Jonathan V. Last's Blog, page 29

‘The Death of Superman Lives’

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

 

‘Interstellar’

The new trailer for Interstellar was just shown at Comic-Con, and the general impression seems to be that it feels a bit like Contact.

Why is it that people don’t revere Contact? For me, it’s one of the two great under appreciated sci-fi movies of the last 20 years.

I suppose part of the reason it gets overlooked is that to really appreciate it, it has to be on a giant screen with big sound. It suffers from the home video experience as much as movies such as Gravity and Avatar do.

Libertarians on Gender and Sports

Reason has a trollish essay up arguing that we should stop segregating sports by gender. Like a lot of libertarianism itself, it’s a superficially interesting argument that would lead to practically terrible outcomes with no actual benefits, to anyone.

The piece is hung entirely around the success of a single female contestant on the show American Ninja Warrior, which leads to the following conclusion:

If a woman can play basketball or baseball well enough for a men’s team, then it’s hard to think of even marginally credible arguments for not letting her. Likewise, it’s hard to think of a good reason for separating male and female golf, or track and field, and so on.

The only plausible explanation for keeping women out of men’s sports is that it also keeps men out of women’s sports. If you let women compete against men, then you have to let men compete against women, and gender physiology makes it likely that a lot of women’s teams could soon become JV men’s teams instead. Men who couldn’t quite make the cut in the NBA, for instance, could try out in the WNBA — and some of them would elbow women aside.

Here’s what would happen if you “desegregated”–which in all practicality would mean merging–gender differentiated sports: The number of women playing those sports would approach zero at every single level in which the sports were desegregated. About a dozen years ago I looked into this question for a piece which isn’t online today. Some highlights:

Take the 2000 Olympics in Sidney. Marion Jones went into the games as the most ballyhooed female sprinter in history, and she made good on her promise, winning gold in both the 100 and 200 meter events. But how do Jones’s times stack up against high school boys from, say, New Jersey?

In the 100 meters at last year’s state championship meet, Jones would have finished fourth (At the Olympics Jones won in 10.75 seconds; the boy who was state champ in New Jersey last year ran a 10.30. In the sprint world, a 0.45 second difference is like winning by three touchdowns.). She would have fared no better in the 200 meters–her Olympic time would have put her, again, fourth in the state.

What we didn’t know back then was that Marion Jones was juiced up and she still couldn’t hang with a bunch of male high school sprinters.

Tennis gives you pretty much the same result. Back in 1998, the Williams sisters decided to play a full set against their hitting partner, a guy named Karsten Braasch, who was ranked #203 in the world. It was 6-2 against Venus, 6-1 against Serena.

Which means that if you merged Olympic track and field, there wouldn’t be a single woman at the Games. If you merged the tennis tours, it’s unlikely that there would be a single woman playing professional tennis. Ditto for the NBA and WNBA. Ditto for soccer. Ditto for pretty much anything except, possibly, motorsports, billiards, American Ninja Warrior, and a few other obscure activities where technology sufficiently mediates physical gender differences. And this would happen at every level where the sports were merged: Semi-pro, college, varsity, and JV. It would mean the end of women in anything other than recreational sports.

Now, maybe some people might view this as a positive good, A=A and all that. But while women’s sports don’t especially interest me, I like that idea that female jocks get a pretty good chance to experience athletic life, except at the professional level. And I think we’d be worse off, in general, if we destroyed those opportunities in the pursuit of some crazy notions about gender equality and the meritocracy.

Great Moments in Law Enforcement

Cops defy stated public policy and harass a reporter trying to take pictures of public buildings in the nation’s capital.

Awesome.

Dept. of Bait and Switch

Newsflash: 96.6 percent of Americans identify as straight. Which is kind of surprising since America has been told, over and over, that 10 percent of the country is gay.

This figure was trumpeted so relentlessly that eventually people kind of thought it was a low-end estimate. Which is why, two years ago, Gallup found that the average American guess that 24 percent of the country was gay.  (In the new CDC study, 1.6 percent of people identify as gay or lesbian.)

