#if you want an example of a martyr from that time period thomas more is the closest thing

[navree]

you can call anne boleyn many things, good and bad alike. a protestant martyr, however, is not one of those fucking things

[apenitentialprayer]

Since you are a Christian who also studies Islam, I wanted to ask you, what are some common misconceptions Christians have about Islam, and vice versa?

Things Christians Get Wrong About Islam

1. “Islam was spread by the sword, and most of the initial conversions were coerced.”

So, disclaimer; there probably were coerced ‘conversions’, especially during the conquest of Mecca. Of particular note is a certain Hind bint Utbah, who hated Muhammad’s movement and even mutilated the corpses of fallen Muslim warriors. She converted shortly after the conquest, probably in the hopes of avoiding punishment for the aforementioned mutilations and general extreme hostility towards Islam.

That being said, Islam for the most part wasn’t a result of sword-conversions. Early documents like the Constitution of Medina may even imply that non-Muslims were considered a part of the Ummah (a word which today refers exclusively to the Muslim community). The early Caliphate was heavily reliant on jizya money to fund further campaigns of expansion, and due to the special privileges given to the elite Muslim military class, there may have even been attempts to discourage mass conversion.

In situations where mass conversion did occur, and those did eventually happen, it’s simply unfeasible to imagine that it could happen on a large scale. Here’s the thing about coerced conversions; when the coercive pressure is taken off, people more likely than not return to their old beliefs. Most mass conversions would have affected the elite or the extremely downtrodden; the former would have been interested in ‘elite patronage’, converting to the religion of the new ruling class in the hopes of destroying any glass ceiling that could prevent further upward mobility. The latter would be interested in ‘social liberation’, hoping that conversion to the relatively egalitarian Islam would remove any severe social pressure being put on them by their old religion.

In other parts of the world, such as Bengal, for example, the introduction of new technologies to indigenous peoples by Muslim settlers likely played a role in mass conversion too. These new neighbors seem to have a pretty sweet idea with this whole “agriculture” business; maybe their religious ideas aren’t too off base either, am I right?

2. On the other end, we have “Muslims were far more tolerant than Christians, and were philosophically more sophisticated.”

Muslims were operating under a system of governance that presumed almost from the birth of the movement’s political dimension that it was a dominant force among several other monotheisms. Yes, Muslims tolerated other forms of monotheism. Here’s a secret, though; there was no pre-Enlightenment society that viewed “tolerance” as a virtue. Tolerance of religious minorities was built into Islam’s understanding of its place in the world, and was a result of many sociological and economic factors.

That didn’t stop periods of short but intense persecution from cropping up here and there. There were anti-Judaic riots in Granada in the year 1066 that likely killed as many Jews as Christian crusaders did thirty years later. The Almohads and Almoravids were two North African Muslim movements that moderated over time but started out with the “convert or die” policy that many people try to attribute to Islam as a whole. Among the victims of this persecution was famed Jewish scholar Maimonides (a child at the time) and his family. They may have even converted to Islam to save their lives - but, as I said, once the coercive element died out, they returned to their original faith.

These tolerated minorities lived as dhimmis, a type of second-class subjecthood in which they were allowed to live in Islamicate societies while practicing non-Islamic religions. Dhimmi communities would pay the jizya in order to ensure that they had this right. In fact, during times of increased persecution, some dhimmi communities even petitioned rulers to allow them to pay a larger jizya tax as a form of protection. That being said, there were still legal limitations for dhimmis. They could not create new houses of worship or refurbish old ones. Religious activities had to be done in private. Non-Muslims were not allowed to be appointed to positions of high status. Fortunately, none of these rules were consistently enforced. When they were, though, you got things like the Granada riots.

A word about Jews in Islamic lands; on the whole, they were treated better in Dar al-Islam than they were in European Christendom. Two things you should keep in mind, though; Christianity and Judaism were both rival claimants to the inheritance of Abraham in a way that Islam really wasn’t. That rivalry created bitter resentment. Second, the Jewish minority in Islamic lands were always one minority among many; in medieval Christendom, the Jewish minority was the only consistent religious minority in existence. That means European Jews were under heavier scrutiny than Islamicate Jews were.

As far as being more philosophically inclined, we should keep in mind that Christianity became philosophized almost immediately. Saints Justin Martyr and Augustine of Hippo made sure of that. The rise of Islamic khalam philosophy was the result of Christian scholars translating Aristotelian texts into Arabic.

3. “Islam is basically Arab cultural imperialism.”

Fun fact; veiling of women, which is heavily associated with Islam today, was a Persian-Sasanian cultural element that was adopted by Islam fairly early on. The wives of Muhammad did veil while out in public, but so did Muhammad at times, and other women were still allowed to walk through military camps unveiled. This would change relatively quickly, but this is one piece of evidence that Islam isn’t just the theologically justified imposition of Arab culture onto non-Arabs.

Likewise, Persian remains the language most commonly associated with Islamic mystical thought. Persian is seen by some communities to be especially well-suited for the articulation of such ideas. This is probably because Shi‘a and Sufi forms of Islam both developed in what is now primarily Iran and Iraq.

