Sophianotloren

Be kind.  Be kind to yourselves and to each other because there are plenty of people who will be unkind.  Spend that extra afternoon with a friend who has had a hard year.  Listen.  Listen past people’s anger and find the root of their pain and then find compassion for that.  Or if their anger upsets you, walk away.  Know that their anger isn’t about you, it lives entirely within them as your anger lives within you.

Most of all, have compassion for yourself and know that there will be better days.

And if this hippie massive contributed to your feelings of depression, email me, I will make you cookies :-p

Mysteria Misc. Maxima is a weekly feature which brings together links on religion and esotericism from around the internet. Please enjoy this “best of” while I am on study break.

• Cleopatra’s devotion to Isis is helping archaeologists locate her tomb. They think the Egyptian queen may be buried at one of the Goddess’ holy sites. (National Geographic)
• Some rabbi’s are consulting professional writers to inject their message with fail-proof humour during the high holy days, the so-called sweeps week of the Jewish year. (Jewish Daily Forward)
• Could polygamy be the issue that politically unites Pagans and Mormons?  John Crow says probably not, but its worth considering as the commonalities are there. (Religion in American History)
• Decreasing rates of church attendance are impacting the number of bowling alleys in America. In related news, God hates league night.  (USA Today)
• It’s long been thought that the more education you have, the less you need religion. However,  this recent study says otherwise. In fact, you’re more likely to have faith if you have a degree. (CNN)
• That Zen-inducing  quote you heard on the internet probably wasn’t from the Buddha. Here’s a break down of things Gautama never said—though people would like to believe he did. (Shambhala Sun)
• Jason Pitzl-Waters looks at “Invisible Christian Privilege” and how Christian ideals are ingrained in western society, despite complaints to the contrary. (The Wild Hunt)
• Should those with an occult-based spiritual practice describe what they do as magic when the term carries so much baggage? (Strategic Sorcery)
• If you plan on advancing to the Golden Dawn’s Zelator grade, you may want to brush up on your Hebrew. Specifically, this list. (Gleamings from the Golden Dawn)
• Finally, a cell phone ad which depicted Jesus offering “miraculous deals” has been pulled for being too “disrespectful.” What Would Jesus Do? Apparently not unlimited talk-and-text. (Huffington Post)

Photo by CGP Grey.

The phrase “No Homo” entered the cultural lexicon approximately 20 years ago.  Initially associated primarily with hip-hop culture, “no homo” is a linguistic method that allowed certain hip-hop artists to co-opt elements of gay culture while selectively “de-gaying” them at the same time (like Cam’ron’s penchant for pink or when DMX discusses other men fellating him to illustrate his status among peers).  It’s a phrase that enables heterosexual men to, perhaps, expand the recognizable boundaries of heterosexual masculinities by symbolically reinforcing the heterosexuality of those performances. Cultural critics couldn’t agree as to whether the phrase was helping to expand the available performative terrain of contemporary masculinity or if it was merely a new form of homophobia and sexual prejudice. Some of the men in my own research used the phrase.  But beyond that, my research suggests that “no homo” is part of a larger transformation in masculine identities among young heterosexual men today whereby some young men endeavor to expand the culturally intelligible boundaries of heterosexual masculinities.

In my article, “A Very ‘Gay’ Straight?: Hybrid Masculinities, Sexual Aesthetics, and the Changing Relationship between Masculinity and Homophobia,” I examine an odd practice. Heterosexual-identified men in each of the three groups I ethnographically studied over two years described aspects of themselves as “gay.”  Beyond this, however, they did this in such a way that it was clear that they hoped to garner status as heterosexual from the practice.  These men attempted to capitalize on what I call the “aesthetic” elements of gay culture in ways that accessorized—but did not fundamentally challenge—their heterosexual identities or systems of gendered and sexualized power and inequality.

My study compares the gender performances and politics of three very different groups of men: a profeminist men’s group, an anti-feminist fathers’ rights activist group, and a group of male bar regulars.  I was interested in varying both commitments to gender political positions as well as levels of reflexivity about gender inequality.  So, both profeminists and fathers’ rights advocates are extremely reflexive about gender inequality (while my bar regulars were much less so), but they had dramatically different understandings of what “gender inequality” actually meant.  Not all of the men in my study engaged in this practice, but men in each of these groups selectively “queered” elements of their heterosexual identities in similar ways, and—I argue—with similar consequences.

I argue that this practice is part of a larger process of hybridization through which contemporary young, white, straight men are incorporating elements of marginalized Others (non-white masculinities, gay masculinities, lower-class masculinities, and sometimes, femininities too) in ways that have shifted the look and feel of some contemporary performances of masculinity.  Yet, whether straight men’s willingness to “borrow” elements of marginalized Others is symptomatic of a move toward greater levels of gender and sexual equality is a very different question.

My findings indicate that heterosexual men’s classification of aspects of themselves as “gay” is better understood as perpetuating or obscuring systems of power and inequality in new ways than as challenging them.  The practice ends up shoring up heterosexual masculinities, privilege, and inequality in a few different ways.  First, reifying these elements of gay culture as “gay” plays a critical role in perpetuating beliefs in the pre-social nature of sexuality, symbolically solidifying boundaries between gay and straight men.  Second, the practice enabled these men to discursively distance themselves from specific configurations of culturally dominant masculinities, but not necessarily the privileges associated with them.  Third, the practice implicitly softens more authentic claims to sexual inequality.  By claiming that “gay guys… are just more fun,” these men co-opt elements of gay masculinities and culture in ways that obfuscate their position in the gender and sexual hierarchy, but do little to challenge the existence of such hierarchies.

By Tristan Bridges on his article, “A very ‘gay’ straight?: Hybrid masculinities, sexual aesthetics, and the changing relationship between masculinity and homophobia,” available through Gender & Society‘s OnlineFirst.

In the previous post I told about the 16 kbps data stream on FM broadcast frequencies, and my suspicion that it's being used by the bus and tram stop display system here in Helsinki. Now it's time to find out the truth.

I had the opportunity to observe a display stuck in the middle of its bootup sequence, displaying a version string. This revealed that the system is called IBus and it's made by the Swedish company Axentia. Sure enough, their website talks about DARC and how it requires no return channel, making it possible to use battery-powered displays in remote areas.

Not much else is said about the system, though; there are no specs for the proprietary protocol. So I implemented the five-layer DARC protocol stack in Perl and was left with a stream of fully error-corrected packets on top of Layer 5, separated into hundreds of subchannels. Some of these contained human-readable ISO-8859-1 strings with names of terminal stations. They seemed like an easy starting point for reverse engineering.

Here's one such packet after dissection:

Each display seems to store in its memory a list of buses that can be expected to pass the stop, along with their destinations in both official languages. The above "bus & destination packets" are used to update the memory. This is done once a day for each display on a narrow-band subchannel, so that updating all the displays takes the whole day. The mapping of the bus stop ID to actual bus stops is not straightforward, and had to be guessed from the lists of buses, on a case-by-case basis.

A different kind of packet updates the remaining waiting time for each bus in minutes. This "minutes packet" is sent three times per minute for every display in the system.

These packets may contain waiting times for several displays using the same subchannel; the "bus & destination packet" contains an address to the correct minutes slot. (The subchannel address is signaled on a lower protocol layer.) A special flag is used to signify an unused slot; another flag indicates that the bus has no working GPS and that the time is an approximation based on timetables. This causes a tilde "~" to appear before the minutes field. This means all calculation is done centrally and the displays only show numbers they hear on the radio.

There's also an announcement packet that's used to sent text messages to the displays. Often these will be about traffic disruptions and diverted routes. It's up to the displays to decide how to display the message; in the low-end battery-powered ones, the actual minutes function is (annoyingly) blanked for the duration of the slowly scrolling message.

I have yet to figure out the meaning of some packet types with non-changing data.

A special subchannel contains test packets with messages such as "Tämä on Mono-Axentia-testiä... Toimiiko tää ees..." and "Määritykset ja tiedotteet tehty vain Monolla - ei mitään IBus:lla" suggesting that they're planning to migrate from IBus to something called Mono. Interestingly, there's also a repeating test message in German – "Bus 61 nach Flughafen aus Haltestelle 1".

What good is it, you ask? Well, who wouldn't want a personal display repeater at home, telling when it's time to go?

Recently I’ve read some interesting posts about how topping from the bottom isn’t necessarily a bad thing and how the idea that it is can go horribly wrong. Those posts reminded me of another post I read ages ago about how the phrase “topping from the bottom” doesn’t really mean anything.

So that we’re all on the same page, “topping from the bottom” can be used to mean anything from “my submissive deliberately breaks rules to manipulate me into punishing him” to “my submissive asked me to hit him somewhere else because that spot was getting sore”. It generally implies that the bottom is somehow overstepping his bounds and trying to make the top behave a certain way.

I’ve been pretty attached to that term because I thought (wrongly, as it turns out), that people were generally using it in the “submissive trying to manipulate the dominant” sense, not the “how dare a lowly submissive request anything” sense. In the manipulative or pushy sense, it describes a problem I’ve run into myself and that I think a lot of straight dominant women have run into thanks to the way male entitlement can screw up otherwise fun power dynamics.

