Atomic Nerds

So long as I’m ranting about gender issues, I’ve noticed a very weird and somewhat annoying phenomenon over the course of my career arguing on the internet. To wit: I will be arguing about some kind of cultural issue, and a male commenter will inform me that he would never date a girl/woman who (insert trait, opinion, or habit of mine here), clearly with the intention that I will take this as a warning that I am scaring off “quality” guys (read: guys like him, the two concepts are interchangeable) and that this will somehow influence my opinions, habits, or whatever. Otherwise, there would be no reason to bring it up in a conversation that was in no way related to dating Male Commenter Sumgye.

What. The. Fuck? Why on earth do they do this? Not only am I married, and happily so, the guys in question never know if I’m young or old or even straight, because the subject at hand is never actually dating. For that matter, WHY would anyone assume announcing that he wouldn’t find me attractive because his values severely conflict with mine (or his aesthetic tastes conflict with my choice of clothing and/or body type) would actually upset or influence me in any way? Even if I WERE single and looking, he just basically announced that I therefore wouldn’t want to date him either. Even better is getting told I’m what’s wrong with “American women” and that’s why he won’t date us anymore; believe me, Mr. Mail-Order Misogynist, I’m clicking my heels for fucking joy that there is no situation in which I would ever have to deal with your interest.

I stopped caring about whether or not I had to change some aspect of myself so “boys” would like me when I was a fucking teenager. I started caring about hanging out with people that liked the way I already am and shared enough of my values that disagreements were minor and friendly, and since college I’ve never really been short of them. (Though being married to a guy I met in college has kind of restricted actually trying any others on, so to speak.) I’m hardly alone in this; the majority of women out there have managed to interact with the rest of the other half of the human race successfully enough that their choices aren’t limited to “scumbags and losers” versus “men who disapprove of her”. So why the hell does this behavior persist to the point of repeated attempts to use it as a persuasion tactic in arguments totally unrelated to finding mates? Do women do this to men too and I just haven’t been on the irritating end of it?

Does this even work as an actual pickup? “You know, if you changed some things about you, I might possibly find you sufficiently attractive to have lunch with.” OH BABY THAT’S HOT. TAKE ME NOW.

It’s up here, and features guest star (and potential regular, we can always hope) Kevin Baker. We made an attempt to be intellectual this time. Results were mixed.

First, a couple of things regarding the continuing brouhaha:

1. If you argument about how we cannot possibly have openly gay servicemembers is identical in structure and rationale to arguments made in 1948 as to why we cannot racially integrate the armed forces, it will either be ignored or for my own amusement I will argue with you as though it is 1948.

2. It’s really interesting how outlook on the armed forces by civilians inverts the standard political affiliation patterns depending on the issue. If our men in arms are truly bestial creatures unable to restrain their killing rage when faced with that which they are suspicious of or unfamiliar with, or unable to restrain their urge to rape whatever looks good, then maybe the anti-war liberals have an excellent point when it comes to inflicting these people on the locals in foreign places under combat stress.

3. I will reiterate for those who are still arguing as though the issue is “we can’t have gays in military or there will be rape and murder in the showers”: we have had gay people in the military and in the showers clandestinely basically forever, officially-but-with-pretend-games for seventeen years, and openly in 23 other countries, some very much like us and and some less so. The predicted chaos and loss of effectiveness simply hasn’t happened. So far as I’m concerned it is very much akin to the “shootouts in the streets!” concealed and open carry hysteria, and you are unlikely to convince me otherwise if you just try to explain it again.

All that said, one comparison frequently brought up is women showering with straight men, soldiers or not. And it’s true, women are generally unwilling to shower with men they’re not sleeping with, and it IS different than showering with other women.

What interests me about the whole question is I spent most of yesterday mulling over the fact that it IS true I wouldn’t want to shower with a collection of strange guys, and yet at the same time it also has never bothered me even slightly to be showering or changing in front of other women who might be- or I outright KNEW to be- lesbian or bisexual. I just don’t worry that they might be looking, in fact it bothers me less than it does to have a strange guy openly staring at my chest when I’m fully clothed. It also strikes me that women in general (with notable exceptions) tend to feel less threatened by that unwanted same-sex interest than men tend to be. At first I thought it was solely because we’re far more conditioned to cope with unwanted interest in general, but I don’t think that’s entirely it, either.

I think it’s because, for a number of reasons, many men will take full or partial nudity in a woman as an invitation. Part of it is just that lovely, sick undertone in our culture that drives the “she was asking for it” defense of rape, or colors people’s perceptions of whether it was really rape or not depending on how much skin is showing. Part of it is that, unfortunately, far too often “no” actually DOES mean “try harder” and some men experience that often enough to be a tad confused when it comes to when “no” actually does mean “holy fuck go away I’m not interested”. Part of it is that there simply is no context in our culture in which men and women are nude together that is NOT explicitly sexual. Either way, any woman learns by the time she’s done with adolescence and early adulthood that if she doesn’t want to be groped or worse, she needs to set and maintain clear boundaries- which definitely do not include hopping in the shower with a guy you’d mind having sex with. I’d mind showering with a strange guy not because it would really bother me that much to have him see me naked- I figure if he’s interested I’ve probably already been naked in his imagination anyway- but because absolutely nothing in my experience prepares me to trust that he will keep his hands to himself.

