This article on why women wear heels included quite a few worthy candidates for this post. The best, though, came from soap opera actress Tina Sloan, who, by virtue of being a lady on TV, is now apparently an expert on being a lady. On why women wear high heels, Sloan said, “I think it is in our DNA as women to want to be peacocks and strut our stuff.”

Note the sex of the bird engaged in stuff strutting in the above picture. People who do not understand biology should not be allowed to make definitive statements based around biological premises. I’m not saying it should be illegal or anything, but a good shunning is in order.

When I heard that Roman Polanski was, at long last, extradited to the United States for the crime of child rape, my heart danced a little. When I heard he was able to be extradited because he had left the safety of France in order to receive a lifetime achievement award in Germany, my schaedenfreude only increased. When saw the Yahoo! headline saying that Polanski was being extradited for “having sex” with a 13 year old, however, a vein may have popped in my forehead. It was a bittersweet day, indeed.

It’s been a couple days, and Kate Harding already wrote not one but two pretty swell posts on the subject, but it bears repeating: if a person breaks the law and flees from, in this case, his punishment, then that person deserves to be punished. It doesn’t matter if bad things have happened to him in the past, it doesn’t matter if he’s done good things in the past, he still deserves to be punished. If there was evidence of judicial misconduct, then by-God, that’s what appeals are for! But a person shouldn’t be able to run from his responsibility and be rewarded for it.

But, of course, this is a rape case, so evidence of having committed the crime is hardly sufficient to judge a person’s guilt in the public’s eye. Yes, she may have been a child, unable to legally give consent, and yes, she never even gave consent for any of the sex acts to which she was subjected in the first place, but let’s look at the big picture here: her mom pretty much GIFT-WRAPPED her for him! And I mean, she was hot! What was Polanski supposed to do? NOT rape her? As if! And the judge was a total anti-Semite: it was POLANSKI who’s the victim in all this! His mom died in a concentration camp and his wife was murdered–he’s had a rough go at things. Let’s just leave him be. After all, he has an Oscar–that’s basically a “get out of jail free” card.

The whole argument is ridiculous, especially coming from a largely liberal group. Reading excerpts from the petition circulating in his favor, one could get the impression that the signers are unaware that Polanski ever even committed a crime. For instance: “Roman Polanski is a French citizen, a renown and international artist now facing extradition. This extradition, if it takes place, will be heavy in consequences and will take away his freedom.” Uh, a-duh? Committing a serious felony usually DOES have serious consequences that result in a loss of freedom. I mean, let’s take a moment to remind ourselves: he didn’t accidentally shoplift a can of tuna, he DRUGGED AND RAPED SOMEONE! If someone were arguing that a CEO be let off the hook for committing a crime, you can be sure that the liberal reaction would be solidly behind the victim, because the law should apply equally to all people regardless of circumstance. Yet these people can’t seem to see the hypocrisy in suggesting someone should not be punished for a crime he committed because HE MAKES GOOD MOVIES! It would be funny if it didn’t reflect on just how poorly women are regarded in our society, that someone Chinatown is a free pass for child rape. Of course, considering that men with considerably less clout than Roman Polanski are able to commit rape without facing the consequences, it shouldn’t be that surprising, and it’s not, but it’s still incredibly sad. However, despite the bullshit reaction, it’s good to know that he’s finally getting a taste of what he deserves, and as France drops their support for him, it’s nice to know that there are reasonable people out there who think that child rape should be punished.

I know, I know–preaching to the choir, once again, but lately I’ve had to hear way more about sociobiology than I ever cared to and it’s leading to a great deal of Hulk-smashing. I’ll be quietly reading and all of a sudden burst into obscenities and start flailing my fists and it’s really unbecoming of a lady of my stature. While my berserker-like outbursts may serve me well if I ever find myself in a battle to the death with a sociobiologist (Um, can someone say “Pay-Per-View”? If anyone has contacts at HBO, let me know!), brute strength will not get me very far in a battle of wits with one, even if they do have “stone age brains”. No, I will need to rely on my skills to give an intellectual beatdown.

