kai_idou's Xanga

People can change if given the opportunities.

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:59:58 GMT

Yesterday I discovered my favorite Last.fm station yet. Combine the tags "folk" and "political" for everything from 1800s union songs to modern anarchist punk. Like this one I liked:

I've come such a long way to get to where I am today,
And I must admit I used to be more like one of my enemies.
And step by step my progress seemed so slow,
Cause there was such a cold and lonely road
That most the while I travelled on my own
With no idea of where I was trying to go.

But we all had to go through so much shit,
And it's hard enough just to live through it
And not lose our hearts and our minds.
How are we supposed to see the light
At the end when we don't even know that it exists?
We need a lighthouse with the fire burning bright!

(People can change if given the opportunities,
That's why I say befriend your enemies.)

(People can change if given the opportunities,
That's why I say befriend your enemies.)

Befriend your enemies and strive to be as perfect as you can be.
Don't ever think that your journey's done.
Cause the road goes on forever,
And it's so much better if we stick together.
Look how far we have come.
Look how far we have come.

("The Road Goes on Forever" by Ghost Mice.)

Or, for your daily dose of white liberal guilt:

Quote of the Day -- Window Shopping

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:12:58 GMT

"One of the things, too, about window shopping, is I call it desire shopping. And desire shopping helps you whet your appetite for the finest. And so, it keeps you motivated to say, "Yes, I've gotta have that!" We're upping the desire level, we're upping the comfort level."

-- This scene from the documentary "People Like Us: Social Class in America".

Quote of the Day -- Speth on Social Issues

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 00:10:55 GMT

America faces huge social problems and needs in addition to its environmental challenges. But priming the economic pump for ever-greater aggregate growth is a poor, sometimes even counterproductive, way to generate solutions on the social front. We need instead to address these problems directly and thoughtfully, with compassion and generosity. A whole world of new and stronger policies is needed--measures that strengthen our families and our communities and address the breakdown of social connectedness; measures that introduce more family-friendly policies at work; measures that provide more time for leisure activities; measures that provide for universal health care and alleviate the devastating effects of mental illness; measures that provide everyone with a good education; measures to eliminate poverty in America, sharply improve income distribution, and address growing economic and political inequality; measures that recognize responsibilities to the half of humanity who live in poverty.

-- James Gustave Speth in The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability

The three courses I have that deal with these topics this semester are in three different subjects: Social Inequality (sociology), Anthropology of Globalization, and Sustainability for Everyone (interdisciplinary environmental, taught by an architecture professor). The funny thing is how much I'm hearing the exact same things in all three of them.

Quote of the Day -- Purity

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 03:07:42 GMT

Now you might think that normal people would be immune to the religious superstition that mere hand washing absolves you of moral responsibility. But you would be wrong. Specifically, in the same 2006 study Zhong and Liljenquist examined this replacement effect (physical cleansing replacing moral responsibility). In the study participants were again asked to recall a moral failure. Afterward, some participants were allowed to use an antiseptic wipe. After using the wipe (or not) the participants were asked to give mood ratings. Many of the mood ratings assessed moral emotions: Disgust, regret, shame, guilt. After the mood ratings the participants were asked to engage in an act of helpful volunteerism (participating for another study without pay to help out a desperate graduate student).

What did Zhong and Liljenquist find? They observed two things. First, if participants were allowed to use an antiseptic wipe they were less helpful. Where 74% of the control participants agreed to help out the graduate student only 41% of those who used a wipe agreed to assist. Second, when compared to controls those using the wipe reported fewer negative moral emotions (e.g., less shame, less guilt) after recalling their moral failure.

This finding is stunning, with huge implications for the Church. Specifically, the physical act of washing made people feel less guilty and reduced their willingness to engage in an altruistic act. Physical cleansing replaced morality, both emotionally and behaviorally. Physical washing makes me feel morally cleaner and, by implication, morally satisfied to the point of unhelpfulness. You already feel like a good person so why do more good?

From Experimental Theology (where else?) Another really good recent post of his is the one called 'The Bait and Switch of Contemporary Christianity.'

This Song Gives Me Chills

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 01:02:06 GMT

Discovered on Pandora via a similarity to Depeche Mode.

I didn't realize how depressing it was until I watched the video and paid attention to the lyrics.

