The question that keeps arising over and over is, how many of these people actually know what teabagging means, and for those who do, how many of them are aware that with this one usage they are reducing themselves from kind of people whom one might take seriously in national politics to the kind of people who are playing World of Warcraft with my twelve-year-old..?
Even Rache can’t keep a straight face. 
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Hugo has a post up about pacifism, which apparently is not a concept I’ve understood very well all these years. I thought pacifism was defined as the philosophical opposition to war or perhaps to the idea of initiating violence–after all, there are religious pacifists who have served in the armed forces–but in any case, I clearly missed the point. This is the paragraph that Hugo quotes to define what he means when he refers to himself as a pacifist:
I mentioned in my post on Monday that I hoped that if it came to it, I would be willing to take a bullet for “my kids.” But I would not be willing to fire a bullet, even to protect the lives of my students or youth groupers.*
I would be willing to fire that bullet; I’m not a pacifist, though I do despise nations going to war for any reason other than self-defense or after being entreated by another nation that was attacked to aid that nation in its self-defense. But it did get me thinking about the actual act of killing another human being.
From CNN American Morning:
Pirates are holding a U.S. captain hostage at sea. The Navy is watching everything that happens. So what is supposed to happen next? We talked to someone who knows a thing or two about the pirates and has experience covering them in Somalia. Kaj Larsen, former U.S. Navy SEAL, spoke to T.J. Holmes on CNN’s American Morning Thursday.
And indeed, that is what the article is about. It discusses in some detail the ransom money the pirates have taken, why Somali piracy has become a real problem and what possible solutions there might be to this problem.
So what IS the headline, again..?
Well, that topic does take up 20 out of the approximately 600 words that the article is constructed out of. It is mentioned that once, about halfway through, even if it’s never alluded to again in the entire rest of the article.
Basic expository writing skills, people…you’re supposed to be a professional writer, right..? Come on, now…
(No, Lisa’s preferences in regards to anal sex or lack thereof are not a theme that is going to be explored in this blog post. If harassed about it, I will briefly state my preference, but hopefully nobody will so far miss the whole point of this post that they will be motivated to ask.)
I got to thinking on this topic today after a brief hop over to Feminsting’s community blogsite where I saw an article entitled “Feminist Critique of Hetero Male Culture Causes Mass MRA Hysteria.” I wasn’t too intrigued by the header there, I’ll admit, because most feminist critiques of anything to do with men and sexuality send most MRAs over the edge of rationality–in other words, well okay but so..? but I was also waiting for about 5 million work emails to finish printing out on my feeble home printer and I had time to kill. So I read it, and followed the embedded link to the original blog post by the author on her own website and read that too.
It wasn’t a bad article, even if the author had to start out with the tired old refrain of “when I was a little girl I was really more like a little boy! because 99% of little girls, unlike me, were all about Barbies and gossip and hated physical activity of any sort–!” I do get tired of that one. It certainly does incline me to agree that the female writers who regularly prop up this stereotype did, indeed, have zero little girlfriends growing up or they’d know better than that. But then, if they acknowledged that to be true, they might have to reconsider why they didn’t actually have more little girlfriends, eh..? I’m sure it’s much more pleasant to imagine that one didn’t because one was simply too guyishly cool for all those little pink rainbow wussies! rather than it being, perhaps, for some other less self-congratulatory reason.
But moving on to the actual point she was trying to make–she certainly got it right about the prevalence of men using being on the receiving end of anal sex as a euphemism for a miserable situation. However, I think she rather missed the boat on why. Men also, just as frequently if not more so, use being raped in the same euphemistic fashion. So, when men are talking about being fucked up the ass by their boss, or the government, or their ex-wife’s lawyer, they’re not actually referring to the mechanics of anal sex–they’re referring to being raped. Since women don’t rape men (yes, I know they do, but bear with me), men are simply using the phrase “fucked up the ass” synonymously with “getting raped.”
