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At Nancy Reagan’s funeral presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told MSNBC that the Reagans “started a national conversation about AIDS.” The response to that obviously false statement was swift and loud. Even Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign (which endorsed Clinton), tweeted “Nancy Reagan was, sadly, no hero in the fight against HIV/AIDS.” Clinton’s apology was posted to Medium the very next day. Picking a platform for a message goes a long way in picking the demographics of your message’s audience. The decision to use Medium for her apology was pitch perfect: older (and statistically more conservative) voters who watch cable news will see her praising the Reagans while younger voters who might turn to Medium to read the definitive take down of Clinton will find her own apology next to their favorite authors. More than just an apology though, the post goes on to give a small history of AIDS-related activism before going on to describe the present challenges facing those infected with HIV. More than an apology Clinton’s Medium post is an example of what I’m calling the “Explainer Candidate.” more...

CW: Cissexism, genital mutilation, penis shaming

“You know what they say about men with small hands?”

—Marco Rubio

Shame and genitals go together like peanut butter and jelly. The story of Adam and Eve tells us just how enduring this shame is. With knowledge came shame, and their nakedness and the differences of their genitals started a downward spiral of fear—fear of our own genitals, and fear of others. From mutilation of the labia and clitoris, to castration, to the disturbing obsession with the state of transgender and nonbinary people’s genitals, we have been conditioned to judge, manipulate, and even destroy these most sensitive body parts. And I really, really wish we would stop doing that. more...

Horse-race style political opinion polling is an integral a part of western democratic elections, with a history dating back to the 1800’s. Political opinion polling originally took hold in the first quarter of the 19^th century, when a Pennsylvania straw poll predicted Andrew Jackson’s victory over John Quincey Adams in the bid for President of the United States. The weekly magazine Literary Digest then began conducting national opinion polls in the early 1900s, followed finally by the representative sampling introduced the George Gallup in 1936. Gallup’s polling method is the foundation of political opinion polls to this day (even though the Gallup poll itself recently retired from presidential election predictions).

While polling has been around a long time, new technological developments let pollsters gather data more frequently, analyze and broadcast it more quickly, and project the data to wider audiences. Through these developments, polling data have moved to the center of election coverage. Major news outlets report on the polls as a compulsory part of political segments, candidates cite poll numbers in their speeches and interviews, and tickers scroll poll numbers across both social media feeds and the bottom of television screens. So central has polling become that in-the-moment polling data superimpose candidates as they participate in televised debates, creating media events in which performance and analysis converge in real time. So integral has polling become to the election process that it may be difficult to imagine what coverage would look in the absence of these widely projected metrics. more...

Facebook Reactions don’t grant expressive freedom, they tighten the platform’s affective control.

The range of human emotion is both vast and deep. We are tortured, elated, and ambivalent; we are bored and antsy and enthralled; we project and introspect and seek solace and seek solitude. Emotions are heavy, except when they’re light. So complex is human affect that artists and poets make careers attempting to capture the allusive sentiments that drive us, incapacitate us, bring us together, and tear us apart. Popular communication media are charged with the overwhelming task of facilitating the expression of human emotion, by humans who are so often unsure how they should—or even do—feel. For a long time, Facebook handled this with a “Like” button.

Last week, the Facebook team finally expanded the available emotional repertoire available to users. “Reactions,” as Facebook calls them, include not only “Like,” but also “Love,” “Haha,” “Wow,” “Sad,” and “Angry.” The “Like” option is still signified by a version of the iconic blue thumbs-up, while the other Reactions are signified by yellow emoji faces.

Ostensibly, Facebook’s Reactions give users the opportunity to more adequately respond to others, given the desire to do so with only the effort of a single click. The available Reaction categories are derived from the most common one-word comments people left on their friends’ posts, combined with sentiments users commonly expressed through “stickers.” At a glance, this looks like greater expressive capacity for users, rooted in the sentimental expressions of users themselves. And this is exactly how Facebook bills the change—it captures the range of users’ emotions and gives those emotions back to users as expressive tools.

However, the notion of greater expressive capacity through the Facebook platform is not only illusory, but masks the way that Reactions actually strengthen Facebook’s affective control. more...

Donald Trump’s Twitter account is a huge part of his presidential campaign (Huge). The media quotes from it, his opponents try to score political points by making fun of it, and his fans / supporters constantly engage with its content. @realDonaldTrump is just that: a string of pronouncements that feel very (perhaps even a little too) real. As Britney Summit-Gil wrote back in December: “the beauty of Trump’s tweetability is that his fans don’t really care if he’s manicured or carefully crafted—it’s what they love about him. His tweets read just like his speeches sound. They’re off the cuff, natural, and engaging.”

