I've recently been rather puzzled by advertisements and articles using the tagline "guilt-free."
For example:
An outlet mall billboard proclaims "Guilt-free shopping!" and displays the logos of available brands, the first one being Nike.
Or, another one:
An article on the Weather Channel website shows how to "Enjoy Your Barbeque, Guilt-Free." It proceeds to relate seven tips, all of which focus on how not to gain weight during summer revels.
The phrase guilt-free seems to be applied pretty often to either the shopping or the eating category. Ok, that's fair enough: consumption as a source of guilt makes some sense.
But what kind of guilt precisely are we avoiding here? On the shopping, I'd guess guilt-free should mean (at the least) that we're buying things made by companies that deal fairly with their employees, but I'm thinkin' probably not if Nike is first on the list of guilt-free shopping options. What is it that makes the outlet mall guilt-free, then? Other advertisements confirm that it's the discount prices. Apparently a lot of people think the problem with buying extra stuff isn't exploiting workers, wasting natural resources, or feeding one's own materialism -- the part responsible for guilt (and hence moral angst, shame, "I really shouldn't," etc.) is . . . spending money? Guilt reactions are structured to protect the consumer's own wallet rather than look out for anyone else.
Same kind of deal for the food guilt. This kind of discourse on guilt leaves out questions like, Does eating all this meat hurt the world food market? and, What can we do for the folks in our community who can't afford mountains of delicious food? (I'm not saying I've got clear answers to those questions, just that I think they're sensible questions to ask if you're going to talk about the ethics of barbeque in the first place.) But instead, we're asking, How can I keep from getting fat? It's a similar misdirection -- forget about the wider implications of the consumption and shift the moral burden to protecting one's own body.
In both cases, there's a move to make morality about covering and beautifying one's own backside. I think that's pernicious on multiple levels, since it distracts people from addressing more meaningful causes for guilt in consumption, and the ethically-charged language also gives an illusory halo of righteousness to decisions that are simple self-preservation. Not that I'm against saving money or staying healthy -- but I think those issues should occupy a very much smaller fraction of the moral discourse on consumption than they now do.
Lately I've been in awe of the act of writing. I regularly ask myself (and nowadays my students) to do something very nearly miraculous. I don't know how it works, but I've developed an almost reckless trust that it does.
So, I've got a blank page and no idea what I'm going to say, but then I start saying something anyway, and sometimes it turns out to be something meaningful and exciting. And sure, it doesn't come out of nowhere -- I draw on lots of past experiences and thoughts to make it happen. But still, the sheer gall of thinking, "I now have no clue where I'm going with this, but 3 hours from now I absolutely am going to have a decent draft of whatever it is" is baffling when you think about it. How do we know it'll work? Yeah, there are deliberate things we can do to foster it -- brainstorming, associations, freewriting, whatever -- but what guarantees that anything will actually come together? Nothing I know of, and yet it happens every time. The quality of my writing definitely varies, but every single time professors have assigned me to write a paper, I've written one. And every time I decide to make myself write, I write something. It's crazy!
I have mixed feelings about how academia forces writing and ideas. When there's pressure to generate material, a lot of it is likely to be inauthentic and written just because we've got a deadline to meet even if we don't care about what we're saying. And the whole reification of ideas is weird -- who thought it was a good plan to assign complex and multidirectional expressions of thought a numeric value? or to use relatively arbitrary writing requirements as a barrier to achieving status? But one thing I'll say in favor of the academic writing situation: It does build faith in whatever miracle we rely on when we write. If I hadn't been required to write regularly, I might not even know that writing can happen on demand. I might be stuck writing only in the conjunction of propitious moods when I felt energetic and thoughtful at the same time. But (largely because of academic writing) I instead know that I can force writing under almost any psychological conditions. And sometimes forced writing can be dang good, too.
Writing is a weird hybrid of hard work and magic. More on that later, perhaps.
Way back before comic books, there were speech scrolls. This is a woodcut from Foxe's Book of Martyrs, circa 1563. Notice how the scroll comes from the general direction of Cranmer's face. Also, notice the written label on the monk's robe in the bottom left. Here are links to some more woodcuts with speech scrolls from the same book. (Warning: This last one isn't a good idea if you're squeamish or trying to eat -- yes, that is his arm bone down there.)You may ask, is this why I'm in grad school? Gory renaissance proto-comics? Well, friends, I don't know either.
sometime in October, with the assistance of literary criticism class:
Me: Hey, I don’t like shaving my legs.
My Inner Feminist: Who said you had to?
Me: Um.
My Inner Feminist: . . .
Me: Was it . . . the patriarchy?
My Inner Feminist: Bingo.
Me: Was it an ideology that compels self-modification for women on the assumption of inadequacy and reinforces the to-be-looked-at-ness of the female body?
My Inner Feminist: Yup.
Me: DANG . . .
My Inner Feminist: Dang is right.
Me: So, does that mean I can stop shaving my legs?
My Inner Feminist: Yes, yes it does.
Me: Oh, ok. Well then, I think I’ll stop.
My Inner Feminist: Good job.
November:
Me: I kind of resent that now I can’t shave my legs even if I want to, because you’d make it sound like collusion with the patriarchy.
My Inner Feminist: Tough. Such is the cost of cultural analysis.
Me: Yeah, I know. Fine.
circa January:
My Inner Feminist: How’s the leg hair?
Me: It’s good. I’m actually becoming rather fond of it now that we’re past that awkward prickly stage.
My Inner Feminist: Really? Would you say that it’s growing on you?
Me: Augh, don’t do that to me. You’re supposed to liberate women, not hurt them.
My Inner Feminist: Sorry. But anyway, it’s still winter, so no one has really seen it yet.
Me: Now who’s reinforcing to-be-looked-at-ness?
My Inner Feminist: Just sayin’. This isn’t very gutsy just yet. You going to shave when you wear a skirt?
Me: I dunno. We’ll see.
summer:
Me: Um, so I’m pretty ok with my leg hair now. Yay not having to shave.
My Inner Feminist: Huzzah! Down with the patriarchy!
1. Toast a bagel.
2. Spread it thickly with cream cheese (real cream cheese, now, none of that diluted spread stuff).
3. Pile on thin slices of fresh strawberries until the bagel is somewhat precarious but not an outright architectural failure.
4. Drip just a little bit of honey on top.
Oh my goodness.
