Intelligent Inquiry

As a way to encourage inquiry, even when they feel unsure of themselves, people often say: "There are no stupid questions." Not everyone agrees with this concept.

Peter Doocy, Fox News: “Has your relationship with the president frayed to the point that you are not going to support anything that he comes to you and asks for?”

Senator John McCain (R-AZ): “Why would you say something that stupid? Why would you ask something that dumb? Huh? My job as a United States senator, is a senator from Arizona, which I was just reelected to. You mean that I am somehow going to behave in a way that I’m going to block everything because of some personal disagreement? That’s a dumb question.”

Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't.

"I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up."
Senator John McCain, Monday, 17 October, 2016.

If the good Senator is willing to go on the record and effectively claim, out of little more than naked partisanship, that any person that Hillary Clinton would have nominated for the Supreme Court would be opposed, what's really so stupid about assuming that there is a level of partisanship between the Establishment and Populist wings of the Republican party that the Senator would decide that any policy advanced by President Trump is a bad one?

Where Mr. Doocy went wrong is in effectively asking Senator McCain to self-incriminate in front of the Fox News audience, who (generally speaking) back President Trump and, like the President himself, expect a certain level of loyalty and deference to him, even from the Establishment Republicans whom the President has no problem attacking when it suits him. Whether he'd hoped to catch the Senator off-guard or elicit an openly disingenuous-sounding answer, Mr. Doocy departed from standard procedure on this one, and Senator McCain verbally spanked him for it. There's a reason why the typical modus operandi in situations like this is to ask an innocuous-seeming question and then spin the answer later through manipulating the context (or leaving it out entirely).

Politicians, especially those who have served for long periods through shifting political circumstances, may think with their party affiliations more often that non-partisans would like, but they aren't stupid. Part of the problem with the common conspiratorial thinking that makes even high-level politicians out to be the bought and paid for puppets of showy wealthy Illuminati is that it allows one to write off as venal and unintelligent a group of people whose day-to-day job (and their longevity in that job) demands a remarkable level of political savvy. And sometimes, that political savvy demands making statements that cloak partisan considerations in ethical or practical ones. Even if the statements made in so doing have to be walked back later.

But there's another way one can look at Mr. Doocy's question, and that is as a veiled form of political research. For anyone reasonably intelligent to go on the record with the idea that they so oppose a sitting President of the United States that they would block initiatives simply because said President supports them, they would have to understand (correctly or not) that they have a strong enough constituency backing them that this is a viable policy. When talking across the Democratic-Republican divide, this is a pretty safe bet. There is a large enough cohort of anti-Tump voters that Democratic members of Congress in many parts of the country can pledge not to support anything that the President might come to them and ask them for and be reasonably assured that voters in their state or district will see that as a legitimate ethical or practical stance. Likewise, a large number of Republican members of Congress could rely on a staunch cohort of anti-Obama voters for the same. But there's an open question, and that concerns the existence of a large enough cohort of anti-Trump Republican voters that a personal stand makes sense.

The other typical Republican holdouts, such as Senator Susan Collins of Maine, while they might be viewed by the stereotypical Fix News viewer as traitorous, place their policy objections in terms of just that, policy. There may have been a lot of grousing from Republicans in other parts of the country about Senator Collins' lack of support for repealing and replacing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but it seems fairly clear that whatever her personal feelings on the subject, she was channeling her constituents in this. Because Senator McCain tends to also invoke Senate ideals in his opposition, it may be easier to cast him as using those as a cover for personal animosity, which would imply a voter base behind him that shares that animosity.

As people come to view American politics as a contest between Purity on one side and Perversity on the other, it's likely, whether its stated publicly or not, that this question of personal, rather than even partisan bias will become more and more prevalent. After all, calling people out as perverse is often a poor way of making friends, and there is an endless litany of angry screeds claiming that one or the other election was effectively decided by hurt feelings. And so it may be a stupid question, but it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

Looky Here

Apparently, my apartment sits underneath a remarkably large, but invisible slab of stone, because until I encountered the article "Why Men Force Women to Watch Them Masturbate" I'd been completely unaware that this was even a thing. It is yet another in the long list of behaviors that I just don't understand. A female friend asked me about masturbation once, and it was perhaps the most invasive question that anyone had ever asked me. She could have bankrolled a major-market sports team with the amount of money it would have taken her to actually get me into a conversation with her about the topic. So the idea that there are people who allow, let alone force, other people to watch them masturbate without some serious money being involved is utterly baffling to me. But then again, sex, of any sort, and I have never really gotten along.

