Why the Internet is Not Ruining Everything

Last Thursday, the Times online published an article called "The Internet is killing storytelling." The author, Ben Macintyre argues,

The internet has evolved a new species of magpie reader, gathering bright little buttons of knowledge, before hopping on to the next shiny thing...

If the culprit is obvious, so is the primary victim of this radically reduced attention span: the narrative, the long-form story, the tale. Like some endangered species, the story now needs defending from the threat of extinction in a radically changed and inhospitable digital environment.

Macintyre's arguments do not ring true to me for several reasons.

First, he is unable to prove that email, texting, twittering, blogging, etc cannot exist side-by-side with more traditional forms of story-telling. In this very article, Macintyre claims that America's rapt attention to the Obama narrative this past fall indicates our "hunger for narrative." One could just as easily argue that our ability to sustain interest in Obama's life story indicates that narrative story-telling is alive and well.

Second, a story does not have to be long to be a good story. I really didn't like how Macintyre was really criticizing damage to the long narrative, but did not make that distinction consistently in his article. One might argue that our attention span has shrunk to a ridiculously short amount, making even the most simple narrative impossible to digest, but hour long dramas on television would beg to differ. Perhaps television or a four page email from Mom, isn't what Macintyre has in mind, but it reeks of snobbery to pretend that something has to be printed and the length of Moby Dick to qualify as a narrative.

Third, even if we presume that narrative story telling is in trouble, I don't think that there is good evidence at all that the internet is the source of damage to the long narrative. In Claude Fisher's book, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, Fisher argues "telephone company management shifted advertising during the 1920's to reflect the demands of the private consumer. Prior to this shift, managers marketed the telephone as a practical, rather than social, tool. Once they realized more Americans were buying automobiles instead of telephones, the telephone companies changed their marketing strategies to reflect the predominant use of their product."

Consumers drive how content is developed and marketed. If internet technology is used to break communication down into smaller and smaller pieces, I don't think the technology that enables this is to blame. A better culprit would be societal forces that demand that people spend less and less time communicating and more and more time working or consuming.

Also, it's a little weird that a newspaper article is criticizing the loss of a long-form narrative. Pot calling kettle black, dude?

follicle talk

I spent the weekend moving into my best friend's house across town. I've been gearing up for this for a long time, but the past two days were the final shove. H was a big help throughout it.

I love my new place, my cat loves my new place, and, for this blog at least, best of all, I now have internet at home.

***
Last week my sister sent me to this article from the NY Times, that discusses how body-shaving is now being marketed to men. I was particularly interested in two parts. Here's the first.

But now evidence from market research and academia indicates that more men are removing hair from their chests, armpits and groins. The phenomenon skews to mostly college-age guys or those in their 30s. Reasons run the gamut fromBecause My Girlfriend Likes It to a desire to flaunt a six-pack or be clean.

What interests me is the unexamined use of "clean." I think it's a common misconception that body hair is a sign of poor hygiene. Seems like these guys could use a refresher from KidsHealth. org, which explains:

The best way to keep clean is to bathe or shower every day using a mild soap and warm water. This will help wash away any bacteria that contribute to the smells. Wearing clean clothes, socks, and underwear each day can also help you to feel clean. If you sweat a lot, you might find that shirts, T-shirts, socks, and underwear made from cotton or other natural materials will help absorb sweat more effectively.

If you're concerned about the way your underarms smell, you can try using a deodorant or deodorant with antiperspirant. Deodorants get rid of the odor of sweat by covering it up, and antiperspirants actually stop or dry up perspiration.

The very next section in this grouping, Body Hair, explains, "You may want to start shaving some places where body hair grows, but whether you do is up to you. " Or, in other words, shaving is about personal preference with regard to appearance, not a hygiene issue.

Here's the other part of the original article that interested me:

Plenty of female commenters online dislike suitors with less body hair than they have. As Eleanorxjane wrote about a chest-shaving video on YouTube, “i want a real man, not one that’s trying to look like he’s 12 again!”

Having hair on one’s chest — as the expression suggests — signals maturity and boldness.

I think this section reveals how wide open body-hair choices are for men still. Shaving is presumably to make a man's body more "consumable" for sexual purposes. Not shaving on the other hand, indicates that a man has reached sexual maturity and has positive masculine characteristics. From this article, it seems like each option, shaving and not shaving, is socially acceptable for men (what you're doing just might not be the personal preference of your current sexual partner). Each way is just one way to be a man.

