February 2015

the wellesley college journal of campus lifefebruary 2015 volume 41 issue 4

COUNTERPOINT

COUNTERPOINTTHE WELLESLEY COLLEGE JOURNAL OF CAMPUS LIFEFEBRUARY 2015Volume 41 / Issue 4

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS4EDITORS-IN-CHIEF

P O L I T I C S

4EMMA STELTER TURNING DOWN THE MEGAPHONE

E D I T O R I A L S T A F F

B U S I N E S S S T A F F

T R U S T E E S

D E S I G N S T A F F

C O N T R I BU TO R S

S U B S C R I P T I O N S

Oset Babur ’15

Layout Editor Charlotte Yu ’17Art Director Jayne yan ’16

Alison Lanier ’15, Emma Stelter ’16

Matt Burns MIT ’05, Kristina Costa ’09, Brian Dunagan MIT ’03, Kara Hadge WC ’08, Edward Summers MIT ’08

Counterpoint invites all members of the Wellesley community to submit articles, letters, and art. Email submissions to [email protected] and [email protected]. Counterpoint encourages cooperation between writers and editors but reserves the right to edit all submissions for length and clarity.

One year’s subscription: $25. Send checks and mailing address to:

Counterpoint, Wellesley College106 Central Street

Wellesley, MA. 02481Counterpoint is funded in part by the Wellesley Senate. Wellesley College is not responsible for the content of Counterpoint.

Cynthia Chen ’18Treasurer

Editor-in-Chief/Managing Editor

Staff Editors

Alison Lanier ’15C A M P U S L I F E

ARE YOU REALLY AN INTERSECTIONAL FEMINIST?

6EUNBYUL LEE

A R T S & C U L T U R E14ALISON

LANIER POSTMORTEM FOR GONE GIRL

Features Editor

Chloe Williamson ’16Olivia Funderberg ’18

Allyson Larcom ’17

S U B M I S S I O N S

Editor-in-Chief/ Co-features Editor

Hanna Day-Tenerowicz ’16

Editor-in-Chief/Copy Editor

Alice Lee ’18

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THE FALLACY OF THE “SAFE SPACE” AT WELLESLEY

8ANONYMOUS

UPHILL BOTH WAYS15HANNA DAY-TENEROWICZ

WHAT AM I?16OLIVIA FUNDERBURG

A PSA18JESSICA LAUGHLIN

M E N T A L H E A L T H

10ANONYMOUS AN ADDICT AMONG US: A STORY IN TWO PARTS PT.2

C R O S S W O R D20COUNTERPOINT

STAFF BLIZZ-POCALYPSE

CAMPUS LIFE

counterpoint / february 2015

Dear Reader,

We’re proud to present the first issue of the new year and the new semester. As always, we’re exciting to bring a diverse collection of voices and persecptives to this forum, and, as always, we seek to publish all manner of opinions. While many of these opinions deal with difficult or controversial issues, we urge our readers to use this magazine as a jumping-off point for discussion.

Due to the sensitive personal material in several of our articles, we’ve allowed (as we always do) anonymous publication. This is in no way meant to curtail discussion. Please feel free to get in touch with us if you wish to pass feedback or responses on to the authors.

The opinions expressed in Counterpoint do not reflect the opinions of the staff but of the members of our community who submit their work. We aim to be an open and accessible forum for campus dialogue and expression.

We are always accepting new submissions, responses, personal essays, or reflections on content seen in the magazine.

Much love,Hanna, Oset, and Ali

B Y E D I T O R S - I N - C H I E F

Letter from the Editors

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Last month, for the second time in my life, I found myself close to the site of a major terrorist attack.

Right now I’m studying abroad in Aix-en-Provence, France, but one week before, I was, as they say, an American in Paris. It seems difficult to imagine that anyone could have missed what happened in the last month, but just in case, here’s a recap: on January 7th, there was an attack on the Paris headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper known for its caricatures and for lampooning religion. Twelve people were shot and killed by Islamic extremists, including four extremely well-known Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, members of the editorial staff, police officers, and bystanders. Later in the week, there were other attacks: a hostage situation at a kosher grocery store in which four people were killed, the killing of another police officer, and a shootout between the police and the Charlie Hebdo killers, a pair of brothers. In total, about twenty people were killed in some of the worst terror attacks in France’s recent history. Certainly the worst, I’m told, in the last twenty years.

After the attacks, I shared the stress of anyone who was in Paris at the time—anyone who was asked to open their bag before entering a department store, who passed police officers with machine guns in groups of two and three on every corner, who felt uncomfortable about descending into the metro. As a visiting American, however, I know I wasn’t reeling in the same way the French were. That my host parents were. That our Parisian tour guide must have been. These attacks hit home

for France in a way that they didn’t for me.

It’s hard not to compare them to the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013. I was close to Boston during that attack, and I remember going through the same motions then as I did in Paris: establishing that my friends in the city were all right, then getting in touch with my parents to tell them I was safe. But the reality is that, for France, this is a lot closer to 9/11.

That concerns me. Not only because of the terrible tragedy of the killings, but because life is already hard for French Muslims, who seem to be viewed as outsiders in the public eye. I worry about the backlash that comes with this kind of attack. I worry, and then I ask myself what place I have to say something like that. I am not Muslim, and I wouldn’t be mistaken for someone from North Africa or the Middle East, which means I have the luxury of being concerned without having to fear for my own safety.

I am also conflicted about Charlie Hebdo and its content. If you haven’t yet seen the newspaper’s caricatures, you should take a look yourself, but suffice it to say they are pretty damn offensive. It’s known that the magazine was targeted primarily for its satirical depictions of Muhammad, who, in the Islamic faith, isn’t supposed to be depicted at all. In France, freedom of expression tends to be valued more than political correctness, meaning that Charlie Hebdo can push the envelope more than it could in the US, and much more than it ever could at Wellesley.

Being in Paris the week of January 7th meant being in a world where #JeSuisCharlie was everywhere—on signs, spray-painted on alley walls, plastered on the inside of storefront windows, and hanging off people’s backpacks, like “Never Forget” and #BostonStrong. Except that I am not Charlie. Because I don’t support the magazine’s content. Because I think an unfortunate side-effect of the shooting is that it gave Charlie Hebdo a megaphone. Because I believe that freedom of speech is more complicated than just a self-expression free-for-all, and that just because you can say something doesn’t mean you should. Because I’ve learned that structures of privilege and marginalization aren’t just maintained with guns. Because I recognize that racism in a funny voice is still racism.

