SALON
TUESDAY, OCT 1, 2013 08:00 AM +0900
Fired for doing porn: The new employment discrimination
Adult performers who get work elsewhere can be fired if their past comes out -- and there's no legal recourse
BY EJ DICKSON
元ポルノ映画の女優が勉強して、外科技術者になったり、学校の先生になっても、職場でいじめや差別を受けて、結局、職場を去るか、過去をひた隠しにするしかない。裁判でも、人種差別などと違って保護規定がなく、かえって、過去を隠していたことが裁判では不利になる、と。
日本ではどうなんでしょうね？
SALON
SUNDAY, SEP 29, 2013 01:00 AM +0900
Walter White’s sickness mirrors America
"Breaking Bad" strikes such a nerve because Walt's ills of body and soul are also those of our country
BY DAVID SIROTA
日本では、「あまちゃん」やら、「半沢直樹」が話題になったように、アメリカではブレイキング・バッド Breaking badというドラマが話題なようである。
その主人公の病（やまい）が、アメリカを象徴している、と。
SUNDAY, SEP 22, 2013 08:00 PM +0900
“Breaking Bad’s” racial politics: Walter White, angry white man
Walter's brutal meltdown shows genius way "Breaking Bad" deals with white privilege, and men who can't get enough
BY TODD VAN DER WERFF
病気になっても、健康保険で賄えず、医療費をなんとかしようとして、借金地獄、さらに、白人であるにもかかわらず、有色人のせいで、自分の欲望がかなわないと思い込み、有色人の野望を邪魔して、他人に頼らず一旗あげてやろう、という現代アメリカ白人の怒りを象徴しているのだ、と。
Salon
Ronald Reagan’s shameful legacy: Violence, the homeless, mental illness
As president and governor of California, the GOP icon led the worst policies on mental illness in generations
BY DR. E. FULLER TORREY
多くの公立の精神病院が閉鎖されて、精神病棟にいるべき人たちが、劣悪な環境のケアセンターにいるか、ホームレスになるか、犯罪を犯すか、犯罪を犯して監獄にいるか、になってしまっている、と。
TUESDAY, OCT 1, 2013 08:00 AM +0900
Fired for doing porn: The new employment discrimination
Adult performers who get work elsewhere can be fired if their past comes out -- and there's no legal recourse
BY EJ DICKSON
When Gauge retired from the adult industry in 2005, she had big plans for her post-porn career. A 4-foot-11 Arkansas native best known her signature move ― receiving anal sex while doing a handstand ― Gauge abruptly left the industry after shooting more than 140 films, due to a contract dispute with her management company. Although she enjoyed her four-year stint in front of the camera, she wanted to take time off to prove to herself that she could succeed in other avenues. “Some girls enter the business without a long-term plan, or maybe they think they can’t do anything else,” she says. “I was never like that. I always thought I could do anything.”
After a few years of saving money through feature dancing, Gauge went to school to get her certification as a surgical tech, reaching the top of her class and logging double her required hours in the process. Then an anesthesia tech recognized her, and word spread through the hospital staff that a porn star was among their ranks. “Everybody wanted me in their room, but they started treating me like shit,” Gauge says. “They made me feel like I was contaminating everything.” By the time she was set to graduate, no one at the hospital would sign off on her required hours.
Thanks to the widespread availability of porn clips on streaming websites like PornTube and Tube8, it’s become increasingly difficult for former adult stars to conceal their past from their employers. Stacie Halas, an Oxnard, Calif., middle school teacher who went by the professional name of Tiffany Six, is the most recent example of this phenomenon. A science teacher at Haydock Intermediate School, Halas was fired after students found one of her videos on the Internet. When she fought her termination in court, her appeal was denied by a three-judge panel, one of whom wrote in a 46-page statement that “the ongoing availability of her pornographic materials on the Internet will continue to impede [Halas] from being an effective teacher and respected colleague.”
