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Thing of Things

~ The gradual supplanting of the natural by the just

Thing of Things

Tag Archives: sex work

Book Post for April, Not About Parenting

14 Sunday May 2017

Posted by ozymandias in book post

≈ 43 Comments

Tags

american politics is the best reality show, diane duane, god bothering, history side of tumblr, lingua latina, ozy blog post, rape tw, rationality, science side of tumblr, sex work, there is no justice and there is no judge

Eros and Thanatos: A pair of philosophical dialogues about love and sex, starring a family of Roman reconstructionist pagans. If this sounds like your sort of thing, it probably is. In the first, Catullus (a closeted gay man who believes that Love Conquers All) debates homosexuality with Germanicus (a Stoic who believes sex is only for procreation), Lydia (a Catholic), Sheila (a basically normal person), Ali (a postmodernist feminist) and Juvenal (the sort of edgelord who goes about saying that everything is violence and power). In the second, Juvenal, Germanicus, and Catullus debate whether murder is ever morally acceptable, along with Caligula (an atheist) and Brutus (a Buddhist).

Motel of the Mysteries: From the Body Ritual Among The Nacirema school of parody, the premise is that two thousand years from now an archaeologist finds a buried motel and concludes that this was a place of sacred mysteries. The book discusses The Great Altar (a television), the ceremonial burial cap (a shower cap), and the sacred collar (a toilet seat). Funny and pointed.

Sexual Authenticity: An Intimate Reflection on Homosexuality and Catholicism: This is a very frustrating book. I thought I would really enjoy it because I love her blog– even when I disagree she’s always insightful– but this book occasionally veered towards something I agree with and then felt like it came from Cloudcuckooland. People who have casual sex are all sex addicts! You can tell, because they deny that they’re sex addicts, and addicts always deny their addiction. Obviously. Nevertheless, Selmys’s conversion story is really interesting. She gets catechized early on by a Druid.

Sexual Authenticity: More Reflections: I find this book much less frustrating than the former book, and even agree with it in some places.

Selmys uses the Roman emperors as a framing to talk about the etiology of homosexuality. Of the first fifteen Roman emperors, only one was completely heterosexual. Even assuming that some were slandered by their detractors, at least half the emperors had some level of same-sex attraction. This seems strange from a perspective in which only three percent of the population is LGB, and startling even if you assume Roman emperors carried the gay gene, since many early Emperors were not related. She uses it as a framework to talk about different causes of homosexuality: for instance, Julius Caesar might have been an opportunistic bisexual, Tiberius a sex addict, Caligula a sexual assault victim, Nero a very feminine man forced into an ultra-masculine role in an ultra-masculine society by an overbearing mother, Hadrian a normal well-balanced person who happened to be in love with a man, Elegabalus a trans woman. Even given the many similarities between Roman emperors, there’s a lot of diversity in sexual behavior and motivation and what it means to call someone gay or bisexual.

Selmys’s observations on ex-gays seem to match up with my own observations of bihacking. Some people experience a sudden change in sexuality, but it’s not common and there’s no way to cause it; most people can, with a lot of hard work, transform themselves from Kinsey 0s and 6s to Kinsey 1s and 5s, but this does not actually offer a realistic hope of a relationship. Selmys claims that sudden orientation shifts are often caused by falling in love, which isn’t true in my experience, and I am curious what the difference is.

Selmys had a really interesting perspective on how having a lot of kids affects the experience of a parent of a disabled child. If you have one kid, all your hopes and dreams are on that kid. When your child is diagnosed with a disability, you have to grieve all the experiences you won’t have: if your child uses a wheelchair, it’s going to be a lot harder for them to play football; if your child is intellectually disabled, it’s harder to share the pleasures of science with them. But if you have more than one kid, then you can still have those experiences with your other kids, and it’s easier to recognize how good your disabled child is as themselves. I am not sure if I agree, but I think it’s interesting to think about.

Interim Errantry: Three Tales of the Young Wizards: An excellent three-novella collection. It’s nice to get a little breather and see what Kit and Nita are up to when they aren’t saving Earth. Interim Errantry is as weird as any other Young Wizards book: my attempts to explain the plots to Topher involved a lot of “Jack O’Lanterns are apparently sapient”, “and then the tree alien decides to become a Christmas tree”, and “and then through a series of misunderstandings an alien concludes that Nita and Kit are going to engage in the Impregnation Ritual on Valentine’s Day and the prelude to this involves eating one candy heart each day.”

Science fantasy is a genre close to my heart. I love urban fantasy that takes full advantage of the fact that it takes place in our reality and therefore has moons and aliens.

Also, I’m not sure if this is just me, but there were definitely more references to boners and porn than I’m used to in the Young Wizards series. The freedom of self-publishing? Changing standards in YA books?

Borderline (The Arcadia Project Book 1): The fey exist. All genius artwork comes from collaborations between humans and their fey soulmates, called “Echoes”. (The soulmate does not have to be a romantic soulmate.) The Arcadia Project, which employs solely crazy people, manages the fey/human interactions.

Our protagonist has borderline personality disorder and it’s amazing. Nothing I love more than a book about a borderline who totally has insight into the awful things she does and keeps doing them anyway. I liked how it realistically wrote her both as sympathetic and as kind of an awful person, but not as some kind of chaotic evil monster– just someone who has the same empathy and compassion as anyone else, but who sometimes does bad things on impulse. I really liked how the protagonist had recovered from suicidality but was still obviously mentally ill and had a life that sucked because, yeah, not being suicidal anymore doesn’t necessarily mean your life is great. And there was DBT in the book! The protagonist talks about her reason mind and her emotion mind, and one of the other characters is someone who literally severed her reason mind from her emotion mind with magic! I would have appreciated more use of skills, but then the protagonist is (canonically) not very cooperative with therapy. So I guess it makes sense.

 

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High: Wow, it’s like the book Nonviolent Communication, but without the weird and creepy implication that if you do everything right then people will do what you want.

