Anyway, otherwise very intelligent people such as Radley Balko go weirdly off the rails on this one. (Whom you should all read all the time, even though libertarians annoy you, because he is the only person in the history of blogging to ever get anybody off of death row by blogging about it. We arrange some excellent book events, and we make nice covers and John typesets’em all purty, but I’m pretty sure Radley’s got us beat ten ways to Sunday on useful blogging and we will never recoup, not with a thousand book events. Anyway he’s not the annoying kind of libertarian. Er, rather, he’s one of the least annoying kinds. He actually cares about the rights of poor people and has noticed that corporations as well as governments can infringe upon your rights, although he doesn’t focus upon this latter point as much as a left-libertarian would. Did I mention he saves people’s lives? His blog is rushing into burning buildings and dragging people out, and then it wants to go back in, and the chief’s trying to hold it back, because it’s inhaled all this smoke and all, but it busts free and saves three more children, but it just has three cute smudges of soot on its face, and then it kisses Natalie Portman. Then maybe it links to Ilya Somin, and you think, the hell he did?! Our blog is just drinking a cup of coffee, and making plans to kiss…Clive Owen? I may need to re-do the polling on this one.)

The other day Radley Balko pointed to a Reuters story which said, basically, that George Zimmerman fed his dog, and was an altar boy (no, but a real one), and loved his momma, and his Black neighbor would say on the record he had always been a sweet boy, what with his lawn-mowing, and waving, and suchlike. Radley seemed to think this showed…something new. “Turns out, the guy is a three-dimensional human being.” I protested, saying, who ever doubted Zimmerman was an actual person, in the round, who was kind to people sometimes? (Because everyone is, so I’m told. Hitler, dog, etc.) Radley responded: “I saw Tweets and blog posts from otherwise smart, calm people who immediately jumped to the conclusion that Zimmerman was a racist.”

Loves your mom, is altar boy, has a Black neighbor with whom you live harmoniously…all these things are compatible with being a racist! For damn sure they’re compatible with doing some racist shit, which may be more pertinent. I was inclined to pursue only the latter point, but what have we here? Oh, dag, Mr. Zimmerman, take it away down south, to Dixie:

I dont miss driving around scared to hit mexicans walkin on the side of the street, soft ass wanna be thugs messin with peoples cars when they aint around (what are you provin, that you can dent a car when no ones watchin) dont make you a man in my book. Workin 96 hours to get a decent pay check, gettin knifes pulled on you by every mexican you run into!

Aw, George, you didn’t have to miss none of that when you move from Manassas to Florida! You can just drive around scared to hit Cubans by the side of the road! Truth is, the demographics of the South are changing so much as an after-effect of construction jobs during the housing boom, there are plenty of Mexicans in Florida (plenty more when he wrote this, I imagine.) And of course there are always Black people. This tolls rather gloomily and out of spirit with the rest of the post all on a sudden. Ah, that’s because Mr. Zimmerman shot killed a Black teenager, isn’t it.

What was the other information provided in the Reuter’s story, which Radley’s commenter’s found so salient? There had been a bunch of serious, sometimes daylight burglaries committed in the storied “gated community” committed by Black men. Yeah, and you know what percentage of the county is Black? 32 goddamn percent. 32%! How is this not evidence that Zimmerman thought Martin was one of the people breaking into the houses, maybe just casing the joints, got out of his truck to follow him, wanted to detain him till the cops got there (which is called false imprisonment, everybody), pulled the gun to keep Trayvon from walking away, and then…? Something bad happened.

I’m sorry, but Zimmerman strikes me as a) racist, b) so dumb he could throw himself down on the ground and miss. His defense team is going to earn every penny they get paid by a huge donation fund of racists conservative citizens concerned that he might not see justice due to Obama and Eric Holder and the New Black Panthers and Acorn and Akon and that one chick who tried to make us use only lower case letters, and L’il Wayne, and the Rev. Al Sharpton and Flo Rida, because damn that is played out; why are people still going for that? My money’s always been on Zimmerman’s escalating and then just fatally screwing up. And on his being racist. His grandmoms worked as a babysitter for two black girls that ate with the family when he was little. Did they inoculate him against racism when they passed the rice? No. Would he have followed and shot a white 17-year-old who tried to force him to taste the rainbow? No. Do I believe his self-serving story about getting lost in his own 2-street subdivision (OK, maybe that part, actually) and then getting jumped on and getting the beatdown from Trayvon, with the ninja skills he learned at Menacing Black Youths Summer Academy? No Sir, no, no and no Ma’am. R-a-c-i-s-t.

UPDATE: I should really scan some of the yam crate labels, but I should really really stop looking at the evil, makes me have to lie down watching the blood beat in the capillaries of the back of my eye computer. Anyway they’re framed. Some aren’t super racist. Like the Black guy throwing dice and it says “Don’t Cry” Louisiana Commercial Sweet Potatoes Packed By Irvin Wimberly, Church Point LA. (But we all know Irvin Wimberly never packed a single motherloving sweet potato in his damn life. He might not of touched a sweet potato. Could be he was toiling away in the sweet potato fields, infected, like Levin, with the general quickening of energy in the sweet potato packers. Could be.) Here the man just looks sad because he (and we) can tell the dice are about to turn on him viciously. The most racist one is “King” Brand Porto Rican Yams; the king is a kind of idiotic-looking 10-year-old with a plush crown whose lips are printed too big. Now, because his skin is printed dark this isn’t immediately apparent; he’s not Sambo. But once you look it it, boy howdy.

