Why was Baby Jesus so ugly?

I’m sure you’ve seen it. A meme, or an image in a textbook, featuring the Madonna and Child. Mary, the mother of Christ, doesn’t look exactly pleased to have given virgin birth. And as you get a really good look at the baby Jesus, you think it might have something to do with just how ugly and grotesque the infant Jesus is.

Didn’t artists in the past know what a baby looks like? Did babies of the past all look like tiny old men, and not in a metaphoric way? Why does that baby have so many abdominal muscles?

Fun fact: the baby Jesus was more than likely drawn and painted that way intentionally.

The thing about Jesus is that he’s kind of a big deal to Christians, and has been for some time. The Catholic church, which was much more prominent in daily life pre-Protestants, was responsible not only for the spiritual health of its parishioners, but also for commissioning the art that would depict to a largely illiterate populace the important highlights of the Bible.

They wanted to get across the large sweeping themes found in the text of the Bible, which was often written in Latin and which wasn’t a common language of the people. (The Bible of the Roman Catholic Church wasn’t always exclusively written in Latin, but various Popes and authority figures were known to ban Biblical texts that had been translated to common languages.)

Of course, Jesus isn’t explicitly described as an old, bald man in the Bible. But he is the son of God, so it was assumed that he wouldn’t be like most other babies—that he would have been born with more wisdom and knowledge and holy insight than your run-of-the-mill ungodly baby.

So how does one show in imagery that the Son of God is smarter than his baby body would imply? Give him a weird mix of adult and baby features, of course.

Age has long been associated with wisdom (Romans intentionally aged their patriarch subjects for portraits). If you’ve reached middle age, it’s fair to assume that you’ve gained some knowledge and experience that you can impart on others.

And that’s what Jesus represented: the wisdom and guidance of God Himself. But also a baby. Innocence and wisdom in one tiny, wizened package.

Medieval and pre-Renaissance art emphasized intangible ideas like holiness and spirit, and de-emphasized worldly concerns like form and beauty. What things looked like mattered less than what things represented.

A combination of religious orthodoxy, a prohibition on idolatry, and a desire to portray the spirit of a subject rather than its physical form all lead to the nearly infinite number of ugly baby Jesus’s found in medieval and early Renaissance art (a period of time from about the 5th century to the early 14th century). It wasn’t until ideas about God’s beauty being present in this physical world crept into the zeitgeist that Jesus was painted in a manner that was more recognizably a baby. Though, to be fair, there are no known paintings of Jesus with that just-born scowl that’s commonly found on real babies.

Resources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_translations (this has some cool images of illuminated manuscript pages, which is not relevant to this topic, but is relevant to my life)
• https://www.vox.com/2015/7/8/8908825/ugly-medieval-babies (an interview with an actual scholar about ugly babies in art. way more informative than what i wrote, and honestly i won’t blame you if you skip to this link) 
• https://www.stufftoblowyourmind.com/blogs/medieval-christ-child-art.htm 
• https://uglyrenaissancebabies.tumblr.com/ (i pulled my images from this tumblr)

Managing the Sickness

I found myself contemplating mental health last night as I was trying to sleep. I often think about mental health, both in the general and in my specific case. I have no official diagnosis for any of the mental illnesses or conditions I deal with, but when I have a cold I don't have to go to a doctor to tell that I'm sick. There are symptoms that present themselves, things I can point to and say, "I know I'm sick because my body temperature really should be this hot", or "Coughing really isn't something that my lungs just do for no reason."

Last night it occurred to me that I don't actually get sick very often—I don't get colds regularly, or the flu hardly ever. My immune system is robust and healthy; even when I do catch an illness and get sick, it isn't for an extended period of time.

And then I found myself wishing there was a mechanism like that for the brain. Obviously the immune system works to keep infection out of the brain in healthy individuals, but it's incredibly ill-equipped to deal with illnesses like depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue, or insomnia. There are no antibodies for my depression.