The key piece of advice is that you should focus on what you actually want and doing things that will achieve the goal you actually want, instead of giving into the temptation to instead achieve the goals “no one ever criticizes me” or “the person I’m talking to is punished” or “my sense of self-righteousness is justified” or similar. Do not assume that it’s impossible to get a deal both sides will be okay with: this is often possible!

Before you can succeed at a crucial conversation, you have to separate out what’s actually going on from the story you’re telling yourself is going on about how you are an innocent victim, or the other person is a horrible monster, or you are completely incapable of improving the situation. Try looking at the objective facts of the situation and separating them from your interpretations of what’s going on. Ask yourself about your role in the problem, why a reasonable and rational person would do what the other person is doing, and what you should do to move towards what you want.

The first step in a crucial conversation is to notice when people feel unsafe. When people feel unsafe, they will usually turn to silence or violence: on one hand, selectively showing your true opinions, avoiding important issues, or even withdrawing from the conversation altogether; on the other hand, forcing your views on others, labeling and stereotyping people, or insulting and threatening people. When these happen, the conversation has gone off the rails. Even noticing unsafe conversations can be a huge step towards improving conversations, but you can also work on making it safer. You do that through: apologizing when appropriate; using a contrast statement which addresses others’ concerns that you don’t respect them or have a malicious intent and then clarifies your respectfulness and intent; and finding a mutual purpose, a goal both sides share. You do that through CRIB (this book is as fond of acronyms as DBT is): committing to find a mutual purpose; recognizing why the person you’re talking to wants the things they want; inventing a mutual purpose, perhaps by agreeing that everyone wants the relationship to be strong or the business to succeed; and brainstorming new strategies that serve everyone.

Once everyone is safe, you want to find out other people’s perspectives and share your own. To share your own perspectives, use STATE: share a factual description of the situation from your perspective; tell the story you’ve told yourself about those facts; and ask for the other person’s perspective. While doing this, talk tentatively, saying things softly and in a way that implies you want other people to correct you, and encourage other people to share their own views, no matter how controversial. To encourage other people to share their perspectives, use AMPP: ask to hear people’s concerns; mirror other people’s feelings; paraphrase what you’re hearing; and if they really won’t share their opinions with you at all, prime by saying tentatively what you think the other person’s perspective might be. If it turns out you and the other person disagree, start with an area of agreement; build on what the other person is saying by suggesting that they might have overlooked something; and compare positions, suggesting that you differ and not that one of you is wrong, when you really can’t reach consensus.

When it comes time to make the decision, you should follow an appropriate decision-making procedure: for instance, the boss has the final say in a corporation, but in most marriages decisions are made by consensus. When decisions are made, you should always be clear about who is responsible, what exactly they’re supposed to do, when they’re supposed to do it by, and what the followup will be.

The Myth of the Rational Voter: Voters are systematically biased: for instance, compared to the consensus of economists, they tend to underestimate the usefulness of markets and the economic benefits of trade with foreigners. Voters are wrong even about obvious empirical issues: for instance, voters tend to vastly overestimate the percentage of the budget devoted to foreign aid. Voters care about trivia about politicians (Dan Quayle’s feud with a television character) at the expense of practical issues (who is their senator); while voters swiftly punish transgressions they hear about, these transgressions are generally things like “said a racist slur” or “cheated on his dying wife” rather than things like “caused the incarceration of millions of people for relatively small crimes” or “destroyed the entire economy”. The worst part is that voters are altruistic, so instead of voting based on their pocketbooks (which, presumably, would incentivize politicians to have a good economy for most of their voters) they vote based on what they think is good for the country (which incentivizes politicians to give voters things the voters think are a good idea, whether it is or not).  All this means that voters vote for and receive terrible policy.

Honestly, it’s kind of remarkable to me how democratic governments wind up with their current level of low-variance mediocrity. This happens every time I read something about society. Like, it’s really remarkable how well our society works given that every individual element of it is a constantly-falling-apart shitshow. I have no explanation for this state of affairs.

Weirdly, Caplan models the situation as “there are benefits to having biased opinions (less effort researching right opinions, signalling group membership, not having to admit you’re wrong), there are costs to having biased opinions (you are wrong about things and that hurts you), since any voter has an astronomically small chance of flipping the election it is rational for them to buy way more bias than they would for things affecting their personal life.” While I think that’s correct for some situations, other biases, such as the availability heuristic, clearly don’t seem to fit this model. Like, I really don’t think parents are hysterical about children playing outside because they’re obtaining a certain amount of signalling that they’re good parents at the cost of a certain amount of parenting effort, I think they’re legitimately just mistaken about the chance their children will be kidnapped. And I suspect similar arguments apply to voters as well.

Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction: I am impressed by the consistent high quality of the “very short introduction” series and wish I could subscribe to a program where they mail me a random one each month and then I get to learn about mathematics or nothingness or logic or something each month.

The most interesting thing I learned from this book is that some people, including Flynn himself, believe the Flynn effect is due to increased familiarity with standardized tests in general and intelligence tests in specific. For instance, in the 1930s, an IQ test was probably the first standardized test a person had ever taken, while I took about two standardized tests a year for twelve years while attending a school system which was widely criticized for primarily teaching me how to be good at taking tests. It’s no wonder that I’d have a higher IQ score. In this case, the Flynn effect means that changing IQ scores provide us little to no information about whether and how people’s IQ scores are changing over time.

The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think: This is a pretty good introduction to the YIMBY position on housing. Various regulations– including rent control and zoning– make it more difficult and less profitable to build more homes, so we have fewer homes than we need. The idea that homes are an “investment” which always increases in price also increases the price of housing for people who don’t own their own homes. As a result, people live further from work (leading to unpleasant commutes and lots of pollution) or move to cities with cheaper housing but fewer jobs. This is bad, because dense locations provide a lot of benefits to people– ranging from higher productivity to a cleaner environment to better restaurants.

