The Black Friday Frenzy: Harnessing The Power of the Masses

I would like to spend some time discussing the fascinating display of human behavior that we witnessed this past Friday, a day of the year known as “Black Friday” (the day that retailers can expect to “get out of the red” and begin to turn a profit) and the day that supposedly officiates the beginning of the Christmas shopping frenzy.

Somehow, corporations and shopping malls have tapped into an element of human nature that drives people to stay up all night long and stampede the stores in droves for this “American tradition” of consumption. Tens of thousands of people line up in front of megastores beginning Wednesday afternoon, many having left their families and friends during the Thanksgiving holiday, in order to get in line for these highly publicized sales on gadgets, goods, and gifts.

Fun fact: Every year the number of people who are shopping, both online and in-stores on Black Friday, the nationally recognized event that takes place the day after Thanksgiving, is growing.  This year, my fellow Americans, we broke records with approximately 75% of the United States, yes, 3 in 4 people, were shopping this past "Black Friday Weekend".  According to the National Retail Federation surveys, the estimated 226 million people (of the entire population of the US: 307 million) is up from 212 million last year. Yikes.

Another fun fact: Approximately 125 million Americans voted in the 2008 presidential election. (That’s of about 231 million people who are 18+ in the United States.)

So what are those retailers doing right? How are they inspiring such immense participation? Most importantly, what can we learn from this to ignite the masses in a similar way (minus the use-of-pepper-spray mentality, one typically saved for peacefully protesting students on the UC campuses, ahem, I digress)  towards productive and socially responsible means? Like voting, perhaps…

I eagerly await the year when Election Day is celebrated with a level of emphatic popular participation comparable to what we see on Black Friday, with people lining around the block for days in advance to cast their vote for what they believe in.

So what is it about Black Friday that so dramatically piques the interest of the American masses? 

Well, for starters, the strategy and preparation that goes into maximizing shopping on Black Friday is quite impressive, both on the part of the shoppers and the retailers alike. The lesson here?  Easy to use, easy to understand preparation materials can be a game-changer when it comes to being involved.  Educating people on the importance of voting and the issues at hand in an approachable and understandable fashion definitely has the potential to rouse the interest of voters and increase informed participation.

(Confession: I don’t read those books that are sent in the mail prior to an election with the dense Arial font writing outlining the details of the things we can vote on in dry and long-winded passages. I mean really, who does? Shhh...)

Bumper sticker by one of my heroes, Ani DiFranco

What else works? 

Having the day off…  If people had to go to work on that Friday, I imagine that not too many stores would be “out of the red” on that infamous day after Thanksgiving, alas, it would be a day like any other. I think that this should be our very first step towards increasing voter participation and sending the message that the voice of the people is so valuable, we’ll shut down the work force to let it be heard. Let’s make it convenient to vote! One sure-fire way to demotivate people to vote is to add it to their already long to-do list after they work an eight hour day in the middle of the week. This needs to be a nationally recognized day off of school and work.

So what more does Black Friday have going for it? 

Well, lots of cool stuff to buy, and we Americans, we certainly love our stuff.  So what of that… Could we incentivize voting somehow in conjunction with increasing knowledge of the election issues? One opinion writer, Matt Miller, of the Washington Post, describes his idea to implement a lottery system in which there was an actual cash prize for a few lucky vote-casting Americans… Certainly an interesting thought, a potentially controversial one, but intriguing, nonetheless.

Here's another thing that Americans love to do as shown by the Black Friday Frenzy… spend money! The same opinion writer, Matt Miller, suggests that every voter ought to be given 50 publicly funded “patriot dollars” to contribute to the candidate of their choice in order to offset private campaign investment.  (Spending someone else’s money… even better!!) Enabling people to be personally invested in the election would be an innovative way to increase participation, not to mention the added benefit of candidates having to appeal to individual voters in all of the states! (Not to worry, I’ll certainly write an aggravated Electoral College spiel in a future blahg sometime.)

