The Tragedy in Norway

Last week, Anders Breivik murdered 91 people in Norway while disguised as a police officer. In the days that followed, the Norwegian Prime Minister gave an amazing speech with a few nice swipes at George W Bush, and made me wish we had him instead of Bush as our President on 9/11(1).

Mr Breivik's 1500-page manifesto was released upon the internet, in which he derided "Marxists" and Muslim immigrants, as well as feminism, and lamented that conservative members of Parliament were invertebrate pragmatists.

And I sit here, for the past week, bewildered. I wondered why such a thing has not happened here. Yes, George Tiller has been murdered; earlier this week a Molotov cocktail was thrown into a Texas Planned Parenthood, but no conservative has thus far had the balls to bring the Tea Party to its logical conclusion (Gabrielle Giffords does not fall into this category because Laughner was ruled apolitical in motivation)2. Most of the conservative party in the United States can directly sympathize with Mr Breivik: They hate Islam and Marxism, and they fervently believe in a "Christian America," some of them as fervently as Mr Breivik himself believed in Christian Europe, it would seem. They even denounced Obama as a terrorist himself, and continue to question his legitimacy as President; their hatred seemingly knew no bounds.

There is a direct correlation between belief and action, and judging by the beliefs of those who listen to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, it would seem to me that anything at all is possible.

What is also interesting to me is that Fox News is kind of playing a double game: They have been quick to emphasize the connection every other terrorist has with his respective religion (i.e. Islam), such as Faisal Shazad and the Fort Hood shooter, but here--because of the proximity of what their anchors and hosts declare to their viewers every single day to Mr Breivik's stated ideology, they are quick to de-emphasize, or even flat-out deny the connection--and they would be right. But it would only be fair to do the same for terrorists on the other side. This is duplicitous because they are denying Breivik's Christianism (more on that in a minute) while at the same time telling their viewers to think in a manner similar to him. The prospect of violence naturally makes everyone uncomfortable, so it is in their interest to deny that they could have anything in common with him in order to continue to do what they are doing and not have to take responsibility for it.

Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic defined Christianism in an editorial for Time back in 2006 in order to differentiate Christian Conservatism from Christianity as a religion.

Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike3.

Sullivan, in writing about Breivik, described him as being an example of what he means by "Christianism":

But Christianist? Breivik's picture should accompany the term in any dictionary. Christianism is all about power over others, and it has been fueled in the last decade by its mirror image, Islamism, and motivated to fury by hatred of what it sees as is true enemy, liberalism. Both Islamism and Christianism, to my mind, do not spring from real religious faith; they spring from neurosis caused by lack of faith. They are the choices of those who are panicked by the complexity and choices of modernity into a fanatical embrace of a simplistic parody of religion in order to attack what they see as their cultural and social enemies. They are not about genuine faith; they are about the instrumentality of faith as a political bludgeon4.

This "religious nihilism"--to use Karen Armstrong's term--is a last-ditch to save one's faith, to make it manifest in order to prove it to one's self after it is lost5. Religion as a political ideology is not, according to Sullivan, a manifestation of one's authentic conviction, but the inner panic of a person who lost it and has nothing else. The less one believes in a religion, the more fervent this need is for their beliefs to be made actual.

But I find this incredibly tragic, as those like myself, and others, are fully able to be genuinely good without being religious. We can only assume that he loved his religion, and it died in his heart despite how much he fought to keep it. Instead of blaming himself, or augmenting his faith with reality--as many do with great success--he blamed greater society and other people for the death of religion in his mind, ultimately killing 76 innocent people.

1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mGBGspE8FM

2) http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/07/dallas-area-planned-parenthood-clinic-attacked-with-molotov-cocktail/

3) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1191826,00.html

4) http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/07/revisiting-christianism.html

5) Armstrong, Karen. The Battle For God: A History of Fundamentalism. Ballantine Books. (C) 2001 New York, NY.

The Debt Ceiling: Two Options

We have 11 days remaining before the debt ceiling deadline, and as we inch closer and closer to the end, I am ever more convinced that the United States is going to default.

