You can tell delirium is setting in with the people who've been tasked to spend the past half-year covering the silliest primary season of all time. The reason? At the last minute, Rick Santorum is getting a bunch of press for a relatively small uptick in the polls that will eventually amount to nothing. Why is Santorum getting so much attention, if it matters so little? Well, I have a theory, and it has everything to do with a certain Google problem Santorum has. In other words, it's fun to put the word "surge" or "surging" next to Santorum. Too fun, really, because I'm beginning to see a little laziness creep in. There are many other verbs and metaphors that could really be fun when used to describe Santorum's situation. Vary it up a little, folks! With that in mind, I created a poll with some potential alternate phrases, and encourage Pandagon readers to pick their favorite. And also to suggest other verbs and metaphors for the rising Santorum we're seeing in the polls.
Tried to use holiday downtime to plow through some books I've had stacking up, and was successful, though perhaps not as successful as I'd have liked to me. But one book struck me as of being of particular interest to the Pandagon crowd: Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case by Debbie Nathan. For those who don't think that there's a meaningful intersection between feminism and skepticism, I challenge them to read this amazing recounting of how three women, each in the grips of self-delusions caused by needs that Nathan definitely demonstrates were created by the constraints sexist culture puts on women, managed to hoodwink themselves, Hollywood, the publishing industry, the psychiatric establishment, and the entire country into believing that a small town Midwestern girl with a stubborn and baffling set of symptoms (mostly physical at first!) had actually suffered constant rape and other forms of abuse at the hands of her mother, and developed multiple personalities to cope. This story, in turn, created an epidemic of "multiple personality disorder" cases and other claims of repressed memories of child sex abuse that frequently couldn't have happened. Lives were ruined. You have the people (mostly women) who ended up in the hands of the wrong therapists and, instead of getting proper treatment for conditions like biopolar disorder, depression or schizophrenia, got worse as they kept inventing new personalities to inhabit and going further down the rabbit hole of mental illness. You had people thrown in jail, often with multiple life sentences, for crimes they simply couldn't have committed on the testimony generated by people who had been provoked in various ways to fantasize and then believe their fantasies had actually happened. And it all started with this one book and three women who, if they'd grown up in a better, more feminist world, probably wouldn't have been so damn messed up.
Nathan turns out to be the best possible candidate to write the expose of how the case of "Sybil" was generated through a series of self-delusions and outright fraud. Nathan brings a thorough understanding of feminism and its complicated history to this book, which means that she manages to achieve the delicate balancing act by both holding feminists who perpetuated the hysteria over "repressed memories" and "multiple personality disorder" responsible for what they did, but also applying a sympathetic, feminist analysis to the various pressures on women in the 20th century that led to this hysteria. (I'm using "hysteria" in the group sense, as a society-wide panic over nonsense, instead of as the sexist label attached to individual women as a way to shame them out of being righteously angry about something.) After all, child abuse and rape are both real and depressingly common, and the understanding of that that developed in the 70s and 80s basically traumatized the country to the extent that plausible accounts were hard to distinguish from implausible ones. Additionally, unlike with other crimes, the "realness" of sexual and domestic violence is often judged by how damaged the victim feels, which created an unfortunate incentive to highlight cases where severe trauma was claimed in order to get people to understand that rape is, you know, wrong. Now I think feminism has come around to realizing that "victims must display extreme trauma" is a trap used to let rapists off the hook, and have moved on to arguing that we need to treat rape, battering, and child abuse like we do any crime, where the victim's ability to recover doesn't mitigate guilt. But in the 70s and 80s, that wasn't as clear. This doesn't excuse people who generated false stories or made existing mental illnesses worse, but it does explain why there was a sudden interest in stories of greater and greater trauma from sexual violence.
Carol Tavris and Laura Miller have excellent reviews of Sybil Exposed that run down the facts of the case, but a quick summary: Shirley Mason was a depressed and neurotic woman with likely undiagnosed pernicious anemia who got caught up with Dr. Connie Wilbur, a charismatic but deeply unethical (though often well-meaning) therapist who always resented that the world didn't see her as the brilliant "pure scientist" she felt herself to be. Mason become emotionally dependent on Wilbur, and when she realized that what it would take to keep Wilbur's attention and interest (and continued services without immediate payment), she started producing multiple personalities, having read about them previously in some literature Wilbur gave her. Excited that she was finally going to make her career, Wilbur encouraged this development, keeping Mason strung out on barbituates for years while exerting massive pressure on Mason to both generate new personallties and come up with "memories" of severe child abuse. Meanwhile, Flora Schreiber, a journalist who, like Wilbur, felt marginalized and underappreciated, got involved by agreeing to write a book about it. Repeatedly throughout the invention of "Sybil", each woman involved has moments of doubt and worries that they're perpetuating a fraud, but their desires (Mason's to get attention and pay her debts, Wilbur and Schreiber's to finally do work that the world has to notice) cause them to tamp down their doubts. At some point, the need to keep the whole thing going gets to the point where Wilbur and Mason deliberately create fraudulent diaries to give to Schreiber, rather than let the fact that Mason's claims about child abuse couldn't be true derail the whole project. It's an amazing story of how ordinary human desires for love, ego gratification, and money can, under the right circumstances, create situations that simply spiral out of control.
Nathan's feminism makes her see the nuances in this situation that another journalist might miss. She grasps immediately why it was women who half-consciously perpetuated this fraud. As Nathan puts it, the continued marginalization of women in American society, added to the newfound ambitions and dreams of a feminist era, created some outright bizarre behavior in women who, in a more feminist time, would have had more productive avenues for their energies. She also suggests that this feeling of wanting so much while having so little created the audience for the book Sybil, and unfortunately created fertile grounds for women to generate false memories and multiple personality disorder. Not to put too fine a point on it, but "repressed memories" and "multiple personalities" had symbolic resonance with women who were torn between their feminist desires and the continued constraints put on their ambitions by a sexist society. Now that those tensions are slowly getting resolved and pressures have lightened up a little, it's unsurprising that these trends have faded away.