We do, however, have lots of cultural context for same-gender nudity that is absent of sex. Everywhere I mentioned: school, gym, camp, and yes, the military. It’s why I stressed it in my last post: anybody who has taken a public shower or steam soak has probably done it at some point with someone who was gay or bisexual and potentially interested- and unless you’re living in a porn or had an unusual experience, nothing happened and you probably never had the slightest clue. This is because, in that context everyone is raised and trained in, you DEFINITELY do not express any form of interest. If a guy assumes a woman who is naked or mostly naked is sexually open because otherwise she has no reason to be naked, nobody assumes their shower-mates in the gym are. They also assume that if they try anyway, they’ll almost certainly be angrily rejected at best and actually beaten up at worst. It’s amazing what astounding powers of self-control the convincing threat of violent consequences impart to those who otherwise claim to have none, and I suspect this is reason number one with a bullet why rape of men is common in prison and vanishingly rare in the military.

It’s not about the possibility of attraction, it’s about gender- and the social and cultural conditioning to cope with the opposite gender and our own we all receive regardless of sexuality.

Abby hits on a note that’s been bugging me. Very worth the visit, and ties in to my take on the whole situation…

“I will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do. Unless they’re queer, and then the lying is mandatory.

Since the debate raging in the comments seems to be taking on some common threads and arguments, it’ll be more productive (and less exhausting) for me to address them up here and clarify my own argument and position more. I am paraphrasing; if you think a fundamental point was missed then feel free to quibble, but if you’re just upset I stated the logic being used in an unflattering fashion, feel less free.

1. “We can’t have openly gay soldiers/female soldiers because of the possibility of sexual misconduct and damaged unit cohesion.”

Hello? We already have tons of sexual misconduct that damages unit cohesion, readiness, and morale among the heterosexual male soldiers. Soldiers sleep with the locals and have dramas about whose girlfriend is whose. Soldiers sleep with somebody else’s wife. It used to be that STDs from soldiers screwing prostitutes was a major source of attrition in wartime before effective treatments and preventions were invented, sometimes a bigger one than actual casualties from enemy action. Now that’s what I call damaged readiness and morale. But we don’t boot out heterosexual male soldiers for this unless it’s really egregious, because it’s assumed that shit happens and people will get stupid over sex. If a policy punishes heterosexual sexual misconduct that causes the exact same kinds of damage proportionately, but bars gay people entirely or throws them out over it, it is blatantly discriminatory and for no good reason at all. Hell, given the grotesque ratio of female soldiers that report being raped by their fellow soldiers versus the actual prosecution of rapes, I would be waving fucking pom-poms over punishing sexual misconduct more often and more harshly regardless of the genital arrangements in question*.

2. “We shouldn’t have gay soldiers because the straight soldiers will be forced to share showers and bathrooms with them”.

Look, I get the argument about how we shouldn’t be forced to be naked with people who might ogle us and how this is why there are separate facilities for the women and the men. But the thing is, we are not actually arguing about whether we should have gay people in the military at all. I hate to break it to y’all, but that particular culture war was lost before you were even aware it existed. Thanks to the fundamentally dishonest nature of that closet some people think was such a marvelous social institution, there have been gay people in the military since Alexander the Great sashayed across a battlefield and probably before him, too. ASM’s post puts this more clearly than I could ever hope to, but the fact that the policy is named “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” should be more than enough all on its own. There have always been gay people showering with the straight people, quite a lot of them. The only way to even begin to effectively keep them out would be to screen a showing of “Big Hot Studs Having Naughty Fun” for recruits and check for stiffies, and even then some with the good self-control they need to get through public life would slip in. (And it wouldn’t even work on the lesbians, who by now should be sought out by the military specifically in order to further stealth technology research.)

Because of this little factoid, especially since DADT was made policy, the people who are fighting DADT’s repeal aren’t actually fighting for protecting soldiers from prurient gazes in the showers. They’re fighting for the privilege of punishing people for ruining their comfortable illusions. Not for sexual harassment or assault. Not for *actually* leering in the shower. For, intentionally or by complete accident, making it impossible for someone to continue assuming everyone in the shower is as completely uninterested in penis as he is. For that, under the current arrangement, Private Peckerhead can destroy the career of Private Peterpetter if said Peckerhead manages to catch the latter giving a good-night kiss to his boyfriend on his own time away from the rest of the unit no matter his attempts to keep his sexuality irrelevant from his duty. This is also why I will not apologize for the tone of my previous post: the argument is that our soldiers need illusions, and the capacity to aggressively punish people that disillusion them, in order to function.

This is, by the way, why I have no respect for the argument that DADT is just fine because people don’t “have” to declare their sexual identity and it’s inappropriate for them to do so. Gay soldiers don’t just have to not shove being gay in other people’s faces, they are OBLIGATED to lie, omit, and sneak in order to make sure that no one realizes it by accident, either. I like to keep what I do in my bedroom private, and prefer that other people do too in most contexts, but I am also never forced to pretend I’m not married to my husband and would find it intolerable if I were.

The fact of the matter is, the degree of gender separation in our society and the existence of homosexuality and bisexuality means that just about everyone reading this has, at some time or another, been in a public space where nudity is accepted with someone who was attracted to their gender. Been in the showers at the gym? Yep. In school? Yep. Sauna? Yep. None of those places have “no gays” policies and couldn’t enforce them if they did, and asserting that you have the right to never be found attractive nude is absurd. Gay and bisexual men and women learn not to stare and make people uncomfortable, and if they choose to ignore that training, that falls under harassment again, which is already not okay.

Lastly, I keep hearing that the fallout from “gays in the military” will cause all sorts of chaos, but all the realities I have just laid out should make it clear that the experiment has already been running for decades and all this lost readiness and destroyed morale simply hasn’t come to pass. Reading people sincerely arguing this is, to me, like reading impassioned editorials in the local newsrag about how allowing open carry will cause blood in the streets and wild west scenarios, with a concealed gun on my belt and a concealed carry permit in my pocket. Somehow, because it’s “open”, people will completely lose their minds and all their social training and just start eyefucking people in the shower shooting everyone that looks funny at them.

