Today I Learned...

I thought this article by an feminist Orthodox rabbi grappling with the traditional daily prayer to thank G-d for not making him a woman was really interesting. I'm not big on observing tradition, but that almost makes me appreciate it more when other people spend a lot of effort upholding it. Both because I think there's some value in the continuity for its own sake, and because things often become traditions for reasons, and those reasons may still be around even if we've forgotten them. And there is something beautiful about submitting to something larger than yourself even when you disagree with parts of it.

OTOH, I think it's disingenuous to say "but tradition!" when you can see a lot of the social forces that formed the tradition, and they are things you claim to reject. Wedding traditions are the perfect example of this. Asking a woman's father for permission to marry her clearly arose from the tradition of women as property AND is clearly treating her as property now. I don't think there's a feminist way to do it. But even though engagement rings are descended from the same system, and I still think they're sexist and reinforce a lot of bad patterns and I don't want one, I do think it's possible to do engagement rings in an aware, feminist way that, if not ideal, falls well within the realm of compromises we all have to make to live in the world. And I will accept "yes, it's sexist, but the ring makes my life easier because men respect it far more than they respect the word "no"" in a way I wouldn't accept "yes, it's sexist, but it meant a lot to my dad".

On the third hand, it's not realistic to expect people to go from sexist to perfect. I want to give this rabbi points for thinking about these things even if he hasn't come to a conclusion I like yet, because just thinking about them is hard. I thought his first few paragraphs were really great, honest, explorations of the difficult choice in front of him. If he had just done that, I'd think he was pretty cool. But I found the second half, where he listed all the reasons the being a man was awesome and pledged to make that less true, really evasive. The blessing won't be any less traditional if sexism is solved, is he still going to say it then? All the things he lists are true, but they're also secular- is he working to diminish gender inequity of Orthodox Judaism in other ways? A lot of those are traditional too.

I came on this article via this response, via the author's blog where she talks about Judaism and gymnastics. I had no idea gymnastics could be so interesting.* Anyways, her response was basically "you don't get to tell women this isn't offensive", and more generally "you don't get to tell the less privileged what is and is not oppressing them." Which are very fair points, somewhat wider in scope than mine, and yet also reflecting that fact that the author (Jewish, formerly Orthodox) has much more invested in this particular fight than I (never Jewish) do.

*The Judaism part is interesting too, but that didn't surprise me.

Wikipedia before I got there:

In June 2011, Watson described an experience at a skeptical conference, concerning an approach by a man in an elevator, who invited her to his room for coffee and a conversation late at night.[19] In a video blog, among other things, she stated that incident made her feel sexualized and uncomfortable and advised, "Guys, don't do that".[20] Her statement sparked a controversy among the skeptic community.[21] Her critics said she was overreacting to a trivial incident, most notably Richard Dawkins, who wrote a satirical letter to an imaginary Muslim woman, sarcastically contrasting her plight to Watson's complaint. This in turn caused him to be criticized by those supporting her on the issue, including several figures in the community.[22][23] Watson announced that she would not buy or endorse Dawkins's books and lectures in the future.[22]

Wikipedia after I got there:

In June 2011, Watson described an experience at a skeptical conference, concerning an approach by a man in an elevator, who invited her to his room for coffee and a conversation late at night, after she had talked extensively about disliking being sexualized at atheist conferences.[19] In a video blog, among other things, she stated that incident made her feel sexualized and uncomfortable and advised, "Guys, don't do that".[20] Her statement sparked a controversy among the skeptic community.[21] Her critics said she was overreacting to a trivial incident, most notably Richard Dawkins, who wrote a satirical letter to an imaginary Muslim woman, sarcastically contrasting her plight to Watson's complaint. This in turn caused him to be criticized by those supporting her on the issue, including several figures in the community.[22][23] Watson announced that she would not buy or endorse Dawkins's books and lectures in the future.[22]

See if you can spot the difference

I am a pretty vocal critic of hormonal birth control. I recognize that it was a great leap forward for women when it was invented, but I'm angry that we've gotten stuck on it as The Anti-Baby Mechanism, and I see it as a symptom of our disconnect from our bodies in general and science's disconnection from women's experiences in particular. I've wondered out loud how Depo can possibly still be legal, when it has such horrendous side effects.

