Peg Tittle's Blog, page 47

Cellphone Syndrome

Cellphone Syndrome

Originally written when cellphones first appeared.  Don’t think I’d change a thing.

Has there been a more transparent advertisement of insecurity?

Look at me, I’m so popular!  Everyone’s calling me!  I have so many friends!  Answer that thing one more time when I’m with you, you’ll have one less.

Look at me, I’m so busy!  I have so many calls to make, so many calls to take!  What you have is a total inability to actually enjoy life.

Look at me, I’m so important!  Excuse me, I have to take this call!  No.  You don’t.  You are not a doctor on call.  You are not a top-level executive.  Neither your presence nor your opinion is urgently required.  Anywhere.  By anyone.

Frankly, it’s frightening.  Suddenly all these men are making calls on their cellphones while they’re driving.  Just yesterday they couldn’t even dial a phone while sitting at a desk, they had to get their secretaries to do it for them.

And of course it’s annoying as hell.  Just what makes people think the rest of the world wants to listen to every word of their unbearably inane conversations?  “Hey, Jen.  We’re at the Van Houtte on St. Laurent.  Yeah.  Just ordered.  No.  Not yet.  We’re waiting.  Coffee.”

Of course people have been having conversations in cafes and stores, and on sidewalks and buses, for quite some time.  It’s not an invasion of public space.  Unless the person TALKS LOUDLY ENOUGH EVERYONE CAN’T HELP BUT HEAR.  Then it’s an advertisement of the immaturity of overriding self-importance.

But that doesn’t explain why a person talking loudly on a cellphone in public is even more annoying than two people having a loud conversation in public.  Why is that?  I think it’s because in the case of the cellphone conversation, we hear only half of the conversation.  However annoying the whole conversation would be, half of it is even worse.  It’s like hearing only every second work in a sentence.  (Speaking of which, remember the early “ – ar ph – s”?)  This occurred to me when I heard someone speaking on a cellphone in a language I didn’t understand.  It wasn’t quite as bad.  I wasn’t engaged against my will in a frustrating half-comprehensible experience.

But what’s most worrisome about the widespread use of cellphones is that it indicates not progress, but regress.  We are, in fact, devolving.  Imagine, for a moment, what it would’ve been like to have been the first one in your cave to discover thought, the first one to hear words, inside your head.  It’s a neat and handy trick – not having to say out loud everything that occurs to you.  And one of the more valuable side-effects of being able to think is being able to evaluate – to deliberate, to compare, to measure.  (And to realize that not everything that occurs to you is worth saying out loud.)  But we’ve gone backwards – from “I think, therefore I am” to “I talk, therefore I am.”  (I wonder if cellphone users can read without moving their lips.)

Given the recent increase in attention deficit (what we used to call ‘a short attention span’) (usually in reference to children and other less advanced creatures), the cellphone phenomenon is not surprising: it takes a certain amount of attention or concentration to think – to focus on and follow that little voice inside your head.  It used to be that doing two things at once meant your ability to concentrate was so good, you could divide your attention.  Now it means that your ability to concentrate is so bad, you can’t pay attention to any one thing for more than ten seconds.

(Either that or you don’t care enough to pay attention to anything or anyone for more than ten seconds.)

And maybe cellphones wouldn’t have become the annoyance they are if everyone hadn’t ditched their landline phones.  Because now the ONLY place you can have a phone conversation is OUTSIDE.  Wherever the signal is good.  Whether that happens to be outside someone’s bedroom window or one foot away from a stranger waiting for a bus, well, no matter.  Your conversation takes priority.  To everything and everyone.  Apparently.

This weather brought to you by…

“A deep freeze continues to sweep through Europe, mudslides and avalanches caused by heavy rains and snowmelt in Oregon and Washington have prompted evacuation notices, prolonged drought continues to devastate much of the American Midwest, Texas, and Mexico, with many areas now being without rain for over 200 days, and flash fires continue to rage throughout those areas, a heat wave in Australia continues unabated with temperatures well over 100 degrees, there are tornado alerts for regions throughout Tennessee and Oklahoma, Hurricane Gordon has touched down in Florida, swift on the heels of Hurricane Florence, flash floods are rampant in southern parts of Africa, and torrential rains have Brazil still in a state of emergency.”