That whole idea did strike me as interesting, though–because men also use “rape” euphemistically, with themselves as the main actor, to describe how they absolutely defeated some other person or persons in competition (the competition can be either formal, as in a softball game, or informal, as in getting the best parking space at Wal-Mart). However, they do not ever (that I’ve witnessed) describe themselves as “fucking someone else up the ass” in that way. So the distinction is made, and the distinction seems pretty clear-cut in cause to me. It is homophobic, specifically male-homophobic, and all of a piece with how the most common thing I hear out of pre-pubescent and pubescent boys’ mouths as an insult exchanged with other boys (and since I have a twelve-year-old son and a seventeen-year-old son, I get to hear a lot of this kind of exchange) is, “You’re gay.”
Men, therefore, who use all these euphemisms, have a clear grasp of the essentials–only women and faggots, ie, persons with status less than the standard issue heterosexual man, get fucked up the ass. To be fucked up the ass is to have your human status reduced. If something happens to you that reduces your status in the eyes of others, you have been fucked up the ass. If you soundly defeat another man, you have reduced his status to that of a woman–you have raped him–but you don’t quite want to say that you fucked him up the ass, as he is male like you, because that would make you a faggot and reduce your status too.
This is why we have the seeming paradox of these men fearing rape more than any other crime that could be committed against them, with the possible exception of castration, yet having no issues at all regularly blowing off and otherwise dismissing the rape of women by men, with the sometimes-exception of the rape of a prepubescent woman or a virgin. For them, rape is psychologically devastating because it makes you a homo, and physically painful because while pussies are clearly designed for dicks, assholes aren’t. They accept that rape might also be psychologically damaging because a girl child’s brain probably hasn’t fully accepted adult concepts yet and a virgin is probably saving herself for some special man, and physically damaging because a child’s vagina isn’t quite done developing to full readiness for a man’s penis and because they can imagine that the rupture of the physical membrane that is the hymen could be painful. However, once a female has begun to menstruate and no longer possesses a hymen, her getting fucked in the vagina is totally natural both physically and psychologically–it’s how we were all designed, right?–so it really can’t be considered anything nearly as psychologically or physically devastating as a man getting raped anally by another man. And it doesn’t reduce a pubescent, non-virgin female’s status–she’s already not a virgin, which is the only status boost she could possibly stack onto her pre-existing undeniable femaleness, and once that’s gone, she has no more to lose.
An interesting conundrum that this can present for men who find that they really enjoy receiving anal stimulation–I was in a long-term, monogamous relationship with one (I won’t say which one). He asked me, very hesitantly and shame-faced, after the first time we really made a point of trying it out, if I thought that that meant he had homosexual urges. I said, I don’t think so–who do you want to be doing this to you? Me, or a man? You! he said, very definitely, and I said, Well, I think that’s what defines you as homosexual or not–who you’re doing whatever you’re doing with, not what exactly you happen to be doing. But men who want to perform anal sex on women don’t have this agonizing conflict–because, again, it is getting fucked that reduces your status and puts you in your place, not doing the fucking.
I used to wonder why men seemed to have so much trouble empathizing with most types of rapes, when a woman was the victim, or even why they en masse never seemed to take it seriously when a man was raped by a woman, yet clearly had no trouble at all wildly overempathizing with the horror that was a man getting raped by another man. This is the answer, and it’s a pretty sad one.
On an end note, though, I can’t help but preemptively sympathize with the author of the original Feministing community blog post–one of the very first responses to her article was the following, by a self-described “MRAman:”
If you don’t like butt sex you should just say so. Nobody would be surprised anyway, since everyone knows feminists are always opposed to things men like.
Sigh. Yes, that must be it…well, if I’m lucky, our periodic trollers won’t be around to read this particular blog post and visit me with such sage perceptions as well. Fingers crossed.
(Clearly it’s Atheism Day at PunkAssBlog.)
When I was seven years old, I thought that sunbeams breaking through the rainclouds was Jesus (or God, I wasn’t too clear on the distinction back then) looking down at me. Seven-year-olds are pretty egocentric; it never really occurred to me at hundreds of other people at the very minimum were in visual range of the exact same meteorological phenomenon and therefore, Jesus (or God!) was equally looking down at them.
