Deconstructionist Movie Night (or, I can't believe I watched this)

Our local library has free movie check-outs and a decent array of flicks, allowing ms. wobs and I to indulge tastes for which we wouldn't normally allocate a nominal rental fee. Hence, our viewing of The Astronaut Farmer. Don't let the story of a dream and gumption bringing a family together fool you. This movie is pro-small business, pro-small government, pro-explosive, pro-(straight)marriage, pro-vigilante, pro-hackneyed cliché, pro-training montage, and, surprisingly, pro-immigrant. Something which I imagine appeals to your average Ron Paul supporter.

Oh, it was also very, very, very pro-manly maleness, in no uncertain terms:


Billy Bob Thornton was competent.

If I may spew

What bullshit. Two and a half assumptions here drive me especially fucking crazy.

1a: Women are sexual sirens who must minimize their seductive capabilities lest they drive one-half the population mad and to depravity.
1b: Men, once captivated by the siren's song, will stop at nothing to sate their most base desires.

Ergo, women who don't shield their sexuality are responsible for whatever ill befalls them. Granted I'm a sample of one, but sufficed to say, whatever you women are doing to get me to notice you, it works. Also sufficed to say, uh... it's never driven me to sate my most base desires by force.

2: Women don't know the difference between "regret" and "assault."

Adventures in praxis

L'il wobs frequently gets mistaken for a little girl. I suppose it's his hair, which he likes in a longish kind of mop. At any rate, I usually let these incidents slide on the theory that by reacting to correct these one-off attributions of gender based on a few second interaction, I am subtly asserting to l'il wobs that girls are something less than totally cool.

On our way back from the grocery store today, l'il wobs told me that he was a boy right now, but when he grew up, he could be a boy or a girl. "True enough," I told him. "You can make a lot of choices about what you want to be when you grow up."

"Yeah," he replied. "I might want to be a girl. I also want to be a teacher."

I gotta say, this "shaping and molding young minds" business is heavy duty stuff!

Looking in the mirror

This piece (via Crooked Timber) sounds a lot like our life at present, especially the first few grafs (and as much a feminist as I might try to be, I'm still the male in our particular story). I don't have much to add, other than that the social system in the United States does not make it easy for folks to raise children.

Aren't they precious?

Conservatives trying to mock that which they don't understand look really, really dumb.

Damaged

I'll be the first to admit that I've taken some pot shots at Britney Spears - she did hire dwarves for her then-husbands birthday, a little fact which deserved to be ridiculed. And I'll even cop to being more than a little amused at her immediate post K-Fed party antics. But after awhile, it stopped being funny and began to become very painful to watch. Today, I came across this:

And multiple sources confirm Spears’ exhibitionist streak: “She’ll strip down in front of staff, nannies, whomever,” says one. “She’ll ask, ‘Do I look sexy? Do I look pretty?’ She’s extremely insecure.”

This is not an "exhibitionist streak," and it's a helluva lot more than being extremely insecure.

The narrative around Britney's spectacular meltdown is becoming one of self-destruction, the typical "I guess she can't handle the fame" shrugging of the shoulders that accompanies such public flame outs. When I look at it, especially that aforementioned quote, I see the inevitable effects of being turned into a sexualized object before the age of 17. Will we see any record executive, any PR flack, any manager, or her parents take some responsibility for letting her be some codger's schoolgirl fantasy? Will anyone step up and admit that putting her in a position where leering old men in the seedier corners of the internets were counting the days until she was legal may have been damaging to her young psyche? Did anyone think twice about making a buck off of pimping out a pretty but not-too-bright hayseed from Louisiana?

I'm not holding my breath for any mea culpas, but let it be said, the entertainment industry eats its young.

Everything you ever needed to know about Camille Paglia's gender politics in a single paragraph

Jeebus. Just because a body uses big words and has an attitude is no reason to give her a megaphone to spread her nitwitticisms:

If women as a group are to advance, it is critical for female politicians as prominent as Hillary to mount serious campaigns for the highest office. So what Hillary is doing is important, even simply to draw a road map for future female aspirants. But it's up to registered Democrats (including me) to decide whether Hillary is in fact suited for the Oval Office or whether her talents are more tailored for a Cabinet role, such as secretary of health and human services.

We'll leave for now Paglia's boneheaded assertion that voters have any say in who is tailored for a Cabinet role. Instead we turn to her patented dichotomizing. It's up to voters to decide if Hillary is suited to the Oval Office (a historical manly men's club), or the Department of Health and Human Services, where she will be able to attend to the more "traditional" concerns of women that she so neglected in her personal life, we're to assume. Because really, the range of human gender is neatly divided into two narrowly defined categories.

