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Taisho Roman inks are a new line from Teranishi and I’m continuing on this week with another two colors from the lineup. If you missed part 1 of this review, make sure to go back and read it!
I discovered the entire Teranishi ink brand at St. Louis Art Supply where the ink is offered in 40mL glass bottles for $21.50 (about $0.54 per mL) or in 1.5mL samples for $2.50. Because I have used samples for this review, there is no photo of the actual bottles but refer to part 1 for a look at them.
Taisho Roman Modern Red is a well-saturated red with a hint of shading and a touch of sheen occasionally.
However, I was surprised at how Modern Red reacted to various types of paper. Sometimes this ink shows as a bold, bright red. Other papers reveal the orange and brown undertones of the ink. The ink can also show very different textures on each paper.
Teranishi Taisho Roman Modern Red on Cosmo Air Light 83gsm paper:
Teranishi Taisho Roman Modern Red on Tomoe River (TR7) 52gsm paper:
Teranishi Taisho Roman Modern Red on Midori MD paper:
Teranishi Taisho Roman Salon de Violet is the second ink in today’s review. This purple also has a bit of shading and plenty of blue in the undertones.
Teranishi Taisho Roman Salon de Violet on Cosmo Air Light 83gsm paper:
Teranishi Taisho Roman Salon de Violet on Tomoe River (TR7) 52gsm paper:
Teranishi Taisho Roman Salon de Violet on Midori MD paper:
Which of the Teranishi inks is your favorite?
DISCLAIMER: The items included in this review were purchased by me for the purpose of review. Please see the About page for more details.
The post Ink Review: Taisho Inks, Part 2 appeared first on The Well-Appointed Desk.
Emily Abel’s book Sick and Tired: An Intimate History of Fatigue, is framed by her own personal account of fatigue following her recovery from breast cancer. It is an intimate Read more
The post Catharine Coleborne on Emily K. Abel’s *Sick and Tired: An Intimate History of Fatigue* first appeared on Society for US Intellectual History.
Our culture glorifies youth. Even the word “old” is one we would prefer to avoid. Negative messages about age come at us our entire lives.
Throughout my life, I have heard people say: “So-and-so can’t do that, they’re too old.” Or there’s the notion that as a woman, you shouldn’t say your age. But the stigma around age is such nonsense, because getting older is a natural part of life. It happens to every person on the planet! Getting older should not be something to be feared.
At 43, I love my age.
Almost all of us know that ageism is out there. It’s a type of discrimination that touches almost every person at some point in their life or career.
Discrimination is unfortunately a subject I know far too much about — not only when it comes to age, but also because of my gender and race.
I live as a black woman in America. My race and gender are two things in this country that are constantly under examination. Every time I walk in a door, who I am and my capabilities are perceived differently once people see my face.
Having been through that my entire life, not only my adult life, but also as a child, I used to get so exhausted by the burden of caring what others thought. But what I learned from it was that being too tired to care anymore can be a powerful thing.
It’s good when you don’t want to put up with it anymore — that same old thing the world is giving you. Then it’s time to change the world.
My experiences inspired me to not care what people thought of me, and that remains the case now, with my age. I no longer allow myself to be limited by other people’s perceptions of me. Instead I focus on my inner strength, and the part of me that says, “I have to do this.”
Age Is Just a Number
Many people encounter ageism at some point in their career. And it’s not only reserved for women, or older people.
In a survey by Glassdoor, 30 percent of workers report experiencing ageism at some point in their careers, and most of the people who report it are actually younger (between ages 18 and 34).
Ageism is also insidious because it’s difficult to identify. Age means something different for everyone. Being a particular age doesn’t reveal a static truth about your person, your experiences, or your skills. As a black woman over forty, I reject people treating me worse or differently for my race or my gender, but I also reject discrimination based on my age — in the workplace or anywhere else.
When I had the life-changing opportunity to go to Africa last year for the first time, I witnessed firsthand that age there is associated with wisdom, as it is in many other places around the world. If you’re over the age of sixty, you are revered as a walking source of information, wisdom, knowledge, and life lessons.
You’re a living lesson for your children and grandchildren. We ought to respect that older individuals are sources of wisdom since they’ve been here longer. There is value in the time they’ve put in on this earth.
Younger people also have a different type of insight to share. Diversity of age, like every type of diversity, enriches our lives and the organizations we work in.
Embracing and Valuing Aging
Ten years ago, I likely wouldn’t have told you my age. Now, on the contrary, I am proud that I’m 43 and thriving. Age is not a curse; it’s a blessing. That I’ve been able to live for 43 years in this body with this face, these hands, or these teeth is a gift.
I’m grateful for the fact that I’ve lived this long, and come this far in the world — and I don’t take it as a given.
Your age is part of the magic about what and when you came into being on this earth. Your particular place and role on this planet, including how long you’ve been here, is all a part of what makes you special.
That’s how I always chose to confront racial discrimination when I encountered it. Instead of letting myself take on shame, or other people’s feelings about how I look, I chose to view my skin color as part of what makes me special.
I see my age as a sign of wisdom, which is built on a set of important experiences and years of building skills. I was not created to be anyone but me.
Coming Into My Own Power
The invisible ageism that we know is so widespread in society was still stuck in my head when, at age 29, I decided I wanted to become a fitness model.
At that point, I never told anyone how old I was. I knew in theory no one ought to be denied opportunities based on age. But the negative culture surrounding age has had an impact on me, as it has for so many of us.
In the modeling world, fifteen is considered the ideal age to start out.
At some point, I had to decide that my will was stronger than just a number. Part of it was I wanted to change the fitness modeling world so girls like me would be given more of a chance. I didn’t worry about how it was going to happen.
What motivated me was remembering how as a teenager, when I looked at fitness magazines in the checkout aisle, there were never faces that looked like mine. I remember thinking, why shouldn’t there be women who look like me? And after that: Why can’t it be me who proves that a woman who looks like me can be featured in a spread in a magazine?
Back then, I didn’t have an agent. I didn’t know anybody in the fitness industry. There was no blueprint.
Oxygen is one of the most influential fitness magazines for women of any skin color. I decided to contact the magazine directly with my portfolio. I created a mega-sized poster, superimposed with my own face and body, wrapped it in cellophane, and shipped it to the editor-in-chief of the magazine.
She called me the next day and told me everybody on staff couldn’t stop talking about it. Her exact words were, “You did what you were supposed to do, which was to get our attention.” In the next breath she asked if I could meet her in New York City for lunch; she wanted to see my abs in real life!
After our meeting, she said she didn’t need to see anything else. She was going to feature me. Flash forward a couple of months later; I was flown to Canada for a shoot. I was featured in Oxygen four more times within two years. Then I was featured in Shape magazine as one of the top three trainers in the United States (out of 300,000 trainers). Fitness RX for Women came next, and my portfolio just kept growing.
Why did all of this happen? It was simple. I saw the problem. I didn’t see girls like me and wanted to see a different reality.
What you create, at any age, doesn’t have to reach millions of people.
If there’s something within you that you have to pursue, it’s never too late to do so.
Maintaining Your Power and Tending Your Flame at Any Age
Modeling in my late 20s and early 30s led to other opportunities including, in my late thirties, headlining a major event at ESSENCE Festival — the kinds of achievements I hadn’t even dreamed about when I was younger. I also had my first child at 38.
Everything that’s happened to Nicole Chaplin has always happened later. It’s just always been that way.
And I like to think, what if all this is just the beginning?
People often ask about the choices I make to be as active as I am (and not just “at my age,” either). If I had to distill the mindset that allowed me to embrace my power, regardless of age, it would come down to the following:
Being devoted to a healthy lifestyle at any age often means making different choices.
As just one example, my friends know they cannot invite me anywhere if the event starts late, because I’ll definitely be going home before midnight. I value my early mornings; doing otherwise would throw off my whole week.
I live a holistic life, and I’ve been that person my entire life: always active, roller-skating, cheerleading, track and field. I was also a dancer, and a choreographer at the University of Miami. Fitness for me hasn’t been about wanting to be strong for its own sake. It’s about stamina. It’s as basic as this: I like to do a lot of things, and to keep doing all the things I like, I need energy.
