Selective Outrage in Support of Rape Culture
| May 23, 2013 | Posted by Issa under Counter/Culture |
By Joshua Bardwell, originally posted in March 2010 at Jack-Booted Liberal.
I’ve been thinking a lot about oppression and privilege lately. Fat-hate. Rape culture. Sexism. Racism. Able-ism. I don’t claim to be particularly well-versed in the topics, but I have started to notice a trend or two in the ways that people respond to an idea that challenges their position of privilege. One behavior that I’m noticing at this moment is what I’ll call selective outrage. Honestly, it’s a topic that I, myself, am only really starting to grasp, so I may have a hard time describing it, but I”ll give it a try. Selective outrage works something like this.
In 2007, A law was proposed in Australia which stated that intoxication does not imply sexual consent. Note: the law did not say that intoxicated people cannot give sexual consent, just that intoxication plus the lack of a “no” does not mean “yes.” Apparently, “She was drunk,” was being used successfully as a defense to rape charges, and this law was intended to change that. Put another way, the law requires drunk people to actually agree to fuck you. Seems pretty non-controversial, no?
Here are some of the comments made on a certain web forum regarding this law:
So yeah, we had a few drinks, we went back to her place she threw me on the sofa, blew me for awhile and then rode we until she orgasmed and then the next day I get arrested for raping her
This commenter appears to be concerned with the potential for misapplication of the justice system. He doesn’t want to see innocent people accused of a crime, and he is OUTRAGED.
When you drink and drive, it’s is YOUR responsibility in the fact that you should of known to say no to driving. Why is it then, that when women drink, our justice system thinks they are nothing but children, unable to control themselves at all, and thus exonerate them of ANY responsibility?
This commenter appears to be concerned with issues of personal responsibility. He also seems upset at a system that treats women like children, rather than autonomous adults. He is OUTRAGED!
Now, I can support the Sober Guy/Drunk Girl = Rape argument to some degree, but I have two issues with this. Foremost; Shouldn’t this girl be, in some respects, responsible for her own level of intoxication? Hate to tell you, but you don’t HAVE to get drunk, and then the consent issue stays clear. How can the guys be the only ones faulted when both parties are drunk?
Likewise, this commenter raises questions of personal responsibility and agency. OUTRAGED!
Do you want to deny a woman with a slumbersex fetish pleasure?
This commenter tackles the conjoined issues of sex-negativity and sexism, standing up for the right of people to consent to treatment of their bodies, even in non-mainstream ways. He is OUTRAGED!
Except it’s all bullshit, isn’t it? Because these people are probably not outraged about misapplication of justice, treating women like children, taking away people’s personal responsibility, or, more to the point, rape, ANY OTHER TIME than when it might affect them. And that slumbersex person? The most egregious example. Is that person actually kink-positive in real life, or is this just some semantic trick, used solely for the purpose of opposing the new law? Which, I will re-iterate, says simply that intoxicated people have to consent to sex just like everybody else.
The sneaky thing about selective outrage is that the points raised are, on the face, valid. At least they would be if they occurred in a vacuum. But they don’t. They occur in a context in which, for example, WOMEN ARE ACTUALLY BEING RAPED and the people who raped them are not being convicted at stunningly high numbers. The commenters often have absolutely nothing to say about that. Being outspokenly angry about rape is reserved for Feminists Who Are Probably Also Lesbians. Oh, if you asked them, they’d probably say, “Rape is bad, yo,” but the only time they can be bothered to actually type a comment on the Internet is when a law might be passed to actually DO SOMETHING about the raping, and when they do, it’s to poke holes and point out potential problems with the law.
This is the essence of selective outrage. If the only time you express your outrage is to oppose ideas that seek to change conditions, then you support the conditions, no matter what you might intend. And in this case, that means you support the status quo as it pertains to rape, which is a little shocking given the state of rape in America today. If you are anti-rape, I don’t insist that you actually speak out about it. Hey, there are a lot of issues in the world for people to care about, and rape may just not make your list. That’s actually fine with me. But at the very least, maintain your position of silence on the issue when those who care enough to speak up do so.
