A great article on disability and online dating by somebody we all know and love. Yes, I’m being mysterious on purpose because I want everybody to click on the article to promote it. (I’m not the author, in case you are wondering.)
The stupidest metaphor of all times. It has a personal significance to me because I once had to dump a person I was dating for advancing this metaphor in my presence. Read the post and you will agree that somebody who thinks this metaphor is valuable is not dateable.
What is it with this weird American tradition of pushing spouses, actors, and other completely unqualified people into political positions of great responsibility? More importantly, what possesses citizens to vote for such candidates? If the Kentucky Democrats can’t find an actual alternative even for somebody so horrible as Mitch McConnell and have to bring in some dime-a-dozen starlet for the job, I feel hopeless about the future of the US progressivism. And before you begin to argue that actors make great politicians, I have 2 words for you: Reagan and Schwarzenegger. And before you start telling what a great progressive icon Judd is, see here and here.
Solar energy will save Taj Mahal. And I’m sure one day it will save us all.
It is high-time that Christianity be reclaimed from the crazies who now call themselves Christians: “Jesus’ command to love others led me to feminism. Feminism is all about equality and justice for groups that have been oppressed. I seem to recall the bible supporting this idea too. So I am a feminist BECAUSE I am following Jesus. And I support marriage equality BECAUSE I am following Jesus.”
This completely ridiculous post argues that men should deprive themselves of sex in order to become “human again.” Seriously, I’m not kidding, you can go see for yourself. The only question I have is how a blog written by a completely unhinged freakazoid got onto my blog roll.
And the post of the week which is absolutely, completely and totally brilliant is: Attachment parenting as a new form of feminine mystique. I’m a passionate fan of Betty Firedan and do not like seeing her name being taken in vain. But in this post, the use of Friedan’s work is brilliant and completely to the point. OK, I need to use the word brilliant again: this post is brilliant, people!
Clarissa's Blog 
Sorry. Xtianity is intrinsically and inalterably anti-female. A good, if rather blunt, statistic: How many female Popes have thjere been? Answer: One. And she was put to death when here femaleness was discovered, as I recall. Nothing further needs to be said at all on the subject. The very recent attempt by some churches to allow female clergy, less than a century old, is merely cosmetic window dressing. The only one of the Abrahamic faiths which is somewhat less than totally anti-female is the Baha’I religion; but it has problems, too.
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Pope Joan is a myth, a legend, and has been thoroughly refuted.
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Really??
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Pope Joan is a myth, a legend, and has been thoroughly refuted.
OK, if this is true, then the number is zero.
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Catholics could have only female Popes from now on and this still would not make them any less of a perversion of Christianity. Every single thing they do – and I mean every single one – is a direct violation of the word of Christ. Of course, the Russian Orthodox Church is even worse.
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The WP article on Pope Joan provides a brief overview of those who determined it to be a legend, or perhaps a satire or folklore that somehow became historicized. In particular, opponents of the papacy contemporary to when Pope Joan is supposed to have lived made no mention of her, even though they would have had plenty of reasons to do so.
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I will look up the article, this is very interesting. If it is a fantasy, it is a very telling one.
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And the legend says that she died in childbirth in the middle of the street, not that she was put to death.
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Once again, you are confusing a faith and organized religion. There is no greater perversion of the word of Christ than Catholicism. What is the point even of discussing the total freak show of Vatican? We are all intelligent adults, we all know that an organized religion is nothing but a way of making money off the insecurities a d loneliness of the simple -minded. What else is there to discuss about this idiocy?
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Also, the very idea of clergy is a perversion of Christianity. Jesus condemned public prayer very specifically and insisted that the only house of worship worthy of the name is inside an individual.
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Jesus condemned public prayer, but he himself preached, which is one of the primary functions of clergy. I do not believe it is possible to separate faith from organization. I hope, of course, that my own faith never becomes what Xtianity is. But it could, no doubt.
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He spoke to people. And there was no ritualized form to it whatsoever.