3. “We shouldn’t allow equal rights and opportunities to minorities because then minorities might try for special rights.”

Thank you for reminding me that many minorities are reflexively suspicious of conservative motivations because they have excellent fucking reason to be. Sometimes I forget this for whole hours at a stretch.

tl;dr: Nobody has the right to significantly damage someone else’s life because you’d prefer not to have to ever think about them.

*And because I KNOW somebody is going to trot this out on me as though it diminished my argument, yes, I think female soldiers who get pregnant from consensual dalliances during their tour of duty should be punished in some fashion. Do something stupid and preventable, take the consequences, not a Get Out Of Service Free card.

So just about everything that can be said about the possible repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has been said. Y’all can probably guess my position; I think a policy that requires soldiers, who depend on each other for their very lives, to lie to each other is even worse than an outright ban on gay soldiers and just generally a shitty policy that should be canned immediately if not sooner. Lots of other first-world nations, including Israel which has to deal with far more crap than we usually do, have fully integrated forces and they seem to be handling it just fine. Not using skilled, motivated resources available to us for a reason as petty as what they do in their bedrooms is just stupid.

There is one thing that I’d like to address, though. When I’ve seen people speaking out against repealing DADT- or advocating for a return flat-out to a total ban on gay soldiers- they are almost always men, and they very frequently cite some variant on a common theme. Apparently, it would be just horrible if they had to think about other men being attracted to them, and worry about being ogled, and maybe even worry about being raped, because there’s always the one creepy guy that’s willing to cross that line, and we just can’t do that to our soldiers. (Lesbians, as usual, are never mentioned, either because what the wimmens do is boring, or because that’s kind of hot and therefore okay.)

To these men, I have the following reply: welcome to what every single human female on the fucking planet deals with from puberty onward. You don’t like the idea that some man you’re not attracted to might be fantasizing about having sex with you, might be eyeing your fun bits, that there’s even a remote but existing chance he might rape you? Harden. The fuck. Up. Fifty percent of the population has to cope with this every day as a fact of life, and we’re called paranoid deranged feminazi man-haters if we even bring it up outside a feminist consciousness-raising session.

And you know what? It’s true, it’s not healthy to go around concerning yourself that deeply with other people’s sexual feelings and flinching as though they’re about to assault you as long as they’re not actually assaulting you. Even being hit on isn’t an assault even if it’s uncomfortable or even crosses the border into creepy territory. Only assault is assault, and until then whatever perverse sexual lust anybody is harboring isn’t your business unless they make it your business, and the only appropriate response of yours so long as it ISN’T an assault is “no”.

If Tiffani Amber the eighteen year old who happened to be blessed with the genes for a great rack can manage to not crack under such pressure, I think soldiers we expect to send into combat can probably find it within themselves.

Be glad you only have to cope with 5% of the male population instead of 95%, that you’re much more likely to be able to fend off a real assault with your bare hands than we are, and STOP WHINING about the bad nasty men that might want sex with people that might not be interested. When “cry like a little girl” becomes an inappropriate expression because the little girls are handling it better than you are, you know you really do need to put on your big-boy britches.

Kodos: This scent pattern tells me a male human not of Our Pack was here. Further searching indicates he was messing with this cable box. Since Male Human Of Our Pack was also apparently here, I’m going to consider this an authorized intrusion, but we should check things out just to make sure.

Kang: Looks like after last time, Comcast got the signal. *puts on sunglasses*

The Who:
YEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH

So shortly before we started this little blog project (and also shortly before we got Kang), we had a Home Owner Security Fail. Kodos asked to go out, and immediately started raising seven shades of hell. LabRat went out to get Kodos to stop barking and discovered he wouldn’t. As it turns out, he wouldn’t because he had an actual good reason for a change. Two “repair men” were in our yard, having hopped over a 6′ fence to get there, and Kodos was doing his job rather well keeping them pinned down to an area roughly the diameter of their bladder stains. LabRat had the perfectly reasonable reaction of the owner of a breed of dog not commonly associated with dog-friendly headlines rather than the reaction of heavily armed property owners in a town with laws specifically protecting the dog in situations like this, and hauled Kodos in before he could explain in a more puncturing manner to the trespassers that fences are there for reasons and should not be lightly ignored. We three holed up in the house with various implements of “Go Away” and waited on the cops.

Fifteen minutes later (a handy measure, especially considering that there is no physical way to be fifteen minutes away and still in this town) the five-oh showed up, took a look around, eyeballed the spot where said sleazeballs rolled a big rock up to the fence to get back out (complete with boot marks on the fence itself), and advised us that if it happened again to just let the dog have his fun and let them worry about the stitches. Really. There are reasons I like this town so much. There was some minor mis-communication at the time, and I mistakenly thought Kodos had been ranging around at a much greater distance than he actually was, leading to some rather derogatory comments about his acumen as a guardian, but fortunately, the reality is he was being a good boy and staying very up close and personal through the encounter.

After the dust settled, the situation wound up that basically a pair of lazy Comcast employees had needed to access the junction box in our yard, and seeing as it’s actually quite a fair detour to go from Nearby Main Road to our front door and the gates to our yard (and thanks to their overall failtastic service in this town in general meaning our address does not show up on the list of paying customers) they simply took the shorter route from main road over back fence rather than the correct route.

What all this is ever so meanderingly building to is the vignette at the top of the post. Partway through this afternoon, the dogs were napping in the living room when I spotted a guy in a day-glo green vest coming up the driveway. Doorbell rang, dogs sounded off, and I saw the appropriately marked truck parked in the street. For some unfathomable reason, even though we’re still not customers, the repairman was very definite and courteous about making sure he had our blessing to venture back there and keep us appraised of what was going on. Say as much ill as you like about Comcast in general (and I’ll add in plenty of my own for good measure) but apparently the word-of-mouth in their pool of field techs has a decent memory. After he had left, Kodos and Kang set about investigating just who the hell that was with such rigor that it would probably make many major metropolitan departments look like Barney Fife – Kodos even performed a full perimeter check, thoroughly sniffing every inch of the fenceline. Kang just made sure to re-mark one of her favorite sections of yard where he had passed through.

