There's a disturbing one-sidedness among women blogging and commenting about public, unwanted, but perfectly legal male attention in a way that paints the man as a figurative predator and the woman as a figurative victim. The truth is that genius and stupidity are abundant in both sexes and this leads to plenty of misunderstandings.
The two most recent examples of which I am aware are my cyberfriend Heartinsanfrancisco's So Many Fools, So Little Time, which tells a vignette of an overheard street approach to a "very attractive young woman" by a young man on a bicycle, and Schrödinger’s Rapist, which purports, amid much frothy giggling, to dispense advice to young men in such a situation.
In both instances, there was a chorus of unanimity from women canonizing the notion that in these situations men are always willful and wrong, not merely mistaken, and that women are innocent and hapless, not merely inconvenienced. An approach on the public street that does not involve physical contact or profanity is not morally equivalent to rape no matter how you slice it and dice it, and there are two players in that scene.
Sure, some men are cads. But some women are foolish.
The woman in So Many Fools gave her name to the stranger, first thing, instead of ignoring him. A commenter told of a "friend" (herself?) who allowed a total stranger, a man who was not a professional photographer, to take her picture. Not a day passes, particularly in the summer, that I see young women in variations of near-undress in the public sidewalks of my city.
Why are women surprised that returning the attention of an unknown male contemporary, giving a stranger of the opposite sex a physical image of yourself or walking around half-naked convey messages that they are open to a conversation, to being objectified or to inspiring fantasies of naked activities?
I'm not endorsing the men.
The young man on a bicycle didn't take the hint when the attractive woman clearly attempted to break off the conversation some moments later. The "photographer" was apparently arrested for masturbating in the public company of a whole batch of photos of foolish women who had let him take their picture. And, yes, many men do undress women in their heads due to a huge swath of anthropological reasons that, I agree, do call for change (a whole other post).
Yet in the case of casual, public approaches by men who are obviously physically attracted to a woman -- they do not know whether she has read T.S. Eliot -- the responsibility for decorum falls upon both the man and the woman.
I cannot think of a reason for a woman to let a stranger in a metropolitan area photograph her, other than sheer narcissism. Um, what could that be for? What is being photographed here, her PhD thesis on Francis Bacon? Similarly, I cannot find any excuse for "photographer," other than pathology.
However, if the attractive young woman was slow to convey her disinterest -- Heartin deems that acceptable -- then perhaps we ought to cut the young man some slack for being slow to get the message.
Similarly, if an adult woman wears a low cut dress that does not exactly draw attention to her frontal cerebral lobes, the men might be excused if their fantasies get away from them, so long as they stay as mere fantasies.
Still, might there not be a woman who dresses attractively to attract and, indeed, meet the man of her dreams unexpectedly? Is it not possible that a suggestively attired woman is actually seeking to inspire fantasies in at least one particular man?
MIght we all simply relax a little about the mishaps and miscommunications between men and women? Isn't it possible that women, as well as men, bear the burden of mixed and missed signals?
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Afghanistan: the Next Step
Since the President is in a listening mood, I thought I'd throw in my three cents regarding what to do with Afghanistan. There is no doubt that the single, clearest goal in all military and security efforts since 2001, and from now on, had to be, should have been, and should be, to bring to justice those responsible for 9/11 and those conspiring to bring about similar crimes.
The initial invasion of Afghanistan had decent prospects of achieving that goal in short order. However, the military execution raised the question of credibility: why was Osama bin Laden cornered, then allowed to escape? Moreover, the invasion of Iraq was a distracting error that should never have happened.
The mission in Afghanistan should never be confused with stabilizing or in any way changing or influencing that country's internal functioning.
Afghanistan is, after all, a country slightly smaller than Texas, with only 12 percent of its territory containing arable land. No one quite knows the population of Afghanistan (estimates range between 28 and 33 million) and it is easily one of the three or four poorest and most backward nations in the world. This is not a country with a few minor problems.
One journalist who was there recounted that Afghan villagers asked why U.S. troops had arrived. He explained 9/11 and people laughed at him in disbelief: airplanes flying into buildings how tall? Remember, most Afghan villagers don't have TV or radio or newspapers (most can't read, anyway) and have likely never seen an airplane or a building higher than three stories, if that.
Developing Afghanistan, bringing roads, schools and modern technology may be high minded, but that is a task to accomplish over generations. Let's not get too cocky about this, either: It took the United States 381 years to go from a primitive settlement on Plymouth Rock, Mass., to the launch of the iPod.
