FeminismIsFree!

This is Slate’s series of articles, structured as back-and-forth letters between a group of conservative “thinkers,” that began the day after Election Day and ran through the following Friday. I found it rather fascinating, in the sense that giant, close-up pictures of bugs fascinate me.

Just in case you haven’t read it, and don’t have time to wade through all fourteen full-length pages of it, I have summarized the meat of each entry below:

Jim Manzi, chairman of an applied artificial-intelligence software company and contributing editor of National Review: It’s finally happened. The middle class has figured out that voting Republican is voting against their own economic interests. The Reagan mantra appears to be losing its hypnotic effect. We must find a new chant to bamboozle them with. Hey, I know–let’s resegregate public schools, start shooting illegal immigrants on sight and concentrate on recruiting the whitest foreign nationals we can find to fill our immigration quotas instead!

Douglas Kmiec, a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University: Barack Obama is Ronald Reagan reborn. Also, could we stop obsessing about abortion?

Ross Douthat, author of Grand New Party and a blogger for the Atlantic: No.

Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey and author of It’s My Party, Too: I refuse to believe that the middle class figured that out. Issues, schmissues– to all those people the election was just a popularity contest! and Barack Obama, unfortunately, is much hotter than Bush. All we have to do is make sure they don’t associate Bush with us from now on.

Tucker Carlson, author and commentator for MSNBC and The Daily Beast: I agree that it’s all a popularity contest, Christine–it’s not enough to dissociate ourselves from him, though, we need to find somebody even cooler than Obama to be our frontman. Also, we need to give the middle class a new strawman to hate–that was so effective during the Cold War. Our efforts to replace “Communists” with “Islamofascists” appears to have lost a lot of its oomph.

Ross Douthat: ABORTION, hello? Abortion!

Douglas Kmiec: Reagan was a god. I really think that Obama is his second coming.

Jim Manzi: You’re probably right, Christine; and Douglas, if you think a single damn one of us is going to do anything other than flatly oppose every last line of Obama’s liberal pinko agenda with our dying breaths, you’re quite mistaken.

Kathleen Parker, author and syndicated columnist who also blogs for the Washington Post: I agree with Christine too and I’ll go even further and say that the deciding popularity factor wasn’t even Bush’s lack of cool or Obama’s abundance of it, but McCain’s horrid, stupid, winking, redneck of a MILF vice-presidential candidate. And no, it’s not elitist of me to say so!

Douglas Kmiec: Ross, Obama is my hero. And I’m pro-choice. Here, let me kiss your ass vigorously to make it up to you in the most passive-aggressive way possible.

Tucker Carlson: Doug, you sound like a woman, and there is no worse insult I could possibly lob at you than that.

Ross Douthat: Well, I loved Sarah Palin because she at least was willing to call out abortion for the baby-murdering slut-enabling conspiracy that it is. But I agree with Tucker that we need to find a man who can compete with Obama for sheer coolness, though I must say that I personally thought Bill Clinton was cooler. McCain? L-O-S-E-R!

Christine Todd Whitman: Maybe if I address this post to everybody, Ross won’t realize I’m speaking directly to him?–look, the abortion bullshit is no longer a winning strategy. The only people who can’t get over it are the Jesus freaks, and clearly, they’re not a majority voting bloc, so screw them. Back to the important topic here–how do we repackage Reaganomics so that the middle class will buy it all over again? Honestly, I’m just praying that the Democrats screw up so badly that every last one of the middle class ends up completely bankrupt. They’ll come running back to us then!

Douglas Kmiec: God, I miss Reagan. Have I said that already?

It’s hard to take seriously, but I’m doing my best. I couldn’t stop myself from doing a Google search on it; one of the first hits was this blog quote:

“Yes, there really is a Journal of Happiness Studies — which could either be wonderful news or yet another sign of our imminent demise.”

I’ll buy that.

So anyway, apparently they have just published a study that proves that just like we all knew it would, feminism has destroyed the future happiness of all womankind!!! Naturally, I am paraphrasing–the actual abstract goes like this–

Aspirations, along with attainments, play an important role in shaping well-being. Early in adult life women are more likely than men to fulfill their material goods and family life aspirations; their satisfaction in these domains is correspondingly higher; and so too is their overall happiness. Material goods aspirations refer here to desires for a number of big-ticket consumer goods, such as a home, car, travel abroad and vacation home. In later life these gender differences turn around. Men come closer than women to fulfilling their material goods and family life aspirations, are more satisfied with their financial situation and family life, and are the happier of the two genders. An important factor underlying the turnaround in fulfillment of aspirations for material goods and family life is probably the shift over the course of the life cycle in the relative proportion of women and men in marital and non-marital unions.