I don't think that is at all in effect for women. Women who don't shave their legs are often regarded as adopting masculine characteristics. And I wonder if the commentor above considers shaved women as representative of the fetishization of pre-adolescent girls.

These articles are often presented as evidence that modern men face just as much pressure as women in regard to beauty standards. Its true, I think, that there is increasing pressure on all of us to conform in appearance to a narrow standard. However, shaved or unshaved, a man's masculinity remains intact in our society's eyes.

Radio junky

Check out NPR's "Hearing Voices" podcast. Here's where you can listen to past episodes. At least a few episodes are hosted by Scott Carrier, one of my favorite contributors on This American Life.

Bic me

This entry (and 90% of my college papers) brought to you by Judith Butler's Gender Trouble and by Jennie Livingston's Paris is Burning. Many thanks to Professor Susan Fraiman for introducing me to both.

This morning I was in the UVA bookstore and the April 2008 Esquire cover caught my eye.

As my sister, Caitlin, says this cover "seems less about hair and more about gender-play...the sexy woman in a man's button up shirt." (Sidenote: What is up with that? Why is it so sexy in a heterosexual paradigm for women to dress up in men's clothes?)

Esquire explains on their website that they are recreating another iconic Esquire cover image, "actress Virna Lisi caught mid-shave on the cover in March 1965."

As a woman who produces enough hair on my face that I feel the need to pluck those little black hairs off of my chin and jawline daily (and use Nair once a week), I saw this cover and felt mocked. Although it might at first glance seem like Esquire is revealing that women do, in fact, grow body/facial hair and go to great lengths to remove it, I think Caitlin's assessment of the cover is accurate. This cover doesn't reveal that women grow facial hair; it obscures that fact. In an excellent summation of my point here, the photographer for this cover says, "There is nothing masculine about Jessica. Even with a beard she couldn't be masculine." This cover is about emphasizing how not masculine Simpson is and the trope for masculinity is being able to grow a beard.

In my opinion, successful drag (and I do mean drag, here; the playful act of performing another gender---not cross-dressing or being transgendered, which is something completely different), plays with the tensions created by a gender binary system. Drag calls attention to gender as a performance, a shell game. Drag says, walk like this, talk like this, wear this; that is the essence of gender. Drag takes, "I am male therefore I shave my face" and makes it "I shave my face therefore I am male [at this moment]."

As a piece of drag, this cover fails (for me). This image of Jessica Simpson does not expose the act of shaving one's face a performance piece that creates masculinity; it reinforces the idea that men alone actually shave their face (and women can only pretend to).

Check out this link to some of Trish Morrissey's work Women with Facial Hair for an example of complex images that I think successfully explode the relationship between facial hair and masculinity. The article accompanying the images is also definitely worth the read.

Stay Classy, Bob

I just finished reading two articles in today's New York Times, Public Infidelity, Private Debate and I Agree, Dear, It Was Awful (which for some reason is not online).

In PIPD, the reporter examines women looking at the Elliot Spitzer scandal, feeling pity for Silda Wall Spitzer, considering what they would do in her situation, but never really believing their husbands could cheat. In IADIWA, the reporter says that men, on the other hand, focused more on why Spitzer got caught.

Reading these two articles, one is left with the distinct impression that men cheat and then women decide whether or not to forgive them.

Even before I read these two articles I was thinking way, way back to 1997 and how I remember that just before the Lewinsky scandal broke, Newsweek did a cover story on the rising levels of adultery and our changing attitudes towards. I couldn't find that particular story, but I did find "Those Cheatin' Hearts" from the 1997 (and about 6 months before Newsweek first wrote about Lewinsky). The reporter writes:

Public attitudes toward adultery are predictably ambivalent. According to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, 78.5 percent of adults polled last year said extramarital sex was "always wrong"-up 10 percent from 1976. But tolerance for adulterers themselves has risen. A 1996 NORC study found that 22 percent of men and 15 percent of women admitted being unfaithful to their spouses at least once. Opposing adultery in principle is not the same as "believing the adulterer is a monster who ought to wear a red letter on his breast," says New York University sociologist Todd Gitlin. [emphasis mine]

Got that? In 1996, there was only a 7% difference between men and women who admitted to committing adultery. We are both a bunch of cheaters.

