#labels are personal expression and celebration - not an opportunity to gatekeep

[reyeslonestar]

Hey, so I've not-so-secretly been creeping on your blog for a while now (it's pretty rad) and just now noticed that your Ace. When and how did you know? Sorry if that's too personal. I think I might be, but I'm not sure.

hi there! thanks, glad you’ve been enjoying my chaos :)

that's not too personal for me, but thanks for checking. this got long though, so I'll put most of it under a cut.

I was about 14/15 when I really started thinking about my sexuality and I played with a few labels for a while - originally I used bisexual or pansexual cause I felt the same way about all genders - the same way being a general disinterest. I find that a lot of different people of different genders are very beautiful, I have certain tastes and types, and I feel appreciation for physical appearances and also for personalities, but sex just wasnt something that I thought about, or felt like I wanted.

(something I do find is that once I get to know someone I struggle to hold their appearance in my head - thinking about them incites more of an emotional/instinctive reaction of how I feel about them rather than their appearance, but I reckon thats more to do with how my brain works than my sexuality)

I had a friend in one of my classes when I was 15 who was really clued up on a wide spectrum of labels and what they meant and she shared them with me, and when she explained about asexuality and demisexuality I was like: huh. didn't know you could be that.

after that I used demisexual as a label for a while - I thought that because I still felt libido that meant I couldn't be ace, so I must be demi, and also I suspect that I felt a certain level of internalised aphobia that meant I was scared to (in my mind) be 'undateable' because I wasnt interested in sex, and if I labelled myself as asexual, then no one would be interested in me, whereas demisexual felt like I was still 'desirable' or something. idk.

internalised queerphobia. hell of a drug.

anyway, demisexual was the right term for me at the time, but the more thinking I did, the more reading/research I did, the more internalised bullshit I unlearnt, and also the more secure I became in myself not needing a partner to be 'whole', the more I felt comfortable using asexual to identify. I started using ace to identify from about 16 or 17, because that feels like the best match, and it's been the term that I've understood the experiences of the most. I also use queer a lot, because even now I sometimes still question myself, and if nothing else I know im queer, and it can save a lot of explaining that frankly I don't owe anyone. although I seem to give off incredibly queer vibes so I dont need to tell most people anyway.

I guess my point here is that labels exist to help you feel comfortable, but dont feel as though theyre set in stone. they can evolve as you understand yourself better, and it doesnt matter how long you've been using one label if you feel another may make you feel better.

[lecognito]

When Consent Goes Haywire

I recently came across a phenomenon called “flirting without consent”. For anyone in the 21st century, consent has become a hot word, but this concept appeared to me like the bastard child of a movement with good intentions. 

There’s no denying that there’s a history of men “crossing the line”, and while we can rail on men for not “teaching children properly” or setting a good example, it’s just not that simple. 

Ok, for the record, rape and assault are inexcusable. The reality is that sometimes consent is set aside and men openly violate a conduct of trust and a communication of trust (i.e. a no means no). But sometimes it’s not that, and there’s more to understand. Sometimes, a woman says no but is less insistent on that no. Sometimes a person goes along with what’s happening only to feel some sort of perceived injustice after the fact, but not during. And it’s moments like these that have proven this decade to be a confusing whirl of legalities regarding consent. 

This isn’t to blame women or to defend the men who have clearly crossed a line and that’s not the purpose of this article. It just means there are more factors to consider before coining a concept like “flirting without consent” because there are deeper implications something like this has on future interactions. 

Before I get into it, let me just say I GET IT. I get why this concept exists. But can we understand that flirting is an ORGANIC and NATURAL part of human interaction? It’s part of social intelligence--picking up on if someone is responding to your advances or not. It’s a way we let someone know we’re interested and a way we gauge the level of interest that someone may or may not have in us. Put guard rails on this organic process and very quickly you lose a lot of what romance and courtship is about, which in turn makes men seem inherently awkward, boring, and stale when that’s the bag of tricks that was given to them.

