Flavorwire describes the Be Yourself Movement as “an Italian art collective with an agenda,” by which mean a political movement. BYM, as they call themselves, is a group of youngish people who reorganize billboards to say things like “Be stupid as these ads.” Their logo, the letters BYM with a slingshot for the ‘Y’, seems to reject the monotony of both advertising and the consumerism and conformity it inspires. You can check out a video of their antics after the jump.

Flavorwire tiptoes around the politics involved, calling their article “Be Yourself Movement: Corporate Collaborations or Pure Vandalism?” But unless the defacement and public derision of these companies and their property  is considered collaboration, there’s little chance of that.

The Be Yourself Movement is a wonderful idea, but it has since taken a strange turn. At the risk of publicly inciting vandalism, I’ll publicly incite this kind of vandalism, this kind of diy, up-the-punks political aesthetic. In general, I support the expression of individual opinions in cultural commons and public space as much as the next member of the Church of Just Stop Shopping, but the Be Yourself Movement is a special case.

I initially support billboard amendments and the like that because they inject agency into a culture saturated with encouragement to buy, buy, buy your way to a better life. In the U.S., there’s little attention to the interior — and even then, you’re expected to pay for lessons in thinking your way to happiness at the School of Practical Philosophy or for therapy or for motivational speakers; you’re supposed to buy the book that Oprah endorses or that Amazon or Cosmopolitan recommends. But reading women’s magazines for just 1-3 minutes has been shown to lower women’s self-esteem. This culture of self-help undermines us by telling us, over and over, that we’re not good enough until we pay them, that being ourselves and doing our thing is inferior to some good or service they’re offering.

Even the Be Yourself movement, which conjures images out of movies like Gilliam’s Brazil or Jeneut and Caro’s Delicatessen, in which the political resistance literally lives underground in strange masks, like scuba divers, is not new. Here’s footage of them in the subway in Milan:

What makes the BYM so strange, however, is that they are not just this group; they have been co-opted by the same international corporate interests that they purport to undermine. Their website is currently a collaboration with EmilytheStrange, an alterna-HelloKitty for the Goth and disaffected markets, which is available for sale wherever kids are seeking something that’s not quite identified with mainstream corporate culture — these days, I’d guess that that means Hot Topic.

In an additional twist, even EmilytheStrange isn’t being herself– in 2009, her owners, the skater brand Cosmic Debris, settled out of court with the authors of a children’s book from 1978 called Nate the Great and the Lost List, which featured a physically identical character named Rosamond who, according to the text, “did not look hungry or sleepy. She looked the way she always looks. Strange.” Meanwhile, when Emily  debuted in 1991, her tagline was “Emily didn’t look tired or happy. She looked the way she always looks. Strange.”

While the tone of the artists’ statement after the settlement makes it sound like they got their due, there’s something unsettling about the idea that even a movement focused on undermining corporate culture would allow itself to be bought. Maybe they were getting older, and needed to settle down, or maybe they believe that they’ve conned corporations into promoting vandalism — the website itself is an image of a town, which you can adjust with your own messages. But there is no triumph in virtual vandalism; there is no audience to have their horizons broadened, and without a body politic, it ceases to be a political act.

This Cinco de Mayo, Arizona’s NBA team, the Phoenix Suns, will denounce their state’s immigration policy on their uniforms.

NBA.com reports that the Noche Latina tradition includes uniforms displaying the team name “as spoken by the Latino population. . .  The Miami Heat, for example, is called “El Heat”; the San Antonio Spurs are “Los Spurs.”

The Suns will wear their Noche Latina uniforms today to show their solidarity with Arizona’s Hispanic/Latino community. In the 2000 census (the last time the question was asked, according to Businessweek) 34% of the population of Arizona was Latino or Hispanic.

That affinity with the Hispanic population is more important to the NBA, it seems, than to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, who signed SB 1070 on April 23. The New York Times reports that “It requires police officers, “when practicable,” to detain people they reasonably suspect are in the country without authorization and to verify their status with federal officials, unless doing so would hinder an investigation or emergency medical treatment.

“It also makes it a state crime — a misdemeanor — to not carry immigration papers. In addition, it allows people to sue local government or agencies if they believe federal or state immigration law is not being enforced.”

In other words, some citizens are now second class citizens. Those who are legal residents or citizens of the U.S. who in any way resemble immigrants are being forced to carry identification. This kind of “Pass Law” was the first step in the Apartheid Regime’s systematic segregation and mistreatment of black South Africans.

