Hey guys. Hopefully I'll have the presentation article up early so you have something to read over Christmas. In the meantime, I mentioned a funny clip about gerrymandering to one of the classes the other day and promised a link, here it is, worth a watch:
There's
no way to structure this coherently. They are random observations that
might help explain the mental processes. But often, I think that we look
at the academic problems of poverty and have no idea of the why.
We know the what and the how, and we can see systemic problems, but
it's rare to have a poor person actually explain it on their own behalf.
So this is me doing that, sort of.
Rest
is a luxury for the rich. I get up at 6AM, go to school (I have a full
courseload, but I only have to go to two in-person classes) then work,
then I get the kids, then I pick up my husband, then I have half an hour
to change and go to Job 2. I get home from that at around 1230AM, then I
have the rest of my classes and work to tend to. I'm in bed by 3. This
isn't every day, I have two days off a week from each of my obligations.
I use that time to clean the house and soothe Mr. Martini and see the
kids for longer than an hour and catch up on schoolwork. Those nights
I'm in bed by midnight, but if I go to bed too early I won't be able to
stay up the other nights because I'll fuck my pattern up, and I drive an
hour home from Job 2 so I can't afford to be sleepy. I never get a day
off from work unless I am fairly sick. It doesn't leave you much room to
think about what you are doing, only to attend to the next thing and
the next. Planning isn't in the mix.
When
I got pregnant the first time, I was living in a weekly motel. I had a
minifridge with no freezer and a microwave. I was on WIC. I ate peanut
butter from the jar and frozen burritos because they were 12/$2. Had I
had a stove, I couldn't have made beef burritos that cheaply. And I
needed the meat, I was pregnant. I might not have had any prenatal care,
but I am intelligent enough to eat protein and iron whilst knocked up.
I
know how to cook. I had to take Home Ec to graduate high school. Most
people on my level didn't. Broccoli is intimidating. You have to have a
working stove, and pots, and spices, and you'll have to do the dishes no
matter how tired you are or they'll attract bugs. It is a huge new
skill for a lot of people. That's not great, but it's true. And if you
fuck it up, you could make your family sick. We have learned not to try
too hard to be middle-class. It never works out well and always makes
you feel worse for having tried and failed yet again. Better not to try.
It makes more sense to get food that you know will be palatable and
cheap and that keeps well. Junk food is a pleasure that we are allowed
to have; why would we give that up? We have very few of them.
The
closest Planned Parenthood to me is three hours. That's a lot of money
in gas. Lots of women can't afford that, and even if you live near one
you probably don't want to be seen coming in and out in a lot of areas.
We're aware that we are not "having kids," we're "breeding." We have
kids for much the same reasons that I imagine rich people do. Urge to
propagate and all. Nobody likes poor people procreating, but they judge
abortion even harder.
Convenience
food is just that. And we are not allowed many conveniences. Especially
since the Patriot Act passed, it's hard to get a bank account. But
without one, you spend a lot of time figuring out where to cash a check
and get money orders to pay bills. Most motels now have a
no-credit-card-no-room policy. I wandered around SF for five hours in
the rain once with nearly a thousand dollars on me and could not rent a
room even if I gave them a $500 cash deposit and surrendered my cell
phone to the desk to hold as surety.
Nobody
gives enough thought to depression. You have to understand that we know
that we will never not feel tired. We will never feel hopeful. We will
never get a vacation. Ever. We know that the very act of being poor
guarantees that we will never not be poor. It doesn't give us much
reason to improve ourselves. We don't apply for jobs because we know we
can't afford to look nice enough to hold them. I would make a super
legal secretary, but I've been turned down more than once because I
"don't fit the image of the firm," which is a nice way of saying "gtfo,
pov." I am good enough to cook the food, hidden away in the kitchen, but
my boss won't make me a server because I don't "fit the corporate
image." I am not beautiful. I have missing teeth and skin that looks
like it will when you live on b12 and coffee and nicotine and no sleep.
Beauty is a thing you get when you can afford it, and that's how you get
the job that you need in order to be beautiful. There isn't much point
trying.
Cooking
attracts roaches. Nobody realizes that. I've spent a lot of hours
impaling roach bodies and leaving them out on toothpick pikes to
discourage others from entering. It doesn't work, but is amusing.
"Free"
only exists for rich people. It's great that there's a bowl of condoms
at my school, but most poor people will never set foot on a college
campus. We don't belong there. There's a clinic? Great! There's still a
copay. We're not going. Besides, all they'll tell you at the clinic is
that you need to see a specialist, which seriously? Might as well be
located on Mars for how accessible it is. "Low-cost" and "sliding scale"
sounds like "money you have to spend" to me, and they can't actually
help you anyway.
I
smoke. It's expensive. It's also the best option. You see, I am always,
always exhausted. It's a stimulant. When I am too tired to walk one
more step, I can smoke and go for another hour. When I am enraged and
beaten down and incapable of accomplishing one more thing, I can smoke
and I feel a little better, just for a minute. It is the only relaxation
I am allowed. It is not a good decision, but it is the only one that I
have access to. It is the only thing I have found that keeps me from
collapsing or exploding.
I
make a lot of poor financial decisions. None of them matter, in the
long term. I will never not be poor, so what does it matter if I don't
pay a thing and a half this week instead of just one thing? It's not
like the sacrifice will result in improved circumstances; the thing
holding me back isn't that I blow five bucks at Wendy's. It's that now
that I have proven that I am a Poor Person that is all that I am or ever
will be. It is not worth it to me to live a bleak life devoid of small
pleasures so that one day I can make a single large purchase. I will
never have large pleasures to hold on to. There's a certain pull to live
what bits of life you can while there's money in your pocket, because
no matter how responsible you are you will be broke in three days
anyway. When you never have enough money it ceases to have meaning. I
imagine having a lot of it is the same thing.
Poverty
is bleak and cuts off your long-term brain. It's why you see people
with four different babydaddies instead of one. You grab a bit of
connection wherever you can to survive. You have no idea how strong the
pull to feel worthwhile is. It's more basic than food. You go to these
people who make you feel lovely for an hour that one time, and that's
all you get. You're probably not compatible with them for anything
long-term, but right this minute they can make you feel powerful and
valuable. It does not matter what will happen in a month. Whatever
happens in a month is probably going to be just about as indifferent as
whatever happened today or last week. None of it matters. We don't plan
long-term because if we do we'll just get our hearts broken. It's best
not to hope. You just take what you can get as you spot it.
I
am not asking for sympathy. I am just trying to explain, on a human
level, how it is that people make what look from the outside like awful
decisions. This is what our lives are like, and here are our defense
mechanisms, and here is why we think differently. It's certainly
self-defeating, but it's safer. That's all. I hope it helps make sense
of it.
Update:
The response to this piece is overwhelming. I have had a lot of people
ask to use my work. Please do. Share it with the world if you found
value in it. Please link back if you can. If you are teaching, I am
happy to discuss this with or clarify for you, and you can freely use
this piece in your classes. Please do let me know where you teach. You
can reach me on Twitter, @killermartinis.
Many
people have told me to write a book. I would, but I'm kind of poor and
busy working. So I've set up a GoFundMe. If enough people are willing to
chip in, I'll be able to focus on writing for a few months and quit
with the double shifts. And I will write a thing I can be proud of. Find it here. And I've also set up a blog, which I hope you will find here.
Thank you for reading. I am glad people find value in it.