Of course, this is all related to the whole Harvey Weinstein story, which is busily unraveling into a tale of a man who seems utterly unready, unwilling and/or unable to exercise any level of control over his sexuality - or to find someone who could assist him with that. And as much as I'm not terribly interested in yet more sordid details about Mr. Weinstein's transgressions, this was something that piqued a morbid fascination; the sort of thing that seemed too bizarre to be true, and was all the more interesting for it.

Until that is, I got to the actual body of the story. It's an interview, between the author, Angelina Chapin, and one Alexandra Katehakis, a sex therapist and clinical director of a practice in Los Angeles. And I knew that I'd made a mistake when I reached the third question: "What are the psychological motivations behind it?" Because the answer was: "I don’t know what it’s like to hold a penis and do that. But from what I know about men, it does make them feel powerful."

Okay, I get that Ms. Katehakis has never held a penis and forced a woman to watch her masturbate. Now, I'm guessing that "Ms." is an appropriate honorific to use here, but I suspect that I'm not too far off. But when she says, "But from what I know about men," a thought occurred to me: "Have you actually spoke to anyone who's done this?" Now, maybe she had, and it just didn't occur to her to say: "But from what I know about men who have done this," or "But from what I know about perpetrators of this activity." But the rest of article did nothing to give me any  indication that Ms. Katehakis actually had any information about the dynamics of the topic, outside of the standard psychological tropes of bullying and sexual assault. Any reasonably attentive and well-read psychology student could have given that interview. And this is not to knock Ms. Katehakis' credentials as a sex therapist, but she didn't come across as someone who'd actually researched the topic.

Which, in the end, is kind of a shame. Not because the topic is morbidly fascinating, but because really understanding what drives someone to expose themselves in so intimate, and vulnerable, a fashion seems that it would have value in understanding an aspect of our greater society that we clearly haven't spent enough time examining. Maybe it's just me, but this seems like an act that takes a lot of chutzpah to carry off, because despite Ms. Katehakis' view that the male penis is "the body part that is most threatening to a female," it's in close proximity to the testicles; one swift kick and it seems that “sexualized hostility” and “eroticized rage” would go right out the window in a world of pain. (Of course, maybe this is part of what I just don't get. Sure, Mr. Weinstein could file an assault complaint, but it still seems that he'd have some uncomfortable, if not incriminating, questions he'd have to answer.)

There is a sort of leering voyeurism that comes with these things. No argument there. But even with that, understanding what makes a person tick under these circumstances, and perhaps even how they came to be that person, can be useful in learning how to create a better future.

Dissed

"When someone disrespects you," the saying goes, "Beware the impulse to win their respect. For disrespect is not a valuation of your worth but a signal of their character."

I respectfully beg to differ. Although I understand the sentiment, the devil is always in the details and here, the details lie in the unstated assumptions that this seems to be built on. (And yes, I do appreciate the irony of speculating about someone else's assumptions.) What follows are those potential assumptions, in no particular order.

The feeling or perception of being disrespected is the same as being disrespected. This is always a tricky one, because it works under the idea that gestures of respect or disrespect are, firstly, both objective and universal and secondly, obvious enough that the observer is always right about them. In this, I fall back on a lesson my father taught me: "Obvious," he said, "refers to something so crystal-clear that you're the only person who sees it." It's possible to feel disrespected by someone who intends no disrespect, simply because the language they use to convey respect is different enough from the one you use to recognize it.

That respect (or at least neutrality), in ways that we recognize and respond to, is an entitlement. This, in my experience, is not a given. For some people. respect is a gift. For others, respect is something that others earn from them. And there are people for whom the way that they withhold the outward signs of respect that they have yet to give, comes off and being actively disrespectful.