As a result of the way that I live, my energy stays high (and sometimes it’s even hard to turn it down). My aim is always to have stamina and endurance, and to be heart healthy. God forbid I trip on the stairs — am I able to catch myself?
It’s the simple stuff. I want and need to be able to keep up with my five year old, Dominic Zion. My own mother used to work very hard, so that on Saturday mornings, she would lie in bed exhausted. I knew I didn’t want to feel like that with my children, and wanted the energy to play with my child.
Now DZ is playing soccer, and I am able to keep up. When he wakes up on a Saturday morning, I’m already up and ready for him. I want to enjoy life to the fullest — going to East Africa, swimming with turtles.
For a lot of folks, if something doesn’t happen by the time you’re like 25, they say, “Oh well, that wasn’t my path.”
What if instead we ask: What if we’re far from done?
The post Owning Your Power at Any Age appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
The place I work is a “Global University” in that we are not just a Boston-based institution anymore. We have campuses in cities all over the United States, Canada, and even in London. You may say, “lots of schools have campuses in other parts of the World,” but what we are doing feels very different.
We now have three undergraduate locations, and while places like one of my previous employers, Penn State, has undergraduate campuses across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, there is something special about the idea that our undergraduate students can start in London, go to Oakland, CA, and then to Boston. We call it mobility.
It also means that we can have classes and experiences that students in all sorts of places can participate in in very synchronous ways. If you are a grad student in Portland, ME you might be interacting with other students who are in a room in Boston. A researcher doing work with an industry partner in Seattle can be actively discussing it with students in Toronto. Believe it or not, it has been really fun finding solutions to make this work in a way that humans can operate. If you’ve been in the technology space for a while you know that this used to be so hard, so expensive, and so low fidelity.
One of the things the work we did during the pandemic made us explore new ways of connecting classrooms across space and time. What was interesting about that exploration is that the technology also improved at a rate that we haven’t seen in quite some time.
Many of our classrooms now allow faculty to have a one tap environment to connect rooms all over the global network. A huge by-product of all of that work is that we can now use those spaces to bring our administration and staff who are spread across the network together to be part of events in real time.
This morning I was taken aback by the fact that as I sat in a room in Boston listening to two of our senior vice presidents talk I could see dozens of people sitting together in spaces stretching from Vancouver to London in real time. I know it sounds so simple, but it is enormously gratifying to see it in action without anyone even thinking that it is special. Maybe it isn’t rocket science, but it still feels like science fiction.
“When we change the input into our minds, we change the output into our lives.” — Zig Ziglar
Even the best jobs are complicated and stressful in various ways. Outside forces are nearly always there and it often feels like many of them are out to get us. And by get us, I mean they are looking to interrupt our work, relationships, leadership, vision, and in many cases, our sanity. We often don’t recognize moments where the outside forces appear to be negative, but In reality, if looked at differently, offers a chance to do a course correct. With that said, sometimes those outside forces are truly out to derail us, but we have more power than we often think.
I recently had a health related incident that knocked me out of action for a period of time. Now that I am back and feel great, I am practicing a different mindset about who I am and how I choose to react to those outside forces. When I heard that quote this morning it really made me reflect on my 25 years of work in higher education and how I have given these forces too much power. At each stop of the way there have been forces that have pushed me to do great work and those that have actively worked against the progress our institutions need to face. Using the mindset above I am learning that we have more control over how we process these signals on the way in and how to convert them into an energy on the way out that allows us to do great work (sanely) and how to treat the people in our lives that are important.
Troublemaker inks seems to be be everywhere lately – new dealers in the United States and the addition of several new inks as well. I’m showing off a couple of these new inks here – Butterfly Dream and Polar Lights.
Troublemaker packages their ink in 60mL dark plastic bottles. I have found some variation in price, but you can find it at Vanness for $24 (for shimmer inks) or $16.50 (for non shimmer inks).
Now for the inks themselves!
The base ink color for Butterfly Dream is an avocado green of medium saturation while Polar Lights is a dark purple-grey. Each ink shows some shading but nothing dramatic. I’ve seen a touch of sheen in each as well.
The two inks really stand out when the light is at the right angle. Butterfly Dream has a blue/purple shimmer and Polar Lights has a turquoise or green shimmer.
Polar Lights is a darker ink than Robert Oster Sterling Silver, but the two are close.
Polar Lights on Midori MD paper:
Midori MD paper at a different angle:
Polar Lights on Cosmo Air Light 83gsm paper:
Cosmo Air Light paper at a different angle:
And Tomoe River (52gsm TR7) paper:
Tomoe River paper at a different angle:
Butterfly Dream is my favorite of these two inks and is incredibly close to KWZ’s Prairie Green (Galen Leather exclusive ink). Prairie Green has lots of gold shimmer, however, while Butterfly Dream is a blue/purple.
Butterfly Dream on Tomoe River (52gsm TR7) paper:
Tomoe River paper at a different angle:
Butterfly Dream on Midori MD paper:
Midori MD paper at a different angle:
Butterfly Dream on Cosmo Air Light 83gsm paper:
And Cosmo Air Light paper at a different angle:
I have kept a pen (a TWSBI Go pen, medium nib) inked with Butterfly Dream for the past two weeks with no sign of blockage or slow ink flow so far. TWSBIs are a favorite of mine with sparkle inks since the feed has a slightly wider channel than other pen feeds.
What is your take on the new Troublemaker inks? Will these be on your to-buy list?
DISCLAIMER: The items included in this review were purchased by me for the purpose of review. Please see the About page for more details.
The post Ink Review: Troublemaker 2022 New Inks appeared first on The Well-Appointed Desk.
Florida has made it illegal for doctors to surgically alter the genitals of minors to treat gender dysphoria. In November 2022, after the Florida Board of Medicine took an initial step toward banning “gender-affirming” procedures, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Lapado praised the board’s members for “ruling in the best interest of children in Florida despite facing tremendous pressure to permit these unproven and risky treatments.” The pressure was indeed quite strong. But describing the procedures as “unproven and risky” misleadingly suggests a technical difficulty that could be fixed with better data or tools.
The real problem is more basic: the surgeries remove healthy organs without good reason. That’s not risky—it’s harmful and morally wrong. The people who seek such surgeries are trying to alleviate very real suffering, but whether surgery addresses such suffering humanely is not a question patients are automatically best positioned to answer. That’s true of any patient seeking any medical procedure.
The question is both a moral and a political one. If the surgeries grievously injure the vulnerable people they’re supposed to help, then patients shouldn’t seek them, doctors shouldn’t administer them—and voters and legislators should seriously think about banning them.
__________
In many surgeries, acts that would normally be harmful and wrong are made beneficial and right by special circumstances. Sticking pieces of metal into a human hand is normally wrong to do, but certain hand surgeries require it. What makes that morally acceptable? Besides having particular shapes, hands have certain functions, like grasping and pushing and pulling. These functions aren’t accidental. Being able to perform them is what makes a hand good at being a hand. When a hand is limp or broken, then what would normally be harmful to the hand—adjusting bones, pricking its skin—is helpful if it’s what a surgeon needs to do to get the hand working normally.
For removing an organ to be morally permissible, you need a very powerful reason—something like countering a mortal threat from the organ.
The basic principle goes back at least to Aristotle. The parts of an organism ought to serve the whole organism. Helping someone’s organs function as parts of their body is how doctors care for a patient’s physical well-being.
Some of the surgeries administered to treat gender dysphoria involve acts much more extreme than small incisions. Hysterectomies, mastectomies, and penectomies don’t just alter but remove organs. Sometimes, taking out an organ is morally quite right—if an organ is cancerous, for instance, or at serious risk of becoming cancerous. Again, organs ought to serve the good of the whole organism—which, minimally, means that organs shouldn’t host agents of harm to the organism. That’s why bilateral mastectomies can often be the right treatment for breast cancer (or for the genetic risk of breast cancer), why hysterectomies can be the right treatment for cervical cancer, and so on.
