Hi, if you have the other magazine blog bookmarked, hopefully you’ve already noticed our big announcement that we moved our blog to a new URL back in June. But if you’ve got us on your RSS feed or aggregator, then you might have missed the excitement! Please reset all your bookmarks and subscriptions to our new address, which is http://www.othermag.org/blog/ – We’ll look forward to seeing you there!

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.

Via Outis I came to this article on Foreign Policy’s blog, about Pakistan’s first drag queen talk diva.

Ali Saleem is just your average, Pakistani bisexual son of a retired Army colonel who likes to dress like a woman and interview celebrities and newsmakers on TV. He’s also South Asia’s first drag queen talk diva, who has made quite a name for himself over the last eight months with his Late Night Show with Begum Nawazish Ali (via Glasshouse). It’s kind of like where Ali G meets Rupaul.

There’s controversy, of course, but what’s interesting to me here is that Saleem claims s/he has had no hate mail and gets only love on the street. This is, according to the article’s writer, because in traditional Indian/Pakistani culture, there is a third sex, the Hijras. From wikipedia:

In the culture of the Indian subcontinent a hijra (sometimes hijira or hijda) is a physically male or intersex person who is considered a member of “the third sex.” They usually refer to themselves as female at the language level; many of them are castrated. Hijras trace their historical roots to Hinduism where they mirrored androgynous deities, as well as to the royal courts of Islamic rulers.

Of course, it’s not all a happy story. Even traditionally, Hijras are low-caste, and their position has been affected throughout the past centuries by values imported by colonizers. But check out the wikipedia entry and also this article at worldpress.org. It’s an interesting read.

I’ll be taking the train up to the march and rally in San Francisco next Monday for the international Great American Boycott and General Strike to protest HR 4437. I like the slogan from May Day in the Bay!: “On May 1st we are all undocumented.” In other words, if you’re not “undocumented", act in solidarity and leave your ID at home.

In my town on the SF peninsula, the schools are begging parents not to keep their kids out of school. They sent a letter home (in English and Spanish) talking about the importance of education. Several schools in the district, though, are closing down completely on May 1. I’m probably going to keep my son out of school and bring him to the Civic Center rally - fighting for civil rights is a good thing to add to his education.

Nationally, there is a movement to be inclusive of all immigrants, but around here the entire rally and strike is very much framed as a Latin America/U.S. issue. Gaba en San Pancho brought my attention to a good article by Lakele on immigration: Por un mundo sin fronteras.

Coco suggests not having Starbucks but “puras Coronas”. I guess the point is to stock up on the Coronas beforehand since in theory you can’t buy them on Monday! La guera loca blogs about the recent arrests of immigrants in Virginia, and the rumors flying in her town. Many people in Mexico and other countries won’t be buying American products on May 1st.

(crossposted at BlogHer World/Latin America)

They just won’t leave off, will they? Via Mixed Media Watch I got to this article from Psychology Today, annoyingly titled “Mixed Race, Pretty Face?” The article rehashes the experiment from last fall that “found” that hapas were (scientifically) more attractive than whites or Asians. However, this article gives a detail about the study that the articles I read last fall did not:

The experiment by Gillian Rhodes, a psychologist at the University of Western Australia, found that when Caucasian and Japanese volunteers looked at photos of Caucasian, Japanese and Eurasian faces, both groups rated the Eurasian faces as most attractive. These visages were created by first digitally blending a series of faces from each race into “composites” to create average, middle-of-the-road features typical of each race. Past studies show that “average” features are consistently rated as more attractive than exaggerated features—such as an unusually wide forehead or a small chin.

Okay, I’m just gonna give you guys a quick chance to consider the proposition above and see if you can find the 800-pound gorilla in the room. (Don’t feel bad if you don’t. Not even the perennially annoyed Mixed Media Watch gals caught this one.)

Yep, that’s right, they based the study not on real photographs of real people, but on digitally “morphed” photos created to present “average, middle-of-the-road features typical of each race.”

Why is this problematic? Let me count the ways:

1. There are no “typical” “Caucasian” features. Duh! “Caucasian” refers to everything from Icelandic, to Serbian, to Greek. In fact, if you showed photos of “typical” Greeks, southern Italians, or Portuguese, nowadays your respondant might be just as likely to peg them as “Arabs”. Many Spaniards and Frenchpersons would be pegged as “Latino”. And many Icelanders, Lapplanders and the like would be pegged as … “hapa”. What is considered “average” or “typical” “Caucasian” is basically Anglo and/or Nordic/Germanic, and/or Slavic. That is to say, what is “Caucasian” in America is entirely socially determined – and not at all biologically determined – by which Caucasians dominate the public image. Presumably, what is “Caucasian” in Australia is even more limited by Australia’s immigration history. So the big question is, when choosing faces to morph, which “Caucasian” ethnicities did they choose? Hmmmm?

2. Given the above fact, by digitally creating faces, the experimenters were not merely smoothing out those annoying flaws reality provides, but actually creating a new, completely nonexistent race, called “Caucasian”. Groundwork had already been done for them by magazines, which do not morph features, but do remove “blemishes” and control features. So the test subjects were prepared to “read” these faces as something approaching reality. They are not. They are nothing approaching reality.

3. This is just as problematic when you consider the morphed “typical” Japanese faces. Who decided what “typical” Japanese features are? Who chose which faces to morph? What race, upbringing, class, immigration status were they?

4. The “Eurasian” faces were morphed, too, from composite Japanese and Caucasian faces. Okay, first of all, my parents, both attractive, do not look like morphed photos. Guess what, neither do your parents. I, of course, just like you, am a certain combination of my parents’ features (and attitudes). However, I, just like you, am not a perfect morph, a perfect 50/50 compromise, between the two. And I, just like you, do not look like a morphed photo. I’m assymetrical, I’m idiosyncratic.

Rhodes, the “scientist” who conducted the study, has found in previous studies that people find “average” faces more attractive than idiosyncratic faces (she attributes the preference for symmetry and average to the desire for health in a partner, and the aversion to idiosyncracies an aversion to potential disease.) This may all be true, however real “Eurasians” are not any more “average” or “symmetrical” than real “Caucasians” or real “Japanese”. Saying a morph of a morph is considered more attractive than just the morph may well be true and provable … but it says nothing about how attractive real Eurasians are.

In addition to these hard problems, the way the article was reported raises additional questions: Who were the test subjects? The article just says that they were “Caucasian and Japanese volunteers”. What the fuck does that mean? Were they Australian Caucasians or Europeans or Americans? Were they Japanese Australians, Japanese immigrants to Australia, Japanese in Japan? Maybe even Japanese Americans? Was there any controlling for socialization in this study at all? Well? Was there? How old were they? What was their exposure to media? To Japanese media (which currently fetishizes hapas)? To Australian media? To American media? Who have they been dating? Who are they married to? Do they have mixed kids?

Obviously, the journalists reporting on this study have no interest in its scientific legitimacy (of which there can be little.) It’s just another juicy episode of Halfbreeds-will-save-the-world. Frankly, I’m perfectly happy to be of average attractiveness. I don’t need to be told that I’m more beautiful than everyone because I’m mixed. Being told on the one hand that I’m supposed to be more beautiful, and then being treated as an other, a foreigner, by everyone, every day on the other hand, really doesn’t create the happy rainbow future. I prefer mixed race, not mixed messages.

(Cross-posted on my personal blog.)

I just heard that Jane Jacobs has died. She was not just a giant of urban planning, but an amazing humanist and a great writer. Even if you’ve never heard of her, if you live in a city you’ve benefited from her seminal writing, especially the Death and Life of Great American Cities. She will be missed.

Kenyan writer Shailja Patel reviews Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu’s installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art:

The work of an African artist exhibited in the Western world is never free of imposed expectations of “authenticity”. San Francisco museum curator, Tara McDowell, says of Mutu’s work: “Born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, she creates work that reflects her African identity and heritage as well as a politics of place with which she is deeply familiar, having spent years exposed to the mutilations that are common in parts of Africa debilitated by civil strife and the diamond trade.”

Wangechi Mutu was a schoolmate of mine at Loreto Convent, a private Catholic girls’ school in Nairobi. The mutilations referred to may be common in Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Congo – they did not figure in the experience of upper middle-class Nairobi schoolgirls in the 1980s. While Mutu admits to a “Catholic-obsessed mind", and clearly draws on the iconography of the ritualized sacrificial body, we see at work in McDowell’s comments the unexamined racism of “collective representation”. Anyone hailing from the African continent is assumed to have first-hand experience of every aspect of the social, political and economic history of every region of the continent. This is the only way their art can be legitimate. Unlike Western artists, Africans may not address a subject simply because it engages them – it must reflect some aspect of their own heritage.

Shailja’s critique recalls for me Binyavanga Wainaina’s essay “How To Write About Africa” in Granta:

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. … Describe, in detail, naked breasts (young, old, conservative, recently raped, big, small) or mutilated genitals, or enhanced genitals. Or any kind of genitals. And dead bodies. Or, better, naked dead bodies. And especially rotting naked dead bodies. Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the ‘real Africa’, and you want that on your dust jacket.

Unfortunately, Mutu’s exhibition at SFMOMA is now closed but she’ll be showing in New York in May/June at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. And you can hear a podcast of her describing her SFMOMA installation by subscribing to SFMOMA’s artcasts.

Twisty Faster of “I Blame the Patriarchy” has an excellent, ranty, fired-up post about a hideous industry of preteen and teenage “supermodels”. I warn you, the photos on that site will make you feel kind of sick. They’re of young girls in skimpy clothes and porno poses. So the site is completely legal, and subscribing to it (30 bucks a month) is too. And yet the obvious purpose of the site is to be porn, i.e. it’s for people (guys) to look at while they jack off.

To steal a line from one of my favorite bloggers…

A bitch is angry.

Seeing this makes me feel queasy about my own moments of pornification. I love to dress up and play with sexiness and power and I defend my right to do that and enjoy it and feel empowered by it. I’m the exhibitionist queen of running around in a flouncy miniskirt at sex parties. And yet when I see these “budding beauty” photos I feel ill at all the underpinnings of patriarchy and exploitation that created… well, me.

I remember being around 10, and dressing up in bathing suits and makeup and lacy scarves, or whatever, and posing in front of my bedroom mirror, thinking… “someday I get to be sexy and powerful.” I was aware even as a little girl that it was wrong to think sexiness was power, and that there were other, more important kinds of power. And yet I still wanted to play with it… I wanted to be that image from the movies. At least I knew then, and still know, that it’s all problematic.

It’s important to draw the line between actual exploitation of children - like that site - and between what I do in my life as an adult. I have trouble, honestly, drawing that line. If it’s okay for me to dress up in a cheerleader outfit and have sex while pretending to be a naughty teenager, why is it not okay for some internet dude to jack off quietly in his own home to some bathing suit photos? He’s not hurting those girls directly and they don’t even know about it (one hopes.) He’s not actually molesting anyone. They’ll know in the future, though, that their parents knew, and that their parents lied to them about how they were “junior supermodels” when they were actually unconsenting porn stars. So maybe it comes down to consent, and our decision as a society that grown women can consent despite the power inequalities we experience (and in my mind that is open to question, unfortunately) while children cannot consent. That line, of when consent is possible and when it’s not is somewhat arbitrary, which is part of makes this such a disturbing and difficult issue to talk about at all.

Oh, and since Twisty mentions the excitement of slugs mating I thought I’d pass along this video of slugs mating. It’s way sexy. They extend glowing blue penises from the backs of their necks and intertwine them while spinning around on a giant glob of snot hanging from a tree.

Artist/filmmaker Dolissa Medina has recently completed a 45-minute film – the work of four years of thinking and sweating – called Cartography of Ashes, which she describes as a collaboration between herself and the San Francisco Fire Department:

Produced to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, the film recounts stories of several city intersections that were destroyed by the conflagration that ravaged the city in the aftermath of the quake.

If that’s not cool enough for you, Dolissa will be premiering the film this Friday, April 21st, at a screening on the Fire Department’s training lot. The film will be projected onto the surface of the fire training tower (the one where they train big, burly, sexy firepeople to rescue folks from burning buildings) on the corner of 19th and Folsom streets in San Francisco. How cool is that? How bummed am I that I’m going to miss this one?

I did get to see a preview of the film on the website and it looks just as thoughtful, beautiful, and well-researched as I would expect from Dolissa. Do not miss this one!

I just got sent a link to A Room Of Her Own, a foundation for women artists and writers. AROHO gives out $50,000 grants to women in need of financial support to make art. Wow, now that’s putting your money where your mouth is.

Additionally, they have a really cool donations ask. They basically just ask you to “celebrate a creative woman in your life” by donating $10 to the fund. I can do that. You can do that! Can you think of one creative woman in your life? Do that, then go here.

Charlie Anders (Other mag’s publisher and fiction editor, and author of Choir Boy)–responding to the flap about Michiko Kakutani in Slate–addresses this questionin her blog (unfortunately, she’s doing the barebones blog thing so there’s no permalink. Just go here and find “[2006/04/12 8:08 pm]")

I definitely lean towards the friendly/balanced school of criticism. Having read one or two reviews of Choir Boy that made me feel pretty demoralized, I don’t really want to inflict that on any other writers. At the same time, I’m pretty clear that my mission as a book reviewer is just to let people know whether a book is worth buying and reading.

(A side note: I’ve always thought that there’s no point in writing a negative review of an obscure or independent book. Most people won’t even have heard of it, so screaming “don’t buy this book you’ve never heard of!” seems kind of pointless and mean.)

Actually, the first question any book review should answer isn’t, “will I like this book?” but rather, “why should I even care about this book? What’s interesting about it?” … And then you do have to address the “does it suck?” question. I have to admit, I go about this somewhat obliquely. Partly because I try to see the good in everything, and partly because I’m still a peon and don’t want to overstep my authority. … It’s true that different people have different tastes, and you might love a book that I kind of hated.

I’m not going to state here that Charlie’s wrong. I think different reviewers need to have different missions, and that, to keep the book-buying business alive and well, we need reviewers who quite simply tell a book-buying audience whether or not to buy a book. I also agree wholeheartedly that most reviewers need to be boosters for books – giving people a reason to buy books, rather than a reason to spend that money on a movie instead.

However, I do think that all reviewers need to at least be aware of the “higher” purpose of serving and furthering an art form. (Let’s pause here for you to cringe.)

It’s easier now than it ever was to get a novel or a memoir published, and easier now than ever to get it read. Yes, despite the moaning and groaning, if you look at the numbers the right way, you’ll see that more books are actually being bought than ever before. (Unfortunately, I’m too lazy right now to look up the stats and do the math. Will do some other time maybe.) What this means is not that we have more people working together to study, enhance and further the art form/s, but rather that we have more pressure on barely competent writers to produce, produce, produce. The stick is short deadlines for drafts. The carrot is three-book deals on the one hand, and warm reception on the other.

Literature is indeed walking forward; memoir and fiction have and continue to meld and affect one another. However, given the sheer amount of memoirish fiction and fictional memoir that has been produced in the past decade, it’s shocking, appalling and lots of other prudish, literary -ings, that the last even minor literary “breakthrough” on this front was A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius six or seven years ago. Since then, there have been a lot of imitators, and even more people who neither imitated nor innovated, but simply took Heartbreaking Work’s success as an excuse to walk backward to a satiate, safe, and unchallenging prose style telling stories that they know will be well received because they have been told so often before.

Readers–perfectly intelligent, literate and well-educated readers–will naturally, in an initial phase of learning to read books, be hostile to the things they read that are unexpected, unusual (to them) and challenging. Anyone who has taught literature or taught writing by having students read literature will be aware that hostility to the new and challenging is not just typical, but almost necessary. The key is to not let your students get away with it. They can hate a book, but they also have to read it through and analyze it intelligently. And I guarantee you that the book they hated, the book they so competently and passionately analyzed to pieces on their final exam, is the one that will stay with them, that will affect they way they think about life, and will inform their ideas about sophistication and competence in literature in the years to come.

But in the process of taking book production from a manufacturing industry to a service industry (like Wal-mart or McDonald’s) the book industry has turned from offering art and forcing those who want art to take what they’re offered, to mass-producing entertainment, and enticing people to buy it by packaging it as art. Both publishers and critics are now letting readers get away with their hostility towards the new and the challenging. They are encouraging readers to ensconce the idea of literary art in a fixed set of plots (self-discovery, familial healing), fixed settings (urban or suburban, middle or upper middle class, white, professional circles), and fixed prose style ("poetic", with an emphasis on descriptions based on lists and visual metaphors) and techniques (indistinguishable first or close-third person, with voice indistinguishable from author’s voice; obsessively shaped sentence structure and rhythm, emphasis on the turned phrase; beauty of authorial voice takes precedence over the needs of the story, etc.)

With these points being the hallmarks of “good writing", anything that doesn’t follow suit is necessarily considered “bad writing", and anything that touches on these points is necessarily considered “good writing", whether it actually is or not. (And I would contend that anything that touches on these now cliched points is almost guaranteed to not be good, because you have to be a genius to write well through cliches.) Readers don’t have to question, just passively receive. Anything that challenges this order is thrown across the room (if you’re me) or quietly dismissed with a “I just don’t like to read that kind of thing.”

You never have to leave the zone of books that tell you the same comforting things over and over again.

The only thing that can possibly counteract the walmartization of book production is competent, purposeful criticism. If that. Because if the reading public, the self-selected, self-described literary top-percentiles are accepting the description of good literature I’ve outlined above (and they are), then it is because the critics who truly shape opinion are either permitting this, or actively promoting it. I rather think it’s the former: that critics permit this because they’re stuck in a book-by-book critical mode, seeking to place the book in its own context, but not in the context of literature in the early 21st century, not in the context of literature against the background of its own traditions, or of the future annihilation it faces as new entertainment media become increasingly culturally sophisticated–become, in short, art forms.

As literature becomes increasingly personal, it becomes increasingly self-absorbed and cut off from the implication of interaction with society in general. New digital media can stand this transformation and continue to turn it on its head–I don’t think printed literature can. As it grows more personal, literature ceases to challenge and produce new ideas. As it ceases to challenge and renew, so it dies. And for those of us who love words on a page, this is simply unacceptable.

I want to see critics who write every review in full knowledge of these trends, in full consciousness of the tradition both they and their subjects are writing in, in full awareness of their role in supporting an ancient art form. I want critics to use every book as a positive or negative example of how the art is being developed (or not) and where it is (or isn’t) going. I want critics to give every book its due respect, by respectfully reaming those books with no ambition, no art, no challenge. I want even a book that passes that basic test (does it challenge, or seek to present something new, or seek to develop an aspect of the art form in an interesting way?) to be thoroughly analyzed for how it does it. I want reviews to teach me more about the art of writing than I already know myself (because how sad is it when a review is less knowledgeable about writing than I am?) I want to be able to read reviews of books to get an overview of the state of the art–no, in fact more than that: I want to read reviews for their own sake, because reading books, and thinking about books, and having my own perspective on books won’t be enough for me. I want someone brilliant and supremely knowledgeable to enhance my enjoyment of books with a view that I could never have. I want reviews that are reading material in themselves, and not just conduits to reading material.

Is that too much to ask?

(this is cross-posted on my own blog SeeLight.)

Want to know how scary our country is getting?

Listen to Bill Bennett call for the imprisonment of journalists who dare publish stories “against the wishes of the president, against the request of the president.”

You can read solid reaction and discussion on Glenn Greenwald’s blog.

[Cross posted with Jeremy’s Journal on Media and Democracy]

I’m wearing my fiction editor hat here, and just wanted to mention that I still need one piece of long-ish fiction for other #10. (Or maybe two shorter pieces of fiction.) Long-ish meaning around 3,000-4,000 words. Doesn’t have to be about monkeys or apes, but it can be. The main things I always look for in short fiction for other are:

We’re having an open staff meeting for other magazine on Wednesday @ 8 PM, at Maxfield’s House of Caffeine, 17th. and Dolores, SF. If you’d like to get involved in helping to put out other magazine, stop by and say hi!

One of the big critiques you hear of the Democratic party lately is that there’s too much of a focus on women’s issues (specifically abortion, but also other stuff). The reason the Dems can’t win an election, supposedly, is that they’re seen as either a “single issue party” or else they turn off voters by focusing on an issue that’s not relevant to most voters. Instead, the Democratic party should focus more on class and less on gender. And we, as activists, should stop talking about gender issues because we’ll just turn off people who might otherwise sympathize with us.

In this line of reasoning, either:

If you enjoyed Nicole Gluckstern’s cool article and book review about McMurdo Station in Antarctica, then here’s your chance to live there. If you’ve got a journalistic background, you could spend a year editing the frostiest newspaper on Earth, the Antarctic Sun. Just don’t forget to send us a postcard!

I don’t know much about how my ancestors came to the U.S. There are Native American names in my family tree, so some of them came over from Asia during the Ice Age. Many came down from Canada bearing both French and English names – on my father’s side, some of them came down before the Revolutionary War, before the border with Canada meant very much. My mother’s people, all French-speaking Canadians, came down much more recently to work in the textile mills of Lowell, MA. I don’t know if they were legal or illegal.

My wife Shelly knows a bit more about her family. Her father’s mother’s family had households in China and Hawaii, and shuttled back and forth on cruise ships. Yes, they were, according to family lore, rich. When the Communists gained power in China, the family divided. Shelly’s grandmother stayed in Hawaii and was raised by relatives. Shelly’s father’s father was born in China but came to the U.S. to go to school. The whole family became citizens when Hawaii became a state in 1959. Shelly’s mom’s family, meanwhile, is supposedly descended from Peregrine White, born on the Mayflower (” …it pleased God that Mistriss White was brought a bed of a son, which was called Peregrine.” – Mourt’s Relation, ed. Jordan D. Fiore, Plymouth, Mass: Plymouth Rock Foundation, 1985.)

Our collective, familial memories are fading; we’re forgetting that we were once immigrants, driven to the States by politics, economics, unhappiness, yearning. We flutter together like quantum butterflies, every flap of our wings triggering hurricanes in times and places we can’t even imagine. How did all these people, bedraggled and confused, traveling from every corner of the earth, come together to form Liko Wai-Kaniela Smith-Doo, my miracle, my hurricane? His name is a trainwreck; so’s his bloodline. He’s a mutt, my son, a walking, talking Amerieuroasiapacific mashup. I think he’s pretty cool.

And this afternoon (I’m starting this late Monday night; will probably post early Tuesday morning) Liko joined 5,000 other mongrels in marching against…well, who cares? Sure, the Senate wiped out on passing some racist immigration law that would have made illegal status a felony; yes, there was talk at the rally of work permits and legal status for illegal immigrants. There were policy issues at stake, but in many ways, policy wasn’t the point.

I don’t know about everybody else, but my family was marching for cross-pollination, miscegenation, globalism, cosmopolitanism. We were marching for cities and against the suburbs. My utopia is closer to William Burroughs’s Interzone - “the Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market” - than gleaming, seamless, monolithic visions like Plato’s Republic, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, or the underground cities of H.G. Wells.

The world is globalizing. Good. But if capital can move across borders so that capitalists can make money, then ordinary working people should be able to do the same. That seems fair, doesn’t it? And a world full of Likos wouldn’t be a bad place. Si se puede!

[Cross-posted from my blog “Daddy Dialectic,” where family members are starting to share more detail about our migratory history.]

Have you ever wanted to be involved in helping to run other magazine? Now’s your chance to join the dynamic, scarf-wearing cabal that has put out other magazine since 2002. Other magazine is like a “general interest” magazine for people who don’t see their POVs reflected in the mainstream media. We cover any topic that interests us, including transgender rock’n'roll, science fiction, drugs, databases, sex toys in the Bible Belt, wannabe reality TV stars and the vagaries of patent law. We also publish fiction, poetry, comics, travel writing and reviews.

We’re looking for people who are interested in everything from writing and editing, to ad sales and layout. If you’d like to be part of putting other magazine together, come to Maxfield’s House of Caffeine on Wednesday April 19 at 8 PM.

Hey folks, check out this competition I’m pasting below. It’s being put out there by Hyphen Magazine and the Asian American Writers Workshop, so bi-coastal y’all. Please forward to your Asian American friends! I’m really hoping Asian Americans from the South and the flyover states will submit work – and REGIONAL work, as well. And Azns: please send them GENRE STUFF. Dunno how they’ll feel about it, but we need to represent! (oh, and please don’t ask me anything about this competition. All I know is below.)

Hyphen & The Asian American Writers’ Workshop announce

2007 Short Story Competition

$1,000 prize and publication in Hyphen

Judges:
Brian Leung and Monique Truong

Writers of short fiction are encouraged to enter the 2006-07 Short Story Competition jointly sponsored by Hyphen and The Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW). The winner will receive a $1,000 cash prize, publication in Hyphen magazine, a one-year subscription to Hyphen and a one-year membership to AAWW.

The competition is open to all writers of Asian descent living in the United States and Canada. To be eligible, manuscripts must be previously unpublished and in English. No email submissions allowed. Previously unpublished authors are eligible. The competition is limited to short works of fiction, including short stories, novellas and excerpts from novels; the latter must stand alone as a separate work. There is no required theme or page limit.

Submissions must be postmarked by Monday, July 10, 2006 and accompanied by a $10 entry fee per story. Please send 4 copies of your story using paper clips. Manuscripts will not be returned and will be acknowledged only if an SASE is provided. Include a cover letter with name, address, email, daytime telephone number and a 3-sentence bio. The story title and page number should be clearly labeled on each page of the submission. Your name must not appear anywhere on the manuscript, except on the cover letter. Manuscripts should be typewritten and double-spaced on 8 ½ X 11 plain white paper.

Manuscripts may be under consideration elsewhere, but please notify us immediately if your story is accepted for publication. Hyphen retains first publication rights and the right to publish a portion of the story on its website. All rights revert to the author upon publication.

To enter the short story competition, please send submission to:

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop
2007 Short Story Competition
16 West 32nd Street, Suite 10A
New York, NY 10001-3808

Make checks payable to “Asian American Writers’ Workshop.”

Hyphen is offering a discounted one-year subscription (4 issues) to all entrants. To receive a discounted subscription, please write a separate check payable to “Hyphen” for $15, and include it with your manuscripts and fees. Please include the memo “2007 Short Story Competition.”

Entrants will be notified by or on Monday, October 2, 2006.

For more details visit: www.hyphenmagazine.com or www.aaww.org.

Over at “Daddy Dialectic,” I wrote:

In online [stay-at-home-dad] circles, Mr. Mom is supposed to be an offensive term, but I find it fitting. When I’m taking care of Liko, I don’t feel like I’m “fathering” him. In my mind – and this is just the thought I was raised with, not the one I want to have – a father goes to work and comes home in the evening. “Fathering” is playing ball, patting on the back, putting food on the table. An honorable role.

A mother, meanwhile, is home changing diapers and cleaning baby food off the floor and kissing skinned knees. That’s also honorable and often honored. That’s what I do. So I feel like by staying home with him, I’m “mothering” Liko. I’m a mom, or at least, that’s my role. In many respects, a man out in the middle of the afternoon with his toddler, who is known to neighbors and neighborhood shop clerks and waitresses as a “Mr. Mom,” is a man in drag, and queer in the most political sense of the term. Why shouldn’t I be proud to be a Mr. Mom? I hope someday “Dad” and “Mom” will be interchangeable with regard to childcare, but we ain’t there yet. For now, I’m happy to be queer.

I didn’t think much of this when I wrote it; I was just musing. However, my post provoked a number of fascinatingly neurotic discussion threads in the progressive parenting blogosphere.

Rebeldad’s April 5 link and commentary triggered some mild, predictable homosexual panic:

Many women also seem to have this facination to want their husband’s or boyfriends to show their feminine side or turn them into “girly” dads. Sorry but I don’t have a feminine side. I’m a frieken [sic] guy! I only have a masculine side…The other day Tina paid me a compliment and said how much she appreciated the way I parent as a DAD. And I told her how much I appreicate the way she parents as a MOM. And then we had sex!

As well as thoughtful disagreement:

I am not a mom, I do not mother. I am a father, and by his [i.e., Jeremy’s] definition, I do father…. and more. The ideals he’s mentioned are exactly the types of stereotypes that create the awkward looks we get on the playgrounds. It’s not an insecurity issue, at least for me. I’m parenting, not mothering. Usually, I’ll take the title with a grain of salt, unless its said in a negative tone. Then I tend to take the same defensive stance I would take were someone to call me a slacker for not “working”.

But the juiciest dialogue happened over at Half Changed World, where Elizabeth (who objected to some parts of the original post) wrote:

But maybe Jeremy’s right in some ways.  I write here a fair amount about what I call “reverse traditional families” – families with working mothers and at-home fathers.  One of the strains on women in these families is that we rarely give ourselves mothering credit for being breadwinners.  We often beat ourselves up for the things that we don’t do, without giving ourselves corresponding brownie points for the things we do.  Maybe we should stop worrying about whether we’re good enough mothers, and decide that we’re damned good fathers.

It’s one of those cases you wouldn’t believe if you saw it in a movie. Jill Cottrill’s supervisor at MFA Agri-Services, Scott Adkins, drilled a peephole in his private breakroom so he could watch Cottrill every time she used the bathroom. The peephole led to a one-way mirror, and Adkins viewed Cottrill two or three times a day for years. Cottrill also had weird rashes after using the toilet, which were so debilitating she could sometimes hardly walk, and she found a sticky substance on the seat. After Adkins was finally caught, they found gloves and leaves that appeared to be poison ivy among his things. (Adkins denies the part about using poison ivy to give Cottrill a rash, and the leaves were never verified to be poison ivy.)

After Adkins was fired and pleaded guilty to a Class C felony, Cottrill and her coworker sued MFA for sex discrimination. MFA won a summary judgment by relying on McCurdy v. Ark. State Police, which held that sexual harrassment charges can’t stand when the employer makes a good faith effort to prevent sexually harrassing behavior, and when employees don’t take advantage of opportunities to report sexual harrassment. A district court agreed that Cottrill and her coworker should have gone through the administrative process at MFA, and that they failed to prove a hostile work environment. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit agrees, ruling in favor of MFA.

On the face of it, this is kind of weird. A peeping tom for years? With some evidence (which sounds like it was bungled by MFA) showing that he intentionally gave Cottrill rashes? But on the other hand, it’s true that MFA acted quickly when suspicions were first raised, including installing a hidden camera in Adkins’ breakroom to catch him spying on Cottrill. But on the other hand, it seems kind of weird for the courts to rule that Cottrill didn’t prove that men were treated differently than women at her office. Duh?! Men didn’t have a creepy supervisor watching them every time they used the bathroom! Cottrill’s complaint failed to make any specific statements about how men were treated at MFA, so that part of the complaint was dismissed.

The Appeals Court considered anew Cottrill’s claims of a hostile work environment. Since she didn’t know she was being spied on in the toilet until Adkins was caught, she can’t claim that this made her work environment unpleasant at the time. (Although I’d be willing to bet she knew there was something creepy about her supervisor.) Likewise, she never knew the cause of her rashes, even if they were caused by Adkins, the court ruled.

Actually, the most shocking part of the Appeals court ruling is its list of other recent cases where some pretty fucked up conduct wasn’t enough to prove sexual harrassment:

See LeGrand v. Area Res. for Cmty. & Human Servs., 394 F.3d 1098,
1100-03 (8th Cir. 2005) (finding no objectively hostile work environment created by
defendant’s unwelcome sexual advances on three separate occasions over a ninemonth
period, including asking the employee to watch pornographic movies with
him, hugging and kissing, and grabbing the employee’s buttocks and thigh); Tuggle,
348 F.3d at 720 (holding no actionable hostile work environment based on
defendant’s inappropriate sexual comments, taking a photograph of plaintiff’s rear
end and giving plaintiff undesirable work assignments); Duncan v. Gen. Motors
Corp., 300 F.3d 928, 933 (8th Cir. 2002) (holding no actionable hostile work
environment where co-employee asked plaintiff if she would have a relationship with
him, touched the plaintiff’s hand on four to five occasions, requested the plaintiff
sketch a sexually objectionable planter, asked plaintiff to complete a task on his
computer where its screen saver depicted a naked woman, hung an offensive poster,
and asked plaintiff to type a document for him containing sexually offensive items).

WTF?!

One judge did dissent in the court’s ruling, noting that MFA’s management pressured Cottrill to let Adkins see her in the bathroom again, so they could catch him on videotape. Supposedly the existence of the peephole wasn’t enough for them to confront him. And they wanted her to do it four times for good measure. One regional manager allegedly said, “If he only did it once, let’s dont do anything.” They finally did agree to let her wear a long skirt for protection, but they still insisted she had to be using the toilet with Adkins watching, not just checking her makeup. Also, the dissenting ruling notes that Adkins had behaved in a “Jeckyll and Hyde” manner for years, and management had ignored complaints about the weird substances on the toilet and the rashes, which also afflicted some other women at the company. That same regional manager, who was a friend of Adkins, stalled on paying for counseling for Cottrill after Adkins was caught, and publicly shamed her about how much the counseling was costing.

Especially after reading the dissent, it’s pretty clear that this was a screwy ruling, and part of a chain of screwy rulings on sexual harrassment. After some serious progress in the early 90s, it seems as though sexual harrassment law is being chipped away by (I’m guessing here) Republican judicial appointees.

PS: All of those precedents quoted above are also from Eighth Circuit, which covers Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

From Evan Derkacz via Amanda at Pandagon: ”Forensic vagina specialist” which sounds like a mildly amusing spam email subject line for porn or something that would be on a frat guy’s tshirt, but unfortunately isn’t. Instead it’s a real job title in El Salvador, where abortion is illegal and any miscarriage is investigated by ob/gyns specially trained in detecting evidence of abortion. Virginia came close to this situation last year, when Republican John Cosgrove proposed a law that would have required women to report their miscarriages to the police within 24 hours or face misdemeanor charges - with penalties of a year in jail and a $2,500 fine.

I knew this part but didn’t know the anti-abortion law was so draconian that you have to wait for your ectopic pregnancy to rupture before surgery is legal. That’s incredibly horrifying. Around 1 in 100 pregnancies is ectopic. Even with early detection and treatment, the mortality rate for ectopic pregnancies is 1 in 826. I can’t find stats for mortality rate once the tube ruptures, but “much, much higher” should cover it along with the words “intra-abdominal hemorrhage” “shock” and “peritonitis”. I’m feeling ill at the picture of sitting around waiting for your tube to rupture. What is going through those doctors’ minds - “First, do no harm"… It’s like watching someone bleed to death but not intervening until their heart stops. Of course the doctors must not consider it harm to a human being, since women are nothing more than host bodies, and anyway, since the main risk factor for a tubal pregnancy is having had an STD, they’re probably sluts unworthy to live. So let ‘em die.

As a bit of an antidote to this horrifying glimpse of the present conditions for women in other countries, and our possible future in this country… I give you Gabby De Cicco’s beautiful photos of last year’s abortion rights protest in Buenos Aires: Marcha Nacional Derecho al Aborto. I like the idea of the underwear worn on the outside with slogans written on. It carries the idea that what should be private is made public - negatively, in the case of state control over women’s bodies - but the idea is made into a powerful (and media-attention getting) protest.

On the other hand I can’t believe I just suggested that painting oneself green and wearing underwear on the outside is a good way to protest women dying from brutal state denial of basic human rights. Violent revolution would be way more sensible.

Last night I saw “V for Vendetta.”

Now, here’s where I’m supposed to denounce the film as Hollywood commodity propaganda. And it’s true: there’s nothing revolutionary about it. I’ve seen The Battle of Algiers – a film that was genuinely designed to prep its audience for revolutionary violence – and “V for Vendetta” is no Battle of Algiers. It’s a superhero story dressed up as dystopian political thriller; it substitutes wish fulfillment fantasy for political analysis.

I should also – I’m yawning – denounce deviations from Alan Moore’s holy text. But I’m largely sympathetic to the plot changes made by James McTeigue and the Wachowski Bros. “V for Vendetta” would have made a great mini-series, but in compressing the story into a two-hour film, the filmmakers had to simplify the plot – which they did by clicking in a lot of the usual Hollywood clichés. In the comic book, for example, Evey is a sixteen-year-old munitions factory worker and wannabe prostitute; the sociopathic V strips Evey of her identity and in the end, all she can do is don his mask. In the film, however, she’s a smart and beautiful twentysomething with an entry level job at the British Television Network; in the end, she falls in love and they kiss – a kiss that V, of course, can’t return. What do you expect? Sure, it’s a sell-out, but I’m not going to waste time telling a scorpion not to sting. Most of the filmmaker’s choices make sense, given the limitations they faced.

So much for the politics and story changes. My complaint with the film has to do with something much more fundamental to Moore’s story. Moore made his name (in the U.S.) as writer for D.C.’s “Swamp Thing” (billed at the time as “sophisticated suspense”) and has written quite a lot of Lovecraftian horror. “Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary gives the primary definition of horror as ‘a painful and intense fear, dread, or dismay,’” says the Horror Writers Association. “It stands to reason then that ‘horror fiction’ is fiction that elicits those emotions in the reader.”

Sounds right to me. There is something in “V for Vendetta” the comic book that provokes feelings of fear and dread; a sense of being trapped in a nightmare from which you can’t wake, of being helplessly carried along into the darkness. (Moore made a list of inspirations for “V for Vendetta” that included Vincent Price’s Dr. Phibes and Theatre of Blood. I’m suprised Kafka didn’t make the list.) You can see it in the comic’s muddy British coloring and feel it in the pacing. “V for Vendetta” is a social horror story, in which social forces have given rise to demons. Soldiers kick down your door, throw a bag over your head, lock you in a cell, strip you naked, inject you with chemicals, throw your corpse into an anonymous mass grave – not necessarily because of anything you might have done, but because of who you are.

This element is present in the film, to a limited degree – the scene I describe happens in the film, and it’s horrible.

In fact, the film “V for Vendetta” could have been made as a social horror story; it might have still been made to fit under the commercial Hollywood rubric. But in interviews, the filmmakers have made it clear that they identified primarily with V’s superhero qualities. For example, producer Joel Silver (Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, etc.) calls the film:

A comic book and…a superhero movie. V is a superhero. He is. Now, he’s an unconventional one. He doesn’t have the superpowers that we’re used to, but he is a masked avenger, who pretty much saves the world. I mean, it could be any number of comic book creations. I think this is a very unique story that Alan and David wrote, and it’s a very unique kind of superhero movie, and a unique comic book. It does have all those elements that other great comic books have, which I think are designed, as if they’re for the young male audience, but I think it does go beyond that.

A comment like this shows that Silver just didn’t get “V for Vendetta.” In the comic, V really is the monster in a horror story, the pure product of hellish times. It’s a question of emphasis: is the comic book “V for Vendetta” a social horror comic with superhero elements, or a superhero comic with social horror elements? I accept that the filmmakers had to simplify the plot. I accept that they had to neuter the anarchist politics. But I can’t abide sidelining the horror, which is what made Alan Moore’s story so powerful.

Good news: the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 may include transgender people in its protections based on sex. Diane Schroer got a job as a terrorism analyst with the high-powered Congressional Research Service in 2004, when she was still living as David Schroer. After 9/11, Schroer had been appointed director of a 120-person classified organization dealing with tracking terrorist organizations, then she’d retired to join a private consulting firm. The CRS was so eager to hire her, they increased their salary offer to match what she was making as a consultant. But after she accepted the job, she informed her new boss that she was undergoing treatment for Gender Identity Dysphoria, and she would be wearing professional women’s clothing in the office. The CRS promptly withdrew the job offer.

Schroer sued for discrimination, and the CRS moved to dismiss, saying that the protection against sex-based job discrimination doesn’t apply to transsexuals. Though this was a complex issue and federal courts had ruled in the past that transgender people weren’t protected, the District Court disagreed. What changed since those earlier cases? The 1989 ruling in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, in which a woman sued after she was passed over for promotion because she didn’t live up to gender stereotypes. The Supreme Court opened the door to considering subtler issues of sex discrimination. Hopkins’ supervisors had accused her of being macho and encouraged her to dress more femmy. As the Supreme Court put it, it doesn’t “require expertise in psychology to know that, if an employee’s flawed ‘interpersonal skills’ can be corrected by a soft-hued suit or a new shade of lipstick, perhaps it is the employee’s sex and not her interpersonal skills that has drawn the criticism.” Since then, lower courts have looked more favorably on various types of gender discrimination cases, including ones involving trans people.

Of course, that was the Surpeme Court circa 1989, before three terms of Bushes. If Schroer or some similar case makes it to the Roberts court, we might end up with a very different kind of precedent.

(A side note: many people criticized Rikki Wilchins and GenderPac, when they veered away from lobbying for transgender people’s rights and towards a mushier fight against gender stereotypes in general. Although it’s still hard to see how a national lobbying organization can fight something as nebulous as gender stereotypes, the wide-ranging impact of Hopkins does show that trannies, among others, benefit when gender expectations are knocked down. It also shows that trannies who get defend the “gender binary” and get upset with trans/genderqueer people who challenge rigid gender roles may be shooting themselves in the foot. Food for thought anyway.)

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Police Department is hiring, and they’re actively seeking more transgender police officers. If you’re a transgender person concerned about the difficulty of finding a job, or about the occasionally transphobic attitudes of some officers, here’s your chance to do something about both issues. Pass it on!

He was one of the greats.

Depressed? Check out this list of “The Top Eleven Spaceships.” Personally, I would have voted for the Millennium Falcon over the Star Destroyer. But that’s just me. But what about Lemmy Caution’s Ford Galaxy? And the Heart of Gold from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?

This is cross-posted at my personal blog.

Other magazine staffer Gregory Dicum linked to this article on his website in the Other magazine blog last week. It’s an overview of the situation of multiraciality in the United States today, general attitudes, and multiracials’ response to general attitudes. Check it out.

It’s a solid overview, but, once you’ve read it, I want to add some arguments/complications. The article was written in 2003 and, in the short space between then and now, some things may have changed. (I also realize that he may not have addressed some of my concerns simply because they fell outside the scope of his article.)

Dicum identifies a number of responses to multiraciality:
1. multiraciality will end race and racial divisions – an approach typified by Interracial Voice
2. multiracials create a solid, fixed “multiracial” identity that is other than the monoracial identities from which they derive – an approach typified, according to Dicum, by “The Hapa Movement”.
3. the mobile paradox/code switching at will – an approach impossible to codify in an organization

Firstly, I’d like to add some critical distance in the discussion of each of these approaches.

As I noted in my othermag/blog post on interracial families, the “multiraciality will end race” approach is extremely problematic. The Interracial Voice community that typifies this approach supports the politics of Ward Connerly, who helped end affirmative action at a number of universities all over the country, and tried to outlaw the collection of racial data in California – including data on the race of people drawn into the justice system, and data on the race of people treated for certain diseases. (He failed, thank gods.) The idea of using multiraciality to end racial divisions is compelling. But because, according to the Interracial Voice community, multiracials will inevitably end race, they declare racial abolition a fait accompli. Often these advocates claim that the vestiges of racism we still find in our country are caused by identity politics, rather than identity politics being a response to lingering racism. I think these attitudes need to be noted in any discussion of this approach.

Regarding “hapa nation": the idea that a discrete “third” or other multiracial identity can, or should be created (and I dispute that that’s what the “hapa movement” is about below) needs to be critically examined. Dicum touches on the absurdity of creating an ethnic identity out of ethnic diversity. He doesn’t, however, discuss how creating yet another racial or ethnic identity for multiracials actually reifies multiracial outsider status, as well as the racial taxonomy that gave rise to it. A new “multiracial” or (especially) “hapa” racial category would let a lot of racists off the hook, offering them a new group of “people of color” to interact with; a group they might find to be more comfortable than monoracial people of color. This would create yet another model minority to buffer the privileged from the underprivileged. In this discussion, therefore, it would be not just be useful, but crucial to measure the amount of energy and resources that would be expended creating and acquiring recognition for a new racial category against the energy and resources used to combat racism and ignorance from the vantage point of multiple identities.

Regarding the “mobile paradox” approach, where multiracials take on whatever identity is most convenient in a given situation (also known as “code switching", which you might have heard used by African Americans to refer to changing their idiom depending upon their context), Dicum gives as examples a person inventing identities, or falsely agreeing with the wrong identities attributed to her by strangers. While lying about your identity can be fun for some and makes for amusing stories (always amusing at the ignorant stranger’s expense) I’d really like to hear more discussion about why no one should be forced into a false position apropos his identity.

To be direct: I don’t want to lie about who or what I am. I’ve had to fight so hard, for so long, to have my self-definition recognized and validated – even by friends and sometimes even by family – that I am not eager to give up that hard-won identity to my own whims, much less those of strangers. The mobile paradox is not always (and for some of us, not ever) the “playground of identities” that Dicum makes it out to be. It is often absolutely necessary for social survival to be able to take on a particular fixed identity that makes converse between you and those around you possible, and then to switch that identity for the next context. It may be empowering for some to view this situation as a playground, but beyond the playful level of sociable small talk, if you want to make friends, be lovers, get a job, or become politically effective, you can’t build your house on sand.

