s baby, Papa’s maybe.” From time immemorial men have sought to control female sexuality to ensure that the children in which they invest their time, money and life energy are their own; and also to maximize their own offspring. Male animals of some other species do the same. For example, when a new male lion comes into a pride, he may kill all of the cubs from the previous male, which brings the females into heat so that he himself can mate them. Man’s Instincts Become God’s Edicts In the tribal, herding cultures of the Near East a young woman’s sexuality—her ability to produce purebred offspring of known origin—was an asset that belonged to her father. In the Hebrew Bible’s legal code, a rapist can be forced to purchase the goods he has damaged and to then keep her as a wife. A woman’s reproductive capacity is also valuable booty of war. In the battle between the Israelites and Midianites, for example, God’s messenger instructs that the Israelites are to kill all of the women who have been with a man but to keep the virgin girls for themselves. (These and other horrible references here.) Culture and religion transform biological urges into legally binding prescriptions from God himself. Once that happens, patterns that may have started for practical or biological reasons take on a momentum of their own, and we see this in the history of the Virgin Mary. The Sexless Union of Israel and Rome The earliest sects of Christianity disagreed with each other about when and how Jesus became uniquely divine. Some believed that he was adopted by God at the time of his baptism or resurrection. But as Christianity, with its Hebrew roots, adapted to the cultures of the Roman Empire, the story of a supernatural, sexless birth won out. It beautifully merged the god-man tradition of the Empire with Judaism’s obsessive and multifaceted focus on purity—pure bloodlines, pure foods, unblemished bodies, monotheism, unblended fabrics, and, of course, virginity. The Roman Catholic Church took the last of these new heights, turning Mary into a perpetual virgin for life and then for all of eternity, and eventually making vows of sexual abstinence a requirement of monastic life and the priesthood. Actress Julia Sweeney, in her funny, tender monologue, Letting Go of God , describes an encounter with two fresh-faced Mormon missionaries. Finding herself incredulous at some their beliefs, she pictures door-to-door Catholics enthusiastically endorsing the faith of her childhood: If someone came to my door and I was hearing Catholic theology and dogma for the first time, and they said, “We believe that God impregnated a very young girl without the use of intercourse, and the fact that she was a virgin is maniacally important to us . . .” I would have thought that was equally ridiculous. I’m just so used to that story. Aphrodesia or Death “Maniacally important” may be a quirky Julia Sweeney turn of phrase, but it contains an oversized grain of truth. The Catholic pantheon of saints and martyrs is peopled with females who, with Mary as their model of virtuous womanhood, valued their virginity (and their chaste yet semi-sexual devotion to Jesus) more than their lives: St. Agatha, in an attempt to break her virtuous resolve, was handed over to Aphrodesia, “an abominable woman, who, together with her daughters, publicly professed immodesty.” St. Lucy, “was yet very young when she offered to God the flower of her virginity.” St. Barbara’s “father, carrying out her death sentence, beheaded her himself, and in turn, legend says, was consumed by a fire from heaven;” and St. Ursula, was martyred on a prenuptial pilgrimage with 11,000 other virgins! The glories of female virginity have spawned tributes ranging from paintings to pilgrimages and poetry to place names. Christopher Columbus christened the Virgin Islands in honor of St. Ursula and her untouched entourage, while the State of Virginia was named after England’s Elizabeth, “The Virgin Queen.” Virginia remains a popular girl’s name in the U.S., along with a host of variants such as Ginny, Ginger, Gina, Lagina, and Gigi. All of these mean chaste, fresh and maidenly—virginal. Promise Rings and Purity Balls Protestant Christianity is a rebel offspring of the Vatican, and even though the Protestant reformers rejected the cult of Mary, Catholicism’s supreme value on female chastity was deeply imbedded in their DNA, where it persists to this day. Among the more quixotic manifestations are purity balls and promise rings through which a young girl can pledge her maidenhead to her father for safekeeping until such time as he should hand it over to a mutually agreeable young man. The image of a girl in a white dress dancing with her daddy, like a beautiful painting of Madonna and child, may evoke a feeling of sweet nostalgia. But rituals and icons like these are artistic residual of the ancient Near Eastern culture in which women (along with children and slaves and livestock) wereliterally possessions of men. As writer Jessica Valenti outlines in her book, The Purity Myth,they are the bright surface of a dark, deep cultural current that denies and shames women’s sexuality. A woman used is a woman soiled. A woman raped is a woman ruined. A girl who explores her body with a boy is a licked lollypop. A divorced woman shouldn’t get married in white. Only an unbedded and so unsullied female—a virgin—could be pure enough to birth a perfect child, the son of God. Beyond Virginity How can sex-positive people who also enjoy Christmas affirm what it means to be fully female, including the physical pleasures of the female body, not merely its reproductive potential? How can all of us teach our daughters that their bodies are wholesome and beautiful, whether or not they have been molested or assaulted or have had sexual experiences of their own choosing? How can we help to break down the harmful virgin-whore dichotomy, with the only alternative being asexual motherhood? Some Christian theologians have returned to emphasizing the earliest Christ birth narratives, in which Jesus came into the world in the normal way. Two Church fathers, Origin and Justin Martyr, mention sects of Christians who believed Jesus was the natural son of Mary and Joseph. The Apostle Paul and even the writer of Luke appear to have held this perspective, and the virgin birth is now thought to be a late addition to the gospel narratives. Episcopal priest, Chloe Breyer summarizes the long history of Christian debate over the virgin birth in her article, “The Earthly Father.” Even after virgin birth stories emerged, a countervailing illegitimacy tradition persisted for centuries. By the time the Bible congealed in the fourth century, such perspectives were considered heretical, but they have been revived in recent years. Such arguments admittedly go against the current, but they show that belief in a virgin birth—with all that implies about female sexuality—is not necessaryto Christianity or to appreciating many kinds of symbolism in Christmas story. Progressive Christians, do not treat the Bible as the literally perfect word of God but instead understand it as a human-made set of documents containing moral and spiritual insights (and failings) of our ancestors. Secularists, though they may not prize the Bible, understand all sacred texts in this way, which allows us to glean through, keeping the parts that fit and treating the rest as a window into human history and psychology. For those who share this mindset, whether or not they retain some belief in the supernatural, the Christmas story and season offer valuable opportunities to open up conversation with young people about many aspects of humanity’s long moral arc, including perspectives on the female body. Simply leaving youth to internalize negative messages about sexuality or waiting for them to bring up awkward topics is asking them to do our job. The wise parent or aunt or friend tunes in to readiness and explores ideas and values as opportunities arise. Perhaps one of your gifts during this holiday season could be the gift of a conversation.

Continue Reading...

We live in the golden age of awful news: Why every year seems so horrible in retrospect

2015 had the same number of days as any other year, but lately it seems like the world is speeding up much faster than we can handle. Technology has allowed us to record and experience so much more than anyone ever has that it's become easy to feel like we are almost drowning in news events. The modern media cycle strips the flesh off of even the most minor occurrences with hyena-like intensity. I can’t recall how many times I’ve thought, “That happened just this year?” The churn is so great that it’s sometimes hard to remember. Horrors come with dizzying frequency. 2014 was routinely described as a “terrible year,” but every year feels terrible now. 2015 has been dire enough that Slate felt compelled to make a list of nice things that happened over the past 12 months, as if to remind us that there were pleasures to be found among the misery. All of this might have something to do with why I keep returning to the idea of our place in history. I find myself wondering, over and over again, how this particular moment in the world will be remembered, 50 or 100 years from now (assuming, of course, that our species is still around at that point). It’s always impossible to really step outside the precise time you are living in, but we are so overloaded these days that I’ve noticed a certain comfort in making that attempt. The past 50 years were rotten in many ways, but they were also beautiful. We remember both of those things now. History has assigned overarching titles to huge chunks of time—the Middle Ages, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment—but we don’t live time in eras. We live it in days. What will they call this collection of days? How much of what we are experiencing right now will wind up mattering? When we're able to emerge from the wreckage and look back, what will seem important? It does feel like we are going through a particularly wrenching bout of transformation. Its source is not difficult to discern. The Internet is bringing about a change as massive as anything we’ve seen in centuries, and we are living right in the middle of that change. Everything, from our jobs to our brains, is being rewired. We are in the midst of shedding one world and introducing another. It is thrilling and terrifying and uncertain. Everywhere, the vast territory opened up by this massive shift in our lives is being fiercely contested. Like any revolution, it is provoking cycles of progress and backlash at record speed. The Internet is driving incredible, inspiring civil rights movements, but we’re also dealing with Donald Trump. It’s pushed discourse around feminism and queer issues to places it would have been astonishing to imagine even 10 years ago, but there’s also an all-out war on women’s reproductive rights taking place at the same time. It’s made us more connected to each other, more able to share joy and sadness and solidarity from across borders than ever before, but we’re also more spied on, more tracked, more collected than we’ve ever been. This unsettling leap into the future is accompanied, naturally, by the lingering effects of the past. The colonial adventurism of the West over the last 100 years has helped turn the Middle East into some unholy fusion of World War I and World War II-era Europe, with decaying empires, horribly knotty rivalries and genocidal monstrosity all combining to form a bloody and intractable mess. (And that’s before you even get to the Israel-Palestine situation.) The global acceleration of fossil-fuel consumption is killing the planet at a torrid pace—yet we seem unable to address the issue with a commensurate sense of urgency. Meanwhile, the 300 million guns lying around the United States are being put to use, to horrifying ends. And the entrenchment of neoliberal capitalism is colliding fitfully with resurgent social movements. It is all… a lot. Perhaps I have been thinking so much about the historical legacy of this period in time because it is the only way to even attempt to sift through such a morass. I really want to know what’s going to happen next—what will turn out to have mattered most, what battles were won. I’d imagine, for instance, that our half-hearted measures to tackle climate change will loom much larger in the historical retelling of our era than many other things that seem terribly central to us now. I’d imagine that the angst around “p.c. culture” and college students who have the audacity to question the prevailing order, no matter how chaotically, will come to be seen as a harbinger of the demographic shifts in American society, and not as a threat to the First Amendment. I’d imagine that Ted Cruz will be mostly forgotten. Eventually, we will come out on the other side of some of these things. A lot of that depends on what people do, of course. Living through a revolution is incredibly jarring, but it is also thrilling in its way. There is a chance we will tip even further into the muck, but there is also a chance that things change for the better. 2016 will be just as awful as 2015, but there will come a point when we are able to see it with some measure of clarity. I’m hoping I’ll be around long enough to get to that point.2015 had the same number of days as any other year, but lately it seems like the world is speeding up much faster than we can handle. Technology has allowed us to record and experience so much more than anyone ever has that it's become easy to feel like we are almost drowning in news events. The modern media cycle strips the flesh off of even the most minor occurrences with hyena-like intensity. I can’t recall how many times I’ve thought, “That happened just this year?” The churn is so great that it’s sometimes hard to remember. Horrors come with dizzying frequency. 2014 was routinely described as a “terrible year,” but every year feels terrible now. 2015 has been dire enough that Slate felt compelled to make a list of nice things that happened over the past 12 months, as if to remind us that there were pleasures to be found among the misery. All of this might have something to do with why I keep returning to the idea of our place in history. I find myself wondering, over and over again, how this particular moment in the world will be remembered, 50 or 100 years from now (assuming, of course, that our species is still around at that point). It’s always impossible to really step outside the precise time you are living in, but we are so overloaded these days that I’ve noticed a certain comfort in making that attempt. The past 50 years were rotten in many ways, but they were also beautiful. We remember both of those things now. History has assigned overarching titles to huge chunks of time—the Middle Ages, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment—but we don’t live time in eras. We live it in days. What will they call this collection of days? How much of what we are experiencing right now will wind up mattering? When we're able to emerge from the wreckage and look back, what will seem important? It does feel like we are going through a particularly wrenching bout of transformation. Its source is not difficult to discern. The Internet is bringing about a change as massive as anything we’ve seen in centuries, and we are living right in the middle of that change. Everything, from our jobs to our brains, is being rewired. We are in the midst of shedding one world and introducing another. It is thrilling and terrifying and uncertain. Everywhere, the vast territory opened up by this massive shift in our lives is being fiercely contested. Like any revolution, it is provoking cycles of progress and backlash at record speed. The Internet is driving incredible, inspiring civil rights movements, but we’re also dealing with Donald Trump. It’s pushed discourse around feminism and queer issues to places it would have been astonishing to imagine even 10 years ago, but there’s also an all-out war on women’s reproductive rights taking place at the same time. It’s made us more connected to each other, more able to share joy and sadness and solidarity from across borders than ever before, but we’re also more spied on, more tracked, more collected than we’ve ever been. This unsettling leap into the future is accompanied, naturally, by the lingering effects of the past. The colonial adventurism of the West over the last 100 years has helped turn the Middle East into some unholy fusion of World War I and World War II-era Europe, with decaying empires, horribly knotty rivalries and genocidal monstrosity all combining to form a bloody and intractable mess. (And that’s before you even get to the Israel-Palestine situation.) The global acceleration of fossil-fuel consumption is killing the planet at a torrid pace—yet we seem unable to address the issue with a commensurate sense of urgency. Meanwhile, the 300 million guns lying around the United States are being put to use, to horrifying ends. And the entrenchment of neoliberal capitalism is colliding fitfully with resurgent social movements. It is all… a lot. Perhaps I have been thinking so much about the historical legacy of this period in time because it is the only way to even attempt to sift through such a morass. I really want to know what’s going to happen next—what will turn out to have mattered most, what battles were won. I’d imagine, for instance, that our half-hearted measures to tackle climate change will loom much larger in the historical retelling of our era than many other things that seem terribly central to us now. I’d imagine that the angst around “p.c. culture” and college students who have the audacity to question the prevailing order, no matter how chaotically, will come to be seen as a harbinger of the demographic shifts in American society, and not as a threat to the First Amendment. I’d imagine that Ted Cruz will be mostly forgotten. Eventually, we will come out on the other side of some of these things. A lot of that depends on what people do, of course. Living through a revolution is incredibly jarring, but it is also thrilling in its way. There is a chance we will tip even further into the muck, but there is also a chance that things change for the better. 2016 will be just as awful as 2015, but there will come a point when we are able to see it with some measure of clarity. I’m hoping I’ll be around long enough to get to that point.

