"Gotcha!" questions

I'm pretty sure that anyone reading this blog is familiar with Todd Akin and his stupefying comment that "legitimate rape" rarely leads to pregnancy because women's bodies are designed, somehow, (magically?) to prevent it. (The comment is rhetorical gold. It both begs the question - so, what's an "illegitimate" rape, then? - and invokes the authority of science where no supporting science exists.)

Almost as disturbing, though, is the media characterization of his stupidity as a "flub". Google is currently returning 178k results for "todd akin flub", two of the top three being from ABC ("Campaign flub by GOP Senate candidate...") and CNN ("A flub by a Republican Senate candidate..."). For the record, "todd akin  misogyny" and "todd akin misogynist" return 140k and 119k hits, respectively.

But this characterization is equally moronic. A flub is something that's comical, accidental, and virtually harmless. A Freudian slip is a flub. Tripping over my own feet and missing a ground ball in a game of softball is a flub. Outtakes or gag reels that are set to hilarious kazoo music. Consciously and pointedly verbalizing your misogyny and scientific ignorance, on the other hand, is decidedly not a flub. It is almost the exact opposite of a flub.

The choice of "flub" reminds me of Sarah Palin and her numerous complaints about "gotcha questions" from the media - another word-branding exercise designed to obscure the stupidity of a politician. Now, "gotcha questions" do exist, and journalists do try to catch people saying the wrong thing, contradicting themselves, or simply lying. It happens. But it's also totally legitimate. And it's also their job to do this. Good journalism should include gotcha questions. And just as those questions shouldn't be reduce to a game of "gotcha", which subsequently diminishes the importance of the question, we shouldn't reduce the answers to "flubs", which makes them seem awfully inconsequential.

(For the sake of levity, I'll include a link to a slideshow from New York Magazine that describes the various incidents that Palin has characterized as "gotcha" moments. Unsurprisingly, all of them are simply cases of journalists doing exactly what you would expect of a reasonably ethical journalist.)

Baseball, hazing rituals, and Poe's law

What with the beginning of September being the part of the baseball season when rosters expand and teams are flooded with younger players, a bunch of news outlets are running their annual 'rookie players are forced to do embarrassing things' stories. (A Toronto Star story published today talks about how the youngest pitcher in the Blue Jays' bullpen is tasked with carrying all of the relief pitchers' snacks across the field in a kids' backpack, but I couldn't actually find it on the site.)


Of course, aside from mentioning that the juxtaposition of professional male athlete and Dora the Explorer is funny because it's unmanly, there's little by way of critical reflection. Which is why it was nice to see a piece from Jezebel, where the author points out, of course, that there's certainly a sexist element to some of the choices. (Jason Isringhausen, for example, is explicit about wanting to find pink, flowery bags.) But Jezebel makes another point that's likely to be missed - that it also has to do with embracing childhood, especially in a number of examples (like Heath Bell's, who collects Star Wars bags that are shaped like the characters) where the older players are clearly not trying to emasculate their teammates.

Naturally, some people will take umbrage at any suggestion of impropriety, and so both a) the reply thread on Jezebel's site and b) the Jezebel Facebook page are loaded with people who think that the authors are taking things too seriously/seeing things that aren't there. (Because sexism is just good clean fun, am I right?) Here's one of the Facebook responses:

"Why do liberals have to ruin everything? It's baseball. LEAVE IT ALONE. Who gives a flying **** about gender politics in the game. Next you'll be saying how they should provide an equal opportunity for women to play."

To go off on a bit of a tangent (although "tangent" implies that I have a single, focused point, and I don't...): I think it's hilarious that I can't tell whether this guy is being sincere or ironic. The caps, the ***, the 'next you'll be asking for equal rights' rhetoric... this guy could be remarkably dense OR sarcastically clever, and one seems just as possible as the other. It's a great example of Poe's law - less a rule than an observation, it says that internet extremism and parody of that extremism are impossible to tell apart.

(It also behaves a lot like Godwin's law, I'm realizing, insofar as every internet discussion eventually reaches a point where you can no longer tell whether what you're reading is an actual argument or the mockery of that argument.)

