Pitching Woo

Source: CNN Front Page.
Goin' on a holiday! So long!

Blog note; Tiptree-style

Sorry I haven't been posting or responding to comments--I've been engaged in activities other than being on the computer. Largely obsessive reading, but also things that involve not being inside my house, which is nice. But anyway--I'm not ignoring comments (also, if you've e-mailed me and I haven't responded, well, see above), and, oh, Picador in particular, I want to respond to you, and hopefully will at some point during this lifetime--possibly with a whole new post, who knows.

Something that will probably delay that is that the day after tomorrow the Baronette and I are heading off to a lake in the mountains for some water and mountain activities and, we pray, no internet. What I'm looking forward to most is seeing more than four or five stars at night.

Quick response to Justin and ergo's comments on the last post--just as a warning, The Book of the Damned and The Morning of the Magicians can be incredibly goofy reads--and the former can be a bit tiresome, as the vast majority of it is just a litany of what Fort considers evidence, mostly of weird things falling from the sky--but if you read them not as positivist statements of what is, which neither book remotely wants to be, but instead as lengthy, impassioned rants against the tyranny of Occam's razor, then they can be quite valuable, I think.

---------

Another quick thing I wanted to make note of is that I've just started reading James Tiptree, Jr.'s first short story collection, 10,000 Light Years from Home, and so far it is excellent for reasons I'm seriously considering writing a full-length book about (OK, it's not just about her, but I'm completely honestly on the verge of writing a book-length study of science fiction), but one relatively minor stylistic point I've noticed is that it seems that she frequently wants the reader to misread what she's written. Maybe it's just me?

Take for example this exchange, which occurs towards the end of the first story, "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side," much of which has been an extended discussion of sex with aliens and the implications of this (and, satisfyingly to me but not directly relevant to this post, our imperialist urges biting us in the ass), to the irritation of the differently-minded narrator:

"Man is exogamous--all our history is one long drive to find and impregnate the stranger. Or get impregnated by him; it works for women too. Anything different-colored, different nose, ass, anything, man has to fuck it or die trying. That's a drive, y'know, it's built in. Because it works fine as long as the stranger is human. For millions of years that kept the genes circulating. But now we've met aliens we can't screw, and we're about to die trying. . . . Do you think I can touch my wife?"

"But--"

"Look. Y'know, if you give a bird a fake egg like its own but bigger and brighter-marked, it'll roll its own egg out of the nest and sit on the fake? That's what we're doing."

"You have a heavy angle on sex." I was trying to conceal my impatience. "Which is great, but the kind of story I'd hoped--"

Now in that last paragraph, is the narrator trying to conceal his impatience or his impotence? He says, Tiptree has him say, impatience, but the context (and subtext) and the shape of the words makes it easy for the reader to switch them.

Then take the third and fourth paragraphs of the next story, "The Snows Are Melted, the Snows Are Gone":

The dog-wolf faded off the ridge, reappeared by the bushes where the human crouched. The figure bowed its head; as the wolf came near. Dawn light flickered on his canines. He snapped sideways, carrying away a dark cap.

A flood of light hair spilled out, flew as the human tossed it back. The wolf dropped the cap, sat down and began to worry at something on its chest.

Tiptree describes a wolf approaching a human, makes us linger on it by the odd use of a semicolon in the middle of the action, after which she gives us a closeup of the wolf's teeth. The wolf snaps, carries something away from the human's head--and then the next paragraph gives us something spilling out from that human's head, and a word that looks almost exactly like, but is not, blood.

For the moment, I have nothing to say about that other than that I am impressed. But my god, you should see the heap of notes I've already built up for that book...

All is well

Another one I got via Mel at some point:

...the Wisconsin Supreme Court [has] upheld an order for a 17-year-old to register as as sex offender, even though he committed no sex crime. The youth forced another 17-year-old to accompany him to collect a debt. This was enough to convict him of falsely imprisoning a minor, which the Wisconsin legislature has defined as a sex crime.

Isn't this wonderful! Wasn't I foolish to be concerned about the Supreme Court (the Big One that time) ruling that people can be held indefinitely, even after their sentences end, if they're determined to be sexually dangerous?

The Wisconsin legislature defines "falsely imprisoning a minor" as a sex crime. What else is defined that way? What else will be?

