Suggested by Shaker summerwing: If you could go back in time and talk to your ten-year-old self, what would you say? How do you think the entire conversation would go?
I would say: "There are going to be some tough times ahead, but I promise you that you're going to be okay."
I imagine my 10-year-old self would react pretty much the same as I would now if my 60-year-old self suddenly showed up to have a chat: "WTF? OMG. LOL! And zounds! But, you know, awesome. Totally awesome."
And we'd marvel that I apparently never grow out of spilling soup on my shirt.
Question of the Day
Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"
See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman and a biracial queerbait telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
Fox doesn't love Cool James
So Sarah Palin has this show on Fox coming up called Real American Stories, which, according to this article, is about "people who have overcome adversity" and the guests include(d):
Among the success stories Palin plans to highlight are those of country music star Toby Keith, former GE Chairman Jack Welch, and a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. LL Cool J (birth name James Todd Smith) was also included in the roster ...They even put out a promo video showing LL Cool J's interview.
Problem was, well, as LL Cool J tweeted:
"Fox lifted an old interview I gave in 2008 to someone else & are misrepresenting to the public in order to promote Sarah Palins Show. WOW"Fox, classy as always, responded with:
"Real American Stories features uplifting tales about overcoming adversity and we believe Mr. Smith's interview fit that criteria. However, as it appears that Mr. Smith does not want to be associated with a program that could serve as an inspiration to others, we are cutting his interview from the special and wish him the best with his fledgling acting career."Yes, that's it. LL Cool J doesn't want to be associated with inspiration. You got him there!
And, as NPR wryly added in its article:
And as for his "fledgling acting career," the CBS-TV show he stars in -- NCIS Los Angeles -- is only one of the most watched programs on TV, and a big hit for the network, you sanctimonious disingenuous asshats.Well, ok, NPR did not actually say the "you sanctimonious disingenuous asshats" bit (that was a slight embellishment on my part) but they totally should have.
Thoughts on Gamer Culture, Rape Culture and CNN
by Shaker Scott Madin
[Trigger warning for discussion of video games which simulate rape and violence.]
I've got video games on my mind lately — as some of you have probably seen me talking about in comments, I was at the Penny Arcade Expo in Boston this past weekend — and I just wrote a mostly-positive post with some criticism and a dubiously clever pun for the title over at my blog, about gamer culture in general and one panel at the Expo in particular.
This post is much less positive, and I'm also much less certain, ultimately, what should be done to try to fix the problems I'm talking about.
Many of y'all probably remember previous discussion, both here (Rape For Sale, Looking for Rape Products? Try Amazon., From the Mailbag for 2009-08-17) and at many other blogs over the past several years, of a Japanese computer game called RapeLay, the genre of hentai (lit. "pervert"/"perverted") games, and the subgenre of rape-focused hentai games to which it belongs.
CNN's Connect the World program has now run a story on the game, and its continuing availability through illicit channels despite its having been pulled from production and removed from retail. The video from that link is embedded below the fold; CNN doesn't appear to have a transcript available, so I've included one at the end of the post.
CNN's Eve Bower also has a post on the Connect the World blog which brings up some additional issues, and related context from recent news in other countries — Iceland's recent vote to ban strip clubs on the grounds that they're degrading to women, and a women's rights advocate in China arguing for the repeal of laws against obscene material.
There are a lot of issues involved here. In particular, I'd like to talk about not only CNN's coverage, which tries to highlight how disturbing the subject matter is but also falls into the "journalistic balance" trap of making sure to find a woman who says she's not offended by the game (as though "offense," rather than the harm to all women — indeed, all people — that the perpetuation of rape culture represents, were the issue), but also whether legislation is a viable way to address the problem games like this represent, and what the existence of games like this says about game culture and games as a medium. I'm going to sketch some of my thoughts, but I'm especially interested in having a discussion and hearing Shakers' ideas.
The content of RapeLay and other games like it is clearly indefensible. The question is, what, if anything, can effectively be done about it? Most experience seems to indicate that banning something for which there's a market, no matter how bad the thing is, doesn't really work to prevent people who want the thing from acquiring it, and in this case that also seems to be true: RapeLay isn't available for sale through any legitimate retailers, but people who want to play it can still get it easily. And I worry that it will be difficult to implement laws which target only material like RapeLay and its ilk without also potentially — depending on the views of the particular people executing the laws at whichever particular point in time — catching in the same net subject matter that has traditionally been wrongly deemed objectionable (e.g. gay characters).
The CNN report fails, I think, to make it clear that neither sexual violence nor sexual activity with female characters who look extremely young are universal features of hentai games, for example. And if outright bans not only may have overbroad effects, but also probably won't prevent dissemination of the games, what's the use of enacting them, especially when developers of rape games could simply work in another country, and distribute their products over the internet.
To make the probably-obvious analogy to illegal drugs, prohibition and cracking down on supply just hasn't worked, because demand is still present; prohibition + demand merely creates a black market.
And, unlike hentai games, illegal drugs are physical objects that need to be transported, causing logistical problems that don't exist when the product is strictly virtual and distribution is effectively both free and instantaneous. Surely prohibition on digital material won't even work as well as the prohibition on illegal drugs — a notoriously dismal failure — anyway.
Now, obviously I don't want these games to be on the shelves, or available on the Internet. Nothing about them makes the world a better place. They are a self-perpetuating component of the rape culture, which, if not demonstrably a cause of actual rapes, are nonetheless the sort of symptom that itself contributes to the exacerbation of the disease. It is only in a rape culture that anyone would think to create games like these, and anyone would want to buy them — and though the rape culture would find other avenues of expression, as it always has and still does, if these games did not exist, they, as well as those other avenues, nonetheless contribute to the continuing mainstreaming and normalization of rape culture's basic idea of women and girls as sexual objects and as things (I use the term advisedly) to be despised.
Where, then, do we start: How can we prevent dissemination of harmful games like this when the pervasiveness of rape culture means there's a continuing demand for them, or how can we work to undermine the rape culture that creates the demand for games like this, when their existence, and indeed the ubiquity of expressions of rape culture in every medium, itself perpetuates and normalizes rape culture? How many people, like Kibble and Gardner, seek out things like this because they're curious, but through exposure become desensitized and come to think of them as normal?
Another issue brought up in the CNN story and blog post is the comparison with non-sexual violence in many games. Most Americans (and probably many other cultures, but I can't speak for them) reflexively think that graphic, bloody depictions of non-sexual violence are less problematic (even, frequently, unproblematically entertaining!) than graphic depictions of sexual violence.
Many of the games I enjoy playing involve a lot of killing — some, like Gears of War, extremely graphically: One of the things many fans love about Gears is the ability to cut enemies in half with a chainsaw attached to the barrel of your gun. Extreme discomfort (to put it mildly) is, I think, self-evidently the appropriate response to something as reprehensible as RapeLay, but doesn't that throw into question the ubiquity of violence as such in our sources of entertainment?
What does it say about gamers — what does it say about me — that I'm totally comfortable with the idea that, in a game like Resident Evil 4, I can shoot my enemies in the head and see their heads explode in a spray of gore, that I only started to have a problem with it when that extreme violence was overlaid with blatant racist, colonialist, genocidal imagery? What does it say about gamer culture (and the larger society in which it's embedded) that we think detailed, interactive representations of violent, gory murder are fine, and there's controversy over whether we should draw the line at rape and genocide? Nothing good, I fear.
I don't think violent games should be banned (irrespective of whether that would ever work, anyway). But I think that gamers, whose reputation for not being very self-aware or introspective is not entirely undeserved, need to look more critically at why so many of us find vicariously committing countless murders to be so much fun.
