Belle Waring

Now, I post this with a heavy heart, because the truth is, that despite any previous complaints about puppies, I actually regard Eugene Volokh as an intelligent, thoughtful person with whom I would love to have a beer or two. (In fact, we have friends in common.) So, I was basically floored by this:
The premise of this post is that laws which prohibit unwanted sexual touching are based on the fear of involuntary sexual arousal on the part of the victim. And I’m sorry to say, that’s just crazy talk.

Say, on the other hand [vs physical contact ordinarily regarded as non-sexual, but which may be unwanted, such as shoulder-patting], that someone intentionally touches your genitals, or intentionally caresses your breasts (if you’re a woman). In many circumstances, this would be considered a crime. Why the difference? I think that here too there is a connection with sexual arousal—either the possibility that you might be involuntarily sexually aroused, or the likelihood that the other person is deriving some sort of sexual arousal from touching you.

Now, the premise here is that unwanted sexual arousal forms the basis of objections to unwanted touching of, say, a woman’s genitals by a stranger on the subway. Now, I would be inclined to give Eugene the benefit of the doubt here. Except for the part where he totally forfeits my trust.

Why the difference? I think that here too there is a connection with sexual arousal—either the possibility that you might be involuntarily sexually aroused, or the likelihood that the other person is deriving some sort of sexual arousal from touching you.

Again, taken alone, this might be reasonable, if only in a thought-experiment way. But the conclusion? Does it perhaps exclude the most obvious problem? Sources say, yes:

So while I’m not positive, it seems to me that there’s something interesting and possibly important in play here: Some conduct that involuntarily sexually arouses another (or seriously risks doing so) may be improper, even if similar conduct in which involuntary sexual arousal is absent is generally fine.

Wait, remember above, where we were considering both the possibility that unwanted sexual contact should be avoided because it might cause unwanted sexual arousal in the victim and the crazy, totally improbable problem that the person feeling you up on the subway might be sexually gratifying himself at your expense without your permission? What happened to option two, eh?
And then, having knotted the noose in boy scout fashion, Eugene just sticks his head right in:

It[unwanted sexual touching of a woman’s breasts or vagina by a stranger] may be both arousing and disturbing; it might in fact be disturbing partly because of the arousal, or of the possibility of arousal.

Now look. I somewhat hesitate to claim magic feminist backsies on everyone who disagrees with me. But. I’ve actually been raped before! Sweet! And I have sat next to someone on the DC metro who was jerking off while I was sitting next to the window and had trouble getting out. I sort of feel like I’m pointing at the sky saying, “hey, it’s teh blue!” The problem of a dude rubbing his thigh against yours while he jerks off is not, and now I must get all caps, NOT, a problem about involuntary sexual arousal on your part. No, it’s more of the problem of where a dude is rubbing on your thigh and jerking off. And my sister got assaulted in the metro elevator before when she was 13 and when she punched and kicked the guy trying to feel her up he broke her jaw in 3 places! Again, and I hate to get all irritated, but the problem was NOT that she was geting all turned on by that guy. So, in short, WTF? And then, W.T.F.???

Ow ow ow. Michael Bérubé uses his “web” “log” to bring the burninating. Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page attempted to defend incoming White House Press Secretary Tony Snow from charges of racism stemming, in part, from one of Page’s own columns. Unfortunately, he also inadvertently let slip the secret of Tony Snow’s mutant power…the power to see the future! (It’s totally like in this one story from Anne McCaffrey’s To Ride Pegasus, where there’s this mutant empath folksinger!) Read, and be amazed…

Tony Snow is eminently qualified to serve as White House press secretary not only because he is a man of conscience who genuinely cares about solving the tough problems of poverty, bad schools and sour race relations, but also because he can see the future. If you doubt it—or if you think, as an out-of-touch liberal elite critic who doesn’t understand physics, that this sensible blog has suddenly degenerated into trippy Fafblogisms—look again at Clarence Page’s “contextualization” of Snow’s remarks:

“Snow was trying to explain why the former Klansman had just won an estimated 55 percent of the white vote in the Louisiana governor’s race. Snow wanted me to know that, just as those of us who attended Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March were not acting out of black supremacy or anti-Semitism, neither were all Duke voters moved by racism.”

