everybody's favorite asshat

Sadly, today we have two people nominated to be everybody's favorite asshat: Larry Summers and John Negroponte. So.

Larry Summers finally released the transcript of his speech about women in science and engineering. A lot of other people, like Bitch, Ph.D. and I'm sure some other academics I can't track down yet, are writing about it with far more personal knowledge of women's situation in academia than I have. So I'm going to confine myself to this: the president of Harvard University can never not be the president of Harvard University, at least in public. If he wanted to kind of shoot the shit about women and science, he should have gotten some people who knew about it together and had a private conversation, like you do; if he wanted to give a speech to people who have invested an enormous amount of time in studying exactly what he's talking about he should have done his goddamn homework and thought about the implications for the university he's supposedly responsible for. Context is absolutely relevant: his bullshit "provocations" are going to make women feel less welcome at Harvard and give the distinct impression that he doesn't give a shit about the fact that fewer women have been offered tenure every year that he's been president. He should no more "just try to think about and offer some hypotheses" on this than Bush should "just try to think about and offer some hypotheses" on the potential benefits of invading Iran while he's addressing Congress.

Also, Summers forgot not only his role, but his audience. There were people in that room (like Nancy Hopkinson) who had spent an enormous amount of time and energy studying this problem, and his remarks ignored all of the work and study they'd done. If much of your audience knows more about this problem than you do, either from personal experience or from academic research, you should probably pick a different topic, or at the very least do your research beforehand so that you're not demonstrating a total ignorance of stuff they know and have published. I mean seriously. This is the president of Harvard University?

John Negroponte. Now I'm sure we'll get honest intelligence with not terribly brutal methods. I seriously am not sure I can think of a worse person for this job. This part of the post is going to be updated later with some kind of actual information. For now, I'm going to go bang my head against a brick wall, because it feels better than reading the newspaper.

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1. http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=505218, via http://slate.msn.com/id/2112799/.

not everything I do is a feminist act

Yes, let's talk about false consciousness. I find myself getting really annoyed with a lot of what passes for empowering women¹ these days. Echidne recently wrote a post over at Alas about Elle magazine. Now, I have never read Elle, but I read women's magazines occasionally, like when someone else buys them and leaves them around. Mostly Cosmo, which is a lot trashier than Elle, frankly, and therefore somewhat more fun.

They all have this particular attitude, which is something I see a lot in Third Wave feminism: anything a woman does and enjoys doing is a feminist act. Thus, it can be empowering and somehow feminist to buy fancy shoes, wear makeup, get cosmetic surgery, pose for Playboy, write for Cosmo, sleep around, not have sex until marriage, wear a corset, whatever.² I think this is really silly, and I also think it lets a lot of people off the hook: instead of having to look at themselves and their lives and actually figure out what their actions mean in a political context, they get to write off their actions as feminist because they are women.

There's a certain truth to this, which is that feminism shouldn't require women to give up their self-presentation: women shouldn't have to dress like men to be taken seriously. That requirement in itself is anti-feminist, because it takes men as the norm. But when I look at appearance culture, for example, I see a lot of requirements that are reasonable for men and restrictive and time-consuming for women. I also see a lot of women enforcing those requirements, and that is also not a feminist act. It's possible that there are people who are writing for Cosmo or posing for Playboy who are feminists and can argue that they're working to change the system from within. I have nothing against people who work within the system, but I think they'd better have a really clear sense of exactly what their plan is, because it's really really easy to get sucked in to the value systems you're trying to fight. Plus you have to weigh whether the feminist subversion you're doing is stronger than the anti-feminist reinforcement you're lending your name too: I don't know, but I think it's a calculation people have to make.

You know, all these cultural standards are really powerful, and maybe the reason people enjoy meeting them is not that it's genuinely empowering and subversive to do so, but because you get a lot of praise for it. I get about a bazillion times more compliments on my appearance when I'm all femmed out than when I'm wearing my usual clothes, even when I think I look great. That's nice in its own way - I like the ego boost - but I wouldn't say it's feminist.

The other important thing is that not everything any given person does has to be empowering or feminist. Sometimes, I put on my girly clothes because I actually feel girly; other times, I just want a little praise, or I don't want to make a stir at whatever event I'm going to. Everyone has vices and weaknesses and things they just plain like, regardless of the sociopolitical context, and I think we'd all be better off if we agreed to look at our lives as a whole. Then we wouldn't have to say, 3-inch heels are feminist! Just like everything else women do! Because we'd actually be feminists, and empowered.

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1. Not feminism. Oh no. That's too scary.
2. Not that any of those actions is necessarily bad, in and of itself. At all.

I won!

I got an award! From Media Girl, for my post about Valentine's Day.

Good for me. All three people who read my blog can now go look at the list of winners.

coffee

Flea writes, in the middle of a long post about her son being in the hospital:

I managed to weasel a styrofoam cup of harsh, boiled coffee from one of the nurses. It was oily and black and tasted like hate, but I was glad to have it.

I've never had a kid in the hospital (never had a kid, either) but I've had that cup of coffee. It was oily and black and tasted like hate, and I had just sent four kids home in the middle of a trip after they threw four separate tantrums. The rest of our students were running around hitting each other over the head. It was noon; I had been up for 6 hours; I had had no food of any kind.

I still think of the woman who brought me that cup of coffee with utter gratitude.

is this the future?

There's a New York Times article right now about robot soldiers (registration required; free til next week). Apparently there are a couple of versions already out there clearing bombs in Iraq, and there are going to be more, including one with guns that's heading for Baghdad (under control of a soldier with a laptop) in the relatively near future.

This kind of thing freaks me out. I've read a couple of sci-fi books lately where one premise is that the culture involved rejected long-distance weapons at some point in their history because it was going to wreck their society.¹ One society rejects distance weapons because they had disastrous wars using mental weapons, and the other won't use bows and arrows for anything but hunting because they live on a sort of vast steppe where running away is too easy, so honor is all about facing your enemies with a sword. I look at the history of wars, and you know, it mostly doesn't seem to be like that. People have always been all about using whatever advantage they can get and killing as many people as possible. Certainly no one swore off distance weapons or explosives because it was cheating, and war back in the day of knights in shining armor was all about putting the peasants out front to get cut to pieces so the aristocracy wouldn't get too many of its own killed.

Not a lot of honor in that long and sordid history. But it does seem like there have usually been lines people aren't willing to cross, whether for fear of hurting their own interests or because of honor, and with that, there have always been people willing to cross those lines. The biggest one, recently, is the idea that there's a significant moral difference between conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction. Nerve gas is no longer in use, except occasionally by people like Saddam Hussein; nuclear weapons have been used twice, and only twice. We rely on the existence of certain rules for combat: the Geneva Conventions, not attacking civilians, whatever. It's the same thing as trying to live with other people: you know that lots of people could beat you up and steal your money, but you count on the fact that most people won't do that.

I think the same thing happens in war. We won't target children. We won't use chemical weapons. People break those rules, but basically we rely on them. And I think those rules require a certain responsibility for our actions. The closer you are to the evil you're doing, the harder it is to do it. So in the Civil War, people didn't aim or didn't shoot, because they could see the people they were going to kill. If you're dropping a bomb, you don't see that. Having a conscience depends on that direct relationship to your actions.

Robot soldiers are even worse. They will allow us to go further and further away from what we're doing, to program soldiers to kill and then not see the consequences. I'm not a pacifist, really, but I think people should be able to look at their actions and own them: the further we get from that the worse war (and everything) becomes.

All this is quite aside from how completely silly it's going to be if robot armies start taking each other on. Then it'll be just like Magic the Gathering or Warhammer. "My Salamander Hunting Pack can beat up your Daemon Prince!" Except, you know, real. And paid for by my tax dollars.

If that's really what they want, I have an old deck of Magic cards they can have. It's not very good, but it'll get them started. Even better, it won't kill anyone.

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1. The Darkover books by Marion Zimmer Bradley and Jaran and its sequels by Kate Elliott. Jaran is awesome, and some of the Darkover books are pretty good too. The Shattered Chain is total adolescent wish-fulfillment for a certain kind of person.

I need a mentor

The other day I went to the library to look at the US News & World Report rankings of grad schools. I'm seriously considering going to grad school in 2006, or possibly 2007, but the only people I've told are two of my closest friends and the woman at the reference desk in the library. I looked at it for a while, and then looked through the Peterson's guide, and thought, this is not useful.

I don't need a reference book. I need a mentor. I need someone who's older than I am, who understands my situation (where I'm coming from, how I approach decisions, my academic interests, the rest of my life) or at least thinks kind of similarly to me, who has more perspective than I do, and who is in a position to give me decent advice about what I should do. I don't know anyone like that. My parents kind of know my deal, but they so clearly have their own ideas of what my life should be like that I don't trust their advice; they also really don't understand me that well, which is fine. My friends are basically all my age, and have no clear perspective on this stage of decision-making because they're in the middle of it; on the other hand, they understand me pretty freakin' well. My professors are 3000 miles away, and they all obviously chose academia; the two I'm closest to might be able to help me think about what I want, but the one who probably seriously considered a non-academic life seems more like a peer than a mentor. My boss has never really considered going to grad school, and what he wants out of his life is totally different from what I want. I'm living with my grandmother, but if there was ever anyone whose advice I shouldn't take, it's her.

