one woman's evil...

I generally despise the WaPo comment section, especially the On Faith section. It's full of raving lunatics spouting drivel without any grammar or thought.

However, I skimmed a comment that provoked actual insight in me today: Deepak Chopra was defending Westerners' right to detach yoga from any semblance of Hindu religious thought (with the cynical view being: he was asserting his moral right to make money off Westerners). On the whole, it was an interesting and well-reasoned article, and it had me half-convinced. The comment section was its usual cesspit. One commenter, however, wrote:

People are upset because this follows a pattern of 200 years of British colonialism when a systematic attempt was made to demean and diminish Hinduism by Christian missionaries and colonial rulers. ... A dishonest & cynical recent attempt has been to create the narrative that Yoga has nothing to do with Hinduism.

Bullseye! First thought: So that's what's going on here. Second thought: Damn, the claim that "yoga isn't Hindu" is inherently evil.*

Part of the reason that it is Not Okay to divorce yoga from its context is that its context has been purposefully stripped from it, for hundreds of years, precisely to make Westerners feel better about themselves by putting down Indians and Hindus. This piece by Deepak Chopra is just one more piece of the racism-fueled border work that Westerners have been doing for ages to separate themselves from India and especially from Hinduism. It adds to the cacophony of Western voices that shout, "Oh, Hinduism doesn't have anything to offer the world**. Yoga? No, we like yoga. Yoga does have something to offer. So yoga isn't Hindu. That'd be crazy. Yoga is Some Other Category."

The article itself is a textbook example of how to resolve cognitive dissonance ("redefine one of the dissonant categories so they are no longer in opposition to each other"). However, there is a really fundamental problem here: redefining yoga allows the people who have the hardest time holding "yoga" and "Hindu" in their head at the same time to avoid ever having to deal with their real root issue: their racism. Cognitive dissonance arises because in these people's heads, "yoga=good; Hindu=bad". Rather than encouraging people to explore their unvetted intuition that "Hindu=bad", the article and the movement simply encourage racist Westerners to redefine their world to avoid dealing with the implications of their racism. The problem is, redefining terms doesn't make the racism go away. Redefinition is just a surface patch for your brain in one of the many thousands areas where the bug is going to cause shit, instead of an opportunity to understand the bug better and start working on fixing it. Chopra, at the very least, should know better.



* For me, knowledge, especially knowledge about the contributions of weaker groups, is one of very few fundamental goods. So, the ease with which Chopra ignores this important aspect of the issue (and thereby contributes to a world in which racism prevails and Hinduism's influence on the world is eventually forgotten) means his argument is inherently evil -- or, at least, just as evil as I will ever label anything.

** the world -- read "us white Westerners who think we are the world"

teh googles

I love when I'm proved right, except when the implications are horrifying.

Google is so effing sketchy.

Everyone knows Google drives down streets to collect images for Street View. Then they tag street addresses in those images, and link them to street maps. Sounded sketchy -- especially when you first looked up your cousin's house and saw they bought a new car, right? At this point though, people are mostly okay with it, because the end product makes for an incredibly useful tool for figuring out how to get somewhere new. And it's all publicly available information, right?

Well. In Germany, Google is also logging your home's wifi network and MAC address(es), which get associated with your street address and thus with you. Now, there is definitely an argument to be made that this is publicly-available information (psssst, smart people hide their SSIDs!). But it still makes me squirm, because this data? This data has all kinds of second-tier implications for privacy on the web that the facade of your house never, ever did.

The article points out too that this is exactly the sort of information that China and Russia should be collecting on us, and vice versa. And, you know, if they aren't already, now all they need to do is hack Google (again)....

I'm not sure that this is "just as public as a house facade", frankly, and the implications are certainly more disturbing, especially on this massive of a scale, and especially in the hands of Google, which already knows so much else.

I went to the toy store!

The gendering was really obscene on this one in particular. Bright pink... "Housekeeping" in big letters... "Toys" in tiny ones. Since, you know, the toy eventually becomes the reality. For people with vaginas (only). Which are pink inside.

FLAIL.

The colored gendering of all the "girls" aisles really pisses me off, even beyond the crappy gendering of which toys were on them/which toys girls are allowed or supposed to want. I know people discuss this time and time again, but why do we insist on marking the stuff for "girls" so that boys know not to go near -- even before they get close enough to see what's on the shelves, or are old enough to read? It twigs me.

---

More gendering.... even of something as simple as musical instruments. Clearly only girls play piano and only boys play drums. Because girls are classy and delicate and smart, and boys are loud and like to bang on things. Yeah. Further underscored by having multiple representations of girls liking piano (and no boys doing so), and multiple representations of boys liking drums (and no girls doing so).

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There are three different boys used for marketing guitars -- one white boy with dark hair, one white boy with blond hair, and one black boy (diversity!). Almost the guitars have one of these three boys, with the white boys dominating, of course.

One guitar -- on this shelf of eight stacks of guitars -- portrays a girl. She is white. And she is dressed in pink, as if to assure, "I'm REALLY a girl, even though I play guitar!".

This shit is horrifying.

