obligatory Barbie 50th birthday posting!

From Barbie's 50th birthday

Oh, where to start. Monday, March 9 was the official 50th anniversary of the creation of the Barbie doll. This snuck up on me, so I didn't have time to unearth my actual Barbie collection, which is massive and consists of many vintage dolls (mostly bought back when you used to be able to go to a Barbie collectibles show or two a year in Chicagoland), collectible and vintage reproduction dolls (some bought at Cut Rate Toys, who are on my links list), and untold amounts of dolls, clothes, and accessories for actual kids to play with (hours and hours in toy and discount stores).

From Barbie's 50th birthday

Neshachan on Flickr posted a lot of new shots from her impressive Barbie collection for the birthday; here's one of a Mod-era Barbie (my favorite Barbie era). I didn't do that, but I at least could observe some media coverage and take weird shots of the TV screen.

From Barbie's 50th birthday

The top photo, from a CBS evening news piece, was when the screen changed, showing the original striped-swimsuit Barbie and her latest incarnation; then some NBC shots of the original Barbie (or a reproduction?).

From Barbie's 50th birthday

Talking about Barbie's influence, I guess; that's Andy Warhol's portrait of Superstar Barbie in back.

From Barbie's 50th birthday

So I had a few requests...or hopes...for the news and entertainment media when discussing Barbie:

1. Must you use the song "Barbie Girl" for your reports? You have to admit it's a tad grating. It's funny, though, that that band got sued by Mattel but won in the end, having their song apparently the go-to soundtrack for any piece about Barbie from now until the end of time...

2. I haven't heard this in a while and it's impossible to quantify, but I could swear, so many pop culture references to Barbie mention "Malibu Barbie." This was a doll only around for a few years in the 1970s, yet the name lived on for decades (I don't mind the doll on The Simpsons being "Malibu Stacy"). My theory was always that all the comedy writers for years were kids in the 1970s and that was their frame of reference. I actually don't know if anyone knows what the hell I'm talking about here, or is a fraction as pedantic as I am...

From Barbie's 50th birthday

3. The discussions of Barbie's influence are always "Barbie's body shape is so unnatural!" versus "Barbie's had all these careers!" Well, actually, I can't quibble with that, they're both true and you just can't expect much more in a two-minute TV news piece...

From Barbie's 50th birthday

4. Re: the Talking Barbie controversy of years ago (that inspired the amazing Lisa Lionheart/Malibu Stacy episode of The Simpsons): the doll didn't say "Math is hard," it said "Math class is tough." I don't think that's a terrible thing to say, but I'd say it was ill-advised to have a doll say it when there are still real issues with women's advancement in math and science. Make your point about Barbie and stereotypes of women, sure, just get the quote right!

From Barbie's 50th birthday

5. And...I had faint hopes that by the time Barbie turned 50, we'd no longer have the thing of talking about Barbie as if she's an actual woman turning 50, and saying how good she looks, or speculating on hot flashes (yeah, that was you, Kathie Lee), or whatever...yeah, no luck with that. Maybe if Barbie lasts to 100 that'll go away...

From Barbie's 50th birthday

The above shots were all from The Today Show on NBC; I caught some of the ABC and CBS evening news pieces Monday too. ABC showed the infamous German Lilli doll that inspired Barbie...

From Barbie's 50th birthday

That's Barbie's creator, the late Ruth Handler (she started Mattel with her husband Elliott). There's a new biography I want to read, Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World's Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her. Jeopardy had a Barbie category on Monday's show and the hardest, $1000 answer was Ruth Handler...no one knew it, sadly.

From Barbie's 50th birthday

Obviously I LIKE Barbie and can admire Handler as a pioneering woman in business and all, but...one of these pieces said that she created Barbie, and the early TV commercials reflected it, to help "tomboyish" girls learn to be feminine and get along with guys or whatever...and I almost cried at that point. Really, can't it just be a fun toy with nice outfits? No, I know it never can be...

From Barbie's 50th birthday

(I always check the Barbie aisle when I'm in a store that has one; this is the Toys R Us in Riverside, IL) Barbie has never actually gotten married; she just dresses up for it with different outfits every year. I know there was some "breakup" with Ken a few years back, but I thought they got back together. But I noticed the "groom" doll here didn't seem to have a name at all...

From Barbie's 50th birthday

I'm not attempting much of an analysis of Barbie; that's what the books I list below are for. Barbie, for me, was always kind of on a level with the ground-breaking Sex and the Single Girl--freeing (middle/upper-class white) women from certain 1950s roles and establishing others. I suppose today's version is evangelical religion versus "raunch" or "hookup" culture, both rather limiting, but I'll leave that to the blogs I've blogrolled to critique...

