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Fragments from Evolving Manhood: A Full-Throated Protest Against Existence and the World

Posted on March 31, 2010 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

I have written before about the book of personal essays dealing with manhood, masculinity and male sexuality that I tried, unsuccessfully (even with the help of an agent) to get published in the 1980s. Evolving Manhood was the working title, though my agent preferred and used my second choice–What Kind of a Man Are You Anyway?–because she thought it might sell better. When my agent finally dropped me because it was clear that no one was going to buy the manuscript–which I may one day make the subject of a whole other essay–I put the material aside and went back to working on my poetry, and then I was commissioned to do the translations of Persian literature that I am still working on, with the result that Evolving Manhood receded into the background of my writing life, and this makes me sad, not only because I worked damned hard on those essays, but also because I think some of the writing has held up pretty well, even though it is, some of it, 20 years old, and because I think the questions I was trying to explore are still profoundly relevant. More, I am saddened by the fact that the odds are overwhelmingly against my returning to this material in any substantial way. Time, both in the sense of what my commitments are now, personal and professional, and of my distance from what I wrote back then, is working against me.

So, since I don’t want what I think is worth keeping to disappear into my filing cabinet forever, I have decided that I will start a series called Fragments from Evolving Manhood made up of just what the title says, though the posts may be edited if I think it is necessary. I decided to make this the first one because it is Passover, a holiday that, broadly speaking, is (or should be) about social justice but that is also about what it means to be Jewish in a world where being Jewish can get you killed.

***

A Full-Throated Protest Against Existence and the World

As a Jewish man, like it or not, my identity within the Jewish community as both a man and a Jew is defined by the fact of my circumcision. Even though I am Jewish first because my mother is Jewish, at least according to the tradition accepted by most of the Jewish communities in the world, I entered God’s covenant with Abraham, became fully a member of my own people, only after my foreskin was removed, and for the first fifteen or so years of my life, I romanticized the moment of that cutting. Imagining a bloodless ceremony saturated with self-conscious majesty, I saw my boy’s body wrapped warmly and securely in a blanket, held peacefully at ease in the lap of my Uncle Max, smiling drunk on the wine-soaked cloth I’d been given to suck on to dull the (as it was explained to me by my grandmother) very small pain I would feel. Prayers were uttered over my flesh, and after the cutting was done, my membership in the covenant, not to mention into the community of Jewish manhood, was celebrated with food and drink. I pictured myself being passed lovingly among the guests, cuddled and coddled as they talked about the man I would grow up to be.

When I turned sixteen, however, I witnessed an actual brit milah, or circumcision ceremony. The house was full of people. I could see in the room beyond the room where I mingled with the other guests the feast that had been laid out for after the cutting. People were chatting, joking, shaking hands with old friends, and making new acquaintances, but when the mohel—the man who performs Jewish circumcisions—arrived, the atmosphere became immediately serious. As he shook hands with the boy’s father and with those other men who would participate in the ceremony, the women left and the room grew quiet. The boy, bundled tightly in a blanket, was brought in and placed in the hands of the man who had been chosen for the honor of holding the child while the preliminary prayers were recited. Then, the boy was given to the sandek, the man upon whom had been bestowed the privilege of holding the infant in his lap when the cutting was actually done. My view was blocked as the older men crowded around so they could see, but I knew when the cut came because that little boy howled. A full-throated protest against existence and the world, his scream filled my ears, the room, the entire house with his pain.

The men smiled and laughed as if they did not hear the child’s voice. Above his wailing, they shouted mazel tov!—congratulations!—and shook hands with each other and with those who had participated in the ceremony. Some of them even began to sing. The boy’s screaming did not stop. I was taken to meet the child’s father. He smiled at me proudly, gripping my hand and, as his still shrieking son was carried from the room, steered me into the dining area where people were beginning to eat. This was not the peaceful ceremony I had imagined. This was hypocrisy, the sanctification and celebration through denial of the pain of the boy who’d just been cut, and also of the pain I had felt, and of the pain of every man in that house. I felt mocked, betrayed, and tremendously angry, but I had no words to express what I was feeling. Even now, having rejected circumcision in my own family, it’s hard to dismiss the ritual merely as the patriarchal marking that, at its roots, it is. Because whatever else that ritual might be, the history of the oppression of the Jews has made it also a sign of defiance, a bodily affirmation of Jewish (male) identity and Jewish (male) worth in the face of enormous persecution.

I put the word male in parentheses in the last sentence because, while circumcision marks only men and is therefore problematic from the point of view of gender equality within the Jewish tradition, I do not want to deny the courage that it took for Jewish mothers to continue to allow their sons to be circumcised, or for Jewish women to continue to value circumcision as a religious ritual, a physical mark and as a metaphor for the relationship between the Jews and their god at times when forcing a man to pull down his pants was one way that anti-semites would identify appropriate targets for their hatred and violence. In Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, for example, Yaffa Eliach tells a story that, whether it is completely true or only an embellished version of the truth, illustrates precisely what I mean. In the midst of a “children’s Aktion,” a massacre of Jewish children, the tale goes, a Jewish woman demanded of a Nazi soldier, “Give me [your] pocket knife!”

She bent down and picked up something…a bundle of rags on the ground near the sawdust. She unwrapped the bundle. Amidst the rags on a snow-white pillow was a newborn babe, asleep. With a steady hand she opened the pocket knife and circumcised the baby. In a clear, intense voice she recited the blessing of the circumcision. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has sanctified us by thy commandments and hast commanded us to perform the circumcision.”