With Liberty and Justice for Some: How The Law Is Used To Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful: I originally thought I was a ooey-gooey soft-on-crime liberal, and then I read this book, and discovered I was an ooey-gooey soft-on-crime liberal except for crimes committed by presidents. When Glenn Greenwald remarked that under international law torture is punished with the death penalty, I thought “yep, actually, I totally support executing George W Bush.”

Unfortunately, my tough-on-crime stance is not shared by most people. In fact, under the name of “unifying the country” and “looking forward not backward”, presidents have managed to get away with absurd violations of national and international law: from Nixon’s multiple felonies to Bush’s surveillance and torture. Of course, this is not actually how the rule of law ought to work: the most basic principle of our government is that it is a government of laws not men, which is to say that if you commit a crime you should be punished, even if you are the president. (Especially if you are the president!) Claims that “public policy takes precedence over the rule of law”. Of course, there are many incentives for any given president to pull this shit: if they punish their predecessors for felonies and war crimes, maybe they’ll be punished for their own felonies and war crimes! All this is combined with a massive expansion of incarceration, meaning a poor black person gets more time in jail for smoking pot than a president does for violating international law.

Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk: The real lesson of this book is that Margo St. James, the founder of COYOTE and the St. James Infirmary, is a stone-cold badass. Margo St. James became a sex worker after she was accused of doing sex work because she was a beatnik and hosted lots of different men in her apartment, and obviously the only reason one would have men stay over is doing sex work. Her conviction meant that she couldn’t find a job other than doing sex work. She founded COYOTE, one of the first sex workers’ rights organizations, a year after J Edgar Hoover died “because we wanted to make sure he was really dead”. COYOTE’s shenanigans included awarding a giant keyhole to the Vice Cop of the Year and holding loiter-ins at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Their largest victory was when Judge Marie-Victoire dismissed almost forty sex workers’ cases on the grounds of sex discrimination, since the police had not arrested the clients. (The assistant district attorney for vice crimes said there was no reason to arrest men because “the customer is not involved with the commercial exploitation of sex, at least not on an ongoing basis.”) St. James also climbed Pike’s Peak to prove that sex workers aren’t diseased. Today, he St. James Infirmary commits to doing research that sex workers feel matters to them: for instance, it performed the first medical research on the foot problems caused by working all night in hooker heels.

I also appreciated the following slogans from a protest of Playboy Bunny clubs which only paid their workers in tips, without any salary: “don’t be a bunny, work for money” and “women should be obscene and not heard.”

In 34 states, doing full service sex work while being HIV positive is a felony, regardless of whether transmission occurred or what the actual risk profile of the sex act is. No HIV-positive client has ever been prosecuted.

The unsung heroes of this book are public health workers and activists, many of whom regularly break laws to help their sex worker clients: from giving out clean needles and crack kits, breaking trafficking laws to help underage sex workers find shelter and necessities, giving out birth control and post-exposure prophylaxis for HIV without prescriptions, or letting people know when the police are a few blocks away.

[content warning: rape]

Bang: The advice in this book is mostly reasonable. The author, however, is a goddamn misogynist.

As an example: Roosh says that you should do things because you want to do them, not in a desperate attempt to please a particular woman. This is great advice; I agree that if you’re buying someone a drink, it should be because you like them and want them to be happy, not because you’re desperately seeking their approval. His next sentence says that if he buys women drinks, it’s not a form of supplication, it’s to loosen them up so they’ll fuck him.

This is merely one example of a larger problem. Roosh seems to view sex not as something that people do together because it’s fun but as a competition between men and women in which men try to obtain sex and women try to deny it. He views a woman saying no to sex as an ordinary, normal part of the process of having sex with her; his writing clearly seems to imply that he expects a woman to say “no” to sex three or four times the first time he has sex with her. It is nice that he does not suggest physically forcing a woman into sex. He does, however, suggest ignoring her nos (for instance, responding to “we’re going too fast” with “yeah, I agree” but continuing to do whatever you’re doing) and responding to an outright “no” by stopping for a few minutes and then doing the thing again.

Of course, perhaps some women are saying “no” in the hopes that Roosh will override her “no”. (As I’ve always said, I think such ridiculous behavior should be punished by those women not getting to have sex until they learn better.) And of course some people say no to sex and then change their mind and say yes, although early on in a relationship you should probably check in and see if they’re sure. But a lot of the women he’d be using that strategy on are people who are scared, inexperienced, unsure, not good at setting boundaries. They might be frightened that if they don’t comply he will hurt them; he’s given them no reason to think otherwise. It is scary to be alone and naked, often in a house that isn’t your own, with a person who is larger and stronger than you. Is this the sort of thing you’re comfortable doing with a sexual partner?

Even from a purely selfish level, I can’t imagine that this is a great way to obtain sex. Like… surely you want to have sex with someone who wants to have sex with you? What benefit does having sex with a reluctant person have over masturbation? They make very good Fleshlights these days, you know. And it certainly makes the rest of Roosh’s pickup advice questionable. If he’s so good at seducing women, how come he has to pressure people who don’t want sex with him into sex? Surely they should be throwing their dripping panties at his head?

I think a lot of pickup stuff can be really useful for shy men. It can be hard to think of something to say to strangers, so knowing basically what you’re going to say can make it easier to break the ice and come off as charming and fun. A lot of pickup stuff isn’t the Magic Secret To Obtaining Sex, it’s just a basically reasonable thing to say while flirting, and that can serve as a magic feather to build confidence so you actually hit on people. And by relying on other people’s lines for a while you can develop a sense of what works and what doesn’t and eventually learn to flirt without the lines. But there has got to be a book written by a man with less awful and disgusting views about sexuality.

