Along one of the streets in downtown Minneapolis, there is an ad on a bus kiosk. It wants people to support concrete as a paving decision.
Looking to the right, it’s certainly easy to see potholes. In concrete.
Next time, they might want to consider just where they want their ads to appear. Oops.
Alexander Jablokov writes fiction that is…odd. That’s a compliment. Futuristic science fiction is supposed to be odd, in ways you don’t quite expect. An excerpt:
“But she’d be someone else then. Not Rue.”
“Contrary to what you might have heard,” he said, “it’s not actually that easy to change a personality by sticking in false past memories. The old personality wants to continue to exist somehow, like a vampire that won’t be killed. The new memories get rearranged to justify the old personality. Sometimes people contract for memories that make them make sense to themselves. Gives them an excuse for being what they are. Obnoxious, unpleasant, distant from those who love you? Create memories of mistreatment by your parents. It all makes perfect sense then.”
His despair hung around him like a swarm of gnats, making him squint and squish up his face. He had real memories back there somewhere. He seemed very attached to them: an odd, regressive sentiment.
“We all do that,” she said. “Freelance and untrained. We have to….”
“Bah,” he said. “That’s childish. All of it is. You’re just avoiding the main issue. Tell me. Do you love your daughter?”
He barked the question, and thrust his face into hers like an interrogator in a concrete-walled basement cell trying to extort a confession. His eyes were flat planes of meanness, and for an instant she couldn’t think of an answer, as if the reply was something complicated, easily screwed up.
“Yes!” She choked in a breath. ”Yes, I love Rue. I love my daughter!”
“Why?” His voice was suddenly gentle. The interrogator was sure he had broken his prisoner.
“Why? Because … I do.” She looked away from his harsh gaze. A streetlight had been captured in the countless independent drops on the window. Each had its own vision of the light, and each was exactly the same.
He shook his head. ”You love your daughter because you were programmed to. It’s…natural.” He lingered contemptuously over the syllables. “A complex preset behavior evoked by a releaser. Evolution, survival. Well, you know the drill.”
In yesterday’s post, I noted the attempt of certain proponents of evolutionary psychology (specifically that dealing with matters of gender and sexuality) to position themselves as skeptics resisting the dogmatic pressures of societal group think. I contrasted that with actual, procedural analysis of evolutionary psychology practices and claims. I also documented how one set of researchers is spending time selectively looking into evolutionarily adaptive reasons for behavior, when we already know that behavior looks much like other behavior with no reasonable adaptive value. (Yes, that’s vague. The post itself it much less so. I promise.)
I wrote all this in the context of a web page and email that the Michigan CFI put out promoting a lecture by one of the researchers I critiqued, hosted by a local student group. Then I ended the post with this sentence: “That is what makes it disappointing that CFI Michigan has chosen to uncritically promote his work.”
The objections have been interesting, both to my post and to Bug Girl’s post at Skepchick, which is a rantier take on the same topic. Today, I’ll summarize the objections to how we dealt with the science, although the one I got here was not exactly helpful:
You have a very poor understanding of evolutionary psychology, evolutionary theory, and human origins. I suggest going to Shackelford’s talk or contacting him for more information and explanation. I would not consider him a “rape expert” nor do I think he considers himself as such either, but he is a very well-respected evolutionary psychologist. You are misinterpreting his research and related research.
It doesn’t note anything in particular that I’m supposed to be wrong about, acknowledge that I read his papers, or seem to understand that not being familiar with the literature on rape while studying the topic is a rather large problem. It makes it incredibly difficult to design studies, much less understand what your results are telling you.
Comments both here and on Skepchick, as well as Bug Girl’s post itself, note that there are a rather large number of rapes (non-vaginal, involving males or females outside reproductive age ranges) that have no chance of increasing the rapist’s odds of reproduction. One Skepchick commenter attempted to address this criticism:
If we’re talking about rape as an evolutionary strategy, then it would be as a built-in instinct. As such, it would need to do little more than create a forced copulation with a subject to be useful in that manner. In that context, a child rape and etc. could be thought of as a misfire of the rape instinct.