How do you find a mentor? How do you approximate one? I've tentatively decided that by the fall of 2006 I'll not only have a long-term plan, but be in the first stages of getting it done (i.e. going to grad school, or enrolled in a teacher certification program, or hired by some company or organization where I'd like to work for at least a couple of years). But I desperately need perspective outside myself on what grad school in the humanities-oriented social sciences is actually like, and what it feels like to be a professor, and so on. Whether the thing I would want to study is even an option in the field I think I'm interested in. What my alternatives are. Academic blogs are my distractor of choice lately, but they only tell me so much.

about love

Kameron is writing about love again. It's funny, she talks about the people you'd walk through fire with, the people you look at and think, I know there are so many things wrong with you. But I will love you forever.

I think there's something strange about me, because I feel that way about four people, maybe five. There's one on his way to being there, and a couple more who are sort of more distant. I've gotten it on with precisely one of them - my ex - and intend to get it on with precisely none of them in the future. But I love these people. When she writes

You better get giddy. You better be thinking about them when you go to sleep at night, when you get up in the morning; you better be thinking of them in the middle of the night, shit, when you can't sleep. You better be wondering about what they'd have to say about your day, about that bizarre person you bumped into on the train. You better know when you see the absolute perfect thing for them. You'd better want nothing more than to move heaven and earth to hang out with them.

I think about my friends on the East Coast. They don't make my blood boil, but I don't ever really want to live apart from them. I want to raise kids with them, in a loose, extended-family sort of way. No one knows me better than they do - certainly not my biological family or the people I've considered sleeping with lately. I see things and I think, oh man, when can I talk to Hipster Monk about that? I call the Ex from the grocery store to tell him about the produce 3000 miles away, because I know he'll be interested.

And the more distant people? One of them got stupid drunk the last time I saw him, and his boyfriend and I walked him home, stopping every so often to let him throw up in the bushes. He almost never drinks, and I've never seen him that drunk, so it was interesting. Taking care of him I thought a lot about love, and how much I love him, and how I hadn't seen him in a year but there's this part of me that goes with him when he's in Europe or that midwestern I state or wherever. Because love is funny. Love is about what you feel when the person you love is being a moron as much as it is about how awesome they are. It's about affinity, and excitement, and what makes you both laugh, but it's about way more than that. I don't really know what it's about.

I've felt that blood-boiling insanity for a couple of people - one in high school, one in college, a few more people who were just overwhelmingly attractive - and I have to tell you, I'm not impressed. I don't really like any of the people I've felt it for anymore. I actually saw one of them recently, for the first time in three years. He's much the same. He's still a jerk. His life was and remains a mess partly because he can't make promises to people and keep them. He made me so crazy then: whenever I was around him, it was like this switch flipped and my body felt totally different; when he left, it was like I imagine withdrawal is. I don't feel like that about him anymore, and thank goodness for that.

The way I love my friends feels more real than that. The crazy-making attraction feels so sudden and disconnected from everything else that I suspect it of being just physical. Some kind of pheromone trip. I know loving someone you're sleeping with (or want to sleep with) is different from loving someone you'll never sleep with, but I don't know how. I suspect they're less different than usual for me: the Ex and I are really close, and while for me it feels a lot like my other friendships, it's a little different for him, I think. I think it's partly because my serious friendships are a little romantic, a little exclusive, a little intense. We're still friends in large part because I refused to believe that the end of our relationship meant we had to stop loving each other. It's different now, but not that different.

People have said to me that friendships, even ones that seem really serious, shift and move and go away. People leave. People's priorities change: they care more about their partners than about their friends. That doesn't make sense when I think about how I feel, or what I need. I miss my friends; I need my friends. Whether I'm dating someone or not doesn't change that. Bitch, Ph.D. has been writing about her open marriage and her boyfriend, and the way she writes about those relationships makes me think that maybe these long-standing, unconventional ways of loving more than one person can work. Lately I've been thinking that I might actually be able to do non-monogamy, if a good situation ever came up; and part of that is because I feel so strongly that I love my friends, but I can have more than one of them. Who knows. We'll see. I'm young yet.

good bad stupid

good:
Finally finding my good tamari, after I thought my grandmother had nearly used it up and somehow accelerated its aging so that the label was all faded and dusty. It was in the refrigerator, where I'd put it.

bad:
I still can't find the brown sugar. Where does she put most of a pound of dark brown sugar if it's not in the refrigerator, the cupboard, the cooler, or with the big jars of grains?

stupid:
The measuring cups at IKEA. Not only are they round on the bottom - a stupid design, but the kind of thing stores like IKEA do - but they are half in metric and half in US measurements. Thus, the set is 1/2 cup, 100 mL, 50 mL, and 1 tablespoon. Totally useless. I know they're not an American company, but they could have a set that's consistently in one unit of measurement. At least then I'd know what the problem was.

semi-voluntary poverty

I'm an outdoor educator. This means I have a really awesome job, that I spend most of my time playing in the woods, that I get to be part of someone's life-changing experience pretty much every week, that I go to professional development trainings on whitewater canoeing. It also means I'm poor.

I make less than minimum wage. I also get no benefits of any kind, including unemployment, because I am a per diem employee and my wages are regulated under the same laws that regulate camp counselors. I get a sort of grim amusement out of reading articles about labor laws and people who are underpaid. Sometime last year, the New York Times ran an article about hot dog cart companies that don't follow labor laws. One of the enforcement agents said, "No one should have to work from sun-up to sun-down for $65 a day." Guess what? That was my per diem rate last year,¹ except that I work round the clock. There was an article about grad student unions in the US News I was looking through today, and a UPenn student organizer said you can't live on $15,000/year in Philadelphia. That's about half again as much as I make, and I live in Philadelphia. Last year I think I cleared the poverty line, but by maybe two thousand dollars at the absolute most. My job expects me to spend two or three months every year going to unpaid training. This year, things have improved: we'll get a stipend between $100 and $300, depending on which trainings they decide to offer, for nearly a month of more or less mandatory training. There's a bumper sticker I like, somewhat bitterly, that says, "I work 40 hours a week to be poor." More, actually, in my case.

Of course, I'm not selling hot dogs. I'm doing something I love. It's also not like I don't have other options: I could probably make more temping half-time in California than I do at my outdoor ed job. I could do something like the New York Teaching Fellows Program.² I could go back to school. My whining is the whining of a college-educated kid with plenty of other opportunities, and I know that. It's also not like the organization I work for is making a huge profit off my work.³ They're kind of broke too. And outdoor ed norms are to pay poorly and expect people to be more or less homeless: live in a staff house that makes me miserable, live in a truck, whatever. That's how their budget is laid out, and the courses are still way too expensive for any of my students to even consider if they had to pay full fee. The extra from my work, the value I'm not getting paid for, goes to my students.

I've heard a lot of arguments about gentrification, which is rampant in Philadelphia, and I've heard a lot of people say vaguely nasty things about white lefties who kind of slum it for a couple years after college by working for non-profits and saying that they're poor. It's true that some people seem to take the fact that they work for a non-profit for less than they could get at a corporate enterprise as evidence that they're saints, and it's also true that some of those people are actually making a reasonable living and are complaining because they come from wealthier backgrounds. But I've worked for a lot of non-profits, and let me tell you, most of those white college-educated lefties are not getting paid much. They're usually getting paid more than I am, but the organizations they work for would be in trouble without people to run the office, write the grants, teach the after-school classes, and recruit the volunteers for substantially less than their skills are worth on an open market. Non-profit funding gets stretched and stretched and stretched, and much as it's true that my organization would do better with more staff stability, it would cost them money they don't have.

But I keep coming back to the fact that I'm living in Philadelphia, not Colorado or California. I'm giving up a lot of the options for natural beauty and playing in the mountains so that I can have some kind of normal life and be near my friends. And I'm busting my ass for my job: when I'm working, I'm working. I am doing nothing else. It's really important to me to eat well, but if my students have a crisis one morning, I deal with that. I don't have breakfast. I sleep six hours a night so I can keep track of them while they're awake and make plans for the next day with my co-instructor. I spend more than half and sometimes all of any given month away from home, I give up the opportunity to take martial arts classes or Spanish or pottery or just have a weekly discussion group, because I cannot say that I'll be somewhere once a week. I haven't tried to have a love life with this job, but there's a reason for that. I have some kind of a normal life, but not really.