I'm an idiot. A privileged idiot.

This was driven home to me while reading Escape, which is about a woman's escape from a fundamentalist mormon cult. Her first or second pregnancy ended with a placental abruption, and every subsequent pregnancy (there were eight total) mandated bedrest and still risked death. And then her 7th child was born and required near 24 hour care and constant medical visits; her husband fought her when she took the child on her own. If she didn't have the mental energy to do that or the physical ability to follow through, her son would die. And while it wouldn't be quite as quick, her death or incapacitation put all of her other children at risk as well. Staying not pregnant was literally a matter of life or death.

But being caught with birth control could get her, or her children, killed as well. Contraception that was absolutely undetectable, and required as few doctors' visits as possible, was all that mattered. However bad blood clots and bone density loss are, they were first world problems, relative to a hostile uterus and rapist husband.

So Depo? I take it back. You're like that friend who is sometimes impossible to deal with but is absolutely there when you need them, and I respect you for that.

In first edition Mage (the world of darkness RPG), the opposition group was called The Technocracy. As described to me by my best friend in my freshman year of college, their goal was to wipe out belief in magic, originally for benevolent reasons like "penicillin works better with fewer chances of turning you into a chicken" but eventually because they just hated magic. Unknown to them, succeeding would cause an end to all scientific progress as well, because they would have killed humanity's ability to imagine and accept something better than what already existed.

Reading God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens, I feel like a mage reading a book by a Technocracy operative. He points to all the terrible things people have done in the name of religion, and sees a reason to banish belief in deities. But that doesn't gel for me: there's no reason holding different stories about why the sun rises in the east should cause people to kill one another. Hitchens would argue that it's because the stories come with instructions to do so, but he also spends a lot of time proving that those stories are human creations*. It seems to me like religion is simply the name we give to the category of things that make people that stupid.** Or, I suspect, to one of the effects of a deeper Thing, the destruction of which would have larger consequences than Hitchens imagines or has even bothered to look for.

It seems like Hitchens believes that if he could just prove to people that their origin stories (and by extension their deities) were obvious falsehoods, they would stop killing their neighbors in the name Huitzilopochtli and everything would be fine. My belief is that, as long as there are resources to compete over, people will form in groups and out groups to help marshall those resources for themselves. Put another way: Christianity was used by priests in medieval Europe to move resources from non-priests to priests. But belief in God and Heaven and Hell, was the tool, not the reason, for that theft. You might as well ban electricity because it was used to execute people.

*I'm a bit annoyed at how long he's spent proving that the Talmud, New Testament, and Koran were assembled by human beings from a tangle of conflicting accounts, decades or centuries after the events in question, and in many cases can be definitively disproven with historical data. I would have spotted him this without argument, both because it's obviously true and because the point isn't interesting to me. It's possible I'm simply annoyed at him for not writing on the topic I wanted to read, but it's also possible I recognize a grad student padding out the strongest section of his thesis to disguise the fact that the rest of it is so thin.

**I'm using stupid in a less pejorative than usual sense. Being too stupid to know something can't be done is how we do new things.

I don't have a dog in the Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays debate, in the sense that I don't mind being wished either. But two things really annoy me:

1. People who don't care about being wished Merry Christmas and believe it is therefor wrong for other people to care.

Now, if you did a survey and the number of people who didn't like being wished Merry Christmas was statistically insignificant, that would certainly be an argument for leaving the store displays up. But my close friends have weirder and harder to remember preferences than this, and I still do my best to honor them, because that's what you do for friends.

2. People who say "Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, or whatever it is I'm allowed to say."

This is, I think, strictly worse than just wishing someone Merry Christmas. It demonstrates that you're aware of the issue, have given it some thought, and decided to do the bare legal minimum while making it very clear how arduous it is for you. We have a generic well-wishes for everyone statement, it's called "Happy Holidays", and while not everyone loves it, it deftly conveys "I'm trying to be celebratory and inclusive", which is a pretty good start.



*either because they feel it's an attack on Christmas (stupid), or promotes a false equivalence between Christmas and Hannukah (I can see the argument but I still think you need to give people credit for trying).

Ferule & Fescue has said everything I ever wanted to say on Rick Perry, Christianity, persecution complexes, and homophobia. The parting shot is "According to Rick Perry, being a Christian means being part of a very special and persecuted minority on whom no real demands are ever made."