Proof that my daughter learned better than I taught her: she said “those are racist.” I said: “documenting history of racism blah blah.” She, fixing me with withering scorn (she’s only just 9 at this point) “Mom, if an African-American family were coming over for dinner, would you take them down?” I was defeated. 1930s yam crate-labels: racist.

She knew Nigerian people had been at our old place when I had them up. African-American, see, that was the kicker, though in her opinion I should have never have hung them up. (They look so cute in the kitchen!) Belle Waring, hanging racist 1930s yam crate-labels all up in everywhere: doing something racist. I was willing to amend. They’re all just moping behind the toaster now. I don’t know what to do with them, honestly. Maybe give them back to the lady who collects them, but in the beautiful frames.

My Chinese business partner loves it, she thinks Southern accents are the cutest things in the world, and it also means I talk at about…2/3 the speed of my previous rate. Maybe even 1/2. It’s just, really weird. I can feel it; I can actively fight it with concentration. It varies throughout the day, depending on pain and so forth. The funny thing is that I used to be unable to produce a Southern accent on demand. If she asked me to do it, I couldn’t, I would just freeze up somehow, it felt like I was pretending something. Oh well, ain’t is a perfectly fine word.

I consider myself something of an expert on the subject of broken noses. Mine first got straight-up broken in a random mugging by a 5’10’-6 ft tall black guy in a black hoodie and jeans. Actually, for real, not lying here. (Needless to say I didn’t bother to report it to the police. I seriously couldn’t have picked him up out of a line-up, and what, I want them to wander along Amsterdam Ave looking for 6 ft tall black guys in hoodies to hassle? What’s the point there? This was a long time ago, at the peak of NYC crime in the early 90s) Not really a mugging because they didn’t end up taking my stuff, more like a freak-out because I was walking too close to him or something and he was high. Whatever. Since then it has been broken numerous times, but because the initial break weakened it, I think, in a number of the cases. I mean, that one time a guy just hit me in the face by accident, that was a plain old hard hit. (Really an accident, not “I’m being abused” an accident.) The later breakages definitely produced less blood/trauma; maybe Zimmerman is in Fight Club?

Anyway, when someone hits you in the face hard enough to break your nose, you look rather distinctly awful. You are pale*, with bruises starting under your eyes, and the place where the break happened is busted open, and there is blood all over the damn place. Coming from the wound on your face, pouring out of your nose: blood everywhere. Now, maybe there’s some other more manly way to get your nose broken I’m not aware of, and that’s just the ladyway of getting the lady-noses broken. Or I’ve been the victim of some particularly bad nose-breakings? That’s frankly not unlikely. In any case, annoying as the video is (the ABC news EXCLUSIVE banner overlays the interesting part of the image for 90% of the running time), it clearly shows a man who was cuffed (so I was wrong about his not being cuffed!), but did not just get the beatdown from Trayvon Luke Cage Martin. He doesn’t even look shook up enough; dude just shot and killed a kid! If I had done that by accident I would be in agony. So, dear readers, a) don’t believe everything you read, and, b) the Sanford police should really have arrested this asshole at the time and their decision looks worse and worse in retrospect.

N.B. in re: trolling. I myself am mildly pro-troll on principle. I would prefer that there was no one trolling. However, if someone has to troll, they should damn sure be doing it right. Piss everybody off at once. Suddenly advocate nuking Japan for no reason. That’s why, when confronted with the weak-ass “trolling” of…bjk? I can’t even remember; I was inclined to call in the big guns and say if someone’s going to derail my thread it’s going to be a high-quality troll like Bob McManus. I know, you’re all thinking “when the hell are you going to tire of his demands that other people’s blood flow in the streets and so on?” I don’t know. He’s strangely almost exactly like my dad along certain axes, so he’s got a gilt-edge pass from me. We all know he would never abuse that by…what? He just? Oh, well.

*Even very dark-skinned people can look ashen or sallow—fundamentally unwell. In white people this expresses as blanching to paper-white, but there are analogues for the majority of the world that is not white.

Trayvon Martin was 17, and was staying with family in Sanford, Florida, in what is referred to by the obligatory monicker “mostly-white gated community.” He walked out to buy some candy and a can of iced tea at a local convenience store, and was tailed back by a self-appointed neighborhood watchman, who deemed him “real suspicious” and “probably on drugs or something.” This joker George Zimmerman then got out of his truck to (perhaps) scuffle with Trayvon, and then shot him in cold blood, as far as anyone can figure, while Trayvon was pleading for his life. This (the pleading) can be heard in the background of neighbors’ 911 calls. I have to say it’s a little odd none of them stepped out on the porch with a shotgun to say “I’ve called the cops already, cut it out!” The number of people committing crimes who will just run away if you say “I see you down there, knock it off” is high IME. Zimmerman claims it is his high-pitched voice we hear begging for his life between the firing of the first and the second shot, after which there is silence. Take a look at a picture of the man. I don’t even know what to say.

