Gender

So, a new DJ Earworm mashup. This one was getting a lot of bitching in comments, but I like it a lot. Partly it’s because many were complaining that the inclusion of “Happy” made it bad, and I really like the song “Happy.” Partly because it’s “only” five songs. This is funny to me because I have been listening to mashups/bootlegs for a long time, and for many years there were always only two songs, and that was often even the titling: Song A vs Song B, or Artist A vs Artist B. One of the best mashups ever is dsico’s “Love Will Freak Us” (Get Your Freak On vs Love Will Tear Us Apart) (Missy Eliot vs Joy Division obvs.).

Another early classic is Freelance Hellraiser’s “The Strokes vs Christina Aguilera ‘A Stroke of Genie-us.'” I am entirely certain that the popularity of this bootleg made Christina Aguilera’s people write/produce songs for her differently. Really, her music was no question influenced by how good this sounded. (Now you’re going to tell me that there’s still Christina Aguilera in there, so “good” in that previous sentence is not being employed properly but…OK. Don’t like it. It was ground-breaking, though. I think it came out in 2002.

I feel obliged to warn you that this video contains scenes of…well, unrelieved priapism? There is no reason that a man crashing through the successive stories of a normal Asian apartment building, and convincing his neighbors to join him in mimicry of unsatisfied sexual behavior should be more sexual or more salacious than girls shaking their almost-naked asses at you and performing sexual congress with the wall of Jason Derulo’s dressing room or whatever, but somehow it is. Zoë says it’s more disturbing “because they look like real people.” This is right; we expect impossible plastic beauties from around the world to shake their money-makers right into the camera. An ordinary Chinese dude in sweatpants dry-humping an old TV is…more sexual? This can’t be right, but it’s right? Anyway, NSFW in some illogical way that is fully clothed and has no one touching anyone. This combines with the ordinary people in the video for “Happy” in a humorous way.

Next time: is Iggy Azalea a drag queen? Is this a kind of reverse blackface where you take the rhymes you want from a woman MC from South Florida and then repackage them in a model-perfect white blonde?

I hear that the chicks have it easy on online dating sites. They say the dicks flow like the waters of the Nile, carrying all away before them. Also the pictures of the dicks. I am led to believe that they are very easily obtained. Men who want dick pics use Grindr and that’s apparently working out great for them. But what about straight guys? What? About them? One brave redditor decided to test his theory, by using science. Which is real.

Last night I was bored and was talking with a friend on skype about her experiences with online dating. I was joking with her that “girls have it easy on dating sites” etc. etc. ….I decided that I would set up a fake profile. Set it up as a gender-swapped version of me essentially see what would happen. So I did the username, and I was up. Before I could even fill out my profile at all, I already had a message in my inbox from a guy. It wasn’t a mean message, but I found it odd that I would get a message already. So I sent him a friendly hello back and kind of joked that I hadn’t even finished my profile, how could he be interested, but I felt good because I thought I was right that “girls have it easy”

Do go on. Wait, no, I’ll summarize. Dudes started messaging him right away (he notes here that his female friend is only average in attractiveness and is fine with his saying so.) They said things that were not immediately sexual, but weird. Then when he said no or responded neutrally, they said unpleasantly sexual things. They repeatedly proposed NSA sex, like maybe in the next hour? and some skyping, maybe? Webcam action?
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I’m in bitterly cold Philadelphia at the moment attending the meetings of the American Economic Association (and a bunch of related societies). I was at a very interesting session on long-run discounting, which had a panel of six with (as is common) one woman[^1]. Looking around the room, I realised that the panel was actually balanced (inside econometric joke) when compared with the audience, which was about 90 per cent male.

I don’t think that the academic economics profession is quite as male-dominated as that. Some casual discussions suggested a couple of hypotheses:

(i) There were some parallel sessions on gender issues for which the audience was mostly female (not surprising, but kind of ambivalent)

(ii) Men were more likely to attend the sessions while female colleagues were more likely to be on the hiring teams. For those unfamiliar with this exercise, a large part of academic conferences consists of academics sitting in hotel rooms for days on end while a string of recent PhDs give a 15 minute pitch on a piece of research (their ‘job market paper’) followed by a ritual Q&A (a plausible but depressing story)

I get the impression that academic philosophy is even worse than economics, but that most other disciplines are better. Any thoughts?

