cheese it, the cops!

thank you

katie roiphe.

destroying sarah

it's amazing how much a lot of people i know - especially the women - hate sarah palin. right. but as gleeful as her destruction might make you, you'd better think about joe mcginniss's approach. hounding her, harassing her, moving in next door to her, watching her through the windows with a pair of binoculars, going through her trash, and now publishing her alleged sexual history. without assuming this crap to be true, i would contemplate how you'd feel if someone took this approach to hillary or whomever, or to yourself. let's just say that with regard to most women i know, the 80s might look bad as a series of headlines, etc., and if everyone takes this approach to the female politicians on the other side, we'll end up ejecting all non-nuns from the political system. this would be a victory for patriarchy, which of course i warmly endorse, but i'm not sure the level of discourse is being raised by pointing and howling 'slut!' or photoshopping a red 'A' onto someone's cute outfit. before you get pissy with sarah for always attacking the media, you might want to think about what the media actually has done to her. it's frigging ridiculous.

plus they're so cute!

did you know that sex with neanderthals boosts the immune system? you're gonna be ok after all!

against trollops

hate to say it, but i more or less agree with this, a piece by the 'president of the national fatherhood initiative' which asks why we don't alot a bit of the blame for misbehaving men to the women they misbehave with. now, of course, if it's a rapist - a la (allegedly) dsk - then blaming the victim is out of the question. also of course, power differentials create the possibilities of one or another extent of coercion, which reduces the agency of the people coerced. but no one is forcing a young woman to undergo plastic surgery, dress in as little as possible, and try to seduce tiger woods (or, you know, musicians, actors, politician, rich persons), in order to enhance her self-esteem or professional opportunities or cashflow or to achieve some sort of notoriety. i just have to say that i'm against using sex this way. and i might say i often feel kind of...sexually manipulated by women, many of whom seem to value sexual attention above nearly anything else (i'm definitely not rich or powerful, however).

power and money and fame are aphrodisiacs, i guess, at least for many women. actually i don't think they really have an aphrodisiac effect; they just suggest that you could use sex to get power and money out of this chump. anyway, if power and money have an aphrodisiac effect on you, i suggest that this is a failure of your character, and you ought to get busy in therapy or something. the world would obviously be a better place if power and money were sexually repulsive.

though some of the 'other women' are victims to one degree or another, many are really not, and the fact that we just informally don't hold the (admittedly, usually young) women responsible at all says either that they are not moral agents, or that, having sex for power or money - or to feel the flattery of power and money - is normative for young women. since what is really normative for young women is that their whole predicament is described by themselves and their sub-culture as a self-esteem drama, and getting the governor's attention and screwing him enhances your self-esteem, it's actually a wholesome activity.

c ya

i would expect anthony weiner to appear in two years as a host on msnbc. one problem: he's lost his sense of huma, har har. seriously it's funny that she's been globetrotting with hillary; in some ways both the best and the most peculiar person to give advice in a situation like this. at any rate, if there's anything american culture is good for at this moment, it's always offering a new show to famous people after rehab (or even during). this thing was bad for his career as a congressman, but very very good for his fame. as americans, we have certain...values.

born this way

i do understand why it's important to some folks to assert that their sexuality is inborn. first off, the idea does make it nonsensical, more or less, to condemn homosexuality on moral grounds. also it is a response to the idea that heterosexuality is 'natural' and homosexuality is 'unnatural' (whatever that means, exactly; it ain't supernatural!). you can respond to religious antigayness by saying, 'god doesn't make mistakes!' it would eliminate the idea of re-education camp, or therapies to convert people gay to straight, one of the most offensive procedures ever applied. and it registers the centrality of one's sexual identity to one's human identity: one feels one's sexuality to be part of one's essence, something one could not lose without ceasing to be oneself. so there are many good results (as well as some dangers) in asserting it.