Good stuff from recent days

The hellhole I work in makes me fall way behind on my internettization for the first half of the week, and other aspects of life made me behind to begin with, so here's some good things ("good" referring to the posts themselves, not always their subjects) I would have responded to in the past week or so had time allowed:

what the Tee Vee taught on monogamy. An excellent and hilarious discussion of what's insane in our attitudes towards sex, and as is so often the case, wtTVt can say in a tangential aside what it would take me a thousand words to say. Here, it's this: Yes, it's pop-sci. Smart folk will hate it (assuming, since it's a book, that they — and only they — are the intended audience, adorable smart folk will write squawking reviews: "I already knew all of this!! Not groundbreaking!")

Jack on Mehserle and Grant, summing up the difference in the treatment of violence directed upwards and violence directed downwards in as few words as possible.

For Rhode Island-interested people, stupid Dave Segal posted some pretty cool proposals for a walking bridge where the old 195 bridge used to be. My favorite is the second one he posted, if you take the awful "The Creative Capital!" slogan off of the wall. Team 10's design is also pretty great, and Team 3's would be good if it didn't assume that there would always be swans and lots of fog on the Providence River, which in my experience is not a safe assumption.

I approve of this Postsecret.

Justin's unfinished Ballroom Dream is one of my favorites of his that I've seen. Very cool layering effect achieved just by painting over someone else's mostly-bland painting.

Dr. Boli misinforms us about the French. Nutella On Toast in comments reminds us that the same is unfortunately true of all foreigners.

We kill other species in lots of different creative ways. Increased UV exposure is burning whales.

Eric Garris on the FBI's detention of David House and seizure of his computer, not even for any bullshit criminal charges, only for working with the Bradley Manning Support Network.

Choose your own adventure

One thing that my friend Melissa McEwan is actually pretty good about is the fluidity of sexuality. She frames her essay as a critique of an episode of The View, which is kind of annoying (though I guess it's not much different from the way I frequently frame my own essays as critiques of McEwan, so I shouldn't complain), and her critique is myopic in the way it tends to be, but she gets at some good things here:

I don't particularly love the idea that women who come out as lesbians late in life were necessarily closeted all along. I'm sure that's true for many women, but why is it so hard to conceive of a woman (or a man, for that matter) whose attractions, or choices, change over hir lifetime?

We're always so desperate to talk about sexuality as if it isn't a choice, ever, for anyone, lest we create a crack into which homobigots can insert their argument that it's an American-wrecking lifestyle choice that makes the Baby Jesus cry buttplug-shaped tears or whatever, but, you know, maybe we should be talking about sexuality in a way that says even if it is a choice, people who love and fuck and live with and parent with and grow old with or have one-night stands with people of the same sex are deserving of equal rights because it's no one else's goddamned business and MREWYB.

(MREWYB is an acronym for my rights end where yours begin; it's a nice enough thought if we must remain within the conceptual framework of "rights," which I wish we wouldn't. Jack has a nice essay on some of the problems with this framework.)

The whole "it's not a choice" concept is muddled on a number of levels. There's what McEwan mentions, which at a more fundamental level is that this rigid interpretation of sexuality devalues choice in favor of genetic (or whatever) destiny. It sets up a context of unavoidable circumstances and says we're all helpless victims to them--while simultaneously insisting that being thus victimized ain't half bad! Sounds a lot like capitalism when you put it that way, actually.

Another problem with "it's not a choice" is that even if we say that sexual preference or orientation or whatever isn't a choice, sexual behavior always is. The capital-L Lesbians of second wave feminism, for example, could tell you that. It may or may not be personally healthy for any given individual to choose one sexual behavior over another, but it is still possible to choose. Acknowledging this does not lead logically only to the "choose monogamous heterosexuality within marriage!" argument, though if you have a case for it, by all means make it. Accepting that sexual behavior is a choice can lead equally to any number of other arguments, from "do whatever you feel like but try not to hurt anyone" (my favorite) to others just as specific (and potentially harmful) as the fundamentalist line, like "have sex only with people matrilineally related to you" or "never get consent" or "stick with nonhumans." Out of the whole range of options opened up by admitting that there is a choice here, it shouldn't be difficult to argue in favor of doing whatever we feel like short of hurting people, and yet we still seem to be terrified of making this argument.

