Today I Learned...

Today's pattern is best exemplified by this letter to Dear Abby:

DEAR ABBY: One night I woke up to my cat scratching at my bedroom door to be let in. When I got up and opened the door, I heard my parents making love. They were so loud it grossed me out, because my little sister is 10 and we share a room right next to theirs. She still doesn't know about this kind of stuff.

I want to tell them they don't need to be doing that, because what if she got scared and woke up and tried to go in there? What should I do -- tell them to go to a motel? -- GROSSED OUT IN MADISON, MISS.

Oh...sweety.

There's so much going on in five little sentences. First, the story has unnecessary set up involving the cat. Either the intro is important in ways we don't understand, or she's preemptively defending herself against accusations of doing something wrong. It strikes me as not-un-possible that it was actually her parents who woke her up, but she can't bring herself to admit it.

Second, there's the fact that she doesn't own her discomfort, and projects it on to her little sister. This could be a horrible manipulation, but I'm inclined to believe she's fallen victim to the fairly common problem of teaching little girls that they don't have a right to anything for themselves and their feelings don't matter, but they are strongly obligated to look out for other people. Given that incentive structure, of course they start using other people as reasons. This might actually explain the cat thing too- "I was just caring for another one of G-d's creatures when..."

Third, watch how her language gets more and more distance. She starts with "making love", which is somewhere between euphemism and romantic description, then "this sort of thing" and then finally just refers to sex as "that."

Finally, and most heart breaking to me, is her use of the phrase "don't need to" to mean "shouldn't". There's a pattern here that's operating just like the "you're not entitled to want things" problem, but I don't know what it is. All I can think of are all the other times I've seen "necessary" used to absolutely shut someone down. One possibility is that it is in fact the same problem: you can't/shouldn't want X for yourself, so once I tell you no one else wants it, you must stop wanting it. Another is that it implies X is so horrible you could only possibly be doing it out of necessity, and once I tell you it's not required, you'll stop. It's incredibly shaming.

My favorite high school teacher, the only one who was really on my side, once observed a very rare incident of me (verbally) standing up for myself to another student. His comment afterwords was "that was unnecessary." With 10 years of retrospect, I can see he might have meant it in a comforting fashion: "you didn't need to get so upset about that because her opinion has no material impact on you life" What came across at the time was "protecting yourself is not necessary because it doesn't matter if you get hurt." Which is a terrible thing to teach anyone.

So I guess what's going on here is the use of the need preemptively invalidates any other reason for doing something. "I want" is sufficient for actions that don't hurt other people. What's extra tragic in this case is that she's not only invalidating her parents' desire for physical pleasure and intimacy, but her own desire to not bloody hear it, which is a thing I think she's entitled to want and have reasonable accommodations made for.

Dear Abby's answer is, of course, worse than useless. Tell the girl she ought to be happy about it and should not talk about it and moves on to sex ed for her sister. First, it turns out that the fact that something is associated with good things (like your parents still being in love) does not obligate you to be happy about it. Second, don't tell anyone, but especially not adolescent girls, to be happy about something but never speak of it. Seriously, don't. Third, her sister's sex education is not her responsibility. So an all around failure.

Just finished I Think We're Alone Now, a documentary about two mentally challenged individuals obsessed with pop star Tiffany. It is one of those excellent examples of how studying a severely broken system can give us insight into systems that we think are healthy but are actually subtly broken.

At first, I had a real problem with the way they listed their subjects as "Jeff Turner, suffering from Asperger's syndrome, and intersex Kelly McCormick", because it seemed to imply that Kelly's intersexuality caused her inappropriate behavior the way Jeff's Asperger's caused his. I have no information other than what was in the documentary, and being forced to grow up as the gender she no longer identifies with clearly has left McCormick with emotional problems, but I highly suspect that her worst, weirdest behavior has a lot to do with the traumatic head injury they briefly mention. Implying intersexuality was the cause was a slight towards intersexuality.

