A Proportional Response
Breaking the Mold
Even as a small child, I recognized, although I didn’t fully comprehend, the irony of my Indian Barbie. Mattel had released a series of “international” dolls, dressed in stylish ethnic garb that draped beautifully over Barbie’s unrealistically proportioned body. The Indian edition was sari-clad and even came complete with a bindi. The blond-haired, blue-eyed figurine looked like a miniature Michaele Salahi. I recognized her as the wealthy, white American who always got the best table at restaurants in India. She’d stayed at a fancy resort for a week and appropriated my parents’ culture, and she had the red dot to prove it. I distinctly recall my frustration. I wanted my Barbie to look like me. I wonder now if what I really wanted was to look like my Barbie.
Mattel’s first minority doll was released in 1968, marketed as Barbie’s black friend. The company stopped painting white dolls black 12 years later. Instead, as Lisa Jones of The Village Voice wrote, it fashioned a doll made of “brown plastic poured into blond Barbie’s mold.” (Metaphors abound.) Recently, the company broke the mold and released a new line consisting entirely of black dolls. However, in the group of six, five have long, straightened hair, and three have blue or green eyes. These discrepancies compelled The Wall Street Journal’s Ann Zimmerman to ask, “Are Mattel’s New Dolls Black Enough?” It’s a question that many are clamoring to answer. Some of the mothers interviewed had incredibly positive things to say about the line; one said she could now “show her daughter that you don’t have to have a pointed nose to be beautiful.” Another mother complained about the uproar, arguing that a doll with a kinkier hairstyle would have been billed as too afro-centric. “We’re so hard and picky,” she bemoaned.
Touring the Ivory Tower
Many years ago, when an older friend e-mailed to debrief me on his first few days living in Weld Hall, he quipped: “I woke up today to the sound of a tour guide outside my window, explaining that this is where freshmen at Harvard live. I’ll never visit a zoo again.” Little did I know that in just a few years, my issues with volume control and freakish levels of enthusiasm would lead me to join the Crimson Key Society, and I would find myself leading throngs of wide-eyed Asian tourists throughout Harvard Yard. The first few tours I gave were incredibly unnerving. I worried I’d slip up on a date or be faced with an obscure question from the tourist equivalent of “that kid in section.” But the nerves faded as I came to a realization, one that I’ve passed on to many a younger keyster. “You’re a Harvard student,” I remind them. “These tourists want to like you.”
In his Dec. 1 column “I Go to Harvard. FML.”, Brian J. Bolduc ’10 denounced one of Harvard’s nearest and dearest traditions. “Students target the figure, whose shoe tourists rub for good luck, because it symbolizes their success,” he wrote. “But when we disrespect this institution, we disrespect ourselves. Revelry in other people’s misery, public urination, and embarrassment over your affiliation are undignified.” As an expert on undignified behavior, I’m hardly in a position to comment on the appropriate comportment of members of the intellectual elite. I will, however, join Bolduc in condemning this tradition. Not because it’s disrespectful to this institution, or to ourselves, but because it’s disrespectful to individuals who travel to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for an hour-long glimpse into our ever-so-privileged lives.
Let There Be Light
Two weeks ago, 18 scientific organizations wrote the United States Congress to “state the consensus scientific view” on global warming. The letter, signed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Meteorological Society, and the American Statistical Association (among others), declared that “climate change is occurring, and...that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver.” The letter took special care to point out that “contrary assertions are inconsistent with an objective assessment of the vast body of peer-reviewed science.” The next morning, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press revealed that the reminder was painfully necessary. In the past 20 months, the number of Americans who view global warming as a serious problem has decreased by nine percent. And, despite mounting scientific evidence to the contrary, the number of Americans who believe in global warming has reached a three-year low. More Americans are willing to spit in the face of scientifically supported, objective reasoning, counterintuitively tailoring their perception of facts to their beliefs.
The opposite approach should be instinctual. People are exposed to and absorb information. They make valid logical inferences based on that information. They form beliefs based on those inferences. They act according to those beliefs. When they are exposed to new and different information or analyses, they modify their beliefs and actions accordingly. Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer used this framework to describe his struggle with vegetarianism. As a child, the notion of eating meat as hurting animals had never occurred to him, so he happily consumed his grandmother’s chicken. Later, when his babysitter asked him a life-changing question—“You know that chicken is chicken, right?”—he had no choice but to modify his diet. Foer argued that, for years, he was simply innocent, “just...a child, ignorant of the world’s workings. Until I wasn’t. At which point I had to change my life.” The process isn’t clean. It involves constant and exhausting reevaluation and pride-swallowing. And there are slip-ups, to be sure, moments of weakness and temptation. But these are recognized as downsides in the complex formulation of and obedience to our ever-changing system of norms.
True Love Revision
I approached my interview with Rachel Wagley, co-president of True Love Revolution, as an opportunity to rethink my perspective on TLR’s platform. Time allowing, I also hoped to track down the Harvard students whose “casual, liberationist sentiments toward sex, sexuality, and relationships” the group denounces. (For purely journalistic purposes, of course.) Unfortunately, the discussion fell short in both respects.
TLR describes itself as a student group whose mission is not only to “promot[e] abstinence,” but also to “focus...on objective truth, virtues, self-respect, the strength of morality, and upholding the community.” As an officer in the group, Wagley has ventured far outside her comfort zone, from Radcliffe Union of Students meetings at the Women’s Center (gasp!) to hour-long debates about abstinence, feminism, and homosexuality with editorial columnists. As little as she seemed to enjoy our chat, she stressed the importance of this type of outreach. “I of all people love passionate opinions on either side of the aisle. My only problem is people who are totally apathetic,” she claimed.
Reevaluating Rape
Last Monday, the women of “The View” gathered at their round table of rambling incoherence to discuss one Roman Polanski. (I use the term “discuss” loosely.) Whoopi Goldberg emerged from behind her rose-tinted sunglasses to make what she seemed to think was an important distinction: “I don’t believe it was rape-rape, and when we get all the information, someone will tell me in my ear.” No word yet on what’s been whispered to the star of “Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit” since, but perhaps I can offer something in the way of elucidating details. Roman Polanski lured a 13-year-old girl to a friend’s home under the guise of taking her picture, gave her champagne and part of a Quaalude pill, and proceeded to have oral, vaginal, and anal intercourse with her in spite of almost constant protest. Polanski lacked consent in a wide array of ways: The victim was underage, the victim was intoxicated, and the victim didn’t provide any.
But Whoopi Goldberg isn’t the only celebrity who has rushed to Polanski’s defense. Throngs of Hollywood types have expressed their support of the Oscar winner in the form of an online petition demanding that the director be released. (Polanski pled guilty to sex with a minor over three decades ago, then fled to France before receiving his sentence. He was recently arrested after traveling to Zurich, where a film festival was being held in his honor.) The absurdly long list of his supporters includes former crush of mine Gael García Bernal, former artist worthy of my respect Pedro Almodóvar, and former and current creepster Woody Allen. The petition dismissively referred to his crime as “une affaire de moeurs”: a matter of customs.