Women Are Powerful (Natural Resources)
| May 20, 2013 | Posted by Issa under Counter/Culture |
By Joshua Bardwell, originally posted in March 2010 at Jack-Booted Liberal.
This ad, seen in an airport, illustrates the complexity of attempting to support women in a culture that is steeped in female objectification.
On the one hand, the ad is explicitly pro-woman. On the other hand, it represents women as a “natural resource” to be “tapped.” If we are to support women, it should be for the same reasons that we support any person, and those reasons start with basic respect for human dignity. Saying that we should help them so as to “tap” them reduces them to the value that we can extract from them, which is, granted, totally consistent with our culture’s treatment of many people the world over, but is probably not reflective of the progressive values that this charity attempts to represent.
On Listening to Children and Believing Them
| May 15, 2013 | Posted by Issa under Parenting |
Excerpts from Children Talk But No One Listens from s.e. smith:
The sentiment ‘better seen than heard’ reflects a larger social attitude of the value of children’s voices, namely that they have none. Children should remain silent, and they are ‘good’ when they’re quiet, but ‘bad’ when they are not, because they are disturbing the adults and causing trouble. This attitude runs through the way people interact with children on every level, and yet, they seem surprised when it turns out that children have been struggling with serious medical problems, or they’ve been assaulted or abused.
The most common response is ‘well why didn’t the child say something?’ or ‘why didn’t the child talk to an adult?’ Adults constantly assure themselves that children know to go to a grownup when they are in trouble, and they even repeat that sentiment to children; you can always come to us, adults tell children, when you need help. Find a trusted adult, a teacher or a doctor or a police officer or a firefighter, and tell that adult what’s going on, and you’ll be helped, and everything will be all right.
The thing is that children do that, and the adults don’t listen. Every time a child tells an adult about something and nothing happens, that child learns that adults are liars, and that they don’t provide the promised help. Children hold up their end of the deal by reporting, sometimes at great personal risk, and they get no concrete action in return. Sometimes, the very adult people tell a child to ‘trust’ is the least reliable person; the teacher is friends with the priest who is molesting a student, the firefighter plays pool with the father who is beating a child, they don’t want to cause a scene.
and
Children are also told that they aren’t experiencing what they’re actually experiencing, or they’re being fussy about nothing. A child reports a pain in her leg after gym class, and she’s told to quit whining. Four months later, everyone is shocked when her metastatic bone cancer becomes unavoidably apparent. Had someone listened to her in the first place when she reported the original bone pain and said it felt different that usual, she would have been evaluated sooner. A child tells a teacher he has trouble seeing the blackboard, and the teacher dismisses it, so the child is never referred for glasses; the child struggles with math until high school, when someone finally acknowledges there’s a problem.
This attitude, that children shouldn’t be believed, puts the burden of proof on children, rather than assuming that there might be something to their statements. Some people seem to think that actually listening to children would result in a generation of hopelessly spoiled brats who know they can say anything for attention, but would that actually be the case? That assumption is rooted in the idea that children are not trustworthy, and cannot be respected. I’m having trouble understanding why adults should be viewed as inherently trustworthy and respectable, especially in light of the way we treat children.
Treating children well, treating them as people, and being part of the solution in creating a world where they have a place involves allowing children to speak, listening when they do, and believing what they say.
Honoring Symptoms as a Voice of the Soul
| May 13, 2013 | Posted by Issa under Radical Self-Acceptance |
Care of the Soul
A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life
by Thomas Moore
Chapter One
“Care of the soul begins with observance of the soul.”
This line stood out to me, since it’s something I have taught about in different situations. In Step One: Notice, I talked about noticing the cultural messages all around us. On another topic altogether, my acceptance of my fat body involved a lot of simply looking at it. Just looking and nothing else. I have frequently found that there is great value in simply paying attention to something, even if I don’t consciously change my actions. So it seems entirely right to me that Thomas Moore begins with suggesting that we simply observe the stirrings of our souls.
Another idea in chapter one that really spoke to me is the idea that we tend to strive for an idealized version of “normal”, when in fact our selves, our soul, resides specifically in the ways that we are different.