For removing an organ to be morally permissible, you need a very powerful reason—something like countering a mortal threat from the organ. It’s true that there are cases in which removing a perfectly healthy organ from a patient is morally acceptable—live organ donation, for instance. But in all cases of licit organ donation, the functions performed by the donated organ are performed by organs that remain in the body. That isn’t true for the surgeries covered by the Florida ban.
The big question is whether something about gender dysphoric patients can justify the surgeries we’re talking about. I think the answer is no. Even assuming the psychological facts most favorable to proponents of the surgeries, and even assuming ideal conditions of autonomous consent, the surgeries are unjustified and therefore harmful. Compassion demands acknowledging the pain of transgender people; it equally demands not performing surgeries that make their lives worse.
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Some patients seeking the treatments we’re discussing claim to be assigned to the wrong sex, to have a gender (a psycho-social sense of self) that doesn’t match their body. Surgery, this argument goes, could settle the conflict between, say, a female gender and a male body by surgically reforming the latter to mesh harmoniously with the former.
I think it is always an error to say you’re a woman trapped in a man’s body. Whether one is male or female is determined not by psychology, but by organs that serve distinct reproductive roles. Interestingly enough, this point actually seems to be accepted by those who say the bodies of gender dysphoric patients should be altered from one sex to the other. If whether someone is male or female isn’t determined by reproductive organs, why should gender dysphoria be treated by altering just those organs? The problem is not misassigned sex, because sex cannot be assigned or misassigned or reassigned. It can only be embodied.
But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that you could be a woman trapped in a man’s body. Surgery wouldn’t change that. Altering a man’s genitalia may disable him from engaging in reproductive acts, but it does not—indeed, it cannot—produce the organs that enable a woman to engage in reproductive acts. A man cannot become a woman, no matter what a surgeon does to his genitalia. If that weren’t true, then the many people who in the history of human cruelty have had their genitals forcibly removed would have thereby been moved closer to membership in the opposite sex. But that is simply not so.
If whether someone is male or female isn’t determined by reproductive organs, why should gender dysphoria be treated by altering just those organs?
Altering a woman’s genitals doesn’t make her into a man, and altering a man’s genitals doesn’t make him into a woman. Even assuming that the proponents of the surgeries are right about the psychological states of patients before the surgeries, the surgeries don’t achieve their intended result.
___________
Perhaps what’s morally relevant isn’t whether a surgery switches the patient’s sex, but whether it gives the patient psychic relief. If the patient is psychologically improved by the surgery, does that make the surgery morally permissible? Whether something gender-related caused a patient distress before the surgery isn’t relevant to our question; all that matters is whether the patient feels better afterward.
As before, let’s grant the proponents of surgery their best-case psychological scenario. Assume these surgeries do, in fact, induce relief, contentment, a sense of wholeness, or some such positive mental state. Here’s the problem: any positive mental state will be an unfitting response to the physical harm caused by the surgery. The patient might feel better, but they will feel better about a situation about which they ought to feel worse, so the surgery will have replaced one mismatch between mind and body with another.
Consider, for example, the mental state of fear. Fear is that distinctively unwelcome, repellent, dominating frisson. Fear is appropriate for dangerous situations and a bad fit for harmless ones. Fear has norms. There could be such norms only if fear, in addition to being a feeling, also depicted the world outside the mind in a certain way. To be afraid of something is for one’s mind to claim that the something is threatening, dangerous, to be avoided. If a situation is in fact dangerous—if fear is making a true claim about the situation—then fear is the right response. Otherwise, it is not.
As it is with fear, so it is with contentment, pleasure, relief, and other mental states. They can be judged appropriate or inappropriate only with reference to the situations to which they respond. Take contentment, for instance—that calm state of desire for things to continue as they are. That’s the correct response to a loving marriage or a good job. But it’s an incorrect response to injustice, because injustice ought to be rectified, and contentment is a state of satisfaction. Or take relief, that lessening of felt urgency or pressure. Relief is a good response to, say, the successful end of an important and difficult project, but not to the accidental, unexpected death of a beloved child. The same goes for pleasure, that warm feeling of attraction and inner harmony. Taking pleasure in another’s suffering is wrong, because suffering calls for sympathy, a desire to aid the victim, and perhaps anger.
For one’s mental states to respond improperly to the world is a sad thing, and it calls for compassion, not blame. People who have been depressed know how frustrating it is to feel numb at what ought to elicit joy or sadness. I know people for whom everyday stuff is terrifying. This is an awful experience, not because terror is always bad—it’s often fitting and valuable—but because everyday stuff just doesn’t call for terror.
The mental states we are discussing can be valuable only if they fit the situations to which they respond. So, even if removing a healthy sexual organ makes a patient content, the contentment itself is valuable and worth aiming at only if the removal of the healthy organ is something with which one ought to be pleased. But considered on its own, the removal of healthy organs is physically harmful.
Surgeons who try to relieve their patients’ pain by stunting or removing healthy organs are doubly in the wrong: they are harming their patients’ bodies, and they are doing it in order to induce an inappropriate mental response. It would be similar for a doctor to help a teenager cut herself to alleviate her anxiety.
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But maybe we should take a longer-term view of benefits to patients. Let’s say that some surgery relieved a patient of psychic distress that had blocked the patient from having the friendships they wanted, the job they hoped for, or some other aspect of human flourishing. Would the gain to the patient’s life outweigh the direct harm of the surgery?
No, because well-being shouldn’t be instrumentalized that way. Imagine that some people said you could be friends with them, but only if you did some degrading thing in public, or if you slept with every member of the group, or if you stole from your grandmother, all these acts would be as immoral as physical self-harm. Moreover, they’re not the sorts of things good friends would ask of someone, since good friends try to promote one another’s well-being, not to harm it.
Let’s imagine a friendship between two people, one of whom has gender dysphoria (but who has not had any surgeries). Besides the standard duties of friendship, the friend without dysphoria has duties owing to the other’s dysphoria: sympathetically acknowledging their distress, helping them to accept identity in their body, encouraging them to seek psychiatric treatment, and so on. If anything, surgery would make these duties harder to discharge, even if the surgery delivered psychic relief. The patient would be physically worse off (because they would have lost healthy organs) and would not be mentally well either (because they are now psychically relieved at having sustained a physical injury). Advancing the health of the dysphoric friend would mean undoing the psychological effects and alleviating the physical harm done by the surgery. Not advancing the health of the dysphoric friend would mean neglecting a basic purpose of friendship—to help unwell friends to get well, which at a minimum requires not acquiescing in their belief that they are well when the belief is false.
___________
Up until now, I’ve been exploring whether the surgeries can be justified by their benefits to a patient’s mental health, or to some part of their life that might be affected by mental health. I’ve assumed the psychological facts that are most favorable to proponents of the surgeries, and still, a good justification for the surgeries hasn’t been found.
It could be that we have been looking for the justification in the wrong place. Maybe it’s not the patient’s improved mental health (as well as related goods, like friendship) that makes a surgery moral, but rather autonomous consent to the surgery. In the preface to his book When Harry Became Sally, Ryan Anderson discusses a 2018 New York Times op-ed by Andrea Long Chu, who identifies as a transgender woman. Chu intended to undergo vaginoplasty surgery in the coming days, but he didn’t expect the six-hour procedure to make him happier or relieve his dysphoric thoughts. To Chu, that was beside the point: “no amount of pain, anticipated or continuing, justifies … withholding [the surgery]. … [S]urgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want.”
When a human being acts wrongfully and autonomously, she isn’t an accidental part of chain of events that produces something undesirable. She’s consciously willing the wrong thing.
If a surgery considered in itself is wrong, it’s difficult to see how consent could make it right. Consent just doesn’t seem to have that power. Consider some other wrongful acts: tearing the wings off of butterflies, cheating on an exam, lying to a friend. Does the fact that one freely chooses to do these things somehow make them morally right? On the contrary, to quote the great liberal political theorist Joseph Raz: “Demeaning, or narrow-minded, or ungenerous, or insensitive behavior is worse when autonomously chosen or indulged in.” When a human being acts wrongfully and autonomously, she isn’t an accidental part of chain of events that produces something undesirable. She’s consciously willing the wrong thing.