[content warning: rape, suicide]

The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented A Story of Martyrdom: A depressing amount of this book is based on word games about the meaning of the word “persecution”. You see, it only counts as persecution if the government intended to oppress Christians. The actual state of affairs was that Christians were widely thought of as very strange and rumored to be incestuous and cannibals, were occasionally oppressed by local governors, and sometimes were executed because the Emperor passed a law that said that everyone had to sacrifice to him or be executed, intended to figure out who his political enemies were, but that accidentally harmed Christians. I found this sort of argument-by-definition extremely pedantic. I also found the tie-ins to current culture war stuff really annoying: I can figure out for myself the connections between Christian ideals of martyrdom and Rick Santorum’s idea that Christians are persecuted today, thank you.

That said, it’s still an interesting read for the historical facts. Many so-called martyrdom stories are, in fact, fiction: there are historical inaccuracies and lurid plotlines that make the most sense if they were popular novels intended to amuse the reader. Many bear a striking similarity to Greek romance novels popular at the time. They have plots like “a Christian who has taken a vow of celibacy is forced to marry a vestal virgin, whom he converts to Christianity; they are arrested for trying to convert people, where the vestal virgin is sentenced to work at a brothel; an escaped lion does not harm her but instead kills the men attempting to rape her.” This is salacious enough that it is probably fiction and not a thing that actually happened.

Voluntary martyrdom was apparently quite common in the early church. We have several early Christian writers condemning it as heresy and the sin of suicide; this was probably political, because the Christians we would today consider non-heretical often escaped or recanted their Christianity, and there was a group of heretics, the Donatists, who had confessed to being Christian but were not executed for one reason or another. The non-Donatists have an obvious reason to condemn voluntary martyrdom. One of the stories we have about early Christians is that they went to a regional governor to try to be martyred, except the governor refused and instead told them that if they wanted to die there were cliffs to throw themselves off and ropes to hang themselves on.

The Christians were really confusing to the Romans. Roman polytheism was syncretic; it literally did not make sense to them that worshipping one god meant not being allowed to worship the emperor either. Many Christians were deliberately stubborn and difficult: for instance, one Christian responded to all questions, including his name, with “I am a Christian.” Many Christians said they respected God alone, which was both incomprehensible and probably seditious from a Roman perspective, since Roman society was based on hierarchies of respect.

 

Book Post for September

03 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by ozymandias in book post

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

my fucking state, ozy blog post, parenting, rationality, sex work

Stumbling on Happiness: Daniel Gilbert’s writing style is super-fun; I recommend reading Stumbling on Happiness if you like Slate Star Codex’s characteristic snark, because there’s a lot of it here.

Neurotypical people are very strange. I spent a large portion of this book going “wait, when most people experience something really really bad, they come up with reasons why it wasn’t so bad after all? They don’t think of a bunch of reasons about why it was actually worse than they thought and means they are doomed to eternal misery? Are you sure?” This just sounds incredibly fake. #DepressiveRealism

I am not sure how accurate this book is. I noticed several citations of things (priming!) that turned out to fail to replicate, but I don’t actually know off the top of my head everything that failed to replicate. Someone should write me a program that automatically highlights citations of papers that failed to replicate so I don’t believe them.

Deep Work: I have rarely read a book that was as useful for solving my particular problems that didn’t have “for borderline personality disorder” on the cover. Even then, half the stuff in the borderline personality disorder books are for people who have violent rages or substance abuse issues, which is not a problem Deep Work particularly has. So this is likely to be a fairly useless review for people who aren’t Ozy.

Deep Work is about cultivating deep work: distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to its limit. As a heuristic for separating deep work from shallow work, Deep Work suggests thinking about how long it would take to train a bright undergraduate to do the task. For instance, writing a good book is deep work because it takes years of expertise to become a good author, while scheduling a coffee date or creating a PowerPoint with the latest sales figures is shallow work. While not everyone needs to do deep work– entry-level positions are full of shallow work, and high-level executives hire other people to do deep work and are selected for their ability to make good snap decisions– Deep Work argues that our current economy has a high demand for deep work and a low supply. The current economy favors people who are superstars in their field and those who are really good at using computers, both deep-work-heavy skills; however, because of the rise of the Internet, we’re more distracted and prone to hyper-connectivity at the expense of deep thought and focus.

Deep Work emphasizes a sense of craftsmanship. Through cultivating a sense of craftmanship, you get into flow state, which is linked to overall happiness and pleasure. And through creating work that you can feel proud of– instead of frittering your life away going to meetings and answering emails– you can find a sense of meaning in your work, which allows you to be more satisfied.

Newport’s single biggest piece of advice, which he returns to hit on again and again, is that excessive use of the Internet kills deep work. If you don’t ever let yourself get bored, you’re not going to let your mind wander and have interesting new ideas for what you’re working on. (I personally have all my best ideas in the shower, probably because that’s the only place I can’t bring my laptop.) And if you’re constantly distracted and multitasking, you’re not developing the powers of focused concentration which are necessary for work. Work-related Internet use, like email, is actually even more evil than recreational Internet use, because it gives you the feeling you’re doing something productive. Newport’s advice is as follows: Don’t schedule time away from the Internet; schedule time where you are allowed to use the Internet. (I actually disagree with him about the evils of All Internet Browsing; fact-checking a blog post or researching Kuznets curves on Google Scholar are obviously different from Twitter, and I’ve found it’s nigh-impossible to do deep work without an Internet connection.) Quit social media for thirty days and only add back in services that caused a concrete improvement in your life. Pick up a hobby or form of entertainment other than reading Buzzfeed articles about the 33 Dogs That Look Most Like Presidents.

