Thought Portal

In fact, thanks to municipal regulations, people deal with harsh fines and even jail time for failing to maintain neat lawns: Frank Yoes, a then 57-year-old in Grand Prairie, Texas, was jailed for two days in 2015 because he couldn’t afford the $1,700 fine the city slapped him with for an overgrown lawn. In 2019, the city of Dunedin, Florida, fined then 69-year old Jim Ficken $30,000 for his unkempt lawn, which was growing tall while Ficken was away caring for his sick mother. The city then moved to foreclose on his home. On the other hand, some municipalities are now encouraging people to ditch lawn culture. Burbank, California, is offering up to $2 for each square foot of ripped-up grass, incentivizing residents and businesses to create water-wise landscapes. People are also banding together against lawn culture. The “No Lawns” subreddit, created in early 2019, features daily posts from people seeking and sharing advice on growing more native plants and disregarding the “boring grassy lawn.” Food Not Lawns, a 25-year-old international community promoting sustainable gardening, shares options for people feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of getting rid of their lawns, including planting things you love to eat and collaborating with your neighbors. If it sounds like too much work, the Canadian Wildlife Federation suggests taking the “wild patch” approach and leaving a section of your lawn unmowed.

While many may think that lawns are too deeply embedded in our expectations of how outdoor space is cultivated and maintained, it’s important to remember that lawns are a recent mainstay in North American culture. It’s easy to react incredulously to the criticism being made about lawns, but the environmental cost of lawns, their history, and present existence as a fruitless status symbol is glaring. Having a lawn doesn’t make you a bad person, but if you’re privileged enough to own land, recognize the potential of what your space could be—environmentally friendly, biodiverse, and simply, more interesting.

Isolation. Frustrated attempts to communicate. Bodily decay. Imminent death. These are the hallmarks of Western horror movies—and also of old age, if stereotypes are to be believed. While horror’s target audience is young (and supposedly characterized by delusions of immortality and indifference to anyone older than 40), the genre’s movies are often dominated by elderly characters—usually elderly women. In a culture obsessed with female youth and beauty, the horror of aging is hardly gender-neutral, and there’s remarkable overlap in the stereotypes about women and those concerning old folks (you know: needy, frail, and irrational).

But unlike horror-movie fates such as, say, decapitation by paper cutter, aging is the ultimate fright because viewers recognize that they cannot escape it. Moreover, the feminized traits associated with the elderly carry a universal shiver factor because they are fundamentally human characteristics, repressed by our culture of superheros and Final Girls. The blood-drooling, cackling witches and crones of horror cinema don’t seem especially fragile, of course. But their over-the-top violence offers a convenient excuse to hate them, rather than acknowledge that aging is what truly freaks us out.

The battle—both inside and outside the courts—to censor sex workers is far from new. Garnet, an indoor full-service sex worker (FSSW), notes that Izumo no Okuni, “the original creator of the Kabuki theater,” performed with sex workers in the 17th century. Okuni’s “hoe brigade,” composed of trans and queer sex workers, worked together to create art and make money. Since these sex workers were so successful, the “shogunate [military rulers] banned women from performing onstage,” citing the sensuality of the dances as an affront to morality. The moral panic and saviorism continued far past the 17th century. Established in 1872, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice would sneak into burlesque clubs to report the sex workers who performed there for “lewd” behavior. It aimed to revoke the licenses of burlesque theaters and shut them down. (The last three burlesque clubs in Manhattan finally lost their licenses in 1942.) While these so-called vice suppressors tried to “save” sex workers, sex workers just wanted to be left alone.

In letters to The Times, an anonymous sex worker described her frustration with those who try to save sex workers as they brag about their own piety and generosity—all while lobbying to close the places where sex workers could safely do their jobs. “You railers for the Society for the Suppression of Vice, you the pious, the moral, the respectable, as you call yourselves, who stand on your smooth and pleasant side of the great gulf you have dug and keep between yourselves and the dregs, why don’t you bridge it over, or fill it up, and by some humane and generous process absorb us into your leavened mass, until we become interpenetrated with goodness like yourselves?” she wrote. Continuing this trend in the modern age, Craigslist shuttered its adult-services section in 2010 after receiving repeated warnings from the Department of Justice (DOJ).