At this point, a proponent of the surgeries might dig in their heels and say we have unlimited moral sovereignty over our bodies. I find it hard to argue against this opinion, though I find it equally hard to imagine how one might argue for it. But consider the consequences. Torture, live vivisection or burial, slavery, drowning, and so on would all be considered morally acceptable, as long as someone freely signed a consent form. Our basic dignity would be exchangeable if only we agreed to the exchange. The idea is obscene.
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None of the potential justifications for the surgeries has passed muster. If the surgeries aren’t justified, then the extreme acts they involve—such as amputation—are not helpful but severely harmful. That means patients shouldn’t request the surgeries, and doctors shouldn’t agree to perform them.
Generally, the medical profession can be counted on not to perform harmful procedures. Patients who have Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), for example, believe that they would be better off if an arm or a leg were amputated. Both BIID and gender dysphoria involve a deep alienation from one’s body. But while many doctors in America do remove organs to treat gender dysphoria, they do not amputate limbs to treat BIID (according to Dr. Peter Brugger, a Swiss research physician who’s published extensively on the disorder, whom I interviewed over email). This is not—so far as I can tell—because the law prohibits it.
Sometimes there are good reasons for the law to step in and just say no to a procedure. Many American states have made it illegal to perform gay conversion therapy. The risk of serious harm was judged too high to leave to the medical field to regulate. Sex-reassignment surgeries, which are increasingly popular to perform and risky to oppose publicly, should be banned on similar grounds. Such surgeries aren’t a run-of-the-mill vice like excessive smoking that the state should, given limited resources, leave to individuals. The surgeries do direct, grievous, physical, irreparable harm to the vulnerable, under the auspices of medical care.
There is a very brave and growing movement to persuade states to ban these surgeries, along with puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones, for minors. Proponents of such bans often argue that we lack empirical data about the treatments, that there may be bad long-term psychological effects to such treatments, and that minors are at a delicate stage in life and should wait until they have grown up (by which time their gender dysphoria may have abated).
I worry that appeals to data outsource the final word to the researchers in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. Given the present state of these professions, does anyone have serious doubts about the results the experts will deliver?
Addiction, loneliness, our inhumane sexual culture, and the ever more popular desire to reconfigure one’s body with surgery aren’t isolated problems—they result from a national refusal to put political and cultural heft behind the conditions of genuine flourishing.
Untethered to a principled view that the surgeries are wrong, the anti-surgery camp may find itself making concession after concession—to the poignancy of severe cases of gender dysphoria, to the independence of the medical profession, to ignorance about the long-term effects of the surgeries (which ignorance could be remedied only by letting the surgeries be performed and observing the results), and, of course, to patient autonomy.
Instead, we should oppose the surgeries with an account of human freedom ordered toward the goods that make freedom a blessing rather than a curse. The goal of self-government, at the political level, is to help citizens govern themselves fruitfully in their personal lives. Addiction, loneliness, our inhumane sexual culture, and the ever more popular desire to reconfigure one’s body with surgery aren’t isolated problems—they result from a national refusal to put political and cultural heft behind the conditions of genuine flourishing.
Unfortunately, American conservatives are wary of political appeals to flourishing. They prefer to talk about freedom and leave matters there. That was fine when America’s enemy was the Soviet Union and when American culture generally promoted the fruitful use of freedom. What about when America allows 100,000 people to die from alcohol and opioids in one year, sees over half of all marriages dissolve, can’t find enough military recruits, empties out church pews, and fills heads with TikTok, porn, and Adderall? Americans are used to thinking of their free society as a humane society, and the more humane for being free. But a society can be both free and inhumane if that society’s culture and laws are neutral about the virtues enabling the proper uses of freedom.
Conservatives need to choose between their impulse to let people live as they damn well please and their opposition to the grisly stuff being done by scientists and surgeons. One of these days, artificial intelligence and medical technology are going to get together and transform flesh-and-blood men and women into bespoke apparatuses of circuitry and steel. What will conservatives say then?
Certain limits cannot be transgressed without abolishing our humanity. The time to build a political coalition around the significance of our embodied personhood is now, when the practice to be opposed is the not-terribly-alluring one of cutting off the genitalia of vulnerable people. Next time, conservatives may not be so lucky.
— In last night’s high-stakes state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin, Democratic-aligned Janet Protasiewicz comfortably dispatched former Justice Daniel Kelly, giving liberals a 4-3 majority on the court.
— Compared to some previous Democratic-aligned judges, Protasiewicz had a more “nationalized” voting coalition, although she still carried several Republican-leaning parts of the state.
— A liberal state Supreme Court could revisit redistricting-related matters, to the benefit of Democrats, although there are a lot of moving pieces. With that in mind, we are downgrading our rating for southeastern Wisconsin’s 1st District from Safe Republican to Likely Republican.
| District | Old Rating | New Rating |
|---|---|---|
| Bryan Steil (R, WI-1) | Safe Republican | Likely Republican |
In Wisconsin last night, Judge Janet Protasiewicz defeated former state Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly in what became a nationally-watched (and very expensive) race. Importantly, Protasiewicz will be replacing the retiring Pat Roggensack, a conservative veteran of the court — this will give the court’s liberal bloc a 4-3 majority on the bench. During the campaign, Protasiewicz was clear that, if elected, she would side with Gov. Tony Evers (D-WI) over the Republican leadership in the legislature when it came to high-profile issues like abortion or gerrymandering (more on that later).
In our write-up last week, we called Protasiewicz a mild favorite: though the race was hard to nail down exactly, we wrote that we expected anything from a double-digit Protasiewicz win to a slight Kelly win. A commanding Democratic win would have followed the pattern of 2 of the last 3 state Supreme Court races (2018 and 2020) while the 2019 race offered a template for a Republican-aligned upset.
The result last night was nearly a carbon copy of the 2018 and 2020 results: Protasiewicz won by 11 points, or about the same margin as now-Justices Rebecca Dallet and Jill Karoksfy, who she will soon join on the bench.
Though former President Trump’s indictment happened a day after we put out our analysis last week, it was something that would, according to some punditry, rally Republicans. But, as we’ll explore here, last night’s returns offered scant evidence that Kelly disproportionately benefited from any Trump-inspired backlash.
One of our other pre-election predictions held up well: high turnout was a hallmark of last night’s election. In February’s primary election, roughly 960,000 votes were cast. As of this writing, that number roughly doubled in the second round, with close to 1.84 million votes cast. 2023 featured the second highest-turnout April state Supreme Court race of the last decade, falling only behind 2016. About 1.95 million votes were cast in that 2016 race — importantly, it was held in conjunction with the presidential primary that year, where both sides saw competition.
Though turnout was down slightly from 2016’s contest, it rose in 10 counties. Dane County (Madison), which is one of the two Democratic powerhouse counties in the state, was among those 10 — it easily had the largest increase, casting 23,000 more votes than in 2016. The county that saw the largest decrease was actually the state’s other blue bastion, Milwaukee, which tallied 45,000 fewer votes this year. But that Milwaukee decline was not necessarily to Democrats’ detriment. Kelly earned only half as many votes in Milwaukee (124,000 compared to 63,000) as Justice Rebecca Bradley, the conservative that year, while Protasiewicz garnered 17,000 more votes there than JoAnne Kloppenburg, the liberal candidate who lost statewide by 5 points.
As noted earlier, in terms of the percentage margin, 2023 lined up nicely with the toplines from 2018 and 2020: in all 3 instances, the Democratic-aligned judges won by about 11 points.
Conveniently, for the sake of comparison, Kelly was the conservative candidate in both the 2020 and 2023 elections. Last week, we wondered whether the increasingly partisan nature of state Supreme Court elections, coupled with the expected high turnout this year, could lead to a more “presidential” coalition. As Map 1 shows, that was basically the case.
Protasiewicz fared about half a percentage point better than Karofsky overall but lost ground in 59 of the state’s 72 counties. The 3rd District, which takes up a large swath out west, illustrates some of the gains Kelly made in non-metro Wisconsin. According to our rough unofficial calculations, Protasiewicz carried the district by about 10 points — which is quite respectable, considering it gave Trump a 5-point margin and flipped to Republicans last year. But in 2020, Karofsky would have carried the 3rd District by closer to 15 points (the seat was barely altered in redistricting).