Besides, how do we know that our kind of society is really an advance? Do we want to export to Afghanistan our American clogged freeways, drug problems and obesity?
As to making change by military force ... forget about it!
The mountainous Central Asian nation has been the burial ground of the hordes of Genghis Khan, the quicksand of British military expeditions in the 19th century and in the 20th swallowed whole entire divisions of the very same Red Army that defeated Hitler. What makes any American even think that the U.S. military would experience anything less?
Overthrowing the Taliban, despite its religious affinity with Al Qaeda, was most likely a crass error. Sure, it provided images and headlines of "victory" similar to those of World War II, but it also landed Afghanistan on our laps.
A more realistic view would be to let "the Afghan bastards," in George Patton's salty language, deal with the problems of Afghanistan. If Afghanistan is a base for Al-Qaeda, let's get them there; if Osama and his gang are elsewhere, let's go where they are and capture them there.
Let's leave fixing all the world's problems for another post, another policy.
The initial invasion of Afghanistan had decent prospects of achieving that goal in short order. However, the military execution raised the question of credibility: why was Osama bin Laden cornered, then allowed to escape? Moreover, the invasion of Iraq was a distracting error that should never have happened.
The mission in Afghanistan should never be confused with stabilizing or in any way changing or influencing that country's internal functioning.
Afghanistan is, after all, a country slightly smaller than Texas, with only 12 percent of its territory containing arable land. No one quite knows the population of Afghanistan (estimates range between 28 and 33 million) and it is easily one of the three or four poorest and most backward nations in the world. This is not a country with a few minor problems.
One journalist who was there recounted that Afghan villagers asked why U.S. troops had arrived. He explained 9/11 and people laughed at him in disbelief: airplanes flying into buildings how tall? Remember, most Afghan villagers don't have TV or radio or newspapers (most can't read, anyway) and have likely never seen an airplane or a building higher than three stories, if that.
Developing Afghanistan, bringing roads, schools and modern technology may be high minded, but that is a task to accomplish over generations. Let's not get too cocky about this, either: It took the United States 381 years to go from a primitive settlement on Plymouth Rock, Mass., to the launch of the iPod.
Besides, how do we know that our kind of society is really an advance? Do we want to export to Afghanistan our American clogged freeways, drug problems and obesity?
As to making change by military force ... forget about it!
The mountainous Central Asian nation has been the burial ground of the hordes of Genghis Khan, the quicksand of British military expeditions in the 19th century and in the 20th swallowed whole entire divisions of the very same Red Army that defeated Hitler. What makes any American even think that the U.S. military would experience anything less?
Overthrowing the Taliban, despite its religious affinity with Al Qaeda, was most likely a crass error. Sure, it provided images and headlines of "victory" similar to those of World War II, but it also landed Afghanistan on our laps.
A more realistic view would be to let "the Afghan bastards," in George Patton's salty language, deal with the problems of Afghanistan. If Afghanistan is a base for Al-Qaeda, let's get them there; if Osama and his gang are elsewhere, let's go where they are and capture them there.
Let's leave fixing all the world's problems for another post, another policy.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Day of Argument
In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue and, beyond that, no one ever quite agreed what happened next.
In the English speaking world, unparalleled Spanish cruelty coupled with Catholic obscurantism descended on the continent until 1607, when English people landed in Jamestown. In the Spanish-speaking world, the English were preceded by explorers and priests who brought Western, Christian civilization and spawned a new multiracial society (see Hispanic theologian Virgilio Elizondo's "cosmic race" born in mestizaje), featuring the continent's first universities, churches and other august institutions -- all long before the Puritans or the British pirate Drake.
Among the oldest inhabitants of the American continent (I'm told their preferred word for themselves these days is "Indian" but I'm not taking chances), from Hudson Bay to Tierra del Fuego, October 12 is the anniversary of the beginning of a long tragedy in which various ancient ways of life were destroyed by the sword, the pen and the cross of various Europeans.
Spanish conquistadores decapitated three major pre-Columbian empires. A British general invented biological warfare to better steal lands in New England. French Jesuits naïvely brought about among the once fearsome Iroquois one of the most genuine and heartfelt mass conversions to the gospel of "blessed are the peacemakers," and the tribe was subsequently wiped out in a generation by its long-suffering enemies.