One line of questioning that comes to mind is: Does shooting someone constitute the same denial of their personhood as raping someone does? How does the difference in intimacy level factor into this?
On the one hand, it seems, rationally, as though the necessary closeness and the fact that most rapists are acquainted with their victims, while a murderer with a gun can kill someone they've never seen before from far enough away not to see their face or hear their voice, would argue for killing as more depersonalizing; but on the other, if rationality entered into it we wouldn't need to have this discussion.
Certainly in some cases, serial killers do adopt a "predator" mentality, and a view of their victims as Other, subhuman, prey; but I know of few if any video games which cast the player in such a role. Another point here, of course, is that in games where the player shoots people, those people shoot back (or attack in some way): they're active opponents, a threat to the player*. In other words, they have agency, which is a sharp contrast to the victim characters in games like RapeLay, and supports the idea that casting the player as a rapist is more dehumanizing to the victim characters than casting the player as a killer.
I don't really have any conclusions, and I've left a lot of issues involved in this story unaddressed, but I'm sure they'll come up in comments. I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, both in general and in the context of this story and my experiences at PAX, about what a hypothetical society free of oppressive hierarchies would be like. I don't think we can really know, because our experience is so molded by those oppressive hierarchies, no matter where each of us stands in them; but we can see what our society is like, and perhaps extrapolate from that some things that a non-hierarchical society might not look like. And in particular, I think its forms of entertainment wouldn't look much like ours at all.
[Update: Sady Doyle, proprietor of such fine blogs as The Tiger Beatdown, also has a post on RapeLay at Broadsheet, and I always encourage everyone to read Sady's writing.]
*There was a notable exception to this recently, the "No Russian" level in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Shaker Nolittlelolita had an excellent post on it, over at Hysterical Broads, but the gist is that your character, an American agent, is undercover in a Russian terrorist cell and must participate in a terrorist attack on an airport, indiscriminately killing civilians. The level caused a great deal of controversy, possibly even more than Resident Evil 5 did.
----------------------------------------
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
[Title: This report includes graphic content. Viewer discretion is advised.]
[Shot of busy street in Akihabara]
Voiceover: The heart of Japan's electronics district. The world's games of tomorrow, on sale today.
[Shot of software boxes on shelves]
VO: On shelves in mainstream stores, plenty of what's known here as "Hentai games." Almost all feature girlish-looking characters; some are violent, depicting rape, torture and bondage in detail. It didn't take long to find a game where the object is revenge: find and rape the woman who fired the player from his imaginary job.
[Parts of screenshots from the game, depicting women in distress and/or tied up. Background sound effects of a woman moeaning as if in distress.]
VO: Most of this game we cannot show you.
[Shot of shopper holding game boxes whose covers are blurred out.]
Hentai games are not new for Japan. This country has long produced products the rest of the world would call pornographic,
[Shot of street again.]
but before the Internet shrunk the world, it stayed here.
[Shot of hands typing on a keyboard.]
VO: A quick web search generates hundreds of Japanese games.
[Shot of Google results, apparently for search terms "rape game free".]
[Shot of shopper picking up games from a store shelf.]
VO: Once a game goes on sale in Tokyo,
[Shot of Google video results, apparently for search term "rapelay".]
VO: it's digitized and shared everywhere.
[Footage from RapeLay of a woman standing on a subway platform. During the following narration some of the possible actions are demonstrated in the game footage.]
VO: This one, called RapeLay, begins with a teenage girl on a subway platform. With a click of your mouse, you can grope her, and lift her skirt. You, the player, stalk her, her sister, and her mother, following them on the train.
[Shot of reporter Kyung Lah in front of computer with RapeLay on the screen.]
Lah: What follows is a series of graphic, interactive scenes that we can't show you. Players can corner the women to rape them again and again, and it goes on from there.
[Footage from RapeLay.]
VO: The game infuriated women's rights groups.
[Shot of Taina Bien-Aime, Executive Director of Equality Now.]
Bien-Aime: These sort of games that normalize extreme sexual violence against women and girls have really no place in our communities.
[Footage from RapeLay.]
VO: International outrage led the Japanese developer to pull the RapeLay game from stores last year.
[Shot of YouTube search results for clips from RapeLay.]
VO: But that didn't stop its spread. In fact, the controversy took it viral.
[Shot of laptop screen; Lah is video chatting with a young couple in Britain.]
VO: That's how Lucy Kibble and Jim Gardner in England heard about and downloaded the game,
[Shot of Google results, apparently for search terms "rape game free".]
[Shot of Lah sitting at laptop, talking with Kibble and Gardner.]
VO: As they told me over Skype.
[Shot of laptop screen.]
Lucy Kibble: Just the fact it was a controversial subject, and I wanted to try it, really, just to see what it was all about.
[Shots of game store and streets in Akihabara.]
VO: That global availability is why international women's rights group say Japan needs to regulate game makers better, stopping creation of certain content.
[Shot of Taina Bien-Aime, then of YouTube videos from RapeLay.]
Bien-Aime: What we are calling for, though, is that the Japanese government ban all games that promote and simulate sexual violence, sexual torture, stalking, and rape against women and girls, and there are plenty of games like that.
[Shot of Japanese flag, pulling out to show Lah walking down the street.]
Lah: How sensitive is Japan to this issue? Despite weeks of repeated calls to the government, not a single government official would speak to CNN on camera. They wouldn't even make a statement on paper. Over the phone, one official who would not allow us to use her name said that the government realizes these games are a problem, and it is checking to see whether self-policing by the gaming industry is enough.
[Screenshots and footage from games Chain Trap and RapeLay.]
VO: Sexual images are subject to censorship in Japan. For example, in the RapeLay game, genitalia are obscured. But Japan does not have laws that restrict video game themes.
[Shot of laptop screen showing Skype call with Kibble and Gardner.]
Lah: Did you feel offended, as a woman?
Kibble: No, not at all.
[Shot of YouTube videos.]
VO: Lucy and Jim point out it is easy to find shoot-'em-up games, which no one seems to worry about.
[Shot of laptop screen.]
Kibble: It's escapism, that's why people play it.
Jim Gardner: The idea of banning it, or telling people what they can and can't do, just because — on the off chance some kid might get involved in it, is just ridiculous.
[Footage of RapeLay.]
VO: But women's rights groups say the interactive games step closer and closer to reality, and no one should play a game where the only way to win, is to rape. Kyung Lah, CNN, Tokyo.
No.
I have no opinion on Sandra Bullock's and Jesse James's marriage, or its collapse, or its survival, or any of the incidents that have led to a rumored divorce—and I will continue to have no opinion on these subjects.
However, I do feel compelled to acknowledge Jesse James' apparent fascination with (or tolerance for, or whatever description would be appropriate) white supremacy and its practitioners, just long enough that I might say: No.
Donning an SS cap while doing the Nazi salute and miming Hitler's mustache is not "a joke," it is not "funny," and it not awesome or clever or edgy to pose for a picture au Nazi for the "shock value."
I can't believe this is a post I need to write.
Wednesday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, makers of Spudsy's ScooterToots, the bite-sized snack for scooter aficionados on the go.
Recommended Reading:
Andy: Sinead O'Connor, Thomas Roberts, and Bill Donohue Appear on Larry King to Discuss Catholic Clergy Sexual Abuse Epidemic (I. Fucking. Hate. Bill. Donohue.)
Resistance: As Seen by the Census
Chally: Keeping Up Appearances
Tami: Social Capital and Denying the Pain of Black Women
Angry Asian Man: M. Night Shyamalan Talks Last Airbender and "Diversity"
Ellen: Secretary of State Clinton Calls it Like it Is on Reducing Maternal Mortality
Leave your links in comments...
