Curating the ten easy steps

On and off the catwalk, women’s sexuality is relevant only where it can be used to encourage consumption. Women are expected to be able to put their sexuality on and off as easily as a size-zero skirt; it skims lightly over the surface of the body but has nothing to do with desire. Top Model contestants who get it wrong are regularly disqualified for acting too sexual — hoochy is the favored term. But women who are not models also know just how this goes: You dress for the office, you mold your online and offline persona to reflect well on the company, and even out of office hours, your “performance” is judged as part of the branding of whoever’s dollar pays your rent and sends your kids to school.

In the world of women’s work, how one looks is as important, if not more important, than what one does: The existential anxiety of identity creation is also economic and social anxiety, because the penalties for nonconformity are so high. Feminine mystique becomes identity itself. The woman who does not possess it, the ugly woman, the overweight woman, the older woman, the woman of color who will not straighten her hair or bleach her skin, is assumed, in a very real sense, to be invisible. She is overlooked on the street, at parties, on dating web sites, at job interviews. She is dogged by a feeling of unreality; she does not exist, and if she dares to “be herself,” she is stunned to find, since her social legitimacy is contingent on artifice, that her self is not a legitimate social construct. As Shulamith Firestone writes in The Dialectic of Sex:

“Women everywhere rush to squeeze into the glass slipper … thus women become more and more look-alike. But at the same time they are expected to express their individuality through their physical appearance. Thus they are kept coming and going, at one and the same time trying to express their similarity and their uniqueness … this conflict itself has an important political function. When women begin to look more and more alike, distinguished only by the degree to which they differ from a paper ideal, they can be more easily stereotyped as a class: they look alike, they think alike, and even worse, they are so stupid they believe they are not alike.”

This is the intimate edge of neoliberal feminism, the meritocratic fantasy that, in this freest of all possible worlds, any woman can be anything she wants to be, as long as she slices her face and dresses her body to look exactly the same as everyone else.

So in parts of the world governments began killing, jailing, demonising, silencing, opposition parties and leaders. Originally in countries including Germany, Chile, Argentina, Soviet Union, Indonesia, China. More recently in countries such as Malaysia, Russia, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Ukraine, Burma. Not democracies – a democracy could be defined as one which has free and fearless opposition parties, alternative governments in both name and reality.

This sort of thing didn’t happen in western democracies of course, including our own (although the aftermath of the Qld election is worrying). Governments didn’t like oppositions, but generally treated them according to the old adage “be nice to people on your way up because you will meet them again on your way down”. But more recently in America, quickly followed by here, the opposition parties decided they would turn the tables. Allowing for different systems, Republicans and Liberals have blocked as much govt legislation as possible, blocked appointments, attacked public servants, put gunsights on pictures of opponents, called for killing, tried to delegitimise the leaders of the governments, set up fake protest groups, screamed abuse and disrupted parliamentary proceedings, and, recently here, have tried to destroy the careers of the Speaker of the House, and one of the MPs, in order to bring down the government.

Same approach, in reverse, as from those dictatorships. Just as damaging to a democracy.

For more than 60 years, readings have been in the 300s, except in urban areas, where levels are skewed. The burning of fossil fuels, such as coal for electricity and oil for gasoline, has caused the overwhelming bulk of the man-made increase in carbon in the air, scientists say.

It’s been at least 800,000 years — probably more — since Earth saw carbon dioxide levels in the 400s, Butler and other climate scientists said.

Until now.

Readings are coming in at 400 and higher all over the Arctic. They’ve been recorded in Alaska, Greenland, Norway, Iceland and even Mongolia. But levels change with the seasons and will drop a bit in the summer, when plants suck up carbon dioxide, NOAA scientists said.

So the yearly average for those northern stations likely will be lower and so will the global number.

Globally, the average carbon dioxide level is about 395 parts per million but will pass the 400 mark within a few years, scientists said.

The Arctic is the leading indicator in global warming, both in carbon dioxide in the air and effects, said Pieter Tans, a senior NOAA scientist.

“This is the first time the entire Arctic is that high,” he said.

Those that work in politics are now addicted to today’s emergency, whatever it is. It could be a world event, a faux scandal or merely something the other side said. They use it to fundraise, they use it to distribute talking points and they use it to get attention and score points on the opposition. And they use polls to keep score, daily.

It’s practically impossible to get the attention or effort of people on a campaign unless you’ve got something urgent and imminent to discuss. This is no way to do serious marketing.

One side effect of the endless emergency is an insatiable need for cash. Clearly, money spent on campaigns is effective (particularly in depressing the vote for an opponent), but just as clearly, it doesn’t scale. Twice as much money is not twice as effective. When the campaign falls in love with the combination of instant reaction plus unlimited fundraising, all strategy and leadership go out the window.