After Craigslist, the DOJ and Federal Bureau of Investigation turned their focus to RedBook, a site that hosted classifieds, message boards, and reviews. The site was shut down in 2014  amid claims that the creators and moderators were “facilitating prostitution.” But Craiglist and RedBook weren’t the only sites lost through censorship and bans: When Congress passed FOSTA-SESTA—an expansion of the 1996 Communications Decency Act allegedly meant to curb human trafficking—CityVibe, Nightshift, Men4Rent, Eccie, VerifyHim, the Erotic Review’s U.S. discussion boards, P411, and several subreddits for escorts and FSSW shut down. Sex workers used many of these platforms to vet clients by requesting provider references or asking them to verify their identities. When Backpage shut down in 2018, many full-service sex workers were forced into far more dangerous situations because they lost their ability to screen potential clients. Hacking//Hustling’s 2020 study about the effects of FOSTA-SESTA revealed that 99 percent of surveyed sex workers felt less safe after Backpage was shut down—and nearly 34 percent had, in fact, seen a rise in violence. A whopping 72.45 percent said the dismantling of online-based sex-work environments caused increasing economic instability.

Not only are sex workers exposed to more danger when they’re limited in their abilities to use online spaces for safety, but they are often survivors themselves. “Many sex workers are survivors and many survivors have experiences trading sex,” Danielle Blunt, a dominatrix and cofounder of Hacking//Hustling, says. “Our needs aren’t in opposition to each other. The criminalization and platform policing of sex workers increases sex workers’ and survivors’ exposure to harm and labor exploitation.” Limiting sex workers’ ability to autonomously do their work—through both online censorship and criminalization—actually perpetuates the violence these rules claim to mitigate. Instead of more restrictions and more criminalization, sex workers—especially those who are survivors of violence—need sex work to be fully decriminalized. “The more you decriminalize sex work, the safer we are,” Onyx Black, a Black stripper, says. “If it wasn’t a crime, we would be able to speak up if we’re being raped. If you think that criminalizing something makes it safer, think about the war on drugs.”

While there are no official plans for a second season of We Are Lady Parts, its success has been largely positive. The #weareladyparts tag on TikTok has more than 4 million views, and the top videos are filled with young Muslim women raving about being thrilled with the representation—which is exactly why these kinds of shows matter. Creative choices aside, you don’t have a show if you can’t serve your audience. But if we’re lucky enough to see a Season 2, I’d love to see Amina try to reconcile her love of playing music and her friendship with Noor, find out whether Saira manages to make it back into her mother’s heart, and see Amina and Ahsan’s storyline continue. Manzoor has effectively created an avenue to explore the nuances of faith and feminism; the conflicts she’s set up in Lady Parts—isolation, judgment, anxiety—are all very real parts of womanhood that aren’t always discussed in Muslim communities. But stories like these deserve to be told, and I hope this was just their first track on a very long, very punk album.

Montell doesn’t examine cults through the voyeuristic or sensational lens often generated by The Vow, Wild, Wild Country, and other recent docuseries. Rather than participating in the spectacle from the safe distance of a living room, Cultish is deliberately unsentimental and research based, which allows Montell to humanize those in the clutches of a cult. As she points out in the book, the idea that humans can be literally brainwashed is a myth that overlooks the incredible power of mental and emotional coercion. No one is entirely immune to succumbing to charismatic leadership, though some people are more susceptible due to childhood trauma, economic status, and a host of other factors.

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The internet is not an unflawed arbiter of justice, and it should be okay to admit that without invalidating what it has afforded in terms of a platform for the marginalized.

In the end, there is only one winner in a generation war, and it’s not millennials or boomers or Gen Z—it’s capitalism. 

These essentialized, whitewashed stereotypes impede the intergenerational organizing needed to create meaningful change.

"though capitalism has convinced us that in working hard we will be rewarded with a dream job, jaffe illustrates how our intense commitment to labor is turning us into the most efficient workers possible: devoting everything to labor and keeping nothing for ourselves"

During the 2016 GLAAD Media Awards, Lilly Wachowski said, “While the ideas of identity and transformation are critical components in our work, the bedrock that all ideas rest upon is love.” Seeing an instrumental part of their landmark film turned into a symbol of hatred is a heartbreaking illustration of what happens when creators lose control of the culture they’ve created. It also raises an essential question: How did the red pill go from being a critical component of a film created by two trans women to being a popular term used by men’s rights activists (MRAs) and white supremacists? 

