YouTube's New Policy on Gun Videos

The New York Times recently ran a story about YouTube changing its policy about allowing videos

pertaining to "the sale or manufacture of firearms and their accessories, specifically items like ammunition, gatling triggers, and drop-in auto sears". According to YouTube, the new policy will go into effect in April 2018.

As announced in October 2017,  YouTube had already made clear its plan to take down "video tutorials" about how to make guns fire bullets more rapidly via the use of a bump stock device. That decision was in response to a mass shooting that month in Las Vegas, wherein the shooter used a bump stock to rapidly spray bullets and take lives.  

The policy is not entirely new, but more of an expansion on YouTube's existing policy about dangerous or harmful content. In my book, Guns on the Internet,  forthcoming from Routledge/Taylor & Francis in August 2018, I include a chapter on YouTube gun videos. 

(I found videos using search terms like "bumpfire" and "bump stock", among others.) My specific interest in writing this chapter was whether gun-related video content should be protected speech under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, using standards such as those established through prior court cases. In other words, to what extent does the gun-related content of a video constitute political speech, or contribute to the marketplace of ideas? In a way, YouTube gun videos represent an intersection of sorts of the First and Second Amendments, with the caveat that YouTube is not a government entity and can enforce standards that are much more restrictive than Constitutional free speech standards. 

Source: http://blog.k-var.com/news/nssf-youtubes-policy-causes-concern/

Will the new policy mainly affect commercial operations like GlockStore, or will individuals -- gun owner YouTubers -- be impacted as well? On the blog of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the new policy is, unsurprisingly, decried as "censorship". 

My guess would be that the policy will not be uniformly enforced. Will YouTube staff do searches on words like "bumpfire" and "bumpfiring" and remove each and every video with those words in the tagline? That might be in the tens of thousands of videos. They could do this, but then YouTubers may simply switch to other synonyms (e.g., "rapid fire shooting with __________" [fill in name of gun]).

Time will tell how much of an impact YouTube's new policy will make. 

Florida's New Gun Control Law

As many folks know, this month the Florida legislature passed, and Governor Rick Scott signed, a new gun control law in response to a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Image source: www.thestreet.com/story/14488770/1/

police-deal-with-active-shooter-at-parkland-fl-high-school.html

The new law establishes a waiting period of 3 days, or until a background check is conducted, with some exceptions (e.g., police officers, members of the military). It also raised the minimum age for buying a gun to 21 years old (up from 18 years); included provisions to allow school personnel to be armed; and banned bumpstock, even though no bumpstocks were used in the Parkland shooting. Bumpstock was used a few months earlier in a Las Vegas mass shooting. (For the record, a gun owner doesn't need a bumpstock to bump-fire, but that's another conversation.)

As the New York Times and other news outlets made clear, Florida's new law didn't cover other areas, such as banning specific types of guns (e.g., AR-15s), strengthening background checks, or banning so-called "high capacity" magazines that can hold upwards of 100 bullets. Gun owners will often complain that bans of magazines that hold a certain (high) number of bullets won't do much good, due to shooters simply being able to quickly reload -- as is shown here and here. Some of these points are outlined in this video by Colion Noir. The new law also didn't touch the issue of guns being left in and subsequently stolen from cars. 

Shortly after the new law went into effect, the National Rifle Association filed a lawsuit to stop it. 

Will the new law be effective? Will it prevent future shootings and keep schools safer? As Pam Bondi of Florida's Office of the Attorney General wrote in a statement, the bill is "not perfect, and sadly it will not bring back the 17 lives lost in the horrific school shooting, but the safety of our children is not a political issue - it's simply the right thing to do."

Time will tell.

The Most Surreal Photo

It happened yesterday. 

(Source: https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/03/01/mobapp-sen-dianne-feinstein-giddy-trump-gun-bill.cnn)

On February 28, 2018, Presi-dent Trump hosted a televised bi-partisan meeting to discuss gun control legislation in response to yet another mass shooting, this one at a high school in Parkland, Florida. As CNN described it, Senator Feinstein "erupted with glee" at the President's seeming embrace of a variety of gun control measures.  Banning bumpstocks. Expanding background checks. Taking guns away <gasp!> from people who are seemingly dangerous and/or suffer from a mental illness. This about-face from a POTUS who was elected with great support from gun-rights groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA). 

Unsurprising-ly, gun rights groups have pushed back. NRA spokes-person Dana Loesch announced that the NRA "doesn't back any ban" on semi-automatic firearms. The Gun Owners of America just today (3/1/18) issued a Current Action Alert that "Yesterday was a horrible day for the Second Amendment"; called the President the "Gun-Grabber-in Chief"; and called on its members to "call the President immediately", listing a phone number. 

But it was the photo of the President next to a gleeful Senator Feinstein - showing him documents, POTUS nodding in agreement - that really struck me. I suspect I'm not alone in this.

How much do gun rights groups and members hate Dianne Feinstein? A lot. In fact, in visiting a story posted at Breitbart.com about Trump's February 28th gun control  meeting, I found this ad (shown above) with a picture of the Senator holding a rifle alongside the question, "Oppose gun control?" On its blog, the Gun Owners of America has a post entitled "Hypocrisy... I name thee Feinstein."

