I’d heard really great things about Julia Serano’s book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, particularly in the way the book incisively criticizes feminists for not seeing how hostility to femininity itself is a kind of misogyny.  Things that made me especially eager to get more insight into this idea were the Snickers ad that played like shooting at a man for the high crime of doing something feminine was cute instead of a celebration of gay-bashing, and the ugliness that greeted the film version of “Sex and the City”.  The latter in particular seems to be a textbook example of what Serano fairly describes as a feminist distancing from hostility to femininity even as women themselves are defended. 

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Update: The cracker is gone.  The post is worth reading because PZ explains how the puffery around the supposed sacredness of communion wafers is linked to finding excuses to torture and kill Jews.  Something to consider if you have an urge to treat treacly Catholic nonsense, from opposition to birth control to sanctifying women who die in childbirth to acting like communion wafers and embryos are more important than people, like it’s harmless goofery.  It’s interesting to see the emails he got, which resemble ones I’ve gotten in the past from people whose minds have been completely ruined by religion. Except they’re even more crazy. I can say that most half-crazed emails I get make me laugh, but the pitiful ones from true believers just depress me.  They’re just broken people, and I blame the church.

Sorry it took me so long to write a proper review of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.  I half expected the book to be a hateful screed against religious people, since it was treated that way by critics, but as usual when it comes to these things, religion is being sheltered from criticism by conflating criticism of it, or even mockery, as if it’s as bad or worse than hurting actual human beings.  (Recent example: Caterwauling over the desecration of a cracker of a length and volume that the death of human beings rarely gets.  People, blasphemy is a victimless crime.)  The book actually takes the view that I do of most religious people, which is that they’re the primary victims of religion, either because of the brainwashing by their own or the violent oppression by those who follow other religions.  If anything, Dawkins’ meme theory tends to make him more sanguine about religious people than I feel, as he thinks that religion has somewhat taken a life of its own and infects hosts, which are believers.  My cynicism about the motivations of those who use religion to exploit and control people tends to color my views, but he’s absolutely right to look at religion as its own entity that can be examined for how it spreads and survives without necessarily getting into a pissing match over whether or not the people who actively push it are bad, or if some are bad, or whether or not the bad outnumber the good or whatever. 

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At the airport, I spied the paperback version of the atheist polemic that caused so much grief that I haven’t read yet: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.  I’ll admit; I get influenced by blurbs, and this book had a gazillion really great ones.  And even though I’m a hardline atheist like Dawkins, and I’m in full agreement that the hysteria greeting this book says more about the people getting upset (that they’re trying to bully atheists into silence) than about Dawkins, I cracked and bought it.  If all these people enjoyed it/were offended by it, then surely I could learn something from it, right?

I’m less than 100 pages in, and I’ve learned a couple of things.  First of all, reading it on planes causes the inevitable Bible reader next to you discomfort.  Second, Dawkins actually tackles the question in precisely the way you’d hope he would if he’s writing to an audience that largely agrees with him, but needs tools to go out in the world and convince others.  Not by door-knocking, sentimental storytelling means, either.  Atheism spreads primarily by outing people that are already atheists in their thinking, but haven’t yet admitted it completely to themselves or others out of stone cold fear. 

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Not too long ago, a friend of a friend joking-aggressively asked me while we were out and about what the difference between misogyny and sex is.  Mind you—-we were sober.  So I kind of blinked at him and was like, “Come again?”  I know the game Bait The Feminist, but this one didn’t even make a lot of sense.  He tried to clarify, but it wasn’t helping.  I kept thinking he was trying to imply that feminists think straight male sexual desire itself is somehow anti-woman, but he knows that I can’t possibly think that, so I was confused.  Later I thought about it and decided to give him the benefit of the doubt—-maybe there are men out there who really do struggle to find a way to desire women that doesn’t have a backlog of misogyny and resentment towards women.  God knows that our culture doesn’t do much to help men out in this regard, and in fact encourages men to resent women for being desireable, and to rectify the dissonance between feeling vulnerable towards women because you desire them and feeling superior to women because of your social station by making the act of intercourse a symbolic conquering of the female body.  In case that sort of heady language is confusing, a good deal of porn simplifies things by making women choke on cocks, look generally uncomfortable, get double-pronged in painful-looking ways, get spat upon, and get called names like “slut” and “whore”. 

