—Bumper sticker slogan

At a the annual conference for the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality last year, I heard a researcher describe how the pharmaceutical industry “jukes the stats”—that is, crunches numbers creatively in order to persuade the public that their products actually accomplish their stated tasks.  This researcher, Dr. Duryea, offered a succinct finding: Antidepressant manufacturers go to great lengths to disguise the fact that people kill themselves during the “wash out” phase of antidepressants.  Once participants stopped taking certain antidepressants (and, in clinical trials, before they resumed taking them again), those taking the antidepressants had an increased risk of suicide compared to their pre-drug state.  Of course, since these users were not technically ingesting the drug during this “wash out” phase, the pharmaceutical industry convinced the FDA that antidepressants did not increase the risk of suicide—a creative interpretation with a potentially fatal cost to those who blindly take these drugs.

I bring up this anecdote because it is one of many in a long list of such problems that occur in the U.S. today surrounding the issue of “lifestyle drugs”—drugs one takes not just for a temporary cure to an ailment (in the way Penicillin kills bacterial infections), but rather, as a response to lifelong, forever ailments (e.g., depression, anxiety, high cholesterol, acid reflux, impotence, and so on).  As anyone who has watched television commercials in the last decade can imagine, the pharmaceutical industry expends enormous sums of money to encourage consumers to “ask their doctor” about a host of drugs, nearly all of which advertise “lifestyle” remedies.  Get erections that last for days!  No more burping up acid after eating mountains of salty, fatty, chemical-laden food!  Stop feeling anxious despite chronic sleeplessness and slaving away at your vacationless McJob!  And, like all advertising ploys—particularly ones where astronomical sums of money are expended—it works.  Not only do people in the U.S. tolerate direct-to-consumer advertising (note that, within the Western world, the U.S. is alone in such a practice), but we indeed do consume more and more lifestyle drugs each year, making us the most medicated, and pharmaceutically-profitable, society around.

So how do we explain this phenomenon?  What about the U.S. lends itself to this perfect synthesis of self-medication, corporate greed, and pharmaceutical horsepower?  I propose that to tackle such a question, we must consider three separate entities: first, the invention of sickness, whereby normal aspects of daily life get branded as illness, like inventing female Viagra because women may not always desire sex; second, our refusal to live with the most basic elements of the human condition, as evidenced by the multi-billion dollar antidepressant industry; and third, our nearly reckless disregard for common sense, as evidenced by a host of lifestyle drugs, particularly Viagra for men.  It is not just that those in the U.S. have been duped, or that the pharmaceutical industry wields uncanny powers, or that we largely cannot decipher the difference between self-generated needs and manufactured needs (all true); additionally, at its most basic level, people in the U.S. have embraced a new wave of pharmaceutical personality sculpting, a philosophy arguing that pharmaceuticals can compensate for our unfulfilled desires and needs.

Let’s begin with the case of female Viagra.  Six years ago, pharmaceutical efforts to repackage the success of Viagra into a female-friendly version began in earnest.  First, Pfizer attempted to replicate the powerhouse success of male Viagra with a simple goal: create physiological arousal in women, simulate lubrication and swelling responses, and (voila!) women would achieve orgasm in unprecedented numbers, thereby ending their relatively higher rates of “sexual dysfunction.”  Unfortunately, this did not come to pass as expected.  The big problem?  Women who became aroused physiologically still did not choose to initiate or submit to sex with their (male) partners.  Unlike male Viagra—where physiological arousal and desire for sex allegedly worked more in tandem—female Viagra successfully achieved physiological arousal but failed to generate mental arousal or motive for sex.  Women with aroused vaginas still said no.  This frustrated Pfizer to the point where, during one interview with the New York Times, researchers declared, “Although Viagra can indeed create the outward signs of arousal in many women, this seems to have little effect on a woman’s willingness, or desire, to have sex…Getting a woman to connect arousal and desire…requires exquisite timing on a man’s part and a fair amount of coaxing.  ‘What we need to do is find a pill for engendering the perception of intimacy.’”

Perhaps said in jest, this statement nevertheless perfectly illuminates the first of three problems that contribute to the age of pharmaceutical personality sculpting: illnesses are invented, often for profit, by industries that have a serious investment in making people believe they are sick when they are not.  In a for-profit healthcare industry where sickness is money, invented sickness makes even more money.  Case in point, a recent psychological study by Jan Shifren and her colleagues found that, though 43.1% of women reported feeling that they had some form of sexual dysfunction, less than half felt troubled by this fact. Rather than rely upon women’s self-description, the pharmaceutical industry instead convinces women through conversation and commercials that their inconsistent sexual desire is a defect, and that their bodies are imperfect and in need of drug treatments to “repair” their “dysfunctional” libidos.  We live in an age where illness makes profit, and where the invention of “disorders” improves the economic bottom-line of the health care industry. Such profit-driven health care requires the consumer to imagine these invented illnesses as real. Unless people learn to call out and resist such inventions, pharmaceutical personality sculpting will become the mainstay of the industry.

Step two in the process of selling people on lifestyle drugs involves an almost laughably ill-advised premise: convince people that the human condition no longer entails sadness, anxiety, depression, loneliness, social unease, lost erections, ups and downs in libido, and grief.  Indeed, the antidepressant industry has swooped in during a time when we have a lot to be unhappy about: unprecedented class warfare (the top 1% of U.S. earners now make more than the bottom 95% combined!), new and insidious forms of sexism (women’s desires usurped by the whims of patriarchy, ongoing failure of the Equal Rights Amendment, increasing reports of eating disorders and body dysmorphia, alarmingly high rates of women faking orgasm, national failure to recognize working mothers’ needs, and so on), rampant and shameless forms of racism (states retaining rights to block interracial marriages, anti-Obama rhetoric latching onto anti-socialist rhetoric throughout the nation, erosion of communities of color, overrepresentation of men of color sent to Iraq, etc.), and, in essence, a whole lot of things to be anxious, depressed, and un-aroused about!

Again, denying the difficulties of human existence seems to be a peculiarly U.S. phenomenon.  Along with their ironic taste for high cholesterol foods, plentiful red wine, and good health, the French (yes, the French!) construct tragedy as an unavoidable process of the human existence.  It is entirely remarkable that people in the U.S. want to manufacture an existence without such tragedy, yet this is exactly what antidepressant manufacturers count on.  They make a bargain, albeit without full consent: Take these drugs and you’ll feel less—both positive and negative.  Those on antidepressants report exactly this: they feel less sadness, they can get out of bed in the morning, and they can go to work and walk their dogs and enjoy modest pleasures.  However, they no longer feel the same happiness they once felt either.  They are dampened down, as the clinical literatures say.  The antidepressant industry wants to trick us out of experiencing ourselves as fully human, as fully engaged in the process of being alive.  How bad for business if we accepted that, when people die, grief is a horrendous, sometimes long, and certainly painful process, but one that we need to experience in order to process death. What a blow to their bottom line if people in this country started considering what their anxiety at work meant about their job satisfaction?  What a downer to the share holders’ stock portfolios if we stopped to consider that feeling bad might propel us to take action in order to feel better?  After all, aren’t we at least a little bit suspicious that Prozac and Zoloft and Wellbutrin create obedient, gracious, mellow, toned-down citizens, ready for the work of tolerating gender inequities, pay inequities, class inequities, and race inequities?  What if people instead confronted their reasons for being upset, depressed, and anxious?

