A couple weeks back I received some LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) diversity training. Frankly, I figured the seminar would be a skate. While I am your typical heterosexual white male, it’s not like I have not known people in the LGBT community. As a Unitarian Universalist, I have also helped our church become a welcoming congregation for LGBTs. I was even Standing on the Side of Love at their annual assembly in Salt Lake City last year. Still, I was not quite prepared when I walked into the classroom, and left more than a little confused.
That’s probably partly by design, and partly because I have some trouble when an issue has too many permutations. Two instructors showed up from Out and Equal, a San Francisco based non-profit that is helping integrate the LGBT community into the workplace. Of course, the LGBT community has always been in the workplace. For the most part, they stayed silent about their natures at work. During the last couple of decades, more from the community have come out at work. In San Francisco, you expect LGBT to be out in the workplace. In other parts of the country, like many places in the Deep South, if you know what is good for you, you remain closeted at work, and maybe in your community as well. In Washington, D.C., being LGBT not that big a deal, as like most major cities we have a rather large LGBT community. For the most part the LGBT community just blends in. In general, there is an unofficial “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the workplace. You disclose as much about your personal life as you feel comfortable disclosing. However, it is also perfectly okay to come to work, do your job, act pleasantly and then go home with your colleagues not much the wiser. Miss Manners does not approve of prying questions anyhow. So we generally don’t pry.
One of the instructors was a fifty something lesbian dressed as a man, right down to the blue suit and pinstripe tie. I first mistook her for a man until I heard the pitch of her voice. She spent most of her career in the military, but left the day the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy went into affect. She was eligible to retire anyhow, but said she could not live with an official policy where she had to remain closeted. The gentleman was much younger, gay and frankly gorgeous. He was skinner than Fabio but otherwise looked a lot like him, but with long dark locks mixed with blond streaks that flowed down his back.
Men dress up for work all the time, however, most of us just dress for success, which means that while we may look good in a suit, we are indistinguishable. When we get home, we revert to blue jeans. This man was as beautiful and any woman I’ve ever seen exiting out of a beauty salon. Frankly, he had me a bit mesmerized. Obviously, I need to get out more because I had no idea my sex could look so good. By the end of the day, I realized what my problem was: I found him attractive. I had no desire to put the moves on him nor I could not imagine myself intimate with him but the same is true with the many attractive women I run into everyday as well. I realized I found him attractive because he took exquisite pride in how he looked and in many ways, this made him seem effeminate to me, and this was the source of my attraction. Finding a man attractive has happened to me before, but only rarely, and generally about every five years or so. Generally, I don’t see my fellow men. I know them as people, but I don’t see them the way heterosexual women do. During the seminar, we were encouraged to challenge our assumptions, and I must say I was challenged.
I have always said I was heterosexual, yet few of us who call ourselves heterosexuals really are entirely heterosexual. Whether we wish to acknowledge it our not, we fall somewhere between the extremes of heterosexuality and homosexuality. Most of us tilt rather markedly toward one side or the other but at the same time, many of us have had homosexual experiences, generally when we were younger. Many like me assume we are completely heterosexual because even if occasionally we do find a man attractive, we don’t act on it.
From the seminar, I learned there is much more to someone from the LGBT community than just their sexual orientation. There are in fact at least four aspects to sexuality to consider about any person. The first aspect is our birth sex, which is straightforward enough. However, there are exceptional cases where someone is born with both obvious male and female genitalia. The second aspect is our sexual orientation, or the sex to which we are attracted. For most of us straights, this is all we think about when we consider someone from the LGBT community. The third is the gender we identify with. A transgender person, for example, has a conflict between their birth sex and the gender they feel inside. For example, if they have male genitalia, they may find it disgusting and unnatural. This often leads to stress because they are inhabiting the wrong kind of body. Lastly, there is the aspect of gender expression, or how someone chooses to express their sexuality. Transvestites, for example Eddie Izzard, like to dress in the clothing of the opposite sex, even while most remain extremely heterosexual. If you think about it, this means that a person might fit into any one of 24 possible categories. Moreover, categories are simply conveniences for us to try to organize aspects of someone in our own mind. A person’s actual sexuality includes all sorts of other possible variants.
By the end of the class my head was spinning. For example, I could be a biological man who so strongly feels I am a woman to the point that I might consider sex change surgery and hormone replacement therapy to look like a woman. Yet, even though I feel inside like a woman, even after all that surgery to make me a woman, I might prefer to dress like a man. Moreover, I might prefer men to women, which suggests I am not homosexual, but a heterosexual woman in a man’s body who prefers a “butch” look. Most would label this person as a homosexual simply because they are attracted to men and be done with it. We were asked to ponder how we would make the workplace an accommodating and friendly environment for people like this so they don’t have the stress of living a closeted identity. Indeed, they will probably be most productive in a work environment where they can truly be out and equal. Before taking the seminar, this all was so less confusing. Of course, I just chose to remain largely ignorant of the many variations of humanity out there.
As confusing as the LGBT world is, it is relatively straightforward stuff, compared it with the kinks many of us straights have but choose to keep in the closet. Since my wife has many friends from the LGBT community and well the kink community, about a decade back I purchased the book Come Hither, A Commonsense Guide to Kinky Sex by Dr. Gloria G. Grame. It sits next to my bed. I am a reasonably sexually curious person, but curiously in the nearly ten years, I have owned the book, I still have not finished it, although I genuinely mean to finish it. Frankly, I find the numbing variations of kink too confusing to fully get my mind around. Although I’ve gone through the definitions many times, I still cannot quite get the difference between a “top” and a dominant, and submissive and a “bottom”. To my wife it all makes complete sense and is intuitive, but to me it is a confusing muddle. Moreover, power play is just one aspect of the whole world of kink that seems to me to be an endlessly confusing hall of mirrors.
So I figure that if once every five years or so I run across a guy that I find attractive, then overall I must be a very vanilla heterosexual. Because of the seminar, I certainly will be more respectful of those in the LGBT community and mindful of the diversity inside it. In fact, I may be less “don’t ask, don’t tell” than I am now, simply because I don’t want them to feel they have to shutter some part of their life when they come to work.
Frankly, I don’t care if someone at work is or is not part of the LGBT community. If they want to have a picture of their same sex spouse in their office, that’s fine with me. I am glad to hear about their weekend activities with their lover or same sex spouse. I hope they would voluntarily open their lives to my gentle inquiries, because so much of their world still confuses me. My philosophy is people are just people, and these sort of variations should not matter at all as long as in the workplace there is no harassment. Which of the 24 squares a person falls into perhaps helps in understanding where they are coming from and how to manage them. I hope that I can set a standard with my employees that these variations do not matter and we should welcome anyone in the LGBT community we happen to work with for the complex person they happen to be.
I hope I will eventually understand all these permutations. Right now, I just wish my head would stop spinning. Once again, my black and white world seems to be mixed with too many colors to wholly comprehend.
February 20th, 2010 at 01:58pm
Posted by
Mark |
Sociology |
no comments
Tags: GLBT, Sexuality
Perhaps to really appreciate Valentine’s Day, you have to be single or divorced. When you are an old married dude like me, Valentine’s Day has a perfunctory feel to it. Of course, I get my wife a card, some chocolate and sometimes even some flowers. She does likewise. It should be a special day since after all it is a day that celebrates romantic love. Perhaps we could find ways to make the day more special. For us the truth is that we love each other the same every day of the year, so there is not much point in making a fuss over Valentine’s Day, beyond what is expected.