The lesson here is a subtle but important one: Skepticism without empathy has its limits. You can make an airtight skeptical case about multiple personality disorder, repressed memories, and the "Sybil" case without understanding the pressures on women that allowed this to happen, but your analysis would be severely limited. You could say that these claims weren't true, but you wouldn't understand why this particular hysteria took off. By bringing a feminist analysis to the situation, Nathan adds understanding, which suggests ways that clusterfucks like this could be prevented in the future. Reading this book, you realize how much damage that sexism and homophobia can do to the mental stability of those oppressed by it---by the time the book is over, you can cite dozens of examples of how sexism and homophobia provoked bad choices and weird behaviors in the people involved in this situation. Sybil Exposed is an excellent example of the best kind of skepticism, one that's rooted in a desire to understand why people believe false things. Highly recommended.
It was kind of strange listening to two men I'd characterize as elite conservatives deal with Corey Robin's thesis, which I think makes a lot more sense if you look at the right as a whole. I also think it's funny how people swear up and down I don't have a Texas accent. I don't exaggerate it, like some politicians I can think of, but when I'm immersed in people who don't talk like I do, I can definitely hear it.
Yesterday, I was on the Michael Slate Show on KPFK in Los Angeles, talking about the war on contraception. You can listen to it here; I was the last interview, and it was about 20 minutes long.
In a couple of hours, I'll be on WBAI for the 3:00 to talk about the same thing, how the war on abortion rights really expanded to contraception in 2011. This time, it's a roundtable, and we'll be spending the hour on this very important topic.
And finally, I'm pleased to note that I'll be on "Up with Chris Hayes" from 8-10AM tomorrow morning. The election season is really going to kick off tomorrow---all these Republican sheninigans were just prelims, in my opinion---and I'll be joining Chris, Nate Silver, Michael Doughtery, Corey Robin, Errol Louis, and Noah Kristula-Green to discuss the Iowa caucus. It'll be a two hour roundtable. I have lots of thoughts about Iowa, but you'll just have to tune in to find out what they are!
Well, my plans to blog some of the best of 2011 totally fell apart, and for that I apologize. I thought I would make it up to you by compiling a list of some of my favorite (or most disturbing) moments in sexual misinformation. These are some of the strangest, most dunderheaded, or most appalling falsehoods of the year, at least when it comes to doin' it. You'd think Americans in 2011 wouldn't be so dumb, but sadly, we have a long way to go before we start getting smarter about sex.
Most Jaw-Droppingly Audacious Lie
Yep, when Michele Bachmann tried to claim that a woman told her that her daughter got Gardasil and became mentally retarded. This lie was audacious on a number of levels. Obviously, the HPV vaccine has been demonstrated to be safe, and Bachmann's just trying to maximize the number of health problems and deaths that come to women who have sex, which she disapproves of. But what made this lie special was that she didn't even reference some of the prior, false accusations about the vaccine. It seems what she did here was half-remember claims about the MMR vaccine causing autism, translated "autism" into "retardation" in that special brain of hers, and coughed this one up. It's unlikely that there was a woman, and if there was, she probably didn't say what Bachmann is claiming. Even the most audacious anti-vaxxers know better than to insinuate a shot given at 12 years old causes some of the mental problems they falsely claim early childhood shots cause. Bachmann couldn't even get her bullshit straight.
There were many iterations of this claim, but to summarize: Many supposedly "skeptical" dudes repeatedly and apparently with a straight face claimed that there was no way for a fellow to get his dick wet if he couldn't cold-proposition women he had never met before at 4 in the morning in enclosed spaces with no means for her to escape. You would think that a skeptic, before making this bold claim, would gather some evidence first, by asking people how sex happens for them. Of course, they weren't going to do this, because they'd find that overall, straight people manage to hook it up without scaring the shit out of women most of the time, through processes like meeting someone, chatting, letting it develop into flirtation naturally, and developing a mutual attraction that eventually spills into fucking. Obviously, for sexist men, the problem with this process is it involves being nice to a woman for stretches of time, be it an hour or days or even months. So they falsely claimed it was cold propositions in scary circumstances or nothing, and women who expected men to behave in socially normal ways when they're physically attracted to women are out of their minds.
My favorite version of this lie was by James Onen:
Here is where the problem lies: a man generally cannot know until after attempting the proposition that it was unwanted. Not only that – it is, after all, also possible for a proposition to be unwanted at first but for the recipient of the proposition to change her mind after persuasion.
Setting aside the notion that it's acceptable to badger someone who has already turned you down for sex, let's consider the extraordinary nature of this claim, which is that a man literally cannot know if a woman is amendable to fucking him until he corners her in an enclosed space, and without any prior introduction, discourse, or flirting, asks her to his room for "coffee", a well-known euphemism for sex. For a skeptic, you'd think that such a claim could be tested, again, by asking people who have had successful sexual interactions, and asking what process got them from not knowing each other to touching naked bits. I bet you'd find that 0% of them said, "By getting perfect strangers into enclosed spaces and cold propositioning them." The notion that there's no way to know if someone likes you without asking them for sex without so much as a formal introduction? But James really believes this, and so he suggests that since sex can only happen under these dubious circumstances, we need to build an opt-out system for women who have peculiar ideas like, "A man should flirt with me a little to see if I'd be interested before he asks me to suck his cock".
The solution to such ambiguity is simple – as a way forward, women who attend atheist-skeptic conferences that are absolutely certain they don’t want to be hit on should wear a clearly visible “do not proposition me” sign on their backs. If not, maybe a colour-code can be designated for such women by the event organisers – let’s say, red – and then it could be announced that all women wearing red clothes should not be propositioned or approached by strangers.