She straightened her back, looked up to the heavens, and said, “God of the Universe, you have given me a healthy child. I am returning to you a wholesome, kosher Jew.” She walked over to the German, gave him back his blood-stained knife, and handed him her baby on his snow-white pillow. (152)

I am that boy; that boy was me. Had I been alive during the time of the Nazis, they would have tried to kill me precisely for being “wholesome and kosher.” Yet while the violence that mother did to her son absolutely pales in comparison to the violence the Nazi intended to do to him, the story nonetheless omits the boy’s pain, glosses over the blood that must have stained the pillow, the mother’s hands and the German’s knife. It is that blood which haunts me, for my circumcision is my connection to that mother’s courage, to the courage of the men who circumcised and were circumcised at a time when a cut penis could have gotten them killed. Yet that blood is also about the making of men, and as long as the making of men requires such bloodshed, manhood will continue to require the spilling of blood as its proof.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

Posted in Anti-Semitism, Gender and the Body, Jews and Judaism | 14 Comments

You'll Get No Argument from Me

Posted on March 30, 2010 by Jeff Fecke

I enjoy reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog; he’s a cogent writer, and while he’s made some catastrophic decisions during his career, he at the very least is willing to change his mind when events warrant. He’s been one of the strongest voices against the current crisis in the Catholic Church, and there aren’t many Bush-supporting, pro-Iraq War bloggers who became passionate anti-war, pro-Obama backers — I think that universe is limited to Sullivan and John Cole. Reading Sullivan gives some insight, and some hope.

That said, Sullivan is not exactly a feminist, by which I mean to say that Sullivan is not a feminist. And that means that from time to time, he’s capable of giving over space on his site to completely wrongheaded arguments, whether his own or those of others. And today he’s picked a doozy, a whining, bitter, anti-woman missive from a guy who regrets the choices he made in life, and therefore, women suck.

From the first, you know that this is going to be bad:

Call me a misogynist asshole….

You’re a misogynist asshole.

I firmly believe that when you say, “I’m not a racist,” it’s ipso facto proof that you’re a racist (or sexist, or homophobe, or what have you). Similarly, if you say, “Well, you’re going to call me a sexist for this,” it’s proof that you’re a sexist (or racist, or homophobe, or what have you). What’s more, it’s proof that you know damn well that what you’re saying, or are about to say, is sexist/racist/ableist/homophobic/anti-Semitic/whatever. You’re simply okay with that.

So when the first words out of your keyboard announce that we can call you a misogynist asshole, well, that’s enough proof for me; you’re a misogynist asshole, one who knows he’s a misogynist asshole, and you simply are okay with hating women and blaming them for your own failures.

We could stop here, but I want to demonstrate that there is significant evidence in my favor, in the form of the rest of what this yahoo wrote.

…but I have to agree with Warren Farrell [who argues that women make less money because they choose to] on this one. Four years ago, I made a decision to move to a new city in search of better employment. When I came to LA, I left behind a wonderful relationship with a woman who was much too good for me. In the intervening four years, I’ve gotten on a path towards a high-earning career. However, I have also felt more emotional pain than in the rest of my life combined. I’ve hardly even had a date since working 70-80 hours a week. I recently tried crawling back to my old girlfriend, but she wanted nothing to do with me.

Well, golly gee. You’re in a career that you appear to hate, though it pays a lot of money. It requires a huge time commitment, and it’s interfering with your personal life.

And this is women’s problem how?

I don’t want to address any specific person whose email you printed, because maybe some of them have encountered legitimate sexism – which does exist. But, while women have a lot of avenues to address potential earnings gaps, men like me have no means to seek recompense for the emotional toll taken out on us by the expected focus on our careers.

I am certainly not going to argue that men are not expected to go out and earn, nor will I argue that society has a long way to go to recognize that work/life balance is not just a women’s issue. But by the same token, the women who went out into the workforce in the ’60s and ’70s, who strode into hostile work environments and stared them down, who demanded representation in the workforce — those women weren’t being encouraged to do so. They weren’t coddled by society. They went out, one by one, and they seized their own destinies.

Nobody’s forcing any man to declare that his work is his worth. Oh, society sends that message loud and clear, but each of us is free to say, simply, no. Men can and should state forcefully that we should have an equal role at home, just as women have an equal role in the workforce. Indeed, there’s a philosophy and political movement that encourages just that. It’s called feminism.

Of course, even if tomorrow we woke up to a truly egalitarian society, that wouldn’t mean that all men and all women lived their lives in perfect balance and harmony. There would be men and women who chose to be full-time homemakers and those who chose to work 95 hours a week while they moved up the corporate ladder. They’d just be freer to make those choices. And yes, they’d have to deal with sacrifices along the way.

Note: those sacrifices are yours. Not anyone else’s. And here’s where our correspondent really goes off the rails.

Should my old girlfriend be legislated to take me back? Should women be required to date me? Of course not, we would all say. I guess I’m just expected to suffer in silence as all the attractive women my age date older guys with more money and nicer cars, and I have no opportunity for intimacy. And that’s actually okay with me. I’ve made the choices I’ve made, I am the person I am, and one day I’ll be on the winning end of this equation, assuming I’m mentally and emotionally capable of sustaining this pace for more years on end.

Dude, you are so not okay with this. You simply have bought into the patriarchy, hook, line, and sinker. You hate your job, hate your life, hate that what you really want to do is work a normal schedule and date a nice girl, settle down and raise a family.

Instead, you’ve convinced yourself that the patriarchy is right — that all you have to do is work hard and make money and then, when you’re fifty, all the hot twentysomethings will want to date you because you drive the right car. And sure you’ll have wasted thirty years of your life when you’d rather have been doing something else, but when your kids are graduating college when you’re eighty, it’ll all be worth it.

And women are the problem? Please. Women are fighting the battles that you’re too afraid to fight. Feminism has been fighting for work/life balance for decades. Moreover, feminism has been fighting for guys like you to have the right to live a life that makes sense to you. Maybe it pays a bit less. Maybe you drive a Hyundai instead of an Audi.

But then, maybe you see your wife by six every night. Maybe you get to coach your daughter’s soccer team, or go on wilderness retreats with your son. Maybe, just maybe, your worth isn’t defined by your bank account. Indeed, there are many, many, many women out there — women who have their own careers, their own goals — who would be happy to find a guy who really, more than anything, wanted to have a family.

These women, by and large, are feminists.