Which brings us to the third point: The pharmaceutical industry relies upon our most basic denial of common sense, intuitive wisdom, and self-affirmation.  Consider the recent discussions about the paradoxes of the modern food industry.  As Michael Pollan has pointed out, we have lost touch with common sense about eating because the food industry has systematically done three things.  First, the food industry has asserted a singular, authoritative knowledge of what kinds of food make us healthy.  Second, it has extracted, via “nutritionism,” the elements of food that yield health without considering the interplay between enzymes and vitamins within a whole piece of food (e.g., Eat Omega-3s! Don’t worry if it comes from actual salmon or fish oil tablets!  It’s all the same!).  Third, the food industry has assaulted our common sense by forcing us to rely upon their definitions of “healthy food” at the expense of what our grandmothers and great-grandmothers already knew to be true (e.g., we eat processed boxes of chemical goo that claim to be “low fat” and “enriched with vitamins” rather than simply eating an apple or a carrot or a head of lettuce in the produce aisle).  The same process has occurred with other elements of health, particularly mental health.  Rather than considering the ways that our unhappiness, anxiety, and grief stem from elements in our lives that deserve our attention, “experts” feed us insights about how pill-popping and pharmaceutical personality sculpting will come to the rescue.

Case in point: A friend of mine once dated a man who had erectile dysfunction with onset in his early 20s.  All physiological tests came out normal, indicating that doctors could find no physiological reason why he had erectile dysfunction.  He tried Viagra for four or five years, with decreasingly successful outcomes.  He had a more and more difficult time becoming erect, and often could not get an erection even in the most stimulating of circumstances.  Viagra eventually stopped working entirely (as it often does).  The man sought out psychological therapy to discuss his distress about his seemingly inexplicable erectile dysfunction.  Frustrated by his lack of success at relying upon Viagra, he eventually discovered, during the course of a multi-year therapy, that his lifelong incestuous relationship with a family member—one in which he consistently became aroused in situations of potential punishment and shame—had contributed greatly to his current erectile dysfunction.  Indeed, all of the signs pointed to his traumatic sexual history as a culprit to his current dysfunction.  He had begun to masturbate at work, and could get aroused only right before his boss walked in on him.  He had asked his partner to have sex in crowded movie theaters, subway cars, and park benches.  He could never become aroused while at home in bed with her.  During this course of treatment, he began a slow and difficult recovery, disentangling his associations with shameful early life experiences and replacing them with healthier models of consensual, non-punitive sex.  I tell this story because it represents, most basically, a truth that should seem obvious to most people if they consider common sense: erectile dysfunction, like most “illnesses” treated by lifestyle drugs, is rooted in a person’s reality, and without addressing that reality, the drugs simply mask the underlying issues.

Yet, we in the U.S. continue to perfect our skills at denying common sense to the point of rapidly dismissing the real rootedness of our psychological problems in the reality of our existences. We do this with food and we do this with mental health.  We eat fewer and fewer apples because food-industry consultants have told us to eat fiber-enhanced apple-flavored fruit-roll-ups.  We deal less and less with the complexities of our psychological lives because “scientists” have told us that a pill will solve the problems of our brain chemistry and will repair our wounded histories.  We rarely stop to consider why unhappiness pervades our culture because the “experts” have told us that it not only is possible to medicate this away, but is in fact medically sound to do so!  This all comes at a great cost, personally, socially, and culturally.  A generation raised on Lean Cuisine and Paxil has learned to condition away the intuition of mind and body.  As a consequence, we do not recognize what tastes good any longer because experts have successfully tricked our taste buds into believing we are eating “butter” when we aren’t.  We do not recognize that unhappiness can have positive, affirming, enriching results on our lives (as in, motivation toward something else—a new partner, a new job, activism on behalf of oppressed groups, and so on) because we have become susceptible to marketing campaigns selling us on the fundamental lie that life is pleasant.  We have already begun selling women on the promise of pharmaceutically terminating menstruation for “convenience” and trimming their labias in order to generate better orgasms, despite known tissue damage and reduced sensation from such surgeries.  Just last week, advertisements promoted a new “mint” that will disguise the vagina’s natural smell.  We sculpt and trim, tweak and prune.  This comes at a considerable cost, as individuals, as a society, and as a potentially toxic contagion within the global community.  Until we seriously challenge the impact and reach of the pharmaceutical industry, these assaults on our most basic ways of being human will continue in earnest.

Television documentaries such as Jump Britain have described this activity as ‘urban ballet’ given the sense of ceremony or ‘Tai-Chi’ like deliberation which comes with the performed movements. On a more realistic level, and one away from the television cameras, however, it appears as a hybridized leisure activity – incorporating elements from gymnastics and break-dancing to enable elegant and graceful movement over ‘obstacles’ found in the urban environment. Having studied a group of Parkour enthusiasts for the past couple of years in Nottingham, UK (NottsPK) I have become as intrigued by their ‘sport’ as I have been with public reactions. Because Parkour takes place mostly in urban space, it has been seen as a kind of reclaiming of the streets. Although this is undoubtedly true, it is the reclaiming of the body which I find of particular interest and the implications this has for health. Before expanding on this further though, we should take a brief historical look at how the body has been used elsewhere to construct identity.

Many socially marginalised groups have positively employed the phrase, ‘The personal is political’ for celebrating their identities. Within sections of the gay community this is best exemplified in the ‘hanky code’ whereby different coloured bandanas signal individual sexual preferences and interests. Encoding sexual activities enables conversations to develop in which they are ‘talking’ rather than ‘listening’. I see this as a political act,  taking control of your own identity. The resulting sense of self is visual and proud and, in its defiant construction around sex, celebrates [and subverts] a common prejudice used to marginalise gay men.

Similarly the feminist movement in the early 1970s attempted to reclaim ownership of the body through the politics of abortion, ‘access’ and diet. Taking control of the body and using it as a boundary enabled a certain level of self-control, particularly in relation to identity.

By this logic, voluntary mistreatment of the body must also be thought of as political and personal expression. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the MTV spin off show Jackass. (1996 – ) The programme revolves around a group of men recording a series of humiliating and dangerous pranks on camcorder such as BMX jousting, shark hugging or being shot at. The group leader, Johnny Knoxsville, warns with subtle irony ‘Do not try this at home.’ This bodily mistreatment clearly struck a chord with the public as Jackass: The Movie (2002) grossed US $64 million.

While Jackass may be read as another example of the ‘levelling-down’ process, an analysis of the body in Jackass provides an alternative explanation. Using the body as a cultural text, self harm and mutilation give material expressions to certain cultural anxieties, like the supposed ‘crisis of masculinity,’ and are a basic inversion of the destructive machismo which epitomised 1980s classics such as the Rambo and Rocky films. Both explanations are plausible, but Jackass also entails a rational assessment of risk. As people encounter greater daily intervention into their lives from bureaucratic forms of governance, such as ‘health and safety’ legislation and the whole ‘culture of blame’ which this has created, the message of Jackass is simple:  This is my body and it is the one thing which you can’t control, so sit back and watch me smash bottles over my head and fire nails into my arse.

I situate Parkour within this tradition of bodily empowerment and as a more nuanced reaction to similar anxieties. In Jackass the body is treated with contempt, as something expendable, which could be seen as indicative of a wasteful capitalist modernity. In Le Parkour we see an inversion of these values so that self-preservation, finesse and agility are favoured. The goal is to move as fluidly between objects with the minimum of fuss and hopefully no injury. Through this experience a kind of oneness is achieved with the body, mind and environment.