Still, I find myself confused.  In my experience, men are not complete fools and are fully capable of choosing to define sexual desire for themselves in ways that aren’t dominating and cruel towards women.  There’s even porn out there that’s not that bad.  But I couldn’t help but be concerned—-is it that hard to tell the difference between straight male desire and misogyny?  What do feminist men think of this issue?  Lucky for me, Shira Tarrant put together a wonderful anthology of men’s views of feminism called Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex, and Power, and you’ll be gratified to know that not only do the men in this volume understand the distinctions very easily, some of them taught me a thing or two that I hadn’t thought about in this regard.  For women guessing at what men are thinking, the issue of lechery is always confusing—-what percentage is hate/resentment/power play and what percentage is genuine lust when a man looks at you like you’re meat, grabs at you, or hollers at you from a car?  From the men in this anthology who have the privilege of not only having male brains themselves, but access to male-only spaces where men are a little more open about these things, the answer becomes clear: It’s 100% about power.  Genuine lust is something you feel on the inside and is idiosyncratic and under your control.  Men aren’t so different than women after all.  But expressing your sexuality in a way that establishes your power is something done to feel strong, to dominate, to show off to other men, and to satisfy insecurities.  And that is why lecherous gazes, wolf whistles, and calling someone a “cunt” from a moving vehicle is not, contrary to the claims of anti-feminists, a “compliment”.  It’s an expression of dominance, a way for men to signal to themselves, to women, and especially to other men that they are ranked higher than women.

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So last week I was helping with the Seal Press booth at the National Women’s Studies Association conference in Cincinnati, so I took the opportunity to get some books that they put out that I’ve wanted to read but haven’t gotten around to yet.  One was a book I’ve been eyeballing for awhile, with equal parts enthusiasm and dread: Single State of the Union: Single Women Speak Out on Life, Love, and the Pursuit of Happiness, an anthology edited by Diane Mapes.  I was eager, because I wanted to read single women talking about being single in honest ways, because right now 99.9% of pop culture references to single women carry the assumption that single women are primarily interested in not being single.  And that’s not been my experience of single life at all.  On the other hand, I dreaded reading it because I feared that there would be a lot of New-Agey-love-your-broken-self-as-is stuff that doesn’t go far enough in exposing myths, especially the wrong myth that being single equals being unhappy for women. 

I shouldn’t have worried.  There were probably a couple of essays that crossed my nonsense line, but most of the pieces in here are refreshingly free of sentimentality.  Most of the writers manage to tease out the complexities of enjoying your independent single life while also being open to combining your life with a partner’s, if that comes along.  A couple of the writers do think of themselves as way too dedicated to living alone to ever live with a partner, and a few pieces come from women who left their single days behind but still have fond memories.  A few women haven’t quite gotten to the point in your life where you really, truly get over the doormat tendencies around men that are bred into women from a young age, and while I flinched at some points as these women detailed out their mistakes in overplaying their hands with men they meet, I really appreciated the inclusion of that viewpoint.  Because it is a part of single life, and for a lot of straight women, a tendency you have to overcome or men will keep making you unhappy.  For myself personally, living completely and utterly alone for a year and a half was a critical part of my development into a woman with a genuine backbone of my very own, because it wasn’t until I lived alone that I really did scrub the belief out that men had something to offer me that I didn’t have to offer them, and that I have to be more compliant.  For that reason, I especially enjoyed a couple of the essays from women who’ve left relationships to live by themselves and found out that it was a joy and a boost to the self-esteem to start handling parts of life that men handled in the past (everything from finances to house repairs) because of strict gender roles.  I think men are easier to get along with the less you feel like you need them and the more you feel like you chose them freely, a point of view not that welcome in the mainstream media but well argued in a number of essays in this book.

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Oh man, this is so cool.  I did an image search for “rapture” and on the first page I saw the first picture I’d ever seen depicting it. (You can click it for a bigger version.) I picked it up while at youth group in high school and asked about it, and the leader answered my questions shortly, indicating, I think, that belief in this event was a sore spot between various parishioners at what was basically a mainline church.  I was already well on my road to an adulthood of grouchy atheism, and I think this image—-with its gloating cruelty that haunted me—-drove me further that way.  Christians say they believe in a Jesus of love and mercy, but then they have stuff like that just laying around.  (Not all, I realize, or even most.) 

I bring it up because I just finished what is probably the funniest book on the Rapture-obsessed evangelical Christian culture that I’ve ever read: Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture.  The book, as you can tell from the title, focuses on Christian pop culture, that weird, watered down imitation of real pop culture that’s sanitized of “dirtiness” and injected with Jeebus.  Christian bookstores, contemporary Christian music ranging from heavy metal to rap, Christian comedy, Christian wrestling, and of course the entire abstinence-only industry with its side industry of fetus trinkets.  For secular people, believers or not, this junk is embarrassing.  You pity the kids whose parents make them listen to Christian rock in lieu of real rock.  You wonder at people who can read a Christian horror novel with a straight face.