However, as important as I believe it is to talk about how power dynamics outside of your relationships affect the power dynamics inside of your relationships, I don’t think “topping from the bottom” is the way to do that. Just like the terms “submissive” or “slave” are so subjective that it’s useless to say you’re looking for a “submissive” without defining what exactly you man, saying someone is “topping from the bottom” hardly tells me anything about what’s actually going wrong.

Even in the most narrowly defined “we have a punishment dynamic and my sub deliberately misbehaves so I’ll feel obligated to punish him” sense of topping from the bottom, there are still so many different things that could actually be wrong. Maybe the sub thought that misbehaving a little was a playful way to ask for a scene and didn’t know the top disliked it. Maybe the sub felt neglected and thought that misbehaving was the only way to get their top’s attention. Maybe the sub was afraid that their top would be bored by perfect obedience and leave them. Like Ferns says in her post, labeling a problem “topping from the bottom” doesn’t help you solve it. To do that, you need to talk about why you’re unhappy with a specific behavior and figure out why the sub is doing it.

Aside from the issue of whatever behavior you call “topping from the bottom” being a symptom, not a root cause, it’s become so broadly defined that it’s kind of useless. The idea that it’s topping from the bottom for a submissive to make a request is just ridiculous. I want to know what my submissive wants! Maybe I’ll give it to him and maybe I won’t, but I can’t make that decision if he withholds information because he’s afraid that I’ll get mad and say he’s topping from the bottom.

By calling anything and everything “topping from the bottom”, we’re setting submissives up to be unhappy and unfulfilled, if not outright harmed. Dominant types are not mind-readers, we can’t fulfill our submissives’ needs unless they tell us what those needs are. Even in the best case scenario, telling submissive people that they can’t express preferences or make requests means that their doms have to flail around hoping they’ll stumble over what their submissives need to be happy. In the worst case, it sets submissive people up to tolerate abuse because they’re afraid that standing up for their own needs in any way means they’re bad subs.

As much as I’d like the phrase “topping from the bottom” to mean something, it just doesn’t. It’s time to let it die.

In 2008 I pointed out that the TSA's pseudo-scientific "behavior detection" program seemed almost indistinguishable from random chance. Five years and millions of gropes-by-government-agents later, the General Accounting Office agrees:

The program called Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) trains TSA officers to identify suspicious behavior that could reveal a terrorist. While it has been criticized for years for alleged racial profiling, TSA officials say it is a key part of screening airline passengers.

The Government Accountability Office reviewed 400 studies over 60 years that found people are only slightly better than chance at spotting deceptive behavior. And a Department of Homeland Security study in April 2011 intended to validate the program was unable to demonstrate its effectiveness because of unreliable data, according to the new GAO report.

The program has cost a billion dollars. The TSA can't demonstrate that it works using accepted scientific means. The TSA's reaction is unsurprising: "yeah, well, our other methods are even worse:"

Behavior Detection Officers also operate a program called Managed Inclusion which evaluates passengers at the checkpoints and allows some to enter the faster Pre-Check lanes.

"Defunding the program is not the answer," Pistole said. "There would be fewer passengers going through expedited screening, there would be increased pat downs, there would be longer lines, and more frustration by the traveling public."

Or, put another way, a piece of shit is better than no piece of anything:

The union representing TSA officers defended the program.

"An imperfect deterrent to terrorist attacks is better than no deterrent at all, " said American Federation of Government Employees National President David Cox, speaking in a conference call after the hearing. "Is it a perfect program? No, but until we have a better program, we shouldn't just trash and burn this program."

That's so sciency! "Well, I can't prove this hypothesis. But until I come up with a better hypothesis, I think we should stick with this one."

Meanwhile, in Texas . . .

. . . did you just say "aw, shit, this is gonna be awful, because it's Texas?" Perhaps you did. Perhaps you are not completely unjustified in leaping to that conclusion. But you're wrong. Texas, it turns out, passed an innovative law to allow prisoners to attack convictions premised on discredited junk science spouted by prosecution "experts." Last week, using that law, a Texas court overturned the convictions of four women caught up in the "ritualized child abuse" scare of the 1980s and 1990s:

Indeed, at the original trial of the San Antonio Four, a pediatrician testified that the victims exhibited physical signs of sexual abuse. This expert testimony provided the prosecution with much needed corroboration of the two girls' stories. Such medical testimony, however, has now been debunked by new understandings in the field of pediatrics. If the two girls had been physically examined using today's standards, the medical testimony would no longer corroborate the allegations of sexual abuse.

Like many of the defendants in ritualized-abuse cases, the San Antonio Four faced bizarre and fanciful claims that should have triggered skepticism — had not "think of the children!" drowned out all critical thought. Like many such defendants, junk science and bizarre and facially questionable allegations combined with innate identity-based hostility:

A witness for the prosecution, pediatrician Nancy Kellogg, testified that the two young girls’ injuries were used in satanic rituals prevalent among lesbians.

I don't claim to be a scientist. I'm functionally scientifically illiterate. But I know enough to understand that science is about questioning and proving, and that when it's the government that shows up with the snake oil, we too often accept it without scrutiny. That may be because the government usually packages junk science with fear.

Dispatches From The Junk Science Front © 2007-2013 by the authors of Popehat. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Using this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. No scraping.

In 1987, the Beastie Boys wrote this:

Girls – to do the dishes
Girls – to clean up my room
Girls – to do the laundry
Girls – and in the bathroom
Girls, that's all I really want is girls
Two at a time I want girls
With new wave hairdos I want girls
I ought to whip out my girls, girls, girls, girls, girls!

That's a rare instance where a reference to new wave hairdos isn't the most embarrassing part of the lyric.

A company called Goldieblox, which sells toys designed to get girls designing and building rather than princessing and preparing to be drunkenly pawed by oafs, did a parody cover as part of an advertisement:

Girls to build the spaceship,
Girls to code the new app,
Girls to grow up knowing
That they can engineer that.
Girls. That’s all we really need is
Girls.To bring us up to speed it’s
Girls.Our opportunity is
Girls.Don’t underestimate Girls.

Compare the videos here.

Goldieblox claimed that the Beastie Boys cried copyright infringement and threatened action. So Goldieblox sized the initiative and sued for declaratory relief, seeking a declaration of non-infringement in federal court in San Francisco. Seizing the initiative like that is often an effective tactic. Goldieblox isn't playing around; they are represented by giganto-firm Orrick.

The Beastie Boys are playing wounded innocence:

Like many of the millions of people who have seen your toy commercial “GoldieBlox, Rube Goldberg & the Beastie Boys,” we were very impressed by the creativity and the message behind your ad.

We strongly support empowering young girls, breaking down gender stereotypes and igniting a passion for technology and engineering.

As creative as it is, make no mistake, your video is an advertisement that is designed to sell a product, and long ago, we made a conscious decision not to permit our music and/or name to be used in product ads.

When we tried to simply ask how and why our song “Girls” had been used in your ad without our permission, YOU sued US.

Awwww. The Beastie Boys may be using this as a continuation of the "sorry for being douchebags" tour. Goldieblox may be using it for very clever pre-Black-Friday self-promotion. But the core issue is interesting.

The song is clearly a gleeful parody of the Beastie Boys' lyrics, which display typical and banal sexism. If someone did it to promote a nonprofit, or for art, or for fun, it would rather clearly be protected as fair use. It only uses part of the song, it transforms the song through parody, and it doesn't interfere with the market for the song. But this is a commercial use. Does that one factor outweigh the others? Not necessarily. In 1994, addressing 2 Live Crew's song "Pretty Woman" (a parody of Roy Orbison's song), the Supreme Court held that commercial vs. noncommercial use is just one of the fair use factors, and is not necessarily determinative.

It was error for the Court of Appeals to conclude that the commercial nature of 2 Live Crew's parody of "Oh, Pretty Woman" rendered it presumptively unfair. No such evidentiary presumption is available to address either the first factor, the character and purpose of the use, or the fourth, market harm, in determining whether a transformative use, such as parody, is a fair one.

Instead, the case may involve detailed inquiry into how much GoldieBlox's version departed from the Beastie Boys' version:

This is not, of course, to say that anyone who calls himself a parodist can skim the cream and get away scot free. In parody, as in news reporting, see Harper & Row, supra, context is everything, and the question of fairness asks what else the parodist did besides go to the heart of the original. It is significant that 2 Live Crew not only copied the first line of the original, but thereafter departed markedly from the Orbison lyrics for its own ends. 2 Live Crew not only copied the bass riffand repeated it, [n.19] but also produced otherwise distinctive sounds, interposing "scraper" noise, overlaying the music with solos in different keys, and altering the drum beat. See 754 F. Supp., at 1155. This is not a case, then, where "a substantial portion" of the parody itself is composed of a "verbatim" copying of the original. It is not, that is, a case where the parody is so insubstantial, as compared to the copying, that the third factor must be resolved as a matter of law against the parodists.

This will be a thoroughly entertaining fair use case to watch — if the Beastie Boys don't decide to find a graceful exit first.