I want to take a minute to dive into the powerful linguistic work that hides behind Trump’s natural and off the cuff style. Consider the following pair of tweets:

Lightweight Marco Rubio was working hard last night. The problem is, he is a choker, and once a choker, always a choker! Mr. Meltdown.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 26, 2016

Low energy candidate @JebBush has wasted $80 million on his failed presidential campaign. Millions spent on me. He should go home and relax!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 21, 2016

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“So, is anyone going to bring up the masturbator thing in the bathroom?”

“Whoa, wait. What?” Did I leave a dildo in the bathroom? No, no way. Then it hit her.

“Oh, you mean the bidet? I was wondering if anyone would mention it. Masturbator? What makes you say that?”

“I dunno, it’s just weird I guess” Cheryl replied. “When did you get it?”

“A couple of days ago. The pipes are old and the toilet kept clogging. I read online that getting a bidet can help. It cuts down on paper use.”

“Wait, so you don’t use paper anymore?” Neil asked.

“No, I still use paper. But just… less. Because… ya know… it’s like, cleaner before…” This was a lot harder to explain that she’d anticipated. Poop. Spray. Wipe. For some reason saying that out loud seemed much more embarrassing in the moment than when she’d practiced to herself before the party.

“You don’t use as much paper because you’re already clean. You just have to dry off.”

“So, how does it work?” someone chimed in.

“It just hooks up to the water supply and attaches to the toilet seat. The knob controls water pressure. So, if you’re gonna use it, start slow.” She laughed a bit, realizing how embarrassing it was to give that warning.

“… it’s cold water?”

“Yeah, it’s cold. But you get used to it really quickly. After a couple times it doesn’t even bother you.”

“You’re trying to tell me you shoot cold water at your asshole, and it doesn’t bother you? What the fuck?”

“So what’s it like?” Folks were starting to get curious. This was kind of exciting. Like having some exotic pet.

“I really like it. It’s… refreshing? I definitely use less toilet paper. And it’s a real time saver. And obviously I feel a lot cleaner.”

The thought of feeling clean—not just getting rid of dirt or shit but all the different ways a person can feel clean— brought up unexpected memories. She remembered a vingette in a book she’d read long ago, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, a novel about a family of Muslim Americans facing Islamaphobia and culture clash in the Midwest. The passage she remembered was a discussion about dirty American buttholes, and how water was the only way to become truly clean. The father in the story, if she remembered correctly, had pointed out the irony of Americans’ belief that they were the more civilized society, while they walked around with shit in their ass cracks all day.

“How much was it? I heard they’re expensive.”

“Some are I guess, but mines a pretty basic setup. No heated seats or butt dryers or anything. It was like $25 on Amazon. That’s the only reason I bought it. I figured if I didn’t like it, it wasn’t a huge investment.”

“I use those wet wipe things. They’re pretty good, and you can just flush ‘em.”

Wow, we’re doing it, she thought. We’re talking about how we clean our asses.

“Maybe if you have decent pipes, but mostly they don’t disintegrate and they clog up the plumbing really bad. And I’m not keeping poop napkins in my trash.”

“I dunno, it seems like a good way to get yeast infections or something,” Chris retorted, their nose wrinkling.

This was starting to get intense. She felt on the defense, like she was personally invested in this piece of plastic that cleans your butt, like she needed to shield it from the naysayers.

“Actually, a lot of doctors think it can lessen lots of infections. Because… ya know, it’s cleaner.”

“I dunno. I think it might be kind of nice. I wonder why they’re not more popular in the states. When I went to France last summer they were everywhere.”

“Did you use any when you were in France?”

“Nah, too intimidating. The ones I saw were separate from the toilet, and I wasn’t really sure how to do it. I sorta thought I might end up drenched in poop water. Pretty silly now that I’m saying it out loud.”

“They’re pretty common in most parts of the world—Europe, South America, Japan… I think Americans don’t like them because we’re all so puritanical.”

“Also homophobia. Because, of course, anything that touches your butt is gonna turn you gay.”

Everyone chuckled a little. Some of the obvious discomfort eased a little.

“So, does it… feel good?”

“Yeah. I mean, it doesn’t reach the level of arousal or anything, or not for me at least. But it feels good. Sorta like when someone scratches your head, or when you take your watch off and the skin is all soft and touching it feels cool.”

An uncomfortable silence settled, and someone stood up and announced they were going to get a beer. Two others followed. The hostess wondered if she’d committed some faux pas by explicitly saying that the bidet felt good. Yes, obviously I did. People do not typically express pleasure over spraying their buttholes with cold water in decent company. 