But thinking about it: Asperger's isn't a particularly good explanation for Turner's problems either. See this brilliant comment on Captain Awkward. Autism spectrum disorder sufferers may be crap at detecting nonverbal or otherwise implicit cues, but the good eggs respond to this by getting really good at Using Their Words. It may feel awkward to people used to accomplishing the same thing implicitly, but the good intentions are abundantly clear.

To take a non-Tiffany example from the doc: a well intentioned, up on the latest in gender expression person will make a best attempt to figure out what gender a person identifies as without explicitly asking, to avoid making them self conscious. This isn't always possible, and it's usually better to err on the side of asking rather than being wrong, but in many cases it's trivial even when someone's gender identity seems pretty at odds with their appearance. ASD people will have more trouble with this than most, will be worse at intuiting someone's gender identity, and depending on the person may go through a phase of "but The Rule is Penis = Man.", but once you explain "People's chosen pronouns override the ones they were given at birth, ask if you have any doubt.", ASD should in some ways make them more amenable than neurotypicals to just accepting that and moving on.

In contrast, when Jeff meets Kelly, he decides to use the pronoun "he", because "I see him as a man, and that's the advantage of hermaphrodites: you get to choose." That's not Asperger's, that's being an asshole. And while AS could explain Turner missing the cues that Tiffany was clearly uncomfortable with the amount of physical affection he was inflicting on her, it does not explain why he persists in insisting he had an absolute right to wait for a teenage girl holding a sword. Or that any time you need to dodge security guards to do what you you're doing, people will be upset. That is something AS people are capable of understanding if they want to.

( Cut for rape triggers )

Ultimately, the scariest thing in I Think We're Alone Now is that there are people behaving as badly as Jeff Turner all the time, but because they pick weak targets and have the social skills to keep the focus on their feelings, they face no consequences.

As mentioned previously, I find stand up comedians fascinating. They have this wonderful mix of ability to analyze and inability to lie means that they give unusual clarity into the patterns in their lives. My most recent thread of interest is Kevin Smith. Technically, he doesn't do stand up, but he does record the Q+A sessions he does while promoting his movies. Given his utter lack of focus, I'm counting it.

In Burn In Hell, he describes the process of making Red State. It's beautiful. It's that perfect kind of creativity, where he saw something that provoked an emotional response in him, and tried to create something that shared and refined that emotion. The financial bit was also interesting- he'd been trying to make it for years, no one would fund it. Finally, a friend of a friend who had no experience in the movie business funded it entirely because he saw Smith's name on a poster with Bruce Willis. The movie in question was Cop Out, the only movie Smith directed but didn't write, which apparently was not well received by anyone. But it got Red State made. I love this story so, so much. It is perfect.

So you can imagine my disappointment when Red State was kind of meh. It had ambitions, but ultimately it didn't speak to me. It really doesn't deserve that origin story. Undeterred, I'm going back and watching all the movies Kevin Smith has done, plus the commentary and special features. I've seen most of them before, but it's been years, and I have fresh eyes now. Clerks and Mallrats are both... fine. Much like Red State, Clerks's reach exceeded its grasp, and Mallrats wasn't trying to be more than a comedy. I may just not identify with the source material very much.

But the third one... the third one stood. Chasing Amy feels like the first movie made by the Smith I know from his stand up. It's not merely insightful, it's honest, and it's right. I almost wished I watched more (any) romantic comedies, so I could more accurately describe how much better this movie is than them. Chasing Amy is basically this blog post in art form. It is about how the desire for a well marked map for romance and sexuality can kill the best thing you've ever had. And how filling in the empty parts of the map can be painful and costly, but brings you a certainty and a calmness that would be impossible otherwise. Safety and certainty are in some ways opposed, like innocence and wisdom. It's about the human inability to take yes for an answer, and how destructive that is.