Updated to add: GoldieBlox has taken down the parody ad, apologized (allegedly because they didn't realize that the late Adam Yauch had asked that Beastie Boys songs never be used to advertised), and said they will dismiss the lawsuit if the Beastie Boys agree not to sue. This doesn't determine the fair use question, but it does suggest to me that either (1) GoldieBlox and its lawyers never thought this through, or (2) it was all a publicity scam from the start. The fair use analysis aside, I think the Beastie Boys come out looking better in this dispute.

You Gotta Fight For Your Right To Parody © 2007-2013 by the authors of Popehat. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Using this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. No scraping.

Logging into the Facebook account, I spy a private message.

Hello,

We think that the readers of your blog would be interested in our site. We have developed and launched the first completely Free Auction site with all the functionality of the "Other Big Auction Sites". With one big difference, our site is 100% Free! Our mission statement sums it up pretty nicely.

"Our mission is to promote Legal Firearm Ownership, Strengthen the 2nd Amendment and promote Outdoor Recreation via a FREE Marketplace."

If you have questions, please drop me a line or give me a call. Thank you for your time and have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Regards,

Edward Eddins
Tactical Auction LLC.
Founder & CEO

Contact information and website link removed.

Could this be the solution to all our problems?

Mr. Eddins, we certainly believe in Second Amendment freedom, and our readers do as well. Are you proposing a sidebar link to the tactical auction page, or would you like to write a guest post about the bargains and benefits to be found in a free market for guns and tactical equipment?

I ask because a number of big game hunters frequent our site. We ourselves hunt. I have a particular problem with wild ponies in my area. The ponies break through my fence, run over my property, and … well, you'd shudder if I said what they do next. It's horrible.

What rifle would you recommend for a man who needs to kill a number of ponies, and kill them quickly? A prompt reply would be greatly appreciated.

Patrick

My savior!

Hello Patrick,

I was hoping for just a general introduction to your readers. Our site is like Gunbroker with one Big Difference. Its totally Free.

As for your Pony problem, I have only been to 2 places in the us where there was free range wild horses. In both places they were illegal to kill and protected.

As for killing a pony, any caliber of 270 and above with a good TSX round will do the job.

Take Care

This man may be useful.

Mr. Eddin, thank you for the advice about proper calibers and ammunitions.

As for the ponies, I am afraid they follow no law except their own – the law of the jungle. The savage, stinking jungle of the ponies! I must take the law into my own hands, if I am to survive.

Mark my words: The ponies must die, or I will die in the attempt.

Best wishes for the upcoming holidays,

Patrick

They Shoot Ponies, Don't They? © 2007-2013 by the authors of Popehat. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Using this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. No scraping.

Mr Cameron is targeting websites which show videos and images of rape – whether they claim they are ‘simulated’ or not.

The prime minister has previously attacked websites which show the material, saying: ‘These images normalise sexual violence against women – and they are quite simply poisonous to the young people who see them.’ (“Rape Porn,” Metro.co.uk)

My response:

Mr. Cameron: these sites do not normalize violence against women. If they normalized it, people wouldn’t find it erotic. It’s erotic because it’s transgressive, i.e. not normal. And if  you really cared about what is poisonous to young people, you’d reconsider issues of school fees and student loans. Because ignorance, Mr. Cameron, is far, far more poisonous to young people.

Fear and disgust are deeply wired mechanisms. Visceral reactions to the things we don’t like, things that scare us. I don’t deny anyone their right, as a human – as an organism – to react, to recoil, to turn away from the things in the world that trigger these reactions.

It’s the very common secondary knee-jerk reaction I object to: the equally almost instantaneous, equally mindless need to quash, kill, stifle, smother or ban the object of disgust or fear. And I object to a media that almost wholly validates this secondary reaction. They revel in it, they profit from it, they luxuriate in the serve and return of irrational spectacle that erupts from it.

I’ve spent many years, as a writer, creating stories that attempt to interrupt the mindless snowball that can result from that first reaction of disgust. I don’t want to make my readers like something they find disgusting. I just want to encourage them stop and consider what lies at the root of that fear or disgust, and consider what is really going on, in them, at the moment of that reaction. I try to do this as responsibly as possible, while still respecting that my readers are intelligent adults.  I know I am going to offend and lose some of them. I know that some are going to plunge unflinchingly forward. What really interests me are those readers on the edge of the fight or flight knife.

I wrote the short story “Click” for this purpose. I don’t ask my reader to see the protagonist in a sympathetic light, although some might. I don’t ask people to be turned on by the non-consensual sex in the story, although some will be. Others will be instinctively disturbed and disgusted by it. It’s not a story that romanticizes or eroticizes rape or excuses it. And I’d have to wonder at the ethics of anyone who doesn’t find the story at least a little difficult to read. It was certainly difficult to write.

All I wanted to do in that story is carve a moment of thought, a minute of silence and consideration, for the complexity of the chain of events and for the readers own instinctive, emotional reactions to them. No one in their right mind would excuse ‘Carl with a C’; he’s a rapist. He’s a miserable, fucked up man with a mountain of existential anger that makes him dangerous and cruel. But I did want to invite my reader to pause and consider how he got there. Not to forgive him, just to understand.

Let me be really honest: I don’t like ‘rape porn’. I don’t like porn much, period. I can see how, for many women and men, rape porn might trigger a visceral, instantaneous reaction of disgust. It might even trigger both arousal and disgust. But the fact is that this is NOT REAL. The actors are consenting, the sex is consensual. The ‘rape’ part of rape porn is a fiction. And in the very few instances where what is offered is a documentation of a real crime, there are plenty of existing laws to prosecute that.

I understand this, and still I don’t like it. I think visual rape porn is problematic. Unlike text, which requires the reader to actively construct the imagery in their minds and by its nature engages whatever filters the reader requires, still and moving images are mentally processed differently. Those filters and that active participation are not required in the same way.

And so… I don’t watch it.

Yup. That’s it. I. Don’t. Watch. It.

Simple as that.

No need to make laws. No need to ban it.

If you don’t like it, don’t watch it.

If you do watch it and are shocked or disgusted or offended. Please feel free to be, and pledge never to watch it again. You don’t need to go that extra step and ban it just because you have a visceral reaction to it. Your urge to ‘keep the world safe from it’ is not a rational one; it’s a product of your very valid, very unreasoned visceral reaction. Yes, yes, I know it may FEEL like you need to stop the rest of the world from seeing it. But you don’t.

And just before you grope for another justification to ensure the thing that just disgusted you is never seen again by anyone, I’d like to remind you that there are a lot of heterosexuals who have this exact same reaction to homosexual sex.  And no, I’m not equating gay porn with rape porn. I’m simply pointing out the problem. Our visceral knee-jerk reactions of disgust are uncontrollable. How we act upon them IS controllable, and we should act based on real threat, not imagined threat.

There is no significant data to argue that porn of any sort causes rape. There is, however, significant evidence that fictive, eroticized rape serves as a metaphor for a host of very complex psycho-sexual issues. I’ve got a post coming on that.

Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go.  -  Victor Hugo

Today in the United States is Thanksgiving Day, a day specifically set aside to be thankful for what one has.  One would hardly know it nowadays; as with nearly every other American holiday, it is thought of more for the way it is celebrated than for the ideas it was established to commemorate.  And so Independence Day has become a day to barbecue, impossible to distinguish from Memorial Day and Labor Day except for the presence of fireworks; New Year’s Day and Halloween are days to get drunk; Christmas is the day one gives gifts for which one has shopped for over a month, and Thanksgiving is merely an excuse for eating like a pig before rushing out the next day (or even that night) to join a mob which will trample children, old people and store employees in an idiotic quest for a few bargains the merchants take a loss on so as to drag the hordes into their facilities.  Even the word is vanishing from the calendar; chain stores put up their Christmas decorations on the Day of the Dead, Thanksgiving week is called “Black Friday Week“, and even the day itself is eclipsed by the traditional entree served at the feast, so the Philistines all go about belching “Happy Turkey Day!” at one another.  Ugh.  Please, American readers, allow me to repeat the advice I’ve given y’all for the past two years:  “celebrate this day…with those you love, giving thanks for what you have rather than just stuffing your face and planning to buy more tomorrow.”  And though my readers outside the US don’t officially celebrate this as a holiday, I wish all of you peace, prosperity and good fortune as well.  Blessed Be!

The holidays are a glorious time of shiny baubles and delicious food and sepia memories — unless, of course, your life is even a tiny bit complicated, in which case there’s a 97% chance that the mere idea of the next month of celebrations makes you want never, ever to get out of bed.

Some of us have messy families or Republican uncles. Others, particularly survivors of violence and members of marginalized groups, face depression and unsafe gatherings. Luckily, there’s a lot of really good advice on the internet. Here’s some of the best advice we’ve found online for surviving the holidays. Add your own suggestions in the comments to support feminist in need of some help this season.

(Note: Internet advice is great, but sometimes it isn’t enough. If you need immediate help, I urge you to call into a hotline rather than turn to my WordPress-constructed guide.)

If you don’t have a place to go for the holidays…

…but are up for throwing yourself a party, here are some fun, cheap(er) recipes and a list of immediately available holiday movies.