Absence does make my heart grow fonder. There are times when I feel if we really wanted to rekindle the old flame, we should spend a month apart. A week apart, which happens a couple times a year when I am off on business travel, definitely makes me miss my wife. I miss her as well as all those comfortable, somewhat nebbish things we do both together and apart, like sit three feet from each other while she inhabits one computer and I another but largely never speak. I imagine to feel so distracted that I craved her most of the time would take about a month. I really don’t know because in nearly a quarter century of marriage, we have not been apart for more than two weeks at a time.
Passionate love is designed to be fleeting. It tends to get more passionate with increased separation, up to a point. If your hormones remained as high as they are during the passionate love phase, you would live happy but die young. This is why many of us crave a lower intensity kind of love that amounts to the comfort and routine of being married. After a while, you take it for granted simply because it is so always available. We have someone to come home to. He or she may not be perfect, but neither are we. This low-key love that most of the time is pleasant rather than passionate seems to be the key for many to low blood pressure, health and long life.
Some of us would like this pleasant kind of love but haven’t found the right person yet. Others of us may have found the right person but cannot get married. The person they love inconveniently has the same sex as they do. Except in a handful of states they are out of luck. Perhaps they can live with their love, but they cannot do anything to make their relationship legal.
I do not know exactly how things would be between my wife and I right now had we decided to live with each other the last quarter century instead of tying the knot. I do know they would be a lot different. Would we have ever had a child? These days there is a lot less stigma associated with having a child out of wedlock but childrearing is so much less complicated when you are married. Our daughter could fall under my insurance. My wife of course would not be my wife, unless you count her as a common law wife, so she would have to fend for herself in the health insurance market. Frankly, I doubt we would still be together. We both wanted to settle down. Inhabiting a house together was nice, but until we were tied together legally, it didn’t feel quite right. Marriage was important because it meant we were an established and committed couple and could plan a future together in a straightforward and structured way.
It baffles me, particularly with the passing of each Valentine’s Day, why gays and lesbians cannot enjoy the simple right to a civil marriage. I could enumerate the many reason why denying civil marriage is so counterproductive to our society. However, the Reverend Evan Keely, an interim minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church I attend pretty much said it all in his succinct sermon Forty-Seven Theses that he delivered appropriately on Valentine’s Day Sunday. In addition, I have talked extensively about this injustice before.
Today, I simply want to say to my gay and lesbian brethren just how sorry I am that they were born into a society where they still cannot know the everyday pleasure of waking up with and interacting with a spouse. I never have to worry that my wife will be denied hospital visitation privileges, or that someone I trust can direct our financial affairs when I am unable to do so. I don’t have to worry about finding someone to accompany me to the hospital for outpatient surgery or to drive me home afterward. It comes implicitly with marriage. Having a spouse makes live so much less complicated in so many ways, while of course it introduces relational complexities as well. It is not fair, but I am fully vested in society and you, unless you live in a state that allows gay marriage, are not. Even if you happen to live in a progressive state like Massachusetts, in the eyes of the federal government you are still not married, and are treated as such.
Rest assured that this will change. In time, this injustice will be rectified and you will be treated as equally as the rest of us who happen to have been born with heterosexual orientations. I will not rest until you too can enjoy the right to live pleasantly (but not always with burning passion) with the blessing of civil society with the person you love.
February 17th, 2010 at 09:01pm
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2010, Sociology |
4 comments
Tags: Gay Marriage, Marriage, Valentines Day
In case you haven’t noticed, I just love news stories about politicians that cannot keep their zippers zipped. One rarely learns anything new from these news stories, but they always amuse and entertain even though they are heart-wrenching experiences for the aggrieved spouse and family. It seems that cheated ex-wives (and ancillaries who facilitated the cheating) are competing with each other for Amazon bestseller status. There has been a whole rash of books lately. Elizabeth Edwards recently released Resilience, her tell all book about her marriage to John Edwards. Also hot off the presses is The Politician by Andrew Young, the former myopic and masochistic aide to John Edwards wherein we get all sorts of details we probably did not want to know. These include that Edwards’ bit on the side, Rielle Hunter, couldn’t be bothered to clean up a pot of spilled coffee. Why bother when there are maids for these sorts of things? Anyhow, perhaps John would have commanded Young to lick it off the floor. If pretending to be the father to Rielle Hunter’s love child was not beneath him, licking up spilled coffee off a hotel room floor should not be either. God, what a sap.
There is also Jenny Sanford’s recent book Staying True. Jenny is of course the soon to be ex-wife of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who earned his day of infamy last June when he was supposed to be hiking the Appalachian Trail alone but was instead in Argentina crying over losing his mistress. Good news, Mark. Within a few weeks, you will be legally able to marry your soul mate. Some how I’m betting she won’t let you come within a hundred clicks of her.
Staying True seemed like a good name for the book, for there are few things that women like to read more than stories of courageous women who take their vows seriously. Jenny may have had a philandering husband, but at least she was faithful to her vows: score! It’s hard to feel sorry for any philanderer and I certainly felt no sympathy for Mark when I learned of his indiscretions. That is I didn’t until yesterday when I read this news article.
South Carolina’s first lady says her wedding was a “leap of faith” because Gov. Mark Sanford, who famously cheated on her with a woman he described as his soul mate, did not want to include a vow of fidelity in their marriage ceremony.
…
Not having a vow of faithfulness “bothered me to some extent, but … we were very young, we were in love,” Jenny Sanford tells Walters. “I questioned it, but I got past it.”
In her memoir, a copy of which The Associated Press obtained Tuesday, Sanford writes that her groom was worried “in some nagging way” that he might not be able to remain true.
“With the benefit of the knowledge I have about Mark now, I could point to this moment as a clear sign of things to come,” she writes. But at the time, she found his honesty “brave and sweet” and thought he just had cold feet.
The first time I read this I thought, “This has to be a joke.” Apparently not. Here is the aggrieved soon to be ex-wife of the conservative South Carolina governor writing a book called Staying True for crying out loud wherein she gets to proclaim how justifiably aggrieved she is. She gets to say how important fidelity is to her in a marriage and yet she went into the marriage knowing that her husband could not promise fidelity. She found his honesty “brave and sweet”.
Oh kay… Jenny, you must have been high on something at the time and I will be charitable and say it must have been the love hormones that made you temporarily lose your mind. I applaud you for your honesty with this admission but really, anyone who bought your book should demand their money back. Yep, your soon to be ex-husband is still a philanderer and a snake. But it’s not like he didn’t warn you. Most philanderers leave their spouse in the dark until the evidence becomes impossible to ignore, you pick up a STD or they mysteriously move out in the dark of night. Here Mark told you up front that he wasn’t sure he could be faithful to you and you married him anyhow.
Now I haven’t read the book to know if there is more to this but if fidelity is so important to you that you write a book called Staying True, for crying out loud, don’t you think you should have made it a requirement before agreeing to take the marriage vows? Granted, the Guv’s stepping out on you was not right. I hope you at least had the understanding that his extramarital relationships would be in the sunshine. But it’s not like he was not up front about his feelings before marriage. Basically, the Guv was saying he too had doubts about marrying you, but when he disclosed how he was honestly feeling, you swept an issue of such critical importance under the rug.
We all make mistakes in our marriages and I know I have made plenty. This one though was a whopper. You absolutely should not have married the guy if fidelity was important to you. And you certainly should not be writing a tell all book called Staying True saying what great character you have in contrast to your soon to be ex-spouse. Maybe it should have been titled, God, I was such a Putz.
