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.

On Trifles

The problem with humans is that we have a really poor sense of scale.  We have great imaginations and an excellent ability to organize and work socially, so we made things that were too big to see the ends of, things that would last beyond our lifetimes.  We also made things too small to be manipulated by our hands, and too many to imagine the act of counting, and then we allowed a bunch of those things to fly up into the atmosphere and start warming the climate by two to six degrees.  Here too is the problem of scale: two to six degrees sounds quite trivial as a change in external temperature (though by all means try it inside your body and see how that strikes you) and any idea of the effects of that change on the almost infinitely complex global weather system is simply too big to hold in a head.

Now, dealing with shit we can't really comprehend is not like some kind of a product of the modern age; it's always been the case.  The new thing is that now, the stuff we don't understand, we made ourselves.  What we've mainly done about the problem of misunderstanding is create complex heuristics, cognitive fallacies, and general coping mechanisms for getting us by day to day in the world we complicated. 

Often, this just boils down to shifting the blame.  A big systemic snarl that we would hesitate even to begin to approach working out because of how embedded in our lives are in the reproduction of that system (let's say, the inhumane practices of factory farming) can be safely substituted with a manageable but ultimately trivial example in which we have little stake (say, the production of foie gras). 

I'm talking here about cooking fires.  People, typically rural people, in India and the rest of Asia and Africa, burn animal dung, wood, or coal to cook their food, and this creates a certain amount of smoke which goes in the air and contributes to various things including climate change and poor respiratory health.  The extent to which cooking fire smoke contributes to poor respiratory health is non-trivial; prolonged smoke inhalation demonstrably causes excess deaths, and as we're talking about 3 billion people whose households use solid-fuel cooking fires, this is a lot of deaths.  The extent to which cooking fire smoke contributes to climate change is, of course, disputed, but to appeal to the scientific consensus, it's probably around twenty percent of the global emission of black carbon, half as much as either diesel engines or forest fires. My best guess from looking at the data is that cooking smoke might account for up to five percent of total anthropogenic global warming, but as many of the aerosols produced by cooking fires are atmospheric coolants as well, it's hard to say.  

So, obviously, what we see is a global push to build [to sell] a better stove under the banner of fighting climate change, with health concerns an afterthought.  Besides the misapprehension of the scale of the problem--both the health problem and the contribution to climate change--there are other proximate causes for why we live in a world where trivial things are taken seriously and serious things are trivialized.  To fat warm Western audiences, climate change is still scary in a sexy way, like a serial killer, rather than scary in a deadening, heartbreaking way, like cancer.  And of course descriptions of new tech are more exciting than exhortations to be more austere.*  And then there's feminism. 

When I said that it was "people" who burn solid fuel on cooking stoves, I ought to have said that enough of those people are women as to cause asperity in your interlocutor if you were to mention in conversation that some of the members of this group were also men.  In fact, let me mention at this point that I figure I am broadly in favor of doing away with that kind of gender-neutral language in discussions of real-world populations that skew heavily to one side or the other, on the grounds that it encourages assumptions of gender neutrality where none exist--let's make the cutoff, say, 85%.  So we would have said "the people in Congress" before the 2010 elections, but "the men of Congress" after, for example.

Returning to the subject of cooking fires--the whole thing just puts me in mind of Ruth Schwartz Cowan's tremendous writing on how developments in domestic technology changed expectations for women's lives, leading to the second shift and all that.  Western women have been through the change from solid-fuel-burning stoves to electric or gas ranges; it was accompanied by the construction of infrastructure to support a power grid and natural gas lines into people's homes.  This stove stuff is pretty much an attempt to deliver the endpoint without that worryingly complicated "progress of society" project in the middle there.  While I have my own reservations about, you know, society, I find that mildly distasteful, much like the idea that I'd have to hear about how it relates to climate change in order to give a shit about a large-scale public health project.  I really want to be appealed to for my fellow-feeling for other humans (woman and child humans! the easiest humans to feel sympathy towards!) rather than a climate change rationale which is at once more self-interested and more bullshit.


*Usually.  Austerity and self-mortification also have their proponents, such as fitness fanatics, or vegans.  Is that unfair to vegans?  I was just reminded of how much I hated cooking out of Isa Chandra Moskowitz's recipe books, is why I ask.  Obviously I get most of my fake meat and a fair amount of my chili recipes from vegans, so I don't really buy the party line where vegan cuisine is bland and unappealing, but for fuck's sake, you'd never learn that cooking out of Vegan With A Vengeance.  And Bragg's Liquid Aminos is a terrible glutamator, it tastes like fucking tamari. 