After the year 1250, the ruling classes of the most expansive Islamic empires were not ethnically Arab, but Turkic. Just so we’re clear, these Turks were not from what we now call Turkey, but Central Asia. They brought all sorts of cultural innovations with them.

In the Indian subcontinent, the Mughals created a ‘Hindustani’ culture that combined elements of Turkish Islam with philosophical, cultural, and architectural elements of native Indian cultures. The Mughal emperor, a Muslim king, was modeled after the example of Rama from the Indian Epic tradition. Many rituals that they performed were modeled after those expected to be performed by ideal Hindu kings. South Asian Islam has a range of cultural idioms and pilgrimage sites unique to itself, largely a result of the Sufi pioneers who settled the continent before and during the rise of the early Indo-Muslim sultanates.

Things Muslims Get Wrong About Christianity

1. “Christians corrupted the true Gospel, which was a book like the Qur’an and the literal word of God”

The Qur’an described what is called the Injil, a word probably derived from evangelion, which most Muslims interpret to refer to a specific book recited by Jesus Christ. Except it seems very, very unlikely, for two reasons. First, there are no extant writings attributed to Jesus, excepting a forged communication between Jesus Christ and King Abgar V of Edessa. Second, not a single early Christian source (besides the aforementioned letter) ever references writings made by Jesus.

The closest thing we have to the Injil as understood by most Muslims today is the Gospel of Thomas, which is a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, and the hypothetical Q source. Regardless, the New Testament, as we have it, never attempts to present itself as the actual words of Jesus in the way that, say, the Book of Jeremiah claims to be from Jeremiah.

.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you want more, I could name more, but I think I’m talking to a primarily Christian audience, and I’m kinda tired, man.

[shirlleycoyle]

An AI Paper Published in a Major Journal Dabbles in Phrenology

On Friday, a trio of evolutionary psychology researchers published a research paper in Nature that sought to use machine learning to track historical changes in "trustworthiness" using facial expressions in portraits. The experiment was widely panned online as a digital revival of racist practices that claimed to discern character from physical characteristics, such as phrenology and physiognomy. 

At its core, the paper is concerned with "research linking facial morphological traits to important social outcomes" and uses portraits over the past few centuries, along with selfies over the past few years, to conduct its experiment. To that end, the researchers used machine learning to train an algorithm to analyze why and how those judgements were made, specifically in European portraits over time. In addition to that core question, they investigated whether people from richer nations were more likely to have “trustworthy” portraits. 

On Twitter, the researchers shared their study and said that they designed “an algorithm to automatically generate trustworthiness evaluations for the facial action units (smile, eye brows, etc.).” The tweet was shared with an image from the study that resembles outdated and debunked diagrams from a well-known phrenology booklet from 1902 that promised "to acquaint all with the elements of human nature and enable them to read these elements in all men, women and children in all countries."

Quickly, this sparked a backlash as a flood of researchers pointed to a deeply flawed set of assumptions, questionable methodology and analysis, superficial engagement with art history, and a disregard for sociology and economics. Critics also accused the project of being the latest to simply use machine learning to train an algorithm to be racist.

The co-authors of this study did not respond to Motherboard’s request for comment.

It has long been understood that people consistently and (un)consciously make judgements about a person's personality based on facial features, despite there being no evidence of a relationship. Predictably, then, the study’s conclusions are weak; for example, the finding that "trustworthiness displays in portraits increased throughout history" seems to simply be saying that the closer in time a portrait is to us, the more trustworthy we would rate it. 

The claim that "trustworthiness displays in portraits increased with affluence" is more problematic. The study relies on a 2014 publication from the Maddison Project, a collaborative effort by historians to build on economic historian Angus Madison’s attempts to reconstruct medieval economic data. A more recent Maddison Project publication from 2018 emphasizes that, in the years since, the collaborative has realized we "urgently need a new approach to Maddison's historical statistics" because Maddison's traditional method was found to result in significant distortions and contradictions. 

There are more issues, however. Take for example, the fact that there are no art historian (or historian) co-authors. As one historian pointed out on Twitter, the paper makes questionable claims about European social trust such as "religious tolerance increased, witch hunts abated, honor killings and revenge lost their appeal and intellectual freedom became a central value of modern countries." The major source for these claims is Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature, itself criticized as a deeply flawed exercise in “wishful thinking.”

 The study also does not account for the intentions of artists or subjects, the context of certain portraits and art styles, or their changes as the art itself changed. Take another user’s thread on various portraits and styles which the study fails to adequately engage. If you were to subjectively view a portrait of, say, Henry VII, your subjective perception of its trustworthiness would be biased, not only because of your personal biases but because of the intention of Henry and his painter. As the thread explains, Henry was a king who "wanted to look like he could crush you like a bug if you opposed him." 

The study’s conclusions on trustworthiness, then, don’t really jibe with reality. A portrait  of Thomas Cranmer was found to have low trustworthiness by the algorithm, and one of Sir Matthew Wood was found to have high trustworthiness. As one writer explained on Twitter, Cranmer was "martyred for renouncing a recantation extracted under torture" while Wood "finagled an inheritance by seducing the 'feeble-minded' daughter of a prominent banker.