As I said, I'm currently without an official diagnosis for any mental illness. But I know I'm sick. I've got the equivalent of fever, chills, and a runny nose.

What I learned growing up, both about mental and infectious diseases, is that I have to pretend that I'm okay. I have to work through the sickness, keep going despite the aches in my joints and the fever-sweat on my brow; keep going even when I can't clearly see the next week, let alone the next year.

I don't know why it's so important to not let others see that I'm sick. I don't know if it's a bravado thing; if it's an American exceptionalism thing; if it's a pride thing; it might be a fear of showing weakness to others, or just to myself. It might be a lack of vocabulary to talk about these things. It might be the belief that others don't go have similar experiences.

I do know that I've had to work long and hard not to feel like it's a personal failing of mine any time I do get sick. I still have days where I'm sure that if I were a better person, I wouldn't have these feelings or thoughts.

I've grown up in a culture where everyone is supremely responsible for the goings-on in their own mind—which means that if something goes wrong in there, it's the fault of whoever owns the mind. There are no acceptable external factors that contribute to mental illness.

Everyday is a struggle. I don't mean in the sense that I'm constantly flailing at life; I mean that every day that I wake up, I have to fight my own mind in order to keep it healthy.

Left to its own devices, my brain would engage in ultimately self-destructive behaviors because it's really only interested in the short-term. It's learned, somewhere, that long-term plans never pay off, so cling to things that feel good right now.

I, on the other hand, know that I have to engage in long-term thinking if I want to keep my mind from getting sick. I have to plan my day, as much as I can, in order to make sure that I'm doing things that support myself. For the longest time, I didn't understand that I had to do this. I looked around and saw fully functional human adults and thought they had access to powers beyond my capability. They just were able to do things and be productive and build a life for themselves, while all I seemed to do was keep my head above slowly-rising water.

It is important for me to remember that, metaphorically speaking, my mind's immune system is compromised. I am more prone to mental illness than the (apparently) functional humans I see all around me. It isn't a moral failing. It isn't something I've earned because of my misdeeds. It's simply a truth about my biology. I probably won't ever be cured (lots of diseases have no cures), but I can learn to manage it.

I can probably learn to manage it.

What's in a misandry?

"What power do misogynists have that misandrists don't?"

This seems to be a question that many people unfamiliar with the history of feminism find themselves asking when confronted by the possibility that something they aren't personally aware of (misogyny) exists. (For context, the above quote is a nearly verbatim quote from some lovely person I encountered on a mutual friend's wall on the popular social media platform Facebook.)

On the surface, this question seems pretty straightforward and innocent. It doesn't seem unreasonable to wonder why feminists are so upset about misogynists (or, more accurately, about misogynistic actions and behaviors), but seem to completely ignore the equally frightening proposition of man-hating (known popularly today as "misandry"). Isn't sexism against both sexes equally bad?

Ignoring the implication (for now) that there are only two sexes (spoiler alert: there aren't), there is a pretty darn good reason that feminists focus primarily on issues of sexism faced by women. There are a myriad of issues that women face. Not all women face the same issues, and not all issues that women face are exclusive to women. For instance: issues of bodily autonomy, abortion, and access to health care in the form of birth control and care during pregnancy are issues important to women, some non-binary/genderqueer people, and some trans men. No one of those groups of people have a special claim on how impacted they are by conservative efforts to curb access to these basic services.

Aside from the current battles being waged for access to basic health services, in order to understand why a feminist might be less than sympathetic to the idea that sexism against men is just as bad, one needs a basic lesson in history; and an understanding of systems of power get established and tend to favor the status quo. You also need to understand what misogyny is rooted in. History, systems of power, and the roots of misogyny are intertwined in pretty complex ways, so I can only offer a short(ish) overview (as I currently understand things).