My response, which also applies to those who criticize Bug Girl’s statement that rape is not an adaptation, was that, yes, it is possible that there could be an instinct for rape that misfires, is warped by cultural pressures, etc. It is also possible that there is an instinct for sex that misfires, is warped by cultural pressures, etc. In fact, that would be the parsimonious explanation. However, scientists working on this rape adaptation theory are advancing their theory without doing the work that would be able to support something more than the parsimonious explanation. Until they produce some work that does counter the simple explanation, or even a testable theory that encompasses all of what is already known about rape, the simple explanation is the more reasonable one.
There also seems to be an idea that criticizing these researchers is somehow limiting the topics that it is acceptable for science to touch. I addressed that yesterday at Skepchick.
There are a number of comments that seem to be suggesting Bug Girl is making a moral argument in the place of a scientific one. There are a couple of problems with that. First off, she’s linked to three people (me included) discussing the scientific problems with this research. Any moral argument is being made on top of a scientific argument.
The second problem is that there’s absolutely nothing wrong in making an argument for the moral practice of science. We do this already. That’s why institutional review boards exist–to (ideally) ensure that the fewest people and other organisms are put at risk or injured by research. Bug Girl certainly isn’t saying that no research should be done on rape. What she is pointing out is that this research is bad (badly designed, badly reasoned, and badly represented–as supported by her links), and that the quality of this research puts people at risk, making it even worse research. It’s nifty to point out that the naturalistic fallacy is a fallacy, but that won’t prevent the idea that rape is promoted by evolution from becoming just another excuse to rape–unless someone knows how to abolish the naturalistic fallacy.
Rape is an issue that touches an incredibly large number of people. I fully support researching rape, and I highlight the results of that research on this blog. I also demand, and intend to keep demanding, that this research be of as high a quality as we can manage. Scientists can, and many of them do, do much better than to produce studies and statements that completely ignore vast swaths of our knowledge of rape and of victimization in general. We produce good science on this topic. There is no reason to tolerate bad science and every reason to sharply criticize those who produce it.
In a day or two, I’ll come back to this issue to talk about the response to my one sentence about the promotion by Michigan CFI. The issues and people involved are different enough that it warrants a separate post.
It isn’t terribly difficult to find well-written, skeptical pieces on evolutionary psychology. In fact, several have come out quite recently. They examine current evo psych theorizing in the light of scientific requirements for proof of any such theory.
Kate Clancy wrote a post on the variety of human behavior that evo psych studies attempt to represent by using mostly college undergraduate research subjects. In addition to her concern over undergraduates’ WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) demographics, she notes other ways in which these research participants aren’t representative of the whole of humanity they’re being used to study:
Another problem is that most work on relationships in EP tends to be heteronormative, meaning that they think nothing of assuming that either everyone is straight, or the universally best behavioral strategy is to be straight. They also tend to assume that the best strategy is to be monogamous, with occasional sneaky infidelity permitted if one can get better genes or more offspring that way (keep in mind that there is a difference between what might be biologically advantageous in a certain context, and what is culturally appropriate – the argument here is not against the culture of monogamy).
But heterosexual monogamy is only one reproductive strategy of many that humans employ. Depending on how you measure it, monogamy and polygyny (single male, multi female marriage) vie for the most frequent strategy – in fact, polygyny occurs in about 80% of modern human societies (Murdock and White 1969). There are even a few rare populations that practice polyandry, which is the marriage of a single female and multiple males. And, even in those populations where monogamy is practiced, serial monogamy is far more frequent than lifetime monogamy: this means that individuals have a series of monogamous relationships rather than find one mate for life (so no, divorce is not a modern human invention).
And that’s not even getting into the nonhuman primates with whom we share a fair amount of evolutionary history. In short, Clancy makes the case that if we wish to describe a behavior as evolutionarily adaptive in humans as a whole, we need to consider more than a subset of the behavior in a single culture.
Also looking at the challenges that evo psych must meet in order to scientifically determine the adaptive value of a behavior is Jeremy Yoder. In a multipart series examining the evidence that homophobia is an evolved trait, he breaks down the multiple lines of evidence required:
When evolutionary biologists say a trait or behavior is “adaptive,” we mean that the trait or behavior is the way we see it now because natural selection has made it that way. That is, the trait or behavior is heritable, or passed down from parent to child more-or-less intact; and having it confers fitness benefits, or some probability of producing more offspring than folks who lack the trait. Lots of people, including some evolutionary biologists, speculate about the adaptive value of all sorts of traits—but in the absence of solid evidence for heritability or fitness benefits, such speculation tends to get derided as “adaptive storytelling.”
