Today I Learned...

Eh, it's all right. I wish there were enough decent sex-science writing I could blow it off for not only using Alfred Kinsey's quantitative data, but praising it, but there isn't, so I'm forced to see it's better points: it approaches the subject amorally while respecting the importance of morals, it taught me a fact I so *want* to be true even though I looked up the original reference and it appears to be shakier than he claimed (foot fetishism peaks during STD epidemics), and its consideration of proper moral handling of pedophilia is pretty nuanced.

Actually, let's talk about that. The data is pretty strong that:

• A sexual attraction to children (pedophilia) is as out of conscious control as any other sexual attraction
  
• It is possible to have these thoughts, recognize that acting on them is immoral, and refrain from doing so.
  
• The available data is excruciatingly limited, but appears to point to access to child porn leads pedophiles to be less likely to attack an actual child, not more.
  
• The stigma against pedophilia makes it very hard to pedophiles to seek out the kind of help that would strengthen their resistance to their urge to act with an actual child.
  

Hypothetically, what if we legalized simulated child porn (so no actual kids are abused in production), but only for people who registered as official pedophiles? If we managed to keep the consequences to registering reasonable (e.g. it only blocked you from jobs that brought you into contact with children), it could make everyone better off. You might think no one would ever go for it, but if you allow for a concept of pedophiles that includes well meaning people tortured by the corruption of one of the strongest drives in the human soul, it could work. It allows people to simultaneously get some relief while giving their current, morally strong self a way to block their future, weaker self from temptation. And if you ever found an unregistered pedophile in possession of child porn you could feel more justified in throwing the book at him, because the only reason not to be on the list is to have access to children.

Obviously we can't get there from here, but I like it as a thought experiment.

A footnote on the Ginger Snaps thing. If you left that post thinking "man, I want to see werewolves used as a metaphor for something, but I don't want it to be adolescent sexuality, and I want it to be done perfectly.", I cannot recommend Susan Palwick's short story "Gestella" enough. It is about female obsolescence. You can read it in Palwick's anthology The Fate Of Mice, every bit of which is worth reading.

I'm going to take a brief break from the heavy blogging to do some nice, easy criticism.

I've really enjoyed Ron White's previous specials: They Call Me Tater Salad, You Can't Fix Stupid, and Behavioral Problems. Please enjoy these clips demonstrating why I like him:


(Ron White: Deer Hunting)



His latest special is called "A Little Unprofessional". This is not a great start. His first (excluding Blue Collar Comedy Tour) special, "They Call Me Tater Salad", had a really great, evocative name that no one else could have used. His second ("You Can't Fix Stupid") could have been more generic, but it was the punchline to a joke that was utterly his, and once you had seen it you couldn't imagine another comedian using the line. Almost everyone in comedy has "Behavioral Problems", and while I'm sure he used the line in the special, I don't remember it.* But "A Little Unprofessional" is so damn generic, and didn't tie into the act in the slightest. Wait, no, I take that back.

His act didn't talk about him being unprofessional, his act was unprofessional. Detecting altered states in comedians is hard: many of them do their best work drunk or high and do so deliberately. Others do it because they're addicts, but have been doing it for so long they've worked it into their act, or at least learned to make light of it. And others stay sober but act altered because it's funny.** So I'm very slow to make guesses about a comdian's actual mental state. But I'm pretty sure White was drunk, that he started drunk, and that it was hurting the act.

One of the things I admired about White was how he made consistency look natural. Like most comedians he doesn't repeat jokes between specials, but between amateur footage, his short Comedy Central Episode, his multiple solo concerts, and the Blue Collar Comedy Central specials, you can find multiple versions of the same joke. Every version you watch looks completely natural, with a lot what look like pauses to think, and spontaneous changes and interesting voices. But if you watch multiple versions, they're fucking identical. Check out this audio-only version of the Drunk In Public bit I posted above.


I am pretty sure that's a different recording, because the mic quality is different, some of the character voices changed, and you can hear other voices on stage with him (presumably it's Blue Collar Comedy Tour). But the timing is so close I can't be sure. The deer hunting bit was on one of his specials too: I can't find a sharable copy, so please take my word for it that it was the same performance on a different night in front of a nicer camera. And you would never know unless you saw the repeated clips, because he looks so natural every time. I can't stop talking about how amazing that is.

Or, was. I can't prove the pauses were genuinely because he forgot the joke, or that he isn't doing the same every other night, but it sure didn't look like it, and it sure wasn't aiding the material. His timing was frequently awful, and I'm pretty sure he dropped several jokes halfway through. Where his act used to be mostly long stories with outstanding transitions between them, it is now a lot of short disjointed jokes.

It still surprises me how much work and feedback you need to take the idea of a joke and turn it into a polished comedy bit. This is why even Jerry Seinfeld still occasionally goes to open mics.*** If a comedian doesn't get that feedback- either because they choose to stop going to open mics, or because audiences are too pre-disposed to laugh at them- you get the comedy equivalent of the writer who's too big to edit. Either Ron White has stopped getting this feedback, or he's stopped listening to it.