Or consider the source of data: the National Portrait Gallery collection and the Web Gallery of Art, which boast some 1,962 and 4,106 pieces of art, respectively. These are huge and rich datasets, but they are also explicitly curated ones. The study does not question its datasets and how they were constructed—curation obviously favors certain art styles, time periods, and artists. Instead, the study analyzes the degree of democratization present when and where they were painted, and relies on Maddison’s likely flawed historical statistics when trying to measure economic indicators.

The algorithm can’t actually detect trustworthiness according to one statistician’s Twitter thread, where he calculates its ability to detect "trustworthy" or "dominant" faces is only 5 percent better than simply saying every face is equally trustworthy. The algorithm’s inherent flaws are made even worse by incomplete data. The core claim that the increase in trustworthiness is "more strongly associated with GDP per capita than institutional change" is undermined by the fact that while the portraits stretch back from 1500 to now, the economic data only begins in 1800. This means nearly 42 percent of the economic data from this analysis is missing. 

All together, it’s not clear there is any value in this sort of experiment. If anything, it seems destined to end up being used in attempts to legitimize digital reskins of physiognomy and phrenology, much in the way police departments tried to use empirical analysis to legitimize their racial profiling.

An AI Paper Published in a Major Journal Dabbles in Phrenology syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[klavier]

Formulary for a New Urbanism by Ivan Chtcheglov

SIRE, I AM FROM THE OTHER COUNTRY

We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That's lost. We know how to read every promise in faces--the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry:

Shower

Bath of the Patriarchs

Meat Cutting Machines

Notre Dame Zoo

Sports Pharmacy

Martyrs Provisions

Translucent Concrete

Golden Touch Sawmill

Center for Functional Recuperation

Sainte Anne Ambulance

Cafe Fifth Avenue

Prolonged Volunteers Street

Family Boarding House in the Garden

Hotel of Strangers

Wild Street

And the swimming pool on the Street of Little Girls. And the police station on Rendezvous Street. The medical-surgical clinic and the free placement center on the Quai des Orfevres. The artificial flowers on Sun Street. The Castle Cellars Hotel, the Ocean Bar and the Coming and Going Cafe. The Hotel of the Epoch.

And the strange statue of Dr. Philippe Pinel, benefactor of the insane, in the last evenings of summer. To explore Paris.

And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. Now that's finished. You'll never see the hacienda. It doesn't exist.

The hacienda must be built.

All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.

These dated images retain a small catalyzing power, but it is almost impossible to use them in a symbolic urbanism without rejuvenating them by giving them a new meaning. Our imaginations, haunted by the old archetypes, have remained far behind the sophistication of the machines. The various attempts to integrate modern science into new myths remain inadequate. Meanwhile abstraction has invaded all the arts, contemporary architecture in particular. Pure plasticity, inanimate, storyless, soothes the eye. Elsewhere other fragmentary beauties can be found -- while the promised land of syntheses continually recedes into the distance. Everyone wavers between the emotionally still -- alive past and the already dead future.

We will not work to prolong the mechanical civilizations and frigid architecture that ultimately lead to boring leisure.

We propose to invent new, changeable decors....

Darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting, and the seasons by air conditioning; night and summer are losing their charm and dawn is disappearing. The man of the cities thinks he has escaped from cosmic reality, but there is no corresponding expansion of his dream life. The reason is clear: dreams spring from reality and are realized in it.

The latest technological developments would make possible the individual's unbroken contact with cosmic reality while eliminating its disagreeable aspects. Stars and rain can be seen through glass ceilings. The mobile house turns with the sun. Its sliding walls enable vegetation to invade life. Mounted on tracks, it can go down to the sea in the morning and return to the forest in the evening.

Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams. It is a matter not only of plastic articulation and modulation expressing an ephemeral beauty, but of a modulation producing influences in accordance with the eternal spectrum of human desires and the progress in realizing them.

The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and a means of action.

The architectural complex will be modifiable. Its aspect will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of its inhabitants....

Past collectivities offered the masses an absolute truth and incontrovertable mythical exemplars. The appearance of the notion of relativity in the modern mind allows one to surmise the EXPERIMENTAL aspect of the next civilization (although I'm not satisfied with that word; say, more supple, more "fun"). On the bases of this mobile civilization, architecture will, at least initially, be a means of experimenting with a thousand ways of modifying life, with a view to a mythic synthesis.

A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and conveniences sewage system, elevator, bathroom, washing machine.

This state of affairs, arising out of a struggle against poverty, has overshot its ultimate goal--the liberation of man from material cares--and become an obsessive image hanging over the present. Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit. It has become essential to bring about a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light forgotten desires and by creating entirely new ones. And by carrying out an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires.

We have already pointed out the need of constructing situations as being one of the fundamental desires on which the next civilization will be founded. This need for absolute creation has always been intimately associated with the need to play with architecture, time and space....