A few particularly interesting points were brought up in these posts. One, which should be obvious but often seems not to be, is that evo psych is talking about biological mechanisms for behavior, which means that a demonstration that the behavior is widespread is not enough to support claims that a behavior is evolved.
To recap: Gallup proposed that homophobia could be adaptive if it prevented gay and lesbian adults from contacting a homophobic parent’s children and—either through actual sexual abuse or some nebulous “influence,” making those children homosexual. In support of this, he published some survey results [$a] showing that straight people were uncomfortable with adult homosexuals having contact with children.
I pointed out that all Gallup did was document the existence of a common stereotype about homosexuals—he presents no evidence that believing this stereotype can actually increase fitness via the mechanism he proposes, or that it is heritable.
The next item of interest didn’t come from Yoder, but from Jesse Bering, who wrote the article to which Yoder was responding. Bering described his affection for research that is done “without curtseying to the court of public opinion.” Yoder points out that a study providing a rationale for homophobia didn’t exactly run counter to public opinion in 1983, when it was done.
Later, in a response to Yoder’s first post, plus those of others, Gallup himself suggests that his critics “tip-toe around the fact that my approach is based on a testable hypothesis” and “go out of their way to side-step the fact that the data we’ve collected are consistent with the predictions” because the hypothesis is “politically incorrect or contrary to prevailing social dogma.” Given that Yoder specifically discussed the relevance of his data to his theory, it’s difficult to award Gallup the mantle of abused maverick he and Bering both claim for him.
Earlier this year, Jerry Coyne wrote (in response to another Bering article), a caution about building strong evo psych edifices on slim foundations. In this case, he examined the idea of the “rape module”–a genetic, inherited predisposition among human men to commit rape–and of specific, genetically programmed, inheritable behaviors in women designed to avoid this “rape module.”
Well, one can debate whether reading a story about rape is the same thing as being sexually assaulted, or whether a marginal increase in handgrip strength would have been sufficient in our ancestors to fight off a rapist. But the important part of these studies is that they were apparently one-offs—they have not, as far as I know, been replicated by other researchers. Do we accept single results, based on surveys of American undergraduates at a single university, as characterizing all modern women?
As we know, many studies in science, when repeated, fail to replicate the initial results. Think of all the reports of single genes for homosexuality, depression, and other behavioral traits that fell apart when researchers tested those results on other groups of people! And if an author did an initial study (not a replication) of handgrip strength that didn’t show the relationship with ovulation, would that even be publishable? I think not.
I suggest, then, that the results of evolutionary psychology often reflect ascertainment bias. If you find a result that comports with the idea that a trait is “adaptive,” it gets published. If you don’t, it doesn’t. That leads to the literature being filled with po
sitive results, and gives the public a false idea of the strength of scientific data supporting the evolutionary roots of human behavior.
In addition to critiquing the studies themselves, Coyne also notes that this is not the first time the “rape module” idea has been criticized.
Thornhill and Palmer’s book was controversial, with many critics claiming that the authors were trying to excuse or justify rape. Bering takes after these critics, properly noting that “‘adaptive’”does not mean ‘justifiable’,” but rather only mechanistically viable.” But what he doesn’t mention is that there were strong scientific critiques of the “rape module” idea as well. I produced two of them myself, a long one in The New Republic and a short one with Andrew Berry in Nature, pointing out not only scientific weaknesses in the evolutionary scenario but Thornhill and Palmer’s unsavory fiddling with statistics, distorting what the primary data on sexual assault really said. Bering doesn’t mention the scientific controversy, noting only that “it’s debatable that a rape module lurks in the male brain.”
The New Republic article is itself a strong skeptical look at the science used to bolster the concept of the “rape module.” I recommend reading it in its entirety. Coyne discusses the various versions of the idea that rape is a product of evolution (one trivially vague enough to be meaningless–but intuitively acceptable–and one stronger and requiring proportionally more evidence) and how they are played against each other in such a way that they could describe any evidence. He also applies a broader understanding of crime to provide alternate explanations that don’t require a biological predisposition to explain patterns of victimization, and he explains how the evidence in three studies used depend on statistical manipulation. He also examines claims that rape can only be prevented properly using an evo psych framework for understanding it.