Le Parkour can be thought of as an urban philosophy as it has a clearly defined manifesto but rather than having one specific ideology, it is formed out of multiple narratives drawn from a wide range of influences such as fantasies, escapism, cult icons, films, books, comics etc. It also extends into philosophies of self-improvement and self-awareness drawn from both the West and the East. In many ways this is emblematic of many new forms of modern identity which have grown out of internet forums and chat rooms; thus Parkour as philosophy is a kind of cultural sponge which is able to absorb information and influences without ever losing its shape.

This is possible because Parkour centres around emotive rather than factual language and thereby opens itself to interpretation and play e.g. one word which pops up more than others is ‘fluidity’, which itself implies the ability to change and transform smoothly. For fluidity to be achieved, participants must overcome four obstacles: mental, social, martial and family.

The mental obstacle – and perhaps the most difficult of them all – entails conquering your fears and gaining the necessary mental strength and confidence to make a particular jump. As different movements vary in complexity and risk so too the rate at which strength and confidence are perfected depends individually. Working together as part of a large cooperative helps as each group member is able to guide and reassure the other. When one member performs a particularly risky jump it then motivates another to try.

Overcoming mental obstacles leads to a certain degree of confidence arguably will translate into other areas of personal life. It is for this reason that Le Parkour can be seen as a philosophy of self-help and realization. The underlying message is if you can make a jump which seemed impossible, what is to stop you from sorting out emotional and mental problems in other areas of your life.

It should be noted that some movements are clearly built upon physical agility and power and therefore easier for older, taller and more disciplined bodies to achieve. Self- confidence in itself is not enough. But the fact that you are able to realise these limitations of your own volition is important as it is only by emotionally relating to something that we are able to fully comprehend it. Far too often in life restrictions are imposed on people without allowing them to discover for themselves. It is perhaps for this reason that Parkour enthusiasts on forums such as Urban Freeflow, turn to the wisdom of movie idols such as Bruce Lee. ‘If you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits.’

Le Parkour is described as ‘the way’ on the UF website, which suggests that it is a particular way of perceiving reality. While Parkour’s ideologies are influenced by films such as The Matrix (1999) these may also have had a physical influence as well. One thing which The Matrix, comic super heroe’s such as Batman and Spiderman, and computer games all have in common is that the characters can do super human things with their bodies as they swing and fly through the metropolis. Technology has been criticised for creating inertia, obesity and an artificiality in everyday human existence. Yet could it not be the case that engaging in such fantasies has inspired individuals to redefine and expand the limits of human potential? Le Parkour in trying to overcome mental objects and achieve seemingly impossible movements seeks to reverse the potentially negative effect of technology while heightening human experience and the body in the process.

As Le Parkour is performed in public space, individuals must be prepared to overcome certain social obstacles or stigmas such as people staring, pointing, ridiculing etc. In letting go of inhibitions and ignoring negative comments by passersby (who are rare I should point out) can lead to more confidence in other areas of life. However, in my experience it is the observers rather than the participants who go through the real anxiety. On numerous occasions I’ve seen people try to coerce one of them down from a wall because they might injure themselves only to be shocked when they exit with such panache.

Martial obstacles come in the form of authority figures who move participants on because they’ll ‘cause damage’ or are unwittingly on ‘private property’. As frustrating as this may be, the group I studied never argued back or were rude. Arguing with authority figures who weren’t listening because they were ‘just doing their job’ was seen as a waste of time and stopped them from doing what they were here to do. It was easier to just move somewhere different.

Contemporary sub-cultures like Le Parkour are often described in terms of moral decay whereby social regulation has broken down, metanarratives have crumbled, and youth have been left to run wild. But Le Parkour clearly refutes such claims. In explaining their ‘art’ to law enforcement agencies, they are learning to reason. They are also learning humility, tolerance, and understanding, thereby re-embedding a sense of order in a supposedly atomised and increasingly fragmented society. Indeed, they are actively encouraged to show concessions towards authority figures in arguments over space as in effect they are ambassadors for this relatively new discipline. Failure to be civil could lead to the activity being banned in certain areas and thereby ruining it for other enthusiasts.

Perhaps the most formidable of hurdles to overcome is the negative attitude of relatives, in particular parents. This can be intensified by negative representation in the media which tend to favour the more extreme aspects of the discipline rather than the more everyday practise that I witnessed. But you only need to watch this group of kids working with each other to realise that everything is calculated risk and clearly well thought out and planned before anything serious is attempted. Similarly, there are endless videos and training advice on the UF website. As one member of the group once pointed out to me, ‘my mum’s just glad I’m not doing drugs or getting’ in fights’.

The ability to persuade loved ones to trust and support the decisions you make with your life helps to develop communication and reasoning skills which will spread into all areas of lived experience. These may seem like a new set of values but really all recreational activities, in particular sports, promote a certain degree of friendship, fair play, respect, team work, problem solving etc. However what differentiates this urban sport from more traditional sports is that it is built around cooperation rather than competition.

Risk clearly has an important role to play in Le Parkour as it has to be managed to minimise injury and courted to fully enjoy the extreme experience. But what it really offers participants is the opportunity to draw a thick line between life and death. There are many false or thin risks in modernity which have made death appear ubiquitous: killer bugs in hospitals, terrorism, GM and processed food, overzealous health and safety intervention, etc. The list is endless – but such ‘risks’ make everything seem to be a potential danger.

Le Parkour reacts against this gross and perhaps inevitable trivialisation of knowledge. The constant intervention by the state and its systems ‘for our own good’ (and often it is), has meant alternative forms of expression and self diagnosis have emerged. As history has proven time and time again, how we use our body and the boundaries it enables us to make are as integral to our mental and physical health as they are to our identity.

When you cough, I hand you a napkin, remind you to cover your mouth,
Coach you in swallowing. I take your hand, gently, as she would have done,
Help you rise from your chair, steady your hesitant steps.
You are like petals folding into their calyx, or a hibiscus closing for the night.
I admire the young mother who coaxed this bud into bloom,
Who intuited from slender wisps of hope the man you might become.

Now as our world shrinks to a table for two,
The taste of butter your sole residual joy,
I remember how you could spin me in a waltz,
Turn on the sun with a moonlight kiss,
Harbor me within your encircling arms.
I feel sure you cannot unbecome what you became.
What you have been, you are.

I must intuit, as your mother did, what you need and feel.
Once you said fervently, “With all my being I love you.”
Now the words will not come, yet I believe them.
Even as my heart grows heavy with fearful tears,
I read your smile, and strangely find content.

She has done well by you,
The woman whose love you did not have to earn,
Who guided your toddler steps uphill,
Releasing you when your manly stride
Assured her all was well.
May I do equally well by you, holding your hand to guard against a fall,
Helping you gently down the shadowy slopes,
Releasing you when the evening petals close
And the music from the stars
Assures me all is well.

© 1999 by Helen Heightsman Gordon

I did not have a lot of opportunities to “return.”  My parents did not go back so often that my siblings or I would be able to accompany them.  When they did go back, the cost of a trans-Pacific trip was too prohibitive for my sister, brother, or me to be able to join them.  My brother was the first of my siblings to visit the Philippines, and he went with Dad after his sophomore year in high school.  He had a great time meeting our relatives but complained about having been a feast for the mosquitoes there.  After they returned, I told Mom and my sister that someday we would have to make a girls’ trip to the Philippines as this was only fair.  At that moment, my brother became one of “them,” someone who had “been back,” and I admit that I envied him.