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Re the aging thing: my friend and I were talking and he observed that the idea that if you can’t be a “star” you shouldn’t even try is a very American thing. It’s all tied into our mania for “success” — which term means more than simply doing something correctly, it means you’ve “made it,” and now you can by the big house and the gorgeous wife (this is a very male-centered ideal) and the flashy car and lord it over everyone else, who is supposed to look upon you, Successful Guy, with a combination of awe and envy. And it increasingly has less and less to do with actually accomplishing anything worthwhile — I mean, the linked website is all to do with kids playing sports and who will become sports stars and who won’t! While it can be fun to play a sport, it’s also an activity of little intrinsic worth (and in the case of most sports Americans like, like football and hockey, are actively detrimental to the health of the players).
And then there is this comment, on how the commenter can’t enjoy a song or a movie because he wants to make music and movies but doesn’t have the talent. That’s so unbelievably sad that I can’t even. I sometimes wish I had the talent to make music, but I know I don’t have it, but I love music anyway. Go figure!
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This is really sad, indeed. This person is allowing a narcissistic trauma to control his life.
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While it can be fun to play a sport, it’s also an activity of little intrinsic worth (Andrea)
For some of us, sports were a vehicle to help us develop some self worth. The fact is, for many people the challenges that are inherent in sport help individuals develop skills that will benefit them in all areas of their lives. You may not have benefitted from sports but many of us have and still do. 🙂
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Self -worth can’t come from achievements in any area. It can only come from the inside.
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Of course it comes from the inside but make no mistake, the activities, be it sport or something else can help with the process.
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Sports “helped” you to develop self-worth because you were taught that sports were a worthy activity. I rejected the idea that sports were important enough to waste time learning them (seriously, they have fucking books on football rules, how fucked up is that?), and if I accidentally did well in some sport I was forced to participate in, I felt only a fleeting pleasure that did nothing for my overall self-worth — something I already had thanks to a childhood environment where I was treated as a person of value. If you don’t already think you are a worthy person, as Clarissa said, being good at some activity won’t replace that, because once the congratulations are over and your audience goes away, you’ll be left with the same old worthless you.
What I am trying to say is, you must already have had a sense of self-worth or being good at sports would not have helped you. You would have become, perhaps, one of those high school football stars whose life falls apart once school is over. Don’t give some temporary physical activity credit for something so important as your perception of yourself as a person worthy to exist.
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@Andrea
I am always amazed at the people who speak for others because something might not fit their worldview. You have absolutely no idea what sports can or did do for myself and millions of others. Your disdain of certain activities is palpable and at the very least sad and misguided. The interesting part is that had you maybe participated in sports on a relatively consistent level you might not be experiencing the physical parts of aging to the same degree that you do now. The temporary physical activity you speak of has allowed me to work manually in an industry where the average career is less than 10yrs. Im going on 23yrs. 🙂
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TfT says: ” The interesting part is that had you maybe participated in sports on a relatively consistent level you might not be experiencing the physical parts of aging to the same degree that you do now. ”
I agree with that. Physical fitness keeps you young. Mike, who is 68, is still physically fitter than I.
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Competitive sports and sports for enjoyment are completely different things. Successful competitive athletes – but I repeat, successful ones – have the intellectual and emotional maturity of 5 year olds.
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And as for their health, they are practically invalids by the age of 35.
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Pistorius…hmmm.
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@Clarissa
Would that be all successful competitive athletes or just some of them?
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There are exceptions to every rule but they are few and far between.
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Lol, and to think you actually teach people.
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OK, I can see you have had one too many beers this week-end. I don’t teach athletics. What a bizarre notion.
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Those who couldn’t do, taught. Those who couldn’t teach, taught gym.
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Also, no, the worst part about aging *is* the physical aspects. I’m still interested in things, I still want to go places and do stuff, but now my body says “Woah, what are you doing!” if I stand up too fast.
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I completely agree about the online dating article.
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People have ridiculous ideas about aging. To me it is about earning one’s stripes.
It’s absolutely vital that one becomes who one already is in deeper ways. Social forces often take us away from ourselves, but we have the power to bring ourselves back to ourselves. Playing that game right, that power increases with our years of experience in life.
