Althouse

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• Answering my question what the hell is that song stuck in my head.
• "I can hear the hurt and frustration over colorism, of feeling still unseen in the feedback. I hear that without sufficient dark-skinned Afro-Latino representation, the work feels extractive..."
• "Articles on use of pornography by young people often point out how boys can come to believe that the abusive and misogynistic things that happen are normal and right..."
• "It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear."
• "There was an unspoken understanding among women that we were on a collective and never-ending diet. It was a hellish time..."
• "[F]or some men, seeking sex with a sleeping woman is an active preference, a fetish known as somnophilia."
• "Stop joking about your lockdown weight gain – it reeks of fatphobia."
• "I am not concerned with whether or not fat people can change their bodies through self-discipline and 'choices.'"
• "To say that fatphobia is not connected to anti-Blackism is to not understand the deep-rooted history between the two."
• Sunrise, 5:20.

Answering my question what the hell is that song stuck in my head. Posted: 15 Jun 2021 01:52 PM PDT From Romper: Into the thick of it! Into the thick of it! Into the thick of it! Ugh! If that little ditty is stuck in your head, you can thank the Nick Jr. children's show The Backyardigans. But Pablo, Tyrone, Uniqua, Tasha, and Austin aren't behind just one viral trend on TikTok right now; the animal pals also sing "Castaways," the smooth samba you've been hearing on your "For You" feed. That's right, "Into the Thick of It" and "Castaways" are from The Backyardigans, which aired on Nick Jr. from 2004 to 2013. If you don't know these songs, you can click through and hear them or just count yourself lucky and save yourself while you still can. Backyardigans, indeed. ADDED: Two-eyed Jack writes, "You obviously need to watch this:"

"I can hear the hurt and frustration over colorism, of feeling still unseen in the feedback. I hear that without sufficient dark-skinned Afro-Latino representation, the work feels extractive..." Posted: 15 Jun 2021 12:59 PM PDT ".... of the community we wanted so much to represent with pride and joy. In trying to paint a mosaic of this community, we fell short. I'm truly sorry. I'm learning from the feedback, I thank you for raising it, and I'm listening."  Tweets Lin-Manuel Miranda, quoted in "Lin-Manuel Miranda Addresses Lack of Afro-Latino Representation in 'In the Heights': 'We Fell Short'" (Variety).  Here's the criticism that caused him to go straight to apology mode: DAMN DAMN DAMN THIS IS PAINFUL pic.twitter.com/A4TOwYwHlb — numa perrier (@missnuma) June 13, 2021 By the way, that's an interesting use of the word "extractive" — "without sufficient dark-skinned Afro-Latino representation, the work feels extractive." Is that a new usage? The OED has the adjective "extractive," but in the sense of "extractive industries" — like the coal industry, where a resource is extracted.  Miranda does not want to have merely extracted material from the community — Washington Heights in NYC. He wants to represent it. To extract is to treat the people like an inanimate resource — like, say, coal. He wants to treat people like people, not things. But you may question whether matching the colors of the actors to the colors of the people in the neighborhood is the way to treat people like people. And yet I think you can tell that what was done was to pick extraordinarily beautiful people, so there is some sense that this is a statement about who is most beautiful. Now that I've put it that way, I can see that the people of the neighborhood could also assail him for not showing a representative cross-section of good-, bad-, and middling-looking people.  What is this movie anyway? Is it a celebration of diversity? If so, then the complaints come with the territory. I see the movie has a 96% "fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes, so it's slathered in praise. The dissenting viewpoint seems to come from conservatives, e.g., National Review. Let's read that (by Armond White, who is black): Miranda composed his 2008 show about New York City's Dominican Republic enclave in Washington Heights as if he was putting its non-white immigrant community on display. It's the same local-color concept handed down from Porgy and Bess, West Side Story, Zoot Suit, and Do the Right Thing. Miranda shamelessly pilfers all four but goes light on sociological angst.... Whose idea was it to hand Puerto Rican Miranda's shallow Dominican folktale over to Jon M. Chu, director of Crazy Rich Asians, the most ethnically fake, aggressively woke movie of 2018? In the era when racial groups complain about not being "seen," Chu depicts the Other as outsiders see them: diversity stereotypes, proud ethnic minions.... And yet, In the Heights's phony "communal" style suits Miranda's inauthentic Broadway rap. He owes his breakthrough to Eminem's white hip-hop "breakthrough" — it's too fast, nonsensual, and bloodless.... Miranda's cultural misappropriation in In the Heights is the grotesque product of a mainstream culture that seeks a Latino figure who is acceptable precisely because he is politically and artistically nonthreatening.