I called them back in when they started trying to dust for prints though. There’s a point where thorough just gets silly.

Alan, Jay, Robb Allen, Jim, Stingray, and me cover… this and that, mainly that. Features me attempting a version of Jay’s accent, which I was then asked to repeat… a lot.

Vicious Circle

Title of article: Afghan Men Struggle With Sexual Identity, Study Finds.

The actual content of the article, on the other hand, details the culture clash between Western forces and the local Pashtun culture, in which men having sex with men is common but those participating deny being gay. Go ahead and read all of it; it’s interesting.

What’s more interesting to me is the title of the article and the line in it about “a new report suggests an entire region in the country is coping with a sexual identity crisis.” But, if you read the article, the locals don’t sound remotely confused; so far as they are concerned, it is culturally normal to lust after and take sexual pleasure from men and boys, and to marry women and have children with them. They’re not gay; they don’t (so far as they claim) have romantic relationships with men, just indulge in sexual pleasure, whereas gay men fall in love with and have relationships with other men. QED- at least to them.

They’re not even all that unique; that cultural pattern has been seen before, in some places and times in ancient Greece, in at least one Indonesian tribe I know of, and one African. (Forgive me for not citing- the sources on the latter two cultures are in some of my anthropology books that I never took with me when leaving home.) They all have several other things in common, too- women are largely socially segregated from the men, either in having their own separate world or simply not taking part in society at outside the home. Misogyny and extreme patriarchal control are the common thread: when women are seen as worthless except in terms of bearing sons, it apparently becomes difficult for men steeped in such a culture to get excited about having sex with them. Humans are still pretty randy creatures no matter what kind of sexually repressive culture they’re brought up in, though, so as usual, given enough time, teaching twists to accommodate the local culture- and allow the men a sexual outlet with those that ARE admirable and therefore possibly desirable. The Pashtun men probably ARE no more gay than the men participating in male-male sex in prisons are- as much as that disturbs Western sensibilities from several angles. (Though I’d bet money there are a few in there that *are* having relationships and romances and are pretty much gay- closets are big and roomy when you can be caught having sex with another man and not be doubted as straight.)

One of the arguments frequently brought up by those arguing that homosexuality is just a recent perversion and product of cultural decline is that there was no such thing as a gay sexual identity until the late nineteenth century, and they do have a point: modern Western sexual identity is very much a creation of our culture, and filtered through our understanding of how love and relationships work, which is also a pretty recent construct. Love as the primary tie between married couples, rather than economics, status, and reproduction, is one of Rousseau’s more radical inventions- just one that caught on like gangbusters in wealthy first-world nations. Thus, when Westerners wrestle with their sexual identity, they filter it through that prism of love and relationships, so that that identity is defined by who you want sexual relationships with- which our culture stresses are legitimized by love.

The thing is, heterosexual identity and relationships have come in a pretty huge variety over the course of history as well, with massive variation on when and in what contexts it’s considered normal to express sexual feelings, how many partners can or should be in a marriage, and whether it’s okay to have partners outside of your primary relationship- right up to whether it’s okay or not to achieve sexual climax when not trying to reproduce at all. (Usually the woman gets the short end of the stick on this, but there are a surprising number of cases where male ejaculation is seen as draining and lessening him as well.) This just doesn’t strike us as unusual because for obvious biological reasons, heterosexuality is normal and assumed; it doesn’t rock anybody’s world that it should vary, and vary a lot. Homosexual identity and behavior, on the other hand, we tend to expect to look the same all over the world regardless of what frame we’re thinking about it- either as a seamless whole of identity and behavior as inevitable as red hair, or as a perversion caused by some sort of pernicious outside influence.

Culture dictates, up to the point possible, the shapes that all the monkey urges humans naturally have take; it gives us the options for the acceptable ways to experience or express anger, frustration, affection, attachment, grief- and love and lust. Not all cultures are created equal, and I among others would certainly define one that found keeping children of any gender as sexual servants for the high status as disgusting- but it should not surprise us so much when they vary. The Pashtuns aren’t confused about how their world is ordered and the identities they have within that order- only we are.

Seems some members of the media are bent out of shape that the Tea Party Convention is only inviting a few news outlets, and that all of those news outlets are either directly sympathetic to their cause or, in the words of the Convention organizers, “have never bashed, misrepresented, or maliciously distorted the Tea Party movement, its events, or its adherents”. Even Jake Tapper, whom I normally respect for regularly recalling that his role in life includes keeping a critical eye on the government rather than cheerleading it, was bitching about it.

The American Thinker (slightly pompously) makes the point that the right to free association also includes the right to, well, not associate- up to and including with the media, and that to do otherwise has a pretty big stifling effect on a movement that may face hostility. This point is entirely true, though I don’t really think it’s why these media members are pulling the sour-grapes routine or what I think the central one is. Nobody was suggesting that the Tea Partiers ought to be forced to include the press in the name of public good, after all.

It’s that the self-same media is used to always being included in anything relevant, even if the people doing relevant things want them to die in a fire, because the organizers usually want the publicity that badly. When the Tea Party movement started up, the media leapt to the conclusion that they were an irrelevant and silly fringe, and they wasted no time in mocking and deriding them, often to the point of open scorn during what were supposed to be objective reports on national TV. MSNBC and Anderson Cooper called them “teabaggers”, again on national TV- a phrase that refers to an act that is most definitely not prime-time friendly and was clearly intended as a juvenile way of belittling the protestors. The term has since caught on, become standard in the non-conservative media and in political attack ads, and has become nearly more mainstream under that meaning than its original one.

