Modesty, Misogyny, and Logic

I'm not a fan of faulty logic; I hate it. I also am not a fan of misogyny or gender disparagement, so the latest meme going around really got under my skin. There's a reason I've done everything possible with my Facebook settings to avoid seeing GIFs and memes in my feed - well, I just don't like GIFs; they seem stupid and pointless - but memes generally make me mad, which is their purpose and thus I try not to see them so they don't win.

I saw one the other day. You might have, too. It looks like this:

Let's tackle the logic first, before we get to the misogyny.

You can't get into a petting zoo without asking - even if there's free admission, there's at least a gate you need to pass through and an attendant who has to open it. Nobody's insurance would cover a come and go, self-service petting zoo. Not even bunnies are that safe. For this analogy to hold up, you'd have to do away with consent or permission altogether - as if just wearing more-revealing-than-average clothes or putting a cuddly animal inside a fence near public view is, in and of itself, invitation to touch. No one in their right mind would ever argue for that.

Is the guy (and it's definitely a guy) putting this meme together advocating willy-nilly animal fondling? In some versions of this meme, the text is credited to "grandma." It's just not fair to pass off that kind of terrible logic on someone's grandmother. Irresponsible and despicable - and that's before you get to the content!

I mean, sheesh, it doesn't even work if you accept the premise. Let's say the clothes of these women do, in fact, 100% advertise themselves as objects for sexual interaction, then what? I mean, you can't even touch a prostitute until you've paid up - there's a consent agreement inherent in the interaction. What this is logically saying is that any man can touch any women if they believe their appearance is inviting it. The clothes don't matter at all, unless you're willing to posit a universal definition of modesty - and if you are, there's an Amish women I'd like you to have a chaperoned conversation with across a very wide table.

Let's get this through our heads, guys: women are not objects, even if they objectify themselves or allow themselves to be objectified. The post of Kate Upton in a bikini on your wall might give you license to touch yourself, but it's not permission to touch her or any other woman. I'm not even sure what that's hard for us to understand.

Ok, that's a lie. I know exactly why that's hard for us to understand: we've been conditioned with 10,000 years of human development and for about 9,900 of them women were literally property - and when they weren't property, they were considered too weak, stupid, or fragile to make decisions for themselves. We live in a society that subtly tells us women can be used and manipulated with a clear conscience - in the last few years, when women are finally being listened to when they disagree with this norm, it's become controversial for some reason.

A woman should be able to walk down the street naked, if she so choose, without getting touched, manhandled, or molested (aside from the arresting officers, I suppose). There's no excuse or justification for that kind of thing. Period.

This meme is asinine on both a logical and practical level...

...it does bring us to the tricky situation of modesty, though.

What should people wear?

The short answer is whatever they want, right? People are people. They have free agency and none of us really agrees on what's "appropriate" or not. We've got some basic public decency laws - but even there we find complications at the margins of the definition. A lot of it boils down to sex - what clothes will keep men from lusting after a woman? The answer is none, really. The lie we've been telling ourselves is that men need a reason to objectify women and it's simply not true.

I mean some clothes might cause more men to lust than others, but even the nature of the dresses in the meme above are only titillating because our society has made them so over time. Those women are out at public events, not bedrooms or brothels - and part of the purpose of those events is specifically to draw attention to them and their various projects.

As the father of a daughter (albeit one who's only five), the logical question to ask me is "would you want your daughter wearing those dresses?" There's a gut reaction "no," because of the world in which we live, but there's a more reasoned answer that says, "it should be her choice, right? Why is my input required." Those are grown women; they get to make their own choices; I want my daughter to make her own choices, even if I don't agree with them.

Of course, it's my job to help teach her how to do that as she gets older.

She's definitely getting to the age where she can process and think critically about decisions, although we still usually have to prompt her to think of alternatives. She's already skittish to have conversations about topics without clear answers or to make her own choices when we don't tell her what's right and wrong - but I presume that changes as they get older.

A year, or so, ago, I was given an article about a facebook post a women wrote concerning what her teenage daughters wear. I've kept it because it focuses on questions they ask their kids (or teach them to ask themselves) about how they make clothing choices - covering things like context, comfort, health, exposure, purpose, etc.