Recognizing and performing the reality of an ambiguous racial identity will always, at some point, become deadly serious. It is in the shallow interactions with boorish, questioning strangers that multiracials practice their responses and rehearse identities. Some, like Dicum apparently, use these situations to relieve tension. This is perfectly legitimate, if condescending to strangers (who risk being condescended to by intruding on others.) Others (like me) don’t, because the underlying seriousness is always present, and because we (or at least I) believe that it is better, or more instructive, or more honest, or more just, to simply refuse to allow myself to be engaged by strangers about my race. Rather than being forced into some position – true or false – by a stranger, I force that stranger to deal with me and my racial ambiguity without my cooperation. This is, in fact, a fourth distinct approach, but one which, by its very nature, is impossible to codify as a trend, or even to discuss with those who use it, unless they choose on their own (like I have here) to address it.

(Note: the term “mobile paradox” itself encodes a problematic atttitude: discomfort with ambiguity. If racial categories really were unmixable, then code switching would be a paradox. But racial categories are not unmixable, and code switching is not a paradox. You can be two things at once, or three, or four.)

Secondly, what Dicum calls “the Hapa Movement” or “Hapa Nation” (with a capitalized “hapa") may not actually exist. I was closely involved with Hapa Issues Forum between 1999 and 2002. At that time, and I think, still, Hapa Issues Forum (HIF) was the only national organization created around the Asian/Pacific Islander part of multiracial identities. (There has been, starting in the mid-nineties, an increasing number of API or hapa-based multiracial groups on campuses. Some are started by HIF, some start themselves and join HIF as a chapter, and some maintain their independence. There have also been a few community-based hapa orgs. As far as I know, all of these are now fallow.)

The need for “hapa", as opposed to general, non-API-specific multiraciality, arose from the fact that mixed race Asians/Pacific Islanders in the US (mainland, of course) were only a small proportion of the overall multiracial population. Many of those hapas who joined multiracial organizations found their voices and concerns overwhelmed by the majority, who were black/white. Black/white multiraciality is fraught with the history of slavery, the “one drop rule” and the severe stigma of being of African descent in our society. API multiraciality doesn’t always contend with these issues, and furthermore, has to deal with immigrant, colonization, and foreign language/culture issues. Not falling into the black/white dichotomy meant hapas had little to contribute to the largest discussions, and that few had anything to contribute to hapa discussions. So creating a space around not just multiraciality but primarily around API multiraciality privileged the API aspect for the first time. It also gave hapas a power base from which to negotiate entrée and membership into Asian and Asian American groups who often dismissed them – a very important consideration.

All of this is to say that the promotion of the term “hapa” wasn’t necessarily a group effort to create a “third” or other identity separate from the monoracial identities from which hapas derive. It was rather a term that needed to be invented: 1) to distinguish the issues around API multiraciality from general multiracial, or black/white multiracial issues, and 2) to honor and distinguish API multiracials within their monoracial API communities.

The “hapa” in “hapa community” is not capitalized because “hapa” is a noun, adjective, or complement, and not a proper noun, nationality, or ethnic designation; “hapa” is grammatically like “white” or “black", and not like “African” or “Asian”. The “hapa movement” is not called such by most of those involved, because of our awareness that there was no common mission among all hapas, and that the word “hapa” needs to be protected as something that anyone can use without declaring a political stance. (Naturally, this means that some hapas do capitalize it, and use it as an ethnic designation.) Rather, those involved called it the “hapa community", recognizing that a community shares certain things while tolerating a great deal of difference.

That is what the organization of Hapa Issues Forum was about: not a new, monolithic “hapa” identity, but rather creating a space for discussion around issues of multiraciality. At the time that I was involved, the very idea of the organization was to protect every participant from being coerced into a particular stance by someone else’s racial agenda. Wei Ming Dariotis, whom Dicum quotes in the “hapa nation” segment of his article, has dedicated her career to examining this issue, and her ideas should be listened to. But her “new hapa identity” approach is different from mine, and when I helped her run the San Francisco chapter of Hapa Issues Forum, there was plenty of room for both of our approaches therein.

Additionally, in the past three years or so, the community (adults and families) chapters of HIF seem to have collapsed or gone fallow, while the energy and emphasis has returned to the student chapters. When adults and parents do take an interest in multiracial organizing, it seems more often to be with general multiracial organizations, which (with the coming of age of post-1965 Immigration Act hapas) are much more diverse now than they were 15 years ago. This would seem to argue for the failure of the idea of a discrete hapa identity, if that was ever a ruling idea.

Transgender activist Maria Roman was in Miami filming a Transamerica-themed segment of the Cristina show, a popular Latino talk show. It went really well, and afterwards she went to a popular nightclub to celebrate. There, she was assaulted by a transphobic man, who broke her nose, and when the police showed up they arrested her, not her assailant. The cops strip-searched her, humiliated her, referred to her as a man constantly and harrassed her sexually. She’s going back to Miami to face charges, and maybe also to get some justice. Unfortunately, Florida’s non-discrimination laws and hate-crime laws don’t include transgender people.

I was meaning to blog about the Transgender Law Center’s survey on transgender employment. The amazing Tali Woodward at the San Francisco Bay Guardian helped to do the survey and also wrote a cover story about it a week ago. But it was officially released a couple of days ago, at the transgender job fair in San Francisco. The numbers are pretty depressing – only one out of four trans people surveyed has a full-time job, and another 16 percent work part time. More than half of all Bay Area trans people make less than the poverty line, and 96 percent make less than the area’s median income.

Woodward also wrote a terrific, if depressing piece about abuses of trans people in prison, bringing us back to the subject of the start of this post. Let’s just say I’m never going to jay walk again.

Cecilia Fire Thunder, the president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, has pledged to host a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic on her own land, which is within tribal jurisdiction and not South Dakotan jursidiction. Rock awhn!

via boing boing

And if you want to let Bill Napoli (the S. Dakota senator who thinks he should be able to make essential life decisions for all women) know what you think of all this, this comic suggests that you call him at work or at home every time you have a decision to make and ask him. His numbers are listed there.

A friend of mine, Isobel Rosenberg, wrote this essay for a school assignment last month for MLK Day:

She’s a second-grader at a Bay Area peninsula public school. Wow, 7-year olds who know and use the word “gender”. That rocks my world! Izzy’s mom, surprised yesterday with this beautiful essay at her parent-teacher conference, said, “My kid has a social conscience. My god. I’ll take that over top marks any day.”

I love the chandelier! And the veils on the brides, and the pillow with two rings. (The ring-bearer’s body never got finished.) Off to the right, the flower girl is happily admiring the femmy, fancily coiffed brides.

Isobel’s analysis of gay marriage boils down to “it’s not fair that some people can get married and others can’t.” Her essay makes this wonderfully clear. Maybe next year she’ll write and illustrate an anti-assimilation rant that will smash patriarchy and the nuclear family while lynching the landlord… but for right now, her dream made me feel a lot of hope for the future.

Last week I was visiting Mark and Darrin, my friends in Houston who had just gotten married as part of a protest against the anti-gay marriage bill that passed last fall in Texas. They want to adopt and are very worried about their ability to do so, about their rights and about the generally homophobic laws in Texas. The protest and marriage ceremony, in the 4th largest city in the U.S., only had around 15 couples show up to get married. Around there, SO many people are in the closet. Everyone knows who’s gay, but there’s a sort of don’t ask don’t tell climate that’s possible, but difficult, to live in. Anyway, I know that Izzy’s dream made my friends’ day! Just like it made mine.

We shouldn’t get too bitter and blind to the cultural changes that are happening around gender and sexuality. There is a generation of kids growing up now who have a strong belief in social justice. In the balance against anti-gay marriage laws that have passed or that are going up on state ballots right now, we have not only ourselves — we have the hearts and beliefs of young idealists, who are naturally on our side.

Via Bookninja:

Campaigners complained that requests for information on abortion generated the response “Did you mean adoption?” at the top of the page. They expressed their suspicion that Amazon was tampering with its search results to appease pro-life groups, and expressing what appeared to be an “editorial position”.

Of course:

An uncomfortable Amazon was yesterday fighting off suggestions of bias. The “Did you mean adoption?” query had been randomly-generated, it insisted. It said it was based on a user’s previous search requests, likely related topics and the similarity of spelling between abortion and adoption, which triggered its spell check software.

This could easily be true. A writer friend who published her first novel last year hit up all her friends with information on how to game Amazon to make a book turn up more often in the suggestions. If you go in there and click on an obscure book, and then go from there to a famous related book – over and over – you can associate the obscure book with the famous book and make it turn up in the “customers who bought this book also bought ____” section. It’s quite possible that pro-lifers were gaming Amazon.

It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen pro-lifers gaming. My parents just moved and over Christmas they received a friendly, signed postcard from a total stranger saying that she had noticed that they were Planned Parenthood donors and wanted to encourage them to think about this choice before donating again to an organization that offered abortions. My mother automatically assumed that the card was for her; she was on the board of her local Planned Parenthood for years. This turned out not to be the case – the card was actually addressed to the house’s previous owner. But it still freaked her (and me) out that people could be so personally targeted this way. Information on donors is part of the records of a nonprofit organization which are legally open to the public. But to use this information for such a direct intimidation tactic really freaks me out.

I wrote in an earlier post about my discomfort with a tactic same sex marriage advocates were using: posting names and addresses of people in their communities who signed petitions against same sex marriage. That smacks of intimidation, and so does the postcard tactic. The major difference here is that gay marriage advocates haven’t shot any doctors to death or bombed any private medical facilities. Pro-lifers cannot say the same thing about their fellows in conscience. Pursuing open information intimidation tactics on the side of a group of activists whose fringe is notoriously violent is playing with fire … deliberately.

I know I’ll be accused of quotafying, but I thought you should know:

via boing boing I got to this list of the top 1000 titles held by libraries around the globe. I’ve listed below the titles that originated from non-western societies, western meaning European or eurocentrically-based cultures like the US or Australia or Canada.

#13 Koran
#18 Arabian Nights
#23 Bhagavadgita
#44 Rubáiyát, Omar Khayyám
#53 Tao Te Ching
#100 History of Prophets and Kings, Tabari
#112 Haggadah
#152 Analects, Confucius
#185 Upanishads
#198 Art of War, Sunzi
#301 I Ching (Book of Changes)
#314 One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
#429 Gilgamesh
#436 Talmud
#480 Popol Vuh
#586 Book of the Dead
#587 Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
#593 Mishnah
#596 Chuang Tzu, Zhuangzi
#634 Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
#664 Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
#667 Tale of Genji, Lady Murasaki
#699 Dhammapada
#874 Dream of the Red Chamber, Xueqin Cao

Twenty-four. Out of a thousand. Libraries all over the world.

‘Nuff said.

Last week I saw a sneak preview of the new teen gender-switching comedy She’s the Man – featuring a rare instance of female-to-male crossdressing as a plot device – and I’m not afraid to say that it was one of the most rousing pieces of feminist propaganda that I’ve seen in quite a while. Let me be clear: it’s not a realistic flick, nor is it subtle. It’s feminism for the masses, and specifically the TEEN masses, who deserve more than anyone a movie whose heroine breaks up with her boyfriend for being sexist, and then kicks his ass in a soccer game.

The plot is as simple as whipped cream. Soccer-loving Viola is a tomboy who is often mistaken for her twin brother Sebastian. When her high school cancels the girls’ soccer team, she and her fellow teammates petition to try out for the boys’ team. They’re rebuffed by the clueless coach and soccer captain (Viola’s soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend), who say girls just can’t play soccer as well as boys can. When Sebastian runs away to London for two weeks to play in his band, Viola takes on Sebastian’s identity and enrolls at his new school – that way, she can play soccer with the boys, and prove that girls play just as well as they do.

[Spoilers ahead, but they’re all offered in the service of critical analysis! Yay!]

Unlike many, many movies in the girl-tries-to-outdo-guys genre, which always pit the girl’s love of whatever she does against her love for some hot dude, Viola is allowed to win. There is no “separate but equal” bullshit here, and no “I decided to choose the guy and give up sports because I want to follow my heart” crap. After various shenanigans, Viola is forced to reveal her real gender during the crucial final soccer game against her old school (and her sexist ex). The reaction? Her current crush, the captain of her new soccer team, tells her to keep playing. And when the sexist coach from her old school protests, her current coach delivers this year’s best-ever line in a teen comedy: “AT [OUR SCHOOL] WE DO NOT DISCRIMINATE BASED ON GENDER!”

I couldn’t help but bust into crazy cheers at that. When Viola delivers the winning goal – smashing it past her ex-boyfriend, who is the goalie – moviegoers get a double treat. Not only has Viola won, but she’s won *as a girl*, not as a girl dressed as a boy. She’s been accepted by the team as her real self, not via continued deception. Not only has she proven that girls can kick boys’ asses at sports, but more importantly she’s proven that boys will accept girls as teammates.

And of course, she gets to go out with her crush too. In a sweet genderfucky scene at the end of the movie, he confesses to her that he probably never could have become so close with her if he’d known she was a girl at first. “That boy is still here,” she replies, putting her hand over her heart. Or, as her gay friend told her when he’s gave her a boy makeover earlier, “Inside every girl’s heart there’s a boy . . . or something like that.”

Sure the movie is a cheesy comedy, just like its 1985 forerunner Just One of the Guys was. And star Amanda Bynes, as Viola, does broad slapstick *really* broadly. But this movie is still revolutionary. Sometimes it’s in the most common forms of our popular culture that the world begins to change.

By “we” I mean people of mixed “race,” and by “mainstream,” I mean that there’s a new Pew study about us, and it found that 22% of Americans have a relative in a mixed-race marriage. We’re in a fifth of your families. Mutts at the Dog Show indeed. The Pew study says that we have “evolved from nearly non-existent to merely atypical.”

We’re here, we’re related to you, we’re atypical!

Yesterday was the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Protests took place throughout North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.

For years I’ve debated the practice and ethics of non-violence, mostly to myself. I don’t think that at this point I could call myself a pacifist, precisely because I am a dad: I know that if my family was attacked, as a last resort I would respond with violence (feeble, ineffectual violence, probably; but yes, I would hit back with whatever weapon was available).

Yet at the same time, I can say, without any irony or doubt in my heart, that yesterday I realized that becoming a father has caused me to hate war. “Hate” - I use that word with full knowledge of its meaning and implications. In becoming a parent - especially since becoming a child’s primary caregiver - I’ve realized exactly how helpless a child is, how utterly, heartbreakingly dependent. To betray a child’s trust, or worse, to deliberately and knowingly hurt a child, is an act of true evil. That it happens every day, in ways large and small, does not make it any less evil. My words feel cliched, even dead, as I write this; I know that I’m not doing justice to my feelings.

This morning I read - in the dark, before the baby and Shelly were awake - an essay on Hiroshima by John Berger:

I refrain from giving the statistics: how many hundreds of thousands of dead, how many injured, how many deformed children. Just as I refrain from pointing out how comparatively ’small’ were the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Such statistics tend to distract. We consider numbers instead of pain. We calculate instead of judging. We relativize instead of refusing.

This is just the way to talk about war: judging, refusing.

George Bush puts on a mask of innocence and idealism: “A victory in Iraq will make this country more secure, and will help lay the foundation of peace for generations to come.” (Note that future tense; but hadn’t we declared the mission accomplished two years ago? Well, whatever. We - all of us who gave it any thought - knew that was bullshit.)

“The construction of hells on earth was accompanied in Europe by plans for heavens on earth,” writes Berger, thinking of the Holocaust. “Evil from time immemorial has often worn a mask of innocence. One of evil’s principal modes of being is looking beyond (with indifference) that which is before the eyes.” Berger quotes the memory of a survivor of Hiroshima:

I was walking along the Hihiyama bridge about 3 pm on 7th August. A woman, who looked like an expectant mother, was dead. At her side, a girl of about three years of age brought some water in an empty can she had found. She was trying to let her mother drink from it. As soon as I saw this miserable scene with the pitiful child, I embraced the girl close to me and cried with her, telling her that her mother was dead.

And later, in Nagasaki:

August 9th: On the west embankment… was a young boy four or five years old. He was burned black, lying on his back, with his arms pointing towards heaven.

How many times during the past three years have such scenes played out in Iraq? How many children have been burned alive? How many have seen their parents killed and been left helpless, possibly injured and dying themselves? The evil of such acts - committed in our name as Americans - is beyond comprehension. This is why we refuse to believe it, grasp it; we get lost in policy debates, punditry, statistics. “Only by looking beyond or away can one come to believe that such evil is relative, and therefore under certain conditions justifiable,” writes Berger. “In reality - the reality to which the survivors and the dead bear witness - it can never be justified.”

[This is cross-posted from my own blog on the politics of parenting.]

Just finished an interesting essay in the academic journal The New Atlantis, “Are We Worthy of Our Kitchens?”. It covers a lot of the same themes of my previous blog entries (see March 12, March 5, and Feb. 24) on balancing work and home, but from a different angle:

Judging by how Americans spend their money—on shelter magazines and kitchen gadgets and home furnishings—domesticity appears in robust health. Judging by the way Americans actually live, however, domesticity is in precipitous decline. Families sit together for meals much less often than they once did, and many homes exist in a state of near-chaos as working parents try to balance child-rearing, chores, long commutes, and work responsibilities…

Ironically, this decline in domestic competence comes at a time of great enthusiasm for “retro” appliances and other objects that evoke experiences that many Americans rarely have. We seem to value our domestic gadgets more and more even as we value domesticity less and less.

“Many homes exist in a state of near-chaos” — OK, yes, that certainly describes our household. The essay is filled with a fascinating history of household appliances and little tidbits about the trajectory of domestic labor:

“It must be remembered,” wrote Isabella Beeton in 1869, that the kitchen “is the great laboratory of every household, and that much of the ‘weal or woe,’ as far as regards bodily health, depends upon the nature of the preparations concocted within its walls.” Today, the laboratory is filled with the finest equipment, but there is often no one to use it. Despite purchasing more and better appliances, home-cooking and family dinners are both racing toward extinction. American Demographics reports that between 1985 and 1995, “the number of hours women spent cooking per week dropped 23 percent, and the number of hours men cooked dropped by 21 percent.” By 1997, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that more than one in five households used their (non-microwave) oven “less than once weekly” and only 42 percent “make a hot meal once a day.”

The author, Christine Rosen (an academic, natch), ends the piece with a rather utopian call for the renewal of domesticity:

What is necessary is a sober defense of the worth of domestic life, including those labors—chopping vegetables, sweeping a floor, setting a table—that are hardly glorious in themselves but essential parts of the domestic satisfactions we still seem to want…

Unlike some feminist critics of domesticity, who argue for the lowering of domestic standards—Cowan wants to overthrow the “senseless tyranny of spotless shirts and immaculate floors,” for example—Mendelson and others seek to elevate the domestic sphere in a culture that too often denigrates or neglects it. They hope to appeal to the deeply-felt yearning most people have for a comfortable and well-functioning home life. And perhaps, in a strange sense, they want to make us worthy of our fancy machines, which means recognizing the permanent limits of domestic technology to produce domestic happiness. Not a brilliant way to sell the newest appliances, but a recipe for learning again how—and why—to use the ones we already have.

I am afraid that I actually laughed out loud as I read this conclusion (which woke my baby up; he was sleeping on my lap). I’d love to “elevate the domestic sphere in a culture that too often denigrates or neglects it” – just as soon as I get the time. I think that our little family would also need more space; it’d be hard to live out her utopian vision of domestic bliss in our cramped urban apartment.

Here’s the problem: we Americans don’t live this way because we want to – we are forced to by the economic insecurity and inequality that drives our economy. Sure, you can make individual choices or get lucky – don’t have kids, get rich and retire to the country, decide to live with less money and move to a red state, etc. – in ways that might mitigate anxiety. But the choices we make (and the luck we have) are shaped by our relative family wealth, the need to secure health insurance and pay outrageous rents or mortgages, and the desire to give our children opportunities and expose them to values and cultures that might not be available out in suburban Jesusland. Our lifestyles and values are driven by an unforgiving business culture and abysmal parental leave policies – not misuse of household appliances. Am I characterizing Rosen correctly, or have I missed something?

[This is cross-posted from my own blog on the politics of parenting.]

From an article in the Denver Post:

A landmark study by Cornell University has quantified what many working mothers have suspected for years: Women with children are less likely to get hired and are paid less in starting salaries than similarly qualified fathers or women without children. This disparity often follows them throughout their careers…

[At the start of the study, the researcher] created two fictitious applicants seeking a job as a marketing director for a communications company. Both had virtually identical qualifications and resumes with no indication of gender or family status. The applications were presented to 60 undergraduates - both men and women - for evaluation. The reviewers found the applicants to be equal and said they had no hiring preference.

Correll used undergraduates because she believed them to be most closely attuned to the current hiring climate. She also assumed they had been raised in an age when sensibilities about working mothers had changed.

Next, the same resumes were shown to another set of undergraduate evaluators. This time, though, the applicants were both women.

A memo was slipped into one of the application packets mentioning she was a mother of two. Her resume was changed slightly to include a reference to being an officer of a parent-teacher association.

The outcome changed dramatically. The evaluators said they would hire the childless women 84 percent of the time. The mothers were given a job only 47 percent of the time.

The mothers also were offered a starting salary of $11,000 less than their counterparts without children.

The author of the study, Shelley Correll, then “created 300 pairs of cover letters and resumes to apply for advertised midlevel marketing positions. One ‘applicant’ said in her cover letter she was relocating with her family. The resume mentioned the parent-teacher board position. The other cover letter said the ‘applicant’ was relocating but made no mention of a family. Early results of this study show the applicant who did not mention a family was called in for an interview twice as frequently as the mother.” Later in the article, an HR executive “speculates the tightening job market is giving potential employers a sense they have the upper hand and are more free in their questioning than they would have been a few years ago. She also wonders if there is a backlash brewing against mothers - and increasingly, fathers - who have demanded more flexibility from companies to be with their families.”

We already knew this, of course. I wonder: what if someone applied the same test to male applicants? If anybody knows of such a study, let me know.

I have no comment, really, beyond the obvious call for revolution.

Check out this very cool blog for the Blank Noise Project a day dedicated to blogging about “eve teasing", what they call street harrassment in India.

March 7 the women of the project recruited all the Indian women bloggers they could find to blog – on that day – about street sexual harrassment. A lot of women signed up, and the result is a very sad, enraging, and terrifying collection of stories about how restrictive public life is for women in India. Have a look see.

Check out this blog especially.
And this one.

(via boing boing.)

Ian Brill at Brill Building posted a really apt comparison between the incompentent Totalitarian regime in Brazil and the Bush Administration. It’s scary how close the parallels are.

Being reminded of the wonders of Brazil just makes me sadder that The Brothers Grimm was so unwatchable. Get out of Hollywood, Terry!

Un. Fuckin. Believable.

via Pam Noles

I adore superhero comics for many reasons. Many older superhero comics display a wonderful inventiveness and exuberance, and you can still find those qualities in the work of more recent creators, such as Mike Allred or the late Mike Parobeck. The serial narrative format of superhero comics gives them a Dickensian quality, with subplots weaving in and out, cliffhangers leading into more cliffhangers, and closure never quite arriving. The best superhero stories are often metaphors for the challenges of wielding power responsibly, which is a theme that most Americans can probably relate to.

But superhero comics, for a long time now, have been trapped in a bit of an identity crisis. They don’t really appeal to younger readers. (Peter David posted an anguished message in his blog a year or two ago, about meeting a child in the park. The child had a Spider-Man T-shirt, but seemed unaware that Spider-Man was a comic book character. The kid only knew Spider-Man from TV cartoons and movies.) Instead, they appeal to an aging base of middle-aged “fanboys” who find them in out-of-the-way specialty stores.

So superhero comics try to become more “realistic” or “relevant,” a process that kicked into high gear with the 1980s comics like Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. At the same time, though, they also pander to those aging obsessive fans by dwelling more and more on obscure continuity elements.

Both those impulses are on display in some of the recent DC Comics mega-storylines. Brad Meltzer’s miniseries Identity Crisis drew a lot of criticism by using the rape of Elongated Man’s wife, Sue Dibny, as a crass plot device. Dibny had already been murdered when it was revealed that a supervillain had raped her years before. We never get to see how she dealt with being raped – it’s only important because of its impact on the (mostly male) superheroes. It’s really a crime against the men, even though Sue Dibny’s body happened to be the actual site of the crime.

Meanwhile, though, Identity Crisis led to a whole bunch of other miniseries, culminating in the current Infinite Crisis, which you’d have to have a PhD in DC Comics history to understand. If you don’t know the difference between Earth-8 and Earth-Prime, or if you don’t know the Cosmic Treadmill from the Speed Force, you’ll be utterly lost. Even as those more recent miniseries included more brutality (Wonder Woman decapitating a man who had blown Blue Beetle’s brains out graphically) they also (somewhat hypocritically) feature other superheroes lecturing the reader about how terrible it is that everything has gotten so dark.

I was thinking about these issues because of a post at Comics Should Be Good. Brad Meltzer was asked about the rape of Sue Dibny, and he basically said, “rape exists in real life, and comics should reflect that.” Even if comics are utterly unrealistic in every other respect. And even if the rape victim apparently spent the next umpteen years being cute and perky. (I’m guessing Sue’s rape is supposed to have happened before all those issues of Justice League: Europe where she’s constantly laughing and serving as a kind of girl friday to the superheroes?)

Anyway, the discussion thread at Comics Should Be Good will make you cry. It appears there are more than a few clueless fanboys out there. But they do raise one interesting question: Why are people more upset about Sue getting raped than various other characters getting killed?

The answer, and it’s a pretty compelling one: because death is never permanent in comics, whereas rape can’t be undone.

By coincidence, DC recently brought back Jason Todd from the dead. Jason was the second Robin, after Dick Grayson, and the Joker murdered him way back in 1989. (You might remember the 1-900 number where you could vote on whether he should die.) For the past few months, Jason has been running around, without any explanation of how he survived being bludgeoned, blown up, and then buried in a full funeral. It turns out the explanation is pretty simple: the Superboy from an alternate earth was “punching reality” so hard that he caused shockwaves in continuity. The shockwaves from Superboy’s reality punches brought Jason Todd back to life. See? Comics are becoming so much more realistic!

Which brings me to my favorite comment in that Comics Should Be Good thread: maybe an upcoming issue of Infinite Crisis can reveal that one of Superboy’s “magic punches” caused reality to warp so that Dr. Light raped Extant, a lame supervillain, instead of Sue Dibny? We can only hope.

[I wrote the following before I read Claire’s blog entry, below, “Does patriarchy keep the birthrate up?” Read hers first; it’s much more interesting. However, the two do fit together well, yes?]

My friend Wendy Call sent me an interesting article from the New York Times on the stalled movement of women into the workforce: “Most of us thought we would work and have kids, at least that was what we were brought up thinking we would do – no problem,” says one of the mothers interviewed. “But really we were kind of duped. None of us realized how hard it is.” The article continues:

[A study of] time-use surveys done by the Census Bureau and others, has concluded that contrary to popular belief, the broad movement of women into the paid labor force did not come at the expense of their children. Not only did fathers spend more time with children, but working mothers, she found, spent an average of 12 hours a week on child care in 2003, an hour more than stay-at-home mothers did in 1975.

Instead, mothers with children at home found the time for outside work by taking it from other parts of their day. They also worked more overall. [The study] found that employed mothers, on average, worked at home and on the job a total of 15 hours more a week and slept 3.6 fewer hours than those who were not employed…

The research suggests that women may have already hit a wall in the amount of work they can pack into a week. From 1965 to 1995, [the study] found, the average time mothers spent doing paid work jumped to almost 26 hours a week from nine hours. Time spent on housework fell commensurately, from 32 hours to 19.

Then the trend stalled. From 1995 to 2003, mothers, on average, spent about the same amount of time on household chores, but their work outside the home fell by almost four hours a week.

“Looking toward the future,” said Francine Blau, a professor of economics at Cornell University, “one can question how much further increases in women’s participation can be had without more reallocation of household work.”

A good question. “This is having broad repercussions for the economy,” the article concludes, ominously. “Today, about 75 percent of women 25 to 54 years old are either working or actively seeking a job, up from around 40 percent in the late 1950s. That expansion helped fuel economic growth for decades.”

Economic growth, huh? Let’s restate the numbers: since the Seventies, women are spending more time with their kids and more time at work, but they’re sleeping 3.6 fewer hours a week while still taking time from “other parts of their day.” Men probably have it slightly easier, but this, in a nutshell, explains why contemporary parenthood has become such a pressure-cooker.

In such conditions, what’s the best way to live? Working even less would be a start, which is exactly what’s happened in Europe. But the European Union is no utopia for women: depending on the country, there might be even less gender parity in housework and childcare, and a recent Newsweek article suggests that by providing support for women to stay home, Europe’s generous maternity leave programs are killing their career prospects. Is this just imperialistic American propaganda? Maybe, maybe not; but why should that situation surprise anybody? When given options, most people, male and female, will choose to spend more time with their families, or in pursuing creative interests – both of which make society a better, happier place, even if they don’t contribute much to making the rich richer. It seems to me that the solution is not to junk Europe’s welfare system, as some suggest, but to change the culture and public policy so that more men can take more advantage of parental leave. At present, in both Europe and America, it’s simply not OK for most men to go back into the workforce after five years of full or part-time parenting and explain the gap in their resume by saying, “I took a few years off to take care of my daughter.” It’s hard enough for women, but for men, taking that time can mean death to their careers, and they know it.

What if the culture changed – or perhaps I should say, what if we changed the culture? – so that men were expected to take on more childcare, and public policy supported that expectation? Many men would jump at the opportunity, and many women – those who want to – might jump back into careers. Then maybe you’d see fewer men in decision-making positions, but more women, and everybody might work less. It is, as the hacks say, a win-win…isn’t it? Unfortunately, no – it means less social power for men and more for women, and that makes it a political fight. [Again, see Claire’s blog entry below!]

How does one go about creating such a multifaceted change – or, to put it a different way, how can we finish what feminism started? I’m not sure. The unions aren’t much help – they’re fighting for survival – and most of the coherent cultural institutions in America – churches come to mind – are dead-set against gender parity in work, family life, or politics. Suggestions?

This article by Phillip Longman in Foreign Policy (via Dar Kush) contends that patriarchy keeps birthrates up. It’s a fascinating idea. Watch him go:

Patriarchy … is a particular value system … It competes with many other male visions of the good life, and for that reason alone is prone to come in cycles. Yet before it degenerates, it is a cultural regime that serves to keep birthrates high among the affluent, while also maximizing parents’ investments in their children. No advanced civilization has yet learned how to endure without it. Through a process of cultural evolution, societies that adopted this particular social system—which involves far more than simple male domination—maximized their population and therefore their power, whereas those that didn’t were either overrun or absorbed. This cycle in human history may be obnoxious to the enlightened, but it is set to make a comeback.

He starts with a familiar theory: patriarchal systems are what keep men interested enough in marriage and children to replace both mother and father. Honor and status depend upon having children to carry on the family name, especially sons. Illegitimate children are a no-no because they can’t be linked conclusively to the father, so men have to marry and keep reproducing until they have at least one son. Since their honor is so closely linked to their children’s behavior, they have a stake in sticking close and managing their children’s upbringing. As for women, their roles and opportunities are restricted, and their honor is tied to the status of being married, and the number and success of their offspring. So they’re also strongly encouraged to reproduce.

But then:

Often, all that sustains the patriarchal family is the idea that its members are upholding the honor of a long and noble line. Yet, once a society grows cosmopolitan, fast-paced, and filled with new ideas, new peoples, and new luxuries, this sense of honor and connection to one’s ancestors begins to fade, and with it, any sense of the necessity of reproduction.

And he argues that that is exactly what is happening now in the first world, linking higher birthrates with more patriarchal segments of society, and lower birthrates with less partriarchal folks.

nearly a quarter of the children of baby boomers descend from the mere 11 percent of baby boomer women who had four or more children. These circumstances are leading to the emergence of a new society whose members will disproportionately be descended from parents who rejected the social tendencies that once made childlessness and small families the norm. These values include an adherence to traditional, patriarchal religion, and a strong identification with one’s own folk or nation. This dynamic helps explain, for example, the gradual drift of American culture away from secular individualism and toward religious fundamentalism. Among states that voted for President George W. Bush in 2004, fertility rates are 12 percent higher than in states that voted for Sen. John Kerry.

Interesting, but is that really all that’s going on? It grows really problematic with the hugely simplistic round-up:

Advanced societies are growing more patriarchal, whether they like it or not. In addition to the greater fertility of conservative segments of society, the rollback of the welfare state forced by population aging and decline will give these elements an additional survival advantage, and therefore spur even higher fertility. As governments hand back functions they once appropriated from the family, notably support in old age, people will find that they need more children to insure their golden years, and they will seek to bind their children to them through inculcating traditional religious values akin to the Bible’s injunction to honor thy mother and father. Societies that are today the most secular and the most generous with their underfunded welfare states will be the most prone to religious revivals and a rebirth of the patriarchal family. The absolute population of Europe and Japan may fall dramatically, but the remaining population will, by a process similar to survival of the fittest, be adapted to a new environment in which no one can rely on government to replace the family, and in which a patriarchal God commands family members to suppress their individualism and submit to father.

Wow, what a clever argument. We don’t really want patriarchy, of course, but we’re going to get it, so just grit your teeth and think of England. A perfect neocon con; you agree with your enemy about what should happen, and then say, in a regretful voice, that unfortunately what all of you don’t want to happen will, in fact, happen, and we need to get used to it for our own sakes. Plus, “by a process similar to survival of the fittest"? Social Darwinism? Are you kidding me? The implications scream. Longman’s conservative tendencies are also howled out when you consider the fact that he doesn’t even tip a wink in the direction of immigrants. The birthrate among American-born parents has nearly plateaued. But America’s population continues to rise because of: 1) immigration and 2) foreign-born parents, who reproduce at a higher rate.

Longman does address this in another article, in which he discusses birthrate issues not in terms of absolute birthrate vs. deathrate, but rather in terms of working-age to retirement-age ratio. This is a legitimate economic concern in societies where elder care is financed through taxes on the working-aged. He states, without discussion, that immigration is no solution because immigrants are already working adults and so arrive in the US already at least a third on their way to retirement (which is stupid, because although we might lose some working years from an immigrant, we also lose the burden of raising and educating them.) He also says – without citing any numbers, though – that immigrants don’t produce as many children as you liberals would like to think. And finally, saying an increase in population is really a decrease because people aren’t birthing at the same rate as they are retiring doesn’t address the environmental and social impact of overpopulation by the elderly.

Anyway, guess what his “secular” solutions are? Don’t cram all education into people’s most fertile years! Throw them out into the workforce before they’ve finished skills acquisition and let them educate themselves over their entire lives. (Conveniently, this will remove a great deal of funding burden from the government, and necessitate more part-time and flex-time employment, i.e. that without benefits.) Also, relieve parents of the burden of paying into social security and taxes! They’re contributing enough already by contributing future under-educated workers! (I guess freeing them from this financial burden will better enable them to pay for now-private elder care for their parents.) Also, promote “productive aging", i.e. make sure that old people stay healthy by mandating reduced insurance premiums for people who don’t get fat or don’t smoke! (’Cause that’ll work!) Then we can keep them in the workplace longer, therefore reducing not the aging of the population, but at least the ratio of workers to retirees! … !!!

This Longman is a fellow of the New America Foundation, a think tank characterized by middleeast.org in the following manner:

To put things in perspective, the New America Foundation moved in to town a few years ago after the Bush/Cheney takeover trying to establish a kind of new centrist block in modern-day Rome. On the whole New America types are too smart and internationalist to be Bush/Cheney/Neocons, too patriotic to want to be part of an American super-nova eclipse which they fear is underway, yet too compromised, power hungry, and on-the-make to be trusted by the rest of us.

It’s a fascinating new world, where crypto-neo-cons provide the (pseudo)intellectual muscle – thinking outside the bocks and the like – to back up muddle-headed, ambitious neocon social engineering. Can’t wait to see what they come up with for education “reform”. This patriarchy thesis, as fascinating as it is (and it is fascinating) is designed to be politically, and not intellectually, useful. It could be destined to bloom unseen (except for me and – now – you) but if it ends up in some degraded form on the front page of Newsweek don’t say you weren’t warned.

Here’s another take – or take-down – of Longman’s article at Alternet.

And now for the pop culture frivolity. I’ve been noticing that high school and middle school kids are accessorizing with this sense of irony about gender. Macho guys with hello kitty shirts, bumming around on the street corner. Yesterday I was on Mission and 23rd, walking behind a group of barely-teenagers, rowdy, joking, leaping around and cussing… and two of the girls had absurdly macho backpacks - one was Transformers, and one was Spiderman. One of the guys, very butch otherwise, had a huge pink-with-rainbows Carebears backpack.

I’m more used to middle-school aged kids trying to make each other conform to gender norms. Maybe it’s just that I’m noticing, lately, particular instances of kids flying their freak flags in a casual way.

Just in case anyone missed it, here’s a link to Molly Saves the Day’s information on how to do an abortion as safely as possible. There’s some intense discussion in Molly’s comments, and in the general blogosphere. And people are talking about smuggling morning-after pills, and learning menstrual extraction, and doing “underground” railroads to help women leave anti-choice states either to have abortion access, or to leave permanently.

What if San Francisco, the city itself, were to start a program to help women in South Dakota? I’m trying to picture what this would be like. Other than calling the government and sending letters and signing email petitions… and giving some money to NARAL and Planned Parenthood… what should we be doing at this point?

Major, and not a few minor, cities around the country are issuing RFPs for municipally sponsored, high-speed, wireless Internet networks. Yesterday Philadelphia was the first major city to announce an actual deal, in this case with Earthlink. “The contracts call for Earthlink to rent 4,000 city light posts, subsidize Internet access for low-income households at $9.95 a month and share future revenue for funding of certain social programs,” says an Associated Press article.

I don’t know the details of the deal – which could be a farce – but I find it very significant that the nation’s first municipal wireless program highlights a digital divide component – meaning that the deal comes with provisions to provide subsidized service, training, and equipment to underserved communities. A joint Google/Earthlink proposal is considered the front-runner in San Francisco, but the outlook for a deal that closes the digital divide is mixed. “We are cautiously encouraged by the fact that some of the proposals address our recommendation for a Digital Inclusion Fund to resource affordable computers, training, and locally-relevant content,” says the blog for Media Alliance, which has led the charge in SF for a progressive wireless contract. “Surprisingly, the Google/Earthlink proposal does not mention the creation of such a fund, despite the fact that Earthlink has committed to this in its contract with the City of Philadelphia.” Hopefully, Philly will put some pressure on liberal SF.

Naturally, the cable and phone industries are organizing against municipal broadband projects, seeking to actually make them illegal on state and federal levels. To learn more, and find out how to act, go here or here.

In the “I can die happy” category of pop culture appreciation, this NY Times article notes:

Traditional D&D is still around (the noted role-player Vin Diesel wrote the adoring foreword to a 2004 book celebrating the game’s 30th anniversary). But these days, aspiring wizards, druids and paladins are more likely to click and type their way through the evil necromancer’s tower rather than huddle around a table casting spells between grabbing bites of pizza.

“Noted role-player"? Vin, we hardly knew ye. The meat of this article is about the soon-to-be-released MMORG of the Dungeons and Dragons game:

The new game, called, simply enough, Dungeons & Dragons Online, is to be released tomorrow . . .

More than 300,000 people signed up to test the game in recent months, and if a similar number subscribe to the final product, which will cost about $15 a month, Turbine and Hasbro, which now owns the Dungeons & Dragons brand, will have a moderate hit on their hands. Mr. Anderson hopes that the well-known D&D brand will bring in players from other online games while his project’s close adherence to traditional D&D rules will also entice pen-and-paper holdouts to give cyberspace a chance.

Apparently the game is also endorsed by D&D god Gary Gygax himself, who confesses that his 19-year-old son spends all his time online playing World of Warcraft. But what will D&D be without all the pencils, paper, dice, and cute girls with long hair and purple nailpolish? I guess we’ll find out when the game is released tomorrow.

Hopefully the game won’t duplicate WoW’s abysmal queer politics, in which players aren’t allowed to describe themselves as “GLBT-friendly” because it could be perceived as sexual harassment. Personally, I’m hoping for some awesome, uncensored dragon sex.

Writer Steven Barnes has this to say about “Madea’s Family Reunion":

[Tyler] Perry honors the black Matriarch, but presents her as a blend of male and female characteristics by playing her in drag. Like Shakespeare, he uses farce, because such broad strokes appeal to his core audience: working-class blacks who, in another day, would have been Chitlin Circuit customers. Denied access to the Hollywood megabucks, the training one gets coming up in the Hollywood system apprenticing under working directors–most of whom are white males–his directing is crude at times.

And he uses that broad-stroke humor, those “clichéd” relationships. (It’s not a cliché if you haven’t seen it applied to your group. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN would be utterly cliché if the events took place between a man and a woman. But America has grasped that the same images of love and hope and need and renunciation, viewed through the lens of a group–male homosexuals–who have never had their internal reality, their inwardness, presented honestly on film before–well, everything old is new again.) And so it is true of blacks in cinema. “Reunion” distributor Lionsgate deserves its reward for rolling the dice and believing in Tyler Perry’s vision.

The reality of our pain and hopes and needs has so rarely been depicted on film. The life of slaves–so central to understand the current status of black America–has been almost completely washed from cinematic history, despite the vast number of films about the Civil War. Slavery didn’t exist. What are you black folks complaining about..?

and this:

This man, coming outside the studio system as he did, dealing with issues that have been ignored for 400 years, showing tissues of black society from top to bottom, appealing to a disenfranchised black audience that Hollywood has fed an endless stream of polished but soulless pap–that Tyler Perry has reached this audience is only a surprise in retrospect. That his audience has broadened beyond this core is a miracle. That white male critics would put their noses in the air is utterly predictable.

But then, just go read the whole article. He also acknowledges a point that Lauren McLaughlin made to an earlier post of mine on this subject: that it’s not so much Hollywood that won’t take a chance on filmmakers of color, but rather the audience, especially white men and boys, who don’t want to see black men in film. Just go read it!

After resisting them for years, California has approved easily hacked Diebold voting machines. Expect to see Republican candidates score a lot more “close shave” victories in California from now on.

If I were an uber-haxxor, I would hack as many of those Diebold machines as possible so that they showed “Bozo the Clown” as the winner of several 2006 local elections around the country. I don’t even think most juries would convict you for that… but I could be wrong, alas.

There’s no official news yet but everyone has been linking to Steven Barnes’ blog announcement ( link ) saying that Octavia Butler, the great writer (modifiers: black, woman, queer, science fiction) died on Saturday of a stroke in front of her house in Seattle.

She meant a great deal to me, and to many, many others . That’s all I can think of to say right now. I just found out. I’m glad it’s so gray and rainy out.

*update* I’ve been reading that Butler herself did not identify as queer or lesbian, but now The Advocate is attempting to out her. Sorry to parrot that information. I’m not sure it’s true.

In response to my Feb. 16 blog entry Chris writes: “The left is weak because of too much identification and particularization, and the resultant in-fighting… On the other hand, conservatives are able to compromise a little to maintain a large, unified bloc. There is lots of disagreement and debate inside conservatism, but they all line up when the vote counts. Conservatives are better organized, more disciplined, and see the big picture. Leftists are just chumps who still think armpit hair is a political statement.”

Chris’s self-loathing opinion amounts to conventional wisdom in some circles, but I think it’s partially wrong about the right and impossibly narrow about the left. “While there is no formula for a social movement,” write Jean Hardisty and Deepak Bhargava in “Wrong About the Right,” “we know that successful ones share some things in common. First, people become mobilized around issues they hold dear; at some level they share a powerful vision about what is wrong with society and how it must be improved; and they engage in lots of diverse activities not under any one leader’s direct control. The resulting political motion and its effect lead to a change in attitudes, practices and public policy.”

I readily concede, as do many people, that the right is “better organized, more disciplined, and see[s] the big picture” – I’d add to that better funded and more ruthless – but that’s not the result of less “identification and particularization.” Activists on the right – libertarian, theocratic, corporate, etc. – identify very strongly with a range of ideologies and organizations, and, as Chris notes, there’s no shortage of in-fighting on both elite and grassroots levels. But the vitality of competing views and organizations, and the loyalty of individuals associated with them, is a source, not a destroyer, of the unity he rightly praises.

I also think that the left compromises, with itself and with the right, far more than the right – to its detriment. “The right has not been afraid to propose extreme positions, knowing they will be pushed back to more moderate ones still well to the right of the status quo,” write Hardisty and Bhargava. “We’ve seen this in almost every policy fight since 1980. By boldly taking stands that are far outside the mainstream, the right has managed to pull the mainstream to the right, which is why it is now perceived as speaking for the majority. For progressives, meanwhile, timidity, ambiguity and constant compromise have not proved successful strategies; projecting a clear, principled and uncompromising voice of progressive values and policies is not only morally compelling but strategically smart.”

