Sophianotloren

Impenetrable in their dissimulation, cruel in their vengeance, tenacious in their purposes, unscrupulous as to their methods, animated by profound and hidden hatred for the tyranny of man…  -  Denis Diderot, “On Women”

As I have written on numerous occasions, the fallacious notion of the prostitute as a specific type of woman, with characteristics that set her apart from all other women, is a relatively recent one.  Prior to the mid-19^th century it was widely understood that transactional sex was a normal female behavior, one that any woman might engage in under the proper circumstances.  This is not to say that it was accepted and condoned; far from it.  But nobody imagined that a woman was entirely defined by the act, either, nor embraced the foolish fantasy that only women of a certain background or experience made the choice.  I have also often pointed out that women are far more pragmatic than men like to believe; many if not most of us, even those from relatively sheltered lives, are perfectly capable of trading sex for money or other advantages should the need arise.

Case in point Jeanne-Louise de Belleville, Dame de Montaigu, born in 1300 to the powerful Breton nobleman Maurice IV of Belleville-Montaigu and his wife Létice de Parthenay.  She was married off at the age of 12 to a 19-year-old nobleman named Geoffrey de Châteaubriant and bore him two children.  Geoffrey died young in 1326, and four years later she married Olivier III de Clisson, bearing him five children.  But while her first marriage seems to have been a typical one, the second one was unusually passionate for a 14^th-century noble couple.  The two were extremely close, and Jeanne was very devoted to him…so devoted, in fact, that what would have been the easy and unremarkable life of a wealthy French noblewoman became remarkable indeed after her husband was executed for treason in 1343.

It happened like this:  in the early part of the Hundred Years War, there were two rival claimants for the title of Duke of Brittany; Charles de Blois was favored by the French and John de Montfort by the English.  Olivier was on the French side, but after he lost Vannes to the English in 1342, de Blois complained that Olivier had not fought enthusiastically enough, and accused him of having defected to the English.  Olivier responded, predictably enough, by defecting to the English, but was captured by French forces and beheaded by order of King Philip VI on August 2^nd, 1343; in a particularly barbaric touch, his severed head was then displayed on a pole at Nantes.  Jeanne was devastated by his death and furious at the King and de Blois, and swore revenge on both.  But while a lesser woman might’ve been content with cursing them from afar, spreading rumors or bribing someone to poison the royal wine, Jeanne was no ordinary woman.  She promptly sold off all of the Clisson lands the King had not seized, purchased the three best warships she could find, and had them painted black and rigged with sails dyed blood-red.  To raise money for a crew and to win allies from amongst the other Breton noblemen (who were none too fond of the French to start with), she sold her favors to them and charmed them into swearing to support her.  Keep in mind she was 43 years old at the time, had borne seven children and presumably had only been to bed with two men before this; she must have had a powerful charisma.

But that charisma, however great, paled beside her hatred.  From 1343-1356 the “Lioness of Brittany” mercilessly hunted and pillaged every French ship she could find, slaughtering the crews except for one or two who would be released on shore to tell the King who it was that had done the deed.  At the Battle of Crécy (1346), she helped to secure an English victory by bringing in supplies on her ships.  And after King Philip died in 1350, Jeanne only got worse; apparently enraged at his having escaped her wrath by fleeing into Hades, she began specifically hunting down ships owned by French nobles, and whenever she caught one she would personally behead him with an axe and have his body thrown into the sea, despite the fact that she could’ve made tremendous profit by ransoming them.  Were this a Hollywood movie, she would have eventually caught up with Charles de Blois and given him his comeuppance, but real life is rarely so neat; de Blois not only outlived the Lioness by five years, but was also made a saint (though the canonization was annulled by the next pope on request from the English-supported Duke John V of Brittany, whose side had eventually won).  By the time she was 56 Jeanne’s thirst for vengeance was apparently slaked at last; she retired from piracy, married Sir Walter Bentley (who had personally fought de Blois) and settled in Hennebont, France, where she died in 1359.  Her son, Olivier Jr, earned the sobriquet “The Butcher” for his fierceness in war; he obviously inherited that from his mother, whose ghost is supposed to haunt the ruins of the old Château de Clisson (which was destroyed during the French Revolution).

Jeanne de Clisson was neither poor nor disadvantaged; neither sexually abused as a child nor mistreated by a husband; and neither homeless nor addicted to any drug.  Perhaps it could be said that she was emotionally disturbed by the loss of her beloved husband, but if so it was a very lucid kind of madness:  Jeanne knew exactly what she was doing, and chose to sell sex as a means toward that end.  And though most whores have far more mundane goals than the death of a king and the downfall of an entire country, our choices are every bit as pragmatic – and often as temporary – as hers.

Paul Krugman, in the course of responding to Ross Douthat, makes what I still consider to be a bad rhetorical move:

But Ross Douthat, in the course of realistically warning his fellow conservatives that Obamacare doesn’t seem to be collapsing, goes on to tell them that they’re going to have to come up with a serious alternative.

But Obamacare IS the conservative alternative, and not just because it was originally devised at the Heritage Foundation. It’s what a health-care system that does what even conservatives say they want, like making sure that people with preexisting conditions can get coverage, has to look like if it isn’t single-payer.

As I’ve said before when noting how radically dissimilar the ACA is from the Heritage Plan, the comparison is often made by liberals with good intentions. Krugman is definitely not using the comparison to undermine the ACA because he’s incapable of strategic thought or clueless about the institutional constraints on progressive change.  His position has always been, and still is, that the ACA is inferior to European models of health care but is nonetheless a major progressive achievement that substantially improves the status quo. (Correct on both counts.) When he says that the ACA is “conservative,” he means it in this comparative sense, and fair enough, as long as we keep in mind that in the universe of American politics it’s not remotely conservative.

But I think to say that the ACA was “devised at the Heritage Foundation” just takes this argument too far. First of all, it’s simply not true — the Heritage Plan shows, in fact, that it’s perfectly possible to design something that could be vaguely called “comprehensive health care reform” that would be far more conservative than the ACA. And I particularly don’t like it because it’s far too kind to the Republican Party.

In particular, conflating the ACA with Heritage papers over what should be a central issue for the Democrats now: Medicaid. Huge numbers of people are being denied Medicaid coverage because of Republican statehouses, who are then cynically using their own obstructionism as an argument against the ACA. As the Heritage Plan — which would have, rather than expanding coverage, further devolved Medicaid (in multiple senses) to these very states — makes clear, this is not some new feature of Republican politics. And while the Supreme Court is a major villain here, the responsibility for denying mostly federally-funded Medicaid to millions of people now lies with Republican public officials. Bad as the Roberts/Kagan/Breyer compromise was, it left states with the option of taking the expansion; those that don’t need to take the blame. And Democrats need to be making these distinctions as clear as possible, not blurring them.

The reason there will never be a serious Republican alternative to the ACA isn’t because it’s impossible to propose reform that’s significantly to its right. From the Heritage Plan to this very year, there are plenty of alternatives to the ACA that are much more conservative. The real issue is the “welfare-state embedding” cited by Douthat. One of the many reasons that these Republican plans are terrible is that they would all result in huge numbers of people getting much worse insurance than they would under the ACA or none at all, and as more people sign up on the exchanges and as the less lunatic Republican states bow to the pressure of various interests and take the Medicaid expansion, this is going to become a bigger issue over time. (Republicans were perfectly rational on their own terms in trying to sabotage or kill the ACA before it could become established.) We shouldn’t let Republicans off the hook by pretending that the Heritage Plan was remotely similar to the ACA.  Their callous indifference to the interests of the uninsured is longstanding, even if we leave aside the fact that the de facto Republican alternative to the ACA isn’t Heritage but “nothing.”

By: C.J. Pascoe and Tristan Bridges

Originally posted at Girl W/ Pen

What it means to be masculine changes over time and from place to place.  After all, men used to wear dresses and high heels, take intimate pictures with one another and wear pink in childhood.  In our scholarship and blog posts we have been grappling with making sense of some of these more recent changes as we’ve watched (and contributed to) a discussion about what it means to be an ally and changing views on gender and sexual inequality—primarily among men (see here and here).  We recently published an article thinking through changes in contemporary definitions of masculinity allegedly occurring among a specific population of young, white, heterosexual men.

We sought to make sense of some complex issues like the contradiction between what seems like an “epidemic” of homophobic bullying alongside rising levels of support for gay marriage.  Or the seeming contradiction between young white men’s adoration and emulation of hip hop culture side by side with deeply entrenched racism toward African-American men.  Or the way in which contemporary men speak of desiring equal partnerships and marriages, yet women still earn less  in the workplace and do more of the housework and childcare.

In our article, we collect a body of research illustrating that, often, what is going on in contradictions like this, is that systems of power and inequality are symbolically upheld even as their material bases are (partially) challenged (e.g., here). We show how these seemingly disparate issues might be better understood as small pieces of a larger phenomenon—something we refer to as “hybrid masculinity” (drawing on other scholars—see here, here, and here).

Hybrid masculinity refers to the way in which contemporary men draw on “bits and pieces” of feminized or marginalized masculine identities and incorporate them into their own gender identities.  Simply put, men are behaving differently, taking on politics and perspectives that might have been understood as emasculating a generation ago that seem to bolster (some) men’s masculinities today.  Importantly, however, we argue that research shows that this is most often happening in ways that don’t actually fundamentally alter gender and sexual inequality or masculine dominance. In other words, what recognizing hybrid masculinity allows us to do is to think through these changes in masculinity carefully.  While these changes may  appear to challenge gender and sexual inequality, we argue that most research reveals that hybrid masculinities are better understood as obscuring than as challenging inequality.

