Warning: Shittiness of picture may cause seizures.
This article is well-intentioned, but kind of gave me an uneasy vibe. It’s about a trend I was blissfully unaware of until very recently, when I went out bowling with some friends to a place that plays loud music and videos, and suddenly this song came on—I can’t tell you which one—and like half the people at the bowling alley started to do some kind of line dance. As I stood there appalled, my friends explained that this is some new thing that’s really popular, and later my friend Spinetta emailed out a video of a bunch of middle aged men doing the same dance in kilts….at a wedding of course.
In other words, you can blame the patriarchy for shitty dance crazes, at least in part. The craze for big weddings has created an engulfing need for songs that can get every rhythm-free and shame-laden guest at a wedding onto the floor after a couple of glasses of champagne, and line dancing really fits the bill. As long as weddings have been with us, so have line dances, because everyone can do them and get applause and recognition for it, and doubly so if they are usually considered terrible dancers. Everyone’s just pleased to see them capable of something. This guy spends a lot of time uncomfortably dwelling on how he, white boy from Iowa, looked to hip-hop from a young age to inject some cool and some masculinity into him, but what he fails to realize is that the widespread nature of that desire in this country made the hip-hop-to-gaudy-wedding-music road an inevitability. Who has these big weddings with a strong need for line dancing but the young men like our author here, who listened to NWA on the bus to the Iowa schoolhouse? And with the pressure to both have a picture perfect wedding and to express your “true self”, goofy employments of pop music on the wedding dance floor are de rigeur. I’m not denying that this can sometimes be fun, to watch the old folks shake it to Outkast, but it’s also the source of really goofy dances.
Secular and religious schlock: Separated at birth.
As much as I’d like to puzzle over why evangelical Christianity does so well by putting out mediocre pop culture products to compete with the larger world—why do people take the imitations over the real thing?—the answer seems obvious enough to me. Could it be that Christian pop culture really isn’t significantly worse than the steady drumbeat of mediocre product put out by the secular entertainment industry? I mean, you look at the pop culture ripped off described in this article and the resounding realization is that it’s not like Christians are really going to make the products more mediocre as a rule.
At a Christian retail show Radosh attends, there are rip-off trinkets of every kind—a Christian version of My Little Pony and the mood ring and the boardwalk T-shirt (”Friends don’t let friends go to hell”). There is Christian Harlequin and Christian chick lit and Bibleman, hero of spiritual warfare. There are Christian raves and Christian rappers and Christian techno, which is somehow more Christian even though there are no words. There are Christian comedians who put on a Christian version of Punk’d, called Prank 3:16.
And if they are more mediocre, then they’re closer to the baseline of mediocrity that defines the initial products, a mediocrity that is central to profitability. Mediocre pop culture and fundamentalist Christianity are a perfect marriage, because the dimwittery of America that finds thinking and developing tastes too hard—the people who would have liked Creed, Christian messages or not—is fundamentalist Christianity’s audience.
I have a response piece up at RH Reality Check to Matt Taibbi’s article about John Hagee’s church, and it’s clear to me that as odd as the megachurches are—especially when they have speaking in tongues and demon explusion, as Hagee’s church does—they also gain popularity from having a really good grasp of the American middlebrow mediocrity culture that maximizes audiences so easily. The Rush Hour movies, American Idol albums, dinner at Chili’s, and embracing your inner child at Hagee’s church all inhabit that area of of mindless posing as engagement that marks this culture. Christian pop culture isn’t odd, but the most natural thing in the world. It’s something that I really realized after going to karaoke a few times where someone inevitably sings the Carrie Underwood song “Jesus Take The Wheel“. Is this mainstream schlock or Christian schlock? Both, and the two are firmly intertwined and not as easily separated as this article implies they can be.
Rebecca Traister has a great article about the 10th anniversary of “The Vagina Monologues” in New Orleans, and ends up having the same reaction that a lot of what you might call advanced patriarchy-blamers have when seeing this play: a reluctant appreciation for how fun it is to see it, after a period of intense irritation at the hoopla around it. I’m definitely in the rationalist category of feminism, as it were, and have little to no patience with the Earth Mother feminism that tries to make a big deal out of the feminine essence. It’s true that we are awash in a culture where anxious men have a submissive relationship to The Phallus, but seriously, the way to correct that is not to make a great emblem out of vulvic energy or whatever you want to call it. There are some men who have a healthy relationship with the penis—they like it, but see it as a tool that belongs to them. I think that route out of shame over having ladyparts is to take that pathway. But, as Traister notes, Ensler surrounds the play itself with this Earth Mother goddess stuff that makes me squirmy.
In Ensler’s megalomaniacal V-universe, everything from voter registration to the Iraq war is seen through the speculum, er, spectrum, of the vagina, and moist metaphor and love for Eve (and beav) rule the day. It often seems, in fact, that Ensler has taken her laudable grass-roots success and turned it into a celebrity-centric, glitzy franchise — one that has, in its unrelenting and patronizing focus on women-as-cootches, often felt as reductive and objectifying as the language Ensler originally set out to fight.
All that is true, but at the end of the day, the “Monologues” continue to draw huge audiences because the play itself is so good. You don’t have to love Ensler’s approach to love the play, because what makes the play awesome is that the monologues are all built from the direct words of a bunch of ordinary women. The factors that were in play 10 years ago when the play made its debut—shame about sexuality, the belief that women are inferior and that control of the ladyparts belongs to men, because women can’t be trusted with it—are only more pronounced now than they were then, and have been enshrined into the law. I think women flock to the play, because it’s refreshing to hear other women talk about their vaginas…..much in the way that men with healthy masculine identities see their penises. It’s mine, but it does not own me. Ensler may skirt the edge of “women as cootches”, but the play itself sends home the all-too-uncommon message that women own their cootches. And because of its emphasis on personal narrative, it does this without being preachy or driven by ideology, and it’s really funny and entertaining.