"Balance" and "theory"

I often watch The View when I feed Penelope her lunch, and turned it on this morning just as their panel was discussing the new Cameron/Comfort edition of On the Origin of Species. (The equally absurd and awful contents of which I blogged about a few days ago.) During the discussion, Heidi Montag and Sherri Shepherd (mis)used two words that, when deployed in these arguments, drive me absolutely nuts: "balance" (as in, the introduction provides "balance" to the evolution vs. creation debate) and "theory" (as in, both evolution and creationism are "theories").

1) To call the Cameron/Comfort edition "balanced" is outrageous - even if I agreed with Heidi's definition of "balance". Comfort is writing in the 21st century, Darwin in the 19th - genetics wasn't even a word when Darwin wrote, which makes Comfort's discussion of DNA both anachronistic and irrelevant. (Irrelevant to a debate about Darwin and/or evolution, but it's obvious that Comfort's actual target is science as a field, not Darwin as such.) Comfort can - and does - misrepresent Darwin's argument while Darwin, for obvious reasons, cannot refute his erroneous claims. Heidi also commits a sin that I'm all too familiar with as a teacher - she conflates complaint and critique, mistakes a wholly fallacious straw-man argument for rigorous analysis. Bringing balance to a debate requires, at the very least, some responsibility on the part of the commentator to accurately represent the position that is being critiqued. What Heidi calls "balance" would probably be libel if Darwin weren't long dead.

2) a. The "theory" bit is equally annoying. At some point, it became conventional outside academic circles to use "theory" as a derisive or pejorative term - the implication being that a "theory" is not simply unproven but is purely speculative, a mere hypothesis. Of course, if you can use Wikipedia, much less know anything about science, you know that a theory is far more complicated than this, that it's an analytic concept and that it proceeds from controlled observation - it's deductive - rather than preceding it, as would a hypothesis. It's on this basis that the Darwinian theory of evolution is astoundingly incomparable to the "theory" of creationism.

b. What's even more annoying, of course, is that creationists - and Sherri was doing this, implicitly - collapse i) the Darwinian theory of natural selection as the reason for evolution with ii) the fact of evolution. Evolution has occurred and we have a fossil record that proves it - hell, the non-fossilized remains of much smaller human beings from several centuries and millennia in the past are evidence of evolution, too. What remains is not for us to determine whether evolution occurs, but to determine how it occurs. And while the fossil record for the entire world is small, yes - the conditions under which organic material is fossilized are quite specific and rare - this shouldn't give us reason to doubt that evolution has occurred. It's a problem, yes, but insofar as it presents us only with the transitional forms - because all life is a transitional form that evolved from something else, which is transitioning to something else - and not with a roadmap of how it got there and where it was headed. And that's where the theory bit comes in.

The funny thing is, of course, that I'm actually quite critical of the way that scientific "truth" is produced and sold. Too often, scientists have encouraged us to conflate fact and theory just as eagerly the creationists do. But they get a well-deserved free-pass on this one.

"Hetero man-crush"

One of my very favorite expressions to use is "hetero man-crush", in part because it always gets a laugh from people who've never heard it, and in part because it's almost always perfectly apt. I use it to describe non-sexual-but-more-than-platonic attraction to other guys, though it seems to be used by most other guys to exclusively describe an attraction to male celebrities or other guys that they don't actually know. (I suppose it's somehow safer or less anxious if it's confined only to people you'll never meet?)

I can't recall when I first started using it or who/where I got it from, though the very oldest reference to "hetero man crush" (as opposed to simply "man crush") that I could find on Google is in August of 2005, which uses it "to denote a man that [one] admires, to the point of wanting to get to know that person more, admiring that person to the point of thinking about them often and wanting to be like them." In fairness, though, that definition seems to fit "man crush" more accurately than "hetero man-crush", the latter being a bit more ironic and cute about the way that it self-reflexively asserts the heterosexuality of the speaker/writer. (And, in that assertion, also winks knowingly at the anxious and tenuous construction of that heterosexuality.) There has to be some admittance that you want to be too much like them, that your fandom (in the case of celebrities) approaches a discomforting level or your interactions with them (in the case of people you know) are already ambiguously gay. No definition of "hetero man-crush" works without the inclusion of those levels.

As for specific examples of my own? George Clooney as Danny Ocean is maybe at the top of the list, and I suspect it has something to do with both his overwhelming coolness and my love of Clooney's hair, given that I'm getting a number of grays and hope sincerely that my gray hair will somehow eventually be like his. It's incredibly unlikely, sure, but just maybe...

