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.

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. 

dreams and the Internet are similar

I didn't know Satoshi Kon.  I suppose that's obvious, but all the same it makes me uncomfortable to eulogize someone based only on his public face.  I've seen nearly all of what he made, though (with the exception of Paranoia Agent and Tokyo Godfathers, which in such a small filmography is a fairly big gap), from Magnetic Rose to Paprika.  I'll tell you this.  The impression he left with every film I saw was of an upward trajectory.  Is it ghoulish to say I wanted to see his very best, to see when he would naturally stop improving his art and exploring his visions, before he died?  I just don't think the body of anime will be as good as it would have been if he'd gotten to become an old granddaddy like Miyazaki. 

On Giving Offense

Recently, somewhat to my chagrin, I have adopted the word "retarded" into my daily vocabulary.  I don't consider this in any way laudable, and I don't intend to advance a defense of my practice.  Just because I enjoy something, that doesn't make it right, is the basic theme of this blog.  What I'm interested in is interrogating what gives the word its appeal to me and its offensive punch.  As for me, I like its sort of Southern US drawl...what're yew, some kine a ree-tawrd?  I also like (if I can move beyond that word association without insulting the South more than is absolutely necessary, as they have their own problems, the poor dears, and besides, the South seems to hate being labeled an intellectually deficient region almost as much as they hate being compelled by judicial fiat to treat fairly the people they had planned to treat like shit) how it is basically the way anybody who doesn't think much of education or curiosity (e.g., a Southerner) calls somebody stupid.  It's a word you might get a slap for saying as a child, which makes saying it at this point in my life kind of giggly and exhilarating. 

As to offense, well, thereby hangs a tale.  A certain portion of a word's offensiveness is tied to its meaning, but obviously not all, or else Richard Herring would genuinely have been censured as much by the BBC for saying "clacka-lacka-dack-dack" as if he'd said "cunty-cunty-cunt-cunt".  There are ways to refer to taboo subjects long and turgid enough to dissipate all but the most histrionic of hurt feelings, and cruel and ugly ways to phrase nice sentiments.  The offense content of swears, slurs et al., then, is mainly the implicit contract that one party ought to intend to give offense, and the other party should be courteous enough to take some of it.  People are always renegotiating one side or the other of this bargain for any term sufficiently charged with vigorous feeling--hence your reclamation efforts, your refusals to let a word "define me", your PC thuggery, your South Park episodes. 

Now, the word retard, as you probably know, is similar to the words moron, idiot, fool, simpleton, imbecile, and cretin, in that it was once advanced as a neutral term for someone with a cognitive  impairment but rapidly increased in pejorative use until its proponents abandoned it and jumped onto a new, more passive term.  Inasmuch as disabilities will likely always carry some stigma that will stick to words used to describe them, this is pretty much a treadmill for disability advocates, which sounds exhausting and disheartening.  "Retarded" is fresh enough as a term created to provoke an outpouring of sympathy that its use as a synonym for "stupid" still carries a shocking and painful sting. 

I should say, here, that like "retarded" I also have a history which does not reflect well on me.  Until I was around seventeen I had a hysterical fear of being perceived as having Down Syndrome by strangers.  I would examine my face in the mirror to make sure that no inadvertent expression would make me look slow.  I knew a couple kids in grade school who seemed to have greater than average learning disabilities--Wayne, my childhood boyfriend for around a week, who manifested an obsession with Chuck Norris before it was ironic to do so, and Michelle, an obese girl with cornrows, who could only discuss the band TLC.  They evoked a certain horror in me, particularly Michelle, whose overuse of ketchup at lunch created in me a longtime aversion to the sauce.  I tried my best to avoid them until they switched schools, just in case. 

In middle school, as a desperately fat, charmless, and unpopular child myself, I was often the remainder of any group-formation exercise, and would as such be placed by the teacher with the autistic or Down's kids.  Rather than risk displaying any kind of warm human fellow-feeling, which frankly I still have yet to develop, I treated them with an arms-length minimal politeness that I'm sure did not endear me, particularly to the autistic ones.  It was essentially a manifestation of my fear that the one thing I believed I had over the other kids, my freakish smarts, would go unrecognized or be stripped from me, and then I would have no way to feel superior (and therefore good about myself) at all. 

I don't mean to conclude with the suggestion that calling things retarded decreased my anxiety around being, if I may slightly misuse the term, socially deprived.  That was resolved instead by finding people who would tolerate me and help me build feelings of worth that wouldn't be so brittle as to shatter if someone didn't think I was smarter than them.  Today, I don't believe too much empathy can damage me, and if someone regards me as a pariah for believing that everyone deserves to be treated with respect and kindness, whether convict or miner or immigrant or ned or misogynist or paedophile or suspected Lockerbomber or bipolar or Israeli, well, I don't think that person is very nice, but I try to see where they're coming from. 

I still use that word, though.