That’s right: back in the fall of 1991, when David Duke had just won 55 percent of the white vote in the Louisiana governor’s race, Tony Snow was able to compare David Duke’s white voters to black participants in a Farrakhan-led march that would not happen for another four years. That’s the kind of foresight and sagacity the White House needs now! Oh, how I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when Tony Snow turned and said to Clarence Page, “You can’t write off Duke’s voters as racists, Clarence. After all, four years from now, many of your people will take part in a march organized by a nutcase anti-Semite. And don’t even get me started on O. J. Simpson! It may be hard for you to see it now, but I have the very strong sense that something bad is going to happen with that man, and many white Americans are going to get extremely upset. David Duke is just proleptically channeling that future racial tension into a right-now campaign, and if mainstream politicians don’t listen to the frustrations of ordinary people and address them in some constructive way, the loony extremists inevitably will move in.”

Man, Trogdor would be proud.

This is a very interesting post about sexuality and sex education as it applies to women with disabilities. (Obviously much could be said about men with disabilities as well.)

It raises questions in my mind. What does it mean to “have the mental age” of a 12-year-old? Should you necessarily have the sex life of a 12-year-old, for all your days? I think all of us can imagine both the nightmare of a mentally-disabled woman raped in a poorly-monitored group home and the nightmare of a mentally-disabled woman who is ruled out of bounds wrt any form of sexual experience by well-meaning supervisors.

The painful legacy of mainstream treatment of stipulatively “sub-normal” women and men [i.e., forcible sterilization] might incline us to extend the human rights of sexual autonomy to people who cannot reliably employ them on their own behalf. Or, American preoccupation with child sexual abuse might lead us to rule out-of-bounds an entire realm of human experience when we think about disabled adults.

As a mother, I am interested to hear about what the parents of disabled children think about this. I would be even more interested to hear about what disabled adults have to say, with the hopeful caveat that at least a few disabled adults read our blog.

When I was a kid there was a Latino family living in a house up the street from us. They had a funny hand-lettered sign above their door which said “my sweet Tunibamba.” None of us ever knew what that was supposed to mean. Of the 12 kids living there who were under 15, I would say 10 had Down’s syndrome (this is just a superficial judgement, but possibly somewhat accurate.) The meta-meaning of “Tunibamba” in my family was “don’t judge a book by it’s cover.” Like, “you think you know about this, but maybe ‘tunibamba.’”

Relatedly, I am genuinely curious about something. Some people claim to fear a future in which citizens of the Western nations are reduced to “dhimmitude” by muscular Islamists. The first act of this tragedy is meant to be the excessive deference to Muslim sensitivities we see in US papers’ craven refusal to print Danish cartoons about The Prophet (now stipulate that I type PBUH in an ironic way) or Cartoon Network’s Comedy Central’s patent lack of cohones (yeah, man, they totally censored Buttercup from the Powerpuff Girls when…oh, no.) Act three includes women from Cleveland being legally required to wear burkas as their impotent menfolk look on. What the hell is act two supposed to be? Lots of suicidal terrorist attacks on US soil? Can anyone, reviewing the recent past in her mind, believe that this would decrease the American appetite for rizziping some shit up? Like, Indonesia is going to invade the US or something? Hitlery turns US soveriegnty over to the UN and they implement Sharia law using unstoppable black helicopters? I’m not being snarky here; I really want to know. Wait, that’s a total lie. I am being snarky, but I also want to know. WTF?

