So for a while now Alas, a blog has been my number one source of interesting links and cultural commentary on a broad range of issues, and their current instalment is a series of links to their favourite blogs, which opened up some interesting new territory for me.
Great comment from Independent Gay Forum about this story, cutting through the superficially persuasive argument from the hospital to expose what is a frankly sickening case of double standards. Homophobia can be understandable (though perenially lamentable) when couched in a belief set made superstitious by fear of death, but doesn't the confrontation of mortality make you want to lay aside your prejudices and merely allow people to be? I ask anyone who thinks the hospital's decision was right to consider how you would feel if the person you loved most in the world were dying just a few feet away from you and all that seperated you from their sharing their final moments was someone's unsubstantiated belief.
As an individual has to be considered innocent until proven guilty, so should an action be considered legal until proven beyond reasonable doubt to be of serious, illegitimate and consistent damage to mankind. Since whenever homosexuality is considered wrong it is on wholly metaphysical grounds, I contend that there is no justification for perpetuating any legal difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Besides which, what bearing would such concerns have over the right of someone's partner in life and parenthood (and power of attorney) being allowed to visit them in their dying moments? Would any other supposed criminal or moral deviant be forbidden visitation rights? No. A straight man who regularly rapes and beats his wife would most likely still be allowed to be at her deathbed, since the hospital staff would likely be ignorant to his crimes. But where crime is gender it's all too easy to play judge.
More gay bashing bashed at Box Turtle Bulletin, and I'd draw your attention to the comments on this one. Website comments are rarely worth reading, but these are pretty funny. Personal highlights include:
"If porn made everyone gay.. well.. then we wouldn’t have to worry about equal rights any more. We’d be the VAST majority of the population!"
"I think it’s fair to say that the vast majority of the Values Voters crowd share a belief system that is largely delusional and superstitious, thereby creating a reality for themselves that is mostly fabricated from Magic Truth. So, in their world it doesn’t feel bizarre when one of their leaders asserts that all porn is gay porn. Beliefs that cannot be supported by evidence/reason/logic is perfectly normal for them. Things become true through magic."
I won't bother joining in on the 'porn makes you gay' theme, since it's so very, very dumb and these guys have already demonstrated that as far as rational enquiry requires.
What I would like to discuss is the notion of masculinity, raised and barely challenged at The American Scene. Now these guys (inf. people) quite rightly undermine the suggestion that being a 'real' man is about how many girls you sleep with. I can see where the idea comes from, spreading your seed for the greatest chance of gene survival, but am amazed by how blind people can be to the counter-productivity of taking one of the fairly basic tenets of gene survival and making it a foundational belief to the detriment of the person as a whole. Ok guys, one) it makes you look and sound like a total dickhead, two) it entails a laughably simplistic understanding of human beings, three) most people extrapolate their view of humanity from their own experience, so if you think humans are superficial, simplistic humping machines with no capacity for qualitative judgement whatsoever... four) it's going to end in STDs, that's just statistical probability.
Nowhere has this dunderheaded idea been more glorified than on trashy Hollywood testostorama Entourage, where the *not-quite-but-almost* of Beverley Hills strut about like peacocks with painted tail feathers 'banging' every, *entirely* characterless, girl in town. The great part is, if a guy fucks 50 girls a day, he's a MAN, if a girl sleeps with anyone who happens to know anyone else, she's a slut. Isn't that liberating? Oo look I've come, best pout and tell someone they're an idiot ('cos that's how business works).
So what do we want a man, not a MAN, to be? Well, for my part I'd rather stay out of it thank you. Why do I have to have a gender identity? I have plenty of things from which to self-define already, and I'd rather lose them all (or at least all the ones that I was allotted by default). I don't particularly want to be defined by everyone who happens to own a pair of testicles, or for that matter anyone of my race, nationality, music taste... I understand this will happen to an extent but never understand the need for a group to assert a collective identity. It's just a fallacious concept. Men have a collective identity insofar as they share some biology, no further.
This brings me onto feminism. Now I would say I'm a feminist but one thing really grates on me, and it's something I've seen this at times on I Blame The Patriarchy and other passionate blogs: glorification of women acting like assholes in the same way men are criticised for. By this I mean things like seducing a whole load of people. In fact that was what I read about the other day, on another blog. Unfortunately I now can't find it, so I can't go into detail and this whole paragraph becomes a bit vague and unfounded, but I'd still like to make my point: guys being assholes is not good, but neither is girls being assholes. It's exactly the same as when a guy I knew once told me that he didn't see any problem in misleading the girls he slept with into thinking that he has an emotional attachment to them given that a girl once did that to him. Nevermind that each of the girls he slept with was an individual, who had different character traits and had never done him wrong. Now this may be my personality type, sexuality and prejudices bleeding into my arguments (I don't sleep with many people) but it seems to me part of a wider subtrend of feminism that I don't like. I can understand why people get angry, it's very much provoked, and it's really difficult to work out what the line ought to be now (given that it revolves around the concept of what a person should be and do, which in two millenia of serious thought we've made very little progress on), but to my mind feminism is part of a wider scheme with two aims: liberating everyone from inherent restrictive cultural frameworks and making everyone treat each other better. I don't think it's about justifying women being shitty to men on the basis of a history of oppression (in the same way black people would not be morally justified in enslaving white people, or Islamic fundamentalists are not morally justified in committing acts of terrorism, even if their motivations and their oppression can be clearly demonstrated). However, I Blame The Patriarchy is well worth reading and the sentiment which I attack here is limited.
For an uncommonly detached and empirical blog on all things oppressive, I strongly recommend Sociological Images, which does an excellent job of demonstrating the infinite array of subtleties in advertising and media which in isolation appear harmless but, as extensive reading of this blog brings home, dictate a culture in a surprisingly pervasive manner. It was this blog which really made me understand the concept of a cultural construct. If you have any serious thoughts about discrimination of any kind, read!
Ok so now it's five am and my writing has degenerated. Time for bed.
Alright, one more.
Congratulations to PJTV for excellent use of piggybacking unsound arguments onto sound arguments and putting them all under one umbrella, so either you accept both or neither, and accepting neither's dumb. Why don't us shameful liberals ever use such tactics? O yeah, cos its cheap and its tacky and it doesn't get you any nearer the truth.
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