From Barbie's 50th birthday

That's Day-to-Night Barbie, which I never owned, but Day-to-Night Ken was my first male doll. These magazine covers, and the "Barbie Drama" stories enacted with dolls, ads for appalling 1980s clothes, and more are in my new Flickr set of Barbie magazine scans. This is the earliest issue I ever owned...

From Barbie's 50th birthday

This Seal Press anthology was put out in later editions under the name Body Outlaws, so I'm glad I got the first edition with the title Mattel forced them to change...

From Barbie's 50th birthday

See, Barbie's had all kinds of exciting jobs, even astronaut...even if this outfit does have a bit of a B-movie feel to it, perhaps...

Now a little recommended reading: So much of my Barbie obsession was piqued by M.G. Lord's Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, a book I loved so much I have the original hardcover with color illustrations, and bought the 10th-anniversary paperback with extra material, and if there are future editions I'll buy those...

If you can read cultural studies (which I enjoy in small doses), Barbie's Queer Accessories is full of fascinating ideas.

Ten years ago, a number of women writers were anthologized in The Barbie Chronicles: A Living Doll Turns Forty; it's pretty good. For a fiction and poetry anthology, there's Mondo Barbie, from the early 1990s, where I first read A.M. Homes and David Trinidad, among others.

It included poems from Denise Duhamel's excellent book about Barbie, Kinky. Her poem "It's My Body" somehow inspired me to take and post a near-nekkid shot of myself for the first time (no, I'm not linking; it can be found, I'm not that many places on the Internet, I mean, it's not on Goodreads), which probably got a lot of views because of searches for words in the poem and the book title. I just got inspired to post something "authentic"...it's also been a strange week where I might regret things I've put on the Internet. Or might not... By odd coincidence, maybe, I wrote most of the text here while blond hair dye is on my head; it's basically searing my skin off at this point so I'd better go...

Just doing my part to destroy romance

Oh, but I missed my shot at ruining everyone's Valentine's Day in advance. Sorry I wasn't here writing anything properly cynical. Though I'm not a huge fan of the day, in truth the past few Valentine's Days have been pretty good, far, far, better than the typical disaster that is my birthday. I suppose the fact that I'm not still with my co-celebrators of previous years makes those Valentines a "failure" by dating industry standards, in the way that any relationship that's not currently marriage and/or approaching it, is a failure (or am I supposed to cheerily embrace past relationships as "learning experiences"? Hard to keep up with the experts). Oh, but I won't write the anti-dating-advice-industry manifesto right now. One of the "experts" I caught recently, author of a how-to-date-a-"bad boy"-manual, started off a "dating myths" piece on The Today Show by blathering that "men aren't men" and "women aren't women" anymore, and that's typically a good sign one should turn off the TV, throw it out a window, and flag down a cement truck to thoroughly pulverize it.

Valentine's Day got reclaimed as V-Day, to combat violence against women, a while back, and it's a day to peform that feminist play, you know, the, uh, The Hoohah Monologues? Well, the conservative Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute snipes that “February 14, a day generally recognized for hearts, love and valentines, is now a day that has become increasingly associated with female private parts and the radical feminist agenda," and even has a booklet on how to combat this nefarious presence on your campus. Meanwhile, the Independent Women’s Forum “Take Back the Date” campaign (get it? They turn Valentine's Day into V-Day, we'll turn Take Back the Night into...) has an infamous flyer with a dejected, ball-and-chain-wearing Cupid walking past a Vagina Monologues marquee; as Feministing snarked, “Poor Cupid, tethered to the unreasonable feminist demand that women not be raped.” (By the way, Eve Ensler and Jane Fonda were on The Today Show Valentine's morning, and though I had it on I was more listening to WBEZ, and missed when, as Meredith Viera apologized later, “Jane Fonda said a word from the play that you don’t say on television.” I found it out later. Hint to Chicagoans: it rhymes with the name of a major east-west street that runs through Rogers Park.)