Continue Reading...

Merry XXX-mas: A brief history of Yuletide smut

Could anything better invoke the festive holiday sprit of Christmas than pornography? After all, before the laughably nonexistent contemporary War on Christmas, in which a friendly face says “happy holidays” and ever-fragile Western culture thereby crumbles, the actual historical war on Christmas came from Puritans even more joyless than Sean Hannity himself. And as Stephen Nissenbaum makes clear in his delightful "The Battle for Christmas," most of that resistance came from the holiday’s occasioning of “a kind of behavior that would be shocking today,” much of it openly sexual. Christmas began in debauchery, and, through holiday-themed smut, extends that impulse through the present day. As an invented tradition, Christmas grew out of drunken, interclass carnivalesque behaviors such as mumming and wassailing more than any theological imperatives. These activities always intersected with freewheeling sexual activity. In 1712, the somewhat uptight Cotton Mather’s complaints about the holiday included “lewd Gaming,” while a decade later an Anglican minister in New England bemoaned finding himself “in the midst of Rioting and Chambering, and Wantonness.” Less polite lips might call chambering fucking. Almanacs of the era frequently alluded to holiday sex (Nissenbaum notes that birth patterns for colonial New England show that “sexual activity peaked during the Christmas season”), and when the Puritans took charge in the mid-17th century, Christmas celebrations were made illegal. As always, however, capitalism proved a more effective disciplinary mechanism than law, and in the 19th century U.S. the holiday was co-opted by the consumer revolution. Santa Claus was rendered banal and bourgeois, detached from his rowdy plebian traditions; the tree and its gifts went to use stabilizing children, privatizing the family, and expanding consumer markets; and holiday activity moved indoors to the church pew. Christmas even became a tool against pornography, when good Christian men in both London and New York established a “sham indecent street trade” in the 1840s, selling purported “shameless publications” in sealed packages that, when unwrapped, contained Christmas carols and sermons (as Donna Dennis notes in a deliciously juicy footnote in her book "Licentious Gotham"). Yet the suppressed erotics of the holiday’s folk traditions resurfaced constantly, as when the charitable work of Charles Loring Brace, Louisa May Alcott, and other midcentury philanthropists so nakedly sought excessive displays of gratitude from their “charity objects” that they nearly served as an “economic equivalent to the sexual representation of women in pornography,” as Nissenbaum notes. Thus it’s no surprise that Christmas smut is, and historically has been, everywhere. A stealth trade in holiday erotica surely dates back to the very invention of Christmas, but becomes more visible by the 20th century. By 1939, John S. Sumner, successor to infamous smut-buster Anthony Comstock at the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, claimed that while “it may seem unthinkable that for commercial gain anybody would make and sell vulgar and licentious cards making a travesty of Christmas and the Christmas spirit, this practice has been prevalent in recent years.” While Sumner’s plea for stricter laws went unheeded, and his vice society soon sputtered into protracted death throes, spicy Christmas cheer persisted. In one perfectly calibrated historical incident, the Jolly Rogers Club in Maryland hosted a Christmas fundraiser with a striptease in 1952 that was busted by police sergeant Leo Kinsey, of whom the Baltimore Sun added, “(no relation),” lest the public think that Alfred’s stricter brother was out putting the kibosh on those sexual behaviors of which the famed researcher had written. Siding with Sgt. Kinsey over Dr. Kinsey, an unimpressed judge issued fines all around. In addition to being a season of ribaldry, Christmas has also provided an erotic iconography for everyone from Hugh Hefner to Kenneth Anger. A half-century of smiling Playmates offered safely sanitized Christmas leers, and in a nominal gesture at equality, Playgirl put Burt Reynolds on the cover in a Santa hat for its 1974 Christmas issue. But those in the margins founds holiday pleasures, too. “Christmas isn’t for queers,” Lauren Gutterman recently noted, but perhaps that also gave it a deliciously illicit frisson. A Christmas tree candle enters into Anger’s set of barely-sublimated invocations of male orgasm in his queer experimental masterpiece "Fireworks" (1947). A few decades later, gay liberation allowed for less coy Christmas pleasures, as seen in Robert Opel’s elusive 1978 short "Fuck You, Santa Claus," described by the UCLA Film & Television Archive as a “satirical look at the commercialism that surrounds the Christmas holiday that culminates with a young man enticing a department store Santa in an explicit sexual act.” Still, throughout all of this history, the holiday season remained marked by rampant gluttony and consumerism, remaining a capitalist’s dream, and many of us partake in it whether we approve or not. Perhaps this is why Charles Dickens’ "A Christmas Carol" is such a persistent favorite. In spite of its seeming anti-capitalist message, the story generally promotes consumption (just share the consumables!), while Dickens and the Victorian era are the origin of our modern understanding of Christmas. This all has a lot in common with the history of hetero hardcore cinema, itself an adaptable capitalist enterprise that frequently plays, in complicated and contradictory ways, with the Victorian past (as Laura has shown in her scholarly work). Sometimes, the link is as facile as cheap—if endlessly amusing, for the easily amused—wordplay: "O Cum All Ye Faithful" is apparently too irresistible to avoid, popping up as a title for an early-1970s short, a 21st century Christmas dinner orgy and even a recent ebook featuring—and we quote—“a gangbang of biblical proportions.” Yet within this yuletide frenzy, there’s a distinct subset of cynical, dark, and strange XXX Christmas flicks that tap more deeply into this vexed tradition, such as David Stanley’s delightfully downbeat "Eve’s Gift" (2001). The greatest of these films, though, is Shaun Costello’s 1976 "The Passions of Carol," faithfully adapted from Dickens’ perennial classic, perverting many of the Dickensian values we still cherish. Filmed and set in 1970s New York City, the epicenter of the golden age of porn, here Ebenezer Scrooge is Carol Scrooge (Mary Stuart), editor of Biva Magazine (a takeoff on Viva magazine, Bob Guccione’s attempt at a Penthouse for women). Carol is selfish and exploitative, using other peoples’ sexuality for capitalist profit. It is Christmas Eve, and she won’t let Bob Hatchet (a deceptively sweet Jamie Gillis) go home until he has fixed the soft dicks in the latest pictorial (we still have no idea how he is meant to achieve this). Carol has lived a lifetime of selfish antics and greed, and it’s about time she learned her lesson. Thus, she is visited by three spirits, each of whom shows her scenes of a sexual nature from which she is meant to understand the toxicity of sexual commodity culture. Spoiler: She changes her ways and declares, like Ebenezer, that she will “never be mean again.” What is captivating about "Passions" is that while Costello manages to retain the lessons we are meant to take away from the Dickens tale—don’t be mean, don’t be selfish, give to the needy, don’t exploit your female sexuality for capitalist gain (ok, the last one is Costello’s)—he also manages to thoroughly unsettle other, arguable more cherished, sentiments. Watching this cheerful, sparkly Christmas yarn from the director of the notoriously rough and violent "Forced Entry" and "Water Power," we have always imagined Costello chuckling from behind the camera as he artfully inverts the sanctity of childhood, cherished notions of femininity, and ultimately traditional notions of gender and sexuality. Easily the most impressive scene in this regard is that of Christmas Past. How to foster a hardcore sex scene set in the past, when the protagonist is a child? The answer may surprise or even horrify you. Costello chose to create an oversize playroom so the adult actors look like children, while the scene itself takes on a feeling of the fantastical. Furthermore, in this scene Carol is essentially molesting her two childhood friends, Billy and Barbie, and the exploitative nature of the proceedings is figured in the body of a doll. Let us explain. This doll, unsettlingly large in itself, serves as a symbol of childhood and commerce throughout this number, showing up in the creepiest of places, such as above Carol's head while she gives head. Later, as if to depict the raping of childhood, the doll appears disheveled and missing an arm. This initiates a bizarre sexual number. Carol fucks Barbie with the doll’s arm, eventually inserting it all the way to the wrist, resulting in the disturbing image of a hand emerging from a woman—fucking and its sometime-result are merged. Did we mention Costello also punctuates the scene with hardcore shots of Raggedy Ann and Andy? Well, he does. This is as carnivalesque as early Christmas revelry, a cinematic wassail for the Gerald Ford era. This is just one memorable scene in a film that offers up a bounty of grotesqueries at the same time as it produces romance, humor and a genuinely festive atmosphere. Somehow Costello manages to create a Christmassy film worthy of cuddling up in front of with a partner, but which may elicit more than a few “what the fucks.” Personally, that’s our kind of Christmas yarn. The leering old pre-makeover Saint Nick would surely approve. The film shimmers and sparkles, the music (ranging from "Tubular Bells" to "Carol of the Bells") is festive, and Costello has made a genuinely cinematic recreation of Dickens’ story on an incredibly meager budget. Whip up the eggnog, grab that special someone (the one you thought of while reading this), and watch the beautifully restored release of this classic courtesy of Distribpix and now streaming on exploitation.tv.