In yesterday's meeting, President Trump chided Republican Senator Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania) for being "afraid of the NRA". Toomey was a co-sponsor, along with Democrat Joe Manchin (West Virginia), of the Manchin-Toomey amendment, written in 2013 in consultation with the NRA on the request of President Obama in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting. The Manchin-Toomey amendment ultimately failed to pass in the Senate, coming up several votes short. And yet President Trump has breathed new life into it. Who'd have thought?

Back to the President's comment about legislators being afraid of the NRA - yes, they are. We all know this, and so does the gun lobby. (Remember Senator Marco Rubio ducking & dodging a Parkland student's question about not taking any more NRA money? Three words: painful to watch.) After the Manchin-Toomey bill's defeat in 2013, Senator Manchin stopped talking about the bill or gun control. Back in 2015 I reached out to him via Facebook about the bill, in connection to a book I was writing (Guns on the Internet; due out from Taylor-Francis/Rouledge in fall 2018). He never responded. I suppose that makes sense. The NRA took out an ad against him, "Tell Manchin to Stand with West Virginia". "Manchin is working with President Obama and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. Concerned? You should be. Tell Senator Manchin to honor his commitment to the Second Amendment", the ad's narrator intones. And who can forget a decade earlier, gun rights advocate Charleton Heston taking aim (pun intended) at Presidential candidate Al Gore at a NRA convention for his (Gore's) gun control stance. "For everyone within the sound of my voice, to hear and to heed, and especially for you, Mr. Gore: FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS" [rifle raised above his head]. The convention crowd subsequently erupted in applause.

As some have asked, will Trump be the POTUS who - ironically - disrupts the legislators-gun lobby relationship, and brings about gun control measures? Something his much-hated-by-the-gun-lobby predecessor couldn't claim by the end of his eight years?

Well... let's see what tomorrow brings. I'd say it's 50-50 that tomorrow POTUS is back to pushing for arming teachers. 

New Jersey Bail Reform: It's working, but...

A year ago (early 2017) under Governor Christie, New Jersey switched from a cash bail system to one wherein judges use a risk assessment algorithm to determine whether a defendant should be released or locked up in jail while awaiting court processing. As noted in a Feb. 20th, 2017 story for NJ.com, the system was "similar to the federal system and the one in place in Washington, D.C., but New Jersey is the first to roll out such a system statewide." As reported for a September 2017 story in Wired.com, factors that determine a person's risk score include their age at present arrest; whether their arrest was for a violent offense; prior convictions (both misdemeanor and felony); past history of violence; and any prior incarcerations. The call for, and action on, bail reform have spread to other locations including Atlanta, GA, Philadelphia, PA, Maryland, and even New York City with Mayor de Blasio announcing that one of the notoriously dangerous Riker's Island jails will close by summer 2018.

The complaints about bail include that it disproportionately, and unconstitutionally, impacts the poor, keeping them locked up because they cannot afford their bail. Not being able to afford bail, or being denied bail, means that an accused individual ends up incarcerated before being convicted. They're technically innocent until proven guilty either through trial or accepting a plea bargain; but they're not free to go home. How free can someone be as a 'pre-trial inmate'? A long delay in processing their case may have an individual sitting in jail for months, potentially in violation of their Sixth Amendment right to a speed trial. 

In early 2017, New Jersey's Bail Reform and Speedy Trial Act  was heralded as ground-breaking, although not everyone was pleased with the change. The bail bonds industry, for one, has been hurt by the shift. Police and some prosecutors also complained about the risk of releasing potentially dangerous individuals back into the community. (But then again, there's that pesky Sixth Amendment thing. Dangerous, possibly; but not yet convicted.) 

Fast forward a year to February 2018. How is New Jersey's new no-cash-bail approach working out? A newly issued report from the New Jersey Judiciary notes that the data show "a reduction of the pretrial jail population by 20% from January 1, 2017 to January 1, 2018, and a reduction of 35% from January 1, 2015 to January 1, 2018." The new approach also seems to have increased the speed with which defendants are initially processed through the court, in keeping with the new law's requirement that the accused be indicted within 90 days; and intent that the amount of time they can spend in jail awaiting trial be limited. This is all good, right?

Except that there's the issue of cost, which was raised back in 2016. As recently reported by both NJ.com and the Press of Atlantic City, the new system appears to be going broke fast, with costs greatly exceeding revenue brought in. (The program is funded by court fees, rather than funding through the State's budget.) As noted in the report, the new law set up a Pretrial Services Program, which operates 24/7 (as in every single hour, every day) and statewide employs a staff of 267, including managers and supervisors. Judges and other staff are on call to "address emergent matters". The report notes that in "slightly less than one-third of the counties, county jail staff assist in responding to emergent monitoring alerts. Pretrial Services staff handle these emergent alerts in all other counties." As noted in NJ.com on February 13, 2018, the "highest tier of pretrial monitoring, which requires defendants wear GPS monitoring bracelets, was particularly taxing on court staff.... Keeping tabs on the 3,686 defendants entered into that tier last year required 24-hour staffing. In a few counties, local jails have taken up the duty of responding when a defendant goes missing, but in most jurisdictions around the state, that responsibility fell on the civilian court staff." Similarly, as noted in the Press of Atlantic City on February 16, 2018, counties have had to hire additional staff for sheriff's and prosecutor's offices, and the courts, because of a 48-hour deadline to decide whether an individual can be freed or must remain in jail. As noted in the article, "Courts now must be open on weekends and holidays to adhere to this deadline."

