Too Fat For Our Pants

Critique of "Sex, Bombs and Burgers" by Peter Nowak

2012-02-13T13:37:00.000-08:00

This is a response to a book called Sex, Bombs, and Burgers: How Porn, War, and Fast Food Created Technology As We Know It by a Canadian journalist named Peter Nowak. I discussed the book and interviewed Nowak on the weekly radio broadcast of Too Fat For Our Pants on Radio One, 91FM, which you can listen to here. Because of the constraints of radio interviews, and because it is so much easier to address questions when you can write and think and take your time, I have invited Mr. Nowak to respond to the critique on this blog, if he so wishes.

The book is concerned with technological developments which have occurred since WWII, a fairly standard point of departure for discussions of the contemporary world, since so many of the institutions that shape the way world government and trade and finance are organized today were formed in the aftermath of WWII – the World Bank, the IMF, the rise of the US as a superpower, etc. It’s also significant because the war itself was a driver of the inventions of a whole host of new technologies that have since been adapted and adopted by other industries for other purposes, the majority of which revolve around commercial consumption. That is to say: technology developed for and by the military during WWII to serve that purpose have been reappropriated as consumer goods. It’s true that the vast majority of new technology, at least since WWII, has come from the military, and I think we all understand why fairly intuitively: research and development takes a great deal of money, and the military has most of the money – in a capitalist system the more money a sector has the more successful it’s going to be, which, in a capitalist system, means the more money it’s going to make. And as Dr. Robert H. Frank pointed out two weeks ago, arms races have been occurring in evolution since life began; the military budget is really just an extension of evolutionary arms races. Wars have been won – not every war, I’m sure, but that’s not really my area – but as long as there have been wars, the technology with which they have been fought has always been a factor in the winning or losing. If you’ve got a sword and the other guys have muskets, well.

As Mr. Nowak is a reporter, this book is mostly a series of stories about the development of modern technology and role played in that development by the industries of pornography, the military, and fast food, and as far as the recounting of the history of some technological development goes, it does fine. I think the simple documentation of the trajectory of the technology that so shapes our contemporary existence is an important process, and creates a platform for more rigorous discussion. But it’s also completely uncritical and in being uncritical, reveals some serious oversights and misunderstandings on the part of the author, and he espouses some troubling ideas. In fact, his two fundamental premises are pretty problematic, and that's what I want to discuss here. They are: 1) that technology is value-neutral, and that the use of it is good or bad; and 2) that the industries of porn, war, and fast food are directly related to and driven by basic animal instincts for eating and procreating.

First premise first: technology is not inherently good or bad, it is how we use it that matters. This is an argument that gets thrown around all the time, from all kinds of quarters, including some very smart people I really respect, like Noam Chomsky; Peter Nowak points to some compelling examples, like the "terrible duality" of military machinery (radar both saved Allied lives and enabled the bomb drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). It kind of seems like a no-brainer, but I don’t think it is; at least not completely. I do think that some technology can and has been used for both positive and negative contributions to society and the world, but I don’t think that the use is the only place where influence is felt. Tools of any kind may be used in a variety of ways, certainly, but not an infinite number of ways - you can use a hammer to build a house, or to murder your neighbour, and which you choose is in the wielding of the tool and not the tool itself, but that overlooks the fact that both of those uses involve hitting something. A hammer is made to hit things, and so the realm of use of that tool is pretty well defined by what it was designed to do (I guess it could pry things, also). Furthermore, technology does not spring up from nowhere, as the book illustrates, and so claiming value-neutrality ignores the fact that the prejudices, preconceptions, and privileges of the developer will impact the type and design of the technology itself (and I don’t think it’s belabouring the point to remind you that the people designing these technologies are overwhelmingly white, male, and middle class - so when Nowak says, as he did in the interview, that the world is better than it has ever been, he probably wasn't lying. His world, as a white middle class male, is undoubtedly better than it has ever been. But if he were a subsistence farmer in India, he would likely think otherwise. And that, my friends, is privilege.). Those factors conflate to influence a worldview, and that worldview influences the direction of innovation. I’m skeptical about the possibility of value-neutrality in the first place, as nothing exists free of context, and context influences not just the intrinsic value of an idea or product, but also the perception of how valuable it is, and for whom.

This extends to the subject matter of this book as well as to the construction of the book itself. As a reporter, Peter Nowak is, no doubt, trying to be neutral. But there are facts which are recorded, and facts which are not recorded, and the worldview of the author lies in situating the facts which are presented in the context of all the possible facts. So when he presents us with the fact of the European Union opposing GMO foods, or the facts of what the Green Revolution promised to do, without the facts of the critiques of those promises, and the facts of where those two sets of facts diverge, then that reveals a worldview which supports the technology of the Green Revolution, even if it is not explicitly stated. And no, I don't believe that quoting an inflammatory remark from Prince Charles and pointing at Greenpeace was a genuine attempt to acknowledge the criticisms of the biotech industry, and the fact that during the interview Nowak stated outright his belief that biotech is the only way to feed the world.

As for his second premise, and the main thesis of the book, that the underlying driver of the industries’ adoption and innovation of technology is a means to satiate what Nowak calls the “shameful trinity”: food, fighting, and sex. I’m sure there's a whole conversation to be had about the Puritan origins of the idea that our basic animal instincts are at odds with our godly natures as humans, and all the oppressiveness that grew up out of that, but perhaps here is not the place. What is certain is that Nowak, and many other people, is guilty of the false logic of the biological imperative.

So that deserves some clarification: I don’t mean that sex, or fighting, or eating are not directly related to human instincts. Of course they are, because at the most basic evolutionary level our overriding imperative is to reproduce, and reproduction means you have to fight to eat enough to stay alive long enough to have sex, or you have to eat enough to be strong enough to fight to have sex. And this simple fact is so often extrapolated wildly as a defense of the pornography and military industries in particular, a way to assert that they are somehow “natural” and therefore “right”. It's the same school of thought that leads people to say asinine things like "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" - I'm exaggerating Nowak's use of it, but he most definitely does use it, and it's a type of essentialism that is used to validate discrimination on the basis of nature. This is such a red herring: there is a difference between the fact of sex and the industry of pornography. One is a biological imperative, the other is a social construction which is shaped by cultural taboos, the economic environment, international trade laws, business regulation, and on and on and on. The growth of the fast food industry and the form it takes is not the same thing as the need to eat. Yes, people need to eat, but they would do so without fast food. Yes, people need to have sex, but they would do so without internet porn. So I’m immediately and deeply skeptical of anything which seeks to justify social constructs as biological imperatives, because it can be and has been a very dark and dangerous road. And particularly when we’re talking about industries which are economically and socially oppressive, it becomes very easy to dismiss that oppression as inevitable. To ignore the damages in a book which posits the industries of porn, war, and fast food as natural extensions of human instinct – that’s oppression apologism. Saying that the pornography industry is natural and inevitable because the human drive to have sex is natural and inevitable, without addressing the differences between the act and the industry, is essentially saying that the oppression caused by the industry is natural and inevitable too.

Or at least, that's what it would be, were there not also numerous cheeky asides such as "the porn industry, like it's performers, must be flexible", or the paragraph about how porn work is not always glamourous, no no, sometimes there are long hours and late nights and lots of travel and sleeping in hotel rooms by yourself. I don't even know where to start on this. Long hours and lonely hotel rooms are not the hazards of porn work. Rape, abuse, drug addiction, post-traumatic stress, slavery, injury, poverty, and death are the hazards of porn work. For Nowak to not acknowledge these aspects of the industry - while glamourizing the individual woman he spoke to, who even says "the girls don't make money, now I'm one of the few women making money"! - is worse than accepting that oppression as inevitable, it's denying that it exists at all (but if it did exist, well, it would be inevitable and natural, because sex exists). I've written about the porn industry here, and the food industry here, and there are lots of other places to find mountains of information.

Now, I understand that a book cannot cover everything, and that's fine. It would have been far too much to cover all possible social outcomes of the technology he describes, I get that. But the problem here is the divide between the existence of industry and the conflation of industrial motives with biological ones, and by erasing that divide and presenting them as the same thing, Nowak has essentially posited all the not-mentioned outcomes and knock-on effects of those industries as biological as well. And that is a big, dangerous, oppressive problem.

The Darwin Economy with Dr. Robert H. Frank

2012-01-29T19:15:00.000-08:00

For the whole interview with Dr. Robert Frank, you can go to Radio One or Facebook. What follows is my commentary on certain aspects of the book which I wasn't able to fully address in the interview itself. Please read the book for yourself, here.

So I did take some issue with some of the smaller points made in the book, and though I brought some of them up in the interview I really do agree with his main point, which is that individual and group interests often diverge, and that we should find fair and progressive ways of guiding individual behaviour so that it cleaves as closely as possible to the interests of the group. That sounds like social engineering, of course, which is always what neoliberals start shouting as soon as you mention prescriptive taxation, and it is. But everything is; every tax policy influences behaviour, every single law is meant to prescribe acceptable behaviour and discourage negative, harmful actions – there’s a definite tendency to assume that the way things are is the way they should be, that there’s something inherent or natural about the status quo, and that messing with it or trying to change it is social engineering. This argument comes up all the time in discussions about gender – remember that family in Toronto who are bringing up a child without announcing the gender publicly? Though it’s obviously not a perfect model, some of the least coherent arguments were that it’s cruel and inhumane to experiment on a baby – so the experiment is not assigning the child to one side of a gender binary, but assigning a child to one side of a gender binary is somehow not a social experiment. It’s natural that girls like pink and boys like blue, and not telling your child which one he or she prefers based on what their chromosomal sex is, is a dangerous social experiment.

Listen: we are all socialized.

We grow up in a culture which tells us to behave in certain ways, makes others taboo, and we all agree very early on some basic rules, which is how we’re able to live in society together. Make no mistake about it: everything we do is a social experiment; just because one experiment is run more often or more pervasively than others does not make one more “right” or “natural”, or any less of an experiment. One of our biggest problems, at least in the realms of gender, race, and class discussions, is that we refuse to acknowledge that we create our own realities, because it means we have to be responsible for the negative actions that arise as a result. So we could agree that there are some behaviours that we would like to encourage, such as let’s be idealistic and say honesty, trustworthiness, a desire not to inflict harm on others, and some that we do not, like murder and theft, and we make laws and systems of economics and social institutions which elevate and denigrate those behaviours accordingly. But we can’t agree on our ability to assess and influence human behaviour, let alone take responsibility for the systems which perhaps are influencing the wrong kinds of behaviours, and so often the only recourse is to fall back on “human nature”.

The existence of social institutions and laws which already seek to govern our behaviour for the good of society – I’m talking about laws against murder, theft, collusion, etc – should allow us to talk about governing our behaviour for the good of society. But often we’re precluded from having that conversation by the “human nature” defense, which posits corporate culture as just “the way people are” - sure, we’re often selfish. From there, though, shouldn’t the question be: “what impact does 200 years of economic and cultural narrative which insists that we are all selfish have on our tendency towards selfishness?” Couldn’t we be asking how we’ve managed to survive so long as a species if we’re all so inherently selfish? Could we ask what cultural narrative would emphasize the traits of compassion, respect, understanding?

That pervasiveness of the economic philosophy into all aspects of contemporary culture creates a sort of side problem that I can’t seem to get away from, I even fall into it myself sometimes. It’s the insistence that we can’t talk about doing things simply because they’re the right thing to do, at least not at the level of politics. Dr. Frank spends a lot of time in the book arguing for income redistribution, progressive consumption taxes, and in general higher taxes on those people with higher incomes. To me, the fact of such extremely poor people and the fact of such extremely rich people makes income redistribution attractive – simply because it’s not right that some people are so rich while others are so poor. What’s astounding is that this is such a controversial statement – Dr. Frank says, repeatedly, that his prescriptions have nothing to do with social justice or morality, he’s very explicit on this point. His prescriptions are about economic well-being, not about social justice. But if everyone will benefit, why would it matter if it’s about social justice instead of economic justice? Why does he feel its necessary to package his ideas in explicitly economic terms? Why does he have to go out of his way to disconnect the economic aspects from the social ones? It’s a completely fallacious dichotomy, in any case: capitalism is a class-based system, and as such there is no separating the economy from society; there is no difference between social inequality and economic inequality, and presenting them as separate only serves to reinforce the idea that we can only talk about things which can be objectively measured. Can’t talk about right or wrong because they’re not objective enough. Having seen no evidence of the fundamental objectivity of human beings, I’m not sure why we think it’s such a good idea.

