Escapes: Sworn Virgins

Helen has a few good posts up right now that were prompted by the Times's article on the decline of sworn virgins in Albania. Helen's take:

There is a difference between fulfilling traditionally male responsibilities and adopting a masculine manner and masculine patterns of thought, and insofar as the Virgjineshe realize that you can't do the former without also doing the latter they're smarter than, say, American feminists. The mental quirks associated with masculinity (an obsession with pride, aggression, competitiveness, etc.) developed (partly) in response to male responsibilities, and I think there's something to be said for insisting that, if you're going to play patriarch, you should go all the way with it. Gender isn't a buffet bar; be one or be the other, but pick.

I'm inclined to agree with Helen on most counts, but I don't see sworn virgins as any closer to a solution than gender neutral proponents. Sworn virgins, girl geeks, and gay best friends, when neutered sexually, undermine the idea of gender as a non-arbitrary construct by divorcing the gender role from some of its roots.

After all, why go all the way to Albania, Helen? These behaviors are common in high school. I was treated as one of the guys on stage crew, (not that surprising, as I had no one to be one of the girls with), but more interesting was the situation in my AP Computer Science class. The class was split 8:3::male:female. The other two girls were girls, tank tops, pedicures, lazy coding and any other archetype you care to project. I was still one of the boys, the only girl in the class whose coding was respected, and I was even invited to play Dungeons and Dragons with the boys and then chosen to run the game as Dungeon Master in the summer.

Being accepted as one of the boys meant I was accepted in all spheres of manhood. I heard all the stories about their girlfriends, and the guys felt comfortable talking to me about their conquests and seduction techniques without the slightest discomfort. Because they never treated me as a female, they never thought of me in a sexual context. In fact, the only time that my feminity became an issue was when I wore a non-baggy shirt to school that revealed my figure. The boys proceeded to mock me for this for the rest of the year, in front of the teacher. I hadn't upheld my end of the deal, but the transgression would have been just as heinous if I had leered with them at one of the other girls.

This is what I find particularly interesting about the Albanian sworn virgins. When they become men, they never have sexual relationships with men or women. The Albanian women aren't men, they are neuters. In the U.S., there's a parallel role for men: the (neutered) gay best friend. This isn't as simple as performing a different gender, since it isn't allowed to be performed wholeheartedly.

This shilly-shallying does as much to erode gender norms as equality=sameness feminism. You still retain, as Helen said, the mental quirks of masculinity, which arose in response to male-type responsiblities and objectives. To retain the behaviors while removing one of the motivations undermines the framework in which it makes sense to see these behaviors as related and co-dependent, rather than options to mix and match.

By all means, pick a gender and stick to it, but if you divorce sexuality from these behaviors you didn't pick a side, you're just in a nonsensical no-man's-land.

Science Tuesday: Standards Set by Communities Deeds Freak Out Community

When jurors are asked to determine if the defendent in an obsenity trial has "violated community standards," they are seldom given a definite heuristic to evaluate these standards. But in one case in Florida, the defence is arguing that community standards are nothing more than behavior that is standard for the community and has found a novel way to assess these behaviors.

Rather than showing broad availability of sex-related Web sites, he is trying to show both accessibility and interest in the material within the jurisdiction of the First Circuit Court for Santa Rosa County, where the trial is taking place.

The search data he is using is available through a service called Google Trends (trends.google.com). It allows users to compare search trends in a given area, showing, for instance, that residents of Pensacola are more likely to search for sexual terms than some more wholesome ones.

“We tried to come up with comparison search terms that would embody typical American values,” Mr. Walters said. “What is more American than apple pie?” But according to the search service, he said, “people are at least as interested in group sex and orgies as they are in apple pie.”

The idea of community morals being determined by the average morality of the community is sort of frightning. The lowest-common-denominator morality this seems to promote is hardly what we should aspire to. Laws don't exist to enforce or create guidelines for moral action, but rather to regulate behavior that infringes inappropriately on the choices and actions of others. The real danger is that having a better picture of what we are will promote moral complacency. The actions of others have nothing to do with guides to moral behavior.