Blood & Salt

The things that managed to interest me about Salt (a largely unremarkable entry into what, to me, will henceforth always be the Jack Bauer genre) are, unsurprisingly, gender issues, courtesy of Angelina Jolie.  By the IMDB's account, Tom Cruise was originally attached to play the part of Evelyn Salt, but backed out when he discovered the film would portray him married to the Marxist from The Counterfeiters.  The part was subsequently rewritten for Angelina Jolie, which seems to have mainly involved changing the pronouns.  I approve!  Jolie is a fine actor and high in essential charisma, though I always wish she'd get back up to her Gia weight because right now the way her robust head is set on that tiny, ropey neck makes her look like a spoon.* 

But imagining each scene as it would play with a man of equal height also allowed me to imagine I might be observing something about the culture, something I could later use as a jumping off point for gassing about gender equality in a blog entry.  So: I believe that Tom Cruise's torture scene would have been longer, and I believe the discussion I had in the car driving home wouldn't have been about whether crashing a van into a police car would have snapped Cruise neatly in twain.  I believe, too, that I can back up my belief with comparisons to pretty much all the other 24-style action thrillers, which depict with loving detail the suffering of their leads.  To keep this fairly brief let's just take it as read. 

It would be usual to follow this line down a regular feminist argument: women are presented in media as weaker than men in their ability to withstand pain, when in fact blah blah childbirth, oorah.  I feel that, besides being the kind of bullshit that social conservatives use to argue that men and women may have their separate spheres, but each is of equal importance and equally fulfilling, this argument is just missing something.  I can't truly blame anyone for missing it, because, pardon me for getting all Morpheus here, we're soaking in it.   What we've become blind to by its constant naturalization in basically all media is violence against men, aka "violence". 

Men are constantly situated in media as the ideal subjects of violence.  I'm not saying there's not also an agenda running in some Hollywood films of punish-the-feminine; that would be a silly claim.  But we perceive depicted violence against women as particularly brutal against a backdrop of near-constant violence against men.  Salt, for example, kills somewhere between twenty and a hundred men in her film and I think kicks a lady cop in the chest, but the villain is unforgivably evil because he shoots a female attaché after shooting a dozen equally defenseless dudes. 

A conversation about how men have it kind of rough is uncommon in feminist circles, though I know so many women with interests in genders outside their own.  Primarily, if one brings up the fact that men are more likely to be the victims of violence than women and that this is normalized and celebrated in media, it is viewed as an attempt to undercut and equate violent victimization of men with dehumanization and control of women, drawing attention away from this important subject.  Fair enough, but who's going to stand against systematic, socially-approved gender-based violence if not feminists? 

Now, I enjoy very much the privilege of being considered unhittable.  I've only been punched once, in the fourth grade, and I doubt there are many men who can say the same.  But it seems to me that the protection I enjoy from being considered an appropriate target for violence isn't based on a recognition of my human dignity, but rather on a societal calculation of the value of protecting me as a resource.  Men's value is calculated differently, and so they are naturalized as the targets and perpetrators of violence.  While they are overrepresented as CEOs and politicians, so too are they overrepresented as the homeless, prisoners, and soldiers.  The Expendables, as opposed to Precious.

So one of the things we could do to increase gender equity in the affluent West is increase assaults, robberies, and carjackings against women, and of course by women.  We could get comfortable with the idea of more women being homeless and more women being exploded and shot fighting for us.  We could accept that whatever men are experiencing is the gold standard for what should be considered human, and strive always toward getting women to experience the same shit.  Or we could acknowledge that men are disproportionately the victims of violent crime, stop viewing and portraying that as perfectly reasonable, and try to, you know, decrease violence, particularly state-sponsored violence, against them, just like we campaign and rail against violence toward women.  That's the option I like. 

* It is wrong to focus on women's appearances in this manner.  Terribly, terribly wrong.

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.

Almost Rosey

I'm honestly a bit self-conscious about this next thing, but I regard this blog as somewhere between confessional and exorcism, and so it must come out.  My embarrassment stems from how this hits a bunch of anti-feminist stereotypes of women: it was a frivolous expense, on a foolish superstition, for looking pretty.

