Feb 15 2010

Figure Skating: A Very Gendered Thing

Many call figure skating a sissy sport, a feminine thing. To the contrary, and to my unrelenting irritation, it is a very gender-inclusive sport, a sport of both sexes, a sport where men must be men and women must be, well, girls.

Consider the costumes. The men usually wear ordinary long pants and a more or less ordinary shirt. The women, on the other hand, with such consistency I suspect an actual rule, show their legs–their whole legs–and almost as much of their upper body as they can get away with. And they always wear that cutesy short little girl skirt. What is it with that? Or they wear a negligée. (Ah. It’s the standard turn-on for sick men: sexy – child.) (Why is child sexy to men? Because child guarantees power over. And that’s what sex is to men–power, not pleasure. Or rather, the power is the pleasure. Probably because they don’t recognize the responsibility of power.) (So even in a sport without frequent legs-wide-apart positions, the woman’s costume would be questionable. But I believe it’s actually a rule–the female skaters must show leg. Like most rules women are expected to follow, this one surely was made by men, for men. As if women exist for men’s viewing pleasure.) Continue reading

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Feb 10 2010

Canterbury’s Law, The Good Wife, etc, etc, etc…

When the pilot episode of Canterbury’s Law aired, I was really annoyed. The main character was an intelligent, powerful woman (a lawyer). Good. Who is shown obsessing over her appearance, albeit grudgingly, wondering whether the color of her suit brings out her eyes. Within the first hour, we also see her going to her husband for comfort and mourning a lost child.

The main character, a man, in Law and Order? I didn’t see the pilot episode, but I’ll bet it didn’t open with him fretting over his tie, and I’ll bet he’s never shown seeking, let alone getting, comfort from his wife, and being a father is not a defining aspect of his character. He’s just a damned good lawyer. Why can’t women just be damned good lawyers?

(Because the men who write the scripts and/or the directors who direct them and/or the producers who fund them are insecure – they can’t be men unless women are women. And being a woman means being a(n aspiring) beauty queen, a wife, and a mother.

Case in point. The Good Wife, The Trophy Wife, The First Wives Club… Why in the 21st century are women still so frequently identified as wives? That is, identified in relation to men?

We don’t see a similar proliferation of tv shows and movies with “husband” in the title. The word is emasculating. It would be especially so if it were in the context of “The Perfect Husband” or “Julia’s Husband” or some such.

Why don’t people see that “wife” is just as bad, just as subordinating?

(They do. That’s why the male writers, directors, and producers use it so often.)

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Feb 09 2010

In Praise of AIDS

These days I’m kinda rootin’ for AIDS, you know?

First, I mean, if we need a ‘die off’, if we need a major decrease in the human population, in order for the planet (the human species included) to survive, well then AIDS gets my vote.

War would do it. But, whether biochemical or nuclear, it would also destroy a lot of the environment. Which kind of defeats the purpose. Furthermore, a lot of innocent people tend to die in wars.

And that’s the problem with major environmental catastrophe, another contender. Sure, a lot more earthquakes or droughts would do it–droughts are especially effective because they can cause mega-famines–but again, lots of innocent people would die.

There are other diseases which, in epidemic proportions, would do the trick. Continue reading

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Jan 19 2010

Garbage

I was walking down the lane the other day and I noticed this piece of litter, looked like the melted bottom of a plastic bottle. I fumed for a bit, angry at whoever had just tossed it there, and planned to pick it up on my way back. To carry it all the way home, where I’d throw it in the garbage, and three weeks later take to the dump. And it suddenly occurred to me: why go to all that trouble just so it could be buried in some arbitrary place six miles away from here, when I could just as easily bury it here?

But it’s not so arbitrary, is it. It’s ‘away from here’, it’s not on the lane I walk on every day, it’s not in my backyard. And I realized then that when city planners started including dumps in their blueprints, we took a seriously wrong turn: with such a word, such a concept, we legitimized NIMBY. So too with words like ‘litter’ and ‘garbage’. What is that but stuff that doesn’t belong here, stuff we don’t want here, here in our back yard. We ‘throw it away’.

And where is ‘away’? Continue reading

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Jan 17 2010

Men’s Precision Teams

Have you ever wondered why there are no men’s precision teams?

Sure, precision skating requires attention to detail and a highly developed spatial sense. But both are surely male capabilities; in fact, aren’t they male superiorities? Isn’t that why (so we’re told) men dominate science and engineering?

And of course, the sport requires skating skill. But countless men–Alexei Yagudin, Elvis Stojko, Kurt Browning, Brian Boitano, to name a few–have proven this to be Y-chromosome-compatible.