Note that I am not saying (and I think Hardisty and Bhargava would agree with me) that a dogged single-issue focus is a good thing – it is certainly true that the left needs to build multi-issue organizations and modify funding and organizing models that encourage “stove-piping” of single issues, which encourages issue-based groups to function in isolation from each other. But people turn on by toking single issues, and that usually leads to harder stuff, on both the left and the right.

I also readily concede that there is an immature and navel-gazing component of the left, but I would counter that it is largely confined to college campuses and post-graduate ghettos and that there are many more sectors of the left, more numerous and better funded, that are doing deeply rooted organizing work in both rural and urban areas. The students who fetishize armpit hair (and hey, who hasn’t?) tend to gain a lot of more perspective if they go to work after college for the labor or enviornmental movements, or if they just stay active but relocate to a non-academic community. Progressive activists and organizers aren’t “chumps” – they aren’t saints or geniuses either, not usually, but they’re often brave, ordinary women and men who are struggling against terrific odds to make the world a better place.

There are much more serious, structural problems facing the left than an overabundance of armpit hair. I think that Claire, in her response to my blog entry, puts her finger on one structural factor that’s encouraged apathy among potentially left-wing constituencies – the American electoral system – but I would add another, which is the growth of suburban and exurban communities at the expense of urban ones. I can’t stand SF Weekly columnist Matt Smith, but he has a point in a Feb. 15 article when he writes:

“The Democratic Party has seen an exodus of the white working-class men who were once their most reliable voters. In the suburbs according to the Democratic pollster Mark Penn, the percentage of white men supporting the party has plummeted 16 points just since Bill Clinton left office…That shouldn’t have been surprising. According to a USA Today survey, population growth in the largely big-city-hosting counties won by Al Gore in 2000 was 5 percent. In rural, exurban, and suburban Bush Country, population growth was 14 percent, a trend that will likely add more Republicans to the House of Representatives with every passing election…

.The suburbs’ role as a breeding ground for conservative messages isn’t terribly mysterious. Out in the cul-de-sacs, perceived quality of life is elevated when individual property rights are maximized, taxes lowered, government diminished, and ethnic, religious, and economic diversity cordoned away. More time is spent in private backyards than in parks, and it’s not unusual for someone to go through life and rarely encounter anyone outside his own ethnicity and social status.

In cities, people tend to appreciate to some extent the sort of human social interdependence that is the philosophical root of the U.S. Democratic Party’s ideals: the elevation of the public sphere as a potential font of good, a “live and let live” embrace of diversity, and an appreciation for things everybody shares in common – rather than hoards in private – such as the environment, public spaces, and government institutions and services. In a dense city, gay, straight, Chinese, and white mothers, fathers, children, and single adults encounter one another in the subway, on crowded sidewalks, and in the park. The quality of their lives depends upon public services such as schools, health care, libraries, and museums.

For these reasons it’s foolish for rich liberals and their followers to explain away America’s growing tide of conservatism as the result of a vast, well-financed propaganda ploy. America’s growing legion of conservative exurbanites isn’t comprised of rubes duped by Fox News. These people vote their interests. Facing up to that fact, and building a political movement to grow Americas cities, is a task at least as complicated and difficult as politically proselytizing America’s youth.”

What am I saying? I’m saying, to Chris and anyone who agrees with him/her, that you shouldn’t waste time beating up on a few 22-year-olds who confine their politics to their own appearance and patterns of consumption. Their perspective will widen as they get older and their experience deepens. Instead focus on the system, on changing the structures and organizing in whatever community you live in, liberal or conservative, urban or suburban, to make that happen.

I’m in Seattle! And I thought I’d share my vacation photo from the Science Fiction Museum bathroom.

I’m the primary caregiver for my 19-month-old son Liko. Friends have suggested that I should write about this; one even, hilariously, called me a “pioneer” and proclaimed my “courage” to her husband. I always feel itchy when I hear stuff like this and I always say, No, I’m not going to write about being a dad; not yet, anyway. I’m writing about it now, of course, but I feel somehow that a blog – ephemeral and diary-like – is more personal and expressive; a magazine essay feels authoritative and prescriptive, like I’m supposed to know something that other people don’t and I’m somehow qualified to tell them how they should live their lives.

Here’s the thing: I don’t think I deserve a medal and I don’t think every dad should do what I’m doing. Not everyone can; we’re lucky – it’s all relative – that my wife’s job has solid benefits and that I can still make enough money as a freelancer to pay our $1,800 rent (in San Francisco $1,800 gets you a one-and-a-half bedroom apartment with a deck). Yes, I read newspapers and I’m aware that I’m supposedly part of a trend. “The number of stay-at-home dads almost doubled from 1994 to 2004 – from 76,000 to 147,000 – according to the U.S. Census,” says a Feb. 22 article in the Contra Costa Times. But let’s put that in perspective: 147,000 is nothing compared to the millions – billions, if you look worldwide – of women who defer careers, hobbies, adventures, and sex lives to take care of a legion of children. Even in liberal, genderfucking San Francisco, I’m still usually the only dad in Liko’s music and swim classes, and usually the only one of the playground before 5 pm. Yes, I quit my job (which I hated anyway, BTW) and powered down my so-called career so that I could take care of my son. I did it because I wanted to, not to be somebody’s role model.

And you know what? – I’m addressing you gentlemen, in particular: I’ve given up a lot, many things besides just a job. I don’t write stories and poems and essays like I used to; I no longer organize readings and fundraisers; my social circle has shrunk significantly. I don’t go to movies. I usually rise at around 5 am – I work in the mornings, and I make enough money as a freelancer to have my own office – and sometimes, when it’s still dark and I’m standing in line for coffee, I can feel my old life twitching like a phantom limb. I want to jump out of line and go running back to 2003, when I could just decide that today, I’m going to sit in a café and read, and then later, I’m going to see a movie, and then after that, I’ll go to the Make-Out Room and get drunk with my friends (most of whom, BTW, don’t call much these days). Today in 2006 I’m just tired all the time. When I have a free moment, I do the dishes.

Does anything I just wrote mean that parenthood and staying home with Liko is a drag? Do I feel sorry for myself? Fuck no. I’m not a good enough writer to tell you how holding him makes me feel; let’s just say it feels good. When we’re blasting Yo La Tengo or the Strokes or Blondie (his favorites; he has a thing for punk, new wave, indie pop, etc.; anything that bounces, really) and I’m dancing and he’s careening down the hall, arms flailing, hopping from one foot to the other, and then he runs up and hugs my leg and yells “Dada!” – life can’t get any better. Nobody gives a shit about my poems anyway; the world can live without my stories. Most movies suck. From where I stand in 2006, the Jeremy of 2003 looks like an emotionally parsimonious, spiritually puerile wanker. I helped make a new life, and that’s staggering: a new human being, and a new life for me. I don’t want to give him to a nanny; I want to take care of him and see him grow. I wish I were with him now. Writing this, I feel like I’m stealing time from him.

It’s probably impossible – and there’s no shame in this – for a non-parent to understand the Heaven and Hell of being a parent. It’s a whole cosmos unto itself, ruled by Satan on one side and Jehovah on the other, and you never quite feel whole – or at least, I don’t. There are two of me now, one who yearns for freedom and the other who wants nothing more than to be chained to my drooling, pooping, cuddly little boy. I’m still new at this, still in the process of being transformed in ways both bad and good; maybe in time I’ll grow up and the two sides will merge into a whole person. More likely, judging from the patterns I’ve seen in my family and in older parents, it’ll be a seesaw, with each side getting heavier, lighter, heavier, wishing, accepting, wishing. And when he’s gone and can take care of himself, who will I be? Well, I’ll let you know when I get there. Humans have been raising kids and facing life cycles since we came down from the trees, but I’ve got a lot more going for me than my flea-bitten, ant-eating ancestors on the African savannah. If I’ve made sacrifices, I’ve made them willingly. I’ve had more choices than most people have in the world – certainly more choices than most women have ever had.

Where was I? Right: I’m supposed to be a trend, according to the Contra Costa Times. Well, it’s a pretty small fucking trend and I guess that I’m not interested in making it any bigger – or maybe I should say, I don’t feel I have the authority to tell anyone how they should structure their family life. I just want to get through to the end of the day. Parenting is brutally hard and wonderful work and it’s not for everybody; most men in our society will resist making the sacrifices involved with staying home – and why shouldn’t they resist, really? What’s in it for them? To be seen as a heroic pioneer? Fuck that. Why, for that matter, should moms be pushed into working so that the guy can stay home? Moms are never interviewed in these trend stories – how do they feel about it? (Maybe that’s the story I should write.) Why, now that I think about it, should anybody be forced to work a 50-hour week at a job they hate? Dads-at-home will be a tiny minority for as long as parents have to scramble to keep their heads above water, trying to make enough money to survive and give their kids the best life possible, under the circumstances. If Americans – we fat, rich, selfish, sadistic, TV-watching bastards – really wanted to encourage stable families and more paternal responsibility in raising kids, we’d raise our boys to be caregivers, guarantee health care for everyone, build more affordable housing, and require and incentivize employers to give all new parents, poor and middle-class, a break. Until all that happens, don’t talk to me about trends.

(I’m obviously speaking from the perspective of a hetero marriage; if anybody wants to talk from some other space, be my guest.)

qDot at Slashdong points out that math can be extra hott. He discovered this fact – which we already knew – in a gallery of naughty images that artist Peter Miller generated randomly using algorithms. Can an algorithm be arrested for obscenity? I think this may be what Alan Turing had in mind when he invented the idea of artificial intelligence . . .

If you haven’t been following the Star Wars comics written by John Ostrander, you’ve been missing out. Ostrander is the creator of Grimjack, an 80s comic about a mercenary in the interdimensional city of Cynosure. IDW has been reprinting the issues of Grimjack in trade paperbacks, and they read even better than the first time around. Ostrander also wrote the awesome Suicide Squad and The Spectre for DC Comics, among other things.

Anyway, Ostrander just recently brought the saga of Quinlan Vos to an end in Star Wars: Republic #83. I won’t tell you how Vos’ saga ends, because you should really read it for yourself, but I will say that Ostrander finds a clever and memorable way of turning Vos’ biggest weakness as a character in a licensed universe into a strength.

In a nutshell, Quinlan Vos is a Jedi knight around the time of the Star Wars prequels. After he loses his memory, he drifts closer to the dark side of the force and you’re never quite sure whether he’ll go over the edge.

The biggest problem with a character like Quin is that he doesn’t appear at all in the three prequel movies. This is good, in that anything can happen to him without contradicting the movies. But it’s also bad, in that he can only be a bit player in his own story. That is, we, the readers, know that Quinlan Vos isn’t going to defeat the Sith lords. He’s not going to stop Anakin from becoming Darth Vader. He’s not going to prevent the Republic from becoming an Empire. He’s not even going to be a major part of those events. He’s Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern.

But like I said, Ostrander turns Quinlan Vos’ biggest weakness into the most interesting thing about him. We, the readers, know that Quin won’t defeat the Sith lords. But Quin doesn’t know that. He knows that Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi fought and killed one sith lord, Darth Maul, and he suspects there’s a “second sith,” whose identity he’s determined to uncover.

Quin’s determination to be the hero, and to be the person who defeats the Dark Side is what puts him at risk of succumbing to the Dark Side. Not just because he’s willing to go to any lengths to find out who the second sith is, but because his ruthlessness becomes a form of egomania. But he doesn’t find out who the second sith is until it’s way too late and the Jedi are all being killed.

Quin struggles, to the last, with the temptation to make himself the hero of his story, instead of the bit player we know he is. It’s a much more interesting battle with the Dark Side than the ones we see Anakin and Luke go through in the movies. The only way he can vanquish the evil inside himself is to accept that he can’t defeat evil, in its wider sense, alone.

(If you want to read Quin’s story, pick up Twilight, Darkness, The Stark Hyperspace War, Rite of Passage, Clone Wars Vol. 1, Jedi: Shaak Ti, Clone Wars Vol. 4, Clone Wars Vol. 6, Clone Wars Vol. 8 and Republic #81-83. You can find most of those trades used on Amazon or Bookfinder, or at your local used book store.

The good news is Ostrander will be writing a new Star Wars title starting in May. Star Wars: Legacy will be set more than a hundred years after Return of the Jedi, meaning he has a blank slate to work with. Yay!

It’s not enough for ClearChannel to own every billboard in my neighborhood, over 1200 radio stations in my country, and thousands of concert venues all over my fucking planet. Now they want to own my memories of going to a music show. That’s why my (beloved) former employer Electronic Frontier Foundation is attempting to stop ClearChannel from enforcing a ridiculous software patent on the process of recording a concert and instantly burning it to CD to sell after the concert is over. Already, the Pixies have been harassed by ClearChannel so much that they’ve had to stop selling CDs of their concerts after shows in ClearChannel venues. EFF is attempting to stop the madness by requesting that the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) reexamine the patent and declare it invalid. Not only is the idea captured in this patent completely unoriginal, but there are also clear examples of prior art proving this – other companies were making software to do instant burning of concerts before ClearChannel bought this patent. Boo on ClearChannel!

Jason Schultz, who is lead attorney on EFF’s excellent Patent Busting Project, says he hopes that this re-examination request will show other people that there is a way to squelch bad software patents before they do harm. “Our next move is to make the re-exam process easier for the general public,” he told me while munching apple pizza. “The open source community really needs to make use of it.”

Jason and I may not agree on the virtues of fruit pizza, but we do agree on this: the patent system is for celebrating good ideas, not crushing them. And the ClearChannel patent threatens to crush new kinds of audio software, as well as our memories of cool concerts. The USPTO will respond to EFF’s re-exam request in about 2.5 months.

Read this first. (courtesy of blog of a bookslut.)

Did you notice what he did, the clever, disingenuous bastard? He used a critique of memoir to promote his own memoir – nay, more: to circumvent the apparent weaknesses of his own memoir.

Do I even need to say “argh"?

Upon this piece of cynicism, I declare a moratorium: no more memoir. No more. No. We don’t wanna know about you. We don’t care how you feel about your mother. We don’t care how you feel about your body. We don’t care about your addiction or the crazy, yet macho, things it made you do. We don’t care how much you hate yourself or why. We don’t care whom you fell in love with, or how, or why or how you fucked up and lost them. We don’t care how funny your bad French accent is. If your penis is too small and you’re brave enough, or desperate enough for material, to report it, we still don’t care. (On the other hand, if your penis is big and pretty, a photo blog might be in order.)

If you weren’t Mao’s alternately abused and petted waterboy on the Long March, we don’t wanna know. If you weren’t gored by a rhino while palpating the open heart of an AIDS-afflicted child on your third stint with Medicins Sans Frontieres in the middle of Darfur last year, we don’t give a shit about you. If you’ve never partied with Uday Hussein, bringing along an extra two linen handkerchiefs in case of assertive blood spraying, and now feel really, really bad about it, why should we care? If you didn’t jerry-rig a space capsule with a paper clip and your tongue to get you and your colleagues – Laika and Major Tom – safely back home; or clone and distribute hundreds of little Hitlers from Brazil; or get abducted by aliens and anally prodded – and have proof in the form of permanent flourescent green stains on your sphincter; or garrotte over fifty potential political leaders in porn theaters before their time; or remove your nipple and photograph it near famous landmarks around the world and send the photos back to your chest … then don’t bother us. If you haven’t, at the very least, tried seriously, and for more than four days at a time, to dig a hole through the center of the Earth, then what do you really have to offer? Seriously, what?

We don’t wanna know. We don’t care about you. You are no better than we of the silence and the lack of talking about our private lives publicly. You are no more interesting than the rest of us – in fact, considerably less so. You are no smarter than we – just more exhibitionist. And frankly, you are no better of a writer than those of us who struggle toward the much, much loftier and worthier goal of making shit up. In fact, you suck. We’re done with you. Enough already. Stop.

No, really, fuck off.

Mobile Jones points out that over half the blogosphere is not integrated into the rest of the web, and it’s dominated by teenagers, in ”The site that ate the blogosphere”.

The separate blogosphere that MySpace represents, 56 million members, receives very little coverage or even acknowledgement from the blogging intelligentsia… One might argue that Technorati’s claiming that only those blogs which ping Technorati make up the blogosphere is an questionable claim.

Think of the complexity of human interaction at a party, maybe the first teenager-party you ever went to; you can probably imagine a novel about that one event and the intertwining of relationships, friends, lovers. In fact I just read a novel like that, Invitation to the Waltz, by Rosamund Lehmann, about two sisters who go to their first dance in 1920; about the buildup to that event and what happens that evening. Or the first party I remember clearly, where we had Everclear trashcan punch, and too many things were happening at once for me to track. From the outside, it looks like a bunch of teenagers being idiots. From the inside, an epic novel! Anyway, no doubt Myspace has its literary geniuses along with its hanging-out-behind-the-7-11 social scene and all the accompanying, complex joys and sorrows.

I get really annoyed when people use “teenager” as a synonym for “stupid”.

Since we’re getting all intro/retrospective here on otherblog…

Astute readers might recall a story I contributed to other #7 about the deliciously guilty pleasure of Schadenfreude.

I’ve been thinking about that story a lot lately, in connection with a certain Vice Presidential hunting trip.

Actually I can barely contain my glee. It’s so wrong, yet it’s so right.

I was thinking about my last (and first) post ("Quest for power?!") in relation to Other’s founding themes and audience – “people who defy categories.” Is it necessary or important for an individual to tag herself as being “left” or “right"? Is it really all about people who call themselves “left” beating people who call themselves “right” when it comes to symbolic and real contests for power? What happens when you just decide to “transcend” (a problematic verb) those categories?

For me, the answer is not straightforward. Yes, it’s a bad idea to base your entire identity on one of these categories – when your ideas become integral to your identity, then any challenge to those ideas appears as a threat to one’s sense of self (see any of the socialist newspaper sellers, if you want an example). I’ve made this mistake in my life. There is much to be said for stepping outside of such categories if you want to live life to its fullest and really get to know people outside of your comfort zone – to know the world. There’s also a lot to be said for creating both private and public spaces for dialogue with people whose political views differ from your own. I enjoy the time I spend with my Christian fundamentalist, Air-Force-Captain cousin Steven; we mostly talk about the trials of parenthood, but it’s fascinating to hear about the strength he gets from his church and his life in the Air Force (which he hates and is getting out of, mostly because of the long and dangerous deployments required by Bush’s various wars). It’s also chilling to hear the hatred and fanaticism that creeps into his voice when we talk about immigrants and queers.

People who purport to be above and beyond right and left tend to fall back on certain rhetorical poses – for example, they say that they only care about what “works,” not what’s “politically correct.” (Sorry about all the quotes, but man, I just can’t stand the way these words are used.) The problem with this pose (a favorite of policy wonks) is that it generally accepts the rules of the game as it is currently played. For example: yes, school vouchers seem to be a great way to get poor children out of failing public schools and into successful private schools. It’s a practical solution, right? Unfortunately, it also strengthens private at the expense of public education. It accepts a history of segregation and neglect and implicitly rejects the notion that we should collectively take responsibility for the health and success of all children. In the long run it sorts our society into mutually exclusive categories and deepens inequality, and vouchers can be canceled in a second, with a speed and finality that a public system resists. Here you tread into a problem of values: are you committed to health and equality of opportunity for all, or do you think inequality is the engine that drives our economy? Believe me, the latter is exactly what conservatives believe. In our society, today, those commitments tend to sort themselves into left and right categories. This example also applies to crime: sure, in dangerous neighborhoods more cops and surveillance seems like a practical solution to ensure the safety of residents. But it also turns those neighborhoods into occupied zones and further stigmitizes residents, and it does nothing to create jobs or strenghten cultural integrity, which are the real solutions to crime. I’m perfectly willing to accept charter schools and more cops if those solutions are implemented in the context of a social and political commitment to making life better for everybody; but when they are imposed in order for one small group to maintain their power and wealth, then I know which side I’m on.

“For the Right, metropolitan-level engagement does not grow out of a warm fuzzy commitment to civil society. Rather civil society is the growth medium for political power in which whoever out-organizes whom wins. Civil society is seen in oppositional terms, not as a field for the exploration of common ground, and never as something whose cultivation will spontaneously yield political results by itself.”

Bingo. That quote is from Target San Diego: The Right Wing Assault on Urban Democracy and Smart Government, by Lee Cokorinos, which I just got through reviewing for Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank that studies the right. You can download the whole report at the Center for Policy Initiatives. Cokorinos is making a point about something that has been driving me up the wall for years. Many liberal foundations have a funding category called “Civil Society,” which all purport to try to piece back together America’s frayed social context, usually imagining some New England town hall meeting as the ideal for which we’re all working. Many liberal and even some left groups – especially media reform groups like Free Press – talk incessantly about bridging left and right and reviving civil society, when what they really want is more political power for dissenting and disenfranchised viewpoints. The right, meanwhile, recognizes that civil society never went away and just keeps evolving; rather than wasting time trying to revive civil society they jump into the fray and organize for political power. Is bridging left and right really what we need right now? Personally, I want to beat ‘em, not join ‘em.

If you follow the action over at Hyphen magazine’s staff blog (or if you read the mag itself), you’ll suspect that Asian America is currently involved in a war against racism on radio programs. In the past year or so, Asian America has been hit by several incidents:

• Philadelphia’s Star and Buc Wild show prank called a customer service line outsourced to India specifically to berate the employee with racist and profane language.
• New York’s “Hot 97″ created a “We Are the World” parody song called the “Tsunami Song", making fun of “Chinks” and “Chinamen” drowned in the tsunami.
• New Jersey’s 101.5 fm “discussed” the mayoral candidacy of Korean American Jun Choi by imitating a stereotypical “Asian” accent and saying that American politics should not be dictated by “foreigners”.
• WRCZ in Albany, NY ‘referred to Asian Americans as “slant-eyed gooks,” and characterized blacks as “cotton-pickers” and criminals.’
• Now, Adam Carolla on CBS radio has done a segment making fun of the Asian Excellence Awards by imitating Asian Americans involved with the awards using “ching chong” sounds.

What bugs me the most about all of this is not so much the rampant anti-Asian racism that these radio shows reveal. In fact, the repeated protests against radio racism this year give me hope, because finally Asian America is undertaking an active, consistent campaign against a racism we’ve been dogged with since … ever. Most of the perpetrators so far have apologized and “taken steps", which means – guess what? – that the campaign is starting to work. So keep it up all you protesters!

What bothers me is that when this stuff is shoved in the public’s face, and in a way that is impossible to refute (look again at the list above), a lot of the public responds by saying “lighten up! it’s just a joke!", crying “censorship", and citing “freedom of speech”. (For reference, check out the comments on the Hyphen blog to the above campaigns, and also to the posts on Asian Media Watch’s protest of MTV and Comedy Central racist “jokes”, and the T-Mobile “Posermobile” advertising campaign.)

I think the main problem here is that people don’t understand what a “joke” is, what “censorship” is and what “freedom of speech” means. So let’s break these down:

JOKE: Humor is notoriously subjective and culture-specific, but putting that aside, in American culture there is a general animus against mean-spirited mockery. This is because in all representations of human interactions (jokes, sit-coms, chick flicks, etc.) there is a power dynamic. The mean-spirited joke is not the one that mocks someone or something – all jokes mock someone or something. The mean-spirited joke exploits an unequal power dynamic to mock and denigrate a less powerful person or group. That is to say, someone from a more powerful group (e.g. white, or male) will make a joke mocking someone from a less powerful group (e.g. black, or female.) This is mean-spirited (literally – low in spirit) because the joker already has more power than the mocked. Taking advantage of the joke to further express power is an abuse of what is already an injustice.

When racist radio DJs and their apologists say that the jokers treat all races equally by mocking all races and groups alike, they are being disingenuous. When a white man makes fun of whites, he is expressing his privilege as a member of that group. When a white man makes fun of blacks or Asians, he is expressing his privilege as a person of higher status and power than those groups. There’s no equality of treatment there. If you are privileged, you can only treat people equally by treating everyone equally well.

(At this point, someone will chime in with the argument that the Hot 97 DJs are African American, to which I will respond that the people they were calling “Chinks” and “Chinamen” were mostly South Asian, desperately poor, third world, underclass types. And yes, in that scenario, the African American DJs are hands down the privileged ones.)

CENSORSHIP: The word “censorship” is now replacing “fascist", as a catch-all phrase for “things we disapprove of but can’t articulate why.” What people tend to call censorship is usually one of three things: official action (a law or legal precedent prohibiting free expression), semi-official policy (an institution or private corporation refusing to permit certain types of public expression in its private space) or social action (public pressure to boycott, or a concerted effort to ignore the source of a certain type of expression.) These three things are not separated by hard lines. Laws prohibiting forms of expression, and private policies guidelining their avoidance, are almost always created in response to, or in anticipation of, public protest. If you look again carefully at what is covered under “censorship", you’ll find that pretty much all levels of public discourse are included there. That is to say, all proscriptive public discourse can be called “censorship”.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH: or freedom of expression means all speech, all expression. Keep in mind that opposition to free expression is itself free expression. Protest is also protected by free speech. The farther you get away from official censorship, the more blurry the terms become. If I say “Fuck you!” that’s protected by free speech. If you say “Don’t you dare speak to me that way!” that’s also protected by free speech. If you say “No one should talk to you anymore until you stop using the f-word!” that’s also protected by free speech; and if you then go around and get all of my friends to agree not to talk to me until I stop saying “fuck", well, that’s your right as well. So if I come back and say “Don’t censor me!", aren’t I actually telling you what not to say and do? Aren’t I actually censoring you?

The big question in defining censorship is: Is all censorship necessarily evil? You can’t say “fuck” on radio or tv. That is, quite literally, official censorship. It is a law prohibiting free verbal expression in a public space, a law whose violation entails actual punishment. But no one decries the censorship of certain profane words from the airwaves. Why not? For one, because proscribing certain profane words from the airwaves doesn’t actually hurt anyone. For another, because all cultures have generally accepted boundaries of public civility. Many adults think it’s stupid that you can’t say “fuck” on tv, but don’t bother to protest because the restriction doesn’t oppress them, and because they share their culture’s recognition of these boundaries of public civility.

So, without advocating a law against broadcasting racist jokes, you can still apply these standards. Would suppressing racist jokes for broadcast really hurt anyone? Can we acknowledge that racist jokes fall outside the boundaries of public civility?

Does this whole argument scenario sound familiar? It should, because it’s exactly the same cut of logic surrounding the Danish cartoon controversy. Just because Muslims (Arabs, Central Asians, South Asians and the like – you know, The Swarthy) have their own countries where they are the dominant culture doesn’t mean that a) in Denmark and Europe, “Middle Eastern” immigrants aren’t underprivileged like it’s goin’ out of style and; b) in the world theater, Swarthy Nations aren’t stomped on by the first world as a matter of a century-old global policy. Who has the power when making the mockery? Who needs to take another look at power dynamics?

Or, as the angrier-than-me Lenin over at Lenin’s Tomb put it:

Free speech, then, is in material terms, in this climate, and at this conjuncture, the freedom to denigrate black people, Muslims, Arabs and just about anyone liable to come on the wrong end of Western power. So cut it out. It’s not funny any more, just quit it. The laughter track on this ‘free speech’ gig is wearing thin. Even if, for some bizarre medical reason, you still refuse to acknowledge manifest and obvious racism, don’t persist in the insulting pretense that issues of free expression emerge in an ideological vacuum. Don’t pretend there aren’t institutions with their own interests at work, states, corporations, corporate media and so on. And certainly don’t pretend to be even-handed about it.

So my favorite blog, Dave’s Long Box, is devoting a whole week to mocking dumb comics where a man is magically transformed into a woman. There are many, many comics of this ilk. Although for some reason it’s never happened to Batman, who’s probably just Too Gay to be a girl. I love dumb gender-switching comedies – I even own White Chicks and Sorority Boys on DVD – and I have hazy memories of the Peter David Justice League J’onn J’onnz sex change issue. I’m super psyched that Dave is tackling this vital topic in comics fandom. And he’s assured me that he’ll respect his transsexual brothers and sisters. (Dave apparently has a large and unusual family.)

Meanwhile, my favorite TV show, Veronica Mars, had a transsexual appear briefly in the latest episode, “Ain’t No Magic Mountain High Enough.” Veronica’s first season featured an episode with a super respectful portrayal of a tranny trying to be reunited with her son, which showed that you shouldn’t hate your tranny brothers and sisters (or parents) without being too preachy. So it was kinda disappointing that this time around, the tranny was the comic relief – one character, Beaver, hires a tranny hooker and tricks his brother, Dick, into having sex with her. Dick discovers the hooker’s “secret” and is freaked out, spitting on the ground everywhere. Okay, so Mars has a huge reservoir of good will from last season’s pro-tranny ep, plus I’m not easily offended. And it is my favorite show.

But this was kind of dumb. For one thing, the way it was played, they played it as if the TS hooker was playing along with the charade and helping to trick Dick. No self-respecting TS would get herself into a situation like that (and even most self-loathing TSs would think twice.) By getting into a compromising situation with someone who doesn’t know she’s trans, when she knows it’ll freak him out when he discovers the truth, she’s compromising her own safety. Dick could bash the tranny’s skull in – and in fact the show comes awfully close to portraying “transsexual panic” as a natural response to discovering that the girl has a cock. As if Dick would be sort of justified in lashing out at her, because she tricked him. The only way this scenario makes sense is if you don’t really think of the TS hooker as a person – just a comic foil.

So the message those two episodes of Veronica Mars send is: if you’re a conservative tranny who’s in a stable hetero relationship and trying to be a good parent, then you’re a person. But if you’re slutty, or if you’re a sex worker (through choice or because you need to eat), then you’re just a thing. Kinda disappointing message from my favorite show.

This is pretty amusing: there’s a role-playing game based on Storm Constantine’s Wraethuthu novels, which are about sleazy violent skinny beautiful nihilistic drunk hermaphrodite alien genocidal vampire rapists who take over the world. There’s some killingly funny and mean reviews of the game here:

For instance: For your entire life, you’ve had a particular sexual identity. You’re a man. Suddenly, somebody kidnaps you, starves you for three days, and then cuts you open and pumps new blood into you. When you wake up, your old sexual identity is gone, flat-out. The body that you spent your entire life with, with all of its attendant flaws and quirks, is gone, replaced with a prettified version of Iggy Pop’s body. Also, your johnson is gone, replaced with a sea anenome. And your captors, who are just like you now, want to fuck all the time.

This isn’t just going to cause a psychic crisis; it’s going to tear your mind right the fuck in half. ” (Darren MacLennan, rpg.net)

The game is defended in this rpg.net thread started by Levi Kornelsen:

The target audience is expected to use this book to collaborate and create stories like those in the books. If that makes you think that I’m talking about some kind of slightly-fetishistic form of creating collaborative almost-porn as a group, that’s right. If that bothers you, too bad. People also have cybersex. People also write fanfic….

Some of them want to think about kinds of sex that don’t even really exist, and this is an opportunity to do so; in fact, it’s an invitation to do so.

Some of the rpg.net critics are perturbed at trying to imagine who’s playing Wraethuthu. “Gamers” can’t possibly want to play it, because it doesn’t fit into “gamer culture", because nerd guys won’t want to role-play disturbing sex with their sweaty nerd guy buddies. Therefore “no one” will buy it and play it. Therefore, this game must be for goth fags and fanfic-writing teenage girls and maybe some creepy grown women who love yaoi. Therefore, real gamers should hate it.

Plume, an rpg.net user, responds:

Why, yes, if anyone wants to know: I am an overweight woman, though not hugely so, and I do like the bishonen cliches, and the fantasy of radical transformation of body that liberates the soul, and things that seem monstrous outside and lovely inside.

The game sounds incredibly cheesy, the example gamefic hideous, the game mechanics cumbersome and unnecessarily complex, but that’s true of nearly every other fantasy role-playing game. What we need is a *better* game about other-sexed goth polyamorous Mary Sues who have to have sex once a day or die.

Newsarama has a retrospective about Mike Parobeck, who is by far my favorite comics artist. There’s actually not even any competition for that title. Parobeck’s art was so clean and filled with vitality, it’s amazing. It just blows me away that someone who spent so much time tearing himself down could put so much joy into his work. The article mentions that since Parobeck died ten years ago, a more “cartoony” art style has become much more popular. But the truth is none of the newer “cartoony” artists have the clarity, or the liveliness, of Parobeck. He’s still terribly missed.

I don’t really know who Sarah Vowell is, because I don’t listen to NPR and it sounds as though that’s her main claim to fame. I’m annoyed at her, though. Because she’s a guest columnist for the New York Times Op-Ed page, which almost never lets women contribute except for the supremely fluffy Maureen Dowd. (The “token woman” slot used to belong to the even fluffier Anna Quindlen.)

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a substantive op-ed written by a woman for the Times. Substantive, meaning about policy or politics in some meaningful way, not just commenting on George Bush’s hair. Apparently Vowell is determined to keep that trend going, since her first contribution is navel-gazing piece about how she hates torture in real life but enjoys it on television. It’s not badly written and there’s a vaguely interesting point buried in there. But it’s basically another fluffy female-written op-ed.

Back in the mid-90s, the Washington Post actually had a number of great women op-ed columnists, including Lally Weymouth. They had women writing about economics and foreign policy. I haven’t looked at the Post op-ed page lately, but apparently now it’s as bad as the Times.

Over here at /other/ magazine, not content to rest on the laurels bestowed by sleek pink unicorns, we’re hard at work on issue #10. I’m going to be editing a piece by Rob Los Ricos, and it’s turning out to be an interesting process.

You see, Rob’s in prison in Oregon. That means all my correspondence with him has been by mail—real good old fashioned US Postal Service. It’s quaintly charming in many ways. When was the last time you had a genuine exchange of letters with someone, complete with the mysterious act of faith of dropping the note into the post box? Remember the thrill of finding an envelope–even an intimidatingly utilitarian prison envelope–enlivening your junk mail and bills with something you’re actually looking forward to reading?

(Well, there was the last time you received your subscription to /other/, but that’s about it.)

But scratch the surface and the quaint charm evaporates. My correspondence with Rob is a reminder that the acceleration of communications is putting prisoners into an even more isolated place—trapped in a persistent eddy of the past. In his last letter to me, RLR wrote “I’ve been wondering how to connect with people on-line who might … share my visions for the future.”

You’d wonder too if you were cut off from the biggest cultural developments seven years ago, as Rob was. (He can’t even get a copy of /other/ in jail. Something about obscenity.) There are a number of prisoner blogs, but they’re indirect—supporters on the outside do the posting and responding to readers. They don’t have the immediacy of a true blog. Imagine life behind bars: no email, no IMing, no blogging, no voicemail, no text messaging, no cell phones—not even calling cards.

Instead, Rob sends me inmate mail from the Oregon Department of Corrections, and they’re short, thoughtful letters in longhand, like they’re from another century.

As his editor, I don’t even really know what he’s working on; there’s no room for quick IMs back-and-forth to clarify things on the fly; no last-minute phone calls.

I think it could make for better, more thoughtful writing. Maybe I’ll start insisting that everyone who writes for /other/ use only the USPS. I just wish it didn’t take incarceration to make it so.

++++++++++++++++

Try it yourself:

Explore the world of prisoner support and familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of prison correspondence, then you’re ready to get yourself a prison pen pal.

I was poking around in LiveJournal and came across this question posed by chreebomb:

What do you believe a white person’s place is in the anti-oppression fight? Details, please.

In the comments and answers to that question, the one that made me think the hardest was one by angryasiangrrl, whose answer broadened the question:

i think that the best place for white people to pitch in is educating other white people. this question makes me think of work i’ve done for same-sex marriage. often straight allies want to lend a hand. they come to meetings, protests, etc. but they are too uncomfortable to talk to their own homophobic family members, neighbors, etc. in my opinion, these allies, much like white allies would do a whole lot of good if they’d spend more time in their own environments working on these issues. i think it’s tempting to join the queers or the POCs because that’s where your more likely to get kudos or at least not have to get in fights with your loved ones. it can also feel a bit like voyeurism or vacationing if allies are just staying in queer and/or POC spaces fighting the fight rather than doing so on their own turf. white and/or straight turf is often a difficult place for POC and/or queers to tread and make much headway, whereas there is less threat in doing so for whites/straights.

sorry for all the analogies, but i am also likening this to men who are feminists. it’s cool to have men involved, but the best place for them to get shit done is to call their friends and other men on shit, not go hang out with feminist women.

AA Fiction Writers! Hyphen magazine has a new lit editor, Sabrina Tom, and she’s at home to y’all. Here’s her announcement:

Hyphen is devoted to providing a venue for emerging and established Asian American authors who dare to defy and reinvent traditional genres and subject matter. Please do not send us your stories about identity or race. We’re seeking fresh voices and courageous perspectives, stories that explore new pyschic landscapes, driven by language, humor, character and extraordinary details.

We are currently accepting unsolicited submissions in fiction. We have no word limits, but generally prefer stories that are no longer than 4,000 words. Please send submissions by email as a ”.doc” attachment; the subject line should read “[Full name] - Fiction Submission.” All submissions should include a cover letter with contact and other relevant information. We will not read any submissions which do not meet these criteria. Response time is roughly 3-4 months. Contact Literary Editor: sabrina(at)hyphenmagazine.com.

Please forward this to all your favorite Asian American writers. That includes South Asians and Central Asians, yes.

Argh.

Bookslut’s Blog pointed me toward a WBUR (NPR Boston affiliate) segment from yesterday where, in response to Bush’s State of the Union call for stronger immigration enforcement, they talked with lit critic Steve Almond about “Literary Border Crossings”. Almond, it seems, produced a list of books that “illuminate the immigrant experience”. So far so good; that’s an immediate mouse click for me.

But when I listened to the nine minute segment, I found that the books Almond discussed were:

1. an admittedly romanticized novel about Italian American immigrants in the 1950s;
2. a novel about early twentieth century Italian immigration by an Italian novelist (not Italian American);
3. Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep; and
4. a fifteen-year-old book of essays by journalist Debbie Nathan about living on the US/Mexico border.

Added to this list by the host, but not mentioned or discussed by Almond in the main segment was the classic novel Chicano by Richard Vasquez.

Okay now, I’m really, really not looking for any sort of affirmative action on this list … really I’m not. But if you’re responding to Bush’s new policies controlling immigration by trying to illuminate the immigrant experience, shouldn’t you be seeking out narratives that illuminate the immigrant experience today? Our contemporary understanding of The Immigrant Experience was largely formed by the late nineteenth, early twentieth century models of central and southern European immigrant groups (especially Ashkenazi Jews and Italians.) But the political, economic and social circumstances that formed that immigrant experience no longer obtain.

Then, most European immigration was legal. Today, the largest immigrant groups are heavily undocumented. Then, immigration was primarily from Europe. Today, “immigrant” means Chicano/Latino first, then Asian and Eastern European and Middle Eastern – and then everyone else. That is to say, today’s immigrant comes from different cultural spheres and traditions than yesterday’s immigrant. The traditional “immigrant” was ethnic European, a lower-class – or alternate ethnicity – form of Indo-European language-speaking descendents of the Graeco-Roman ideosphere. Today’s immigrant is … not.

So what do we choose to illuminate a United States so choked by labor “equity” that it has to rely on undocumented labor to provide the profit margins that keep American companies from outsourcing? How do we represent the rabid control of middle-class non-white immigrants through restricted visas and Patriot Act provisions? And how do we portray racism in the technological age? Do we choose books by immigrants who have experienced this? Nope. Instead we have two books about a romantic Italian American past, one from and about a romantic Jewish American past, and one rapidly aging nonfiction about the US/Mexican border by a white woman – an American insider, not an immigrant across that border. Mm hmm. And what have we illuminated? Well, simply, that America still isn’t ready to let go of its romantic, three generation, hard-work-plus-assimilation-equals-a-rich-and-hearty-America vision and look hard at the enclosed containment loop that is undocumented, controlled, non-European immigration today. And when we are willing to let go and look, we want to be led by one of us, an insider, not hear the point of view of one of these … aliens.

So, to remedy, I’m starting a new list: books by actual immigrants and second generation children of immigrants that illuminate the contemporary immigrant experience in a way that might actually illuminate, rather than reify, something. I’ll start things off with a few suggestions. Please add to the list in the comments section. In no particular order:

• Junot Diaz Drown
• Carlos Bulosan America Is In The Heart
• Ruth Ozeki My Year of Meats
• Bharati Mukherjee Darkness
• Lalo Alcaraz Migra Mouse: Political Cartoons on Immigration
• Paul Flores Along the Border Lies

That’s all that’s coming to mind right now, although I’m sure I’ll think of more tomorrow. Now you …

UPDATE:

Okay, it’s tomorrow and I’m thinking more clearly. I’ve added links to the books above and here are a few more:

• Jaime Hernandez Locas
• Gilbert Hernandez Palomar
• Guillermo Gomez-Peña The New World Border : Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century
• Elmaz Abinader In the Country of My Dreams
• Truong Tran Dust and Conscience
• Myung-Mi Kim Under Flag
• Jaime Cortez Sexile

Here’s another analysis of Peter Jackson’s King Kong that’s worth reading: The Nightmare Vision: King Kong as Captivity Narrative, by Ron Briley. Briley begins by contrasting Kong with The Chronicles of Narnia:

Kong’s current status as number one at the box office suggests that cultural fear of the primitive “other” may outweigh the redemptive powers of a muscular Christianity.

And then goes on to link the Kong narrative (noble/brutal black savage and pure white angel) both to fears of the African American other and to Native American captivity narratives. Check it out.

First read that, then check out some of the millions of positive reviews of the movie, many of which nod to the racism of the original, without addressing the question of why King Kong needed to be remade in the first place. Is it that Peter Jackson doesn’t know how to make up his own stories? What kind of a culture do we live in that we prefer a retooled racist classic – merely updated with a minor acknowledgement to seventy intervening years of identity politics – to an original story that carries no such singular and unavoidable burden?

Ide Cyan rounded up some good links on rape as a plot device in comic books. I haven’t thought a lot about this, but I have thought about how movies use the threat of rape in a similar way, as if the women’s rapeability has to be established right away or the story won’t work right. This always pisses me off.

It strikes me as very similar to the way jealousy works in stories. Jealousy is the motivation, the reason, the answer to why there was a murder or a marriage or a war. Once you start seeing this pattern, an awful lot of books and movies seem to be “about” this tremendous anxiety to establish that women are valuable property that have to be claimed, possessed, and managed carefully like any other valuable property…

And then there are books that just do something else. I was thinking of “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and how, when I read it, I kept expecting the main character to get raped, or beaten up because of jealousy. She never did, and I cheered like crazy! The story was about her from her point of view.

Then I considered a batch of Peter David’s Hulk comics I read recently. The Hulk is sort of fragmenting and it’s a complicated interesting story about masculinity and violence. But another level of the story is about who gets to control and own Betty. Whoever gets teh sex from Betty, wins… She’s SO ANNOYING. Then there are sub-plots about women, like the one about Blaire, whose abusive cop husband beats her up – and the girl who gets randomly attacked while alone at home and blinded by a psycho – (And then back to Betty, who’s being grilled about her feelings for Bruce Banner and the Hulk and her marriage by a weird panel of male authorities in a courtroom hearing about a gamma bombing incident, so her status as correctly-behaving patriarchal property is bizarrely on trial.) I was so annoyed I couldn’t analyze it properly anymore. It’s like every story needs a girly victim ex machina to prop it up.

But that’s overthinking the issue. If comic book heroes usually or always have a past trauma that defines them, I think we should be asking what it means for the woman’s past trauma to always be rape. Ragnell goes into thisreally well:

Someone needs to sit these writers down and tell them to stop. You’re not adding emotional resonance to the story anymore, because this ploy is tired and overused. You are not showing the slightest sensitivity to women’s issues, so don’t consider yourself enlightened for using such an adult subject. And you are not making the female character any deeper and more compelling with this, at all. If anything, they become more superficial because the issue isn’t properly explored.

And it really bugs me that these writers find the only way they can emphasize a female character’s strength is by giving her a past sexual trauma to overcome. As thoguh this is the only trial fit for a woman.

But when my partner John plays a female character, and he often does, his character usually doesn’t get threatened with rape, and I think this is because the (male) GMs and players are uncomfortable threatening John the player with the idea. His femmy, passive-aggressive heroine wandered Charlemagne-era Europe with nary a hint of her vulnerability; his Buffy-the-Vampire slayer character kicks ass without the issue coming up.

The Supreme Court of California denied Phillip Jablonski’s appeal of his death penalty conviction (note: link goes to a disturbing Adobe PDF), in spite of his contention that there were multiple errors in his trial. Jablonski’s main defense was that he was insane when he brutalized, raped and murdered his ex-wife Carol Spadoni and her friend Eva Petersen. The bulk of the expert testimony, which you can read at that link, shows that Jablonski probably was schizophrenic and psychotic when he committed those murders – but that doesn’t mean he was out of touch with reality. Experts pointed to all the signs of premeditation, including buying a gun and taser beforehand, and cashing a check and driving to Utah afterwards. It’s sort of a classic “other” sort of question – is there a hard line between sane and insane, for these or any purposes? Can someone be insane but in touch with reality? One expert testified that Jablonski was nuts but nevertheless understood that society would not approve of his actions.

