A Conlang for Your Heart

Glossary
Conlang: A constructed language, or conlang, is a language whose features have been consciously constructed rather than developed naturally, as in most languages.
Asexuality: Asexuality is a sexual orientation (or something analogous to a sexual orientation) in which a person does not experience sexual attraction to anyone. Although many asexual people are aromantic--meaning that they do not experience romantic attraction to anyone either--not all are. People who are only minimally sexual, but not entirely asexual, are often called "grey."

One of the things that excites me about the asexuality movement is the attempt to create a new vocabulary for attraction. Many, if not most, of the ways we have learned to describe our relationships with other people are based on romantic and familial models, though we've generated a few others to describe sexual non-romantic relationships in the last few decades (friends with benefits, f*ckbuddies). And there are some institutional or quasi-institutional terms, too: mentors, sponsors, confessors. But there are few words or phrases for peer-to-peer relationships, and there are even fewer words or phrases for the kinds of bonds people have, irrespective of the particular activities that people do with one another. Asexual people, and especially aromantic asexual people, therefore have hardly a vocabulary at all to describe the different kinds of bonds they have with people. Making a new vocabulary is more urgent for aces, but it is useful for anyone who has informal non-romantic relationships . . . which probably includes pretty much everybody.

I encountered a "web of attraction" at the blog asexy beast. It consists of a spider's web with different points around the edge labelled with different kinds of attraction: sexual, romantic, aesthetic, platonic, physical, fantasy. The different components go unexplained, so we're required to use the author's commentary to try and make sense of the diagram. But I'm not wedded to the particular labels What was revelatory for me when I first saw the web was that all of these different kinds of attraction could be de-coupled. Until then I had been assuming that if I experienced a certain kind of attraction toward someone I really must be experiencing all of the others, since I had conflated them all. This became very confusing when my actual experiences did not line up: how can I be attracted to someone I don't find attractive? How can I be attracted to someone when I don't want to date them? etc. So long as I was grouping all types of attraction into one category and treating them as simply facets of a single experience, I was confusing myself. Seeing the web of attraction--especially in the context of asexuality--broke that conflation up for me. I have been able to make much better sense of my own experiences now that I am not reflecting on them with a limited vocabulary.

For instance, I am no longer especially confused or worried if I find a person attractive to the point of distraction but I do not have the slightest inclination to date that person: "thinks is cool" and "finds physically attractive" might be prerequisites to "wants to date" for me, but they are not sufficient, because "wants to date" is its own discrete and indivisible experience. But I'm simplifying a little--"finds physically attractive" isn't a single indivisible experience, either.

But of course different people will be experiencing different combinations of these forms of attraction, in response to different aspects of other people, so it will make sense for people to be developing their own vocabulary for their own use. The trick in making your own vocabulary is the danger that you'll try to project that vocabulary onto others (of which the problem asexual people encountered trying to explain themselves in sexual language is one example). I'm recommending that people make these vocabularies largely so they can explain themselves to themselves, and therefore it can be an entirely private language; however, teaching other people to speak your language could be helpful if you wanted to explain yourself to them and if you wanted to help them revise and improve the conlangs for their own hearts.

If you want to learn more about asexuality, I recommend checking out AVEN, the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network, and the YouTube channel Hot Pieces of Ace.

Although I have finished and posted this in response to a comment conversation at Unequally Yoked, I have been sitting on drafts of this for awhile.

"Her Naked Glory": Objectification and Female Nudity in Television and Film

I've been reading* a bit of commentary about "Blurred Lines" and Game of Thrones, particularly regarding female nudity and objectification. In the comment sections more than the articles themselves I've noticed a few people (mainly women, incidentally) asking if female nudity couldn't be empowering (or be read as empowering) in certain cases. While the individual comments I saw were not really well worked out with regard to "Blurred Lines," which we probably cannot read as empowering if we're being honest about the video, I still think that this is a question worth asking. I don't really have an answer, but I do want to break this broader question into a few more specific ones.

1. Are representations of female nudity always erotic?
I ask this because male nudity isn't always erotic. In the first season of Game of Thrones (the only season I've seen), there is a lot of female nudity but there is also some male nudity. In the first instance of male nudity that I recall, there is really no sense that that nudity is erotic. It's humiliating and objectifying, yes, but not erotic. (A man is forced to march naked and tied to a horse as a punishment for attempting to murder another character.) So my suspicion is that, if male nudity is not always erotic, then female nudity wouldn't be, either.

2. Are representations of female nudity always objectifying?
I have little to say about this, except that if the answer to this question is no and the answer to the previous question is no, we have to ask the next question.

3. Are representations of female nudity, when erotic, always objectifying?
Again, for reasons like those above, I am assuming that it isn't. The example that's usually cited here is lesbian pornography (as in real lesbian pornography, made by women about women for women, not pornography made about lesbian women by straight men for straight men), but the example that comes to mind for me might be Irene Adler in the BBC's Sherlock. She appears naked as a way of exercising power, and I think her agency is deliberately emphasized in that scene, but I'm not always sure that this sort of agency is maintained as the representation crosses the fourth wall. In other words, can a female character still be objectified for the sake of male viewers while maintaining agency within the fiction?

(Note that you can set this up as a chart, with two columns and two rows; the columns would be erotic/non-erotic and the rows would be objectifying/non-objectifying. I've covered three of the four cells now, but the fourth, non-erotic objectification, is pretty obvious, I think, in that if non-erotic nudity is possible, then non-erotic objectifying nudity must be, since objectification does not rely on eroticization to function. That statement is a pretty important piece of evidence, though.)

4. If the answer is no to questions 1 through 3, then under what conditions do representations of female nudity a) become erotic and b) become objectifying?
This is the question that really interests me, and that I am most ignorant about so far. I suspect that I know the answers to #1-#3 as far as I am asking those questions abstractly: so, representations of female nudity almost certainly aren't always inherently erotic. But maybe, in the cultural and representational settings I inhabit, the conditions making nudity both erotic and objectifying are always present; maybe, under patriarchy, where the assumed viewpoint of any text is both male and heterosexual, and where male heterosexuality assumes subject status at the expense of female subjectivity, representations of female nudity always become erotic and objectifying, regardless of the text's own features. I'm not saying that any of this is true, just that I could believe that it is true without much convincing. But I would need some convincing.

The point where I resist this story that I've posited is where, under patriarchy, male heterosexuality's assumption of subject status always entails objectifying women. I think it's easy to do, and that we (as in "heterosexual men" and not "you and I") are encouraged (by whom?) to assert subjectity at the expense of female subjectivity, but I don't think it's inevitable. That's one place where I'd need convincing. And I'd also need convincing that the assumed reader/viewer is always male and heterosexual. (In other words, just because patriarchy is big and strong doesn't mean it's omnipotent and omnipresent.)

In other words, we are confronted with the problem--the same problem, really, that all textual or cultural interpretation confronts in some way or another--of where meaning resides: intention? reception? context? form? Does a film objectify women, or does the director objectify them, or do the veiwers? Do well-intentioned viewers, watching a well-intentioned and well-executed film, nonetheless objectify nude women when watching in a patriarchal context? Can the act of watching, in anyway and by anyone, recover agency for women represented erotically when nude? Or is it some formal (or intertextual) feature of the film itself that objectifies or does not objectify nude women, and that feature trumps anything you or I might bring to the text? The answers to these questions certainly aren't obvious in the general case of textual interpretation or the specific case of representations of female nudity.

We can ask a version of question #4 of women even when clothed, obviously: Under what conditions do representations of women a) become erotic and b) become objectifying? However, because we criticize films for gratuitous nudity and not for a gratuitous presence of women (the problem is the exact opposite), I think there is something special about nudity that lends it to objectification. (Notice, too, that when people criticize a film for gratuitous nudity, they almost always mean female nudity, not nudity in general.) And gratuitous female nudity does seem for most people to mean "erotic objectification of women" in and of itself, which makes me think that these questions are particularly apt, since if female nudity is not always objectifying, then we ("you and I" this time, not "heterosexual men") should probably be criticizing films a bit more pointedly and accurately than just saying "gratuitous nudity" without explaining how it is objectifying in this case.

(I'm assuming feminist reasons and not prudish ones for criticizing a film for gratuitous nudity. While rather prudish myself, I don't consider prudishness grounds for criticizing a film; it might mean you don't like the film, but it has no bearing on the film's quality.)

