Settings
About Us
Categories
Search
Archives
Links
Miscellany
If anyone needs a good cheer-up today — or cheer-down, depending on one’s disposition — read Ann Althouse’s analysis of President Obama’s obfuscations and dodges regarding DADT and gay marriage. It’s devastating.
Tom posted this at 12:55 PM HKT on Thursday, October 28th, 2010 as I, For One, Welcome Our Judicial Overlords!, Kulturkampf, Ladies, Gentlemen, and the Rest of us, The Law Is An Ass--An Idiot
In the Middle East, Egyptians are buzzing over the trial of Hisham Talaat Moustafa, an Egyptian real estate tycoon, for murdering Suzanne Tamim, a Lebanese pop star. Prettier than Napoleon summarizes the sordid details:
Egyptian millionaire politician woos Lebanese pop singer, spending over $7 million on her. His mother refuses to consent to their marriage, so the pop star leaves him. He pays $2 million for a contract hit and has her murdered.
What boggles Prettier than Napoleon is the reaction of Egyptian women:
“She made him kill her, and she deserves it,” said Sherine Moustafa, a 39-year-old Egyptian corporate lawyer, an opinion that was echoed by every woman of dozens interviewed. “If he killed her, this means she’s done something outrageous to drive him to it,” reasoned Ms. Moustafa, who has no relation to the convicted businessman. Both her sister and mother, who sat next to her, agreed.
This is the standard argument presented, more even by women than by men, in the Arab world, where strict patriarchal traditions continue to hold female victims responsible for crimes against them by men. If a woman is sexually harassed, then she must have been dressed provocatively. If raped, she somehow must have put herself in a compromising position. If pregnant out of wedlock, her conduct is to blame. And if she is murdered, then she must have committed an even more abhorrent crime.
We might be somewhat less boggled if we examine a similar reactions from women to a man murdering a woman. Specifically, OJ Simpson’s murder of Nicole:
“This is a story about race and gender and how they intersect,” said Susan Reverby, a professor of women’s studies at Wellesley College, who is white. “It’s about a black man married to a white woman being judged by black women.”
That alone required an emotional calculus that every black woman had to figure out. As the trial became bigger than the sum of its testimony and more personal to its viewer-chorus, the same facts summoned different interpretations. White women tended to identify with Mrs. Simpson as an abuse victim. Black women, pulled by competing loyalties, tended to see Mr. Simpson as a black man framed by the system — even if he had been indifferent to the black community, and even if they thought he might be guilty.
“We’re willing to put aside his personal preferences,” said Denise Cade, a securities lawyer in Washington, who is black and believes that Mr. Simpson may have had something to do with the murders but that the prosecution was flawed. “We have been oppressed for so long that we really do take people back. Maybe this will bring him home.”
. . . .
“The reason a black man may beat his wife is because he is facing racism on his job and racism in America,” Ms. Cade said. “What is the reason a white man beats his wife? It’s certainly not because of oppression in America. We can understand what our black men feel. That’s why we don’t rally around those feminist people.”
To Hisham Talaat Moustafa and every interviewed Egyptian women, the Lebanese Suzanne Tamim was a nonperson. To OJ Simpson and many black women, the white Nicole Brown Simpson was likewise a nonperson. Had Moustafa murdered an Egyptian woman or Simpson a black woman, reactions would be different because a real person was just murdered. What would have happened if the reporter from the New York Times had asked the Egyptian women how they’d feel if Ms. Tamim had been Egyptian? It’s likely they’d say that no Egyptian woman would behave in such a way.
CULTURE MATTERS
Prettier than Napoleon asks,
What is the lesson here? Don’t become a Westernized pop star? That’s not what got her killed. Refusing to be this guy’s mistress after he wouldn’t buck his mother and marry her is what got her killed.
Some parts of Lebanon are quite Westernized (see this old Steve Sailer essay for details) and it appears that the relaxed, tolerant, mostly Christian and secular world is where Ms. Tamim came from, as opposed to the more clannish Shiite or Sunni worlds. The real lesson is that when dating outside your own culture, remember that you might be a nonperson to them. Given the witches’ brew of cultures and politics that is Lebanon, Ms. Tamim probably never tried to date a Muslim man from her own country: too much blood has been spilled on both sides for there to be trust. In all likelihood, she thought that Moustafa wasn’t like those crazy Muslims back home: he was a good guy who’d made a fortune and seen the world and who saw her as a human being. She didn’t realize until too late that to him, she was always a nonperson.