In the past, I’ve tripped over the fact that it really upsets people to suggest that free will is an illusion, even though it’s hard for me to see how you could arrive at any other conclusion. The problem of free will is this: If you could make two absolutely identical people, with the exact same experiences and thoughts and lives, and give them a choice—any choice at all, from abortion or not to chocolate or vanilla—would they choose differently from each other? The only way I can see that being possible is if the choices presented were of equal value to the person, and then the different choices would be more a matter of chance than will.
Most people probably don’t think about that sort of thing much, but one of those who does is the blogger writerdd at Skepchick, who denies that we are either ensouled (which is important and I’ll come back to it) or that we have free will. And she has some scientific evidence that’s unsettling to people attached to free will.
ou may think you decided to read this story — but in fact, your brain made the decision long before you knew about it.
In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people’s decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them.
The decision studied — whether to hit a button with one’s left or right hand — may not be representative of complicated choices that are more integrally tied to our sense of self-direction. Regardless, the findings raise profound questions about the nature of self and autonomy: How free is our will? Is conscious choice just an illusion?
This book review is interesting—more than any other critique of the 60s counterculture, this one seems to draw the correct conclusions about how the counterculture is sort of irrelevant while the 60s were significant. The world changed a lot in the 60s, but it was the civil rights movement and the Great Society that did it more than the counter-culture. The review sets up and knocks down all the goals of the counterculture: Ending the war? The influence of the counterculture on changing people’s opinions on that is controversial, and it seems that it might have hurt as much as helped. Free love? Its seeds of destruction were in the fact that it was so sexist. (Though the partial birth of feminism from the ashes of the counterculture is nothing to sneer at, but for the sake of this argument, let’s say that feminism was a unique movement.) Tuning in and dropping out? Yeah, that was never going to work. I find myself only halfway convinced by this—let’s just say the counterculture was overrated. The review mentions Thomas Frank’s tedious arguments about consumerism and how it took over the counterculture, but I find myself wholly unconvinced there’s a there there. Consumerism is an ill-defined idea. Is it consumerist if money changes hands? Or if it’s a lot of money? Is it selling out to make any money, or are you morally pure so long as you don’t make enough to live on? Shaming people about enjoying material things or making a decent living strikes me as a cheap substitute for taking on economic injustice—ensuring a living wage for everyone is hard work, and it’s a lot easier to cruise around calling people sell-outs for how they dress, how much money they make, or what electronic gadgets they own.
Jamaican Tourism Minister Shrugs off Violence Against Gays. Jim Burroway and Tim Kincaid of Box Turtle Bulletin have earned the scorn of the homophobic Jamaican government for daring to point out the increasing violence against its own LGBT citizens while courting U.S. tourism dollars. It’s worth the read.
Check out this bold letter to the editor from a die hard homophobe – the writer is miffed at the idea that people would stay away from the island nation because of its hostility toward gay citizens.
It fully angers me to hear that this group of foreigners think they can dictate the policy and laws of another sovereign nation because they trade products and services with them. It was selfish, shortsighted thinking like this that led to Haiti being in the state it currently is.Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett apparently doesn’t give a damn about his countrymen and women either. Read below the fold.I always thought that the laws of a nation were dictated by what that society decided was right and wrong and that we were in a world where, if my countries laws and polices were not the same as yours, we could agree to disagree.
(more…)
Sorry to be a bit late in the posting; I’ve been at UT watching David Simon receive a communications/journalism award and talk about, what else, “The Wire”. It was a productive hour and a half of discussion, which is somewhat surprising, since they opened the floor to questions, which is usually an invitation for a bunch of assholes to pretend that everyone showed up to hear them talk instead of the speaker. There were a couple of people who asked questions where the question was a minor pretense for them to bloviate, but on the whole, the question askers were respectable and the questions were good. Perhaps the show functions as a bullshit filter or something. I did not ask a question, but Marc asked about the inspiration behind the character of Clay Davis, so our little corner of the world got some representation.
I almost have to wonder if Simon isn’t wearing a little false humility when he expresses surprise—as he did tonight—that a show so entrenched in the particulars of Baltimore would resonate with so many people around the country. I suppose every city is different, but the ways that we differ from each other are kind of the same—Baltimore has scrapple, but we have breakfast tacos, for instance. The crime problem in Baltimore may not resonate in a city like Austin that has so little crime you can all but walk down the street at 2AM counting a wad of cash, but most city dwellers relate to the larger themes of “The Wire”, the interconnectedness of the mini-world of a city and the problems of braindead bureaucracies. Most shows and movies nowadays take place in specific cities, and try to capture something of the local flavor in them, but very few shows really tackle the idea of the city as an entity the way “The Wire” did. It really filled a hunger that the urban dwellers of America have to see this experience of the city reflected back at them. Simon said that this idea of place above all was his motivation. That every American city has its own character and if you really dig in and get to know a place and call it home, even if it’s not exactly the greatest city in the country, you’ll love it. Since I have roots in El Paso, I can relate to the sentiment—it’s an armpit, but it’s our armpit and really, it’s not that much of an armpit once you get to know it and find out what’s to like. Of course, I don’t have to defend Austin as a loveable city with its own unique character—lately, a lot of us are wishing that was a better kept secret, especially after having to wait in line for a breakfast taco during SXSW. But I digress.
This video is only tenuously related, but very funny.
