Search Results for: Marriage

In Sickness, In Health — and In Prison

Najeebah Al-Ghadban for The Marshall Project.

Mia Armstrong | The Marshall Project | August 2019 | 9 minutes (2,400 words)

This article was co-published with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

Niccole Wetherell and Paul Gillpatrick were engaged in 2012. The state of Nebraska has prevented their wedding ever since​.

Wetherell is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder, housed in a prison about 50 miles away from her fiance, Gillpatrick, who is serving a 55-to-90-year sentence for second-degree murder.

The pair, who met in 1998, have come to accept they cannot marry in person. Instead, they want to wed via video conference, and they want an end to a prison policy that forbids Nebraska inmates from marrying each other except in “special circumstances.” Wetherell and Gillpatrick argue they have a “fundamental right to marry.”

In June, U.S. District Judge Robert Rossiter ​affirmed​ that right. The case is now in appeal. But the legal precedent Rossiter cited has a quirky history that involves an infamous co-ed prison, an impromptu wedding, a soon-to-follow divorce and a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

That decision, Turner v. Safley, established how courts should weigh the constitutionality of prison regulations, and has formed the legal basis for prison weddings across the country​—​most often between one incarcerated person and someone on the outside. It opened the doors for a niche industry of ​officiants​ ​who​ ​specialize​ ​in​ prison weddings. And its clear articulation of marriage as a fundamental human right was even cited in ​Obergefell v. Hodges​, the landmark Supreme Court decision that in 2015 affirmed the right to marriage for same-sex couples.

It all started in 1980 at a prison in Missouri. Read more…

Pages You Can Dance To: A Book List

People Images / Getty

Brittany Allen  | Longreads | August 2019 | 10 minutes (2,730 words)

 

In 1974 Walter Thompson, a Berklee-trained bandleader, moved to Woodstock and made up a language. A fan of improv, Thompson initially designed forty signs for structuring a live composition. With one gesture, he could single out a group in his orchestra (like “Woodwinds”). With another, he could instruct said group to hold a long note (“Long Tone”), match one another’s phrasing (“Synchronize”), or tell players to dit dit dit out a series of staccato bursts (“Pointillism”). Wham, Blam, thank you ma’am: a new song, on the spot.

Forty years later, directors working with all kinds of performers — actors, dancers, and musicians — still employ Thompson’s conducting shorthand to devise material. The language has a name now: soundpainting, a term I find almost unbearably lovely. At my (blessedly experimental) college I studied soundpainting, stage pictures, lyric essays, many radiant paradoxes that suggested trespass between one mode of making and another. But soundpainting, this word lingers. What a pure reminder that our creative borders are porous by definition. That some of our metaphors ought to be mixed.

Either Martin Mull or Frank Zappa or Elvis Costello or someone else entirely once may have said, “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” and meant this as a cut. But like Thompson, I chafe against the arbitrary border. In this reader’s opinion, there are some excellent books about music. But on the synesthetic end of the exercise, there are also miraculous books suffused with music, there are rhythmic books that dit dit dit a forever impression on your skull. A man in Woodstock believes you can paint with sound. Well, I know for a fact you can dance to pages. Read more…

Flagrant Foul: Benching Teen Moms Before Title IX

Illustration by J.O. Applegate

Britni de la Cretaz | Longreads | August 2019 | 27 minutes (6,922 words)

Before the pregnancy, before the ineligibility, and before the lawsuit, Jane Christoffer was one of the best basketball players in the basketball-loving state of Iowa. As a freshman in 1968–69 at Ruthven Consolidated High School, a school of just 106 students located in northwest Iowa, the 5-foot-11 Christoffer averaged 35 points per game, leading Ruthven to the state tournament for the first time in more than a decade. She upped her scoring average the next season to 47 points, and was named third team all-state, which prompted Richard Barber, her coach at Ruthven, to say, “Jane’s as good a player as we’ve had in the 20 years I’ve been here.” Read more…

‘Horror Is a Soothing Genre … It’s Upfront About How Scary It Is To Be a Woman.’