5. Are representations of female nudity ever empowering for women, and under what conditions?
Which is the question I started out with. It isn't a question I feel I can answer, though, this time not because of ignorance (as in #4), but because I'm a dude. I feel that this particular question is probably one that men can't answer.
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(The title quote comes from Paradise Lost and refers to a pre-lapsarian Eve. There's some obvious baggage with that quotation--for example, Milton's spectacular sexism--which is why I chose it. Because, you know, so-called empowering nudity might come with misogynist baggage.)
*OK, skimming.

Girardian Rivalry

[I should be writing a final paper (mimesis in The Two Gentlemen of Verona) right now; the longer I put it off, the more I'll suffer for it. In a move that may seem counterintuitive, I am going to write a blogpost instead. I intend to write on an idea that I will be employing in my paper, which will with any luck bring my brain gently back on topic and help me get something done on this paper...]

René Girard is reasonably well known for his idea of mimetic desire, which states that we all want things because we have learned to want them from someone else. The traditional example for this is romantic or erotic love: A loves B because C loves B. This does not only produce particular relations between A and B; it also produces particular relations between A and C. That is, I have unique relationships with people whose desires I imitate, and with people who imitate my desires.

In Theatre of Envy, on the operation of mimetic desire in Shakespeare's plays (Girard claims that Shakespeare is exceptional because he's one of the few playwrights to understand that desire is mimetic and is therefore one of the few to portray it realistically), Girard spends the introduction and the first chapter discussing this dynamic: "Individuals who desire the same thing are united by something so powerful that, as long as they can share whatever they desire, they remain the best of friends; as soon as they cannot, they become the worst of enemies." Thus mimetic desire becomes mimetic rivalry. But it is not only that we inevitably wind up desiring the same things as our friends, or are friends with those whose desires we imitate: we are active agents in sharing desires. We want our friends to desire the same things that we do. Speaking of the eponymous friends in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Proteus and Valentine, Girard writes: "Whenever they do not see eye to eye, our two friends feel that something is wrong; each one tries to persuade the other that he should reorient his desire in such a way as to make it coincide with his own once again. Friendship is the perpetual coincidence of two desires." The consequence of this effect is as inevitable as the effect itself. On top of friendship's first imperative (Girard sums it up as "imitate me") arises a second imperative, "do not imitate me." He calls this the "double bind" of friendship.

The idea of mimetic desire (and mimetic rivalry) is one we vigourously want to reject, says Girard. As a result, it is masked by assorted claims and ideas and discourses. It very rarely appears in our culture, and when it does it is always disguised. But it cannot be so easily gotten rid of. Short of embracing our mimetic desires and rivalries, we have two options: "total renunciation" of desire, or the production of some kind of monster or perversion. These monsters or perversion have the characteristic of producing new mimetic rivalries later on, or simply recycling the old one in some disguised way.

Girard of course goes on. He talks about learning to desire oneself from a besotted courter (Pheobe and Silvius from As You Like It is his example, and I will parenthetically add that his chapter is the best explanation for the title of that play that I've ever read); he talks about the role of the pander; he talks about alliances forged out of conflicts when the desired object is lost to both parties. But I will rest with this description of his idea for now.

*****

When discussing my paper with the professor, she said, "Be careful with Girard. He has a tendency to take over everything." I don't imagine she's wrong. Reading Theatre of Envy, I started seeing mimetic desire and mimetic rivalry everywhere. I know other people have made much of the idea. Eve Sedgwick's Between Men, one of the most interesting pieces of literary theory that I have never read, is a good example. Dr. Richard Beck from Experimental Theology has also used Girard's ideas (like this post). It also does a wonderful job of explaining how Betty and Veronica remain friends, and how they band together when defending their stakes in Archie against outsiders like Cheryl Blossom (you can see how I spent my childhood). The applications abound.

One of things I like about it is that Girard deliberately sets this up as a competitor to Freud's ideas. This is why I also like Lacan. It is not that I necessarily like the consequences of these any more than I like the consequences of Freudian incest and repression. Rather, I see how Freud's ideas can monopolize discourses and can form an ideological juggernaut which is hard to defeat. Freudian psychoanalysis has the tendency to be able to explain away any objection by describing any counterexample as a transformation of a repressed desire. Girard's ideas (like Lacan's) are nice because they provide competitors with the same insiduous powers of explaining-away. Any one alone is pretty scary, but competing with each other they become managable.

But, as I think you'll have noticed by now, I'm not too worried about this mimetic desire. I have read Theatre of Envy and I have found that it cannot take over everything after all. I see gaps in it. Friendship, for instance, is built out of differences as well as similarities. I generally want my friends to be pursuing different goals than I am, actually; I like being able to watch them do things I don't understand. And quarreling over trivial differences of opinion can be rather fun; one of the major let-downs of Lewis' heaven in The Last Battle is that everyone agreed (an ideal utopia for me would be a place where people could quarrel without taking it personally--I, at least, usually take it personally, and so can never really enjoy it as much as I'd like). And I have difficulty imagining who I am imitating in a number of my desires. I can't think, for instance, of anyone else who likes to eat limes; at the very least, I was eating limes before I met anyone else who did. A prerequisite for mimesis is that there must be an original, even if it is lost. That originary desire could not have been mimetic.

What I like, then, about Girardian mimesis is that it is helpful in understanding some things, and it breaks the hegemonic hold of Freudian psychoanalysis (for instance, by offering another way of explaining Oedipal complexes without making them universal) and certain strains of evolutionary psychology (rather than needing to explain how a particular behaviour--the desire for pale skin, say--emerged in early hominids, you could explain how it arose as a consequence of mimetic forces in this context, and therefore avoid universalizing a contextual trait). I do not think it accurately explains the whole picture, but it helps contribute to a set of alternative explanations which, I think, does a better job of describing the complexity of human psychology and sociology.

Pointing an Arrow

I'm going to direct your attention to a post by Ily of asexy beast, a blog about asexuality. This post discusses what romance is, and I think it's worth looking at. She contrasts romance with sensuality, drawing a parallel between them but also making a distinction: sensuality is about immediacy, romance about escape.

I want to call your attention to this blog generally, though, for a few interrelated reasons. First, Ily's voice is one little heard in our culture, and I think wholeheartedly that we should use the blogosphere for a way of sounding the depth (and breadth, but that metaphor doesn't work so well) of human experience and identity. This technology is unique in it's ability to publish and disseminate minority positions of all sorts. Second, Ily's insights into (a)sexuality and other relational stuff is helpful, I think, to anyone at all in understanding human experience. One of the biggest advantages of Ily's thinking is her ability to a phenomenon (say, romantic attraction) and pull it apart and show that it is actually composed of parts, and that these parts can occur on their own. (It's very helpful to realize that feeling strong affiliation and a level of physical comfort with someone of the opposite sex does not mean that you're romantically attracted to the person, for instance.)

The Problem of the Obedient Body

or, What is our body?, part 2

If what does and does not count as part of my body is not determined by organic attachment (or at least not entirely), then is it possible that obedience does determine it? That is, can we say that whatever obeys our mental commands is part of our body? This is the sort of reasoning Leah at Unequally Yoked suggests, along with some commenters. Explaining why she thinks a prosthetic counts as a part of one's body, she says, "It's attached to me and serves my will." Presumably, then "regular" body parts are governed by the same principle: that which is obeys your will is part of your body. It is not this particular claim that I'm interested in refuting, but a similar one. That is, that our body is that which obeys our will. Perhaps (I'm not yet conceding this point) whatever we can command is part of our body, but I am going to suggest that not all of our body is especially obedient. In the course of this post, I am going to suggest that obedience can only be part of the story because our bodies have a knack for disobedience.

First I want to notice briefly that our bodies have physical limits. We cannot, for instance, bend our elbows beyond a certain angle no matter how hard we will it. We cannot bend where we do not have joints. We cannot expect our eyes to smell or our noses to hear. We can only will our body parts to perform the functions they can perform. This seems obvious and does not seem to me to suggest that the body is disobedient. One could easily enough stipulate that we're only refering to a body's normal functioning. (I am using "normal" deliberately because I plan to indicate later how big of a problem normativity is in this question.) Again, I am going to use a list to indicate ways in which bodies are disobedient.

