Whedonfest!

Good.

Better.

Best.

Ovary Blog

I am the number one Google hit for "Ovary Blog." On that note, some reproductive health links:

- According to the New England Journal of Medicine, there's apparently no scientific evidence that emergency contraception interferes with implantation in humans. That's news to me, but it makes these people looks even worse.

- Who Gets Abortions? A comprehensive report is available here (summary; link to PDF here).

- Is abortion bad for women's mental health? A recent study says no. (Previous post on similar studies here.)

Mo to the D'oh

I already posted once about Maureen Dowd's latest lament on her single status, but now that my flare of disgust at Dowd's temerity in comparing herself to the incandescent Dorothy Parker has faded, I can take aim at the more substantive weaknesses of the piece, albeit in ranty fashion. (However, I will note that Ms. Parker was lonelier and less successful at love than Dowd, but she neither had the 1960s to blame nor allowed her heartache to get in the way of putting out incisive and witty writing. Dowd, by contrast, is a historically illiterate bore.)

Dowd's piece is superficially appealing, especially to the sort of highly educated single woman who's likely to read the New York Times for advice about her love life. It lays out a persuasive story that allows the reader to bask in the knowledge that she's been inexorably borne along the currents of twentieth century sexual revolution. None of the romantic disappointments we suffer are our own fault; even if we have become complacent in our enjoyment of the partial successes of women's liberation and failed to require more from men than acknowledgment of our legal equality, we are not to blame. No, Maureen Dowd, noted evolutionary psychologist, swoops in to save us with the knowledge that men's stubborn refusal to engage in relationships with their mental, social, and professional equals is hard wired. Something in the genes makes them gravitate toward non-threatening pink collar types who will never threaten their financial or intellectual supremacy, who will fulfill their fantasies of manly dominance by taking part in the economic equivalent of foot binding. What is a modern girl (note the infantilizing terminology) to do?

Beneficiary of the efforts of scruffy, unladylike feminists she derides with all the venom of an Ann Coulter, Dowd laments her failure to connect with antediluvian men who find her success and power threatening instead of celebrating her opportunities and scorning those who would find her sexier if she were weak. Unable to tear herself away from her high status job, but apparently unwilling to expand her dating circle beyond an incestuous Manhattan crowd (there's no talk here of dating down; Dowd ferociously embraces the gender stereotypes whose inverse numbers keep her alone and unwanted), she yearns for a simpler time, when somehow our culture was rife with crackling, sexy images of romances between equals even though men and women weren't equal at all.

Once she's singled out the sexual revolution as the reason she can't find a man, Dowd assembles a catalog of examples of retrogression as proof that we must shift inexorably back toward a less equal state of affairs, lest romantic love go the way of the men's platform shoe. She digs up a few sneaky New York women who admit to manipulating their men into thinking that they are the ones doing the chasing. There's also a brief attack on going Dutch; apparently equal pay for equal work can stay, but men should still pick up the dinner tab. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic: women who make good salaries pretending to only have a bit of pin money so their dates can feel like good providers. "Paying is like opening a car door. It's nice." But what do these women do that's nice for their men? Is the mere act of gracing a man with your feminine presence supposed to be worth all this cash? If the reciprocal niceness involves puffing up the male ego with simulated weakness, all of these tricksy, false femmes may be in for a shock when they settle down in Stepford with Mr. Right.

Instead of challenging the dominant social paradigms like those nasty bra-burners who didn't wear makeup, Dowd argues for preservation and reinstitution of the "dating ritual," even if that means women perform an elaborate, deceitful Kabuki dance in order to procure a mate. Any impediment to romantic bliss (men's tendency to wed younger, nonthreatening women, a failure to commit) is viewed as inescapable biological destiny, not a socially constructed interlocking set of roles.

Dowd's evidence is impressive at first glance; she puts forth several examples of phenomena in support of her thesis that strong, smart women must degrade themselves for love. Unfortunately, many of these references are drastically oversimplified or have been comprehensively debunked. The British IQ study she cites looked at women of the WWII generation, if I recall; bluestockings do rather better these days. Similarly, her use of the recent article on Yale women becoming homemakers should be amusing to anyone who witnessed the vicious online dissection of its weaknesses. To claim that women are changing their names in greater numbers because they want to appeal to men with a taste for subjugation is interesting, but correlation does not prove causation.

It's hard to take Dowd seriously when she castigates young women for all being pretty in the same way and not caring about women's rights, but wants us to embrace the cultural trappings of yesteryear and the lying romantic strategies that our grandmothers used to trap a man into marriage. Does she really think we can put on the masks of the old power structure with no effects on the propensity of women to submit to male authority? Maybe Dowd can play roles with ease (she seems to advocate it in day-to-day male/female relations), but I fear that not everyone can, and that fewer still will distinguish between feigned male supremacy in romance and actual male supremacy in other spheres.

