gay marriage debate: keeping the spark alive
On Wednesday lawyers in the Prop 8 trial will make their closing arguments. The judge has come up with 39 questions for them to address. Some of them bring up issues that we partisans haven’t turned to cud yet:
How does the Supreme Court’s holding in Michael H v. Gerald D […] square with an emphasis on the importance of a biological connection between parents and their children?
Michael H is a child custody case in which the Supreme Court denies a biological father visitation rights because there’s another guy on the birth certificate—the mother’s husband at the time she gave birth. Writing for the plurality, Scalia favors the marital relationship over the biological connection because, he says, that’s what American law has always done.
A pro-gay ruling could use Michael H to defeat two arguments: that America has some kind of grand tradition of privileging biology-defined families; and that kids are better off being raised by biological parents (even if the facts show that they are, the law as stated in Michael H supersedes them).
What are the constitutional consequences if the evidence shows that sexual orientation is immutable for men but not for women? […]
The constitutional consequences are clear: the state would be allowed to discriminate more against lesbians than against gay men. The question’s not academic. At trial the anti-gay side’s only credible argument was that it is a woman’s prerogative to change her mind. Some of their evidence on this point even came from non-religious sources.
If the court finds that lesbianism is whimsical, there are ways to argue we should have marriage rights anyway. For example, all women deserve the same level of protection as gay men, because we are all immutably bisexual. But I hope no one bothers. It’s about time the federal courts recognize that fags and dykes have nothing in common.
In Utah, after a pregnant 17-year-old paid a man $150 to beat her in an effort to induce a miscarriage, legislators passed a law that would allow a woman in such circumstances to be charged with homicide.
NY Times. Homicide, huh? Reminds me of the hail mary arguments I used to make on law school exams when I couldn’t figure out what the actual issue in the fact pattern was.
I will write fiction about premature ejaculation because that’s how interested I am in the plights of others
Some write to make money; some write to communicate; some write because they enjoy it; Jonathan Franzen writes to prove to other writers that he is capable of writing from the perspective of a rape victim.
“When she started fighting, she fought hard, if not well, and only for so long, because she was drunk for one of the first times ever. […] Altogether, there was much to blame herself for.”
It’s too bad that this story reads like a final project for 10th grade health class, because I really admired Franzen’s portrait of a lesbian in The Corrections. Now I’m looking back thinking, wtf Franzen, literature shouldn’t make the reader feel “admiration.” Write something that disturbs me instead.
Why have today’s male novelists repudiated the aggressive sexual virility of Bellow, Updike and Roth?
Because it’s already been done by Bellow, Updike, and Roth?
here’s to our nutbag friends
To help myself feel open-minded, I often read right wing cultural criticism. Unfortunately I perceive most of it as insane, which throws my open-mindedness into question. But in the past few days I’ve found two rational right wing essays:
How Pedophilia Lost Its Cool shows that we vilify adult-teenager sex much more now than we did even ten years ago, and pegs the trend to anti-clericalism.
Average Janes damns the mainstream fem blogs (Slate’s XX Factor and Salon’s Broadsheet) while keeping hope alive for fem blogging in general.
“Men have written great prose about fast cars. They have turned boxing, which is pretty dumb, into a metaphor for the human condition. It’s a stretch to take baseball as seriously as some writers do, and yet Bart Giamatti pulled it off beautifully. Why shouldn’t we give the same credit to women’s more mindless pursuits—even fashion and celebrity gossip?”
And maybe one reason [Obama’s] not as comfortable and intimate with his women staffers is his incredibly strong relationship with Michelle.
Emily Bazelon, inferring a rich romantic life from anti social behavior
New York keeps arresting guys for hitting on guys
I wish they’d arrest guys for hitting on me!
“Exchanging Hats” by Elizabeth Bishop
(Seriously read this, it’s funny, like a non-jackass version of Judith Butler.)
Unfunny uncles who insist
in trying on a lady’s hat,
—oh, even if the joke falls flat,
we share your slight transvestite twist
in spite of our embarrassment.
Costume and custom are complex.
The headgear of the other sex
inspires us to experiment.
Anandrous aunts, who, at the beach
with paper plates upon your laps,
keep putting on the yachtsmen’s caps
with exhibitionistic screech,
the visors hanging o’er the ear
so that the golden anchors drag,
—the tides of fashion never lag.
Such caps may not be worn next year.
Or you who don the paper plate
itself, and put some grapes upon it,
or sport the Indian’s feather bonnet,
—perversities may aggravate
the natural madness of the hatter.
And if the opera hats collapse
and crowns grow draughty, then, perhaps,
he thinks what might a miter matter?
Unfunny uncle, you who wore a
hat too big, or one too many,
tell us, can’t you, are there any
stars inside your black fedora?
Aunt exemplary and slim,
with avernal eyes, we wonder
what slow changes they see under
their vast, shady, turned-down brim.