But fella, you’re too blind to see it. Too tied up, bitter and angry at women to understand that they’re not your enemy.

But, I get sick and tired of women who want to treat the workplace as somehow separate from other parts of life. There seems to be an attitude of: “I’m going to party all through my twenties while I’m young and hot, then have a family and be a mom and have a full-time career as well, and I’m owed a dollar for every dollar anyone else makes, regardless of the priorities each of us has set up until this point in our lives.” That ain’t life.

There are a hell of a lot of men who party through their twenties, too. And, call me crazy, but they aren’t criticized for that nearly so much as women.

As for what women want, all any feminists have argued is that if they do the job a man is doing, they should get paid the same as men do.

This whole discussion started with a Newsweek study that showed women — with or without children — make 77 percent what men make a decade out of school. Top end female M.B.A.s make $4600 less in their first job out of business school than male M.B.A.s. Is this a case of women “making choices?” It sure doesn’t seem like it. It seems like a case of sexism, pure and simple.

Buddy, here’s the deal: the women working 80 hours a week in your department? They’re doing the same work as you, for less money. They’re making the same sacrifices as you, for less money.

That’s the problem. That, and the fact that you’re blind to your own pain.

I wanted better career prospects, so I gave up love to get it. If I had made the opposite decision, nobody would say that I was owed anything. But if I do get successful, it is virtually certain that I will be regarded in some circles as just another beneficiary of a system (Hollywood, in my case) set up only to promote or benefit white men. Nobody will give a shit about the sacrifices I made.

Well, actually, I do care about your sacrifices, because they’re sacrifices you don’t want to make. It’s clear as day — you hate what you’re doing and you don’t want to do it.

That’s not women’s fault. It’s your own — your own fault for believing, deep down, that you are your paycheck. That’s why you’re threatened by women making as much as you — because when women make as much as you, those twentysomethings who should throw themselves at you when you’re fifty…won’t. Because they’ll have their own money, their own job prospects. They can make their money on their own. They don’t need you to do it for them.

That’s how I, as a man born in the mid-eighties – long after the high-water mark of sexual discrimination – perceive much of what passes for feminism these days. It’s an excuse that women have that men don’t. I’m forced into a box (the “earn lots of money” box) just as much as a woman is (the “have a family” box), but women are given tons of sympathy for the things they miss out on.

You know why we recognize that women being forced into the “have a family” box are missing out? Because women fought for us to see it. And they’re still fighting for things like, you know, equal pay.

Are you really going to tell me you’re upset that women aren’t fighting your battle as well? Get over yourself. For one thing, women have fought for men to be full partners in the home (and have been criticized for it; men cleaning? Quelle horreur!), fought for men to be seen as having emotions more complex than lust and anger.

But more to the point, women have focused on women’s battles, which are still legion. Rather than complain, why don’t you step forward and start fighting for the idea that men are valuable with or without a fat wallet? Why don’t you step forward and say, you know what? Feminists are right — we shouldn’t be put into our neat boxes. People should be free to pursue their own destinies.

Of course, that’s hard, that fight — feminists have been vilified for decades for daring to speak the truth, that women are as capable of rational thought and hard work as men. Much easier to sit in the box and stew, and blame women for your own complicity in being caged.

I’m not given any sympathy at all. Instead, to the extent that I can even bring myself to talk about my personal problems, I’m thought of as a loser for not having (or wanting to have) casual sex with multiple partners. I’m somehow inadequate. And you know what? I FEEL inadequate. I just don’t have anyone to officially blame for it.

Yes you do. You have the patriarchy — the same system that’s oppressing women. The same system that’s telling you that you should want sex with multiple partners, that you should want fat wads of cash, that your only hope for domesticity is to work in a job you hate long enough to attract a pretty enough woman who doesn’t mind that you’re comparatively old. You’re fighting against the exact same system that women have been battling for generations. You’re just too deep into it to see it.

I pity you. But I can’t free you, and neither can women. Only you can free yourself. And I misdoubt that you won’t. That you’ll just spend the next thirty years bitter at the world. And when you finally retire, you’ll look back on the years wasted and blame anyone but those responsible. Because to blame those truly responsible is to admit your own failure.

Posted in Feminism, sexism, etc, Gender and the Economy, Sexism hurts men | 27 Comments

Open Thread, Metal Men Sprinting With Thor Edition

Posted on March 30, 2010 by Ampersand

This is an open thread. Use it to post whatever the heck you want. Linking to your own awesome posts would be, well, awesome.

Happy Passover, folks!

Last week, I posted about Steve Perry, former “Thundercats” and “Timespirits” writer, who is in pretty dire need of help. This week, cartoonist Walt Simonson (whose 1980s Thor run is widely considered the best that character has ever been done) is ebaying the above drawing to help Steve Perry out. At this moment, the high bid is $2000 (!), and there’s still six days to go. Sometimes it must be really, really cool to be Walt Simonson. Plus, no one draws big-ass capes the way Walt Simonson draws big-ass capes.
A long-delayed missive on “childhood obesity”, from a onetime obese child. If only Michelle Obama would read this…
Predator Theory. “…of the 120 rapists in the sample, 44 reported only one assault. The remaining 76 were repeat offenders. These 76 men, 63% of the rapists, committed 439 rapes or attempted rapes, an average of 5.8 each (median of 3, so there were some super-repeat offenders in this group). […] Lisak & Miller also found that the repeat rapists in their survey were responsible for a broad array of violent acts, including intimate partner violence and child abuse.”
Fugitivis comments on the above-linked Predator Theory post.
The Kaiser Foundation has a two-page, pdf summary of the Affordable Care Act that’s pretty good.
This is great. “When Salinger was 7 she became plagued with nightmares about the film ‘Monster House’. Strangely, through a friend, I knew the screenwriter Dan Harmon (@danharmon, Creator of ‘Community’ on NBC). So one day, in early 2008, I wrote to him….”
Nothing whatsoever of any importance happened to Social Security this week. And at Dollars and Sense, learn how to fix the entire Social Security “shortfall” in one simple step.
If someone would pay you the same money (and the same benefits) as your current job to be chased by a bear for 10 minutes a day (workdays only), would you do it?
How Might We Measure Race Without Reifying It?
We Hate the Government But Want More Government Jobs
In West Bank Palestinian Childhood Is Cut Short – It’s the Law
Outrageous Treaty Nonsense, or The Copyright Tail Wagging the Internet Dog
White Backlash: Yes, It’s Real
I Died in a Law & Order: SVU Bus Wreck and Lived to Tell the Tale [Law And Order: Svu]
Abra-Cadabra: NBC’s Community Makes Burqa Jokes
Revisiting the Paradox of the Chess Queen
Broken down by race, the trends for education achievement scores in the US look pretty good.
Recruitment and the Underrepresentation of Women in Political Offices
11 predictions for the health-care reform bill
Citizens United doesn’t treat corporations like people. It treats them better than people.
I haven’t yet listened to this Douglas Adams lecture, but I want to.
J.D. Shapiro, screenwriter of Battlefield Earth (which just won a Razzie Award for the worst movie of the decade), discusses his participation. “No one sets out to make a train wreck. Actually, comparing it to a train wreck isn’t really fair to train wrecks, because people actually want to watch those.”