Quote of the Day
"Look I eat really well and I work out, but I also indulge when I want to. I don't starve myself in an extremist way. You're not taking away my coffee or my dairy or my glass of wine because I'd be devastated. My advice: just stop eating shit every day."—Jennifer Aniston, in the May issue of Harper's Bazaar UK, on her beauty secrets. [Via.]
Leaving aside the awesome display of privilege in admonishing people just to "stop eating shit," I'd love to know how one starves oneself in a moderate way.
Never Let You Go. NEVARRRRRR!!!
[Trigger warning.]
[Lyrics available here; description of video within post.
Above is the new video from teen bangs sensation, Justin Bieber, for his single, "Never Let You Go," which is a totes perfect song for a 16-year-old-who-looks-like-an-11-year-old to be singing, you guys, because, as everyone knows, the best age for finding your eternal soul mate is about 13 and a half.
I mean, this song is just great: Not only does it pay homage to
And, ZOMG, howsabout that awesome video, in which Bieber (a white boy) and his love interest (played by Paige Hurd, a young woman of color) fall in love while frolicking "in the catacombs of Bahamian aquariums … sharing near-kisses, touching and nuzzling…. Shots of the pair in silhouette holding hands play into the video's plot of two young teens falling in love in a very exotic locale."
You know what the best place to shoot a video of a white boy and a brown girl falling in love is…? An exotic locale.
I also appreciate how the video never really lingers on the girl's face, or gives us a glimpse of her emotional spectrum beyond "gazing admiringly and/or mysteriously" at her new white boyfriend. The denial of her autonomy and personhood really lets me
If Bieber Fever means repeatedly vomiting until you get an urge to hit yourself in the head with a tack hammer, I've got it! BIG TIME.
[Commenting Guidelines: Please note that the critique in this post does not include condemnation of Bieber as a person or an artist. Comments that present an argument based on an erroneous assertion that the post is criticizing Bieber personally, or his talent, will be considered off-topic. Comments that do criticize Bieber personally, or his talent, will also be considered off-topic. Also unwelcome is apologia that seeks to dismiss concerns about the problematic elements in this video by pointing out Bieber is not the only artist whose videos use these elements, or by ignoring that videos in which a female singer has a genericized love interest who's male, or a singer of color has a genericized love interest who's white, don't play into the same narratives that this video does.]
Lost Open Thread
Last night's episode will be discussed in infinitesimal detail, so if you haven't seen it, and don't want any spoilers, move along...
Shaker Thumbs
Hello, and welcome to Shaker Thumbs: Heirloom Legume Edition!
This post covers Rancho Gordo New World Specialty Food and Purcell Mountain Farms. Use the thread to discuss businesses, products, and services you like or dislike, so we can share in the wealth of your knowledge.
Magic beans: heirloom Vaquero beans from Rancho Gordo New World Specialty Food of Napa, California. Heirloom strains are those that are open-pollinating and have been carried from one generation to the next for more than 50 years. Read more about open pollination and heirloom crops.
In John Steinbeck's The Wayward Bus, bus driver and mechanic Juan Chicoy muses on the longevity of his contentious marriage:
Besides Alice was the only woman he had ever found outside of Mexico who could cook beans. A funny thing. Every little Indian in Mexico could cook beans properly and no one up here except Alice—just enough juice, just the right flavor of the bean without another flavor mixed up with it. Here they put tomatoes and chili and garlic and such things in the beans, and a bean should be cooked for itself, with itself, alone. Juan chuckled. "Because she can cook beans", he said to himself.I could write a whole post about how Steinbeck's love of Darwin (possibly gained from his buddy Ed Ricketts) emerges in The Wayward Bus as speculations in pop evolutionary psychology, and maybe someday I will. For now, though, I'll say that besides the vividness and economy of the writing, there are two great things about this book: the women are actual characters, not merely symbolic links between men. And Juan Chicoy is 100% right about beans.
(page 114 of the Penguin Twentieth Century Classics edition)
My parents are natural born Texans. They raised me in Steinbeck country (Santa Clara County, right next to Steinbeck's native San Benito County). My mother also spent the '60s living and teaching in Colombia. So throughout my childhood the big pressure-cooker my folks got as a wedding present was usually full of beans. Beans in our house meant pinto beans cooked for themselves, with themselves, alone. When I was hungry I would eat some cold straight out of the pot. My mother preferred her signature creation, the bean "foldover": a single piece of bread folded around a scoop of beans, plain or refried.
Steve Sando, founder of Rancho Gordo New World Specialty Food, says that "[y]ou can tell where someone is from by their attitude about beans," adding that "Californians and Southwesterners understand that you have a pot of beans like any other veg[.]" That is certainly true for me, and over the past few months, I've cooked Sando's beans according to his simple directions with nothing added but perhaps a bay leaf, a bit of sauteed onion and carrot, and a splash of vinegar at the very end.
I discovered Rancho Gordo on a search for dried posole for my sister. Now, posole is worthy of a whole other post, and I doubt I could write about it better than Calvin Trillin did in Gourmet in 2002. I will report, though, that Rancho Gordo's dried posole has a rich heady flavor and addictively chewy texture entirely unlike the waxy lumps you get in cans.
Rancho Gordo offers $8.95 flat rate shipping by UPS no matter how many pounds of food you buy, so when I got TheLadyEve's posole I added a bunch of beans too: Good Mother Stallard, Vaquero, Yellow Indian Woman, and Cargamanto. All I have left is the handful of vaqueros pictured above. Rancho Gordo is not cheap, but rest assured, these are no ordinary beans.
Because Rancho Gordo beans are never stored for more than a year, they are very fresh and require only a short soaking (4-6 hours); over-soaking can cause them to split during cooking. The varieties I tried all cooked in 1.5 to 2.5 hours, and all were dense, velvety, and fragrant.
Sando's Yellow Indian Woman beans impressed me so much that I went looking for a place that sells this heirloom variety in units larger than one pound. That's how I found Purcell Mountain Farms in Moyie Springs, Idaho. Purcell Mountain Farms partners with other farms to offer a wide selection of beans, lentils, dried fruit, and much more. Some of their beans are heirloom strains and some are organic; everything is clearly labeled. And you can buy many of their beans in 1-, 3-, 5-, or 10-lb quantities. The Yellow Indian Woman beans I got from Purcell Mountain farms are darker in color than Rancho Gordo's, and I have not cooked any yet, so I cannot compare the quality. However, the heirloom Rio Zape beans from PMF are absolutely the best beans I have ever made or tasted. (Rancho Gordo offers this variety as well.)
Purcell Mountain Farms ships in USPS flat-rate boxes; orders up to $25 ship for $9.99. So while PMF's prices are a bit lower than Rancho Gordo's, the shipping may be more, depending on how much you buy.
What I would recommend is to get a few friends together, put in a big order to Rancho Gordo or PMF (or both), and divide the goodies.
5-dollar-a-pound beans are steep compared with grocery store brands, but there is no comparison in flavor and texture. A pound of beans is about 10 servings, and they are a complete meal with a bit of rice, bread, or cornbread. You could dress them up with a sofrito/mirepoix cooked in bacon grease, or with a bit of sausage or roast chicken, but it's really not necessary. These beans make for luxurious vegan meals.
Share your recommendations and warnings in comments, folks. Your links need not be legume-related!
Previously in Shaker Thumbs: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six.
I'm So Excited I Just Bipartisaned in My Pants!
Obama to Open Offshore Areas to Oil Drilling for First Time:
The Obama administration is proposing to open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the first time, officials said Tuesday.The article notes that Obama has "staked out middle ground" on the environment with support for other bipartisan, ahem, energy policy, such as expanding nuclear power, and did use the occasion of his State of the Union address in January to prepare people for his support for offshore drilling, but nonetheless "the sheer breadth of the offshore drilling decision will take some of his supporters aback."