I’m personally anti-death penalty, but in any case Jablonski seems like someone who should never be free. He allegedly tried to drown his first wife, then raped his next girlfriend on the first date. And then he allegedly murdered another girlfriend when she said she was leaving with their child. He married Spadoni when he was still in prison for that earlier murder. To put it mildly, he seems to have had issues with women.

But he does draw a very cute clown picture. What is it with serial killers and clown art? (There’s lots more weirdly pretty serial killer art here.

If you haven’t read Pam Noles’ essay ”Shame” go and read it… and then read her response to accusations of “reverse racism":A Public Response to What Folks Are Saying About That Essay.
. Noles goes even further beyond talking about SF fandom and race, and does a great job of explaining where she’s coming from.

But you have a tag called Die Whitey on the blog!” (Yeah…I hear it coming. People follow patterns.) “That’s racist! That’s exclusionary! That’s putting up a wall between you and me!!”

No, dears. That’s FUNNY. There is a great and grand tradition of using the sheath of humor to make you comfortable before removing it to reveal the sharp edge designed to Wake You The Fuck Up. See Johnathan Swift, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Eddie Izzard, and a whole bunch of other people trying to engage with any extremely difficult topic in a public sphere. A lot of men still don’t get the whole Woman Thing we insist on bringing up over and aain. A lot of straights still don’t understand the damage caused by willful denial of other orientations. They don’t even think to question the assumptions behind the term ’straight’. A lot of whites still can’t see that when I care about Me and My Kind? I care about yours, too. That’s why I’m screaming. That’s why we all are.

Back to my hobby horse:

I recently came across an article titled “What Are The Strengths of Interracial Families?” on The Diversity Training Group’s site. The (very brief) article is bizarrely lacking in argument or point (the site uses frames, so if you wanna read it, you’ll have to click through to the “search articles” page and find the title), but it does list a number of things that “interracial families” tend to do. These include tending to: “live in culturally diverse neighborhoods", “preserve the richness of the customs, and languages of both cultures", “teach their children about diversity, and model appropriate behavior on how to treat those who are different from you", “build bridges with their respective families by teaching them about both of their cultures", and “teach their children to exhibit patience with those who ask them questions about being biracial”.

Wow. What planet does she live on? I wanna go there! In my years working with the “multiracial movement” (not a single movement but a bunch of mini-motions) the main commonality was that multiracial adults deal with their families’ failure to exhibit one or more of the above outlined tendencies. Sometimes this failure is one of love. Because interracial parents can be more concerned with their children’s happiness than with solving the world’s race problems, often they will repress one ethnic culture and encourage their children to identify with the higher status culture. But there’s no multirace-wide “tendency” to do any one thing. There’s no multiracial country that multiracial families immigrate from. There’s no multiracial culture. There’s no multiracial enclave neighborhood that produces most of our country’s multiracial children. What multiracial families have most in common is that they are all different. As the article’s author herself states, there have been no comprehensive studies of what multiracial families (which comprise every racial, ethnic, cultural and national mix in the world) “tend” to behave like.

The cum-shot is contained in the article’s conclusion: “in a world marked by racial boundaries, multiracial families provide convincing evidence that races can coexist, not only in the same neighborhood but in the same home.”

See, this is why I’m glad to be biracial. All of you monoracials out there are just people, but me? I’m a magic pill on legs. Doesn’t matter if I never lift a fucking finger in my life, even to pick my nose. Like Frodo Baggins or Haile Selassie, my very existence has a higher purpose: to end the racial problem by erasing it.

This is just the pseudo-scientific leading edge of an idea that’s been around for decades, an idea that wets the panties of every American who’s ever felt helpless about being privileged. It’s the dream of future racelessness. If we all shut up and stopped “Balkanizing” into our little identity groups, we could start fucking our way into a dark beige future. My parents got a head start, and once I marry a black/latino/arab, my kid will be a united nations of one. Won’t you join us? It’s much, much easier than getting a handle on racial issues now. In fact, if you contribute to multiraciality (or even just wish along with us) you don’t actually have to ever wonder if you might be racist, too, or change your lifestyle, ideas, attitudes and behaviors. In fact, if your kid is half black/asian/indian/latino/arab/brownish-something, you’re officially not white anymore.

If you think I’m getting hysterical over a single, random article, have a look through the Interracial Voice website . Although it has all the trappings of the irrelevant fringe, IV is a nexus for this kind of thinking. Proponents of dark beige crash and proselytize every multiracial discussion group on the internet. They muscle their way to a quote whenever the press discovers people are intermarrying. They confirm and comfort the confused and race-hostile. And their racelessness-now agenda, spokes-assed by Ward Connerly, not only biliously opposes all affirmative action, but opposes any collection of racial data whatsoever, including data on whom the police are arresting, or on who is getting which diseases. Yeah, folks, this is the logical extension of wanting race to just go away.

Racism is not bad people thinking bad things about people of a different skin color. Racism is attitude, speech and action motivated by discomfort with racial and ethnic difference. This discomfort can be expressed by lynching black men, or holding Arab Americans at Guantanamo Bay without trial, or crossing the street to avoid a group of baggy-trousered Latino teenagers, or consistently interrupting an Asian colleague at staff meetings. But that discomfort can also be expressed through what I call the “thank you ma’am body slam", a tactic involving praising an ethnic culture for stereotypical virtues attributed to it, and then restricting that culture to behaving only according to those virtues. An example is the white reverence for Native American cultures (yeah, all of ‘em) combined with lamenting their death. Of course, many of the lamented cultures (Cherokee, Sioux, Navajo, etc.) are actually still alive and reasonably well, but they are adapted to the modern world in a way that is uincomfortably complex. In this case, American Indians are restricted to being dead, which leaves not a lot of play room for live Indians, much less ones who drive cars, go to school, and vote. Another example is the “model minority” myth associated with Asian Americans, who are praised for academic achievement, while on the one hand reviled for the unfair competition they offer to whites and on the other reviled as failures if they deviate from the script.

The glorious multiracial future is another one of these body slams hidden behind a welcoming smile. Multiracials are convincing evidence not that the races can have unprotected sex for five minutes, but rather that the races can meld winningly into one race, the human race. So multiracials are approved and welcome. But multiracials don’t actually exist in the present. We are the future and our place is there. We’re sort of like the anti-Indians: the only good multiracial is an unborn multiracial. Our contemporary pettinesses, neuroses, yeast infections and bad hair days are cognitively dissonant. Our desire to be Chinese when with Chinese people, and be black when it’s appropriate, and speak Spanish with our Mexican friends, is a betrayal of the future we represent. Our anger at our parents preparing us to be white, and at society for treating us as anything but, is childish and racist. The raceless future only works if multiracials neglect to carry race with them into the future. But our very definition is racial. Damned if you do, stupid if you don’t.

I’m constantly asked, angrily, why positive stereotypes are so problematic for me, why people finding hope in multiraciality has to be bad. It’s because, as I said above, all racial/ethnic stereotypes and fantasies are motivated by discomfort with racial/ethnic difference. The stereotype/fantasy is an attempt to control the uncontrollable, to understand that which you can’t understand. The dark beige future dream destroys discomfort with race by destroying race itself. It doesn’t deal with the discomfort, it attempts to destroy the source of the discomfort. And perhaps this may be possible. Perhaps what we understand as “race” now will be gone in a few generations. But cultural difference won’t be, nor should it be. If it’s not racial difference, it’s ethnic difference. If it’s not ethnic difference, it’s religious/culture clash. If it’s none of these, it’s class difference. There will always be difference, and people will always be uncomfortable with it.

If someone is culturally, ethnically, or even just physically different, then they’re just different. Period. You can’t control it, you can’t change it, and you can’t wish it away. The only right, good, decent, just and adequate response to discomfort with difference is tolerance of your own discomfort. Yep, that’s right: learn to deal. You’re hardwired to be uncomfortable with people unlike you and things you can’t understand. That’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with that. But just deal with it, okay? Stop categorizing, preaching, interrogating, prescribing, praising, revering, approving, suggesting, explaining, accounting for, or being so goddamned understanding. Stop trying to make yourself less uncomfortable at the expense of other people. Take a deep breath, hunker down, and deal.

This week’s Carnival of the Feminists, hosted by Lauren at Feministe, is particularly huge and shiny. The focus is on feminism and pop culture in the recent blogosphere.

I noticed there’s a big section full of links to what feminists are saying about sexism in the comics industry. The “media” and “movies” categories are also especially interesting, with speculations on what the movie “Lady of the Rings” would be like - and would it be popular? There’s analysis of “Bond girls vs. Bond women” from DED. And in the Television category, Blakedemic discusses the L-word - and Charlie’s othermag post on Veronica Mars and Dr. Who is mentioned.

The blog-carnival model is very interesting - it’s really a new way of creating a magazine. I wonder how it will shake down - what will that look like a few years from now?

Click here for the fake-umentary, or “fuckyoumentary", if you will, of the Negro Space Program, or NASSA, which reached the moon a full three years before NASA did.

Thanks to Nalo Hopkinson for the heads up!

Do you think James Frey’s career is over?

“This I believe: If Hollywood has taken a groundbreaking, universally acclaimed, multicultural novel that has been in print for over thirty years and turned it into a white-boy romp, that is a news story.”

“They reminded me that nothing changes until the culture changes. They reminded me that it is a mistake to assume the majority is even paying attention or aware of whatever it is upsetting me, let alone interested or motivated enough to do something about it.”

Link.

The New York Times‘ Style section has an article today about indigos. Indigos

share traits like high I.Q., acute intuition, self-confidence, resistance to authority and disruptive tendencies, which are often diagnosed as attention-deficit disorder, known as A.D.D., or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D.

San Diego parapsychologist, Nancy Ann Tappe, who noticed the emergence of children with an indigo aura, a vibrational color she had never seen before. This color, she reasoned, coincided with a new consciousness.

I’m all for alternative therapies, methods of making children with behavioral problems, kids who struggle with school or authority or other kids, more confident, feel special, believe in magical or numinous selves. But, as acknowledged in the article, it’s important not to diffuse a child’s obstacles entirely into mysticism. It’s important to remember, whether learning-difference (LD) kids are helped either by ‘conventional’ psychology or psychiatry, or by more ‘unconventional’ approaches, there is no magic bullet. Calling a child indigo, or psychic, or brilliant, or challenged–that is, the labels one affixes to a child–never excuse one from being sensitive to that child’s needs or wants, and should never obscure what’s in that child’s best interests.

In other words, ‘othering’ a child is no excuse for not confronting his or her complexities. Differences should certainly be celebrated, and I’m not peddling normalization or homogenization, but exoticization is not a satisfactory answer to deviance.

Suzette Haden Elgin wrote a long post today about one way abortion is seen in Japan. When she read that Japanese women visit shrines to make offerings to their aborted and miscarried fetuses, she got on the phone and wrote letters to ask for more information:

With the help of respondent Fran Stallings (English/Japanese) and her friend and colleague Hiroko Fujita (Japanese/English), I learned that the water babies not only aren’t folklore but are very much a part of contemporary Japanese life. Hiroko Fujita was kind enough to send me a postcard of one of the most famous temples… showing row after endless row of the little statues that Japanese families put there to honor their water babies, both those that result from miscarriage and those that are the result of abortion. Hiroko Fujita sent pages of detailed information, and Dr. Stallings directed me to a book by William R. LeFleur, Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan, where I found a thorough account and discussion.

Hm. Well, it seems yet again I’m posting a rather trivial diversion rather than anything of real rant or substance, like Charlie’s last impassioned blog. Sigh …

Check out the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project. Boing Boing recommends the pink elephants cartoon. (Insert joke here.) The music sounds great, but my aged iBook (which is honestly more an iCrumbling Stone Tablet or an iPapyrus) denied me the “surreal” visuals. This kind of archiving ties into a copyright issue FreeCulture, the national student movement for intellectual property and copyright reform, the EFF, and Public Knowledge banded together to promote last year: that of orphan works.

In related transcendence: the final film on McSweeney’s new Wholphin DVD magazine is an old Iranian cartoon that’ll also make you feel like your head’s been severed from your body, been put on ice skates, thrown a flawless triple axel, unlaced the skates, and been calmly replaced on your neck like nothing’s happened.

Columnist Greg Palast has this to say about Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” Act testing:

Under No Child Left, if enough kids flunk the tests, their school is marked a failure and its students win the right, under the law, to transfer to any successful school in their district. You can’t provide more opportunity than that. But they don’t provide it, the law promises it, without a single penny to make it happen. In New York in 2004, a third of a million students earned the right to transfer to better schools – in which there were only 8,000 places open.

You see, Palast looked at one of the tests and the first two questions are about tennis. The first questions expects the kids to know, without being told, what “doubles” games are. The second question wants to find out if they know what a “tennis club” is. These are inner-city third-graders, people!

Someone has to care for the privileged. No society can have winners without lots and lots of losers. And so we have No Child Left Behind – to provide the new worker drones that will clean the toilets at the Yale Alumni Club, punch the cash registers color-coded for illiterates, and pamper the winner-class on the higher floors of the new economic order.

Class war dismissed.

A few weeks ago, the SF Chronicle had an interview with Denaë Doyle, the “femininity coach” who helps genetic males pass as women. Doyle was in the news because she helped Felicity Huffman prepare for the role of a tranny in TransAmerica. I haven’t seen the film yet, so I have no idea whether Huffman did a good (or respectful) job of playing a TS.

But Doyle sounds like a jerk. I have to admit I’m skeptical of the whole industry of genetic females who teach transwomen the mysteries that are encoded in their genome. Most women have no clue what it takes to learn womanhood as an adult, and it’s much better to ask (or hire) another tranny to teach you than a “genetic girl.” Plus it makes me sad to think of transwomen training themselves to embody female stereotypes and perpetuate ossified gender roles.

But Doyle is also a devotee of the Michael Bailey school of gender studies. Bailey, for those who missed it, was the guy who “proved” all bisexual men were really gay by putting a blood-pressure cuff on their genitalia while they watched porn. He also wrote The Man Who Would Be Queen, which argued that transsexuals were really gay men suffering from “autogynephilia,” which basically translates to thinking it’s sexy to be a woman.

Doyle says she won’t work with trannies who suffer (?!) from autogynephilia, meaning transwomen who look in the mirror and think they look hot. For some reason, it’s okay for genetic females to enjoy dolling themselves up and looking sexy, but when a tranny enjoys it, it’s sick sick sick!

So Doyle won’t work with anyone who wants to dress naughty or sexy, in case they might be enjoying it. “If they’re going to walk around looking trampy, that’s not being a woman,” says Doyle of the would-be clients she turns away. “I don’t agree with that. That’s not being transsexual. I don’t think a true woman would want to degrade women.”

Presumably, in her spare time, she goes out to the mall and tells all the genetic women in short skirts and heels that they’re degrading women. Or maybe she hangs around nightclubs and yells at all the women-haters with two “X” chromosomes.

In almost the same breath, Doyle says being sexy is hard work, and you’re not a real woman if you don’t wear a corset and five inch heels. And she says TSs who wear T-shirts and jeans are really guys who aren’t trying. WTF? What does this woman want?

One final thought is that trannies can’t win. If we dress like frumpy housewives, we get told off by people like Dan Savage, who lambasted TSs of trying to look as dowdy as possible. If we dress the way many women dress when they want to go out and paint the town, we’re evil bitches.

The New York Times frets and frazzles over the identity of writer JT Leroy today. Ah, the spectre! The spectacle! The humanity! The mystery!

Does it matter?

A poster on SuicideGirls.com writes,

I know nothing of JT Leroy or any of the events/stories surrounding this person, but something like this amuses me because of our society’s obsession with identity, and how it has to be concrete. If something about that changes, i.e. name, gender/sex, looks, etc., then everyone spazzes about it.

See the New York Metro article, one in the Village Voice, and another in the Guardian.

Aside from crossing elevated ankles in delight at Leroy’s successful public boggling (however fleeting) and concurring with the Suicide Girls poster, there is one more question that Leroy’s non-identity or anti-identity or quasidentity raises: that of journalistic integrity and authorship, specifically at the Times.

Enjoy the hubbub. Really, how often do we jump and shriek for (or at) authors? How often do they outrage or perplex or confound us? Nothing like a category-jumping, fame-humping, gaze-ducking, faceless body putting pen to paper to kick up the literary dust.

A leetle bouquet of fierceness for your new year:

90’s boom-era irony hits Chinese teenagerhood and is transformed for the bettah. (My fave is the guy in the background who doesn’t move a muscle, jes’ keeps surfin’, throughout the proceedings.

In the Drivetime video blog Ravi Jain records a sort-of-weekly talk show taking place in the interior of his car as he drives to work. He talks to his wife. She disappears. He picks up reasonably random people and interviews them. Stuff happens, or more commonly, not. Sublimely boring! Boringly bizarre! Bizarrely mundane! How can I make clear how fascinating such dailyness is?

A drug you should know about.

In other news, awareness of one’s own idiocy begins to strike the obnoxious males of the species. What’s next, fashion magazines resolving to photoshop flaws in?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer had such a huge impact on the popular consciousness, or at least on the people who obsess about television shows, that we’re still seeing ripple effects a few years after it vanished.

Two shows in particular seem very consciously to be imitating Buffy: Veronica Mars and the new Doctor Who. They both have the perky blonde protagonist, and in the case of Doctor Who’s Rose Tyler, she’s much more the show’s protagonist than, say, Jo Grant ever was. But more subtly, they also have some form of the Buffy/Giles relationship, between Veronica and her dad, or between Rose and the Doctor.

The problem is, to duplicate Buffy, you need to give your protagonist super powers. And that requires some thought on the part of the would-be imitators. The ways the shows’ creators deal with this issue say a lot about how they approach gender roles.

Veronica Mars has two super powers, one good and one not so much. Her good super power is her ability to make startlingly clever deductions and see through all sorts of subterfuge, like when she realizes who stole the money from a poker game simply based on all the little details that people drop in. Her not-so-great super power is when she uses her perky blonde wiles to seduce people into doing what she wants. To be fair, she doesn’t usually rely on this, and to some extent it’s just simple social engineering – we see her non-blonde dad doing the exact same thing on a few occasions, with equally good results. But it’s strongly implied a few times that Veronica gets her way because she’s young and cute.

As for Rose Tyler, she has two super powers too, but they’re only valuable because the scripts bend over backwards to make them so. Her first super power is stating the obvious. For example, in The Long Game she notices that it’s hot inside the space station, and this is held up as a fantastic example of why she’s such a brilliant observer. She cuts right through all the nonsense and notices that it’s hot. There are a few other examples of Rose making Harry Sullivan-ish statements and being praised to the skies for them. Rose’s other super power is best described as “feminine intuition.” Occasionally she makes a leap beyond reasoning, based on incredibly sketchy evidence, and turns out to be right. The biggest example of this is the end of Season One, where she “figures out” the meaning of the “Bad Wolf” message that’s been following her and the Doctor around. The resulting sequence, in which Rose gets actual, but completely improbable, super powers for about five minutes, is one of the few really cringe-worthy bits of the new show.

So, to sum up: Veronica Mars does a reasonably good job of making its protagonist a plausible Buffy substitute. The new Who, not so much. I also really like the relationship between Veronica and her dad, who genuinely seem to like and respect each other. I can’t remember seeing anything quite like it on television.

Oh, and one last point about why Mars is better than Who. Veronica lives in the town of Neptune, CA, where we’re explicitly told that class warfare is raging, in the first episode. The entire show is about class, and Veronica is torn between the super-rich ‘09ers and the poor people whose parents serve them. Meanwhile, Christopher Eccleston goes out of his way to play up his working class accent, but there’s no discussion of the fact that the Doctor is a “Time Lord,” and in some sense the “social better” of everyone he encounters. Nor has the Who done any examinations of post-colonialism, the way the original show routinely did. So there you have it. Watch Veronica Mars. That is all.

Last night I settled back into a high-padded seat with a secret dinner stashed away neath my feet to watch Woody Allen’s new film “Match Point.” I’d browsed a few reviews on NPR and Slate, inhaling the critics’ sighs of relief that the lost, haplessly circling Allen had come up with something fine, if not almost good, for their peep-gaping qualitystarved mouths.

The movie was good. Loath as I am to repeat the phrase “seventy years young,” as one glee-seized critic called Allen due to the movie’s adequacy, it is, um, inspiring that papa Woody has been able to reinvent himself, brave enough to seek new territory and fresh voices, this ‘late in the game.’ And, between Jonathan Rhys-Meyers’ chronically (heh heh) bloodshot eyes, Scarlett Johansson’s … uh, everything?, Matthew Goode, a taller, less melancholic, less wry Hugh Grant-ish faced hubba-hubba, and Emily Mortimer, wren-haired but still (wink) lovely and amazing, the cast’s unbland good looks and sexual tensions (between Rhys-Meyers and pretty much everyone else) and all the stung-up lips carry a thrill of fantasy into which one can retreat when the thrill onscreen wanes.

“Match Point” began with a discussion of luck, and the protagonist opines throughout that luck, above all, shapes one’s life. Always timely, of course, but a quick glance at the headlines–ice rinks collapsing, mines exploding, the very ground flooding, sliding, and burying–prove its validity and relevance.

“Match Point” bears curious resemblance to Allen’s work in the ’70s (I can’t speak for many of his films, especially the more dramatic or recent): flirting with, acknowledging, but ultimately expressing ambivalence about, morality. There is little, if any, ‘karma’, or justice. Infidelity and murder are, in this film and others, transgressive, but not conventionally. Not entirely anarchic, there remains a sense of fate that, though tempted, has yet to call back. It occurred to me that the theme so recurs in Allen’s work because it echoes his existence: adultery, semi-incest, and near-pedophilia are all part of the life to which he’s committed.

Allen doesn’t suggest, through this movie or otherwise, that betrayal or murder is good or right, that an ideal world is a moral vacuum, that convention is patently bad or wrong. He uses a subtler, more ambiguous language. His canon’s answers to questions of responsibility, right and wrong, and justice vary. “Match Point” isn’t nihilistic; it’s ambivalent. Let us hold hands and praise the subversive, in art or in life. (Especially when it yields such fodder for fantasy.)

Heads up:

The UK’s Bulb magazine “is Britain’s first and only global issues magazine aimed at and largely written by young people.” The website has resources for young people to inform themselves and take action. I think they’re also looking for writers and designers from around the world, who are under 23 y/o. Shoot ‘em an email. By the way, they were just nominated for an Utne Reader Independent Press Award.

The Bulb links page also turned me on to another Brit product: the organization Ethical Consumer Research Association, which lists “the social and environmental records of the companies behind the brand names” on its website and publishes the magazine Ethical Consumer.

Yay ethics!

In line with Americans’ desperation for novelty, we bring you a new year every 365 days. This year’s edition arrived today, ordered via internet, as is appropriate for the new millenium. It’s bright and shiny and just out of the package, as are the styrofoam peanuts it was packed in. So unused! So many possibilities! A blank book, a blank slate. Even if you did not set your last year’s affairs in order before you threw the last year out, you’re still probably feeling right now as if you have a new lease on said affairs – unless you’re too hung over to feel much of anything. What is it about the turn of a day, an hour, a second, that gives you new energy and hope?

But then, how many days until the shine wears off? How many weeks until the new year becomes the current year, is broken, and we toss it into a closet with a sigh, waiting for the next opportunity to get a new new one? Besides, what was wrong with the old year? Was it broken so badly we couldn’t fix it? Couldn’t we have lived on with the old year for … well, another year before needing to replace it?

Rhetorical questions, all. Actually, the above preamble is an excuse for me to put forth a resolutions list. Note: this is not my real resolutions list, or, at least, it’s real and it’s a resolutions list, and it’s mine, but this is not (necessarily) the list with which I will be proceeding this year, the list which I will use to measure accomplishments this year, necessarily (but who knows; the year is still new; see above.)

First, a quick refusalon of resolutions (perhaps real) from the old, not necessarily worn out yet year, which did not get fulfilled:
1. overthrow the evil regime (you know which one I mean, but I don’t wanna get OtherBlog in trouble from surveillance scannerbots or whatever they’re called and then get my own house il/legally wiretapped.)
2. get laid finally so that total strangers who disagree with my political blog posts can stop telling me to get said laid (how do they know what’s going on in my sex life, anyway? How could they possibly know? *rends hair*.)
3. have those children my mom keeps hinting about in bizarre and twisted ways (this year she offered me the leather firewood carrier she and my father got as a Christmas gift, saying, “You can put the baby in this when you have one.")
4. quit coffee. (Yeah, I can’t remember why, either.)
5. learn to grow facial hair by pushing out from inside.
6. write prose of such beauty it makes the very pixels weep.
7. … um …

And now, to this year’s to do list. Brand. Shiny. New:
1. learn to make a website.
2. make a website.
3. write the great American novel.
4. overthrow the evil regime.
5. make puke green the new black. I think it’s puke green’s turn.
6. become a trendsetter (not necessarily in that order.)
7. stop getting laid so much so I can be more controversial on the web.
8. meet Bono and tell him he’s making the world a better place.
9. read boing boing every day without fail.
10. stop hating on Christian fundamentalists.

Yeah, yeah, Happy New Year to you too.

As the recording industry seems to be clamping down ever harder on music copyrights, the venues through which the public can access music—free of charge or by unsigned artists—appear to be proliferating at like intensity.

The Audio Mill is a work in progress, but cut it some slack: its aim—to amplify unsigned and under-the-radar voices for free—is noble and democratic. The opportunities for self-promotion on the internet do, of course, abound, but websites devoted to communalizing the struggle to be heard and those that maximize exposure by organizing artists make it easier to de-squelch the underground and take even a mote of power away from the big guys.

Pandora.com is a sonic cynosure, a sort of septic tank in which music is broken down and analyzed according to attributes, or “genes.” Type in one artist or song, and the site creates a ‘radio station’ whose playlist is not based on album, artist, sales, or genre, but syncope or structure or use of snare drum. Pandora’s project deconstructs music categories in the interest of revealing how counter-intuitively or anachronistically similar music is; it annuls bias against one genre or artist, focusing not on difference but similarity, assuming trans-sonically shared experience, assuming the categories record shops or radio stations use, and that we do as habit or convenience, can sometimes obscure something profoundly relevant or shared.

To an other new year!

Getting the Truth Out is a protest to sites like Getting the Voice Out. “Kim” of Getting the Truth Out is deeply critical of how autism organizations oppress autistic people. Go through the entire “Truth” site - it’s very worth it, challenging and interesting.

Cal Montgomery has a long explanation of the context and background of this site and the discussion between disabled people and the people who advocate for them or who fundraise by using them, who claim to speak for them and who frame their images and stories.

I came upon the Museum of Obscure Patents today. Particular favorites include the ass bra, the Homer-perfect beerbrella, and the termite fart detector. (Embarrassingly, I have a friend who owns something similar to the electroshock game of fun; his toy shocks whichever player has the slowest response time to a stimulus. I was afraid of it.)

The best part of the site isn’t the venting of obscurity or idiosyncrasy that, once quirky and hilarious and sincere, has just become ho-hum (mostly through Weird U.S. and the like), but the seemingly inadvertent anal fixation the staid-looking, smarmy-smiling attorney has. I mean, this guy just can’t get enough of toilet seats, butt cheeks, and feces. It’s a coprophilic frenzy over at IPWatchdog.

(other sidenote: see Jason Schultz’s “Best. Inventions. Ever.” in issue 8 for affirmation and more)

Twisty Faster has a super-witty post up at “I Blame the Patriarchy” about women in sports: Lady Bloodlusting Mercenaries. First she works up a head of steam… “It’s no newsflash that nobody watches women’s sports on TV unless the “sport” involves premenstrual nymphet children in sparkle makeup and crack-crawler leotards. But that’s not even what I’m complaining about today.” She then mocks women’s basketball teams that have names like “The Lady Norsemen”. It’s not just a casual mocking - it’s thorough and lengthy… no sports team could survive its eagle-eyed scrutiny!

I love her list of names for men’s sport teams:

The Virgin Dude Brides
The Raped Slavewomen
The Straight Guy Airbrushed Supermodels
The Obedient Male Secretaries
The Well-Hung Trophy Wives
The Pussywhipped Suffragettes
The Gentleman Manicurists

To follow up on Annalee’s intersex deer story several days ago: several sources have reported the presence of intersex fish from the East coast to the West, and rivers in between. River fish downstream from waste treatment plants in Colorado have manifested both male and female characteristics; the AP has reported ovulating men-fish in Maryland’s Potomac River, and the same off Southern California’s coast. The presence of egg-producing male English sole and hornyhead turbot in the Pacific is noteworthy, as all previous ambi-fish had been freshwater, not salt.

In a report juicily titled “Evidence of a high percentage of intersex in the Mediterranean swordfish” published in March 2003’s equally enticing Marine Pollution Bulletin, G. De Metrio and a slew of white-coated cohorts observed 25% of wild swordfish “macroscopically classified as males, [which] showed the presence of female germ cells within the testes.” (And – you were dying to know – they also found grouped previtellogenic oocytes and single scattered previtellogenic oocytes in some of the fish.) In short, the male swordfish were ovulating.

The cause of this epicene epidemic?

Nearly a billion gallons of treated sewage are released into the Pacific Ocean every day through three underwater pipelines off Huntington Beach, Playa del Rey and Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Although the wastewater is filtered, it still contains contaminants that settle onto the ocean floor.

Many think that fish exposed to treated sewage from human waste are being steadily exposed to rising levels of endocrine disruptors and estrogens (that’s right, honey, your birth control), which are causing the ‘mutations’ in the male marine population.
So make that kingfish a queen, change the alewife to a husband, amberjack becomes amberjane, and turn that roosterfish into a hen. By land and by sea, the intersex animal community is growing, increasingly problematizing convention, and making scientists ask the same questions about gender categories that we all should be.

yearrrarrgghe!

that sound accompanies the cuteness overload face, with which i’m sure you’re all familiar.

this is by way of a merry christmas gift (YES! MERRY CHRISTMAS! I SAID IT!) to everybody, or a seasonal gift, depending. beware and take in small doses.

thanks to ana machado’s apparently new blog for this tip.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

This is just damn weird: Crypto Cat’s life story.

When I was three, I lived next to a Navajo reservation in Arizona with my parents who were school teachers on the reservation. I learned a lot about the customs and culture of the Navajo Indians from my babysitter who was an elderly Navajo woman. She even taught me how to speak the native Navajo language - pretty cool huh?

I notice that Crypto actually taught Navajo to some of the Navajo kids at their school. Because Crypto learned it from the babysitter and stuff! Wow! And the very multicultural home-schooled hippie, Rosetta Stone… WTF with the “carpe diem” and the origami?

How can anyone not make fun of this site! Heh heh! The internet is totally KEWL!

It screams out for an over the top parody… any cartoonists out there want to draw something hilarious?

What you might not know is that modern foreign language study and comparative literature was all funded heavily after WWII by the defense department. Multiculturalism is all about going to spy school! Crypto Cat fits right in.

I’m flashing back to the Mickey Mouse comic books I had in the 70s all about the wonders of nuclear energy… I wish I had them; they were extremely strange.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has an article today about a confused hunter in Iowa who shot what he thought was a male deer with a “big rack,” i.e., super huge antlers – but discovered, while he was skinning it, that it was “missing some plumbing.” He called a state biologist, who confirmed that the hunter had killed a doe with a rack “big even for a buck.” (Generally antlers are a secondary sex characteristic of male deer.) I couldn’t help but have a moment of anthropomorphism, imagining this big, butch deer who made all the does swoon with her impressive antlers. Further proof that there are genderqueer creatures throughout the animal kingdom! Or, at least, there are intersexed creatures, even if they don’t have a concept of gender.

According to the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA), an estimated 1 in 1500 to 1 in 2000 babies are born with some kind of intersex condition, whether that’s having genitals that are slightly ambiguous (a small penis; a large clitoris) or having an extra X chromosome. Humans who are born intersex are often subjected to freaky therapies that might involve things like enforced hormone regimens or elaborate surgeries to “regularize” their genitals. Luckily, groups like ISNA are working to stop doctors from doing stupid crap like this.

I wonder if that doe with the big rack liked to make it with other female deer, or if she had boyfriends who liked girls with a little something extra? Now that she’s dead I guess we’ll never know. Isn’t hunting science grand?

Arrrgggghhhh!

Okay, now that everyone is talking about Memoirs of a Geisha, the mispronunciations of Chinese names are once again flying. (How wrong is it that a movie called “Memoirs of a Geisha” will cause mispronunciation of Chinese names?) So if you give a shit, here’s how you pronounce Zhang Ziyi:

Zhang = Jaaaahhhhng
(or close enuff. If you want to be correct, say the “j"with your teeth clenched and the tip of your tongue curled up and over the back of your tongue, almost touching the roof of your mouth. … Right, just say “Jahng” then.)

Zi = Dz
(yeah, just say it. Sound like a drop of water falling on a hot pan, or a radio station you flip past too quickly? Then you’re saying it right. Dont’ try for vowels.)

Yi = Yee
(pretty much, except short, not drawn out.)

Zhang Ziyi = Jahng Dz Yee
(I don’t know the tones, but if you can say the tones correctly, you don’t need this guide.)

Also, just so’s you know, “Zhang” is her last, or family name, which goes first if you want to be culturally correct, and last if you want to westernize it. Once more, she’s “Zhang Ziyi” in Chinese and “Ziyi Zhang” in English.

And while we’re at it, “Beijing” is not pronounced “Bay zhing", all Fraaaanch ‘n’ shit. Chinese “Js” are exactly the same as English “Js” and completely unlike Frrrraaaaanch “Js”. It’s “Bay Jing", like the “J” in “Jackoff”.

I’m so glad that’s all off my chest. I’d tell you how to pronounce “Gong Li” but you’d probably sprain your tongues and the “o” sound doesn’t appear in English anyway.

One of my favorite bitch-topics (which I may yet expand upon in the future – the subject is so rich) is the inordinate amount of time American fiction writers spend describing the complexity that is the white American middle-class to itself. If we called a moratorium on this genre (and yeah, it is a genre, even though the genre name is “literary fiction") would the white American middle class suddenly become less complex? I would say not. I think every extant and imaginary detail of sub-, ex-, and jes’ plain urban professional life, without the added complexity of race, gender or physical otherness, has been limned right through the paper and into the table top. It’s thoroughly carved. Let it go, already, people!

On the other hand, aside from all the lovely tenured MFAs and department admin types (hi, Barbara! you rock!) who would lose their jobs, not to mention the sector of our economy that would collapse as a result, the terrifying question remains: what would they write about now?

Arthur Golden gave us a little taste of an answer several years ago with his novel Memoirs of a Geisha. The movie has just come out, its characters embodied, I might add, entirely by Chinese actors (who, even if the readers of literary fiction might not realize it, do not look the same as Japanese.) I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I did read the book back then, and engaged in a lot of discussion within the Asian American community about:

1. whether or not Golden had a right to write such a book
2. was this evidence of fetish or a genuine effort to work through the fetish to the truth at its source
3. what the fuck anyway?

It may surprise you to know that I came down on the side of:

1. yes he absolutely had a right to write that book, coupled with an absolute responsibility to
2. do his damned research, and work heavily through his own obvious fetish to create a real world and
3. yeah he’s a fetishist but at least he’s doing something about it.

I’ll go to the wall for a writer’s right to investigate or invent, through fiction, any world s/he chooses. But that right, that privilege, confers a responsibility to really do the damn work, do your research, work on the psychology of the characters until your brain breaks, imagine and refine and imagine and refine until you’re two seconds away from shooting yourself. Then go and do whatever the fuck you want and more power to ya, especially if you’re using your fiction to examine a culture unfamiliar to you (see the above first paragraph.)

(by the way, for any writers who wanna know how to do this “right", I refer to you my friend Nisi Shawl’s excellent essay “Transracial Writing for the Sincere”.)

The point of writing outside your own particularly narrow box isn’t to represent the folks you’re writing about, but rather to give yourself a new perspective on … well, your own narrow box. Get outside, walk around, smell the lotus blossoms, ya know? Then come back and show us how our way of life isn’t the only, nor even the best one. Writing into another existing culture is one way to do that, and it’s an excellent way, as long as you’re clear on the fact that you’re still writing from – and about – a point of view that is rooted in your place and your time. (The other way to do it is to go the science fiction/fantasy route and invent a new culture that is better, or worse, or just different from yours. Either way.)

The problematic thing about Golden’s book is that while writing into and through the western stereotypes of geishas, he’s also adding to that fetish mythology, rounding it out, making it more real. He isn’t really challenging that fetish mythology so much as feeding it with some of the grittiness and psychological structure that today’s sophisticated readers demand from all of their stories, including fairy tales and real mythology, which aren’t supposed to be complex. I honor the attempt, but as I said above, the attempt is really about an extended method of cultural self-reflection. When the attempt is made in the direction of a time-honored fetish-object, the “truth” will be further obscured by both the self-reflection inherent in such a project, and the unintended commentary on one’s own culture made by the very selection and pursuit of the “truth” behind a fetish-object. In other words, Golden’s representation of geisha life is irrevocably tainted by western notions of identity, ambition, desire, self-determination, and individual rights. Golden’s own attitude towards Asia and the eastern other is indicted by his obsession with that easy fascination, the sexy female geisha. Golden’s readers are caught red-handed in sharing that easy fascination, to the detriment of the literally thousands of projects currently in print about all aspects of Asian culture and the encounter between (white) American culture and Asian cultures.

The whole mess results in, and encourages, the flattening of notions of Asian cultures. You seek out “Memoirs” not because you’re interested in Japanese culture, but because you’re interested in geishas. You’re presented with a story structured in a western manner, told with western attention to psychology and internal processes. You are comfortable with this story and what you “learn” from it. You go away again, thinking that you have a handle on something intrinsically Asian. This effect is also enhanced by the sorts of diversity awareness training most white, middle-class Americans are subject to. These trainings tend to reduce cultures to a set of values, which you are then expected to apply to encounters: Asians are reticent and passive in confrontations, therefore, do not confront Asians agressively. Or whatever the flavor is this week. It doesn’t actually help you when you’re conflicting with your Vietnamese American co-worker, or when you’re touristing in Japan.

Or, for that matter, when you’re trying to decide whether or not you should fund stem cell research. (*shriek of hastily shifted gears*) Last week’s New Scientist magazine (out of the UK) has this op-ed piece on Woo Suk Hwang, the South Korean stem-cell researcher who admitted to unethical practices in his research last month. Apparently Hwang had accepted eggs donated by two of his assistants – an ethical taboo “designed to prevent vulnerable individuals from being coerced.”

In Europe and North America, where an individual’s rights carry enormous weight, Hwang’s failure to protect his female subordinates is seen as a serious breach. But in Asian societies rooted in Confucian traditions, greater store is set by loyalty and striving for the common good. From this perspective, the junior scientists who donated their eggs are not victims but heroines. This may help explain why South Koreans are now rallying behind Hwang, with hundreds of women pledging to donate eggs for his research. Meanwhile, the TV station that exposed Hwang’s lies faces public opprobrium.

Again, the attempt is honorable, but the flattening of this situation into a simple story of heroism or dirty-dealing – one or the other – is ridiculous. Human interaction and gender power dynamics are just as complex in a Korean research lab as they are in an American one. A Korean woman can be both coercied into and valorized for an action, simultaneously. And more. Once again, and this time not in fiction, the story reflects what we want to know and what we think about ourselves – not what really happened in Hwang’s lab, nor what the ethical dangers of this type of research comprise. I have no moral to wrap this up with, only one of those frustrating childish taunts: you think you know but you don’t! Is that too scary to proceed with?

I am stunned by the amazing crocheted vulva coin purses, tampon holders, earmuffs, kleenex cozies, and condom packs over here at Crochet My Crotch.

In other vadgacious news… My friends Kevin and Becky pointed out this Wikipedia article on some “cervical cancer” cells from 1951 that are believed to be a newly devolved organism:

In biological and medical research, a HeLa cell is a cell which is
derived from cervical cancer cells taken from a woman named Henrietta
Lacks, who died from the cancer in 1951, and circulated (without Lacks’
knowledge or permission) by George Gey. These cells are treated as
cancer cells, being they are believed to have stemmed from Ms. Lacks’
cervical cancer, but a debate still continues on the classification of
these cells.

…

HeLa cells are perhaps an example of devolution, in which a complex
multicellular organism has devolved into a simple, self-replicating,
single-cell organism. It may also represent the first documented
creation of a new species. As such HeLa cells were given the name
Helacyton gartleri.

Okay that’s stupid but I couldn’t help it….

But the neat thing is that the mutant cervical/hpv cells from 1951 are immortal. It would be very strange if an immortality drug was invented not from dandelions but from someone’s bad pap smear and genital warts. Wow. “Unwitting heroine of modern medical science"… and this one sentence that unfortunately sticks in my head:

It has been estimated that the total mass of HeLa cells today far exceeds that of the rest of Henrietta Lacks’ body.

Sometimes I really love technology!

My friend Tisa Bryant caught me on Friendster IM yesterday, the first time I’d been on Friendster in, like, three months. Friendster did then and does now, indeed, suck. So we took the show over to iChat and hooked up the voice chat and basically we caught up long distance for free for, like, five hours. Welcome to the 21st Century! Sometimes it’s pretty here.

Anyhoo, Miss Tisa is not only hot, and a kickass writer, but she’s also coediting a very cool project over the next five years. The Encyclopedia Project “is a series of five annual literary/arts print publications that will constitute an encyclopedia of and about fiction.” The first volume, which will be out soon, is A-E. A list of luminous names on the website indicates how many exciting people will be contributing to the first volume, under the first five letters of the alphabet and addressing the question “What occurs under the sign of fiction?” Plus, it’s gonna be bound like an encyclopedia! Check it out.

In other ‘pedia news: turns out that Kos at the Daily Kos, according to himself the nation’s top blog or something, has started a political encyclopedia of the US political system called dKosopedia. It was started about a year and a half ago and organized like wikipedia, so you, too, can contribute! And you should. Their “issues” sections are woefully incomplete. There isn’t even a stub article for transgender issues, frex, or for Asian American issues. But it’s there and it has the potential to be a powerful autodidactic tool. Which is something Americans sorely need, indeed.

The FBI crackdown on porn hasn’t just claimed sites with gone-too-far BDSM images and movies, like Max Hardcore and Extreme Associates. A couple of months ago, the FBI apparently raided Red Rose Stories, a text-only erotic story site with few or no images. In other words, the site only included fantasies and only imaginary people could possibly have been harmed in the making of the site. The FBI showed up while the site’s owner was away and seized her computers and most of her diskettes. (This case seems to be reasonably well known inside the adult webmaster community, but I only just heard about it, and haven’t seen it blogged elsewhere.)

To be sure, some of the stories on the site sound reprehensible. According to AVN Online, the site included stories of bestiality and “sex with children.” If there was one area of sexuality that I would support banning even fantasizing about, it would be pedophilia.

But the federal government does not, and should not, be in the business of regulating people’s fantasies, or what people write about them. Sites like Red Rose could simply be the thin end of the wedge – if they can shut down a site for having stories about kids, then they can use that as a precedent to go after transgressive fiction writers, or bloggers who talk honestly about childrearing and their own sexuality.

Luckily, it sounds as though Red Rose has one of the top obscenity lawyers representing it. Here’s hoping they fight this case all the way.

Here’s what everyone’s talking about: Hirshman’s article, “Homeward Bound”.

I can’t weigh in on this right now. But check what Bitch PhD says, and the 300+ comments on there. Quite a lot of people are blogging about this at the moment. It’s a wonderful barometer for the current state of feminism and “What Is To Be Done”. I enjoyed Hirshman’s brutal, bitchy, intelligent article. She really cut through a lot of the crap that’s out there. Bitch PhD takes it even further.

I think part of the solution that Hirshman ignores is that we need to formalize the Momune. We need cooperative or communal structures. Hiring day care, nannies, or “marrying down” all keep a sickening exploitation going strong.

The only thing better than having friends who make art is having friends who make art and are good at it

José Márquez and Ana Machado, known collectively in their music-makin’ life as Pepito have just posted their third album to the iTunes Music Store. It’s called The New World and you can find it here.

I’ll stick my neck out and coin a category: pop-commentronica. That would refer to all of those culturally hybrid smarty-pantses who don’t bother to keep their awareness of the sea of troubles out of their music, but do make it hooky. You know, the folks who can’t stick to one genre, or language, or platform (analogue or digital) for one single minute, and think that performance is an opportunity to be all interdisciplinary and project things and dance around ‘n’ shit. People allergic to message but not vocoders. Don’t know what I mean? Subscribe to their podcast and find out (or go to their website and download sample mp3s.)

If you like it (and you will) buy a song or two, or the whole album and support independent artists.

Your one man marches out like an ant
into a horizon of bleak, orange dust,
into a land where his tongue is dust,

where the planes
and the motives of his home country
soar miles over his head..

What can we do then?
I ask you, with empty hands.
I speak to you, as a woman
who also loves a boy soldier, a boy man.

