From Whence Misogyny In Geek Culture?

There's a good article up over at Shameless Magazine that explores misogyny in geek culture. The basic thesis is that geeks feel that women and pop culture are taking away geek culture. It's summed up in a later adumbration.

1. Straight White Dudes, we are not here to steal geek culture away from you - we’re here to help make it MORE AWESOME. 

2. Excluding people just because they’re not geeky enough, or bullying them because they’re female is just as bad as the isolation and bullying you may have experienced while growing up. If, as a geeky teenager, you hated and resented the kids who picked on you, why the hell would you turn around and do it to someone else?

I think that the author is missing the wellspring of the behavior and the reason why her arguments will fall upon deaf ears. Namely, geek culture has never been about acceptance, and it is not surprising that geeks have turned around and behaved identically to ways in which they themselves were treated. It's like the Pilgrims coming to America to escape religious persecution, when in fact they were coming to America so they could be free to be the ones doing the persecuting.

While geek culture has many elements, one of its unifiers was exclusion from popular culture. They were rejected, so they created a culture that was purposely separate. It was not a culture that was defined internally, but also externally. Geek culture requires something separate from it for it to be geek culture. If it becomes integrated into the wider culture, it loses one of its original bricks and is thus no longer geeky. This connotation is built into the very history of the word.

Similarly, geek culture was defined by rejection by women. The point of it was to happily accept that rejection and create a society where part of its very make-up was a lack of women. Geeks have been resistant to accepting pop culture and women because part of geek culture is not having these things.

Let's face it. Many of the people in geek culture are not attractive and have few social graces. It hurts to be that way. It hurts to be rejected sexually. When one's life is heavily influenced by sexual rejection, a safe haven will be sought. And once found, that safe haven only remains safe when the object of rejection, be it pop culture or sexuality, is specifically left out.

It doesn't matter if women entering geek culture are as "geeky" as the men already there. Their not being there is the point. They could never make the culture "more awesome." And when one considers the perspective of those within the sub-culture, this makes sense.

While this is a sympathetic viewpoint, it does not absolve them. Perhaps my own experience with the sting of rejection makes me appreciate their views more than some others. I have never been an object of desire and that sucks. Losing myself in a fantasy world always felt great.

Moreover, this doesn't absolve the community of its racism and homophobia, although I think that these elements are something much more easily expunged. I think that it has more to do with the fact that middle-to-upper class culture in America is dominated by white, cis-gendered people. the biases of that socio-economic group will obviously rub off on any fantasy worlds created by it. Since geek culture was not created by people who had previously been rejected by homosexuals and people of other races, accepting these people will be something that will happen quickly. Accepting them will not undermine a tenet of geekdom.

Does that mean that traditional geekdom will not transform? Of course not. Traditional geek areas like science fiction, fantasy, and games will expand into the general culture, and the language is what will fade. Just as art and filmmaking are no longer the domain of those who lived on the outskirts of polite society, we will stop calling fantasy, science, and games "geeky." The label will die.

Perhaps that's the ultimate point that people should be making: geek culture as it was once known is dying. Science fiction, Dungeons & Dragons, comic books, video games, and fantasy are in the mainstream. I don't begrudge these men for wanting to have something into which they can escape, and specifically something that is theirs, separate from the broader culture. But they must realize that the world of traditional sci-fi, fantasy, and games is no longer that world.

On Junk Food for the Soul

Whenever you read some fuddy duddy complaining about how the moral fabric of our youth is being corrupted by this or that, read this fantastic article about the book The Closing Of The American Mind by the inimitable Frank Zappa.

It is interesting how the Internet has eliminated so many of the worries that both Zappa and Bloom had.

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On Junk Food For The Soul: Frank Zappa's article from New Perspective's Quarterly on America's cultural decay. 1987.

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were one of the strongest influences on early rock n' roll. In recent years, Zappa has publicly defended rock from cultural conservatives like Tipper Gore and her group, the Parents' Music Resource Center, which seeks greater parental control over what they consider the inordinate influence of sex and violence in rock music.

We asked Frank Zappa to respond to selected passages from The Closing of the American Mind, in which Allan Bloom laments "Parents' loss of control over their children's moral education,' and provocatively labels rock music "junk food for the soul."

The Nature of Music

"Music is the soul's primitive and primary speech... without articulate speech or reason. It is not only not reasonable, it is hostile to reason...Civilization... is the taming or domestication of the soul's raw passions... Rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire- not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored." — A. Bloom

This is a puff pastry version of the belief that music is the work of the Devil: that the nasty ol' Devil plays his fiddle and people dance around and we don't want to see them twitching like that. In fact, if one wants to be a real artist in the United States today and comment on our culture, one would be very far off the track if one did something delicate or sublime. This is not a noble, delicate, sublime country. This is a mess run by criminals. Performers who are doing the crude, vulgar, repulsive things Bloom doesn't enjoy are only commenting on that fact.

