Finishing the Parlor

Nixed Messages

"If someone outraged me by publishing naked photos of my body, I'm pretty certain my next move would NOT be to then pose semi-naked for a national magazine, especially with a cockatoo."
Bruce Kasanoff "Why Jennifer Lawrence Confuses Me"

This is why we have so much difficulty with consent in our society. Because people become confused by the idea that whether or not someone consents to an act has any place in the moral calculus.

Or... do they? People give money to charity. That money, once they have given it, is usually the given charity's, to do with as they please. Using Mr. Kasanoff's logic here, if someone stole money from me to give it to a charity, and I was outraged about that, it would "send confusing signals" for me to donate money to a charity. Because I'm obviously outraged that charities have my money, right?

Of course, when I swap out nude and semi-nude pictures, and insert money, Mr. Kasanoff sounds like a complete and utter moron, which I really doubt is the case. So what changed? The fact that in the United States, the nudity taboo is alive and well, and so, "clearly," what Ms. Lawrence was outraged about was people seeing her naked - because it appears to be the only topic that carries any moral weight. It's the same thing when we talk about sexuality - there was a time when the sexual history of a woman who had been raped was fair game, because if she had shown a willingness to sleep with other people out of wedlock, why was it a problem if yet one more person decided to help himself? Even though that is no longer (generally) considered an acceptable legal defense, the train of thought still rolls on in some places.

Outside of "victimless crimes," nearly every criminal offense is really about acting without consent. It isn't, for instance, illegal for me to enter someone's home, and leave with $100 more than I had when I arrived. That person could have owed me $100 for some good or service that I had performed for them, or perhaps I had just borrowed the money. What is illegal is for me to use stealth or force to take the $100 from them without their consent - even if the other person owed me the money, or I was only intending to borrow it for a time. This concept, which we don't typically find hard to grasp, applies to everything - including nudity and sex. As Mr. Kasanoff notes, Ms. Lawrence is free to have as many nude pictures taken of herself as she wants, under any circumstances that appeal to her. But as long as those photographs are her lawful property, she has an absolute right to dictate who may see/distribute them, and under what circumstances. If she happens to drop prints of half of them from an airplane over Los Angeles, the other half are still off-limits without permission. Just as if Mr. Kasanoff had $1,000,000 in cash - if he dropped half of it from an airplane over Los Angeles, it would still be a crime for anyone to help themselves to so much as a penny of the remainder without Mr. Kasanoff's express permission. The apparent gulf between asking first and the act itself makes no difference in either case.

Let me point out that sexuality is not the only taboo topic that works this way. I've encountered people who appear to have genuine difficulty with the idea that I might allow a trusted friend to refer to me as "Nigger," but would consider the same from them to be overly familiar (even if I understood that they didn't mean offense by it), and thus transgressive. Like Mr. Kasanoff, they tend to assume that since I've gotten over the general taboo against the word, that I now have no issue with it at all, from anyone. And this leads them to become confused (and sometimes, angry) when I withhold permission from them

It's (way) past time that we stopped letting the taboos that we have around nudity, sexuality and language blind us to the fact that they are not necessarily moral outrages in and of themselves. Otherwise, people like Mr. Kasanoff may never get it.

Versus Them

I am, one might say, only marginally attached to gaming culture. I enjoy games, but I don't really consider myself a gamer per se. So I've been observing the battles of self-described Social Justice Warriors (and Rogues and Clerics and Rangers {It's a Gamer Thing. I'm not sure that I understand...}) against the forces of Evil in (guy) gamer culture with a certain amount of detachment.

And when I look at things from a distance, while I understand the anger at, and the desire to vanquish, the perceived "sexists, recreational misogynists and bigots," I think that it misses the point.

The gamification of misogyny predates the internet, but right now, in this world full of angry, broken, lost young men convinced that women have robbed them of some fundamental win in life, it's rampant.
Social Justice Warriors and the New Culture War

This statement that Ms. Penny makes, seems, to me, to hold the keys. If the gamification of misogyny is a symptom of angry, broken, lost young men who feel that they have been deprived of a fundamental win in life, then isn't it logical that the solution is to provide these men with the win that will soothe their anger, repair them and show them the way without needing to inflict pain on others? Of the conflict in the gaming community, Ms. Penny says: "This is a culture war. The right side is winning, at great cost." Which I understand. The idea that the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice is a common one. I don't think that anyone believes that this will still be an issue twenty years from now, or more than likely that it will even take that long to resolve. But, earlier in the piece, Ms. Penny had also made this point: "Gender isn't a game you can play and win by brutalizing and harassing and shaming and hurting the other 'side'." But as I see it, the whole of her op-ed is about shaming the other side.