Of course, I am not a biologist. The last biology class I took was in 10th grade, and I don’t recall doing particularly well in it, so I am perfectly willing to concede to the expertise of those who do know something about biology: biologists. You see, the initial problem with sociobiology or evolutionary psychology or whatever crap they have in anthro is that as difficult as it is to perform work well in one discipline, it becomes exponentially more difficult when it is compounded with another discipline. I’ve heard it said in regard to historical sociology and it’s true in this case as well. Academia requires a certain amount of immersion to understand something well, and it also requires that academics turn out as much work as they can manage. Lacking the time it would take to properly understand an additional field, people will take short-cuts, they will occasionally piggyback on the work of others, they will misunderstand concepts. But then again, who will call them out on it? As flawed as the biological element to their work may be, they still probably know more about it than all the other social science softies like me, and so it can slide.

This is not an argument against interdisciplinary studies. In explaining human behavior, there is certainly some overlap, and knowing a little something about the major theories and explanations employed by other disciplines helps broaden our understanding, and this is not to say that biological explanations for human behavior will get us nowhere. I am perfectly willing to concede that the range of human behavior is constrained by biology. There are certain hormones that trigger certain reactions because they were adaptive to life as it was 10,000 years ago–cool, that makes sense, and evolution works very slowly, so just because they may not be adaptive now, or may even be maladaptive, doesn’t mean that they’ll just automatically go out of commission within one generation. And okay, I can see how your own genetic code could have a constraining effect as well. This is not the problem: the problem comes when they try to reduce the entire range of human behavior to its biological function, when they make it seem as though certain behaviors are hardwired into our brain. From the little I do know about the brain, I know that it is extremely malleable. I know that humans have fewer instincts than just about any animal, which is why babies are so helpless and why our period of socialization is so long. Things need to be learned. Don’t believe me? Take a look at this piece of hard-hitting journalism from the Onion: Studies reveal: Babies are stupid. It’s the God-honest truth; they are. There may be genetic determinants to our reactions and our capabilities, but how those manifest themselves is a function not of biology, but of how we are socialized within our culture.

Lastly, sociobiologists disprove their own point through the ubiquity of their own social conditioning in their work. Take the evolutionary theories of rape as a prime example. These theories hold that rape, as maladaptive a behavior as it may be today, was adaptive as a way for males to ensure the maximum number of progeny back in olden times and exists today as a relic of our evolutionary past. Oh dear God, it’s just so wrong in so many ways, it’s difficult to know where to start. Well, let’s start at the beginning: if rape is so adaptive, then why only do most men not rape, but don’t even express a desire to rape? Even in phallometric studies, non-rapists are much less responsive to non-consent scenarios than rapists or other violent criminals, suggesting that if there is some natural inclination to rape, it is a function of being deviant, not of being male. If this is true, rape is actually maladaptive no matter what time period we’re looking at, as more socially adept people are more likely to survive and prosper, and violent, anti-social people will be less likely to be taken care of by the group. Why do rape rates differ culturally? When a woman is under stress, it’s less likely that she will become pregnant, right? Rape is pretty fucking stressful. Stress can also negatively impact the health of a fetus. That hardly seems conducive to one’s genetic survival. And remember, this is not the middle ages; we have pretty definitive proof that both men AND women contribute genetic code to their offspring. Following the evolutionary theory’s logic, wouldn’t weaker, slower women be more likely to fall victim to a rapist than a woman who is fast enough to run away or strong enough to fight off an attacker? And wouldn’t the weaker woman pass on less adaptive genes to her offspring? What about gang rape? According to evolutionary theories, wouldn’t a rapist want to lay sole claim to his victim, at least for the duration of the attack, so as to prevent competition? This theory falls apart all over the place, but because these theorists are defining sexual success purely in the number of sperm depositories made and ignoring all the other social functions of sex and the many, many other variables that will contribute to a child’s heath and survival, somehow these problems don’t seem to bother them. It doesn’t take a trained biologist to spot the obvious holes in their argument, and it doesn’t take a trained social scientists to reveal their bias toward theories of domination and control, stereotyped masculine, instead of social and cultural, stereotyped feminine.