Delaying childbearing til the less-fertile years. No-fault divorce. The War Against Boys! Just like all those wise folks have predicted, oh, you may be having fun NOW slutting it up, affirmative-actioning great jobs right out from under the noses of more deserving men, and failing to stick out your marriage because you want to “find yourself,” but just wait til you get old!! Then all those fine young men you screwed over will be sailing their yachts and living in McMansions with their 25-year-old mail-order brides while you sit alone in your assisted living condo bitterly feeding your cats.

Now, I do only have access to the abstract, so perhaps I’m mistaken, but it appears that the authors of this study seem to think that the only thing that changes as people age is the people; as in, the culture and society surrounding said people has been static and identical from the day they were born til the day they reached old age. If that were the case, then certainly you would have a leg to stand on if you attempted to explain all happiness imbalances in simplistic terms of who is married and who isn’t, for instance. However, I think it’s really safe to say that the world of my grandmother’s birth was excruciatingly different than the world that existed when she was a young woman in her twenties in terms of what was offered to women and men respectively, and also from the world that a young woman in her twenties today was born in, and also the world of today, this moment, when my grandmother would be in her seventies.

My grandmother was born in 1933. Actually, that was quite a year as far as world events went–Franklin Roosevelt took office, the first concentration camp was opened in Germany, and the original King Kong movie was released starring Fay Wray, among other things. However, I want to look at this from the perspective of how the world has changed for women, so:

When my grandmother was born, women had only been allowed to vote in the United States for thirteen years. There was no Planned Parenthood; birth control information was legally considered “obscenity.” Many states had laws mandating that if men were available, women couldn’t legally work, or if a woman’s husband worked, she couldn’t, which meant that she either lived at home, unemployed, or she married, period. If she did work, it was almost always at a very poorly paid job with little to no hope of advancement. Less than ten percent of women held college degrees and the vast majority of colleges, especially the most prestigious, forbade women to apply for admittance.

My grandmother’s twenties were spent primarily in the 1950’s. The FDA still had not approved birth control pills for sale in the United States, to any woman, married or not. Many jobs were still restricted or outright banned for women to hold. Many colleges, especially Ivy League and other prestigious universities, still forbade women to apply for admittance.

A woman in her twenties, now, was likely born in the 1980’s. At the time of her birth, the Civil Rights Act forbidding discrimination based on sex in job hiring and pay was nearly twenty years old. Abortion had been legal and Title IX had been around for over ten years and there were no legal restrictions on birth control pills. By 1985 every state had adopted no-fault divorce. Marital rape had been legally acknowledged to exist and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act had been passed.

And now, in the new millenium, when she is actually in her twenties–31% of women her age have at least a bachelor’s degree, more than the number of men with degrees. Over 60% of women are in the job force, only 13% less than the number of men. Nearly half of all women of childbearing years are childless, the majority by choice.

So–a woman near the end of her life, today, was given virtually no opportunities for higher education or a career, choice in how many children she had or when–marriage was clearly the best choice for her, rather than any particular man being presented as the best choice for her. A man her age, however, had many more options. The chances of him finding himself, at the end of his life, in the situation he wants to be in is going to be correspondingly higher; hers are going to be overwhelmingly much more a matter of chance.

But a woman in her twenties today–a woman who will have financial means and choices both now and near the end of her life, who if she married and stayed married, likely did so because of the man, not because of a lack of choice, who was able to choose how many or if any children she had? I suspect that there will be a strong shift upward in terms of the level of happiness these women display near the end of their lives. Hopefully the Journal will still be around and studying away, and maybe will have lost its rather unfortunately obvious agenda in terms of interpreting study results in the process.

For anyone who thinks that “feminism” as a practiced theory is narrow in either scope or defintion and that “feminists” are pretty much six-of-one-half-a-dozen-of-the-other—not even clooooose. F’rinstance, recently on another feminist blog, one of the posters told off Yours Truly during a discussion about the disapproval I was expressing towards a woman who had had an affair with a prominent married politician:

…I don’t think in the context of feminist blogging and critique that shaming these individuals is either valuable or appropriate…I also tend to believe there isn’t a lot of room for shaming in feminist ethical critique in general, particularly when we’re talking about women who are already shamed by society. It’s just incredibly easy for that sort of criticism to support the patriarchal narrative, even unintentionally.