Bonus inanity from this pompous gasbag!:

However, I am a skeptic about what is currently called global warming. I have been highly suspicious for years about the political agenda that has slowly accrued around this issue. As a lapsed Catholic, I detest dogma in any area. Too many of my fellow Democrats seem peculiarly credulous at the moment, as if, having ground down organized religion into nonjudgmental, feel-good therapy, they are hungry for visions of apocalypse. From my perspective, virtually all of the major claims about global warming and its causes still remain to be proved.

Climate change, keyed to solar cycles, is built into Earth's system. Cooling and warming will go on forever. Slowly rising sea levels will at some point doubtless flood lower Manhattan and seaside houses everywhere from Cape Cod to Florida -- as happened to Native American encampments on those very shores. Human habitation is always fragile and provisional. People will migrate for the hills, as they have always done.

Who is impious enough to believe that Earth's contours are permanent? Our eyes are simply too slow to see the shift of tectonic plates that has raised the Himalayas and is dangling Los Angeles over an unstable fault. I began "Sexual Personae" (parodying the New Testament): "In the beginning was nature." And nature will survive us all. Man is too weak to permanently affect nature, which includes infinitely more than this tiny globe.

First, can we note the out-of-left-field self-promotion of her brilliantly bad Sexual Personae for no apparent reason in that third graf? You don't get to count that as a citation on your CV, Camille, and no self-respecting grad student is going to read your tome unless it's to point and laugh.

And then, of course, based on her growing up in upstate NY and having a college professor who encouraged her to study geology (and oh, how we wish this professor had been successful!), she dismisses the consensus opinion of climatologists, enshrined in the studies of the conservatively biased (in the scientific sense) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as religious dogma. From her perspective, the major claims about global warming have yet to be proven. Of course, from her perspective, she's a Major Thinker who'll be celebrated in the academic canon for centuries.

Moreover, she reduces climate change to "[s]lowly rising sea levels [that] will at some point doubtless flood lower Manhattan and seaside houses everywhere from Cape Cod to Florida," and when that happens, people will just move, as they've always done. No mention that even small increases in the average temperature can completely disrupt ecosystems, cause mass extinctions, and completely ruin economies. But nope, for her, it's all a hypothetical matter of losing a vacation home.

What a twit.

Working girls (Updated!)

Last week, ash regaled us with tales of the social and biological limitations faced by working mothers. Today's WaPo illustrates that professional women face similar challenges at the other end of life's spectrum:

Retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor would have preferred to stay on the Supreme Court for several more years, until she was ill and "really in bad shape," but she stepped down because of her ailing husband.

The question needs to be asked: would a male SCOTUS justice have stepped down in order to care for a terminally ill spouse or partner? My guess is no - men do not have the same social expectation for caring that women have, and given the high stakes of a SCOTUS seat, I'm not convinced that any of the men who currently sit on the court would sacrifice it to spend "more time with their family." That's not to say that male SCOTUS justices don't care for their spouses, but I do believe it would weigh far less on their mind to hire someone to provide primary care while they retained their positions on the Court.

At any rate, gendered expectations for caring cost Justice O'Connor a career that she seems to have found fulfilling and gave us the unholy reign of Justice Samuel Alito.

[updated on February 6, 2007 at 4:05 PM]: Dahlia Lithwich has these observations on the gender dynamics of the Court.

Christians who say fuck

via the General



Just when you thought that the traditionalist conservatism of the American right couldn't get any more hyper-masculinized, some loud-mouthed jackass with the right connections comes along to up the ante:

The strobe lights pulse and the air vibrates to a killer rock beat. Giant screens show mayhem and gross-out pranks: a car wreck, a sucker punch, a flabby (and naked) rear end, sealed with duct tape.

Brad Stine runs onstage in ripped blue jeans, his shirt untucked, his long hair shaggy. He's a stand-up comic by trade, but he's here today as an evangelist, on a mission to build up a new Christian man -- one profanity at a time. "It's the wuss-ification of America that's getting us!" screeches Stine, 46.

A moment later he adds a fervent: "Thank you, Lord, for our testosterone!"

It's an apt anthem for a contrarian movement gaining momentum on the fringes of Christianity. In daybreak fraternity meetings and weekend paintball wars, in wilderness retreats and X-rated chats about lust, thousands of Christian men are reaching for more forceful, more rugged expressions of their faith.

Wow. I don't know that I want to think about thousands of Christian men reaching for more forceful, more rugged expressions of their faith during an X-rated chat.

Reactionary assertions of "traditional" hegemonic masculinities were once a side interest of mine in my former profession, and they still fascinate me in their increasingly bizarre methods of attempting to re-establish and re-legitimate gendered relationships which rely upon the assertion of brute (masculine) force. This particular iteration contends that Jesus was pretty much a bad-ass motherfucker:

So what's with the standard portraits of Jesus: pale face, beatific smile, lapful of lambs?