Of course things get tricky with flirting. Some people don’t have good social intelligence and don’t read social cues very well. And that makes things vastly more complicated. Add to that the fact that everyone’s experience of romance and courtship can be drastically different and that everyone’s preferences are different. There are women who preach that guys “need to be more aggressive” and welcome the bad boy attitude, there are some who like to be the one who leads, and then there are those who like to set clear expectations. Tone of voice during a conversation, body language, and the level of relationship that two people have all come into play. At the end of the day, everyone falls on a different part of that spectrum of experiences which informs their decisions, their ability to pick up on social cues, and how they perceive a given action or inaction. In short, things become exponentially more complicated. Oh, and that’s not even including whether or not they’ve had drinks.

The need for some sort of structure is understandable. But consent to flirt is not that. A structure like consent to flirt is essentially a form of gatekeeping—a way to justify swiping left IRL just because you think you’re not interested. We can agree that there are some things that are clearly over the line, vulgar, and inappropriate. That’s what we as a society have termed, “harassment” and “sexual harassment”. Both are obviously wrong, and consent to flirt tries to wrap the idea of harassment under the gallant flag of “transparency”. Really, it’s like slapping a Smart Water label on a bottle with your normal house tap water—it’s a gimmick, a fluffy phrase, while providing no clarity to the confusion of consent. 

Bear with me here with what I think could be the worst case scenario, but with something like consent to flirt, a girl could sue a guy who came up to her at a bar and gave a compliment to strike up a conversation. You could argue that even a positive comment that was stripped of any sort of sexual or inappropriate intent was perceived by the woman as “crossing a line”. That’s how romance dies. That’s how courtship becomes a bureaucratic, robotic transaction that deems your advances appropriate or inappropriate based on whether or not you have “premium” features. Again, probably the worst case scenario.

Even so, the question remains, how can you really know if someone isn’t right for you? Feelings change. Perceptions change. And consent to flirt destroys that opportunity for learning and discovering aspects of a person you would’ve never expected to see or know. This isn’t to say that we can’t form judgments about a certain person because in a way, that’s inevitable. 

When we get down to it, what a concept like “flirting with consent” and consent in general seems to reveal about the heart of our broader culture is the desire to set intentions and expectations. Why do celebrities get into problems with consent? Why does anyone get into a problem with consent? Precisely BECAUSE no one knows when or where consent is necessary. You might be saying to yourself, it’s simple: no means no. Consent seems like a very obvious thing when you put it strictly in terms of “no means no”. It’s a good rule of thumb to go by, but realistically as we’ve seen, a variety of factors complicates even a simple construct. 

So what do we do? How do we mend this broken system? We need a simple construct where consent is already implied. What is that construct? The oldest form of love, courtship, and romance in the books: marriage. I know what you might be thinking, but hear me out. 

Call it the idealized form or what it should be, but marriage is a covenant, a promise between two people who have essentially AGREED in the presence of witnesses, to being with each other. Keyword: AGREED—from the very beginning of anything happening. Within this covenant is a sense of trust. You have roles, you know who the other person is, and you know what to expect within this relationship. But let’s be clear: this doesn’t mean one person can do whatever they feel like or that they’re entitled to the other person in any sense. It doesn’t mean one person loses their individuality or their autonomy. It doesn’t rule out the possibility of bad things happening--they still do. It’s just that when it comes to the issue of consent, there are certain things that aren’t totally uncalled for. 

Marriage maps out and clears out the murky forest of consent. You can be flirtatious, you can be suggestive, you can have intercourse—because you both agreed to it! It doesn’t mean you can’t get uncomfortable about certain things but you still have that sense of TRUST that allows you to express that discomfort openly, safely, and unabashedly. That trust and that relationship takes you so much farther with someone you know and love than with a complete stranger, where it may be awkward to voice a concern at the risk of appearing inexperienced or being a mood killer. 

