Psyche's Lamp

Please Consult Wikipedia Before Hitting Publish

2009-10-27T19:40:00.000-07:00

It saves you from looking like a complete idiot. Like this Randall Parker post I'm going to charitably call "speculative", asserting that "the 20th century was a relatively mild, wet, and calm century as compared to the 19th century" on the basis of it having fewer earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and no massive solar storm.

Only, Wikipedia provides a handy list of historical earthquakes, and 20th century earthquakes, which tells us that the 19th century saw 16 earthquakes measured with an (estimated) magnitude above 7.5 on the Richter scale and 9 above 8, while the 20th century saw 51 earthquakes above 7.5, with 25 above 8.

Oops.

Obviously, there was not a threefold increase in earthquakes from the 19th to the 20th century - this is an artifact of better record collection. Nevertheless, to claim that the 20th century didn't show us how devastating earthquakes could be in densely populated areas is particularly laughable in the light of this, this, this, and this, to pick out just a few examples.

Heartbreaking

2009-10-27T11:55:00.000-07:00

What's hardest to read in this New York Times article on teenage runaways who end up working as prostitutes is that many of them seem genuinely to view selling sex under the aegis of abusive and controlling pimps as a step up from their previous living situation. Why is this not the real scandal - the terrible lack of options faced by children in abusive or dysfunctional families, such that their only choices are hellish group homes or employment in the black market?

This bit was pretty disgusting too:

Previously, said Sgt. Byron A. Fassett, who leads the department’s effort, girls working as prostitutes were handled as perpetrators rather than sexual assault victims. If a 45-year-old man had sex with a 14-year-old girl and no money changed hands, she was likely to get counseling and he was likely to get jail time for statutory rape, Sergeant Fassett said. If the same man left $80 on the table after having sex with her, she would probably be locked up for prostitution and he would probably go home with a fine as a john.

Ironic that opponents of legalization point to underage trafficking as an argument in favor of the current regime, when in fact it was de facto decriminalization that allowed the Dallas task force profiled to actually help girls and arrest pimps.

Not that I think legalization would actually solve all, or even many, of the problems these girls are facing, but it would at least make their least bad option slightly less bad.

Thoughts on Monogamy II

2008-06-27T20:16:00.000-07:00

If anybody'd offered to pay me to write a cover story on marriage and infidelity for a glossy weekly magazine (Hi New York! Feel free to send your offer to psycheslamp at gmail dot com) these are some of the ideas I might have developed.

1. There are two distinct types of wounds inflicted by infidelity. The first is the private one involving deception and broken vows. The second is a public one. The cheated-upon spouse becomes a figure of pity, their charms and shortcomings (real or imagined) held up to public scrutiny. At best, the cheated-upon is a dupe, at worst, their successful manhood or womanhood is disputed. Even the most sympathetic reactions still assert the legitimacy of judgment. "I can't believe he'd cheat on her - she's so beautiful and accomplished" is as patronizing as Obama's much-dissected "You're likable enough" gaffe.

Divorce is currently the primary culturally-sanctioned method for the cheated-upon spouse to regain their social dignity. Forgiveness, acceptance or just plain old resignation are all socially constructed as weak and humiliating. This strikes me as a deeply unfortunate dynamic.

2. For all of the insistence on our Christian heritage, how come the virtue of forgiveness gets such short shrift? Christianity without forgiveness is like hanging Bach's Art of Fugue in an art museum to admire the symmetry of the notes on the page. How one is supposed to maintain a relationship for three weeks, let alone thirty years, without cultivating forgiveness is absolutely beyond me. And that includes the capacity to forgive infidelity.

3. The hardest part of a polyamorous relationship? Resisting the urge to say very nasty things to people who insinuate that non-monogamy is incompatible with real love. Who says such a things? Pretty much everyone who is monogamous. This, I believe, is why polyamory remains uncommon...not the jealousy, not the fear of being compared to another lover, not the difficulty of juggling multiple relationships. It's the ubiquitous voices insisting that the only true love is an exclusive love. How do you disprove this? How do you know, for absolutely certain, that there isn't some deeper connection, some more passionate level of sexuality, some more complete intimacy, that you could be having if only you were with someone else?

But really, how do you know with any relationship that there isn't something better out there?

4. I have a hard time understanding jealousy because I've never felt it with any particular strength. However, I would identify three separate aspects of jealousy: the sense of anger that someone else has taken something (time, affection, attention) that should have been yours, the sense of contamination that the thing you once had has become less valuable because someone else has used it, and the sense of fear that you are in danger of losing something that you value. I would argue that only the second of these three reactions is incapable of being addressed through some sort of rational reassurance. I would also argue that this second reaction is a demeaning, dehumanizing way of looking at one's partner that should be discouraged in all cases.

