PLEASE GENDER-SWAP EVERYTHING, BECAUSE YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TERRIBLE YOU ARE YET

THE LAST OF US

The world has been overrun with zombies, as usual, and the only people who survive are rugged individuals and bands of armed mercenaries.  You play as an ordinary tween girl, El, tasked by a boy you love and trust with protecting a headstrong middle-aged man, Joely, who may hold within his delicate body the key to human salvation.  For the first half of the game, you must use your skills to keep him safe, though eventually you trust him enough to give him his own pistol and he assists you during fights.  You grow to bond with your grizzled middle-aged companion through a series of incidents, while stubbornly denying that he is nothing more to you than a surrogate for your own father.  When you are gravely injured, Joely feeds you and brings you medicine, but while he is on his own he is captured and held by the tween leader of a cannibal cult, forcing you to torture and kill the cult members you capture before mounting a raid on their compound to rescue him.  

In an innovative twist, you are briefly allowed to play as Joely (though admittedly only while El is incapacitated by injury).  The writers have gone out of their way to present the men in this game as having their own agency and goals, a laudable change from the passive wriggle-and-squeal tropes of men in video games.  Also refreshingly, no one suggests that the cannibals will abuse Joely sexually (perhaps because of his age), only that they are likely to eat him.  The violence, however, is still quite shocking: especially when you play sidekick, the animations have you stabbing girls many times in the eyes, neck, and groin to disable them.  The context cues of the game ensure that whenever El kills a girl, you know you are killing a human being with personal relationships to her sisters-in-arms, and one of the last human survivors of the apocalypse--all the more distressing because the game frequently requires you to kill all the girls in an area before you can progress.  

The visuals, writing and music in the game are all top-notch, but it suffers from being mired in a survivalist fantasy that has always been about honoring and privileging feminine skills at the expense of masculine ones.  The world of The Last of Us is designed to make technological consumerism, lawn-mowing, and high-shelf-reaching look like ridiculous, obsolete skills; mending, cooking, conflict resolution and child-rearing are the valued skillsets of the post-apocalyptic age.  It gives me pause that so many of our modern fantasies are about this type of world.  It seems to presage a generation of women dreaming about a world where they can be respected for their base animal qualities, without having to worry about male concerns or social pressures.  I shudder to think about the position of men in such a world.  

Runcible Rape

So, if you're a person, you're probably aware of the latest spasm of insane nonsense in Republicans' ongoing battle against women who have bodies: Todd Akin's assertion that pregnancies resulting from rape were rare enough to be a non-issue in outlawing abortion, because the wombs of women who were victims of "legitimate rape" had a mechanism by which they would "shut that whole thing down."  This fantasy must be a great comfort for anyone who is genuinely troubled by the idea of a woman suffering through an additional humiliating, expensive, life-threatening ordeal after a traumatic assault, yet who must still demand that such a woman be prevented at all costs from accessing safe abortion services.  Akin was at first roundly decried by all sane people everywhere, then right-wingers demanded that we shut up about how terrifying it is that this idiot is allowed to make laws on health care and science and that we ought to only talk about how bad the economy is.  After that, a number of defenders of the sanctity of life until birth emerged from their Morlock caves, and now we have a media "debate" about "legitimate rape" just as we had a "debate" about going to war in Iraq, torture, global warming, et al, ad nauseum.

I am, by nature, an internet feminist, and so in this case I want to discuss issues of language.  When Akin laid his giant head on the sympathetic lap of Mike Huckabee the day after his moronic remarks, he explained that he had misspoken, and that by "legitimate rape" he had of course meant "forcible rape", rather than something that was worth the little ladies getting all het up over.  This term, "forcible rape", has a long history in the anti-abortion fight, most recently when Paul Ryan and Todd Akin forcibly inserted the phrase into a bill which would have denied any federal funding for impoverished women's abortions unless they were victims of rape.  "Rape" not being rapey enough, the co-sponsors made sure the bill read "forcible rape."

Now, "forcible rape" is a bit of a poser, as a phrase something like "close proximity" or "unexpected surprise" or "personal friend."  It modifies a noun by placing before it an adjective which is a central defining characteristic of that noun.  "Rape" means sex which is forced, coerced, produced through threat or violence.  Now, I'm not against differentiating between different circumstances of rape via categorical adjectives, if it helps break the idea of stranger-rape being the typical case, which arguably phrases like "date rape" or "acquaintance rape" do.  But the very use of the words "forcible" and "rape" in conjunction suggests that people who use it believe that there are other species of rape which are important to distinguish from this type.

Indeed, the one which anti-abortion campaigners suggest as an example of non-forcible rape is statutory rape.  Now, I haven't thought much about statutory rape since I stopped wanting to have sex with teenagers, at around age 19, but I think I have a pretty good handle on the right-wing objection to statutory rapes being included in the category of "rape" for the purposes of judging victims' merit.  The idea is that that slutty teens (abetted by the satan-worshipping lesbians at Planned Parenthood) will be so keen to get free abortions that they will (falsely, it is assumed) accuse venerable older men of consensually raping them, so the state had better at least ask the teens to display some vaginal bruising to back up their accounts.  Again, this is a fantasy of female evil created by anti-abortionists to escape from the knowledge that they are hurting children, rape victims, and women in general with their stance against modern fertility control methods.  Statutory rape is not a perfect legal construct, but it codifies the idea that extreme power imbalances, such as those that exist between children and adults, create a coercive atmosphere in which the child's consent is not legally meaningful when compared to the adult's coercion.

Anyway, all this is to suggest that, when you see the phrase "forcible rape" used as though it were a serious concept, you might well want to substitute "runcible rape," because "runcible" is a delightful nonsense word created by Edward Lear, and "forcible rape" IS A NONSENSE TERM CREATED BY POWERFUL SOCIOPATHS.

Men Ain't Call Me Shit

My enthusiasm for blogging has been on the wane for some time, but nothing has been quite as boner-killing as the recent outpouring of feminist bloggers' litanies of death and rape threats they have received from readers.  This mirrors a lot of my experiences with the feminist blogosphere, in that it's an awareness-raising campaign about an apparently universal female experience (rape threats when you express a feminist opinion online) that has never happened to me.¹

I have two main reactions when my whole sphere suddenly lights up with solidarity over how men are always treating you as primarily sexual objects.  First, there's the reaction of horror at the malice these women experience, which makes me genuinely fearful about blogging and being in public.  Later, as I read more and more and learn how widespread such campaigns of internet terror seem to be, I begin to wonder what on earth is so wrong with me that apparently no one wants to choke me with cocks for my opinions.

It's a real headfuck.  The consciousness-raising, solidarity-promoting campaign to reveal the extent of the abuse other women have suffered in silence makes me feel pressured to either self-censor my own lack of abuse or attempt to compete with other feminists in the victimhood stakes.  While I often feel alone in my (patently dickish) reactions, I know I'm not alone when I feel pressure to conform to feminist narratives of victimization, because shit like this crops up from time to time.  I have a great horror of becoming an editor of my own experiences to match the narrative of a group I ache to belong to. 