If you’ve got plans and are worried about dinner table political debates…

…and you couldn’t be paid to utter the words “health care” around your family, Jill Filipovic has some suggestions for dodging heated conversations.

…and you want to finally convince your bigoted cousin that he’s wrong, then may the force be with you! Sometimes you’ve got to stand up for your beliefs and embrace the awkwardness. If the conflict falls along traditional party lines, check out the Dem’s guide to arguing with your Republican uncle. RH Reality Check published a great Planned Parenthood break-down of how to talk about repro justice over turkey (or tofurkey), including some sample answers to common questions. You can also use your family’s own traditions against them by pointing out the feminist messages within their cherished holiday stories.

For a family insensitive — or downright hostile — to indigenous rights and history, bring along one of these children’s books. Pass it off to a relative to read to a little niece or nephew and educate two generations at once. You can also use a video to start a conversation, on your own terms, about the bloody history of colonialism and genocide erased by the cheery Thanksgiving story.

Photo: Tanie Laramie

…stand up for yourself. Help out preparing the meal or cleaning up because it’s the nice thing for anyone of any gender to do, but, as this feminist Thanksgiving guide insists, tell your uncle to get off his butt and help, too.

…meet people where they are. When I turned to Feministing writers for advice, Juliana reminded me to keep in mind the context from which each person comes, and Suzanna stressed the importance of recognizing what gets lost in (literal) translation when not everyone at the table speaks the same language. Plus, as a reflection at the Feminist Legal Theory blog from UC Davis Law School points out, you have to consider whether your family is so stuck in its old ways that your efforts will do more harm than good to your own health and happiness.

If you’re anxious about travel…

… you have options. Check out this guide if you’re traveling while trans. If you need special accommodations, check out these tips on air travel and other forms of transportation. xoJane has a good list of coping mechanisms for travel anxiety, and you can of course always call into a hotline to talk you through your anxiety. Me? I like to make lists of what I’m worried about, think over each item, and then cross them out.

If you don’t feel safe at the celebration…

…you don’t have to go. As this guide for adult survivors of child abuse explains, this is a time when it’s really, really ok to lie. Pretend you’re sick, don’t answer your phone, and take care of yourself. Lori’s colleagues passed around a guide to the holidays that encouraged everyone to make the decision to spend holidays with their family of choice, rather than going home, if they know it won’t be good for them.

…but you’ve decided to anyway, make sure to practice self-care. The holidays are hard, really, for more reasons than we could possibly address. Our library is far from comprehensive, but here are some of our favorite resources (and please suggest more in the comments):

• The guide I mentioned above about getting through the holidays as an adult survivor of child abuse is powerful and insightful — and it’s insistence on self-care makes it a helpful read for anyone.
• Turn to Spectra Speaks for their advice to queer people of color.
• A few years back Radically Queer published a guide to surviving the holidays as a queer person.
• Autostraddle has some advice for bringing home your same-sex partner for the holidays.
• There isn’t a ton of advice out there about navigating the holidays as a person with a disability, but Disabilities Unlimited has a few tips.
• If you’re trans, or love someone who is trans, sign up for the December Project and get ready for a friendly, supportive call!
• Listen to this short segment from NPR on relatives missing from the table — some deployed abroad, some deceased, some at work.

If you’re struggling with or recovering from an eating disorder…

… you’re far from alone. Melissa A. Fabello and other online activists will gather together under the #THX4SUPPORT hashtag on Thanksgiving, and six awesome feminists will be available to talk you through any feelings of negativity. Fabello also has a great vlog on how to support a friend or relative recovering from an eating disorder during the holiday season. The National Eating Disorders Association’s offers a holiday survival guide, and the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders’ phone and email help lines will be up on holidays.

If you’re looking for food or shelter this season…

… services are available. Options vary by location, but religious centers are always a good place to check and the National Coalition for the Homeless can point you toward local resources.

What resources do you find helpful during the holidays? Share below!

Alexandra Brodsky is sure he’s lovely, Grandma, but doesn’t need to meet that nice boy from shule.

On Sunday, the RNC tweeted “Today we remember Rosa Parks’ bold stand and her role in ending racism,” producing much-deserved mockery. Ann Althouse is OUTRAGED:

Can you see why this is worth scoffing at, other than that it’s a tweet from the Republican National Committee?

First, you have to be enough of a douchebag to act like you don’t see that “ending racism” is a process and that a person might have a role in that process even though that role didn’t go so far as to entirely complete the process.

The answer to what she thinks is a rhetorical question is that, of course, is that the idea that racism is a thing of the past that we once had to worry about but no longer have to is a very real and very pernicious feature of American political discourse and practice. And while yes, there are some cases (like the War on (Some Classes of People Who Use Some) Drugs) in which Both Sides in fact Do It, this lie is much more embedded within the Republican Party. The Supreme Court making up extraconstitutional limits on the congressional power to enforce the 15th Amendment because racism just isn’t the issue it used to be is a rather powerful example. And Republicans wanted the green light for a reason: to enact vote suppression measures that aren’t even nominally connected to imaginary “vote fraud” but are solely means of making it more difficult for African-Americans to vote. The embrace of vote suppression is an almost exclusively Republican phenomenon and the RNC’s tweet accurately reflects the ethos.

So there’s perfectly good reason why the RNC’s tweet attracted attention. The idea that racism ended permanently when a few heroic individuals who conservatives can now support decades after the fact in highly sanitized versions — so that the only remaining racism is liberal opposition to racism — is a fundamental principle of the contemporary Republican Party.

Marissa Alexander should never have been sentenced to jail for defending herself from an abusive husband by shooting at a wall, injuring nobody. She shouldn’t have to be retried. But at least she has been released on bond and was able to spend Thanksgiving with her family. It was the first time she had seen her family out of jail in three years.

Alexander had to pay $250,000 and will be under home arrest and wearing an ankle monitor until her trial on March 31st 2014.

Of course, Florida could just drop the charges but that would require that Angela Corey see Alexander for what she truly is: a victim and survivor of domestic abuser who dared to defend herself, not a criminal or an instigator of violence.

Melissa Harris Perry spoke her letter to Corey on her show this weekend.

Transcript

To the woman who put Marissa Alexander in jail

If you want to be a quasi-literate racist asshole, go right ahead. It's a free country. There are lots of quasi-literate racist assholes around and it's unlikely you will distinguish yourself. I trust the marketplace of ideas to assign appropriate social consequences to you and your business. I may or may not help distribute those social consequences depending on the degree to which you irritate me.

But when you start threatening to sue people for pointing out that you're a racist asshole, I feel that you are going out of your way to antagonize me. I feel that it's time to put on my cockroach-stomping boots.

You might have seen the coverage at Lowering the Bar or FindLaw or numerous other sites of a breathtakingly racist caricature in a purported law firm advertisement produced by a company called Definitive Television, the vehicle of one Jim DeBerry of DeBar Holdings Ltd. The advertisement features a man dressed up in an Asian-caricature costume using an Asian-caricature voice to recommend a law firm called McCutcheon & Hamner, PC in Alabama. The caricature is a character Definitive TV offers to its clients. Definitive TV is a little defensive about it right out of the gate:

IF YOU ARE ON A SENSITIVE WITCH HUNT OUR SUGGESTION IS TO FOCUS YOUR ATTENTION TO MURDERERS, DRUG DEALERS, CHILD MOLESTERS THAT LIVE NEAR BY YOU.

So touchy!

When Joe Patrice at Above the Law reported on this, two things happened. First, the law firm of McCutcheon & Hamner PC claimed that it had been "hacked" and that it did not approve the commercial. That may or may not be true. Second, Jim DeBerry wrote Above the Law and threatened to sue for suggesting that the advertisement is racist.

The threat is a masterful example of sub-literate drivel from a self-important tool who thinks he's learned law from ten minutes on Google, seven of which were spent looking at lolcats. There's the moronic "it's not racist under this dictionary definition I chose" rhetoric:

We object to the statements of racism, as we do not fit under the legal definition, which is, The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability that a particular race is superior to others. 2. Discrimination or prejudice based on race.

There's the bizarre use of commas, odd diction, and weird capitalization that suggest that Jim DeBerry just took a break from sending 419 scam emails:

Furthermore, upon your interview request, we have read MR. JOSEPH PATRICE article/blog

YOU MAY FIND IT ODD THAT I EMAIL YOU BUT I HAVE A BUSINESS PROPOSITION FOR YOU MR. JOSEPH PATRICE. I AM THE QUEEN OF ROMANIA.

Finally, there's the barely-coherent jibber-jabber threat:

We firmly believe MR. JOSEPH PATRICE statements of racism when done with intentional malice and to damage our name for gain of revenue and promotion on his article through your business. Mr. Patrice is not stupid or ignorant, by lacking intelligence or common sense. By all appearances, He is educated and he fully understood the reckless racist statement claims with intentional malice he chose to type and for yourself to distribute when he submitted for article creation in which you accepted. We are currently consulting with another party regarding how we should pursue action against the libel statements made by Mr. Patrice, through your company, and others.