1. Has sexting replaced old-fashioned love letters?
2. How have relationships between teens changed in the age of the Internet?
3. Why do people cheat on their partners?
4. What are the stereotypes surrounding cheating women?
5. Do you believe childhood influences one's older life? How?
6. Discuss any different types of parent-child relationships you know.
7. What stereotypes of parent-child relationships do you know?
1MA/2
1. Has sexting replaced old-fashioned love letters?
2. How have relationships between teens changed in the age of the Internet?
3. Why do people cheat on their partners and is it ever justifiable?
4. What are the stereotypes surrounding cheating women?
5. Are people more lonely now than in the past?
6. What should be done about the loneliness epidemic?
7. Is loneliness only a problem of the elderly or does it affect all age groups?
Howdy. Seeing as you've got a long weekend to read, I figured something a little longer than normal would be in order. Here's your article for next Tuesday:
This year, 81 percent of Internet-using teenagers in America
reported that they are active on social-networking sites, more than ever
before. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and new dating apps like Tinder,
Grindr, and Blendr have increasingly become key players in social
interactions, both online and IRL (in real life). Combined with
unprecedented easy access to the unreal world of Internet porn, the
result is a situation that has drastically affected gender roles for
young people. Speaking to a variety of teenaged boys and girls across
the country, Nancy Jo Sales uncovers a world where boys are taught they
have the right to expect everything from social submission to outright
sex from their female peers. What is this doing to America’s young
women?
“Social
media is destroying our lives,” a 16-year-old girl from L.A. tells
contributing editor Nancy Jo Sales. But without it, she says, she “would
have no life.”
NOTE:Some of the names and identifying details in this story have been changed.
THE TINDER GUY
She
wanted it to be like the scene in the Lana Del Rey video for “Blue
Jeans”—“hot and slow and epic.” The scene where strangers meet and fall
into an easy intimacy, making love in a pool—“and they look so hot and
it’s just, like, totally epic.” A boy at her school—she didn’t want to
talk about him now; he’d broken her heart; but “like, whatever.” She’d
“deleted him” from her phone. “I was stalking him too much, seeing him
doing fun things on Instagram, and it hurt.”
They’d
been instant-messaging on Facebook, and one night he told her he loved
her. And then “I found out he was talking to, like, four other girls.”
And now she wanted to do something to get over it, maybe to get back at
him. “I mean, I should have known. All men are basically whores.” When
he didn’t turn out to be her “true love”—“like Bella and Edward, or
Bella and Jacob, you know?”—she decided she had to “lose it to someone,”
so why not with someone she would never have to see again? And yet, she
hoped it would somehow be like the Lana Del Rey song. “I will love you till the end of time,” it goes.
The
guy she was supposed to meet that day—the guy from Tinder, the dating
app kids were using to hook up—“I know, like, five guys who’ve done it;
girls use it too, but they pretend like they don’t”—he was cute and had
tattoos on his arms. He looked “James Franco–ish,” but younger. On
Tinder you could meet people in your age group. She was 16; he was 17.
Alone
in her room, the night before, reading her friends’ Twitter feeds and
watching YouTube videos (Selena Gomez and “baby animals being cute”),
she’d started feeling lonely, restless, and bored. “Sometimes I just
want to talk to a guy so bad.” So she downloaded the app and started
swiping through the pictures of boys in her area. She “hearted” his
picture, and within a few minutes he had hearted hers, and then they
were instantly texting.
“Ur hot,” he wrote. “U wanna meet?”
“When?”
They
arranged to rendezvous at a shopping mall in Los Angeles not far from
the neighborhood where they lived. “Of course it was going to be a
public place. And if it turned out he was really some gross old man, I’d
just run away.” But there he was, standing by his car, looking almost
like his picture. . . . Almost. There was something different about his
face—it was “squishier. Like, he was almost fat.” But now here they
were, and she didn’t know quite how to get out of it.
He
smiled and kissed her on the cheek. He smelled of Axe Body Spray. She
was sorry she’d spent so much time getting ready for this. “I even
waxed,” she said. He wanted her to get in his car, but she knew she
shouldn’t. They started walking around the mall, “talking about nothing,
nothing. It was awkward, totally weird.” He asked if she wanted to sit
down, but there was nowhere to sit except in restaurants, so they wound
up going inside a Pottery Barn and making out on a couch. Later she
posted something on her Tumblr blog about the difficulty of finding
love.
WHEELING IN THE BITCHES
“Gotta
wheel the bitches in. Gotta wheel the bitches in,” said the teenage boy
on a city bus in New York. “Nowadays you can do it so easy. There are so
many apps and shit that just, like, hand you the girls. They don’t even
know that’s what they’re doing, but really they’re just giving
teenagers ways to have sex.”
This
year, 81 percent of Internet-using teenagers in America reported that
they're active on social-networking sites, one of which is Tinder, a
mobile dating app that teens use to hook up.
SEX, LIES, AND SOCIAL MEDIA
If you’re
between 8 and 18, you spend more than 11 hours a day plugged into an
electronic device. The average American teen now spends nearly every
waking moment on a smart phone or computer or watching TV. This seismic
shift in how kids spend their time is having a profound effect on the
way they make friends, the way they date, and their introduction to the
world of sex.
Kids have always been interested in
sex, of course; but there have never been more ways for them to express
that to one another, at any moment of the day, no matter where they are.
They don’t even have to be together, and often they are not. “You can
be sitting in class getting a boner ’cause some girl is texting you that
she wants to suck your dick,” said a boy in L.A. “It’s kind of
distracting.”
As quickly as new social media appears,
teens seem to find ways to use it to have sex, often sex devoid of even
any pretense of emotional intimacy. There’s sexting, and there’s
Snapchat, where teenagers share pictures of their bodies or body parts;
on Skype, sometimes they strip for each other or masturbate together. On
Omegle, they can talk to strangers, and sometimes the talk turns
sexual. A boy in L.A. told me about a boy he knew who had a PayPal
account where he accepted payment for being sexual online with “random
guys . . . Two hundred bucks.” And then there is Tinder, where kids can
meet each other on their phones. “It’s like Grindr used to be for gay
guys, but now kids are doing it,” said a girl in L.A. “No one cares
about anything but how you look.”
“We don’t date; we
just hook up,” another girl in L.A. told me. “Even people who get in a
relationship, it usually starts with a hookup.” Which can mean anything
from making out to having sex. “When you have sex with a guy, they want
it to be like a porno,” said a 19-year-old girl in New York. “They want
anal and oral right away. Oral is, like, the new kissing.” “The cum shot
in the face is a big thing,” said another girl.
And
then there are “texting relationships,” a disembodied coupling that
takes place solely on a screen. It can still become very sexual, often
very quickly. “Guys you know from just, like, having one class together
will be like, ‘Do you like to suck dick?’” said a 17-year-old girl in
New York. “And if you say no, they just move on to the next person.”
THE GIRLS AT THE GROVE
“Social media is destroying our lives,” said the girl at the Grove.
“So why don’t you go off it?” I asked.
“Because then we would have no life,” said her friend.
The
girls had been celebrating a birthday at the busy L.A. mall, and now
they were on their way home; they carried bags of leftovers from the
Cheesecake Factory. There were four of them: Melissa, Zoe, Padma, and
Greta.* They stopped to sit down and talk awhile at an outdoor table.
They
were pretty girls with long straight hair—two blonde, two brunette, all
aged 16. They wore sleeveless summer dresses and looked fresh and
sweet. They went to a magnet high school in L.A.
Greta,
they said, was famous—or Instafamous, having thousands of followers on
Instagram. She showed me a gallery of her Instapics; some were of her
dog and some were of Greta pouting and wearing “the duck face.” Some of
her followers, she said, were “random dudes in Italy and Arabia.”
Melissa said, “I have Facebook, a YouTube account. I’ve used Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Vine . . . ”
Blendr, another geosocial dating network like Tinder, describes itself as a “free, socially flirtatious chat-to-meet app.”
“Path, Skype,” Zoe said.
“Tumblr,” said Padma.
“I have a Twitter, but I don’t use it except for stalking other people,” said Greta.
They all laughed knowingly.
“I
think everyone does it,” Greta said. “Everyone looks through other
people’s profiles, but especially being teenage girls, we look at the
profiles of the males we find attractive and we stalk the females the
males find attractive.”
“It’s a way to get to know them without the awkward ‘Oh, what do you like to do?’ You already know,” said Padma.