So I'm putting a lot in, and even if the organization is broke, they could make it a priority for us to get paid a reasonable amount. The outdoor ed programs in other cities pay more, and frankly, one of the reasons I came back this year was that my Philadelphia Boss promised me they'd be paying us what people get for this work in Boston and New York. They're not. We're also not getting paid enough for training to cover my rent, which Philadelphia Boss also promised.⁴ Tomorrow I'm going to talk to the Director about training, the stipend, and whether I'm willing to work a month straight with one or two days off, and I have to think about how I want to frame it. I want her to pay me more, and I think one place where I have leverage is in being willing to stick around if I get paid more.

But I'm not convinced I do want to stick around, because I'm going to have to have this conversation every three months forever; I've been thinking that I want more stability in my life anyway, and thinking that this coming year might therefore be the end of it. I might leave Philadelphia next September and spend the fall working with adjudicated youth and the winter skiing, and apply for grad school or a teacher cert program for fall 2006. My job is kind of not going anywhere: I can stay and be a lead instructor for a few years, but I suspect that two years of doing this particular job full-time will be more than enough, and I'll stop learning from it and therefore stop wanting to do it. Then I can either look for instructing gigs that will teach me more - either technical skills in some other part of the country, or teaching skills working with a different kind of program - or start thinking about transferring to administrative work, which, maybe. But at some point, no matter what, I'd have to go work for other programs and see other models. I don't want to tell the Director I'll stick around for a long time, and then not do it. On the other hand, I might come back next spring if they take care of me, or stay for the fall, but I sure won't do either of those things if they don't.

The truth is I hate being poor. I hate it in a lot of ways, from being dependent on my parents for health insurance to not being able to buy new clothes when I put holes in my jeans, and what I hate most is that it makes me think and talk about money all the time, and that makes me feel like I'm greedy and materialistic. It makes me resent my organization. I need to leave before I start really resenting them, because busting your ass for something you resent is no good at all, and it will mess up my teaching.

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1. Small raise this year. Woohoo.
2. Except please, not in New York. I am apparently one of two people in the entire world who never ever wants to live there. It feels like too many rats in too small a cage, and I worry that I would have babies and chew their heads off. Or perhaps not have babies and just chew my own fingers off.
3. When my boss told me that he came in $20,000 under budget last year, I wanted to scream. But I also know that our national organization is broke and the local isn't that flush.
4. Philadelphia Boss apparently desperately wants these things to happen, and promises them because he thinks they're important. He's great. But he also needs to stop promising me things that he wants to be true and are nevertheless not certain, because it makes me not believe him.

sex for roses

I hate Valentine's Day, but not as much as I should. It makes my sister completely miserable, because it's another reminder that she's single and makes her feel undesirable and sort of failed. She cares a lot more about cultural norms than I do. She's also had a less satisfying romantic life than I have, though not because mine is superlative.¹

I've never spent Valentine's Day with someone I was dating. The one year I was dating someone on February 14, my little brother's bar mitzvah was that weekend. Bar mitzvot have to be scheduled nearly a year in advance, so when my mother asked how I felt about the second weekend in February I couldn't think of any problems. My euphemism² was sort of disappointed: he's a bit more of a romantic than I am, and I think he wanted to actually do romantic things on Valentine's Day. I was perfectly happy to go out to fancy-dress dinner with him the next weekend, and in fact probably happier about it than I would have been if we'd gone on the 14th itself.

My dislike for Valentine's Day falls into two major categories: the political and cultural criticism category, strongly informed by my feminism; and a certain bemusement towards the actual practices by which people observe it. Flowers? Well, roses are nice, but I don't really care about them. Plus, what little energy I put to thinking about flowers focuses on wishing I could afford them regularly. Chocolates? I like chocolate, but chocolates are usually not too interesting. I'd rather have a bar of really good plain dark chocolate. Cards? I made a couple of nice valentines (one has a sort of artsy green butterfly; the other has red polka-dot trim and a purple heart and little blue spangles and a red fishnet wrapping), and I really enjoyed the process of making them. But I also made really pretty New Year's presents for my friends, and enjoyed that just as much. I like strawberries, but they're not any good right now; I don't eat steak or oysters. Even the whole needing to have a date thing is sliding off me right now, because I don't really mind being single.³ The only thing I really like that's associated with Valentine's Day is champagne. Man oh man do I like champagne. But since I can't afford it, and neither can most of the people I know, it's not really an issue. So I just sit there and look at the circus and go, huh.

The one thing about this feeling is that I really hate it when people assume that the way to make me happy on Valentine's Day is to give me culturally approved signifiers. Come on, now. There are lots of reasons to give people presents, but two of the primary ones are to give people things they will actually like, and to impress them by showing them how well you understand them and how thoughtful you are. But you know, it takes no creativity or thought whatsoever to get someone a dozen roses for Valentine's Day. And if that's what you get me, I will not be precisely annoyed - it's a nice gesture, after all, and it's kind of ungracious to be annoyed when someone gets you pretty flowers - but I will not be nearly as impressed as I would have been if you'd glued interesting pictures to a piece of cardboard and made me a card. Or written me a note about why you like me. Or made me a cd of songs I don't know but would like. Or baked me cookies. Or bought me warm socks or a bar of dark chocolate. All of those are things that are personal. All the standard stuff is just a way to express generic affection without bothering to learn anything about the person you claim to care about.

That kind of substitution of the generic for the personal is one of my big political problems with Valentine's Day. Another is the way all the approved actions are so strongly gendered, with women cast as the people who want reassurance, love, and romance, and men cast as the ones who provide it (by spending money, of course). Professor B links to a favorable article about online dating,⁴ which mentions that women are more sexually adventurous and men are more emotionally open online. I don't know why they're so surprised. The internet cuts people out of their usual social contexts, which can be scary, but can also free them from the kind of social coercion that makes men pretend to be emotionally dead and women pretend they're not interested in sex.

Valentine's Day is all about keeping all those roles in place. Women provide sex and want romance and money; men provide romance and money and want sex. Eew. I hate thinking of my relationships, romantic or not, in that transactional mode. The relational part of being human is really strong, and really wonderful, and I think it cheapens and sours it to talk about it like it's a widget exchange. Not to mention the way these enforced gender roles damage women, damage men, contribute to sexual violence, and completely fuck over anyone who's not straight.

One consequence of the heteronormativity of everything is that shows like the L Word (a guilty pleasure if ever I had one) usually make the characters take recognizably masculine and feminine roles, even when there's not a butch woman among them. There was this one episode in the ongoing struggles of the central couple to find an appropriate sperm donor in which they considered a threesome with some guy who was hitting on them.⁵ After it failed, Bette - the bigshot curator who's always really busy with work - asked Tina - her partner, who would have been the one getting pregnant - if Tina had been attracted to the guy. There was never any question of whether Bette would be attracted to him: after all, only the person in the "woman" role can possibly be attracted to a guy, even when there aren't any butch/femme dynamics going on. I'm betting that if they'd had a Valentine's Day episode (which, because of scheduling, they didn't) Bette would have bought Tina flowers and taken her out for dinner. These shows slot their characters into gender roles because without them, they don't know how to tell the story. There's no spot for the generic cultural signifiers, because those signifiers are totally dependent on gender for their meaning.

Come on, people. Live a little.

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1. If you know a nice boy in the Boston area who wants to date a lovely, intelligent, practical, somewhat insecure, and totally inexperienced college junior, please let me know. But he has to be nice. And, you know, appropriate.
2. That's what I called him for a long time. I still dislike all the actual options.
3. Or, you know, whatever.
4. Which I have never tried and probably will never try, despite the minor kick I get out of writing profiles.
5. What a terrible idea. Unprotected sex with a complete stranger can have all sorts of nasty consequences, even aside from the ethics of specifically trying to conceive a kid with someone who may not want one.

miscellaneous fauna

During my run yesterday, I saw cows. Cows! In a public park in Berkeley. I came around a corner in the trail and there they were, lots of them, just kind of hanging out, eating and chewing and looking at the scenery. There were a few calves, including one who nursed while I was there. It was great.

On Saturday, a raccoon ran across the street in front of me.

And a week or two ago, there were newts out on the trail where I run. It had been raining, and they were crawling everywhere. Apparently it's newt breeding season here. One of the park roads is closed for it. They're beautiful and kind of astonishing: burgundy above and burnt ochre underneath, and when you pick them up to move them off the road they feel dense and muscular and a little slimy from the rain.

There is also the ever-present Pongo, my grandmother's dog, who is a prince among dogs. My mother is his fairy dogmother. She rescued him and brought him to California.

safety questions

I've had a number of conversations with my parents that start out with me telling them about my exciting ideas for cool things to do, and end up with them telling me to be careful, usually by taking someone else with me. The most recent was today, about going up to Yosemite Valley; the most memorable is something I'll probably never forgive my dad for saying. I was talking about hiking one of the long trails - the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, and the Continental Divide Trail - and he said, "I'm sorry, but there has to be a male on that trip." They're mostly not worried that I'll twist an ankle and not be able to call for help for a couple of days; instead, they worry that I'll be attacked, raped, and murdered. One of my grandmothers has the same worries: she insisted on lending me her cellphone when I drove from Chicago to Philadelphia alone, and regularly sends me those stupid forwarded emails with new schemes that kidnappers, carjackers, rapists, or whatever supposedly use.