The proposal — a compromise that will please oil companies and domestic drilling advocates but anger some residents of affected states and many environmental organizations — would end a longstanding moratorium on oil exploration along the East Coast from the northern tip of Delaware to the central coast of Florida, covering 167 million acres of ocean.
...[T]he Interior Department will spend several years conducting geologic and environmental studies along the rest of the southern and central Atlantic Seaboard. If a tract is deemed suitable for development, it is listed for sale in a competitive bidding system. The next lease sales — if any are authorized by the Interior Department — would not be held before 2012.
Unintentionally hilarious understatement FTW!
Given that Obama did campaign on an openness to an energy policy that incorporated conservative/corporate preferences, and has already conceded to expand both nuclear power and offshore drilling, Steve notes that the real mystery here is "the administration's negotiating tactics. ... Obama has already effectively given Republicans what they wanted on energy. What is he getting in return?"
Excellent question. And here's another one: What are we getting in return?
We, the people, are trading some measure of safety for nuclear power, and we are trading some measure of environmental security for offshore drilling—and potentially delaying indefinitely the sustainability that our current energy infrastructure lacks. We, the people, might be better served if those government contracts were offered, say, to people wanting to put wind turbines offshore, instead of drills, and people whose technology could update our crumbling energy infrastructure and turn the US into a global leader in green power.
Obama needs to be orchestrating the energy equivalent of packing us all into the Apollo 11 and shooting for the moon. But he's packing us all into the backseat of an Edsel and driving us to Poopsburg.
I've already been to Poopsburg! I wanna go to the moooooooooon!
Free Speech Isn't Free - Update
Following up on my post from yesterday, Shaker chef007c informs us (as in Melissa who passed it on to me) via the comments that Bill O'Reilly has paid the legal costs for Mr. Snyder. Good for him, and I mean that sincerely.
As the commenter noted, Mr. Snyder will still have other legal costs to pay as he proceeds towards the Supreme Court, so I'm sure he'll continue to need our support.
ETA HT to Shaker chef007c.
Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker Skreee: What did you learn about yourself in the past year that surprised you, good or bad?
Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"
See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman and a biracial queerbait telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
Free Speech Isn't Free
Not being a lawyer I can't figure out the rightness of this ruling, but there it is.
Lawyers for the father of a Marine who died in Iraq and whose funeral was picketed by anti-gay protesters say a court has ordered him to pay the protesters' appeal costs.I get it that Phelps, being the defendant in the suit, has the right -- somehow -- to demand that his legal costs for the appeal be covered by the plaintiff. It's one of those things that makes our justice system so infuriating... and frequently unjust.
On Friday, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ordered that Albert Snyder of York, Pa., pay costs associated with Fred Phelps' appeal. Phelps is the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church, which conducted protests at the funeral of Snyder's son, Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, in Westminster in 2006.
Lawyers for Snyder say the Court of Appeals has ordered him to pay $16,510.80 to Phelps for costs relating to the appeal, despite the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review the Court of Appeals' decision.
They say that Snyder is also struggling to come up with fees associated with filing a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court.
"We are extremely disappointed," said Sean E. Summers, an attorney for Snyder. He added that the U.S. Supreme Court will likely hear the case during its October term and make a decision in June of next year.
"The Court of Appeals certainly could have waited until the Supreme Court made its decision," Summers added. "There was no hardship presented by Phelps."
Summers said there is no timetable for when the costs must be paid, but if his client doesn't have the money when Phelps requests payment the matter would go into collections. Snyder could lose his property or his wages, Summers said.
Summers added that if Snyder pays Phelps' court costs and then receives a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court, "imagine him trying to get money back from Phelps."
If you wish to contribute to the legal fund for Mr. Snyder, go here.
HT to Steve M.
From the You Can't Make This Shit Up Files
Professional Ding-a-ling Doc Thompson, subbing for Glenn Beck on his radio show today, claimed that the 10% tax on indoor tanning salons included in the healthcare bill to "disincentive the carcinogenic practice of indoor tanning" is actually racism "dropped at my front door and the front door of all lighter-skinned Americans."
I now too feel the pain of racism. Racism has been dropped at my front door and the front door of all lighter-skinned Americans. The health care bill the president just singed into law includes a 10% tax on all indoor tanning sessions starting July 1st, and I say, who uses tanning? Is it dark-skinned people? I don't think so. I would guess that most tanning sessions are from light-skinned Americans. Why would the President of the United Stats of America — a man who says he understands racism, a man who has been confronted with racism — why would he sign such a racist law? Why would he agree to do that? Well now I feel the pain of racism.Okay, this is wrong on about a thousand different levels, but the wrongness I love the most is that "light-skinned Americans" constitutes a specific race.
I get the feeling he was sort of smart enough to realize that there are light-skinned people of multiple races who use indoor tanning (though perhaps not smart enough to realize that there are dark-skinned people who use indoor tanning, too), so he didn't want to say "white people." Especially since he certainly knows that anyone ignorant enough to be listening to the Glenn Beck Show in the first place will naturally do his work for him and substitute "white people" right where it belongs, in order to get their grievance on.
Fine. We'll Just Increase Unemployment Then.
No one could have predicted that corporate America would act like greedy, belligerent shits:
An association representing 300 large corporations urged President Obama and Congress on Monday to repeal a provision of the health care overhaul that prompted AT&T, Caterpillar and other companies to announce substantial charges for the current quarter.Blah blah blah. Because if it's just explained to them in a reasonable voice, voraciously avaristic corporations will realize they were mistaken and that the health, happiness, and general well-being of the American Worker really is more important than mountainous fuckpiles of profits.
The association, the American Benefits Council, said the provision — which reduces the tax deductions for companies with drug coverage for their retired employees — would deal a significant blow to corporate profits and would discourage companies from hiring more workers.
...James A. Klein, the president of the American Benefits Council, called the provision "a serious mistake that is having negative and unintended consequences."
White House officials defended the provision, saying it was a deliberate effort to eliminate what they said was an unusually generous tax loophole. ... White House officials said it was rare for companies to obtain a tax-free federal subsidy and be able to deduct it as well.
..."We're confident that the benefits are going to accrue and strengthen business's bottom line," said Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House Health Reform Office.
..."Let's put these changes into perspective," Ms. Douglass said. "While accounting rules required companies to book this cost upfront, there are a whole set of benefits that will accrue to companies over time..."
The Bubble People
In a piece seriously and not ironically titled "How Should Conservatives Deal with the Left's Disrespect and Lack of Empathy?" the always-amusing Dr. Helen—who is totally "not saying here that liberals are psychopaths, for this would be incorrect for the most part"—suggests that one reason liberals are such assholes is because of our insularity:
The second possibility is that liberals do have the capacity to empathize with conservatives, but they do not have to do so because of the liberal bubble they mostly live in. Schools, the media, and many of the cities they live in lean left. This means that there is no incentive to understand other ideas and there are no consequences for showing disgust and ugly feelings towards conservatives.Leaving aside the idea that "most" liberals live in beautiful blue enclaves of progressiveness (I've this week alone spoken to five different friends or acquaintances who are struggling at their jobs in conservative states because of a work culture that creates a hostile environment for them), and the myth that a "left-leaning" city creates a protective bliss for every liberal (ask any feminist, any person of color, any member of the LGBTQI community, any liberal person with a disability who lives in a left-leaning city if they're cloistered in contented inclusion), I'd like to address the quite genuinely hilarious contention that any liberal in America has found a place of residence hermetically sealed from conservative ideology.