What particularly struck me was the admission by her daughter than people will ogle and objectify her regardless of what she wears, so she's going to wear the clothes she likes and is comfortable wearing. She wasn't going to let the bad practices of others dictate her choices. That's a lesson I'd love for my daughter to learn and it's applicable in many contexts.

The question, "Are you comfortable with the parts of your body that are visible?" takes into account that people might do or say uncomfortable things, even if it's not the fault of the women herself. It also makes kids aware that the world isn't as perfect as it should be, which is something that's often difficult for teenagers to deal with.

Lastly, there's an emphasis on decision - why are you wearing what you're wearing? Are you doing it to show off or be provocative or impress someone? You might be wearing perfectly modest clothes for the wrong reasons and it's a worthwhile question.

I'm not going to repeat the whole thing for you, because you can read it (and you should). There's a real difference between shaming someone from their choices and asking questions which allow us to reflect on our choices. I'm not saying the more revealing dresses in the meme are right or wrong - I suspect they might be good fodder for conversations about our society, the way we view women, and the choices we make in our clothing. At the very most, you can question a person's motives for the decisions they've made, but you can't blame them for the response of others. That's basic human decency and one half of the population really has to work harder to remember the other half is actually human.

Let's get on that; it's WAY overdue.

The Ballad of Smith and Wesson

I spent most of my formative years in Vermont. We moved there near the start of second grade and left after middle school. I grew up there - for all intents and purposes - which means I grew up in a hunting culture. I haven't lived there in twenty-five years, so I can't say if things have changed, but certainly it was NOT a gun culture, at least not in the way you see today. Hunting was (and presumably is) a part of life. Kids went hunting as soon as they were old enough to take a hunter's safety course. My middle school was one wing of the high school and there were pickup trucks in the student lot with rifles (plural) on racks in the back. In what might be an apocryphal story (although if it is, I've done a phenomenal job of creating the memory of a photograph in my head) one of my sixth-grade classmates killed a deer with a .22 while out squirrel hunting before school one day (the photo is of a brutally mutilated deer head, because .22 bullets are small and it takes a lot of them to kill a deer).

We were not a hunting family, as anyone who's ever met my father could tell you (although there's a great/traumatic story about my mother picking off a moving groundhog with a head shot from 150 yards in defense of her garden), and guns have never really interested me, but I grew up around it. Hunting was part of life; there were guns everywhere. I never once felt afraid.

Of course the notion of self-defense never came into it. We lived in a small town where literally everyone knew everyone else; crime was not something to which one gave much thought - outside of kids from the state college getting into whatever mischief they happened to invent for themselves.

I say this only to register that I understand. Guns may not be in my DNA the way they are for some people, but I get hunting culture at least.
I'm serious when I say, although I'm no fan of guns, that I have no intention to get rid of them. I know why they're important and useful and proper in the right context.

I also spent a good deal of time volunteering and working in Kansas City during grad school, specifically at an after school program that catered to low income, largely minority students. I went to the funeral of a 15 year old kid who got shot, not even in anything crime adjacent, but in an accident with a handgun - which, I think more than anything, illustrates the problem of gun prevalence in inner-cities, coupled with an extreme lack of knowledge and preparation for how to use them.

I've got strong views on what I'd do with gun laws, were it up to me, but I hope, at the very least, I can understand the vastly different context from which people come to this debate.

The one that's totally foreign to me, though, as I've alluded to a couple times, is the true "gun" culture. I see people on youtube videos shooting ridiculously high-powered weapons at targets and almost literally blowing shit up. To some extend, as a former teenage boy, I get the adrenaline rush and excitement of the power. Although it's definitely not my thing, I do understand, to some extent, why having and shooting big guns is kinda cool. I won't claim to understand the culture surrounding this past time, though. I don't want to step in some place where I don't belong.

I'd like to at least be sympathetic, though - since the root of our dysfunction when it comes to guns is the fear we invoke in those who disagree with us.

