Hatred for the Male Body

There’s no question that when it comes to the specter of the body, women have it worse. (Black women, and especially the pregnant black female body, have it worst of all. I can’t even wrap my head around the black-women-get-too-many-abortions versus welfare-queens-have-babies-to-get-more-money nonsense). But the male genitalia is typically thought to be hideous, and I don’t get that.

Of course, as a cisgender male erotically attached to the male anatomy, I have a horse in this race. I’m not especially interested in getting people to love the cock, but cock-hatred is too casual, too easy and too unexamined.

I get that men all too often actively threaten women, and the erection is all too potent (pun semi-intended) a symbol for that threat. The male body actually grows even larger just before it rapes you. And that’s terrible.

But here’s an exchange from 7×7 Magazine that’s just too much. (The title, “Am I More Bisexual Than I Think?” is dumb, too. It’s 2011. Get over the primacy of identity over action, fuck who you want to fuck without getting all anxious, and things will fall into place more easily.) Here’s the money quote:

…[T]he fantasies that run in my head often involve women’s bodies—men’s too, but there are lots of female parts. Is this because women’s bodies are so pretty? Have I seen too much porn? Maybe I’m more bisexual than I think. How common is it for a straight woman to fantasize so much about other women?

He Said: I surveyed several of my female friends, and all of them found your fantasies normal. Men generally thought you were hot just for having them. So I’m not sure you need to figure out why you fantasize about women’s bodies. It might be a mix of the reasons you stated or something else entirely. Without question women’s bodies are more beautiful than men’s—I mean, have you ever had a close look at a scrotum?

I know I’m picking apart casual discourse as if it were a gravely worded treatise, but why is this idea okay? What purpose does it serve to allow this free-floating and entirely subjective opinion masquerade as fact.

(I want to stand up and yell that scrotums are awesome, and fun to play with, and I like having one, and their size and shape is determined by their function, and the density of nerve endings makes them as erogenous as the glans if not more so, and pretty pretty boobies look like colossal squid eyes to me sometimes. But that’s not the point either.)

It’s totally okay to hold the opinion that penises are ugly, but it’s not a fact that they are so. Shouldn’t sex columnists dispense advice that encourages people to appreciate their own anatomy? A lot of guys have major insecurities about the nether regions–in fact, pretty much everyone does. It’s why we have Ferraris and the Burj Khalifa.

Don’t use words like “pretty,” with connotations that already define masculine beauty out of the equation, to put my scrotum down, stupid. My balls are fucking awesome!

Rupert Murdoch

I’d be very skeptical if the scandal unfolding actually laid low the media empire that is News Corp, but there are some things worth noting about this. First, as accurate as it is to say that Murdoch and his company are forces for conservatism in the affluent English-speaking countries, in Italy he’s got the one property that isn’t owned by Silvio Berlusconi (himself sort of evil Mike Bloomberg; read the New Yorker article if you haven’t), which pits them not only as the opposition but also, effectively, the mainstream left.

Second, Rupert Murdoch doesn’t want to advance the cause of conservatism as much as he wants to destroy the power of the media to act as a check on power. This intensely destructive philosophy finds a natural niche on the right because of its pro-corporate orientation and the cultural aversion towards dirty hippies and other folks who aren’t gaga for getting stomped in the face by transnational capital. But he’s different from Roger Ailes, the head of Fox and true believer in the Republican Party.

Murdoch’s an extremely adroit practitioner of the ultimate corporatist strategy of keeping regular folks at each other’s throats when we should all be allied against him and the other people at the top. What is the news cycle? It’s not a parade of effective muckraking wherein corrupt people are thwarted and the massing of wealth and power gets its due comeuppance by a healthy democratic polity’s vigorous Fourth Estate. It’s a top-down nightmare of competing resentments.

Liberals find Michelle Bachmann ignorant and scary (and freakishly focused; she’s what Sarah Palin was supposed to be). Movement conservatives flock to her because as a first principle, they’ll gravitate towards whatever those snobbish, effete liberals hate the most, and other conservatives will find reasons to support her. The act of exposing Markus and Michelle Bachmann’s predictably awful Christian weirdness just hardens her white, middle-class fan base all the more because their basic grievances (there’s no work to be had, no guarantee of getting ahead even when there is, and life sucks) are legitimate and Rupert Murdoch and his ilk have been successful at channeling it and, unfairly or not, hammering at liberalism’s comparative inability to do so.

