Polina Skibinskaya - Author, Editor

Rasul Guliyev Accuses Azerbaijan Government of Pilfering Billions

2011-11-27T11:57:00.003-05:00

Former Speaker of the National Assembly of Azerbaijan Rasul Guliyev has written an interesting analysis (translated by yours truly) of the current state of Azerbaijan in the context of the Arab Spring.

I don't always agree with Rasul - for example, I think any discussion of per capita budget numbers is pointless without taking into account how the budget is actually distributed: even the most generous per capita numbers lose their significance when the majority of funds ends up in the pockets of a small elite. But despite our disagreements, Rasul's works are always thought-provoking, and very educational. Every time I work with him, I feel like I should be getting a college credit just from all the research I have to do!

You can read the article here.

Torchwood: Miracle Day - All About Ianto?

2011-09-21T10:06:00.006-04:00

One of the first things a writer (or a keen reader) realizes is that everything is autobiographical. Some writers wear this fact proudly; others like to hide it under layers and layers of distancing tricks; but the fact remains: a careful reader can always pick up the fictional threads that lead back to the writer's reality.

Digging through my favorite writers' heads is one of my favorite pastimes. As such, Russel T Davies has a wonderfully big one to roam around in. Brash, outspoken, confrontational, Davies wears his convictions on his sleeve, unapologetic about his radicalism. People (like myself) whose politics are in line with his might see him as an activist, a champion who screams the things too many people are afraid to whisper. Others wish he'd just shut the hell up.

Activists are driven by emotion. Some may be more diplomatic than others, but deep down, only powerful, overwhelming, undeniable emotion that keeps you up at night can force you to fashion yourself into an object of scorn and hatred. You don't make yourself a target for fun - you do it because otherwise the anger will asphyxiate you.

But writing - and especially television writing - is a highly structured affair. It demands a seemingly impossible feat: making best friends of raw, overwhelming emotion and iron-fisted control. Too much restraint, and the writing falls flat, failing to ignite the passion of the audience. Not enough restraint, and the anger will spin out of control and crash and burn like a war plane on fire.

This is exactly what seems to have happened with Torchwood: Miracle Day. For once, it felt like Davies couldn't quite force his anger into the structure of a storyline. And I think by retracing our steps, we can figure out what went wrong.

Miracle Day stands in stark contrast to the last installment of Torchwood. The powerful Children of Earth wasn't lacking in emotion - passionate rage burns through the show's exploration of the class system, the government's ongoing betrayal of its electorate, the self-hatred that makes us our own worst enemies, and the impotence of trying to make yourself heard. And yet all these beautiful literary gifts seemed overshadowed by the fans' insane overreaction to the death of Ianto Jones.

Russel T Davies made the mistake of demanding maturity from his audience. And the audience would have none of it. In the wake of Children of Earth, along with near-uniform critical praise, Davies was subjected to a torrent of vicious attacks - even death threats - from viewers who refused to accept the powerful emotional experience Davies was offering them. Even his family wasn't spared by angry fans.

This reaction seemed completely out of place in the context of a show like Torchwood, where one main character was killed off in the very first episode and two more died at the end of the season immediately preceding Children of Earth. For some inexplicable reason, an extremely vocal group of fans seemed to think they were watching Hustle instead - a show of perpetually happy endings, solid structure, fun storylines, and complete absence of even the slightest pretense of emotional involvement. Now, don't get me wrong, Hustle is a pleasant little distraction - but it's no Torchwood.

In the context of viciousness directed at Davies after Children of Earth, Miracle Day almost feels like a direct response to the Ianto crazies. You want a show where nobody ever dies? Davies seemed to be saying. Well, here you go. As the show constructed an argument for the value of death in both fiction and reality, dialog seemed to be addressed more and more explicitly to the Ianto brigade. "You know what, let him die," Rhys tells Gwen in the last episode. "Bless the poor bugger, he's had his time." He is talking about Gwen's father - but he might as well be talking about Ianto Jones.

There is a marked difference between the anger we might feel towards a government that has betrayed us, and the anger we might feel towards people who are personally threatening our family. It's the latter that seems to fuel Torchwood: Miracle Day. This very personal, protective, primal rage has nothing to do with reason, or politics, or least of all structure. It's blinding - and as such, it's not the best foundation for writing. In Miracle Day, potentially powerful storylines come and go, never quite making the artistic and political statement they are intended to make - it's as if Davies feels like he has an obligation to address certain things, but keeps losing interest. Other elements seem to be introduced solely for the benefit of the Ianto brigade: the "Dead is Dead" movement, which could potentially serve as a springboard for serious sociopolitical discussion, is reduced to a mere taunt aimed at Ianto fans, not a whole lot more mature than the people it addresses. Even the show's closing scene seems to be designed to stick it to the "Bring Ianto Back" people.

Despite all this, Torchwood: Miracle Day still manages to be highly entertaining - a testament to Russel T Davies' underlying talent and to the show's two remaining stars, John Barrowman (Captain Jack Harkness) and Eve Myles (Gwen "Rambo" Cooper). I even found its failings strangely satisfying, in a purely juvenile way. The Ianto brigade had managed to hijack the discussion of Torchwood: Children of Earth, viciously shouting down anyone who dared to like the show and generally behaving like rabid dogs even PETA wouldn't defend. As a fan of Torchwood and Russel T Davies, I found myself cheering Davies' jabs at the people I found so excruciatingly annoying last time around. But it's hard to ignore that, in a very real sense, the same people still dominate the discussion of Miracle Day. This time around, however, they didn't have to hijack it - this time, Davies simply handed over the steering wheel.

Let's hope he got it out of his system.

An interview with Bi Women

2011-06-01T12:32:00.002-04:00

Bi Women is a quarterly journal published by the Boston Bisexual Women's Network. A few months back, Editor Robyn Ochs interviewed me for the Bi Women Around the World column.

You can read my interview - and, in fact, the entire issue - here.

Check out my short story Changes at SexLife Canada

2011-01-18T19:28:00.004-05:00

SexLifeCanada.ca, the home of The National Sexlife Journal, recently started a new fiction section. My hardcore short story Changes is one of the first two pieces of fiction ever featured on the site! You can read it in the Hot Words section.

Changes was first published in Men Magazine in March 2006, along with a very explicit full-page illustration. Can we have a vote on whether or not I should scan it in? ;P

Kiran interviewed by Toronto's OMNI News

2010-12-16T17:22:00.004-05:00

On 6 December 1989, an armed man entered Montreal's l'Ecole Polytechnique and with the screams of "I hate feminists," murdered 14 female engineering students. Protests that they weren't feminists didn't save these women. The fact that they were in a university classroom, studying to be engineers, was enough to condemn them in the eyes of this self-professed warrior.

The attack became known as the Montreal Massacre.

Since then, 6 December became National Day of Action and Remembrance on Violence Against Women. Still, and more women seem quick to disown feminism while living a feminist life. The refrain of "I'm not a feminist" has become way too common among young women who work, go to universities, live alone or with their boyfriends, choose whether and when they have children, and do a million small things women before feminism couldn't imagine doing.

So if they live a life afforded them by feminism, can they really disown it without disowning their entire lives?

Of course it's actions, not words, that truly matter. Maybe it doesn't matter that so many younger women seem to react with seething hatred to the word "feminism." As long as they keep living their feminist lives, the notion that women and men are equal will be just fine, regardless of what happens to the label.

To commemorate the Montreal Massacre, Toronto's Women Won't Forget hold a candlelit vigil on the UofT campus. This year, Kiran was invited to read her beautifully life-affirming poem The Love Manifesto. Before her performance at the vigil, Toronto's South Asian Omni News chatted with Kiran about her own experience with violence.

To watch the report, go to the Omni News website, wait for the annoying ad to end, then scroll to the beginning of the news segment about the vigil at 3:59.

