A neat trick

A baby with only male relatives.

Rufus Wainwright announced yesterday that he and his fiance, Jorn Weisbrodt, welcomed a baby girl via surrogate. The surrogate was Lorca Cohen, daughter of Leonard Cohen.

Lorca Cohen carried and gave birth to a child who is presumably her own genetic offspring.  By the lights of the Montreal Gazette writer, this doesn’t make Lorca Cohen a mother, but it does make Lorca Cohen’s father a “granddad”.

Isn’t it amazing to live in a country where women’s contributions are so highly valued? Gosh, I feel lucky.

ETA: Rufus Wainwright himself refers to Lorca as a “parent” in his announcement of the birth.  Double fail, Montreal Gazette.

don’t get me wrong, I still hated “I Kissed A Girl”

Okay, I love Tiger Beatdown, and I know next to nothing about Katy Perry, so I may well be missing some major messed up things Katy Perry has said or done, but I don’t get the hate on this subject.

[Perry] shows up talking about your cock and shooting whipped cream out of her tits, and then she talks about how marriage is super-important to her and she “tamed” her husband out of non-monogamy. She kissed a girl, and she liked it, but ultimately it’s very important that her boyfriend don’t mind it, because he has veto power on her sexuality. She wants to see your cock, but not really, cocks are for heterosexual monogamous marriage and she has one of those.

I don’t really get this.  I’ve encountered this “if they’re monogamous, that means he has veto power on her sexuality/thinks he owns her” accusation from a number of people in open relationships, and I think it’s really disrespectful and annoying.  I don’t see how that’s different from accusing people who prefer monogamous relationships for ourselves of “false consciousness” or anti-feminism.

Which would just add monogamously inclined women to a long list of women whose personal lives and sexuality have been unilaterally declared fake or anti-feminist.

(And okay, I am a big ol’ prude in a lot of ways, but I hardly think my relationship preferences should confine me to dressing and talking like Taylor Swift.)

That thing where we codify performing for men as “rebellion,” which strangely makes your “rebellion” (HA) (UGH) dependent on how much you please men, and once more divorces you from your own complex human sexuality in favor of making it an externally-defined show which you have to create in order to please as many men as possible? But you can’t ACTUALLY be having a lot of non-monogamous sex, so you have to be as constantly, overtly, “rebelliously” sexy as possible WHILE ALSO FINDING A HUSBAND AND “TAMING” HIM TO RESPECT THE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE WHICH IS SOOOOOOOO IMPORTANT TO YOU???????

Okay.  That idea of “taming” a husband is straight out of the Victorian era and it’s stupid.  The idea that women’s sexuality is just a performance for men, that the most fulfilling thing we can do for ourselves is to get lots of men we don’t even like to drool over us, is offensive and stupid.  To the extent that Katy Perry embraces all these things, she is being offensive and stupid.

But I don’t see how having a lot of non-monogamous sex would actually make this situation better.  Does Katy Perry have some kind of obligation to match her off-stage sex life to her on-stage performances?  If you subscribe to the misogynist notion that women’s sexuality doesn’t exist or have a right to exist, that it’s just a man-pleasing performance, why is it worse to perform for one man than for several?  Isn’t the performance the real problem here?

More.

Schmeducation #1: Science

I’ve been reading a fair bit of writing on progressive education over the past few weeks, starting with Alfie Kohn (linked from The Fat Nutritionist; I love the Internet).  And oh my, it is fun: delicious, enraging fun.  Sometimes I have to put the books down, when my own massive cynicism overwhelms me: oh, you poor dear deluded thing, trying to prove that Punitive Technique X doesn’t help children learn, as if learning had ever been the point…

It’s hard for me to discuss this stuff without sounding as if I think I had some uniquely horrible childhood and every moment I spent in school was hellish, when really I had it pretty good. But you know, that’s kind of the point: I had a fair number of good school experiences and lots of okay ones, but I also had plenty of stupid, pointless, degrading, harmful experiences, and that counts as having it pretty good.

The “best” school I attended, my prestigious private junior high for the “academically able”, was the source of my worst experiences by far, which is why I look askance at most prestigious private schools. And as a response to Holt, Kohn, Gatto, Meier etc., I am going to blog some of the things I learned there, so that you can have the benefit of a first-rate junior high education without having to pay tuition!

Our first lesson will be in science, a subject for which I admit I had no extraordinary aptitude.

How To Do A Grade 7 Science Lab, Prestigious Private School, ca. 1994

1. Learn from teacher what lab will be testing, what hypothesis will be, and experiment procedures. Laboriously copy it all down in your neatest handwriting, under headings “Purpose”, “Hypothesis”, “Methods” etc. Get hand cramp.