Fluffing the people who “got” Michelle Obama for eating a cheeseburger or who express outrage at the things that come out of Fred Phelps’s mouth is entertaining, and jabbing at a person’s moral superiority with a stick is a great way to keep them all exercised and paying attention, but it’s also complete bullshit. Measurable depreciations in the standard of living are really all that matter, but they involve math instead of dick tweets or verbal gaffes.

Almost every Tea Partier could be a Democrat, since when you strip away the ignorance of history and the false consciousness and the overt racism and the gold fetish and the misplaced rage at who it is who took their country away, it’s the Democratic Party who used to be able to address their fundamental anxiety. (Of course, the Democratic Party used to be really racist, too, but that’s a whole other subject).

There’s a natural alliance there, but the sophisticated half of the country thinks the patriotic half is stupid and the forgotten half thinks the entitled half is a cancer.

Anyway, this whole dynamic is precisely what Rupert Murdoch stokes. If you believe that the overarching problem with everything in the United States is imperial plutocracy’s tendency to gobble everything, no matter how obviously unsustainable, destructive and anti-democratic, you must agree that Murdoch is the primary enabler. He exists to enhance power. If he can be toppled, we have a chance.

In the meantime, the News of the World is gone. That’s one fewer tabloid out there, which is fine because I always preferred the Sun, anyway. Page 3 has tits!

Grand Rapids

I’ve watched this twice now, and both times it made me tear up a little. (I’m a sap, and I know the song is trite beyond description, but I know all the words). The thing that’s actually sad isn’t the tragic death of the Big Bopper in a plane crash, but the fact that the initial impetus to make this video is a sad truth: Grand Rapids is a dying city in a dying state in a dying empire.

Although the production is excellent (what are they blowing up on that bridge?), I fail to see what you’re supposed to experience about Grand Rapids. Unless you know the city well already, who would even guess that was where this was shot until the camera whizzes up into the stratosphere at the very end? I didn’t.

Michigan, where people get arrested for growing vegetable gardens, is one of two states to have lost population in the 2000s. The auto industry might have been spared a gruesome death, but you can’t arrest a half-century of deindustrialization with a tough union contract and a bailout. They’re in trouble.

I have no doubt that quality of life is higher there than in a lot of places, and that the eager participants in the video were genuinely happy to be part of this, but the fact that they need to do it at all says everything. I would never want to live in China, and I wouldn’t want to live under a banner that says something like “Civilize Our City, and Make Yourself a Citizen” or whatever their propaganda du jour might be, but I doubt you’d ever see something like this there.

It would be nice for a mid-size Midwestern city to become a tech haven for wind turbines that float on the ocean and harness wave power, with their rotors bejewelled in photovoltaic cells. They could de-acifidify seawater so the corals don’t bleach and, WALL-E like, condense the garbage in the North Pacific Gyre and they would never need replacement, ever.

 

How Embarrassing

It’s official.  Years after abandoning their inane paywall, and later the TimesSelect bullshit that forced you to shell out to read Maureen Dowd’s latest meows, there is a new bulwark against the paper’s eventual extinction.  Read up to twenty articles a month, and after that, the shit ain’t free.

That a letter from the publisher should announce the change speaks for itself.  Who better to inform us than the titular demigod who dwells in a cloud above West 44th Street?  I’m sure when the Onion follows suit, they’ll exhume T. Herman Zweibel to communicate the new policy from on high. And as all these opaque corporate thunderbolts go, it’s presented in watery biz-speak as a sweeping transformation of their service, when really all it means it that you pay more to watch journalism’s withering husk succumb to mediocrity–only more slowly now because you’re plugging a huge revenue gap for them.

But what strikes me as an even better tea leaf to decipher is the latest column by Arthur Brisbane, the fourth Public Editor.  He’s the fourth man to hold the position–and, if one can safely judge on the basis of names, the fourth white man.  (The name Arthur Brisbane suggests Skull & Bones, a membership at Stanwich, and all that.  Wasn’t Maude’s neighbor, played by Conrad Bain, named something like that?)

Anyhoo, Brisbane finally got around to looking at this Twitter thing.  His conclusion?  It has some perils but on the whole might be a net benefit for the hallowed craft of journalism.

