Lean Out, Lean In, Lean Out, Then Shake It All About

Sheryl Sandberg has been making noise ever since the release of her book Lean In which encourages women to be more aggressive in their social attainment. I have nothing against Sandberg and think that her heart was in the right place, but her Lean In movement is total horseshit and it has long since worn out its welcome.

First, let's ignore the white, hetero-normative, cis-gendered focus of her book. This is a problem that could fill a book and others have come close to doing so. I actually think that this criticism effectively negates Sandberg's arguments entirely, but it's not the biggest problem that I have with her work.

I also want to point out that while the core argument she is making is nonsense, she makes tons of great points about equality and sexism that are worthy points. If these were novel points or analyses, it would be a bigger deal, but they aren't. These are data points that have been known for a long time.

The biggest problem that I have is that Sandberg further reinforces socio and econo-normative behaviors and values. For Sandberg, success in life is found in a nuclear family, money, and property. Again, this is utterly without merit. Research has shown that economic stability is critical to happiness, but economic stability is relative, and that once stability has been reached, property and money do not correlate with happiness.

If the world were different, she would just be another author saying less-than-correct things, but the world is not different; the world is the world. And the world is one which is filled with damaging and counterproductive value programming that encourages people to try to find happiness in money and status. As such, her message is actually dangerous.

There is no inherent value to climbing the proverbial ladder (or jungle gym as Sandberg rephrases it). As far as I know, she never once addresses the underlying assumptions of value that undergird her thought. For her, they are taken for granted.

Well I don't take them for granted. Money is not inherently valuable. Success is not inherently valuable. Our national discussion rarely focuses on these subjects because it is the last thing anyone wants. Our economy is based on people not believing these things. Businesses are based on people not believing these things. Governmental power is based on people not believing these things.

People who addresses these underlying issues and try to discuss them and not simply the icing on the capitalist cake are labeled as fringe or fanatics — people with their heads in the clouds. By belittling these people, we can avoid discussing things that are, on a societal scale, very scary.

Sandberg would have been much more groundbreaking if she had used her privilege and position, the bully pulpit, to discuss our underlying values. Because it is these values that are the wellspring from which our prejudice flows. The patriarchy and all its concomitant misogyny and sexism are products of these very basic values.

(There is actually a term for this, mores: folkways of central importance accepted without question and embodying the fundamental moral views of a group. These are deep-rooted assumptions. They are like the id and ego of a society — the reptilian hindbrain of a nation.)

Sandberg didn't do that. She produced a digestible little nugget of fluff. And funny enough, this perfectly embodies her underlying values. Her fluff sold hundreds of thousands of copies and earned her spots on talk shows. If she had written a truly trenchant and piercing analysis of society, no one would have bought it.

She did precisely what she said we should all do: she leaned in... straight into the top of the best sellers list.

We Are All The Same

Science Proves: Avoid Politics If You Care About Your Sanity

A study came out awhile back showing that politics kills your ability to effectively analyze data. For most informed people (and informed is a label that could be correctly applied to a very small percentage of the population), this was a total well duh! moment. Still, it's always good to have some rigidly-created data to back up anecdotal observation.

Every time I see something like this, I get depressed. As someone who loves science and philosophy, history and literature, the predilection for humanity to just revel in its own prejudice and stupidity is enough to send me off a bridge. To combat this suicidal drive, I read Machiavelli. While I think that The Prince may have been dark satire, its cold, cruel views of humanity always make me feel that if humans want so desperately to be tricked, then goddamnit, trick them.

I Have Stopped Reading The News

I give up. I'm waving the white flag. I simply can't take the punishment anymore.

I am, of course, referring to the news. I used to get my news via MyYahoo!, which actually provided me a degree of protection of which I was unaware. It did it by being a really poor product. Feeds would fail to load on a regular basis, refreshes wouldn't happen, and the overall speed was pretty slow. This forced a restrictor on the flow of news from the various services to my eyeballs. This meant that, on any given day, I would only be exposed to a small handful of big news stories that reminded me that the world is shit.

Unfortunately, Google had to go and upset my little arrangement. A couple of months ago, Google announced that Google Reader was getting shut down. This caused everyone who had been using it to make the jump to another program called Feedly, which became an instant superstar. Out of curiosity, I made the jump from MyYahoo! to Feedly, and ho. Lee. Crap. The feeds to which I'm subscribed produce over five-hundred posts per day. I would spend hours just digging through the headlines, much less reading them. I was completely unaware of how much stuff is written. Billions of words, every day, efficiently being dumped into a list of stories that, no matter how fast I read, never seemed to empty. There was always more to read.

This alone would have been enough to overwhelm me. The subject matter, though, was what pushed me over the edge.

From my analysis of news stories over the past two months, I feel safe in concluding that the world is, and I believe that this is a scientific term, fucked. Like, really fucked. There is no place on Earth that isn't fucked. If the government is alright, then that country can expect to be turned into a burnt cinder by global warming. If the environment is alright, the government is set on being as bad as possible. If neither of those things are bad, then the economy is shit. And in all places, at all times, corporations are trying to destroy us all.

The first thing that I stopped reading was Alternet. I like the website. I think that it is a useful website. But the constant outrage -- the fact that no matter where you look there is extreme injustice -- I just couldn't take it.

The next thing that I stopped reading was Salon, another progressive website that is lighter on the injustice than Alternet, but still depressing enough to drive me into the arms of a warm coffee for comfort and a blank wall for entertainment.