I'll try and work on my failures of empathy. In the meantime, I think I can advance an explanation of the origin of rape threats themselves, which many feminists seem to be crying out for.  In brief:
1) Everyone feels massively threatened by the current climate of fear and despair, even male sexists.
2) Powerless male sexists feel that the feminist narrative has totally won out and they are disenfranchised, making attempts at civil disagreement futile.  Feminists, despite feeling themselves embattled and fearful, are perceived to present male empowerment and female disempowerment as universal rather than situational and relative. 
3) Powerless male sexists cast around for ways to silence feminist arguments they feel are so wholly baseless (due to their own experiences as embittered social rejects) that they cannot engage with them intellectually. 
4) Because women have a sex, sexists settle on the notion of attacking their ideological opponents at this point of weakness.  Historical styles of disciplining misbehaving women are employed, which mostly hinge on women's desirability as sexual objects.  Men who advance opinions which are similarly objectionable to reactionaries receive a different style of threat--threats of violence toward themselves or their loved ones, accusations of homosexuality, or threats towards their jobs.  Men perceive the problem of threats as a lamentable characteristic of public life, while women perceive it as a problem of their gender. 
5) Real patriarchs continue to live blissful lives unfettered by consequence while the rabble tear each other to pieces. 

1. "Ah, privilege!" cry the feminist bloggers.  "Your existence has been so privileged that you may even regard our identification of your privilege," they add, "as simply a way of dismissing any experiences which contradict our narratives."

tone it down

For the moment, let's turn our focus on the notion of a person being "attention-seeking."  This is the concept we draw on when we sigh "he just wants attention, ignore him", or sneer "shut up, you attention whore."  We might describe Lady Gaga this way, or Louis Spence, or a small child--anyone shrill or grating.  It's a catch-all term of abuse for anyone whose behaviour is outré in a way that people consider otherwise unjustifiable.  This is a term of discipline, meant to evoke shame.

This first started niggling at me when I was seventeen.  My high school's yearbook committee had planned a page devoted to photos of couples kissing (which was dumb), and administrators had excised a photo of a pair of my lesbian classmates from the final product while preserving the rest of the page (which was dumber).

The message was clear: the school didn't see our relationships as valuable or meaningful in the same way as our heterosexual classmates, but rather as obscene. The administrators advanced two arguments in their defense: first, that the young ladies involved would benefit from not having a permanent record of a relationship they might later characterize as a youthful indiscretion (a courtesy not advanced to a straight couple who had vowed on the page that they would be "still together ten years from now" but who had broken up between the taking of the photo and the yearbook printing); and second, that any further debate over the fairness of this decision would distract other students from their important studies.

Naturally, we organized a kiss-in.  That is to say, we called up the local newspaper and tv news and told them that all the high school students would be kissing each other in a variety of gender permutations out on the school lawn one afternoon.  The form of this protest was considered.  It held up as ludicrous the idea that being photographed kissing your girlfriend might be shameful, and demonstrated that failing to value us queers as students was going to be more distracting than just treating us like everybody else.  It referenced the golden era of American protest, and it had a hook to draw in the media (hot teen sex lawn).  We did get a good amount of coverage, and although we had to add our own lesbians to the yearbook that spring, they made damn sure to acknowledge the existence of queer students in the following years.  It was also, incidentally, the first time I ever kissed someone.  A successful protest all around, I would say.

So it was with some dismay that I read a letter in the paper (an early form of online commenting!) the next day, admonishing the editors for deigning to attend the protest, grousing about all the "giggling bisexuals" on the local news, and generally complaining that it was clear that all the protestors wanted was attention.  Well, yeah.

The more I considered it, the more of a mystery it became to me.  Attention seems like such a Maslovian need--would we sigh "ugh, what a food whore" when we see a starving man?  "She's only doing that because she's looking for a sense of security and belonging in a group."  Attention is how we understand ourselves to have a reciprocal social connection with others.  Not being attended to frequently by people in your life fucks with your sense of self.  Ask a homeless man, charged with the task of soliciting permission to survive from every passerby, how dehumanizing a lack of attention can be. 

Then I started looking at whom the epithet was directed--first, children and reality show subjects.  Second, trolls and bullies.  And thirdly, women in the public eye, queers of all stripes, and people of color who complained of institutionalized racism.  People it's not applied to include parents, reality-show creators, the owners of sports franchises, and straight men in general (hard to be attention-seeking when your gaze is constantly subjectified). 

So.  The framework that's being encoded in the pejorative use of "attention-seeking" is that some people have an excessive desire for our finite attention, like small children, and that ignoring them will serve both to punish them for their bad behaviour and to help them grow up into strong, capable straight white men who dress conservatively.  This is untenably paternalistic, and I reject it.

There is, however, one instance in which I support the diabolization of attention-seeking, and, spoiler warning, it's when corporations do it.  I am profoundly annoyed whenever I see a corporate blog post end with an exhortation to "join the conversation!" or "tell us what you think!"  It's a lazy and useless attempt at online community-building, one which attempts to shunt all the work of fostering a discussion space onto commenters.  Moreover, it's one part of a creeping systemization of creatives working for free (not, as I wrote initially, "pro bono") to make profits for corporate stockholders--regard the ads you see regularly nowadays which ask you to produce content for more advertising campaigns, presenting this as a fabulous creative opportunity rather than a pure scam.

It's really getting to the point where capital is in such a strong negotiating position that it can demand years of free service from a worker before paying him, that he may prove a faithful and uncomplaining employee.  We can fight this, but we need one thing.  Workers of the world: get attention.

Meat Foods I Have Missed

I thought I'd keep a running tally of foods that I enjoyed a lot as a meat-eater, pined for as a vegetarian, then used my newfound cooking skills to recreate.  After some consideration, I've excluded recipes where the flavour comes from heavy spicing and the meat is sort of a blank center point, e.g. curries, buffalo wings, that sort of thing.  I never want for those.  Also burgers.  The state of veggie burgers is fine. 

French Dip sandwich
My favorite thing made from a cow.  Easily recreated with sliced portabello mushrooms and tons of garlic.
Satisfaction: High

Tuna Salad Sandwich
Very successfully recreated with cold crumbled tofu and vinegar.  My partner enjoyed this moist sandwich not one bit.
Satisfaction: Mixed

Unagi
The buttery, tender flesh of eels is one of the last things I gave up on my course from pescetarian to proper vegetarian.  Hit on the solution to this one after frying tofu marinated in alcohol a few days ago.  Made some kabayaki sauce to put on it and I was in non-hog heaven.
Satisfaction: High

Ham
It's a struggle.  The grocery store won't sell me any liquid smoke.  I use some quorn lunchmeat right now. 
Satisfaction: Low

Bacon
Lots of work has been done on this by eminent bacon scholars.  There's baco-bits for your baked potato, veggie rashers for your bacon sandwich, and smoked cheddar for anything that takes bacon and cheese.  As to streaky bacon, I haven't really attempted a remake due to the aforementioned liquid smoke issue. 
Satisfaction: Moderate

Sausage
I've posted about this before.  Morningstar sausages also provide that greasy wrongness you want in a full breakfast sometimes.  
Satisfaction: Perfect

Braunschweiger
I like how it tastes of liver.  Haven't really tried recreating it, but Marmite has a nice kind of metallic organ-meat quality.
Satisfaction: Untested

Short ribs
Heartbreaker.  There's lots of good barbeque options for the veggie, but nothing is quite like using your low incisors to scrape the smooth muscle off a jerk-glazed pig bone.  I'm just saying. 
Satisfaction: Low 

Crispy Duck
Of all the ghoulish things I miss about meat, it's eating that layer of crispy, fatty waterfowl skin that I miss most.  There's apparently a couple of Asian solutions to this: Buddha Duck, which is made of stacked tofu skins, and mock duck, which is made of wheat gluten.  I've managed to find neither in Boulder or Scotland as yet. 
Satisfaction: Pending