Maybe at night
we should coax a rebellion

– Ishle Yi Park “Open Letter to the Girls of Soldiers”

Via Lenin’s Tomb, an “angry” and informative and smart blog from Brit Socialist “Lenin", I was pointed to this article by Huibin Amee Chew, called “Why the War Is Sexist (and Why We Can’t Ignore Gender Anymore; Here’s a Start for Organizing)”. Chew points out that women at home and abroad are just as affected by war as men, but their affliction is utterly ignored by the patriarchal military – and the patriarchal press. Here are Chew’s reasons why the war is sexist:

1. Soldiers are not the only – or main – casualties of war. 
2. The economic harms of war for women are exacerbated by patriarchy – both within the U.S. and in Iraq.
3. Militarization intensifies the sexual commodification of women.
4. Militarization helps perpetuate sexual violence, domestic violence, and violence against women – both in the U.S. and Iraq.  
5. Militarization and war decrease women’s control over their reproduction.
6. Militarization and conflict situations result in a restriction of public space for women – impacting their political expression.
7. Occupation will not bring women’s liberation.

For the smartest (or only) gender analysis of the war I’ve ever read, read the rest of the essay here.

*****
Okay … a “start” for organizing. The big question of course is, where do I go to continue organizing? It’s great to have a new way to look at – and hate – the war, but how does this get turned into activism? Cindy Sheehan, as Chew points out in her article, has become a central figure in a new, gendered and family-oriented phase of the “anti-war movement", but if you want to join her, where do you go? What do you do?

For example, Sheehan is associated with “Bring Them Home Now”, which, as their website carefully states, is a “campaign – not an organization”. If you want to join the campaign, you’ll have to organize a group on your own. Of course, the campaign refers you to other military personnel-based anti-war organizations, each of which offers you an obstacle course of email addresses and online donation forms, but little information about where to take your physical body to meet other people and talk about what you can do. Sheehan’s own organization Leave My Child Alone, targets military recruitment on school campuses, but doesn’t seem to address the Iraq War directly. Plus its main component appears to be making a pledge, not actually going somewhere to do something.

As opposed to the war as I’ve been, I’ve done remarkably little to actively protest the war for one very simple reason: I haven’t been able to find an organization that will use me. I have found plenty of organizations, some of them specifically anti-war, and others of a more general political bent (like moveon.org). What they’ve all offered me is the opportunity to give them money and my contact information. Some of them used my info to send me “action alerts", which always consist of online petitions of ambiguous impact. Most did not offer me the opportunity to become part of the organization in a real, impactful way, you know, in a way that allowed me to actually meet people and help decide policy. (And no, MoveOn, trolling your issues lists for hours and rating them is not the same as actually participating in a policy meeting at your local chapter.)

Of course, these days, everything is organized online, to optimize time efficiency and get as many busy people involved as possible. For those of us more hands-on, the new model of physical (as opposed to online or virtual) organizing is the “affinity group”, which is essentially a small “cell” (yeah, like a terrorist cell only without the terrorism) which acts individually in affiliation with, but undirected by, a larger centralized organization – usually a coalition.

This is a terrific idea if FBI penetration is a serious problem, but not so much when it comes to the potentially thousands of people like me who:
1) fall in between the two extremes of “let me sign a petition and then don’t bother me” and “I want to give my entire stock of spare time to the cause”
2) don’t know anyone in an affinity group
3) don’t have the time or inclination to organize their own, and
4) really just want to go somewhere and contribute to a program that’s already underway, and not be fully and entirely responsible for initiating and fulfilling every action they take

The affinity group is intentionally a way of dysorganizing for a specific purpose, but a lot of its effect is simply disorganization. I’m more active and skilled in organizing than most people in this country, but my antiwar energy has been lost during most of this war so far. It still is. In fact, I think that’s why there’s been so damn much blogging about it. If I had a weekly or bimonthly meeting or action to go to, I wouldn’t blog so damn much. And I’d probably be having a bigger impact (correct me if I’m wrong and online petitions are really really important.)

Maybe I’m wrong and selfish, but giving money to organizations whose active organizers appear to be hiding behind websites is not appealing to me, although I do it anyway. I want to meet organizers, in person. I want to talk to them. I want to go to meetings in rooms that get hot from the heat of all the bodies around me. I want to work with people, not click my mouse on the paypal button alone in my room and say to myself: well now! I’ve done my duty! On the other hand, having done a lot of organizing, I know how much work goes into organizing your own group, even a small one. It’s a full time job. I’ll give the war half-time when it’s necessary, but why should every sixth person in the United States who opposes the war spend 40 hours a week organizing their friends? More traditional, centralized organization is easier for The Man to infiltrate, but damn, isn’t it worth it for all the thousands of bodies and minds you’ll be drawing in?

If anyone knows of a more traditional anti-war organization I could join, especially a feminist one, please let me know!

UPDATE*******
Check out this new campaign by the new, ballsier Democratic Party to put up a “shame on you” billboard in the backyard of every Republican who attacks a veteran’s record to score political points. For the first time in years, I feel like giving the donkeys some money. I’ll go hide ’til the feeling goes away. Via Making Light.

I couldn’t sleep last night, and so I started thinking in my sleep of reasons why DC Comics should make Sue Dibny the new Spectre. In my half-awake daze, I thought I’d thought of this idea myself, but actually a couple of people had suggested it before.

The Spectre is the spirit of God’s vengeance on Earth, paired with a human ghost. For years, it was John Corrigan, but he finally moved on at the end of John Ostrander’s Spectre series in the late 1990s. And then it was Hal Jordan, the former Green Lantern, for a little while, but now Hal is alive again and the Spectre is hostless.

Sue Dibny, of course, was the wife of Ralph Dibny, the Elongated Man. (Click the link for scans of one of my favorite comics ever.) She has plenty of reason to want vengeance. She was nearly raped by Doctor Light while she was working with the Justice League. And then Jean Loring, the Atom’s ex, murdered her when she was pregnant by shrinking herself and whacking her in the brain. It would be interesting to see Sue Dibny, who for years was an unofficial member of the Justice League with no super-powers, become more powerful than most of her former colleagues. What if she wanted to rejoin the League? Would they let her?

Contrary to what others have said, I don’t think a Sue Dibny Spectre series would need to be a humor book – I sort of see the concept as being similar to the vengeance demons on Buffy, only without the need for someone to wish for vengeance. Sue could go around righting wrongs and altering the world to suit her sense of justice. And sometimes that would be horrific and gruesome, and sometimes it would be cool and empowering. It wouldn’t hurt if she took a special interest in redressing all the crappy things that happen to women in mainstream comics.

If I were writing a Sue Dibny Spectre comic, I’d start off with a flashback revealing that it was her idea for Ralph to stop wearing a mask and concealing his identity. After all, the main reason Ralph would want to hide his real name would be to protect the super-powerless Sue from his enemies. I picture Sue taking Ralph aside and saying she can look after herself, she’s already helping the Justice League in a zillion ways, and the mask looks silly every time Ralph does that thing with his nose.

The irony being, of course, that Sue didn’t die because Ralph’s identity was known publicly. The Atom’s ex-wife probably would have known who Ralph was even if the public hadn’t. But it would show how cool and brave Sue was.

Oh, and Jean Loring? I wouldn’t have Sue take vengeance against her at all. I’d have Sue be better than that. It might be a constant temptation, something Sue thought about doing, but she’d be above that. She’d be too busy chasing down killers and abusers who hadn’t been punished, and saving people who could still be saved – unlike herself. It would be a cool series. Too bad we’ll probably never see it.

Don’t sell those Hummers yet.

Lenin, over at Lenin’s Tomb, just posted this about American oil companies locking Iraq into 30-year contracts. This is not where the rage comes in. The furthermore is that Iraq pays the US oil companies for doing business with them. We monopolize Iraqi oil, and Iraq will pay us for the privilege.

Arrrrgggggghhhhhhhhh!!!!!

I noticed during a random walk the other day: This explains this. So perfectly! I feel only slightly bad for mocking someone’s possible grief at miscarriage… but seriously, commemorating miscarriage or stillbirth by having a silicone or resin “miracle doll” made from photos of it? That’s insane. Or maybe it’s not insane… maybe it’s… magic. If only I had the patience and an army of student animator-nerd slaves, I’d get some of those Precious Little Ones and make the creepiest stop-motion animation short ever, where they’re all blood-drinking Golden Babies kept alive through careful ritual… Or maybe they’re eating the magic dead babies for breakfast - as you can see in the photo of the apples and mugs (weirdest thing ever.)

Dolls creep me out! My god! I had two miscarriages myself. The first time, I was getting a 2nd ultrasound a couple of weeks after hearing the heartbeat on ultrasound#1, and they were like… “Um… I’m really sorry… there’s no heartbeat this time… and… from how it looks it’s kind of … breaking up in there and has been dead a while. It’s like, there’s some… decomposing parts drifting around.” After I finished begging the ultrasound tech to tell me it was a mistake, through my tears I was basically like, “AAAAAAgh! there’s a dead rotting fetus in there! Get it out of me!” The last thing one would want is a photo-accurate alien-eyed silicone doll of it - maybe in an itty bitty satin body bag with “Jesus loves me, I am a Christian Warrior, and if you have an abortion you go straight to hell” embroidered on it? What … the… fuck? I can’t imagine it!

So it’s kind of cool to imagine the anti-choice nutcases going all blank-eyed at midnight, gathering in the catacombs with their Dead Baby Boutonnieres, chanting as they carry brimming bowls of smoking hot quivering human brains, pouring out libations of coca-cola… perhaps praying for the Day of the We-turus!

I love that word… I just found it
here in the comments to Twisty Faster’s blog, “I Blame the Patriarchy"…

haha! A ‘we-terus’! Dictionary definition:

The communal foetus housing device - owned by the patriarchy and housed within public property commonly known as ‘the female body’.

- Madwoman in the Attic

Let’s just call it PWB, “professoring while black.” It’s the newest crime.

Nationally renowned ethnic studies school San Francisco State University (SFSU) took a huge credibility hit last month when campus police arrested an African American African American studies prof for, wait for it, resisting arrest (and, of course, assault.) Yep, that’s right, campus police. Not the regular, ass-beating kind.

It gets better. The prof, Antwi Akom, had returned to campus just after 11 pm on a school night to retrieve some materials from his office. Yes, his office … you know, in the Ethnic Studies Building. A security guard saw him go into the building and called campus police, who confronted him, according to some reports in the hallway of the building, possibly even in the hallway where his office was, although that could just be a rumor. The police asked him who he was, and he told them. When they demanded identification, according to the police report, Akom pushed past one of the officers and a scuffle “broke out”.

Akom’s own version, as told to friends and colleagues immediately after the incident, is rather different: he says he was approached by a security guard outside the building before he went in, then came out to meet the police officers who handcuffed him before they told him he was being arrested. The “scuffle", according to Akom’s version, was basically the police throwing him on the ground.

Akom had left his children asleep in the back of his car, and had to call a colleague from jail to go get them.

There’s no question here that Akom was stopped and questioned because he was African American. The only question is who started the “scuffle” and why. For perspective, consider this: a year ago a 15-year-old African American boy who was eating lunch with friends on the SFSU campus, was grabbed and slammed to the ground (his head beaten repeatedly against the ground) by campus police, who thought he had been involved in a previous incident. He was found to be innocent. The beautiful irony for me in this one was that he was a student of The June Jordan High School for Equity.

SFSU prez Corrigan has commissioned an external review by none other than former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and former City Attorney Louise H. Renne. For those of you unfamiliar with San Francisco politics, Willie Brown was for years one of the central figures of Northern California’s Democratic party machine. He is known for his charisma, his hats and his corruption. He’s also African American. Involving Willie Brown in this drama is a deliberate bid to heighten the Theater of Justice feel. Naturally, Akom’s lawyer is Matt Gonzalez, the hipster green city supervisor who lost the mayoral race to become Brown’s successor to democrat Gavin Newsom (the gay marriage mayor). What a circus.

Got an opinion on police brutality and the sacred nature of campus space? Voice your opinion to:

Kimberly A. Wible
Chief of Police
Department of Public Safety,
1600 Holloway
San Francisco, CA 94123
phone: (415) 338-7200
fax: (415) 338-1926
email: dps@sfsu.edu

Wow, I always knew our Governator was a slimy asshole, but these excerpts from his Playboy Carnival in Rio video are unbelievable.

Thanks to SFist for the heads up.

Here’s a cool project to honor the great short stories at Scifiction, which after years of the best sf stories new & old, is being discontinued. I wrote to scifi.com and sounded off & suggested they reconsider, and especially that they are dumbasses to abandon the best possible “web content” right when everyone is scrambling to provide content to attract web advertisers for niche markets.

Anyway - the project is for all of us to write up a review, analysis, or appreciation of every story that’s ever been published on there. It might sound extreme - but as I’ve been reading for the Tiptree award, Scifiction stood out so much that I read through a bunch of its archives from past years. There were amazing stories! You know how 90% of everything is crap? Well… a good bit of the other 10% ended up there and almost every story is mind-blowing. It makes the major print magazines look like even more of a bad joke than they already are. (Er, sorry… but that’s how I feel about it… If you, dear reader, had a story in one of them, I’m sure it was the exception to the rule!)

I love their format, too, of new stories and reprints of classics. Who else is going to reprint Zenna Henderson or Chad Oliver?

Go pick a story and write about it. Their archive is a good place to start looking. I was on the fence between ”Luciferase” and some others, especially the Carol Emshwiller stories, but finally settled on ”Little Faces” by Vonda McIntyre, which was satisfying in every way & made me giggle insanely. It’s about as “other” as you can get. Oddly gendered sort-of-lesbians with sentient living pet/lover spaceships and these sort of weird detachable penises that are their male mates/children/symbionts/hard drives! It answers the age-old question, “How do you write an exciting crime story set in a genderfucked utopia?” What could be better?

Wow, this is so wrong and yet so great. A copy editor was fired by the Danbury, CT News Times after she stuck a funny caption on a photo of a Catholic girls’ school soccer team celebrating a victory. She didn’t mean for the caption, which said the girls were celebrating one of their number coming out as a lesbian, to go online, and she was just goofing around. I’m not sure why I’m so amused by that – maybe just because it’s Monday morning.

I used to love to wake up to the radio – before Dubya was elected. But since a certain day in September 2001, every morning I wake up to more and more horrifying news and discussions, and I just don’t find it that relaxing anymore. Ya know?

Take this morning. I was awakened by an NPR “Morning Edition” story on school reopenings (or lack thereof) in New Orleans. I was half asleep but .. was that verbal applause for a further delay in reopening public schools in favor of charter schools? Further research confirms this: Catholic schools were already reopening last week. In the next few weeks new charter schools are being opened, and reopening the public school districts is being delayed indefinitely. In fact, Governor Blanco will ask the legislature in a special session “to authorize a state takeover of most of the city schools, turning many of them into charter schools and leaving the city board with little authority.”

Okay, so why the negative? After all, New Orleans’ public school system was one of the worst in the country. Aside from the abysmally low test scores and bad managment, there was that little question of corruption that sent $70 billion in federal aid missing and got the FBI to set up an investigative office in the school district HQ last year. Yikes. Katrina did not make this mess, and it’s true that Katrina has offered one very direct opportunity to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch. So what’s the problem?

It’s the term “charter schools” that really gets my creepy crawling. There’s nothing inherently wrong with charter schools. Like many good ideas, it began as a way of enhancing existing systems: in this case enhancing the public school system, by enabling parents of children with special needs (not the euphemism, but literally) to formulate alternative educational systems when the standard of public school militated against their learning curve. It gives communities — parents and teachers — the opportunity to shape their own pedagogic vision. It was intended to be supplementary, and may work well as such (definitive studies declaring one way or another are lacking.) The most comprehensive study on text scores and charter schools so far has indicated that charter school students score worse than their peers in nearby public schools. This may, however, be owing to the possibility that children sent to charter schools are self-selected for poor academic performance, so comparing their scores to public school peers may be misleading. The key for these kids would not be absolute performance, but rather improvement over time, and charter schools tend to improve with age.

But, and here’s the real point, charter schools have become the great white hope of Dubya’s No Child Left Behind Act. Because of significant, continuing, and effective resistance to school voucher programs, Dubya’s administration latched on to the idea of charter schools as a sort of compromise (after all, Clinton, supported charter schools, too!) Although charter schools are part of the public system, they carry a certain amount of responsibility for funding themselves. Typically, charter schools receive about 22% less in per pupil funding than district schools around them. This is because charter schools lack access to local and capital funding. Also, because the No Child Left Behind Act has mandated national standards, the federal government can withhold federal funding from schools that aren’t up to snuff. As is par for the course, the federal government often fails to come across with even the funding that schools have “earned” by making the score.

Getting the picture yet? Charter schools aren’t a compromise at all. They: 1) take away local government control of school curricula through local school districts and elected school boards, substituting an only sometimes genuine feeling of direct community control; 2) allow the federal government to control curricula through national standards and the now-greater dependence upon federal funding that comes from losing local funding; 3) require greater “community” (i.e., not government) fiscal support, thereby permittting tax cuts and placing the financial burden on the families of the students, kinda like with private schools only without the higher standards or greater autonomy. It’s the best of all worlds for Dubya’s regime, and the worst of all worlds for everyone else.

I don’t have an apocalyptic vision of what’s going to happen with NOLA’s new charter school district. It’s just that creeping, crawling feeling I get in the back of my scalp whenever anything has anything to do with relying on Dubya’s perspicacity. He’s been fingerpainting with the stuff of our lives, and Katrina has given him carte blanche to create his experimental society in mouth-of-the-Mississippi microcosm. (Does anyone doubt that this would include sterilizing psych patients and creating special New York climate zones to freeze the homeless to death, if he had the resources and, frankly, the presence of mind to think of it?) Every time I think, “Naw, it can’t always end up as badly as I fear,” then four months later, I find out that it’s worse. Dubya has taken “worst case scenario” to such a whole new level of meaning that it’s even penetrating the skulls of Republican voters.

With NOLA’s educational system, which was already largely worst case scenario before the hurricane wiped it away, even an improvement could still be disastrous. What Dubya’s doing here is setting a precedent; creating a school system that, for better or worse, whether it works or not, can be used as a model for future Republican administrations and legislatures. And I, for one, object.

Remember how everyone used to debate who’d win in a fight, Kirk or Picard? And then the movie came up where the two of them met and we didn’t even get to see them have a space battle or a contest of wits or anything?

Well, now we know. Kirk wins. At least in the self-effacing humor, comfortable with his legacy sweepstakes. Patrick “real actor” Stewart was on Good Morning America years ago, and they had done up the set to look like the Enterprise. And they were wearing Star Trek uniforms. Stewart was so pissed he walked off the set and refused to appear.

Compare that with Shatner’s appearance on the Tony Danza show. (Scroll down to the bottom and click on boston-legal.org to see the video.) Shatner shows up, sees the Star Trek chairs, and plays along. Even when Danza rips off his shirt to reveal a Star Trek uniform and asks Shatner to act out a Star Trek episode with him, Shatner goes along with it. It’s probably easy for Shatner to do the self-mocking thing now that he’s a two-time Emmy winner, but he was making fun of his legacy ten years ago, when he really was a forgotten joke. (Rent Free Enterprise and see what I mean.)

Ah, but Stewart is a real actor, you’re probably saying. He only did Dune and X-Men and Lifeforce for the money so he could go on doing Shakespearean monologues to homeless people. To that, I only really have one answer: “There – are – THREE – LIGHTS!!!!!!”

I’ve been reading this guy’s Joshua Norton’s blog, strip mining for whimsy, for 3 or 4 years now. He writes about Seattle, about his childhood being dragged around the U.S. by his shifty, abusive dad, about being incredibly dirt poor in cities, and about his early adult life working at crummy jobs. I’m always fascinated by the tough macho of his childhood. It seems like he was always casually blowing things up with other little kids who would be playing around with staple guns while swinging out on cliffside tire swings over toxic junkyards, and then some homeless junkies would beat him up and he’d break some other guy’s leg and then be afraid to go home because his dad might be so fucked up on speed that he’d get beaten up even worse. Then he’d play some more with some other kids blowing up GI Joe dolls with some more toxic waste. That’s not even an exaggeration. That guy is tough! He’s like, 6 foot 5, or something, too, and often has problems where people treat him like he must be a complete thug because he’s huge. At least that is my impression… And he’s a sort of sensitive philosopher with a novelist’s eye for character.

So it’s totally fascinating now to read his perspective on what it’s like to live in Wales. He’s been saying what a shock it is, how people in Wales just go around having fistfights, when in the U.S. that level of casual violence wouldn’t happen, because if it did, guns would come out and people would get shot. Or - that level of violence does happen in the U.S. and it is why so many people get shot. There, it happens and people don’t have guns. So there’s just a lot of bloody fistfights and beatings. I keep thinking about this, and about stories my friend Squid tells about her 3 older brothers and how they’d go out to bars on purpose to pick fights. They were just sort of tough vaguely military guys in their early 20s, and they wanted to punch someone in the nose, so they’d go drinking and wait for someone to say something obnoxious, and then punch them. It was just what you did.

Anyway, Joshua wrote some more observations on violence and cultural differences. He starts out talking about savages tattooed with woad, goes into rugby and rugby fandom, speculates about black vs. white bodybuilders, and ends up here:

Thing is– those high-density white guys? They’re all from here, man. Or their ancestors are from here. The guys I see on the streets here, I can’t believe how fucking amped-up a lot of them look. All they’re made of is rock-hard muscle and very long, very thick bones. Like racing horses. Or like a moose. And they’ve got those kinds of faces where you can’t imagine getting into a fight with them because you pictures socking one of these dudes in his cheek and all you can think about is how much it would hurt your hand– and, conversely, they’ve got fists like mace heads.

I have thought too about how men, at least quite a lot of men, seem to meet or pass each other in the street and the first thing to pass through their minds is some kind of evaluation of who is physically stronger and tougher, i.e. who could kick who’s ass. Perhaps that is a stereotype - but I hear men say this and it still surprises me because it would never occur to me to think it. But when I imagine being a man, I realize that I’d have to think about it all the time and that as a short guy I would be in way more danger walking around than as a medium-sized chick, even though I’m the same exact person.

Yay Californians!

Our meaty Governator tried to sell us a bill of goods yesterday and we told him to fuck off. The gubernatorial election is next year. Maybe he won’t be baahk.

Trevor Phillips, the chair of the Commission for Racial Equality in the UK , nearly says it all :

Everywhere, smugness about the state of race relations is being punctured. And this is no longer the patronising ‘be kind to blacks’ territory with which politicians and minority leaders of the past may have felt safe. It is big politics, on which governments will stand or fall.

In discussing the horrendous race riots in France and England in the past weeks, he draws the connection Americans have failed to draw between racial tensions in Europe and racial tensions in the United States, as vividly demonstrated by the Katrina disaster. The only problem is, he’s wrong about the smugness being punctured. In all the verbal outpourings of the smug, self-congratulatory love-fest that was the Rosa Parks tribute this past week, few commenters pointed out that there was still work to be done; few remembered the thousands of inpoverished African Americans trapped inside the Superdome while Washington fiddled.

This is a job, above all, for politics. And so far, politics seems distressingly comfortable either fighting old race battles or celebrating our imagined happy diversity.

In remembering Rosa Parks last week, American commenters laid bare the fundamental misconception of what race truly is and what racials tensions really arise from. Racism or not-racism is not about judging a person based on the color of their skin versus judging them based upon the content of their character. If you don’t understand that person’s culture, language, idiom, challenges and travails, then how can you presume to judge the content of their character? Character is made, and only makes sense, in context.

There are two big mistakes we could make. The first is to imagine that racial conflict is caused only by the sort of foul white supremacists convicted last week, or by the sick bigots (who may have been white or black) who desecrated a Muslim cemetery in Birmingham. The million or so people who voted for BNP councillors last year aren’t all knuckle-dragging racist apes. Many are ordinary folk frightened by the pace of change in their communities who can be persuaded that somehow this must be the fault of people who do not look like them.

The other error is to believe that regeneration of areas in which poor minorities live will overcome all differences. Yes, the poor need jobs and better homes, but this will not be enough. In New Orleans, the left-behind blacks complained of being neglected. In Paris, when asked what they want, young people say: ‘Stop addressing us as tu ‘, a bit like the French equivalent of being addressed as ‘boy’ in pre-civil rights America. In Birmingham, African-Caribbean and Asian community leaders talk about a lack of mutual respect. So, alongside equality of material things, we have to instil other kinds of equality, starting with equality of esteem between different communities.

We not only have trouble connecting our white/black problem to Europe’s Christian/Muslim problem, we have trouble connecting our white/black problem to our Christian/Muslim problem. Especially when Rosa Parks is lying in state in the Lincoln Memorial, we seem to have trouble remembering the thousands of Americans on no-fly lists or pulled daily out of security check lines – the Americans held in Guantanamo Bay and other prisons without being charged – because they are or appear to be from Muslim cultures.

Another missing equality is that of power: why is it that in all the countries involved there are still so few minority politicians who have clout? Even the much-vaunted American success story can only boast one black senator.

And I’m hoarse from saying things just like this. People’s ears are worn down to nubs from not listening. It’s not just political representation that’s missing, it’s economic representation by minority community members in executive positions in large businesses; it’s cultural representation, by minority actors in the movies, yes, and by academics, artists, writers and media mavins, by people who speak to the public.

Finally, we need equality of interaction. The far right thrives on our residential segregation, which allows them to scare people about communities they do not know and understand. And when we have the chance to mix with people not like ourselves, we increasingly fail to seize it.

And this is the toughest item of all. Because who wants to reduce their life down to “How many friends of different races/ethnicities from your own do you have?” Who wants to quota their personal life? And here’s where we get stuck. Here’s where I get stuck. I’m not gonna shout any prescriptions. I don’t have any. All I know this second is that Paris is burning as I write this, and not in a good way.

Here I am in Montreal at a conference hotel full of literary translators! They’re an odd crew, passionate about writing, xenophilic to a fault. In fact, they’re used to being invisible. It’s like a party of invisible cheerleaders who are starved for attention. We’re all making out with each other; no one ever stops talking as if to make up for years in a hermit’s cell. My experience as a “nightclub hostess” kicks in, and I’m reminded of all the traveling salesmen who wanted to confess their deepest secrets to me in smoky bars - but here among the translators the deep secrets are not about their sex lives - it’s all about your philosophy, your most private feelings about writing and what you do.

The nicest conversation I had today was with C.M. Mayo, who founded, edited, and published Tameme, which was a journal of new writing from North America. (Including all of North America.) It was great to have a long talkative lunch with someone I’ve admired for years! I love her radical commitment to side by side bilingual publishing, her border crossing literary philosophy, and her brave magazine that, alas, is dead but not forgotten after three issues. (You should buy it from her - it’s really good. And submit to her new anthology.)

I just cried all the way through Chava Rosenfarb’s talk about translation and her life. She said that Yiddish has died a thousand deaths. When she was a teenager in the Lodz Ghetto in Poland, she and her fellow writers squabbled fiercely about what should be said, but they agreed that although they were all going to die, their top priority was translating their work and hiding it underground as a message to the world. “We knew we were not leaving the ghetto, but we wanted to leave behind some message that would survive our own extermination.”
Her poems were ripped away from her at Auschwitz, where her father died… She re-inscribed the poems with a tiny stub of pencil on the slats of her bunk bed at Bergen-Belsen. Later, in Canada, after her publisher had helped her emigrate, she realized the vibrant literary culture of Yiddish magazines and writers was disappearing, and that the lifeline of her work would be translation. (She made her 13 year old daughter sit at the kitchen table every night and work on the translation to English. Can you imagine?)

I think everyone burst into tears (again) at this point, and again when she said that translators were noble and that translation was “the most optimistic of literary endeavors” and were snatching meaning from the jaws of oblivion. I felt like I was suddenly part of a 200-foot tall marxist statue with everyone in the room, one of those group compositions of square-bodied, sturdy-jawed people facing the dawn with shovels and wheelbarrows. Except - pens and dictionaries.

Chava liked my “Writing well is the best revenge” t-shirt from Fussy.org. She snickered benevolently and asked me if I lived by it. Heh! I hope that Mrs. Kennedy of Fussy gets a little thrill from this. Hey Mrs. Kennedy! Chava Rosenfarb liked your t-shirt! So, you should buy her books!

Excuse my moment of hero-worship - but she was a fantastic speaker. The flattered ballroom full of invisible, ghostly cheerleader-scribes swooned at her feet.

Meanwhile, when I’m not sighing in the arms of my literary heroes, or making out with them in dark corners over signed copies of obscure handsewn chapbooks of Laureano Alban, I’m going around just talking to everyone who I don’t recognize, hoping that it absolves me from any appearance of kissing ass and that it will help new people feel welcome. I recommend this for anyone who is entrenched in a literary scene. Quit stuffing your tongue down the throats of your own clique and go talk to the shy person in the corner; pretend you’re a whore and they just bought you a drink, and ask them to talk about their work in the exciting world of industrial pipe-fitting sales. You will discover many shy erratic geniuses this way! Then, take them back to your posh hotel room and make them rub your feet while you blog about it, naked in bed.

- - Liz

I seem to start every post with an excuse or complaint about one of the following things: a)not posting often, or b)not sounding as highfalutin or smart about stuff as my blogity colleagues. I still don’t have time to compose a post of any real import. And if I had my own blog it would probably just all be stories about Mr. T, or Dog Chapman the World’s Greatest Bounty Hunter, or that website of guys in underpants sitting on fixed gear bicycles. Or that show that comes on TLC in the middle of the night that features a different person each show who has some kind of horrendous and possibly fatal medical situation. And although the shows themselves are rather sensitive to these folks, the title is always something cringe-inducingly blunt, like “Born With Two Heads", “The Half Ton Man", or the most devastating and cry-inducing one of all, The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off.

Are any of you out there fans of Homestar Runner? One episode features Strong Bad showing off his surefire method for making Homestar cry: Just show him a drawing of a one legged-puppy named Li’l Brudder, who has big liquid eyes and a word bubble saying “I can make it on my own!” At one glance, Homestar drops to the floor, sobbing, “Tell me how to make the most out of life!!” Well, Jonny Kennedy, the (36-year-old) “boy” of the show’s title, has his own terrible illness played up for full Li’l Brudder effect, as he cheerfully purchases his own coffin and talks of the joy that will come from releasing his spirit from its “dodgy shell.” Jonny, (who managed to record the voiceovers for the documentary before dying, and therefore seems to narrate his own death from beyond the grave) had a wicked sense of humor, and how could you not, when your life is enshrined in a documentary that pounds this message into the viewer: “hey, cheer up folks, count your blessings, be glad you’re not THIS poor guy. I mean look, he’s covered in open sores but he’s still happier than YOU, pathetic ingrate! You’ve never even gone hang gliding–and YOU have skin! What’s your problem?”

I say all of this like a tough dissector of pop culture. But in reality I of course was sobbing like Homestar by the show’s end. If god forbid I ever become disabled or contract a debilitating illness, I promise to never do anything inspirational. Because isn’t it difficult enough to be dying, without also having to do double duty, symbolically making healthy people feel better about themselves? Screw that. I’m not going hang gliding just to make other people less terrified of death. Not. My. Job.

When I was around 10 years old I hadn’t seen very many movies. I saw some Disney stuff, and then Star Wars, and that was about it, because movies were expensive. I didn’t know anyone with cable TV and I had to walk six miles through the snow and battle enormous robots dressed only in my underpants just to watch Star Trek in grainy, tiny, black and white. Once in a while I’d try to “fit in” and be cool on the playground by pretending I’d seen the latest episode of Mork and Mindy. My point is, most of my knowledge of popular culture and movies came from Mad Magazine parodies. I still haven’t seen most movies from the 70s and 80s, but by god, I sort of know what they’re about, or at least I remember other people making fun of them.

That’s how all kids now will grow up! They won’t know what government or politics or news is. We’re living in a dumb parody drawn by Dean Martin and Al Jaffe! They’ll have referents that only point to other referents. The universe will be turtles all the way down.

I was thinking about this as I realized that my 5 year old kid hasn’t seen the “real” Star Wars movies, but has seen Star Wars Revelations, the movie made by fans. It’s a pretty good movie! Way better than the “real” ones.

He also learned about superhero narrative conventions by watching cartoon episodes of “The Tick”. I’ve noticed a huge amount of kids’ books lately that are parodies or have elements of parody – the Lemony Snicket books, or “Whales on Stilts”. I’m not complaining… I love parody… but there’s something bothering me about it as a trend.

So I wonder about learning about all narrative convention from “fannish” sources or from parodies of parodies? What will that turn into? Will we go around mocking everything because reality sucks so bad and we can’t change it? Or is it not that dire and I’m just in a bad mood and really it’s all about decanonization and empowerment?

‘Cause big ol balls are hereditary.

Thanks to Making Light for the heads up.

Why is everyone still so scared of Rosa Parks?

Today’s Reuters article summarizes her story thus:

Parks was a 42-year-old seamstress for a Montgomery department store when she caught a bus in downtown Montgomery on December 1, 1955. Three stops later, a white man boarded. … Parks refused to move, saying “I’m tired of being treated like a second-class citizen.” She was arrested and, four days later, convicted of breaking the law and fined $10, along with $4 in court costs. That same day, black residents began a boycott of the bus system, led by a then-unknown Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. It lasted 381 days. Legal challenges led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that forced Montgomery to desegregate its bus system and helped put an end to laws separating blacks and whites at public facilities throughout the U.S. South. … Parks, who died on Monday at home in Detroit at age 92, was remembered as a freedom fighter during a memorial service in the city where her quiet protest 50 years ago led to a revolt against the segregation of whites and blacks.

The Academy of Achievement Museum of Living History website tells the story thus:

December 1, 1955 … was the day when an unknown seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. This brave woman, Rosa Parks, was arrested and fined for violating a city ordinance, but her lonely act of defiance began a movement that ended legal segregation in America, and made her an inspiration to freedom-loving people everywhere.

Today’s AP article even has Al Sharpton doing it:

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who was a year old at the time of Parks’ arrest, said when he arrived in Montgomery for the memorial, he thought about “how if she had just moved her seat, how history might have changed.” Sharpton, a New York City activist, said national leaders such as Rice and former Secretary of State Colin Powell would have never reached their posts without Parks’ symbolic act

So let’s recap. Parks was “an unknown seamstress”. What she did was refuse to give her seat up to a white man. Once. This was “a lonely act of defiance", a “quiet protest” and ” a symbolic act”. If she hadn’t done what she did “history might have changed.”

The implication–the negative space around this skeleton–is clear. Rosa Parks was a simple soul, salt of the earth, a person like any other, like you. She is even thought of as an older woman, whose feet hurt her. She kept to her place, didn’t cause trouble, lived her life–until one day, the injustice was too much for her and she spontaneously stood up for her rights. This single, solitary act of courage sparked a similar courage in all those around her and they, too, spontaneously rose up, coming together to win, quickly and efficiently, a long withheld justice and equality. Yay, Rosa! Yay simple people! Yay us!

The only problem with this story is that it’s a lie. Parks had been active in civil rights for over 20 years before the bus boycott, helping to fundraise for the defense of the Scottsboro boys in 1932 and working on, by her own account, “numerous cases with the NAACP … cases of flogging, peonage, murder, and rape.” In 1943 she became the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, the only woman officer at that time. She held the position until 1957, when she had to leave town because she couldn’t find a job. Her 1956 bus incident was also not the first time she’d made trouble on the bus. In 1943, being deliberately provocative, she had sat down in a white seat to pick up her dropped purse and was thrown off the bus into the rain. At the time of the bus boycott, the NAACP was looking for a test case to fight bus segregation. Parks was not the first person to be arrested on a bus, in fact she was on a NAACP committee investigating the case of a 15-year-old girl, Claudette Colvin, who had been arrested on a bus a few months earlier. When Colvin became pregnant, the organizers deemed her an unsuitable figurehead, as was another young woman who had also been arrested recently. Parks was very aware of all of this when she boarded the bus on Dec. 1.

And viewing the Montgomery bus boycott as a spontaneous uprising is extremely misleading. Parks’ protest in particular hadn’t been planned, but local civil rights activists had been planning for a test case and boycott for months. When word came through that Parks had been arrested, they were ready. If Parks hadn’t chosen to stay in her seat that night, someone else would have at some other point, as two other women had in the preceding months–or perhaps an action would have been planned. Local activists could have chosen, as they did with Claudette Colvin, not to support Parks’ case and nothing would have come of it. It was coordinated, it was organized, and it was very effective.

So why the disconnect?

Because activists are scary, annoying, half-crazy people who badger society and say outrageous things. They are hysterically sensitive to the slightest of slights, and accuse good people of racism, sexism, or other silly isms at the drop of a hat. They do stupid things, form endless committees, and never stop talking about the cause, the cause, the cause. They fight amongst themselves constantly over arcane differences, they insist that their issues take precedence over normal daily life, and they come up with the dumbest acronyms. They pick fights. They challenge people. Everything they do is uncomfortable. And if we listen to them at all, they make us very, very dissatisfied with ourselves.

Burying Parks’ scary activist background enables her to be recast as an everywoman, and her story to be one that every American can identify with. Burying the planning and thought behind the bus boycott enables the action to be recast as a spontaneous rising of the people, the sort of thing that can happen at any time, anywhere. The false narrative confirms that all people are at heart decent, that heroism and effective action require no training and no preparation, and that it is never too late to put aside a “quiet", politically apathetic life, when circumstances call for it.

The fake Parks story affirms political apathy. It affirms that activists are both annoying and unnecessary. “Look,” it says, “at this four hundred year history of wrong righted in less than a year by the solitary action of a simple woman!” Pay no attention to the hundred preceding years of activism behind the curtain. Ignore the thousands of people across the South already engaged in protest and prepared to jump to Parks’ support at a moment’s notice. The infrastructure, the phone trees, mimeograph machines, meeting places, minutes, internecine fights, intercommunity class struggles–none of that is of any importance. And today’s injustice, be it war, or poverty, or *gasp* even racism (didn’t Rosa take care of that 60 years ago?) is just as water soluable. Grab that bucket and watch it melt.

Rosa Parks is not a hero for a moment on a bus almost 60 years ago. She’s a hero for a life largely spent feisty trouble-makin’, loud ass-kickin’, complainin’, badgerin’ and doing the right thing. Thank you, Rosa, and thank oG you’re not the only one.

I’ve gotten so tired of hearing the GOP talking point that says the Valerie Plame/Scooter Libby affair is just about perjury. Or that Plame wasn’t under cover. Or that there was no crime. Etc. etc. etc. And I’m equally tired of people like Michael Kinsley (who really ought to know better) claiming the whole business is too complicated and oh gosh, we don’t know what to make of it.

It’s very simple, and this is what liberals should say when people try to obscure the facts:

There are two coverups here, not one. The first was when Scooter Libby and Judith Miller tried to lie about the leak of a covert CIA operative’s identity and cover story. That’s the coverup that just led to indictments.

But the second coverup is the one that matters. That’s the one where Libby and Karl Rove were trying to bury any evidence that Iraq hadn’t sought uranium from Niger. And that the President knew this when he said in the State of the Union that Iraq had. And that they knew there was no nuclear weapons program long before he sent thousands of Americans to be killed or injured in Iraq (not to mention all the Iraqi casualties.)

The first coverup is only really important as it relates to the second coverup.

The other point is, if Joseph Wilson wasn’t qualified to go to Niger and his appointment was only the result of nepotism, how come he was able to discover the truth? Or put another way, do these Wingers believe that Wilson was wrong, and Iraq really did try to buy uranium from Niger recently? Can they prove this? Otherwise, they should shut up about the nepotism angle, because it’s irrelevant.

It’s always amazed me that the Republicans get to be the ones who claim to have morality, while doing things that are just plain evil. Not misguided, or mean-spirited, but Evil, in a Vincent Price, cape-swirling way. The latest example is the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s vote to cut $11 billion out of Medicaid. The cuts could actually total $20 billion if other changes don’t take effect, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Among the changes: states would have more flexibility to cut benefits, and poor people would have to fork over more out of pocket. As Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) points out, this is taking money directly from the poor to support bloated tax cuts for the rich. Experts are already predicting that the changes will add to the numbers of uninsured Americans.

Commerce Committee chair Joe Barton (R-TX) responds to critics with the same type of arguments the GOP was using for Social Security. Medicaid is broken and growing too fast, and will collapse if we stand by and do nothing. Obviously the Senate Finance Committee disagrees, since its competing bill would take money out of Medicare, the health program for the elderly, and leave Medicaid relatively unscathed.

I’ve long thought that Medicare and Medicaid should be collapsed into one program. Why should old people receive a better standard of health care than poor people? In particular, why do federal entitlement programs give more money and better care to the wealthy elderly than to poor children? The government would have to continue to subsidize copayments, deductibles and Part B premiums for poor people, as it does now for Medicare-Medicaid sual eligibles. The one drawback of combining Medicare and Medicaid into one program would be that it might allow the GOP to paint a target on it, as with any program for the poor. But if it continued to serve all elderly Americans, then it might still have a powerful constituency in the AARP and other groups.

In related news, duh. Apparently it’s now official that uninsured people don’t go to the doctor when they’re sick because they don’t have insurance, not because they don’t think they’re sick. Wow! It’s a breakthrough!

Thanks to Lauren McLaughlin for pointing this out:

Starbucks has capitulated to Christian fundamentalists who protested Starbucks putting a quote from Armistead Maupin on its cups. So now Starbucks cups have an expressly Xian message: “You were made by God and for God, and until you understand that, life will never make sense.”

Boycott those cowards! Show ‘em what we want on our cups! … er …

If you’re mourning the relative failure of Serenity and the fact that, barring some miracle, there won’t be any more Firefly adventures, there’s one bright spot in the ‘Verse. Apparently Pocket Books are gearing up to release at least two original novels set in that universe, and a dozen authors have submitted proposals, including Keith R.A. DeCandido, who novelized the movie and is one of the best writers of media tie-ins. (That’s not faint praise, incidentally. Good media tie-ins are hard to write, and when they’re done well, they can be downright literary.)

Well-known speculative fiction author Steven Brust has apparently written an entire Firefly novel on spec for Pocket Books. This strikes me as somewhat insane, because if Pocket rejects the thing, what is he going to do with it? I always assumed with media tie-ins that you would just submit a writing sample and an outline, which would probably be subject to change.

But it sounds like a pretty great read, and hopefully we’ll get to see it one way or the other.

It just shows how much love people have for that show/movie (even though I understand from Claire’s complaints about the lack of Asian characters to go with the trappings). And it shows that the line between fanfic and “official” products is getting blurrier all the time. Especially with things like Doctor Who, which is now being made by avowed fans.

How cool is this? The Dark Stars Project seeks to use public pressure to get more actors of color cast in major roles in Hollywood. More specifically, you send postcards to major directors asking them “to cast minority actors as the main protagonists and Euro-Americans (whites) as main antagonists for two years.” Pipe dream? Sure, but a nice one.

Which brings us back to the controversy that seems to have died down now over at Hyphen magazine’s staff blog, where I posted a complaint about Joss Whedon using Chinese language to indicate Chinese cultural/economic dominance in his future world in Serenity, without using any Chinese or Asian actors or characters at all. (Liz posted a similar, but less angry, complaint below.)

What was annoying about the comments on my post was that they assumed that I was simply uttering the now-familiar truism about minority casting in Hollywood, and somehow deciding to pick on poor Joss Whedon while I did it. This was not, in fact, what I was doing. There are two seperate issues here:

1. overall lack of minority casting in Hollywood, especially for major, positive roles, under which there are two sub-issues:

1. a. lack of casting of actors of color in any roles i.e. in roles that were written without a specific race or ethnicity in mind that could technically be played by anyone (who is American and can act white, that is)
1. b. lack of creating characters that are specifically people of color, i.e. creating important or central characters who are specifically supposed to be of a particular non-white race or ethnicity.

Issue #1 has become a truism, but is no less true for all of that. Not enough minority actors are cast in Hollywood. Not enough minority characters are created in Hollywood. They need to do more. Period. Argue with that, if you dare.

Issue #2 is a seperate thing, something which has become common enough to identify (see Star Wars and Blade Runner,) without actually becoming a trend (yet). Opponents of Issue # 1 want the American public cultural forum to recognize the diversity that already exists within American society and to promote a much-professed and little practiced multiculturalism by mirroring this existing diversity in our cultural products. Opponents of Issue #2, on the other hand, want the American public to recognize that culture does not exist seperately from the people who make it. Issue #2 is about facile appropriation of aspects of non-western cultures, without respect for those who created the culture, and without respect for the integrity of culture itself. It’s cultural syncretism without understanding of how syncretism works, without understanding that syncretism is an utterly two-way street; without understanding that you can’t meld without … uh, melding. Issue #2 protests the increasingly popular idea that American culture can be “conquered” or infiltrated by non-western cultures without white people, or current European American values losing supremacy. Do I really need to explain why this is problematic?

Sad as this is, movies are our best way of getting ideas across to each other and of reaching mass audiences. why is it so hard to get Hollywood directors with their massive budgets to call in a consultant or script doctor every now and again, to make movies that don’t have so many huge, yet simple, problems in them?