The rest of the stuff in that paragraph is pretty interesting too. It seems that hypocritical attitudes regarding sexually activity are not the sole domain of politicians using the very acts they rail against for their political capital...(Though, to be clear, I am not arguing against bringing this hypocrisy to light. I'm just saying let's not get too far up on the horse, because it's a long way down.)

And then there's the overlooked victim in this situation (from IADIWA):

Bob Beleson, 58, an independent beverage marketer who lives in Manhattan, said that the discussions he had with several buddies condemned the governor not for his sin, but for his excess. "These guys that pay $4,300 for a hooker are the same guys who pay $9 for an espresso," he said. "They're ruining it for everyone else."

Now, Bob, I realize that being in the beverage business, espresso are probably part of your whole thing, but comparing a human being/sex with that human being to a hot coffee drink, isn't that a bit much? Also, really? Really?! You are really going to complain in a nationally read newspaper that the thing about this whole Spitzer-thing is that it's really causing some price gouging in sex industry? I'm sorry "hookers" have been "ruined" for you. You must be devastated.

A Matter of Perspective

Today's New York Times includes an article titled, "Senate Committee Seeks Audit of How Iraq is Spending it's Soaring Oil Windfall." Senators Carl Levin and John W. Warner, from the Armed Services Committee, have written a letter asking for an accounting of how Iraq is spending its oil money to further the reconstruction in Iraq. Apparently, the Iraqi government isn't spending much of it and are instead relying on U.S. money for reconstruction.

As upsetting as that is, I was thrown for a loop when I got to the last two paragraphs of the article.

"Finally, Senators Levin and Warner ask the question looming over the entire rebuilding effort: 'Why has the Iraqi government not spent more of its oil revenue on reconstruction, economic development and providing essential services for the Iraqi people?'
Also on Friday, Iraqi security forces discovered a mass grave containing the remains of about 100 people in Diyala Province, said Maj. Winfiel Danielson, a spokesman for the Mutlinational Forces-Iraq."

Ok, hold the phone. 100 dead people? Mass grave? At the end of an article about oil money? I guess the connection is that both of these things happened in Iraq, but isn't this a little bit like the New York Times ending its "the price of grain is really rising" (also in today's paper) with something like this, "Oh yeah, btw, mass grave found in Northern Indiana." Doesn't a mass grave warrant it's own teeny little column?

So I went to Iraq Today to check it out, which led me to a BBC article and a Washington Post article about the mass grave. The BBC article explains that the bodies have probably been there since pre-invasion and the Washington Post article says that hundreds of mass graves have been found since the March 2003 invasion.

The thing is though, scrolling down through the info on Iraq Today (and reading that Washington Post article), I can kind of see why the mass grave part got buried in the NY Times article. Mass graves and incredible amounts of violence (please note that all those links are from this past week and I got them from Iraq Today) are the norm in Iraq. That's not what the scoop is anymore. I'm glad that Levin and Warner want to get to the bottom of where that oil money is going in Iraq. But I'm sad that instead of our politicians demanding answers being the almost un-reportable norm, we are expected to be so blaze about the discovery of 100 (more) people dead in Iraq.

Science! It means whatever you want it to!

As my friend Lauren put it, there are grocery lists that are written better than this piece in the Washington Post.

There is so much I could say about this article (and much of it has already been said). I'd like though, to address (the author) Charlotte Allen's point about women drivers.

Depressing as it is, several of the supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true. Women really are worse drivers than men, for example. A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men's 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women. The only good news was that women tended to take fewer driving risks than men, so their crashes were only a third as likely to be fatal. Those statistics were reinforced by a study released by the University of London in January showing that women and gay men perform more poorly than heterosexual men at tasks involving navigation and spatial awareness, both crucial to good driving.

Run for your lives! It's a woman driving!


Let's re-write this paragraph shall we:

"Depressing as it is, several of the supposed myths about male inferiority have been proven true. Men really are worse drivers than women, for example. A study published in 1998 by Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Public Health revealed that men were three times more likely to be involved in a fatal car crash as women. Although women get in slightly more accidents then men (5.7 women car accidents/million miles to 5.1 men car accidents/million miles), men take many more stupid risks. [I'll get to the whole spatial/navigation thing]"

I haven't read the study. However, I don't think either of the above paragraphs accurately represent the study, mainly because they take the findings (as I understand them--that men's car accidents are more fatal and women get in more car accidents) and draw the conclusion that one sex is a better driver than the other sex, a conclusion that I don't really think is supported by the findings. I mean, take a look at this abstract of a study from Spain, which says that Spanish men are more likely to be in a car crash than Spanish women. (BTW, this study was published in May 2001, in the American Journal of Epidemiology, which is the same journal [I think] that published the Johns Hopkins' study that Allen references.) What does that mean for Allen's little theory? Being Spanish effects a man's ability to perform task involving navigation and spatial awareness?