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Jimmy Stewart was my teen idol

I saw "It’s a Wonderful Life" for the first time when I was 15. I’d noticed it in the periphery of Christmas for many years, with teachers rolling televisions into classrooms to play the film during grade school holiday parties. But the mere fact of its black-and-whiteness had immediately led me to dismiss it as “boring,” and I’d instead opted to chomp mini candy canes and pass notes about who in class had gotten her period so far.

Then in my sophomore year of high school, I strolled through my parents’ living room and caught a glimpse of Jimmy Stewart’s slow smile. It stopped me. Who was this absolute dreamboat of a man, and why wasn’t he all we were talking about nonstop, every day of the year?

Previously my affections had veered toward the likes of Christian Slater and Neil Patrick Harris -- each ticking the bad boy and good boy (and gay boy) categories that typically mark one’s adolescent crushes. But Jimmy Stewart was a different kind of crush. He was incredibly handsome, yes -- with that full mouth and those twinkling eyes -- but more so in a teasing, playful way. Here was a man whose speaking voice sounded as if he were forever on the cusp of swallowing his own tongue, and somehow, coming out of that face, it came off as utterly charming.

There was nothing sexual in my affection for him. Unlike Christian Slater, I never imagined kissing him or slow dancing with him to Extreme’s “More than Words.” Intimacy was in no way a part of the fantasy. I just wanted this kind man, with his tall, grasshopper body, to come knock on my door, and offer to lasso me the moon. 

I still wasn’t quite ready to be physically attracted to an actual grown man -- one who had to shave every day, and who most likely knew how to kiss without banging into your teeth. At 15, sex was still a hazy concept -- a confusing, gropey mess of strange appendages, and this feeling that was only intensified by attending Catholic school. I once made out with a boy on a patch of grass near the gym, right beneath a statue of the Blessed Virgin. Later, I couldn’t quite decide if this made the sin better or worse.

 My safe, cozy little Indiana world was opening up ever so slightly, cracking with tiny fissures that I knew would eventually split wide, dropping me face first into adulthood. My driver’s license loomed around the corner. The oldest of my seven siblings was hauling duffel bags off to college, leaving gaping holes at the dinner table where we once sat so closely our elbows knocked. And my relationship with my father had suddenly become stilted and awkward. I spoke to him in scripted teen-speak -- all sighs and mumbles. I’d recently learned that he had at various points in his life had serious struggles with alcohol. This knowledge sent me reeling. I’d never seen him take a sip of a drink in my entire life, and had always assumed he was just incredibly fond of iced tea. I made his iced tea every night  -- a chore that had previously annoyed me, as I spooned powdery Nestea into a pitcher and swirled it with a spoon. But now, the dark swirls appeared even murkier to me. Here was this new knowledge -- that my dad was not just my dad, existing solely to blast Neil Diamond’s “We’re Coming to America” as he drove us to school, or to chase bats out of the house with a golf club when they managed to sneak down our chimney. He was an independent person, with his own contradictions and experiences, and a life that spooled out long before I’d ever poofed into existence.

There was so much new knowledge. And the prevailing message of it all was that life was in fact unknowable. No one could tell me what my future would hold, and what triumph or romance or heavy sorrow was hidden in my own story. It was a thought that kept me awake at night, staring at the drooping canopy over my bed. Who would I love and hold dear? And would they love me back?

Out my window, I would hear the Indiana freight trains blasting their whistles, ghostly and urgent, and then I would wonder why that sex scene in the movie "Dreamscape" -- the one where Dennis Quaid seduces Kate Capshaw on a train and then that cobra man appears -- why did it make me feel so excited and strange? Was there something wrong with me? Did I have a reptilian sexual perversion?

The trains outside would race by, several miles away, though they sounded as if they were in fact roaring up my parents’ driveway. I would lie as still as possible, and wonder what would happen if I just never again moved from this stretch of my floral bedspread.

There was no sex in Bedford Falls. This I knew. There was only the delicious, electric tension between George and Mary as they tried to share a telephone together. Their school dance was all white gloves and Charleston competitions. There was no “Oh Me So Horny” blasted from a stereo while a boy tried to grind his Dockers against you. Bert the cop never cracked jokes to Ernie the cabbie about “fingerbanging,” no matter how risqué Violet’s dress was that evening. There were no drinking problems, unless you counted Old Man Gower understandably going on a bender after receiving his heartbreaking telegram. The main street of Bedford Falls wasn’t dotted with the plastic glow of Arby’s and Long John Silvers. Instead, there were cheerful soda fountains, and the trusted Bailey Building and Loan.

I longed for this idyllic place and time so badly I could almost taste it, and I funneled all of this angsty longing into Jimmy Stewart. I wanted him to “call on me” one night during a passing stroll. To stride up my parents’ porch with his long legs… and then freeze time. To make things simple and knowable once more. To make them -- if you will -- black and white.

Of course, in Bedford Falls people were also dying in WWII. The only person of color was a maid, and women were either married off or doomed to lives as sad, bespectacled librarians. But this didn’t really register with 15-year-old me. All I saw was a winking George Bailey singing “Buffalo gals won’t you come out tonight...” And that was all I wanted to see.

I went to the local library and unearthed Jimmy Stewart’s address from a leather-bound “Who’s Who.” I penned him a letter in my scrawled cursive, letting him know how much I appreciated his contribution to American cinema. I mentioned that I sometimes thought about being an actress myself, having just been in a rather successful version of "The Jungle Book" at my high school, where I leapt around stage with mascara on my nose and a felt tail safety-pinned to my sweatpants.

I kept the letter very formal, and had the self-control to not unleash all of my teenaged Midwestern melancholy onto an 80-year-old Hollywood legend. I certainly didn’t tell him what he meant to me. I also never dwelled upon the fact that the crush I was writing to was in fact a senior citizen. In my mind I was writing to the Jimmy Stewart of my daydreams, and my daydreams made no allowances for walkers or liver spots.

My mother made no comment about my new choice of teen idol. She merely hid her smile when I asked her to rent "The Philadelphia Story" and "Harvey" at the local Blockbuster. She’d hand the tapes over to me along with my requested bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, and then let me shut myself into my room with my daydreams. She bought me a book about him for my birthday, a big coffee-table-style deal with glossy photos of him smiling next to a mink-coated Rita Hayworth. As I flipped through the pages my eyes skimmed words like “womanizer” and “FBI informant,” and I slapped it shut, reading no further.

At a flea market I purchased an enormous, vintage-style poster of "It’s a Wonderful Life." I pulled "Beetlejuice" down from my bedroom door and carefully scotch-taped Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed in its place.

One July morning when I was 17, I walked barefoot out to the mailbox, the day already thick with Ohio River humidity. My car was parked nearby, and as I flipped through the catalogs and bills, I wondered where my friends and I would go that night. Would we break into the quarry to swim? Go to the truck stop that sold hilarious porn? And then suddenly, I spotted a small white envelope addressed to me. It was postmarked from Marina Del Rey, California, and may as well have read “Marina del Rey, Mars.” I couldn’t for the life of me think of who it could be from. I tore it open, and inside was a small card covered in shaky black script:

“Thank you for your very kind and thoughtful letter. I wish you well in your acting work, and I hope you have a wonderful life. Sincerely, James Stewart.”

I stared in disbelief, my heart pounding in my ears. I had completely forgotten I ever wrote to the man! Had he really held this card in his hand? And now it was in my hand? I imagined this elderly Jimmy Stewart sitting somewhere in a patch of California sun. I imagined a blanket over his knees, looking not unlike he does in "Rear Window." But this time, instead of gaping at his murderous neighbors, he was peering quizzically at a fan letter from a pensive teenager in Indiana.

I stood on the hot pavement and let the card quiver in my hand, which was shaking with excitement. George Bailey had at last made it up my driveway. He had come calling after all! And yet… it was too late. He hadn’t stopped time. Life was pushing me forward quickly now. I didn’t know it then, but in two months I was going to fall in love for the first time. It would be with a boy with his own twinkling eyes, though his would be hazel. In another four months I would lose my virginity to him. He would make me mix tapes and write me funny poems. And in a year and a half, he would die very suddenly during my first week of college.

In a few more years, my father and I would slowly learn how to talk to each other again -- mainly by mocking the other’s political leanings. But we would eventually grow very close. In another 17 years he would develop Alzheimer’s. I would sit by his bed and offer him sips of water through a straw. And I would give anything for one more chance to make him iced tea.

In 13 years I would meet my husband in a shadowy bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He would be Irish and dimpled, and would make me laugh so hard my eyes would tear. We would have a child together. A singing, blue-eyed boy, whose smile would make my heart feel like a fireworks display.

In 20 years, I would carefully pull that poster down from my bedroom door. It would have hung there for decades. Long after I’d left for college. Long after I’d moved to New York, and later Europe. Unlike George Bailey, I would kick the dust of that town off my feet and see the world. Or at least parts of it. By the time I’d take it down, it would be yellowed slightly from the sun. I would carry it back to my home in Brooklyn, and hang it on my bedroom wall there. Lying in bed at night, I would once again see Jimmy Stewart’s profile in the darkness. Though this time my husband would be snoring softly, while my son’s tiny hands gently held my face.

Standing out in my parent’s driveway, holding that quaking card -- I wouldn’t know any of this. I wouldn’t know what the movie I had memorized all those years ago had been trying to tell me: There is no stopping of time. Life moves on and on and on; the future is unknowable. It is filled with moments of great happiness -- kissing your true love Donna Reed for the first time. And moments of immense grief -- your father dies the very night you kiss her. But it’s this joy and this sadness -- the mingling of the two -- it’s the great big mess of it that makes a life. And so we stay brave, and move through the mystery with nothing but hope and luck to safeguard us. But also with knowing that there will be tremendous love woven into the story. And that -- that is what makes it wonderful.

I saw "It’s a Wonderful Life" for the first time when I was 15. I’d noticed it in the periphery of Christmas for many years, with teachers rolling televisions into classrooms to play the film during grade school holiday parties. But the mere fact of its black-and-whiteness had immediately led me to dismiss it as “boring,” and I’d instead opted to chomp mini candy canes and pass notes about who in class had gotten her period so far.

Then in my sophomore year of high school, I strolled through my parents’ living room and caught a glimpse of Jimmy Stewart’s slow smile. It stopped me. Who was this absolute dreamboat of a man, and why wasn’t he all we were talking about nonstop, every day of the year?

Previously my affections had veered toward the likes of Christian Slater and Neil Patrick Harris -- each ticking the bad boy and good boy (and gay boy) categories that typically mark one’s adolescent crushes. But Jimmy Stewart was a different kind of crush. He was incredibly handsome, yes -- with that full mouth and those twinkling eyes -- but more so in a teasing, playful way. Here was a man whose speaking voice sounded as if he were forever on the cusp of swallowing his own tongue, and somehow, coming out of that face, it came off as utterly charming.

There was nothing sexual in my affection for him. Unlike Christian Slater, I never imagined kissing him or slow dancing with him to Extreme’s “More than Words.” Intimacy was in no way a part of the fantasy. I just wanted this kind man, with his tall, grasshopper body, to come knock on my door, and offer to lasso me the moon. 