Though we flagged the area as a potential Democratic cause for concern — mostly because it torpedoed their chances in 2019 — Protasiewicz performed well in metro Milwaukee. As the third image on Map 1 illustrates, Milwaukee County was the sole county where Protasiewicz improved by more than 10 points on Karofsky’s showing. In fact, Protasiewicz swept all 19 municipalities within the county — this has likely not been done by a Democratic or liberal candidate since 2017, when Evers was reelected in a 40-point landslide to his previous position, state Superintendent of Public Instruction.
In an era when, from election to election, Democrats have seen their most obvious gains come in the suburbs, last night’s result represented something of a change of pace. Compared to Karofsky, Milwaukee proper was one of the municipalities that shifted most to Protasiewicz, as Table 2 shows.
To be clear, Table 2 is not meant to single out Karofsky as a poor performer in Milwaukee (her numbers were quite robust), but it is more to emphasize how strong Protasiewicz’s showing was. In fact, Protasiewicz’s 81.9% within the city of Milwaukee was even stronger than the 80.1% two-party share that Joe Biden received there.
Aside from Menominee County, a small county in the north that consists of an American Indian reservation, the county that shifted most to Democrats since February’s first round was Waukesha, one of the Republican-leaning “WOW” suburban counties that border Milwaukee County. Six weeks ago, Waukesha County gave the Republican-aligned candidates a combined 64%-36% share over the Democrats. Kelly’s advantage there last night slipped to 58%-42%. In February, Kelly’s GOP rival was Judge Jennifer Dorow, who had a base in Waukesha and performed better than him in most Milwaukee metro counties. Given last night’s result, we have to wonder if Dorow would have been a stronger conservative candidate than Kelly. At minimum, Kelly likely suffered some defections from Dorow voters.
A notable result from last night — and one that Democrats will certainly try to replicate in actual partisan races — was that Protasiewicz narrowly carried the City of Waukesha, the largest municipality in the similarly-named county.
The victory by Protasiewicz opens the door to the Wisconsin Supreme Court to potentially intervene against the state’s congressional map, which is a version of a Republican partisan gerrymander. Other state courts have done so in recent years against both Republican and Democratic gerrymanders.
This has national implications given the closely-divided U.S. House. Despite being one of the nation’s most competitive states, Republicans now hold a 6-2 advantage in the state’s U.S. House delegation. After losing the red-trending Obama-to-Trump WI-3 in western Wisconsin last year, Democrats are now confined to just a pair of heavily blue enclaves centered around Madison and Milwaukee.
The current congressional map is actually one drawn by Evers. Following Evers’s decision to veto the Republican legislature’s maps during the post-2020 census round of redistricting, the state Supreme Court and its 4-3 Republican majority asked both sides to submit maps, but they asked for only minimal changes to the existing map. So the map, which is a Republican partisan gerrymander from a decade ago, was just tweaked. The court, in a 4-3 decision reached by the 3 Democratic-aligned justices as well as Republican-aligned Brian Hagedorn, picked Evers’s map. But, again, it’s still functionally a Republican gerrymander, although Wisconsin’s political geography also lends itself to Republican advantages in redistricting. Our understanding is that one might not expect a “fair” map, however defined, to produce 50-50 outcomes in a 50-50 political environment in the state, although we also don’t think a 6-2 Republican advantage in the congressional delegation and huge Republican state legislative majorities really reflect the political makeup of Wisconsin. (We analyzed the current map in depth last year.)
So we’ll see if the court decides to intervene now that Democratic-aligned justices are in charge. Protasiewicz does not take office until August, and litigation that would eventually lead to the state Supreme Court ruling against the congressional map remains only a hypothetical at this point, although a progressive law firm plans to ask the state Supreme Court to hear a redistricting case once Protasiewicz takes office, the New York Times reported.
Still, we are not going to necessarily assume that Wisconsin will have a new U.S. House map next year. There are a number of hurdles to be jumped first. That could include the Moore v. Harper U.S. Supreme Court case, which could end up constraining the ability of state Supreme Courts to intervene in cases regarding congressional gerrymandering. That case concerns the formerly Democratic North Carolina state Supreme Court’s intervention against a Republican congressional gerrymander there. But now that the North Carolina court flipped to Republican control last November, the new state court is rehearing a related case and may reverse the old decision. So it’s possible that the U.S. Supreme Court will just punt on Moore v. Harper following the change on the North Carolina court.
However, consider this possibility: What if the U.S. Supreme Court stands down on Moore v. Harper, and then the Wisconsin Supreme Court intervenes against its state’s congressional map? Couldn’t Moore v. Harper be revived, only this time as a Wisconsin case, as opposed to a North Carolina one? That is one of the moving pieces we’re keeping in mind as we think about the Wisconsin congressional landscape.
One other thing: As part of last night’s election, Republicans narrowly held a state Senate seat in a Trump +5 seat in a special election, which gives Republicans a supermajority in the Senate. That gives Republicans the power to potentially convict officials, such as Supreme Court justices, as part of an impeachment process initiated in the state House. State Sen.-elect Dan Knodl (R), who won the state Senate race last night, suggested the possibility of impeaching Protasiewicz in a pre-election interview. So a high-stakes battle over redistricting could also involve the “I” word. (And that doesn’t even get into abortion, the issue that likely played a huge role in Protasiewicz’s victory.)
We are making one rating change following the liberal takeover of the Wisconsin court. Rep. Bryan Steil (R, WI-1) moves from Safe Republican to Likely Republican. We considered listing Steil — Paul Ryan’s successor in the House — in our initial ratings, as he holds a district that is competitive on paper (Trump only won it by 2 points, and Protasiewicz carried it with about 53% in last night’s contest). The added uncertainty of redistricting gives us more reason to list it, as it’s possible that if the court imposes a new map and if it is in place for the 2024 election, both WI-1 in southeast Wisconsin and WI-3 in western Wisconsin could take on blue chunks of the Milwaukee and Madison areas, respectively. Those changes could seriously imperil newly-elected Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R, WI-3) and Steil in WI-1.
So they’ll both be Likely Republican for now, with the potential for much more dramatic changes down the line depending on how what appears to be a looming redistricting legal battle goes.
Nature, Published online: 05 April 2023; doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05906-y
A high throughput recruitment assay testing the transcriptional activity of more than 100,000 protein fragments tiling across most human chromatin regulators and transcription factors maps the locations and strengths of activation, repression and bifunctional domains, and identifies the sequences necessary for these functions.
— In one of the biggest elections of the calendar year, a Democratic-aligned justice appears favored in next week’s Wisconsin state Supreme Court election. But that was also true in 2019, when a Republican-aligned justice pulled an upset.
— Democrats often underperform in such races in Milwaukee, so that is a key place to watch.
— Judicial voting patterns largely reflect voting in partisan races, but there are some key differences.
Next week, Badger State voters will head to the polls to weigh in on what has been billed as the most important judicial election of the year. If Democratic-aligned Judge Janet Protasiewicz prevails, liberals will assume a 4-3 majority on the state’s highest court. If voters send Daniel Kelly, a former justice who is effectively the GOP nominee in the contest, back to the body, conservatives will retain control.
From what we can tell, Protasiewicz is a favorite, although given the marginal nature of Wisconsin, we wouldn’t rule out a Kelly win. One indicator has been fundraising. Given the stakes, the race has been expensive: the two sides have combined to spend at least $26 million. Protasiewicz has significantly outspent Kelly, although the latter is getting a late boost from third party groups. Though there has been no public polling, Protasiewicz reportedly leads in private surveys. Early voting has been in progress for over a week, but Wisconsin is a largely Election Day-voting state, so we would not read much into early tallies — indeed, one map that considered the early vote, posted yesterday, has a decidedly “choose your own adventure” feel.
With that, we are going to look at a few areas of the state that may be useful to watch next week. We are assuming anything from a double-digit Protasiewicz win to a narrow Kelly win is possible.