all of that, however, does not bear on, much less entail, its truth. i think it tends to minimize the struggle a lot of people have to forge a sexual identity, which has all sorts of entailments: who you're hanging out with, or what music you listen to, or how you dress (either way round, of course). i would think that (though this is a dangerous thing to say) who you happen to have early sexual experiences with could be partly dispositive, either way round. (that is, say you're a man who first had sex with a man: one would suspect that whether it was pleasurable or degrading - which depends on all sorts of things besides the gender of one's partner - could have an effect on driving you one way or the other.) and i'll say this: no one is born fabulous: homosexuality as a social identity consists partly of a whole aesthetic repertoire which just cannot be inborn.

and the 'born this way' approach seems to minimize in a disturbing way the liquidity of sexual identities, or the idea that they could shift, which seems often to happen. as well, it exonerates heterosexuals from responsibility for our own identities, or even for our problems with regard to homosexuality: we can't help our repugnance, given how we were born. 

when i say that the homo/hetero taxonomy (which of course desperately needs complicating, and which is being or has long been, complicated) has only been in place for a couple of hundred years, i'm working off foucault and others. i don't mean that we've only been using that language in that time; i mean that this way of conceiving the fundamental human sexual idenities has only been in place in that time (this is complicated, and i am not saying i've done adequate research). if you look at plato, for example, it's often held that the greeks accepted homosexuality, but that's anachronistic. they certainly accepted sex between two men or two women, but they did not look at that as the basic fact of one's sexual identity; it's far more complicated than that, involving ages, friendships, social situations, sexual positions or roles (active vs receptive, etc), occasions, etc. socrates certainly appreciated the beauty of young men, but he was married to a woman, but he wasn't some closet case: he just didn't think of sexuality in terms of the homo/hetero dyad.

and no, i'm not struggling with my own heterosexual identity! i do remember it as a sort of achievement, however, and i'm not really willing on reflection to describe that exclusively as either the realization of an underlying truth or as a set of decisions.

let tweeting dawgs lie

i used to have some sympathy for this idea that there's a difference between private lives and public functions, at least within limits (like: no fair being head of the imf and also an actual rapist). and i have admired weiner from time to time, patriot act vote among them. (and really the liberal dems had no more articulate spokesman.) but i think ultimately the leadership and the rest of the person are of a piece. you have to ask yourself: why does this person want power, and ought he to be entrusted with it, and what will he do with it once he has it? it's no use pretending that people do not come whole to their jobs.

great moments in politics

a truly great moment in american political history - replayed everywhere of course - was when wolf blitzer asked weiner, 'is that a picture of you?' and his response was, 'we've retained a firm to investigate that.' weiner has a notably high iq, and that was a complete and grammatical english sentence. but it made palin's random nonsense look brilliant. this intelligence thing is...complicated. the asshole thing is pretty simple, though. it would surprise me if he's still in congress or still living with huma 48 hours from now.

twitter dawg

yeah you had to figure weiner was going to burn after all those evasions. and it would surprise me if there wasn't more more more. i guess what puzzles me is that people lie in circumstances in which, and in a way in which, it's just impossible for anyone to believe them. i've had people (well, kids, but also adults) tell me passionately that they didn't do what i actually just watched them do, or (in an outside case) that they never did what i saw them do every day for months. sometimes you just wonder what people think they could possibly be accomplishing. ah well. reflect, confess in full, and apologize: that's my advice. and working back: sending lewd pictures to a random 21-year-old girl? asshole, please. while you're at it, get out of congress.

just to pile on: geez, chump, what a lovely wife you have. she'd have been plenty.

sex and power

one obvious thing about extreme asymmetries of power - from corporate hierarchies to armed forces to institutional religions to welfare states - is that they are typically infested with sexual predation (of various forms). one has to be a bit suspicious of almost anyone who devotes their lives to ascending these hierarchies on these grounds. that's one reason why i sometimes cringe when i hear such ascenscions described as selfless devotions to public service, especially when people are describing themselves that way. not that that is impossible as a motivation; it's just that you very frequently are confronted with the extreme dark side. i don't think one should endorse various hierarchical structures without also confronting the extremely fraught connections between sex and power.