I still wasn’t quite ready to be physically attracted to an actual grown man -- one who had to shave every day, and who most likely knew how to kiss without banging into your teeth. At 15, sex was still a hazy concept -- a confusing, gropey mess of strange appendages, and this feeling that was only intensified by attending Catholic school. I once made out with a boy on a patch of grass near the gym, right beneath a statue of the Blessed Virgin. Later, I couldn’t quite decide if this made the sin better or worse.

 My safe, cozy little Indiana world was opening up ever so slightly, cracking with tiny fissures that I knew would eventually split wide, dropping me face first into adulthood. My driver’s license loomed around the corner. The oldest of my seven siblings was hauling duffel bags off to college, leaving gaping holes at the dinner table where we once sat so closely our elbows knocked. And my relationship with my father had suddenly become stilted and awkward. I spoke to him in scripted teen-speak -- all sighs and mumbles. I’d recently learned that he had at various points in his life had serious struggles with alcohol. This knowledge sent me reeling. I’d never seen him take a sip of a drink in my entire life, and had always assumed he was just incredibly fond of iced tea. I made his iced tea every night  -- a chore that had previously annoyed me, as I spooned powdery Nestea into a pitcher and swirled it with a spoon. But now, the dark swirls appeared even murkier to me. Here was this new knowledge -- that my dad was not just my dad, existing solely to blast Neil Diamond’s “We’re Coming to America” as he drove us to school, or to chase bats out of the house with a golf club when they managed to sneak down our chimney. He was an independent person, with his own contradictions and experiences, and a life that spooled out long before I’d ever poofed into existence.

There was so much new knowledge. And the prevailing message of it all was that life was in fact unknowable. No one could tell me what my future would hold, and what triumph or romance or heavy sorrow was hidden in my own story. It was a thought that kept me awake at night, staring at the drooping canopy over my bed. Who would I love and hold dear? And would they love me back?

Out my window, I would hear the Indiana freight trains blasting their whistles, ghostly and urgent, and then I would wonder why that sex scene in the movie "Dreamscape" -- the one where Dennis Quaid seduces Kate Capshaw on a train and then that cobra man appears -- why did it make me feel so excited and strange? Was there something wrong with me? Did I have a reptilian sexual perversion?

The trains outside would race by, several miles away, though they sounded as if they were in fact roaring up my parents’ driveway. I would lie as still as possible, and wonder what would happen if I just never again moved from this stretch of my floral bedspread.

There was no sex in Bedford Falls. This I knew. There was only the delicious, electric tension between George and Mary as they tried to share a telephone together. Their school dance was all white gloves and Charleston competitions. There was no “Oh Me So Horny” blasted from a stereo while a boy tried to grind his Dockers against you. Bert the cop never cracked jokes to Ernie the cabbie about “fingerbanging,” no matter how risqué Violet’s dress was that evening. There were no drinking problems, unless you counted Old Man Gower understandably going on a bender after receiving his heartbreaking telegram. The main street of Bedford Falls wasn’t dotted with the plastic glow of Arby’s and Long John Silvers. Instead, there were cheerful soda fountains, and the trusted Bailey Building and Loan.

I longed for this idyllic place and time so badly I could almost taste it, and I funneled all of this angsty longing into Jimmy Stewart. I wanted him to “call on me” one night during a passing stroll. To stride up my parents’ porch with his long legs… and then freeze time. To make things simple and knowable once more. To make them -- if you will -- black and white.

Of course, in Bedford Falls people were also dying in WWII. The only person of color was a maid, and women were either married off or doomed to lives as sad, bespectacled librarians. But this didn’t really register with 15-year-old me. All I saw was a winking George Bailey singing “Buffalo gals won’t you come out tonight...” And that was all I wanted to see.

I went to the local library and unearthed Jimmy Stewart’s address from a leather-bound “Who’s Who.” I penned him a letter in my scrawled cursive, letting him know how much I appreciated his contribution to American cinema. I mentioned that I sometimes thought about being an actress myself, having just been in a rather successful version of "The Jungle Book" at my high school, where I leapt around stage with mascara on my nose and a felt tail safety-pinned to my sweatpants.

I kept the letter very formal, and had the self-control to not unleash all of my teenaged Midwestern melancholy onto an 80-year-old Hollywood legend. I certainly didn’t tell him what he meant to me. I also never dwelled upon the fact that the crush I was writing to was in fact a senior citizen. In my mind I was writing to the Jimmy Stewart of my daydreams, and my daydreams made no allowances for walkers or liver spots.

My mother made no comment about my new choice of teen idol. She merely hid her smile when I asked her to rent "The Philadelphia Story" and "Harvey" at the local Blockbuster. She’d hand the tapes over to me along with my requested bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, and then let me shut myself into my room with my daydreams. She bought me a book about him for my birthday, a big coffee-table-style deal with glossy photos of him smiling next to a mink-coated Rita Hayworth. As I flipped through the pages my eyes skimmed words like “womanizer” and “FBI informant,” and I slapped it shut, reading no further.

At a flea market I purchased an enormous, vintage-style poster of "It’s a Wonderful Life." I pulled "Beetlejuice" down from my bedroom door and carefully scotch-taped Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed in its place.

One July morning when I was 17, I walked barefoot out to the mailbox, the day already thick with Ohio River humidity. My car was parked nearby, and as I flipped through the catalogs and bills, I wondered where my friends and I would go that night. Would we break into the quarry to swim? Go to the truck stop that sold hilarious porn? And then suddenly, I spotted a small white envelope addressed to me. It was postmarked from Marina Del Rey, California, and may as well have read “Marina del Rey, Mars.” I couldn’t for the life of me think of who it could be from. I tore it open, and inside was a small card covered in shaky black script:

“Thank you for your very kind and thoughtful letter. I wish you well in your acting work, and I hope you have a wonderful life. Sincerely, James Stewart.”

I stared in disbelief, my heart pounding in my ears. I had completely forgotten I ever wrote to the man! Had he really held this card in his hand? And now it was in my hand? I imagined this elderly Jimmy Stewart sitting somewhere in a patch of California sun. I imagined a blanket over his knees, looking not unlike he does in "Rear Window." But this time, instead of gaping at his murderous neighbors, he was peering quizzically at a fan letter from a pensive teenager in Indiana.

I stood on the hot pavement and let the card quiver in my hand, which was shaking with excitement. George Bailey had at last made it up my driveway. He had come calling after all! And yet… it was too late. He hadn’t stopped time. Life was pushing me forward quickly now. I didn’t know it then, but in two months I was going to fall in love for the first time. It would be with a boy with his own twinkling eyes, though his would be hazel. In another four months I would lose my virginity to him. He would make me mix tapes and write me funny poems. And in a year and a half, he would die very suddenly during my first week of college.

In a few more years, my father and I would slowly learn how to talk to each other again -- mainly by mocking the other’s political leanings. But we would eventually grow very close. In another 17 years he would develop Alzheimer’s. I would sit by his bed and offer him sips of water through a straw. And I would give anything for one more chance to make him iced tea.

In 13 years I would meet my husband in a shadowy bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He would be Irish and dimpled, and would make me laugh so hard my eyes would tear. We would have a child together. A singing, blue-eyed boy, whose smile would make my heart feel like a fireworks display.

In 20 years, I would carefully pull that poster down from my bedroom door. It would have hung there for decades. Long after I’d left for college. Long after I’d moved to New York, and later Europe. Unlike George Bailey, I would kick the dust of that town off my feet and see the world. Or at least parts of it. By the time I’d take it down, it would be yellowed slightly from the sun. I would carry it back to my home in Brooklyn, and hang it on my bedroom wall there. Lying in bed at night, I would once again see Jimmy Stewart’s profile in the darkness. Though this time my husband would be snoring softly, while my son’s tiny hands gently held my face.

Standing out in my parent’s driveway, holding that quaking card -- I wouldn’t know any of this. I wouldn’t know what the movie I had memorized all those years ago had been trying to tell me: There is no stopping of time. Life moves on and on and on; the future is unknowable. It is filled with moments of great happiness -- kissing your true love Donna Reed for the first time. And moments of immense grief -- your father dies the very night you kiss her. But it’s this joy and this sadness -- the mingling of the two -- it’s the great big mess of it that makes a life. And so we stay brave, and move through the mystery with nothing but hope and luck to safeguard us. But also with knowing that there will be tremendous love woven into the story. And that -- that is what makes it wonderful.

I saw "It’s a Wonderful Life" for the first time when I was 15. I’d noticed it in the periphery of Christmas for many years, with teachers rolling televisions into classrooms to play the film during grade school holiday parties. But the mere fact of its black-and-whiteness had immediately led me to dismiss it as “boring,” and I’d instead opted to chomp mini candy canes and pass notes about who in class had gotten her period so far.

Then in my sophomore year of high school, I strolled through my parents’ living room and caught a glimpse of Jimmy Stewart’s slow smile. It stopped me. Who was this absolute dreamboat of a man, and why wasn’t he all we were talking about nonstop, every day of the year?

Previously my affections had veered toward the likes of Christian Slater and Neil Patrick Harris -- each ticking the bad boy and good boy (and gay boy) categories that typically mark one’s adolescent crushes. But Jimmy Stewart was a different kind of crush. He was incredibly handsome, yes -- with that full mouth and those twinkling eyes -- but more so in a teasing, playful way. Here was a man whose speaking voice sounded as if he were forever on the cusp of swallowing his own tongue, and somehow, coming out of that face, it came off as utterly charming.

There was nothing sexual in my affection for him. Unlike Christian Slater, I never imagined kissing him or slow dancing with him to Extreme’s “More than Words.” Intimacy was in no way a part of the fantasy. I just wanted this kind man, with his tall, grasshopper body, to come knock on my door, and offer to lasso me the moon. 

I still wasn’t quite ready to be physically attracted to an actual grown man -- one who had to shave every day, and who most likely knew how to kiss without banging into your teeth. At 15, sex was still a hazy concept -- a confusing, gropey mess of strange appendages, and this feeling that was only intensified by attending Catholic school. I once made out with a boy on a patch of grass near the gym, right beneath a statue of the Blessed Virgin. Later, I couldn’t quite decide if this made the sin better or worse.

 My safe, cozy little Indiana world was opening up ever so slightly, cracking with tiny fissures that I knew would eventually split wide, dropping me face first into adulthood. My driver’s license loomed around the corner. The oldest of my seven siblings was hauling duffel bags off to college, leaving gaping holes at the dinner table where we once sat so closely our elbows knocked. And my relationship with my father had suddenly become stilted and awkward. I spoke to him in scripted teen-speak -- all sighs and mumbles. I’d recently learned that he had at various points in his life had serious struggles with alcohol. This knowledge sent me reeling. I’d never seen him take a sip of a drink in my entire life, and had always assumed he was just incredibly fond of iced tea. I made his iced tea every night  -- a chore that had previously annoyed me, as I spooned powdery Nestea into a pitcher and swirled it with a spoon. But now, the dark swirls appeared even murkier to me. Here was this new knowledge -- that my dad was not just my dad, existing solely to blast Neil Diamond’s “We’re Coming to America” as he drove us to school, or to chase bats out of the house with a golf club when they managed to sneak down our chimney. He was an independent person, with his own contradictions and experiences, and a life that spooled out long before I’d ever poofed into existence.

