February 21, 2011 · 9:00 am

Why is Violence More Acceptable than Sex?

One of the most puzzling aspects of US culture is the difference between how people react to violence and how they react to sex in the media.

Violence pops up regularly in almost every genre, even in material written specifically for children. Sex may be hinted at but unless a movie or television show is rated for mature audiences it is much less common for characters to be featured in a graphic sexual scene.

Apparently it’s ok to air story lines about people being:

  • tortured
  • raped
  • decapitated
  • skinned alive
  • dismembered
  • kidnapped
  • blown up
  • shot
  • stabbed
  • mutilated

Yet it is equally unacceptable to show a nipple at the same time slots.

Why?

Why is sexuality so much more frightening than violence? How can murder be less offensive than two characters having consensual sex? These aren’t rhetorical questions. The longer I live outside of the US the less I understand certain aspects of their culture.

Possible explanations:

Desensitization. Violent art and other creative works have been around for so long and have become more graphic so gradually that the average person does not necessarily think about what it is their minds are absorbing.

(some) Violence is Cartoonish. That is, it doesn’t accurately represent how an action plays out in the real world. Certain guns, for example, do far more damage to a body than what is typically portrayed on tv or the movies.

Easier Conversations. Do some parents find it easier to bring up something in conversation that most people do not personally experience than something that the vast majority of people are going to do eventually?

Moral Qualms. Religious beliefs influence so much of how and what we think about sex and sexuality. It does make sense that people would think it was wrong to see graphic representations of sex if their religious backgrounds taught them not to seek out such subject matter or that certain acts were a sin. What I don’t understand, though, is why there aren’t more religious objections to violence in the media. If it’s sinful to watch someone having what your religion considers to be illicit sex shouldn’t it be just as (if not more) wicked to see a character being raped or murdered?

Internal Conflict. Western society (especially, but not only, in the US) is deeply conflicted about sexuality and how it is expressed. What we say isn’t necessarily what we  believe and what we believe often has little to do with what we actually do.

What do you think?

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February 19, 2011 · 9:00 am

Suggestion Saturday: February 19, 2011

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, comic strips, photos and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Meat. I can’t decide whether spray-on skin for burn victims or fly-eating furniture is more creepily extraordinary.

Loving the Christians Without Conforming to Religion. Elizabeth, the author of this blog, has churning out  a spree of fantastic posts recently. She’s walking down a road that I know all too well. I cannot disagree with her hunch that love will have the final say, though.

From The Wonder of Life:

The passionate, the empathetic, and the inquisitive will own the future. Look around you at the marvelous world with its wonders inconceivably great and small.

Don’t Know Much ‘Bout. I wonder why we so often rely on what other people say about something instead of researching it ourselves?

Writer Fight. If only pens were swords and books galloped.

What have you been reading?

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February 17, 2011 · 9:00 am

Cabin Fever Relief

Mid-to-late February is the most restless and irritable time of year. The excitement of the holidays has long since ebbed away, the new year has lost its baby fat and spring seems to be a thousand years away.

On a more personal note, this is also the time of year when respiratory infections like the flu or a cold affect me the worst. I’ve been fairly healthy this winter but due to these experiences I’ll trudge though the next few weeks with a tinge of dread.

Yes, average winter temperatures in Vancouver do tend to be warmer than what people in Ontario or the midwest in the United States generally experience but it has been much colder than normal here recently and we are expecting a big storm in the next few days.

Cabin Fever Relief

I haven’t found that many indoor activities that quell cabin fever to be honest. It’s something that seems to need time (and a lot of outdoor time once spring does arrive!) more than anything else.

These activities are good distractions, though:

  • Visiting friends.
  • Organizing and cleaning out the house room by room.
  • Sorting out and donating unused possessions. (There’s something so cathartic about helping others and freeing up some space!)
  • Watching highly-anticipated movies.
  • Researching upcoming trips.
  • Planning this years garden or other outdoor, time-intensive hobbies.
  • Fixing or replacing items that you’ll need in the near future.
  • Visiting the library for new books, DVDs, magazines and information on upcoming community events.
  • Meditating.

How do you cope with the restlessness of late winter?