Chicken wings
The good thing about these was eating all the flesh, then chewing the cartilage, then cracking the bones with my teeth and sucking out the marrow like it was crab meat.  But I also just like dark meat on a chicken.  I'm not going to bake any false bones and then fill them with marmite or something.  It's not worth it. 
Satisfaction: Not to be had

Crab
Is crab delicious, or is it just something vaguely saline that you can dip into lemon butter?  Think about it.  It's more the activity I miss here, the cracking and picking.  Replaced that by buying walnuts in the shell. 
Satisfaction: w/e

Beef Jerky
Again, it's less that I like the actual food, which is just beef, and more that I love taking something very tough and fibrous to pieces with my teeth.  There's plenty of vegetarian options for something tough and fibrous, believe you me.
Satisfaction: At peace 


When I started this list, the intention was to demonstrate that anything you miss as a meat eater, you can substitute as a vegetarian.  As I went through the things I liked eating when I ate meat, however, I found that many of my pleasures were bound inextricably to the consumption of animal parts.  It wasn't a question of taste or texture, but rather my enjoyment at using my hands and teeth and tongue to render those things that had made an animal able to live--its connective tissues, bones, and organs--into energy for myself. 

The capacity to enjoy meat is hardwired in me, and it would certainly be easy enough to pursue its pleasures.  But enjoyment isn't a moral imperative.  We can weigh our pleasures against the harm they cause and make decisions that both minimize harm and make us happy.  Frankly, I think if more people would accept this premise, I'd hear fewer of them assert that a monogamous bisexual is a contradiction in terms.

You're Doing Gender Wrong

I enjoy watching pop videos, I guess.  I'll certainly watch them for hours until I've had my fill.  Sometimes I even like the songs.  But mainly I enjoy watching brief linguistic and visual spectacles on the Semiotics Channel.  Take Mike Posner--if you listen to his lyrics, he just sounds like a classically-trained date rapist.  Classically-trained in date rape, I mean, not music.  But the videos for his odious songs are great!  "Cooler Than Me" has him stealing sunglasses off hipsters and looking into different film universes through them, and in "Please Don't Go" the emotional pain of a breakup causes the world to fragment and artifact around Posner like a badly-streamed video.  And every week produces a new guilded turd of similar caliber. 

Generally these days UK pop videos are fashion shows whose central themes alternate between a kind of Babestation Lite and personal affirmations that you are, in fact, okay to just be yourself, even if maybe you don't look and/or fuck like the video people.  So basically music television has become women's magazines, with all the conflicting messages about women's roles that that implies.  I'm open to the idea that young women may be in need of someone to tell them that becoming the world's most lifelike Realdoll is only one of the many things they can aspire to, of course.  I'm just not sure that message is best delivered by a writhing professional dancer with no skirt or trousers.

One style of video I have come to find especially grating is the specific claim, made over and over again, that women are in fact just as good as men and can achieve anything they want.  This was a brave sentiment in 1961; the fact that it's still in heavy rotation in 2011 would seem to imply that it hasn't really soaked in, despite the very different material conditions of first-world women these days.  These songs--Jessie J's "Do It Like A Dude" is the one in current rotation, but previously we had Alexandra Burke's "Broken Heels", a couple entries in the genre from Beyonce, and basically Pink's entire oeuvre--they appear to stem from a sense of inadequacy at not being male, a kind of "penis envy", if I may coin a phrase.  And the answer in the videoverse is to do what men do, but sexier. 

This approach misses out one of the major conceptual gains of the feminist movement, aside from how it got pretty much everyone to agree that there was some historical point at which women were getting a raw deal (currently debates tend to rage about whether we should be locating this point in the past or the present).  The gain I'm referring to is the capacity to question the gender binary.  Rather than attempting to slavishly duplicate men's lives, only with killer heels and bouncing a baby on the hip, we could use feminist intellectual tools to stand back and ask whether the mass of men have it so good today that women ought to expend their energy on catching up. 

Also of note: I am apparently so straight these days, or Jessie J's hoodie-playsuit and wacky gurning antics are so terrible, that I didn't notice that the backing dancers for her number are largely delicious-looking Afro-Carribbean butches.  J, much like Lady Gaga or myself, identifies as bisexual, so I guess I'm meant to feel some kind of solidarity.  I don't.  Also they keep mentioning that she has a heart condition.  The phrase "save your breath" springs to mind.

Weighing in on Dickwolves

My background: I've been reading Penny Arcade since 1999, I've been reading feminist blogs since the invention of blogs, I am intimately familiar with the way internet arguments escalate, and I have a sense of humor.  My take, which you should understand is the correct take from what a fucking expert I am on all these topics, is that PA made a perfectly appropriate rape joke which no one ought to have objected to, and then a funny comic mocking the concept of rape culture, and then a series of increasingly swinish moves, followed by an absolutely stellar apology.  Pretty much everyone else has behaved execrably. 

Out-of-context criticism is absolutely endemic to feminist blogging, and I think it's because expressing solidarity for rape victims outweighs pretty much any other concern including accuracy and fairness.  This is a value feminists have: if you asked most feminist bloggers what motivates them to blog, "because somewhere, a woman is being forced to have sex against her will" is going to be high on the list.

But qualities of the crime of rape are variable and resist conforming into an overarching social narrative of cause and effect, whether this narrative is "rape culture causes rape" or "women's rape claims are strategically-motivated".  Proponents of each narrative have their own shibboleths and very little patience for views or data that fit their narratives badly.  And why would they display patience?  Either there's a world of women whose lives have been destroyed by rape, or a world of men whose lives have been destroyed by false accusation--in either case, the appropriate response to this terrifying world of arbitrary injustice is outrage and activism. 

My personal, meaningless opinion is that there are probably numerically more rape victims than falsely-accused rapists in the Western world, but it would certainly be easy to receive the opposite impression.  False rape accusations have inherently longer news cycles, for example, and tend to leave believe-the-victim feminists looking credulous.  Also, my high-school sex-ed teacher has by now taught generations of young men that a woman whose lips have touched even a single drop of liquor will be fully supported by society and the legal establishment in railroading any young men who foolishly have sex with her to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.

I suppose reviewing rape conviction rates from reality would have conveyed the impression that you could do quite a lot of rapes without fear of prosecution, and so I see why she presented this nugget of men's mythology instead--still, it joins the pinpricked-condom and half in undergirding a worldview where relationships with women are a threat.  And the complementary worldview in which men are a kind of deadly animal who mainly abuse, rape, stalk, and discriminate against women is, of course, prevalent in its own circles. 

Now, on the internet, these ideologies are taken up by people whose knowledge of the nuances of their apologia vastly outweigh their experience with, e.g. the mechanics of sex, and so everything is really angry and stupid and broad.  In the case of feminist blogging, I've seen this translate into a practice of defending the notional traumatized rape victim at all costs (for example by tagging up every fucking post with "trigger warning"), even against actual rape survivors who, after all, are women who continue to live and crack wise and have idiosyncratic opinions even if the rhetoric we use tends to present them as broken or no longer fully human ("lives destroyed" earlier in this post, for instance).  For the video gamer, it is probably fairly difficult to transition suddenly to the feminist version of a term ("nonconsensual sex") which is in ubiquitous use in his subculture as a synonym for "defeat soundly", and in general use as something more like "sex obtained at knife-point, by a psychotic stranger, from a jogger".  The gulf between definitions, not to mention the existence of complete assholes on various sides, makes some kind of conciliation between ideologies a seeming impossibility. 