One of the things we see happening with hybrid masculinity is what we call “discursive distancing”—attempts made by men to distance themselves from masculinities that have been subject to sustained feminist critique.  Research has shown that, often, this “distancing” is more superficial than it might at first appear. Tristan’s study of “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes” marches (in which men walk in high heels to empathize with women and raise awareness about gender and sexual violence) is one example.  He found that the men (and often women) present were often less interested in the message of the march and much more interested in jokingly perpetuating stereotypes that symbolically reinforce issues the marches are designed to challenge.  The anti-rape campaign directed at men—“My Strength is Not for Hurting”—works in a similar way: simultaneously shoring up gender inequality (by framing men’s power and dominance as natural) while fighting it (here). Research on a diverse set of issues has shown that this kind of “discursive distancing” works in ways that create the appearance of larger moves toward equality than are actually taking place.

Hybrid masculinity also allows primarily white men to “strategically borrow” from less powerful men, while not suffering the structural constraints those men endure. For instance, young, straight, white men borrow from Black hip hop style without suffering the same criminalization that African American young men face – as evidenced by research showing that young African American men are seen as more adult and dangerous by police. Research suggests that the motivations behind “strategic borrowing” often stems from feelings of meaninglessness associated with the identities young, straight, white men perceive as available to them.  Indeed, Tristan published on a similar process at work among young, straight, white men who co-opt elements of “gay men’s culture.”   While “strategic borrowing” might illustrate great change in what masculinities look like and in how they are performed, this research shows that the practice is more often obscuring inequality than challenging it.

Finally, by expressing a “softer” masculinity, hybrid masculinities can actually “fortify boundaries” by perpetuating existing inequalities in new ways.  This is perhaps best exemplified by “Ex-gay” and evangelical Christian masculine practices.  As Melanie Heath documented in her research with the Promise Keepers (among other places), men are encouraged to be sensitive, emotional, caring and loving—not necessarily traits we associate with a dominant masculinity.  They are simultaneously, however, encouraged to be the head of their household and to enact a sort of biblically sanctioned patriarchy that entails gender inequality in the home.  This is only one example.  But it’s a great example of a more general trend documented in research on masculinities: while the outward styles of (some men’s) masculinity seem to have changed a great deal, the underlying structure of gender and sexual relations and inequality have been subject to much less change.

“Hybrid masculinities” is an exciting area of research that reminds us that social change is complex. Sometimes things might seem to be more transformative than they actually are.  While these transformations offer incredible potential for change, research suggests that much of this potential is largely unrealized.

_________________________

*Thanks for hanging with us through the more “academic-y” than usual tone of this post.  We promise to return with less dense language next month.

The full article is available at Sociology Compass—HERE.

I can’t recommend this Stephen Bezruchka essay on structural inequality and infant mortality strongly enough. Just a quick excerpt:

Everyone in a society gains when children grow up to be healthy adults. The rest of the world seems to understand this simple fact, and only three countries in the world don’t have a policy, at least on the books, for paid maternal leave—Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and the United States. What does that say about our understanding, or concern, about the health of our youth?

Infant death rates, those occurring in the first year of life, are a particularly sensitive measure of health in a population. According to a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released in 2013, our infant mortality rate is about 6.1 deaths for every thousand live births. Sweden has an infant mortality rate less than half of ours, 2.1 deaths per thousand births. If we had Sweden’s rate of infant deaths, the United States would have around forty-seven fewer infants dying every day in the United States. That is what is achievable: every day forty-seven babies wouldn’t die if we had Sweden’s rate of infant deaths.

Differences in mortality rates are not just a statistical concern— they reflect suffering and pain for very real individuals and families. The higher mortality in the United States is an example of what Paul Farmer, the noted physician and anthropologist, calls structural violence. The forty-seven infant deaths occur every day because of the way society in the United States is structured, resulting in our health status being that of a middle-income country, not a rich country.

There is growing evidence that the factor most responsible for the relatively poor health in the United States is the vast and rising inequality in wealth and income that we not only tolerate, but resist changing. Inequality is the central element, the upstream cause of the social disadvantage described in the IOM report. A political system that fosters inequality limits the attainment of health.

Resist changing? For Republicans, rising inequality is the stated goal, with an underlying racial tone that gets poor whites to buy in against their own economic interests.

The only thing I’d add that Bezruchka leaves out is how the decline of labor unions has played into this problem. He suggests worker-owned businesses as part of the strategy to overcome this structural inequality, but that he mentions this and not unionized workplaces says a lot about just how desperate organized labor’s situation has become. In all of American history, only labor unions have allowed workers to have a real voice on the job and provided a powerful and long-term voice for the American working class. Without that voice and the potential of delivering (or withholding) votes and money, politicians have little reason to care very much about structural inequality.

But otherwise, an outstanding essay.

Alex Blaze

7:29 AM

That column was asinine.

First, there is no conservative general and liberal general who can agree to an armistice. Conservatives aren’t following orders when they form their beliefs, so there is no one to make any sort of deal with. The leaders you refer to - pastors, pols, etc. - are really just skillful followers who know people will listen to them if they say what people want to hear. So what you're asking for is unilateral surrender from one side.

Second, I don't see anyone on the left trying to get "revenge." Yes, some people make fun of Christians, and often get shouted at by progressive Christians. But how many liberals are trying to ban straight marriage? How many are trying to force churches to teach Darwinian evolution? How many are trying to force Catholic women to get abortions? How many are trying to deport people from Red States?

I don’t think you understand the nature of the culture war: the right tells itself that the left is out to get them so they have to get the left first. This is why Fox News refers to it as a “culture war” instead of what it really is: conservatives trying to defend practices that hurt other people that some on the left are trying to eliminate for that reason.

Third - and most importantly - the left has NOT won the culture war. I notice you didn't mention women's reproductive rights at all in your column. Hmmmmm... could that be because conservatives are clearly winning that issue? Fewer women have access to abortion than did a couple of decades ago. States have been taking away access to abortion in order to effectively take away the right to abortion. The result has been fewer women having abortions.

And the big news from last week was that the Supreme Court might rule against *contraception*. The right is winning so hard on the abortion front that they are literally going after contraception, and we're supposed to stop that fight, sacrifice women's freedom, because we think conservatives are ready to sign up for some kind of grand compromise?

I would consider immigration a cultural issue, at least partly. Liberals are definitely not winning there.

Then there are the cultural issues around violence that conservatives have also clearly won. Gun violence continues unabated, and many states have moved to make guns *more* accessible. State laws that allows white people to get away with killing minorities are only being challenged in liberal media. Prisons are unimaginably cruel and states are still finding more ways to make them worse. The death penalty isn't even debated publicly.

On church/state separation, there's more government funding of religious education than ever through voucher programs and charter schools. Many states still teach abstinence-only programs which are founded on teaching "traditional" gender rolls. Is it surprising that the percent of Americans who believe in creationism has actually been rising in recent years.

So basically the left has won... gay rights? Um, OK, most states don't allow same-sex marriage, the federal government hasn't banned employment discrimination against LGBT people, the military still bans transgender people, LGBT youth are still being kicked out of their homes and there's inadequate funding for homeless LGBT people, access to the legal and medical means of transitioning remains piecemeal at best, transgender people are forced into poverty at an alarming rate through rampant employment discrimination and violence....

To claim that all the work here is already done is simply laughable. To extend the WWII metaphor, this would be like the Allies declaring victory after Germany took Paris.

Oh, I forgot that pot has been legalized in 2 out of 50 states, but banks won't lend to pot shops in those states because they think the feds will bring down the hammer any day now. VICTORY! Jesus h christ.

Given how embarrassing attempts to create plausible counterfactual scenarios under which a significantly better health care bill was possible in 2010 tend to be (“threaten to primary senators who aren’t running for anything!”) people who start with the premise that the ACA was an unconscionable sellout and figure out the accompanying argument later have a new line of argument. Rather than trying to explain how Bayh, Nelson, Lieberman et al could have been compelled to vote for single-payer or a robust public option, this argument re-defines penny-ante reforms as superior to the ACA. Our own Dilan Esper has now adopted this argument:

Just because people repeat so often that this was the most liberal thing that could pass doesn’t mean it is true. We don’t know what else could have passed because the Democratic Party decided to try to pass THIS.

My best guess– but it is just a guess– is that much more anti-corporate (and thus superior) forms of healthcare reform plans could have passed, but they would not have been “universal”. (Obamacare isn’t universal either, but it is quasi-universal.) In other words, expanding S-CHIP, expanding Medicare, building public health clinics, etc., are all things that have passed in the past and could plausibly have continued to progress had that been the Democrats’ agenda. But it would have been incremental, not universal. I tend to think THAT course is more “liberal”, because I think expanding the reach of private insurance is a conservative outcome. But if you believe that the liberal goal is providing everyone with a product called “insurance”, rather than incrementally increasing the reach of public sector health care, then Obamacare is more “liberal”.

The idea that a series of fairly small-bore reforms would be preferable to the ACA is implausible in the extreme. Let me cite as my first witness Dilan Esper:

The point is, if the left is a necessary part of a coalition that Gore needs to win an election, he shouldn’t be picking right-wingers to be Vice President, and should generally be proposing more left wing POLICY (again, making “populist” speeches is not the same thing). An example: Gore was the first Democratic candidate since FDR to NOT campaign on national health insurance. Instead, he proposed only an expansion of S-CHIP. If you were an adult, and you were uninsured, you were screwed.

You can make all sorts of political arguments about how after Hillarycare, that’s a move that he needs to make to reassure centrist voters. Fine. But it’s also a fine reason for a leftist who thinks health insurance is a right not to vote for him.

