@ceebarks – Just the Canadian one. I believe Presbyterians in the US already accept gay marriage in some capacity, so they’re ahead of us there. Thanks for the kind words!
@Nameless Wonder – That’s a good point. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a more politically-minded friend a few years ago. I was ranting about how some conservatives equated gay marriage with marrying trees, and she said, “Well, why can’t you marry a tree?” She thought marriage as an institution had a bad history, and wasn’t in favour of taking it too seriously. But as you point out, too, it has a component of state recognition that helps with things like taxes. Part of that buys into a patriarchal or otherwise -archal culture too, but certainly it can help financially to have a relationship recognized, not to mention personal and familial validation.
As to religion in general – whether I believe in God or not depends on the day, but I ever since I found out about the Presbyterian doctrine of Calvinism (age 11 I think) I’ve strongly disagreed with it… so if a deity exists, s/he has a good sense of irony having me born into the denomination. I’m a bit contrary too – I can relate 🙂
A lot of Sarkeesian’s positions (for example her dislike of violence, or referring to sex workers as ‘prostituted women’) seems to hearken back to second-wave feminism rather than a more modern flavour.
It’s very current. Prostituted women have stated that they do not want to be referred to as “sex workers”, but as “prostituted women”.
1. We do not want to be called ‘sex workers’ but prostituted women and children, as we can never accept our exploitation as ‘work’. We think that the attempts in UN documents to call us “sex workers” legitimizes violence against women, especially women of discriminated caste, poor men and women, and women and men from minority groups, who are the majority of the prostituted.
Is anybody not an Ayem Cemmani? Is the test rigged? Or are we really just a hive mind here?
Pandapool -- The Species that Endangers YOU (aka Banana Jackie Cake, for those who still want to call me "Banana", "Jackie" or whatever)
9 years ago
@WWTH
I know a couple of people I know got different results, but I doubt having 3 people with the same results demonstrates a hive mind ALL HAIL QUEEN KATIE.
Flying Mouse
9 years ago
I just took the chicken quiz (FOR SCIENCE!). Turns out I’m a Silkie. I don’t know whether to be delighted that I’m the avian equivalent of a Muppet, or sad because I can’t join the totally metal fellowship of the Ayem Cemmani.
EJ (The Other One)
9 years ago
I’m a Phoenix Chicken apparently. Flying Mouse, I’ll sit with you in the non-Ayem Cemmani corner.
Robert
9 years ago
Our younger son has been watching (and sharing with me) some atheism promoting videos by someone with the moniker Darkmatter2525. Actually, not so much promoting atheism as deconstructing Abrahamic theism. I have shared with him that not all theists subscribe to the Hairy Thunderer school, despite its high visibility in the USA. He’s got quite a range of interests, including genetics and child development. In a previous generation, he’d be the kid spending the lunch period in the school library. Or the principal’s office.
Unrelated: I saw a piece from the Guardian by the pianist James Rhodes, inspired by the apocryphal quote from Charles Bukowski: “Find what you love, and let it kill you.” To clarify, he was putting his own gloss on ‘follow your bliss’, rather than ODing; he WAS a poet, after all. The article made me rather angry. It was expressing a point of view I’ve seen from a number of artists, which can be crudely summarized as “Art is for Everyone! Go do Art!” I have much the same reaction to this sort of thing as I would to being told, “You don’t need those glasses to see properly; you just need to try harder! Look at me – I don’t use glasses!” As if art is something just anyone could do, if they were willing to make an effort. I am not prone to violent emotion, but it’s hard for me to view this calmly. My apologies for not being able to provide the link.
John Calvin ranks high on my personal list of People Whose Ideas Have Harmed Humankind. I cannot believe that Jesus would have accepted Calvinist beliefs.