So in a nutshell it comes down to money. And where it will come from. The New Jersey budget is already running a deficit. The state's pension program is coming up around $50 billion short. The new Governor, Phil Murphy, got elected with an ambitious set of promises, including raising the minimum wage to $15/hour and making tuition for community college free. Maybe he'll pay for this through the millionaire's tax he promised, or from new tax revenue brought in through legalizing recreational marijuana. Where could funding needed to keep the Pretrial Services Program running come from? It's a program with good intentions, to make due process more fair for the poor and pre-trial court processing more in line with the Sixth Amendment. While not on the top of the Governor's to-do list, funding the state's new approach to (no) bail shouldn't fall off the radar either. 

Lessening the Opioid Crisis, Helping Addicts

This week marks the anniversary of two high-profile drug-related deaths of artists. On February 2nd, 1979, Sex Pistols guitarist Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose in Greenwich Village, NJ. Thirty-five years later on the same day, Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died of an accidental drug overdose, also in New York. (Sid Vicious image source: https://www.biography.com/people/sid-vicious-246010)

Drug use, drug addiction, and drug overdose are nothing new, of course. Remember the crack epidemic of the 1980's? In 1971 President Nixon launched a war on drugs that would continue for decades. We know now that the drug war did little to stem drug use, and mostly managed to throw lots of people into prison.  

We now find ourselves in the midst of an arguably preventable opioid crisis. Preventable because, it has been revealed, major drug distributors hired away Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) lawyers and got those lawyers to help them draft new legislation that would weaken the DEA's ability to successfully prosecute the distributors for flooding the market with prescription narcotics like fentanyl. Deaths from these legal drugs have skyrocketed. The new Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act was signed into law by President Obama in April 2016. In other words, this is a crisis of our own making. This echoes some speculation that the crack epidemic of the 1980s was facilitated by actions of the CIA in a drug-sales-for-gun-purchases arrangement with the Contra army in Nicaragua. (This, and the fate of journalist Gary Webb who wrote the article "Dark Alliance" about the CIA's role in the crack explosion, were the subject of the movie "Kill the Messenger".) The word 'epidemic' gets thrown around a lot, but in this case I think it fits. 

So how do we fix this? Various suggestions have been proposed. Here are mine.

(1) Change the law back. If the new law has made it "virtually impossible for the DEA to freeze suspicious narcotic shipments from the companies, according to internal agency and Justice Department documents", which "had allowed the [DEA] to immediately prevent drugs from reaching the street" then fix that. Give the DEA its teeth back.

(2) Get addicts the detox they need. Detox covers the first 5-7 days of stopping using a drug, and it's a critical period. Some drugs are physically harder to stop using than others. Heroin, as most people know, has a very nasty detox. Alcohol and marijuana detoxes are also unpleasant. Cocaine detox? Very few physical side effects. (Mental & emotional reactions are another issue.) Having an addict spend a week at an inpatient detox facility (e.g., in a hospital) can help tremendously, and facility staff can be available 24/7 during this time should any medical problems arise.  


(3) Get addicts the ongoing treatment they need. Since many addicts also have addictive personalities, ongoing resources -- for weeks, months, years -- are important. Twelve-step programs like Narcotics Anonymous can be tremendously useful in connecting addicts with other recovering addicts who 'get it'. An added bonus? It's basically free. (Similar to church service, a basket gets passed for a suggested $1 donation to cover expenses like coffee. But contributing isn't mandatory.) (NA logo image source: http://southbrowardna.org/) 

Me Too

In the wake of revelations that Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein sexually harassed and potentially sexually assaulted many women, women have taken to social media using the hashtag #MeToo to recount their personal experiences. This leads to the uncomfortable realization that the phenomena are extremely common, almost like a rite of passage for growing up female. 

According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program, in 2016 there were nearly 96,000 rapes reported to the police, an increase over the prior 3 years. (According to UCR data, reported rapes have been increasing since 2014.) As most criminologists know, rape is an underreported crime for various reasons. More accurate numbers may be found via the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization (NCVS) program. Counter to what the UCR data show, the NCVS data indicate that rapes actually declined from 1994 through 2010. From NCVS data we know that most rapes involve a perpetrator that the victim knows; and that many victims never report the assault.

I was mulling over my own experiences with harassment - not rape - this past weekend. I've never thought of myself as a 'victim'. As Dani Bostick describes in her TEDx Talk, people who self-identify as victims can incur - unfairly - all kinds of backlash. Not self-identifying as a victim for me had little to do with a fear of any backlash, but more that I thought of my experiences as not that bad. Certainly not bad compared to what some others have gone through. Just sort of 'garden-variety' harassment, if there can be such a thing.