The red pill invites viewers to rethink reality, breaking through the surface to become more aware of what’s really happening. But it’s not the only place in The Matrix where the films challenge the characters’—and the viewers’—reality; the entire trilogy is an extended exploration of the real and unreal, pushing the boundaries of understanding. When Neo first encounters the Oracle (Gloria Foster), a clairvoyant (and archetypal “magical Negro,” a thinly realized Black character who exists primarily as a guide for a white hero’s journey) who becomes a crucial guide, he also meets a young boy who bends a spoon with his mind, boggling the newbie with something that shouldn’t be possible. “Do not try and bend the spoon. It’s impossible,” the boy says. “Instead only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon. Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, but only yourself.” The boy’s words prove to be a critical moment of awakening for Neo and unwittingly present the option of another path: Rather than taking the red pill to wake up, perhaps viewers need to do the work, bending themselves and their understanding of the world to break free. It’s a longer, messier path, but ultimately a more rewarding one. The red pill represents a false promise, radicalizing without substance and doing untold damage in the process.

In these difficult times, it’s understandable that some consumers want pop culture to be a transcendent symbol of a social and cultural shift that benefits survivors. And while I agree that moments—like Harvey Weinstein being convicted of first-degree criminal sexual act and third-degree rape and sentenced to 23 years—are cause for celebration, films like Promising Young Woman are susceptible to the same limitations of the commercial girl-power-lite narratives that came before it. Promising Young Woman is a fascinating indictment of the way institutions protect predators, but it’s also glaringly simplistic in its navigation of justice and retribution, leaning on a vigilante narrative with a palpable sense of fatalism. Promising Young Woman isn’t a film about beating the system; it’s the pessimistic tale of a martyr who’s willing to sacrifice her body and mind for a small victory. Ultimately, Fennell’s debut is a noble effort weakened by a short-sighted adherence to old ideas of crime and punishment.

However, it also speaks to a larger symptom of television culture: Racialized depictions like the one in The Queen’s Gambit are glossed over because so many TV writers still default to them—and because viewers remain comfortable devouring them unquestioningly. Even in a time of increasingly diverse television, creators and critics alike still fail to question how a show can be all “good” if it lazily and irresponsibly uses characters of color. The Queen’s Gambit is a captivating show on the unique, underreported subculture of chess that deploys a hackneyed, racist trope in depicting its sole Black character. These two facts can both be true, and ignoring or sidelining necessary critiques of pervasive racial dynamics is inaccurate and disrespectful to Black women both real and fictional.

Much as they reflect TNB complexity, however, multiple pronouns are also especially vulnerable to erasure. Multipronoun users, Page included, face something of a visibility paradox, one most apparent in the pronouns left unsaid. In their coming-out letter, Page chose not to classify his identity beyond claiming “trans,” and presented “he” and “they” pronouns as equally-viable reference. This nuance is crucial for those like genderfluid disability activist Annie Segarra (she/they), whose relative comfort with gendered terms changes frequently. “I felt that for some people, [Elliot’s ‘they’ pronouns] went completely forgotten,” Segarra says. Instead, some “only use[d] he, and referr[ed] to him as a trans man.” According to Ren, this is symptomatic of “an innate urge to think in binary terms…for those unacquainted with the nuances of gender identity and expression.” Celebrities with access to biomedical transition, from Laverne Cox to Caitlyn Jenner, have dominated media narratives about what trans identity can look like, normalizing an image of trans both binary and medicalized. Rather than a fluid, felt identity or political category, trans identity has been represented as a diagnosis, treatable by hormones and surgeries. Movement from one gender to its imagined “opposite” comes to stand in for an entire landscape of gender experiences. After all, “in truth, there are no opposites.”

This has also conferred a false sense of fixity, erasing the ways in which gender might fluctuate over the course of a day, week, or lifetime. As a result, Ren says, “Many media outlets and people on social media have taken ‘he’ and ran with it” at the expense of the “nuance and multiplicity” multiple pronouns reflect. In other cases, rather than being binarized, one’s TNB identity might be erased entirely––especially when one retains the pronouns associated with their assigned gender.