I read the article that Anita Sarkeesian recommended, and I do not see anything that is not pretty standard feminist thought in it. We do not criticize individual women for the choices they have made, unless they seem to be harmful to others; and women’s social conditioning is such that they rarely cause serious harm to others. But we also realize that choices for women (and for men too) are seriously restricted in a sexist/patriarchal society, particularly once you get past a relatively small set of upper/middle class women in first world nations. We do not criticize women for the choices they make to survive within those restrictions, but we also recognize the necessity of working to eliminate sexism from society so that women (and men) will have much greater opportunities to live fulfilling lives in the future.
The biggest problem that sexism creates is not so much on the female side, but on the male side — what we call “toxic masculinity”, which produces beatings, rapes, and murders of which women are often the victims, and at its highest point creates large-scale tribal/national conflicts which pose a very real threat to the continued existence of our species. It is difficult to accept the possibility that we are an evolutionary mistake that will succeed in erasing ourselves, but that is obviously possible. So, although feminism is not explicitly pacifistic, it is difficult for me to imagine an effective feminism that does not have a strong pacifistic element, since violence is so overwhelmingly male, and women (and their children) are so often its victims.
So choice is a good thing, but nobody should forget that we need to work to tear down sexism so that there will be even more freedom of choice in coming generations. We have the privilege of being in on the opening phases of what could be a major transformation in human society that would be of great benefit and perhaps even keep us from sending ourselves to the ash bin of evolutionary history. We should enjoy the progress that has been made without being satisfied by it.
Here’s where I demonstrate the depths of my grumpitude. I do not watch “action movies”, so I cannot make any intelligent comment on the latest Mad Max movie per se. I have never been able to get any sort of pleasure out of seeing people hurt or killed, and it always has seemed to me that action movies are the ultimate glorification of male violence, the most outrageous propaganda for toxic masculinity. I understand that these movies set up situations so there are “bad guys” who “deserve” to get killed. It seems like BS to me, and I have a hard time getting excited over a movie in which a woman is depicted as being just as violent as men commonly are. Yes, I’m an old fogey. And my only hope for the future of our species is that women (with the help of some enlightened men) will be able to pull off a social revolution.
It seems like BS to me, and I have a hard time getting excited over a movie in which a woman is depicted as being just as violent as men commonly are.
See, the trouble with this attitude is it’s just the tiniest hairsbreadth away from the old “keep women out of that nasty business” argument used by misogynists since the days of yore (G. K. Chesterton, for instance). Or, more generally, the idea that it’s okay to exclude one group of people from something because you think that thing shouldn’t exist at all (for instance, those libertarians who oppose gay marriage on the purported grounds that they don’t believe in the institution of marriage).
This is why it’s so important to be able to separate one’s beliefs about different things. There are two issues here: Inequality and violence. Regardless of what you think of violence, inequality is a Bad Thing, so yes, equitable violence is better than inequitable violence, even if you really, really hate violence. (Hence why nearly all feminists support a coed draft if there’s a draft.)
If you can’t separate the pacifism from the feminism, like Sarkeesian can’t, you either have to rank them on a hierarchy (ie, “who cares about equality if there’s violence”) or reject everything as equally bad unless it aligns with every facet of your views.
Either way, the result is that you end up not siding with equality (that is to say, not seeing anything meaningfully better about a film in which men and women hold equal roles versus a film in which they don’t) because you cared more about something else.
And do you really not watch any movies where the bad guys die? Even Disney movies don’t pass that bar.
guest
9 years ago
@Robert–over the past several months I’ve read three really great articles about the privilege embedded in the ‘everyone can follow their bliss if they just try’ myth–here’s one:
I’ll have to see if I can find the other two. As a ‘creative’ and bright person, who was unknowingly educated far above her actual social class (and didn’t realise this until very recently) and thus had no idea at all why things weren’t working out the way I’d always been told they would, these articles were a real eye-opener for me.
guest
9 years ago
Here’s the second one. (The third one is the best! I know I’ve sent the link to people so should be able to find it.)