Chirico remains one of the most remarkable architectural precursors. He was grappling with the problems of absences and presences in time and space. We know that an object that is not consciously noticed at the time of a first visit can, by its absence during subsequent visits, provoke an indefinable impression: as a result of this sighting backward in time, the absence of the object becomes a presence one can feel. More precisely: although the quality of the impression generally remains indefinite, it nevertheless varies with the nature of the removed object and the importance accorded it by the visitor, ranging from serene joy to terror. (It is of no particular significance that in this specific case memory is the vehicle of these feelings; I only selected this example for its convenience.)

In Chirico's paintings (during his Arcade period) an empty space creates a full-filled time. It is easy to imagine the fantastic future possibilities of such architecture and its influence on the masses. Today we can have nothing but contempt for a century that relegates such blueprints to its so-called museums.

This new vision of time and space, which will be the theoretical basis of future constructions, is still imprecise and will remain so until experimentation with patterns of behavior has taken place in cities specifically established for this purpose, cities assembling--in addition to the facilities necessary for a minimum of comfort and security-- buildings charged with evocative power, symbolic edifices representing desires, forces, events past, present and to come. A rational extension of the old religious systems, of old tales, and above all of psychoanalysis, into architectural expression becomes more and more urgent as all the reasons for becoming impassioned disappear.

Everyone will live in his own personal "cathedral," so to speak. There will be rooms more conducive to dreams than any drug, and houses where one cannot help but love. Others will be irresistibly alluring to travelers.... This project could be compared with the Chinese and Japanese gardens of illusory perspectives [en trompe l'oeil]--with the difference that those gardens are not designed to be lived in all the time--or with the ridiculous labyrinth in the Jardin des Plantes, at the entry to which is written (height of absurdity, Ariadne unemployed): Games are forbidden in the labyrinth. This city could be envisaged in the form of an arbitrary assemblage of castles, grottos, lakes, etc. It would be the baroque stage of urbanism considered as a means of knowledge. But this theoretical phase is already outdated. We know that a modern building could be constructed which would have no resemblance to a medieval castle but which could preserve and enhance the Castle poetic power (by the conservation of a strict minimum of lines, the transposition of certain others, the positioning of openings, the topographical location, etc.).

The districts of this city could correspond to the whole spectrum of diverse feelings that one encounters by chance in everyday life.

Bizarre Quarter--Happy Quarter (specially reserved for habitation) -- Noble and Tragic Quarter (for good children)--Historical Quarter (museums, schools)--Useful Quarter (hospital, tool shops) --Sinister Quarter, etc. And an Astrolaire which would group plant species in accordance with the relations they manifest with the stellar rhythm, a planetary garden comparable to that which the astronomer Thomas wants to establish at Laaer Berg in Vienna. Indispensable for giving the inhabitants a consciousness of the cosmic. Perhaps also a Death Quarter, not for dying in but so as to have somewhere to live in peace,and I think here of Mexico and of a principle of cruelty in innocence that appeals more to me every day.

The Sinister Quarter, for example, would be a good replacement for those hellholes that many peoples once possessed in their capitals: they symbolized all the evil forces of life. The Sinister Quarter would have no need to harbor real dangers, such as traps, dungeons or mines. It would be difficult to get into, with a hideous decor (piercing whistles, alarm bells, sirens wailing intermittently, grotesque sculptures, power-driven mobiles, called Auto-Mobiles), and as poorly lit at night as it is blindinglylit during the day by an intensive use of reflection. At the center, the "Square of the Appalling Mobile." Saturation of the market with a product causes the product's market value to fall: thus, as they explored the Sinister Quarter, the child and the adult would learn not to fear the anguishing occasions of life, but to be amused by them.

The principal activity of the inhabitants will be the CONTINUOUS DÉRIVE. The changing of landscapes from one hour to the next will result in complete disorientation....

Later, as the gestures inevitably grow stale, this dérive will partially leave the realm of direct experience for that of representation....

The economic obstacles are only apparent. We know that the more a place is set apart for free play, the more it influences people's behavior and the greater is its force of attraction. This is demonstrated by the immense prestige of Monaco and Las Vegas--and Reno, that caricature of free love--although they are mere gambling places. Our first experimental city would live largely off tolerated and controlled tourism. Future avant-garde activities and productions would naturally tend to gravitate there. In a few years it would become the intellectual capital of the world and would be universally recognized as such.

[topmixtrends]

GROUNDBREAKING NEW feminist books like Roxane Gay’s Not That Bad and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dear Ijeawele proffer strategies for navigating Trump’s America, and bookshelves are stocked with volumes celebrating high-achieving female rulebreakers, like Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding’s Nasty Women and Anne Helen Petersen’s Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud. But in 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality (Harper Perennial), journalist Allison Yarrow takes a step back, seeking to account for how we got to a place where Americans elected a confessed sexual predator and women are still, nearly a half century after Roe v. Wade, fighting for ownership of their bodies.