[^1]: Maureen Cropper, who’s been doing great work in this field as long as I can remember

There was a truly unprecedented riot in Singapore’s Little India neighborhood last night. (Video report from the BBC, Channel News Asia, Al Jazeera’s good report.) Our family just moved house, out to the wilds of Bukit Batok (a lovely apartment, actually, next to the Bukit Gombak MRT). Up till October, though, we were living right up the road from the spot where it took place, like 700m away; we would have been able to hear the yelling no question, and the bus exploding with what I imagine would have been rather startling ease. The riot started when a private bus, driven by a Singaporean, struck and killed an Indian worker while backing up. The bus driver was injured in the riot, and the bus itself destroyed completely. There is video of the windshield being smashed, and later footage of the bus completely aflame, suddenly punctuated by the gas tank bursting. Ambulances and, later, police cars (?!?!?! there aren’t enough interrobangs to express my feelings about typing this sentence) were also turned over and torched. A number of policemen were injured in the riot, as were some rioters, but the police never fired on the crowd, and got things under control within two hours, and happily no one else died. The cops were able to get there in a hurry because the Tanglin Police Post (bigger than a station, and more important) is about 500m away. They’ve had a big photo on one of their recruiting ads for ages, on a banner on the side of the building, that shows a bunch of ethnically diverse police officers armed with riot gear and huge plastic shields. I used to think, whenever I rode past in the taxi, so exhausted from work and in terrible pain, at the end of a thirty minute drive, with my head fallen to one side and my cheekbone pressed flat on the glass like skinless chicken breast against the cold plastic in the butcher’s section, “well, they ain’t never going to get the chance to do that.”
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Another follow-up on the philosophy styles and aggression issue, raised initially by Chris. I meant my first post to be a response, narrowly, not to Chris’ post but to the suggestion that sort of ate the comment thread: trolley problems are symptomatic of philosophers’ taste for intellectual bloodsport. (Not that tying people to tracks and running them over is sporting, mind you.) I didn’t mean to offer up the whimsical innocence of trolley tragedy as proof that philosophers don’t, otherwise, suffer from the sorts of problems that Jonathan Wolff alleges. But I actually do disagree, substantially, with the Wolff piece. Let me try to say how. [click to continue…]

Yesterday, Jo Wolff tackled the question of women in philosophy in his column at the Guardian, writing:

At its worst, philosophy is something you do against an opponent. Your job is to take the most mean-minded interpretation you can of the other person’s view and show its absurdity. And repeat until submission. Certainly the method has the merits of encouraging precision, but at the same time it is highly off-putting for those who do not overflow with self-confidence.

Brian Leiter thinks Jo Wolff is making a mistake:

At the end of the column, he runs together two issues that should be kept separate: the combative nature of philosophy and how one should treat students. Professor Ishiguro’s approach [see the Wolff column] on the latter seems the right one, but that is independent of whether philosophy as practiced among peers should, or should not be, combative. Insofar as truth is at stake, combat seems the right posture!

I disagree, unless there’s some good reason to believe that combat leads to truth more reliably than some alternative, more co-operative approach. (Does the adversarial system of the US and English courts lead to the truth more reliably than the inquisitorial system?) Sometimes combat might be the right stance, but seeing that as the default mode for philosophical discussion leads far too often to destructive Q&A sessions that aim at destroying the opponent and bolstering the amour propre of the aggressor. Where the aim is victory, then all kinds of rhetorical moves can prove effective: there’s no reason to think that truth will emerge as a by-product. I think a relatively common occurrence is that people on the receiving end of an aggressive battering lose confidence (in themselves, or in a good idea). Sometimes people should defer to criticism, of course, and sometimes people should make criticism in forthright terms and Brian is right to value that. But frankly, a lot of the stuff that goes on in philosophy seminars is just damaging.

What I’ve said so far is independent of the gender issue. I realize that some women in philosophy are uncomfortable with the link between gender and philosophical style and there’s certainly no reason to think that merely being robust and forthright in argument is specially male. But a lot of conduct in philosophy goes well beyond the robust and forthright and tips into the straightforwardly arseholish, and there may be a selection effect in favour of women in the profession who are able (though not willing) to endure that. A lot of people in the academy – both men and women – suffer from “imposter syndrome”. But it turns out that women are more likely than men to suffer from this and there is no correlation with actual ability. An atmosphere where there is systematic reinforcement of such a widespread anxiety is not a good one, and it might be, because of its uneven distribution by gender, just one of the several mechanisms that exclude women.