Ergo, the only logical conclusion to be drawn from this intellectual exercise is that I rule and sociobiological theorists drool. It is as simple as that.

Help! I’m surrounded by sex positive feminists!

I do not think sex workers are victims. I do not think they are sluts. I do not think they are feminist icons. I think they are rational human beings who have weighed their options and have found that in a society which values women primarily as fuck toys, their best bet for survival is to pander to that idea. Hell, some may even enjoy it, either as a result of internalizing these values or simply because sexual attention is a fun thing to be on the receiving end of. Perhaps a more progressive society than our own which can conceive of gender on something other than a binary scale, one which assumes the same degree of humanity for all people, perhaps in this society there would still be a market for sex work. However, this market would not be all-encompassing. It would not be based on degradation, on power, on sexual stereotypes. Sex work in this sort of society would be about sex, and as I discussed in my review of Pornified, this is certainly not what sex work in our own society is based on.

Our own sexual culture has arisen out of a desire to dominate, to put women back in their place. It is misogynistic, homophobic, racist, and one could easily argue misandrist as well. To blame sex workers for its existence is like blaming child sweat shop laborers for the existence of sweat shop labor. To fight for sex work’s dissolution without addressing the culture that creates it is like closing those sweat shops and leaving the children without an income to bring home or schools to attend. To support this culture, celebrate it as empowering and feminist, is to play into the hands of the oppressing class, to eat the shit they serve us with a smile. Those who take this approach are as reactionary as Phyllis Schafly. What we need to do is to understand the culture that creates these poisonous sex relations and fight to put an end to it. This is a truly sex positive approach: one in which the natural sexual desire of all people, not just straight men, is celebrated, and is allowed to develop without shame or stigma, one in which the human body in all its forms is recognized as capable of giving and receiving sexual pleasure, and one in which even a lack of desire is seen as a legitimate form of sexual expression. “Sex positive” feminism as it exists today fosters none of this.

Now how do I express this without alienating myself from two academic departments?

You know, I’ve seen a lot of repulsive things recently. Half an episode of Bridezillas, this ad for pap awareness, a Red Bull commercial about a little boy going to a strip club; but it took this movie trailer, which interrupted a perfectly enjoyable evening of Bones reruns, to get me out of my blogging hiatus. I couldn’t find the exact trailer that sparked my Hulk rage, but this should do nicely. Ladies and gentleman, allow me to present The Ugly Truth.

Here’s the information I have gleaned about the plot of this film from the trailer: Abby is an attractive, intelligent, ambitious, accomplished woman who wants the same thing in a partner. In her role as television producer, she is introduced to Mike, a Repulsoid from the planet Repulsor who was given a television show in order to spread his enlightening perspective on sex relations. That perspective? Men are entitled to constant boners, if a woman is not contributing to the making of one or more of those boners she may as well never have been born, boners can only be created by Beauty2K compliant women who know their fucking place, women should be grateful when given the chance to bestow boners upon any member of the male sex, and men can only relate to women on a boner-receiving level. Even though Abby is Beauty2K compliant, her attempts to be an actual human being instead of a boner-producing machine have kept her from being able to achieve the greatest experience a woman can hope to achieve: finding a man who wants to get boners from her on a regular basis. Mike, ever the altruist, takes her under his wing and teaches her how to appeal to the homogenous mass known as men by wearing cupless bras, fellating hot dogs, and straddling the line between virgin and whore in order to produce better boners. Abby starts out thinking that it’s possible to find a man who loves and respects her for who she is instead of how great her tits are, and at first she is resistant to Mike’s Tao of the Boner. However, as time goes on, she comes to embrace the Tao of the Boner and recognize that the idea that men can regard women as fully human is a myth, a by product of our PC society. It may not be pretty, but men are biologically programmed to treat women like shit, and women are biologically programmed to like it.