Not to be simplistic and cynical, but I don’t think the current clash of cultures between the largely Christian , Western Kulturraum and the largely Muslim, middle-eastern one, is religious, ethnic, or even entirely cultural. I think it’s economic. But I’m pretty ignorant on the complex of subjects and am totally willing to hear a variety of viewpoints, telling me I’m wrong.

Especially if they come couched in good prose … and especially if well-padded with fun and fiction. So I’m really excited about my novelist friend Nicole Galland’s current project. Her third novel is going to be a historical fiction based on the monty-pythonesque comedy of errors known as the fourth crusade. Although the crusade never made it to the Holy Land, the political machinations are illuminating, when viewed in a contemporary context. Plus, fun!

Nicki’s been sending back terrific journal entries from her ports of call, giving crusade history tidbits and narrating her – often comical – efforts to find the sites of crusade events buried under the asphalt, diverted rivers, and military installations of the modern urban landscape. I convinced her to let me put them all together in a blog, called Chasing the Fourth Crusade by Nicole Galland. Check it out. It’s a good read.

Opera on ESPN! Other magazine contributor Elizabeth Searle has written the libretto for an opera about Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan called Nancy and Tonya: The Opera. Even though it won’t be performed until next spring, the opera has gotten covered on ESPN and MSNBC. Because it’s about sports! But also because of the chicks and jealousy and violence thing, of course.

Searle constructed the libretto from her story “Celebrities In Disgrace” as well as actual quotes from Tonya and Nancy, as well as other participants in the scandal, from newspapers and FBI reports.

“Adjusting gender attitudes is the open heart surgery of the soul, and there’s no anesthetic. However, the thing about surgery is that it’s a lot better than the alternative.”

Dear God, please turn me into the essayist who wrote this blog entry/essay. It’s long but reads like a dream, and makes so, so much sense. Would that we all wrote so intelligently, clearly, forcefully, and well.

The threat of physical danger focuses anyone’s mind, male or female. When faced with an unknown man, women go through some millisecond decision-making about the need for fight or flight or whether they can go off red alert. After all that, if he’s trying to be friendly, comes the question of whether he was worth all the bother. The sexual landscape women have to live in is so different from the one inhabited by men that obvious male sexuality is often considered repellent rather than attractive. That makes as much sense as men being put off by sexy women. Imagine how much damage it would take to achieve that effect, and you start to have an idea how much crimes against women complicate everyone’s life, male and female.

thanks Wendy for the link!

When I first started watching Firefly earlier this year, I remember blogging about how it’s funny that you never seen any Chinese people in that universe although people are speaking Chinese. In fact I annoyed everyone around me by trying to extrapolate the society’s history. How come you never see them? Maybe because they’re super privileged and the characters aren’t and don’t come into contact with many people who are. If that’s the case you would expect the Alliance officers to be mostly Asian. But no! At least I don’t remember it if they were, and at some point in the series, I started looking. In the movie, we did see River’s teacher was east asian… supporting my theory. I thought that maybe Simon looked a little bit hapa, and sometimes Kaylee if you look hard enough. But really… I couldn’t make a good theory to explain it and it’s pretty clear that… they just didn’t think about it, which is disappointing.

I kind of liked it that the actors seemed to be speaking actual Chinese. Then I looked up transcriptions and read some interesting criticisms by Chinese speakers saying that obviously the translations or scriptwriting of those bits were done by an ABC, american-born chinese, basically that no one in China would talk quite that way. (Whether they could even assert this with certain authority, I’m doubtful; I don’t know all the dialects of the U.S. or how people could be expected to talk ‘naturally’.)

But also, how come people swear in Chinese? Obviously, the out of character reason is because they could get away with doing that on TV in the U.S. In character, it seems against the principles of historical linguistics that a population would swear mostly in the language of the dominant culture. They don’t just swear, but they seem to bust into Chinese when under stress or feeling emotional. I’d love to hear what linguists have to say about this. It seems unlikely for a whole culture to do this. Though I’ve done it myself with Spanish, to avoid being understood by little Anglo kids on the playground; swearing or scandalous gossip.

So, I also thought about other examples of cultural mixing-up or appropriation in science fiction, where you have a future of U.S. and Asian mixing. This could be a huge long essay, but I don’t have time so I’ll just mention a few books it would be worth talking about. There’s The Man in the High Castle where Japan conquered and colonized the west coast of the U.S. There’s Neuromancer, that has a bunch of scenes in Japan, and I remember thinking in some ways it was a book expressing something about 80s meme of “Japan is going to take over economically & culturally,” a meme that comes and goes and is back right now as a sort of “everything from Japan is cool” anime-o-philia, or the idea that everything happens faster there, their culture and tech is more cutting edge somehow, and while the U.S. is not directly conquered in the Neuromancer-future, the future is less U.S.-white-culture-dominated than most. I thought of Geoff Ryman’s recent novel Air, set on the border of western china. I also thought of some fantasy novels where the “exotic” culture is based on something vaguely asian, like in Tamora Pierce’s Protector of the Small series where Keladry, the preteen warrior cadet, is super good at martial arts and using the Not-Japan weapons, and it’s taken to the point of pleasant ridiculousness, like when she suddenly busts out into some kind of razor-blade fan juggling group folkdance with the visiting Not-Japan palace women. I wrote something about this a year ago maybe, but couldn’t find it on my blog…

All of those books seem to me to have done a better job at extrapolating than the Firefly series. Firefly, it’s like someone said, “Hey, I know, we’ll make it so that in the future, China kind of won the space race, or at least shared it, bigtime, instead of that old-school future history thing where there’s some Russians. ” And someone else went, “Yeah, neato, they can swear in Chinese, and there’ll be some samurai swords, and they can wear kimonos, and people will eat dim sum all the time, and worship both jesus and buddha, and yet, they’re all white redneck space cowboys, wouldn’t that be mindblowing? ” And then someone else went, “Duuude! yeah, let’s hire someone to write some of the script IN CHINESE and hire a language coach for the actors, and we won’t subtitle it!” And that’s about as deep as it went, and it didn’t occur to anyone that maybe some actors in the series should be Chinese or at least asian. It’s just not particularly thoughtful, and so… it ends up being annoying. Or thoughtless. Or fluffy. Or cultural appropriation. Or rude. Or racist. In fact, all those things. It’s part of racism and of imperialism for white people in the U.S. and Europe to do that. (And then to expect people not to notice or if they notice, not to care.)

Class is the focus, and race/ethnicity thrown in thoughtlessly as a sort of decoration.

I’m in a mode where I enjoy watching it and then I want to pick it apart — not in a “dammit, how racist” mode, but more like “oh look, it’s That Thing again, that the U.S. does, it’s a perfect example of it.” I still love the series and the movie. (The same way I love Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series, and think it’s amazing, but could talk about gender problems in his books for a year without stopping.) I would have liked Firefly and Serenity even more if the history were deeper, and the “multiculturalism” well thought out. If it were really hybrid - I like Guillermo Gomez-Peña’s ideas about hybrid culture. In fact I had hopes that the movie would fix some of the problems of the series. The good thing is that our expectations are higher. I think more people are noticing and pointing out loudly that “surface multiculturalism” is not only annoying but actually racist and harmful. It’s good to point it out and to expect better of our best writers!

Which is what I hope everyone does – go see the movie and support it, but write to the producers in detail about what was done wrong, and write more articles about it, so that Joss & co. will pay attention.

And I haven’t even scratched the surface of other races and what goes on with blackness in the movie - you could write a whole book about it.

***update - This whole post really should be a footnote on Claire’s article over at Hyphen - thanks for the link, Laura! Now I feel like a dirty apologist for Joss. I might have to see the movie about 12 more times for purposes of analysis. ***

So apparently Unicef has decided people are numbed to images of violence and destruction in the third world. So for their latest ad campaign for a fund to help former child soldiers in Burundi, they’re using a film of the Smurf village being bombed. It’ll only be shown after 9 PM, but a clip was shown earlier in the evening, on the news, and traumatized some kids. Apparently the footage of the smurf baby crying amongst all the burned smurf corpses is pretty chilling stuff. The ad agency that made it wanted to go further – with Smurfs losing heads or limbs – but they were told to tone it down a bit.

“It’s so un-Smurf-like,” a spokesman said. “It might get people to think.”

I love boingboing. They pointed me to this, the perfect stereotype of male desire: twats ‘n’ beer.

I was reading this article about the ruckus in the House over an energy bill… and this bit about Nancy Pelosi caught my eye:

But as the vote stretched beyond 30 minutes, Pelosi took to the floor to denounce the process.

“This is bringing dishonor to the House of Representatives for this body to act in the shameful way it is acting,” Pelosi said.

“The gentle lady is not stating a proper parliamentary inquiry!” shouted Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, the presiding speaker, banging his gavel to silence her.

Gentle lady? How odd it sounds, especially for someone who was standing up to denounce. Like… Simpson wishes she would be a gentlewoman.

My friend Laura Quilter of Chilling Effects and Derivative Work was giggling with me about this, and she said that in Massachusetts, lawyers on opposing sides have to call each other “my sister” and “my brother” instead of “the opposing counsel” That’s so odd.

Maybe we can start a new custom, extending this kind of enforced polite discourse, so that at rallies and protests, and on giant bloggity flame wars, opposing ranters must call each other sweet endearments. Dawn Eden will be all like, “As always, I completely disagree with my beloved snookums and life partner, Amanda Marcotte.” And Amanda will go, “Darling pumpkin, Dawn, honey, your eyes outshine the stars, but, you’re batshit crazy about politics and women’s rights.”

Two totally unrelated news stories today caught my eye, both of them from Europe. In Italy, the Vatican ruled that gay men can be Catholic priests as long as they can prove they’ve been celibate for three years. This raises the fascinating spectacle of would-be priests having to produce all the names of people they didn’t have sex with. Or possibly demonstrating absurdly high sperm counts. How do you prove a negative? I’m dying to find out.

Meanwhile, in England, a judge sentenced two hackers to nine months in jail despite accepting that they didn’t use the TK internet worm for any nefarious purposes. Andrew Harvey and Jordan Bradley were able to prove they were only using the worm to set up a secure Internet chatroom, not to spy on people’s computers or mount distributed denial-of-service attacks. The judge commended them for their restraint, but still imposed a stiff sentence for infecting computers with a tool that had such devastating potential.

So let’s recap. The Vatican says that gayness is no problem as long as you don’t, um, exercise it. But Judge Beatrice Bolton says a tool, such as the TK worm, can be inherently bad and destructive, even if you don’t use it for any destructive purposes. To be fair, at first read-through of the hacker story, I didn’t realize they’d actually infected some computers, which does sound worse. Still, which is it? Is it the facility for evil, or the use of it? Inquiring minds want to know!

Not to use this as an excuse to plug my own writing, but… my first legit fiction publication last year, entitled “Pigs In Space”, had humans collecting porcine methane in installations in solar orbit. Yep, they were collecting pig shit and farts to convert to an energy source.

After telling him about my story, my friend Jose Marquez turned me on to “Pig City”, a four-year architectural project by Dutch architectural company MVRDV . The Netherlands is the primary producer of pork in the EU and MVRDV estimates that, with the greater space needed per pig in an entirely organic pig farming scenario, plust the amount of land dedicated to growing pig feed, 75% of Dutch land would be dedicated to pork production. Mmmmm … bacon. In addition there are issues of energy expenditure, pig waste management, and disease prevention, and transportation of the product into urban centers. In a nutshell, “Pig City” proposes centralized high-rise pig farms to solve the problems of space, disease prevention, recycling, and transportation in pig farming.( Here is the MVRDV “Pig City” site, which I can’t make give me any information about the project itself.)

I can’t tell you how exciting it is to find that great minds think alike. But the discussion about the project on the architecture website, makes me want to scream. Why must every speculative project have a political message at its core? Couldn’t this have been something, oh, I dunno … investigative? You know to come up with a feasible, self-sustaining, urban pastoral plant out of sheer field-of-endeavor exuberance? Plus, if all it is is a way of getting a message across, as a prompt for an extended discussion of ethics Pig City is a bit underwhelming for a writer. I mean, they spent 4 years on this project? They could have come up with a plausible sounding project (using a science fiction writer) in 4 days.

Anyway, maybe the following comment proves that I live too much in my future scenarios, but I don’t see why this is so ethically compromising. To produce the amounts of pork they already produce means they rely on battery farming anyway. So anything’s an improvement, even – no especially sanitized high rises. But I guess to have architects and engineers openly, publicly treating contemporary western pastoralism as what it is – a highly mechanized industry – is still a no-no to a western population so desperate to cling to its illusions that parts of it still think “intelligent design” is … well, intelligent.

I go for weeks and months without ever thinking about the way I talk. Because I usually have better things to worry about. But last month I gave a reading from a story that appeared originally in Pindeldyboz, a story which I guess in some circles could be called a little racy, though nothing graphic or ourageous. An audience member (who apparently identifies as a Christian and claimed to be employed by Homeland Security, which sounds dodgy to me) was so outraged by the reading that he left a frothing phone message to complain about it: although six people read that night, he saw fit to single out only two of us. “The Lesbian” (Katia Noyes, author of the brand new novel Crashing America), and me.

“The woman with the stutter.”

And suddenly I had that third-grade-playground feeling, the same way I felt when I would be told as a kid, “don’t act upset when they bully you, you’re only making it worse.” Every year in elementary school, my concerned teacher would send me off to the sad little speech therapist’s office for a screening, and the lady would talk to me in a slow and condescending way, wary, like you would talk to a person who doesn’t speak English, and ask me to repeat sentences back to her. And invariably she would report back that although I did repeat some words and sounds and get stuck in a few spots, it didn’t fall under a category serious enough to qualify me for therapy. And on I merrily went, into adolescence and adulthood.

It’s only come up a handful of times, and all of them hurt. In high school I asked a teacher to write me a letter of recommendation for a scholarship intended for kids who had overcome some major hardship. Having gone from psych hospital inpatient to straight-A student in a short period of time, I assumed this was what she would write her letter about. I ended up not applying, and opened her letter, out of uncontrollable curiosity, to see what glowing things she’d said about me. I was horrified to discover that she’d written instead about my “disability"— the stuttering. “Just saying a sentence out loud in class is excruciating for her,” she wrote, “but Suzanne has earned the respect and sympathy of her classmates.” Sympathy. I found this letter again recently and a decade later it still makes me want to punch something. A year or so after the letter incident, a college counselor told me that speech therapy would improve my chances of getting into a good school. “You only have a short time to make a good impression in an interview,” she said. I stopped speaking to her at that point, fearing she’d pull out a diet plan next.

Stuttering is a strange and mysterious condition. No one really knows what causes it or how to fix it. It affects men far more often than women, which makes me an even rarer bird. I’ve bonded over stuttering stories many times with male acquaintances, but I’ve never met another female stutterer. I did listen very carefully to a few Joan Didion interviews, where she seems to pause, repeat herself, and draw out words in a practiced way, and I suspect she is a (post-therapy) member of the c-c-c-club. Stuttering typically stops when speaking in unison with others, singing, or when you can’t hear yourself talking. Two different friends with very bad stutters have told me that they “graduated” from speech therapy because they no longer stuttered in the therapist’s office, though there was no effect on their speech in normal life. Maybe it’s an aftereffect of having to distract the world from the way you talk, but all the stutterers I’ve met have been very quick, funny, charming people with active social lives, jobs, romantic attachments. You would never suspect this from the despairing tone of the various stutterer’s advocacy organizations.

A severe stutter is absolutely a disability, and I’ve met people who say that speech therapy saved their lives. Mine is so mild it’s barely an annoyance, and the annoyance comes from the reaction of others. I would LOVE to never hear the following sentences again:

1. “You should just relax and speak slower.”
Wait, I should what? Oh my god! I never thought of that, but now thanks to you all my problems are solved. I am forever indebted to you, Amateur Armchair Speech Pathologist. Turns out there was no need for the foundation, the in-ear mechanical devices, the clinical trials, or this cafepress shop.

2. “Wow, it’s so weird! Ever since I started hanging out with you, I stutter too!”
When dating a stutterer, the moment you utter this sentence is the moment the relationship ends. And yes I’m talking to YOU, Every Every Guy I Dated Between The Years 1998 And 2002.

Are you out there, stammergirls? let’s hhhhear your story.

check in to express more screamin’ Katrina outrage.

Former FEMA chief Michael Brown–you know, the one directly responsible for the 1000+ deaths?–is back on the FEMA payroll while he “transitions out”. Yes, that’s right, folks. He’s being paid to explain why he fucked up and destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives. I guess there would have been no other way to compel him to stay and answer some questions … like, say, a subpoena?

Here’s another idea: You know those swear jars some workplaces have, where you have to put in a quarter for every swear word you use, and at the end of the month the money buys everyone a treat or something? What do you think would happen if FEMA instituted a dead body jar, where they took $100 out of the responsible person’s paycheck for every person who died in an emergency, then used the money to … I don’t know … pay for aid to the victims? Ya think Brownie woulda taken that job in the first place?

Here’s a report from a gay Iranian man who recently escaped from Iran and is seeking asylum in a gay-friendly country. He was denounced by a gay acquaintance, then caught in a sting operation set up by the basiji (a para-police force tasked with the regime’s dirty work) on a gay chatline. He has been arrested, harrassed and tortured in the past several months, and finally threatened with death.

I don’t know if this sort of thing has been happening in Iran consistently in the past 25 years, or if we’re just seeing a recent upsurge of anti-gay feeling. The recent election of a conservative hardliner to the presidency could have touched off an anti-gay campaign. Or, it could be that the recent hanging of two gay teenagers in Iran has simply focused media attention on a problem that’s been bubbling along quietly this whole time. There is now some controversy over the conviction of the two gay teenagers, who may have been hanged for consensual homosexual acts, or for the rape of a 13-year-old boy. As US Reps. Barney Frank, D-Mass., Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., and Tom Lantos, D-Calif put it in a recent letter to Condi Rice, asking her to get to the bottom of the story:

The exact details of the case remain unclear, and because the conflicting reports about the nature of the charges against the two boys make it difficult to react appropriately, we urge the State Department to do everything it can to clarify the circumstances of this case. Initial reports were that the 16-year-old and 18-year-old boys … were punished for homosexual activity with each other. In other reports, the Iranian authorities claim the teenagers were accused of raping a 13-year-old boy. Some human rights groups suspect that this charge may have been trumped up as an excuse for the brutal treatment of gay people and to undermine public sympathy for the boys.

Project GayRussia.Ru interviewed editors of the online gay Iranian magazine MAHA shortly after the election about the hangings and about the state of homosexual tolerance in Iran. They had this to say to the question of what the situation of gays in Iran was:

The GLBT situation in Iran has changed over the past 26 years. The regime does not systematically persecute gays anymore, there are still some gay websites, there are some parks and cinemas where everyone knows that these places are  meeting places for gays, furthermore it is legal in Iran that transsexual applies for sex change and it is fully accepted by the government. There are some medias which sometimes (not often) write about such issues. Having said that, the Islamic law, according to which gays punishment is death is still in force but it is thought not much followed by the regime nowadays.
 
You may remember the Soviet days, there was not much info about homosexuality in your country, families and the society could not accept it and the regime did not allow GLBT to have their organisations or to spread info about the issue. The situation is pretty much the same in Iran today. But thanks to Internet and contact with the International community, people get the info and Iran society has changed a lot and support for GLBT rights is growing in Iran though we still have a long way to go.
 
In the recent elections there was a candidate who put “RESPECT FOR DIFFERENT LIFE STYLES” in his program. And it was something new. We do not know if he really meant gay life but we know that his front is not anti gay. In addition there is a famous political person, Mr. Akbar Ganji, who also openly talks about RESPECT FOR DIFFERENT LIFESTYLES. Add to that GLBT which is still in the beginning of its journey but it is young and determined to fight for GLBT rights. There are also opposition political groups in exile and some of them voiced their support for GLBT rights in their program.
 
So, on the whole, we are optimistic about the future as Iran’s situation can not continue like that and people are pushing for reforms and changes.

I suppose improvement in one’s situation should be looked upon with optimism. However, the editors noted elsewhere in the interview that there is still very little information available for LGBTs in Iran – and of course, the death penalty for homosexuality, even if not enforced, still applies. What can we do?

Please do keep an eye on Iran and demand a better life and respect for Iranian GLBT. Your support means a lot for us and gives us energy and encouragement. Despite the fact that you may not hear from Iran GLBT regarding your support, please rest assured that we hear about it and we welcome it but sometimes it is not easy to work and be in touch with our friends abroad.

I can’t possibly bear to write or speak another word today about disaster relief work. Until 10 minutes from now when I start babbling again to anyone who will listen.

So what to write about? Something witty and clever and cheering? Something ranty, yet not using the words “FEMA” or “inbred assclownz"?

Kids’ books? They’re pretty cheerful and silly. Aren’t they?

I’ve talked before about how the Harry Potter series is moving towards this interesting subtext. Its message is that truth is a fluid concept, and authority is not necessarily to be trusted. That’s fairly subversive, though on the surface the books never seem particularly radical. I’ve talked about this on my own blog, and a reader, blog-friend, and mild-mannered librarian, Elsewhere, pointed out to me that J.K. Rowling pays homage frequently to Jessica Mitford, a radical political activist and notorious over-the-top prankster.

How about another insanely popular series, the Captain Underpants books by Dav Pilkey? I’ve got “Captain Underpants and the Invasion of the Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies From Outer Space (and the Subsequent Assault of the Equally Evil Lunchroom Zombie Nerds)” right here in front of me.

The heroes of Capt. U are two fourth grade boys who draw comic books about their principal, Mr. Krupp. (Oddly, I just read Neal Stephenson’s first novel, The Big U, and noticed that the school’s top administrator is named S.S. Krupp. Coincidence? I think not.) Mr. Krupp by a trick of fate turns into Captain Underpants, a superhero, if he hears fingers snapping. If you pour water over him, he turns back to the mean principal. So, I have never quite figured out why the boys are so hot to rescue him and restore the status quo! They freak out and save him every time! They like him, and worry that he’ll get into trouble! It’s all about exposing that adults have secret, scary dark sides that get exposed suddenly, and how then they have to be helped to stuff their Ids back into a box. So it’s training in a way for the kids to do that with themselves: the book, like many great children’s books, is like a little hegemony installation system. While it’s on the surface an annoying book about fart and booger jokes, it’s deeply “status quo restoring”.

But the 2 comic-book drawing bad kids also save the world by their abilities of naughtiness and prank-playing.

Both HP and Capt. U. share the idea that naughtiness, in fact, extreme, dangerous, thuggish badness, can be a very strong site of political resistance. That’s kind of cool!

Then, thinking about the gender politics in play… I wondered if I could come up with examples of that level of thuggishness being a site of resistance for girls. The Akiko books? Nah. They’re great, but Akiko triumphs over adversity by being Nice and having lots of cool geeky friends. That’s fine… Hmm. Nausicaa or other Miyazake books? Nah again. Girls win by being nice. Gail Carson Levine’s Princess series? That’s more fruitful… the rewrite of the story about the sister who drips jewels from her mouth vs. the one who spits out disgusting vermin and insects was quite excellent. The jewel-drooler does okay in life, but is dull. The bug-spitter has a rip-roaring time. But it’s not… socially or politically subversive.

Where are the kids’ books about nasty, lying, weaselly, booger-joking, shoplifting, rule-breaking, bitchy little hellcat girls who set off bottle rockets in school? And then who grow up to be bomb-throwing revolutionaries or who save the world from alien invasions? Instead, girl-badness in stories comes later, with sexual maturity and misbehavior. That seems so dumb and limited. I’m just wondering.

Citizen! Stop living your life! Do not attempt to be an individual! Or you risk discovering that your life is wrong according to the most venerable of journalistic bludgeons, the unsourced trend piece. The New York Times is here to tell you the way “many” people are living their lives – which of course just happens to be the most conservative wet dream possible.

The most recent example, of course is the Times’ front-page story which allegedly proves that “many women” at elite colleges are planning to abandon their careers for husbands and kids, pretty much as soon as they graduate. As various bloggers, including Kevin Drum, have pointed out, the story is based on nothing. Basically Louise Story had a good hit of a crack pipe and then decided that she glimpsed a trend in the fumes. There are not only no statistics, the piece is based on a handful of interviews and a smattering of emails that Story sent out to a skewed sample of women.

The Times also recently had a trend piece about South Asians in the U.S. deciding to have arranged marriages, only with veto power. This piece was similarly conservative, and similarly based on absolutely no data, except for a few interviews. And the liberal use of the word “many,” as in “many people think the New York Times is full of crap.

I still haven’t forgiven the Times for letting Judith Miller hype non-existent “intelligence” about WMDs in Iraq.

But really, the Times is just one example of the decrepitude of print journalism. The goal is to present a stultifying world view that encourages people never to try and challenge any of the idiotic aspects of the status quo. Remain in your brain-dampening chambers, citizens! – Do not attempt to exercise brain activity! – The brain-orderlies will come and administer an extra dose of Soma shortly!

I’ve thought a lot lately that we don’t talk about the central facts of our age nearly as much as you’d expect – global warming, extreme income inequality, our massive debt, and other signs that we’re living in a way that is drastically unsustainable in the short term. (Plus the housing bubble, and the widespread predictions that the world’s supply of oil will peak soon.) People have said that sort of thing for decades but it seems truer than ever now. And we do talk about all those things – but at the same time, we sort of talk around them more than we talk about them. They’re sort of on the horizon but not squatting on our heads like ugly birds. They should be all we talk about, not just things we talk about occasionally.

And I think the media actively work to keep us from discussing the only things that matter in our world. In favor of bullshit celebrity news, or manufactured controversies. But also by focusing us on “trends” that let us know that everything is fine, “many” people are behaving in an orderly, obedient manner.

So I was away, then dealing with job transitions and general madness, have not posted in a long while and may not post regularly, but here I am now. I admit to feeling a bit inadequate when my fellow Otheries know all kind of stuff about the news and stuff, and I know about Mr. T. Now, I also know about “Dog The Bounty Hunter", which may be the greatest show on TV and I have been watching the A&E marathon all week.It’s a reality show about a bail bondsman and the bad guys who he hunts down and helps with his own brand of tough love, with the help of his gigantically breasted wife Beth and really, really attractive son Leland. I can’t help thinking, though, that spectacularly mulleted Duane “Dog” Chapman calls himself “The world’s greatest bounty hunter", but they are based in Honolulu. How hard could it be to hunt down impoverished meth-heads…on a small island? Especially when their moms and girlfriends call your office to tell you exactly where they are? But quibbles aside, my heart was in my throat when hot, hot Leland was sent to capture a kickboxer during a match. He waited until the guy won the fight, then arrested him IN THE RING to the boos of the crowd. But he got through it, and not one hair on his waist-length ponytail was out of place. (everybody on this show has excellent, highly dramatic, enormous hair.)

I’m fascinated by the show because of the respect they have for the suspects. I don’t know if it’s a Hawaii thing, or just a Dog thing, but they routinely do things like give jobs to the teenage kids of the women they arrest, or help a guy get out of jail quicker because they know he’s the only one who can lift his legless mother in and out of bed. When they have to arrest a broken-down Native Hawaiian for public drunkenness, they acknowledge that “alcohol is the white man’s curse on native people.” If all cops in this country acted like these guys–looking every arrested man in the eye and acknowledging him as a human being with a family who is having some serious problems and needs a lot of help, problems of his own making as well as economic and racial realities that he is up against–I think the crime rate and the prison population would drop dramatically. But it’ll never happen.

And my first ever post got several bitchy responses from an American Apparel employee. As far as I can figure, Am. Ap. gets google alerts when they are mentioned in a blog, and then an employee posts an indignant message about how professional they are and offers a factory tour to prove how saintly and good they are and not coke snorting, orgy-having ass grabbers. I honestly don’t care enough about the subject to keep talking about it. So there.

I meant to blog about stuttering, and stutterers as an overlooked minority group. I promise to write about that next time. I have a lot to say about it. And I’d rather say it in print so I don’t have to see that look people get when watching me get through a moment of Stop-Plosive Consonant Disfluency.

In the meantime, please have a look at Fixed Gear Enthusiass, a site for anyone who likes bicycles and/or men in underpants.

Some of you may have seen this by now: a group in Massachusetts is publishing online a list of names and addresses of people who sign an anti-same-sex-marriage petition. Link.

The website, KnowThyNeighbor.org, states about this campaign:

In the fall of 2005, extremists will attempt to convince 65,825+ Massachusetts voters to sign a petition that would add anti-family language to our state constitution. Those who sign it will be listed here.

Quite straightforward. Now, there is nothing illegal in this. It’s all open and aboveboard. And furthermore, I have no objection to activists using social pressure as a tactic. That’s the point of boycotts, protests, letters to the editor, and pretty much every other weapon in the arsenal of the political activist. Plus, this seems like it might actually be more effective than most of the small arms lefties carry. So there’s that.

But I’m just not comfortable with the fact that this tactic so obviously employs intimidation. Because it’s clear that this will only work if people are too afraid to be seen by their neighbors online to actually sign the petition. If people didn’t care, or were passionate enough about restricting same sex unions to do it anyway, then this effort would be wasted. What’s having petition signatories available online gonna hurt, if the petition gets delivered with sufficient signatures anyway?

The org itself indirectly acknowledges its intimidation tactic by warning the sites users not to actually, ya know, intimidate people:

KnowThyNeighbor.org hopes to inspire Civil, Legal, and Respectful Discourse on the topic and discourages with its fullest conviction the actions by anyone to harm a person or their property in retribution for exercising their democratic right to sign the petition.

Yeah … right. You know what this reminds me of? The whole argument for permitting the government to use torture to interrogate terrorists. The threat of possible torture has been shown to be very effective in interrogation. Therefore, proponents argue, if you publicly permit torture, you mostly don’t have to use it. But if you really do prohibit torture and everyone knows it, then you’ve lost your most effective, non-torture tactic.

Likewise, this effort only works if the threat of neighborly retribution for “exercising their democratic right to sign the petition” stops people from signing. If they know that those lefties are too pc pussified to attack, then the website has failed. Like with torturing terrorists, KnowThyNeighbor.org operates in the shadowy zone between threat and fulfillment.

Furthermore, if we move out of the shadowy zone, KnowThyNeighbor can’t be expected to take responsibility for the actions taken by those who read the website and actually exact retribution. But the cause benefits from the added intimidation factor that would create.

I don’t like it. I know, I know … but I don’t like it.

My new favorite author is Ken MacLeod, a Scottish science fiction writer whose political space operas always have three crucial ingredients: fully-realized characters, lots of interesting speculative politics, and super-cool aliens (or cyborgs). Plus, spaceships. Did I mention the spaceships?

I fell in love with MacLeod while reading a manuscript version of Newton’s Wake that had been sent to me gawd knows how long ago when I was a book review editor. It languished in my “to read” pile for over a year before I read the first paragraph, noticed that the main character was an ass-kicking female “combat archeologist,” and dug in. Combining witty pop culture references (separatist, Christian farming communities on terraformed planets call themselves “America Offline") with a tale of gray market interplanetary trade routes ruled by a group of off-the-hook capitalist Scots, the novel manages to explore both the future of social democracy and the sexuality of synthetic humans.

I promptly went out and bought MacLeod’s “Engines of Light” trilogy from Borderlands, and I’m about half-way through the second book, Dark Light. There’s more political intrigue – communists vs. anarchists vs. capitalists vs. tribalists – and a lot of terrific commentary on gender roles. Two of the main characters in the novel are more or less cross-gendered: one is a male-to-female transsexual from a tribal culture which views gender as a function of social role, and therefore people can switch genders if they want; the other is a female machinist from a proto-social democracy where her interest in a male-dominated profession makes her something of an oddity. Plus there are polyamorous aliens, computer geeks, and a mysterious alien plot to relocate humans from all eras in earth’s history to a bunch of remote planets in a “second sphere” of the universe.

Even better, I found MacLeod’s blog, where I discovered to my great pleasure that he is a terrifically thoughtful Marxist and all-around leftist curmugeon. I highly recommend the novels and the blog – but mostly the novels. Smart, politically-astute science fiction with a leftist, queerish, feminist bent is hard to find. I’m glad I found MacLeod.

The Republicans have been arguing for years that private charities are better at caring for the poor and vulnerable than the government. Either because private non-profis are more efficient (!) or because they won’t encourage people to become dependent the way government programs allegedly will. I’ve had a number of problems with this argument, not least the fact that often private charities are stretched to their limits before the government cuts social spending, and private donations or volunteer resources don’t increase enough to pick up the slack.

But also, my pretty extensive experience with homeless charities left me feeling as though there are a lot of people whom non-profits can’t help. Non-profits, especially ones which rely on volunteers, tend to be kind of capricious about whom they help and how much. I sat through hours of discussions with people who only wanted to help the “deserving” homeless, or the homeless people who acted grateful and kissed our hands. The rude homeless, the angry homeless, the ones who didn’t grovel or who obviously had major behavior problems, nobody wanted to help. And the last homeless charity I tried to get involved with had wanted volunteers to ask people why they thought they were homeless, and then the volunteers would write why we thought the people (whom we’d just met) were homeless. And then we were supposed to make a judgment about whether the homeless people were sincere about wanting to change, or else they’d be tossed out of the shelter.

So I ended up feeling as though a major strength of government programs was that there wasn’t as much scope for individual volunteers, or even managers, to discriminate. If you qualify for a government program, you get helped, regardless of whether you look nice, or seem to be the “right” kind of person. Of course, in practice, every government program spawns some horrible bureaucracy that’s designed to frustrate and confuse people, especially people the individual bureaucrats don’t like. But at least with a government program, you have clear criteria for receiving benefits.

The performance of government agencies in the wake of the Katrina disaster has shaken my point of view. Not just becuase of all the horrendous inefficiency, but also because there are so many stories floating around of people with FEMA and the National Guard and various other agencies behaving in a capricious and discriminatory fashion. Some of the stories of functionaries and soldiers pushing people around and denying people access to stuff reminded me very strongly of my worst charity experiences.

So I’m not sure what the take-home message is now. Having good, well-funded government programs is only the start, but then you also have to rules in place to prevent abusive behavior and discrimination? And find ways to attract the best people to those sort of agencies? Or maybe the message is that discrimination is endemic to human endeavors, and no amount of standardization can eliminate it?

It was the worst of times, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of credulity, it was the season of darkness – in short some of this season’s noisiest authorities insisted upon its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Bitches.

FEMA chief Michael Brown, apparently still stinging from the one-two punch of being removed from NOLA relief and being spanked by the press, sent out a “candid” email to family and friends this week in which he complained:

“I don’t mind the negative press (well, actually, I do, but I try to ignore it) but it is really wearing out the family … No wonder people don’t go into public service. This country is devouring itself, the 24-hour news cycle is numbing our ability to think for ourselves …”

Poor baby! I mean, my God, people were actually expecting him to do his job? It’s almost as if the press didn’t know that FEMA Director is just a neocon sinecure. No wonder people don’t go into public service! Where’s the gratitude? The way they pick at you when the slightest little thing goes wrong! I mean really, what’s wrong with Brownie’s resume?

Meanwhile, on the other side of metaphorical town: nonprofits that rely on public charitable giving (i.e. most nonprofits) were already taking a hit in favor of Katrina relief. While an L.A.-based cultural center cancelled a major fundraiser for lack of ticket sales, United Way fretted about its ability to maintain:

“It’s important that people realize that the nonprofits that are here are providing resources for a critical safety net that would not otherwise be there,” said Elise Buik, the group’s president and chief executive. “We have 90,000 homeless right here in Los Angeles County.”

Social service and cultural nonprofits may have already taken a hit this year because of the overwhelming response to the call for tsunami relief. The generosity Katrina has called out in folks is truly awesome. But everyone, please keep in mind that the hurricane was so devastating because it came on top of all the problems of homelessness and poverty and poor education that America already has.

This year is extra harsh. Please try to give a little extra this year, even if it isn’t money. Don’t let this year be a tale of two competing generosities.

New Scientist reported a few days ago on a study showing that stem cells degrade as they replicate over time. Basically, they begin mutating wildly as they “grow older.” This comes as bad news to the scientific community, which has been limited by law to using only a few elderly stem cell lines in federally-funded experiments. Privately-funded and state-funded research has no such restrictions, and several states have set up their own stem cell research centers for this reason. But as New Scientist points out, many stem cell therapies rely on replicating these pluripotent cells into liver cells, nerve cells, or whatever. So even if scientists have access to “fresh” stem cells, the whole basis of the therapy might be undermined if it turns out that these cells have a tendency to mutate when they’re replicating (genetic mutation usually leads to cancers).

Even though I’ve supported stem cell research, and fought the religious hocus-pocus behind the idea that embryonic stem cells are “unborn babies,” I’ve always been suspicious of the idea that stem cells could become the cure-all for cancer, aging, and inherited diseases. At this point, there’s religious zealotry on both sides of the stem cell debate. The stem cell true believers often claim that new therapies will grant us eternal life as we replenish our ailing organs with new cells that keep us going forever.

A lot of money is being thrown at stem cell research, despite the fact that we haven’t reached a point where we know much about how stem cell therapies will work. The therapies look promising, but mostly on paper. We’re only just now discovering how stem cell lines function over time, as this new study suggests. I wonder if stem cell “cures,” like electrotherapies of the nineteenth century, will turn out to be more fad than fact?

I wish I had something smart or insightful to say about Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans. Unfortunately, I’m stunned in a particularly unhelpful way.

Meanwhile, though, I’m going to blog about something I’ve been vaguely obsessed with lately. I wish there were an umbrella term for people who are queer, but not gay or lesbian. In other words, a term that encompasses trannies, bisexuals, genderqueers, pansexuals, intersex people and whoever else calls themselves queer. Just not gays or lesbians.

The word “queer” is great as an umbrella term, but given how much visibility gays and lesbians tend to have in the “queer” scene, it’s easy for everybody else to disappear into that term. And I feel as though there are a lot of people who are queer-but-not-gay who get lumped into the “gay” category. Maybe we’d be surprised how many of us there were if we had a word for us.

Is this divisive? I don’t know. But in my experience of both the bi/pansexual and the trans/genderqueer scenes, I’ve found that people spend a lot of time whining that the “mainstream” queer community doesn’t include them enough. I’d like to see us doing a better job of building our own scenes and including each other. Maybe if trans/genderqueer people had scenes that included bi/pansexual people, and vice versa, the gays and lesbians would see how cool we were and beg us to come play in their sandbox.

My suggestion for a word that means “queer but not gay or lesbian"? I really don’t have one, I’m afraid. I thought of “wanderqueer,” which sounds like “wanderlust,” but is also too cutesy. Any other suggestions? Or do you think this is a bad idea in the first place?

I don’t know why I can’t look away from Katrina, but I’m riveted, like a bunny in headlights. This must be the most blogged disaster in the history of the world, simply because it’s American (and because it’s the most recent.)

Here’s a bitter and empassioned tirade by Anne Rice. Yes, the vampire lady. She says:

Now nature has done what the Civil War couldn’t do. Nature has done what the labor riots of the 1920’s couldn’t do. Nature had done what “modern life” with its relentless pursuit of efficiency couldn’t do. It has done what racism couldn’t do, and what segregation couldn’t do either. Nature has laid the city waste - with a scope that brings to mind the end of Pompeii.

and:

But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us “Sin City,” and turned your backs.

Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.

Okay, how fucked are we that we are taking a huge, moderate-to-liberal gulp at the death of a Nixon/Reagan appointee? Here’s the Guardian on Rehnquist’s legacy:

He dissented on some landmark decisions during his career on the bench. They included Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that women have a constitutional right to an abortion. He also objected to a 2003 ruling that struck down laws criminalising gay sex, and to a ruling that preserved affirmative action to favour black student admissions at public universities.

The chief justice pressed for the expansion of states’ rights at the expense of central government; he backed the death penalty and opposed the separation of church and state.

As the highest judge in the land, he presided over the impeachment trial of president Bill Clinton.

He played a pivotal role in the contentious 2000 presidential election, siding with the conservative majority in a bitterly divided court to stop ballot recounts in Florida and hand the White House to Mr Bush.

This is what we are sincerely mourning in the anticipation of something much, much worse? I’m exhausted from bad news and have no comment to make.

What we really need now is a good insult. I can’t believe the Department of Homeland Security wasn’t prepared for this eventuality. We pay all these taxes, and they don’t even have a Disaster Plan.

A good disaster response plan has really catchy disparaging terms. Like, in the early 20th century we had the word “Wop", “Without Papers” to insult refugees. Who could forget the Okies, and all those hobos and bums in their shantytown Hoovervilles? Then later after WWII, we had D.P.s, “Displaced Persons”. Since I grew up partly in Houston, I had the handy term “wetback” to add to the plethora of racial insults available to insult Latinos living in the area.

Now, post-Katrina, we need something catchy so we can talk smack about hurricane refugees. I was thinking at first “Nolas", but then realized that would leave out all the people from Biloxi and Gulfport. FEMAbots? No. Too technical-sounding. So how about “Caners”. It’s short. It’s simple. It rolls off the tongue beautifully. You can say it, then lean over a little and spit expressively on the sidewalk. “Goddamn filthy Caners, messin’ up our city.” *spit* See?

How come I had to think of this? Imagine all those decent, hardworking people who live in Houston. They’re being flooded with dirty homeless people who mostly talk funny and who probably just finished looting some DVDs, Huggies, and Fritos out of a Quickie-Mart, and who’s going to hire them when they can’t prove who they are? Why didn’t they have their birth certificates and social security cards into ziplock baggies, stapled into their underwear, just in case the levees broke? They keep freaking out and crying like howling animals. They can’t even act like civilized people. Shooting’s too good for them. And when that’s the case, you need a good catch-all term to make them seem more like desperate subhumans - to encourage the proper state of paranoia and suspicion among decent citizens.

The people in Houston and Atlanta can breathe easy, because while the Dept. of Homeland Security and FEMA have fallen down on the job, I am here in the breach, extending the glorious English language.

Reading the website for Force Ministries is a forced lesson in the inclusive and exclusive power of context. I don’t live in the non-denom (and therefore evangelical) “Christian” alternate America. So me no speaky lingo. Near as I can tell from their self-evident-style (and poorly written) text, Force Ministries is an evangelical organization dedicated to members of our armed forces. Near as I can tell, but this is as far as I get in that direction.

Perhaps the main problem I’ve been having is that the language of American evangelical Christianity has been melded here with the language of American militarism, and it’s not a happy marriage, either to my ear or to the part of my brain that wrests meaning from words. Here’s the “Mission Strategy":

Mission: Christ-centered duty
Purpose:
- Impart faith in Christ.
- Instill patterns and principles for victorious Christian duty.
- Ignite individual calling and destiny.
Defining Passage: “From the days of John the Baptist unitl now, the kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing, and forceful men lay hold of it.” (Matthew 11:12) NIV

Elsewhere, the “Mission Strategy” is broken down into three major areas: Evangelism, Discipleship and Deployment. “Discipleship” is obvious: it is their program for developing a congregation among members of the armed forces. It includes bible study, online teaching and interaction, providing chaplains, etc. “Deployment” is their missionary branch. How missionaries on military bases differ from chaplains is probably one of those things you have to be in context to understand.

What’s really interesting here, though, is the first component: “Evangelism”. The Evangelism branch of Force Ministries is … you guessed it, a skydiving team! “FORCE skydiving is a ministry to the military and through the military … comprised of current and former Navy SEALs.” Why? you might ask. Well, “in this era of Gen-X extremism, it’s proving harder and harder to capture the attention of the world’s youth. If it doesn’t go over 100 miles per hour, make a lot of noise, put a hole in your lip, or turn your hair a different color, it probably won’t get a second glace (sic). This, no doubt, makes evangelism challenging for many of today’s ministries.”

No doubt. Thank goodness some evangelists have the ability to take the following flights of fancy:

“Imagine a group of today’s youth standing around with their skateboards and piercing’s (sic), when all of a sudden, one of them looks up and sees an aircraft at 12,000 feet, with a smoke trail. What appear to be 5 human beings have (sic) exited the airplane, all of them trailing a stream of smoke. Nearly a minute later, brightly colored parachute (sic) with the single word, “FORCE” boldly visible, begin to open. All witnessing these daring stunts are curious to see if these guys can pull off a landing and live to tell about it. They quickly make their way to the ‘drop zone’ where they notice a thousand other kids watching the beautiful parachute formations and spectacular landings.

“Immediately following the jump the jumpers quickly make their way to a stage were (sic) they began (sic) to speak a truth never before heard by many in the audience and soon a life changing realization comes over the newcomers …” etc.

What’s disturbing me about the whole scenario isn’t that evangelicals are missionizing the military – in fact, good for them for doing it, for concerning themselves with the spiritual welfare of soldiers deployed in horrifying war zones. What’s disturbing isn’t evangelicals trying to borrow the cred of xtreme sports to appeal to youth – in fact, good for them for doing it, for bothering to take note of our Zeitgeist and attempting to fit their spiritual message to the needs and interests of today’s youth. As the language makes clear, this stuff is straight out of the imagination of someone standing on the wrong side of the generation gap, but maybe today’s pierced youth will respond to sky divers.