So let's put aside the fact that I'm a lot less likely to need protection from lascivious or violent humans on one of those trails than in my daily life. Let's put aside the fact that any help I'd need from another person would almost certainly be some kind of medical care, and in that case I'd want someone with a cellphone, emergency medical training, or ideally both. Let's also put aside the fact that I have pretty darn good wilderness medical training myself, and am at least as likely to be doing the helping as to need the help. Instead, let's talk about women and safety.

There are a lot of supposedly basic precautions I don't take. I don't feel I need a partner to go backpacking, although I don't often go alone because it's so much more fun to go with someone. I walk home alone at night, sometimes in sketchy or unfamiliar neighborhoods, sometimes when I've had a fair amount to drink. I take the subway or the bus instead of a cab, because I don't have money. I took a ride up to my snow skills training from some guy I'd met once, and I'd take a ride from people I'd never met if I knew them through some context, like as friends of someone I'd once met. Tonight I went running: there was plenty of light when I started and I had originally planned to do a short run and be back before dark, but I really wanted that long run. So it was almost fully night in a public park and there I was alone, doing some stretches next to my car.

I've only been hassled twice, once at 11 am on my way to the train station three and a half years ago, when a guy riding by on his bike grabbed my breast, and an evening that same summer when I was waiting for the bus in a neighborhood I didn't know and ended up waiting for about half an hour. Someone who seemed to think I was a prostitute came up to me and kind of mumbled at me in a language I didn't understand, and someone else drove by and offered me a ride and then came back to repeat his offer after I refused, which frankly kind of scared me. It was my first time living in a major city, and I don't think I knew the kinds of tricks I know now about how to walk so you look confident and aware of your surroundings, even when you feel like shit.

Not looking vulnerable only does so much good, though, especially since I'm small and female and that makes me look vulnerable even when I'm walking assertively. The worst part is that I can never tell which fears are rational and which aren't. Is it reasonable to go for a run at night in a city? Is it reasonable to have four beers at a bar and then walk home by myself, because my friends want to stay longer and I'm tired? What's reasonable? The woman at the temp job I'm doing tomorrow said they'd pay for a cab on Tuesday, because they want me to work til 9 pm. That's nice, but of course I take bigger risks than a bus ride in a posh SF neighborhood all the time.

And the real question: what's the alternative? I could decide not to run, but I really want to run; tonight, I really wanted 6 miles instead of 4. I also like (by which I mean love and need for my own sanity) to be out in pretty places by myself: should I give that up? I could take cabs back from all my social events, but then I couldn't afford to go to social events. I could make my friends walk me home from the bar - something they'd probably do, if I asked - but I'd feel like a burden. I could stop drinking except at home and at friends' houses where I can spend the night. I could always drive my own vehicle. Not walking alone at night was kind of reasonable in Des Moines, where everyone drives everywhere, but try doing that in a major city. Basically, I could spend a lot more money and fuck up my life to deal with a relatively minor risk, because most people who attack women are people those women know. Not to mention the fucking highway, which is way more dangerous than Yosemite Valley and all three trails combined.

The really ridiculous thing is that all these nonspecific fears don't actually help me - or anyone - stay safe. They don't help me make good decisions, because I need or want to do so many "unsafe" things. They don't help me respond to bad situations. They don't address the bad situations I'm actually likely to encounter. They just give me a big pile of guilt and worry to take the edge off my joy in my life and my independence. Thanks, culture, and fuck you too.

the worst that can happen

Bitch, Ph.D.'s post about fearing American fascism echoes a lot of my own fears. The word fascist has been so diluted that Michael Ignatieff of the NYT recently said that the people who are disrupting elections in Iraq are fascists. They're not. Fascism is a particular political ideology. The left has been pretty free with the cries of "fascist!", and in some ways we're now paying the price. Because this isn't fascism, right here. Bush is not a fascist, at least not publically. But his ideology does echo fascism in significant ways.

Fundamentally, fascism is an ideology of the nation. It has no founding texts, really, but back when it was a respectable political ideology it had ties to the futurists. Fascism reveres the nation, but only as an idealized history full of cultural signifiers like traditional dress and food, heroic ancestors, and, of course, traditional family structure. The futurism shows up in the cult of violence and progress. There's an incredible passage in The Futurist Manifesto: "We will glorify war�the world�s only hygiene�militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman."¹ That's the cult of violence, right there, and the rest of it is much the same. For the fascists, war offered a proving ground, a place to find meaning. It also engaged the whole state apparatus and provided a useful symbiosis between corporate and social; and it made people stay in their social roles. While fascism was once a respectable political ideology, the seeds of its downfall were within itself: it is necessarily violent, repressive, and exploitative of national tradition.

The summary of traits at Bitch, Ph.D., is right on. David Neiwert of Orcinus has a lot more about the creep of fascism in this country; he also argues that gays are the new Jews, which seems terrifyingly plausible.

An American fascism would look different from Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, Franco's Spain. But it would share those basic traits. I think a lot about the worst that could happen, and what I would have to do in that situation. What we would all have to do. It wouldn't be pretty.

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1. F.T. Marinetti, reprinted at http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/manifesto.html. I was shocked that I found it online. Considering it's The Futurist Manifesto, maybe I shouldn't be.

justly married

About the only thing that makes me feel politically hopeful these days is same-sex marriage. I know 11 states passed amendments to their constitutions banning it; but when I was a high school gay rights activist, not so long ago, it was unimaginable. Now Massachusetts actually has same-sex marriage, Vermont has civil unions, and a bunch of other states are in various stages of getting there. There's a map here that describes what's going on in each state, and Freedom to Marry usually has the latest news, good and bad. The latest news is big news, too: a New York state judge just ruled that same-sex couples must get marriage licenses. Her ruling explicitly links these changes in the meaning of marriage to older changes, like allowing interracial marriage and banning marital rape. People are talking about a backlash, of course, but I think this is great news. There may be no same-sex marriage in my flyover state for a long time (though an amendment banning it failed), but this is the one issue where we're winning. Ampersand, as usual, has a thoughtful discussion, and some links to other discussions.

No really, we are winning. I really believe it. Homophobia will still be there, but on this issue we will win.

What strikes me about this, though, is that it all makes me ridiculously happy. Really, really personally happy. When San Francisco started issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Derek Powazek posted a really beautiful series of photos called Justly Married. I remember sitting in my house in Philadelphia with my housemates and looking at all of them, and at the photos of Phyllis Martin and Del Lyon (and again, right after they got married) and crying. It still gets me choked up to see that second picture, the one where they're old and hugging and the two famous women who are watching the ceremony are crying in the background. And the ones at Justly Married, well, none of them makes me cry individually. But the whole series? The guy in the kilt who looks like he's screaming with joy? The guy who's sticking his tongue out and smiling and holding hands with his much older husband? The woman in the leather jacket and purple sunglasses who looks like she's about to cry? The middle-aged women under the umbrella? Oh god. I don't understand people who can see these pictures and not be moved.

They make me happy and they make me cry and I am so glad that soon there will be more. Thank you, Judge Ling-Cohan.

taking it personally, redux

The awesome Bitch, Ph.D. has written her last two posts about how totally awful the State of the Union speech made her feel. It reminds me of what I said about taking it personally. All this stuff affects us. It affects our lives. It affects our chances of going bankrupt, having major health problems, getting hassled in public, being able to raise our kids in a safe world, having wilderness near us, getting drafted. Bush's presidency makes it harder for me - me personally - to get a job, because everything I want to work for is getting its funding cut. And if things get really bad, it will be our lives that we have to put on the line. Even worse, I don't feel like I have any control over any of those things.

I'm not surprised that she feels like shit. Some days I'm surprised any of us actually function.

beer and Social Security

I just watched the State of the Union with a pretty decent amount of Lagunitas IPA and some friends of a friend. There's a lot on my mind, but the biggest thing is this: you want to talk about Social Security? OK, let's talk about Social Security.

But let's get a couple of things straight: Social Security is one of the great triumphs of American government. It used to be that being old meant being poor and homeless because you couldn't work any more, unless you were lucky enough to have kids who could support you or lots of money saved up. And when bad things happened to the economy, as they tend to do periodically, those kids couldn't both support you and feed their own kids, or themselves. The same thing happened if you got hurt and couldn't work: your choices were to starve or to seriously burden your (probably already burdened) family. Social Security fixed that, because it guaranteed that anyone who finds himself or herself old or injured - conditions which can affect any of us - would not starve. It's not a lot of money, but it's the difference between poverty and starvation. That's a big fucking difference. Social Security is awesome.

