Peg Tittle's Blog, page 55

Grey's Anatomy, Flashpoint, and Who knows how many others (I don't – and this is why)

Why didn't Bailey get the Chief of Surgery position?

For the same reason Ed jokingly says to Greg, when he questions his rank, "Should I get you a dress?"—and they both laugh.

Because in 2012 being a woman is (still) (STILL!) (STILL!) (STILL!) being subordinate.

I love that on Grey's Anatomy, so many main characters, surgeons every one of them – are women.  Actually they outnumber the men.  8:6.  And yet Owen gets the Chief position.  Richard, then Derek, then Owen.  3 of the 6 men get to be Chief.  0 of the 8 women.  Bailey's been there longer than Owen.  And longer than Sloan, the other contender.  And yeah, okay, Kepner got the Chief Resident position even though she was there longer than Karev, but he didn't want it.  (And we see it primarily a position of responsibility, not power.)  At one point, the Chief (Webber) said he was grooming Bailey for Chief of Surgery—what happened?

And Sam gets to be team leader in Ed's absence.  Not Jules.  Again, she has more seniority on the team.  And is just as competent (if not more so—she can shoot and she can negotiate a crisis).

This is why I stick to my Cagney and Lacey, Murphy Brown, and Commander-in-Chief reruns.

(We're going in the wrong direction, people.)  (And just when did we turn around?)

Making Taxes Gender-Fair

Since men commit 90% of the crime, they should pay 90% of the tax that supports the judicial system. Prisons are expensive to build and maintain. As are prisoners – they don't work while they're in prison, so we have to support them. Then there's the expense of the police forces and courts that get them there. We already require that they pay the bulk of car insurance premiums because they're the worse drivers. So what's stopping us from going further, making the system even more fair?

And since a large percentage of their crime is violent, it follows that men are responsible for far more ER visits than women (assuming no gender differences with regard to illness and other injury) (actually, since men take more risks than women, there probably is a gender difference with regard to injury) (don't forget the driving thing), so men should pay more of the tax that supports the healthcare system.

Oh and the military. Men are the ones who thrive on aggression, they get off on the excitement of fighting. They want to join the military. They want to go to war. So let them pay for it. Let them pay the $530 billion required by the military budget.

Then there's all the environmental stuff. All those beer cans, empty cigarette packs, fast food cartons – most of the litter along the highways was put there by men. As they continue to drive their big gas-guzzlers with the high emissions. And the companies that dump toxic waste, and clear cut forests, and dam river systems? All run by men.

We could call it the Gender Responsibility Tax – a $5,000 surtax could be levied on each and every male. Payable annually, from birth to death. By the parents, of course, until the boy reached manhood.

The Soaps vs. The Game

While both 'the soaps' and 'the game' have been criticized as poor viewing choices, only the soaps have been dismissed as fluff. However, a close examination reveals that, in fact, the soaps have more heft than the game.

In both cases, the central theme, and that which drives the action, is winning. In the soaps, what the players are trying to win is money, power, love, and/or happiness. These are pretty substantial goals. In the game, however, the players are trying to win – the game. Frankly, it verges on circularity (you play the game in order to win the game), which comes close to utter triviality.

And while both sets of players use strategy, often involving manipulation, the strategy of the soaps is considerably more complicated than 'Go left, fake, then go right.' In fact, I would venture to say that the soaps is to the game what chess is to checkers.

With regard to setting, the soaps have a bit of an edge: while a well-furnished room is the norm, at least the set does change. (One has the well-furnished office, the well-furnished den, the well-furnished living room…)

With respect to dialogue, again the soaps have the edge: there is some. (Actually, I expect the game players speak to each other too, but for some reason we never get to hear their dialogue; instead, we are privy only to a voice-over commentary, explaining the action, rather like a Greek chorus – as patronizing now as it no doubt was then.)

While the characters of the soaps are more gender-inclusive, the characters of the game are more race-inclusive. (And in both cases, they're rich.) I'd call it a tie here.

As for plot, again I'd call it a tie: in both cases, the events are terribly predictable. I'd venture to say one is hard put to distinguish one game from another or one soap from another – only the characters give it away.

In the cinematography category, the game is superior for its long shots, but the soaps are superior for their close-ups. Again, a tie. However, in the soundtrack category, the soaps walk away with the prize.