Psychology Today: sexism happens because women are more animalish than men
Here’s how the argument works: we all hate being reminded that we’re brute animals who will die soon. Female bodies are more animalish than male ones because of our weird leaky vaginas (inference: nature doesn’t control male splooginess, angels do). Therefore it’s not that men try to control women because they can. It’s that all of us tacitly agree to keep women out of public life as much as possible because the sight of female bodies is disturbing. “In short, women sometimes remind us that we are animals, and we don’t like it.”
Radical sex discrimination is explained thus:
“Societies have long enacted norms and rules that seek to control the female creatureliness problem.”
Even assuming it’s true that people are more grossed out by women than by men, the article ignores the possibility that it’s because our male-dominated culture tells us to be. This is why I believe men and women are inherently the same and all difference is socialized by a masculine culture bent on self-preservation: because the people on the other side always wilfully ignore obvious arguments. Like also, how can you say vaginas are more primal than penises when penises look like tails and howl at the moon!?
Sorry. That was all very stupid. I recommend that you stop thinking about it and instead read the Times Magazine’s interview with Hillary Clinton about the State Department’s women’s rights agenda. If Clinton were to remind me of an animal, it would be the camel.
novels I couldn’t finish because they weren’t novels, they were transcriptions of sex dreams
- The Savage Detectives
- Atonement (sex nightmare)
- Ravelstein
Related: For a while I was planning to read Netherland, but then the president publicized his approval of it. Can you think of a better way to define “politically correct”?
child strip search case: supreme court at its worst
Today’s big supreme court story is that it stood up against child strip searches but the stand is headline deep. School officials will never get in trouble for pointlessly snooping in students’ underwear, if they say there was a point.
The court didn’t lay down any rules about when it’s okay to strip search. Teachers can’t duplicate the exact scenario of today’s decision—underwear inspection of 8th grade girl suspected of holding advil—but otherwise they just have to molest kids “reasonably.” Kids can’t sue teachers for strip searches that already happened, because the law was vague before (disgustingness was never a vague concept, but justice is blind to disgustingness). No one can get sued for strip searches they conduct in the future because… the law is still vague! Today’s opinion basically says “yeah that was gross” and that’s it.
If the court had ruled for the school district in a more obvious way then parents around the country would have freaked out and demanded local regulations against strip searches. That’s what happened with eminent domain in a lot of states after Kelo, for example; and with pay discrimination after Ledbetter at a national level. But the anti-strip search headlines will placate most people so they don’t make a fuss at their kids’ schools, and everything will continue status quo. Teachers can investigate kids’ underwear and parents can’t sue them because the law is vague.
how RI became the only US state to allow sex work
and more important, gave us the term “indoor prostitution,” which guarantees the whole episode will become an irrelevant but charming four page digression in a maximalist novel about the foibles of human governance & entwined gay multifaith immigrant families
oh prejudice is bad?
Conservatives are calling Sotomayor racist because she said there’s a difference between white people and brown people. If you think she’s bad then you’ll die when you read this!
As a 17 year old Chief Justice John Roberts argued against letting girls into his school:
The presence of the opposite sex in the classroom will be confining rather than catholicizing. … I would prefer to discuss Shakespeare’s double entendre and the latus rectum of conic sections without a [b]londe giggling and blushing behind me.
As a grown up Roberts wrote:
Some might question whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good.
No giggling, ladies!
sexually assaulting young boys, yea or nay?
Dahlia Lithwick describes today’s Supreme Court oral arguments about the school nurse who strip searched a 13-year old girl because she’d heard the girl was holding ibuprofen (she wasn’t).
Lithwick is anti strip searching children in hot pursuit of nondangerous drugs. I agree with everything she says except that she seems to think it’s relevant that the girl had good grades and no discipline record; and relevant that she’s a girl.
There should be an absolute rule against strip searching kids, not some sliding scale based on how good the kid is. If the school is 99% sure that a kid with bad grades has a bag of heroin in her vagina which she intends to inject into classmates when they’re not looking, they should just send her home or keep an eye on her or something. Kids shouldn’t get more or fewer human rights depending on their “disciplinary record.” By that standard I deserved to get raped every day in elementary school.
I guess it’s moot—any kid normal enough to have a “disciplinary record” would tell the nasty nurse to fuck off.
Second, Lithwick (and a lot of the other commentators) fixates on how the kid is a girl. Why is it worse to sexually assault a girl than a boy? Because it hurts her marriage prospects?
I don’t know—I don’t have a penis, but I’m pretty sure if I did, I wouldn’t want to show it to my school nurse. Like I said, I don’t have one, so I don’t know for sure…
Otherwise though it’s a funny and infuriating piece, and will make you hate the supreme court a lot, so I encourage you to read it.
images on page 1 of my tumblr right now
Six of the people featured are beautiful women, including two topless porn actresses and Reese Witherspoon in a bunny suit.
The remaining three are fat doofusy men.
Am I sexist?