There was one other big main point that I wanted to bring up in interview but just didn’t have time, and that is that some of the conclusions drawn from his admittedly remarkable insight about Darwinian competition lack a certain rigor. For example, he claims that many of his lefty friends have the knee-jerk response of exploitation to explain market failures, but that in reality “unfettered competition … fail[ing] to promote the common good has nothing to do with monopoly exploitation. Rather its a simple consequence of an often sharp divergence between individual and group interests”.

Now, maybe it’s because I am not an economist, it’s possible that I’m missing a point here that’s simply too subtle for me to apprehend, but I can’t see that those two things are necessarily mutually exclusive. Why can’t monopolistic exploitation be a manifestation of the divergence between individual and group interests?

To wit: the example of the Irish elk’s antlers: because the male elk are competing with other male elk for mates, and that competition is won or lost on the size of the competing antlers, it is in each individual male elk’s best interest to have larger antlers. However this creates a kind of arms race, whereby eventually all the antlers get so big that they become a hindrance, so that all male elk as a group would benefit from having smaller antlers, but no individual elk would be better off if they had smaller antlers, and so the antlers keep getting bigger. This is the divergence between individual and group interests. Now I think that monopolistic exploitation is a perfect example of that playing out in real life – in much the same way as house sizes get bigger and bigger, which he talks about, in the book, and yet still makes this statement about monopolistic exploitation. Walmart, as a stand in for corporations that size, competes with its competitors, and as it wins, it drives them out of business. It does this by being bigger than they are – big enough to control the shipping routes and the production costs, big enough to outsource manufacturing, big enough to cut wages and lobby governments. Other businesses, then, in order to compete with Walmart, also have to do those things, to the benefit of the individual business but to the detriment of the group as a whole. So now we have walmart, the winner, which is so big that it can’t move or turn around, it’s consuming resources faster than they can recover, it’s driving down wages in the towns where it employs people, it’s forcing the wholesale purchase cost of products down below the price of production in many cases, particularly food (and I can hear you saying now “oh, but there are some people who can only afford to shop at walmart, they couldn’t pay more for those products; the consumer is the ultimate winner here”. This is not true for two reasons: one, that we all have to live in the environment Walmart built, which is depleted and knee-deep in cheap plastic detritus, and two: that walmart is part of the reason people can’t afford to pay more for their products. Aside from the general cultural disconnect between price and value, walmart drives wages down as far as they can go, so that people in a walmart town would have been making more and able to afford more before walmart came along). So really, we’d all be better off if Walmart, as a stand-in for giant corporations, was smaller, but because no one of those businesses would be better off, they have no choice but to keep competing. Otherwise they get eaten. In fact, quite contrary to what Dr. Frank was suggesting, I think the Darwin economy gives us a good vocabulary to talk about monopolistic exploitation and its role in market failures – it’s the divergence between individual and collective goals.

Deregulation and the Culture of Overwork

2012-01-25T14:54:00.000-08:00

Go to Radio One to listen to the full show, find podcasts of interviews, and check out musical playlists.

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay called “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, in which he referred to the Great Depression as “a bad attack of economic pessimism” and predicted that by the time a century had passed from when he was writing, “the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day”. He foresaw an Age of Leisure, in which at least in Anglo countries, we would have solved the “economic problem”; that is, the problem of ensuring that everyone has adequate food, clothing, shelter, which he called “absolute needs”, and once this point had been reached, we would be free to turn our energies to non-economic pursuits. Presumably things like art, leisure, family time, etc. He was certain enough of this – even in the midst of the Great Depression, which was gripping England while he was writing – that the bulk of his essay is taken up with worrying about how we will fill our time, once we have solved the economic problem, and the kind of existential crises humankind could fall into once we have solved our economic problem. He thought that at least in the “progressive countries”, by which he meant, presumably, England, Canada and the States, Western Europe, and Australia and NZ as well, we would all suffer a collective “nervous breakdown” from living the lives of wealthy wives with nothing to do. As it turns out, obviously, he was wrong about everything except for the insight that “we have been trained too long to strive, and not to enjoy”. And that’s what I want to talk about today – I spend a lot of time on this show talking about specifically marginalized and dispossessed groups of people, but today I’m going to focus on another group. Namely, the class-formerly-known-as-middle, which I’ll just call middle for now, and the problems faced by people who are employed in white-collar or service jobs in the public or private sector. Just like so many things, our favourite brand of capitalism is not only harming those people who cannot fully participate in it, disabled people, unemployed, single mothers, people of colour, but it also harms those people who are participating, as the price of participation rises and the returns diminish.

Needless to say, Keynes was wrong about the coming Age of Leisure, though it wasn’t immediately apparent that he was. For a while it really did look like we were headed that way, as long as you didn’t dig too deeply into exactly who was going to benefit from that leisure – increasing automation throughout the 20^th century looked like an indicator of the coming fulfillment of the promises of the Industrial Revolution – that eventually, all the work would be performed by machines, and people would then be free to pursue higher goals of creativity and learning. And until about the mid-70s, there wasn’t too much reason to doubt that was the logical end-point of the industrial trajectory. Of course, it didn’t happen that way, not at all – in fact, just the opposite: over the last 30 or 40 years, the number of hours worked per week and the intensity of that work have both increased dramatically for certain sectors of society, particularly public sector employees.

A brief caveat for inclusiveness before I get into it: this show is about the work lifestyle of the middle class in Anglican countries, which means it is a fairly racially narrow view of work. The people in the affected group are primarily white, as the middle class is primarily white, and there are significant gender aspects that I will not deal with today. It’s not because I don’t think those things are important – usually the overlooked groups are who I try to particularly focus on – but because a comprehensive examination of the history of work, accounting for all class, race, and gender implications is simply too big a topic to cover in one show. So for today, just assume that for everything I say here is disproportionately worse, or felt more, or is more of a problem, for women and people of colour. Because it is.

If you're interested in some statistics, there are lots in these books. I will start from the premise that many people can’t find work at all, and many people who have work are struggling with both the amount of hours they must work, and how hard they have to go while they’re working. These are not, of course, unrelated phenomena, and though the reasons for the shift in work time and intensity are complex, the disappearance of the middle class is closely tied to neoliberal doctrines of deregulation.

Beginning in the late 1970s and really finding its groove in the Reaganite- Thatcherite-Muldoonite 80s, Anglican governments began the ongoing work of deregulating trade, with Rogernomics and the Closer Economic Relationship with Australia marking the shift here in New Zealand (currently, though the Multilateral Agreement on Investment was shelved in the 90s, its much bigger and angrier sibling the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement looks set to go ahead. So that's awesome.). Trade deregulation has immediate and direct consequences on a country’s labour force, as companies are forced to compete on broader global stages and are left more vulnerable to foreign undercutting of things like wages, production costs, and import tariffs. Companies competing on international levels must therefore have the widest possible profit margins to ensure they remain competitive, which often means cutting back on the numbers of people they employ. It does not, however, mean cutting back on the amount of work that needs to be done, which means that companies are often chronically understaffed, and must be able to downsize quickly in lean times, reassign people to different tasks as needed, and they must have access to a large pool of contract or temp labour to assist with surges in demand. The proliferation of contract labour is its own problem, which I’ll talk about another time, but for those remaining full-time employees, it means both an extension of work hours and an increase in responsibility, for which you may or may not be compensated. For most, working those hours is simply a result of 30 years of currency inflation unaccompanied by a rise in average wages, but for some, particularly at the highest levels of an organization, the compensation is not the issue – paid overtime goes a surprisingly little way towards making the people working those long, intense hours any happier about working them. Overtime wage are no recompense for missing your own life or the lives of your loved ones because you’re at work.

So along with the new long, serious hours comes a decrease in the power of the employee to say ‘no’ to working them. Part of the legacy of deregulated trade and increased flexibility in the labour market means that your job is far less secure than it would have been in, say, the 50s, almost no matter what your job is – a big part of the rise of neoliberalism, and related to trade deregulation, was the busting of unions and a cultural discouraging of unions as a dangerous and corruptible form of collectivism. So you watched your office cut in half, or a third, and you watched the inbox on your desk grow to insurmountable heights, and you missed your kids birthdays or plays or having kids altogether, but you know you can’t say anything because your job is in no way guaranteed. And more than that, it’s not only your job which is insecure – the nature of global competition can foment a sense that “we’re all in this together”, that if we don’t all work the very hardest and longest that we can, the company itself may just go under. And who in the world is going to say no to doing that work, if the implication is that if you don’t, it could result in the loss not just of your job, but everyone else’s job too? The very reason for the increased workload is exactly what keeps people working it.

And that fear of job loss manifests itself in the culture of the workplace in the form of “presenteeism” whereby people may put in those long hours not because they’re strictly necessary, but because a couple extra hours a day is simply expected as part of the job and people must be seen to be working them. This is a problem because of the simple physiological fact of our human ability to concentrate – that you can either focus really hard or for a long time, but not both, and every hour you attempt to put in after that optimal period of a couple hours your productivity, memory, and mental agility begin to flag. But in an office where the expectation is that you stay a few extra hours every day, leaving at 5, even if you’ve been more productive than everyone who’s staying later, can be seen as skiving or slacking, and people are made to feel guilty about leaving on time. Whatever the actuality is, it becomes difficult to leave on time if it gives your colleagues or your boss the impression that you’re not doing your share, especially when your job is far from secure in the first place. Though this isn’t the show to talk about this, there are some things to be said about the nature of consent and refusal in general, and what your ability to agree or disagree with a request says about the kind of social privilege you possess in comparison to the person doing the requesting. Read some awesome stuff about that on the supergreat blog A Radical Transfeminist.

The rise in work hours and intensity is exacerbated by another phenomenon that goes largely unnoticed in the day to day, and that is the automation of minor services which used to be someone’s paid employment, and is now a task that we perform for ourselves for free. This kind of unpaid semi-automated labour is called “shadow work” by an Austrian social critic called Ivan Illich in the 80s. He included in his definition all types of unpaid labour, like child rearing and elderly care, and I and many other people have written about that elsewhere so I won’t go into it again here – for this conversation I’m interested in those tasks which used to be done by a paid human for us, and are now done for free for ourselves. This is from a recent article in the New York Times about shadow work:

The conventional wisdom is that America has become a “service economy,” but actually, in many sectors, “service” is disappearing. There was a time when a gas station attendant would routinely fill your tank and even check your oil and clean your windshield and rear window without charge, then settle your bill. Today, all those jobs have been transferred to the customer: we pump our own gas, squeegee our own windshield, and pay our own bill by swiping a credit card. Where customers once received service from the service station, they now provide “self-service” — a synonym for “no service.” Technology enables this sleight of hand, which lets gas stations cut their payrolls, having co-opted their patrons into doing these jobs without pay.
Examples abound, helping drive unemployment rates. Airports now have self-service check-in kiosks that allow travelers to perform the jobs of ticket agents. Travel agents once unearthed, perused and compared fares, deals and hotel rates. Shadow-working travelers now do all of this themselves on their computer screens. Medical patients are now better informed than ever — as a result of hours of online shadow work. In 1998, the Internal Revenue Service estimated that taxpayers spent six billion hours per year on “tax compliance activities.” That’s serious shadow work, the equivalent of three million full-time jobs.

What this automation often means for those who remain employed in the service sector is that their work hours too have lengthened and intensified with fewer staff to cover them, which in service often takes the form of increased accountability and decreased autonomy and freedom. That often coincides with an increased demand for quality, as companies believe simultaneously that high turnover is key, but that customers will return to a company where they had experienced a genuine, empathetic human interaction. Services workers are required to find the balance somewhere between dealing with as many customers as possible in the shortest possible time period and ensuring that each felt personally and patiently attended to. For example, call centres and places like that offer training in how to make a forced smile look natural and how to make your voice sound like its smiling, while also closely monitoring every word and every second the employee spends with a caller. It’s the commodification of human interaction. It’s kind of fascinating, because although the empathy is required on the part of the employee, it’s not necessarily a reciprocal arrangement. I always felt this as a server or waitress in Canada, and the way servers are treated has definite classist implications; lots of people who are totally lovely to their friends will treat their waiter like crap, or completely ignore the cleaner. I would go so far as to say that there’s a sense that a certain amount of abuse is included in the price, so to speak; it’s part of what you’re paid for. If you’ve got a job in sales or hospitality, you take other people’s crap with a smile all day, a carefully monitored smile, how are you supposed to then go home and feel like you’ve had a productive day, to feel satisfied? The answer, for the employer, is increasingly to convince your employees to believe that they’re taking that crap with a smile in pursuit of a worthy ideal. Here's how that works:

Obviously any increase in the time spent at work is a decrease in the amount of time spent doing things other than work, like raising your children or pursuing your hobbies. And though it’s nice to be fulfilled by your job, for many people a job is a means to an end and they have things in their lives outside of work which fulfill them. With work becoming a bigger and bigger part of some people’s lives, the workplace then has to provide not only a paycheque but the personal, emotional, and spiritual fulfillment they would normally find from relationships and hobbies they no longer have time for. Companies are beginning to find that their employees will not make those sacrifices for something as utterly banal as the company’s bottom line, and so the companies then must create a higher reason for the long hours and lack of a personal life. With less time free outside of work to pursue the things that fulfill them, white collar workers are increasingly encouraged to find fulfillment in the brand, in their relationship to the company itself. Meaning is created in the brand itself, and the employees are encouraged to feel like working very hard all the time for many extra hours a week is a demonstration of their commitment to that higher meaning. People who believe they are working for something greater than themselves will put in enormous amounts of energy. If they become emotionally invested in their work, whether its justified or not, they will work harder, simple as that.

