The big issue is supposed to be that women are attractive to men, which means there are only two possible alternatives. Women have to be kept in a box (or tent, according to taste) so the poor men aren’t driven to distraction, or women can be distracting and men have to deal with it.

Some man with a very limited little mind came up with that. Those are not our only choices. They don’t begin to cover the spectrum of possibilities. Half of humanity, for instance, is not driven to distraction by women, whether boxed or not. For women, there are issues of being pleased as well as pleasing, and that doesn’t even seem to be on the map for the limited little man.

And then, how about another whole range of choices? Imagine a world where everyone had a good sex life. A world where men didn’t have to come howling out of the woodwork whenever anyone made a noise like a vagina. One where women could express an interest in sex without being trampled. There’d be dozsens of choices then, not just two invented by some guy starving in a basement.

What brought on this rant was an article about the new, sexy music videos appearing in the Arab world.

Habib recalls how one of her early videos helped shoot her to superstardom.

“The video Akhasmak Ah was basically shot in a cafe in Beirut, and the woman was seen as a power figure in the video.

“She was dancing on the table and it was a room full of men and the men were just at her feet. And she was just commanding them. So in some ways it was seen as showing a woman as an object and in other ways it was seen as a woman being empowered.”

Many of the music clips – like those in the West – are selling sex in a way that is new to the Middle East.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I hardly know where to start, the whole world view is so pathetic. (If only it were limited to Arabs, but the BBC reporter himself obviously thinks in those terms too.)

Let’s just start with the whole sex-as-control aspect. Sex can’t be a tool of control if you want it. Then you’d have nothing to withhold and nothing to bargain with. So the first step is to be so out of touch with yourself, so unaware of your own desires, so castrated that you can dole out sex as currency. That is not empowerment. That’s being so thoroughly crippled, your only jollies are hitting people with your crutches.

Depriving a woman of her own life until she’s nothing but a figment of somebody else’s imagination is not empowerment. Not even when she’s given the means to be a disturbing figment. Wearing lipstick is not liberation. She’s still living in somebody else’s world, even if she gets to do it in technicolor.

Empowerment is having your own life. It’s having enough control to be able to choose which life you want. It’s having enough control over your own fate to be able to get what you want sometimes, too.

Everything about the report, and the world view it echoes, rests on the same ignorance about empowerment, and, for that matter, sex. Take the comment about “selling sex.” It’s not sex that’s being sold, but only women’s sex. The implication being the same old myth: only men want sex, women don’t want it and all they do is use it.

Or, take the following statement.

Many Arab women say they find the videos demeaning.

The discussion has been about “sex,” not about sexless (although of course sexy) women. So the quote implies women find sex demeaning. Nobody wants humiliation (except perhaps sadomasochists who’ve bought into the idea that sex equals it). Hence, again, over and over, the message is the same. Women don’t want sex.

Outside the world of sex-deprived men, though, it doesn’t take much to see how asinine the videos are. It doesn’t take a spiritual giant to know that a body slave is not really a step up from a maid of all work. All it takes is any sense of self. Women who see where the videos put them are closer to empowerment than reporters who sound like they have no idea what the problem might be.

The really sad thing is that this pathetic ignorance is far from harmless. It’s worse than not liberating. It is the opposite. It takes everyone further and further away from ever being free of it.

The truth (which on good authority is said to set us free) is that women spend at least as much time as men thinking about sex. Sometimes it seems like they think about it even more. If you’re female, you have no trouble remembering examples. (If you’re male, probably not so much. See “trampling,” above, if you wonder why.)

It’s true that at this point women don’t always dream of exactly the same sort of satisfactions as men, for the simple reason that men have succeeded in making sex either frustrating or even unpleasant for so many women. But it’s not nature that made things that way. Any time we want to stop living inside narrow fantasies, there’s a whole world of other choices out there.

Left to themselves, women are crazy about men. Left to themselves, women are crazy about sex. If they didn’t have to fear frustration or worse, they’d be having a lot more sex, not less. As a result, men would be having a lot more sex too, if they stopped trying to have all of it.

*(Written from a straight perspective. As they say: write what you know.)

Technorati tags: politics, gender, sex, relationships, liberation

It is astonishing to me that people of good will find anything to argue about in the statement that hate speech is not on.

Hello?

Kathy Sierra received death threats and had her address published all over the net. In what sense, exactly, is free speech served by protecting that behavior? There’s Sierra’s speech, which has been shouted down, and a bunch of useless yapping that did the shouting. The argument seems to be about how limits on really bad yapping can avoid infringing on yapping.

Even that last issue is not difficult. There is no valid point of view that requires the expression of personal threats against other people. It’s that simple. It’s also illegal. It’s called hate speech. It’s not free for a very good reason. It needs to be enforced, by the police and by all of us on our individual blogs. It needs to be enforced when it’s misogynist just as much as it does when racist, anti-semitic, or homobigoted. Sometimes it seems that these days the point is debatable only when misogyny is in question.

So, let’s make a start, here in blogland, by rejecting all forms of threats against people. Yes, that includes completely harmless crude threats hurled between commenters in the livelier blogs. Throw them out. I don’t know anyone who would miss them, except the commenters themselves, and they’ll just have to deal with it like men, even if they are highschoolers (whatever their gender). Shutting them up is the price of hearing voices with something to say, voices like Sierra’s.

Would that rule get rid of offensiveness on the web? No, not by a long shot. Bigotry isn’t excluded by that rule. Only bigotry directed specifically at individuals. You have to start somewhere.

And you have to stop somewhere. I’m not sure where, after hate speech is excluded, the line should be drawn. Bigotry expressed as an incitement to riot is already illegal, and should be. But I don’t see how one could make the expression of just plain honest bigotry, so to speak, illegal without at the same time destroying free speech itself.

The test has to be whether harm is threatened against specific people. If not, just turn it off and go pay attention to something else if you’re offended by the sentiments expressed. (Violent porn is an interesting hybrid area here. I would argue that since it does advocate harm against specific people, for entertainment no less, it falls squarely into the hate speech category.)