So I’m standing there, enjoying the hell out of this Gogol Bordello concert last night,* and I dwell for a moment on how many influences they manage to wrap into their music. They bill themselves as “gypsy punk rock cabaret”, which basically is this mash-up of Eastern European music and punk rock, but what makes them especially fun is they’re perfectly happy to grab all sorts of influences, so you have Carribean influences, with reggae beats, dub effects, and even dancehall rapping, plus some rapping in Russian but with more of a U.S.-style feel to it. It’s a band that could seem like a novelty act, but they’re serious about just delving into using the energy of culture clash to drive this music, and it’s really pretty amazing. You really find yourself buying into this larger vision that’s expressed by the musical style, but also their lyrics that are almost cutely modernist and progressive, like “There were never any good days/There is today/There is tomorrow” and “My brothers are protons/My sisters are neurons”—this notion that culture is a shark that has to keep moving or it dies.
Wow, this is a telling little light shone into the anxious masculinity that defines the conservative “revolution”. (Via.) Apparently, Brett Favre teared up at his retirement press conference, an understandable action considering the high emotions that have to be flying as you end a career as prestigious as his. And Laura Ingraham, who knows her audience very well, decided this was a good opportunity to call Favre a woman.
“All these years, and I didn’t know there was a woman quarterback in the NFL.”
“Brett Favre…we’re watching this in the studio, obviously retiring from the NFL, great quarterback, handsome 38-year-old man, he gets up there and he does this press conference that was frankly one of the most embarrassing things I have ever seen.”
“That’s a great message for young boys. ‘Get up there and act like a girl and start blubbering like a baby.”
Then, in her best impersonation of a crying toddler with its favorite toy taken away, she wah-wah-wah’s while uttering in a mocking tone, “It’s about me, it was never about me, but it is about me, bla, bla, bla” before returning to her regular voice and stating, “I could not believe what I was seeing.”
Unfortunately, the reaction from too many sporting outlets has been, essentially, “Nuh-uh! He’s earned the right to cry a little without having his masculinity taken from him. And you’re not a woman, so there!” Which really isn’t probably going to hurt her feelings, because clearly she doesn’t think much of women to consider it an insult to call someone a woman.
Original context.
This piece is semi-contrarian, and I feel the strong need to be contrarian against it. Well, not against the general idea that a sex scandal just to have one is a bad thing—I still maintain that garden variety adulteries and kinks are nobody’s business but their own, and the media needs to butt out of it, barring other factors that make the story news. But let’s face it, everyone agrees to those rules these days, barring the Clinton sex scandal, where the whole “perjury” trap was set up just so there could be an excuse for a pointless, salacious sex scandal that helped distract our nation’s capital right when more attention needed to be paid to the movement of terrorists that, you know, wanted to kill us all as we soon found out.
But outside of that, most of the sex scandals that have rocked the political world as of late might better be called “patriarchy scandals”, and since they involve the very same politicians who make a living preening around as great patriarchs, ripping their mask off and showing the squirmy insides is a favor to us all. Which is why I blanched at this:
Using this picture because I dig it.
The best part about being a voracious reader is the juxtapositions. Yesterday, while taking a blow-off day to be very sick, I laid on the couch and read through the most recent edition of Bitch, and I was impressed by an article by Jessica Wakeman called “Slap Happy” describing the practice of domestic discipline, which is something that really seems to have started with Christians who wish to return to an era where women were “managed” by their husbands through regular spankings. (The social acceptance of spanking women is something that seems to have disappeared so rapidly during the feminist era that it’s nearly forgotten that it was socially acceptable to the degree that images of men taking their wives or fiances over their knees and spanking them were on TV and in movies on occasion without too much fanfare up through the 50s.) But Wakeman isn’t interested in the fundamentalist Christians who want to return everyone to a Victorian era of gender roles that are mandated by law. She’s interested in the practice’s spread to couple that aren’t religious really and may even call themselves feminist.*
The article, and the whole issue really, are great and I’m not just saying that because they have the first review out of my book.** Wakeman lets the DD participants speak for themselves, but doesn’t fall into the “I’m okay, you’re okay” trap and lets that speaking-for-themselves make it very clear that these people are fucked the fuck up. DD is not BDSM, which is a sexual game, though some DD couples do also enjoy incorporating BDSM elements into their relationships. No, it seems that domestic discipline is a way of thwarting conflict in your relationship by assuming that every conflict or problem in the heterosexual relationship is the woman’s fault (because she’s childish, scattered, rebellious, whatever) and that it’s up to her man to discipline her. As Wakeman points out, it’s like The Surrendered Wife, except with spankings and time outs in the corner and women having to crawl over to their husbands or boyfriends on their hands and knees to beg forgiveness. There is no equality here; conflict appears to mainly and possibly always be solved by blaming the woman and wielding punishment. I failed to see how it’s much different from domestic violence, except that the women in this situation tend to minimize the conflict through stylizing the violence and submitting to it in a tacit exchange for their partners’ agreeing to have a limit on how much beating and abuse is handed out.
I’d like to dedicate this post to one of my favorite skeptics out there, Sara from F-Words. Sara, unfortunately, has had a tumor discovered in her head. They won’t know if it’s benign or cancerous until they take it out, but either way, she has to undergo major brain surgery. If you’d like to help her and her husband out during this difficult time, they’ve put up a Pay Pal in the right hand corner of her blog. Insurance will cover a lot of the medical costs, but as you know, these things tend to cost more than just what the hospital bills you, in time lost from work and travel expenses. I’m pulling for a speedy recovery for Sara.
So I was listening to “The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe“, and they mentioned that the blog Quackometer got shut down by its webhost because one of the quacks exposed threatened to sue. Said flim-flam artist didn’t have a leg to stand on, but the webhost somewhat understandably didn’t want to have to deal with it, and dumped Quackometer instead. The site is back up now, and I, for one, intend to start reading it.