1. Paralysis Bodies sometimes do not act when willed to act; they are paralyzed. This can be permanent or temporary, caused by nervous tissue damage, psychoactive chemicals, or psychosomatic disorders. Whatever the details, sometimes our bodies, even when physically capable of the action we will, do not move. If obedience alone determined what counted as our body, would we then be required to say that a paraplegic person's lower torso is no longer part of their body? This seems to me to be a highly problematic move.

2. Conjoined Twins and "Two Headed" Snakes You may recall that last time I worried that, by the definition of organic attachment, conjoined twins could not distinguish their bodies when it seemed clear that they should be able to. In this post I want to suggest instances in which conjoined twins actually cannot distinguish between their bodies. Since I do not know of any human twins to whom this applies, I will refer to snakes. (Note on phrasing: it is typical to refer to human conjoined twins as plural people but to refer to animal conjoined twins as a single two-headed organism. This seems an arbitrary distinction to me. Insofar as animals have consciousnesses, two conjoined animals would have separate consciousnesses and therefore be distinct animals. So I am continuing to use the phrase "conjoined twins" rather than "two-headed snakes" to emphasis that these are two snakes sharing a body, not one snake with two heads.)

If you watch the video, you should be able to see that the two snakes here share (or, perhaps more accurately, compete for) control over their body. Both control the body; put differently, the body is obedient to both snakes, except when they compete. In this instance I think it would be quite fair to suggest that at least some of their body is shared. That is, it is part of the left snake's body and part of the right snake's body. However, obedience as an indicator of being part of a body is complicated by the possibility that your body could obey another. Further, it makes more complicated the idea of what a "body" is. The left snake's head is not part of the right snake's body, I shouldn't think. But both of these are attached to the parts of the body which the share. Conceptualizing the body as some sort of concrete "thing" is therefore pretty problematic. That human conjoined twins have never been reported to share motor control does not, to my knowledge, mean it could never happen. Further, conjoined twins do sometimes share tactile perception. (Abigail and Brittany Hensel, I have heard, can both feel touch on the skin between their spines. Do their bodies not just connect but overlap in this instance?) And what of internal organs that "obey" signals from both brains? Not conscious willing, no, but signals which help moderate chemical production in digestive and reproductive organs. This does occur in human conjoined twins, and suggests that we cannot simply write of these problems as ones belonging exclusively to conjoined animals.

Perhaps someone at this point will object that these are not normal bodies with normal functioning. There are two problems with this objection. The first is that if we want a universal definition of what constitutes a body, it needs to account for ALL bodies. The second is that we will have trouble defining what a normal body is. "Normal" is a problematic word, in the first place, because it has a normative element: that is, normal is how things should be. And just switching for "typical" isn't going to work. If we say that we're only talking about "typical" bodies and then define bodies as we are used to them, we're still saying that these atypical bodies are somehow uncategorizable according to the rules we've set up, recreating a standard by which bodies are considered "typical" or "atypical", with these terms functioning identically to "normal" and "abnormal." But if you remain unconvinced, I have two parallel examples remaining which apply to all bodies.

3. Inert body parts Some of our body parts do not obey our will. I was somewhat interested that in Leah's post on transhumanism she suggested that our teeth obey our will. Do they really? I haven't ever commanded my teeth to do anything at all. I don't think they would do anything if I did command them. And this is something slightly more than limits to their functionality: there is literally no way that they can obey my will. Neither can my bones or fat deposits. Like a person with paralyzed body parts, not all of my body can obey me. Therefore obedience cannot possibly be the only marker of what counts as my body, unless I wish to forfeit my bones and teeth and fat.

4. Body parts that do things "on their own" Sometimes body parts seem to act of their own volition. The other day I got into an argument and immediately afterwards I was shaking so badly I had to sit down. My legs buckled without my ordering them to; in fact, they continued buckling even when I tried to stop them from shaking. Of course I am sure this was a result of things going on inside my nervous system, but if we're defining according to will, then I must say they weren't obeying my will, even though they were fully capable of doing so. There are numerous physical states and phenomena which have the same effect; off-hand, I can think of nervous tics, hyperventilation, and unwanted physical arousal. In each of these cases, one or more organs act in ways counter to our conscious will. If you are still skeptical, let me suggest an exercise for you (don't actually do this). Turn on one burner of your stove range. Wait five minutes. Touch the burner. Don't pull back. See if your body obeys you. (Even if you succeed in keeping your body there, I am rather sure your arm and finger will be "attempting" to jerk back in ways you did not will.) In the case of paralysis or inert body parts, sometimes parts of our bodies do not obey our will but are nonetheless part of our body. In the case of some conjoined twins and some physical states/phenomena, our bodies will do things we did not will, either because a conjoined sibling willed it or because of a command given by the nervous system outside of a conscious will. While I might be able to say that something is part of my body if it obeys my will, I cannot say that obedience to my will is the only feature which could make something part of my body.

Series Index

I Ought To Be In The Fetish Porn Business?

I looked at my Webmaster Tools stats.

You know how they say that the sorts of search queries your blog answers to should reflect what your blog is about? And you know how some people say that you might want to change your blog to reflect what searches bring it up? As in, if you are blogging about the ethics of different brands of diapers but somehow Google has decided to offer your site to people looking for "puppies and windmills", then you should consider blogging about puppies and windmills instead?

If that's true, I'm writing about the wrong thing entirely. In the past, I have received visits from people interested in grammar, figures of speech, Renaissance sonneteers, cookies made with ham, and pachycephalasauruses. I've been getting weird searches every since this post and this post, but before now it hasn't been bad. These days, however, the search queries that find my blog are about a very select number of topics, namely the following:

1. Dracula's brides
2. Wynona Rider's breasts
3. Naked amputees (especially Aimee Mullins)
4. Sexy black albino women
5. Sexy black albino men
6. "Siamese" twins (particularly the Hensels)
7. Sexy disfigured people
8. Combinations of the above

OK. This is a bit disturbing. I thought they invented DeviantArt so people could commission fetish pics, but, hey, what do I know? Maybe Google's the go-to place for specialty porn now? If so, do I need to start posting pictures of a naked, armless, albino Blackula with his topless conjoined twin Wynona-Rider-lookalike brides?

Or I can rely on links from other blogs and a continued presence on Mr Linky Lists. Yeah. I think I'll take this last route.

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Note: I think it is clear that this particular post will make the situation much worse. Now there's a single page devoted to all of this nonsense.

7 Quick Takes (XXXV)

1. This last weekend my Mom and I watched Up in the Air. We also watched Surrogates, which was unspectacular. It's Up in the Air that I want to talk about. I thought it was very good, but what else would you expect from the director of Juno? I didn't expect to see George Clooney in that sort of movie, but he did very well in it.

In case you don't know, the movie is about a man who travels the US firing people for a living, played by Clooney. He has no friends and is estranged from his famil, relying instead on fellow passengers and random hook-ups. His home is the airplane, and his mantra is "What's in Your Backpack?"--what things, what relationships, are weighing you down? This all changed when a new employee, a cute girl with strangely facially-invasive hair, tries to change his industry to on-line firing. He must escort her around, teaching her the art of face-to-face firing. Meanwhile, he meets Alex, an attractive older business woman who he has a more-than-one-night affair with... and all characters learn things about relationships etc. and so forth. It's a good movie. I think I will write a review of it later, but it will have spoilers in it. Sorry.

2. I finished both A Ring of Endless Light and The Educated Imagination. I would suggest reading the latter, by Northrop Frye, but not as much as I encourage you to read A Ring of Endless Light. Cait said that L'Engle's Ring is hands down her favourite. I don't know that I'm organized enough to have a favourite book, but, if I did, Ring would be a contender. Not only has it impressed upon me a term that I like and want to use--lightbearer--but it also has re-affirmed for me the ennobling possibilities of fiction and art in general. It has infused me with a purpose that I badly needed. Not hope, exactly, but determination nonetheless. In a previous post, Yolanda posted a link which discussed the idea of being post-hope. This might be something worth thinking about... regardless, you should read A Ring of Endless Light.

