My new favorite blog is Molecule of the Day. I think it’s because I never took chemistry in high school – I’m hungry for fun ways to find out about molecules and molecular structures. I still can’t believe that I’ve made it through life this far without ever really learning chemistry or biophysics. So, here’s to learning at least one molecule every day.

25,000 Goreans can’t be wrong, can they? That’s how many people allegedly practice the male-dominant master-slave lifestyle, according to a BBC News article. They’re living in the zone where consensual BDSM veers into being downright creepy, with wack rituals and an assumption that all women will be slaves and men will be masters.

British police investigated when a Canadian woman was allegedly being held by a Gorean splinter group against her will. She had gone to join the group willingly, but then they’d burned her passport and return ticket. But when the police showed up, they found no evidence of illegal activities. In other words, the woman said she was there by choice (or she was coerced to say that she was there by choice.)

It’s the business of destroying her passport and return ticket that pushes it over the edge into creepyland. But the idea that there are 25,000 people practicing the Gor “sex cult” lifestyle is pretty scary too.

My favorite anthropologist, John Hawks, writes about the recent media frenzy over a scientific paper that suggested humans are the result of hybridization between early hominids and early chimps. The paper, published in Nature by Nick Patterson, et. al., is the result of some rather shoddy research into human origins that fails to cite crucial counter-theories mostly in order to make the rather sensational claim that human-chimp speciation – or gradual evolutionary separation between the two species – was somehow “extraordinary” because it involved a lot of gene-swapping between the two groups.

Hawks writes:

There’s no evidence here that the human-chimp speciation was unusual in any way. It is not unusual for two species to have a long period of genetic divergence before they cease reproductive contact with each other. It is the normal mechanism of speciation in mammals.

What’s even more interesting is Hawks’ point that this kind of sloppy sensationalism will only feed Creationists’ delusions:

But creationists will now cite [co-author] Eric Lander in support of the idea that hominid fossils are not transitional between apes and humans, but instead are hybrids of apes and humans.

Scientists often accuse the media of sensationalizing and misintepreting their work, but this is a perfect example of scientists tarting up their own discoveries to create a media-ready package that not only feeds the public’s misperceptions of how evolution works, but also actively undermines the legitimacy of evolutionary theory.

Yes, I keep blog-checking Steven Barnes over at Dar Kush, but he’s just so damned smart and interesting. This time, he’s using Poseidon to examine how mainstream America’s ideas of the value of gay white men vs. men of color (any color) have shifted.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, in disaster, adventure, and horror movies, a strict hierarchy was observed, so reliable that you could make damned good money betting on it to someone unfamiliar with the rules. Folks survived, in general, based upon their genetic usefulness to the tribe, or by their moral virtues. … If you were fat, gay, old, black—in other words, not considered a breeder/warrior type for White America—you were disposable. White children were the most precious. White females of child-bearing age next. Then came white males. Non-white children were in there somewhere. Everybody else came last.

In the last few years, there has been a concerted (and overdue) gay rights movement. I always knew that, in terms of media images, gays would kick butt—after all, many of them are the very same white males who control so much of media and government. Even more, almost every single white person in a power position has a gay brother, sister, uncle, aunt, son, or daughter. Statistics just work that way. So eventually, the pendulum would swing that way.

And the last year has seen a couple of interesting indications. Of huge importance is “Brokeback Mountain” which solidifies the fact that white males can have sex with anyone—even each other—and it is preferable to non-white males having sex with anything at all, even themselves.

Go ahead and read the rest. He goes on to talk about an incident in Poseidon (spoiler alert) which pits a gay white man against a generous Latino and how this incident demonstrates that gay white men have arrived, but people of color still haven’t. I’m not sure he’s right in general about this shift in attitude towards gay men. Hollywood can say one thing, and the rest of American can vote on the exact opposite. But it’s an interesting read.

Beauty pageants have a long history of contention, but what about non-beauty pageants? Is it possible to have a “person pageant", modeled on the beauty pageant format, in which people are judged for their commitment, or their effectiveness, or even their overall community cool? Or will such an attempt inevitably devolve into an ogle-fest?