Last Thursday I went to the launch party for Katie Green’s Lighter Than My Shadow (just published by Jonathan Cape) a graphic memoir in which she tells the story of her descent into and recovery from anorexia (and quite a bit besides). It is a big book, 524 pages in all, which somewhat belies its title, yet I read the whole thing in one sitting. I know I’m not alone in having done this: once you start, it is very hard to stop. It is compelling but a hard book to read: I felt the tears welling up several times. It is also a great book. The graphic format works perfectly for the story and Katie – a terrific illustrator – has managed to convey very vividly some little part of what it felt like from the inside. The black cloud of despair, the screaming monsters in the head, the desperate urge to control, control, control and the sense of alienation from those closest to her, the pain she knows she’s inflicting on them but can’t help doing so.

When she spoke at the book launch Katie said that she hadn’t written the book to help anyone. Nevertheless, I’m sure it will help one very large group of people, the people who can’t imagine what it is like for someone in her position, who can’t understand the sense of compulsion, and why the sick person can’t just “pull themselves together”. In giving voice to this inside, Katie has pulled off something comparable to what William Styron did for depression in Darkness Visible. That’s a pretty high standard of comparison, I know, and I’m feeling swayed by the immediate experience of just having read Lighter Than My Shadow, but I don’t think it an unfitting one.

I should disclose a slight interest. I know Katie slightly (she’s a friend of one of my children) and a photo I took is on the cover flap. So I’m not entirely impartial. Still, I think this is, objectively, a very great achievement. And I don’t mean to relativise in a way that suggests that it is great for someone who has gone through her experience to have produced something this good. I mean that it would be great for anyone to have created this, even though her experience is a condition of having done so. Anyway, people out there, this is a book that most of you ought to read. You can get it at Amazon of course, but better to buy from somewhere else. (The Guardian had a feature on the book last week.)

Oh, Belle. Belle, Belle, Belle. First, you told us some authors were such a bunch of sexist dillweeds that you didn’t really like their novels all that much. In a throwaway sentence! A sentence that made it clear that you in fact didn’t read such books at all, but merely checked the covers for sexist content and then threw the books away in the trash. In. The. Trash. And then John said you could read fast. Biased much LOL! Yeah, well, so fast that you stopped reading books completely after you reached a sexist sentence! Because that’s manifestly what ‘reading fast’ means. Yes, and then you had an actual man testify again on your behalf that you finished books even if you didn’t super-love them. Like–probably the only chick in the world, seriously! How was any of us to know that “reads books fast” means “reads books”? What is this, some kind of crazy advanced logic class, or a blog?

So then you explained at length, that you were only talking about this one group of male authors who wrote more or less from the ’50s on, and that you didn’t like their novels because you thought they weren’t good novels. When since is that a reason not to like a novel, I would like to know, Missy? Any anyway, Belle, your problem is that you’re reading the wrong thing. Nobody cares about these books anymore! Or, as a commenter suggested: “No. It seems your definition of ‘important’ is skewing your choice of reading, so not surprising that your results are skewed. I’d suggest that you drop everything else for a while until you’ve finished reading all of Pratchett and Banks.” [Here I must note that for whatever odd reason this rubbed me the wrong way. I have already read all of Pratchett and Banks (except maybe one Tiffany Aching one?). The knowledge that there will be no new Iain M. Banks novels dismays me. He’s one of my all-time favorite writers full-stop. WHY AFTER 500 COMMENTS WOULD SOMEONE NOT ASK IF I HAD READ THEM ALL FIRST BECAUSE YOU KNOW, I VERY WELL MIGHT HAVE? Unnamed commenter: I don’t hate on you; it was almost bad luck that you…naw, you still shouldn’t have been so patronizing. But, like, talk to me, dude, what were you thinking?]

Well, dear readers, someone does care about these authors. Someone cares very, very much, and that man is University of Toronto Professor David Gilmour. In a recent interview with Random House Canada’s Emily Keeler, he explained his teaching philosophy:

I’m not interested in teaching books by women. Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. Except for Virginia Woolf. And when I tried to teach Virginia Woolf, she’s too sophisticated, even for a third-year class. Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth….
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I don’t want to step on my husband’s post, so I am merely supplementing it, because I think there is something that deserves enough excerpts to warrant a post rather than a comment. To wit, this article from The Toast, “You Wouldn’t Like Jonathan Franzen When He’s Angry.” I am turning off comments to this post so we can talk in the thread below.