Unfortunately, employee discrimination cases involving sex workers are usually “very, very difficult to win,” says adult entertainment lawyer Michael Fattorosi. Under current discrimination laws, there are no protections for former sex workers, and firing someone for their porn past is “not like saying we’re letting you go because you’re black or Jewish or you wear a turban. Those things are not a result of a life choice you make, and being a sex worker is.” An employee who, like Halas, failed to disclose a porn past on his or her résumé would be compromised even further; the employer could argue that the employee had been hired under false pretenses, leading the court to side in their favor.
元ポルノ映画の女優が勉強して、外科技術者になったり、学校の先生になっても、職場でいじめや差別を受けて、結局、職場を去るか、過去をひた隠しにするしかない。裁判でも、人種差別などと違って保護規定がなく、かえって、過去を隠していたことが裁判では不利になる、と。
日本ではどうなんでしょうね？
SALON
SUNDAY, SEP 29, 2013 01:00 AM +0900
Walter White’s sickness mirrors America
"Breaking Bad" strikes such a nerve because Walt's ills of body and soul are also those of our country
BY DAVID SIROTA
日本では、「あまちゃん」やら、「半沢直樹」が話題になったように、アメリカではブレイキング・バッド Breaking badというドラマが話題なようである。
その主人公の病（やまい）が、アメリカを象徴している、と。
The most obvious way to see that is to look at how Walter White’s move into the drug trade was first prompted, in part, by his family’s fear that he would die prematurely for lack of adequate health care. It is the kind of fear most people in the industrialized world have no personal connection to ― but that many American television watchers no doubt do. That’s because unlike other countries, Walter White’s country is exceptional for being a place where 45,000 deaths a year are related to a lack of comprehensive health insurance coverage. That’s about ten 9/11′s worth of death each year because of our exceptional position as the only industrialized nation without a universal public health care system (and, sadly, Obamacare will not fix that).
Walter’s fear of bankrupting his family is also familiar. The kind of medical bills Walter faced are hardly rare in America ― they are, in fact, the country’s single largest cause of bankruptcy. And again, this makes America exceptional because, alas, medical bankruptcies basically do not exist in the rest of the industrialized world.
He is the personification of the whole theory that America’s exceptional form of safety-net-free capitalism ― and the desperation it breeds ― truly does breed innovation and entrepreneurship.
So what sets him apart and makes his story so representative of this moment’s zeitgeist? The answer is his total embrace of the most pernicious aspects of the American Dream mythology.
Walter still chooses what he calls “the empire business” in an effort to live out the dominant mythology. More specifically, he rejects his friends’ offer of help and embarks on a flamboyant journey to live out the archetypal up-from-the-bootstraps story ― the American Dream narrative on which our society bases its very definition of manhood. In the process, he also tries to live out the Aggrieved American White Guy Fantasy of thwarting his dark-skinned foreign competitors and claiming a market that he believes to be rightfully his.
SUNDAY, SEP 22, 2013 08:00 PM +0900
“Breaking Bad’s” racial politics: Walter White, angry white man
Walter's brutal meltdown shows genius way "Breaking Bad" deals with white privilege, and men who can't get enough
BY TODD VAN DER WERFF
It’s once viewers consider just how wide-ranging and epic Walter’s anger is that one of its true sources emerges: This is the voice of white male privilege, the angry, unfiltered sense that one is owed something and has had it taken away. Never mind that Walter built an empire worth $80 million. He always wanted more―respect or fear or worship―and he never got it.
病気になっても、健康保険で賄えず、医療費をなんとかしようとして、借金地獄、さらに、白人であるにもかかわらず、有色人のせいで、自分の欲望がかなわないと思い込み、有色人の野望を邪魔して、他人に頼らず一旗あげてやろう、という現代アメリカ白人の怒りを象徴しているのだ、と。
Salon
Ronald Reagan’s shameful legacy: Violence, the homeless, mental illness
As president and governor of California, the GOP icon led the worst policies on mental illness in generations
BY DR. E. FULLER TORREY
President Reagan never understood mental illness. Like Richard Nixon, he was a product of the Southern California culture that associated psychiatry with Communism.
California was the first state to witness not only an increase in homelessness associated with deinstitutionalization but also an increase in incarceration and episodes of violence.