I used to feel this interminable divide between Filipino-Americans like me who were born in the United States and Filipino-Americans who immigrated mostly as small children with their parents to the United States.  I often wondered if they were somehow superior Filipinos, and that they were somehow culturally predisposed to be more proficient in Tagalog and have an undiscerning taste for Filipino cuisine, no matter what ingredients and strange animal parts were involved.  Being U.S.-born, I felt that there was some ineffable, missing element that made me more of a poseur than a “real” Filipino-American.  In fact, for a time, I insisted on identifying myself as just “American” because I was born in the United States and did not see the point of placing my parents’ national origin in my own ethnic identification.  I also saw the label “Filipino-American” as something of a lie – how could I dare to label myself with a country I have never seen with my own eyes?

As originally planned, we Espineli women finally set off on our own Philippine journey on June 7, 2007 with the intention to canvass a selection of its thousands of islands in a scant two weeks.  Like some kind of strange time warp across the International Date Line, Mom, my sister Lauren, and I left Los Angeles for Manila in the early evening of a Thursday and arrived in Manila early Saturday morning.  The sixteen-hour plane ride was punctuated with many hot meals – an unexpected treat given the fact that all U.S. domestic plane trips no longer serve meals.  The hot meals were Filipino dishes which helped make it all the more real that we were finally going to visit our parents’ home country.   I remember feeling nervous about meeting my large extended family and wondering what they will think of us.  Mom is the fifth of nine children, so we had plenty of aunts, uncles, and cousins to meet.  Dad only had three siblings, all of whom are now in the United States, but his uncle had eleven children and his aunt had sixteen. So this makes for many more cousins, many of whom are scattered around the world (such as in Norway).

As per usual, Lauren and I procrastinated about packing, and we each ended up each packing a huge suitcase, a decision we regretted as soon as we landed.  In addition to all of our suitcases, we had a huge cardboard box, filled with gifts and supplies for relatives.  If you have ever passed the Philippine Airlines counter in the international terminal, you have probably seen many passengers waiting to check in huge cardboard boxes called Balikbayan((“Balikbayan” literally means “returnee” or someone coming home after an extended stay.)) boxes.   These boxes are a long-standing tradition which also adds to the cost of a trip to the Philippines – because you can’t just go there empty-handed.  We brought old clothes, little gifts and souvenirs as well as foodstuffs like instant coffee, corned beef, and Coffeemate that are very expensive and hard to come by in the Philippines.

As we deplaned and made our way to the baggage claim, we felt the profound humidity engulf us as we tried to find our bearings.  So this was what the tropics really felt like.  Our first trip to the bathroom was an experience!  We had to tip someone in the bathroom when we finished using the facilities…the last time I encountered this was going to the bathroom at a nice hotel so it was a bit unexpected in an airport.  Thankfully, we had been warned in advance to bring our own toilet paper as this convenience is very much a Western one.  As soon as we gathered all of our luggage, we needed to find our connecting flight to Tacloban.  Our first stop on our journey was to go to Mom’s hometown of Calbayog on the island of Samar.  Samar is part of the middle region of the Philippines known as the Visayas.

As we dipped beneath the thin layer of clouds, we got our first peek at the lush greenery that awaited us.  I had seen some photos of Mom’s hometown but they were mostly of people and of buildings so my imagination forgot to fill in the fact that it was enclosed by all of this amazing nature!  I wondered why my mother never mentioned this…then again, it was probably something she saw as normal and not something worth pointing out to us.

Fortunately, we got help in acclimating to our new environment.  Our uncle Tito Ecot (Mom’s brother-in-law) and our cousin Francis met us at the airport in Tacloban.  Tacloban is on the island of Leyte and is best-known for being the humble birthplace of Imelda Marcos – this was a factoid with which we were immediately supplied.  Tito Ecot and Francis hired a van for the day to pick us and our luggage up since it was a five-hour trip by car to Calbayog.  I think that our luggage outweighed us so this was good planning.  Tito Ecot warned us that it would be a bumpy road, but that was an understatement.  The potholes in some places were so deep that the driver would drive on the dirt shoulders which were actually smoother than the roads themselves.  We were amazed that this was the main highway of Samar!  When we asked why the roads were in such a state, Mom explained that due to political corruption, the funds for public works were siphoned off to more personal interests.  This got me to thinking about how much I took for granted in the United States.  Despite the frequent potholes I encounter in the Boston area, I don’t complain about them anymore.  Having a road in good repair is not a right but a privilege in my mother’s home province.

When I asked about whether they would ever do any repair on the road, my uncle and cousin laughed.  They explained that the road had been and would always be dangerous to travel and that they avoided taking this route when possible.  Our cousin Francis also mentioned that there was a possibility that Calbayog’s airport would soon offer flights to and from Manila (it does today).  It was great to see Francis, having only known him through photos and relatives’ stories.  I knew he was a little older than me and that he and his twin brother Terrence were both married with kids.  I looked forward to connecting with him and all of our cousins.  I could not help but wonder what we would talk about, if we had any interests in common, and what they would think of me and Lauren and our American ways.  It was a nice surprise to discover that he had so much to share with us about the Philippines, including local attractions and historic sites that he wanted us to see.

Before we started out on our treacherous five-hour journey to our relatives’ hometown, Calbayog, we took a quick trip to a nearby monument.  General MacArthur’s words, “I shall return,” was one of the few tidbits I remembered learning about the Philippines in my high school world history class.  It was a surprise for Lauren and me to learn that we could go to the exact spot where General MacArthur had indeed returned with forces to liberate the Philippines at the end of World War II.   The monument’s statues of MacArthur and his officers looked to me like performance artists standing in water.  It was meant to duplicate how MacArthur and his men waded through the Pacific waters to return to the Philippine shores marking the fulfillment of his promise of his famous words.

Just as I had once felt awe standing  in front of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris where so much of the history of that city had taken place, I felt chills about what a momentous occasion this moment was for both the United States and the Philippines that had only happened 63 years previously.   Now here were my sister and me, making our way to the country that our parents left behind to pursue a brighter future in the United States.  Would they have left the Philippines behind had MacArthur not returned as promised?  The Philippines would never be the same and still struggles with the repercussions of that moment today.  Gone were its Japanese oppressors and in came the democratic saviors.  But at what cost?  Did the United States seduce the Philippines with so much of its culture and language that we first-generation Filipino-Americans feel even more of a disconnect between our ethnic origins than other first-generation Asian-Americans?  I couldn’t help but think of all of the implications that MacArthur’s return had for both the Philippines’ destiny as well as my own.

We crossed a bridge connecting Leyte to the island of Samar, and I was blown away by this island of palm trees.  It looked completely untouched by human hands as the palms grew thick and wild to the very ends of its shores.  How many islands were there like that in this archipelago of thousands?  In crossing this bridge, it made me think of the threshold I waited for so long to cross – to be one of those Filipino-Americans who have been “back.”  Of course, I did not feel any differently, but I knew that thereafter, I would never be the same.