UPDATE: I place this above the fold so everyone will see. I was sort of taking it for granted that people were reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blogging on this, which has been copious and excellent. But if you haven’t, you should.

Now, although I went to high school in D.C., and have lived a lot of other places, I was born in Savannah, GA, and lived in S.C. as a child, like unto L’il Soft Shell, the turtle chile (from Pogo). I always went home in the summertime, and always planned to spend my golden years on the screened porch with my brother and sister. John will be consulted about his preferences also be allowed to come. So let me tell you what those gated communities are.

They started in the 70s and 80s and I’d bet more than half of them are brazen enough to have “Plantation” in their names. Ha. No really! They let white people move into places where black people couldn’t enter, on account of the gate. There’s a two-bit security guard running a little…what do you call those things, gantries, whatever. You get stopped if you’re black and asked where you’re going and whom you’re visiting, and are held up for an embarrassing length of time, and if you’re get white you get waved through, unless you’ve gone all Swedish death metal or something. Many of them pushed black people out, off of land they owned, on Hilton Head Island especially. Or rather, I happen to know about it. If I lived somewhere else I’d know about that. There’s a history book waiting there. They made it so black people couldn’t visit their own family cemeteries, going back to slavery days, because they had enclosed them in a gated community. They privatized the damn beach and chased black people off! You can’t privatize the everloving beach?! Under the high-water line is public to all, there ain’t no exceptions for gates. They didn’t fix these problems till various lawsuits forced them to in the 1990s. OK, sorry, digression, but if you wondered what a “mostly-white gated community” was, it is that.

The real problem with the situation is not that George Zimmerman, the man who shot an unarmed 17-year-old, is racist. He is racist as the day is long, as can be deduced from his thoughts on the nature of “being suspicious,” oh, and by his saying “fucking coons” while on the phone to the goddamn police dispatcher. Which he did, as plain as dishwater. There is no doubt there. I’ve heard all this “the young people don’t say ‘coons’ now what with the ipods and the friendsters and the series of tubes.” Bullshit. The problem is not that Florida has some poorly drafted law that either re-enshrines existing self-defense claims or grants justice to whoever shoots to kill first in any altercation. The problem is not that knee-jerk defenders of the powerful over the powerless of the Megan McArdle type would, in her words “have to acquit” if the case came to trial.

The problem is the cops didn’t arrest Zimmerman at the scene. They didn’t take his gun. They didn’t test him for drugs or alcohol, although they did do so to Trayvon’s dead body. They didn’t run Zimmerman’s records. They didn’t look at Trayvon’s phone and call the contact marked “Dad,” or note that he was on the phone within minutes of the death, and dial that number to see who that was. It was Trayvon’s girlfriend, and she recounts that he told her he was being “followed” by someone. She urged him to run, but he said he was not going to run, he would just “walk fast.” That just breaks my heart right there, as a mother. “I’m not going to run. I’ll just walk fast.” He was too brave as a young man to run, maybe, or he knew enough to know that running would make him look “real suspicious,” or both.

The problem is that the government of Sanford, Florida has given its official sanction to any white guy* who failed out of mall cop school, and sits home at night jerking off to back issues of Guns and Ammo, and has appointed himself neighborhood defender, to shoot a black teenager armed with candy, and walk away from the scene. That’s the thing: walk away from the scene. I know we’re all tired of hypotheticals, but we all know black Zimmerman wouldn’t have walked away from the scene after shooting an unarmed white kid. They didn’t breathalyze this asshole, they didn’t have him pee in a damn Dixie cup, they didn’t take his gun away temporarily just till “things got cleared up.” If an actual real-live cop shot somebody to death they would have taken his gun and put him behind a desk, even if the IA investigation was cursory bullshit. Higher level investigations are welcome, from the state of Florida, from the Feds… But nothing will change the fact that the cops thought Zimmerman was on their side. They were going to fix things for him. Those bastards had his back so hard his spine was right up in his beer gut. Nothing will change for the next black teenager walking “suspiciously,” i.e. at all, down some Florida street. Justice means more than just the Feds showing up the Sanford PD for a bunch of Skoal-using morons who couldn’t govern their way out of a wet paper bag. Justice means actual freedom for Trayvon Martin to walk down the street and not be in danger of losing his life to someone with no badge and a gun. Not just hypothetical freedom, like the kind of voting rights black people used to have before the 1950s and 1960s. Real freedom.

*I am aware that Mr. Zimmerman is, at least in part, a s33kr1t mexican so it’s not about race and white people are the real victims here Hispanic, a non-racial classification used by the US census to…uh…help people who are “passing” go through a middle stage? Make sure we can keep track of which Hollywood actresses are “smoldering”? I honestly have no idea.

That wasn’t totally unreasonable because they are less effective for women who have never given birth vaginally, being more likely to be expelled. I think there was also a misguided consensus that you couldn’t dilate a woman’s cervix enough to insert the device unless she had previously given birth. Today, as I understand it, manufacturers produce a smaller size to solve this problem.

I was on the pill for about 10 years. I always had trouble with it, experiencing breakthrough bleeding (basically you get your period twice a month, no thank you) and other various side effects including, in my opinion, exacerbation of depression. I got switched around to more types than I can remember in an attempt to find one that was acceptable.