I appreciate bean’s concern about the description of a woman’s body (or the parts therein) as a “factory” in a political environment where there’s powerful forces centered around making sure that women really are treated like baby factories that are properly owned and operated by their patriarchally appointed male guardians. It would be really easy to deliberately misread this cartoon in just such a manner. But I’ll admit, when I first saw the cartoon posted, my first thought was, “If all men could come around to thinking about women’s bodies in just this manner, there would be no anti-choice movement in the U.S.” What made the cartoon endearing and funny is how respectful the male figure is towards the female figure, in his own eccentric way. It’s startling, too, because we so rarely hear men openly frame women’s procreative powers as “neat” or using language that shows a full understanding that such powers belong to the women who hold them alone and not to anyone else.
Women’s bodies are pretty damn neat. Part of the reason I find myself drawn to writing so much about reproductive rights is because I think that women’s bodies are neat. It’s ironic that I don’t ever want to have children myself, but my attitude about it is roughly the same as my attitude towards scientists—I am mildly obsessed with admiring the whole shebang without feeling a need to get personally involved. I think biology is neat and human evolution is neat, and the ground zero of where all this begins—in the womb—is neat. I never want to have a baby, but upon learning that one theory about why women menstruate so damn much is that we have to get a jumpstart on building the placenta to nurse the giant brains of human beings, well, I was kind of awed and felt a lot better about dealing with my period, which is mainly experienced by me as a nuisance. But it’s a nuisance that evolved so I could have a giant brain, so that’s pretty fucking cool.
If you want to gauge how much a social problem is determined by society to be a matter of individual morality more than a collective problem that can only be addressed by a collective solution, you could do worse than to ask, “Are individual women considered the gatekeepers/middle class white women the moral exemplars on this issue?” Rising obesity and nutrition-related health issues? If we considered it a social problem, we’d look to economic controls on corn syrup, restructuring our food distribution, building more opportunities for exercise into our city structures. But if we considered it a matter of morality, we’d simply demand that women show off their moral purity by having a race for the smallest waistline. STDs and unwanted pregnancy: If it were a social problem, we’d have sex education and free condoms for all. But instead we tell women to keep their legs shut and save for daddy their husbands. Just because a lot of people have abandoned religion except in the nominal sense doesn’t mean that we’ve spared women from duties as the moral mainstays of families and society. We’ve just redefined the duties.
Which is what troubled me about this story in the NY Times about “Ecomoms” and how environmentalism is becoming a trendy hobby-duty for suburban housewives, a replacement for PTA meetings, church bake sales, and other demonstrations of the housewife duty to uphold her family’s moral status in a community. It’s not that I think it’s the worst thing in the world if the richest and most wasteful people in the world rein it in a little in terms of environmental destruction. It’s just that once an issue has been coded as the moral responsibility of housewives, it tends to stay there, and larger collective solutions drift out of view.
By the way, has everyone read the blog Stuff White People Like? It’s my new obsession. I am so jealous I didn’t think of it first. It’s fucking brilliant. It makes me as happy as Dadsmacker.
As usual with the NY Times, the promise of any sort of new moral duty that will get the bitches out of your workplace and back into the kitchen where they belong causes the editors to yell, “Can this green light get any greener?!” The ecomom trend causes swoons, because it promises to load up the household with so much shit to do that women simply have to quit their jobs. Added bonus is the opportunity to subtly mock women for prattling.
So the current show that’s the focal point of our household obsession with watching TV shows on DVD is “Deadwood”. The show caught a lot of praise and flack for the amount of cursing on it, but I haven’t seen much in the way of in-depth criticism about how the rampant cursing works, just some standard titillation. What I’ve noticed about it is that it’s part of a larger trend on the show of overlaying anachronistic stylistic touches to signal to the viewer that this show is about the idea of the 19th century West, not a direct historical show, and that we the audience are meant to read modern meanings into plotlines that are in fact mired in the semi-historical world of Deadwood. The profanity-laden dialect on the show has more in common with the way people talk now than it would then, and some of the phrasings they use would have probably been meaningless even to the most rough-languaged 19th century Americans. There’s other stylistic choices that point to this—a prostitute wearing lipstick, another one smoking a cigarette (which was probably rare to non-existent in the 1870s), terms like “dope” and “junk” to refer to opium, and I think even some of hymnals they sing were written after this time period. It’s deliberately unrealistic—the Wild West is as realistic in a lot of ways on “Deadwood” as it is on “Firefly”.
Which is why I think a lot of the discomforting behavior on “Deadwood” is less about making the audience feel superior to 19th century Americans, and more about, yes, holding up a mirror to ourselves. But it’s surprisingly subtle in that project; the allure of believing that you’re watching a world much different than your own sucks you in. The anvils are admirably sparse on the show. Which is why I was glad to have read this quote:
According to advertisers, this is the going price for pussy on today’s Valentine’s market.
Because it’s the end of the onslaught of commercials peddling this misogynist, consumerist version of romance that makes me hate the world. I used to be something of a sucker for the idea that I could somehow remake Valentine’s Day to be quirky and special and not at all feeding into the bullshit. My conclusion, after many years of trying and failing to do that, is that it’s best just to boycott the non-holiday. Truly, you can’t win. I saw that the Alamo Drafthouse was showing “The Apartment” on Valentine’s Day, and despite the no celebration commitment in this house, both my boyfriend and I want to see that movie on the big screen enough that we were willing to risk breaking my rule—no leaving the house after 5PM on Valentine’s Day. There’s just too many people trying too hard to convince themselves that they’re having fun, which depresses me. But there’s no way that watching one of my all-time favorite movies on the big screen won’t be fun, right?
