Reason number 67830495 it's Hard to be a Religious Feminist

I didn't listen to Mormon general conference this session.  Like most sessions, I skimmed a handful of talks I heard were great and I read in full exactly one, my motives for doing so being mostly self-serving.  I wanted to figure out the following quote I had seen reposted by a few girls in various places on the internet:

I thought it was a joke when I first read this little bit and I have to admit I laughed a little bit when I realized that Thomas S Monson, the president of the Mormon church, actually said such an awkward thing in general conference.  Thankfully,  the quote in context is not so bad, but this "women need to be told they're beautiful" excerpt was so admired by some femalr members that I've seen it posted either as the image or as a reposted quote probably over 10 times.  In context, Monson is telling a room full of all men (it was the priesthood session) that members need to be reassured of their worth if they are to feel needed within the church.  He adds that men also need to be told that they "amount to something" and "are capable and worthwhile".  

That being explained, let me try to put a finger on why I don't think Monson should be saying that women need to be told that they are beautiful in contrast to how men should be told they amount to something.  Mostly it has less to do with my problems with the church and more to do with the problems I see other women have with it, as I do not see the church as overwhelmingly patriarchal like some inactive feminists I know.  I honestly want what's best for the church-- I would be happy to see it grow if it was in a way that embraced the warmth and values I was brought up with as opposed to encouraging and ever-expanding public image of an army of Mitt and Ann Romney types spewing catchphrases rigged from 1950's lipstick commercials like "women need to be told they're beautiful". 

Aside from equating beauty in women to capability in men, Monson is exerting a weird forced sense of authority that just puts a bad taste in your mouth unless you already subscribe to his ideology.  Which would be fine if the church only tried to pander to its members, but the Mormon church is so much more than that.  Its members and former members already know that the Mormon church is not as sexist as other Christian religious.  Nonmembers don't, and they see bits of rhetoric like this posted on the internet and get quite a skewed impression of what Mormonism is all about-- one of a priveledged elderly white man who is head of a patriarchal church within a patriarchal culture telling a room of men what women need to be reassured of their physical attractiveness in order to feel they have an important place in the church.

Basically it comes down to the fact that I couldn't count the amount of weird messed up rumors and misconceptions I've heard about the Mormon church in my life, and I guess I just wish church authorities would stop encouraging them. 

The sound of the dying endangered newspaper...crinkle.

I picked up the Washington Post this morning and got a pretty in-your-face reminder of how bullshit the current explanation for the death of printed news is.  Any old school newspaper sympathizer will tell you that the reporting industry sold its soul to the devil the second Al Gore invented the internet because now lightning-fast resources allow stories to spread instantly while nobody cares enough to read more than a headline before slapping it onto a twitter feed and moving on to the next story about someone's recent haircut or break up or boob job.  Or some presidential candidate's recent family outing or $1000 shirt which is really just as relevant.

Well, to the post and every other printed paper, I'm calling out this cop-out excuse.  The truth is, if newspapers spent half the money and resources on reporting news that they do on faux-artsy editorials, their market demographic might expand once again to something more than retired liberal arts professors and nerds like me.  This morning, the post dedicated a front page headline and 3-page spread not to a breaking story about Pakistan reopening its border crossings (aka the freaking news), but to a photojournalism editorial called "Liberty through the Lens."   In this story, the post interviewed 12 random women from "all walks of life" in Virginia to share their thoughts on the upcoming presidential election, while publishing 5 obscenely humongous random images of of the state (and someone's lime green shoes) that looked like an aspiring photography major's art portfolio.  Cute, but seriously what the fuck?  One small reality check the Washington Post: people (myself included) tend to spend their lives avoiding the half-assed and usually idiotic political opinions of their peers, not paying to read them.  One big relevant reality check to the newspaper industry: Nobody cares about your desire to be arsty.  Instead, report the news, and do it well.  People know quality when they see it.

The Wisdom of Whores

Prostitution or especially global policy towards it is in my opinion so terribly captivating because of the amount of legitimate angles it can be argued.  I love everything to do with it--it is intriguing for its various cultural adaptations as it exists in virtually every society everywhere, it is statistically generous from health and social work standpoints as it plays into various phenomenons, and it is academically useful in its connotations-- prostitution has everything to do with class, economics, politics, culture, and well everything.  It is what people do and have done forever.  Forever.

But that's not why I wrote my UG thesis on it or why I bring it up to anybody that won't immediately freak out at the P-word.  I do this because my whole life I thought prostitution should be legalized and regulated until I read the book Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn about the correlation between legalize/regulate models and human trafficking.  They argued basically that prostitution wasn't as much about policy as I always thought but about power and how women don't have it but could.  They drastically changed my opinions, and I can't stress this enough: that is pretty damn difficult to do... but here I am  scribbling out some stuff about prostitution again.  This time I'm blaming someone else: Elizabeth Pisani and her pithy, thoughtful book The Wisdom of Whores and it's humanistic approach to what *some* people don't consider about *some* hookers: the stigma is a social construct.  Prostitution is a SOCIAL pathology, not a real one.  At least not to prostitutes.