If there were laws that banned assault weapons and super high-powered guns that, while possible to use for hunting are generally designed to kill people, and hunters were free to keep, buy, sell, and use their guns for their intended purposes, I don't think you'd get a lot of pushback.
Yes, the libertarian ideologues and conspiracy wackos would be up in arms (literally and problematically), but you wouldn't have a ton of major opposition. The problem is, those people involved in hunting culture just don't trust the people on the other side - they're not confident gun reform would be fair - and they've got a point.

Listen, I'm a pro-regulation guy. As much as I like and espouse the notion of anarchy, I get the reasons why a government bureaucracy is essential, but you'd have to admit it's a bit absurd. The inefficiency and waste of our system is mind-boggling and unnecessary - it's just the easiest way to do things, which is almost never the best. It's not impossible for us to image that gun regulations would go the same way.

Then you've also got the people who really do want to see every gun in the world destroyed. I get that from an ideological angle - in a perfect world we wouldn't need them, even for hunting, but it's also hard for me to find real fault with target shooting, as a pleasurable pastime. Yet those people exist - and they're generally the most vocal (along with the gun nuts who would complain most vociferously about reform) and you can't deny that it's all a bit scary.

I won't save the punchline for the end: this post is about fear. Extremes on either side of this thing have fear as a motivator. There's a lot of common sense in requiring registration and tracking for guns the way we do for cars - it's not too hard to sign the back of a registration form when you sell a car and transfer the ownership at the DMV - or limiting the capabilities of guns people can keep in homes. There's no common sense in seeing gun-toting murderers around every corner (which also goes for Presidential characterizations of immigrants, too, by the way). Yes, some people have suffered real gun-related traumas that cause them to literally see gun-toting murderers around every corner - and with good reason - but those are not healthy people, operating in functional or encouragable ways.

There's a lot of common sense in hunting as means of controlling animal populations (or simply improving the food supply) and there is a legitimate public debate to be had about the time, place, and degree of self-defense that's in the public interest. It's downright delusional to think private citizens should be armed to combat a future tyrannical government; those are the lunatic whims of fantasy world - not because tyrannical governments don't do bad things to ordinary citizens, but because the government in question has nuclear weapons and a fleet of sophisticated drones that could level your doomsday bunker before you even get the AR out of the ceiling tiles.

They call it the "lunatic fringe," because fear-reactions are not logical or helpful - and they're not limited to one "side" or the other.
Fear is the enemy, not guns or snowflakes. It's not even the hate and evil that make people kill no matter the weapon in their hands. It's fear. Being afraid is perfectly human; reacting out of that fear is the most inhuman thing you could possibly do. What we call "human nature" is actually the animalistic part of us. What separates us from the animals is our ability to recognize our own instincts, evaluate them and act against them, if necessary.

We don't because we're afraid of each other. Why? Because we're mean and cruel and evil and vindictive to each other. We're selfish and we take a mile when given an inch. We're generally subhuman and we excuse it as natural.

What saddens me most about the gun "conversation" right now is that it's not a conversation at all. We take our media-driven talking points and beat each other about the head with them, all pawns in the powerful's attempt to distract us from actual discussion. Who's paying for rallies and events are irrelevant to the discussion; rich interests on both sides pay to support people who agree with them. Ideology doesn't matter either. I know it's strange hearing me say that, but when it comes to enacting public policy, it's true - it's one of the reasons I'm not cut out to enact public policy. Philosophical notions of freedom and utopia are profoundly important, but entirely irrelevant to governing the real world in which we must all live.

If I leave you with anything, let it be that a call to self-reflection. However we're responding to people, whatever actions we advocate, let us do so without fear. Don't think the worst of someone with whom you disagree, but give them the benefit of the doubt: at the very least, take them at their word. Be graceful. You won't get what you want, because that's how life works; don't come to the conversation assuming you can or will. And please, please, please, don't get caught up in distractions and irrelevance; the arguments you hear on cable news aren't good or relevant or worth hearing, let alone repeating.

Talk to people like people; if we respect each other and genuinely seek the good of the other, not thinking first of ourselves, we'd already be in a better world.

Mao, Conditional Approval, and Palm Sunday

Dealing with the message of Palm Sunday upcoming, the gun debate ongoing, and the historical context of protest, revolution, and resistance, there's a lot of think about when it comes to challenging power. I live in country built on armed rebellion. One of the most problematic aspects of the US gun control debate is the continued tradition of citizens seeking to be prepared to overthrow a corrupt government.

