Normally I love walking around the city. It’s one of the things I enjoy most about Oslo, and one the very few things that makes me feel like I belong here. It’s my main form of exercise, and a major reason I’m no longer chomping at the bit to move back to the US. Give me my headphones, a cool, overcast day, and I’m in heaven just walking around the city.

Recently, however, something has made me feel reticent and more than a little paranoid about my daily excursions. I’ve been repeatedly attacked by gay men.

Seriously.

The first time was a couple of months ago. I was taking the dog for a walk. We were right in front of the grocery store we usually go into, and all of a sudden I felt a bump on my legs from the back, like maybe I’d run into something or a woman with a stroller had rear-ended me. I turned around, at some gay guy was fleeing the scene, spitting obscenities, including the perennial Norwegian favorite “hore”. How did I know he was gay? He talked with that characteristic gay accent. The bump I felt was him kicking me in the back of my calf. My first instinct was to stop and grab him and make him tell me why the fuck he’s attacked me so pathetically from behind, but my second though was, “no, this guy is obviously insane–physically restraining him would be a bad idea”. Also was afraid to get into an altercation because of my glasses (I am terrified of my glasses getting broken or lost). So I let him go. The dog showed nor reaction whatsoever. One bystander asked me what the hell had just happened, did I know the guy? Never seen him before in my life, I replied.

It dawned on me after a few hours, though, that maybe I had seen him before. I remembered that once in that very grocery store there had been a guy in front of me acting like a real ass towards the cashier. I don’t remember what his problem was, but he was making a real fuss, and letting the cashier have it all the while. I snickered at him. Might this attack have been retribution for my snicker? Well, OK. If that was the case, then I’d learned my lesson. It’s wrong to laugh at people. You might get kicked from behind, if nothing else.

Now I’m wondering what the hell is going on. Today in front of my neighborhood post office, yet another gay guy attacked me. How did I know he was gay? He walked like a supermodel walks down the runway. He and I were walking towards each other, and I looked at him because his clothes caught my eye. He was dressed in a really cool, interesting outfit. I was about to smile at him when he spit in my face, and then proceeded to swish violently off down the sidewalk. I’m not taking a stab at him here by calling it “swishing” He was really workin’ it. I was so shocked all I could do was stare after him.

So is there a gay mafia here in Oslo? Have they got my picture taped up on some bulletin board in the men’s room of the one gay club we have here? What the hell is going on? I’ve been physically attacked three times since I’ve lived in this city, and two of those times by gay men. (The other time, the guy ran away so fast I couldn’t tell. He ran up from behind and shoved me, then ran away. I didn’t budge an inch, so he probably hurt his wrists. That’ll show him for trying to push over a fat chick!. That was the first time I got attacked, anyway, so I wouldn’t have thought to pay attention to whether or not he was gay.)

In light of our recent discussion about racism here on this board, I was interested to observe my initial thought on this most recent attack.

My first thought was, “I hate this country!”

My second thought was, “No, I hate the white people in this country!”

My third thought was, “No, I fucking hate the gay white people in this country!”

My fourth thought was, “Now I’m gonna have to fucking go and get myself checked for HIV.”

My fifth thought was, “Man, I should have stopped and yelled at him ‘Get the hell back here you fucking faggot!’”

My sixth thought was, “Faggot? What the hell? I’m not a homophobe!”

So basically I went from hating the general to narrowing it down to hating the specific, then hurling the specific demographic’s difference back in its face as a nasty slur. My instinct was to point out his otherness and turn it into a weakness, something he should be ashamed of.

Which is weird, and very telling. I’m not a homophobe. I’ve had a lot of gay friends. I went to NOLoSe, a convention for fat lesbians, for god’s sake, and it was one of the most awesome experiences of my life. I tend to like gay people more than straight people because they know what it’s like to be different. They’re used to people considering them disgusting, second-class citizens. They’re told that if they just try hard enough, they can be “normal”, and well, if they can’t be normal, at least they can damn well stop flaunting their gayness in our faces.

So what does it mean that I instinctually wanted to insult the guy buy negatively judging his difference, when normally I look upon that difference as a positive thing? At least I think I do. I have to wonder, now. Like I said in the racist thread, I know I’m less homophobic/racist than most other people, sow how disturbing is it that I have thoughts like these/am so ignorant about the situation? I still think my conclusion is right–that we’re bred to be wary of others and see them as inferior, worthy of less respect and care, and all we can do is to try to be aware of that fact and get over it. It’s just sad and scary when it takes so little to make the bigot in all of us rear its ugly head.
I also thought about that. I was mystified when the first gay guy kicked me, and I was paranoid about going out for a little while after that. I kept looking for him everywhere. I wanted to stop him and ask him why he’s kicked me. But I didn’t feel….personally insulted, in a way. Getting spat upon…it’s totally gross, and it’s considerably more self-righteous and derisive and personal and nasty than getting kicked from behind. I went home, broke down, and washed myself thoroughly all over with betadine. I don’t want to take the dog out.