This weather brought to you by everyone who’s driven a gas-guzzling minivan, pick-up, or SUV in the last thirty years, everyone who still makes unnecessary trips, and everyone who still lets their vehicle idle while they’re somewhere else doing whatever the fuck they’re doing.

“Office Help”

Anyone remember the job ads titled “Office Help”?  You knew, when a job ad was titled that way, that they expected, or wanted, a woman.  Women help.  They don’t actually do a job, they just help someone else do a job.  So the someone else gets the credit.  And the big bucks and the benefits.  After all, you’re just helping out, you’re just doing a favor.  Because you’re nice.  That’s what women are.  You never saw “Maintenance Help” or “Engineering Help” ads.

Another give-away was, and maybe still is, when the job was for something like “10:00 to 2:00”.  A man wouldn’t take a part-time job.  Men needed a full-time job.  Even if they hadn’t made a couple kids they then needed to support.   (Did I ever get paid more to support my choices?  Don’t think so.) 

And they’d get it too.  The full-time job.  Men are good at talking about their needs.  Because having needs makes you important,  If you’re a man.  (If you’re a woman, needing something makes you weak, dependent.)

(‘Course everything makes you weak if you’re a woman.  Even ethics.  It’s called ‘sentiment’.  In a man, it’s called ‘integrity’.)

Have things changed?

Mainstream and Alternative

So I was browsing the movie collection at my online DVD rental site and feeling so very tired and bored with movies by men, about men, for men.  My request list had dwindled to almost zero, and I wasn’t finding anything I was interested in.  So I decided to check out the “Alternative” section for at least an off-beat movie (by men, about men, for men) and WOH.  There they were! The movies by women. About women. For women. Lots and lots of movies with women front and center. Strong, interesting women. 

So I’m thinking, what a labeling mistake.  Why don’t they just call the mainstream ‘male’ and the alternative/indie ‘female’.   (Oh.  Right.)

                       

Porn’s Harmless and Pigs Fly

The fact that ‘you’ claim porn doesn’t harm women is proof that it does.  Because such a claim indicates that you are so accustomed to seeing women sexually subordinated you think there’s nothing wrong with it.  Such a claim proves that that porn has skewed your perceptions so much you actually believe the women are enjoying, asking for, whatever it is you see.  (They’re pretending, asshole.  They’re acting.  According to some guy’s fantasy script.  And they’re doing so because they’re getting paid.)

Such a claim also proves you haven’t read the research: for example, compared to those who did not watch porn, men who watched porn were more likely to have aggressive and hostile sexual fantasies, more likely to say that women enjoy forced sex, less likely to be bothered by rape and slashing, and more likely to consider women subordinate and submissive.

The research also indicates that males are starting to watch porn as young as eleven these days.

 

Snowmobiles Rule – Only in Canada. Pity.

Snowmobilers are often presented as enjoying the natural beauty of the North.  Oh please.  Not at the speeds they drive.  Not while their exhaust pipes spew fumes into our air.  And their engines roar at a volume that must be endured by everyone within five miles.  And their tossed beer cans litter the forest until someone comes by and picks up after them.

What snowmobiling is all about adolescent males going VROOM VROOM.

Which means that our government has handed over thousands of miles of crown land to a bunch of young men to use as their personal racetrack.  How fair is that?  And did they ask us first?

When a friend of mine contacted the MNR to ask about putting up signs at each end of a short trail through crown land that snowmobilers are using as a short cut to get to their trail and, in the process, making it dangerous (not to mention extremely unpleasant because of the fumes and the noise) for the rest of us to use (for walking and cross-country skiing), she was told No, they can’t put up signs prohibiting snowmobilers from using it because everyone has access to crown land.  Right.  Then why do the signs on the snowmobile club trails say ‘No Trespassing – You must have a permit to use this trail’?

Why has the government done this?  Because they’re adolescent males themselves.  Who still want to go VROOM VROOM.