None of this is to say that Charlie Hebdo or its ilk should be declared illegal. As much as I dislike the newspaper’s content, I don’t believe participants in democracy should be in the business of deciding what’s acceptable to say and what isn’t. Determining where to draw the line would not only be extremely complicated, but unrealistic. If someone wants to publish satirical cartoons depicting Muhammad, they’ll make it happen, especially with today’s efficiency of communication. If people want to marginalize Charlie Hebdo, they will have to use the power of the purse.

Maybe that’s horrible to say. I know I’m coming from a perspective where cultural sensitivity is paramount, sometimes more than freedom of expression. I understand

POLITICS

where #JeSuisCharlie comes from. I can empathize. I can, and do, denounce the murders of French citizens by religious extremists. But it has to be said that ultimately, I am not in France to become French. That would be impossible. The best I can do is to occupy a sort of ex-pat space, neither French nor American, where my feelings about Charlie Hebdo and freedom of speech can develop and become more complex, but ultimately aren’t really going to change.

I hope not to stop the conversation here. I hope this will be the first of many essays about being an American in France, about being a student of French culture. For the moment, I certainly have the time. I hope to be just as able to understand the perspectives of others as I am interested in expressing my own.

Emma Stelter ’16 ([email protected])knows the power of the pen.

Turning Down the Megaphone

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counterpoint / february 2015page 6

CAMPUS LIFE

Are You Really an Intersectional Feminist?B Y E U N B Y U L L E E

Dear white friend, I beg you to stop declaring yourself

an “intersectional feminist.” I beg you to think critically about your usage of this term. I beg you to learn how harmful it is to use this term as a label. I beg you to stop claiming “intersectional feminism” as an identity for your philosophy of [white] feminism. I beg you to stop ignoring the racist repercussions of misusing the term “intersectional feminism” for your own benefit. I beg you to put an end to the endless cycle of white people extracting self-importance by appropriating collective struggle.

I don’t blame you. Flip through any women’s studies book, log into the social justice domain of Tumblr, read a few OKCupid or Tinder biographies, and chances are you’ll run into the popular buzz-term over and over. “I’m an intersectional feminist,” the writers claim. This is both confusing and unsettling for me, so let’s rewind several decades and uncover what one Black woman originally meant by the term “intersectionality.”

In 1989, the term “intersectionality” was coined by Kimberle Williams Crenshaw as a way to analyze the intersection of her Black and female identities and for other women of color to explore their own intersecting

oppressions, primarily along the lines of racism, sexism, and classism. In her 1993 article, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Crenshaw discusses the various ways in which white patriarchy disempowers Black women, Latina women, and Asian Pacific Islander women, who all experience raced and gendered oppressions that subtly expose the limitations of the generalized terms “feminism” and “antiracism.” I encourage you to read her piece; it uses an intersectional lens to analyze violence against Black, Brown, and Asian women in domains such as sexual assault, domestic violence, lobbying efforts, immigration, inaccessibility to support services, and representation, to name a few.

One of Crenshaw’s main points is that men of color do not experience the same racism as women of color, and white women certainly do not experience the same sexism as women of color. Inequality in pay is a classic example: remember that “a woman makes seventy-seven cents for every dollar a white man makes” statistic? Native Hawaiian women and Pacific Islander women can expect to make sixty-six cents. Black women can expect to make about sixty-four cents. Native American and Alaska Native women can

expect to make sixty cents. Latina women can expect to make fifty-three cents. Clearly, the gendered pay gap affects all women, but women of color bear the heaviest burden, and such examples exist in just about every domain of social, political, and economic life.

Herein lies our first clue: if you are white, you simply do not experience the intersecting oppressions of race and gender. You never have, and you never will. Mutating the historical significance of this oppression to cater to your personal interests is not a solution: you cannot claim to be an “intersectional feminist” based on your queer, disabled, or trans identities, and doing so would feed into a long legacy of throwing Black and Brown women under the bus while furthering both notions of white supremacy, as well as the structural violence against women of color that Crenshaw sought to dismantle. There have been too many instances of Black and Brown women paying the price for mainstream feminism’s thirst for acceptance in POC spheres. To steal this term in self-interest is to perpetuate the seemingly innocuous anti-black sentiments indoctrinated in so many white people and non-black people of color.

Solidarity should never assume this

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form of misguided labeling. I understand that sometimes the term “feminist” can feel inadequate. I understand that you want others to know that your feminism carries inclusion and versatility and subversion. Your identity as a white feminist warrants an acknowledgement of historical cherry picking from the struggles of women of color, done without so much as batting an eyelash when raced and gendered issues do arise and devalue women of color. While you routinely engage with other white feminists in exclusion, you are blatantly showing feminists of color that our issues actually don’t matter and that you are only adopting certain attitudes in order to fit a certain aesthetic. Sound familiar? You want to be counted in the struggle, but you don’t care to learn about the lived experiences of our oppression. You desperately want your voice to surface above everybody else’s, but you don’t care to listen to those who have been silenced.

As white feminists, your white privilege affords you the power to speak above us, silence us, derail us, and discredit our

voices. Tacking on “intersectional” before your feminist label changes none of that. Having read critical and feminist theory in class changes none of that. Having dated a person of color changes none of that. Indignantly denying your involvement in its perpetuation exacerbates all of that.

Most importantly, the term itself binds itself more to praxis than a mere label. So until each of us can prove that we actively practice antiracism, that we readily challenge white supremacy and anti-blackness in feminist and social spheres, that we assuredly commit ourselves to the lived experiences of Black and Brown women, that we read and support literature by Black and Brown women, that we have taken concrete measures to expand our consciousness, and that we are willing to decenter the narrative from white folks to prioritize Black and Brown folks, we are accomplishing the very opposite of what we claim to advocate.