I liked going to church back then. I loved to sing, and one thing that Southern Baptist congregations do well is belt ‘em out in praise of the Lord–every church I went to with my grandparents back in those days had a near-professional quality choir. I wasn’t as keen on the actual sermon, especially when the pastor would start pounding on the podium and shouting (Southern Baptists like to do that too). But my grandma, when the shouting and pounding would start, would cuddle me close and even let me rest my head on her lap if I wanted to, and that was good enough for me. I did notice, of course, that my mom never went with us, but as my mom made a habit of avoiding anything that went on in the mornings any day of the week period, I didn’t take any special note of it.
My grandma had bought me a children’s bible–I’ve never seen anything like it since and I would frankly love to find another copy of the one she got me someday; the artwork alone was completely fascinating and gorgeous to my seven-year-old mind, not like the sloppy crap I’ve mostly happened across that passes for children’s bibles illustrations since. However, I also haven’t really seen such a gruesome and accurate rendition of a lot of the harder-core Old Testament stories in children’s bibles since then, either–more modern versions seem to skip over the majority of the Old Testament entirely and spend a lot more time focusing on Jesus. My bible, as I recall, did indeed contain the stories of Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt and Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac.
By the time I was twelve, I was feeling rather more iffy about organized Christianity, and actually about the idea that Christianity was the only one and true faith, but I still unquestioningly believed in some sort of deity that oversaw us all. I did want to find a place of worship to inspire me, as well. I went to church with various friends over the next few years, but never really found what I was looking for. Amusingly enough, the best fit I found–which honestly was only that because it was the church the greatest number of my friends attended–when I spoke to the pastor about possibly joining the congregation, he told me that he didn’t think I was ready to make that kind of decision. (I remember how bad I felt about that at the time–what evil had he somehow sensed in me that would have led him to discourage me so? At the time, I was a very nice girl. Who knows?)
Some days, I really miss being a Christian.
No, really. I do.
This might be kind of odd to some people, because when I stopped believing in god I was in the crazy, hypocritical, speaking-in-tongues, burning Harry Potter, misrepresenting evolution, homosexuality is an abomination, abortion is killing people, and feminists-are-taking over the world, Left Behind reading church. I don’t miss that church so much* . No, the Christianity that I miss is the fuzzier Christianity of my childhood, the one that probably didn’t really exist.
The church that I miss was that of cookies and punch after Sunday School, and a Sunday School that consisted of a lot of stickers. It was a place of community, and singing**. It was a place of frustrated teachers unable to answer my questions about the Bible; but it was also a place where the pastor dealt with a curious, confused, member of the congregation by playing chess with me for cookies, and casually telling me what faith meant.
In hindsight, it was also a place of comfort and surety; there was a god, he had a plan for you, he loves you, and what he says to do is right. As an adult, I lack that surety, and I mourn it. I can think about an issue, I can read what other people have to say, I can look at evidence, but at the end of the day it is only me and my lens of what I know to be right to back me up. It’s hard to go in against the force of “god said so” with “I think the evidence says this, but I’d be willing to look at new evidence”.
I’m not going back to the church of my childhood. Aside from looking back with nostalgia glasses, I could not trade being sure but wrong with being possibly right, but unsure. I also could not stand all of the problems that became more and more apparent the older I became (and I’m sure you can think of numerous ones). I can get my own cookies, punch and Yet, I think it’s important for me to remember that the church of my childhood, and try to keep that in mind when it comes to people who do enjoy membership in a church. I’m sure that what they love about church is what I miss about it; that’s not something to malign.
*Though, to my eternal nerdiness, I did enjoy the skate shows and concerts- rebellion with no scary drugs and alcohol, or temptation for sex yay!
**I really miss choir, probably more than any one aspect of church. True enough, most congregations I went to were tone-deaf, but the choir worked hard, and the songs are beautiful enough on their own.
When you think of volunteerism, what do you think of? What image springs into your head?
Actually, there are lots of answers to that, and they’re probably informed by your own experiences, and that’s wonderful. What I ought to ask is: what do TV writers evidently think of when they think of volunteerism? What cultural image embodies that concept?
Soup. Ladling soup. Some white kid with their heart in the right place, ladling soup out to the homeless.