Since the vast majority of women aren't amendable to being propositioned by perfect strangers in enclosed spaces, and the vast majority of men know better than to do that (and, I'll add, have no real interest in it, because a lot of men actually like women and enjoy the process of flirting and building up sexual tension so that the eventual sex is about more than crossing the daily ejaculation off the to-do list), this system seems unfair, because it puts the burden of monitoring the behavior of the slim minority of men who feel they're too good for flirting onto women. I offer a counter-solution that puts the burden on those who are too good for ordinary social interactions: men who feel they can't get laid without cold propositioning strangers. If you're one of those men, I suggest walking around with your cock out, to signal that you'd like a lady to do something about it without having to go through that tedious process of introducing yourself and having a conversation with her to gauge her interest. Since there are supposedly a lot of women down with cold propositions from strangers, I'm sure that these guys will find lots of takers!
My personal theory is that when Jon Kyle said that 90% of what Planned Parenthood does is abortion, he felt that was accurate, because the word "abortion" is slowly becoming a catch-all phrase on the right to describe any health care that allows women to have happier, healthier sex lives. So, you or I, when we say "abortion", mean "terminating a pregnancy". But Kyle probably includes Pap smears and condoms in his list of things that are "abortion". Anything that allows sexually active women to avoid conceiving against their will, contracting an STD, or dying? The end game for anti-choicers is to get all that defined as "abortion". Kyle was just being a little over eager.
Weirdest Theory About Anal Sex
This may eclipse the B.S. right wing claims that gay men all spend their old age shitting themselves from all the anal (why that doesn't happen to straight women who take it up the butt is never explained), and strangely, this claim comes from an actual gay man:
Paul Angelo MHA, MBA, the Miami Gay Matchmaker who incorporates health, relationship and lifestyle coaching has again "gone wild" with the intention to save the gay community from poor self-esteem, lack of confidence and relationship confusion.
Angelo explains that receptive anal sex decreases self esteem by forcing the person to assume a submissive position during an act of pleasure. This confuses the brain to believe that a feminine-like behavior is appropriate for a man and in turn reduces the man's assertiveness, confidence and will power.
Angelo is an enthusiast of "neurolinguistic programming", which is an obsession usually only found amongst straight men who, coincidentally, find the process of meeting and flirting with women to be a tedious waste of precious man-hours and so spend a bunch of time reading "pick-up artist" materials to find a way to fast track from seeing an attractive lady you don't know and having your penis inside her. Angelo's interest in the incredibly iffy NLP practices may not be geared towards trying to get vagina while minimizing your interactions with the woman surrounding the organ, but he nonetheless seems to be a rabid misogynist. This suggests a link between finding NLP intriguing and rabid misogyny, though further study is needed on this question.
Right Wing "Always Be Breeding" Pressure Reaches A New Low
The discussion then moved on to how she has been able to use this healing power to cure all sorts of maladies, particularly barrenness, including one time when her prayers "completely replaced everything" for a woman who had had a full hysterectomy, resulting in her pregnancy.
In the past, religious wingnuts guilt-tripped women who had abortions, and then those who used contraception. Now they've added women who physically can't have children to the list of those they wish to shame. If you're not reproducing because your uterus has been removed from your body, well, I guess you're just not praying hard enough, you slattern.
Just an FYI; some maintenance/upgrade-y stuff is going to happen over the weekend. If you catch something that seems broken, please do NOT send an email to Amanda until at least Tuesday, as there is likely to be intermittent weirdness.
Among other things, we're going to be trying out an upvote/downvote implementation, to see if that weeds out some of the not-quite-Stick-Ruleable folks.
I will DEFINITELY have a bug report catcher set up after I've got stuff taken care of, and certainly if you see any PERSISTENT issues feel free to sing out on Tuesday; just please don't bug the proprietors about anything broken over the long weekend!
Let's get this Panda Party started! Only two days left in the year, so you best be partying. I know most of us have to work today, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't Panda Party.
With that in mind, here's another one of my favorite records of the year:
This was definitely the year for women in music, as far as I'm concerned: Wild Flag, Shilpa Ray, Dum Dum Girls, CSS, Le Butcherettes, Vivian Girls, and probably a bunch more that I'll remember after my coffee is consumed. All put out great albums this year, all worth checking out. But I have a special place in my heart for Shilpa Ray, who is intense in a way that pretty much no one else can do effectively right now.
As the year winds down, I thought I'd end it on a note of cheer, by blogging about a couple of my favorite things. I got the idea from our latest episode of "Opinionated", where Samhita and I listed some of our favorite things about 2011, both in entertainment and just overall. One of the new developments that caused a lovefest was, of course, Turntable.fm, which has its hooks in both myself and Samhita. Samhita has a short post at GOOD on Turntable that explains how the genre rooms tend to replicate the off-line fandoms that support them.
In the simulated club environment of Turntable, you get to be the DJ, along with four others. When people like your music, they press “awesome” and their avatar heads bop back and forth. It is gratifying—virtual reality at it’s best. Listeners can also hit “lame” if they don’t like it, which quickly reinforces the often stubborn borders of musical genre.
Spend a few hours on Turntable and one thing becomes clear: Musical tastes are fickle and nuanced, so diverse that a computer can’t replicate or auto-generate them no matter how many preferences you put in. Pandora based its algorithm on input from real people (as opposed to the iTunes “Genius” function, which culls data from the store—an indicator of what people are buying, not what they're listening to), but the method still fails to capture the marginal differences in music. And it's the differences that are most important to those with refined musical sensibilities.
