A toast to Twitter: consuming ourselves and others

Signifying Nothing: Body type objectification is not gender-specific

Growing up, I was the fat kid. I wore a shirt while swimming, ate pizza and drank extra-large Slurpees like it was my job, and eventually attended a juvenile weight reduction program. I lost a few pounds in high school, but I was never quite satisfied. Raised on popular media, I always aspired to have the body of a Men’s Health cover model or Ryan Gosling in “Crazy Stupid Love.” So, last May, I decided to buckle down and work towards the physique I always wanted.
Over the summer, I exercised daily, and kept track of everything I ate. I liked the mathematical certainty of counting macronutrients, and I was happy with my success. But I noticed that once I started, it was impossible to stop scrutinizing my diet and worrying over my energy consumption. Once you learn that an Oreo has 50 calories and a PBR has 144, the numbers get stuck in your brain—and they haunted me all the time. The more I learned about nutrition, the more I became convinced that the fewer Oreos I ate, the better off I was. Every food decision felt like it would determine my waistline as well as my lifespan.
When we think of someone who stresses over food, we often picture a malnourished young woman. And while many people do struggle with not eating enough, I felt not only that I had to avoid eating too much, but also that I always had to eat the right things. After all, I couldn’t build muscle without enough protein. As a man, I often find myself at a frustrating crossroads: I don’t want to be fat, but I also don’t want to be scrawny and malnourished.

Signifying Nothing: Free to pee: analyzing the segregation of bathrooms by gender

The year is 2004; the place: the hallway outside the gym of Brooklyn’s Public School 321. There I wait with my fourth grade class, staring into space and dreading the approach of P.E. Suddenly, I feel a shove from my side and fall to the ground, disoriented. Regaining my faculties, I see I’m surrounded by scattered paper towels and peach linoleum—someone pushed me into the girl’s’ room. I regain my composure as fast as I can, stumble out of the forbidden area and notice several of my male classmates laughing at my misery. My cheeks shine bright red as the humiliation replays endlessly in my head. Why did it have to be me? Why did I have to suffer? What did I ever do to deserve being pushed into the girl’s bathroom?!
Why was I so embarrassed to spend that moment in a female restroom? It was, of course, where I didn’t belong. Boys are supposed to go to the boys’ room and girls to the girls’ room—I’d known that since before Pre-K. As a young kid, this rule felt as natural and normal as school itself, reinforced by teachers, Disney Channel shows, and Louis Sachar’s classic, “There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom.” Gender segregation carried on through middle school and high school, where hormone-crazed boys joked about what they would do for only a peek through the thin wall separating male and female locker rooms.
When I showed up to Maine Hall my first semester at Bowdoin, I didn’t think twice about the second floor having separate bathrooms for men and women. The boys’ room was a nice refuge —pleasant and bright for a mid-morning poop and a good place to meet bros for a quick pre-College House shotgun. In the bathroom, the guys on the floor could share weekday routines and shoot the shit after a hookup. We really got to know each other there. The bathroom brought us together, but we were only bonding with half of the floor, and in a way that reinforced the gender norms that shape mainstream college socialization.
This year I live in Reed House, with its co-ed bathrooms. After the many years of having to pee in a room separate from girls, I finally share a bathroom with women my age. How could Bowdoin possibly allow this? Wouldn’t all hell break loose? Well, okay, it was a little uncomfortable to poop in a stall next to a woman, but it’s a little uncomfortable to poop in a stall next to anyone. I quickly got used to the desegregated bathrooms, still enjoying college without the boy’s club that had been the men’s lavatory.
This got me thinking about my mortification in fourth grade. What exactly was so bad about going into the girls’ room? Perhaps gendered bathrooms prevent women from sexual harassment and assault. But anyone can harass anyone, so why make such a heteronormative assumption? As in the case of immature high schoolers, forbidding men from the girls’ room doesn’t prevent men from sexualizing women, but rather turns it into some erotic paradise, implicitly suggesting that some kind of orgy would break out if different genders peed near each other.
And, of course, what about those who don’t identify as male or female? Gendered bathrooms are nothing short of discrimination against trans and intersex people. A few months ago, several Wesleyan students demanded the bathroom reform on the basis that “gender-segregated bathrooms create uncomfortable and potentially dangerous situations for trans and gender-variant presenting people.” Many at Brown shared similar complaints, and activists at both schools removed or replaced bathroom signs to encourage gender neutrality.
While discrimination against trans students makes bathroom segregation a relevant social justice issue, gendering bathrooms reveals how we expect all men and women to act. Although we may initially feel uncomfortable with desegregation, we must wonder if this discomfort is “natural” or socially-conditioned. Why should we organize our society in a certain way merely out of habit, especially when that habit marginalizes and oppresses a group of people? Many people at Bowdoin would agree that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Should we not say the same about our bathrooms?