Wednesday Dining: Yes, We Have No Bannanas

Say what you like about the questionable carbon neutrality of organic foods, I'm up for anything that cuts into the market share of monocultures. Dan Koeppel's op-ed today doesn't just condemn the competition-suppressing, democracy-squashing actions of the banana cartel on a moral level, but on a practical level.

Unlike apple and orange growers, banana importers sell only a single variety of their fruit, the Cavendish...however, a new, more virulent strain of Panama disease has begun to spread across the world, and this time the Cavendish is not immune. The fungus is expected to reach Latin America in 5 to 10 years, maybe 20.

So, it turns out environmentally destructive decisions often bite you in the ass. Who knew.

I just hope this actually results in Chiquita et alis actually funding seed banks and heritage crops.

Science Tuesday: Porn Scarier than Censorship

Verizon made a deal with NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to police child pornography traffic on its networks. An original survey of Usenet groups found 88 newsgroups that shared child pornography. (Side note, Usenet was the first widespread, civilian internet network and is still popular in some circles today). This established, Verizon has announced that it will ban all Usenet forums except for the "Big Eight" a subset of forums that are more actively moderated and organized.

This is patently ridiculous. I'd be horrified at the precedent that's being set if it weren't so clearly absurd; eliminate porn on the internet by eliminating the internet. The 88 targeted newsgroups are a miniscule subset of the hundreds of thousands that will be eliminated under Verizon's policy. Users will still be able to access Usenet by using other ISPs, who hopefully won't be so foolish as to follow Verizon's example.

So what caused this illogical reaction? The idea that ISPs should (or can) be responsible for all user content on their networks is crazy. Senator Lieberman is fighting YouTube to have all videos with jihadi content removed, regardless of whether they advocate violence, but it is not the place of ISPs to regulate speech on the internet any more than it is Microsoft's problem if I use MS Word to write revolutionary tracts. The ISPs should leave the question of child pornography with law enforcement, perhaps helping to identify questionable content, but it should not be responsible for porns prevalence.

(The Verzion plan suffers from no taint of sanity or irony; one of the newsgroups banned is alt.censorship)

Science Tuesday: Hal in India?

The New Yorker is lame and only makes part of the current issue available online, so no link today. No big loss. John Seabrook's article "Hello, HAL" is a good overview of some of the problems facing voice recognition problems, but its certainly not worth getting the mag just for this article. I just wanted to share this:

Designers [of voice recognition systems] found that Southerners had more trouble using the system than Northerners didm because when instructed to answer "yes" or "no" Southerners regularly added "ma'am" or "sir," depending on the I.V.R.'s gender, and the computer wasn't programmed to recognize that.

In Memoriam: Tim Russert

When I heard that Tim Russet was dead, I felt like I'd been punched in the stomach. I wasn't processing his passing as a standout news anchor or thinking about particular interviews I had loved. I missed him emotionally, the way I would have missed Grover (the muppet, not Norquist) if I had been told he had died. After all, I had been fans of both at the same time.

My dad gave (and still gives) current events talks at Long Island libraties, so he watched all the Sunday politics talk shows.
9 - 10 am Sunday Morning (CBS)
10 - 11 am This Week (ABC)
10 - 11 am Reliable Sources (NBC) (taped upstairs to watch later)
11:00 - 11:30 am Meet the Press (NBC) [only the second half, so he'd often watch the first half when it was repeated at 6pm that evening]
11:30 am McLaughlin Group (CBS)

I was a big fan of all of these shows (for the volume, if not the content) from a young age. When I was three years old, I'd run into the room when the 'Gokkin Goop' came on, for the pleasure of yelling "Issue One!" with host John McLaughlin. Tim Russert, with his obvious love for his work, was a delight to watch, even if I didn't understand what he was doing. When I got older, I began to enjoy his show for his remarkable interviews and insights. The many tributes to him have done a beautiful job of eulogizing him. I just want to praise the enthusiasm and passion he brought to his reporting that was powerful enough to move a three-year-old and inspire an eighteen-year-old.