Misogyny is based in the idea of the inferiority of the feminine; there are thousands of years of tradition and social teachings which convince many people to treat anything coded as 'feminine' as weak and inferior. Women have traditionally been denied political power because of the supposed innate weakness of their gender. Women, as a social group, in most parts of the world have historically held little to no power; this is especially true if you hail from a country with a history of strong patriarchal religious tradition (such as Christianity).

There has been no such historical repression of people who are coded masculine. Masculinity is held to be the opposite, opposing force of femininity. Masculinity is strong where femininity is weak. Masculinity is superior where femininity is inferior. Men, as a social group, have held political and social power for quite some time.

The last few decades of feminism have hardly put a dent into how women and femininity is viewed, given that women and others who can bear children (who are thrust into the role of 'the feminine', usually against their will) are denied bodily autonomy specifically when it comes to making decisions about pregnancy and sexuality (when, how, and with whom they can have sex).

"Misandrists", those man-haters of yesteryear who have come back to haunt us, simply don't have the power, in any sense of the word, to actually and literally oppress men and masculine-coded people the same way that misogyny has served the purpose of oppressing women and feminine-coded people.

What Are Actors Allowed?

It's happened again. Hollywood has cast a white person to portray a person of color. Which, if you pay attention to this sort of thing, really shouldn't surprise you. It should perhaps, at the very least, exasperate you.

Hollywood's history is the history of white actors taking roles of non-white characters. There's something a little extra insidious when the character they've been cast to play is based on a person of color. It's quite literally erasing an aspect of that character that likely played a key role in shaping who they are as a person.

You might be tempted to ask a question like, "Aren't actors pretending to be someone they aren't all the time?" or "So should actors only be allowed to act as their own race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation?" Focusing on what an actor does for a living, or what they should be allowed to do isn't really the right way to think about criticisms of casting in Hollywood. Criticizing a particular movie for casting white actors in roles that could have easily gone to actors of color, or Hollywood in general for whitewashing movies in a misguided attempt to appeal to the lowest common denominator (otherwise known as the status quo), isn't an attempt to tell actors what roles they should go out for. It's also not the point.

The point of the discussions happening around issues of racism and racial bias in Hollywood are an attempt to point out what seems to be a fundamental assumption in casting directors' minds: if you're a white actor, you can play literally anything. It doesn't matter the background of the character you're playing if you're white—your whiteness isn't seen as a distraction for audiences, it won't make the character less believable, or unrelatable.

If you're a white actor, you are a blank canvas for audiences to paint their imaginations upon. You afforded enough agency and humanity that it seems natural to see you play characters from all arenas of life—you're found in positions of power, and at the lowest stations of life.

If you're a white actor, you are allowed and encouraged to play literally every character.

It's not so for actors of color. Actors of color are restricted in the roles they are allowed to take on. Actors of color are often given roles which are stereotypes of a specific race, and usually they're restricted to playing characters of their own race (though not always the same ethnicity; especially in the United States, race is primarily determined by skin color, not country of origin).

The issue isn't "white actors can't play a non-white person", the issue is "white actors are afforded more opportunities and bigger roles than actors of color".

Not coincidentally, the same holds for straight actors, cis actors, male actors—those qualities open up more desirable acting roles, and it you're not straight, cis, or male, the opportunities available to you are basically shit.

Criticizing Hollywood for casting yet another white actor to place a character of color is another way to point out how normalized being White is. Michael B. Jordan can't be Johnny Storm because Johnny Storm is the brother of a white woman. Idris Elba can't be Heimdall (another comic book character) without moviegoers raising a stink. But very few of the people criticizing these casting choices bat an eye when a white actor is cast as a character of color (or if a man is cast as a trans woman).

The bottom line is that there are different standards for white people in Hollywood. This shouldn't surprise anyone, but it shouldn't prevent them from speaking up about it.

David Bowie

A brief note about the content for this piece of writing: I discuss a sexual assault of a minor.

