Trend stories that treat the phenomenon of men being "hit harder" than women by economic woes and unemployment as an inevitable outgrowth of masculinity, as if masculinity wasn't a social construct that itself should be questioned, examined, and changed. (And don't even get me started on the fuckery that is the "women are best positioned to ride out the recession" meme.)
For example:
Recessions gripping economies around the world will hit men harder than women as job insecurity threatens an inherent sense of masculinity, damaging mental health, British researchers said this month.
A study by Cambridge University showed that despite more women than men losing their jobs in Britain due to the credit crunch, men who think they may be fired or made redundant are likely to become more stressed and depressed than women.
For example:
"Inadequacy," he said. "I can't harp on that word enough. I just feel inadequate. Why have I not found a job yet? And what if this happens eight years from now when I'm married and have a 2-year-old? Do I go through this again? Do I trust myself that I can pull it off? And I do, but in the midst of it, you definitely question yourself."
For example:
As the stress level increases, so does the stress on men. Ingrained into their DNA is the mentality of Provider and Protector, and as cash and/or security dwindles, so does their sense of security and masculinity.
I'm not saying the phenomenon of "threatened masculinity" isn't real, or that people shouldn't be discussing it or even studying it. But to accept the premise that men have a built-in sense of masculinity, from birth, that precludes them from finding self-worth separate from their identity as breadwinner is just all kinds of lazy.
See also the corollary: "Mommy Breadwinners."
You Know What I'm Sick Of?
Europa and the Pirate Twins
I was sitting at my desk just now, totally not writing a post about Chuck Norris, listening to my iPod, and thinking, "wow, this is some really good shuffle I got going on today." To wit, the last ten songs I heard:
Tim Curry - I Can Make You A Man
Blur - Ultranol
King Swamp - Blown Away
Sex Pistols - God Save The Queen
Eels - I Like Birds
The Specials - Gangsters
Depeche Mode - Personal Jesus (Single Mix)
Les Baxter - Sensual Hallucination
Thomas Dolby - Europa And The Pirate Twins (Extended Version)
Gene Loves Jezebel - Twenty Killer Hurts
Why don't I have my own radio show already?
I Write Letters
Dear Dorothy, Blanche, Rose, and Sophia:
This letter is long overdue. As you know, we have spent many joyful hours together over the last two-and-a-half decades, laughing warmly about all kinds of kooky highjinks, and I've never properly thanked you for everything you've given me.
Thank you for being a part of my childhood. Thank you for hanging out with me, in four-hour blocks on Saturday mornings, when I was in college; there has been and never will be any better hangover cure than you ladies. Thank you for always being there on some obscure cable channel or other in the middle of the night when I have insomnia.
Thank you for being feminists. Thank you for showing me that divorce isn't shameful, that being a widow doesn't mean your life is over, that love and sex are different things, that sex can be fun and frivolous and not always fraught with meaning (and judgment). Thank you for showing me women are cool. And smart. And funny as hell. Thank you for showing me that female friendships are awesome.
Thank you for being sassy. Thank you for being subversive. Thank you for being bawdy. Thank you for teaching me words like lanai and caftan. Thank you for being what I suspect is a big part of the reason I have never really feared getting old.
And finally, to each of you: Thank you for being a friend, traveled down the road and back again. Your heart is true; you're a pal and a confidant. And if you threw a party, invited everyone you knew, you would see the biggest gift would be from me, and the card attached would say, "Thank you for being a friend."
No one really understood why an 11-year-old loved you so much, nor an 18-year-old, nor a 25-year-old, and there are probably some people who wonder why a 34-year-old loves you still. But looking over that list, it seems to me the question isn't why I have always adored you, but how it is possible that anyone couldn't.
With admiration and gratitude,
Liss
P.S. Thank you in particular, Dorothy Zbornak, for making me love my voice.
Random YouTubery: Your Wednesday Swashbuckling Chamber Musicians
I was going through some old photos of mine and came across this print of the 24 gun frigate HMS Surprise, taken at the Maritime Museum of San Diego. I was there to see my cousin get married on the 1898 ferryboat Berkeley, another of the Maritime Museum's historic ships. The HMS Surprise is a replica created in 1970 and is best known for its starring role in the Peter Weir film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. The frigate is now a permanent exhibit at the Maritime Museum.