(Photo by 3268zauber.)

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February 14, 2011 · 9:00 am

Verbing Valentine’s Day

This post was originally going to be a rant about everything about Valentine’s Day that makes me uncomfortable:

  • The rampant consumerism.
  • The assumption that the best way to woo someone is by buying stuff.
  • The cookie-cutter approach to what is of the most unique and personal aspects of each of our lives. No two romantic relationships are alike! What works for one person or couple may be worthless or even harmful advice for another.

Instead of talking about what is wrong with Valentine’s Day, though, I decided to list more meaningful ways to show affection to a significant other. (Last year I wrote a post about why I don’t celebrate Christmas. Many of the points made there also apply to Valentine’s Day for those interested in re-evaluating holiday traditions in general.)

My philosophy of love, so to speak, is pragmatic. I’m generally uninterested in traditional gender roles or grand gestures. Love is an action verb in my family of origin, not a monologue. With this in mind let’s begin….

Verbing Valentine’s Day

Accumulate small gestures. It’s easy to say, “I love you!” Paying attention to small details consistently over time takes more work but it also shows that you’re in tune with what your SO likes, needs or wants.

Say I’m Sorry, Thank You. Apologies and appreciation are the axle grease of life.

Show anger gently. How you act when you’re mad is a far more accurate representation of who you are as a human being than how you treat others while in a good mood. I’ve never known anyone in a conflict-free relationship! How disagreements play out when they do happen, though, is a good indication of how healthy the interactions are between you.

Keep certain things private. Some of my most uncomfortable conversations have been with friends who  complain about their SO in ways that they’d never attempt if he or she could hear what was being said. Yes, sometimes advice from a close, trusted friend can help you navigate a tricky situation but be careful about what is said and how you say it.

Offer to help. There’s nothing better than hearing this phrase when you have a time-consuming or difficult project coming.

No, nothing mentioned today can be bought last-minute at the drug store or ordered online. As someone who is allergic to most chocolates, wears all two pieces of the jewelry I own every day and has never figured out what to do with flowers or stuffed animals I don’t resonate with the romance memes of western culture.

Respond

What do you consider to be a romantic gesture? How do you show your SO how much you care about them?

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February 12, 2011 · 9:00 am

Suggestion Saturday: February 12, 2011

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, comics, poetry, short stories, quotes and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity. – Albert Camus

Faith. This poem reminds me of the stubbornly whimsical stuff I did while growing up.

We’re Not So Different, You and I. Everyone preaches being yourself (whether they actually mean it, though, is fodder for another blog post. 😉 ) This post is about the important of being the same.

A Confab With the Faithful. 20 Methodists and one Atheist meet at a skyscraper church to talk about religion, science, belief and doubt. This may sound like the opening to a joke. It isn’t. I do wish that you and I could have participated in the discussion, though. People who genuinely enjoy listening to and learning from other points of view don’t cross your path every day!

Feminist Friends. To quote The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Ponies. This is one of the most creative sci-fi/horror stories I’ve ever read. Yes, the allegory is macabre but the author pushes these boundaries in order to shake us out of our complacency. It’s much easier to see the unhealthy aspects of other cultures than it is to notice our own.

A final thought on advice:

What have you been reading?

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February 10, 2011 · 9:00 am

Embrace the Shame

As far back as I can remember I’ve lived with one foot in imaginary places. Whenever the world around me quiets down enough for thoughts to form (and sometimes even when it doesn’t) I stitch together stories in my mind.

No two have ever been quite alike. If I don’t like the direction a story is headed I begin again from the first scene to create something better. I tell myself stories that are funny, sad, outlandish, as cliched as I could possibly make them and as unique as I dare. I tell stories as I go to sleep and pick them back up again while getting dressed or eating breakfast in the morning.

Sometimes as a kid I’d whisper the lines or scene I was working on to see if they sounded as good out in the open. It was something I was deeply ashamed of growing up, though. No one else I knew crafted stories like this or, if they did, they never talked to themselves while figuring out a particularly tricky plot point. At 11 or 12 I’d cycle through these feelings, promise to put away childish things and never do it again and then slide back into storytelling a day, week, month later. Life without story-telling was and is:

  • Eating the same meal for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the rest of your life.
  • A vocabulary of 100 words, 90 of which are about the weather.
  • Eternal February.