Quote(s) of the Day -- Defining Postmodernism

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:19:18 GMT

Probably no two writers agree on the defining characteristics of postmodernism. Given the numerous influences, ranging from literary theory to linguistics to studies of the practice of science, any attempt to find the underlying unifying element that defines postmodernism is doomed to elicit many cries of “But that doesn’t apply to me!” For Marvin Harris (1999b: 153), “the most prominent and important’’ aspect of postmodernism “is the disparagement of Western science and technology.” For others, the main focus is the rejection of grand theory, metanarratives, essentialism (the attribution of a priori or universal traits, such as a common human nature), and of any description of objective reality that fails to take into account the way that reality is cognitively or socially constructed. Such ideas have led to accusations that postmodernism implies a degree of relativity that renders any kind of authoritative statement impossible. It should be noted, however, that the question of relativity is a controversial one even within postmodernism.
I would suggest that what is common to postmodernist anthropology is, first, its attention to the cognitive and the epistemological, and second, its rejectionism, both of which have many precursors in the history of anthropology. Whether or not postmodernists accept that there is a real world separate from our interpretations, they emphasize that the world is cognitively constructed differently by different peoples at different times. Culture may be interpreted as a process of negotiating meaning. This calls into question any claims of objectivity, even within the physical sciences. Indeed, modern science is only one type of human rationality, though one that has been privileged over other forms through the hegemonic globalization of Western technology, culture, and economy. Equally legitimate traditional knowledges have been marginalized or obliterated in the process. Within anthropology, all classic ethnographies that claim objectivity may be reassessed as literary texts that might tell us more about the author and his culture than about the people he or she was studying.

[...]

Postmodernism, at least in its stronger versions, picks up on this traditional rejectionist tendency within anthropology. It is unique mainly in the degree of its rejectionism. What does postmodernism reject? Specifically, it rejects all grand theory (cultural materialism, structuralism, structural-functionalism, materialist versions of Marxism), ecological and biological explanations of human behavior, all claims to objectivity in representing other cultures, hypothesis testing and other applications of the scientific method, and all essentialisms (including the attempt to find universals of human nature or of gender behavior, whether based in biology or cross-cultural regularities). Difference and complexity are favored against unifying or simplifying theories. This is a hefty load to leave by the wayside.

The more general villains of the postmodern drama are the Enlightenment and positivism. The Enlightenment envisaged progress toward a better world as emerging from the applications of reason, science, and technology. Positivism ostensibly embraces a correspondence theory of reality; that is, there is something truly out there, separate from ourselves and our perceptions, that we can describe, at least in rough approximation, through the neutral and objective methods of science. The laws of nature can be mathematically formulated.

Quote of the Day -- W. E. B. DuBois

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 18:44:56 GMT

    Within the race itself today there are disquieting signs. The effort of Negroes to become Americans of equal status with other Americans is leading them to a state of mind by which they not only accept what is good in America, but what is bad and threatening so long as the Negro can share equally. This is peculiarly dangerous at this epoch in the development of world culture.
    After two world wars of unprecedented loss of life, cruelty, and destruction, we are faced by the fact that the industrial organization of our present civilization has in it something fundamentally wrong. It went to pieces in the first world war because of the determination of certain great powers excluded from world rule to share in that rule, by acquisition of the labor and materials of colonial peoples. The attempt to recover from the cataclysm resulted in the collapse of our industrial system, and a second world war.
    In spite of the propaganda which has gone on, which represents America as the leading democratic state, we Negroes know perfectly well, and ought to know even better than most, that America is not a successful democracy and that until it is, it is going to drag down the world. This nation is ruled by corporate wealth to a degree which is frightening. One thousand persons own the United States and their power outweighs the voice of the mass of American citizens. This must be cured, not by revolution, not by war and violence, but by reason and knowledge.
    Most of the world is today turning toward the welfare state; turning against the idea of production for individual profit toward the idea of production for use and the welfare of the mass of citizen. No matter how difficult such a course is, it is the only course that is going to save the world and this we American Negroes have got to realize.
    We may find it easy now to get publicity, reward, and attention by going along with the reactionary propaganda and war hysteria which is convulsing this nation, but in the long run America will not thank its black children if they help it go the wrong way, or retard its progress.

-- W. E. B. DuBois, "The Problem of the Twentieth Century is the Problem of the Color Line," first printed in 1950.