There was so much new knowledge. And the prevailing message of it all was that life was in fact unknowable. No one could tell me what my future would hold, and what triumph or romance or heavy sorrow was hidden in my own story. It was a thought that kept me awake at night, staring at the drooping canopy over my bed. Who would I love and hold dear? And would they love me back?

Out my window, I would hear the Indiana freight trains blasting their whistles, ghostly and urgent, and then I would wonder why that sex scene in the movie "Dreamscape" -- the one where Dennis Quaid seduces Kate Capshaw on a train and then that cobra man appears -- why did it make me feel so excited and strange? Was there something wrong with me? Did I have a reptilian sexual perversion?

The trains outside would race by, several miles away, though they sounded as if they were in fact roaring up my parents’ driveway. I would lie as still as possible, and wonder what would happen if I just never again moved from this stretch of my floral bedspread.

There was no sex in Bedford Falls. This I knew. There was only the delicious, electric tension between George and Mary as they tried to share a telephone together. Their school dance was all white gloves and Charleston competitions. There was no “Oh Me So Horny” blasted from a stereo while a boy tried to grind his Dockers against you. Bert the cop never cracked jokes to Ernie the cabbie about “fingerbanging,” no matter how risqué Violet’s dress was that evening. There were no drinking problems, unless you counted Old Man Gower understandably going on a bender after receiving his heartbreaking telegram. The main street of Bedford Falls wasn’t dotted with the plastic glow of Arby’s and Long John Silvers. Instead, there were cheerful soda fountains, and the trusted Bailey Building and Loan.

I longed for this idyllic place and time so badly I could almost taste it, and I funneled all of this angsty longing into Jimmy Stewart. I wanted him to “call on me” one night during a passing stroll. To stride up my parents’ porch with his long legs… and then freeze time. To make things simple and knowable once more. To make them -- if you will -- black and white.

Of course, in Bedford Falls people were also dying in WWII. The only person of color was a maid, and women were either married off or doomed to lives as sad, bespectacled librarians. But this didn’t really register with 15-year-old me. All I saw was a winking George Bailey singing “Buffalo gals won’t you come out tonight...” And that was all I wanted to see.

I went to the local library and unearthed Jimmy Stewart’s address from a leather-bound “Who’s Who.” I penned him a letter in my scrawled cursive, letting him know how much I appreciated his contribution to American cinema. I mentioned that I sometimes thought about being an actress myself, having just been in a rather successful version of "The Jungle Book" at my high school, where I leapt around stage with mascara on my nose and a felt tail safety-pinned to my sweatpants.

I kept the letter very formal, and had the self-control to not unleash all of my teenaged Midwestern melancholy onto an 80-year-old Hollywood legend. I certainly didn’t tell him what he meant to me. I also never dwelled upon the fact that the crush I was writing to was in fact a senior citizen. In my mind I was writing to the Jimmy Stewart of my daydreams, and my daydreams made no allowances for walkers or liver spots.

My mother made no comment about my new choice of teen idol. She merely hid her smile when I asked her to rent "The Philadelphia Story" and "Harvey" at the local Blockbuster. She’d hand the tapes over to me along with my requested bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, and then let me shut myself into my room with my daydreams. She bought me a book about him for my birthday, a big coffee-table-style deal with glossy photos of him smiling next to a mink-coated Rita Hayworth. As I flipped through the pages my eyes skimmed words like “womanizer” and “FBI informant,” and I slapped it shut, reading no further.

At a flea market I purchased an enormous, vintage-style poster of "It’s a Wonderful Life." I pulled "Beetlejuice" down from my bedroom door and carefully scotch-taped Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed in its place.

One July morning when I was 17, I walked barefoot out to the mailbox, the day already thick with Ohio River humidity. My car was parked nearby, and as I flipped through the catalogs and bills, I wondered where my friends and I would go that night. Would we break into the quarry to swim? Go to the truck stop that sold hilarious porn? And then suddenly, I spotted a small white envelope addressed to me. It was postmarked from Marina Del Rey, California, and may as well have read “Marina del Rey, Mars.” I couldn’t for the life of me think of who it could be from. I tore it open, and inside was a small card covered in shaky black script:

“Thank you for your very kind and thoughtful letter. I wish you well in your acting work, and I hope you have a wonderful life. Sincerely, James Stewart.”

I stared in disbelief, my heart pounding in my ears. I had completely forgotten I ever wrote to the man! Had he really held this card in his hand? And now it was in my hand? I imagined this elderly Jimmy Stewart sitting somewhere in a patch of California sun. I imagined a blanket over his knees, looking not unlike he does in "Rear Window." But this time, instead of gaping at his murderous neighbors, he was peering quizzically at a fan letter from a pensive teenager in Indiana.

I stood on the hot pavement and let the card quiver in my hand, which was shaking with excitement. George Bailey had at last made it up my driveway. He had come calling after all! And yet… it was too late. He hadn’t stopped time. Life was pushing me forward quickly now. I didn’t know it then, but in two months I was going to fall in love for the first time. It would be with a boy with his own twinkling eyes, though his would be hazel. In another four months I would lose my virginity to him. He would make me mix tapes and write me funny poems. And in a year and a half, he would die very suddenly during my first week of college.

In a few more years, my father and I would slowly learn how to talk to each other again -- mainly by mocking the other’s political leanings. But we would eventually grow very close. In another 17 years he would develop Alzheimer’s. I would sit by his bed and offer him sips of water through a straw. And I would give anything for one more chance to make him iced tea.

In 13 years I would meet my husband in a shadowy bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He would be Irish and dimpled, and would make me laugh so hard my eyes would tear. We would have a child together. A singing, blue-eyed boy, whose smile would make my heart feel like a fireworks display.

In 20 years, I would carefully pull that poster down from my bedroom door. It would have hung there for decades. Long after I’d left for college. Long after I’d moved to New York, and later Europe. Unlike George Bailey, I would kick the dust of that town off my feet and see the world. Or at least parts of it. By the time I’d take it down, it would be yellowed slightly from the sun. I would carry it back to my home in Brooklyn, and hang it on my bedroom wall there. Lying in bed at night, I would once again see Jimmy Stewart’s profile in the darkness. Though this time my husband would be snoring softly, while my son’s tiny hands gently held my face.

Standing out in my parent’s driveway, holding that quaking card -- I wouldn’t know any of this. I wouldn’t know what the movie I had memorized all those years ago had been trying to tell me: There is no stopping of time. Life moves on and on and on; the future is unknowable. It is filled with moments of great happiness -- kissing your true love Donna Reed for the first time. And moments of immense grief -- your father dies the very night you kiss her. But it’s this joy and this sadness -- the mingling of the two -- it’s the great big mess of it that makes a life. And so we stay brave, and move through the mystery with nothing but hope and luck to safeguard us. But also with knowing that there will be tremendous love woven into the story. And that -- that is what makes it wonderful.

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The “Black Mirror” Christmas special: A thrilling hint of the new season to come