3. At work I have been working with the children yet again. I do enjoy working with them. It's pretty nice.

4. Today is Good Friday, and this morning my mother and I went to a Good Friday service at All Saint's Anglican Church in downtown Fort McMurray. For Ash Wednesday, Maudy Thursday, and Good Friday, three area churches--Christ the King Lutheran Church, All Saint's Anglican Church, and St. Thomas' Anglican Church--alternate holding joint services.

I was not expecting the service to be as similar to the Lutheran services I attended in the little swamp church of my childhood. It's so hard to sing well to those hymns! I've become used to "worship music" without noticing.

It of course was a solemn service, about suffering, and throughout service we held a nail. At the end of the service, we were asked to proceed in silence to the base of the cross, where we would put down our nail. The cross was taken down, as usual, leaning at a slight angle against the altar. When I came to the cross, I didn't quite know what I wanted to say to God: I had some plan to discuss my own sins and ask for forgiveness, but that idea withered at the cross. Instead, all I had was this: "God, this is too big for me. I don't understand."

In C. S. Lewis' The Last Battle there is a bear whose dying words are, "I don't understand." I always felt pity for him, and knew that, were I one of the children at that battle, his death would prompt me to new fury. Now I think on that bear differently--I, too, don't understand. I look about me at the suffering, at my own guilt, and I realize I am too small for this world... and yet, I am asked to take part in it. And I intend to. Yes, God, this is too big for me. No, God, I do not understand. But I will serve you nonetheless. Thank you.

5. I watched Terminator Salvation and Whip It. I know they say you shouldn't compare movies of different genres, but I think Whip It holds up far better than Terminator Salvation. The latter, see, is not as great of an action movie as was advertised, though it certainly is quite good. Perhaps I would recall it better had I not watched Whip It immediately afterwards.

First, I think Ellen Page is a joy to watch. She plays an adorable screw-up so well. Second, it was actually a decent story. I don't know what to say except that I thought it was great. Oh, and Drew Barrymore's character was pretty cool, too.

6. As you can likely tell from reading this post, I have regained a sense of possibility. Maybe not hope, and maybe not a definite purpose, but right now, despite the purpose of this day to be a reflection of suffering, I think I have found the strength/grace to persevere. First, the day itself is beautiful, and I went for a long walk.

While on the walk, I thought about the very real successes I have heard of happening and that I have taken part in in transforming the social landscape of high school. Have you heard about the pink t-shirt campaign in high schools? After some kid got the snot beat out of him for wearing a pink t-shirt, a bunch of his classmates got together with a campaign for wearing pink t-shirts as an anti-bullying symbol. This spread to other highschools. I had been part of an anti-bullying program in high school, but I saw little success. I hear that this one did, and I hope that this is true. I don't know why the possibility of real change in the high school setting buoys me so; perhaps it's because the social order feels so powerful in high school, and that triumph over it matters so much to those involved. On a cosmic level, it doesn't appear to matter much at all... but, on as L'Engle discusses in Ring, on a cosmic level, every little thing, even a single fallen sparrow, matters very much indeed.

I am also listening to these songs on GrooveShark, which is helping: O Verona, Dies Irae, O Fortuna, Requiem for a Dream, Unstoppable, and (best of all) Diem Ex Dei. I must remember to listen to that last one on Easter Sunday.

7. On Jon's most recent post, he links to a YouTube video of Tiffany Alvord singing Taylor Swift's "You Belong to Me." Alvord's music video neatly parallels the photography of Miss Aniela, which I have spent the last week exploring. That is, both engage in the use of "multiples" of themselves to some end or another. Miss Aniela worries that her use of cloning comes off as more of the common Flickr theme of screwing around with clones; she wants to bring out more meaning about her own internal divisions, but wonders whether this is lost. Much of Miss Aniela's discussion seems to surround whether her work is seen with the meaning she tries to invest in it, or whether her audience misses the point altogether.

Appropriately, I am of two minds about Miss Aniela's work, largely because I'm on the one hand a prude and therefore dislike the sexuality inherent in many of her images, but am on the other hand a young straight man, and therefore recognize my own hypocrisy in condemning her images. Her website, I discovered, include many nude images of herself(selves), which makes me uncomfortable. I was thinking about buying her book Multiplicity, but am again concerned about nudity in it. I don't particularly want it if it has nudity.

Of course, Miss Aniela herself would think this silly of me: her nude photos are not supposed to be erotic but rather are about being comfortable with one's own body. Be this as it may, I don't think we can, in our culture, de-eroticize nudity within one generation.

Which is why I delighted in the Alvord video Jon linked, and the other Alvord videos I discovered afterward: they contain multiplicity, but are not as objectionably erotic.

Note: many of the Catholic mommy-bloggers are spending Holy Week off-line, so Conversion Diary is not hosting 7 Quick Takes this week.

7 Quick Takes (XXXII)

1. Saturday was decent. I went to work for an hour, went for a walk, and got some writing done.

2. I managed to miss the Olympic game on Sunday. I screwed up what time it was on, and turned the TV on to see the Canadian team skating the flag around the ice after receiving their gold medals.

"Well," my Mom said, "at least we're saved the suspense."

Belatedly, then, "Go Canada! Woo!"

3. I found out that I was accepted into grad school to study English. I was expecting a phone call at work, so left my cell on (which I never do). I received a call and answered it, and it turned out to be from a university! They are not my first choice, but they are offering me nice incentives, so I'll need to see what I get from other schools which may or may not make offers in the near future. I haven't heard from a few, yet.

Yay!

4. I spent a lot of time with children at work. This was fun. Where I work we have the Open Minds program, in which a class from a local school will come to the Park for one week and we'll run a program for them. Their teacher and some parent volunteers are there, too, so it's not like we have to run the program entirely by ourselves. For reasons irrelevant to this story I was asked to help with the program quite a bit this week. I have a hard time saying, "No," most times at work; I have an even harder time declining working with kids; and I have an exceptionally hard time saying, "No," to a young and pretty teacher who would like me to work with her class.

Apparently some of the kids thought I was an artifact and wanted to write journal entries about me. Actually, they did write entries about me, but Miss Teacher convinced them that I wasn't actually an artifact, even if I had been at the museum for three years.

Oh, and I got married to a supervisor in a skit for the kids. This is the second time I've been wed in the course of working here. This time there was less ceremony, but a bigger audience.

5. It's been t-shirt weather here in Fort McMurray. It's still chilly in the mornings, but by the end of the day I'm going around in short sleeves.

6. I'm re-attempting The Trouble with Physics. After floundering around in the middle of the book, no longer able to pretend I understand this level of theoretical physics (though I think I did quite well considering when I stopped taking physics in highschool), I quit for a littel while. I have now come back to it, skipping to the final section. This section is less about the history of theoretical physics, what string theory is, and what string theory's rivals are, and more on the social mechanics of the situation.

The book is about the author's misgivings about the resources spent on string theory and the amount of confidence string theorists (and the general public) have in this theory when, in fact, it is far from being proven with any confidence. There are enormous problems with the theory (though no worse than with any of its alternatives) which string theorists seem unaware of. Further, he points out the ways in which physics departments stifle dissent and independent thought, which prevents any progress in either string theory or its rivals. If you're interested, you need to read the book, not what an English major thinks of the book.

Anyway, I'm almost done reading it.

Excerpt:

But when and if the issue of finiteness is settled, we will have to ask how it happened that so many members of a research program were unaware of the status of one of the key results in their field. Should it not be of concern that between 1984 and 2001 many string theorists talked and wrote as if it were a fact that the theory was finite? Why did many string theorists feel comfortable talking to outsiders and insiders alike, using language that implied the theory was fully finite and consistent?
Finiteness is not the only example in string theory of a conjecture that is widely believed but so far unproven. What is sure is that the strongest of these conjectures is far from proved, although some weak version is certainly well supported. But this is not how some string theorists see it...

7. I just purchased season 4 of Battlestar Galactica. Uh-oh.

Worth reading: Esther Elizabeth's post.

Go see Conversion Diary. Now!

The Secular Fallacy: Part II

When I ended the first part of this discussion, I asked if my fallacy wasn't such a fallacy after all. Perhaps some people think all things are divine, but don't most people separate the holy from the non-holy, the good from the evil, or at least the religious from the non-religious? Church might be holy, but surely you wouldn't say that a pub is, right? Church is sacred; the pub is profane.