It gets murkier when one gets deeper into O’Reilly’s and Scoble’s Blogger Code of Conduct. (Intelligently, the Code is up for comment as of this writing, so make suggestions for improvement there.) They would like to excise “misrepresentation.” I agree. I’d like to excise it too. /*Falls into beautiful dream: no more Rush Limbaugh, no more Malkin, no more Coulter, no more Shrub . . . wakes up with a shock.*/ Anyway, yes, it would be nice. No, there is no way to do that short of including critical thinking in everyone’s education and making sure that everyone is educated.

O’Reilly & Co. are confusing the desirable with the essential, possibly because the worst aspects of this aren’t their problem. Women are exposed to 25 times the hate speech online that men are. Twenty five times. 2500% more. Yet, when it comes time to formulate a code of conduct, the names I see on the masthead are “Tim,” “Richard,” “David,” and so on. They adopted the outlines of the code from BlogHer, but then for some reason took the ball and ran with it. Possibly, it would have been easier to keep the priorities organized and to identify the worst abuses if the people who suffer the majority of them had been at the center of the project.

Whenever any limits are proposed on free speech, the shout against censorship goes up. The idea is that any censorship will lead to the end of free speech. This is obvious nonsense, as a simple thought experiment can show. If you’re in a room full of people, all shouting as loud as they can, does anyone have the freedom to speak?

Freedom of speech necessarily includes the freedom to be heard. (I’ve carried on about this before.) That’s why apartheid-era South Africa’s banning laws were a suppression of free speech. Talking to yourself in a room by yourself is meaningless. But an excess of noise works just as well as isolation to drown a message. The great danger to free speech now is not silence. The danger is that by not censoring noise, we’re going to lose the signal that freedom of speech was intended to preserve.

Deleting and silencing threats against people is not censorship. It is the essential volume knob that allows free speech to be heard.

Technorati tags: free speech, Code of Conduct, BlogHer, blogging, hate speech, trolls, censorship

Jesus General has another one of his brilliant posts, all about the current Administration’s “promotion of ‘manly virtues,’ almost all of which are related to a willingness to engage in violence and humiliation towards others.”

Funny. That had never occurred to me as a definition of manliness, but now that JG mentions it, I have to agree that’s indeed the definition oozing out of the White House.

Biologically speaking (that’s what you come to this blog for, right?) male violence has a role. Pregnancy and nursing, necessarily done entirely by females, raise the caloric and nutritional requirements of a 120 lb woman right up to that of a very active 180 lb man. If that woman also expended energy fighting and healing from wounds, there’d be no way she could survive unless she got all her meals at a nutrition-enhanced Macdonalds. For most of human history, there have been no Macdonalds.

So, having the men be first in line to deal with the world’s violence, in order to protect the group and the group’s children has enormous survival value. That’s why every human group that’s survived long enough to leave a record does it that way. From the group’s perspective, the manly virtues are protectiveness and self-sacrifice. (This isn’t to say that females don’t fight. They do when the threat is close enough. It’s just that they don’t generally put themselves first in line to take casualties.)

Protectiveness and self-sacrifice are a bit different from violence and humiliation. The opposite, in fact. And generalized male violence that includes the group has the opposite of survival value. It’s sociopathic.

I’m not sure why I’m surprised that a bunch of sociopathic chickenhawk kleptocrats would have as little understanding of manliness as they do of sex. These are, after all, cockroaches in suits. I just keep getting fooled by those humanoid outfits they wear.

Technorati tags: current affairs, chickenhawks, manliness, politics

I think I’ll step into a hornets’ nest. I think we need to get a couple of things clear regarding feelings about homosexuality.

The debate flared up again recently because Perfect Peter (aka General Peter Pace) said it was immoral. (The substance of that statement is hardly worth addressing. We’ve been floating along, letting immorality be defined as whatever anyone says it is, and now we have wingnuts calling a vaccine against a lethal disease “immoral.” So, just to define my own terms, immoral actions hurt someone, carelessly or on purpose, for no reason that the sufferer wants. Surgery is not immoral. Torture is. Since homosexuality hurts nobody, always assuming it’s taking place between consenting equals, it’s obviously not immoral.)

The reaction of the tolerance crowd (which, I hope, includes me) to statements like Pace’s is to bring accusations of bigotry. So far, so good. It is bigotry. But then there’s also the objection to expressing any dislike of homosexuality. That, I think, is where we go off the rails.

It is counterproductive to tell people how to feel. There is no point telling someone that their feelings about God don’t exist (as Dawkins is trying to do), or that it’s stupid to admire celebrities, or that they don’t actually like the taste of coffee but they’ve learned the habit. The only result of trying to tell people how they feel is a yes-no shouting match. Unless you’re telepathic, it is impossible to know another person’s feelings directly. Only the person involved has direct knowledge, and anyone else does not, and therefore has no business making pronouncements on something that they cannot know.

So there is no point telling people that they shouldn’t be put off by homosexuality. They are. Instead of denying how they feel about it, I think it would be much more helpful if they had the right context for those feelings.

Now, admittedly, a large segment of homobigots are simply anti-sex or else, when male, seem to have some kind of insecurity about masculinity. (I always feel, as a biologist, I should tell those guys that the various bits are firmly attached and won’t fall off if they don’t drive a truck.) I’m not talking about those attitudes here, since they go way beyond being put off.

Among the people who are put off, without a lot of added baggage, they assume that feeling is based on the wrongness of homosexuality. Since there is nothing actually wrong with it–and the more honest among them will admit that if pressed–what are they feeling?

I think we’re up against some very simple biology.

Look at our attitudes toward biological functions in general, not just sex. We all like to eat. We all get revolted at watching somebody else chew with their mouth open. We don’t feel bad taking care of personal hygiene issues, but we get very huffy if someone else doesn’t do that in private. There really isn’t any biological function you can visibly perform, except breathing, without causing comment. Breathing is probably exempt only because it’s invisible.

What I’m saying is that it’s in the nature of biological functions to gross us out unless we happen to be doing them ourselves. The more familiar we are with these functions, the less we freak out about them. New parents have more initial reserve, shall we say, about dealing with diapers than experienced ones.

Attitudes to sex follow the same pattern. Doing sex is great. Unexpectedly having to watch somebody else do sex is liable to get the couple involved arrested. It’s the same pattern: watching somebody else performing biological functions we’re not involved in tends to lead to avert-your-eyes situations.