But what happened was the Tea Partiers didn’t stay fringe. They captured a massive undercurrent of dissatisfaction, and managed to sweep up enough ticked off independents and beleagured taxpayers to have a fair amount to do with Scott Brown’s victory in thought-to-be-unassailable Massachusetts- and thus make it crystal clear that no matter how much scorn Democrats and their media friends poured on them, the Tea Partiers were very much relevant and the reflexive derision started to sound like desperation and elitism rather than merited dismissal of genuine kooks.

To which I say: too fucking bad. As it turns out, the Tea Partiers never DID need the media’s help for publicity, don’t need it now, and are completely free to invite whomever they choose to their events- and keep whomever they DON’T want out. Next time, try acting professional and maybe you won’t be off the invite list to cover the next relevant movement’s meeting that comes along. Pointing out that the included networks were chosen on pure partisanship is the height of hypocrisy- it was blatant partisan bias on the parts of those networks and journalists that turned the Tea Partiers hostile in the first place, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of legwork to turn it up.

Want to be invited to the party? Don’t call the first people at the table radicals, un-American, extremists, or make gay sex jokes about them on national television. This shouldn’t be something any journalist needs a reminder of.

So instead, the following loose basket of random.

- Burn Notice and Breaking Bad are currently competing in my head for best thing on TV. Burn Notice is a lot more fun, and Breaking Bad much darker, but they’re both far better written and acted than they have any right to be, given their respective premises. I don’t think anyone had ever really asked Bruce Campbell to really act before, but Matt Nix has pulled it off.

- Superdickery is a deliberately out of context archive, but it still does a pretty good job of offering a window into just how seriously screwed up comics can get. Plus it has amazing real super powers of time-wasting.

- Apparently if you want a comfortable stick when having blood drawn, it’s worth politely pointing it out to the phlebotomist when she’s hammering away on your median nerve while trying to raise a vein. I blame my current devastating lack of inspiration on being a quart low, but at least it was nearly painless.

- I want to start some kind of a charity fund or organization to take screenwriters to the range and run them through a basic three-gun course. It really sucks for your suspension of disbelief, even with a cheesy crime drama show, when a character who declares himself to be “not a gun guy” busts two clays from directly behind a trap machine throwing high, slow targets and this is received as an impressive feat of shooting by the rest of the crowd. I did that the first day I held a damn shotgun. It’s NOT THAT HARD.

Look, I agree that the creeping sexualization of younger and younger girls is creepy and damaging and bad and wrong and I would like to see it stopped. My reaction to coming around a corner only to come face to face with Baby Bratz, the adorable infant dolls that look like they’re ready for a gang-bang, once nearly got me thrown out of Sears. I fully acknowledge and recognize the pressure that girls and women are under to be sexual and edgy in order to be seen as any sort of prospect for boys, and I acknowledge again that it’s bad and damaging.

That said, human women have sex drives. Some of them are on the right and left tail of the bell curve regarding this, but even a doe-eyed teenage girl has hormones just like the teenage boy does. Sure, she might be sexting that cad of a boy because she wants to be loved and feel valued, but she might also be doing it because it’s exciting and sexy and on some level she wants to do him. It’s bad for society that girls feel pressured to be overtly sexual in order to be worth interest at all, but at the same time it’s also equally bad for both the girls and for their future mates if they’re told that women (real women, good women, proper women) don’t really have sexual feelings like boys do, and that if she feels otherwise she’s just sick in the head because of cultural pressures. It tells her both that she doesn’t and can’t know and understand herself- and that those real feelings are things she should reject, whether shoving them entirely aside (most can’t, welcome to life as a sexually reproducing species), or constructing elaborate rationalizations and denial games so that, to her, it doesn’t really count if she was drunk at the time or it was otherwise spontaneous. (And unprotected, and ill-advised.)

Being a teenager is a messy stage of figuring out your identity and your place in the world and what you’re going to do with all the things that go into that. So teenage girls do silly, stupid things, and screw up, and so forth- but the catch is that this includes sexuality, whether we like it or it’s good for us or not. You don’t know who you are yet, so you flip through goth and nerd and band and jock identities looking for one that fits. You don’t know how to manage your emotions without your parents telling you how yet, but something inside you tells you to break from them, so you go through big emotional storms about little things because that’s still new ground. And, likewise, you don’t know how to cope with your own genitals yet- so you have weird fantasies you feel ashamed and excited about and do things that, in the eyes of any adult, are just as foolish as having a complete meltdown because having blue hair was banned by school/your parents. But they’re about sex, so the consequences are much bigger- not that this makes a bit of difference to the necessity of the phase.

We treat boys as though they’re infected with this massive, explosive power, but we acknowledge it’s not really their fault- wanting sex is just part of being male, after all- so we don’t, as a culture, treat it like that big of a deal, we just impress upon them that the consequences can be huge as best we can and move on. With girls, on the other hand, we talk as though parents failed when they set toe in the exact same territory, as though it’s up to them to keep that cache of explosives safe, and to impress upon the girls that it will be their responsibility to protect civilization by keeping the out-of-control filthy male beasts… that she wants to be important to, that she’s probably irresistibly drawn to if heterosexual, and whose basic drives she shares… at bay. Meanwhile the boys get the message that the girls are prey to be caught, or a challenge to be cracked, rather than being confused much like themselves. And, well, if they indulge the “beast”… well, boys are like that, it’s not their fault really. (But it might be hers, she didn’t try hard enough to get away.)

