Imagine 
this: 
You’ve 
just 
seen 
a 
photo 
of 
the 
most 
appetizing 
fettuccine 
pasta, 
smothered with Alfredo sauce, 
on someone’s Instagram story. 
You don’t know the person well, 
but the food looks scrumptious; 
you have to know where they 
got it from. You respond to the 
post, asking for the name of the 
restaurant that prepared this 
mouth-watering meal.
“This 
spot 
is 
kind 
of 
a 
personal thing to me,” comes the 
response. “What’s really crazy 
is … you wouldn’t have even 
wanted this if you hadn’t seen 
me post it.”
This 
exchange 
probably 
comes across as unrealistic. In 
reality, it’s a joke — a quote from 
a video that recently circulated 
on the internet that pokes fun at 
people who go to great lengths 
to prevent others from accessing 
the things they treasure. Most 
people call this gatekeeping.
I laughed, but then again, 
maybe sometimes the mental 
trick is only natural. We are 
protective over the things that 
are valuable to us. Maybe the 
extent to which we care about 
safeguarding 
those 
personal 
finds is a metric for how valuable 
they are to us. Secretly you hate 
it when the two trees in the Diag 
that you always use for your 
hammock have been occupied 

by someone else. Or maybe you 
don’t want to see anyone you 
know in the quaint little coffee 
shop you discovered last week 
because it stops being special 
when someone else finds out 
about it.
In our heads we all gatekeep 
the restaurants and study spots 
and coffee shops that we love, 
but no one is more vocal with 
their gatekeeping than music 
fans.
Unfortunately, I am a music 
fan. I am also the first to admit 
that it’s both comical and absurd 
when a music fan tells you about a 
band that you’ve “probably never 
heard of before.” Nevertheless, 
I get pretty excited about an 
intricate chord progression or 
a thumping bassline. If I find 
a niche song that I’ve never 
heard, I feel like I now possess 
something special. Maybe I have 
a subconscious fear that the song 
that is now special to me could 
lose its value if it fell into the 
laps of my friends.
But 
where 
does 
that 
attachment come from? It’s not 
my song, and yet I buy into the 
illusion that since I “discovered” 
it, 
I 
have 
some 
claim 
to 
originality.
We want things that other 
people have, but it also feels 
good when other people want 
something that we have. So for 
music fans, gatekeeping may 
be a natural human tendency. 
This begs the question: Who 
are the true owners of artistic 

expression? Is it the creator, 
the person who produces an 
original creation and makes 
something out of nothing? Or is 
it the consumer, who inhabits it, 
identifies with it and affirms its 
invention?
And more importantly, when 
thinking about genres of music 
rooted in the voices and efforts 
of people of color, what does it 
mean when this art is co-opted 
or appropriated by a hegemonic 
group, namely, white people? 
At first, the notion of a music 
listener 
thinking 
they 
have 
ownership over someone else’s 
creation 
sounds 
delusional. 
However, 
entire 
genres 
of 
music — indie, house music and 
underground hip hop come to 
mind — are appealing to listeners 
because they haven’t crossed 
over 
into 
the 
mainstream. 
An artist’s success correlates 
directly 
to 
their 
cult-like 
following when the listeners are 
vital to what makes the music 
valuable: its niche status. The 
paradox is that when a band’s 
unpopularity is what makes 
them cool, people are naturally 
drawn to that coolness and 
inadvertently cause the band to 
grow in popularity.
And while we don’t tend to 
think of artists as gatekeepers 
themselves, in a column for 
Medium, Hal H. Harris reminds 
us that jazz music initially 
gained its character thanks to 
key gatekeepers.
“Jazz was such rebel music. In 

its genesis, it was unmistakably 
black,” Harris asserts. “Though 
you had artists like Django 
Reinhardt and Benny Goodman 
making bank, they were still 
subjected to the influence — and 
needed the cosign — of black 
gatekeepers like Duke Ellington, 
Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, 
and others.”
Jazz 
greats 
like 
Duke 
Ellington, perhaps the most 
famous American jazz composer, 
set the bar for other creators 
when it came to jazz standards. 
His composition “Black, Brown 
and Beige: A Tone Parallel to 
the History of the Negro” in 
America debuted at Carnegie 
Hall 
in 
1943 
and 
asserted 
that the lived experience and 
cultural expression of Black 
Americans deserved the same 
recognition as that of their 
white counterparts.
However, the rise of the 
recording industry eventually 
determined 
that 
jazz’s 
commercial 
success 
was 
dependent on its palatability 
to broader audiences and its 
acceptance by white Americans 
rather than the innovation and 
creativity of Black musicians. 
As Harris puts it, “Jazz became 
colonized, and how we treated 
its figures became warped as 
well.”
In an article for New Music 
USA, Eugene Holly Jr. recalls 
that “Duke Ellington knocked 
on Dave Brubeck’s hotel door, 
to 
show 
the 
white 
pianist 