OK, so it’s not surprising that Esper has only one principle for evaluating health care reform: if it’s proposed by a Democratic president or candidate for president it sucks.  But this still doesn’t tell is which of these rationalizations was right. Obviously, he was right the first time (about whether an S-CHIP expansion is preferable to comprehensive health care reform, I mean; the idea that you should want Bush to be president because Gore didn’t propose legislation that would be DOA in any case is nutty):

• The burden on proof on someone advocating penny-ante reform instead of the ACA is huge.  You’re giving up a massive, historic expansion of Medicaid and reforms that not only make private insurance significantly more accessible but transform the individual insurance market into something but a complete fraud.  If you’re going to give up all that for reforms that will affect a vastly smaller number of people — and, in the case of a Medicare buy-in, affect people generally much better-off than the millions of people benefiting from the Medicaid expansion — there had better be an extremely compelling reason for why the massive short-term negative is worth it.
• And, of course, the counterfactual makes no sense whatsoever.  To reiterate what I said last time, the idea that giving public insurance to a class of generally unprofitable customers is a path towards complete nationalization of the American health insurance industry (let alone a nationalization of American health care) makes absolutely no sense in theory and has proven utterly wrong in practice.  Not only are we no close to single-payer or an American NHS than we were 50 years ago, but Medicare recipients were among the people most hostile to the ACA (and why not, since they have nothing to gain and can be persuaded that they have something to lose even if they aren’t Republicans who will hate any Democratic-proposed reform immediately.)
• The idea that an S-CHIP expansion could lead to an American NHS in any kind of reasonable time frame also betrays a massive ignorance of American political history (and, for that matter, comparative politics.)  With the exception-that-proves the rule of abolishing slavery, American reform has always involved buying off entrenched interests.  Lyndon Johnson, in extraordinarily favorable political circumstances, had to settle for cherry-picking unprofitable customers rather than doing comprehensive reform.  Other high-veto-point systems otherwise more favorable to progressive politics don’t have nationalized health care either.  If you extend the time horizon long enough it’s impossible to rule anything out entirely, but 1)trading a policy achievement that represents a major improvement for tens of millions of people for the magic beans of an unprecedented mode of reform is insane, and 2)in some hypothetical circumstance long after we’re all dead where nationalizing the American health industry would be viable, there’s no plausible reason why it wouldn’t be equally possible under the status quo established by the ACA.
• All of this assumes that these penny-ante reforms would have passed.  If you try to do much less than the ACA and don’t even get that, the fail becomes truly epic.
• And, finally, the fact that S-CHIP expansions have passed before is self-refuting.  If you can pass them in much less favorable circumstances than existed in 2009, why on earth would you squander a once-in-a-generation-or-two legislative context on trying to pass it?  A Medicare or S-CHIP expansion can be added on to the ACA at least as easily as they can be added on to the status quo ante.

So, yeah, the idea that substituting an S-CHIP expansion or a few public health clinics for the ACA would be a good tradeoff for progressives is so far from defensible the world’s most powerful telescopes can’t even see it.

The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.  -  H.L. Mencken

So, were y’all thoroughly confused yesterday?  Were you wondering who the hell wrote that crap that was posted under my name, or did you think it was a great improvement over my usual baroque sentence structure and outré descriptions?  Did you find yourself saying, “Ye gods and little fishes, it’s as though Ernest Hemingway had come back from the dead to write a guest column!”  Or did you not even notice anything amiss?

Yesterday was, of course, April Fools’ Day, and for this year’s prank I decided to run my Reason essay “The Mythical Invasion of the Super Bowl Hookers” through Hemingway, a program which purports to “improve” your writing by making it “bold and clear”…in other words, by shortening and simplifying each sentence down to a level that would not confuse a rather slow-witted ten-year-old.  Hemingway said that my original text was “OK”, with 16 demerits; the final product was rated “good” with only 8, though I had eliminated everything the machine had labeled a “problem”.  Presumably, my score couldn’t get any lower because it still had too many words of more than one syllable and too many highfalutin’ terms like “prohibitionist”, “television” and “Canada”.

Now, in part I did this was because I thought it would be funny; not necessarily Monty Python funny, Three Stooges Funny or even Noël Coward funny, but at least whimsically amusing.  But I also did it to show just how stupid it is to defer to the aesthetic sensibilities of something that would lose in a battle of wits with a starfish.  Even if one stupidly believes that there is only one kind of good writing, and suffers from the lamentable but popular delusion that Hemingway was its archetype, and furthermore imagines that even Hemingway always wrote in that clipped, easily-parodied style we refer to as “Hemingwayesque” (which he did not), the notion that a glorified Nintendo console is qualified to judge adherence to that standard is ludicrous at best.  But as stupid as that idea is, a very large fraction of moderns cling to it with childlike devotion because it is a natural outgrowth of one of the most pernicious dogmas of the machine age:  that human beings are just another kind of (albeit complex) machine governed by knowable rules, and that Utopia can be achieved if we can only discover those rules and implement them thoroughly (and ruthlessly) enough.  This is the heart of “Progressive” thought:  force people (via social engineering, prohibition and criminalization) to only eat, wear, watch, read, hear, say, do and think what “experts” have decided is “good” for them, and the Millennium will arrive on the very next high-speed train.

The problem with this is that it’s 99 ⁴⁴/₁₀₀%  pure bullshit.  Human beings are not Skinner’s programmable modules, social interactions are incredibly complex and most “experts” aren’t even qualified to make decisions for their dogs, much less for millions of people they don’t know.  That idea that human beings can and should be governed by rigid, top-down rules designed by said “experts” has given us the Drug War, sex work prohibition, mass incarceration, mass surveillance, the nanny state, “Child Protective Services”, the “sex offender” registry, mandatory minimum sentencing, “zero tolerance” school policies and a host of similar abominations far too numerous to list.  People’s lives, like their writing styles, are unique, and what works for one does not necessarily work for another; by the reductionist “logic” of modern governance, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Dostoyevsky were all terrible writers because they don’t sound like Hemingway…and their works should be mercilessly edited until a mindless computer program declares them acceptable.

by Laura Hamilton

In 1998 I was a first-year student at DePauw University, a small liberal arts college in Indiana. A floor-mate of mine, with whom I hung out occasionally, told me over lunch that she was at college primarily to find a “good husband.” I nearly choked on my sandwich. I had assumed that the notion of the “Mrs. Degree” was a relic of my parents’ era—if not my grandparents’. Surely it had gone the way of the home economics major and women’s dormitory curfews.

Years later, I—along with my co-director, Elizabeth A. Armstrong—would embark on a five year ethnographic and longitudinal study of a dormitory floor of women at a public flagship in the Midwest. As part of my dissertation, I also interviewed the women’s parents. What I found brought me back to my first year of college. A subset of parents wanted their daughters to be “cookie-baking moms”—not successful lawyers, doctors, or businesswomen. They espoused gender complementarity—a cultural model of how women should achieve economic security that relied on a co-constructed pairing of traditional femininity and masculinity. That is, men were to be economic providers and women supportive homemakers. This was a revised “Mrs.” Degree, in the sense that marriage during college, or even right after, was not desirable. College women were to build the traits and social networks that would hopefully land them a successful husband eventually, but it was assumed best to wait until men had proven themselves in the labor market before entering a marriage.

This was not the only cultural model to which women on the floor were exposed. In fact, those coming in primed for complementarity were in the minority. However, as I show in my article, “The Revised MRS: Gender Complementarity at College,” far more women left college leaning toward gender complementarity than their previous gender socialization suggested. Something was happening on the college campus—where women were, ironically, out-achieving men—that shifted them toward performing an affluent, white, and heterosexual femininity, marked by an emphasis on appearance, accommodation to men, and a bubbly personality.

I argue that gender complementarity is not just a characteristic of individual women, but is actually encouraged by the institutional and interactional features of the typical, four-year, public state school. Midwest U, like other schools of its kind, builds a social and academic infrastructure well-suited to high-paying, out-of-state students interested in partying. The predominately white Greek system—a historically gender-, class-, and racially-segregated institution—enjoys prominence on campus. An array of “easy” majors, geared toward characteristics developed outside of the classroom, allow women to leverage personality, looks, and social skills in the academic sphere. These supports make it possible for peer cultures in which gender complementarity is paramount to thrive. Women who want to belong and make friends find it hard—if not impossible—to avoid the influence of the dominant social scene on campus, located in fraternities and Greek-oriented bars.

This structure of campus life is not incidental. In recent years, cuts to state and federal support for higher education have led mid-tier public institutions like Midwest U to cater to the socially-oriented and out-of-state students who arrive with gender complementarity interests. These class-based processes have implications for the type of social and academic climate that all students find upon arriving at Midwest University.

The problem is, however, that most women need to accrue the skills and credentials that translate into a solid career. An institution supporting gender complementarity does them a serious disservice—potentially contributing to gendered differences in pay after college. The situation is particularly problematic for students not from the richest of families: Affluent women espousing complementarity form the type of networks that give them reasonable hope of rescue by a high-credentialed spouse, and heavy parental support means that they can afford to be in big cities where they mix and mingle with the “right” men. Women from less affluent backgrounds lack these resources, and are often reliant on their own human capital to make it after college.

The gradual shift from higher education as a public good—funded heavily by the state—to a private commodity—for sale to the highest bidder—has significantly stalled not only progress toward class equality, but certain forms of gender equality as well. Change is going to require unlinking the solvency of organizations like Midwest U from the interests of those can afford, and thus demand, an exclusionary and highly gendered social experience.

By Laura T. Hamilton, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Merced, on her recently published article, “The Revised MRS: Gender Complementarity at College,” appearing in the April 2014 issue of Gender & Society.

Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin on Tuesday will lay out a tough, election-year budget that purports to come into balance by 2024, in large part through steep cuts to Medicaid and food stamps and the full repeal of President Obama’s health care law, just as millions begin to see its benefits.

But even with those cuts, Mr. Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, is counting on a boost of economic growth to balance the budget, a boost he says will be gained by reducing the deficit. Many economists believe such dramatic spending cuts — especially those affecting the poor — would have the opposite effect, slowing the economy and lowering tax receipts.

“This budget stops spending money we don’t have,” writes Mr. Ryan, the Republican party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2012 and a possible presidential contender in 2016. “A balanced budget will foster a healthier economy and help create jobs. This will ensure the next generation inherits a stronger, more prosperous America.”

In his plan, military spending through 2024 would actually rise by $483 billion over the spending caps established in the 2011 Budget Control Act “consistent with America’s military goals and strategies,” while nondefense spending at Congress’s annual discretion would be cut by $791 billion below those strict limits.

In all, Mr. Ryan says, spending would be cut by $5.1 trillion over the next decade. More than $2 trillion of that would come from repealing Mr. Obama’s health care initiative, the Affordable Care Act, a political move that has become much more difficult with the closing of the first enrollment period. As many as 10 million Americans have gotten health insurance through the law, either through private policies purchased on insurance exchanges, through expanded Medicaid or private policies purchased through brokers but subsidized by the law.

As with past budget proposals, Mr. Ryan seeks to eliminate the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, then turn the health care program for the poor into block grants to the states — saving $732 billion over the decade. He would also cap and block-grant food stamps, starting in 2020, cutting that program by $125 billion in five years. The budget relies on imposing new work requirements on food stamp and welfare recipients.

Such an approach “empowers recipients to get off the aid rolls and back on the payrolls,” Mr. Ryan writes.

But the toughest cuts would come from domestic programs that have already been reduced steadily since 2011, when Republicans took control of the House. Mr. Ryan’s 2024 domestic spending figure would be lower in nominal dollars than such spending was in 2005. Adjusted for inflation, it would be a 29 percent cut from today’s levels, and 28 percent below the average level of Bush administration spending.

photo by Portrayou

I was interviewed by Fleshbot writer McBeardo (who I’m renaming McBeardy) in what is probably one of the most honest, personal, and detailed interviews I’ve ever done. Also, there’s loads of photos to enjoy from Indie Porn Revolution, Crashpad Series, QueerPorn.TV and some shoots I’ve done with friends like Julia and Tex! It was really nice to get to speak candidly

FLESHBOT: What was your very first adult project? How did you make the decision to do it? What did you think and feel before, during, and after it was happening?

My very first adult project was a public photo shoot involving these lovely butt plugs that were handmade by the photographer. He was an older man who wanted them for his private collection, and we negotiated about what the shoot would entail. I enjoyed butt plugs but got anxious about having someone put them in me so I inserted them myself, and I got to choose my outfit and where we shot. I picked the Albany Bulb, which was a repurposed dump-turned-dog park with a bunch of interesting art made of garbage, and I dressed in my gutter punk finest. I got to keep copies of the photos and still have them.

How did I feel about it? Well, I was nervous at first, excited while it was happening (I love the risk of public play!) and confident afterwards. I think the fact I had a lot of control over what happened and how I was portrayed helped immensely with my enjoyment of the shoot. He was very respectful, even offering to take me to lunch afterwards, and paid me in cash. We talked a lot about stuff we did outside of pervery (he was an electrical engineer, I was a sci fi and computer gamer geek). I even got to keep the plugs! I was pretty naive in thinking all porn would be like that, though.

Read it here to find out which porn stars I want to work with, why I don’t work with the mainstream, and how I became the pervert you all know and love. Also, while we’re at it, I now have an AVN official profile.

Well, certain members of both sides, at least.

OKCupid is taking a surprisingly strong stance against Mozilla. Right now, those who visit the hipster/nerdy dating site using Firefox see this message (full text here):

Hello there, Mozilla Firefox user. Pardon this interruption of your OkCupid experience.

Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid. [...]

OkCupid is for creating love. Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure.

If you want to keep using Firefox, the link at the bottom will take you through to the site.

However, we urge you to consider different software for accessing OkCupid.

The reason this comes up now is that some Mozilla employees have been objecting to Eich’s recent promotion to CEO, because Eich donated $1000 to support Prop 8. (There is no sign that Eich has changed his views since then.) (Eich, incidentally, is credited with inventing Javascript.)

I think it’s fair for Mozilla employees to object to Eich’s promotion – it’s their company, they’re directly impacted by who runs it, and they have a stake in the company’s internal culture.

But OKCupid is in the wrong. Note that they are not asking that Mozilla change any specific corporate policies; rather, they are saying that no one who disagrees with them in private life about SSM should be CEO. This isn’t working to create real, positive change; it’s an attempt to economically punish Eich for disagreeing with them. “We wish them nothing but failure” is not a generous sentiment.

Now here’s where it gets funnier. Robert George, co-founder of NOM and the leading intellectual of the anti-marriage equality movement, read this article, in which Eich non-apologized “I express my sorrow at having caused pain.” Eich continued:

I am committed to ensuring that Mozilla is, and will remain, a place that includes and supports everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, economic status, or religion.

Apparently even that weak corporate boilerplate statement¹ is more equality than Robert George can stomach. George, in a public post on his Facebook, called for boycotting Firefox:

I have just deleted Mozilla Firefox from my computer. If I’m not morally fit to be their employee, I’m not morally fit to use their products. If you are a faithful Catholic, Evangelical, Eastern Orthodox Christian, Mormon, Orthodox Jew, Muslim, or member of any other tradition that believes that marriage is fundamentally the institution that unites a man and woman as husband and wife to be father and mother to any children born of their union, providing those children with the inestimable blessing of being brought up in the committed bond of the man and woman whose union brought them into being, or even if you believe in marriage thus understood quite apart from membership in any community of faith, I would ask you to do the same. Why contribute to the prosperity of those who would exclude you? Cancel Firefox or any other Mozilla product. Sure, its competitors are probably “just as bad,” but we have an opportunity here to send a message to all of them.

Problems with both their approaches:

1) It goes against what I think of as a “free speech culture” to encourage an companies to fire employees (even CEOs) based not on how well the employees can do the job, but on their stands on current political controversies. Although there’s no government censorship going on here, that’s not enough. Truly open and free speech – substantive free speech – won’t exist if people are afraid of being fired for taking a side on a controversial issue.

2) It doesn’t actually advance anyone’s cause in any meaningful way. (Admittedly a plus as far as Mr. George’s bigoted cause is concerned).

3) It encourages people to think of politics as a matter of maintaining personal purity through choosing the correct products, rather than making meaningful change.

This sort of approach makes both sides look like bumblers and busybodies, searching around for a high horse to nit-pick from, and makes both sides look as though they aren’t committed to a civil debate or the ideal of substantively free speech. I don’t know if Robert George’s side can do better, but I’m certain the pro-SSM side can.

1. You can read Eich’s full statement here.

The tiny white pill tugs at my willpower. Knows the ripe and tender spot, the toothed indents where it has lodged so many times before.  Beneath the overhang of illusions, in the wet and reeking hollows, where the light of reason fears to go.

“Sleep,” it says.  “Sleep and ache no more.”

An irresistible invitation to a temporary reprieve from the mindless task of watching the sinkhole of want gape wider.

* * *

This little scar, here, above my eye, where my mother threw a silver-backed hairbrush at me.  Here, under my chin, where she lobbed the crystal ashtray. I can’t quit smoking, as if, after it bit into my skin and dropped into my lap, I was destined to have need of it forever. She threw it and it struck and stuck. A sickly gift. I’m an emphysemic optimist; for me, the ashtray’s always half full.

Here, on the bony ridge of my shin, is the faint puckered shine of where I fell through a rusted sewer grating on a humid summer afternoon. It bled so much. Turned my white sock and my canvas sneaker red.  My nanny and her cousin washed it off in a public toilet. The carmine spatters and the pink-lemonade tinged water against the gleaming white of the porcelain. As they rinsed the blood away, I caught a glimpse of the pale bone beneath. That’s when I knew that we are all Halloween skeletons, costumed in meat, masquerading as humans.  It’s been hard to take my flesh seriously ever since.

Oh, it calls. My flesh calls to me as yours does. I have eyes. I see, I hear, I smell, I touch and want. But maybe that early peek at what was inside cured me of a need to listen.  Maybe I learned too early how not to be a baby, how to identify sensation – pleasure or pain – and move on.

It only mattered it if had meaning. When the sun burned my skin, When I paddled frantically, unable to claw my way to the surface and I took that first big breath of salt water and it seared my lungs. When the doorjamb ate my fingers, when my skull met concrete, when the balled fist sank into my soft middle, when my jaw relinquished its spare teeth, when no one checked to see whether the anesthetic worked and they cut anyway.

I speak the language of my flesh fluently. But mostly, it just talks a lot of wordless shit. How ironic then, that I would stumble across the only man in the world who speaks, not to my flesh, but to my bones, and not be able to have him.

The one who would speak sense to every flash of pain, to every tremor of pleasure. To the breeze on my skin and the heat between my thighs. All those meanings. So many meanings.

* * *

No. That’s a lie. That’s a big fat lie.

I depend on him to stay always just beyond my reach. Safe and snug in the quantum spin of his permanent reluctance. I have found the perfect place to sit and smoke and wait for something that will never happen.

This is no mistake. This is, no matter how much I may bask in the poignant role of the exile, a deliberate choice.