In general, anti-rock propositions began when rock n' roll began, and most of these were racially motivated. In the 50s, petitions were circulated which said, "Don't allow your children to buy Negro records." The petitions referred to the "raw unbridled passion" of screaming people with dark skin who were going to drive our children wild. Some things never go out of fashion in certain ideological camps. They are like tenets of the faith.

Music's real effect on people is a new field of science called psychoacoustics- the way an organism deals with wiggling air molecules. Our ears decode the wiggling air molecules, and that gives us the information of a particular musical sound. Our brain says, "This is music, this is a structure," and we deal with it based on certain tools we have acquired.

I personally make music because I want to ask a question, and I want to get an answer. If that question and answer amuse me, then statistically, there are a certain number of other people out there who have the same amusement factor. If I present my work to them, they will be amused by it, and we will all have a good time.

I need to be amused because I get bored easily and being amused entertains me. If I could be easily amused, like many people who like beer and football, I would never do anything because everything that would be beautiful for my life would already be provided by American television.

But beer and television bore me, so what am I going to do? I am going to be alive for X number of years. I have to do something with my time besides sleep and eat. So, I devise little things to amuse myself. If I can amuse somebody else, great. And if I can amuse somebody else and earn a living while doing it, that is a true miracle in the 20th Century!

Music and the Dark Forces of the Soul

"To Plato and Nietzsche, the history of music is a series of attempts to give form and beauty to the dark, chaotic, premonitory forces in the soul- to make them serve a higher purpose, and ideal, to give man's duties a fullness."  — A. Bloom

This is a man who has fallen for rock's fabricated image of itself. This is the worst kind of ivory tower intellectualism. Anybody who talks about dark forces is right on the fringe of mumbo jumbo. Dark forces? What is this, another product from Lucasfilm? The passions! When was the last time you saw an American exhibit any form of passion other than the desire to shoot a guy on the freeway? Those are the forces of evil as far as I'm concerned.

If there are dark forces hovering in the vicinity of the music business, they are mercantile forces. We meet the darkness when we meet the orchestra committees, when we get in touch with funding organizations, when we deal with people who give grants and when we get into the world of commerce that greets us when we arrive with our piece of art. Whether it's a rock n' roll record or a symphony, it's the same machinery lurking out there.

The reason a person writes a piece of music has got nothing to do with dark forces. I certainly don't have dark forces lurking around me when I'm writing. If someone is going to write a piece of music, in fact they are preoccupied with the boring labor and very hard work involved. That's what's really going on.

WHAT MAKES MUSIC CLASSICAL

"Rock music... has risen to its current heights in the education of the young on the ashes of classical music, and in an atmosphere in which there is no intellectual resistance to attempts to tap the rawest passions... Cultivation of the soul uses the passions and satisfies them while sublimating them and giving them an artistic unity. Bach's religious intentions and Beethoven's revolutionary and humane ones are clear enough examples." — A. Bloom

This is such nonsense. All the people recognized as great classical composers are recognized at this point for two reasons:

One, during the time these composers were alive and writing they had patrons who liked what they did and who therefore paid them money or gave them a place to live so that the composers could stay alive by writing dots on pieces of paper. If any of the compositions these men wrote had not been pleasing to a church, a duke, or a king, they would have been out of work and their music would not have survived.

There is a book called Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, with thousands of names in it. You have never heard of most of the people in that book, nor have you heard their music. That doesn't mean they wrote awful music, it means they didn't have hits.

So basically, the people who are recognized as the geniuses of classical music had hits. And the person who determined whether or not it was a hit was a king, a duke, or the church or whoever paid the bill. The desire to get a sandwich or something to drink had a lot to do with it. And the content of what they wrote was to a degree determined by the musical predilections of the guy who was paying the bill.

Today, we have a similar situation in rock n' roll. We have kings, dukes, and popes: the A&R guy who spots a group or screens the tape when it comes in; the business affairs guy who writes the contract; the radio station programmers who choose what records get air play.

The other reason the classical greats survived is their works are played over and over again by orchestras. The reasons they are played over and over again are: 1) all the musicians in the orchestra know how to play them because they learned them in the conservatory; 2) the orchestra management programs these pieces because the musicians already know them and therefore it costs less to rehearse them; 3) the composers are dead so the orchestras pay no royalties for the use of the music.

Today, survivability is based on the number of specimens in the market place- the sheer numbers of plastic objects. Many other compositions from this era will vanish, but Michael Jackson's Thriller album will survive because there are 30 million odd pieces of plastic out there. No matter what we may think of the content, a future generation may pick up that piece of plastic and say, "Oh, they were like this."

