(no subject)

Today and Friday are reasonable rhythm days, and there's not a sign that next week will be unreasonable. Well, Monday will be a in-engagement day.

This weekend has music on both nights: my ex Boss plays clarinet in the Nova Vista Symphony and we'll go see their performance of the Verdi Requiem. Then there's a modern music on baroque instruments concert.

...

As i've been wrestling with anger and work intensity, i've been slowly reading an issue of The Atlantic. I don't know if the two are related, but the stories in this issue -- one on some student at Duke who made a powerpoint presentation for limited distribution about her sexual escapades with the lacrosse team, another on how internet porn proves that male sexuality is undeniably about power over -- make my heart hurt and lead me to wonder just how alien i am in this culture. Yesterday my sister sent news of a childhood friend who combined firearms, alcohol, and a national park over the weekend to result in an experience of what it's like to be arrested. The friend's email account of her adventure to my sister is also alien to me: i find the level of cluelessness combined with the blinding sense of privilege to be nearly incomprehensible.

The only pornography on the internet that i inadvertently stumbled upon was circa 1992 or 93 on NASA computers. I was probably using ... Veronica? Archie? I was a bit indignant: government machines and all that. There may have been one or two times i've done Google searches that accidentally lead to porn sites, but generally the listings were enough to make me realize that i needed to change search terms to find what i was looking for. In my mind, not much more different from finding a set of search terms is overwhelmed by pop music results or some news story that's not of interest. The assertions of how the internet is overwhelmingly full of pornography is so counter to my experience, and i spend so much time on the internet.

What i notice is the email spam that's constantly offering to enlarge something: if i were to write a puff analysis piece, the clear conclusion would be that males are more insecure in their body image than women. So maybe i can dismiss that article as just being the result of unclear thinking?

The other article about the Duke woman in The Atlantic is one i want to dismiss as some small bubble of privilege: the Duke social mess representing the experience of those who can manage to get into Ivy-League-Esque colleges and not the mass of Americans trying to improve their lives by heading to their nearest community college or state college. That same bubble of social privilege probably writes for The Atlantic, right? And my sister's friend: she did attended a fairly "genteel" art school....

Or is it me? Am i really as alien? I feel pretty boringly normal, but i am always reminded of a dear friend laughingly pointing out that as a bisexual Quaker Witch physicist married to a transgendered woman, i am pretty different. Ok, ok, maybe i'm holding down the ends of some demographic curves, but i can't believe the lampoon of heterosexual relationships that i stumble across, that present the values and behaviors as mainstream and given, is "normal" either.

I'm recalling some blog that came out a few years ago with the Wall Street crash that was a "support" site for women who dated the bankers and traders: that too had me incredulous. People run relationships like that? Lyre birds' mating relationships make more sense.

Anyhow. Itchy itchy body, as well as an itchy brain.

(no subject)

My morning's musings were clearly inarticulate. I've skimmed two different responses (one LJ, the other DW) and they addressed completely different issues than what was itching my brain. I will try to redirect my writing. Let see:

Given

Story 1: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2011/01/the-hazards-of-duke/8328/
"A NOW INFAMOUS POWERPOINT PRESENTATION EXPOSES A LOT ABOUT MEN, WOMEN, SEX, AND ALCOHOL" where the exposed "lot" is a hook-up culture where women intentionally get drunk so they can be picked up by guys to use each other for sex.

Story 2: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/hard-core/8327/ "The new world of porn is revealing eternal truths about men and women," which is that, "A warring dynamic based on power and subjugation has always existed between men and women, and the egalitarian view of sex, with its utopian pretensions, offers little insight into the typical male psyche. Internet porn, on the other hand, shows us an unvarnished (albeit partial) view of male sexuality as an often dark force streaked with aggression"

and

the disappointing realization that i actually do know someone who can mix alcohol, firearms, and a national park and then be utterly shocked and appalled that by committing a felony* she is treated like a felon.

* Brother's legal advice on reading the email: Stop. Writing. Things. Down.

i find the heterosexual and gendered relationships and behaviors asserted as given or proven in the first two articles to be so unlike the behaviors that people i know exhibit**, so shallow, and yet so unquestioned in this mainstream magazine that i feel alien. Indeed, it is the shallowness of the relationships described in story one, the shallowness of the analysis in story two that makes my brain itch.

** Despite various and sundry delights or complete lack of interest in kink and porn and sex , and despite the varied and sundry variations of romantic and intimate relationships, despite various and sundry values about numbers and genders of partners and the numbers and genders of partners' partners....

I want to assert it's only in some bubble of privilege that can afford to be so shallow, and then my sister's friend demonstrates a different but similar shallowness: can i argue her connection to the bubble of privilege?

I'm not saying that i'm surprised there's porn on the internet (although i continue to wonder if the common wisdom that it's so easy to find accidentally is some sort of cultural fig leaf excuse so that everyone can excuse any embarrassing revelation with, "It was an accident! You know how hard it is not to trip over a porn site on the internet!").

I'm not saying that i'm surprised that there's violence in intimate relationships.

I am saying that the boundaries of experience that seem to make up the fodder for these two articles seem strangely drawn, clearly unwilling to go past anything other than the most binary understanding of gender, a sort of narrowly defined sexuality, some narrow premise about what relationships look like. I want to argue that the articles are flawed because the authors limit their review of The World to an Us and We that is caught up in power and status and wealth and success. Their conclusions (well, article 1's conclusions) might just be accurate for a community that is caught up in success measured by being seen in the right places with the right people and having the right type jobs: i wonder just how representative of college life in America the article is. Similarly, the observation that there is a lot of porn showing men subjugating others sexually therefore "male sexuality [is] an often dark force streaked with aggression" seems to be such an analysis fail on so many points, i wonder how it got published. (Is this an "eternal truth about men and women" or a clear result of the misogynistic messages in our culture? And shouldn't this author meet up with the failed academics who tried drawing some conclusions about female sexuality based on some cursory survey of slash and fan fiction?)

I suppose the real conclusions is that i shouldn't bother with The Atlantic but to continue to enjoy folks' Wiscon reports. And go to Wiscon someday.