The Inherent Cultural Imperialism of Talking About What Poor People Eat

Wow, I was so hopeful reading "Chitlins, Tradition and Food Justice" by Carolyn Wysinger. When she started talking about tragedy-turned-tradition and how her aunt reacted to the news that she didn't like chitlins ("she informed me that 'I was a citified California kid who could eat weird stuff like hummus but not chitlins.' Then she 'told' on me to the rest of the family." ) I really thought I had finally found someone else who gets it...but she didn't.

The reason the Northern Lights Kroger has chitlins while the ones in richer, whiter neighborhoods have organic hummus isn't because "the man" is trying to keep us Northern Lights shoppers down and eating scraps. It's because the neighborhood is populated by people like her aunt. Stores want to make money, and you do that by selling the chitlins to people who demand chitlins, and organic hummus to people who demand organic hummus. You absolutely don't make money by trying to force food onto people that is so far removed from their cultural traditions and identity that they take offense. So Kroger isn't going to put goat meat or pig guts in Worthington or Bexley, and they're not gonna put any hoity-toity, zen yoga, California crap in the hood. There just aren't enough people who shop here regularly who want it--not because they're being forced, but because it's part of how they've come to see themselves.

You want to solve the obesity epidemic in food deserts? Then you need to change the very essence of the people who live there. Turn back the clock and make kale a comfort food for them instead of mac-and-cheese. Go back to the point in their childhood when a hamburger became an object of desire and replace it with steamed asparagus. Find the time when they learned to think of a cookie as a treat, and teach them instead to feel rewarded by a two-mile run.

We learn from older generations what to value, what feels good, what's worth pursuing and avoiding. Those communally-shared aspirations and aversions and the narrative we use to organize them into something coherent form our cultures. Culture is the matrix of our social bonding, and we are social creatures who need that bonding as much as we need anything. There's a reason people eat together when they gather for special occasions or to have fun. When you ask someone with a lifelong sweet tooth to stop liking sweets, you might as well be asking her to disown her family and change her name. It's not about "bad choices" so much as ranking other things like camaraderie and enjoyment as being more important than nutrition and fitness.

We can make apologies and say that the poor are obese because carbs are cheap--and we can point to a conspiracy between Big Ag and government to get us whipped up into a righteous indignation over this, with the likes of Michael Pollan and Jamie Oliver leading the charge--but you know what's even cheaper than high-calorie processed foods? Cabbage and dry beans. Nobody's going to get fat eating boiled beans and cabbage. But when's the last time anyone invited you to go watch the game and eat boiled cabbage at a sports bar? How many people are going to take a date out to eat beans? Who goes to a carnival looking forward to eating a cabbage leaf stuffed with lima beans unless it's also deep fried and covered with powdered sugar?

I like cabbage. I also like beans. And I can point to various cultures that value them as staples. I cannot, however, think of one culture that treats those two foods (without additional fats or carbs) as "fun" foods that serve as the center for social bonding. They're not. And if you tried to make cabbage and beans your mainstay because that's all you could afford, I bet you'd be miserable pretty quickly.

So what do we poor people, food desert or not, have to stave off the misery? Food stamps. We don't have vacations and concerts. We can't afford cruises and road trips. We don't go to music festivals or science fiction conventions. We don't hang out at gyms or craft shows or martial arts competitions. We don't do any of those spendy things middle-class people do outside of work that they think of as making their lives worth living.

What we do have--the only boon in our lives other than a once-a-year tax refund--is a balance at the beginning of every month saying we can buy several hundred dollars' worth of food. You can't pay your rent with food stamps. You can't use them to keep the electricity or gas turned on. You can't use them to get your car fixed or fueled or insured or registered. You can't use them to buy toothpaste or deodorant or toilet paper. You can't even use them to buy food if it's hot or served to eat on the spot. What you can do is buy groceries to take home and cook. Inevitably, you'll learn that cats will eat store-brand canned tuna and you can clean your house with vinegar or lemon juice. You might even fool around with trying to use baking soda as toothpaste and deodorant, or making Play-Doh and finger paint out of flour and food coloring. I remember one year for Christmas, I made ornaments out of dried apple slices and made braided breads to give people as gifts.

But most of that food is going to be eaten. You might not even have enough (with recent cuts, that's even more likely), but once a month, you can walk into a grocery store with the knowledge that you can have almost anything you want. You can fill an entire cart to overflowing, and as long as it's not all meat, you'll probably have enough to cover it all. You don't need to tally it in your head as you do with literally every single other expense in your life. For one day a month, you get to live and think and shop like a wealthy person. I mean, not really. It's still in the back of your mind that you've got to make this last all month, so you're going to be frugal, but if you want an apple or a pack of cookies, you can just grab it without thinking about how much it costs which is something you never get to do otherwise when you're poor. It's the only glut you know.

You've seen shoppers line up after Thanksgiving to get all those amazing discounts, right? The way they camp out and then battle each other for a half-price TV? Well, people on food stamps can't afford a new TV even at half-price, so that's an alien world. A sale means nothing when you're broke. But take that same sense of frenzy, that sense of being overwhelmed with rare, sudden, and momentary bounty, and you have some sense of what it's like to see your food stamp balance replenished at the beginning of the month.

When my family borrows a car to go on a big grocery shopping trip, the first thing we do when we get back to the car is start opening things up to eat them. The kids want a cookie or some candy. I want a soda. We might pass around some chips. It's a craving we've been feeling and unable to feed for maybe a week or two...or longer. For some people, it's heroine or weed or pills or alcohol that brings them relief. For us, it's a long-anticipated glucose rush. When the kids have a birthday party or we celebrate a holiday, there's nothing elegant about it. The meal isn't about exotic ingredients or preparation methods with French names. It's about whatever gets us that rush. (I prefer meat over sweets, myself, but price is a constraint, so you find work-arounds. I've eaten two packs of beef-flavored ramen noodles just while writing this.)