All that said, I feel quite strongly that it is possible to invigorate the involvement of our populous in the democratic process. It is not only about making the process more convenient and understandable (though that's essential), most importantly of all it's about redesigning the electoral system overall to make us feel like we, the people, matter. It seems that we have a disillusioned population on our hands, many of us (myself included, at times) among them, and that is a sad state of affairs. Until we are assured that each individual vote truly makes a difference, and that the people we are voting for earnestly care about our day-to-day lives so much that they will ask us for our individual and important vote, our voting turnout will remain abysmal.

It’s time to get creative, to think outside of the box, and to reinstate our long lost democratic system.

Special shout-out to my fix-the-world-one-heated-social-commentary-debate-at-a-time buddy, Chris Garrettson, for hashing out these ideas with me.

Kim Kardashian and the "Sanctity of Marriage"

“Mawwage. Mawwage is what bwings us together today. Wove, twue wove... So tweasure your woves fowever.” –The Clergyman in The Princess Bride

I was recently educated about the apparently hugely famous Kardashians. I’ll tell you, this was after several occasions of meeting people upon which their first reaction to the news that I live in New York City was to emphatically ask if I’d ever seen a celebrity, at least one of the Kardashians, they’d say, and I’d reply, the who?

One of the three $20,000 wedding dresses that Vera Wang donated to the Kardashian wedding.

WELL. The Kardashians are a family whose fame stems, as far as I can tell, from the patriarch having been the defense attorney in the O.J. Simpson trials in the mid-90s. And then there was Kim Kardashian’s sex tape (one of the daughters), the family’s subsequent reality TV show, a perfume and clothing line, the list goes on and on.

The most recent media explosion of the family's news is that Kim has decided to divorce her husband, after 72 days of blissful marriage. The embers of the celebrity gossip news columns still smoldering after the $10 million, star-studded, designer brand sponsored, TV sensationalized wedding, Ms. Kardashian would like everyone to know that she “would not have spent so much time on something just for a TV show” and that it was true love that inspired the marriage.

Be that as it may, there are many, many elements of this debacle that I find quite obnoxious, so I won’t spend more time on that specific event here. (I’m sure in glancing through any of the news on the wedding, you’ll find why it’s not worth the precious blahg space.) Instead, I would like to draw your attention to an alarming juxtaposition of this with some other current news.

Right now, in North Carolina, yet another legislative battle is ensuing with regard to a proposed state constitutional ban on same-sax marriage. While I feel confident that two generations down the line, my grandkids will scoff at the notion that two consenting adults, no matter their sex, were ever not allowed to marry, (similar, I would say, to the way that we now shake our heads in disbelief that it ever made sense to deem illegal the union of a black person and a white person), I wish we could move this issue along a little quicker. This senseless debate is getting old.


Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries, a couple showered with praise, adoration, massive media attention, and HUGE amounts of money, have become a highly acclaimed symbol of marriage in the US, while these people are denied their rights entirely.

 

How have we created a culture in which two people who have devoted their lives to one another, created families together, and happen to be of the same sex are considered an offense to the “sanctity of marriage” while Kim and Kris’ 30-second marriage gathered an astonishing 10.5 million eager viewers? Something here seems not quite right.

It’s time, friends, for us to truly and completely separate church and state (what a concept). And marriage, as a religious institution, should be taken out of the governmental sphere entirely. Really, the only argument that upholds the notion that same-sex couples cannot marry is that the religious institution of marriage stipulates that a couple may only be comprised of a man and woman. 

As far as the government is concerned, the legal union between two consenting adults that grants them shared benefits is just that, and marriage can be left to the churches, temples, beaches, backyards, or any other wedding venue that a couple chooses to celebrate and recognize their union (should they choose to).

Don’t get me wrong: I think that the Kim Kardashians of the world should remain free to wed at their whim and will, unimpeded by any legal means or value judgments.  Far be it for me to say what grown adults can or cannot vow to do.  After all, at the end of the day, when two people (who are not me) freely decide they want to be legally bound to one another, with all of the glory and hardships that come along with that decision, it certainly does not affect my day, and what I think of that decision certainly should not affect theirs.

But if it really is the “sanctity of marriage” that is in question, people, it is not the same-sex couples of the world who we ought to be scrutinizing.

