Category: sex

Community

Retrenchment

The new abortion laws being enacted across the country should come as no surprise. This was going to happen. This has been in the cards since Reagan. Reliance on the courts to defend the right to choose was as much an indication of how much we underestimated the threat as it was any kind of faith in our institutions.

Right after Roe was passed, amendments to state constitutions should have been passed to nail it down. Other laws should have been written and passed to nail it down. One of the inherent problems with a federal solution is that it’s a one-time solution that can be reversed the next time across the board. Roe should have been the start of a long series of embedding legislation which should have been taken up on the assumption that Roe could be overturned.

It didn’t happen for a variety of reasons. One, I believe, is that too much support for the right to choose is tepid. It is too often circumstantial, waffling, and uncomfortable.

Now we’ll find out. Penalties are being attached. Some have already been enacted. This means one thing that has traditionally scared the anti-choice movement off—it will now be in the courts all the time.

Let me say here that in my opinion, as a male, I should have no say in this. At all. I was never at risk in this issue. I could never get pregnant. I was never going to suffer consequences from being denied the right to an abortion. This should not be something I have any stake in.

That said, it has become politicized to the point that having an opinion is unavoidable because now it is a civil rights issue, and civil rights affect all of us.

And no, as far as I’m concerned, a fetus has no civil rights. A fetus is not a person. At best, a fetus is a manifestation of an idea, and it only becomes a person if all the parties involve follow through. All the moralistic posturing about when life begins and what constitutes a human are just that—posturing. By taking the position that a fetus—now, in some cases, a zygote—is a human being with a full suite of rights, you automatically strip rights of personhood from the one carrying it. Personhood is an aspect of autonomy. Autonomy at the very least is a matter of self-determination. By declaring that a collection of cells has greater claim to state protection than the one carrying them is by definition declaring that woman less than everyone else. You can’t have it any other way.

Until we stop waffling about that, this issue will not be resolved.

Resolution, however, entails several other issues that are hanging upon the thread of ongoing discomfort. Like equality, for instance, and not just for women.

Education for another. The rationalization of sex. Not to mention the ongoing squirming about gender, orientation, and identity. All of this is tangled up and therefore it is difficult to know just what some people are objecting to when they go on a jeremiad about abortion. We may believe our response is exclusively aimed at the words coming out of their mouths, but then when their next response comes, laden with contradiction and vehement rejection, we sense that we did not know just what we were arguing about.

This is simple:  if the goal is to reduce and/or eliminate abortions, then a sensible solution is to substantially invest in meaningful sex education and the wide availability of contraception. Attack the causes of unwanted pregnancy and empower individuals to protect themselves. How hard is that?

Apparently, very. Almost no anti-choice group does not also include a ban on contraception as a stated goal. One of the justifications touted for this stance is the notion that contraception is simply abortion by other means. Pre-emptive abortion, if you will. That contraception inculcates a lax attitude toward the value of life. That contraception leads to an acceptance of abortion.

This facile excuse-making masks a very simple reality:  that the real issue is not abortion but sex. Sex practiced outside the bounds of what is hoped to be strict social parameters that will control behaviors said advocates find unacceptable. (A recent declaration by Alabama Republican state Senator and sponsor of the bill Clyde Chambliss, responded that, “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.” That’s about as clear as it can be made—he and probably his supporters are not interested in the “facts of life” regarding fertilized egg—they are concerned with pregnant women and making sure they stay pregnant.)  This is a direct assault on a woman’s right to be her own agent.  It is punitive and it is a curtailment of her civil rights. This has nothing to do with fetuses except as a means of control.

Until we largely get past the traditional views that linger like mold that sex is somehow bad and that women who try to live their lives according to the same privileged sensibilities men do are “unnatural”; until we get to a place where we can accept that sex as an act of communication is separate and distinct in intent and outcome from sex as procreation and that all of us have a right to manage our own aspirations free of outside interference, we will continue to have this problem.

It is the start of a chain, though.  If you can dictate pregnancy this way, you can dictate all the rest of the privacy concerns adhering to questions of free association and identity. This can be enlarged for purposes of a resurgent legal challenge to homosexual rights, transgender rights, adoption rights, marriage rights, and so on.  Not that it necessarily would go there but by accepting the legitimacy of such limitations on one group for purposes having nothing to do with their innate and autonomous desires, you can construe a challenge to any group failing to fit an arbitrary social “norm.”

That is not a society I care to live in.

Until we quite clearly and loudly start dealing with the underlying (and not so well hidden) issues involved, we are destined to keep fighting these back-and-forth legal wars.  Despite the distance traveled since the 1950s and all its suffocating social restrictions, people still seem reluctant to defend their right to have healthy sex.  Indeed, we still have too many people who do not believe sex is healthy. Too many people who excuse their desires and passions by making babies and therefore proving a legitimate reason for having such a good time was there all along.

It sounds silly, doesn’t it?

When you disassemble the challenges and look at the arguments and then look at the policies advocated, it doesn’t sound so silly.  The anti-choice movement has depended on the tepidness, the discomfort, of too many people in order to build the momentum they have. They have relied on our collective ill-ease with the whole subject.

Well. Be that as it may. Sad to say, the pro-choice movement is likely going to lose this one. Having lost it, we will regroup, and maybe next time do the necessary trench-warfare in the state legislatures, and school boards, and town halls to instantiate this right in too many places, too deeply to be effectively challenged.

We need to. I am not willing to live in a Calvinist dystopia. I don’t think the Fifties were all that wonderful. I don’t want my friends to suffer a retreat from the dream of equity.

This has been a fight with ignorance. The depth of that ignorance is on display now across the country. People who don’t know—and who don’t want to know, because knowing confuses them, makes them doubt. They want a pure, righteous cause by which to feel virtuous.

For the life of me, I’ve never understood why genuine equality doesn’t fill that bill.

Equality? For the ignorant—that a woman can be shackled by a condition and have her entire life twisted and reshaped through no choice of her own and that men can never be so trapped automatically makes this an equity issue. That is reality. And I have no doubt that many if not all the architects of the so-called pro-life cause know that perfectly well and they are glad of it, because they think that’s as it should be.

 

 

Community

Pathological Ownership

Beth Moore has left the Southern Baptist Conference. If you are unaware of her and what this means, you should look into it. Beth Moore has for many years occupied a special place within that community—a preacher without portfolio, one might say, as the SBC does not permit women to hold the title “pastor.” The straight-up “pure quill” fundamentalism they espouse holds the inferred Biblical injunctions inviolable in this instance, but she has been such a forceful speaker and operates such a large organization that they are loathe to relegate her to silence. So she held that special position.

Till now.

She has split with them over Trump. The schism is instructive. Ms. Moore cannot find common ground with the majority of her colleagues over Trump.

“He became the banner, the poster child for the great white hope of evangelicalism, the salvation of the church in America,” she said. “Nothing could have prepared me for that.”

Since 2016 she has been on the outside of the SBC over this issue. She identified Trump as an exemplar of everything they should stand against, and yet she was met with silence, then disapproval, then warnings, and finally with the loss of her publisher. She could not understand the attitude of her (male) colleagues in their support for this man she saw as a walking “poster child” for evil.