Hmm…

What is feminism, anyway? Most simply, it’s the dictionary definition of the word: the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes . I take this very much to heart, especially the equality part. I believe that women are just as “good” as men…and just as “bad.” They’re just as smart, and caring, and responsible, and mentally and emotionally capable as men; there is absolutely no difference whatsoever between the innate and inborn capacity of all the preceding adjectives and adverbs in any average, random sampling of men and women all around the world.

Now, unfortunately, it is a man’s world. If you don’t believe me, look at the numbers; see who has the overwhelming lion’s share of the power, money and influence worldwide. What that means literally is that while we are all born with the same moral and mental capacities, the expression and the suppression of selected traits is quite different depending on the gender of the person being born. Both the expression and suppression are implemented at birth and continue throughout the individual’s entire lifetime, exacerbated even more by physical impositions. For example, if you are a single woman who has an affair with a married man, the impositions range from the unpleasant (say, having to listen to social gossip painting you as a loser for being a woman who had an affair with a married man) to the fatal (say, a court-imposed death sentence for being a woman who had an affair with a married man). If you are a single man having an affair with a married woman, very little is said about you or to you at all; your sexual morals are shrugged off with a “boys will be boys! whenever those women give ‘em the chance!” and in countries where such behavior is technically just as illegal for men as it is for women, somehow the men just aren’t the ones getting stoned to death, though presumably somebody had to be committing adultery with all those women who are.

And this, of course, was the other poster’s whole point–because there is a strong patriarchal bias against women who behave immorally while men are getting a free pass in much the same situation, it should be the desire, nay, the duty, to cut women the same amount of slack that men have been traditionally cut. I could certainly agree that this is a form of implementing equality between the sexes…holding EVERYONE to the same low standards! Because people basically suck! YEAH! (This is very bad for my incipient misanthropy. Down, Fido!)

However, I prefer to implement my feminism in terms of holding everyone to the same high standards, and I prefer to believe that the spirit of feminism is such an uplifting, best-of-humanity ideal, rather than a lowest-common-denominator one. Therefore, I reject attempts to enable women to behave like pieces of crap because men have historically gotten to…and I really, really reject attempts to excuse women who actively harm other women for the benefit of men. Of course, the fact that it is, as I said, a man’s world (and an adult’s world, and a white person’s world, and a rich person’s world) must be taken into account–this is where that finely honed moral judgement, the kind that, yes, women are just as capable as men of making regardless of what Lawrence Kohlberg thinks, comes in. Let’s have an exercise of this kind of judgement right now!

Situation A: Jane lives in a country where girls are routinely sold off as wives to other men by their fathers long before the age of eighteen with full legal and societal consent. She herself was sold to a man thirty-five years her senior at age fifteen and was regularly beaten and impregnated by him until he mercifully kicked the bucket five years later. However, he left her with no money and three children under the age of five to feed and clothe, and neither his family nor hers is willing or able to help her out. She is approached by a friend of her late husband’s, a married man, and told that he will give her some money every week if she will have sex with him on a regular basis. She agrees.

Situation B: Jane lives in a country where girls marry on average in their late teens to early twenties and the amount of parental involvement is varied, though it’s accepted that your parents will have at least some say in who you marry if they don’t outright arrange it for you, and they usually won’t beat you or kick you out for refusing someone. Jane is twenty-five and single because she is not very pretty and her family is poor; she has a menial job, the only one she can really get, as unemployment is endemic in her country, and the job has no real future. Jane meets a man, a married man, who tells her she’s beautiful and charming and intelligent. He then tells her he will help her find a better job and that he really likes her and then suggests that they start having sex on a regular basis. She agrees.

Situation C: Jane lives in a country where women don’t marry on average til their mid-twenties and selling your daughter to anyone for any reason whatsoever is generally considered outrageous, not to mention being highly illegal. She is a single, good-looking, well-educated woman of forty with a successful career. She is approached by a married man, who tells her how attractive she is and offers her an even nicer job than the one she has now and suggests that they start having sex on a regular basis. She agrees.