Yarrow argues that we laid the foundation for our current cultural moment 20 years ago, during the golden hour before we succumbed to internet culture. Despite massive potential in the ’90s for women to claim agency at work and at home, Yarrow reveals that “the decade was marked by a shocking, accelerating effort to subordinate them.” Women who gained too much power, or got too angry, sexual, or ambitious, ended up reviled by American culture. Yarrow painstakingly revisits the stories of figures like Tonya Harding, Monica Lewinsky, Anita Hill, Janet Reno, and Nicole Brown Simpson, offering deft reinterpretations of the subtext that rendered them controversial in their own moment. Yarrow coins the term “bitchification,” the formula that “reduced women to their sexual function in order to thwart their progress.” Bitchification, as Yarrow theorizes it, is a socio-cultural process by which a woman makes headlines, breaks patriarchal mores, is judged by her sexuality, and sees her credibility and reputation shattered. 90s Bitch presents a convincing case that women lost political, cultural, and sexual power grabs in the last decade of the 20th century, shaping the gender inequality we’re still experiencing today.

As a ’90s kid myself, I recall that the way we treated the women mentioned above — like punch lines, rather than human beings — never sat well with me, though I couldn’t say why at the time. Like many of Yarrow’s readers, I absorbed stories like Hill’s and Lewinsky’s before I’d embraced “feminism,” a term that conjured unshaven legs and bra burning in a decade that glorified the hyper-feminine girly girl. Now I know why I squirmed: those attacks didn’t just target powerful and misbehaving “bitches” in the public eye, they targeted all women.

“Bitchification” may be a new idea, but “bitch” isn’t. Yarrow reminds us that the term has long been “the worst invective hurled at women.” Etymologists trace the origins of “bitch” to Artemis, the Greek goddess of chastity who could transform into a dog and was seen as secretly begging for sex. “From its very conception,” Yarrow explains, “‘bitch’ was a verbal weapon designed to restrain and silence women and strip them of their power.” By 1811, the word was codified in an English dictionary as a greater insult than “whore,” and by 1987, two chart-topping rappers centered the term. Public Enemy released “Sophisticated Bitch,” while N.W.A. dropped “A Bitch Iz a Bitch,” which characterized bitches as money-grubbing sex fiends who could “eat shit and die.” Over the years, women have attempted to reclaim the epithet, and Yarrow observes that “what was once a derogation is now seen as an appellation of empowerment and sisterhood.” Millennial women might jokingly refer to their “resting bitch face,” ironically embrace the label “basic bitch” — and the fashion and lifestyle implications that come with it — or don the title “boss bitch,” to signal career ambition and independence. Earlier generations started the trend, though. Meredith Brooks’s 1997 hit “Bitch” left radio stations debating whether to bleep out the word, since Brooks used it not as a slur but to signify strength and power. And a 1985 record dispute led to Madonna famously saying, “I’m tough, I’m ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, OK.” Still, Yarrow argues that attempts to use the word to capture the multiplicity of female identity will be feeble if we don’t face how the moniker still “degrades, disparages, and disenfranchises.”

Yarrow is a skillful scene setter, and unpacks trends that objectified women’s bodies, making it easy for bitchification to take root. The ’90s saw the rise of the human Barbie doll ideal, memorably celebrated and critiqued in Aqua’s 1997 hit single “Barbie Girl,” and driven by stars like Pamela Anderson and Anna Nicole Smith, whom the media (and not just tabloids) characterized as breasts, personified. Yarrow cites a story in The Economist claiming that with Smith’s breasts, “a girl from nowhere […] could do anything.” But Smith’s body was also her undoing. She began to “swell and then shrink over the years, making her a target” for cruel media scrutiny. When she died, Smith “was ceaselessly mocked for pursuing love and self-esteem from the outside in, even though it was exactly what society had instructed her to do.” This bait-and-switch tactic, which penalizes women for playing to the feminist ideal and for opting out, crops up throughout 90s Bitch.

Yarrow shows that fat-shaming was standard for fictional characters on primetime TV, too. Monica Geller of Friends fights to live down her history as “fat Monica,” while the 90210 pilot shows Steve taunting Kelly for her nose job, asking if she’ll turn to liposuction or a tummy tuck next. Yarrow posits it’s no coincidence that plastic surgery rates skyrocketed, teen diet programs abounded, and Victoria’s Secret boomed as women tried to fit the new model of beauty: “bionic, breasty, and blonde.” They were promised that “this was achievable through consumption: buy this diet or this underwear to make men want to sleep with you, because being desired by men is the path to self-esteem, power, and love.” In other words, success for American women was still about attracting male attention, but now they could achieve this success at the mall or on the operating table.

To further complicate the landscape, abstinence-only sex education made girls gatekeepers, and laid the onus of preventing STD transmission and unplanned pregnancies on them. “Boys were encouraged and even pressured to pursue sex (with girls and girls only),” writes Yarrow, while girls were “blamed and shamed for sexual consequences.” It was a lose-lose situation. Girls were taught to fear sex “in school and society, and by elders and peers,” but this advice was at direct odds with what they “were sold about sex” on TV and in magazines. It was under these conditions, Yarrow asserts, that the pattern of bitchification could take hold. If “society values female bodies primarily for their function and consumption,” it’s easy to shift the conversation away from their skills and qualifications. This reinforced the message that when women posed a threat to men, they’d be trivialized and knocked out of power. Girls waiting in the ranks learned there wasn’t a place for them.