Hubbard posted this at 2:33 PM HKT on Friday, October 15th, 2010 as Ladies, Gentlemen, and the Rest of us
After some off-the blog discussions about domestic violence prompted by the Eminem-Rihanna video, I considered writing another long post about the matter, but found that Theodore Dalrymple had been there long before and had written something better than I could have:
The two of them became the heroines of their own mental soap opera. Their quarrels and reconciliations became the focus of their whole existence, the very violence of their scenes being evidence (as far as they were concerned) of their importance and significance. And then one scene ended in murder.
If you want to understand domestic violence’s intractable horrors, read Dr. Dalrymple.
Hubbard posted this at 11:20 AM HKT on Saturday, September 11th, 2010 as Evil, Ladies, Gentlemen, and the Rest of us
I find this story quite fascinating. The Vatican has linked the Roman church’s child abuse issues to homosexuality. In a strictly definitional sense, I’m not sure why this is the slightest bit controversial; every single case I’ve seen involved a male priest assaulting a boy. Homosexual, in the strictest sense.
Gay rights groups, obviously, feel the need to differentiate what perverted priests do from what your average gay man does. I sincerely hope this isn’t their best answer:
“This is a scientific absurdity. The World Health Organization calls homosexuality a variation of human behaviour. It is paedopholia that is a pathology, a crime, not homosexuality,” said Franco Grillini, a former parliamentarian who was at the vanguard of Italy’s gay rights movement.
Of course, 40 years ago homosexuality was considered a pathology, and in large parts of the civilized world was a crime (it’s still a crime in vast swaths of the globe). If the difference between right and wrong hinges on the definitions provided by some politically influenced international agency, humanity is doomed.
Even if the need for an age of consent is objectively obvious, any particular age of consent is going to be arbitrary. 12? 14? 16? 18? 20? – one could make a case for each of those; one could also find a society in the world that adhered to each, or to another. In contrast, legal definitions that divide the genders are (with very rare exceptions) objectively correct. If this were a line-drawing competition, there’s not question of which side would win. The difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality is obvious and concrete. The difference between pedophilia and consensual sex is one that varies significantly across cultures and times periods, and, at the margins, at the individual level.
I’m not here to equivocate between homosexuality and pedophilia. Obviously, one, by definition, hurts an innocent party, while the other does not. But no thinking person can, as Mr. Grillani does, simply point out that one is illegal in some Western countries and the other isn’t and say that the difference, therefore, is obvious.
The gay rights movement’s obsession with normalizing homosexuality doesn’t help things. I think it’s perfectly reasonable for one to observe that, obviously, heterosexual intercourse between post-pubescent males and females of child-bearing age is the norm, while also observing that some individuals have impulses, of varying strength, toward other types of sexual behavior. We don’t have to expand the definition of the norm, or destroy it altogether, to allow that there is some natural variance, and that those who vary should be tolerated. And it is obvious that certain kinds of variances are harmful to the innocent, while other variances seem to harm no one.
But how far can these variances go before they cross the line between moral and immoral? The Catholic Church has offered a coherent answer (one that I don’t necessarily agree with), that any non-procreative sex is a sin. It’s a shame that their critics don’t put as much thought into the matter.
Apollo posted this at 2:05 AM HKT on Thursday, April 15th, 2010 as Ladies, Gentlemen, and the Rest of us
This post is vaguely amusing and somewhat worth reading. It makes fun of this article, by a woman who thinks she’s being radical and new agey by not taking her husband’s – I mean, “wusband’s” – last name. She considers herself a “hife,” and lists of some of the “wife” stereotypes that she doesn’t follow:
I’d argue that, for all of my wifely qualities (I can obsess over throw pillows with the best of them), I have an inner husband who tends to drive at least double the legal speed limit and leave socks on the floor . . .