You know, it’s funny. One of the reasons I’ve had such a hard time living here is the coldness emanating from everyone, this coldness that threatens to suck the life out of me. People don’t make eye contact, and they certainly don’t smile at each other, especially when they’re walking out on the street. So many times I try to smile at someone, and it’s hard to get the smile out on my face because of the blank general hostility that radiates from ethnic Norwegians. They’re fine when you get to know them as individuals, but as a monolithic group, they’re horrible. I hate them. I decided a while back to fuck ‘em, and go ahead and make eye contact and smile at them anyway, maybe even say something to them when they refuse to make eye contact and smile back. Because that’s what they do–pretend like they can’t even see you. I guess, though, that societal rules about eye contact, smiles, and conversation with strangers should never be broken, because otherwise your behavior is likely to get you ignored, spat upon, marked as someone interested in buying drugs or sex, or worse. That’ll fucking teach me to try to be nice to people. From now on I’m going to go around just like they are–refusing to make eye contact, with a blank, hostile caul over my face. And I despise them for it. I despise them for beating my innate friendliness and politeness out of me, for making me assimilate or be branded as a threat. I despise them for it. And I miss home.

I’m not too happy right now. I’ve got the new design for my blog worked out. It’s just the same as the old design, although I hope the code is a little more robust. Getting it to work as a theme in WordPress has not been fun, however. WordPress seems to be considerably more difficult to customize than MT. Like, I actually am having to read the documentation. Which really sux.

So I’m gonna try to get this done tonight. Beware:

Here’s a perfect opportunity.

BBC NEWS | Africa | Kenya shock at mutilation death

You know, sometimes I joke about that phrase that comes from Twisty’s blog.  I use it to point out problems that are obviously partriarchal in nature, but always with a laugh, because no one uses that word “patriarchy” seriously outside of anthropolgy classes and radical feminist ‘zines, right?  Well, this time it’s obviolsy the patriarchy’s fault, and it’s no laughing matter.

Aftenposten.no - Oslo can ban niqab

Personally, I agree with the head of MiRA on this one:

Banning something that impinges on an individual’s freedom is never good. Adult women over 16 should be able to choose for themselves.

It’s one thing when you’re talking about a little kid, but presumably someone over the age of 16–well over the age at which most Christian kids get confirmed–should be able to make this decision herself. Many argue that the women who wear hijab, niqab, etc. aren’t in a position to make a free choice. Perhaps, but isn’t the case in every patriarchal society? How many women do you know who would feel improper with unshaven legs and armpits, for example? And that’s inside the house and out. The example might seem trivial, but the principle remains the same. There are certain things we feel like we have to do in order to be acceped by society. Some activists might think those standards are confining and work to try to change them, but I’ve never heard an activist fighting to restrict women’s choices.

Well, with the exception of the issue of the veil.

Personally, I cannot imagine what it would be like to be told that I must go to school dressed more immodestly than I’m comfortable with. I’m not exactly sure what to think, though–what would it be like to have your family to force you to encase yourself in heavy, dark material before appearing in public? How liberating would it feel to “have” to take the thing off at school?
An Iraqi couple owns the ethnic store across the street from my building, and since we go to their shop so much, we’ve developed a warm relationship with them. The woman came up to me excitedly one day and told me to be sure to watch NRK1 at 10:30 because she and her family were going to be on TV. They showed up in the background of the main scene, which was taking place in IKEA. the director had apparently told her to ask her kids to pretend they were fighting and making a big ruckus, and she was supposed to be trying to get them to behave. The director also asked her to wear a hijab for the shot. It was funny, I wold never have recognized her in the shot if she hadn’t told me what to look for–the veil made her look so much different, and so much older. She definitely lost a lot of her individuality by putting on the hijab.

I hate it.

So I’ve been working on a new design for this thing since I converted to WordPress. I came up with a new design, but I didn’t like it. So I decided to go back to the old design. Which I have to recreate, since when MT crapped out on me I lost all the templates and HTML pages. So I’m recreating it, and I get it to work, then all of a sudden it doesn’t work, despite the fact that I didn’t change anything. Also the pages where I got the basic layout (footer bottom, even when the main text is shorter than the viewport), pages that used to work, no longer work. In Mozilla or r IE. Or an online example page will work, but when I copy it exactly to a page on my computer, it won’t work.