We do not get to bastardize this term to heighten our social capital and to

promote visibly racist agendas. We do not get to benefit from the #BlackLivesMatter protests and stream Nicki Minaj and recite quotes from bell hooks and Audre Lorde as we continue to make our feminist spaces inaccessible to, and unwelcoming for, Black and Brown women. As feminists, we must all normalize the practice of holding each other accountable. We must do this by calling each other out and cultivating ready responsiveness and subsequent action to these call-outs. We must resist demonizing outspoken Black and Brown voices unless we wish to sponsor the cycle of their silencing. We must uplift Black and Brown voices in whatever capacity we can.

Please do not misinterpret my words. I strongly believe that white feminists and non-black POC can effectively practice antiracism in several ways. Calling yourself an “intersectional feminist” is not one of them. Calling yourself an “intersectional feminist” is not an admirable act of revolution. It’s a lie. I believe that there exist several better ways to prove that we care about Black and Brown lives, Black and Brown histories, and Black and Brown narratives without homogenizing and erasing them. I believe that we can help each other figure these out in constructive, respectful, and critical ways. We can help each other unlearn and learn again, but only if we are willing and eager to do so.

Eunbyul Lee ’17 ([email protected]) has really great hair.

CAMPUS LIFE


to stop complaining and start realizing their privilege.” But most upsetting is the quiet reaction: “I don’t feel comfortable vocalizing that Wellesley doesn’t feel like my safe space, when someone chastises me for wanting to call this a ‘sisterhood,’ or wanting to stand up for its status as a college for cisgender or trans women only.” There’s the crux of this issue: if we want this to be a true “safe space,” it needs to be safe for everyone to speak up. A safe space is somewhere every student feels that she can voice her opinion without feeling unsafe or unwelcome doing so. This doesn’t mean we need to tolerate ignorance or bigotry on this campus: it means we need to permit opinions we disagree with, without marking them off as bigoted because we disagree. Otherwise, we risk relegating important discussions to the realms of Yik Yak and Tumblr.

Take the New York Times article that questioned the definition of what it means to be at a women’s college today. In the week following the article’s debut, an alumna visited my philosophy class, and asked us how we felt about the article. I watched silence sweep over half the classroom and resignation sweep over the other half. No one wanted to share an opinion that challenged the piece. But when we broke into smaller groups, I was amazed to hear a majority of my peers slowly voice my own thoughts: “It’s not representative of Wellesley as a whole. Some of us are proud to attend a traditional women’s college. We don’t feel like a vocal minority has the right to demand we

The Fallacy of the

“Safe Space” at Wellesley When I came to Wellesley

College, I was excited to join a safe space. A space

in which I could share my opinions, debate, grow, and face other viewpoints. It was okay if my peers and I agreed to disagree. However, never would I have imagined that often times, I would feel uncomfortable voicing my thoughts, because they differed from those which seemed to represent the entire student body. I’d question whether or not I was bigoted, ignorant, or prejudiced, and I worked to educate myself whenever I asked these questions. Ultimately, however, I have come to accept that Wellesley is not an ideological safe space for all; we subscribe to unwritten rules of Wellesley College every day—rules about what opinions are okay to make known publically, and which are not—and this convention proves both isolating and dividing for many on this campus.

The problem has and does manifest itself on the numerous anonymous forums that have knocked our campus off its feet—Wendy Quiet, Wellesley FML, and now, Yik Yak. On each site, I have watched this argument rise to the top: “LGBTQ students have to justify their identity on a day-to-day basis. Straight students don’t. Therefore, straight students have less of a right to complain that this community doesn’t feel like their community.” I’ve heard multiple responses, ranging from: “Straight people are the majority here. How could you not feel like this is your community?” to “Straight people need

change for them.” One student responded to the article over dinner, saying, “If you go to an art school, and decide you want to become an engineer, would you ask that Pratt or RISD change for you? No. You would leave, and enroll at MIT.” Wellesley doesn’t pretend to admit people of all gender identities— just like RISD doesn’t pretend to be an engineering school. Months later, I was confronted with a challenge to the unwritten rules of this campus when chatting with a friend from the class of 2012. I was saddened at her reaction: “It’s so upsetting to watch a few people dominate the discussion at Wellesley. Once you leave, people become comfortable hearing it be called it a sisterhood, or a siblinghood—regardless of which they agree with, and most importantly, stop judging one another for the variety of opinions. It gets better—it’s just sad that it has to happen after we leave Wellesley.”

The problem is not so much that the cisgender community should get to decide what happens to the status of transgender students at this college. It is that the former students are frequently denied the right to express their dissenting opinions and their satisfaction with the college’s policy as it stands. This frustration flourishes when some students deny that this obstacle to open conversation even exists. If this aggression surfaces every time an anonymous forum crops up, and every time that aggression catapults into a heated discussion, it’s impossible to just dismiss the discontent. Whenever

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For more information on anonymous articles please contact any of our Editors-in-Chief.

a student dismisses the feelings of any group on campus—gay, straight, black, or white, regardless of society’s historic treatment of that group—the discussion becomes inhospitable to someone in the room. This happens at org meetings, in classrooms, in friends’ rooms, and most often, online. The examples are easy to find once you are open-minded enough to look for them, and are not limited to those I discuss above.

Bearing these two conditions in mind, what are we to do about the lack of a true safe space at Wellesley? The students who claim to make Wellesley a “safe space” need to re-evaluate how they define that term. Every student may not have a “stake” in the conversation to the same degree you do (the discussion may

not impact her status as a prospective or current student), but it is absolutely ridiculous to exclude her from the conversation altogether, and then to insist that this is still a safe space for her. She, too, is Wellesley. She is just as much a part of this greater community as you are. We need to refrain from making sweeping generalizations about the discontent this campus feels towards the College’s current status as a women’s college, and its current definition of women. Not everyone shares your sentiments—come to terms with this.

Ultimately, we all deserve to feel that this community is our own, regardless of our views or our identities. Who are we? We are the students that are eligible to attend Wellesley College, a women’s

college. You may not like or agree with this statement, but it currently applies to admissions at this college. These policies are credible because the trustees and alumnae of Wellesley College decided on them. Until you personally ascend to this board or position, your only option is to comply with these regulations. However, you are allowed to protest, debate, and express your anger in ways that do not endanger the well being of others—but you are not permitted to make me feel helpless in attempting to counter you in the process.