The Guv told you he was a snake. Snakes bite. You married him it appears on the expectation that through the course of marriage you could change this. Smile sweetly, raise a bunch of healthy kids and perhaps your hope was that all such concerns would simply vanish. It sounds like you projected your feelings about fidelity onto him once the marriage was underway. He probably snuck around in part to spare your feelings. Granted it was a stupid thing for him to do, but no more stupid, in fact a lot less stupid than you were for marrying him. His behavior after marriage was not decent, but at least he was decent up front about it before tying the knot.
I haven’t read what you plan to do with the profits from the book, but here’s hoping that you at least donate the money to a good charity. Here’s a spouse abuse shelter I can recommend that desperately needs your money. I’ve given them quite a handful this year as the D.C. government greatly reduced their contributions due to the recession. Perhaps this would be a way to atone for your serious lack of judgment thirty some years ago.
If you ever decide to remarry, I hope this time that you will have the good sense not to marry the dude without making sure he first agrees to a sexually and emotionally exclusive marriage with you and you alone.
February 4th, 2010 at 09:16pm
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2010, Sociology |
no comments
Tags: Infidelity, Jenny Sanford, Mark Sanford
Perhaps it is just winter, always a dark time of year. Or perhaps I have spent too much time reading Joe Bageant who lives life without the rose colored glasses on so well he makes my head groan. Republicans winning a special election for Ted Kennedy’s seat didn’t help either. I am finding it hard to escape the feeling that our species is toast. We are rearranging the deck chairs on our Titanic. The ship is going down but conventional wisdom is it is good somehow. “You know, we are ten feet deeper in the water than we were an hour ago. But it’s good. It gives us more ballast. Gives the crew something to do pumping out all that bilge water. Another margarita anyone?”
Then terrible tragedies like the Haitian earthquake occur that reinforce that not only are bad things happening all around us but also that they are getting worse. The human toll from the earthquake is but a wild estimate at this point, but 200,000 deaths seem to be the current working number. For many Americans, or at least some Americans like that usual jackass Rush Limbaugh, it’s like who cares about the freakin’ Haitians? Oh, and by the way, Obama is using this for his political advantage. But what else would you expect from Rush? This same guy checked into a hospital in Hawaii recently complaining of chest pains. Of course, he used it as an opportunity to gush about how we have the most wonderful health care system in the world, at least for self insured multimillionaires. As for the rest of us, well since we are not multimillionaires I guess we don’t count. In Rush’s mind, we’re just Haitians. If a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck downtown Washington D.C., Rush would doubtless be calling for us to do no more than bulldoze the whole city under. God bless his compassionate soul.
Our world is rapidly devolving into the dystopia Neal Stephenson chronicled back in 1992 in his prophetic novel Snow Crash. Unable to afford to live in our own homes, or even an apartment, how long will it be before we, like Hiro Protagonist, call a room in a U Store It home. In fact, newspapers periodically chronicle people in my area doing just that. Ask any homeless Haitian and they would be thrilled to call a room in a U Store It a home. At least it is clean and in many cases heated. Those Haitians who are still alive are fleeing the capital Port-au-Prince. Tent cities full of refugees are emerging, but international aid can address just a tiny portion of the overwhelming need. Those who survived for the most part cannot find clean water and food. If the earthquake didn’t kill them, perhaps the cholera and dysentery which will soon be rampant will do the trick. It sounds like it would make Rush Limbaugh happy.
Meanwhile, Pat Robertson believes Haitians made a pact with the devil. That’s why they died in such large numbers. Seriously. This is what religion can do otherwise sensible people. And this guy somehow runs his own university. I guess that long established fault line running though Haiti had nothing to do with the earthquake. Or God told all the sinners to build houses right above it. Any illiterate and starving Haitian has more sense than this Robertson fool, including those who believe in Voodoo.
The sad reality is that hardly anyone without relatives in Haiti gives a shit about Haiti. We do our best to keep Haitians out of the country so their impoverished relatives won’t join us in the states and lower our property values. To the extent that we have cared over the years, we have used Haiti as an experiment in our capitalist values. Organizations like the International Monetary Fund loaned money to Haiti then turned the screws, making repayment virtually impossible.
It’s not like in the best of times their lives were not already miserable. They have the lowest standard of living and life spans in the Americas. They also sit in the middle of hurricane alley. When hurricanes arrive, like earthquakes, they tend to collapse an already fragile infrastructure. Now this: half of the buildings in and around the capital are destroyed or unusable. Of course, they could be rebuilt to modern building codes. Think that is going to happen? In your dreams! Building codes take money you can’t afford living on a dollar a day or less, and Rush Limbaugh certainly doesn’t want to give the ingrates any more. As for Robertson, it would be the same as giving money to the devil. After a year or so, we will have largely forgotten all about their plight, but they will still be as miserable and hopeless as always. Incredibly, when there seems no possible way to make their lives any more miserable, a subsequent disaster proves us wrong.
No, we will soon go back to ignoring Haiti, as will most of the world, because we will need to become xenophobic. As the health care debate has demonstrated, in America we believe in every man for himself, come hell our high water. We are not far from a time when we will leave the uninsured bleeding to death outside our emergency rooms because we won’t want to shoulder even their emergency room costs. With our national wealth quickly moving overseas to countries like China, America continues to be one big fire sale. Soon we are going to emerge from our collective hangover to discover that we are no longer a first world power. This is what happens when you neglect your infrastructure and human capital costs long enough because you are intoxicated by ever lower taxes. The whole neighborhood just goes to hell. We will realize that we can no longer afford our military, our international commitments, or even Social Security and Medicare because our creditor China says we can’t. And that means when we have no more means to beg or borrow, we move toward second-class status, which is sort of like Mexico. America will become a harder, meaner, more intolerant, more polluted place that will border on anarchy. The gated communities will go up just like in Snow Crash, but this time there will be armed guards patrolling the fence and manning the gates.
What we can do, like almost every country in the world, is keep adding recklessly to our population, which today guarantees a lower standard of living. More natural wilderness is transformed into ugly sprawl. With more mouths to feed, we have more reasons to punt issues like global warming because trying to maintain our standard of living will always trump over serious action on the environment. We are already there. The social contract is fraying. Living on social security alone means you are living in wretched poverty. At best, so long as you do not get sick you can afford to inhabit that trailer somewhere. However, there won’t be enough left over to fix that hole in the rusted trailer roof, let alone buy your heart medicine.
I see it in my own in-laws. To the extent they have a middle class lifestyle, it is thanks to a reverse mortgage on their house in a burb outside of Phoenix. It was not worth that much to begin with and is worth even less now. Most likely their equity is gone. When their air conditioner broke down, they were looking under the sofa cushions for money to get it fixed. About the only thing they can count on is Medicare and getting that monthly social security check. They allow them to exist, but certainly not to live. It’s been more than a decade since they took a real vacation. Instead, you eat light and watch a lot of Fox News.
A chain always breaks at its weakest point. In the western hemisphere, that has traditionally been Haiti. The conditions that caused Haiti are leaching all over the hemisphere. This includes here in the good old United States of America. As is well documented, in the 2000s when we had the bliss of Republican rule, our wages stayed flat, our net worth declined, our stocks lost value and we added no more jobs to the economy. Naturally, upper class Republicans did well. Their plan worked great, for them, as it always does because they are experts at screwing those who make less than they do and getting applause for doing so. Those jobs that we did add were at Wal-mart instead of IBM. However, our waists expanded. Perhaps that’s progress. All that extra eating and lack of exercise though helped cause health costs to explode.