After that, website after website fell. I lost interest in my gadget websites because everything on them is being manufactured by slave labor in shit-hole countries. I stopped reading about cars because gas costs $4,345.92 per gallon. I stopped reading economics news because no matter our education level, we are doomed to a future of poor pay and no free time. I stopped reading foreign policy news because other countries suck, and the U.S. sucks, and when the two combine it's like speed and kinetic energy -- double the country count and you don't double the suckiness, you actually quadruple it.

These trials and tribulations did provide one positive thing, though, and that is a new perspective. Currently, progressive media has a problem: very few people read it, and even though the Internet is overflowing with options for news, the majority of people get there news from a small number of sources. Before this experience, I was as puzzled as everyone else. I am no longer puzzled.

Not only is it freaking difficult to actually access with some acceptable speed all of the stories being published every day, but the subject matter is so universally depressing that it turns people into shell-shocked zombies, incapable of integrating further news in any meaningful way. To truly know what's going on is to feel depressed and powerless. There are so many wrongs that need righting, and those in power, nearly them all, couldn't care less. It is a war with a thousand fronts. It is overwhelming.

Since I stopped reading the news, I've been able to get more work done. I haven't been much happier, because I still know that nearly unfathomable injustice is being perpetrated whether I know about it or not. I have been more capable of dealing with that, though. Seeing the photos of this or that catastrophe would sap every bit of emotional energy that I had. I would simply sit there, unable to do anything.

I'd imagine that I will go back at some point. I care too much and think it too important to never go back. But for now, at this point in my life, when things are so difficult, I simply can't. I can't be made aware of the events because I cannot help but care. I cannot turn off my empathy and sympathy mechanisms. When exposed to certain stimuli, they activate, and on many days, it cripples me. I cannot afford to be crippled.

RIP Roger Ebert

I have been profoundly affected by the death of Roger Ebert. I’m finding it difficult to simply do things.

When someone who is so good dies, especially someone as iconic as Ebert, it's hard to believe that they will ever be replaced. It's as though the world has suffered an irreparable loss. Even though my rational mind knows that there will be others, at this moment, my emotions will not let that thought take hold. Today, the world is less.

It seems odd to wax so poetic about a movie critic, but Ebert became much more than that. He was a prominent and charismatic intersection of social criticism, entertainment, art, and politics. He was a singular person. No other film critic comes close, and few writers begin to approach his scope of social analysis. Fewer still did it all while being so amazingly entertaining.

For me, this is the end of an era.

Conservatives Own Their History

I have often argued that to accept a worldview requires you to accept the history of that worldview — its genesis. You have to own that history. Frequently, this can be painful. Lots of worldviews have some nasty underpinnings. For example, the history that I must own because of my education in psychology is pretty dark. Indeed, many of my classes dedicated significant amounts of time to discussing the manifold failures of science and ethics that peppers the history of psychology and psychiatry. Owning, understanding, and thus learning from that history was a primary element of our education.

Not owning one's history generally requires revisionist history, whereby the nasty elements are either ignored (denialism), reduced in significance (reductionism), or reframed in such a way that makes those who enacted the bad stuff seem less bad — sort of a reverse ad hominem attack. Most of the time, these forms of revisionism don't hold up to even the slightest analysis. How, then, can people possibly believe them?

I don't think that they do.

Almost all revisionist history is found on the extreme ends of the spectrum. I don't want to say conservatism exclusively, because forms of extreme liberalism can be similarly insane. In the U.S. at least, "conservatives" are almost wholly responsible for this sort of behavior.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Capitol, recently. Conservatives are giving up on the revisionism publicly. Previously, they would vociferously deny racism and jingoism and try to fight on the same terms as the liberals and progressives. It doesn't take too long on a well-known progressive website like Alternet or Mother Jones to find extensive analysis of the inconsistencies inherent to this strategy. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it generally turns out to be bullshit.

It results in the Republican party currently trying to argue that their strategy will increase racial quality, increase tax revenue, increase good, decrease bad, and so on. Of course, as I mentioned, it takes little effort to find inconsistencies in this rhetorical strategy, but the current conservative movement is relying on its adherents not doing research. That works in the short term, but the slow death currently being suffered by the American conservative movement shows that it doesn't work in the long term.

Thus we have a few Republicans coming out saying that Republicans need to, for lack of a better term, stop being stupid. The most notable one that springs to mind is Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana -- a state that has taken full advantage of Bush's school voucher program to send its children to dozens of newly opened fundamentalist Christian schools.

Unfortunately for the future of the party, the majority of them are not doing this. They are reacting to the changing political landscape, though, and this is coming in the form of cracks —  cracks in their public facade behind which hides all of the nasty stuff that has been festering under the surface for the past seventy-five years. Overt racism, misogyny, fear, and intolerance were all more or less obvious, but they were hidden behind euphemism and circumlocution, and if those speaking the hate were ever called out on it, they would fall back on said euphemism and circumlocution to say that their attacker was "seeing things."

Now, though, not we have cracks. I suspect that these cracks represent the death throes of a fading social entity, to wit, the conservative, post-Depression social mores that defined the Greatest Generation and many of the Baby Boomers.

Some recent and salient examples of these cracks are Antonin Scalia barely hiding his homophobia and racism. We have dozens of examples of lesser people doing similar things, and while not nearly all of them are letting their defenses down enough to see all of the 'isms therein, they are letting them down enough to see the strange rationalizations that they use in private.

