Rape worse than death?

In my feminist theory course, we've had some discussions and debates about the role of women in the military. Framed within that debate in the class was the idea that women are nuts for wanting to be part of the military, considering if they are caught, they will be raped. My classmates couldn't believe that any women would lay herself open to that potentiality by choice.

I remember feeling uneasy about the whole debate and yet incredulous too -- why do so many women fear rape so much? And why, in debates about the military, is rape framed as the deciding reason why or why not to join up? It would seem to me that having to kill another human being would be far worse than rape, that it would be more damaging to the soul. And wouldn't your own death be worse than rape? If given a choice between rape and death, wouldn't you choose life? And be proactive about tactics to avoid rape, so long as you safe-guarded your health? Isn't avoiding rape all about maintaining your health and your life, after all?

Apparently not, according to this Alternet article. It lays bare details on the circumstances of the numbers of US female soldiers in Iraq who consciously chose to not drink water after 2 or 3pm, in order to not feel a need to urinate during the night. Apparently, the path to the latrines are unlit and this lays female soldiers open as potential victims to predatory males. And the males were their own platoon mates.

The confounding issue? The heat. It reached as high as 50C degrees. At that heat, frequent and plentiful hydration is necessary and going without water for extended periods of time can be lethal. Tragically, in the case of many of the female soldiers, it was lethal.

Yet still, despite knowing this, many female soldiers consciously chose to avoid water and liquids so as to avoid the risk of rape. And many of them paid for this choice with their death, expiring in the middle of the night from dehydration.

After learning about this, I'm left questioning my assumptions about rape and patriarchy and power and the military. The structural inbalances in this situation are huge and the path these women seemed to have needed to navigate was littered with obstacles against them. I can't pretend to begin to understand their complete situation, true, but at the same time, it would seem to me that there should have been ways around this.

Call me a pessimistic realist, but I had to laugh bitterly at the US Army's Sexual Assault Prevention motto, An Army of One, Caring for All and their own Human Resources Commander's pledge/call to action that soldiers "require us to provide the world-class human resource support they deserve". Despite the command's assertion that "the Army is committed to supporting and caring for victims of sexual assault and to ensuring that victims and offenders are treated according to Army policy", it would certainly as if Command is unable and indeed unwilling to back up those words.

Obviously, whistle-blowing and working within the Army system hasn't worked for the women serving. What I don't understand, then, is why they didn't find ways to take matters into their own hands? What about the buddy system? Or a pail under your bunk? Or carrying their guns when they had to go after dark? Aren't these women trained to kill? Weren't there ways for them to defend themselves? Wasn't there other ways to deal with the threat that wouldn't have resulted in so many perishing?

Don't get me wrong...I am not blaming these women for their victimization and for paying the ultimate price for attempting to avoid it. I am not exonerating the structural factors that legitimated the behaviour of the male servicemen and turned a blind eye to the very real problem and the tragic loss of life. But when the structure fails you, when the system turns a blind eye, as the resourceful, smart and capable woman you must be to be serving your country overseas, couldn't you find a way to ensure your own surivival? Isn't your own life worth that?

Was the situation so bad for those women soldiers that they saw their condition as hopeless and viewed rape as worse than death?

Reacting to the Feminine Mystique

The paper I started on Friday is done. Since it's brief, I figured, why not post it? So here it is:

The key argument in the opening chapter to Betty Friedan’s (1974) seminal liberal feminist book, The Feminine Mystique, is that women in the early to mid period of the 20th century were socialized to believe that biology was destiny (p.11). Inculcated into them was the idea that the pinnacle of fulfillment for a woman was to be a wife and mother (pp.11-13). Women threw themselves into their role, subsuming any personal individuality to the societal dictates of perfect womanhood (p.14). In women’s pursuit of the mystique of utter femininity, however, they found a vague, nameless, malaise that they could not speak of to others (p.14-15). Friedan named the problem (p.27), and later in her book suggested the solution was more education and greater choice. However, I argue that this combination has not yet brought about the ultimate goal of liberal feminism, which is the true freedom to achieve feminine self-fulfilment on our own terms.