Growing up, images of the strangeness a human being could imagine for themselves was essentially unknown to me. I tended towards weird fiction from an early age, loving stories with protagonists who didn’t fit the norms imposed upon them from outside. Once I was allowed to buy my own music (after a period of exploring the popular options of the 90s), I gravitated towards the artists who had ‘weirdness’ and ‘outsider’ emblazoned across their bodies in neon and black glitter—Nirvana, Queen, Marilyn Manson, Tool, NIN. The Cure, Bjork, Radiohead, The Smashing Pumpkins. David Bowie.

A couple of things stand out from the music I listened to when I was younger: Those bands and artists are primarily white and primarily male. I’ve made strides to correct this in recent years. That isn’t what I want to talk about right now, however. (And probably not something I’d write about to a general audience; I’m white, and don’t have any original or important insights into racism. I’ll leave that to better and more important writers.)

What might not be so obvious upon first glance is that amongst their number lie men who have done evil things. Bad, morally reprehensible things. Often, these things were done to women. These men were products of their culture, thoroughly, regardless of how Other and Weird and Queer (not necessarily a reference to their sexuality) they may have seemed to Young Me.

Recently, one of these artists has died. He was one of the artists who did morally reprehensible and morally questionable things, from the racism present in his body of work to the advantage he took of a young girl who put her trust in him. By “took advantage of”, I don’t mean that he made her do unpleasant chores for him, or that he took money for her. It’s a very mild euphemism for statutory rape. In her own words, David Bowie “took [her] virginity” when she was barely into her teens. Her name is Lori Maddox.

You can imagine that my feelings when I heard of Bowie’s death were perhaps on the strong side. Statutory rape is undeniably a capital-B Bad Thing, given the power dynamic at play between a young girl and an older man. The young girl in question, when she was older and an adult woman, doesn’t claim to have been harmed by Bowie’s actions. That’s good for her; not all of us are able to claim no harm in these situations.

Regardless of the lack of harm done to Maddox, Bowie’s actions were not consistent with morality as I understand it. “With great power comes great responsibility.” Yes, I’m quoting a comic book character in reference to morality. It’s an important idea, though. Bowie was clearly the one with all of the power--he had the glam, the money, the drugs, the fame. He was older than Maddox. He had the power in the situation; he did not handle it with any sort of responsibility.

I was never that into Bowie. I enjoyed his music. I enjoyed his movies. I enjoyed his weirdness, and I enjoyed seeing his image when I happened upon it. I didn’t go out of my way to find his music, though I know I had meant to at some point. I perhaps wasn’t what you’d call a fan. But his art touched my life. His weirdness let me know that there was a space for me. His art told me that being queer and strange wasn’t a hindrance to my art, that it was a boon.

Was David Bowie a good man? That’s not really the question. Is there such a thing as ‘good people’? I don’t believe there are. There are good actions, actions which are moral, which follow from ethical principles. There are bad (evil, even) actions, actions which may be performed with moral intent but which result in bad ends, which follow from flawed ethical principles.

There can be grey areas when trying to determine what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are. That’s okay, I think. We’re all just trying to figure out how to be good people, as impossible as that goal may be.

David Bowie did terrible things. David Bowie had a positive influence on my life, and many other lives. These aren’t contradictory ideas. I likely won’t ever be able to listen to my Best of Bowie 2-CD set without remembering that Bowie slept with a barely-teenager. My feelings when I learned of David Bowie’s were quite strong. They were also incredibly complicated.

Was David Bowie a good man? No. Does his goodness matter? I don’t know.

The Gay Marriage Problem

Gay marriage is often used as a marker of how accepted LGBTQ people are in the US. As marriage rights are expanded state by state, as the media focuses more and more on queer couples being allowed to participate in the larger society much as straight couples have been able to all along, it’s easy to think that queer acceptance is on the rise. The issue of gay marriage is highly visible; it’s easy to count the states where it’s legal for (some) queer people to marry. The largest gay rights organizations trumpet each state which at last extends legal marriage for same-sex partners. It’s easy to point to gay marriage and say, “See, queer people are like us now, they can marry in many states.”