“You
can know their likes and dislikes,” Greta said. “‘Oh, they like this
band.’ So you can, like, casually wear that band’s T-shirt and have
them, like, fall in love with you or something. Or you can be like, ‘Oh,
they listen to that music? Ew. Go away.’”
I asked them how they knew when a boy liked them.
“When
a boy likes your [Facebook] profile pic or almost anything you post, it
means that they’re stalking you, too. Which means they have interest in
you,” said Zoe.
I asked them how they made the transition from social-media interaction to real-world interaction.
They blinked.
“You talk to them on Facebook; you do chat with them,” Melissa said.
I asked if they had boyfriends.
“There’s
this boy Seth,” said Greta, “and when he liked my profile picture, I
knew it was like, ‘Hey, ’sup, you cute.’ Then we held hands at a party.
We were cute. But the one thing I didn’t like about him was he didn’t
follow me back on Instagram. Social media causes soooooo much anxiety.”
They all agreed on that.
“The
thing with social media is, if a guy doesn’t respond to you or doesn’t,
like, stalk you back, then you’re gonna feel rejected,” said Melissa.
“And rejection hurts,” said Padma.
“And
then you’re gonna go, like, look for another person to fill that void
and you’re gonna move on to stalking someone else,” Melissa said.
“That’s how men become such whores,” said Greta.
“Guys actually take the Facebook-talking situation way too far,” meaning sexually, said Zoe.
They were nodding their heads.
“Like,
when guys start a Facebook thing, they want too much,” said Padma.
“They want to get some. They try with different girls to see who would
give more of themselves.”
“It leads to major man-whoring,” Greta said.
“They’re definitely more forward to us online than in person,” said Zoe. “Because they’re not saying it to our faces.”
“This guy Seth, who is normally timid in real life,” said Greta, “sends girls messages asking for nudes.”
She
showed me a text exchange in which Seth had asked her to “send
pics”—meaning nude pics, a request Seth had punctuated with a smiley
face. Greta had responded “Lololol” and “Hahahaha” and “Nope.” “It
wasn’t THAT funny,” Seth had texted back.
“He isn’t my boyfriend,” clarified Greta.
“My
friend, she was VC-ing,” or video chatting, “this guy she was kind of
dating,” Melissa said. “He sent so many nudes to her, but she wasn’t
trusting that he wouldn’t show the pictures to other people. So she
Skyped him and showed him nudes that way. He took a screenshot without
her knowing it. He sent it to so many people and the entire baseball
team. She was whispered about and called names. It’s never gone away. He
still has it and won’t delete it.”
I asked if they knew girls who posted provocative pictures of themselves. They all said yes.
“More provocative equals more likes,” said Greta.
“It
attracts more guys and then it makes other girls think about doing it
just for the attention. They’re attention whores,” said Padma, frowning.
“My father thinks all my photos are provocative,” Greta mused.
“I
think some girls post slutty pictures of themselves to show guys the
side to them that guys want to see,” said Zoe. “It’s annoying.”
“Girls call them sluts. Boys call it hot,” said Padma.
Greta shrugged. “I call it hilarious.”
MIRROR, MIRROR
In
the video for ”We Can’t Stop,“ Miley Cyrus writhes around on a bed,
sticking her ass up in the air. She grinds her ass into the crotch of a
woman twerking. She writhes around in an empty bathtub, sticking her ass
in the air some more. She appears at the V.M.A.’s twerking into the
crotch of Robin Thicke, causing an international sensation.
In
the video for ”Summer Fling,“ Willow Smith stares at the nipple of a
teenage boy while offering him her phone number. Willow’s 12. She sings
about having a summer fling: “It’s just a couple nights, but we do it anyway.” A boy shoots water into a pool party at which Willow and her bikini-clad friends jump on a trampoline, spreading their legs.
“Of
course girls want to emulate this stuff,” Kim Goldman said one
afternoon at her home. Goldman is the director of the Santa Clarita
Valley Youth Project, a counseling service for teens that reaches around
23,000 kids in 14 schools in the district. (She’s also the sister of
Ron Goldman, the man slain along with Nicole Brown Simpson, the ex-wife
of O. J. Simpson.) “Girls talk about feeling like they have to be like
what they see on TV,” she said. “They talk about body-image issues and
not having any role models. They all want to be like the Kardashians.
Kendall Jenner posts bikini shots when she’s 16 and gets 10,000 likes,
and girls see that’s what you do to get attention.”
Santa
Clarita, an affluent community nestled in the arid Santa Susana
Mountains north of L.A., has its share of troubled kids. There’s been a
rash of heroin-related deaths over the last year. A Facebook page
entitled “Santa Clarita Sluts” was finally taken down. In January,
Michael Downs, a local teen, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for
sexually assaulting 15 girls (one a 12-year-old), many of whom he met on
Facebook.
“We’re seeing depression, anxiety,
feelings of isolation,” said Goldman. “I think social media is
contributing to these things. We have kids who’ve had sex with people
they meet on Chat Roulette. At one of the junior highs we work with, we
found out there were a few kids engaging in an online orgy. They all
signed into a video chat room.” One of their parents walked in on it.
“We
had girls selling oral sex for $10 and $15 in the bathroom at a
school,” said Goldman. “Sex is everywhere. Everything is sexualized.
They’re all reading Fifty Shades of Grey.”
CYBER-QUEENS
On
a bright, hot day in June, I met Sydney at the Popover Café on the
Upper West Side. She was blonde and angelic looking, like a girl from a
Beaux Arts painting of the 1890s; she was 17.
She gave me her headshot; I’m not sure why. She said she wants to be an actress.
“I
was cyber-bullied when I was younger,” she said over popovers, “on this
[social-media site for kids]. It was this thing where you create a
profile of a cartoon character, and this random stranger started talking
to me and saying really creepy things. I was in sixth grade.
“I
didn’t know who it was at first. It turned out it was one of the girls
at my school,” a private girls’ school in Manhattan. “She was saying,
like, all this sexual stuff. I don’t even know how she learned how to
talk that way.
“I was 11 years old, and I didn’t know
how to respond. And then she and her friends took screenshots [of the
conversations] and spread them around and started calling me a slut.”
She winced.
“I was completely traumatized. I had to
switch schools. I became insanely insecure.” But nothing ever happened
to the girls who bullied her. “I begged my mom not to bring the school
into it. I didn’t want to be that girl that tattletaled.”
And
then a few years later, she saw her former victimizers on Facebook.
“They kept stalking me and I was curious, so I friended them back.”
That’s when she found out that these girls had become “famous.”
“In New York every kid knows each other,” and some
kids are “famous,” Sydney said. “Everyone’s obsessed with the feeling
they have fame. They post pictures of themselves at certain parties.
They friend certain kids. There’s so much social climbing.”
Her
bullies were now two of the most visible girls in the Manhattan
high-school scene, the type of girls who “go clubbing with 21-year-olds”
and get invited to “events.” “One of their moms has, like, a clothing
line.”
On her iPhone, Sydney showed me the girls’ Facebook pages, where
they had posted many pictures of themselves partying in nightclubs and
posing, hand on hip, Paris Hilton–style, surrounded by Euro-looking men.
These pictures got a lot of likes.
“They dress like
sluts,” Sydney said, “in bandeaus and short shorts that show your butt
cheeks—excuse me, you’re not at the beach.” She admitted she sometimes
dressed like that too. “Because if you don’t, you will get shunned.
Girls are just so mean.
“I don’t go into the
bathrooms at school,” she said, “‘cause they just say mean stuff to you.
They look at you up and down like, ‘What are you wearing?’ Social media
makes it so much worse. Like on Ask.fm”—a social-networking site with
65 million users, half under the age of 18, on which subscribers are
invited to speak their minds about each other—“they just say mean, mean,
mean, mean things.
“I love Tumblr,” she said, “’cause
it’s just kids expressing themselves with writing and pictures; but
it’s also a lot about how to look and dress, and it makes a lot of girls
feel bad ‘cause there’ll be beautiful girls with beautiful everything
and everyone re-posts it, and, like, it makes you feel bad about all the
things you’re doing wrong.