B Y A N O N Y M O U S

An Addict Among Us:A Story in Two Parts

Falling

If you’ve ever woken up in a hospital then you know how alarming it is to have fluorescent lights and cheap linoleum be the first things you see. The first time it happened to me, it took me a while to remember why I was there at all. I found a huge bruise on my knee. I felt like I had been hit by a train but was still cruelly allowed to survive. I also had a vague memory of having been hooked up to a breathing machine.

The emergency room doctor explained that I had been drunk the night before and that I had an asthma attack. She said that she already cleared me for discharge

and that a campus police officer would be arriving shortly to take me back to my dorm. I’d be back in time for brunch.

The next couple of days I went on as if nothing had happened. The only thing that forced me to revisit the events of that night was a mandatory meeting that I had to attend with the school’s assistant director of health education as well as the director of health services. What I assumed to be a mere formality turned out to be a mini-intervention. They told me that my blood alcohol content was .30, despite not having had a drink in the four hours prior to the measurement, and asked for an explanation. I didn’t have one. It was just a rough night. I told

them I had always been a “heavyweight” drinker and that ten or more drinks in a few hours’ span was the norm.

They were incredulous, and I could not fathom why. I was referred to an addiction therapist who told me that I had a full-blown alcoholism problem, and that if I continued drinking the way I did, I’d die soon. This, I thought, was bullshit. I told her I was just “fun.” Deep in denial, I insisted that I was no different from anyone else. I told her upfront that I refused to stop because I could not imagine life without alcohol.

The one thing I couldn’t deny was that I mostly drank alone and at inappropriate times—a shot or two in my coffee in class,

page 10 counterpoint / february 2015

Part Two

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for example—and hid my habits from my friends. Regardless, I thought that the longer and more fiercely that I shot down the diagnosis that any truth it had would gradually fade away. I’d prove them all wrong.

Rock Bottom

On the day before finals week that spring, I found myself in the hospital again, detoxing once more. This time, there were two armed guards outside of my door. I’d been sectioned; according to Section 12 Law, the hospital was allowed to place me on an involuntary seventy-two-hour hold at which time they would re-evaluate my case.

God fucking damn it. My ire was unbelievable. I must have sounded insane: I was certain that they would let me go if I could just convince them of how important my finals were, but no dice. “You’re not going back, so you should get used to the idea of being here for a while.” And Wellesley wouldn’t let me come back, either. It wasn’t until my father flew out to get me in person that the hospital discharged me—four days later.

Over those four days, my will to fight my doctors, parents, friends, and Wellesley gradually eroded. I thought back to the last few weeks leading up to this hospitalization: I had snapped publicly several times; out of desperation, I bought back pills I previously sold to friends; I sent several long, rambling emails to professors talking about nothing at all. The list goes on to include some paranoid behaviors, too—all in all, it was a nightmare. And all I could talk about was finishing my exams. My vision was so opaque that I was imprisoned by my own mind and its warped priorities. I cried. It was time to go home.

Rehabilitation

I was released into my father’s care and barred from setting foot on campus aside from moving out. I was told that the stipulation of my return to Wellesley in the fall was entering and completing a full-time drug rehabilitation program during the summer. I decided that I loved Wellesley more than I hated the idea of being treated for an illness I didn’t believe I had. I gave in and enrolled, but internally swore that I wouldn’t comply with quitting completely. I still thought that I was better off high.

When I look back at my mindset then, I can’t believe it either. It went beyond hard-headedness: it was a pure and simple death wish. But as I was soon to find out, wishes and wants had little to do with why I was an addict.

That first day of group therapy I sat there with my arms folded like a misbehaving toddler sitting in time-out. I stayed silent not out of shyness but rather out of arrogance. I couldn’t imagine that the others’ stories would look anything like mine but when I stopped fuming, I finally listened.

It was like I had an epiphany that lasted a week. I sat there and listened to everyone’s ridiculous, sad, hilarious, and crazy anecdotes of all the events that brought them to that room, whether they were directly related to using and drinking or not: family issues, low self-esteem, medical conditions, past traumas, and even addiction that had no obvious “cause” or exacerbating factor at all. Everyone was good-natured and had this charmingly dark sense of humor about their disease; the moments spent laughing uncontrollably shared equal time with the quiet, reflective ones. My story came out through the voices of others with whom I shared nothing in common——aside from the most difficult times of our lives.

That first week in rehab was a major

turning point in my recovery; I had never met people who were so open and, above all, kind and understanding of what I felt were the worst parts of myself. Most had been through rehab at least once before. They welcomed me like the accepting family I never had, because they had all been me at one point, and people had done the same for them. I would soon learn that a huge part of recovery is paying it all forward.

In rehab I also learned about the brain’s reward pathway and the wiring of an addict’s mind. I learned that our brains are severely and unfairly wired in such a way that we experience a compulsion to repeat actions that we find pleasurable; the more pleasure we get out of it, the stronger the compulsion to repeat it. A defining characteristic of addiction is the complete inability to limit the intake of a substance. Most of us addicts and alcoholics have tried cutting back on our own or making rules for ourselves——only wine, only on weekends, etc.——but to no avail. These misguided measures inevitably fail and will oftentimes land us in the hospital, jail, or dead. Our true drug of choice is always more.

It is difficult to separate the idea of compulsive behavior from one’s self-will. Humans are thoughtful, reflective beings. We make good decisions and poor ones, but all the while, we’re in control——except for when it comes to addiction, and other obsessive and compulsive behavior. Addiction is an illness where willpower has nothing to do with starting or stopping. (This is a big idea; I found it hard to accept, and I would not blame anyone else who) shares that difficulty. In fact, a major part of Twelve-Step programs is calling for the surrender of one’s self-will, as unintuitive as that sounds. However, those of us in these programs define “will” as a character flaw that begets stubbornness and that can be broken in moments of weakness. “Will” isn’t good

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enough to get us through something as massive and important as substance abuse recovery: we need to let it go.

Relapse

Although I had graduated from my program and received clearance to return to school, I was still considered a “beginner” in recovery and felt shaky on my sea legs. I gave up my self-will when it came to staying sober, but I retained my stubbornness in almost everything else.