that he made the cover of 
Time magazine in 1954 before 
(Ellington) did.” Holly explains, 
“Throughout my life, it had 
been drilled into me that jazz 
was 
created 
by 
blacks 
and 
represented the apex of African-
American musical civilization.” 
So how could a white jazz 
pianist end up on the cover of 
Time magazine before one of 
the genre’s most influential, 
trailblazing composers?
Gatekeeping can accomplish 
only so much in preserving the 
original character of a musical 
style. It couldn’t prevent jazz 
from being co-opted by white 
musicians and adopted to suit 
mainstream audiences, which 
above 
all 
else 
reveals 
our 
society’s intrinsic racism that 
artists like Duke Ellington had 
attempted to subvert with their 
musical expression in the first 
place.
Maybe as music becomes more 
and more accessible, ideas of 
ownership and gatekeeping will 
become less and less concrete. 
We can stream music anywhere 
we go using our mobile devices. 
In fact, anyone can make a 
professional-sounding, perhaps 
slightly rudimentary, song all 
by themselves on their iPhone. 
The utilization of “sampling” 
in modern music production 
has already put our ideas of 
intellectual 
property 
to 
the 
test. And because of all this, the 
genre of jazz has suffered.
According 
to 
Nielsen’s 

2014 year-end report, jazz is 
steadily falling out of favor with 
American listeners. In 2014 it 
was tied with classical music 
as the least-consumed music in 
the U.S. Francis Davis, writing 
for NPR Music, notes that “For 
decades now, wags have had 
it that jazz is dead. But what’s 
actually falling prey to changing 
times is the entire recording 
industry. 
Jazz 
is 
merely 
collateral damage.”
I did say that when artists 
create, they make “something out 
of nothing,” but that isn’t entirely 
true. Jazz took inspiration from 
a variety of different techniques, 
instruments and sounds to give 
people something that they had 
never heard before. We can try 
to protect the music we love, 
but originality arises out of our 
willingness to see it change and 
meld in the hands of others.
In the same way, the next 
time someone asks where I got 
the delicious fettuccine pasta 
I’m eating, I’ll ask if they want 
to come with me the next time 
I go. The harder I try to keep 
that Alfredo sauce to myself, the 
less I appreciate what makes it 
special in the moment.
Like the improvisation of a 
jazz solo, it’s the little quirks 
of flavor that make the dish 
unique that should be celebrated 
and given the recognition they 
deserve.
Statement Columnist Connor 
O’Leary Herreras can be reached 
at cqmoh@umich.edu.

I confronted public nudity for the 
first time when I was 13, spending 
three weeks at a sleepaway camp in 
Yosemite. I mindlessly walked into 
the women’s bathroom and was 
immediately greeted with a posse 
of naked bodies. I was startled by 
the sudden, forced intimacy and 
I simply didn’t know where to 
look. The shower room consisted 
of one large room with multiple 
shower heads and a very apparent 
lack of curtains or doors dividing 
the space. Both counselors and 
campers filed in to start showering 
— completely naked, reaching over 
one another to borrow shampoo, 
listening to a speaker blasting early 
2000s throwbacks. 
I was terrified. There I was, at the 
height of my awkward pubescent 
era, with hair growing in places I 
didn’t know it could. Yet I strangely 
felt more uncomfortable with the 
fact that there I stood, fully clothed 
in a bathing suit, while everyone 
else went about freely exposing 
their bodies. I slowly removed my 
clothes and stepped into the scary 
space of confidence that felt so 
unfamiliar to me. 