People do stupid things. They just do. It happens, and everyone knows it. Despite this, humanity's first reaction to doing doing stupid is to double down, and do any number of vastly stupider things to save themselves from consequences of the first. See: The autobiography I'm reading of comedian Craig Ferguson, who drank in large part to avoid thinking about all the terrible things he'd done while drinking*.

The part of twelve step programs where you apologize to everyone is pretty well known (Ferguson wasn't in AA and it's not clear to me what kind of program he was in after rehab, but he was going back and making amends). Last year I learned about a part of Rosh Hashanah celebration, in which you seek forgiveness from people you've wronged. And it wasn't until this year that I saw the similarity to the rehab step, presumably because I'm listening to Ferguson's autobiography now.** My theory is that both Rosh Hashanah and AA are trying to make you pay whatever price you owe for whatever stupid things you did, thus removing the incentive to do more stupid things to avoid paying that price. As plans go, I think this is a pretty good one, and I'm giving a lot of thought to incorporating it into my own life.

I think this ties in really well with the serenity prayer. One thing you really can't change is the past,and trying to fight the consequences of it is doomed to failure (serenity to accept the things I cannot change). But it is equally flawed to say "it happened and I can't change it therefor nothing is required of me.", thus ignoring your obligation to make things as right as possible (courage to change the things I can). Knowing which one of these you're doing is hard, and it's so easy to fall off on either end.

*Also to avoid dying of the DTs. But some of it was blotting out past sins.

**Also because when my friend and I discussed this last year, it was in the context of how the Jewish G-d can't forgive you until the relevant person does, which blew my little Presbyterian-raised mind.

I'm going to start this by saying I'm completely pro-marriage equality. In my mind, civil unions for everyone is a better outcome than marriage for everyone, but I'm not picky. I don't really understand why the distinction is so important, but it's clearly extremely important to a lot of people, so I accept it. I would dearly love to see a documentary showing why this word is so important to so many people on both sides.

8 didn't do that, or anything else that comes under the "portraying emotional truth" set that I think is documentaries' natural advantage. The gay couple that was unmarried by prop 8. had a nasty habit of conflating batshit crazy fears ("Gay Marriage jeopardizes national security") with fears that are well grounded in reality but that we think they shouldn't be afraid of (gay marriage + existing non-discrimination laws will force entities that rent wedding space or produce overpriced flowers to serve gay weddings as well).


And while the Mormons did pour a lot of time and money into anti-marriage equality initiatives, I can't help but feel they're getting a larger beatdown than any other church would because they're considered weird and unpopular, so gay marriage advocates can go farther in their attacks without fear of a backlash. This is an excellent tactic for marginalizing the anti-gay-marriage point of view, and I'm not sure the Mormon Church has any right to complain, given the number of logistically genius ethically suspect tactics they use themselves, for any number of things. But I like my side to meet certain ethical standards, and this falls just a tiny bit short.

Expanding further: I broadly fall under the category of "spiritual but not religions", although I don't use the term much because I feel like most people who use it are implicitly criticizing organized religion and universally look down on it.. I only look down on poorly organized religion.* If you want to be a loosely organized spiritual support center that encourages people to find their own path, do that. If you want to be an actual organized religion, I expect you to expect things of your congregation. The mushy middle ground taken by, say the Catholic Church, which demands a lot and then provides you with loopholes, bugs me. So I have a grudging respect for the fact that fact that the LDS really demands a lot from their congregation and come down pretty hard on people who deviate- including demanding copies of paystubs and shunning people with don't tithe "enough." It's not something I'd want to participate in, and I find that social pressure abhorrent in all other circumstances, but here... I dunno, I admire competence even when it's put to ill use.

I have no idea why I'm being so nice to the Mormons. Their ads stating that Prop 8 wouldn't revoke existing marriages make baldfaced lies everywhere blush with their lack of subtlety. And the organizational skills I so admire lead to people who can't explain their position beyond repeating (asinine) slogans. I just wish 8 had been more like Bible Camp, which was so true the subjects thought it was a compliment.

*Statement exaggerated for humorous effect. It was funny enough that I wanted to leave it in but potentially hurtful enough I wanted to comment on it