Now, I haven’t seen this movie, so who knows? Maybe it could surprise me. Maybe at the end Abby realizes that she no longer wishes to be regarded as a place in which to hide a salami and runs off with her assistant to join a lesbian separatist commune and Mike spontaneous combusts. Anything is possible. Somehow, though, I doubt this.

And you know the interesting thing? The Ugly Truth was written by women. Three self-loathing women. Why is it that so many women so enjoy media that insults them and holds them back, to the extent that many of them will go so far as to create the kind of trash that contributes to their oppression? We’re all socialized in the same misogynistic culture and for many women, these values outweigh their own experience of not being two-dimensional cum dumpsters. These values are so ingrained, in fact, that not only do many women believe them, but they believe that they somehow benefit from them. It’s the Doctrine of Separate Spheres, but with a sexy, 21st century twist involving stilletos and brightly-colored alcoholic beverages! Unlike the self-loathing women of say, the middle ages, self-loathing women from the nineteenth century on have accepted the idea that they are not fully human, but instead of resigning themselves to their drudgery, they have been convinced that they somehow benefit from their inhumanity. In The Ugly Truth, women may not be fully human, but through the power of their tits, they can influence people who are: men! So really, it’s women who have the power! Am I right, ladies?

The Ugly Truth is an insult to any person capable of intelligent thought. It is an insult to women because it defines their worth in relation to men and puts no stock in the value of their humanity. It is an insult to men because it says that they are no more than overly-entitled dicks on legs, incapable of emotion or thoughtfulness, no better than male turkeys who’ll go so low as to court a wooden turkey head on a stick. It is insulting to intersexed people because it denies their existence. It is insulting to members of other species because humans are purportedly supposed to be the smart ones. And above all, it is a firm reminder of why I should just watch my favorite shows on DVD instead of putting myself through the misery of commercials.

Mr. Crankosaur frequents a forum on a website with primarily male membership that has nothing to do with social or political issues that occasionally features threads on social and political issues. As you can imagine, things can get pretty grotesque. This morning he had up a thread on the new Gallup polls which have more Americans identifying with the erroneous term “pro-life” than pro-choice. It was like a car wreck! I had to look! And here’s what lead me to cause some property damage:

“Seriously, why should a human life’s choice to life be decided by some woman who couldn’t control herself?”

SSSIHWIO#1!~~~!!!!!! ARGHWE!#EFJ! Oh my God, I… I don’t know where to start. The idea that women are the only ones responsible for becoming pregnant? That having sex is somehow akin to being WILD AND CRAZY and OUT OF CONTROL? That women are not to be categorized as human?! Oh no. Somebody needs to get cut.

A lot of the other arguments fell into the “Worst Case Scenario” camp. You know what I mean. “Abortion is bad, okay? But I mean, what if she’s mentally challenged and twelve years old and becomes impreganted on a full moon after her dad is bitten by a werewolf and rapes her in his mutated state? In the case of werewolf incest rape, I think it might be okay.”

Any argument against abortion is anti-woman. Period. I don’t give a shit what it is. I don’t care how cute and cuddly and gurgly babies allegedly are. When a fetus is inside a woman, it is not a person. When a woman is pregnant with a fetus, she is a person. Alleging that fetuses have rights as people is just another way to deny the personhood of women, hence the aforementioned comment. The fact that a sub-human woman would dare to attempt to impersonate a human being is what got that douche angry; it has nothing to do with the fetus at all. She stepped out of line, she gets punished, and the fact that women may be able to avoid this punishment and go about their lives like real people is infuriating to him. If a woman becomes pregnant, her personhood is deemed of less importance to the personhood of whatever is growing inside her. Her personhood is defined in relation to her relationships with others and her ability to make new people, not, as in the case of men, by virtue of being a person. Arguing against a woman’s right to have an abortion is arguing against the existence of a woman’s personhood. It is defining her by her reproductive functioning alone. It is anti-woman. End of story.