As for sex and violence, I'm afraid the soaps lead the game on both counts. There is simply no sex in the game – unless you count the occasional ass-pat (but that is so very elementary, it hardly even counts as foreplay). And while there is a lot more physical contact in the game, of a violent-seeming nature, and while injury must therefore be frequent, it is seldom permanent; in the soaps, however, people get hurt all the time, in rather long-lasting ways. Death is even rarer in the game; not so in the soaps.

One might point out that the game is real, whereas the soaps are not, and on that basis alone claim victory for the game. Unfortunately this very 'advantage' backfires: given the level of injury and death in the soaps, it's to its credit that it's not for real; in the game, however, real people get hurt.

Tally up the points and I rest my case: the soaps are pretty substantial stuff compared to the schoolyard play of the game.

Government Grants for Grad School

So – this was quite a while ago – a colleague at work, another part-timer, who was also going to grad school, got a government grant. She'd be getting $675/month to cover her living expenses. I'd spent five years saving $10,000 to cover my living expenses (hopefully it wouldn't take more than ten months to get my degree).

She's 'native'. Well, she was born in Canada same as me, actually in the same year even, but her parents' parents' parents' parents' parents' parents were living here before the Europeans moved in.

So, the argument goes, the money is compensation for past prejudice. Okay, then let's establish past prejudice. I mean, how exactly were her parents and grandparents denied opportunities – that, presumably, my parents and grandparents were not?

She tells me that in high school, she got 50s and 60s. So? She also tells me that she was delinquent. Excuse me, but that's her fault. How can it be her parents' parents' parents' fault? Did what the Europeans do (deny them jobs?) somehow create a culture of laziness among the people who were here first? And they were powerless to resist that? I attended school every fucking day, did all my homework, and then some, and got 80s and 90s. I guess because I'm white. And lower middle-class. Bullshit!! There were plenty others like me who skipped class. And got 50s and 60s. My brother, for one.

But I was encouraged, she explains. She wasn't, because school isn't important in the native culture. Yes, I was expected to go to school every day. And my parents were happy, though not particularly enthusiastic about, my grades, but that's about it. I wouldn't say I was encouraged. In fact, I was discouraged from pursuing a graduate degree in Philosophy.

If she attended every class, and did all her homework, and then some, and scored well on a culture bias-free IQ test, and still got 50s and 60s, then I'd say, yeah, okay, you're a victim of prejudice.

But even if that were the case, how does $675/month compensate for the prejudice? How does it equal my privilege? I got As but that didn't lead to $675/month. I ended up with the same part-time job she did. The same number of shifts, at the same rate of pay. If she had applied for the same jobs as me and not gotten them in spite of similar qualifications and experience (and opportunity to get said qualifications and experience), then I'd say, yeah, okay, unfair discrimination.

But still, why just give her $675/month? Wouldn't it make more sense to give her a job that pays $675/month? Doesn't the hand-out just repeat the past, which presumably is at fault, for putting her in this awful present of hers?

Death for Willy?

I was sort of attacked by a dog a while ago when I was out running.  It wasn't really a severe attack: I was simply taken down, like a deer, in a well-executed stealth manoeuvre by a large German Shepherd; he did not, nor did his companion, come in for the kill, or even the maul – I was left with a single but deep and ragged bite requiring half a dozen stitches.

It wasn't provoked – well, perhaps it was – in the way a red miniskirt provokes an assault:  I was running, which in itself is provocative to most canines for at least accompaniment, if not pursuit; and I was running past (but not on) his property, so I was, given the canine propensity to extend legal boundaries by a few miles, 'in his face'.

Thing is, almost everyone I've spoken to encourages me to report it to the police so the dog can be 'put down'.  Now, true enough, while my thick thigh survived the bite and I'm not now traumatized for life regarding all furry brown and black things, a child would not have fared so well.  I understand that.

But dogs can make mistakes, and I don't think we should necessarily be killed for our mistakes.  Again, true enough, this doesn't sound like a mistake – but I decided to meet Willy and Axel before taking any further action.  I did so and concluded that Willy is not a psychopathic killer or even a beaten and abused dog with an understandable but incurable 'attitude': I had both he and Axel eating out of my hand – those little doggie treats shaped like little letter carriers (or, come to think about it, like little joggers); Axel even licked my face (Willy gave me a look that seemed to discourage that sort of invitation – though he could have been remembering just at that moment that cellulite tastes rather yucky); and both dogs were quite obedient to their owners' commands to lay down in their corner.  So, I concluded instead that Willy is 'simply' a big, rough, strong dog who hasn't been taught that Biting is Unequivocally Unacceptable (Bad).