If tomorrow the gates to all that I desire were flung open, I would not step through. If he relented and let me in, what would happen to my flesh, my bones, and me?

He knows too much of me. He knows the magic words.  He would mutter the incantation and I would shed my skin. My bones would turn to pale grit and crumble. I would cease to be.

Cease to be. There’s an allure to that.  Incineration.  True, I know that nothing ever truly ends, it only changes form. But what form would I be? I can’t contemplate the possible abominations I could be, with him.

* * *

Here, there is always the option of provisional peace. If some people measure their lives in steps, some in empty glasses, some in small victories, I can measure mine in the gaps between sleep.

The little white pill calls to my bones. “You are tired of wanting. Of rubbing together to make fire that gives no heat. Sick of the taste of your own marrow. Come, sleep.”

jeanpaulfarte:

in stories featuring aliens, they’re always like “on my planet this never happens!” or “in my culture, this differs from your human culture.” and that’s neat and all because i like worldbuilding and all that jazz but wouldn’t it be fun if they just. couldn’t do that?

i want a story where humans encounter an alien who frustrates them because they don’t know enough to tell them anything concrete

like humans will ask “tell us about politics in your planet!” and the alien’s all “uh… hold on it’s been a while since i took gov. um….”

"what sorts of plants grow on your planet?"

"i dunno i grew up in the suburbs. they’re like… purple? idk what you want me to say"

"tell us about the culture on your planet!"

"do you have any idea how many fucking countries are back home, i don’t even know where to begin"

"your planet is obviously much more scientifically and technologically advanced than ours. is it possible for you to enlighten us on certain matters concerning space travel, or would that be a form of interference you must avoid?"

"naw it’s cool, it’s just that, um, i’m a philosophy major"

This always bugged me about the “tell me about your planet” thing.  Can you imagine just plucking some random person off Earth and going “tell me about the culture and politics on Earth”?  Chances are pretty low you’d get somebody who would be able to answer many much less all of their questions with real accuracy.  And having one person represent an entire planet (much less culture or region) is always hilarious to me.  Also how alien planets in fiction almost always only have one culture, one language, and one climate. 

Of course, a lot of the reasons why we treat alien cultures like this in fiction (besides that it’s easier than inventing a whole diverse planet, especially if you’re just making a TV show) is that aliens are often analogues or stand-ins for non-white people (with humans being the white people), and they’re treated much like PoCs are treated now.  Like, a single PoC is expected to represent their race, speak for their culture, explain all the questions white people have, and often answer for a country they don’t currently live in, hardly lived in, or never lived in.  So I think changing the way we treat aliens in fiction should start with changing the way we see and treat PoCs in real life. 

can-i-be-your-favorite-bird:

it’s very frustrating being a girl and trying to flirt with other girls like. you tell them, ur cute. ‘Aw thank you’ no. no i’m being gay with you. homo intended. damn it

Making pimps the centre of things justifies more money to catch/punish them & keep the status quo where women are collateral damage in a war.  -  Laura Agustín

I’m sure you saw all the hype and ballyhoo about a “landmark” government study of pimp bragging the sex industry,  and if you’ve read my columns about the relative rarity and non-centrality of pimps, the so-called “facts” this report “found” must strike you as the farthest thing from.  As I wrote in my recent Washington Post article,

The researchers made bold statements about the “U.S. sex economy” based on interviews with law enforcement personnel, 73 men convicted as “pimps,” and only 36 incarcerated street workers.  As the sex worker activist Melissa Gira Grant observed, the average sex worker activist follows more sex workers on Twitter than these researchers managed to find for a supposedly “landmark” study.  Furthermore, the report’s bias is clear from the skewed proportion of its interviewees:  Street workers represent less than 15 percent of the trade, but were 100 percent of the sex workers interviewed for the study.  Moreover, fewer than half of street workers have pimps, and about half of the pimps are actually the employees of the women they manage, not the other way around.  Yet the researchers interviewed twice as many pimps as sex workers, thus inflating their perceived importance remarkably…

Dr. Laura Agustín had much more to say about the report than that, both on Twitter and in her blog.  But I’m not going to write more about how awful this report is; rather, I’m going to discuss the motive behind it.  Agustín’s statement in my epigram sums it up nicely, but more detail will provide a better picture.  The story starts in September of 2008 with the publication of “The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in New York City”, AKA the John Jay study, which was funded by the US Department of Justice:

[Meredith] Dank and [Ric] Curtis…interview[ed]…249 underage prostitutes…and…thoroughly obliterated the long-held core assumptions about underage prostitution:

• Nearly half the kids — about 45 percent — were boys.
• Only 10 percent were involved with a “market facilitator” (e.g., a pimp).
• About 45 percent got into the “business” through friends.
• More than 90 percent were U.S.- born (56 percent were New York City natives).
• On average, they started hooking at age 15…
• Nearly all of the youths — 95 percent — said they exchanged sex for money because it was the surest way to support themselves.

In other words, the typical [underage sex worker]…is not a tween girl, has not been sold into sexual slavery, and is not held captive by a pimp.  Nearly all the boys and girls involved in the city’s sex trade are going it alone.  [Curtis and Dank] were…completely unprepared for the way law-enforcement officials and child-advocacy groups reacted… “I remember going to a meeting in Manhattan where they had a lot of prosecutors there whose job was to prosecute pimps,” Curtis recalls.  ”They were sort of complaining…that their offices were very well staffed but their workload was — not very daunting, let’s say.  They had a couple cases, and at every meeting you go to, they’d pull out the cherry-picked case of this pimp they had busted, and they’d tell the same story at every meeting.  They too were bothered by the fact that they couldn’t find any pimps, any girls.  So I come along and say, ‘I found 300 kids’ — they’re all perky — but then I say, ‘I’m sorry, but only 10 percent had pimps.’  It was like a fart in church.  Because basically I was saying their office was a waste of time and money.”

As Curtis explained, law enforcement “authorities” were very unhappy with the results of his study, which is why they have been buried (you won’t find them on any official website dealing with the subject of prostitution).  As Maier’s Law states, “If the facts do not conform to the theory, they must be disposed of”; the DoJ therefore immediately ditched Curtis in favor of his younger, hungrier and less-principled assistant Dank, who was obviously instructed to do another study which would find what the DoJ wanted found - that pimps run the whole show - so as to shore up “sex trafficking” mythology and justify the vast expenditures and rampant civil liberties violations of the War on Whores.  Since interviewing real sex workers would merely find the truth again, they were largely avoided except for an easily-manipulated handful in prison.  Since the John Jay study couldn’t find any pimps in the actual environment where sex work takes place, Dank instead just interviewed people the “authorities” had already decided were pimps.  And since interviewees might still tell some truth despite incentives to the contrary, the fantasies of cops and prosecutors were included to balance that.

To ensure that the “researchers” stayed on-message, the report’s “recommendations” must have been dictated in advance:  they include “Cross-train drug, sex, and weapons trade investigators to better understand circuits and overlaps” (i.e. more money to cops); “Continue using federal and local partnerships to disrupt travel circuits and identify pimps” (i.e. justify illegal use of federal funds and manpower to enforce local prostitution laws); “Offer law enforcement trainings for both victim and offender interview techniques, including identifying signs of psychological manipulation” (i.e. teach cops to psychologically manipulate arrestees); “Impose more fines for ad host websites” (i.e. pressure the courts into giving politicians the power to censor the internet); and so on.  The result?  A Jenny Haniver, a methodological monstrosity cut and stitched and distorted to provide bogus “evidence” for a creature that exists only in the minds of prohibitionists:  a sex industry dominated by “pimps” and “trafficking gangs”.  When charlatans produce objects they claim to be mummified mermaids, chupacabra carcasses and yeti scalps, it’s the duty of skeptics to expose the scam.  And when the con artist is the government, and the goal destroying people’s lives rather than merely separating them from a few bucks, that duty is even more crucial.

• North Korean live-fire exercises have elicited a South Korean artillery fire response as tensions remain high after North Korea hinted over the weekend at new nuclear tests.
• An eight-year old South Carolina girl's effort to have the woolly mammoth named as the state fossil has been derailed by creationists in the State Senate.
• US Secretary of State John Kerry met in Paris with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov over the weekend, looking for a diplomatic solution in Ukraine.
• As the number of new Ebola virus cases reaches 78 in Guinea, two cases have now been reported in neighboring Liberia as West Africa deals with the worst Ebola outbreak in seven years.
• Netflix users on Verizon and AT&T continue to suffer from slow streaming speeds as negotiations between the companies have stalled.

This is dumb:

Ahead of a Swiss referendum on the country’s plan to buy 22 fighter jets from Sweden, a report raised concerns Sunday that a US-made communication system onboard could be used for spying.

According to a report in Swiss weekly Le Matin Dimanche, Swedish defense firm Saab last year brought in US company Rockwell Collins to replace Roschi Rohde & Schwartz of Switzerland, which had originally been contracted to build the communications system.

While the Swiss would still be making their own encryption keys, the physical box and the software inside would be American made, according to the report.

Several experts quoted by the paper cautioned that the US company could potentially build a “backdoor” into the system, making it possible for US intelligence to see the information gathered during reconnaissance flights.

In case you’re wondering, the Swiss Air Force currently flies (between 9am and 5pm on weekdays) Boeing F/A-18 Hornets, and Northrop F-5E Tiger IIs.

But more broadly, this is the kind of unpredictable second order effect that happens when national security establishments are allowed to expand their activities without sufficient forethought and monitoring by civilians and diplomats.  It’s dumb that NSA spying concerns might convince some Swiss citizens to vote against buying a Swedish fighter with American components to replace their American fighter with American components.  But it’s not exactly surprising that people around the world will resent the perception that US intelligence agencies are collecting massive amounts of data about their lives, and act (even in small ways) upon that resentment.