It’s entirely possible that you’ve already seen “White Christmas,” the “Black Mirror” Christmas special, which premiered this time last year. Maybe you live in the United Kingdom. Maybe you have DirecTV, which is the only network in the U.S. that aired “White Christmas” last year. And—most likely of all—you may have torrented it, because legality aside, a year is a long time to wait for a 90-minute installment of a series that is just six hours altogether. It’s fitting that, for American viewers, at least, the experience of watching “Black Mirror” is such a technologically mediated one. To quote Zack Handlen at the A.V. Club, it’s “a show that regularly applies imagined technology from the not-so-distant future against the cracks of human weakness,” and each week there is a new innovation to discover. It makes the process of watching an unpredictable guessing game of cause and effect, as both the convenience of the technology and its unexpected pitfalls become known to the viewer. And “White Christmas” is more about technology than any of the episodes previous, drawing on the devices introduced in “The Entire History of You” to tell an even more dramatic story about the division and merging of the “IRL” self with the persona that self performs in the digital world. The episode tells three small tales and one big one, and underlying each vignette is the notion that our cyber-lives are as real as our real lives. This is a theme throughout “Black Mirror,” such as in “Be Right Back,” which tells a heart-rending story of a widow (Hayley Atwell) who finds a bit too much solace in an algorithm that guesses her dead husband’s personality through his texts and emails. Though the program is guessing at being him, it ultimately becomes a creation with a personality of its own—one that is both very alien and very familiar. It isn’t Ash, but it’s still someone. Also in season two, “The Waldo Moment” features an animated creation that becomes greater than—and ultimately destroys—the loser-ish comedian who created it. And season one episode “The Entire History of You” is a glimpse of how expanded technology makes for whole new smorgasbord of anxieties for the brain to prey on, fixating on the person we are in memories, or the person we perform at a dinner party, as being different from that which is seen and perceived by others. Throughout, there is this motif of dissociation and re-merging of two selves—the performed, quantifiable and data-driven side, and the irrational, qualitative and meatspace-dwelling one. It’s a kind of metaphor for what “Black Mirror,” the show, is about to do. Netflix announced this year that they will be releasing a 12-episode third season of “Black Mirror,” with creator Charlie Brooker and executive producer Annabel Jones onboard. Netflix has money, which “Black Mirror” must require an enormous amount of--given its all-new sets for each episode and casts of characters with significant star power--so in that sense the move makes a lot of sense. But the flexibility and binge-watchability of Netflix’s aesthetic is at odds with the tightly edited, carefully structured, episode-to-episode unpredictability of “Black Mirror.” “White Christmas” was made well before this deal was made, but because it strays from some of “Black Mirror's” fundamentals, it’s a less satisfying episode. The Christmas special isn’t bad, but it’s not the tightly wound, razor-sharp episode that “National Anthem,” “Be Right Back,” or “Fifteen Million Merits” is. Partly that’s because it’s longer; partly that’s because it takes place in flashbacks; and partly that’s because unlike every other episode of the show, “White Christmas” refers to technologies and terrors of the last two seasons. It’s a little too irritatingly neat; one of the reasons “Black Mirror” could so reliably get under your skin, even with weaker episodes like “The Waldo Moment,” is because in every installment a world is created and then metaphorically or actually destroyed. The fact that these were spaced out weekly made each episode a separately experienced journey into a separate world—almost the exact opposite of binge-worthy. But in “White Christmas,” rather than the “Twilight Zone” feeling of a sudden, truncated adventure, a few characters are introduced who live, somewhat, by the rules of other episodes. The bionic camera that was the subject of “The Entire History of You” returns to make a second appearance, accompanied by a nod to the grisly politics of digital slavery (“Fifteen Million Merits”) and the harsh, punitive environment of “White Bear.” Hamm is a smarmy and cheery smooth-talker—Dick Whitman in a universe where he believed Don Draper’s lies. He beckons his roommate Potter (Rafe Spall) to a Christmas breakfast, and starts telling the story of how he ended up in this odd little snowy lodge in what feels like the middle of nowhere. It’s certainly thematically satisfying. “White Christmas” puts the contrast between the digitally experienced and the really lived on stark display with the first story, of how Jon Hamm’s character Matthew used to be an in-ear Cyrano de Bergerac for guys who wanted help picking up women. What starts as an intellectual pursuit, a problem-solve, turns unexpectedly violent—the most brutal meeting of the cyber-self and the real self possible. And the episode also gets into the real-world implications of that cornerstone of the social media experience, blocking. When Matthew’s wife discovers that his side project resulted in a murder, she puts in place a program that is singly deployed, but doubly felt; she blocks him, which makes them both into white, muffled silhouettes in each other’s existence. As it happens, Potter was also blocked by his estranged wife for whole years, and is driven to near-madness by the shutting-out. The white, in “White Christmas,” is not describing fresh-driven snow covering the ground but rather the ghostly blank spaces where people used to be; instead of a wind whistling through the trees, the moaning sound is what used to be the intelligible voices of other human beings. And most disturbingly, in exploring the limits and mergings of the digital and “real” selves, is the episode’s notion of “cookies”—those little pieces of web code that stick around in your browser and do things for the parent code—but for people. A little fragment of persona, put into a box and assigned tasks. The entirely digital people do not realize that they aren’t real, meaning that Matt has to torture them, if you can torture a cyber-person, into some kind of compliance. In the vignette, Matt is working with Greta (Oona Chaplin), and when she impulsively refuses to cooperate, Matt fast-forwards her clock six months while he eats a piece of toast. When he hits play, she is wild with boredom and anxiety, barely able to speak above a whisper, having been sentenced to solitary confinement without even the entertainment of mealtime for half a year. Unfortunately, “White Christmas's” sense of the cookies’ mechanics is a fudged, even with broadly giving them the benefit of the doubt. The show is typically very on top of how its technology would work—that’s one of “Black Mirror's” fundamental appeals—so it’s strange to see the show misstep here. As a result, the second vignette in particular lacks the full impact it might have had otherwise. Comedy often arises from a willingness to take a premise to its logical endpoint; “Black Mirror” has been extraordinarily dedicated to logical endpoints up till now. Watching it produces a sense of mounting dread, as you discover the world’s rules and limits and then watch precisely how it fails. Going forward, I hope “Black Mirror” on Netflix continues to commit with such dedication to its premises—if only to reinforce that in this comedy, the joke’s always on us, the audience.It’s entirely possible that you’ve already seen “White Christmas,” the “Black Mirror” Christmas special, which premiered this time last year. Maybe you live in the United Kingdom. Maybe you have DirecTV, which is the only network in the U.S. that aired “White Christmas” last year. And—most likely of all—you may have torrented it, because legality aside, a year is a long time to wait for a 90-minute installment of a series that is just six hours altogether. It’s fitting that, for American viewers, at least, the experience of watching “Black Mirror” is such a technologically mediated one. To quote Zack Handlen at the A.V. Club, it’s “a show that regularly applies imagined technology from the not-so-distant future against the cracks of human weakness,” and each week there is a new innovation to discover. It makes the process of watching an unpredictable guessing game of cause and effect, as both the convenience of the technology and its unexpected pitfalls become known to the viewer. And “White Christmas” is more about technology than any of the episodes previous, drawing on the devices introduced in “The Entire History of You” to tell an even more dramatic story about the division and merging of the “IRL” self with the persona that self performs in the digital world. The episode tells three small tales and one big one, and underlying each vignette is the notion that our cyber-lives are as real as our real lives. This is a theme throughout “Black Mirror,” such as in “Be Right Back,” which tells a heart-rending story of a widow (Hayley Atwell) who finds a bit too much solace in an algorithm that guesses her dead husband’s personality through his texts and emails. Though the program is guessing at being him, it ultimately becomes a creation with a personality of its own—one that is both very alien and very familiar. It isn’t Ash, but it’s still someone. Also in season two, “The Waldo Moment” features an animated creation that becomes greater than—and ultimately destroys—the loser-ish comedian who created it. And season one episode “The Entire History of You” is a glimpse of how expanded technology makes for whole new smorgasbord of anxieties for the brain to prey on, fixating on the person we are in memories, or the person we perform at a dinner party, as being different from that which is seen and perceived by others. Throughout, there is this motif of dissociation and re-merging of two selves—the performed, quantifiable and data-driven side, and the irrational, qualitative and meatspace-dwelling one. It’s a kind of metaphor for what “Black Mirror,” the show, is about to do. Netflix announced this year that they will be releasing a 12-episode third season of “Black Mirror,” with creator Charlie Brooker and executive producer Annabel Jones onboard. Netflix has money, which “Black Mirror” must require an enormous amount of--given its all-new sets for each episode and casts of characters with significant star power--so in that sense the move makes a lot of sense. But the flexibility and binge-watchability of Netflix’s aesthetic is at odds with the tightly edited, carefully structured, episode-to-episode unpredictability of “Black Mirror.” “White Christmas” was made well before this deal was made, but because it strays from some of “Black Mirror's” fundamentals, it’s a less satisfying episode. The Christmas special isn’t bad, but it’s not the tightly wound, razor-sharp episode that “National Anthem,” “Be Right Back,” or “Fifteen Million Merits” is. Partly that’s because it’s longer; partly that’s because it takes place in flashbacks; and partly that’s because unlike every other episode of the show, “White Christmas” refers to technologies and terrors of the last two seasons. It’s a little too irritatingly neat; one of the reasons “Black Mirror” could so reliably get under your skin, even with weaker episodes like “The Waldo Moment,” is because in every installment a world is created and then metaphorically or actually destroyed. The fact that these were spaced out weekly made each episode a separately experienced journey into a separate world—almost the exact opposite of binge-worthy. But in “White Christmas,” rather than the “Twilight Zone” feeling of a sudden, truncated adventure, a few characters are introduced who live, somewhat, by the rules of other episodes. The bionic camera that was the subject of “The Entire History of You” returns to make a second appearance, accompanied by a nod to the grisly politics of digital slavery (“Fifteen Million Merits”) and the harsh, punitive environment of “White Bear.” Hamm is a smarmy and cheery smooth-talker—Dick Whitman in a universe where he believed Don Draper’s lies. He beckons his roommate Potter (Rafe Spall) to a Christmas breakfast, and starts telling the story of how he ended up in this odd little snowy lodge in what feels like the middle of nowhere. It’s certainly thematically satisfying. “White Christmas” puts the contrast between the digitally experienced and the really lived on stark display with the first story, of how Jon Hamm’s character Matthew used to be an in-ear Cyrano de Bergerac for guys who wanted help picking up women. What starts as an intellectual pursuit, a problem-solve, turns unexpectedly violent—the most brutal meeting of the cyber-self and the real self possible. And the episode also gets into the real-world implications of that cornerstone of the social media experience, blocking. When Matthew’s wife discovers that his side project resulted in a murder, she puts in place a program that is singly deployed, but doubly felt; she blocks him, which makes them both into white, muffled silhouettes in each other’s existence. As it happens, Potter was also blocked by his estranged wife for whole years, and is driven to near-madness by the shutting-out. The white, in “White Christmas,” is not describing fresh-driven snow covering the ground but rather the ghostly blank spaces where people used to be; instead of a wind whistling through the trees, the moaning sound is what used to be the intelligible voices of other human beings. And most disturbingly, in exploring the limits and mergings of the digital and “real” selves, is the episode’s notion of “cookies”—those little pieces of web code that stick around in your browser and do things for the parent code—but for people. A little fragment of persona, put into a box and assigned tasks. The entirely digital people do not realize that they aren’t real, meaning that Matt has to torture them, if you can torture a cyber-person, into some kind of compliance. In the vignette, Matt is working with Greta (Oona Chaplin), and when she impulsively refuses to cooperate, Matt fast-forwards her clock six months while he eats a piece of toast. When he hits play, she is wild with boredom and anxiety, barely able to speak above a whisper, having been sentenced to solitary confinement without even the entertainment of mealtime for half a year. Unfortunately, “White Christmas's” sense of the cookies’ mechanics is a fudged, even with broadly giving them the benefit of the doubt. The show is typically very on top of how its technology would work—that’s one of “Black Mirror's” fundamental appeals—so it’s strange to see the show misstep here. As a result, the second vignette in particular lacks the full impact it might have had otherwise. Comedy often arises from a willingness to take a premise to its logical endpoint; “Black Mirror” has been extraordinarily dedicated to logical endpoints up till now. Watching it produces a sense of mounting dread, as you discover the world’s rules and limits and then watch precisely how it fails. Going forward, I hope “Black Mirror” on Netflix continues to commit with such dedication to its premises—if only to reinforce that in this comedy, the joke’s always on us, the audience.

Continue Reading...

10 reasons to feel better about 2015: Amid the bombings, the political insanity, the rise of Islamophobia, there really were some bright spots

It would certainly be easy to do a piece about 10 horrible events from 2015, from the ongoing war in Syria and the refugee crisis, to the bombings in Beirut, Paris and San Bernardino, to the rise of Donald Trump and Islamophobia. But that wouldn’t be a very inspiring way to bid farewell to this year and usher in a new one. So let’s look at 10 reasons to feel better about 2015.

Iran nuclear deal:Despite significant political opposition and millions of dollars spent to try to quash the deal, the nuclear agreement with Iran was passed and the possibility of another US military entanglement was narrowly avoided. The powerful lobby AIPAC had its wings clipped, as did Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu (except that the deal unfortunately came with a payoff of even more US tax dollars going to the Israeli military).

Cuba thaw: It’s official! The US and Cuba now have embassies in each other’s territory for the first time in over half a century. The year has been marked by a UN meeting between Castro and Obama, more travelers to Cuba and more trade between both countries -- but Congress still needs to lift the trade embargo, fully lift the travel ban, and return the Guantanamo naval base to the Cubans!

Keystone pipeline ain’t happenin’. After years of stellar grassroots activism against the Keystone pipeline (and years of lobbying by the oil companies), President Obama finally took the side of the activists (and the planet) by shutting down the project. And while the Paris climate talks did not result in the dramatic commitments we need to stop global climate chaos, they did raise consciousness and move the global community in the right direction.

The Black Lives Matter movement gets results. This incredible uprising has forced issues of racial injustice into the national spotlight and created real reforms within communities across the country. The Movement for Black Lives got its momentum in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, and spread throughout the nation. Cops have been convicted, police chiefs have been ousted, citizen review boards have been empowered, Confederate flags have come down, buildings named after racists have been renamed, presidential candidates have been forced to talk about race. Kudos to the many young black activists leading the way.

Canada welcomes refugees. While Donald Trump threatens to ban Muslims from the US, newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau showed the rest of the world how a country can open its doors –– and hearts –– to Syrian refugees. Trudeau and other smiling officials welcomed the first batch of Syrian refugees with flowers, toys, clothing, goodwill and the heartfelt declaration, "You are home." “We get to show the world how to open our hearts and welcome in people who are fleeing extraordinarily difficult situations...because we define a Canadian not by a skin color or a language or a religion or a background, but by a shared set of values, aspirations, hopes and dreams,” Trudeau proclaimed.

Jeremy Corbyn heads UK Labor Party! Running on an anti-war, anti-austerity, and pro-refugee platform, longtime progressive parliamentarian Jeremy Corbyn earned a whopping 59% of his party’s votes. In an interview with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, Corbyn voiced his support for diplomacy and his aversion to airstrikes in the Middle East: “I want a world of peace. I’m not interested in bombs. I’m not interested in wars. I’m interested in peace.” Wouldn’t that be nice to hear from Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi?

Same-sex marriage was legalized in the US! In a landmark and long-awaited decision, the Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage a federal right. On June 26, the LGBTQ community and its allies rejoiced and took the streets to celebrate the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. While there have been some minor setbacks since then (primarily due to bigots like Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis), there is no turning back now.