Where am I going with all of this?  Here: we routinely let people live who have done far far worse than Willy.  Are we just inconsistent or is our distinction between human and not-human/dog justified?  Frankly, I don't see the justification.  I think there's as much likelihood that Willy can be rehabilitated as there is that the forementioned people can be – perhaps even a greater likelihood, given the (relative) simple clarity of Willy's mind.  (Furthermore, the human's greater potential to control natural tendencies with reason make such assaults less excusable and therefore more punishable than Willy's assault.)

Rehab aside, is Willy more likely to repeat the attack?  I don't think so – it was a fluke of timing and circumstance (I happened to run by his property just at the moment he was let out of his kennel and then left unsupervised for a few minutes – first time in five years).  Furthermore, fencing the entire property (the solution I advocated to the owner) would reduce the likelihood of repeat attacks.  Unlike Willy, most of the forementioned humans know how to open a gate.

Lastly, Willy has an owner, of whom I can request a remedy short of death.  Alas, the forementioned humans don't.

Am I wary when I pass by now?  Of course.  But I'm still more afraid of the camouflage-clad hunters with their beer and rifles, and the half-wandering drivers with their cell phones.

Boy Books

Boy books. You're thinking The Boys' Book of Trains and The Hardy Boys, right? I'm thinking most of the books I took in high school English.

Consider Knowles' A Separate Peace. Separate indeed. It's set at a boys' boarding school. The boys are obsessed with jumping out of a tree. This involves considerable risk of crippling injury. And yet they do it, for no other reason than 'to prove themselves'. Now my question is 'What are they proving themselves to be – other than complete idiots?' We don't get it.

They are also obsessed with going off to war. While this again involves risk of injury, it could, at least, be done for some lofty and heroic reason. But the reasons for the war are not once discussed. So it seems to be just another peer pressured ego thing: 'My dick's as big as yours.' Again, we don't get it.

Consider also Golding's Lord of the Flies and Conrad's Heart of Darkness. In all three, a major theme is the loss of innocence – not through the discovery of evil in the world, but through the discovery of evil within. The boys discover their heart of darkness, their capacity for cruelty. Well, we can't identify with that – after all, we didn't spend our childhoods tearing the legs off harmless flies and putting fish hooks through live frogs.

We especially can't identify with the feelings of pride, which lie just beneath the pretensions of horror, that accompany this discovery. For make no mistake, in forests and on farms, and on foreign battlefields, killing is still the rite of passage, the test of maturity, for boys to real men. Hands up, does anyone else see this as sick?

Let's go back to Lord of the Flies for a minute. Again, all boys. Plane-crashed on an island, their task is simple: co-exist. They must figure out how to live with each other. They can't do this. Instead, they figure out how to kill each other.

Would girls have done any better? Well, yes, I think they would have. Would they have splintered into rival groups? Probably. Would they have picked on the fat ugly girl? Sigh. Probably. But they would not have killed the pig, especially like that, laughing about its squeals of pain. (Especially not with all that fruit around.) And the little 'uns would've had lots of mommies to look after them. And at the end, they would not have been discovered smeared with blood and war paint. Instead, they probably would have been found on the beach singing and doing the Macarena. (And the really horrible thing is that many men reading this won't see that as unquestionably better.)

So don't tell me these novels are universal. They're not. They're boy books. By boys about boys. And I'm a girl. Was a girl. I can't tell you the effect Lord of the Flies had on me. First of all, I had to change sex to even be a part of the world. Read that sentence again. Then I saw myself as seven parts Simon, two parts Ralph, and one part Piggy. And I saw my options: insanity or death. Quite the education.

But even when the theme is universal, we get boy books. Consider Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Duddy wants to buy some land. As a person, I can identify with that. Unlike much of the previously-mentioned novels, this is not a boy thing. But still, Duddy is a boy. Very much a boy. So there's not much else I can identify with.