One thing that strikes me as funny about this whole “let’s invade Iran” thing…wait, did I actually just type that? I’m looking at the desk and I don’t see any glass tube with burnt-up brillo pad in it, so I probably didn’t just smoke a glittering rock of yeyo. Probably. OK, nothing about this is funny except in a nervous, “ha ha I’m sure he’s just joking way” that one might employ if locked in a room with a drunk person holding a chainsaw and making jokes about how Texans love real meat. The warmongery is starting up, from Mark Steyn columns to “hawkish” “liberals” pontificating on how no options should be off the table (not even A NUCLEAR FIRST STRIKE ARE THEY INSANE???!), to stop-making-me-commit-genocide wankery to credulous NYT articles to James Lileks relating everything back to this one chick who wouldn’t sleep with him was wrong about Iran in the ‘70s. (You should really read the Vodkapundit post and accompanying thread. He says you’ll need a drink, and the man is not kidding at all. The story he links to [by Dan Simmons] takes grave misreadings of Thucydides to a whole new level, a category in which the competition is stiff. Simmons is sure to win this year’s coveted “Golden Hanson”. The trophy features a stern VDH uprooting an olive tree with one hand and hitting himself repeatedly on the head with an axe handle with the other.) [Edited for clarity—thanks tom scudder!]

Any minute now I’ll have to read from K-Lo about how hypocritical western feminists don’t care about women being oppressed in Iran. I can’t be the only one to find the machinery a bit creaky. Are the warbloggers’ hearts in it? The more important question is whether the US will really do something so extraordinarily, supremely crazy, but I’m firmly committed to lowering the tone at CT. If that means ignoring the important issues of the day to make mocking, ad hominem comments, then let the chips fall where they may.

No, the thing that strikes me as funny is that everyone who supports was with Iran is all about the “mad mullahs” and how they can’t be deterred by normal deterrance because they’re crazed jihadis content to incinerate their own country, plus OMG THE HIDDEN IMAM The people making this argument now insist that of course MAD worked back when we faced rational opponents like the USSR or, you know, Mao’s China or whatever. But now, in a new era of crazy people having nukes, all bets are off. It’s like Iran is one big suicide bomber! The limits of the internet and my own laziness prevent me from researching this at all, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and bet that all these people (over a certain age) did not regard the commies as secular rationalists who weighed the costs or war carefully back in the day. Not at all. Much more of the “they’ve got a plan to retreat to their bunkers and sacrifice their own hapless citizens upon the altar of destroying America” Just a theory. (Obligatory on-the-otherhanding: I’m sure some of the liberals now advocating deterrance railed against MAD at the time as an armageddon-hastening nightmare.)

I think this is my best spam email ever. It’s part Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and part Russian sci-fi:

“Why is it,” Jonathan puzzled, “that the hardest thing in the world is profoundly serious work, since every bent line illuminates a straight one. They were all just watching and grunting words of welcome, but not one was swift wind. Yet he felt guiltless, breaking the promises he had made.”

Bullshit stock hype, if you wondered. And I can hardly blame my mail; perhaps the coming AI kernel is building in the relentlessly negative spam-filter hive mind. Each time a nonsense phrase is chancily uplifted to poetic virtue the filter “stumbles” and allows it through.

Until recently, I thought that famous quote about the king and the priests and the entrails and the running and the explosions and the monkeys was from Professor Frink Diderot. I learn now that the source of the quote was Jean Meslier, whose bloody aspirations ran as follows: “Je voudrais, et ce sera le dernier et le plus ardent de mes souhaits, je voudrais que le dernier des rois fût étranglé avec les boyaux du dernier prêtre.” Worse, the form of the Diderot quote I had in mind was wrong. Diderot actually had this to say, in Les Éleuthéromanes, “Et ses mains ourdiraient les entrailles du prêtre/Au défaut d’un cordon pour étrangler les rois.” In a move reminiscent of a young Ben Domenech, however, one dastardly Jean-François de La Harpe attributed to Diderot the following version in his Cours de Littérature Ancienne et Moderne: “Et des boyaux du dernier prêtre/Serrons le cou du dernier roi.” Due to a distinct lack of blogswarms in the 1840’s, the error was never uncovered. I hope that after a sufficient period of contrition, perhaps involving live-cam self-flagellation, you all will someday be able to give my judgments about wankery the respect they deserve. In the meantime, Hitchens is still a wanker.

1. “Since he is of no use anymore, there is no gain if he lives and no loss if he dies.”

2. “I shall go on keeping score about this until the last phony pacifist has been strangled with the entrails of the last suicide-murderer.”