I was still kicking myself for having to take the summer off (that is, without a glamorous internship or traveling experience) to attend to what I still saw as my moral degeneracy. I accepted that it was a disease, but I still didn’t like myself any better for it.

That fall, I doubled down to make up for my losses. I took five classes and picked up a job on campus. I was active in my orgs and even joined a new one. My recovery took a peripheral role in my new life: I stopped going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and stopped being honest about my “using” thoughts and dreams. Eventually I neglected it altogether. I figured the summer should’ve been enough time to last me for a while.

It’s not hard to guess how that all turned out. I fell so behind on work due to my prior incompletes and the weight of my current workload that I skipped class because of the social anxiety of facing my professors. Then I stopped going to class, period, because the more I skipped the more ashamed I was to return. Though I was sober the entire time, it was getting harder and harder to control my emotions; I always felt unstable and on edge and struggled with even greater self-loathing for all the weight I gained from quitting amphetamine and for not living up to

my beginning-of-the-semester expectations. In mid-October, an emotionally upsetting event occurred, and three days later I checked myself into the hospital again, this time voluntarily, at the behest of my therapist. In our multiple sessions that week—a bad sign in itself—I couldn’t stop talking about getting electroshock therapy for the amnesiatic effect it supposedly has. The only way I saw getting past that event was by shocking my brain into forgetting. Eventually it became clear that I needed more help than she could provide.

I stabilized after a weeklong inpatient stay and was placed on a mood stabilizer in addition to my anti-depressant. I agreed to drop a class, cut my work hours, and enroll in an intensive outpatient program for my comorbid eating disorder. But by late November I had stopped going and by December I had relapsed. I drank an entire magnum of white zinfandel (it was truly awful-tasting and I do not recommend it) and thought “fuck it all.” I drank more than ever, and stocked up on the various readily-available forms of ephedrine—the “poor man’s speed”—at the pharmacy, though neither using nor drinking was at all like it used to be. Every high was mediocre; every hangover and comedown was unbearable.

I admitted to my therapists at the Stone Center that I had relapsed. At that point I didn’t really care. After learning of my relapse, some of my best friends confronted me, and I told them to fuck off. I didn’t owe them an iota of my recovery. My resentment toward them made me isolate myself even more, and I drank harder just to spite them. I was taking poison hoping that the other person would die.

My outpatient addiction therapist had been considering that I might suffer from Borderline Personality Disorder, and I decided that I might as well embrace my fucked up-ness. Nevertheless, one day I realized that I couldn’t return to school in the spring like this. I knew I had to take time off, so I did. I went home, got a job, and started seeing a new BPD therapist.

When I was home, I drank and wrote and drank and wrote. I hid it from my mom. It wasn’t hard; I’d had almost ten years of training myself to hold my alcohol. I drank alone on my twenty-first birthday. And one night, I was bored


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and decided to see what my parents had in their medicine cabinet. All the way in the back was tucked away a bottle of Norco, a painkiller that contains both acetaminophen and hydrocodone. The bottle was full: I had struck gold.

But being a speed fiend, I never really understood the allure of painkillers as euphoric agents. I was excited to try. I took two. I didn’t feel anything. I took another two. A little fuzzy, but not the kind of high I was used to. Before I knew it I had taken ten and was absolutely useless. My breathing became terribly weak and slow.

I thought that if I were to die, I wouldn’t mind. I closed my eyes.

The Beginning

I survived my overdose. I had been too scared to call an ambulance so I decided to sleep through it. The next couple of days were so horrible that I kept praying—something I don’t do—that if I were to get through this, I would go to my home group on Monday and would quit everything. For good.

I’ve been sober ever since. For as long

as I was home, I went to my home group every week. Sometimes my sister would come along mostly to support me, but also because meetings nearly unequivocally make anyone feel better, regardless of whether they suffer from the disease of addiction or not. Although my mother didn’t fully understand my addiction, she was as supportive of my recovery as I could’ve asked her to be, and that meant the world to me. When the initial storm after my “coming out” to my parents had blown over, we emerged with a greater understanding of one another and now are extremely close. Each member of my family struggles with anxiety, depression, and anger issues, and my journey through recovery has made everyone take a good, hard look at their inner demons. We are more sensitive and expressive now. We are the family we should have been.

I no longer lie to my parents. I tell them about moments when I feel unstable and overwhelmed, and even moments when I’m craving. Secrets, lies, and drugs all go hand-in-hand: once you start with one, the others enter your life soon afterward. I live a lighter and more honest life. I do what I say I’ll do and I show up when I promise to. People trust me again, and I wouldn’t give it up for the world.

Returning to Wellesley had the potential to be a disaster, but all the growing I did during my eight months away did not go to waste. I took it easy. I enrolled in four classes and no more. I learned how to say no, and that it’s okay to take time for myself. By the time this article is published, I’ll have eleven months of sobriety. No matter what happens, the only fact I know to be true is that there is absolutely nothing as important as recovery, regardless of how things may feel at that moment. Everything else can wait.

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counterpoint / february 2015page 14

ARTS & CULTURE

POSTMORTEM FOR GONE GIRLB Y A L I S O N L A N I E R

SPOILERS. SO MANY SPOILERS. REALLY IT’S A FUN READ. DON’T RUIN IT FOR YOURSELF.

BUT IF YOU’VE READ THE BOOK, FORGE AHEAD!

I’d been taunted by cinematically beautiful gifsets long enough: I tore through Gone Girl right alongside the

rest of the trendy-bestseller readers on my subway commute. The internet’s obsession over Rosamund Pike’s Hitchcock-inspired stare wasn’t my only motivation for reading the book—because I always read the book first, but of course. I’d also seen the hotheaded flurry of online comments—and then Time article—in which intelligent, socially aware viewers

couldn’t quite make up their minds if Gone Girl is doing wonderful or horrific things for women in popular media.

In case you by some wonder missed it: the book follows stunningly blonde Amy Dunne, who vanishes from her housewife life, leaving behind a trail of masterfully incriminating clues to frame—and ultimately, murder—her despised self-indulgent husband, Nick. And there you have it, the first of many twists that yank and shock the reader through Gillian Flynn’s revelation-heavy psychological thriller.

