Atheism, Ethics, and Pornography: An Interview with Nina Hartley

Here's an interesting article in The Humanist with veteran porn star Marie Hartman, AKA Nina Hartley (her stage name).

Porn has, and continues to be, incredibly controversial, despite no clear link being made between porn and aggression, rape levels, etc. One meta-analysis found that violent pornography raises aggression, though this also occurs for non-pornographic violent media.

Personally, I don't see the big deal; we watch action movies to get excited, horror to feel scared, and porn to get turned on. What's wrong with that? Unless, of course, you're against people getting turned on... and for those that are, why isn't there a crusade against romance novels, too? Harumph.

LINK: The Humanist: Atheism, Ethics, and Pornography: An Interview with Nina Hartley

Saudi Arabia tells clerics to stop issuing absurd fatwas

Sounds like the news may be a little less colorful in the future :(

The LA Atheism Examiner:

Are Saudi Arabian clerics running wild?

Sheikh Abdel Mohsen Obeikan, a former royal court advisor with his own radio program, "Fatwas On the Air", caused an international stir a few weeks ago when he issued a fatwa (IE: religious edict) allowing unrelated men and women to mingle in public so long as a woman allows the guy to drink her breast milk in order establish a maternal bond.

[...]

Now, however, the Kingdom is striking back. A royal decree from King Abdullah, Custodian of the Two Mosques, has restricted the issuing of fatwas to only those clerics approved of by His Majesty and his authorities.

LINK: The LA Atheism Examiner: Saudi Arabia tells clerics to stop issuing absurd fatwas

Fair and Balanced: Atheist doctors 'more likely to hasten death'

More anti-Christian hate from the liberal news media! /sarc

But really, it's when you read articles like this - and from the Guardian, which really is left-leaning - that it puts the lie to the media's supposed anti-Christian bias.

In case it wasn't clear already: what the article is referring to is the tendency for nonreligious doctors to discuss assisted suicide with their terminally ill patients, as opposed to religious ones who, in general, won't even offer the option due to their religious beliefs. Translated into Christian, it comes out "atheists murder their patients because they have no morals!!!!!1!11!!one"

LINK: The Guardian Online: Atheist doctors 'more likely to hasten death'

Dry water!

Another cool-but-irrelevant thing to know about: dry water. Yes, it's real.

Nothing Grows Forever: The case for a no-growth economy

An article from Mother Jones:

PETER VICTOR is an economist who has been asking a heretical question: Can the Earth support endless growth?

Traditionally, economists have argued that the answer is "yes." In the 1960s when Victor was earning his various degrees, a steady rise in gross domestic product (GDP)—the combined value of our paid work and the things we produce—was seen as crucial for raising living standards and keeping the masses out of poverty. We grow or we languish: This assumption has become so central to our economic identity that it underpins almost every financial move our leaders make. It is to economics what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is to physics.

But Victor—now a professor at York University in Toronto—felt something tugging him in the opposite direction. Ecologists were beginning to learn that Earth does have limits. Pump enough pollution into a lake and you can ruin it forever; chop down enough forest and it might never grow back. By the early '00s, the frailties of the planet were becoming even more evident—and unsettling—as greenhouse gases accumulated and chunks of Greenland's glaciers began breaking off into the sea. "We've had 125,000 generations of humans, but it's only been the last eight that have had growth," Victor told me. "So what's considered normal? I think we live in very abnormal times. And the signs are showing up everywhere that the burden we're placing on the natural environment can't be borne."

In essence, endless growth puts us on the horns of a seemingly intractable dilemma. Without it, we spiral into poverty. With it, we deplete the planet. Either way, we lose.

LINK: Mother Jones: Nothing Grows Forever

Religious discrimination at work

A recent article I'd like to comment on, or rather to provoke a broader discussion: Hijab-wearing Muslim woman sues Disney over dress code.

This is only one example, and I'm certain you can find atheists who do that same sort of thing, but this is a kind of discrimination that just doesn't really seem like discrimination. In my last job, for instance, I was told I needed to not wear my skull bandannas, because they were against the dress code; I had similar issues at my job before that; and as a vegan, I'm certainly never going to get a job at a place like McDonald's. Why are the issues any different when religion is the excuse, instead of one's ethics or culture?