"Articles on use of pornography by young people often point out how boys can come to believe that the abusive and misogynistic things that happen are normal and right..." Posted: 15 Jun 2021 08:45 AM PDT "... which might cause them to be too aggressive. But parents should not ignore the opposite effect on many girls, who see these videos and think 'if I act subservient and cool with whatever they want to do to my body, that will make me popular and boys will like me.' I'm not victim-blaming. I know of what I speak and I think it's an important part of the conversation." That's the top-rated comment — by a lot — on the NYT article "If You Ignore Porn, You Aren't Teaching Sex Ed" by Peggy Orenstein.

"It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear." Posted: 15 Jun 2021 06:52 AM PDT On November 24, 2020, on Jimmy Kimmel's TV show, James Taylor performed a song from the 1949 musical "South Pacific," "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught": This was a daring song in its time, Wikipedia notes:  [The song was] judged by some to be too controversial or downright inappropriate for the musical stage. Sung by the character Lieutenant Cable, the song is preceded by a line saying racism is "not born in you! It happens after you're born..."... James Michener, upon whose stories South Pacific was based, recalled, "The authors [of the musical, Rodgers and Hammerstein] replied stubbornly that this number represented why they had wanted to do this play, and that even if it meant the failure of the production, it was going to stay in." I love James Taylor — the warmth, the non-corny sincerity — and I don't know why he selected that song from the set of things he put on his "American Standard" album. The album came out November 1, 2020, and the performance was shortly after the election. I imagine the choice had something to do with the idea that Americans had just voted out a President who, for many people, embodied a message of racial hatred.  But YouTube pushed it at me the other day, as I was reading about recent efforts to teach young children about racism and thinking how sad — how immoral — it was to be teaching children that they are hated,  that they are repositories of hate, and that you need to understand — whether you can see it yet are not — that this is a world of hate. Lyrics from 1949: You've got to be taught to hate and fear  You've got to be taught from year to year  It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear  You've got to be taught to be afraid  Of people whose eyes are oddly made  And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade  You've got to be carefully taught  You've got to be taught before it's too late  Before you are six or seven or eight  To hate all the people your relatives hate  You've got to be carefully taught

"There was an unspoken understanding among women that we were on a collective and never-ending diet. It was a hellish time..." Posted: 15 Jun 2021 05:35 AM PDT "... but it seemed completely normal. And I haven't even touched on Bridget Jones.... a film series portraying a 130lb woman as a disgusting sad lump....  Of course this is not to suggest that millennials are the first or last generation to be subject to unattainable beauty standards. While the body positivity movement has done so much to shift the conversations we have about our bodies, Gen-Zers are already beginning to deconstruct their own relationship to TikTok and Instagram's faux empowerment of the 'slim thicc' ideal-type. I mourn the life I could have lived if the Nineties had just let me weigh what I weighed." From "Millennials were traumatised by Nineties fatphobia" (Evening Standard). "Slim-thicc" refers to an overweight woman with a relatively small waist and a somewhat flat stomach. It seems to be fat acceptance within the narrow range of the conventional appreciation of voluptuousness. That is, you can weigh a lot and look great but only if it's distributed according to a certain traditional preference. That's the ideal that, in the future, Gen-Zers will look back on in articles about what traumatized them in the 2020s.