Next weekend, all folks in the Yay Area will have a chance to find out (and – let’s be frank – ogle, if that’s your preference.) This Friday the 19th, Hyphen magazine (disclosure: I’m an advisory board member) will be holding its first ever Mr. Hyphen Contest, celebrating the style, talent, and most of all, community commitment of Asian American men.

It’s both a strange and a perfect choice for Hyphen, a Gen X founded, and now partly “Gen Y” run news and culture magazine focusing on Americans of Asian heritage. Hyphen, organized as a collective by a predominantly female staff and concerned with offering a “stealth progressive” viewpoint (progressive politics sugared with pop culture and snarkiness), would and does have a lot of sharp things to say about classic beauty pageants, especially those involving women, ballgowns, and the word “Miss”. On the other hand, subverting questionable cultural outgrowths is Hyphen’s bread and butter.

Add to this the continuing discussion in Asian American about the feminization of Asian masculinity in the West – the silencing of the Asian American male – and you end up with a potentially progressive pageant of pride. (Yes, I had to go for the alliteration.) On the other hand, it could just be a bunch of Asian American women (and men), giggling and whistling.

Whatever the case may be, Hyphen magazine itself, as an independent non-profit print mag, is worth your support – as are the men, who are competing for a $500 donation to the nonprofit they work with. And the event will be fun. So please turn out and support this Friday. Hyphen’s text and info below!

Note: If you prepay online you save $5!

You’ve heard of Miss Chinatown, but have you heard of Mr. Hyphen? That’s right. Hyphen, the Asian American magazine dubbed “the oracle of Asian American culture” by the San Francisco Chronicle, thinks Asian American men should be celebrated as much as Asian American women. To that end, the magazine will present the inaugural Mr. Hyphen contest honoring the men of the Asian American community. In partnership with the Oakland Asian Cultural Center

On May 19, activists, organizers and leaders of various Asian American nonprofit organizations will compete to earn the crown of the first-ever Mr. Hyphen. The event, held at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, will feature participants competing in several rounds including talent, fashion and Q&A. Contestants will be judged on style, attitude, talent and dedication to the Asian American community. The winner will take home a cash donation of $500 from Hyphen for the nonprofit he represents.

EVENT: Mr. Hyphen
WHEN: Friday, May 19, 7:00-10 pm
WHERE: Oakland Asian Cultural Center, 510.637.0455, 388 9th Street, Suite 290, Oakland, CA 94607 (Pacific Renaissance Plaza, second floor) COST: $15 presale, $20 at the door, all ages welcome. 21+ for alcohol.

Pre-pay $15 (Please make sure you bring your id during the event)

Last week Liko and I were visiting with our new friends Karen and Argus. Leaning in the playroom corner we found “Peace Trek: Family Coloring Book,” published in 1986.

“Why are people in this picture smiling and relaxed?” write the authors. “They are at peace with themselves and with everyone else in the world. That would make anyone a happy person. We must learn to be at peace with ourselves before we can help bring peace to the world.” We see businesses with names like “Soy Foods,” “Planetary Holistic News,” “Holistic Health Clinic,” “Curative Herb Garden,” and “Peace Academy.”

“In a world at peace,” they write, “schools will be different from the way they are today. Money no longer needed for national defense and weapons will be used to buy wonderful equipment for schools…In a peaceful world, schools will become lifelong education centers for the whole community. Schools will be places of great excitement and adventure.”

Promises, promises! Can you hear the creepy, passive-aggressive, be-happy-or-else, wheat-germ grooviness behind these lines? I can. I have experience with this sort of thing.

“In a world filled with conflict and fights over money and property, many problems are caused,” concludes “Peace Trek.” “Many people think that all these problems can only be solved by raising children differently, and with much more love and attention.”

