Light and Water for the Trees

"But an intellectual slight of hand occurs over this matter of identity--explaining oneself in this way neatly avoids dealing with the Political implications of one's identity. If identity is held as a given, it is off-limits to criticism or analysis. If, for example, I hold catholicism as my identity rather than my choice then I avoid moral accountability for the various beliefs and political stances go along with it. And if I demand that other people respect my identity as a catholic, then I demand that they accept without protest the policies that I choose along with my catholic identity, even while I pretend my catholicism is not a political choice, only a matter of identity. Identity politics is a stealth maneuver that demands, in the name of tolerance, that others do not challenge my politics."

Erich Fromm wrote that love is the capacity to engender love in others. I'm not sure I agree with that definition; it seems facile to say "if they don't love you back then that means you don't really love them" - so Jesus didn't really love his enemies because they nailed him to a stick anyway? It also seems wrong, somehow, to insist that love must always be returned to the point of making it part of the definition of love. Then what about love for a plant or a goldfish or a fictional character or the planet or humanity in general?

"it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all"

I'd be inclined to say "depending on what's meant by 'loved and lost" - for some meanings of "lost", all love relationship will be "lost" eventually; they end sooner or by death, and even then they won't stay the same. People who've been together for a long time often say they actually had a succession of different relationships with the same person.

So one take on lost is in the sense of a love relationship that was, but ended or changed into something else. In that case the statement is fairly obviously true, like saying "it's better to live and die than never live at all".

Another sense, the one I'm personally thinking of when I hear the phrase, is not about relationships, but where "to love" is when you commit a serious part of yourself to something or someone, essentially taking a risk, making a leap of faith that the effort will contribute to their happiness. And then "to lose" in that context would be when you misleap, misjudge, like when your very existence causes suffering to the one you love, and you can do nothing to change that. I think what Tennyson is trying to say is that, even if in a particular situation it might seem that it would have been better to "not have loved at all", that doesn't mean it's better to lose courage in general, to never take the risk of reaching out and being affected by someone else. At the risk of sounding woowoo, I think avoiding love is a spiritual dead end, it's as much an extreme as becoming codependent...

I think a striving to be "a good person" often derails into rationalizing and justifying our not-so-good actions as somehow virtuous. I have the impression that often, when there is a conflict between our moral sense and some other consideration, people try to redefine their morals so as to avoid ever acting immoral in their own mind, even if such rationalisations appear blatantly self-serving to others. I think that is actually the greater evil - it's a habit that can lead people very far astray, committing atrocities that they've convinced themselves are moral.

I think the main fallacy behind this is seeing "goodness" as an attribute of a person (if we do a bad thing we're not a good person anymore) rather than a property of an action. It gets even more convoluted by bringing intentions into it - so if you do a bad deed with good intentions or a good deed with wicked intent, it's the intent that determines your "goodness". Clearly if we strive above all to be "a good person" it becomes more important to us that our intentions were "pure" than how many people were hurt by our actions. Like a Christian focus on sin, it can lead to judgmental airs of moral purity and hypocrisy - one's "stance" trumps the actual consequences of one's behavior.

I tend to think that moderation in all things (including moderation) is usually preferable to all manner of extremism. In my opinion, it is better to *not* try for "moral perfection". Because, if we think a certain course of action is "good", then being anything less than fanatical about it would mean acting less "good" than we are able to. But the moment we start investigating, the concept of absolute, objective or essential morality quickly collapses, and one is left trying to do good when "good" has no fixed meaning.

The childish answer is the negative "don't do anything bad" - don't break the rules. A more mature morality will make judgments on what a given situation requires - who will benefit, who will we harm, in which kind of world do we want to live? Even then I think perfect morality would require perfect wisdom; it's easy enough to say that, for example, minimising harm is a good thing, but it's far from easy to figure out what course of action in a given situation corresponds to minimal harm.

Since I'm only moderately wise, I think it's best if I accept that I can only be moderately moral, too. History is full of atrocities committed by people whose desire to be moral exceeded their wisdom. Or as they say; "the best is the enemy of the good." I think it's preferable to leave my morals intact even if I sometimes don't live up to them for various reasons of fallibility.