(Sheila Espineli’s travels in the Philippines will be continued in a later issue)

Describing the Spanish that we used as “broken” is like saying water is wet. Our mangled word pronunciation, notoriously bungled syntax, and grammatical non-sequiturs were linguistic train wrecks in the making every other second that we opened our mouths to “articulate” our breathlessly pidgin Spanish. In contrast, Nona and her adult children spoke a sturdy and grammatically flawless Spanish. So all things considered, our grandmother had a world of patience for the linguistic disasters that we sent crashing her way during our everyday conversations with her.

There was one exception. In Peru, the term for grandmother is “mamavieja,” an affectionate if rather formal compound title comprising four syllables that translates into “Old Mother.” My older brother by nine years and his contemporary cousins enunciate this word perfectly. Alas, “mamavieja” was at least three if not four syllables too long for us latter born “americanos” to ever come within a Peruvian kilometer of pronouncing even semi-correctly.

So here our grandmother, one of the most practical people I have ever known, intervened at a point in time before I myself was out of diapers and drew the line with the then present and all future grandchildren. “Nona,” which means grandmother in French and other cultures, was so comparatively easy to say that not even we could blow the pronunciation. So “Nona” her title would be, and “Nona”she always was to us, even after her death in 2002.

Being that my grandparents lived with my mom, my brothers, and me, in an extended family household until I turned sixteen, Nona played a towering role in the world that I grew up in. Because my mom worked the night shift during my early grade school years, Nona was the one who got me up for school in the morning, and Nona was the one who waited for me when I ambled home from school, as my mom got in what rest she could before she would be off again to her night time job.

Nona was old school strict and old world tough.  She grew up in the 1920s on a wind swept and isolated mountain ranch located in the nether reaches of the northern Peruvian Andes far above Peru’s second largest city of Trujillo.   The glorified hamlet of about 150 people that was her ancestral hometown carried a Quechua name, Paranday.   Paranady in the 1920s more closely resembled say, Fargo, North Dakota circa 1890 than the relatively antiseptic 1980s era California surroundings that I walked out to every time I left the family house.   In fact, Paranday was so geographically and technologically shut off from the rest of the country that its entire location, along with all of the surrounding mountain ranches like Nona’s, were completely inaccessible by car until after 1981, nearly sixty five years after Nona was born.  Until that year any hardy soul trying to reach Paranday from the nearest sizeable population center had to do so Old Testament style, traveling twelve hours by donkey just to make it to the town limits.

Nona’s upbringing was forged in the crucible of this frontier like environment.   She grew up living a utilitarian and hard-scrabble life that put iron in her blood.   Six of the seven children she gave birth to were born right on the ranch she grew up in, without the benefit of epidurals or any other kind of modern anesthetic.   All things considered it is safe to say that Nona brought her frontier values with her everywhere she went and this was as true in how she raised me as it was for anything else. One thing that meant was nothing ever went to waste. Let me repeat: Nothing. Wasted. Ever.

This was most especially true in the area of food. Nona’s rural upbringing, which meant she was intimately familiar with the back breaking manual labor involved in cultivating agricultural products, and Nona’s legendary cooking wizardry in preparing her home-cooked meals, combined to form in Nona’s heart an exalted appreciation for the sanctity of food. Thus, for Nona, throwing away food was akin to an insult against God’s benevolence and an affront to the starving Ethiopian children depicted in what at the time felt like an infinite loop of World Vision television commercials.

In my early grade school years I was often Nona’s captive audience for one of her home-cooked meals. Ever faithful to her Spartan values and rural heritage, Nona naturally considered me morally obligated to eat all of the food she served on my plate. This stayed true even if the designated meal-time consequently tumbled into an overtime period of interminable length because of my passive resistance to what I then considered Nona’s culinary tyranny.

Those endless meal times often devolved into a test of wits between Nona and I. However, school morning breakfasts were especially perilous for my second-grade self because Nona insisted on serving me a daily bowl of Quaker Oats oatmeal, and there was a school bus to catch, so I was up against a clock, in addition to Nona’s formidable resolve.  Now, Nona always mispronounced this non-Spanish word for oatmeal as “Quack—errr”, dutifully left out the Oats part, and she saw it as her grandmotherly duty to make me ingest this particular kind of breakfast meal down to the last soggy oat. As for me, I was just as determined not to. In fact I felt I had a sacred responsibility to my kid palate not to drink the despised Quack–errr to anything like the bottom part of the bowl, where all the doomed soggy oats submerged to rest in watery oblivion.

However, I could not argue this point with Nona directly. I never did, as I had been raised not to. At this particular point in my family’s immigrant experience the rules were so strict that young children could never for any reason so much as say the word “No” to any responsible adult. So despite my kid’s eye view of the tragic injustice involved, no way and no how was I going to start the soundtrack of “No” with Nona around the consumption of Quack–errr.

Instead I employed subterfuge and tactical misdirection wrapped up in a metaphorical falafel of non-violent resistance. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. organized historic sit-ins for racial integration. John Lennon choreographed a televised 1969 bed-in for peace. And at age seven I began staging spoon-ins for escaping the de facto jail that Nona’s kitchen table was to me.

You may ask, what was a “spoon-in”? While Nona watched (or more accurately stated, pretended not to watch) me “finish” my breakfast from the business side of the kitchen (where the oven was), I dramatically and repeatedly buried my spoon deeply into the tilted bowl and pretended to scoop out every one of the surviving oats to eat them all, and thus in Nona’s eyes justify my getting off the kitchen table. My goal was to sustain my spoon-in pantomime just convincingly and long enough so that Nona would soon be distracted by a phone call or a bathroom break or some other minor miracle that would result in me being outside her line of sight. This in turn would allow me to jog sight unseen to the kitchen sink and flush the offending Quack-errr oats down the drain before Nona would be the wiser.

My spoon-ins were occasionally successful but in truth, Nona usually achieved her goal of making me eat everything she set on my plate.   She could and often would wait me out my spoon-ins because right after breakfast she walked me straight to the school bus stop.  Even at age seven I knew the school bus waited on no one, not even anti-Quack-err kid crusaders like myself.  And seeing as how Nona physically stood in the middle of the only possible route to the kitchen sink, unless Nona was distracted or otherwise called away from her ambush spot, my spoon-ins were doomed to fail.   Of course, the quiet irony is that at this current point in my life I would gladly trade any number of material things in exchange for being able to again taste any and every part of Nona’s cooking and to hear, even if only one more time, the soft grandmotherly laugh that she would so often share with me at the beginning of our meal times together.

Nona had a wonderful meal time laugh, I assure you.  Her laugh was vibrant, infectious, and carried within in it a love of life that found its original expression in Paranday and brought its resilience and generosity to my little childhood corner of Pasadena.    No matter where I am, I can hear its echo in my memory and know how blessed a grandkid I am to have had her in my life.   Nona’s laugh was graceful, loving, and communicated the elemental essence of who she was, how she lived, and where her truest treasure could be found.

The space program is largely mediated in the cultural imaginary, from news coverage of tickertape parades in celebration of successful space flights to Life magazine’s oversize, color portraits of the everyday lives of astronauts and their wives. With the exception of those who venture to the Kennedy Space Center for a shuttle launch or partake in the tourism offerings at Kennedy, Johnson, or the Space and Rocket Center, we know NASA primarily as a televisual spectacle. Anniversaries of historical events evince the relationship between media and cultural memory: how an event is framed by the media shapes the way audiences come to know history. Revisiting and reframing a particular historical event can change the way it is recalled in cultural memory.