But doesn’t this agreement exist already even without marriage? Aren’t there plenty of extramarital relationships that demonstrate that level of agreement? Isn’t that what consent is all about? Yes, our culture of sexual freedom and companionship have applied the blueprint of  marriage to relationships without the words and the paperwork of marriage. Yet that’s where it falls short--the lack of a proper covenant. The very existence of millions of relationships in this moment is dependent on a commitment that isn’t real. Sure there’s a verbal recognition of some sort of feeling of commitment but that’s all it is: a feeling. And for anyone with an inkling of experience in a relationship, feelings can and do change. If that’s the case, then commitment can change. 

Marriage brings into focus a certain expectation, which is that while your feelings can change, your commitment shouldn’t. That’s the point of making vows to one another and that’s the point of “til death do us apart” even if many would consider it just an antiquated trope that romantics and movies say. Some might say that there shouldn’t be any labels on a relationship and that love is love. Sure, but is love only love when you feel like it? Shouldn’t it go beyond just a purely personal emotional satisfaction? 

None of this is meant to be accusatory towards extramarital relationships or to say that marriage is the cure-all. It is however, to draw attention to the idea that “labels” if you will, help us know exactly what something is and know what to expect from it. You don’t look at a strawberry and say “I don’t like putting labels on it,” because then it becomes very difficult to describe what to do with a strawberry. Do you eat it? Do you use it as ink? Do you throw it like you would a baseball? On that note, labels help you understand what to expect: what you get from a strawberry is very different from what you get with a strawberry milkshake, a strawberry smoothie, or strawberry milk. Without a name for a strawberry or any produce for that matter, the produce aisle would be chaos.

Sure, a strawberry is not a relationship. But the same logic applies—relationships have the potential to be utter chaos without the label. A boyfriend or girlfriend who runs off is theoretically off the hook. A label-free relationship can invite multiple people into it and people do. But it breeds a nebulous and subjective ground of emotions and expectations that can’t be adequately expressed or fulfilled. In other words, there’s no consistency. And when there’s no consistency, what can and can’t be done can change. It’s your word against theirs. It’s your feeling against theirs. 

That “label” of marriage gives a greater sense of security. It helps us to know that the intimacy that happened the night before wasn’t “a mistake”. It gives us emotional fulfillment and the expectation of that fulfillment. It doesn’t leave us hanging in the wind. 

No, this is not a call to get married and this is not a judgment on anyone on how they pursue relationships. It’s to address and contemplate why our culture (and most probably the entire world) struggles with consent. Consent to flirt doesn’t make things any easier or any clearer in that struggle. In fact, it moves in the opposite direction of what we need. It cripples the creation of organic relationships and enables an even more confusing set of rules under the guise of honesty and transparency. Consent as a whole is crucial, but pursuing it and being an advocate for it requires us to exercise caution with careful consideration of the words we attach to it. No matter our zeal, we can’t push for it blindly. Specificity is important, but not all specificity serves to clarify.

[theatreducation]

Altering Parameters

12. Constants A constant defines the rate at which something happens in a system. For example, change the constant rate of fuel consumption per mile in a car, and you fundamentally change the way that vehicle operates in traffic. As an anti-racist artist, you can disrupt racism by viewing social justice and community-engaged scholarship to be as fundamental to your creative processes as your chosen craft. Likewise, as an anti-racist art teacher or museum educator you can recalibrate the parameters of both your public pedagogy and curriculum themes to be centered on effecting social change, while also holding space for your learners of color to express their own experiences and thoughts when talking about and making art.