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RE: This completely ridiculous post argues that men should deprive themselves of sex in order to become “human again.”
It’s part of the way American Christian fundamentalist culture makes gender out to be a product of metaphysics, i.e. women, supposedly, are not physical and not logical, whereas men are physically oriented and logical. Consequently, the dame just wants a cuddle.
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And it’s yet another instance when the 3rd-wave American feminism has the same goals as the Christian fundamentalism.
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I see. That’s what that post was–3rd wave US feminism. I don’t like it–the gender essentialism. I’ve been shouted down by some of these guys before. They think their mysticism is so true, probably because they feel it in themselves, through their social conditioning. That doesn’t make it true. They need to break out of themselves and see the issue from outside of their own heads a bit.
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That post was just creepy weird. I don’t know if the author has any political or religious affiliation. This kind of discourse has become so normalized that people just repeat such things like they are completely unquestionable.
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One doesn’t need any particular religious affiliation is religion is in the air and on the media waves. I think it is. There are all sorts of religious ideas that have taken on the meaning of common sense. For instance, it is very prevalent in US culture to presume that men are rational and women are emotional. Yet, actual physiology begs to differ. If you look and men and women scientifically, we both have the capacity to process abstract reasoning and to have emotional sensations. Similarly, there is a prevalent idea that if you are suffering in any way, you have only yourself t blame for that. That is the notion of original sin. Any problem must necessarily have its root in you, as an individual, and does not originate from outside of you. And so on. There are all sorts of ways that religion has entered the mainstream culture. And third wave feminism seems lack the intellectual engine to really analyse this properly. It’s too blithe and frothy.
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” For instance, it is very prevalent in US culture to presume that men are rational and women are emotional. Yet, actual physiology begs to differ.”
– I agree completely. But if people keep buying into this so massively, it means they are getting something out of believing these things. Based on one’s gender, one can easily relinquish one’s responsibility for either one’s intellect or one’s emotions. Surely makes life easier. In a really sad, immature, self-limiting osrt of way.
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It’s old fashioned and relates back to a time when a division of labor was to some extent practical. If you can’t control your fertility, you are going to be doing emotional work with young children, and you need someone to defend the system on the boundaries, so the male would have to suppress his emotions and just do the hard yakka.
It’s no longer required though. Men don’t need to be soldiers or workmen bending their backs to the wheel whilst shutting out all emotion and feeling. Women don’t need to produce a brood.
America is much slower than other industrialized countries to realize this, since the extent of its religiosity is so great.
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“It’s old fashioned and relates back to a time when a division of labor was to some extent practical. If you can’t control your fertility, you are going to be doing emotional work with young children, and you need someone to defend the system on the boundaries, so the male would have to suppress his emotions and just do the hard yakka.”
– In a tiny segment of the world population for a tiny period of time. Yet most people now believe that this has been this way from time immemorial.
“America is much slower than other industrialized countries to realize this, since the extent of its religiosity is so great.”
– Crappy secondary education, too. The first European settlers couldn’t even begin to imagine a situation where women would sit on their asses being emotional all day long. They would have all just starved if that happened. All the Americans need to do is look at their own literature where women work, in the factories, the fields, the schools, the shops, the offices since the days of the first settlers until the very brief hiatus of the 1950s. Still, every semester I hear from students, “Women only recently started to work.” It’s mind-boggling how they manage to convince themselves here, in the farm country. These students’ mothers all work. A lot.
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In the culture I come from, there was definitely a need for men to repress any refined feeling quite strongly, in order to be soldiers and breadwinners. That said, the women were not exactly “emotional”, either. I only encountered that trope of female emotionality when I came to Australia. Women had to be very rational and very stoic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDFebbdyOcQ
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As a matter of fact, it’s not so much that the “women emotional/men logical” thing is based on old-fashioned notions of the division of labor as it is that whatever our society deems frivolous, second-rate, less important is held to be the province of women, while the deep, serious, important things are all for men. As a matter of fact, it used to be that women were considered less emotional than men — or rather, they were not capable of feeling deep, serious passion, and were silly weak-brained things or calm and boring, but never could they be trusted with anything “important” like running a country or whatever because they couldn’t get how serious it was with their shallow female minds.