Sex and love create enough problems just by their very nature without culturally front-loading even more frustration, self-loathing, and false dichotomies into it. When you’re setting up a societal expectation that even wives must basically want jewelery, chores, or something else in exchange for doing her brutish, carnal husband the favor of having sex with him… that creates its own problems. Reacting in the opposite direction from over-sexualization of women and girls and trying to stuff them in cultural burqas won’t solve more problems than it creates- but normalization might.

So it seems the National Organization of Women is upset about Martha Coakley’s loss even though she, um, explicitly ran on the promise of supporting the health care bill they want killed entirely. (For very good reason.)

“Women are clearly harmed” by these lawmakers, O’Neill said. “Shame on the male-dominated Democratic Party for supporting them. They hold themselves out as the party that is women-friendly; well they’re not acting like it.”

“And that has a lot to do with why Martha Coakley lost this election,” O’Neill alleged, explaining the Democrats’ loss of Ted Kennedy’s seat with an argument that few others have made.

Well, er… the Democratic party, while indeed male-dominated just as the Republican party is, also went out of their way to choose her to fill the “Kennedy seat”, and she won an election against a male Democratic challenger. And if she ran on the promise of changing the anti-abortion language in the health care bill, I never heard about it. (Which doesn’t mean she didn’t, admittedly, but the message I got was she intended to help the effort to pass the monster as-is.)

Martha Coakley lost the election because she richly deserved to. The Democratic party did a horrible job vetting her past and didn’t bother to take note of some of the amoral things she had done as a prosecutor until they became campaign issues, at first she didn’t bother to run at all on the assumption she had it in the bag, and then when she did start campaigning it was an incredible series of gaffes and missteps that only made Brown look better and better. The Washington Democrats are blaming her for the loss because most of the blame indeed belongs to her, though they’re also trying to stick their heads back in the sand regarding the part of that loss that belongs to them.

Lemme ’splain something about sexism and feminism. Feminism is the premise that women are people, which means treating women like full and complete persons. Part of that exalted status is owning your fuckups as well as acknowledging and respecting successes; when children fail, we kiss their booboos and take responsibility for the damage, because they can’t be full members of society yet. When adults- citizens- fail, we fucking expect them to own it.

Excusing Martha Coakley’s failure as a politician due to perceived sexism is treating her as less than a full, adult person. Nobody ever tried to blame Walter Mondale’s epic crash and burn on his manliness.

Signs pointing to the D team getting the hint and giving up or starting over on healthcare reform.

Important bits of McCain-Feingold struck down, Supremes admit political contributions are speech.

Air America goes through its last stage of failure.

This calls for an Aquaman dance.

So in the wake of the Scott Brown roflstomp of Democratic legislative ambitions in the Senate, the leftist and “progressive” pundits are in the throes of an apocalyptic episode of Chicken-Little tantrumming. Never to be left out, here we have Keith Olbermann and Howard Fineman mulling over the REAL reason for the Brown victory, which obviously cannot possibly be that the Democrats have used their massive majority for massive incompentency and corruption and Americans are kind of pissed about it. No, it must be that blue Massachusetts has had a sort of allergic reaction to the President they went 26 points for in 2008 and turned racist. And you can tell because there was “coding” in the Brown ads that involved pickup trucks. I hate watching Olbermann too (and for the record I have no more stomach for O’Reilly than I do for him), but it comes in the first bit of the video.

To recap, in case you didn’t watch it or just couldn’t quite believe what you were hearing: Massachusetts voted for the white guy over the white chick because the Scott Brown ads featured pickup trucks and that was secret visual code for “we’re not okay with having a black guy in the White House.”

Originally I asked Stingray if he wanted to do this post, seeing as how it seemed like the kind of material that inspires him do those berserker profanity binges that he’s so artistic at, but he just quirked his eyebrows at me and pointed out the obvious, which is that trying to spin this as a race thing is just so incredibly stupid and pathetic it’s impossible to really get angry over. And, really, he’s right. This is just the spastic kickings of someone who finds it completely impossible to admit to himself that His Team, led by His Guy, is doing kind of a crap job right now and that large numbers of Americans are recognizing that and are upset about it- and not about some other thing, like race, that would make it totally not His Team’s fault and them just Bad Bigoted Americans.

I have to give Fineman a small shred of credit- but not a whole hell of a lot, since he said “that’s a good question” rather than “are you serious”- in that somewhere in his bizarre pickup truck ramblings he manages to more or less land on the truth, which is that the pickup isn’t a racial message but a class message to a pretty big demographic that doesn’t trust the urban elite ruling class that Washington is largely composed of.

What he fails to mention, of course, is that this demographic has an excellent reason not to trust that class and that he’s sitting next to a really good example of why. Rural and suburban proles don’t have pickup trucks to tote around their crosses, lighter fluid, and lynching victims, they have them to tote around the tools and materials with which manual labor is done, and the fact that Olbermann apparently can’t even wrap his head around that enough to connect it to work and to class rather than attach it as a nebulous symbol of a racist “underclass” is a picture-perfect illustration of why they don’t trust him and the governing class he represents.

What’s especially sad about this is that non-white people own pickups too, lots of them. If you live out in the sticks or have a job that involves manual labor or are just in an economic bracket where doing your own dirty work makes sense (and that includes educated pasty us), then having a pickup truck is really handy. They’re ubiquitous on the Indian reservations and among the Hispanic working class out here, and might even have become a racial symbol in that sense if so many white people didn’t own them for the same reasons. I don’t live in a state with a large black population, but I suspect the same is true among black people in not-completely-urban areas in Southern states.

Barack Obama is impossible to picture in a pickup truck, but that’s not about the color of his skin, it’s about his class. His educational credentials are Ivy League, and so are his wife’s. They may be darker than past Presidents, but they came from the exact same culture as the entrenched governing class. If the Pickup People can make the distinction between class and skin color more easily than Keith Olbermann can, that says a lot more about Olbermann than it does about them.