To be sure, this has puzzled those outside the evangelical camp all along. The slogans and protestations over perceived moral lapses in Democrats would seem to support a no-holds-barred moralism that should have found Trump utterly unacceptable. And yet we have been witness to very public campaigns of image rehabilitation all along. It has been with mixed incomprehension and horror that we have seen people who flew into paroxysms of condemnation over Clinton’s behavior make showings of almost servile support (bordering on worship) for a man who bragged about pussy-grabbing and attempted to pay off a porn star to keep her from talking about her paid services to him. The very public ridicule he heaped on anyone who did not fit a shallow model of Americanism that combined a host of clichés and segregated anyone who didn’t meet the standard—essentially the acts of a bully picking on the weak—seemed to gain favor with the very people who claim Jesus as their exemplar. Beth Moore saw this for what it was and tried to convince the SBC to abandon its support for him, and instead found herself more and more at odds with them, more and more isolated.

It is fair to ask what is going on with this enormous contradiction. How could the self-professed moral arbiters of the country, the Christian Right, support this?

Beth Moore’s ambiguous status holds much of the answer.

It is by now a convention that in many religions women are relegated to secondary (or lesser) status. One may puzzle about how this can still pertain in a time when the evidence for any rational justification for it has been shown to be nonexistent. Certainly it is an aspect of male privilege, but that does not satisfactorily explain the complicit acquiescence of so many women. Moore is a good example of the conundrum. (Just as with people like Michele Bachman, who espouses a paradoxical belief that women should be subservient yet she herself sees no problem with holding leadership positions.) In Moore’s case, she has been in accord with the evangelical attitudes toward women and accepted a lesser status even while she has risen to a commanding position in her community. She felt the larger message important and, no doubt, felt protected within the larger community.

But when Trump’s very public attitudes toward women became a very public issue, and she protested, that community seemed to withdraw its protection.

In my opinion, this apparent betrayal is due to a basic misunderstanding which is not only endemic to communities like the SBC, but to our society as a whole, and it has to do with Ownership.

The only reason to deny equality to women and then justify it, you have to understand who thinks who owns what.

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel, The Dispossessed, there is a scene early on which strikes the issue squarely. It is a flashback of the protagonist, Shevek, as a child in, basically, preschool:

…the fat infant was at this moment coming towards the knobby one rapidly…he approached out of boredom or sociability, but once in the square of sunlight he discovered it was warm there. He sat down heavily beside the knobby one, crowding him into the shade.

The knobby one’s blank rapture gave place at once to a scowl of rage. He pushed the fat one, shouting “Go ‘way!”

…The knobby one stood up. His face was a glare of sunlight and anger. His diapers were about to fall off. “Mine!” he said in a high, ringing voice. “Mine sun!”

“It is not yours,” the one-eyed woman said with the mildness of utter certainty. “Nothing is yours. It is to use.  It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.” And she picked the knobby baby up with gentle inexorable hands and set him aside, out of the square of sunlight.

The knobby one shook all over, screamed, “Mine sun!” and burst into tears of rage.

Baby Shevek has determined that things belong to him. Personally. Perfectly natural, to a degree. The world is centered on him, he feels he has a right to the patch of sunlight, that he can, in fact, own it. We read the passage with a mix of amusement and enlightenment. We recognize this to be an infant’s response to the reality of the world.

But.

Our culture is based, largely if not wholly, on an idea of ownership that was in the beginning a redress of imbalance. The idea that anyone, regardless of “station”, could own property was radical, especially in its unremarked egalitarianism. Communal ownership was more common, but this was not the aspect of ownership that captured the imagination—rather, it was the sole ownership, the possibility the individual, any individual, could own outright the equivalent of a kingdom that became the unquestioned ethos of the American experiment. This idea—so powerful, so very American in its expression if not its origins—fueled the growth of the United States and rocketed us to heights unparalleled in history.

And it underlies everything that is currently wrong with the republic. It has always had its dark side, it has never been free of abuse, but it has gone through cycles during which it was tempered—by circumstance, by public morality, by the very excesses of those most adept at acquisition. Boom and Bust cycles are the product of poorly controlled acquisition. Theodore Roosevelt knew it and attacked it. His relative, FDR, went further.

But it’s very difficult to regulate that which is an outgrowth of a cultural feature, part of our own mythology, our identity—our psychology. Any attempt to regulate it feels like theft.

This is not new, by any means, but it has become so dominant in our culture as to be like the very air we breathe, at least for some. Ownership has come to possess us as the only worthwhile aspect of anything and everything. If looked at from this perspective, all our present ethical and social conundrums clarify, from taxes to fashion, gun ownership to healthcare, voting rights to marriage, property to opinions, abortion to minimum wage.

What Trump has done for the membership of the SBC that puts them at odds with Beth Moore and seems so perverse to many of us is to reaffirm for them what they feel proprietary about, what they believe they rightfully own, that their claims of possession are legitimate. Beth Moore does not, for them, have a right to be shocked and repulsed by Trump because she is not an owner. They are. To put it as bluntly as possible, while perhaps most of them are dismayed and censorious about Trump’s pussy-grabbing, it remains a fact for them that the pussy is there for him to grab. His grabbing it makes it his, because the woman does not own it. Women’s sexuality is not theirs.

Beth Moore does not even have a right to her own voice—they have tried to take that away from her—but only has use of it because it serves the self-presumed owners.

Absurd? When you look back at the history of personal rights over the centuries, one thing becomes clear—it always revolves around some formulation of ownership. As the franchise expanded, those opposed railed against it out of a sense of privilege, that they are losing something which they act as if they owned. What we are seeing right now across the country is exactly that—people trying to limit voting rights, reduce them, take them away from those they see as a threat. (Because the consequences of such expanded voting might impinge on other things that self-styled elites feel are theirs.) Many reasons are given, but the presumption that such restrictions are even considered is based on a notion of proprietary civic ownership that goes back centuries.

Plato discussed communal space, where everyone in a polis “owned” things in common. Aristotle thought this was a bad idea since in his view (to simplify) common ownership like that would dis-incentivize care, that without the added encouragement of private ownership, no one would feel obligated to preserve, maintain, or build. Aristotle was the one “good pagan” that the Catholic Church used to build its own social ethics and so this idea came into the mainstream of thought through the dominant religions of the modern era. Plato and Aristotle approved of limited forms of democracy, but felt that not everyone was suited to participate equally and Aristotle made no bones about believing only elite males had a natural right to ownership, which meant the ability to participate in the politics of the polis. Hence the franchise came down to us from ideas of suitability and because so much history, property, conquest, and nation-building has accrued around these ideas since, it is difficult to tease them apart. They are the air we breathe, as I said.

There has always been a cycle of balances set against this. Simple ability to enforce, the reach of government and church, the situation on the ground at any given place and time—all have made a pure form of this hard to achieve and there has always been some push-back. But we cannot seem to be rid of it. One would have thought that by the Enlightenment, the categorical denials of agency necessary would have fallen by the wayside, and yet…

Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696 – 1792) was a major figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, a patron of David Hume and Adam Smith, among others. He, with others, established the Philosophical Society of Scotland. A precursor to the much more influential work of Adam Smith, he was concerned about the importance of property to society. The economics aside, when it came to the franchise, he wrote:

“Those who depend for food on bodily labor, are totally void of taste, of such taste at least as can be of use in the fine arts. This consideration bars the greater part of mankind; and for the remaining part, many by a corrupted taste are unqualified for voting.”

With some allowance for the passage of much history, this would have fit rather well with Aristotle (and even Plato). Specific justifications aside, the idea that it is not only permissible but desirable to exclude certain people from participation is clear.

The rest of the 18th Century, in terms of Enlightenment thinkers, wrestled with questions of nature, merit, innate value. Property emerged as a key concern and with the creation of the United States, the momentum of such concerns barreled on with increasing force until, today, property has become everything.