This stems from the simple fact that the House leadership does not at all care about good governance; they care more about "drowning [government] in a bathtub" (Starve the Beast) than they do about federal debt. It would be in their interest, from this point of view, for the government to default insofar as it would greatly restrict its borrowing power. Their adamant resistance to tax increases in this case would only serve to finally kill the government they so hate (which, ironically, governs the country they say they love). I would further say that they would gladly have private businesses--and ordinary Americans--take the credit hit if it would serve the greater cause of bringing down the federal government.

As the clock ticks, the GOP only grows in power, as their negotiating in bad faith and interest in seeing the government collapse would force the President to take their unilateral proposition just to prevent a default, as it is unlikely that the GOP would accept anything that isn't on their terms. Now we see how dangerous it is to see our government negotiate in bad faith, and why we can't afford to elect people into government who believe that government 1) cannot work, and 2) is itself the problem.

The Male in Pornography

Forewarning

This essay will probably be more controversial than many of my other ones, even those on religion. Many of my Facebook friends will probably untag themselves as soon as I create a link.

I am going to start with a confession: I watch a lot of porn. At 24 years old, never having been successful at finding love, this may come as no surprise. But there are a few things about porn that strike me as particularly interesting--even unsettling. Many feminists argue that the woman in porn is objectified and oppressed, and while this may be true in many cases, it is evident to me that onscreen, it is the male that is much less of a person. I don't want to say that there are not any instances where the male and the female are equal, but this scenario is, tragically, the most difficult to find.

Heterosexual Porn

The attention in a pornographic video is placed upon the female(s) and what they are doing, and the (often fake) pleasure they are experiencing, as this encourages both the male participants and the audience. The function of the man lies solely in his penis, as the woman often cries "give me that cock!" and other such exclamations; never is he treated with even the same kind of consideration the males may even pay her: Caresses and massages from the male to the female are never returned; all of their attention, if any at all, is upon his penis because that is all he is.

In porn where there are two women, it is between them that they find any kind of human affection: They kiss, they caress between themselves, and again, the male is simply his penis; a passive object subjugated to the whims of the woman: he receives nothing as a totality in himself.

The Male Orgasm in Porn

At the end of a given scene, after a display of nearly superhuman endurance, the male is finally permitted to release sexual frustration in his one and only orgasm. Here, he is often responsible for his own pleasure; despite the fact that he is allowed to ejaculate on her body, she does not reciprocate for the pleasure he has given her precisely because he is made to masturbate to orgasm after 20-30 minutes of sex. Even though having the male ejaculate on the woman is an aesthetic interest on the part of the pornographer with the intent to further encourage the audience, the fact that the woman does not help him still reinforces the fate of the male in pornography.

Oral Sex in Porn

Oral sex is the only area where men possess the upper hand in porn. A woman may spend anywhere from thirty seconds to a full minute--or, depending on what you're watching, five to ten minutes--on the man, but scenes where men perform oral sex on the woman are difficult to find, and I have only ever found a single scene where the male spends more than 5 minutes. Contrary to what one might conclude from this fact, this reinforces the notion that the man is just his penis, as any other kind of intimacy--such as that which is not focused on his genitals--received from the female is simply nonexistent.

Lesbian Porn

What I said about porn in which there are two women with men present is true without men present, but here there is something else going on: The equality between two or more partners in a lesbian porn video is apparent: There is an equal exchange of pleasure between them, whereas if a male were present, this condition would not exist.

Even in videos in which a strap-on is used; in which a female "becomes" the male, this equality is never broken, because either female maintains consideration for her partner's pleasure, and gives up the "male" in order to receive it from her partner after she (her partner) achieves orgasm. While it can be said that the "male" (the one wearing the strap-on) becomes a mere object by virtue of the fact that a toy cannot feel pleasure, and the woman wearing it is acting for the pleasure of her partner, she again becomes a subject when she relinquishes the strap-on.

This says volumes about men in porn--in fact, it says everything about men in porn. The man (or men) is necessary insofar as he is able to provide the woman with pleasure. The woman is encouraged to reach orgasm whenever she pleases, but the male only achieves orgasm at the end of the scene. She could have as many as four or five orgasms, but the male can only have one, after the woman appears satisfied. The presence of a condom does nothing to change this fact. A man cannot relinquish his penis as easily as a woman can remove a strap-on, and therefore he is damned to be a slave for the star of the show, forever objectified and passive.