And because local businesses asked them to, because they want to make money from the snowmobilers.

Snowmobilers are a minority.  Local business owners are a minority.  Why do they get to determine policy and practice?  Policy and practice that affects other people?

When snowmobilers (and ATVers and dirtbikers – essentially, all motorized ‘recreational’ vehicles) use crown land the way they want, no one else can use it the way they want.  Consider the trails, mentioned above, unsafe and unpleasant now for hikers and skiers.  Consider the lake we all live on.  In winter (and in summer too – jetskis, another motorized recreational vehicle), our properties may as well be backing on, well, a racetrack.  (So much for sitting outside and – well, so much for sitting outside.  Not to mention canoeing or kayaking.)  Consider all the backroads we live on, the ones without sidewalks.  It’s nice that we can hear a snowmobile coming from miles away so we have time to get off the road, but it’s not enough to get off to the side (assuming that’s not where we already are), because that’s where the snowmobiles drive.  It’s not even enough to get off the road and up onto the snowbank, because they like to ride the banks.  You have to climb up and over the snowbanks to be safe.  In some countries, pedestrians have the right of way.  In Canada, gas-guzzling, fume-spewing, noise-farting, male-driven snowmobiles do.

Being Josh

[Another old one, but it still applies...]

It’s Monday night basketball, an all-comers pick-up game, supposed to be fun and a good sweat. But week after week I steel myself against the anger, the frustration of not knowing how to correct the problem, and the despair of not being able to even begin to do just that. Eventually it happens: this time it’s Josh who yells at me to switch, to guard the new grade niner who’s just come onto the court to sub for the guy who’d been guarding Josh and Josh would guard the guy I’d been guarding.

I am distracted, as always, by the insult, the unwarranted assumption that I’m always the worst player there (even worse than the new grade niners) (although I’m thirty-five and played basketball throughout high school), and by the faulty logic that weak offensive players* are weak defensive players and should therefore guard other weak offensive players.

Nevertheless, I manage to focus on yet another problematic aspect of the shouted order: that it was an order, and it was given with the full expectation of compliance. How is it, I thus have occasion to wonder yet again, that a kid, a 17-year-old less than half my age, believes he can tell me what to do, believes he knows better than me? The answer is simple: he’s male. And I’m female. If I were a man over twice his age, he’d keep his thoughts to himself. And if he were a girl, he wouldn’t even have such thoughts.

When Chodorow wrote “Being and Doing”, a ground-breaking analysis of sexism in terms of passivity (of being, of women) and activity (of doing, of men), she got it right – but she also got it wrong. Josh is so easy in his authority over me simply because he’s male, simply because he is male. He hasn’t had to do anything to gain that authority, or the respect I feel myself giving him just before I catch myself acting like Pavlov’s dog. The confidence, the assurance, the arrogance that he must have to even think he can just tell me what to do – he has it just because he’s male. And he probably started developing it as soon as he realized he was indeed male: I’ve heard 5-year-old boys speak with the same kind of authority.

Women, on the other hand, have to do – we have to earn respect, we don’t just get it automatically. And I’m not sure we ever achieve any authority, no matter what we do.

And of course it’s not just respect and authority men feel entitled to just because they’re men: they also feel entitled to money (pay, and higher pay) and power (supervisory positions). In short, they feel entitled to dominance, just because of who, of what, they are (not because of what they do).

* I concede on this point, especially when I’m playing with people who are taller than me, who play with a slightly larger ball than I learned to play with, and who, most importantly, recognize only a hotshotting inside kind of game.

Why do you read the paper every day?

Why do you read the paper (or listen to/watch the news) every day?  Certainly not for an objective account of events.  Because surely you’re aware of editorial bias – what gets in (or not), where it goes, and how much space it gets there.  And reporter bias – who gets interviewed, what gets asked (or not), and what gets put at the beginning of the piece.

