I went and watched Star Trek the other day. The movie is just flat-out great; provided you go in expecting a Star Trekian plot (now with more Red Matter to fill in the plot holes!). This is Star Trek with the budget and acting it was always meant to have, with a real commitment to the spirit of the original.
Spoilers Below the Fold
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If I were a registered, voting Republican, I think I’d be a little concerned about the RNC’s priorities at this point. But that’s just me; maybe most Republicans think this is, like, really superimportant!! 
I wouldn’t know.
(Hat tip to Auguste and Pandagon.)
(Parts One and Two are here and here.)
Being something of a scientist, and living in a society that revels in its hierarchy and is constantly looking for ways that at least appear objective to justify it, I’ve struggled with this issue before. It was interesting to see it come up at Sex 2.0, and hear an actual professional researcher tackle it.
So, let’s say you’re an Associated Press writer and you hear about a tribe of people in Ecuador. And let’s say this tribe had the highest homicide rate ever recorded by anthropologists. And let’s say that researchers discovered, among other things, that the most murderous of the tribe members didn’t always get the most wives and stuff.
Is this how you would write your opening paragraph?
Apparently the bad boy doesn’t always get the girl. At least in a South American tribe with the highest known murder rate, it turns out that the most aggressive guys end up with fewer wives and children than milder men, according to a report in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Randy’s article suggests that the report discussing the lives of these people covers a lot more than who got laid the most. Thus, proving the “bad boys” wrong seems like an odd thing to fixate on… almost as bizarre as equating our American conception of a “bad boy” with an Ecuadorian tribesman who murders a lot.
Hey Randy, I’m really sorry some 19 year old with a camaro and an almost-mustache was dating the girl you liked in Social Studies class, but trying to tell that person today that he’s going to have less sex than you by pointing to a tribe of people who have absolutely no shared context with our lives in the developed world is an enormous fucking stretch. And ethnocentric. And rooted in sexism. And soaked in weak sauce.
He can’t hurt you anymore, dude.
(Part One is here.)
Of the three Sex 2.0 lectures the ex-spouse and I attended, he liked the second one best. The session description:
Internet Advocacy for Sexual Freedom
Do we need a new national sexual freedom discourse? Does the transparency of the internet or its opportunity for anonymity help answer this question? Can we use our blogs, elists and online groups to shape the national sexual freedom discourse? For this workshop we will explore how we can use the internet to transform sexual issue debates into dialogues and then broad conversations creating new allies. We will use the issues of trafficking and decriminalization of consensual sex as examples.
In the beginning of the session, one of the speakers used the example of this as an ideal situation where people who are supporters of sexual freedom (defined as being supportive of polyamory, swinging, homosexuality in general and marriage equality in particular, etc.) could dialogue with people who are not supporters of sexual freedom (defined as thinking that doing any of those things will result both in you personally burning in Hell and the collapse of civilization as we know it generally). It’s a nice idea, and I actually remember reading about that whole pro-choice/pro-life lovefest several years ago when it was happening and thinking then that it was a nice idea. The speaker at the session emphasized that the great thing about this was that neither side is expected to change his or her opinion–compromise can and often does leave a sour taste in the mouths of both compromisers–this was all about building consensus.
But…there does have to be a but, I’m afraid…
What is Sex 2.0, you may ask? (If you already know, feel free to skip over this next part.) From the website:
Sex 2.0 will focus on the intersection of social media, feminism, and sexuality. How is social media enabling people to learn, grow, and connect sexually? How is sexual expression tied to social activism? Does the concept of transparency online offer new opportunities or present new roadblocks — or both? These questions, and many more, will be addressed within a safe, welcoming, sex-positive space.
Now, the above isn’t a completely accurate description of what Sex 2.0 turned out to be–at least, not the three lectures I attended. Feminism barely came up at all, though all the attendees around me save for two, when asked by one of the lecturers, indicated that they self-identified as feminists. You notice the phrase “sex work” is entirely absent from the official description–I don’t know if that was on purpose or not, but sex work was the theme in two of the three sessions I attended, and many of the attendees were associated with or involved in sex work in some fashion.
I enjoyed it–it was different in many ways even from the few non-mainstream-type events I’ve attended in the past, and I do really like that. I was inspired to blog on a few of the observations I made and the thoughts that arose from those observations, both during the conference and later on in the evening when I discussed them with the spouse (who attended with me). Observation #1 below the fold!
“We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” — Woodrow Wilson
Education and school have been the subject, direct or tangential, of a number of posts lately. Most notably this fantastic, honest piece about Antigone’s school experience. Government schooling is an emotionally charged subject since most of us attended school every non-summer weekday for 12+ years. Many of us are sending or planning to send our children to this institution for the same duration.