Another problem I have with the "it's not a choice" crowd, and this is more anecdotal, is that at least among people I personally have known, there is a high correlation between promoting the choiceless concept and promoting the static, often binary (on/off, straight/gay) model of sexuality that McEwan critiques in her original post, the model that doesn't seem to be questioned by anyone on The View for instance.

I tend to identify my sexuality, when called upon to do so, as "gay," for a bunch of reasons. It's a simple shorthand. It is the single word that most accurately reflects my actual sexual behavior as it has occurred in the real world (though "infrequent" also comes close on that front). It has the force of habit behind it, as it's the identification I came to back when I first realized there was something to identify, more than half my lifetime ago now, back when my still-developing brain and still-strong (despite my parents' best efforts!) cultural indoctrination led me to simple answers rather than accurate ones. Because, yes--"gay" is a simple answer, and a decent approximation, but it's not accurate, in a multitude of ways that I'm not going to go into here (partly because some of them are entirely private, partly because it's complex enough that it would extend the length of this essay a thousandfold, and partly because a huge chunk of it is things I haven't even figured out how to articulate externally). I don't know what a more accurate description would be--I guess "queer" would do it, though I have an aversion both to the sound of the word and to the specific people who used it most frequently when I first became aware of it as a legitimate descriptor, and anyway I'm not sure how I feel about using such an enormous blanket term that nevertheless separates all of humanity into the distinct categories of "queer" and "straight," which I reject as invalid.

I think the problem is that the whole notion of "sexual identity" is a crock. It's a function entirely of our socialization in this insane, fucked up, unlivable society we have. It is, in fact, a form of the choiceless victimization I described early on in this essay. Don't get me wrong; there are clearly people who tend towards the behaviors we bundle under the "straight identity" and those who tend towards the behaviors we bundle under the "gay identity" and those who tend towards the behaviors we bundle under the "bisexual identity" and so on, but tendencies do not an identity make.

For a long time, the concept of fluid sexuality confused me; surely, I thought, if you're attracted only to members of the opposite sex, you're just straight, and if you're attracted only to members of the same sex, you're just gay, and if you're attracted to both, you're just bi. Why make it more complicated, more mysterious I thought, than that? Doesn't that cover everything? I eventually realized that the whole concept of "same" and "opposite" sexes is, at best, incomplete and inaccurate, that the "attraction" model isn't much better, and that there is a great deal more to sexuality than just which side of the artificial gender binary you most enjoy mingling genitals with.

Earlier, when I said "sounds a lot like capitalism!" it was more than a jokey throwaway. The late-period capitalism that we live in requires of us that we feel like we have options--but only the options provided to us by the system itself. Thus, with sexuality, we do have, in many ways, a greater openness than the generations that preceded us. It's OK to be gay, pretty much! But this openness has been channeled into tiny little boxes, easy to control, easy to market to. Gay? Buy the gay identity! Straight? Buy the straight one! Look at all these options we have for you. Anything you could possibly want to reflect and display your identity, we can sell you. And if you want to choose some other option--sorry, it's not a choice.

I've said it before--just as economic interests seek to control our movements, a control that can be fought with the Situationist concept of psychogeography, the same interests seek to control our sexualities. We need, again and always, to be sexual flâneurs--in, and this is important, whatever way best suits us.

On religion and goat fucking

And now, commentary on the Pharyngula post that led to chaos, destruction, and the near dissolution of my blugfriendship with BDR.

Here's PZ Myers' latest imbecility. (Just kidding! He posted it two mornings ago, so there have been plenty of imbecilities since.) Take a look at it. See the problem? Apparently, PZ thinks the only significant difference between Pakistan and, say, the United States that might have an impact on online behavior is....religion. Is that so.

Take a look at this list. I'm not 100% clear on how Wikipedia defines "internet user," but regardless it seems like a good starting point. We see that 10.6% of the Pakistani population is online. In the US, it's 76.3%. There is one factor in any country that will consistently separate internet users from non-internet users, and it's not religion. I'll leave it to you to figure out what I might be talking about.

And that is of course just the beginning. When you're talking about Pakistan, for fucking hell's sake, you can't disregard its, uh, relationship with the US. Now I don't have statistics handy, but it's a good bet that those members of the Pakistani population who have internet access are more likely to have US ties, while the primary interaction between the US and those who do not have internet access is more likely mediated by predator drones.