My point is that at the very root of it, we're dealing with strong, biological urges. Satisfying those urges feels good, so we make that satisfaction something we share with people we care about. It's something we do together. If you've ever gone out for sushi, think how you'd feel if a friend who came along with you brought a burger and fries along to eat while you have sushi. Or the other way--you and some friends grill burgers outside or go to a hamburger joint, but one of them packs a little bento box. By not joining in eating the same thing as the others, you're missing a major social aspect of the gathering. For this reason, when we eat with others as a form of social bonding, we eat what they're eating. When you buck the trend, you isolate yourself socially. This means we're talking about not just biological cravings, but psychological ones, too. We need acceptance.

What happens, then, when tragedy becomes tradition, as Carolyn Wysinger wrote about? What happens when the slave master throws the scraps of the pig carcass to his slaves, and the slaves' children grow up with that as their fond memory of  childhood? What happens when that slop becomes a part of your cultural identity? I'll tell you: it becomes a source of pride, because it's part of your identity as a member of a community that has survived hardship. When someone outside that community tries to exert their supremacy by devaluing the things that define you, you either let them, or you fight back, as Wysinger's aunt did. You devalue whatever they're holding up as supreme and declare your own thing to be supreme. That's how you assert your equality. "I don't want your fruity ol' couscous anyway. I got venison!"

In that situation, what would happen if Wysinger got her way...if the grocery store where her aunt shops stopped carrying chitlins and replaced them with hummus? Would her aunt feel liberated and empowered, now that the man is no longer forcing those slave scraps on her? Or is she more apt, as I think she would, to feel like an outsider was imposing his culture on her against her wishes? If she couldn't get what she wanted because a grocery store executive or public official made the decision that she should give it up her tradition and adopt a way he deems to be better, why on Earth would anybody think she'd be eager to embrace that?

It's an insult. When affluent white people decide that their taste in food is superior to the that of the poor brown people on the other side of town, and task themselves with the "merciful" mission of making those poor brown people give up their wretched ways and eat the way the affluent white people say is proper, that's the very definition of cultural imperialism. There are bigger hurdles here than just diabetes.

What's good for the goose...

I saw a post on a liberal page on Facebook criticizing Republicans for thinking the nation would be better off if everyone had guns and nobody had health care. The Republicans don't have a monopoly on idiocy, though. To their credit, they haven't been applying anti-gun arguments to health care coverage. Imagine if they did:

"Nobody needs that!"

"What do you want it for? What kind of injury or disease are you planning to get?"

"You're paranoid! People only get sick in the movies."

"If you want to be in a hospital, go work in one."

"Have you been properly trained to handle this health care? You should have to take a class so you don't do something stupid like running out and getting your limbs amputated as soon as you get your health insurance."

"You shouldn't be allowed to have health insurance, because someone might steal it and use it illegally."

"You should have to go through intensive screening first to prove to society that you're not going to abuse this privilege: a criminal background check, a psychological test, character references, and a signed letter from the director of your local health department certifying you to use health insurance."

"Health insurance doesn't keep you from getting sick! It just puts more people in the hospital."

"Studies show that you're more likely to die in a hospital if you have health insurance than if you don't. You're safer not having it."

"You're a coward. Only pussies sit around worrying about getting sick."

"If you avoid risky behaviors and don't do things you're not supposed to, you won't get sick or injured in the first place."

"You think having health insurance will make you immortal. It won't!"

"I can see having insurance to cover sports injuries, but covering injuries from violence will just encourage more violence."

"Studies show that doctors, nurses, and pharmacists are more likely than the general population to abuse prescription drugs. That just proves they're not safe for anybody. We should end prescription drug coverage."

"I've got an idea: we let people go to the doctor, but we charge 'em $5,000 for an aspirin. That way, nobody will go unless they REALLY NEED to!"

Goosebump Politics: Warriors and Worriers

My kids were watching "Goosebumps" for the first time tonight. For those not familiar, it was a TV show in the '90s made from a popular line of horror books for children. Watching a few episodes with them, I noted a heavy reliance on a standard trope in horror, a fear we all learn as children: being dependent on someone else to protect you, and then having that person dismiss or disbelieve in immediate threats to your safety. There's a monster under your bed, and only Mom or Dad can protect you from it, but they refuse to even come look under the bed because they don't believe there's anything there.

It occurred to me that there's a similar thing going on in the gun control debate, and that this is why it becomes such an emotional conflict. Observant people see that in instances of interpersonal violence, the police typically don't show up until after the fact. They're not there to head off the attack. They just snap the pictures and interview witnesses after the damage is done. Some folks react to this by preparing to fend off attacks themselves until the police arrive: arming themselves, training in martial arts, buying stronger locks, etc. Others simply call for better prevention—more police, more cameras, block watches, training in anger management and conflict resolution, etc. The first group doesn't necessarily rule out the methods of the second group, but the second group wants nothing to do with the methods of the first.

The first group is convinced of the inevitability of violence. They don't trust any prevention method to be 100% effective. When they ready themselves for an attack and other people dismiss their concerns or try to outlaw their solutions, they're experiencing what our monster-under-the-bed kid is experiencing when he screams for his parents to investigate the growling under his bed, only to be told he's going to be punished if he doesn't go to sleep.