Reading the book’s introduction, I was struck by the similarities between the behaviour, feelings and views of women of the 50s and 60s and of women today. The basic ideal of seeking self-fulfillment is still there, though now a plethora of seeming choice has been opened for women. But are they truly choices? While the ability to go to school and forge a career are now equally available as valid goals for women, there are still strong societal expectations that these will be pursued alongside the old goals. The techniques for achieving these goals of education, career, family and hearth are depressingly the same now as they were in Friedan’s time. Through family pressures, the media and the market, women are told to be smart and goal-oriented, yes, but also continue to be pretty and thin, busty and sexy. Go ahead and be successful in your career, certainly, but also remember that you have a moral duty to get married, keep a clean and attractive house and have a few well-adjusted, smart and active children.

As Friedan herself notes, the liberation women were supposed to have achieved as a result of the industrial revolution’s new inventions such as the electric washers and dryers is a myth (p.14-15) and women realized it, but internalized it as a “problem that has no name” (p.15) .

Today, partly as a result of Friedan’s book, we have a name for the problem – desire for self-fulfilment as women. Yet we are not necessarily any closer to being able to actualize that desire than women were in the time Friedan was writing. All that has happened is that we have more choices to make in how we live our lives and an apparent freedom to choose among them. The consumerist thrust of late modern life belies the freedom of such choices, however, reducing them to pseudo-choices of a stunted feminine agency. While women are certainly are no longer silenced and unable to talk about the problem, as evidenced by the proliferation of women’s magazines, daytime talk shows and self-help books, the problem itself is still there.

The old expectations of a specific housewife role for women, that almost mythical role which Friedan argues so eloquently was the stultifying straightjacket of perfect zombie femininity (p.24), has been merged into an additional role – that of a successful wage-earner. Thus, I posit that we have not moved beyond the ideal of the feminine mystique, but have rather merged it into a new ideal of femininity that incorporates most of the expectations and techniques of the old and has layered new ones on top of it.

In Friedan’s time, the “problem” was, as one woman put it, “always being the children’s mommy, or the minister’s wife and never being myself” (p.23). This has not changed. The roles of mother and wife persist as prescribed and desirable goals on the path to feminine self-fulfillment. Layered on top of them now is the goal of successful careerist, consummate consumer, ageless beauty and socially-conscious citizen. While that liberal feminist goal, the ability to choose, has seemingly been obtained, I am left questioning how much better off women are today than they were in Friedan’s time. Despite the advances and expansive roster of choices, women today still often feel as if they are frantically treading water, filling their time with activity and obligation, but never able to stop long enough to concentrate (p.25). In looking for herself, she continues to lose herself. The problem may be named, but it is not yet solved.

Critiquing an introduction

I sat down this morning and attempted to construct a reaction paper to the introduction to Betty Friedan's seminal liberal feminist book, The Feminine Mystique. But how can you critique/analyze an introduction to a larger work if you haven't read the larger work?

Friedan discusses how the mania over obtaining a husband and becoming a housewife so occupied women of the 50s and early 60s that they stopped going to college, obsessed over their weight (by consuming a chalk product called Metrecal) and appearance, pretended, at age 10, to have "bosoms", and generally subsumed any sense of individuality into their prescribed role.

This sounded interesting to me, because if you swap out the reason for this (i.e. getting a husband) for getting a lover (i.e. having sex), you still see the same end result behaviour today.

Plus ca change....?? Should that be my theme?

Memories of farming

I am potentially one of the last generation of Canadians who can claim to come from a traditional farming family. I can remember Easters and summers spent on my uncle's Saskatchewan wheat farm, with chickens and cows and horses, with a huge vegetable garden and mangy cats who caught the mice that otherwise nested in the hay bales. My uncles road the tractors and stalked the fields day in and day out. They talked about the weather and worried about tornadoes and rain, drought and bugs. They chewed tobacco, talked very little, and with their wrinkled careworn faces, they seemed much older and wiser than my own government engineer father. They seemed larger than the life, yet inextricably tied to it.

Because I lay claim to the idea of having been a half farm kid (the other half being the kind of suburban/rural kid you can only be when you grow up on the outskirts of a small and relatively unimportant Canadian prairie city) , stories of farming and farmers have always touched a chord. My uncles are part of that for me. Which is probably why I want to see the film "The Real Dirt on Farmer John". While it is American made and will no doubt have some of the US patriotic jingoism that goes with that, it is made by a man who grew up in a farming community, on a family farm and watched the changes wrought by weather, politics, economics and globalization. Alternet's overview has piqued my interest. I hope it shows in a theatre near me this summer.