2. Conduct experiment. Enjoy playing with Bunsen burners and beakers; feel like alchemist.

3. Observe and record results. Observe that results do not conform to hypothesis. Try to ignore feelings of panic at prospect of getting in trouble.

3a. If this is the first time you have got the “wrong” results, ask teacher for help. Carefully absorb lesson in how you cannot possibly really be getting the results you are getting and you are probably deliberately misusing materials or lying to waste teacher’s time. If this is not the first time you have got the “wrong” results, disregard this step.

4. Weigh possibility of getting in trouble for fake results against certainty of getting in trouble using real results.  Erase or cross out measurements from actual experiment.  Falsify data.

5. Write up results. Try to sound as if understood why class was doing experiment or actually gave shit about subject matter. Fail. Try to explain results, but have trouble coming up with more than simple sentences like “gravity exists” or “water boils at 100 degrees Celsius.” Fight feelings of despair at own hopeless stupidity and likelihood of miserable death in poverty and squalor, because not good enough for Prestigious Private School.

6. Hand in lab sheet.  Slink out of class.

please don’t write like this, part the umpteenth

I was not going to post about this, as it is thoroughly petty and outdated to boot, but what the hell, I miss Why Women Hate Men, and this letter to Venus Envy’s Love Bites made me cringe almost as hard as Mr. “I will pay for your dinner up to $15 dollars at sizzler”.

I mean, read this crap from “Accomplished” (nice screen name, dipshit):

My potential love interest, who is unattached, appreciates and even sought my mature attention to her singular life and talents as yoga teacher and videographer. We met in a coffee shop and superficially we have much in common. Acting instinctively, I crave caring and sharing and even intimacy were her mood ever to become affirmative. I cannot yet intuit whether or not to pursue closeness with this tantalizing creature across a complex Age Gap.

You, “Accomplished”, are gross. You are a dirty old man. You give me the creeps.

I say this not knowing you, not knowing anything about your looks, your income, your propensity to give to charity or plant community gardens or help little old ladies across the street. I am still quite, quite certain that you are creepy. Your creepiness comes through in every sentence you write.

Understand, “Accomplished”, if you had simply written “I met a lovely single woman in a coffee shop and I would like to date her, but I am afraid to ask her out because she is so much younger than I am”, I would not think you were gross. I would give you the benefit of the doubt. I might even think it was kind of sweet.

But instead, you fling twenty-dollar words every which way, refer to your crush as a “tantalizing creature” (EW), me-me-me on about how you “crave caring and sharing”, litter your letter with Pompous and Unnecessary Capitalization, and defensively quote Alex Comfort to explain that you can still have sex (and I’m not sure why you need to check a 40-year-old book by an embarrassing sexist kook to figure out whether your junk still works, but whatever). So yep, “Accomplished”, I’m going to say you are a creep.

And annoying.  What the hell is a “complex Age Gap”?  What makes it complex?  Is she a time-traveller?  A 300-year-old vampire trapped in the body of a “tantalizing” young woman?  Are you Benjamin Button?  I have a feeling that “complex Age Gap” means that she is really young — like, barely legal — or that you have been qualifying for senior discounts much longer than most people who call themselves “middle-aged”.  Or both.  I hope I am wrong.  I also hope that she is not, as I have a sneaking suspicion she is, an employee of the coffee shop where you met her.

Sasha to your knowledge how do alert, passionate women feel today about all of the slants above on Age Gap?

“Alert, passionate”…yeah.  I know that is pompous-ass-speak for “hawt”, but I’ll play along for the moment: I drank some coffee and had a feeling today, so I declare myself qualified to answer this question.  I think you are creepy.  You are not creepy because you are attracted to a younger woman.  You are creepy because you appear to think you can ask one women how all women feel about something, because you refer to the woman you have a crush on as a “creature” and her attraction or lack of attraction to you as a “mood”, because your pseudonym and language use indicate colossal self-absorption and self-importance, because your quotation from Alex Comfort suggests that you think the only reason she might not be in an “affirmative mood” is because you might not be able to get it up.