Kiran is featured on the University of Toronto's Anthropology page

2010-11-11T14:40:00.007-05:00

Kiran is currently taking Anthropology 323 at the UofT (and acing it, though if you tell her that she will not believe you), and her professor asked to feature her on the web page for the class! Kiran's short bio can be found here, at least until the end of the semester. And here, for posterity's sake, is the screencap:

Who you callin' a zombie? AMC's The Walking Dead Join the Tea Party

2010-10-30T18:47:00.008-04:00

Zombies are not exactly the darlings of serialized television. While the recent years have seen a great deal of excellent (and not so excellent) zombie movies, weekly TV has mostly steered clear of the subject. It’s easy to see why: unsexy, dull and slow, devoid of motivation and unable to deliver snappy one-liners, zombies might just be the most two-dimensional villain a show can have.

So why, then, do I find AMC’s new weekly drama The Walking Dead - a wall-to-wall zombiefest the likes of which serial television has never seen - so damn irresistible?

The North American political discourse has a rich history of dehumanizing the enemy. Whether it’s Communists hiding under our beds or immigrants coming to steal our jobs, the easy answer holds undeniable attraction: if our enemies are mindless hordes, then we are blameless - we’d done nothing to earn their hatred, they simply want to kill us for our freedoms (or our brains). The two-dimensional villain is the villain of America’s Tea Party movement; the villain of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh; and, closer to home, the villain that sent Toronto voters running scared to the polls to elect Rob Ford. And the zombie is about as dehumanized as an enemy can get.

If the two-dimensional zombie villain reflects our reluctance to examine our shortcomings, then The Walking Dead is an answer of sorts to Battlestar Galactica in America’s post-9/11 cultural polemic: where BSG tried, however successfully, to examine what makes an enemy, The Walking Dead turns fear of self-examination into a point of pride by focusing on an enemy that’s beyond examination. Our hero, the archetypal good cop Rick Grimes, played to great effect by Andrew Lincoln, simply wakes up in his hospital bed to find the world around him infested with zombies. The first episode gives no hint of questioning how the world got to be this way - and our bewildered but decidedly uncurious hero doesn’t seem to care. All he has to do is hang on to his all-American identity, signaled by his Georgia twang and his uniform, to which he clings long after the apocalypse has rendered it irrelevant.

And yet, here I am, one episode in and already hopelessly addicted. If The Walking Dead is, in fact, the Tea Party’s Battlestar Galactica, then it might just be the most entertaining piece of horror fiction the right wing has produced since Glenn Beck. But no matter how much I try to congratulate myself on being open-minded enough to enjoy the product of an ideology that I find abhorrent, or tell myself that I welcome the show’s insight into enemy mindset, I fear the real reason is much less flattering.

For I have my own hordes. Beyond the self-congratulatory attempts at understanding those who play the role of villain in my world, the desire for a simple answer is always there, gnawing at the edges of my consciousness. Each individual Tea Bagger, Rob Ford supporter, homophobe and xenophobe bases their ideology on hopes and fears that carry absolute validity in their individual life. Next to this quagmire of human psychology, the simplicity of zombies is worryingly comforting.

And there it is: the real reason I am hooked on The Walking Dead. I see right through the show’s attempt to dehumanize the villains of its world: the hordes of mindless zombies who are coming for our freedoms, jobs and brains, are people just like me. But so is Deputy Grimes. In the end, he’s not so different from a disenchanted hippie like myself, bewildered at the hordes that just keep coming and so, so tired of asking why.

Read an excerpt from Against the Tide by Rasul Bayram

2010-10-29T14:07:00.004-04:00

Rasul Bayram's book Against the Tide, translated by yours truly, has been doing respectable business on Amazon. You can now read a four-page excerpt on Rasul's official site.

US Religious Knowledge Survey Proves What Atheists Have Known All Along

2010-10-02T18:19:00.004-04:00

I see it all the time: to illustrate why she can't believe in her parent's religion, an atheist or agnostic kid quotes the ignorance, cruelty, or plain old contradiction contained in the parent's holy book - only to have the parent argue that the book doesn't really say that. The proof, of course, is easy to come by: the kid simply pulls the holy book off the parent's shelf, opens it to the right chapter, and points to the quote.

It's been a long-running joke among the nonbelievers that atheists know the holy books better than the faithful. For many people born into religion, a study of their family's religious text becomes the first step towards atheism. And it's no wonder: it must take some seriously dedicated willful ignorance not to notice the fact that the god of the book behaves more like the book's own devil, killing and torturing saints and sinners alike - or, at best, a petty warlord with a tiny penis, unsure of his power and terrified of the vagina.

A new study by the Pew Research Center gives credence to what the unbelievers have known for a while. A survey of nearly 3500 people in the US – the only developed country in the world in which religion still plays a significant social and political role – shows that atheists and agnostics know more about religion than the faithful, even – or should I say especially – when it comes to the faithful’s own doctrine. To the nonbelievers, this is a case of stating the obvious. We have long known that ignorance, willful or otherwise, is a necessary ingredient of religious faith.

When, at 17, I was transplanted from the atheist Soviet Union to the alien (and heavily religious) culture of the United States, I, like many other people, went looking for a Meaning. I read all three books of the Abrahamic religion, studied Buddhism and Hinduism, and even invited a Jew for Jesus home for dinner, to mostly hilarious results. To my shock, every page I read seemed to strengthen my familial atheism. Hinduism seemed like a quaint throwback to the simpler times (which might or might not have existed); Buddhism was useful but completely secular; and the Abrahamics – America’s scam of choice – seemed as idiotic and heavy-handed in their lies and cruelties as L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology. Far from being touched by the mystery of organized religion, the only mystery I saw was that of seemingly reasonable people believing such obvious bullshit.

Unexamined atheism might be as dangerous as any unexamined ideology – my birth country’s history certainly makes a strong case against it. I’m happy that I had the opportunity to study religious texts and history. It’s made me a better, stronger atheist. Today, I consciously know what I might, unconsciously, have felt all along: that life is too complex for a Meaning. Instead, it’s full of meanings, coming together and breaking apart in a beautiful and ever-changing dance of exuberant complexity that can’t be quelled by simplistic human faith.

Here's to Perfection

2010-09-02T01:26:00.004-04:00

Perfection comes in many forms. Shouldn't something perfectly awful be celebrated as much as something perfectly beautiful? Absence of talent can be just as monumental as its presence! So here's to the Mona Lisa of What the Fuck:

Once the initial spasms of laughter subsided, it occurred to me how closely the song echoes patriotic praise of Israel. In the mythologies of both Israel and Saudi Arabia, "no office were in desert no park were in desert no roads were in desert no cars were in desert" until the respective country turned things around. It's always interesting to see the similarities in the ideologies of sworn enemies.

Favorite line, because it's both poignant and hilarious: "students were zero now they are the million, hospitals were zero now they are the hundred"

Kiran Mehdee: The Burqa/Niqab ban controversy

2010-07-19T16:50:00.004-04:00

"Proving a point should not be more important than defending the human rights of individuals, no matter what culture they happen to be from. If liberal feminists ignore them, who among progressives will speak up about those women oppressed by patriarchy in “other” cultures, while we are busy defending the patriarchal structures that exist inside those countries and cultures? Why has it been left up to right-wing think tanks to challenge the most right-wing branches of Islam? Why is it fine and dandy if a Muslim woman is oppressed by Muslims, but not okay if she is told she has to show her face to confirm her identity, to communicate etc.?"

Read the rest of Kiran's passionate and carefully reasoned out article that argues for a regulation of the face veil as opposed to an outright ban at her blog.

Edited to add: the prestigious Online Journal picked up Kiran's article!

11 April 2011 - just as the Burqa ban goes into effect in France, Alternavox picks up Kiran's article!

Against the Tide by Rasul Bayram, translated by Polina Skibinskaya

2010-05-21T12:04:00.007-04:00

Xlibris Book Publishing Company has published Against the Tide by Rasul Bayram, translated from Russian by yours truly. The book follows two dynasties - a Lebanese Muslim family and a family of European Jews - through the creation of Israel after World War II and the escalating tensions in the Middle East. The story of two families, whose paths cross through several generations, is a crash course in proxy wars, identity politics, religious nationalism, and the transnational human toll of the Middle East conflict.
When it comes to politics, Rasul and I don't always see eye to eye. But while I don't share his respect for Reagan , I can't help but relate to the relationship at the heart of the book. The story of the two families trapped on the opposite sides of the conflict asks the simple, but necessary question: when superpowers collide, who pays the price?

Happy Draw Muhammad Day!