Downsizing

As I begin to prepare for what will probably be smaller living quarters, starting this summer, I am trying to figure out how to handle all of those electronic components I've got that are rechargeable and whose mess of cables look rather untidy in a small place.

So I'm rather interested in the eNook, a wall mounted charging station that acts as a mini-desk. You plug all of your adapters and the like into a strip powerbar that the desk hides at the bottom, then you pull the cables up and pin them to various shelves.

In a bachelor apartment, this might make a lot of sense to hang in a hallway near the entry.

First conservatives, then what?

Given that the Conservatives won the election last night, I should be wearing black today. Especially given their promised assault on liberal and feminist values and laws.

Is the US scenario going to be the case in Canada now, if the abortion rights legislation is struck down?

Page out of the Odd

While doing other things on the web tonight, I stumbled across this eBay auction for a t-shirt.

Yeah, so what, you're saying. T-shirts are sold every second on eBay. Right?

Well, the story behind the t-shirt is what makes the auction interesting. The auction is being offered by the Swedish owners of PirateBay, one of the web's most popular piracy/warez sites.

This auction may not be JC in a piece of toast, but it is definitely a page from the odd files. I wonder if the buyer will actually pay up? And if they will actually make it to Sweden to see if it is true that polar bears really don't wander the streets there? And why, if they can afford a trip to Sweden and the purchasing of copious amounts of alcohol for probably a large-ish swedish man and his fellow pirates, why they wouldn't just buy their software and music to start with?

Would be cheaper wouldn't it?

Or is this proof that price/cost isn't everything?

Paradox of undergraduate education

Jotted in the margins of the reference page of one of my first undergraduate essays was the comment, "Excellent grasp of the theoretical material and original ideas of your own, but the whole paper could have been deeper if you had read and considered the entirety of the major works you use".

I remember that comment giving me pause. Deeper thought. It stuck with me and since that day, I've strived to do that in my academic works; be deeper, write deeper, display more nuance.
Yet, this afternoon, while reading the lyrical introduction to Marshall Berman's excellent and compelling book, All That is Solid Melts Into Air, I came face to face with that concept again. This time, though, it was presented as an issue of 20th century modernity. The problem with this third phase of modernity, Berman argues, is that thought and analysis have flattened into dualisms and polarities. He seems to suggest we've lost the colour and nuance to our thinking and, in doing so, have become passive in our cultural participation. As a consequence, too few 20th century modern thinkers dare to think big thoughts, to create grand narratives, or to delve deeply into the messy contradictions of life.

While I could go on about how he develops this and show how much I agree with it, the point here is rather to talk about how the originating idea of modernity, the call from Kant to have the courage to think, has been so compartmentalized by the acceleration of time and thought that it becomes difficult to be original, to demonstrate a largesse of vision or an incisive depth of thought.

Case in point - my undergraduate education. As an emerging sociologist and cultural theorist, it is to be my job to contemplate the questions of human social life. I am expected to have read all the greats from all the tiers and to understand how they link to one another in a rich and strong web of understanding and argumentation on what it means to be human. The tacit expectation is that I will have read each of these great thinkers deeply, and that I will have a strong and almost didactic grasp of who said what about what and whom.

Sounds right? Of course.

Yet, the reality of my education falls far short of this expectation. Rather than take courses that deal with the entirely of thought that is a single thinker (e.g. Marx, Weber, Habermas, Foucault), all of my courses have been survey courses. They have been about tracing a large field of thought, be it classical social theory, theories of self and society or, as of now, contemporary cultural theory. In all cases, my exposure to various big-T theorists and thinkers has often consisted of a 20-30 page excerpt of their work.

So, when it comes time for me to sit down and write a 10 or 20 page paper on some aspect of someone's theory, I stumble in the gloaming of their work, the short brief evening of their thought to which I've been exposed that semester. As I do this, time and again, I'm reminded of how little of their overall body of work and argument I can claim to know.

The remedy for this may seem obvious -- read more. Take all the books for those theorists out of the library, sit down and read them. Doing so would allow me to answer Berman's call.

But the structure of my undergraduate education is not built for that. Often, I am given a set of essay topics and must produce a compelling and original paper within two week. Fourteen short days. And while working on that paper, let us not forget that I am juggling four to five other courses, each demanding a minimum of 40-60 pages of dense theoretical reading weekly.