I understand, to a large degree, why the focus has been on gay marriage over the past decade or so. It’s shiny, it’s flashy, it’s sexy--and it is one of many important issues relevant to many queer people. When the state legally recognizes your partnership, you’re allowed to more fully participate in the greater society; you’re afforded more legal rights. It’s a certain kind of validation of your relationship, when the state allows you to create a legally binding contract with another person. And when you love that person, and when marriage is understood to be an expression of that love, it’s important to be able to marry.

The problem with gay marriage is that it’s not a marker for attitudes towards queer people among the general population. Whether a state allows for same-sex partnerships says nothing about whether queer people are at a greater risk for bullying, harassment, or other more subtle bigotries. Being able to marry someone with the same legal gender as myself will never be a protection from bigotry. Being able to marry someone with the same legal gender as myself doesn’t mean that I won’t ever be fired for being queer.

According to Wikipedia: “Twenty-one states, the District of Columbia, and over 140 cities and counties have enacted bans [on public sector employment discrimination based on sexual orientation] of one sort or another.” Keep in mind, too, that legal prohibition on discrimination isn’t a guarantee that employment discrimination doesn’t happen. As with gay marriage, it isn’t a preventative for other discriminations. The now infamous story about a bakery refusing to sell a cake to a same-sex couple occured in Oregon, which legalized gay marriage in 2014 and has prohibited employment discrimination on sexual orientation since 2008.

Queer people face discrimination in all aspects of their life. Some queer people are more susceptible to certain types of discrimination than others. Gay marriage is an issue that is of concern primarily to middle-aged, affluent, and white queer people. If you’re queer, poor, and not white, you face a completely different set of discriminations; and you’re probably more vulnerable to the consequences of these discriminations than someone who has more social privilege than you.

If you care about queer people, you need to support organizations which do more than push gay marriage. Queer kids often lack adequate access to basic mental health resources, yet are the most likely to need help. Queer kids often face housing discrimination, especially if they're openly queer, and especially if their parents are homophobic.

Legalizing gay marriage will not solve these problems. Legalizing gay marriage will not magically better the lives of queer kids living with bigoted parents; allowing gays to marry will not end the murder of trans women; being able to marry someone with the same legal gender as myself does not make it easier to accept that my actual gender isn’t even generally recognized, let alone legally recognized.

If you actually care about queer rights, find an organization with promotes more than itself and gay marriage. Find an organization which provides legal and mental health resources to queer people; find an organization which focuses on outreach. Find a local organization, one that will help queer people who have pressing and immediate problems, problems such as being evicted from their homes, being fired from their jobs, or being attacked in the streets. Don’t fall for the symbolic feel-goodness of gay marriage.

Non-consensual Labeling

There's a trend amongst liberal types where they like to guess at the sexuality of people they don't like--usually GOP senators or Christian fundamentalist preachers. I call this sort of thing non-consensual labeling (a term I may have picked up from Julia Serano's Excluded). It's a fancy-sounding term for "attributing to a person an identity label they wouldn't use to describe themselves." Senator Bigot McFuckface is caught in a consensual sexual act with someone of the same gender? He's clearly a closeted homosexual. (It's inevitably a "he", though whether this is due to the gender imbalance present in US politics or because we forget that men aren't the only ones who have sex, I'm not sure.)

On the surface of it, this doesn't sound all that bad. One could argue that it's merely applying a descriptor to a person based on a set of behaviors they exhibit. Person A performs Actions X, Y, and Z, therefore Person A is part of Category 1. It seems rather logical, after all, to describe people based on how they act; how else are we supposed to understand other people, if we don't attempt to describe them?