The United States, however, has an in-built conflict. The Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights are neither one based on such blatant exclusions and form the basis of a tension that has grown along with the self-conception of the country. Property, as it turns out, is only valuable when made exclusive. Politics, however, always intrudes on the uses of property, which brings in the concerns of those excluded. Rights occupy a special space that seem beholden to the ephemeral even as the exercise of Rights inevitably impacts the temporal. Because we have a love-hate relationship with ideas of property that transcend mere material objects, the inextricable dependence of one on the other creates a conception of property that seems to encompass Rights and treats them as a species of Things Which Can Be Owned. My Rights, My Land, My Freedom, My Things, My Self.

The most accessible way to conceive of all this is as property. Which means that when Rights are expanded, some people will see this as an encroachment because it depletes the value of their property. And so, the question at the center of modern conservatism, whether stated explicitly or not (or even acknowledged), is: What can I own? The next question, then, would have to be: how can I maintain the value of what I own?  This becomes the justification to deny ownership to others.

For most people, historically, the goal was autonomy. The freedom to be who you are, unapologetically, without having to justify yourself to authorities. But autonomy—agency—is not the same as ownership. Unlike property, agency should not be—cannot be—a contract or title to the claims of self possession. It must be a given, unbarterable, nonfungible, and universal. The American myth is that here, we have that. In practice, most of us do not. It is traded away every day by the fact that without money—the means of ownership—we have nothing anyone feels obligated to respect.

So alliances are made, groups are formed, coalitions emerge. Churches are ready-made for this, because by joining one the agency we seem unable to possess on our own can be “borrowed” from the cadre. But churches aren’t the only method for becoming something by allying with many. Political parties, certainly, but the principle works with businesses, charitable organizations, clubs, special interests, schools…

All these things, however, exist—here—within a framework that has promised agency.

But that’s a slippery idea to pin down. It’s the thing implicit in the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, in the enumeration of rights to be kept free of outside (government) interference (or any other), like speech, freedom of worship, privacy, assembly, legal redress, and equal access to public determination. Agency. Rather than that, we have come to regard ownership as primary, as established throughout our history by repeated referral to property as a qualification for common regard. As time marched on, the meaning of the franchise expanded, and in each expansion the issue has been centered on ownership. In the beginning, only property owners could vote. While not so explicit today, there is still a property qualification (permanent address).

In the advance toward a universal franchise, those opposed to the expansion have insisted on more and more qualifications—amounting to proof of ownership—to bear on the people they wish to exclude. After 250 years (here) of this, we have come to a point where almost everything has been, in some sense, transformed into a commodity.

Things that can be owned can be controlled.

How does this relate to the Religious Right’s support of Trump and their censure of Beth Moore?

Trump is all about ownership. His “brand” is everything. He is admired (by some) for having things. Having things is the hallmark of success in this country. Not “who you are” but “what you have” matters more to most people, because the former requires a sense of Self that is neither publicly evident or reliably fixed (people change).  (Also, who you are may be terrifying to other people, so it is easier to reduce the Self to a set of traits that you “have”—implying that you can trade them in, get new ones, swap them out, or just put them away.) Success at Having Things is understandable, accessible, universalizable. It also validates for others the presumed right to have things.

Trump is popular among certain groups because he does just that—he validates their view of what it means to be an American, which is entirely wrapped up in Having Things.

One of the things he “has” is the prerogative to deny agency to those he sees as inferiors or, at least, unworthy of consideration.

For evangelicals this includes many of the kinds of people of whom they disapprove. While Trump’s “manner” may offend their sensibilities, they do not find fault with his presumptions. In the case of the “pussygrabbing” it comes down to the fact that the pussies he is grabbing are attached to “fallen” women. After all, their wives would never be in a position to be so treated, because they are not “that kind” of woman. They know better than to put their pussies in such circumstances.

I phrase it that way because below all this, the reality for these men is that their wives’ pussies belong to them. Because this is a factor of our culture that underlies much of our disconnect over women’s rights and equity. For them, women don’t “own” their sexuality. They carry it around until a man claims it. Which is why so much of the anxiety and anger over gender equality remains a muddle for certain people.

And Beth Moore? She had the temerity to express the idea that Trump’s pussygrabbing was in all cases immoral, obscene, and deserving of censure. But she can only make that charge if women are their own persons, whole and worthy of regard as free agents.

And agency is the one thing evangelicals cannot grant outside the confining circle of their faith, which is a club of limited membership, very exclusive, and cannot admit to any kind of baseline equality. Doing so would require they change their message on so many fronts and accord respect to people and persons they a priori consider beyond the pale. Unredeemed. Damned.

Just the fact that Beth Moore has for all these years been disallowed from holding an equal position within her chosen conference demonstrates that the principle of ownership is in force to deny her agency, because she cannot own what her colleagues already claim for themselves. They see it as their prerogative to grant status and people outside their selective regard have no right to claim anything for themselves.

Consider their stance toward transgender persons: this is a threat to their purview because it is individuals taking possession of their Selves and claiming agency. That they would have to know that Self intimately enough to move beyond the reach of simple possession is a denial of the message of “salvation” through superior agency (Christ). And, on a more basic level, it frightens because gender orientation is one of those things that is “owned” and often regarded as a separate thing to be scorned (denial of the flesh). That it is fundamental to identity creates too many confusions and contradictions for the smooth apprehension of a theological proposition which is supposed to be Otherworldly.

But in practice it comes down to an ownership issue.

Consider an example outside of questions of Self. The rejection of government economic support for the poor. This would seem paradoxical. If the point is to alleviate poverty, what does it matter where the aide comes from?  But it matters if you consider the dispensation of that aid proprietary. They see it as charity and according to their own philosophy, charity comes from the heart. Governments render this moot, because it becomes a matter of economic systems. There is no “charity”—hence no Good Works, no affirmation of moral mission, no opportunity to demonstrate one’s christianity. Charity has become a wholly-owned trademark of religious expression and no one should take it away, least of all systems that might render the matter solved.

Beth Moore ran afoul of an unexamined aspect of American culture as expressed through a religious lens. Trump may be an immoral, foul, odious being, but he affirmed for them the basic right of ownership of so many issues, and hence condemning him and withdrawing support was not possible. It might have played out a little differently had a man in Beth Moore’s position done what she did, but it still would have intruded on the majority’s presumptive rights of ownership—in this case, the ownership of male privilege.

On an even more perverse level, Trump was also the proof of government corruption—he fit their idea of what the government already was. If the end game was to destroy the beast, why not support the one who best exemplifies everything they claim to hate? Putting a good man (or woman—unthinkable!) in that office would seem perverse, because what could a good man accomplish? It would only delay the advent of freedom from what they see as secular attempts at creating a baseline equality that denies their “right” to judge.

And here it generates endlessly stranger ideas of what may have been going on.

But Beth Moore turned on the juggernaut and was trampled by the unstated assumptions of the inner circle. That evangelicals can show a history of their own indulging in all the things she condemned Trump for doing ought to have been a signal that she misunderstood just what she was dealing with.

Agency, as I assume it here, is something beyond ownership. But it’s personal, and it’s malleable, and it is uncontained by convention. It actually cannot be owned, so it becomes necessary to prevent its manifestation.

I do not here claim everyone is so ensconced in this morass of what I’ve termed Pathological Ownership—but then it never requires many people to subscribe to an idea to have an impact on how the culture responds. Because we have a rather nebulous set of alternate models, the idea of Having Things being a substitute rather than an expression of Self can distort all out of proportion to the numbers involved. It helps if we know what it is we’re talking about, identify the issue at hand, instead of stumbling on assuming a different set of values at play.