Given the availability of people like these, with the tools and inclination to turn a skeptical eye on the topic of evolutionary psychology, it is perhaps no surprise that Center for Inquiry Michigan is promoting a speaker tomorrow night on the topic of evo psych and rape. What is surprising, however, is the identity of the chosen speaker. Dr. Todd Shackelford is the director of the Evolutionary Psychology Lab at Oakland University.
Dr. Shackleford will present a talk on the competing theories of rape as a specialized rape adaptation or as a by-product of other psychological adaptations. Although increasing number of sexual partners is a proposed benefit of rape according to the “rape as an adaptation” and the “rape as a by-product” hypotheses, neither hypothesis addresses directly why some men rape their long-term partners, to whom they already have sexual access. He will present the findings of two studies that examined these hypotheses, discuss the limitations of this research and highlight future directions for research on sexual coercion in intimate relationships.
Now, the problem is not that Dr. Shackelford is an evo psych researcher. There are people doing good work in evo psych. The problem is that Dr. Shackelford isn’t doing good work on this topic. In particular, the work he is presenting, relating female infidelity to rape of female partners by male partners, doesn’t tell us anything that the already robust scientific literature on rape hasn’t already told us.
In the 2006 paper that Shackelford will be presenting tomorrow, “Sexual Coercion and Forced In-Pair Copulation as Sperm Competition Tactics in Humans,” (pdf available) Goetz and Shackelford demonstrate a correlation in heterosexual couples between the likelihood of female infidelity (past or present, rated by the male or female partner) and the likelihood of male sexual coercion, up to and including rape via physical assault. This isn’t news. We already know that men who endorse rape myths and the acceptability of sexual violence against women under certain circumstances are more likely to rape. One of the common attitudes that predicts rape is that “sluts” lose the right to say, “No.” (“Nice girls don’t get raped.”) Non-monogamy is used to excuse rape, and not merely rape by prior sexual partners.
Non-monogamy also isn’t alone among excuses for rape (Scully and Marolla, 2005, pdf available). The idea that women secretly want the sex is common. Rapists claim that the circumstances of the rape were beyond their control due to drugs, alcohol, or emotional problems. People see demands for sex as more reasonable in circumstances where financial contributions to a date or relationship are uneven. None of these, however, are examined whether they similarly contribute to rape within an existing relationship. Without that, the 2006 paper tells us nothing about whether potential female infidelity triggers “sperm competition tactics.”
Nor is this Shackelford’s only study that ignores our broader knowledge of crime in a way that selectively supports evo psych explanations for violence against women. In the 2002 paper, “Understanding Domestic Violence Against Women: Using Evolutionary Psychology to Extend the Feminist Functional Analysis,” (pdf available) Peters, Shackelford, and Buss note the trend toward fewer domestic assaults of post-menopausal women as support that domestic assault is evolutionarily selected as a means of controlling fertile women. They do this using New York City police incident reports for assaults against women only.
They don’t use data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, despite the fact that they cite the survey in the paper. Nor do the results for female victims don’t look substantially different than those they do use. From the NCVS:
Then there is the NCVS data for males:
There are fewer assaults overall, but the pattern isn’t much different. In fact, the pattern isn’t much different if you look at other types of crimes, either.
Given this information (the report on the age of crime victims dates to 1997), the challenge isn’t to explain why the rates of domestic assault fall off near menopause, but to explain what is common to all crime experienced by females in the U.S. that produces that age curve, whether the crime is sexually motivated or not. This study, by again ignoring the data on the broader topic, fails to tell us anything about what it purports to be studying.
In order to actually present a skeptical view of a topic, it is not enough to assert, as some evo psych advocates do, that yours is the minority viewpoint or not widely accepted. That is simple contrarianism. Skepticism and honest inquiry require that one deal with all the information available on the topic. They also require that we not use the absence of information that would allow us to choose between explanations to argue for only one of these explanations.