It is still unclear who will replace Tim Russert on Meet the Press, but the blog Web 2.Oh...Really? has an interesting post calling Russert the last of the 1.0 newsmen. Russert's
whiteboard is the stuff of legend, soon to be replaced by

[T]he new host[,]... he (or she: Katie?) will become, like Wolf Blitzer of CNN, a moderator and curator of digital data streams, remote interactive liver feeds and public discussion. A 2.0 website will be kitted out. The competition will follow.

And Tim Russert will be missed.

(Belated) Science Tuesdays: Gay Couples are a Model for Straights...

...Not so much the reverse for straight science columnists.

Imagine my surprise and delight to find, while catching up on the New York Times upon returning home from the national ACLU membership conference, this article. Science writer Tara Parker-Pope suggests that gay marriages should set the standard for heteros, citing a Vermont study of married couples (straight and gay) after Vermont instituted civil unions. The findings:

Notably, same-sex relationships, whether between men or women, were far more egalitarian than heterosexual ones. In heterosexual couples, women did far more of the housework; men were more likely to have the financial responsibility; and men were more likely to initiate sex, while women were more likely to refuse it or to start a conversation about problems in the relationship. With same-sex couples, of course, none of these dichotomies were possible, and the partners tended to share the burdens far more equally.
While the gay and lesbian couples had about the same rate of conflict as the heterosexual ones, they appeared to have more relationship satisfaction, suggesting that the inequality of opposite-sex relationships can take a toll.

Gay couples "fought more fairly" and showed fewer physical signs of stress after a fight. The hypothesis was that these couples were better at seeing each other's point of view and therefore became less irrational during fights.

It's an interesting hypothesis, but the article isn't clear whether all couples in the sample were married. It is rational to assume that gay married couples might have healthier relationships, on average than straight married couples. Since gay couples had a longer wait to marry, couples with insoluble problems or difficult relationship are much more likely to split up before marriage was available. Additionally, gay couples are less likely than straights to rush into marriage either due to pregnancy or a desire for its fruits. Without additional data on how long the couples had been together before any kind of committment ceremony, the data aren't really conclusive.

Regardless of the reason, the behavior modelled by the gay couples is positive. The
NYT Magazine cover story is on families that try equal parenting (as opposed to either gender-normed or egalitarian). Is it progress? Maybe, but I can't help but feel relentless scheduling deals only with symptoms, but play-acting at equal parenting may lead to children who live what their parents modeled.

Book Review: Sci Fi vs Space Opera

Will's been arguing that space operas are about humans and human problems and speculative fiction is about post-human problems. The first kind is fairly common (and awesome) but decent examples of the second sort are a lot harder to find, making it a little harder to assent to Will's assertion that

relatively modest technological innovations can change human nature in an effective sense if not in an intrinsic sense

That's why I recently failed (for the second time) to finish Ursula LeGuin's
The Left Hand of Darkness. I know the book's a classic, but it fails as a space opera (and, by contemporary standards, is sort of disappointing as speculative sci fi, too). The hermaphrodite society is interesting, but the political problems aren't really dependent on the sci fi aspects of the world. It comes across as a dull political drama interspersed with mildly interesting encyclopaedic explanations of the structure of the society.

Ian McDonald's River of Gods is a decent speculative epic (and he pulls off hermaphrodites better than LeGuin), and it does succeed in creating a post-human nature world populated with Indian aeai regulated by jacked in Krishna Cops, but the novel's plot doesn't make sense. I'd recommend instead his shorter stories in this work including and "The Little Godess" and "The Djinn's Wife" (excerpted in Asimov's).

Another good blend of speculative and space opera is my usual favorite, Battlestar Galactica. The show was mostly space opera (The West Wing with explosions and robots), but later seasons have focused more on the Cylons, as well, adding speculative elements.

Overall, I'm inclined to agree with Will that small changes can push us into speculative sort of new problems, but my reading leaves me unconvinced that it solves old ones. Is there a qualitative difference between the issues addressed in spec and opera and those that only surface in spec or does technological progress just add to our burden of human woes? I've yet to see fiction to convince me that technology doesn't just give us cooler problems to deal with, without resolving our human issues.



Since this is my first Sunday Book Review post, I might as well finish up with a recommendation from the actual New York Times Book Review. Helen, this one's for you.