I'm not sure that I can bring all this together to some kind of conclusion.  I'm not sure anyone can.  I'd like to see everyone treating the person glimpsed through the screen like they were sitting beside them, but I don't exactly follow this precept in my own online conversation, and I am a bit of a dick IRL besides.  And I'd like to see fewer rapes and, I guess, fewer false accusations of rape.  I suppose I can do worse than conclude by quoting Tycho: "Go, and rape no more."

Letting The Side Down

Increasingly I've come to regard my decision to call myself a feminist as being similar to my earlier decision to call myself a lesbian when I knew I was strongly attracted to men as well as women.  Calling myself a lesbian was a personal, political choice: an attempt to manage other people's impressions of me and a prescription for myself as a sexual radical.  But it was essentially dishonest, and so it was not only problematic for me personally but harmful to the sexual identity I was trying to establish solidarity with--what was the lesson of my love life but that dykes just need the right man to come around? 

I think feminism is super important of course, and the legal, social, and political equality between genders it aspires to are fundamental human justice issues that are far from resolved in even the most progressive circles of even the most privileged areas.  I'm incredibly grateful to my feminist forebears, who ensured that I wouldn't be compelled to whelp live young if I didn't want to and could go to university and all that.  And it gives me pause to even consider dissociating myself from an important social justice movement that has fallen on hard times. 

But I get exasperated with the unfalsifiable doctrine that wherever there are men and women, women must be getting the worst of it.  I get mad whenever "men" is used as a synonym for "patriarchy".  I get offended when media representations of white women are treated with greater seriousness than the actual lives of black and brown ones.  I get irritated whenever I see the implication that the advancement of women consists of getting them to catch up to men, and that men's lives are a fixed measure by which everyone ought to be judged.  I can't subscribe to the idea of a zero-sum game between one half of humanity and the other, and I don't feel that I'm different enough from penis-havers to automatically side with my sisters against my brothers.  And, lordy loo, I'm tired of having that one argument about rape.  

It's not just that my knee-jerk reaction in any situation is to also consider a male perspective before coming to a snap judgment.  I have selfish reasons as well.  I'm tired of how I react emotionally to mischaracterizations of feminism, feelings which seem distressingly near to patriotism or sports fanaticism.  I'm tired of dealing with the fallout from a 60-year disinformation campaign anytime I want to convey to someone what I believe generally.

What I want is a word that doesn't imply that I hate sex and jokes and men and domesticity, but which ideally implies that I hate God.  I want to go back to what I knew was the right term for myself the first time I read it as a child: humanist.  Secular humanist if you're nasty.  I want to define myself as pro-human and resolve to be in solidarity with humans. I know it's very white-privilege of me, but I just want my affiliations and opinions to be by choice rather than by default.

My beloved, let's get down to business

Can it really be so?  Have I actually decided I have something to add to a discussion of that hyperinflated term, empowerment?  Well, yes, I'm afraid that time has come.  Strap in. 

What put me over the edge this time was watching Music, Money, and Hip Hop Honeys--which I dearly hope will have the distinction of being the only show produced by the BBC to feature a presenter asking a sexual assault victim to explain how her clothes influence rapists and jurors.  What happens in the show is, one of the women (who refer to themselves as 'video girls') gets quite bubbly and animated when she puts on revealing clothing, so the presenter concludes that, far from feeling exploited and unhappy and used while performing sexually, some women find it empowering. 

Then the presenter discovers that most women performing in videos don't get paid, and that they have shockingly unrealistic expectations that they are about to be 'discovered' while gyrating, and that being so discovered would make them super-rich.  She concludes that, while some video girls may feel empowered, the power actually rests with the people making all the decisions that affect their lives, and that this power relationship is not substantially affected by their gyration. 

That seems to cover the ways I generally see "empowerment" used in discussion.  So what I want is to tease out some of the meanings and assumptions when different people talk about empowerment.  I made a chart. 

As Twisty classically pointed out, the term has been co-opted by advertisers, tied firmly into the ideals of consumption.  At some point, "empowerment" was decoupled from the actual substance of power in capitalist society, namely the ownership of money and property, which is handy because open discussions of wealth do not benefit capital.  So the main way empowerment's used today is to describe feelings. 

Now, I am sick to death of empowerment discourse which is about personal feelings and not substantive measures of social power (i.e. money, i.e. redistributing money more evenly among existing humans, i.e. people pissing and moaning about the status quo but if you try and change it suddenly you're a communist).  Personal feelings pay for jack shit. 

Moreover, it seems that people who want to talk about feelings of empowerment are happy to imply that individual empowerment is simply collective empowerment at a smaller scale.  Individual empowerment is plainly not the secret to collective empowerment: I may gain a great deal of personal power by marrying a billionaire, but that does fuck-all for the rights of any group I purport to belong to.

What also tends to happen, as is very much the case in Hip Hop Honeys and in Twisty's worldview, is that empowerment then becomes the disempowered individual's responsibility, neatly removing oppression from the equation.  Anyone who comes to the table pre-empowered--whether by an accident of birth, lucrative work, or bald calumny--will be treated as though power is their birthright, while anyone trying to get somebody's boot off his face will have to prove both faultless and meritorious to be granted the right to occupy the ground he's being crushed into.

Mostly, though, "empowerment" is used to talk about women and sex.  What kind of sex would empower women?  What kinds of acts would sexually empowered women get up to?  What positions would be most empowering for them?  Would it be more or less empowering if the women were very attractive and young?  Would adding additional young attractive women to a sex act make it more empowering?  These questions and so many more like them have been discussed in tedious detail in the media for some reason. 

The position of third-wave feminists, if I may generalize, has tended to be that THEY are deeply afraid of a woman's pleasure, and as such every orgasm amounts to sticking it to The Man, even when you obtain it quite the other way around.  But this association of pleasure with power is problematic.

One of the themes of this blog is that pleasure is, at best, limited in its capacity to change power relationships: there's a lot of pleasure and peace in complying with society's plans for your ilk.  And unlike Homo Economicus, we often do things to get along, or to impress a lady, or to be sociable, or to have self-respect, which may not garner us or our identity-politics group greater social clout.  Making empowerment a stand-alone measure of whether an action is morally positive collapses a bunch of relevant factors into a black-and-white caricature of human lives, emotions, and social relationships, which I guess explains why it's so widely used.  

Viva La Dainty

On the occasion of the let's-say-40th anniversary of these songs, and the let's-say-four-day dieversary of someone asserting that, based on the content of my blog, I would probably be right into shaving my face (!?), I feel like I ought to clear up a couple things about feminism.

Feminism is not just women getting to do what men do.  The implicit assumption behind that idea is that what men do--men's work, men's preferences, men's pastimes, men's rights and responsibilities--are the real, genuine human things, so when women do them, they will have achieved complete personhood.  That this is such an easy mistake for feminists and non-feminists alike to make testifies to how strong the idea that women aren't properly people remains, even in this era of lady policemen and men returning home in the evenings.

Now, the other assumption implicit in the discourse of feminists-wish-they-were-men is that men's activities are more desirable in addition to being more authentically human, which is also pretty wrong.  There's a number of (particularly upper-class white Western) traditional female activities which are great fun, such as baking.  You can identify these activities by whether there's an army of men clamoring to redefine them as masculine and deep and life-affirming and meaningful--currently no one is gassing on about how folding laundry is an art and a science, for instance.