The example that sticks in my mind, and the example that triggered this article, was a set of comments from a variety of people in the Republican Party about how Joseph McCarthy was justified in fueling the Red Scare, and indeed, the Red Scare itself was completely reasonable. Again, this is unsupported by the evidence, but it is significant because the pretense of generally agreeing with the historical consensus has been dropped. No longer do they try to argue that the Soviet Union was a threat, but the Red Scare itself was wrong. Now they admit that they think that any charge against "evil" is justified in the righteous fire of American Freedom. They are now using the argument that McCarthyism was justified as support for whatever social crusade they believe needs to be enacted today.

The moral and philosophical ancestors of the current conservative movement are no longer being rejected by the conservative movement. They are owning their history, and I think that that is a big deal.

As I mentioned, I think that this represents the death throes of a social system. When faced with adversity, and unable to reconcile their views with the emerging mores, the movement is doubling down on their beliefs and are rejecting the rhetorical assumptions that have previously defined the arguments.

By rhetorical assumptions, I mean the set of unspoken beliefs about the definition and value of certain words that underlie a discussion. At the most basic layer, we have terms that are representative of physical phenomena: ball, cloud, rock. But anywhere above the basic layer of language, values and judgements are attached to the words: good, freedom, mother, bad. These values and judgments come from the massive and complex system that gave rise to the people using the words. The further apart two people are vis-a-vis their rhetorical assumptions, the more difficult communication becomes, because most of our higher level language is predicated on these assumptions. It can reasonably be argued that the history of philosophy has been a three-thousand-year-old process to strip away assumptions in a quest for a perfect language.

Many of today's rhetorical assumptions were defined with the last major social shift: the counter-culture. I'm using that term to describe everything that exploded post-WWII: feminism, civil rights, free love, drugs. The educated progressives of the day helped to define the values on which our modern language rests. Sixty-five years ago, a white person could casually describe a black person as a nigger in public with little fear of retribution. Today, though, doing so would be social suicide.

This is because, for all intents and purposes, we won the culture war. For a long time, the reaction of those on the losing end was to complain about "political correctness." That's the reason why that term is always used in a negative way. Political correctness is the sigh of the oppressed bigot.

Now, we have the oppression being cast off. They aren't going so far as to call anyone who is anywhere past off-white as a nigger, although I am confident that they are doing so in private, but they are complaining about how whites are the oppressed. Whites need to be afraid. Whites are under attack. They then look to a glorified past of white supremacy to show how "their" world is crumbling away.

And in their bizarre minds, this is true. They are still raging against a culture war that they lost decades ago. Rush Limbaugh has lost, as best as I can tell, damn-near all of his sponsors after his attacks on Sandra Fluke. Fox News ratings, though still easily #1, have fallen for the past many years. Gay marriage went from having minority support to majority support in less than five years. Acceptance of misogyny and the patriarchy is becoming widespread.

These are all good things from a reasonable perspective, but those who lost the culture war are not reasonable. They are angry. They are afraid. And they are going to make life miserable for the rest of us until they finally die out.

At least, as the Tea Party has put in stark display, these people are no longer pretending to be arguing the same things as us. They are openly admitting that they reject reason and rationale. They are openly admitting that they are speaking a different language from me. They are openly admitting that there can never be a common ground, and we are seeing this in Congress. There is no hope. All we can do is relax, and wait for the inevitable day when the world of the white conservative does precisely what white conservative are afraid of: pass into history.

So, my dear conservatives, roar and rage all you like. We won the war. The rest is just a waiting game. And I'm a lot younger than you, so I have all the time in the world.

Really Existing Free Markets

This is less than an hour out of your life that will hopefully change your views, if you haven't already heard this. It was a seminal speech given by Noam Chomsky and one of the most piercing bits of economic philosophy done in the past fifty years. I stress philosophy, because this is not economics. He mentions many economic studies to back up his philosophical thesis, but it is definitely logical and qualitative in nature.

Of Rapists And Nazis

The recent video, uploaded by Anonymous, of the Steubenville "Rape Crew" is suitably mind-numbing. It shows a human being, seemingly too young to even be coherently using the words he is speaking, display a lack of empathy and consideration that would make a psychopath blush.

It is coincidental that I was reading an article about The Angel of Life, Gisella Perl, who described her treatment in the death camps. Men would gleefully kill babies, throw women alive into furnaces, and beat starving, helpless human beings to death.

After the war, psychologists took up the task of studying the behavior of the Nazis. How could humans possibly become so depraved, and do so in such large numbers? Even those who were involved would look back with shock at their own actions.

The core of that depravity is on display today in Steubenville. While the holocaust and the behavior of a small town's stupid population are in different leagues, what allows the two to exist is the same. In a different environment, the boy in that video would have been a Nazi, or a mercenary, or a murderer. That behavior is simply the manifestation of an internal characteristic that I don't think I need to even bother trying to explicate. It is apparent.

What we saw, for a brief moment, is the rotten core that can take hold that is held in check by society. Yes, we do not have bands of mercenaries rampaging around the countryside like it was 1300's Europe. But just because the behavior doesn't manifest in the ways that they previously did does not mean that the Freudian motivation is gone.

What society has done, and especially what the progressive movement of the past one hundred years has done, is make the display of this behavior incredibly unacceptable. It is the genesis of the term "politically correct" in the pejorative sense. People who use the word "PC Police" or something equally negative are essentially saying that they are angry that they are not allowed to be aggressive, violent, or bigoted in public.

But what every oppressed group in the country knows full well is that this rot, this toxin, is in full effect behind closed doors. This monster, this animalistic man-child, would have never dreamed of saying these words in public, but he did so in private. He even defended himself to those in the room who made wan efforts at arguing with him.