And another thing: PZ's argument seems to be that the more repressive a person or a society is about expressions of sexuality, the more interested individuals are going to be in it in private, and that this means everyone should be open about sexuality. And while I have no particular opinion on this line of reasoning in specific, I'm certainly in favor of sexual openness, no fan of sexual repression. However, it is an easily observable fact that PZ Myers himself is not in favor of open expressions of the kind of sexuality directly relevant to the post, which are in fact bestiality and pedophilia. I'm always open to a discussion about these things, and I think their morality or lack thereof is far from a settled question, but Myers is definitively of a different persuasion. So what, exactly, is his point here?

And finally. There is an argument similar in structure to PZ's "the more someone says they're against sex, the more they're into it in private" that I do think is pretty consistently valid, and that's this: "the more someone says they're committed to rational evaluation of the world based on empirical evidence, like, oh, say, capital-A Atheists, the more they are absolutely idiotic, smugly ignorant, and completely unaware of their massive, massive blind spots." This post and its lengthy comment thread are excellent examples. About the first half of the thread is taken up by discussion about whether the methods used to attain and analyze the data are valid, but with no mention of the fact that the data sets for different countries with different types of social and economic stratification are not directly comparable and that therefore the entire premise of the whole discussion is nonsense. Then, a commenter using the name "Pakistan" comes in to berate the commenters and the original post for their racism, which, yes, absolutely. It's only part of the problem with the whole thing, but in any Pharyngula discussion there are going to be so many things to object to that it would be impossible to cover them all. (And I love his response when people point out that the only person who has used the phrase "sand nigger" is him: "I apologize profusely for suggesting that any of the good people of Pharyngula would say something ignorant and potentially racist straight out." Accurate!) Then the rest of the thread mostly consists of people haughtily pointing out that it's simply impossible that they might be engaging in racism (none of them, incidentally, aware of the distinction between "being racist" and "being a racist"). I leave you with this comment, which might be one of the most breathtakingly ignorant and awful things I've read in a good long while. She says that Pakistan

as a whole IS a fundamentalist hellhole though, largely due to Islam and ignorance. The Taliban seem to be ramping up, the government is a corrupt US puppet, and no one seems to care.

To paraphrase someone or other, what do you mean "no one," paleface?

Compare, contrast

In the following, all emphasis is mine.

The, er, youtube blog, back in March:

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

(via Avedon)

Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors, page 37:

Attorney Lawrence Stanley, who published in the Benjamin A. Cardozo Law Review what is widely considered the most thorough research of child pornography in the 1980s, concluded that the pornographers were almost exclusively cops. In 1990 at a southern California police seminar, the LAPD's R. P. "Toby" Tyler proudly announced as much. The government had shellacked the competition, he said; now law enforcement agencies were the sole reproducers and distributors of child pornography. Virtually all advertising, distribution, and sales to people considered potential lawbreakers were done by the federal government, in sting operations against people who have demonstrated (through, for instance, membership in NAMBLA) what agents regard as predisposition to commit a crime. These solicitations were numerous and did not cease until the recipient took the bait. "In other words, there was no crime until the government seduced people into committing one," Stanley wrote.

If, as police claim, looking at child porn inspires molesters to go out and seduce living children, why were the feds doing the equivalent of distributing matches to arsonists? Their answer is: to stop the molesters before they strike again. Newspaper reports of arrests uniformly follow the same pattern: a federal agent poses as a minor online, hints at a desired meeting or agrees to one should the mark suggest it, and then arrests the would-be molester when he shows up. But another logical answer to the almost exclusive use of stings to arrest would-be criminals is that the government, frustrated with the paucity of the crime they claim is epidemic and around which huge networks of enforcement operations have been built, have to stir the action to justify their jobs.

The specific motivation may vary slightly from situation to situation (though profit and entrenchment of power are always the ultimate goals), but Power will always behave in the same manipulative, exploitative ways.

(NOTE: I am perfectly aware that the Youtube blog, being a public face of Google, is also the voice of Power. They are most certainly despicable in their own ways. That's just not particularly relevant in this particular example.)