I have this ongoing debate with a friend of mine who interned at the DA's office and developed a deep empathy for guys that had it rough and stumbled into prison without a second chance for dumb reasons.  I argued him that prostitution was inherently degrading and inherently victimized-- that there were of course deviations from this norm, but that it was indeed the norm.  I guess I'm changing my mind about that (again) as I read this book.  What I've realized is that to take a step back from the narrow viewpoint of my experience means separating prostitution, a profession which many enjoy and reap a variety of benefits from, from its connotations.  Sure, in a paternalistic social system, prostitution will manifest itself as a paternalistic evil, thus our stereotype of prostitution today-- misogynistic and cruel.  But trying to "fix" prostitution is trying to fix the symptoms without blaming the disease.  It is just a part of the big picture, albeit a rather ugly and messy part that nobody wants to look at.

Animal Spirits

"Cause we are living in a material world,

And I am a material girl." -M

As society speeds increasingly rapidly into uncharted territory technologically and materialistically speaking, the place of women continues to evolve.  We have a tendency to point to changes in society as "progression," but an objective second thought allows us to see that change in an affluent capitalistic system will not necessarily be good or bad, but rather the path of least resistance fiscally speaking.  Contemporary philosophers have remarked on the ability of advances in technology and market speculation to increasingly addict the modern man to his place in society over his independent self, but not much has been said about women, especially young women.  If we are to figure out on a more positive rather than normative level what is happening to 21st century girls, we have to first figure out what that place is.

In One Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse presented a radical and daring thesis that through economic and political liberalization, man had effectively trapped himself into a functional role in which he is completely dependent on the purpose he serves within the societal whole.  There are many factors as to why this happened, including rapid technological advances furthering more definite class lines and market specialization, handicapping men from their inherent ability of self-reliance.  Man's option to distance himself from society becomes less and less viable as he becomes dependent on others to fulfill not only his real needs (food, shelter, etc), but his socially constructed consumer needs, which continue to expand and are never effectively satiated.  As he becomes more of a member of society, he becomes less of a person in the whole individual sense.  The paradox is that he loses his free will to freedom--to market expansion and capitalization.

Marcuse doesn't talk about the role of pre- or non-professional women specifically in his rather prophetic book, but modern girls face a symmetrical paradox.  Through societal pressures and constant media reinforcement, the place of girls not as the consumer but instead as the commodity is becoming a similar addiction to girls themselves.  And in the same way that men propagate themselves as powerful based on their economic delusions, women propagate themselves as powerful based on delusions of sexual power.   Girls are addicted to themselves as an object, so even their main role as consumer plays into the idea of becoming a better, more attractive commodity.  They learn to view all aspects of their life in such a light, relying on their parents, friends, and love interests to reinforce the idea that they are an adequate, marketable substance, the one-dimensional girl.

It has been said that the sole problem of philosophy is to build an argument against nihilism, which many claim cannot be done.  From Descarte's foundations to Nietzsche's limitless human potential to James's poetic pragmatism, all ideas suggesting a greater point to human existence have delved beyond the grounds of reason, and shown us that reason has not and quite probably cannot give us a conclusive argument that there is such a greater truth.

In asking myself the central question, "what drives 21st century girls," I was struck by the economic ideas of John Maynard Keynes's "animal spirits", the idea that humans participate in acts of progression not for any logically sound reason, but just through sporadic impulse.  In his more eloquent words, "Our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation, whether moral or hedonistic or economic.  Most, probably, or our decisions to do something positive...can only be taken as a result of animal spirits-- of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities" (General Theory, 161).  Here Keynes was attempting to explain the "why" of early financial markets, but in a broader sense also to explain the "why" of human nature.  It is not striving for a logical end goal that moves us, because we have nothing to show that such a thing exists.  Evolution has given us the illusion of purpose, a "spontaneous optimism" that allows us to thrive as a species.  In the words of Nietzsche, "The beast within us insists on being lied to...without erroneous moral assumptions, man would have remained a beast"  (Thus Spoke Zarathustra).  If we are to accept his theory, it becomes pathetically amusing that while centuries of philosophers have struggled to defend a greater truth to give purpose to man, their actions have only been perpetuated by purpose when not in contrast to raw biology.