I assumed that other people had internal dialogues rarely if ever* and that there was something unhealthy about continuing to make up stories after puberty. Like an early bedtime or training wheels on a bike it only seemed appropriate for kids half my age and yet I had zero interest in what I thought I should be thinking about as an adolescent: clothing. makeup. boys. dating. calories.

*I’ve since learned this isn’t true!

It sounds nonsensical now but this bothered me for years. More than anything I wanted to blend in, to think the way other people thought. Being different wasn’t a perky slogan or a beat marched to with pride back then it was something to try to get rid of (or hide well) at the first opportunity.

I began to grow more comfortable in my own skin as I stopped worrying so much about the thoughts I thought were rolling around in the heads of everyone else. What mattered was this: I like telling stories and hashing them out has never hurt anyone.

If it’s weird, well, there are far more destructive things that I could be doing with my time.

Respond

Do you have any slightly eccentric habits or personality quirks that you’ve always felt a little ashamed of? How did you learn to resist the urge to compare your thoughts with how other people behave in public?

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February 7, 2011 · 9:00 am

Jeremy

How we form and what we do with our assumptions has been on my mind lately. This story illustrates one of the most interesting (and wrong!) assumptions I’ve ever made.

Soon after I moved up here six years ago Drew’s parents invited us over for dinner at the house they had lived in for nearly 25 years. Their kids had grown up there and it was the only home Drew’s youngest sister has ever know. Before we ate Drew took me on a tour of the place.

The Name on the Wall

The most interesting part of Drew’s tour was the room that had once been his bedroom. I couldn’t help but to notice that there was a name  on one of the walls there that didn’t seem to belong to anyone in the house:

Jeremy.

No one mentioned it and our tour continued. I wondered if there had once been a fifth sibling in his family. As a child and young adult I’d known too many families who had lost a child and every one responded to it differently. Some talked about their deceased family member(s) openly and with anyone who would listen, others I knew for years before hearing a word about that part of their history.

Later, in the privacy of our own home, I asked Drew about Jeremy. It was ok if he didn’t want to talk about it but I thought it was better to know about a potentially painful topic than guess whether something bad had happened or if it was something the family was comfortable discussing with an outsider.

Drew laughed and told me that the room had been decorated like that when they first moved in. It had nothing to do with their family.

I couldn’t decide whether to be relieved that Drew hadn’t lost a sibling after all or amused that over the past two and a half decades no one had decided to take those wall decals down.

Lessons learned:

  • Not everything in life has a complicated explanation.
  • Sometimes the truth is more mundane than fiction.
  • Redecorating isn’t as common as I had originally assumed.

What assumptions have you made recently?

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February 5, 2011 · 9:00 am

Suggestion Saturday: February 5, 2011

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, poetry, programs and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Municipal Gum. As much as I appreciate certain aspects of modern life (read: antibiotics, birth control, arts festivals, libraries, grocery stores) there’s also something just a little suffocating about it all. Especially in cities or suburbs. This is why I love this poem and why I’m looking forward to Jean Auel’s next book so much.

Liquid Dreams III. What would your dreams look like if their subject matter was catalogued and graphed? I’ve inserted information about many aspects of my life into spreadsheets before but had never thought to plot my dreams. Fair warning: I haven’t downloaded this program and cannot verify its safety or how well it works yet. Fascinating idea, though!

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. How the 3RS Can Help You with Washing Up. I wonder what other aspect of life could be simplified by this idea? Laundry seems to be an obvious choice. What else?

Control-B. A story about an elderly woman who can no longer talk due to a stroke and how she challenges the assumptions her personal aide makes about people who are disabled. Sometimes you have to (metaphorically) shake people out of their stereotypes.

30 Questions Guaranteed to Make You Think. I’ve answered all 30 questions (privately! 😉 )and strongly encourage you to do the same.

Love is Not Real Unless There is Freedom to Hate. This post may stretch your brain. I know that I had to read it more than once to understand what the author was saying. Instead of expecting ourselves to love everyone we should have a different term for engaging with people we don’t get along with than we use for the people we genuinely care about and love.