However, also unlike the previously-mentioned novels, this one has a few female characters in it. Actually, so does A Separate Peace: one is Leper's mother and she is just that – Leper's mother; the other is Hazel Brewster – the 'town belle', a mere object to be observed and perhaps used by the boys. Yvette, in Duddy Kravitz, is seen, by both Richler and Duddy, as either sexual or secretarial. Am I supposed to identify with that?

Consider Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Now I can really identify with saving books, with perpetuating the intellectual heritage of civilization. But the five men Montag meets at the end who are doing just that are just that – five men. So are the thousands of others: "Each man had a book he wanted to remember…" Where am I? What was I supposed to be wanting? (Another television wall – recall Mildred, Montag's wife.)

I'm so thankful for Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. For Scout. She's one of the two main kid characters. She's a girl. A spunky girl. A girl who runs, and thinks, and feels. There I am!

(But, alas, she doesn't have a mom. She has a father and a brother; if she had a mom, if there were an adult woman like her, like her dad, that would even it up a bit – Scout wouldn't be the female minority in her world. But that would be too much, I guess. Equal representation is going too far.)

And I'm thankful for Laurence's The Stone Angel. It's about a woman. An old woman. A feisty, sarcastic old woman who embraces her inner bitch. I wanna be Hagar when I grow old.

But what do I want to be when I grow up? There's this huge void between Scout and Hagar. Why? What the hell happens to girls when they turn thirteen? I'm an adolescent, was an adolescent, presumably discovering and creating my identity. If I stay within the boundaries of the familiar, the apparently possible, I – Where are the girl books? Where are the books set at girls' boarding schools? Where are the books about 'girls only' islands?

And what would happen if boys read them – what would happen if adolescent boys experienced Gilman's Herland and Tepper's The Gate to Woman's Country instead of Golding's Lord of the Flies? (and Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy, and Newman's A Share of the World and McCarthy's The Group and…)

Maybe, eventually, instead of boys and girls, we could have kids, and then people; kids, and people, would read kids' books, and people's books.

The Superbowl: knock yourself out

So does anyone think someone's going to get knocked out during this year's Superbowl? It's happened before. And frankly, I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often. Just like that latest disgrace with our prisoners of war.

I mean, consider the similarities: both the military world and the sports world are nothing but teams of hyper-emotional men who are fixated on winning at any cost.

Men hyper-emotional? Haven't you got that backwards? It's women who are the emotional ones. Yeah right. Anyone who says men aren't emotional hasn't seen a game. Or a fight. What do you think motivates the players, the soldiers – the calm, cool voice of reason? Thinking for oneself, should this be possible, is openly discouraged on both the playing field and the killing field; success of the team depends on uncritical obedience.

The very structure of the league/legion is irrational: 'the enemy', the guys you are expected to beat, have never done anything to you and there's little proof they ever will. Hell, the enemy changes at the flick of a hat – excuse me, a dollar: players are traded like the performing commodities they are, today's good buddy is tomorrow's target; and lest we forgot, the Gulf War reminded us that any nation's soldiers are really just mercenaries. (Hell no, we won't go, we won't fight for Texaco! Did you notice when announcers started saying Molson Leaf Hockey?) Given such a vacuum of rationality, no wonder the men are in emotional overdrive most of the time.

Oh but I can hear the coaches protesting: 'We always say winning isn't everything, it's how you play the game!' Well, coach, actions speak louder than words: who gets the applause, who gets the trophy, who gets the money – the loser?

And how do they play the game? Like the real men they're taunted to be – with all the aggression they've got. And if testosterone, and ten years of Ninja Turtles and big-boys-don't-cry, and another ten years of how-far-d'ya-get isn't enough, then put back a coupla six packs and pump some steroids to bring out the beast in you.

Oh sure, there are rules – don't forget fouls and the Geneva Convention. Yeah right. Let's get serious. The only rule is Don't-Get-Caught.

So why the surprise when the players do exactly what they've been trained to do: hate and hurt (and kill), for no real reason, and not care about it.

I mean, what do you expect at a cockfight?

Getting Married

When you 'get married' you are entering into a legal contract. You might be doing a few other things (promising your love to someone, making a deal with a god), but you are most certainly entering into a legally binding contract with another person. There are rights due to and responsibilities incumbent upon people who enter into a marriage contract. Some of these have to do with money, some have to do with children, some have to do with sexual services, and some have to do with other things.