2010-05-20T00:19:00.005-04:00

Today, May 20th, is the first annual International Draw Muhammad Day. Here's to freedom from fear!

I must not draw Mohammed by Plantu, Le Monde

For those of you who, like me, can't even draw a stick figure, here is a wonderful archive of Muhammad images by people who can:

Mohammed Image Archive

The Limitless Spirituality of Atheism

2010-02-19T16:41:00.008-05:00

I believe that what we call spirituality is a natural extension of recognizing (consciously or subconsciously) that we are all part of a larger whole. The laws of physics tell us that everything is interconnected; everything impacts everything else. Whether we realize it or not, we feel a physical connection with the earth, the air, the tree under our window and the stars a billion light years away - we feel it because it is PHYSICALLY there. When we are conscious of this feeling, it becomes the basis for our own atheist spirituality which informs our ethics, completely divorced from the imposed, politically motivated fairy tales of religion that seek to limit (and often contradict) the limitless world around us.

People are afraid to leave their religion for various reasons: some are afraid of being ostracized by their families and communities; some are terrified of losing the rigid rules that guide their lives and having to figure things out for themselves; and some simply can't imagine living a life devoid of spirituality. There's little we can do about people's fear of personal responsibility. But we can do something about the fear of ostracism by offering religious people a welcoming, loving community on the other side of the divide. And most importantly, we can do something about the erroneous belief that without religion, a person's life is empty, lonely and full of fear. It is exactly the opposite - and it is up to us to say that. When we discuss atheism with religious people, I think it is important that we talk about this atheist spirituality based on provable, observable laws of physics, and impress upon them the awe and joy we feel - not towards an impossible and often malicious entity, but towards EVERYTHING, without limits, without conditions, and without demands.

We could use a word of our own, an atheist version of "spirituality" - or we can just feel the sense of awe and connection implied by the word without the need to label it. However, when we are talking to religious people, I do think we need to use terminology that is familiar to them. When we're dealing with people's fears that an absence of religion equals an empty, lonely, miserable life, the word "spirituality," I think, goes right to the core of their fears.

Religion claims that it is the source of that awe and connection - and I think the key to wrestling control away from religion is exactly this: showing, by concrete example, that these feelings not only don't originate in religion, but can be stronger without it when divorced from the fear and shame of religion.

Emma Rosenthal Tells It Like It Is

2010-02-12T22:53:00.004-05:00

Over the years, I've had many conversations with Jews and Gentiles, Zionists and anti-Semites, family members and strangers, trying to explain the -Zionist Jew phenomenon . The suggestion of our mere existence is often met with more disbelief than that of the Sasquatch.

But we do, indeed, exist. (The jury is still out on the Sasquatch - he might want to consider starting a blog.) Our existence is inconvenient, both to the anti-Semites who want to pretend all Jews think and act alike, and to the Zionists who want to do the same. What's more, our ranks seem to be growing. The more the Israeli government and Zionist organizations all over the world push to stifle criticism of their deplorable ideology and murderous actions, the more people push back.

Writer, teacher and human rights activist Emma Rosenthal formulates the reasons she is not a Zionist better than I ever could. She says:

I am not a Zionist because I believe in universal human rights and do not believe that the establishment of one more elite leadership based on nationalism, will bring about a more just world. I believe with all my being that an injustice to one is an injustice to all, that when one is oppressed, with each drop of blood that is shed, with each aspiration that is quashed, each of us is diminished in our capacities, each of us becomes more unsafe.

Read the rest of her excellent article Open Letter: Re: jewbitch ur a mental case? at Emma's Room.

Royal Shakespeare Company's HAMLET

2010-02-05T14:36:00.005-05:00

I've been CRAVING the Royal Shakespeare Company's Hamlet... We've watched it 3 times now, and I can't wait to see it again. I've seen tons of Hamlet productions which I loved - but with this one, I actually RELATE, truly and fully. This Hamlet is not mopy, a gentle soul done wrong - he's a sarcastic, vicious, spoiled brat fully aware of his superiority. His story is not the story of weakness as much as it's a story of strength thwarted. And the bastard is FUNNY!

So if this, of all the countless stage and screen productions I've seen, is the one I relate to the most, what does it say about me?

I can't recommend this version highly enough. If you've never quite bought the hype around the play (like Kiran, who always found it pompous and boring, and is now completely and utterly in love with it), this production will convince you. And if you've loved Hamlet all along (like my mom, a theater connoisseur who was highly skeptical before seeing this version, only to call me at 4am after watching it, choking on her tears), it will convince you that there's always something new to be found, even in a play as over-performed as this.

Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Refugees in Canada

2010-01-18T17:36:00.002-05:00

Canada is one of the few countries that recognize the danger gay, lesbian and transgender people of the world face on a daily basis. Long before the Canadian government legalized gay marriage, it began allowing Canadian citizens to sponsor their foreign same-sex partners for immigration the same way married and unmarried straight Canadians can sponsor their spouses living in other countries.

More importantly, the Canadian refugee claims system has long offered protection to gay, lesbian and transgender people fleeing persecution and violence in their native countries. Just like refugees escaping war and political violence, LGBT people from countries who practice institutionalized homophobia can come to Canada as refugees and enjoy the legal protection and financial help of the Canadian government.

Read more at Associated Content.

BLINK, and You'll Miss It: An Interesting Thought About the Ultimate Doctor Who Episode

2010-01-10T15:29:00.008-05:00

To celebrate (read: mourn) the 10th Doctor's departure, we've been rewatching all Doctor Who episodes starring David Tennant. As always, four stories stand out as perfect examples of everything that's great about this show: Blink, Midnight, Silence In the Library / Forest of the Dead, and Human Nature / The Family of Blood.

The fandom behind the show is so huge, lasting and intelligent that it's near impossible to say anything that hasn't been said before. But one thing about Blink seems to have slipped under everyone's radar: the episode is subtly, delightfully self-referential.

Self-referential art calls attention to its artifice: in a self-referential play, a character might talk directly to the audience, shedding the play's realism and acknowledging the audience's presence; a self-referential book might discuss the reader's reaction to its own story; and a self-referential movie might center around the behind-the-scenes world of moviemaking.

Blink breaks the imaginary "fourth wall" that divides the audience from the action, making the audience part of the events. But it does this in such a subtle way that it's taken me two viewings and several days of contemplation to even notice it: this is easily the sneakiest example of self-referentiality I've ever seen.

So how does Blink make the viewers part of the action? How does the fact that we are watching the episode influence the way the action unfolds? Let me know what you think!

Eight Predators Die During a Northern Performance Tour

2009-12-22T11:47:00.004-05:00

This morning, a friend from PETA contacted me and asked me to research the death of seven tigers and a lioness from a Russian circus. Exhausted after a long trip yesterday, I thought I'd do some quick research and go back to sleep. What I found out will keep me from sleeping for quite some time.

Here's a quick translation of the article that appears at Vesti.ru:

________________________________

In Yakutsk, posters and banners advertising a New Year show with tigers are being pulled down. The performance tour of Krasnodar tent circus “The Dream,” which has been selling out, has been cancelled. On the way to Yarkutsk, seven tigers and one lioness have died. The legal authorities are trying to find out why this happened and who is responsible. One version says that the circus animals might have died of hypothermia. Another says that they were simply poisoned.

… “We were supposed to meet them here,” says director of Saharcircus Sergey Rastorguyev. “They selected the car on their own and came over, and when they got here, they realized something had happened on the way. Right now, we can’t give you exact information.”

The animals had spent several weeks traveling successfully around the country. They performed to sold out crowds in the Middle Eastern city of Habarovsk and the town of Nerungy in Yarkutsk. The tour organizers, employees of the Krasnodar tent circus “The Dream” decided to go to the northern-most circus by cars. But the 800-kilometer trip in a heated Kamaz refrigerator truck were lethal to the predators.

Investigators and criminal authorities are trying to determine the exact cause of death. Nikolay Sizyh, deputy director of the press department of the police department of the Saha Republic (Yakutia) says the following:

“Right now, we’re conducting a special investigation, after which the cause of death of the tigers will be known. Seven tigers and one lioness were being transported. The preliminary version points to food poisoning.”