I’ll just echo what Jill said: This is sad.
Update: Lauren notes in comments that the survey has a reductive definition, limited to “literature” and excluding non-fiction. While I think fiction should be part of one’s reading diet, I also think that it’s stupid to think you don’t get the benefits of complexity if you only read non-fiction. Plus, histories aren’t literature but can be as rich in story-telling detail as novels.
I’m usually the first to decry the hand-wringing over young people these days and calls of social decline. I even have a blog category called “Signs Of The Non-Apocalypse”, I’m so dedicated to my opposition to moral panics. But I can’t help but think there’s a problem when people don’t read books at all. Hopefully the surge in Internet use indicates that people are reading something, though.
I’m not going to bash other forms of entertainment, like TV or video games. In fact, I think different mediums improve different kinds of intelligence. My skill at picking up foreshadowing has improved more from watching “The Wire” than reading a dozen novels, so that show has ironically made me a better reader of novels. Video games have taught my clumsy ass some necessary motor skills, and weirdly they’ve really improved my self-esteem. I don’t feel the need to defend movies—they’ve finally been allowed into the pantheon of culturally redeeming media by the reactionary snob patrol.
I agree with Carol Lloyd-–while the idea of the female-only trains and buses that have been built in Mexico City and Japan in response to the amount of harassment women get on the integrated trains frustrates my non-segregationist heart, it would be hard to pass up the female-only bus if given a choice in an atmosphere where I know that groping is on the way. It’s interesting and not just a little bit disturbing that the fear of being accused of hating all men puts a lot of women in a situation where they feel they have to be sexually assaulted in order to prove they don’t. But it’s not “all men” that’s the issue here—a few bad apples will ruin the bunch in closed quarters. The men who don’t grope are only as guilty as the women who allow it to happen in front of them.
I trust that the cities that have instituted this policy are doing so in reaction to a real problem. I’ve never been harassed on a crowded bus or train, but then again, I don’t ride them daily. But I have generally noticed that cities I’ve traveled to where there’s a lot of public transit (and therefore a lot more people on the sidewalk) are places where I don’t get hollered at on the street as much, either. You could probably make a formula up—the less people on the street around me, the likelihood someone will yell something from a moving vehicle. Harassers like to have the semblance of privacy before they act, to make the abuse seem unwitnessed in a world where men’s word is taken above women’s as a matter of routine.
Nonetheless, I’ve been to a lot of rock concerts and know that there’s a point where crowdedness creates the sense of witness-less that encourages some men to grope. At which point the likelihood that it happens to you is entirely dependent on whether or not the groper thinks you’ll fight back or be believed if you complain. I’ve seen what happens to rock concert gropers in Austin enough to see why it doesn’t happen often. But in other cities, it’s more of an issue. I can see that if women don’t have much recourse in Tokyo or Mexico City that groping would get really out of control.
Thoughts? It’s obvious that female-only trains in cities where groping is a massive problem are a “Band-Aid solution”, but that sure doesn’t mean we should let women suffer on a daily basis until there’s a complete cultural overhaul that gets men to stop harassing of their own accord. The letters at Salon were mostly hostile ones from men who probably resent any intrusion on their “right” to engage in acts of minor acts of sexual assault, but one letter writer makes the good point that women-only trains might make such men justify groping women on integrated trains.
what if you choose not to ride the women’s only cars?
will that be interpreted as “wow, she must be asking for a groping?”
this is why I’m leery of segregation. part of why.
Foot tattoos: Morally offensive?
Ampersand links to this interesting article by Steven Pinker about how there’s five moral themes that seem to exist cross-culture, and might be biologically “programmed”. (I hate the word “programmed”, even if there’s a legitimate reason to think something is inborn to us. It implies both that the tendency is not malleable and that the culture-specific manifestations are somehow inborn. There’s a bit of Pinker’s eagerness to overdo the “programming” talk in this article, but it’s not too bad.) This particular article avoids generalizing the specifics to our culture by making it clear what is considered “immoral” is extremely flexible, even if the way that it’s understood stays the same—people have emotional rejections of the immoral act and then rationalize it, instead of reasoning about it. The examples in the story are culture-specific, but mostly because they need to be for the reader to understand.
Ampersand drew up short when he read this one example of how the five moral categories manifest in our culture.
The exact number of themes depends on whether you’re a lumper or a splitter, but Haidt counts five — harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity — and suggests that they are the primary colors of our moral sense. Not only do they keep reappearing in cross-cultural surveys, but each one tugs on the moral intuitions of people in our own culture. Haidt asks us to consider how much money someone would have to pay us to do hypothetical acts like the following:
Stick a pin into your palm.
Stick a pin into the palm of a child you don’t know. (Harm.)Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it at no charge because of a computer error.
Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it from a thief who had stolen it from a wealthy family. (Fairness.)Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in your nation.
Say something bad about your nation (which you don’t believe) on a talk-radio show in a foreign nation. (Community.)Slap a friend in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit.
Slap your minister in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit. (Authority.)Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like idiots for 30 minutes, including flubbing simple problems and falling down on stage.
Attend a performance-art piece in which the actors act like animals for 30 minutes, including crawling around naked and urinating on stage. (Purity.)In each pair, the second action feels far more repugnant.
I love my retirement plan!