Posted in Link farms | 9 Comments

Defending my irresponsible, abusive, gender-stereotypical coming-out story

Posted on March 29, 2010 by Clarisse Thorn

Note: this post is a bit feminist-theoretical.

I try to think seriously about about all comments on my work, but I usually just brush off the snide ones. Every once in a while, though, one arrows through and hits me where I’m vulnerable and shakes my confidence, and if it’s nastily phrased, then it hurts all the more. Seeps into me like poison.

Yep, this is another post about my S&M coming-out story, published in February by “Time Out Chicago”. (I’ve received some questions about when I’m going to start officially blogging for “Time Out” — the answer is that we’re still negotiating the terms of my blogging contract and I’m not sure when we’ll be done. I think we both really want this professional blogging gig to happen, so I’m confident that we’ll work it out, but it might take a while.)

Here’s a brief one-paragraph synopsis: my coming-out story talks about how I got drunk with a man named Richard at a party when I was 20; he started hurting me intensely; and I really got into it. I’d known a little bit about the existence of BDSM for a while — had experimented with light BDSM before, in fact — but this experience was much more intense, and in particular led me to the realization that I needed very dark and tearful masochistic encounters. As an independent, rational feminist, it was difficult for me to come to terms with my desires. It didn’t help that Richard and I weren’t well-suited romantically, although we were well-suited on an S&M level. Adjusting took a long time; but after seeing a Kink Aware therapist, coming out to my parents, exploring BDSM on my own terms, and having BDSM relationships with non-Richard men who suited me better romantically, I feel pretty much at peace with my BDSM identity.

I’ve gotten some great feedback on my coming-out story — primarily from submissive women who thanked me for articulating their experience. But here’s the comment that’s been upsetting me, from “emily”:

it’s great when people can come out, even under a pseudonym. but i have to say i have some real problems with the way the author has portrayed her “awakening.” should dominant men be rewarded for coaxing women into submission, assuring them that they can “tell”? the presentation, not the content, of this story is irresponsible and reproduces stereotypical gender roles. is the discovery of one’s sexuality dependent on her relationships? that’s the message i’m getting, whether or not it was intended

In a later comment, she adds:

whether or not you meant to, you implied that some women won’t know they’re submissive until a man figures it out for them. i think this is a really dangerous thing to do in our culture, and i think you know why. i don’t have any problem with your experiences, as i said. i have a problem with the way you’ve presented these ideas without thinking what they might mean in another context. just tacking on your personal bit about feminism isn’t enough. how can we hope to change the status quo if we dont acknowledge these issues? as a submissive feminist myself, i have no problem with your lifestyle or how you conduct your affairs, and i dont care whether or not you’re a switch. i DO care about women (and men) who get into abusive situations that start out as “safe, sane, and consenual” bdsm play. i take this personally. it just seems to me that this essay was more of a self-righteous paean than an educational article and probably should not have left your friend circle.

There’s a lot to unpack here. I think I’ll do it in sections.

I. “Irresponsible”

Writing my coming-out story induced a lot of anxiety — not just because I was coming to terms with myself in the process, but also because I worried constantly about how readers might take it. Obviously, there’s always the saying “if you can’t please everyone then you might as well please yourself,” but with this … I guess I felt like there was a lot more than “pleasing everyone” at stake. It felt important to portray my experiences as accurately as possible — to write the experiences as close to how I felt them as possible — and yet I wondered how to angle them, too. Because what if a closeted BDSMer, new to everything, finds this and it’s their first exposure to the wider community? (Or what if an anti-BDSMer comes upon it looking for ways to use it as anti-BDSM ammunition?)

For instance, I wrote about, not just one, but two relationships that had their origins in drunken hookups. Will that encourage readers to unwisely push boundaries while drunk — even to take advantage of drunk people? (Which is particularly dangerous when S&M-ish violence is involved?) And yet there’s no denying that, in our culture, it’s incredibly common for alcohol to function as a social and sexual lubricant. Yes, some people use alcohol to take advantage of vulnerable partners, and that is unacceptable. But millions use it all the time as part of their normal, entirely consensual dating routine. I don’t actually much like that, as it happens — I’ll drink, and certainly I’ve been known to get trashed, but I’m happier at events where I feel like we’re all having fun sober; still, it really is an endemic part of most youth culture in America. (In fact, one thing I like about the BDSM community is that many BDSM events encourage sobriety or even require it.) When I describe my experiences, including some drunk consensual encounters, I’m describing reality — not just my reality, but that of millions of other young women.