At some point in the near future we’re going to start getting data on the actual number of same-sex unions and only then will society get a sense of the real magnitude of the trade it seems to have made.

Another Data Point on VOXDOTCOM

Refusal to correct an “error.” Though in Vox’s defense, it’s really hard to sort out what is and isn’t true if the “facts” aren’t on Google.

Archie? Nooooooooooooooooooo!

The news of the “‘death’ of Archie” (as they put it on the CGC slabs) shocked–shocked–America yesterday. And not just because Archie is now “dead”–the publisher, Archie Comics, announced that he was going to buy the farm back in April. No, the real shock was that it turns out Archie was assassinated. Gunned down while valiantly saving the life of his friend. Who’s gay. And also gay-married. And a politician. Who’s crusading against gun rights. While dealing with Iraq-war related PTSD.

Okay, I made up the last part but everything else is true. A few thoughts:

* Archie isn’t really dead, of course. Only the Archie of the Life with Archie series is dead. The regular Archie in the regular Archie series will keep plugging along.

* How relevant is Archie? I mean, from the hundreds and hundreds of items in the news yesterday, you’d think it’s a pretty big deal. Well in June the regular, flagship Archie title came out with issue #656. It was ranked #327 on the sales chart. Anyone want to guess how many copies it sold? Bueller? Bueller?

4,063

Not a typo.

* But Archie is a dynamo compared to Life with Archie. In May, the most recent issue of Life, #35, sold 2,064 copies.

* The stunt is perfectly in line with a company that’s experiencing massive internal turmoil. But it makes you wonder: Didn’t they get the memo at Archie Comics? Gay is yesterday. The future is trans! You have to wonder why the transphobic writers and artists at Archie are happy to include well adjusted homosexual characters, but have no room for trans-characters in their stories. It’s this sort of cis-gender bias which is holding back sales of comic books and keeping them in their ghetto subculture. It’s not like the character of Jughead hasn’t been silently signaling her true gender identity for years with her tiara. If only they’d be more inclusive.

The lesson we can all take from this, I think, is that the people who run Archie Comics are small-minded bigots and that Archie got what he deserved.

The Pregnancy Pre-Nup

A 36-year-old Slate writer who’s not sure that she wants to have kids says that she thinks what might get her over the hump is having a “pregnancy pre-nup” with her husband specifying exactly her do’s,  don’ts, won’ts, and can’ts.

This is a capital idea and I encourage her to be as rigorous and detailed as possible in drafting the document. America’s entitlement system needs all the future taxpayers it can get.

And besides, what could possibly go wrong?

You know who else is really racist? Wrestling.

Over at the Reparations Atlantic Monthly there’s a piece up about how racist the WWE is because they’ve never had a black WWE world champion. Which is slightly problematic because of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. But the point here isn’t just another example for the “media ignorance” tackboard. It’s that the actual history of race and wrestling is pretty interesting.

For example, in David Shoemaker’s excellent history of pro wrestling, The Squared Circle, he talks about how, for decades, promoters would only cast black wrestlers as babyfaces. That’s because they knew audiences would accept them as faces. But they worried that if a black heel made too much heat–that is to say, was too good as a villain–then audiences might riot.

As a consequence, a sign of real racial progress in wrestling was when promoters felt comfortable enough with audiences to cast black wrestlers as heels.

You know who’s really racist? People who do yoga.

I’m pretty sure (?) this isn’t a joke. But you never know:

“Racism is so implicit that you never even notice that it’s a white girl on the cover every single time,” added Amy Champ, a PhD from the University of California, Davis, who wrote her dissertation on American yoga. “But when you begin to ask yourself, ‘What does yoga have to do with my community?’, then you begin to question all these inequities.”

I’m really looking forward to society doing some deep searching over how “racist” Uber and Bike Share and all the other darlings of urban hipster consumerism tend to be. But I suspect that somehow those folks will find a way to make peace with it.