Small Victories Should be Celebrated

2008-06-26T10:48:00.000-07:00

Like using all the vegetables in last week's CSA share. Including the turnip greens that came attached to the turnips. My German immigrant great-grandmother would be so proud of me. (And my mother, who left the farm for college and never looked back, is rather bemused that her daughter both lives on a block with a population many times greater than that of the entire town in which she grew up and goes to such great lengths to recreate the experience of feeding a family from the kitchen garden because there will be no spare cash for food until the harvest comes in. Except, you know, for the aged sherry vinegar. And the imported Parmigiano-Reggiano.)

Another small victory: posting something here three days in a row. I'll see if I can keep this up.

Bait and Switch

2008-06-25T08:59:00.000-07:00

I confess I'm uncertain why University of Chicago faculty are complaining that a Milton Friedman Institute could bolster the perception that the University of Chicago is a conservative institution. Don't they realize just how useful this little misunderstanding is in luring in the sort of smart, unsuspecting young conservatives that might otherwise be heading off to some place like Hillsdale? Instead, they arrive at the University of Chicago, and lulled by all the Plato and Aristotle their first year, they find themselves reconsidering some of their assumptions before they realize they're living in a nest of (gasp!) liberals.

So really, shoring up the reputation of the University of Chicago as a conservative bastion is a good thing, especially since people seem to be catching on to the fact that the reputation is really built on the basis of a few prominent exceptions (hi, Leon Kass) rather than an institutional mindset.

But in all seriousness, what the University of Chicago as an institution does try, and more often than not succeed, at getting right is a general attitude that "liberal" and "conservative" (at least in the narrow, political sense) are not the appropriate labels by which to build a university program, despite efforts from students and faculty on both sides of the political spectrum to convince them otherwise.

Thoughts on Monogamy

2008-06-24T09:12:00.000-07:00

I really think that after the hysteria of the late nineties regarding divorce rates and single-parent families, and with gay marriage being much on people's minds (go California!), there is something of a cultural moment currently happening around marriage - what it means, why people marry, and what constitutes a good marriage all seem to be open to discussion, both privately among couples, and publicly in the media.

Which is good, I believe, but then I read articles like this piece in New York Magazine, and wonder how we can possibly have a productive marriage moment, culturally, without first having a productive feminist moment. Because while the article purports to be a bit of a fearless examination of "the troubles with sex and marriage" doesn't seem to amount to much, in the end, beyond an unexamined assertion of male privilege.

Start, for instance, with the title: "The Affairs of Men". Immediately, the article has committed itself to telling the traditional story. Men cheat. Specifically, men cheat either because their wives don't provide the sex they need or because, as men, they simply crave variety. Men have needs, but women just aren't that into sex. When the author is pushed by a therapist to question this paradigm - to consider the "sexless" woman as something other than a natural inevitability - the author immediately shuts down this line of inquiry because it makes him feel guilty.

Braverman was impatient with the idea that the marriage couldn’t fulfill this man’s needs. “What does it mean that she’s not interested? How long has she not been interested? We know that age does not end sexual arousal or interest, we know that’s a myth. Was there some argument about something else, feelings hurt? What happened? Did one person feel abandoned?”

I felt that Braverman was missing the point, and making me feel guilty to boot. It was the old male-female morality play.

By "old male-female morality play" I think the author means that men assert needs and then women try to block them from acting upon them. Which is ironic, because what's actually going on here is that women are asserting needs, and a man is denying any responsibility to consider them, let alone try to meet them. The word I'd use is patriarchy, but I suppose that would probably make the author feel guilty as well.

What follows is what you'd expect for such an article...some evolutionary psychology, some musings on porn, a long, fanboyesque meditation on prostitutes, and some insistence that no, really, men are actually the weaker sex.

He and I love our wives and depend on them. In each of our cases, they make our homes, manage our social calendar, bind up our wounds and finish our thoughts, and are stitched into our extended families more intimately than we are. They seem emotionally better equipped than we are. If my marriage broke up, my wife could easily move in with a sister. I’d be as lost as plankton.

The author seems to see this as an example of female power. If that's the case, please can I be powerless like the men the author encounters? I want a wife to cook and clean and take care of my children, be my social secretary, provide endless emotional support, and take care of all those pesky family obligations for me. Cause really...I'll totally let any man in my life have that "power".

And while on the the subject of power, well, I'll just quote the article:

One man told me that when his wife wasn’t available, he snuck out to massage parlors in a “primal state” or watched porn. He felt no compunction about this; it was part of the never-ending battle of the sexes.