I tried dealing with this kind of thing by shifting my tone at the end of the piece, pulling back and taking a more analytical stance rather than the up-close-and-personal moment-by-moment approach. For instance, I wrote: I fear that others will read this narrative as describing an assault, a near-rape — and a woman who tried to rationalize her experience by embracing it. That’s not what happened. … Conversely, I’m afraid that some conservative will read this and say: “Look how the feminist movement has failed us!” That’s not what happened, either. It felt incomplete, and yes, it felt tacked-on too; but I also didn’t feel like I could stack on an infinite number of more disclaimers and clarifications without losing reader interest or muddying my most important goal: making people like me feel better about their terrible horrible BDSM needs.

So the “irresponsible” charge, the charge of “not thinking about what [these experiences] might mean”, just kills me. It brings out something I feared so much, and maybe that I did not succeed in evading.

Continue reading →

Posted in Feminism, sexism, etc | 12 Comments

What are our expectations for the 2010 Congressional elections?

Posted on March 28, 2010 by Ampersand

I have a question — for both the conservatives and the lefties who read “Alas” — which I think might enhance our post-election discussion in eight or nine months. What are your expectations for how many seats Democrats will lose (or gain) in November? Not just your predictions, but also what levels will make you feel that each party has exceeded expectations (i.e., “won”)?

Nate Silver has a table which might help with thinking about this:

Add on top of that the lousy economic situation, which is always bad for the incumbent party. My feeling is that if the Democrats can keep it down to losing about average for a midterm election, they’ll have done extremely well — as Silver says, they’ll have “won” the election cycle.

My expectation is, all else held equal, Democrats will lose around 30-40 seats in the House, and 4-6 in the Senate. If Democrats end up losing 60-70 in the House and 8-10 in the Senate, I’d call that an enormous, stunning loss, beyond what I’d expect.

Rob and Ron, both of you have (iirc) suggested that passage of the Affordable Care Act will lead to enormous losses for Democrats in November, beyond what we’d normally expect in a mid-term election with a lousy economy. (Robert even bet $100 that Republicans would have a two-third majority in the House after the election — which means Democrats losing 111 seats.) Could you put those expectations in numbers, please?

Not just Ron and Rob, but everyone. How well do Republicans have to do so that we can say they did much better than we’d normally expect, given the circumstances? And at what levels would you say that Democrats actually “won” under the circumstances?

Posted in Elections and politics | 21 Comments

Online Poll Proves That Those With Strong Views More Likely To Answer Online Poll

Posted on March 27, 2010 by Ampersand

This post on Open Left has lots of tables and stuff showing that over 50% of Republicans believe Obama is a socialist Muslim who “wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a one world government,” blah blah blah. But the page on Harris Interactive says that this is an online poll.

“Online poll,” if you rearrange the letters, spells “complete bullshit.” Is there any argument for taking a poll like this seriously?

Posted in In the news | 10 Comments

Translating Classical Persian Literature: Introducing Ferdowsi and the Shahnameh – Part 1

Posted on March 27, 2010 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

Often called the national epic of Iran, the Shahnameh or Book of Kings, was written in the 10th century CE by Abolqasem Ferdowsi, who took as his subject the pre-Islamic history of the Iranian people, starting with the creation of the world and ending with the 7th century Arab conquest of the Persian empire. A literary expression of what Sandra Mackey calls in The Iranians “the separate identity within Islam that Iranians [have always] felt” (64-5), the Shahnameh represents an act of cultural resistance, an assertion that, despite Muslim rule, the values and traditions of ancient Iran were not only still relevant, but perhaps even superior to those of Iran’s conquerors, whose reign, as A. Shapur Shahbazi suggests in his Ferdowsi: A Critical Biography, was threatening to reduce the majestic sweep of Iran’s past into a single chapter in the history of Islam (34). The success of this resistance can be seen most prominently in the fact that, even today, in the words of Dick Davis, the Shahnameh is “one of the chief means by which both Persian rulers and the people of [Iran] have sought to define their identity to themselves and to the world at large” (3). The last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, for example, invoked the Shahnameh in order to underscore Iran’s historical, cultural, racial and linguistic difference from (and superiority to) Iran’s Arab neighbors; and then, after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when Iran’s new and theocratic government wanted to discourage its citizens’ identification with the nation’s pre-Islamic past, the Ayatollah Khomeini himself attested to the cultural importance of the Shahnameh when, along with discouraging the use of Persian first names and expressing the hope that people would stop celebrating Norooz, the Persian New Year, a holiday with deep Zoroastrian roots, he singled out Ferdowsi’s poem as representing everything the revolution had fought against when it ended the Shah’s reign.

More recently, to take another example, it could not have been an accident that the scenes of protestors carrying green banners through the streets in the weeks following Iran’s contested presidential elections in 2009 bore such a striking resemblance to the scene near the beginning of the Shahnameh in which the blacksmith Kaveh marches through the streets carrying a banner and calling the Persian people to rise up against the evil Arab king Zahhak. Kaveh is an unapologetic revolutionary, intent on overthrowing the despot who has killed all but one of his eighteen sons, but he is also a Persian calling for the overthrow of his people’s Arab monarch, which makes it very tempting to read Ferdowsi as more seditious than he really was, as if his purpose in writing the Shahnameh had been to foment a revolution against Islam. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Just as the protestors in Iran sought to have their votes counted in the context of the government they already had, not to overthrow that government, Ferdowsi, who was a practicing Muslim, wanted to preserve and transmit Iran’s cultural heritage within an Islamic context, not present that cultural heritage as a replacement for Islam.

In this purpose, Ferdowsi was not alone. He may have been a practicing Muslim, but he was also a proud dehqan, a member of Iran’s landed gentry, a group Shahbazi calls “the backbone” of Iranian society, powerful enough that Arab commanders sometimes felt it necessary to negotiate peace treaties with them, and a group that saw itself as duty bound to preserve the “memories of the golden days of [the Persian] empire and the heroic traditions and cultural heritage of [their nation]” (20-21). After three hundred years of Muslim Arab rule, the dehqan had reason to be concerned. Not only had Arabic replaced Persian as the language of law, literature, philosophy and science, but there was also a growing acceptance among Muslim Iranians that it might be possible to rebuild Iran’s imperial structure within an Islamic context. Indeed, revisionist histories of Iran, such as Tabari’s Tarikh, which is contemporaneous with the Shahnameh, were written in support of this idea. In Tarikh, Tabari incorporates Iran’s origins into the creation story as told in the Koran. His goal is to demonstrate that the reigns of the Persian monarchs fit into Koranic chronology, placing Iran’s legendary kings and heros into the world inhabited by, and ultimately subordinating those kings and heros to, characters like Adam and Nuh (Noah), who are far more important to Islam’s overall narrative than Iran could ever be.