“On Tumblr there’s ‘The
Rich Kids of Instagram,’ which is these kids trying to show off their
wealth, and it’s so not O.K., it’s revolting, but it still makes me feel
bad about myself—kind of like I’m not part of it.”
She said there was a term for this, FOMO—fear of missing out.
She
told me about parties where girls “literally wear nothing” and kids
take Molly, MDMA. “The ‘in’ thing for girls to do is to really just go
nuts at parties, just go insane. They feel like the more they drink and
the crazier they act, the more guys will come to them.” Crazy how?
“Dancing around, flashing their boobs.”
At these
parties, she said, which take place “at people’s houses or a space
somebody rents out to make money,” “people hook up with more than one
person. It’s dark and, like, 100 kids are there. It’s not considered a
big deal. Guys try and hook up with as many girls as possible.”
“At one party?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “They have lists and stuff. This kid in my grade has this list of 92 girls he’s hooked up with.”
“BAD GIRLS”
“We
know this girl Ursula that had a list of guys she had given blow jobs
to, like 45 people,” said Sarah.
Sarah and her friends Elena, Jeff, and
Abby, all teenagers from the Valley, were having dinner in L.A. one
night before going to a movie.
Over burgers and fries at an outdoor café, they started talking about the “bad girls” at their high school.
“Ava’s like that too,” said Jeff. “She asked me out and then took my head and, like, shoved it in her bra.”
“She gave Richie a hand job on the back of the bus going to band competition,” said Sarah.
They
talked about girls who had made sex tapes; girls who had sex with
different guys at parties every weekend. “Was that the same weekend she
went to the emergency room [for drugs]?” asked Abby.
“Remember when Anita got semen on Maya’s jacket?” Jeff asked with a smile.
“And then Maya posted it on her [Facebook] wall,” Sarah said with a laugh.
“She
asked to borrow Maya’s jacket and she wore the jacket, and she gave
this guy a blow job at a party while she was wearing the jacket,” said
Jeff.
“And then she gave the jacket back to Maya
without washing it, so Maya took a picture of the jacket with the stain
and posted it on Anita’s wall: ‘You didn’t wash my jacket,’” said Sarah.
They laughed.
“Which was so mean, but I love that she did that,” Jeff said. “I was like, ‘Oh my God.’”
They laughed again.
“There was this girl in 10th grade who was gonna be on MySuper Sweet Sixteen,”
said Jeff. “I don’t think it ever aired. That same girl, she was in a
porn video going around school. People were in math class watching the
video.”
SELFIES
“I first started seeing
people doing selfies in sixth grade,” said Emily, a senior at a private
school in L.A. “Back then everybody was on MySpace. In sixth grade
everybody started getting phones and they started posting pictures of
themselves, and it was weird, ’cause, like, a lot of the pictures were
supposed to look sexy and they had the duck face and we were all, like,
11.”
“Guys do selfies, too,” said Alexandra, a girl at
a public high school in L.A. “They post pictures of themselves smoking
weed and drinking codeine cup”—a narcotic mixture of Jolly Ranchers,
cough syrup, and 7-UP—“like, ‘Look how boss I am, look how gangster.’
They think that makes them hot. If a guy posts a picture in his boxer
shorts, people say that’s funny, but if a girl does it, they say she’s a
slut. It’s a double standard, but girls still do it ’cause it gets them
more likes on Facebook.”
“My little cousin, she’s 13,
and she posts such inappropriate pictures on Instagram, and boys post
sexual comments, and she’s like, ‘Thank you,’” said Marley, a New York
public-school girl. “It’s child pornography, and everyone’s looking at
it on their iPhones in the cafeteria.”
SEXY BABIES
Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus are the co-directors of Sexy Baby
(2012), a documentary about girls and women in the age of porn. It
follows three subjects: Nichole, 32, a porn star who bemoans the
mainstreaming of porn in the digital age (she thinks it’s unhealthy);
Laura, 22, who has plastic surgery on her labia (her ex-boyfriend deemed
them unattractive) so that she can “look like a porn star”; and
Winnifred, 12, a middle-school student in New York who does sexy photo
shoots with her friends and posts them on Facebook. Winnifred also posts
a video of her little sister dancing around provocatively to a pop
song.
Gradus, a photographer for The Miami Herald, was
on assignment shooting strip clubs in Miami in 2009 when she first
encountered young women who were not professional strippers pole-dancing
for young men.
“These were regular college girls. They didn’t seem to
be having fun,” she said. “It was like, ‘This is what
we’re supposed to
be doing.’”
Gradus and Bauer, a writer for the Herald,
then went on a research mission to a porn convention in Miami where
“they were selling stripper poles to college girls and housewives,” said
Bauer. “There were so many mainstream women idolizing the porn stars
and running after them to take pictures, and we were like, ‘Whoa, this
exists?’”
“We saw these girls embracing this idea that
‘If I want to be like a porn star, it’s so liberating,’” Gradus said.
“We were skeptical. But it was such a broad concept. We asked, ‘What is
this shift in our sexual attitudes, and how do we define this?’ I guess
the common thread we saw that is creating this is technology.
“Technology
being so available made every girl or woman capable of being a porn
star, or thinking they’re a porn star,” said Gradus. “They’re
objectifying themselves. The thinking is: ‘If I’m in control of it, then
I’m not objectified.’”
PORN HISTORY
Porn
is more available now than at any time in history—especially to kids.
Ninety-three percent of boys and 62 percent of girls have seen Internet
porn before they turn 18, according to a 2008 study in CyberPsychology & Behavior.
Seventy percent of boys have spent more than 30 minutes looking at
porn, as have 23 percent of girls. Eighty-three percent of boys and 57
percent of girls have seen group sex online. Eighteen percent of boys
and 10 percent of girls have seen rape or sexual violence.
“Historically a spike in interest in pornography is
associated with advancement in women’s rights,” said April Alliston, a
professor of comparative literature at Princeton. She teaches a class on
the history of pornography and has an upcoming book about porn, Consenting Adults: On Pornography, Privacy and Freedom (2013).
“What
happened at the time of the invention of the printing press was very
similar to what’s happening now with the Internet,” Alliston said. “With
the printing press you had porn suddenly made available through
technology. At the same time you had women getting more rights; there
was more literacy and freedom for women. I see the spread of porn in
part as a backlash to women’s increased independence.
“I
believe that porn has gone mainstream now because women have been
gaining power. The feminist movement was somewhat successful. Rather
than being about sexual liberation, porn is a form of control over sex
and sexuality.
“It’s become unfashionable to [take a
negative view of porn] because of the reaction to the extreme
anti-pornography views of [radical feminists] Andrea Dworkin and
Catherine MacKinnon in the 90s. There was a reaction to their calls for
censorship, and at the same time you had ‘sex-positive feminists,’ as
they called themselves, saying porn is good, saying sex is the same
thing as pornography, and seeming to imply that if we like sex, we like
pornography too, which I think is equally extreme and incorrect.
“When
it comes to children, there is really nothing to argue about,” Alliston
went on. “Kids are defined by our laws as not being able to consent to
sex or to using pornography. There are few protections against them
seeing it, and some people take the attitude that it’s inevitable and
benign. I think a lot of people who make this argument don’t realize
what porn today really looks like in terms of how the women are
treated.”
THE ANTI-DAPHNE MOVEMENT
“In
the eighth grade, I had friend—it was a toxic friendship,” said Daphne,
now 19 and in college in L.A. “We got into a fight. I can’t even
remember what it was about—probably I had bought the same shoes as her
or something. It got really bad, and one of her friends, a guy, decided
to make a YouTube video starting an ‘Anti-Daphne Movement.’
“Their goal was to get me to kill myself.
“It
was, like, a 10-minute video. He showed a picture of me. He said my
name. He recounted all the details of the fight. He said I was ugly and
that I should kill myself. He told everyone on Facebook, ‘I’m a member
of this movement. If Daphne has ever done anything to you, post about
it.’