Palm Sunday presents the challenge to the powers of the world - a law of peace and love and suffering over a law of power and might. It's easy for us to constrain it in the ghetto of idealism and ignore it as we tackle the real world. Jesus says love overcomes hate and peace, violence, suffering over power and control. We're down with that until it's too difficult, then we make justifications.

It's called conditional approval - we can do bad things in certain situations because it's for the greater good. We can nuke Japan, but North Korea can't. We can blow up buildings all over Iraq and Syria, but Saddam Hussein and ISIS can't. A police officer or, perhaps, a local vigilante who feels threatened, can shoot unarmed teenagers, but they can't shoot back.

They're cut and dry situations because conditional approval always goes to the powerful over the less so. Why? Because the powerful make the laws. They get to decide. (I guess I should fairly say "we" here, since I benefit from conditional approval far more often than I suffer from it.) We like to say it's just democracy or fairness or good vs evil, but that's really not true. We skew the rules to benefit us. When we do it, it's good; when other people do it, it's wrong.

This is precisely why the radical gospel of Jesus Christ is so dangerous: there's no conditional approval. Killing is wrong, no matter what your justification. Abuse, oppression, selfishness, violence, power - they're all out, regardless of context. What's wrong is wrong, no matter who does it. Without an "us" and "them" the powers that be have no means of coercion or co-option.

The gospel is good news for the poor because the message is literally, "we have nothing to lose." The Empire took over Christianity when it gave the Church something to lose, something worth protecting, something requiring conditional approval. God is an easy excuse to give ourselves cover. "I'm just doing it for your own good," or "I don't make the rules, God decides what's right and wrong."

The problem with conditional approval, though, is when we find ourselves on the other side. We're down with killing our enemies until we become the enemies of a more powerful force.

Jesus marched into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, accompanied by losers, and proclaiming peace to people who'd always been under the heel of conditional approval. Pilate marched into Jerusalem on the very same day, astride a white war horse, accompanied by legions of soldiers proclaiming peace to anyone who fell in line and followed the rules of conditional approval.

Many through the years have been tempted by the power of power. When you've been on the wrong end of justification, it's quite easy to use the same rationale to overthrow the oppressors. Forgiveness doesn't jibe very well with justice. Yes, we can argue that our conditional approval is necessary - that's how it works - those rules don't just protect us, but the people we love, innocents, children. It's not about war, but about self-defense. Surely staying alive is the most important thing?

Jesus didn't think so.

The call of the Christian is the call to Christlikeness. It's not the call to use the weapons of the world for some purportedly righteous end; there's nothing of God in that. The very notion of friends and enemies, good guys and bad, is directly contrary to the gospel of love and grace.

I ran across a quote this week that perfectly sums up the problem of the spirit of empire, of power - the ideas that seem to run the world:

"We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun."

You may say that's foolish, but it under-girds just about every dealing with power that exists in every society. Those who fight for righteousness do it to destroy evil. We never both to wonder if perhaps we're just as evil as the ones we try to kill or if they're as good as we think we might be. We really don't stop to wonder if perhaps power just simply can't overpower itself. Maybe violence can't stop violence and war can't end war. We know that deep down, but we keep giving conditional approval, because we don't really believe there's another way.

It's not just about intellectual assent, it's about putting our lives where our minds are and living differently in the world. Do we do it perfectly? By no means; in fact we're downright failures, but I'd rather be failing in the right direction that succeeding on the highway to hell.



...by the way, that quote? It's from Mao Zedong, former Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and one hell of a success.

Empire and Establishment

Hopefully this will be the start of me back on a normal, twice weekly posting schedule. I never really should've taken the time off. Granted, dropping down to once a week during basketball, when I'm already posting a 1500-2000 word piece each week would make sense, but getting out of the habit of writing on the blog is bad form on my part. Mea culpa.

So, in this first post back (outside of the random Black Panther and Black Power piece I managed to throw together last month), I'll transition a little bit from basketball back to ponderous, intellectual life reflections. During the last month, I attended a whole heap of NCAA tournament games - nine to be exact - and there's a standard set of announcements that come with each. While they are hosting games mostly on college campuses, they try to keep the experience as uniform as possible to maintain some level of neutrality for the players.