Why women who kiss the asses of sexist men are being played for fools, Exhibit #1: They are happy with your pleasant squawking, but ultimately see you as an ambulatory uterus. Megan McArdle is here getting scolded by Rod Dreher for committing the ultimate crime of having a uterus in a white woman’s body that is currently not filled. He’s not exactly subtle with his scolding—every white woman refusing to do her duty to the reich society is going to die alone and unloved. As Roy notes, the threats of being alone and unloved are a favorite tactic of culture warriors trying to bully the rest of us into following their paranoid values system. On the alone and unloved front, I have to point out, with as much tact as I can muster, that while Rod Dreher and Phillip Longman, who he quotes extensively, might be in a situation where they have to make people to get anyone to care about them, their dilemma is not shared by the entire nation. Many people are able to get friends and loved ones on a volunteer basis, even. The “no one will love you” threat has been way overplayed on the right, by the way. It’s the favorite to bully teenage girls into remaining virgins, and is easily disproved time and time again. Gay marriage has become such a central issue but all but the most dedicated homophobes will carry on about how “choosing” homosexuality is a surefire ticket to the “no one will love you” zone. I suspect that even though no one would accuse McArdle of being a deep thinker, she’s not going to say, “Oh my god, no one will love me! Off to the sperm bank I go!” Which Dreher would probably disapprove of anyway—it’s not a real baby unless it’s tied to traditional, i.e. male-dominated, marriage.
So I’m reading this article about home film distribution on Salon, and the reviewer, Andrew O’Hehir, mentions “The Business of Being Born” as a primary example of a film that’s seen most of its business through Netflix, and then proffers the most defensive review of a movie I think I’ve ever seen. Most of the language is a (probably futile) attempt to plead with people to simply read the damn review as a review instead of spin off into defensive posturing about how they are Not Bad People because they went with hospital births instead of midwives. I’d quote part of the review to show you how defensive it, but every sentence in it is about driving home the thesis, “Just because you personally gave birth in a hospital doesn’t mean you have to flip out and shut down every discussion of alternatives for fear that you’ll conclude that you made the wrong choice, thereby destroying your last attachment to any hope of self-esteem.”
Reading Anne Applebaum’s standard issue “the pointy-headed, white, liberal, middle class, self-absorbed feminists don’t care about women in the Middle East” routine a few days ago juxtaposed with a recent Bitch magazine article about the resurgence of the Jewish American Princess stereotype got my mind moving, but ever so slowly because it only occurred to me today what’s largely going on here with this particular feminist scapegoating. You know how the right has transformed a lot of anti-semitic stereotypes onto the more diffuse category “liberals”, because it’s both bad news to be openly anti-semitic nowadays (though more openly anti-black or anti-Muslim is still okay, apparently) and because these stereotypes were just too juicy to give up completely? Now we don’t have as much talk about Hollywood Jews, but there’s still plenty of crap you’ll hear about the Hollywood liberal set. The War On Christmas nonsense is about transferring a traditional slur against Jews onto this vague group called “secularists”. And it occurred to me that the favorite right wing myth about how feminists are supposedly all overprivileged spoiled brats is an update to the Jewish American Princess stereotype. Replace Prada, Chanel, and Lexus with reproductive rights, equality in the workplace, and anti-rape activism, and you have the 21st century version of an old slur. You don’t hear the words “boutique cause” attached to feminism for just random reasons. The baffling amount of “Sex and the City” references in right wing screeds against feminism is no accident, either.
Of course, there’s two major things that are accomplished with this stereotype. The first is that it erases the diversity of feminism. The implication in all these right wing rants about how “the feminists” don’t care about Muslim women implies a) that Muslim feminists don’t exist and b) that if they did they’d so want Americans to throw bombs at their houses. The first is ridiculous and the second even more so.
The second major thing, of course, is to minimize the importance of things like equality in the workplace, reproductive rights, etc. But of course, reproductive rights and equal opportunity at work are not boutique issues only relevant to a handful of overprivileged white women at all. In fact, said overprivileged white women are the ones who’ll probably be the least affected by things like abortion bans, and are least affected by sexism in the workplace now. The easy acceptance of lady lawyers, writers, etc. on the right shows amply how sexism in the workplace is much more of a concern to women living paycheck to paycheck, and could really use the 25% difference between their average paycheck and a man’s average paycheck. Reproductive justice is an annoyance issue to women with privileges; ban abortion in Texas, and I’ll just fly to New York if I need one, for instance. I’d rather not, of course, but I’ll live if I have to. But for women who don’t have the means to do that, the lack of access can be a life or death issue, and not just in terms of what you need to get an illegal abortion, but also just in terms of getting by in your daily life. Rape and domestic violence suck no matter who you are, but they suck 15 times harder if you don’t have the resources you need to escape or heal or get justice. See this post by Shark-Fu about the Pretty Bird Woman House that serves the Standing Rock Indian Reservation for a very good example of how these issues become even more important for women who are certainly lacking in these boutique privileges.
It’s kind of interesting to see how these hoary old anti-semitic stereotypes are being revised and renewed. In the past, they existed to excuse oppression of Jews, of course, but now that’s less of a prominent right wing hobby horse. So instead, they’re being revised in a way that’s two steps removed from the real targets—the poor and people of color mainly—but still that’s the end goal and end target of this nastiness.
In my post below, I suggest that Laura Session Stepp’s determination that college girls by and large want to stop having sex and go on chaste, quite possibly chaperoned dates, is based on some very flawed evidence. The evidence? Four out of five college women will raise their hands when asked if they want a return to “dating” (i.e. going on dates without the possibility of sex during the evening) after hearing a hard sell about how the only way you’ll avoid dying a lonely old cat lady is by “dating” the way Stepp prescribes. Since, by the time the question is asked, it’s clear that, “Do you want a return to dating?” means, “Do you want to have love and happiness within this lifetime?”, the only option in a group pressure situation is to raise your hand and affirm that you do not have a freakish desire to die a lonely old cat lady, even if you may have objections to the bullshit about how ladies without hymens never find true love.