At a party at my grandmother's, one of her upper-middle-class friends was insisting that Social Security is just not enough to live on and doesn't make a big difference for people. Now, it's true that $955 a month¹ doesn't go that far in San Francisco. But in Des Moines, you can probably live on it. And even if you can't just live on your Social Security, it makes a big difference. Lord knows $955 a month would make a big difference in my life. In fact, it's not that different from what I make now, and retirees have Medicare so they don't have to worry about health insurance. People who argue that it's a meaningless amount are just completely ignoring most people's lives.

Also, it's a good thing that rich people get benefits too. Yeah, payroll taxes are regressive; the fact that you don't pay Social Security taxes on income over $76,000 means that I pay a larger percentage of my income in Social Security taxes than someone who makes ten times as much as I do. It's kind of a bummer. But the fact that everyone gets Social Security means that everyone feels invested in its continued existence. Anyone who's watched American politics in the last fifteen years (and probably before that, but I wasn't paying attention) knows that it's really freakin' easy to throw around poor people's lives and safety nets. Because Social Security pays a meaningful amount - because for most people, that $955 makes a big difference - the middle and upper classes really care about it's continued existence. For more evidence of why this works, check out the home mortgage interest tax deduction, which is another politically untouchable program that benefits (in this case primarily) middle and upper class families. Middle and upper class families are a much more politically important constituency than poor families; even though the money means less to them, it keeps them invested. It keeps them caring about Social Security. It makes Social Security the third rail of American politics.

I have a particular interest in this because I've done some comparative study of welfare states. The Netherlands has particularly successful social programs, and one of the reasons they're so successful is that everyone gets benefits. Everyone has a stake. Means-testing makes sense, theoretically, but in reality it often undermines over-all social commitment to particular programs. It lets wealthy and middle-class people see beneficiaries of social programs as somehow different from them. This is bad for social unity, for the longevity of the program, and for the actual policies. To quote a paper I wrote in 2003, "Wealthy and middle class people tend to get programs that address their own felt needs; poor people get programs that wealthy and middle class people think will help them, which tend to be punitive, ineffective, and stigmatizing." Programs which serve everyone, rich or poor, avoid this dichotomy. If you feel like knowing more about this, you can read The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, a comparative analysis of the US, Germany, and the Netherlands,² or The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States³. Or ask me. Back on track:

Bush's plan is basically a windfall for the financial industry. Social Security is one of the most efficient government programs ever, partly because it's pretty damn simple. Its overhead costs are around 1%⁴ for a pretty good reason: the SSA only invests in US treasury bonds, which don't make that much but have essentially zero risk and don't need a lot of decision-making. Active financial management costs a lot more: you're paying someone to spend time doing research for you, to have trade memberships, to explain your options to you, to make transactions for you. The financial industry would love to get its cut of the $1,366 billion the Social Security trust fund had in 2003, or the $3,585 billion it's projected to have in 2012.⁵ Sadly, that cut comes at the expense of our security. Active management is basically always riskier (you're making judgment calls, rather than just investing in the safest option), and it takes a big cut out of the available money for Social Security. Also, Social Security's very size helps it be efficient. National health insurance would also have that advantage.

Fourth, the money you put into Social Security is not money you're saving. You don't have a personal account at the Social Security office. Social Security is a giant fund that all workers and their employers pay into. Your employer contributes the same amount you do, and the government uses that tax and their formula (which is related to how much you've paid in) to provide you with benefits. It's called a social insurance scheme for good reason: there's a large pool of people putting in money, and you get benefits when you end up in particular situations. Is the money you give your health insurance company yours? No. But it funds the benefits you get from them if particular things happen. The same is true of Social Security. Bush wants to make us all individually responsible for our old age, our health care costs, everything, by making us save money for them individually. The fact is, though, that insurance schemes work because they spread the risk around. For every person who needs a lot of money from Social Security or a health insurance company, there's someone else who doesn't. And you don't know which person you're going to be. If you're tied to your individual account, the catastrophes and unexpected twists of life hurt you a lot more. If instead you give up some of your money to the social insurance plan, you end up with a lot more security.

Yes, Social Security was designed for an era when people died younger. But that's easy enough to fix: raise the retirement age. Most people these days can work past 65. Or make people contribute more. It does not require a fundamental retooling of an incredibly successful system. Paul Krugman's columns⁶ have elegant explanations of this, as well as of many other things.

Remember that part about your employer putting money in? Bush's plan for Social Security, like his plan for Health Savings Accounts, basically absolves employers - who usually have an awful lot more power than their individual employees - of responsibility for the maintenance of society. I don't have much to say about this, except that it's of a piece with his general plan to keep rich people from doing their fair share. If he's successful enough with this, he will manage to destroy much of what's still good about this country. And really, that's what his Social Security plan is about. That's what creating accounts that you can pass on to your children means. Time was when inherited wealth was treated by the tax code as something slightly shameful, like capital gains. The tax code always favors something, and it used to favor work; Bush is trying to change it to favor wealth, to favor privilege, to favor inheritance and investment over labor. That's dangerous. It pulls this country towards a wider split between rich and poor, and towards a government that reflects that split. And as the middle class disappears, so does the vision of this country as egalitarian, meritocratic, and self-governing. However deluded that vision is, like the ideals of civil liberties, it acts as a philosophical check on bad policy. I don't really want to live in a US without that check.

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1. The amount the average retiree receives in Social Security benefits.
2. by Robert E. Goodin, Bruce Headey, Ruud Muffels, and Henk-Jan Dirven. Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN: 0521596394 (paperback). It's the kind of quantitative political science that makes me like quantitative political science: thoughtful, clear, accessible, and honest about its own assumptions and limits.
3. by Christopher Howard. Princeton University Press, 1999. ISBN: 069100529X (paperback). I honestly don't really remember this book, but I wrote a paper about social welfare policies which cited it extensively in the passages about this kind of differential, and the summary makes it sound useful.
4. http://californiaaggie.ucdavis.edu/article/?id=7266.
5. http://research.aarp.org/econ/dd86_oasdi.html.
6. Available at the Paul Krugman Archive or from the New York Times.

what to eat, #3

Migas always make me think of this weekend in late October 2002. It was the first weekend of a really wonderful relationship, and we made migas that Sunday morning and talked about food. Migas make their own good memories, though. They're pieces of fried tortilla scrambled with eggs and served with whatever you like. They're a Tex-Mex breakfast food, but I've been known to eat them whenever and wherever the fancy strikes, because they're easy, filling, and delicious.

one small corn tortilla (some recipes call for tortilla chips; because I usually have flour tortillas on hand, I often use just over half of one of those, which is absolutely not traditional)
fat of some kind - my preference order goes butter, neutral (canola, corn, etc) oil, olive oil
2 or 3 eggs, depending on how hungry you are
cream or milk
salt
hot pepper (ideally a bit of jalapeño, but cayenne, hot pepper flakes, and black pepper are all fine)
at least one more tortilla
embellishments: onions, mushrooms, other veggies, guacamole, salsa, chopped tomatoes

Heat a scant tablespoon of fat in a skillet until the butter foams or the oil is warm; tear the tortilla in pieces - an inch square is a good size, but they can be rough - and throw them in. Stir to make sure they all get coated in fat, then cook over medium-high heat while you do the other stuff. Check regularly to make sure they don't burn. If there's not enough fat, add a little more.

Break the eggs into a glass or jar and add a little cream or milk. It helps keep them soft and custardy when cooked. Add a pinch of salt, the minced jalapeño or hot pepper flakes, and whisk it all together with a fork until it's pretty uniform. Check the skillet: the tortilla pieces should be toasty-looking. Pour in the eggs, and immediately take the heat way down, to just above low. Stir everything together, and cook the way you would cook scrambled eggs. I like my eggs custardy, so I keep it on low heat and stir periodically but not all the time. Not stirring all the time lets big soft curds set up. At the end I stir a lot. Make sure you scrape the bottom of the skillet pretty often, or you'll have a mess of burned eggs at the bottom of your migas pan.

Serve with embellishments and another tortilla, heated briefly in a warm oven or on another skillet.¹ Tear off pieces of your tortilla and use them to scoop up guacamole and migas. Mmmmmm.

If you're using onions, mushrooms, or other vegetables that you want to cook, you should throw them into the skillet with the tortilla pieces, and before the egg. This is also a good time to add garlic or other seasonings that do better with a little cooking. Onions always go in first, and cook til they're translucent before anything else goes in.

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1. It really is worth heating it up.

reconsidering

I keep being tempted to tell people about it, though.

lost in cyberspace

This blog is on the internet, and I am the only person who knows it's here.