(1) When I was about 12 or 13 and sitting in our town's public library reading, I became aware of a man sitting next to me. He was breathing heavy, and - what really caught my attention - his legs were spread wide open. His crotch was pointed toward me. He kept inching his chair closer and closer to me. Pant pant pant, inch chair closer, pant pant pant, etc. I don't specifically recall my parents ever having the 'good touch/bad touch' conversation with me, but I knew this creeped me about. Uncomfortable, I got up and walked away. 

(2) Around the same time, my friend Amy's older sister's older boyfriend (named Louie or Louis, maybe) told me once when we were alone in a room, "I could rape you right now and you couldn't do anything about it." I didn't know what to say at the time, so I remained silent. Nothing happened, but I guess he got his point across, communicating to a girl four or five years younger than him - a 12 or 13 year old - that he could overpower and assault her. I saw him years later and thought he looked very familiar. Maybe 10 years had passed by that point. I think it was at a restaurant where he was working as a waiter. He walked right up to me and said, "Hi, Connie." Yup, still a creep.

(3) Worst experience - when I was 17 years old and a freshman at Rutgers University, I was briefly on the women's crew team. Having to get across town to practice, I hopped on an extremely crowded bus. Some guy got in right behind me and proceeded to press himself up against me from behind. True, the bus was crowded, but not that crowded. He was using it as an excuse to subject some unsuspecting woman (me, this time) to an unwanted full body press. I could feel his erection on my backside. I tried to maneuver away, but he stayed firmly pressed against me. I started to shake uncontrollably. In hindsight, I probably should have reached around and grabbed him, hard. But I didn't. I endured the ride - a full 15 minutes - until I could get off. Once I got off, I turned to look at him as he also exited the bus. He looked back at me, and I knew that he did it on purpose. My nerves were too frayed at that point, so I skipped practice and just went back to my dorm room. 

(4) During the summer between sophomore and junior years in college, I went to France to study for six weeks as part of an arrangement that Rutgers had with a university there. Students - females particularly - were warned that when crossing through the woods from the dorms to the cafeteria, we needed to watch out for the Masturbating Men. Sure enough, two or three times fellow students and I had to walk by men standing in with woods, wearing no pants, masturbating and calling out to us to look. "C'est bon, oui?" ("It's good, yes?") I remember one of them calling out. <blech>

(5) Some years ago on a NJ Transit train, I was sitting alone or virtually alone in a train car. This creepy little man came in and sat down right next to me. Many empty cars, but he chooses to sit next to me. I'm sitting in the window seat, and he's in the outside seat, blocking my exit. In my peripheral vision, I notice lots of activity happening with his hands, in his lap. I glance over and sure enough, he's wearing clingy velour pants and, it seemed, no underwear underneath. He was arranging his clearly-visible penis back and forth in his lap, back and forth, back and forth. The point was for me to witness this. Fucking gross. I got up immediately and said - because I had to get around him - "MOVE". He smiled - SMILED - at me and shifted his legs so I could get by. Flustered, it wasn't until I got out of the train car that I realized I had left my ticket back at the seat with the pervert. This would mean going back to retrieve it. I decided against this, and when the train conductor/ticket-taker - a woman - came up and asked for my ticket, I explained what had happened. She looked at me unhelpfully/flatly/unsympathetically and said, "You need to talk to the conductor." I see - I've just been subjected to an unwanted sexual encounter by a pervert on your train, and you've got the empathy of... I don't know what. (Like, WTF?) I sought out another conductor (for the record, a man), who 'got it'. He gave me a pass on not having my ticket, and went into the car to handle the perv. 

These are my #MeToo experiences. Nothing major, nothing earth-shattering. Just garden-variety, rite-of-passage yuckiness that females get subjected to. And maybe that's part of the problem - the assumption that this is somehow normal. Except that it shouldn't be. Just because it happens often doesn't make it right. 

Women in History, Women Today, Women in the Trump Era

From Meredith Brooks' "Bitch".

Image source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/23918343018153590

As I posted this week on Twitter, September 18th-24th marks a number of notable historical events involving women. This week in 1975, heiress and kipnapping-victim-turned-Symbionese-Liberation-Army participant Patty Hearst was captured by police in San Francisco. On September 20, 1986, the TV show Cagney & Lacey won an Emmy Award for Best Show (Windell 2015). The show was about two women detectives who worked for a police department in a large city, and dealt with issues like alcoholism, harassment of women, and death of a fellow officer. Also on September 20 but in 1973, tennis legend Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in the highly publicized "Battle of the Sexes". (A movie of the same name is coming soon to movie theaters everywhere.) On September 21, 1981 Sandra Day O'Connor was confirmed as the first female Supreme Court justice by the U.S. Senate. She would ultimately serve 24 years on the bench. On September 22, 1692, the last eight 'witches' were hanged in Salem, Massachusetts (Windell, 2015). Most (not all) of the arrested and executed witches were women. Also on September 22, 1975, a would-be female assassin, Sara Jane Moore, attempted to kill President Ford (Windell, 2015). 

Fast forward to present day, two weeks ago Hillary Clinton's account of her 2016 bid for the Presidency, What Happened, was released. I'm currently on p.121 (348 more pages to go). I heard about the book first, with the predictable framing on both sides. Always better to read something for oneself than to take others' words for it. Example: Counter to what some conservative pundits are saying, Clinton doesn't blame everyone else for her loss, but accepts her fair share of responsibility for things that went wrong. 

In Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman, author Anne Helen Peterson (2017) notes that after Clinton's unexpected defeat, she sat down to write an article tentatively titled "This is How Much America Hates Women" (p.x), which would eventually evolve into a book (Too Fat...). I don't think America hates women per se. (We make up half the population of the U.S., after all.) But I do think that those who've traditionally been in the dominant gender group (i.e., men) don't really know what to make of women. We are wives, mothers, and daughters. We're coworkers (probably paid less). We're pioneers, sports champions, outlaws and victims. As Meredith Brooks sings in "Bitch", "I can understand how you'd be so confused, I don't envy you, I'm a little bit of everything all rolled into one...."

As the filmmaker Michael Moore satirically observed in his blog post "Five Reasons Why Trump Will Win", "Our male-dominated, 240-year run of the USA is coming to an end. A woman is about to take over! How did this happen... and now, after having had to endure eight years of a black man telling us what to do, we’re supposed to just sit back and take eight years of a woman bossing us around?" Is that really what men think? That if put in charge we'll boss them around and take their toys and not share? Because that's what they've done to us all these years so now it's payback time? Really??

I didn't vote for Donald Trump, but accept that he's the President. "Give him a chance," I've been told by one of the many men in my life (men I like and consider good friends). I'm trying. Like many women, I haven't forgotten POTUS's famous "Grab 'em by the p*ssy" comment. Why this doesn't offend all women deeply I still don't understand, but I also accept that not everyone has to think like me. Also, Mr. Trump isn't the first Pig in Chief we've had in the White House; he's just the most unapologetic about it. Bill Clinton was a pig. JFK was also a pig about women. (White House intern Mimi Alford wrote a book about her affair with President Kennedy, including that she gave Appointments Secretary David Powers a blowjob on the President's instruction, with JFK in the room.) Many men in my life -- men I consider to be good people, (mostly) non-sexist -- voted for Trump and still (mostly) like him. They assure me that terrible things for women aren't coming with Trump as President, and I try to believe them. I try. But I'm still waiting and watching.

Crime, Justice and Music

As I recently tweeted, September 14, 1974 was the anniversary of "I shot the sheriff" -- hitting #1 on music charts. The song was written by Bob Marley and performed by Eric Clapton (Windell, 2015). This is not the only time that the theme of crime or justice has come up in music.

Sammy Hagar has sung about his propensity to speed. Before the dark web, AC/DC famously offered a variety of methods of disposing of a nagging spouse ("concrete shoes, cyanide, TNT... high VOLTAGE!") at cost effective prices. Johnny Cash sang "Folsom Prison Blues" at Folsom Prison. Bob Dylan sang of the wrongful incarceration -- still an issue today -- of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter. Years before the #BlackLivesMatter movement took off, N.W.A. rapped about strained police-community relations. Similar frustrations with police, racial profiling, and traffic stops were expressed by Chamillionaire in "Riding (dirty)". Canadian rapper Snow shares his unwillingness to rat out a friend in "Informer". Perhaps this is why, at the end of the video for the song, he and his friend end up together as prison cellmates. 

Then there are the many songs about substance use. George Thorogood has a few about alcohol: "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" and "I Drink Alone". And everyone likes to sing about cocaine, from Styx's "Snow Blind" to Eric Clapton's aptly-named "Cocaine". Jackson Browne also has a song of the same title ("Cocaine"). The inspiration for the Eagles' "Life in the Fast Lane" came from singer Glenn Frey riding in a car with a drug dealer who said those words to Mr. Frey, who thought "Now there's a song title." During his solo career period, Mr. Frey also co-wrote "Smuggler's Blues" about drug trafficking. Guns N' Roses "Mr. Brownstone" is about the band's heroin struggles. "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" by the Beatles is commonly thought to be about LSD. Bone Thugs are known for their love of marijuana (e.g., "The Weed Song", "Mary Mary"). It's unclear if Afroman's "Because I Got High" is a tribute to weed or a cautionary tale. 

Victimization themes come through in songs as well. Two that quickly come to mind are T.I.'s "Dead and Gone", a tribute song to his murdered friend Philant Johnson. "I'll be missing you" is also a tribute to Notorious B.I.G. by his wife, Faith Evans and Puff Daddy. Eminen and Rihanna tell the tale of a physically and emotionally abusive couple in "Love the Way You Lie". Violence is a theme in a few other Rihanna songs as well, particularly "Man Down" (homicidal revenge after a rape) and "Russian Roulette".

I'm sure there are many others I've forgotten. Feel free to comment below to add some.

Pregnant on September 11th

I remember September 11th, 2001 very clearly. I was eight months pregnant - very, very pregnant - at the time and generally moving slowly. Working in Newark, NJ at the time -- and running late on that particular day due to oversleeping (pregnancy fatigue) -- I was on Bergen Street, I think, waiting to turn left to begin hunting for parking. Z100 radio station was on, I believe. Sometime around 9:00am, one of the DJ's announced that a plane had flown into one of the World Trade towers. It wasn't known at that point that the hit was intentional. Probably just a terrible accident, was my thought.