11. Buffer Sizes Buffers are stabilizing elements within a system. Big buffers make the system more stable, and small buffers make it more subject to change. For example, the larger the amount you have in your savings account, the more likely your lifestyle will remain unchanged when faced with unexpected or exceptional expenses. As an anti-racist artist, you can disrupt racism by depicting more figures, symbols, and artifacts celebrating the identities and cultures of persons of color in everyday life. Likewise, as an anti-racist art teacher or museum educator, you can: 1) intentionally reconfigure the parameters of the typical canon of artists and artworks represented in your classroom resources or museum exhibitions; 2) eliminate terms like primitive, aboriginal, and Oriental from the language you use to talk about art; 3) abolish the practice of jamming the distinct experiences of living as Black or Latinx or Korean, etc., in America all under the single umbrella term minority, thereby further “othering” these diverse ethnicities and their subcultures; and 4) inform your own anti-racist and postcolonial worldviews by reading books and articles on the privileges of Whiteness and on the lives of people who are Black, Indigenous, or Persons of Color.

10. Physical Structures Rebuilding a system’s physical structure and the way it takes in the resources it uses to sustain its functioning can have an enormous effect on its operations but can also be difficult or prohibitively expensive to change. For example, when the loss of life and destruction of property in an urban center is caused by regular, uncontrolled flooding, the streets might be ripped up to install a major stormwater drainage system as a means to mitigate the problem and change the batten-down-the-hatches behavior of city residents when heavy rains are forecast. As an anti-racist artist, you can disrupt racism by presenting more of your work independently as street art or public art—outside the boundaries of moribund cultural institutions with classical facades yet steeped in distorted racial hierarchies.

Altering Feedback

9. Delays A system’s functioning is determined by how much lag time passes between the summoning of new resources and the intake of that regulating inflow. For example, imagine stepping into a shower in an old hotel where the water temperature takes at least a minute to respond to each faucet twist, oscillating between an overcapacity of hot water and an undercapacity… with lots of involuntary yelps and expletives in between! As an anti-racist artist, art teacher, or museum educator, you can disrupt racism by contributing your creative efforts to positive media portrayals of Black lives that matter—allowing no lag time for TV audiences to imprint biased messaging and dog whistles from opinion-based media efforts to stereotype Black lives as dangerous.

8. Negative Feedback Loops A negative feedback loop slows down a process to preserve the optimal functioning of that system. An example is when a thermostat calls for more heat in a room, and the boiler responds by sending hot water to the room’s baseboard heaters, which in turn begins to heat up the air in that space over a period of time. The slow loop will keep the system’s functioning optimal and keeps the room from getting overheated too quickly depending on established parameters of the boiler and the accuracy and speed of the feedback. As an anti-racist local art council, art teacher, or museum educator, you can disrupt racism by speeding up the process of including the contemporary work of artists who are Black, Indigenous, or Persons of Color in your curricula, collections, or public parks without waiting years for them to be sanctioned as important or famous by the gatekeepers of the powers that be.

7. Positive Feedback Loops A positive feedback loop speeds up a process that regulates the optimal functioning of that system—the more it works, the more it gains power to work more. For example, the success of pyramid schemes depends on the ability to recruit more and more investors. Since there are only a limited number of people in a given community, after the initial rush of success, all pyramid schemes will ultimately collapse. The only people who make money are those few initial investors who are on the top of the pyramid. Donella Meadows suggests that in most interventions, it’s preferable to slow down a positive loop rather than speeding up a negative one. As an anti-racist art collector, patron, buyer, or seller, you can disrupt racism by slowing down the rush to overprice the work of White artists to far exceed the valuation of their artist contemporaries who happen to be Black, Indigenous, or Persons of Color.

Altering Design

6. Information Access It is easier to change the flow of information about what is happening within a system and where it is happening, than it is to change the structures that constitute that system. For example, it is easier to count calories and carbs on food labels, keep track of steps taken throughout the day on your pedometer, or to monitor your heart rate on your iPhone, rather than to try to improve the health of your body through an invasive gastric bypass operation that physically shrinks the size of your stomach. As an anti-racist artist, you can disrupt racism by drawing upon a history of racist artifacts and images, whether intended to injure or intentionally forgotten, thereby increasing their accessibility through contemporary works of art intended to inform anew. Likewise, as an anti-racist art teacher or museum educator, you can decrease the accessibility of misinforming, Eurocentric, or “color-blind” resources in your classrooms and collections.