It’s pretty to think so, isn’t it? This morning I re-read a 1985 essay, “Looking for Mr. Good Dad,” by Ellen Willis, one of my favorite cultural critics:

Why do men and women have such an unequal relation to parenthood? Is it biology - we bear children, they don’t? Actually, this difference becomes inequality only in the context of a specific social system for rearing children - the family, or, to be more precise, familialism (since I’m talking about a system that affects us all, whether we’re in actual families or not). A familialist society assigns legal responsibility for children to the biological parents; the society as a whole has only minimal obligations to its children…This system puts women at an inherent disadvantage: Since it’s obvious who a child’s mother is, her parental responsibility is automatic; the father’s is not. And so the burden has always been on women to get men to do right by them.

[Nearly everyone] takes familialism for granted… After all, the family is so ancient, so apparently universal, that it seems as natural and fixed as sexual difference itself. Yet a mere 15 years ago [mid-1960’s] it didn’t seem that way at all. Feminists and other cultural radicals were pointing out that the family is a social arrangement, invented by human beings, subject to criticism and change. All sorts of radical ideas got a serious hearing: that children should be considered members of the community, rather than wards of their parents; that they are properly a collective responsibility; that every child ought to have a socially guaranteed right to be supported and genuinely cared for. Some of us envisioned a society organized around communal households, in which adults as a matter of course were committed to sharing in child rearing, whether or not they had biological children. With the conservative onslaught, debate on these ideas has been choked off…

Indeed. The conservative chokehold on family values had only just gotten started in 1985, mid-way through Reagan’s regime; it’s strange to think that people like Ellen Willis - whose own child was a year old at the time of the essay - or the creators of “Peace Trek” could still call to the page, even in past-tense, elegiac tones, visions of a future so fundamentally different from, and better than, the present.

Now we live in the future - the first decade of the 21st Century - in a world as exploitative, anxious, and wartorn as anything in dystopian science fiction. No one is “smiling and relaxed,” unless they’re on a psychotherapeutic drug. Few in post 9-11 America talk about utopia, except in the most derisive tones. The “family” - as an idea and as a unit in which most of us live - is a battleground, and yet we all find ourselves in the same trench facing an enemy who looks exactly like we do.

Even conservatives who relentlessly attack the latte-sipping urban liberal are really at war with their own ambition and the circumstances of their lives - the “liberal” is just a symbol and a scapegoat for the economic forces that undermine their yearning for stable home and hearth. In fact, no one of any consequence is ever willing to rhetorically “attack” the family.

Certainly not anyone who calls herself liberal, progressive, or left. Today even progressive visions of the family are fundamentally familial. Most of us in America make our experiments within the ambit of the nuclear family and capitalistic work, even as the nuclear family disintegrates and the demands of work tear children from parents and grandparents - covert, de facto attacks by employers are part of the landscape of our lives. If we really are in a war, it’s a shadow war: it’s us against someone else’s profits. Perhaps because the family really is being undermined six different ways to Sunday, many of us are horrified by the prospect of quitting the safe familial realm and making the family an arena of utopian aspiration and experimentation – it sounds monstrous.

And the results of the radical ideas Willis delineates have been, when implemented in the real world, mixed. Take the Kibbitz movement. Early Jewish settlers in Palestine made children a communal responsibility. Babies slept outside the home, side by side in dormitories. “This experiment failed the test of reality,” writes Israeli sleep researcher Avi Sadeh. “In a study that took advantage of the survival of communal sleeping on one kibbutz that still kept this tradition, scientists… compared the sleep of babies and young children in their parents’ homes to that of children who slept in communal children’s houses or in day-care centers. It was found that children who slept in their parents’ houses tended to have longer continuous periods of sleep than those in communal sleeping situations on the kibbutz…Researchers found that the kibbutz children’s sleep improved greatly after moving to family sleeping arrangement.”

Children are born of our bodies; it’s not so easy and probably not so desirable to sever family from biology. Score one for familialism!

Maybe utopia and families don’t mix. But when you think about it, all ideas of the family are ultimately utopian. No family utopia is at present more perfectionist, totalitarian, and widespread than the White American Christian ideal (which has counterparts in Black, Latino, and various Asian communities that differ in politically interesting ways).