Hentai (Japanese Animated Porn)

Japanese anime porn is quite different, but the treatment of men is worse in this genre than in any other. Most people agree that because women in hentai are often tortured and abused onscreen that it is they who are most oppressed, but where women are oppressed, it is the men who are often portrayed as sex-crazed demons (literally) and predators. In many hentai series, the man often has power over the women already: often, he is the headmaster of an all-girls' school. The role of the male in hentai is to attack and violate the woman in an incredibly exaggerated fashion. Neither the female nor the male is anything in themselves, but the fact of the male always being the perpetrator of violent crime does damage to a man watching it, and to women who see it and expect not only for men to be that, but also to accept it as normal. It is important to note that the woman in violent hentai often accepts her situation despite her initial shame and fear, which is intended to portray the situation as OK for both parties in order to give a kind of approval to the audience's sexual arousal, but it still leaves a lingering, profound sense of guilt after the scene is over.

Unknown to many is the fact that the Japanese produce interactive novels that are pornographic in nature. One of the most infamous--as it was rejected by Amazon.com--is the game RapeLay, which is exactly what it sounds like: The player takes the role of a sexual predator, and the goal is to violate a mother and her daughter. I know someone who has played this game, and when asked about it, I said to this person, "Watching such anime porn is bad enough, I don't want to be party to it."

There is anime porn that does not victimize women, but I do not know the exact proportion in which it exists relative to the kinds of hentai in which women are victimized.

Conclusion

It is interesting to me that an industry so condemned as oppressive to women has so succeeded in an almost total reversal of sexual roles: The males exist for the sake of the woman's pleasure.

The question remains: How does this impact real life? What does it tell us about ourselves? Insofar as a single party can be disenfranchised, the system remains dysfunctional. If pornography is going to mimic real relationships--even a heavily exaggerated view of real relationships (and the physical possibilities of human sexuality--"How many can she fit in there!?")--it is going to have to rectify itself. I am glad to see more actresses saying that they enjoy what they do (and I hope their testimony is authentic), now if only men could say the same thing.

Male self-image is damaged by pornography. Juxtaposed with the dream of the "insatiable whore" is Herculean endurance: "Whoa! How the hell am I expected to last that long!? 30 minutes of thrusting!? That's IMPOSSIBLE!"1. The very point is that both of these extremes are not what constitutes good sex (or even what is expected of us, male or female). The absence of intimacy on behalf of the male can only be described as disheartening, as it can dampen the range of sexual pleasures he can expect to receive in his own life, even if he would ideally enjoy receiving all things which he expects to confer upon his partner--he wants to be treated as a woman is treated, as more than simply his penis.

All media conveys a message, and whether or not this message is true is important for us to examine and decide. If it is false--which, in this case, it is--it should be rectified if it cannot be ignored. We are told things about ourselves and our world that may or may not be true, and it is important for the betterment of our own self-perception and our perception of others that we scrutinize the merit of what we are told, as how we see ourselves and others is integral to how well we function in the world.

1) http://feministphilosophers.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/qzg4v.jpg

Short Story I Just Wrote

The following text is a work of FICTION. It DID NOT happen. It also needs a title.

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It was 2:00 in the morning on a Thursday night. I was in the city, walking back from the midnight opening of The Ledge, and as I was walking back to my car, I was assaulted by a gunman. I had turned my back to open my car door, and a pistol was pressed against my back.

I dropped my keys on the seat as I put my hands in the air. “Give me your wallet,” the man’s voice was shaky; he was pleading, as though he had never done this before. I took a few seconds to consider my options, and swiftly turned around, grabbed the barrel of the pistol, and twisted it out of his hand, while at the same time hitting the side of his jaw with a palm-heel strike. I then bent him over with a wristlock, and forced him to the ground. I pointed the pistol at him on the ground with two hands—one on the grip, and one on the butt—and stepped back.

The man was rubbing his cheek, where I had struck him. “Please don’t shoot me!” The man was clearly bewildered: he had never considered the possibility that his first time would end so badly for himself.