"He's been domesticated," says Roland Martinson, a professor of ministry at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minn. "He's portrayed now as gentle, loving, kind, rather than as a full-bodied person who kicked over tables in the temple, spent 40 days in the wilderness wrestling with his identity and with God, hung out with the guys in the street. The rough-hewn edges and courage ... got lopped off."

Leaving aside the obvious problems of identifying Jesus's biblical fortitude as inherently masculine and "wild", I think it's a fair critique to say that some mainstream churches present the Gospels in a manner which encourages an obsequiousness to power. The story of Jesus can easily be read as a narrative encouraging action against injustice, as a rallying cry to take the stand up on behalf of the oppressed.

We know, however, that that's not the message that is being taken from these non-wussy Christian retreats:

[S]ome men at the conference run into trouble when they debut their new attitudes at home. Eric Miller, a construction worker, admits his wife is none too pleased when he takes off, alone, on a weekend camping trip a few weeks after the GodMen conference this fall.

"She was a little bit leery of it, as we have an infant," he reports. "She said, `I need your help around here.' "

Miller, 26, refuses to yield: "I am supposed to be the leader of the family."

Just so we're clear: Jesus fasted for forty days in the wilderness, fucked shit up in the Temple, and hung out with lepers and hos. This entitles Eric Miller to leave his wife and newborn child for two weekends - one for his Christian he-man circle jerk, and one for his "weekend camping trip" (where I'm sure he'll be reaching for a more forceful, more rugged expression of his faith). Yeah, his wife says she needs his help, but by the grace of God - his awesome, awesome fucking God - he's the leader of this family and he's going to go camping anyways. That's the way Jesus would've wanted it, dude.

In-your-face aggression at first troubles Howard Stephenson, who paid $68 for a day at GodMen in hopes of forging friendships with other Christian men. When Stine, a born-again Christian, shouts that it's OK to cuss -- and then demonstrates with a defiant "bull ..." -- Stephenson shifts uneasily.

"This is so extreme for me," he says. A few weeks later, Stephenson, 43, is still not sold on profanity. But he has ditched the nice-guy reflex of always turning the other cheek. When he spots a Wal-Mart clerk writing "Happy Holidays" on a window, he boldly complains: It should say "Merry Christmas."

The clerk erases the offending greeting. Chalk one up for Christian testosterone.

"I wouldn't have done that before," Stephenson says proudly. "I am no longer a doormat."

Nope, you're no longer a doormat, having gone the real man route of telling a minimum-wage worker with no health insurance (probably a woman, probably a minority) that you'll have none of that godless liberalism at your local low-wage, cheap-plastic emporium. It must feel good to fight back against such relentless persecution suffered at the hands of the Walton family.

The hostility that barely lies beneath the surface of this particular group creeps me out. And boy do I feel bad for the women who are unlucky enough to find themselves around guys who buy in to this horseshit.

Bring the pain

I don't think anyone who runs in our circle is surprised by this WaPo report stating that men and women experience pain differently. And while the article makes attempts to claim that biological differences between the sexes aren't the only explanation for differing perceptions of pain, the implications drawn for improving pain relief are exclusively in the domain of targeting biological and neurological processes.

I think this runs the risk of missing out on the social causes of these differing perceptions. The medical anthropology and sociology literature makes it clear that symptoms related to the same environmental stimulus or etiological agent are experienced differently across cultures. The logic of the article would seem to dictate that we look for some sort of biological differences between racial groups in order to most effectively treat these afflictions.

My inner sociologist is screaming that the differences in how people perceive pain are primarily social. We learn to experience pain in different ways, and the processes by which we deal with pain become "hard-wired" at a point early in our lives. Take this paragraph from the WaPo article:

When I get a particularly nasty headache, I race for the ibuprofen bottle and down three 200-milligram tablets (a dose long ago approved by my doctor) and get on with whatever I was doing, comforted by the knowledge that I've taken action to dull the pain and that I will feel better soon. When my husband has a headache, he delays doing anything -- including telling me, for whatever comfort that might bring -- and succumbs to the ibuprofen (taking just two tablets) only when the pain is so severe he can't do much else.

Some might say our headache techniques are a manifestation of our quirky personalities -- and there may be some truth in that.

That just screams "socialization!!!" to me. It has nothing to do with individual personalities. It has a lot to do with the fact that our culture sends out the message that girls are sensitive and frail and that boys should just suck it up (or, as Peyton Manning so eloquently puts it, "Rub some dirt on it!").

I'm all for research being done on more effective ways of relieving pain. I'm just concerned that a search for gender-specific pain relief rooted solely biology may not be as effective (and could cause some serious harm i.e. over-medication) if the social causes of differing pain perceptions aren't controlled for in the research.