If people try to "be good" rather than "do good", they have to resolve the tension between who they are and who they think they ought to be. I think that being excessively bothered by that gap may lead one into bizarre directions. Much simpler to say that no person is "good" or "bad" as some inherent property, but rather the same people can act in ways we admire or disapprove of...

I was skipping through "manga for dummies" when I came across this:

"Drawing your male characters wearing the loose-fit jeans is perfectly acceptable,
but having them wear anything tighter than the classic jeans is, for the
most part, a major faux pas. You don’t want to blatantly describe a male character’s
anatomy to your readers. It’s just wrong (trust me)."

What rubbish. Reading that just tempted me into a deliberate major faux pas, of course.

BTW the book also defines shounen-ai and shoujo-ai as "romance comics for boys" / girls...

"In our culture now, there is tolerance of violence and even sexual violence (or even ESPECIALLY sexual violence) but complete INTOLERANCE of naturally expressed sexuality."

http://toddshammer.wordpress.com/2007/10/22/jk-rowling-and-violence-guest-post/

Note: I'm not implying OMG violence == bad (or even HP == evil) but I do find it upsetting that "naturally expressed sexuality" is this big taboo whereas there are so many portrayals of dysfunctional, unhealthy, mean, twisted or even violent sexuality... can anyone name even one pop culture icon who could be considered a role model for healthy sexuality (compared to, say, spades of role models for being an ass-kicking mofo)?

The way sex is usually portrayed in media seems... very off to me. All too often it is portrayed like a performance of sorts, an empty ritual with only the barest of contexts. There is no real sense of intimacy because even though people are naked they don't seem to disclose anything personal so it's all so completely unsurprising and predictable that they don't even *need* tenderness... so it's often like watching space aliens to me.

The Hajnal line is a border that links Saint Petersburg, Russia and Trieste, Italy. In 1965, John Hajnal discovered it divides Europe into two areas characterized by a different levels of nuptiality. To the west of the line, marriage rates and thus fertility were comparatively low and a significant minority of women married late or remained single; to the east of the line and in the Mediterranean and select pockets of Northwestern Europe, early marriage was the norm and high fertility was countered by high mortality.

What surprised me was that this difference was supposedly noticeable since the 16th century. I somehow didn't think it would have been that long since we "suddenly" decided to marry for love. It was not entirely clear to me if the marriage age difference didn't exist earlier, or if they just failed to establish whether it did or didn't. The second wouldn't surprise me; it's not like "the media" back then didn't adore love stories long before the 16th century...

There was an article in the Hartford Advocate (http://web.archive.org/web/20071116212115/http://www.hartfordadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=3873)
from a journalist who entered a furry con under false pretenses with the hope of finding some shocking smutty furry orgies to report on.

The result is a rather poor con report - because about the only thing the intrepid reporter observes about the different events is what was NOT going on that she expected, namely, visible plushfucking. We learn that there was a dealer's room and some sort of art, but the main gist of the descriptions is whether or not anything "adult" was discernible. Aside from that, the only furry that is presented with any amount of detail is described as some sort of social misfit (I'm skunk, because when a skunk enters a room, everyone leaves! Haha unfunny), which isn't exactly flattering.

While it's a welcome change to see an article without blatant misrepresentations about what happens at furcons, there still seems to be an implicit assumption that it is acceptable to judge an entire subculture based on whether or not anything "adult" is going on. The author seems to have gotten an inkling of how important furriness is to some people, yet still predominantly focuses on the (lack of) sex angle, and that saddens me. Being furry is not about sex, but this is completely separate from whether or not anything sexual happens at furcons. Being furry is also not about designer drugs, or gambling, or satanic rituals, or a million other things far more unwholesome than kinky sex, whose absence at the con might have been mentioned.

I regret the media's preoccupation with passing negative judgments based largely on sexual stereotypes and prejudice. The above article is a good example of this, as the author is rather blatantly the one with "sex on the brain" and engaged in Jungian "projection onto the Shadow" - as can be seen from quotes like Thus I went undercover, after visiting a Halloween store to buy a belled collar, velvet cat ears and a nice piece of tail (30 inches, if you think length matters). That the reporter went looking specifically for sexual stuff, or that the presence or absence of sexual stuff in, say, furry art, is seen as the most crucial issue - that is a problem.