Conversely, there are many areas of life where men have drawn the short straw, though I'm pretty sure I'm in danger of losing my F'membership card for saying so.  Criminal prosecution is one I've discussed previously, but things like, oh, trusting you can get the benefit of the doubt about whether you're a sex criminal when you're adjacent to a child, or not having to scrape a blade or series of blades across your vulnerable face all the time, these could reasonably be described as female privileges.

But one is discouraged from making (or ceding) this point in an argument, I guess because it encourages fellows to think that everything already works out to be square in the end, and so the status quo is jim dandy.  All I'll say about this aggressive, dare I say masculinist rhetorical posture is that maximising the points you score in arguments is by no means a foolproof way of winning souls to your side.

That said, I surely would like to grow a real beard one of these days.

I got arms that long to hold you

Where I'm going I'm pretty sure I'll still need eyes to see, but--sadly? I don't know--I doubt I'll need a lot of the other body parts I collected over the years. A number of the more portable ones are already packed away, but those pictured here must remain in my room or, in the case of the torso, be stealthily abandoned in a distant public area after dark.

I decorated these when I was younger and worse and had fewer
Sharpies, so, you know, sorry you had to look at them.

Glass head appears courtesy of Pier 1.

Barbie leg at left for scale.

A keychain and...not sure why that has a safety pin. Punk rock!

Some human hair.

My closet.

Okay, so why do I have these? I'm more into skulls these days, but I think it had to do with wanting to seem dangerous, yet clever and sexy, like a serial killer. I never felt like other people regarded middle-class pacifists as sufficiently dangerous for my taste. But I also surmise that my motivations had something to do with the suggestion in Killing Us Softly that women are often depicted as disembodied parts rather than full people.

I saw Killing Us Softly 3: Son of Softly once in a college sociology class, and once in a college feminism class, and once before that in a context I don't remember.  It begins with Jean Kilbourne relating how she, a simple young woman working in the advertising department of a medical journal, happened to invent the idea of "taking ads seriously" in the 1970s when she started pinning sexist ads up on a big board in her home and then asking her friends to assist her in rendering a critical reading.  I can't really fault her for promoting a DIY approach to forming a personal philosophy, but I can't help but be irritated by anyone advancing the intuitive, anecdotal I-just-know approach to scholarship that is her stock and trade.  Anyway, she goes on to claim that violence against women is "widespread and increasing", which would have been quite a bold thing to say in 1999 since it would have so drastically contradicted so many reports and studies discussing the dropping crime rates at the time.  I imagine it's just a consequence of not updating your slideshow that often. 

Kilbourne argues, over clips of leggy women voguing as cameras follow them at a low angle, that "over and over again, just one part of the body is used to sell products, which is of course the most dehumanizing thing you can do to someone. Not only is she a thing, but just one part of that thing is focused on." Leaving aside a whole bunch of begging the question there, to what extent is this true, and to what extent does it matter? I guess after giving the whole thing around ten years' thought, I'll go with a) to some degree and b) somewhat. Close-up framing is basically an inevitability in image creation since, oh, ever, but at the very least since Birth of a Nation. And the way advertising works--the constant, increasingly sophisticated attempts to create, shape, and respond to consumer demands while always showing them something memorable--any part of the body that's fair game to show is going to be continually refigured and repurposed to make it new. That would probably be well and good if making a display of the perfected aspects of women's bodies weren't of such special interest to this society at the same historical moment when we seem to have reached the maximum tolerable level of equality and autonomy for the distaff and have started trying to shout back the tide.

But to what extent does this sort of compartmentalization and objectification affect women's self-conception, thereby insidiously undermining efforts at equality? When asking a question like this--essentially "is this a cultural construction or are women just like that?"--it's useful to be able to look to men. Sure enough, men are reported to experience great distress when the value of their bodies is abstracted to the dimensions of a single appendage. That level of distress, however, doesn't seem to have greatly affected their overall performance as a gender. It really seems to have more to do with, you know, choice and opportunity and all that, than whether they're humiliated in advertisements.  Because boy, are they ever.

The control of images and words is overly weighted as a tool for equality, I think, because words and pictures are fun to blether about. Controlling them seems quite easy compared to enacting policies to lessen the gulf between rich and poor, which would probably do the most good for everyone involved. But it isn't easy. Words and pictures are always going to break out of restrictions, because that's just the way people do. And I daresay, if political energy is indeed a finite resource (who knows, right? But I bet I wouldn't be so interested in the study of images if it weren't for Kilbourne) that it could be better spent studying to organize than studying to adbust. I understand, however, that my opinion may lose some of its authority when you see that I bought human hair.

Lain will be accompanying me to grad school if I can just
figure out a way to remove her head.

Instructive Failures

 I am something of an academic by nature, and it is to this I attribute my (apparently unusual) high tolerance for didactic cinema.  I'm not saying I could sit through Crash without yelling at the screen or anything, but I stuck with Studio 60 long after the show had dropped all pretense of being anything other than Aaron Sorkin's Chew On That Hour.  Sorkin is that entertainer who pulls a rabbit out of a hat in a novel and entertaining way, and then when the audience clamors "Amazing!  More tricks!" just pulls the same rabbit out of some slightly different hats over and over again until everyone has left.  It's not an uncommon mode for artists, and the first rabbit you see can be really something.

I never watched Sorkin's most beloved creation, The West Wing, but I feel like I understand the kind of catharsis it provided to progressives rendered catatonic by the actions of the Bush administration to have a shadow cabinet play out their Al Gore fantasies.  I'd seen Sports Night and enjoyed as much of it as I understood when it was first on, years before my partner told me he was really getting into Studio 60.   We watched almost all of the doomed first season together.  It's probably telling that I've seen the show up to the big nineleveny cliffhanger in which a main character's life hung in the balance, and have not yet felt a need to see whether she lives or dies.

What finally killed my willingness to indulge Studio 60's oratory, that I might learn something about how American topical sketch comedy shows are formed, was a dawning awareness of a certain tendency it had in common with a lot of modern screenwriting.  It was what instantly put me off Fringe and of course Heroes: a compulsive need to subvert audience expectations that turns pathological.  The fall of Heroes between its first and fourth season is...well, already this post is of extreme length, and I could go on essentially indefinitely about what went wrong there, breaking it down fractally, shot by shot.  But basically what killed Heroes was trying to surprise the fan community by refuting their expectations, especially when they expected a sensical, meaningful plot. 

For Fringe, the expectations it was subverting were those created by The X-Files, which in 1993 was itself subverting an audience expectation by creating a skeptical and science-minded female character (who was still always wrong) and an intuitive and credulous man who seemed to assemble his near-unfailingly correct interpretations of weird events by the same word-association method the Bat-Man uses to solve the Riddler's clues.  Fringe, then, seemed to be based on the assumption that audiences would find it daring to see a credulous and intuitive female investigator paired with a skeptical and science-minded man, and would not correctly identify their subverted subversion as a tired stereotype.