Another strip club has been found to have an underage girl working in it and another media outlet is covering the story like it’s some kind of pulp movie about when bad girls go wrong. Just look at the picture that the Cleveland Scene ran for its cover story:

Oh yeah, baby, you’re a naughty barely-menstruating little girl, aren’t you? If that’s not bad enough, this picture was accompanied by the words, “Don’t stand so close to me”, referencing the Police song about a dangerously sexual student who just makes it so hard for her teacher not to bang her, what with her having boobs and a vagina and all. Those middle-schoolers, man, they’ll get you in trouble. They’re all walking around, starting to go through puberty and all, but when you try and rape one of them all of a sudden the PC police try to make you out to be the bad guy! What’s a guy supposed to do? The 14-year-old wasn’t the only underage girl found working at the club when it was busted, which is hardly surprising, but there’s really no outrage about skeezy men getting dry humped by a high school girl because I mean, come on, she’s 17! She should know better! And who wouldn’t want to be dry humped by a high school junior? But a 14-year-old? That’s just wrong. Unless she’s wearing a schoolgirl uniform… Then it’s pretty hot.

The two underage girls are being charged with “committing illegal acts in a sexually oriented business”, which seems a little like blaming a McDonald’s worker for making shitty food. It’s McDonald’s. That’s what they do. It’s not the worker’s fault the food is bad. One might argue that the worker doesn’t have to work at McDonald’s, but then one might be a complete moron. Somebody has to work at McDonald’s. There’s a demand for shitty food, just like there’s a demand for the sexual degradation of teenagers. That’s what I find so hilariously awful about this article. The question raised is why a 14-year-old would be working at strip club. Really? Is that a trick question? You can’t figure out why a strip club would hire a 14-year-old? The answer is because men want to see a 14-year-old at a strip club. I find it hard to believe the owners didn’t know she was so young, considering that the article says she didn’t dance nude or perform lap dances like the other women working there. Obviously they just didn’t care. Their customers wanted to see young-looking girls, they provided that, and yes, they’ll be in trouble for a little while, but it’ll all pass. People are already blaming the girl, saying things like, “Her presence in the club…. was not a nightmare scenario of the young girl being seduced or held captive in the club.” Because no one held a gun to her head or promised her a pony, she was obviously acting of her own free will. She didn’t decide to strip because our society glamorizes women’s sexual degradation or judges women’s value by their fuckability, no. She decided to strip because she is a dirty, naughty little minx. The Play House obviously just gave her an outlet to let her wild sexuality run free. They were practically doing her a favor! Who’s the real victim in all this?

As soon as females are deemed fuckable by society, they’re declared free game for anyone who wants them in any way and the victim blaming starts in full-force. Society has been sexualizing young girls for God knows how long, because society has been sexualizing naivitee and stupidity and docility in women for God knows how long, all qualities associated with younger, less-experienced females. However, with the earlier onset of puberty, younger and younger girls are having to put up with the thoroughly dehumanizing effects of male desire without being emotionally or cognitively prepared to deal with it, and the mystical boner-inducing qualities of their changing bodies provide enough evidence to society as a whole that they WANT it. That they ASKED for it. By being in possession of a sexual body, they prove themselves prepared to be regarded as nothing more than a sexual being. It’s a thoroughly fucked up situation that no one deserves to be put into, and it’s one that girls are being subjected to at younger and younger ages. A fourteen-year-old at a strip club is not an anomaly. It is a perfectly logical occurence in a society in which sexualized fourteen-year-olds are the norm. The sooner people stop deluding themselves into thinking it’s not and start trying to face the problem head-on the better, otherwise people will continue to think it’s a symptom of a few over-sexualized young girls and a few over-zealous perverts in the bushes instead of being symptomatic of some of the primary values of our patriarchal society.

“If a guy can’t rape his wife, who’s he gonna rape?” Wayne Anthony Ross, lawyer, “fathers’ rights” supporter, and nominee for Alaska attorney general.