Peggy McIntosh wrote the classic White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack wherein she describes the difficulty of realizing one's own privileges, likening them to a knapsack full of useful things that is visible to everyone but oneself. She writes about the path of self-reflection and soul-searching she traveled in an attempt to unpack her own invisible knapsack.

It is darkly ironic that the most common reaction to her piece has been people making inventories of others' privileges while vehemently denying their own...

Some related articles:

http://creativedestruction.wordpress.com/2006/06/02/privilege-and-disadvantage-as-sexist-framing-devices/
(Sexist framing; a man has a privilege, a woman lacks a disadvantage)

http://sweatingthroughfog.blogspot.be/2007/10/playing-games-with-privilege.html
(Alleging superior moral and epistemic knowledge based on claims of victimhood while silencing others based on alleged privilege)

http://adamjones.freeservers.com/effacing.htm
(Effacing the Male: Gender, Misrepresentation, and Exclusion in the Kosovo War)

Here's a disturbing old article on Japanese shops selling used panties:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040226204619/http://www.smn.co.jp/e/key/burusera.html

Personally, if I could get good money from selling my worn-out underwear to a shop that caters to perverts who get off on that sort of thing, I would.

That said, I find it disturbing that the author of the above editorial reserves her moral outrage for the fact that girls are "allowed to sell themselves" - not only does it seem like a huge leap to equate selling panties with "selling yourself", what I find particularly disturbing is that the author deplores that girls are allowed to make their own choices, not that there are schoolgirls in a possibly unhealthy relationship with the sex industry. One gets the feeling the author wouldn't object to parents selling their surplus daughters into sex slavery (a historical practice in Japan), or would prefer a situation where girls are forced by poverty to sell their panties ("girls who come in to sell are not from poor families") over one where they can freely choose to do so for whatever reasons appeals to them.

I find *that* far more scary than a guy who likes to stick his face in other people's laundry. I am a bit shocked that the panties bought for $20 sell for $50, but I guess having to interact with pervert customers is worth that much...

(I totally don't understand the objection that material things are exchanged for material things, or how the situation could be made in any way better by involving the girls' "soul" in the transaction.)

Someone else objected to the shops because "it does contribute to the overall culture in which the men buying these panties are free to dream about schoolgirl panties as if they were illicit. The underwear may have actually been freely sold, but the image in everyone's minds, the thing that I think the shops are trying to evoke, is that of illicitly-stolen underwear. By reinforcing that image as something that's okay for everyone to partake in, one is encouraging guys to get off on girls' underwear that they feel like they "shouldn't" have, which of course encourages a feeling that these guys have taken advantage of the girls without their consent, even though they haven't. This feeling thus becomes more commonplace in society, and then society becomes more complacent to the idea of guys taking advantage of young girls without their consent, and that is what is bad."

I'm reluctant to agree that an activity is problematic, based on assumptions about the way people think in general. In my opinion, these shops didn't *create* the attraction of stolen underwear/taking advantage of young girls. I doubt one can "encourage" someone to get off on something one wouldn't otherwise get off on. I'm not convinced that offering a legal, harmless outlet for that attraction necessarily makes society more complacent about harmful actions. There are some really scary things happening in Japan, but is it actually worse now than, say, during Meiji when it was acceptable to take advantage of girls as long as they were poor? If access to escapist fantasy material had a detrimental effect, things *should* be exponentially worse now than ever before in history.

Also, if there is no relation between our actual consent and the way our actions are perceived, what can we do? We could refuse to sell our used panties, or we could burn them to make sure they don't fall into the hands of perverts, but that seems like playing into the trope - we pretend that we don't want people to perv over our panties, whereas we really couldn't care less.

If you sell your dirty underwear, openly and unambiguously, with full consent that any stranger may use it for whatever, and the buyer nevertheless likes to imagine that he really obtained it from you against your will, what can *you* do to disabuse him of the notion, except to repeatedly and enthusiastically say - and demonstrate - that you really want to sell your dirty undies? Criminalizing possession of dirty laundry hardly seems practical. =P And it would only re-enforce what you try to avoid by making it actually illicit.

The answer that you simply can't ever consent to selling your underwear is not only totally objectifying, it's also promoting a society where consent really is meaningless. No doesn't really mean no, unless and until yes really means yes.