Ten years of BDS wins. The non-violent, non-sectarian, Palestinian-led movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel has seen a decade of victories. Key this year was the decision by the European Union that goods produced on land seized in the 1967 war must be labeled “Made in Settlements” (not “Made in Israel”), which will deprive Israel the corresponding tax benefits. The former Israeli intelligence chief Shabtai Shavit is convinced that BDS has become a “critical” challenge to Israel, while the former prime minister Ehud Barak admits it is reaching a “tipping point.” In a desperate attempt to counter the momentum of BDS, Israeli Embassy officials in DC sent holiday gifts exclusively made in settlements to the White House this year.

Marijuana becomes mainstream. What a year of momentum to end our country's disastrous war on drugs and mass incarceration. Marijuana is now legal in Colorado, Washington. Alaska, Oregon and Washington D.C., California and others will hit the ballot box in 2016 to hopefully push us past the tipping point on marijuana legalization. President Obama, the first president to visit a prison, spoke out forcefully against mass incarceration and for criminal justice reform, and is helping formerly incarcerated people re-enter society by "banning the box" for those applying for federal jobs.

Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign! The energy that Bernie has mobilized, especially among young progressives, has been phenomenal. While the media is obsessed with Donald Trump, droves of people have been flocking to hear Bernie talk about breaking up big banks, a financial transaction tax to make college education free, single-payer healthcare and other ideas to make our society more just. Wouldn’t it be great if this movement could continue after the race is over?

So while this holiday season the nation is obsessed with the latest Donald Trump insult and the special effects of Star Wars, may we bring in the new year truly striking back at the injustices of the empire. May the force be with the grassroots activists trying to build a more peaceful world.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of Global Exchange and CodePink: Women for Peace.

It would certainly be easy to do a piece about 10 horrible events from 2015, from the ongoing war in Syria and the refugee crisis, to the bombings in Beirut, Paris and San Bernardino, to the rise of Donald Trump and Islamophobia. But that wouldn’t be a very inspiring way to bid farewell to this year and usher in a new one. So let’s look at 10 reasons to feel better about 2015.

Iran nuclear deal:Despite significant political opposition and millions of dollars spent to try to quash the deal, the nuclear agreement with Iran was passed and the possibility of another US military entanglement was narrowly avoided. The powerful lobby AIPAC had its wings clipped, as did Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu (except that the deal unfortunately came with a payoff of even more US tax dollars going to the Israeli military).

Cuba thaw: It’s official! The US and Cuba now have embassies in each other’s territory for the first time in over half a century. The year has been marked by a UN meeting between Castro and Obama, more travelers to Cuba and more trade between both countries -- but Congress still needs to lift the trade embargo, fully lift the travel ban, and return the Guantanamo naval base to the Cubans!

Keystone pipeline ain’t happenin’. After years of stellar grassroots activism against the Keystone pipeline (and years of lobbying by the oil companies), President Obama finally took the side of the activists (and the planet) by shutting down the project. And while the Paris climate talks did not result in the dramatic commitments we need to stop global climate chaos, they did raise consciousness and move the global community in the right direction.

The Black Lives Matter movement gets results. This incredible uprising has forced issues of racial injustice into the national spotlight and created real reforms within communities across the country. The Movement for Black Lives got its momentum in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, and spread throughout the nation. Cops have been convicted, police chiefs have been ousted, citizen review boards have been empowered, Confederate flags have come down, buildings named after racists have been renamed, presidential candidates have been forced to talk about race. Kudos to the many young black activists leading the way.

Canada welcomes refugees. While Donald Trump threatens to ban Muslims from the US, newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau showed the rest of the world how a country can open its doors –– and hearts –– to Syrian refugees. Trudeau and other smiling officials welcomed the first batch of Syrian refugees with flowers, toys, clothing, goodwill and the heartfelt declaration, "You are home." “We get to show the world how to open our hearts and welcome in people who are fleeing extraordinarily difficult situations...because we define a Canadian not by a skin color or a language or a religion or a background, but by a shared set of values, aspirations, hopes and dreams,” Trudeau proclaimed.

Jeremy Corbyn heads UK Labor Party! Running on an anti-war, anti-austerity, and pro-refugee platform, longtime progressive parliamentarian Jeremy Corbyn earned a whopping 59% of his party’s votes. In an interview with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, Corbyn voiced his support for diplomacy and his aversion to airstrikes in the Middle East: “I want a world of peace. I’m not interested in bombs. I’m not interested in wars. I’m interested in peace.” Wouldn’t that be nice to hear from Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi?

Same-sex marriage was legalized in the US! In a landmark and long-awaited decision, the Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage a federal right. On June 26, the LGBTQ community and its allies rejoiced and took the streets to celebrate the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. While there have been some minor setbacks since then (primarily due to bigots like Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis), there is no turning back now.

Ten years of BDS wins. The non-violent, non-sectarian, Palestinian-led movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel has seen a decade of victories. Key this year was the decision by the European Union that goods produced on land seized in the 1967 war must be labeled “Made in Settlements” (not “Made in Israel”), which will deprive Israel the corresponding tax benefits. The former Israeli intelligence chief Shabtai Shavit is convinced that BDS has become a “critical” challenge to Israel, while the former prime minister Ehud Barak admits it is reaching a “tipping point.” In a desperate attempt to counter the momentum of BDS, Israeli Embassy officials in DC sent holiday gifts exclusively made in settlements to the White House this year.

Marijuana becomes mainstream. What a year of momentum to end our country's disastrous war on drugs and mass incarceration. Marijuana is now legal in Colorado, Washington. Alaska, Oregon and Washington D.C., California and others will hit the ballot box in 2016 to hopefully push us past the tipping point on marijuana legalization. President Obama, the first president to visit a prison, spoke out forcefully against mass incarceration and for criminal justice reform, and is helping formerly incarcerated people re-enter society by "banning the box" for those applying for federal jobs.

Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign! The energy that Bernie has mobilized, especially among young progressives, has been phenomenal. While the media is obsessed with Donald Trump, droves of people have been flocking to hear Bernie talk about breaking up big banks, a financial transaction tax to make college education free, single-payer healthcare and other ideas to make our society more just. Wouldn’t it be great if this movement could continue after the race is over?

So while this holiday season the nation is obsessed with the latest Donald Trump insult and the special effects of Star Wars, may we bring in the new year truly striking back at the injustices of the empire. May the force be with the grassroots activists trying to build a more peaceful world.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of Global Exchange and CodePink: Women for Peace.

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“Christmas has no place in the Holy Land”: Far-right Israeli leader wants to expel Christians and ban the holiday

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Karl Rove: Obama wishing Americans “Merry Christmas” in Hawaiian proves he’s un-American and soft on ISIS

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Even Donald Trump’s supporters are ashamed of him: Many backers too embarrassed to admit it to pollsters

Donald Trump has been the runaway leader in the Republican race for several months. Indeed, Trump has led for so long that his popularity, depressing as it is, is no longer shocking. Well, it turns out the polls may be under-representing just how popular Trump is — and that’s truly eye-opening. People love Trump, ironically enough, because they think he’s honest, authentic. “He speaks him mind,” you often hear from passionate Trumpites. That’s scary because, presumably, the people supporting Trump agree with what he says, even if Trump himself doesn't believe it. Trump’s language is unapologetically nativist, and so his broad appeal says something unpleasant about our country. The amount of people cheering his message is a rough indication of how amenable to fascism and nativism his conservative supporters are. And that's discouraging to say the least. As bad as things appear to be, a new study by Morning Consult confirms what many pollsters have long suspected: Voters are more likely to support Trump in surveys taken online than in polls conducted via phone. Vox’s Michelle Hackmann summed up the results earlier this week:

“Pollsters interviewed 2,397 registered Republican voters and Republican-leaning independents about their favorite candidates in the primary. One-third of the respondents took the survey online. Another third answered the same questions posed by a live interviewer on the phone, while the final third heard the same questions in an automated phone call. Overall, 36 percent of voters picked Trump as their favorite candidate after the last Republican debate. But his levels of support differed markedly among the modes of questioning. Of the respondents answering questions online, 38 percent picked Trump for president, while only 32 percent of respondents named him when speaking to live pollsters. That pattern is unique to Trump. Ted Cruz did about 2 points better in live telephone surveys, as did Ben Carson. Jeb Bush saw no difference. The gulf grew even starker among voters with college degrees: College graduates favored Trump in online surveys over live telephone by about 10 percentage points.”

To make sense of the numbers, Hackmann referenced a psychological theory known as “social desirability bias.” Simply put, the theory holds that respondents are more likely to give socially desirable answers to survey questions when speaking to live interviewers. And the reason is straightforward: people don’t want to be judged for outlier or controversial beliefs. In online polls, however, there’s anonymity: the fear of being judged or disliked is non-existent. So if respondents hold what they consider taboo views, they’re more likely to be honest about that in an anonymous context. As Hackmann points out, this idea was known popularly as the “Bradley effect,” when political scientists found that, in races involving black candidates, “white voters told pollsters they planned to vote for the nonwhite candidate but ended up voting against him.” Something similar seems to be afoot with Donald Trump and Republican primary voters, although it’s not about race – at least not explicitly. Trump says outrageous things, offensive things, things that would get you sideways glances in most rooms. Unless you pal around with xenophobes and fascists, you probably don’t want to boast too much about your love for Trump. For the same reasons, you may not admit to a live interviewer that Trump’s mercurial mix of bombast and rage appeals to you. Whatever the case, the fact that Trump’s enormous popularity may be under-represented is frightening. Trump already feels like an unstoppable political force – perhaps it’s even worse than we imagined.Donald Trump has been the runaway leader in the Republican race for several months. Indeed, Trump has led for so long that his popularity, depressing as it is, is no longer shocking. Well, it turns out the polls may be under-representing just how popular Trump is — and that’s truly eye-opening. People love Trump, ironically enough, because they think he’s honest, authentic. “He speaks him mind,” you often hear from passionate Trumpites. That’s scary because, presumably, the people supporting Trump agree with what he says, even if Trump himself doesn't believe it. Trump’s language is unapologetically nativist, and so his broad appeal says something unpleasant about our country. The amount of people cheering his message is a rough indication of how amenable to fascism and nativism his conservative supporters are. And that's discouraging to say the least. As bad as things appear to be, a new study by Morning Consult confirms what many pollsters have long suspected: Voters are more likely to support Trump in surveys taken online than in polls conducted via phone. Vox’s Michelle Hackmann summed up the results earlier this week:

“Pollsters interviewed 2,397 registered Republican voters and Republican-leaning independents about their favorite candidates in the primary. One-third of the respondents took the survey online. Another third answered the same questions posed by a live interviewer on the phone, while the final third heard the same questions in an automated phone call. Overall, 36 percent of voters picked Trump as their favorite candidate after the last Republican debate. But his levels of support differed markedly among the modes of questioning. Of the respondents answering questions online, 38 percent picked Trump for president, while only 32 percent of respondents named him when speaking to live pollsters. That pattern is unique to Trump. Ted Cruz did about 2 points better in live telephone surveys, as did Ben Carson. Jeb Bush saw no difference. The gulf grew even starker among voters with college degrees: College graduates favored Trump in online surveys over live telephone by about 10 percentage points.”