And at the center of what makes these twists so effective—and the overall product so engrossing—is the book’s earnest, convincing tone, which Flynn builds for the characters and their clashing

viewpoints. For a long stretch there in the beginning, we see Nick carrying around a half-truth story full of plot holes and a suspiciously self-conscious attitude. Meanwhile his wife, missing, presumed dead, is represented to the reader through a chain of orchestrated diary entries: she is the perfect wife, the Amazing Amy of her parents’ idealizing children’s books, modelled on a cheerful but exasperated version of Amy.

This is the first Amy the reader is privy to in the book. The second Amy arises with the advent of what Time calls the “Cool Girl” speech: this version of Amy disdains the Cool Girl, the woman who “pretends to like what men like in order to attract attention. She’s the type of girl who unabashedly loves sex and

counterpoint / february 2015 page 15

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drinking beer and eating burgers—while still miraculously maintaining a perfect figure—and is always ready to forgive her husband’s foibles.” Amy has had enough of being the Cool Girl: now she is going into hiding after faking her own death, in order to get payback on the husband who dismissed and underappreciated her.

And then we see the third Amy, as we realize the terror of Nick’s situation and Amy’s willingness to go to extreme and horrific ends to maintain control.

Amy is brilliant. She’s a genius, who we first pity, and then suspect, and then fear deeply. She is a complicated monster. And she has landed her creator in quite a lot of hot water. Flynn has been accused, she told Lev Grossman in an interview, of perpetuating all the “psycho bitch” stereotypes that Hollywood has made such a grotesquely recognizable trope in scores of similar blockbusters (read: everything Taylor Swift mocked in “Blank Space”). Amy’s menace does have all those trademarks, and more: she is an extreme inventor of narratives. False narratives of pregnancy, death, and sexual assault, all invented to keep her in control, to keep her husband under her thumb, to keep her in the spotlight as a media sweetheart, rather than a villain.

Eliana Dockterman wrote in Time that Amy Dunne portrays many of the most painfully typical anti-feminist narratives. Woman invents abuse. Woman invents rape.The delicately beautiful blonde prototype of a Hollywood love interest—now contorted into her vampish opposite. And these ugly tropes are definitively anti-feminist, says Dockterman. They reinforce the already two-dimensional image of women in media, and they make it easy to categorize Amy as a very specific kind of recognizable woman-monster.

But, she relents, Amy does not represent all of womankind; she’s not the Everywoman Next Door, but the articulate, nuanced, and intelligent sociopath disgusted by her own hyper-

gendered performance of Cool Girl and Loving Wife. And, at the same time, writes Dockterman, Flynn’s anti-heroine is further redeemed by “the complication” of gendered behavior, gendered interactions, gendered identities of Amy’s life as a girlfriend-then-wife. She’s infinitely more complex than the typical blockbuster femme fatale. And now the movie’s heavily gendered issues are an active part of the conversation.

But I have to disagree to some extent with the assertion that the introduction of the anti-feminist tropes are inherently a bad thing. Amy is so well aware of these narratives—the Cool Girl narrative, the victim narrative, the loving wife narrative—that she is able to weaponize them. The narratives become explicitly dangerous and are all released, rampant, out of control: when Amy employs them, and when the media circus does, when Nick does, when Nick adopts his father’s furiously misogynistic mantra of bitch bitch bitch. The reader can’t read the book without picking up the obvious and painful consciousness from Amy and Nick, consciousness of the narratives they’ve been locked into, as wife, as husband, as suspect, as victim. And yes, as Dockterman says, all of those narratives are inherently linked to gender.

The gendered narratives are so obvious in Amy and Nick’s story that they’ve become, at the very least, a topic of discussion. But at the most, the Cool Girl standard gets thrown into the fray as a terrifying impetus, a damaging, despicable standard. But this point shouldn’t be as simple as “now gender issues are part of the conversation.” It should stretch farther, to say that the Cool Girl is now frightening. Those tropes and rigid boxes cannot be picked apart and dismantled. They’re there, and they’re vilified.

I don’t intend this to sound like an end-all defense of the negative misogynist tropes obvious throughout the book. That those tropes are recognized is

a sign of a healthily critical media environment armed to respond to them. But the consciousness with which the book approaches those issues is a strong indicator, to begin with, that the psychobitch trope is not being put forward only as another usual bit of drama. Amy’s powerful narratives are not only complex; they’re important—and they can’t be summarized as a thriller about a “crazy lady.” Amy’s reasoning may be deeply flawed, but her context and what she sees as the roots of her suffering isn’t.

The real terror of Amy’s character is not the clingy “psycho girlfriend” plotline. Yes, that’s there, and it’s bad—but it’s also supposed to look bad. It’s so conspicuously trope-heavy in terms of that ugly stereotype that it’s difficult, or maybe more accurately painful, to believe that Flynn could have accidentally crafted it into such a self-consciously female narrative.

No, the real terror of Amy is that (Spoiler, spoilers, SPOILERS) when she returns as the fully realized complex monster, she and her husband both know that what the watching media world will see, or decide to see. Amy stands confidently behind the two-dimensional character of woman, victim, wife, mother, because as a woman she can be confident that she will be understood, as a woman, only in those terms. Just like she revels in her beautiful missing-poster picture and the flat, simple tragedy presented there, Amy’s two-dimensional mask—Loving Wife, Cool Girl—becomes the misogynistic construction of what she is as a woman. And that does not include complicated monster. The trope-mask is destructive, a hopelessly simple disguise that is so thoroughly ingrained, Nick can’t manage to dismantle it, to reveal the real individual, the monster, underneath.

Alison Lanier ’15 ([email protected])thinks you alone are to blame if you just spoiled Gone Girl for yourself.


College is primarily about intellectual growth. But we all know it’s about more than just

that. College is where we go to find independence, to shape our identities. It’s where we go to experiment and explore all kinds of different lifestyles, habits, and looks; it’s where we learn about our alcohol tolerance and about complicated relationships, about how to take care of ourselves and how to take care of others. It’s so much more than it appears.