5. Rules The rules by which a system operates define its scope, its boundaries of growth, its degrees of freedom within certain habitats. Unfulfilled needs, pressure points, pain, and mobility constraints are all rules of a system. These are strong leverage points for change inasmuch as they can be written and unwritten. For example, there is a group of scientists currently at work on a project in the field of genetic engineering with the goal of recoding human cells both to resist viruses and have less risk of transforming to become cancerous. As an anti-racist artist, art teacher, museum educator, or other kind of creative leader, you can disrupt racism by rewriting the rules that render folks who are Black, Indigenous, or Persons of Color as dangerous or invisible, or last to be hired/first to be fired. You can go out of your way to support their businesses, seek their sponsorships, invite their presentations, collect their arts and crafts, and hire them at top dollar for their goods, services, and consultancies.

4. Evolution This is the power to insert rogue elements into a system which can then mutate, evolve, or self-organize in a way that radically changes the functioning and constitution of that system. As an anti-racist artist, art teacher, or museum educator, you can disable racism by working to seek out, develop, and closely mentor the next generation of artists, art teachers, museum educators, and other creative leaders who are Black, Indigenous, or Persons of Color to enter and spread throughout our various professions.

Altering Intent

3. Goals Changing the goals of a system changes its parameters, its feedback loops, and the inherent design of its information flows and self-organization. An example is when a city council changes the goal of a local lakefront from a free facility for public and private use, to a conservation area for the protection of endangered wildlife. As an anti-racist artist, art teacher, or museum educator, you can disrupt racism by exchanging the goals of the current paradigm from more White supremacy and its history of hoarding wealth and power, to a love supreme and the distribution of reparations, equal access, and mutually beneficial creative opportunities.

2. Remodeling Paradigms A paradigm is a model or a pattern to live by. Paradigms are the sources of systems. Goals, mindsets, values, beliefs, and social contracts for ethical interactions all arise from the prevailing communal paradigm. As an anti-racist artist, art teacher, or museum educator, you can disrupt racism by dropping inauthentic and unhelpful platitudes proclaiming your “color-blindness,”—firstly, because the history of art has always seen color, and secondly, because people who are Black, Indigenous, or Persons of Color are generally proud of our ethnic distinctions and only ask that folks stop actively or benignly attaching negative stigmas to surface identifiers like skin color or hair texture. What if we instead saw and taught color for what it is—just an extended palette to represent our shared humanity?

1. Transcendence Like being born-again into newfound purpose, this is an “all-of-a-sudden” intervention that comes out of nowhere and changes everything. It is akin to an eruption, an earthquake, or a revolution. Any anti-racist artist can disrupt racism simply by forming lifelong local collectives with artists who are Black, Indigenous, or Persons of Color. Likewise, anti-racist art teachers and museum educators can disrupt racism by “all-of-a-sudden” recruiting one another to serve in leadership roles in professional membership organizations like NAEA or its state affiliates, nominating one another to receive key awards and recognitions, and fund-raising to one another’s shared professional advantage.

These are my initial ideas for where NAEA and the field of art + design education might go from here, given the urgency to become an anti-racist organization and do better. These won’t be my only ideas, and they certainly leave all kinds of room for you to come up with ideas of your own.

In the cause,

Dr. James Haywood Rolling, Jr. President-Elect of the National Art Education Association Chair of the NAEA Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion Commission Professor of Arts Education, Syracuse University

[pikaland]

How to be Everything by Emilie Wapnick

I’ve been a long-time fan of Emilie’s Puttylike blog that talks about being a multipotentialite (read: people who have multiple interests/skills/preference to excel in two or more different skills). Her new book How to be Everything has just launched, and I’m really thrilled. So while you might say I’m biased because I was featured on her TED talk in 2015 (and I’m also in chapter 5 of the book) – reading her blog and talking to her made me realise that I’m not as weird as I thought I was; and instead, being able to straddle a few different industries with a varied set of skills meant that I could build a career that could play to my strengths.