Yarrow shows that, while the recipe was always the same, bitchification came in popular flavors, like femme fatale and frigid old maid. Much of 90s Bitch is smartly organized around unpacking these labels, with chapters on how women were punished for being too sexual, cold, angry, unfeminine, or simply too competent. To demonstrate, Yarrow opens the vault of high-profile cases that were either too hot or too cold. Anita Hill, to detail one example, was simply “too cold” to be credible in her case against Clarence Thomas. In 1991, she testified against Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court, citing the years of sexual harassment she suffered as his subordinate. Yarrow conjures the “indelible image of Hill sitting alone behind a microphone, testifying opposite fourteen white male senators performing their disbelief on behalf of disbelieving men everywhere.” They seemed bent on bitchifying Hill, a lawyer and academic. Senator Howell Heflin asked Hill if she was a “scorned woman” with a “martyr complex” and “militant attitude.” Rather than focus on her testimony, they attacked her character, labeling her desperate for male attention. A law school classmate “detailed how Hill couldn’t stomach men rejecting her.” Hill was pegged an erotomaniac and paid with her career; she relocated to Oklahoma to escape Justice Thomas’s advances, taking a job at a barely accredited institution, while Thomas still sits on the Supreme Court. Hill was punished for speaking up, and is remembered as a controversy rather than a flag bearer.

Yarrow doesn’t have to dig through right-wing sources to reveal the rampant sexism and double standards that plagued women during the ’90s, often in ways that we continue to experience today. Her research shows that the liberal bastions publishing #MeToo exposés and touting body positivity today were as culpable as the tabloids in the pre-millenium period. A New Yorker article quipped that before the Clinton affair, Monica Lewinsky’s “only other serious interest in life was dieting.” The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd called Lewinsky “too tubby to be in the high school in-crowd,” ditsy, and “pathetically adolescent,” mockingly referring to her relationship with the president as “way unique.” Dowd won a Pulitzer for her coverage. Lewinsky is only now beginning to shed the stigma she has lived with for two decades.

Even women who weren’t sexual at all could be lambasted. Yarrow traces how ruthlessly Janet Reno, the first woman attorney general, was maligned for being unfeminine. Reno, a tall, single lawyer with cropped hair, “lacked the feminine qualities and life choices typical for women, and the run-of-the-mill sexism wouldn’t work.” Instead of an ice queen or dangerous seductress, she was “a man in women’s clothes.” On Saturday Night Live, Will Ferrell implied he did Reno a favor when he played her straight in “Janet Reno’s Dance Party,” because she seemed so asexual. “Ferrell said he wouldn’t have crafted such a sketch if Reno was a ‘normal woman.’”

Conditions were even worse for women of color. Yarrow flags how concepts like the “damaged girl” trope told the story of straight white women who turned to cutting to cope with unachievable body standards. But, it left out LGBTQ women and immigrants whose self-injury might stem from other pressures, like the experience of navigating gender identity or being a first-generation American. Women of color were more likely to be perceived as dangerous than their white peers. “Unless it could be commoditized, like Alanis Morissette on the cover of Rolling Stone, public brashness and anger was unacceptable for women in the 90s, mostly because it was feared,” Yarrow explains. “Black women’s anger was feared even more.” Yarrow shows how this played out for TLC’s Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, who was vilified in the media for setting fire to the house she shared with NFL player Andre Rison. That Rison abused her before the blaze is usually left out; the press played up the spectacle and deemed her out of control. Further, Yarrow shows how, while white women like prosecutor Marcia Clark were attacked for being working mothers, black women were conversely ridiculed for not finding jobs: “While white mothers who worked […] were pilloried for appearing to shirk domestic and motherhood duties, unemployed or underemployed black mothers were shamed for failing to work and staying home with their kids.” For women of color, the trap of bitchification was doubly complicated, and the long-term effects of those damaging narratives and roadblocks to success are still playing out today.

The best moments in the 90s Bitch are when Yarrow swivels away from the archives to reflect on her own participation in the cultural process of bitchification. Here’s how she evaluates her teenage response to Fiona Apple’s hit music video “Criminal,” which featured an emaciated, 19-year-old Apple writhing on the floor of a house party, sarcastically confessing to mistreating men:

I was Apple’s target demographic, yet I absorbed the critiques of her and parroted them myself […] I was sold and bought into what Apple was rejecting — beauty, sexuality, and even personality shaped and policed by men. Apple’s attempt to undermine the “perfect girl” aesthetic — shaming the gaze, spilling her guts, and starving her flesh from her frame — threatened the affable, obedient, perfect-girl archetype that my peers and I were trying so hard to mirror. […] Apple was “damaged goods” — something I longed not to be. She upset me. Now I realize that was exactly the point.

That’s the real power of 90s Bitch — it looks beyond the gender war many girls didn’t realize they were fighting to show how they were implicated in their own submission.