Now, feminism as defined as the pussy pass would suggest that you immediately excuse all three women from any real expectation of moral behavior, as they are all living in societies with some degree of embedded patriarchy and to do otherwise is to support said patriarchal narrative,, and places any blame only on the man. The patriarchal societies each woman lives in, on the other hand, demands that you immediately castigate each woman for having sex with a married man and either somewhat exonerates the man (”boys will be boys, you know, bad as it is, they’re just wired that way”) or completely exonerates him, depending on the degree of patriarchy that society supports.

I reject both options equally. True morality, I believe, involves first having a set of firm principles, and second being able to apply them in a proportional fashion to any number of wildly varying situations. Feminism as defined by some appears to be trying to skip step one and the patriarchy outright skips step two, but both steps are absolutely vital to the process. Women are both just as capable of men of abstract reasoning and just as capable of rising above a reasonable amount of handicaps and hardships to sometimes choose to take the harder path because it’s the right one–it is incredibly demeaning to even suggest that women can and should do the easiest thing as if they’re not capable of anything better. And it’s inexcusable to exonerate a woman who hurts another woman in the interests of pleasing a man when she has no real physical or financial pressure to do so in the name of feminism, of all things. And since when are feminists, especially ones such as ourselves who have absolutely zip influence or power to worry about, supposed to start censoring themselves out of fear of what the patriarchy might think, for good or for ill?

So: Compassion, understanding, a realistic view of the lives of women both in our own country and in others abroad, yes PLEASE! Proceeding from the assumption that all women, regardless of socioeconomic status, cultural opportunity and age are mental and emotional children in terms of what moral expectations can be set for them..? No thank you. Believing that monogamy in of itself is a zero-sum game that human beings regardless of gender are simply psychologically incapable of consistently practicing..? Sure, why not. It’s got a lot more evidence in its favor than some of the notions about human sexuality and psyche that are currently in popular circulation. Believing that engaging in completely consensual behavior in a narcissistic and self-delusional fashion that ends up hurting any number of other people probably including oneself is really excusable based on the fact that the one happens to be female? NO thank you. Unless I see it in Teh Feminist Blogger Rulebook, I ain’t never buyin’ it.

Another offsite trip!–my company was building a new, very large scale manufacturing facility and so we were buying all kinds of goodies for it from a whole slew of outside companies. On this occasion, the company in question was going to show us their pride and joy, a software package that simulates mixing behavior inside various types of stirred tanks. So we watched the demo in the morning, then they brought some lunch in and we had time to ask various questions more pertinent to our specific applications. I was only peripherally involved in that specific project so I didn’t get deeply engaged–I made a few comments about comparability of results involving various mixer designs but other than that pretty much just munched pizza and listened to everybody else talk.

After lunch was over, the simulation engineer asked if we wanted a quick tour of the shop. We all agreed that would be interesting and informative and got to our feet, and as we were all milling around securing laptops and dumping pizza trash he said to me, very abruptly, “Don’t be scared if they holler at you.”

I froze in mid-motion, then peeked around to insure that he was, in fact, speaking to me; he was, judging from the peculiar paralyzed looks on the faces of our corporate engineer and project manager standing right behind me. So I returned my attention to him: small guy, mid to late twenties, skinny with a pot belly, black-framed glasses, earnest expression. “I’m sorry?” I said, totally confused.

“The guys,” he said, and essayed a smile. Note: We had all gone round the room with the standard introductions that morning, but aside from that, this guy had not once made eye contact with me, and had only spoken to me in direct response to my few earlier queries during lunch; I hadn’t even thought he’d really noticed my existence. “They’re not used to seeing anyone like you on the floor.”

Light dawned. I involuntarily glanced down at myself, half expecting to see my quite boring business casual ensemble of button-down shirt, slacks and loafers completely replaced with a red leather miniskirt, platform shoes and a corset, but no–a snort issued from someone behind me and I straightened back up to stare at him. “I’m sorry I shaved off my moustache this morning–I just wasn’t thinking,” I said cheerily. He turned red, which pleased me enough to add, “Maybe you should let those poor guys out of their cages at night, you know, so they can mix with the rest of humanity more often, see a few girls now and then!”

Suspense! Did he pass out from mortification and/or apologize for being a complete and unprofessional moron? Nope to either one. Though I am happy to report that he did not inflict any more conversation upon me for the rest of our sojourn there. And did any of those shop floor savages holler, hoot, whistle, catcall or make any other vocal incursions upon my person? No, in fact they did not. Til the next time, signing off!