While such procedures are arguably threatening individual citizens’ constitutional rights to “liberty”, the larger problem is the blatant incitement to racial profiling.

The American Civil Liberties Union had already reported that racial profiling was “a widespread” and “pervasive problem” in 2009, when they submitted a study to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination explaining that “Government polices are a major cause of the disproportionate stopping and searching of racial minorities by law enforcement.”

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Geraldo Cadava, a history professor at Northwestern, argues that while Arizonans have historically”attempted to justify [their actions] in nonracial terms”, they have a consistent record of racial discrimination.

Yet this law goes a step further. As an explicit mandate for state and local police to enact racial profiling against immigrants in Arizona, it represents a formal indictment of immigrant communities in general and Hispanic and Latino communities in particular, in a time when the country is lead by Obama, whose ethnic makeup embodies the ‘melting pot’ metaphor.

It’s ridiculous from lots of angles: Mexico used to own Arizona, so Latino Arizonans potentially have an older claim to the state than white residents; the University of Arizona estimated in 2007 that immigrants add nearly $1 billion to the state’s economy. This law bars communication between over a third of the state’s population and the law, which stands to endanger public safety.

The NBA’s Senior Director of Marketing, Saskia Sorrosa proudly reported, in 2009, that it “has one of the largest and fastest-growing Hispanic fan bases in U.S. professional sports, and we want to continue building their interest in the game through participation, programming and events.” She stated that Noche Latina “celebrates the NBA’s unique and dynamic fan base with a focus on our Spanish-speaking communities.”

It is in that same spirit that the Phoenix Suns will bring back their “Los Suns” jerseys for their game against the San Antonio Spurs this Wednesday, in honor of the Cinco de Mayo holiday and “to honor our Latino community and the diversity of our league,” the team’s Managing Partner Robert Sarver stated in an interview with Businessweek.

He continued, “However intended, the result of passing this law is that our basic principles of equal rights and protection under the law are being called into question.”

NBA Executive Director Billy Hunter added, “The recent passage of the new immigration law in Arizona is disappointing and disturbing. . . The National Basketball Players Association strongly supports the repeal or immediate modification of this legislation. Any attempt to encourage, tolerate or legalize racial profiling is offensive and incompatible with basic notions of fairness and equal protection. A law that unfairly targets one group is ultimately a threat to all.”

Let’s just hope that pressure for justice in the basketball court will be felt in other courts as well, and that Arizona’s intolerance won’t be copied by Pennsylvania or other states. Read the ACLU’s denouncement of SB 1070 here or take action with them to stop it here. Hat tip to my bro Logan for the lead on this one.

However, it’s never too late to act. After all, limiting your actions on behalf of women to Women’s Day would be to cede the other 364 days of the year to men: a ratio that’s clearly imbalanced.

In the spirit of fairness, take action for women:

Urge the U.S. Congress to sign the International Violence Against Women Act, protesting violence against women. (Hat tip, Katie.)

Join Amnesty International in demanding justice for the women of Atenco, Mexico.

The group reports, “In May 2006, over 45 women were arrested without explanation in San Salvador Atenco, Mexico. Many were subjected to physical, psychological and sexual violence by the police officers who arrested them and then held in prison for days before being released on bail. More than three years have passed and they are still waiting for justice.

None of the officials responsible for their abuse have been adequately held accountable. The Mexican Supreme Court has already affirmed that human rights violations occurred at Sal Salvador Atenco. Before concluding that it did not have jurisdiction in the case, the Special Prosecutor for Crimes Against Women and Human Trafficking (FEVIMTRA) identified 34 members of the state security forces as suspects in the crimes. The investigation is now in the hands of Mexico State authorities.”

And, corny as it might sound at first, remember that, as Feministing’s Ann points out, women are the solution.

The American Dream is also bound up in those four words, “the pursuit of happiness,” an “unalienable right” guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson and Franklin elided our right to “the means of acquiring and possessing property,” a phrase appended by the shorter-sighted or more egalitarian George Mason. For those guys, egalitarianism was only extended to other rich, anglo-saxon protestant males.

The idea of pursuing happiness without a material basis is so contradictory as to be comical to us, apparently. This fact should be sad, since not we do not grant everyone enough material goods to survive, let alone be happy. For brilliant blues/spoken word poetry on this topic, see Gil Scott-Heron (who wrote The Revolution Will Not Be Televised)‘s recent album, I’m New Here.