Here’s what’s great about the copper IUD: no hormones! The copper makes your womb inhospitable to a fertilized egg, for reasons that I think are still somewhat unknown. So, maybe an egg is fertilized, but it can’t attach itself and begin appropriating resources to build a placenta. I’m not sure whether this counts as baby-killing to the anti-abortion crowd; probably yes, even though the definition of getting pregnant involves a fertilized egg implanting itself in your uterus. Not just, you know, hanging around briefly. (Do these people really think when they go to heaven they will be vastly outnumbered by the souls of fertilized eggs who failed to implant and were washed away during menses? That’s going to be some boring conversation right there. Will those little dudes be casting down their teeny, tiny golden crowns around the glassy sea? I call bullshit; I don’t think anti-abortion people believe that at all.)

Insertion of the device does hurt. It only takes a few seconds, though, and then you don’t have to do anything about it for several years. The main reason women have the device removed it that it causes heavier bleeding during their period. My experience was that this was (dramatically!) true at first, but that my body then adjusted.

Obviously the IUD does nothing to protect you from STDs. But it’s not competing with condoms in this area, it’s competing with the pill. Pregnancy rates are lower when using IUDs than when being on the pill, probably because it’s very difficult to be a perfect pill user. Guys may think it sounds easy: you take one a day, end of story. But sometimes you forget if you’ve taken it or not; actions repeated so frequently have a tendency to blur together. Or you end up staying out super-late and crashing at your friend’s place. In theory you’re meant to add condoms to the mix at that point until you start taking a new set, but in real life people often don’t bother. Part of the appeal of the IUD is that you don’t have to do anything.

My only jealousy now is of the new pills where you only get your period 4 times a year. That would be great! Let’s face it: getting your period is a pain. There’s blood everywhere! Who needs it? It’s true that it can be the most welcome sight in all the world, when you have been sitting there thinking you might be pregnant, and wondering what the hell to do about it. And suddenly these is a cadmium red solution to all your problems. Otherwise: lame. So, ladies, IUDs are great and you should consider them.

UPDATES: One commenter notes that although we don’t know how the IUD works, it seems to work primarily by inhibiting fertilization, and only secondarily by preventing implantation. So we all win, including the little dudes with the tiny crowns. Another commenter who survived a pregnancy while his/her mother was using an IUD wants me to point out that this is a possibility, and that grave birth defects can result. This is true, and something my doctor mentioned to me. The failure rate is incredibly low, but if the IUD does fail the consequences can be very serious for the developing fetus (if not fatal before the fetus is viable outside the womb, which is more likely).

Yeah OK, but Chuck Brown, with or without The Soul Searchers, is considered the “Godfather of Go-Go,” did everybody change their kit later? And do all mostly black musical sub-genres have to have someone named “Brown” be the godfather of them? And “it was because they couldn’t afford bigger congas” has urban legend written all over it. Anyway, yeah, a whole bunch of congas and bells and whatnot. The only time a white DC audience ever heard that many drum solos was when Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” concert was in town. (Before Randy Rhoads died in that tragic plane accident at Ozzy’s ranch. Who knows what magic might be flying off the fretboard of his distinctive “Flying V” right now. I’ll tell you all about my deep, deep love of “Tribute” and how I cry when I listen to “Goodbye to Romance” another time.)

Yeah, anyway, why two Rare Essence songs? OK, they’re my fave go-go band. But also I think this shows the evolution of the genre from something like funk to an intriguing version of hip-hop backed with live percussion and horns. It has continued to evolve, and is still popular in the DC metro area despite never making it anywhere else. Well, that’s not quite true, in that the music has been heavily sampled for other hip-hop songs which are then, perforce, go-go.

This is ye olde skuel, “Body Moves.” It’s special because it includes the DC slang word “sice” in the call and response at the end. “Sice” is more or less entirely equivalent to “psych,” (I’m siced for this party!) but can’t be negative (you can’t “sice someone out.”):

Back in the crack epidemic years go-go clubs were the site of lots of crime and shootings, and since the DC City Council is a bunch of morons, they decided to solve this problem by banning certain clubs from playing go-go. Ha ha pretend. NO RLY! One wonders whether, if such a club were to play, say, Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” (not that it would be a good idea, mind you) whether the club would be in violation, since the main loop is a sample from Chuck Brown’s “Busting Loose.” (Notice Chuck saying “give me the bridge now,” in 1978, that’s the oldest song I know that does that.) “It’s go-go!” “But it’s just a sample. It’s as if there are invisible quotes around the go-go that make it safe!” I could imagine the liquor license board debates getting pretty metaphysical. Next up is Rare Essence’s most popular ever song. It even made it to Yo! MTV Raps, as you can see (video way worth watching).

It is a testament to how not gentrified parts of DC are that I still don’t know where the hell Montana or Minnesota Avenues is. They’re getting the shout-outs, I assume they’re in S.E., but damn, that’s a lot of not knowing shit about your hometown. Go-go’s just weird in that none of its practitioners have ever hit the big time, even though it’s more or less next to New York. Even little old Savannah, GA has had more success in this regard (Outkast). I was originally going to defend disco from its detractors in the Don Cornelius thread who complained there was only one beat and the bass could never stray, and that was bad, by showing a) the bass can walk all over the damn place, and b) no harm in having generic constraints. Do you hate Loleatta Holloway and the SalSoul Orchestra, I intended to ask? Do you hate dancing (N.B. there is a go-go break in that song, “212 North 12th St.”)? Do you hate life itself? Then I got distracted. Squirrel! What? John insisted on the title. Brought to you by Stuff White People Like.