“Porn captures these women [its performers] before they get smart,” he said in a hot whisper as we sat in Schiller’s Liquor Bar on the Lower East Side. Porn exploited the sexual desires, and naïveté, of women in their early twenties, he went on, but older women had come to terms with that. “The most one can expect is that women will cede that area, in porn, a period when you can observe us before we have power, because it ain’t going to happen again.”

And men wonder why women mistrust porn?

What makes this a particularly frustrating article is that the author makes a series of tantalizing feints towards a more complex picture of marriage and cheating. For example, he recognizes that female infidelity is viewed differently than male infidelity, but then fails to consider the effects that those social pressures might have on marriage. He admits that male infidelity is not actually biologically hardwired, but nevertheless still views it as fixed. He acknowledges the existence of polyamorous relationships, but consigns them to the purview of those with abnormally high sex drives. He recognizes that the "European" model of marriage carries its own flaws, acknowledges that many people have actually spent a great deal of time considering the question of marriage and sexual passion (but then dismisses their work as "chick lit").

After all his research, the author describes a conversation with his wife.

When I got back from the Kinsey Institute, I told my wife all about the evolutionary data and Erick Janssen’s questionnaire, and she got agitated. “Okay. Let’s have an open marriage. And I have to be out Wednesday night.”

I said, No thanks.

This picture of marriage reminds me of nothing more than the cold-war nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, where nuclear holocaust is replaced by the threat of infidelity. What's dreamed of is not so much a new paradigm of marriage, but a return to an older one, when men cheated with impunity and women accepted this as their lot in life. But since that's unlikely to happen, the best that can be achieved is this uneasy truce...I won't so you won't.

God, how depressing.

I Have No Words

2008-06-13T06:52:00.000-07:00

Article Title: Media Charged With Sexism in Clinton Coverage

Picture accompanying article:

Vacation

2008-05-18T15:32:00.000-07:00

Which is both what I got back from, and where my creative energy has been for the past month or so (though really, it would probably be more accurate to say "in hiding" than "on vacation" with respect to the latter.) April was the sort of month that can't seem to end quickly enough, no matter that you're always behind.

Quebec City, however, was much better than April. Pretty, quiet, comfortable, and tasty - especially Restaurant Toast which was conveniently located in our hotel.

Hopefully, now that I'm back, all that creative energy will come back at well (and while this is a superlatively dull description of my vacation, frankly I figure any blog post represents positive progress).

History Geekery

2008-04-28T20:30:00.000-07:00

This reminded me of my first college medieval history class, particularly Bernard of Clairvaux and his sermons on the Song of Songs.

The sermons are an allegorical reading of the Song of Songs, inspired by Paul's metaphor of the Church as the bride of Christ. It's a truly odd combination for modern sensibilities...deeply erotic gestures reinterpreted as metaphors for spiritual virtues. Reading Bernard of Clairvaux was one of the experiences that convinced me that the past was both a lot weirder and a whole lot more interesting than I'd ever suspected.

Then, not long after, I encountered this book which caused a minor stir in certain pretentious Christian circles at about the same time. The author claimed that Bernard's use of passionate bridal imagery had irredeemably pussified the Christian Church, such that the reason there were no "masculine" men in the pews on Sunday morning was because this one metaphor had become so powerful over time that being Christian was now practically synonymous with being teh gay, so this is why women could never be ordained. Because it was bad enough having to imagine taking it for Jesus, but if one had to listen to women in positions of authority as well, no real man would ever darken a church door again. (I'd like to say that I exaggerate here, but really, I don't.)

The problem, of course, with this whole silly theory (or, I should say, a problem, since they are legion) is that the best historical evidence suggests that Christianity from its inception was more attractive to women than men, since it spoke particularly to those lacking in power in the here and now. In fact, there's a trope in accounts of early Roman female martyrs of these women undergoing a masculinization process...rejecting their children in favor of martyrdom, then being described (often in accounts in the first person voice) taking on the armor of a warrior to go out and die for their faith. But as Christianity became increasingly intertwined with secular authority, these radical voices became less favored and those that supported existing gender roles much more so. (Though it's also worth noting that the medieval church harbored a much greater diversity of voices than it is often credited with doing.)

But no history is so weird nor so interesting than someone can't find a way to misread it - especially in a manner hurtful to women. Maybe I should take to calling that Psyche's Law.