The Bristol Conundrum

This is a heavy one. A difficult one to gather my thoughts about, presenting a powerfully intense combination of both full support and utter disdain, and an extremely controversial situation…

Bristol's new book

Here’s the deal: Bristol Palin (oh yes, the teenage, abstinence-only touting, totally anti-everything that I stand for, daughter of Sarah Palin herself), has disclosed in her recently released book that her first time having sex, allegedly the event that led to her current motherhood, with Levi Johnston, is an event that she has no memory of. She tells of a camping trip that she went on with a group of friends and Levi (unbeknownst to her ultraconservative parents), and consumed more wine coolers than her tolerance for alcohol could handle. She describes waking up the next day not knowing that she had had sex with Levi and feeling distraught when she found out.

Hmm.

While Bristol is certainly a character that I loathe the idea of relating with on any level, her story is one that I cannot shake from my mind. The criticism against her out there (much of which she brings upon herself with her senseless hypocrisies and conservative evangelical viewpoints passed down from her incompetent mother, ahem, I digress) with regard to this issue, is that she is claiming to have been sexually assaulted as an attempt to gather up the pieces of her tainted reputation as a God-fearing, abstinent-until-married young woman. Dan Savage, a well-known sex columnist who I respect profoundly and follow avidly, speaks to this viewpoint, claiming that he does not believe her story is true, and for the first time Mr. Savage, I disagree with your position with regard to an important and controversial social issue.

I do not believe that Bristol is lying about this; in fact, my understanding is that she has never actually said that she was raped. She told Fox News that she is “not accusing Levi of rape” and nowhere in the book did she directly make that claim. Her book though, tells a story of a self-blaming survivor of sexual assault. In this victim-blaming society (i.e. “she shouldn’t have been there at that time”, “she shouldn’t have worn that outfit”, “she shouldn’t have had that much to drink”), blaming one’s self for the incident and not relating as a “victim of rape” are some of the most common characteristics of a survivor. And no matter the language she uses, the mass media has ascribed her a self-proclaimed rape victim, an undesirable label in our world, to say the least, as we can see in the way that this situation is being treated.

It is high time that we as a society start taking this issue very seriously. Why is it that so many of the high profile sexual assault situations in the news (Julian Assange, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and Bristol, to name the most recent big news) tend to result in the intense and dramatic denigration of the accuser’s character in the mass media, while seriously questioning the accused is left up to the less mainstream media?

The reality is that in bringing a story like this to the public sphere, the accuser has much, much more to lose if the case is dismissed than the accused, as shown in the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Nafissatou Diallo this past summer in New York City.

And worst of all, every time that a sexual assault situation is discredited in such a public way, we send the message to the millions of survivors out there that they should remain silent, and that speaking out will most likely lead to secondary victimization by institutions and individuals alike.

All of this is to say that when someone brings out a story like this (even someone part of the detestable Palin family), we must take pause and consider the story deeply, and certainly not dismiss it.

My next blahg entry will be a lighter one, I promise. J

The F-Word

I would like to take a moment to unpack the term "feminism" a bit. What a mysteriously controversial term. Far too often I hear about gross overgeneralizations and stereotypes around what a feminist looks like or acts like or thinks. I'm here to argue that these ideas are destructive forces in this important movement of the people. See, feminism, women’s rights, sexism… these are all issues that affect every one of us and the reality is that until every single person is free, equal, and respected to the utmost, no one can be free.

“You don't have to be anti-man to be pro-woman.”—Jane Galvin Lewis

This is an important concept that deserves a discussion. I sense that there exists a misperception that feminism is somehow anti-men… Well, I’m here to say, it certainly is not. Feminism is a movement that benefits all people, and in order to work towards true equality among all people, we need the support of… all people. Men, you are our brothers, fathers, partners, and friends; you love us and respect us, and with that sentiment, I welcome you to this essential movement.

If you are someone who thinks that women deserve ample and equal opportunities in society, representation in our political sphere, respect, autonomy, freedom from harm, and are in general pretty cool people, then you too are a feminist.