This is only the most recent case of the festering underbelly of our society bursting out into the daylight like some pus-filled boil. Apologists for this sort of behavior love to point to the very consequences of their loathed politically correct movement -- the lack of public behavior of this sort -- as proof that it doesn't exist. They claim that those who pull the racism, sexism, or classism "card" are simply paranoid and themselves bigoted.

No. This rot exists, and pretending that it doesn't because we have brow-beaten those that would act this way into some semblance of submission fails to address the wellspring of the poison. We must chase bigotry and anti-social behavior wherever it hides. There can be no apologies. There can be no toleration. We must go after it with a righteous fire and the profound desire to see justice done, no matter how painful. Because until we do, we will continue breeding those who would be well at home stoking the fires of Auschwitz.

There Is No Discussion

Andrew O'Hehir is one of my more well liked writers. He reviews movies, writes on a variety of subjects, and has a well-measured attitude on most things. As such, it's not surprising to find him as the most recent addition to the pantheon of writers and thinkers who ask "can't we all just get along?"

If we think we can understand this division better by using cute demographic shorthand or by trying to claim that it’s fundamentally about religion or abortion or sexual morality or the role of government or whatever other hobby horse we choose to ride, we’re kidding ourselves.

Defining it as libertarian vs. communitarian, for instance, or as a religious view of society set against a more secular one always simplifies or overlooks some aspect of the problem. It involves values or mores that people hold on a primordial or unconscious level, which are not easily expressed in language and not readily subjected to rational inquiry. Translated into the political realm, these fundamental cultural mores become entrenched ideological positions, modes of expressing the unshakable conviction that my side is right and yours is wrong.

We just had an election that was a de facto contest between America’s competing cultural factions, and one side won a narrow but decisive victory to the intense amazement and anger of the other. More name-calling isn’t going to help. If there were ever a moment to talk about this stuff dispassionately, this would be it.

If we can’t find a way to address the American cultural divide, beyond insults and quadrennial beauty contests, it is sure to destroy us.

And so is O'Hehir's point. While he blunts the false equivalency attack at a point early in the article, he misses another point: the uselessness of the discussion. I don't mean to say that understanding the conservative movement is useless, I mean to say that a discussion about dealing with them as humans is useless.

Even though both sides have abdicated logic and reason, at least to a degree, it is the conservative side that has abdicated it, and any hope for cogent language, to the extreme. They are relying entirely on nebulous, emotional concepts, and if we attempt to address these issues rationally, contradictions and problems are sure to arise. The instant that happens, and stress is thus caused, we have lost the people with whom we are trying to argue.

It is unfortunate, because I appreciate his feelings regarding the referenced video very well. I do feel bad for those who have been duped by the cynical patriotism of the modern Republican party. But at the same time, while I do not judge them, I will cast them aside without worry. They must be defeated in whatever way possible, because they represent the claws of the past, terrified by a brave new world, desperately trying to impede the future.

Moreover, I do not look at this battle in apocalyptic terms like O'Hehir does. I do not think that it is sure to destroy us. If the Civil War didn't, neither will this. Change comes, bit by bit, with every funeral. No matter how angry or contentious our current issues may become, and even if we accept that there is no way to resolve these issues, we will continue our march into the future as each generation rejects elements of the value system of those that came before.

We do not need to reason with the bigots, since they will die soon enough. And with few great works, with few marks in the sands of time, their sound and fury will be remembered as little more than a tale, told by an idiot, signifying nothing.

Our Drug Laws Are Stupid (A Documentary)

Hooked: Illegal Drugs And How They Got That Way was a documentary that aired on the History Channel some years back--around the same time that the History Channel was still primarily the World War II Channel.

One thing that can be said of The History Channel, now simply called History, is that they are an incredibly timid, conservative channel. They want to insult no one, and worse still, have recently started catering to the lower common denominator in their show selection. While the LCD programming is a relatively new characteristic, they have always been conservative. That said, the fact that they were willing to air a series of shows that all but directly call our drug laws stupid is amazing. It should tell you how truly idiotic the laws actually are.

Conservatives Losing the Fight on Same-Sex Marriage

From Free Thought Blogs.

The notable silence by the Republicans on the issue of same-sex marriage during the current election campaign is a sign, if one needed one, of how rapidly sentiment has shifted on this issue. In 2004 opposition to this was very potent and was used to galvanize voters to go to the polls and vote for George W. Bush. Daniel McCarthy argues in The American Conservative that it is one more sign of the retreat of religion in the face of modernity... 

Even conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly thinks that they are losing this battle and blames (of course) public education.

No. You are losing the fight because you are a bunch of backward, bigoted, troglodytes and people don't want to be associated with you.

There is an extensive quote from an article in The American Conservative, and the author tries his best to frame the loss of a fundamental tenet of conservatism as something that is totally cool. I guess he is tired of being automatically classified as a bete noire at dinner parties when everyone there finds out he writes for a magazine called The American-freaking-Conservative.

My recommendation: stop being conservative. Then you won't simply be the most recent iteration of a grand tradition of being left behind by the progress of society.

Dropout Nation: The American Education Crisis

Watch Dropout Nation on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Whither The Male Feminist

Earlier this year, there was something of a blow-up involving Hugo Schwyzer, a well known male feminist writer and professor. Essentially, he did a lot of really nasty stuff in his past. He directly covered up some of it and chose to cast other parts of it in edifying terms. This information was revealed late in 2011.

Apparently, many a writer and thinker in the feminist and gender community have had mixed feelings on Schwyzer for some time, and for them, this was the straw that broke the feminist's back. Websites that had previously been running his work pulled it, and he was largely cut out from the larger feminist conversation.