The second group of people, who prefer preventative solutions rather than tackling threats head-on, feel that attackers cannot be defeated, only outwitted. To them, the only way to stay safe is to scour from their lives all potential for danger. It's like they're in a zombie movie where the zombies are unstoppable, so the only way to be safe is to prevent people from becoming zombies in the first place...and just to be safe, they chain up anyone who's at risk of becoming a zombie. Common rabble with guns are what are scaring these folks in the first place, so they see letting even more civilians have guns as being like trying to protect yourself from zombies by making more zombies.

These are both visceral fears, and people who are viscerally afraid tend not to think clearly. That's a bad engine for politics.We can never reach consensus if the only agreement possible looks to at least half the people like letting the zombies eat us.

As any thriller fan knows, there's another character who regularly appears in survival-horror flicks: the one who's paralyzed with fear. They either panic or go immediately into deep denial, and they invariably do something incredibly stupid that endangers all the other characters. These people exist in the real world, too. In the movies, they often act as a stand-in for the protector who won't do anything. In the real world, they tend to align themselves politically with the people who say prevention is enough. If you want to pretend a problem doesn't exist, you'll be able to maintain that illusion longer if you hide from the problem rather than locking horns with it. 

Some stories will have a pivotal moment where the panicker gets it together and turns into a warrior. Other times, he just get killed off--usually fairly early on--and viewers from the first group celebrate. Of course, these movies are made for them. I'm not sure what a movie made for the second group would look like, but you can be sure it wouldn't be at all exciting. The conflict would have to all be in the backstory. The film would open in Utopia, and we might hear a tale of how a noble visionary crafted an elegant solution that enabled her society to evolve into something like a cross between Pandora and Lothlórien...but without all the monsters and scary weapons.

Such things occur to me throughout the day

I've had a number of random thoughts bumping around in my head that may or may not open some interesting discussion:

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 I've long felt that the positions of the Democratic and Republican parties on gun control are the opposite of what they ought to be if they were being ideologically consistent. Democrats claim to champion minorities, the oppressed, the underdog, democracy, everybody getting a vote, equal rights, and so on. You'd think they would be against giving the powerful elite a monopoly on violence. You'd think they'd want to empower the oppressed instead of the oppressors. You'd think they'd try to equip the downtrodden to resist tyranny.

The Republicans, on the other hand, hold that the elite--the innovators, the gifted, the achievers--are more competent and deserving of leadership and privilege. They're of the opinion that rich people deserve to be richer than the rest of us, and that the world just works better when we get out of the way and let those natural-born leaders run everything. It would stand to reason that those Chosen Few would have a much easier time running things if the common rabble were powerless to interfere. It makes no sense, then, that they want guns to be plentiful, legal, and easy to get, so that every ignorant yahoo is capable of mounting an insurrection.

Likewise, their positions on abortion should be switched. If Democrats belong to the party of compassion, they should be the ones whose hearts are bleeding for a little bundle of cells that has the potential to one day grow into a baby. The Republicans, you would think, would be mandating abortions for...well, basically anyone who's not one of them. Anyone who's even suspected of not being a rich, white, able-bodied, English-speaking, heterosexual, cisgendered, Protestant Republican would be snuffed out before they could draw their first breath.

I've recently developed a hypothesis to account for this inconsistency. The parties aren't formed along ideological lines, as I'd first thought. Instead, they conform to gender stereotypes. The Republicans are the men and the Democrats are the women.

Think about this. The Democrats envision a world of sugar and spice where everyone's nice, where everyone settles conflicts by talking about their feelings, where aggression and machismo are shunned, and where we judge the rightness or wrongness of a person's actions by how sorry we feel for them because of unrelated circumstances. The Republicans, on the other hand, favor institutions like the military, law enforcement, big corporations, and contact sports, where domination, aggression, penetration, and insensitivity rule. Democrats think Republicans are dicks; Republicans think Democrats are pussies.

If there's anything to this, then there's really no hope of overcoming the political polarization in this country unless our value systems become a lot more androgynous.

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In discussions of race relations, gender issues, and the like, one often hears it said that "you can't know what it's like" or "you can't possibly understand" some other person's experiences. I think this idea insults both parties. It presumes that one person can't articulate his experiences in a way that's easy for others to understand, and it presumes that the other person lacks empathy and basic listening comprehension skills. I wouldn't argue that one person can know intuitively what it's like to walk in someone else's shoes, but there's no reason they can't be taught. It seems to me that the purpose of these statements is to shut down communication and to elevate the status of the person claiming to have "unknowable" experience above that of the person who's allegedly too dim to understand.

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In discussions of privilege, I think it would be helpful to distinguish among three different types of privilege.
   1. Freedom from externally-imposed oppression
   2. Freedom from natural obstacles
   3. Freedom from self-repression

Let's say, for example, that a privilege you have that I don't is that you're the kind of a person who can go to a gym to lift weights and I'm not. What does that really mean? Well, we have to ask why I can't. If the gym has a policy of only approving memberships for serious bodybuilders like you and not for fat guys like me, then that's an example of externally-imposed oppression. If I'm paralyzed from the nose down, or if I'm stranded on an island where there is no gym, then I'm physically incapable of going to a gym to lift weights. That would be an example of a natural obstacle. If it turns out there is a gym nearby that I can get to and afford, and they'd be happy to have me, but I don't go because I feel self-conscious about working out in front of other people because I imagine they're judging me, then that's an example of self-repression.

Dividing obstacles into these three categories would help us to better identify whom, if anyone, is to blame for a particular problem and what, if anything, can be done about it. Despite all reassurances to the contrary, the label of privilege has been weaponized. It's used to shame others into silence, or to invalidate their opinions. We need tools for determining whether that's ever actually justified, and for demonstrating when it's not.