The studies produced on this topic by Dr. Shackelton don’t meet either criteria. That is what makes it disappointing that CFI Michigan has chosen to uncritically promote his work. [ETA: This topic is discussed at some length in the comments. They’re worth reading.]
Citations
Goetz, A., & Shackelford, T. (2006). Sexual coercion and forced in-pair copulation as sperm competition tactics in humans Human Nature, 17 (3), 265-282 DOI: 10.1007/s12110-006-1009-8
Peters J, Shackelford TK, & Buss DM (2002). Understanding domestic violence against women: using evolutionary psychology to extend the feminist functional analysis. Violence and victims, 17 (2), 255-64 PMID: 12033558
The buzz this morning on Twitter was George Monbiot’s rejection of the anti-nuclear movement based on the statistics it uses, published in the comment section of The Guardian.
First she sent me nine documents: newspaper articles, press releases and an advertisement. None were scientific publications; none contained sources for the claims she had made. But one of the press releases referred to a report by the US National Academy of Sciences, which she urged me to read. I have now done so – all 423 pages. It supports none of the statements I questioned; in fact it strongly contradicts her claims about the health effects of radiation.
I pressed her further and she gave me a series of answers that made my heart sink – in most cases they referred to publications which had little or no scientific standing, which did not support her claims or which contradicted them. (I have posted our correspondence, and my sources, on my website.) I have just read her book Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer. The scarcity of references to scientific papers and the abundance of unsourced claims it contains amaze me.
It’s worth a read in total. It’s also worth stacking up against a pro-nuclear energy piece in yesterday’s Guardian, written by Dr. Melanie Windridge and published in the science section. If you read my previous piece on the statistics used to show nuclear energy is terribly safe, you’ll see a familiar piece of information:
The World Health Organisation estimates that indoor air pollution from biomass and coal causes 1.5m premature deaths per year.
This, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with the production of electricity. This is indoor air pollution from fuels burned for cooking and heating, mostly in stoves or hearths with no venting. It’s appalling, and fixable if we’re willing to deal with world poverty, but it has nothing to do with the nuclear power industry. It’s a simple case of lying with statistics.
[An an on-topic aside, the author of the Death per TWh statistics that have been floating around, Brian Wang, commented on the post that calls their reliability into question to let me know that I was wrong about him using indoor air pollution deaths as part of his coal numbers. Instead, he was attributing all deaths from urban outdoor air pollution to coal. Windridge puts the coal numbers at 100,000 a year instead of the 1.2 million Wang used, although her numbers are probably low.]
The article gets worse, however. Windridge cautions against getting too upset at the idea that radiation is leaking from the reactors.
Calls to widen the exclusion zone or to evacuate must be weighed against the risks of evacuation, which itself leads to many deaths, especially among the old and infirm.
She tells us this in the same article in which she says:
It has been three weeks since the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. There have been problems at the Fukushima plant with cooling, gas explosions (not nuclear), and radiation leaks – all serious issues, but so far no one has died.
She is in such a rush to tell us how grand nuclear energy is that she forgets (I’ll assume) to think about what she already knows. There have already been evacuations from Fukushima, to the tune of 210,000 people. And she’s right about one thing. There have been deaths, 25 that we know of so far (not including the two Dai-ichi workers killed in the tsunami or the one killed when a crane collapsed during the earthquake).
The Guardian newspaper reports Friday that Japanese Self Defense Force troops found 128 elderly patients abandoned at a hospital about six miles from the tsunami-stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant.
According to the British newspaper, most of the patients were comatose and 14 of them died soon after being discovered. Japan issued an evacuation order for the area surrounding the Dai-ichi plant as the possibility of a meltdown increased in the days following the quake and tsunami.
Another 11 elderly Japanese — residents of a nursing home slammed by the tsunami — were found dead by security forces, apparently having succumbed to hypothermia. The newspaper said 47 residents of the home died as the wave initially washed over the building in Kesennuma.
Those are the people we know of. There will be more. There probably already have been more, of the 128 if nothing else. The conditions were bad during transit for everyone who was evacuated, and they are only marginally better in the shelters. Japan is not a young country, and even among the young, there are those who need medicine and power to live. (Yes, power is a factor in survival, too. At least there’s wind to take up some of the slack.)
So we have nuclear proponents lying about nuclear safety as well. Think anyone’s going to repudiate their movement for it?