But first, a bit of context. For the tables in this article, we’ll consider returns from 4 recent statewide races. In the 2019 state Supreme Court race, liberal judge Lisa Neubauer was seen as a tenuous favorite but lost to now-Justice Brian Hagedorn, a conservative, by fewer than 6,000 votes. The 2019 result is reason enough to not rule out a conservative win this time. The following year’s election, 2020, went better for Democrats. In the spring, Democratic-aligned Jill Karofsky defeated Kelly, who was appointed to the court in 2016, by a better-than 55%-45% margin. Then, in November, as Joe Biden patched up the Democrats’ Midwestern “Blue Wall,” he narrowly beat Donald Trump in Wisconsin. Though this was not a court contest, we’ll examine some differences between coalitions in partisan and judicial races. Finally, we’ll consider results from late February, which was the “first round” of this contest. As we covered at the time, in a 4-person race, Democratic-aligned candidates combined for 54% of the vote to 46% for the GOP-aligned candidates.
To start, Wisconsin’s two most populous counties are Dane (where Madison is located) and Milwaukee — both are deep blue. As a pair, they typically cast about a quarter of the votes in statewide elections, which gives Democrats a relatively high “floor.” In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden netted just over 180,000 votes out of each county. While both counties have voted heavily Democratic in most recent state Supreme Court races, the turnout dynamics don’t always mirror those of presidential (or partisan) races. Table 1 breaks down the 4 recent races there.
One pattern is that Democratic-aligned state Supreme Court candidates overperformed Biden in Dane while running a few points behind him in Milwaukee. The simple explanation for this seems to be that the Madison electorate is made up of higher-propensity voters. The Democratic base there — including students, University of Wisconsin faculty, other state employees, and white collar professionals — has a front row seat to state government (and all the tumult that has come with it over the past decade or so). In recent presidential elections, Milwaukee County cast upwards of 100,000 more votes than Dane, but in each of the last 3 supreme court races, the pair has been much more evenly balanced (when Karofsky won in 2020, for example, Milwaukee cast 200,000 ballots to Dane’s 196,000). Even while losing statewide, Neubauer came close to surpassing 80% of the vote there, a few ticks better than Biden’s showing 19 months later.
Table 1 separates Milwaukee City, which makes up about 60% of the county’s population, from the rest of the county, which includes a diverse selection of suburbs. Neubauer’s share was 7 points lower than Biden’s in the city itself and 5 points lower in the suburbs — something that proved costly in a close race. Though Karofsky carried the suburbs by a better-than 60%-40% spread, she underperformed Biden in Milwaukee City. As a result, despite doing about 10 points better than Biden statewide, Karofsky did 5 points worse in Milwaukee County.
So the bottom line here is that, if Protasiewicz wins next week, she’ll likely clear 80% in Dane County, but will probably fall short of 70% in Milwaukee County, even if she wins by double-digits. In February, the Democratic performance in Milwaukee tracked closely with Karofsky’s showing — which should put Protasiewicz in a strong position if it holds. If Protasiewicz is stuck in the low-60s in Milwaukee County, though, Kelly may have a path to win.
Though each is exhibiting distinct trends, Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties are often grouped into the memorably-named “WOW” counties category — and it is hard to discuss Wisconsin’s electoral landscape without mentioning them. Generally speaking, the WOW counties, which border Milwaukee and take in many of its exurban communities, have been the state’s “GOP heartland” for much of recent history. The area was former Gov. Scott Walker’s (R-WI) electoral bread and butter, and its voters boosted Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) in his come-from-behind reelection win in 2016. In fact, in 2019, Neubauer’s weakness in the Milwaukee area was not limited just to the city and its closer-in suburbs: as Table 2 shows, Hagedorn outpaced subsequent conservative candidates there.
Though Table 1 considers all 3 WOW counties, Waukesha County, which is the most populous, often tracks closely with the group as a whole. Essentially, Ozaukee and Washington counties seem to cancel each other out — the former, which is directly north of Milwaukee City, has seen some blue trends, while Washington, which has a more exurban character, is the reddest of the three.
In February’s result, Republican-aligned candidates combined for 64.5% of the WOW vote, which was an improvement from either of the 2020 contests listed on Table 2. However, both Kelly and his leading GOP-aligned rival, Judge Jennifer Dorow, hailed from Waukesha County, so it seems possible that Kelly has room to fall if Dorow’s voters are not enthusiastic. Put somewhat differently, 15.1% of the total votes in round 1 came from the WOW counties. As Hagedorn won in 2019, that share was a slightly lower 14.9%, suggesting that any Republican enthusiasm from February may be hard to maintain next week, although Dorow was quick to endorse Kelly.
As with the blue counties we discussed earlier, Kelly’s path to victory would be to basically replicate Hagedorn’s showing by carrying the WOW counties by a roughly 70%-30% spread. If Democrats are having a good night, Protasiewicz could keep Ozaukee County within single-digits (actually carrying it may be too heavy a lift) — in that scenario, she would likely be close to 40% among the group as a whole.
As an aside, another important contest will be taking place in the WOW counties on Tuesday, although one on the legislative front. If Republicans win a special election for state Senate District 8, located in the northern Milwaukee metro area, they will claim a supermajority in the chamber. While they could not override Gov. Tony Evers’s (D-WI) vetoes (they are a few seats short of a supermajority in the state Assembly), state Senate Republicans could theoretically impeach officers in other branches of government. In fact, the GOP nominee, state Assemblyman Dan Knodl, recently threatened to vote to impeach Protasiewicz, should he be elected. Donald Trump carried SD-8 by 5 points in 2020, so a Knodl win would not be a surprise.
So, thus far in our survey, we’ve learned that Dane and Milwaukee counties should heavily favor Protasiewicz while Kelly should sweep the 3 suburban WOW counties — in other words, the allegiance of those counties is not in question, it’s just an issue of margin and turnout.
But moving further north, the BOW counties — a moniker that is, by now, well known to followers of state pollster Charles Franklin — are a more marginal group of counties. Sometimes referred to as the major counties of the Fox Valley, the BOW counties consist of Brown (Green Bay), Outagamie (Appleton), and Winnebago (Oshkosh). This manufacturing-heavy stretch usually accounts for 10% of the ballots cast in most statewide elections. Table 3 considers the BOW counties’ voting patterns.
In each race, every BOW county has voted at least a point or so more Republican than the state. They typically vote together, but not always, and they have some interesting idiosyncrasies. Biden, for example, despite winning the state, performed slightly worse than Neubauer did there a year earlier — a fact that speaks to Biden’s relative strength in the Milwaukee area.
If next week’s vote is close (either way), expect Kelly to carry all 3 by relatively modest margins. But if Democrats are replicating their first-round performance, Protasiewicz will likely at least carry Winnebago, the most Democratic of the trio. In 2012, Barack Obama won the state by a comparable 7-point margin — he carried just Winnebago County while keeping the other 2 very close. Finally, if Prostasiewicz is running away with the race, the dam may break, as it did in 2020 when Karofsky swept the BOW counties.
Finally, in something of a catch-all category, don’t be surprised if Protasieiwicz carries at least a few Trump-won rural counties — this will probably be necessary, but not sufficient, for a Democratic win. Specifically, keep an eye on the state’s western border. If she is carrying most of the counties in the southwestern corner, that would be a great start, but if she sweeps most of the western border counties, that would probably signal a win.
We say this because, in 2019, Neubauer won over several Trumpy counties in western Wisconsin — she even carried the Obama-to-Trump 3rd District — but was done in by her underperformance in Milwaukee. Map 1 shows the difference.
So, for Protasiewicz, we’d expect some strength in southwestern Trump counties like Crawford, Grant, and Vernon. In Karofsky’s 10-point 2020 win, she added a few Trump-won counties around the Eau Claire region to her coalition, like Dunn, Jackson, and Pierce — all 3 of those counties favored Democratic-aligned judges. Even further north, Iron County was 1 of 2 Kerry-to-Romney counties in the state, with the other being Pierce. Iron County is smaller and considerably more rural than Pierce, though — Karofsky didn’t carry Iron County, but it narrowly favored Democrats in February. If Protasiewicz holds Iron, it could be another sign that Democrats are beating expectations in rural areas.