One of the versions under consideration is poisoning by exhaust fumes. The animals might have run out of air in the crowded container. The owners of the predators have refused to comment. This is understandable: they are, after all, being accused of blatant disregard of rules of animal transportation.

This would have been the first show of this type in Yakutsk with the participation of seven tigers and one lioness. The ticket sales were brisk. Now, the entire New Year’s entertainment program is quickly being changed. But a worthy substitute to the dead animals will not be found.

________________________________

Another article published by Maiak Radio adds that two of the tigers were protected Siberian tigers entered into the Red Book - Russia's registry of protected animals. It is against the law to use protected animals in circuses.

RIA News mentions the case in its Ecology section and links to a long, heartbreaking list of other cases of animals who've died in Russia during transportation. The article ends with these words:

“The exotic animals were transported in an unheated, unventilated container, and the personnel that was supposed to take care of the animals during transportation spent the whole trip getting drunk.”

Zombie Nazis or Nazi Zombies?

2009-12-01T23:50:00.001-05:00

Zombie Nazis are Nazis who have, through an accident of fate, become zombies. Their basic nature is their Nazism. Their zombie condition is secondary to their Nazi worldview and attitude: i.e. what kind of Nazis are they? - they're zombie Nazis.

Nazi Zombies, on the other hand, are just plain implausible.

"I don't want to sound like a queer or nothing..."

2009-11-21T14:46:00.017-05:00

Kiran has written a Facebook piece about the pitfalls of identification with sexual labels. Since she refuses to have a blog of her own, I'll just have to post it here. :)

"I'm Not a Queer Or Nothing, But..."

Have you ever said, "I'm not gay, but..." or "I'm not bisexual, but..." as a disclaimer before expressing how much you are attracted to someone of the same gender as you?

If you are progressive, liberal, and you stand for LGBT rights, have you ever wondered why you need to give a disclaimer like that before expressing feelings that might qualify you as being bisexual?

I have.

First of all, as a bisexual woman (I prefer the term queer) who has been in relationships with both men and women, and who is in a happy, long-term relationship with a woman, I find it hurtful when some of my friends still qualify their own sexual desires for people of the same gender by first separating themselves from people like me. There's nothing wrong with being heterosexual, but there is something very wrong with being heterosexist, which is the idea that heterosexuality is the default, natural, normal thing to be, and that it's a black or white area with no variations.

If you are telling someone how you support gay rights, you don't need to keep qualifying that with "I'm not gay or nothing, but...". Similarly, if you are telling people that you are bi-curious, or attracted to someone of the same gender, then those of us who have put our lives on the line to be honest about sexuality, would appreciate it if you could stop talking about this matter like it's a hot potato that you are willing to support in passing, but not willing to own, even when you yourself have feelings that would qualify you as bisexual.

Some might say that labels don't matter. While I agree with that, I have to wonder why the label "straight" matters, while "bisexual" or "homosexual" or "queer" don't. If none of them matter, why label yourself anything at all? Saying "I'm straight, but I'd totally do that guy/girl" is tantamount to saying "I'm not a transvestite - I just love wearing women's clothes." The first part of the sentence is only there as long as the speaker is assuming that something is wrong with the second part. No matter how progressive the speaker might be, the disclaimer unmasks the fact that heterosexuality is still the norm in the speaker's mind.

Labels define us only insofar as they stand for the feelings we experience. When people say "I'm not bi, but...", they are deciding that one set of their feelings (feelings of attraction to a person of the same gender) are less valid than others. The "gay" feelings they might be feeling are less important, less defining than the "straight" ones. What does that say about their attitude, invisible as it might be to them, towards those of us who own up to our "gay" feelings and act on them daily? This separation of feelings into more important and less important colors the progressivism of the speaker: instead of expressing true unity with the people he or she is claiming to support, the speaker is now simply expressing condescending concern towards lesser beings for whom he/she feels pity, but one of whom he/she can not imagine actually being.

Society has given "straight" a higher status than every variation of sexuality, and calling yourself "straight" gives you the social status of one who is privileged. So, by denying your own bisexual feelings, and by constantly stating that you are *not* bisexual (or gay, or trans), even though you have feelings that "those" people have, you may be perpetuating the same heterosexism that you as a progressive, liberal person claim to be against. Heterosexism, like racism and classism, is the idea that one group of people ought to be privileged above everyone else. And many people, while they may have good intentions, are afraid of letting go of that privileged status in society. But then, how progressive are we if we're not willing to live up to the principles we claim to uphold?

We need to start being honest with ourselves. And we need to think about the words we use to communicate, because that's how people know each other, especially online. When you claim that you are yourself, of course, obviously, "straight" but that you have these little feelings that come up towards a certain person you know, or someone famous, who is the same gender as you, then what you are saying is that the label "straight" is more important to you than your feelings. And that your heterosexual feelings are what define you and are what are *real* and *important* and that your bisexual/homosexual side can be dismissed as something fun, but meaningless. That does not help LGBT rights, and that's not what I would expect of someone who otherwise supports LGBT rights.

This is not to say that all progressives have a duty to identify themselves as bisexual. We can all recognize that sexuality is much more fluid than the narrow labels used to describe it. Identifying as straight in the context of admitting attraction to a member of the same gender tells us much more about the speaker's prejudices against certain sexualities than it does about the speaker's sexuality itself. The moment you have sex with, desire for, or fantasies about a person of the same gender as you, you are no longer fitting into the heterosexual definition, and by forcing that definition upon your multi-faceted and fluid sexuality and denying your sexuality and the sexual diversity of many others like you, you are actually helping the status quo, the privileged heterosexism that is the domain of religious fundamentalism.

So, the next time you want to express your bisexual tendencies while simultaneously denying that part of yourself, please try and think about who you are supporting and who you are dismissing.

Death By Torchwood, And The Rise Of The Queer Superhero

2009-10-27T15:25:00.015-04:00

- Check out the condensed version of this article at AfterElton.com! -

Few deaths have been more shocking to gay television viewers than that of Ianto Jones in this summer’s Torchwood: Children Of Earth. His death during the fourth night of the BBC miniseries created a huge backlash, none of which surprised me more than claims that Ianto’s demise was an expression of the show’s homophobia.

Created by Russel T Davies, an openly gay writer famous for the complex and empowering Queer As Folk (UK), and starring John Barrowman, who might just be the most boisterously “out” star in the industry, Torchwood has been a bastion of queer pride since its debut in 2006. It evokes a world where homophobia is so non-existent that labels “gay,” “straight,” and “bi” have become irrelevant.

So how does the death of one of TV’s few prominent queer characters involved in a same-sex relationship fit into the show’s socially progressive vision? To my mind, Ianto’s death, rather than being homophobic, serves as a marker on the continuing road to true gay empowerment – a road that has frequently been two steps forward and one step back.

Gay and lesbian characters on screen have gone through a long and difficult journey from invisibility and vilification to understanding and acceptance. This journey is by no means over: queer people all over the world are still fighting for the most basic forms of cultural recognition. But while queer visibility in the media is on the rise in the Europe and North America, the nature of this visibility – and its effects on queer viewers – are not always positive.

For years, the best queer viewers could hope for was subtext. Mainstream movies and TV shows were ripe with it, and for lack of anything better, many of us embraced this subtext with open arms, happy to see even the slightest indication in pop culture that we do, in fact, exist. As the gay rights movement carved out a wider and wider field of visibility, the pop culture grudgingly followed. Over the last few decades, subtext in sitcoms and dramas has, to a large extent, been replaced by expressly queer storylines and characters.

If we agree that pop culture plays an important part in shaping the boundaries of acceptability in the minds of viewers, then this is no small victory. But for years, the overwhelming majority of gay characters in the mainstream media (in other words, films and TV shows not made specifically for the queer audiences) were relegated to the status of a sexless best friend – or worse, a tragically misunderstood Frankenstein monster doomed to be sacrificed on the altar of straight viewers' pity.

This portrayal of victimization might be a necessary step towards the acceptance of any minority group. Pity is as good a way as any to get people on your side; and to be fair, queer people were – and in too many cases, still are – victimized or marginalized in real life. The tragic nature of being queer in a heteronormative world is a reality the mainstream culture has had to face in order to consider the injustice and dangerous consequences of its casual homophobia. Hate crimes still take place in many parts of the Western world (to say nothing of developing countries), but we are unlikely to catch the mainstream Western media openly condoning anti-queer violence.