Personally I think Brown’s victory had a hell of a lot more to do with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid than Barack Obama, but if you want to make it about him, at least get it right.

Once upon a time in late 2008, a charismatic and forceful young President carried both himself and his party to overwhelming electoral victory, in what many saw as setting the scene for an unfettered Democratic hand in dramatically remaking the American political landscape, if they could but muster the vision and boldness to execute it. With powerful majorities in the House and Senate. January 2009: Yes We Did!

One year later, the only thing of note the administration has managed to accomplish was the massive TARP bailouts expanding upon the Bush bailouts, which Americans are slowly realizing only stimulated legislative backscratching hands. Cap and Trade has been shelved indefinitely, and the health care bill that was to be the administration’s signature achievement has spiraled into a nightmarish vision of legislative sausage-making, with it becoming ever more apparent that they now want to just pass something, anything, that they can claim as an accomplishment, no matter how vile. Foreign policy has gone largely nowhere, with the Russians, Iranians, Chinese, Israelis, and Olympic Committee being equally uinmpressed and overall disinclined to do anything but what they were going to do anyway. January 2010: What, Exactly, Did We Do?

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Ted Kennedy met his last martini and inconvenienced the Congressional Democrats by dropping dead before the final vote on the health care bill could be had. Before Kennedy arranged to have the rules changed in MA to avoid having a Republican governor be able to pick a successor to a MA seat, and instead arranged for a special election to be held, this would have been meaningless; a sufficiently Ted Kennedyesque replacement would have been slotted in the Kennedy Seat and it would have been business as usual.

It still should have been business as usual. Massachusetts has been a Democratic fiefdom for many decades; every once in awhile the populace gets sufficiently annoyed with the very worst excesses of a single-party state and elects a Republican governor to do some damage control, it’s generally acknowledged that Massachusetts Congressional seats are Democrat seats and that’s the way it is the same way Alaska is snowy. And under that belief, the DNP shrugged and picked a likely enough candidate (due to being a Democrat, having a pulse, and being a DA) and then more or less forgot about the special election, as did the placeholder candidate in question. In order to defeat a Republican candidate, all she had to do was not die or be caught with a dead hooker, after all.

Then a charismatic and forceful guy named Scott Brown with an R tag after his name (the GOP would love to claim credit for him, but they had little enough to do with his success) started conducting his political campaign against Coakley in the same high spirits as Sherman’s campaign against the South. Suddenly polls started showing Scott as having a chance, and then as having a close chance, and Coakley and the Democratic Party collectively lost their shit. Coakley hit Brown hard with a barrage of negative advertising, which mostly backfired, since she took to doing this as silly as declaring Brown an enemy of rape victims.

The harder she tried and the more desperate she smelled, the higher Brown’s polling climbed, and now it’s election night, and Coakley’s so panicked the blame ping pong has already begun even though the polls aren’t closed yet- and so has the accusation of cheating.

Even if Brown DOES manage to lose, the fact that he’s gotten this close to a miracle like taking a Massachusetts Senate seat away from the Dems should be blaring red klaxons that they are in serious political trouble and that they need to make a major shift in how they’re handling governing if they don’t want to suffer a bloodbath in the midterm elections akin to the 1994 Republican takeover. And some of them know that.

Obama, meanwhile, has issued a statement on how he plans to handle it- by doubling down and getting more combative about his approach. This could have the same expiration date as every other Obama statement, but I actually doubt it; never in his political or personal career has he ever actually been thwarted from something he really wanted to do, and I don’t think he intends to start now. If so, all the GOP, as idiotic as they are, will have to do is stand back and let him walk himself into the sawblades- and hope he doesn’t do too much damage to the country on his way through.

1. I found my stout recipe.
2. The beer store had the correct hops & malts for said recipe in stock today.
3. Draw your own conclusion.

…And started a Warcrack blog.

Over the last couple of months blogging and producing what I consider acceptable content has gotten harder and harder, and I’m looking to put some of the fun back into it for me. My HOPE is that doing so will lead to the tap for Atomic Nerds content being a little easier to turn on, but at the very least I’ll be completely enjoying myself more often rather than working for a perceived obligation to my readers. I write about every single other hobby I have, so the only reason not to do so in terms of gaming is that what I’m talking about is a foreign language to anyone who doesn’t play themselves. Crossover interest is also likely to be low between this audience and the one a Warcraft blog would have, so solution: throw together a WordPress blog that lives off by itself. That way that stuff stays strictly where people who actually are interested are.

I don’t intend to let this site suffer if I can possibly, humanly avoid it, so we’ll see how this works out. If I think Atomic Nerds IS suffering, I’ll kill the other blog. More likely it will remain a niche side project in the lines of The Arms Room or Retrotechnologist.

For the Warcrack players and people who for some bizarre reason read anything: Paladin Pants

I like reading good food writing nearly as much as I like eating good food (if not more because I can’t leave a top-notch relleno in my coat pocket to whip out whenever I’m in the mood), and have a thing for regional American cuisines, so Jane and Michael Stern’s books are a natural fit for me. They’re responsible for the Roadfood books and forums, and center around the American eating experience outside of standardized chains and franchises, tuned to national tastes rather than what the locals in a given area have come up with. One of their books, Two For The Road, is mostly essays about the experience of eating for a living and contains several recipes emblematic of the more interesting regions and foodways they’ve travelled through. One, a recipe for baked pork chops from a radio personality in Iowa, made me drool reading the description of eating them, so I determined they’d be next on the list.