I suppose somewhere in the future there will be other men like Bloom certifying that the very narrow spectrum of rock n' roll which survives composes the great works of the later half of the 20th Century.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CLASSICAL MUSIC AND ROCK MUSIC

"Rock music provides premature ecstasy and, in this respect, is like the drugs with which it is allied... These are the three great lyrical themes: sex, hate and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love... Nothing noble, sublime, profound, delicate, tasteful or even decent can find a place in such tableaux."  — A. Bloom

Again, Bloom is not looking at what is really going on here. The ugliness in this society is not a product of unrefined art, but of unrefined commerce, wild superstition, and religious fanaticism.

The real difference between the classics and rock n' roll is mostly a matter of form. In order to say we have written a symphony, the design we put on a piece of paper has to conform to certain specifications. We have an exposition that lasts a certain amount of time, then modulation, development and recapitulation. It's like a box, like an egg carton. We must fill all the little spaces in the egg carton with the right forms. If we do, we can call it a symphony because it conforms to the spaces in that box.

Compare that creative process to rock n' roll. If we want to have an AM hit record, we have another egg carton to fill. We have an intro, a couple of verses, a bridge, another verse, and then a fade out. All of which requires a "hook." That's a very rigid form. If we wander away from that form, our song's not going to go on the radio because it doesn't sound like it fits in their format.

Now, whether the person writing the song graduated from a conservatory or whether they came out of a garage, they know that in order to finish a piece they have to do certain things to make it fit into a certain form. In the classical period the sonata or a concerto or symphony had to be that certain size and shape or else the king was not going to like it. One could die. These were literally matters of life and death, but not in the way Bloom defines them.

THE ROCK BUSINESS

"The family spiritual void has left the field open to rock music... The result is nothing less than parents' loss of control over their children's moral education at a time when no one else is seriously concerned with it. This has been achieved by an alliance of strange young males who have the gift of divining the mob's emergent wishes- our versions of Thrasymachus, Socrates' rhetorical adversary- and the record-company executives, the new robber barons, who mine gold out of rock."  —  A. Bloom

There is some truth to that, but how did we get to this point and what do we do about it?

We got here because teenagers are the most sought after consumers. The whole idea of merchandising the pre-pubescent masturbational fantasy is not necessarily the work of the songwriter or the singer, but the work of the merchandiser who has elevated rock n' roll to the commercial enterprise it is.

In the beginning, rock n' roll was young kids singing to other kids about their girlfriends. That's all there was. The guys who made those records came from Manual Arts High School. They went into a recording studio, were given some wine, $25 and a bunch of records when their song came out as a single- which made them heroes at school. That was their career, not, "Well, we're not going to sing until we get a $125 thousand advance."

Today, rock n' roll is about getting a contract with a major company, and pretty much doing what the company tells you to do. The company promotes the image of rock n' roll as being wild and fun when in fact it's just a dismal business.

Record companies have people who claim to be experts on what the public really wants to hear. And they inflict their taste on the people who actually make the music. To be a big success, you need a really big company behind you because really big companies can make really big distribution deals.

Even people who are waiting to go into the business know it's a business. They spend a great deal of time planning what they will look like and getting a good publicity photo before they walk in the door with their tape. And the record companies tend to take the attitude that it doesn't make too much difference what the tape sounds like as long as the artists look right, because they can always hire a producer who will fix up the sound and make it the way they want it- so long as the people wear the right clothes and have the right hair.

RETAINING CLASSICAL MUSIC

"Classical music is dead among the young... Rock music is as unquestioned and unproblematic as the air the students breath, and very few have any acquaintance at all with classical music... Classical music is now a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand."  — A. Bloom

On this point, Bloom and I can agree, but how can a child be blamed for consuming only that which is presented to him? Most kids have never been in contact with anything other than this highly merchandised stuff.

When I testified in front of the Senate, I pointed out that if they don't like the idea of young people buying certain kinds of music, why don't they stick a few dollars back into the school system to have music appreciation? There are kids today who have never heard a string quartet; they have never heard a symphony orchestra. I argued that the money for music appreciation courses, in terms of social good and other benefits such as improved behavior or uplifting the spirit, is far less than the cost of another set of uniforms for the football team. But I frankly don't see people waving banners in the streets saying more music appreciation in the schools.

When I was in school, we could go into a room and they had records there. I could hear anything I wanted by going in there and putting on a record. I won't say I enjoyed everything that was played for me, but I was curious, and if I had never heard any of that music I wouldn't know about it.

Once we're out of school, the time we can spend doing that type of research is limited because most of us are out looking for a job flipping hamburgers in the great tradition of the Reagan economic miracle. When all is said and done, that's the real source of America's barren and arid lives.

Immigration Is Good

This is the kind of information that needs to be disseminated far and wide in this fucked up country.