This moment transformed the 
way I felt about my body. I looked 
around at staff members who 
didn’t cringe or hide at the sight 
of cellulite and hairy legs. I saw 

boobs that were different sizes and 
full bushes next to bikini waxes. I 
noticed that the counselors who 
I had idolized and imitated as a 
camper did not have the so-called 
“perfect body,” and instead had 
physical flaws, both similar and 
different from the ones I myself 
had obsessed over for years. For 
the first time, I didn’t feel like a 
pubescent freak, but instead like a 
normal human being with a body 

like everyone else’s. 
Now, when people hear that I 
take three months out of the year 
to work at this same summer camp 
as a counselor, nudity wouldn’t be 

the first image that comes to their 
minds. Most likely they conjure up 
an idea of me making friendship 
bracelets, 
braiding 
campers’ 
hair and tie-dying an old white 
T-shirt. They would be surprised 
to imagine me, calm as can be, 
surrounded by naked friends at a 
river, body parts openly on display.
Going from summer camp to 
nudity seems like a bit of a leap, so 
let me provide some context. This 
camp is a natural paradise. Nestled 
in the Sierra Nevada Mountains 
and on the outskirts of Yosemite 
National Park, the property is 
filled with tall Ponderosa pines and 
brightly colored wildflowers. But 
what makes the property so unique 
is the river that flows through it: 
the wild and scenic Tuolumne 
River winds its way through the 
property, its refreshing waters 
providing refuge against the hot 
California sun. A common pastime 
for staff and campers is to hike 
down to the river, take a dip in 
the water and find a sunny rock to 
nap on. The catch is, the staff do it 
naked. 
When I entered my first year on 
staff, recently having completed 
my freshman year of college, I 
heard talk about skinny dipping 
at the river. I was anxious. What 
if people looked at my body in a 
way that made me uncomfortable? 
What if I had just inhaled a burrito 
and was feeling bloated and 
insecure? What if I was the culprit 
of looking at someone’s body with 
judgmental eyes? I was reminded 
of the moment when 13-year-old 
me contemplated taking the brave 
step into the group shower.

Wednesday, September 21, 2022 — 7
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
S T A T E M E N T

 CONNOR HERRERAS
Statement Columnist 
The gate-keeping and co-opting of jazz music in America

The summer I discovered 
public nudity

 ELLA KOPELMAN
Statement Columnist

Design by Abby Schreck

As students settle from the 
flurry of school-sponsored and 
not-so-school-sponsored Welcome 
Week activities, we gaze back 
lovingly on the rites of passage 
that characterize that coveted 
week: meeting people in our 
dorm, sweating in bikini tops and 
unbuttoned floral shirts and, of 
course, the infamous midnight 
walks down frat row, or Hill Street, 
toward Washtenaw Avenue.
The Migration, the Stampede, 
the Herd — whatever you want 
to call the groups of freshmen 
walking to parties. It’s a pop-
culture given for any campus. 
Engineering senior Seerat Kaur 
remembers her first fall semester, 
walking as far as two miles 
with her friends in the standard 
Welcome Week uniform: a black 
top and jeans.
“(The freshmen) all talked about 
that stereotype, of freshmen who 
can’t find parties and are desperate 
enough to walk around wherever,” 
Kaur said.
But, thanks to social media, 
the collective actions of college 
freshmen, 
particularly 
young 
women, have exploded from being 
a well-known college stereotype 
into a whole new genre of content. 
Whether just walking down the 
street or relaxing on their own 
property, 
freshman 
girls 
are 
targets of social media ridicule. 
Videos on TikTok also appear to be 
taken without the girls’ knowledge 
or consent, with the videographer 
filming from another level and 
zooming in from afar.
Making fun of fashion trends 
is one thing; the black-top-jeans-
white-shoes look is basic, but 
calling it out is hardly an unpopular 
stance. By virtue of this look being 
trendy, everyone on campus is 
aware of its cultural pull, even the 
ones partaking in it.
However, the implications of 
these videos are less about clothes 
and more about the undertones 
of misogyny throughout. It’s as 
though the mere presence of 
women is enough to gawk at –– a 
joke everyone is in on except the 
girls themselves. Even though 
freshman boys also walk to parties 
and also have their own Welcome 
Week uniforms, the hordes of 
freshman boys don’t garner the 
same level of media attention that 
the girls do.
This leads me to the million 
dollar question: What is the joke? 
What is so funny about girls 
looking the same, about girls 