A quick mathematical calculation tells me that I am reading somewhere in the vicinity of 250-300 pages a week. On top of attending 15-20 hours of class lectures. And, of course, commuting to school, staying in touch with my social circle, exercising, doing household chores and grocery shopping and, by necessity, eating and sleeping and bathing.

Add onto that the assignments that pile up each week in each class, the seminars I have to lead, the papers and critiques and replies I have to create, exams I have to study for and things I have to just plain know and the overall picture of a sociology undergraduate falls far short of the ideal to which Berman would have me aspire.

How can I have broad knowledge of theory, have read anyone extensively and deeply enough to be able to redress the issue noted in that first of my undergraduate essays, given the realities of my undergraduate life? When all of the enormity of a theory or theorist is instructed in confetti-like bits and drags and drops, what one is left with is a murky Andy Warhol-meets-Jackson Pollock-like collage of an understanding, rather than a cohesive, all-dots-connected flowing knowledge, the kind of knowledge that can lead to wisdom.

Like today. I would dearly love to rush out to the library or bookstore, buy Berman's book, whose introduction I enjoyed thoroughly, and sit down with a few cups of tea and read it, cover to cover, spending the weekend wallowing in it and engaging with Berman's take on modernity. But, if I do that, I will not be able to read the Baumann reading for this week for that class, nor will I read chapters 3 through 5 in my Cities and Urban Life textbook (all 100 pages) for my Urban Regions course. Nor would I get to reading Friedan, Trebilcot and Jones for my Feminist Theory course, rending me unable to participate as expected in Tuesday's seminar. Nor would I read the four chapters for my Comm course, or the two chapters for my development course or do the literature review for my field research course...along with the reading for the week in that textbook too.

And so it goes. Be thorough, be broad, be deep, dig and sift and think, think, think. Yet each of the readings for each of my classes jumps me around each week from topic to topic, from writer to theorist, never pausing anywhere long enough to get more than a glossed-over white bread understanding of an incomplete microcosm of some important person or thought or book. Demands of each course being what they are, where am I supposed to get the time to read broadly and deeply enough of any single theorist to be able to make any knowledge claims about their work? Let alone be able to think deep thoughts about any one topic, or write deep and nuanced analytical paragraphs into a coherence of brilliance that will show that I've heeded those comments on that first paper.

Do as we say, not as we demand of you. This is the message I'm taking away from my undergraduate education. This, it seems, is the paradox of my undergraduate education.

New addition to my family

After a looooong day on campus in three intense three-hour-per class classes, I gingerly made my way back to my car, chipped it free of ice, drove carefully home in yet another Montreal ice storm and wearily dropped all my stuff at the front door. I was looking forward to just making a cup of tea and settling into my bed to watch some TV on my laptop.

But there it was.

The box, sitting all innocently on my table. The return address? Somewhere in Alabama. Was it...?

My heart started to race.

I force myself to calmly walk to the gadget drawer in the kitchen, find a paring knife, slit open the packing tape. Pop open the top. Rummage through the peanuts.

Allelujah! Yesss!!

My new 30GB iPod has arrived. The new addition to my family of tech toys is here!

I got it from eBay at a good price for a Canadian (hence the Alabama return address). As I therefore didn't get a colour choice, I ended up getting it in white. I don't mind.

Only odd thing is that it doesn't come with a way to power it independently of the computer. Luckily I have gadgets and cables for it that are universal and can be appropriated from my mini, which I'm now selling.

I can actually fit my entire iTunes library on this baby. Wow!

Is it dorky to be so in love with a probably-over-hyped piece of technology?

Call me guilty, then.

Book about film and myth

Through ALDaily, I stumbled across this book that treats how film has changed our view of the myths of modern society. Wonder if it would illuminate anything in game studies?

CFP risk

Okay so I'm probably dreaming in technicolour, but I just finished putting together and submitting a paper submission to the American Sociological Association's 2006 conference, Great Divide. I sent in a paper called "Rapping Adorno" that uses German-Turkish youth rappers to gainsay the seeming stifling totality of Adorno's negative stance towards mass culture and popular culture.

It felt odd though to see no institution after my name on my submission. As of May, I'll be in a rather liminal state academically. I'll no longer be a student at Concordia but will not yet be a student at whatever grad school accepts me and me them.