Add to that the fact that homosexuality is less familiar to most straight people than heterosexuality, and there’s a double dose of feeling put off.

That’s all very well and good, you’re probably saying, but the problem isn’t gay people rolling around in the town square, doing their thing. The problem is that others don’t want them to do their thing anywhere.

Indeed. And I think that’s because talk of gay sex makes people think about gay sex, and that grosses them out. Then they leap to the conclusion that, of course, the disgust is based on the awful immorality of the situation.

No, the disgust is based on the same feelings we have about lots of other biology. It has exactly NOTHING to do with morality.

If that distinction could be more widely appreciated, people might realize that even though they’re put off that doesn’t mean they have to do anything about it. All they have to do is keep out of it. It’s not immoral and it requires no action except minding your own business.

I think the people who would like to see more tolerance don’t help matters by insisting that there’s no place for disgust. We conflate disgust and morality as much as the bigots, only in the other direction. We’d all be a lot further ahead if we provided context instead of denial.

We shouldn’t deny the revulsion that some people feel. They just need to understand what the revulsion means. It doesn’t mean any more than the same feeling about lots of other biological things. Thinking about people having sex, if you’re not attracted to them, is always vaguely, or even hugely, off-putting. (I mean, just think about your parents . . . no, don’t think about it. But it would be very unwise to start agitating against parents having sex, just because the thought was so gross.)

So let’s stop attacking people for feeling disgusted. I once saw a guy in a gay pride parade carrying a sign that read, “I don’t understand your sexuality either.” Where he’s a step ahead is that he knows that doesn’t mean he has to race out and do something about it. There are lots of people, straight people, whose sexuality I’d rather not think about. That’s okay. They can do their thing and I can do mine.

And that is the big take-home message: Biology is not morality. Feelings about biology are not morality. Morality is morality. And everything else is nobody’s business but your own.

Technorati tags: homosexuality, morality, Pace, Peter Pace, immorality

The BBC has a series of short reports from Iraqi refugees about their lives in exile and, sometimes, the events that precipitated their flight. Heartbreaking, every single one. This one about a woman named Fatima is just one example of the insanity.

It doesn’t seem like a lot to ask.

I have to add my two cents’ worth. I can’t help myself. It’d take a much stronger person than me to resist something so giggle-worthy.

The big news is:

Newsflash, guys: it’s not length that matters. It’s width.

I mean, use your head. (No, not that one. The other one. The one with an actual brain in it.) All length does is enable the penis to reach the cervix of the uterus, which lies at the end of the vagina. The cervix has the same level of sensation as an internal organ. Pushing on the cervix is a lot like palpating the liver: it’s not that you can’t feel it, but it’s just pressure and not terribly interesting. A short penis might not reach as far as the cervix, but who cares? Only guys involved in measuring contests. Width, on the other hand, affects all the extremely sensitive and very interesting parts near the surface.

But, to be perfectly honest, even width is a minor matter, compared to knowing how to use what you’ve got and she’s got. Ability, and caring enough to use the ability, that’s what makes all the difference. So, now do you see why Zsa Zsa Gabor, or somebody, said years ago that the sexiest part of a man is his mind?

Technorati tags: condoms, condom sizes, size doesn’t matter

Not among humans, of course. This is among chimps, as reported in the Nov 25th, Science News (sub. reqd.), based on work done by Martin N. Muller and others reported in the Nov 21 issue of Current Biology (abstract).

(I’m not sure why this is big news at this point. I heard much the same thing in primate anthropology classes I took decades ago. This has been observed repeatedly.)

Muller’s explanation, though, is what led to this post, just as soon as I stopped hooting with disbelieving laughter. From the SciNews article, “…nothing beats the sex appeal of an old female chimp. If that preference makes no sense to the average human male who’s entranced by young, smooth-skinned women, it’s because the mating game has evolved in different directions in chimps and in people…. People usually form long-term sexual partnerships. Men thus tend to look for women’s physical signs of youth, which signify childbearing potential for years to come….”

This is the first time I’ve seen one of these just-so story explanations based on male monogamy. The very first time. I mean why didn’t I think of that? Of course human males have to go for young women, because after they’ve found their one and only, they’ll never ever have sex with anyone else. If they go for some licentious old hottie, fwump go their chances of fathering more than a couple of kids before she’s past it.
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We need a new word. Something that describes intelligent people urging the stupid use of force. If you were feeling temperate, you might want to call it pundofallacy, but I’m not and I don’t.

What brought this on is an article in the TimesOnline, “It sounded so good to start with. But where did it all go wrong, George?” by Gerard Baker, Aug 18 2006.

…as the world contemplates the nervous breakdown of American policy in the Middle East, it is something President George Bush should surely be asking himself, or at least his fellow Americans. How’m I doin’?

Let’s see. You invaded Iraq because you argued you would be able to bring about a peaceful, democratic society in the heart of the Arab world, a step vital to the eradication of modern terrorism. Many of us supported the project because we believed the stakes were so high that you would not stint in committing the resources necessary to achieve it.

But you tried to do it on the cheap. If many of us miscalculated the scale of the threat Iraq posed, there was no excuse for the woeful lack of preparation by your Administration for the task of pacifying the country.

So far, so good, assuming by “resources” he means keeping order until people without guns, including women, had a voice. Assuming he means intelligently applied, uncorrupt resources for rebuilding the mess left after Saddam and over a decade of sanctions. But the reasoning floats into fantasy after this.

…you supported and perhaps even encouraged Israel to invade Lebanon last month, after repeated provocations by terrorists. The aim — a good one in principle — was to crush Hezbollah, weaken its Syrian and Iranian sponsors and put Lebanon on a path to long-term, terror-free stability.

There’s the old “crush the terrorists” dream. Yes, it would be nice if you could just stomp them like so many cockroaches. Have you ever tried to get rid of cockroaches by stomping them? I mean, to really get rid of them all, not just one? Of course not. It would be idiotic. The intelligent application of force in that case involves cleaning the kitchen. “Crushing” terrorists makes as much sense as crushing an oil spill.