–Lisa, the Perky Girl Engineer

I spent a day not too long ago offsite–my company hired an outside company to design and build a piece of equipment for our manufacturing plant and the outside company had asked us to come down to their fabrication shop and vet the design, see what we thought of the work in progress, etc. With me were another engineer from our manufacturing group (male), an engineer from the corporate office (male), and a machine operator from the plant (female). The morning went pretty smoothly; I was able to identify some potential functional issues in the design that in the still-early phases of manufacture weren’t going to be much of a problem for them to solve, so everyone was relatively happy by the time we all decided to break for lunch.

So, we’re all sitting around the table at the restaurant waiting for our food to show up, and one of the two guys from the outside company (they were the senior director of sales and the lead design engineer respectively, both male, the speaker in this instance was the sales director) was talking about how hard it was to get good welders in any quantity. “Kids these days, they just aren’t so interested in the trade schools!” (Yeah, he was in his fifties. At least.) “Our shop foreman, our lead welder, his dad actually teaches welding, but–”

“Actually,” said the other guy, “it’s his mother that teaches welding.”

Blank silence, coupled with wide-eyed stare, then… “Really?”

“Yeah,” said the other guy. “She’s probably one of the best welders in the area.”

“Really?” said the first guy. Pause. “Seriously?” (The other guy nods, looking deadpan.) “You’re kidding!” Longer pause. “That’s amazing!” Still staring bulge-eyed at the other guy, very much as if that guy had whipped a two-headed calf out of his pocket and plunked it down on the middle of the lunch table. “I really did not know that–”

Our two engineers were looking anywhere but at me. Our operator was looking sideways at me with narrowed eyes. So I perked up, beamed at the first guy and said brightly, “Yeah, the next thing you know, they’ll be driving and voting!”

I may let how this scene ended remain a mystery.

My World of Warcraft girl Aogail.

From Hugo Schwyzer’s blog–“Escape, Entitlement, and Empowerment: Young Men and the ‘Four Ps’” pretty much says it all (the “Four Ps” being pot, Playstation, porn and poker). Focusing in on the “Playstation” P, he quotes a few paragraphs of the Kimmel book he is analyzing–as a “Playstation P” woman, I was fascinated to try and analyze where I coincided with the “guys” and where (if anywhere) I took off on my own, and what meaning that might have in terms of gendered arguments such as the one below. Let’s examine it!

Because, as it turns out, the fantasy world of media is both an escape from reality and an escape to reality — the reality that many of these guys would secretly like to inhabit. Video games, in particular, provide a way for guys to feel empowered. In their daily lives guys often feel that they don’t measure up to the standards of the Guy Code — always be in control, never show weakness, neediness, vulnerability — and so they create ideal versions of themselves in fantasy. The thinking is simple: if somebody messes with your avatar, you blow him away. It’s a fantasy world of Manichean good and evil, a world in which violence is restorative and actions have no consequences whatsoever.

This doesn’t resonate with me at all. It isn’t that I don’t feel I always have to be in control and never show weakness, neediness and vulnerability–quite the opposite! As a woman in a heavily male-dominated profession, I must show more control and far less weakness/neediness/vulnerability than even your average guy can get away with, if I want to be taken at all seriously. In my personal life, as a single mother raising two sons, again, the pressure to provide such an invulnerable role model is constant and unrelenting. However, I have no urge to physical violence–I rarely ever have such an urge, except in situations where I am directly physically attacked by another person. Therefore, I find no psychological freedom or release in the knowledge that oh hey, I CAN kick that sumbitch’s ass here! Woot! As a matter of fact, the need to suppress weakness, neediness and vulnerability is no different in the virtual world of Warcraft than it is in the real world on Earth, not for me. I am a woman in a MMORPG (for all you noobs, that’s a “massively multiplayer online role-playing game”); I’d better not act like some kind of wuss if I’m in a group. The lack of consequences does not appeal to me either, again, as there are certainly game consequences for acting like a dumbass–the only “consequences” that could be said to be escaped are, if you choose to massacre other players or computer-generated characters, you won’t go to jail. Since I have no urge to do so, there is no relief of any suppressed feelings for me.

They’re getting a parallel education to the formal curriculum — complete with its own Three Rs: Relaxation from the weight of adult demands and of the rules of social decorum (also now known as political correctness); Revenge, against those who have usurped what you thought was yours; and, Restoration to your rightful entitled position in the world.