The ship is quite small inside and I was amazed that they managed to fit a camera crew into such a tiny chamber along with the actors to film this swashbuckling duet scene:
Luigi Boccherini, La Musica Notturna Delle Strade Di Madrid No. 6
This scene is slightly less risible than most movie scenes where actors pretend to play string instruments, as both Crowe and Bettany took lessons. It's still a little funny, but in a cheesetastic way.
Shaker Gourmet: Rhubarb-Raspberry Rice Pudding
The recipe this week comes to us from Shaker Lauredhel!
If you'd like to participate in Shaker Gourmet, email me (include your Shaker name & blog link, if you have one!) at: shakergourmet (at) gmail.comRhubarb-Raspberry Rice Pudding
Ingredients
1 cup arborio (short-grain) "risotto" rice
4 cups milk
1/2 cup sugar (caster/superfine). You can push this down to a quarter cup if you prefer a less sweet pudding.
1/2 tsp vanilla bean paste (sub in vanilla extract if you absolutely must, but it's nowhere near as good).
Fresh rhubarb (a couple of cups, or whatever you've got)
3/4 cup sugar (caster/superfine)
1 cup water
Juice of half a lime. Make a gin & tonic with the other half.
Raspberries
Optional: cream; cinnamon or nutmeg
~~~
Methods
1. The rice pudding part
Mix the rice with the milk (I used skim milk with two teaspoons of butter, or just use full cream).
Add the 1/2 cup sugar and the vanilla bean paste and stir. Other spices are optional; some people might like cinnamon and/or nutmeg.
Simmer the rice mix very very gently, stirring frequently and watching very carefully - it has a tendency to suddenly make a break for it and boil over. Simmer it down till it's a nicely slushy almost-risotto texture, not too gluggy. Add more milk if necessary. This might take 25-40 minutes, give or take. Go by texture, not time.
2. The rhubarb topping
While you're cooking the rice, gently poach short segments of rhubarb in a mixture of 3/4 cup caster sugar, 1 cup water, and the lime juice. You can add finely minced lime zest too, if you like. I added a smidge of vanilla bean paste to this too.
When the rhubarb just softens but isn't falling apart (5-10 minutes), lift it out with a slotted spoon and set it aside.
Reduce the liquid right down to syrup - again being careful of it bubbling up and leaping, it'll make a mess of your stovetop. It needs to be reduced until a drop dropped into a cup of ice cold water balls up into a soft malleable globule.
Set the syrup aside.
3. Combining
Combine your rice pudding with the reserved poached rhubarb and some frozen or fresh raspberries, either mixing or layering. This can be prepped ahead of time and stored covered in the fridge for a day or two.
If you have children at school, make up a couple of these in teeny Tupperware type containers for the lunchbox. They also freeze quite well.
Reheat in a moderate oven until hot through.If you really want to indulge, pour some cream over the top before reheating.
Serve with the warmed rhubarb-lime syrup poured over the top.
Two Mass Shootings
One in Alabama, where 10 people have been killed by a 28-year-old man who had a list of "people who had done him wrong," including family members and former employers, and one in Germany, where a teenage gunman killed 15 people, specifically targeting female teachers and female classmates, before killing himself.
I never know what the fuck to say about these situations, and I don't feel remotely inclined to make some kind of political point about guns or the economy or misogyny or anything else, so I'm not going to say anything.
Except: My condolences to the family and friends of the victims.
Number of the Day
5. The approximate percentage of every day Deeky and I spend calling each other assholes via email.
Liss: Got a QotD? I'm so out.
Deeks: Lots of shakers own kitties, and puppies. But does anyone own any "exotic" animals? Anyone own a ferret? Piranha? A wildcat?
Liss: Great idea. A QotD that 12 people can answer.
Deeks: Asshole.
Liss: You're the asshole, asshole.
Deeks: You're the assholist asshole in all of assholdom!
Liss: I would be, except for the fact that you're Assholio, the Assholiest Assholitron in the Multi-Galactic Assiverse.
Deeks: Assiverse? Nerd.
Liss: You're the governor of Assachusetts.