I find the use of group pressure dynamics in the anti-choice movement to be fascinating. The Dark Avenger sent me this link about the inefficacy of virginity pledges, which is mainly information we already knew. (The kids who take them rarely follow through, etc.) But I found this particular bit of information quite telling:
More brilliance from the Passive Aggressive Notes blog.
Cary Tennis, in an effort to find and give the worst advice possible, has managed to give passive aggression an even worse reputation than it already has. Today’s letter-writer has a rude boyfriend who ogles other women in front of her in a really obvious manner, though it’s unclear if he does it because he’s trying to humiliate her or if he just thinks she’s stupid. It doesn’t matter, really, because Cary Tennis proposes that she react to this rudeness not by calling it out but by participating in her own humiliation by first joining in with the boyfriend, offering ratings of women, and analyzing women who catch his eye so she can properly lower her self-esteem by dwelling on her inadequacies. Cary seems to be a bit cheeky with this—he seems to think there’s a good chance that the first time this woman calls her boyfriend out by participating in the ogling of women, he’ll be so embarrassed as to cut it out—but he seems to be holding out hope that the woman and her boyfriend can participate together in this girlfriend-humiliating ritual and bond over it. I’m not so sure.
Of course, there are those who will immediately take this to mean that I Hate Men and that I’m saying the Looking Is Wrong, and I’m not. I’m saying that it’s not really very polite to rub your lover’s nose in your lust for others and try to make him or her jealous.
It’s worth noting, too, that it’s possible that she’s just over-reacting and her boyfriend is trying to be discreet about looking. But assuming that her anxiety has a genuine cause in a boyfriend who rudely ogles women in front of her, he does have a respect issue.
But not only is the passive aggressive approach that Cary is advising wrong, it’s also bad passive aggression, as was noted in the thread at Feministe. Passive aggression is an art form, albeit an emotionally unhealthy one. If you are satirizing someone’s behavior to him, you have to do it in a way that he can’t call you out without digging a hole for himself, and playing the victim to his humiliations is a weak way to do it. This letter-writer at Salon knows how to play this game much better:
Warning: Tomboyish joy is atypical.
Um, Feminism Friday post on Saturday. Enjoy!
So, Salon has this article up about a new wedding trend of “trashing the dress”, which is, like 95% of wedding traditions, mostly another photo opportunity.* Still, the writer Izzy Grinspan painted the new tradition as being a rebellion of sorts against the all-important wedding dress, which you’re not only supposed to spend a fortune on, but then you’re supposed to preserve in expensive storage for no discernible reason. It’s not like you’re going to wear it for your next wedding, right?
Well, I got all excited at the idea of new brides taking their dresses out and destroying them photogenically. I had mental images of women tossing fluffy white dresses on bonfires or spray-painting them. I hoped that at least one picture on this Trash The Dress website would show someone taking her dress out to the range and riddling it full of bullets. I set my hopes way, way too high. Mostly, “trashing the dress” is just another paean to femininity, and the pictures show the women in the dress, lolling around looking fuckable. The dress is trashed both by getting wet and having someone vamp in it, just screwing with the iconic virginity of the whole thing.
Black Looks: Public Sector Strikes in Africa: Any Subversive Elements?
Women’s Experiences of Abuse as a Risk Factor for Incarceration.
Professor Black Woman has to deal with the racist stupid. (Hat tip: Shannon.)
I thought this was satire. Apparently, it isn’t. Maybe we can get MB to give her a new, “Most Unintentionally Funny Blog Post” award or something?
Shark-fu posts on the recent dustup between Brownback and Romney, and the uncomfortable reality for many conservatives that no, actually, not everyone’s Christian faith similar or palatable to others.
Psuedo Adrienne blogs about the stakes for Moroccan women in the upcoming parliamentary elections.
Public sector workers in Israel may have to strike to get decent pay.
Finally, I know I’m an anti-consumerist pinko, but wow. These folks put me to shame. Then again, I don’t think I’d get such a sweet haul in the dumpsters in my neighborhood, which is definitely not affluent. You’ll find no working iPods tossed away.
Yeah, Sheelzebub, Auguste can play that game too
————
Yes, yes, Laura Mallory, we all see you there.
A suburban Atlanta judge on Monday upheld the decision of Georgia school officials to keep the best-selling Harry
Potter books in Gwinnett County school libraries…Afterward, Mallory said she may take her case to federal court.
Mallory has tried to ban the books from Gwinnett County school library shelves since August 2005. She says she has never read any book in the series but says they are an attempt to indoctrinate children in witchcraft.
The story has been done to death - Mallory’s been contesting this since 2005 - but I found one little nugget tucked away in one little corner of one little story from last October:
Though neither a literary critic nor religious scholar, the impassioned mother of four informed Gwinnett County’s Board of Education Tuesday that the best selling children’s books are in fact an “evil” attempt to indoctrinate children in Wicca religion…In June, the county’s library board cut $3,000 allocated for Spanish-language fiction, after some residents objected to spending tax dollars entertaining possible illegal immigrants.
Zuzu linked this article by Patricia Cohen at the NY Times about the capitalist excess known as the wedding-industrial complex. Social competitiveness of the sort that’s sprung up around weddings and having children is a capitalist wet dream, because there’s no top limit on how much money can be spent besting your friends in neighbors. Your best friend had a $4,000 wedding gown and a $1,000 stroller? Show everyone you love your husband and baby even more—get that $5,000 wedding dress and $1,500 stroller. It’s a stock market of show-offiness.