“It caught on really fast. I had a lot of people
writing really mean messages to me and deleting me as a friend [on
Facebook]. I had never done anything to these people. At school they
would put gross things in my bag, cottage cheese in my binder. It got
over all my homework.
“It took three months before I
got the courage to tell my dad. My dad got the school to get [the boy]
to take the video down. The guy who did it didn’t get in any trouble.
The principal was friends with his mom. The principal said I must have
done something bad for him to act that way, and I was actually suspended
for a few days.
“I didn’t know this boy at all. He
was kind of a weird kid. People thought he was quirky and cool. He would
say he was ‘brutally honest,’ but mostly he was just rude to people. I
had to stay in the same school with him all through eighth grade. I went
into therapy for what happened. It’s made me so much more insecure.
It’s really hard for me to trust anyone.”
THE SCENE GIRL
Amanda,
17, a senior at a high school in Santa Clarita, tried to kill herself
last year. Her boyfriend of eight months had broken up with her so that
he could play the field before graduating from high school—“he just
wanted to live it up, was what he said”—and, after some months of
turmoil, Amanda took an overdose of one of her mother’s prescription
medications. She was hospitalized briefly and is now in therapy.
She’d
been slut-shamed on Facebook in ninth grade by a girl at her school,
along with the girl’s mother. “She”—the mother—“was saying I was a slut
and all I do is lay on my back, but I’ve only been with one person,”
Amanda said. The police said nothing could be done about it because no
direct threats were made.
Feeling isolated and
depressed, Amanda got into drugs, ecstasy, and weed, and started hanging
out with the Scene kids (kids into hard-core punk rock). “All I talked
about was sex, drugs, money, and partying,” she said. “I’d post pictures
on Facebook of me smoking weed and partying.”
When
she started dating her boyfriend, with whom she went to school, she
finally felt as if she had something to live for. “We were like the one
couple that everybody knew, that everyone was like, ‘You’re so cute.
You’re gonna be together for a really long time.’” And now that she had a
steady boyfriend, she was no longer called a slut.
But
that ended all too soon. She attributes her boyfriend breaking up with
her to the influence of his friends. “All his friends were like, ‘Dude,
you have a girlfriend. You can’t do anything,’” meaning sexually, with
other girls. And, Amanda says, he confessed that after breaking up with
her, he did sleep with another girl.
“Boys have no respect for girls,” Amanda said. “They’ll be like, ‘Damn, that girl’s hot. I’d fuck her.’”
THE SEX EDUCATION OF JENNA: PART I
“One
reason my boyfriend broke up with me senior year was that I was not a
real person,” said Jenna, 19, a college student in New York. She and her
boyfriend dated online for two years after meeting at a beach resort
where their families stayed when they were in high school. They
communicated via Facebook, e-mail, and text. They met in person only
twice. “I sat there and contemplated suicide when I heard he wanted to
break up with me,” she said. “I was like, ‘What was the point of
living?’ I had given so much of myself to this person.”
Jenna,
a quirky beauty of the Zooey Deschanel variety, aspires to a job in the
arts; her senior year in high school, she got a job working
prefessionally in her chosen field. She friended a boy on Facebook, also
an aspiring artist, who had already gotten some attention for his work.
“I was like, ‘Let’s stick together and be friends and do this
together,’” she said. They became good friends (in cyberspace). And then
the boy developed feelings for her. But at the time Jenna was still
dating her online boyfriend, so she declined the artist boy’s online
advances.
“After that, every time I would do any
kind of status update on Facebook or post something on Tumblr or
Instagram,” she said, “he would comment on it, like, ‘Jenna, you’re not
funny.’” Jenna often posted comical status updates; she thought of
herself as a funny girl; she’d always liked to make people laugh. “He
got everyone at my school”—a Manhattan magnet school—“in on it,” she
said. “His sister went there, so we knew a lot of the same people.
Suddenly everyone was like, ‘Jenna’s not funny. She’s stupid.’ Everyone
was posting mean comments about me, and he was egging them on. I saw him
at a play at my school, and I asked him, ‘Why are you doing this to
me?’ He said, ‘Because, Jenna, you deserve it.’”
After
that, she said, “I lost all my self-confidence. . . . And I realized in
life there’s only two ways for a girl to go, and that’s to be a dumb
bitch or just a bitch. I decided that from now on I’m just gonna be a
bitch, ’cause at least from now on guys would be intimidated by me. At
least I would have the upper hand. So from then on, if anybody ever
tried to say anything to me, I would come back at them 30 times harder.”
BREAKING UP IS HARDER TO DO
“So you
broke up with your ex-boyfriend,” said a freshman girl at a college in
Manhattan; she was speaking hypothetically. “It’s very sad. So of course
he’s not gonna want to see you in real life, so you wanna see him on
Facebook. But then he defriends you on Facebook, so what do you do? You
get your friend’s account so you can stalk him. You check up on him on
her account.
“But then he deletes your friend; he
figures it out. So right now you have no connection to him, so what do
you do? You create a fake account . . . call her [Jane Doe]. You
literally Google ‘brown-haired girl Instagram’ and find a picture where
you can’t really see their face, but it’s an actual person. You friend a
bunch of his friends as [Jane Doe], add people from his family. Then
you add his ex-girlfriends.
“What are they like? What
are they into? What’s the difference between them and me? Are they
skinner than me? In their profile picture, they’re in a bikini—they must
be sluts, right? Maybe lesbians. And then finally after you have about
400 mutual friends, that’s when you add him. This is so intelligent;
it’s like war strategy.
“You add some more pictures.
You start a new persona. You start a new life, just so you can keep tabs
on the person who doesn’t want to ever speak to you again. Just so you
can know he goes out to clubs all the time, and he’s with this other
girl. Why would you do it? Because it’s an obsession. Social media
breeds obsession.”
SEX AND THE SOUL
What
kind of love lives are teenagers headed for after they graduate high
school? Sadly, more of the same, according to Donna Freitas, a former
professor of religion at Hofstra and Boston Universities. Freitas’s The End of Sex (2013) might as well be called The End of Love. The book studies hook-up culture on college campuses.
Much has been written about hook-up culture lately, notably Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men (2012) and a July New York Times article,
“Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game Too,” both of which attributed
the trend to feminism and ambitious young women’s desire not to be tied
down by relationships.
But Freitas’s research,
conducted over a year on seven college campuses, tells a different
story. “Both young women and young men are seriously unhappy with the
way things are,” she said. “It’s rare that I find a young woman or a man
who says hooking up is the best thing ever.”
She describes the sex life of the average college kid as “Mad Men
sex, boring and ambivalent. They drink like they’re Don Draper to drown
out what is really going on with them. Sex is something you’re not to
care about. The reason for hooking up is less about pleasure and fun
than performance and gossip—it’s being able to update [on social media]
about it. Social media is fostering a very unthinking and unfeeling
culture. We’re raising our kids to be performers.” And researchers are
now seeing an increase in erectile dysfunction among college-age
men—related, Freitas believes, to their performance anxiety from
watching pornography: “The mainstreaming of porn is tremendously
affecting what’s expected of them.” College kids, both male and female,
also routinely rate each other’s sexual performance on social media,
often derisively, causing anxiety for everyone.
“The
conversation that is missing is what rape is in hook-up culture,”
Freitas said. “These young women’s sense of their own agency is
incredibly detached. They tell me, ‘And then I found myself in someone’s
bed having sex.’ There’s little actual choice or volition when you are
drunk, and there is this expectation among everyone that if you are
walking with a boy to your dorm room after a party, sex will necessarily
happen.”
And yet, with all the dangers for young
women in hook-up culture, Freitas says, she’s faced criticism from
feminist colleagues for her take on it. “Big-time feminists won’t go
near hooking up because they look at it in theory as a sexually
liberated practice,” she said. “But I’m looking at it on the ground,
talking to actual people, and it doesn’t hold up as sexual liberation.”