I love that.

taking it personally

The Well-Timed Period, an excellent and expert blog about reproductive health, recently wrote a long, furious post about Bush's conversation with the leaders of the pro-life march. It reminded me of Kameron Hurley's post about a country without Roe. Reading Kameron's post was what made me consider the possibility of losing Roe in a serious way, and it made me incredibly depressed. Reading both of these posts, it's clear that Kameron and Ema are both really, really personally angry about this, and I feel like every time I read stuff like that there's this voice coming in over my shoulder saying, "Hey, it's politics, don't take it personally. Don't be an angry feminist." I hear that voice a lot: when I'm the only person talking about gender issues at my job, when I get pissed off because some kind of mainstream media obviously thinks I don't exist,¹ when I'm talking about social services being cut.

Of course I fucking take it personally. It's my life these jerks are talking about controlling. That picture of the patriarchy at work? They're deciding what I can and can't do with my body. They're making my medical decisions for me. And they've never even met me. They don't know anything about my life, but because I'm a woman I get no say in my own reproductive health. And make no mistake, the anti-abortion movement is about controlling women's bodies. When the same people are working to outlaw abortion, prevent access to over-the-counter emergency contraception, prevent access to routine contraception, encourage marriage for its own sake, promote the idea that women are naturally better caregivers, stop anything that addresses sexism, prevent access to sex ed, make sex ed about gender roles.... I mean, it's not hard to see the pattern here. Being able to have sex without risking pregnancy, being able to make a living without a man, being a legal person were big changes in the social order and women's lives, and these people want to go back to how it was before. And that's my life. That's my life they want to wreck, my body they want to commandeer, my sexuality they want to control.

How the hell can I not take it personally? How the hell can any of us not take it personally? And then when we do, we get told we're being too emotional. It's an implicit argument against feminism, because feminism gets associated with angry women, who are simultaneously too feminine (too emotional) and not feminine enough (loud and outspoken). The hell with that. We're not going back.

They're brave words, of course, but we may not have much of a choice. We may lose every legal battle, and see the US government slowly tighten into something pretty close to actual fascism. We may lose Roe. We may not have time to worry about Roe because we 'll be too busy with total environmental collapse. And thinking about those things a couple days ago made me despair. Because as far as I can tell, there is nothing I can do about it.

I don't feel that despair as strongly now. It's only a little because Amelia told me encouraging things about judicial respect for precedent and how things aren't that bad, yet. It's mostly because I thought about it, and yeah, there's not much I can do to affect national politics right now. But I thought about it, and we'll fight. There will be battles to fight and ways I can fight them. I'd rather not have to, but if push comes to shove I'll be there. Taking it personally, even when it's not about me.

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1. Cosmo and magazines like it do this all the goddamn time.

literary trash

I went to the Berkeley Public Library today and got my card reactivated from when I was here three years ago, then walked over to the Central Library to get some entertainment. I've recently started reading Derrida's The Gift of Death, and the minute I picked it up I knew I wouldn't be able to get through it without a fair amount of trashy, entertaining scifi.¹ This is how I work. I read really dense, complicated books, but I have to be able to take breaks from them. The distractions also push me to go back: enough trash makes me need substance and enough substance makes me need trash.

Looking at the science fiction shelf in the library, though, made me think about how much terrible science fiction there is in the world. Holy shit. And I don't even mean bad in comparison to people like Ursula LeGuin who are serious art-novel writers; I just mean bad. Formulaic and pretentious and gawd, is it poorly written. Not even entertaining. It's sort of depressing, because I love scifi. I love the super-brilliant stuff and I love the entertainment and I have trouble picking up new writers. If I don't have a pretty solid recommendation for someone, I end up worrying that it's going to be impossibly bad and just returning to the books I've read over and over, or to new books by the same authors.

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1. I mean scifi the way it's shelved in the library: science fiction and fantasy. In terms of what I actually read for this purpose, I'd also include a fair amount of pseudo-historical fiction - the kind that's about myths, legends, and pre-history - and young adult fiction.

socialist utopias

Sometimes Berkeley seems too good to be true. For my last couple of weeks in Philadelphia, I kept talking about how I wanted there to be a public space with tools and materials for cooking and crafts and building. Like a sewing cafe. Places that would stock tools that are expensive for an individual or household to get, and that nobody needs to use all the time. It turns out that there are two in the Bay Area: the Tinkers Workshop in Berkeley and CELLspace in San Francisco. And they both have bike workshops and youth programs too. Plus there's a tool lending library for Berkeley residents or anyone over 18 who owns property in Berkeley, at the goddamn Berkeley Public Library.

Stuff like this makes me want to stay here forever. It feels like home. It also makes me worry that I'd get too comfortable too easily, though, and not feel like I had to really work to make it better, because it would already be so awesome.

what to eat, #2

If you happen to go snow camping, I strongly suggest the following breakfast:

Naan (or pita, or whatever they have at your grocery store)
Peanut butter - I like the crunchy peanuts-and-salt version
Nutella

Take a small tupperware and fill it with peanut butter and nutella: you can put one on each side, and they'll stay pretty separate. When you're actually snow camping, you'll have to put this in your sleeping bag or bivy sack, because otherwise it will freeze and you'll have to eat it for lunch (assuming it gets pretty warm during the day). But it's the best damn thing ever, whether you actually bother to spread it on the naan or just eat peanut butter and nutella with a spoon and alternate with bites of naan.

what to eat, #1

Have I mentioned that avocadoes are in season? Here's what I've been doing with them:

1 ripe avocado¹
half a lime
salt
a very small handful of cilantro

Scoop the avocado flesh into a bowl large enough to hold it and let you stir things too. Mash the avocado up with a spoon or a fork until it's a good texture - a few small chunks, but mostly blended up. You can put the lime juice in right away, to keep the avocado from discoloring and to give you a little liquid to help with the mashing. Don't squeeze the lime all the way out, though. Add less than you think you need, taste, add more. Add the salt: put too little in, then taste it. I find that it takes a generous pinch, but you can always add more; and we might pinch differently. When the salt and lime and avocado are all well balanced, chop the cilantro up as fine as you can get it and stir it in. Eat it with a spoon.


People do all sorts of things with guacamole, but I think this is the best. It's simple and fast, and you can really taste the best parts of the guacamole. Tomatoes and garlic are fine, but who really cares? You're there for the avocado, and maybe the cilantro; the lime and salt just bring out the other flavors. Sometimes I add a little very finely chopped fresh hot pepper. My mom uses brined hot peppers, which disperses the heat more and also adds some salt and a different kind of sourness (from vinegar, instead of lime). I think the biggest advantage of hot pepper is that it balances the guacamole really perfectly without overwhelming any other flavor: round avocado taste v. sharp lime and cool cilantro v. hot pepper. The major disadvantage is that it's very difficult to get the heat dispersed effectively. Using a coffee or spice grinder, a mortar and pestle, or a blender might help.

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1. Hass avocadoes - the most common variety in the US - turn black when they're ripe, and get tender. You can buy them firm, and let them soften into ripeness on your counter. If you can get to the Monterey Market in Berkeley, you should. The avocadoes have been perfect.

generalizations from ME

I've been reading the comments for this post about a Dilbert cartoon based on a joke that only women like shopping, and the comments keep reminding me of Larry Summers's latest adventure in stupidity, in which he tried to justify not having a lot of women in top science professorships while claiming he was just explaining.

Both the people commenting on flea's blog and Larry Summers are making vast generalizations from their personal experiences. "I like shopping, but I can barely get my husband to buy his own underwear." "My daughter got two trucks and named them daddy truck and baby truck." They see these personal experiences, they see stereotypes and heuristics which validate them, and they conclude that the stereotypes are accurate and useful ways of seeing the world. And you know, I bet they're confused, because flea and people who agree with her are also arguing from their personal experience (I hate shopping); so is Nancy Hopkins, an MIT researcher who did a major study on gender bias at MIT and has been very clear about her distaste for Summers's remarks (I'm offended because I'm a woman who likes to work 80-hour weeks). But there's a difference. Flea and Hopkins are looking at stereotypes, and saying, "The world is more complicated than that." They're not saying that there are no women who like shopping, or that there are no women who would rather raise children than study physics: their experience provides no basis for stereotypes, just a way to refute them.

For anyone who's forgotten seventh grade science (apparently including the president of Harvard University!) the scientific method works like this: you look around you for a while, and come up with a hypothesis. Your hypothesis lets you make predictions, and then you design an experiment. If the stuff your hypothesis predicted happens when you do the experiment, your hypothesis is doing ok. But if your hypothesis fails - if there are situations where your predictions are wrong - you have to get a new hypothesis, either by narrowing the scope of your old hypothesis or by finding a new explanation with new predictions. You can't just keep bringing up situations where your predictions were right, because there's a counter-example.

This is what flea and Hopkins are doing. They're giving a counter-example. And Summers and the commenters don't have theories that explain flea, or Hopkins, or me. They just keep bringing up times when they were right. Of course, nothing flea or Hopkins is saying means that Summers's daughter has to grow up to be a brilliant physicist or that no women can like shopping, so using that as a response to their arguments makes no sense whatsoever.