I'll second everything Ann Friedman said here on her 2007 piece on the controversy:
“The idea that a play featuring women's ruminations on their bodies and sexuality is at odds with 'true romance' is deeply disturbing. Personally, I have numerous problems with the Monologues, but one valuable thing about the play is that it communicates to young college-age women, many of whom aren't self-identified feminists or women's studies majors, that it's okay to talk about their bodies, to explore their sexuality. I fail to understand how this -- a frank discussion of women's physical selves -- and romance are mutually exclusive.
Moreover, I would argue that women being knowledgeable and vocal about their own bodies does indeed help curb violence….
…The 'chivalrous' dating practices venerated by IWF thrive on outmoded, restrictive gender roles and an inherently lopsided power dynamic. This type of dating has always placed the onus on women not only to suppress their own sexual urges, but also to control those of their male suitors.”

I've read the play, never seen an entire peformance of it, it's not my favorite...but V-Day seems like a worthwhile endeavor when you've got this quote, said just a few days before Valentine's, from Tennessee state Sen. Doug Henry, “Rape, ladies and gentlemen, is not today what rape was. Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman, against her will, by some party not her spouse. Today it’s simply, ‘Let’s don’t go forward with this act.’ ” Wow.

"Take Back the Date" isn't just an anti-V-Day phenomenon, it's also a reaction against the supposed dominance of "hookup culture" among young people, which like everything else, gets blamed on feminists. I've mentioned it before and I'm sure I'll mention it again, the moral panic over Our Slutty, Slutty Young People and Their Inability to Love ™. Eh, maybe I'll read yet more books about it before I do. "Dates" aren't such a bad idea, the old days of "necking and petting" have their appeal, and if you want to be REALLY old-school, bundling sounds charming. I just don't care to go back to the old days when women's reputations and lives could be destroyed for going "too far."




Anyway...how about that article on "settling" that's made Lori Gottlieb the current whipping girl of the blogosphere? See Feministing or Pandagon or Shakesville (hey, I finally linked to a piece by a man), or Gawker for extra snark. I have little to add, except I'm sorry Gottlieb wrote such a bizarre piece; her memoir of having anorexia at age 11, Stick Figure, is probably my favorite (and the wittiest) of the many, many, many eating disorder memoirs I've read.

Since I didn't write this piece in as timely a manner as I wanted to (I was partly afraid of jinxing my actual Valentine's, which went nicely), I'm able to mention this piece that ties together Gottlieb, Take Back the Date, and the hookup hysteria, plus includes Barney from The Simpsons: Take Back the Loser! And something (finally) on how feminism enhances relationships (The website ads that popped up when I looked at this on Pandagon included "Married & Lonely?," "Women's Infidelity," and "Asian Girls For Marriage." How sweet).

A few years ago I was flipping through a celebrity magazine and complained about shirts that said "Josh's Girl" and the like, wondering why women thought it was cool to be someone's property. Then I thought, maybe I'm harsh, people will think I'm Katherine the Scowly Romance-Hating Feminist. I mean, just because I'd never wear "Tom's Girl" or "The Future Mrs. Anderson" or use the expression "my man" other than 999% ironically, who am I to judge? Then I saw this in Us Weekly's Feb. 11 issue. (The ones you can't read say "Cali Girls Do it Better!" [eh] and "If found, please return to boyfriend." [I immediately thought "Found where? In an alley? That's creepy."]) Being his "girl" and "Valentine" isn't enough, now you're a "playground" (note the graphic) and really, truly, calling yourself "property?" And now I flash forward a few years, to when I complain about the "Zack's Property"-declaring rhinestone bracelet, you know, the one that goes along with the tracking device that's been implanted so he knows where you are at all times, because "he loves me that much"... Once again, I've failed to understand modern romance.

I've been avoiding the matchmaker hype--apparently several of them have reality shows--but I couldn't resist watching a recent Oprah episode which promised to be full of things "single women could relate to" or whatever, which meant I was mostly baffled. Patti Novak, of “Confessions of a Matchmaker,” went on about how it's great that women are competent and successful but you have to let men choose the restaurant you go to and open pickle jars for you and blah blah blah to feel like a man. Oprah (and talk shows in general, actually daytime TV in general) seems woefully ignored in the feminist blogosphere, so I was delighted to discover a feminist food blog called Little Ms. Foodie taking this on. Still, she's not as bad as Patti Stanger of "The Millionaire Matchmaker," relish this exchange in Time Out Chicago:
TOC: What’d you learn about matchmaking from your mom and grandmom?
Patti Stanger: That the rules have never changed. As long as you give sex away for free, without exclusivity, you’re gonna end up single and alone and unhappy. You’re the commodity and when you learn that, men will gravitate to you. You want to be the female, you don’t want to lead in the relationship. And the only way the men are going to lead and be the hunters is if you sit back, smell good, relax and let the man drive the car.
TOC: Anyone ever tell you that’s a little sexist?
Patti Stanger: No.
(Well okay then, that's A LITTLE SEXIST.)