There’s a lot to do at a soup kitchen. Someone has to acquire raw ingredients. Someone has to prep those ingredients; someone has to cook them. Someone has to clean the place, near-constantly. And that’s just the soup. Someone has to acquire and maintain the space; someone has to advertise; someone has to coordinate with other social services. Depending on how you do it, you can skip some of these things—the Food Not Bombs chapters in my area just go serve food in the park and rely on word of mouth, but even they have to forage for ingredients, maintain their cooking spaces, and so forth.
On TV, all of this is reduced to one white kid, ladling out soup. Which is telling. Seeing that image, I wonder: why is she even there? I mean, there’s the soup, there’s a ladle, and there’s a pile of bowls. People—even homeless people—can generally ladle soup without assistance. The ladler, in this scene, isn’t giving out food—she’s portioning out food: this much for you, this much for you, this much for you….
I think that image and its connotations, more than any reality, damages the notion of “volunteerism”. I don’t want soup ladlers. I don’t want people to “help” me. I don’t want to “help” people. Volunteerism, in short, isn’t activism. Volunteerism is me giving you food. Activism is us, cooking. The government isn’t going to encourage activism, because activism, at its best, is dangerous—not violent, but not helpful, and certainly not safe.
[ Of course, TV has an image of activism, too. That would be (a) white college kids protesting something, or (b) passionate brown people working to “bring down” televangelists whose refineries are giving cancer to children (the passionate brown people, obviously, exist only for as long as they are useful to the main cast). ]
Because this is a tragedy that can and should be avoided in the future:
Three police officers have been killed by a gunman in Pittsburgh – the second mass shooting in the US in 24 hours…
Police said he was waiting, armed with rifles and a bulletproof vest. He shot two officers as they entered the house, and a third who tried to help them…
His friends said he had recently lost his job, and was worried that US President Barack Obama was about to ban guns.
…I’m going to resort to the use of ALL CAPS for this.
HEY, PARANOID NUTBAGS!
OBAMA IS NOT GOING TO BAN GUNS. NO ONE IS GOING TO BAN GUNS. WE PROBABLY DON’T EVEN HAVE ENOUGH NATIONAL GUARD RESOURCES LEFT IN THE COUNTRY TO RAID YOU AND TAKE YOUR GUNS EVEN IF WE WANTED TO. WHICH WE DON’T. SO PLEASE RELAX.
And to the people who are not hoarding guns but are sending RightWingDad forwards and listening to too much Rush and finding yourself saying things like “Obama is going to force us all to volunteer in lieu of mandatory military service” (seriously, I heard that), please fucking stop. Your less stable cohorts already have enough to fear, they don’t need you adding fuel to their paranoid fires. The last thing this country needs is a bunch of ignorant, fearful, paranoid, unemployed, hopeless, bored, and possibly suicidal people who are armed to the teeth and convinced that their government is out to get them. It is, apparently, a recipe for dead cops that doesn’t take too long to cook before it’s well done.
Hi. I’m a 21 year old white male. I just graduated from Oberlin College and will be attending Columbia’s graduate program in journalism next fall. My still-married parents have paid for everything in my life to the point where I’ve not had to hold a single job. Ever.
BUT YOU REALLY NEED TO FEEL SORRY FOR ME BECAUSE I’M A SHY VIRGIN AND MY DADDY DRINKS AND MY PARENTS MAY NOT PAY FOR MY SCHOOL OR MY NEW YORK APARTMENT AND I LIKE THIS GIRL WHO HAS THE GALL TO BANG SOMEONE ELSE EVEN THOUGH I WAS JUST TOTALLY BROKEN UP OVER SOME OTHER GIRL I DATED FOR 11 DAYS LIKE 2 WEEKS AGO AND ALSO OTHER GUYS PUNCH ME IN MY NUTS OVER AND OVER AND I JUST TAKE IT SO NOW I’M WORKING AT AN AMUSEMENT PARK WHICH IS LIKE WHAT POOR PEOPLE HAVE TO DO WHILE I READ HENRY MILLER AS A STATUS SYMBOL AND MY FRIENDS ARE UGLY.