And I would like to be sympathetic, to wonder why you are so insecure that you have to give yourself a handle like “Accomplished”, to say that we all crave caring and sharing, and it hurts to be lonely, and crushes are painful as well as exciting, and so on.  But I have met way too many men who interpreted even the blandest friendliness as a sexual come-on.  I have met way too many men who got it into their heads that a particular woman owed them something, because she smiled at them, or chatted with them for a few minutes, or said thank you when they held the door for her, and then got pouty and aggressive when she didn’t give them what they thought she’d promised.  And the ones like you, the ones who dress up their very ordinary feelings and attractions in layers of flowery language, who concoct elaborate fantasies in which the cute girl at the coffee shop is a “potential love interest” and a “tantalizing creature” instead of just a cute girl at the coffee shop, are probably the most persistent and annoying.  So yeah, I’m not feeling as kindly disposed to you as I might.

So if you want to stop being creepy — which I have little reason to think you do — accept that she’s not your “potential love interest”; she’s not yours at all. Recognize that you’re just a guy with a crush, and then ask out the girl at the coffee shop.  But if she says no, back the hell off.  Do not whine that she led you on by talking to you about yoga.  Do not argue.  Do not tell her that Sasha and Alex Comfort said it was okay.  Just go home, lick your wounds, and then find somebody else.

See also:  How Not To Meet Women.

librul d00ds strike again

Oh, man. No. Just, no.

I was born in 1981, which by most accounts makes me a member of Generation Y. I gather the writer is too, which apparently makes him an expert on everybody born within fifteen years of him.

Generation Y is inherently impulsive: a generation raised on the immediacy of the Now; an impatient and forgetful group trained by our parents and the culture industry to discard what is unwanted immediately in favour of instant gratification. It is a generation of children whose grades are often demanded rather than earned; a generation exposed to the rise of i-marketing, believing that everything was produced specifically for our personal enjoyment; a generation raised in a perpetual state of Narcissus narcosis, uncritically accepting of those messages that we’ve received.

I’m willing to countenance the idea that pop culture has grown increasingly narcissistic within my lifetime; certainly the Internet has allowed us all to broadcast our narcissism far and wide. I’m also aware that marketing has become increasingly niche over the past few decades, that the big middle-market retailers have lost market share, that a lot of advertising appeals to pure hedonism and self-regard as it didn’t necessarily fifty years ago, and that this has all had an effect on people in their thirties and younger.

But that doesn’t change the fact that this is an unbelievably reactionary argument. The fact that it’s spun off from a story about a hideous gang rape — never mind that most people of my generation are not rapists, and never mind that the victim in this gang rape was also presumably part of this terrible generation of mine — just it makes it worse.

I come from a comfortable professional middle-class background. I personally had a lot of material advantages growing up. But my entire generation did not have those advantages. I was born and grew up in an era of stagnant or declining real wages, slashes to the social safety net, deindustrialization, outsourcing. University education has become more required and more expensive. We are now in a serious recession that has had a disproportionate impact on young people.

How do older adults — well, the ones who work in the mainstream media — respond to this? They report on one twentysomething who is unemployed because he turned down a $40,000-a-year job that didn’t look exciting enough and studiously ignore the rest of us who’d be thrilled to get $25,000, only nobody is hiring. They hand-wring about how their parenting was just too awesome and they made our childhoods so wonderful that we don’t want to grow up. They piss and moan about us in exactly the same terms that older people used about the student left in the 1960s: permissive, entitled, lazy, can’t defer gratification, no respect for authority.

And then some dude on Rabble — a leftist website, supposedly — decides to uncritically repeat those same assertions about an entire generation of people, with the added twist that now my generation’s narcissistic upbringing is to blame for gang rape. Because young men of the past didn’t rape women. Never. Certainly not. Or at least not the way my generation does, spreading the evidence around Facebook and stuff. They had to use videotapes. No, when people of my generation commit rape, it isn’t because rape and rape-supportive attitudes are common throughout society; it’s because the Youth of Today are “inherently impulsive” and think everything (and everyone?) “was produced specifically for our personal enjoyment.”

(And where do young feminists and anti-rape activists fit into this bleak picture? I guess we don’t actually exist. We’re too busy passing around gang-rape videos on Youtube so the boys will like us and whining at our teachers to give us better marks on that assignment we like, worked really hard on. Which I have seen people do, yes, but never did myself. Because — get this — not all young people are the same.)

It’s evident that there are underlying cultural issues present in this case of alleged teen gang rape-turned-viral event, but we have to see this case for what it is: an example of a prevalent generational problem possibly taken to an extreme. Pornography alone did not cause this gang rape, nor is it the primary reason that the pictures of the rape were spread through the Internet. The alleged rape, its defense, and the online dissemination of the pictures speak to deep-seeded generational feelings of narcissistic entitlement that affect both sexes — in this case, very, very negatively.