THE SEX EDUCATION OF JENNA: PART II
At
the end of junior year of high school, Jenna met Ethan. “We were drunk,
we hooked up,” she said. “We saw each other again, drunk at another
party, so we hooked up again, then we met at after-prom and hooked up
’cause we had hooked up before, and so it was comfortable and whatever.”
And
so began their non-romance. In fact, Jenna made it clear to Ethan that
she didn’t want “a Facebook relationship. There’s people who have
Facebook relationships where every day it’s like”—typical status update,
delivered in a singsong—“‘Out to lunch with babe.’ Kissy picture of
this, kissy picture of that. Two weeks later, they’re broken up. And
then it’s”—bitchy voice doing the status update—“‘Certain people need to, like, stop stalking me on Facebook. Clearly we are never
getting back together.’ There’s the Taylor Swifts and then there’s the
people who are just long-hair-don’t-care. They just don’t give a single
fuck. They’re just like, ‘I’m gonna have sex with you.’ ‘I’m gonna have
sex with you.’ ‘Hey, you’re cute. I’m gonna have sex with you too if I
want to.’ They don’t give a shit.”
That, she told
Ethan, was how it was going to be. “I told him it was just hooking up. I
was so used to guys treating me like shit, I didn’t want any guy to
take advantage of me.”
And Ethan took her words to
heart. “He said, O.K., he wanted to hook up with other girls. And I was
like, ‘Sure, if you don’t want to be in a relationship with me, I don’t
really care.’ So I was like, ‘Fine, I’ll start hooking up with other
guys.’ So I would come to his house—no nonsense, clothes off, let’s do
this, get into my bed. And we would hook up every couple days; it
started being a casual thing.”
This went on for about a
year. “We were friends with benefits,” Jenna said. “Sometimes we
wouldn’t even talk that much. I’d just be like, ‘I’m coming over,’ and
then I’d go over and we’d sleep together and then I’d leave.”
Even
when Ethan, drunk at another party, admitted to Jenna that “I think of
you as my girlfriend,” she told him, “‘I would never, ever in my fucking
life be your girlfriend.’ Immediately his face fell and he walked away,
and after that we were pretty mean to each other.”
They
still continued hooking up. And then, last spring, Jenna’s grandfather
died, and Jenna was furious with Ethan when he didn’t reach out to
console her. “I finally texted him like, ‘My grandfather died and you
have nothing to say to me? And I’ve been sleeping with you for a year?’
And his response was, ‘So I really just don’t see why you said I could
never be your boyfriend.’”
She smiled.
“So
we realized we were being super stupid, and I was like, ‘Do you want to
be in a relationship? What do you want?’ And he was like, ‘I really
love you. I’ve never met anybody like you. You’re not a dumb bitch.’
Here's a list of possible questions. Feel free to add any opinions you have in the comments!
Edit - May 14th (Joined questions 1&2 and got rid of the filibuster in question 5)
Edit II - May 20th - Split 1MA/2 & 1MA/1
1. What is Obamacare, its purpose, and why it's so controversial?
2. What are some reasons given for why the US political system may be failing?
3. Why could America default on its debt and what could be some of the results if it did?
4. Explain what gerrymandering is and its consequences.
5. Can you compare the US to any historical empires?
6. Who do politicians seem to be acting for?
7. How does a system with 5% support survive?
8. Is Tanner's theory of societal collapse relevant in any way today?
1MA/2
1. What is Obamacare, its purpose, and why it's so controversial?
2. What are some reasons given for why the US political system may be failing?
3. What is the purpose of spin doctors and why are they useful to politicians.?
4. Explain what gerrymandering is and its consequences.
5. Can you compare the US to any historical empires?
Hey guys. Next week is going to be our first experience of having different articles for the two 1MA speaking classes. However, I'd like both classes to come prepared to speak about possible final exam questions.
1MA/2 will be based on this:
Russell Brand on Revolution
It's a little long but well worth it. There's also an interview he did the other day you can watch:
The final days of empire give ample employment and power to the
feckless, the insane and the idiotic. These politicians and court
propagandists, hired to be the public faces on the sinking ship, mask
the real work of the crew, which is systematically robbing the
passengers as the vessel goes down. The mandarins of power stand in the
wheelhouse barking ridiculous orders and seeing how fast they can gun
the engines. They fight like children over the ship’s wheel as the
vessel heads full speed into a giant ice field. They wander the decks
giving pompous speeches. They shout that the SS America is the greatest
ship ever built. They insist that it has the most advanced technology
and embodies the highest virtues. And then, with abrupt and unexpected
fury, down we will go into the frigid waters.
The last days of empire are carnivals of folly. We are in the midst
of our own, plunging forward as our leaders court willful economic and
environmental self-destruction. Sumer and Rome went down like this. So
did the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Men and women of stunning
mediocrity and depravity led the monarchies of Europe and Russia on the
eve of World War I. And America has, in its own decline, offered up its
share of weaklings, dolts and morons to steer it to destruction. A
nation that was still rooted in reality would never glorify charlatans
such as Sen. Ted Cruz, House Speaker John Boehner and former Speaker
Newt Gingrich as they pollute the airwaves. If we had any idea what was
really happening to us we would have turned in fury against Barack
Obama, whose signature legacy will be utter capitulation to the demands
of Wall Street, the fossil fuel industry, the military-industrial
complex and the security and surveillance state. We would have rallied
behind those few, such as Ralph Nader, who denounced a monetary system
based on gambling and the endless printing of money and condemned the
willful wrecking of the ecosystem. We would have mutinied. We would have
turned the ship back.
The populations of dying empires are passive because they are
lotus-eaters. There is a narcotic-like reverie among those barreling
toward oblivion. They retreat into the sexual, the tawdry and the inane,
retreats that are momentarily pleasurable but ensure self-destruction.
They naively trust it will all work out. As a species, Margaret Atwood
observes in her dystopian novel “Oryx and Crake,” “we’re doomed by
hope.” And absurd promises of hope and glory are endlessly served up by
the entertainment industry, the political and economic elite, the class
of courtiers who pose as journalists, self-help gurus like Oprah and
religious belief systems that assure followers that God will always
protect them. It is collective self-delusion, a retreat into magical
thinking.
“The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more
real than reality, where the image has more dignity than the original,” Daniel J. Boorstin
wrote in his book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.” “We
hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is
so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality
is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories in the great
hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”
Culture and literacy, in the final stage of decline, are replaced with noisy diversions and empty clichés. The Roman statesman Cicero
inveighed against their ancient equivalent—the arena. Cicero, for his
honesty, was hunted down and murdered and his hands and head were cut
off. His severed head and his right hand, which had written the
Philippics, were nailed onto the speaker’s platform in the Forum. The
roaring crowds, while the Roman elite spat on the head, were gleefully
told he would never speak or write again. In the modern age this toxic,
mindless cacophony, our own version of spectacle and gladiator fights,
of bread and circus, is pumped into the airwaves in 24-hour cycles.
Political life has fused into celebrity worship. Education is primarily
vocational. Intellectuals are cast out and despised. Artists cannot make
a living. Few people read books. Thought has been banished, especially
at universities and colleges, where timid pedants and careerists churn
out academic drivel. “Although tyranny, because it needs no consent, may
successfully rule over foreign peoples,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The
Origins of Totalitarianism,” “it can stay in power only if it destroys
first of all the national institutions of its own people.” And ours have
been destroyed.
Sensual pleasure and eternal youth are our overriding obsessions. The
Roman emperor Tiberius, at the end, fled to the island of Capri and
turned his seaside palace into a house of unbridled lust and violence.
“Bevies of girls and young men, whom he had collected from all over the
Empire as adepts in unnatural practices, and known as spintriae, would
copulate before him in groups of three, to excite his waning passions,” Suetonius
wrote in “The Twelve Caesars.” Tiberius trained small boys, whom he
called his minnows, to frolic with him in the water and perform oral
sex. And after watching prolonged torture, he would have captives thrown
into the sea from a cliff near his palace. Tiberius would be followed
by Caligula and Nero.