We still don't know conclusively whether the remains of Christopher Columbus are in the Dominican Republic or in Spain. Nor whether he was Italian, the grandson of a Christian Spaniard in Genoa or, potentially, a Sephardic Jew. (The first person in Columbus' first expedition to set foot in the New World was, indeed, a Sephardic Jew, translator Luis de Torres.)
Nor do we know, of course, who really "discovered" America. Most likely, it was a Mongol who crossed the Behring Strait more than 10,000 years ago. Take that, Leif Erikson!
America the continent -- not the weasel "Americas," which tries to make up for the theft of the continental name by one of the countries of the original British North America -- isn't even named after anyone who was actually here.
Of course, as shown, we can't even agree about the name even though, to my mind, on my side of the Atlantic, we are all Americans, from Argentines to Venezuelans and every other nationality in between.
Despite my bouts of flea-bitten regionalism, I feel at home anywhere on the continent, having lived in Canada and Argentina, as well as the economic behemoth that lies somewhere in between. We americanos de la patria grande or Greater Homeland Americans really have a common history of migration and settlement, of constantly remaking and renewing our hopes.
We are more flexible than the Europeans, whose culture is pretty much fixed in identities forged in the first half of the last millenium. We are less mature than the Asians, whose wisdom and ways of life are at once the oldest and newest. We are far too much more individualistic than we should be, as the communitarian cultures of Africa teach us. We are, all of us, too driven to simply enjoy the paradises of Oceania.
Yet we are a tossed salad of them all -- Behring-Strait crossers and Polynesian raft sailors, European transoceanic transplants, Asian seekers of industry, African survivors of the "middle passage" and Pacific Basin neighbors.
In this last notion, I hope, we can all agree.
In the English speaking world, unparalleled Spanish cruelty coupled with Catholic obscurantism descended on the continent until 1607, when English people landed in Jamestown. In the Spanish-speaking world, the English were preceded by explorers and priests who brought Western, Christian civilization and spawned a new multiracial society (see Hispanic theologian Virgilio Elizondo's "cosmic race" born in mestizaje), featuring the continent's first universities, churches and other august institutions -- all long before the Puritans or the British pirate Drake.
Among the oldest inhabitants of the American continent (I'm told their preferred word for themselves these days is "Indian" but I'm not taking chances), from Hudson Bay to Tierra del Fuego, October 12 is the anniversary of the beginning of a long tragedy in which various ancient ways of life were destroyed by the sword, the pen and the cross of various Europeans.
Spanish conquistadores decapitated three major pre-Columbian empires. A British general invented biological warfare to better steal lands in New England. French Jesuits naïvely brought about among the once fearsome Iroquois one of the most genuine and heartfelt mass conversions to the gospel of "blessed are the peacemakers," and the tribe was subsequently wiped out in a generation by its long-suffering enemies.
We still don't know conclusively whether the remains of Christopher Columbus are in the Dominican Republic or in Spain. Nor whether he was Italian, the grandson of a Christian Spaniard in Genoa or, potentially, a Sephardic Jew. (The first person in Columbus' first expedition to set foot in the New World was, indeed, a Sephardic Jew, translator Luis de Torres.)
Nor do we know, of course, who really "discovered" America. Most likely, it was a Mongol who crossed the Behring Strait more than 10,000 years ago. Take that, Leif Erikson!
America the continent -- not the weasel "Americas," which tries to make up for the theft of the continental name by one of the countries of the original British North America -- isn't even named after anyone who was actually here.
Of course, as shown, we can't even agree about the name even though, to my mind, on my side of the Atlantic, we are all Americans, from Argentines to Venezuelans and every other nationality in between.
Despite my bouts of flea-bitten regionalism, I feel at home anywhere on the continent, having lived in Canada and Argentina, as well as the economic behemoth that lies somewhere in between. We americanos de la patria grande or Greater Homeland Americans really have a common history of migration and settlement, of constantly remaking and renewing our hopes.
We are more flexible than the Europeans, whose culture is pretty much fixed in identities forged in the first half of the last millenium. We are less mature than the Asians, whose wisdom and ways of life are at once the oldest and newest. We are far too much more individualistic than we should be, as the communitarian cultures of Africa teach us. We are, all of us, too driven to simply enjoy the paradises of Oceania.
Yet we are a tossed salad of them all -- Behring-Strait crossers and Polynesian raft sailors, European transoceanic transplants, Asian seekers of industry, African survivors of the "middle passage" and Pacific Basin neighbors.
In this last notion, I hope, we can all agree.
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