I know that I probably haven't a hope in Hades of getting accepted -- I've heard it said that the rejection rate for this conference is somewhere around 80%?!? But I couldn't resist - the conference will be in Montreal, after all. Funnily enough, though, I may not be by then - I hope to be in Toronto, Burnaby, Amherst (MA), or Atlanta.

If it doesn't (when it doesn't?) get accepted, I'll start working on submitting it to a few journals, though at this point, I have no ideas which ones.

Gendering online activity

As I begin my own small-scale qualitative research project on female adolescents' online activity, which compares the richness of their interactions in digital space against the sterile and stereotyped "use" captured in Canadian statistical data, I stumbled upon this Alternet article that makes a cogent argument against the gendering of online activity.

Urge to converge

An article in today's Montreal Gazette gave an overview of a new Nissan concept car to be shown at the upcoming Montreal car show. Called the Urge, it is designed to appeal to the so-called Echo generation, the teenage children of boomers.

Based on online survey data from the target group, the car is built to appeal to video game and gadget geeks, which Nissan claims exemplifies the large majority of that demographic. The car is unusual in that it takes the idea of being a toy to a new level. Instead of marketing it by talking about how fast and powerful the car is, instead, the marketing is centered around how fast and powerful the game system is that is in the trunk. In this case, the Microsoft Xbox 360.

Yes, that's right. This car has a built-in Xbox in the trunk, with a flipdown screen in the dashboard. The controller is the steering wheel and pedals and the sound is channeled into the car's existing audio system.

No, it can't be played while driving (thankfully!). It is strictly a stationary only thing. Interestingly enough, it comes with a customized special edition version of Project Gotham Racing and was developed as a joint venture with, yes, Microsoft.

Oh and there is no key to speak of -- the car starts using a cellphone as a "smart key". And yes it has an integrated iPod docking station.

Politics of the art prize

Since writing a paper last semester on Theodor Adorno's views of high/low culture divisions and the culture industry's commodification of culture, I've been interested in how art prizes play into the economics and interests of this. While writing that paper, I came across an excellent article on this in one of my favourite journals, Media Culture & Society.

Then today, AL Daily pointed me to this New Yorker article that provides an overview of this topic from the perspective mainly of author and English professor, James F. English, who has written a book on the topic. As the New Yorker article points out about English's book, his central idea is that the need for authors to have the power to create economic value (cultural capital?) increases, so too do the number of prizes created and given out each year. The intent behind these prizes is to create value where it otherwise didn't exist, but that value is intended to be economic only. Thing is, how many consumers pay attention to such prizes? And since when did consumerism become so important to the art and vocation of writing?

Of course, this very topic is one that Adorno deals with extensively and at least in the case of literature, many of his concerns are valid. But I am reminded of Hannah Arendt's views on the culture division between high and low and I think they play into this too. Perhaps even moreso.

As I believe I blogged here last month, Arendt is quite critical of the notion that an author's work reflects the author themselves. Rather, she notes that the work instead reflects the author's ability to author and to play the role of author -- there is little, if any, within any artistic work that can lead us to the true inner-ness of the artist. Their artistic output can give us hints of what the artist is, but not who they are.

I believe this distinction is important to consider when looking at the role of art prizes such as the Booker, Giller, Pulitzer, and yes even the Nobel.

Google PC?

Friends have been joking with me over the last year about what the next big innovation to come out of the Googlesphere would be. They were putting their money on an operating system.

Seems they weren't wrong -- Google is expected to announce this week at the keynote for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that they are bringing out a low-cost Google PC.

My friends were more prescient than they realized.

Science without proof

Last year, John Brockman sent out a call to the global scientific and digerati community to answer the question "What ideas do you believe to be true, but cannot prove?"and 120 eminent thinkers answered. The result created a book, What we Believe but Cannot Prove.

This year, the big question being sent out is, "What is your most dangerous idea?". Now this is one that really interests me.

If I had to think of my own and narrow it down? None of them are new, though they aren't very popular. For me, it would be the disservice both science and religion have done to mankind. Probably also the idea that life isn't supposed to have innate meaning - humans aren't here to create, the world doesn't have to have a purpose. It just is.

Like I said, not new. But perhaps something from one of the more complicated and erudite minds out there may spur something for me. I'll look forward to the book.