Oh now, Relaxation I understand! World of Warcraft is most definitely an escape from the real world, with its stupid obsession with minutae and social interaction–it’s puzzle-solving and ass-kicking fun, pure and simple and wholly engrossing. Revenge…again, that does not resonate. Revenge against whom? Those I might possibly want revenge against are still quite in power in the mythical World–there are kings, commanders, wealthy merchants, etc–the World is just as hierarchical and biased in favor of those with money and power as the real world. Now, WoW does offer you a far more straighforward path to success than the real world does–it is the most basic and pure distillation of the highest ideals of capitalism and the Protestant work ethic–as long as you are willing to buckle down and spend lots of time and effort at the earning, you will guaranteed rise to a position of great power and wealth, without the unfairnesses of pre-existing family and coinage and irrational prejudices that beset us in reality. I do quite appreciate that…but there really is no revenge factor there. It’s much more along the lines of the first R, relaxation–not having to navigate pitfalls to success that are a function of the real world and none of my personal making.

Restoration–oh yes, that DOES resonate with me, though after reading the next paragraph, I realize that I have finally hit upon the strange dichotomy that is the real gendered difference, at least in terms of female me and the males Kimmel is discussing in his book, in the “Playstation P.”

They spend so much of their lives being bossed around by other people– teachers, parents, bosses–it’s really a relief to be the meanest, most violent, and vengeful SOB around. And they spend so much of their lives in a world that is, if not dominated by women, at least is characterized by women’s presumed equality, that it’s nice to turn back the clock and return to a time when men ruled — and no one questioned it.

This is almost funny.

Here is how it would look if it were rewritten for me.

She spends so much of her life being bossed around by men–bosses, politicians, religious leaders–it’s really a relief to be in a place where her gender is only a matter of aesthetic choice; it in no way affects her career, her autonomy or her physical abilities both real and perceived by others. No matter what others in the World say or think or even try to do, they cannot discriminate against her on the basis of her gender–she can be and do anything she wants, finally and incontrovertibly–the most anyone can do is spit a few obscenities, and that is easily remedied by simply placing them on Ignore.

Whereas the “guys” Kimmel describes apparently want to be conscienceless reavers, motivated by and answering sheerly and only to their grossest whim at the moment and are therefore freed by that state, what I want to be, as it turns out, is a hero. Women aren’t heroes, you know. There is one form of “heroism” and one only that women are encouraged (we might even say “forced,” betimes) to pursue, and that is the “heroism” of complete self-immolation. Women are lauded for sacrificing every personal inclination to further the ambitions of their husbands and devoting themselves to raising children. The “heroic” woman is one who lives in a permanent and driven state of personal servitude to men and children. The ultimate sacrifice, of giving your life for your freedom, the freedom of others, an ideal–women are actively discouraged from any form of that heroism except that of dying in the name of pregnancy. A woman’s heroism is never exciting, never results in great power or prestige or personal gain or adulation–a woman’s heroism is by definition hidden behind those surrounding her, done in as much silence and humility as possible, and usually in the channel of her reproductive and family-running function.

In the World, I can be a hero in all the ways men are encouraged and lauded to be heroes–I can use my force of arms to defend the weak; I can choose any number of professions to further my defense of the weak; I can gain great fame and riches in pursuit of my heroism and my name will be known throughout the realms. (Seriously!) My reproductive function, in fact, does not exist at all.

So, interestingly enough, in an unregulated fantasy environment, I aspire to the ideal of heroic manhood–that is what I find so freeing and liberating–and “guys” aspire to the ideal of amoral piracy–that is what they find so freeing and liberating–apparently no one aspires to the ideal of self-sacrificing womanhood–er, surprise surprise..? Probably the most intriguing (and distressing) aspect of this is how said guys can perceive themselves as living in a society where women control them so strongly while I perceive myself living in a society where men control me so strongly…the SAME SOCIETY..? A puzzle. I expect I will give that a lot more thought. Stay tuned!

Apparently this is me.

So, not too long ago at work we were suffering through some “group exercises” to “build teamwork” (thankfully there was no “hugging,” or GOD forbid, “sharing”)–BUT anyway, one of the things we did was take the Myers-Briggs assessment. I’ve never formally taken it before and certainly never done so with a whole bunch of other people. One thing I must say, the statistics provided as to what percentage of the population is usually this four-letter combination and what is usually that four-letter combination turned out to be nearly spot-on in terms of our little gang of twenty or so.