No wonder that these days we prefer to escape reality, if not in traditional vices like booze and drugs, then, like Hiro Protagonist, in our virtual worlds in cyberspace. There we make our own pretend reality. We kill demons online in multi-user role-playing games while our first world status crumbles around us. It’s true in the U.S.A. but is also worldwide: collectively we have exceeded our resources which means we are all driven to figure out how to get a bigger share of a smaller pie. We already sense the truth. There is no magic technological fix. Anyone whiz bang new technology invariably brings with it other hidden costs. Nuclear power begat vast quantities of nuclear waste and tragic nuclear accidents. More recently, our new compact fluorescent lights carry the burden of all their mercury vapors, most of which leaches back into our already toxic atmosphere.
We are doomed and we are in denial, but in Haiti, denial is not an option. Eventually we too will have to acknowledge the truth. If we ever reach that point, it’s unlikely that we will be able to summon the nerve to actually change our situation for the better. Instead, we’ll be eyeing our neighbor trying to figure out how to make his life more miserable so we can profit from his misery. This is the new American way: ask not what you can do for your country; ask how you can profit at your neighbor’s expense.
We should weep not just for the Haitians, but also for ourselves for Haiti is our destiny too. The more we deny our connection to Haiti, the worse it will be for us and the sooner we will share their misery. We have already laid out that path in front of us.
January 22nd, 2010 at 09:02pm
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2010, Sociology |
no comments
Tags: Debt, Economy, Haiti, Second World
I am trying to retain a positive attitude during my convalescence. Rather than look at my recovery as a drag, I am looking at it as a reason to do more self-education. One of the things I have been doing is reading Deer Hunting with Jesus by Joe Bageant.
Admittedly, reading this book is depressing as all get out. Author Joe Bageant frames the book in a town where generations of Bageants were born and bred: Winchester, Virginia. In the thirty years I have lived in the Washington metropolitan region, I have never visited Winchester, although it is only about an hour’s drive away. I had no reason to visit Winchester, nor was it on my way to somewhere else.
Winchester is like Binghamton, New York where I spent my formative years. Within its town boundaries, Winchester has about 25,000 people. Around 122,000 people live in the greater area. The City of Binghamton has around 47,000 people but add in the nearby communities of Johnson City, Endicott, Vestal and Endwell (where I grew up) and you get a similar sized area. According to Bageant, the one constant in Winchester has been its Rubbermaid factory, where generations of its working class residents have toiled. The plant is still there. The same cannot really be said about the Endicott Johnson Shoe Corporation in Endicott, New York. When I was last there in 2000, all the former factories, which for generations manufactured lower end shoes and sneakers, were idle. There was something resembling a corporate Endicott-Johnson office in a small building along Main Street. Also gone is IBM. During the time I lived near Endicott in the 1960s, Endicott was a manufacturing hub for many of IBM’s business class computers and processors. Essentially, Endicott is no longer manufacturing anything as evidenced by its crumbling roads and mostly empty downtown.
Unlike Endicott, which has had its soul torn apart when EJ and IBM left, Winchester has done a little better. The Rubbermaid factory is still there. Since the truck corridor of I-81 runs through Winchester (as it does Binghamton), the town also makes some money from truckers and tourists passing through. Working class men and women can get jobs in and around Winchester, but they are not great jobs. Bageant makes clear that today’s working class in Winchester are worse off than their parents who sweated through similar low-end jobs.
For example, Rubbermaid used to offer real middle class wages, benefits and a pension to its employees. Those days are long gone. Winchester remains a workingman’s city, but now jobs are particularly precarious and real wages are lower. Yet, its working class soldiers on because it must. Winchester is a city full of the white working class. They are the sorts who if they are not working at Wal-Mart are shopping there in what feels like a futile effort to make their $8.59 an hour wage stretch a little further. It is a city where the working class survives on their wits. For the vast majority of folks, you work two or three jobs to get by. No job or combination of jobs is likely to provide a ticket to the middle class. Most folks are but one major medical mishap away from financial ruin. It’s hard to build up a medical savings account when you are in arrears to a couple credit card companies already.
Winchester is the sort of place I might well have lived, worked and died in had not I been a bit more fortunate. According to Bageant, my family would be the exception in Winchester. Although my mother had working class roots, both my parents had college degrees. Moreover, my siblings and I assumed we were destined to end up in careers, not jobs. Yes, we sweated through our own working class jobs prior to (or in some cases during) college. We have a basic understanding of what this life is like. Our experiences informed us that this was a life to be avoided, if possible.
Bageant understands the white working class intimately because this is how he grew up. What makes Bageant unusual is that he awoke from his working class stupor. He also became a gifted writer. Through the prism of his experience, I can subsume myself into the world of Winchester’s working class. I can taste the draft beer at the Royal Lunch diner where Bageant hangs out with his kind. I can peer (however indirectly) into the souls of these people. Moreover, with Bageant’s help, I can see their world through their resigned and pragmatic eyes. It is a world where continually dodging life’s many landmines informs folk much more than some fancy pants education. It is an area where the gun feels as natural as the many sidewalk ministries in the town. It is a place where the town’s elite can keep the working class forever in control. For Winchester’s working class are largely unable to marshal the combination of family support and financial resources to really escape this lifestyle. Moreover, if you told them this was the only way they could escape, they would berate you for your silly liberal notions.
According to Bageant, the working class in Winchester earnestly believe that somehow by applying themselves just a little harder they will reach the next economic rung, despite mountains of evidence that it takes a supporting infrastructure of family and community for all but a handful of us to reach that next rung. It is The Big Lie they tell themselves which is also endlessly fed to them by their politicians. It causes them to vote for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush or more recently Bob McDonnell, who yesterday was inaugurated as Virginia’s latest Republican governor. Naturally, McDonnell is preaching the same old tired Republican soap that has yet to work: that he will somehow do much more with much less and in the midst of a recession to boot. Winchester will be lucky if its Rubbermaid factory does not end up in Mexico, where many of its other factories have gone over the last few decades.
If I feel like I do not understand their lives very well, the same is true with them and my life. I would feel awkward drinking beer with the locals at the Royal Lunch diner in Winchester. They would feel just as awkward bellying up at a local sushi bar or buying wholly organic food at a Whole Foods. In Bageant’s case, he got lucky. Remember The Great Society? Those of us of a certain age will remember. Back in the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson earnestly tried to right longstanding class inequities. A few like Bageant were the beneficiary of the social experiment that for the most part failed in its goals. Thanks to some grants courtesy of The Great Society and despite the considerable odds, Bageant went to and graduated from college as well as did a stint in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Those who attend a good college, like Bageant, finish with not only a degree but also with a true education on the complexity of our messy world. You might say the lens of his life opened up for Bageant, courtesy of Lyndon Johnson.
About ten years ago, he felt the need to return to his roots in Winchester. The result was this book, a seminal work on the working class unseen since the death of Studs Terkel. It takes those of us without the experience inside the lives and minds of the working class rednecks. As uncomfortable and heart wrenching as it is, it should be required reading for every progressive. For until we truly understand the Bubba’s of this world, any changes we try to make to society are likely to be merely window dressing.
Bageant lays it all out for us. I hate to admit it, but Bageant is right about gun control. In the past in response to incidents like the Virginia Tech shootings, I have railed about the need for gun control. Bageant blows quite a few holes into the myths about gun control, while perhaps selectively ignoring a few pertinent facts. He points out statistics that show how many intruders are actually deterred because of the presence of a gun in a household. He documents how homicides in places like New York City have decreased as the rate of gun ownership has gone up. Where Bageant may have a blind spot is in dismissing the number of homicides facilitated among people who are related to each other because of the presence of guns. Where Bageant is unfortunately dead on (no pun intended) is the futility of even trying to control guns. It is like trying to put a genie back in the bottle. It simply cannot be done, no matter how much we might wish it so. We might as well wish to change our eye color. Guns are part of our national DNA and will be for at least many generations to come. If it happens at all, it will be long after any of us reading this are dead.