I love this movie so much I ordered Jersey Girl and Zack and Miri Make a Porno from the library. I love this movie so much I may actually buy it, and I don't buy *anything* right now, much less things I can stream on Netflix. But G-d, this thing is beautiful

There is a lot of debate on sexual assault prevention education tactics. Generally it takes the form of warning women not to do things. The argument for this is that:

1. Rapists know what they are doing.
   
2. They know it is wrong.
   
3. Rape is strictly a male-on-female crime.
   
4. Therefore, the only people with an incentive to work on the problem are women/victims and their supporters. Potential rapists and their supporters have no incentive to change
   

I don't think any of those conditions are always true, but I'm willing to grant there's a significant subset of rapists that fulfill conditions 1 through 3. Enough that 4 is a worthy angle to attacking the problem, although not one we should use exclusively. There's also a wide range of how useful the advice is, and how restrictive. "Don't leave a drink unattended at a bar" is a pretty good idea (for both sexes- robbery is a thing), and has minimal impact. "Stay indoors after 7 PM" is effective (-ish), but highly restrictive. There is never, ever a discussion about exactly how risky a given choice is and how that weights against the potential rewards.

The anti- argument focuses on the unfairness of making women feel afraid when they're doing nothing wrong. If points 1-3 are correct, this is irrelevant even if true. I think most of the people on this side are implicitly focusing on the (many, many) cases in which they are not true, but there is also an ideological component that is simply orthogonal to the practicalities. It's easy to dismiss this as a luxury to be tackled later, but I think there are second order effects that may be relevant.

The focus on "what women should do" to prevent the implicit big, scary, obviously ill-intentioned man from raping her subtly shifts rape prevention from a woman's right to a woman's responsibility. The best example of this I can think of is in children. I got what was as far as I know fairly standard little-kid molestation prevention education: "private areas", stranger danger, tell a trusted adult when something makes you feel uncomfortable, etc. If a stranger ever told me there was a box of puppies in the back of his van, I would have been prepared. But that never happened, so the main effects were: 1. I became suspicious and uncomfortable about levels of touch I hadn't before (which, to be clear, were totally non-sexual and appropriate) 2. But couldn't speak up about it, because then I'd be calling a relative a CHILD MOLESTER and that was THE WORST THING EVER. I didn't think much of this until I talked to a friend (as an adult), who had the exact same experience. I haven't run the poll, but the fact that this friend, who had a very different temperament, went to a different kind of school, in a different city, makes me think that there are enough other kids who feel this way that it's worth addressing.

What I think would have been actually helpful is to focus on our right to bodily autonomy without mentioning what we were protecting ourselves from. Actually, look at my phrasing there: protecting. That's a big job to give a six year old. I think the most we can hope for is teaching them to recognize and assert their comfort levels, and to escalate if they feel disregarded. This is not without costs: you have to teach them the difference between the discomfort of molestation and the discomfort of a doctor's visit. But learning to do things you don't like because of the future benefits is a good thing to learn. You have to teach them how to escalate properly, but that too is a useful life skill. If we do this (plus a section on how the puppies in the van are a lie), stranger danger will take care of itself, plus the much greater risk of molestation by people who are known and trusted by the family, plus it's a great foundation for enthusiastic consent when they're ready.

It's sort of like our bioterrorism effort: right now we throw a ton of money at a very unlikely problem with no idea if it will even help, while ignoring things like flu-preparedness. If we threw that money at anti-flu infrastructure instead, we would not only immediately improve our standard of living, but build a robust system that is totally reusable in event of black swan epidemic or attack. Giving kids a robust system of recognizing when something is wrong and giving them the tools to share that without making it a huge thing is the equivalent of well staffed urgent care clinics and a stockpile of tamiflu.

Emphasizing bodily autonomy is not without its costs: you'll have a lot more arguments about whether or not your kid needs to wear her mittens, and you will have to allow yourself to lose the argument about whether he hugs his gross uncle. Many embarrassing things will happen in grocery stores. I can't see how it's not worth it.

How does this translate to adults? Counterintuitively, one of the things we need to do is deemphasize the terribleness of rape to potential victims in favor of of helping people figure out what sex "should" feel like (for them), and the tools to communicate with their partners about how to get there.