"[F]or some men, seeking sex with a sleeping woman is an active preference, a fetish known as somnophilia." Posted: 15 Jun 2021 05:06 AM PDT "Svein Overland, a Norwegian psychologist, is one of the few to have studied it.... Overland believes somnophilia is part of the wider growth of what he calls 'one-way sex.' His research into online porn showed a steep rise over the past decade in categories such as 'sleeping sex,' as well as other forms of sex that are based on unresponsiveness, on only meeting your own needs. ('Flexi dolls' is another example – where women pretend to be sex dolls.) These preferences overlap with porn itself, says Overland. 'With one-way sex, with porn, with masturbation, there's no dance, no seduction, no interaction and no pressure to perform,' he says. 'The more I looked at this area, the more you see that a lot of men are afraid of having sex. Society is becoming more pornified but, at the same time, many studies show that people are becoming less sexually active. We have young men buying Viagra, unable to keep an erection.'... As a kink between two consenting adults, somnophilia comes with rules and (problematic) terms such as 'blanket consent' and 'consensually non-consensual.'" From "The sexual assault of sleeping women: the hidden, horrifying rape crisis in Britain's bedrooms" (The Guardian).

"Stop joking about your lockdown weight gain – it reeks of fatphobia." Posted: 15 Jun 2021 07:37 AM PDT Writes Adwoa Darko (in Metro). The policing of "fatphobia" has reached the point where joking about your own struggle with weight gain is becoming unacceptable. ADDED: Reader JPS emails, "I think Adwoa Darko would spontaneously combust if she saw KD French's 'She's At The Fridge Again,' from last August. I think it's hilarious, and beautifully done" and links to this:

"I am not concerned with whether or not fat people can change their bodies through self-discipline and 'choices.'" Posted: 15 Jun 2021 04:50 AM PDT "Pretty much all of them have tried already. A couple of them have succeeded. Whatever. My question is, what if they try and try and try and still fail? What if they are still fat? What if they are fat for ever? What do you do with them then? Do you really want millions of teenage girls to feel like they're trapped in unsightly lard prisons that are ruining their lives, and on top of that it's because of their own moral failure, and on top of that they are ruining America with the terribly expensive diabetes that they don't even have yet? You know what's shameful? A complete lack of empathy." Wrote Lindy West, quoted in "Farewell to Shrill: truly radical TV that laughs in the face of fatphobia" (The Guardian). West wrote that in 2011 in a piece titled "Hello, I Am Fat" (Stranger). The current TV show — "Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman" — is based on it. According to the article in The Guardian, "Shrill encapsulates the constant politics of being a fat person."

"To say that fatphobia is not connected to anti-Blackism is to not understand the deep-rooted history between the two." Posted: 15 Jun 2021 05:14 AM PDT "During the late seventeenth century, body type was used as a marker for racial categorization. Scientific racism led to the attribution of other signifiers, besides skin color, to justify the horrendous treatment of the enslaved. Body size became way to dehumanize and demonize Black people. The robust figures of Black women's became associated with immorality, laziness, and lack of self-control— painting a stark contrast with the 'rationality' and 'refinement' of Europeans. Thinness became associated with whiteness and intellectual and moral superiority."  From "These 7 Black Influencers and Bloggers Are Challenging Fatphobia" (Ebony). AND: "Despite the fact that intersectionality lies in the very groundwork of our community, the conversation around size inclusivity often remains white-focused. Efforts to uplift more marginalized voices within the plus-size space — particularly of Black women, who originated the body positive movement — have often neglected an important experience: that of the Asian American Pacific Islander community" — from "The Unique Experience of Navigating Fatphobia Within the AAPI Community" (Nylon).

Sunrise, 5:20. Posted: 14 Jun 2021 06:13 PM PDT

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