That "worth" is synonymous with any other measure of esteem or regard, and thus, we are best people to measure our own "worth." I understand the idea behind making self-worth, self-value, self-esteem, self-regard and other concepts roughly equal to one another. But it is perhaps useful to take into account that these words can have very different contexts. I can value someone quite highly, yet hold them in relatively low esteem for other reasons. Likewise, I regard someone immensely, yet find that they don't bring much of tangible worth to the table. And those are my judgements to make. Someone can tell me all they like that I should view all people of equal worth, but there are going to be times when choices have to be made, and when they are, we may be better off divorcing their valuation of us in the moment from the valuation of ourselves that we carry with us every day.

Once someone has hurt your feelings, looking for their regard is a form of self-debasement. A reasonable position to take, but not always an accurate one, for some of the reasons I've already outlined. But also, sometimes, having a positive relationship with someone takes work. There will always be times when the work that one put into it turns out not to be worth it. That's true of anything. Chasing the respect of people who will withhold it from you just to boost their own egos is a drag. But sometimes, the risks that we take for connection, and yes, respect, pay off.

It's always about you. This is a variation on the idea that what feels like disrespect is always disrespect. Just because it feels like someone's disrespecting you doesn't mean that it has anything to do with you. One of the big things at my workplace is never, ever, EVER allow someone to tailgate you when you're passing through a secure door. And of course, that can mean that you literally wind up closing a door in someone's face, to force them to tap the card reader and unlock it again so that they can come in. But rules are rules, and I'm not up to being the guy on the unemployment line because I held the door open for someone who had no business being in the building. Or maybe someone doesn't respond to a greeting because they're 10 minutes late for that dressing down their boss is going to give them.

it's never about you, because you never have it coming. I know that I said that these were in no particular order, but I am placing this one last on the list. Sometimes, people disrespect us, because they understand that we've disrespected them. Maybe they're not the person in this situation with the flawed character - we are. And it's important to recognize that possibility. "Character," despite how we like to talk about it, isn't an absolute. Sometimes, we're on our manners and respect A game, and other times, we really need to go soak our heads for a while. When we make being disrespected into a reflection of the flawed character of everyone else, we walk right by a chance to stop and say: "Under what set of circumstances is what just happened a reasonable response to things?" Now, to be sure, there is a risk in this. We run the risk of always finding fault with ourselves and striving to be all things to all people, and losing our sense of self in an effort to please everyone around us. But there are more, and better, ways to avoid that fate than simply presuming that the other person is always wrong. Especially when we live in a society were people, for any number of reasons, won't always tell you that you've done something to injure them. Or if they're intimidated by you. Or if they think you don't like them. Or maybe you blew them off because you were already running 10 minutes late for that dressing down your boss was going to give you, and just wouldn't spare the time.

The idea that when someone disrespects us, we shouldn't consider winning their respect because they have a flawed character runs the risk of turning our subjective feeling of disrespect and possibly hurt at being judged badly into a judgement of the other person - one that we are often encouraged to take at face value and see as infallible. Yes, internalizing a negative external judgment and working to combat that by seeking the approval of others is dangerous. But rather than reverse that judgement onto the other person, withholding judgment in favor of questioning may be the better approach. We are not entitled to be seen as we wish to be seen, because not everyone can see us as we do. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Root Causes

What, one wonders, is the cause of sexual assault?

I ask this question because I'd heard about the negative reactions to part of Mayim Bialik's op-ed in the New York Times on Friday.

I still make choices every day as a 41-year-old actress that I think of as self-protecting and wise. I have decided that my sexual self is best reserved for private situations with those I am most intimate with. I dress modestly. I don’t act flirtatiously with men as a policy.

And this prompted what has become by now a standard response to pretty much any talk of taking precautions against sexual assault; charges of victim-blaming and/or slut shaming. If Ms. Bialik was in the least bit taken aback by this, I'm impressed that she could both resuscitate her acting career and live under a rock simultaneously.