I don't want to talk too much about Schwyzer here. In fact, while I've felt that his voice wasn't necessarily a bad voice, his strong religiousness hinted at deeper personality layers that I suspected I would find distasteful if found out. Indeed, I have no idea how someone can call themselves a feminist and a Christian.

Instead, the point that came out of this that I found most interesting, and the one that I want to discuss, was the question of how men can be involved with feminism. There is a boat-load of complex variables hidden in this question, each one of which would take an entire book to adumbrate, and all of them have bearing. Obviously, I could never do them all justice in a blog post.

I shall thus put it in its coarsest formulation: can the person who is the beneficiary of an unequal society be a voice for those oppressed within that society? Can a straight, white, well-bred male talk with any meaningfulness about feminism (or any 'ism for that matter)? There were many women, and some men, who said "no." For them, the ideal scenario is a feminist movement essentially devoid of men. Most of them didn't frame this in misandristic terminology. They basically said that the purpose of feminism is to give a voice to the oppressed, not to give yet another stage for those who are not oppressed. This is the more extreme of the arguments.

The milder, and I think better, argument in favor of "excluding" men was to say that men should not be wholly excluded, but instead just not be given the spotlight. Men should never be the focus of feminism, and the superstars should always be women, since only women can fully understand other women.¹

I think that both of these arguments are incorrect. That doesn't mean that I cannot appreciate the perspective, though. I am a straight, tall, white, man living in America. I live a life of, sometimes, invisible privilege. I truly have little idea of what it is like to be oppressed and victimized by prejudice and bigotry. But I can grow to understand it, and it is important to recognize this ability and not denigrate the human potential to understand a great deal without needing direct experience. As a man, I can grow to understand things by reading accounts of women and the sexism they must endure. I can learn to identify it. I can experience it empathetically. That is real, profound, and useful.

Moreover, even if we were more limited in this regard, even if I didn't have mirror neurons churning away to help me feel other people's pain, it would be important to have men in the discussion (sympathetic, well-meaning men, of course. Not trolls.). I have never been oppressed, but I have fallen victim² to gender normative behavior and felt the drive of bias and sexism. I've been in groups of men expressing all kinds of sexist ideas and been made to feel profoundly uncomfortable about my behavior and thoughts. If I and others like me are not given the stage now and then, these valuable experiences will go unspoken. That would be a terrible thing.

The argument for male exclusion may have held more water if we were talking exclusively about sexism against women, but it's much more than that. The problem is not just female oppression, it's sexism and gender norms in general. All men are not the beneficiary of an unfair society. The patriarchy sucks for everyone except those on top. Being a white male may be easier than a black female, but that doesn't mean that my life can't suck in unique ways, and these are issues that need discussing.

As I mentioned earlier, there is a large complex of psychosocial variables hidden in this noise. If we focus on one thing, we miss the various ways these other variables can manifest. For example, homophobia is essentially misogyny in a different guise. Men are never penetrated. Men are the penetrator.  To be penetrated is to be a woman, which as we all know is the worst thing ever. And any man who is willing to be penetrated is not only broken and corrupt, but also dangerous since he may, like some kind of zombie, try to turn others into women.

The whitest, straightest, most cis-gendered man in the world can fall victim to this prejudice. He can be suddenly declared a persona non grata by his peers and ostracized. Or if the man is gay, and is afraid of this reprisal, he must remain hidden and fearful. Or a family that is "shamed" by the "abnormal" behavior of a child or parent that feels trapped in their neighborhood. All of this has its root in sexism and misogyny. All of this needs to be analyzed within the larger discussion.

To try and categorize that as gender studies and not feminism is to, I think, understate the breadth of feminism. We discuss racism through the lens of minority groups. We should discuss sexism through the lens of those most oppressed and analyze all of the ways that this prejudice infects other areas of life. I don't think we should look at this as a zero-sum game of superstars and celebrities. We should look at it as a network of people, all of whom have had different experiences, colored and affected by the same thing. These people all deserve an equal voice. To say that feminism is only about women is to deny this complexity.

I am a feminist. I seek no stage. My voice is only one of many, and many have suffered far worse than myself. But I am still a feminist, and I want to be a part of the discussion.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

1: That latter assertion may seem a bit sweeping of a statement, but I completely agree. When the lives of men and women are so demonstrably different, unless a man pretends to be a woman for a couple of years, or is transgender, he will never be able to fully understand the gestalt of being female. It requires a woman. Although even then, not every woman gets it. We only need look at Michelle Bachman or other such wackados for examples.

2: I don't think that victim is too strong a word. I feel like a victim because I feel that society essentially poisoned me with deeply emotional programming that has taken years to untangle. It undoubtedly colored my interactions with people from a very young age, and lord knows what kind of damage it caused in friendships and family relationships. That said, I don't mean to take away from the significance that the word implies in many areas of sexism. I do not feel victimized in the same way that someone who has ever been assaulted, raped, or vilified would feel victimized.

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.

---

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.

Women Smarter Than Men? That's Unpossible!

A recent study by James Flynn, a researcher who focuses on intelligence, has shown that for the first time in, well, ever, woman are smarter than men according to IQ tests. This doesn't surprise me at all.

He says that women are being forced to stretch their brains more as they attempt to juggle all of the things that society expects of them: home, children, work, etc. He also speculates that women may simply be intellectually better than men on some biological level. Even though he admits that more research is obviously needed, I think that he's missing the most obvious answer: society asks very little of men.