The lunar landing was an extraordinary television event, witnessed live by millions around the world. Yet for those too young to recall the Apollo 11 mission, the image of the space program just as likely to come to mind is the explosion of Challenger shortly after takeoff in 1986. The image of the Challenger disaster is so vivid in cultural memory not just because of its horror, but because television viewers were subjected to replaying of the same sequence of events, as if caught in a catastrophic loop.

There are certainly space enthusiasts among Generation X, yet for most of those born between 1964 and 1980, men walking on the moon was taken for granted: most GenXers could not remember a time before, when it was not so. Nor did they have the lived experience of the Apollo program and the intense drama of the early years of the Space Race. In the cultural narrative GenXers grew up with, the lunar landing is tied not only to the Cold War but also to Kennedy’s call for a man on the moon. Like the Civil Rights Act, one giant leap is part of Kennedy’s legacy. GenXers have certainly had ample opportunities to see moon walk footage, but the blending of personal memory and cultural memory makes the Challenger footage more salient.

The cultural gap between Generation X and the Millennial generation plays out in perspectives on the space program. Millennials, after all, are a post-Cold War, post-Challenger generation. Not only is the space race a historical notion for them, they also have as much exposure to NASA’s tragedies as its triumphs. The dream of becoming an astronaut, while still somewhat common among GenX kids, is less likely to rank high for Millennials. In a media landscape deeply saturated by celebrity, young people are given cultural clues to bank their dreams on being professional athletes or pop stars before considering the space program as a site of unparalleled acclaim and financial success.           

On the morning of February 1, 2003, residents in Deep East Texas were jarred by something similar to a sonic boom, as the shards of space shuttle Columbia fell to earth around them. For many, the event was a devastating national-and international-tragedy. Running alongside their sense of mourning was a feeling of privilege, or belonging, as their circumstantial participation in the shuttle disaster stitched them in to cultural history. As federal agencies and local volunteers began recovery efforts, a handful of East-Texas Millennials, seeing the event as more akin to a scavenger hunt than a tragedy for the space program, set out in search of souvenirs. This reaction can be read through different lenses. We can critique the souvenir hunters as lacking reverence for the space program and disregarding both the tragedy of Columbia and the federal laws that prohibit keeping any shuttle debris. Or, we can see the desire to have a piece of the shuttle as a desire to own a significant piece of the past, the same sensibility that inspires us to save baseball cards, wedding invitations, and commemorative issues of magazines focused on significant cultural events. The lunar landing is likely one of those events, as the hundreds of Apollo 11 collectibles up for sale on eBay suggest.

Across generations, we see a shift in the idea of astronauts having “the right stuff.” Tom Wolfe’s notion of the right stuff is the capacity to overcome death-defying odds without flinching, making it look easy. For Wolfe, courage in the face of death, on behalf of national honor, made the astronauts heroes. That sense of reverence for the astronauts diminished as space travel became routine. In the aftermath of September 11, we’ve experienced a sea change with regard to heroism, and it is difficult to think of astronauts as heroes. The astronauts of the 1960s were vested with ideological symbolism. The astronauts of today are scientists who, if they are lucky, get to go up into space. Space travel is still a risky endeavor, but with national pride detached from the undertaking, NASA’s symbolic power is minimal.

With federal funding always in flux, NASA strives to be popular, to win the hearts and minds of the public as well as the Congressional funding required for its costly programs. The shuttle program is winding to a close, and President Obama was slow in appointing a new NASA administrator, leading many to speculate that the space program may not be a priority for the White House.

Marking the 40th anniversary of the lunar landing grants NASA the opportunity to reframe, reconsider, and reconstitute the past for purposes in the present that aim toward the future. NASA can take advantage of cable programming devoted to science and technology, and they can offer documentary retrospectives on the space program. Such documentaries could act as a counter to those programs that argue the lunar landing is a hoax, staged by NASA on a Hollywood soundstage. Changing the minds of conspiracy theorists may be impossible, but changing the perspective of a tech savvy generation seems a worthy effort. The lunar landing is a momentous narrative, and one that is tainted by association with cultural contexts and tragedies. Reframing the moon landing can restore its place in cultural memory, reminding new generations of a valuable past that can have technological benefits for the future.

Perhaps an argument could be made here for the ascendance of spectacle and celebration, for commemorative events taking on a meaning and importance based on ritual rather than remembrance.  Maybe we live in a time and a place defined by bullet points and power point presentations, where history is boiled down to a holiday, where the details fall by the wayside and public drunkenness and wanton celebration find justification in the commemoration of any event that allows us a bit of freedom from the Puritanism of our daily lives.  By this line of reasoning, such anniversaries are little more than empty vessels to be filled by the repressed desires of the celebrants, ciphers floating without reference.  One could even go so far as to argue that anniversaries in and of themselves have become nearly irrelevant; commemoration has been flattened across the public sphere to the point where everyone and everything can have an anniversary: people, animals, buildings, events, stores, corporations, products, television shows.  Anniversaries have been indelibly linked now to commercial language; indeed, one would be hard pressed to find an anniversary whose commemoration hasn’t been transformed into an occasion to buy, sell, or consume.

Given all this, what then is the utility of an anniversary?  Why are anniversaries still important, even after their rampant commercialization, indiscriminate application, and often specious interpretation?

Much has been made of the drive towards instant gratification as a defining characteristic of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.  The statement that the internet puts the world at our fingertips has gone from a revolutionary idea to a cliché.  And yet, along with the expectation of access to everything all the time, another shift has quietly occurred.  It finds its genesis and its metaphor in a device/service offered by our cable and satellite television companies.

The digital video recorder, with its ability to pause and rewind live television, is subtly shaping the way we live our lives.  The marketing for this product promises that we will never miss anything again–should the real world intrude on our television watching, we can simply hit rewind and not miss a single moment of programming.  We can record our favorite shows and skip through the commercials with the press of a button.  The DVR has singularly revolutionized the way we watch television.  Once one gets used to the idea, it’s surprising how quickly it translates to other venues.  More than once I’ve caught myself reaching to push some non-existent button on my car stereo, attempting to rewind what someone has said on the radio.  And of course, while that button might not exist in my car, a few minutes on the Internet will likely yield that radio station’s website with an archive of the program in question, allowing me to listen to it again whenever I want.  The same is true of television and, if something is not on an officially sanctioned network website (or even if it is), it’s almost certainly on YouTube.  There is no such thing as missing a televised event now that everything ends up on YouTube.  The DVR is a metaphor for how we live our lives, where everything is instantly repeatable, instantly archived, and always accessible.  Nothing again will ever be “can’t miss”; indeed, nothing can ever be truly missed again, as everything is instantly documented, archived, and available with a couple of clicks.  History repeats itself, literally.  

Within this context, the anniversary does still hold value and meaning.  The anniversary makes the argument that time does matter, that time is real, that despite all our technology time is still the one thing we cannot change, alter, or halt.  An anniversary is the insistence that today is different from yesterday is different from tomorrow.  When we commemorate an anniversary, we are not just celebrating an event, we are recognizing the passage of time.  An anniversary marks an important event, but it is not just about remembering that event, it is an affirmation that what has happened between then and now is also important.  Anniversaries tell us that life is important, that life is not repeatable, rewindable, or redactable.  Time marches on and every moment is singular and unique and precious.