Keynes saw economic power as detrimental to the wholeness of man in the same way that I am arguing sexual power to be detrimental to the wholeness of girls as independent people.  It is a very old idea dating back as far as we have records of human history, but further cultivated by Adam Smith, that the individual vices of people contribute to the greatness of a whole society.  This society-dependence for women is the result of their Keynesian animal spirit.  What Keynes described was a sort of economic nihilism, the idea that there was no objective progress in economics, only the illusion of progress.  Pragmatically speaking, the difference between real progression and the illusion of progression in financial actions doesn't matter at all.  This idea is heavily dependent on pre-Hebrew ideas of the cyclical nature of human development, and ties into renowned Czech economist Tomas Sedlacek's sub thesis in Economics of Good and Evil, that just like myths, mathematical economic models show what never was, but always will be.  There is no truth to them in the idealistic sense if they do not and cannot copy reality, but their truth value lies in their pragmatic cash-value, i.e. as guides for investors and (now, though they weren't around in Keyne's days) hedge fund managers.

So, of course economic models are true to an extent, stopping short of an ability to capture the non-rational, or even arational, essence of human behavior.  This is why they are timeless-- they do not change as man changes.  The price that comes with that explains the riskiness of all economic behavior-- the face that while a myth or model can interpret an aspect of human nature, it cannot copy human reality.  Economics cannot force itself to be an actual positive science because it describes people, and the idealistic girl of the 21st cannot be given life, but only modeled for her pragmatic value vis-a-vis the manipulative power real women do wield in learning to become her.

"Patriotism is the last refuge to which a Scoundrel clings"

There I was right in the middle of one of the most feared and most common aspects of modern society: the social confrontation.  It wasn't that the people in whose presence I found myself were overtly hostile, or contrary.  But I felt that I wished they would be.  There is nothing more than disinterest and genuine apathy to make a confrontation awkward, but that's what I felt when I was asked: "What do you mean you don't consider yourself a patriot?"

My first reaction was my usual one- to wince with discomfort at the couple pairs of questioning eyes on me.  God damn it if I usually knew to not allude to socially unacceptable ideas in the presence of strangers, but I had definitely messed up somewhere here.  What is bothering me as I jot this down is that what came out of my mouth in response sucked.  It seemed ungrateful, trite, and worst of all didn't even answer his question.  I gave him some laundry list of things I hated done in the name of American patriotism-- but that's not what he was asking, not really.  The 90% of Americans who consider themselves patriots don't believe in human slavery or war.  But they believe in something greater than themselves.  In God, in country.  They believe America is greater than the sum of its parts, and I don't.

After mulling it over a bit, here is my real answer.  I don't believe, especially in what is meaningless.  Patriotism is linguistically empty.  It is a subjective personal response to nostalgic triggers, enhanced especially by those who have benefited from the American class system.  Patriotism truly is whatever you want it to be, making its parsimonious value next to nothing.  Take for example these typical defenses to Patriotism:

"I'm proud of my country."  This one is clearly unfair.  You can be proud of individual things you have done for your country, but you can't be proud about things you haven't done.  You can't be proud of the American constitution, you had nothing to do with it.  By sporadic and meaningless chance, you were plunged into a citizenship that you didn't choose or contribute to.  Furthermore, if you are going to feel pride in it, you must also feel guilt in the 250 nearly constant years of war this country has been in, most extensive genocide in recorded history, etc etc.

"I'm grateful for the freedoms I enjoy"  Fine.  But again, we've run into some pretty general and blunt linguistic territory, meaning a clarification is in store if we are to achieve parsimonious communication.  "Freedom" is one of the most cop-out conversation enders in the American vocabulary, yet what does it signify?  Our questionable right to vote, to dictate our own destinies?  There is no black and white when it comes to freedom, there is constant grey scale.  We don't have the freedom to drive without car insurance, but we do have the freedom to expect financial support when we get in a wreck.  A 14 year old girl I know from Eastern Europe who complains about the public education system in America doesn't have the freedom of education here that she did in Poland, but she does have more professional options after graduation.  It is no hidden truth that a child born into a middle or upper class family has more ability to dictate his own destiny than a child born poor.  That isn't an American phenomenon, it is universal, and more freedom in one area almost always translates to less freedom in another.

"I believe in the greatness of America".  Here is the kicker for me.  Belief is dangerous territory for a sound mind attempting to accomplish its function--to reason.  Once you have accepted a belief, there is no going back.  If one is to blindly accept patriotism, there is no arguing against what is done that is justified in the name of it without using reason, the authority of which has already been squelched.  We cannot only demand objectivity and rationality when it fits our agenda.  We must strive for it at all times,or not at all.  Reason cannot be used as a slave to any ideal.  It is an evolutionary development common to all man if and when we choose to tap its resource.

Anyway, that's what I would have said to him if I had the time and really wanted to bum him out.