What’s disturbing to me is the implication that Force Ministries is using military personnel to missionize non-military-affiliated kids for the military. It’s an indirect (and completely unacknowledged) military recruitment tool: first you get them for Christ, then you sign them up for Uncle Sam. No, there’s nothing on the website that says this, but why would you use an organization called “Force Ministries", dedicated to the military, to recruit kids for Christ, unless the point was to also prepare them for military life? Why, otherwise, the military-style language on the website, and the glorifying images of soldiers holding weapons for Christ?

Force Ministries isn’t awkward or stupid enough to glorify militarism in its text, but it is savvy enough to call itself “Force Ministries", with all the possible concomitant meanings and implications of the word “force", and the power of the idea of “force” to those who feel powerless. Do you really think that they haven’t thought that word through? So what is it that they’re really trying to do here? Recruit kids for Christ and then recruit Christians for soldiers? Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? Or are they maybe going to skip the first step (or leave the first step to other organizations) and just move straight to the second by “deploying” sky divers over existing Christian youth gatherings? That is actually what the fantasy scenario rather sounded like: militarize the already-Christian and rake in a few unbelievers, too. Kill three birds with one parachutes (sic).

What do you suppose? Is this a solution to the Bush admin’s impending recruitment crisis? Onward Christian soldiers?

I’m deep in translating “Cadáveres", a long poem by Nestor Perlongher. And I was thinking about all the things I read and hear that are in translation or aren’t. And I think it’s important to look at all levels of culture in another language, whichever language you choose, to make an effort not to be monolingual & an effort that goes beyond language classes or tourism.

How not to be a tourist? How to translate, and bridge between cultures/languages, without exploiting or … er… engaging in cultural appropriation, a long mouthful of jargon for “not being an asshole”. Translators lately talk a lot about this, about two-way translation, not expecting everything to be in English, about particpating in the culture you’re translating from, about being aware of your own subjectivity or subject position.

This weekend at Barcamp, an anarchic nerdfest, I talked all morning with Peter Kaminski of Socialtext - about collaboration, wikis, science fiction, and translation… He believes strongly in reading newspapers in other languages that aren’t your first language; that you are jolted out of your perspective (and you learn the language too.) You can also try listening to the radio… try the Pocho Hour of Power, at Pocho.com.

I spend a bit of time puzzling out people’s blogs in Spanish. It’s harder than newspapers or books, and more like trying to eavesdrop on the slangy, intimate conversations of strangers who know each other well. Slash fanfic in Spanish is vastly entertaining, and you can warm up if your spanish is rusty with the Spanglish translation of Don Quixote by Ilan Stavans.

In my translations of Perlongher, a great poet who is foulmouthed in Spanish, Portugues, Portuñol, and French, I’ve had to look at a lot of tranny porn, or actually, travestí porn; in Latin America, LGBT organizations are LGBTT, because transexual and travestí are fairly well-defined different identities with specific political histories and problems.

Mmm, internet porn. It’s got so many serious literary and political uses! And you should read it in its original down and dirty International Espanglish. The Swearsaurus Global Swearing Archive at Insultmonger is a good starting point to understanding the dirty slang of particular countries, but going right to the porno source teaches you much faster. I’m being flip about it, but the dynamics of the international porn trade are complicated and important. Porn and sex work continue to become globalized, like most other industries.

Anyway, listen to Perlongher’s amazing poem Cadáveres and read along if you dare.

According to every blog I read, Scott Westerfeld’s new vampire novel Peeps is out TODAY. Very exciting, very exciting.

I haven’t read it yet (it’s just out today) but all signs point to a great reading experience: Peeps is apparently a new spin on the vampire legend, doing for vampires what 28 Days Later did for zombies. I can vouch for Scott’s writing chops; he has me completely at his mercy, awaiting the third installment of his Young Adult magic trilogy Midnighters, and the second installment of the sci-fi teen cosmetic surgery trilogy (no joke, it’s great) that begins with Uglies.

Here are some reviews of Peeps. And now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

Okay. So it’s a tragedy that this teenage girl in Kansas got inside the tiger’s cage last week and was easily slaughtered inside its feline jaws. But cold-hearted question number one: Why didn’t anyone inform her that tigers and nature’s other megafauna weren’t made for cages or, in general, for humans to play with? Question number two: Since said tragedy occured in the enlightened state of Kansas, will we have to give her both a Darwin Award AND an Intelligent Design Award? Heartless question number three: If there is, in fact, no such natural principle as so-called evolution, will the filtering out of her genes in any way affect the collective intelligence of our species?

And in international news… Newsweek magazine outdid itself last week, and wrote a fairly even-handed, in-depth article about the pull-out of Jewish settlers from Gaza. It touched thoughtfully upon all the key elements of this historical moment: the woes of the settlers, the terribly young Jewish soldiers weeping as they led out the farmers who had planted their hopes in the soil, and the pathos of the Palestinians, their hopes, their suffering. There was even an interview with an orthodox settler who showed the Newsweek correspondant a potato he had dug out of the ground with his own hands. And he told the reporter to look closely at the earthy potato, with its lumps and eyes–wasn’t that obviously the face of Moses? Okay. So, forget that for a thousand years people have been seeing the Virgin Mary in their pasta fazul and that kind of thing, and now one Jewish guy in the middle of the summer in the southern desert under a lot of stress says something crazy, forget all that. My question is this: Didn’t the other settlers know that Newsweek would be coming? “Avi, Avi, whatever you do, don’t tell the American press your potato story. The Jewish and Arab newspapers, they know you’re just the potato guy, but, please, Avi, please, it’s Newsweek, goyishe-kop, you know they’ll just eat it up.”

My other question: Is Thomas Friedman a piece of shit or what?

I love superhero comics. I wasn’t a big comics reader as a kid or adolescent – I got into comics after I graduated from college and had a period of brain-mulching unemployment and temp jobs. I started buying lots of old superhero comics from the “bargain bins” and found them a nice escape from the utterly cruddy life I was having at the time.

Since then, I’ve been into superhero comics, and I occasionally read other comics. I like some “art” comics and “indy” comics, especially Evan Dorkin, Adrian Tomine and Ivan Brunetti, plus of course Michael Kupperman, who did the cover for other #1. But I pretty much only read superhero comics – if I want to read a serious literary story about ordinary people, I’ll read a novel. Or watch an indy movie. I know there are some ways comics can do the “serious literary story about ordinary people” differently or better than a prose-only narrative, but I find I just prefer prose-only narratives. I went through a Manga phase years ago, but I’m not into Manga any more.

But when I want to consume a superhero narrative, I read comics. I don’t like movies about superheroes, and I’ve read very little prose-only superhero narratives. In other words, I don’t read comics to read comics, I read comics to read about superheroes.

Mostly I still read things from the bargain bin, plus the occasional new issue by a creator I especially like. But lately the new superhero comics seem to have gotten more boring and “event-driven.” “Event-driven” is a term of art in the comics industry that refers to comics where, for five months or a year, everything is about The Death of Superman, or the Gotham City Gang War. Plus, most comics are being written so they’ll read well in collected editions, meaning the story moves at a snail’s pace.

Online comics critic Paul O’Brien ripped the Internet in half when he announced he was bored with superhero comics. He cited creative stagnation at DC and Marvel, and the lack of any interesting new titles lately. And people jumped down his throat. Mostly there was a flood of people suggesting that O’Brien just wasn’t reading good comics. (Good defined as non-superhero comics, natch.) If he’d only stop watching Bruckheimer movies and start watching Aguirre: Wrath of God! Even though O’Brien very carefully included a caveat that said his column only applied to superhero comics, and he’s only interested in superhero comics, everybody assumed he must just be an idiot who didn’t realize that Peter Bagge is God!

What bugs me isn’t the lack of reading comprehension of O’Brien’s column. It’s the silly snobbery, or the assumption that people who read superhero comics “need to be gently led,” as one person put it, towards better comics. As if I’m too stupid to have noticed the huge wall of indy comics at my local store.

Daniel Clowes’ main competition for my time isn’t Spider-Man, it’s Graham Greene and Ursula K. LeGuin, and a bunch of other authors I have unread books by. If I’m in the mood for something escapist and light, then Spider-Man gets to compete with television and movies. (And actually, that’s part of why mainstream superhero comics have gotten so boring: they’re not even fun escapist reading any more, because of the emphasis on some highly dubious sense of “realism,” and the aforementioned five hundred-part storylines.)

It all started with those Dove ads that show all the hot, mostly naked girls in weirdly desexualized lingerie with the tagline: “Real women have curves.” I can only assume it’s from this sentence alone that we are supposed to guess that the women in the ad are fat or have otherwise culturally unacceptable bodies (a few are people of color, one has a large tattoo, another is sort of tomboyish). The ads are part of Dove soap’s “campaign for real beauty,” another tip-off that we’re supposedly looking at women larger than the usual “unreal” models.

And yet if it weren’t for Dove’s helpfully-condescending slogans for these women, I would never have pegged them for “real.” Sure, their underwear is kind of drab, but every model has flawless skin, shiny hair, a radiant smile, and not a dimple of cellulite anywhere on her “real” body. None of them have flab or wrinkles. And their breasts are perfectly perktacular! I’m definitely in the audience of “real-bodied” women the ads are aimed at, but I don’t see my body up there. I see the same old airbrushed cuties, except with less makeup, slightly more muscle, and no Victoria’s Secret.

In New York, people with magic markers started doctoring the ads with occasionally fat-phobic, occasionally anti-corporate, and occasionally utterly random comments. In Dusseldorf, a local branch of zippy advertising agency Ogilvy took up space on local bus stops with a parodic campaign for real men’s bodies.

That’s when the new craze for “real” women took off. Nike launched its “big butts, thunder thighs, and tomboy knees” campaign, which only exists in print and online – perhaps because the TV audience isn’t ready for such “frank” representations of unfeminine body parts on women. Like the Dove ads, these Nike spots revel in women whose bodies are supposedly unlike those of fashion models. They also include unusually beautiful women of color in with “real” unskinny or boyish women. According to an AdAge story:

Trend expert Faith Popcorn of Brain Reserve, New York, said the shift did not start in advertisements. “No copywriter did this,” she said. “It started when we started to celebrate the black and Hispanic culture. In those cultures you can be a little ‘butty’ and even have a little mustache, too, and it’s considered cool and attractive. Now these white girls are looking at themselves and saying, ‘I don’t want to be a stick, I want to be natural.’”

One is left with the weird sense that not being white is somehow the cultural equivalent of being fat or hairy, two natural feminine states that advertising often tries to cure.

When I watched a commercial on Nike’s website of a woman caressing her “thunder thighs,” I was once again struck by the unreality of the body in front of me. I saw two muscular thighs, not particularly large, framed by a pair of trim (Nike) gym shorts. If those delectable gams were supposed to be almost unacceptably heavy, then my own body is much farther beyond the pale than I ever realized.

As for the Gap’s new lines of women’s jeans – “curvy,” “original,” and “straight” – I stared and stared at pictures of the three supposedly different body types the jeans are designed to fit, looking for differences. But I was only able to discern that the model who wore “straight” actually stood perfectly straight, while the “curvy” model had cocked her hip into an exaggerated C shape. An AP article about the new jeans tells us helpfully, “The new curvy fit is for the woman whose waist is considerably smaller than her hips - whose jeans often gap at the back of the waistband. There’s a deeper curve in the seam shape, eliminating extra fabric at the top.”

What the hell does that mean? Julie Vaughan, Gap’s senior director of denim design, clarifies: “We designed the jean on a curvy model. The curvy has a contoured waistband. It hugs the waist, and it has an easy fit through the hips and thighs.”

So curvy means curvy and you figure out what they’re trying to get at. You’d never know from actually looking at the Gap’s ads for the new jeans featuring preternaturally firm asses. The other day, as I headed to the men’s section of the Gap to buy pants, I reflected once again that I never see myself represented in fashion ads aimed at women. I only see myself in the men’s ads. Men have such reassuring ways of sizing their pants – I can buy 34 30 instead of “curvy” or “thunder thighs.” I guess I’d rather be a number than a “real beauty.”

First off, my apologies to all Trekkers and Trekkies: I have no idea when it is appropriate to say which for whom.

That having been said, check out this bloggage about the link between Star Trek fandom and pedophilia, as reported by the L.A. Times. Apparently, 99 out of 100 pedophiles prefer Star Trek paraphernalia in their houses.

I don’t know if I believe it, but here’s my take on the whys and wherefores: Trekkers, Trekkies and other fans of Star Trek are nerds. Nerds inevitably gravitate towards Star Trek because, well, the nerd mansion has a special room for Star Trek and that’s where all the cookies and conversations are. Pedophiles are maladjusted, which means, among other things, that the world clocks them as nerds. (This isn’t true; there’s a huge difference between socially awkward and sociopath, but cheerleaders aren’t making that distinction this week.) So pedophiles tend to live in the nerd mansion too, and will, so to speak, inevitably pass the Star Trek room on their way to the bathroom or the kitchen at some point.

Caveat for those of you about to defend nerddom to me: me nerd. In fact: me Star Trek fan, although not a fan of the original series. My irony doesn’t extend that far out.

I’m sure everyone’s heard about how great the Austin music scene was in the 80s until they want to throw up. And in writing about musicians when they’re dead, they’re always saints. Well, brace yourselves because I’m about to wax sappy.

But… Biscuit is dead! I’m a sad fan girl. Imagine me in 1986 as a little pink-haired kidlet newly hatched into the world, and bopping around Austin with my neurotic performance artist junkie girlfriend. We’d dress up in lime-green pantsuits, carry clipboards, and demand of everyone we met to let us draw mustaches on them in charcoal. Fu Manchu? Hitler? Walrus? Dastardly Dan? Which mustache would you like? In the 100-degree heat at some party or at Liberty Lunch or something. And there was Biscuit. He was cheerful! He was never serious, never pretentious! I feel like I’m praising the family dog from 20 years ago, like Karen Finley’s essay on Dead Pets in Shock Treatment. “She was a bad dog, she peed on everything, but that’s Lady. Yup, she barfed on everything, but she was Lady.” Biscuit was Lady! Up with a microphone telling everyone to get on up, and he meant it, and everyone would do it. “Go start your own band, now, y’all hear?” Dressed in something strange and fluffy with plastic dinosaurs epoxied to his head and an enormous grin. Biscuit was about infectious artistic empowerment. And I totally worshipped him! His art was good… I remember him doing an elvis shrine for the huge Dia de los Muertos exhibit one year. He made people feel like anything was possible in life, art, whatever.

And all I have is some 20 year old audio mix tapes. I got to get downloading! There do seem to be CDs… The Fat Elvis & the Skinny Elvis are definitely available.

I loved how they could play anything and mixed everything up. The happy funk of “We Got Soul", “Funk Off", “What’s the Word?"— witty pop of “Influence", “Self Contortion", or “Identity Crisis” like the happier moments of Glass Eye or the Dead Milkmen — glorious punkosity with a velvet underground/MDC/Ramones beauty to the driven guitar in songs like “Authority” – thrashing rhythms but with velvety textural complexity. Or just plain silly a-la-Ed-Hall… “Frat Cars! Frat Cars! I can’t stand those Frat Cars! Fucking with the freaks!” & the later psychedelifunkpunk discoqueer weirdness of Cargo Cult….

I was thinking of this just last night because of something Pandagon said in her blog about an Austin-American Chronicle article on Biscuit. And remembering him fondly, and thinking of his band’s swirling legacy in the late 80s in Austin where he would come into a party and the party would suddenly reconfigure. Because … BISCUIT!!! In little reality-warping ripples all around the room. And then I woke up this morning to final_girl’s lj and … he’s dead.

As for the mixing-up of the music, it was beyond genre-crossover. The Big Boys just had fun and didn’t give a fuck what genre people expected. Again like Glass Eye, who refused to market themselves as one slick thing. That in itself is admirable even without Biscuit’s larger than life glowing saintlihood.

When I say that I love porn, I’m not speaking rhetorically. I didn’t adopt this stance in an enlightened, women’s studies kind of way. It’s just that ever since I got my sweaty hands on my junior high school best friend’s mom’s tattered copy of Nancy Friday’s Forbidden Flowers, followed precipitously with my parents’ stash of Penthouse Variations, I’ve been a porn fan. I just love reading the stuff, especially now that the internet brings it to me fresh and free everyday. And yeah, I read it for wanking. As it turns out, my textual habits are now being defended by none other than President George W. Bush and various religious right wing zealots.

It all started when Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln proposed a 25% porn tax on internet porn sites. She and several other Dems hope that their wildly unconstitutional Internet Safety and Child Protection Act of 2005 will help make the internet a more “child safe” place by forcing adult website owners to pay a ridiculous, blood-sucking one quarter of their revenues back to the government (who can then, one supposes, use it to subsidize defense spending which makes the real world child-unsafe). But here’s the beauty part: the religious right opposes the proposed law.

Randy Dotinga at Wired News reports that Rick Schatz, president of the religious advocacy group National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families, told him: “We’d not necessarily be pleased if the U.S. gets into what some people would call a ’sin tax.’ There would be the concern that the government would change its focus to tax pornographic materials rather than control production and distribution.”

In other words: to tax a thing is to legitimize it. I’m glad my Christian allies are keeping my favorite mom ‘n pop porn sites afloat by fighting this evil sin tax. But I think their strategy may be more canny than it seems at first. Let’s leave aside the fact that taxing a form of speech based on content is unconstitutional on its face. And let’s also leave aside the fact that it will be impossible to determine which kinds of sites should be taxed because there are so many kinds of sexual and erotic expression on the web, both commercial and noncommercial. (Although the bill’s architects say their definition of adult material will be based on the same rules that define “sexually-explicit conduct” in Title 18, section 2257 of the US Code – note that these rules are actually borrowed from section 2256 – that isn’t much help. This definition of sexual explicitness was developed in the context of identifying child porn, not “adult material.” It’s vague and strange, and its use in the application of a sin tax would no doubt lead to a whole host of litigation epiphenomena.)

Back to the bizarre canniness of Schatz’ camp. I think they’re opposed to the bill because it will impose such a burden on sites with sexual material that it could actually tip the balance of the nation’s sympathy back towards pornographers. After all, these are just Americans out to make a buck on sex. If it appears they’re getting beaten down by a tax-happy government, they may become martyrs rather than evildoers. So I say: bring on the porn tax. I want to watch the legal smackdown. I want to see anti-tax right-wingers and pornographers fighting side-by-side, shaking their fists at Big Government.

Today the right wing made another move to help me get more internet porn. The Bush Administration, possibly in response to a call from the conservative Family Research Council, has asked that ICANN delay plans to implement a “xxx” top-level domain on the net. ICANN – or, for non-wonk, non-geeks, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers – is a controversial US nonprofit which serves as a domain name gatekeeper. In June, it approved the use of domain names with a “xxx” suffix [note to self: buy www.othermag.xxx!]. You’d think conservatives would rejoice, right? Instant porno ghetto, complete with a really easy way to filter out “nasty” material based on the domain name.

But no! Conservative website FamilyNews reports:

Daniel Weiss, Senior Analyst for Media and Sexuality at Focus on the Family Action, says there are nearly 260 million porn web pages already. A .xxx domain would only make matters worse. “Basically they’re creating an entire new domain that can be populated with pornography.” Weiss says once a .xxx domain is officially established, there would inevitably be a feeling that pornography is normal and given an official stamp of approval.

So now I have the Christian right’s full approval to keep surfing porn in all the usual places – no pesky changing my bookmark file; no rules forcing adult sites to get ripped off when they buy those $75 xxx domain names.

Damn I love America.

One of the most frustrating things about the federal government’s obsession with cracking down on grannies with cancer who smoke pot is that it diverts resources away from serious drugs. Now one serious law-and-order Republican, at least, is admitting that other issues are way more pressing. In a Aug. 1 letter Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) takes the Office of National Drug Control Policy to task for ignoring the rise in popularity of methamphetamines. Not only does meth destroy people’s lives (and facilitate the spread of HIV), but meth labs leak toxic chemicals into water supplies.

“Marijuana is a much more popular drug in terms of the number of people who use it. However, methamphetamine causes much more destruction in a much shorter period of time than marijuana. We believe that reducing drug use is not just about reducing the number of users of a drug, but reducing the overall harm to society caused by the drug,” Grassley writes. “While we agree that any drug use is harmful to users and those around them, the problems associated with marijuana are not comparable to methamphetamine in terms of cost to society.”

He goes on to list positive steps to curb the spread of meth that the Bush administration either hasn’t taken or has actively opposed. I don’t have much to add, except that it’s refreshing to see a hard-line Republican talking sensibly about drugs.

A bizarre adoption case in Indiana has taken a strange turn recently, begging questions about race and adoption policies.

A 58-year-old single male New Jersey school teacher wanted to have kids. Through a surrogate birth adoption agency in Indiana, he arranged to adopt twin girls, born prematurely (in Indiana) to a surrogate mother from South Carolina. Problems arose at the hospital when nurses became nervous about the adoptive father’s seeming lack of child rearing skills for the medically fragile preemies and alerted authorities.

What came out of an ongoing investigation is that the father, Stephen Melinger, apparently went to Indiana to adopt because New Jersey law renders surrogacy contracts illegal, while Indiana law is ambiguous on this point. The surrogate mother gave birth in a different county from the agency that arranged the adoption, apparently because the agency had had problems before. Also, the home study required by law before adoption was never performed in Melinger’s home (which is in New Jersey.) Further, it is illegal, according to Indiana law, for someone from out of state to adopt an Indiana-born child unless the child is “hard to place”. No one would have caught any of this if the nurses at the hospital hadn’t become suspicious of Melinger himself.

The twins were originally reported in the legal papers to be the biological children of the adopting father, Melinger, and of the surrogate mother, Zaria Nkoya Huffman. However, Huffman is black (and was incorrectly reported in the papers as being white) and the children appear to be white, not biracial. The most recent twist, reported in the Indianapolis Star, is that Melinger now appears not to be the twins’ biological father after all. All this should, in hindsight, be obvious, since why would a biological parent need to apply for adoption of his child?

The report in the Indianapolis Star does not state for a fact that Huffman is not the biological mother. The speculation around the identity of the mother appears to be based solely upon the appearance of the babies, which is white, compared to the appearance of the mother, which is black. And now it seems that if Huffman is not the biological mother, if, in fact, the biological mother was a white egg donor, then the monoracial children will no longer be the “hard to place” adoptees that biracial children would be, and therefore will no longer be permitted to be adopted by someone out of state. This raises the question then of why Melinger chose a black surrogate mother. Was he playing the laws the whole time? Was this a strategy to get the kids born and then get them out of the state under the rules governing “hard to place” adoptees?

Simply the reporting on this story raises a whole host of issues, aside from the issues of the story itself. Is there really a medical question as to Huffman’s biological motherhood or is it entirely based upon appearance? Is it the reporter questioning her relation to the babies or is it the investigators? And if there’s really a question as to the provenance of the girls’ DNA, then why don’t they just do a damn test already?

As everyone should know, but most people don’t seem to, the background of multiracials – especially newborn babies – cannot easily be determined by appearance, especially when the interpretation of appearance is so subjective. It’s rare to find a child whose appearance is an exact 50/50 meld of its two parents’, or whose hue is exactly midway between that of its ethnically varied parents. Babies’ complexions – ALL babies’ complexions – are lighter than their complexions as older children, which is lighter than their complexions as adults. Furthermore, the way this story is reported underlines the one-drop rule: Huffman (the surrogate mother) is black, period. There’s no room in this “assessment” for a description of her actual appearance, which could range from dark-skinned and African-featured to light-skinned and European-featured. African America is a very multiracial community to begin with. As we’ve all seen time and time again, but have not seemed to recognize, there’s nothing to prevent a “black” mother from having very white-looking children.

That aside, adoption policy needs desperately to be cleaned up, if multiracial children can be blithely assigned to a “hard to place” category based upon the racial categorization of those who contributed their DNA. These rules originate in the practice of not placing adoptees interracially; i.e. not placing black children in white homes and vice versa. This is a serious problem for multiracial children, for whom almost ANY adoption would be interracial, unless it were by an already multiracial family of their exact mix. Add to this the fact that, in essence, all adoptees are interracially adopted, since there are infinite significant variations in ethnicity and family culture within the monolithic structures of single races in this country. I’m not suggesting that the rule against interracial adoption should be entirely dropped. But this case shows to what a ridiculous extreme it can be, and is, taken.

Spoilers ahead for the new Harry Potter novel…
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OK then. So apparently it didn’t take long for super obsessive compulsive fanboys to create a site called Dumbledore Is Not Dead to advance the view that, well… you can guess. The site includes tons of ridiculously detailed “clues” that Dumbledore didn’t die at the end of Half-Blood Prince as well as lots of wacky speculation.

But one of the main reasons why people seem to think Dumbledore lives is because he appeared to plead for his life. When Snape shows up, Dumbledore gets all freaky and desperate and says “Severus… please…” a few times. So the theory goes that either Dumbledore wanted Snape to kill him, or Dumbledore wanted Snape to help fake his death. They refuse to accept the idea that, at the moment of imminent death, Dumbledore simply freaked out and didn’t want to die.

After all, didn’t Dumbledore say in an earlier book that he saw death as the next great adventure, and didn’t fear it? Well, then, he obviously couldn’t change his mind. Or realize when it came down to it that, yeah, death actually freaked the shit out of him. Because that never happens in real life. People are always completely consistent and live up to things they said years earlier.

In fact, Dumbledore’s last night on Earth is sort of an interesting encapsulation of what it’s like to watch an aging relative or friend careen into the grave. It’s not generally crisp or glib. You have to watch all of the structures and ramparts of their personality melt a little. Even if they don’t have Alzheimer’s or dementia, just the process of a body ceasing to function by degrees is sort of infantilizing. So in the book, we have Dumbledore being force-fed the nasty potion and becoming increasingly whiny and incoherent. It’s a really disturbing scene as all of his trademark serenity vanishes. And then he stumbles into a trap, almost talks his way out of it, and winds up pleading with his murderer.

Part of what makes dying of “old age” so demoralizing and humiliating is that you get poked and prodded a lot by medical science. Half the Medicare patients who died in Miami spent time in an ICU in their last six months of life, and nearly a third saw ten or more doctors, according to testimony at a conference on end-of-life care. And yet Medicare patients who died in other places were much less likely to see as many doctors or spend time in the ICU. And yet their “outcomes” were much the same as the people in Miami.

Here we have to pause and ask what they mean by “outcomes.” Well, duh. Everyone died, that’s how they got included in these statistics. But we don’t know if the people in Missoula would have lived a few more months if they’d gotten the same care as the people in Miami, or if they’d have considered those months worth having.

It’s a cliche to say that Medicare could save billions if it didn’t go overboard on “heroic” measures for people in the last six months of life. The trouble is, you never know when someone’s in his/her last six months of life. Patients don’t wear T-shirts with their approximate date of death on them.

By law, patients can’t get hospice care under Medicare unless a doctor is willing to certify that they’re in the last six months of their lives. In some cases, a doctor will swear that a patient has less than six months to live, and then the patient will fuck everything up by living another few years. A few years ago, the federal government tried to investigate doctors for fraud if their patients lived longer than the doctors had said they would. Because the doctors had sworn the patients only had six months to live, and obviously they had lied.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, except that the issue isn’t as simple as anyone would like it to be. We’d all like a dignified death, and less medical poking and prodding after there’s already no hope. But at the same time, sometimes the medical poking and prodding actually works, and people get a few more good years. And it’s really hard to predict which people will benefit from more care.

Once again Kos of the popular political blog DailyKos puts it out there that “women’s rights” as an issue is interfering with “politics”, which is way more important than any petty single issue. Therefore, obviously, we should vote for an anti-abortion Democrat over a pro-choice Republican. It’s not just what he and his toadies are saying it’s how they say it…

“… clearly they don’t understand that good politics – turning the Senate Democratic is far more beneficial for their issue (women rights) than anything the Republicans can muster. Until NARAL (and the rest of the single-issue groups) understand that building a movement is more beneficial to their causes than singular devotion to their pet causes, I can’t take them seriously.”

“There is no issue “much, much bigger” than abortion rights” responds fedupnyc in the comments. “Roe v Wade is about the very humanity of women.”

Oh, those silly women – I can never take them seriously either. If only they understood what’s really important! You can see them chasing their tails here on Mediagirl.org, Rox Populi, and Feministe.

Imagine if it were all about men. If men got pregnant, or even just ended up with the kids and a whole lot of downward mobility, maybe they’d be fighting bravely for the right to vasectomies. There’d be do-it-yourself vasectomy classes becasue the clinics were being blown up by mad-eyed fundamentalist militia.

Here’s a plan. Make a law that whenever a woman gives birth, a random guy who voted against abortion rights is selected from the population in her neighborhood. Force-feed him to be 30 lbs heavier, operate on him to make his boobs sag down to his belly & give him hemorrhoids, and tax half his paycheck for the next 20 years. Also: as an extra-refined torture, make him join the PTA.

No, wait. Here’s an alternate plan.
You know those pregnancy simulation vests? All guys should have to wear them for a few months, maybe when they hit 16 years old. At the *very least*. Nevermind simulating the hemorrhoids and lifelong downward mobility. The state’s brutal interference with their bodies should go a long way to scare ‘em.

And to get the simulation vest thingie removed they should be required to travel to another state, run a gauntlet of Operation Rescue simulators, spend at least 500 bucks - or they have the choice of back-alley vest removal which involves a life-threatening unsanitary rectal exam with a coathanger.

That’s disturbing isn’t it? That packs a punch. I really shouldn’t say things like that. It’ll just alienate people! I shouldn’t sound like I want the government to have scary power over men’s bodies. That would be SO wrong!

A few thoughts about life in the age of the sound-bite. Why, when speaking to the nation that invented the t.v. dinner, would anyone use the phrase “Global Warming"? Americans all secretly think it sounds like a dream come true. Not so with the phrase: “Global Climate Destablization.” Likewise, “Ozone Hole” doesn’t sound nearly ominous enough–most Americans secretly suspect ozone to be the problem. A better phrase: “Punctured Oxygen Layer.” This is all so obvious that eight year olds should be laughing about it in Mad Magazine.

I sometimes think that the Left is losing the media war for the same reason nobody liked my film studies teacher in college. Whatever brilliant ideas he might have had were immediately disqualified by a humiliating nervous tic: He could never respond to his students without eventually relating everything back to “the great poet Bob Dylan.”

On a lighter note, regarding the intelligence of the American public, two weeks ago I finally read an article that gave me hope. A study has shown that the average IQ in America has gone up dramatically among youngsters born in the last fifteen years. This was being attributed, of all things, to Harry Potter. (The people doing the study belonged to the less intelligent generation.) Funny. Just a few days earlier, I had read an article suggesting that, due to the phasing out of leaded gasoline in the seventies and eighties, the amount of lead in children has gone down by 8600 percent in the last fifteen years. Anyways, just surfing some food for thought.

I don’t have time to do justice to the subject, but I’d like to mention two events: this year’s Blogathon and the Blogher conference.

I participated in the Blogathon a couple of years ago. For 24 hours, I posted every half hour. For me this translated into nearly continuous writing with bathroom breaks & interludes of reading other people’s Blogathon entries. I didn’t sleep. I raised a few hundred bucks for charity through reader pledges. It was a wild rollercoaster of a writing exercise! It was writing as a spectator sport or as performance art. This year’s Blogathon looks exciting… I have only cruised a few of the ongoing 24-hour freakouts, revelations, streams of consciousness, explorations, and art projects, so this is not a “best of” list. Take a look at:

Seeworthy’s 24-hour exploration of fat lib and body issues
Portraits for a Purpose: two artists draw portraits of each other every half hour, and post the results. Watch them go insane for hours!
Three Moms and a Single Lady - “Four sexy ladies talking about sex”. It’s sort of touching and earnest. Oh, those ladies!
Disconnected - Driving around posting from a different hotspot for every post. On the Road! this guy doesn’t have a huge amount to say, or time to say it in, but you have to admire the extreme nerdiness.

The Blogher conference was a hoot. Reality and the recording of reality were happening at such a fast pace no one could keep up. I skipped all the political panels and talks about technology & instead went to storytelling, identity blogging, and mommyblogging sessions. What a lot of fierce mouthy loud activist right-on feminists! It was like flying an airplane into a hurricane. I’m still reading the fallout on blogs like I am Dr. Laura’s Worst Nightmare, Multidimensional Me, and Contentious.

I’m so out of touch that it surprised me that some women dissed the idea of mommyblogging as “dumb arguments over whether to breastfeed or not.” Stuff like that, as if just because we were breeders and talked about it, we had no brains and as if everything we talk about must be takedowns of each other’s parenting. NOT. The mommybloggers were powerful strong women who never shut up. Never! Part of what makes it political to blog and be a mom is the immense pressure on women, once they breed, to be self-abnegating. Case in point, people think that blogging as a parent endangers children. ("What if some creep off the internet stalks your kids?") We heard stories like Alice’s from fussy - how one of her readers threatened to call Child Protective Services on her because she wrote about her 4 year old son’s penis. “Try getting HIM to shut up about his penis,” she responded. Take my word for it, the pressure is huge on moms to stay out of public discourse, or to keep their mom-ness out of it and live out a schizophrenic divide that does no one any favors. What the mommybloggers think of each other is that it’s a brave political act to refuse to divide whatever else you’re writing about from your role as a mom and a feminist.

For example, Jo Spanglemonkey’s discussion of an obnoxious transphobic post by Ambra Nykol, a conservative Christian attendee of Blogher:

What I was thinking about Ambra was that she thinks she is exempt. She thinks that because she knows herself to be an individual, not actually reducible to her skin color or her gender (or god only knows how she thinks of herself: the mind boggles to think of the kind of self-co-opting and self-flagellatory participation in one’s oppression that is implied by her political affiliation) that she can rise above the kind of discrimination that might be aimed her way. She thinks, in other words, that it won’t happen to her.

A final note about Blogher: Everyone should take a look at Ka-Ping Yee’s nifty tool, Regender, which he developed the night before the conference. It lets you surf the web with pronouns and first names gender-swapped. I can’t recommend it highly enough! It’s mindbending to read the news, or just everything you normally read, with genders reversed. You can neutralize gendered language too; try the other buttons at the top of the page once you start surfing.

Ok, I was supposed to post yesterday and I forgot. Besides, I don’t have a whole lot to say. Though I did notice that one of my fellow bloggeteers below made reference to the infamous 1986 Incident at Lake Forest, which is well on its way to being enshrined in urban legend. The truth, as far as I can make out, is that when Mr.T bought his estate, he had all the trees cut down because of his allergies. And as someone who was up ALL NIGHT two nights ago with sneezing, watering eyes, and asthma, I sure as shit would’ve chopped down the offending tree that has done this to me if I had a chainsaw handy. The T-man said, in a 1993 interview with the Onion A/V Club:

“Back in 1986, I bought a mansion in Lake Forest, Illinois, and then I cut down my trees and the neighbors got mad. How dare my neighbors get mad about my property? But the issue wasn’t the trees, as if they don’t cut down trees; the issue was that I was the only black man moving to a town of about 15,000 people. Stuffy people. Some of them were rich, some of them barely scraping. Actually, the really rich people didn’t even say nothing. The people that got little houses, their house ain’t bigger than my garage. So I’m sort of the black version of the Beverly Hillbillies. My driveway’s about a block and a half long, most unusual for a black man to have.”

He did not, as some claim, chop the trees down to “piss off the white man.” He chopped them down so he’d stop sneezing, and it was only the middle-class, striving white man who got pissed off. The very rich don’t feel threatened by other people’s tree-chopping habits. The anxious middle class do. If I had the time and energy, this could actually be a complex and compelling discission about race and class and entitlement over the environment. But I’m sneezing too hard. Anyone want to tak eit up, feel free…

The American Society for Journalists and Authors has changed its collective mind, and decided not to give Judith Miller the prestigious Conscience in Media award after all. The original vote to give her the award was a narrow one, but the new vote was unanimous. The society apparently yanked the award after looking at the whole of Miller’s career. Were they concerned by her hyping of incredibly flimsy evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Or maybe her hijacking of an army WMD search unit?

Actually, Anita Bartholomew had it right: the real reason not to give Miller the award is that she was protecting confidential sources who were trying to silence whistleblowers instead of blowing the whistle themselves. It’s a pretty basic distinction, and one the mainstream media seems to have forgotten. Back when I was starting out as a reporter, we were warned to use confidential sources sparingly and to be aware of their agendas if we did use them. If your source works for the government and is pushing the government’s agenda (or ditto for a corporation) then he or she is just a cowardly shill. Forbidding reporters from talking to off-the-record-but-official sources would be the first step towards cleaning up the putrid relationship between the media and the establishment.

Have you noticed, these last few years, the striking preponderance of wood grain in the “fine arts"? Next time you go to a show at any contemporary gallery or museum or leaf thru an issue of Art Forum or any other trendy art magazine, keep your eyes peeled for: faux wood grain, actual chunks of wood grain, drawings of wood grain, or anything else either faintly or boldly suggestive of wood grain.

So, what’s up with the wood grain? Is it all a coincidence? In those arts we used to call the avant garde, which, whatever they are called these days, are still supposed to over-exert themselves and remain ever on the unfamiliar edge of the new, how could one “original” or “maverick” artist after another be inspired to use wood grain? Does this dangling signifier hold some key to the modern condition? Is it an inside joke? Clearly it is a trend–but in that case, is it *gasp* trendy?

& what does wood grain mean to the art world? Does it signify, um, Authenticity, which is not actually authenticity, but rather, um, the campy and ironic appropriation of “natural” texture into the artificial “canvas” of Big Art, as if to say, “In our lives, as in art, the Authentic is dead"? Is this a reference to, or a recapitulation of, that by now ancient cubist piece by George Braques, the famous one, where he pasted a sort of hardware-store-grade linoleum wood grain panel onto his illustration of a chair, so that the fake real is glued onto his real fake? Yawn. Am I missing something?

The whole thing reminds me of the alleged time in the 80s when Mr. T, star of the A Team, bought a house with acres of lovely property in a lily-white wealthy suburb north of Chicago. For the benefit of his stuck-up neighbors, the week he moved in, he fired up a chain saw and took down all of the old beautiful trees on his property. But to really mess with his neighbors, he made sure to leave the ugly stumps. I myself am not into cutting down hundred year old trees, but of all the people working in wood grain, I appreciate Mr. T as truly an artist.

Just in time for you to be finishing up the latest Harry Potter tome, there’s the world’s cutest and most subversive web comic to read. It’s called “HD Comic,” and it’s made by a friendly livejournaler who posts regular updates for many adoring fans. For anyone who is familiar with Harry/Draco fanfic – in which fans recount the glorious, queer love affair between Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy – this will be an amusing delight. For people who have no idea what I’m talking about, reading the comic will be like traveling to another planet where homosexuality is accepted by all and giant entertainment corporations don’t sue fans for creating their own stories using copyrighted characters.

Imagine a Ziggy cartoon entirely devoted to the snuggly, magical romance between a lightening-marked sorcerer and his devilish blond boyfriend. HD Comic is sweet, friendly, and happily queer. Every strip is a silly affirmation of love, with just a little bite to it. Check it out – you may find yourself hooked.

The old news is that a lesbian couple were denied fertility treatments by their doctors back in 2000. Guadalupe Benitez was trying to get pregnant. Apparently, after charging Benitez and her partner for 11 months of fertility counseling and treatment, the doctors, Christine Brody and Douglas Fenton, refused to do the insemination procedure for Benitez, who sued them. Five years later, the lawsuit continues.

The new news is that the California Medical Association filed an amicus brief in support of the doctors who refused to treat Guadalupe Benitez. Here’s the CMA rebuttal to the GLMA press release. Then - Lambda Legal rants up a storm right back at the CMA.

Whatever you think about gay marriage, assimilation, breeders, and people’s right to insurance coverage for IVF; put that aside for a moment and think about the California Medical Association defending a doctor’s “free exercise of religion.” Doctors can’t legally refuse a patient based on sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or transgender status. But they can refuse a patient for not being married. Nice end run, fundie sleazebags!

Is this a ”right of conscience“? How come ”conscience” so often means “control over women’s bodies” and fertility? You can’t have a baby… you have to have a baby… we won’t fill your birth control prescription because you’re not married… we’ll sterilize you because you’re not married. Oh, and by the way, if you’re already pregnant, remember that God meant you to suffer labor pain & hope that your anesthesiologist doesn’t have a religious conscience.

The world of IVF, fertility treatments, and IVF is brutal and strange. I began to intersect with it in 1998 or so, after having a miscarriage. Then I had an ectopic pregnancy and blew out a Fallopian tube. I found out why many women don’t talk about miscarriages. Everyone had an opinion on whether I should be pregnant, what was best, what was “for the best,” what I should do and what I should feel. Another thing I hadn’t realized was that a miscarriage with complications was as expensive as private adoption; around $10,000. That’s also about what a hospital birth or an IVF treatment costs. My insurance wouldn’t cover any investigation of why I had miscarriages until I’d had three in a row, as if to keep getting pregnant and miscarrying were a minor inconvenience.

Fertility/infertility blogs like A Little Pregnant and The Naked Ovary give the bitter, witty, details of the insanity women go through: obnoxious things people say, horrible things their doctors do, and their own emotional rollercoaster, hopes, doubts, and fears. I think it’s interesting that the blogging world has opened up personal discussion of pregnancy and fertility issues; it’s something that hasn’t been done anywhere else. We should talk about our miscarriages, abortions, pregnancy scares, birth control, tube-tying, and all that messy stuff.

While I ramble all over the map, here’s another pregnancy tangent for your enjoyment: the Annouen archive of LOTR mpreg slash fanfic. Yes - you can fulfill your need to read Elrond’s diary as he agonizes over his own magical elfy uterus and what he and Frodo’s baby is gonna look like and what it means for his career as head of the Council. And when universes collide, and Galadriel knocks up Voldemort… what could be better? And what would the CMA say about it?

The Califonia State Supreme Court recently ruled that you can sue your boss for sexual harassment not just when you are directly being pressured for sex, but also when the boss’ sexual relationships with other employees prevents you from being treated fairly. The case involved the warden of Chowchilla women’s prison, who was apparently sleeping with three of his employees concurrently. (I was going to say “simultaneously", but that makes it sound way too much like a porn movie script.) “the demeaning message is conveyed to female employees that they are viewed by management as ’sexual playthings’ or that the way required for women to get ahead in the workplace is by engaging in sexual conduct,” wrote Chief Justice Ronald George, according to the CNN article above.

This ruling, methinks, does not do much to help out Dov Charney, creepy mustachioed CEO of American Apparel, who is being sued for sexual harasssment by three women in his employ. Charney has made a name for himself by selling socially-responsible American-made t-shirts on the one hand, and selling a sweat-soaked porny persona on the other. He readily admits to being overtly sexual at work, walking around in his undies, having an employee give him a BJ in front of a Jane magazine reporter, et cetera. He says it’s just part of his “First Amendment right to pursue one’s affection for another human being.”

But the ruling would seem to make Charney’s “it was all consensual” defense is neither here nor there. It may have all been consensual, but this sort of work environment doesn’t bode well for the future job prospects of any employee who the boss doesn’t consider hot enough to bang. If he were a rock star, a photographer a la Terry Richardson, (who Charney seems to be channeling), or a writer, I wouldn’t give two shits about his under-the-desk masturbatory habits.

As the owner, operator, and beloved perk-bestowing benevolent overseer of a garment company, employing mostly young Latina seamstresses in a non-union factory, his “first amendment right” to sleep with women who depend on him for their livelihood smacks a bit of droit du seigneur.

It’s not a good time to be a pornographer, or even just somebody who enjoys posting dirty self-portraits on the Interweb. First the Justice Department came out with a stricter version of the 2257 rule. In the new version, anyone who posts on the Internet any images of “an actual human being engaged in actual sexually explicit conduct” must maintain records of the performer(s). These records include actual name and any aliases, plus a driver’s license or other Picture ID. You must make them available during normal business hours (9-5) and post on your Web site a street address (not a P.O. Box) where someone can view these records. In other words, anyone who posts adult photos on the Web has to make the performers’ personal info available to anyone, and has to maintain an address where they’re available during the day to talk to the feds or anyone else. The bad news is the main group challenging this hideous rule is the Free Speech Coalition, which seems mostly interested in gaining minor concessions that will help big adult companies – such as more exemptions for porn made overseas. (See the FSC’s July 22 update for more about these concessions, which don’t help indy porn makers or small-time exhibitionists.)

And then a federal appeals panel refused to find the Communications Decency Act unconstitutional – even though the judges admitted it had led to self-censorship by photographer Barbara Nitke, and that Nitke had good cause to fear prosecution. The judges conceded that “community standards” in the most conservative town in America could be used to squelch online expression in more permissive communities. But they said Nitke hadn’t given enough evidence about community standards to clinch the law’s unconstitutionality. The Nitke case may end up before a newly conservative Supreme Court.