Just about everything in the divisive cultural and politic mess we’ve experienced for the last few decades can be explained by this idea. The GOP won’t cooperate with the Democrats? Why? Because they seek to own the issues. If they cooperate, then they must share, and sharing is the road to ruin, because no one can own what is shared. The moment you share something it is no longer exclusively yours,.

Too many people just want to own everything.

 

 

culture

Clueless

Some people think if they throw enough words of the “what if” or “but then” variety, anything can be twisted out of shape enough to render even the most toxic subject harmless.

Take sexual harassment.

The presumption on the part of some men that a woman is there for their entertainment underlies the casual fecklessness of the entire frat-boy mentality.  They excuse themselves with all manner of absurdity. “She was there to party” “her clothes” “she didn’t say no” “she laughed.”

That last one gets me every time.

I worked with a man for nine years who used that as his justification for a level of “flirtation” that bordered on intimidation. Every attractive woman who came into the store could be a target for his brand of locker room humor and he excused himself from charges of harassment by saying “But they laughed.” Which to him signaled they were having a good time and what he was doing was acceptable.

He seemed tone deaf to nervous laughter. He was oblivious to the rictus of “I can’t believe you just said that.”

Gradually, they stopped coming. We lost business. One good friend complained to me about it and I advised her to call him on it. She did. Immediately afterward, his comment was “I had no idea she was such a bitch.”

“She’s not,” I said. “You’re just such an asshole.”

He looked genuinely hurt. I patiently tried to explain what he was doing that was wrong. Maybe he didn’t want to get it, but I still believe that he was so steeped in the culture of the Fifties and Sixties that he just couldn’t accommodate the idea that what he had been doing all his adult life was fundamentally wrong.  Disrespectful, intimidating, humiliating.  “But they laugh.”

This is who he saw himself as and he thought it was cool.  He thought I was being a whiney liberal. 

But we lost almost all our female customers of a certain age and physical description.

Now he did ask one question that got me thinking. “If I say the same things at a party, I don’t drive anyone away.”

Well, I had to question that a bit, but—

The difference between a social occasion where everyone is perfectly free to walk away and a business environment wherein the parties are trapped by a set of necessities which do not allow easy egress. In order for them to walk away they have to be willing to break a business arrangement. They have to find another source for what they need. They have to start over to build a relationship.

None of this has a damn thing to do with making yuk-yuk over sexual innuendos and flirtation.  There are costs involved.

Of course, there are always costs involved, just that some of them are not so immediate or monetary. Loss of respect, at minimum.  Actual fear. Women who may realize that they’re quite glad never to be alone with you. The easy intimacy of friendship lost.

Not to mention just adding to the general toxicity of a culture that takes as given, usually unstated but always there, that women are there for a man’s pleasure.

And those who reject that?

The oblivion of being recategorized and cast out.  At best. Punished at worst. Punished by assault, but actions based on the assumption “Oh, she really wants it even if she’s saying she doesn’t.”

Underlined by ridicule.

But it was all in fun! After all, the boys were laughing.

culture

The Irish Option

I tend to avoid prognostication. Prediction. Dicey game, right answers stumbled upon seldom enough to imbue them with an aura. But I might put one out there after this week. I’m going to predict that what just happened in Ireland is the start of a movement and might come to be called The Irish Option. Just the fact that it occurred in, of all places, Ireland, that land of formerly austere and resolute Catholic dominance and abuse, will make it emblematic.

In an apparently overwhelming referendum, the Eighth Amendment of the Irish constitution, which banned abortion, has been removed, by more than 2 to 1. People returned to Ireland from all over the world just to cast a ballot. If nothing else, this should give Americans pause to reflect on how much we value the vote.

After arguing over this for most of the last century, the issue has come down to some very simple precepts. But the primary one, the one that will carry forward, is simple—women should be the ones to decide whether or not to bear children. Only the most obdurate and unaffected stubbornness can fail to see the reasons. This single right underlies all other arguments for equality. This single factor determines self-empowerment. This single option dictates how one can conduct one’s life.

And of course it is not only the individual woman who benefits from having the choice. But we should not lose sight of this central, primary fact. Historically, women have had little to say concerning their own lives, and this biological reality has been the chief excuse for varying degrees of disempowerment, chattel bondage, and denial of agency. Redressing that has been one of the chief issues of Western Civilization since the 18th Century at least. Along with general questions of inequality, the period from 1820 (just to select a starting point—others may serve as well) to the present has been defined by a constant discourse on what we mean by civil rights and civil liberties. At every point where significant transitions occurred, individual autonomy has increased. The arguments against have fallen because they are morally unsustainable. White people are not genetically superior to other so-called races, women are not constitutionally unsuited to political engagement or forms of work men traditionally claim as their own, property is not a sufficient condition to segregate the right to vote, money is not a basis for denial of rights to those who lack it. And so on and so forth. We come at last (or perhaps not) to what remains of the justification for keeping more than half the human race in some degree of bondage. Moral arguments about sex, national arguments about the duty of motherhood, economic arguments about the structure of the home, political arguments over resources, and finally turf battles over privilege have combined in a toxic morass to muddy the core issues and make the road to a simple understanding bloody and brutal and divisive.

Certain people chafe at losing control, however imaginary. Others chafe at not having it in a very real and visceral way.

The litany of objections have all come down to a few assumptions based on tradition and an obsolete configuration of moral constraint that are more distraction than legitimate. Now in Ireland, with its history of sectional strife and tragedy, people have decided that it is time to set aside that mountain of gilded offal under which people squirm to meet standards that have nothing to do with hopes, dreams, or even practical abilities. Time to say enough to the history of sadistic denial, perverse chastisement, and unexamined fear of the female and say “We’re all people, human beings, and we want the same things, and those of us who never have to deal with a biological condition that can derail everything have no right to put chains on those who do have to deal with it.”

Choice frightens a lot of people. Because it takes power out of one set of hands and gives it those whose choice might make us uncomfortable. Because it takes away privileges. Because it unsettles. Because it changes arrangements that have given some a sense of worth at the expense of others’ freedom to live a life of their own choosing.

Now we see that some people, still, are simply terrified of the idea of the self-possessed woman.

Just as some are terrified of the idea of the self-possessed individual of a race not our own.

I have nothing to say to them, other than you will not dictate the terms of civilization anymore. Maybe you should talk to someone about what you fear.

In the meantime, I suspect more and more we’ll be seeing The Irish Option. The pushback against fear, ignorance, and hate is happening.

For those who will resort to the war cry “But the babies!” No. A zygote is not a baby. It’s not a baby until the woman carrying it says it is. But, then, it’s never really been about that anyway. Has it?

Absurdity

In What?

I had no idea till yesterday this was a thing. The Toronto van killer apparently was a member of a supposedly oppressed group that wishes to declare open rebellion against—

Well, I’m not entirely sure, but I think I understand. They have adopted a cognomen, which took me by surprise, one because it has the sound of something clandestine, serious, a thing with heft and glamour. But when you discover what it actually stands for there is a moment of dismay and…really?

Incels.

The incel rebellion is upon us.

Involuntarily Celibate.

Take a moment. Or two. This has emerged from something else with a label I had not heard before (because I don’t, apparently, pay attention to the people or places where I would hear such things), the Manosphere.

Involuntarily Celibate.

In other words, people who can’t seem to get laid.

And are convinced it’s not their fault.

They must all be 15 years old.