I think just about everyone at a prestigious institution of higher education such as Wellesley could agree that we are valuable for more than our bodies. As a campus, we fight body-shaming of all sorts and advocate for self-love. We are here to nourish our minds, our souls, and yes, also our bodies. But as an academic establishment, is it really Wellesley’s place to require students to exercise? For many students, the PE requirement is manageable and even sometimes pleasant. However, eating disorders are by no means rare on this campus, and for many of us, the PE requirement presents dangerous and slippery patterns of thought and behavior.

I’m aware that exercise can be helpful to the body and mind. That being said, we can’t pretend like we don’t all know

that exercise is often used for weight control. I remember being very surprised when I found out that Wellesley had a PE requirement. Making exercise a mandatory practice, rather than a choice, seemed so archaic and problematic to me.

Physical fitness has been highly prized by the college since its founding in 1875. Our campus is landscaped with brutal man-made hills—which, says campus legend, were mandated by college founder Henry Fowle Durant so that Wellesley students could get their exercise by walking to class. Durant was a strong proponent of physical fitness; according to the Wellesley website, he “believed in the importance of physical exercise for women,” and accordingly, he “outfitted the College Hall gymnasium with dumbbells, chest weights, and flying rings.” Durant’s emphasis on physical education has carried through to today: Wellesley is still consistently ranked as one of the fittest colleges in America.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Wellesley enforced a posture requirement which mandated that all students must stand naked, spine pinned full of glow-in-the-dark spikes to reveal their posture to a photographer in the dark. All of the photos were kept on file, and rumor has it that they now

reside at Yale. Many Ivy League schools required these posture pictures around the turn of the twentieth century, when the American eugenics movement was at large. By requiring a certain degree of fitness in order to graduate, Wellesley is, in a way, upholding the same principle that the American eugenics movement advanced: to be a valuable member of the intellectually fit elite, one must also be physically fit.

Wellesley isn’t the only one of the Seven Sisters overly fixated on physical fitness and weight. This past January, Bryn Mawr College sent out a highly controversial email to select students inviting them to join a PE program called the Fitness OWLS (Onwards to Weight Loss Success). Students were invited based on their BMIs (a flawed system of weight judgment, as it does not take muscle mass into account), which were calculated using Health Department data without students’ consent. Bryn Mawr fat-shamed its students and conflated weight loss with health, when really, students are there to learn, not to get in shape. What students do with their bodies should be their choice.

Admittedly, I have an extremely biased perspective on modern American exercise culture. As an eating disorder survivor

Hanna Day-Tenerowicz ’16 ([email protected]) has not yet paid a visit to the newly renovated KSC, and hopes to keep it that way.

for whom exercise has been a huge issue in the past, I personally feel upset that this requirement even exists. The reasons behind my feelings are selfish, to be honest; if we institutionalize exercise, I will never be good enough. The PE requirement reminds me painfully of the handicaps my mental illness can create. Exercise would present a huge risk of relapse for me, and relapse can be a relatively fatal thing (because, after all, eating disorders have a mortality rate of 20%, more than cancer). So in my case, exercise is more of a risk than the potential benefits of regular exercise. I can’t live life the way American culture tells us every “healthy” young woman “should,” and obligations like the PE requirement remind me that I’ll always be that freak kid sitting on the sidelines, at least when it comes to institutional exercise.

I understand that Wellesley’s goal in upholding the PE requirement is likely to teach students a balanced and healthy lifestyle, but it seems strange that the only way we’re encouraged to do this is through

exercise. Why isn’t there a two-semester therapy requirement, too? Learning how to reach out for help with one’s mental health is a crucial life skill, yet so many students leave Wellesley still unfamiliar with this process, despite the consistently high rates of mental illness on campus.

I’m not saying we should ban Wellesley’s PE requirement entirely, but I do think that Wellesley needs to consider the implications of mandating that students increase their physical fitness in order to graduate. Opting out of the PE requirement should be as easy as getting a med single. And upholding our mental health should be treated with the same importance that we give to maintaining physical fitness.

Uphill both WaysB Y H A N N A D A Y - T E N E R O W I C Z

CAMPUS LIFE

Let’s talk about race. Race is a hot topic right now, because of recent attention on police brutality and

potential racial profiling. Race is also an important topic, always. Whether we realize it or not, race, and associations that come with it, affect our daily lives. For me, the topic of race is a little complicated.

But to start, I don’t want to talk about myself: I want to talk about Barack Obama. We all know who Barack Obama is—the first African-American President of the United States. I’m sure we can all recite that fact off the top of our heads, but it doesn’t tell Obama’s whole story. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, African-American refers to “an American (especially a North American) of African origin: a black American.” Yes, Obama is a black American, and yes, he is of African origin, but there is more to him. Obama is biracial. His father was originally from Kenya and his mother was born in Kansas. Obama is of African origin but he is also of white American origin. Labeling him the first “African-American” President of the United States isn’t wholly accurate, and somewhat ignores his maternal heritage. Obama is the first mixed-race president, and that makes him even more exceptional.

I had a conversation about his exceptionality with my mom after I had a sort of Obama epiphany. I had been reading his Wikipedia page, and that fact jumped out at me. I called her up to say, “Mom! Obama isn’t just African American! He’s mixed-race! People don’t

B Y O L I V I A F U N D E R B U R G

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Olivia Funderburg ’18 ([email protected]) is human and proud.


really talk about that, why don’t people talk about that?” She told me that she was, of course, completely aware of the fact that Obama is a multiracial person. She also informed me that she isn’t fond of the word “race.” She had expressed this sentiment previously, but I hadn’t really gotten what she meant. Now, I do. By my understanding, race (as a social concept) refers to groups of people who look alike. I like the word “ethnicity” a lot more than I like the word “race.”

For me, “race” connotes categorization; it’s about differences between people and separation. In contrast, I think a question of “ethnicity” asks about where you’re from; it asks about your history, your ancestors. Ethnicity is about people and culture and connections. Ethnicity is a more personal word, and I think it holds countless more possibilities than the current understanding of race does. Ethnicity is more inclusive, and it most definitely is about more than the color of

your skin. Ethnicity is a more reasonable way of considering different types of people than through separations of race. What is race? When you ask about race, aren’t we all just part of the human race?