IMMIGRATION IS GOOD! If it wasn't for immigration, the United States wouldn't be the United States. We wouldn't have Chinese food, or Italian food. We wouldn't have Wall Street, or modern philosophy. There is no aspect of our life that hasn't been touched by immigrants! From our diets, houses, and technology, to the way that we dress and talk. The US is the greatest nation on Earth precisely because we've been filled by the globe's best and brightest for the past two-hundred years.

Myopic, racist, bigoted, xenophobic pricks have attacked every major immigrant group in history! The Irish and Italians were literally beaten to death in the streets. Our reactions to outside groups has been one of the worst manifestations of our worst characteristics.

It's ironic that those who are most likely to hate immigrants are also those most likely to get angry at the idea that their "daddy was a monkey," all the while they act like a bunch of angry, shit-throwing, violent, horrible, animalistic chimpanzees.

Just go fuck yourselves, you pieces of shit. I mean this in every way possible; The world will be better off when you are dead, and your house is inhabited by an immigrant who has actual skills.

70% of Science Award Finalists Are Children of Immigrants (LiveScience.com)

Fuck You And Your Manly Men

I hate gender stereotypes. I hate masculinity and femininity. I hate the nebulousness of it all. And, most importantly, if you want men to be MEN, and conversely demand similar things from women, I hate you.

I've talked about it before, and here it is again. Shocker(!), this complete garbage is being spewed by someone who fashions herself a "conservative." I mentioned that these ideas are nebulous, and Katherine Miller does nothing to bestow clarity on the subject. She simply embraces facile, insulting ideals and runs with them. As you would expect, a good chunk of society's ills can be explained by men not being manly enough, oh, and skinny jeans.

Fuck you. I am who I am. If I'm a man and I want to wear make-up and dance to Lady Gaga, THAT'S MY FUCKING BUSINESS. Idiots such as these seem, to me, to be embracing 300 like it's actually tenable. Rock Hudson, James Dean, and Alexander the Great were all fudgepackers. The bouncers dressed as Dorothy at a gay club could easily kick the shit out of you and your entire cavalcade of conservative friends.

So don't give me this bullshit about indecisiveness and mamby pamby feelings being what actually annoys you. You want Pa, smoking a pipe, working his job, mowing the lawn, and grilling on weekends. You've got nothing concrete. Because anything concrete can be said of both men and women (because we're all people!). No, you want the same arbitrary differences that allow you to fantasize about being a sitcom from the early 60's.

Fuck you. Happiness, no matter how I achieve it, is good. You can take your comical ideals and shove them so far up your ass that you puke out Donna Reed.

Black Culture

I've been thinking about popular black culture and the negative ideal that it has spawned. There seems to be no need to go into the particulars of it, Bill Cosby has that covered, so instead I'll jump right into my thoughts.

I'm beginning to change my mind about popular black culture. One time, not that long ago, I was positive that black culture in the US was a terrible phenomenon that disregarded its heritage and history of the struggle for equality in a violently antagonistic society. Many historians have written about it, and I even had Bill Cosby on my side. And did you ever see the Cosby Show? That guy was right about everything!

But I have come to the realization that a lambasting of pop-black culture is contempocentric. Yes, it seems terrible, now, but what about in the grand scheme of things? Gangsta' culture has been around for barely twenty years! Even in human terms, that's nothing. If a person is a troublemaker for a few days, we don't then generalize that into her entire psyche. We frequently use the word "stage" or "phase." Sociologists will also describe society going through the same sorts of things, just over longer periods of time.

I have begun to think that popular black culture is an important and positive step in the development of "black" America. Basically, for the first time in history, blacks were allowed to act badly. Before this, if you were a black man acting badly, you were either killed or immediately thrown in jail. The incredibly intelligent, upstanding people who were the vanguard of civil rights movement had to be that way. If they were anything but irreproachably dignified they would have been ignored or branded as just some upstart nigger. If anything, we should be happy that our society has finally gotten to the point where blacks can act badly.

Is there racism in this process? Of course. We end up with police profiling, and white kids wanting to be black, and, well, you get the picture. We still have a label that we're using to describe blacks, as opposed to them just being people who are black. Black people breaking the law, as opposed to just people breaking the law. Black college graduates, as opposed to simply college grads. That's somewhat disheartening, but when racism is so deeply ingrained in our culture, our society, even our very population distribution, we're going to have to go through many phases before it's entirely expelled. As for now, I think that Cosby shouldn't be upset. His generation and the generations before him fought for the right for blacks to be fully actualized people in society, and that means being complete assholes, just like the rest of us.

Appalicious

The Apple App store has had something of a controversy. Long story short, Apple expunged most of the sexual apps from the marketplace. This included pretty much anything involving boobs except for apps from major developers.