Gun control is really a knee jerk and ill thought out response to a much more daunting set of institutional and societal problems that Bageant outlines with a painful clarity that is hard to criticize. To truly move our country and our planet toward a sustainable future, we must be able to persuade people like the working class people in Winchester to embrace real change. As Bageant makes clear, the hour is very late and the odds are very long. For the rednecks of America have centuries of Calvinist Scots Borderer breeding in them. They do our nation’s dirty work for us, almost reflexively making them easy for politicians to manipulate as long as they pander to their fundamentalist beliefs in the sanctity of God, guns and autonomic patriotism.
Bageant’s book is really a series of long essays about who our puppet masters are, how they got in charge and why we let them remain in charge. Liberals as well as rednecks are at the hands of these puppet masters. Identifying who they are, understanding how they are manipulating us and developing the skills to actually change these institutional forces will give us the ability to create real and meaningful changes. More on this in future posts as well as more analysis of Bageant’s thoughtful book. Stay tuned.
January 18th, 2010 at 11:14am
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2010, Sociology |
no comments
Tags: Joe Bageant, Rednecks, Winchester VA, Working Class
This is the thirteenth in an indeterminate series of entries that provides my “real world” lessons to young adults. It is my conviction that these lessons are rarely taught either at home or in the schools. For those who did not get them growing up you can get them from me for free. This is part of my way of giving back to the universe on the occasion of my 50th birthday.
Surfing YouTube last night, I spent most of my time enjoying the excellent TED channel. There I stumbled across this video by Cindy Gallop, a “lady of a certain age” as they like to be called who is fortunate enough to bed many men half her age or more. One thing she has noted is that young adults today confuse pornographic sex with real sex. The sad truth that many young adults cannot discern is that pornographic sex has about as much in common with real sex as a Formula One racer has in common with the Honda Civic that you drive. To help you out, Gallop created this site. Gallop, however, just scratches the surface of this topic.
The confusion is understandable. Like it or not young adults have probably been exposed to hundreds of hours of pornography on the Internet, often before they have sex with someone other than their own right hand. Lord knows that in most cases their parents cannot be bothered to clue them in on how real adults have sex. They are more likely to completely hide their sexuality from their children and make sure they are asleep or being very quiet while having sex.
It may surprise you to learn that your parents probably are still having sex. They are probably not coupling every night anymore as middle age takes a toll on many things, including their sex drives. There is no one size fits all when it comes to sexuality. There are couples in their middle years still going at it like bunnies. Others can go months without having sex and it is fine with both of them. Most likely, when they do get around to making love it bears no resemblance to a pornographic movie. Most likely, neither will your sex life.
This is because pornography is about fantasy, not real life. Moreover, the vast majority of videotaped pornography is for the male, not the female. Since women these days watch a lot of pornography too, you may be under the impression that they are being trained to enjoy the male-oriented version of pornography. Perhaps some of it is rubbing off (no pun intended) but likely not very much. However, pornography might carry with it the implication that modern women should enjoy or at least accommodate men by engaging in sexual acts rife in modern pornography.
Ask any porn actress how much they enjoy being in porn. A certain amount will lie for the trade presses, but when interviewed most will candidly admit (gasp!) they are in it for the money and get little or no pleasure from participating in sexual acts in front of the camera. Any great sex they have likely happens off camera. For one thing, they are being tightly directed. Second, they are expected to act so of course for the most part they will be faking lust they do not genuinely feel. They are following a script for a few quick bucks so you (generally a guy) can get off. Their directors know what you want because they analyze their sales and follow trends. So if you see a lot of videos about something like anal sex, they are there to meet your market demand. Satisfying your lust is simply a business. Pornography attempts to render idealized sexual fantasy, nothing more. It is particularly unhelpful in educating you on how ordinary people make love.
So while you may think a sex act like anal sex might be very arousing, chances are any female you have a real life sexual encounter will not. Now, as in most things in life, there are some women who are into anal sex, and if that is also your passion, you two will have a lot of fun in bed together. Most likely though she will be into anal sex about as much as you would be if she were doing it to you. Most men don’t want to go down that road because it kills the fantasy and has homosexual implications. In any event, rest assured that those couples that do have anal sex are doing it slowly with lots of artificial lubrication and probably using a condom, something you are unlikely to see in a pornographic video.
The same can be said about almost any sexual act portrayed in pornography. If you are a male and can find a woman who is genuinely into your kinks, you are likely going to be a happy man in the bedroom. Most but certainly not all women may be into a couple of your kinks. Oral sex, for example, is now fairly out of the closet mainly because the tongue is much more expressive than a penis or a vagina. It is not too hard to find a woman who is willing to satisfy you orally, particularly if you are willing to return the favor. However, most women see oral sex as foreplay (although for many it is the only way they can get off with a man, providing he knows how to do it to them right). Relatively few women see mutual oral sex as the primary way to have orgasms. Do not expect your partner to be Linda Lovelace for she is no more likely to have mastered the gag reflex than you.
The majority of women cannot have an orgasm from intercourse alone. In fact, you may not be able to even give them an orgasm. Some women never achieve orgasm, but those that do often need a lot of foreplay and need you to exercise a lot of patience. You may need to slow down when nature says go faster because they may need to also use their fingers or a vibrator to get off.
The truth is that having a great sex life with your partner takes a lot of time and energy. Your first experience with someone new is likely to be memorable, but only so-so as far as actual sex is concerned. That is because we are all different and no matter how much experience you have between the sheets, the first time two people couple they are really just getting to know each other sexually. If you are a guy and your pattern is to move from woman to woman, aside from the dangerous aspects unless you practice very safe sex, you are likely to be disappointed.
In most cases, the best sex between two people happens months or years later after they really know each other, both as sexual creatures and as people. In short, sex becomes better the more trust and understanding there is between two people. Most likely, you will find that sex is best not when you are engaging in the latest bizarre position you saw in some pornographic Internet video but when in the sex act you become one passionate creature with your partner, each feeding off the signals from each other. When you do X to your lover in a certain way that creates a passionate response tailored to their sexual buttons and she responds similarly, that’s when sex really becomes great and transcendent. You feed off her signals and she feeds off yours and, if you are both lucky, for a few special moments you will experience transcendent pleasure, although the time before and afterward will be great fun too. You should feel connected sexually, emotionally and spiritually to your partner when this happens. Your orgasm, when it happens, will be so much more than an orgasm. Rather than be kinky as you see in pornography, it should feel wholesome, godlike and spiritually uplifting. What positions you are in do not really matter, nor does it matter how kinky or pedestrian the act is when it happens. What is important is the overwhelming sense of pleasure and intimacy between two people.
Trust me, it is way better than anything you are going to see in a pornographic video. No video can capture these feelings that happen inside you during these short but exquisite moments. The high comes from the feeling of mutual connection, not because you also had an orgasm. The orgasm is the frosting on the cake. The mutual connection is the cake itself. This is the difference between making love and having sex.
My suggestion is to go into sex in a spirit of mutual playfulness. Sex can have many meanings, both for good and ill. At its best, it is warm and playful intimate adventure between two people who are just really into each other, not just as sexual creatures, but also as people and with all the dimensions that this encompasses. That is way better than anything you are going to find in some pornographic video.
December 28th, 2009 at 10:33am
Posted by
Mark |
Sociology |
no comments
Tags: Pornography, Real Life 101, Sexuality
I have finished reading Buddhism for Dummies. I now at least feel like I can have a semi-informed opinion on Buddhism. I may be wrong. Reading Buddhism for Dummies and thinking you have an informed opinion on this ancient religion may be like flying across the United States at 35,000 feet and feeling you have a pretty good idea that you understand the country.