This is the dark side of the lofty ambitions Umair Haque wants businesses to have, as I talked about last week. Take Nike’s grandiose language in its mission statement: “to help Nike, Inc, and its consumers to thrive in a sustainable economy where people, profit, and the planet are in balance”. Obviously, those are not Nike’s actual goals, this mission statement is not genuine – if they really wanted those things they would have to do everything completely differently. They couldn’t be Nike. But if you’re working 60 hours a week as a manager at a Nike office, the balance of people, profit, and planet is a much nicer thing to be working for than the company’s bottom line. And you’ll work much harder for it.

All this is not to dispute that seeking fulfillment in your work is obviously a worthwhile goal, as long as its being honestly pursued. But this manufacturing of meaning through brand loyalty and grandiose messaging is exploitation, pure and simple. It’s the harvesting of human emotion to increase productivity and steal a bunch of hours of free labour from employees. It sounds good on the surface, “we want our employees to be fulfilled”, but what they’re really saying is “we want our employees to work for free because we successfully manufactured brand loyalty”. Underneath, it’s not a message about fulfillment at all, it’s a message about consumerism.

Part of the problem is that a culture which emphasizes consumption leads people to be trapped in their very long hours to afford the payments on the house, the house that, given the lending climate of the last decade and a half, they maybe couldn’t afford in the first place. It’s the dangerous combination of easy credit and a narrative which assures us that there will be more tomorrow – there must be, that’s perpetual growth! That’s where our dissatisfaction is directed, then – rather than to political protest or an examination of the problems with the workplace, we’re told that we can ease our dissatisfaction by believing in the brand of the company we work for, which is really about having faith in consumer capitalism. It is fundamentally neoliberal, as well – to go back to the Nike example, it describes a belief that the problems of the planet can be solved by private enterprise, if everyone just works hard enough. The logical endpoint of that belief is, of course, that you will spend money on that brand, or on brands which espouse the same dishonest premises. So you’re exhausted from work, you feel alienated and dissatisfied but maybe lack the vocabulary to articulate it or the security to be able to act on it, so you do what we’re all told to do when you’re sad: shop. So then the less secure our job becomes the more demanding it is, and the unhappier we are, so we buy things to feel better, but the more things we buy, the more our debt increases, the more we rely on the salary of that demanding job, and the less likely we are to raise a fuss about the amount of work or the number of hours. It’s a lovely little feedback loop, from an economic standpoint. Capitalism and narcissism are mutually reinforcing.

Reclaiming Domesticity - the Long Play

2012-01-16T20:39:00.000-08:00

This is the longer version of a response I dashed off to a blog by Emily Matchar in the Washinton Post, and a reply by Jamie Stiehm in US News, which struck something of a nerve for me. Matchar writes about the “new domesticity zeitgeist” which she sees sweeping up her female friends: women learning to knit, sew, bake bread, grow vegetables, keep bees. Stiehm’s concern is that the revival of traditional skills and an appreciation of homesteading is fetishized nostalgia and a glorification of domesticity, and that the renewed valuing of those skills also necessitates a return to the slightly-more-extreme gender imbalances that accompanied them. She worries, I guess, that women will run back into the kitchen, thinking it’s all a bit of fun, and will unwittingly wind up trapped their just like their grandmothers. She worries that any return to performance of those tasks will also initiate a return to defining women by those tasks, to a cultural acceptance that women aren’t good for anything outside the kitchen. Maybe she’s right to be skeptical – lord knows it wouldn’t be the first time oppression was sold as empowerment – but I think mostly she didn’t think very deeply about what she was saying.

This happens to be a subject about which I have thought very deeply, in fact; I think about it a lot, lately. After Slutwalk started being a thing and I was hearing everywhere about reclaiming the word slut, which you might remember I totally hated, it occurred to me immediately that the word I really thought needed reclaiming was housewife. I think that the status of women globally would benefit a great deal from the conscious application of feminist ideas to the domestic sphere, from the redirection of the conversation away from getting women out of the home, and more towards promoting the value of the work done in the home, and done, still, mostly by women. This is my little pet feminism, domestic feminism, and it’s getting more and more of my attention lately. I think this is a great time to start talking about resituating discursive power in the home, so that the work itself is valued, no matter who’s doing it.

At the heart of Stiehm’s disapproval of Matchar’s article is her unexamined and unstated assumption that being in the home is bad for women, and that returning there is against our best interests. I’ve often thought that this was an oversight of second-wave feminism, which, instead of rejecting the notion that domesticity is exclusively woman’s domain, or that women are best suited to domesticity, rejected domesticity itself. What should have been - and started out as - a conversation about the undervaluing of the work performed in the home (think of the Wages for Housework Campaign), and the relationship it bears to the undervaluing of the gender doing most of that work, became instead a conversation about getting women out of the home and into the workplace, which has from there turned into a conversation about women struggling to balance work and family. Now, I am in no way suggesting that women should leave the workplace and return to the home. But that work is still performed primarily by women, and women being a lesser social class than men, the work they do is also seen as lesser. If we can bring some value to the work women are doing while we’re also trying to simply value women as a social class, that makes it easier for that work to stop being so gender-segregated. If we can acknowledge that the work itself is necessary and important, then the workers also become so, and it becomes easier for men to take on more domestic tasks, which makes it easier for everyone to balance work and family.

First- and second-wave feminism fought to break down gendered barriers to entry in the work place and offer women the choice to work or to stay home. Not to rehash all the compelling and obvious arguments against the mantra of "personal choice", but the ability to choose represents a level of privilege which is simply not available to most women: a proliferation of various options is, itself, a privilege, in addition to indicating membership in a particular social class. And this particular conversation is doubly let down by a narrative of personal choice because it was very clear that the only truly feminist choice to make was to leave the home, which was the seat of oppression, and enter the workforce. Rather than trying to bring power to the work done by mostly women all over the world, rather than acknowledging that the problem wasn’t the work, but the lack of value assigned to it specifically because of the gender doing most of it, the work itself became symbolic of that oppression. Escaping the oppression of being confined to the domestic sphere meant escaping domesticity altogether.

It’s a racist narrative because the women who have the least options open to them, the women who couldn’t possibly decide not to go to work once they had children, or who have jobs with less security and less flexible hours and lower pay, are by and large black, Hispanic, Aboriginal peoples all over the world, Maori and Pasifika people here in New Zealand, and globally in general anyone who’s not white. So framing the decision to return to domestic skills and knowledge as a step backwards for women, as is so often done, marginalizes and silences all the women who never had the choice to leave the home or return to it in the first place. More than that, it paints them as the kind of women we shouldn’t want to be: if being empowered is wrapped up in the ability to exempt oneself from the tasks of cooking and cleaning and growing food, the implication is that all those women who do perform those tasks are not empowered, because the tasks are not powerful. And I think that contributes to the harm being done to those women, and therefore the harm that’s done to everyone who identifies as a woman.

The idea that domesticity is anti-feminist was seized upon and perpetuated by marketers of products like processed food, which were meant to be freeing women from the tedious drudgery of cooking, at the same time that women were continually being told that keeping house was the greatest possible achievement for a woman. Housework is both anti-feminist and the pinnacle of femininity: we’ve always been good at conflicting narratives. And certainly some women were freed from tedious drudgery, but it happened not by sharing a workload more evenly or valuing the work so that it’s less drudgery, so that both parties in the household appreciate the importance of dinner and what it takes to make, but by outsourcing the tasks to McCain and Betty Crocker and everyone to whom they outsourced. It’s like an STD ad from the 90s – you’re having sex with everyone he’s had sex with. Food companies created a market by selling specifically women on products which were unhealthy, which were economically, environmentally, and socially expensive, and they specifically used the language of female empowerment to do so. Feminism became another market, another avenue for capital absorption, part of the post-war spatial fix defined by suburbanization. I think there’s a whole other show in there, a feminist reading of the second spatial fix.

Just as an aside, many of those products which were meant to make the keeping of a house a simpler, less labour-intensive task in fact had the opposite effect. Things like dishwashers and vacuum cleaners are time savers, to be sure, but they also raise the bar on the acceptable level of cleanliness for a house. So less and less dirt is tolerated anywhere, to the point that now we’re being sold anti-bacterial disposable counter-wipes which eliminate 97% of germs, like we can’t even have microscopic dirt. Your house now not only has to be clean, it has to be sterile. That’s not liberation from housework, that’s a company manufacturing a market for a product that isn’t needed and co-opting the language of either feminism (“you don’t have time to do housework, you’re a high-powered woman on the go!”) or motherhood (“we know you care about your family too much to let them anywhere near germs!”).

Though I don’t see the feminist analysis used often these days, there is most certainly an aspect of political resistance to this domesticity zeitgeist. Partly it represents a growing awareness that our way of life is finite, that we do not exist in a post-industrial economy but have simply outsourced our industry to poorer countries. One of the side effects was that we ceased to value those production skills in favour of consumption ability, which is of course a highly class-based project which excludes huge numbers of people, the majority of whom are female. Part of the political aspect of adopting more traditional ways of life, like homesteading and small-holding and more ethical and local eating habits, the resurgence of farmer’s markets, is an acknowledgement that being able to live in any other way is a luxury and an anomaly in human history, and one that is subsidized by people, mostly women, mostly in poorer and browner places.

It’s also an acknowledgement that even aside from the exploitative underpinnings of the entire western way of life, the financial crisis is alerting people to the flimsiness of a consumption economy and the inherent problems with the perpetual growth paradigm. I think this has prompted people who are able to begin learning skills to survive in an economy which requires less consumption and greater production, as well as an environment which necessitates it. Some of this renaissance of domesticity is simple survival; this way of life has always been expensive, and many people who were previously able to afford it are now not, and so are being forced to adapt. Sometimes that adaptation takes the form of making more and buying less.

Finally, though the first two points are reason enough for me, there is the simple fact that all these systems of food transport, factory farming, processing, outsourcing of labour, all the systems which have granted some women freedom from the work of sustaining themselves, are based on the assumption of cheap and abundant fossil fuels. And those are just not going to be around anymore. We are absolutely going to have to start performing domestic tasks, whether we like it or not, and so we might as well begin to talk about how necessary and valuable those skills are. And if we can do that, we can also begin to talk about how necessary and valuable the (mostly) women who perform them are, as well. If anything’s a step backwards for women, it’s an absolute refusal to see worth in the work that is done by women all over the world, to insist that domesticity is “nostalgia”, that it is distasteful, or that it is something to be avoided. Steihm and those who agree with her are only succeeding in favouring their own privilege over the pursuit of true gender equality, for all women, everywhere.

Many women are relearning tasks their grandmothers knew, but as this return to domesticity has roots and ties to political resistance rather than simple nostalgia, there are also many men. The trendiness of homesteading is useful for prompting discussions about the value of this work which has always been performed almost exclusively by women, and by extension therefore the value of women as a social class. And I recognize the problems with what I’m saying, here: like it took men’s interest in domestic chores to start talking about them as valuable, productive work, and I don’t at all want to encourage that. But I do think that an increased awareness in the male social consciousness of the energy, intelligence, and skill required for this kind of voluntary labour can only benefit the class which most often performs that labour. And I also recognize that I’m attempting to raise the worth of women through their connection to an increasingly valuable skill set, rather than raising the value of the skill set through an increase in the value of women, but I’m not sure they’re so different – or at least, they’re not incompatible. Either way, what interests me is a shift in the way we value work altogether.

Because it’s not enough for me to have women and people of colour succeed in a system which was created with only one social class, white men, in mind, which is what we’ve been aiming for; I want a system which is designed to be equal. I don’t want us all to agree to only value the same things that the economic system values, as those are not representative of the full range of human experience, and success means embodying and exemplifying the traits that the economic system values – selfishness, cold rationality, efficiency. I don’t want to try and fit into the parameters of the market; the market is a human construction, its parameters should include all of humanity. I don’t want women’s success in a man’s world, I want a new world which is for everyone. I know that sounds idealistic. But listen, we’ve been ten thousand years with more or less the same power structure, as far as gender relations go, and a good few millennia as far as race relations go, so it’s ridiculous to expect that everything would be equal after a century’s work. Social change takes time, and it’s ok that we’re not there yet, but it’s only ok as long as we keep talking about getting there.