This tiresome accusation of leftist insularity is really reflective of a fundamental denial about our national discourse, which is absurdly lopsided in favor of rightwing narratives and ideas—social, political, financial, theological—and yet consistently misrepresented as balanced between two equal sets of extremists. It's the old "Both Sides Are Just as Bad" canard, which is treated as self-evident by all the Very Serious People of the Beltway, and all the so-called moderates across this country who think Bill O'Reilly's a decent and reasonable guy, and all the rightwing extremists who have a vested interest in perpetuating the myth of parity, and most of the rest of the country, right up to the president himself, who never misses an opportunity to pretend there are two equal and competing forces in this country, despite the fact that there are fundamental differences and, no, both sides are not just as bad.
Rightwing ideology is so ubiquitous in America that it is not even possible for a progressive to access the news in an impenetrable bubble. Despite attempts to frame MSNBC as wildly lefty, there is no equivalent to Fox News on the American airwaves, with the possible exception of _Current, which is comparable only in content but hardly in scope.
I couldn't avoid rightwing opinions even if i wanted to. The idea that I could is laughable.
As laughable, quite frankly, as the idea that any left-leaning city is devoid of conservatives and conservative ideology. New York's got a Republican mayor. California's run by a Republican governor. Chicago is surrounded by some of the reddest bits of the country, whence sprung Henry Hyde and Dennis Hastert. I'm frankly not sure in which of America's blue cities, exactly, Dr. Helen imagines a progressive lives completely removed from and utterly untouched by conservative thought.
On the other hand, I have known many people from many small, conservative towns across this great country in which words like "feminism" or "same-sex marriage" or "universal healthcare" are never spoken, even in the year 2010. Except, perhaps, as dirty words.
That's not even intended as an indictment of such places; it's merely a factual observation that there exist throughout America a vast number of extremely conservative communities which are insular by design (and a smaller number of similarly insular progressive communities), which explicitly reject the multiculturalism of big American cities, which are diverse in both people and ideas. Calling city-dwellers the Bubblings gets it precisely backwards.
Dr. Helen, it seems, ought to stop fretting about liberals' "disrespect and lack of empathy" and tend to her own raging case of projection.
Whose Choice?
Liss forwarded me this story a few days ago and I've been flipping it around in my head, trying to figure out how best to approach it.
I've decided that maybe we can have a conversation of sorts about it and the larger issues. I'll tell you what I think, of course, and then give you some background (on me) for context.
The headline reads "Mother furious after in-school clinic sets up teen's abortion" and the first paragraph is
The mother of a Ballard High School student is fuming after the health center on campus helped facilitate her daughter's abortion during school hours.The mother, referred to as Jill, says she feels her rights were stripped away.
Because I am pro-choice and do not support parental notification laws, you might wonder where, exactly, I am conflicted. It's more of a personal conflict. As a mother, I wouldn't want my child to have a surgical procedure without my being there to be supportive. And I would hope my child could come to me in similar (I have a son) circumstances. I don't necessarily believe it is my right to know and I definitely don't think I should be able to impose my will on such a personal choice.
See, the other side of my story is that I have had an abortion. I was seventeen-going-on-eighteen, my parents did NOT know, and I know I made the right choice. My devoutly-Baptist parents would've never consented. I did not feel it was their right to know or to "make" me carry that pregnancy to term. I wonder if the daughter in this case had similar sentiments.
I am against parental notification laws for two primary reasons. First, I have heard forced pregnancy described, too many times, as parents' punishment for girls who dared to have sex. I know people who say, "If she was woman enough to lay there and get it, she's woman enough to keep it." I know mothers who have denied their daughters epidurals during labor as punishment and "to keep her from doing it again." I know people who posit pregnancy and motherhood as a punitive consequence. I know parents who hope their daughters will feel shame and stigma.
Second, the choice often becomes the parents'. Right now, I am watching as a young relative of mine deals with her second pregnancy. She's a high school senior. When I asked her, at the beginning of this pregnancy, what she wanted to do, I heard, "Well, Granny doesn't believe in abortion" and "Mama says I have to have it." Her father told my sister his daughter would NOT be having an abortion. I am not saying that the young woman is pro-choice; I'm saying I haven't heard what she thinks. It does not matter that she is 19 and could have had it without her parents' consent--she would've faced ostracism, anger, and withdrawn support. Too much for a young person already struggling with school and one baby.
And that's another thing I notice about this story. The mom did not describe what her daughter thought or wanted. She mentions her rights and the school clinic's audacity, but in the end, it was her daughter who decided to terminate the pregnancy without notifying Jill.
What do you think, Shakers? I'm curious to know.
Legitimate Concerns
I didn't see the interview discussed here, because I don't watch TV in the morning. But according to the article, President Obama "recognizes the movement involves 'folks who have legitimate concerns' about the national debt and whether the government is taking on too many difficult issues simultaneously."
As Liss and I discussed it this morning, she said "I guess it's easy to be magnanimous toward FUCKING TERRORISTS when you've got a 24/7 Secret Service detail. The rest of us? Not so fortunate."
Yeah, exactly. And as the article states "he said he didn't want to paint Tea Party activists 'in broad brushes' and he hopes to win over members who have 'mainstream, legitimate concerns.'"
Great. More of the same old shit.
No matter what Obama says or does, they will always hate him. And he tells them they've legitimate fucking concerns. No. No, they don't. And no matter how much you suck up to them, Mr. President, they'll always hate your stinking guts.
Texting! With Liss and Deeky!
I just got back from a doctor's appointment, which was for 10:15, although I didn't actually get called in to see the doctor until 11:15. That sort of wait would be aggravating enough for any old appointment, but this was for a routine pap smear—a procedure that is anxiety-provoking enough already without having an extra hour to sit and contemplate it. Luckily, I had Deeks at the other end of my phone to keep me company…
Liss: "Are you ready to do something about overactive bladder?"
Deeky: I'm ready to urinate.
Liss: That made me LOL 4 realz right in the waiting room.
Deeky: Yay!
Liss: They've got "The View" on and the ladies are talking about fat people. It's a GREAT discussion. P.S. It's not a great discussion.
Deeky: LOL.
Liss: OMG coming up on "The View": Ricky Gervais. I predict: High blood pressure today. Thanks, "The View!"
Deeky: LOLOLOL!
[Note: I actually had high blood pressure today, which I normally don't. It was so high that the nurse took it again manually because she couldn't believe the machine could be right, given my usual numbers. That's what happens when you leave me in a waiting room for an hour before a pap smear to watch "The View."]
Deeky: You should have brought your iPod. Some Oasis would have soothed you.
Liss: Shut up, fuckface! You know I don't have an iPod, lol!
Deeky: That's right: You're a no-iPod asshole.
Liss: Be quiet—I'm trying to hear Ricky Gervais' rape jokes!
Deeky: LOL for realz.
Liss: I shit you not: Next on "The View"—the cast of "The Jersey Shore." It would be more efficient if Barbara Walters just took a shit directly into my skull.
Deeky: Double-plus LOLz for real.
Liss: I'm glad I got here five minutes early for my appointment!
Deeky: Totes. It gives you a chance to get caught up on People magazine from 1997. How are the Spin Doctors doing, by the way?
Liss: Awesome. They're putting out a new line of plaid skater pants. "Little Pants Can't Be Wrong."
Deeky: LOL… You're killing me here.
Liss: Also: Jesus Jones says hi.
Deeky: They say hi everyday. On my iPod.
Liss: Joy Behar just asked "The Situation" if he uses condoms. Oopsy! Now I'm celibate.
Deeky: LOL.
Liss: Tomorrow on "The View": "The Octomom."