We may not have known it on that margarita-soaked night, but in its own way Cinco de Mayo commemorates the significance of time.  The Battle of Puebla took place on the Fifth of May, 1862, with the Mexican army successfully, if temporarily, forcing a withdrawal of the occupying French forces.  It is widely recognized that French General Charles de Lorecenz’s fatal error was beginning his campaign too late in the day.

photo credit: Bengt Nyman

While hearing this kind of talk from amongst the professorial ranks is rare, the ability to offer proposals that draw the ire of one’s colleagues does not in itself amount to an actual platform of reform that is in the public interest. If Taylor has done nothing else, and in my opinion, by and large he hasn’t, he has nevertheless succeeded in launching an opening salvo for a broader conversation as to what the university endeavors to be. How and toward what end should our institutions of higher education operate?

Taylor’s argument presumes that the U.S. system of higher education is going through a fundamental crisis; one similar in nature to the financial crisis. Already in Taylor’s opening metaphor, he demonstrates the pronounced influence of the very sort of disciplinary specialization his proposals would eliminate.  As a scholar of Kierkegaard and other philosophers of religion, Taylor understandably sees the world around him through that particular disciplinary lens. In this academic theological parlance, a crisis (as in “crisis of faith”) refers not simply to a dilemma posed to a particular person, institution, or belief structure regarding how it ought to proceed; a crisis is a dilemma that both threatens and stems from the essence of what a person, institution, or belief structure most takes for granted. A crisis can only be resolved (and such a resolution is itself always and only temporary, the philosophers remind us) insofar as the person, institution, or belief structure in crisis abandons the very basis upon which it relates to the world. Moreover, no real assurances can be given that the person, institution, or belief structure which comes after the “leap of faith” will be any better or less problematic than the one that came before. After all, if a radical transformation seemed like a good idea from the untenable perspective that it was trying to abandon, then such a transformation would not be radical enough because it may still be wedded to the basic orientation of the original perspective.

Viewing contemporary social issues through the lens of specialized theoretical concepts may (or may not) be accurate, suggestive, or useful. For instance, “crisis” may very well be a good name for the state of financial institutions at present, and this is perhaps why Taylor compares the state of higher education to the financial crisis. The collapse of the housing market and the credit market (and the subsequent reverberations throughout the world economy) was not on the whole caused by isolated cases of fraud and misconduct. Propelled by the drive to ever-increased speculation that comprises their very essence, financial institutions kept making more and more bets on more and more bets that became increasingly distant from the actual transactions.  To offer an extended metaphor, it’s as if instead of betting on boxing matches seen in person, or boxing matches watched on TV, or boxing matches with results that would be put in the paper, our financial institutions were all betting on boxing matches for which the results would never be known at all–in fact, boxing matches that would never even take place. One doesn’t have to be Marx to see that this logic presupposes its own destruction.

To say that such a situation constitutes a crisis–if we follow out the Kierkegaardian line of thought–is to suggest that the only possible way of recovering from the current situation, or preventing a similar crisis from happening in the future, is to transform the fundamental basis for how we go about coordinating economic transactions. Given the deleterious effects that follow from speculative capitalism even when it is working well–e.g., ever-increasing disparities of wealth, the various forms of social stratification that result from these disparities, the transformation of the Earth into a place less and less habitable by various forms of life including human beings, etc.–a case could be made for Taylor’s Kierkegaardian “crisis” approach to the problem. The course of action counseled by this analysis (the “leap of faith”) would not be the ameliorative-incrementalist approach of utilizing the political system to place a series of regulations upon financial institutions in the attempt to prevent those institutions from realizing their inner need for destruction. The leap of faith would instead demand that we get rid of financial institutions entirely. After all, if we allow the continued existence of these institutions, it will only be a matter of time before their immense power and influence, which will always be accorded them due to the central role they play in capitalist production, will once again be utilized in order to manipulate whatever political systems dare to constrain them.

In this essay, I am not claiming that an anti-capitalist revolution is the most sensible way of responding to the current financial debacle.((Just as it is necessary to point out the likely failings of incrementalist regulation, it is also necessary to recall the conservative, Burkean observation that revolutions often serve to pave the way for counter-revolutions. However, the current approach to the financial crisis taken by our political representatives is neither the radical leap of faith of anti-capitalist revolution, nor is it the band-aid approach of confining the market’s impetus to self-destruction through strict regulation. The approach adopted by our political leaders (the “bailout”) could best be equated to the strategy employed by an alcoholic who drinks more and more every morning in order to get over the hangover from the night before. This strategy will continue to work in the short-term–again, as long as one defines “working” as the cycle of booms and busts that we have grown accustomed to–until one day when it blows itself up completely. Given their role in encouraging this process to reach its apotheosis, our leaders might very well be considered anti-capitalist revolutionaries after all. We might just all be exterminated in the process, but that’s the leap of faith for you!)) I chose to elucidate the revolutionary position regarding the financial crisis in order to demonstrate how the application of specialized theoretical concepts can help us to consider courses of action for addressing social problems beyond those which are the most obvious. By enlarging our discussion of social problems through the deliberate inclusion of a pluralistic variety of ideas, perspectives, positions, proposals and opinions (including many with which we disagree, perhaps even vehemently) we are more able to see the limitations of our habitual ways of encountering those problems. Professors, artists, and intellectuals of specialized training and temperament–especially those who have a difficult time marketing their labor directly in the consumerist economy-have a unique role to play in public deliberation. We need them to think up crazy, impractical, nihilistic, idiosyncratic, faulty, utopian, tangential ways of seeing the world so that they can share those perspectives with the rest of us. This social role of the university is performed best when the pluralism of its constituents is encouraged to the greatest conceivable extent. The university should be an asylum (or perhaps a zoo) without walls in which the freaks and outcasts who are its inhabitants are encouraged to come and go as they please and the rest of us are free to visit as long as we agree to preserve (and perhaps contribute to) the oddity of the surroundings.

It is in the public interest (and in the interest of the capitalist market as well, incidentally) for the university to function as an incubator and store-house for ideas that would otherwise be discarded because they are too iconoclastic, counterintuitive, or controversial to come into being equipped with their own revenue streams. The internet is an example of one such idea. From this perspective, the problems faced by U.S. institutions of higher education today are not best understood as the result of a fundamental crisis stemming from the university’s pursuit of specialized, impractical knowledge as Mark Taylor suggests. In fact, I believe that a better argument could be made for the converse hypothesis: the university’s present problems can be seen as the result of its failure to adequately preserve its own working ideal–entelecheia in Aristotelian terminology–as a sphere of infinite pluralistic debate that operates in relative autonomy from the immediate dictates of the market.

photo credit: seantoyer

Indeed, Dylan went on record making several claims that would typically fit with a classic sex-positive, feminist model of sexuality: she wanted to associate the personal with the political, in that selling her virginity would enhance her thesis research on the value of virginity. She believed that selling her body would lead to self-determination in the face of a culture that strips women of their bodily power, and she learned to “think differently” in her women’s studies education about the master narratives of purity, chastity, and virginity. She said, “College taught me that this [idealization of virginity] is just a tool to keep the status quo intact. Deflowering is historically oppressive—early European marriages began with a dowry, in which a father would sell his virginal daughter to the man whose family could offer the most agricultural wealth. Dads were basically their daughters’ pimps. When I learned this, it became apparent to me that idealized virginity is just a tool to keep women in their place. But then I realized something else: if virginity is considered that valuable, what’s to stop me from benefitting from that? It is mine, after all.”