The internet is a violent, dangerous place, and has been for years. Megarich tech giants with access to years and years of analytics, user data, complaints, and the best and the brightest coders and developers, must do better. In fact, tech and Silicon Valley are running out of excuses. As we imagine a better, more humane world after COVID-19, we must include our digital landscape in those plans.

Consider that if you have watched primarily mainstream U.S.-made movies during your lifetime, as certainly can be said of a great many humans living around the world, almost all the films that you have ever seen were directed by men, the overwhelming majority of them white. Between 80 and 90 percent of all the lead characters you have ever seen were men, the overwhelming majority of them white. And 55 percent of the time that a female character appeared on-screen, she was naked or scantily clad. The effect of all that is more staggering and profound than we can imagine. 

The stories we tell, hear, and internalize through film influence the entire mental framework by which we organize the world around us. And it’s been constructed almost exclusively by white men. I want to be really clear here—I am not saying that their experiences and worldview are invalid or unimportant. They are not. But it is deeply damaging to have our society constructed around the perspective and value system of one group of people that demographically makes up only a small percentage of the global population.

When Princess Leia enters Jabba the Hutt’s lair in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, she greets him with “Yá’át’ééh, yá’át’ééh,” a Navajo greeting, and her iconic double-bun hairstyle imitates a traditional Hopi style for young girls. In the “Spirits” episode of Stargate SG-1, a science-fiction series that ran between 1997 and 2007, the team lands on a planet inhabited by the Salish, a Native American tribe with ancestors on Earth, and the episode is peppered with animal totems and mysterious spirits. Even Jordan Peele’s 2019 movie Us features Native imagery: At the beginning of the film, a young Adelaide (Madison Curry) enters a fun house on the Santa Cruz boardwalk called “Shaman Vision Quest Forest,” sees a mechanical owl (an animal some tribes consider a foreshadowing of death), and whistles at night (an act some tribes believe beckons bad spirits).

In many mainstream science-fiction narratives, Native Americans—as people, not lifted cultural elements that make a scene more exotic—are virtually nonexistent. Yet many of our most iconic science-fiction tales offer perspectives about colonialism. Aliens or apes invade or attack planet Earth, aiming to replace us (the “us” usually being white people), and cataclysmic wars bring about the end of the world. This connection isn’t coincidental: In his 2008 book Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa English professor John Rieder notes that Western science fiction rose to prominence in the late 19th century during a period of massive European colonial expansion. “Evolutionary theory and anthropology, both profoundly intertwined with colonial ideology and history, are especially important to early science fiction from the mid-19th century on,” he writes. “The complex mixture of ideas about competition, adaptation, race, and destiny that was in part generated by evolutionary theory…forms a major part of the thematic material of early science fiction.”

As European nations were developing new ideas on racial hierarchy—including Social Darwinism, the belief that “inferior” people would “naturally” die off—writers of science fiction were exploring futuristic wars, invasions, and discoveries of new species. Their works often imitated violence occurring in the real world: H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, one of the first massively popular science-fiction books, imagined a world in which martians invade England—and was inspired by the British colonization of Tasmania. More than 100 years later, James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar, which was also a story about invasion and colonialism, became one of the highest-grossing films of all time. Colonization and marginalization are commonly used as plot points, but for Native Americans these are not fantastical, imagined scenarios. We live them.

As Portland State University Indigenous Nations Studies professor Grace L. Dillon wrote in the introduction to 2012’s Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, “It is almost commonplace to think that the Native Apocalypse, if contemplated seriously, has already taken place.” Indigenous authors are thus in a unique position to reclaim sci-fi narratives as a form of resistance against settler colonialism. Indigenous science fiction or speculative fiction—which Dillion encapsulates with the term “Indigenous futurisms,” inspired by the Afrofuturism movement—offers a space for Indigenous writers, filmmakers, and artists to explore possible futures. From cowboy films to government-assimilation policies, Native American communities and cultures are often portrayed as a “vanishing race” with no place in the present, let alone the future. Indigenous futurism is a contemplation of what our futures look like as Indigenous people, one that recognizes the significance and strength of Indigenous knowledge systems.