But while portrayals of queer victimhood have helped straight audiences get over their fear and, to some degree, hatred of gays and lesbians, they do little to empower queer viewers. Tragic demise after tragic demise might have earned us the sympathy of the “straight” society. But what have these portrayals done for queer viewers, other than fuel their (often justified) anger or teach them that pity is all they can hope for? As anyone who’s ever worked with victims of abuse knows, a mind frame of victimhood can become quite addictive and paralyzing, preventing them from reaching true empowerment.

It’s this empowerment the LGBT community desperately needs now – and it’s still sorely lacking in the mainstream culture that seems stuck on patronizing pity. A film like Brokeback Mountain might have pushed the queer rights movement forward 20 years ago; but is it still relevant – and more importantly, does it help its queer and straight audiences move forward – today? In a world where more and more Western countries (and a few countries of the developing world) are moving to recognize the fundamental rights of their queer citizens, we can argue that yet another pop culture event that equates queerness with victimhood can only drag us down.

Simple visibility is no longer enough. We know where we’ve been; now, it’s time to figure out where we’re going.

Xena: Warrior Princess is a perfect – and often frustrating – illustration of the stop-and-go process of queer empowerment in popular culture. The show’s lesbian theme started out buried in subtext, but by the 3rd season, the two lead characters were professing their love for each other and even enjoying an occasional same-sex lip lock.

Still, the show remained as vague on the subject as possible: the closest it came to openly discussing the lead characters’ lesbian relationship was when a secondary character confessed she wanted to be a “thespian” just like Xena and Gabrielle.

Nonetheless, Xena may have been the most empowering queer character of the ‘90s: this fierce warrior chopping up battalions of thugs with a joyful smirk was anything but a victim. And yet, when the show ended, it was not with a battle cry, but with a whimper. Even this undefeated killing machine had to pay for her sexuality with her life, and in the end, she died for love.

Her death might have been somewhat more heroic than the death of, say, Alan in Torch Song Trilogy or Brandon/Teena in Boys Don’t Cry, but to this queer viewer, it was hardly less frustrating or disempowering. If a warrior princess forged in the heat of battle can’t manage to live as a happy dyke, what chance do we mere mortals have?

Like Xena, Torchwood’s “Captain Jack Harkness” (whose real name remains a mystery) is a complex character often haunted by his past misdeeds. And like Xena, he is a gay basher’s worst nightmare: a queer weapon-wielding, ass-kicking superhero gleefully chewing his way through awesome fight scenes.

But Torchwood is a 21st century show (and a British one at that), so it sheds the last vestiges of subtext that had dragged down Xena: Warrior Princess. Where Xena’s sexuality was never discussed, Captain Jack’s sexuality is brought up deliberately, then casually dismissed as irrelevant to who he is and what he does.

His sexuality makes him no less kick-ass, no less respected by his peers and no less feared by his enemies. In all fairness, he goes through his own painful coming out process – though it has to deal not with his sexuality, but with his inability to stay dead. His apparent immortality is often a source of angst and self-hatred; his queerness never is.

No less empowering than his superhero antics is the fact that Captain Jack comes from a future where divisions based on sexuality no longer exist, and even the labels themselves have lost all meaning. Many critics have pointed out that this fact alone makes the show more groundbreaking than anything to come before it.

But while Jack’s blasé attitude towards sexuality certainly rubs off on his present-day cohorts, the present in which they operate is still ripe with divisions. This conflict is most obvious in Torchwood: Children Of Earth, culminating in what I see as a showdown between a future where sexuality is a non-issue and a past where it’s equated with weakness, victimhood, shame and death.

While Jack, who’s been around for centuries, has had countless boyfriends and girlfriends (and probably a few alien squid-friends as well), the show has, so far, concentrated on his relationship with his male employee Ianto Jones. The duo spent the first two seasons cocooned in the safety of the Hub, their super-secret sci fi lair, where the tone of joyful omnisexuality set by Jack was happily followed by the other team members. (By the middle of the first season, every team member got to make out with a member of the same sex.)

The third season miniseries Children Of Earth begins with the destruction of this safe haven, which sends our heroes tumbling through a present-day world that might not be quite ready for this casual acceptance.

When we encounter him in the mundane world outside the Hub, Ianto shows himself to be as much a product of our culture as any of us. The scene in CoE where the audience is first introduced to his sister and her family is essentially the first time homophobia has ever come up on the show – and ironically, its source is Ianto himself.

Apparently, Ianto has kept his relationship with Jack secret from his working-class family. To be fair, his sister and brother-in-law are nowhere near as refined as Ianto as they drop offhand remarks such as “Have you gone bender?” – but these remarks seem more insensitive than mean, and the couple is very protective of Ianto.

Faced with his sister’s gentle questioning about his private life, Ianto looks like a deer caught in the headlights and doesn’t quite notice that she seems genuinely happy for him.

Ianto protests that he doesn’t want to talk about his relationship in front of his young niece – as if the news of him dating a man is something lewd and disgusting. But his sister quickly assures him that it’s not a problem, and that her daughter’s best friend has two mommies. Sexuality is obviously not an issue to Ianto’s family; still, Ianto looks like he could die of shame.

Eventually, he admits that he is, in fact, in a relationship with a man, but is quick to assure his sister that this doesn’t make him bisexual. “It’s not men,” he tells his sister, “it’s just him.”

His claims of innocence sound a bit strange, considering that Ianto has often been the one pursuing Jack. Captain Jack might be an interminable flirt, but he rarely takes things further than that, preferring to wait for others to make the first move. He often takes the back seat, giving others room to figure out their sexuality for themselves. Most notably, he doesn’t act on his attraction to a World War II-era soldier in the show’s ultimate same-sex romance episode Captain Jack Harkness. Instead, he waits for the object of his desire to find the courage to act on his attraction to Jack. This willingness to respectfully step aside is also central to Jack’s relationship with his fellow Torchwood officer Gwen Cooper: while both have deep feelings for each other, Jack quickly recedes from every opportunity to act on them – not because he puts much stock in Gwen’s relationship with her boyfriend, but because she does.

With Ianto, too, Jack rarely plays the seducer. Time after time, in episodes including To The Last Man, They Keep Killing Suzie, and in the 3rd hour of Children Of Earth, Ianto is the one coming on to Jack. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Ianto has had other same-sex experiences (though in the safety of the Hub, he hardly acts like a newbie) – but he’s definitely not the shrinking violet helpless in the face of another’s sexual onslaught that he plays with his sister.

And yet, away from his teammates, Ianto still clings to the need to label his sexuality as “not queer.” In his defensive reaction to his sister, Ianto is making the same mistake too many pop culture powers-that-be still make when it comes to portrayals of queerness. He has failed to notice the strides the mainstream society has made in its attitude towards queer sexualities, expecting people to be much less accepting of him than they actually are.

Just as TV networks and film studios, especially in the U.S. often shortchange their audiences by assuming that they are too stupid or too conservative for a sophisticated discussion of sexuality, Ianto shortchanges his sister and her family by thinking that they somehow can’t handle his relationship with Jack.

In this way, while Jack represents a possible future, Ianto is a character rooted firmly in a past we are eager to shake off: a representation of self-hatred borne of real victimization, unable to move past it towards empowerment. He is reacting to a reality that doesn’t quite exist anymore.

Later in the miniseries, this changing reality is represented by the character of Clem McDonald. Clem is, literally, a throwback to the past, a remnant of events that took place in the 1960s and have triggered the present disaster. When he calls Ianto a queer, Ianto answers forcefully, “It’s not 1965 anymore.” Where his sister’s acceptance had scared and confused him, Clem’s putdown evokes a more familiar expression of contempt that seems to energize Ianto.

Before Ianto dies, he tells Jack he loves him. Back in the surreal world of alien threats, he can once again drop all pretense, stop worrying about being gay or straight, and simply be. The scene reminded me of many disempowering death scenes that invite straight audiences to commiserate with the queer character at the expense of queer viewers’ own self-esteem – but while many Torchwood fans have reacted to it with the anger that those previous disempowering death scenes elicit, I found myself reacting in quite the opposite way.