Special form of the general law

Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors, pages 102-3, emphasis mine:

Following the implementation of the [sex ed funding rules in the Clinton-era welfare "reform" legislation], a study of 659 African American Philadelphia sixth- and seventh-graders, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, returned the same verdict. A year after the classes, the kids who had undergone an abstinence-only program were engaging in intercourse in the same numbers (about a fifth) as kids who had received lessons stressing condom use, with the dangerous difference that the first group hadn't been taught anything about safe sex. "It is difficult to understand the logic behind the decision to earmark funds specifically for abstinence programs," commented JAMA's editors. ...

If it is difficult to understand the logic behind abstinence-only policy, it may be instructive to know that its proponents were proudly unswayed by logic. Although the law's impetus came in part from the continuing concern over nonmarital births, the House staffers who worked on the legislation admitted, in the commentary circulated in Congress, that "there is little evidence...that any particular policy or program will reduce the frequency of non-marital births." Now, this is not true; any number of policies, from contraceptive education to college scholarships for women, can reduce the frequency of nonmarital teen births. But the welfare law was not really intended to reduce teen births anyway.

Levine goes on to imply that the law was intended to make a statement that the Congress was on the side of social conservatism; I would argue instead that it was intended as a form of class-based social control.

Regardless, though, she makes a point that is important to remember: our Leaders neither form nor market policy based on what "logically" will accomplish what they claim in public to be trying to do.

Think of the children

Not irrelevant to the post I might eventually write at some point during my lifetime about young people and sex: I see that Perez Hilton could conceivably be charged with distributing child porn, which according to the article carries a mandatory minimum 15 year sentence, for linking to an upskirt underpantsless photograph of seventeen and a half year old Miley Cyrus.

Now, from what the article says, no one is actually charging him as of yet. But I hope we can all see past the natural disgust we feel towards Perez Hilton, and towards the concept of upskirt shots, to see how patently ludicrous even the possibility, even the suggestion, that someone could be imprisoned for fifteen years for not taking, not posting, but linking to a photograph, taken in public, that includes a glimpse of a vagina belonging to a woman half a year away from an arbitrary "age of majority."

I mean, it's absurd to call that porn, let alone criminal child porn. Our society's attitudes about sex are insane. That includes both what I've just described and the attitude that leads to the idea that taking and "distributing" such a picture is desirable. In fact, they're the same fucking attitudes.

Incidentally, I stumbled upon that article because it was linked to in the sidebar of this Greenwald article, which is overall his usual decent quality but which also casually refers to high school seniors as "children." I mean, what is wrong with us?

Sexually dangerous, belated addendum

So obviously the promised followup to my Sexually dangerous post, focusing on our society's attitudes towards young people and sex, hasn't happened yet. Maybe eventually I'll feel up to the task. But in the meantime, I want to point out something that I didn't say (or even think of) explicitly when I wrote the original post.

In comments, there was quite a bit of back and forth, first between ASP and myself, then between ASP and Richard, and then between ASP and Jack, and eventually I started feeling really bad that it seemed like an argument between ASP on one side and a bunch of dudes on the other. Of course the only person who really got argumentative in the whole thing was me, and that was because a) I was tired and b) I unfortunately conflated what silly Jenny was saying with what sensible ASP was saying, which, sorry about that.

Uh, anyway, now that my absorbing summary of the comment thread is done, what I want to point out is that out of the exchange between Jack and ASP came this statement of Jack's, in response to a summary of a study of rapists:

It contains the beginning of the answer of how to "handle" rapists.

Don't make them.

No one, I think, could disagree with this. The disagreement arose when ASP responded, quite accurately, that feminists have been working on this for quite some time. And it is true, and no matter how minor any individual example may seem, I do think it's valuable to point out examples of how our mass culture reinforces the attitudes that lead to so many men thinking it's perfectly OK for them to do as they please with women, regardless of how the women might feel about it. On all this, I agree with ASP 100%.

However.

These efforts, particularly as I see them at Shakesville but also in other places (and I am not accusing ASP of doing this herself; this is simply a response set off by what she said, hopefully not to be taken as a criticism of her herself), often seem to come hand in hand with the kind of punitive impulse, and the kind of deference to power, that I was clumsily attempting to criticize in my original post (I realized later that I should have split it into two posts, one discussing the ruling itself, one discussing the reaction to it, but my own navel gazing self-criticism is neither here nor there right now).