Books that Got Away

2008-03-31T19:43:00.000-07:00

I love Belle Lettre's post on "the book that got away" - that book that you started reading but could never quite finish. Belle mentions The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, which made me want to read it again (I adore Ishiguro, and I have a special fondness for the utterly strange, utterly frustrating Unconsoled). But evidently, The Unconsoled is also my "book that got away" in the literal, rather than figurative sense, because my copy is nowhere to be found. (Any of you have it, incidentally?)

But I very much sympathize with the concept of the book that got away, because I'm rather irrationally obsessive about finishing books that I start, so the ones that I don't finish nag at me for years as well. Anna Karenina I put aside because it just isn't suited for subway reading, and never quite got around to picking it back up. Notes from the Underground, even though I really want to like it, I actually find awful and tedious - but I remain convinced (why, I have no idea) that if I just finish the thing depths will be revealed that will speak meaningfully to me. Or if not depths, perhaps acceptance that my Dostoyevsky moment has passed.

Strangest, perhaps, of my books that got away are The Savage Detectives and The People's Act of Love. Both of these books I enjoyed immensely, yet nevertheless quit reading about halfway through. I wonder if I felt they were somehow too good to finish - that I was becoming so caught up in them, I couldn't bear the inevitable loss that would come when I finally reached the end. Better, perhaps, to leave them out there as possibilities, the title and page number resting permanently on my to-do list as though I'd just stepped away from them for a bit.

Noted in the City

2008-03-31T19:33:00.000-07:00

Reading the news crawl playing on the TV screen city cabs are now required to have, I would say that a good two out of three of the headlines dealt with criminal activity and/or serious bodily injury. I certainly understand the urge to scare off the tourists, but I thought New York was all about the warm and cuddly image nowadays...

Too Many Loraxes (or Why I am Deeply Dubious about Everyone's Health Care Plan)

2008-03-27T22:02:00.000-07:00

M. LeBlanc posts an observation on how many more medications are available without a prescription in France than in the US at Bitch Ph.D.'s blog, and the resulting comments thread is, I think, a good illustration of why health care debates in this country tend to be so unproductive.

The discussion starts off wondering if Big Pharma's money isn't responsible for the various roadblocks that exist to getting access to basic medications like antibiotics and birth control pills. A bit into the comments, somebody suggests that doctors are responsible, as they obviously make money being gatekeepers for prescription drugs. Then, somebody shows up to explain the pharmacists' interests, and somebody else defends doctors and blames trial lawyers.

The problem is that all of these groups - doctors, lawyers, drug companies, pharmacists, regulators, even insurance companies - all claim to be speaking on behalf of the interests of consumers, but nowhere in the process do you get much in the way of actual consumers speaking on behalf of consumers.

It's not that I think any of these groups are ill-intentioned, necessarily (though I am extrordinarily dubious about insurance companies). I suspect that even at big pharma, the majority of employees are proud of and motivated by making drugs that help sick people become healthier. It's just that they all have a strong tendency to see the consumers' i nterest most clearly where it intersects with their own.

Now, obviously, experts are experts for a reason, and I don't think all of health care policy should be put up for popular referendum. But it seems to me that something like how to organize access to commonly used medications would be a good issue to put to the general public, because there's obviously a lot of workable middle ground between some sort of completely unregulated libertarian utopia, and our current regime where doctors are the only gatekeepers for most all the good stuff.

But instead, we find ourselves playing the "guess which interest group is responsible for this silly state of affairs" with regard to our medical system, and the thing is, nobody's health care plan involves a strategy to decrease interest group influence. Instead, they all involve making sure everyone gets enough of the pie to keep them from torpedoing the plan, making sure that the squabbling will continue unabated and consumers' interests will continue to get drowned out in the shuffle.

But this article in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine about a website that encourages people to share their detailed experiences treating their serious, chronic diseases offers an interesting model for one way that people can educate themselves about their health problems, and take a more participatory approach towards their treatment. And also, perhaps eventually a way to involve more consumer voices in the debate on health care policy?

Grouch, Grouch

2008-03-27T20:01:00.000-07:00

The Kirov Ballet is coming to New York in April and, aside from several all-Forsythe evenings, the program is about as exciting as warm milk - without even a single full-length classical or modern work. Now that a major international company should tour with a program devoted entirely to a living artist (an another evening devoted to an artist who was alive within my lifetime) says worlds about why the ballet world is healthier than that of, say, opera. But this trend towards excerpting full-length dramatic works irks me, in large part because what tends to get lost is the drama - leaving just the pretty costumes and virtuosity.