As the New York Times article on the case notes, a California couple served federal prison time in 1996 after a Tennessee postal inspector downloaded some images from their bulletin board system and decided they were obscene.

I remember visiting Canada after that country passed the Dworkin-MacKinnon obscenity law. I was told several places that Roberta Gregory comix weren’t available because they were obscene. But you could buy XXX porn featuring California blondes with silicone breasts almost anywhere. That’s how these things work – the 2257 crackdown and Nitke defeat won’t worry the big porno companies at all. They can afford attorneys and custodians of records and age-verification services. But if you ever post an image of yourself or someone else involved in “actual sexual conduct” on the Internet, you could find yourself behind bars for a decent stretch.

Blog-a-thon tag:
EFF15


I hope you’re not reading this blog entry using somebody’s open wireless network. It could get you arrested for trespassing. Earlier this month, a Florida man was arrested for sitting outside somebody’s house in his car and using their open wifi network. What the hell? The network was open, people. But as Engadget reports, another guy was arrested for the same thing in the U.K., and found guilty last week of “dishonestly obtaining an electronic communications service.” Law enforcement in both instances claimed that the problem with accessing an open wifi network is that it allows people to commit crimes anonymously. And yet we have only a very few examples of such crimes, comparied to the millions of examples of happy people using open networks without doing anything illegal.

All this bullshit about arresting people for sucking free bits out of the air with their antennae makes me think back to a time, many years ago, when I first realized the social injustices suffered by geeks didn’t originate entirely from groups of jocks and generic popular kids in the halls at my high school. When I was a teenager, many of my friends met on a local BBS where we could chat and exchange cracked software ("cracked” meant the copy protection had been stripped away by a friendly geek who thus enabled all the poor teenagers of Orange County to have amusing games and nifty applications). While we infringed copyrights blithely, without any opinions about the justice of the intellectual property system, we took hacking very seriously. It was an art, and a way of being conscientiously disobedient. Nobody who broke into systems ever defaced them. The idea was to go in, look around, and leave no trace.

Only a few of us were hardcore hackers, people who had seen WarGames and taken it to heart. But one pretty day in spring, a few people in my extended group of online acquaintences were arrested and had their computers confiscated by the FBI. These guys weren’t criminals, and they weren’t trying to steal military secrets. They were just exploring the nascent Internet, peeking into any computer network they could find to learn about it. I don’t want to say that they were as innocent as the guys I described earlier who were arrested for accessing open wifi networks. My online pals knew they were breaking into computers. Nevertheless, to my teenaged sensibilities, they were heroic explorers being punished for daring to ask questions and go where the adults didn’t want them to. How could the quest for knowledge be so violently censured?

This question has continued to haunt me twenty years later. As the Internet has grown into a fully-adult communications medium, packed with everything from motion pictures to poetry, our ability to access it and publish to it unmolested is more critical than ever. But government and private industry are working to erode the distinction between harmless exploration and crime. Most of my activities involving high technology could probably be deemed unlawful in the right court, under the right circumstances. I rip CDs, access the Internet from open wifi networks, download Doctor Who from BitTorrent, play DVDs using an “unauthorized” media player on my computer, run port scanners on random computers I encounter on the Internet, republish sexual images online, and own a modded Xbox. I’ll leave it to you to unbury all the laws that could make any one of these activities unlawful – suffice to say that they exist, and they’re being used right now to punish people who dare to use their technology in ways that defy convention. In my own humble way, I am still honoring those brave teenage geeks who were arrested in my neighborhood two decades ago.

With my work, I’m trying to create a world where fewer explorers will be punished for what they do, and for teaching others how to understand technology better. July marks the fifteenth anniversary of one of my beloved workplaces, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a high tech civil liberties group in San Francisco which fights to keep freedom of expression and privacy alive on the Internet. This blog post honors EFF on its birthday. May its team of attorneys, geeks, and activists make the future better than my past.

Elisabeth Lloyd, who recently published The Case of the Female Orgasm : Bias in the Science of Evolution, is blogging on the heritability of female orgasms:

The gist of her statement is that surveys and other studies haven’t shown any evolutionary basis for human female orgasm, and that in fact the evidence they have all points away from female orgasm being an adaptive trait.

In this post she criticizes a study by Tim Spector that concludes women’s ability to have orgasms during intercourse, and the ease and speed of those orgasms, is inherited. Lloyd’s cheerful ranting builds up a great head of steam. Nobly, she refrains from making fun of anything other than their faulty understanding of statistics and heritability. I’m not noble. I’m giggling madly picturing the Scientific Study of “sperm upsuck” and time-to-orgasm of the Doublemint Twins.

Dr. Petra chimes in to help beat the crap out of Spector et al:
“…not only is female orgasm supposedly entirely genetic, it’s also a means of mate selection, and something you can blame your mother for.” Dr. Petra points out that , with no evidence cited, Spector and his fellow orgasm survey analyzers think that female capacity for orgasm is “probably inherited from the mother.” Petra also slams the Spector crowd for saying that women never or rarely having an orgasm with intercourse is “sexual dysfunction” and that “some women orgasm too quickly”. The implication is that if you’re slut enough to come too quickly (remember, this is with intercourse) then you aren’t going to be very good at “mate selection” which is an evolutionary disadvantage. Er, what?

Rowan Hooper, writing for New Scientist, has a good summary of the issue. Hooper mentions three main theories to explain the evolutionary importance of female orgasm:
1) The wonderfully named “sperm upsuck” theory: Orgasm’s motions give a shove to sperm, slurping it up closer to that mighty traveler, the ovum.
2) The man-tester theory: If the guy’s fiddly and patient enough to get his mate off, he is a better child-raising mate. This theory is mentioned often in the press but apparently there’s zero evidence for it.
3) The social bonding theory: Orgasms promote social ties and give an evolutionary advantage. I wish this were true and that we were more like bonobos, who have the best naughty housewife lesbian leg-humping child-raising co-ops ever invented.

Hooper’s article ends on a note of promising weirdness. What Spector is hoping for is to do pharmaceutical or genetic fixes so that women can have just the right number of orgasms in just the right way. Not so many as to be indiscriminatingly slutty, and not so few as to be labeled neurotic and frigid, or whatever the “problem” is defined to be.

Not too long ago, when screening emails of prospective new roommates, one of the candidates described herself this way: “I work at a marketing firm, I love Harry Potter and Desperate Housewives. I’m also a total chore nazi in the kitchen, because a clean home is very important to me. It’s just the way I am.” I didn’t write back, because, well, if we squared off, we might have a conversation I’d regret:

Her: Hey, did you leave that dish in the sink?
Me: Hey, did you gas my relatives?

Why is it that this particular murderous regime became synonymous with a clean kitchen? Phrases like “chore nazi”, “kitchen nazi”, and “dish nazi” turn up lots and lots of Google hits. At this point it’s become so widespread that if it bugs you, you’re liable to be branded as “too sensitive.” So, I’m not going to let it bug me. The more the merrier, I say. There’s nothing problematic or scary about turning a term for perpetrators of genocide into a morally neutral phrase meaning Neat And Tidy. Here is my roommate ad:

I’m a writer, I like music, and I’m a total Kitchen Klansman: I’m always scrubbing that grout to keep it white. I’m also a bit of a House Hutu, a Sink Serbian— an “Ethnic Cleanser” if you will! I like to keep a clean house, it’s just the way I am.

What? Stop being so sensitive.

Don’t blame bisexual African American men for the high rate of HIV among African American women, says a new article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The article, called “Focusing ‘Down Low’: Bisexual Black Men, HIV Risk and Heterosexual Transmission,” claims that only 2 percent of African American men are behaviorally bisexual. But at least one study showed “black MSM” who were “on the down low” were less likely to engage in risky behavior than men who were open about their activities.

“The flawed logic that is often perpetuated by the media is that ONLY homosexual men have HIV, bisexual men ONLY contract HIV through homosexual behavior, and the ONLY way black women contract HIV is through sexual contact with these bisexual men,” said one of the report’s authors in an interview.

The JAMA article doesn’t present any new research, and it’s basically just a survey of the existing literature. In exonerating bisexual African American men from HIV infections among women, the study reaches for other stereotypes, including the idea that blacks are more promiscuous or likelier to trade sex for drugs than other ethnic groups. Black heterosexuals are likelier to have unprotected anal than vaginal sex, the authors claim. They also point to a higher prevalence among African American women of vaginal douching, which may increase their susceptibility to HIV. They admit that the causes of HIV in the African American community need further study, but make a plea for people to treat the issue as more complex than just secretively bisexual men on a rampage.

Until recently, you could deduct the entire cost of a $100,000 SUV on your taxes, but you couldn’t deduct the cost of a vaginoplasty or other genital reconstruction surgery if you were transgender. Deirdre McCloskey, in her memoir Crossings, talks about writing checks for $10,000 or $12,000 knowing that her treatment “was going to be paid out of her own pocket and was not tax deductible. Blue Cross and the IRS take a dim view of gender reassignment surgery.”

The reason for this was simple: the IRS viewed GRS as cosmetic, and the tax code, at 26 USC Section 213, states that cosmetic procedures aren’t deductible, unless they’re “necessary to ameliorate a deformity arising from, or directly related to, a congenital abnormality, a personal injury resulting from an accident or trauma, or disfiguring disease.”

Transgender advocates had been fighting to change the IRS’ stance on GRS for years, and now they’ve finally succeeded. The Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders announced that the IRS had reversed its position. Rhiannon O’Donnabhain can indeed deduct the costs of her 2001 surgery from her taxes because it was part of a legitimate treatment for her gender dysphoria. This doesn’t just open the door for other trans people to deduct necessary surgeries on their taxes (possibly including top surgery for transmen). It also means private insurers will have a harder time turning down coverage for GRS as well.

On the one hand, this is wonderful news. The government should be funding GRS for everyone who needs it. Many transwomen view GRS as a life-saving operation that enables them to feel free to live fully as women, without a body that retains such a crucial male signifier in our culture and without the fear of being exposed.

But at the same time, it would be nice if we could have achieved this victory without reinforcing the idea that all transgender people suffer from a “deformity” or “congenital abnormality.”

Deep in the heart of Texas, I have no idea what’s happening. But here’s what’s going on deep in the asshole of Texas.

A few miles from where I grew up in a corner of unincorporated Northwest Houston, the Spring school district is making kids of all ages carry RFID cards. The kids “swipe” on and off the school bus and then in and out of the school building. The principal’s office and the local police can track the movements of individual kids on a little video-game like screen. Since the kids often forget their cards, there’s already talk of implanting them with chips just under the skin.

How cool is that? I love it when my dire predictions come true. I thought that chipping everyone in the country would start with kids, to “protect” them — but I thought it was maybe 10 years off. Maybe it can be combined with cool tattoos and body piercings!

It would be great if an electric shock capability was built into the chip! The police chief in the Panopticon would “joy buzz” anyone who pissed him off or cut class.

I’m just stupid and technophilic enough that I’d go get chipped on purpose. But forcing kids to do it WILL happen and it’s incredibly fucked up. The ACLU has an interesting Position Statement on RFID that’s worth checking out; the EFF wrote one too.

Meanwhile, thought crimes are being averted and diverted in Plano, which is deep in the diseased, swollen tonsils of Texas - sort of the early warning alert of the country’s immune system.

There, a small-town school has TWIRP Day, a tradition which in my East Texas high school was called “Sadie Hawkins Day,” on which everyone reverses gender to some degree; girls are supposed to ask boys out to a dance. Apparently in Plano they take it a little further, and actually cross-dress for one day during football Homecoming Week. But no longer! Complaints from homophobic parents and the Liberty Legal Institute have changed Cross-Dressing Day into Camo Day, so that kids can be trained up for the Army. Because dressing like you’re going to kill somebody is moral, and crossdressing threatens the very fabric of society, or maybe the very thin crepe paper of society.

It’s not like queerness and crossdressing are diametrically opposed to war and killing. Think of the Sacred Band, or the male teenage fighters in Liberia who put on pink wigs and wedding dresses for the most incredibly disturbing battle uniforms ever. Maybe we can join up with the noble “queers in the military” movements to promote crossdressing in the military. Crew-cutted jarheads will don regulation lipstick and those cute little dresses that WACs or WAVES or whatever used to wear. Embedded fashion magazine reporters will accompany our troops to war, chirping brightly about stockings that match one’s machine gun over their satellite phones.

Looking at management theory sites like this one makes you realize the true goal of management: to reprogram your brain. “Most people don’t like change because they don’t like being changed,” the site’s author writes in between weird charts and highlighted buzzwords. In other words, the “continous revolution” of business processes really involves changing your employees themselves, not just the way they work. Books like Who Moved My Cheese? or The Unshackled Organization: Facing the Challenge of Unpredicability are designed to tell managers how to create more malleable employees. Reading these breathless blurbs, one gets the sense that managers ought to be pushing change even when it’s not particularly necessary – just to win employees’ acceptance of change and the submissiveness that comes with it.

It’s all part of how corporations are “colonizing and redefining our private, inner world” to make us “more pliable employees and consumers,” as Madeleine Bunting writes. (Scroll down past all the stuff about the pop group to get to the management theory stuff.) Corporations want to supplement their business logic with “emotional logic” to capture the hearts of consumers, but also of their own workers.

So today’s Washington Post makes it sound as if John Kerry’s chance of becoming president is wafer-thin unless he:

a) wins Florida, or
b) changes the “dynamic of the race.”

It’s amazing how quickly this has become the conventional wisdom. And yet who could be surprised? John Kerry hasn’t given voters any positive reason to support him over Junior, and in particular he has no credible plan for fighting terrorism and sorting out the mess in Iraq.

Kerry’s mistake was focusing entirely on his distant war-hero past, instead of on projecting a tough-guy image in the present. Americans want a badass who will spank Osama Bin Laden, not a wuss who earned some medals 30 years ago. Whether or not they agree with the occupation of Iraq, most Americans want to prevent another 9/11 and punish the people behind it.

Which leads to the Democrats’ other problem: they’re acting as if George Bush is the bad guy. He’s not. Pretend for a second that this is an action movie, and that John Kerry is the renegade hero who’s going to take down the bad guy, no matter what it takes. The “bad guy” in this scenario is Osama Bin Laden. Dubya is just the mealy-mouthed authority figure who tries to prevent the action hero from doing what’s necessary. He’s “Dickless” in Ghostbusters. He’s the Commissioner who takes away the tough cop’s badge. He’s Cornelius Fudge.

OK, you can stop pretending now. Obviously, in the real world, John Kerry is Dickless/Cornelius. But if Kerry could reverse the dynamic and cast Bush in the Fudge role, we might actually get somewhere. Kerry wouldn’t have to mislead anybody, either. There are a lot of smart, constructive things we could be doing to crack down on terrorism that Bush hasn’t been willing to do, including nuclear non-proliferation and port security but also including a harder line with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia on their support for Al Qaeda. Couch it in language that makes it sound as if Kerry will take a tougher line with terrorists than Bush has. It may not be what progressives want to hear, but it’s probably the only way for Kerry to “change the dynamic of the race” at this point.

It’s official: mixed race people are sexy. Reflecting our racially swirly world, the fashion and pop industries seek people whose beauty reflects a combination of ethnic strands. Sure, there’s more than a bit of “exoticism” involved in these images (like Christina Aguilera wearing Arab/Indian drag). But for a media culture that scowled on interracial marriage a few decades ago to adore its fruits seems like a step forward. And pundits claim “Generation Y” takes racial interweaving for granted.

“The current fashionable genes seem to be the super-mongrel genes,” writes blogger Martin Willett. He argues that as people learn to be “color blind” in their attractions, they’ll automatically gravitate towards an image of desirability that blends attributes of different groups. In fact, anyone who looks racially pure will be deemed less attractive, he claims.

Pop stars, models and escorts are flaunting their mixed-race status as an extra point of attractiveness. When the mainstream definition of beauty broadens or changes to include people who were shut out before, that seems like a good thing. But if a group that used to be singled out for abuse now gets singled out for its exotic sexiness, people are going to feel fetishized.

Drug companies are pouring rivers of cash into pathologizing the fact that you don’t have sex the way you’re supposed to. So perhaps it’s not surprising that there are more and more sexual diagnoses in the International Classification of Diseases. Doctors, including shrinks, use diagnoses from the ICD, created by the World Health Organization, to get paid for the work they do.

The ICD version 9 has only seven diagnoses for sexual dysfunction under the grouping of 302.7. These are psychosexual dysfunction, inhibited sexual desire, low libido, frigidity/impotence, male orgasm inhibition, female orgasm inhibition, and premature ejaculation.

The newer set of diagnoses, known as ICD-10 and revised in June 2003, includes all of these under the new F52 heading, although it replaces psychosexual dysfunction with “hypoactive sexual desire disorder (including anhedonia),” and “inhibited sexual desire” with “sexual aversion disorder”. “Frigidity” is now considered to be part of “female sexual arousal disorder,” which is still the companion to male impotence. (And yes, it still uses the word “Frigidity.")

But the new set of diagnoses also includes diagnoses for “vaginismus,” “dyspareunia” or other sexual dysfunction, all of which aren’t due to a substance or known physiological condition.

Meanwhile, a lot of groups are up in arms over the treatment of sexual minorities in the ICD-10. Flip to the psych section, and you’ll find gender identity disorders listed right after “pathological gambling,” “pyromania,” “kleptomania” and compulsive hair-pulling. And then after GID, you find the dreaded F65, for paraphilias. Fetishism, transvestitism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, sadomasochism and “frotteurism” are all sick, sick, sick behaviors. And just in case you thought maybe the F65 section was for things that are basically fine as long as they don’t keep you from holding down a job, the section includes F65.4, “pedophilia.” This is sandwiched right between voyeurism and sadomasochism.

Oh, and just in case you’re wondering, according to an article in the British Medical Journal, these behaviors aren’t paraphilias if they’re incorporated into “usual adult lovemaking.” (Except, presumably, for pedophilia.) BDSM only becomes a problem if “such behavior becomes the erotic end in itself.” Consider yourself warned!

You can get the latest issue of other magazine at Tower Records for only $4 a copy, reduced from the $5 cover price. Tower is giving the magazine an extra promotional push by reducing the cover price and stocking extra copies of issue four. You can help by picking up a copy for yourself or a friend!

It’s not all that surprising that Republican Sam Walls lost his runoff for a state House seat in Texas after it was revealed that Walls liked to crossdress. A fairly recent picture of Walls in a wig and makeup started making the rounds during the election. And Walls served as treasurer of the local “heterosexual crossdresser” society in 2000.

What is somewhat surprising is how many of Walls’ friends and GOP colleagues came to his defense. OK, so they were saying things like, “he’s not a murderer,” and “at least he doesn’t smoke.” But there was definitely a recognition among many local Republicans that this doesn’t make Walls a bad person.

It was a little unnerving, though, when county GOP Treasurer Roy Giddens said he didn’t have a problem with crossdressing because “J. Edgar Hoover was one of the greatest Americans who ever lived.”

When the New York Times quoted a prominent black preacher as saying he would “ride with the KKK” as long as they opposed gay marriage, it caused a stir. It added to a lot of people’s feelings that the Republicans had succeeded in coopting African American religious and political leaders into standing on the front lines against same-sex marriage. (Of course, it sure didn’t help when the Advocate claimed that black people no longer face overt discrimination.)

But as usual in American politics, people are leaving class out of the discussion. Antagonism towards queers has a lot to do with the fact they’ve perceived as not just whites, but upper class whites. Though there are many working class queers (and queers of color) out there, the media routinely present gay men, in particular, as rich snobs. Shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy portray gays as snotty and materialistic, obsessed with haute couture and fashion. It’s a running joke on Frazier that everyone thinks Frazier and Niles are gay, because they act like wealthy aesthetes.

Confirming these stereotypes, the San Francisco Chronicle paints the same-sex newlyweds as mostly doctors and/or lawyers. It seems as though marriage is the one piece of middle class respectablitity that working class hets can still claim that queers can’t, and now that’s being taken away.

It all plays into the Republican strategy to divert class warfare from economic issues to cultural antipathy. George Bush seems to have learned one thing from his openly patrician dad: act like a working stiff, and people will forget your silver spoon and ties to the mega-rich. If queers succeeded in projecting an image that wasn’t so snobbish, they’d not only improve their own lot, they’d hand the GOP a major setback as well.

The other day I read a newsgroup post that said Mariposa County sheriff Joe Arpaio was indicted for something or other, and might have to spend time in his own concentration camp-style jail. Apparently, this was wishful thinking, since I couldn’t find any reliable reports to back it up. But by the time I’d gotten to the bottom of that rumor, I’d already wasted too much time reading up on the guy not to write something about him.

Although he hasn’t been arrested for anything “America’s Toughest Sheriff” has been accused of assault and faced numerous lawsuits involving harassment and wrongful death.

But Arpaio is most famous for his horrendous jail conditions. He made inmates wear pink underwear and black-and-white striped uniforms, work seven hours a day with only two meal breaks, and boasted that he’d slashed meal costs to only 40 cents per prisoner per day. And he replaced jail cells with Korean war surplus tents. Inmates complained of rotten food and unsanitary conditions, but he responded, “If they don’t like it, they shouldn’t come back.” He boasts of creating the first all-woman chain gang and says he plans to set up the first all-child chain gang.

He also created a cult of personality around himself, selling “official” souvenir pink boxer shorts with his name on them. You can also buy Joe Arpaio bobble heads.

But maybe the person who said Arpaio had been indicted was thinking of Davidson County, NC sheriff Gerald Hege, who also calls himself the toughest sheriff in America. If toughness is measured in terms of amount of pinkness, Hege wins hands down. No pink undies for him: he made his name with bright pink jail cells and paramilitary uniforms for his staff. But Hege was indicted for embezzlement and obstruction of justice. His pay has been suspended and is facing removal from office. But he still has time to worry about a local parody newspaper.

Harlan Ellison won a slight victory in his battle to destroy the Internet.

Ellison sued America Online a couple of years ago, after a guy Stephen Robertson posted some of his stories on a Usenet group called alt.binaries.e-book. AOL wasn’t Robertson’s Internet service provider, nor did he use AOL for Usenet access. But AOL gave its users access to Usenet (just like most other halfway decent ISPs) and cached Usenet posts for a couple of weeks. So Ellison claimed AOL was helping to rip off his works.

A District Court shot down Ellison’s suit, saying that a 1998 law protected AOL from liabilities. But now an Appeals court has overturned part of the District Court ruling and sent it back for more consideration. If the District Court decides AOL isn’t protected, it could make life difficult for ISPs everywhere.

In the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, Congress gave ISPs safe harbors from litigation for four common activities, including “system caching” and “information residing on systems or networks at the direction of users.” But you only get to take advantage of these safe harbors if you take reasonable measures to curb copyright infringement, including terminating repeat infringers.

AOL messed up – the ISP changed the email address for reporting copyright violations from copyright@aol.com to aolcopyright@aol.com. AOL forgot to notify the Copyright Office of the new e-dress for months, and didn’t check the old addy.

So the Appeals Court partly agreed and partly disagreed with the District Court ruling that let AOL off the hook. The Appeals Court found that AOL couldn’t be liable for contributory infringement (helping someone else to break copyright law) because AOL didn’t profit from it. But it’s not so clear-cut that AOL is protected from litigation by the DMCA safe harbors, due to its bumbling copyright protection measures.

If AOL’s incompetence leads to a new ruling that the DMCA safe harbors don’t protect it after all, this could be an important precedent that leaves other ISPs open to copyright lawsuits for passive activities like offering Usenet access.

Deciding that “Jr.” or “the second” was passe, “engineering geek” Jon Blake Cusack decided to name his son Jon Blake Cusack 2.0. Cusack, a self-employed designer, spent months convincing his pregnant wife to go along with the idea, says USA Today. No word yet on whether Version 2.0 is free of that annoying “hubris” bug.

Apparently, the capture of Saddam Hussein failed to spark the expected Wall Street rally. For some unknown reason, investor confidence in the bleary U.S. economy didn’t explode just because we nabbed a sick old mass murderer.

But not to worry – stock analysts foresee a much more satisfying Dow bounce if we hook Bin Laden.

It’s hard to imagine an American political leader proposing to screen political candidates for marital faithfulness as Somchai Sunthornwat, chairman of Thailand’s Thai Rak Thai party has done. But it’s even harder to imagine American politicians clamoring against the proposal on the grounds that infidelity is natural, as many Thai members of parliament did. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has voiced cautious support for the monogamy requirement, even as he works to legalize prostitution and gambling.

Thaksin – who’s claimed victory in Thailand’s war on drugs – says that casinos and brothels are part of reality and should be brought “above ground” as part of an “entertainment complex.” In other words, malls. It’s interesting to see how the battle over family values plays out in a country that practices Theravada Buddhism. As one commentator points out, “law vs. morality is a long-running debate with no end in sight.” Kamol Hengkietisak notes that most of the things Buddhism considers a vice aren’t actually illegal, including being lazy and having bad friends.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney, the Mormon governor of Massachusetts, claims that thousands of years of “history” speak unanimously toward the rightness of marriage equalling one man, one women, no ifs or buts. Apparently, his history book is a very thin and highly selective one, probably with lots of pictures and a few captions.

Remember how your mother always told you bullies were weak and insecure? Turns out it’s not true. A study of nearly 2,000 kids by UCLA researchers found that bullies are strong psychologically and receive lots of props from their peers. Victims of bullies are ostracized and psychologically damaged, but kids who are bullied and also bully others tend to be the most damaged of all. On the other hand, the UCLA study, published in Pediatrics, also suggested that other kids didn’t really want to hang out with the bullies, but merely treated them as “cool” to avoid becoming victims themselves. The other striking thing about the study is how prevalent bullying was – 22 percent of kids had bullied, been bullied, or done both.

It’s one of those rallying cries that means almost nothing: “Small business.” What is a small business? The definition changes drastically depending on the political aims of the person using it. Even though the term conjures up an image of that tiny mom-and-pop bead store on your block that constantly skirts the edge of Chapter 11, it can include so many different businesses as to be meaningless.

The Small Business Administration defines a small business as “one that is independently owned and operated and which is not dominant in its field of operation.” In other words, not part of a corporate giant, and not the 800 pound gorilla in its field.

This vagueness lets President Bush claim that his tax cuts give an average of $2,042 to every small business owner, when in fact most small business owners receive only $500 and 5 million small business owners get nothing. Meanwhile, another oddity of Bush’s tax cuts lets small business owners deduct $100,000 of the cost of a new SUV, whereas they could only deduct around $10,000 of the cost of a new Lexus. This is a tweak to an old tax break from the 1940s intended to help small farmers buy tractors and pickup trucks.

The point is not just that vagueness about what constitutes a small business lets fat cats roll in dough while genuine mom-and-pops are going under. The real point is that the Republicans have successfully portrayed themselves as the party of small business when they’re really on the side of big businesses. A Democrat who proposed genuinely pro-small business policies, including a change to the Alternative Minimum Tax and an end to double FICA taxation for self-employed people, could position himself or herself as revolutionary, moderate and pro-businesses owners, all at once. And the cost could come out of some of those SUV-sized tax breaks for the big guys.

At first glance, when you hear of Stephen Tidwell insisting that he should be called a “sexually oriented offender” instead of a “sexual predator,” you wonder why a rapist is splitting hairs. Is this a new form of political correctness for sex offenders?

No, it turns out. We’ve created a byzantine system where mind-numbingly small distinctions between assailants actually make a huge difference. It started because of laws requiring local authorities to register and track certain kinds of sex offenders. Because the authorities don’t have the resources to do this, they’ve figured out ways to apply it only to certain types of offenders. But the task of assigning classifications to these felons is, in itself, daunting and enormous.

Hence “human error” like Tidwell’s incorrect label. Also, according to the Boston Globe, the Massachusetts Sex Offender Registry Board is so backed up with trying to classify the state’s sex perps that it may take years just to figure out which ones are dangerous enough to warrant a warning to local parents. Partly this is due to legal challenges. In Massachusetts, the least dangerous offenders aren’t publicized, the slightly more dangerous ones are publicized only if someone requests the information and the identities of the most dangerous are broadcast far and wide.

To make the classification process easier, legislatures are automating it as much as possible. A paper in the Buffalo Criminal Law Review criticized the prevailing form of actuarial justice, where courts try to come up with formulae and rules of thumb for determining which offenders are most likely to repeat their crimes. The problem with these risk tables is that they assume that certain types of offenders are doomed to slide back into bad behavior. They also ensure that people accused of those types of crimes won’t plead guilty, for fear of a lifetime of having their names in the paper.

In other words, all of this nitpicking over labels happens because we have no way of knowing which rapists and abusers will come back to the well. Instead of acting like insurance companies trying to predict a flood or fire, the authorities need to use a combination of treatment and assessment to identify the likely recidivists. But instead, to make our “blunderbuss” approach (as the Review paper calls it) possible, we have to resort to a bizarre taxonomy.

Hooray for Bubba, the sex-change fish! Bubba, a member a rare and endangered species of grouper, was found in a bucket 16 years ago and brought to Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. Back then Bubba was a girl, and the aquarium kept him because of his rarity. Due to a process known as “protogynous hermaphroditic,” Bubba became a boy – and one of the stars of the aquarium. Unfortunately, his keepers discovered a tumor on Bubba’s head in 2001. Now, thanks to a ground-breaking operation involving a tumor removal and a pigskin graft, the doctors have been able to treat Bubba. Who’s doing fine, by all accounts.

A federal judge ruled that high school authorities violated Bretton Barber’s First Amendment free speech rights when they told the 17-year-old to take off his T-shirt and go home. Barber was wearing Kersplebedeb’s famous T-shirt that depicts George Bush with the words “International Terrorist.” Now the Dearborn, MI high school must allow Barber to wear his shirt to school, thanks to a suit by the ACLU.

And yes, this is the same T-shirt that caused PayPal to shut down Kersplebedeb’s PayPal account back in April based on a highly selective application of PayPal’s policies. (PayPal restored the account after a week’s worth of angry emails from activists.)

DNA evidence from the crime scene indicates that the man who strangled Toronto transgender sex worker Cassandra Do also raped another sex worker (a genetic female) in 1997. The 1997 rape victim was able to provide a detailed description of her attacker. That’s great, because now the police have a lot to go on in tracking down the murderer. But you have to wonder if Cassandra Do would be alive today if the police had bothered to go after this guy in 1997. Of course, he might have served his prison term and been back on the streets by now if they’d caught him back then.

Do the Democrats actually have any popular positions? You have to wonder, given how unwilling the ten presidential candidates have been to propose any new ideas, and their ferocity in attacking Bush’s policies without proposing any alternatives. Now that Bush is weakened in the polls, it seems as though the major Dems believe, not that the American people are ready for new ideas, but that they can defeat Bush merely by pointing to his mistakes.

Much has been written about the Democratic malaise in the past few years. Commentators cite the fact that unlike Republicans, who can feed red meat to their more extremist elements (the Christian right, corporate bigshots and Tom DeLay-style nutjobs) while presenting a moderate face to mainstream America. Meanwhile, the Democrats have to bend over backwards to avoid even the slightest appearance of “pandering” to interest groups like unions, environmentalists, queers, minorities, etc. The result is a world where Republican extremists like DeLay are taken seriously when they spout off, while all but the most jejune progressives are dismissed out of hand.

What to do? I’ve thought for a couple of years that the Democrats need their own version of the “Contract With America,” which Newt Gingrich used to take over Congress in 1994. A list of positive steps the Democrats would take if they were in charge. If the Democrats can’t come up with a list of a dozen intiatives that would please their hardcore supporters and appeal to mainstream Americans, then maybe the party really is dead and it’s time for everyone to go Green.

People can quibble about what a Democratic “Contract” would contain. But this site does a pretty good job of laying out some basics. Fiscal responsibility, real environmental protections, reduced dependence on foreign oil, etc. Some of the proposals are a bit vague and there’s not enough stuff about women’s rights, queer rights, workers, etc. But it’s a start.

If enough hardcore Democrats came up with a list of initiatives and demanded that all national Democratic candidates sign on – much the same way that all Republican presidential candidates in 2000 had to sign a pledge not to raise taxes – then the party might actually begin to generate some enthusiasm. Of course, you’d risk blunting the policy differences between the candidates. But it’s not as if those differences are particularly noticeable now, is it?

An Australian appeals denied an exemption to equal opportunity laws to LesFest, a lesbian gathering that happens in Daylesford, Victoria. The organizers of one of the country’s biggest Lesbian gatherings asked for the right to restrict the festival to female-born lesbians. LesFest spokesperson Anna Holland-Moore insists there’s a difference between lesbians who were born female and those who were brought up male. She says the gathering ought to be able to restrict its attendance to allow attendees to “consolidate our culture”.

The organizers also wanted to ban boys over eight and non-lesbian girls over 15.

In Holland-Moore’s view, the objection of transgender lesbians to the “woman-born lesbian” requirement is a “technicality.” In her comments, she sounds a bit clueless, asserting that “transgendered lesbians” and “transsexual lesbians” are “a different kettle of fish” from each other. She also announces that the “homosexual community has quite a strong queer coalition.”

“Now you’re not gay and lesbian; it’s queer politics now - and the queer mob seem to want everyone to be the same and to be all inclusive,” she complains. Allegedly the LesFest request is the first time anyone has asked for an exemption to Australia’s non-discrimination laws based on “gender identity.”

The festival will either reapply for an exemption or limit attendance to invitation-only, according to Al Jazeera. You have to wonder what Al Jazeera’s readers think of this imbroglio.

What’s really cool in youth culture today? Mixing libertarian/jingoistic conservativism with a porno aesthetic, according to this article in Newsweek online. Tim Wilson scanned half a dozen magazines, including Tokion, WYWS and Vice, and found a weird combination of explicit BDSM sexuality with homages to Pat Buchanan and G. Gordon Liddy. The makers of these popular magazines identify with conservatives’ “outcast” sensibility and indifference to political correctness. Plus celebrating the invasion of Iraq dovetails nicely with articles about “resentment sex” and images of naked women holding steaks to their black eyes. Apparently the chicks dig it.

Wilson’s theory is that the consumers of these magazines are trying to overcompensate the uncoolness of being straight, white and middle class by embracing the most shocking expressions they can find. My feeling is that he might have come up with a different analysis if he’d left out Vice magazine, which is by far the most extreme magazine, in both conservatism and in raunchiness, of the six he covers. There’s a reason I haven’t read Vice in ages.

We just approved the proofs for issue #3 of other magazine, and we think it’s now error-free and immaculate. Not to mention it looks gorgeous. Soon you, too, will be able to discover Brittany Murphy’s views on human cloning and eavesdrop on Ed Rosenthal telling Lynnee Breedlove about nymphomania. Not to mention mass crucifixion, Mercedes Lackey, Japanese Noise music, B-boys, fag hags on the wagon, and much more. All coming in October!

from other #1, June 2003: How many times will you disclose your gender today? If you read the Washington Post on-line in the morning, you will be asked to check “male” or “female” in a dialog box before you get the news. If you go to work or school, you have already told a human resources manager or admissions officer what your gender is. Along with a great deal of other information about you, your gender is permanently attached to your name in a database of your fellow employees or students. If use a public bathroom sometime during the day, most likely you’ll have to pick a gender in order to do it… read the rest here!

A fifteen-year-old high school student, Lisa McClelland, wants to start a “caucasian club” at her high school because she doesn’t feel like she fits into any of the other clubs. She sees her club as an alternative for people who feel like they don’t belong in the Black Student Union or other race-based clubs. She wants to create, according to the San Jose Mercury News, ” a haven for those who don’t fit into such categories.” Apparently, McClelland is mixed-race.

It’s funny that she would choose “caucasian” as the umbrella term for people who don’t see themselves as any particular race. This was exactly what European immigrants of the nineteenth century chose to do when they embraced the term “white” as a way to erase their national differences and form a new, “American” community. Of course, we all know that whiteness didn’t turn out to be a very inclusive category in the end. Hard to say if McClelland is calling for a new kind of reactionary race politics or if she’s just clueless. Why didn’t she start a club devoted to a hobby or something if she didn’t like the idea of racial clubs in the first place?

Various FTM activists have pointed out that it’s way harder to get breasts removed than it is to get breast implants inserted. The former procedure requires a psychological evaluation in many places, but anybody can walk into a plastic surgeon’s office and plunk down the cash for a boob job.

Now a team of Dutch researchers has suggested in a British Medical Journal article that maybe women seeking breast implants should have psychological screening as well. The researchers looked at 3,521 women who’d had breast implants and found they were three times as likely to commit suicide as other women in their age group. Whether the disappointment of life with bigger breasts led these women to kill themselves or women who are predisposed to suicide are more likely to get implants in the first place remains a mystery. Of course, we’re only talking about 15 suicides versus 5 suicides in the general population. But last week, a Finnish-American study found similar results, the third study in a row that found a breast implant-suicide link, according to one news account.

Not surprisingly, the Aesthetic Surgery Association rushed to condemn the Swedish study as bad science and called for more research. It doesn’t appear the Association has had anything to say about the confirmatory Finnish study yet.

Beware, transgender travelers! The Department of Homeland Security has identified men who dress as women as a potential security risk. In its latest press release, the DHS says that terrorists may use “novel methods” to evade detection. In particular, “Male bombers may dress as females in order to discourage scrutiny.”

This means that anyone who is obviously transgender is going to be a major target for searches and harrassment. It also may increase public fear of TG people. But most of all, it seems slightly ludicrous: obviously, whoever thought crossdressing would “discourage scrutiny” hasn’t talked to too many trannies.

Ewen McGregor says he feels like a girl compared to his macho fighter pilot brother. The actor “admits his role as a thespian makes him feel effeminate when he considers the death-defying duties performed by his brother.” McGregor points out his brother is doing a “manly thing… whereas I wear make-up for a living.”

Legal minds like numbers. They prefer the “bright line” to the blurry curve. This causes problems in cases where things are hard to define precisely.

Like “mental retardation.” Last year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could not execute people who were mentally retarded. The Supremes left it up to states to define mental retardation for themselves, but noted that many mental health experts consider anyone with an IQ of less than 75 to be retarded. Never mind that the IQ test is notoriously subjective in itself, and the same person can achieve wildly different scores on multiple tests.

The state of North Carolina decided to use the number 70 as its magic divider between the killable and the retards. If your IQ is 69, you get to live. If it’s 71, you don’t. The state also chooses to look at factors like ability to function in society. But as some recent questionable cases prove, it’s hard to agree on who is fair game for the state’s axe. Take Travis Walters, who scored as low as 64 in one IQ test and qualified for Social Security payments from the federal government on the grounds that he was mentally disabled. But Walters also held down a job at one point and had a girlfriend. Apparently the ability to date proves that you’re sharp mentally.

The country prosecutor argues that 70 is too high a cutoff number, and Walters did score a 72 on one of his IQ tests. But nobody’s questioning the wisdom of using arbitrary numbers to judge ripeness for slaughter in the first place.

Apparently someone has coined a new word for people who aren’t transgender and who have a socially condoned gender identity. We’re now supposed to call such people cisgender, which sounds a bit like they have cysts or something. The idea is that defining the majority as other than “normal” or “default” will make transgender identities seem less like aberrations, and more like equal alternatives. Of course, it’s unclear how much power word games have to change most people’s perceptions.

Psychologists and social scientists have piled up tons of data on the “cross-race effect,” which is pretty well accepted as fact now. In a nutshell, people are more likely to recognize (and correctly identify) a face of someone who belongs to the same race than the face of someone from another race. One study of 15 Latino students found the students were much more likely to recognize Latino faces than black faces. The study also found that this effect depends on the “perceptual categorization of race.” The researchers used “racially ambiguous” faces and still the subjects were more likely to recognize the ones they believed were Latino.

Now a new study finds that kindergartners and third graders are less likely to be able to pick someone out of a lineup if that person comes from another ethnic background. The study seemed a bit simplistic, but it did suggest that even at a young age, perceived outsiders blur together much more.

What the research doesn’t seem to do is explain why the cross-race effect happens. Is it unconscious racism, a belief that all people outside your ethnicity look alike? Is it that when you see someone of another race, you’re registering them as a member of that race instead of registering the facial characteristics you’d be noticing about someone of your own race? We need to know, not least because the cross-race effect makes accusers much more likely to provide a false identification of a criminal suspect of another race.

Legal newspaper The Recorder reports today that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that psychiatrists cannot testify against their clients in court. The decision grew out of a lawsuit in Oregon where a man was convicted on two counts of threatening to murder FBI agents based on two pieces of evidence: some things he said to a telephone operator, and his confession that he was having murderous thoughts in a therapy session. After the court’s decision, he was acquitted on the second count.

What this means is that while counselors/therapists/psychiatrists are obligated to report clients who seem homicidal or suicidal, information from their sessions with the client will not be admissable as evidence in court. On the one hand, this seems like a good idea: it will reduce the number of people convicted of thought crimes and (as the judges wrote in the majority opinion) it will allow people to get more therapy rather than making a decidedly non-therapeutic trip to prison. But the problem is that counselors who have genuinely dangerous patients will have to rely on law enforcment to find more evidence before they can take custody of a possibly suicidal or violent person. In some cases, perhaps involving angry Muslims, I could imagine law enforcement being eager to gather this extra evidence (unanswered question: does testimony from a shrink constitute enough evidence to merit a wiretap?). In other cases, though, I could see law enforcement dragging their feet, telling a shrink that just because some guy says he feels like raping his girlfriend that doesn’t mean he needs to be investigated.

So I’m on the fence with this one.

According to the archives of NPR’s Fresh Air program, Gene Simmons “declined to give permission” for the Fresh Air web site to archive the audio of his interview with Terry Gross. (You can read a transcript here. Of course, that interview has been blogged to death, but what’s interesting is that half the people who discuss it believe that Terry Gross put Simmons in his place, and the other half see Gene as the undisputed winner in their smackdown. (Is it the battle of the sexes? Of the classes? Gene keeps talking about Terry being immersed in books and dust mites, Terry keeps asking Gene about his codpiece.) But if it’s true that Terry was willing to have the audio on the NPR site and Gene wasn’t, then that really settles the question of which of them felt he or she came out on top. (Of course, NPR may not have tried too hard to get Gene’s permission.)

It’s hard to imagine a more tawdry coda to the chest-beating legend of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway’s son Gregory, author of “Papa: A Personal Memoir,” had a sex change and became Gloria Hemingway in the 1990s. Gloria blamed her father’s “super-masculine” image for her need to transform. Then, in 2001, Gloria stripped naked on the street and got arrested. Soon after, she died of a heart attack in jail. Now, Gloria’s ex-wife Ida is claiming that Gloria and Ida remarried in 1997 (after divorcing in 1995) and Gloria left Ida all her money in a new will.

The whole controversy predictably raises questions about the legal status of transgender people, much like the famous lawsuit over whether transsexual J’Noel Gardiner could inherit part of her husband Marshall’s $2.5 million estate. Gloria’s kids are claiming that because Gloria was a woman in 1997, the second marriage to Ida was a same-sex union and therefore invalid. The judge in the case sounded gleeful to be tackling such “cutting edge” topics.

Leaving aside the considerable Jerry Springer-meets-Moveable Feast titillation factor, it seems really sad that one of the main ways that society tries to grapple with serious issues of gender and social status is through a prism of greed. Ernest’s grandkids wouldn’t be affirming Gloria’s femaleness if they didn’t stand to inherit all her dough as a result.

Update Oct. 3, 2003: According to press accounts, the grandkids and Ida have settled out of court.

Identity theft, questioning sexuality, pickpocketing… and prog rock?

A man who impersonated Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy has been arrested in New York, the band’s web site claims. Not only did the unnamed man steal Portnoy’s identity using an uncanny knowledge of his band, his drum beats and his business contacts, but he also stole from people once he gained their confidence. One post on the band’s site claims that the faux Portnoy would hang out in bars and tell men he was “questioning his sexuality” and uncovering memories of childhood sexual abuse. He would then go somewhere and “get it on” with his victims – then steal their wallets and whatever else he could grab, including house keys.

The real Portnoy is happily married, doesn’t drink, and works hard on producing ponderous two-CD sets of arty Pantera-inspired rock for the band, according to the official site. It’s interesting to see the different forms identity theft can take – the imposter didn’t know Portnoy’s social security number or bank account number, but he still managed to do plenty of damage. And he showed just how slippery identity is these days – how many people in New York now believe Portnoy is a gay kleptomaniac?

Wale wanted to escape anti-gay persecution in west Africa, so he fled to Russia. There, he fell in love with Sergei and the two of them moved in with Sergei’s mother. But everywhere Wale went, officials and others harrassed him as a “monkey” – not to mention the abuse he and Sergei received from people who knew they were gay. They managed to find a Scandanavian country that would accept them as both refugees and as a married couple. But before they could get away, Wale’s body was found – below the apartment’s fifth-floor window, his neck broken.

The story of Wale and Sergei reads like a tragic romance, but also something out of an older time, when we lived in a bipolar world. A world full of people trying to escape from the Nazis or Communists to the “free world.” Only now the free world is a place where people like Sergei and Wale can live openly and safely. And at this moment, it’s hard to predict whether the U.S. will be part of the “free world” – or someplace that people flee.