“At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Céline
wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts
together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind!
Panties overboard!”
Illustration by Mr. Fish
The anthropologist Joseph Tainter in his book “The
Collapse of Complex Societies” looked at the collapse of civilizations
from the Roman to the Mayan. He concluded that they disintegrated
because they finally could not sustain the bureaucratic complexities
they had created. Layers of bureaucracy demand more and more
exploitation, not only of the environment but the laboring classes. They
become calcified by systems that are unable to respond to the changing
reality around them. They, like our elite universities and business
schools, churn out systems managers, people who are taught not to think
but to blindly service the system. These systems managers know only how
to perpetuate themselves and the system they serve, although serving
that system means disemboweling the nation and the planet. Our elites
and bureaucrats exhaust the earth to hold up a system that worked in the
past, failing to see that it no longer works. Elites, rather than
contemplate reform, which would jeopardize their privilege and power,
retreat in the twilight of empire into walled compounds like the
Forbidden City or Versailles. They invent their own reality. Those on
Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms have replicated this behavior.
They insist that continued reliance on fossil fuel and speculations will
sustain the empire. State resources, as Tainter notes, are at the end
increasingly squandered on extravagant and senseless projects and
imperial adventures. And then it all collapses.
Our collapse will take the whole planet with it.
It is more pleasant, I admit, to stand mesmerized in front of our
electronic hallucinations. It is easier to check out intellectually. It
is more gratifying to imbibe the hedonism and the sickness of the
worship of the self and money. It is more comforting to chatter about
celebrity gossip and ignore or dismiss what is reality.
Thomas Mann in “The Magic Mountain” and Joseph Roth in “Hotel Savoy”
brilliantly chronicled this peculiar state of mind. In Roth’s hotel the
first three floors house in luxury the bloated rich, the amoral
politicians, the bankers and the business owners. The upper floors are
crammed with people who struggle to pay their bills and who are steadily
divested of their possessions until they are destitute and cast out.
There is no political ideology among decayed ruling elites, despite
choreographed debates and elaborate political theater. It is, as it
always is at the end, one vast kleptocracy.
Just before World War II, a friend asked Roth, a Jewish intellectual who
had fled Nazi Germany for Paris, “Why are you drinking so much?” Roth
answered: “Do you think you are going to escape? You too are going to be
wiped out.”
WASHINGTON — Shortly after President Obama started his second term, a
loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former Attorney
General Edwin Meese III gathered in the capital to plot strategy. Their
push to repeal Mr. Obama’s health care law was going nowhere, and they desperately needed a new plan.
Out of that session, held one morning in a location the members insist on keeping secret, came a little-noticed “blueprint to defunding Obamacare,” signed by Mr. Meese and leaders of more than three dozen conservative groups.
It articulated a take-no-prisoners legislative strategy that had long
percolated in conservative circles: that Republicans could derail the
health care overhaul if conservative lawmakers were willing to push
fellow Republicans — including their cautious leaders — into cutting off
financing for the entire federal government.
“We felt very strongly at the start of this year that the House needed
to use the power of the purse,” said one coalition member, Michael A.
Needham, who runs Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the
Heritage Foundation. “At least at Heritage Action, we felt very strongly
from the start that this was a fight that we were going to pick.”
Last week the country witnessed the fallout from that strategy: a
standoff that has shuttered much of the federal bureaucracy and
unsettled the nation.
To many Americans, the shutdown came out of nowhere. But interviews with
a wide array of conservatives show that the confrontation that
precipitated the crisis was the outgrowth of a long-running effort to
undo the law, the Affordable Care Act, since its passage in 2010 — waged
by a galaxy of conservative groups with more money, organized tactics
and interconnections than is commonly known.
With polls showing Americans deeply divided over the law, conservatives
believe that the public is behind them. Although the law’s opponents say
that shutting down the government was not their objective, the
activists anticipated that a shutdown could occur — and worked with
members of the Tea Party caucus in Congress who were excited about drawing a red line against a law they despise.
A defunding “tool kit”
created in early September included talking points for the question,
“What happens when you shut down the government and you are blamed for
it?” The suggested answer was the one House Republicans give today: “We
are simply calling to fund the entire government except for the
Affordable Care Act/Obamacare.”
The current budget brinkmanship is just the latest development in a
well-financed, broad-based assault on the health law, Mr. Obama’s
signature legislative initiative. Groups like Tea Party Patriots,
Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks are all immersed in the fight,
as is Club for Growth, a business-backed nonprofit organization. Some,
like Generation Opportunity and Young Americans for Liberty, both aimed
at young adults, are upstarts. Heritage Action is new, too, founded in
2010 to advance the policy prescriptions of its sister group, the
Heritage Foundation.
The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, have been deeply
involved with financing the overall effort. A group linked to the Kochs,
Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, disbursed more than $200 million
last year to nonprofit organizations involved in the fight. Included was
$5 million to Generation Opportunity, which created a buzz last month
with an Internet advertisement showing a menacing Uncle Sam figure
popping up between a woman’s legs during a gynecological exam.
The groups have also sought to pressure vulnerable Republican members of
Congress with scorecards keeping track of their health care votes; have
burned faux “Obamacare
cards” on college campuses; and have distributed scripts for phone calls
to Congressional offices, sample letters to editors and Twitter and
Facebook offerings for followers to present as their own.
One sample Twitter offering — “Obamacare is a train wreck” — is a common refrain for Speaker John A. Boehner.
As the defunding movement picked up steam among outside advocates, Republicans who sounded tepid became targets. The Senate Conservatives Fund,
a political action committee dedicated to “electing true
conservatives,” ran radio advertisements against three Republican
incumbents.
Heritage Action ran critical Internet advertisements in the districts of
100 Republican lawmakers who had failed to sign a letter by a North
Carolina freshman, Representative Mark Meadows, urging Mr. Boehner to
take up the defunding cause.
“They’ve been hugely influential,” said David Wasserman, who tracks
House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “When else in our
history has a freshman member of Congress from North Carolina been able
to round up a gang of 80 that’s essentially ground the government to a
halt?”
On Capitol Hill, the advocates found willing partners in Tea Party
conservatives, who have repeatedly threatened to shut down the
government if they do not get their way on spending issues. This time
they said they were so alarmed by the health law that they were willing
to risk a shutdown over it. (“This is exactly what the public wants,”
Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, founder of the House Tea
Party Caucus, said on the eve of the shutdown.)
Despite Mrs. Bachmann’s comments, not all of the groups have been on
board with the defunding campaign. Some, like the Koch-financed Americans for Prosperity, which spent $5.5 million on health care television advertisements
over the past three months, are more focused on sowing public doubts
about the law. But all have a common goal, which is to cripple a measure
that Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican and leader of the defunding
effort, has likened to a horror movie.
“We view this as a long-term effort,” said Tim Phillips, the president
of Americans for Prosperity. He said his group expected to spend “tens
of millions” of dollars on a “multifront effort” that includes working
to prevent states from expanding Medicaid under the law. The group’s goal is not to defund the law.
“We want to see this law repealed,” Mr. Phillips said.
A Familiar Tactic
The crowd was raucous at the Hilton Anatole, just north of downtown
Dallas, when Mr. Needham’s group, Heritage Action, arrived on a Tuesday
in August for the second stop on a nine-city “Defund Obamacare Town Hall
Tour.” Nearly 1,000 people turned out to hear two stars of the Tea
Party movement: Mr. Cruz, and Jim DeMint, a former South Carolina
senator who runs the Heritage Foundation.
“You’re here because now is the single best time we have to defund
Obamacare,” declared Mr. Cruz, who would go on to rail against the law
on the Senate floor in September with a monologue that ran for 21 hours.
“This is a fight we can win.”
Although Mr. Cruz is new to the Senate, the tactic of defunding in
Washington is not. For years, Congress has banned the use of certain
federal money to pay for abortions, except in the case of incest and
rape, by attaching the so-called Hyde Amendment to spending bills.