This recalls an observation made by the author of my primary textbook* for this class**: "[M]ass movements of oppressed persons in capitalist societies (not just the working class, but women and racial and ethnic minorities as well) have responded by seeking to get into the class system rather than overthrow it."

* The Structure of Social Stratification in the United States by Leonard Beeghley. The DuBois reading is from the anthology below.

** I suppose I hadn't mentioned yet that I'm taking a class called Social Inequality.

Quote of the Day -- Neoliberalism

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 21:29:20 GMT

Neoliberalism favors the rich and, since anthropologists usually study the poor or lower middle classes, a near consensus has emerged that neoliberal adjustments undercut domestic production prices, cause unemployment, create sweatshops that utilize underpaid child and female labor, disrupt families, disempower peasants, and encourage environmental despoliation.

From my anthropology of globalization textbook, which I am loving.

And speaking of capitalism, there's an interesting discussion of it going on at ReveLife now. I considered participating, but found the logic so baffling I'm not even sure where I would begin.

Intersexuality

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 04:43:41 GMT

So we already know that there isn't any one psychological characteristic that you can use to sort men from women. (If you missed that, that was the point of the boring essay I linked to the other day. For any given trait, there is way more variation within a gender than between the average man and the average woman. Unless as a trait you count the tendency to identify as a man or a woman in the first place.) But now let's talk about physical bodies.

Most of us grow up with the assumption that there are only two types of bodies people can have, and only two ways to sort them. Male and female. )And of course their souls are male and female to match, so that anyone whose behavior differs too much from the way someone of their assigned gender is supposed to act must be in denial of their true nature.) And while there are always exceptions that can happen, just like with any other physical trait, there must be one characteristic that clearly defines a person's sex as one or the other. And most people nowadays assume this to be the chromosomal configuration. Anyone with the configuration XX is female, and anyone with XY is male, period. Simple, right?

Well, reality isn't so simple. You'll recall that in my post on sex differentiation I said that actually what has the biggest effect on a person's sexual development is their hormones. But sometimes a person's hormones aren't what we'd expect from looking at what chromosomes they have, and sometimes their body fails to respond to their hormones in the expected way. These can result in anything from almost normal development to a person whose body is completely in between male and female, to one whose body is the complete opposite of what their chromosomes would tell us they are. (Instances of the latter led to controversy back when mandatory chromosome testing was used to verify the sex of female competitors in the Olympics). A person whose bodily characteristics don't completely match one sex or the other is called intersexual.

So let's say that Jane Doe and her husband go to the hospital to have a baby, and when it is born they discover to their astonishment that their child has funny-looking genitals. Is that bump a penis or a clitoris? Is that his scrotum below it, or are her labia fused together? The nice doctor tells them not to panic, the child is definitely a boy or a girl, they just need to figure out which. And possibly on closer inspection the infant's body shows a definite tendency toward one sex or the other, in which case the completely male or female child will just need a bunch of surgery so that they look normal and will be able to engage in proper vaginal intercourse with someone of the opposite sex as an adult.

But sometimes it still isn't clear what sex the infant is, or for some other reason they decide to go with a different criterion in deciding what sex/gender to raise it as, and consequently what kind of surgery to use to make it look normal. You wouldn't believe how this is decided. Go ahead, take a guess.

.

.

.

.

. . . They measure the phallus.
One intersex activist puts it bluntly:

Doctors act as enforcers of genital and behavioral conformity for the Penis Club. As high priests of the biological technocracy, and as privileged possessors of “secret” knowledge, they wield their power to ensure that only owners of a medically approved, “viable” penis are granted membership in the Penis Club. All others are by default granted membership in the Vagina Club. The penis does need to be “viable” as its purpose is not seen as being for pleasurable gratification, but as the mechanism by which members of the Vagina Club are penetrated. Intersexed neonates who have no clearly defined membership qualifi- cations for either club are modified at Hopkins to become members of the Vagina Club.

This approach was all the rage back in the 60s when it was thought that a child's gender identity was completely flexible and an infant reared properly either way would turn out a perfectly normal, heterosexual boy or girl. But I've been surprised to hear that it is often still used even today. Because surgery works much better at creating a vagina than a penis, individuals whose phallus length falls below the cutoff are modified to look female, sometimes even if they have testes which must then be removed so they don't develop masculine secondary sexual characteristics later. The assumption here that I find most interesting is that it's worse to be a man without a penis than to be a woman who can't bear children. Think about this: a penis' main function is symbolic. You can urinate without one (females do). You can sexually pleasure a female partner without one (lesbians do). And if it's just a matter of length, you can even procreate without one. The only thing you can't do is feel like an adequate man. That this should be considered more important than the ability to reproduce, particularly the reproductive ability of someone living as a woman, speaks to me not just of the strange ideas our society has, but probably also of which gender the creators of this policy belonged to.