There have been countless words spilt on the subject, but one element that hasn't been discussed is the nature of the two genders vis-à-vis the iPhone and the programs for it.

One of the biggest problems for gender science is that, even if differences can be experimentally discovered between men and women, it's very difficult to determine whether those differences are the result of anything evolutionary or biological or from social and societal mechanisms. One of the biggest issues with this potential confounding variable is that society is still male-dominated.

We've certainly made progress, but there's still a huge gap in which sex drives the societal dialog. Movies are all written by men. TV is dominated by men. Men dominate advertising firms. Men decide how society presents certain subjects. For example, what is sexy? Sexy is heavily affected by pop culture and male advertisers determine what pop culture is. Again, this is changing but is still a strong influence.

Aside from the usual attacks on the good ol' boys that keep women out of the power structure, is there something else? I think there is, and the app store provides me a little evidence in support of this. Namely, sex sells, as we all know, and is the male sex drive (I'm grouping all aspects of sexual behavior in the term) so strong that it simply drowns out other things?

Look at the app store. iPhone users are roughly equal, with a slight skew towards male, but in less than two years, the app store became dominated by male-oriented sexualized apps. Weather... with boobs. Calendar... with boobs. In very short order, the entire app store had sexual apps dominating the top ten of multiple app categories.

I won't bother discussing the manifold reasons why this could be the case, just suffice it to say that it is the case. Where the hell do we go from there? Apple had to make a public-image decision to shut down that aspect of the app store because it didn't want every new user of an iPhone, be it straight or gay, male or female, to have their first experience with apps be soft-core porn aimed at straight men.

Is sexual culture dominated by the male perspective not because of sexism, but because classic economics dictates that is what will happen? The app store was a new market. Its genesis was in as liberated as a time as any in history. A new platform, a new product, and a company that appealed to both sexes. Less than two years later, it was nothing but fart-noise apps and boobies. If Apple wasn't the overlord of the market, and the market was allowed to operate entirely on free-market principles, there would have been nothing to stop it from becoming dominated by the male perspective.

So I ask again, where the hell do we go from here? Is any free market economic system doomed to be dominated by the male perspective? Or is this simply a symptom of women not being completely free, or not feeling that way, to express themselves in these systems? Perhaps because systems like this have been so classically male that the women don't even bother trying to make their voices heard.

It's an annoying prospect. The app store issue was consternating because it painted a very negative portrait of men, at least to me. One of the greatest technical innovations in history... used to dispense soft-core smut. My, how we've advanced. It's all so infuriating for someone like me, who is very interested in how and about what other people think. If my perceptions are colored by a world designed for and by men, what do I learn? Nothing! I learn nothing about other people who happen to be women. And worse still, it hurts those women's (Firefox spell check wants me to change that to "womenfolk's") quest for self knowledge, since their cognitions are colored by a society that objectifies them (nothing against objectification) and only looks at sex and male-female interactions from a male perspective.

That's damaging! Self knowledge is perhaps the most important type of knowledge there is, and the male society does damage to women by preventing them from having a level emotional ground from which to embark on self analysis. And how can you blame them for having a skewed perception of themselves when all they see of the world is breasts and farts?

Putting it All...

I'm watching History International, which judging from the ads is watched almost exclusively by old men, and it's running a show on 1968 and the sexual revolution with a touchstone in 1969.

I always like to put things into perspectives that are understandable. Put time on a scale that is tangible to a human. For example, all of human civilization is encompassed by just fifty people. If we count a human life-span at 100 years, everything we've ever had or done fits neatly into five thousand years, thus, fifty people. That's a number that can be grasped.

It is the same with the moon landings. It's really amazing how little technology has to develop before a species is able to leave the confines of their own planet. Think about that, in 1969, someone born in 1900 was only sixty-eight years old. Someone born before 99.9% of the population had ever seen a car, telephone, or electric light bulb (I'm not counting arc lamps). No movies, almost no sound recording, no nothing. Life was defined by steam power, horses, and gas lamps. It was the dark ages compared to the Star Trek of today.

In just sixty-eight years, we left the planet! Sixty-eight years! Try to emotionally grasp that. That would be like children born today being sixty-eight when warp drive is perfected. Or transporters. It was inconceivable to people of the day that we would walk on the moon and that they would live to see it.

Or the show right after the one on 1968, the sexual revolution of '69. Hugh Hefner is interviewed talking about the social-sexual mores of the day where gay men were literally prosecuted. Out-of-wedlock sex was punished with jail time. Washington DC had an enforced law on the books stating that missionary position sex was the only type allowed by law. No matter how stupid Bush was. No matter how stupid the people who support Intelligent Design are. No matter whatsoever, times are getting better.