The problem is that these attitudes, the deference to power and the impulse to punish, are in themselves extremely powerful drivers of the rape culture.

The problem with the deference to power, expressed here by McEwan's bizarrely trusting "sure, there's potential for abuse, but..." framing, expressed elsewhere in her fawning admiration for people like Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, surely needs no explanation. Rape is in large part about expressing power, the rapist declaring his total dominion over the body of the victim. A society with entrenched power structures such as we have, in which we are expected to subsume ourselves to the individuals at the top who present themselves as speaking for us, by its very nature encourages other, violent expressions of power. And this is all without even mentioning the fact that the wielders of American power have encouraged and instituted regimes of systemic rape as a means of control, around the world.

(Another aspect of the power-worship--passively allowing huge corporations to define culture for you--was ably demolished by Jack in the original comments.)

The problem with the punitive impulse as a response to rape should be even more obvious, but somehow it doesn't seem to be. I mentioned in comments to my original post that "rape is itself rampant in prisons." Your good liberal thinks that this is something that could be regulated away; of course I think differently. Rape, as far as I'm concerned, is an integral part of the prison system, a way of ensuring that the power structures that prison serves to reinforce are perpetuated on every level. But even if it's not--even if we could somehow eliminate all traces of rape and sexual assault from prisons--even in this hypothetical (if you ask me, impossible) world, the prison system, and the punitive impulse that leads almost everyone, no matter where they fall on the limited spectrum allowed in mainstream thought, to encourage it, would still reinforce the rape culture.

Opposition to the death penalty is thankfully common among liberals. In discussing it, they often rightly point out the hypocrisy inherent in killing someone as punishment for killing someone. That the implications of this line of reasoning are never explored any further is an indication, again, of how limited the range of mainstream, allowable thought is.

Because surely a moment's reflection would make anyone realize that imprisoning someone (i.e., the use of power to remove someone's agency) as punishment for raping someone (i.e., the use of power to remove someone's agency) is just as hypocritical. And if one's goal is changing the culture that creates rapists, it can only be counterproductive.

I hope it is clear that none of this should be taken as a defense of rapists, nor as an erasure of the fact that, as things stand, rape is a largely consequence-free act as far as the rapist is concerned. And no, I don't have a solution for what we should do with rapists, given that we obviously have a culture that creates them in large numbers. I do know, however, that what we currently do with them, both when we let them go free and when we do punish them, only contributes to creating more and more of them.

UPDATE I'm kind of an asshole. See comments.

Sexually dangerous

So. The other day the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government can indefinitely hold prisoners considered "sexually dangerous", after their sentences end.

"Sexually dangerous." This, in a country where teenagers taking naked pictures of themselves on their phones can be convicted of child pornography (and made permanently "registered" sex offenders). In a country where, for example, a man can be sentenced to ten years in prison (and maybe more, if someone decides he's "sexually dangerous" at some time in the future) for having sex with his fifteen year old girlfriend when he was seventeen. In a country where the first thing that leaps to mind (at least for me) when hearing the phrase "sexually dangerous" is this.

The primary reaction of our good liberals seems to range from indifference to complete silence. A notable exception is Melissa McEwan, who in this one post transforms in my eyes from an amusingly misguided and ignorant simpleton into an irredeemable, despicable monster.

...like any extrajudicial detention policy, there is a huge potential for abuse.

But, unlike most other crimes, perpetrators of sexual assaults have a high recidivism rate and are more resistant to rehabilitation. Convictions for sexual assault frequently don't come with sentences that reflects that reality, with average prison terms being appallingly low. So, something's gotta give.

I'd personally prefer to see long mandatory sentences with multiple parole opportunities, with parole contingent on rigorous and comprehensive rehabilitation, some demonstrable evidence of success, and a required lifetime commitment to ongoing treatment, the failure to comply with which automatically triggers a reversal of parole.

Waiting until people re-offend is not working. For anyone.

(Incidentally, she closed the comments on the post after about twelve hours because a few people were questioning her baseless assertions, and when she said she had provided links to back herself up in previous posts, they responded by saying "Where?")