Head of Medusa by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Photo by Araldo de Luca/Corbis via Getty Images)

Laura Barcella | Longreads | August 2019 | 14 minutes (3,597 words)

 

In her acclaimed 2016 debut, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear … and Why, feminist author and cultural critic Sady Doyle dissected the ubiquitous American pastime of simultaneously idolizing and vilifying female celebrity. Her new book, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power, also looks at how the morass of misogyny poisons everything — including our psyches, our popular culture and our everyday lives. But this book focuses more intently on … horror.

Not the horror genre — though plenty of those examples are included — but about the horror of living as a woman in a violent patriarchal society that fears you, despises you; even wants you dead. Pulling from a broad range of cultural references, from Freud to Aristotle to the second-wave feminist theories of Dorothy Dinnerstein to obscure slasher films like The Mutilator, Doyle examines the myriad ways that the world is monstrous to women — and how the world has made monsters of us. “Women have always been monsters, too, in the minds of great men; in philosophy, medicine, and psychology, the inherest freakishness of women has always been a baseline assumption,” Doyle writes in the introduction. “A monster does not merely inspire anger, or disgust. A monster, by definition, inspires fear.”

The fantastically smart book that follows is broken into sections covering the monstrousness associated with the entire socially-prescribed female life cycle, from the spark of adolescence; to marriage and motherhood (with their attendant domestic indignities); to the solitude of old age. Read more…

Whiteness on the Couch

Paint texture by Punkbarby / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Natasha Stovall | Longreads | August 2019 | 28 minutes (7,061 words)

 

“Father, Mother, and Me/

Sister and Auntie Say/

All the people like us are We/

And everyone else is They.”

Rudyard Kipling

“England’s not the mythical land of Madame George and roses/

It’s the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds.”

—Sinéad O’Connor

 

The couch in my therapy office is occupied mostly by white people. Anxious white people and depressed white people. Obsessive white people and compulsive white people. White people who hurt people and white people who hurt themselves. White people who eat too much, drink too much, work too much, shop too much. White people who are bored, envious, guilty, numb. Racist white people and antiracist white people. White people who look across the room and see a white therapist listening. We talk about everything. Except being white.

***

An old saw about therapy is that the thing you don’t talk about is the thing. The therapist and patient together avoid this thing, this shameful and threatening thing. The thing is unconscious — sometimes partially, other times totally. You only know it by the silence and illogic that surrounds it, and the extremes to which the patient will go to erase any sign of it in their own mind, and in their therapist’s, too. The first step towards unpacking the thing is finding a way to talk about it. Just talk about it, moving step by careful step into a psychic place so raw that even acknowledging this unconscious thing is a threat to safety and sanity. Freud called this process “making the unconscious conscious” and it has defined psychotherapy ever since.

What if whiteness is the thing?
Read more…

Losing My Religion at Christian Camp

Illustration by Homestead

Katy Hershberger | Longreads | August 2019 | 25 minutes (6,207 words)

“Will you pray with us?” It was my fifth day as a camp counselor; I was 17 and the three girls who asked me were probably 12. The five years between us was a teenage lifetime, though now as adults, we could be classmates, colleagues, barflies on adjacent stools. Then, we were children. I pushed myself up from the cool summer ground. “Um, yeah. Do you — ” my voice cracked, “ — want to be saved?”

It was July 2001 in rural Virginia, the last night of Christian summer camp. A hundred girls sat in a circle around the campfire, the smell of embers and bug spray permeating our clothes. We sang praise songs, lifting our hands toward the Virginia stars, toward God. The camp director led us in prayer. Then she implored the campers: If you want to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior, ask a counselor to pray with you.

A week earlier, I had graduated from CILT, a three-year counselor prep program. The acronym stood for Camper in Leadership Training, though Caring Imaginative Loving Teachers was printed on our t-shirts. I collected songs and games in a “resource file,” I taught a daily drama class during the week-long camp sessions, and I stockpiled readings and Bible verses for daily devotionals. I did not learn how someone becomes a Christian.

I don’t remember what the girls wanted to ask God that night, but it was, blessedly, not to be saved. We huddled away from the crowd, holding hands, and I stood above them, just barely the tallest. I prayed, my voice husky with uncertainty, and stared at the grass, glancing at the girls’ faces to see if I was doing this right. I asked God to help and guide them, and I silently asked the same for myself.
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In the Country of Women

Catapult

Susan Straight | In the Country of Women | Catapult | August 2019 | 38 minutes (7,573 words)

 

To my daughters:

They never tell us about the odysseys of women. They never say about a woman: “Her passage was worthy of Homer . . . her voyage a mythic quest for new lands.” Women don’t get the Heroine’s Journey.