And I said, Of course my fallacy is a fallacy. I wouldn't be writing this if there wasn't more to it than that. If we look back you'll see that I defined the Secular Fallacy as saying that people divide their lives into the sacred and the profance. Even people who rigourously categorize things based on the sacred and profance do not divide their lives according to such things. Consider the Gnostics: they very certainly thought some things were sacred (ideas, the right books, fasting, Jesus, wisdom) and some things profane (food, sex, bodies, Earth, most people, the God of the Old Testament). Every decision they ever faced was made on this framework. If two courses of action came before them, they would ask only, "Which brings me closer to the world and which brings me closer to Sophia (their name for Wisdom)?" They would then choose the latter. It did not matter whether it was Sunday or Monday. It did not matter whether they were worshipping or working. It was always Sophia, never the world.

I'll give you an example of how this might look in a modern, Christian context. Let's say it's a Friday night. Staying up all night won't interfere with going to Church for a regular service, and it's not a holy day by my religion. My friends say to me, Let's go out to the pub, and so we do. There we talk about things, and I have the opportunity to bad-mouth someone. The bad-mouthing will make me more popular among my friends and they will be happier in general if I do. There are some folks who'd say that this decision is not a religious one at all. It has to do with everyday morality. It has to do with weighing the consequences of my actions.

I will from the outset agree that it has to do with weighing consequences. The scary thing is, those consequences are eternal ones. Our lives are a pilgrimage to the Divine. Each decision we make brings us further or closer, though often we don't understand how or why at the time. Those consequences are also world-shattering. Each day of our lives is a battle between evil itself and good itself.* We are both the battlefield and a combatant, and, if the truth be told, we fight for both sides. We are traitors to the good and to the bad; we are traitors to our allies; we are traitors to ourselves. Just because I am in a pub does not mean that there is no war going on. Just because we are not talking about God or religious-seeming things does not mean that I am not choosing between cowardice or heroism. The spiritual conflict is on all fronts. You cannot ignore half of them and hope to wn the war.

A different metaphor may here be suitable: Each decision we make is one between contributing to a war or contributing to peace. We can either fight for some piece of property, or we can try to make peace. If we fight, we might win, but each enemy we slay has a brother who will seek revenge. Eventually, we will die in this war. If we try to make peace, we will likely be killed, but in the event that we aren't killed, we have contributed to peace. If enough people contribute to peace, perhaps the war will end, and we won't all die. This decision is not just sociological (think of The Bomb), but also spiritual, and it literally inhabits every decision we make. We can fight for war, or we can work for peace.

How can whether or not I am sitting in a bar make the slightest bit of difference in such a situation?

If you look at this worldview, whether or not you believe it, you can see that I do not separate my life up into things that are religious and things that are not. Hopefully, you can also see that I cannot divide my life in this way. All decisions affect who we are, and who we are affects how we relate to the divine, and how we relate to the divine is all that matters. Sunday might be a holy day, but that doesn't mean I'm free to do whatever I like come Monday.

And yet the secular world expects me to divide my life like this. It wants me to live a double life. Well, it wants me to live a singular life--the one it offers--but if I won't do that, then I had better keep my religious life separate from my public one. For example, I shouldn't talk about my religion in public, or really even act "religiously" in public. When I write papers for university, I better not base my arguments on the existence of God, though I can base my answers on premises that presupposed the non-existence of the Divine because that's still secular. Universities will frown upon religiosity in papers, and I have learned to write 'closet-Christian' papers; these are essays which say something quiet and 'secular' if you don't read for religious things, but will grow into something much more significant once you add God as a premise. (For instance, I wrote a paper about rationalism as an origin theory for mathematics; I attempted to put that theory into such a position that it could only be 'saved' by the acceptance of some sort of God, even a Diest one.) People will criticize others for "being too Christian," and religious symbols are banned in some public places. The secular world believes that we, the religious, can live this double life, privately religious and publicly non-religious. In many cases we try, but in all things we must be secretly religious. Some of us have learned to be silent about our motives, but these motives must always be spiritual ones. (Others, of course, are not so silent. I sometimes have problems with their methods.)

The Secular Fallacy is not that we do separate our lives into the religious and the non-religious. It's not that we should separate the religious and the non-religious. The Secular Fallacy is that we can separate our lives into the everday and the divine. In truth, the everyday is divine.

So when Jon asks me to list the "infinite" times in my life, but to exclude the religious ones, I must say, "There are none." Properly seen, all things in my life are religious. If the academic world requires that I sort all of my ideas into 'religious' and 'secular' boxes, the secular box will be empty. Now, before you go any further, I fail at doing this. My life is full of the secular. I am terrible at remembering the consequences of my actions. I am always forgetting just how eternal we are. I do divide my life into religious and non-religious sections. The trick of it is, this division is accidental. I just forget sometimes. But forgetting doesn't change anything: my life is whole, whether I want it to be or not. Everything belongs to God. The key to life is to remember that.

Christianity is not the only faith that operates this way. Every religion I have ever studied operates this way. Atheism seems to operate this way--rational materialists seem to seek reason in all things. Religion is about the foundations of our beliefs, our worldviews, our decisions. How can we separate our lives from their foundations?

Bonhoeffer says about Christ's commandment not to look upon a woman in lust: "Jesus oes not impose intolerable restrictions on his disciples, he does not forbid them to look at anything, but bids them look on him. If they do that he knows that their gaze will always be pure, even when they look upon a woman."

The idea that we can make decisions outside of our religion is a fallacy. We can have a secular government, one which is not institutionally bound to organized religion; we can have secular schools, which do not compel us to believe a particular thing. But even in these 'secular' spheres our religions will always intrude, because institutions have members, and those members have religions. When citizens vote, what they believe about God will influence their choices. When students think, what they believe about God will influence their theories. This is true for Christians, atheists, formal agnostics, Muslims, Jews, Toaists, Buddhists, Confucians, Shintoists, practitioners of Vodoun, and Theistic Satanists. Society is built by our behaviours, and our behaviours are steered by belief. We can have a secular state, but we cannot have a secular society. We cannot have secular lives.

----

*I realize some people may be tired of or troubled by using war as an analogy. It is of course time-honoured, used by the Old Testament, by Paul, by C S Lewis, and others. Perhaps that's why it seems exhausted of meaning to some. Unfortunately, it seems perhaps like the best analogy we have. There isn't much room for Satan in diplomacy, and we can't quite leave him out of the picture.

7 Quick Takes (XXVI)

[Note: for some reason, my spacing won't come out in the post in the same way that I have it in the draft. It's unprofessional-looking, but the most I can do is explain it here.]

1. On Saturday, as I'm sure you can see in my previous post, my folks and I went down to Conn Creek. It was breath-taking. I had to run into the variety store to buy some batteries for my camera, and I'm glad I did. They were disposable batteries, though, and were giving me low-battery signs for the whole walk.

2. On Saturday night, we watched Is Anyone There? This movie was not as funny as I expected it to be. As a matter of fact, minus the very end, it was fairly depressing. That's not to say it wasn't good. It just wasn't as billed.

3. I served again this past Sunday. The officiate told me that it was a morning prayer service, and Dave, the deacon, would not be serving that morning. She said that on such occasions the server usually didn't serve, though I could if I wanted to. I asked her who else was up there, and she said, "No one but me." So I served, as I didn't think she ought to be all alone. I have no objections at all to serving. I like the formality of bowing to the altar, of taking the offering. It's silly, but I feel childishly pleased to put the collection plate on the altar, to be the one who gets to do that. In Christianity, most of our sacrifices are abstract or interpersonal; I am fortunate to be able to make a more physical, ritual sacrifice when I serve. Nonetheless, I will be happy to sit in the congregation again for two Sundays.

Afterwards, I went downstairs for lunch and spent most of the time talking to Rob, the former-priest-now-bishop's son. Rob will be leaving soon. We discussed all sorts of things that you might discuss with a kid. Somehow I am bonding more with children at St. Thomas' than I am with adults. I don't know what this says about me. Even Kim, who is pretty much my age and extremely outgoing, is harder to talk to than Rob or Dakota, who are children. Sometimes I am absurdly shy, which I don't think anyone who knows me--especially from class--will believe or understand. Like many shy people, I hide it by giving firm handshakes, speaking confidently, and taking official-ish positions, such as server or DSC representative.