But the pursuit of happiness is a serious hunt. Witness this brilliant Nutrigrain advertisement (after the jump); which also demonstrates the hyperbolic humor of Sarah Haskins, Arrested Development, or The Mighty Boosh. It’s a shame that there isn’t advertising that’s this awesome in our lives every day. Hat tip to Davi and Katie for bringing it to me.

If it’s true that, once we have enough to survive, potential happiness has less to do with material possessions than with attitude, in the end, we answer to ourselves.

And that seems to be what more and more people are doing, at least in the U.S.. I should pause here and specify, since I apparently have not done so elsewhere in this blog, that Americans are technically those who reside anywhere in North or South America, as my South American friends rightfully point out. It’s a fairly significant oversight that our language doesn’t have an accurate adjective for ourselves which many languages do have —for example, in Spanish, it’s estadounidense.

But back to the hunt for happiness –a recent study by the Pew Research Center describes the “Millenial Generation” , who are now between the ages of 18 and 29, as the most diverse generation in U.S. history; only 61% white, 19% Hispanic, 14% black, and 5% Asian. That contrasts with those 30 and older, a group that is 70% white.

We “Millenials” are significantly more tolerant of others’ differences, and we generally believe that gay and interracial marriages are, or at least, can be beautiful things. We’re all about technology: 83% of us sleep with our cellphones nearby. We are also “expressive” (they explain: 38% of us have a tattoo), and more liberal than previous generations. We voted 2 to 1 for Obama. More of us are in school than ever before, and we are on track to become the most educated generation in our history. We’re less likely to have a full-time job, partially due to the recession and school—but we have good values. We are less likely to seek high-income work, and instead, we seek happiness, or report as much to researchers.

While it’s clear that this ad mocks other crazy ads suggesting that happiness can be bought, it also suggests, on some obvious levels, that it can. Take it with a grain of salt—to be honest, I’m just grateful that it advocates agency while mocking crazy gender stereotypes. Enjoy.

Untitled, 2004, by Emma Bee Bernstein

Hello lovely revolutionaries! Welcome to 2010! ObjectifyThis has recently relocated to New York, delaying posts on this blog in favor of searches for shelter, income, and long-lost friends.

However, I’ll be sure to get back atcha as soon as my schedule allows. I look forward to any semblance of monotony, believe me.

In the meantime, here’s an intense and haunting memorial to Emma Bee Bernstein, a feminist and photographer after Francesca Woodman’s troubled and troubling vision of the female.

Let’s celebrate her insight and her work while recognizing that, as her collaborator and friend Nona Ellis Aronowitz reminds us more than once, suicide is not romantic.

Emma and Nona waitressed and hostessed to afford a heady, two-month road trip across the U.S, speaking to women along the way about feminism and the roles that sex and gender play in their lives. The book of their writing and photography, GirlDrive, is an informed, intergenerational inquiry into the meaning that the women’s movement has or can have, and the obstacles to a unified, positive identity for women as a political group with common needs and communal power.

Nona continues their work together with a hard-hitting blog, in which she argues, amongst other things, that there might be logical reasons that young women were inspired to vote for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton.

This week, driving to New York with a car full of worldly goods, I shook my fist at an NPR piece about women and power parroting the same outraged quotations from Geraldine Ferraro (the first female vice-presidential candidate) that Nona decries.

I didn’t feel comfortable voting for Hilary because, while I believe that women can run countries, I didn’t like her politics. Ultimately, she is another politician. Ultimately, she is deeply allied with an administration that strengthened big business’ hold on the senate during its time in power, an administration that whose largest single day of bombing in the Balkan conflict occurred the same day as the Columbine High School shootings and Clinton’s heartfelt condemnation of the “terrible” events in Littleton, Colorado.

And most importantly, wouldn’t it be just as insulting to vote for her because she’s a woman, because her victory would be historic, as it would be to deny her a vote because she’s a woman? In the NPR piece, Anne Kornblut tells Tom Ashbrook that she’s not sure that Americans will elect a woman anytime soon, but fails to recognize that this job is hardly a prize.

As she notes, politics is an ugly place; it is especially ugly for women, because of our culture’s relative tolerance of sexism. But there are women who succeed in politics; it’s not too ugly for women. And there are male politicians who have ugly experiences in poltics; it’s not just ugly for women.