Deeky: WTF???????
Liss: This show is a real thing in the world.
Deeky: Totes.
Personal Note
I've just returned to my laptop and inbox, having been struck down with a brutal migraine in the early hours of Monday morning, after we'd gotten back from Shakago.
I saw a number of e-mails from various Shakers with links of beauty and outrage, and I'll try to get caught up with them over the next few days. Just wanted to explain why i'm not answering right away, I've got work to catch up on that was due yesterday evening. :)
Bobo
That David Brooks' columns are poop is a well-established fact. So you don't need me to tell you about that David Brooks' columns are poop, nor that his latest execrable emission is something that the editors of the New York Times should have demanded was dispatched via courtesy flush before anyone else had to suffer, just like every other thing Brooks has ever written.
But wow, really wow, about casually appropriating Sandra Bullock's life for an opening salvo in a truly cynical attempt to make his stinking deposit look more "hip" and "relevant."
Two things happened to Sandra Bullock this month. First, she won an Academy Award for best actress. Then came the news reports claiming that her husband is an adulterous jerk. So the philosophic question of the day is: Would you take that as a deal? Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow?Ha ha what a terrible, terrible question posed by a terrible, terrible man.
Who, by the way, doesn't even attempt to justify raking through the life of a person he doesn't know for a piece that's ultimately not even about answering his
…would have the amazingly poor taste to crap out sentences like this—Yup.
"Most people vastly overestimate the extent to which more money would improve our lives."
—at literally the exact moment when tens of millions of American men and women are watching their tomorrows being obliterated in a brutal tsunami of lost homes, lost jobs, lost savings, lost health care, lost retirement, lost marriages and lost futures.
And in the face of such widespread fear and pain, who but an utterly oblivious and insufferably privileged asshole would have dared to print such drivel in the New York Times, reminding us yet again that, as millions of hardworking citizens go broke, David Fucking Brooks—for reasons that passeth all understanding—continues to be inexplicably and lavishly remunerated, year after year, for cranking out what are essentially two, perfunctory, 800-word, C-minus high school book reports a week.
One of These Things Is Not Like the Others
by Shaker Katebears
[Trigger warning.]
MTV has a new reality prank show called Disaster Date. From their website: "Disaster Date is MTV's hilarious new hidden camera dating show that puts unsuspecting singles on the worst blind date of their lives. And it all comes courtesy of a best friend looking for payback." So the "unsuspecting single" friend gets set up with an actor, and that actor will usually personify the person's biggest pet peeves. For example, the actor will talk way too loud or smoke at the non-smoking table or send his or her food back multiple times. The unknowing dater gets a dollar for every minute he or she lasts. After 60 minutes, the date is over and the ruse is revealed.
The dates are usually unpleasant but not dangerous. They are annoying and maybe even embarrassing but never scary... Or so I thought.
The recent episode shown on March 29 featured as the unknowing dater a woman roughly in her 20s, whose pet peeves were controlling men and people who insulted her fashion sense. At first, it followed the established pattern of obnoxious but not sinister—her date made fun of her hair-vest and made a big embarrassing fuss when her food tasted gross.
Then, it took a turn for the worse. He started talking about her facebook profile, telling her that he had visited it several times. She seemed weirded out by this but continued with the date, uncomfortably giggling and smiling. He then pulled out a collage he had made of pictures he'd found on her facebook profile. He'd left a space in the middle for her to include a picture of the two of them, and he asked the woman sitting at the next table to take a picture. The unknowing dater continued to look uncomfortable.
Then he mentioned coming over to her house and visiting. That made her more uncomfortable. Then, he said that he had already been in her house and took a lipgloss out of his pocket which she confirmed was hers. He explained that he had taken it so he would have something of hers. To this girl's knowledge, he had never been in her home. Finally, this was the breaking point and she got up from the date to get the hell out. Like many prank shows, this is where it is revealed to the victim that it was all a joke.
Hilarious, MTV! Really, really funny. And by funny, of course, I mean horrifying. This disaster date was not the same kind that they usually feature on the show. The jokes usually just rely on making the dater feel annoyed and embarrassed. This young woman, however, probably felt fear, terror, and extreme anxiety at the notion that her date was a stalker and an intruder and likely dangerous. Her fleeing from the date wasn't out of annoyance, but was of self-preservation and fear.
And here it is again: the rape culture. Rape culture is the belief that unwanted and frightening male attention is just an annoyance and similar to other "disaster" dates.
I am sure that all of the women who are raped on dates and by dates don't consider those to just be "disasters" in the way that MTV is defining the word. I am sure that all the victims of stalking in real life don't think of it as merely an unpleasant blind date. I am sure that those dates are life-altering and terrifying and terrible.
Those dates aren't fiction, either, MTV. Those dates are not exaggerations of bad dates like many of the other scenarios are. People really do go on dates with stalkers who terrorize and abuse their "dates". Not so funny, really, when it is the truth.
Rape culture is when violence against women is made to be a joke and prank and something that could casually be dismissed as a "disaster date".
Contact Viacom, owner of MTV, here.
Question of the Day
Is there anyone from your childhood/early adulthood with whom you've lost touch that you'd like to reconnect?
(You don't need to provide their actual name, if you don't want to, of course. A description of the relationship, e.g. "my first boy/girlfriend," is sufficient.)
Have you ever tried to find or contact hir? Why or why not? If you did, what was the result?
Meet-Up Recap
Thanks to everyone who attended the Chicagoland meet-up this weekend. It was, as always, so much fun. I loved meeting everyone new and seeing everyone who I haven't seen in awhile, and getting the opportunity to spend time with so many truly amazing people—even though I always feel like I don't get enough time with everyone who attends; there's always someone I'm just about to go sit down with when my food arrives, or someone new walks in the door, and I don't talk to them again until they're leaving. I need better mingling management skillz!
My gratitude to RedSonja for coordinating RSVPs to the event once again, and to RedSonja and KarateMonkey for nametag organization.
Random Notes: Anything worth eating at all should always be eaten with gusto (especially squid, if you're into that sort of thing). Laughing makes costochondritis simultaneously better and worse. These are the ZOMG Shoez I was wearing. Anyone who has ever used the term "humorless feminists" should spend a few minutes at a Shakesville meet-up. A good thing to do before bed is stick your feet in the freezer. True fact.
Also: I found a pair of fingerless gloves left behind on a table. Email me to claim them.
P.S. BrianWS is totes an eyebrow actor.
Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"
[Trigger warning.]
See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman and a biracial queerbait telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
The Grandest Male Organ
Dear friends, I confront you today, my whiskers a-bristling with outrage. I was traversing o'er the Great Plains in my airship on my way to a gentlemen's conference on Potions, Elixirs, and Poisons, where I was to deliver what reviewers of the talkies call an "epic tour de force" on the potential curative properties of kudzu for sufferers of Pantaloon Fever, when I was indefinitely delayed by the most scandalous report!
My faithful yeoman Bruce was perusing his favorite web windows on the visual-teletype (keyword: men) when he stumbled across an outrageous electronic-newsey regarding the male brain.
Quite obviously, I am in no disagreement with the assertion that the male brain is a special and robust organ, which should be self-evident to any man with even the most modest of educations. One needn't have spent thirteen years of diligent matriculation at Emmett Q. Crumblecorn's Preparatory School for Fancy Lads to understand that the male brain is the finest organic machinery ever created by our gracious and wise Lord above.
It is as natural as silencing a babe in arms with a nip of moonshine that the male brain would respond to a lady's petition for support in the midst of a crisis by "racing to find a way to resolve the problem as soon as possible." If a gentleman does not make available the extraordinary capacities of his brain to a lady in her moment of desperate need, how will her problem ever be solved?