The thing is, even though I haven't read the study, I'm pretty damn certain Allen hasn't either. After all, she says that she has no use for math ["I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female mental deficiencies. I can't add 2 and 2 (well, I can, but then what?)"], so I'm sure she can't really bother with a silly little thing like fact checking.

I don't know why men are involved in more fatal crashes than women and I don't know why (American?) women are in more car crashes than men. But neither does Allen. Maybe she was going for a whole meta-"this article is so illogical that it proves women are stupid because I am a stupid women" thing. Whatever it is, the Washington Post never should have published it.

Belly up

After returning to Bikram yoga last week, I picked up Yoga Journal at the grocery store. It's a cool magazine packed with a lot of information about life in general as well as yoga (there was financial advice and information on SAD to name just a few things I wasn't expecting in a yoga magazine).

I always like to read the letters to the editor in magazines (actually, I have a tendency to get in trouble with friends when they send me links to things, because they want to talk about the actual article and I want to talk about the [often ridiculous] comments about the article). In the Feb 2008 issue of Yoga Journal, Alice Stevens of Atlanta, Georgia writes in about an article on prenatal yoga. She writes,

...I would have preferred to have seen your suggested poses photographed in better taste. Yoga honors and respects the body. I don't think that showing a bare pregnant belly is respectful or appropriate in a magazine---not even in a prenatal yoga class.

Within the letter section there's a shrunken image of the magazine spread that accompanied the prenatal yoga article. It's a smiling woman sitting in a tailor seat, in a sports bra and yoga pants. Her hands are on her ankles so her arms are framing her belly. It looks something like this:

[This image comes from Birth Roots Doula Collective, Inc.]

Am I missing something? Is there something inherently disrespectful to the body about showing a pregnant woman's belly?

Remember when Demi Moore posed naked and pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair? I remember there was controversy at the time, but I can't remember it's exact nature. Now, looking at this image, I see Moore gazing out at the viewer proudly and aggressively. We often see nudity connected to sex in magazines images and, often in more sober content, sex connected to pregnancy. This image of Moore directly connects nudity to pregnancy and, in doing so, brings sex to the forefront. While Moore explodes the idea that a pregnant women is not a sexual being, her defiant gaze out from the glossy cover, also says that she is looking at us. The roles are not reversed, but the playing field is leveled; the "object" of our gaze, is looking back.

In Yoga Journal, however, the pregnant model (student?) sits smiling happily for the camera and in the image above, the model has her eyes cast downwards. And they both are at ease in yoga poses. Rather than forcing the reader to confront the sexualization of women, while simultaneously challenging imagery of pregnancy as scrubbed clean of sex, these images really are squeaky clean. It made me wonder what Stevens' point was. If just showing a naked pregnant belly is offensive, then perhaps having one is a shameful thing, in Stevens' mind. I hope not though.

Dollars and Sense

I meant to write about this when I read it, but I've been having computer trouble at home and I've been too busy at work. (When I'm having busy days at work I want to spend my lunch hour away from the computer.)

I've noticed this all over, but last Sundays this paragraph from a New York Times article about Obama's South Carolina victory caught my eye:

"A heightened anxiety about the nation’s economy was at the center of the primary fight here. More than half the voters said it was the most important issue facing the country, overtaking health care or the war in Iraq." (Emphasis mine.)

From this quote, I assume pollsters/reporters were asking voting South Carolinians, "What issue do you care the most about, the economy, health care, or the war in Iraq?" This question (or the quote that results from it) fails on two counts: (1) It perpetuates the idea that the economy, health, care, and the war in Iraq are separate issues and (2) it is practically empty of meaning as I don't know what aspect of each issue they respondents are concerned about, leaving me to fill in whatever I am concerned about with that issue.

There will always be buzzwords summing things up into neat little categories that allow everyone to think that we're talking about the same thing when we're not. What concerns me most is the first failure. The economy, health care, and the war in Iraq are connected to each other, not separate issues.

Dwight Eisenhower said, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

If you're looking for the actual numbers the American Friends Service Committee (via Iraq Today) spells it out for us here.