But I can also relate real-life experiences attending a half-dozen services with my wife at the Ekoji Buddhist Temple in Burke, Virginia. At least at this temple the members are uniformly nice and harmless people. Perhaps they are saddled with as much baggage as the rest of us but they really do seem a lot more serene than most people I meet. They are also friendly and respectful. Unlike other religions where men in suits are anxious to have coffee with you after the service, I found none of this at this temple. Like my religion Unitarian Universalism, Buddhism is a come as you are no pressure sort of religion.
That is not to suggest that Buddhists are entirely out of the proselytizing business. Once enlightened, out of a spirit of compassion Buddha traversed much of northern India preaching his dharma. Upon his death, his followers also spread far and wide to preach the dharma too. However, I don’t think you ever have to worry about anyone leaving Buddhist pamphlets in your door or knocking asking you if you are enlightened.
Buddhism is centered on meditation. While meditation can relieve a lot of human suffering, by itself I do not think it offers a panacea. Following Buddhist dharma gives no assurance that in the next life you will be living in bliss. Rather it suggests your next life will be a lot like your current life, at least in the sense that you will be wrestling with the same sorts of issues. However, they claim that through techniques like guided meditation, you can discover your inner spirituality and through lots of study and practice anyone can achieve enlightenment.
You can be both a Christian and a Buddhist and it is not necessarily a contradiction. Guided meditation techniques pioneered by the Buddhists are useful for anyone, regardless of whether they are even religious. At its core, Buddhism is about eliminating human suffering through attacking its root causes, not in achieving salvation. If like most human beings you suffer, there is little reason not to give Buddhism, or at least meditation a try. It’s not like it has to cost anything. Many Buddhist temples will offer guided meditation free to all comers, or you can pick up a book and try to learn it by yourself
If there is a theology to Buddhism, it is that reincarnation happens. Not all Buddhists believe in reincarnation, but clearly, the vast majority of them do, otherwise they would not be so concerned about the karmic consequences of their actions. Most karma acquired during a given life is not addressed during the same life, but is carried forward into the next life for you to stumble through again until you get it right. In this sense, for those who prefer religions that are salvation-based, Buddhism is a big disappointment. If you believe in salvation, all your bad karma is pardonable by some higher authority upon death. In most cases, you are expected to be earnestly devoted to the beliefs and practices of the faith in order to achieve salvation.
For those who believe in salvation, getting into heaven is like getting past the bouncer at a club. If you are not too obnoxious, the bouncer lets you through. To the Buddhist (well, except a few like the sect my wife belongs to) you get into the club when you are spiritually ready to enter. In actuality though you are already a member of the club, since you are already divine in the sense that you have an immortal Buddha nature, you just have to get in touch with it. Achieving enlightenment sounds a lot like an alcoholic deciding to put down the bottle and embrace sobriety. When you achieve enlightenment during your mortal life, you pass through the door (nirvana). Out of compassion, many who do achieve enlightenment elect to reincarnate to help others also achieve enlightenment. For those who believe in salvation, there is little point in going back to an earthly life to wrestle with sinful mortals. You leave all that behind.
Part of meditation amounts to self-psychoanalysis. The theory goes that if you ponder a personal problem long enough, you can see it from all its various sides and permutations and know how to resolve it. The other part of meditation is to learn to exist in the moment. I personally am skeptical on the value of the self-analysis part of Buddhism, but I do see value in learning to exist in and appreciate the moment. People like me who perhaps spend too much time thinking about the future may end up missing the joy of being alive in the present. As Buddha taught, while death is inevitable, suffering is not. If you can develop a state of mind where you can revel in the now, you can spend less time worrying about the future. If you can master this, then it alone will do a lot to relieve your personal suffering.
I think the evidence is clear that Buddhism is one of the best major religions on the planet. As evidence, observe the behavior of Buddhists. Over 2500 year, have Buddhists caused any wars? They have not, as best as I can determine. Have they fought internecine wars to achieve dominance of one sect over another, such as have happened between Catholic and Protestant or Sunni and Shiite? I do not believe so. Do they go around hurting other people? All people hurt other people at times, sometimes inadvertently, but overall Buddhists take great pains to avoid being in the hurting business. They strive to be always mindful of what they say and do and the consequences of their actions. No other religion that I can see is doing as much to generate real harmony. Moreover, by their nature, they are not materialists. They tend to be natural environmentalists, vegetarians and eco-friendly. It takes a really tortured soul to hate a Buddhist. How can you hate someone who gives no offense?
If you think you are free to muddy up this world in order to achieve your salvation, Buddhism is not for you. However, if out of compassion you want to make this world better for everyone, including yourself, as well as all the other creatures on the planet, Buddhism might well be for you. If you are less concerned about slipping through some pearly gates in some amorphous next life then in relieving your suffering and the suffering of your fellow men, Buddhism is for you.
What is to dislike? Well, it may be just my Western orientation, but there is a fair amount of mysticism in Buddhism. The ringing of a gong, the smell of burning incense and the frequent use of chants do little to me to make me feel spiritually connected. There is also a strong belief in the nobility of celibacy, at least among the clerics. Sex is generally frowned upon for those who have or are trying to achieve enlightenment. I guess you are supposed to have transcended such earthly pleasures.
For me and for many of us of Western orientation, a religion like my Unitarian Universalism may be a better fit, while achieving similar aims. However, if your religious orientation is more spiritual than religious, if you feel more human-centered than salvation-centered, and if compassion is at the center of your being then Buddhism should feel very natural.
December 12th, 2009 at 07:46pm
Posted by
Mark |
Sociology |
no comments
Tags: Buddhism
How ugly can retail get? There are uglier chain stores out there than Wal-Mart, but not a whole lot. Perhaps a Marshalls. Or a Dollar General. Wal-Mart is likely to remain forever the epitome of the gargantuan box store. It comes replete with lots of garish florescent lighting, narrow aisles and overflowing merchandise.
As far as us shoppers, apparently, I am not the only one to notice a certain lack of standards among many of Wal-Mart customers. Way back in 2003 I wrote about Wal-Mart:
I don’t hate its customers, but they don’t appeal to me a whole lot. They make me itchy. I know I paint with a wide brush here (and I’m certainly not saying that all their customers are this way) but they seem to me to be a lot of overweight and over-hassled looking people. They seem to disproportionately represent the lower middle class. I don’t hold it against them for shopping there. If I were living from paycheck to paycheck I might be shopping there too.
It’s not that finding stylish customers is impossible at a Wal-Mart, it’s just unlikely to be someone other than Sarah Palin. Of course, most of us avoid dressing stylishly unless the occasion commands it, which Wal-Mart certainly does not. Still, a certain amount of decorum is expected anywhere you shop, isn’t it? It’s hard to find a store, except perhaps along a beach, that does not require you wear shoes and a shirt. Apparently, it was not my imagination. We really do need to add the ubiquitous Wal-Mart to this list. In pursuit of the almighty dollar, it appears that Wal-Mart will let virtually anyone in the store. I guess I have to give the company an A for being egalitarian, but frankly part of the reason I avoid Wal-Mart is because some of their customers frighten me (and I’m 6’2”). When I see some of these types on the street, I hurriedly cross over to the other sidewalk to avoid them. In a Wal-Mart, they tend to be in your face whether you like it or not.
Another fashion challenged Wal-Mart customer
The theme of PeopleofWalmart.com seems to be, “Don’t be afraid of these eccentrics; celebrate them.” Wal-Mart customers much braver than me are apparently snapping unflattering and amazing pictures of other Wal-Mart customers and putting them on this web site for us to gawk at. While I am unlikely to ever shop again at a Wal-Mart unless they start paying their employees a living wage, I can at least observe the Wal-Mart customer spectacle from the safety of my computer.