Except that, in graf two, “I haven’t been tweeting long enough to judge its merits.”  Well, with 1985 tweets under my belt since April 2008, I can safely condemn that as a goddamn embarrassment.  If the Times thinks it’s a) necessary to explain Twitter to people in March 2011 and b) wants to install as the “readers’ representative” someone who admits he doesn’t quite get it then this is indeed a sinking ship.

This is the paper whose style guide still insists that websites are “Web sites.”  Even William Safire objected to that one.

Does Brisbane think there are any risks to reporters using Twitter?  Yes: things go out “unedited.”  The only example he’s got is a business reporter tweeting “Toyota sucks.”  Meanwhile his entire position is predicated on the serial fuck-ups when reporters when through the standard channels, complete with editors, and no less a titan than Glenn Greenwald said of Brisbane that he “has quickly proven himself to be the most pliant, vapid and useless person to occupy that position” of Public Editor for defending the Times when it allowed the Pentagon to tell it what to publish.

Yet here we are, ensconced in the future, when journalism isn’t profitable and lots of mid-size cities can’t even get decent coverage of their own goings-on.  The alternative is the Fox universe, which really isn’t conservative per se but devoted to destroying the credibility Fourth Estate itself–by which I mean the institution of the media as a check against government and corporate abuses of power.

But as with Democrats and Republicans, you can bitch about how evil the reactionaries are and always trust the liberals to do the same shit on their own.  (Sometimes, with NPR, the right provides an assist).  I give the (print version with quality journalism) New York Times ten years before it’s snuffed out, reduced to an amalgam of piddling, super-cautious blogs no one reads and one really superb full-length article per week which no one reads.  They need some serious stem-cell therapy but they’re shopping for an iron lung.

Honestly, do they really need me to tell them to ax the auto, real estate and sports sections–and anything else where true aficionados will turn to niche blogs, or no longer wait until a day later to hear results–put the crossword online?  That would be a start.

The World Might Be Collapsing, but Here’s A Bunch of Good Things, Including Cookies

For today, I refuse to get worked up about cartoons in the New York Post where the punch line is apparently “Black people are monkeys” or how depressing it is for the Obama Administration to continue some egregiously malevolent Bush anti-terrorism policies or how Goldman Sachs executives are openly stealing bailout money or how Detroit will have a population of 500 by 2020.

Here are links to nice things.

First, the EPA may regulate carbon dioxide.  Really, they just have to or we’re all fucked.  This is technically a minor good thing that relates to a strongly terrible thing, but we’ll take it.

Second, NYU students have occupied a floor of the Kimmel “student center.”  I got my entire secondary education at that school, and Kimmel is a hideous trainwreck whose real purpose as the student union at a university with no campus is to boot students out for donor luncheons and special events, because NYU is actually a vast real estate empire with auxiliary teaching duties it maintains to keep up appearances.

I was on the speech and debate team and my freshman year (’99-’00) we had a practice space and an office — the bad old days.  By the time I was in grad school (’04-’05), I had to coach the kids in an open lounge where everyone was talking and moving around.  The more buildings NYU erects or conquers, the less space there seems to be.  They’re like Robert Moses, building highways to eradicate traffic.

The students’ demands are a greate combination of considerate, radical and achievable.  Opening Bobst Library to the general public is especially progressive.  As of now, it’s a hermetically sealed Borg cube perched at the corner of Bloomberg Square Park.  (When you graduate, you’re permitted to return only once.)

Third, the inebriated fun of the Bay to Breakers race might not go the way of Halloween in the Castro.  (I realize the possible laziness of linking to the NYT from SF about an SF event, but googling it and searching wordpress didn’t come up with anything better).

Finally, delicious things.  I want to make this.

And I’ve been making chocolate chocolate chip cookies compulsively since finishing the lemonade cleanse, and I think I’ve achieved jouissance.  I follow this recipe with some variations.

First: instead of 1/4 tsp of salt I add a heaping 1/2 tsp.  I swear nothing comes out tasting salty and the ability of salt to intensify the taste of everything is particularly effective with the butter.

Second: double the vanilla, from 2 tsp to 4.  This enables you to cut back on the sugar by maybe 1/8 – 1/4 cup.

Third, I also substitute some brown sugar for a bit of the white, so that the total amount of sugar is a little more than 1 1/4 cups, of which at least half a cup is brown.