Frequent readers (or passengers) will know that I’m not a slow driver. When my GPS is on, I will always drive above the speed limit, where the Garmin shows my speed in menacing red, as a point of principle. I think that the speed limit on most highways should contain three digits and only be enforced in egregious circumstances. When I got a warning for speeding back in December (my 4th in 26 months in Texas), I was advised that, “Eventually if you get enough of those, someone will write you a ticket.” Point being, the big side of the legal limit is familiar territory to me, and I have no objection to others driving fast.
But “at least double the legal limit”? That means 71 in a 35, or 111 in a 55, or 141 in a 70. If you can do that, either you or the person who set the speed limit is doing something wrong, and it’s probably you. The main virtue of a legal limit is that it causes traffic to flow at a predictable pace; if someone is driving a car twice as fast as the flow of traffic, even if that person is a good driver, it’s almost always not safe.
So perhaps this woman’s “inner husband” is allowing her to fulfill that most feminine of stereotypes: the bad driver. I presume her “inner husband” has other masculine traits, like liking large vehicles (her Lexus crossover), and electronics (the phone glued to the side of her head).
Apollo posted this at 7:21 PM HKT on Monday, March 1st, 2010 as Ladies, Gentlemen, and the Rest of us, Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!
Although he’s only the second man of color to serve in the Supreme Court, the Backstreet Boys have more standing in the black community than Clarence Thomas. That’s because he looks to the Constitution as “colorblind,” says he’s a man who just happens to be black and opposes government programs intended to help minorities. I’m not sure if the late Thurgood Marshall would want to pop Clarence ’side his head with his gavel, but there are plenty of blacks who would volunteer to do it for him.
Yeah, they went there.
This sparked some jackass from the California YAF to make this speech:
It gets better: after the speech, one of the attendees confronted said jackass — Ryan Sorba — about his comments. Some ugly words followed between them, which ended with Sorba physically threatening his opponent.
As others have noted, this is rather incredible, and in a good way: CPACers just booed a homophobic jerk off the stage, though whether it was for his homophobia or his jerkitude remains unclear (I’m guessing, but the boos in the first speech sure sound like they could be Sorba’s and they would certainly be consistent with his behavior in his speech). Still, it’s heartening to see CPACers of all people — the same folks who, a few years ago, thought it was hilarious when Anne Coulter called John Edwards a faggot — to reject some homophobic jerk in favor of a liberty-loving gay group.
* Alan Keyes certainly is embarrassing, but that feeling shouldn’t be limited to Black folks.
Tom posted this at 1:49 PM HKT on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 as Ladies, Gentlemen, and the Rest of us, Race
It’s often thought that the aphorism “Politics is showbiz for ugly people” is descriptive. On the contrary, it is prescriptive.
If the last few years have taught us nothing else, it’s to be wary of attractive politicians. Not because good-looking people are stupid, but because they make us stupid. Witness the utter brainlessness that Sarah Palin and Barack Obama elicited from their supporters — not because of anything they did or were believed likely to do — but because they had tremendous sex appeal. It’s no more a coincide that Palin is a woman and that the GOP is disproportionally male than it is that Obama is male and democrats are disproportionally female.
The GOP’s new diva, Rep. Michelle Bachman, may not be quite as attractive as Sarah Palin, but she’s comfortably over the “hot” threshold. There also appears to be little question that she is both witless and increasingly popular among the GOP base. Now, apparently, Sean Hannity is busy misreporting (or lying) about the size of her crowds. People do funny things when people pretty are involved. Politics shouldn’t be funny that way.
Tom posted this at 11:43 AM HKT on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 as Ladies, Gentlemen, and the Rest of us, Politics
What happens when a woman is forced to choose between her husband and her pet crocodile?
When he finally snapped and said it was the crocodile or him, Vicki didn’t think for a second.
She said: ‘I felt like Greg was asking me to put him ahead of one of my children.
‘I had pets when I met Greg, so in my eyes, he knew what he was getting into – just like any other man who gets with a woman with children.
Once again, we love Australia.
Hubbard posted this at 12:02 PM HKT on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 as Animal Kingdom Strikes Back, Ladies, Gentlemen, and the Rest of us
Maxim has a peculiar article on cheating that recommends NOT telling your girlfriend that you’ve cheated:
Examine Your Motives
When a man cheats, even just once, there’s usually a problem in his relationship. “Men often stray if their sex lives are stagnant or they’re feeling neglected,” says Ruth Houston, author of Is He Cheating on You? “The other woman fulfills something that his current girl isn’t giving him.”If the love is worth salvaging, you have to fix the problem or the issues will fester. “Ask yourself why you did it,” advises Weiner. “Then let your girlfriend know what you need from her.” But still, do not confess.