I am torn here between dismissive ridicule and being deeply serious. In another time, another age, no one would so publicly proclaim this condition, but since a way has been found to make it sound like a civil rights violation, it can now be a group identifier with significant political weight. Evidently so, since people are now dead because this guy doesn’t know how to deal with a personality problem.

There seems to be no middle ground on which to stand. Every adolescent who ever looked in a mirror has doubtless felt the despair of not being attractive. Most of us grow up and out of it and realize that it was just part of the learning curve of being human. Too many of us probably forget how awkward that whole part of our lives was. But some few no doubt never figure it out.

This is now a serious issue because it is being politicized, along with all the other aspects of what it means to live in the world, and in this instance it is based on a serious misapprehension of the entire question of sexual freedom.

After the Sexual Revolution, two notions seemed to become widespread that actually conflicted, although at the time it may have appeared to a lot of people that there was no contradiction. The first was that people now had the right to express themselves sexually and it was no ones damn business but your own. The other was largely, I think, a male reaction “Holy shit, now we’re gonna get laid more!” It didn’t occur to the latter that part of the personal ownership of one’s sex life meant saying No was now easier and a right. In the party that we witnessed that carried on through the Disco Era and started to stumble in the Age of AIDS, not a lot of attention got paid to the idea that women, especially women, could now pick and choose and say No without being castigated for it. (Men, it seemed to be assumed, didn’t know what to do with a right to say No. This is a stereotype, but one backed up by a LOT of circumstantial evidence.)

Fast forward to today when everyone is talking about Rape Culture and power arrangements and other aspects of civil rights and women’s health is threatened by political activists who clearly don’t like women having the ability to decide for themselves, and what do we have now? The same feckless arrested adolescents declaring their inability to get laid is because those people over there have oppressed us!

They apparently think it has to do with looks.

Let us put this out there now, clearly and succinctly. Sex is a gift. It is a wonderful gift people give to each other. You have a perfect right to have it when offered. What you do not have is a right to expect it and demand it. It only  counts if it is freely given and willingly indulged by all parties. You have a right to own your sexuality. You do not have a right to anyone else’s.  If you take it, it is not sex, it is rape. If you do not offer it and it is wrested from you, it is rape.  If you ask for it and are told no, move on. To do otherwise is to prove to all involved that you have no clue what this is all about.

To go out and run down a bunch of innocent people because you get turned down for sex is criminal narcissism. You aren’t being denied sex because you have been oppressed, you’re being denied sex because on some level you don’t know what it is. You’re throwing a tantrum, stamping you feet in petulance, and killing people because of a problem which is pretty much all yours.

Incels. My ghod, are you serious? Like they came to your house and clamped a girdle around you, like a chastity belt, and issued a restraining order to prevent you from having sex?

If women (and, possibly, but given the rhetoric I’ve seen, not likely, men) turn you down (and of course one has to wonder if that is actually happening or if conversation leading to a refusal ever actually occurs), it is not because you are ugly (what does that mean anyway?) or because they’re “castrating bitches” and you have a dick. It’s because you are a dick.

I don’t know what the cure is for that, but it’s not revolution.

But there is also the likelihood that many of these males (I refuse to call them Men, that has other connotations having to do with character which may be problematic in this instance) are not celibate so much as intolerant. They cannot stand the idea of being refused, as if women, in their view, simply have no right to turn them down.  They want slaves. They want to live on Gor. They can’t find women who will put up with their unexamined misogyny. (But of course there are plenty of males who are like this who have plenty of opportunity for what for them passes as sex, just not from wholly willing partners. Abuse has many faces.) There may well be males involved in this who have political litmus tests, or religious criteria, or—

Or have no fashion sense and zero conversation.

Sex, at the end of it all, is conversation. A dialogue (or more). If you don’t know how to talk to people…

Which is an adolescent problem.

Forgive me for going on about this, but I am genuinely annoyed. And stupefied. It is difficult to take it seriously, but it is a serious thing. Next we’ll be hearing from them that they think the world of A Handmaid’s Tale is a good idea, a utopia. They will completely miss that this is satire, dystopic, a warning, an altogether Bad Thing, and long for the instantiation of Gilead.

Boys, if you’re having trouble talking to girls, start with something easier—talk to a person. And then get it through your skull that women are persons. Until then, instead of wasting all this energy trying to get a political movement going in order to get laid, get some counseling.  And stop hurting people.

Grow up.

culture

Being Adult

I have been wrestling with all the recent allegations of sexual harassment and assault boiling up like magma from a caldera. The image is apt—volcanoes can appear sedate, dormant, unthreatening for decades or even centuries, and then, suddenly, boom! Like that volcano, it does not mean there was never a problem before, only that we grew comfortable with its failure to express itself and assumed everything was fine.

Well, some people did.

The problem I’ve had, I will admit, has been incredulity. Knowing there are men in the world who behave this way is not quite the same as learning that  those men and so many and for so long are like this, and it is a bit overwhelming.  And in some instances the temptation is great to make excuses. Circumstances, the times, “it was different back then”…  Personal heroes melt into their own clay and we’re left trying to reconcile the obvious and often real divide between what we perceive as the good done from the closed-door actions we are now learning about. How, we ask, can that person, who has done so much worthwhile work in the world, be someone who could do that to a woman?  And what does it say about the apparent good work?

What does it say about our judgment?

What, finally, do we do about something which seems as pervasive as air?  Is this something we just have to put up with if we want things to get done in the world?

Overwhelming.

And, of course, we have the bizarre situation of a president guilty of the same behaviors who at various times has bragged about it.

Through all this, as well, is the real fear that one of the solutions that might be proposed and gain ground is the segregation of the sexes.  Keep ’em apart.  Obviously men can’t be trusted and women will always be vulnerable, and by so thoroughly mixing them up in situations where perhaps they ought not to be together—work, politics, schools, etc—we have somehow invited this.

Anyone with half a brain will immediately see that as not only unworkable but as offensive as the behavior such a proposal would purport to protect women from.  Such a solution might be viable for five-year-olds, but it seems to me we live in a society that is already over-infantilized, especially in this area.

I grew up believing intrinsically that in matters of sex, women had the final say. Always. For me, forcing an issue was simply unthinkable. Nothing my parents ever said explicitly told me this, it was more a matter of…well, it was pervasive on a certain level. But my parents also offered the example of a man and woman who constantly respected each other and did nothing without the others consent. Furthermore, my father was not one of those who had some innate idea of “women’s work” that rendered him unwilling or incapable of doing anything in the house that needed doing. I saw no such gendered division of labor growing up in my home. Along with the movies and television I saw at the time, I came of age with an idea of women as…

I had no idea at the time. Certainly, upon entering adolescence, they became alien to me.  This was also reinforced by many of the same givens that had shaped everything else. I had no idea, by age thirteen, how to talk to girls.  This was aided by my grade school, which was parochial, and had, in retrospect, the unusual physical situation of two entirely separate playgrounds for the boys and the girls, separated by the very building. By seventh and eighth grade, a transgressive air attached to the boys sneaking to the other side and talking to Them through the chain-link fence that kept them isolated from us.

Then, too, was the whole hormonal thing and all the boys felt it keenly, this quite obvious transformation we had no idea how handle. The girls, of course, seemed to us to have it all in hand. They were very self-assured in their emerging sexuality and we guys, feckless and inarticulate as we were, could only watch and try to find a way to be cool while restraining a drool reflex.

Then high school, where dating really became a thing, and at which I was very bad.  And of course it was another way of rating people—who went out with whom, how “well” you did, and so forth. Without much being stated bluntly, it became clear that those who did poorly at this ritual were somehow defective.

And for no discernible reason.