Other advice: Create a ritual to begin your deep work and transition your mind into a flow state; this might include stretching, setting up your workspace, or making a cup of tea. Write down what you’re doing for every half-hour of the day, and when you notice you’ve gotten off track revise the schedule. Alternate time spent alone and concentrating with time spent in serendipitous encounters (he gives the example of Bell Labs, in which people in a bunch of different disciplines encountered each other in the hallways and at lunch and talked about their work), which can prompt creative insight. Keep track of your daily hours spent in deep work; aim for about four. At the end of the workday (he recommends five-thirty), check your email a final time, prepare your to-do list for tomorrow, and then shut it down and don’t think about work until tomorrow morning; this gives you the idleness to recharge your energy and have insights, and since at the end of the day you’re tired enough to only do shallow work, the work you were doing probably isn’t that important anyway.

The Informed Parent: A Science-Based Resource For Your Child’s First Four Years: Amazon.com has discovered my weakness and is now solely recommending me parenting books with ‘science’ in the title.

This book makes an argument which I think is very reasonable about the alcohol/pregnancy connection: it seems plausible that alcohol has a dose-dependent effect on fetuses, so that light drinking has similarly light effects, which are outweighed by women who drink lightly in pregnancy typically being more educated and wealthier. (Of course, since the effect is quite small, there is no reason to freak out about drinks you had before you knew you were pregnant, nor even much reason to cancel that trip to Napa Valley you were looking forward to, as long as you only sip the wine and alternate it with lots of food.)

Studies about the safety of homebirth in other countries don’t necessarily generalize to the US because other countries have a lot more medical licensing. In the US, a person calling themself a midwife is not guaranteed to have any medical training whatsoever.

About 5% of women can’t breastfeed, and 10% can’t produce sufficient milk to feed their babies. If you are in this group, it is not because you are a bad mother, and there is nothing wrong with feeding your children formula, which is perfectly safe; the benefits of breastfeeding are fairly small and the costs of babies not being sufficiently fed are very high.

Effective ways to soothe a baby: white noise; skin-to-skin contact and breastfeeding; giving the baby something to suck; swaddling the baby; rocking the baby.

Shaken baby syndrome is most often caused by parents who aren’t bad or abusive but who are overwhelmed and sleep deprived because their baby won’t stop crying and who do what humans naturally do with something that won’t work– they shake it. It can help to know that colic is normal and common and will pass, and to notice when you’re getting overwhelmed and take a break before you do something you’ll regret.

Children do not understand that guns are not toys. Studies repeatedly suggest that children– even children that receive gun safety instruction– will pick up and play with handguns. If you have guns, store them locked and unloaded, with the ammunition in a separate place, until your child is a teenager.

Exposure to print and books is tightly correlated with reading ability as an older child and teenager (a result that is, of course, completely unconfounded); eating books is therefore an important pre-literacy skill that parents should encourage.

Science of Mom: Unlike The Informed Parent, which takes a somewhat encyclopedic approach, Science of Mom explores a few issues in more depth. I particularly appreciate the first chapter, which is a good and accurate explanation of which pieces of parenting advice are worth listening to (whenever Cochrane says something other than ‘more research is needed’) and which pieces are not (anything that primarily focuses on rats, which is mostly useful in the event that you happen to be parenting a rat).

Another thing I really liked about Science of Mom is its focus on tradeoffs. The decision that’s right for some people isn’t right for others. The breastfeeding chapter can be basically summed up as “breastfeeding has health benefits, but many people can’t breastfeed and that’s totally fine and they should not feel guilty about it, and the benefits of breastfeeding are not large enough to be worth making you feel miserable.” And the bedsharing chapter explains how conflicted the research is on bedsharing and SIDS/suffocation, then encourages the reader to make their own decision based on their own values and assessment of the evidence.

Anti-anti-vaxxing is too mainstream, so fortunately Science of Mom has enlightened me about the possibilities of getting pissed off at parents who don’t get the Vitamin K shot. It is not dangerous! It is literally a vitamin that all babies are deficient in! Do you want your baby to have brain bleeding? I don’t think so! Those are two words that do not belong together! (And, yeah, babies are deficient in Vitamin K. Humans are very poorly designed.)

Delayed cord clamping is surprisingly important: because breastmilk is not very rich in iron, babies often experience iron deficiency, and a few minutes of iron-rich blood from the placenta can prevent iron deficiency and anemia. (For the biodeterminists in the crowd: adequate iron as a baby reduces the risk of lead poisoning.) Iron is also important in feeding your child solids; omnivores should consider starting their child on meat, while vegetarians/vegans should begin with iron- and zinc-fortified infant cereal.

The Birth Partner: The Birth Partner is primarily aimed at birth partners (i.e. non-medical people who support the pregnant person during labor). However, it is still useful for the pregnant person to read, as the book clearly explains the process of labor and provides guidance for figuring out what you want out of labor.

The Birth Partner is a wonderfully nonjudgmental book about giving birth. It lays out the evidence for and against medical interventions, as well as the available alternatives, then encourages the mother and birth partner to consider their values about birth and come to the decision that is right for them. It’s a rare book that is equally nonjudgmental about homebirth and elective C-sections (while acknowledging the dangers of both). Another thing I liked is that it didn’t assume that birth partners are the pregnant person’s life partner or the biological father of the baby; when it had advice for one of those groups it always says “if you are the X.”

I particularly appreciated the clear explanation of various non-painkiller pain relief techniques; a lot of books tend to just have “breathing” and “meditating” as your only options, while The Birth Partner gives a lot of different strategies for reducing your pain. (I particularly appreciated the woman who chanted “epidural epidural epidural” and, when asked if she wanted one, said “if I get to chant it I don’t need it!”)

Apparently it is recommended that if you’re doing natural childbirth you use a safeword. They called it a “code word” but it’s definitely a safeword. I am so amused. My safewords are, as always, “red”, “safeword” and “I forgot the safeword.”

Gender Dysphoria Rating: 0/10. This book is sufficiently inclusive that its use of “the mother” as the term for the pregnant person actually stuck out to me, instead of being something I glance over as normal boring societal cissexism. But it’s not exactly fair to take points away from a book because it’s great on every issue except this one.