As noted, I had a good Valentine's afternoon excursion (with someone), and also got to spend the evening in a single-girl way: sitting at Borders on Halsted, enjoying a Cocoa Trio, reading an obscure old book about Detroit. If you'd like a true anti-Valentine's screed, this hilarious one at I Blame the Patriarchy will do quite nicely. I'll have a good story specifically about Dating For Nerds sometime soon...Besides the ad, the other images in this piece are: The front and back covers of a novel I found at Shake, Rattle, and Read in Uptown; a WrigleyvilleSingles.com ad seen in Graceland Cemetery Dec. 2007 (cemetery desecration!); a chalkboard in an abandoned Catholic elementary school; all 69 different messages found in an 18-ounce bag of Necco Sweethearts (yep, I sorted them, that's what nerds do for Valentine's Day [Gapers Block linked to this photo on Valentine's Day, thanks!]); a CiceroSingles.com ad seen along abandoned train tracks (in a desolate area where I also spotted a frozen dead dog, and white police harrassing a black man); if that's how you find love, then here's how you find a wedding photographer; and a photo I already used (seen on an abandoned church in Englewood) in this post, but I just replaced it there with a different one and put it here because Chicagoist used it as one of their Valentine's photos, thanks! I hope you all had a decent (or indecent, as the case may be) Valentine's.

So, are you an adult?

Monday I headed downtown to Preservation Chicago's press conference at the Archicenter to announce “Chicago’s Seven Most Threatened Buildings” for 2008 (that will be its own post), and to make an appointment at the Apple Store's Genius Bar (it was already full for the day) because I can't upload photos right now (and I got 100s of shots on weekend explorations!). I'm not around there enough; I completely missed CompUSA's clearance sales and the store's gone now. I bought a new CTA 7-day pass but since it was mild I ended up walking from Chicago to Jackson and back again (wow, exercise).

Talk of the Nation was on as I walked back north, and after a numbing discussion about delegates at the upcoming political conventions, got to the good stuff, and by “good stuff” I mean “idiotic” and “extraordinarily offensive.” Kay S. Hymowitz, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute (a conservative think tank), had just written an op-ed on the rise of the “child-man,” you know, fun-loving American males in their 20s and 30s who mysteriously lack the urge to settle down to productive lives of work, marriage, and kids, and instead prefer video games and such. Her discussion threw together numerous cultural trends.

There's what Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist Pigs (a book I mostly liked), called “raunch culture" and what the Brits called "lad culture": the "anti-PC" embrace of hot chicks! sex! strippers! beer! sports! "being a man again!" (because if your life doesn't revolve around all that, you're not a man?). There's the Rejuvenile or "kidult" phenomenon of adults who love kids' toys and games (also a TOTN segment), which seems generally harmless.

There's the Urban Tribes trend that claims that for twentysomethings, "friends are the new family," explicated in an okay but overall annoying book. Annoying because it's ultimately a paean to the joy and necessity of settling down (it ends with a Hawaiian honeymoon, where ”my new wife awaits.”) The author somehow found a woman to marry him despite his habit (recounted at length) of using evolutionary psychology as party chatter, insisting to women that men are meant to you know, get around, and can’t be expected to commit to one woman—they can’t help it, it’s biology!

But of course the biggest moral panic around "delayed adulthood" is concern over people marrying later (if at all) and having children later (if at all). A book called Unhooked Generation attempted a sympathetic look at the social factors around "why you're still single," but ended up with the same old line that you're not mature until you're settled into monogamy and marriage. (This book is not to be confused with Unhooked, one of many books to scold the youth [nope, women only] for their wild ways of "hookup culture" that get in the way of their proper goal at college: landing a man. Bake for the guys instead, ladies! [Yes, it really says that]). (I'll throw in Generation Me too, an interesting and sympathetic look--not the typical conservative "kids these days" screed--at what the emphasis on self-esteem and "entitlement" have done to young people. However, the author utterly ruins it with panic over the falling birthrate and an insistence that's there's something wrong with you if you don't have children. I wish I had the exact quote, but I'm shocked so few people picked up on that part of the book.)