“Why not? You have threatened my life; what obligation could I possibly have to you?” Adrenaline was still pumping through my veins; it would be easy to kill him.
“I have a family!”
“So do I. Why did you assault me?”
“I…I needed drug money,” this man clearly had nothing to lose, and little to live for. “Please have mercy on me! Aren’t you a Christian?”
“No, no I’m not, actually. Are you?” I said, rather dismissively. The man’s eyes widened: I had appeared to him as Satan incarnate, and he psychologically prepared for his death. He started to cry. Ignoring the real-life consequences of killing the man for a moment, I found him too pathetic to pull the trigger.

“Yes, I am!” he said with a slightly proud tone, as though declaring his love for his Lord and Savior would magically transport him out of the dire situation he immediately finds himself in. It didn’t.

“How can you consider yourself a Christian if you would murder a man in cold blood for drug money?” This response only made the attacker cry harder. Once again, he begged for forgiveness and to be let go.

“Redemption from me will not come easy. At this moment, you may believe that you understand the gravity of what you did, but as you walk home tonight, you may well forget. What guarantee do I have that you won’t try this again? What if I let you go, and I read in the papers next week that you killed someone else? I could only hold myself responsible for that.” The man prostrated himself before me, and was wailing. He clutched at the bottoms of my jeans, promising that he would not repeat his mistake.

Watching him carefully, I slowly lowered my left hand into my pocket and reached for my cell phone. Steadying the pistol to deter him from running away, I called the police and told them what happened. I turned to the pathetic assailant: “The police are on their way. I am going to unload the pistol. If you run, I will catch you.” I removed the magazine, and pulled the slider back as I turned the pistol upside-down. The round in the chamber made a soft high-pitched ring on the sidewalk.

The police arrived shortly after. In that time, I said to him, “You might want to read Crime & Punishment.” The police officers walked up to the scene and told me to drop the weapon. I told them it was unloaded as I slowly placed it on the ground. They collected the weapon and the magazine, and arrested my attacker. They asked me to accompany them to give them a more detailed account of the incident. I obliged.

Epilogue

The man was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and possession of drug paraphernalia. He was addicted to heroin, and was connected to a series of robberies that occurred over the past few months. I later testified in court against him, and he was sentenced to 3 years in prison.

What do you think?

Casey Anthony and Public Ignorance

I must admit that I did not pay much attention to the trial until the day the verdict was read. That day, I read a synopsis of the arguments of the defense and prosecution, and I have come to believe that the jurors made the correct decision.

The circumstances surrounding Caylee Anthony's death are mysterious, but all of the evidence that points to Casey's guilt is purely circumstantial: Not calling 911 when Caylee was found, and providing law enforcement with false information. The jury could not be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt of her guilt, and therefore they did not convict her. This is the correct thing to do.

What I'm most upset about is the public's reaction to the verdict. Nancy Grace fanned the flames of this trial, and whipped up a national frenzy, convincing spectators that Casey Anthony should be nailed harder than Jesus himself. It is not often that a trial with such a high profile as this one is divorced from greater society, and I am glad that the outcome of case has restored some of my confidence in the American judicial system.

But many other people do not feel that way. A chili restaurant in Florida has expressly banned the jurors involved in the trial, and a large portion of my active Facebook friends are equally angry. I think this betrays a profound misunderstanding of how our criminal justice system is supposed to work: Innocent before proven guilty. Is the State's case strong enough to warrant the effective end of a person's life?

But I would be naive to ignore the fact that many people who should go to jail--such as the CEO of Goldman Sachs, and Erik Prince, President of Blackwater (now Xe Services), or the high school football stars from Glen Ridge, NJ in 1989--do not; and there are others who do go to jail, but are not there for long, like Bernard Madoff.

Our justice system is not perfect, but the Casey Anthony trial is one important instance in which we get to see how it is supposed to work.

1) http://eater.com/archives/2011/07/07/florida-chili-restaurant-bans-casey-anthony-jurors.php

Further reading: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/07/05/why-casey-anthonys-verdict-makes-sense/ (Yes, I know it's a Fox News article, but it is a legitimately good read)