My answer: Um, nobody? Read more on Palin’s anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-Native American, pro-Klan choice here.

I would venture to say that most men would rather be considered good looking than ugly. However, so little of a man’s personhood is linked to his appearance that most men will not go much out of their way to improve it. For many men, even if they would like to be better looking, what exactly “better looking” means is difficult to ascertain. Men are not used to objectifying themselves in the same way that women are, and since men are typically defined by more than their sexual characteristics, the very definition of “good looking man” is hard to pin down. Men are not used to seeing themselves as the other, and there is no real standard to which they can compare themselves. Therefore, I see a man’s desire to be good looking as analogous to those, “What would you do for a Klondike Bar?” commercials. Klondike Bars are pretty delicious, this is true, but going without one is not such an earth-shattering crisis than anyone in those commercials is willing to make too much of a sacrifice for one. They are willing to make the small sacrifice of minor embarassment, but it is small, it is minor, it is not ongoing, and when it is over, they have the Klondike Bar and they are done.

For women, on the other hand, the question of what they will do to be attractive is not so trivial. Being good looking and being ugly is not merely a matter of eating ice cream or not eating ice cream, but could be said to be a matter of life and death. To be a woman is to have one’s selfhood defined almost entirely by one’s sexuality, and if one is not attractive, one effectively becomes invisible, an abberation to be ignored. In order to grasp onto the tiny shred of humanity women are allowed to possess in a patriarchal society, one must fulfil the duty of Decorative Boner-Maker to the best of one’s abilities. It is thus no wonder so many women sacrifice so much of their life in order to be “sexy”; the alternative is social death.

Consider the extremes to which female celebrities will go to maintain their appearance. Over at Shapely Prose, Sweet Machine discussed an article from the Daily Mail which had one of their reporters training with the trainer of celebrities like Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow. The experience reads something like torture: grueling workouts that wear her down to the point where she is too weak and listless to do anything but train: her body becomes her life. Recently, I saw a tabloid purporting to offer tips from the professional dancers on Dancing with the Stars on how they keep their bodies so boner-inducing. I didn’t look at the article, but the blurb next to one of the women said that she forgoes all carbs except orange juice. Anyone who has ever dieted knows how consumed one’s mind becomes with food when one is not “allowed” to eat it. Multiply that by an entire food group and you get an idea of how much of this woman’s mental energy is devoted to thinking about her body. Of course, I can’t say for sure that this is the experience she has had, but I know enough to say that if it isn’t, she is an exception to the rule. It has been the experience of countless other women who make the same ridiculous omissions in their diet that she has. I think Courtney Martin does a good job of detailing this waste of energy in Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, which exposes just how much time many women spend obsessing about their body and how it serves to further their disenfranchisement, putting them at a disadvantage compared to men who do not have these pressing thoughts and obsessions. For men, being good looking is a fortunate accident, not something to spend too much time on, while for women, it is a calling.

Not only do women sacrifice their lives in the sense that their lives become subsumed with this striving for attractiveness, but they are often willing to risk death if it means it will make them better looking. This is the basis of the entire cosmetic surgery industry. Although the dangers of cosmetic surgery are woefully underreported, to the point that many women are likely to be unaware of the risk they are putting themselves in by having it done, the fact remains that many women are willing to undergo major surgery in order to prolong or improve their attractiveness. A disturbing portion do die or suffer complications. However, even if more women knew the dangers of cosmetic surgery, it is likely that many would still have it done. When faced with the options of the inevitable social death that comes with lessening attractiveness and the possibility of physical death from a practice that will stave it off, women will be willing to take the risk of physical death, and all because our personhood is dependent on something as transitory as the state of our body. Until women are defined as human beings in their own right and not in their sexual relations to men, this will continue to be the case.

I have been M.I.A. for a while, and I apologize. I have had a generous helping of writers’ block and have been preoccupied with school, work, moving, and baby mama drama. Please be patient with me. Until then, I thought this piece from The Onion hit the nail on the head, so to speak, and I think you will too.