Normally I avoid sites like Townhall.com like the plague; the last time I got tricked into reading a Townhall.com article I lost the ability to have sex with my husband for, like, a week straight.
But today, I find myself curious. It’s a clinical sort of curiosity, like the kind I get that inspires me to jump on Wikipedia and look up the cultivation history of the pineapple or the mating habits of bonobos. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular–I just wondered, What is on the conservative mind these days..? So I nipped on over to the Townhall to find out.
I have an extremely boring job. I am a technician who’s job is somewhere between insurance and go-for; it is my job to keep distance classes (either recorded, streaming over the internet in real time, and distance classes that work in real time over a video conferencing systems) run smoothly. This could mean that I keep professor from breaking ELMO machines, finding some way to connect archaic slide-reel equipment to modern computers, troubleshooting any technical problems or simple things like making sure there’s enough paper in printers and sending faxes. While doing this, I am normally also doing online help chat for various programs. This sounds really impressive. It isn’t. I spend the bulk of my time playing on the internet, and listening with half an ear to graduate level classes.
But this week, I had a new challenge. The regional Methodist conference was doing a video conferencing meeting that, lucky me, I got to tech for (Methodist Conference’s motto: the only thing more boring and petty than discussing who gets what in the budget is arguing over the theological distinctions of budgeting differences!) One of the couples for the meeting brought their 3 small kids, a boy and two little girls, and didn’t bring any toys for the kids to play with during this three hour long meeting. Predicting that nothing good could come of this, I sprang into action by tracking down some paper and markers, which the children gleefully (and quietly!) used.
This lasted about an hour and a half (which I must say, I thought was pretty impressive for these small kids: the eldest couldn’t have been more than 7). At the break, I overheard the kids (paraphrasing from memory):
Kid 1: Mom, I’m hungry
Mom: I don’t have anything; we’ll get food after this
Kid 2, clearly getting fussy: But I’m hungry NOW!
Kid 3: I don’t WANNA draw anymore
Mom: Hush; it’s over soon
Dad: *engrossed in conversation*
Me, to mom: Would it be okay if the kids had some cookies and juice? And I can set up the tv in the other room, what would be okay for the kids to watch?
Mom: Oh god, you’re a lifesaver. (This was a direct quote).
So, I go and buy the kids some cookies from the vending machine, and we all get a cookie and split a red gatorade*.
And what did the little children want to watch? The unanimous vote, including the little boy? Dora the Explorer. They wanted to watch a little girl have adventurers with her monkey and learn Spanish words. They even said “Gracias” when I asked if they knew how to say “Thank you” in Spanish, so clearly some of it is sinking in.
And what did they want to watch after Dora was over? Mythbusters.
These did not strike me as overly intelligent little children (particularly when one managed to lose her cookie piece in her hand). These were nice kids, mostly obedient, a little fussy when hungry and bored, and seemed to come from a normal, Midwestern family. And what they wanted to watch was television that broke gender and racial stereotypes, and used science to combat urban legends.
The kids are okay. They’re not any more greedy than any previous generation, nor mean, nor evil, nor more -ist of any kind. In fact, they’re probably less -ist than the generation before them.
Yay.
* I am so envious that most kid’s problems seemed to be fixed with cookies and juice. Could we all be so lucky
Thank you Pew Research Center for doing the legwork to confirm things that we already knew: in this case, the inverse relationship between human decency and church attendance.
When I was a kid growing up in Dallas, I thought all the talk of Texas seceding was kind of adorable. It was just party talk, something I would hear adults laugh about over a beer and see kids mimic in school. Having spent my early years in Iowa, I’d never really encountered state pride on the level of Texas’, and it seemed kind of cool to be living in a state that thought it was that badass.
Then I turned, like, 16 and stuff, and realized that:
1) There was more to life than weekend sleepovers playing Techmo Super Bowl for 18 hours at a time, and
2) There were some people who weren’t kidding about that secession business. And they were fucking crazy.
That was the late 80s/early 90s. Now? There are even more secession nuts. They’re still fucking crazy, but they’re popping up all over the South. And unfortunately for everyone, their numbers are going to go waaaay up over the next 5 years. In other words, the whole secession thing’s just getting started.
Holy crap, I can’t believe anyone thought this image was posted earnestly. Here at punkassblog, we post shit that seems insane to us. And if it’s alarming, that’s the point. This is the southern patriarchy’s wet dream. It’s absurd. It’s awful. It’s the type of shit we address here.
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