First, it escaped.
The director of the zoo expressed confidence that the snake was still in the reptile house and said the snake would probably avoid open areas. “To understand the situation, you have to understand snakes,” Jim Breheny, the director, said in a written statement. “Upon leaving its enclosure, the snake would feel vulnerable and seek out a place to hide and feel safe. When the snake gets hungry or thirsty, it will start to move around the building. Once that happens, it will be our best opportunity to recover it.”
Then it started to tweet.
Then it acquired a tweeting wife.
Then a tweeting mistress.
Then it was recaptured.
The adolescent female snake is in good condition after her weeklong foray into cageless freedom. “We’re really happy to announce that cobra missing for seven days has been found,” Jim Breheny, director of the Bronx Zoo, said at a press conference Thursday afternoon. “She’s alive and well … resting comfortably and secure.”
Or rather, then she was recaptured. The original tweeting snake is still in pretty good condition, but the wife and mistress? I think they’ve got more problems than a #snakeonthetown.
Oopssss.
A couple of weeks ago, Thers at Whiskey Fire put up a post examining the bizarre ideas revealed by James O’Keefe’s “sting” videos that’s worth thinking about.
But there is another level here that’s worth peeling back.
The most bizarre aspect of this wingnut “sting” is its intended “gotcha.” What the wingnuts thought they would be able to “prove” is that NPR is a biased socialist left-wing organization that would be thrilled to spread Islamist propaganda for a hefty paycheck.
What got the NPR executives fired was their alleged meanie comments about the Teabaggers being racists.
But the O’Keefe ratfuckers did not set this up in order to “bust” NPR executives as media moguls who do not like conservatives.
No, they hypothesized that NPR executives would be delighted to take money from shadowy Muslims and use it to undermine American security.
This is something we’ve been over in regards to the other recent O’Keefe “sting,” of Planned Parenthood. That “sting” depended upon the right-wing fantasy that there exist extensive well-organized juvenile “sex-trafficking” rings, something that upon even cursory examination turns out to be utter crap.
It’s only Thers’ conclusion I have problems with.
What I’m getting at is that I don’t think it is at all recognized the degree to which right-wing “ideas” are merely the emanations of a carefully constructed, internally coherent, yet deeply nonsensical folklore. It’s a hothouse cargo cult that scavenges in plain sight, battening off frequent, generous Fox News airdrop cultivation.
Actually, I rather wish that were the case. However, “folklore” implies that this all happens somewhere away from “real” life, in a land of the other. To a weird friend of that friend who knows everyone, or to those people who end up in the newspaper.
The problem is that these ideas do have analogs in reality–in right-wing reality, where these people live. O’Keefe thought NPR would play ideologue for money? You mean O’Keefe thought NPR was News Corp. He thought there were pools of young people kept subservient and preyed upon sexually by adults? How many authoritarian pastors caught molesting and raping kids do you want listed? O’Keefe thought others would aid the sex rings? How many institutions like the Catholic Church that try to control the sex lives of everyone but their leaders taking sexual advantage of their positions do you need?
It’s no secret that those screaming loudest on the right about redistribution of wealth are supporting a system that has been shifting wealth to the wealthy, or that those screaming about class warfare are insisting on a “shared sacrifice” in which the wealthy contribute nothing. The people who claim feminism is bad for women are not exactly known for supporting women themselves. Those who accuse the left of restriction religious freedom make the claim in support of government endorsing their version of religion over others. While the right is whimpering in fear of communist conspiracies, they’re electing Family men who introduce ALEC legislation.
The list goes on and on. In the latest example of the right being what they claim to fear, we have Mike Huckabee (starting at 30 seconds):
Thanks to Chris Rodda for preserving the footage.
It’s the combination of laughter and applause that gets to me. “Tee hee. Tee hee. Oh, that’s such a daring joke! Oh my blessed God, he’s serious! Yay!” Those who are terribly concerned that schools are indoctrinating our children go from disbelief to cheers when religion and the threat of being shot are added to the mix.
For all the work that the right-wing does to try to make us afraid, I think it’s time we start giving them some return on their investment. From here on out, I’m going to stop talking about conservative bogeymen. Everything they tell me I need to be afraid of, I’ll believe them. They know better than I do what bizarre forms of ugliness and evil want to intrude on our public life.