What Radosh found, though, surprised me.  And I think it surprised him, too.  The evangelical subculture has been around just long enough that changes are beginning to emerge, as the creators of it, being creative people, start agitating against the restraints that doom them to mediocrity.  Which isn’t to say that it’s not mediocre—-it is.  But a lot of it wasn’t as bad as you’d think.  And there’s signs of hope out there that the creative element in Christian pop culture could be exerting a positive influence on the evangelical community.  But don’t take my word for it—-Daniel has put up a really nice interactive site to go with the book, so you can sample a lot of the Christian pop culture yourself.  Warning: There’s an extreme hokey factor.  But there’s occasional gems, like Victoria Williams. 

Instead of doing the usual review, though, I thought we’d have some fun and post an interview with the author instead.  So, without further ado, here’s Daniel Radosh!  My questions are in bold.

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Having tangled the other day with 9/11 Truthers at Firedoglake in a thread that was supposed to be a book salon for Matt Taibbi, I got to thinking (because of comments David Neiwert made in the thread) about the allure of conspiracy theories.  What bothers me about them is that they obscure the real ways the world is fucked up, but they do satisfy a need to understand what is true on a broader scale, which is that the rich and powerful seek to maintain power even if they have to do weird things to do it.  Conspiracy theorists accuse the reality-based community of not wanting to buy into their silly theories because we can’t handle the truth, but I think that they’re projecting.  They can’t handle the truth, which is that power mongering is more about being opportunistic and flexible, and less about controlling reality itself.  The real truth is harder to grasp, and has all the incoherence of real life.

I mention this, because the difference between a conspiracy theory and a genuine examination into a community that exists to create and maintain systems of power is well-demonstrated in Jeff Sharlet’s book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.  I was a little wary at first, since the marketing makes it seem like a conspiracy theory kind of thing, but the book itself details why groups like this bear examination if not conspiratorial fears.  It’s the difference between getting that the meetings at the Bohemian Grove are undoubtedly times when movers and shakers get their business done outside of the prying eyes of the public and thinking that they’re worshipping Satan in there.  For a lot of conspiracy theorists, actually getting inside the secret rooms that we’re kept out of would be boring, because it’s actually a lot what you’d expect except even sillier and more boring.  But to reality-based citizens, that’s when it gets more interesting.  That the “Satan-worshipping” rituals at the Bohemian Grove are actually fraternity-style ceremonies, jokes, and pranks is even more chilling to me, suggesting at distinct lack of maturity and decency on the part of our leadership that would like to project otherwise. 

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A couple of book reviews tonight for some short, funny books.  First of all, Jen Sorensen’s cartoon collection Slowpoke: One Nation, Oh My God!.  I met Jen at the WAM! conference, and I have to say that the arch humor she showcases in her comics is exactly how she acts in person.  There’s usually some minor disconnect between what you read on the page and how someone comes across in person, but for some reason, Jen has the perfect fit going on. 

This book made me snort with laughter.  Seriously, it’s like the funniest comic ever.  (Sorry, “Get Fuzzy”.) I made Marc look at every other comic until it became clear that it would be more efficient if he just read the entire book himself.

I enjoyed that Jen’s take on politics tends to veer towards, “Am I the only person who sees how fucked up and stupid all this is? Please tell me I’m not.”  I appreciated that, for the simple reason that I often think I’m crazy, and this book reassured me that I’m not.  The added bonus to the book is that with every cartoon, she has a little paragraph of thoughts, inspiration, or background, and it’s all almost as funny as the cartoons.  Almost, because it’s hard to be funnier than these cartoons.

The other book I’ve dashed through and want to review is Jessica Valenti’s He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know.  Where Jen is full of arch humor, Jessica is crass, but in a good way.  Seriously, coming from another person who thinks crass is funny, that’s a high compliment. 

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Posted by Amanda Marcotte at 03:15 PM • (12) Comments

While I think all my interviews are good at Reality Cast, I have to draw everyone’s attention to this week’s.  Jeff Sharlet is talking about his new book The Family, a group of fundies that aren’t like the religious right we all know and don’t love, but in fact may be more powerful.  Genuinely new information for me; I can’t wait to read his book.