Two key quotes from The Game: "I'd never heard grown men cry as much as I had in the last two years" and "I've lived and worked alone most of my life. I've never had a strong social circle or a tight network of friends. I've never joined clubs, played team sports, or been part of any real group prior to the community. Project Hollywood was bring me out of solipsistic shell. It was giving me the resources I needed to be a leader, it was teaching me how to walk the tightrope of group dynamics, it was helping me learn the let go of petty things like personal property, solitude, cleanliness, sanity, and sleep. It was making me, for the first time in my life, a responsible adult."

For a certain kind of man- believes in a gender binary, not religious, not into team sports- the seduction community is their only place to be on a team. Being on a team is a powerful emotion- my personal belief is that we're hard wired to want one and become edgy without, because in the end wild humans cannot survive on their own. And even if you do team sports, PUA communities are better: you can admit vulnerabilities, you can hear from others with the same issues, you can learn from people who used to have them, and you can give back by teaching. The Intro to Seduction reddit post just about says this explicitly. If they didn't need to treat women as the opposing tribe to maintain this camaraderie, it would actually be pretty neat.

As someone with a real thing for personal growth, I feel like there's a lot to learn from PUAs, procedurally. Translating book learning into usable social skills is hard, and their system seems to work. Probably not as often as they think it does, and not as well as they think it does, but that's true of anything. And if you ignore the absolute filth that happens to use this as their outlet (I'm looking at you, Mr. "The only lies I ever tell are 'I won't come in your mouth' and 'I'll just rub it around your ass'"), you could fix 80-90% of the problems in the community by changing the goal from "never be rejected" and "don't care about being rejected because women aren't real" to "handle to rejection with grace." All of the assholery I cared about came from a need to dehumanize women in order to deny the power of rejection. If you could inject a little power of vulnerability into the mix, this all goes away. New assholery would come up because that's what humans do, and in fact the end of the book is about the breakdown of an enclave due to internal competition, but there's a ton of power here just waited to be redirected.

I feel like I just said the same thing three times without ever really encapsulating the point. More data needed.

There's a horrible demonstration idiots do in some abstinence only sex ed classes in which the idiot applies duct tape to a child (usually a girl, because you expect them to touch a boy?), and rips it off. "Ow", the child says quietly to themselves. Then they apply the tape to another girl, and note that it hurts less. After 4 or 5 girls, the tape doesn't stick at all. This is supposed to demonstrate how sex uses you up, and after a few partners you won't be able to bond at all.

Good.

Sex/kissing/romance/being wanted are all drugs. They are incredible rushes that can overcome a lot of intelligence and even wisdom. If you never manage to recreate the oxytocin rush of your first time that is to your benefit. Because what you lose is not the ability to feel that amazing or that deeply, but the burning need to do so with whoever is nearby. You become less like a duckling seeing its mother for the first time and more like an adult who will see the problem in the sentence "Everything in our relationship is perfect except..." before you send the letter in to Captain Awkward.

ETA: more interesting title

I stopped reading Pandagon when it moved from being a policy blog to a political blog. I like ready about policies I disagree with, those are informative and interesting. Reading Amanda Marcotte call another Republican a dickless wonder? Less so. I gave it another shot yesterday, and have had my decision more than confirmed.

I realize it was SOP in pundit circles to think [Newt Gingrich] ever had a chance against Romney, because it is true that your average Republican voter likes him way more than they like Romney. After all, they believe he pisses off the liberals, since that's what they remember happening last time they tuned in to what liberals were actually thinking in 1995. Pissing off the liberals is the fundamental urge of the wingnut, after all. It's a primal urge that fills in the holes where your sex drive used to be.
...
(Anti-choice nuts are excluded from this, of course. They are like subway masturbators. They know they're inappropriate, and that's what gets them off.)

...because you see, people who disagree with Amanda Marcotte are not merely wrong, they are uninformed children who are deliberately wrong for the sole purpose of annoying her. And they need to be sexually shamed for it. And that is totally an appropriate tactic for an extremely prominent feminist to use.