Selling Sarah Palin: on post-feminism and the misuse of "feminist"

This isn't so much a complaint about Sarah Palin as it is about the media that is supposedly vilifying her and the fast-and-loose way that people now deploy the word "feminism". Namely, it's a complaint about the insistence with which some media types (and bloggers) sincerely push Palin as a feminist - often, as in these examples, her feminist credentials are posed as a question or debate, though the angle is always a sympathetic one - or at least present her political ambitions as an achievement made possible by feminism and representative of its success.

The first suggestion is, to anyone who knows anything about the broad philosophy of feminism, total bullshit. Feminism is not a politics that aims for the exceptional and symbolic advancement of a single woman, nor can it be reduced simply to the success of women - their ability to perform masculinity while preserving a recognizable femininity - in a man's world. Rather, a feminist and feminist politics are oriented toward gender equity and equality, and accomplishing that 1) by recognizing larger social structures and institutions that produce and reproduce this "man's world", and 2) doing something to change those same structures and institutions. Palin's politics are in no way feminist for the simple reason that she fails to recognize her exceptionalism as a woman who can play the boys' game, and so makes no effort to change that boys' game in order to make it inclusive. (Contrast this with Obama, who acknowledges historical and systemic race barriers - even if he can't explicitly call the USA "racist" - as well as his own good fortune to have been able to access systems of power that are only rarely available to other black men in the USA. Sarah Palin disingenuously describes herself as just a "hockey mom"; Obama would never reduce himself to just an "Afro-American dude".)*

The solution to the problem of the second argument is less obvious - which is merely to say that it's not completely fucking clueless - but equally misdirected. Marketing Palin as the end product of feminism or as a woman who will usher in a "new" feminism is actually a post-feminist position. Hillary Clinton got it right when she, like Obama, marketed herself as a pioneer - her run at the president's office was not indicative of feminism's success, but of its continuing gains and potential to succeed eventually. Conversely, Palin's nomination to the vice-president's office is seen by Republicans as just another reason to declare feminism dead and the feminist movement irrelevant - if a woman can be one step from the highest political office in the country, then surely gender discrimination is a non-issue. (And if you need me to tell you how and why this opinion is woefully misinformed, then you probably realized that I'm one of those self-hating feminist men and stopped reading this a long time ago.)

* In fact, the ways in which pundits describe Palin's feminist achievements actually serve to illustrate the persistence of gender inequality. Note how Palin is lauded for her ability to balance family and work - as if she could not be "feminist" if she focused on only one. Conversely, male politicians are rarely celebrated for their ability to be both good fathers and good leaders, nor are they decried for their perceived parenting failures. In fact, it's not really expected that they should have to parent- it's a mostly unspoken expectation that primary parental responsibilities will fall to their spouse, to whom most of the child-rearing questions are directed by the media anyway.

Guilty displeasure

What's sure to be a new favorite term, from Carl Wilson's (of Zoilus) book about Céline Dion, A Journey to the End of Taste:

If guilty pleasures are out of date, perhaps the time has come to conceive of a guilty displeasure. This is not like the nagging regret I have about, say, never learning to like opera. My aversion to Dion more closely resembles how put off I feel when someone says they're pro-life or a Republican: intellectually I'm aware how personal and complicated such affiliations can be, but my gut reactions more crudely tribal.

Wilson later links guilty displeasure to Julia Kristeva's notion of the abject - but Kristeva's writing is not really ideal for what's supposed to a semi-accessible blog, so I'll quote Barbara Creed instead: "The abject threatens life, it must be radically excluded from the place of the living subject, propelled away from the body and deposited on the other side of an imaginary border which separates the self from that which threatens the self." It is, in short, something that is a part of you but which must also be denied, these denials being as important in your ability to fashion a coherent identity for yourself as are your affirmations.

Wilson's examples of guilty displeasures work for me, too, though I find myself struggling to find less obvious ones: the idea of patriotism, probably, since I'm sure that it's more nuanced than it seems in many cases but I'm nonetheless eager to dismiss its usefulness on the whole. Maybe I'll come back to this post and either add some items or add them in the comments as they come to me - more banal and poppy stuff. Though I'd love to here about what other people find a guilty displeasure, too.