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I am so effing disturbed. Barbie's target market is 3 years and up. Where does this ripped near-naked mantoy come in??

The only thing I can think of is that Mattel is marketing to the Twilight fangirls (who are happy adults).... on one of the Pepto-Bismol pink aisles of Toys"R"Us. Or, alternatively, Mattel is super smart and knows that their 3-8 year olds know that older women think about shit like this, and therefore will think having a mantoy of their own is cool -- even if they don't "get it". WTF, Mattel. I'm creeped out in either case.

(It also leaves me wondering: are the Ken-like series still eunuchs beneath their shorts? How deep are they willing to take the fanservice?)

no, really, I don't think I'm reading too much in....

This cup's imagery has to be as phallic as McDonald's could possibly get away with:

Lordy. It's like they took some phallic imagery and twisted it just enough to be inoffensive...

• "Long" and "tall" in big type (inoffensive by way of including "cool", albeit in super tiny font)
• Long skinny thing poking up into the air (but pyramidal, not cylindrical)
• Two balls beneath it (but squarish, not round)
• Liquid being splashed out (but spread out, not a single stream)

So, being who I am, I burst out laughing and took a pic of this random man's cup. Yeah.

I am probably the only one who thinks my interpretation is legit. But, I swear it is an example of our indoctrination to think of long things as penises, and that the indoctrination is so subconscious that we don't even notice when we're drawing on the tropes.

fooooooooooul

So I have a sketchy older man asking for my number, my email address, looking at me sideways at inappropriate times, asking me how he can best learn English, asking what there is to do in the area, or asking what I'm doing tonight, or when I'm returning to my home city and if he can visit me later this week, or if he can have my cell phone number (after I'd already given him my work business card, which has a phone number itself), or or or!

And then, I have this other older guy who comes to visit me, offers to let me sleep at his house, organizes a series of meetings so they better fit my schedule (and confuse other people), collects my different phone numbers and the contexts for them, remembers pieces of previous innocuous conversations and quotes them back at me, wants to give me free old t-shirts from volunteer events, when I refuse to accept the free t-shirts, looks up my mailing address and mails them to me in a package, adds me as a friend on IM, comments on the fact that I seem "unhappy" in messages that were never addressed to him and wants to know why, and and and!

Fucking scary shit.

It's fucking unfair that there is no socially acceptable way to respond to this bullshit with a "HELL NO, get away from me, you're fucking weird and scary and I DON'T LIKE THIS!" as long as they keep all their comments in public, their hands to themself, and act like they just want to be "helpful" or in need of "help". Do they even know that their behavior is shockingly out of line???

I call (scream) gender norms foul.

my new favorite commercial!

I've never seen this one before -- but it was on about 3 times in an hour in a bar with a sports channel, and it seems to have fansites.

Chortle.

damn yankee

Guess what happens when I start having time to read the news again?

April 2010 is now Confederate History Month in Virginia!

But I'm left floundering on these points -- why exactly do I need to understand the sacrifices of (only) Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens? And why again is it worth celebrating that "all Virginians can appreciate the fact that when ultimately overwhelmed, [they gave in]"?

Apparently it's a tourism stunt. A really, really awful, self-centered, short-sighted, but very earnest one.

Lakoff : women :: Herring : the internets

Lakoff 1975 was the first big work on women's/gendered language, and is still often cited despite some serious flaws, lack of connection to current context, and lack of any meaningful content.

Her generalizations may have been true at the time, but certainly aren't now, and were only correlated with rather than caused by gender even at the time, although that point isn't really stressed.... The vast majority of Lakoff's signals arose simply because of her time period: women were powerless and/or had little to use their attention or brains on but "vapid" topics (which itself buys into a sexist trope when positioned as such). She also focuses entirely on upper-class white women, although clearly "women's" language was much broader even in the early 1970s. Yet Lakoff is still cited and recommended....

My favorite parts of her "womanly" language: Women tend to...

1. Lack a sense of humor/be poor at telling jokes
2. Use empty adjectives (e.g., "charming" and "adorable")
3. Use specialized vocabulary for things like colors
   
4. Speak in italics (e.g., "sooooo" and "verrrry")
   
5. Use direct quotations (e.g., "Hannah said that he said ...")
6. Invoke question intonation in declarative contexts
   

And they say things like:

1. Oh fudge, I've put the peanut butter in the fridge again!
2. Isn't that absolutely diviiiine?
3. Dinner will be ready... around 6 o'clock?
   
4. I'd really appreciate it if you wouldn't please close the door?

Even if these factors were actually intrinsic to how "women" speak, Robin Lakoff phrases them in very anti-feminist ways (women are poor at telling jokes?). And then she actively argues women are "deficient" in their linguistic behavior as compared to men.

I flail at the memories.

And it reminds me all too much of how academics (especially linguists) and the media portray The Internets for their audiences. Oh, academia, why do you cause me this pain? Just because someone was "first" in a subject area doesn't make their work relevant or insightful -- usually it means their work is simply cited often, whenever other people have (un)interesting insights and need to cite someone to get taken seriously. Yes, this means you, Herring.