The Danish Way of Parenting: This is a weird book for me to read because my friend Ilzolende fucking hated living in Denmark, and so whenever it is like “the Danish way of parenting is so great!” I am like “if Denmark is so great how come ILZO didn’t like it???” which I admit is not the best objection.

I have been spoiled by Science of Mom and The Informed Parent and am now sulky about parenting books that don’t include proper citations. This book’s evidence was mostly “Danish people are very happy, and therefore they must be happy because of the parenting techniques they use, so if you use the parenting techniques then your children will be happy! What’s a confounding variable?” Also they don’t cite any studies that show that people in Denmark actually parent the way they are claimed to parent in this book. I mean, I don’t know anything about how Danish people parent, they very well might, but how do I know that this person wasn’t just in Danish Berkeley?

In Denmark are there books that advise everyone how to parent like an American, or is Raise Your Children As If You Are In A Foreign Country just an American book genre?

I mean, the parenting advice is probably fine. I am totally in support of being authentic with your children and playing with them and family togetherness and positive discipline and the rest. But I do not think this book has good evidence for it.

Age of Em: I had been vaguely under the impression that Emworld was bad because subsistence living, but since making ems have a really nice world is significantly cheaper than running an em in the first place, we’d actually expect ems to have very enjoyable leisure and lots of music and stuff. And anyway most ems would probably be emulations of workaholics who actually want to work twelve hours a day. So it’s a very noncentral example of a subsistence world, and in general sounds like a very nice place that I hope my descendants would manage to experience if they have more conscientiousness than I do.

The Essential Guide to Freelance Writing: Nope, the concept of pitching people still gives me a panic attack. In retrospect, it is probably not this book’s fault that it failed to fix this.

The Gated City: This book informs me that a large number of economic and environmental problems could be solved by the policies which lead me, Ozy, to have lower rent. Since I don’t like having to pay a lot of money in rent, I have obvious reasons to support this thesis. So it seemed pretty convincing to me, but take with many relevant grains of salt. (Unless you happen to live in the SF Bay Area, in which case you should agree with this book 100% and also contact your local Insert County Here Forward for a voter guide.)

[cw: sex trafficking, slavery]

The Slave Next Door: I am impressed by the existence of a book about modern slavery that spends more time talking about agriculture and domestics than it does sex work, and sad that I feel impressed.

One thing I hadn’t realized before I read this book was how fuzzy the definition of ‘slave’ is for people in the modern US. There’s a remarkably thin line between “victim of sex trafficking” and “sex worker in an abusive relationship who gives her boyfriend some of the money she earns working.” There’s a remarkably thin line between “victim of labor trafficking” and “domestic who is being mistreated by her employer but can’t leave because her visa is linked to her employer.”

The impression that I’m getting from The Slave Next Door is that immigration reform would do a lot to reduce slavery in the US. A lot of slaves are either undocumented or have their documents stolen by their employers. Decriminalizing sex work also seems to me to be important for reducing sex trafficking; sex trafficking occasionally involves U.S. citizens who speak the language, while labor trafficking is almost solely immigrants.

Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking: The title of this book is ‘Beyond Victims and Villains’, but there is clearly a villain in it! The villain is the child welfare system! False advertising!

Anyway, this is a really amazing book about minors doing sex work. Most of the time, the author argues, it’s not that minors are forced into sex work by pimps: it’s instead that– due to poverty, abuse, neglect, or homelessness– for many minors, sex work is the best way to support themselves. To many minors, street sex work seems like a better option than an often broken child welfare system. If we want to end underage sex work, the solution isn’t criminal: it’s changing the push factors that drive minors into sex work. This book does a really good job of emphasizing the agency of underage sex workers (something that is far too often ignored) while also recognizing how limited their choices are.

Disposable People: Before I read this book, I hadn’t realized how much innumeracy affects someone’s life– even more so than illiteracy. Many of the slaves in this book were kept in debt bondage (that is, they were laboring to pay off a debt to their owners). Their owners often told lies about how much the slaves owed, but the slaves, being innumerate, had no ability to check their owners’ numbers. They just thought “well, I did ask for a loan for my son’s wedding, and there was that one time my daughter got sick, and we had to pay for food that one time the crops failed… I know we’ve harvested a lot of crops for the owner, but I guess it makes sense that we’re still in debt,” because they have no way of comparing the very large number that medicine costs with the very large number that they earned from harvesting crops. If all the slaves knew they were being lied to, the institution would end: you can kidnap and beat up one person who tries to escape, but you can’t kidnap and beat up five hundred people. And also a lot of people stay because they feel honor-bound to pay off their debt, which they wouldn’t do if they knew they already had. Being able to do basic math is really important!

I hadn’t realized quite how much sex work happens in Thailand. The book points out that sex workers aimed at white people, being high-end, are usually not sex slaves; instead, sex slaves usually service middle- and working-class Thai men. While Disposable People does bash the police a little bit (they collect bribes and have no interest in actually preventing sex slavery), I think the book could have used a little more bashing of the sex-slave rescue industry, which is also pretty awful.

Mauritania really sucks as a country. I had known about the force-feeding of girls, but I hadn’t known that it is one of the few countries which still has endemic old-style hereditary slavery (as opposed to debt bondage, etc.). Of course, the Mauritanian government likes it that way, having declared all Mauritanian slaves to be ‘former slaves’ and then magically claimed to have fixed its slavery problem, because now all the people who are working for no pay but rice and a bed are doing it of their own free will! (It gets away with this because the government is totalitarian and censorship-happy.) Mauritania is also very poor, and many people go hungry, which helps preserve the slavery institution– if slaves ran away, they would starve.

My Feminism Will Be Pro-Sex-Work Or It Will Be Bullshit

23 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by ozymandias in feminism, sex positivity

≈ 120 Comments

Tags

not feminism go away, ozy blog post, sex positivity, sex work

I recently read Lisa Duggan and Nan Hunter’s Sex Wars and Melissa Gira Grant’s Playing the Whore, both of which are giving me a lot of thoughts.