Still, the rapid growth of the wedding-industrial complex—according to the article, the average price tag for a wedding stands at $27,000 a pop—begs for another explanation besides market pressures, because it’s not like capitalism is a new thing, but the new levels of wedding insanity kind of is. The expert, Rebecca Mead, that Cohen speaks to has a theory about this:
“Getting married is still a big thing, but the transition is not the traumatic thing that it used to be,� she said. “I think there is a way in which the trauma of the wedding planning is substituting for the trauma of the newlywed. People feel they have to go through some type of traumatic experience to show that they’re married, to show that there is something different about them.�
Intriguing theory, but I have my doubts. Her generalized use of the word “people” set off my alarm bells, because, as the rest of the article makes clear, the trauma and stress of weddings is a trauma for women. That a handful of men magnanimously take on some of the burden of the wedding planning doesn’t mean that’s the general trend. The escalating pressure to have a huge, perfect wedding is really the pressure to be a perfect bride. As evidence for this, just look at what Cohen and Mead encounter at the huge event where wedding peddlers push their wares—the Bridal Expo. (Note: That’s Bridal Expo, not Wedding Expo. The industry doesn’t bother with the illusion that men are involved in weddings much besides showing up and writing checks.)
Will we see these home-grown suspects called potential domestic terrorists? These weren’t just people with grandiose thoughts — these militia crazies were caught with grenades, rocket launchers and a ton of ammo.
Oh wait, they’re not brown people of that “other” faith. Can you imagine the reaction if they were Arab or Muslim? From the Birmingham News, this just goes to show you that we have to worry about the armed and dangerous enemy within. This is f*cking scary:
Simultaneous raids carried out in four Alabama counties Thursday turned up truckloads of explosives and weapons, including 130 grenades, an improvised rocket launcher and 2,500 rounds of ammunition belonging to the small, but mightily armed, Alabama Free Militia.At the Hughes home, officials found 100 improvised hand grenades, 70 improvised hand grenades fired from the 37 mm rocket launch, a submachine gun and two silencers.Six alleged members of the Free Militia also were arrested by federal authorities and are being held without bond.
Investigators said the DeKalb County-based group had not made any specific threats or devised any plots, but was targeted for swift dismantling because of its heavy firepower. The militia, which called itself the Naval Militia at one point, had enough armament to outfit a small army.
… “We classify these groups as violent and anti-government,” said Jim Cavanaugh, who supervises the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives operations in portions of the South. “They stockpile things and live off a fear, a paranoia they’re going to need weapons and explosives because some event is going to happen when they will need them.”
…Agents encountered booby traps at one site. They found trip wires and two hand grenades rigged as booby traps at the Collinsville camper home of 46-year-old Raymond Dillard, who holds titles of both militia major and fugitive from justice on an unrelated federal case in Mobile.
“We were prepared,” Cavanaugh said. “We suspect booby traps with these types of groups.”
Arrested and detained in federal custody were Dillard, also known as Jeff Osborne, 46, of Collinsville; Adam Lynn Cunningham, 41, of Collinsville; Bonnell Hughes, 57, of Crossville; Randall Garrett Cole, 22, of Gadsden; James Ray McElroy, 20, of Collinsville; and Michael Wayne Bobo, 30, of Trussville.
Here are the all-American faces of potential terrorism: Dillard, McElroy, Cole, Hughes, Cunningham. More photos here.
God Bless America.
There’s no need to post news wires, since this awful story is all over. A chilling article in the Baltimore Sun is definitely worth the click — ‘I don’t think my teacher got out‘.
[Virginia Tech junior Richard] Mallalieu said his professor “held the door shut” while several students darted to the windows. Some climbed up on desks, ledges and a radiator cover to pull the screens down and kick at the metal-framed glass. Three windows easily gave way and swung open on hinges as the gunshots got louder.There’s already much discussion about gun rights, gun control, the response of the school administration and security to the initial shootings, who’s right, who’s wrong. The bottom line is that there is little that can be done to prevent a tragedy like this from occurring again, mostly because no one will agree on what action to take, given the heated nature about guns and rights. The demand to put adequately trained security and more effective emergency policies in place will be met by some schools and not others.Closer.
“It sounded like he was going out into the hallway,” said Mallalieu, a civil engineering major. Once the windows of the second-floor classroom were open, Mallalieu and most of his classmates hung out of them and dropped about 10 to 15 feet to bushes and grass below, he said. Some students ran immediately to a nearby building. Others waited to help students who were injured by the fall, Mallalieu said.
But then the sound of gunfire filled the classroom they had just fled, sending the rest who had escaped running about 30 yards to Patton Hall, he added.
“I don’t think my teacher got out,” Mallalieu said.
Eventually, we will have to come to the realization that if someone is determined enough they will find a way around those measures to commit violence on a large scale in places we believe (or are led to believe) are secure or safe.
Look at the terror alert chart or the TSA inspection of your shampoo in quart-sized baggies. Do you feel really safer?
Part of the illusion or fantasy is that we have to believe these tragedies happen elsewhere or else everyone will be in lockdown.
***
And this filth is incredible. The Rotting Cryptkeeper and his family are going to show up at the funerals of those killed. No, I’m not linking (h/t Kelli):
WBC to Preach at Funerals of Virginia Tech DeadWBC will preach at the funerals of the Virginia Tech students killed on campus during a shooting rampage April 16, 2007. You describe this as monumental horror, but you know nothing of horror — yet. Your bloody tyrant Bush says he is ‘horrified’ by it all. You know nothing of horror — yet. Your true horror is coming. “They shall also gird themselves with sackloth, and horror shall cover them; and shame shall be upon all faces, and baldness upon all their heads” (Eze. 7:18).
Why did this happen, you ask? It’s simple. Your military chose to shoot at the servants of God today, and all they got for their effort was terror. Then, the LORD your God sent a crazed madman to shoot at your children. Was God asleep while this took place? Was He on vacation? Of course not. He willed this to happen to punish you for assailing His servants.