Read Against Our Will; read Virgin or Vamp, especially the discussion of the New Bedford gang rape that happened more than twenty years ago; read any number of social histories; read a criminal law textbook; hell, read the effing Bible.  Rape is not new.  Gang rape is not new.  Violent porn is not new.  Communities that support rapists rather than their victims are not new.  All of these things were clichés before my generation was even born.

(If my generation rapes because of entitled attitudes that affect both sexes, where are all the young female gang rapists, anyway?  Is this what Stockwell Day had in mind when he started talking about the uptick in “unreported crime”?  Or is someone just a little desperate to avoid talking about gender as a factor in sexual assault?)

I know I am being particularly vehement here, but I cannot believe I just read this kind of drivel on Rabble.ca, a site where I used to hang out regularly. It appalls me that I am being lambasted for my supposed age-related narcissism and ignorance by someone who felt entitled to pontificate about rape culture and Kids These Days without familiarizing himself with any feminist history, or apparently any history at all.

In a way I suppose he’s proved his own thesis.

your daily dose of sadness

This is so depressing I don’t even know where to start.

The yo-yo dieting, the wasted money, the scary control and codependency issues, the perfectionism, the self-righteous self-and-other-tormenting pointless nastiness of it all. The fact that the writer thinks it’s both virtuous and realistic to never eat dessert again for the rest of her life, and that she can’t see or can’t accept that continuing the gain-and-lose cycle is making her and her husband poorer, more miserable and almost definitely fatter.

I’m off to the Fat Nutritionist to get the bad taste out of my mouth.

get ready, get set for imagination day

So this is the current frontrunner in Toronto’s mayoral race:

Yes, that guy who throws a public tantrum when a vote doesn’t go his way.   That guy who…just read this.  And this.

Ford seems to be cruising to a victory on resentment: resentment of the leftist “downtown elites” who “tax and spend” on AIDS prevention and snooty arts programs and transit that “nobody wants” (according to the National Post).   What amazes me is how he seems to have captured people’s imaginations.  Rob Ford is the puppies and rainbows candidate in the Toronto election.  Rob Ford is going to get us everything we ever wanted and it’s going to be free.  Rob Ford is going to do things for us that even Rob Ford hasn’t said he wants to do.  Rob Ford is going to get rid of all the bad people (leftists, gays, cyclists, refugees, etc.). Rob Ford talks like a child, and people respond to him as if they, too, were children.

I want to understand a bit more about where this is coming from.  I am having such trouble making that imaginative leap.

someone spit in your coffee, eh?

Yeesh, someone has a chip on his or her shoulder.

I doubt anyone really visits English Canada for the food, but this wholesale trashing of Anglo-Canadian food culture surprises me.  Many of the criticisms levelled at Canadian white people are no more or less true of us than they are of white Anglos elsewhere: that we are ignorantly patriotic, that we eat “ethnic” food as a substitute for engagement with people of colour, that we are overly reliant on processed food.  And then some of it is just completely inaccurate, to the point where I find it hard to believe it was written in 2010.  A few highlights:

- I am not up on the fine details of dairy regulation, but it is not difficult to get foreign cheeses in Canada.  Yes, there is something called “Canadian Parmesan”, but Parmesan stamped “Product of Italy” is available at most supermarkets, and there is plenty of selection of other cheeses; I’d estimate the cheese stall in Fredericton’s Boyce Market had between fifty and a hundred cheeses, only a fraction of which were Canadian.  And this is Fredericton: not exactly the metropolis.  Canada also has respectable small cheese producers, although perhaps not as many as the writer would like.

- I don’t know anyone who bemoans the difficulty of getting good hot dog wieners in Canada.

- The “double-double” coffee ordering system is specific to Tim Hortons.  If you ordered your coffee that way anywhere else, people would look at you funny.  Most independent coffee shops let you pour your own sugar and milk/cream (not “creamers”).

- Fusion is not a novel idea here.  Toronto is awash in Asian fusion.  Most of it isn’t that great, but it’s mainstream, so mainstream that I personally have become a bit tired of it.  Women’s magazines like Canadian Living and Chatelaine publish fusion recipes.

- I have lived nearly three decades in Canada and never heard anyone suggest that growing vegetables in your back yard is weird or déclassé, or that it’s better to buy your vegetables to show that you can afford to.  Growing vegetables in your back yard is a way to demonstrate that you have a back yard, which is a hell of a lot more expensive than going to the supermarket.

- I’ve never considered my country the world’s breadbasket or given much thought to the relative quality of Alberta beef.  Maybe if I lived in Alberta or Saskatchewan I’d feel differently.

- The writer points out that cultural divisions don’t follow national borders here — for example, the Maritimes have a lot in common culturally with New England — but then goes right back to writing about English Canadian food as if it is the same from coast to coast.