The courts in the U.S. have tended toward "accommodationism", which essentially means that the onus in on the employer to show that an individual's religious practices prevent them from doing their job effectively; if you can do your job effectively (whatever that means, given the circumstances), you get an exemption from the rules.

This seems to me to be a big, big can of worms - who decides what "effectiveness" means? Who decides what "a sincere religious belief" is?

And this is only the start of the issue - what about more gray areas like Harvard's decision to set aside women-only hours at the gym after a request by Muslim women, for example. If you can give people permission to leave places they don't want to be because it's there religion, can you give them special access to places they do want to be because it's their religion? What if these were evangelical Christians who wanted all the gay men to leave the gym, instead? Would that be acceptable? And granted, the request the women made at Harvard was incredibly modest: just 6 hours out of the 70 hours the gym would be open, and it was only one of apparently several gyms Harvard has - but if it's only a liiittle bit of discrimination, does that make it okay?

Maybe I'm just being a simpleton here, but it seems like so many of these issues are so easy to rectify by giving religious people the same rights everybody else has, instead of their current special privileges.

Half the Sky: 800,000 women trafficked across borders every year

Pardon my putting on my cultural imperialist hat, but this is serious issue. The authors of the book Half the Sky, from which the article title is taken, point out that:

If the supreme moral challenge of the 19th century was slavery, and of the 20th century the fight against totalitarianism, then, they write, "in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality in the developing world".

The contention is as startling as the idea of a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist buying up prostitutes. I put it to them that, to some people, the claim will seem overblown. After all, you don't go lightly comparing the plight of women in developing countries today with slavery or, by implication, the Holocaust.

"This idea is a couple of decades in gestation," Kristof says. "Over those years, we reluctantly came to the conclusion that this really is the greatest moral challenge of this century."

Then WuDunn chimes in: "When you hear that 60 to 100 million females are missing in the current population, we thought that number compares in the scope and size. And then you compare the slave trade at its peak in the 1780s, when there were 80,000 slaves transported from Africa to the New World, and you see there are now 10 times that amount of women trafficked across international borders, so you start to think you are talking about comparable weight."

There are a lot of NGOs that are currently working to stop human sex trafficking; a couple of the bigger ones are humantrafficking.change.org and ecpat.net, but if you do a web search you can find plenty more if you're looking for something to do about it.

That all said, though, there's only so much that NGOs can do - eventually, if things are really going to change, we'll need to see government action. Western countries, and especially the USA, have a lot of leverage they could put on countries that engage in this behavior (and a lot they could do to alleviate the underlying problems surrounding it). The U.S. allegedly invaded Iraq and Afghanistan in part to save its women; why not exercise some authority here?

LINK: Half the Sky: how the trafficking of women today is on a par with genocide

ZOMBIE ANTS AND UNICORNS!!!

This is another irrelevant post, but I just had to share it - not only do unicorns exist, but so do zombies!

It just goes to show that as soon as you start to think reality couldn't possibly get any more boring, something pops up to make things more interesting.

But Will It Make You Happy?

This is a good article from the New York Times - it's so important to remind people (read: Americans) that money can't buy happiness. Like, seriously.

She had so much.

A two-bedroom apartment. Two cars. Enough wedding china to serve two dozen people.

Yet Tammy Strobel wasn’t happy. Working as a project manager with an investment management firm in Davis, Calif., and making about $40,000 a year, she was, as she put it, caught in the “work-spend treadmill.”

So one day she stepped off.

LINK: But Will It Make You Happy?

Fannie and Freddie's Foreclosure Barons

This is an article by Mother Jones - it's a little long, but I feel like it's worth it. The major point it makes is to show just how many foreclosures are being pushed through the woodwork, so many that neither judges nor banks can review them all. In fact, most of the foreclosures are made by foreclosure mills that get paid a straight fee for every foreclosure they push through - not surprisingly, this makes for a perverse profit motive where homeowners, even ones that have never missed a payment, are being given the runaround, having their homes put on auction without even being notified, having paperwork "accidentally" lost over and over again, and being given the runaround until their homes are confiscated.