Throughout this survey, we’ve emphasized Democratic softness in the Milwaukee metro in past state Supreme Court races, as it has typically manifested to at least some degree. But it’s possible that this year’s contest is so nationalized that a more “presidential” coalition takes form, with Protasiewicz making considerable gains in urban areas while doing worse than expected in the west and north — this would essentially be the opposite of Neubauer’s result.
Finally, to name one last county we’ll be watching, we’ll sneak a more urban county into the non-metro section of the article. We flagged this one in our initial February write up, but Kenosha County, in the southern orbit of Milwaukee, will be interesting. Typically a purple-to-light blue county in state races, it was the scene of nationally-watched riots in the summer of 2020. It has since not voted for any statewide Democrats in partisan races, although Republicans have not carried it in blowouts. Democratic-aligned candidates took a small 50.6% majority there in February, so if Kelly is making up ground, look for Kenosha to turn red again.
Next week’s contest will be the most closely-watched Wisconsin state Supreme Court race since 2011. A dozen years ago, conservatives narrowly came out on the winning side of a contest that was seen as a referendum on then-newly minted Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-union legislation. This time, issues like abortion and gerrymandering seem to be animating the electorate, if asymmetrically so, to the benefit of Democrats. Still, again, we cannot rule out a conservative win.
With that, we’ll end on something that we can be fairly certain of: next week’s race will be a high turnout affair, at least for a judicial race. In February, 961,000 ballots were cast, which was a 36% increase from the 2020 spring primary — it dwarfed the 2016 and 2018 primaries by even larger amounts.
In this post, we unpack the meaning and many works of creating and maintaining digital multiples, a term we coined in our recent ethnography, A Filtered Life, to explore the multiple, dynamic expressions of self across online contexts (Nichter and Taylor 2022). This concept emerged from our ethnographic research with more than 100 college students exploring sociality, emotional expression, and online identity work. Our methods for this study included in-depth interviews, focus groups, writing prompts, and long-term participant observation in students’ social media sites.
Colette, a college junior studying marketing at a large public university, prides herself in curating clever posts across her social media. After a difficult day, her Instagram post would feature an artsy photo of a glass of wine, using her signature colors as background. On Twitter, she would post a funny meme about getting drunk. Snapchat would show a video of her drinking the wine (since the post would disappear quickly). Colette’s Facebook post would include a short narrative about why her day was hard without any mention of wine (since her parents might see it).
Posts from one weekend include a filtered close up photo on Instagram of Colette dressed in fitted jeans and a tank top taken from a flattering birds-eye angle with the caption, “Getting ready for fun with my girls (heart emoji).” On Snapchat, her photo was a blurry image of a half-empty pizza box and several crumpled tissues on her cluttered bedside table with the caption, “Had better days.” Facebook featured a candid selfie of Colette snuggling with her golden lab on the couch with the caption, “Just a quiet night at home.”
One Thursday night, Colette posted a curated photo of herself laughing with friends in front of an iconic graffiti wall in Austin that reads, “I love you so much.” Snapchat featured her bare legs in bed with a bandage and scratch marks along with the caption, “I’m a fucking mess.” On Twitter, she retweeted a popular cartoon meme of a woman falling down stairs.
These examples from Collette’s social media illustrate the strategic presentation of self across social media contexts, a process guided by site-specific affordances, social norms, and perceived audience expectations. The term “polymedia” refers to a dynamic model which incorporates the proliferation of new social media that “each acquires its own niche in people’s communicative repertoires” (Madianou 2015, 1; see also Madianou and Miller 2013). The concept of polymedia underscores that today’s users rely on an assemblage of media to accomplish their online goals.
If we consider the multiple contexts that college students traverse without factoring in social media, impression management is complicated enough. We can imagine that a typical day for college students might include interacting with peers, co-workers and supervisors, and professors in a variety of contexts such as home, campus, parties and bars, and workplaces. Once we layer in social media contexts that overlap and integrate with those offline realms, the idea of managing one’s impression, performing appropriately for the particular platform, and segregating audiences becomes infinitely more complex. Additionally, the digital multiples that one presents on various online platforms reach diverse audiences, a factor requiring consideration in the creation of a post.
Cover of A Filtered Life, by Nicole Taylor and Mimi Nichter
Engagement with multiple online contexts is not a new area of study. Tom Boellstorff has highlighted the interconnected nature of interactional contexts, arguing that digital worlds are as real as offline worlds (Boellstorff 2016). He illustrates that what we do online affects life offline, challenging a pervasive assumption in research on technology and sociality that understands “digital” and “real” as binary opposites. We found that digital multiples necessitated fluid identities—that is, being flexible in one’s presentation of self in relation to specific contexts and social spaces. Yet, the mandate to remain consistent with online and offline presentations of self further complicated the creation of digital multiples.
Here we explore the many works involved in creating and maintaining digital multiples alongside the impossible imperative of authenticity. Maintaining digital multiples required intensive labor as college students competed for likes amidst an attention economy where the half-life of a single post was short. On the one hand, site affordances, social norms, and perceived audience expectations constrained self-presentation; on the other hand, engaging across multiple sites, each with its own unique set of cultural mandates, provided an opportunity to cultivate digital multiples.
Daniel Miller and colleagues point out that since most people now engage across multiple sites, social media has become an ecology that offers many choices for sociality, ranging from small, private exchanges to public broadcasts (Miller et al. 2016). Miller and his colleagues refer to this as scalable sociality, a term they coin to describe the interconnected nature of social media, where individuals have a range of platform choices, degrees of privacy and size of audience that they want to reach. Interactive dynamics between social media users and their audience are key for understanding digital multiples.
Sociologist Erving Goffman described social life as a theater with interactions representing the interplay between actors and their audience (Goffman 1959). Goffman contends that we are always performing to create an impression for an audience. We need an audience to see our performance and a backstage area where we can both relax and do much of the work necessary to keep up appearances (Hogan 2010). Importantly, the self is not “a fixed, organic thing but a dramatic effect that emerges from a performance” (Tolentino 2019, 14). In our study, we observed that students portrayed themselves differently across social media platforms, depending on site affordances, audience expectations, and aspects of their identity they wanted to highlight.
We found that the process of constructing and maintaining digital multiples not only requires strategic tailoring by site, but also needs to be sufficiently aligned with one’s offline self and appearance to maintain an “authentic” identity. The concept of “authenticity”—revealing one’s true self—emerged as an important theme in our study. Students emphasized the importance of “being real” online as a marker of honesty, trustworthiness, and integrity. They scrutinized social media posts for signs of over-editing, a faux pau that signaled inauthenticity and elicited derision.
Among young women, authentic expression online translated into beauty practices that highlight physical appearance. The name of the game was to present both an authentic and an edited self that appeared effortlessly attractive. Successfully navigating this contradictory imperative required great skill, attention to detail, and vigilant monitoring of editing norms and feedback on posts. Men felt less pressure to post a flawlessly edited image, making it easier to achieve an appearance of authenticity. However, some still struggled with their online image and sense of self.
Both women and men were cognizant of the superficial nature of their editing practices. Students who did not edit risked critique for visible flaws and imperfections; those who did edit risked critique for being inauthentic. Successfully striking a balance between real and fake in social media was a highly valued skill and getting it right was important. This pressure underscores the importance of impressing an imagined audience, one that appears to value both perfection and authenticity, an impossible contradictory imperative.
Using social media. Image via Pexels.
Throughout A Filtered Life, we highlight the many works involved in creating and maintaining digital multiples, which include the following: editing work, the work of identity and gender performance, beauty work, emotional work, the work of remaining visible, and the work of managing social relationships. This is mostly invisible labor. Editing work, for example, is an intricate process for perfecting social media content, involving taking multiple photos, attending to angles, lighting, posture, spacing, and background, as well as editing out perceived flaws and strategically posting during peak times to attract maximum attention.
Another important work is that of identity and gender performance, shedding light on cultural prescriptions for self-presentation, which remain equally robust online as they do offline. Physical appearance, emotional expression, and lifestyle must be carefully surveilled and curated differently across contexts, yet it is important for a unifying thread of authenticity to remain intact. Under the constant surveillance of multiple imagined audiences, some were able to maintain the appearance of a seemingly “natural” aesthetic despite the tremendous effort required to produce content so that the “look” of their posts was eye-catching.