For instance, the fourth act of La Bayadere (one of the excerpts on the program) is supposed to represent the guilt-ridden opium dream of a man who has inadvertently driven his true love to her death. In context, the 32 identically-dressed women dancing in perfect unison represent some of the best choreography written ever for the corps de ballet, but they're also really, really creepy - 32 copies of his lost love come to haunt his dreams, and no way to identify the real one. Out of context, the whole thing plays like a courtship, not the ghostly reproduction of one that it's supposed to be.

I wish people would take the grand romantic and classical ballets a bit more seriously, all together. Yes, they're sometimes rather mannered, but there's an incredibly rich vocabulary of emotion and symbolism there for anyone who cared to mine it a bit more carefully.

Spring? Perhaps? Finally?

2008-03-23T14:08:00.000-07:00

This weekend I spotted the first blooming things of the season - a few shivering daffodils, and several patches of pale purple crocuses. Though the weather is still chilly and windy and the trees resolutely bare, at least the clouds and rain have stayed away for several days in a row. I am contemplating expressing a belief in spring, but those few delicate, valiant blossoms still seem so vulnerable to attacking snow flurries or freezing rains.

It's more than the end of gray skies, bare trees, and dead grass that I'm craving. I want it to be warm. I want the freedom to walk outside without a coat and scarf and umbrella. I want to ride my bike to the library on a whim, take my Sunday cup of tea to drink on a bench in the park at the end of the street, stroll at sunset along the river without hunching my shoulders against the wind. So many times this month I've said, "As soon as it's warm, I will." Always soon, it seems, never now.

My mother's yard is awash in blooming things: the apple tree, plum trees, bottlebrush, camellias, pansies, poppies, marguerites, azaleas, even the gladiolas have joined the general exuberance, despite being very out of season.

March is always when I miss California the most.

Last Spitzer Post, I Promise

2008-03-15T17:34:00.000-07:00

So I was going to write something about how despite all the online discussions about whether Silda Wall Spitzer is hot or not, nobody seems to find it relevant that Eliot Spitzer is balding and has features kind of like a gargoyle. Then I came across this New York Times article which is just...well...here:

The latest model is the familial crisis facing Silda Wall Spitzer, corporate lawyer, mother of three daughters and, most pointedly, wife of Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who resigned after revelations that he had been paying for prostitutes. In conversations and throughout the blogosphere, wives at great remove have imagined what they would do if they were in her shoes, even as they hastened to add that those shoes would never, ever fit.

Except, of course, for those rueful, former Cinderellas who know better.

I love the way that Eliot Spitzer's infidelity turns into Silda Spitzer's familial crisis. It's one of those framings that masquerades as choice and empowerment (now she gets to choose if she stays or leaves) but is really about work. The Times article goes on to describe various strategies for dealing with infidelty, but the common theme is that it's the wife's job to figure out where the marriage is going to go from there. Husbands, the article seems to say, are like kids who break a glass to get out of washing the dishes. "Oops! I broke our vows here, honey. You better take care of the marriage from now on."

Throughout the article, it's the woman who does the forgiving, initiates counseling, explains to the kids what's happening, starts divorce proceedings, and of course, is left caring for the kids alone when the marriage goes belly-up. Which is, of course, only reflecting the division of labor society still universally enforces. Even those outlets with enough reticence to avoid saying it's her fault for failing to keep him satisfied, it's still unquestioningly her mess to clean up.

(And, gotta love the extra dose of fearmongering the Times throws in to the whole brew as well. You may think you man would never cheat, but how can you ever be sure, huh?)

And This is Supposed to be a Defense?

2008-03-15T17:32:00.000-07:00

This article in Slate purports to be a defense of Eliot Spitzer, but it nevertheless manages to encapsulate everything I found dubious about his approach. The key quote:

Many of those who ran afoul of Spitzer failed what I call the Parents' Night Test. Even if certain practices are commonly accepted in your industry or circle of friends (like going to strip joints) and are plausibly legal—or clearly illegal but rarely prosecuted (like running an NCAA betting pool in the office)—would describing these practices to your kid's kindergarten teacher embarrass you and your spouse, cause other parents to place junior on the no-play-date list, and spur the headmaster to rue the day he accepted your child?

If someone stood up at a Parent's Night I attended and announced which of the fathers (or mothers - let's not be heteronormative) had been seen in a strip club in the past year, I wouldn't applaud. I'd launch a suburban-style Stop Snitchin' campaign. Spitzer's campaign is not as obviously appalling since corporate privacy means something different than individual privacy, but there are still several issues with Spitzer's approach.

It's one thing to shame people for unethical but not illegal. It's another to use the threat of an expensive lawsuit to extort an expensive settlement for this sort of behavior. Government prosecutors exist to prosecute crimes, not arbitrate reputations.