They have to. They own them. And now I know where to look to find them.
Tate Hallaway is the author of the Garnet Lacey series of paranormal romances and the young adult fantasy Vampire Princess of St. Paul series. She’s also Lyda Morehouse, who has just published the long-awaited follow-up to her fantastic science fiction AngeLINK series, Resurrection Code.
“Indigo Bunting” belongs to none of those series. It just amuses me. An excerpt:
Myself, I’ve been a good Catholic. Well, good enough to attend Mass every Sunday; not good enough to keep from spending my time in the church watching Fiona McCarthy bow her pretty head so fetchingly. That sight, my boys, was far more divine than anything coming out of the side of the mouth of Father O’Rourke. I can see how the wee folk get such pleasure out of teasing the likes of priests. Sure, and half what they say is nonsense. It’s not proper Irish faith, at all.
Another wave racks through me, braking my reverie. My fists grasp uselessly at the crumbling dirt and shriveled grass between my fingers. I moan lowly. I wish I had the strength to curse. It’s time for going, but I’m not ready yet.
A shadow blots out the sun. I focus on a tall figure standing over me. Sure, and doesn’t it look like the dark angel himself. His eyes strike me most of all. They’re a piercing sort of black. I think they stand out so much due to his pale, almost Irish complexion. I smile. I always knew the Devil was Black Irish, like me.
“So, you’ve come for me then?” I ask. My voice sounds strange to my ears, like it’s coming from a long distance.
“I have.” I’m disappointed not to hear a Donegal accent in his words.
I want to go to Toronto this weekend.
SlutWalk, a beautifully conceived and organized protest against this kind of women-hating, starts at central Queen’s Park at 1:30 this Sunday and winds up at Toronto Police Headquarters at 40 College St. Wear anything you like, the organizers told me when I emailed them. Because it isn’t what you’re wearing that matters, it’s that cops, and indeed rapists, will assess you whatever you wear. Their assessment will invariably be different from yours.
SlutWalk will feature people in all sorts of garments and gear, dressed for the office, clubbing, yoga, walking the dog, whatever it is that people wear as they go about their lives not asking to be raped. It is a message of love and strength to all women (and men), especially those who have been assaulted at the core of their being.
Well, I want to go to Toronto as long as I don’t have to file a police report about being sexually assaulted. This is what set off the SlutWalk.
“Women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized,” Toronto police Const. Michael Sanguinetti told a class on rape at Osgoode Hall Law School.
Yes, he said this recently. Yes, he said this as part of a class at a law school. No, attitudes like these are not remotely uncommon or marginalized.
Heather Mallick, a Toronto columnist who intends to participate in the walk, explains why that reasoning is wrong and harms victims. Along with that, I think it’s time to remind people how we actually prevent rape.
maymay delivered a talk last weekend on best practices for getting around the censorship that sex-positive sites face, whether their mission is entertainment or education. I wasn’t at the talk, but he’s helpfully posted the video and text (potential for NSFW material in the sidebar). As he notes, this information is useful for anyone facing censorship of their topic or message.
Censorship also happens in the form of service discrimination, not merely content blocking. For instance, after Wikileaks began releasing US diplomatic cables in December, 2010, it faced a series of extrajudicial attacks: Amazon kicked Wikileaks off its servers, Everydns.net withdrew its domain name, and PayPal froze WikiLeaks’ account. The amazing thing about this is that each and every one of these attacks has a sexual censorship precedent.
In other words, if you didn’t see this coming, you weren’t talking about sex loudly enough.
The folks who published the NYC Sex Blogger Calendar have had their PayPal account frozen and their funds seized not once, but twice, before they decided to ditch the service way back in 2008. Web celeb Violet Blue’s “sex-positive URL shortener,” vb.ly, had its domain name seized by the Libyan government in October, 2010. And just one month before Amazon cut off WikiLeaks, there was a big hoopla over Amazon’s initial defense of, then banning of a “Pedophile book” from their virtual shelves. Interestingly, Amazon initially said it wouldn’t pull the book because that would amount to censorship. Eventually, Amazon capitulated to public pressure and, of course, now the book is gone.
What do we do about this? Go find out.