4. This week I helped run the Open Minds program at work. The programs coordinator was away on Monday, so we had planned for me to run it then. Her flight was turned back, so I had to run Tuesday's, too. By then the children (grade two/three students) knew me, so I stayed and helped for much of Wednesday. On Thursday the coordinator told them I couldn't really stay with them all week, as I had my own work to do. I did, however, attend their certificate ceremony. The programs coordinator had them hug her, if they wanted to, but I said nothing because I'm constantly paranoid about getting sued for doing inappropriate things around children. Not that I do inappropriate things at all; I just recognize that I could get frowned at for being hugged by a kid, you know? It's backwards, but that's the way our world works. But after shaking all of their hands when they got their certificates and saying goodbye, and group of the girls came up to me and hugged me anyway. This was sweet, of course, but also uncomfortable for me. For some reason, if I wouldn't be comfortable with a person being attracted to me, I probably won't be comfortable with them touching me. I don't know why that is. I am so neurotic.

I wish adults could show affection the way children do. I sometimes wonder if adults can still even feel affection the way children do. (Honesty check: replace "adults" with "I.") Probably not; affection is so muddled up with romance and eroticism among adults that we can get confused. You can't even go and call something a Platonic relationship because then 1) people assume you're trying to hide something, and 2) through contrast the possibility that it might at some point be something other than Platonic, while left unspoken, is nonetheless spoken. In drawing a picture of a candle-light, you must also draw darkness; by saying that a relationship is Platonic, you point out the existence of non-Platonic possiblities. So you're better off not saying it at all. And if you talk about friendship with people of the same gender as you, either people assume there's the latent possibility of homosexuality, or you have to use words like "buddy" or, alternately, "bromance." The possibility of real, non-ambiguous friendship or affection is all muddled up by either shying away from or parodying a homosexual relationship. As much as I support coming out of the closet, it seems to me as though homosexuality's publicity has broken homosociality. With children, it's so much more uncomplicated, or at least can be if these kids are anything to go by. It never was for me, but I have always been weird, and no more so than when I was a child.

That probably made no sense. Gah. It's not as though I haven't had normal, unambiguous friendships with guys and girls. I just mean that you can't articulate that without making what it is unstable. Any display of friendly affection is misconstrued.

5. I worked on grad school applications. Almost there!

6. My day-by-day Bible had a really interesting conjunction of Genesis and Gospel readings. Actually, this one's pretty cool. Got your Bible handy? Read Genesis 40:1-16 and Matthew 12:46-13:23. That was for January 19th. I have been waiting for a day's reading that has been so deliberate-seeming. The first day, opening with the first chapter of Genesis and the first chapter of Matthew, was of course connected, because both are about the beginning of the world in two different senses. This week the verses corresponded in a way which was less predictable and therefore more potent. I have a hard time imagining Joseph as looking different from Jesus, and I think this conjunction is one of the reasons. (Another is that I recognize that Joseph is a foreshadowing of Christ. But then, Samson is that too, and I don't picture him as anything like Jesus. I imagine him more like Hercules or Gilgamesh.)

Each night also has Psalm and Proverb readings, but these haven't yet been terribly connected to the other readings, except, again, on the first day. Proverbs begins with a call to listen and a promise of wisdom, so that kind of goes with the creation of the world and the genealogy of Christ.

7. I just finished reading lullabies for little criminals by Heather O'Neill. I am not inclined to profanity, and yet the response which wants to come from my lips is something like, "H**y f***ing sh*t, this book is good. G*d. Read this!" I have no idea where this blasphemy is coming from; even when I do want to swear, it's usually profanity and not blasphemy. I make a distinction.

If you're in the mood for the romanticization of urban homelessness, read this book. It's God in the Alley without Jesus, and fictional. [Edit: The "without Jesus" part isn't supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing. That's just what the book is. God in the Alley is literally about Jesus, and lullabies isn't. That's all.] Actually, I can't recommend it as highly as I would like because it's terribly depressing almost all the way through. In my opinion, the ending makes it worth it (I'll try not to spoil it any more than saying that), but it's a hard book to read. If you're feeling even slightly inclined to depression or melancholy--and, let's be honest, folks, that describes me when I get lonely, which is all the time up here--then this will be a very hard book for you. If I read this too soon before I went to bed, I'd be a bit miserable. Most of the book doesn't have the desperation you might expect, but that's only because it's hopeless. Desperation implies that you think there's a way out.

Anyway, if you're up for a challenging read, pick this up. It will be worth it. It's Canadian, which I approve of. And I met the author at uni and got the book signed, which I also approve of. Once you're done reading the book, read the author bio, too. That's a story in itself.

Jennifer Fulwiler is hosting 7 Quick Takes, as always.

And that's me for tonight. This hasn't been a cheery post, I think, though I certainly feel happy enough right now. I'm still happy about holding that giant millipede. I liked how his little legs moved.

Well, rambling thoughts end here. Good night and God bless,

Christian H

Writing with a Goal

Of course I ought to be doing other things, like preparing for bedtime or working on grad school applications or not drinking caffeinated beverages, but instead of being responsible or something stupid like that I will write a blog post.

In writing text documents for the on-line exhibit I'm working on, I have stumbled upon a fact or few about writing itself. The fact-cluster is one which most of you already knew on some level, but I am going to augment your knowledge with fresh examples. I hope you find it useful.

1. Writing is usually done with a goal, or a purpose, or a win-scenerio in mind. A person does not simply write things willy-nilly. One writes toward something.

2. Different projects are written with different goals in mind. Take popular books. You can generally get a sense--but only an imperfect one--of the goals that authors wrote their novels towards in author interviews. The goal of a horror book is usually to scare the reader in a way that the reader finds enjoyable, though a bonus is to make the author think about things somewhat. Stephen King expresses this interest; mainly he's concerned with the story, but if you read On Writing you'll see he is nonetheless interested in what the story's "about." Science fiction's goal is often to explore ideas and, most importantly, possibilities--both in the sense of 'things we could do' and 'things that might happen if we don't wise up.' The goal of a romance book is, as far as I can tell, to provide a form of escape or distraction through titillation, sometimes outright arousal. Other books, those labelled "literature" by those who do such labelling, have some sort of critique or education as a goal, perhaps, though often it's a challenge.
The goal of an essay or argumentative book is different; the goal there is to persuade the reader. Perhaps they want to persuade the reader of a theoretical concept; perhaps they want to persuade the reader to a course of action; perhaps they want to persuade the reader (ie. grader) to give them a high mark. Sometimes it is to persuade the public to stop hating the reader so badly--this is a defence.
There is sometimes overlap here: a novel may be an attempt by the author to persuade the reader to respect the author. This would be "writing for fame."
Or, perhaps the writing is not reader- but self-directed. This is writing as celebration, writing as therapy, writing as discipline, writing as reasoning, writing as documenting. Or it is writing as exorcism, because the story burns to come out. Or it is writing for the sheer joy of wordsmithery.

3. Writing, when done well, is shaped by its goal. In English class they explain how, in a good story, each chapter, each scene, each sentence, each word somehow contributes to or drives the plot. This is only true if the goal is to move that plot along. As we have seen, this is not the only goal. A romance novel may include graphic sex scenes which move well past advancing the plot; they are obviously there for some reason all their own. This is because the plot is secondary to the response the author wants to elicit in the reader; usually, this is the same response the reader wants elicited in her, since she bought the romance knowing what would likely contain. (Or perhaps she does care more for the story and skips over these bits as silly. But at rate I think the author can expect that the reader will be buying the book at least to some extent for the sexy bits.) In a horror novel, a scary scene might be included not because it appreciably advances the plot but because it appreciably advances the suspense. In an 'idea' novel, a scene may be included not because it advances the plot but because it explores some new angle to or establishes some important groudwork for the ideas being analyzed. The goal shapes the story, in other words.
Essays are more obviously goal-driven. If you know this, I needn't explain it; if you don't know this, you likely don't want to.
Journals are shaped by their goals more nebulously; in this case it's how it serves the writer.