And how it’s said.  To describe an incident with complete objectivity is to give a phenomenological account.  And anyone who’s taken Phenomenology 101 knows how difficult that is.  Even to say “There is a brown house” is to have made an assumption, is to have imposed your subjectivity.  You can’t see the house.  From your perspective, standing in front of it, all you see is one, or maybe two walls.  You assume there’s a third and a fourth.  Your subjectivity fills in the gaps.  All the time.

It gets worse.  Is the glass half empty or half full?  One description is positive, the other is negative.

And worse still.  Consider something as simple as an accident report.  You begin with “A serious accident occurred…”  Well, right away you’re in trouble.  Who says it’s serious?  How serious is serious?  Serious to who?  You’ve expressed your opinion.  Furthermore, you’ve assumed it was an accident.  My guess it that you didn’t speak to the drivers.  Maybe it was intentional.

Try again.  To say “A ran into B” is to put it in rather aggressive terms.  “A hit B” is almost as bad.  “Car A hit Car B” is a little better.  “Car A collided with Car B” is even better, but still you’ve suggested that A is to blame (because it did the doing – colliding or whatever); maybe Car B got in the way of Car A.  “Car A and Car B collided” is better still, but only “Car A and Car B occupied the same space at the same point in time” is really objective.

Now consider the difficulty of reporting something involving more than inanimate objects.  For example, people.  Consider “The fight continues between the Board and the Union…”  To call it a fight is to describe a whole set of attributes (animosity, competition) which may or may not be present.  And, in any case, I don’t think everyone agrees on when an interaction involving those attributes actually becomes a fight – again, it’s a subjective call.  “The struggle to find a common ground continues…” is better, but still, you’ve called it a struggle, you’ve again put your own opinion into the report.  To say “The negotiations continued…” is perhaps most accurate, most objective.  But you’d better stop there: even to add “for yet another day” suggests it’s going on too long – an opinion.  The thing is this: purely objective reports are boring; to make the news interesting, to sucker you into reading it, it’s make subjective.

It’s also made exciting.  Loud noises are exciting.  At the very least, they get our attention.  And conflict, more than resolution, seems associated with loud noises.  So conflict gets covered more than resolution.  And things involving neither get covered as if they were conflicts, as if there is some problem, some difficulty.  (And certainly any problem or difficulty that is there gets emphasized, even exaggerated.)  So you read the paper for excitement (get a life) – but not only is it vicarious excitement, it’s fabricated, fake excitement.

Even if the news accounts were objective, why do you read so many of them every day?   (Now commentary, that would actually be useful – it could make sense of the accounts.)  I just want to know what’s going on, people say.  But why?  Does it give you a feeling of control to know?  Anyone who gave it half a thought would feel less, not more, powerful knowing about problems they could not or would not solve.

Truth is, people read the paper because, well, people have always read the paper – it’s what you do, every morning or on your break or after work.  People in general are a rather thoughtless bunch.  And they pay with the skewered world view they thereby acquire.

Why Aren’t Women Funny?

Well, they are, of course.  It’s just that many men don’t find them funny.  Which is why many stand-up clubs (those managed by men) (that is, almost all of them) actually have a rule: only so many stand-ups on any given night can be women.  Too many and they kill the night.

But, of course, that’s so only in clubs where most of the audience is male.  Because, as I’ve said, men don’t find women funny.  Partly, this could be because men find farts and burps funny.  (Except, of course, when women fart and burp.  For some reason, they find that horrifying.)

The other mainstay of comedy (for both sexes) is ‘(heterosexual) relationship humour’ – so men laugh at the caricatures of women presented by men (and women laugh at the caricatures of men presented by women).

But my guess is that even with sex-neutral comedy, women comedians fare more poorly than men.  A woman tells a socio-political joke, and people (men) just sort of stare at her (as if they’re seeing a dog walking on its hind legs?).  Give a man the same material, and the audience will respond.  Ironically (given my topic), I think this is so because men don’t take women seriously. To laugh at someone’s joke is to accord them some sort of authority, if only the authority to make some sort of comment through humour.