Of course, this isn't the whole story: some people bought homes they couldn't afford, while others bought homes they could afford, but then lost their jobs in the recession and couldn't make payments - and now that the inundation of foreclosures has started, banks have had to hand the work to the mills, where there's just not much profit in dealing with customers in a decent (or even legal) way.

LINK: EXCLUSIVE: Fannie and Freddie's Foreclosure Barons

Book Review of "Dangerous Children": Chapter 3

In chapter 3, the author fairly briefly goes through the following points:

1) Femininity is a product of men
2) Women's Studies found that there are lots of "femininities", depending on social class, ethnicity, etc., but they're all united by the fact that men defined them
3) Masculinity is also defined by men
4) Men's Studies also found that there are lots of "masculinities", but unlike Women's Studies (and as the author states, incorrectly) came to the conclusion that there isn't really anything that unites the various forms of masculinity

Now, not (yet) being an expert on men's studies, I can't comment as to what the reigning paradigm is. I also want to point out that while no one asked women what their role in society ought to be, no one asked me what I thought masculinity ought to be, either - and this goes for all the other men I know, too. Maybe one or another man could have broken from the pack and shared his views with other men on what a proper gender role is for men, and maybe his views would have gained some currency, but how much of men's roles have been defined by men, and how much is simple inertia? And, since men, like women, are a diverse group, how many men actually wanted those roles that were foisted on them? Men may still have had more control over their gender roles than women have had, but even then, it doesn't seem like much...

So, I've noted before, (and this may just be a bias on my part) I don't completely accept that either gender necessarily designed gender roles, at least not in a way that was without considerable constraints. Since humans are apparently uniquely able to speculate about non-present minds, most of us have a tendency to see design and intent where there really wasn't any, and it seems to me like this is another case of that; and even when people have consciously set about thinking about gender roles, historically it's been done unscientifically, and usually winds up (in my opinion) being more the product of economic, political, or religious factors more than the thinker's own intentions.

I don't mean to say, though, that gender roles weren't affected by men's general monopoly on political and religious discourse (though there were certainly exceptions to this rule), but that I think it's very important to keep in mind that whatever these men thought about gender, it wasn't in a vacuum, and seems to me to be mostly the product of other social forces. And, also, while men tended to own the religious and political discourse, women usually had control of children's upbringing, and it seems undoubtable that this would have had its own effect on gender roles.

Attack of the Lower Upper Class

This is an interesting article I stumbled on - to quote:

Everybody talks about the gap between the “haves” and “have-nots.” But what about the growing gap between the “haves” and the “have-not enough time to spend all my money in multiple lifetimes”?

Essentially the idea is that while most commentary on class has been about the very poor and the very rich, or the lifestyles of the middle class, but that there's a very interesting discussion to be had about those who are already in the top 10%, but not the top 1%...

Link: Attack of the Lower Upper Class

Confessions of a Tea Party Casualty

I really want to share this story by Mother Jones. Basically, the thing we're seeing here is how, after the Republicans lost horribly in 2008, most conservatives seem to have concluded that it's because they're TOO moderate, and not vice-versa. So, Republicans like Bob Inglis (who, while I disagree with him, is definitely the kind of politician I'd like to see in office) are getting pushed out of the party.

Mother Jones: Confessions of a Tea Party Casualty

Unemployment in the USA is still REALLY BAD, in caps

Here's a short article from Mother Jones I want to draw some attention to. Not a whole lot to comment on here, but Kevin Drum points out that

And now, for the actual substance of Winship's post, it's this: unemployment is really bad right now. Really, really bad. His chart is on the left: it shows that there are about five people unemployed for every job opening. A different chart is on the right. It shows there are about five people unemployed for every job opening. In words that even Mitch McConnell can understand, the unemployed aren't slacking off because they enjoy the vacation. They're out of work because there aren't any jobs.

Businesses aren't hiring more employees because people aren't buying as much, because they don't have as much money, because they're employed, because businesses aren't hiring, because...

It's a vicious feedback loop. TARP and ARRA helped the recession from turning into a depression, but things are still really bad.

The good news, of course, is that the already-rich are doing better than ever.