While it's tempting to applaud Spitzer's hard-edged "we'll bury you under legal bills, even if we don't really think we can win our case" approach when it's aimed at companies like Merrill Lynch, the most common application of this sort of tactic is by large companies against much smaller ones, with chilling effects in areas such as fair use and patent law. I'm highly dubious that normalizing bullying - even if one claims to only bully other bullies - is the best way to help out the rest of us.

Obligatory Comments on Scandal du Jour

2008-03-12T18:17:00.000-07:00

Blah blah blah Eliot Spitzer blah prostitute blah scandal blah blah hypocrisy blah blah victimless crime private matter blah blah blah.

All that said, how entitled do you have to be to be to a) frequent high-priced escorts b) as a governor of New York c) whose marquee accomplishment in the office to date has been the acquisition of a number of high profile and powerful enemies d) and who built his career on the public exposure and humiliation of those he opposed e) including others who frequented high-priced escorts and f) engaged in the sort of financial shennanigans he himself used in an attempt to cover up his predilection and g) nevertheless think something this juicy will stay secret?

And, is it incoherent for me to think this says something not particularly flattering about his character that could perhaps be relevant to his qualifications to hold the governorship, even though in an ideal world I think this ought to have remained something for he and his wife to work out, privately? (Of course, in my ideal world, there wouldn't be the stink of hypocrisy about the whole thing since prostitution wouldn't be a matter for the criminal courts in the first place.)

Nullify

2008-03-11T19:05:00.000-07:00

I haven't seen the final season of The Wire yet (I watch the TV series as it comes out on DVD) but I've found the first four seasons,besides saying a number of painful things about class in America, present the most compelling argument against our current drug prohibition regime I've ever encountered. And, the show does all this while being fantastic entertainment - a suspenseful police procedural overlaid with pitch-black gallows humor and enough tragic hubris to launch a dozen wailing Greek choruses. Now, the creators of The Wire have come out advocating jury nullification as a weapon to fight against the war on drugs.

While I recognize that jury nullification has had a troubled history (to say the least), I'm still incredibly pleased to see them take this stand. Of course, other commenters have pointed out that jury nullification isn't as simple as refusing to convict...many jurisdictions eliminate potential nullifiers in voire dire and committing perjury goes beyond nullification (though certainly one can argue, and I would agree, that it could still be justified). Nevertheless, even though the article doesn't go as far as suborning perjury, I think it does point out that citizens are not sheep, nor are individual actions meaningless.

Radley Balko suggested that laws making jury nullification explicit are a key first step in the fight against the War on Drugs, but frankly I think we'll see heroin sold by Walgreens before we'll see legislatures endorse jury nullification. While there are certainly more robust theoretical justifications for enforcing and obeying laws with which one disagrees, I believe the most common vulgar rationalization tends to follow a basic line of "I agree to respect the body of laws in its totality because I wish others to follow laws with which they disagree but I support." According to the common understanding, jury nullification violates this basic contract - I certainly believe jury nullification can be just, but I don't see how a legal system that includes the ability to selectively decline to enforce laws with which one disagrees can be perceived as fair by the majority of participants.

Waiting...Hoping...

2008-03-04T22:08:00.000-08:00

Endlessly clicking "refresh" on the results page is failing to make the Texas and Ohio vote counting go any faster, so I've collected some of my favorite recent links regarding Obama.

From Edge of the American West, quoting Obama advisor Samantha Power:

He’s acutely conscious of the loss of US standing in the world...and the need to recover it in a hurry, so first acts will be closing Guantanamo, renouncing torture etc., and trying to embed ourselves again back in the international system.

From Timothy Burke:

...this is very much how I understand some of Obama’s emphasis on bipartisanship. Not as centrism, but as a desire to reconstruct processes of consultation, to remove politics as much as possible from those aspects of governance that need to at least strive for neutrality, to firewall off partisan calculation from ordinary administrative work.

From Verbal Privilege

As appalling as our current domestic political shortcomings are, I cannot grant them the same moral weight as the terrible impact of American foreign policy—above all, the war in Iraq and the so-called war on terror—on people who have no voice in the democratic process in this country.

This is the first election I can remember where I've actively rooted for a presidential candidate, rather than simply against one of their opponents. After nearly seven years of feeling helpless and discouraged by the direction our country has taken - our willingness to spy on, lock up, torture, and kill in a misguided quest for security - I finally feel, yes, hopeful that we can change our course, and motivated to go out and fight for that change.

Currently, Obama is barely hanging on to a lead in Texas. Here's hoping it sticks...

Kids These Days?