They can't understand why they look ridiculous.

[T]here's nothing the sad, mad little boys who hate women and queers and people of color can do about it.

When I was in college, we were discussing domestic violence in class - it's roots, and who was at fault. And one person in the class made a statement that has always stuck with me. "It's clear that people learn this from the society around them, but we can still hold them responsible and punish them for allowing themselves to learn it." What I don't understand is why this is better than unteaching it.

As I've grown older, I've come to understand that "traditional masculinity" is a box, and any attempt to leave it is punishable. I know that it feels good to think of defeating the "terrified [...] mouthbreathing manchild misogynists," and punishing them for the "adversity, [...] shame[,...] pain and constant reminders of our own worthlessness" that they dished out. But if the very existence of the gamification of misogyny is the result of people attempting to deal with adversity, shame, pain and the constant reminders of their own worthlessness themselves, what are we really gaining when we enlist those tools as our weapons? If the so-called sexists, recreational misogynists and bigots have created their own worst enemies with these tools, why are the self-proclaimed Social Justice Warriors so certain that they aren't about to do the same? I understand the impulse to see those that injure you out of their own injuries as complicit in the wounds that lead to them being angry, broken and lost. I understand the impulse to see the "right" side of things as self-evident and to understand that opposing it is ironclad proof that "the other" is willfully and deliberately of insufficient intelligence and sensitivity to be worth saving. I was there, once.

"They" may be losing, but they haven't yet lost. In fact, for a time, they've won. Not because of the great personal costs that they've exacted from Anita Sarkeesian, Leigh Alexander, Zoe Quinn, Jennifer Lawrence, Laurie Penny and those that love, support and respect them. But because their hurts and losses have robbed them of their compassion for others; and their lack of compassion is robbing others of theirs. Gender oppression may create a world were everyone loses, but so do anger, hatred and hurt. They all do this through creating a broader culture where hounding and brutalizing and harassing and shaming and injuring others is the normal way of attempting to heal themselves, despite it's woefully poor track record. When we understand this, yet we deal in them anyway because the ignorance, weakness and/or evil intent of those we oppose make it right; and because we've convinced ourselves it will work out differently when we do it - we've become the servants of our pain, and not its masters.

All Natural

I've always taken something of a laid-back attitude to environmental issues. I don't really worry about the planet. Mother Nature is a grown woman and can take care of herself. We, on the other hand, could really create serious problems for ourselves if we're not careful. But that said, I'm glad that environmental protection wasn't an issue tens of thousands of years ago. I can just imagine what the environmental impact statement for "fire" would have looked like. We'd still be living in caves.

I think that we've come to see ourselves as outside influences on "the environment" rather than a natural (if unusually influential) part of it. If the population of some particular animal - any animal, most likely, were being decimated, or even pushed towards a realistic chance of extinction by a different animal that had recently evolved into a remarkable effective animal-hunting niche without any measurably direct influence from human activity, no-one would be saying that we had a responsibility to attempt to halt the evolution of one animal to spare another. And we, as humans, have simply evolved to the point where we're capable of doing incredibly destructive things to the environments that we live in and interact with. Some of these things we live with, because we like for people to be able to have more children or keep out of the rain. Some of these things we push back against because we like the idea of having pristine spaces or we worry about damaging the Earth's ability to support us over the indefinite term (which is almost certainly limited).

Where I do think that we have a responsibility is to take ownership. I don't find anything wrong, in and of itself, with deciding that we're willing to trade bats and birds for a lower atmospheric carbon load - or when it really comes down to it, that we're willing to trade bats and birds for a better standard or living for some number of people. But I think that carelessly stumbling into those tradeoffs is what is going to get us into trouble. But that's kind of the way it's always worked. I know that here in the United States, we tend to not work to avoid catastrophes - we simply dump resources into cleaning up after them after the fact. And that, more than likely, is one of the real drivers of a lot the issues that we have. But it is what it is, and we don't have the drive and unity that it would take to change it.

Downtown