Easy, right? The less bloodthirsty one is Pol Pot. (As Brother Number One famously mused “Look at me now. Am I a savage person?”) It’s only fair to note here that Christopher Hitchens is not, in fact, a genocidal maniac. Well, not someone who has actually killed anyone, that we know of. It’s also nice to know that Pol Pot has a myspace profile. (His interests include taking control of Kampuchea and social experimentation. Music? DK, obvs.)

Normally we hoity-toity academic types around here don’t stoop so low as to name a wanker of the day. And this isn’t even from today. Nevertheless, this cries out for wankegnition (that’s when you recongnize someone as a wanker, obvs). Vote for your favorite in comments [click to continue…]

This NYT Magazine article about women who are choosing to become single mothers by using donor sperm is very interesting. The article is entirely focussed on the women’s side; no sperm donors are interviewed. But I actually thought the strangest fact was this:

…the Aryan bodybuilder with the leaping sperm has fathered 21 children (and counting — he is still an active donor), including four sets of twins. These children are all 3 and under, and their families — four lesbian couples, three heterosexual couples and six single mothers — have formed their own Listserv, where photographs of the children (all blond, with a strong familial resemblance) are posted, and daily e-mail messages are exchanged about birthdays, toilet training and the like. They are planning a group vacation in 2007.

21 children? That’s a lot of children. Is there a limit to how many children the fertility clinics will allow a single man to father? These people seem to live in NYC, so the chances of two unknowing half-siblings turning Tristan and Isolde Seigmund and Seiglinde, duh (thanks Matt) are small (and this listserv forestalls the possibility in any case). Or, if he prefers younger women, could a reverse Holy Sinner situation loom in his future? I am most interested in what this guy thinks, though. I mean, he’s a bodybuilder, which at least implies a certain degree of narcissism. It can only enhance his self-image that he’s got such motile sperm and that he is so frequently chosen by the would-be mothers—he’s the man! I’m sure we can all spin a nice Darwinian tale about how he’s maximizing his chances for reproductive sucess (and boy is he ever!), but is that really the sort of thing that consciously motivates people? Does he turn and look at every tow-headed kid on the playground as he walks by, wondering? What will he feel like when he has a child of his own, and it’s his 28th child?

UPDATE: it has been suggested in coments that he might not even know—do they really not tell you at the clinic? Also, it occurred to me that this number is only of children whose parents have registered on this donor sibling list; he may well already have 50 kids.

I watch a lot of kids TV with my two girls. A lot. Like, you, hypothetical bourgeois CT reader, think I am a bad parent type of a lot. This is in part a consequence of a happy development: 24-hour cable channels offering ad-free, age-appropriate kids shows. To say that these shows are better than the ones I watched when I was young doesn’t begin to bridge the vast chasm which looms between the Higglytown Heroes and Jem and The Holograms (which remains, however, totally outrageous. And in fairness I watched that show when I was much older than my kids are now. Which is all the more embarassing, really.) But one’s mind tends to wander when a previously viewed episode of Stanley comes on. (Warning: an instrumental version of the Stanley theme song will play. Interestingly, the original version played on the show is performed by the BahaMen, of “Who Let The Dogs Out” fame. Or, perhaps more accurately, not interestingly.)

So, I have been wondering about the gender politics of these shows. Let’s take the new offering: Little Einsteins. This show has obviously been put together by a crack team of well-meaning educational consultants. The opening credits for the show have the Little Einsteins explaining that the music from this epsiode is by Camille Saint-Saëns, and the images are provided by Paul Gaugin and Hokusai. But they refer to him as Katsushika Hokusai. On the kids show. That’s not even really his first name, it’s some kind of toponym, but whatever. It’s not like I’m totally ignorant about Ukiyo-E, but I had never heard this before. It’s a very random thing for 4-year-olds to know.

The Little Einsteins have to navigate around the problems they encounter by referring to a map on which the directions are encoded as various musical themes. So then they offer (phantom) choices to the viewer, à la Dora The Explorer: was this a crescendo? No, the music got quieter! And so on. So, the cast: there are two boys and two girls. One boy is black, the other white. One of the girls is asian-ish, and the other white. This is all fine and dandy. But who is the captain of the team? The white boy. Why? No, really why? (Or on Stanley, sure, he’s got some little black twin sidekicks, but when you get right down to it it’s all about Stanley and his British fish (also male.)) Now, there are also shows with female leads, such as Dora and Jojo’s Circus. (Though in the former case they’ve had to come up with Diego, even more boring than Dora herself. And all her friends are boys except Issa the useless iguana.)