Photo source: TheBump.com

Managing to find parking, I waddled along the sidewalk slowing making my way to my office. I noticed that people were standing, not moving, staring in the direction of New York City. The street is elevated enough that there was a view of the city, and the World Trade Center, even from 10 miles away in Newark. Smoke was pouring out of one of the towers. The plane! I thought. At the time both towers were still standing.

In the office, everyone clustered around a radio, listening for details. Word came through that the other tower was hit. The terrible realization: Oh my God, we're under attack! 

Photo source: USAToday.com

Our boss dismissed us shortly thereafter. By the time I left, one or both of the towers were down. Manhattan without the World Trade Center was bizarre to think about. Hadn't they always been there? And now... they were gone? Driving home, I suddenly remembered a high school friend -- also 8 months pregnant -- who worked in one of the banks at Ground Zero in Manhattan. Oh dear God, NO!!

As soon as I got home, I called my friend. Fortunately, she had overslept that morning too. Panicking when she woke up, she had been in such a rush to get to work that she didn't kiss her husband goodbye, she recalled. Her oversleeping saved her life, as both towers were down by the time she was on the NYC subway. After numerous tries, she managed to get a message through to her husband -- who by then was in a full-blown panic -- that she was okay. She was alive. Our kids were born a month later, two days apart.

Three days after the 9/11 attack, co-workers threw me a surprise baby shower at work. I was grateful, but confessed to a colleague that it felt like a strange time -- maybe the wrong time -- to be bringing a child into the world. A world that suddenly felt much less safe.  

October 2001, motherhood day 1. For better or worse, it's been quite the journey. Still is. 

Women in Policing - Then and Now

Photo source: http://www.huntingtonbeachca.gov/government/departments/pd/employment_opportunity/women-in-policing.cfm

As I recently commented on Twitter, September 10th is the anniversary of Alice Stebbins Wells becoming one of the early female officers, signing up with Los Angeles Police Department in 1910 (Windell, 2015). Marie Owens, who joined the Chicago PD in 1891, may actually lay claim to the title of THE first woman police officer. Women began joining police agencies in other countries as well in the early 1900s. Just yesterday, it was announced in local news that NVMPD police recruit Andrea Martinez won the Miss Nevada pageant and is now competing to be Miss America 2018 in Atlantic City, NJ. A woman of color, she states her goal of improving police-community relations.

According to the National Center for Women and Policing, women still make up only about 13 percent of police nationally. Women bring a different skill set to the job, are less likely to use force against citizens, and may be less likely to incur complaints. Some research shows that women police have not made great progress in attaining supervisory positions within their organizations.

Looking around my undergraduate criminal justice courses, I have as many female as male students. Most of these young women want to go into policing in some capacity (local, federal). How far we've come, how far there still is to go.

Why HBO's Insecure is So Much Better than Girls

The season 2 finale of HBO's show Insecure is approaching this coming Sunday, and I can't wait. 

Image: Issa Rae, creator & star of Insecure; Photo source: http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/enICWEUMsSW/HBO+s+Insecure+Block+Party

Series synopses are described elsewhere (e.g., Wikipedia, HBO.com/Insecure) so I won't go into too much detail other than to say the show is about two young Black women friends in their mid- to late-twenties, and their experiences with careers and co-workers, friendships (with each other and others), dating and sex. Since it's the second HBO show in recent times focusing on the perspectives of young women -- Girls being the other -- mental comparisons are inevitable. 

Insecure is a much, much better show. Here's why.

The writing is better for Insecure. The randomness of the Girls story lines was always irritating, and over the many seasons I kept waiting for it to improve. It never did. I stopped watching halfway through the first episode of the final season and never went back. 

The characters in Insecure are more well-rounded, focusing on multiple life issues. Unlike Girls' Hannah, Marnie et al., Issa and Molly don't just focus on guys. Molly (played by Yvonne Orji) has to navigate being one of the few African Americans working at a largely White and male law firm. While issues of race, identity, and professional recognition come into play, Molly's experiences transcend race, IMHO, and speak to all women. Fast forward ten years, one can imagine Molly navigating work, marriage, motherhood, childcare arrangements, and making partner at the firm -- as many women (Black, White, Hispanic, Asian) similarly do. 

Issa (played by series creator Issa Rae) works for a non-profit after-school program, offering academic and homework assistance, and mentoring to middle school students. Among the ideas put forth are Issa's successes and failures at recruiting snarky adolescents for the program; having to answer questions about her hair, why she's not married, and whether she made the right choice in choosing to work for a non-profit organization; whether her White co-workers are excluding her from meetings and emails; and her financial worries. (In season 2, Issa wrecks her car and doesn't quite have the money to fix it.) These are issues that speak to many young (and not-so-young) adults. In season 1, Issa turns 29 and reflects on whether her life -- professionally, romantically, self-confidence-wise -- is where she wants it to be. This is a universal question that anyone might ask themselves at 29, 39, 49, and beyond. 