To celebrate the launch of her book, I set up an interview with her to find out more about the book, and what it could mean to you.

Congrats on your new book! I’ve always been a fan, and when I found your website, I realized that I’m a multipotentialite myself. When did you figure that out for yourself?

In my late teens/early twenties I began to notice my tendency to jump between different disciplines and projects. I actually worried about it a lot at that time. I was afraid I would never be able to stick with anything, and I was afraid I’d never find my Thing. Plus the idea of making a living was terrifying to me because I thought I would either have to jump from job to job to job and have no financial stability or choose a single path and deny all of my other passions.

Why the label? Why is it important for people to recognize that they’re a multipotentialite?

Labels can be empowering or restrictive depending on who’s using them and for what purpose. I’ve found that many multipotentialites grow up feeling like there’s something wrong with them. They internalize messages from the culture that warn us of the perils of being a “jack-of-all-trades, master of none,” or a “quitter” or “dilettante.”

Learning that you are a multipotentialite–that there’s a name for it and that there are many other people out there like this, some of whom are incredibly successful–can be a huge relief and help you feel proud of your plurality. The term multipotentialite also brings a positive spin to the idea, whereas “jack-of-all-trades,” usually has negative connotations.

So the book – tell us how you got to being unsure of what you wanted to do, to broaching this big subject that you’ve brought forward through your website and the TED talk?

In my mid-twenties I made a personal declaration of sorts: I decided that if this was how I am wired, I was going to find a way to make it work. That’s when I started my blog, Puttylike. I wanted to create a space where I could learn from other people who were doing many things successfully and share what I was learning. My vision was to create a community of people who don’t just want to do one thing so we could share resources and figure this out together.

Over the years, I noticed that there are a handful of books about the phenomenon of people with many passions, but none of them go into much detail about how to make a living. And then there are a ton of career planning guides out there that help you whittle down your aptitudes and passions to that one perfect fit. Where was the work advice for multipotentialites? That’s how the idea for How to Be Everything came about. I saw a real need for something practical, specifically for multipotentialites.

I believe that great artists are multipotentialites in some form or way. Could you give us a few examples of creative people you researched when you were writing the book?

I agree. There are a lot of famous artists/creatives who have worked in multiple disciplines. Everyone from Bowie to James Franco to the Charles and Ray Eames. In my book, I really tried to focus on more relatable examples though. I wanted to make it clear that you don’t need to be well-known or some kind of genius to make this work.

I interviewed a percussionist named Mark Powers who performs, teaches, runs workshops, writes children’s books, hosts TEDx events, and travels all over the world creating records with a philanthropic purpose to them. I also spoke with a digital media artist named Margaux Yiu who works at a company that is open to her stepping out of her job title. So over the course of her 16 year career, she has done design, web development, photography, video editing, and writing.

But yes, I think the reason that great artists tend to be multipotentialites is that artists are curious people who draw inspiration from domains outside of whatever medium they happen to be working in. It’s not really about the medium anyway; the medium’s just a tool to express a deeper idea.

What does being a multipotentialite mean in this day and age? How can they make the world a better place?

This is a really good time to be a multipotentialite. It’s now possible to work from anywhere and get your work out to the world without the help of gatekeepers who have access to distribution. You can self-publish a best-seller, crowd fund an invention, or teach people on the other side of the globe! There are infinite opportunities to express your creativity and design a career that really works with your multipotentialite nature.

Embracing your many passions doesn’t just lead to personal fulfillment, it’s also about social contribution. Multipotentialites are creative, out-of-the-box thinkers who can see multifaceted problems from several angles, make connections between disparate subjects, and relate to people from all walks of life. It’s no coincidence that the great artists, scientists, and innovators throughout history were (and are) multipotentialites.

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Thanks so much Emilie!

Her book is now available on Amazon, and in bookstores near you!