How to "win" an internet debate when you're wrong

I recently involved myself (as I'm apt to do) in a totally absurd argument about artistic genius, social influence, and individual effort over at Comicboards.com. (Yes, the familiar cliché about having to post message after message because "Someone is wrong on the internet!" does apply.) It basically amounted to someone claiming that, for example, Harry Potter is the creation of an individual genius that transcends issues of influence and cultural antecedents, and two others of us arguing that it's absolutely insipid to claim that Rowling acted in a vacuum and that Harry Potter could not have existed if, for example, Tolkien had never written Lord of the Rings. To anyone with a modicum of knowledge of social or cultural theory, this is hardly revolutionary - at its simplest level, our ability to communicate relies on our use of a symbolic order that precedes and exceeds us, and within which we are constantly acting and being acted upon.

To this other debater, though, this is an opportunity to invoke some of the stupidest and most underhanded means of declaring victory in an internet debate. So my issue isn't so much with this particular argument as it is with the sorts of strategies that she deployed in order to fake a "win". This list is incomplete (feel free to propose new items), but succinctly sums up the unfortunate turn that this discussion took in the past 24 hours or so:

1. The common sense victory - Reduce your position to an unfair, but totally undeniable, truism and assert that your opponent's disagreement with you equals a rejection of the truism. (For instance, assert that you're just supporting the artist, whose craft requires hard work and dedication (the truism), and that anyone who doubts the "wholly individual" genius of an artist lacks respect for that artist's enormous efforts.)

2. The moral victory - Announce that you're walking away from the debate. (Bonus points for returning because you just couldn't let your opponent continue to get it wrong.)*

3. The victory in absentia - Mock one of your opponents in a forum that is restricted or to which s/he doesn't have access, but to which you know a number of other participants in the forum have access and will be able to witness your victory dance. (Bonus points for classiness if 3 follows directly after 2.)

4. The lowest-common denominator victory - If all else fails, play the intellectual laziness card by suggesting that your opponents' efforts to refute your argument - via various appeals to textual authority, social theory, and lived human experience, as well as their need to correct your theoretical errors - and refusal to agree with you is evidence of irrationality and a closed-mind. (This is especially effective if your opponent is right.)

5. The ad-hominem victory - Ignore all the arguments and poke fun at your opponent with a non sequitur or other incomprehensible and ostensibly humorous gesture in order to emphasize that while his/her seriousness is surely derived from insecurity and anxiety, you are so comfortable in the truth of your opinion that you can openly joke about it. (Although I'm lost on exactly what this one is supposed to accomplish and how it could fool anyone.)

It's incredibly difficult to do any of this offline - or, at least, to do without someone calling you on it immediately - but all too common online. And this is why I sometimes hate the internet.

*I am, of course, occasionally guilty of engaging in this one myself.

On comics and the church of Continuity...

So I allowed myself to get dragged into (another) one of those internet comic arguments where the crux of the discussion is Continuity*. Run quickly from these fights, because they're never fun. (Even when you're right!)

[*Comic book Continuity (n.) - to paraphrase Wikipedia, a consistency
in the characteristics of character and a contiguity of plot]

Case in point: Emma Frost explained some issues ago in Astonishing X-Men that Cyclops' inability to control his powers related to a mental block, not brain damage from a childhood fall (as it had always been explained). Ardent anti-Whedon X-Men fans complained that Whedon is just making stuff up as he goes along, ignoring tons of precedent that would render such a development an impossibility. I suggest that, in fact, there is precedent and am told, basically, to put up or shut up and produce the evidence. And after 10 minutes on Google, I find it: Cyclops hits his head on a rock in Uncanny X-Men 332, and the accompanying caption implies that the brain damage is somehow undone. It's a stupid explanation, but it's there. So I win, I guess.

After all that trouble, though, I'm not sure that I even care. The fact that Whedon may have had some other comic in mind - and this is worse because it was written by a hack writer (Scott Lobdell) as part of a massively awful crossover (Onslaught) - actually does something to diminish the experience for me. Sure, Whedon's story isn't entirely self-contained, but its references have been pointed and meaningful; they add something thematically, and there's often a knowing reflexivity to them. If Whedon is referencing Lobdell, though, it's purely to satisfy the utilitarian demands of plot. And for that reason, I'd almost prefer that Whedon didn't know about this scene, or that he never had any precedent in mind whatsoever.