Pandapool -- The Species that Endangers YOU (aka Banana Jackie Cake, for those who still want to call me "Banana", "Jackie" or whatever)
9 years ago
@GrumpyOldSocialJusticeMangina
I think what gets me is that violence is a man thing? Violence is a human thing that just happens to been established as masculine by society, which, you know, is kinda a big reason why female on male violence isn’t treated as seriously as male on female violence, why women have been barred from the military, etc., etc.
Other than that I agree.
(Although I do like some action movies, so, yeah.)
@brooked:
Thanks for that link! I looked it up and it was cool. I’ll see if I can check out Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
@Clarity:
Thank you for pointing me to that summary. I’ve seen the term “prostituted women” under attack by the sex-positive movement and as a man I lack the background to judge between the merits of the two positions. Is there an academic consensus on the matter or is this one of these things that is still being fought over?
@GrumpyOldSocialJusticeMangina:
I think I share your dislike for media in which violence is presented as cool, masculine and dominant. I’ve been to war cemeteries, and seeing all the thousands of young men there that never had the chance to grow old, it’s hard for me to shake the belief that such impersonal male-on-male violence – especially large-scale organised violence – is a crime against men perpetrated by patriarchy. The concept of the “mook” is an example of shocking dehumanisation and (usually) genuine misandry, and it’s telling that the MRAs have never pointed that out in all their whining.
However, I must disagree with you that our only hope is for the women to stage a social revolution. Power structures generally tend to endure a change of leadership, because exploitation is useful to people in power regardless of who they are. To believe that the sort of person who is attracted to power is going to relinquish that power simply because they’re female is, to my mind, utopian and somewhat pedestalling.
This is a male thing, and we need to sort this out for ourselves. Women aren’t going to ride to our rescue here. It’s going to be hard, because it involves unpicking enormous amounts of socialisation and taking away a lot of the fictions that make life bearable. But it has to be done, for the sake of our sons and their sons.
Because of this, if women want to have their share of the violent dominance fantasies with which our culture is currently beset, it’s not my place to tell them not to. Would I prefer it if nobody had violent dominance fantasies? Yes. But trying to keep one gender pure and untainted while the other is taught to march in lines is not the way forward.
I am having a fairly good day. In a comment thread of a writer I follow I found both someone who understood why Faramir in the LotR movies was so bad, AND someone who had seen the original, Russian, Solaris. Which is wonderful.
Gilshalos, that is great news about the bats. Bats are wonderful, and I’m glad there are humans on their side.
Guest, those links make very good points. My emotional reaction was more about the assumption that art is something that everyone can actually do. Rhodes was not writing so much about people doing art for a livelihood, but as a part of their lives. As in, come home from work and parcel out thirty or forty minutes to practice piano, draw or write. The assumption that regular people are capable of creative pursuits is what aroused my ire.
Hambeast, Social Justice Road Warrior
9 years ago
@guest
Those three articles were really great. I will be forwarding them to my husband who is being laid off from his IT job in a few days and is very angsty about what to do next. He’s swallowed the whole DWYL thing hook, line and sinker. Unfortunately.
The whole “Do What You Love” movement has always rubbed me the wrong way for the “well, who’s supposed to do the jobs that NOBODY loves??” reason, but the articles fleshed out the rest for me, that never seemed to mentally coalesce until now.
Many thanks!
guest
9 years ago
Yeah, I totally swallowed it too but these articles helped me think more clearly. Robert, that is related to the idea of these articles–who has the time to ‘do art’? ‘Doing art’ can often be a serious time commitment, and a lot of us without privilege just don’t have the time to invest–we work, and then we’re too tired after work to do something super-demanding.
Another related issue that was brought to my attention a few years ago (I’m single and without children so didn’t recognise it) is that most women’s time is spoken for. Family first, then work, then other social commitments, THEN whatever she wants to do–though of course there’s no time left by the time you get down the priority list. And any woman who puts what she wants to do on a higher priority than the others is ‘selfish’, which is the most deadly thing you can call a woman.