By contrast, over the various episodes of Girls, the audience learned a little about the characters' professional ambitions. But never too much. Jessa (played by Jemima Kirke) is studying to be a therapist of some sort, and Adam (Hannah's ex) is paying for it. We never learn anything more about how that goes. (Does she graduate? Land a job?) In fact, the scenario seems more of a lead in for the main point that Jessa stole Hannah's ex-boyfriend! Shoshanna (played by Zosia Mamet) ditched a boyfriend in one season to follow a career opportunity to Japan. This was going well, and Shoshanna seemed to just love it... except that none of that was true. Counter to what her character explains at the beginning of the episode, she doesn't really love it (for reasons that are never made clear); she's terribly lonely; and only wants to return home. In a later episode or season, she becomes some sort of political campaigner for Ray (Alex Karpovsky). Very little is done with the character after that. Throughout the series, various characters let the audience know that Hannah Horvath (played by series creator Lena Dunham) is a great writer. Not that she seems to do much writing or ever really commit to it. 

Despite its name, Girls seems to be mainly focused on the characters' relationships with guys, and even this has a random, meandering feel to it. In one episode, Hannah is headed off for the summer with then-boyfriend Fran (Jake Lacy). Except that she doesn't want to, doesn't love him. Abruptly abandoning him while they make a pit stop (leaving her luggage and all possessions [wallet, phone, etc.] behind), she gets a ride back to the city from Ray, wearing only a bikini. This makes about as much sense as anything else in the show.  

Girls has been criticized for the lack of racial diversity in its casting. Hank Steuver recently wrote in the Washington Post that "[t]he talking we did about Hannah and Marnie in 'Girls' far outweighs the talks we skipped about Issa and Molly in 'Insecure.' Let’s not pretend we don’t know why." I assume he's referring to race, and that Insecure has garnered less attention (if in fact that's the case) because people assume it's a 'Black' show. If so, that's too bad because the show's themes go beyond race and speak to a larger audience. That, plus it's just terrific TV.

Raising a Feminist Daughter in the Instagram Age

How do the parents of daughters raise them to be girls of substance? Raise them to be young women who will make some effort, big or small, to improve the lives of other women and girls? To make a meaningful contribution to the world in general?

In particular, how is this done in the age of Instagram and other electronic media?

If you have a child over the age of - what, 12? 10? 8? - chances are s/he has some or many social media accounts. Log into your child's account on any given day and you may encounter an image like this:

(Image source: Sabina Mussaeva,

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/423690277426210377/)

 

In the U.S., 2016 was the year of two female candidates for President, one of them a serious contender. Last November, droves of American women voted for Hillary Clinton, and then visited the grave of Susan B. Anthony to post "I voted" stickers on the headstone.

In this same period, log into your daughter's Instagram account on another given day, and you might see an image like this:

(Image source: https://favim.com/image/2658410/)

Or this:

(Image source: https://www.pinterest.com/Theylovecyn/b-a-d-d-i-e-s/)

 

(Caveat: While none of the images in this blog post were specifically taken from Instagram -- I use Facebook, not Instagram -- I've seen images very much like these come across my daughter's Instagram scroll.)

In November 2017, New Jerseyans may elect a female Governor, Kim Guadagno, the current Lieutenant Governor to Chris Christie. (Or not, given Gov. Christie's recent shut-down-the-beaches-except-for-my-family-and-me fiasco.) Is the possibility of a female Governor exciting? Sure, to me. To my teenage daughter, probably not (although she'll humor me by pretending to be interested) compared to this:

(Image source: http://weheartit.com/cassie_tay/collections/40132630-friends-selfies)

Or this:

(Image source: http://www.tomorrowoman.com/leisure/18-girls-selfies/17/)

Why is there so much vapid, overly sexualized, dumbed-down imagery of women so easily available to anyone and everyone, including our daughters? Why do women participate in it? With all due respect to Miley Cyrus, what is the deal with sticking one's tongue out for a selfie? I still don't understand what message, if any, that's supposed to communicate. 'I have a tongue!' Well... yes.

And most importantly, what lasting effect will this have on young women, now that readily-available images like those shown above have become part of the cultural norm?

To return to the original question, what's the secret to ensuring that you're raising feminist daughters in the social media age? Taking them into the voting booth on election day while they're teenagers, and - once they turn 18 - making sure they're registered to vote (and go vote)? Discussing the importance of the approaching 100-year anniversary of the 19th Amendment (women's voting rights)? Having them read The Second Sex? Let me know if you figure it out.

What I learned about High School Popularity from my Teenage Daughter

I was not popular in high school. How bad I’ve felt or didn’t feel about this fact has waxed and waned over the years. Not that I didn’t have friends – I did. Other non-popular, smart kids I knew through high school band, of which I was a member. Kids I knew from the school’s honor society and drama club. And through the German square dancing club for those of us studying German. It was supervised by our German teacher. Fun, but still… Can there be any high school club more uncool that this? Probably not. As a middle aged adult, I have rarely thought about high school; ignore mailings about ten-year reunions; and have mostly lost touch with my high school friends apart from the annual holiday Christmas card from one or two of them. Life is full now with family and work.  

2017 is the year my perspective on high school popularity shifted.

Backstory: At the end of my sixth grade year, for parental work-related reasons my family moved from our working class town known mostly because it’s home to a prison. It was kind of a rough place to grow up, and most residents as I remember it were poor or poor-ish, including us. During my one year of middle school there, I remember daily fist fights, or at least the awareness that there might be a brawl. Somehow, I fell in with a fairly popular group of kids for reasons I couldn’t tell you now. Maybe because one of the ring-leaders lived near me, and had been my friend in fifth grade.