I will accept a retraction and apology related to the racist claims made by MR. JOSEPH PATRICE published by your company.

Let's be clear: Jim DeBerry's legal threat is complete bullshit and shows that he's pig-ignorant in addition to a racist. When Above the Law or any other blog or individual looks at DeBery's douchey video and calls it racist, that's a classic statement of opinion absolutely protected by the First Amendment. Above the Law didn't claim that DeBerry's company produced a racist video based on a secret review of some undisclosed videotape. If that had been the case, DeBerry might argue that Above the Law was implying false undisclosed facts. Instead, Above the Law and other commentators are offering opinions based on a specific disclosed fact — the video. You might not share the opinion that the video is racist, or that it reflects racist attitudes by the people who produced it. That's your prerogative. But calling the video racist — and calling the classless untalented hacks who shat it out racists — is classic opinion. As I have explained before, such an opinion is protected by the First Amendment:

This is not a case of opinion premised on false unstated facts, as if someone said "based on what I overheard Donna Barstow say, she is a racist." Rather it's pure opinion based on disclosed facts — the very cartoons she complains they posted. (Note that this strengthens the fair use argument.) Partington v. Bugliosi, 56 F.3d 1147, 1156–1157 (9th Cir.1995) ("when an author outlines the facts available to him, thus making it clear that the challenged statements represent his own interpretation of those facts and leaving the reader free to draw his own conclusions, those statements are generally protected by the First Amendment.") Such accusations of racism are routinely protected as opinion by the courts. See, for instance, Rambo v. Cohen, 587 N.E.2d 140, 149 (Ind.Ct.App.1992) (statement that plaintiff was “anti-Semitic” was protected opinion); Stevens v. Tillman, 855 F.2d 394, 402 (7th Cir.1988) (Illinois law) (accusations of “racism”); Smith v. Sch. Dist. of Phila., 112 F.Supp.2d 417, 429–30 (E.D.Pa.2000) (granting judgment on the pleadings after concluding that the accusation of racism was an opinion); Martin v. Brock, No. 07C3154, 2007 WL 2122184, at *3 (N.D.Ill. July 19, 2007) (accusation of racism is nonactionable opinion in Illinois); Lennon v. Cuyahoga Cnty. Juvenile Ct., No. 86651, 2006 WL 1428920, at * 6 (Ohio Ct.App. May 25, 2006) (concluding that in the specific context of the accusation, calling a co-worker racist was nonactionable opinion); Puccia v. Edwards, No. 98–00065, 1999 WL 513895, at *3–4 (Mass.Super.Ct. Apr. 28, 1999) (concluding accusations of racism are nonactionable opinion); Covino v. Hagemann, 165 Misc.2d 465, 627 N.Y.S.2d 894, 895–96 (N.Y.Sup.Ct.1995) (concluding statement that plaintiff had “racially sensitive attitude” is not actionable). By contrast, cases finding that accusations of racism were actionable defamation usually involved implication of false facts. See, for instance, Overhill Farms v. Lopez, 190 Cal.App.4th 1248 (2010) (accusation that business fired workers for racial reasons was a statement of fact distinguishable from a mere opinion that farm owners were racist). And those are just the cases I found in about five minutes whilst distracted by yelling at an associate.

Similarly, if I said "I've reviewed his personal papers and Jim DeBerry is illiterate," that might be defamatory, because I'm implying potentially false facts. But that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that Jim DeBerry's idiotic legal threat, which I've linked, shows that he's less literate than the average penis-enlargement spammer — in addition to being a racist douchebag. That's opinion based on disclosed facts and therefore absolutely protected.

Before closing comments on the YouTube video, someone (consider the diction and grammar, and guess who) from Definitive TV wrote this:

We are respect your 1st amendment right and your freedom of opinion and speech on our comment board and will approve your comments. Due to the overwhelming feedback (50% positive and 50% negative) and at the request of McCutheon & Hamner at Law we have elected to disable the comment thread. We may open the comment section back up soon when we can reply.

Of course, this is wrong. YouTube is private and Definitive TV is private and nobody has a First Amendment right to post comments there if YouTube and Definitive TV don't want them to. But Definitive TV's mention of the First Amendment here is more than a little erratic, given their bogus legal threat to Above the Law. Maybe being a racist douchebag all the time is mentally taxing.

So: don't let the stupid threats of the Jim DeBerrys of the world chill you. Instead, call them out.

And I propose, to commemorate Mr. DeBerry's idiocy forever, that we make "We are respect your 1st amendment right!" a catchphrase for dealing with such censorious thugs.

Quasi-Literate Racist Asshole Jim DeBerry of Definitive Television Threatens To Sue Above The Law For Calling His Video Racist © 2007-2013 by the authors of Popehat. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Using this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. No scraping.

Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it.  -  Václav Havel

For several years now, I’ve been pointing out examples of the increasingly-bizarre claims of “sex trafficking” hysterics; regular readers have watched the claimed numbers of “sex slaves” rise along with their supposed number of clients and their pretended income, while at the same time their “average age” has dropped and the imagined abuses to which they are subjected have become ever more horrifying.  It is the natural tendency of rumors to grow in absurdity, and moral panics only collapse when the myths become too ridiculous for the average person to believe any longer; every time a claim ratchets up to a new level more people become skeptics, and the process continues until the number of True Believers drops below the critical mass required to sustain mass hysteria.  Every new inflation of the myth is therefore a good thing, because every one hastens the day when the whole thing collapses.

There was a perfect example of this just over a week ago, but the path to it began back in 2001 with the publication of Estes & Weiner’s “The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U.S., Canada and Mexico”.  In this farrago of breathless nonsense they claimed that somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 “children” (a category that to the authors includes both adolescents and adults below 21) were currently “at risk” for “sexual exploitation”.  Their idea of “risk factors” included things like having access to a car and living within a short drive of either the Canadian or Mexican border, and their definition of “sexual exploitation” included stripping, consensual homosexual relations and merely viewing porn.  In fact, they considered “sex trafficking” to be the rarest form of exploitation; in 2011, Estes estimated the number of legal minors actually abducted into “sex slavery” as “very small…We’re talking about a few hundred people.”  But by that time, his “estimate” had taken on a life of its own:  in the course of ten years “all people under 21” became “children”, “at risk” became “currently involved”, “having some sort of sexual contact with older people” morphed into “coerced prostitution”, “at any given time” grew into “per year”, and the estimate was usually quoted at the high end.  By 2011 we were seeing nonsense like “100,000 – 300,000 children between the ages of 12 and 14 years old are victims of the child sex trade in this country” or “100,000 American children are…sold into a life of sex slavery every year”, and by last year it was usually something like “300,000 children at an average age of 13”.

But in November, this meme underwent the strangest metamorphosis yet.  Texas congressman Ted Poe, eager to boast of the power of government to destroy people’s lives, stated not that there were 300,000 sex trafficking victims per year, but rather 300,000 sex trafficking prosecutions per year…quite a different claim.  And, I might add, an unwise one; while the usual nonsense is supported by hand-waving about how “trafficking is a hidden crime” (therefore we don’t need to prove any of our statements about it), prosecutions are official proceedings for which records are kept.  Had the news media in this country not degenerated into the slave-parrots of government this would have immediately been fact-checked, but instead the opposite happened; on Friday the 22^nd the Dallas Morning News published an editorial which repeated Poe’s error, further distorting it to “In Houston alone, about 300,000 sex trafficking cases are prosecuted each year.”  It proved one of the tipping-points I mentioned in the first paragraph, something so absurd that no rational person could believe it.  And as a result, even people outside the sex worker rights sphere took note and wrote about it.  The story was first mentioned on Twitter by Dr. Laura Agustín, and I pointed out that the number is 1/7 of the population of Houston.  The next morning Amy Alkon published a column on it:

…[including] uncaught…[sex traffickers] on top of the 300,000…suggests that a vast segment of Houston’s population…maybe 25 percent…is engaged in…sex trafficking…a Bureau of Justice Statistics report…[states that there were only] 2,515 suspected incidents of human trafficking…between January 2008 and June 2010…Hey, Dallas Morning News…should we send over a math teacher and the Jaws of Life to help pull your staffers’ heads out of their asses?…

Walter Olson soon linked that post, and then Texas criminal defense lawyer Mark Bennett blew the claim to smithereens:

…accord­ing to Texas Office of Court Admin­is­tra­tion sta­tis­tics, 2,650 new felony cases…and 5,819 new mis­de­meanor cases were filed in Har­ris County in 2012…So the total of all new cases…is nowhere near the 300,000 sex traf­fick­ing cases asserted by the Dal­las Morn­ing News.  Accord­ing to the Har­ris County Dis­trict Clerk’s web­site, there hasn’t been a pros­e­cu­tion for sex trafficking in Hous­ton since 2010.  But when peo­ple say “sex traf­fick­ing,” they may mean “com­pelling pros­ti­tu­tion.”  There have been two compelling-prostitution cases filed in Har­ris County this year.  Not 300,000.  Two…

On Sunday, the News “corrected” the story, but I’ve become more diligent lately and had already secured the screengrab I linked above.  Then on Monday, Techdirt made sure it got national attention:

Editorials written in support of legislation are prone to conjuring up hysterical…numbers…But the…writer should at least make sure the numbers being used don’t immediately prompt incredulous laughter from any reader with a couple of functioning brain cells…[the claim] that Houston prosecutes nearly 900 sex traffickers a day…365 days a year…has since been removed…

The article extensively quotes Bennett’s analysis, including a reference (and links) to yours truly; it also links Alkon’s post.  I’d have been happier if an even bigger media outlet picked it up from Techdirt, but one can’t have everything.