Even non-fanatics hold in our minds an ideal of the perfect family; we all work to realize that ideal in daily life; all of us fail and suffer disappointment in not reaching that ideal. We try to forge a good life for our kids, inside and outside of standard gender roles: dad stays home; mom stays home; mom and dad split it all down the middle of a pie chart they post on the refrigerator; kids have two dads or two moms; we move to be closer to relatives; we tinker with disciplinary regimes, trying to balance our child’s need to develop as a creative person against the need to set limits.

And more explicitly utopian experiments still persist: in a recent New York Magazine article, Other mag editor Annalee profiles a 100-person commune on Staten Island, which sounds like “Peace Trek” in action. “Our cars are a perfect example of socialism,” says a founder. “Nobody owns them, so we treat them like shit.” If children are defined as a “collective responsibility,” will they be treated like cars on a commune? Thanks, but that suburban townhouse is starting to sound pretty good.

And so we, from religious right to secular left, find ourselves trapped between the family life we’ve imagined and the quotidian, globalized reality of life in “the future.” Last night Liz of Badgermama described her efforts, which have been so far frustrated, to launch a co-living community with other families. During the past year, my wife and I have twice tried to set up more communal living situations with other families - we’re not talking radical free-love vegan communes here, but just a mutually supportive, cooperative environment for our kids. Both efforts fell to pieces - or perhaps I should say are on hold for the moment - for many different reasons.

But when I think about it, all the reasons share an underlying unity having to do with the mobility and velocity of our society. Like our toddlers, we can’t seem to sit still. There’s always something better somewhere else, in a place we never seem to reach.

—————-

“Right now we can’t waste time imagining or promoting alternatives to capitalism,” a then-unknown Tom Frank once told me. “At this historical moment that’s just soft-headed.” At the time I disagreed. I was twenty-five years old.

Years later I interviewed the science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson. “There’s got to be a utopian strand, there’s gotta be positive stories,” he told me. “You can criticize over and over again, but it also helps to have some vision of what should happen… All ways of trying to imagine some post-capitalist world are useful, even though - or precisely because - they are wish fulfillment and escapist in some senses. It means there are wishes still in existence for a better and more just world, and it means people want to escape, like prisoners, the current reality. All to the good!”

At the time I agreed with Robinson, yet today - in my mid-thirties - I tilt more towards Frank’s position. Never has my daily life been brighter; never has my imagination been darker. The contrast is intolerable and I would like nothing more than for inside and outside to find some kind of harmony. Perhaps Frank and Robinson are both right. In such a case, I think Robinson’s is the more courageous default position. If only I could find his courage.

[Cross-posted with Daddy Dialectic.]

As a previous post about gay Iran hinted, LGBT activism is springing up all over the middle east. Karl Soehnlein sent along this email (below) about another organization, Helem, in Lebanon. From Helem’s website:

Helem, a group previously known as Club Free, has been working on LGBT issues in Lebanon for the past 4 years. Our activities have included social and cultural events to bring the gay community together, extensive work on HIV/AIDS related issues, advocacy for prosecuted LGBT individuals and lobbying with other human rights organizations for the advancement of human rights and personal freedoms in Lebanon.

For those of you in San Francisco, Karl and a group of writers (participants are listed below) will be throwing a reading “trying to raise money and awareness about Helem’s mission”. It will be happening

This Saturday, May 13, from 4-6 p.m. at A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books, Rabih Alameddine (author of “I, the Divine") has gathered together a huge group of writers for a relay-reading and party. [I’m not sure exactly when I’ll be reading in the lineup].

Please take a little time out of your Saturday to stop by the bookstore – any time between 4-6 – and buy a signed copy of a book or a glass of wine. The money goes toward this important cause. After 6, the fun and fundraising continues at Restaurant Medjool (2522 Mission St. at 21st).

INFO:

Saturday, May 13 from 4 to 6 PM
Partying for Sexual Freedom in the Middle East

A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books (at Opera Plaza)
601 Van Ness (bet. Golden Gate and Turk), San Francisco
415-441-6607
http://www.acwlpforbooks.com

Join literati Amy Tan, Dorothy Allison, Ayelet Waldman, Po Bronson, Rabih Alameddine, Kay Ryan, Justin Chin, Stephen Elliott, K.M. Soehnlein, ZZ Packer, Andrew Sean Greer, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, Beth Lisick, Elizabeth Stark and Susanne Pari to raise money for Helem, a gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights organization in Lebanon.