But I most object most strenuously to the decision by the editorial slobberchops over at CNN—which I had never taken to be a hotbed of Suffragette sucklemucking!—to allow a woman to seize control of their virtual newspaper in order to report this "news." A lady doctor, they say. Poppycock and balderdash! Curses on CNN! Fie!
The lady-brain is a highly delicate instrument that must never be taxed with complex thought, lest it overheat and cause a dreadful case of the vapors, requiring a cooling period in repose upon a fainting couch, preferably on a shaded veranda, during which the swoonful lass must be cautiously revived with a steady influx of mint juleps. The lady-brain cannot be stressed writing for web windows! Complete uterine collapse will not be far behind such wanton willynillying!
Such fragility is precisely why no one of the female persuasion is allowed on the airship! Not only can I not abide the exploitation of gentlewomen by the unnecessary strain of their pitiable mental facilities, but I cannot fit a fainting couch in the infernal contraption, anyhow—not with Bruce's enormous collection of classic gentlemen's calendars and physique magazines lying about!
The chap is very interested in good health.
As well should we all! Let us begin promptly with a collective endeavor to cosset the precious and weak lady-brains into which we shall entrust only the simplest of tasks, such as raising children. Particularly virile young men, who will someday realize their birthright as superiors to the mothers who raised them.
Good day to you, Shakesvillians! I said good day!
[Previous Grumblings: Benjamin H. Grumbles, Progress: Dagnabbit!, A Day in the Life of Benjamin H. Grumbles, What in the Sam Hill Are You Rascals Thinking?, Friday Cat Blogging, Damnable Milkshakery, Grumbles' Gashouse, Dash It All, McCain Is Off His Trolley, I Say, Somebody Bet on the Bob-Tailed Nag, Grumbles Writes Letters, Hosiery Is No Laughing Matter, Fear Not, Shakesvillians!, Bunsen's Balderdash!, Taint a Good Man, A Hearty Yawp of Well Wishes.]
Is It Terrorism Yet?
The FBI has arrested nine members of a Christian militia group. The group, called the Hutaree, "planned to kill an unidentified member of local law enforcement and then attack the law enforcement officers who gather in Michigan for the funeral" using IEDs.
I poked through the Hutaree's website and didn't see much of interest. Lots of crap about Jesus, as per usual, and end times, and blah blah blah. They seem to have a big boner for a man who "lay[s] down his life for his friends" which I think means they've seen one too many John Wayne movies. And they certainly seem to have missed that bit in the bible that says "Thou shalt not kill." In fairness, that's probably the least known passage in the whole book.
According to the FBI's press release "Hutaree members view local, state, and federal law enforcement as the 'brotherhood,' their enemy, and have been preparing to engage them in armed conflict." Or, as the militia's website puts it "We believe that one day, as prophecy says, there will be an Anti-Christ. All christians must know this and prepare, just as Christ commanded." I'm not sure how killing cops figures into that.
I'm glad the FBI and state and local authorities were able to apprehend these d-bags before they started shooting.
True Science Facts About Booze and Broads!
by Shaker Ethyl, a geologist and feminist who lives, much to her dismay, in Upstate New York. Special Friend Holocene is a feminist ally and biologist in the Pittsburgh area and has been Ethyl's BFF since before the dawn of time (i.e., those dark ages before the internet).
[Trigger warning.]
In recent "Today in Fat Hatred" installments we've noted some of the ways in which scientists can allow their prejudices to influence their work. Unfortunately, as we all know, it's not just obesity research that suffers from the insidious intrusion of the kyriarchy into what is idealized as a strenuously objective enterprise. A recent article from the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) of all places really drives this home.
Spring break season is here and many teenage girls may be tempted to take their first drink. The AAAS Science Inside Alcohol Project suggests that parents, teachers and caregivers help girls delay that drink by telling them of scientific research that shows they may be more vulnerable than boys to alcohol-related problems.I'll leave aside the vague and undefined "alcohol-related problems" for the moment to address instead the purported reasons that girls "may be more vulnerable" to them.
• Girls have less water in their bodies than boys. Girls have a slightly higher proportion of fat to lean muscle tissue, concentrating alcohol more easily in their lower percentage of body water. This means they become intoxicated faster after drinking less alcohol.So...about these facts. The first thing I did after reading this article and deciding to write a post on it was to get with my biologist friend (code name: Holocene) to do some fact-checking. According to Holocene, the True Science Facts are generally true—women tend to have differences in body type that seem to be able to affect how much alcohol is kicking around in one's bloodstream—but he noted, however, that there are also plenty of other variables (age, race, body type, etc.), and there's much that is not known about the ways in which our bodies process alcohol. So how much can one really generalize these True Science Facts to an entire population of people…? Never mind that! If one's agenda is not, in fact, the health and safety of humans but instead the prevention of damage to one's property, then the conclusions make a lot more sense.
• Girls have fewer enzymes to break alcohol down. Alcohol dehydrogenases are a group of seven enzymes that help break down alcohol so the body processes it. Girls have fewer of them, so it is not as easy for their bodies to metabolize the alcohol they drink.
• Girls are smaller and often weigh less than boys. When drinking the same amount as a boy, a girl will experience a quicker rise in her blood-alcohol level, and she may stay intoxicated for a longer period of time. Girls who drink heavily can be at greater risk for alcohol poisoning because it takes less alcohol for them to get really sick.
My suspicions as to the agenda behind these True Science Facts were further aroused by the fact that they all, aside from bullet 3 there, seem to focus on how fast women can get drunk, without focusing on why that might be a bad thing. It's taken as read that being drunk is inherently bad—well, bad for women at least.
And of course, my suspicions as to the agenda behind these True Science Facts are entirely upheld with the last bullet point:
• Girls often prefer sweeter, carbonated mixed drinks. Such drinks can speed up the absorption of alcohol into the bloodstream.This...this is my current favorite True Science Fact. Holocene could find nothing at all to support either the claim about women's preference in alcoholic beverages, or the assertion that these types of drinks are likely to make women drunker faster.
Shockingly, it almost seems as if someone took their preconceived notions of what women drink and made science out of it. But no, this is the AAAS, they wouldn't do that, would they? These must be True Science Facts if the AAAS says so!
But wait! There are more True Science Facts for our edumacation!
If those points don't sell girls on abstention or drinking less, here's another reason: Boys don't like it when girls drink heavily, according to David J. Hanson, professor emeritus of sociology at the State University of New York at Potsdam and a member of the Science Inside Alcohol Project's advisory board.And I was just beginning to wonder: Where are the boys in all this? Oh right. Turning up their noses at girls who drink (unless it's to target them), because girls who drink are dirtybadwrong and probably sluts to boot, whereas boys who drink are just having a bit of fun, right? These are True! Science! Facts!
Also a True Science Fact: Girls should do and not do things based on what boys think of that behavior. I know the only reason I myself pretend to enjoy craft beers is because I think it makes "boys" like me!
What about girls who like girls? Or boys who like boys? Or people who are not interested in a romantic or sexual relationship at all? Or even just people who don't focus their entire lives on what someone else thinks of them? And what makes this David J. Hanson person believe this, anyway?
On his "Alcohol Problems & Solutions" Web site, Hanson discussed a recent study in the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors that found seven out of 10 of the college-age women surveyed thought their male peers wanted them to have five drinks during social occasions, while the men preferred they drink half that or less.Okay, it doesn't take a ton of scientific understanding to note the enormous piles of cultural baggage that are inherent in a study asking women what they think men want from them, and following that up by asking men what they want from women. This result, IMO, is not surprising, but I think maybe it doesn't mean what Hanson thinks it means.