I don't know how many of those who received corrective surgery are happier than they would have been without. Perhaps many of them benefited by not having to deal with society's disapproval of their genitalia. But there are certainly a lot of adults who are angry about having had harmless bits of their anatomy removed without their consent, often leaving them looking like the opposite sex from that which they end up identifying as. Or unable to experience orgasm because their too-large clitoris was cut off. Or emotionally scarred by the secrecy and shame with which they were raised by parents who wouldn't tell them what they were being taken to the hospital for. Very, very angry!

I guess in a society in which statistically normal women get expensive surgery to fix not just their boobs but now their vaginas, too, and email spam consists mostly of advertisements for viagra or penile enhancement scams -- where effeminate men and butch women are marginalized even within the gay and lesbian communities -- where the transgendered get surgeries sometimes because that matches their understanding of how their body should be, but other times because society won't allow them to live as that gender unless they look the part -- all this does make a twisted sort of sense.

But the thing is, it's all so dumb. Sex isn't binary at all -- it's a spectrum, with most of us near one or the other end. Why should gender be, either? How can it be -- how can we assume that a person with an in-between body is completely one or the other? And if we use their own identity and behavior as our criteria for determining which gender an intersexed person belongs to, what do we do about people whose body is clearly one sex but whose identity and behavior is that of someone of the other?

(And of course since the masculinity or femininity that God gave you and you are denying is deep down inside, a psychological reality that only you can observe directly, we are free to assert whatever we want about it without the fear of you ever being able to produce evidence that can prove us wrong.)

Why should characteristics that are good in people of one sex be bad in those of the other? Was there ever a logical reason to think this? If we believe that the physical and psychological differences between men and women somehow reflect or symbolize or embody some higher truth about masculinity and femininity, about the existence of complementary initiation and response . . . what does that even mean, really? And how would it be any less of a testament to that truth if the same person sometimes played one role and sometimes another?

Technically of course the existence of in-between individuals doesn't tell us anything about the true nature of those who don't deviate from the norm, or what should then be right and proper for them . . . technically. But somehow I think a lot of people would have trouble holding on to their ideas about gender if they were aware of intersexuality and took it seriously.

There'll probably be a part two to this, but in the meantime here are some links with more information on the subject:

Hermaphrodites -- a brief (though longer and more detailed than this post) explanation of intersex, the various conditions that cause it, how it's treated, historically and currently, and society's attitudes toward it.

"What if It's (Sort of) a Boy and (Sort of) a Girl?" -- New York Times article about how parents cope with raising intersexed children, the pros and cons of genital surgery, the infant's rights versus parents' inability to cope with their child's sexual ambiguity, etc. Requires a login. (I use BugMeNot via its Firefox add-on.)

Intersex Society of North America -- support and advocacy group, hosts the Kiira Triea article I quoted (about the Penis Club) and lots more besides. Here's a good one.

Quote of the Day -- Love and Equality

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 02:51:17 GMT

Love does not speak the language of equality. Love speaks the language of wonder, gratitude, and reverence.

-Anthony Esolen. I got it from here, but it's often quoted in discussions about marital equality vs. male headship.

On a related note, I sat through a sermon with my family once on anger. According to that particular pastor, getting angry is always always bad, because anger comes from a belief that you're being denied something that you deserve or have a right to. And as Christians we know we don't deserve anything, and we also know that following Jesus means we choose to give up our rights. Say it with me: "Christians don't have rights." I've heard similar sentiments from much more sophisticated sources--not about anger, but about rights; we should get rid of the idea of rights, because everything in life is an undeserved gift. And from other not-so-sophisticated sources, such as Elisabeth Elliot.

All of this intrigues me, because much as it seems logical, it contradicts a lot of what seems common sense about relationships. I could type paragraphs and paragraphs of explanation, but instead I'll be brief: it just seems to me that justice would be better served if the oppressed were allowed to act entitled to fair treatment, and that abusive relationships would be easier to prevent if one didn't have to morally justify every "no" by explaining who other than oneself would benefit.