There was a saying in the sixties, “If it feels good, do it.” This works for some things–sex, for instance–but it falls down badly as a method of anger management. Everybody hates people who hurt them. Everybody wants to hurt them back. It feels good. It just doesn’t happen to work as a way of stopping people from hurting you.

That point bears repeating. It does not work. It’s not that it’s unkind, or that I feel sorry for the poor terrorists in some liberal, pinko, namby pamby way. It’s that it does not work. The real cowardice is to avoid the facts–which are, I repeat, that it does not work–and to avoid effective action. That action may be something deeply unsatisfying, like cleaning the kitchen in the case of cockroaches, or paying the economic price in the West of having actual human rights in the Middle East.

That said, there is one way in which crushing enemies can work. Every last one of them has to be crushed. There are no terrorists among the Tasmanian aborigines because there aren’t any Tasmanian aborigines. They were all killed in a literal genocide. People convinced of the pundophallacy that brute force should work have to remember that it only works when the enemy is eliminated, culturally or literally. They should stop hiding behind limp-wristed, liberal ideas like democracy if they really believe in force.

(None of this is to say that strength is totally useless. Every village needs its policeman, and the global village is no exception. But that’s intelligently applied force, and it’s applied to exceptional cases that stand out on a background of law-abiding people. Police forces are never effective when whole populations are breaking the law, and our current intractable terrorist problems are embedded in widespread popular support in their communites. … Widespread, and getting wider.)

Further in the article, Baker continues:

The common critique of US foreign policy these past few years has been that it was insufficiently multilateral. That if only the US would work a bit more with the French and the Russians, be a little bit warmer to the Palestinians, sign up to international treaties, say nice things about the United Nations, the world would be a much safer and calmer place.

I always found that a slightly old-fashioned critique. The events of September 11, taken together with the other, steadily escalating acts of terrorism committed against the West in the past 30 years, required a radical new departure for the international system. Preventing the lunatics from blowing us all to the hereafter was going to require that the US, the only country with the power to stop it, break a bit of crockery.

And through the rest of the piece to the end:

… [T]he US could take the risk of alienating the world and discarding international law only if its leadership was going to be effective …. [I]t went all mushy and multilateralist …. [T]the world’s only superpower,… pinned down like Gulliver, tormented by an army of fundamentalist Lilliputians. … I don’t truly see how the failings in the Middle East could have been avoided by Washington’s being nicer to foreigners. What’s been missing is resolute leadership.

He starts with a different fallacy in that section. Russia has as much “power” to blow things up as the US. Russia, China, and India have plenty of men under arms. Europe, Japan, China, India, and Brazil have plenty of economic power, and enough, if they worked together, to force action even from the US.

So, no, the US is not the only country with the power to stop it. The US is the single largest concentration of power, and the US has the easiest time exercising that power. But using that fact as a reason for inaction, especially on the part of a European, is pathetic. Europe definitely had enough power, in any sense of the word, to get in there and start cleaning the kitchen. Of course, now that the US has tipped a pig’s breakfast onto the floor, I can see where the Europeans might want us to clean up our own mess first, but that’s a different matter than saying the US is the only country with the power to do anything.

Otherwise, it’s the same fallacy repeated. “Breaking crockery” will prevent “lunatics.” It might, or it might not. It depends on the relationship between the crockery and the lunatics. Since in actual fact the relationship seems to be that lunatics feed on broken crockery, this is one more example of dreaming that force will solve something because it feels so good.

“Effective” (read “strong”) leadership is useless if the strength is applied to bashing your head against a wall that you’re building yourself.

“Pinned down like Gulliver.” Of course they’re pinned down. The intelligent application of strength wins every time.

“I don’t truly see how” anything could be solved by “being nicer to foreigners.” Well, the British could have not invaded Iraq for its oil at the beginning of the First World War. The CIA could have not overthrown democratically elected Mossadegh and installed the Shah in 1953. The US could be not supporting totalitarian, torturing dictators in Saudi Arabia. Little things like that.

The core problem of terrorism is the lunatics. Removing what they feed on by paying the price of real human rights is part of the solution. Another equally difficult and unglamorous part is recognizing that the specific lunacy in question, fundamentalism, is everywhere. It is used by politicians to gain power everywhere, and has the same effect everywhere. Fundamentalism spreads intolerance, which ends in killing, wherever it goes. We need to deal with the theocrats–our own as well as everyone else’s. It’s the separation of religion and state we need to achieve–in our own governments as well as others’.

Nobody wants to hear that. It’s much easier to blow things up.

Postscript

Baker ends with this, which is wrong on every level.

“It is hard for me to recall a time when the world was such a scary place.” Balderdash. I remember all too well those years and years when the whole world could have been obliterated in half an hour. The whole world. The entire planet. The only thing that comes close for scariness is global warming.

Then: “No one should rejoice at America’s weakness. The world is scarier still because of it.” I don’t know about that. If the US is going to be a pro-torture country that detains people without trial, it can’t get weak enough for me. The US has some distance to go before becoming a global dictator, but dictators are preferable only to total destruction. Those are not our only choices.

Aug. 22, 2006 Tom Tomorrow says it much better.

A schism without a name runs through the world. People are supposed to be divided by race, class, gender, religion, education, or wealth, but the biggest division cuts across all those. A fundamentally different sense of good and evil is the biggest rift. It’s been there a long time, but technology is making it huge.

The realization that a different concept of evil exists first struck me when I was reading an article by George Packer about post-occupation Baghdad. A well-educated doctor doing the best job he could under impossible circumstances was showing the journalist around the hospital and the morgue. “An entire subspecialty of forensic medicine deals with virginity,” Packer notes, and before the war there was an examination room at the hospital that did nothing but perform female virginity tests. “These days, the morgue overflows, but the examination room down the hall is usually empty.” The doctor “was appalled by this inversion of the normal order. In his view, a fragile moral relationship existed between the two sections of the Medico-Legal Institute—as if the social control of virginity offered a defense against the anarchy that led to murder.” (Caught in the Crossfire, New Yorker, May 17, 2004.)

And yet, absurd as it sounds, on some fundamental level that is precisely what that doctor and like-minded people think. Looked at from a different perspective, it is not absurd so long as you feel that sex is evil. If sex is the thing that makes the center lose its hold, that corrupts society, and that has the potential to destroy everything you hold dear, then virginity tests really are vitally important.