Time passed, and the conversation on anus-cleansing practices gave way to more respectable topics like Supreme Court decisions and new additions to Netflix. The party was starting to wane, empty beer bottles on every surface, the pile of coats getting smaller and smaller. She walked toward the kitchen to start sorting bottles and then she heard it—the unmistakable sound of the bidet. Someone had given it a go. She smirked, and averted her gaze when the user left the bathroom. She was strangely embarrassed that she knew someone had just used it, even though she wasn’t terribly embarrassed to own it.

When the party was over, the guests gone home, she laid in bed thinking over the conversation about the curious device that performed a basic, everyday, yet unspeakable function. A device that, to her mind, was far preferable to the toilet paper tyranny that so often goes unchallenged. But she was absolutely convinced that the whole thing had made at least a few guests bidet curious. The gospel was spreading. It was only a matter of time. The bidet revolution had begun.

Britney is on Twitter

Stephen Hull, editor of Huffington Post UK, created a bit of a stir a week ago when he admitted that the site does not pay its writers.

That statement alone would have raised eyebrows high enough. What made a lot of eyebrows especially frowny and angry is the way in which he then proudly defended this practice as something admirable, something the site’s unpaid writers should not only accept but be pleased about:

…we don’t pay them, but you know if I was paying someone to write something because I wanted it to get advertising pay, that’s not a real authentic way of presenting copy. So when somebody writes something for us, we know it’s real. We know they want to write it. It’s not been forced or paid for. I think that’s something to be proud of.

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I want to share with you a personal story – an experience that I dealt with about four months ago that caused me a great deal of anxiety: I found a flea on my dog.  That’s right a flea; not multiple fleas, a flea.  But I panicked.  I vacuumed everything – couches, throw pillows, mattresses, floors – twice a day, every day for at least three weeks.  I mopped every other day.  I washed everything in the house three times a week.  I bought some of that terrible chemical shampoo and washed my poor pup with it. I also bought my dog some dog treats from KarmaPets to calm his discomfort during the time.  I flea combed her three times a day.  I set up flea traps in every room before bed.  I caught three more fleas.  I started having recurring dreams about fleas multiplying on my dog – growing in size as in an arcade game while I tried to knock them out one by one.  My language changed.  I started singing the Pokemon – “Gotta Catch All” song while vacuuming and talking like Ted Cruz, using phrases like “we’ve got to obliterate…,” etc.  My partner was seriously concerned about my sanity.

Now this sort of anxiety is partly personal – an anxiety over microscopic things that have the potential to grow completely out of my control.  But I’m going to argue that there is more to it than that.  I’ve talked to pet owners who – upon spotting fleas – tore apart their houses, spent hundreds of dollars on flea products, set off chemicals in their homes that notably released the same poisonous gases that were instrumental to the India’s Bhopal disaster.  We can’t all be this crazy.

I don’t think we are. more...

A recent Atlantic article introduced readers to Emma, a 28 year old woman who lives in a Dallas suburb, wears brightly colored blouses, sports a ‘blinged out’ case for her iPhone 6, and even met her boyfriend on the dating website, Plenty of Fish.  She also grew up without light bulbs and by age 18 had, just an 8^th grade education.  Emma, you see, grew up in an Amish community near Eagleville, Missouri and left her German-speaking religious community at the age when American youth acquire the right to vote, telling her parents in a note that she was “sorry to do this…but I need to try a different life.”  Her story is the topic of an interview conducted by Olga Khazan titled, Escaping the Amish for a Connected World, a piece that uses Emma’s status as an Amish outsider to offer “a fresh perspective on how our lives have changed since the digital revolution- for the better, and for the worse.” more...

We should be nervous when the most profitable company in the world takes a principled stance against the most powerful government in the world. Apple released a statement today (they call it a “letter” to their customers) which states that the FBI has requested that they provide a backdoor to the iPhone’s operating system and they are refusing to give it to them. This is huge because If there is any sort of consistent observation across decades and genres of social theory it is that as organizations get bigger they tend to treat the rest of the world as a potential threat to their own interests. War criminal and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger summed it up nicely: “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.” The same can be said for Apple, China, General Motors, Russia, and Amazon. As a company or empire grows its stability relies on more and more factors and so the tendency is to bring those things into the fold either by buying them, colonizing them, or some indiscernible combination of the two. If Apple and the United States federal government are at loggerheads about data privacy it means that something big and fairly stable has ended. When powerful actors disagree, it usually heralds a major shift in one party’s conception of what is politically viable. Is that what just happened? more...