What I find so extremely odd is that even though well over 90% of all people in the USA and Canada get married, almost none of them read the terms of the contract before they sign. (Most people find out about these terms only when they want to break the contract.) Probably because the contract isn't presented when their signatures are required.

Although this begs the question 'Is the contract, therefore, still binding?', the more interesting question is 'Why isn't it presented?'

The Other Sex

Men, I mean. After all, they are the ones who define themselves in relation to us: to be a man is to be whatever is not to be a woman.

If women are graceful, then to be graceful is feminine. A graceful man is effeminate. A real man is not graceful. He's not necessarily clumsy, he's just not-graceful.

If women like flowers, then men do not.

If women like pink and orange and mauve, then men do not.

And when women change their abilities, their desires, the men also change. For example, as soon as women became banktellers, suddenly men (real men) did not become banktellers. As soon as women were typists, men were not-typists. Et cetera.

I pity a whole sex that is so dependent. Living in a rut of reaction, they are simply incapable of such a proactive move as defining themselves for themselves. They didn't even know they didn't like quiche until we said we liked it.

Frankly, I fear for their future. At the rate women are doing, well, doing whatever they please, men will soon be, well, not.

What Went Wrong with Political Correctness?

My guess is that it started well enough, as sensitivity: people realized that terms such as 'crippled' and 'retarded' had gathered too many negative connotations, had become insults; so they replaced them with new words such as 'physically challenged' and 'mentally challenged' – words that, because new, would be free of such slant.

This linguistic reform became called, I suggest, 'political correctness' – perhaps by people (men?) who couldn't say (let alone be considered) 'sensitive'.

From there, 'politically correct' became 'expedient', and the terms were used not out of sensitivity to those being identified but out of sensitivity to those doing the identifying: 'which term will make me seem most like what people want, so that I'll get what I'm after?' People unaccustomed to treating others as ends in themselves (as people with interests that could be violated by an insensitive insult), but familiar with treating them as means to an end (as people who could serve one's own interests if one simply pushed the right buttons, used the right words), turned linguistic reform into a matter of linguistic usefulness.

If we'd just stayed with 'sensitive', perhaps we could've kept the sensitivity. Then again, if enough people pretended to be sensitive just because it was expedient, the term 'sensitive' would've become stained – better that 'politically correct' got stained.

But hey, what's in a word? Well, a lot. Our language determines, indeed limits, our thought as much as it reflects it. There are lots of things we don't have words for. Read Douglas Adams' and John Lloyd's The Meaning of Liff and The Deeper Meaning of Liff for examples. One of my favourites is 'abilene', an adjective to describe 'the pleasing coolness on the reverse side of the pillow'. And the thing is, if we don't have a word for it, we can't easily talk about it. We don't have a word for the woman's active role in sexual intercourse – no surprise then that we usually talk about her role as passive. And if we can't easily talk about it, we don't often think about it – could well be why so many women are passive in sex: we still think, most often think, that women are fucked, penetrated, taken (not that men aren't engulfed, enclosed, taken in).

Sometimes linguistic reform alone can bring about an attitudinal change: changing our habits sometimes changes our selves. Calling myself non-Black rather than Caucasian has made me think less of white as the norm.

But sometimes changing a word is just superficial and not the result, or even accompaniment, of attitudinal change – nothing really changes. And we've seen that with the politically correct replacement terms: 'physically challenged' and 'mentally challenged' have themselves now picked up negative connotations, have become insults; so yet another new pair of terms must be found. But unless the attitude changes too, unless there are truly no negative connotations to be picked up, what's in a new word? (Nigger, Negro, Black, person of colour – )

But 'politically correct' doesn't refer only to words; it also refers to attitudes and actions. It's politically correct to have a person of colour on your Board of Directors, for example. What does that mean? That it's expedient to do so, because then you'll look like a non-racist organization. Who really buys that? Soon after 'politically correct' entered common discourse, the term 'token' also showed up. And no wonder. The hypocrisy was pretty obvious. Repackaging something that's sour doesn't make it sweet. Which is why 'politically correct' now means not 'sensitive', nor even 'expedient', but 'hypocrite'.

Ironic, isn't it? The very thing that's happened to politically correct terms has happened to the term 'politically correct' itself: it's become tarnished, with negative connotations. But unlike terms like 'physically challenged' and 'mentally challenged', rightly so.