Beauty work describes the imperative to post your most attractive self and the production process required to achieve such perfection, including the work of micro-targeting each body part to discover and then conceal one’s flaws. In this process, social media practices are shaped by viewer expectations and site-specific conventions, as they converge with an online social milieu that values maximum visibility, adherence to cultural and gendered beauty norms, and promotion of the self as a recognizable brand image.
Students engaged in the emotional work of anticipating audience desires and developing tailored content across sites designed to get as many likes and positive comments as possible, vigilantly monitoring feedback on posts, and the emotional vicissitudes of counting likes and reading comments. Emotional work also included the imperative to always portray a happy, upbeat self and package one’s sad or angry emotions in socially acceptable ways, which differed by site. In this way, students needed to carefully produce and manage their emotional state.
The work of remaining visible by posting regularly was also important. Posting infrequently suggested a lack of social life. Students worried that if they did not post frequently friends would forget them. Being online constantly and seeing other people’s posts of how they were living their best life often resulted in frustration and jealousy, especially when comparing your own life to that of people in your friend network who seemed to “have it all.”
Finally, the work of managing social relationships involved scrolling through sites and liking others’ posts. Students said it was especially important to like the posts of friends who regularly liked their posts. It was common for a student to call out their closest friends for failing to reciprocate in this way. The timing of a like was important as well. Being the first to like a post signaled a sense of desperation; conversely, students said it was strange to get a like on an old post, explaining that it could signal a sudden and intense focus on them. Through the lens of these various works, we can see how the creation and maintenance of digital multiples becomes infinitely more complex and labor intensive.
The title of our ethnography, A Filtered Life, is multi-layered in meaning. On the most obvious level, it refers to the use of filters available on many platforms to alter and enhance one’s physical appearance and the background of an image. Beyond this interpretation, filters are a metaphor for strategically repackaging the self on different sites. Filtering the self is about every aspect of self-presentation, from the aesthetic of a person’s feed and their physical appearance to the personality characteristics and lifestyle they want to convey. Yet, all of this is bounded by a generational desire to remain authentic, meaning that there are limits to strategic self-expression online. Collette, like others in our study, carefully walked the fine line of achieving the impossible imperative of maintaining both filtered and authentic digital multiples.
The maintenance of digital multiples across online spaces—each with their own set of rules, editorial mandates, and audience expectations—intensified identity work. Everyone knew images they saw online were heavily cultivated, yet many students worked hard to perfect the ability to mask their editorial efforts in an image that appeared natural and effortless. While this editorial tight rope was stressful to navigate, students took pride in cultivating their skills and enjoyed the positive feedback from others when they got it right.
On the one hand, students expressed cynicism and frustration with social media—they struggled with the seeming inauthenticity of editing and self-presentation imperatives. On the other hand, students enjoyed the creative freedom to play with their identities, from the more superficial elements of fashion and physical appearance to deeper aspects of emotional expression and authentic self-presentation. As we look toward the future, it will be important for research to explore how the production of digital multiples shifts after college as young adults take on different roles and responsibilities.
Boellstorff, Tom. 2016. “For Whom the Ontology Turns: Theorizing the Digital Real.” Current Anthropology 57(4): 387-407.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Hogan, Bernie. 2010. “The presentation of self in the age of social media: Distinguishing performances and exhibitions online.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 30(6): 377-386.
Madianou, Mirca. 2015. “Polymedia and Ethnography: Understanding the Social in Social Media.” Social Media + Society, (April – June): 1-3.
Madianou, Mirca and Daniel Miller. 2013. “Polymedia: Towards a New Theory of Digital Media in Interpersonal Communication.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 16(2): 169-187.
Miller, Daniel, Elisabetta Costa, Nell Haynes, Tom McDonald, Razvan Nicolescu, Jolynna Sinanan, Juliano Spyer, Shriram Venkatraman, and Xinyuan Wang. 2016. How the World Changed Social Media. Vol. 1. London: UCL Press.
Taylor, Nicole and Mimi Nichter. 2022. A Filtered Life: Social Media on a College Campus. New York: Routledge.
Tolentino, Jia. 2019. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. New York: Random House.
No modern smartphone is completely carbon neutral. Even the most eco-conscious phones are only partially made out of recyclable materials. But you can help cut back on plastic usage by at least purchasing an eco-friendly case to protect your phone from dings and scratches. There are plenty of them, from those that are completely compostable to ones made from ocean-based plastic. Best of all, eco-friendly cases are often just stylish and durable as their mainstream counterparts. Here are our favorites.
Without a doubt, our favorite eco-friendly phone cases are those made by Pela. We absolutely love their colors and designs, plus the fact that the entire line is 100 percent plant-based and compostable. The case material is called “Flaxstic,” which the company says is made from flax straw and compostable bioplastic elastomer. Importantly, it's also free of BPA, phthalates, cadmium and lead. If you ever decide to get rid of it, you can indeed just chuck in a compost bin and it’ll be completely biodegradable.
What’s more, Pela cases are available for a wide array of handsets. They can accommodate iPhones (from iPhone 5 onwards), Samsung Galaxies (Galaxy S8 and newer), Google Pixels (from the Pixel 3a on) and even some OnePlus and Huawei models.
For iPhone users, we should note that Pela cases are not MagSafe-compatible by default. Strangely, too, you can only purchase an additional $13 MagSafe module for the iPhone 13 and 14, and not the iPhone 12. Applying it to my phone was pretty straightforward, so that’s not a big concern, but it’s something to keep in mind. And, obviously, the MagSafe module with all its magnets is not compostable; you’ll have to take it off and dispose of it separately.
LifeProof is a phone case brand that specializes in recycled materials, with each of its products being at least partially made from them. But the most eco-friendly option is the LifeProof Wake, which is made from 85 percent ocean-based recycled plastic. According to the company, a lot of that comes from discarded fishing gear, which would otherwise be a fatal hazard for marine life like sharks and turtles.
In addition, we’re big fans of the Wake’s design. It comes in four different colors, and features an attractive sculpted wave pattern. It feels sturdy and durable, and LifeProof says it’s drop proof from two meters (roughly six and half feet). Plus, it’s MagSafe-compatible by default. The LifeProof Wake is available for iPhones (iPhone 11 onward), Samsung Galaxies (Galaxy S20 and newer) and Google Pixels (Pixel 4a and up).
Casetify is mostly known for making durable yet stylish phone cases, but it has several eco-friendly options, too. The latest is its Compostable line, which is made with a 100 percent compostable and plant-based material called “Ecotify.” Basically, it’s a blend of bamboo, biopolymers and starch.
The regular Compostable line has a drop-protection of around four feet, while the Ultra Compostable line, with its extra corner bumpers, has a drop-protection of about 6.6 feet. My recommendation would be to go with the more durable Ultra Compostable option, even if it does cost a bit more.
Unfortunately, Casetify’s Compostable line is only available for iPhones the (iPhone 7 and up). Casetify does make other kinds of sustainable cases for both the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy handsets (Galaxy S20 and newer), but they’re not compostable. Instead, they’re made from 65 percent recycled materials. Plus, Casetify offers the option to return your old case, which they’ll then reuse or up-cycle to create a new one, thus reducing waste.
The biggest perk of Casetify’s cases is that they’re very customizable. Not only can you pick out your favorite bumper colors and designs (Casetify regularly partners with brands and illustrators to come up with unique styles), but you can actually add engravings to them too. You can also choose to add even more protection with thicker bumpers (Casetify says the “Bounce Case” offers a 13-foot drop protection).
Incipio’s Organicore line of cases is one of the most attractive we’ve seen, plus they are 100 percent compostable. You’ll find them in clear and opaque designs, the latter of which has a buttery texture that makes the case feel more luxurious than you’d think. Most Organicore cases will protect your handset from drops from up to eight feet, and we like the way their raised edges defend against accidental bumps and dings. There are also MagSafe options available, so you can still use your iPhone with magnetic accessories without taking your case off.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/best-eco-friendly-phone-cases-150016494.html?src=rss
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