DISTURBING UPDATE: People born on the day Blackstreet’s “No Diggity” was at #1 are old enough to comment on youtube now. I mean, I know stray dogs comment on youtube, but still. Possibly more disturbing: I have a sweet-tooth weakness for this song.

NOT PARTICULARLY DISTURBING AT ALL UPDATE: If you find the openly proffered go-go unpalatable, then listen to the more funk-like Chuck Brown track linked above. You will probably like it more. If you like funk, which you probably do, because it’s funk, and all.

The Soul Train Youtube channel is generally amazing, and I am so buying a boxset now. The sound quality on this one isn’t as good, but a)it’s Marvin Gaye singing Distant Lover b) the look on the woman’s face at 2.02 when he comes down to sing into the crowd is truly beautiful. I know what you’re saying. “Belle Waring, I am a busy person and even though I am skiving off work I do not have 5 minutes to spare listening to one of the greatest singers of all time singing a beautiful sad song.” Well OK, Ms./Mr. Thing, you can listen to it open in another tab while you read a blog post write your journal article. Or you could watch Marvin Gaye in a knitted hat, charming the pants off of every person so inclined as to have their pants charmed off by a dude, and frankly, probably no small number who didn’t think they were in the “a dude can charm my pants off” crowd. Wishing you peace, love, and soul.

For the first time, India has gone a full year without a new polio case, the World Health Organization announced last week.

The last case, the only one in 2011, was of an 18-month-old girl in West Bengal State whose sudden paralysis was confirmed as polio on Jan. 13. There were 42 known cases in 2010.

Polio eradication officials described a year without new cases as a “game-changer” and a “milestone” because India was for decades one of the biggest centers of the disease.

All from the NYT article. I…can’t think of anything bad about this at all! Don’t help me.

One thing one might wish to consider is what the actual economic/social conditions were like back in the Environment of Early Adaptation? Well, the real answer is that we have no idea, but a not totally implausible answer is that the most similar existing societies are those who live in relatively small bands of hunter-gatherers, such as the !Kung, and (apparently) less ¡exciting! tribes in the Amazon. In such tribes everyone has notably more leisure time than in agricultural societies, though of course their reproduction rate is much, much lower.

Generally, the gathering (mostly done by women) provides 80% of the average adults’ calories and the hunting (mostly done by men) 20%. That’s on average, and the protein is obviously important, so… Now, being the all-that best hunter in the tribe can convince lots of laydeez to have sex with you. Is this because they want your resources? No, because every motherfucking-body shares the food, Holmes. Shares the motherfucking food. They don’t want your resources—-though they probably wouldn’t say no to you getting the oysters off that roast wild turkey for them. They want your hot body. Why are you so good at hunting? You’re in the pink. A fine physical specimen, keen of eye, etc.

Now, if you, hypothetical armchair evolutionary psychologist, are very, very good, I might allow you to construct a loooong chain of argument by analogy, in which being the best hunter=social capital, and monetary capital today=social capital. Note, however, that you will be forced to leave out all the bits about “providing” for the offspring and so forth, and be left with something more along the lines of birds that do stupid dances to garner sexual attention, and the great engines of modern capital will turn out to be the baroque construction of a thousand bower-birds working at cross-purposes. Which, granted, not totally implausible.

“No but food’s important,” I hear armchair evolutionary psychologist cry. Yes. Food. Totes important. We’re all together on this one. So maybe fucking the best hunter does get you (as female hunter-gatherer) a bit of extra food. (Note that everyone’s far from starving or they could just put in a little more time looking for food, which they do not, because they’d rather hang around poking the fire with a sharp stick or creating oral epics.) Then maybe you’d want the best hunter to think your kid was his so your kid would get extra food too. But life is short, and being the best hunter doesn’t last forever, maybe you better fuck that likely young up-and-comer with the blue feather in his hair. And then again, truth be told, strength isn’t everything, and that guy who used to be the best hunter a few years back knows a trick or two, if things were to get rough, might be useful. You know what you should really do here? Fuck every last member of the tribe who isn’t your dad or your brother, and convince each and every one of them that he is your special little schnookie-boo, and separately at various times of the day give each of them a blushing, downcast look which indicates he is the still point of your turning world.

And that explains why women are all total sluts to this very day, and why people who think that the veldt predisposes women to sleep with old men who have lots of money appear to have forgotten about the perishability of food items, and the non-utility/replaceability of almost all other items, and the fact that there was no money then. The End.

P.S. My husband came up with the “ad hominid” formulation and deserves full credit.

Moving on, Slate has proffered for your attention an article by one Mark Regnerus, if that is his name. It is entitled thusly: “Sex is Cheap: Why Young Men Have the Upper Hand in Bed, Even When They’re Failing in Life.” I’m actually concerned that the stupid is going to burn my screen, and that readers of the article should perhaps be provided with an old-timey screensaver to avoid this. Flying toasters, say.