Spring is “on” with a vengeance here in the Pacific Nor’west.  The rain amounts are almost phenomenally high and everything is turing a lush green even if the trees are mostly hesitant to leaf out.   But the rough rose bushes are beginning to show green, and the hummingbirds are a-hunt.  And among the first blossoms here?  The flowering quince!  And there is the green-gilded bird, taking a sip of nectar!

They still hit the nectar saucers hung outside both the normal house and the small Haven as well.  I’m glad some flowers are opening to supplement my feeding, as that nectar needs to last a week now.  We are to the big tear-up in the kitchen, with new cabinets to emplace alongside older ones being re-faced, and a countertop to tear out and replace.  So the sink will be out of commission for a few days!   So the hummingbirds have their nectar, and I am coffee’ing up for a busy day!  Both the tiny bird and I will share the title of the post: it will be fast and I will be furiously engaged!

I wish I could say my title was related to ballet and dancing hooved creatures in the wood.  But no, the world has other rites of spring — sabre rattling, war-games and such provocations.  The last news I heard last night was of the two Koreas trading artillery fire over water.  So, in the greening of the year, after a long cold winter — thoughts turn to vehicles churning the mud amidst chaos and death?  Not my idea of how to begin an April Fools joke — though there certainly is no shortage of fools, in April or any other time.

I’m sure that crazy fat little fool in North Korea thinks a war makes a great unifying distraction for his propagandized and nigh starving people.  In truth, he has no damned idea; and the thought of such misery being unleashed again just undoes me.  Because war is never really over for those who fight it.  The costs go on for lifetimes, the bodies and minds of the young men and women usually sent to war by old men (thank you Cheney, you son of a bitch), carry the load alone for the rest of their lives.  And all the “support the troops” rhetoric means nothing when they come back broken.

Oddly, it is the Democrats who end up trying to help them — Obama has increased the VA budget by 60%; and yet vets think he is a lousy leader compared to Bush — who sent them TO the war that wasted their blood, their time, their youth and America’s wealth.  But yes, it is spring and thoughts of “statemen” — like that maniac in Korea and the ambitious one in Russia — turn to war.  I’d prefer ballet in the woods, thanks.  And raindrops on roses, and fresh spring leaves — but more teardrops seems to be what we all will get.

Some of you know my real name, some of you don’t. Today was a true milestone for me. One of my stories not only won an award, but has been published in a non-erotica anthology, and I appear there under my real name.

The Trouble With Parallel Universes is the first anthology published under the new, vibrant Fincham Press imprint. This collection features new writing from the University of Roehampton’s English and Creative Writing Department.

It is edited by the fabulous, witty, smart and very sexy Leone Ross.

She’s an amazing, sensitive and creative editor and if you’re looking for literary editing services; I believe she does some freelance work. Also, she writes horror, sci-fi and erotica herself, so if you’re an erotica writer in need of a UK editor,  drop her a line. She doesn’t flinch at the explicit passages.

When I became more interested in political blogs and began reading them on a regular basis, I was shocked to learn to the movie “300,” which I really like, was considered something of a joke in liberal circles. I’ve never quite gotten a handle on why. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that it has a sizable conservative fan base (something else I didn’t know anything about).

I bring this up because our own Left_Wing_Fox asks some very thought-provoking questions in my last thread about “The Incredibles.”

I think there might be a purity issue complicating things. Is it important if the media we enjoy match our image of ourselves as good people? Are boycotts the necessary way to eliminate negative messages from our culture? Are we exposed to peer pressure to dislike things because of the negative elements? Do we need to opinions of others to validate our tastes?

Honestly, it never occurred to me to stop liking “300.” (Because it’s great-looking, really…amazing-looking. It looks like it was filmed on a soundstage– it’s simultaneously old-fashioned and modernly comic-booky. Because it’s a straightforward tale of very kooky-brave people standing up for themselves. Because it’s just fun. Because I loved the imagery of the Oracle flailing around in the moonlight.) But I’ll be honest: finding out it was considered something of a joke in some circles did give me pause. But then I hit “play” again. I don’t let other people pick what gives me pleasure (no matter where they are on the political spectrum)–I pick these things for myself.

UPDATE: In the comments…

“I generally enjoy bspencer’s writing here, but I actually debated if this post was meant as an April Fool’s trolling sort of thing. Perhaps it was, but taking it at face value this entry reads like it was written by a bright but totally naive 14 y/o, who doesn’t yet have any comprehension of symbolism or metaphor.”

“Again, that’s fine, but that makes you–genuinely no offense intended–an uninformed viewer, and probably in the minority. Doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy 300. But characterizing it as a tale of kooky wunderkinder fighting The Man is incorrect and ignorant.”

I haven’t seen “300″ in years. It’s entirely possible that I could rewatch it now and find it troubling. The first time I watched “Avatar” I was so bowled over by the special effects and just the feel of the film of that I didn’t recognize it had its share of troubling aspects. The film was personal to me because interstellar travel, the prospect of finding alien life is something of an obsession of mine. Similarly, the look of “300″ felt spectacularly personal. To be frank, it reminded me of my art. So what I took away from the film was not “Iranians suck” but “I want to immerse myself in that sepia-toned world.”

I expected to take a little ribbing for liking “300.” Didn’t expect this.

An open letter to conservatives

March 22, 2010, 3:16PM

Dear Conservative Americans,

The years have not been kind to you. I grew up in a profoundly Republican home, so I can remember when you wore a very different face than the one we see now.  You've lost me and you've lost most of America.  Because I believe having responsible choices is important to democracy, I'd like to give you some advice and an invitation.

First, the invitation:  Come back to us.

Now the advice.  You're going to have to come up with a platform that isn't built on a foundation of cowardice: fear of people with colors, religions, cultures and sex lives that differ from your own; fear of reform in banking, health care, energy; fantasy fears of America being transformed into an Islamic nation, into social/commun/fasc-ism, into a disarmed populace put in internment camps; and more.  But you have work to do even before you take on that task.

Your party -- the GOP -- and the conservative end of the American political spectrum have become irresponsible and irrational.  Worse, it's tolerating, promoting and celebrating prejudice and hatred.  Let me provide some examples -- by no means an exhaustive list -- of where the Right as gotten itself stuck in a swamp of hypocrisy, hyperbole, historical inaccuracy and hatred.

If you're going to regain your stature as a party of rational, responsible people, you'll have to start by draining this swamp:

Hypocrisy

You can't flip out -- and threaten impeachment - when Dems use a parliamentary procedure (deem and pass) that you used repeatedly (more than 35 times in just one session and more than 100 times in all!), that's centuries old and which the courts have supported. Especially when your leaders admit it all.

You can't vote and scream against the stimulus package and then take credit for the good it's done in your own district (happily handing out enormous checks representing money that you voted against, is especially ugly) --  114 of you (at last count) did just that -- and it's even worse when you secretly beg for more.

You can't fight against your own ideas just because the Dem president endorses your proposal.

You can't call for a pay-as-you-go policy, and then vote against your own ideas.

Are they "unlawful enemy combatants" or are they "prisoners of war" at Gitmo? You can't have it both ways.

You can't carry on about the evils of government spending when your family has accepted more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts.

You can't refuse to go to a scheduled meeting, to which you were invited, and then blame the Dems because they didn't meet with you.

You can't rail against using teleprompters while using teleprompters. Repeatedly.

You can't rail against the bank bailouts when you supported them as they were happening.

You can't be for immigration reform, then against it .

You can't enjoy socialized medicine while condemning it.

You can't flip out when the black president puts his feet on the presidential desk when you were silent about white presidents doing the same.  Bush.  Ford.

You can't complain that the president hasn't closed Gitmo yet when you've campaigned to keep Gitmo open.

You can't flip out when the black president bows to foreign dignitaries, as appropriate for their culture, when you were silent when the white presidents did the same. Bush.  Nixon. Ike. You didn't even make a peep when Bush held hands and kissed (on the mouth) leaders of countries that are not on "kissing terms" with the US.

You can't complain that the undies bomber was read his Miranda rights under Obama when the shoe bomber was read his Miranda rights under Bush and you remained silent.  (And, no, Newt -- the shoe bomber was not a US citizen either, so there is no difference.)

You can't attack the Dem president for not personally* publicly condemning a terrorist event for 72 hours when you said nothing about the Rep president waiting 6 days in an eerily similar incident (and, even then, he didn't issue any condemnation).  *Obama administration did the day of the event.

You can't throw a hissy fit, sound alarms and cry that Obama freed Gitmo prisoners who later helped plan the Christmas Day undie bombing, when -- in fact -- only one former Gitmo detainee, released by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, helped to plan the failed attack.

You can't condemn blaming the Republican president for an attempted terror attack on his watch, then blame the Dem president for an attempted terror attack on his.

You can't mount a boycott against singers who say they're ashamed of the president for starting a war, but remain silent when another singer says he's ashamed of the president and falsely calls him a Maoist who makes him want to throw up and says he ought to be in jail.

You can't cry that the health care bill is too long, then cry that it's too short.

You can't support the individual mandate for health insurance, then call it unconstitutional when Dems propose it and campaign against your own ideas.

You can't demand television coverage, then whine about it when you get it.  Repeatedly.

You can't praise criminal trials in US courts for terror suspects under a Rep president, then call it "treasonous" under a Dem president.

You can't propose ideas to create jobs, and then work against them when the Dems put your ideas in a bill.

You can't be both pro-choice and anti-choice.