Showrunner Russel T Davies is no stranger to queer empowerment. His groundbreaking Queer As Folk, unlike its American remake, ends with a jubilant celebration of queer strength that makes me whoop with joy every time I watch it: the vision of the show’s two heroes, guns drawn, reclaiming their pride from a gay-bashing redneck, is sublime.

And while I certainly recognize that mine is only one of many interpretations offered by critics and fans in the wake of Torchwood: Children Of Earth, to me, the death of Ianto Jones is more at home with the empowerment of Queer As Folk (UK) than with the victimization of countless queer death scenes it evokes.

When it comes to Ianto’s attitude towards his sexuality, he’s reactive rather than pro-active; defensive rather than assertive; self-doubting rather than proud; queer only when no one possibly disapproving is present. Ianto’s attitude makes him literally a thing of the past – and the past swallows him up along with Clem and his perfunctory homophobia. In a moment full of poignant irony, Ianto and Clem are killed by the ghosts of the ‘60s.

For the vast majority of us, the fight for queer equality is far from over. Victimization of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual people still exists in various degrees in most countries of the world. But surely, we have won enough ground in enough places that we no longer have to be content with our cultural role as victims.

Armed with an ever growing list of victories, the queer rights movement is gathering steam. What we need now is not pity, but our own superheroes: cultural proof that we don’t just exist – we kick ass.

Television is a good gauge of cultural attitudes. The fact that Torchwood, with its unapologetically queer superhero, is so popular with mainstream audiences, is a good indication of how far we’ve come. The show has been largely embraced – same-sex smooching and all – by the notoriously macho-centric sci fi community, and Captain Jack action figures have taken their rightful place among other pop culture symbols. Queer kids growing up today have a cultural icon to claim as their own in a way none of us ever did before. And as they grow to adulthood, they will shape the world accordingly.

In this context, Ianto’s death seems logical, even welcome: to me, it symbolizes the shedding of our old skin, putting to rest all those doomed gay heroes of the past and starting with a clean slate. The beauty of Torchwood is that Captain Jack, who so dashingly embodies queer empowerment, can never die: he will go on, because he is the future.

If we stand with the Muslims, will the Muslims stand with us?

2009-10-10T22:38:00.008-04:00

Lately, I've been counting my blessings that I don't live in Europe. From the relative safety and comfort of Canada, it looks like England and France are on the verge of what would probably amount to a civil war - and the rest of Europe is not far behind.

On the one hand, Islam is growing by leaps and bounds, carrying with it the threat of social conservatism. Islam is not exactly supportive of women's equality, gay rights, or freedom from religion; and progressive Muslims willing to fight for these ideals within their communities seem to be few and far between.

On the other hand, white supremacist movements and racist organizations are rising to prominence in ways they hadn't done in Europe in decades. Like its poster-boy BNP, this bunch isn't exactly socially progressive: in fact, while they hate Muslims for their skin color and non-adherence to Christianity, the racists and nationalists hold much the same opinion of women, gays, and freedom of thought as that held by Islam.

Each side strengthens the resolve of the other. The racist and nationalist threat doubtless drives many moderate Muslims to become more radicalized, and further radicalization of the Muslim community whips nationalists into even more of a frenzy. It's a destructive circle jerk of fear and hatred.

And to someone like me - a queer, atheist woman - both sides are equally terrifying.

I also happen to believe that self-criticism is the key to progress (or, in fact, survival). Of Jewish background, I tend to be more critical of Israel than my Muslim-born partner. Raised in the Soviet Union before its collapse, I am more suspicious of communism than many of my Western left-wing friends. And since I'm white, I consider it my responsibility to stand against white supremacists and unequivocally say NOT IN MY NAME.

And yet, I can't ignore the fact that the community currently under attack by the white supremacists and nationalists in Europe is not exactly on my side.

My guess is that many social progressives in Europe are facing the same dilemma. Right now, for those of us whose lives literally depend on feminism, gay rights, and freedom from religion, it's easier to figure out whose side we're NOT on than whose side we support. As both sides whip each other into further heights of frenzy, true social progressives are left standing on the sidelines, more confused than they've been since the early days of the Bolshevik revolution.

There's no question of social progressives supporting racism and nationalism. But what does that mean, in practical terms? What does that mean during clashes between white supremacists and Muslims? What in this batshit crazy world are we supposed to do?

If we stand with the European Muslims in the fight for their survival, will they stand with us in the fight for ours? Will they support progressive ideals? Will they support gay rights - including the rights of their own gay children? Will they support women's equality - including the equality of their own wives? Will they support freedom of religion - including the freedom to have no religion at all?

Is it right to expect them to?

An Atheist Afterlife

2009-09-27T22:23:00.008-04:00

Religions tell us that an afterlife awaits us after death - an afterlife which we will enter as individuals, as the people we currently are. From the standpoint of continuation versus ending, many religious people look at atheists with pity: it must be terrible, or so they think, to believe that you just... end.

Of course many atheists believe nothing of the sort. Far from despairing over the end of their individual beings that comes with death, many atheists derive joy from the simple scientifically based knowledge that, as their individual being disintegrates with the dead brain tissue, they remain vibrantly present as part of the boundless living world, not the dead world of heaven, hell and the afterlife.

Our brains die and disintegrate - but our minds and spirits live on, quite independently from our individual entities. Each time we meet another person, each time we speak or write or smile at a passer-by or give a bank teller a dirty look, we contribute to the body of human consciousness. Famous people are the most obvious examples of immortality of the human mind - but one doesn't have to be famous. We are all products of our history, as individuals and as a society on the whole; and our history is comprised of all the people who have ever lived. Through us, their consciousness, the product of their now dead brains, is as alive as it ever was in their lifetimes.

This immortality of mind goes not only beyond famous people, but beyond recorded history. The thoughts and beliefs of people living during recorded history were based on the thoughts and beliefs of their ancestors; the fact that they were never written down makes them no less a part of our shared body of consciousness in the 21st century.

The bottom line is, whether we publish books and make discoveries that revolutionize our descendants' world, or whether we simply interact with people in our daily lives, the bits and pieces of what we think and feel, by way of influencing the people around us, will live on in them, their children, their grandchildren, and so forth - even if none of them ever learn our name. The very act of our being makes us forever part of the body of human consciousness.

As with our minds, so with our bodies. As the structural integrity of our bodies falls apart in the grave, our bodies don't disappear - on the contrary, they spread across the world, becoming an integral part of more places than we could ever hope to visit while alive. As our individual being rots in the earth, it feeds the bugs who feed the birds; it feeds the flowers that feed the bees, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The bees and birds carry bits and pieces of our bodies, dropping seeds and pollinating flowers - and next thing, our bodies are feeding humans halfway across the world, becoming parts of their bodies just like our ancestors fed us and became parts of our bodies. Humans who were alive millennia ago are still around today, giving us life as part of the neverending food chain; and we will be around millennia from now, becoming flowers and bees and fruits and people and earth over and over and over again.

The Racism of Cultural Relativism: Germany Cites Koran in Rejecting Divorce - New York Times

2009-09-14T15:57:00.009-04:00

Throughout the Western world, cases of domestic violence against white women are met with vigilance. But thanks to cultural relativism that expects tolerance of intolerant customs, this might no longer be the case for non-white women.

In Germany, cultural relativism was once again exposed as the appallingly racist ideology that it is, when a white female judge refused to grant divorce to a battered woman whose husband threatened to kill her, on the basis that the woman is from Morocco.

Mark Landler writes in his New York Times article:

In a remarkable ruling that underlines the tension between Muslim customs and European laws, the judge, Christa Datz-Winter, said that the couple came from a Moroccan cultural milieu, in which she said it was common for husbands to beat their wives. The Koran, she wrote, sanctions such physical abuse.

[...]the greatest damage done by this episode is to other Muslim women suffering from domestic abuse. Many are already afraid of going to court against their spouses.

Western feminists have shown an appalling disregard for their third-world sisters. The fact that a female judge in Germany, a country with some of the most progressive laws in the world, has decided to withhold these rights from another woman on the basis of her country of birth, is only the most obvious example of apartheid to which too many Muslim women are subjected in the West.