Virginia Miller’s Elegant Pork Chops

The marinade:
2 cups soy sauce
1 cup water
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1 tablespoon molasses
3/4 teaspoon salt

The sauce:
1/3 cup water
1 3/4 cup ketchup
1 1/2 cups chili sauce
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1 tablespoon dry mustard
2 tablespoons Russian salad dressing

The meat:
6-8 pork chops cut as thick as you can find

Combine the marinade ingredients in a baking pan large enough to hold the pork chops in a single layer, add the meat, and marinate for several hours or overnight.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Remove the chops from the marinade and place in a 9 x 13 inch baking pan. Put the pan in the oven, uncovered. Combine all the ingredients for the sauce in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil. After the chops have been in the oven about ten minutes, turn them and cover with the hot baking sauce.

Cover the pan and bake the chops for about 1 hour, until they are tender, turning them several times as they cook. Serve hot, with the sauce spooned over them.

Okay, well, we can throw the light and dark brown sugars out the door and just use whatever’s in the pantry as far as the brown-sugar family goes. Otherwise this looks doable as-is.

1. As soon as you remember that you intended to make these that night, assemble your marinade ingredients. Soy sauce: check. Water: still accessible via sink. Brown sugar: check. Salt: accessible from at least three different sources. Molasses: um.

2. Ask your spouse where the molasses lives. In the pantry, apparently. Open the pantry, which is floor to ceiling crammed with things, with several shelves above eye level, and organized in absolutely no fashion whatsoever. Optional: hum the score from the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the one with the warehouse.

3. We don’t need Top Men to find the damn molasses and for once we’re going to find something for ourselves without having to hassle Spouse into coming in and digging it up for you. Rummage through the flour, sugar, cocoa mix, honey, canned oysters, canned chipotles, unopened jar of clotted cream, elk jerky, dried squid flakes (?!), chocolate chips, leftover Halloween candy, dill pickles, sauerkraut, canned beans, grits, quinoa, tea, Thousand Island dressing, tomato paste, tahini, and sesame oil as time passes and the disturbed dust in the air mounts.

4. Split the difference and ask Spouse for a hint. On one of the middle two shelves, in a container with a yellow cap. Rummage several times through the middle two shelves, cursing vigorously at various jars of Spouse’s local honey collection, which are all dark as molasses and all capped in yellow.

5. Expand your definition of “the middle two shelves” to include the one one slot up from the bottom. Extract the molasses from the very back of the shelf. Success!

6. We’re halving this recipe as 6-8 pork chops is a bit much for two people, so a gallon freezer bag will do as a marinade-and-chop container. Do some quick (by which I mean laborious) kitchen math and dump the requisite proportions of dry ingredients into the bag. Open the molasses jar and enjoy the incredibly appetizing scent of blended sugar and sulfur. Try to keep as much of the molasses possible inside either the jar, the bag, or the tablespoon, although this will be challenging. Pour in the liquid ingredients and add pork chops. Seal the Ziplock.

7. Make the discovery that the chops and marinade bag require two hands to hold flat and handle, as you want to rest the chops on a refrigerator shelf so that they are both covered and in a single layer. Open the refrigerator door. Curse under your breath as the door closes itself when you turn around to fetch the chops. Repeat. Resolve by balancing on one foot while you hold the door open with the other until you can get your elbow up as you transfer the chops. Now bugger off and go read blogs or something until closer to dinnertime, turning the chops once sometime in the midpoint and wandering in to start the oven preheating twenty minutes or so before nomoclock.

8. Extract the chops and a smallish baking dish and drain the marinade from the bag after you put the chops in the dish. Explain to Kitchen Bitch that we’re not using anything that can really be shared with even very patient dogs. Toss the chops in the oven, find a small saucepan, and start pulling stuff out of the fridge and pantry for the sauce.

9. Ketchup: check. Water: check. Sugar: check. Mustard: check. Russian dressing: check. Chili sauce… well, the only thing we have in the fridge labeled “chili sauce” is Sriracha, since Real New Mexicans make their own chile sauces-qua-sauces as the dish that requires them is made, rather than keeping it around bottled or canned. The recipe calls for 3/4 of a cup of the stuff, once halved. Raise an eyebrow at your Sriracha, which exists to add a dash at a time.

10. Dab a bit of Sriracha on your fingertip and lick it off. Notice the way your tongue tingles vigorously for minutes afterward? Compared to what Iowa housewives had in mind, this may be just a mite aggressive. Glop in an amount that looks like enough to add zing without being considered an assault weapon in Massachusetts.

11. Make up for the lowered volume with extra water and ketchup. Add the rest of the ingredients, kick the burner up to high, and stir continuously until it boils. Remove the pork chops from the oven, glop on the sauce, pop the whole thing back in the oven, and wander off for twenty minutes.

12. Return and turn the chops, then set the timer for another twenty. Sit down and start writing the whole thing up. Type in the part about covering the chops once the sauce goes on, which we did not do. Mother goatfucker.

13. Note glumly the rather reduced state of the sauce when you return to turn again, then makeshift cover with a stockpot lid. Leave it for the last twenty minutes of cook time.

14. Pull it out of the oven, add pork chops to plates, spoon on some sauce over each chop, and serve with the corn Spouse grilled in foil packets over the gas burners. Nom.

These tasted really interesting, though they came out a little bit dry; I don’t know if it was because I neglected to cover for the first two-thirds of the cook time or if an hour was simply too much for only two chops, but either way next time I’d use a meat thermometer and go by internal temperature rather than time. The flavor was good and I tuned the proportion of Sriracha well- it turned out to work quite nicely with the rest of the ingredients in the sauce. I’d like to try this again with bigger chops, cooked for less time. The overall sweet, savory, spicy flavor profile turned out really nice.

If the title wasn’t a subtle warning, this post is going to be very heavy on the profanity. Those with a sensitive constitution should not click further.

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