going to parties, about simply 
walking … together? And what 
is the goal? If the past decades of 
media viewership have taught me 
anything, I’d assert that the goal is 
to bring women down a peg — and 
make them feel mindless, insecure 
and unsafe.
This misogynistic brand of 
humor, in which the punchline of 
a joke revolves around the mere 
existence of women, is not new or 
surprising. It’s only taken on a new 
face. In an article for SAGE, U-M 
communications professor Susan 
J. Douglas presents the fallacy 
of “ironic” depictions of women 
in media. Offering an example 
in MTV’s “My Super Sweet 16,” 
Douglas analyzes how the irony 
lies in the show’s presentation; the 
girls may be shown as glamorous 
and lucky, but as the audience, 
we’re meant to laugh at their tacky 
materialism and vapidity.
“This kind of irony allows for 
the representation of something 
sexist — most girls, and especially 
rich girls, are self-centered bimbos 
— while being able to claim that 
that’s not really what you meant 
at all, it’s just for fun,” Douglas 
writes.
For college students today, 
platforms such as TikTok have 
replaced MTV but fulfill a similar 
role. Admittedly, the comparison is 
not perfect. First of all, complaining 
about TikTok is low-hanging fruit, 
and to blame the platform for the 
mockery of freshman girls as a 
whole would be a ridiculously 
broad statement. And second, the 
numerous videos on young women 
do not necessarily carry the same 
ironic tone that MTV boasts and 
are much more blatant in their 
criticism.
Nonetheless, 
like 
the 
girls 
on “My Super Sweet 16,” young 
college women are treated with 
the same animosity via TikTok’s 
bite-sized videos and across other 
media platforms. Michigan Chicks, 
an affiliate of Chicks, a branch of 
Barstool Sports that’s “all for the 
girls,” had a video go semi-viral of 
a group of young women walking 
down East Liberty. They were 
mostly wearing black tops and 
jeans, and the caption read “college 
girl fashion is unmatched.”
Regarding Michigan Chicks’ 
anti-freshman-girl content, Kaur 
noted 
that 
“bigger 
accounts 
post individuals’ content. They 
normalize making fun of girls 
online and justify that it’s okay.”
Part of the lure of this content is 
the potential for it to be reposted by 
a company account and have it go 
viral. Under this logic, making fun 
of freshmen, or women in general, 

is not such a fringe trend but 
essentially a company-sponsored 
one. If major media presences 
like Barstool Sports or Michigan 
Chicks make this type of content 
and it goes viral, individuals’ 
content can get even more internet 
clout should a brand pick it up. And 
so the cycle continues.
In this way, making fun of 
young women is not only popular, 
but profitable. This means that 
it’s even harder for young women 
to stand up for themselves, going 
up against not just individuals but 
even businesses capitalizing on 
their image.
MTV’s birthday girls or college 
freshmen, the message is the same: 
Young women are bimbos driven 
by their lust for clothes, parties 
and alcohol. Especially when irony 
is employed, as Douglas described, 
it’s easy to veil one’s misogyny 
behind the front of it simply being 
“a joke.”
Though not every joke and video 
is specifically targeted at freshman 
women (and even if a caption says 
they’re freshmen, how can we 
know for sure?), I call specific 
attention to freshman girls for two 
reasons: First, given that freshmen 
don’t yet know the campus very 
well and most likely don’t have any 
friends with off-campus housing 
yet, one could infer that groups 
of people walking to frat parties 
would be freshmen.
Second, and more importantly, 
in terms of age and gender, 
freshman girls are the most 
vulnerable 
group 
on 
campus 
to sexual assault. According to 
University of Michigan Sociology 
professor Elizabeth Armstrong, 
freshmen are vulnerable because 
of a number of factors: the pressure 
to “fit in,” which may cause them to 
overdrink; not having close friends 
to look out for them at social 
events; limited knowledge of safety 
measures and overcompensation 
for this newfound freedom of 
going to parties.
Welcome Week and the few 
weeks that follow are positioned 
as the peak dangerous time for 
freshman girls; over 50% of 
assaults on college campuses 
take place between August and 
November, a time frame also 
known as the Red Zone. According 
to the Center for Women and 
Families, during the Red Zone, 
“(f)reshman females are targeted 
further as they are new to the area, 
have less parental supervision, and 
may participate in new activities 
such as alcohol and drug use as 
they try to meet new people.”

In defense of freshman girls

ELIZABETH WOLFE
Statement Columnist

A public lecture and reception; you may attend in person or 
virtually. For more information, including the Zoom link, 
visit events.umich.edu/event/95671 or call 734.615.6667.

ANN CHIH LIN

Scapegoating 
Chinese American 
Scientists in the 
Name of National 
Security

Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Richard H. Rogel 
Professor of Chinese Studies

Associate Professor, Gerald R. Ford 
School of Public Policy

Thursday, September 22, 2022 | 4:30 p.m. | 10th Floor Weiser Hall

LSA LECTURE

Read more at MichiganDaily.com
Read more at MichiganDaily.com