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People consider reading books to be a virtue, but watching TV and movies to be a vice. Even reading on the internet gets trashed while books are sanctified. Why is that? Why don't we refer to people who lay around on the couch reading books all day as lazy or addicted, rather than studious? If you're talking about great books and trashy TV programs, then of course, you're comparing the best to the worst, but it's about content, not medium. I don't see how reading trashy romance novels is superior to watching, say, a documentary or a TED talk. What is the particular virtue of taking in printed-on-paper words through your eyeballs instead of taking in spoken words through your ears? Personally, I find instructive videos to be of far greater educational value than written instructions. I like to see a thing demonstrated.

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COTA sucks so bad they're paying people to ride now

COTA (that's the Columbus bus system, for you out-of-towners) is giving away bus tickets and passes to Huntington Park to go see the fireworks this year. To get them, you leave a comment on their Facebook page stating why you ride COTA. I lived through the nightmare of sitting on a bus for hours on High Street trying to get home from Red, White, and Boom once already. After discovering how quick and easy it was to drive down a half-hour before the show, park under the Statehouse, walk down to the riverside behind COSI, and then drive just 30 minutes on Cleveland Avenue to get back home, I have no desire to attempt riding the bus downtown for that event again. If I did want to claim a pair of tickets, however, this is the comment I'd have left explaining what appeals to me about riding the bus in Columbus.

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1. A chance to explore: When I take a car or bike or walk to where I'm going, I just go straight there and straight back. Instead of spending just 15 minutes going in a straight line, I can spend an hour and a half on COTA seeing parts of the city I didn't think I had any reason to visit.

2. The opportunity to contribute to something worthwhile: Why take a 20-minute walk when I can take a 12-minute walk and pay $2.00 to ride the rest of the way (and another $2.00 for the return trip)? The city needs my money so they can fund things like a massive, diesel-powered bus transporting only two passengers.

3. It's a good way to get in shape: Walking no further than your driveway is a quick way to get soft around the middle. When you ride COTA, you get to walk, sometimes as much as a mile, just to get to the stop you need. And when you look on Google maps to find out when the next bus runs, you'll find one route for a bus that leaves in two minutes, one that leaves in eleven minutes, and two more that will make you miss your appointment entirely, meaning you get to *sprint* to the bus stop, often only to see the tail end of the bus in the distance. Advanced fitness level riders may want to try outrunning the bus to the next stop. In moderate traffic, it's possible. Slower people will have to march back home, look up another route, and repeat the drill. Also, learning to fit yourself into those seats without banging your knees or touching the people around you is a great way to avoid spending money paying for yoga classes.

4. Structure: When I drive somewhere, I leave whenever I want, take whatever route I want to get there, make other stops along the way without having to wait 40 minutes to leave again (Shoot, I forgot to ask for a transfer! Guess I'll have to spend the two bucks I was gonna use to get home.), listen to the radio without headphones, and enjoy a beverage while I drive. If it's too late to stop in somewhere to eat, I might even go through a drive-thru. All this convenience and self-indulgence makes people soft and causes them to develop a sense of entitlement. Riding the bus, you develop the discipline needed to conform to someone else's rules and schedule. Conformity is good. I think the only way they could really improve on this would be to mail me a list of places to go every week, with a time table saying when I should report to each location.

5. Minimalist living in the moment: With a car, I might buy one or two weeks' worth of groceries at a time. Such hoarding should be discouraged. When riding the bus, you can only carry what you can put on your lap or in an empty seat next to you (unless you want to block the aisle--that can be a real conversation starter). With my own car or truck, I can buy things like building materials to fix up my house, chicken feed and soil amendments to grow my own food, or large tools that let me do any number of things to improve my life. Who needs all that stuff? If you can't carry it on the bus, you don't need it in your life. Just go to your job, return to your rental, read books, and sleep. Anything else is just likely to get you into trouble anyway.

6. Daily dose of drama: Left to my own devices, I seek out a pretty low-key life. If someone doesn't observe basic rules of civility, I tend not to associate with them. I don't watch Jerry Springer, professional wrestling, or other sorts of things where the main event is loud, belligerent people shouting foul utterances at one another. That is to say, I seek out a sheltered, insulated life where I can create for myself the illusion that most people are polite and well behaved. Sharing space with other bus riders gives me a good, hard slap back into reality. I get to hear arguments, loud and very personal discussions, and women getting hit on with pick-up lines like "You ain't never been with a black man, have you?"

7. Jesus: Being as I'm not a Christian, I almost never step foot inside a church. As any good Christian can tell you, this is a threat to my immortal soul. Fortunately, there's usually someone on board willing to share the Gospel (or at least their version of it) with everyone within earshot, thereby giving me periodic inoculations against the powers of Satan.

Which Party Gets Your Kids?

I swear I need to start a new political party.

In this article, David Ferguson writes about an ad that Melissa Harris-Perry did on MSNBC, Rush Limbaugh's and Glenn Beck's criticism of it, and her response to their criticism. For those who can't be bothered to read the article, here's the deal: Harris-Perry's ad was basically a message of "it takes a village to raise a child." Beck and Limbaugh threw a fit about it because, well, it was on MSNBC, and it's apparently their job to throw a fit about anything any liberal says. Harris-Perry got a lot of hate mail from FOX viewers, and rather than backing down, she "doubled down" and emphasized the point she had already made. Okay, now that you're up to speed, here's what I have to say about it.