Men are accorded the road and the sea and the asphalt. The monsters and battles and the murders. Men get The Iliad and The Odyssey. They get Joseph Campbell. They get The Thousand Faces of the Hero. They get “the epic novel,” “the great American story,” and Ken Burns documentaries.

Read more…

Searching for The Sundays

Hayley Madden / AP

David Obuchowski | Longreads | July 2019 | 35 minutes (6,336 words)

 

What makes a band your favorite band? Is it the quality of their songs? Is it their politics? Is it because they pioneered a certain sound? An emotional association? I don’t know. Any of those are valid reasons for crowning a band as your favorite.

For most of my life, starting in high school through my 30s, the Smiths were my favorite band. And to be sure, I still love the Smiths. But a few years ago, I came to a simple and somehow comforting realization: My favorite band is the Sundays.

Read more…

Free Solo

Hulu, Photo Illustration by Homestead

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | July 2019 |  8 minutes (2,101 words)


The original cut of the
Veronica Mars pilot had a cold open set to “La Femme d’Argent,” the first track from AIR’s 1998 debut album, Moon Safari. A neon take on noir, the scene has the 17-year-old titular blond (Kristen Bell) alone in her car in the middle of the night outside Camelot, one of her local “cheap motels on the wrong side of town.” Her camera — along with a calculus textbook — sits on the passenger side and her lips are glossed as she watches through the rain-streaked window of her convertible. The silhouette of a couple can be seen having sex in one of the motel rooms.“I’m never getting married,” she says.

Instead of this kick-ass intro — which accompanies the DVD version at least — the series, whenever it airs on television, opens on a brightly lit trio of cheerleaders tearing through a school parking lot to the pop-rock strums of the Wayouts’ “What You Want” (Bite, 1993), also under Veronica’s voice-over: “This is my school. If you go here your parents are either millionaires or your parents work for millionaires.” It’s simple exposition, with none of the mood or the bite of the original, and it sets Veronica Mars up as a teen show with a babe at the center, not the contemporary noir revolving around a precocious P.I. that it actually was. Rob Thomas’s series, which first aired on UPN in 2004, takes a typical sun-kissed California girl, murders her best friend, turns her sheriff dad  — and eventually Veronica herself — into an outcast, has her mom abandon them both, and, as if that weren’t enough, has her raped at a class party (the network tried to get rid of that part), then the new sheriff laugh down her report. All of this happens in the pilot, by the way. The whole ordeal turns Veronica into a cynic and ultimately her dad’s sidekick at his newly launched private eye agency.

Every time Thomas sees the actual opening, it breaks his heart, he recently admitted to Vanity Fair. He was proud of his version, but Les Moonves, the chairman and CEO of CBS (owner of UPN), was not into a prologue in which the hottie appears as a hardboiled antihero. “It’s a high school show,” he said, according to Thomas. “It should start in a high school.” But it’s 15 years later and Moonves is out, having resigned in disgrace amidst a series of sexual misconduct allegations, and there’s a new season of Veronica Mars, this time on Hulu, at the top of which Veronica is back outside a seedy motel, alone. The image of the lone woman is as strong as it ever was. And perhaps it is even more poignant these days as a symbol of transgression in the wake of our collective awareness around men’s control of the world. In this moment, the singular femme represents the possibility of a future without the trappings of the past. She’s less marshmallow than s’more. Read more…

How Do You Move Past a Dad?

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Sara Fredman | Longreads | July 2019 | 9 minutes (2,492 words)

 

What makes an antihero show work? In this Longreads series, It’s Not Easy Being Mean, Sara Fredman explores the fine-tuning that goes into writing a bad guy we can root for, and asks whether the same rules apply to women.

Golden Age antihero plots were inextricably tied to marriage and the family. Women were often written as villains, antagonists to their husbands who were humanized by the way they loved and provided for their families, no matter the means. Parenthood in particular fulfilled another key requirement for the success of an antihero show: the perfect balance of power and powerlessness the antihero had to maintain in order to retain our sympathy. There is nothing quite like parenting children to make a person feel like a superhero one moment and dust in the wind the next.
Read more…