Of course, the relationship could already be dead in the water. “You may just be too lazy or scared to address the issues,” Houston points out. “So you sleep with someone else, trying to sabotage it, even if only subconsciously.” Or you just want to see what else is out there before doing anything drastic. But do yourself (and your girlfriend) a favor: Cut the cord.
What If She Finds Out?
Even if you’ve covered your tracks, your woman could discover your indiscretion. Assuming you still want to be with her, your best bet is to say how sorry you are, swear it’ll never happen again, and beg for her forgiveness.Now is not the time to get into the reasons why you did it. “Wait a couple weeks before airing your grievances,” says Weiner. “She needs time to process the betrayal without being confronted with the mistakes she’s made.”
Finally, being cheated on can do a number on a person’s self-esteem, so you have to stroke the poor girl’s ego. Regardless, she will be pissed and might need space. If so, leave her alone until, fingers crossed, she forgives you.
Born to betray: Some men could be hard-wired to cheat. A study done on male twins at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London suggests that one in five men may carry a genetic “cheating” trait.
Certain peculiar things need to be observed in this particular article.
All in all, it seems to be a rather appalling article, and one must wonder how any sane editor could have published such a sexist piece. Men come off as childish. We don’t expect children to be responsible for their actions, but shouldn’t grown men be responsible enough to admit they’ve cheated—or, better yet, not to cheat in the first place? One would think that a magazine that caters to men would think through anything that assumed men were so pathetic.
But I’ll make a confession right now: this sexist article didn’t appear in Maxim. It appeared in Cosmopolitan, and was about women cheating rather than men. I switched the gender pronouns to make a point. Go and read the original article, and ask if Cosmo is interested in female equality or if these ladies want to justify their cheating ways.
Hubbard posted this at 2:22 PM HKT on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 as Ladies, Gentlemen, and the Rest of us
From the Big Picture’s spread on Afghanistan:
Afghan girls attend school on February 16, 2009 in the village of Sandarwa in eastern Afghanistan. Women’s education has been severely compromised in Afghanistan as a resurgent Taliban has practiced a policy of intimidation of female students. Women, who make up a significant proportion of Afghanistan’s population, have been killed, burned and threatened for attending school. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
That’s true!
Tom posted this at 12:30 PM HKT on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 as Journalism, Ladies, Gentlemen, and the Rest of us
Then, Jimmy Stewart and Dean Martin and Orson Welles (H/T)
Now, Idiots of Ants
Some things never change.
Hubbard posted this at 1:40 PM HKT on Friday, March 6th, 2009 as Ladies, Gentlemen, and the Rest of us
Christian Toto tries to explain why Ms. Ryan’s career is unlikely to come back:
Ryan is a good example of what happens to too many older actresses. Sure, you’ll always have the exceptions — Meryl Streep and Judi Dench come to mind. But only Streep remains red-hot, commercially speaking, at the ripe age of 59.
Ryan, the ’90s rom-com princess, could command big paychecks. Romantic comedies are where actresses shine, both commercially and in the hearts and minds of movie goers.
Just think back to Goldie Hawn and Doris Day before her.
Today, Ryan is often seen in direct to video fare (”The Deal,” “My Mom’s New Boyfriend”). She still looks beautiful even if she may have dabbled in some plastic surgery. And her figure remains to die for.
But she’d need Quentin Tarantino to stage an entire film around her to give her career that ol’ A-list juice.
Then you have Rourke, an actor who seemingly spent the last decade burning every bridge in sight. And his face is a Jackson Pollock painting of age, boxing losses and who knows what.
But he came this close to beating out Sean Penn for the Best Actor Oscar over the weekend and is in talks to star in “Iron Man 2.”