When Ideologies Clash: It’s a Numbers Game - But What Are We Counting?

2009-09-13T11:21:00.014-04:00

As the birth rates of many Western countries plummet, with those countries’ orthodox religious communities picking up the slack, the “numbers game” concept is gathering steam. Where even a couple of decades ago, this xenophobic demographics-based concept was the nearly exclusive domain of right-wing nationalists, more and more liberals seem to be jumping on the “numbers game” bandwagon.

The panic is certainly understandable: as Muslim communities expand throughout Europe and North America, their members are seen as carriers of an ideology that threatens the hard won progressive secular values of their host countries. Like a menacing clawed hand of the enemy army crawling across the map of Europe in old World War II movies, Islam can be seen as leeching into the Western culture, carrying with it the threat of misogyny, homophobia and intolerance, and pushing Christianity (which can be - and has been throughout history - no less virulent given half a chance) back into a dangerous position of relevance along the way. But does the “numbers game” attitude help to stave off the threat to secular values like women’s self-determination, sexual freedom and gay rights?

On the contrary: I suspect that it only compounds the problem.

No child is born with a built-in ideology. Children are indoctrinated, often aggressively or violently, into their community’s acceptable way of life by their families, their schools, and their culture. In Muslim countries, children are bombarded with uniform messages from all sides - but despite this blanket indoctrination, Muslim countries frequently produce progressives, apostates and revolutionary thinkers. Much like Catholicism with its stifling and completely unrealistic demands, Islam, in spite of itself, has managed to give birth to some of the most inspiring free thinking individuals of the last few centuries, including such diverse yet socio-politically liberal thinkers as Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Omar Khayyam, Jalaluddin Rumi, Salman Rushdie, Tariq Ali, Maryam Namazie, Irshad Manji and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

The free thinkers that come out of Muslim countries are proof positive that being born in a Muslim family and growing up in a Muslim culture are not the only factors that determine one’s ideology. And if this is true of people growing up in societies where doubt is anathema (both the Quran and the Bible condemn plurality of thought in no uncertain terms), then it must be doubly true of people growing up in religious communities within secular Western countries. Unlike kids growing up in, say, Saudi Arabia or even the less hardline Pakistan, the Muslim kids of Britain, France and Canada have a whole tapestry of choices before them. No matter how much their parents try to shield them from the secular culture of the host country, these kids can’t help but be exposed to the plurality of ideologies that is the cornerstone of any free society.

People who get caught up in the “numbers game” fail to understand this simple fact. Instead of fighting the ideology that threatens their society’s progressive values, they focus on the attributes that cannot be controlled or changed: people’s familial connections, which is to say, their race. The “numbers game” concept is racist, no matter how you look at it, because it is based on the assumption that a person’s genes determine his or her ideology - which is to say, that a person is nothing more than his or her ethnicity. If that’s not racism, I don’t know what is.

Yes, the Muslim communities in Europe are currently producing more children than the secular communities - but what these kids believe in as they grow older is up to the host societies. One amazing teacher can fire up the imaginations of hundreds of kids; one great writer can introduce hundreds of thousands of children and adults to new ideas and ways of thinking. A woman can only give birth to so many children - an educator, be it a school teacher or a writer, can influence the minds of children of countless women. If it is, in fact, a numbers game, no birth rate statistic can beat education.

People who focus on the birth rates tend to forget about the power of education. Having already decided that these kids are lost to progressive values, they send the wrong message not only to their liberal supporters in the host societies, but also to the kids of the Muslim communities, playing right into the hands of Islamo-fascists within those communities who seek to turn Europe into a suburb of Saudi Arabia. Today, when a kid in a Muslim neighborhood starts questioning his or her upbringing and dares to step outside the ideological gates of his or her community, what he or she encounters too often is suspicion, which only serves to drive the kid back into the perceived safety of his or her “own kind.”

The only effective way to stave off the wave of repressive and dangerous ideology that is threatening the progressive values of the secular world is by the proliferation of pluralistic education and by further spread of social freedoms that will encourage more kids to question, examine and reject the intrinsically repressive aspects of their own background. That would require that these kids’ education be taken out of the hands of religious schools that systemically demonize the very pluralism that allows them to exist. This goes for both the misogynist, homophobic and culturally imperialist Islamic ideology and the equally misogynist, homophobic and culturally imperialist Christian ideology it tends to strengthen.

Most kids are eager for sources of inspiration, soaking up worldviews presented to them. By ghettoizing these kids further, the "numbers game" ideologues make sure the progressive worldview that values individual freedom and equality is, indeed, NOT presented to them. Instead of giving the kids of Muslim communities a real choice and trusting them to choose a better world for themselves, as most people inevitably do, they end up victimizing their most crucial would-be allies.

Most importantly, when these kids do rebel, as kids of any culture inevitably do, and venture outside the prescribed limits of their communities, the host society must be there, waiting for them with open arms, ready to welcome them with joy and without condescension or discrimination.

Air Show Porn - NOW Magazine

2009-09-07T14:09:00.006-04:00

This Labour Day weekend was marked (or rather marred) by fighter jets ripping holes in the beautiful Toronto sky. Every time one of them passed overhead, making the city shake and leaving a trail of poison, I would flash back to the weeks after 9/11, when every New Yorker would stop and look nervously at the sky each time a plane appeared.

Mike Smith talks about the effects of the Labour Day Air Show on Toronto's refugee population (not to mention its environment) in his insightful article in NOW Toronto Magazine.

Sure, the whole thing’s over in days, but what if you came here to escape that ghastly circus? Over 60 per cent of refuge-seekers in Canada settle in the GTA. For them, Air Show memories may quietly take up residence with pre-existing trauma.

The term "post-traumatic stress disorder" has certainly been overused to the point of losing most of its impact; but I can't deny that witnessing the events of 9/11 first hand has left me with emotional scars that are unlikely to heal completely. And tragic and soul-crushing as it was, this was just one event, just one attack. Watching the fighter jets pollute our world with fumes and noise, I couldn't help but wonder how thousands of refugees who've found a safe haven in this peaceful city, many of whom had escaped lives full of death and explosions, felt about this rude and insensitive invasion.

"The Death of Ianto Jones: The Point of Pointlessness" - the Space Channel

2009-08-04T16:20:00.029-04:00

Did Torchwood creator Russel T. Davies make a mistake in expecting a certain level of maturity from his audience? After reading post after post full of verbal abuse (and sometimes even threats of bodily harm) in the wake of the tragic events of Torchwood: Children Of Earth, I had to chime in.

My brief rebuttal was picked up by the blog at the Space channel which carries the BBC hit Torchwood in Canada.

The death of Ianto Jones in the 4th episode of Children of Earth seems to have sent a few shippers off the deep end. And even to the uninitiated, the death might seem like a plothole: these people are professionals, this is what they do, so how can they not have a plan? But if you've followed Torchwood from the beginning, this should come as no surprise.

Read the rest at Space channel's blog.

Added on September 7th, 2009: Referring to Ianto Jones' contentious death during the September 4th Torchwood panel at DragonCon, Gareth David-Lloyd, the actor behind Ianto, said, "I thought it should be as unremarkable, as pointless as possible..."

The Bisexual Resource Center releases the 2nd edition of Getting Bi

2009-07-15T13:23:00.018-04:00

Earlier this month, the Bisexual Resource Center released the 2nd edition of its excellent Getting Bi collection. Edited by activist and teacher Robyn Ochs, the collection presents hundreds of writers from 42 countries of the world talking about what bisexuality and queer sexualities mean to them.

Among countries represented in the book are several countries known for terrible human rights violations, like Egypt and Zimbabwe. Though some of the essays that hail from these places are quite heartbreaking, the very fact that writers from these countries have sent in their essays gives me hope. The queer rights movement is gathering steam all over the world, and I like to believe that a victory in one country pushes queer rights forward in all countries.

I was disappointed to see that neither Russia, the country of my culture, nor Ukraine, the country of my birth, are represented in the book. Is it possible that queer people in Russia and the Ukraine are more repressed and afraid than their brothers and sisters in, say, the Muslim world? I'm tempted to chuck this up to a language issue, but I'm just not that optimistic.