Then my family moved to a very different town in New Jersey. The socio-economic level of the new town was much higher. Adolescence is a hard time to make a geographic change. On top of that, there was a bit of a culture shock. The new town had a big class divide, and many of my new friends lived in houses. We lived in an apartment. They had designer jeans. (Remember Jordache, Sassoon, and Gloria Vanderbilt?) I had no such jeans. These kids played video games – even owned their own game consoles – which I had never heard of (Pac Man, Atari).

When I began school in seventh grade in the new town, I found friends but also quickly became aware that they were not part of The Clique, as it was referred to. What determined membership in The Clique, as far as I could tell, was not the ability to physically fight well (unlike in my old town). No, in the new town it was good looks, money, and athletic ability that begot popularity. The stereotypical jocks and cheerleaders. (The 1987 movie Can’t Buy Me Love starring Patrick Dempsey [later of Gray’s Anatomy fame] reminded me a lot of my high school climate.) I, on the other hand, was shy, smart, not rich, pale, prettyish, and otherwise a bit of a misfit. This is not a unique situation, I am aware. Fortunately, I made some new friends and found my place in my new school. I endured adolescence, survived high school, had a few boyfriends, graduated, went on to college, and life went on. High school was neither great nor terrible. It just was. And then it was over. Post-high school life has been much better.

Did I want to be part of The Clique? Not especially, only it bothered me to know that I wouldn’t have been accepted into it had I wanted to be. The exclusionary nature of it bugged me. This is the point of cliques, I suppose – it’s only fun if everyone can’t get it. (A friend’s daughter is currently coming to terms with not being accepted into the PPP – Perfect, Pretty & Popular – group, and being instead relegated to the Leftovers. Different year, different town, same idea.) What I knew of the popular girls from some classes I shared with a few of them was that they were pretty – some very pretty - but not particularly smart, or nice. They passed a lot of notes. They weren’t involved in any clubs I knew about apart from the occasional student council member. They did go to weekend sporting events (football!), and from what I heard threw exciting, booze-filled parties on the weekend. I’d heard there were drugs there. (This was confirmed years later when I befriended someone – by then a recovering drug addict – who used to sell drugs to them for these parties.) And sex happened at these parties, or at least that was what I heard. Oh, and the popular girls really liked boys. And shopping. And boys. And manicures. And boys. Did I mention they liked boys? A lot.

Fast forward 30 years and I find myself the mother of a high school teenage girl. (Young woman is probably a more accurate term, even if it sounds a little clunky. Female teenager, maybe?) Unlike me my daughter is pretty enough and funny enough and whatever-enough to be accepted into her school’s version of the popular group. This has afforded me an up-close look at what I was missing in high school.

Not much.

Comparing my daughter’s experience running with the popular kids – I’ll call them the Westtown Crew – to my own high school experience has shed some light on a few points:

(1) Less popular kids are more interesting. Girls in the Westtown Crew like to go shopping (Victoria Secret!), get mani-pedis, buy fancy Starbucks drinks, walk around Westtown and gossip, go shopping (Victoria Secret!), take selfies, flirt with boys, go shopping (Victoria Secret!), get mani-pedis, rinse and repeat. Non-Westtown Crew girls make independent films, sing in the State choir, travel to Peru as part of service learning trips abroad, and act in plays.

(2) Less popular kids are much nicer and make better friends. They’re actually concerned if you don’t show up to school or lunch one day. Popular kids gossip about each other and laugh at friends’ misfortune and spread mean rumors. For fun.  

(3) It’s all about the boys. Boys who are handsome, athletic, and mean. Even though girls are a vital part of the Westtown Crew, they spend lots and lots of time talking about boys, texting about boys, flirting with boys, agonizing about boys, etc., etc., etc. (Text message from the female leader of the Westtown Crew, 16 years old: “John [not his real name] and I r so serious now we talk about getting married having kids.” And then two texts later: “I love him very much but I know I was happier with Ted [not his real name] but what if he leaves again.” And then two texts later: “And there is stuff that John does that Ted doesn’t do.”) Despite all the female energy in the Westtown Crew, boys’ wants and needs and whims are of central importance to the girls, more so I suspect than the reverse.

I recall an incident from my own high school days. A class trip to some estate that had several acres of grounds that we all got to run around. We explored the nearby woods and played capture the flag. It was fun. Then I noticed the girls from The Clique, lying down on towels sunbathing in bikinis while the rest of us were running around in shorts and t-shirts. One Clique girl sat up at one point, looked around to see who might be noticing (perhaps she was wondering where the guys were), and then lay back down.

My daughter no longer runs with the Westtown Crew, to the relief of her dad and me. Even though it’s for the best, transitioning to new friends is never easy or quick, particularly for adolescents. I tell her that in the grand scheme of her life, what happens in high school will matter little, if at all. She doesn’t know this yet. How could she? But she will.

As for me, I no longer care – at all – about having been unpopular in high school. I was in the better clique the whole time, and finally know it.