The subversion I remember best from Studio 60 is when Evangelical funnywoman Harriet is misquoted in an interview in a way that suggests she believes that homosexuality is uniquely sinful, after which she is violently attacked by some large angry gays.  You may recall this particular story--in which god-fearing men and women innocently expressing a nuanced version of their beliefs are physically threatened by the same depraved sex perverts who control the media and twist around their words to suggest that not wanting gays to marry is somehow an expression of hate or fear--from the recent Supreme Court case on whether petition signatures from Washington state's Referendum 71 would remain public record or become secret, in the interest of protecting people who feared that their public expression of bigotry might cost them something.  (The court ruled 8-1 that the plaintiffs' wish to keep their terrible opinions between themselves and their legislature did not override well-established laws promoting civic transparency. The plaintiffs continued plainting after this, wishing the court to note how unfair it was that they had no chance of proving how fellow co-signers of this, their attempt to protect the solemn gravity of marriage by keeping it safe from people who really really want to get married while reserving it for people who have been cooling on the whole idea for 40 years, might be targeted with a similar level of harassment to two men who want to hold hands.)  So I found that to be a somewhat irresponsible bit of writing, in that, like most of Harriet's character on the show, it felt intended to pander to and soothe the ruffled feathers of a moderate Christian audience I'm pretty sure was never watching.

The second notable subversion attempt I wanted to talk about is one I misremembered, which came up during a discussion with my partner of blogospheric rumblings on whether Olivia Munn's disastrous Daily Show appearances were yet another manifestation of The Daily Show's "woman problem".  The female problem in question is one that should be familiar to students of television: shows, but especially comedies, have trouble attracting and keeping female writers even when they are actively seeking them out, let alone when they aren't.  My partner mentioned that Studio 60 had had a subplot involving a lawsuit by a former writer, Karen, alleging that the writers' room on the show-within-a-show was no more than a boys' club and that she had been fired for being insufficiently like the chick in the men's mags who just, you know, likes totally normal, pudgy guys and wants to wear push-up bras and Daisy Dukes and get beaten at video games.  I recalled that the episode contained a sequence in which Karen's lawyer asks around the show to find out why people believe she was fired, and to a man, they answer "Because she wasn't funny."

This did indeed happen, but it's worth noting that none of the characters expressing this opinion were actually contemporaries of the fired writress.  Also, when I went to look at more detailed summaries of the episode, I noticed that the final word on the matter came from one of the executive producers reading out the actual text of the complaint, which begins to make Karen look like she might not be talking completely out of her ass.  The content of the scene is based on a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against the producers of Friends by shitcanned stenographer Amaani Lyle, where besides discussion of David Schwimmer's orientation and Courtney Cox's fuckability, she alleges that the writers had collaboratively constructed a parallel Friends in which Joey was a serial rapist.  Regrettably, this is not the plot of Joey.  The complaint in Studio 60 relates an extensive public discussion of various ways the male writers would fain fuck Harriet--on an altar, with a crucifix, in Pat Robertson's mouth, etc.--which would itself constitute excellent grounds for a religious discrimination lawsuit.  The executive producer is of course deeply troubled by this, because Harriet is his woman.  So let's call Sorkin's opinion on the frivolity of high-profile sexual harassment lawsuits--because I think it is pretty safe to say that the words coming out of his characters' mouths are intended primarily to advance his opinion--ambiguous.

It sounds like I'm saying I disliked the show for not toeing my particular party line, and maybe that's the case, though I wouldn't be watching much TV if I couldn't put my politics to one side in the interest of entertaining myself.  I think it's more that I don't really believe Sorkin thinks that scary gays will bash Christians or that bitches be trippin', but that he is condescending to the imagined prejudices of his audience in order to feel he has leeway to make his point.  I'm not exactly bucking the conventional wisdom here: all reviews I've read of Studio 60 involve some variation on calling it condescending.  But, you know, it's not awful to be condescended to if you're genuinely ignorant on a subject and are interested in getting a quick grounding.  What Sorkin managed by talking down to me on subjects I know something about, and by not seeming to mind if he was getting them all wrong, is just to make me doubt his credibility on anything I thought I might be learning from him.  The only times I've ever minded a lecture are when I know I have a hell of a lot better handle on something than the guy who's trying to explain it to me in very small words.

To Know Too Much

It's a fact and you're just going to have to come to terms with it: knowing certain things is going to make you gay.  If you're a man, a good example would be sewing (or grooming, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer); if you're a woman, it's harder to become gay but a good example of something that would make you a male-homosexual-style social pariah (i.e. an unattractive but disquietingly still sexual woman) would be vibrators, cats, or Twilight.  Avoid vampires in either case. 

Maybe you acquired intellectual curiosity early in life, and you're trying to gain information about everything, particularly things that seem like social phenomena that matter deeply to some people.  Maybe you have the mistaken belief that learning will enrich your life.  Don't fall for these lies.

Be a smart information-consumer: if you're unsure whether a particular knowledge base is gay, check out a popular internet forum.  If the guys there hate it but are willing to post long, punctuated screeds about why it is awful, it's just fine and you may learn more about it without becoming gay.  If, however, they're simply using offhand references to someone with this interest metonymously to represent people of low character and social standing, then you will immediately have to give up playing Pokemon, and disavow and/or forget everything you have learned about it. 

If this is making you feel qualmy, be assured that thinking less of someone because they know more than you is perfectly natural, and, why, just everyone does it sometimes!  Yes, even Phil Nugent.  When directed toward the educated of means and privilege, it is a regular human trait called "anti-intellectualism", the source of the term "over-educated".  When directed towards the knowledge bases of school-leavers (e.g. sport, making a lamp), it is called "elitism".  When directed toward those with specialist subjects, it is called "being a normal person with girlfriends and not a creepy autistic-spectrum shut-in".  When directed towards women with domestic or personal-care interests, it is called "WIN A LOAD OF MAN-GADGETS".  All of these groups of people--riches, poors, nerds, women--are vile, and have helpfully signified themselves as such by having different priorities from you, probably out of spite.  If it's not spite, well, maybe they're just too dumb to know how stupid knowing all that stuff makes them look.

On Women in the Sciences

Years ago, I attended a panel on Women in Science for which the prompt was the shitstorm stirred up by Harvard president Lawrence Summers remarking that tenure appointments of female science and mathematics professors at Harvard had probably declined steadily throughout his tenure because of a) babbys, and b) innate differences in the sciencey parts of women's brains. The panel was made up of three female scientists and one male scientist; the audience was...well, I went to a panel later in the same conference titled A Woman's Right To Jimmy Choos and the demographic composition was roughly the same.

The male scientist was the first speaker, and looking distinctly uncomfortable, he explained that while he in no wise agreed with Summers' assessment, he felt it would be a disservice to the panel format to have only panelists who were in total agreement, and so he would advance what he felt was the best defense of the innate differences theory he could muster. Basically, that defense was: it was utterly ridiculous to dismiss discrimination and socialization as factors in women's low representation in science jobs in the manner Summers had been presented as doing, but to treat the idea of innate differences between men and women as an already-settled question was unscientific, and more research should always be conducted.

The female speakers all declined to touch directly on the subject of Summers' remarks, and I had the distinct impression of them scooting their chairs ever so slightly away from the first speaker.  Instead the female scientists focused on their personal narratives as girls and then women interested in science. All noted that they had been routinely mistaken for secretaries by male colleagues of all ages, and all bemoaned the difficulty of finding mentors who people would decline to spread rumors they were fucking. The second speaker, who seemed most interested in talking about female scientists in the aggregate and least interested in talking about her journey, mentioned the case of Ben A. Barres. Barres, an M.I.T.-educated neuroscientist, transitioned from female to male in his thirties, and recalled, for example, overhearing colleagues discussing his work commenting "He's such a better researcher than his sister Barbara!"