I need another movie about a depressed well-to-do white boy like I need someone to rip out my teeth with pliers. Enter Adventureland, one of the most tone-deaf comedies I’ve ever seen. If you like feeling sorry for privileged Nice Guys(TM) chasing cardboard cutouts of actual women, check it out.
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Two thumbs up. Its own ass.
No soup for you! This is reserved for those who need it. Like Goldman Sachs.
All Americans are certainly gettin took in the patoot by the big banks. Looks like some folks are taking to the streets about it around the nation, if you’re interested: A New Way Forward Demonstrations. I expect I’ll be out with my video camera in Austin, and I’ll post footage here if anything interesting turns up.
Matt Taibbi and Paul Krugman are awash in despair, and when those two canaries go down for the count, you know we’re facing some sinister corporate shenanigans.
GM has been told to dump its CEO and will be given plans on how it will restructure itself according to the desires of the government. Banks, meanwhile, continue to get hundreds of billions of dollars with nothing more than a “pretty please” attached to it to make sure that money gets in the hands of people who do not have their own private jets.
Sadly, we all know that trickle down economics is a joke, and it’s been disappointing (though not shocking, as many hardcore-in-denial liberals seem to feel) to watch the Obama administration continue the Paulson Cash Dumptruck Plan of 2008. Lesson to GM: More campaign contributions next time, sucka.
In the meantime, protests may kind of matter again, because this administration has shown before that they pay attention to the public and the media. Now, that may include the disclaimer “only when not in direct conflict of massive donors” but at least we know it’s worth a try.
So if you’d rather see the big banks nationalized, broken apart, and thrown back out into the world as smaller institutions regulated by harsh antitrust laws, then let your voice be heard, eh?
And if this isn’t your thing, we can protest whatever that is next.
In the not-too-distant past, I noted long before I saw it written or heard it said anywhere else that I didn’t think Bristol Palin’s marriage to the father of her son was going to happen. When that turned out to be correct, I made another note of it, congratulated myself at seeing through the kerfluffle of various amounts of posturing about and/or outright avoidance tactics towards the entire topic by the principals and the media involved, and moved on.
But it’s happened again. And I’m no longer feeling so self-congratulatory. I don’t want to be able to read these people’s minds! I don’t want them to be an open book to me! I don’t want to understand them this well!
Yes, William Saletan is at it again, but this time, he isn’t writing about ladyparts or about any of the other stuff he usually expounds upon (which I mentally dubbed “Frankenstein medicine” a while back, though he’s made a few notable segues into race issues). He…is…writing…about…gays.
Before I go on, let’s recap something from my Saletan bitch session from last week:
…the place where I usually see [Saletan's tactics of "oh of course I'm pro-choice! and now that I've said that, let me do my best to completely undermine the pro-choice stance"] used over and over is in the gay/lesbian debate world, under the rallying cry of “Of course we don’t hate homosexuals themselves! What we hate is homosexuality. Hate the sin, love the sinner!”
Let’s recontext what Saletan has to say, and see if it starts to sound awfully damn familiar to you too:
Every
abortionhomosexuality dilemma is different, because every situation is different. The person best situated to make the right decision is thepregnant womanperson having the homosexual feelings.A few years ago, I wrote a whole book on this point.***So why do I keep bringing up
abortionhomosexuality as a moral problem? Because it is a moral problem. It’s the destruction ofa developing human beingthe traditional family unit. For that reason, the less we do it, the better. When I sayabortionhaving a homosexual relationship is bad, I’m not saying it’s necessarily worse thanbringing a child into the world in lousy circumstancesnever marrying someone of the opposite sex. I’m saying it’s worse thanavoiding unintended pregnancy in the first placehaving homosexual desires in the first place. That’s why I keep pushingcontraceptionconversion therapy. If youcause an unintended pregnancyenter into a homosexual relationship andan abortionget married to that person becauseyou didn’t want to wear a condomyou didn’t want to undergo conversion therapy, you should be ashamed.
***He hasn’t written one about homosexuality. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that there was one in the works.