I don’t think it is caused so much by the division of labor in the Olden Tymes so much as the division of labor is caused by this attitude. If it’s considered boring or useless or weakening by the men, then it’s for women to do. Whatever it is — being more emotional or less especially goes in and out of fashion because it’s so easy to control people through how they express their feelings. Now we think emotions are weakness, so naturally women, the “weaker” sex, is supposed to be more emotional. And so on.
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“As a matter of fact, it used to be that women were considered less emotional than men — or rather, they were not capable of feeling deep, serious passion, and were silly weak-brained things or calm and boring, but never could they be trusted with anything “important” like running a country or whatever because they couldn’t get how serious it was with their shallow female minds.”
– Exactly. These myths get concocted, upheld and rejected according to the temporary goals they serve. What is curious, though, is how much support they garner even from very intelligent people at any given moment.
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Andrea Harris said: “As a matter of fact, it used to be that women were considered less emotional than men — or rather, they were not capable of feeling deep, serious passion, and were silly weak-brained things or calm and boring, but never could they be trusted with anything “important” like running a country or whatever because they couldn’t get how serious it was with their shallow female minds.”
This was more like my original culture. Actually, though, the women had quite a bit of power despite this, really tremendous power over the whole society, as the men were at war.
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“This was more like my original culture”
– That’s my culture, too. But it is as skewed and oppressive as its opposite. The specific ways of how people mutilate themselves in the service of gender roles are not extremely important. It is all mutilation. For centuries, women were considered the repositories of an uncontrollable, unbridled, scary sexuality. Now there is a discourse of women not needing sex and preferring either chocolate or “cuddling.” Both approaches are ridiculous and stupid.
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Well, like I implied, in my culture there really was a practical element to all this. It’s just how it turned out. The men would not have given women civil authority, except that they often had it by default as the men were at war. Also, it was considered that men would be a bit damaged by the war, hence a bit “emotional”.
So, any damage done seemed to stem largely from the need to make practical adjustments.
Nowadays, this just is not so.
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I think there is always a practical element to it. People wouldn’t participate in something for a long time of their own free will if they didn’t get something out of it. The system is stable because, on some level, it works. I feel like such a spoilsport, trying to shake things up.
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Hmm. Actually a large part of my memoir has the concern of breaking free from a role that was not practical anymore on two levels. By practical, I mean it really wasn’t an individual choice. I know that it is hard for people these days to believe that a role was not based on individual choice, but that is how it was. I grew up in a certain way so that I was extremely rational and emotionally controlled but also, as the stereotype demanded not “deep”. The men who went to war were considered deep. I wasn’t and I didn’t claim to be. For many years, after migrating, I sought to find my depth. Eventually I found it by crossing over into what had been denied me in the past — knowledge of the male modality.
However because “emotion” is gendered female in contemporary Western society, nobody had any idea what I was doing (making myself whole by integrating more emotional knowledge and experience). It was assumed by quite a few people that my job ought to have been to try to move away from slushy, feminine “emotion” and into the realm of rationality and logic. However, the opposite was the case — I had been brought up into the realm of rationality and calm logic, but without much scope to experience or express emotion.
Actually it really was a struggle for me to break the hard shell of my character so that some knowledge of emotional life could enter there.
I struggled with the same project for years and years — about ten to fifteen actually.
Finally, I’ve reached the point where emotion seems to be fully integrated with the way I live my life, at least on an individual level.
The problem is with Westerners who understand my project at cross-purposes and think I have been trying to become “feminine”. No, not at all, because emotion was masculine in my book.
So there it is. Change can happen, but it is hard.
Also, in terms of Western culture and its expectations, I have an inside-out personality. The more threatening I find a situation, the less emotional I am, even to the point that I actually lose touch with my emotions in very threatening situations, and become a stone.
However, it is often assumed that as a female I must inevitably be very much in touch with “feeling”.
It has taken me a long time to realize that the majority of people reason about gender and experience it differently from I.