Book Review of "Dangerous Children": Chapter 2

Most of this chapter consists of a history of modern feminism as well as an overview of political dominance, most specifically the way that dominant political regimes control or influence thought systems.

She brings up first the matter of how establishments maintain their dominance:

Enforcement alone, whether by physical or legal means, is rarely successful in the long term because of the conflict and resistance that it inevitably fosters.

Justification is far more effective. It works by persuading subordinate individuals and groups that there are valid reasons for their own inferiority and equally valid reasons for the enhanced status of those who are designated superior.

My first note here is that, throughout this chapter, she seems to work from the perspective that thought systems work only from the top-down, with the least dominant basically acting as passive sponges for the viewpoints of the dominant. I'm not sold on this point: human brains are pretty obsessive about interpreting things in a non-dissonant way, and I don't see why many establishment-promoting beliefs couldn't, or wouldn't, be provided by the oppressed classes themselves. The possibility I'm suggesting works like this: underprivileged classes are trying to find a way to explain their lack of privilege, and would be unlikely to accept that they're lazy, since that would conflict with their views of themselves as basically good, hard-working people; unless they're fairly cynical, they're unlikely to believe that the upper classes are evil, since that could conflict with their view of the world as basically just; so that leaves the conclusion that the upper classes just deserve it, somehow. I think this is especially likely, in many cases, because throughout Western history, at least, it's been common practice for the rich (and especially rich women) to dispense of their largess through charity and philanthropic works. Religion could also play a part here; if God's in control of everything, why would He put these evil people in control? It's very difficult for most people to accept that someone could, on the one hand, donate heavily to charity, and on the other hand promote slavery, abuse, and imperialism, or other abominations, so I don't think it's absurd to suppose that at least a few of them would conclude on their own that the privileged were so simply because they deserved to be so. In practice, this does tend to benefit the continuation of whatever regime happens to be in power at the time, but I don't think it's necessary to assume that this is directly or entirely the doing of the regime itself.

Also, I think these kinds of things can become self-fulfilling prophecies: when people make these sorts of rationalizations, they frequently begin to act in accord with them, or, when someone identifies a negative trait in themselves, saying "Well, it's not my fault, that's just how my gender is" can be a powerful excuse to not rectify that kind of behavior, even when it happens again in the future.

A final note: something strikes me as a little odd. If the people in charge of education usually made use of that power to benefit themselves, even at the expense of others, and women had virtually sole charge of children, frequently in schools as well as the home... wouldn't women therefore have used that power to benefit themselves? This is sort of where I see that logic headed, like the way that radical masculists will invert feminist thought and argue that clearly we live in a matriarchy and that women are making use of their power to indoctrinate children while they're still young and "feminize" them. It's a bit ridiculous, but the mainstream feminist interpretation seems to have some of the same issues - clearly, there's more going on here than that.

She goes on:

Studies have shown that people react differently to tiny babies according to their perception of the child’s sex. Babies perceived as female are treated with greater care and gentleness whilst being spoken to quietly and soothingly.

Infants perceived as male elicit an opposite response, being handled with greater physicality and being spoken to in louder and more jocular terms, all based on the ‘common sense’ understanding that girls are ‘feminine’ and boys are ‘masculine.’

Everyone has a working knowledge of what these terms mean and this is invariably couched in bipolar terms. Blue-pink, hard-soft, active-passive, the bigendered nature of humanity seems to fill it with a desire to divide its world in half – and then to use this demarcation as a basis for the allocation of power, opportunity and advantage. The problem for women, however, is that the masculine half of the equation has always appropriated far more than its fair share of half of all available resources, rewards and authority.

I want to emphasize the point about males being handled more roughly than females, even when they're newborn and there's no physical difference between the sexes that would justify such treatment, because as we go deeper into the book, that general point is going to become more important.

I also, as you should probably be able to guess by now, take a little exception to the last sentence I quoted; I'll grant that men had more authority than they deserved, but I'm less sold on the rewards and resources, and even less sold on the unmentioned sacrifices. When a woman marries a rich man, she probably enjoys the servants, cakes and fancy clothes just as much as he does; and I know that corsets are uncomfortable, but then so is military training, sleeping in campgrounds, and getting shot, and I don't think you can argue that wearing a corset is any less a choice than being drafted.