Then came the Q&A portion of the panel, where people could get up and query the panelists. To a woman, it consisted of people who wanted to unleash a blistering torrent of invective at Larry Summers and were not reluctant to use the unhappy male speaker as a surrogate, whatever his views. After three or four of these the moderator opted to restrict commenters to only caustic screeds which could be phrased in the form of a question, and it was around then that I decided it would be a better use of my time to wander off.

On The Perils Of Representation

 I borrowed this PSA poster--yes, let's say borrowed, I am definitely one day going to return to that university and replace that poster--from a bathroom stall at a university, because I think it is a poetic bit of propaganda.  It allows for a fair depth of deconstruction, which I like in an image.  Before reading on, I suggest you familiarize yourself with the ideas of literary and film criticism, particularly the concept of a "reading" of a text.  I don't want to have to delete a bunch of comments going "you're wrong because that's not what the creators meant" like I did when I said Disney's The Little Mermaid was about interracial relationships. 

So: what are our elements?  Black hand, money, white hand, disease.  I say that this will extend to metaphors about black people, white people, commerce, and all varieties of malady.  So: White imperialists come to black nations with the promise of enriching commerce, but instead blight them with poverty and disease.  Or a corruption affects all commerce, poisoning black and white alike.  Or the green bugs are not pathologies, but the "germ" of new life, created by the flow of currency.  Or money is germy.  Or black people are germy.  Note that this last (and maybe the first if we're being picky) is racist.  Indeed, there are several racist readings of the text of this image, even without getting into the positioning with respect to the viewer and who is accepting what and so on. 

Let us consider two hypothetical images like this, one with two black hands, and one with two white hands.  Because race, like most human categories, has a marked and an unmarked (or default) status, only one will appear to the casual observer (particularly a casual observer from a default category) to be dealing directly with race.  This problem is a Known Issue with race.  What are some of the proposed solutions (i.e. ways to avoid being called racist while portraying non-whites in media) and what are the possible drawbacks to each one?

• Always ignore race
Maybe a noble thought, but the problem is that people can't actually do this.  Largely it boils down to ignoring the fact that everyone in your portrayal is white due to the consequences of some unstated assumptions.

• Harp on race constantly
Annoying and exhausting for anti-racists, racists, and people who feel that not much caring puts them more in the former group than the latter.  Leads to films like Crash. 

 • Be black
Wait, hear me out.  In media contexts, people from marginalized groups tend to be granted more latitude to express opinions only on the matter of their specific group's relation to the mainstream, on the grounds that people from marked categories are likelier to be expert on these subjects than people from default categories.   More comprehensibly, on tv, black people get to talk shit about black and white people and no one except racists or academics or racist academics will really take exception.  Of course, there is a firmly-established political culture dedicated to catering to upset racists, so this is still a bit dicey.  Other possible drawbacks: society won't just let you become black for some bullshit reason.  And, I don't know if this is true, but I heard somewhere that there are disadvantages to being black in America that outweigh the notional pleasure of knowing that you could still potentially be on tv if you use the word "nigger" extensively. 

 • Tokenism/Diversity Checklist casting
Regardless of their level of racial savvy, pretty much everyone can tell if you're doing this.  The impulses that drive this style of character creation (a bid for universal appeal) usually also preclude fully humanizing any characters, and because the desire to have "one of each kind" of cast member need not spring from any actual political awareness, it's easy for it to be accompanied by a bunch of racial stereotypes or for Ma-Ti to not really have any good powers. 

 • Use only white people
Don't...don't actually do this, as a strategy or otherwise.  Besides being patently inhumane, people do eventually notice, and then you either have to justify it (questionable) or change (difficult).   

 • Stop depicting humans
This can backfire pretty easily.  Certain suites of characteristics you might wish to portray with a non-human character, George Lucas, are already associated with poisonous racial stereotypes and whether or not you meant them that way everyone will assume the worst.  Also, people generally need to be involved at some stage, whether in voice, character design, general aesthetic, writing, or premise, and any of these people can have unexamined racial biases or ignorance that make their way into the final product. 

 • Alien casting method
Maybe you know the story, but the scriptwriters for Alien supposedly specified that all the characters were "unisex", and encouraged the casting of actors of whatever gender to play any of them, except Ripley, who was definitely going to be a dude.  While a favored technique of mine, this can only work in situations where race and gender are genuinely interchangeable, and as such is limited in its capacity to tell stories in which these are meaningful dynamics. 

 • God, this is tricky.  What would Solomon do?  

 Oh goddamit it Solomon.

In Defense of MSG

I'm a vegetarian and a semi-avid cook, and I like MSG.  Not only do I like its meaty, savory taste in food, but I like it as a metaphor for how we deal with different kinds of social problems. 

MSG, or monosodium glutamate, or hydrolysed yeast protein, or yeast extract powder, or malt extract, or Parmesan, or Bragg's Liquid Aminos, is a food additive, one of a group of substances added to food to make it more in line with qualities we prize in foods.  There are too many food additives to count, with varying levels of harmfulness, but perhaps the most harmful of these is salt.  What I find reading people's offhand conversations--I read a lot of people's offhand conversations--on food forums and the like, is that salt is vaguely understood to be bad, but unless a doctor has directly told someone that they will die it is not really thought of as a harmful component of food so much as a basic taste.  MSG, by contrast, is widely understood to be Bad News if it occurs in a dish or on a label, and is resolutely to be avoided. 

Information on reducing your salt intake can be found online at sites like the Mayo Clinic, the American Heart Association, and the Center For Science In The Public Interest.  Information on reducing your MSG intake can be found online at sites like MSGTruth.org, Curezone, Holisticmed, and TruthInLabeling.org.  I advocate for the removal of neither sodium nor MSG from the diet, but for the monitoring and reasonable intake of each.  What interests me is the different reputation of each of these substances.  You don't see Alton Brown or Heston Blumenthal suggesting you glutamine your thanksgiving/christmas turkey, for example. 

MSG occurs as free glutamates in most savory foods as well as grapes and tomatoes, but it is very much viewed as a foreign menace which reached our shores from sinister Asia and immediately started killing people who ate at Chinese restaurants.  It is unusual among food additives for being quite heavily studied, due to a late-70s hysteria over Chinese food.  Glutamate is an amino acid and neurotransmitter which can, if overloaded into the brain, cause nerve death.  However, we do have this whole blood-brain barrier thing going specifically to prevent this type of death.  Consumption of MSG alone can briefly cause headaches, increased heart rate, and flushed skin in some people, but in double-blind studies taken with food, this effect can't be replicated either.  A recent study shows a small but positive correlation between heavy MSG use (over 150 mg per day) and overweight in Chinese housewives, with heavy MSG users consuming more calories overall and a greater proportion of their calories from animal sources.  Incidentally, MSG is a salt compound, and all of these results--neurotoxicity, headache, rapid heartbeat and dizziness, obesity--have been demonstrated much more reliably in studies linking them to salt.

Study upon study links high salt consumption to high blood pressure, contributing to heart disease and stroke, the primary killers of people.  Salt is additionally dangerous because we all need a little of it to survive--it's an essential electrolyte that helps us keep our nerves conductive.  Salt was thin on the ground when we were evolving, and consequently we have such a taste for it that we will gorge ourselves on salty foods when the opportunity presents itself. It is a taste sensation, to be sure, but the reason it is in most processed food is its qualities as a preservative (think of salt pork, pickles, preserved lemons, or kippers), as well as its use to make food with terrible ingredients taste less shitty. 