I'm sorry that Maureen Dowd hasn't yet found a man, but she's just another in a long line of doom-sayers. Isn't the old news chestnut, "if it bleeds, it leads?" Certainly the death of romance and the demise of hope for an entire generation of female readers will sell papers. Dowd's disjointed lament is the most-emailed article on the NY Times's website today. But extrapolating the experience of one self important and (if I may say) rather personally unappealing woman onto an entire class of American women is probably a bit much. (Women of a certain age must typically choose to maximize the appearance of one of two features: ass or face. Dowd has chosen ass.)

Like Dowd, I like being pretty. But I don't hate myself enough to pretend to be helpless, impoverished, and weak to get men to fall for me. All you get from that is a man who only wants you as long as he has someone to lord over. Love shouldn't keep you small.

"If all the girls at Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised."

Dorothy Parker would have thrown a drink at Maureen Dowd. Perhaps not, though -- what a waste of a good drink.

More here.

Boo!

I got no trick or treaters, despite living in an apartment complex with children in it. And I cut my hair off, so my Halloween costume was a bust. Maybe next year. In the meantime, there's a bag of fun-sized Skittles and Starburst packets with my name on it.

Chicks dig SF

Girls nerds outnumber guy nerds. What implications will this have for intra-nerd dating?

Hmm

So which is it?

Taking Leon at his word

Some people are taking Kass's call for the resurrection of old-school norms of female sexuality to heart. Dr. Michael Adams, for one.

Kass, on womanly virtue:

Many, perhaps even most, men in earlier times avidly sought sexual pleasure prior to and outside of marriage. But they usually distinguished, as did the culture generally, between women one fooled around with and women one married, between a woman of easy virtue and a woman of virtue simply. Only respectable women were respected; one no more wanted a loose woman for one's partner than for one's mother.

The supreme virtue of the virtuous woman was modesty, a form of sexual self-control, manifested not only in chastity but in decorous dress and manner, speech and deed, and in reticence in the display of her well-banked affections.

Adams, on the existence of an "Orgasm Festival" for college students that purports to teach them about the female body (AKA Shorter Kass):

Jessica Polka, an executive board member for the co-sponsor of the event, was recently quoted as saying that "We also have the goal of trying to work toward fighting the social stigma against female sexuality." In other words, she wants college women to become whores without being ostracized.

Some people made excuses for Kass and tried to defend his statements when his essay was dissected at Crooked Timber last week, but this is what Kass's reinstitution of the stigma on female sexuality will require: male authority figures calling women who are interested in sexual pleasure "whores."

As one commenter pointed out, it must be very uncomfortable to be a female student of Dr. Adams's. (h/t Feministe)

My Blog is Worthless

My blog is worth $0.00.
How much is your blog worth?

Random Roundup XII

Hugo Schwyzer on looking and lust.

Douthat defends Kass. A commenter cherry-picks the most egregiously misogynist bits from Kass's piece. Phoebe Maltz points out that a big flaw in the "withholding milk makes cows happy" theory is that women like milk, too.

George Takei (Mr. Sulu) comes out. Slash fans the world over rejoice.

Jason Kuznicki defines marriage better than Maggie Gallagher ever could.

AUUUGH

Can't . . . wait . . . much . . . longer . . .

Don't know much about geography

I know some people tried to get their commenters to identify themselves a while back, but I didn't jump onto that blog meme when it went around. That's good in a way, because this is much cooler. Please add yourself to the Prettier Than Napoleon reader map. You can add personal information a la the previous meme if you like, but just an ID and a location would also be cool.

Additionally, if any of you are in the Twin Cities area and would like to help out a fellow lawyer and a service member, Juicylicious needs someone to foster her cat for six months while she is deployed. It would cost you nothing, as she has laid in supplies to last the little guy for that timespan.

More Buffy

I know I said I was not a Riley fan, but his whole character arc was justified by the payoff of The Replacement (Season 5 Episode 3).

However, I am not on board with the Dawn thing.

50 Book Challenge #58: The Traveler

I got about 100 pages into Gene Wolfe's The Knight, but eventually I realized:

1. I hate Gene Wolfe's writing. It's cold and precise in a way I associate with the hardest of hard SF. He's usually describing something extremely complex or multilayered and/or something that could be really rousing, but I can never manage to care, and I never have a good grip on the world he's creating. This quality of being simultaneously vague and meticulous is utterly infuriating.
2. The Knight is a quest, but after the first four times Sir Able slips into a neighboring dimension and time glides by while he dallies with some fey slip of a thing or fights a big scary something or other, it all blends together and again, I just don't care.