I've found it replicates the off-line music nerding world in many other ways, too, which I'm sure Samhita has seen and just didn't have space to discuss. She prefers hanging out in genre rooms, whereas I have a tendency to run with a specific group of people who have somewhat varying tastes, go into "anything goes" rooms, or go into rooms that have wider genre boundaries that don't lend themselves to people diving for the lame button on the grounds that this isn't in-genre. This has advantages and disadvantages, compared to the genre rooms. There's a general expectation that your selection should flow naturally from the one before it, which can often take more guesswork than trying to decide if something's in-genre, though it's not as hard as it sounds for those of us who spent our adolescence and eary adulthood making one mix tape after another. More importantly, you have to play something "good". That is a subjective measure, to say the least. Naturally, I'm full of self-confidence when it comes to my own taste, so if I play something that's maybe a tad avant garde and it gets rejected by people, you can guess where my feelings lay on the subject of whether or not the song or the people judging it fell on the right side of the taste line on this. But, like in real life, you don't want to be an obnoxious fuck, so you quickly learn who is more open to the weird shit and who isn't, and adjust accordingly. People have this image of music snobs as aggressive and uncompromising, but in reality, you'll find that it's all about having a good time, and few are going to just try to shove the most erratic choices on people who aren't in the mood to hear that. No, they wait until you leave the room and only fellow travelers are with them---this is replicated on Turntable.
What Turntable gives you that real life can't is two major things, I've discovered. One, you can have the experience of sitting around playing records with people any time you want. Real life just doesn't have that. Second of all, it allows you to drop in on people spinning records without having to participate at all. I use that function to get exposure to new music, by dropping into genre rooms, like the hip-hop room or the indie rock room. In other words, you can choose your own adventure. Is it going to be a sitting-around-playing-records-with-friends experience, or a DJ-ing-for-a-large-group experience or a going-to-a-club-to-listen-to-other-DJs-while-you-drink-a-beer experience? Your choice.
I'm a big fan of the impact that the internet has on being a music fan. In the past, you either had to accept what was on the charts, or do a lot of work in researching to find cool, underground stuff. Now, you can have basically whatever you want with much less work. Instead of going to the record store and listening to records---a time-consuming task---you can go to MP3 blogs and listen to samples before buying, without leaving your house. For people who like music but don't live in areas that have easy access to record stores, the internet is a godsend, and you really see the impact of it when you're chatting with people on Turntable. But the one thing that all this does is removes the communal experience from music. Playing cool new stuff for friends, exchanging mixtapes, spitballing with people? More than anything, Turntable has filled in that gap, allowing people to go into these spaces and play music for each other while bullshitting about what they like. Like Samhita said, there's no computer program smart enough to replicate that for you, and I doubt there ever will be.
What would you put on your "best things of the year" list?
Few things provoke a man gripped by anxious masculinity like the idea of a woman reading, at least a woman reading anything beyond patriarchal assignments in man-pleasing. As any female bookworm can attest, almost no public behavior you can perform is more likely to get men to bother you and demand to know what you’re doing than simply reading a book. It makes sense. Few behaviors signal subjectivity more than reading. A person reading is existing in that moment only for themselves, enjoying the pleasure of being immersed in thought. Reading anything outside of instructive material (make-up guides, cookbooks) suggests a woman may have a reason to exist outside of being support staff for men. No, more than suggests. Puts it beyond a shadow of a doubt. Which is why, historically, the idea of a woman reading has causes so much strife. Female bookworms have been denounced from newsletters and pulpits, and subjected to claims that they were unmarriageable, corrupted, and somehow broken as women.
I wish that I could say that anxious men have abandoned the terror that a reading woman strikes in their hearts, but alas, as those of us frequently interrupted in public for the task of daring to pay attention to our books instead of looking around for a man to serve, it is not to be. And sadly, a 15-year-old atheist girl on Reddit learned the hard way this week what men who don’t believe women are people will do when confronted with hard evidence that woman like to do people-things like read: they will swarm, angrily insisting that you aren’t a person, but merely a hole to fuck. And they’ll do it while pretending to be “joking”.
Rebecca Watson has the blow-by-blow report here, but to summarize: In an atheist subreddit, a 15-year-old girl put up a sweet picture of herself holding Carl Sagan’s marvelous book The Demon-Haunted World, and noting that her religious mother gave it to her. The reaction was hundreds of comments of the “I’d like to stuff a cock in it, ha ha that’s illegal!” variety. Rebecca has the rundown, including how much that got upvoted. Turns out a lot of men are really, really afraid of women who have their own minds, even if those minds lead them to agree on stuff like atheism! After all, a woman with her own mind is likely to form judgments about you, and if you’re a prick, they run a strong chance of being negative judgments. Those women need to be smothered with sexual harassment until they learn a valuable lesson of never appearing to exist for any other reason than cock-sucking and sandwich-making.
But what struck me as emblematic of this entire clusterfuck was that someone posted this cartoon:
Rebecca touched on the most obvious reason this cartoon is wrong, which is that it argues, incorrectly, that posing in the picture with an object that you’re showing off is “female” behavior. Actually, both men and women do it, as Rebecca proves beyond a shadow of a doubt. The cartoonist probably thinks it’s “female” behavior because he only looks at pictures of women for very long, and forgets the dudes he saw do this. Confirmation bias at its worst.
But there’s so much more fail in this. Let us count the ways that this cartoon is epically wrong:
*The assumption that if a behavior is coded “female” instead of “male”, that automatically makes it inferior. This is a really common and unquestioned assumption that even feminists tend to make, especially if they’re newbies. But if you step back and think about it, even if only women posed with objects they want to show off, what’s wrong with that? It’s never articulated, beyond just “women do it, and men don’t”, which isn’t even true. People enjoy pictures with people in them, so why not put people in your pictures? After all, the point is community-building and having fun; there's no reason to take a picture of a fucking book and put it online outside of that.