Signifying Nothing

A toast to Twitter: consuming ourselves and others

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

April 4, 2014

A few weeks ago my roommate and I invented a new drinking game. He would read out a headline from Twitter, and I had to guess the source of the tweet. The idea was that I’d drink when I was wrong, and he’d drink when I was right. In the end, we just drank whenever we felt like it, and cracked ourselves up imitating the tones of NPR, The New York Times, Pitchfork, and The Onion.

As we kept playing, it seemed like we were on to something. Each news source had its own stylistic trademarks, and it was possible to pick up on these subtle differences. In this game, media outlets no longer said anything important but merely became caricatures. Recognizing the distinctions between BuzzFeed, Gawker and The New Yorker was funny because it was so easy. It quickly became hilariously and painfully obvious that these publications aren’t broadcasting news—they are broadcasting a voice.

The Internet seems like a Great Equalizer. On Twitter, every tweet suffers the same limitations and appears in the same place. All you need to open an account is an email address—after that, it’s up to your own merit or desperation to get as many followers as you can. But how do you stand out from the crowd? When you’re scrolling through Twitter, Lena Dunham, LeBron James, and your older sister may all be competing for your attention. To be heard in a Twitter feed’s cacophony of information, a profile needs its own sound.

This isn’t limited to the news publications that my roommate and I ridiculed. Everyone’s Twitter handle is competing for favorites, for retweets—and ultimately, for recognition. Tweets are constantly moving, so there is only a little time to make a lasting impression.The best way to do this is to be funny. I’ve impulsively favorited countless tweets just because they made me laugh. Because Twitter thrives off humor, its natural mode of communication is irony. What other medium could juxtapose The White House, Lil B and Disney and produce a homogenous stream of information?

Every Twitter profile is producer, consumer and product, all rolled into one. Where else can an individual person have a two-way conversation with Toyota or Quaker Oats? And here’s where it really gets weird—does a company’s Twitter represent the entire business, certain employees, or the product itself? In embracing this hodgepodge of consumer roles, one might think that Twitter can’t be anything other than ironic. But what happens when we take it seriously?

Entire revolutions have sprung out of online social networks, and yet mainstream American culture treats them as little more than a comedic stage. Most “serious” moments on social media seem trite and offensive. (“Share this picture 1000 times to save a terminally-ill child.”) Irony and wit are competition—we point out the contradictions all around us, attempting to get as many laughs as we can.

The ironic nature of Twitter suggests that Twitter itself is absurd—a waste of time. So why do we play along? Do we just want the opportunity to prove we’re better than other people? Is self-objectification irresistible? Do we want others to acknowledge our value by consuming us? Because we idolize our objects of consumption, we want to turn ourselves into those objects of admiration and worship. We try to make our tweets funny so everyone stays on Twitter to justify our presence on the medium, and our delusions of importance. But how can we sustain this illusion when the mode of communication revolves around Twitter’s unimportance?

I recently heard a professor ask if careers in journalism would soon die. I’m not sure what this question was meant to suggest, but today journalism seems more alive than ever. I’ve never been able to follow so many different news outlets at once, or read so many different opinions. Online platforms give everyone the tools to create and disseminate information. But, with so many sources, how can I believe anything that I read?

I can go on Twitter and write the same thing as the New York Times and the only thing separating our tweets is that little blue and white check mark next to “The New York Times.” This check is a subtle reminder that, no matter what we tweet, we’re all still part of the same system—which someone, somewhere, controls. After all, as long as we continue to tweet, however ironic we may be, Twitter Inc.’s profits are nothing to laugh at.

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