…and, of course, today’s offering from Lord Saletan IS:
Shades of Gay
The heterogeneity of homosexuality.Researchers contacted more than 1,800 mental health professionals to find out whether they would ever try to change a client’s sexual orientation. Of the 1,328 practitioners who responded, one in six admitted to having helped at least one patient attempt to alter homosexual feelings. The total number of such cases reported by the respondents was 413. That’s nearly one case for every three therapists.
The study’s authors find this disturbing. Treatment to change homosexuality has proved ineffective and often unsafe, they argue. Therefore, therapists shouldn’t try it.
If only life were that simple.
It IS that simple, unless you’re a professional abortion concern troll turning your well-honed skills towards also becoming a homosexuality concern troll.
(OMG, he actually IS WRITING IN SUPPORT OF CONVERSION THERAPY, I thought I was just making a witty comparison..!!!)
In the big picture, the authors are right.
And Will Saletan agrees, women should have the right to choose!
But
I think we all saw that word coming…
…therapy isn’t about the big picture. It’s about lots of little pictures: the worlds unique to each of us. You and I may have the same sexual orientation, but our lives are very different. You know nothing of my family, my religion, or my community. You don’t even know how straight or gay I am. If I tell my therapist that I’d rather try to modify my feelings than give up my faith or my marriage, who are you to second-guess her or me?
In the British study, the therapists who admitted to collaborating in such cases weren’t anti-gay.
Well, of course they weren’t, and Saletan isn’t either, and he is ALSO pro-choice. One thing to love about the English language is the flexibility with which people are able to use it.
The rest of the article is typical Saletan concern trolling, liberally sprinkled with bizarre phrases that only make sense if you don’t think about them too closely, like
The therapists also distinguished between clear-cut and borderline homosexuality.
…”borderline homosexuality?” Like, your right hand yearns to touch Bob but your left hand would really rather stroke Susan?…wtf?
The idea of heterosexuality as a valid “lifestyle choice” turns the argument for sexual acceptance on its head. If a patient prefers to adjust his orientation to family or cultural circumstances, rather than the other way around, should the therapist challenge him?
…uh, the “patient” is always trying to adjust his orientation to family or cultural circumstances; it is NEVER the other way around–at least, this would be the absolute first time ever I have heard of the epidemic of people flocking to therapist’s offices to try to “convert” to homosexuality.
Sometimes, the substitution makes sense. When the patient is clearly gay
…”clearly gay?” Like, when he’s wearing lipstick and heels or she’s in steel-toed workboots and a buzzcut? Yargh…
…and when his discomfort with homosexuality isn’t fundamental to his personality, it’s logical to target the discomfort. But not every case is that simple. A friend once told me she was “primarily wired toward women.” She was my girlfriend for the next year and a half. Another friend told me he couldn’t countenance homosexuality because he was “obliged to believe it’s a mortal sin.” He came out of the closet a year later, but he never left Christianity or conservatism. Another friend lived as a gay man for years, then carried on a multiyear, monogamous relationship with a woman, then went back to the gay life.
“The evidence shows that you cannot change sexual orientation,” says King. But on the margins, I’ve seen it happen.
No, you haven’t. Rinse, repeat–NO, you haven’t, Dumb Ass! Good lord…case 1: your girlfriend told you she was bisexual. I’m sorry to be the one to break this to you, but no, she wasn’t “borderline” or “marginally” straight and the magnificence of your manlyhood resolved her oh-so-confused feelings on the subject–she was bisexual, which is why she used the word PRIMARILY rather than EXCLUSIVELY. Case 2: Your friend was gay, from start to finish, which amazingly enough has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with having religious and political beliefs (I know, can you believe it?). Case 3: Is bisexuality something you just can’t comprehend? Either he’s taking it up the butt and therefore he is G-A-Y or he’s sticking it in the pussy and dammit for several years there he was STRAIGHT!! so he was clearly radically switching his orientation, back and forth, back and forth..! …er, or he’s just bisexual, like your girlfriend in case 1. (So anticlimactic, but the truth often is, I’ve found. Sigh.)
So, what’s going on with me..? Am I mutating into a conservative concern troll or Greta Van Susteren? How is it that my passing observations are coming so ickily true..?
I think I need a hug.
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