And it occurs to me that the heart of this are two different narratives about the root cause of sexual misconduct among men. (While there is also criminal sexual misconduct among women, it's typically not viewed as either common enough or damaging enough to warrant much discussion.) As an outsider to the overall conversation, in that I only really interact with it when the media takes note of the more fiery aspects of it, I wonder if the way the conversation plays out actually gets in the way of the conversation itself, because the various narratives are never directly spoken of.

Of course, as an observer, rather than a participant, I'm conjecturing about what other people are thinking, so take what I'm going to say here with a grain (or a mine's worth) of salt. But, generally speaking, Ms. Bialik's self-protection policy makes sense if one thinks of sexual assault as, to some or another degree, as arising from a failure of control on the part of the attacker. So Jack sees Jill's sexual self on display, and lose some level of control of his own sexuality. It's worth noting that this doesn't automatically implicate Jill - after all, American society has no problem will labeling any number of other issues, obesity being a notable one, as being the result of failures of individual self control and personal responsibility. And it's worth pointing out that in my grandparents' time, were someone like myself, say, were to have any noticeable reaction of Ms. Bialik's sexual self, that could end very, very badly for that someone. And although for many young people, much of what one might reasonably consider recent history is beyond an event horizon, for the middle-aged and older, it's in living memory. And so we recall a time when as respected a source as _The Joy Of Sex_ could refer to "a man's rape instincts," and posit that those instincts responded to women in the vicinity, without being viewed as hopelessly regressive.

But there is a counter-argument, and one that claims that sexual assault isn't at all a matter of sexuality, and more about the way that men express their socially sanctioned (if not expected or even demanded) traits of power and aggression around women. By this logic, sexual self, flirtation and modest clothing be damned, if Jack sets himself to showing his dominance over Jill, he's going to assault or abuse her in some or another manner, and the only factors that make any difference are Jack's choices and the acceptance of the greater society of those choices. This view effectively makes Jill into a completely passive object of Jack's desire to demonstrate his masculinity, there's nothing that she can reasonably do in the way of taking precautions to either shift Jack's choices or the social reaction to those choices. Taking precautions against sexual assault may reinforce the perceived social order but they don't do anything to deter anyone but those unlikely to do the deed in the first place.

While these two views are not necessarily mutually exclusive, given the overall population of the planet and the differences between individuals, they've become pitted against each other. But in that, it seems to me that people don't discuss them directly. Rather, they debate the upshots of them. And in that respect the debate between "there are precautions one can take against rape," and "rape can only be prevented by men making other choices" are proxies for the differing world views that underlie those statements. And each sees the other as dangerous; naïve on the one hand, and victim-blaming on the other.

Of course, as I noted before, I'm basically a bystander in this whole situation. And being mostly disengaged, I could be missing a raging debate that I'm simply not a part of. But if it's there, perhaps it would benefit from being more open and more public.

Jar of Evils

Deities, as one learns from certain creation stories, can at times be right bastards, to the point where it makes sense to ask "Whose side are these guys on?" But it's also worth pointing out that ancient people were often sexist as all get-out, and the question one might put to them is "What have women ever done to you?"

The story of Pandôra illustrates both of these concepts. Created by the Olympian gods at the command of Zeus for no other reason than to carry plagues to humanity (Zeus, like many deities worldwide, being both a bastard and loath to do his own dirty work directly), she was given a pithos (a large jar) and perhaps the world's first screamingly ironic name ("all-gifts," my foot). In any event, Pandôra's primary purpose in life was to open the jar, which contained a multitude of evil spirits. As intended, the evil spirits fled the jar, and proceeded to torment humanity, pretty much forever. Left in the jar was elpis, hope. The standard reading of the Pandôra legend is that elpis was intended as a single blessing for mankind, something slipped into the jar by some or another god who sympathized with Prometheus' notion that the gods were constantly abusing the mortal people they'd created. But there's another take on the story, one that says that hope is a spirit just as evil as pestilence or death.