“…People often neglect their own natures and are tantalized by images of some ideal normality and health that may always be out of reach.”
“Individuality is born in the eccentricities and unexpected shadow tendencies of the soul, moreso than in normality and conformity.”
I am definitely “tantalized by images of some ideal normality and health”. I write a lot about being different and rejecting mainstream thought (The Fuck-It List comes to mind), but I have to constantly think about and write about these things because I feel the constant pull of conformity. I’m sometimes alarmed by how often I find myself doing things I don’t want to do because I think I’m supposed to do them. Trying to achieve normal is something that will always pull at me and something at which I will always fail.
Moore speaks in chapter one about not seeking to excise movements of the soul – symptoms, complaints, fears, and perversities that present themselves. He talks about speaking for these shadow aspects, moving towards them, going through them, embracing them, rather than curing them or seeking their opposite.
My greatest complaint is about my depression. I think about accepting it rather than trying to cure it through medication or through making some great life change after which I will magically no longer be depressed. I am tempted to think that if I “accept” it then I will no longer be depressed, but that’s not right. When Moore talks about “honoring” symptoms, I wonder if it is possible for me to both be depressed (miserable!) and also have a relatively peaceful acceptance about my feelings at the same time. I just don’t know.
- I’ve started off the comments with some questions. Jump in and reply or comment yourself on any thoughts you had from reading this chapter.
- Even if you aren’t reading the book, you are welcome to answer the discussion questions and topics as they arise.
- Comments are threaded. Reply to a specific comment by hitting the reply button underneath it. To allow for different conversations to develop at different rates, try not to reply to multiple comments in the same reply. Even if you want to reply to all the questions or comments, reply to them individually.
- You can still join in on the discussion of the introduction.
- We’ll discuss chapter two in the post on next Monday.
Headed to Serendipity 2013
| May 9, 2013 | Posted by Issa under Counter/Culture |
Today Dylan, Joshua, and I are headed to Serendipity, a burn here in our home state of Tennessee. The last time I wrote about Serendipity I was extremely hurt and angry about the organizers’ decision to ban children from the event. That decision was reversed for 2013, and so I’m going.
I’m a little wary. I’ve already been wounded by this event, so I don’t feel eager to get too emotionally involved. It’s also a very small burn, which is usually more socially difficult for me. I love the hustle and bustle of a big event, and I also like the ability to hide in the chaos. There are burners going to Serendipity who I used to be my friends and aren’t any longer. I worry about my ability to smoothly avoid them. Well, I worry about a lot of things. It’s just my way.
But, also! There will be good friends there I don’t get to see very often, and it will be awesome to hang out. Plus, it’s my first burn of the season, and I’ve missed camping.
I’m sure I’ll have a great time, as long as I can get out of my own way. And Dylan always has a good time at burns, so I’m excited for him, too.
Besides, my hair is newly pink again. Life’s looking good:
Care of the Soul Introduction
| May 6, 2013 | Posted by Issa under Radical Self-Acceptance |
Care of the Soul
A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life
by Thomas Moore
Thomas Moore is not the only author to catalog our psychological ailments, blame them on shifts in our culture, and then point a way out of the darkness, but he’s certainly the most poetic writer on the subject.
Over the next 13 weeks, I’ll be hosting a group discussion about this book, with a new post for a new chapter each Monday. If you can, there’s still time to find a copy and join us.
Even if you don’t read the book, you are welcome to answer the discussion questions and topics as they arise. As my friend Clove said, the interesting stuff is in the discussions. You don’t have to have read the book to jump in to the comments.
In the introduction, Moore calls loss of soul the great malady of the 20th century, encompassing an array of symptoms like feelings of emptiness, meaninglessness, disillusionment about relationships, a loss of values, and a yearning for personal fulfillment.
These sound immediately familiar to me, perhaps especially as a person diagnosed with depression. Indeed “vague depression” is on his list of “emotional complaints of our time”. My depression is at times frustratingly vague, making the all to common advice to “just snap out of it” dangerously alluring.