So I gave up and picked up The Traveler, which has the disadvantage of being much more poorly written (I may not like Wolfe, but he is skillful) but at least did not put me to sleep. The book grabs you right away with a kinetic scene of a preteen girl being thrown into a soccer riot by her own father and doesn't let up for a while. There's a lot of rather awkward exposition about the various secret groups that exist under our radar: Harlequins, badassed mercenaries who guard Travelers; Travelers, people who can send their life force to another dimension and somehow are, by virtue of this, usually rabble-rousing messiah types; and Tabula, a group obsessed with orderly society and thus opposed to rabble-rousing. Once we have the stage set, though, it has potential to be a ripping yarn. (I was never sure why it took interdimensional travel to figure out that the status quo generally sucks for a lot of people, but picking nits like that in a book that assumes won't find it odd when packs of genetically engineered hyenas are left to run rampant in major urban areas is perhaps expecting a bit too much.)

Of course, the plot is like something the Unabomber would have written if he'd been into fiction instead of manifestos (we're all being watched by technology! beware electricity and use only cash!) and the dialogue laughable (Actual bit from a climactic confrontation: "They want to destroy any kind of personal freedom." "That's the plan for the ordinary people, but not for us."), but it was at least a quick read. I had some amount of fun trying to figure out which of the characters was the Mary Sue/Gary Stu: the dimension-hopping, motorcycle riding Traveler? one of the Highlander-wannabe Harlequins? I'm going with option A, since it was obvious from his introduction that sooner or later the icy yet beautiful multiethnic lady Harlequin would fall in love with him, with much angst to follow.

(P.S. There's even a sellout brother! Are we sure Kaczynski's quit writing?)

A foolish inconsistency

You know, stories like this make me really angry for the obvious reason. But they also infuriate me because the pharmacists are dumb. They object to emergency contraception because it can prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg, but so can regular birth control pills (because they are the same thing, people). Are these self righteous types also refusing to fill hundreds of prescriptions for regular BCPs? If not, why not?

BBQ Wars

Roast beef? ROAST BEEF? Them's fighting words. Barbeque is not just pork. While ignorant of the origins of the founders and defenders of Texas, Reynolds's emailer is correct that defining barbeque as solely including pork smacks of rationalization of resource deficiencies. Next thing you know they'll be saying chili has beans. Sure it does, when you can't afford meat. Peasants.

Let's talk about all the good things and the bad things that may be

Two perspectives on being a woman who writes about sex online.

I don't write about sex, mostly because I like to keep some things private, but also because I find it really troubling that the best way for a woman to get attention in the blogosphere is to be titillating. It's hard to walk a line between a frank discussion of sexual politics and realities informed by personal experience and a more confessional style that seems to bring the oglers out of the virtual woodwork, so I choose to stay firmly on the more conservative side. But that I do so out of fear of attracting the wrong kind of attention and of being slammed for my sexuality (because women can't win, as Amanda notes: someone will attack you as either frigid or slutty) is itself shameful.

50 Book Challenge #57: Player of Games

Iain Banks, author of freaky modern fiction, has an alter ego, Iain M. Banks, who writes SF. Most of these are set in a universe that includes the Culture, a propertyless paradise of genetically modified humanoids and artificially intelligent machines. I read one of his other Culture novels earlier this year and was underwhelmed, but multiple people recommended another one, Player of Games. Since much of the action takes place on a hierarchical, propertied world that has more in common with contemporary culture than does the Culture, it's a more nuanced display of the differences Banks is trying to emphasize between the systems.

Nutshell: Gurgeh (which I always read as Gurgle; not as bad as the city of Tai-Tastykake, but still unfortunate) is a professional gamer offered the chance by the Culture to travel to the Empire of Azad to take part in their massive Azad tournament. The game determines everything for them, including the identity of their emperor, and is itself a reflection of their society and its values. Gurgeh's simple mission grows complicated as he becomes immersed in the game and the culture of Azad, which is diametrically opposed to the Culture in every possible way. In a LeGuin-like twist, Azad has three sexes, with males and females both oppressed by apexes, the intermediary sex.

This was a decent bit of SF: less depressing than Consider Phlebas, and less predictable than Look to Windward. The moralizing gets a bit heavy-handed at times, and the ethical choices made by the Culture are only elliptically explored, but all in all it was a worthy outing.

"Dirt and migrating and more dirt."

Were you underwhelmed by some of the books on Time's list of the 100 Best Novels Since 1928? Well, these folks were too.

Cheese for Amber

I am less fond of extremely stinky cheeses than the top-billed star of Aardman's latest feature, but not by much. The movie, for those of you who haven't seen it, was five years in the making and stars everyone's favorite clay couple, Wallace and Gromit. If you're already a fan of their short films from the 1990s, that's all I really need to say; if your most recent encounter with claymation was the California Raisins, get ye to Netflix and rent the backlist.

(Besides Gromit and Brain from Inspector Gadget, are there any other superintelligent yet non-English speaking dogs in television or film?)