Hymowitz started off tolerable but then got to the nasty heart of her argument: you're not a worthwhile adult till you're married with kids. Until then, she claims, you're unlikely to volunteer, and you don't care about schools or children. Marriage and parenthood make you a "full member of society." Oh, how hard it was not to scream or throw things when I heard this. Since I know so few people that are married, let alone with kids, never mind owning a home too (only my former professors fit this description, I think, though I do know more people that have achieved one or two of the above)...well, they must be dragging me down. Attention, nearly all my friends and acquaintances: despite being amazing artists, writers, performers, activists, publishers, educators, photographers, chefs, musicians, etc.--you're just a big ol' drain on society. I'd better stay away from you till you grow up.

I'll point out I listened to this in Moonstruck, a Michigan Ave. chocolate shop I’d passed many times without trying out, sipping my plain hot chocolate. I'd immediately decided on another project--trying all ten (!!!) kinds of hot chocolate on the menu (there’s numerous mochas too). I was using my Lego duffel bag that day (and later wished I'd visited the nearby Lego Store, learning that yesterday was the 50th anniversary of Lego. I was wearing the most expensive ($18) jewelry I got last year, a pendant made from a typewriter "shift" key. I’d just made photocopies of the floor plan of a certain vacant school I've been visiting, in part to rescue kitschy old yearbooks, music books, guides to science filmstrips, etc. Oh, right, and at my advanced age, neither my wedding ring finger nor uterus have ever had their "appropriate" accouterments. Nor am I the self-supporting adult I'd like to be.

At home I looked at the accompanying "Blog of the Nation" discussion. What about the female equivalents of the "child-man,?" lamented many. (For instance, the party girl Cosmopolitans, stilettos and nightclubs sort, or the quirky cupcakes-and-Hello-Kitty-loving variety.) Actually, Hymowitz IS an equal-opportunity offender; she went after single women here. There's not exactly a shortage of hand-wringing and fear and panic about single women out there (their alleged frivolity or sluttiness and/or their achievements and independence).

Some people pointed out the economic factors driving the trends towards later marriage, children, and home ownership; I'm not sure that anyone talked about how the low marriage age/high birthrate 50 years ago was an aberration in the 20th-century trends towards later marriage and fewer children. (Also see The Way We Never Were for more on how this weird historical blip is misused for political reasons.) Some people, happily, pointed out the cruelty of her definition of adulthood: “This is the most shallow, exclusionary piece I have ever heard on NPR. It shocks me that none of the listeners have pointed out the obligatory politics of heterosexual reproduction that motivates Hymowitz's conservative rhetoric. Rather than provide us with any meaningful analysis of how the so-called ‘man-child syndrome’ is changing, say, the socio-political or economic landscape in this country, she simply insists that we all had better sit up straight, find a partner with opposite naughty-parts, and start behaving ‘like adults’…it completely ignores the possibility that waiting to get married, mortgaged, and saddled with kids may be making many young men *and women* happier,” said John from Ithaca, NY.

But it was bizarre on that blog to see how many people think if a woman is saying anything critical about men, then she must be a feminist (and therefore a man-hater and BAD).* Reminds me of Katha Pollitt's take on Knocked Up, "...the real subject of Knocked Up is the immaturity of men: only under the most desperate circumstances will they put aside their bongs, or their porn, or their even more idiotic friends. If a woman had made this movie she'd be labelled a total man-hater: there isn't one man in it who isn't basically a teenager." (Of course that movie's an example of the men-are-fun-women-are-nags pop culture trend, this blogger sure didn't like it.) Anyway, I don’t know what’s less feminist than the deadening gender roles and conservative morality Hymowitz promotes.

I hadn't yet seen the "child-man" piece discussed on feminist blogs (what? I'm first at something?!) when I wrote this, but since there appear to be a few unmarried, video-game-loving men on the internet, I've seen them go after it as a way to bash nasty, nasty modern women and their unrealistic expectations. Oh, whatever. I agree that dating and relationship culture does seem centered on "what women want," (well, and the man-pleasing things they need to do to get what they want) but that's because 99% of it is aimed at women, and...ah, that's all a rant for another day. I've already spent an incredibly long time on this post, sitting here at my computer surrounded by a giant plush lobster, huge crayon-shaped banks from a toy store I visit every few months, listening to bouncy retro-influenced pop songs on the fuschia rhinestone-encrusted CD player I bought when my Hello Kitty one stopped working...oh, you get the idea. I haven't yet put away childish things. And even when I fit my definition of "adult," I don't intend to.