2008-02-28T01:03:00.000-08:00

Evidently, today's high schoolers know as little about history and literature as yesterday's high schoolers, which is to say, not very much at all. According to a new survey reported on by the New York Times:

The survey results, released on Tuesday, demonstrate that a significant proportion of teenagers live in “stunning ignorance” of history and literature, said the group that commissioned it, Common Core.

Incidentally, is it really "stunning ignorance" any more? I mean, these sort of surveys have been coming out on a regular basis ever since I was old enough to read the paper, I would think that in nearly two decades (at least!) we would all have gotten over being stunned. But then perhaps there are groups of people who are uniquely susceptible to stunning, since I would assume that anyone engaged professionally in wringing their hands over the ignorance of youth would also be aware of the tragic devolution of the English language brought about as once-emphatic adjectives slowly become commonplace through overuse, and would certainly not want to contribute to such a trend.

Now, I am certainly all for preserving our shared tradition of history and literature but... but... 25% of students think that Columbus sailed sometime after 1750, 6 in 10 can't identify Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and only 50% know Job is known for patience? How many potential Jeopardy champs does this country really need?

The thing that makes surveys such as these particularly unhelpful is that we all know that our school system is doing a subpar job of delivering education. Or, to be more specific, a few public school systems effectively deliver a comprehensive education to most of their students while many more are manifest failures at this task. What new information does this study provide as to the state of education in the United States? None, that I can particularly see.

What She Said

2008-02-21T17:14:00.000-08:00

Mistress Matisse on settling (previously discussed here):

So marrying someone just because he's a nice guy and you're tired of dating is a mistake. However, Ms. Gottlieb goes beyond that, suggesting that women should abandon the idea of passionate love altogether, and view ourselves as mere wombs that need subsidizing, and men as stud animals with paychecks. It's a repulsive notion—a variety of sex work that is truly contemptible. It makes a lie out of two people's whole lives. More than two, if you have kids.

Megan on everything, but especially:

I can have extravagant, promiscuous, incredibly good sex before marriage, with whomever I choose AND have a wonderful life in all respects. I can be thoroughly loved by a man I love outrageously, NO MATTER WHAT SEX I HAVE before that relationship. Me and my adored can also have fantastic sex and make arrangements with each other for unconventional forms of sex and still have a loving and supportive relationship. I CAN HAVE SO MUCH GOOD SEX and never be punished for it in any form. Yep. I can have all sorts of crazy kinds of sex and be a great engineer and have a good job and have friends and family adore me and never ever suffer for AS MUCH SEX AS I WANT TO HAVE. Lots of conscientious fun sex, with whomever I want, and NO BAD CONSEQUENCES. Even though I am a woman. Having sex.

Boys, boys, boys

2008-02-21T16:51:00.000-08:00

This thread on Feministe about ways to deal with lingering sexism in otherwise rational men is absolutely fantastic any woman who sleeps with, works with, or even occasionally talks with men. My advice, gleaned from trial and (lots and lots of) error with my generally fantastic but occasionally jaw-droppingly outrageous boyfriend, is below.

1. Nobody (especially men) wants to lose an argument, admit they're wrong, or change their mind. But learning something new, discovering a different perspective, or having a great insight are all things everyone likes to do. I tend to want to go in to a discussion guns blazing and call him out on his shit, but this tends to make my boyfriend, at least, more likely to defend his position. Anything that can avoid framing what we're doing as arguing makes him more receptive to what I'm saying. Especially jokes. Jokes are fantastic because he can "jokingly" acknowledge a mistake without it becoming a big deal.

2. Once you've started your not-argument, listen to how he responds. And take what he says seriously. A lot of the really sexist bullshit men spew is coming from real fears and anxieties, albeit ones that are often stroked by the media and society all out of proportion. (For instance, I know men who are legitimately afraid that they'll be falsely accused of sexual harassment or rape, and have their lives ruined by the accusation.) Suggest ways that these anxieties can be addressed without trivializing women's needs and women's experiences.

3. Patriarchy hurts men too. I've made lots of progress with my boyfriend by pointing out things like poor paternity leave policies, or male-on-male bullying and how they're part of the patriarchy as well.

4. Patriarchy hurts men part II. I recognize that some of the sexist crap my boyfriend spews is the male equivalent of lipstick - what he does to get along in a patriarchal society (like sexist remarks with his buddies) and tend to be inclined to either let that pass, or call him on it privately. His anxieties about his masculinity and his place in the patriarchal hierarchy are real and have real consequences, and suck in their own way as much as ones about femininity.

5. Always remember that while he may occasionally say sexist things, he's not a sexist person. The line "That sounds really sexist, but I don't think you meant it that way. Can you explain further?" helps to start a discussion, not an argument (see point 1).