The Economics of Betterness

2012-01-16T20:15:00.000-08:00

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Today I’d like to introduce one of the many inroads being made into discussions about economics done differently - specifically, economics which focuses the well-being of human beings, as opposed to the maximization of industrial output. Umair Haque is one of a number of people contributing to a definition of economy which places the promotion of human well-being at its centre; an economics of better, as opposed to an economics of more. That’s what consumer economy means – people buying stuff. The point is the stuff, whether or not it makes your life better or happier; but maybe making lives better and happier should be the point instead.

For centuries we’ve equated more with better, first as simply an economic principle and then as a general cultural philosophy driven by that economic principle. And for a while, that was useful, because up to a point, more certainly does mean better. If you’re a woman living on a dollar a day or less and watching your children die of starvation or enter into prostitution, as millions of women around the world are, then more money does mean a better life. But once those basic needs are met – secure food, clothing, shelter, and I’m going to add the presence of some family or community or social network around you to that list of basic needs – then more money does not mean better, it just means more. It’s called the Easterlin Paradox, that happiness and satisfaction do not necessarily improve as material wealth improves. After that point at which material gains no longer lead to increased satisfaction, the equation of more with better becomes not only inaccurate but potentially harmful, because of what we want more of, where it comes from, and how we are affected by it.

With all our incredible intelligence and creativity, maybe we should be talking about something other than acquisition, especially acquisition within a system under which we must overlook all manner of costs which are not included in a product’s price or value, but which are very real nonetheless. Markets themselves are not the problem; believing in their omnipotence is. Money itself is not the problem; the way we value it and the products and processes to which it is or is not assigned is the problem. This is not to say that there was never any benefit for anyone to our current system; certainly for two centuries or so it did a lot of good for a lot of mostly white people, while also doing a lot of harm to a lot of mostly brown people. But now, even for those of us living in countries in which some have benefited significantly from contemporary capitalism, we’ve reached a point of ‘diminishing returns’. For example, the equities market, normally considered a safe investment, is shrinking for the first time over the last decade. Real asset returns have been shrinking, not rising, for decades; ditto real-dollar wages, median household income, and basic human satisfaction with both one’s present situation and any hopes for the future (10).

Haque comes at the problem from a business standpoint, because that’s what he knows, so his suggestions here are business-based as opposed to like legislative or grassroots or community-based. He believes that at least part of the reason we are all so much less happy, less healthy, less educated, is that the economy is measured with what he calls the industrial age paradigm. Apologies to those of you who have taken Econ 101, but the equation a macroeconomist would use now to measure an economy is this: output equals consumption, plus government expenditure, plus investment, plus net exports (Y = C + G + I + NX). It asks questions only about the maximization of output. If we were to really measure how well a nation was faring, we would have to design an equation that measured a broad variety of indicators, and a growing number of people are doing exactly that, including Umair Haque: “real human welfare equals natural capital, plus ﬁnancial capital, plus intellectual capital, plus human capital, plus social, emotional, and organizational capital” (16). And I think that the process of defining these alternate forms of capital is an extremely important first step towards valuing things differently. From a feminist perspective, it is useful and necessary to include unpaid labour, domestic labour, cooking and cleaning, child raising, elderly care, in those expanding definitions of capital as a way to value and measure that work without assigning it market value like hourly wages.

Haque’s suggestion is a form of economic measurement he calls “eudaimonia”, from the Greek for “good life”. Based on Aristotle’s insistence that the highest good was the goal of human endeavour, eudaimonia measures not the ease of one’s life, but how meaningfully rich and satisfying that life is. It does not necessarily refer to material wealth, although the sovereignty and security of basic needs is included in that; it refers to wealth of relationships, of emotions and ideas, health, passion, and fulfillment, to a “life that matters because it resonates with meaning, accomplishment, and purpose” (13-14). All these things can be expressed in economic terms: the wealth of your relationships, for example, is your social capital, which you spend in ways like getting your friends to pick you up from the airport – if you have no solid relationships, no real social capital, you have nothing to spend, no one to ask. Your education and skills contribute to your human capital; your thoughtfulness and compassion contribute to your ethical capital. There are lots of people talking about these kinds of ideas, and innumerable different categories of alternate capital, and as we start talking more seriously about applying these ideas to our actual national economies, more categories will surely develop. That these alternative conceptions of capital are often diffuse, notoriously difficult to quantify and measure, and vary considerably across cultures and demographics make them no less important, and part of an insistence on “objectivity” explicitly means not focusing on these forms of capital. And that’s a problem because whatever GDP has been doing, most of these other capitals have been falling. Education, happiness, fulfilment, interpersonal and interfamilial relationships, mental and physical health, job security, food sovereignty, new ideas and new patents – flatlined or falling, across the board (17-19). In fact, a Naval physicist found that “rate of invention of new and different tools peaked in 1873 and has been dwindling gradually ever since then” (Heinberg, Peak Everything, 42). Haque quotes a study that find the number of patents has shot up recently, but that the quality has significantly dimished. New patens are, by and large, not about the invention of new ideas but cornering the marketplace, what he calls “creating gridlock” - that “patents are less expressions of true intellectual wealth than tools for strategic control” (18). Think Monsanto, patenting neem seeds and brinjal. And through all this, the traditional macroeconomic equation could and does continue to show growth, because it measures negative transactions right alongside the positive, and makes no distinction between the two.

Over the past 30 years there have been over 80 academic studies conducted with the specific goal of analyzing the relationship between a company’s economic robustness and their social responsibility – or at least the public perception of it. 53% of those indicated a positive relationship between social responsibility and the health of the bottom line, and only 5% a negative one (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/2369.html). In the world of economics, being a social philosophy and not a hard science, that’s an extremely strong and solid relationship, though I don’t know what kind of debates exist about whether or not a company is robust because they are socially responsible, or because they are more able to afford those socially responsible decisions because they are financially robust (the old correlation-causation chestnut). Whatever the reason, the relationship is hard to overlook: securities analysts, which tell firms which stocks to buy and sell, used to give lower ratings to companies with higher levels of real or perceived social responsibility. Now, though, and in a recent shift, social responsibility is considered by security analysts, to be a positive and will recommend accordingly (29-30). This may not seem significant, but it indicates a shift in perception about what is prosperous, even if for now the goal is still defined by profit. It helps open the door to define prosperity differently.

Writing about a new form of economics is not just about money, is it about human rights. It’s about the right of all people to work at something meaningfully productive, the right to a purposeful existence. That may seem overly broad and nebulous, but for me, it’s is a useful frame for the discussion precisely because so much is contained within it – a purposeful existence could mean any number of things to any number of different people, but it’s virtually certain that no matter what makes their lives purposeful, the mere feeling of purpose and fulfillment by more people is going to improve the health of a community.

And let’s not forget that the economy is a human construction – it was created by people and is nothing more than a measure of the movement of a specific form of capital. It’s already been drastically overhauled a number of times, most recently after WWII when the global financial infrastructure like the IMF and the World Bank were designed. It’s entirely within the realm of the conceivable to redraw the definitions again, nearly a hundred years later, to suit a new century with dramatically different needs and problems. There are already economists all over the world designing systems of national accounting that includes the full spectrum of human wealth, not just financial, and the list of ‘well-being indicators’ is growing all the time. The goals of these new national accounts measures is to ensure that simple bottom-line profit will no longer be sufficient for businesses and companies. They would have to also prove that they are increasing – or at least not decreasing – the possibilities for education, good health, fulfilling relationships, and creativity for their employees, customers, and the community in which they are based. They would have to prove that the gains in their financial wealth was acquired through that kind of positive capital movement, not negative, and the accounts system will recognize and measure both. A company which continues to make its profits through negative exchanges would no longer be financially viable, because they would be required to account for more than just the unexamined movement of capital.

In the economics of betterness, wealth-creation means something other than just capital inflows to the company; it means a contribution to the commonwealth. Under that definition it’s not enough for the company to increase, say, its intellectual capital by just owning a bunch of patents and trademarks, wealth creation is about making their employees, customers, and constituents demonstrably smarter (33). It’s about positively contributing to the pool of human capital, and of course a serious discussion about how to make businesses behave this way involves much more than a new mission statement or new regulation. We have to fundamentally reconsider the structure of the way we do and define business, and that means setting some loftier goals, having some higher ambition, than simple profit. In business terms, Haque demands not just a vision statement, but an actual vision that is superordinate to the business organization itself: it must outlast than the organization, it must transcends the commitment the organization makes to its shareholders, and it must be meaningful to the constituents outside the organization (45). And that in turn requires us, dare I say it, to have some faith in the ability of humanity to be something more than the selfish competitors we’re constantly told we are. And that, for me, though the business stuff is interesting and useful, is what’s really compelling about this line of discussion: it demands that we demand more of ourselves, collectively; we have to agree that humanity is capable of better. No more “practical politics”, no more saying “that’s human nature” as though we’re all born one way and stuck with it, no matter what. As though we don’t already spend an enormous amount of energy trying convince people to behave in this way or that way. It may even, as Bill McKibben recently wrote, require us to be a little naïve, and a little less cynical, and a little more angry and hopeful. Before anything can change we have to agree that it’s even possible for things to be different. And they can, of course they can; things have been different before. Though right now the stated goal of our economic system is to have everyone buying more, we could just as easily design a system where that wasn’t true. And while I’m leery of anything approaching utopianism, I do think that the elevation of all humanity to a level where everyone is cared for, where everyone has the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to their society, is a worthier goal.

All citations are page numbers from Haque, Umair. Betterness: Economics for Humans. Harvard Business Press Books, 2011.

Reclaiming Domesticity

2011-12-05T13:23:00.000-08:00

Jamie Stiehm posted this blog on the US News in response to Emily Matchar’s Washington Post article about the “new domesticity zeitgeist” which she sees sweeping up her female friends: women learning to knit, sew, bake bread, grow vegetables, keep bees. While Emily Matchar sees this as a “continuation of feminism”, Jamie Stiehm’s article begins “Reader: beware”. Stiehm’s concern is that the revival of traditional skills and an appreciation of homesteading is rooted in nostalgia and a fetishization of do-it-yourself-ness, and that the renewed valuing of those skills also necessitates a return to the slightly-more-extreme gender imbalances that accompanied them. I could not disagree more strongly.

Stiehm's analysis ignores the simple fact that those tasks have always needed to be performed. When middle-class white women from the global North are not performing them, other, less white, less middle class women are. And those women are being paid less and valued less, precisely because the middle class white women were not performing those tasks. The decision not to keep chickens, or to buy bread instead of bake it yourself, or to purchase your clothes instead of sew them, is rooted in privilege pertaining to race and class as well as gender. Many – even most – women do not have the choice to not do domestic work, and to continue talking about work which is both vital and deingrated is to continue to marginalize and silence huge numbers of women. The choice of privileged women to not “be domestic” is directly subsidized by other, less privileged women, who then take on many of those tasks themselves. Someone makes the clothes bought by a woman who is able to choose not to make her own, and that someone is probably another woman, probably of a slightly different colour, getting paid a pittance. To me, that is not a step forward for women’s enfranchisement.

Stiehm’s analysis also ignores the often very overt – as it is in my case – political stance that is only represented by a return to domesticity. For many women, including myself, the appeal that this “new domesticity” holds is in its rejection of the corporate systems that underlie all our Northern freedom from domestic chores. Many of the gains women have made in the last century, at least in the domestic sphere, were products of corporate marketing campaigns and the need to establish entry ways into new markets, what David Harvey refers to as the spatial fix. Women were freed from an enormous number of hours of labour by washing machines first, and I am in no way advocating for a return to hand-washing clothes, but then, more sinisterly, by pre-packaged, frozen, and processed food. Food companies created a market by selling specifically women on products which were unhealthy, economically, environmentally, and socially expensive, and they specifically used the language of female empowerment to do so ("Hey, ladies! You don't want to make dinner, do you? No way! Who does? Making food is an awful, awful, thankless task that no one should do. Let us take care of dinner! Why don't you have a cigarette instead? I like to call them 'liberty sticks'. Love, Philip Morris").

Big Porn, Incorporated

2011-11-29T14:17:00.000-08:00

DJ bios, playlists, podcasted interview with Dr. Abigail Bray, editor of and contributor to Big Porn, Inc, and links to stream the full show here.