I'm not the only one who feels this way. This special is a marked step down from his previous one: the venue is 1/5 the size of this previous special, and the complete absence of crowd shots
makes me think it wasn't full. Or maybe they just didn't want to strain their videographer, who was having enough trouble keeping the top of Ron White's head despite both White and the camera being perfectly still. The lighting was mediocre. And it was produced by Country Music Television, not Comedy Central or HBO or even Netflix.

And while I wanted to take a break from the heavy stuff, I can't let the misogyny or racism slide. He does a joke set in a sushi bar, and caps it off with an impression of the chef's accent. There is no joke except that the foreigner talks funny.

The case for misogyny is more involved. There is a spectrum: on one side lives specific criticism of specific non-gendered traits of specific people, which is clearly okay. On the other lives broad derogatory generalizations about entire groups, which is clearly not. There is an uncertain middle ground where someone is saying something consistent with widespread stereotypes, but about a specific person, or a subset of the group for which it is legitimately true. You can't put noticing when people conform to stereotypes off limits, but you can use those stories to reinforce stereotypes without acknowledging it, or even meaning to.

Up until now, I'd put White on the safe end of the spectrum. I wondered why he kept marrying such high maintenance women, but thought the jokes themselves were okay, and they rested in a larger relationship context. Even the woman he'd already divorced came across as a real person who he remembered loving and why. This time around, he described telling a woman talking at the theater to "shut her cock holder", and ended three or four jokes about being annoyed by his wife with "this dick ain't gonna suck itself."

So in conclusion: not impressed with "A Little Unprofessional"

*Come to think of it, I don't remember enjoying Behavioral Problems as much as the first two. At the time I'd put it down to watching it with my best friend, two weeks after he transitioned from boyfriend to best friend, and Ron White's main selling point was as a way for us to spend time with each other without crying. It didn't seem fair to expect the same laughs/minute under those circumstances. Although I will note that a week later, Christopher Titus's "Love is Evol" was hilarious as I unpacked my boxes the apartment I had moved to but not yet furnished.

**I saw Dylan Moran this summer and thought his hungover thing was an act, until he called an intermission- a thing that is never, ever done in single person comedy shows. I assumed he must be completely destroyed to need that kind of break. I double checked that for this post, found reports of intermissions in lots of cities. So maybe it was an act after all.

***It's also why comedians are so protective/defensive of other comedians when they say terrible things at open mics. It is really easy to misjudge the proper amount of irony and exaggeration you need to layer into a joke, and if the topic is sensitive it's really easy to say something horribly offensive. I've done it myself. Saying you have to get it right the first time is the same as banning all sensitive topics from comedy.

Of course, that defense only works if your response to being told you offended someone is "I am horrified that that is what came across, thank you for tell me so I can correct it."

As is my custom when sick, I've been watching depressing documentaries on Netflix. Here are my opinions:

Hot Coffee: opinion piece saying tort reform has been driven by corporations, that said corporations have used money to corrupt the justice system to their advantage, and that the popular examples of lawsuits gone awry were legitimate suits distorted by the media. They raise some interesting points that run counter to my existing beliefs, and I want to acknowledge that this makes me defensive. Nonetheless, I think documentaries are a bad medium for disputes of fact, and it fails to do a good job at documentaries' natural role, sharing the emotional truth of something.

Bully: follows five children who were viciously bullied. This did a great job of conveying emotional truth, in that I WILL KILL THAT BITCH PRINCIPLE IF IT IS THE LAST THING I DO HOW DARE YOU TELL A VICTIM IT'S THEIR FAULT FOR BEING BULLIED BECAUSE THEY REFUSE TO PRETEND IT'S NOT HAPPENING. Bully is this illness's winner of the coveted "I'm stupid for watching this when I'm low on cope" award.

The House I Live In: "The drug war is bad and not motivated by genuine concerns of public safety." Somewhere in between. It's definitely advocating a position, but it also works to show some of the feelings of devastation the drug war brings. I was already well on board with its position, but I did learn a new fact or two. I don't have a single friend who isn't already convinced the war on drugs is an excuse to control and destroy poor people, and I can't judge how it would do with the uncoverted.

Lost Angels: Skid Row is My Home: how life feels to residents of Skid Row, Los Angeles. This is what documentaries are supposed to be. It makes me retroactively downgrade The House I Live In because it's so much better at being a documentary.

First, a review: I liked it. Some of that is because it required exactly the amount of attention I wanted to give it, but it's also well acted, well directed, and a pretty good plot. It rewards thought. Totally worth your time, but no The Shield or Mad Men. Yet.