While extreme societal demands on women undoubtedly have a part to play in all of this, I think that the primary reason for the failing of men is that they are not asked to work. Recently, colleges were caught letting in men who performed only slightly better than average, because if they let in those who truly excelled, they would be letting in almost nothing but women. They tried to explain this by saying that any smart university doesn't accept all qualified people since some set percentage of them will invariably choose to go to another school, but this was a nonsensical excuse for a number of reasons.

Their reasons were, almost humorously, more practical than that. Basically, schools don't want a student body that is overrun with women, because that may drive students away. Top-performing female students don't want to go a school that's filled with other women. They want a mixed crowd. If they don't want a mixed crowd, that's what the Seven Sisters are for.

Think about that. Men are performing so far below women of the same age that men who even slightly stand out are being given acceptance. It's not that society's expectations on women are too high, it's that their expectations on men are too low.

Think about all of the nearly pre-verbal people that you have met in your life. How many of them are men? I'd wager over 90%. That's my number, certainly. There is no reason why 90% of pre-verbal human chimps should be men. But it makes perfect sense when you think about the system of entitlement and absolution provided to men. Boys will be boys is heard when boys do almost anything undesirable. This is ridiculous and is a massive disservice to every male that we raise in this society.

If males fail in school, it's funny. If males act up, it's just what they do. If males reject the system, they're seen as rebels. When we give boys a pass for this sort of behavior, we fail them. In decades past, this worked fine. In decades past, the system was geared toward men, so even if a boy was an idiot, the system would simply grab him and place him somewhere. It was the very root of the factory job. Drop out of high school? No worries! Get a job at the local plants. None of these opportunities existed for women, and were, in fact, actively taken away from women after World War II to be given back to men.

Unfortunately, those systems are starting to fail under the immense weight of increasingly equal women — women who were forced to work so hard to overcome systemic sexism that they now wildly exceed the men that are being raised. My alma mater, Rhode Island College, is nearly 70% female. That is an untenable system. It cannot be maintained. It also completely explains why women exceed men on IQ tests. Because we're raising them to.

Karen Klein And The Village

Karen Klein is the bus monitor who recently became a viral video sensation after video of her being horrifically berated by some kids on a bus became national news. Her fund-raiser (which had a target of $5,000) has broken $600,000 at the time of this writing. Many people are saying that this has as much to do with hatred of kids as it does support for Karen. I think that it's not simply child-hatred or a perception that children today are worse than children of yesterday. I think that it is merely a visible element of a complex social mix.

Even though conservatives responded very negatively to Hillary Clinton's book It Takes A Village, they actually agree with what it says. The only difference is that in the conservative formulation, they are allowed to be judgmental assholes since they blame the family for the failure of a child as opposed to the society in which the family lives.

What do I mean by them agreeing? Go out and talk to anyone who was of childbearing age fifty years ago, sixty years ago, and ask about the social pressure to have children. Those who didn't have kids were seen as selfish and strange — judgments that the religio-conservative right still fling around today. These ideals were still strongly felt in all social segments as little as twenty years ago. Understandably, this created a feeling of contempt among those who had no interest in having children, and the lingering judgments create further contempt now.

No, it's not as explicitly stated as it once was, but the act of marriage and children is still seen as the badge of adulthood by a large hunk of the population. And for the young people of today, this pressure comes from those who were raised in decades past where these expectations were explicitly stated: their parents, grandparents, and extended family. My own family (and the family of my partner) are not-so-quietly hoping that we will reproduce.

That is, I think, at least one of the primary roots of this amazing outpouring of support for this woman. Many of us hate children not just because children are pricks, which they sometimes are, but because we are seeing children as a symbol of social pressure that is stressful.

Oddly, I also argue that the wellspring of the behavior on the children's part is also of the same sort. We have the aforementioned renouncers of parenthood, but on the other end of the spectrum, we have those who happily engage in child-bearing. They are doing so in a society that today has two large, conflicting pressures: the pressure to be an individual and reject social expectations, and the pressure to be a "good person." This gives an opening for those to inject an enormous amount of self-importance and self-rigteousness into the act of having children. They still see themselves as part of the individualists, but enjoy a sensation of being traditional as well. They try to raise themselves above the individualist din by appealing to conservative values. This sort of activity was hilariously lampooned in the song Pregnant Women Are Smug.



In this rejection/acceptance of parenthood, we run the risk of highly entitled children being produced. People have injected such an enormous amount of importance into the child, because they are living vicariously through that child, that any assaults on the child are seen as unjust, even if the child is a complete jerk. This is because assaults on the child are interpreted as assaults on the parent.

This is not new behavior, obviously. Parents have lived vicariously through their kids for generations. I suspect that the problem is growing because of the loss of reverence of authority.

I think here we are seeing a pendulum swing. Sixty years ago, authority was automatically assumed to be correct in any conflict with a child. Look at the unprecedented child abuse cases from decades past that are only being revealed now. How many of these cases could have been uncovered if children had been listened to. For further evidence, look the trope in television and movies of the child who knows the truth, but is ignored as a liar, fabricator, or storyteller. Sixty years ago, teachers were allowed to hit children, today, teachers can't even hug children.

Compounding the problem is Internet access. Kids today can more easily learn than ever before that adults are just as stupid, immature, and dickish as other kids are. The separation of "child" and "adult" is becoming harder to maintain. And even if kids aren't thinking too deeply about the concept, they can use the Internet to simply enact experimental actions against authority. The AP covered this in only slightly-alarmist tones here.