I know where I won't be shopping

In this week's issue of the Hook, the weekly newspaper ran a column called Holiday howlers, which consisted of interviews with local shop owners about their stories of last minute holiday shoppers. Cynthia Schroeder of Spring Street's interview particularly caught my eye. The author of the article, Claiborn Thompson, writes,

In her second year running the women's clothing shop Spring Street, owner Cynthia Schroeder found the holiday season to be especially hectic. But things turned from hectic to strange when a man came into the store-- located at that time in Meadowbrook Shopping Center-- apparently looking for a gift for his wife or girlfriend. But no. Schroeder says he wanted to try the clothes on... himself! Realizing she had no rules against it, she allowed him to take his pick.

Then, while he was busily trying on clothes, a lady out in the parking lot backed into Schroeder's car and tried to drive away.

"Since then," she says, "we've decided that men should not try on women's clothes-- during store hours or otherwise!"

I don't even get how this was a story. Let's break it down: A man wanted to try on women's clothing. The store owner let him. An unrelated woman then backed into the store owner's car. Since then the store owner has decided men should not cross-dress.

All I have to say is, WTF?

This past Tuesday (November 20th, 2007) was Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day "set aside to memorialize those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice." The website for the day defines transgender as "a transsexual, crossdresser, or otherwise gender-variant" individual.

It's depressing that the Hook ran this story the same week as the Transgender Day of Remembrance. If this woman wants to exclude a group of people from her private business, fine, but it's ridiculous for the Hook to publish this as a humorous story that condones her bigotry.

The Hook dehumanizes cross-dressers and other transgender individuals with this story by making them a punch line in a joke and celebrating their exclusion from a business. It is exactly this kind of attitude that protects members of our society who commit violent acts against transgender people merely because they do not conform to our notions of what it means to be a man or a woman.

Shame on The Hook.

Insert slogan here

Yesterday NPR's Morning Edition began with this segment about a poll that had been conducted regarding perceptions of the black community in the United States. The article expands on a lot of information in the poll, but the radio segment focuses on the conclusion that the poll draws that black people in America no longer see themselves "as one race." Steve Inskeep (the host) and Juan Williams clarify that in the poll "not seeing themselves as one race" is akin to seeing themselves as not having the same economics or same values, rather than not having the same skin color.

It was really strange for me to hear this on NPR. Is it really news that all black people are not the same in their values and economics? The article does a better job of framing the poll, saying that television and popular culture portrays black people as having only one set of values, but black people do not see themselves this way. I was really upset, however, when Inskeep asked (something like) "So do middle and upper class blacks seem to get closer to whites in their values?"

Just as black people are not a homogeneous group of people, white people are also divided in their values and along class lines. Inskeep's question implies that all whites are middle and upper-class, which erases a large portion of white people in America who are poor.

According to the article,

72 percent of whites, 54 percent of blacks, and 60 percent of Hispanics agree that in the last 10 years, "values held by black people and the values held by white people (have) become more similar."

I think that this perception is wrong, not because there are not shared values between people of different races, but because, like Inskeep's question, this perception rests on that there is such a thing as "white people values" (or "black people values").

Many historians have written about the Jim Crow laws in the south as not only a reflection of racist attitudes of the time, but an attempt to maintain and fuel racist attitudes particularly in poor white people. These historians argue that poor white people and emancipated slaves had much in common, namely the conditions of poverty, and that people in power were afraid of unity between the two groups erupting into a class war.

It's a good step to recognize that there are class divisions within the African American community (as obvious as I think this is, I'm still glad it's being said). An even better step would be to recognize that those same class divides exist throughout the country, regardless of race.

*
In more local news from yesterday, first-year Alex Cortes had a piece in the UVA newspaper, the Cavalier Daily, in support of shouting "not gay" during The Good Old Song at football games. For those of you who aren't from Charlottesville, when UVA scores a touchdown, the fans sing The Good Old Song in celebration. There is a verse about everything being bright and gay at Virginia, after which some people (fewer and fewer, I hear) shout "not gay."

My sister Caitlin sent me Cortes' opinion piece this morning explaining how hilarious and sad it was all at once, and it really has to be read to be believed.

Anyway, here is my little response (which I may or may not send to him; you can vote! But I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter because he seems the type to google his name on a regular basis [see last paragraph of his article]).