Deeks: LOL!
Rape in Entertainment
Part Wev in an emergent series*… [Trigger warning.]
I wasn't really intending to turn this into a series (it's colossally depressing that it even needs a series in the first place), but a lot of this stuff seems to be in the ether right now. Last night, I saw (again) the trailer for The Last House on the Left, about which I've been meaning to write for ages. The film, a remake of a 1972 film with the same theme, is a protracted rape revenge story that begins with an explicit rape scene of two teenage girls, followed by gruesome scenes of torture and assault as one of the girls' parents avenge their daughter's brutal rape after her attackers (in a zany coincidence!) seek refuge at their house. [Please note: The trailer may be triggering.]
That's entertainment!
Aside from the obvious problem with this film (at least obvious to anyone with a basic sense of decency, which necessarily precludes every person involved with making it) using scenes of graphic sexual assault and torture for fun and profit, it's eminently worse that all of it is served up under the guise of familial love.
The tagline of the film is: "If bad people hurt someone you love, how far would you go to hurt them back?"—thus justifying the commodification of sexual assault for consumption as entertainment by attempting to bury its ugliness beneath some half-assed philosophical exercise on love and loyalty, without a trace of irony.
Now there's some jaw-dropping cynicism for you.
And beneath that layer lies something even more grim: Using a family's limitless, unwavering support for a sexually assaulted member to rationalize this pile of reprehensible rape-porn is predicated on the idea that limitless, unwavering support is the natural, common response to a sexual assault on a family member. The ostensible premise, serving to "legitimize" the objectionable material, is that the revenge is the point of the film, not the rape and torture itself.
Thing is, the notion that limitless, unwavering support is what most sexual assault victims receive from their families is total bullshit. It is, consequently, a fiction that is being used to justify selling rape as entertainment.
Certainly, families exist (and Maude bless them) who rally, without hesitation or qualification, around one of their members after a sexual assault, but the typical reality for survivors of sexual assault, who tell their families, is less impressive. For many survivors, there is initial support, followed by the same kind of pervasive silence that surrounds sexual assault throughout our culture. Don't talk about it; pretend it doesn't exist. And those are the lucky ones.
Other survivors never get any support at all, just shame and/or silence; some experience initial support only to have families turn on them when they don't "get over" their assault quickly enough. A&E's documentary series on addiction, Intervention, is littered with female addicts who were sexually assaulted at a young age, whose families express regret for that horror in the same breath as exasperation that their daughter-sister-granddaughter-niece won't get over it already.
The truth is, for many parents whose daughters are never quite the same after being sexually assaulted, the frustration at losing their happy-go-lucky little girl is taken out on the little girl, revictimizing her by expressing frustration at her struggle, or exhorting her to "get back to normal," or putting discussion of her life-changing event on lockdown, because it makes other people uncomfortable.
That the film uses what is, for most young survivors, an absurd fantasy response from hir parents to legitimize a film that treats their nightmare as a swell bit of distraction to consume while eating popcorn, is indescribably hostile.
And, you know, the chanted mantra about what was done to "my/your daughter" by both parents and rapists is no great shakes, either. It's difficult to say whether it's more infuriating that The Last House on the Left drags us back to the days when rape was a property crime, or that it casually underscores without regret the fact that even among people who manage to giving a flying fuck about rape, most only care when it happens to one of their own.
(Except, of course, for the people who care passionately about paying $10 to be titillated by it.)
It's perfect, really, that a film whose very existence is contingent on a culture's yawning apathy to a pervasive crime could so splendidly reinforce the narratives that feed the indifference on which it depends.
Product of the rape culture. Purveyor of the rape culture.
And so it goes.
-------------------------------
* Previously: Law & Order: SVU, Trigger By Void, Watchmen: The Triggering, Rape Is Not a Compliment, Don't Be This Guy, Rape Is Normal, I'm Mad at You Just Because I Know Who You Are: Dane Cook, In Things That Make Me Hate the World, and the Rape Is Hilarious and Soaking in the Rape Culture series, the latest installments of which are here and here, with older posts linked at the end of each.
Wednesday Blogaround
What's the frequency, Shakers?