So today I'm wading into the seething morass that is the debate around pornography, both as an industry and as an increasing presence in our day to day lives (hint: they're related! Gasp!). Just to clear a few things up first: Pornography is prostitution. It’s the sale of sex in which the customer purchases a video of the sale of the body, instead of the body itself, which some have argued makes it infinite prostitution, prostitution that lives on after the performer is no longer a performer, or even no longer alive. Secondly, while heterosexual porn for male consumption is certainly not the only form of porn, it is the overwhelming majority of what is consumed, and so much of my language, though I try to be inclusive, will reflect that. Many of the studies in the book Big Porn, Inc, which was the impetus for this show, deliberately access the most mainstream selections as chosen by the Adult Video News’ bestselling and most-rented lists (So I can't access or link to AVN from my computer because I'm writing from work, and it won't let me at porn sites. Obv. But I could access CNBC, which has a slideshow of the top selling adult videos of all time. CNBC! If that's not an example of pornification, damned if I know what is). So no complaining that sometimes the woman is the dom and the man’s the sub; that’s true, but it’s not what most people are watching.

Also, this is not a discussion about sexual morality, it is about human rights. And for that reason, this isn’t about being sex-positive or sex-negative, those are nonsense terms that are used to often to silence or undermine arguments against prostitution. No one is suggesting that sex is bad, or that women shouldn’t be sexually liberated; this isn’t about sex, it’s about power and violence and poverty, and the conception of women’s sexuality as a commodity. The third largest illegal trade in the world after arms and drugs is the sale of women (if you include all human trafficking, it becomes the second largest), and the legal trade in women, the global porn industry, was worth $96 billion in 2006 (1). Apparently that legal trade is seen as being valuable enough to the global economy - which it is, at 96 billion - that the US government gave its domestic porn industry a 5 billion dollar bailout in 2008-9. For real. That’s the argument against prostitution and pornography, that the sale of women’s bodies is something we should be talking about ending, which involves having some uncomfortable conversations about the socio-economic circumstances that encourage women into prostitution, which includes pornography.

Also, Occupy Vancouver just released a list of demands which included, at #39, the legalization and regulation of prostitution, like in New Zealand, which is specifically mentioned. And though it’s too big a topic to cover in one show, I will at some point talk about exactly why the legalization model we have here doesn’t meet the needs of the women in the industry, and in fact can do much more harm than good - in the meantime, read everything by Meghan Murphy at the F Word. But I can see why demanding the legalization of prostitution, as an unexamined presence, would have made it onto a socially progressive wish list. Porn and prostitution seem like the kinds of thing that should be legalized, you know, like drugs – like it’s the kind of thing you can’t prevent people from doing and any attempts to regulate it seem like religious moralizing at worst, and at best, an infringement on the rights of free speech. I have two things to say about that: the first is that when we talk about decriminalizing drugs, our concern is with the health of the users of the drugs, not the drugs themselves. With porn and prostitution, what’s being sold isn’t a substance, they are human bodies, usually female human bodies, and that makes it qualitatively different than talking about the needless regulation of substances. And accordingly, much of the legislation to date is, primarily, concerned with the patrons of sex workers, not the workers themselves.

And secondly, let’s just talk about free speech for a second. I’ve for sure fallen for this argument before, that it’s the rights of free speech to make porn, but maybe free speech doesn’t mean the right to say whatever you want whenever with no consequences, just like freedom doesn’t mean doing whatever you want with no consequences. And I think – or rather, I agree with Betty McLellan, who also thinks – that it would be more useful to think of free speech in the same way we talk about free trade, and that fair speech, like fair trade, is a more worthwhile goal. Because free speech, like free trade, favours the powerful, entrenches inequality, focuses on the individual, and ignores quality of life. Conversely, fair speech, like fair trade, means not oppressing anyone, it decentralizes power, focuses on the common good, and fosters justice and respect (2). Applying the laws of free speech to the creation of porn ignores the fact that “those with more power in society have much greater access to speech than those with less power, and that the powerful can subordinate and exploit the powerless with impunity in the name of free speech” (3). Basically, the right to film, distribute, and watch the exploitation of actual women trumps their right to not be exploited.

Because I'm pretty sure it's impossible to disagree with anything Noam Chomsky says:

Defending pornography as a choice made by consenting adults simply expressing their sexuality is a justification which ignores the fact that for many women, the poverty they face is so great, and their options are so limited, that the sale of their bodies becomes their only recourse for survival. Also, let’s pretend for a minute that getting into prostitution is a genuine choice, even within the context of a culture which presents sexual exploitation as power and liberation. That doesn’t mean that you can’t be raped, that you can’t be abused, within the industry itself. You sign up have sex for money, to take naked photographs, whatever; this does not automatically mean you sign up for being abused, humiliated, degraded, beaten, choked, slapped, raped – it’s a contiguous industry, you don’t step right into hardcore or gonzo porn. You start out stripping, you’re recruited into porn, which starts out pretty vanilla, but the money’s not as good as you thought, and it’s presented like a promotion, and so you lower your boundaries more and more. Various studies have put the number of porn stars and sex workers with post-traumatic stress between 75 and 90%. Ever seen Deep Throat? I have, a lot of people have. But the actress, Linda Lovelace, has been quoted as saying that she was forced, often at gunpoint, to perform in porn, and that anytime someone watched Deep Throat they are very literally watching her being raped. She’s not an isolated case, either; a huge number of sex workers were sexually abused as children, they are horribly physically abused; they suffer from dissociative disorders, drug and alcohol addiction, and a higher than average suicide and murder rate (see this chart again). But it is commonly expressed in studies of mostly men’s response to prostitution and pornography that once you have purchased the body, you have free reign to perform on it whatever acts you like, as though a woman is a couch or a table. That once money has been exchanged there cease to be any boundaries that would make an action abusive or violent. They just dissolve. We don’t treat animals that way, and yet here we are.

In addition to the economic pressures that might make prostitution of some kind seem like an attractive option for some women, we face social pressures which insist that we are in a post-feminist world in which women are now completely enfranchised, and in fact, have significant power over men, who are completely at the mercy of their sexual desires. Obviously no genders are fairly represented in this paradigm, but it is there, and it is loud. In the same way that women bought into the idea that their sexiness was empowering as long as it looked like pornography, so society bought the idea that pornographic sexiness is sexual liberation, when really it’s just another form of sexual oppression. And sexual liberation does not only mean that you love sex and think it’s great and want to have it all the time; it’s about the freedom to figure out your own sexuality without constraints from social scripts which validate one form of sexuality at the expense of others. In our case, porn sexuality is validated and sold as empowerment, but in order to access that power you must be sexy in this one particular way which often includes breast implants, bleached hair, and high heels.

This is what is meant by the pornification of society: shirts with porn star on them in sparkly letters, padded bras and thongs in children’s sizes, playboy bunny logos on everything from jewelry to car seat covers, that ten-year-old French model. The undertone of pornsex is very strong, and it is telling girls and women that empowerment is looking like a porn star, that being a porn star is glamourous. Later in the interview Abigail will refer to it as the “gentrification of sex work”, which I think is a marvelous turn of phrase, but whatever you want to call it, more and more women are drawn or coerced or enticed or convinced into the porn industry. It often starts through ‘glamour modeling’ or stripping, and those women are often completely shocked by how degrading the work turns out to be. It’s not fun and glamourous; for most, it’s humiliating.

And because our regular, not-porn lives are becoming more and more porny, porn itself has to become more and more extreme to offer the same experience. The whole genre of Gonzo porn, which is a type of porn which is exclusively violent and degrading acts committed by men against women, things like choking and triple penetration. There’s a whole series of violent throat-fucking called “gag factor”, which has won porn awards for best oral series and has spawned a whole genre of copycats (4). Almost all the porn directors interviewed for these essays agreed with this guy, Joe Gallant, who said “the future of american porn is violence. I see signs of it already … the culture is becoming much more accepting of gang rape and abuse movies” (5). Compared to equivalent studies conducted in the 80s and 90s, the study conducted for this article “revealed that pornography has become uch more aggressive in both frequency and type of act” (6). She cites all kinds of stats like the percentage of scenes which feature verbal aggression like name-calling (almost half), the percentage of scenes which feature physical aggression (almost 90%, with only 3% directed against the men involved), the violent gagging which is so hot right now had not been recorded in previous studies but now comprises 28% of the scenes.

We talk a little bit, Abigail and I, about the involvement of children in pornography, as viewers and targets. She makes a valid point about the cultural narrative being very significant; just the fact of kids seeing two people having sex, live or filmed, is going to make them hate women or view themselves as sexual objects. I have a great deal of faith in children’s capacity for critical thought, certainly much greater capacity than they are given credit for. But the narratives presented in the pornography that kids have access to are enforced and echoed by hypersexuality in the world around them, and us. It’s impossible not to internalize some of those ideas, which can “lower their inhibitions, discourages empathy towards other, and reshapes their sexual aspirations and expression often in risky, violent, or unhelpful ways” (7). If porn becomes the place you learn about sex, of course you’re not going to learn anything about intimacy, about complexity, about safety or respect. What you’ll learn is that it’s awesome to come on a woman’s face, and that she loves it too. This lack of awareness of boundaries is evident in things like the fact that children are now sexually assaulting other children. One of the contributors to the book, Maggie Hamilton, interviews counselling professionals who say that the number of primary-school children who experience sexual assault has shot up, and that many of those assaults are being perpetuated not by older boys or men, as is usually the case, but by their classmates (8). So children are learning how sex works by watching porn, which explicitly positions women and girls as sexual objects who enjoy being degraded, and they believe what they’re told and act on it. That’s what kids do; that’s why grownups are supposed to teach them stuff.

This social phenomenon is paralleled by an aspect of porn called pseudo-child pornography. For me the biggest, problem, as I said to Dr. Bray, is not that we can’t trust the pornographers to tell the truth about the age of their performers, or that 18-year-old women aren't still vulnerable, though that’s certainly true. It’s that it encourages us to look at children as sexy. It breaks down the cultural taboos which instruct us that children are not for having sex with. It sort of shifts our ideas of when it’s appropriate for children to start being sexy.. There’s a huge amount of porn that does this, too, it’s extremely mainstream to see young-looking teenagers made to look younger with like knee socks, pigtails and, most importantly, no pubic hair. That’s a convention that started in the subgenre of ‘teen porn’ and has since spread completely, it’s totally normal not to have pubic hair. It’s more normal than having pubic hair. So subtly, little by little, each website that emphasizes the performer’s innocence, her cuteness, her slightness, her youth, the more time spent in a place where the “norms and values that circulate in society and define adult-child sex as deviant and abusive are wholly absent” (9), the more we are told that kids are totally sexy. And the more we believe it.

I ask her about her navigation of the pornography debate: she’s of course right that the debate has not always been between radical feminists and neoliberal sex workers, there are whole political and religious aspects that I’ve not dealt with at all, because I absolutely do not want to equate this discussion in any way with religious or moralistic viewpoints. I'm not against porn because I think it’s dirty or that sex is shameful, it’s because the industry is abusive. So I just want to clarify the contemporary debate as best as I can to sort of provide some context here – I try to be very careful with my language, but these are tricky subjects, so just know that I’m trying to be inclusive and respectful: it’s not necessarily that some sex workers hold neoliberal beliefs about the value of their own empowerment and that feminists deny this is relevant. It’s more about the feeling on the part of some sex workers that the tendency of radical feminists to speak about prostitution in a way that depicts the women involved as being brainwashed by the patriarchy and unable to make informed decisions. Some sex workers feel that the denial of their ability to make a choice is itself degrading and offensive, and that using the term “prostituted women”, instead of “sex worker”, itself makes women sexual objects by undermining their personhood. The position taken by some radical feminists is that we cannot deny the influence of our cultural narrative, we are all socialized, it’s how we exist as social beings, and that to account for the pervasiveness and the extraordinary influence of our society is not the same as denying personhood, intelligence, or agency. For this reason even if a woman feels genuinely empowered in her sex work – which again, some do but they are very few, and are by no means representative – the cost of that individual empowerment is the reinforcement of a continuing cultural narrative that sees women as salable goods, as sexual objects that can be purchased.

But of course the debate is not nearly so binary or distinct, because feminism and sex have a complex history. Initially, as I pointed out in the interview, female sexual liberation was a highly inflammatory political idea; political enfranchisement and sexual enfranchisement were mutually reinforcing. If the personal is political, which I think it is, then you can see how taking control and ownership of your own sexuality can feel like an embodiment of political resistance against a culture which represses your sexuality. Like the young Egyptian blogger who posted a naked photo of herself as a protest – sexuality is a very powerful thing. But, as Dr. Bray points out, we are now inundated with female sexuality, we are saturated with it, you can’t look around without seeing some reference to it. Because porn is everywhere, now we don’t need porn. And anyway, just like with children, porn is not a good place to learn about sex.