Pandapool -- The Species that Endangers YOU (aka Banana Jackie Cake, for those who still want to call me "Banana", "Jackie" or whatever)
We Hunted The Mammoth
Apparently I am an Ayem Cemmani chicken!
@Lanariel
Third one! 😀
@ceebarks – Just the Canadian one. I believe Presbyterians in the US already accept gay marriage in some capacity, so they’re ahead of us there. Thanks for the kind words!
@Nameless Wonder – That’s a good point. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a more politically-minded friend a few years ago. I was ranting about how some conservatives equated gay marriage with marrying trees, and she said, “Well, why can’t you marry a tree?” She thought marriage as an institution had a bad history, and wasn’t in favour of taking it too seriously. But as you point out, too, it has a component of state recognition that helps with things like taxes. Part of that buys into a patriarchal or otherwise -archal culture too, but certainly it can help financially to have a relationship recognized, not to mention personal and familial validation.
As to religion in general – whether I believe in God or not depends on the day, but I ever since I found out about the Presbyterian doctrine of Calvinism (age 11 I think) I’ve strongly disagreed with it… so if a deity exists, s/he has a good sense of irony having me born into the denomination. I’m a bit contrary too – I can relate 🙂
It’s very current. Prostituted women have stated that they do not want to be referred to as “sex workers”, but as “prostituted women”.
https://www.change.org/p/say-no-to-un-women
Is anybody not an Ayem Cemmani? Is the test rigged? Or are we really just a hive mind here?
@WWTH
I know a couple of people I know got different results, but I doubt having 3 people with the same results demonstrates a hive mind
ALL HAIL QUEEN KATIE.I just took the chicken quiz (FOR SCIENCE!). Turns out I’m a Silkie. I don’t know whether to be delighted that I’m the avian equivalent of a Muppet, or sad because I can’t join the totally metal fellowship of the Ayem Cemmani.
I’m a Phoenix Chicken apparently. Flying Mouse, I’ll sit with you in the non-Ayem Cemmani corner.
Our younger son has been watching (and sharing with me) some atheism promoting videos by someone with the moniker Darkmatter2525. Actually, not so much promoting atheism as deconstructing Abrahamic theism. I have shared with him that not all theists subscribe to the Hairy Thunderer school, despite its high visibility in the USA. He’s got quite a range of interests, including genetics and child development. In a previous generation, he’d be the kid spending the lunch period in the school library. Or the principal’s office.
Unrelated: I saw a piece from the Guardian by the pianist James Rhodes, inspired by the apocryphal quote from Charles Bukowski: “Find what you love, and let it kill you.” To clarify, he was putting his own gloss on ‘follow your bliss’, rather than ODing; he WAS a poet, after all. The article made me rather angry. It was expressing a point of view I’ve seen from a number of artists, which can be crudely summarized as “Art is for Everyone! Go do Art!” I have much the same reaction to this sort of thing as I would to being told, “You don’t need those glasses to see properly; you just need to try harder! Look at me – I don’t use glasses!” As if art is something just anyone could do, if they were willing to make an effort. I am not prone to violent emotion, but it’s hard for me to view this calmly. My apologies for not being able to provide the link.
John Calvin ranks high on my personal list of People Whose Ideas Have Harmed Humankind. I cannot believe that Jesus would have accepted Calvinist beliefs.
I read the article that Anita Sarkeesian recommended, and I do not see anything that is not pretty standard feminist thought in it. We do not criticize individual women for the choices they have made, unless they seem to be harmful to others; and women’s social conditioning is such that they rarely cause serious harm to others. But we also realize that choices for women (and for men too) are seriously restricted in a sexist/patriarchal society, particularly once you get past a relatively small set of upper/middle class women in first world nations. We do not criticize women for the choices they make to survive within those restrictions, but we also recognize the necessity of working to eliminate sexism from society so that women (and men) will have much greater opportunities to live fulfilling lives in the future.