Dear Alex,
You want to shout "Not Gay" at football games during the good old song? Fine, whatever, I don't really care. But you're going to have to accept that in shouting "not gay" you are aligning yourself with idiots and assholes. And do you want to know the reason that is the case? Because as much as you might want it to be, shouting a catch phrase is not an intellectual argument. I don't care if "not gay" is supposed to stand for "I am against the homosexual "lifestyle" for religious reason and I also am against sex between a man and woman before marriage." This is akin to saying that screaming "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you" to your parents at the age of 14 is an intellectual argument that is meant to convey "The differences between our ages makes it almost impossible for us to relate to one another. I am becoming an adult and I need more space and freedom."

However, I whole-heartedly invite you flesh out your "not gay" chant. At the next football game, try hysterically shrieking, "I am not gay because it says it's wrong in the bible and I also believe that men and women should only use the act of intercourse for procreation" if that is what you are really trying to say. I am sure all those people who have been staring at you and saying negative things at past football games will be completely won over by this "intellectual" argument.

Lifestylely yours,
Rachel

Built for Gender-Neutral Play doesn't have the same ring

I was pedaling along on my exercise bike tonight, watching TV when a commercial came on for Tonka Toy Truck. Has anyone else seen this commercial? The one with the motto "Built for Boyhood"?

The commercial begins with what has got to be the earliest example of well-intentioned-man-is-clueless-about-the-house style of advertising, when a toddler tracks dirt all over the floor in order to bring his mom flowers that he's pulled up from the roots.* The commercial then informs us that boys are "just different" and that's why they need the Tonka Toy Truck, which allows boys to do things that are natural to them like selecting shapes...and walking...I suppose the part that the toy makers consider truly gendered (let's hope they don't consider picking out the square to be a naturally male talent), is the last function of the toy, that a toddler can ride around on it and it's shaped like a truck. Didn't you know? Girls only like to ride around on ponies. The commercial then ends with the cheery (yet ominous to me) note, "Let's face it, boys are just different" (so stop trying to efface harmful gender roles and stereotypes, you dirty feminist bitches?).

I guess what really gets to me about this commercial is the last line, the just face it one, and the motto, Built for Boyhood. Both suggest that there are rock solid rules and behaviors to being a boy (and implicitly to being a girl). I feel like the motto has it spot on, but not in the way that the manufactures want. Yes, this is how we build boyhood (or girlhood for that matter), by giving children repeated messages about what is and isn't appropriate for them based on their gender.

I'm not saying that there aren't girls out there who just like to ride ponies or that there aren't boys out there who just really love trucks. Hell, the majority of boys and girls might fit into these stereotypes. I just think that it's much more complicated than that. For example, when I was a kid I loved playing house, but I also loved pretending to be an explorer in Anartica. One year, I desperately wanted to go as a ballerina for Halloween, but then when the actual night was too cold for my costume, my mom made me go as Zorro...and guess what, I loved being Zorro way more than I liked being a ballerina. I had a plastic kitchen, but I also had a creek that I loved to muck around in with my brother. And I know I'm not the only one out there whose childhood cannot be neatly categorized. If it can't be categorized so neatly, then maybe Tonka should "just face it," people are born male and female (and sometimes intersexed), but they are made into little boys and girls.

The moment that you accept that at least some aspects of gender are socialized, the next question becomes, but why do we socialize gender this way? What purpose does it serve? Whom does it benefit? I think there are many different answers to these question and which answers that we chose to see might be as personal and complex as childhood play.


*For other examples of these kinds of commercials please see any commercial where "Dad" does laundry, dishes, or any kind of childcare. I just love how we are still asking if a woman is capable of being president while at the same time we portray men as not being capable of doing a load of whites. Here's an idea, maybe commercial men can't do housework because that helps reinforce the stereotype that woman are naturally better at it. And maybe real life men want that stereotype reinforced because doing housework is a boring thankless job and as long they are considered bumbling fools within the household they can have plenty of time to do all the things that are "natural" to men, like holding political office, making laws, and deciding who gets what money.)

I can't think, the TV is on

Lately I've been feeling way too wired into television and the internet. For me, it's akin to feeling full or even like a glutton after a huge (unhealthy) meal. I have several websites that I check multiple times a day throughout the day everyday. And now, with the fall television season starting up again, I've been spending a lot of time letting my eyes glaze over as I practically slump over on the couch in front of the t.v. I am one of those people who cannot watch tv and carrying on a conversation at the same time; I get completely engrossed in whatever is on. I guess it's all those bright and shiny colors flying by me at a fast rate.