The rules of social science evidence are a little different, of course. I know that. One counter-example doesn't disprove the whole thing, because people are ridiculously complicated and varied. There's a lot to say about the real social science evidence that Summers is ignoring, or the way the kind of evidence you allow changes the results you get. But when you look at the logical structure, Summers and the commenters are making nonsensical arguments; and despite their use of the same kind of evidence, flea and Hopkins are making arguments that make plenty of sense.

the mystery of the hat

There's this awful woman who's been staying with my grandmother. She's gone now, but she used to say things like, "you're very perceptive for one so young" when I said anything even marginally intelligent (I'm 22, not 8), and constantly talk about all the important people she knew and important things she had done. Totally unreliable. But the other day she said something interesting: "With your cap on, you could easily be mistaken for a boy."

There's no way for her to know this, but my little brother and I have pretty much exactly the same haircut. We got our hair cut at the same time by the same person, my all-time favorite stylist, who lives in my hometown and makes me ignore all the fancy places in Philadelphia and San Francisco and New York because she's better. When she finished cutting my hair, after her usual comment about not making me look too butch, she said, "Well, they're pretty similar." We both have short brown hair, layered and slightly spiky in the front, trimmed and shaped in the back.

I've also never been mistaken for a boy, or almost never: a friend thinks someone called me sir one day when we were walking down the street, and it may have happened once in an airport, but people basically get my gender right. I have a really feminine figure, I'm short, I have no real facial hair (aside from the nearly transparent peach fuzz that actually makes me look more feminine than shaving would), and even wearing work pants and big sweaters with my boyish haircut or shaved head doesn't override the other gender cues (and anyway, I usually wear girl clothes: butch girl clothes, but girl clothes nevertheless). I'm really obviously a girl. In fact, my hair is often one of the least feminine things about my appearance.

I think she might be right, though. I can't figure out why: maybe the hat gives people less information in general?

I used to want to be cool

I love country music. So there. Not radio country, but Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, and Johnny Cash. Merle Haggard and Hank Williams and Emmylou, oh goodness. It's kick-ass work music, they have awesome voices, and they make fun of themselves and each other like family.

In high school, I claimed I didn't like country. It wasn't cool. I was totally full of shit. Country music will always mean cooking and washing dishes, driving out west, and my parents dancing in the kitchen. Of course it embarrassed me in high school. It's awesome.

clumsy!

I came to California, and promptly lost my cds, broke a dish, and ripped part of the toilet paper holder in the bathroom off the wall. Hrrumph.

on running

I've been running a lot lately, and further than I used to think I could. After barely running for the last month, I ran 4 miles on Tuesday, and another 37 minutes (maybe 3.5 miles?) tonight. I've been thinking that by the time I leave California I'd like to do a serious challenge run, something over 10 miles. Maybe the 11 mile roundtrip to Wildcat Camp at Point Reyes, or something up in Tilden Park - I have the feeling that the Inspiration Point trail goes a long, long way. It's a long way to come from sophomore year of college, when I'd never gone running and maxed out, after a couple of months, at 2.5 very slow miles. Even further from high school, when I would get up before 6 for aerobics classes at the Y (can you imagine? me in an aerobics class?) but refused to run under any circumstances. Except, of course, from enemies or to the bathroom.

I know a lot of people who hate to run, and because I used to feel that way, I think some of those people could learn to love it. Not everyone, of course. I come from a family of runners, which in this case means a family full of reasonable but not spectacular athletes and addicts. Everyone in my family gets a rush from doing too much. I remember deciding where to go to college, and choosing the place that would kick my ass. It did - I had no idea how to handle it for the first two years, and would find myself at the end of the semester with a massive pile of back work; so I'd have to work almost straight through for two weeks to get it done, and then I'd feel awesome. This isn't a healthy way to do things: I get a lot done, sometimes, and I like running, but I'd be better off working steadily. We also have a lot of addicts - cigarettes and alcohol, and most of the women in my family have eating disorders. It's the same feeling, right, except starving or binging instead of schoolwork, or exercising compulsively instead of pushing yourself right at a particular moment. And feeling like you have to kick your own ass to be alive is often really unhealthy. If you like it, though, if you really enjoy doing things that are incredibly difficult for you, you might like running. It also helps to be ok at it, and to have good joints: if your joints are bad, running is going to do you very little good.

I don't really think running is good for your body, except for the cardiovascular stuff. For being healthy, as opposed to good at a particular activity (running, boxing, skiing, anything that takes intense cardiovascular power) or high on endorphins, I think walking and yoga are probably both a lot better. Or non-competitive swimming. Walking and swimming have enough resistance to keep your bones strong, yoga gets you flexible, none of them destroy your knees and ankles like running does. There's a cult of running that says that it's the only serious exercise, but that's total nonsense. If you want to love your body and be healthy, you should do whatever physical activity makes you love your body and be healthy. Walking, swimming, yoga, aerobics, canoeing, squash. The people who think their own kind of exercise is the best can all go to hell. For me, though, running is amazing. I like the high and the cardiovascular resource, but I also just like how it feels.

I started moving towards running after high school. I'd taken these weightlifting classes - all women, supportive environment, ages from 15 to 75 - and I kept doing circuit training the summer after I graduated. I also started doing the elliptical cross-trainers, because they were low impact and didn't make my breasts bounce. In all seriousness, that was a major reason that I hated running. I played pick-up ultimate, which involved running, but that was ok because I had some goal (catching the frisbee! blocking my opponent!) to distract me from the way my breasts bounced. Back to the elliptical trainers: they also helped me build up enough cardio fitness that when I went to college and lived with two other people who wanted to take up running for the first time, I could do it. It was fun - we'd go on sunny afternoons and run about 2 miles, very slowly, and then drink tea and bake things to avoid thinking about schoolwork. One of them has since switched to yoga and bicycling as her primary exercise, and the other runs marathons. Go figure. When I decided to play on the ultimate team, I could just barely sort of maybe if I tried really hard keep up with the rest of the team and be completely exhausted at the end of warm-ups. I remember one round of sprints nearly made me cry during the spring break training trip. I quit. It was a kick-ass team, and I contributed just about nothing.

But it made me a runner, sort of. I couldn't have started from scratch and gone running; I needed the gradual build-up. I ran intermittently, always slowly and about the same distance - 2 miles, occasionally 3 - until last spring. I'd been running pretty consistently just then, and I had this realization. I wasn't turning around because I was exhausted or expected to be exhausted at the end. I was just sick of it. I was bored. Running the same route in Philadelphia day after day is boring as shit. It was a great thing to realize. I ended up asking a good friend who can outrun me over any distance to flat-out do me a favor and go running with me to keep me company, and it was a revelation. I could run for almost an hour at a reasonable pace, and I could run almost indefinitely if we went slowly enough. I think the difference between 2.5 miles and 5 is a lot less than people think. It is for me, anyway. I'm running 40 minute increments now, and I want to go out on Sunday and make it 75 minutes because I think it's possible. I haven't run that far in almost a year.

That friend and I actually ended up with an arrangement that I loved, and which is by far the best running arrangement I've ever had. He would run from his house to mine at his pace: about 4.5 miles, and a 7 or 8 minute mile. We'd have some water, drive up to Fairmount Park, and do a nice hour-long cooldown for him, which was my run. I never ran too fast or far for him to keep up with me, and he could push me a little but he didn't need to for it to be a good run for him. The only time I did anything like maxing him out was on this fairly brutal hill, which for some reason I felt like running up. Of course, then he moved to DC.

Running alone has never worked very well for me, until just now when I started running at one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. That's pretty helpful. Treadmills make me crazy, so that's not really an option. I've also learned that I have to be careful about eating when I run. I need to eat before I go, so rolling out of bed in the morning and running out the door is no longer an option, and I can't eat right before I run or I'll want to puke.

I eat an enormous amount when I'm running. I think this would happen with any physical activity, though: whenever I'm really active, I feel like eating anything in my general vicinity. Over the last year I've even started craving meat, something that has never happened before in my nine years of vegetarianism. There are people who run a lot who are vegan, but I don't know how. Actually, I called one of them when I felt like no matter how much I ate I was still hungry, and said, "What did you eat?!" and he said, "Well, I ate probably two pounds of tofu a day. Sometimes three." Oh. Right. My current strategy is avocadoes, because I'm in California and they're in season. I'm trying for one a day, but it might get too expensive.

I have to drink a lot of water. Juice is actually better, because then I get calories too. And stretch - stretching is awesome. You do it for five minutes, and then you're not sore the next day. My friend who I used to run with who did the marathon also has a training technique that she swears by: run five minutes, walk one. Repeat for 26.2 miles. She said it doubled her mileage immediately to walk one minute out of six. I haven't tried it, but everyone I know who has loves it. The major thing I do is to go slow. I'm not super-interested in going fast, so I don't. Sometimes I'm really slow, sometimes I go a little faster, but I'm never going much faster than a 10 minute mile. It's nice. By the time I'm done with my run, my whole body has sort of warmed up and loosened and stretched out.