The Onion was right to run the headline Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job when Obama was elected. So far, we have seen him lose popular support as he prioritizes and appears to move away from his broad promises of “change” we “can believe in.” We have seen racist cartoons, we have seen the widespread celebration of the 2009 Lynyrd Skynyrd ballad “That Ain’t My America,”– with its veiled racism, which is reminiscent of the hotly contested veiled racism of their other work. We have seen the president attacked for taking his wife to musical in New York, we have seen insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry thwart a real overhaul of the healthcare system, we have seen him choose to continue a war in Afghanistan in spite of the knowledge that counterinsurgency is unlikely to succeed, at best. (See Nasser Hussein’s forthcoming article in Boston Review, which will be online 1/14/10).

Yet, despite all of this ugliness, despite his compromises, I am glad to have Obama as our president because I believe that he has the right intentions, and that he is doing what he can to bring about some positive social change. If Hillary were in his place, I wouldn’t have that faith; I think she’s been accepting corporate handouts for too long. But in her defense, she would have fired Blackwater. That’s a step in the right direction.

Since I’m getting some traffic from Ms. Chen, I’ll make it easier to find the post she refers to:

Here’s a discussion of sex columnists and sex blogging, called Carrie On: Sex and the College Sex Column, and here’s a Vindication of the Rights of Sexbloggers.

The argument (whose title is drawn from Mary Wollstonecraft’s venerable A Vindication of the Rights of Woman) is basically that to degrade a woman for her expression of her sexuality is not so different from degrading a woman for her sex. Part of granting women agency is granting them the ability to do things that other people think are tawdry or lewd.

It’s interesting to note that all of the commentators with their panties in a twist about Lena Chen’s lewdness are sitting at home at their computers, choosing to look at photos of Ms. Chen and then smacking themselves in the cheekbone.

She never frogmarched anyone to her website. They came willingly to squawk in dismay. This is not to say that everything that can be done for attention should be done for attention. But a girl has rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Live and let live.

Photo Credit: Rachel Kramer Bussel

Stephanie Mencimer at Mother Jones reports that a Pro-life movement, the American Right to Life, believes that Palin is secretly pro-choice.

Dispute Over Repercussions of  Health Care Reform Act?

At the NPR health blog Shots, Julie Rovner explains that neither abortion rights groups nor anti-abortion groups believe that HR3962 will work for their aims. Abortion rights groups believe it is a huge step backwards, while anti-abortion groups believe that women can buy extra coverage or pay out of pocket for their abortions, so their rights are not lost.

Andrea Seabrook Breaks Down the Language of the Stupak Amendment on All Things Considered here. Ah, clarity! She says, “If you get your health insurance through your state, as in Medicaid, your state could buy supplemental abortion coverage for everyone it insures. And 17 states already do this under Medicaid.

“The Exchange: The next section of the abortion amendment deals with the exchange. That’s the government-administered service where people can buy insurance and join a risk pool. One of the reasons health care is so expensive for people who don’t get it through their work is that they’re not in a large risk pool. The bill tries to group them together and cut costs for everyone.

“Private insurance companies that offer a health plan through the exchange are allowed to cover abortion. But if they’re going to, the companies must also offer another plan that is identical in every way, except that it does not cover abortion.

“So, say you’re buying insurance with your own money, and you get it through the exchange. You can choose a policy that covers abortion, or one that doesn’t. But if you’re getting help from the government to buy that insurance—in the form of a tax subsidy—you may not choose a plan that covers abortion. You are still allowed to buy a supplemental policy with your own money.

“Private Insurance: The Stupak amendment does not apply to private insurance bought with private money. It is also not close to becoming law. The Senate bill does not have similar language, though lawmakers on both sides of the debate are now looking at it.

“The question now is how this might play out in a whole new medical system, and what it means in the broader narrative of abortion in America.”

This attack on the reproductive rights of poor Americans may have dire repercussions for women and society, and that may be what the pro-life movement wants.

A significant portion of the pro-life movement does not truly care about fetuses. If they did, they might advocate good nutrition or smoking cessation to prevent miscarriages. Miscarriages cause the loss of 10-25% of clinically recognized pregnancies, according to the American Pregnancy Association.

Nor does the pro-life movement advocate for accessible contraception to prevent the conception of unwanted fetuses. The National Right to Life Committee “does not have a position on issues such as contraception [or] sex education,” despite the causal relationship between a lack of contraception and unwanted conception. The online forum LifeSiteNews deplores sex education workshops taking place at St. Mary’s College, and offers contact information for the office of the college’s president, Dr. Carol Mooney, with the heading “To express concerns.”