To better understand what’s going on, it’s worth a crash course in “sexual economics,” an approach best articulated by social psychologists Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs. As Baumeister, Vohs, and others have repeatedly shown, on average, men want sex more than women do. Call it sexist, call it whatever you want—the evidence shows it’s true. In one frequently cited study, attractive young researchers separately approached opposite-sex strangers on Florida State University’s campus and proposed casual sex. Three-quarters of the men were game, but not one woman said yes. I know: Women love sex too. But research like this consistently demonstrates that men have a greater and far less discriminating appetite for it. As Baumeister and Vohs note, sex in consensual relationships therefore commences only when women decide it does.

And yet despite the fact that women are holding the sexual purse strings, they aren’t asking for much in return these days—the market “price” of sex is currently very low. There are several likely reasons for this. One is the spread of pornography: Since high-speed digital porn gives men additional sexual options—more supply for his elevated demand—it takes some measure of price control away from women. The Pill lowered the cost as well. There are also, quite simply, fewer social constraints on sexual relationships than there once were. As a result, the sexual decisions of young women look more like those of men than they once did, at least when women are in their twenties. The price of sex is low, in other words, in part because its costs to women are lower than they used to be.

Ok, I’m game, I’ll call it sexist! I can’t believe he’s citing this study, which is so poorly designed that it defines conception. Do you know what women are warned against every second of every day? Going anywhere with a man who is a stranger. Say, to his house or room, without having first met him in a public place for an earlier date, and then later having told a friend where you’re going on the second/third/whatever date. Because despite the fact that most rapes are committed by people whom the victim knows, stranger rape does exist, and, more relevantly, is endlessly hyped to young women. Walk in lighted places! Carry your car keys bristling from your fist as makeshift brass knuckles! Have pepper spray! Learn useless martial arts!

Guess what women are unlikely to do? Go to a strange location with a rather odd young man who is much bigger and stronger than they are. Because, face it, he’s a little off; it’s not normal to just walk up to complete strangers and ask them to fuck. What if you were game for sex but then he started to do something that hurt or that you just didn’t like? He could overpower you. And what kind of rape defense would you have after the defense lawyer told the jury you agreed to have sex with a complete stranger? He could tie you up and keep you there for the next 48 hours raping you periodically, and really you’d have zero legal defense. She was into bondage! Could you really say beyond a reasonable doubt that a woman who would abandon her plans for the day to go have sex with a complete stranger might not also be into bondage?

I was at a Berkeley bus stop one time on a beautiful day, in the champagne air, with a cloudless bowl of cobalt overturned on the hills, and a guy pulled up in a cherry-red 60s convertible and asked if I wanted a ride. I told him where I lived and he said, fine, it was more or less on his way. So I accepted a ride. I told him I was married and he didn’t even bother to hit on me much, just got my email address and then never emailed. God, you cannot imagine the endless ration of shit I got from every single person I knew. I could have been killed! What was I thinking?! My psychiatrist interpreted it as a death-wish. For Christ’s sake, I could have jumped out of the convertible! He was just a normal guy who wanted to give a pretty girl a ride in his car. He saw me standing there in a lovely dress at the bus stop and thought, what the hell, I’ll ask. And I thought, sweet car: fuck it. I’m tired of waiting for the bus.

I’ve wasted too much time on this idiocy because the real problem is deeper: the economic model of sex. There are people who sell sex as a commodity. They are called prostitutes. I favor legalization of prostitution. However, almost all ‘actually existing prostitution’ is evil and, particularly here in SE Asia, involves actual slavery, kidnapping, and torturing and raping children. So not cool. I consider men who participate in this type of prostitution in, say, Cambodia, to have done something very wrong, and to be supporting some of the most truly evil organizations in the world today. But if in a hypothetically equal society grown women and men wanted to charge people to have sex with them, then, fine.

However, there’s another thing that happens, which is people have sex without charging one another. Here’s the crazy thing: this is not an exchange of a commodity but an activity that men and women both participate in, because it’s fun. People can and should have sex together, not just with enthusiastic consent, which I think doesn’t stray far enough from the commoditized model, but enthusiastic participation. Sex is not a thing than men do to women if the women say they can, and then the women just lie there like Snow White in the glass coffin, red as blood, white as snow, and black as the ebony in the window-frame.

Sex is an activity which two people can enjoy performing together. Now, I’m sorry that Mr.Regnerus has never elicited any such reactions from his sexual partners, but being a shitty lay doesn’t entitle you to make stuff up about how women feel. A feminist can perfectly well say it may be the case that women in our culture don’t want to have sex as often as men do, and are more picky (it is beyond difficult to imagine how one would figure this out with any scientific precision, because those people at the approval of experiments on humans thing are pretty strict nowadays). You know what? Women are not particularly encouraged to enjoy sex in our culture. Why? Because this economic model gets drilled into their head at every opportunity. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Sex is not presented as something fun two people so together but as a dog biscuit you dole out at various times until get the behavior you want: a marriage proposal. Because God forbid you ever have sex with anyone whom you’re not trying to trick into marrying you. Because if you enjoy having sex with various random guys just for the hell of it, do you know what you are? A slut!