I watched Heroes last season and I'm going to continue to watch it again.

Spoiler alert **if you haven't watched the first season of Heroes and want to stop reading now, even though I'm only going to talk about it in a general way**

Last season focused good battling the evil of "progress at any cost." The Company was willing to sacrifice the lives of most of the people in New York City in order to unite the country under Nathan, ushering in a new era of progress and prosperity. Because the cost of the Company's idea of progress was millions (thousands?) of deaths through a nuclear explosion (in New York City), I initially thought that the show was trying to say something about terrorism. But I think that there is something else there, namely I think the Company represented the ideas of Social Darwinism*, (the concept that the rule "survival of the fittest" applies in economic and social situations).

On an individual level it's easy to see that, Social Darwinism is ridiculous; it requires us to consider a man who had the happy accident to be born into a wealthy family morally superior or more deserving of his wealth than a man who was born into poverty (it also requires us to think that the man born into poverty deserves to be poor). But I think that Social Darwinism lives on in some of our business practices. More and more companies are turning to global outsourcing as a means of cutting expenses. It is cheaper to make products in foreign countries that have less strict (or no) environmental or labor regulations. Those cheap costs of production are then (somewhat) reflected in lower costs to the United States consumer.

How can it be fair to pay someone with the same skill sets as an American worker less money just because they are born in a foreign country? I know there are complicated reasons why less money is seen as acceptable in these cases, but is one of those reasons based on a Social Darwinian idea? That those who work hard enough, no matter where they start, can and will achieve wealth and therefore, people who are poor are poor because they did not work hard enough (and do not deserve equal treatment)?

If progress in this case is cheaper goods for American consumers then the cost might be companies must engage in unethical business practices. Are we asking ourselves if progress is worth the cost? I know they are in academia, but is this question being asked by business leaders? Is it being asked by consumers? How can consumers even ask if progress is worth the cost if they don't even know what the ethical costs are? Is it the consumers job to stay informed about global business practices of the companies they use? Or is it the government's job to prevent unethical global business practices to begin with?

I honestly do not know if global outsourcing has a net positive or negative effect on foreign countries. I have heard arguments from Americans on both sides. I would like to hear from the foreign workers as well, because I don't want to be Whitey McPriviledged spouting my opinion about what's best for other countries. I do think, however, there are clearly some costs to global outsourcing.

I'm leaving this entry the scattered mess it is. I don't really know enough about this stuff to be writing about it, and clearly I have more questions then answer. If anyone has any good books/links in regards to globalization that they'd like to share, please do.




*A note about Social Darwinism: the theory of evolution defines success by a species ability to adapt to a given situation; the ability to adapt is measured first by the number of offspring a species successfully raises to reproduce and secondly, the number of new species that spring from the original species. Social Darwinism, on the other hand, measures success in terms of wealth acquired and the idea of "progress and civilization." One of the reasons that Darwin's theory of evolution was so threatening at the time he wrote his books is because there is no "progress" in Darwin's evolution; there is no end goal, there is only randomness. In college I took a class called Origins of Contemporary Thought where Allan Megill argued that this was Darwin's real challenge to religion; a world that works without an end goal, without progressing, implies that there is no God.

Without a paddle

Today my friend Jake sent me this post about the hostile (towards gay people and it sounds like towards women too) work environment at the New York Post. This sent me digging around on the current state of federal discrimination laws.

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2007 (ENDA) (which would include sexual orientation and gender identity in the categories that the government protects from work place discrimination) was introduced to the House in late April of 2007. A couple weeks ago, the House held subcommittee hearings on ENDA; supporters of the bill are hoping to pass the ENDA before the end of the year.

The ENDA is intended to protect gays/lesbians/transgendered people from workplace discrimination in the same way that the the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (CRA) protects workers from discrimination based on race, color, religion, or sex. The CRA also created the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which identifies harassment in the work place as a form of discrimination that violates the CRA. The EEOC says,

Harassment becomes unlawful where 1) enduring the offensive conduct becomes a condition of continued employment, or 2) the conduct is severe or pervasive enough to create a work environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile, or abusive.

and

Petty slights, annoyances, and isolated incidents (unless extremely serious) will not rise to the level of illegality. To be unlawful, the conduct must create a work environment that would be intimidating, hostile, or offensive to reasonable people.