The essay closest to my heart appears on page 84. Written by the love of my life Kiran Mehdee, it's a beautiful, funny 3-page piece about defiance and acceptance, and the meaninglessness of labels in a free world. Here's an excerpt:

The gay people most annoyed by the bi label are usually the ones most invested in the uphill battle that the gay movement, especially in the USA, is still fighting. In a culture where equality is still very much under threat, it's too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that if you're not 100% with us, you must be against us. In a culture where competition is valued much higher than cooperation, any freedoms gained by another group can be seen as a threat to one's own group. As if there was only so much freedom to go around.

In the last few years, I've been amazed to watch my own "us against the world" attitudes soften and melt away. A truly free world is not one where gay, straight, bi and transgender people live in harmony - it's a world where people are not separated into these narrow groups in the first place.

To purchase Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World, Second Edition, try Amazon.ca (Canada), or Amazon.com (USA).

Hell Yes, It's Personal!

2009-04-10T14:45:00.001-04:00

This is a real conversation between me and my observant Jewish uncle.

ME: Uncle, is it true the prayer you have to say every morning includes thanking god that he didn't make you a woman?
UNCLE: Yes.
ME: How does it make you feel saying that every morning, seeing as you have two daughters, two granddaughters and a sister?
UNCLE: Come on, it's not personal!

Writing Dialog With a Foreign Accent

2009-02-03T13:11:00.016-05:00

Our literature, much like our society, is becoming more and more multicultural. A story in which all characters come from the same background, might not sound credible in a world where people increasingly communicate across racial and national divides: today, most neighborhoods, workplaces, and families are a kaleidoscope of diverse accents and cultures.

But portraying linguistic differences in writing can be tricky. How can you write dialog for a character with an accent with grace and respect, without coming across as offensive?

First and foremost, you must ask yourself: how does the character's accent serve your story?

Make sure you have a good answer before you proceed. Does the maid's Spanish accent underline the racial and economic divides in our society, or does it simply strengthen the stereotype that all maids are Hispanic? What can you achieve by giving a waiter - or a high-powered attorney - a Pakistani accent? Do you expect your readers to react to a Russian accent in a certain way, and what do you plan to do with that reaction?

You must always remember that an accent is a tool, not a comment on the character's personality. When you use an accent to imply intellectual abilities, or to draw humor from the imperfect English, you run the risk of offending your readers. But used carefully and with a lot of forethought, an accent can add depth and flavor to your writing.

Intention

Research

If ever the saying "write what you know" were true, it's in the case of writing accents. Make no mistake: if you fake it, your readers will know. So before you use a specific accent in your writing, you must make sure you know what it sounds like.

American movies are not always the best source of research. If you do have to use movies for your research, check the actor bios at the Internet Movie Database: do they have a real-life connection to the accent they're portraying?

Luckily, we now have a much more accurate source: the World Wide Web. Today, the Internet connects cultures and continents in ways unimaginable a decade ago, putting resources from various countries at our fingertips. Whatever the ethnicity of your character, chances are, you will find videos by his or her compatriots on YouTube.

Your best sources, however, will come from real life. Meet people who speak with the accent you are trying to portray; talk to them - and more to the point, listen to them. However, be mindful of the way an accent might change over the years: if your character has only just arrived in the country, chances are, chatting up your university professor who has been living here since the '40s will be of little help.

Exposition

The easiest - and safest - way to let the reader know that one of your characters has an accent, is to indicate this in the exposition or in the description of the character. You can simply add "he said with a heavy accent" after the line, or be a bit more creative and imply the accent, as in "he said, rolling his Rs" or "she stammered, thinking hard of the right words."

But as with all safe things, this method is low on drama. If you want your dialog to pack a punch, you might have no choice but to insert it into the actual lines.

Misspelling

Phonetic spelling of mispronounced words is an often misused way of writing dialog with an accent. Most of us don't think twice when we read a German character say "Ze child fell into ze vell," or when a Korean character misspeaks a greeting as "Herro" - we have been conditioned by years of reading this kind of stereotyped misspelling to recognize what the speech patterns signify.

But the common use of this method is often its undoing. More often than not, the phonetic misspellings come across as patently racist - and unless this is precisely the point you are trying to make, you might want to steer clear of them.

Another problem with phonetic misspelling is that anything more than the barest sprinkling of misspelled words can make it very difficult for your readers to read. Spelling mistakes tend to jar readers out of the story, diverting their attention. This may be your aim - but know when to let it go. Chances are, the readers will continue reading the character's lines with the accent you've assigned to him or her; and you can always remind them of it later in the dialog.

Formal Style

To use accents effectively, you must know how a person learns a new language. Most of the time, we learn the formal structure of the language first; once we are comfortable with the formal language, we can start learning the more conversational language, which often breaks the formal rules.

For example, a person in the beginning stages of learning English is less likely to use contractions like "it's," "he's," "they're," and others. You can make great use of this: having your character say "It is raining" instead of "It's raining" can be a subtle way of showing his or her accent.

You can take this method a step further by having a character use formal language in informal settings that clearly don't warrant it: for example, having your character speak in rigid academic English during a rowdy party can be a further reminder of the character's accent.

This method can, of course, be used to illustrate an opposite point. A record store owner in the British television series Life on Mars, for example, speaks with a thick Indian accent, but uses very conversational language peppered with youthful expressions of the time, like "groovy" and "chicks": he is a typical young "dude," regardless of his accent.

Idioms

Idiom misuse is another great way of implying an accent. If you can train yourself to look at the English language through the eyes of an outsider, you can use this method to add gentle, playful fun to your dialog.

A great deal of our speech consists of idioms. From the moment we "take a shower" in the morning to the moment we "fall asleep" at night, we use words to describe things they don't actually mean. We don't actually take the shower anywhere, and falling asleep will, hopefully, not involve any actual falling.

We are so used to this idiomatic nature of our language that most of the time we don't even realize we are using idioms. Most of us recognize "off the top of our head" as an idiom - but asked to think of an idiom off the top of our head, how many of us would say "catch the bus"?

Since idioms make (let's face it) no literal sense, they often prove to be a challenge for language students. Even people with advanced knowledge of English can sometimes misuse less common idioms. The misuse can be subtle - like "let's play it by the ear" - or more pronounced - like "I got goose lumps" - depending on your character's mastery of English.

Awareness

No matter which method you prefer, the main ingredient in the successful use of accents is a keen awareness of your own language and the way it might sound to others. What are you taking for granted? What are you not noticing?

In a way, by using an accent gracefully and with a well-defined purpose, you can do much more than add flavor to your dialog: you can uncover new dimensions of the language and of the story for yourself - and for your readers.

Kiran Mehdee's short story The Wellness Room published in The Broken City Magazine

2009-01-27T14:57:00.008-05:00

The Broken City Magazine has published a short story called The Wellness Room written by none other than my partner Kiran Mehdee. This funny and life-affirming story is easily one of the best pieces Kiran has written (so far). Here's a taste:

My aloneness was a warm blanket I could hide in, burrowing like a wild ferret. The room, called the "Wellness Room," was the only reason I even managed to survive the job for the fourteen months I was there. Sparsely furnished with a plain table, a chair, a small trash can, and a fake plastic tree in the corner, it was an inner room surrounded by offices full of cubicles full of diligent wage slaves like me.

But not quite like me.

Read the rest of the story in the Winter 2008 edition of The Broken City Magazine. And watch this space - and Kiran's own blog - for more beautiful prose and poetry!

Take My Grandma... Please!

2009-01-03T16:09:00.004-05:00

The following is an actual conversation between me and my paternal grandmother on New Year's Day.

GRANDMA: Happy New Year, honey!
ME: Happy New Year to you too, grandma!
GRANDMA: I wish you a happy, healthy year - and to finally meet a great man!
- pause -
ME: Wait, what?
GRANDMA: You know, I wish you to fall madly in love with a great man.
- pause -
ME: Wait, wait... you do know Kiran and I are practically married?
GRANDMA: Well, people get divorced all the time!
- pregnant pause -
ME: I just want to make sure I understand correctly - you are wishing me divorce?
GRANDMA: You know I would never wish you anything bad.