- I grew up in Toronto, eating from hot dog stands, and I have never heard anyone call them “smog dogs.”  Maybe I hung out with the wrong crowd.

- Toronto’s Jewish deli culture didn’t disappear; it just moved.  Spadina Avenue is more Chinese/Vietnamese than Jewish now; there are Jewish neighbourhoods around Bathurst and Wilson, and in suburbs like Thornhill.

I don’t usually read about food, but it’s interesting to me that the writer is so contemptuous, not only of our bureaucracies (about which I am not informed enough to comment) but of us as a group.  So butter tarts have Scottish roots — well, so do millions of Canadians; golly gee, could there be a connection? So hot dogs are the only street food you can get in Toronto barring the odd chip wagon or ice cream truck (and yes, people do still buy from those); that might not be a food item of which the writer approves, but so what?  Buying a hot dog and piling it with a dozen toppings is part of Toronto food culture — a culture that isn’t as deep, stable, or cohesive as the food culture of other places, but that exists nonetheless.

This wouldn’t stick in my craw so much if the articles on British and American food were equally scathing, but they’re not, even though both of those countries have produced some appalling food.

Oh, and I love maple syrup.

our home

Dear Toronto Police Service,

I’m so glad your lurkers support you in e-mail. However, if you are going to run a propaganda/disinformation campaign, may I suggest that you provide your imaginary supporters with names and places of origin?

Seriously, trolls on Twilight fan sites are more sophisticated than this.

—–

I don’t know how to blog about the crackdown on protesters at the G20. Elsewhere I’ve been reading and posting, link after link, trying to piece together an interpretation. I wasn’t there; I was here in Halifax.

I was born in Toronto, pre-megacity Toronto. I grew up there. I wrote once, when I was younger and less temperate in my language, that I had fallen in love with Halifax, but that I loved Toronto the way one loves family; I identified passionately with it and occasionally hated its guts. I wouldn’t use the word “hate” now, either regarding my family or the city, but it’s true that the places and people I grew up with can frustrate and anger me like no one and nothing else, and it’s also true that I love them and belong to them, even when I am elsewhere.

Pretty clichéd, boring stuff, yes, but the point is, this feels personal and intimate to me. The Harper government just spent a billion dollars to indulge a Conservative fantasy of Toronto without Torontonians, to brutalize hundreds of my neighbours and terrorize thousands more, and I cannot fully articulate my feelings at this point and am not sure I will ever be able to manage it, but this matters a hell of a lot more to me than broken windows or trashed cars.

It’s a mark of my enormous privilege and naïvety that I feel betrayed; I expected and dreaded some brutality, but not to this extent, and I certainly didn’t expect the smirking contempt with which our elected and appointed officials are treating us now: yeah, we’re lying, what are you going to do about it? I expected they would try to cover up the beatings, the sexual assaults, the denial of food and water and medication and access to counsel.  I didn’t expect that they would defend them, sneering at my city and its people all the while.

I don’t see much to celebrate this Canada Day.

but then, these people probably also get hot for the confederacy

I was going to write about the very stupid article discussed here, but really, Blue Milk basically covered it (except for the epic failtasticity of the writer, who argues that it’s “dicey” for women to claim the right to decide whether someone will perform surgery on us).  What I will observe is that the right-wing asshole ideology that is most commonly referred to as libertarianism in North America might be the most overtly masculinist I’ve ever seen.  Religious patriarchal types occasionally have to pay lip service to an ethic besides “whatever the man says goes”; you can’t advocate forcing people to have abortions if you think all abortions are evil.  But in the asshole libertarian paradigm, individual freedom for white privileged men explicitly includes the right to trample on everyone else’s individual freedom, for pretty much any purpose.

(For the record, I am somewhat sympathetic to the anti-child-support argument when it isn’t being made by would-be surgical rapists who can’t be bothered to wear a condom; I think the current North American system of child support forces non-nuclear families into a nuclear paradigm when that doesn’t necessarily make sense or even work, and we need to have alternative ways of conceptualizing family relationships and responsibility for children. But the Elle article doesn’t get into those kinds of issues.)

I read non-asshole libertarian blogs (which do exist) regularly, and every so often the “why there are so few female libertarians” question comes up.  There are a lot of reasons for this, one of which is that asshole libertarians can’t seem to avoid following this question with “because libertarian men need to get laid too huh huh huh boobies”, but one of the big ones is the presence of male “libertarians” like the ones in the Elle article, who do not actually support liberty for anyone with a uterus.

More from Shakesville.