This stupid economic model of sex is so deeply embedded in our culture that we often don’t notice it enough to question it. Happily, Mr. Regnerus has dragged it out in all its tattered glory, so that we can marvel at the idiocy which animates it. He’s tacked on the additional moronic theory that porn is an acceptable substitute for sex with actual alive women, such that it competes with them On this theory, a young man might say to himself, “hm, I could have sex with this average-looking chick who seems totally down for it, or jerk off looking at porn-stars. Oh my stars and bars this is a difficult question!” I do not think I need to bother to conduct a study on how men feel about this.

Let’s all say it together again: people have sex together, with each person performing some physical activity, because it’s fun to have sex. Please note also that under the economic model, lesbians can’t exist, since they have nothing of value to exchange for sex, except for…um…sex? And since women only use sex as a means to an end, and exchange it with men; and since further, sex has been explicitly devalued to something cheap, well, hm. I submit that if you propose a model of human sexual behavior, and it positively forbids the existence of a whole class of people who nonetheless actually exist, then maybe there’s a problem with the theory? Just a thought.

Take it away, thoughtful, not-particularly-sexist CT commenters, who aren’t a bunch of assholes at all, and are not about to bust out some ad hominid, “back on the veldt” bullshit. I am unfortunately asleep during the time when US workers are procrastinating by commenting on CT, but rest assured I will ban the fuck out of any and everyone when I get around to it. Because feminists don’t believe in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

So, she insisted we all call her Calvin, and call Saki “Hobbes.” And refused to wear any of her dresses or skirts or girly T-shirts. And then a few months later she insisted she needed a boy’s haircut, and a boy bathing suit, and also boy underwear. Our reaction was to say: OK, as you like. I cut my children’s hair anyway (and my own!), so that was no problem. Her schoolmates and teacher were very supportive, calling her Calvin; she turned in all her homework and tests as Calvin. She still had girl friends, though; when I asked her if she wanted to play with the boys at school or have them over she rolled her eyes and said, “Mom, they’re all morons.” She also still played with her dolls, but more with Lego, and more Super Mario (both Wii—Super Mario Galaxy!—and Nintendo hand-held).

When I cut her beautiful curls off I saved them, because I thought I might never see them again; that and the rows of lovely dresses in her closet did give me heart pangs from time to time (it will surprise none of you to know that I buy my children a lot of truly adorable clothes. Grosgrain ribbon trim! Gingham!). Also, Violet is an unusually beautiful little girl, so part of me felt it was a shame for her to be a boy.

Other parents, even my American, Yale alumna friend, were surprised at our willingness to go along with it. The Chinese parents were truly mystified, but game enough to send birthday invitations to “Calvin” for the most part. John and I talked about it, of course. We thought, maybe she’s a baby dyke, or a budding trans person, or just really loves Calvin and Hobbes, or something else. There didn’t seem any harm in it. It was clearly centered on Calvin the character, at least at first, but later seemed to be more generally that she was a boy.

We have a live-in maid here in Singapore also, who takes care of the children much of the time, and she clearly thought the whole thing was a terrible idea but was willing to call Violet “Calvin” if that’s what we wanted. Then, after about 8 months, our daughter just got up one day and told our maid Malou that she was Violet again. Snap. End of story. Hobbes also reverted to Saki, though Hobbes’ mama (an identical but bigger toy…that I sleep with but we’ll all just pretend I didn’t say that) remained “Mama Hobbes.” And that really was the end of it. Occasionally we’ll remind Violet, “hey, remember when you were Calvin?” and she’ll merely say “yes, what about it?”

Obviously this would have been much more difficult had she been a boy who wanted to be a girl. I think we might even have gotten push-back from the school, and I’m almost certain the other boys would have teased her. She’s a very popular child at school, so no one teased her at all, as it happened, but I don’t know if that would have been enough had she been a boy.

I have read recently about children who decide that they are “really” the opposite gender almost at once, and who may even get hormone therapy that (for example) blocks the onset of puberty in boys, so they never develop male secondary sex characteristics. I know there is debate over whether children can make an informed decision about these matters, and about whether they might not just be gay as adults rather than trans (certainly many of my queer friends strongly identified as the opposite gender when they were young). I explained to the girls about trans adults, and their main question, naturally enough I think is, how do they make a penis? (I said this was the most difficult part.)

In any case I feel happy with the way it worked out for our family. It is interesting that Calvin’s biggest supporter was her older sister, who began calling her Calvin immediately, and demanded that I buy her boy’s underwear the way she wanted, and so on. Violet is still very insistent that she never wants to develop breasts. (Her sister, at 11, is just barely beginning to do so.) I don’t know how she’ll feel when that starts to happen. Maybe she will go back to being Calvin; maybe not.

Sadly, No!

Ta-Nehisi Coates thoughtfully quotes some Ron Paul newsletters so you don’t have to read them:

Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.

Hate Whitey Day is actually one of my favorite holidays. It doesn’t have all the pressure to be perfect, like Christmas, or everybody getting along, like Thanksgiving. Just white people cowering in their houses/retreating to their heavily armed compounds in rural Oklahoma while America’s non-white population runs riot, more or less totally burning shit down. And the clean-up and re-building costs always add a bump to the January jobs report, as Matthew Yglesias has noted.

The question of whether Ron Paul’s having voted for MLK day would bring about the state of mind in which one would find the charge of racism against Mr. Paul “preposterous” is left as an exercise for the reader.