We do not, in this culture, have anything like formal adulthood rites. No one takes us in hand to teach us what we need to know. We expect parents to do this, but there is nothing universal, nothing agreed upon, and in too many instances parents choose to punt. Leaving us all to figure it out from the clues which, in some instances, are the equivalent of reading tea leaves.

(This is evermore difficult for anyone not traditionally cisgendered, who likely grows up being flatly told that their essential self is “wrong” or “obscene” or “broken” and the tea leaves get tangled with weeds.)

That so many of us come out as well as we do is a tribute to those elements of our culture that do serve and to our own sense of being.

It seems to me that we still inhabit a euphemistically-driven culture. One must “read the signs” regarding things no one is willing to state baldly. Most of us, I hope, have outgrown this, but when you look at some of the dialogues in play about rape that center on how a woman was dressed instead of on the brutality of her attacker, you have to wonder how much past this we are.  “Dress” is treated as a sign—not perhaps by the rapist but by the people who can’t quite accommodate the ugly dynamics of it who seek to find  reason to blame the victim.

(This is not something isolated to sex—during the height of the Sixties, with regards to riots, one heard it all the time that “if those people had been home where they belonged, the police wouldn’t have had to bash their heads in.”  On campuses, “they should have been in their dorms studying instead of where they were.”  And of course the whole issue of dress attended as well.  But it is most egregious when it comes to our treatment of women who have been abused.  We seem, collectively, unwilling to simply say that none of that is important.  Well, some of us have that problem.)

I confess that I tried to find some way to intellectualize these behaviors by blaming the culture of Code Speak. Mixed signals, yes-no-maybe, and so forth.

No.  This will not suffice.

I am perfectly willing to lay the blame on the perpetrators, even if I might be able to find reasons for their behaviors.  But basically they are simply not adults.

A thirty-year-old man who consistently hits on teenage girls has an inability to deal with other adults.

A man who threatens a woman with her job in order to elicit sex from her is because he is a child with too much power incapable of dealing with others as equals.

A man who makes suggestive remarks to a coworker on the off-chance that she might take him up on it has no concept of appropriateness or confidence in his ability to interact as an adult.

I would go so far as to suggest that men like this really don’t treat other men well, either, but it comes out far less because the rules of male interaction are  bit more ritualized and, really, the sexual component in many instances is less present.  But if push comes to shove, these abusers have no regard for their male colleagues, either. An office full of such nascent sociopaths and arrested adolescents would be pure hell for anyone not a member of their “club.”

I could describe examples—a boss who thought it was outrageously funny to take his shirt off, fill his hand with soft-soap, and appear to the woman working that day with the declaration “See what you made me do?” A coworker who told me that he once thought his wife was cheating on him and was relieved to find out she wasn’t because otherwise he would have had to kill her, but then later when preparing for an out-of-town business trip with our employer gleefully anticipated “getting a little” when he was there.  An earnest talk by an older acquaintance about how you couldn’t let women turn you down, that this was degrading not only to you but to men in general, and really,”they want it just as bad but they need an excuse”—but if you think about it you have heard this and seen it often.

Women have been complaining about Man Childs for decades. They define separate spheres of appropriate work, but fall down on maintaining even their own.  The deficit in equal work. The petulance exhibited when they can’t play.  It rests on a continuum.

All of this, though, comes down to a mindset that will not accept even the possibility of being told No.  The circumstances, the power differentials, the absurdity of some of the behavior, all of it might be avoided by a simple practice of dealing openly with each other in situations where both parties are free of ancillary obligations and can walk away. “No, thank you.”  But for certain people, that no is intolerable.  So they use blackmail, threat, physical force.  Euphemism.  Turn it into a joke.  Anything but be an adult who knows how to accept being turned down.

Because, of course, this isn’t about relationships—it’s about power. Again.

And I have to say, if you are willing to subvert the autonomy of an individual for your personal gratification, you have no business leading others in any capacity.  I don’t care if you’re a CEO, a senator, the director of a movie or a nonprofit, or the president.  After due consideration, if you can’t see other people as people, then…well, I’m afraid I have to tell you no.

Try to be an adult about it when you lose your position.  I know.  That’s hard.  Probably everything you’ve done to get to your position has been so you didn’t have to be an adult.

Oh well.

 

Absurdity

How Doctor Who’s Sex Change Explains Everything

Heavy sigh.

Seriously? People are getting exercised over this? I suppose these will be some of the same people who will come out in angry revilement if the next James Bond really is a black man.

There’s a certain space wherein this kind of angst is perfectly acceptable.  Private conversations with people who share the same interests and have Opinions about the condition of a favorite bit of entertainment and how it would be if certain changes were made.  Three or four of you get together over beers (or floats, depending) and pizza and spend an hour or two reconstructing the whole æsthetic as you would have it.  This is good, healthy use of imagination and the application of ratiocination over something that is fun and has no real impact on anything else. The relative merits of various incarnations of the Doctor (or Bond) is a legitimate question within the confines of a small subject relating to art and storytelling and critical appreciation.  Same kinds of questions apply when a reboot of an old film or tv show is in the works or when a dead author’s work is licensed out for new books.  We flex our gray cells and participate in a way in the creative process.  We can draw lessons from such interactions.

But when someone, like a John C. Wright, weighs in to tell us how this is all part of the feminization of civilization at the expense of masculine role models and that civilization itself is at risk because after 12 incarnations of a fictional character who is also an alien being several centuries old the people in charge decided to give a female version a try, and a cadre of spoiled, semi-privileged misanthropes go on a tantrum in agreement, condemning the change and anyone who might like it to the nether regions of Hell…

Get a life.

If you don’t like it, you don’t have to watch it.  You can go back and rewatch the umpteen seasons already available (you will anyway, probably). You have several options here.  You can even discuss—discuss, as in have conversation, engage discourse, exchange opinions—the merits of it among yourselves or others. What you don’t get to do is tell other people how they’re about to bring on the end of the universe because they like something you don’t.

Really, that’s going just a bit far, don’t you think?

This is the flip side of insisting that everyone must have an opinion about something, even if it’s something of zero interest to them.

We’re talking about art now.

The fact is, there’s room for all opinions, as long as we remember they are just that—opinions.

This is one of the places wherein we learn to play nice with people who disagree with us.

But a lot of people don’t know how to do that anymore.  Maybe they never did.  But they also never had access to such incredible amplification systems before.

At it’s base, though, this is what a certain kind of privilege looks like.  It’s taking a position that what I believe is the absolute Norm and anything that deviates from it is unacceptable.  We can’t have a female Doctor Who because it runs counter to the way I want the universe to work, and what is it with these girls anyway, trying to shove their way into something they don’t fit? They have perfectly good heroes of their own that are just as good as mine, so they should leave mine alone!

Sound familiar?  If it doesn’t, that may be symptomatic of the problem.

We see this time and again when a group previously thrown a bone by society asks for more respect and society, or the arbiters thereof, look at them like they’re being selfish and demanding something undeserved.  In reality, the most vocal opponents have been skirting by on the earned privilege of others for ages, and when according something like equality to a group that has never had it before is presented to them they realize, in their bones, that they just might not be able to compete on a level playing field and everything must be done to convince the world that everything as it has been is meant to be.  Because, damn, what if that group turns out to be better than us?

Well, tough. The fact is, fanboy, sitting there on your couch feeling one with the Superbowl Star because you bought the jersey and cheer the team and you are, somehow, the same as that quarterback because you both have testicles, you can’t compete with the standard model you already feel you own.  You don’t get to claim superiority because someone else can do all that shit that presumably only males can do.