Even worse, girls were promised a solution that turned out to be a mirage as “self-esteem” became the buzzword of the day. “We were told to ‘have’ self-esteem and, if we didn’t have it, to ‘get’ it,” Yarrow writes, “but nobody told us precisely how.” That’s where marketing stepped in. Brands promised women and girls that they could perfect their bodies and purchase confidence. Stores like Limited Too might have touted Girl Power but they diluted the movement into “a shopping spree.” Embracing girly fashions may have felt like freedom — “Choice, after all, was a feminist plank” — but Yarrow argues that we’re still paying for the loss of true empowerment.

There are statistics to back up this claim. Millennial women hold more bachelor’s degrees than men, yet they haven’t achieved workplace equality. Women’s median hourly wage is up — but it’s still only 84 percent of men’s — and they are still hired and promoted less frequently than male counterparts. Teen pregnancies have dropped, but maternal mortality rates have risen, and the United States remains one of the only developed nations without mandatory paid parental leave. While the current round of elections witnesses the entrance of female candidates in greater numbers than before, Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election “delivered an undeniable blow to American women.” In light of bitchification culture, Trump’s election was a natural development, Yarrow argues, being as he is a reflection of “the blatant and lewd sexism woven into the fabric of our society finally emerged unabashed in a modern presidential campaign, and in the White House itself.”

For those pining for simpler times, Yarrow’s 90s Bitch is an uncomfortable read and a reminder that widespread sexism and misogyny aren’t new problems — and that the solutions won’t be easy. The good news is that we can use Yarrow’s framework to reevaluate the stories we tell and the narratives we accept about women who step outside the prescribed lines of female success. In doing so, we can set aside some of our ’90s nostalgia and work toward a future of gender parity.

¤

Randle Browning is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Her book reviews and essays have appeared in LARB, The Brooklyn Rail, Electric Literature, and elsewhere.

The post The Bitchified Decade We’re Still Paying For appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Jusepe de Ribera’s Catholic Perversity

Jusepe de Ribera, “Apollo and Marsyas” (1637), oil on canvas, Naples, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Quintavalle (all images courtesy the Meadows Museum unless otherwise noted)

“All property should be held in common (Omnia sunt communia) and should be distributed to each according to his needs, as the occasion required. Any prince, count, or lord who did not want to do this, after first being warned about it, should be beheaded or hanged.” 

—Pastor Thomas Müntzer (1488–1525)

“Baroque art was wrought under the strain of change during a warfare that was as wide as Europe and that conscripted art for propaganda more consciously and vehemently than any age has done until our own.”

—Curator Hyatt Mayor (1901–1980)

DALLAS — In the 1630s drawing “Acrobats on a Loose Wire,” a frolicsome piece by Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652), four performers freestyle on a loose tightrope. On the left, a figure latched on by his legs is holding a second man dangling from a looped rope. Ribera transposed these two men into another drawing from the same time, “Group of Figures with a hanged Man being taken down from a Tree.” Here, the pendulous performer becomes an executed man holding a crucifix while being lowered to the earth. The loop is now a noose, the man a martyr. In the second drawing, two other men climb on the tree for no apparent reason, despite the danger. To the right, men gaze into the distance as a mother clasps her naked baby and gestures to a passerby, who lifts his hat politely. The exchange probably goes something like: “Great day, ma’am.” “Indeed, but look at that hoopla down yonder. He’s dead.” It’s a baffling scenario, but an apt representation of Ribera’s terrific bent towards horror.

Jusepe de Ribera, “Acrobats on a Loose Wire” (late 1630s), pen and brown ink and brown wash on beige paper, Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid

Jusepe de Ribera, “Group of Figures with a hanged Man being taken down from a Tree” (late 1630s), pen and brown ink and brown wash, Museo Civico

A leading Counter-Reformation artist who was born in Spain, Ribera worked his entire career in Italy after Protestantism was squashed there — around 1600, when the Baroque period of art began. The artist was a prolific draftsman and printer, which set him apart from his vanguard elder Caravaggio. Between Heaven and Hell: The Drawings of Jusepe de Ribera at the Meadows Museum is the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the Spaniard’s works on paper, with frequent glimpses into a wonderfully dark imagination. Most of Ribera’s drawings were not studies for larger paintings, but projects of their own ends. They served as inexpensive works that brought him side income and examples of his skill that he could distribute to those seeking commissions, such as Spanish viceroys who ruled the city where he lived, Naples. His subjects, all of which are represented in this show, vary more than any other artist of his time, ranging from saints, martyrs, gods, and heroes to corporeal punishment, urban and rural scenes, and bizarre fantasies. They always contain figures, mostly men.