Those are my running tricks. But I think the most important thing is that if, on balance, you hate it, you shouldn't do it. Do something else. Do something you like. There are so many awesome physical things to do in the world that no one should have to be miserable exercising.

we should NOT return to modesty

I just finished Wendy Shalit's A Return to Modesty and nearly threw it into the Pacific Ocean, which was about ten feet in front of me.¹ Holy shit, it's annoying. Her argument, as briefly as I can make it, is that women should be more sexually modest (i.e. not have sex or any significant sexual contact) because that's the best way for women to be happy, individually and as a class. She says a couple of things that strike me as both interesting and important, but none of them are about sexual modesty; the best I can say for her ideas about sex are that, yeah, fine, no one should harass her for having them. Other people who feel the same way should join with her to create a subculture in which they're all happy. Meanwhile, I'm annoyed. Why?

1. She's constantly talking about "now that we've gotten rid of the patriarchy..."² Hey! The patriarchy is still here! I even have a picture of it. Alternatively, please look at any photo of the US Congress or a state legislature, or think about the fucking pay gap. The people who make decisions about women's reproductive rights (i.e. my body) are all old guys. That's patriarchy, folks.

2. She's advocating for a return to a "true" womanhood, which existed in relationship to a "true" manhood. It's interesting - everyone I've ever heard say this is a good idea fits fairly neatly into gender norms. I don't. I can do a passable imitation of femininity, but I'd rather be out in the woods not showering and kicking ass, and I'm certainly not interested in being quiet and sweet. Barry at Alas, a Blog and Kameron at Brutal Women occasionally write about growing up as a less than masculine boy and a less than feminine girl, respectively. It's hard and often miserable, and the more people like Shalit prop up those norms (even arguing that people who have abandoned them should go back), the worse it gets. Which brings me to the next problem.

3. Shalit romanticizes the past, when men were men and women were women and gender norms created courtesy and made everyone nice to everyone else. But you know what? Women couldn't own property. Women couldn't vote. Women weren't legally persons. Not only that, but the women of that time worked their butts off to make sure that things changed; Shalit doesn't seem to notice that the world she romanticizes created the feminist movement. She talks a lot about how happy her grandmother and her friends are, but they can't have been that satisfied with gender relations: they and their daughters moved heaven and earth to change them. It reminds me of Kameron's neat way of phrasing a big problem that feminist (or otherwise tough) women have: the simultaneous desire to be a real person and to be loved. Shalit comes down squarely on the side of trading personhood for her version of a satisfying romantic life. It seems like that isn't a trade-off in her life: the kind of person she is and wants to be is modest and feminine, and this book comes out of her frustration with not being able to find men who want to be chaste with her. It's about her struggle to be a real person and be loved, but at the same time she undercuts everyone who doesn't want to be the same kind of real person as her. There must be something wrong with us. We're not really women, because women, says Shalit, are naturally modest and embarrassed and want sex to be the same thing she wants it to be. The hell with that. I'm a real woman, and I like messing around in the woods and fighting and being strong, and having egalitarian buddy relationships with people. One major goal of the last, say, 40 years of feminism has been trying to convince people that women aren't all the same. Shalit apparently hasn't noticed.

4. She also never considers queer people. The words queer, homosexual, lesbian, and gay do not appear in the index. The only mention of queerness is in the context of virgins being teased that they may secretly be "lezzies," and it's in a quotation from someone else. This is a book about sexuality by a woman who went to a small liberal arts college in the late 90s. She must have known that queer people existed.

5. Feminism is about way more than romantic relationships, and all the behaviors Shalit recommends will keep us from those other goals. She doesn't even think of it. The pay gap? Female legislative representation? Women judges? Being modest, decorous, and following the gender rules will keep us from those goals, which, frankly, are a pretty big deal to me. It shows how little Shalit understands both feminism and gender that she doesn't consider this.

6. This is yet another book about gender that says, "you know, if women would just go back to their places and be more feminine, we wouldn't have all these uncivilized males running around being sexually violent." Shalit argues over and over that women's job is to be feminine and thus "civilize" men, and that it's therefore unsurprising that men are "rude"³ to women. I find this kind of logic insulting to men, who are presumed to be wild and uncivilized and in need of women to be human. It also places the major burden for sexual violence on women, and you know, that's just stupid. I may not be very inspirational to a man looking for civilizing influences, but that does not make me responsible for sexual violence. It just doesn't. And that kind of argument tends to restrict women's choices by predicting the downfall of civilization if they act like themselves instead of like a gender norm. It also helps justify blaming the victim: it's pretty easy to move from Shalit's argument to the argument that women who aren't modest, or aren't feminine, have no one but themselves to blame if they are sexually assaulted. After all, they didn't inspire proper masculinity in the men around them, and they didn't look for protection to the men in their lives. Shalit has a particularly stupid section in which she basically blames a woman's murder by her abusive boyfriend on her independence and her family's respect for it. What exactly was this woman supposed to do? Refuse to leave the house without a male relative for protection? Shalit never gives us anything specific.

I think what I find most frustrating is that, hidden in this incredibly irritating book, are a couple of really important insights. Our culture is, in fact, really fucked up about sex.⁴ Sexual violence is a huge problem. Most of the mainstream discussions of sex I've seen - primarily in Cosmo, Maxim, etc, but also in mainstream news media - talk about it in a transactional, exploitative, mechanistic way that makes me feel vaguely ill. I'm not promiscuous, and I doubt I ever will be: in friendships and romantic relationships both, I tend to want depth of attachment and understanding more than I want lots of casual interaction. I'm not particularly personally threatened by the idea of having fewer sexual partners. But that's me. And if others can have healthy, meaningful relationships casually, that's fine with me. What's not ok is the kind of 'how to get what you want from other people regardless of what they want' that appears in Cosmo, Maxim, etc, and that seems to be an integral part of some people's dating lives. It's manipulative, disrespectful, and gross, and I have no idea why anyone would want that kind of romantic life.

This isn't the same as saying that you shouldn't be friends with your exes, or shouldn't have casual relationships, or shouldn't go on dates: those things are all possible (and I have seen them and sometimes done them) without manipulative, disrespectful behavior.

The most interesting conclusion she comes to is something along the lines of, "liberalism has made us independent, but it has not made us free," coupled with the conclusion that some ways of life work only with enough social support. The cult of the individual - the idea of the unencumbered, rights-bearing self who enters into the social contract - is one of the founding elements of the modern American public philosophy, though Michael Sandel argues⁵ that it wasn't always so. I find the idea of myself as an unencumbered, rights-bearing individual absolutely inadequate in just about every circumstance: figuring out what kind of life I want to live, what kind of educator I want to be, what kind of government I want, who I am. Part of what makes us human is that we are encumbered, that we have relationships and obligations and that some of those obligations are to our society as a whole. We need social context for our lives, and we need the kind of narrative structure that Shalit constructs for herself as a modest woman. She is also right that social codes of decency and virtue (by which I mean honesty, compassion, courage, etc, rather than chastity) are important: we need guidance in conducting our daily lives and becoming better people that the law does not and should not offer. But our need for such rules doesn't mean we have to accept whatever ethos is handiest. Especially not when we've spent the last hundred years trying to get rid of all the ways it's sexist.

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1. I'm just bragging here. Sorry.
2. Starting on page 10.
3. In quotation marks because I don't think rape and sexual harassment are about rudeness.
4. Please, pardon the pun.
5. in Democracy's Discontent, which is less brilliant than I used to think.

in California, where all things are possible

1. Avocadoes are in season. Who knew?

2. I learned to drive stick on Saturday, in suburban Philadelphia on a sunny day in a relatively new, well-maintained car. On Monday, my first day in California, I took my grandmother's battered and ancient Honda Civic (stick shift) on the freeway in rush hour traffic during a rainstorm with directions that made no sense. Except for a couple of bad moments on hills and the moment when I tried to shift to fifth and it wasn't there, I was fine. Trial by fire, anyone?

3. Land's End. Not the clothing company, the spot in San Francisco. Whoooo eeee. My soul feels showered and massaged.

4. I ran four miles up at Inspiration Point last night. More than I've run in two months, and the first time I've run in over two weeks. Then I came home and did 55 push-ups and sit-ups, which I've certainly never done. I recently discovered the ladder concept - do 10 push-ups, 10 sit-ups, 9 push-ups, 9 sit-ups, ...., 1 push-up, 1 sit-up. It's kind of miraculous. Because of course I can't do 55 push-ups straight, but I can do ten. And after ten and a bit of a break (during which I do sit-ups, or more accurately crunches) I can do nine. By the time I'm exhausted, I only have one left. And I hurt this morning, but not as badly as I expected.

5. I'm seeing an old high school friend a lot. It's amazingly great. I always remember how much I like him and all my fears that he doesn't really like me, and you know what? He does.

media/philosophy

The Life Aquatic might be the most post-modern movie I've ever seen.