Of course, this is just one incident, and it isn’t even on most people’s radar.  But the good news is, it doesn’t have to be.  Because it isn’t an isolated incident; it’s part of a trend which will be producing many more equally-egregious idiocies in the coming year.  Every one of them will wake up more people, and soon every one will lead to articles like the ones above.  And in about three more years by my prediction (and I see no reason to revise it yet), the bubble will implode and the busybodies will all move on to worrying about the next big bogeyman.

This thread went past the 400-comment mark, so some of you may have missed the comment where LGM frequenter, Karen, nonchalantly admitted she had read all five parts of John C. Wright’s plea to take that goddamn bow out of Katniss Everdeen’s hands. Now, folks, I confess I’m a little worried about our Karen, because that is some hardcore masochistic reading-kink and I’m not sure she has the proper tools and training to handle that sort of thing. What’s more, she’s gone on to even more dangerous kink. I’m worried about Karen, folks…is what I’m saying. No, but really, this is a thing of beauty:

As a young female teenager occupying a place in modern society, I understand when I hear it said that feminism is no longer viable.

I understand when I see that I have to wear tiny skirts and publicly visible underwear to reclaim my sexuality. I understand a song tells me that I am beautiful [if I dance like a stripper]. I understand when I see women stuffed into business suits, irritably peeling the clinging fingers of their wailing children from their pinstriped skirts and ushering them into the waiting arms of daycare staff. I understand when I see the empty home, the shattered marriage, the children eating canned soup alone because Mommy is working late. I understand when I see the downtrodden man. I understand when I sit in an empty pew on Sunday morning.

I understand when I’m told that I may care for children….as long as they are not my own. I understand when I’m told that I may clean home….as long as it is not my own. I understand when I’m told that I may cook….as long as it’s not for MY family. I understand when I’m told I may intimately please my husband….as long as he’s paying. I understand that I may be whatever I want in life…as long as it’s not what I want. I understand when I’m told that I may be at peace….as long as that is during yoga classes at the company gym.

I understand when I watch a Slutwalk on TV. I understand when I see abortion clinics. I understand when I see modern art. I understand when I see someone from behind, and cannot guess what gender they are. I understand when I see a mother in a soldier’s uniform reunited with the child she hasn’t seen in over 6 months. I understand when see pornography on late night TV. I understand when I hear that it no longer takes a man and a woman to conceive a child. I understand when I see all-girl football teams.

I understand when I see motherhood mean nothing. I understand when I see love as a text message. I understand when I see free condoms for 13 year olds. I understand when I see dignity as a fishnet shirt and a smug placard. I understand when I see a single father. I understand when I see two women on top of a wedding cake.

I understand that feminism has no place in my life.

Feminists: is there nothing we can’t ruin? You know what I heard about feminists? They broke up The Beatles. And they’re the cause of climate change. HA HA, JUST KIDDING. CLIMATE CHANGE DOESN’T EXIST, LIBTARDS.

The punchline is the title: A Student Denounces Feminism — and Receives a Bad Grade

Maybe because the essay is a complete misapprehension of feminism and includes no citations to back up its assertions? Maybe?

If you’re really in the mood for a hard spank and a mouthful of ball-gag, please take a gander at the Klan member trolling Roy’s column on The Knockout Game.

YOU’RE WELCOME!

When VHS cassettes first came out, I thought they were just about the most futuristic invention in the world, and that technology could advance no further than movies in your television (well, that and one-way beepers). When I was coming up, my household owned just two videos, which I watched in perpetual rotation: the musical The Wiz, and Eddie Murphy’s 1983 stand-up act Delirious.

The Wiz made such an indelible impression on me that when I finally saw the original Wizard of Oz, I was incensed on behalf of the actors and filmmakers of the former—this new startup had basically stolen their idea, only made it worse and with white people! But I’d have to say that the cassette that influenced me most profoundly was Delirious. In grade school, I used to recite lines from Murphy’s act to perplexed classmates. In a helium-pitched Michael Jackson timbre: “Tito, give me some tissue.” Or a sing-songy kid-voice: “I got an ice cream, and you didn’t get one, ’cause you’re on welfare!”

Murphy’s flagrant homophobia throughout the show was, in retrospect, horrific. But boy, did it imprint on this writer-to-be. I suppose I was a pretty different kind of kid all around; though I didn’t discern precisely how different until years later (more on this in a moment), I must’ve known that whatever I turned out to be, it was vaguely related to Murphy’s callous AIDS jokes and over-the-top display of masculinity. It was, however, the opening of Murphy’s show that landed the hardest, the part where he paces back and forth in his tight red leather pants with matching jacket split to his navel (this get-up somehow a paradigm of hetero-masculinity), explaining to the audience that the only reason he was moving so fast is so homosexuals (well, he used a different word) couldn’t ogle his genitals.

Okay, that’s what I always remembered Murphy saying. But I just re-watched Delirious for the first time in thirty years, and I realized I have been recalling one tiny detail incorrectly. Murphy wasn’t concerned gay men were watching his genitals on stage; he was actually afraid they would watch his buttocks if he didn’t keep moving. My bad.

I myself recently completed a cross-country tour for my last book (my fifth, though the first autobiographical nonfiction one), and like Murphy, I found myself on stage in front of (albeit much smaller) audiences with my own posterior on display. At some point during these couple dozen events, I grew likewise paranoid that people in the audience were actually staring at my crotch, and a flicker of “Oh, I have to keep moving like Eddie” would dance across my consciousness.

A visual aid: if I were standing before you right now–in the flesh, not just in words–you would see a short, dark-haired man with brown eyes and a beard. You might venture that I’m part-middle eastern, or that Spanish is my native tongue. If you had more exposure—say you lived on my block and saw me on a daily basis—your view might expand to allow that I am a husband (to a quite pretty, notably taller strawberry-blonde wife) and father (to two equally lovely, tween- and teenaged girls). You would also likely note that I’m a dog owner (of two well-trained and affable pit bulls) and, depending on the weather, that I have tattooed arms.

Here are some things that you wouldn’t ascertain unless I told you: my first car was a black, ’79 four-speed Volvo coupe, M*A*S*H is my all-time favorite TV show, and my friend accidentally fired a .22 pistol at me when we were nine, the bullet just grazing my thigh and leaving spark burns before lodging in the rust-colored shag carpet beneath us.

Here’s something else you’d never know: I was born female, and only became the man I am today over the last fifteen or so years. A subject which my aforementioned book (Real Man Adventures) takes up. But also a subject that doesn’t arise in my life on a daily basis—not at the grocery check-out counter, not when I drop off my kids at a sleepover, not when I sit in a meeting, board a plane, or wave at the neighbor replacing rotted siding on his house. I honestly still don’t know whether my good friend Gabe even knew that I was transgender until he read my book. Because we never talked about it. Which is my preferred way of moving through the world where this topic is concerned—and yet I went and wrote a whole book about the very thing I’ve spent a life trying to achieve the luxury of not talking about.

You see how it might get confusing sometimes.

As one of my heroes Joan Didion has said (and I have studiously abided, although I’m pretty sure she wasn’t talking about being a transsexual when she wrote it), “You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.”

So now I have potentially made the whole world one of those places, opened myself up to the queasy sensation I’m getting right now as I type this, the same one I always feel in the moments shortly after I reveal this fact about my past, for fear that folks will start scrutinizing me more closely for “signs,” will suddenly see me differently. Which happens more than I’d like nowadays.

At a literary festival in Miami, one of my fellow panelists suddenly, mysteriously, started calling me “she” after I introduced my book to the audience, even though when we initially met beforehand she just seemed to take me for some random dude with whom she was stuck on a panel. After another reading in Los Angeles, a woman self-described as a “celebrity chef” approached my wife and asked, “Did you know you were a lesbian before you fell in love with her?” after I’d just spent a good half-hour sharing our decidedly unique but also completely universal story of a (straight) girl who fell in love with a (lucky) guy.

Maybe it points to some moral failing, and with another decade on me I’ll laugh off being mistakenly referred to as female, but to date, moments like these make me feel really, really bad. Every time, without exception, no other way to put it. I have only myself to blame. This is probably why all of my tour dates featured “guest stars” reading passages with me, plus a musical component, artists playing songs inspired by various chapters and themes in the book (which I like to think of as a literary scrapbook comprised of essays, interviews, artwork, conversations, lists, diagrams, poetry, and more on the subject of masculinity, but which most people seem to want to call a “memoir”). Anything to take some of the focus off of me.