Again, I want to stress that women's issues are important, and whatever discrimination men face would never lessen the issues faced by women, or make them any more acceptable - but still, when people say that women are the primary victims of traditional gender roles, I just have to ask, "But what about this? what about that?"

Historically this inequity has been justified via the ideology of the ‘natural’ gendered dominance of men, based on time-honoured definitions of the masculine that reach back as far as written history allows us to trace their origins. History tells us that men have been dominant for two reasons. Firstly, because it is allegedly part of their inherited biological nature to be so. Secondly, because the perpetual defining of the masculine as superior to the feminine means that they have been continuously presented as deserving to be so.

I think this goes back to what I was saying about cognitive dissonance, and the ways that people try to prevent themselves looking like the bad one by somewhat creatively interpreting events. I also want to add that I think it's important to note what men were deemed superior at: namely, activities related to politics, athletics, war, and academics. Women, on the other hand, were considered to be generally more morally pure, better with children and other things related to the feminine sphere. One of the main problems, I think, with this gender division is that over the past few thousand years, men's domain has expanded exponentially due to the rise of science, globalism, and economic growth, whereas the things considered feminine have pretty much stayed the same they were when gender roles were first getting written. I don't think there's as reason to assume that people knew back then just how much people would have to learn, or how many kinds of jobs there would be, or how many different peoples your average politician would have to engage with on a regular basis, just in order to survive in society. The ancient Greeks did typically deny women an education, at least of the masculine kind, but what this education consisted of is a rudimentary understanding of political rhetoric, athletics, basic arithmetic and learning to play a flute - and that was for those rich know-it-alls who had the money to send their kids to school for some larnin'. It seems to me that the main problem of gender is that it failed to evolve with the times - at least until things became so untenable that you simply had to start expanding on women's rights just to keep the economy going.

Finally, she turns to masculine bias in academia. She doesn't name names, but the two most obvious examples I know are from psychology: Freudianism and various theories related to women's cognitive development. These are excellent cases of why it's important to have gender equity in the sciences: when men looked at the way that women developed, they basically didn't understand what they found, and were forced to conclude that women were just underdeveloped - for instance, women very frequently didn't develop of sense of inherent rights, or developed it very late compared to men, which was (still is, I think) considered the epitome of moral-rights development. What they didn't realize is that there are other ways of conceptualizing morality, such as by relationships, that the women they studied were adept at and the men weren't. They couldn't see that because, of course, they lacked that moral perspective themselves, and it wasn't until the influx of women into psychology that they were able to get at the real story.

For the most part, she says, Women's Studies was the main avenue of studying the ways that gender had influenced, and continued to influence, the academic world. Almost as soon as Women's Studies had gotten established, however, in came Men's Studies, whose proponents argued that you needed to study both sides of the equation to get at the true answer. Not only that, many of them argued that only men could study masculinity, in much the same way that only women could properly study femininity. (I don't personally quite agree with either; while obviously it's important to get feedback from people that experience what you're studying, the entire point of science is to learn things that you didn't already know - if only men could ever really understand or learn anything about masculinity, for instance, it seems like that would kind of defeat the purpose of doing science.)

She says:

Women mostly acceded to the concept of the male exploration of masculinity, it was after all a step forward that they were looking at it at all and it would have seemed churlish not to encourage this development.

However, leaving the dominant to investigate themselves in never a good idea..........[sic]

That's the end of the chapter. My oversensitivity seems to be at work here again - her overall perspective seems to be that men are like little children that need permission to study their own masculinity, and that while it's not that important an issue, well, at least he's studying something. I wouldn't necessarily mention it, but her book (and many other feminist writings I've seen) come off as having kind of a paternalistic attitude toward men's interest in gender studies, and whenever men disagree, it regularly seems to be assumed that men are just acting out and their complaints don't need to be taken seriously. This also, interestingly, is a complaint I've heard from many feminists regarding other people's (and especially men's) responses to feminism. I wonder if this isn't more of your typical gendered tunnel-vision, but I can't really do more than speculate at the moment.

Link: Dangerous Children: Chapter 2