Recommended Reading:
Leigh: Gender-based Violence Skyrockets Among Poorest Katrina Evacuees
Sady: Oh, dear. It seems that, once again, I may have failed to appeal sexually to each and every member of the male gender.
Jill: Honoring Abusers at the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards
UPDATE: Chris Brown has removed his name from consideration at the Kids Choice Awards.
Monica: Pecah Lobang
Mannion: President Obama and the Teacher Meter
Lauren: I Don't Find This Funny
Leave your links in comments...
Mmm...Womany!
President Obama will "sign an executive order tomorrow to establish a White House Council on Women and Girls, according to an administration official familiar with the move."
The Council will be chaired by Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser and personal friend to the president, and the day-to-day operations will be run Tina Tchen, who is currently director of the White House Office of Public Liaison and was a major fundraiser for Obama during the campaign.Very interesting. There's a lot of potential there; I fervently hope that the Council will be a functional and important addition to the administration and not one of the many sops of a similar nature various White Houses have thrown to marginalized constituencies in the past. Because if it does become something tangible and influential, that would be extremely exciting.
"The mission of the Council will be to provide a coordinated federal response to the challenges confronted by women and girls to ensure that all Cabinet and Cabinet-level agencies consider how their policies and programs impact women and families," reads a memo describing the move and obtained by The Fix.
Relatedly, a new post in the State Department has been created "to tackle global women's issues."
Obama named Melanne Verveer, an aide in former president Bill Clinton's administration, as ambassador-at-large for international women's issues. She will serve at the State Department under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.Wow. Just wow.
The appointment, which has to be approved by the Senate, "is unprecedented and reflects the elevated importance of global women's issues to the president and his entire administration," the White House said in a statement.
Clinton has put efforts to improve the lot of women at the heart of boosting international development, which she says must be an "equal partner" with diplomacy and defense in US foreign policy.
[H/Ts to Shaker JR_JR and Samhita, respectively.]
InfamousQBert's Email Makes Me LOL
i am ADDICTED to infomercials. i mean, seriously, Ron Popeil is like a god to me. i once watched an entire infomerical in spanish, just because it was awesome. thus, the "as see on tv" logo is like a beacon to me. i just love perusing the website to see what kind of crap i NEEEEEEEED.Are there people who don't consider Ron Popeil a god?
this one just cracks me up: the frickin' hollywood COOKIE diet!
Huh. Learn something new every day.
Truth, Justice, and the American Way
Well, truth anyway.
Bill Wolfrum's just posted a big exposé on Overstock's CEO Patrick Byrne (which is a follow-up to this piece), along with a post about the process and the why of it all.
(And I did the pretty pictures!)
For Spudsy
Question of the Day
Vaguely apropos of my earlier post about eBay, what is the stupidest purchase you've ever made?
This can be taken in one of two ways, and either way is fine: 1. The thing you've bought that's most intrinsically dumb, pointless, or otherwise a huge, inexplicable waste of money, like a Devo's Greatest Hits album; or 2. The worst buying decision, i.e. a house in Indiana.
My answer's in the question, in case it wasn't obvious.
(lol my stupid house)
Losing Their Religion
According to a recent poll published in the Washington Post, the number of Americans who identify themselves as Christians has fallen in recent years. And in an opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor, Michael Spencer, who describes himself as "a postevangelical reformation Christian in search of a Jesus-shaped spirituality," predicts that evangelical Christianity is going the way of the passenger pigeon: once overwhelmingly plentiful but now bound for extinction.
We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.The number one reason for this, Mr. Spencer explains, is because evangelicals aligned themselves with politics rather than faith.
Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the "Protestant" 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.
This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.
Millions of Evangelicals will quit. Thousands of ministries will end. Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Many Christian schools will go into rapid decline. I'm convinced the grace and mission of God will reach to the ends of the earth. But the end of evangelicalism as we know it is close.
This will prove to be a very costly mistake. Evangelicals will increasingly be seen as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society.Mr. Spencer lists other causes, including the failure to pass on to succeeding generations the core of their faith and an understanding of why they should believe what they do an inward turn in education, and the failure to make the case for their faith in a secular world. In other words, they haven't closed the sale. There are other reasons, including the fact that, as Mr. Spencer says, "the money will dry up," but it is the first one -- the branding of evangelical Christianity as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican Party (or vice versa) that has probably been the root cause of this oncoming demise.
