They do not speak in my name, nor I in theirs
As the Midrash says, there are seventy faces of Torah. I have chosen to follow a certain path within Orthodox Judaism, but I’m willing to admit that other paths are also valid. In particular, if other Jewish men and women find spiritual benefit from practicing a higher level of gender segregation than I favor, they should live and be well. To paraphrase a certain Chinese sage, I tolerate those who are tolerant; I also tolerate those who are intolerant.
Up to a point.
Vandalizing an elementary school and harrassing eight-year-old girls is not, by any reasonable construction, a face of Torah, or for that matter, a face of ordinary human decency. I am glad to see that the Rabbinical Council of America and the Orthodox Union (the mainstream American Orthodox rabbinic and lay organization, respectively) have condemned the violence and called on the Israeli police to suppress it.
Some people in the wider Jewish and secular worlds, seeing that both I and the kanna‘im [zealots] identify ourselves as “Orthodox”, might think that they are acting on behalf of my own principles. Not only do I want to disassociate myself from them, but I feel that they, along with the regular charedi1 leadership, want to disassociate from me. Look at how Agudath Israel of America, the most prominent American institution representing charedim, comments on the events. Condemning the violence is their warm-up act, but the main event is condemning something else:
Lost in all the animus and ill will, unfortunately, is the concept ostensibly at the core of the controversy: the exalted nature of tzenius, or Jewish modesty. Judaism considers human desires to constitute a sublime and important force, but one whose potential for harm is commensurate with its potential for holiness.
In a society like our own, where the mantra of many is, in effect, “anything goes,” many charedi Jews, men and women alike, see a need to take special steps – in their own lives and without seeking to coerce others – to counterbalance the pervasive atmosphere of licentiousness, so as to avoid the degradation of humanity to which it leads.
Reading that statement, you’d never know that the girls in question—primary-school students being called “shiksa” and “perutza [slut]” by grown men—are, themselves, Orthodox. The kanna’im would be just as despicable, of course, if they directed their insults at secular Jews or, for that matter, Gentiles. But the Agudah’s press agent compounds the insult by treating this as an affair with only three parties: the regular charedi community, who are good guys; the kanna’im, who are bad guys; and the smutty secular folk, who are also bad guys, but for a different reason. So which team, in this formulation, do the victims belong to? Hint: not the regular charedi community.
1 The term “ultra-Orthodox” is often used to describe these folks. Many of them consider the phrase pejorative, and I myself am not fond of the implication that a community is “more Orthodox” than my own just because its members are outwardly more distinct from the mainstream.
“A family is a little commonwealth”
Matthew Yglesias points and jeers at an NYT article on how Newt Gingrich is trying to sell his third wife as an asset to his Presidential campaign. Gingrich, one of the leaders of the effort to impeach Bill Clinton for his marital misdeeds, negotiated the terms of his divorce with his first wife while she was recovering from uterine-cancer surgery. He broke up with his second wife after she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Callista Bisek, his third wife, had been Newt’s mistress during his second marriage, but she convinced him to become Roman Catholic, so I guess there won’t be a third divorce.
Gingrich’s marital adventures are a perfect metaphor for the Republican model of governance. If you are fit and attractive, then handsome and powerful Uncle Sam will be happy to let you decorate his arm; once you actually need his help, he will cut you loose.
The woman in question
Various news outlets have reported that a pro-life group is calling a fetus as a witness before the Ohio state legislature, which is debating a bill that would outlaw abortion in any case where the embryo or fetus has a detectable heartbeat.
This is incorrect reportage.
First, witnesses, by definition, give testimony, and a fetus cannot testify to anything. A fetus can be evidence, but not a witness.
Second, one does not bring a fetus to the witness stand; one brings a pregnant woman.
I can understand why the Faith2Action is framing their legislative stunt in this particular way, but the rest of us don’t have to play along. In particular, it would have been nice if the Associated Press had reported the name of the woman who is coming before the committee.
via Facebook
see also Feministe
One out of every four sentient species is a victim of domestic violence
I have seen various discussions online about colonialism, and of course, these make me think about colonialism in SF—especially the kind where our planet becomes someone else’s colony.