We sometimes lose perspective because of our limited scope. We always live in the now. The now is always the most important, the most pertinent and salient. But because of that, the slow progress of the planet is sometimes missed. Hell, it's always missed, but stepping back a bit and trying to put things into perspective grounds me. It reminds me. It reminds me that we walked on the moon forty-two years ago. It reminds me that just fifty years ago, I could have been arrested for having sex with my girlfriend. It reminds me that all of human existence is contained in fifty lifetimes.

I Feel Special!

Apparently, Atheists are the group that surveyed people would least like to see marry into their family. They beat out blacks, gays, Hispanics, Martians, midgets, and serial killers, presumably.

I actually feel pretty good about that. It's fun to know that I'm at the top of a list about what makes people really uncomfortable.

A few points, one, this only comes from the end of a conversation on NPR, which can be found here, that wasn't even about atheists. There is no source cited, so we have to take it with a grain of salt.

Two, if this is entirely correct, I don't find it too surprising. The "battle" between faith and reason, or God and atheism, depending on how you want to frame the argument, has been brought to the forefront in ways not seen since the early 1900's.

George W. Bush pandered to the extremists; we've seen a jump in evangelical fundamentalists teaching their kids at home; the war between Intelligent Design and evolution seems to crop up at least once per year; and we have militant atheists like Christopher Hitchens roaming about telling people that they're stupid for believing in God.

When you think about what religion means to most people, it's a sort of psychological glue that gives them certain givens off of which they can build a sense of self-identity, right and wrong, and of society and other people. I matter. Something cares about me. Right and wrong exist, and I will do what's right. These are incredibly basic concepts! To try and strip people of these concepts would be crippling to someone without the mental priming to accept them.

By priming I don't mean brainwashing or indoctrination, but providing a sense of self separate from society and something different from their amoeboid ideas of morals and culture. They need to be introduced to ideas like secular humanism, whereby right and wrong are of our own making, but that doesn't make the concepts any weaker.

Because, without those, most people who aren't specifically religious and don't think about it every day are forced to face concepts, ideas, arguments, and truly, fears that they don't usually ponder. For the average person, I can imagine this to be a trying experience that they would rather just avoid. The last thing they want is a constant, living reminder of the possibility that they are wrong.

Depending on what has happened in the news at the time, my thoughts on how to best discuss atheism change. Sometimes, I support Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins in calling people who believe in God total idiots. If extremists haven't done anything recently to piss me off, I'm much more measured. Most people live their lives as reactive creatures, interacting with their environments and each other with little thought of cosmic significance. Religion, even if they go to church regularly, plays little part in their day-to-day existence.

They're good people, and they would basically live identically whether they were atheistic, theistic, deistic, or agnostic. So, really, whether their beliefs on the nature of reality are fully formed or not makes no difference whatsoever. This is the way I've felt recently. Maybe it's because nothing has happened, because I haven't watched Jesus Camp for awhile, or because I'm starting to set aside my righteous indignation for something a bit more level-headed. Regardless, it gives me some ideas on where the atheist/theist debate should go.

Namely, most people use religion for those things I outlines above. They use it as an excuse for bake sales and gatherings. They use it to answer really difficult questions about existence and reality that don't matter too much. In a very cosmic sense, they use it to feel good about living every day.

Instead, atheism should be most interested in the places where the concepts espoused by atheism: reason, logic, measured behavior; are most needed. Atheism is needed in science, in universities where the very purpose of the higher education is to bring up the tough questions, and importantly, in religious extremism.

People's fear and ignorance is what allows idiocy like the ID/Evolution debate to come to fore. These are the battle grounds that matter. Whether people "believe" or not is of utterly no importance.

Poll: Blacks Optimistic About Their Future (NPR.org)

Mickey Mouse Monopoly

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
-G.K. Chesterton

I just watched Mickey Mouse Monopoly and have found much to disagree with. The gist of the documentary is that Disney is too large and perpetuates its biases and stereotypes through a massive, global corporation, thus poisoning our children's minds.

Using the word poisoning sounds like I'm exaggerating their thesis, and they never use that word directly, but it's accurate as far as I understand. The thoughts Disney perpetuates are negative, children lap it up, and as such it can be considered poison.



Right off the bat, one of the interviewees refers to Disney as dangerous because what she obviously sees as highly negative concepts are communicated as innocent entertainment. I can already tell that I'm not going to agree with most of what she says, since the paranoia required to see danger in innocence is not something I possess. I did for a time. In tenth grade I was convinced the government was covering up shit in Roswell.

They next have two college students that are interviewed for another part of the documentary where they both argue that Disney is mere entertainment, adults read too much into it, and that it doesn't harm children at all. These few seconds of film are the only dissenting voices in the film.