Limbaugh wasn't so quick to defend the sanctity of the nuclear family back in 1995, when his boy Newt Gingrich was trying to seize the children of parents who received welfare benefits. Gingrich's "modest proposal" was to steal poor parents' children and force them into orphanages, because to him, raising a child in poverty was child abuse, and a kid would be better off being raised in a state institution than by parents who didn't have a lot of money. We saw echoes of this a couple years ago when he objected to child labor laws, saying that poor children ought to be forced to get jobs. When it comes to treating the poor like livestock, breaking up families like slave traders used to do, the Right doesn't give a shit about the sanctity of the nuclear family. Like every other argument they employ, they don it only when it suits their purposes, and doff it just as quickly when it doesn't.

But the message they're attacking...I can't say it's no better, because it is. It still leaves a lot to be desired, though. It's this statement in particular that got to me:

"Of course, parents can and should raise their children with their own values, but they should be able to do so in a community that provides safe places to play, quality food to eat, terrific schools to attend, and economic opportunities to support them. No individual household can do that alone. We have to build that world together."

I daresay a good many homeschooling families who farm or run a family business would beg to differ. A family who lives in a concrete box, in a stack of concrete boxes, among row after row and block after block of similar concrete boxes, where the only safe place to play is one provided by the government, where the only food available is the food produced by somebody else, where the only option for educating a child is to ship him off to the indoctrination center, where the only economic opportunity is to sell hours of your life to other people's companies for their profit...undoubtedly, such a family can't provide these things alone. They're at a disadvantage. They're shackled to a life of urban interdependence.

But to make a general statement that no single household can provide these things is like sticking a hen in a battery cage and saying no individual hen can find her own food. It's truth in only very limited circumstances. I don't doubt that those limited circumstances are the only world Ms. Harris-Perry knows, so I don't believe she's trying to intentionally mislead anyone. But as a matter of cultural sensitivity, if nothing more, she needs to be aware that her statement is a slap in the face to households that DO manage to independently provide these things for their families.

Ever Fly a Kite in a Thunderstorm?

Religious Authority
 
I was raised as a Christian. As such, I was taught to see Jesus as a role model, his actions and teachings as the ideal to which I should aspire. I came to embrace the values of mercy, compassion, self-sacrifice, forgiveness, acceptance, charity, and love. And then I got a little older and started listening to Christian clergy. Some of them said things like, "Anyone who's not baptized can't go to Heaven." As someone who valued mercy and forgiveness, I found that idea offensive. Some of them said that gay people were an abomination, that they were doing something God didn't want them to do. I thought that if God didn't want them to be that way, he wouldn't have made them so. Given that I valued love and acceptance, I thought it was wrong to judge so harshly someone who was just being what God made them. I knew good people following good philosophies and moral codes who weren't Christian, but some of the Christian clergy said these people were condemned to Hell for all eternity, because they had heard the Gospel and rejected it. I felt that anyone whose life so closely resembled that of Jesus ought not be penalized for the fact that he had a hard time believing a lot of highly implausible stories in the Bible.

And in feeling these things--these things that I'd have thought made me a good Christian--I was in opposition to the teachings of the Christian authorities. They were the ones who declared what made a good Christian and what made a bad one, and I was clearly a bad one...because I embraced Jesus' values more than theirs. The mere fact that there was a conflict between their values and his should have been enough to call their authority on such matters into question, I'd think, but I was but a young and insignificant peon, a stray sheep, and not a graduate of a divinity school with a whole church coming to listen to me every week. I was the subordinate and they were the superiors. That automatically made me wrong and them right. They owned the word "Christian," and if they said anyone who believed what I believed was a bad one, then I was a bad one. There's no arguing with it.

For most of my life, I've found myself in a similar position in regard to the word "feminist." The scripture of that religion says that if you believe in equal rights for both sexes, and that if you believe that women are human beings, then you're a feminist. If I hear of a woman being discriminated against or being treated unfairly, I think that's wrong and I say so. I regard women and men as equals. I thought that made me a feminist. That's what all the feminist slogans claim, anyway.

But the matriarchs of this religion, the angry, misandrist thugs who preach their gospel of patriarchal conspiracies and rape culture, disagree. They're pretty much convinced that I and every other man desperately despise every woman alive and are in a conspiracy to rape women and keep them from advancing in society. If a man and a woman both take a test, and the woman fails while the man passes, it's not because those individuals scored according to their own unique, individual abilities. No, it's rigged. It's sexist. They say so, and you and I aren't to say anything to the contrary. It's like the Inquisition--admit to the allegations, and you're a sinner deserving of the worst punishment our society can think up for a sexual predator and a bigot. Deny it, and you must be lying--proof that you can't be trusted. They're the authorities on this. They own the word "feminist." They set the rules as to how it can be used. If they say I'm not a feminist, I must not be. And they not only say I'm not, they say it's not even possible for me to be one, since I'm a man.

"B-b-but...your T-shirt says 'FEMINISM IS THE RADICAL NOTION THAT WOMEN ARE PEOPLE.' I believe that! I share that notion. I believe women are people."

"My T-shirt??? Who gave you permission to stare at my tits, pig?!? You need to turn off that male gaze and get out of my sight. I'd rip your balls off, but you clearly don't have any."

So I guess I'm not a feminist any more than I was ever a Christian.

Rape Culture

Given that I'm not a feminist and therefore have no need of approval from the feminist clergy, I'd like to raise an objection to one of their articles of faith that's been getting a lot of play in the blogosphere of late. That's the issue of "rape culture." It's one of those dog whistle words where, if you take issue with it, the assumption is that you must hold a position in direct opposition to the one held by the speaker. She's anti-rape, so if you have a problem with her dog whistle word, it must be because you're pro-rape, and that's what you'll get accused of every time for just speaking up. But as I said, I have no need of the feminist clergy's approval, so I'm speaking up.