Installation view, Between Heaven and Hell: The Drawings of Jusepe de Ribera at the Meadows Museum

Jusepe de Ribera, “Study for Martyrdom of St. Sebastian” (c. 1626), red chalk on paper, William Lowe Bryan Memorial, Indiana University Art Museum

Of the known drawings by Ribera (157 sheets), roughly a quarter show men tied to trees in impressively uncomfortable ways: upside down, the standard “we’re holding you for ransom” wrap, and some that look like rock climbing accidents. Why so many half-naked men tethered to trunks? Not exactly S&M — or, perhaps “M” — Ribera’s obsession with tortured men was driven by interests in anatomy and iconography. He drew novel poses with utmost fidelity to the human form, frequently within dramas that depict fidelity and sacrifice to the Roman Catholic Church, which was then under threat.

Before his torture and execution in 1525, the German Protestant pastor Thomas Müntzer — a heretical contemporary of Martin Luther — led the Peasants’ War while flying a rainbow flag. It was a religious symbol of Yahweh’s covenant with Noah (Genesis 9:8-17) and the “Kingdom come” the ex-Catholic wanted to establish by blade in the here and now. In time, Karl Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels would find in Müntzer a model for radical revolt, with Engels’s essay “The Peasant War in Germany” (1850) stacking society this way: The “peasants and plebeians,” whose “boldest expression [was] in Müntzer,” are at the bottom. The “middle-class moderate Lutheran” stratum are lay princes, lower nobility, and looters of Catholic churches. On top are “conservative Catholics,” who “embraced all the elements interested in maintaining the existing imperial power.” These three groups would become the proletariat, small capitalists, and bourgeoisie in Marxist parlance.

Jusepe de Ribera, “Head of a Warrior” (first half of 1610s), red chalk, Museo Nacional del Prado

The Roman Catholic Church responded to Müntzer by “conscript[ing] art for propaganda,” as Metropolitan Museum curator Hyatt Mayor once noted, in a new style codified at the Council of Trent (1545–63). Ribera, following Caravaggio (but not overly influenced by him), was hired talent. The aesthetic agenda was to steady Catholic priests, seminarians, and defenders of Church rule against attacks, as rival Protestant sovereignties arose. The images were also meant to express an earnest, bare-bones faith, in an effort to engage lay believers. The Church wanted pictures stripped of the wealth, decoration, and lasciviousness that Protestants denounced — like, for example, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. No more of that.

Page from Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543) (image via Wikimedia Commons)

Immediately before the Council of Trent began, a first-of-its-kind medical volume appeared. De humani corporis fabrica (1543) was the first anatomy book drawn entirely from dissected humans, the corpses of executed criminals. (A fourth-edition copy at Brown University is bound in human skin.) Physician Andreas Vesalius offered Europe perfectly detailed, unflinching images of flayed and splayed men, many cast in poses of religious longing and immanent death. It’s a scientific work but also premodern, making it inextricable from theology. De humani was circulated in artists’ guilds like Ribera’s. He drew from live models, not existing images or casts, and his renderings of flopping flesh have a remarkable naturalism. He took the Catholic Church’s idea of bare bones faith to an unsettlingly literal degree.

The venerated Saint Sebastian was a favored subject for Ribera, with 10 renderings of him appearing in the new drawings catalogue raisonné accompanying the exhibition (not all of them are in the show, which was first staged at the Prado). In “Saint Sebastian seated and attached to a Tree” (late 1620s), Ribera renders foreshortened legs, upward-stretched arms, a dropped-back head, expressive hands, and a twisted torso, all with impressive anatomical accuracy and theatrical conviction. The work suggests a man caught between agony and ecstasy. His right hand goes limp as his left opens up to the divine; his head falls back, directing itself to the sky as he nears unconsciousness. This precarious state of being, somewhere  between life and death, is entirely convincing in Ribera’s work (and an unlikely precedent for Robert Longo’s popular Men in the Cities series). It’s one of the more peaceful drawings to come from this time of violence and obligatory allegiances.

Jusepe de Ribera, “Penitence of St. Peter” (1617–18), pen and brown ink, brown and red-brown wash, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris

On the other hand, “Apollo and Marsyas” (1637) is Ribera going NC-17 with gore. The most monstrous work in the show, it combines his multiple obsessions: guy tied to tree, torture, martyrdom, creative poses, anatomical exactitude, and tranquility joined with pain. It represents the tale of Marsyas, who’s shown screaming while Apollo flays his skin as if playing a harp. In the background, men, perhaps saytrs, recoil at the screeching, a far cry from Ribera’s comedic drawings like “Masked Man with Small Figures Clambering Up his Body” (late 1620s). Though not a religious scene, the composition is akin to upside-down crucifixions such as “Study for a Crucifixion of Saint Peter” (mid 1620s), on view in a nearby room.

Between Heaven and Hell gently unfolds the inner workings of Ribera’s strategic perversity. It brings to American audiences 47 drawings — each deft in execution and handleable in size — from a world marked, like our own, by brutality. The difference is that Ribera’s was an age of unrefined war, when the methods of killing were so much less efficient than ours.

Installation view, Between Heaven and Hell: The Drawings of Jusepe de Ribera at the Meadows Museum

Between Heaven and Hell:  The Drawings of Jusepe de Ribera continues at the Meadows Museum (5900 Bishop Blvd, Dallas, Texas) through June 11.

The post Jusepe de Ribera’s Catholic Perversity appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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