The one movie in which I liked Meg Ryan was Courage Under Fire; perhaps not coincidentally, she died horribly in it. But more important than that, she was NOT in a chick flick or rom-com. Perhaps a large part of the trouble is that actresses try to do rom-coms long after they should have moved on. John Wayne always played John Wayne because being a tough guys, like fine wine, improve with age, but actresses must get beyond My Mom’s New Boyfriend. Note that Meryl Streep wasn’t most recently nominated for a rom-com but for playing a hard edged nun. Ingenues sparkle in gooey rom-coms, but grande dames need to get out of the candy shop and into the forge. Ms. Ryan needs needs roles that showcase iron will, steely determination, brassy self-confidence; the heart of gold is optional and might be a counterproductive. (See the careers of Bette Davis or Joan Crawford.) It’d be nice to see some more actresses evolve. Helen Mirren and Judy Dench won’t be around forever. I somehow doubt Meg Ryan will evolve, but one never knows.
Hubbard posted this at 5:14 PM HKT on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 as Film Rants, Ladies, Gentlemen, and the Rest of us
Quite a bit of what’s celebrated as love resembles Romeo & Juliet: an explosion of passion that burns out or ends with living-happily-ever-after. A different sort of love comes up in one of my favorite children’s stories, The Velveteen Rabbit:
For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
There seems to be a real story of this, so to speak, in the New York Times (H/T). Dana Jennings is fighting prostate cancer, and he has become Real:
Right now, I’m not quite what you’d call “a catch.” I wear man-pads for intermittent incontinence, I’m a bazaar of scars, and haven’t had a full erection in seven months. Most nights, I’m in bed by 10. The Lupron hormone shots, which suppress the testosterone that can fuel prostate cancer, have sent my sex drive lower than the stock market, shrunken my testicles, and given me hot flashes so fierce that I sweat outdoors when it’s 20 degrees and snowing.
Even so, Deb has taught me that love is in the details. Humid professions of undying love and tear-stained sonnets are all well and good, but they can’t compete with the earthy love of Deb helping me change and drain my catheter pouches each day when I first came home from the hospital.
Yes, in the details. She measured my urine, peered into places I couldn’t (literally and figuratively), and strategically and liberally applied baby powder, ice and Aquaphor to my raw and aching body. She battled our intractable insurer, networked, tracked down the right doctors — and took thorough notes all the while.
I was wounded. She protected me. She chose to do these things.
Read it all, especially Mr. Jennings’s conclusion.
Hubbard posted this at 10:44 AM HKT on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 as Grace, Ladies, Gentlemen, and the Rest of us
Quite a bit of what’s written about love is unlovely. A certain trope that recurs when reading about love is that idea that the writer or speaker is so long-suffering and wonderful, but the beloved is so annoying if not appalling. An old but still relevant example that comes to mind is this stanza from Showboat’s “Can’t help lovin’ dat man of mine”:
Tell me he’s lazy, tell me he’s slow,
Tell me I’m crazy, (maybe I know).
Can’t help lovin’ dat man of mine.
It’s a blessed relief to see Julia Gorin handle it differently (H/T). She’s utterly honest about her own flaws, and her husband comes off wonderfully. She writes about the first time she did stand up comedy in front of him:
If my speech in the cab hadn’t scared them off, the stand-up routine should have. My comedy was in its anti-sex stage, and the audience had to suffer through gems like:
“Sometimes I’ll spot a guy I’d been with and wonder: ‘Why on earth did I sleep with him? Oh, yeah. He wouldn’t leave.’ Let me explain something: If you ever want to get rid of a guy fast and never hear from him again, sleep with him. He’ll be on his way after five minutes, which is a lot less than the half hour he was going to spend at your door trying to get you to let him in. Then you can go to the bathroom, which is all you really felt like doing after dinner anyway.
“Of course, this approach often leads to regrets — like that I didn’t get paid. Because sometimes the sex is so blah, and I know there are women getting paid for that sort of thing, and it makes me feel like a sucker. Be honest: Wouldn’t sex be just a little more exciting if you knew you would at least get a dollar afterward?”
The whole thing is here, and worth a read, but a point we should consider is that all of us are far from worthy of being loved, but sometimes we get lucky: someone knows that you’re lazy and slow but is crazy for you anyway.
Hubbard posted this at 2:27 PM HKT on Monday, January 12th, 2009 as Ladies, Gentlemen, and the Rest of us