*Women can't win, believe me. Knowing that you're going to be accused of preening and vanity if you put pictures of yourself online, I've often avoided doing so. Invariably, what I'm rewarded with is accusations that I'm avoiding doing so because I'm ugly and don't want people to know. Putting the pictures up shuts up the "you're ugly" thing, and brings in the "you're vain" thing, no matter how non-sexualized the picture is. The point is that all choices a woman can make with a camera are wrong. This is basically a way of saying that women should simply have no agency or subjectivity; the problem isn't the choice in pictures, but that she thinks she has a right to operate a camera and put stuff online at all.
*Blaming the victim. Part of the reason to put up this cartoon is to rationalize the "stuff a cock in it" reaction. The implicit argument here is that men can't help themselves, and seeing a picture of a woman on the internet causes such a rush of lust that they are forced---forced, I tell you---to sexually harass her and even cross the line into making rape threats disguised as jokes. The implication is that women have to do all the work to prevent this from happening, and if a woman puts up a picture that features her visage in it, then she was clearly asking to be abused. There's even an implication that she secretly likes it.
*Reducing women to sex objects. This cartoon assumes that the only value that the image of a woman might have is sexual, thus the implicit argument that women are trying to be provocative by putting their pictures online. In reality, as demonstrated by the many men who put their pictures online, there's a social value in showing pictures of yourself beyond offering yourself up as spank material. In this girl's case, it's clear that the message being sent is, "I'm so happy today, look at me smile!" If this sets off alarm bells, I suggest it's time to do a little more interior work on your assumptions about women and what they are allowed to be in our society. Humans are social animals, and as our society moves more online, it's useful to replicate some of our social gestures---such as showing our face and smiling---to convey the same ideas we would in one-on-one interactions. Excluding half the human race from that process by saying that any picture of them in inherently porn and can have no other function is wrong.
I expect the "it's just a cartoon!" reactions, so to cut that off at the pass: You do humor a disservice when you use the "just a joke" excuse. Humor that doesn't have a point isn't funny. Since good humor has a point to it, that point can and should be analyzed. Humor is like any other rhetorical device; the content the rhetoric is conveying matters. I accuse people of being humorless all the time, sure, but that's usually because they don't understand the nuances of a joke. This cartoon is a sledgehammer, however, and can be treated as such.
Which leads me to the second point: Rebecca and everyone who has linked her post has received this reaction, invariably from dudes: "Oh boy! People on the internet are mean! Big news!" Which is an attempt to deflect and silence the criticisms. This is why I'm not going to allow that attempt at shaming to work on me: In actuality, this stuff matters. When you step into a male-dominated space where men feel free to dogpile you in an effort to run you off---even if it's a virtual space---you learn really quickly that merely by being female, you are somehow controversial. That feeling sticks with you. As I noted in the comments at Skepchick, situations like this color a woman's entire world. Knowing that so many men find you threatening and have a desire to put you in your place makes a surprising number of otherwise simple interactions fraught. The example I used in comments as going into record stores, at least the more underground ones that sell a lot of vinyl. Often I'll go vinyl shopping, and I'll be the only woman in a record store. Even though I pretty much never run into problems with it, my frequent interactions with men who guard what they believe are "their" spaces elsewhere has made me wary, afraid that the guys in there are secretly looking for reasons to judge me or objectify me or somehow justify their hostility to me. In a sense, it's paranoia---like I said, that actually never does happen, at least in record stores---but it's an ingrained fear because that sort of thing happens all the time to me and to other women who are somehow seen as invading "male" spaces and acting like we have equal rights to enjoy X, Y, or Z. I feel that I'm often the only woman in these sorts of situations shows my fears are widely held, and that there's a vicious cycle created where even friendlier male-dominated spaces tend to stay male-dominated because women have, for good reason, so much fear of coming into male-dominated spaces. You can't tell the friendly ones from the ones where everyone is going to bum-rush you with the "stuff a cock in it" mentality just by looking, you know. For what it's worth, I tend to go in and do my thing anyway, because a) screw 'em if they don't like it and b) you don't know for sure that they're easily provoked by independent women until they actually show their colors. But it's understandable that many women aren't going to bother.
The result is that women's freedom and options are subtly constrained in all sorts of ways. Want to be a music nerd while female? Since the literal first step of walking in the door is emotionally fraught, even starting out and seeing if you like it is often a step that women aren't going to take. Think you might be into reading comic books? Many women will never find out, because the obstacles of men gawking and acting like assholes outweigh the long-term rewards of finding some titles to get into. Want to get into an atheist forum online? Be prepared to told in many ways, over and over, that you're not wanted as anything but a sucking-and-fucking machine. A lot of men tell women in these situations to suck it up and just do it, but that seriously misunderstands human nature. We want to do these things---go record shopping, buy comics, join forums---for the same reason men do, to have fun. If it's not fun, we're not going to do it. The men who harass women understand this perfectly well, which is why they do it. They want theirs to be male-only spaces, and use harassment as a tool to get that. It's worth pointing out that women aren't the only victims of this, though that's reason enough to speak out. Men who want to have a more integrated experience also are. Since, like I said, women can't tell if a roomful of men is safe or not just by looking at it, they often just err on the side of caution. Therefore, male-dominated spaces that might actually be welcoming more intergration and diversity don't get what they want, and it's the fault of guys who harass in other male-dominated spaces.
That's why it matters. It's not just about Reddit, but about women being told over and over again that they aren't welcome and that men have a right to drum you out and harass you, and it's your fault if you'd rather not bother. Speaking out and pushing back matters, because when you react to the harassment campaigns with silence, you're accepting the status quo how it is. And that's unacceptable.
There's a temptation for progressives to entertain Ron Paul as a serious alternative to Obama, primarily because Ron Paul is very, very serious about getting rid of a couple of major federal programs that progressives tend to hate: namely, our War on Some People's Terror and our War on Some People Who Use Some Drugs.