Jonathan Franzen is the angriest novelist in the world. He is the novelist who is so angry he cannot move. He cannot eat. He cannot sleep. He can just barely growl. Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis.

He is angry because Salman Rushdie uses Twitter, and nowadays people can buy books on the Internet, and the Home Depot, and he had to go to Germany one time, and also some women exist who have not had sex with him….

Think of all the women who have never slept with Jonathan Franzen. His anger must grow by the day. Soon it will envelop the world, and we will be forced to bow down in chains before it, and create ziggurats out of human corpses as terrible tribute. Some of these women who Failed To F#ck Jonathan Franzen might now be on Twitter, which is wrong because of a German essayist who is now dead.

To quote one of the most internetty minds of our generation, “heh, indeed.” Now I will speak my part, and then fall silent, except for the part about where we get into a huge argument in comments because I think pretty much all the Important Male Novelists of the mid to late 20th-century are such sexist dillweeds that it is actually impossible to enjoy the books. For me. Except William S. Burroughs, and that is because he does not want to sex chicks up. Not even a little bit. He wants us to be able to make clones, and then just go live on another planet with only men and boys and million-year-old crab creatures made of radioactive cadmium and then have gay sex there. It is astringently refreshing to have a novelist not care about having sex with you at all. It’s the best! Goodbye, poorly drawn female characters who exist as trophies for when the protagonists level up after a boss battle with Freudian analysis!

Now, dudes, part of shared bank accounts and having children and shit like that is that you can coordinate on stuff and divide responsibilities sensibly. Am I going to sit down and read about the Fourfold Root? No, I will ask my husband, “hey peaches, what’s this with the Schopenhauer here, am I giving a f*@k or what?” Then he can answer on account of having written a dissertation about it. And he arranges for everyone to go to the dentist, and parent-teacher conferences, and guy stuff like that which I as a mother, am not really into. Similarly, as John is a busy person who doesn’t have time to read novels which are both extremely long and quite bad, I can read them on our joint behalf. No, I can also read long good books on our behalf, so I can tell John crucial stuff about Proust like when the last volume opens and it seems as if all the characters have come in fancy dress but then… I read very quickly, stupidly quickly, a skill I primarily use to read the equivalent of a 500 page paperback, but made of internet bullshit, every day (I’ve checked). The Corrections, Jesus. It didn’t even have to be bad! There were many aspects of it that were very well observed and memorable. It needed an editor. It needed a nano-particle of self-awareness that was doing something other than comparing the distance of Franzen’s masturbatory ejecta to that of Philip Roth. Something that might, eventually, if nurtured in a caring bosom, maybe some kind of DH Lawrence glorying sheaf of wheat in the firelight thing, become humility. Just for like a second! It needed negative 4089 C of sexism to return to conditions amenable to reading rather than being the heart of a the giant blue-white star which is poised, even now, to go supernova in the center of the swirling storm of Eta Carinae. Let us never speak of Jonathan Franzen again.

[This post is not entirely about Oprah Winfrey. FYI. It discusses a former slaveowner’s attempts to run her plantation after emancipation.]
Rest easy everyone! We’re cool! The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto has sussed out this Oprah situation in a way that I think you will all find correct and satisfactory. And what is more reliable than the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal?

Jesse Jackson hasn’t yet declared Zurich the new Selma, but from some of the news coverage you’d think Oprah Winfrey was the next Rosa Parks…It seems there was a language barrier: The clerk’s English isn’t great, and Winfrey probably doesn’t speak Swiss. “This is an absolute classic misunderstanding,” the store’s owner, Trude Goetz, told Reuters…What Winfrey construes as a racial episode is actually a story about class–a wealthy, privileged celebrity aggrieved by a lowly saleswoman’s lack of deference…It’s reminiscent of the endlessly repeated claim that criticism of Barack Obama proves racism is alive and well in America. Somehow Obama’s defenders are unable to see past the color of his skin and notice that he is president of the United States. As for Winfrey, she went all the way to Europe to discover that racism is alive in America.