At a university gig not too long ago, after the live accordion-music portion of the show wrapped up, a good-natured student referred to my reflexive, conspicuous discomfort with the subject of my former assigned gender by asking, “So why did you write this book again?” To him I could only offer another Didion gem: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”

But that doesn’t mean I want to contemplate it 24/7.

Today it is possible to have three decades of Eddie Murphy’s comedic oeuvre zapped through the air into a device we can hold in a palm and watch on the subway. The attendant modern expectation being that each and every one of us is on-blast, all of the time, constantly uploading everything from the mundane (first cars, favorite TV shows, which haircut should I get!), to the most intimate (losing a parent, almost getting shot, what your genitals may or may not look like). My deep, ever-welling ambivalence and suspicion about this information-industrial-complex finds me attempting the impossible, the cleaving of myself into two distinct versions: the regular-looking guy you may catch walking down the street and never give a second thought to, and the one revealed in the book, who happens not to have been born male, and thus has a little more at play than that average man on the street.

But if publishing this book has taught me anything during the year since its publication, it’s that no matter how much frantic pacing and zigzagging I may do down this lifelong path to becoming a man, I am never not going to be both these men in one. The trick now is figuring out how not to feel like less of one every time I slow down long enough for someone to take a good look.

Related Posts:

• Coming Out, Again and Again, in 27 Easy Steps
• “I Am One of Them”
• An Oral History of Unsung Queer Latino Immigrants
• Self-Made Man #22: Second Person
• Multiplicity

http://gizmodo.com/fbi-can-secretly-activate-laptop-cameras-without-the-in-1478371370

FBI can secretly turn on laptop cameras without the indicator light

Scary. Insane. Ridiculous. Invasive. Wrong. The Washington Post reports that the FBI has had the ability to secretly activate a computer's camera "without triggering the light that lets users know it is recording" for years now. What in the hell is going on? What kind of world do we live in?

Marcus Thomas, the former assistant director of the FBI's Operational Technology Division, told the Post that that sort of creepy spy laptop recording is "mainly" used in terrorism cases or the "most serious" of criminal investigations. That doesn't really make it less crazy (or any better) since the very idea of the FBI being able to watch you through your computer is absolutely disturbing.

A reminder: you can cover your digital device's built-in cameras with opaque stickers that not only do the job, not only look sporty, but also help support the EFF and the good work they do.

https://supporters.eff.org/shop/laptop-camera-cover-set

Laptop Camera Cover Set

Thwart hostile adversaries and frustrate peepers with EFF's Laptop Camera Covers! Say goodbye to that unsightly sticky note/masking tape/nectarine sticker guarding your machine. This handsome set includes three 0.5" X 0.75" and two 0.5" X 1" adhesive stickers designed to help protect you from visual surveillance by covering the lens of your laptop camera (and other devices) until you're ready to use it! Every shop order helps EFF fight unlawful surveillance.

These stickers feature a unique ultra-removeable adhesive backing to ensure that they won't leave gummy residue on your lens.

Clark-household-approved.

…both the stickers and the EFF.

This Sticker Kills Thwarts Fascists © 2007-2013 by the authors of Popehat. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Using this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. No scraping.

I have been going through my thousands of photos, and realize just how many shots I have of this SF library patron. He is my favorite, I call him Mediation Man.

At any given time, there are undoubtedly thousands of things vying for a “Dumbest Thing on the Internet” award, so it’s probably foolish to say you think you’ve picked a winner. But, screw it, I’m gonna call it. This article–about how nanny statin’ liberals will (obviously, DUH) make ogling boobs illegal–is officially the Dumbest Thing on the Internet. It’s like a Derp Unicorn vomited derp in a bucket already full of derp then spilled the derp vomit, then got grossed out by all the derp vomit, and vomited some more derp to create a pool of derp so wide so deep it became a vortex of derp, and everything on the internet was sucked into the derp vortex, except for the Derp Unicorn, who continued to vomit up stuff for The Daily Caller.

UPDATE, SUBMITTED WITHOUT COMMENT:

Not my son

UPDATE 2, ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: Holy crap, this guy is the gift that keeps giving.

I guess conservatives were right. Obama is an islamofascistcommunistnazisocialistkenyanusurpertraitortoamerica.

The president shaking hands with the great evil dictator of a nation 90 miles to our south? What kind of horror is this? Who will protect the nation from the great threat Cuba offers to our democracy? What would Ronald Reagan do? Oh yeah, I guess he’d send an envoy to do this:

Totally different of course.

The right wing reactions to this are going to make for a popcorn-filled day on the intertubes.

Also, when I typed in “Obama Castro handshake” into Google Images for the first picture, the autocorrect came up as “Obama Castro similarities.” I don’t even want to know what kind of searches led to that insanity.

….The predicted idiocy has begun.

snailchimera:

jocularwitticism:

hugtherobots:

I know it’s trendy to fight the system and cry that we are all becoming slaves of technology, but this attitude overlooks that computers and phones are tools for communicating. When someone thinks I’m an idiot smiling at a machine, I’m actually smiling at my girlfriend who is 10000 miles away and whom I would have never met if not for these newfangled electronics. As they say: when the wise man points to the moon, the fool looks at the finger.

This is a topic that I’ve been wanting to tackle for a while now; much credit to this excellent post for bringing it to the front of my brain.

Beautiful.

There’s a tendency to talk about computers and electronics the same way people used to talk about television, but they’re entirely different animals. Television is not, at its heart, interactive. A TV displays a transmitted signal which you can receive as passively as you wish, while ways in which you can engage with it are limited. While you *can* do the same with other electronic devices, since after all most of them can be used *as* TVs, there is a much wider range of possibility and you are much more likely to become engaged with whatever you’re doing. There’s really no excuse, in particular, for ignoring the extent to which we use our electronic devices to communicate and form bonds we would not otherwise have been able to form, or maintain bonds that would otherwise have been lost.

In short, kudos to the OP.

I was going to rant about how the internet actually allows a lot of people to MAKE friends and build communities in a way that many people can’t do in “real” life, and that it allows marginalized people to connect and be themselves in ways that they couldn’t in the past.  But then I saw this.  So I’ll just leave it here.

It also goes to what snailchimera said above, that we’ve ALWAYS found ways to occupy ourselves and keep to our own personal space, but until the internet and computers, it’s all been one-way.  We read newspapers, read books, watch TV.  Now we have the option of doing all of that AND interacting with people we like and want to.  Sharing our thoughts with the world, being in communities online, etc…  It’s not like without the ability to do that, we were EVER more connected in person.  People might make small talk with the person next to them if they were bored, but that’s not a real connection.  And just because it’s in person doesn’t make it deeper than talking to a friend via email.  And honestly, most of the time pre-computers, people were reading like in the above picture. >_>  And I’m sure if they could talk to their friends through those newspapers, they’d be doing that too.

We have a wired world that exhorts us to reveal ourselves. Of course, this didn’t start with the web. It was brewing since we said goodbye to our Victorian reserve. Early celebrity magazines like “Tattler” and “Hello” both served and punished those who featured in them; congratulating the rich and famous on their weddings, and publicly pillorying them for their excesses and social faux pas. But the exposé talk shows of the 80′s, with their cast of families falling apart, people coming out on live television, the spectacle of humanity in its ugliest moments, etc. brought this push for full public disclosure to a fevered pitch. The formula being that if celebrities are people whose lives are fully exposed, then we can all be celebrities if we fully expose ourselves. And this is formalized in the structure of reality TV and taken to its limits in the spectacle of self-made amateur porn.

Meanwhile, the tragedy of 9/11 and the growing sophistication of electronic means of surveillance, allow states, in the name of keeping us safe from harm, access to our communications, data transfers, stores of privately held information. Edward Snowden’s revelations about what the NSA has been doing have been met with, for the most part, ambivalence. For every person who complains that they no longer have privacy, five people respond that ‘If you don’t have anything to hide, this shouldn’t bother you.’

It’s for our own good. Our safety. We are told, patronizingly, that public confession is good for our souls. Get it off your chest. Tell us all about it. Blog it, tweet it, put it on Facebook. Reveal your innermost secrets, desires, dreams and we will… marketize them. The internet runs, financially, on user-generated content. And so we must encourage users to generate content and we do it by making self-exposure a civic duty.

I’m sorry Michel Foucault is not alive. I think he would have some valuable insights on what has happened to our culture in the last 20 years. He had some interesting things to say about surveillance; extrapolating the ‘panopticon’ model of Victorian prisons to the culture at large. For the most part, it is not necessary for those in power to keep us in line. We watch and judge each other. We model correct behaviour to each other, and never more so than now that we do it online.

We continue to protest that our sexuality is repressed, and yet we talk about it constantly. We flaunt our fantasies and our desires, and our self-exposure is reinforced by the accolades we receive for doing so. And the more extreme those desires, the more attention we get for having them. As long as we perform them publicly… and someone makes some money out of it.

For those who don’t expose themselves, there is always the shadowy, pseudo-legality of ‘those who keep us safe from terrorists’ who can pry into our emails, our telephone calls, our servers and our harddrives. If you refuse to be a public spectacle, we will ensure you know that you are still watched, still overseen by those who purport to have our best interests at heart.