No, the thing I don’t understand with Little Einsteins is, since it’s an absolute given that the creators had all kinds of earnest meetings about the ethnicity of the characters etc., what was the motivation to just revert to ordinary filmic conventions and make the white boy the leader? I sort of imagine them feeling, well, me made enough concessions in putting the asian chick in, so… Finally, if the Little Einsteins ever get in any real trouble that little black guy is toast. (This just reminds me of watching Final Fantasy. When the one big black marine sacrificed his life for the white guy and his magic scientist girlfriend I thought “even a digitally animated brother can’t catch a break.” Although the most egregious example ever was in that movie Mimic about scientist Mira Sorvino inventing giant bugs. The noble black subway worker who just met these people 10 minutes ago sacrifices himself by going out to lure giant bugs to eat him alive, and he does so by banging a sledgehammer on the subway tracks while singing old Negro spirituals, I shit you not.)

Then again, given Chertoff’s overall record, maybe they did place the nation’s security first and foremost:

“I wouldn’t feel safe nowhere on this compound as an officer,” former guard Derrick Daniels told The Associated Press. Daniels was employed until last fall by Wackenhut Services Inc., the private firm that protects a Homeland Security complex that includes sensitive, classified information.

An envelope with suspicious powder was opened last fall at the headquarters. Daniels and other current and former guards said they were shocked when superiors carried it past the office of Secretary Michael Chertoff, took it outside and then shook it outside Chertoff’s window without evacuating people nearby.

I know life is meant to imitate art and all, but is it supposed to imitate Benny Hill episodes? I can just imagine the guards running around in fast-motion, shaking clouds of powder out just below a hacking Chertoff’s window. And if a somewhat zaftig, topless woman in a nurse’s uniform could be worked into an ensuing chase scene, then so much the better.

Poetic justice as fairness. Thanks, I’ll be here all week. Actually, my first thought, on hearing that the UAE company had edged out Singapore’s hometown PSA was, “shit, they should have had Singapore do it!” Say what you like about Singapore’s idosyncratic form of government, they a) run the most kick-ass port in the world and b) can really be counted on to deliver efficient government services, without either the corruption which plagues such services in other SE Asian nations, or the general how-can-I-make-this-person’s-life-worse attitude which often seems to prevail in such places as, oh I don’t know, say the Washington, D.C. DMV? On the question of whether it’s a good idea to allow a UAE state-owned company to control (in whatever attenuated way) our port security, I’m kind of of two minds. On the one hand, if some other foreign company would otherwise be running the show, and if the same US, union-member stevedores will be doing the actual work, then maybe its not that big a deal. On the other hand, it seems that the US actually had to refrain from bombing bin Laden (pre-9/11) at some falconing retreat because a good portion of the “emirs” who make up the Emirate in question were there too. I don’t know why that makes me feel dubious…On the gripping hand, I have a perverse sense of pleasure as I watch Bush twist in the wind of the very anti-Arab, our-oceans-no-longer-protect-us bullshit the rest of us have had to hear for the last 5 years. Enjoy! (Unlike during the cold war, where naiads festooned with the stars and stripes were on constant call to toss back offending ICBM’s from their dophin-pulled-seashell mobile tactical units.) But his latest defense is, “I didn’t know anything about it.” Whaaaa? “The president is a sock-puppet moron” is supposed to be a snide criticism, not an exculpatory point. In general I am confused and await further information. Matthew Yglesias rightly notes that the alert citizen will have learned not to trust the administration to make S’mores without plunging half the nation into a sticky-sweet inferno of death. Death that’s sandwiched between Graham crackers! Food for thought.

When you are a crazy person, as I am, you may find yourself awake early in the morning, having gotten up to nurse your baby and now being unable to fall asleep, as the room slowly whitens with dawn—you may find yourself, I say, thinking about gun control. That’s right, gun control.

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