Race is something I think about a lot because of my family. My mom is white and my dad is black. What am I? What is my brother? Black? White? We’re both, and we’re neither. We’re something in-between. Being in-between is going somewhere with my white mom and having people question her relation to me. Being in-between is having someone say to me, “Well, you’re basically white,” or ask, “What are you?” That question, “What am I?” is so impersonal. How about, “Who am I?” The answer to that, or almost any other question, would provide much more substantial information about me. Being in-between is difficult, but it also allows you to embrace your identity and stop being afraid to be a little bit different.

CAMPUS LIFE

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CAMPUS LIFE

The thing about walking is it only works when there aren’t things in front of you.

Things can be desks, things can be chairs, and things can be tables. Things can be all of these things and more. Things can even be people—please try to breathe and allow me to define things loosely, I’m amped up and cold and this is my article anyway. Write your own.

When things are in your way you stub your toe, you trip, you scrape your shin, or in the case of things being people, your feelings are hurt.

“What in the world could she be talking about?”

When groups of people take up the whole fucking sidewalk.

It’s interesting to think that this is a concept that needs to be explored explicitly at an institution of higher learning. I’m even willing to forgive that the practice of such a seemingly simple idea might be pushed aside due to a certain kind of weather. Hell, I’m not walking through that puddle and I’m wearing kid-size North Face snow boots. I don’t expect you to.

What I’m talking about is groups of students, where group is defined here as two or more, who walk together in a straight line, imitating American Revolution war formation-marching lines without the flashy costumes. Honestly, I might forgive them if they had the drum player or flutist, but you never see that anymore. What I do see are students, who, despite noticing that you are an actual human being that exists in the real world and therefore whose molecules take up physical space in the real world, choose to maintain this rigid formation and, subsequently, plow you over into the snow.

a PSANow, don’t get me wrong, I can

appreciate a war reenactment as much as anybody else. I’ve even tried to look at the situation from that perspective. Nobody loves a #tbt more than me, but, please, let’s cut the dramatics. It is simply not that hard to recognize a blob of a human walking toward you. When this happens, just slide in front of or behind the friend with whom you are walking until the mystery blob has passed. You can even hold your breath if you want, like when you pass cemeteries. It’ll be the hip, new game. If you constitute a group with more than two people, please apply same technique. Unless you all try to go to the same spot. That would just be embarrassing. Yet, no matter what position you choose, it’s easy. You don’t even need to acknowledge the mystery blob. You just need to acknowledge that the blob exists. Move aside. Live and let live. Walk and let walk. Hakuna matata.

I realize that this may pose a problem for those students who have chosen to go out for Phi Beta Kappa and are forgoing regular social schedules and therefore are trying to fit hours of chatting into one break. Maybe you just have ten minutes. After three and a half years at Wellesley, believe me, I know busy schedules. Not because I have one. Other people do and I overhear them in the dining hall. So if you have seventeen midterms this week and ninety-four meetings and three partners to somehow keep up with, I get that. You have a doppelganger at the table next to me, and there’s probably one of you in every dining hall as you’re reading this. Look up. There they are.

I also get that sometimes we compartmentalize our friends. We’re complicated social beasts that rarely know what we’re feeling or thinking. We do

B Y J E S S I C A L A U G H L I N

Jessica Laughlin ’15 ([email protected]) is currently climbing out of a snow-bank.

weird things. Sometimes I catch myself doing this. Now, maybe you’re walking with your “break friend.” You know, the one you talk to for the ten minutes from class to class, but then ignore in the dining hall with an unnatural head movement that suggests there’s no way you could have seen them? No, I’m not a mind-reader. We all do it. So, believe me, I get that. I get that you might have to squeeze this person in. You only have these ten minutes!

You, too, can apply the aforementioned technique.

And while you do so, just talk fucking louder.

Not only will you be sharing the sidewalk appropriately, like we aim to do in civilized society, you will be improving literally every single person’s day who has to walk past you. Your “break friend” might even be impressed with your initiative. Years later, at your wedding, they’ll give the Best Person speech and note the first time they ever found you remarkable: that time when you moved aside and didn’t shoulder shove the poor pedestrian, unlucky enough to cross your path, into the snow.

In sum, I think we can all agree that it’s the little things that matter. It’s those days when you don’t stub your toe on the dresser drawer you left open. It’s those days when you get a straight A- instead of an A-/B+, because we all know that’s not a real grade. It’s a purposeful, hateful slight. But from now on, let’s aim to also make it those days when you don’t get shoulder shoved.

That is all.

Race, for me, is complex, and confusing, because I don’t fit into any traditional existing racial category. I’m biracial, multiracial, mixed-race; multiple terms can be used to describe me, and they all give the same general, vague information.

Being multiracial isn’t always an option though. A lot of standardized tests or questionnaires require you to choose one option to describe your race, but don’t include multiracial as one of them. They merely list the option of “other.” I am not “other.” No person is “other.” There is almost nothing that bothers me more than having to check a box labeled “other.” “Other” shouldn’t be a label I, or anyone, is forced to use. I think it’s important for the understanding of race, or ethnicity, to expand in such a way that nobody will be put into an “other” category. Nobody is “other,” because everybody comes from somewhere.

Race is hard to talk about for anyone, but especially for someone like me, who can’t be labeled as being one race. I’m proud of being mixed; it’s part of who I am and where I come from. But being mixed is living in between racial divisions and that’s why (I get it now, Mom!) I don’t really like the word race. I think ethnicity is a better word than race for talking about people. We definitely live in a society built upon a lot of labeling, but some labeling wouldn’t be missed if it were to disappear. I, for one, wouldn’t miss labels of race. What race am I?

Human.


CROSSWORD

Across2. Your friendly neighborhood feminist co-op6. To be honest9. A three-day weekend in February12. No ____ police, please.13. The real reason for Valentine’s Day14. Made Walter White famou$15. A Valentine’s Day favorite, whether single or taken

Down1. The deflation that gets all our spirits down3. Underground and vaguely hazardous activity 4. On his snow days, this Frenchman pondered existentialism5. The most addictive (and expensive) Facebook group at Wellesley6. Better than sledding7. There is too damn much of it right now.8. Also a popular activity on Marathon Monday 10. Capital letters, Wellesley has many11. A public writing seminar

What to Do with a Snow Day (Or Three)

February 2015

Documents

Transcript of February 2015