Stereotypically, in these kinds of stories, the aliens are either Bad Guys or Good Guys. If they are Bad Guys, they dominate the planet by sheer brute force, disintegrating anything that stands in their way until (in American SF) our plucky heroes find the aliens’ weakness and create a glorious victory for humanity, or (in British SF) everyone dies. If the aliens are Good Guys, then they are protecting us from the baser elements of our nature until we can rise to full membership in the galactic community. The problem with the stereotypical Bad Guy scenario is that historically, colonial regimes among humans never1 act purely with brute force; an effective colonial administration knows how to co-opt at least some of the natives. The problem with the stereotypical Good Guy scenario is that it uncomfortably resembles a justification for real colonialism: the aliens in these stories are, so to speak, taking up the little green man’s burden.
Thinking of Good Guy aliens made me think of Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood trilogy (formerly titled Xenogenesis); I had read these books when they first came out around twenty years ago, and recalled them as a well-written and original take on the whole alien-invasion theme. The aliens in this series are the Oankali, who arrive on Earth shortly after nuclear war has wiped out most of the human population. Their schtick is to exchange genetic material with other species, so that the descendants of each contact with a new world acquire new traits. To this end, they scoop up as many nuclear-war survivors as they can and prepare them to become parents of human-Oankali hybrids. The main character of the series, Lilith Iyapo, is charged with training other humans to survive in Earth’s recreated wilderness and mediating between them and the Oankali. Over and over through the series, the Oankali remark on a “contradiction” built into the human condition: that we are both intelligent and hierarchical, and that without an injection of some Oankali genetics, this combination will doom us to self-destruction. So: Good Guy aliens. More or less.
I reread Dawn looking for stuff about colonialism, but what struck me about the book, instead, was the gender politics.
- Victims of domestic violence are frequently confined and stalked, unable to move freely, right? Lilith spends the first book on a spaceship and in the opening chapters, she can’t even open a door.
- Most of the humans that Lilith trains hate her for being a collaborator with the enemy. She refers to herself as a “Judas goat”, but I was reminded of a not-uncommon pattern in abusive families: Dad beats both Mom and the kids, but the kids resent Mom for not standing up to Dad.
- Control of sexuality and reproduction is one hallmark of domination in male-female relationships, and indeed, the Oankali decide whether or not Lilith is fertile, without even asking her opinion.
And consider these quotes (page numbers are from the trade paperback edition of LB):
“We… do need you.” Nikanj spoke so softly that Joseph leaned forward to hear. “A partner must be biologically interesting, attractive to us, and you are fascinating. You are horror and beauty in rare combination. In a very real way, you’ve captured us, and we can’t escape….” (p. 153)
Isn’t that one of the classic excuses for sexual assault? “She was so attractive, I couldn’t keep my hands off her.” And savor the irony of humans trapped on a spaceship being told “you’ve captured us”.
…It reached out and caught his hand in a coil of sensory arm. “I won’t hurt you. And I offer a oneness that your people strive for, dream of, but can’t truly attain alone.”
He pulled his arm free. “You said I could choose. I’ve made my choice!”
“You have, yes.” It opened his jacket with its many-fingered true hands and stripped the garment away from him. When he would have backed away, it held him. It managed to lie down on the bed without seeming to force him down. “You see. Your body has made a different choice.”
…
“Let go of me.”
It smoothed its tentacles again. “Be grateful, Joe. I’m not going to let go of you.” (pp. 189–190)
Ten pages earlier, Lilith had intervened violently to prevent one human from raping another. In this scene, though, an Oankali commits what in a human-on-human context would be clearly recognizable as date rape, using the rationale he said no, but he didn’t really mean it—again, a classic—and Lilith just watches approvingly.
In spite of all this, the Oankali do come off as generally sympathetic characters. Perhaps they give me this impression because the human characters, throughout the series, are frequently brutal to one another—more often for the sake of conventional crimes (banditry, kidnapping, etc.) than over anything directly involving the Oankali. Like I said, the Oankali are Good Guy aliens. More or less.
PS: Butler also wrote a novellette, “Bloodchild”, that examines human-alien family dynamics from a different angle. I recommend the Lilith’s Brood novels, but I think “Bloodchild” is one of the finest SF stories ever written.
1 Well… hardly ever.
Getting the point
The Seven-Year-Old had been spooked by a book he had been reading in his bed, and I was looking for something to distract him from his fears. I picked up Sally Miller Gerhart’s Wanderground, flipped through it, and then thought better of offering it to him.
“This probably isn’t a book for seven-year-olds,” I said, recalling that although the world the book portrays is bucolic, some of the stories within are less so. “It’s a book about a bunch of women who live without any men.”