The logic, such that it is, falls apart when you pick apart at it, though. For one thing, sexual orientation is not primarily understood to be a set of behaviors. That is to say, you can be a gay man without ever having sex with men. You can be a lesbian even if you've had sex with men. You can be asexual even if you've had sex. You can even be straight if you've had sex with people of your own gender.

Sexual orientation is understood to be, for the majority of us, self-defined. Each of us examines our own desires and emotions, and settle on a descriptor to help facilitate social situations--after all, just because two people call themselves "gay" doesn't mean their sexual history or desires are identical; we use such labels as shorthand for conversations with people who we feel don't require an intimate knowledge of our wants and desires.

Well, you might be saying, if sexual orientation can't be deduced based on a person's behaviors (engaging in same-sex hanky-panky, for instance), how should one go about figuring out the sexual orientation of others? That's usually easy enough--assuming you have a sufficiently close relationship with the person (or are hoping to begin a close relationship with this person), it's customary to ask a person what their sexual orientation is instead of trying to apply a label to someone without their consent. Telling someone they're [insert sexual orientation here] without bothering to ask that person is much like assuming everyone you meet is named Bob. Depending on where you live, there very well may be a lot of Bob's, but it's generally understood that calling everyone you meet "Bob" is rude.

In addition to the rudeness implicit in calling people names that aren't theirs, applying descriptors to a person based on a behaviors you observe in them can also be called stereotyping. When one person comes up with a descriptor for another person, they are basing their description on a limited set of data, and run the risk of misapplying a descriptor. Stereotypes are often based on faulty observations and are generalizations our brains make in order to survive in a complex world; we can't help but make generalizations, but we can help how we use this information.

To go back momentarily to Bob, perhaps you've observed in your life that people with hair are often called "Bob", and every Bob you've met has had hair. Naturally, with every Bob you've met, your generalization ("people with hair are Bob") has been reinforced. But perhaps everyone you've met with hair has been too shy or intimidated to correct you when you call them "Bob"; maybe some of the people you've met and called "Bob" are, in fact, "Mary." You can't know until you bother to ask their name, of course.

There is a difference between self-identifying as, for instance, gay, and having someone tell you that you are gay. There is a feeling of loss of agency when someone tells you what you are--they are forcing you into a box, often without consulting you about the box. When someone tells you what you are, when they call you Bob without making the effort to find out if you're a Mary, or a Fred, or an Anne, they are denying you the chance to define yourself. They are asserting that they know you better than you know yourself.

When it comes to the sexual orientation of public figures such as Senator Bigot McFuckface, it's easy to overlook their basic humanity, as they are quite often publicly hostile to queer people. They aren't nice people. There's no reason to treat them with the same politeness you'd give people who aren't pile of horseshit masquerading as human. It may not seem like that big of a deal to speculate about the orientation of such people.

However, when we speculate about the orientation of people we don't like, there is implicit the idea that because they aren't good people, it's okay to non-consensually label them. This isn't as overt a homophobia as punching someone in the face because they're queer, but it's still troubling. Non-consensually labeling a person "gay" who is publicly vocal about their bigotry towards queers relies on the idea that being queer is something they should feel bad about. If we are actually concerned with making the world a safer place to be queer in, laughing at Senator Bigot McFuckface because he got caught having consensual sex is counterproductive to this end.

Deciding that someone is gay based on one sexual act, and using that act to trumpet their hypocrisy, actually works to foster a hostile environment for those who are still in the closet. Many queer people have engaged in sexual acts in their past, before they were out, that would seem counter to how they presently describe their sexual orientation. Sometimes the reason a lesbian has sexual relations with a man isn't because she's confused, but because she lives in a heteronormative society which doesn't allow her to honestly examine her own desires. And sometimes a person avoids using non-heteronormative labels because of the high social stigma associated with them (Roy Cohn, for example, was emphatically not a homosexual, despite the sex he had with men).