*Uh, Ellen Willis again, from a 1985 piece, "Looking for Mr. Good Dad": "Though the two are easily confused, female cynicism about men is not an expression of feminism. The cynic assumes that men will always have power over women and the will to exploit it, that if things change it can only be for the worse. But since few people can live entirely without hope, she tends to displace hers onto the past. For the feminist's utopian vision, she substitutes a romantic nostalgia for patriarchal paternalism; she imagines that by pursuing freedom, we've gained nothing, only sacrificed the 'respect' and 'protection' and 'commitment' that were once our due..." And, a few resources for anyone who by choice or chance isn't yet a "full member of society"--for childfree people; for singles: lifestyle advice, advocacy, alternatives to marriage, a terrific read about "singlism".

Late January newsworthiness

I meant to be at a literary event (the debut of a new lit mag, Bruiser Review) Thursday night, but got scared off by the fact that the temperature sign outside my window said 0 degrees. And the temperature on the screen at CLTV said 00 degrees (!!). So I decided to stay in and combine some recent photos of the CTA (six different stations, all taken Mon. 1/21) with somewhat political content, for no good reason.

Monday morning I had my volunteer shift at the Archicenter and spent much more time on the computer than usual. I looked up a piece about the acclaimed urban/ruins photographer Camilo Jose Vergara that I'd heard on "Morning Edition" as I rushed around earlier, about Vergara's project of documenting Martin Luther King Jr. paintings and murals in American cities. I also found a story about this book by a journalist and photographer exploring the various streets named after MLK in America. Sounds intriguing, like the similar-themed MLK Blvd Flickr group and blog.

I also spent quite a bit of time on Chicago-L.org, looking up abandoned CTA stations and being amazed at the number of demolished stations and entire vanished lines. I knew about some of it, but still...I'll definitely have some full-fledged posts on that someday. I set out to photograph an image on the Vergara NPR page, and the abandoned station I'd seen on Chicago-L. A couple different explorer friends had mentioned the possibility of going to Gary on Monday, but one couldn't and one went when I had the Archicenter shift. I'd felt weird anyway about the prospect of white people romping around the ruins of Gary on the King holiday. So what did I do? I ended up photographing the ruins of Englewood. Oh well.

So, a good afternoon photographing, and a visit to my friend Shag--I hadn't seen him or his cats in ages. Then the gloom I've been in this week seized me again. Tuesday, I lay on the couch thoroughly depressed and listening to a very good "Talk of the Nation" discussion called Abortion Experiences: 35 Years After Roe v. Wade. Since it was the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, of course. The point was that abortion is extremely common but rarely discussed in terms of personal experience, and I was impressed with the diverse experiences/opinions I heard on the show.

There was obviously a lot in the more political parts of the blogosphere, but I'm not political enough here to say much about it myself, so I'll just link to a good collection of pieces at Alternet. I was especially impressed with Amanda Marcotte's piece that discussed adoption politics: “It seems women across the nation realized that if they had a right to abort a pregnancy, they also had a right to keep a baby, and didn't have to give it up just because their parents, church, and community said so. People treat "choice" like a code word for "abortion", but it really does mean "choice"--the choice to have an abortion, sure, but also the choice to be a single mother, to be childless, to delay marriage, never to marry at all, or to be a lesbian.” By the way, I've had a rant boiling in me for a long time about the hit-and-now-Academy-Award-nominated Juno, but I don't want to rant about movies I haven't actually seen. It isn't the typical feminist response ("what's with all these movies about unexpected pregnancy that don't discuss abortion?"), it's the way adoption appears to be treated in that film. But I need to see it first.

One more. Cristina Page has a blog at Birth Control Watch and the link right there is to another hugely important, not-discussed-enough part of the abortion debate: how religious right groups aren't just trying to ban abortion, but birth control as well, by actually trying to redefine forms of birth control AS abortion. First they try to confuse emergency contraception with the "abortion pill," then since EC is actually high doses of the birth control pill, they can redefine the pill as abortion. Her post about teenagers and pregnancy was decent but predictable; I'm annoyed at how often the socioeconomic factors around early motherhood get left out and everything's reduced to education/birth control access or morality. Reading about the 18-year-old mother of four in There Are No Children Here (who has a fifth by the epilogue), in a time and place when many very young women were mothers (I know I should know the statistics today, by comparison) really complicates things for anyone on any side of the abstinence vs. comprehensive sex ed debate, doesn't it? I'll point you to another essential read, Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy.

UPDATE: I got a comment from a good friend that strongly disagreed with some of the opinions here, and just posted a long excerpt in comments from one of the late Ellen Willis's essential essays about abortion rights, have a look. If I'm going to express opinions, I have to be willing to accept dissent/criticism (but I'm kind of thin-skinned, so it's not always easy).