At the start of each day of competition there's a national anthem (as one would expect, I guess) - I've written quite a bit here (even before it was a national storyline) about how I generally handle that piece of nationalistic liturgy for myself. I ran into a bit of a philosophical quandary during this year's tournament, though, because the wording of the announcement was unique (or at least it was the first time I noticed it).

The NCAA pre-game script included this invitation: "Please rise to honor America and all those who support our freedom at home and abroad." Obviously there's usually something about "honoring America" and I typically stand with my head bowed so as not to disrespect those who are worshiping, but the "support our freedom stuff" made me think.

One the surface, it's pretty benign. Freedom, even without a solid definition is pretty universally praised. We like freedom and people who support freedom are certainly worth honoring, I suppose - but there's also the implication that typically the phrasing used here denotes military or law enforcement - it's a celebration of power, at best, violence, at worst.

I've written pretty extensively as well about how I view the military (in short: for the most part well-intentioned, honorable people willing to sacrifice for something they believe in, just not by a means I can agree with). I believe all people deserve celebration in whatever ways they serve others, but to make a mass celebration of power and violence (even under the socially accepted guise of "good guys with guns" is deeply problematic for me). You add to the situation that I'm serving as media, representing a pretty well-known (at least in this context) outlet and sitting courtside, in full view of the crowd, there's a dynamic of whether I'm free to speak for myself or not.

I generally fall into the camp of, even if you're going to protest something, doing it in the midst of a ritual meant to celebrate that things isn't entirely loving. It seems almost disrespectful (which is why I usually stand with my head bowed - as did many players on many of the teams I watched - no visible kneeling though, at least in my memory).

At the same time, it's deeply troubling that we continue to creep ever closer to associating the military with the nation, the same way a demagogue tries to make the government or their own person synonymous with the country. It provides protection and horns in on the cult of national pride that exists pretty much everywhere.

One of the ironies of all this is that it comes amidst a renewed push for gun control in the US. One of the most pernicious problems in the US gun debate is the colonial notion of revolt against tyranny. There is an argument I'd like us to collectively discredit, which says that citizens should not only have the right, but have the obligation to arm themselves in case there's ever a need to overthrow a corrupt government. It's logically and practically problematic in the contemporary age for any number of reasons I might outline elsewhere later, but the underlying principle for this argument is that the State is not the nation; there is a difference between the people and the government.

That gets all blurred to death in an effective democracy (which we at least had in our memories and ideals, if not in reality), but it's both untrue and not entirely untrue. In the same way the government and the military are related and inexplicably intertwined with the nation, so are they not entirely synonymous with it.

Schools teach their students to say the Pledge of Allegiance in part to make them good and loyal citizens - it's an indoctrination of sorts; it's precisely what feels like is happening as we more and more connect the military to our understanding of nation. We're making war and violence inviolable. There's a long history (everywhere, but specifically in the US) of debate between militaristic and peacemaking forces, even within our elected governmental system, a history that's largely going away. We've become comfortable with the power our military might ensures for us to the point where using it to do our bidding is simply assumed by both political parties. The only arguments are when and where.

There are problems enough with nationalism, although they're to be expected in any nation. It gets deeper and stickier when we bring military might, power, and violence into the mix - in fact it's one of the signs of the end stages of Empire. Empires fall once the military becomes more than an ancillary tool.

In the end, though, it's all about power. The more ingrained something is in our everyday lives, the more important it appears to us. People may not spend much time on Facebook anymore, but if it went away tomorrow, we'd be upset - not because it's really important, but because it's become familiar.

I tend to be a person who likes doing everything with intention. I want to have a reason for everything or to find the best/most efficient/most defensible way of doing just about everything - from loading the dishwasher to how I spend money. The message implied in our actions is at least as, if not more important than, the actions themselves.

I know the NCAA was probably just trying to capitalize on a trend that gets them additional good will (Lord knows they need it) and not really thinking about the implications of what those words mean or who might be left out, confused, or troubled by them (if they even care, which I doubt), but they are important, nonetheless. Words mean something and they're worth thinking about.