( Spoilers for both British and American version )

I was going to give the US version credit for having more female agency, but I think it's really a shift from a show focused around a single individual to an ensemble show. At the same time, the show widened its discussion of power tremendously. The only man who consistently understands power is Underwood. Other men are either his victims or his unquestioning helpers. There is a single act of male rebellion in the very last episode, and the perpetrator is black*. Meanwhile, the women are shown to be playing the game, and to either be good at it or getting better. Underwood's wife is as skilled as he is. Each of them try to manipulate a young woman to serve their own ends, and each is facing serious consequences for it by the end of the series.

*Underwood dismisses this man as trading power for money and not understanding the difference in an early episode. He was wrong.
( Read more... )

Thoughts on True Blood season 5, three episodes in:

• Detective Stabler was a weird choice for head vampire
• Patty the daytime hooker was a excellent choice for werewolf pack mother.

The Order of Myths is a documentary about a town in Mississippi with extremely elaborate, racially segregated Mardi Gra celebrations. It is mostly mediocre, but I like it as an example of progress coming not from morally pure, philosophically brilliant people make the intellectual case for it, but when flawed, ignorant people decide it would be easier or less embarrassing to go along with it.

I am about a third of the way through Empire of the Summer Moon (hat tip: squid314), which is a history/sociology/anthropology of the Comanche Indians, from the time of Spanish contact through around 1900. It is very interesting in ways I so far don't have much to add to, but it does highlight just what is wrong with how American schools teach history.

Like everyone else, I learned history as one thing happening after another. You might have sort sort of causal chain (the classic example being Archduke Ferdinand's assassination leading to WW1), but there's no attempt to understand the system. This tendency to teach isolated facts is why I get actively angry in museums: I feel like I've been handed six pieces out of a 1000 piece puzzle and been told to place them correctly. Even if those are the most interesting pieces, six of them won't show me the larger picture, and with so few pieces "placed correctly" isn't even a meaningful concept. Empire is, more like getting a bunch of pieces from a subset of the puzzle: I may not have the whole thing, but I can at least see how this part works.

Which is useful for all kinds of reasons, some of which are that patterns repeat throughout history but you need to study them in depth at least once in order to recognize them again (ask me about my elves v. orcs theory of the transition from hunter/gatherering to agriculture). The way we teach history is pathologically incapable of providing this. For example, my education was good enough to mention economic uncertainty as a reason for 1930s Germany to turn on the Jews. What I didn't learn until I was 26, and only then because a Jewish friend told me, was that right up until that point Jews were extremely well integrated into German society. Some were more integrated than others and of course there were isolated problems, but their overall position was strikingly similar to, just to pick an example, Jews in America in 2010. Which has some pretty fucking important implications for how Jews, and other currently-embraced minority groups, view and interpret the current situation, and what constitutes an isolated incident versus a portent of terrible things to come.

It's not like history is unique in this. Science education seems to focus way more on teaching specific facts than an understanding of science, much less the scientific method. But we have *got* to do better on this.

Because Empire is focused on the Comanche side of things, it leaves open the question of why European settlers were so willing to move into what was essentially Reaver territory. Which is totally fine: no single book can do all things, especially not at the level of detail I want. And I knew enough history to have some guesses ("too many people in Europe"). But it is interesting that when I discussed this with a friend who knew a lot about European history, he was able to paint a picture of exactly why things were so bad, focusing mainly on the 30 years war. Which I immediately compared to Warhammer 40k ("..the grim nightmare of the far future, where there is only war"), a game I have never even played. And you'll notice my reference point for the raping and torturing done by the Comanches was from a short lived science fiction television show*. And my reaction to reading Nothing to Envy (about North Korea) was "that's post-apocalyptic dystopia bad." Speculative fiction has taught me more patterns than all of my history and humanities education combined. Which I guess is better than not getting those patterns anywhere, but I this is maybe exactly what social studies should have been covering?


*To be fair, the Reavers were almost certainly inspired by the Comanche, at least indirectly

It looks like the great Ally McBeal experiment is going to end not because the show is terrible (the original prediction) but because of what I like to call "The Scrubs Problem." A show has The Scrubs Problem when it's drama enough for the characters to have real emotions that I care about, but sitcom enough to never let the characters grow. I can't stand watching people I empathize hurt themselves with the same stupid decisions over and over again. I so want to hang on at least until Portia De Rossi shows up, because she is the whole reason I wanted to watch it in the first place, but it is so depressing seeing Ally run into that same wall, dust herself off, and try again.

How to Talk so Kids Will Listen...And Listen So Kids Will Talk (Adele Faber, Elaine Mazlish) is very, very good. It is in many ways the For Dummies accompaniment to Brene Brown's work on connection, and that's a good thing to be. It's aimed at parents, but since the whole idea is treating your offspring less like things you are a building and more like independent human beings, it translates to adult relationships very well. It has already made me a better listener.

My one complaint is that it not only doesn't address what to do when the techniques don't work, it explicitly tells you it's going to, and then doesn't. For me, this is uncomfortably close to saying that the techniques will always work if you work hard enough/are smart enough, and that's not fair or helpful even if it's true, which it is not. But beyond that, it's an excellent resource I recommend to parents and non-parents.