Three weeks without coffee and so forth

Depressed teen/abandoned factory
Originally uploaded by katherine of chicago

[This one’s personal, and political. There’s a new exploration-related post right before this one, with all non-Flickr photos, but they’re rather bland. In case you want to read about something else.] Personal: I’ve now gone three weeks without coffee, regular tea, or caffeinated pop. I stopped it on a whim, because someone I know (who’s never had coffee, and no, he’s not a Mormon, everyone asks) kind of suggested it, or rather, he pointed out how it’s easier to not start on caffeine in the first place so you won’t become dependent on it. This isn’t the first time I’ve temporarily given it up, so it isn’t just “changing yourself for a man,” as my friend Kate suggested when we were at Reading Under the Influence Wed. night, heh. I’m doing okay, even though I’ve been to many new (and old) family restaurant/snack shop-type places recently and I’d ALWAYS order coffee at them…it doesn’t feel right. The “herbal coffee” I got at Whole Foods the other day, (Vanilla Nut) Teeccino is shockingly drinkable, I’m having some right now. I’ll be back on the poison after trying a month without it.

Political: My favorite political blog Feministing is raising some funds now (to become more of a "community" site, which means I could try to promote this blog there); I should contribute. If they could reduce their recent dependency on ads, it’d be great. Kind of jarring to see a big Sears ad with the line “Get the ‘I’m So Happy I Could Cry But I’m a Guy’ reaction” in the midst of all the gender-stereotype-breaking. Anyway, I’m borrowing a couple links from them. No mainstream news about the death of Senator Henry Hyde (his funeral was today) will mention Rosie Jimenez so it’s up to blogs to do so. And if only the major media (especially NBC/MSNBC, who seem especially fixated on the story) would throw in a mention of, say Latasha Norman at least once for every 20 mentions of Stacy Peterson, please? The horrific mass shooting at the mall outside Omaha led to the obvious network TV pieces about “are YOU safe at the mall?” and the easy title, “massacre at the mall,” but I was particularly amused/horrified by some woman (possibly a therapist) The Today Show had on as an expert. So she’s trying to make the point that the U.S. has been all hopped up about outside terrorist threats for years when the real danger is right here (a point I mostly agree with). So what’s the real danger? “Our kids are killing us!...These teenagers are terrorists!” Is that not a tad overblown? Violent crime by juveniles (actually, this guy was 19, so this is like articles on teen pregnancy that don’t point out the largest number of pregnant teens are 18-19) is not exactly the majority of crime. Anyway, I’ve obviously been watching too much TV news this week (and listening to too much NPR, though they barely touched the mass shooting, not even to make a point about failures of foster care/group homes/the mental health system, all the things the shooter had much experience with).

I promise the next post will be cheerier. Sort of.

The most fun you can have with a 1 Day Fun Pass

So I set out Halloween Wednesday with my Chicago exploration companion DK to see how much fun we could possibly have with a CTA 1 Day "Fun Pass." Actually, I only got the $5 pass because I was a bit short on cash to get a weekly one, and DK didn't even have a pass but a regular transit card, so this is a remarkably poor framing device for this story, but I wanted something better than "we hung out all day."

Anyway, I was running late on the bus, as nearly always happens when I meet up with DK, who has never actually taken a CTA bus (!!!!). From North/Clybourn, we headed on the Red Line up to Wrigley Field--he wanted photos of both ballparks on a day when they weren't surrounded by inconvenient crowds of fans. There's work going on inside Wrigley, and something with hoses in front when we showed up. We circled the park, got a few shots. Lunch at the Horizon Cafe at Broadway & Grace. I had the 4-cheese grilled cheese: cheddar, a couple others, parmesan-crusted bread. I didn't like it as much as I thought I would, but I do try to get to the Horizon now and then. I showed him a bit of Lakeview, including my first apartment in Chicago, a studio in a very bland apartment building on Grace.


Back to the Red Line at Sheridan, more crowded than we expected that time of day. We got a seat in what would be the conductor's area, the "private booth" as I called it. You get a nice view out the window, and a nice view of the colored lights on the next car, and we also got a nice view (aroma too) of a bag of leftover fast-food trash at our feet.


You can sort of see Chinatown reflected here. We intended to get out at 35th, but rode all the way to 95th (he's only been there once) because the view, or something, was just so compelling, we didn't want to move. Got out at 95th, looked at the massive bus terminal, got the same seats on a different car. At Sox/35th, we noted the old Comiskey homeplate, all that remains of the former stadium. I honestly never noticed this here before, since I'm not given to wandering through ballpark parking lots.