On Wednesday, May 10, I’ll be taking part in a “rapid fire” (three minutes, tops!) benefit reading at Valencia Street Books in San Francisco, along with Other Magazine mavens Charlie Anders and Liz Henry. The event, which starts at 7pm, is a fundraiser for Strange Horizons and the Speculative Literature Foundation, two of my favorite science-fiction organizations.

Ever wonder what it would look like if comics artists drew the male superheroes with the same salaciousness with which they render the female characters? Well wonder no more! Karen at her “oddity collector” livejournal used photoshop and (presumably) some gay porn to mock (up) comic book covers that objectify men! It’s not something I ever thought about, but with this thrust in my face (in more metaphorical ways than one) it’s hard not to notice the utter inequality with which women are represented in comics, still. Grrrls can kick ass nowadays but only if they are sexy doing it. ‘Cause really, does it matter what they’re doing, as long as the action shows off their rack?

(I wish I could figure out which blog pointed me to this but I can’t. Sorry, whoever it was!)

***
(Update: I remember now. It was Nalo Hopkinson. Thanks, Nalo!)

Chita, who played Tarzan’s sidekick, turned 74 years old recently. Was it “Cheeta", in English? I’m not sure, but I keep coming across this news in blogs in Spanish - like here at motherjoana - complete with excellent photo of Tarzan and Jane. Apparently Chita loves beer and cigars.

I bet Koko the gorilla wishes someone would give her a beer.

In honor of the forthcoming issue of other, the monkey issue, I read an extremely strange book from 1930 called His Monkey Wife. It’s written from the point of view of Emily, a chimpanzee who falls in love with her owner and learns to read his books. She’s read all of the best of English literature… but can’t speak or write. Anyway, the book is full of the casual exposure of deep racism and sexism. It’s often horrible and horrifying all at once. Half the time I think it’s making fun of intellectual women, and half the time it’s exposing the double bind that women find themselves in & exposing it with sympathy. A very weird book about race and gender - I recommend it with the caveat that you have to deal with lots of racist epithets.

Hell, it’s a romance novel about a chimpanzee. What’s not to love!

A more recent monkey book I enjoyed a lot… well, an ape book… Eva, by Peter Dickinson. It’s about a teenage girl whose parents transplant her brain into a chimpanzee’s body to bring her out of a coma.

I’m reading a lot of stories lately that push the idea that we can figure out a lot about what it means to be a woman by taking a close look at what it means to be subhuman.

I’ll be talking about animals and gender at WisCon at the end of May, on a panel with David D. Levine, Ursula K. Le Guin, Tom La Farge, and Elizabeth Bear. So, this monkey issue is perfectly timed for me!

Galeria de la Raza is hands down one of the coolest arts organizations in the country. Apart from their 36-year-old gallery space (on 24th and Bryant in San Francisco) and their store, which sells work by Latino/a artists, they have a billboard (that’s right) upon which is displayed digital murals from their mural project.

One of the most compelling mural sites in the city, Galería de la Raza’s public mural is a 30-year diary of San Francisco’s socio-cultural history through the eyes of Latino artists. From the dot-coms to immigration, to gender, war and dislocation, Galería’s Digital Mural Project engages diverse communities through its presentation of new genre public art billboards presenting artistic, social and political content.

Galería/Studio24 invites Latino artists to submit a public art project for Galería’s Digital Mural Program. The project should address what you consider a current critical issue (social, political, cultural). The selected project will be exhibited on Galería’s 10’x24’ street level billboard located on the corner of Bryant Street and 24th. The billboard will be exhibited for a 6-week period that includes digital publication on our web site, newsletter, and various media channels.

Please forward this link to all the Latino/a artists you know. It’s a great opportunity, a great project, and I can think of at least one “current critical issue” that needs to be addressed repeatedly in such a forum.