For white women in the middle class and above, one of the most potent forms of sexism has been pedestalization. In the nineteenth century, she was forbidden to vote lest she sully herself with politics, forbidden to have sexual freedom lest she give up her precious purity, forbidden to work outside the home lest she no longer be the domestic angel her husband cherished. In a 1980s amicus brief against a feminist anti-porn ordinance, Nan Hunter and Sylvia Law summarized several examples of twentieth-century pedestalization and the harm it caused to women:

Traditionally, laws regulating sexual activity were premised on and reinforced a gender-based double standard which assumed:

that women are delicate, that voluntary sexual intercourse may harm them in certain circumstances and that they may be seriously injured by words as well as deeds. The statutes also suggest that, despite the generally delicate nature of most women, there exists a class of women who are not delicate or who are not worthy of protection. [By contrast, the law’s treatment of male sexuality reflected] the underlying assumption that only males have aggressive sexual desires [and] hence they must be restrained. … The detail and comprehensiveness of [such] laws suggest that men are considered almost crazed by sex.

K. Davidson, R. Ginsberg and H. Kay, Sex-Based Discrimination 982 (1st ed 1974)…

For example, the common law of libel held that “an oral imputation of unchastity to a woman is actionable without proof of damage. … Such a rule never has been applied to a man, since the damage to his reputation is assumed not to be as great.

In the modern day, exposure to pedestalizing beliefs decreases women’s cognitive performance, people who pedestalize women are more likely to blame rape victims who don’t follow their standards for ‘proper’ behavior, and people who pedestalize women are more likely to believe women shouldn’t exercise their sexual autonomy by asking people out or initiating sex— to pick just three studies.

Pedestalization is one of the major ways that sexism continues to be reinforced in our society. After all, everyone would recognize that “women should stay home and take care of children because they’re too flighty and emotional to work” is bullshit, but “women should stay home and take care of children because women have a special emotional connection to children, and motherhood is the most important job in the world” slips past the radar. “Playing outside is for boys” is something the straw sexist in a movie says, but “little girls are so polite and mature, not rambunctious and rowdy like little boys” comes out of the mouth of the most ardent feminist. “These occupations are female-dominated because women suck at being in charge” is unthinkable, while “these occupations are female-dominated because women are so good at caregiving” is a routine observation.

How can it be sexist? It’s nice!

Of course, not all women have a special emotional connection to children or are good at caregiving, and not all little girls are nice and polite. There are two ways I’ve noticed that people deal with women who aren’t on the pedestal. First, they may conclude the women have been misled, taken advantage of: that evil men are forcing them to engage in the behavior that person doesn’t like. Second, they may conclude that those women are not really pure wonderful angels; instead, they’re evil and disgusting. In fact, the pedestalization of women is highly correlated with the degradation of women, both on a cultural and individual level. At first this may seem bizarre– how can you simultaneously believe that women are refined, moral creatures that men ought to sacrifice for and that women are horrible conniving bitches? Well, obviously, they don’t believe it about the same women.

Think about the classic Nice Guy ™. (Not to be confused with men who are merely sad about their romantic prospects and are called Nice Guys ™ because it makes feminists feel uncomfortable to admit that some people can’t get laid who didn’t do anything wrong.) He is often accused of being entitled to women’s bodies, but in my experience that’s usually not the case. Instead, the classical Nice Guy ™ starts by pedestalizing women: “women are wonderful people who will all choose whom to date based on solely their sterling moral qualities. All I have to do is be sufficiently self-sacrificing and chivalrous and I will find a girlfriend.” Once this doesn’t happen, he has two choices. First, he can go with the former strategy, and become a classic white knight: “clearly those guys who fuck her and never call are taking advantage of her, and I should rescue her from those evil men”. Second, he can become a classic Nice Guy ™ by choosing the second strategy: “sometimes women date hot guys who are jerks! It must be because they are deliberately seeking out jerks and not because, like men, they are sometimes blinded by a pretty face. Bitch.”

So how is this related to sex work?

The Mann Act was a 1910 act forbidding interstate transport of “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” The FACT brief describes:

Like the premises underlying this [anti-pornography] ordinance, the Mann Act assumed:

that women were naturally chaste and virtuous, and that no woman became a whore unless she had first been raped, seduced, drugged or deserted. [Its] image of the prostitute … was of a lonely and confused female. … [Its proponents] maintained that prostitutes were the passive victims of social disequilibrium and the brutality of men. … [Its] conception of female weakness and male domination left no room for the possibility that prostitutes might consciously choose their activities.

Note, “The White Slave Traffic Act: The Historical Impact of a Criminal Law Policy on Women,” 72 Geo. L.J. 1111 (1984)

Pretty clear example of the pedestalization of women which pretty clearly harms sex workers. However, the Mann Act had a perhaps unexpected outcome:

Over the years, the interpretation and use of the Act changed drastically to punish voluntary “immoral” acts even when no commercial intention or business profit was involved. See Caminetti v. United States, 242 U.S. 470 (1917); Cleveland v. United States, 329 U.S. 14 (1946).

The term “other immoral acts” was held to apply to a variety of activities: the interstate transportation of a woman to work as a chorus girl in a theatre where the woman was exposed to smoking, drinking, and cursing; a dentist who met his young lover in a neighboring state and shared a hotel room to discuss her pregnancy; two students at the University of Puerto Rico who had sexual intercourse on the way home from a date; and a man and woman who had lived together for four years and traveled around the country as man and wife while the man sold securities.

Note, supra, 72 Geo. L.J. at 1119

Society’s attempts to “protect” women’s chastity through criminal and civil laws have resulted in restrictions on women’s freedom to engage in sexual activity, to discuss it publicly, and to protect themselves from the risk of pregnancy. These disabling restrictions reinforced the gender roles which have oppressed women for centuries.