Perhaps it’s the degree of cooperation required that’s simply beyond men. Yes, men are capable of cooperation–that’s what team sports are all about. But in hockey, football, basketball, and the like, there’s always room to be a star; there’s always room for grandstanding, for upstaging. In a precision skating team, there’s no room for even the teeniest of egos. (Synchronized swimming–there’s another sport men simply couldn’t handle. There’d be way too many deaths by drowning.)

And yes, men are capable of the timing that cooperation entails. Continue reading

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Jan 13 2010

Countdown to Looking Glass

I highly recommend the movie Countdown to Looking Glass. Through a series of newscasts by a fictional television network (CVN), we see a chain reaction that takes a mere eight days to go from the default by three South American countries on loans from the United States to the detonation of a nuclear weapon in the Persian Gulf.

Eerily, I realized that I watched people watch the media watch the world end. Complete with commercial breaks.

The credible ease with which one thing led to another was nothing less than frightening. It was like dominoes: once the chips are in place, all it takes is a single trigger, and the end is inevitable. Just like the nuclear fission process itself.

But perhaps what was more frightening was that only one television network aired the movie – and it did so at 2:15 a.m. on Christmas Eve. Apparently our real networks are not nearly as committed as the fictional CVN to keeping their viewers aware and informed. Those domino chips are in place.

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Jan 11 2010

Kids Behind the Wheel

The other day, I was walking with my dog on the gravel/dirt road I live on. It’s a back road that might see a dozen cars in a day. As one such car passed us, I noticed that a kid was at the wheel in dad’s lap. Proud dad, happy kid.

What is it with that? Why, of all the adult things, do parents push their kids into that one? Mis-asked the question. It’s not the parents, it’s the dads. And usually, it’s their sons, not their daughters.

Given that men are worse drivers than women (ask the insurance companies – why do you think young males pay such a high premium?), perhaps it makes sense: boys need all the practice they can get. But surely it would be better to take them to a go-cart track.

Proud dad, happy kid. I get the impression it’s not practice. Is it a rite of passage to manhood? Continue reading

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Jan 10 2010

I Don’t Have a Conscience

I’ve always been uncomfortable with the term “conscientious objector” – especially as it is used, to identify those entitled for exclusion from military service (whether in body or in wallet) on the basis of moral principles. I object to military service, on that basis, but I don’t have a conscience.

Phrases such as “Follow your conscience” and “Do what your conscience tells you” suggest that one’s conscience is a fixed sort of thing, an unchanging absolute. Indeed, it often sounds like one’s conscience is innate, something we’re born with. And something quite separate from us, a sort of homonculus, or at least an ‘inner voice’ (the voice of God?). Chomsky may have proven that there are innate structures of language in the human brain, but to date, to my knowledge, no one has proven there are, in the human brain, innate moral principles. Nor, despite a dictionary definition of conscience as “the moral sense of right and wrong”, has such a sixth (?) sense been established.

On the contrary, our ‘conscience’ is acquired: Continue reading

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Jan 10 2010

Arrogance, I think

Fresh from the office of my supervisor who persists in gently giving me unsolicited advice, despite being neither older nor wiser, I’m struck by Rousseau’s tone (in his “Marriage”): “Extreme in all things, they [women] devote themselves to their play with greater zeal than boys. This is the second defect. This zeal must be kept within bounds. It is the cause of several vices peculiar to women, among others the capricious changing of their tastes from day to day. Do not deprive them of mirth, laughter, noise and romping games, but prevent them tiring of one game and turning to another. They must get used to being stopped in the middle of their play and put to other tasks without protest on their part.” I have as much trouble imagining the absolute certainty, the arrogance, required to initiate, let alone sustain, such pontification as I do imagining myself putting an arm around the shoulder of the guy who works in Accounting, and telling him what he should be doing with his life. Even if I were his supervisor. I simply could not go on and on like that, not even to students, nor even to children. Not even at forty.

At least not without the qualifier ‘I think…’, Continue reading

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Jan 09 2010

Impoverished Scientists

To read the science journals, one would think animal life consists of nothing but predation and reproduction, both thoroughly competitive in nature. The absence of any capacity for pleasure, or at least for non-competitive pleasure, is frightening. Lining a nest with warm and soft material is not for comfort, but to “increase the survival rate of offspring” and arranging for others to watch the baby during long and deep dives is not from affection but to “maximize reproductive success”.

This is of concern for two reasons. First, to judge by my own life and that of the dog with whom I live, that view is, to say the least, narrow and thus incomplete.

Second, what does it reveal of the scientists? Continue reading

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