so someone in iowa asked michelle bachmann the following question: "Congresswoman, some groups — including this one, I believe — have argued that homosexuality is a public health crisis akin to second-hand smoking. I was wondering if you agreed with that."
   She responded, "Um. I — I don’t have an answer on that. I don’t have an answer. Why don’t I have another question." 

jonathan capehart is offended. and i imagine if you prodded bachmann on sexual-orientation-type issues, only disturbing things would come out. however, i want to point out that this question might flummox anyone. in what way is gayness like second-hand smoke? and the idea that second-hand smoke is a public-health crisis embodies so many pseudo-ideas that it is itself a labyrinth. so i'd have responded more or less the same way, probably. 

truly we're in a 'crisis' crisis.

 

so there have been some pretty dramatic protests at the college where i work (dickinson in carlisle, pa) concerning sexual assault of students (mostly, of course, by other students, and mostly acquaintance assaults by male on female students, again of course). hundreds of students have occupied the administration building for the last couple of days, and coverage has been kind of amazing: it led all the local newscasts and the local newspapers, and you've seen slices even on huffpost and other national outlets. 

now first of all, it's actually great to see students active in this way; dickinson hasn't really in my time there been a hotbed of activism, and more students seem interested in binge-drinking (which of course you'd have to say plays a large role in this problem, which is serious) than anything that has anything to do with anything. and the demands of the protesters seem by and large reasonable: more transparency in the disciplinary process, expulsions for serious sexual offenders, and so on. but we're also back to the following, which is the kind of thing i've spoken out against at a number of the institutions where i've worked (this is from the list of demands as presented by the protesters this morning):

The college must recognize sexual violence as existing on a spectrum: cat-calling, lewd comments, and homophobic or misogynistic slurs contribute to a culture conducive to sexual assault. This is one sideof the broad spectrum of offenses that we consider sexual violence, with the most extreme end of said spectrum being rape and sexual assault. These behaviors must be dictated in the same policies thatgovern sexual violence and formally punished, though certainly not with the same severity as sexual assault and rape.

the definition of speech as violence, and the banning of certain phonemes, is just completely wrong and counter-productive and counter-educational. i and others have put forward these arguments for so long that it seems almost silly to repeat them, but i will just a bit. it matters who uses the 'slur' and when and why. a gay person throwing around 'faggot' and 'queer' (like a black rapper with 'nigger' or a feminist with 'bitch') is routine and part of the ways that words mutate and get constantly inflected and turned around. i just mentioned or quoted those words, and that is completely different for my money than hurling them at someone as a form of verbal abuse. you actually get the feeling that people are scared of certain sounds, and 'the n word' etc is just pathetic: gutless. they want to ban even talking about what words they want to ban. please.

banning certain words just leads to the spiral of useless euphemisms, and if you think people can't replace 'retarded' with 'special' or whatever you may authorize next, i will demonstrate that you are mistaken. and even if you could get teenage boys actually to stop using 'gay' as an all-around term for anything they don't like, that wouldn't keep them from feeling like they have to continually establish their heterosexuality to each other using whatever terms you might leave at their disposal.

you increase the power of any word that you brand as an act of violence or propose to delete from the language. in fact you attribute to words a literally magical power: like i can literally assault you, damage your body, by sitting here in my little house typing. and i can make you love me by writing your name on a piece of paper and folding it up just so. if it were true, i might be tempted actually to make use of this supernatural ability.

and if you can't hold out some sort of distinction between words and violence, you can't stop censorship anywhere, of anything. etc!

 

Assange's London attorney, Mark Stephens, told AOL News today that Swedish prosecutors told him that Assange is wanted not for allegations of rape, as previously reported, but for something called "sex by surprise," which he said involves a fine of 5,000 kronor or about $715.