After the health law passed in 2010, Todd Tiahrt, then a Republican
congressman from Kansas, proposed defunding bits and pieces of it. He
said he spoke to Mr. Boehner’s staff about the idea while the Supreme
Court, which upheld the central provision, was weighing the law’s
constitutionality.
“There just wasn’t the appetite for it at the time,” Mr. Tiahrt said in
an interview. “They thought, we don’t need to worry about it because the
Supreme Court will strike it down.”
But the idea of using the appropriations process to defund an entire
federal program, particularly one as far-reaching as the health care
overhaul, raised the stakes considerably. In an interview, Mr. DeMint,
who left the Senate to join the Heritage Foundation in January, said he
had been thinking about it since the law’s passage, in part because
Republican leaders were not more aggressive.
“They’ve been through a series of C.R.s and debt limits,” Mr. DeMint
said, referring to continuing resolutions on spending, “and all the time
there was discussion of ‘O.K., we’re not going to fight the Obamacare
fight, we’ll do it next time.’ The conservatives who ran in 2010
promising to repeal it kept hearing, ‘This is not the right time to
fight this battle.’ ”
Mr. DeMint is hardly alone in his distaste for the health law, or his
willingness to do something about it. In the three years since Mr. Obama
signed the health measure, Tea Party-inspired groups have mobilized,
aided by a financing network that continues to grow, both in its
complexity and the sheer amount of money that flows through it.
A review of tax records, campaign finance reports and corporate filings
shows that hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised and spent
since 2012 by organizations, many of them loosely connected, leading
opposition to the measure.
One of the biggest sources of conservative money is Freedom Partners, a
tax-exempt “business league” that claims more than 200 members, each of
whom pays at least $100,000 in dues. The group’s board is headed by a
longtime executive of Koch Industries, the conglomerate run by the Koch
brothers, who were among the original financiers of the Tea Party
movement. The Kochs declined to comment.
While Freedom Partners has financed organizations that are pushing to
defund the law, like Heritage Action and Tea Party Patriots, Freedom
Partners has not advocated that. A spokesman for the group, James Davis,
said it was more focused on “educating Americans around the country on
the negative impacts of Obamacare.”
The largest recipient of Freedom Partners cash — about $115 million —
was the Center to Protect Patient Rights, according to the groups’
latest tax filings. Run by a political consultant with ties to the Kochs
and listing an Arizona post office box for its address, the center
appears to be little more than a clearinghouse for donations to still
more groups, including American Commitment and the 60 Plus Association,
both ardent foes of the health care law.
American Commitment and 60 Plus were among a handful of groups calling
themselves the “Repeal Coalition” that sent a letter in August urging
Republican leaders in the House and the Senate to insist “at a minimum”
in a one-year delay of carrying out the health care law as part of any
budget deal. Another group, the Conservative 50 Plus Alliance, delivered
a defunding petition with 68,700 signatures to the Senate.
In the fight to shape public opinion, conservatives face well-organized
liberal foes. Enroll America, a nonprofit group allied with the Obama
White House, is waging a campaign to persuade millions of the uninsured
to buy coverage. The law’s supporters are also getting huge assistance
from the insurance industry, which is expected to spend $1 billion on
advertising to help sell its plans on the exchanges.
“It is David versus Goliath,” said Mr. Phillips of Americans for Prosperity.
But conservatives are finding that with relatively small advertising
buys, they can make a splash. Generation Opportunity, the youth-oriented
outfit behind the “Creepy Uncle Sam” ads, is spending $750,000 on that
effort, aimed at dissuading young people — a cohort critical to the
success of the health care overhaul — from signing up for insurance
under the new law.
The group receives substantial backing from Freedom Partners and
appears ready to expand. Recently, Generation Opportunity moved into
spacious new offices in Arlington, Va., where exposed ductwork, Ikea
chairs and a Ping-Pong table give off the feel of a Silicon Valley
start-up.
Its executive director, Evan Feinberg, a 29-year-old former Capitol Hill
aide and onetime instructor for a leadership institute founded by
Charles Koch, said there would be more Uncle Sam ads, coupled with
college campus visits, this fall. Two other groups, FreedomWorks, with
its “Burn Your Obamacare Card” protests, and Young Americans for
Liberty, are also running campus events.
“A lot of folks have asked us, ‘Are we trying to sabotage the law?’ ”
Mr. Feinberg said in an interview last week. His answer echoes the
Freedom Partners philosophy: “Our goal is to educate and empower young
people.”
Critical Timing
But many on the Republican right wanted to do more.
Mr. Meese’s low-profile coalition, the Conservative Action Project,
which seeks to find common ground among leaders of an array of fiscally
and socially conservative groups, was looking ahead to last Tuesday,
when the new online health insurance marketplaces, called exchanges,
were set to open. If the law took full effect as planned, many
conservatives feared, it would be nearly impossible to repeal — even if a
Republican president were elected in 2016.
“I think people realized that with the imminent beginning of Obamacare,
that this was a critical time to make every effort to stop something,”
Mr. Meese said in an interview. (He has since stepped down as the
coalition’s chairman and has been succeeded by David McIntosh, a former
congressman from Indiana.)
The defunding idea, Mr. Meese said, was “a logical strategy.” The idea
drew broad support. Fiscal conservatives like Chris Chocola, the
president of the Club for Growth, signed on to the blueprint. So did
social and religious conservatives, like the Rev. Lou Sheldon of the
Traditional Values Coalition.
The document set a target date: March 27, when a continuing resolution
allowing the government to function was to expire. Its message was
direct: “Conservatives should not approve a C.R. unless it defunds
Obamacare.”
But the March date came and went without a defunding struggle. In the
Senate, Mr. Cruz and Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, talked up the
defunding idea, but it went nowhere in the Democratic-controlled
chamber. In the House, Mr. Boehner wanted to concentrate instead on
locking in the across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration, and
Tea Party lawmakers followed his lead. Outside advocates were unhappy
but held their fire.
“We didn’t cause any trouble,” Mr. Chocola said.
Yet by summer, with an August recess looming and another temporary
spending bill expiring at the end of September, the groups were done
waiting.
“I remember talking to reporters at the end of July, and they said,
‘This didn’t go anywhere,’ ” Mr. Needham recalled. “What all of us felt
at the time was, this was never going to be a strategy that was going to
win inside the Beltway. It was going to be a strategy where, during
August, people would go home and hear from their constituents, saying:
‘You pledged to do everything you could to stop Obamacare. Will you
defund it?’ ”
Heritage Action, which has trained 6,000 people it calls sentinels
around the country, sent them to open meetings and other events to
confront their elected representatives. Its “Defund Obamacare Town Hall
Tour,” which began in Fayetteville, Ark., on Aug. 19 and ended 10 days
later in Wilmington, Del., drew hundreds at every stop.
The Senate Conservatives Fund, led by Mr. DeMint when he was in the Senate, put up a Web site in July called dontfundobamacare.com and ran television ads featuring Mr. Cruz and Mr. Lee urging people to tell their representatives not to fund the law.
When Senator Richard M. Burr, a North Carolina Republican, told a reporter
that defunding the law was “the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” the fund
bought a radio ad to attack him. Two other Republican senators up for
re-election in 2014, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Lindsey Graham of
South Carolina, were also targeted. Both face Tea Party challengers.
In Washington, Tea Party Patriots, which created the defunding tool kit, set up a Web site, exemptamerica.com,
to promote a rally last month showcasing many of the Republicans in
Congress whom Democrats — and a number of fellow Republicans — say are
most responsible for the shutdown.
While conservatives believe that the public will back them on defunding,
a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a majority —
57 percent — disapproves of cutting off funding as a way to stop the
law.
Last week, with the health care exchanges open for business and a number
of prominent Republicans complaining that the “Defund Obamacare”
strategy was politically damaging and pointless, Mr. Needham of Heritage
Action said he felt good about what the groups had accomplished.
“It really was a groundswell,” he said, “that changed Washington from the outside in.”