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Andrea Harris said: “I don’t think it is caused so much by the division of labor in the Olden Tymes so much as the division of labor is caused by this attitude. If it’s considered boring or useless or weakening by the men, then it’s for women to do. Whatever it is — being more emotional or less especially goes in and out of fashion because it’s so easy to control people through how they express their feelings. Now we think emotions are weakness, so naturally women, the “weaker” sex, is supposed to be more emotional. And so on.”
That is the effect of religious metaphysics on contemporary consciousness. I have written quite a bit on this, stating that the system is maintained by people projecting their disowned qualities into the other gender, and expecting them to behave in accordance with those projected characteristics:
http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2011/03/magical-dimensions-of-traditional.html
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Since Clarissa is so into accusing anyone who is into movement politics of being middle class, she’ll probably like this.
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“Last month there was a research report from Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce and Penny Lewis on the economic background of people who participated in some #OWS events in New York City. The New York Times and other press outlets picked up on one of the report’s findings — that More than a third of the people who participated in Occupy Wall Street protests in New York lived in households with annual incomes of $100,000 or more … and more than two-thirds had professional jobs.”
– I told you so!!! 🙂 🙂
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This is certainly the message I have gotten from women almost exclusively all my life, along with the superiority attitude that women are better than men since they do not need such things. I suspect that this is a far more common attitude among women than you imagine, and they are systematically working to convince men of the same thing.
Am I remembering incorrectly that you were taught the same thing as a teenager?
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“This is certainly the message I have gotten from women almost exclusively all my life, along with the superiority attitude that women are better than men since they do not need such things. I suspect that this is a far more common attitude among women than you imagine, and they are systematically working to convince men of the same thing.”
– That’s what my husband keeps telling me. And I keep disbelieving him.
“Am I remembering incorrectly that you were taught the same thing as a teenager?”
– The message I got was that men didn;t need sex and women had to trick them into it. I keep telling this to my husband but he keeps disbelieving me. 🙂
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Please add me to the same box with David Bellamy and your husband…
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“The message I got was that men didn;t need sex and women had to trick them into it. I keep telling this to my husband but he keeps disbelieving me.”
I remember you mentioning somewhere that your father told you the opposite; that your boyfriend was just using you to satisfy his physiological needs. I have been searching and cannot find the post, so maybe my memory is faulty.
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Yes, my father said exactly that but I never valued his opinion on the subject of sex. 🙂 My vision was informed by the conversations among adult women I kept hearing: my aunts, my mother’s friends and colleagues.
By the 1980s in the USSR 80% of men suffered from partial or complete erectile dysfunction by the ages of 30-32. In the 1990s, it did not get any better.
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Here’s something on the Evangelical case for gender essentialism. Reads much like the “feminist” case.
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I finally got this post on the 14th Child ballad done. It’s the English/Scottish variation of the ballad that inspired Ingmar Bergman’s movie “The Virgin Spring” and Wes Craven’s “The Last House on the Left.”
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Getting here late, but the lock metaphor link is trying to argue with a metaphor which by definition relies on an intuitive emotional reaction by saying it doesn’t make sense and attacking those for whom it does.
The only way to defeat a good metaphor* is with a better metaphor and the pencil sharpener isn’t that. It can be turned around to ‘if you keep a pencil in the same sharpener all the time it disappears so if you subject the pencil to a variety of sharpeners it at least lasts a little longer’. Worse, in addition to not attacking the central idea of the lock metaphor (the double standard which is very real in the non-feminist world) while conjuring images of vaginas fitted with razor blades or grinding edges…
You might reframe the metaphor as “the only people who want a key that can open any lock are criminals” but that’s just off the top of my head and there might be problems with it if examined further.
*by ‘good’ I’m not referring to the content, just the fact that appeals to and makes emotional sense to a significant percentage of the population, and in those terms the lock metaphor is an excellent metaphor even if you really dislike it.
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This is pretty much right up your alley, Clarissa, and it also shows you were largely correct about it: Helicopter Parents May Breed Depression and Incompetence in Their Children.
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