I’m obviously in the other camp, the one that thinks damaging others constitutes evil, because the doctor’s world view struck me as new and bizarre. That’s one of the biggest problems when bridging world views, which is that it can’t be done. The closest approach is to gain some intellectual insight, but on the level of actual understanding or empathy, the other viewpoint will always feel insane.

Take one example: the vaccine for cervical cancer. The incidence of that cancer increases with the number of sexual partners. For me, that’s irrelevant. But if sex is the source of evil, increasing the amount of sex in the world will have horrible downstream consequences, and guarding against that by scaring women away from sex with the fear of cancer is a small price to pay for goodness. People in this camp can’t understand how I can be so blind to the destructive forces I’m unleashing on civilized society. I can’t understand how they can think that sex should warrant the death penalty.

Take another example: violence and sex on US television. Children can, apparently, watch any amount of violence without warping their minds. Nudity, on the other hand, or worse yet a visible erection, would cause perversion. Likewise, guns are sold under clear glass in general stores, whereas sex toys are sold wrapped in plain paper in their own part of town. This makes sense only if sex is the prime source of evil, and damaging others is a distant second.

It’s vitally important to see how large a gap in understanding separates the two sides because we expend vast time and effort trying to convince each other to be reasonable, while not even realizing that neither side understands a word the other is saying. We can’t hope to reach any mutual peace–nor can we avoid or implement manipulation–unless we have some clue where they’re coming from.

A tangential point here is how women fit into the sex-is-evil world view. The tangle at the core of that view is that you can’t live with sex, but you also can’t live without it. The party line is generally to tolerate sex only for essential reproductive purposes, which, theoretically, applies to men as well as women. However, it’s a drag to fight your hormones your entire adult life, so the tedious enforcement function gets laid on the less-powerful gender. The sex-is-evil crowd do not, in their own minds, see themselves as anti-women. It just happens to work out that way.

The difference between being anti-women and anti-sex may seem like a distinction without a difference, but it is a significant aspect of the other worldview. It explains, among other things, how so many women can hold that view even while it’s doing its best to cripple them. It also explains why gays are consistently hated by that group. If the attitude was primarily anti-female, gay males, at least, ought to be getting a free pass. Instead they get killed. If, on the other hand, the attitude is primarily anti-sex, then gay sex is about as unnecessary as you can get. Add to that the potential “ickiness” factor of any biological function you’re not personally involved in, and you have a truly toxic mix.

I mentioned that technology is enlarging the gap between the two world views. The separation of sex and reproduction is the main factor. When sex leads to children, uncontrolled sex can cause harm to others, and there is some overlap between the two concepts of evil. When sex is just sex, it becomes much harder to make the case that it’s hurting anyone–unless, of course, you set up social rules to make sure that it does. The anti-sex folks reject technologies that make sex easier or less dangerous. Since a lack of control of reproduction is the linchpin on which this definition of evil hangs, any technologies that increase control over reproduction are also bad. Abortion, cloning, and stem cells all become targets. (Note that other technologies are acceptable. Anti-sex advocates are happy to use medicine, satellite dishes, guns, and computers.)

Being anti-sex is a minority stance in Western nations, so the people who feel sex is bad don’t always label themselves as such. They talk about “family values” or “pro-life” issues instead, but they’re easy enough to spot because the only effects of their policies are to make sex a more fraught experience. “Family values,” oddly enough, are coupled with opposition to parental leave or actual aid to real children. “Pro-life” attitudes tend to be found with pro-gun, pro-death penalty, and pro-war politics.

So what do we do? Is there a point to understanding these blighters? To be honest, I’m not really sure, except that we can stop wasting energy on reasoning with them. Changing concepts of good and evil are realignments of the soul, and reason justifies them after the fact. It doesn’t create them. They happen only on an individual level, they can’t be legislated, and they can’t be bridged. There is no way for the two to live side by side. Tolerance breaks down because it’s a logical impossibility. To take one example, there is no way to simultaneously legislate both against harm to others and for honor killings. The struggle can end only with annihilation of one side or apartheid. The latter solution has already been (semi?)-facetiously suggested in a post-election map that shows the states voting for Bush in a new country called Jesusland, while the two coasts and some of the north Midwest are happily part of the United States of Canada. All I want to know is where do I sign up?

Separation of beliefs and state offers a partial solution. “They” would have to stop trying to control anyone’s sex life except their own. “We” would have to make it easy for them to avoid sexuality they feel is offensive. It would take a real willingness to let other people live by their beliefs for that solution to work, which is why it’s only a partial solution. It is (almost?) impossible to let other people live by beliefs that one is convinced unleash evil on the world.

If we were sensible, we’d avoid murdering each other, wait for the changing of the gods to end, and then the struggle would be over. But what are the chances of that?

Postscript: I can’t stop myself from looking at the whole thing as a biologist’s joke. Label the two viewpoints using the conventions of fruit fly geneticists. On one hand you have harmless–or is it Mostly Harmless? On the other hand is sexless. The only interaction between the two seems to be that they can’t coexist. Expression of one silences the activity of the other.

Technorati tags: sex, evil, culture wars, morality, pro-life, family values, morality

One point is getting lost in the discussion about the Iran “jewish” star sham.

Background: A law passed by the Iranian parliament was initially reported as enforcing a dress code that would mark the various religions (Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian). In the “reporting,” this morphed into making Persian Jews wear yellow stars. Horror shot round the world.

Then it turned out that: (from an article in Jewish Week)

Indeed, the law’s text and parliamentary debate, available in English from the BBC Service, discloses no provision mandating that any Iranians will have to wear any kind of prescribed dress. It instead focuses on promoting traditional clothing designs using Iranian and Islamic patterns, by Iran’s domestic fashion industry and preventing “the import of clothes incompatible with cultural Islamic and national values.”

The law is meant to develop and protect Iran’s clothing industry, Javedanfar said.

Note that: “no provision … that any Iranians will have to wear any kind of prescribed dress.”

A recent headline from The Guardian, April 20, 2006
Police in Tehran ordered to arrest women in ‘un-Islamic’ dress

Hello? Earth to progressive blogosphere? Maybe the reason the stuff about yellow stars found so many willing believers is because that nonsense is so similar to the actual nonsense perpetrated by the Islamists?