The evangelical investment in moral, social, and political issues has depleted our resources and exposed our weaknesses. Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can't articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith. [Emphasis in original.]
While I personally oppose nearly everything evangelical Christianity stands for on both a spiritual and practical level -- Quakers are not big on evangelism; you might say we are "silent" on the issue -- and I especially dislike the homophobic and misogynistic threads woven into some of the hard-core evangelical denominations, I do not wish for the demise of this or any spiritual community. Organized religion, like any human endeavor, has its flaws and its monsters, but there is also no denying that it provides a stable and comforting foundation for many people and communities. Far be it from me to disparage anyone or any group because I don't happen to believe in their creeds or mythology. But when you have joined it at the hip to a political party and made it so that candidates for office must be defenders of the faith to the point that, as Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee wrote in Inherit the Wind, "every act ... must be measured against an arbitrary latitude of right and longitude of wrong -- in exact minutes, seconds, and degrees", then you have a problem.
Mixing politics and religion is a dangerous brew. The history of the world is strewn with the bloody corpses of civilizations that have given governance to dogmatism and made faith the tool of the powerful to use as a control mechanism, and it still shatters parts of our world today from Southeast Asia to Northern Ireland. And despite the best efforts of the writers of the Constitution to make it plain that religion or its practice should have no formal role in the operation of the federal government, they also made it plain that there were to be no restrictions on its faith and practice. This cuts both ways for both the believer and the non-believer; freedom of religion balanced with freedom from it. It is, at best, a compromise between our human instinct to have hope in the unseen and a practical need to provide a workable secular society.
This philosophy is apparently counterintuitive to the evangelical Christian movement. My experience with them -- and I've had quite a bit -- is that they see their faith infusing every aspect of their life and they must share it with others. That is what evangelism is all about; to be a witness of their faith to the world, and they have no qualms about making it abundantly clear that they think they have all the answers, in spite of their often self-deprecating denials that they don't ... however, they do know that the Bible does. The next step, logically, is that if it's so great for them, everybody must share in it. It didn't require a very big leap of faith to look for a political party that not only shared their conservative values but also gave them the entry into the halls of power where they could put their faith and morality into legislation and on the ballot. And the Republican Party, long identified with the mainline Protestant denominations but also aware of the demographics, had few qualms in embracing both a powerful messenger of their platform of "traditional family values" and the practical fact that the most well-known televangelists had volumes of mailing lists of devoted followers...and donors.
But it was all destined to come to a crash. Just as political parties dry up when they run out of ideas, the evangelicals, as Mr. Spencer noted, found themselves becoming irrelevant or worse, a hostile force within families as the reality of our human existence made keeping to the faith a challenge. The world is not flat and it wasn't created in six days. Good little boys and girls who love Jesus and believe in him grow up to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered or simply not what the bible says they should be. Faith has to coexist with Truth, and not everyone wants to be told that God has a plan for you. And when the political party that rode with you to giddy heights of being within an arm's length of being a permanent majority is swept from power to the point that they can't decide who is really in charge, the last thing they're going to think about is you needy and insistent Jesus-shouters who can't seem to grasp the idea that the only reason they went along with you in the first place was because you paid for it. Republicans are, by nature, a cheap date.
Mr. Spencer sees the future of evangelical Christianity as rising from the ruins and reshaping itself.
We need new evangelicalism that learns from the past and listens more carefully to what God says about being His people in the midst of a powerful, idolatrous culture.May I be so bold as to suggest that the evangelicals take a leading from the un-evangelicals -- the Quakers. Let your silence and your love be your ministry.
I'm not a prophet. My view of evangelicalism is not authoritative or infallible. I am certainly wrong in some of these predictions. But is there anyone who is observing evangelicalism in these times who does not sense that the future of our movement holds many dangers and much potential?
HT to Melissa.
Caption This Photo
Swatch: $35
Mullet c/o Krazy Kutz: $18
Z Cavariccis from the mall: $52
Olan Mills photography session: $79
Preserving for eternity a special moment with your beloved wildcat: Priceless.
[Pic via Recon, natch.]