In the eyes of the dehqan, this was an unacceptable diminution of Iran’s cultural heritage, and so when Ferdowsi wrote of the beginning of the world in the Shahnameh, he placed Iran squarely at the center of the narrative, and when he told the stories of Iran’s mythical monarchs, he told the stories in their own terms, without trying to justify their existence within the dominant cultural, political and spiritual context of Islam (Davis 14). Yet it would be a mistake to understand the Shahnameh purely as a historical or political text, of interest primarily not for its literary worth, but for its role as a repository of ancient Iranian legends. To do so would be to ignore not only Ferdowsi’s literary intent–he was, very self-consciously, writing a poem–but also the fact that, as any of the apocryphal stories told about him illustrate, both in their content and by the fact of their existence, it was as a poet, not a historian, that Ferdowsi made his reputation. In one tale, that reputation was preordained. Ferdowsi’s father, this story goes, had a vision of his recently-born son climbing a roof and calling out loudly towards each of the four corners of the earth. Each time the child called out, a strong voice answered him. Najm-al-Din, who was a dream-interperter, explained to the boy’s father that the vision foretold Ferdowsi’s achievements. “Your son will be a genius, a poet whose name will be known to the four quarters of the world and whose songs will be learned and revered everywhere” (Shahbazi 39, n. 1).

In another story, Ferdowsi travels from his home in Nishapour to Ghazna, the capital city of Sultan Mahmoud, who was a great patron of the arts and about whom I will have more to say later. Upon entering the city, Ferdowsi encounters three of Mahmoud’s court poets, Ansari, Asjadi and Farrukhi, who did not want to be disturbed by someone whose manner of dress so clearly marked him as provincial. Thinking to have some fun at Ferdowsi’s expense, and to make sure he did not bother them again, they issued him a challenge. “We are the king’s poets,” Ansari, who was the most senior, said, “and only a true poet can keep company with us. So, to test your ability, each of us will compose one line of a quatrain using a single rhyme. If you can provide the fourth, we will allow you to join us.” Ferdowsi, confident in his skill as a poet, agreed.

The rhyming word Ansari chose was roshan (bright) and, at least according to Edward G. Browne, in whose Literary History of Persia I first read this tale (129-30), he chose that word because he was sure there were only two other words in Persian that would rhyme with it: golshan (rose garden), with which Asjadi ended his line, and joshan (cuirass), with which Farrukhi ended his. The difficulty of reproducing Persian rhymes in English forces Browne to offer two translations. The first, in the main body of Browne’s text, preserves the rhyming challenge–though the rhyme he chooses is hardly challenging in English–while losing both the meaning and, because he has to change the images and metaphors, the Persian character of the lines. The second translation, which he gives in a footnote, preserves the meaning of the quatrain but loses the rhyming challenge entirely. In each translation, though, his rendering preserves the sense of Ferdowsi’s completing line. Here is Browne’s mono-rhymed quatrain:

Ansari: Thine eyes are clear and blue as a sunlit ocean
Asjadi: Their glance bewitches like a magic potion
Farrukhi: The wounds they cause no balm can heal, nor lotion
Ferdowsi: Deadly as those Giv’s spear dealt out to Poshan.

And here is the quatrain that more accurately renders the sense of the quatrain:

Ansari: The moon is not so radiant as thy brow
Asjadi: No garden-rose can match thy cheek, I trow
Farrukhi: Thy lashes through the hardest breastplate pierce
Ferdowsi: Like spear of Giv in Poshan’s duel fierce.

The court poets were deeply impressed. Not only had Ferdowsi survived their poetic challenge; he had done so by referring to an obscure story from Persian lore, demonstrating not only that he was a fine poet, but also a man of some learning. Realizing that they had underestimated him, Ansari, Asjadi and Farrukhi decide to present Ferdowsi to Sultan Mahmoud as a poet worthy of completing the versification of the national epic begun two or three decades earlier by another poet, Daqiqi, whose murder had left the court with only a thousand or so completed verses. This the poets did and the rest, as the saying goes, except that the story I have just told you is almost entirely apocryphal, is history.

Works Cited

Davis, Dick. Epic & Sedition: The Case of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. Washington, DC: Mage Publishers 2006.

Mackey, Sandra. The Iranians: Persia, Islam and the Soul of a Nation. New York: Dutton 1996

Shahbazi, A. Shapur. Ferdowsi: A Critical Biography. Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 1991.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

Posted in Iran, literature | 1 Comment

Every Day is Judgement Day

Posted on March 26, 2010 by Jeff Fecke

This is a post about the midseason finale of Caprica. Spoilers abound, so I’m putting the rest below this musical interlude from Battlestar Galactica.

“Mists of dreams drip along the nascent echo and love no more. End of line.”

–Cylon Basestar Hybrid, “Torn,” Battlestar Galactica

Caprica a tragedy. That’s easy to forget, because it’s a new show that’s feeling its way along its own narrative arc — and because, let’s face it, tragedy has nothing on drama and comedy for popularity (though it still is ahead of irony).

But that’s what the show is — a tragedy, in the classic Greek sense of the word. A series where fate works most for woe, with folly’s fairest show.

Man’s little pleasure is the spring of sorrow.

Tragedy is, at its heart, all about making choices that try to defy fate. Creon is warned not to strike against Antigone, even though she is breaking the law; because he will not listen, his son and wife die. Hamlet is told to take action, but he waits, and waits, and waits for a perfect moment, and the perfect moment never comes. Oedipus is told he will murder his father and marry his mother, and to prevent that from happening he leaves home, and murders his father and marries his mother.