In Maryland, students posed as their vice principal's twin 9-year-old daughters on pedophile websites, saying they had been having sex with their father and were looking for a new partner. Elsewhere, students have logged on to neo-Nazi and white supremacist sites claiming to be a Jewish or minority teacher and inciting the groups' anger. Others have stolen photographs from teachers' cellphones and posted them online.

These are the kinds of behaviors that we should be regulating. Instead, we try to take cell phones away, expel kids for legitimate criticism of teachers, and have inane zero-tolerance policies that causes kids to be expelled for bringing plastic flatware into school. The pendulum has not only swung too far, it is downright broken.

Obviously, in any discussion like this, alarmism must be carefully avoided. Kids today are not fundamentally worse than kids from a generation ago. I think that observable behavior is increasing because the environment is both allowing or amplifying the behavior. Likewise, since the generation isn't fundamentally worse, they will likely turn out just the same as previous generations — afflicted by the same problems and resulting in the same demographic groups.

This is a long way from my original subject, Karen Klein. I think that the support shown her is a historical fluke. The event of her exposure happened at the right place, in the right time, to the right population. The remnants of an old social order are in their death throes, and are mixing with the emerging social order to create specific psychosocial anxieties and issues. Once the old way dies, so goes our contemporary specific problems with children; so goes the wellspring of our reaction to this event; and so goes the wellspring of the event itself. In another time, no element of this series of events would have ever happened.

But for now, for all of the incidental elements of the process, it did happen. So send the women a couple bucks. Because, man, kids suck.

Dan Rather Reports: The Dalits of India and Forced Marriage

Along with Frontline, Dan Rather Reports is the best news show in TV. You should watch it.

The most recent Dan Rather Reports that's been posted to YouTube is included. It covers further updates on India's "Untouchables," the Dalit Women. Also covered is forced marriage in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Mother's Day Gifts WTF?

I understand that certain societal tropes still hold. I understand that sometimes sexism still exists. I understand that most stores only run an ad if they have data to indicate that the ad will work. But still. WTF?

We haven't gotten past this? We're still selling vacuum cleaners to moms? Don't mothers want something, I dunno', fun on what is ostensibly their day? What would the male equivalent of this even be?

Here, dad! We bought you a premium Monster.com membership so you can earn more money! Because that's all you do!


I ripped this bad boy from Amazon's website, and again, I understand that if there is a company out there that backs their ads with good data, it's Amazon. As such, I'm sure that there are in fact a significant number of mothers out there that would like a new vacuum cleaner. Hell. I'd like a new vacuum cleaner (Dyson, please).

But that doesn't eliminate the inherent ridiculousness and sexism in this ad. I can almost guarantee that most mothers would rather have new clothes, a new television, computer, iPhone, shoes, or perhaps the Nikon listed above the vacuum cleaners. But no. The images for Amazons Mother's day section is nothing but cleaning supplies. Because that's all women do.

From Whence Misogyny?

I've been thinking, as I do, about gender hatred a great deal recently, and specifically about the different nature of misogyny and misandry. They are startlingly different. Two great examples of misandry that stick in memory are Cosmopolitan magazine and the Kieu-Becker case from late 2011.

The Kieu-Becker case elicited a response on the penis-chopping incident on the television show The Talk, which NPR hilariously described as "an angry man's vision of what groups of women friends are like." They laughed and generally mocked the incident of a man, who has been proven to be guilty of nothing more than fooling around with other women, who had his penis violently removed and thrown into a garbage disposal. They laughed and giggled and seemed to find it a jolly old time.

An example that sticks in my mind is Cosmopolitan. My mother read the magazine for years, meaning that it was frequently, along with BMW Club Magazine, National Geographic, and Consumer Reports, my primary reading material in the house.

Cosmo has a very defined and twisted perspective on what makes a male, and it is predicated almost entirely on sex. Men are sex-crazed animals that only need placating, after which you can finally be left alone to your painting and novel writing, or whatever other weird things Cosmo seems to think that their readers do. This sentiment is found in every issue, going back decades.

Understandably, issues from the 50's, 60's, and 70's were very much rooted in the society of post-war America, where looking pretty and satisfying the man were the only concerns of women. But we've been living in the Feminist era for a while, now, and Cosmo, instead of evolving, has instead doubled down on its antiquated sexual philosophy. Their perspective on women has changed, but men remain unchanged from the 1950's. In fact, men are even worse. They want sex. They want it wild. They want it constantly. And that's it.

These two examples are only nationally salient instances of misandry, though. There are many smaller examples littered throughout society. For example, male elementary school teachers frequently have tales of administrators and female teachers all but accusing them of being perverted child molesters. Men receiving harassment and stares if they are near a playground or park.

The takeway, though, is the nature of the misandry; it is almost entirely about sex. Men are animals. It's all that they want. Other elements come into play, but these aren't really misandristic and more just generally sexist. Beliefs that all men are controlling, or all men like sports. These are gender-normative constructs that don't come anywhere close to describing all men.

But that basically goes without saying. Gender-normative concepts fail to describe the majority of society, much less just men. That's why I'm interested in specifically misogyny and misandry. They are very different. All one has to do to see the difference is peruse Men's Rights message boards online and then read similar message boards aimed at women. The language difference is bone-jarring. There's no need to completely detail the many subtle differences, all you have to know is that only one of these communities calls for the raping of those with whom they disagree. I'll give you two guesses as to which one.

And that is the difference. Misogyny is problematic because of its violent nature. Misandry is not violent. It is judgmental, certainly, but a belief in the disgusting sexuality of men does not cause widespread violence like the Kieu-Becker case. Likewise, those aforementioned misandristic message boards are filled with women complaining about men, but the vitriol never turns to violent hatred demanding that men be raped or beaten. Why?