Why have web standards not progressed since, like, 1999? XHTML, which is really not any kind of an improvement, was 1999. CSS2 was frickin’ 1997. That’s almost 10 years ago. And we still have to use hacks like this:

#container {
position: relative;
min-height: 100%;
height: 100%;
voice-family: "\"}\"";
voice-family: inherit;
height: auto;
}

html>body #container {
height: auto;
}

to get things to work. I mean, WTF? This is the frickin’ web, people. How can the building blocks of the web have stagnated so much? I mean, we don’t use wattle and daub for making houses any more. Why do we still have to resort to crap like tables for layout in order to get decent cross-browser compatibility?

People are actually reading this blog now. I feel like I’m having visitors over and there’s dog hair and dirty dishes all over everywhere.

The Hindu : Sci Tech : Living on a vegetable-free diet

A national diet and nutrition survey was conducted by the U.K.’s Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. According to the survey, it was that found that most British children eat less than half the recommended five portions of fruit and vegetables per day.

About 20 per cent of them did not eat any fruit at all in the week in which the study was carried out, apart from some of those foamy banana-shaped sweets and a packet of Jaffa Cakes (biscuits).

Indeed, in these heady days of obesity and overprocessing, children are so removed from the agricultural lineage of their diets that many now believe carrots come from sheep, and stories about youngsters having survived on nothing but jam sandwiches and Coco Pops for the first seven years of their lives are not uncommon.

And yet the little tykes miraculously continue to thrive. No one appears to have a good explanation for this.

Donald Rumsfeld briefed the President this morning.

He told Bush that 3 Brazilian soldiers had been killed in Iraq this week. To everyone’s amazement, all the color instantly drained from Bush’s face. Then he collapsed onto his desk, head in hands, visibly shaken, almost in tears.

Finally, he composed himself, and asked Rumsfeld, “Just exactly how many is a Brazilian?”

Recently there’s been a heated (ha ha) discussion on a few blogs about one black woman’s experience of having a white chick (hereafter referred to as WC) ask her whether or not she got hotter in the sun because her skin is dark. My first thought on reading the set-up of Piny’s post on Feministe about discussing of Nubian’s original post was to think, “Hmmm, good question”. Piny then proceeded to call the inquisitive WC stupid, and to slaughter for having the gall to ask Nubian this question in the first place. Boy, did I feel like a rube.

As I continued to read the discussion on Feministe and blac(k)ademic, however, I started getting pissed off.

First of all, if your nick is Nubian, you’re kind of setting yourself up for questions like these. You’re identifying yourself primarily by your ethnic heritage, after all. Granted, Nubian’s experience happened IRL, so presumedly the white woman knew Nubian as Kourtney and not Nubian. Still.

Nubian inferred from WC’s question that WC is trying to “‘other’ [her] into some kind of sub-human anomaly, whose body functions automatically differently than whites, and in such a negative way”. WTF?!? Nothing in WC’s question implied anything of the sort. Of course I don’t know what was going on in WC’s brain when she asked Nubian this question, but there is no racism implied in the question itself. “It’s a sensible question, the kind of thing a four-year-old might ask Mommy”, as one commenter on Feministe put it. And as a matter of fact, Nubian is other, at least other than WC. I’m other, too. I have different experiences from thin people, and black people have different experiences from white people. We’re all “other” from someone else, and wondering about our differences in no way implies that our own experiences are the default. What the fuck is the matter with acknowledging these differences and trying to learn about the “other”? It’s crap like this that causes the alienation of one group of people from another.

Piny says that “there is a point at which each person must take responsibility for their ignorance.” Sure, yeah. It would seem to be the case, however, that that was precisely what WC was trying to do. But daring to ask an “other” person a question about her experience apparently makes you seem ridiculous–you’re making an ass out of yourself by trying to take responsibility for your ignorance, in this way, according to Piny. Apparently if we’re curious about the experiences of an “other” we should do anything but ask questions of them. Wikipedia and Google were suggested as solutions to this conundrum. OK, but:

Piny goes on to say that “while education may well be the problem of the non-privileged group, it is not their responsibility.” Yes, it is in fact the responsibility, at least partially, of the non-privileged group to clear up any misconceptions others have about them–they’re the only ones who know what the misconceptions are! Ideally people should be accepted regardless of their differences, but this is not an ideal world. It’s also the case that the path to acceptance includes precisely the kind of enlightenment Piny would have minorities shirk. Michelle makes this point beautifully in our discussion of the relevance of busting myths about fat and health to the SA movement. So i wonder, if it’s not the responsibility of the “other” to educate the ignorant about their experiences, who is it exactly that’s supposed to be writing the Wikipedia articles?