The problem, as Ben Adler points out, is that Ron Paul's motivation for opposing these programs has nothing to do with the progressive motivation for opposing them. Most charitably, Paul just cares about limiting federal power. His administration would care little about the impact of federal policies on various populations; it would only care that the government pursued those programs at all. This means that the end of the War on Drugs would come alongside a push to end Medicare and Social Security, a push to end all forms of social welfare, a push to end everything designed to ameliorate the effects of systemic discrimination over past decades and centuries.
Ron Paul doesn't care about equality or social progress, he's just an adorable shrunken grump who has an ideological opposition to the government doing most anything. That opposition has certain incidental benefits, and it's hard not to think of him as a useful tool in achieving long-term political goals.
Less charitably (and, I think, more honestly), Ron Paul by and large only gives a shit about maximizing the freedom of white men. The War on Drugs is problematic not because it helps incarcerate truly ridiculous numbers of young black and Hispanic men, it's problematic because white guys deserve a doobie or some blow after work. The War on Terror is an outward extension of American resources and manpower, but the person whose freedom we care about isn't the little girl disfigured by a drone or the imam whose mosque was destroyed. It's the white guy who works long, hard hours to pay for that war, who would much rather be spending his money on other things, like gold bricks or gold boullion or ads trying to get people to buy his stock of gold.
What that ultimately means, though, is that the shining moments of a Paul presidency would be largely flash. Paul's libertarianism would mean an end to the War on Drugs, but it would also mean an end to enforcement of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, a push toward a future of rampant Tentherism where a state's discriminatory action would be met with a shrug and a casual bon mot about the Fed.
The appeal of Ron Paul is that he comes off as truly principled. Even when his policies may achieve a goal of racial equalization that he would seem to be otherwise opposed to, you're still assured that he'll advocate for those policies.
That allure, however, masks the dirty secret of his appeal to progressives: we're so sure that he'll pursue the policies that we like, we might be willing to compromise on the other stuff. The problem is, that other stuff is the very core of progressivism. The scant victories a Paul presidency promises are meaningless when they're the curtain hiding the abyss.
Unless, of course, you have a whole lot of gold. At that point, I can't really blame you.
I have a theory about the Spiderman musical, and its inexplicable popularity despite being the most hated piece of pop culture in 2011 (people's loathing for "Friday" is mixed with giddy affection, taking it off the list). It's a combination of two things. One, the amount of bad press it got raised its visibility, so when tourists come in and are looking for a show, they latch on to Spiderman because it's a known quantity. Of course, that's not enough to push it over the top. If you go to Times Square and take in the ads, you'll see Broadway is awash in known quantities to appeal to incurious tourists, revising all sorts of classic movies and TV shows to reel them in, plus Mamma Mia. No, I suspect what's helping Spiderman out is backlash. This is just a theory, but I suspect that this scenario plays out over and over again: A Fox News-loving family is planning their trip to the Big Apple, and they want to see a Broadway show. They look over the list of available shows and Spiderman sticks out. They heard a lot about it this year! Of course, it was all bad reviews. But hell, those reviews probably came from those elitist liberal snobs who want their Broadway shows to be nudist interpretative dances about the deaths of animals from oil spills, so fuck 'em. They bet Spiderman is great, because those reviewers hate it so much. And another batch of tickets is sold.
If this theory seems a little far-fetched, I invite you to read Media Matters' end-of-year round-up on the right wing war on health. Health is a thing those elitist liberals like, with their jogging and their fiber. The liberal associations with health grew stronger because of the health care reform battle. Now healthiness itself is suspect. Some of my favorite highlights:
Fox & Friends Attacked HPV Vaccine Law While Promoting Teenage Tanning. During the October 11 edition of Fox & Friends, the co-hosts attacked a California law that will allow adolescents as young as 12 to receive the HPV vaccine, which can protect against cervical cancer, without parental consent. They also juxtaposed this law with a California provision that restricts those younger than 18 from using tanning salons, but failed to note that tanning beds increase the risk of skin cancer by 75 percent.
I liked this one, because it not only touches on the hostility to health, but also encompasses the creepy right wing obsession with the sexy virgin. Jessica Valenti wrote about this in The Purity Myth, but to recap: the right doesn't just want young women to be virgins. They want them to be sex object virgins: slender, beautiful, preferably buxom, apparently super-tan, and compliant. The virgin's value is ratcheted up dramatically by how sexy (by the most conventional standards) she is. It's like objectification on steroids. Thus, the constant churning out of one blonde sex symbol after another who puts on a faux-modest look while bragging about her virginity. And, of course, the inevitable fall.....
Fox's Gutfeld: "Why Are Health Food Freaks Always So Sickly Looking?" On the August 23 broadcast of The Five, Gutfeld said, "Why are health food freaks always so sickly-looking?" Co-host Andrea Tantaros replied, "They're unhappy, because they're not eating any fat."
Projection is the favoritest of all right wing neuroses. This is the war on health equivalent of when a guy hits on you, and when you shoot him down, he calls you ugly and denies that he had any interest, due to the ugliness.
Right-Wing Media Freaked Out Over Red Lobster, Olive Garden Decision To Shrink Portion Sizes. In September, after Darden Restaurants Inc., the parent company of Red Lobster and Olive Garden, announced it would shrink portion sizes and reduce sodium in its meals, right-wing media responded by attacking the decision and claiming the company was "bending to the whims of Michelle Obama." In a blog post, Malkin claimed that Darden was "strong-armed" into "re-designing meals" by Michelle Obama, while the Drudge Report linked to the story with a picture of Michelle Obama and the words, "Adult Supervision for fries."