There of course exists, as in any major organized social or political group, a handful of people who represent the extremity of the viewpoint and are often quite outspoken (think Tea Party, PETA, etc). While certainly not to be dismissed, these more extreme viewpoints along the wide spectrum of opinions, are not representative of the majority.

I leave you with this quote:

“Feminism has fought no wars. It has killed no opponents. It has set up no concentration camps, starved no enemies, practiced no cruelties. Its battles have been for education, for the vote, for better working conditions.. for safety on the streets... for child care, for social welfare...for rape crisis centers, women's refuges, reforms in the law."

—Dale Spender, author of For the Record: The Making & Meaning of Feminist Knowledge, 1985

If you ever say you are not a feminist, I will certainly ask, and why not?

Facebook Rape Pages

A new (or perhaps not-so-new) Facebook phenomenon came to my attention when I read an essay recently published by the marvelous Eve Ensler in the Huffington Post: Facebook rape pages. I, as you perhaps are, was baffled by what this could possibly be and needed to learn more.

As seen in The Telegraph on Oct. 16, 2011

It turns out that there exists on Facebook a shockingly large collection of pages that Facebook members can “like” that glorify horrific acts of violence against women. While this is not the only issue that has elicited pages on Facebook that promote hateful messages, this is the one that I would like to explore right now, an issue that is particularly poignant for me and in my line of work. (Feel free to bring up others if you wish.)

For example, until recently, one was able to “Like” the Facebook page What’s 10 inches and gets girls to have sex with me? My knife. Or perhaps one might “Like” the page You know she's playing hard to get when your chasing her down an alleyway (as shown here). One more to more fully paint the picture… Wiping makeup off your shoe after a long day of kicking sluts in the face.

After weeks of protest and petitioning, Change.org was able to convince Facebook authorities that this cannot be considered “just a joke” as they had been claiming and that removing these pages is imperative in order to adhere to their own Safety Rule #7 that states “Your will not post content that: is hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence” and to maintain a safe Facebook environment. Only some of the pages were removed as a result.

Let's count the ways that this rule is violated by the three page titles listed above, and the many others that are STILL ACTIVE on Facebook. (An interesting activity: for every violation you find, recruit another person to sign the petition to eradicate this content from Facebook.)

And what of free speech, one might ask? Good question, with a simple answer—on Facebook, we don’t have it. Facebook is a private domain with set Terms of Use that we all agreed to upon initiation of our beloved Facebook accounts. Facebook upholds the right to edit content that it deems inappropriate or harmful. And we say, Facebook, this is your moment to take a stand.

These pages have collectively accumulated hundreds of thousands of “Likes” on Facebook, an abhorrent display of socially destructive and oppressive “humor”. For many weeks, Facebook executives defended their decision to let these pages remain live on Facebook claiming that an offensive statement to one person may be just a joke to another and equated it to telling a dirty joke in a pub.

Well, Facebook, and the rest of the world, this is simply not funny. Heedlessly publicizing, joking, and “liking” acts of violence against women, and diminutive and sexually repressive language is promulgating the culture of violence that we live in. Unfortunately, many of us have learned to tolerate these types of “jokes” for the sake of not causing a ruckus or drawing attention to our own offense, and this has come at no small cost.

Friends, the way that we “joke” about an issue is a reflection of the way that society at large views that issue; and subtle as a joke may be (or perhaps not), it reinforces and in a way condones an action or a viewpoint.

After all, you never know for whom these “jokes” are a reality.

My First Blahg

The time has come. Watch out, world. Inspired by the power of online social media and ready to see it be utilized more fully for productive and relevant messages, I am going to start to blahg. (We all knew something big would happen on 11/11/11.)  :)

In creating this blahg, I intend to evoke critical contemplation, controversial ideas, and challenging conundrums that we see every day in the social realm. I invite any of you who are so inspired to join in and speak out. Themes that you can expect to come upon in this blog are human rights, politics, sexuality, public health, feminism, social injustices, activism, fun facts, not-so-fun facts, current events, inequality, calls to action, and much more.

Tune in, turn on; let’s talk.

(Special shout-out to my dear friend, Frances McCorkle, for her creative spelling of "blahg", my new favorite word.)