"We don't even know what 'sex by surprise' even means, and they haven't told us," Stephens said.

sometimes you're running through the possible jokes and you realize that it's just not necessary. happy birthday, baby!

the stephen fry thing is pretty funny. he says women don't really like sex; they just use it to manipulate men. i like the wit with which fry makes his claim - "you don't know what it's like to have one of these in your pants' etc - and i like the opposite of wit in the response. feminists have no sense of humor: there, i just pulled a fry! "Instead of solidarity in the face of a heteronormative patriarchy that oppresses all of us, there remains a chasm of suspicion and misunderstanding that obstructs genuine solidarity between women and gay men." oppressive heteronormative patriarchy - as opposed, i guess, to liberatory heteronormative patriarchy: christ we're still producing the same sentences as we did thirty years ago. bell hooks is still out there with her english phrase-book, struggling toward perfect redundancy. but i really like the basic response: we are too horny. for fry, it's self-evidently good to "shag behind a bush." i really like the basic liberatory stance of a lot of gayness: real freedom is constantly having sex in public bathrooms. if you think that's freedom, or that it means anything at all, you are pathetically deluded. a "feminist" response that goes "i like to walk around the streets and then do it doggy-style in an alley with a stranger" is not a real good response. there's not a lot that could make heteronormative patriarchy look good, but this really actually does. it's like looking at crack cocaine as the essence of human liberation. my view would be: ok, get free. now do something meaningful or worthwhile. vice, it strikes me offhand, is the very opposite of freedom. no doubt this expresses both my misogyny and my homophobia. but this particular argument makes homophobia and misogyny look entirely rational. look, ok, take your pleasures where you find them. shag whomever wherever you want. only don't tell me you're doing this as a revolutionary act of human liberation: that's on beyond horseshit.

actually, call me a woman, but i like to associate sex with love. ok this emerges out of problematic histories of sexual oppression, human ownership or even (gasp) marriage. but i say the idea that gay bath-house scene in frisco circa 1980 was an important political site it wishful thinking: no you just wanted to have sex with lots of people cause you were hyped up and horny. ok! that's cool, even if also having a touch of compulsion, degradation, and disease. i wouldn't do it, but y'all go ahead. i'm just saying it's not really a political act and that this way lies not human freedom but simply new (actually very old) forms of unfreedom. you want to believe pleasure is liberating or revolutionary because then you have another rationalization for your vices. indeed you're trying to ennoble your vices. i don't think that's...fully honest. this, in the long run, is not even a plausible route to pleasure. i'm not sure what can save us, but a lot lot lot of sex with strangers just isn't it. if you don't believe, give it a shot!

maybe ultimately the idea that pleasure is political liberation comes from a freudian scheme on which societal repression of natural urges is reflected in each person's repression of herself (=neurosis). well i think it is a lot more complex than that, and maybe i'll throw down a post trying to explain why. asceticism or whatever is not only self-repression; it is a liberating as well as an enslaving thing. 

i thought i might have a crack at some examples of what i might call strategic beliefs, which i think raise important questions in both epistemology and actual science and social policy. so here are my examples:

(1) alcoholism (or in general addiction) is a disease.

(2) people are born straight or gay.

(3) depression (or for example bipolar disorder) is a chemical imbalance in the brain.

now i am not a researcher and i haven't really had a serious crack at the evidence. but my view is that these assertions are either false, misleading, or so vague as to be unevaluable for truth value (for example: the notion of "disease" is an extremely vague, ambiguous, and problematic folk concept). but i also think that in certain situations each of these might be extremely important to believe: those circumstances are, roughly, treating addiction or depression, and making peace with one's sexual orientation and allowing people to have whatever sexual orientation they have.