In the end of a tragedy, the tragic hero understands his mistake. Oedipus tears his eyes out in shame. Hamlet dies, knowing that he waited too long to strike. Creon stumbles out of the room, saying, “Lead me away. I have been rash and foolish. I have killed my son and my wife. I look for comfort; my comfort lies here dead. Whatever my hands have touched has come to nothing. Fate has brought all my pride to a thought of dust.”

That is tragedy. And we are working on a tragedy in Caprica, heading for a bloody war that will ultimately leave billions dead.

There are many characters in Caprica, making many mistakes. A few of them will be our heroes, ultimately — our tragic heroes, the ones who look on their own creations with despair.

In Sophocles’ Antigone, the titular character tels her brother Ismene, “It is the dead, not the living, who make the greatest demands.” And so it has been in Caprica. Zoe, though dead, still pushes Lacey. Still flirts with Philo. Still enrages her father. Tamara, though dead, still floats out in the ether, drawing her father further and further in, a nightmare, a dream, a bit of both.

Daniel is broken. He stole a metacognitive processor to give his daughter a chance at life, and it failed to do so — or so he thought. The theft led to two deaths, deaths that enraged the owner of the company he stole from. And so that owner, Tomas Vergis, has set out to break Daniel, and he’s doing a good job of it so far. Daniel has been forced to sell his beloved Caprica Buccaneers, a professional Pyramid team. Worse, his wife has been told by Vergis about Daniel’s theft, and the murders that stemmed from them. And Amanda Graystone has found herself at that deepest point of depression, where the pain of going on seems far worse than the possible relief of nothingness. And her husband — her beloved husband — is maybe a murderer. Probably a murder. Is a murderer.

Daniel doesn’t notice Amanda’s despair, because he’s too busy trying to save his company from the abyss. He has already tried psychological torture to draw his daughter out — if she still exists. But that failed (as it was bound to — he all but proved to her that he was not to be trusted), and the government is on his back, and he simply has reached the end of his rope. He’s willing to wipe clean the MCP on which his daughter may still reside — on which he knows, at some level, she does reside — so that he can get with the program and start building his business again.

The dead demand much. And they do not like it when we do not listen. Daniel is one of our tragic heroes. He is not the only one.

Joseph is stuck in New Cap City, desperate to find the ghost of her daughter left in the shell. Tamara is approached by the woman who’s been Joseph’s guide. The woman tells Tamara that Joseph is desperate, lost, falling apart in the real world. Tamara wants her father back in her life, but more than that, she wants her father happy. She is a good person. She loves him, more than she loves herself. She will find a way to release him. She does not fear what lies on the other side. When Joseph finally finds Tamara, she shoots herself, before shooting him. She leads him to believe that she has died — though she cannot die, not in there. But she does so to free him. To let him go, as he needs to let her go.

Neither Tamara nor Joseph are tragic heroes. They are, if anything, the chorus. The people who wander in to explain morality, the way we should behave if we but listen to our better angels. They will find redemption. They will not end the show in tears.

Lacey has gotten her box for Zoe, checked through to Gemenon, but it will not ship in time. Zoe is desperate, angry at Lacey — who has gotten in so deep that she’s swapped out a key fob in Sister Clarice’s car so a rival S.T.O. faction can follow her. Or so she thinks. Lacey has been using Barnabas, using her boyfriend Keon. But they have been using her, too. And as Lacey finds out, being a terrorist requires the willingness to draw blood. You can’t shake the Devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding, and by the end of the episode, Lacey will push a button that will detonate a bomb meant for Clarice. She will do so to save herself, and Keon. But she will do it. She will become a murderer, so as not to fail Zoe the way she failed the flesh-and-blood Zoe. She is one of our tragic heroes, but she has time to be redeemed. She already knows she’s made the wrong decision. But she can claw her way to the light.

Clarice, you will be happy to know, survives the attack. She is not, perhaps, what we thought she might be. She is a terrorist, perhaps, but she is above the violence at some level. She is fighting the depravity of Barnabas. She is pushing for a vision of an afterlife, not a takeover of this temporal world.

When the bomb goes off, she is standing on the banks of a river, looking up at a bridge from which Amanda Graystone has just jumped. Amanda is not our tragic hero either. She is Euridyce, she is Ophelia, she is Jocasta. She cannot bear up under the failures of her loved ones. Not the failure of Daniel. And not the failure of Zoe.

Which brings us to Zoe, for if anyone in this series is the tragic hero, the moral center, it is she.

From the moment she was implanted inside the robot that houses her, Zoe’s decision-making has been, well, bad. She told Lacey to shun Sister Clarice in favor of the violent and dangerous Barnabas; Clarice hoped to use Zoe’s invention to bridge life and death, while Barnabas wishes to make the world burn. She hid from Daniel to maintain “control” over her situation, but her disappearance from his life — and his grief at having caused her death — have sent him spiraling out of control. By extension, her refusal to reveal herself to Daniel has allowed both he and Amanda to believe that the living, flesh-and-blood Zoe was responsible for the bombing of a train — when Zoe was actually just running away to Gemenon. This has pushed Amanda into a downward spiral, and caused her hard-won sanity to ebb away.

When Daniel gives the order to erase Zoe’s personality, she might have been able to persuade him to stay the execution by coming clean. Instead, she turns to Philomon, the lab technician whom she’s been dating in the virtual world. She pushes him, too fast, to set her free, to let her go. And for a second, Philomon agrees. Perhaps, had he been given time, he would have meant it.

But in his panic, he instead sets off alarms, and Zoe — Zoe kills him for it.

And in her grief, as she flees the scene of the crime in a stolen van, toward an army blockade that she can not hope to outrun, Zoe will put her life in danger, because she knows that she set these rocks in motion — and that she bears the responsibility for it. She doesn’t know how far these rocks will slide — doesn’t realize that the heavy boulders moving are but pebbles compared to what is to come. But she knows, like Creon knew, like Hamlet knew, like Oedipus knew, that she was wrong. And that she can’t undo it.