Either that or they’re just not interested in women (except as sexual possibilities).  (I’m reminded of a brilliant skit I once saw, on “A Bit of Fry and Laurie”: a woman was giving a business presentation and all present, mostly men, were paying such close and supportive attention – I was, frankly, surprised (that had certainly never happened to me!); then the woman casually mentioned that she’d come up with her proposal on the weekend when she was out with her boyfriend, and their attention turned off as quickly and as completely as a spotlight – a woman is either a sexual possibility or she doesn’t exist.)

This would explain why, for example, Susan Juby didn’t win the Leacock Medal of Humour with I’m Alice, I think.  It’s a hilarious coming of age story.  But it’s about a girl.  So while generations of girls have had to read about boys coming of age (The Apprentice of Duddy Kravitz, A Separate Peace, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, The Outsiders, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and on and on), boys have only had to read about Anne Frank (no doubt, it was ‘saved’ by the wartime setting) (oh, well, put guns in it and…).  When a boy comes of age, that’s important, because, well, he’s becoming a man.  But when a girl comes of age, well, she becomes a woman.  Unimportant.  In fact, the Medal has been won by a woman only twice in 30 years.  I wonder if the panel of 17 judges consists mostly of men (the judges aren’t named on their site, but the President and Vice-President are, and they’re both men, whereas the two secretaries and person in charge of the dinner? They’re women).

The Provocation Defence – Condoning Testosterone Tantrums (and other masculinities)

According to the Canadian Criminal Code (and probably a lot of other criminal codes), murder can be reduced to manslaughter if the person was provoked.  Provocation is defined as “a wrongful act or an insult that is of such a nature as to be sufficient to deprive an ordinary person of the power of self-control is provocation for the purposes of this section if the accused acted on it on the sudden and before there was time for his passion to cool” (CCC 232.(2)).

It is unfortunate that “an ordinary person” is used as the standard for judgment rather than “a reasonable person”.  The ordinary person, in my experience, is not particularly reasonable.  The ordinary person is a walking mess of unacknowledged emotions and unexamined opinions, most of which are decidedly unreasonable.

Furthermore, in our society, an ordinary person is gendered (see Martine Rothblatt’s The Apartheid of Sex), and given the specific use of “his” in 232(2), it seems that it is men who are (mostly) in mind for use of this defence.

The ordinary man doesn’t have a very high opinion of women.  In particular, in our society, our heterosexist masculist society, men consider women to be almost solely sexual.  And they consider them to be sexual property.  The ordinary man also considers himself to be almost solely sexual.  His physical strength and other supposed attributes of power (from his income to his hair) are also important, but mostly only as indicators of his sexual prowess or attractiveness (go figure).  This means that an insult to his sexual prowess, or to any of the stand-ins, especially if uttered by a woman, who is, it goes without saying, a subordinate, may provide grounds for invoking the provocation defence.

Perhaps the typical scenario in which the defence is invoked is that of a married man who discovers his wife having sex with another man and in a “crime of passion” kills – either his wife or the other man or both.  We call the murder a crime of passion, but really it’s just an outrage of proprietorship.  Of course, maybe that’s what passion is in men: the expression of conquest, and ownership.  O. R. Sullivan (“Anger and Excuse: Reassessing Provocation” in Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 13, 1993) calls it an “outrage at a failure to dominate” – which also makes sense, given the subordination of women (and the defence’s applicability to men).  And Judy Steele (private correspondence) calls it an honor killing (the man’s honor is at stake).

If it really is passion we want to allow, then I should be excused for stealing a painting because I really like it, I’ve studied and admired art all my life, you could say I’m quite passionate about it…

And what exactly is passion, in an ordinary man, except rage – a testosterone tantrum?  So we’re legitimizing man’s anger.  (‘I was angry.’  ‘Oh well then.  That’s okay.  The man was angry.’)  (No wonder they get angry so often.  It’s a free get out of jail ticket.)

In fact, somehow, in our society, an angry man is more of a man than a calm man, let alone a fearful man, a grieving man, and so on.  Real men must control their emotions, or, better, not have any (well, except anger).  (It’s just a little ironic to allow a defence of emotion to those who pride themselves on not being emotional.  Well, except for being angry.)