I assume that many of the people around me suffer from a similar list of symptoms, and I’m also willing to blame it on “our times”. I do also wonder if these feelings are more universal throughout time, “normal” if you will, and if associating them with a particular century is the same kind of attitude that leads all adults to think there’s something wrong with “kids these days”.
Moore says it is impossible to define the soul precisely. He rather uses examples of its presence: music and people with depth, good food, satisfying conversation, genuine friends, memorable and touching experiences, attachment, love, community, intimacy, fulfilling work, rewarding relationships, personal power, relief from symptoms. What a comforting list of desires that is, and how elusive some of them seem.
Care of the Soul is Moore’s take on a self-help book, although it aims to go a more philosophical and mythically inspired direction than most modern self-help books. The part that tempts me most is his idea that we distinguish between curing ourselves and caring for ourselves and that we stop thinking of common life issues as problems to be “solved”. He says:
As you read this book, it might be a good idea to abandon any ideas you have about living successfully and properly, and about understanding yourself. The human soul is not meant to be understood… What we want to do here is to re-imagine those things we think we already understand.
I’ve started off the comments here with some questions. Please jump in and reply or comment yourself on any thoughts you had from reading the introduction.
We’ll discuss chapter one in the post on next Monday.
Inspiring Images
| May 5, 2013 | Posted by Issa under Radical Self-Acceptance |
This post is a bit of a placeholder. There’s a little image gallery for the sidebar, and the images link back here so they are properly credited.
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Wood: Cords and Pounds
| May 3, 2013 | Posted by Issa under Homesteading |
By Joshua Bardwell, originally posted in February 2010 at Jackbooted Liberal.
The truck has started to pay off. Issa and I have brought home two truck-loads of wood, to become firewood for later. The final amount remains to be seen, because it hasn’t been split yet, but I estimate it to be about 2 “ricks”, or about 2/3 of a cord. For perspective, we were paying about $65 a rick for seasoned, ready-to-burn wood, delivered but not stacked. Since we paid about $6,000 for the truck, I figure that means the truck is two-100ths of the way towards paying for itself.
I’d like to take a minute here and express my frustration with non-specific units of measurement. See, a cord of wood is exactly 128 cubic feet of wood. You can give it to me in a 4x4x8 stack, or a 4x2x16 stack, or whatever combination you please, but a cord is a cord. But people never seem to sell wood by the cord. Instead, they sell by the “rick,” at least that’s what they call it here in Tennessee.
A rick is a 4×8 stack. Notice any missing dimensions? That’s right. A rick is 4 by 8 by whatever length the wood is cut to. So a person who cuts the wood to 18″ is giving you a heck of a lot more wood than someone who cuts to more like 14″. And you never know until they deliver the wood, which makes it damn near impossible to comparison shop, which is, in my opinion, why people like to sell by the rick.
I guess in the long run, it probably works out, because most people cut to about the same length, but the engineer in me just hates the lack of precision.
Anyway, the bed of the truck is about 45 cubic feet. A cord of wood is exactly 128 cubic feet, and a rick usually works out to about 1/3 of a cord, or about 42 cubic feet. So the bed of the truck is, conveniently, almost exactly one rick. Ain’t that handy.
I found a place near my house where some trees had been felled for a construction project. They were cut into 2′-4′ long pieces, and laying on the ground. Some of them had already been run through the chipper, so I felt pretty confident nobody would mind me taking them. Issa and I finished filling up the bed of the truck, and she said, “Do you think we’re over the truck’s weight rating?” Well, I hadn’t much thought of it until that very moment.
It turns out, we have a truck stop near our house, so for about $10, we could have figured out exactly what we weighed. Keep this tip in mind if you own a truck and/or a trailer, because you can overload those things really easy and not know it. You don’t have to be a semi to go through the scales. But since I didn’t think of that, we just drove home real slow and tossed the wood off on the ground.
But we’re not the first to have this kind of question, and I found [a] nifty little booklet that contains a table of nominal weights for a cord of various types of wood. The heaviest type of wood is oak, at up to 5500 lbs per cord of green wood. Which means that if we were to pack our truck bed full of oak, it would weigh about 1900 lbs. I think our truck’s payload capacity is about 1700 lbs, so I guess we might have been over-weight, but not by much.