It doesn't take long before the anti-corporate bias of the film begins to shine through. I'm not specifically pro-corporate. In fact, I detest most corporations, their influence, and the people who run them. This hatred has only be intensified with the recent financial bailouts. But corporate power is not one that is forced upon us. We willingly hand over that power because we like what the company is doing. I get the impression that they are likening the corporations to government entities and I think that the comparison is not only inaccurate, but fundamentally and wholesale incorrect. A company loses the instant we stop giving it money, a government can go on regardless.

Moreover, with the advent of the internet, the supposed censorial power exercised by these large companies has dwindled. A single, scathing blog entry can be enough to rip an entire corporation down. Whole websites exist for no other reason than to air grievances against these companies. Consumerist.com, anyone? Corporations work because people like them. Corporations trying to further their existence beyond this generally requires anti-competitive practices and that is against the law. So, the only issue that is really an issue already has laws against it.

One interviewee who gets used quite a few times is Henry Giroux, author of The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence. He attacks Disney for suing people who try and use Disney's images, be it Mickey or even photos of Disneyland. I agree with him that this is shitty, but it's not just Disney; it's all companies. The website TechDirt.com spends it's entire time arguing why trademark and copyright law is bad and is abused by many corporations. Why focus on Disney when they are simply one element in a large network of legal and social issues? I see no reason. We should be concentrating on copyright law, not Disney.



The documentary moves from corporate issues to sexism, where it's discussed how Disney's portral of females has not changed much over the decades. Again, I agree with this to a degree, but they seek out and focus on the elements of Disney production that conforms to their argument, instead of formulating an argument based on the data. Yes, Belle, Aurora, and Snow White are all thematically similar. They're damsels distressing, and they need help. Females are usually very sexual, with fabulous bodies. But, again, isn't this an issue in all of media? And what about females in Disney cartoons like Gummy Bears? Or what about Eilonwy in The Black Cauldron? Peg in Goof Troop, Gosalyn in Darkwing Duck, Perdita in 101 Dalmations, Bianca in The Rescuers Down Under, Lilo and her sister from Lilo and Stitch, Gadget in Rescue Rangers, Elisa in Gargoyles, Recess, Pepper Ann, Teacher's Pet, Kim Possible, or Dave the Barbarian? What about them?

(Oh, and a note about the female rabbit from Bambi, she has a beard! I can't stop seeing it. She looks like a cartoon rabbit version of Earnest Hemmingway with makeup on.)

It's seems that Disney will produce ANYTHING that they think will sell. Sexist undertones be damned. I think that the comparative failure of their non-traditional films, like The Black Cauldron or Mulan, show that people actively desire these stereotypes. They want to get lost in these worlds that are obviously unrealistic and predicated on stereotypes, and it is not within Disney's power to force upon them something they don't want. The Princess and the Frog is non-traditional (to a degree, at least), and it's under-performing. It hasn't even broken $100 million in the American box office. Compare this to Snow White, the number ten movie of ALL TIME. 101 Dalmations? Number eleven. Fantasia? Twenty. In the top one hundred, you will also find The Lion King, Jungle Book, Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, Bambi, Lady and the Tramp, and Aladdin.

It's obvious that audiences enjoy something non-traditional, now and then. Both Shrek and Shrek 2 are on that list, as is Finding Nemo, but that's it. Perhaps it's because people expect a certain thing from Disney and don't want anything else? Shrek's success is a sauce that the movie companies have been trying to recreate for years. Every damned CGI film that comes out is loaded with pop-culture references, snarky characters, both male and female, and bright, colorful, over-the-top action. But, again, that's it. It's very derivative, with all the movies shooting for the same general personality. Even fairy tales are subject to this hip-ification. Happily N'Ever After and Hoodwinked both took fairy tale raw materials and applied a healthy dose of Shrek to them.

Disney takes the same raw material and applies the Disney juice to it. Just as derivative, but in a different way. They use those stories and fairy tales, which are almost universally racist and sexist, because those are the psychosocial constructs that give us cultural touchstones. Universals with which we all relate since they've been a part of our lives. Shrek lampoons, and it works because we all know them, while Disney worships, and it works because we all know them.

One thing that annoyed the ever-loving crap out of it is the myopia of those interviewed. They only attack those aspects of the films as negative that fit with their preexisting interests. The professors of race talk about racism. The professors of women's history concentrate on sexism. Well, what about all the other elements of fairy tales that can be construed as highly, highly negative.

What about "love at first sight." Forget the sexism and racism for a second and concentrate on the other cultural touchstones used. Isn't it damaging to think that I'll meet someone, love them immediately, have some wacky adventure but live happily ever after? Isn't the very concept of Happily Ever After essentially harmful because it's so hilariously unrealistic? What about Scrooge McDuck being a stingy Scot? Or the stereotypical French chef? Or, for the love of all that's holy, what about Lampwick? Irish stereotype, much?