If I was the sort of person who thought being a victim of a thing made people more sympathetic to that thing, I would be shocked by this. Feminists on the internet are constantly being called so ugly (or hairy legged) or bitter that they can't find a man, and if only someone fucked them straight they'd give up this life of blogging. To turn around and use that tactic against an entire political orientation* is abhorrent.

And I agree with her that there's some weird sexual repression going on in some members of the anti-choice movement. I just also recognize that there are some people who genuinely, sincerely believe that an embryo is a full human being and that, while it is tragic we must violate a woman's rights to honor the embryo's rights, we still have to do it. I think they're wrong, I think they're being manipulated by leaders who genuinely do have "oppress women" as a goal, but I recognize that you can sincerely believe a thing that is different than what I sincerely believe. Hell, there are statistics that prove that evangelicals' sex lives deviate further from the norm than mainstream liberal sects. But in our brave new sex-positive feminist world, that doesn't make them wrong.

And then, when she's called on this in the comments, by someone objecting to the way it portrays asexuals, people actually defender her with "Amanda is clearly a sex positive writer and thinker and her work reflects that." Why didn't they just claim Marcotte has an asexual friend and be done with it?

*and no weaseling out of this with "but some people DO do that." She said average Republican

When the HPV vaccine came out, a lot of religious nutjobs opposed it because if we don't let God punish sluts with cancer, how will they get their comeuppance? Knowing that not all of us view sex as a capital offense, some of them phrased some of their objections as questions about the medical value of the vaccine. And so another group of people said "fuck you, sex is awesome and even if it wasn't, cancer is bad. we're going to promote this vaccine like woah." Many years later, I heard rumors the manufacturer had suppressed some evidence of adverse effects, which were possibly more frequent than seen in other vaccines. Any attempt to investigate this was drowned out by proponents so used to hearing bullshit criticism come from people who wanted to control women. Now, I don't know if the story of excess adverse effects is true or not (and I got the vaccine myself), but it's certainly a good story illustrating how you can get so used to tuning out the voices of your clearly wrong opponents that you miss legitimate criticisms.

My current book Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women's Sports suggests that the same thing is happening with girls' and women's sports. As Hugo Schwyzer says, any book with the phrase "protecting our daughters" in the title is suspect, but the author, Michael Sokolove, really does seem to care about women's and especially girl's sports for the value it brings the participants, and simply wants to make these incredibly valuable activities not perform the equivalent of bringing down a hammer on the knee of one girl in twenty.

I'm of the opinion that even if there were no environmental effects, the range of men's behavior would differ from that of women's behavior. I'm still opposed to gender essentialism because humans are unbelievably varied and the fact that a trait is highly predictive for a group doesn't mean it's useful for predicting the behavior of an individual. But this fact was brought up mostly by people who didn't want girls to play sports because they thought it was bad for their uteruses, so the pro-sports people got used to tuning it out. Now, my personal opinion is that our training programs for high school athletes are abominable for both genders and aren't based on the slightest bit of research, but it appears to be even worse for girls than for boys, judging by rate of injury**, and this needs to be worked on. And while I think the training programs for male and female athletes, I think our pursuit of a one-size-fits-all approach is really part of the problem, and we need to focus more on how to teach kids to distinguish good pain from bad pain, how to track what exercises are most productive for them, and to respect the limits of their body.***

Meanwhile, there's the sexualization of female high school athletes.**** For years I assumed that the cheerleader bikini car wash was made up by hollywood and/or porn. The first time I saw one for real, I went apoplectic. I'm assuming I don't need to explain to any of you why this is bad, or why it was bad to illustrate the story with a picture of what a sexualized high school athlete might look like*****, so please just join me in being angry.

*while I have to work for every pound of gain. Bastards.

**I'm only a few pages in, the statistics given were for soccer, where girls have 8x the risk of ACL tears. If you count cheerleading as a sport, and you should, the discrepancy is worse, because they get no padding while risking considerably worse impact than football players.

***Which would have all kinds of side benefits too.

****I'm a bigger fan of this Schwyzer's blog than his officially published work- one of the reasons I don't do a lot of editing here, possibly too little, is that I've seen several bloggers I really like get more professional gigs and polish everything interesting out of their work. This article is saying valuable things, so I'm glad it was published, but it doesn't have the same sense of watching someone learn that his blog does.