What concerns me is that LifeSiteNews doesn’t want these female college students to be “encouraged to receive STD screening and build relationships with their sexual partners.” The Christian right espouses values that amount to a movement against the woman, inasmuch as the woman can expected to be an independent agent who makes informed decisions and directs her own life.

It’s not my imagination running away with me: women are included in the Declaration of Independence’s “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Women already earn less than men do. Academics who study welfare argue that it is based on a gendered model that is built for and by men, without considering issues such as child care. Women are therefore more likely to receive federal subsidies in the first place than men are. They are thus further at the mercy of the state, and stripped of any financial means of escape to a private system.

If we are cutting health care, let’s not cut it from the people who need it most and have no alternatives. On a practical level, since a pregnancy and labor are much more expensive than an abortion, the state would save money by covering abortion for those who wanted it.

This is an incredibly important issue in light of the horrifying rape statistics our culture racks up. Those statistics indicate that women are already subjected to a terrifying lack of control over their bodies and often, over their conception.

This is exactly the kind of disempowering situation which can perpetuate inequality because, as Professor Wraga’s research shows, stereotype threat affects certain kinds of mental performance, and affects people most strongly when the stereotyes are upheld by high authorities. Thus, by legally decreasing the rights of women–which is to say, decreasing the rights of women under the auspices of highest authority in secular society–Stupak and his cronies are likely to decrease the power and confidence of individual women — even women who would never get abortions. This is a reversal of the same principle which caused the so-called “Obama effect,” in which black test-takers’ scores improved following the election of our first black leader. The Christian right has a definitively misogynistic message, which has misogynistic implications.

It troubles me especially because of what it will mean for people who experience rape and sexual assault. Of course, Stupak makes an allowance for those people–along with mothers whose pregnancy endangers their health, they can receive abortions.

But Americans are very, very suspicious of rape claims.  Remember, in 94% of rape cases which are judged to have enough evidence to stand trial, the alleged rapist is allowed to go free. And 60% of rape cases are never reported, because the survivor convinces him or herself that others would judge him or her, that it’s his or her fault for wanting to go out looking cute, that the other person was too drunk to know what he was doing.

The survivor is always guilty until proven innocent: his or her case is too shameful, too sordid, too vengeful to identify with. (Some survivors have trouble believing their claims themselves, even after they’ve had surgery to repair their bodies, because having your entire culture negate your experience is so disempowering.) We don’t want to perceive the threat of rape, even when it’s all around us, because that would mean shattering our comfortable worldview. So American courts do not believe survivors 94% of the time.

So now, what Stupak is saying is that the only way that a survivor can get an abortion is if she can prove to a doctor that she experienced rape or incest. The survivor still bears the burden of proof, only now much more is at stake. Instead of not getting justice, the survivor stands to not get justice and be forced to bear and raise injustice’s child for 18 years. I don’t doubt that there will be more reports of rape by women with unwanted pregnancies, but I also believe that this law fails to offer women the life of liberty and happiness that was the foundation of this country.

Title IX is supposed to protect women from a “hostile environment” in educational institutions, requiring

“immediate and appropriate steps to investigate or otherwise determine what occurred and take prompt and effective steps reasonably calculated to end any harassment, eliminate a hostile environment if one has been created, and prevent harassment from occurring again regardless of whether the student who has been harassed complains.”

Yet little has been done to address the hostile environment created by our culture. You can start liberating women today by signing Planned Parenthood’s condemnation of the Stupak amendment here.

What if we treated rape like an actual public health crisis?

Meg Stone goes into it over at Bitch. Hat tip to the ever-rad Kaveri for the link.

Sometimes, the left wing doesn’t know what the right wing is doing.

Unfortunately, the long-awaited passage of health care reform leaves us with little to crow about. Bart Stupak’s amendment to prevent anyone receiving a federal subsidy from buying a health insurance plan that covers abortions is a shocking attack on women on welfare.

What’s also appalling is the strength of the case that the pro-life movement is an anti-modern-woman movement, inasmuch as the modern woman can be expected to work or have her own life outside of caring for her children.

Here’s an example: until recently, I believed that the pro-life movement wanted to preserve unborn fetuses at all costs. I was, I thought, as in-the-know as I’d ever be.

A discussion in the wake of Kevin Drum’s recent post about abortion politics over on Mother Jones has taught me otherwise.

On November 8th, Dan S. wrote that in an Alternet interview, Christina Page said,