4. Writing which has no clear goal would be bizarre. Witness things written by children who do not yet have a sense of narrative flair. A friend of mine, for an assignment in our grade five class, wrote a story based on one of the pictures in the Chris Van Allsburg book The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. The picture dictated that the story have as a moment in it a house which was lifting off. The title was something like "The House on Maple Street." I read the story for him, as an editor, I suppose. I cleaned up some grammar and spelling errors, trying to persuade him that because SpellCheck approved, "The dog was baking," didn't make it correct. Anyway, even then I recognized that there were some serious structural problems with the story. Namely, the house-lifting-off part happened in the last page of a five-page story. That would have been fine, of course, if the preceding four pages hadn't been devoted to an account of the protagonist's dirt-biking. What happened, clearly, was that he had to write about the house on Maple Street, but really he was more interested in dirt biking, so he attached the house bit at the end. Which isn't to say that he didn't think a space-going house wasn't cool. It just wasn't as cool as dirt-biking. His story failed as a story because it's goal was unclear. The first part was writing for himself, but the last part was writing for the teacher. He'd have been better off writing for himself, and then going back and "editing like a mofo," as Kay once put it, so that the whole story worked for the teacher. But it was grade five.

So that's the system I have discovered.
1) We write towards a goal.
2) Different writing projects have different goals. (enlightenment, $$$, arousal, pleasurable fear)
3) Writing projects, when done well, are shaped by their goals.
4) Writing projects with muddled or no goals have unsatisfying structures.

Now why I am discussing this?

Well. As I said, I am working on the virtual exhibit. This involves writing "Storylines," or blocks of text and old-timey photographs and new-timey photographs of old-timey things strung out in a narrative fashion. The point of these storylines, according to my instructions, are to lead the virtual visitor through my exhibit and give them something coherent to follow. This is unhelpful, as a great number of things could do that. What we have to keep in mind is that the visitor is at the exhibit because they want to learn, probably as a form of entertainment. That at least is our ideal visitor; it is also possible that there are high school students who want to extract specific information as quickly, painlessly, and thoughtlessly as possible for an assignment, but they will have to deal with the fact that I am not writing for them alone.

Which means my goal is to provide an information dump of assorted trinket-like facts and anecdotes. It's like a rummage sale: I don't expect everyone to find each piece of information interesting, but I'll only include it if I think someone will.

And that leads of course to my list of points, namely #3: Writing, when done well, is shaped by its goal. What is the goal of a narrative (it has to be a narrative) that functions as an information-dump, meant to entertain and inform?
It is a narrative with lots of tangents and anecdotes that don't advance the 'plot' one bit. It's an interesting genre, one which I could do again, but I can tell you that I didn't find it easy. The best thing about it was the fact that I was allowed to include things for no other reason than that they're "cool" (and on topic).

(If you want to see what this 'genre' is like, read A Brief History of Nearly Everything or Rats or The Serpent and the Rainbow or another popular-audience non-persuasive non-analytical non-fiction book. (Of course all non-fiction has some sort of thesis, but some have more than others. My theses in the exhibit are largely 1) this topic is worth writing about, 2) the overarching structure/topic is in fact an authentic claim/category, and 3) we--that being the museum in general and me in particular--are not idiots. This also acts to shape the narrative.) This can be an excellent and enjoyable genre to read.)

Sexy Body, Disfigured Body

Aimee Mullins, who I have referenced here before, asked a question in her TED talk on her 12 pairs of (prosthetic) legs. Actually, she asked three questions. They are, "What does a beautiful woman have to look like? What is a sexy body? And interestingly, from an identity standpoint, what does it mean to have a disability?" I started to think about this over the course of about a week. Not only was I wondering about the answers to her questions, but I also had a few questions about her questions. I'll try to explore these with you here.

1. What is a sexy body? What is a disabled body?

The most obvious way to answer this question is to Google these terms. But I don't think you have to. I think you'll know what you'll find, especially in the case of the former. This won't answer our questions, though. Neither question--sexiness, disability--is easily answerable. Likely, neither is answerable at all, in the end.

First: sexiness. Or, if you prefer, beauty or physical attractiveness. (If you don't want to follow my reasoning, jump to the next bold point.) They say, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," and, whatever that person who originally minted this phrase meant, it has a truth different from that most people accept. Most people think it means that everyone has their own standard of beauty, which is of course somewhat true. However, there is another interesting element to this which I think becomes more clear if I say, "Beauty is in the mind of the beholder." Beauty is not, at least as we experience it, a quality inherent in an object or person. Rather, it is an interpretation of that object or person. People have said this before of all sorts of things, such as colour, but this is really a different matter than colour. A thing, of course, is not red itself. That is a psychological interpretation of the lightwaves we receive. But all things that we experience as red do reflect that particular wavelength. They are in a sense red after all.

In other words, our brains see a person and think, based on assorted qualities our sensory receptors pick up, "That's a sexy person." (If you want to hold onto an essentialist theory of beauty, you of course can. God or Platonic principles or what ever defines universal beauty can make a thing beautiful--truly, inherently beautiful--and then allow our brains to perceive that. Or, there is such a thing as beauty, somehow, derived from something, and it is to our reproductive advantage, somehow, to be able to perceive that, and we have evolved to be able to perceive it. The relevant point is that it's still a process that goes on in our brains.) In this sense, beauty is in the eye of the beholder--but that doesn't mean it's entirely subjective. To the extent that our brains operate the same, sexiness, even though interpreted, is objective; to the extent that our brains operate differently, it is subjective. The degree of difference isn't just genetics, of course, but also individual personal experience and cultural factors (and I'd argue that culture factors are way bigger than most people think). Anyway, the upshot is, 'sexiness' is partly universal, partly cultural, and partly individual. So we can answer 'what is a sexy body' in part, but only in part.

Now, there are all sorts of theories about facial symmetry and hip-waist ratios and things. I don't want to get into those, because I think that they are no more than contributing factors. A girl whose enormous, unibrow-laden, protuding forehead is perfectly symmetrical isn't going to win any beauty pagents. Meanwhile, I wouldn't say Helena Bonham Carter is the most beautiful woman in the world, but she's made it pretty well in Hollywood. But her face isn't perfectly symmetrical. Not at all. So I think we can say these sorts of things contribute, but aren't absolute.

I think here we need to fall back on what I said before. A lot of it is cultural. We are trained to think of particular people--often whole, 'healthy,' young, thin people--as beautiful and others as not beautiful. There was a time when overweight girls were considered sexy by some (Renaissance). There was a time when husky women were desirable (frontier, pre- and revolutionary Russia). There was a time when effeminate men were considered beautiful (ancient Greece, some Renaissance). Sickly girls also had a vogue (Victorian). It is true that some people we just won't find all that attractive anyway for biological reasons. But I don't think that's the case for people without legs. So long as we aren't actively repulsed by them, there's no reason we can't find them attractive. Listen to Aimee Mullins talk--just the first few minutes--on training repulsion.

That's not a real answer, but it's all I've got for now. I'll also note that I purposely trained myself not to be repelled by people with prosthetics and people with assorted facial disfigurations, etc. As a kid, I simply couldn't deal with anyone who looked 'disfigured' or 'deformed,' as I put it.

So what is disability? You'll notice I used "disfigured" in my post title. This is to emphasis a point: disability suggests a definition which rests on whether a person can perform as well as a typical person can in those tasks deemed part of everyday life. So we have people with missing limbs or people who are shorter than usual or what have you or blind people. This definition works well if you're only thinking of amputees, but it breaks down in other areas, at least if you want to talk about attractiveness. People with albinoism are not in any way less able to perform typical tasks, but they are often considered unattractive. Conjoined twins are often less able to do particular things, but they aren't always. Sometimes the only thing they are less able to do is to be alone, and I hardly think that counts. Aimee Mullins points out that people without legs are far from less able. They have now become more able. And then blind people, one of the largest demographics of people who are part of the disability--or different ability--activism movement, are often indistinguishable from sighted people, including in the realm of attractiveness. Disability is not the issue; it's 'looking weird' that is.

What definition can we use, then? Well, one possibility is, People who are visually atypical in some significant anatomical or pigmentational way, which is distinct from race, gender, or age. Another, less politically correct but I think more to the point, definition would be, People who would fifty years ago have been in a freak show, and now would be on the TLC network.

Where am I going with this? Good question. This is where: the fundamental question is, can a person who stikes us as so visually atypical also strike us as attractive?