As it turns out, I am an INTP. This is an INTP:

INTPs live in the world of theoretical possibilities. They live primarily inside their own minds, having the ability to analyze difficult problems, identify patterns, and come up with logical explanations. They seek clarity in everything, and are therefore driven to build knowledge. They are the “absent-minded professors”, who highly value intelligence and the ability to apply logic to theories to find solutions.

The INTP has no understanding or value for decisions made on the basis of personal subjectivity or feelings. They strive constantly to achieve logical conclusions to problems, and don’t understand the importance or relevance of applying subjective emotional considerations to decisions. The INTP is usually very independent, unconventional, and original. They are not likely to place much value on traditional goals such as popularity and security.

INTPs are about 1% of the general population, making this one of the rarest of types.

Contributions to the team of an INTP

In a team environment, the INTP can contribute by:

* using analytical and critical skills to solve problems
* focusing attention on the central issue
* providing intellectual insight
* suggesting ideas that achieve long and short term aims
* viewing information objectively

The potential ways in which an INTP can irritate others include:

* being too intellectual
* finding too many flaws, and not accepting imperfect but ‘good enough’ solutions
* not taking account of others’ feelings
* leave others to worry about implementation once the major problems have been solved
* clinging to a principle at the expense of relationships and harmony

Yeah, well. Scarifyingly dead-on, I must say.

I’m talking, of course, about True Blood, which premiered on HBO in early September. I am embarrassed to admit that I actually went and got HBO added to my cable package just so I could see the thing. Worse and worse, this is the first television show in about, oh, ten years that I actually made a point of trying to watch on purpose. I feel incredibly peculiar, like I’d suddenly gone out and bought a stack of bridal magazines or something. Maybe I’m mutating! and this is, like, the first sign.

As anybody who reads fantasy knows, the urban fantasy subgenre is The Big One and has been for several years now. I can stick my nose up in the air a trifle about the phenom and say that I was an urban fantasy reader loooong before it became the “it” subgenre–I was a Sonja Blue fan in the early ’90s, which most people, even those who obsessively read urban fantasy, still don’t know about, and I knew who Laurell K. Hamilton was before the first Anita Blake book was ever written. Nowadays it’s hard to find fantasy that isn’t urban fantasy, and folks that you wouldn’t ever really imagine penning a word of the stuff, such as Robin McKinley, she of the generally quite lyrical and decidedly nonsexual fantasy prose, have cranked out at least one urban fantasy novel. For anyone who doesn’t know what urban fantasy is, it’s set in modern times, usually in the city but not always, featuring most often (though not exclusively–Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files are one notable masculine exception) a strong female protagonist speaking in first person, who spends the entire book kicking ass and taking names and generally being lusted after by any number of incredibly hot dudes who are usually (but not always) supernatural in nature. Men have been pumping out this type of fantasy for themselves for decades, identical in most respects with only the genders reversed and the bulk of the protagonist’s abilities not necessarily of a magical nature as they are for the females–it’s pretty obvious from a psychological aspect why women have concentrated their own characters’ ass-kicking abilities in the paranormal rather than the sheer muscle or specialized combat training. As it turns out, which should surprise nobody but the sexist, the desire to be the toughest, coolest problem-solver on the block while being hotly desired by multiple drop-dead gorgeous members of your preferred sexual orientation is a universal human desire, not a gendered one.

So anyway, the True Blood series is based on one of my favorite urban fantasy offerings, a series of books called the Southern Vampire Mysteries by an author named Charlaine Harris. The protagonist is Sookie Stackhouse, a small-town Southern barmaid who is uncontrollably telepathic, in a world where vampires have “come out of the closet” just a few years before after a Japanese biotech company invented workable synthetic blood. As it turns out, Sookie can almost never hear vampires’ thoughts, which she finds madly attractive, half-nuts as she is from listening to the endless cacaphony of mindless noise and outright malice from her fellow humans’ brains day in and day out. It’s one of my favorite urban fantasy series for the following reasons: (1) Sookie is genuinely comfortable as a single adult woman. She’s also normal–she gets lonely and horny just like everyone else, but though she has multiple opportunities throughout the books to compromise her independence and personal preferences in exchange for having a reasonable specimen of manhood around full-time, she never does. Refreshing. and, (2) the characterization of small-town Southerners is just too hysterically accurate (do keep in mind I grew up in Hicksville Kansas). and, (3) the author is a good writer–great dialogue, flawless grammar, more than just surface characterizations of even secondary characters–in short, everything that author Laurell K. Hamilton, who is half responsible for the explosion of the subgenre in the first place, lacks. (Buffy the Vampire Slayer is, of course, responsible for the other half.)