But the dress code doesn’t apply to Jews. Or “Iranians.” Only to women.

That’s all right then.

Update, June 1
It seems there is some controversy about whether one should criticise things also criticized by illiberals, just in case anyone lumps you into the company of fools. The issue isn’t argument in the forum of ideas, and changing your mind if you’re wrong. The issue is saying anything similar to what comes out of Malkin, to take an example at random.

Laura Rozen’s mentions the

“Iranian American human rights activist Ramin Ahmadi, up at Yale, who wonders why liberals like himself who opposed apartheid South Africa, dictatorships in Latin America, etc. have for the most part abandoned the Iran human rights issue, and not just during the Bush administration.”

Keven Drum says

“And yet, I know perfectly well that criticism of Iran is not just criticism of Iran. Whether I want it to or not, it also provides support for the Bush administration’s determined and deliberate effort to whip up enthusiasm for a military strike. Only a naif would view criticism of Iran in a vacuum, without also seeing the way it will be used by an administration that has demonstrated time and again that it can’t be trusted to act wisely. So what to do? For the most part, I end up saying very little.”

Call me naive, but that is not the same thing as stupid. The problem with the Bush Administration is that they don’t care about the truth. Among many other symptoms of that, they think a statement can be discredited because of who says it. (“Who said there are problems in Iraq? A Democrat? Well, there you are. It’s obvious nonsense.”)

Fighting that by abandoning our view of truth makes us the same as them. When we start pretending it’s not the truth that matters, but how fools will take it, we’ve decided to join them because we can’t beat them.

To hell with that. Do not go gentle into that good night.

Technorati tags: Iran, yellow star, Iranian badge, dress code

The DNA evidence has come in, and the answer is clear. Women are human beings. Who knew? Consider all the evidence to the contrary.

Skip lightly over the centuries when women were explicitly defined as property. Skip likewise over Samuel Johnson’s famous commen when he said, “A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.” He is said to have been intelligent, witty, devoted to his wife, and kindhearted. It was the 1700s, and DNA hadn’t been discovered yet.

We know better now, right? No, not exactly. Catholicism, Islam (except Sufism, I believe), Judaism, some Protestant sects, the Mormons, many organized religions in fact, tell us that women cannot commune with God well enough to minister to others. Given that the argument can be made, and has been made, that religious awe is what divides us from animals, exclusion from the priesthood says something about the attitudes involved. Especially so when you consider that it can be the same people making the argument and doing the excluding.

It would make sense if women, at least, avoided religions that relegate them to irrelevance, but that’s not what happens. It is, perhaps, the strongest proof that (some) of reality is a social construct. Women don’t mean much even to women.

Consider some examples. There are plenty to choose from. After Pope John Paul II’s death, someone who’d had enough of the eulogies pointed out that his policies had led to millions of excess deaths. Well, I thought, if you add up all the unwanted children who’d died as the pope implemented his policies, and the women dying in unwanted childbirths and botched abortions (e.g. for one year: WHO, world health report 2005), as well as AIDS deaths due to unprotected sex (UNAIDS,2004), it would easily reach into millions. But it turned out the speaker had been thinking only of AIDS. The others were invisible.

Another example is a discussion I had regarding Iraq. I pointed out how braindead it was for the US to let violence and fundamentalism disenfranchise women. The US was wasting a huge bloc of moderate, non-violent voices of the kind they kept saying they wanted. I was told that the issues in Iraq were much bigger than “women’s rights.” I was speechless. The right to freedom of movement, to free assembly, to vote–these are women’s rights? I had thought they were human rights. Furthermore, if women are human, we’re talking about half the population. Of course, if they’re not, then it makes sense that their rights are secondary.

Now, on a personal level, this seems crazy. People, men and women both, care about the women in their lives, and there aren’t many who would insist that their own wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters are some kind of different order of being. It’s hard (but not impossible) to live with someone and not realize that you both have hopes, fears, dreams, and hardships. Thinking of women as belonging to some other species is not something that anyone does. It’s something “other people” do.

Take one example. Ask any father whether he loves his children, and he will say yes. However, look at the marriage statistics of brides who were pregnant at the time and who knew the sex of the child-to-be. The couple was more likely to be getting married if they were expecting a boy (Dahl and Moretti, 2004). Few people see this in their own lives, but, in the aggregate, it happens. Most people’s contribution to the rush of events is so small, it can’t be seen, like a molecule of air. But put all the contributions together, and, like air, they can make people live or die.

The peculiar attitude to women, in the aggregate, can be seen in every aspect of life, but people are tired of being reminded about the world’s social backwaters. However, troglodyte fundamentalists aren’t the only problem. For instance, the left side of the blogosphere had a discussion recently about female bloggers and the relative lack thereof at the top of the blogging tree. Why, we pondered, were there so few female bloggers with huge readerships who were linked to by other important bloggers?

There were many explanations. Women are less techie, so there’s a smaller pool to draw from. Women’s writing of the same quality gets linked to just as much, and the lack of links indicates lack of quality. Women write perfectly well, but the topics they write about have less general interest. And so on. All of these explanations may have some merit, and yet the 800-pound gorilla sitting in the middle of the room was missed.

There are a number of classical experiments in psychology where researchers looked at attitudes to writing based on whether the author had a male or female name. Regardless who the actual author was, papers apparently by males were significantly more highly rated. Yet this obvious explanation was not brought out by the heavy hitters, nor was it noticed when I contributed it.

The big problem, in other words, is not with the women doing the blogging. The problem lies with the audience and with the many small, unnoticed moments of inattention that end up making a huge pattern. To take an analogous, far more extreme situation, the level of analysis in blogspace would have been like that of an Abolitionist who said that slavery was bad . . . and then asked what was wrong with blacks that they were trapped in it.

Sex, like religion, is central to who we are, and the same pattern is repeated. Women are irrelevant. No, really. Think about it. Even the definitions give the game away. Sexually repressed women have to dress in tents. Free women can wear lipstick and thong underwear. And this is supposed to do exactly what for women? (I’m talking about heterosexuals, of course. Homosexuals don’t have to contend with the X-challenged world in quite the same way.) Being “allowed” to be attractive to men is not the same as having men who are willing to think about what a woman might want. Defining a situation in a way that works for you is freedom. Living inside someone else’s reality is not.