"Not only does alcohol affect girls' bodies differently from boys, the result of heavy drinking can be a turn-off for boys," says Hanson. "Boys don't want to take care of a girl who is drunk."Wow. That is...that is quite a statement there. I mean really, there is much that could be discussed regarding expectations and pressures to drink for people of any gender, especially in college. The study Hanson mentions could even be used to explore some of these issues. But to leap to the conclusion from the data he quoted that "boys don't like it when girls drink heavily," and that "boys don't want to take care of a girl who is drunk" says far more about Hanson and his prejudices than it does about These Girls These Days. Because, in Hanson's world, women only ever do things to appear attractive to men, and the way to keep them from doing things that are unattractive to men is to use our favorite tools—shame and fear!
And of course, all of this totally ignores the actual really true fact that could be actually really helpful for people in environments where alcohol is being consumed: That serial rapists on college campuses operate with a clear MO, and frequently use alcohol to incapacitate their victims. But of course Mr. Hanson would probably not rape anybody, so the worst thing he can think of is "having to take care of" a drunk "girl." Sheesh.
So there's a lot that's bad here, but it feels like the worst part is that this article is from the AAAS, an organization who:
seeks to "To advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all people."I guess those "all people" don't, as usual, include women. Typically, the use of fear and shame to keep those pesky womenfolk constrained to roles that men approve of is the "benefit" that is being sought here.
Monday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, makers of Mustang Bobby's Official Freak Flag Lapel Pins.
Recommended Reading:
Jill: Right-wing Cartoon Depicts Obama Raping the Statue of Liberty
Andy: Lt. Dan Choi: 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' Still Forces People to Lie
Mary: But women are an advanced social skill…
Renee: Dan Savage Engages in More Transphobia
Lori: Here They Are: Your Top Ten Young Visionaries!
Matthew aka Seraph: The Past Isn't Dead. It Isn't Even Past: The Irish Hunger Memorial
Zuska: The Arts as a Healing Balm for Mansplaining's Psychic Ills
Leave your links in comments...
Fat Nooz
1. Junk food addiction may be clue to obesity: study. I love the headline ("study"), particularly given that the story opens with the disclaimative line: "The findings in a study of animals cannot be directly applied to human obesity, but..." I also love this: "Obesity may be a form of compulsive eating." As if no one has ever considered a link between disordered eating and obesity before. Especially not every dipshit on the planet who assumes every fat person is fat because they gorge themselves on junk food 24/7. Which brings me to...
2. Plus-size models are better role models? Fat chance! Money quote: "Tolerance is the enemy of shame. With more and more fat acceptance...there will be more and more fat people. Nobody is born 300 pounds. Nobody 'suffers from' obesity. She chooses it, one milkshake at a time." LOL!
3. Better Ways to Help the Public Lose Weight. In which the New York Times seek ideas about the "sorts of public initiatives [that] can promote good eating habits without possibly resulting in discrimination against overweight people." Yay! And there are actually some very good insights here (and some not so good). Too bad they're buried below a headline equating weight loss with health and an image of a frowny face on a scale. FAIL!
4. To avoid breast cancer, ladies, just "avoid becoming overweight as an adult," but, if you're already suffering from CANCERFAT, all you've got to do is "convert more fat into muscle." It's that simple!
5. The workout: An exercise in futility? Subhead: "Canadians have been taught that the gym is a surefire path to shedding pounds. But some experts say gluttony, not sluggishness, is where we should be focusing our efforts." Good call. If only there were more people out there telling fat people to STOP BEING GLUTTONS! My favorite part of the article is this observation about fat people from Eric Ravussin, director of the Nutrition Obesity Research Centre at the Pennington Biomedical Research Centre in Baton Rouge: "First of all, most of them hate exercise." LOL!
6. Obesity: Food kills, flab protects. "Only when the body's fat cells, or adipocytes, are crammed to capacity do the problems of metabolic syndrome begin. The fully engorged adipocytes begin to die and leak their contents into the bloodstream, including saturated fatty acids such as palmitic acid. Such fats then accumulate in tissues such as the liver, pancreas and heart, where they may prompt the symptoms of metabolic syndrome." Gökhan Hotamisligil, a diabetes and obesity researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, describes the theory this way: "When fat cells break, it's like an oil tanker being hit. It unloads this toxic cargo, almost like an oil slick." Forget junk in the trunk. I've got TOXIC CARGO IN MY PANTS!
7. Elle magazine breaks fashion's last taboo: plus-size models on the cover. Shaker Joe says: "It's a little sad that the last taboo was a plus sized model. I would have preferred a Dalmatian in a party dress but whatever." Dear Elle: For the record, plus-size models on the cover of a magazine are not fashion's last taboo. Not even close. And, btw, call me when my fat ass can buy as many cute and fashionable clothes off the rack and a size 2, if you're so interested in radicalizing the industry. Kthxbai. Love, Liss.
[H/Ts, respectively, to Shakers Kevin Baker, MelissaRel, MelissaG, Museclio, lelumarie (and again), and Joe.]
A Quick History Lesson
Dear Military Folk,
Read about your idea of requiring "separate bunks for gays"* if gay servicepeople are allowed to serve openly.
Wanted to remind you we tried that separate-but-equal thing. It was never equal. It was unfair and stigmatizing.
People grew tired of it and effectively resisted.
The military finally gave it up.
I mean, it was even repudiated legally.
Yet, here you are, contemplating a march backwards. This is wrong for so many reasons, and not solely the ones I mentioned above.
As Vanessa pointed out in another forum, the very premise of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, acknowledges that there are already gays in the military. Why do you expect a problem to develop if they are allowed to serve openly? This idea, that gay servicepeople should be segregated, suborns homophobia, particularly, as a colleague of mine wrote, the idea that gays are indiscriminate in their desires and straight people are in danger/in need of rescue. You are insulting your own personnel with suggestions like this which imply they, as a whole, threaten other service people with sexual aggression and potentially, sexual violence.
If only you were as concerned with the actual and significant problem of sexual violence that occurs within your institution.
Though, I suppose you could flip the argument and try to say it was for the protection of gay personnel, especially given the current political climate towards any so-called "progressive" change. In that case, I'd still accuse you of upholding homophobia and some sort of macho-ethic (okay, I'd accuse you of that, anyway).
Why? Because if your solution to addressing the potential danger openly gay servicepeople would face, is to segregate them, rather than address the military culture which allows for that danger, you've totally missed the point.
Sincerely,
elle
___________________
*And I'm not relying on the opinion of one general as sole evidence that the government would consider this. The article says, "The question of whether changes to housing policies would be necessary is being addressed in a study to determine how to allow gays to serve openly."
Party Animal
I always thought RNC Chairman Michael Steele was a fuddy-duddy. Apparently I've misjudged him.
A February RNC trip to California, for example, included a $9,099 stop at the Beverly Hills Hotel, $6,596 dropped at the nearby Four Seasons, and $1,620.71 spent [update: the amount is actually $1,946.25] at Voyeur West Hollywood, a bondage-themed nightclub featuring topless women dancers imitating lesbian sex.I'm sure there's a simple explanation; he just stopped in to get directions to Pastor Rick Warren's church and use the bathroom.
Steve Benen has an update: "The RNC now claims that a 'non-committee staffer,' not Steele, spent the money at Voyeur West Hollywood. The RNC chairman, the party insists, was 'never at the location in question.'"
It probably goes without saying, but I'm all for everyone letting her or his freak flag fly high and proud. I'm just not sure that said flag-waving needs to happen on the RNC's dime -- but we'll see. Maybe the Republican donors are more open-minded than I am.
HT to digby and Melissa.
Cross-posted.