Golly, don’t I feel a fool now! Thanks, the Wall Street Journal! With that out of the way I have something that is interesting and amusing to share with you, rather than something melting down with white-hot rage like a nuclear reactor core in a devastating accident. Let’s just wish we were down in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten, but–look away!
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Do you know how I would describe the actions of a powerful black woman against a defenseless fraulein, if I were, like, not racist at all? CANNIBALIZATION. *[I am wrong here–please read the ETA for why.] Buh–huhh? What now? WTF? Cannibalization, are you out of your ever-lovin’, blue-eyed, mind; this is part of your defense against people thinking you’re racist? Probably that’s just from laying down with the Daily Mail and getting up with pubic lice, as the venerable British saying goes. Oh, what’s this you say, over here? The original article in German? “Sie ist so mächtig, und ich bin bloss eine Verkäuferin. Ich habe niemandem etwas zuleide getan. [Sniffles audible–ed.] Ich verstehe auch nicht, weshalb sie das so gross im TV ausschlachten muss.” My German is rusty, so first I thought, that’s just some form of ausschlagen and the Daily Mail are being a bag of racist dicks per the uge’, but–naw, this is–oh, no, I can’t eve–God, why? For real, cannibalize! Apparently Swiss people are so racist, this is how you can explain you’re not racist! Also, by explaining that you can’t be racist because you’re Italian! [Raises hand, tentatively, ‘excuse me, I–] And, erm, this explanation works great for British people, apparently. And American Gawker readers eat this shit up with a spoon! OMG! Racism is the Cronut for the summer of this August you guys! CANNIBALIZE. No, for real. Cannibal.

I started writing the other day because I wanted to talk about how John’s question, “when did it stop being acceptable to say mind-bogglingly racist things in public?” is half a good question and half a misleading one. In politer society certain awful things were never acceptable to say. As time has passed the band of “can say ‘x’ and retain future political career” has been getting narrower, and higher, and that’s a good thing. But on the other hand, people who were racist never really stopped much being racist, or saying and doing stupid racist stuff. One thing that remained true was that certain words and phrases continued to be considered low-class and redneck even as many other whites remained very racist indeed. Thus we have the continual problem of rural whites doing something obviously racist (like the MO rodeo clown show (I am pretty certain this applies to their state legislature but have not done the research)) and then they are stuck simulaneously saying ‘that wasn’t racist’ and ‘you’re the real racists, playing the race card,” and “AIDS is thinning the herd in Africa and among blacks here in America–I call it natural selection for our country–no racism.” [Promise for real quote which I have cleaned up and can’t be bothered to find among 4,000 new ones on the rodeo article.]

Everybody on the internet is dissecting this thing 12 ways to Sunday and why? Why? Because they’re sexist and racist, I’m so flattered that y’all even asked! No, but a boringly obvious thing happened: A store attendant in Zurich didn’t recognize her (fine), so she treated Oprah like crap because she was racist. Yes, racially prejudiced against black people, is where I’m going with this. R-A-C-I-S-T. OMG, and yet an Italian person! Totally unbelievable, right, be… Later, Oprah was asked in an interview about the last time she experienced racism or racial prejudice. She said that because of her current social position it’s rare, but that when she’s the only minority and the only woman in a huge boardroom she still can tell they think she doesn’t belong. Then she told this story and that it had happened in Zurich, while she was out sans entourage or fake lashes but with [gestures to face] “my full Oprah on.” She did not name the boutique (this detail was ferreted out by gossip site TMZ) or the shop assistant (who is still anonymous.) THE END. CANNIBALS.

Please, please, go read the comments on the Daily Mail, and at Gawker, and elsewhere, and think, ‘these are my people over here. This is who I’m all about identifying with in this situation.’ Y’all know to whom these comments are directed, ye “I’m Richard Dawkins, except about all of left politics, fnarf! Sucks to be you, women and most non-white people, unless you’re willing to take part in the matinée, evening and sometimes midnight showings of the ‘Richard Dawkins is Right About Everything Finger Puppet Theatre'”-types. You begin to cease to interest me.

In conclusion, CANNIBALIZE.