Nubian, of course, should not be required to be the sole custodian of the task of enlightening the world about black people. One poster on her blog had some amusing suggestions for a comeback:

Q: “since you are darker, do you get hotter?”

A: “I don’t know. Since you are whiter, do you get colder?”

A: “I am hotter because I am darker, yes. Oh you mean temperature!”

A: “I’ll let you know next time I come round as a white person.”

IOW, there are other ways to think about and defuse the situation than assuming a racist motivation on the part of the questioner.

Some commenters said that if you are ignorant about this kind of issue, you don’t have enough non-white friends. Uh, well, affirmative action doesn’t apply to my choice of friends. I’ve never chosen my friends because of their skin color–I never even thought about my friends’ “race” until I got older and learned that “race” is an issue. When I think about it, though, I’ve actually had a shitload of “ethnic” friends in my life (and no, this is not a case of “I’m not racist–I’ve got a black friend!”), so in my case, at least, my ignorance isn’t due to a lack of dark-skinned friends. I never thought about the skin color/temperature question until just now. (I guess a lot of participants in this debate think that makes me stupid.) So the hapless WC might have been guilty of showing a lack of social skills by asking a mere acquaintance a question that acquaintance felt was rude, but it’s not necessarily the case that the white woman didn’t have enough “friends of color”.

I should also mention that being from Oklahoma, there were very few black people around when I was growing up, and few of those that lived in Tulsa lived in my part of the city. There are a lot of states in the US in which a person might grow up without having any dark-skinned friends due to probability as opposed to racism.

A commenter on Nubian’s blog said that “As these white people haven’t had any form of interaction with black people, they can be extremely insulting and tactless when speaking to them.” Apparently everything a white person says to a non-white person must be evaluated in light of “the larger sociopolitical context of America’s nasty racist history”, according to another commenter on Nubian’s blog. First, I get annoyed at the idea that we somehow are supposed to speak to different groups of people differently, and not just with the care expected of polite discourse in general. Second, how the fuck am I supposed to know how not to be “insulting and tactless” towards “other” people without talking to them, and thus in the process being “insulting and tactless” towards them? I can’t win–according to this logic, there’s no way possible for me not to be “insulting and tactless” toward the “others” at some point in time. Again, cue the issues about alienation and responsibility for enlightenment. Because of the fact that I have always lived in areas with few black people, I don’t know much about how their experiences might differ from mine. I know that many of them get easily offended about race issues, however (as demonstrated in the posts in question), so I get nervous about even talking to them at all, for fear of insulting them or being tactless. Can a WC get a break?

IMO, the best solution lies in the principle of charity. It’s a bad fucking idea to assume the worst in your interactions with other people. As a fat person, that’s something I learned a long time ago. I might give someone a strange look were they to ask me whether my fat caused me to get hotter, but I wouldn’t take it as an indication that the questioner considered me “sub-human”. Christ on a crutch. Of course, I’ll get slaughtered now for daring to compare my experience as a fat woman to the experience of being a black woman.

The commenter so concerned with us “insulting and tactless” white people goes on to suggest that we “need some sort of education system (maybe incorporated into the school curriculum) which answers all these kinds of questions. There needs to be some kind of an educational forum where all people who are genuinely interested in people of other races can ask questions without being condemned, and can be given accurate information, which should serve to dispel any senseless assumptions they may have of other races.” Yes! I think that would be awesome. It’s why I took anthropology in college, and why I’m interested in feminism, fat acceptance, class issues, race issues, and sociology in general. But we have to get the information for these classes from somewhere. Which means that each group of “others” has to take responsibility for providing it, without getting their panties in a wad. They’re the only ones who can relate their experiences, after all.

—

ETA: There’s an awesome comment over at Pandagon that perfectly spells out my frustration with this debate.

Our MP3 player that we’ve had for two years is crapping out. Something’s wrong with the headphone jack–it keeps cutting out so we can only get one channel at a time. Johannes and I keep fighting over who gets to have the damn thing. That, plus the fact that it’s been about three years since I’ve gotten a new phone (which is considered to be a ridiculous amount of time in this country), has led me to purchase a new phone. A new MP3 phone. The best one on the market now is the Nokia N91, so of course that’s the one I got.

It is kinda big, is poorly weighted, and has very small keys, some of which are hard to get at. Otherwise, it’s very cool. Now I can go out without having to have a backpack in which to lug around the MP3 player.

I have to admit, I do miss my old phone. It was dark sparkly green, and that meant a lot to me.

Pins!

Yes, I just paid 72 kroner for a box of pins ($11.65 in USD). First I was going to say, “Remind me to look at the price tag before buying something.” Then I thought, “You know, on second thought, remind me never to look at the price tag at all.” Christ.