If we open the door to this unreasoned and unreasonable action, this knee-jerk response, shouldn’t we open the door to all knee-jerk responses?  What makes this one so different it excuses murder?  If it’s okay to kill someone because you think you own her, shouldn’t it be okay to kill someone because, oh, I don’t know, you think she’s a spy for the aliens?  Or because she (or he) called you stupid?

A further indication that this defence is primarily intended for men is that if a sexually unattractive man makes a move on a woman (an insult to our sexual prowess), even an illegal move such as sexual touching without consent, we generally don’t kill the guy.  And yet, apparently, an unsolicited homosexual advance can provoke a man to kill.  After all, such an unwelcome sexual advance is enough to make you lose control.  (Oh yeah?  Hm.  Let me get my gun.  There’s a construction crew outside and a bunch of assholes down at the bar.  And another bunch at work.)

I’m also not impressed that with this defence, the act must be done “on the sudden and before there was time for his passion to cool.”  This means we’re condoning a lack of control.  It has always puzzled me that premeditated murder is considered worse, not better, than unpremeditated murder.[1]  Doing something after some consideration should surely be better than doing something thoughtlessly, without stopping to think about it at all – even if the reasons for the behaviour turn out to be unacceptable ones.  (And we should definitely teach kids the difference between acceptable reasons and unacceptable reasons.)

And funny how men seem to lose control only when a perceived-to-be subordinate frustrates their desires.  When they lash out at a bigger guy, it’s just a fight.  Better to be stupid than shamed?  So the provocation defence is just a way out of the shame of ‘picking on’ someone not your own size?[2]

Furthermore, how can such loss of control be both a justification (as when the provocation defence is invoked – in which case what you did isn’t as wrong) and an excuse (as when temporary insanity is invoked – in which case what you did isn’t really your fault)?

Of course, yet another problem with allowing a provocation defence is that it puts at least part of the blame on the provoker.  ‘It was her fault.  She provoked me.’  I can see this for some situations; blame is often justly shared in a physical altercation.  But in a murder?  It’s her fault he killed her?  Please.  She mocks you?  She nags?  She makes fun of your sperm count?  She complains about your failure to get a job, a real job, a good job?  She talks to other men?  She has sex with them?  So call her a bitch and leave.  And don’t look back.  Send money for your kids or apply for custody if you want to look after them.  Or put up with it until they’re sixteen and then leave.  But geez louise d’ya have to kill her?

It is not irrelevant that short of the formal provocation defence, provocation is often invoked in sexual assault crimes as well.  It’s a way to dodge blame.  Not only do we allow this plea of provocation by men, we encourage, we expect, the provocation by women: women are expected to be sexually attractive all the time – to wear sexualizing make-up and attire, even at work.  (Though given that men also rape asexualized women – we’ve all read about the 60-70-year-old victims –  apparently it’s our fault just for being a woman.  Can you say ‘Eve’?)  It’s a neat little trick: encourage the provocative behavior, and allow the provocation defence.  And yet, as Lucy Reed Harris (“Towards a Consent Standard in the Law of Rape” in University of Chicago Law Review 43, 1976) points out, “although a flagrant display of cash in public may very predictably precipitate a robbery, the law does not hold an alleged robbery victim responsible for his own foolishness in making such a display.”  (Unless it were a woman being so foolish?)

When will we insist our boys grow up?  If there’s a legitimate reason they lag behind girls in maturity development (and therefore have relatively little control) and language skills (which provide a much better response to an insult), then let’s just say it – they’re the inferior ones.  And then let’s follow through, and restrict their access to weapons, for example.  (A higher age limit for drinking, and driving, would also be a good idea.  And a curfew for two or more men under thirty gathered together.)

 

[1] In the case of Robert Latimer, for example, the presence of premeditation should’ve made it better: he did not kill Tracy on the spur of the moment, out of anger; he thought about it, long and hard, literally for years, after trying every alternative…

[2] Because if it really is the case that you can’t control yourself, well, we can fix that – we can lock you up and keep you away from others or we can give you drugs that reduce that pesky testosterone.