I'm not pro-rape, and I'm guessing you're not, either. I'm guessing, in fact, that you don't know anyone who is, because if you ever encountered such a person, you'd go to great lengths to dissociate yourself from that person. I'm guessing that when apparently large portions of the city of Steubenville, Ohio, tried to cover up and make excuses for the rape of a teenage girl by some high school football players, you were as horrified as I was, because who the hell takes the side of the rapist??? I'm guessing that you were speechless with shock and outrage hearing news programs that were all apparently sympathetic to the rapists while not seeming to care at all about the young woman they brutally attacked. I'm guessing that even if you were jaded and hardened to the cruelties of the world, you were still experiencing a little cognitive dissonance hearing so many people line up to support the rapists, because since when are sexual predators regarded as anything BUT something to be scraped off the bottoms of our shoes???

Sex offenders are total pariahs in our society. We actually go overboard in punishing them. If you murder someone and do your time, you get out and move on with your life. But if you flash somebody or touch someone's no-no parts without their express consent and you serve a prison sentence for it, that's not good enough. We need to keep on shaming you and controlling you for the rest of your life. We make you register with the Sheriff wherever you live for the rest of your life. We tell you where you can't live, and it may be so restrictive that there's no place in town where you can live. And if you do live around other people, we'll send out postcards with your name, picture, address, and crime on it out to all your neighbors every so often for the rest of your life, because just branding the word "rapist" into your forehead would be too good for you. If we could somehow get away with neutering and lobotomizing you, we'd do it. To hell with the Eight Amendment. This isn't excessive. It doesn't matter if you just brushed against a breast or a buttock in an elevator. In America, there is no crime--not terrorism, not murder, not arson, nothing---that is as bad as causing another person to feel uncomfortable in a sexual context. You can beat them to within an inch of their life. That's okay, maybe just a misdemeanor, depending on the circumstances. It might warrant disciplinary action at a school or workplace and nothing more. We'll let children play violent games and see all kinds of mayhem in movies. But let someone show a little skin, and we've got to put a triple-X rating on that nasty porn.

In other words, it's safe to say that our society has a pretty serious hangup about sex. That's the culture here.

The word "culture" refers to societal norms. It's the thoughts, behaviors, traditions and arts by which we collectively define ourselves as a people. It's what makes us "us" and distinguishes us from all the civilizations that aren't us. You can say we have a gun culture, and I'd agree with you. The heroes in our movies carry guns and use them. Our authority figures carry guns, and there's no shame associated with that. Our everyday language contains gun metaphors for totally innocuous things. We tell young people to "aim high," and we don't think of that as promoting violence. We "set our sights" on a completion date for a project even if we're not snipers. When we prepare ourselves for a challenge, we go out "loaded for bear" even if we've never been hunting. When we make a wild guess, we "take a shot in the dark." A "flash in the pan" refers to a malfunctioning musket, but we don't have to be black powder shooters to say it. Nobody thinks we're contemplating suicide if we talk about "biting the bullet." These phrases have been normalized in our language because for most of our history, guns have been an acceptable, normal part of everyday life. We have embraced guns as part of our culture.

By contrast, when we say we're "getting screwed," "getting shafted," or "taking it up the ass," it has definite negative connotations. Nobody feels good about "being told to bend over and take it." A disastrous situation is said to be "fucked up," maybe even "fucked up beyond all recognition." None of these are happy or benign images. They're all thick with the idea of unfairness and victimization and violation. And the heroes of our movies and folk stories definitely do not rape people. 

In our culture, rapists are deviants. We even have laws against rape, believe it or not. Pretty serious ones. The culture of the rapists, then, isn't our culture. It's counter-cultural. It's antisocial. But when we say, "We live in a rape culture," or "We're immersed in rape culture," it makes it sound as though we're the deviants and the rapists are the pillars of society who get to define our culture and determine whether or not we conform to it properly.

I don't think that's anywhere close to an accurate reflection of the reality of our society. And for that reason, I have a problem with people using the term "rape culture" to refer to American culture in general. Yes, it makes me uncomfortable--not because I'm pro-rape and the term makes me feel properly ashamed of myself, as the feminist clergy would have everyone within earshot believe, but rather because it sounds...schizophrenic. Listening to a person who's utterly convinced that our entire culture is built around encouraging and protecting rapists is like listening to a person who's utterly convinced that the ruling elite are all a bunch of shape-shifting, evil lizards from another planet. I'm willing to compromise on this, though. We can call it "rapist culture" to make it clear that we're talking specifically about a subset of people (a subculture) instead of about the culture at large.

But really, I don't own these words, so I'm in no position to negotiate. If the feminist matriarchs say we're all rapists, I guess we really are. We must just be repressing the memory of our crimes...or we haven't committed them yet, but the matriarchs know our hearts better than we do.

Blame and Responsibility

And one final point, as long as I'm already putting myself out here as flame bait--what is it with so many feminists' complete inability to compartmentalize on the issue of victim blaming? Rape is a crime against a person, and like any other crime against a person, the guilt or innocence of the perpetrator is not contingent on how easy a mark the victim was. If you steal a car and get caught, whether you get punished or not does not depend on whether you hot wired the car or stole a one that the owner foolishly left running. It's the same crime. In both cases, the thief is legally and morally in the wrong, equally so in both cases. The victim's actions do not have any bearing on the guilt of the offender.