"Potential for abuse, but..." Nice. Yes, Melissa, there is a potential for abuse. A potential for abusing this ruling, that is in itself an abuse of a system that is an abuse; a potential for abusing this ruling made by a body that is by definition an abuse. And there is no fucking "but." Sexual assault is of course a horrible and all-to-common thing, but advancing the power of the prison-industrial complex is not the solution.

As for what she'd "personally prefer to see," anyone who thinks that "long mandatory sentences" (regardless of her caveats on it, which range from laughable to terrifying) are acceptable for any crime, particularly one so ill-defined, variable, and frequently (note I say "frequently," not "always" or even "a majority of the time") completely harmless as the vast range of acts our sick society lumps together under the sensationalistic umbrella label "sex crimes," is a horrifying beast who can only vaguely be recognized as human.

And another thing: she posted that horrific excretion just one day before sanctimoniously criticizing what seems to be a fairly useful article from the Guardian on the seldom-discussed, massive increase in the wealth gap between white and Black Americans in the past few decades, because it doesn't use the specific word "racism." MS. MCEWAN, LET ME REMIND YOU OF THIS.

I have a monster post bubbling up in me about our society's attitudes towards young people and sexuality. I've been thinking about it for several months now, trying to figure out how to structure it, and how to go about it so as not to say things I don't mean to say. It was inspired mainly by the popular reaction to the latest round of Catholic sex scandals, but shit like this ruling is pushing it along even more. I hope to have it written soon but make no promises.

Oh, and one more thing. This ruling split 7-2. Guess who the two were? That's right, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. And the person who successfully argued the case before the court? Elena Kagan. Tell me again why I have to vote Democrat because of the Supreme Court.

Interpretable in several ways

(via Zamboni)

The funniest thing I've seen in weeks

Belated, as usual

So I knew that Martha Coakley was not someone I particularly cared to see in office (who is?), but I didn't realize until today that she's the nasty piece of work who made her name by first winning a conviction in the Louise Woodward au pair case and then hounding a bunch of almost-definitely-innocent people into jail, where many of them still are, on trumped up child molestation charges. More cases of "protect the children" being used to utterly destroy lives, all for Coakley's personal gain and the American public's sick entertainment.

Knowing this, all the liberal panic* over her loss is even more hilarious. This election, we're being told, is going to usher in fascism in America! As if, a, we didn't have it already, and, b, Coakley herself weren't at least as much a fascist as Brown! Are you kidding me?

In other news, the Supreme Court said corporations can buy elections now. This is apparently new.

*Note also the weirdly unnecessary casual transphobia. Tristero, always a winner.

Update to previous post

I can't access blogspot from work, where I am right now, so I can't leave comments or update posts. But I do have email posting set up so I can post. And I'm feeling enough of a need to say this that I'm going to do that rather than waiting to respond in comments or update the last post ("Be a sexual flâneur") this evening.

 

In comments (which I have reading access to through email), d. mantis said this: "Would you agree that, in a simplistic way, most of our problems stem from the fact that we couldn't give two shits about anyone other than ourselves or immediate surroundings? Would you then also agree that this post could be less geared to the individual and more to the community?"

 

(Normally I'd do blockquotes, but, you know, email is weird and I'm not sure it'll work right.) So: yes, I absolutely would agree. In fact, I'd put it more strongly. I think that the one root problem that is the cause of pretty much every single bad thing that people do to one another is exactly what d. states. It comes in different forms, but the root is always this lack of empathy or compassion or whatever you want to call it. Sociopathy isn't far off.

 

I tend to forget that a lot of the time a point that seems obvious to me in what I'm writing is only obvious because I know what I'm trying to say. What I intended, and failed, to imply in the previous post is that the psychogeographical/sexual revolution I ask for should be both individual and community oriented. In fact, I have a (completely unsupported) suspicion that one major reason that "we couldn't give two shits" about others is that our psyches and our physical environments have been so thorougly colonized by economic oppressors (who want us to be sociopaths, because it is profitable to them), and that an honest attempt to free ourselves of this colonization will change that or, as d. put it, "A 'revolution' as you state, of passion and desire could lead to a more emotional existence including greater compassion." This is exactly my point, though I failed to make it adequately.