*ETA: My German being, as I said, not the greatest, I trusted my dictionary for this one word and got only “cannibalize,” but I didn’t read carefully enough and get examples. I assumed the Daily Mail was just completely making things up, and my shock at seeing them (apparently) be right overrode my lexical caution. I was wrong. Commenter js suggests and commenter David Woodruff pretty well confirms, that this is “cannibalize” in the “we cannibalized the three crashed planes for enough parts to get the fourth off the ground” sense and not the “we stood around with bones in our hair saying ‘ooga booga’ while stirring a huge cast-iron pot with a skinny Italian woman inside, and we had it on a nice simmer, with some celery and carrots and onion and bay leaves in there” sense. So, we can continue to marvel at the racial cluelessness of a woman who argues that she cannot possibly be racist because she is Italian, and you should read the Daily Mail article carefully to see why her story is implausible in every detail, but I was wrong in my central accusation that she was calling Oprah a cannibal.

Nonetheless you all should continue to read the comments on the article, at, perhaps most surprisingly, Gawker, where the “cannibalize” quote is taken for granted and yet most everyone, every, everyone takes the shop assistant’s side. What reason does Oprah have to lie? How many reasons does this other woman have to lie?

I’ve never been fortunate enough to take maternity leave, but boy have I benefited from it. When I changed career in the late 1990s from film and tv production in Ireland to technology policy in the UK, my first two jobs started as maternity cover positions. I was hired by the Confederation of British Industry and then by The Law Society to be an Internet policy wonk at a time when that was such a new thing, there were maybe half a dozen jobs doing it in the UK and I was one of the first people who’d trained especially for it. (The LSE hadn’t heard of Internet policy either, tbh, but they bemusedly let me write a Masters dissertation on it, because, well, why not?)

But the point is I don’t think either organisation would have been as keen to take a punt on a career-changer like me in a permanent job, even though both subsequently offered me one. A 9 – 12 month interim position was ideal for all three parties; me getting an opportunity to help create a new field, the employer trying out someone new effectively for free (everyone seems to forget that in the UK statutory maternity leave is paid by the government), and the person whose job it was who could take their proper leave and then come back to work.

Of course, where it gets messy and unfair is when employers decide they like the shiny new person more and shunt the returning worker aside, or when they don’t bother to cover the position at all and expect the existing workers to pick up the slack. I’m not saying those things never happen, even in a system where we have decent-ish protections for working mothers, just pointing out one happy though unintended consequence of maternity leave.

UPDATE: Of course the reality for UK working mothers on their return is often far from rosy, with half of them saying their careers have utterly stalled since having children, and a quarter believing they are discriminated against: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-23600465

Marianne Ferber died a few days ago, at age 90. Ferber was one of the founding feminist economists. There is a nice Obit by Frances Woolley here.

I remember Marianne from the IAFFE conferences that I visited as a grad student. One of the most striking memories I have about her is how she would, despite her seniority and fame/status in the field, talk to anyone – indeed, perhaps she even looked out for those who were young or new to the feminist economic community – a virtue one does not always see among the most senior/famous people in a field, and which was definitely not my experience at other economic events. I also remember some of our conversations – how courageously she was in thinking independently and fearlessly and taking the analysis where the argument goes, rather than where the model forces you to stop. As for other women of her age, you can only dream of how she could have been even much more influential if she had been given the same opportunities as men of her generation.

Marianne Ferber will be much missed, not only by her family and friends, but by everyone in the feminist economics community.

I saw an exhibit about a very disturbing matter concerning violence against women near the US-Mexican border. The exhibit addresses the rape, torture and violent killings of hundreds of girls and young women in Ciudad Juárez since 1993 and the fact that there has not been much movement on behalf of the Mexican authorities to prosecute the perpetrators.

“Wall of Memories” by Diane Kahlo “is an installation of painting, sculpture and video about the epidemic of violence against women and girls in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.” (source)

Throughout the history of western art, typically only those of wealthy and noble class were immortalized through portraiture. By painting the faces of these young victims in the form of a small icon, Kahlo was able to memorialize the young women whose social and economic status would not typically be the subject of a painted portrait. Other aspects of this exhibition bring together Aztec and Meso-American civilizations and symbols of death and rebirth. The artist wishes to draw attention to the fact that to this date, the violence against women continues with impunity.

I wasn’t familiar with this situation, but reading up on it briefly, I see that it has gotten some coverage although in rather specialized outlets for the most part. I wanted to spread additional awareness. Here are a few more images from the exhibit.