Salt is something of an intractable social ill because it is bound up with so many other aspects of our food system.  It's necessary for pre-prepared food to be well-preserved because it travels long distances and often sits for long periods on shelves or in refrigerators.  And it's necessary for food to be well-seasoned because profitability demands that food be made from the cheapest possible ingredients, which can be awful.  Dramatically decreasing salt would create problems which would necessitate a radical reshuffling of the organization and priorities of prepared food producers, and no one ever wants to do that. 
MSG also solves problems for processed food producers, by allowing them to create delicious, moreish snacks out of sawdust and paint chips.  No recommended daily intake has been established, and so no quantities must be shown on labels.  Although the additive is widely reviled, it occurs in enough forms that it can be swapped for a synonym with ease--for example, the chicken broth in my mother's cabinet proclaims "No MSG * " with the addendum " * except for that which occurs naturally in autolysed yeast extract".  A can of chicken broth has 80% of the recommended daily allowance of sodium, and the reduced-sodium version has 50%. 

So to recap, what we have here is two substances, both enjoyable, and both with some potential harm.  One of them is more harmful, and is overused by everybody despite dire warnings by health officials, because it undergirds the basic fabric of our way of life.  The other is less harmful, is feared all out of proportion with its objective health effects, has a reputation as dangerous substance due in part to its early association with shifty foreigners, and has been driven into hiding despite the fact that almost everyone uses it at some point during their lives.

That's why I like MSG.

Did you know they have July 4th in England, too?

I'm sorry, it's simply a ridiculous notion--independence.  It's practically Randian.  Imagine a man who has systematically cut himself off from other men, made himself self-sufficient and self-contained.  Ignore entirely the man's history of dependence on mother, medicine, family, food system, schools, transportation infrastructure, societal stability, all technology and recorded knowledge that came before--now the man is alone, by his own choice, feeding himself and living for himself.  Would this man be characterized, in any narrative, as healthy?  As admirable?  What use is he, except as a psychological curiosity?  What about him is still human? 

I think the definition familiar to the Founding Fathers comes from the Cavaliers--the power to rule over others just as you like, and never to be subject to them. 

On Wearing Not-Makeup

"Women shouldn't wear makeup because they look better without it" is right up there on the list of sentiments that keep my eyes rolling like a Kit-Cat clock with "Women shouldn't shave their pubes because I have a deep concern for feminism, and not at all because I long to press my face into a dense bush and reckon I have the authority to order women to comport themselves in a manner befitting my circa 1972 sexual fantasies."

Women have shit going on in their lives that doesn't revolve around you.  If you find yourself saying something along these lines, be aware that you sound like a tool, exactly as much as if you were saying that you should have the right not to be subjected to women's awful bare faces. 

There's a number of rationales people have for feeling like they can demand the paint come off.  Many express outrage or discomfort with the idea of a falsified face, tinged with varying degrees of jealousy or misogyny.  Some cite political or aesthetic objections to beauty standards that women feel compelled to approximate in their makeup.  Many of these, I've learned, habitually confuse people wearing natural-look makeup with people who don't wear makeup, and so believe that the most heavy-handed applications are representative.  A few simply have impossibly high standards for the skill involved in application, and so believe people shouldn't even try if they're not making up at a professional level. 

I also sense, in some of men's objections, a feeling of being unnerved that someone has gone to additional trouble to look pleasing, when they are strongly discouraged from reciprocating in kind.  Makeup seems to make these guys feel like more is expected from them, an implicit contract they didn't have the chance to agree to.

Others, idiots, appear to believe that attention to one's appearance precludes the ability to think about any other subject, and that such attention signals unbecoming pride in a body one is meant to keep from distracting others.  I feel pretty justified in calling this opinion moronic because I used to hold it before I gave the matter even a second's thought. 

Look, If makeup didn't make you look better, for whatever value of "better" is currently en vogue, it would die out.  Structural functionalism comin' atcha.  But I feel makeup has more to recommend it than mere improvement.  It can transform you, not just into your best you, but into any you you can communicate.  Applying makeup well requires a steady hand and good observation, both of yourself and of the qualities of what you want to create.  And I believe that clear self-reflection, tempered with self-love, is fundamental to maximizing what you get out of the brief few years you spend being an alive human.

Everyone should get to wear makeup.  It's what separates us from the animals (if that's your bag).  At the same time, though it irritates me to have to make this explicit, no one ought to be forced or coerced into wearing makeup (at any moment, in any particular fashion) to keep their employment or permission to act as part of society.  Okay, except maybe screen actors. 

If you'd still like to make a feminist-styled argument that pigments applied to the body deserve to be chucked in the dustbin of history (perhaps because you reify some concept of "natural"), let me give you a quick pointer.  You're going to find a great many feminists curiously unmoved by a precis whose assumptions concerning what would increase social justice hinge on making women look better.

That Much Is True

I didn't even realize Susie Bright had updated until, while trying to find an old post about the unintentional comedy of Juno and Waitress' depiction of pregnancy, I finally saw this cracking academic essay from Eithne Johnson analyzing feminist anti-porn consciousness-raising slideshows (memorialized in Dykes To Watch Out For as what turned Lois kinky) with the film theory tools of classic exploitation movies.  Check it out.

 

 ©Alison Bechdel, ~1995.  Go buy the Dykes To Watch Out For collections, with money. 

Dual Pickup

While researching unpleasant bands for a minor joke in yesterday's entry, I was struck by the neat complementarity of Ke$ha's unconscionable "Blah Blah Blah" and 3OH!3's despicable "Don't Trust Me".  Taken together, the songs can be seen to circumscribe both sides of a near-anonymous heterosexual relationship characterized by mutual disrespect and loathing.

"Don't Trust Me" (which I consistently mistype as "Don't Trust Men"; oh feminism!) takes the form of an account of the damage on the meat popsicle the narrator is about to intubate, imbued with equal parts nausea and pity. "Blah Blah Blah" consists of a set of instructions addressed to the listener/fuckee.  The central exhortation of each song, the demand each character makes of their partner, is to shut up.

For 3OH!3's narrator, listening to the bruised head-case he is focused on spit-roasting would bring to the surface distressing thoughts that circulate beneath the surface of this song--of whether taking advantage of a fucked-up girl after taking pains to dehumanize her makes him an untrustworthy, terrible person.  Ke$ha's narrator seems, well, simpler: she doesn't want to hear from her interlocutor because she is aware any respect he displays for her is feigned, part of a ploy to trick her into doing what she's intent on doing anyway [him]. 

Because these atrocious songs and the horrible sentiments they express are quite popular, my natural next move should be to bemoan the breakdown of social mores they represent, and perhaps to long for a simpler time before the invention of casual sex or young people.  But this would ignore context, both social and musical.  I'm going to just assert that relations between the sexes are better than they were in the past and leave it there; if necessary I'll defend it in some forum that isn't a blog post about disposable alterna-pop. Musically, these songs exist in a rather long tradition of opposition to love songs expressing admiration--think of "I Just Want To Make Love To You" in 1954 or "You're All I've Got Tonight" in 1978.  Moreover, they aren't popular because of how acceptable it currently is to treat a sexual partner like they were Clippy the Microsoft Office Paperclip, but rather because in an atmosphere of increased respect and communication, being an asshole becomes subversive. 

Personally, I find it heartening that neither of these acts is allowed to go on tv alone anymore: each has to feat. other artists in their videos to lend credibility to the notion that another person could stand to be around them for three minutes.