Fox Promotes Hypothetical Junk Food Tax, Responds With A "Cultur[al]" Defense Of Macaroni And Cheese. On the July 26 edition of Fox & Friends, Carlson discussed a hypothetical junk food tax, beginning the segment by saying, "Do we really need the government ... policing this?" Her guest, Robert Ferguson, then claimed that "[n]o one has ever really talked about" "what makes foods healthy." He also said that a person needs to "tak[e] into account different cultures" in order to calculate nutritional value, then concluded: "In my world, I like mac and cheese. ... I'm going to eat it."
Right wing media has quite literally cast its audience as belligerent, picky children and Michelle Obama as Mom standing over them telling they they can't have any dessert if they don't eat their vegetables. One could argue the facts on this until the end of time---do they seriously believe the First Lady has such all-encompassing powers that Olive Garden would rather cater to her than make money?----but I'm more interested in the psychology of this. Why are so many conservatives eager to imagine themselves not just as children, but as annoying, picky children? You'd think a bunch of authoritarians would at least prefer the image of well-behaved children who politely eat what's served, but their hatred of the Obamas runs so deep that they are willing to cast themselves in the role of the pointlessly petulant child.
Of course, it probably runs deeper than that. The truth may be that they don't realize that they are casting themselves in that role, but are just naturally drawn to it, because they are petulant and childish. That's probably the better explanation, since it also goes a long way towards explaining "Wah! I don't want to play nice with others!", the lavish worship of the bullies who steal other kids' lunch money, and seeing people in distress, such as the unemployed, and wanting to give them wedgies instead of help them out.
The white Chevy station wagon with the wood paneling was overstuffed with suitcases, supplies, and sons when Mitt Romney climbed behind the wheel to begin the annual 12-hour family trek from Boston to Ontario......
Before beginning the drive, Mitt Romney put Seamus, the family's hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon's roof rack. He'd built a windshield for the carrier, to make the ride more comfortable for the dog.
The ride was largely what you'd expect with five brothers, ages 13 and under, packed into a wagon they called the ''white whale.''
I want to pause to note the various details that make it clear that this car was a large station wagon, and not a compact car that might make packing a large dog in it truly impossible.
As the oldest son, Tagg Romney commandeered the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ''Dad!'' he yelled. ''Gross!'' A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who'd been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.
As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management.
It's always tough to know how to take these stories. On one hand, they feed the cult of personality built up around politics that has become rather toxic in the past few decades. On the other hand, behavior like this can also be a remarkable, easy-to-understand symbol for a candidate's larger worldview and approach to the world. True, there's a number of examples of people who were great liberals, policy-wise, but absolute monsters in private. It doesn't always follow that someone who is an unempathetic asshole will automatically be a bad leader. But as a symbol of the conservative worldview, strapping a dog to a car roof for 12 hours, and then simply hosing him down when he shits himself, but then pointing to a "windshield" as evidence that you're not a total monster? If it were a novel, you'd be indicating that the character was an irredeemable monster, with no self-awareness to boot. In real life, it works well to encapsulate the way the strict hierarchies of conservatism play out. When talking to voters, making it clear that Romney is the kind of guy who thinks dogs should be strapped to cars and then basically ignored until it's time to take them out and play with them again could help boil a complex message down to a simple one.
Look, I have a pet who shits herself in terror at basically nothing. Whenever she goes into her (soft, comforting, towel-lined) cat carrier, there's about a 50% chance that she's going to shit herself in terror. She's just a scaredy cat. I think it's kind of funny from a distance, but when you're actually in the thick of it, it's actually not that funny. You feel sorry for her. You try to prevent it by calming her down beforehand and trying to get her to go before the trip to the vet. You stuff the carrier with towels so if it does happen, you can pull one out and throw it away. If it does happen, you clean her up while petting her to calm her. You certainly don't turn the hose on her and then go along your merry way. Or, that's what I do, because I'm a liberal, and I emphasize with this cat's suffering. I don't see her as merely an object that I have to keep up so I can play with her, but who can be shoved aside when it's inconvenient for me.
"Uh...," Romney said, clearly caught off guard by the question. "Love my dog."
"That’s all I’ve got for ya."
Asked about the idea that his treatment of the animal had been cruel, Romney replied, "Oh please. I’ve had a lot of dogs and love them and care for them very deeply."
With that, an aide abruptly ended the interview.
This story resonates because it neatly captures the cruelty at the heart of the paternalistic conservative worldview. Now some conservatives are just openly hateful, thus the whooping and hollering from the crowd at the idea of just letting uninsured people die at a Republican debate. But then there's the "compassionate conservatism" mentality, where arguments about depriving people of legal protections, rights, and a social safety net are framed as somehow loving and compassionate. You see it everywhere, from arguments that taking away the social safety net toughnes people up, or taking their Medicare somehow gives them "choice", or that taking abortion rights is somehow good for women because it keeps them from "regretting" an abortion. (As though regretting a child isn't much worse!) All this strongly resembles Romney arguing that he "loves" his dog. It's about viewing others as objects to be manipulated and used for your ends, not as people (or dogs) in their own right. In Romney's mind, what's good for him---to have a 12 hour drive without a slobbering dog in the car---is just good for the dog, and evidence that it's not is dismissed out of hand with a few noises about how he doesn't intend to hurt anyone. You see the same thing in play, in an even uglier way, with Ron Paul's defenders trying the "he's not racist in his heart; he just signed off and probably wrote a bunch of unbelievably racist rants" number. It's this imperious demand that we take them at their word when they say they care about and love others, and ignore their actions.
I'm not trying to equate dogs and people here. Obviously, there are huge differences. But this story about Romney resonates because his treatment of his dog perfectly encapsulates how he's likely to treat the people he wishes to govern. He'll swear up and down that he loves this country and loves Americans, but if it's in his best interest---and the interest of his rich friends---he'll strap us to a car roof and when we shit ourselves in terror, he'll hose us off and leave us wet and shivering as he takes us back into the unforgiving winds.