A law originally passed to “save” sex workers proceeded to condescendingly “save” all kinds of women who have never done sex work, but who didn’t act the way good girls were supposed to act. Stigma against sex workers was weaponized to police the behavior of women who had never done sex work.

In Playing the Whore, Melissa Gira Grant writes eloquently about how “whore stigma” harms all women:

“The whore stigma,” states Gail Pheterson in her 1996 essay of the same name in The Prostitution Prism, “attaches not to femaleness alone, but to illegitimate or illicit femaleness. In other words, being a woman is a pre-condition of the label ‘whore’ but never the sole justification.” Sex workers, along with many people who do not do sex work, are exposed to whore stigma for breaking with, or being perceived to have broken with, what Jill Nagle calls “compulsory virtue.” It’s a riff on Adrienne Rich’s “compulsory heterosexuality,” with which lesbians are made invisible. Whore stigma, Nagles writes, is “a mandate not only to be virtuous, but also to appear virtuous.” As with compulsory heterosexuality, compulsory virtue isn’t just about producing a set of behaviors (fucking men, being a good girl about it), but producing a system of social control (punishing queers, jailing whores). “One does not actually have to be a whore to suffer a whore’s punishment or stigma,” writes Nagle. Naming whore stigma offers us a way through it: to value difference, to develop solidarity between women in and out of the sex trade.

The analogy to compulsory heterosexuality, I think, is an excellent one. While compulsory heterosexuality has disproportionate effects on LGBA people– for obvious reasons– it affects everyone. In Rich’s original essay, “compulsory heterosexuality” is defined broadly, much beyond punishments for lesbian sex. It includes literal forced marriages and men raping women, in which women do not have a choice other than having sex with men. It includes denying women sexuality outside of heterosexual sexuality, ranging from poor or nonexistent sex education to prevention of masturbation to the Freudian elevation of the vaginal orgasm over the clitoral orgasm to literal female genital circumcision. It includes removing women’s options to live a life apart from men by criticism of ‘spinsters’ or denying them careers. It includes the idealization of heterosexual romantic love as the ultimate purpose of and greatest joy in life.

Of course, we observe that– because the majority of people are heterosexual– the majority of women who experience forced marriages, poor sex ed, the idea that heterosexual romance is the purpose of life, etc. are, in fact, heterosexual. Their lives are fundamentally shaped by compulsory heterosexuality, even though they’re heterosexual.

Similarly, many women’s lives are fundamentally shaped by compulsory virtue even though they are not and have never been sex workers. “Virtue” here refers not to morality but to a relatively limited set of issues, mostly related to drugs and sex. We’ve loosened up a bit since the Mann Act era: the virtuous woman probably has premarital sex (although never with someone she doesn’t love) and almost certainly drinks (although she doesn’t get too drunk, and she doesn’t take illegal drugs). Virtue has come to apply to particular sex acts, as well: anal is unvirtuous, group sex is unvirtuous, BDSM is definitely unvirtuous.

Compulsory virtue is closely tied to compulsory heterosexuality, of course. Denying women sexuality outside of heterosexual sexuality is, often, explicitly justified by the fear that it will turn women into sluts or whores (a distinction many fail to make). The circumscription of women’s options– as in the case of the Mann Act– is often justified by the same fear. And the valorized heterosexual romantic love is a virtuous love: sexually faithful and completely lacking in commercial aspects. (Even in Pretty Woman, she quits sex work when she meets her man.)

An unfortunate fact of failing to name whorephobia for what it is is that we miss who is most affected. Melissa Gira Grant writes:

There’s an echo of this in the popularization of whore stigma in a milder form as outrage at “slut shaming.” What is lost, however, in moving from whore stigma to slut shaming is the centrality of the people most harmed by this form of discrimination. There is also an alarming air, in some feminists’ responses to slut shaming, of assumed distance, that the fault in slut shaming is a sorting error: No, she is certainly not a “slut”! This preserves the slut as contemptible rather than focusing on those who attack women who violate compulsory virtue—for being too loud, too much, too opinionated, too black, too queer…

Slut may seem to broaden the tent of those affected, but it makes the whore invisible. Whore stigma makes central the racial and class hierarchy reinforced in the dividing of women into the pure and the impure, the clean and the unclean, the white and virgin and all the others. If woman is other, whore is the other’s other.

Because of this failure, feminism all too often embraces the pedestalization of women. I see this particularly in two areas. The treatment of rape and abuse all too often boils down to “those evil men are harming saintly (white) women!”, which erases male victims, female perpetrators, and women who legitimately did things wrong and were also abused and that doesn’t make their abuse okay. And sex-worker-exclusive feminism often has a frankly condescending pedestalized version of women in which it is completely impossible a woman could choose to do sex work of her own free will. Returning to the FACT brief again:

Finally, the [anti-pornography] ordinance perpetuates a stereotype of women as helpless victims, incapable of consent, and in need of protection. A core premise of contemporary sex equality doctrine is that if the objective of the law is to “‘protect’ members of one gender because they are presumed to suffer from an inherent handicap or to be innately inferior, the object itself is illegitimate.” Mississippi Univ. for Women v. Hogan, 458 U.S. at 725. We have learned through hard experience that gender-based classifications protecting women from their own presumed innate vulnerability reflect “an attitude of ‘romantic paternalism’ which, in practical effect, puts women not on a pedestal but in a cage.” Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677, 684 (1973).

Women will never be freed from the specter of compulsory virtue until the sex worker is no longer an object of fear or revulsion. We must, above all, honor the right of women to make their own choices– whether or not these are choices we happen to approve of. Until people have the freedom to take money for sex without criminalization or stigma, all other sexual freedom will be in danger. As long as liberals are concerned that women are being taken advantage of when they choose to do sex work, conservatives will be concerned that women are being taken advantage of when they choose to suck off a stranger. My feminism will be pro-sex-work or it will be bullshit.

 

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