By the mid-1970s, studies in some states suggested that about 5% of jail inmates were seriously mentally ill. A study of five California county jails reported that 6.7% of the inmates were psychotic. A study of the Denver County Jail reported that 5% of prisoners had a “functional psychosis.” Such figures contrasted with studies from the 1930s that had reported less than 2% of jail inmates as being seriously mentally ill. In 1973 the jail in Santa Clara County, which included San Jose, “created a special ward…to house just the individuals who have such a mental condition”; this was apparently the first county jail to create a special mental illness unit.
Given the increasing number of seriously mentally ill individuals living in the community in California by the mid-1970s, it is not surprising to find that they were impacting the tasks of police officers. A study of 301 patients discharged from Napa State Hospital between 1972 and 1975 found that 41% of them had been arrested. According to the study, “patients who entered the hospital without a criminal record were subsequently arrested about three times as often as the average citizen.” Significantly, the majority of these patients had received no aftercare following their hospital discharge. By this time, police in other states were also beginning to feel the burden of the discharged, but often untreated, mentally ill individuals. In suburban Philadelphia, for example, “mental-illness-related incidents increased 227.6% from 1975 to 1979, whereas felonies increased only 5.6%.”
Of all the omens of deinstitutionalization’s failure on exhibit in 1970s California, the most frightening were homicides and other episodes of violence committed by mentally ill individuals who were not being treated.
1970: John Frazier, responding to the voice of God, killed a prominent surgeon and his wife, two young sons, and secretary. Frazier’s mother and wife had sought unsuccessfully to have him hospitalized.
1972: Herbert Mullin, responding to auditory hallucinations, killed 13 people over 3 months. He had been hospitalized three times but released without further treatment.
1973: Charles Soper killed his wife, three children, and himself 2 weeks after having been discharged from a state hospital.
1973: Edmund Kemper killed his mother and her friend and was charged with killing six others. Eight years earlier, he had killed his grandparents because “he tired of their company,” but at age 21 years had been released from the state hospital without further treatment.
1977: Edward Allaway, believing that people were trying to hurt him, killed seven people at Cal State Fullerton. Five years earlier, he had been hospitalized for paranoid schizophrenia but released without further treatment.
Abuse of mentally ill persons in board-and-care homes also periodically surfaced at this time:
1982: “Nine ragged, emaciated adults” were found in an unlicensed home for mentally ill individuals in Jackson, Mississippi. They were living in a 10-by-10 foot building with “no toilet or running water, only a plastic bucket to collect body wastes. A hose and faucet outside the building were used for washing. There were two mattresses on the concrete floor and a single cot in the room.” There were also “two vicious dogs chained outside the room.”
1984: Seven “former patients” died in a fire in a “rooming house” in Worcester, Massachusetts. “The report released this week said officials of Worcester State Hospital who referred the former patients to the rooming house had been warned by community health workers that the privately owned house was not safe.”
Despite the claims of homeless advocates, media attention directed to homeless persons made it increasingly clear that many of them were, in fact, seriously mentally ill
By the mid-1980s, a consensus had emerged that the total number of homeless persons was increasing. The possible reasons for this increase became a political football, but the failure of the mental health system was one option widely discussed. A 1985 report from Los Angeles estimated that 30% to 50% of homeless persons were seriously mentally ill and were being seen in “ever increasing numbers.” The study concluded that this was “in part the product of the deinstitutionalization movement….The ‘Streets’ have become ‘The Asylums’ of the 80s.”
In Contra Costa County, California, all 71 homicides committed between 1978 and 1980 were examined. Seven of the 71 homicides were found to have been done by individuals with schizophrenia, all of whom had been previously hospitalized at some point before the crime. The 10% rate was also consistent with the findings of another small study in Albany County, New York. Therefore, by the late 1980s, it appeared that violent acts committed by untreated mentally ill persons was one of the consequences of the deinstitutionalization movement, and the problem appeared to be a growing one.
多くの公立の精神病院が閉鎖されて、精神病棟にいるべき人たちが、劣悪な環境のケアセンターにいるか、ホームレスになるか、犯罪を犯すか、犯罪を犯して監獄にいるか、になってしまっている、と。