These complexities raise two questions for me, questions with which this essay wrestles: First, what does it mean that the news media refused to take seriously Dylan’s reading of this event as a feminist act? Second, what else is at stake here? Focusing on this first question, my inquiry grates against obvious limitations about the relationship between women and the media. When looking at this relationship, a more obvious set of limitations about the interplay between gender politics and media coverage become apparent. Mainstream news media typically has nothing but contempt for feminism as a concept, ideology, practice, or identity; those who espouse feminist views—particularly if they actually use the “f-word”—typically end up ghettoized by the media as outdated (e.g., “those silly peace protesters from the 60s”), hypocritical (e.g., the frenzy about Gloria Steinem getting married after claiming that marriage oppressed women), a celebrity fad (e.g., Ashley Judd and Susan Sarandon as spokeswomen for a cause waning in its trendiness), or downright scary (e.g., the vilification of sex-negative thinkers like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin within academic and media circles).

Further, the media’s reluctance to accept Dylan’s reading of this event as a feminist act reveals that our media rarely considers the social context of sexual acts, preferring instead to argue for biological essentialism and the “naturalness” of heterosexuality. It seems impossible for the news media to take seriously any claims about the social context in which vanilla sex occurs, let alone the social context that enables prostitution or sex work. I raise this issue because, embedded within these frenzied discussions about Natalie Dylan are the deep-seated cultural anxieties we have about imagining sex as a social act, including the social aspects of virginity, what “counts” as sex, or what is at stake (emotionally, physically, etc.) in (first) sexual exchanges. Case in point: we still believe that erectile dysfunction is primarily related to physiological problems; the popularity of Viagra attests to our blocks about seeing erections within their social context as related to, say, partner communication, relationship issues, crises of masculinity, fatigue, abuse, fear, stress, etc.

So, in addition to the vilification of feminism and the reluctance to see sex in its social context, we also have the problem of the news media believing, particularly for young women, that sexual scripts are fixed, determined by men, and non-negotiable in their social meaning. In other words, we believe that Dylan should value her virginity because it has inherent value, rather than seeing virginity as something constructed in light of our obsession with women as the “purer” sex. We are outraged that Dylan is selling her virginity because it evokes our fear that men will lose control of the sexual economy (e.g., men trade women amongst each other—via marriage and legal arrangements—and not the other way around). In short, the primary objections to Dylan’s actions include the following two things: first, virginity matters; second, men should rule the sexual economy. In this light, the media must belittle, make fun of, ridicule, and shoot down Dylan’s own narrative of selling her virginity as a feminist act. For example, one recent blogger responded to Dylan’s statements by snarkily saying, “Sounds like someone took a couple of philosophy classes, too, and paid really close attention when moral relativism was described (but not critiqued).” If we could move past such belittling statements, we might enable a discussion about that most frightening of realities: the fact that the social world is a flexible, ever-changing universe, wedded not to the inevitability of stagnancy, but to the certainty of change.

This brings me to the second, and arguably more interesting, question I posed: What else is at stake here for social justice, particularly from a feminist lens? I ask this question not in spite of, but in light of, the problems set forth above (namely, that mainstream American news media have a vested interest in reducing the complexity of this situation, dismissing Dylan’s own claims about selling her virginity, and insisting upon a worldview that denies social context and cultural ambiguity). If selling one’s virginity now represents, for Dylan anyway, a feminist act, what do we as feminists do with this assertion? What do we stand to gain from agreeing with her, and what do we stand to lose by disagreeing with her?

Here’s what I like about Dylan’s labeling of selling her virginity as a feminist act: it takes our culture’s normal to its logical extreme. Much feminist research has sought to show how that which is on the fringe actually informs, comments upon, and alters that which is in the middle. For example, Susan Bordo has long argued that the anorexic body, rather than being an aberration, mental illness, or a symbol of the non-normative, actually most fully represents the normal. In other words, the anorexic body shows us what we value in women: passivity, weakness, thinness, conformity to patriarchal norms, lack of nourishment, pre-pubescent and therefore non-threatening bodies, and so on. In showing us these facts, the anorexic body simultaneously takes on a kind of empowerment, saying to the world, “You want thin? Well, this is thin. Now what?” Similarly, Dylan’s approach takes on a similar logic: “You want to overvalue virginity and give it all kinds of powerful social meanings that it probably doesn’t deserve? Well, how about just making it an explicit bidding war!” In doing so, she reveals to us our cultural pathologies about virginity in the very extremity of this act. We do overvalue virginity. We do sell and trade women’s bodies in a discursive sense. We do teach women to be the gatekeepers of sex and to ward off men’s sexual advances. We do have serious cultural hang-ups about keeping women pure and fetishizing processes that deflower them. Remember: in the world of plastic surgery, hymen reconstruction surgeries are on the rise, primarily in response to the demand for women to prove their virginity (or worth) to new prospective mates. The selling of virginity makes fun of, benefits from, and plays around with these realities. Dylan takes these hang-ups to the logical extreme, and this course of action might actually be useful, ideologically and otherwise, to a feminist politics.

That said, Dylan’s approach skirts one of the most severe problems within the feminist movement: we as feminists do not feel enabled—in part because of the heavy social penalties within the movement, and because our politics rely so intensely upon social constructionism, postmodernism, and relativity—to draw lines in the sand about what we will and will not tolerate in a political sense. Let us ask ourselves: Are we really okay with feminist prostitution? Do we really find it compelling to imagine that sexual liberation emerges from playing around with extreme cooptation, exploitation, and the treatment of sex as a form of labor? Might it be deeply problematic that we still construct men as the “buyers” of virginity/sex while women remain objects to be sold, bartered, and traded in a literal sense? Doesn’t it matter that, even in this discussion, we focus only on Dylan rather than on the men who want to buy her virginity? Must we learn to accept and tolerate extremity in the name of sex positivity?

What irks me most about the selling of virginity in general—whether labeled as feminist or not—is that it further entrenches us into a politics that despises pleasure, values commodification of bodies and sexualities, links capitalism with sexual power, and undermines the relational power of the erotic. As such, despite the rather insightful reading that Dylan has about the feminist implications of selling her virginity—and despite the way that it plays with the relationship between women (especially feminists) and the media—calling the selling of virginity a feminist act seems false. I say this with a full awareness of the hazards of drawing such a line in the sand. Yes, women’s desires are constructed by patriarchy and are therefore suspect. Yes, women have limited options with regard to how they enact resistance to social norms; we all, in a sense, struggle to find ways to reconcile the demands of patriarchy, racism, classism, heterosexism (etc.) with our political and social idealism. Yes, it is dangerous to assert that sex in the context of love and emotional relatedness is an ideal form of eroticism, for it sets up hierarchies between “good” and “bad” sex, “normal” and “abnormal” sex. Yes, the potential for resistance to patriarchy and power appears in all sorts of unexpected ways, and as such, we must take care not to obscure our own hypocrisies or exclude others from joining the cause. Still, mustn’t we at least attempt to articulate a worldview that moves in the direction of these most basic principles of social justice—equality, respect, love, solidarity, kindness, freedom from exploitation, creativity, shared power? Can’t we at least imagine a road to sexual empowerment for women that is not paved with the gritty, grungy, raunchy, hypercommodified realities of stripper poles, bunny ranches, online bidding wars, and girls going wild?