each of these claims relieves the depressed, addicted, or gay person from personal responsibility for their situation: they all declare that the situation is not the result of the free decisions of the subject. now i think this actually has basically good consequences. i think this is the fundamental reason, for example, for the success of twelve-step programs, which i have experienced at first hand. it is a dogma in aa that alcoholism is a disease (or, as the big book says at one point, an allergy). if you think that your alcoholism is your fault, you will be filled with self-loathing, particularly at the point where it has destroyed your career or family. well this self-loathing will get you drinking. the typical drinking alcoholic is in a cycle where he desperately tries to exercise will power over his condition, which might work for a while, then lead to a collapse in which he succumbs. the typical addict runs through this cycle again and again. so you "turn your will over," you stop thinking that you can make yourself stop and are a horrible person because you fail. then you can stop.

so i would say that the recovering addict may need to believe that alcoholism is a disease (whatever that means, exactly). i might encourage someone to believe this - and i have - because it is more or less essential to recovery. and recovering addicts often are entirely outraged even by asking questions about this. but that does not make it true, which shows among many other things that the pragmatic theory of truth is false.

the "evidence" that depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain is kind of pathetic. i'll believe that when doctors are diagnosing depression by pet scan or urine test. depression is diagnosed on the basis of..sleep patters or energy levels, "suicidal ideation," etc.  and of course even if there were chemical changes in the brain associated with depression, that would not establish direction of causation: the emotional condition could be causing the brain changes as well as the other way round. the fact that seratonin re-uptake inhibitors are (sort of) effective in treating depression no more shows that depression is a chemical imbalance than the fact that you can treat pain with morphine shows that pain just is a morphine shortage.

try saying something like this to someone who believes or needs to believe that bipolar disorder is a chemical imbalance, and you will just get rejected with extreme dogmatic insistence. no it just is a fact. but that you believe it the way a christian loves jesus doesn't show it's true.

honestly i think that sexual orientation probably has extremely complex or chaotic origins, including i would think the nature of one's early sexual experiences, what sort of person one comes to associate with orgasm. but saying that is dangerous: it indicates that we could manipulate people into heterosexuality etc; it hints at a kind of genocide or something. it hints that if we want our kids to be het we should keep them away from gay people at all costs. basic acknowledgment of the full humanity and basic rights of gay people may be well-served by 'born that way.' but that doesn't make it true. 

there might be a hundred-year scientific consensus that depression is a chemical imbalance. but then, one might notice that much of the research is actually paid for by people who manufacture chemicals. and after it's over it might be entirely obvious that the claim was vague, ill-formed, and...wrong. that doesn't mean science doesn't converge on it for decades. to say that scientists are subject to social consensus, economic context, peer pressure, the models under which they were educated, etc is an understatement. well, there will be a new social consensus in 2045, and science will explore and explain the useful or consensus notion as the objective truth. it's happened many times, and will happen many more.

no no no. he was talking about the earthquake within.

the pill had many excellent effects. but it certainly did make us a nation of sluts. or rather, it helped us express the slatternliness that was always already there. or perhaps if one actually read the linked piece, it would demonstrate that statistics show that the pill helped american women achieve the extreme sexual continence for which they are so justly celebrated.

"he did nothing wrong." ok. well. first off, it obviously must be a deeply tortured and pitiful life. but that's not to say it ain't wrong. were i gay, i believe i'd have the guts to say i was gay, and were i gay, i believe i'd  have the guts not to say i'm not gay. it's difficult and complicated, but why would you simply absolve someone from all responsibility for an extremely false deceptive life? i've had months or years where i was drinking secretly. but you know it was actually me doing that, and the damage i did to relationships etc. was my responsibility. being gay in a homophobic society is not a blanket excuse for every fucked-up thing you do. also, just for the hell of it, i'm not wild about the ethics of anonymous sex in public places. i say that shit is fucked up, cause i sorta think of sex as an expression of love or something. that is, i think it's actually wrong to blow dozens of dudes you don't know. but maybe that's just my prejudice or something.

personally, i am an extreme homophobe. but i think that as long as you're not gay, it's fine to have anonymous sex with men. all the time. in bathrooms.

ok, ok, i admit it. i did an interview with the nytimes about sex in middle age. now you can stop ribbing me, or, i guess, start.