Or white people.

This is instructive, really.  The response to the change came before the first episode aired.  Among those screeling anthrophobes so unhinged at the idea that the Doctor no longer has a penis (if “he” ever did, which is an interesting question in itself from a purely science-fictional standpoint, since the Doctor is Gallifreyan and may well have a completely different sexual arrangement) and now has, gasp, a vagina (again a presumption), it is not so much that they ever identified with the Doctor but that, on some level, they possessed identity because of the Doctor.

Here’s where I start to have problems with this whole process. Are you drawing inspiration from the idea of the role model—brains, ability, character traits—or are you hitching a ride on all that by hitching your ego to the one thing you don’t have to do anything to achieve to be “like” the role model?  To say “I want to be like that character” is to make a commitment, however small or temporary, to doing some work toward.  To say “I am like that character” because you happen to share certain physical similarities is to borrow a sense of self-worth that you haven’t earned.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with that as long as you keep it in perspective.  As long as you know that, really, you aren’t anything like that character but might occasionally pretend to be, in your own head, your dreams, or in a bit of cosplay, and you only pay homage because you think that character is cool.  Some of the cool might rub off.  But that fact is these things change.

How important is it that what may be the least important aspect of a character remain constant and unchangeable just so your shortcomings stay neatly hidden away behind an act of mental pretense?

None of this would rise to a level requiring a response had it not become evident that as role model, The Doctor has failed for these poor, disheartened misogynists.  Failed in that the essential message of the Doctor didn’t get through, didn’t translate, didn’t manifest.  The whole point of the regeneration, aside from need to explain all the new actors, is that what you are on the inside matters infinitely more than the plumbing. And no gender has exclusive rights to the interior. The Doctor moves from one incarnation to the next, changing, becoming different, yet always bringing along the most important things, which have nothing to do with anatomy.  In that way, inadvertently or not, the Doctor has been a role model for people, not boys.

Discussing narrative consistency, the needs of logical drama, the pros and cons of story and character arc choices, all that is one thing, and legitimate.  But that’s to do with the interior, because you already have a character who transforms from one person into another as an essential element of the interior.  Having already established that and had it accepted as part of the way this thing works, to go off on a tear when the transformation doesn’t conform to your limits is small-minded and disingenuous, especially when you couch your complaints in some variation of requiring a role model for gender identity when that was never an essential aspect of the character in the first place, mainly because it’s an alien.

In other words, the shock is all about you, not the character.  Quite possibly there’s always been an attendant fantasy about the Doctor getting it on with the Companions, which now becomes incommensurable with certain neuroses when it might be a female Doctor taking her pick of male companions—or, for the sake of consistency, still doing so with the females.  That opens a whole other door of unmanageable unfathomables, I suppose.  What, the Doctor not only a woman but a lesbian?  Or just bi?

But according to canon, the Doctor never did do that, and we have the fey thread with River Song to even suggest a sexual attachment, and she wasn’t a Companion, and—

Rabbit holes can be fun, certainly, but be careful that they don’t start in your own fundament.

Civilization will not end.  The Doctor will survive.  As for role models, the Doctor has been serving as one for People since the beginning.  This will be just more of the same.

And that is about all I have to say about that.

I’ve got some timey-whimey shit to think about now.

(Oh, the title?  How does all this explain everything?  Well, think about it.  Taking issue with things just to have a snit because you’re uncomfortable…well, look around.)

culture

What Grabs You

So The Donald was caught on tape saying something egregious about what he wants to do with women.  This has caused much ire among those in his party of choice.  Not most of the other egregious things he has said, alleged, alluded to, implied, or otherwise allowed to exit from his mouth.  We have witnessed basically a year-long example of escalating reaction not to the content of his pronouncements but to the manner of their expression.

Paul Ryan has weighed in with an egregious bit of condescension of his own which adds to the evidence that he is a “classic” conservative who seems not to Get It.

As bookends showcasing the problem they could not be more apt.

The basic privilege the self-appointed “ruling class” has always tried to keep to itself is just this—that they are allowed, by virtue of their own money and power, to treat those not in the club any way they choose.  The whole idea of equality and respect is anathema to one of the main reasons they act and think as they do.  Trump is spilling the secrets of the inner sanctum by speaking the way he does.  He is being supported by people who have long chafed under the requirements to matriculate from the high school locker room.

So why is what Ryan said just more of the same?

Mr. Ryan said:  “Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified.”

Now, on its face you might see nothing wrong with that statement.  But remember, this is coming from a man who has consistently opposed women’s right to self-determination where it conflicted with his conception of morality.  (To be clear, he never actually said “rape is just another vector of conception.”  But he made it clear that he has a moral and ethical framework which would demote women’s ability to determine life choices to secondary status in the case of unwanted pregnancy)

This suggests that he sees women as having a role to fill.  A role which under certain circumstances supersedes their position as individuals.

Women are to be championed and revered…

Why?  Because they can’t champion themselves? And how do you revere something without putting it in a special category? Reverence is akin to a religious appreciation.  We can revere life but it becomes trickier to revere an individual without bringing to bear expectations that merit such reverence.  The first—life—is a concept not a person.  It’s easy to revere ideas, beliefs, works of art.  These are not people, they are categories of object.  People are revered only when they are removed from the daily grime of actual living. Saints are never made so until they are dead and for good reason.  A person cannot—nor should—fulfill the expectations of such status.  And it is not a status one seeks but one that is imposed.

Women are not objects of reverence.  He contradicts himself in the next phrase, “not objectified.”

This is the problem at the center of this whole issue, which is difficult to parse for some folks.

And the reason that what Ryan is saying is not much better than what Trump says.  Only different.

Trump is saying out loud what has been implicit in a certain mindset among self-styled “conservatives” for a long time.  They want their privilege.  They want things made available to them and denied to the general public, because these things constitute the trappings of power.

Not all of them pushing this program.  Some, I suspect, are just neurotic and insecure.  Trump is neither.  Ryan is just shallow.  But the arrogance of a Trump has found a home in the shallow waters of what has become conservative philosophy.

Other Republicans, in response to Trump’s comments, have opted for the word respect, but given the repeated, consistent assault on women’s health care options, the concerted opposition to equal rights legislation, the open misogyny toward female politicians, and the general inability to understand the driving essence of the women’s movement for, well, forever, these pronouncements carry little weight outside the fact that they fear for their privilege because a loudmouth is talking out of school.  They want to impose a style of respect on women that will push the real issues back into the box wherein they’ve been residing all along.  These same people have had many gracious and pleasant and approving things to say about the late Phyllis Schlafly and given her quite unvarnished statements about what she thinks women (of a certain class, of course) ought to do rather than try to live lives of personal fulfillment, I take their repudiation of Trump for what it is—an attempt to put the lid back on that box.  From time to time many of them have said things about women that demonstrate a vast disconnect—lack of understanding and lack of empathy and a total disregard for women as people.

They like women to be objects of reverence.  Why can’t they just climb back up on that pedestal where they “belong” and smile?

I don’t want to beat up too much on them, because I also believe that they believe they’re speaking from conscience.  I just wish they had taken the trouble to examine that conscience a few decades ago, before they laid the groundwork for someone like Trump, who has yet to say one thing that has not been part of the conservative playbook since Goldwater displaced liberal Republicans and started us on this road in 1964.  They only say these things in well-turned, polite, and convoluted ways so the average person won’t understand that they basically want to turn this country into a “gentlemen’s club” where they can get what they want without having to respect those who are expected to provide them their services.