No matter how anonymous you try to be, no matter how much think you’ve covered your tracks and separated your ‘real self’ from your online persona – I feel very confident in assuring you that you are not safe. If it is of benefit to someone to discover your real name, your home, your job… they can and they will.

Perhaps, truly, there is only one great transgression left. That of obscurity.

Peter O’Toole died today. I remember my mother telling me she had met him at a cocktail party in London in the 60′s and turned into a pillar of salt looking into his blue, blue eyes. She said he was ‘hyperbolically handsome.’ We were watching Lawrence of Arabia on TV; I was only twelve at the time. I asked her what that meant. “Some men are good looking,” she replied, ” and some men are so beautiful they fuck you up for life.”

I was left to look up the word ‘hyperbolic’ in a dictionary for myself. My mother always was a little self-absorbed and careless with language around her children.

For me, it’s not his eyes, or the face, or the pecs, or the ass…  It’s the hands. Not any particular kind of hand, either. I realize Mr. O’Toole has rather long, graceful, feminine fingers. And, yes, they make me quiver. But I’m not a hand snob -  it’s the belongingness of the hands to the man that counts. The hands need to speak to the man.

I’m just as attracted to rough, grubby, calloused, childlike, scarred-up hands. Short-fingered, hair-dusted, gnarled-knuckled, nimble-quick, tapered, blunt-ended, expressive or still. A man can alter a lot of things about himself; he can change what he wears, build muscle, get wiry running marathons… but the most he can do to change his hands is to get a manicure.

When a man’s words correspond to his hands, an evil little click goes off in my head and I’m gone. I don’t mean that if he has scarred up, calloused hands he should talk like someone who works with his hands. It’s more subtle than that. It’s a liminal agreement of form and content. Hand-to-mouth coordination.

Certain men’s hands become a great distraction. I’ll sit wordless and mesmerized. Yes, of course, it’s the full-sensory fantasy of those hands at work. Caught up in my hair, curled around my neck, full of my thigh, on me, in me, smelling of me. But, it’s also the less personal narrative of that hand slipping into a pocket, holding a pen, lifting a cup, using a knife, clutching a steering wheel. And, of course, possessively curled around the owner’s cock.

So, ‘handsome’ is not about beauty. Lithesome, winsome, loathsome, lonesome, cumbersome… The suffix ‘some’ denotes a thing or person in possession of that quality. You might think that the etymology stems from someone whose hand you might accept in marriage, but the ‘hand’ in question is a measurement of size, inferring largess, generosity and aptness to purpose.

When I look at a man’s hand, I think about the purposes to which they’ve been turned and to which they could be turned. History in a caress or a blow. It is the narrative that cannot lie.

Since Beyoncé released her surprise album last month week, it’s been widely acknowledged as one of the most explicitly feminist pieces of work by a major pop artist in quite a while. Many feminists were surprised to see Beyoncé be so open about her feminism, and though it may be imperfect, that almost makes me love it more.

However I have yet to see an analysis of the album that hits upon the references she makes to Latinidad, specifically Afro-Brazilian culture and traditions. “Blue” is a beautiful love letter to her daughter Blue Ivy, but it is contextualized through shots of daily life for residents of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, or urban ghettos.

One of the things I loved most about the entire album is that it not only shows Beyoncé in settings that contrast with her life of luxury but that it shows her interacting with these spaces. In “Blue,” she’s not standing in front of a favela mural with a bunch of residents dancing behind her. Instead she’s buying picolé (a popsicle) from a local vender, dancing with some young girls, playing soccer with some kids. Beyoncé is not the first person to think that Brazilian favelas are cool; in 1996 Michael Jackson filmed “They Don’t Really Care About Us” in Rio’s favelas, and the most recent Fast & Furious film was set in in the same place.

However most representations of the favelas focus on violence, sex, and drugs. Media portrayals from the Global North often place non-Brazilian actors in lead roles and leave real Brazilians to act as props, or a backdrop. It is clear in “Blue” that Beyoncé and these people are operating in an exchange. There are shots of her teaching and learning various dance steps (the video seems to be an homage to Brazilian dance, with clips of axé, samba gafiera, forró, funk–the one you probably thought was twerking–and carnaval samba), and others where favela residents become the protagonist for a second. One of my favorite moments is when the camera focuses on a young woman, holding her baby and smiling at the camera. It seems to suggest that motherhood is an experience that brings together Beyoncé, an international super star, and this woman who lives on the peripheries of a Global South country. That neither mothers better or worse than the other.

In addition, “Blue” makes various discreet references to an important symbol of motherhood in Brazil, Iemanjá,one of the most popular Afro-Brazilian Orixás (or goddesses). Every New Year’s Eve, hundreds of thousands of Brazilian dress in white and gather at the beach to throw flowers and other offerings to her. Iemanjá and the Virgin Mary are held in close syncretism; in parts of Brazil they are celebrated on the same day and both traditionally dress in blue and white. Iemanjá is considered to be the embodiment of motherhood, a fierce protector of children and very vane.

Knowing this, I found it ever more beautiful to watch Beyoncé sing about motherhood wearing blue and white as she carried her child down the beach, or dressed in full carnaval regalia as she floated among the waves. I can’t guarantee that this color choice and symbolism was purposeful, but if it was, it shows that Queen Bey did her research.

Too often, U.S. media treats favela residents like poverty porn or collateral damage for a “larger cause” (that being mega-events that benefit mostly corporations and those already in power). Seeing them happy and humanized on a platform as huge as Beyoncé’s album warmed my little Brazilian-American heart.

Instead of posing in front of colorful houses, flashing some smiling brown children and dancing on the beach, Beyoncé engaged with the part of Brazil we rarely see represented in U.S. media.

Juliana remembers the first time she wore white to the beach, jumped seven waves for luck, and left flowers in the waves for Iemanjá, making wishes for the new year.

Tonight will be intense. Tonight I will pull from him a fluid manifestation of his pain, but I am not going for blood. No, tonight, I will go for tears.

My voice is calm, my demeanor methodical, though my heart is pounding and my stomach is fluttering. This is unusual for me. Normally, I am unable to hold back my laughter during play, my joy uncontainable, my smiles so wide they hurt my face. Tonight, however, I am nervous; I have never intentionally made a partner cry before, but I am determined to do so now. I am wielding my “mean stick” as he calls it. Similar to a wooden night stick, it’s something like a cross between a cane and a paddle. Heavy and very, very cruel, it is one of my favorite toys.

My most favorite toy is lying on the bed, face down, naked except for his purple boxer briefs. Purple is my favorite color. He knows this, and that’s why wears them. This makes me smile. I aim right below the curve of his ass, above the line of the shorts.

Thwack.

He moans into the pillow, already in pain. “No warm up tonight?” he asks. Tonight is not about gentleness or slowly building pain. Tonight is about intensity. Tonight is about tears. “I am warming you up,” I say. “I could be hitting you so much harder.” I raise my arm above my head to demonstrate.

Thwack.

He twists and screams. “It hurts. IT HURTS.” I remain impassive, although I smile freely now, my endorphins overpowering my nervousness. I know it hurts. That’s the point.

Thwack.

My heart continues to race–no longer with agitation, but with excitement. My dominance is substantiated more as sensuality than sadism, and indeed I have never really considered myself much of a sadist. I do not think I am a very effective or skillful top. I do not think about ramping up the pain or whether something will sting or thud. I merely consider what I want, and then? I take it. And tonight, I am taking his tears.

Thwack.

“I. DON’T. LIKE. IT.”

Thwack.

“Hold still,” I tell him. He’s writhing around on the bed, and I’m having trouble aiming. I want to hit him repeatedly in the same place, to break through his body and tear the emotions from his soul and the tears from his eyes. But he won’t hold still. I move down his thighs. This hurts him more, and I know it.

Thwack.

“I want you to stop, I WANT YOU TO STOP,” he is sobbing. But it is dry sobbing. No tears yet. “That’s not the safe word,” I tell him. He moans: “I know.” I’m not stopping.

Thwack.

“It’s not about what you want,” I tell him. “I KNOW,” he cries.

Thwack.

My arm is getting tired, but I am resolute. No stopping. No stopping just yet.

Thwack.

“There are tears,” he sobs. “I’m crying for you, Boss.” I turn him over and see his face, red. For a moment, I think he’s messing with me–he is, by his own admission, “a bit of a brat.” But he’s not bratting me this time: I see a tear trickle down his cheek, a hard won spoil. The sight of it makes my heart do things I can only try to articulate, and I am awash with feelings which are raw and unfamiliar. They are, in a word, intense.

I gather him up in my arms, my brave, beautiful boy, broken by me, and hold him.

“Thank you,” he whispers.

We haven’t said our first “I love yous” to one another, but my heart is bursting with it. I do not think now is the time for those words, so I hold his face and make him look into my eyes, emoting as hard as I can. He senses my emotions and responds, quietly. “You’re very special to me, too.” His voice is ragged and my eyes prick. I wonder if I will cry, too, but I don’t. Tonight, the tears are his alone. I merely marvel at his beauty, his vulnerability, and my fortune that he is mine.

How to be a Reverse Racist

Got it in one.