Unfortunately, the TV series mostly sucks. Some of the dialogue was lifted straight from the book, which was pretty cool, but they took quite the ham-handed approach to Sookie’s fascination with Bill and Sam’s fascination with Sookie–in the book neither of them ever acts like love-struck teenagers and I think it removes a lot of the sexual tension to portray them that way on the screen. It’s true that Sookie in the book is virginal in body, but she’s far from virginal in mind, and the only reason she’s so in body is because it hasn’t been possible for her to have sex with anybody, tuned unstoppably into their thoughts as she would be the whole time. She certainly has no interest in going around gasping at people for flirting with each other in front of her, as she’s shown doing in the show–frankly, on the show, she’s a complete twit. By far the most interesting female character on the show is Tara, who bears practically no resemblance to the Tara of the book (thought that’s actually okay–she’s a big improvement over the Tara in the book). The most tiresome part of the TV show is its constant stream of soft-core porn–there are simply way too many scenes that are absolutely superfluous to the plot and clearly only included to titillate the watcher. It’s a sad statement about something when the only way you can think of to get and hold viewers’ attention is to constantly strip and fondle yourself and moan loudly, which is a pretty good description of the show’s many interjected sex scenes. I sadly quit watching it after episode 4 or so.

In case anybody’s interested, either in getting his or her feet wet or as an already seasoned reader, here’s a quick list of some of the notables of the urban fantasy subgenre, with of course my opinions appended. Others’ opinions are always welcome!

Continue Reading »

The main character-to-character relationship development in so many books (and movies) is between a man and a woman; the second-most common is between a man and a man–a relationship between two women as the central focus, especially two unrelated women, is definitely the rarest of the three. (Reminds me of the Bechdel test.) This thought came to me the other day when I was rereading a favorite old “comfort book”–it’s a book I first read decades ago as a young teen–I believe it originally belonged to my grandmother. I really love this book for two reasons: one, it’s rich in historical detail about the untamed West of the American 1840s, especially the California Trail, and the other because of the really wonderful portrait of a deep female friendship it paints.

This got me thinking even more–how many other books have I read that I really loved for that second reason? I realized that a few of my books are treasured because of just that. So I thought I’d throw a few of them out there, and see if anybody else out there has either read ‘em or knows of any other books that are beautifully written with a female friendship as a central theme that they’d like to recommend.

Continue Reading »

I’m having a hard time deciding if this is for real or not. I’m leaning toward “yes,” just because I can’t find any evidence anywhere else on the Web that it’s just a big ol’ joke, and also, the commenters on the article that was just making it so haaaaaaard for me to believe it was for real seem to be taking it seriously. That said–

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

So anyway, this site is called wikiHow and its stated purpose is “to build the world’s largest, highest quality how-to manual. With your edits, we can create a free resource that helps millions of people by offering solutions to the problems of everyday life.” I started scanning today’s “Featured Articles” on the sidebar and found myself being offered instruction on such mundane topics as “Calculate How Much Money You Need To Retire,” “Understand Copyright Basics” and “Assist Children with Cultural Adjustment.” …alongside “Pass Time At An Airport” and “Fold a Dollar Bill To Make a Finger Ring” (is that some kinda fad I missed out on or something?) or “How To Trigger Green Traffic Lights.”

(Since you know you won’t be able to sleep tonight if I don’t share the secret on that last one–)

Attach neodymium magnets to the vehicle. While there is significant debate as to whether a magnet can be strong enough to alter the electromagnetic field which triggers the sensor, you may decide to give it a shot. You can buy a commercial magnet or make your own.*

* If you do make your own magnet trigger, be very careful when handling them as they’re very strong. Wear eye protection when handling them because they’re very brittle, and if they slam together or against any other surface, a piece of magnet can easily get into your eye.

(God knows we wouldn’t want that to happen!)

Excuse me.

(BWAHAHAHAHAHA!)

ANYWAY, the whole reason I stumbled across this website in the first place was a snippet on Pharyngula here. Given that I have occasionally wondered if anybody (aside from Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses) ever does make a concerted effort to convert atheists (as opposed to simply control them via legislation), how could I resist checking out an article so artfully entitled How To Persuade An Athiest to Become Christian?

Let’s find out!

Continue Reading »