I've still never been in Wrigley, but I have been in U.S. Cellular, back when it was "new Comiskey," on a school field trip, long before I lived in Chicago. We walked on 35th to Bridgeport, noting the new housing construction, or promise of it, popping up everywhere. This sign is next to a sort-of-abandoned-looking lamp warehouse/store.


Mid-afternoon, kids were already out trick-or-treating. Three houses in a row on 35th had the same sign posted. Regrettably, I didn't get a shot of the middle house, with a woman sitting in front of the sign, talking on the phone.


Since we'd eaten already, the Ramova Grill or the Bridgeport Restaurant (which I seriously doubt still has the "soda fountain" advertised on its old neon sign) will have to wait for another trip (I've been to both). But we went to my favorite-so-far dollar store in Chicago, the insane Dollar Function, just north of 35th on Halsted. I bought two sequined masks I've had no occasion to wear. I needed to use the restroom at the Daley branch library. As we waited to cross, we saw a girl of maybe 10 in a "sexy devil" costume, with a skirt much shorter than I'd wear in public. I read quite a bit on the sexy-costume issue in the feminist blogospere last week (I'll sum it up: 1) the middle-aged scolds whining about how women dress too sexy on Halloween are engaging in "slut-shaming" 2) but why are women expected to be supersexy on Halloween and [straight] men aren't? 3) sexy costumes for girls are out there [seriously, French maid costumes?!] and that's really creepy). But that's a rant for another time...

We kept walking on 35th; I thought there'd be some interesting industrial stuff to check out, and maybe a quiet spot to sit near the river, but there didn't seem to be, so we went clear to Ashland, noting the Zhou Brothers building, Iron Studios, empty Spiegel buildings, and Pepsi bottling plant along the way. Now, I hadn't orchestrated the day to end up at sunset at a certain abandoned silo complex, but it wasn't terribly far from 35th & Ashland, so we kept walking in the chill. We noted an abandoned factory a Flickr friend had recently explored, but it was too close to sunset, no time to check it out. Oh, and I was wearing a vintage dress and coat, forgot to mention that. Not really a costume, but something a little wackier than I'd normally wear around town.


This is what the sky looked like as we walked through a quasi-private industrial drive to get to the silos. I could have used this day to prove that DK and I could have fun together without breaking any laws, but then we were at a hole in a fence with a "no trespassing" sign...Well, we went a whole FIVE HOURS together without breaking any laws. Someone'd obviously been there since our visit a week ago, as there was an easier way into the building now. Damn, and I was actually looking forward to a painful, undignified crawl in in my purple polyester dress. I counted the steps to the top this time--138, and only one is broken. Walking onto a roof, we ran into three young taggers--my first-ever run-in with strangers in an abandoned building! We all nonchalantly said hi to each other. They acted as if it's the most normal thing in the world to run into a guy with a big camera and a woman in a vintage floral coat and pantyhose in an abandoned structure 10 stories up. The view there is spectacular. You get both Chicago's amazing skyline, and a superb view of industry: the canal, warehouses, factories. We sat safely far away from the edge and watched it get dark. Here's a poor imitation of what we saw.


Then, just like last week, off to Huck Finn for dinner. This is not the first time I've eaten at two of these restaurants in one day. I had hot tea, which I never order at these places (honey and lemon, mmm) and a tomato stuffed with turkey salad, served with a hard-boiled egg and far too much coleslaw. Once again, they were out of giant donuts. Poor DK, he'll see one someday...We took the Orange Line from Leavitt to downtown and parted. Eight hours, two ballparks, two "family restaurants," four miles+ walking, one abandoned structure. That is a lot of fun on one pass.


The pass didn't run out after that but the fun sure did. At North and Wells, I got a delicious cider drink at Starbucks and stuff at Walgreens and waited for the #72 bus. And waited. After 15-20 minutes I thought the wait was definitely unusual. After 40, I was furious. Yes, the bus took 40+ minutes to show up (Halloween isn't a CTA holiday, is it?), only ONE bus showed up then (I'd expected at least 2 or 3 bunched up), and it took a good 45 minutes instead of 25-30 to actually get home because of the crowding. (That's my poor attempt at surreptitious CTA photography.) Yeah, not like anyone had anyplace to be at 9:00 on Halloween night. By the time I got home at 10:22, DK had already posted the day's photos to Flickr. He is certainly not eager to try a CTA bus now.