I agree that sexual liberation is a red herring for feminist issues, but I don’t like the way she frames it, that this issue is more important, so what are you bothering to talk about this thing for ("how can a woman be sexually liberated when she doesn't have a job?"). That argument is used a lot to silence feminists (for example: because some women have to wear a burqa, no woman who doesn’t is allowed to talk about sexism). We can only ever be talking about the absolute worst thing, as though all those big things aren’t made up of a thousand little things. But I don’t think that’s what she’s trying to do, and she’s right to bring poverty into the conversation, as very few sex workers are wealthy heiresses amusing themselves by allowing powerful men to spend scandalous amounts of money for the pleasure of pleasuring her (we should entertain the idea that these women are, entirely, a myth). Most sex workers get into it because they are in bad economic circumstances, and they saw it as the surest way of supporting themselves. Talking about sex work in the context of liberation overlooks the poverty that almost always accompanies prostitution and erases the struggle of the women engaged in it.

I don't know what I would advocate here: I don't think criminalizing pornography is necessarily an option, because, of course, of the internet. It's a tricky subject because the real answer is to address ten thousand years of gender inequality and women-as-sex-object, and at the same time (again: they're related!) undo three hundred years of capitalist philosophy which contributes to women having considerably less economic power and forces some into occupations which are deeply harmful and degrading. In the meantime, I guess we just keep talking.

(1) Hawthorne, Susan. "Capital and the Crimes of Pornographers: Free to Lynch, Exploit, Rape and Torture." 107 - 117 in Abigail Bray and Melinda Tankard Reist, Eds. Big Porn, Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry. Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2011.

(2) McLellan, Betty. "Pornography as Free Speech: But is it Fair?" Summary by Susan Hawthorne in Bray, Big Porn Inc, 113.

(2) McLellan, Betty, in Bray Big Porn Inc, 250.

(4) Sun, Chyng. "Investigating Pornography: The Journey of a Filmmaker and Researcher". In Bray, Big Porn Inc, 171 - 181.

(5) Sun in Bray, 174.

(6) Sun in Bray, 173.

(7) Hamilton, Maggie. "Groomed to Consume Porn: How Sexualised Marketing Targets Children". In Bray, 16 - 24. Ref. page 17.

(8) Hamilton in Bray, 21.

(9) Dines, Gail. "The New Lolita: Pornography and the Sexualization of Childhood". In Bray, 3 - 8. Ref. page 7.

Manliness: The Hegemony

2011-11-20T17:56:00.000-08:00

Stream the full show on my DJ page on Radio One, including music playlists and the interview with Dr. Sally Shaw about gender inequality in sports management organizations.

So I’ve been thinking about doing a show about sports for a while now, and in that while a bunch more stuff has happened that should be discussed in sort of the same context. Of course the Rugby World Cup had a lot to do with my thinking about a sports show, mostly because I found myself trying to figure out who I would cheer for in any given game based on what outcome would see the least amount of domestic violence taking place. Obviously I’m giving my cheering for a team greater impact on the outcome of the game than it really has, which I think all fans do to some degree, but it does seem like a conversation worth having to talk about why domestic abuse rates and rugby outcomes might be related to one another. So there’s that.

Then there's this. I’m talking, of course, about the assistant coach of Penn State Football, Jerry Sandusky, being arrested for child sexual abuse, and the head coach of Penn State, Joe Paterno, being fired for covering it up. Yep.

The details are pretty gory, and they just get more horrifying all the time, but a big part of the reason this particular case is so interesting and fraught is that Penn State is a college football school, which means a great deal in the states, and that Joe Paterno as head coach is completely idolized. He’s been teaching at that school for 46 years, has won, I dunno, a lot of trophies for Penn State, and had been developing a legacy which included Sandusky. So Sandusky was hauled in after a three-year grand jury investigation and charged with 40 counts of child sexual abuse, with more charges pending. Two other men were arrested, athletic director Tim Curley and university VP Gary Schultz, who are charged with lying to the grand jury during their investigation and covering up Sandusky’s years-long predatory child-rape spree at Penn. Head coach Paterno, who also knew and covered it up, is not being arrested, but has been fired, and the grad student who actually caught Sandusky in the act of raping a boy, actually witnessed it and said nothing, has been neither arrested nor fired. What I find interesting about the Sandusky case is that what’s leading the headlines is not his abuse of numerous underprivileged boys over 15 years, but rather the firing of Joe Paterno and just how the loss of two prominent coaches is going to affect the football legacy at Penn State. In fact, Paterno’s farewell speech to Penn State was not, as you might expect, an anguished plea for forgiveness from the children he failed to protect, but an expression of how sad he was to not be coaching football anymore and how much he’d miss it. There have been protests at Penn State by students and locals in support of Joe Paterno, and lots of commentary is taking the tack that “now’s not the time, this is about football” or how firing Joe Paterno is taking Sandusky’s actions out on the football players. Now this is something we can all agree is bad, bad unequivocally in a way that few things are, the rape of children is a Bad Thing, and yet when it is brought into the context of sport, especially success in sport, it becomes somehow less of a Bad Thing. Or rather, not that it’s not a Bad Thing, but that the Bad Thing done by one of the coaches of the football team has nothing to do with the football team itself. I don’t think I agree that you can, necessarily, separate these two things.

There’s been another, much more minor incident that I think illustrates pretty neatly where I’m going with this line of thought here, and thanks to Bitch Magazine for the original: In Wyoming, a coach has resigned after an outcry following his circulation of a “hurt feelings report” to his team before a playoff game. Under “reasons for filing report” you can select from the following options: I am a little pussy, I have woman hormones, I am a queer, I am a little bitch, I want my mommy, or all of the above, among a few others. It then asks for the girly-man signature of the person filing the report, and the “real man signature” of the person being accused. The coach, as I said, stepped down as coach, but has retained his position as guidance counselor. Super. Great.

It doesn’t take a great deal of close reading of this particular literary gem to uncover the deeply homophobic and sexist assumptions, but I’m more concerned today with what those assumptions say about masculinity. What makes you a Real Man is harassing and abusing one of your teammates, and if you feel aggrieved by that harassment, you are not a Real Man, you are more like a woman, which is of course a wholly undesirable thing for a man to resemble in any capacity. This survey highlights our cultural tendency to situate masculinity in direct opposition to femininity, to believe that what makes men masculine is the rejection of any traits associated with femaleness, including homosexuality. While this is a broad cultural construction, of course, it does seem to be particularly acceptable, even encouraged, in the realm of elite sports.

It’s my hope that I’ll eventually be able to stop making these kinds of disclaimers when I talk about gender and social constructions, but that time has not yet arrived, so know that I am not saying that sport is bad for men and women, or that anyone who plays sport automatically thinks that bullying is great or that women are weak and gay men are a fair target for abuse. Sport is obviously great for some things: it builds teamwork, fosters loyalty, teaches discipline, encourages social development and inclusivity among the team, promotes physical health and fitness. I’m an advocate for participation in sport; I think particularly for kids, participation in a wide range of sporting activities is a good thing. We’re designed to be physically mobile beings. However, a lot of those benefits to sport can also be negatives: loyalty in excess can lead to your athletic director covering up your assistant coach’s dangerous activities; inclusivity among the team often means exclusivity to those outside the team; and discipline, on the extreme ends, means a strict adherence to the unexamined code of behaviour within that team, which is a problem if the code of behaviour is anything like the one represented by that survey. What I’m suggesting is that the way we talk about elite level sports and the men who play them embeds these notions of masculinity in our cultural awareness, that we create a kind of hegemonic masculinity that can be very harmful to all genders.

This hegemonic masculinity and success in sport very closely linked – traditionally in many countries and historically here, women were not allowed to play sports, which were seen as very masculine domains. Many sports, especially the most popular ones (rugby here in NZ, hockey in Canada, football in the States) are designed to be played by male bodies, and as such prize and take advantage of traits that are particular to male bodies: height, upper body strength, sheer physical mass. It’s also no coincidence that those three sports, the biggest and most popular in their respective countries, are also exceedingly violent by design – I guess it’s worth pointing out the military language that accompany many of these sports and the fact that historically sports were actually about war, and people died while playing the games or for losing them, and those origins are still reflected in the language we use to describe the game and commentate the play. So when we start talking about the relationship between success at a violent sport like rugby or football as contributing in some tangible way to one’s manliness, and that this particular kind of masculinity is the only one we value, we, culturally, together, continue to tie masculinity to violence.

Of course not all sports are committed to this hegemony to the same degree: as George points out, baseball doesn’t use this kind of language, and neither does cricket. But we do not tie our masculinity or national identity to cricket in quite the same way as we do to hockey, football, and particularly rugby. We are willing to overlook all kinds of unhealthy behaviours because they point to traits that are valued on the pitch, or because what happens on the field matters more than what occurs off of it. There are numerous examples that success in those sport is more important than development of healthy social identities – like that Fijian player who left the military to play in this last World Cup, or Richard Loe and the eye-gouging thing, or breaking that Aussie’s nose – lots of examples that if a player is good enough, all manner of negative or dangerous behaviour can be overlooked. I personally find this a bit tricky, because if we stop talking about sport and we talk about music instead, I have a slightly different opinion on the matter – no one knows what Michael Jackson did or did not do to those boys except the boys themselves, now, but damned if I’ll stop listening to MJ, you know? On some level I really do feel like someone’s personal problems do not preclude them from being successful artists, writers, musicians, or whatever, and that their artistic achievements can and should be separated from their personal shortcomings. But for some reason I don’t feel quite the same when it comes to sport – and again, that’s because we don’t tie the same kind of national identity to our music as we do our athletes – like we know MJ was American, but does he embody American national identity, in the way so much Kiwi identity is tied up in rugby and the All Blacks? I don’t know if we talk about them in the same way, and for cultural constructs like sport and music, the way the cultural discussion is framed is very relevant. And as it stands right now, power, violence, hardness, a lack of emotion, and a willingness to sacrifice your body for the play or for the team are all situated very firmly within the frame of manhood.

One of the most immediate indicators of the relationship in the popular mind between sport, violence, and masculinity is to examine the rates of domestic violence as related to sport events. There’s quite a bit of research being done on the violent actions of the players of violent sports off the court or out of the ring, obviously there have been a lot of fairly high-profile cases, people like Mike Tyson and obviously OJ Simpson. What’s less high-profile is the violence that occurs outside the game as well which is perpetrated by fans of the team – there are reports of spikes in domestic abuse, street violence, etc, when teams lose, particularly if those teams are expected to win. So this is what I was thinking about during all those world cup games -- normally I am an underdog supporter, because I don’t actually care who wins and an upset is more interesting than a game which closes 50 to nothing, you know? But the consequences for the women and children that live with the male fans of the team expected to win are far greater if that team loses. There are of course a number of causes for this kind of thing, namely the emphasis on alcohol consumption that accompanies the watching of the games, as well as the hyper-masculinity of rugby culture, which defines Kiwi culture to a not insignificant degree, and particularly for Kiwi men. I’ve spoken to the women at Rape Crisis Dunedin who also cite a rise in reporting in the weeks after the event due to the lag between the incident itself and the reporting of it. This is both violence perpetrated by the athletes themselves, once the game is over, and the violence of the spectators who view their manhood and their national identity as being specifically linked to the outcome of the game and the way it was played.

Sport being a social and cultural practice, there are all kinds of embedded assumptions about who gets to play what and when, how their involvement is viewed by the wider community, and the success or failure of particular demographics in particular sports. Work and leisure activities and the rights to them are divided along gender, class, and race lines – men are seen to do more productive work outside the home, and so are entitled to the leisure activity of sport, whereas work performed in the home, traditionally by women, affords no such leisure time and so participation in sport can be viewed as a waste of time, or at least less of a right. Or else sport is seen, for certain male demographics, as being relevant to their productivity, and so is less leisure than a honing of necessary and masculine skills, whereas women do not require and are discouraged from developing, those same traits of competitiveness, goal orientation, etc. Similarly with race – poor young black men playing basketball, say, can be viewed as either a waste of time that should be spent finding work, or the only way to escape the intergenerational poverty that is the birthright of so many. Because discussion about sports is tied up with our cultural assumptions about work and productivity, these conversations can be rather fraught.

But, gender likewise being a social construct, sport could potentially be a place where fixed notions of masculinity and femininity are re-examined and redefined, rather than affirmed and enforced.