I’m sure I’ve hit a sore point by bringing up what women want. Men’s regular complaint is that they can’t figure this out. Well, how about the same things men want? Such as pleasure, perhaps? Such as someone who’s both willing and wants to please, like the nice young women in all the ads? The specific way a man acts who wants to please would be different, because he’d look stupid batting his eyelashes. And what he does would also depend on the specific woman in question, since women don’t actually come out of a mold down at the female factory. However, the principle, surprisingly enough, is the same.

The irrelevance of women is particularly evident in mainstream ads, big movies, and other dominant myths. The images of women of reproductive age all tend toward the slightly exaggerated breasts-forward, tush-back, pleased-smile look. It’s something that anthropologists call “presenting” when they observe the equivalent in a troop of, say, rhesus macaques. It says, “I want sex,” and it is the female equivalent of an erection. To spell it out, in case it’s not clear, that message is aimed at males. Not females. Is there any equivalent message of obvious and willing male sexuality for women? Have you ever seen even a hint of an erection shown in any medium intended for general audiences? Ever? It’s as if only men have sex. Women have children.

The usual objection to exposing general audiences to actual male sexuality is that it would be bad for the children. However, given that children survive exposure to blatant female sexuality, that doesn’t seem like the real problem. Men, on the other hand, would be in the novel position of seeing themselves as sex objects for women, something which seems to make them squeamish. (That may sound implausible, but there is a difference between wanting sex and doing what someone else wants.) Having said that, personally I don’t think I’d like seeing men on display the same way women are. Sex seems to work better in private, where it’s more interesting (and more feasible), and I’d rather not have either side of it relentlessly in my face. But what do I know? I’ve never been surrounded by images of men with tastefully concealed erections lining up to please me, 24/7, selling everything from broadband to soap to themselves.

So far, I’ve been discussing religion and rights and sex. These are all optional, on some level. Survival isn’t, and the weirdness in attitudes is at its most stark in the reaction to crimes against women.

We had an election for governor not long ago in California. During the campaign, news came out that Schwarzenegger had perhaps praised Hitler, and people even grew concerned about his father’s activities during the World War. There was a great deal of back-and-forth, lots of digging for facts, and it came out that, no, he did not admire Hitler, and that his father had not committed atrocities during WWII. His campaign came back on track.

Shortly before the election, he was accused, by the woman involved, of groping her on a movie set. There was a certain amount of disbelief, but then six other stories surfaced of similar behavior (e.g. LATimes, Oct. 7, 2003) with other women, spanning 25 years right into very recent times. It began to look like he might have had a habit of forcing his attentions on women, to use an old phrase. However, it was not essential to his campaign to show his innocence before the election. He lost a few points in the polls, but only enough to feel called upon to apologize for “playing.” And people voted for him. Women voted for him. The point here is not what he did or did not do. The point is the difference in people’s reactions to accusations of antisemitism versus accusations of anti-women behavior. The point is that people didn’t care enough. Somehow, although nobody agrees with the statement when face-to-face, crimes against women just aren’t that important.

Then there are the attitudes to a far more serious crime: female genital mutilation. The attitudes in Africa vary in ways that are painful to discuss, but what about attitudes here in the progressive West? There are a number of confounding issues: it’s happening “over there,” and it’s happening in a very different culture. Except when it isn’t. At least in the US, I haven’t noticed that it’s much of a priority to prevent this heinous child abuse by the relevant ethnic groups living in this country. (For some statistics on the practice, see, e.g., Dr. N. Nour, African Women’s Health Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, “Number of women, girls with or at risk for female genital cutting on the rise in the United States”)  The British make slightly more effort (see, e.g., this BBC report).

The objection is that, well, it’s highly regrettable, but it is their culture and who are we to interfere? The practice has also been intertwined with religion, so for a while it was excused on religious grounds, until people more familiar with Islam pointed out forcefully that the Koran sanctions no such thing. Either way, there is no other group for whom culture or religion is allowed to trump the most basic human rights. Imagine the reaction to a headline that said: “Penises cut off to keep men faithful.” (Subtitle: “Strangely effective!”) You might as well excuse cannibalism on cultural grounds. That’s only possible if the people involved really are “long pig,” as that particular meat was called by Fijians in the very old days.

Consider the archetypal crime against women: rape. We’re all agreed it’s a very bad thing. We’re all agreed it’s a hate crime. Consider the New Yorker, a magazine with impeccable liberal credentials. They published a book of humor a few years ago, and since like many people the first thing I look at in the magazine are the cartoons, I was sure it was going to be good. I trotted right down to the bookstore. There, at the beginning of the book, was a funny story about rape. To say that I was stunned would be putting it mildly. I returned the book to the shelf and didn’t read any of the rest, so I don’t know if there were jokes further in about lynching, or gas chambers, or murders of gay men. Somehow, I doubt it.

Rape is not a joke. Rape is not a regrettable form of sex any more than foot-binding is a regrettable form of shoes. Rape is a type of torture that uses sex. Like other torture, it is primarily meant to break the spirit, not the body. Its intention is to turn the victim into a tool of the torturer. Obviously, torturers aren’t likely to be the introspective type and articulate all this. But the actions can be judged by the results, whether it produces women who stay in their place or compliant prisoners.

The BBC did a report a few years ago on a brave woman living in one of the predominantly Muslim housing projects outside Paris. She didn’t wear a veil, as per the local thugs concept of propriety, so they gang-raped her. Instead of being intimidated, she spoke out against the reign of terror directed at women. So they gang-raped her again. As the reporter said, “Who in such a system would dare to speak, or even know, her own mind?”

Well, yes, you might say, that’s all very dreadful. But it doesn’t touch me. It has nothing to do with my life. Maybe not, but I see women who think crimes against women are isolated incidents, even as I watch them rearrange their whole schedule to avoid the late-night train. I see men who want everyone to understand that it’s-not-their-fault-they-found-it-that-way, and who are tied in knots about how to approach a woman so she doesn’t misunderstand their intentions.