The biggest problem that sexism creates is not so much on the female side, but on the male side — what we call “toxic masculinity”, which produces beatings, rapes, and murders of which women are often the victims, and at its highest point creates large-scale tribal/national conflicts which pose a very real threat to the continued existence of our species. It is difficult to accept the possibility that we are an evolutionary mistake that will succeed in erasing ourselves, but that is obviously possible. So, although feminism is not explicitly pacifistic, it is difficult for me to imagine an effective feminism that does not have a strong pacifistic element, since violence is so overwhelmingly male, and women (and their children) are so often its victims.
So choice is a good thing, but nobody should forget that we need to work to tear down sexism so that there will be even more freedom of choice in coming generations. We have the privilege of being in on the opening phases of what could be a major transformation in human society that would be of great benefit and perhaps even keep us from sending ourselves to the ash bin of evolutionary history. We should enjoy the progress that has been made without being satisfied by it.
Here’s where I demonstrate the depths of my grumpitude. I do not watch “action movies”, so I cannot make any intelligent comment on the latest Mad Max movie per se. I have never been able to get any sort of pleasure out of seeing people hurt or killed, and it always has seemed to me that action movies are the ultimate glorification of male violence, the most outrageous propaganda for toxic masculinity. I understand that these movies set up situations so there are “bad guys” who “deserve” to get killed. It seems like BS to me, and I have a hard time getting excited over a movie in which a woman is depicted as being just as violent as men commonly are. Yes, I’m an old fogey. And my only hope for the future of our species is that women (with the help of some enlightened men) will be able to pull off a social revolution.
Apparently I’m a Gold Laced Wyandotte chicken.
I’m also a Silkie chicken.
I’m apparently also a Silkie chicken, which is nice cause they were already my favorite kind.
See, the trouble with this attitude is it’s just the tiniest hairsbreadth away from the old “keep women out of that nasty business” argument used by misogynists since the days of yore (G. K. Chesterton, for instance). Or, more generally, the idea that it’s okay to exclude one group of people from something because you think that thing shouldn’t exist at all (for instance, those libertarians who oppose gay marriage on the purported grounds that they don’t believe in the institution of marriage).
This is why it’s so important to be able to separate one’s beliefs about different things. There are two issues here: Inequality and violence. Regardless of what you think of violence, inequality is a Bad Thing, so yes, equitable violence is better than inequitable violence, even if you really, really hate violence. (Hence why nearly all feminists support a coed draft if there’s a draft.)
If you can’t separate the pacifism from the feminism, like Sarkeesian can’t, you either have to rank them on a hierarchy (ie, “who cares about equality if there’s violence”) or reject everything as equally bad unless it aligns with every facet of your views.
Either way, the result is that you end up not siding with equality (that is to say, not seeing anything meaningfully better about a film in which men and women hold equal roles versus a film in which they don’t) because you cared more about something else.
And do you really not watch any movies where the bad guys die? Even Disney movies don’t pass that bar.
@Robert–over the past several months I’ve read three really great articles about the privilege embedded in the ‘everyone can follow their bliss if they just try’ myth–here’s one:
http://beyourrealyou.com/2015/03/01/the-do-what-you-love-myth-and-the-danger-it-poses/
I’ll have to see if I can find the other two. As a ‘creative’ and bright person, who was unknowingly educated far above her actual social class (and didn’t realise this until very recently) and thus had no idea at all why things weren’t working out the way I’d always been told they would, these articles were a real eye-opener for me.
Here’s the second one. (The third one is the best! I know I’ve sent the link to people so should be able to find it.)
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/25/sponsored_by_my_husband_why_its_a_problem_that_writers_never_talk_about_where_their_money_comes_from/
@GrumpyOldSocialJusticeMangina
I think what gets me is that violence is a man thing? Violence is a human thing that just happens to been established as masculine by society, which, you know, is kinda a big reason why female on male violence isn’t treated as seriously as male on female violence, why women have been barred from the military, etc., etc.
Other than that I agree.
(Although I do like some action movies, so, yeah.)