Frankly, I spend much of my time on PeopleofWalmart.com guiltily laughing. The site is hilarious as a nadir of bad fashion. I say this as someone who has almost no sense of fashion. I frequently end up wearing clothes that, in the opinion of my spouse, are mismatched or uncoordinated. So when someone with as little fashion sense as me finds himself appalled by someone else’s dress that truly says something.
On PeopleofWalmart.com you can see many examples of horrendous fashion every day. Just a couple of these photos would make Robin Givhan (the Washington Post fashion editor) go blind. Truly, in your wildest imagination, you could never dream up some of the combinations of clothes that actual people are wearing at your local Wal-Marts. Some of their clothes are so bizarre, so Technicolor and so haplessly uncoordinated that even a hippie would recoil.
See the same person wear too much clothing on one part of their body and too little on another. View guys and ladies with plumbers’ cracks big enough to insert your local telephone book. See people wearing animal skins mixed with garish polyesters. See people wearing florescent colored clothes with pastels. See bare feet. G strings. View ladies in swimsuits that leave nothing to the imagination. See people wearing what I hope are bizarre costumes rather than their regular clothes. See people who look like five minutes earlier they were cleaning shit out of a public sewer. See people who make Swamp Thing look fashionable. How I wish I were making this stuff up, but I am not. Go see for yourself. These kinds of pictures leave me wide eyed with my mouth hung open somewhere near the floor. It is often followed shortly thereafter by bombastic laughter and tears coming out of the corner of my eyes. Could it really be that we share the same forty-six chromosomes? Just the idea is frightening.
At the same time, I feel sad by the overwhelming number of beyond morbidly obese people in these pictures, many of whom are completely happy to let it all hang out. Huge rolls of fat bulge out from jeans five sizes too small for them. See women with fat on their backs so enormous that it dwarfs their already ample bosoms and puffs out around their narrow halter-tops as if they were the Pillsbury Dough Boy. You wonder how some of these people can even walk.
Doubtless, they are disproportionately captured on digital film but the fact that they exist at all, let alone in these numbers, is appalling. The site does suggest something that may now be the norm in Wal-Mart: the obese make up a plurality, if not a majority of their customers. Granted with the majority of Americans now either overweight or obese, they may well be characteristic of the average American in the 21st century. If so, you have to ask, what are we doing to ourselves? The evidence on PeopleofWalmart.com suggests we have been actively engaged in mass gluttony of the most egregious kind.
Perhaps this is also why I cannot be found in the aisles of Wal-Mart. If I can avoid it, I don’t want to face this unpleasant truth about my fellow Americans. Wal-Mart in general and the many examples of its customers captured on PeopleofWalmart.com make me scared for my country’s future. I hope I am wrong, but America has never seemed so infirmed, so fat, so bizarre and so dysfunctional. Everything I see in and around the Wal-Marts of America tell me that America is not just off the right track, but our locomotive has careened into the river and the water is rapidly rising up to our necks. Only most of us cannot see it.
So perhaps I laugh not only because of some personal character defect but because it is the safer alternative. What I really want to do: scream in shock, horror and pain at this daily evidence of a national problem that seems too big to solve. We appear to be destroying ourselves, our country and our national character. There is plenty of evidence available at your local Wal-Mart.
December 9th, 2009 at 05:20pm
Posted by
Mark |
Sociology |
no comments
Tags: Fashion, Obesity, Wal-Mart
(Warning: This post is rated R.)
Every couple of weeks I log into Google Analytics and check out my blog’s web statistics. A fuller report will come in 2010 but I have noticed a few trends. Visits are down by about a quarter and page views are down by about a fifth. This is not necessarily bad. In the past, my page views were artificially inflated by the less than one percent of my blog entries that discuss pornography, particularly this one and that one. Thankfully, page views for those posts are receding at last.
What is increasing? A simple eulogy I wrote and published when my mother died back in 2005 has received twice as much traffic as the year before (over 4300 page views, averaging twelve page views a day). However, my fastest growing blog entry is one in wrote in late 2005 on the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist. Interest in this topic is up 127% from a year ago and averages more than fifteen page views a day. While I have nothing more to say about pornography, in the interest of getting more traffic I could find something more to say about Craigslist.
So over the long Thanksgiving weekend, I put on my dark glasses and revisited Washington D.C. Craigslist Casual Encounters to see what was new. When I reviewed it in 2005 it was a pretty crass place. I am sad to say that four years later the situation is much worse, which I did not think was possible. If I were Craig Newmark, who founded Craiglist way back in 1995, I would be too embarrassed to host it anymore.
At least Craigslist will take the time to warn you that most of the postings in this area are fraudulent.
SCAM ALERT – scammers posing as potential romantic partners are directing CL users to age and identity verification sites, dating/adult/cam sites (where you can see their “pics” or chat with them), even sites designed to deliver malware — all in hopes of earning affiliate marketing commissions at your expense.
In response to the high volume of spam, Craigslist has taken some steps. It has made it harder to post ads, in that you have to go through the open source reCaptcha system first. (I am using it too to filter comments.) The good news is that this means that whoever posts to Craigslist is a human, rather than a robot. The bad news is that it does not appear to be deterring spammers in the least. There must be enough money to be made trying to sell sex as a “casual encounter” on Craigslist to go through the bother anyhow.
Also in response to the high volume of spammers lurking in the Casual Encounters weeds, Craigslist has provided tools to “vote a poster off the island”. If enough people say that an ad is spam, it is marked as spam and shortly prohibited from display. Craigslist then sends the poster an email, which apparently contains a convenient link which if you click on it lets you repost the message. The result is that it appears that Craigslist Casual Encounters is now largely a flame war between people pissed off by the spam and the spammers.
What is getting lost? Well, casual sex connections on the site, which were probably largely an illusion anyhow. However, there a number of ads that appear to my untrained eye to be wholly legitimate. At least I assume that is true of the many ads posted by “BBWs” (Big Beautiful Women, or judging from their pictures when they post them, morbidly obese women) looking for a good time. Whatever, they are likely to be quickly voted off the island as well. Maybe the BBWers are in reality spammers. Or maybe the Craigslist men just hate fat women. The result appears to be a toxic mess of spam and vindictive people willing to flag everything.
Perhaps you read about the murder that happened in Boston in May to a woman who advertised in Craigslist Erotic Services. Since then Craigslist has tightened up its Erotic Services board, apparently charging anyone a fee to post, and prohibiting ads that suggest you will receive actual sex. The result of this policy seems to be to move the whores into the Casual Encounters area instead. As was true in 2005, there appear to be plenty of “women” whoring over there. Certain words though must be getting flagged because these “women” have developed a whole new vocabulary for asking for money. Mostly they want “roses”. Men are not beyond asking for “roses” either, particularly when they are advertising for their own gender. The typical ad is like this one:
I could use your help with bills. If you could use a good bj, let’s help each other. 100 roses for bj. I can host. Must be clean/ddf.
There are even people out there selling manufactured group sex. If I were interested in group sex, I suspect I would find a local swingers group where, presumably, you can swing safely and with people who are not psychos. I sure would not expect to pay for the privilege, particularly when multi-partner sex with complete strangers can kill you. Moreover, who is to know if you go to some stranger’s apartment you will not end up robbed or worse?
hot gangbang 2nite only!!!! 46DDD, big nipples, wet pussy. horny. TIGHT ASS HOLE 5′8 black I CAN HOST TONIGHT ONLY. $
Even if you can find a legitimate poster for a gangbang, do they want you? No, apparently they are into fantasy, which means you must be very well endowed, not Mr. Six Incher. With our African American president, black must be the new “in” color. Well-endowed black men seem to be in great demand, particularly for group sex.