You can't damn someone for failing to pay $900 in taxes when you've paid nearly $20,000 in IRS fines.

You can't condemn criticizing the president when US troops are in harms way, then attack the president when US troops are in harms way , the only difference being the president's party affiliation (and, by the way, armed conflict does NOT remove our right and our duty as Americans to speak up).

You can't be both for cap-and-trade policy and against it.

You can't vote to block debate on a bill, then bemoan the lack of  'open debate'.

If you push anti-gay legislation and make anti-gay speeches, you should probably take a pass on having gay sex, regardless of whether it's 2004 or 2010.  This is true, too, if you're taking GOP money and giving anti-gay rants on CNN.  Taking right-wing money and GOP favors to write anti-gay stories for news sites while working as a gay prostitute, doubles down on both the hypocrisy and the prostitution.  This is especially true if you claim your anti-gay stand is God's stand, too.

When you chair the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, you can't send sexy emails to 16-year-old boys (illegal anyway, but you made it hypocritical as well).

You can't criticize Dems for not doing something you didn't do while you held power over the past 16 years, especially when the Dems have done more in one year than you did in 16.

You can't decry "name calling" when you've been the most consistent and outrageous at it. And the most vile.

You can't spend more than 40 years hating, cutting and trying to kill Medicare, and then pretend to be the defenders of Medicare

You can't praise the Congressional Budget Office when it's analysis produces numbers that fit your political agenda, then claim it's unreliable when it comes up with numbers that don't.

You can't vote for X under a Republican president, then vote against X under a Democratic president.  Either you support X or you don't. And it makes it worse when you change your position merely for the sake obstructionism.

You can't call a reconciliation out of bounds when you used it repeatedly.

You can't spend taxpayer money on ads against spending taxpayer money.

You can't condemn individual health insurance mandates in a Dem bill, when the mandates were your idea.

You can't demand everyone listen to the generals when they say what fits your agenda, and then ignore them when they don't.

You can't whine that it's unfair when people accuse you of exploiting racism for political gain, when your party's former leader admits you've been doing it for decades.

You can't portray yourself as fighting terrorists when you openly and passionately support terrorists.

You can't complain about a lack of bipartisanship when you've routinely obstructed for the sake of political gain -- threatening to filibuster at least 100 pieces of legislation in one session, far more than any other since the procedural tactic was invented -- and admitted it.  Some admissions are unintentional, others are made proudly. This is especially true when the bill is the result of decades of compromise between the two parties and is filled with your own ideas.

You can't question the loyalty of Department of Justice lawyers when you didn't object when your own Republican president appointed them.

You can't preach and try to legislate "Family Values" when you: take nude hot tub dips with teenagers (and pay them hush money); cheat on your wife with a secret lover and lie about it to the world; cheat with a staffer's wife (and pay them off with a new job); pay hookers for sex while wearing a diaper and cheating on your wife; or just enjoying an old fashioned non-kinky cheating on your wife; try to have gay sex in a public toilet; authorize the rape of children in Iraqi prisons to coerce their parents into providing information; seek, look at or have sex with children; replace a guy who cheats on his wife with a guy who cheats on his pregnant wife with his wife's mother;

Hyperbole

You really need to disassociate with those among you who:

• assert that people making a quarter-million dollars a year can barely make ends meet or that $1 million "isn't a lot of money";
• say that "Comrade" Obama is a "Bolshevik" who is "taking cues from Lenin";
• ignore the many times your buddies use a term that offends you and complain only when a Dem says it;
• liken political opponents to murderers, rapists, and "this Muslim guy" that "offed his wife's head" or call then "un-American";
• say Obama "wants his plan to fail...so that he can make the case for bank nationalization and vindicate his dream of a socialist economy";
• equate putting the good of the people ahead of your personal fortunes with terrorism;
• smear an entire major religion with the actions of a few fanatics;
• say that the president wants to "annihilate us";
• compare health care reform with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a Bolshevik plot the attack on 9/11,or reviving the ghosts of communist dictators (update: it's also not Armageddon);
• equate our disease-fighting stem cell research with "what the Nazis did";
• call a bill passed by the majority of both houses of Congress, by members of Congress each elected by a majority in their districts, an unconscionable abuse of power, a violation of the presidential oath or "the end of representative government";
• shout "baby killer" at a member of Congress on the floor of the House, especially one who so fought against abortion rights that he nearly killed health care reform (in fact, a little decorum, a little respect for our national institutions and the people and the values they represent, would be refreshing -- cut out the shouting, the swearing and the obscenities);
• prove your machismo by claiming your going to "crash a party" to which you're officially invited;
• claim that Obama is pushing America's "submission to Shariah";
• question the patriotism of people upholding cherished American values and the rule of law;
• claim the president is making us less safe without a hint of evidence;
• call a majority vote the "tyranny of the minority," even if you meant to call it tyranny of the majority -- it's democracy, not tyranny;
• call the president's support of a criminal trial for a terror suspect "treasonous" (especially when you supported the same thing when the president shared your party);
• call the Pope the anti-Christ;
• assert that the constitutionally mandated census is an attempt to enslave us;
• accuse opponents of being backed by Arab slave-drivers or of being drunk and suicidal;
• equate family planning with eugenics or Nazism;
• accuse the president of changing the missile defense program's logo to match his campaign logo and reflect what you say is his secret Muslim identity;
• accuse political opponents of being totalitarians, socialists, communists, fascists, Marxists;  terrorist sympathizers, McCarthy-like, Nazis or drug pushers; and
• advocate a traitorous act like secession, violent revolution , military coup or civil war (just so we're clear: sedition is a bad thing).

History

If you're going to use words like socialism, communism and fascism, you must have at least a basic understanding of what those words mean (hint: they're NOT synonymous!)

You can't cut a leading Founding Father out the history books because you've decided you don't like his ideas.

You cant repeatedly assert that the president refuses to say the word "terrorism" or say we're at war with terror when we have an awful lot of videotape showing him repeatedly assailing terrorism and using those exact words.

If you're going to invoke the names of historical figures, it does not serve you well to whitewash them. Especially this one.

You can't just pretend historical events didn't happen in an effort to make a political opponent look dishonest or to make your side look better. Especially these events. (And, no, repeating it doesn't make it better.)

You can't say things that are simply and demonstrably false: health care reform will not push people out of their private insurance and into a government-run program ; health care reform (which contains a good many of your ideas and very few from the Left) is a long way from "socialist utopia"; health care reform is not "reparations"; nor does health care reform create "death panels".

Hatred

You have to condemn those among you who:

• call members of Congress n*gger and f*ggot;
• elected leaders who say "I'm a proud racist";
• state that America has been built by white people;
• say that poor people are poor because they're rotten people, call them "parasitic garbage" or say they shouldn't be allowed to vote;
• call women bitches and prostitutes just because you don't like their politics     ( re - pea -ted - ly );
• assert that the women who are serving our nation in uniform are hookers;
• mock and celebrate the death of a grandmother because you disagree with her son's politics;
• declare that those who disagree with you are shown by that disagreement to be not just "Marxist radicals" but also monsters and a deadly disease killing the nation (this would fit in the hyperbole and history categories, too);
• joke about blindness;
• advocate euthanizing the wife of your political opponent;
• taunt people with incurable, life-threatening diseases -- especially if you do it on a syndicated broadcast;
• equate gay love with bestiality -- involving  horses or dogs or turtles or ducks -- or polygamy, child molestation, pedophilia;
• casually assume that only white males look "like a real American";
• assert presidential power to authorize torture,  torture a child by having his testicles crushed in front of his parents to get them to talk, order the massacre of a civilian village  and launch a nuclear attack without the consent of Congress;
• attack children whose mothers have died;
• call people racists without producing a shred of evidence that they've said or done something that would even smell like racism -- same for invoking racially charged "dog whistle" words (repeatedly);
• condemn the one thing that every major religion agrees on;
• complain that we no longer employ the tactics we once used to disenfranchise millions of Americans because of their race;
• blame the victims of natural disasters and terrorist attacks for their suffering and losses;
• celebrate violence , joke about violence, prepare for violence or use violent imagery, "fun" political violence, hints of violence, threats of violence (this one is rather explicit), suggestions of violence or  actual violence (and, really, suggesting anal rape with a hot piece of metal is beyond the pale); and
• incite insurrection telling people to get their guns ready for a "bloody battle" with the president of the United States.

Oh, and I'm not alone:  One of your most respected and decorated leaders agrees with me.

So, dear conservatives, get to work.  Drain the swamp of the conspiracy nuts, the bald-faced liars undeterred by demonstrable facts, the overt hypocrisy and the hatred.  Then offer us a calm, responsible, grownup agenda based on your values and your vision for America.  We may or may not agree with your values and vision, but we'll certainly welcome you back to the American mainstream withopen arms.  We need you.

(Anticipating your initial response:  No there is nothing that even comes close to this level of wingnuttery on the American Left.)

Written by Russell King

Update: removed the mouth kissing reference and tried to clean up spelling

Global warming makes feeding the world harder and more expensive, a United Nations scientific panel said.

A warmer world will push food prices higher, trigger "hotspots of hunger" among the world's poorest people, and put the crunch on Western delights like fine wine and robust coffee, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in a 32-volume report issued Monday.

"We're facing the specter of reduced yields in some of the key crops that feed humanity," panel chairman Rajendra Pachauri said in press conference releasing the report.

Even though heat and carbon dioxide are often considered good for plants, the overall effect of various aspects of man-made warming is that it will reduce food production compared to a world without global warming, the report said.

The last time the panel reported on the effects of warming in 2007, it said it was too early to tell whether climate change would increase or decrease food production, and many skeptics talked of a greening world. But in the past several years the scientific literature has been overwhelming in showing that climate change hurts food production, said Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution of Science and lead author of the climate report.