Fourth, nuke the butter till half of it is liquified.  You really need to watch the microwave; no multi-tasking during this part!  I like to compare sticks of butter melting to the implosion of the Twin Towers.  Once it’s clear that the FDNY are all dead, stop the microwave.

Fifth, mix it by hand.  It’s not hard, you have fewer utensils to clean and I really believe that a heterogeneous mixture–i.e., with little lumps of butter–is the shit.  If you can’t tell, I love butter.

Sixth, refrigerate the batter until it’s as cold as the fridge.  Sure, it’s a pain in the ass waiting and having stiffer batter, but if you’re like me, you actually make cookies as an excuse to eat raw dough anyway.

Just ate the last cookie.

Friedman/Fried Man

All I can really say about Tom Friedman’s column on Muslim extremism in India is that it vaults to new heights of the insipid.  It’s supremely lazy and bereft of insight.  I’m sure it’s not easy to have to furnish the adoring world with 700-word pearl twice weekly but Paul Krugman does it and he’s a full-time professor on top of that.  So if it’s too hard, do give it up.

Except for Friedman’s access to the Mumbai morgue, everything about this could have been written by an earnest high school senior who’s never left the US.  Plus, you could basically switch out India for Israel and Pakistan for Palestine and the rest of the column could stay the same:

The only effective way to stop this trend is for “the village” — the Muslim community itself — to say “no more.” When a culture and a faith community delegitimizes this kind of behavior, openly, loudly and consistently, it is more important than metal detectors or extra police. Religion and culture are the most important sources of restraint in a society.

That’s why India’s Muslims, who are the second-largest Muslim community in the world after Indonesia’s, and the one with the deepest democratic tradition, do a great service to Islam by delegitimizing suicide-murderers by refusing to bury their bodies. It won’t stop this trend overnight, but it can help over time.

“The Muslims of Bombay deserve to be congratulated in taking this important decision,” Raashid Alvi, a Muslim member of India’s Parliament from the Congress Party, said to me. “Islam says that if you commit suicide, then even after death you will be punished.”

The fact that Indian Muslims have stood up in this way is surely due, in part, to the fact that they live in, are the product of and feel empowered by a democratic and pluralistic society. They are not intimidated by extremist religious leaders and are not afraid to speak out against religious extremism in their midst.

It is why so few, if any, Indian Muslims are known to have joined Al Qaeda. And it is why, as outrageously expensive and as uncertain the outcome, trying to build decent, pluralistic societies in places like Iraq is not as crazy as it seems. It takes a village, and without Arab-Muslim societies where the villagers feel ownership over their lives and empowered to take on their own extremists — militarily and ideologically — this trend will not go away.

I realize the irony of including a very long excerpt to prove how boring and unenlightening a particular column is, but the point is the same.  The interchangeability of wisdom from supposed experts might actually be one reason why discourse on such conflicts is so fraught with dishonest, self-serving or unexamined ideas, and why these wars seem intractable.

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Oh, fuck it.  Tom Friedman is dumb.  Gross fried things are better.  So look at thisiswhyyourefat instead, it’s totally amazing.

The bacon cheese pizza burger looks like Pac-Man had an autopsy.

Pandora Gets Passive-Aggressive

Ahem, if you’re not going to order another soy chai, get out.

Do I really need to feel apologetic to a website cause I got up and did something else?  (I’m being a total grandpa about this, aren’t I?)

The Craft + Style blogosphere

My friend Alison works for Etsy and has begun a new blog for them, a compendium of assorted delightful oddities from around the world.

This week’s is particularly great.

The bus-cozy is one thing, but the figure sculpted from tobacco products is like a deranged Muppet.  I fucking love it.  It reminded me of this childhood gem:

Beautytipsforministers: An Amazing Godblog That’s Only Tangentially Related to God

ZOMG.  The handle of the presumably ordained blogger is “Peacebang.”

I love:

No one but you needs to know that you’ll be PMSing during Holy Week or that you had heartburn during your entire stewardship campaign. It’s all for your own self-care and self-knowledge, lamb chops.

And

For as long as I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve been getting inquiries from amazing religious leaders all over the world who wouldn’t hesitate to speak before thousands, but who can’t return a pair of ill-fitting shoes or tell a saleslady that the fuschia and orange blazer she just picked out for them is just not their taste.

Like, whoa.

UPDATED: Ha!  Looks like these pastors should be reading this blog.