Seeking 4 to 5 more Black males to join our GB grp.. Requirements is as follows.. Must be clean and dd free. Able to perform in a grp setting. 8′ or better. Must be in shape. Must not be camera shy.
8 feet or better? Good luck with that. Okay, well, Craigslist posters are not exactly known for their spelling skills and can’t seem to be bothered to reread the posts before the make them.
In short, if you want to waste your time, want to catch some sort of deadly social disease, want to get robbed, are into hugely obese but possibly horny women, want to have an encounter with a woman who turns out to be a transvestite or love flagging spammers then Craigslist Casual Encounters is your perfect destination.
To the many horny men out there, I am sorry, but if you want to get laid, it’s time to start frequenting bars and clubs again. At least you can see what you are getting in a bar. Good news: most are non-smoking these days, so it’s easier to discern the good looking women from the not so. I cannot see how you can possibly find what you are looking for on Craigslist.
Back in 2005, I said that surfing Craigslist Casual Encounters was like rubbernecking past an awful accident. In 2009, I can say it does not even have the appeal of rubbernecking. It is the definition of a complete waste of time.
December 5th, 2009 at 05:02pm
Posted by
Mark |
Sociology |
one comment
Tags: Craigslist, Internet, Sexuality
Polls indicate that a majority of Americans believe the word “marriage” should be reserved for a legal covenant between two people of opposite sexes only. Curiously, polls also show a majority of Americans are comfortable with two same sex partners having all the privileges of marriage as long as they don’t call it marriage. What is the difference anyhow?
As best I can figure out, same sex couples figure the difference is like having “separate but equal” schools for blacks and whites. Calling a legal relationship a different name when it is the same in every other way but the sex of the participants in their eyes suggests that their relationship is not as worthy of sanction as those between two people of opposite sexes. It’s like getting a silver medal when you earned the gold. For many heterosexuals, I think what really makes “marriage” a special word is that traditional marriages come with the potential of parenthood and this is special enough to make the distinction unique.
Not any more, obviously. My wife is a friend of a lesbian couple and one of the wives is pregnant. Naturally, she did not invite a male to have intercourse with her; a willing donor provided semen, which she obtained from her local sperm bank. Most kids get only one mother. This one will have two, which is twice as much of a blessing, I guess. What is noticeably absent though is the father. Does the absence of a father deprive the child of something important? For that matter, does the absence of a mother also deprive the child of something important? Do two mothers equal one mother and one father? Do two fathers equal one mother and one father?
These were questions I didn’t know I was struggling with until last night. After our traditional Thanksgiving Dinner featuring a potpourri of friends and family, the topic of two same sex parents came up. At our table were many of my wife’s friends from the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. I was washing dishes and minding my own business but listening to their conversation. As it turns out, I am perfectly okay with gay marriage. I think any two people of legal age who want to get married should have the privilege. They can have “I’m married” stamped on their foreheads if they want to and I would have no problem calling them Mrs. and Mrs. Jones or Mr. And Mr. Smith. Where I have some hesitation is when it comes to two people of the same sex raising their own children together. Is it a good or a bad idea?
Before I knew it, I had joined the conversation and stated an opinion that for me seemed almost right wing. Since the topic was in the context of two women, I said I thought the presence of a strong father figure was important for raising a healthy child. The same is true with a mother, of course. As proof, I pointed to the District of Columbia where black fathers living at home are almost an extinct species. Single mothers are raising the vast majority of black children in D.C., sometimes with the assistance of their grandmothers because the fathers long ago abandoned the mother. In D.C., a black child is lucky to see his real father on occasion, and even luckier if he is actually providing child support. Many of these youth have no idea who their father is, or if they do, their only memory of him is a distant one.
What is the impact of being nurtured without a strong father figure? Arguably, at least in D.C., it is devastating. How many of these youths who are currently doing drugs and getting involved in gangs would be doing so if they had a father in the household? It is hard to say for sure because I doubt there is much clinical research. I do think it is reasonable to assume that the incidence would be much lower.
I have not had the privilege of having a son, but I do have a daughter. I do know there are plenty of studies that suggest the presence of a strong father figure is a critical factor among those girls who grow into leadership roles as adults. I am not entirely sure how much of daughter was shaped by my presence and nurturing these last twenty years, but it must be a large amount. How could it not? How would my daughter be different if my wife had been a lesbian instead, had been in a gay marriage, had been artificially inseminated and raised her with her loving partner of the same sex? Would something important be missing from my daughter as a result? Perhaps I overvalue my role as a father, but my guts says yes: a good father is necessary in raising happy and healthy children of any gender, as just as it is important for a child to also have a nurturing mother.
Obviously there are many bad marriages out there. There is no guarantee when two people get married and have babies that they will have the right stuff to raise their children into healthy, sane and productive adults. My suspicion is that children raised in dysfunctional marriages are probably healthier without that stress. With roughly half of marriages dissolving, one would have to assume the odds for children in traditional marriages are at best 50/50. Many, many factors influence children throughout childhood and adolescence, but it would seem obvious that parents are their primary influences. The health of the marital relationship should correlate closely to the likelihood of raising mentally healthy and fully functional children. That seems to be true on my block, where I spent the last sixteen years. The adult children who are now doing best tend to be from families with strong and nurturing parents. The struggling children seem to be from those that were rife with marital discord.
Like it or not, children will inculcate behavior modeled by their parents. My question: is there is something critical about having parents of the opposite sex to raising healthy children? Today, gay and lesbian couples no longer have to feel like parenting is off limits to them. What we do not really understand yet is what the long-term effects of children being raised by same sex couples will be. A correlation is made harder because there are so many bad traditional marriages out there too. It appears that even though I have some concerns that children raised by same sex couples may be missing something important (although I am not entirely sure what it is) it is happening nonetheless, and social scientists over the coming decades will have an opportunity to study its effects.
It could be that a child is raised by two people of the same sex will do just fine if both are positive and nurturing influences in their lives. They may grow up to be more tolerant people than they otherwise would be, which sounds like a good thing. Sons though may need to observe and pick up crucial male bonding behaviors from their fathers. It may be that the absence of this factor makes them less functional in society compared with others raised in traditional marriages. The problem is less acute for girls, since the number of men in gay marriages raising girls is much smaller.
I do know that in the District of Columbia, we seem to be raising an angry and dysfunctional generation of young men and women. There may be many factors causing this horrendous outcome, and poverty is certainly one factor, but the lack of strong and healthy male authority figures in these households is obvious. The problems in these communities were not nearly as bad when there were more intact marriages among African Americans. To me it seems reasonable to infer that if this can happen among African Americans, it can happen within any ethnic community.
The example in D.C. suggests to me that when it comes to parenting, we should proceed with caution. Our children should not necessarily become victims of a vast social experiment because newly liberated gay and lesbian couples also want to raise their own biological children. We do not fully understand the nature of nurturing, but I strongly suspect is not solely a feminine or a masculine thing. The masculine element exhibited in the role of a father seems to also be critical, for both boys and girls.
The cry to save the word “marriage” may at its root be nothing more than an inchoate feeling among many of us that we are playing with dynamite. The lessons in D.C. and many inner city communities ought to be red flags for us to think through the consequences of our actions before plunging headlong into them.
November 27th, 2009 at 09:54pm
Posted by
Mark |
Philosophy, Sociology |
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Tags: Gay Marriage, Parenting
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