Tragedies are meant to warn their viewers, to urge us not to make bad choices. To heed warnings from those around us. To not believe that we ourselves are smarter than all who have gone before us. And that is what Caprica is — a warning. A warning that no matter how smart we are, we cannot outsmart the world. That when you use someone, they may be using you. That lies do not give us control of the world — but rather, that they take control from us. That we can mourn the dead, but we cannot hold them with us; that any attempt to thwart nature will carry a heavy penalty.

Or as Antigone closes, “Big words are always punished, and proud men in old age learn to be wise.”

Posted in Popular (and unpopular) culture | 7 Comments

Linkmistress has posts that she doesn’t want to lose so she is unleashing them on the world

Posted on March 25, 2010 by unusualmusic

linkmistress-has-posts-that-she-doesnt-want-to-lose-so-she-is-unleashing-them-on-the-world

The Texas Tribune is tracking the catastrophic “only conservative white people matter in American History textbooks clusterfuck” that will soon be unleashed on the unsuspecting American child population here

In their January meeting, State Board of Education members came armed with more amendments to the state social studies curriculum than they could vote on — a process hardly helped by the acrimony between the board’s socially conservative bloc and more moderate Republicans and liberal Democrats. And so the SBOE kicked the process of revising the standards down the road to this week’s meeting, where social studies rewrites will resume today.

Because of the flood of amendments under consideration, we’ve produced this annotated version of the high school U.S. History standards, which have been the focus of controversy. You can see exactly what the board has added, deleted and rewritten, along with our analysis of the current arguments and historical context behind each change.MORE

A. And here I thought my American History class was a piece of shit.

B. IF I ever do have kids I’ll have to homeschool them.

C. And Texas is actually apparently majority POC. I suppose at some point there will be a grassroots movement to throw this shit out. Hopefully it won’t take too long.

Hipster Racism Because Amanda Palmer showed her ass. AGAIN.

Closeted politicians and bi-invisibility

…Amanda Mennis recently wrote me with an interesting question: Does this story of a secretly gay public figure — and the absurdly long parade of stories like it — contribute in some way to bisexual invisibility?

After all, most of the guys in these scandals (and it has just been guys so far) are married, or have some sort of sexual/ romantic relationship with women. Many of them have children. They’re clearly capable of having sex with women. Doesn’t that make them bisexual, not gay? Or at least, doesn’t it suggest the possibility that some of them are bisexual and not gay?

An interesting question. And one that I’m finding tricky to answer.

Part of the problem is that we don’t have a standard definition of what it means to be gay or lesbian or bisexual. It’s not like there’s a gay person in a vacuum in the Smithsonian, against whom we all measure ourselves to determine our own sexual orientation. Everyone defines these terms — gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, bi-curious, heteroflexible (that was a new one on me!), questioning, queer, “basically straight but wouldn’t kick Jon Stewart out of bed,” whatever — in subtly different ways. Or not so subtly different ways.

So ultimately, it doesn’t really make sense to talk about whether someone is “really bisexual.” There is no such thing as “really bisexual.” Within reason (and please don’t ask me to define what “within reason” means), we get to decide for ourselves what sexual orientation we are, and what language we use to describe it.

But what does that mean for someone who’s closeted?MORE

Some of the downsides of the Health care bill in terms of women Yes, its more than teh abortion executive order. Which is a Big Fucking. Deal.

<Fact: The bill permits age-rating, the practice of imposing higher premiums on older people. This practice has a disproportionate impact on women, whose incomes and savings are lower due to a lifetime of systematic wage discrimination.

Fact: The bill also permits gender-rating, the practice of charging women higher premiums simply because they are women. Some are under the mistaken impression that gender-rating has been prohibited, but that is only true in the individual and small-group markets. Larger group plans (more than 100 employees) sold through the exchanges will be permitted to discriminate against women — having an especially harmful impact in workplaces where women predominate.

We know why those gender- and age-rating provisions are in the bill: because insurers insisted on them, as they will generate billions of dollars in profits for the companies. Such discriminatory rating must be completely eliminated.MORE

He’s a Terrorist. Just say it. Terrorist. For F*%k sake!

You see, the very definition of terrorism has changed, right beneath our feet. A man with strong idealogical beliefs against the government of the United States tries (and succeeds) to kill himself and take as many civilians (federal workers) as he can with him. But they don’t call it terrorism. That sacrosanct term is now reserved only for non-white people with funny sounding names. Preferably Muslim.

Trans Murder Monitoring Project: 333 cases of reported murders of trans people in the last 2 years

Integrating Primary and Mental Healthcare

Currently, primary care providers (PCPs), also called general practitioners, provide over half of mental health treatment in the United States – which results in up to 50% of mental health problems going unindentified, undiagnosed, and untreated through the primary care system. This is a wasted opportunity, as PCPs have significant opportunities to identify behavioral health problems early and provide interventions and treatments to prevent further deterioration.MORE

Videos: Dance party!

The Male “P” Spot: Why het men are so afraid to discover their own bodies’ capacities for pleasure, from a sex organ that ISN’T a penis

Has anyone, anywhere, seen a medical illustration of the prostate gland and men’s other sexual organs depicted with the prostate being touched and the penis erect? Why not? And why do these diagrams only exist to promote “checking for cancer”? Talk about stigmatising an organ!MORE

Gemini Mini Documentary

TransGriot Note: Mini Documentary on Chicago drag queen Saya Naomi Diaz Deleon or Gemini. It includes commentary from Christina Kahrl, who was recently featured on HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.MORE

And finally, Movie rec: Sleep Dealer

Now on sale

And now a word from our sponsor…

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Linkmistress has posts that she doesn’t want to lose so she is unleashing them on the world

Posted in Site and Admin Stuff, Syndicated feeds | 11 Comments