 

culture

The Iconography of the Myopic

I debated whether or not to say anything about Phyllis Schlalfy’s passing. I have never held her in high regard and certainly anyone who has paid the slightest attention to my writings over the past three decades should know where I stand on the issues on which she and I disagreed. Violently disagreed at times.

But as her death follows upon the heels of the canonization of Mother Theresa, I find a certain symmetry which prompts comment.

These two women shared one attribute in common that has come to define them for the ages: an obdurate dedication to a special kind of ignorance. They have become icons for people who prefer their views of how the world should be and see them as in some ways martyrs to the cause of defending beliefs that require the most tortured of logics to maintain as viable.

Both apparently took as models their own examples as standards and arguments against those they opposed. Schlafly never (she claimed) understood the feminist argument about the oppression of the patriarchy and Bojaxhiu never understood the utility of situational beneficence.  Consequently both could proceed with programmatic movements that blocked progress and flew in the face of realities neither could accept as valid.

Schlafly was instrumental in blocking the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. Her rhetoric before and after was stridently right wing, as if the very notion of women wanting opportunities as human beings was somehow a threat to civilization.  She herself apparently never suffered resistance to anything she wanted to do.  She essentially told women less privileged than herself to be satisfied with their stations in life and give up ambitions of being more than wives and mothers, even as she lived a life that was anything but an acceptance of such limitations.  Her inability—or refusal—to come to terms with the fact that human beings deserve to be treated by each other as individuals cost her, but she has never once publicly acknowledged that she might be wrong.

Bojaxhiu set up shop in one of the poorest areas in the world to, ostensibly, minister to those poor.  Normally we hear that and believe some form of relief of suffering is involved, but apparently not.  She elevated the suffering of the dying to some form of divine gift, gave them aspirin, and prayed while they died in misery. It wasn’t lack of money, either. Her order has received many millions—which she used to open convents and wage a campaign in opposition to the one thing that might make a difference in those poor districts she held in such high esteem: birth control.  Of all the things she might have chosen to name as the most significant enemy of our times, providing women, especially poor women, the means to control their fertility, reduce family size so what resources they had might go further and do more, is a perverse choice. Catholic, yes, but it’s not like other Catholics haven’t seen reality for what it is and did something—anything—that might constructively alleviate suffering.  From the evidence, all she did was put a noble gloss on it and exacerbate it.

It could be argued that both were “of their times” and therefore exception should be made before too harshly assessing their legacies, but I don’t accept that.  In Schlafly’s case, she was educated, moved among the best minds when she wanted to, had more than ample opportunity to understand what she was doing.  It didn’t matter.  She had picked a side and stuck with it, reality be damned.  In Bojaxhiu’s case, the daily exposure to those she supposedly ministered to should have served to snap her out of whatever quasi-Freudian obsession she had with sex and start acting like a human being.  (Unless you wish to argue that she was indeed “out of her time” and would have been right at home in the Middle Ages as a flagellant.) She was not stupid, she was the head of an international organization.  She put on the sackcloth of the humble village girl with simple values, but she was anything but.

That the Church has canonized her is no surprise.  In Dante’s Paradiso we meet many saints and upon reading about them and their character we begin to wonder why these people are where they are.  Dante makes the case—among others—that the price of admission to this paradise is a lifetime of obsessive devotion to a view of divine truth that is essentially selfless.  In other words, in the consequences of their lives, the Paradisiacs are not much different than the Infernals, other than they are selfless rather than selfish.  Both share a conviction that their view of the world is right, but for very different reasons.

Of course, Dante’s Paradise is not really a place anyone rational would care to spend eternity.

That Schlafly has devoted followers is also no surprise.  One of the curious similarities between her and the so-called “New Woman” of the post-liberation era is the image of someone who does it all.  Wife, mother, lawyer, political organizer, mover, shaker. Whatever roadblocks might have been thrown in her way, she went around, over, or through them.  If she could do it, by gum, so can anyone, and we don’t need no damn ERA to do it!

Except for the privilege. No, she wasn’t born to money. But she got the advantages of a college education at a time women weren’t going to college much.  She also married money.  Draw your own conclusions, but without that her later ability to do all the things she chose to do would have been absurdly more difficult.  However, she has the background to appeal to the self-made, the education to talk constitutional law with the best, and the security to assert herself in ways women traditionally do not. However you want to spin it, she was privileged.

Both women offered ideologies that overlooked or flatly denied certain inconvenient realities.  But they had their lives, their callings, their successes.  What is this reality that makes any kind of claim on the conscience of the visionary that either was obliged to respect?

Absurdity

Power Hypocrisy

My father worked with a man once who made a big deal out his religious conviction regarding abortion and birth control, roundly condemning both. He based this on his self-professed Catholicism.  It evidently got to the point where weekly there would be a virtual sermon at lunch time on the evils of promiscuity and the horror of contraception.  Finally, my father had had enough.

“How long have you been married, Bill?” my dad asked.

“Fourteen years,” the man responded proudly.

“How many kids do you have?”

“Three.”

“Three? Where are the other eleven?”

The point was made—publicly, in front of several co-workers—and the sermons ended.

Had anyone suggested to this man that the state should have a right to knock on his door, request records of his sexual activity, and then, warrant in hand, search his house for condoms, and upon finding them indict him for wanton disregard for life, he would have been horrified.  More than that, he would not have taken it seriously.  And yet when pronouncing on the should-haves and oughts of other peoples’ private lives, it never occurred to him that what he prescribed would necessarily include him along with some unintended consequences.

It’s never about the person doing the condemning, it’s always about Other People.  There is evidence showing that a goodly percentage of the women dutifully picketing abortion providers end up in those clinics, availing themselves of the very option they then resume trying to deny every other woman.  The mirror fails to show them the nature of their hypocrisy.  They prefer to be seen railing against something they feel is evil rather than sit down and do the hard work of looking inside and understanding that this thing has nothing to do with them—and everything to do with them.

Among people who often stridently take the position that None Of Your Damn Business is the unwritten law of personal liberty in this country, it is amazing how many of them assume this—and this alone, really—is very much their damn business, when of all the things that might be this one surely isn’t.

We’re seeing a spate of anti-choice legislation in states across the country right now.  Judging by the reaction to large numbers of Americans, these are not as popular as the legislators apparently assume they are, and will cost them.  It makes no sense really…

Unless they are actually thinking longterm and assume that it will be harder for their replacements to repeal these laws because they won’t want to appear unchristian or immoral or, gawd forbid, Progressive.  The same with the so-called religious liberty bills passing in the South.  These are traps, perhaps, cudgels in waiting to beat up on any politician with the temerity to suggest they be repealed.  If so, I think the legislators passing these monstrosities are even dumber than they seem to be.

But it’s all about appearances, isn’t it?  Things don’t get done because people are afraid to look a certain way.  In the film Kinsey about the sex taxonomist Alfred Kinsey there is a scene where Kinsey, desperate for funding, is appealing to a millionaire for support.  The millionaire is clearly in his sixties, maybe seventies, and has at his side a young wife, at most in her early thirties.  This aged and privileged sybarite refuses Kinsey’s plea because “If I do that, people will think I support sex.”

A beat. Look at the young bride. Another beat. Look at the ridiculous man afraid of what people might think. Wait another beat. Realize that “people” really would react that way, even while pursuing sex with all the ardor nature has given them, and denying that they approve the act for anyone else.

But really, it’s None Of Anyone Else’s Damn Business and it’s about time we stopped all the posing and posturing about this. Before those ominous men with warrants start showing up at your house looking for those other eleven kids.