I'll be spending my holiday doing my taxes, because my idea of "day off" is "day off of doing my job to get shit done that I wouldn't otherwise." Also, eating enchiladas and watching "Kill Bill". All of which means, no blogging. (Though I can't seem to pry my ass of Twitter.)
I put this picture up, because I can't stand the thought of the Christmas weekend being tarnished because every time you pulled up Pandagon, you had to look at Ron Paul flashing his creepy zealot face. Instead you can look at this cat butt. Cats get delusional ideas all the time, but what's nice is that their ambitions are small. Instead of trying to destroy the Fed, they climb trees they can't get out of. Or, instead of having an irrational fear of black people, they have an irrational fear of vacuum cleaners. Given the choice to vote for Paul or for cats, you should take cats every time. Cats will increase agriculture subsidies for catnip, but outside of that, they can be distracted from their worst impulses with a feather at the end of a stick.
The evidence is straightforward: These racist rants were signed by Paul, in a newsletter that claimed to be written by him. Not only that, he referred to himself in the first person during these rants, and made mention of personal details, such as where his home is. By any reasonable measure, he wrote these things. If someone else wrote them, then they were ghost-written, and he is equally culpable. His reaction when people question him on this stuff is to deflect and basically imply that they aren't worthy to speak to the Mighty Ron Paul, the impertinent peasants. So, really, I had to flinch every time Rachel said he's "unwilling" to come up for a plausible explanation for how these writings came into existence, if the most obvious choice---that he's just a racist crank and he wrote them---is off the table, as he demands.
I say that he's not unwilling. He's just unable. Melissa Harris-Perry made basically that same point, though she was good at massaging the bizarre Beltway willingness to want to take Paul at his word when he said he didn't write them:
Melissa is right, of course. Even if he didn't put pen to paper, he took credit for it, and that's all that counts. This "did he or didn't he?" crap is silly.
But I must insist that the charade generally end. Paul's deflections are weird and half-assed. The whole debate over whether he has racism in his heart or just a pen is strange. I think of themyriad possibilities of how those viciously racist rants got into his newsletters, one stands out as far more likely than the rest: Ron Paul is a racist crank who wrote that stuff because he believed it. Being from Texas myself, I have met his type over and over and over again, and this strikes me as not only a plausible explanation, but the most plausible. Look, he's currently running ads where he claims that abortion providers threw dead babies in baskets, whatever that means. That paranoid fantasy correlates nicely with these racist paranoid fantasies. If I were to break it down to percentiles of likelihood, this is what I see:
*Chance that Paul didn't write it, didn't know who wrote it, didn't read it, and was unaware of what was in the newsletter: .1%
*Chance that Paul had someone who knows him really well ghost-write it, but wasn't aware of what was in it: .9%
*Chance that someone ghost-wrote it with Paul's blessing and knowledge: 3%
*Chance that Paul secretly believes all races are equal, but was just wanking off to appeal to the racist voters of his district: 1%
*Chance that Paul is a racist crank who wrote every word in his rants where he refers to himself as "I" and mentions his house and other personal details: 95%
I'm sure someone better with statistics could break it out better, but I don't imagine that their numbers would be far off mine. So can we stop treating all possibilities as equal?
Merry Christmas! Let's kick this thing off right, with a Panda Party! I'm a fan of much of Christmas: presents, food, enforced cheer, eggnog. But I'm just not that into Christmas music, so while we will have holiday-related themes today, we won't be playing any Christmas tunes. Unless Joey Ramone sings them.
So come into the Panda Party and let's enjoy some holiday cheer.
Tried to use holiday downtime to plow through some books I've had stacking up, and was successful, though perhaps not as successful as I'd have liked to me. But one book struck me as of being of particular interest to the Pandagon crowd: 
As the year winds down, I thought I'd end it on a note of cheer, by blogging about a couple of my favorite things. I got the idea from 
Few things provoke a man gripped by anxious masculinity like the idea of a woman reading, at least a woman reading anything beyond patriarchal assignments in man-pleasing. As any female bookworm can attest, almost no public behavior you can perform is more likely to get men to bother you and demand to know what you’re doing than simply reading a book. It makes sense. Few behaviors signal subjectivity more than reading. A person reading is existing in that moment only for themselves, enjoying the pleasure of being immersed in thought. Reading anything outside of instructive material (make-up guides, cookbooks) suggests a woman may have a reason to exist outside of being support staff for men. No, more than suggests. Puts it beyond a shadow of a doubt. Which is why, historically, the idea of a woman reading has causes so much strife. Female bookworms have been denounced from newsletters and pulpits, and subjected to claims that they were unmarriageable, corrupted, and somehow broken as women.
I have a theory about the Spiderman musical, and its inexplicable popularity despite being the most hated piece of pop culture in 2011 (people's loathing for "Friday" is mixed with giddy affection, taking it off the list). It's a combination of two things. One, the amount of bad press it got raised its visibility, so when tourists come in and are looking for a show, they latch on to Spiderman because it's a known quantity. Of course, that's not enough to push it over the top. If you go to Times Square and take in the ads, you'll see Broadway is awash in known quantities to appeal to incurious tourists, revising all sorts of classic movies and TV shows to reel them in, plus Mamma Mia. No, I suspect what's helping Spiderman out is backlash. This is just a theory, but I suspect that this scenario plays out over and over again: A Fox News-loving family is planning their trip to the Big Apple, and they want to see a Broadway show. They look over the list of available shows and Spiderman sticks out. They heard a lot about it this year! Of course, it was all bad reviews. But hell, those reviews probably came from those elitist liberal snobs who want their Broadway shows to be nudist interpretative dances about the deaths of animals from oil spills, so fuck 'em. They bet Spiderman is great, because those reviewers hate it so much. And another batch of tickets is sold. 
Does the Mitt Romney dog story matter? To refresh, here's the story from 