That's established. I concede that the driver is not to blame for the actions of a thief. Nobody has a "right" to steal a car just because the driver makes it easy. Agreed? Okay. Let's set that fact aside in a box and call it "Exhibit A: Guilty Criminals Are Guilty."

Now let's move on to Exhibit B. Let's say you have a car, and it means a great deal to you. You don't have more than liability insurance on it, and you don't have a lot of money to spend on it, so if anything happens to it, you're out of luck. Out of the kindness of your heart, you let me borrow this car. I back out of your driveway without bothering to see what's behind me, and I narrowly avoid an accident. Then I get out my smartphone and see what's going on in the world of Facebook as I drive the car away from your house, never causing any damage more serious than scraping parked cars' side mirrors a little. That'll buff right out. Probably.

It's a hot night, so when I arrive at the bar, I leave the engine running so I can leave the air conditioner on. I spend the next three hours getting drunker and drunker, telling random strangers about the cool ride I've got sitting outside, even suggesting to a few that if they're nice to me, I might let them drive it. When I leave, I'm all over the road, but somehow, I manage to only put a few small dents in your car. (Hey! Who are you to judge? I'll get it fixed!) Anyway, I pull into a gas station. As I step out of the car, I nearly fall down. I'm not stupid. I know I'm in no shape to drive. I see a pretty sober looking man sitting outside the gas station drinking a soda, so I say to him, "Hey Buddy! Can you drive me home? Pretty please? I'll pay you. Here, I have money. See? Please? Here. Here's my key. I'll just be a minute. I gotta go take a leak. Don't leave till I get back, now, okay? Awright, good man. I'll just be a minute."

I fall asleep in the restroom, but when the attendant yells at me, I wake up and emerge into the sunshine. And would you believe both the car and the man who promised to drive me home are both gone? No note or anything! He just stole it! I specifically told him not to leave until I got back, and he did it anyway!

Let's call this "Exhibit B: Victims Sometimes Enable Criminals by Being Reckless, Irresponsible, or Naive."

Who's fault is it the car got stolen? Not mine. We already established that. See "Exhibit A." Oh, you're mad at me anyway? Why not be mad at yourself? I just did what you did--I trusted somebody.

I propose that "Exhibit A" and "Exhibit B" can exist simultaneously. They're not mutually exclusive. The fact that I was reckless, irresponsible, and naive with your car is true, but it does not cancel out the fact that the guy who stole it is wholly and exclusively to blame for his actions. He shouldn't get a lighter sentence just because I tossed him the key, unless he can demonstrate that he really did misunderstand and thought I was giving him the car. Maybe he doesn't speak English and thought I had walked away after he had waited for a couple hours. Even in that case, he still shouldn't get off scot free. There has to be some kind of due diligence to make sure I wasn't coming back. If it's proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he knew I wasn't giving him the car and he understood that he was ripping me off, he ought to get just as serious a sentence as any other car thief.

So what about me? Do I get off scot free? You've had that car for 20 years and never so much as scraped the paint. Had you not loaned it to me, it probably wouldn't have gotten stolen. It could have! A thief could have sneaked into your garage in the middle of the night, hot wired it, and sped away before you could do anything to stop him. It happens all the time, and just because it never happened before doesn't mean it wouldn't happen eventually. As in the case with my thief, your thief would be wholly guilty. It doesn't matter if his attorney points out that your garage was easy to break into, or that it was such a hot looking car the thief couldn't reasonably be expected not to steal it if he had the chance. No dice. If he does wrong, he deserves to pay.

But can we really say that my actions had nothing to do with your car getting stolen? I didn't ask him to steal it. But am I truly faultless? Does the validity of "Exhibit A" really cancel out "Exhibit B?" When you can finally afford to replace your car, can you think of a good reason not to let me borrow it again? Why? "Exhibit A" says it's not my fault it got stolen. In fact, I'm going to be strident about it.

"It is not my fault that car got stolen. I am not to blame for the actions of a car thief. He did it, not me. You have no business shaming me for something I'm not responsible for. I can get drunk and ask strangers to drive me home if I want to, and that doesn't give them the right to steal from me. I shouldn't have to change my behavior. Don't tell me anything. Tell the people who might steal cars that they shouldn't steal. I didn't do anything wrong!"

Does that strike you as a particularly mature and responsible response to an event like that? Or do you pretty well expect that the next time I get a hold of a car, it will get stolen again? How does that happen, do you think? Fate just picks on some people, I guess. Some people get their cars stolen over and over and over, and other people never have any trouble with car thieves. Why is that? You might be inclined to think that the people who don't have trouble have ugly cars that nobody wants to steal, but sometimes ugly cars get stolen, too. According to the reasoning behind arguments I've heard from some feminists about why rape happens, we are to presume from the fact that ugly, old cars get stolen that nice, snazzy, expensive cars don't get stolen way more often. Because, y'know, it's not about the cars. It's about power. Someone who steals your car for a joyride isn't doing it for the thrill of the ride, especially not the thrill of a ride in a stolen Lamborghini. No, it's just about controlling you and making you feel bad. Yep. Feminism 101. That's on the test. There's no thrill there. It's just about power and subjugation.

Here's the thing--even if cars I drive get stolen again and again, maybe it isn't my fault. Maybe I live in a bad neighborhood. Maybe, through no fault of my own, I've got an enemy who just happens to be a car thief. Maybe I'm too trusting because I overestimate the good in people. I shouldn't have to give up driving and cower in a corner, constantly afraid of what a thief might steal next. I shouldn't. Even if I did, I might get victimized anyway, and it wouldn't be my fault.

And yet still, that doesn't make it okay to get plastered and toss a stranger your car keys at a gas station.