Continuity be damned. I prefer that writers take whatever liberties they feel necessary in order to tell an individual story, one that's coherent and intelligible in relation to its own parts. What's the alternative, really? Attempting to maintain some sort of narrative unity in relation to thousands of issues of comics is a fool's errand, if ever there was one. If the options are loyalty to 1) a confused, contradictory, and notoriously disloyal tradition or 2) loyalty to your own storytelling, why is there even an argument?

Adventures in TAing, case 1 (in a ? case series)

(One of the great things about being a TA at a university is that it allows me to recognize pet-peeves that I never knew I even had. In order to deal with some of the frustration in a passive-aggressive but slightly bemused manner that others may enjoy, I'll share bits and pieces of my favorite peeves here. Note: I changed the title of this ostensible series. It was a little too snarky, I think.)

Case 1: That funny habit that students have of overstating their claims by declaring them 'clear' or 'obvious'. As in, "we can obviously see that so-and-so is clearly a symbol of such-and-such", whereupon they proceed to explain why this is so for the rest of the paragraph. Clearly (tee-hee), this begs the question - if it's so obvious, then why do you even need to waste your/my time explaining it to me?

Interrogating 'bully readers'

A particular species of comicbook fan is utterly fantastic at deflecting criticism of their most beloved creators and titles. A typical and awful exchange from any number of message boards:

Reader 1: I think Book W sucks because of X, Y, and Z.
Reader 2: If you don't like Book W, then don't read it.
Reader 1: Fine, I won't. But I still think it sucks.
Reader 2: I don't care. If you're not reading it, then you're not entitled to an opinion.

It's a ridiculous turn of logic that seems aimed at eliminating criticism or negativity altogether. It's very nearly a twisted sort of syllogism, I think: if you don't like it, you shouldn't read it; if you don't read it, you can't comment; therefor, if you don't like it, you can't comment. It is also, in fact, surprisingly common to internet discussions of all sorts.

There's a certain common sense appeal, of course. That is, if you aren't informed, you shouldn't be writing as if you are. Quite right. But people of the Reader 2 sort are never satisfied by claims to information or authorities that are not Book W itself.

The problem here is that Reader 2s are (unselfconsciously, I'm sure) setting themselves up to be revealed as hypocrites. Thing is, we all register opinions all the time based on something other than direct experience of the topic in question. I can confidently say that Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor is a piece of crap, but I've never seen it. So how do I do it? Well, I've never seen anything by Michael Bay that I've liked; I think that the leads are terrible actors based on other films they've been in; it was utterly trashed by the film critics whose authority I respect and trust; the trailers didn't interest me at all; the blockbuster historical romance/war film genre generally don't interest me at all. (Granted, I could still be wrong - but, again, experience has taught me that my educated guesses are usually close to the mark.) And I'm sure that I'm not the only one who makes these sorts of decisions, whether we bother to enumerate them in this way or not.

There's an additional problem, too - the problem of never having the time or money to read or see everything. Should we be prevented from commenting or registering an opinion on a text simply because it's beyond our means to acquire it? I'm reminded of jury selection in the recently completed Conrad Black corporate fraud and racketeering trial, where Black's lawyer requested a change of venue because the average Chicagoan was not wealthy, did not own multiple homes, and did not employ servants - that is, the jury could not possibly consist of his "peers". These ploys by various Reader 2s strike me as disturbingly similar - the field of "peers" for the purposes of discussion is being systematically reduced to only those who have a similarly positive experience of the comicbook in question, reducing the space for discussion to those that would not only fail to interrogate each other and their texts, but would acquit one another of their "criminal" reading practices.


Note added several hours later: I linked this blog entry to a post I made in the discussion that directly prompted me to write this entry in the first place. The response it elicited from at least one poster is both quite (inadvertently) funny and wholly deserving of my 'bully reader' characterization. Just click the link above and follow the exchange.

Comic book vocabularly lesson #1

With thanks to Somebody from the X-Universe Message Board, this is just too funny (and useful and accurate, probably) not to post here...

continuity porn (n) -

Fundamentally, it's a story whose primary purpose is to involve some sort of past event to the detriment or even exclusion of the story which is nominally being told. (see also: "fanwank")

Exactly what stories ARE "continuity porn" therefore varies from reader to reader, since it's a pejorative term, and therefore only stories a reader considers to be bad tend to get defined as such.