Why is the Self Always Somewhere Else?
| May 1, 2013 | Posted by Issa under Radical Self-Acceptance |
I think this is supposed to sound inspirational. I’m supposed to think, “Yay!” or “Yes!” perhaps.
Here’s what I wonder:
If I need to “find myself”, that means I am not currently myself. Whatever my self is has yet to be discovered. It’s over there or under there or back there. Maybe it’s around here somewhere, but I don’t currently have it. I don’t currently have me. I am not me.
If I need to “create myself”, that means I am not currently myself. Whatever my self is has yet to be created. It’s currently smaller or less colorful or less complete. Maybe it’s a creation almost finished, but it’s not there yet. I’m not myself yet. I am not me.
They sound pretty much the same: I am not myself.
Maybe you would say that it’s about the journey rather than the destination. That the finding or the creating are continual, and that even as I am myself I am always finding or making more of myself.
That sounds really exhausting.
Can I just take a rest here for a moment and be?
Has Heidi Montag’s Plastic Surgery Gone Too Far?
| April 29, 2013 | Posted by Issa under Counter/Culture |
By Joshua Bardwell, originally posted in January 2010 at Jackbooted Liberal.
Oh, checkout-line magazines. What wonderful reflections of popular culture you are. I was in Wal-Mart last night when I noticed the cover of the latest People magazine, which asks:
“Breasts enlarged, chin reduced, nose redone—and she wants more. ‘I’m obsessed,’ says Heidi, 23. But has she gone too far?”
Yes. Has she gone too far? And if she has, I ask, “How would anybody know?” Because we are constantly bombarded by media with the message that we are fundamentally inadequate. For every aspect of the human physical condition, there is a marketer who is willing to define it as an ailment, and a product to be sold as a cure. When we continuously participate in the idea that our bodies are flawed and in need of repair, who are we to point fingers at Heidi and say, “Oh, that’s over the line.” Perhaps Heidi has just internalized the message a little more thoroughly than those who stop at shaving their legs and underarms, bleaching their teeth and skin, tweezing their eyebrows, putting on wrinkle-reducing cream, and dying their hair.
But really, who can blame her? Magazine covers regularly Photoshop already stunningly-beautiful people (link link link link) to further “enhance” them into completely fantastical realms of physical “perfection.” In fact, in some cases, the person is manipulated so dramatically that they are hardly even recognizable as themselves afterwards! Would you have guessed that the two people pictured below are the same person?
Ugly Betty may be “hot,” but I wouldn’t know, because she’s not actually on that magazine cover. So perhaps we can interpret Heidi’s surgery as nothing more than an attempt to “Photoshop” herself in real life like has been done on magazine covers.
As Shakesville points out, discussing Nia Vardalos,
There’s nothing wrong with being a 46-year-old woman, and there’s nothing wrong with looking like a 46-year-old woman. There’s also nothing inherently and objectively unattractive about a 46-year-old woman. Only according to some bullshit beauty standard that expects women never to age is there shame in showing the hard-earned lines of a life fully lived, and only in a vain and immature culture which axiomatically favors youth over experience can there be found justification for dehumanizing Vardalos into a plasticized doll-version of herself and calling that an improvement.
Oh, but the icing on the cake was this other magazine that I found, just across the aisle.
Because, apparently, it’s scanadlous if Heidi gets radical plastic surgery, but if Cher does it, it’s “Wow!”
And the point of all this, dear readers, is that you can’t win. No matter what you do, you will never be beautiful enough to satisfy Media. You will never have bought enough Product and never have done enough Crunches. And if you do somehow manage to pull that off, you’ll just be vilified for over-doing it.
Stop trying to satisfy the tabloid, Hollywood, magazine-stand beauty standard. Be beautiful. Give up. Love yourself. Oh, and by the way, if you are saying, “I do love myself, I just have to lose five more pounds,” or, “I do love myself, except for this hair on my upper lip,” you’re missing the point.
I strongly recommend reading the “Impossible Beauty” series on Shakesville. It’s got over thirty entries, most of which can be accessed from the list at the bottom of this post.