The child, who had seen the map in the frontispiece, asked, “Is ‘Dangerland’ where all the men live?”
“How did you figure that out?”
(I do actually recommend Wanderground… to grown-ups. For the purpose of this book, puberty is probably a necessary condition of grown-up-hood, but not a sufficient one.)
Missing the point
Scene: A father is reading And Tango Makes Three to his three-year-old son.
Father: “…Roy and Silo taught Tango how to sing for them when she was hungry. They fed her food from their beaks. They snuggled her in their nest at night. Tango was the very first penguin in the zoo to have two daddies.”
Three-year-old son: No. One of them has to be the mommy.
Maybe he thought it was a commentary on Leviticus
At shul today, I noticed a guy reading Foucault’s History of Sexuality during the Torah reading.
Think of it as evolution inaction
Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale, believes that human evolution is still happening because, after all, some couples have more children than others, thereby changing the frequency distribution of alleles in the gene pool. So he and his colleagues went over some statistics from the Framingham Heart Study (going back to 1948) and discovered a few heritable traits that were associated with higher fertility [PDF]. From this, they vaulted into the pages of Time magazine with this stunning extrapolation:
If these trends were to continue with no cultural changes in the town for the next 10 generations, by 2409 the average Framingham woman would be 2 cm (0.8 in) shorter, 1 kg (2.2 lb.) heavier, have a healthier heart, have her first child five months earlier and enter menopause 10 months later than a woman today, the study found.
Why yes. And if human cultures had remained static for the past four centuries, we would also expect that the average Framingham woman of 1609 was 2 cm taller than her 21st-century counterpart, 1 kg lighter,…
I looked at the actual paper (which as of this writing is not yet behind a paywall) to see if this was dumb science or just dumb science journalism, and as far as I can tell, the fault is in the science. For instance, the authors, in their conclusions, speculate that “we might have found larger effects of evolution on the levels of sex hormones and related traits had they been measured”… as if human beings have done nothing since 1948 to affect the levels of their own sex hormones.
The process of natural selection pushes a species toward a local maximum of fitness relative to its environment. (When you speak of an organism’s “fitness” in an evolutionary sense, you always have to speak of its fitness relative to some environment, just as if you talk about the dollar “declining” in value, that decline is always relative to some other commodity.) If the environment is changing more rapidly then the evolutionary effects that adapt an organism to it, then the evolutionary effect might as well be noise.
Do these guys have an insight too subtle for me to appreciate, or are they just thick?
via Hacker News
Pornonomics
The authors of Freakonomics, pimping their next book, regale Sunday Times [UK] readers with the heart-warming tale of Allie, a prostitute with a heart of gold and a Visa card to match. The authors mention the precautions she takes to keep herself safe from her clients, her frustration with keeping her occupation secret from her family and friends, and her realization that she had to move into a completely different career before she lost her looks. In the midst of all that, the authors declare:
[T]he real puzzle isn’t why someone like Allie becomes a prostitute, but rather why more women don’t choose this career.
Jonathan Kulick gives this the snark it richly deserves:
I look forward to reading the entire chapter, so I can find out why more men don’t choose to become high-end gay escorts. It has to be much easier than waiting tables or accounting or laying pipe.
I, personally, am puzzled as to why the Freakonomists are so puzzled by the choices of non-prostitute women, but treat the johns’ motivation as self-evident. The vast majority of men who hire $500-an-hour prostitutes can also afford enough therapy and what-not to become attractive to the women who seek, ahem, noncommercial romantic relationships. If they’re not getting those relationships, well, that says something about their capabilities and priorities, doesn’t it?
Personally, if I had to choose between waiting tables for $10 an hour and pretending to love creepy men for $500, I’d go for the tables.
Democrats grow spines, gonads, teeth
Many progressives, myself included, have been concerned that (a) Democratic politicians are so used to losing that they will continue to act like losers on the floor of Congress, even when they are in the majority; (b) with war, the economy, and health care at the front of most people’s minds, Obama and the Congressional Democrats will push LGBT issues to the back burner until, umm, half-past never.
So let me give credit where credit is due: the House passed a bill to extend Federal hate-crimes protection to gay, lesbian, bi, and trans people, and the Democrats played hardball to get it passed—they attached the hate-crimes extension to a defense-appropriations bill and dared the Republicans to vote against the whole bill.
The article quotes Senator McCain, of all people, saying that “elections have consequences”. Elections damn well should have consequences and this particular consequence is most welcome.