Do you get what I'm saying here? "Exhibit A" is true. Even if you don't act like the person in "Exhibit B," you might still get victimized through no fault of your own. But just because those two things are true doesn't mean that I don't still need to act more responsibly than I did in "Exhibit B" if I don't want my car getting stolen.

Yeah, my car. That's the thing that's different about rape. You're not borrowing somebody else's car. It's yours. What gets taken gets taken from you. No, nobody has any right to rape you, not even if you're drunk, not even if you tell someone to take you back to his apartment and you take your clothes off and start kissing him. Nothing makes it okay for someone to rape you. See "Exhibit A." But if you don't want it to happen, see "Exhibit B"  and don't act like that.

Does that make you mad? Does it feel like I'm putting the burden of responsibility on you for avoiding someone else's bad behavior? Welcome to the concept of defensive driving. Just because you have the legal right-of-way doesn't mean it's smart to drive aggressively to keep a bad driver from cutting in front of you. Just because the guy twice your size who's spoiling for a fight called you a name doesn't mean you have to take the bait. Maybe it won't matter. Maybe you'll wreck anyway. Maybe that bully will still come after you. And maybe you'll still get raped. But if you want to reduce the odds, the first step is to recognize what you do have control over and what you don't.

What you don't have control over is the actions of other people. We, collectively as a society, can do our best to try to look out for each other and keep bad guys from hurting you, but we may fail. The only way you can guarantee you don't get attacked is to lock yourself in a cage where only you have the key--and even that's not foolproof. Liberty is dangerous. Having a free society means we're going to be at risk. We can't eliminate that risk 100%. The only way to effectively eliminate any possibility of rape would be to preemptively identify everyone who might possibly do such a thing at some point in the future, and then permanently remove them from society. History shows us that when social engineers get such ideas along with political power, we get mass graves as a result.

I don't want that, and I hope you don't either. So what can we do to keep you safe? Nothing? No, not nothing, though a more realistic goal is safer, not safe. You can be safer if you don't make yourself an easy target. Be hard to attack.

I used the word "attack," there instead of "rape," for a reason. When we train soldiers and police officers and prison guards how to keep themselves alive, that's what we're teaching them--how to be hard to attack, and how to survive if you are attacked. A rape is an attack. Makes no difference whether the attacker is punching you or fucking you. It's violence. So let's stop treating this like they're two different things. It doesn't matter which part of your body they're abusing. If someone can't attack you successfully, they can't rape you. Imagine cops and soldiers saying, "Well, there's no way to be 100% sure I'll never be killed, so I might as well just get rid of this armor and these weapons and quit paying attention to my surroundings. I can be lighthearted now and skip tra-la-la through the wildflowers and nobody will hurt me, because they're not supposed to."

Our population has a certain percentage of psychopaths. These are people who will try to hurt you just because it suits their purposes, and they don't care if we all think it's wrong. Public Service Announcements instructing them not to attack people aren't going to be effective. You do not have total control over their actions. In fact, you have almost none. Even our society, collectively, does not have total control over their actions. We maybe have some percentage. For the percentage that we don't control, you're vulnerable. They're going to attack you. When they do, are you going to try to increase their odds of failure, or are you just going to roll over and surrender because you don't feel it's your responsibility to keep yourself safe?

If it's not your responsibility to keep yourself safe, who's responsibility is it? The attacker's? Yes, see "Exhibit A." Is that okay with you? Are you going to trust your safety to a psychopath who wants to rape and/or kill you? That's about as smart as lending me your keys a second time. That's the thing--the rapist has a responsibility not to rape you, but if you want to lessen the odds of your getting raped, the smart thing to do is to not let the rapist be solely responsible for that. Don't let him have all the power if you don't have to. Seize whatever bit of power over that situation that you can for yourself. What's that mean? All the standard advice you've heard in the self-defense courses. Travel in groups. Be careful who you trust. Learn to fight. Arm yourself. Learn to size up a situation and learn to avoid dangerous ones. Don't send mixed signals, especially to people you're not interested in. The only person you can count on to protect you is you.

You might say, "But I don't want to have to always be thinking about the idea that someone might attack me. I don't want to live in fear. I'd rather just put it out of my mind and not think about it." Fine. That's your prerogative. Just be aware that you're the one who may someday pay the price for that approach. Maybe for you the day-to-day peace of mind is worth the balloon payment of being the unsuspecting victim of a crisis someday. That's not for me. Personally, I don't see it as being about living in fear. The more prepared I am to deal with whatever is thrown at me, the less afraid I feel, so I've learned to look out for my own safety.

And it may be that none of that does any good in a particular situation. But just because body armor doesn't make you immortal, that doesn't mean you don't wear it when you know you're going into battle. It's a numbers game, not a coin toss. You can't guarantee that you'll win, but you can improve your odds...both of winning and of losing.

And THAT, dear friends, is why I and so many others are incredulous when we hear people promoting the idea that because rapists are responsible for their own actions, you shouldn't feel obliged to protect yourself by taking countermeasures. If you've already been raped, your therapist should be telling you it's not your fault and that there's nothing you could have done to stop it. That's healing and kind. But if you haven't been raped yet and someone is telling you to stop protecting yourself because, gosh darnit, that's just not your responsibility, that person is trying to get you raped. They're trying to increase the odds by getting you to make yourself a more vulnerable, and thus more likely, target. Forgive us for getting mad at these people on your behalf. We're not siding with the rapists. We're not rape apologists. We're not blaming the victims or slut shaming or participating in rape culture or any of the other feminist buzzwords the matriarchs use as labels to discredit anyone capable enough of nuanced thought to disagree with them while not being 180° opposed to their position.