Okay, so, here goes: I've had my colors done.  It was a birthday present, anyway!  I just agreed to sit through it!

If you're not familiar with this, it's when you pay someone to look at you and tell you what colors would look good on you, often with regard to your "undertones" or "season" (I'm an Academic Autumn).  The practice is rife with stories of people going to several different practitioners and getting entirely different sets of colors, so you'll excuse me if I don't consider it binding.

I feel that I understand colors pretty well, having often drawn circles on white paper with colored pencils and having observed the apparent change in the centres.  I'm aware of your analogous and complementary schemes, so I see pretty much what is happening here.  The first four swatches are meant to be I guess interpretations (for makeup-buying) of my skin color, blush tones, eye colors, and hair. 

This was back when I was not dyeing my hair, on purpose.  The color-picking woman exhorted me to come back if I ever changed my hair, since of course this would shift around the wheel in a way that only an expert could be reasonably expected to compensate for.
(An aside here: After talking for about five minutes over dinner last night about the physical structure of hair and how that affects the way it can be colored, one of my father's co-workers confronted me in a weirdly hostile, contemptuous way about whether "you even remember the actual color of your hair," as though dyeing would make you unfamiliar with that, and further as though not changing your hair would be more moral than having knowledge about the molecular composition and organization of keratinous structures.) 

 Here's my prescribed, non-embodied colors, separated  by hue.  As you can see I am meant to wear almost exclusively green.  I do wear green without remorse, but colors I generally wear happily not represented on this chart include blue, black, gray, brick, navy, gridelin, yellow, and taupe. Yes, even yellow, which if you mention to someone they'll go "Oh, yellow is a hard color to wear."  No it isn't.  You just put it on your body like all the other colors.   It doesn't try to escape or explode or nothing.

A selection of colors from the chart.  Body colors are situated at the confluence of a circle and a line.

The color-woman said I have the eye-whites to wear proper white, but that I should look into getting my teeth whitened.  Instead I have used them for chewing food, removing tags from clothing, and looking that little bit crazy.

if they say I never loved you / you know they are a liar

I'm quite petty, and I love convincing people who think intelligence is important that I'm smarter than they are.  From this, you might assume that I would be a big grammar nazi, perpetrating systematic, IBM-assisted genocide on unclean participles.  I find I can derive more immediate pleasure and greater satisfaction, however, from using my love of intellectually dominating towards rocking the pillars of faith that buttress grammar snobs' shaky feelings of superiority.  This is easy.  Here's your guide. 

Step 1:
Wait for the grammar snob to overhear something that compels him or her to make a meaningless correction.  You won't be waiting long.  They're on hair triggers. 

Step 2:
"Actually"
Beginning with this lets people know that they have been laboring under a misapprehension.  Keep your voice conversational, as though you were telling them an interesting thing you heard about naked mole rats rather than bringing them up short for doing something annoying. 

Strep 3:
Just say that the point they're correcting is perfectly acceptable English, "attested" (I enjoy using this word, as it suggests data) since Shakespeare.  This is almost always true; Shakespeare was quite free and loose with his words, famously.  If the person is more concerned about being correct in the future than being correct in this instance, this will often defuse them.  You'll have to repeat this tactic every time it comes up, though. 

Step 4:
If the amateur grammarian refuses to accept your authority on this matter simply because you can speak in an authoritative tone, escalate your rhetoric while retaining the same flat, disinterested air.  You know, because you are exceptionally well-read on matters of linguistics, that languages exist in a state of flux, and efforts to preserve them in a fixed state are not merely doomed, but laughably wrongheaded.  Ask them if they understood the sentence in which the grammatical "error" occured, and what the problem is if it communicated clearly to them. 

Step 5:
If your interlocutor still won't relent--and they probably won't, as by this point they have invested quite a bit of their self-worth into the conversation--use shame.  It is pretty trivial to construct an argument concerning class, race, the prestige of different regional speech patterns, access to education, and shibboleths, and so I leave it as an excercise to the reader.  Let them know that by correcting others, they are not educating them, but merely perpetuating an injustice based on the circumstances of their birth and early childhood.  Wither them.  If they are liberal, this should plunge them into a vertiginous shame spiral.  If they are conservative, they are a terrible person.

Step 6:
Repeat as desired, or until you no longer have friends who will talk to you about words.