But that's just it. It's a stereotype. It's not realistic. It's a story. A flight of fancy. If it was realistic and only discussed subjects carefully to make sure that no cliches, biases, or stereotypes were used, the whole endeavor would be tearfully boring. The women are all attractive and the men are all manly! So? That's the point. It's fantasy. If the real world made a habit of invading my fantasy, I'd commit suicide pretty quickly.

We restrict movies about real stuff to adults because children don't like those movies. They attack Pocahontas as being an unrealistic portrayal of Native American relations. Well duh! Would they rather have an animated The New World? If I was a kid, I'd leave the room lickety-split.

They close the documentary with more anti-corporate discussion, using both a quote from Michael Eisner and an interview with what I assume is some random mother, first implying and then directly stating that Disney has a moral obligation to teach our children about the real world and to not fill their heads with stereotypes.

No. No they do not. I find the very idea of that absurd. It is the parents job to do that. It's Disney's job to entertain and to make money in the process, which is exactly what Eisner said. To say otherwise is to belittle the impact of parents and to ascribe moral judgments to something that doesn't need them and, truly, would suffocate under them.

The Siamese cats were racist. Pocahontas was inaccurate. And, someday, your prince is not going to come. It's not hard to tell children these things. Let them enjoy, and then correct their misconceptions as they arise, because you will have to do that regardless of the movies they watch.

When I was younger, I liked Disney. Disney creations affected my fantasies, and that's alright. Complaining about Disney coloring a child's perception is pointless since children live in a fantasy world. The real world and the fantasy world are tightly connected. As such, saying that someone's perceptions at age eight, like the children interviewed, are guaranteed problems in later life is highly inaccurate. Problems arise as they get older and their fantasies become expectations. This is where parenting comes in. Sexism is nearly impossible if your parents aren't sexist. Like all the arguments against cigarette advertising, even though the only variable strongly correlated with starting was whether the parents also smoked.

By my early teens, I was keenly aware that those fantasies were not reality. Both of my parents were raging alcoholics by this time, so I had little parenting, but I managed to figure it all out. Actually, I became intensely anti-Disney and would regale anyone who would listen with how The Hunchback of Notre Dame was nothing like the book.

The point is that fanciful ideas about life are not harmful to a child. Their perceptual construct is wildly inaccurate and that's not Disney's fault. Incorrect ideas about life, society, and who we are in the grand scheme of things are, usually, the fault of the parents. My parents were not racist bigots, and no crows or apes in a Disney film will change that. Disney is not harmful.

A View Askew

I just found out about the gang rape of a 15-year-old girl in San Francisco, early last week.

I feel pretty safe in assuming that this will go down in psychological and sociological history in the same way as the Kitty Genovese murder in New York. Professors for decades to come will discuss what this says about the human animal and the society we've built for ourselves.

I feel for the girl in a way I usually reserve for fat women watching The View. I can't even begin to imagine what the experience was like. I mean that phrase truthfully and without cliche. I can't even imagine. I think I would rather be attacked by a lion and killed, at least the goal of the lion is to end it. Here, the torment was the goal. I feel like crying.

My partner and I have had arguments about the nature of life vis a vis sex. I have argued that things like "Gift of Fear" and the argument that women lead a different life from men to be foolish and fear-mongering. She has said otherwise, and says that I may have a hard time understanding this since I was always not only a male, but a large, loud male. I've never felt fear of my fellow humans.

Still, I argued that the fear she and other women feel is primarily the result of fear programming in our brain going haywire since there is very little to be afraid of, anymore. We no longer have to worry about sabertooth tigers and whatnot, so our brain finds things of which to be afraid.

This wasn't rooted in sexism. This was rooted in the deep-seated belief that men and women are not from Mars and Venus. That our lives are fundamentally the same. The world is identical to us both. Because, if that's not the case, we are not equal. We are different. The world, for men and women, is fundamentally and essentially a different experience.

This case has basically changed that perspective. While I still think that most of the fear that women, and truly people in general, feel about the world is the result of a scare-obsessed media and evolutionary mechanisms meant to keep us safe in the wild, this does not happen to men.

There has never been a case of women gang-raping a drunk man and then beating him nearly to death. It just doesn't happen. Say what you will about the baseness of the men involved. Argue that they are an extreme minority. Argue that women are just as likely to get killed by a coconut as be gang-raped. I'll agree with pretty much all of it. With just a modicum of caution, women will likely never be raped or even assaulted.

But that's the thing. That modicum of caution. That one, little inch. That seemingly insignificant thing permanently and inexorably separates men from women. Men need not exercise that caution. They have no need or worry. But women do. Women and men are fundamentally different. Their world, my partner's world, is fundamentally different from my own.

And that makes me want to cry.

Yuck! A Penis!

“When You Marry”: 1962 Textbook (Contexts.org)