*****I'm annoyed by the trend of including an on-theme but zero-information picture along with articles and blogs in general, but this one in particular.

Headline: Congressman Resigns in Sex Scandal

First paragraph "...will resign amid the political fallout from an 18-year-old woman's allegations of an unwanted sexual encounter with him."

What I surmise actually happened: Congressman, who had previously been accused of raping his then-girlfriend, is accused of raping young woman.

Now, they article only says "sexual encounter", but then uses the phrase "said the sex was consensual", which implies to me that the accusation is of rape, not sexual assault. I suppose I should be glad they didn't use the phrase "had his way with."

I'm pretty convinced Neal Shusterman is a children's author out of laziness. Unwind is set in a world where abortion has been replaced by the option to donate all of you child's organs at 13. It features an attempted rape and the POV of a boy as his organ's are harvested, in such a way as to keep him alive for as long as possible. The Skinjacker's trilogy is comparatively mild in that it's merely about a limbo world populated by children who died but didn't make it all the way into the light, and one girl who wants to kill every living person and trap them there forever. But his writing style in general and sentence structures in particular are maddeningly simple. The internet says grades 6+ for Everlost and 7+ for Unwind, which at about two years younger than the ages of the protagonists sounds about right, but the book's style seems much too simple for them. It's like it has the strategy of an adult book but the tactics of an early reader.

I liked the first book of the SkinJacker trilogy, Everlost, quite a bit, and I'm not sure if my decreasing enjoyment of the last two is because my standards have changed or they're worse. But I do feel I'm on pretty solid ground criticizing its use of love as a crutch. It's a major pet peeve of mine when a book or movie says "they did it because they're in love", without showing the person falling in love, much less any reason for it. It's lazy, it's an attempt to add tension and motivation without putting the work in. And sometimes they say someone is in love with two different people with no motivation for either and I'm supposed to care about the problems it creates.

But it's extra bad in novels aimed at children, who are very actively forming the stories they tell about the world and don't have the data to fight bad ones. Sex, violence, and love are excellent things to put into kids books, provided they're modeled realistically- violence is not glorious and consequence free, sex isn't immediate and continuous ecstasy with no effort or expertise required, and love that is unconnected to the person you're in love with isn't really love. One of the villains is called out on falling in love with three different girls immediately upon meeting them for absolutely no reason, but the heroes' actions are no better motivated. I also think 12 is a little young to be reading sentences like "he held on to her because he could tell she didn't really want to escape", at least without some context*. Honestly, I'm uncomfortable having that much romance in a children's book in general. Even though the protagonists are 13-15, and some of them have been so for a very long time, Everlost is explicitly a children's world, and the simple narrative structure reinforces this. It just feels icky reading a fairly bondagey description of a boy tying up the most-recent-girl-he's-no-longer-in-love-with. What's worse, I can think of maybe one TV show that shows healthy people in healthy relationships practicing well negotiated BDSM**, but this faux-consensual "I could tell she really wanted it" is everywhere. Reprioritize, people.


And of course Shusterman suffers from the usual YA SFF problem of completely interchangeable protagonists. It makes the romance situation worse, but it's also pretty annoying in its own right. Is this an attempt to make the main characters ciphers for the reader? Because I can't think of another remotely plausible reason.


*I say this having read book with a really graphic depiction of the rape of a child when I was 12, Millennium, which had some fairly weird sexuality, at 10, and Stephen King at 13. Two of those at my dad's suggestion, although I sort of suspect he didn't remember some details. And that's just what I remember. It's not the content I'm objecting to, it's the way it's presented.

**And that's Bones, which means one participant is usually dead. My mom once said she liked Bones, but didn't like the way they portrayed casual sex, why couldn't they be more like Law and Order: Special Victim's Unit, which showed the consequences? By which she meant L+O's belief that if you engage in anything remotely nontraditional, you had it coming.