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

The various points raised in this essay are not new. We’ve known about all this forever, or, at least, it feels like forever. Many people, certainly among those reading this, would agree that the human rights of women haven’t been any too good in the past, and that very serious issues still exist in benighted sectors. But the feeling is that the problem has been identified, we dealt with all that years ago, and this is the post-feminist era. The “Mission Accomplished” banner is up and it’s time to move on.

The only problem is that we haven’t actually moved on. Besides the vast swamps of pure-bred ignorance, even progressives don’t always seem to know which species women belong to. It’s not time to move on. It’s time to get back to work.

I know that’s an unwelcome message. Adjusting gender attitudes is the open heart surgery of the soul, and there’s no anesthetic. However, the thing about surgery is that it’s a lot better than the alternative. I’m not suggesting that some sort of new millenium would break out afterwards, but simply that we’d be free of a whole set of aches and pains. Nor am I saying that it’s up to men to do all the work, since there’s plenty of attitude adjusting for women to do too. Actually, it would be surprising if that weren’t the case. We are, after all, only human.

Technorati tags: human rights, gender equality, sexism, hate crimes, discrimination, women priests, genital mutilation, crimes against women

We’re not literally all gay, of course, because if we were, there wouldn’t be a problem. The problem is that we’re all different. Or is it?

Homosexuality has gone from unspeakable crime, to merely unspeakable, to downright speakable. The more familiar we grow with it, the harder it is to see gays as monsters. This is causing much concern in some quarters.

Ironically, Aids*, which kills people, had a lot to do with turning gays into people, for those who hadn’t noticed before. Aids was ignored in the early days, except among the “Christian” Taleban, who hoped it would become God’s Final Solution for perverts. Instead, Aids showed gays to be people who die, like us. People who grieve, like us. People who care for those they love, like us, and who want to be with them in their final hours, so very much like us.

Aids turned out to be, indeed, God’s Final Solution, in that it made us recognize our common humanity and begin the long process of learning to live together in peace.

However, that was one bridge too far for some people. We had, in recent memory, accepted Jews, which worked out surprisingly well. Except for a decided improvement in the quality of sandwich meats, there was no discernible difference to society. So that was all right. Then came the concept of treating blacks as equals. We swallowed hard, and figured out other ways of keeping our distance, but at least we could talk the talk on that one.

Then things started to get messy. Women began claiming they belonged to the same species. That hits us right where we live, in our love lives and in our families. Even talking the talk proved to be too much, but human beings are very adaptable. We got around the problem by saying it had been dealt with years ago, and it wasn’t an issue any more. Surprisingly enough, in a world where rape is barely worth a mention in the back section of the paper, and where women are still considered partial people when it comes to pay, this worked.

The frozen limit, however, has now been reached. Homosexuals are saying they have rights, and not just a few small rights, but the same ones as everyone else. This can’t be allowed. Where will it all end, if the natural order of things is so completely ignored? People will start marrying dogs, and civilization will crumble.

The world is now divided into those who find that point of view laughable (of whom I’m obviously one), and those who cannot understand how anyone can be blind to the opening of the floodgates of evil. There is no one in the middle. You either see it, or you don’t, like the drawing which can be either a vase or two profiles, but which it is impossible to see as both at once.

Leaving for another screed the concept that gays are evil, the question is whether exclusion can work at all. The general idea is that exclusion will solve something. Things will be better with the undesirables removed. The idea behind excluding gays is that they are “unnatural,” with the subtext that the person making the judgment is, of course, “natural.” In other words, it’s an us versus them argument, in which “we” are better than “them,” who are excluded.

Let’s grant for the moment that excluding gays makes the remaining group better. It will soon become evident that it is not yet perfect. It could be even better. If the problem is “them” preventing “us” from achieving a smoothly functioning group, then we have to exclude the new troublemakers. Let’s say this new set are people who vote conservative, and obviously cause all the trouble in the world. There are some minor problems due to antiquated customs involving secret ballots, but with an improved Patriot Act, we manage to identify the blighters and get rid of them. The relief is immense. But it’s soon obvious that there is still room for improvement. Problematic relationships continue to crop up. The new troublemakers are those who are taller than average and have a snooty way of looking over the tops of our heads. They are cast into outer darkness. And so it goes until the group is homogeneous enough to exchange organs without tissue typing. Then the people wearing black socks start looking askance at the misfits wearing white socks.

I cannot think of one single historical example where exclusion of “troublemakers” did not follow that pattern. The undesirables might be anything: female, Jewish, black, Asian, witches, or people from outside a gated community. Usually sooner rather than later, the ingroup finds that some of its members are more equal than others. No group that I ever heard of managed to exclude enough people to feel satisfied.

Exclusion fails on a personal level as well as the social one. Whichever difference is grounds for exclusion, it must also be stamped out, or at least hidden, within ourselves. No human being is purely one thing or another. We all have many facets, and any one of them may turn out to be less than “cool.” Life under the hope that exclusion can solve any problems becomes a matter of constantly looking over one’s shoulder, waiting to be “found out” … and hoping that the Final Solution will lead at last to peace. Unfortunately, reapplication of a failed solution has never resulted in success.

The problem isn’t differences; it’s the way they’re handled. The problem isn’t living our way; it’s letting other people live their way.

Inclusive societies have their own problems. You have to put up with people with purple hair, or people holding hands, or whatever. For that, though, other people have to put up with you. You get to live your life without looking over your shoulder. Oddly enough, the peace that is imagined to lie on the other side of the Final Solution turns out to be right here, without the tedious necessity of doing all that housecleaning first.

So it may be worth remembering what the argument is really about, while controversies swirl around gay rights. Or anyone else’s rights, for that matter, right down to poor thirteen year-olds who are wards of the State. These things don’t merely affect gays, or any other subgroup of the month. They affect how we feel about each other and about ourselves. They affect the feel of our whole society and whether we choose to live in fear or in acceptance. It’s not somebody else’s problem when someone else’s rights are denied. It’s yours and mine. We must either all be accepted, or nobody will be.

[*I’m going with the British convention for common acronyms. I’m tired of all those capital letters screaming at me.]

Technorati tags: discrimination homophobia prejudice