I don't think that it's entirely the framing, context, or the social lens through which we read and interpret events. I think that it's the wellspring of the emotions. For men, sex is difficult to come by. All you have to do is look at the Pick Up Artist community. They are generally unattractive men who are desperately trying to get laid. This causes literal frustration.

Psychological frustration is the physiological agitation one feels when being blocked or prevented from something desired. Many men look out over the population and see multitudes of women with whom they would like to have sex, but cannot. This causes anger. Thus, frustration.

For most women, finding sex is easier. Not easy, certainly, just easier. Their problem is finding someone with whom they want to have sex. So women look out over a social landscape and see few that are acceptable. This results in judgment and sadness, but not frustration. For example, if I want food, but there is only haggis in the room, I am sad. And probably hungry. But if I want food, there is apple pie on a table but someone keeps pushing me away from it, I'm going to get angry. Misogyny is caused by frustration, misandry, by sadness.

Ironically, the very environment that has been built to cater to these men is likely angering them even further. Our media world is filled to overflowing with hyper-sexualized portrayals of women. Half-naked female forms can be found on highway billboards and on bus stops. Magazines for anything even remotely male-focused are filled with attractive, seductive women. The world has turned women into beings of pure sex and made them impossibly attractive.

This only infuriates the sexless men even more. They do not have interaction with real women, so their conception of women is defined entirely by this twisted media landscape. They see women everywhere as throwing in their face the sex that the women will not give. Women become a unified entity of a cruel temptress, mocking men. And when you are a perpetually frustrated man, this is the lens through which you will see the world.

Perhaps even worse is the flip-side of the behavioral coin. Men become frustrated because they can't get the desired sex with super-attractive women, and thus become openly hostile to women who are unattractive because they feel that these are the only women with whom they can get sex. Their frustration lashes out at the related subject of their desires. They feel that other men, be they rich, handsome, or whatnot, are the ones having sex with the attractive women seen in media, and thus the only ones left for these ordinary men are ugly women.

I think that much of this is because of the male focus on sex. It is hard for them to get it, thus, they focus on it. I think that there is a long, complex history that has built our society in such a way as to make sex hard for men to get, even though it doesn't need to be that way. Men and women want the same things! Truly, I feel confident that the vast majority of the differences between the genders are the result of social programming. Ditch the programming, ditch the problem.

The very same sexism that imprisons women to this very day is producing a group of men who feel rejected by the sexist system that was ostensibly created for them. The differences between misogyny and misandry stand as a testament to our need for freedom from sexism in all forms. It hurts us all, and we must grow past it. Men are not animals. We want a lot more than sex. But when society fails to teach us what true happiness is, we fall back on, and thus interpret the world through the lens of, primal drives. We need to teach our boys that sex is only the beginning.

A recent study showed that teenage boys are talking about romance, love, and relationships more than at any other point in history. I can happily say that the cultural shift is happening now. One can only hope that, as being emotional is more acceptable for men, and being sexual is more acceptable for women, this wall of dislike between the genders will fall. Maybe, someday in the future, men will take to message boards to complain that all women ever want is sex. Now wouldn't that be something?

The End of Cheating

Much like issues with the end of judgment and the end of insurance, will future technology bring the end of cheating?

I am, of course, referring to sex robots. They are coming. They are quite literally an inevitability. I would imagine that our first ostensibly human-like robots are less than twenty years away, and our first affordable robots that are at least functional for sexual purposes at a price that people can afford is maybe another twenty years after that.

As with so many things in the future, our ability to understand and thus manipulate the blocks of the world that represent "reality" forces questions upon us. We take so much of the world at face value, which of course makes perfect sense. We evolved in a world where we had to take things at face value. But as concepts like souls, free will, identity, and humanity fall apart under analysis, where we will go?

As regards sexbots, will we be forced to recognize the philosophical issue of not knowing what happens in another person's head? And our concept of a "person" is extrapolated from behavior of a creature that looks like "me." We already have studies showing that human-like robots can be "blamed" in the same way that we blame other people. We know that the robots are not human. We know that they are nothing more than lines of code. Yet, our emotional drives are apparently willing to ascribe human-like souls to robots if they are suitably human-like.

This drive is there even with robots that look more like Wall-e than Wally, so when robots that look very human, this drive will likely be as strong as they would for real humans. Will the inevitable sexbots change our conception of cheating?

For example, very few people would count masturbation as cheating. Likewise, complex masturbation through tools and sex dolls would also not be seen as cheating. Cheating, at least for most people, requires another person. But what happens when sex dolls look like another person?

Aside from the surface issues, we also get into thorny problems like intent. Would it be cheating if the cheater thought that the robot was another person? Could a person program an impossibly-attractive robot to specifically seduce someone for the purpose of destroying a relationship? Would we accept people being in "relationships" with robots? Many more questions present themselves, because this isn't just about sex, it's about love, friendship, emotions, and our ability to socialize.

My answer to these problems is one that Dan Savage would love: the end of relationships as we know them is less than a lifetime away. Traditional relationships with fidelity and monogamy are, by and large, social constructs. They don't even work very well when we only have human people running around, what with over 50% of marriages ending in divorce, as many as 70% of people cheating at some point in their life, and 10% of men caring for kids that they think are theirs... but aren't.

When sexbots come out, our traditional conceptions of fidelity and relationships will be ripped apart, and we will finally be free from the shackles of our ridiculous, socially-prescribed conceptions, free to live and love as we see fit.