Racing Turtles

The individual who has been marked by impoverished spectacular thought more deeply than by any other aspect of his experience puts himself at the service of the established order right from the start, even though subjectively he may have had quite the opposite intention. He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with; the one in which he learned to speak. No doubt he would like to show himself as an enemy of its rhetoric; but he will use its syntax. This is one of the most important aspects of the success obtained by spectacular domination.

• the NYT makes millions in advertiser revenue: it has a financial incentive against publishing a story that would piss those advertisers off
• the NYT has sources in the government and military: it is directly incentivised to remain on good terms with those sources to continue receiving stories from them
• the NYT is set up in such a way so that all stories published are written from the perspective that the USA is fundamentally a good thing. people who think that the USA is a force for evil face several barriers where holding (and expressing) this opinion will prevent them from getting anywhere near publishing in the NYT: getting into a prestigious journalism program, getting hired at the NYT, getting promoted at the NYT, getting any story expressing this perspective cleared at the NYT--all of these are ideologically gatekept
• this leaves a bunch of people at the NYT who might not believe themselves to be doing anything other than neutrally reporting vital truths, who have at no point decided they 'want to produce propaganda', but who nevertheless form an organization that relentlessly and constantly produces nothing but

Most women who use a gym will have experienced that moment of psyching herself up to walk into the free weights area, knowing that many of the men who dominate the space will regard her on a range from nuisance to freak. And yes, you can technically just walk in, but there’s that extra mental hurdle to clear that most men simply don’t face, and it takes a particular kind of self-confidence not to be bothered by it at all. Some days, you just won’t feel like it. It’s the same story in the outdoor gym in my local park; if it’s full of men, I often give it a miss, not relishing the inevitable stares and all too clear sense that I don’t belong.

The inevitable reaction from some quarters to such complaints is to tell women to stop being delicate flowers – or for feminists to stop painting women as delicate flowers. And of course some women aren’t bothered by the leering and macho posturing. But women who do avoid these spaces are not being irrational, because there are plenty of accounts of hostility from men when women venture into supposedly gender-neutral shared exercise spaces. Like transit environments, then, gyms are often a classic example of a male-biased public space masquerading as equal access.

The good news is that this kind of male bias can be designed out and some of the data collection has already been done. In the mid-1990s, research by local officials in Vienna found that from the age of ten, girls’ presence in parks and public playgrounds ‘decreases significantly’. But rather than simply shrugging their shoulders and deciding that the girls just needed to toughen up, city officials wondered if there was something wrong with the design of parks. And so they planned some pilot projects, and they started to collect data. 

What they found was revealing. It turned out that single large open spaces were the problem, because these forced girls to compete with the boys for space. And girls didn’t have the confidence to compete with the boys (that’s social conditioning for you) so they tended to just let the boys have the space. But when they subdivided the parks into smaller areas, the female drop-off was reversed. They also addressed the parks’ sports facilities. Originally these spaces were encased by wire fencing on all sides, with only a single entrance area – around which groups of boys would congregate. And the girls, unwilling to run the gauntlet, simply weren’t going in. Enter, stage right, Vienna’s very own Leslie Knope, Claudia Prinz-Brandenburg, with a simple proposal: more and wider entrances. And like the grassy spaces, they also subdivided the sports courts. Formal sports like basketball were still provided for, but there was also now space for more informal activities – which girls are more likely to engage in. These were all subtle changes – but they worked. A year later, not only were there more girls in the park, the number of ‘informal activities’ had increased. And now all new parks in Vienna are designed along the same lines.

The city of Malmö, Sweden, discovered a similar male bias in the way they’d traditionally been planning ‘youth’ urban regeneration. The usual procedure was to create spaces for skating, climbing and painting grafitti. The trouble was, it wasn’t the ‘youth’ as a whole who were participating in these activities. It was almost exclusively the boys, with girls making up only 10-20% of those who used the city’s youth-directed leisure spaces and facilities. And again, rather than shrugging their shoulders and thinking there was something wrong with the girls for not wanting to use such spaces, officials turned instead to data collection.

In 2010, before they began work on their next regeneration project (converting a car park to a leisure area) city officials asked the girls what they wanted. The resulting area is well lit and, like the Viennese parks, split into a range of different-sized spaces on different levels. Since then, Christian Resebo, the official from Malmö’s traffic department who was involved in the project, tells me, ‘Two more spaces have been developed with the intention of specifically targeting girls and younger women.’

• The premise of the second part of Don Quixote is that the protagonist is on a quest to beat up a guy who wrote an unflattering fanfic about him
• The Tale of Genji contains a chapter with no text to reflect the fact that the viewpoint character has just died
• At one point the framing narrative of Frankenstein develops into a dude telling a story about a dude telling a story about a dude telling a story

• No significant recurring characters appear within the first 25 000 words of Les Misérables, the text’s first fourteen chapters being occupied with a detailed biography of a priest who subsequently appears in one scene
• In its authors’ notes, The Princess Bride claims to be an abridged edition of a 16th Century political satire that the editor’s grandfather once read to him as a bedtime story; the movie is in turn purportedly based on this bedtime story version (which appears nowhere in the published text), making it an adaptation of a fictitious abridgement of a nonexistent novel

• What need motivated the behavior? (Be honest here, don’t triviliaze a need because you don’t like the behavior that resulted from it). 
• Why is this behavior the solution that is most often chosen in response to that need?
• How else could that need be met? How can that alternative be made into a more likely and more attractive option than the current solution?
• How is the behavior rewarded?
• How are people sheltered from the consequences of their behavior? (not to be confused with punishment, which is rarely an efficient deterrent)
• And last but not least: do the circumstances of your community allow for a change? do you have space for making mistakes and learning from them? Is honest self-reflection encouraged or treated as an admission of guilt?