This is where I think men’s place in feminism is – in the mentoring of other men to reject the kind of hyper-masculine, exclusive, usually violent view of manhood, which is harmful to all genders. There’s lots of research indicating that most men do not agree with domestic violence, obviously, but very few will speak out to or against another man they know to be engaged in it. Speaking out can be extremely difficult, of course, especially if it’s someone you look up to or who has more status or prestige within the organization, as evidenced by the silence with which 15 years of systematic predation and rape were met. This, to me, is the greatest shame, because bystander intervention and peer pressure is one of the few reliable ways to prevent and discourage rape and abuse. As it is overwhelming, though not exclusively, men who are perpetrating those acts of violence, bystander intervention is particularly effective when those bystanders are male. For a start, though, men could begin by not encouraging other men to make violent or rapey jokes, which have the opposite effect of bystander intervention, which is to normalize and encourage the idea that manliness is tied up with violence and power. It’s very difficult, I know, and there are always going to be times when you’ll have to pick your battles, you know – feminist women have known this for ever – but culture changes one thought at a time, and we just keep talking until the masculinity and femininity mean different things, until the conversations about changing the constructs are common knowledge. We could, all together, alter the prevailing definition of masculinity to include openness and respect instead of power and privilege, and I think we, all genders and orientations, would be better people for it.

Occupy Patriarchy

2011-11-06T15:04:00.000-08:00

Today I'd like to talk about something that’s been concerning me more and more lately, and that is the perception that the involvement of feminism and women’s rights groups in the occupation movement is divisive, that by bringing issues of female subjugation into the conversations taking place in the various global occupations we are somehow turning on our comrades, that we are trying to hijack the movement or steal the spotlight, that we’re being opportunistic and jumping on the bandwagon of the occupations in order to advance our feminist agenda.

Let’s start by outlining the ways in which inequality still persists in the OECD, where there seems to be a general consensus that complete equality is the norm and that any additional gains made by women would be overtaking men. On some level that is true, as a reallocation of power to achieve gender parity does require that men have less and women have more – not more than men, just more than we have now. And once again, so that I don’t get accused of saying ridiculous things like “men are like this and women are like this” - which, if you’re paying attention, is in fact the exact opposite of what i’m saying – when I say “men” and “women” I am referring to the social classes represented by each, the social construct of MALENESS versus the social construct of FEMALENESS, not necessarily your boyfriend or brother. Although your boyfriend or brother benefits from identifying with a construct which is afforded greater political, legal, economic, and cultural power, just as individual women suffer from identifying with a construct which is afforded less.

So the occupation movement worldwide, including here in Dunedin, whatever you may think of the look of the people occupying the Octagon, is about fighting the economic injustice of a system which funnels money and power to a very small minority of mostly white men at the expense of everyone else who is not part of that privileged few. That’s what the 99% references. So we’re talking about addressing poverty and hunger and political disenfranchisement, but for some reason we’re not allowed to talk about the gender makeup of poverty or hunger or political disenfranchisement. I’m not sure why that is, but it certainly does seem to be the case: we talk a great deal about the need to end poverty, in the states there’s a War on Poverty, global poverty is a cause that rallies people like no other – for example, in the UK in 2007 a world record was set when 43.7 million people participated in the event Take a Stand Against Poverty (www.standagainstpoverty.org), and 3 billion people watched the Live 8 concert series in 2005. But at no point was it discussed that of the 20% of the global population that lives on a dollar a day or less, 70% are female. Or that 2/3 of the world’s illiterates are women, or that women own 1% of the property and means of production in the world. As I’ve spoken about before, the equivalent of roughly half the global GDP is unpaid labour, of which 80% is performed by women in fields like child rearing, elderly care, and subsistence farming. In fact, it goes even deeper than that: while gender inequality persists in such dramatic levels, there can be very little headway made into the eradication of poverty. There are all kinds of statistics, like the fact that African children are 40% more likely to live past the age of five if their mothers have five years of primary education, that point to the fact that “discrimination against women is not only a consequence, but a cause of poverty” (Banyard, Kat. The Equality Illusion. London 2010). Women are overrepresented among the poorest, least educated, least healthy, and least enfranchised groups of people all over the world, including in places like New Zealand and Canada. Incidentally, in case you’re thinking it’s not so bad here, New Zealand has one of the highest levels of inequality in the OECD, and inequality itself leads to all kinds of bad things like recessions – I’ll talk a lot more about the effects of economic inequality in a few weeks, when I talk to Susan George about it.

So I could go on listing the ways in which women and children are the hardest hit by austerity measures, free trade agreements, and neoliberal economic policy, but I want to talk about the ways women are being treated within the occupation movement. It seems to me that there’s a growing backlash against what’s seen as the intrusion of feminism into a movement meant for everyone, as though women are not part of ‘everyone’. We’re accused of being divisive when we request that women’s voices be heard equally, that we give consideration to the needs of the LGBTI community or people of colour, as though excluding the voices of all those marginalized groups is not divisive, but pointing out that it’s happening is. I think that we can only move forward with this is we actually do agree to take everyone along, if we can acknowledge that the 99% is made up of a bunch of smaller percents, and that some of those percents overlap, and that many of those percents have been discriminated against on the basis of their membership in that percent. If we’re really talking about changing a system that is harmful and oppressive, we must also be talking about discouraging sexism, racism, and classism. Otherwise, it’s not a revolution, just a change in management.

There’s been one incident in particular that has caused a great deal of heated controversy that maybe you’ve heard about, and though I’m loath to give it any further attention I do think it highlights some significant issues. I’m talking about Steven Greenstreet’s website Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street, which I will not link to. This started as a single video of shots of beautiful, alternative-looking, admittedly racially diverse women in slow motion, with hazy hallmark music in the background and lingering shots on lowered eyelashes, collarbones, and hands running through hair, and it’s uncertain how many of those women gave their consent to be on camera. There was a great deal of backlash, obviously, to which Greenstreet responded by asking one feminist writer out on a date, for real, and making rape jokes such as this one, in response to a friend’s sarcastic comment about legitimizing the movement: “An erection legitimizes anything.” His friend replies, “Even rape?” Steven Greenstreet says, “It probably wouldn’t be rape without one.”

Now let’s be clear about one thing: I’m not saying you can’t look at beautiful women, or that going to a protest to meet someone is bad. A lot of people have come out in defense of the video on those grounds, and the fact that he focused on neckbones instead of boobs has made a lot of people see this is as celebratory rather than discriminatory. However, as Rebecca Traister and a million other feminist writers have pointed out:

“The larger, simpler argument, outside of consent or permission, is: This video is sexist. It’s an example of women participating in public life — political, professional, social — and having their participation reduced to sexual objectification. That’s what happened here, nothing more, nothing less.”

By focusing on their physical appearance, any aspect of it, the lovely or the sexy, Greenstreet and everyone else involved are undermining the reasons those women are protesting, their very real disenfranchisement. Basically it’s saying “Oh, look, she’s protesting, isn’t that cute.” It’s just one more reminder that for women, how seriously we are taken depends a great deal on how physically attractive we are – too unattractive and you never get to say your piece on camera; too attractive and you are ‘hot’ and nothing else.

It’s worth pointing out here that sexual assaults have happened at various occupations – here in Dunedin there was a series of verbal incidents that, even though they were talked out and teach-ins were agreed on, still made the space unsafe for the women at whom those comments were directed. And, I would argue, made the space less safe for women, full stop. In Cleveland an accusation of rape was dismissed as being politically motivated, as rape accusations so often are, and in Dallas when a girl was assaulted they discussed keeping girls under 18 out of the protest altogether, rather than address the assault itself. There was a gang rape in Glasgow, and Occupy Baltimore suggested that rape and assault victims not go to the police but to the occupation Security Committee instead. All these things are signs that the sexism inherent in economic injustice is not seen as worthy of addressing; that women’s subjugation continues to be marginalized as a ‘fringe cause’ or a special interest, instead of being at the very heart of the system the occupations are trying to challenge.

Because I'm obviously not the first person to notice this kind of behaviour, here are some links to really positive things that are being done to address the oppression within the movement itself and make it a truly inclusive movemet: Women Occupy, Occupy Patriarchy, Racalicious, and the All Peoples' Revolutionary Front are working tirelessly to make these conversations matter, and it might be working. Certainly women have never had the kind of platform or attention that speaking within the space of the occupations affords us, and there are a lot of people, male and female, who are using that space to widen and readdress conversations about the nature of power and privilege. All it requires is that everyone listens honestly to everyone who speaks honestly, and that all experiences and needs are acknowledged. Otherwise, what are we fighting for?

Eat Food. Not too Much. Mostly Plants (if you can find them in your neighbourhood, afford to buy them, and have the time to cook them)

2011-11-01T18:23:00.000-07:00

Listen to the interview with Dr. Marion Nestle of New York University on Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health.

The narrative that drives the food industry philosophy, like pretty much every other philosophy of contemporary capitalism, is one of personal choice and responsibility. It should be - but isn't - unnecessary to point out that the insistence on personal choice intentionally ignores the fact that there are such things as systems of law, distribution, education, economics, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and that those systems are constructed in ways which discriminate against certain groups of people. More than that, the dismissal of the influence of factors external to one's individual choice is a particularly subtle and insidious form of victim-blaming. To emphasize personal responsibility assumes that all possible choices are equally available to everyone, and all one has to do is decide which one to pursue. Implicit in that is the assertion that if you are in a difficult situation, whatever it may be - overweight, un- or under-employed, homeless - you are there specifically because of choices you have made autonomously, and therefore have no one to blame but yourself. This is the set-up required to talk about welfare and health care as "handouts", and it is how the food industry - again, like so many others - shifts the focus from their activities to their consumers'. From this springs the notion that, say, people on the dependents' benefit are "breeding for a business" (or, for that matter, the idea of the "frivolous lawsuit" or the "honeytrap" - both false ideas spread about who files lawsuits or rape allegations and why, both designed to undermine and silence the people casting the allegations, often already-marginalized groups like the elderly and women). Or, to bring it back to food, the demographics of people who are overweight.

Central to the success of the food industry narrative is the idea that there is no such thing as good food or bad good, it's all just food, and it is only about the choices you make about which foods to eat. I don't think it's controversial to assert that there are, in fact, good and bad food - or at least better food and worse food - and that limiting the worse food (fats and sugars) and eating lots of the better foods (fresh fruits and veg) is the key to a healthy diet. But the good foods we should be eating lots of tend to be the unprofitable ones, at least in the modern supermarket aisle: fresh, whole foods, by their very nature, have no added value, and added value is how profit is made. Processing foods adds value (potatoes cheap, chips expensive), and allows the companies to sell product for higher prices and contribute more of the share of that price to their advertising departments. This is particularly true with commodities like corn or soy, which are so heavily subsidized as to be almost free, and which, as a direct result of those subsidies, are massively, unfathomably abundant. They become the food equivalent of stem cells; they can be made into pretty much anything, and they can be sold for cheap cheap cheap and still make an enormous profit.

Also, the further from its original state a food gets, the less nutritious it becomes, and that includes preserving and even cooking. I'm not suggesting we all start raw diets tomorrow - I could not live without cake or red curry - but have you ever thought about why processed food stays edible for longer? Processing or preserving food makes it keep longer because it is less nutritious to the organisms that eat it and make it go bad. That's why McDonald's fries or Twinkies will keep forever: they hold no nutritional appeal to mould or bacteria, which simply don't recognize them as food. They are literally not food. From here on in, I will therefore refer to them, as Michael Pollan suggests, as edible food-like substances.

There is a direct relationship between weight and wealth, and that has always been true for very obvious reasons (aside: check out the differences in results when you google "weight and wealth" versus "poverty and obesity"). In times when food is scarce, which has been the vast majority of human history, being fat is a sign of wealth and success. However, in our contemporary abundance, that relationship reverses, so that thinness becomes the domain of the wealthy, and poverty becomes the single most reliable correlative of poverty. There's a great deal of research backing this up, and it reveals quite a complicated relationship between weight and income: one 2005 study compares the rates of obesity to income disparity over 21 developed countries and finds that the greater the social inequality, the higher the obesity rates, leading the authors to conclude that the relationship is due to the "psychosocial impact of living in a more hierarchical society". But there are problems of correlation versus causation, so let's flesh out the conclusion with some of the other contributing factors, namely, the beauty bias which stigmatizes people who are overweight. For example, as Deborah Rhodes outlines in her book the Beauty Bias, people who are overweight are less likely to have a lot of friends or be respected in their peer group; they are less likely to marry and have children; they get lower grades; they are less likely to land a job and they will be paid less for the jobs they get. They are also, obviously, more likely to suffer from health problems, which also impacts job performance, and they are less likely to seek medical attention for these problems. These factors, in conjunction with food industry marketing initiatives which specifically aim to sell the highest-calorie, lowest-nutrition edible food-like substances specifically to low-income families, conflate to perpetuate and extend a deeply unequal, strictly hierarchical society, which keeps poor people fat, and fat people poor.