Saving Family Farms with Yummy Butter

2008-02-20T15:12:00.000-08:00

This article in the New York Times was particularly relevant for me because my mother grew up on a dairy farm in Central Wisconsin. My grandparents sold their cows when I was still quite young, but one of my aunts had her herd until several years ago, and one of my cousins married a farmer and still lives on a farm. Which is to say that the challenges dairy farmers face are quite personal to me, even apart from my desire to consume fantastic butter and yummy cheese.

On the one hand, I'm really happy about a lot of the trends in this article, but on the other hand, I'm worried that this will be too little, too late to save the sort of farming communities where my mother grew up. Specifically, while most of the affluent consumers who will happily pay a premium for local, handmade dairy products are concentrated on the coasts, most of the farming communities that are deeply hurting are in the midwest, far from the potential markets from their products.

On Romance

2008-02-14T08:05:00.000-08:00

Who at The Atlantic thinks that articles like this discussion of settling - where the author acknowledges that our culture has created an unhelpful panic around certain issues, then proceeds to engage in said panic for several thousand words (c.f. everything written by Caitlin Flannigan) - are either interesting or helpful? In this particular piece, the author's central claim seems to be that for a woman of a certain age, being married to anyone is better than being married to no one.

What depresses me most about this article isn't the gender essentialism on display in statements such as:

Of course, we’d be loath to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).

Nor is it the vague wave at the degree to which the whole notion of "settling" is gendered in our society, before rushing into the comforting embrace of "everyone else is doing it" (though there's a whole different post I could write about both the warnings to "uppity women" and the deep contempt for men on display in this article):

I’ll be the first to admit that there’s something objectionable about making the case for settling, because it’s based on the premise that women’s biological clocks place them at the mercy of men, and that therefore a power dynamic dictates what should be an affair solely of the heart (not the heart and the ovaries). But I’m not the only woman who accepts settling as a valid choice—apparently so do the millions who buy bestselling relationship books that advocate settling but that, so as not to offend, simply spin the concept as a form of female empowerment.

What really depresses me is the view of romance on display throughout the article that seems to be all about avoiding dealbreakers. She writes:

Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics...Some guys aren’t worldly, but they’d make great dads. Or you walk into a room and start talking to this person who is 5'4" and has an unfortunate nose, but he “gets” you.

There's no sense anywhere in her article that there's a vast difference between giving up hope for passion and connection, and being willing to overlook annoying habits and less-than-perfect looks. Is the author conflating the two to add legitimacy to her argument for settling, by claiming most everyone does this to some degree or another? Or are there people out there who genuinely find what I'd perceive as trivial differences to be insuperable barriers to passion or connection?

Perhaps this is as much about the stories we tell ourselves as about realities. I could construct a narrative of settling for my current boyfriend, (he may be short, but at least he does the dishes) but it just wouldn't make any sense to me. What do minor imperfections matter when weighed against all the wonderful things he brings to my life? In which case, an article extolling the beauties of lowered expectations is only going to encourage people to think about normal trade-offs in rather dire terms. Hardly what I'd call a positive contribution to human flourishing.

It's a common trope of fairy tales and love stories that your grand passion comes to you in the form you least expect it (the son of your worst enemy, a scullery maid, a beast). Overweight and balding may lack a certain panache, but it's no repudiation of romance to fall in love with someone who fits that description. Or if it is, that's a romantic ideal I'd be happy to repudiate.

The moral is supposed to be “Don’t be too picky” but many of the anecdotes quote women who seem to be trying to convince not just the reader, but themselves, that they haven’t settled.
“I should be with some guy with a vast vocabulary who is very smart,” said Heather, a 30-year-old lawyer turned journalist. Instead, she’s dating an actor who didn’t finish college. “My boyfriend is fun, he’s smart, but he hasn’t gone through years of school. He wanted to pursue acting. And you can tell—he doesn’t have that background, and it never ever once bothered me. But for everyone else, [his lack of education] is what they see.” Another woman says she dates “the ‘secrets’ … guys other women don’t recognize as great.” How’s that for damning praise?

Your husband has imperfections but you're happy nonetheless? Congratulations! You've talked yourself into settling.

Bah, I say.

Why Psyche's Lamp?

2008-02-11T01:29:00.000-08:00

In Greek mythology, Psyche was a very beautiful mortal woman with whom Cupid had fallen in love. However, to disguise his identity, he only came to her in the dark of night. Eventually, Psyche's curiosity overcame her, and she surprised her mystery lover with a lamp, despite warnings that if she did so, he would leave her forever. I've always identified with Psyche and her curiosity.

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