 

One reason why I have the complicated subclauses and hyphens and parentheses and footnotes in everything I write is that I'm always terrified that I'm going to forget to mention something vitally important. I need to calm down, because as this and other recent events have shown (like my neglecting to even mention race in my post about media narratives of poverty), I'm always going to leave something vital out. Even reading over the flaneur post again I realize another thing I did was treat gender identity, as distinct from sexual identity, as a bit of an afterthought, which was certainly not my intent.

 

I'm always going to leave something out. One benefit of the small readership I've gained recently (thanks, ladypoverty!) is that now there are a few people who can point out to me when I've done this. And I'm certainly lucky to have the specific perceptive people commenting that I do.

 

(PS I apologize for any lapses of editing there may be in this post. Once I submit it it's unalterable until six this evening at the earliest, and as I tend to edit posts for several hours after posting them, it's a bit nervewracking for me to be doing this.)

Be a sexual flâneur

This article is of course completely ridiculous (and written by some sort of a John G. Miller wannabe, judging from the style). But even as it buys into all sorts of ludicrous societal programming (you have to be straight to have children, if you're gay you have to sashay all the fucking time, even in writing, only straight people like "manly" pursuits, gay people have to be promiscuous, women exist solely to bear children, etc.), it does bring up something that, coincidentally, my pretty-much-gay self and my father were talking about just the other day, on the occasion of the public lesbianization of a cousin of mine.

[My friends] have seen little evidence of an interest in the opposite sex during my adult life, nor asked why. And that’s the clincher.

If there had been an interest, it became eclipsed by other more instant, carnal and deliciously taboo temptations, so it never gained light to grow. For 20 years, my life took a track that stifled the fragile stems...

etc, etc, etc, sexuality is like a jewel, made up of many facets, essentially.

Now, strip away all of the self-and-others-loathing here, and what you have left is this: without all of the programming that our society lays down on us from birth, our sexualities would most likely be quite a bit more fluid than they are now. Or, as my father put it the other night, "We'd be messing around with women, men, pumpkins, cows, everything." Now, I'm sure there's an extent to which this is not 100% true--devoid of programming, it seems likely that I'd still tend towards other men, while my father would still tend towards women, both of us tending towards humans--but to me there is a great deal of indisputable truth to it.

The Lettrists, and the Situationists after them, talk about how our physical environments, all of the geography through which we move every day, are shaped entirely out of economic factors. We go where we go in order to make or spend money, and those destinations, our homes, and every place we encounter between, look and interact with us in the way they do because they serve the specific economic purposes that they do. Trace out the path I take during any given day, and the shape you get will be entirely determined by my economic life, even if it's not a day I go to work. What Guy Debord called psychogeography was an attempt to combat this, to get us to redefine our own personal worlds as we, personally, want to define them. He wanted us to do as we desire in any given space, not to do as the space (and the powers behind the space) want; to move as we desire from space to space, not as demanded of us. It can be almost impossible to tell the difference, so a constant effort (both in intellectual reflection and in spontaneous action) is required. This is one of the most revolutionary acts available to us.

Just as much as we need psychogeography, we need...well, we need what I would call psychosexuality if the word weren't taken already by stupid Freud. We don't need Mr. Muirhead's version of it, though--in fact, we need pretty much the opposite. We need to be sexual flâneurs. Rather than basing our sexualities around a societal expectation of what those sexualities will be (which Muirhead is doing even as he scandalously "switches"), we need to stop making any assumptions whatsoever about our own gender and sexuality, and those of others. We need to constantly examine our thoughts about all forms of sexuality--including everything from the standard hetero-, homo- and bisexuality* to more controversial forms like incest, polyamory, pedophilia, bestiality, and so on, as well as various forms of non-sexuality, such as abstinence and asexuality**, not to mention the more fundamental question of the gender binary itself--and figure out why we think what we think about them, and whether or not that would be better off changing. I'm not suggesting any specific course of action here--to do so would be missing my own point. I only mean to say that we need to think about these things, and, more importantly, experiment, be spontaneous, and always, always, try to avoid doing things just because we feel a societal or economic pressure to do them. It's not always possible, but it should always be the goal.

*Despite Muirhead's apparent belief that bisexuality is The New Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.
**And I should keep going, and expand that list to include forms that tend to be dismissed as ridiculous, like object sexuality or a predilection for yiff or yaoi. But goddamn, I'm already so fucking wordy and just this one hyphened-off sentence fragment already has several subclauses and now two footnotes. I gotta chill out.