Personally, I don't have much use for hope, which strikes me as a waiting for some outside factor one can't control to make a positive change in the world for you. Accordingly, I didn't find the slogan of then-candidate Senator Barack Obama, "Hope and Change," compelling. Rather than hope, I reasoned, what people need is the confidence to understand that they can effect the change they want to see in the world for themselves. Now to be sure, this does get me into trouble at times. American society (and others, too, but perhaps more on that later) tends to demand that one approach life with a certain amount of hope. When I was a child, I asked my mother why suicide was a sin. Given that the act of killing oneself conclusively precluded confession (and therefore absolution), it was understood to be a direct ticket to Hell. (A fact that I find a disturbing number of people seem to be perfectly happy with.) This struck me as grossly unfair. A person who murdered and stole their way through life could attain Heaven through a deathbed repentance, but the person who succumbed to despair was consigned to the fires. According to my mother, the sin was the loss of hope that God would make things better, somehow, if one only waited. I was not mollified by this answer. And throughout adulthood, I've found myself being called upon to answer for not taking the commonly accepted way out of certain ethical dilemmas, such as the case in which a warlord says he'll spare a group of captives provided that you shoot one yourself, because I refuse to predicate an action on the hope that someone I already understand to be dangerous and/or criminal will live up to their end of the bargain, once I've done their dirty work for them. Humans can be as duplicitous as Zeus.

But at the same time, I don't begrudge other people their hopes. When a charming pair of young women stopped by, doing missionary work for the Jehova's Witnesses, one told me that her faith gave her hope that the world we be a better place by the time the three-year old that accompanied them grew up. And I'm perfectly okay with this. But for a lot of people, it seems, hope is only a virtue to the degree that it aligns with their own hopes.

The Internet, if one isn't careful, can devolve into a cesspit of people criticizing one another in the name of advancing their own worldviews. And a lot of this seems to, mostly unintentionally (if rather roughly), involve trampling on other people's hopes. The news that the United Nations is relocating staff from two districts in Malawi after five people were killed in a vampire panic has triggered a certain amount of social media finger-waving over the ignorant and backwards people of the nation. But one can also see this as simple a very unfortunate way of people attempting to exercise some control over a world that seems largely beyond the scope of their powers to command. Attacking someone as a vampire is not (or not only) an act of malice, but an expression of a hope that direct action will protect them and/or those they care about from forces in the world that seem malevolent, because they aren't viewed as random. Closer to home, if farther in time, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin famously mocked the Obama campaign's motto. "This was all part of that hope and change and transparency. Now, a year later, I gotta ask the supporters of all that, 'How's that hopey, changey stuff working out'?" she sneered, before a cheering crowd at the first National Tea Party Convention. Closer to the present, House of Representatives Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi asked "President Trump, Where are the Jobs You Promised?" And while this is less directly an attack on people's hopes (and perhaps less openly sneering), the message to the audience that the President's supporters hope in vain is still clear. Shifting the focus away from American politics again, I recently encountered posts referring to traditional Chinese medicine as "not medicine," "quackery" and "superstitious nonsense." And while this narrative can be seen as one of the competition between fold remedies and evidence-based modern medicine, both of these things are extensively based on hope. Reliance on traditional medicine, especially in places were Western pharmaceuticals aren't readily available is just as much based on hope as taking a nondescript pill chocked full of unpronounceable chemical compounds.

But there's more to hope that ideas about the supernatural, politics and medicine. One of the things that allows bad behavior to persist is hope. And there are many different varieties of hope involved. From the outside, they may seem like a combination of self-delusion and wishful thinking, but from the inside, they offer a chance for a change. The person who abuses someone who wants a better life for themselves preys on their hopes and their unwillingness to let them go. I stumbled into a rabbit hole of marginally-attached entertainment industry people who talked about their own experiences on the inside, and how people like Harvey Weinstein, Bill O'Reilly, Bill Cosby et cetera, are able to go on for as long as they do, and they fairly quickly start to become saddening stories of how people work, and what they sacrifice, to maintain their hopes.

I've vacillated over the years on my stance concerning the elpis at the bottom of Pandôra's pithos. Hope strikes me as one of the evil spirits and the pitiless gods placed in the jar; it appears to cause as much pain and suffering as any plague. And perhaps this is simply a failing on my part, but I can't bring myself to undermine other people's hopes. (Well, not directly and openly, at least.) Maybe being honest with myself requires it. But self-deception has already fled the jar, and it's beyond me to put it back.