To make sense of the numbers, Hackmann referenced a psychological theory known as “social desirability bias.” Simply put, the theory holds that respondents are more likely to give socially desirable answers to survey questions when speaking to live interviewers. And the reason is straightforward: people don’t want to be judged for outlier or controversial beliefs. In online polls, however, there’s anonymity: the fear of being judged or disliked is non-existent. So if respondents hold what they consider taboo views, they’re more likely to be honest about that in an anonymous context. As Hackmann points out, this idea was known popularly as the “Bradley effect,” when political scientists found that, in races involving black candidates, “white voters told pollsters they planned to vote for the nonwhite candidate but ended up voting against him.” Something similar seems to be afoot with Donald Trump and Republican primary voters, although it’s not about race – at least not explicitly. Trump says outrageous things, offensive things, things that would get you sideways glances in most rooms. Unless you pal around with xenophobes and fascists, you probably don’t want to boast too much about your love for Trump. For the same reasons, you may not admit to a live interviewer that Trump’s mercurial mix of bombast and rage appeals to you. Whatever the case, the fact that Trump’s enormous popularity may be under-represented is frightening. Trump already feels like an unstoppable political force – perhaps it’s even worse than we imagined.Donald Trump has been the runaway leader in the Republican race for several months. Indeed, Trump has led for so long that his popularity, depressing as it is, is no longer shocking. Well, it turns out the polls may be under-representing just how popular Trump is — and that’s truly eye-opening. People love Trump, ironically enough, because they think he’s honest, authentic. “He speaks him mind,” you often hear from passionate Trumpites. That’s scary because, presumably, the people supporting Trump agree with what he says, even if Trump himself doesn't believe it. Trump’s language is unapologetically nativist, and so his broad appeal says something unpleasant about our country. The amount of people cheering his message is a rough indication of how amenable to fascism and nativism his conservative supporters are. And that's discouraging to say the least. As bad as things appear to be, a new study by Morning Consult confirms what many pollsters have long suspected: Voters are more likely to support Trump in surveys taken online than in polls conducted via phone. Vox’s Michelle Hackmann summed up the results earlier this week:

“Pollsters interviewed 2,397 registered Republican voters and Republican-leaning independents about their favorite candidates in the primary. One-third of the respondents took the survey online. Another third answered the same questions posed by a live interviewer on the phone, while the final third heard the same questions in an automated phone call. Overall, 36 percent of voters picked Trump as their favorite candidate after the last Republican debate. But his levels of support differed markedly among the modes of questioning. Of the respondents answering questions online, 38 percent picked Trump for president, while only 32 percent of respondents named him when speaking to live pollsters. That pattern is unique to Trump. Ted Cruz did about 2 points better in live telephone surveys, as did Ben Carson. Jeb Bush saw no difference. The gulf grew even starker among voters with college degrees: College graduates favored Trump in online surveys over live telephone by about 10 percentage points.”

To make sense of the numbers, Hackmann referenced a psychological theory known as “social desirability bias.” Simply put, the theory holds that respondents are more likely to give socially desirable answers to survey questions when speaking to live interviewers. And the reason is straightforward: people don’t want to be judged for outlier or controversial beliefs. In online polls, however, there’s anonymity: the fear of being judged or disliked is non-existent. So if respondents hold what they consider taboo views, they’re more likely to be honest about that in an anonymous context. As Hackmann points out, this idea was known popularly as the “Bradley effect,” when political scientists found that, in races involving black candidates, “white voters told pollsters they planned to vote for the nonwhite candidate but ended up voting against him.” Something similar seems to be afoot with Donald Trump and Republican primary voters, although it’s not about race – at least not explicitly. Trump says outrageous things, offensive things, things that would get you sideways glances in most rooms. Unless you pal around with xenophobes and fascists, you probably don’t want to boast too much about your love for Trump. For the same reasons, you may not admit to a live interviewer that Trump’s mercurial mix of bombast and rage appeals to you. Whatever the case, the fact that Trump’s enormous popularity may be under-represented is frightening. Trump already feels like an unstoppable political force – perhaps it’s even worse than we imagined.

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So you bought your son a dollhouse for Christmas: How to talk to family members who just don’t get it

Australian organization Play Unlimited relaunched its No Gender December campaign this year in an effort to get parents to not purchase toys targeted toward girls or boys simply based on gender. On their website, Play Unlimited states, “Kids benefit from participating in a wide range of play experiences, honing different skills as they develop and learn about the world. All children should be encouraged to learn without limitations based on their gender, free from stereotypes aimed at discouraging equal access to all toys for everybody.” This is a theme that’s been echoed widely in our culture and our store aisles this year. In August, Target announced it will move away from gender-based signs promoting its bedding and toys for kids, prompted by consumer outrage over item signs announcing, for instance, “building sets” and “girls’ building sets.” In their official statement, Target wrote, “in the kids’ Bedding area, signs will no longer feature suggestions for boys or girls, just kids. In the Toys aisles, we’ll also remove reference to gender, including the use of pink, blue, yellow or green paper on the back walls of our shelves.” A commercial for the Moschino Barbie, spearheaded by Moschino creative director Jeremy Scott, featured a little boy enthusing “Moschino Barbie is so fierce!” Mattel issued a statement stating, “This video parodies iconic Barbie commercials from the 1980's starring a young Jeremy Scott look alike. The video celebrates how boys and girls alike play with Barbie—it's all about self-expression, fashion, imagination and storytelling." Jim Silver, editor of toy review site TTPM, told The New York Times in October, “The industry’s learned that you shouldn’t be labeling for a specific gender. There are so many girls who want to be Iron Man and Captain America, and boys who want to play with Easy-Bake.”” Many parents are fully on board with fulfilling their children’s wishes for holiday toys, regardless of whether they fit the traditionally gendered model. Dolls for boys? Check. Skateboards for girls? On it. It’s not surprising to see lists of gender neutral toys for the conscientious holiday shopper. Father Mikki Willis’s exuberant video celebrating buying his son an Ariel doll went viral this year. Clearly, many parents have gotten the message that neither they nor their kids need to be limited to “pink” or “blue” themed gifts. But even the most open-minded parents when it comes to their child’s gender expression may face pushback from other family members, friends, neighbors, nosy strangers or store clerks when explaining what exactly they’re putting under the tree. This affects not just parents, but entire families, who want to do right by kids, but may not always know how to best support a child who doesn’t fit what they’ve been taught to expect. The grandmother of C.J., the gender nonconforming son of Lori Duron, author of the blog Raising My Rainbow, shared her experience on the blog in 2012:

“One Christmas C.J. only received boy toys and he was devastated. Our son said it was the worst Christmas ever because C.J. was so angry at Santa and didn’t get anything he wanted. Our son said that would never happen again. That really hit home with us. You don’t want to deprive your children. The toys don’t bother us. The dressing up was a little harder to accept. We worry more about how cruel other children can be. I’m accepting of whatever my child or any other person wants to be.”

So how can parents navigate the often tricky terrain of placating those who want to police the toys they give their kids? “When parents experience blowback from family, friends, or fellow shoppers for buying a gender-nonconforming toy, what they’re experiencing is resistance to change. Gender is a continuum, not a divide, but not everyone gets that yet,” said Deborah Siegel, PhD, a Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University and mother of boy/girl twins. “The media may be full of stories portraying the growing acceptance of gender nonconforming kids and parents who encourage cross-gendered play, but most parents still need help navigating the new lingo, concepts, and shifts coursing through our culture with the subtlety of a tornado,” explained Siegel, who’s currently engaged in a multimedia project about the gendering of childhood in the first five years of life. She encourages parents not to make snap judgments when family members or well intentioned friends don’t immediately understand how they can be helpful and welcoming, but who is open to learning. “Have empathy for the uninformed,” Siegel advised. “It’s only a matter of time before a child in their family expresses a desire for a toy from across the aisle.” Siegel concluded, “To the parent choosing the ‘non-traditional’ gift for a child, I say: rock on. Parents who get flack for such choices already know that the truest gift a parent can give a kid is support for being who they are.”Australian organization Play Unlimited relaunched its No Gender December campaign this year in an effort to get parents to not purchase toys targeted toward girls or boys simply based on gender. On their website, Play Unlimited states, “Kids benefit from participating in a wide range of play experiences, honing different skills as they develop and learn about the world. All children should be encouraged to learn without limitations based on their gender, free from stereotypes aimed at discouraging equal access to all toys for everybody.” This is a theme that’s been echoed widely in our culture and our store aisles this year. In August, Target announced it will move away from gender-based signs promoting its bedding and toys for kids, prompted by consumer outrage over item signs announcing, for instance, “building sets” and “girls’ building sets.” In their official statement, Target wrote, “in the kids’ Bedding area, signs will no longer feature suggestions for boys or girls, just kids. In the Toys aisles, we’ll also remove reference to gender, including the use of pink, blue, yellow or green paper on the back walls of our shelves.” A commercial for the Moschino Barbie, spearheaded by Moschino creative director Jeremy Scott, featured a little boy enthusing “Moschino Barbie is so fierce!” Mattel issued a statement stating, “This video parodies iconic Barbie commercials from the 1980's starring a young Jeremy Scott look alike. The video celebrates how boys and girls alike play with Barbie—it's all about self-expression, fashion, imagination and storytelling." Jim Silver, editor of toy review site TTPM, told The New York Times in October, “The industry’s learned that you shouldn’t be labeling for a specific gender. There are so many girls who want to be Iron Man and Captain America, and boys who want to play with Easy-Bake.”” Many parents are fully on board with fulfilling their children’s wishes for holiday toys, regardless of whether they fit the traditionally gendered model. Dolls for boys? Check. Skateboards for girls? On it. It’s not surprising to see lists of gender neutral toys for the conscientious holiday shopper. Father Mikki Willis’s exuberant video celebrating buying his son an Ariel doll went viral this year. Clearly, many parents have gotten the message that neither they nor their kids need to be limited to “pink” or “blue” themed gifts. But even the most open-minded parents when it comes to their child’s gender expression may face pushback from other family members, friends, neighbors, nosy strangers or store clerks when explaining what exactly they’re putting under the tree. This affects not just parents, but entire families, who want to do right by kids, but may not always know how to best support a child who doesn’t fit what they’ve been taught to expect. The grandmother of C.J., the gender nonconforming son of Lori Duron, author of the blog Raising My Rainbow, shared her experience on the blog in 2012:

“One Christmas C.J. only received boy toys and he was devastated. Our son said it was the worst Christmas ever because C.J. was so angry at Santa and didn’t get anything he wanted. Our son said that would never happen again. That really hit home with us. You don’t want to deprive your children. The toys don’t bother us. The dressing up was a little harder to accept. We worry more about how cruel other children can be. I’m accepting of whatever my child or any other person wants to be.”

So how can parents navigate the often tricky terrain of placating those who want to police the toys they give their kids? “When parents experience blowback from family, friends, or fellow shoppers for buying a gender-nonconforming toy, what they’re experiencing is resistance to change. Gender is a continuum, not a divide, but not everyone gets that yet,” said Deborah Siegel, PhD, a Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University and mother of boy/girl twins. “The media may be full of stories portraying the growing acceptance of gender nonconforming kids and parents who encourage cross-gendered play, but most parents still need help navigating the new lingo, concepts, and shifts coursing through our culture with the subtlety of a tornado,” explained Siegel, who’s currently engaged in a multimedia project about the gendering of childhood in the first five years of life. She encourages parents not to make snap judgments when family members or well intentioned friends don’t immediately understand how they can be helpful and welcoming, but who is open to learning. “Have empathy for the uninformed,” Siegel advised. “It’s only a matter of time before a child in their family expresses a desire for a toy from across the aisle.” Siegel concluded, “To the parent choosing the ‘non-traditional’ gift for a child, I say: rock on. Parents who get flack for such choices already know that the truest gift a parent can give a kid is support for being who they are.”

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