Of course they can. If you care to, you can find all sorts of fetish literature about amputees and conjoined twins and human-animal hybrids (not possible yet, I know, but they would fit in this class if they did exist--and they were once thought to exist) and goodness knows who else. There is fetish literature about dragons doing R-rated things with luxury vehicles, so I guess we oughtn't be surprised.

But what about a 'normal' person, who doesn't have such fetishes? Well, I hope by now the pictures I've been putting in have answered that for you. There's no reason they can't, so long as we don't allow ourselves to be repulsed by them. And those fetishes may not be so off topic. I wonder if the forbidden-ness, the taboo, even the repulsiveness itself contribute to the fetish. If you look it up, people can be attracted to some pretty repulsive things. A Freudian analyst might talk a lot about the repression of certain disallowed desires being exagerated through a fetish. My point being, we might be naturally inclined to feel that these people are attractive--that these are sexy bodies--but we think we shouldn't feel so, and are as a result confused and repulsed. Consider the on-going cultural debate about whether the Medusa was beautiful or hideous. C. S. Lewis, for instance, calls the Medusa beautiful long before Cixous does. The classical painters painted her as such. And yet she's also a figure for ugliness--and disability.

Can a disfigured body be sexy? Sure it can. But we must let it be so.

2. Who becomes sexy?

And, of course, unless we find ourselves desiring that element which is different, the body must be sexy even without the disability. By now you'll likely have noticed that most of the people I've shown on here would have been attractive without their particular difference (or not, if you don't find them attractive). A 500-pound person will likely not be considered sexy, unless obesity turns you on. That's just a fact. And if a person is just generally what we'd consider unattractive, whether for cultural or hardwired reasons, then that they have a plastic arm isn't going to make much of a difference one way or another. If they could somehow grow that arm back, it won't help.

Which begins to put stress on Aimee Mullins implication that allowing the disabled to be beautiful is a victory. It seems that it's only a victory for those who are beautiful.

And I don't think this is going to push us into saying, Well, now that the legless are beautiful, people with distortions on their faces can also be beautiful. Because, I'm sorry, but by standard societal definitions, they can't. Not yet.

[I recognize that someone will come around with the argument that, if you fall in love with someone who is unattractive because of their personality, you will begin to find them physically attractive by magic, almost. I am absolutely sure this is true. Love is magic. I think we can also agree that that is beside the point. We already said we're not talking about the subjective. We're talking about quasi-objective attractiveness, in as much as it exists.]

So, if only some disabled people get to be beautiful, why should we value it at all?

3. Why sexiness?

Two reasons.

First, that there is no reason we can't bestow a privilege on some when we are unable to give it to all. It's not fair, but it would be ridiculous not to push for empowerment when not everyone in the demographic will be able to share it. It would be like saying, Let's give women the right to an education, and then someone saying, No, you can't, because those women over there are too old to start learning new things, and those women over their are so mentally handicapped that they wouldn't benefit from that education. (They have advanced learning disabilities or something.) It makes no sense.

And sexiness can be empowering. As much as people talk about beauty being a limit for women in some fields, I'd suggest you try being really downright unattractive before saying that. If you think you aren't taken seriously when you're pretty, at least people listen to you (or pay some sort of attention to you). At least people don't openly mock you for how you look, which I've seen happen.

Second, if we see some disabled people as attractive, we might be more willing to think of them--and by extension their whole demographic--as people. That is, we might think 'disabled person' over 'disabled person.' Grammatically, that is rendered 'a person with a disability,' which is the language differently-abled activists are pushing for. Hopefully, if we see a really hot albino guy walk down the street, we're less likely to think of people with albinoism as 'freaks.'

4. Why not sexiness? (I'll tell you.)

Notwithstanding what I've said so far, I think there's still a problem a number of problems, and I'm likely missing some.

While we're busy training ourselves to think of some disabled/differently-abled/disfigured/anatomically-or-pigmentally-atypical people as attractive, we're simultaneously training ourselves to think of being attractive as an important goal. That is, we're educating ourselves in the culture that worries about how people look in the first place. We're not breaking out of the system which discriminates by appearance. And before Jon breaks in here, I'm not talking about the movies. Whether we agree with Jon or not on cinema (and if you don't know Jon or what he thinks about cinema, don't worry about it) doesn't matter: I'm talking about real life here. I think it's fair to say that while enjoying an attractive person's appearance is not culturally destructive, discriminating based on it is. So we need to be careful when worrying about who is sexy that we don't by mistake brainwash ourselves into thinking that sexiness is somehow more important than, or even worse a contributing factor in, a person's humanity and their right to respect and compassion.

I revealed a particular issue earlier indirectly. There is a sort of thin edge where people who are too attractive aren't taken seriously and people who aren't attractive enough are avoided or ridiculed. Even if you found that happy medium, it would only be successful in that context; presumably, you'd be still unable to compete with those who were 'too attractive' in the other context when it comes to romantic rivalry, etc. In the end, the only thing we can say for sure is that we don't want to be in the lowest half of the attractiveness food chain. The hope, of course, is that we can somehow get out of this scenario, but if that is possible (which you might have cause to doubt), we certainly can't do it if we're at all worried about whether we're sexy when have a disability.

And then there's the issue of encouraging lust. At this point some of my readers will likely be thinking, Uhp, he's playing the prude card again, and from those readers' perspectives that would be somewhat true. There are a number of reasons why I think encouraging lust is problematic, but since some of them are religiously derived I won't fool myself into thinking that they'll be persuasive to someone outside of that context. I want to clarify here, though, that I'm not condemning the experience of physical desire. In the right situation, physical desire is a good thing--and that's biblically supported, in case you were unaware of that. But, at least from a Christian perspective, there is a problem with putting all this focus into making yourself (as a person with an atypicality of some sort) sexy, into discerning who is and who is not sexy, into allowing/encouraging/forcing yourself to feel physical attraction toward a person with a disability; the problem is the encouragement of an over-active libido. In our culture, there's already that threat. We don't need to fan the flame. But I think you can make secular arguments against allowing ourselves to be too sexually active, having to do with destroying our relationships, driving our desires into unattainable fantasies, and hampering our abilities to be romantically and sexually loyal to our partners. I haven't developed these arguments largely because I haven't seen the need to on a personal basis. They exist, though. I've heard about them.

(And in case you're thinking that I'm thus a hypocrit for writing this at all and for putting up all these pictures selected for their ability to arouse you, I say this: you're likely right. I do hope I'm making a point in all this that transcends that, but that's not to say on some level I'm not doing this just so I can think about pretty girls. The naked vanities, and everything, right? My only answer can be, "Orges and onions.")

This, then, is the crux of the question I have about Aimee Mullins' question: If we do allow that a disabled body can be a sexy body, then we are forced with a particular dilemma, which is between choosing the short-term empowerment of sexiness at risk of keeping ourselves in a destructive and discriminatory culture, or striving for other forms of empowerment which have concerns like ability and accessibility, added perspective, inherent worth, compassion, and meaningful relationships. Do we feel that worrying about sexiness as empowerment is in the end empowering, or does it just cause more problems?

There are some further lines of inquiry which are pertinent, but not so directly related that I will give them the space here (as I've so clearly gone well beyond the reasonable length limits of a blog post). You'll notice one of my photos is of an African-American woman who has albinoism. There is no way to discuss her attractiveness without bringing up race--is she beautiful because she is 'white'? The on-line discussion about the attractiveness of the Hensel twins (a pair of dicephalic conjoined twins) has, if not been exhausted, at least been exhausting. The first picture shown on here is of a prosthetic designed to be and marketed as 'sexy.' It avoids what is apparently called 'the uncanny valley'; that is, things which are close enough to looking real to sometimes 'trick' us but not close enough to really convince us are uncanny and make us uncomfortable, and the designers tried to avoid that when making this arm. Other designers strive for something verisimilitude instead, as you can see in other images. The point, then, is that whatever we decide about the moral worth of this question, in the end we cannot stop at the general principle but must then begin to untangle it on a specific level--race, uncanniness, privacy and individuality. These questions are not inseparable.

Which would be a perfect segue into the one problem I have with the feminist movement (Jon and I have discussed this), which is that there are so many other facets to identity that to focus on gender alone for your emancipation seems like a case of poor resource management. But that is getting off-topic and must be saved for another post. This one is way too long as is, and I need to go to bed.