Before I could pull into the space in front of his hotel room, my brother opened the door to Room 4 carrying a black garbage bag. Inside was a change of shoes, t-shirts he’d found or borrowed, a couple of button-up shirts, dark socks, one pair of jeans, shorts. He was fidgety. He was slouching. He was forty-five.

In the years before he showed up in Lubbock, he wandered the streets of downtown Dallas near Fair Park. He hung out in abandoned apartment buildings, run-down hotels. He huddled in crack houses. He slept under bridges and a few nights on the air conditioning unit of a hotel. During those years, when I was in graduate school, I didn’t know if he was alive or not, but every few months, he’d call our father from a payphone.

The voice on the answering machine was my department secretary’s. She said my brother called sometime around noon. He was at that one-story blue hotel on Avenue Q. She said he was friendly. He made her laugh. He said to tell Dr. Talbot her ol’ brother was in town. I pulled the phone book from the drawer and looked up the number.

There are fifteen years between me and my half-brother, Rodney. When he was five, his mother gave birth to a girl who lived thirty minutes. He remembers our father holding him up to the window of her hospital room. Not long after that, she became addicted to pills. She drank. She left. After months, her car was found on the side of the road. Windows down, bottles in the floorboard, the seats soaked with rain.

Rodney told me that when he went out with his friends in high school, he’d get so drunk he’d forget curfew. He’d panic, jump on the trampoline in his friend’s backyard until he’d throw up, hoping that would steady him enough to drive his VW Bug back to our house on Eastbrook Drive. One night, as he stumbled through the back door, he only got a few steps before he rushed out, sick again. My father found the door open. He bolted it and made Rodney sleep outside. I would have been about two.

Rodney knew West Texas well. He played football at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas—two hours south of Lubbock—in the mid-seventies and left college three credits short of a degree. During his last year, he worked at a stereo store in town, making more than he knew he ever would as a football coach. By the time he was twenty-six, he had his own business in Roswell, Georgia and was twice named Samsung’s Rep of the Year. He entertained clients with hotel suites and Dom Perignon. He entertained himself with a red Porsche 911 that was often pulled over. Once a judge wiped his DUI record clean after Rodney wrote some Congressional candidate a check for ten thousand dollars. It went on that way for years. He bought his way in and out of trouble until that’s all he had.

The day he showed up in Lubbock, I drove him straight to my favorite bar. I sat on the stool next to him and watched his silhouette dissolve to shadow against the tint of the Texas sun. He fumbled his lighter and unraveled the last days of his life in pieces disassembling with each drink. Through the years, we’ve done lots of drinking together. One night in his kitchen, we drank everything in the house trading stories of the lives that neither of us had been around for, and the next morning, when his wife woke to find us still at it, she asked him what the hell we had to talk about all night. He told her, “We’re trying to figure out who we are.” I’ve always meant to tell him that no one has ever made anything clearer to me.

On the night before his wedding in 1976, his buddies took off his clothes and tied him to a telephone pole on Greenville Avenue, a high-traffic street in Dallas. He came to a few hours before he was supposed to be at the church and struggled through the ceremony. He was twenty-one. I was six. I was the flower girl.

One night when we came back from the bar, Rodney asked if I’d give him thirty bucks. When I said no, he picked up his black garbage bag and turned it over and shook it until all his shirts and socks and shorts fell to the floor. When he yelled I could go fuck myself, I ran to my closet and hid. After I didn’t hear him for a few minutes, I crept out in the living room and found the door wide open.

After a month, I told Rodney he couldn’t stay with me anymore. I gave him sixty bucks to get back to Dallas. He took a bottle of Windex to his Altima in the parking lot and tried to clean off the black marker graffiti etched onto his console. He loaned his car out almost every night—traded it for crack—but this was the first time it had come back vandalized. Once, I drove him to a dingy apartment complex to get it from some guy and waited nervously in my Jeep while Rodney disappeared behind a closed door and came out fifteen minutes later with the keys. Once, I paid fifty bucks to get his car out of the pound. Once, I found a note in my empty change jar with his hard-pressed letters: IOU 38 bucks. Another time I drove down Indiana Avenue in the gray rain on my way to teach my morning class and passed him walking down the sidewalk. I did a U in the middle lane and pulled alongside him and asked not where he’d been, but if he knew who had his car. He ducked into the passenger seat and sobbed into his hands while I drove to my building. We sat outside. The rain coming down.

While people called my brother Two-Fisted Talbot in college, I roller skated in the driveway behind our house. At some point, my father must have told me that Rodney was on a plane because I remember an afternoon when one flew overhead, how I skated to the alley waving my arms as big as I could calling his name, sure he could see me from the sky.

About two weeks after he had been living with me, Rodney got a job as a car salesman. One Friday, he showed me his commission check for three-hundred and twenty-eight dollars before he went out the door. I didn’t see him until two o’clock the next afternoon. The money was gone.

When our grandmother died in 2009, the family decided to let Rodney live in her house in Gainseville, Texas, until my Aunt received a phone call from the county court asking why he didn’t show up that morning. When she got to the house, she found the garage door and the back door open. Moving through the empty rooms, she saw trash cans crammed with beer cans and cigarette butts in makeshift ashtrays. Later, she’d describe the smell of sweetness and burning plastic. Going through his things, she found a crack pipe in the inside pocket of his only suit. He had skipped town after his third DUI within the month. No one knew he had already pawned our grandmother’s car. That gave him about nine-hundred dollars worth of disappearing.

In Lubbock, after he had been gone for a few days, Rodney called me one night to come pick him up at an apartment complex in a part of town I avoided. When I turned the corner, my lights found him sitting on the curb in a baseball cap that didn’t quite fit. On another night, I stood at the locked gates of that same complex yelling his name, the way I did in my driveway when I was four and saw a plane in the sky. After a while, a man who moved as if he were liquid came out and told me my brother was “in one of the stalls” with one of his ladies. I looked at him longer than I should have through the bars of the gate trying to accept what I knew. The closed doors of the complex weren’t apartments. They were crack dens. When I yelled again, the man put his head down and shook it. My brother was lost behind one of those doors. I yelled his name again. I might has well have been waving at a plane in the sky.

While Rodney was still in Dallas, my father once met him at an Exxon Station with a pair of shoes. He had noticed, the last time he saw him, that the soles were worn down. My brother had been walking on holes. But my father didn’t buy him a new pair of shoes. Instead, he had the soles of the old shoes redone. I wonder if there was supposed to be a lesson in that.

When we pulled out of the hotel parking lot the afternoon he showed up, he asked if we could stop somewhere and get a beer and catch up, as if he’d stopped by on his way through town on a business trip. But he had lost his business years ago.

At the bar, Rodney told me that the night before he’d been slumped on the floor of a hotel room and that the man he owed was outside yelling threats and banging on the door. He said it’s all he remembered about that night. But after his third drink, he told me he had been sitting there with a gun in his hand and that he couldn’t do it.

On one of our drinking nights, Rodney accused me of hiding behind words to avoid my life. “You’re always behind a book,” he said the words as if he were spitting them, “or behind your fancy words.” He said I changed the way I talked, that I sounded “all metropolitan.” No hint of my Texas drawl. He said he wondered where I had gone. I wonder the same about him. Even now.

On the rainy morning I sat outside my building with him, Rodney told me he’d drive my Jeep back home and pick me up when I was done with office hours. I didn’t see him for three days, and the next time I stepped into my Jeep, cigarette butts crowded the ashtray and the coins I kept in the cup holder, around twenty bucks worth, had been cleaned out.

Not long before she left him, Rodney’s wife described the way she’d wake up in the middle of the night to find the back door of their two-story home open. “It happens often,” she told me in the hush of the hallway during a family dinner. She described the unsettling—the house empty and open—nothing between her, their two kids, and the danger of the dark. There came a point every night when Rodney forgot everything but what was out there waiting for him. Abandoned rooms. When he’d come home, he could never remember leaving.

The last night Rodney and I spent together in Lubbock, I pulled into the 7-11 for gas. Before I could fill the tank, he ambled across the parking lot to the pay phone, where he dissolved into a shadow I could barely make out. He had explained to me that crack sellers were easy to find. All he had to do was drive down certain streets and he could spot someone within a few minutes. I imagine he was trying to get a hold of one of them. I called to him through the open passenger door. No one answered.

***

At parties in high school, I was always the drunkest. I spent the entire summer of my sixteenth year grounded because word got around about my drinking. In college, my nickname was Two-to-One Talbot. The last time I remember going out with my brother and his wife, we went to a bar where I climbed up on a stool to dance while the crowd raised their arms to me and cheered. When I got down, Rodney’s wife said, “You two are just alike.” The way she said it was sad.

I worry. I worry that every man who left me went because of the doors I open after too much wine. I have never owned much, and I’ve never stayed around long, and I never tell anyone I’m going. I, too, tremble a tendency toward chaos, and I fear I’m living a life based on third-drink decisions. I write myself as a drunk and disheveled woman because it’s the only way I know how to keep her at bay. So yes, I use words to avoid my life. But it’s the opposite of hiding.

Maybe all my brother and I have ever done is walk out of every door that has tried to hold us.

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• Forgetting Myself

MobyLives reports that British prisons have banned books sent as gifts, a right even allowed in notorious Guantanamo Bay. Many British authors have criticized the new policy—an online petition has collected more than 20,000 signatures. Even prison staff seem to think the policy is a bad idea. Prison Minister Jeremy Wright has defended the decision, saying the Incentives and Earned Privileges scheme allows prisoners to buy items, including books.

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