The Federal Communications Commissions breaks it down for us a little more, with examples of harassment here.


However, the CRA does not explicitly state that harassment is a form of discrimination (and neither does the ENDA). In Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, the Supreme Court held

A claim of "hostile environment" sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination that is actionable under Title VII [of the CDA]

(Sidenote: I really think that it should be a requirement that every Supreme Court opinion has a numbered list right at the beginning of whatever the Court is holding in that case. It would save us a lot of trouble.)

Although I think that were the question to come up (and were the court to follow precedent and legislative intent), courts would be forced to hold that the ENDA protects gays/lesbians/transgendered people from a hostile work environment, I think we can't be sure because it's not explicitly stated in the legislation. (If there are any lawyers/law students out there who think/know otherwise, please correct me.)

I hope it passes. And I hope gays/lesbians/transgendered people are protected from a hostile work environment. In other words, I hope New York Post winds up floating up shit creek.

On why I hate To Catch a Predator

There have been a lot of posts recently on Wonkette about the (alleged) sexual misconduct/crimes of elected politicians (they appear regularly lately under this tag). These include posts on the crazy antics of Larry Craig and that wacky Bob Allen as well as some light gay-bashing (literally) by Tucker Carlson. But in addition to all of that, they also include a couple posts (which I'm not going to link to, but you can find pretty easily) about reports that a legislative staffer for a state assemblyman and council chairman sexual molested children (in different states, in unrelated incidences). Several comments on these two posts refer to the above mentioned bathroom-sex seeking politicians in a kind of, first-this-and-now-this?! way.

I suppose the connection Wonkette readers see between the two things (closet-gay men trolling for sex in public places and child-molesters) is that all of the politicians involved presented themselves as "family values" people to the public. I think there's a couple of pretty obvious differences here though. The first and most obvious difference would be that gay people who publicly solicit other people for consensual sex are not hurting anyone, at least not in the same way that an adult hurts a child through years (or even one incident) of abuse. The second difference would be that though both groups are hypocrites (the closeted-gay men because they push legislation that would take away rights from other gay people and the child-molesters because presumably they present themselves to the world as straight and not mentally imbalanced), I don't really understand how someone who is a child-molester can not be a hypocrite (not unless they're a card carrying member of NAMBLA). They aren't just hypocrites; they're criminals and also, in my opinion, they have mental problems.

Um, I guess I'm just trying to state the obvious: Being a closeted-gay person (even one who takes away rights from other gay people) is different from (read: not even remotely in the same category as) being a child molester.

Besides not liking the lumping together of Craig et al. and child molesters, I'm not sure how I feel about Wonkette's posts and their commenters simultaneous disgust (at the child molesters' actions) and glee (at seeing them bought down), both of which I actually share. It made me think of the t.v. show "To Catch a Predator," which I hate (and it's not just Stone Phillips). Although I am glad that the issue of child molestation/statutory rape is being covered by the media, that show has some problems.

In addition to the legal problems mentioned in the link, I think it has some problems in its conception and execution. For instance, I think it feeds into a myth out there that your child needs to be protected the most from strangers on the internet, when the truth is 80% of the time the attacker is someone the child knows (please check out the right hand bar to see where I got my statistic--I was a little turned off by this sites take on pornography [unless they mean child pornography; it's not clear] so check this out if you want another look at some different, but related statistics.).

I do think it's great that "To Catch a Predator" has a spotlight on the perpetrators rather than shining the hot light on the victim, as is too often the case (what did *she* do to make him interested? is a question that is asked way too often--maybe more often in cases of rape then in child molestation, but in either case, the focus should be on the behavior of the perpetrator rather than that of the victim). But the problem is, the scope of their light is not big enough. "To Catch a Predator" asks parents to look outside of their home, schools, neighborhoods, and churches and into the bushes for that lurking stranger. And that makes sense, because it's actually a much easier idea to swallow then the idea that your children's step-father might be touching them inappropriately. It's easy to keep your kid off the computer. It's not so easy to confront a culture (whether the culture is a home or in a country) that treats women and children as the property.

I want the coverage of child molestation to be accurate. I want it to force us to examine a hard truth that people we know (and even love) could be abusers, not just that creepy guy in the library who is always heavy-breathing near the computers. And I want us to ask, what is it about us, as a culture, that makes otherwise ordinary, average people think they can do this kind of thing to someone else?

I don't know the answer to that, but I would guess it's related to power and systematic oppression.