I think this was the third:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/in-the-name-of-love/
@brooked:
Thanks for that link! I looked it up and it was cool. I’ll see if I can check out Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
@Clarity:
Thank you for pointing me to that summary. I’ve seen the term “prostituted women” under attack by the sex-positive movement and as a man I lack the background to judge between the merits of the two positions. Is there an academic consensus on the matter or is this one of these things that is still being fought over?
@GrumpyOldSocialJusticeMangina:
I think I share your dislike for media in which violence is presented as cool, masculine and dominant. I’ve been to war cemeteries, and seeing all the thousands of young men there that never had the chance to grow old, it’s hard for me to shake the belief that such impersonal male-on-male violence – especially large-scale organised violence – is a crime against men perpetrated by patriarchy. The concept of the “mook” is an example of shocking dehumanisation and (usually) genuine misandry, and it’s telling that the MRAs have never pointed that out in all their whining.
However, I must disagree with you that our only hope is for the women to stage a social revolution. Power structures generally tend to endure a change of leadership, because exploitation is useful to people in power regardless of who they are. To believe that the sort of person who is attracted to power is going to relinquish that power simply because they’re female is, to my mind, utopian and somewhat pedestalling.
This is a male thing, and we need to sort this out for ourselves. Women aren’t going to ride to our rescue here. It’s going to be hard, because it involves unpicking enormous amounts of socialisation and taking away a lot of the fictions that make life bearable. But it has to be done, for the sake of our sons and their sons.
Because of this, if women want to have their share of the violent dominance fantasies with which our culture is currently beset, it’s not my place to tell them not to. Would I prefer it if nobody had violent dominance fantasies? Yes. But trying to keep one gender pure and untainted while the other is taught to march in lines is not the way forward.
I am having a fairly good day. In a comment thread of a writer I follow I found both someone who understood why Faramir in the LotR movies was so bad, AND someone who had seen the original, Russian, Solaris. Which is wonderful.
Also, apparently they have cured white nose syndrome in bats. And bats are always cute.
http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/northamerica/unitedstates/tennessee/success-in-treating-white-nose-syndrome.xml?utm_campaign=social.nature&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=1432323127
Gilshalos, that is great news about the bats. Bats are wonderful, and I’m glad there are humans on their side.
Guest, those links make very good points. My emotional reaction was more about the assumption that art is something that everyone can actually do. Rhodes was not writing so much about people doing art for a livelihood, but as a part of their lives. As in, come home from work and parcel out thirty or forty minutes to practice piano, draw or write. The assumption that regular people are capable of creative pursuits is what aroused my ire.
@guest
Those three articles were really great. I will be forwarding them to my husband who is being laid off from his IT job in a few days and is very angsty about what to do next. He’s swallowed the whole DWYL thing hook, line and sinker. Unfortunately.
The whole “Do What You Love” movement has always rubbed me the wrong way for the “well, who’s supposed to do the jobs that NOBODY loves??” reason, but the articles fleshed out the rest for me, that never seemed to mentally coalesce until now.
Many thanks!
Yeah, I totally swallowed it too but these articles helped me think more clearly. Robert, that is related to the idea of these articles–who has the time to ‘do art’? ‘Doing art’ can often be a serious time commitment, and a lot of us without privilege just don’t have the time to invest–we work, and then we’re too tired after work to do something super-demanding.
Another related issue that was brought to my attention a few years ago (I’m single and without children so didn’t recognise it) is that most women’s time is spoken for. Family first, then work, then other social commitments, THEN whatever she wants to do–though of course there’s no time left by the time you get down the priority list. And any woman who puts what she wants to do on a higher priority than the others is ‘selfish’, which is the most deadly thing you can call a woman.
@gilshalos
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHMMMYYYYYYYYYYGOOOOOOOOOOOOOD~!
http://i.giphy.com/X1zfywreqWqIw.gif
Hopefully they can get White Nose eliminated before it heads too far west, now!