P.S. The real Sadly, No!

On December 27, while most Brazilians prepared for the New Year by bleaching their whites and gathering flowers to toss into the Atlantic for the goddess Iemanjá, Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first female president, was gathering a group a conservative legislators to stealthily assist in drafting and enacting a Ceauşescu-like law requiring all pregnant women to register their pregnancies with the state….
So what is going on? Brazil, the most populous Catholic country in Latin America, finds its politics intrinsically tied to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Dilma, who won a last-minute reprieve from the church’s negative onslaught in the 2010 presidential elections once she disavowed any suggested support for abortion, is to a certain extent beholden to that base. Indeed, Dilma’s cabinet includes an unofficial church representative who was responsible for brokering an agreement between the Vatican and Brazil during President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration. For years Catholic and evangelical parliamentarians have been trying unsuccessfully to establish a registry for pregnant women, with Dilma’s support they’ve finally succeeded.

The obvious actual intention of the law is to prosecute women who have abortions or induce miscarriages. It’s hard to imagine anything more painful than losing a wanted fetus and then being grilled by the police about it, and possibly sent to jail for up to 3 years. Oh wait, except being forced to carry a fetus to term when you are the victim of a rape but there was no successful rape prosecution. That would be worse. Will the cops walk around stopping pregnant women and checking whether they are registered? If anything this seems likely to worsen access to pre-natal care, as women who are undecided about whether to carry to term at first, but end up staying pregnant, decide to give birth at home to avoid getting in legal trouble for failing to register the pregnancy earlier. Or when teenage girls who are ashamed of their pregnancy don’t want to register, and then won’t go see the doctor for any pre-natal care whatsoever. I hope when Brazil’s congress returns to session they will overturn this law. This is just evil and wrong.

UPDATE: Thanks to Witt in comments below, a link to an English-language article explaining the law in greater detail, by Brazilian women’s health activist and human rights advocate Beatriz Galli. (Additionally, those curious may want to know that the woman’s doctor will be compelled to register her with the government when he knows she’s pregnant, which might well be before she does!) Excerpt:

In fact, PM 557 does not guarantee access to health exams, timely diagnosis, providers trained in obstetric emergency care, or immediate transfers to better facilities. So while the legislation guarantees R$50.00 for transportation, it will not even ensure a pregnant woman will find a vacant bed when she is ready to give birth. And worse yet, it won’t minimize her risk of death during the process….
Last but certainly not least, MP 557 violates all women’s right to privacy by creating compulsory registration to control and monitor her reproductive life. In fact, it places the rights of the fetus over the woman, effectively denying her reproductive autonomy. A woman will now be legally “obligated” to have all the children she conceives and she will be monitored by the State for this purpose.

Since then I have developed the ability to wake myself up if the dream is so awful that I can’t bear it. But since I never had anything but nightmares for years and years, with the odd exception, shit has to get pretty rough before I can pull the ripcord and sit up in bed, panting. Oddly for a person my age, I have done Freudian analysis, 3x a week on the couch just like a New Yorker cartoon, for a whole year. The goal was that I stop having nightmares. The therapy was very successful. For a time I had no nightmares at all. Even now they are scattered and few compared to my earlier life. My sister’s experience is the same, and our evening kiss good-night was always followed my the ultimate benediction: “don’t dream!”

I do have certain powers in the dream. Sometimes I can fly, obviously, exercising the muscle you know instinctively how to use. True success in this realm is intoxicating, one of the superior pleasures of life. At other times I am merely leaping, slowly, away from my pursuers, never getting fully off the ground. One thing I can do is, I can always find a weapon. I am trapped in the house, killers outside; once I realize it’s a dream I can say, I’m going into the next room and there is going to be a gun in the desk drawer. There will be a loaded gun in the desk drawer. My sister has the same power. At the very least there will be an axe, a big sharp one.

Here’s the thing, I was talking about dreams with my older daughter, and before I mentioned it, she said “I can always find a weapon.” What? There’s no gene for “can always find a weapon in my dream”?! I never talked to her about it! I must have talked to someone else and she heard it? I…really don’t know about that.

Sometimes I can achieve full control of all aspects of the dream. Flying, yes, I remember fondly standing on a dull, scuffed metal platform floating in an infinitely vast open area between two layers of cloud on an orange gas giant and just…swan-diving off. Free fall for maybe a full minute and then I exercised the muscle that is always there and flew like an arrow between the two marbled cloud layers, the platform receding behind me unneeded; I knew there was another ahead, far, far ahead. I didn’t care how far. Infinitely complex whorls in the orange clouds, true flight, the flat horizon of the massive world. My high school boyfriend woke me up. I could have killed him.

That’s the exception for true lucid dreaming. I think you can imagine what actually happens when you gain total control of the dream; it’s like the holodeck on Star Trek—cleaning that thing would be a bitch. You can have sex with anyone you want! Some people allege you can get beyond this stage and do…I don’t know what, something spiritual, apparently. It’s rare enough that I gain total control that I must say I’m satisfied with the less spiritual angle. In discussions about it my husband always mentions Riker at this point, and the concept of Riker having sex makes my ovaries crawl up inside me to get away. Any other lucid dreamers in the Crookedtariat?