What have you been reading?

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February 3, 2011 · 9:00 am

Does Privilege Corrupt Us?

There is a short reading assignment for this post: Can Men Be Feminists?

To summarize the author’s points: (although I strongly recommend reading it for yourself. My understanding may differ from what you take away from it.)

  • Our world is saturated with racist, sexist, classist, heterosexist, etc. beliefs.
  • All of us have absorbed at least some of these assumptions.
  • One cannot escape his or her privilege. It affects too many aspects of life.

Because of this, she argues, men can never be feminists. The privileges that automatically come with belonging to the dominant group interfere with the fight against those privileges.

My Response

There is no denying that being born with certain characteristics gives certain groups of people often massive social, economic and other advantages over those who aren’t male, white, wealthy, able-bodied, cis-gendered, or straight.

There have even been times when the men in my life honestly doesn’t see what to me is obviously sexist behaviour or expectations.

I could fill this post with examples. Each one would point to the same conclusion, though: privilege allows us to only see what we want to see. People without that privilege aren’t able to do that any more than they can turn off the rest of their senses.

There are things as a white person that I know I’ll never truly get. I can read about it, I can confront people who say racist things, but I will never know what it is like to be the target of racism.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t fight against both the privilege and the oppression, though. In certain ways it is easier to fight against something that you know is in everyone. Rather than having one enemy and seeing it in solely us-vs.-them terms there is we.

We have a serious problem. We harbor certain stereotypes or assumptions. We need to unlearn some stuff. We need a plan.

We also need to listen. It is easy to fall back into often-unconscious interpersonal patterns. I think this is one of the most dangerous parts of fighting to end prejudice when you yourself are not part of the oppressed group. If it is going to work well then the people who ordinarily are not listened to should be leading it and those who are used to being followed should become followers.

“The first shall be last and the last shall be first…”

What do you think?

  • Is acting on or being given a privilege the same thing as being racist, sexist, classist, etc.?
  • How can our privileges be used for good?
  • Does who you are affect how you fight against injustice?

(Photo by Kurt Lowenstein.)

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January 31, 2011 · 9:00 am

The Dangers of Internet People

I started badgering my parents to sign up for internet service in the mid 1990s. In early 1999 they finally gave in. 😉 At the time there was a great deal of conversation about the dangers of the Internet. People worried that they’d be taken advantage of online through Internet People ™ who lied about who they really were or who were running scams. We were cautioned against meeting these folks or giving them too much personal information.

The Truth

What is insanely fascinating about this is that for many crimes – sexual assault and murder to name a few-  the average person is far more likely to be hurt by someone they know than a stranger. Embezzlement by definition happens within personal or professional relationships. Even 43% of identity thefts are thought to be committed by someone the victim knew.

These things happen in every community. No one is immune to becoming the victim of violence or theft. Yes, there are online scammers out there. Yes, caution is a good thing. From the statistics (and depending on the crime), though, we are as if not more likely to be harmed by people we know.

Question: Why is there so much focus on crimes committed by strangers? Shouldn’t there be as many, if not more, conversations about how to avoid or mitigate the harm done in person?

Internet People

When I first leapt online I was wary of sharing my real name or location. Pseudonyms and purposefully vague references to where I lived were the way to go.

A funny thing happened in the last decade-ish, though. Some of these Internet People ™ became longtime friends. When I’m frustrated, afraid, lonely, happy or need advice they’re only an email or phone call away. I’m as close to many of them as I am to those I see in person far more often.

In my experience the fear of online friendships often comes from the idea that there’s only one way to do it. Either you have local friends or you have Internet People ™ who live states, provinces, countries away. There seems to be little sense of how much gray area there is between the two or how the medium matters less than what we do for one another.

I wonder if part of this is a cultural or generational difference. People who grew up with BBSing or the Internet seem to be more comfortable with the social aspects than those who were introduced to it later. (There are many exceptions to this, of course! They’re  just general group trends I’ve noticed.)

These are my fragmented thoughts about the communities that are forming and have formed online. What do you see?

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