Talk About Technology

2011-10-02T17:32:00.000-07:00

Too Fat For Our Pants airs on Radio One, 91FM Dunedin, on Mondays from 10 - 12.
Listen to the full show, including music and interviews, here.

I had a bit of a time writing this show, partly because the sun was shining and I was stuck inside writing with a post-Onefest hangover, and I live downtown so I could hear all the Rugby World Cup to-do, bands playing and people cheering, but also because discussions about significant new pieces of technology are always, have always been, very fraught. Writing this felt like a minefield more than any other topic I’ve covered yet – mostly because I tend to deal in grievous examples, so I’m always reasonably certain of which side of the fence I’m on and why. But technology in the broadest sense of the word has been such a mixed blessing that you have to be sort of circumspect and broad of vision in order to honestly examine the utility and social impact of whatever new tool is under discussion. A lot of the tension around the acceptance of new inventions and new technologies has to do with the interrelatedness of the history of technology and the history of work; the function of technology being the efficient performance of tasks formerly done less efficiently by humans, mistrust of technology was based on a fear of usurpation. Labourers having only their physical labour to sell, the invention of a machine that does their job faster and cheaper in most cases costs them their livelihood. And work – who does what for whom, for how much and how often – has a great deal to do with power and money. So you can’t talk about the history or philosophy of technology without at least implicitly pointing to the history or philosophy of both power and economics.

I’ve been finding lately, in popular discourse, at least, as opposed to say academic or industrial, conversations around new inventions are very often either technophilic or technophobic – that is, they posit whatever piece of new technology they examine as being either our salvation or our damnation. I think it’s obvious how we arrived at this kind of dialectic, both as a general moving-to-the-edges of popular discussion about anything, and the fact that we are in the throes of the third industrial revolution in 150 years, and facing, as a result, problems of a magnitude never before faced by humanity, namely climate change. So just like many other discussions, with such high stakes and so little time, the tone tends a little towards the hysterical and extreme. On one end you have what James Kunstler calls techno-narcissism, I like techno-triumphalism or techno-utopianism, but either way it describes a near-religious faith in the infinitude of technological possibility. If we can imagine it, we can create it, and we will be able to build a technological solution to any conceivable problem facing humanity. The extreme end of this already pretty extreme view is the notion of the singularity, which is the inevitable melding of the human brain with a computer until we all live in a beautiful shiny computopia, but the faith in technology’s ability to save us is fairly widespread. It includes ideas like the ones held by economist Jeffrey Sachs, who believes that we will be able to genetically modify plants to be resistant to climate change. Ha, that’s one of those grievous examples I like so much; I find that notion to be just criminally stupid. But that idea, like the others, rests on the idea that new technology will be able to correct our problems, and if we don’t have it yet, we will come up with something. So it is, at bottom, faith in the exceptionalism of human ingenuity, the belief that we have infinite capacity for creative invention and innovation. And if we also had infinite time and resources, that faith might be justifiable, but alas, we do not. The other fairly problematic assumption at the heart of the techno-triumphalist narrative is the conflation of “newer” with “better”, implicit in which are the conflations of “faster” “smaller” or “more efficient” with “better”. That is not to say that making things faster or smaller has not had positive effects, just that they are not inherently positive traits. Same goes for “newness”; lots of new things have been great, but their newness is not what makes them so. Technophilia points to a belief that our quality of life can, will, and should continue to go up and up with each new invention, and that new is inherently an improvement on old.

On the other side of the coin is technophobia, the belief that technology has fundamentally altered our human environment, to our detriment, and that a retreat from technology is necessary to rescue our humanity. It’s an essentialist view that the technological is inherently opposed to the human, a postmodern critique that

“claims that information and communication technologies are taking us into the sphere of [Beaudrillardian] hyperreality . . . and that we are losing touch with our bodies, with nature, with other people and with focal things and practices … these liberal and humanist critiques of technology follow Heidegger [and later Marx] in perceiving modern technology primarily as instruments of domination and as threatening individual freedom, autonomy, and creativity. From this optic, the new technologies are imprisoning us in a technological cage … and reducing human life to mere instrumentality, while alienating us from nature, other people, possibilities of self-development, and being itself.”

(Dr. Douglas Kellner)

So this idea of alienation requires the implicit acceptance of two false dichotomies. The first is the idea that there existed a former unity, a wholeness, that has been fractured by technology. There’s an almost biblical undertone, here, particularly with regards to our separation from nature, which kind of hints at the lost wholeness of the garden of eden. The other is the idea that technology is taking people away from “real life”, that they are losing touch with reality because of their use of technology: implicit here is the separation between your activities online and off as belonging to two separate spheres of reality, and that the online one is inherently lesser than the offline one. It posits the relationships formed, or the knowledge gleaned, as less valuable, that there is only one kind of connection that is valid. If we want to get really abstract, I would suggest that modern humans have always been alienated from nature by dint of self-awareness and reflexivity, that rationality itself alienated humans from nature. We mediate nature through rationality, and so must “understand technology – just as for example language, institutions or ethics – as a way of mediating the natural order” (that's Kellner again). But maybe that’s going a bit far.

Remember in the 90s when the Prodigy broke and everyone started talking about the end of guitar music? Or also in the 90s, when we started using debit cards and we were on the brink of a paperless society? Or Francis Fukuyama talking about the end of history? None of those things, obviously, were true, and talking about modern digital technology is not going to mean the end of community or the end of face to face relationships, as the fear of alienation indicates. As Jason Benlevi, my interview today, points out in his book, when TV was invented, Hollywood was afraid that people would stop going to movie theatres. At the time their response was to make their movie theatres an inimitable experience, but no matter what advances have been made with television, people still go to the movies. When recorded music was popularized, there was widespread concern that people would no longer go to concerts, and much of the concern around the internet is that young people no longer gather in groups, but are isolated in front of their computers or tablet screens. While there’s not no validity to this, we are, as i’ve said a million times before, social primates, and we need that human connection. People still go to parties, go out to dinner together, gather together in groups to interact. As Edward Glaeser notes, a few decades of the internet are not going to outgun millions of years of evolution. Economist Ha-Joon Chang points out that we have a tendency to view the most recent technological invention as being the most impactful, so it might surprise you to learn that it’s widely accepted that the washing machine had more of an effect on the way we live our day-to-day lives than the internet has. The washing machine, and the other small household appliances that it represents, freed women from a great deal of the time-consuming labour of housekeeping and facilitated their entry into the workforce. That’s a pretty major shift, which we tend now not to recognize. This is not to say that the internet will not, in time, come to be seen as having had an equally significant effect, but just that it will not wrest from us the things that make us human, namely, our interdependence and reliance on community. In Triumph of the City, Glaeser notes that the rise of the internet has been accompanied by a renewed interest in urbanization, and that the last few decades have seen a renaissance in downtown city living. This is, of course, due to a number of factors: a backlash against post WWII suburbanization and isolation; decreased public transportation and rising cost of private transportation, elimination of heavy industry from the city centres, making them nicer places to live; the increasing ability to live and work distantly via the internet, etc etc. But all those factors add up to a picture of people becoming more connected, not less, both physically and on the internet.

The instrumentalist view of technology posits the notion that technology is a neutral tool, it is not inherently good or bad – well, I suppose weaponry would be the exception to that. This is the view I tend towards, mostly because it’s the view put forth by Noam Chomsky and it’s pretty hard to disagree with that guy, but it can be tricky as well: talking about technology in purely instrumentalist terms also kind of rests on a narrative of individualism, and can overlook that technology is also a major constitutive force of contemporary social reality. Noam Chomsky compares the internet to a hammer – you can use the hammer to build a house, good, or to hit someone on the head, bad. There is nothing inherent in the hammer which favours one activity over the other. This is a fairly anthropological view, and he’s in good company, but it does tend to overlook the social impacts of technology. You can’t separate the technology from the society and culture in which it is created and utilized, and you can’t ignore the fact that the society and culture is being created, likewise, by the technology. Any productive critical theory of technology must also take into account the socio-economic conditions at the time of invention, how cultural biases or systemic discrimination might enter into the design or utility of a particular piece of technology itself. Social context in which a piece of technology is produced is going to impact the way it’s used once it’s been disseminated – for example, computers created by, and in the beginning were used almost exclusively by, relatively young, white, middle class males, and so inevitably that particular cultural standpoint is going to be included in the technology itself.

In the end, I think, what’s required is a sort of case-by-case analysis of the potential utility of a piece of technology – I’m talking from a theoretical standpoint of social criticism, not a regulatory or legislavtive one. It can be very difficult to figure out if a piece of technology is good or bad, or even what that means, as the traits that point to one or the other are often related, and this is where the instrumentalist view comes from: the internet is full of vitriol and hatred and violent porn, and love and resistance and kittens. The process of creation is deeply embedded in humanity, we are tool-makers, which makes any conversation about technology extremely complicated and difficult. We are altered by our technology, created by it in the same way that it is created by us – it has so deeply informed the way we have formed our societies and social institutions. The fact that it is created by humans for our use does not mean that the act of creating it, the process of invention, as well as its tangible effects, are not intrinsic to our humanity.

Next week - Raj Patel!

Enlightened Sexism and Erotic Capital

2011-09-25T16:42:00.000-07:00

Too Fat for Our Pants airs on Radio One, 91FM, Dunedin, on Mondays from 10 - 12.

Listen to the whole show, including interviews and music, here.

Today I talked about and interviewed Dr. Susan J. Douglas about her latest book, Enlightened Sexism: the Seductive Message that Feminism's Work is Done.

By way of introduction to Dr. Douglas’s work and why work like it is relevant, I want to talk about another book that has recently been released by another female academic, this one at the London School of Economics, Dr. Catherine Hakim. Maybe you’ve come across this one already, as it’s raising some hackles among feminist writers and critics: it’s called Honey Money: the Power of Erotic Capital. The crux of Dr. Hakim’s argument is that having erotic capital is at least equal in importance to having other, established forms of individual capital: monetary capital, obviously, but also social capital like networks and friends in high places, and human capital, which is intelligence potentiated by education. Erotic capital, to Hakim, is comprised of a number of amorphous attributes, things like “liveliness”, which I reckon in the 60s would have been called “spunk” or “vivacity” and is meant to imply a certain lightheartedness, an unconcernedness of humour, and is certainly not meant to include, say, impassioned political involvement. Indeed the phrasing rules out any kind of activism, particularly of the feminist variety, as that implies, for Hakim, a lack of humour, a stodginess, a decided lack of vivacity. She did not coin the term, but claims that she has broadened its meaning from simple sex appeal to include other traits like charm, the aforementioned liveliness, and actual sexual expertise. Though she insists that her definition is not reliant on sexuality, despite the actual terms of the definition being decidedly sexual, to my mind and the minds of most other critics who’ve read this book, “erotic capital” is basically “things about you that make men want to fuck you”.

Catherine Hakim goes on to defend her idea of “erotic capital” using possibly single most problematic cultural idea we hold, partly because it’s so pervasive and taken so often as objective truth, but also because it is the platform on which all manner of unsavoury cultural practices rest. That is the idea that men want sex from women, and women want sex a lot less from men. She terms it the “sex-deficit”, and it may sound harmless enough, and you might find yourself agreeing with it – but the premise extends to include the idea that therefore, men cannot always be held responsible for the deeds and acts that their intense, constant, barely-restrained lust for sex with women drives them to commit. And from there, that women are responsible for protecting themselves against men’s wanton sexuality, and that leads to everything from a culture that tells women not to walk alone because men will rape them to the burqa, which is designed to serve the same function. Underlying all this is the notion that men want sex from women so badly, and so much more than women do, that not only can they not control their urges, but they should not be expected to. Of course this is all bollocks, and dangerous bollocks at that, but it’s important groundwork to get to Hakim’s main point: all those “truths” about the relative intensity of male and female sexual desire endow women with the power over men that we should be exploiting. Women should make sure they’re good looking, sexually appealing, lighthearted, and implicitly but not explicitly sexual available, in order to manipulate those men into thinking they might get some and will therefore be more likely to give that woman a raise.

The real, pernicious message of Hakim’s book is actually not Hakim’s idea at all, which is partly why it’s so real and pernicious. Hakim states is explicitly, but it is stated implicitly in pretty much every media message we receive: that women’s true power, the real empowerment, the real liberation, comes from our sex appeal, our looks, our erotic capital. The real way to equality, in fact the way to female dominance, is to be sexy, to spend untold amounts of money on the way we look and the clothes we wear, in order to get men to think about doing it, which they care a lot about but we don’t care about at all. So we have the bargaining power, here, because women have something men want, and the sexier we are, the more revealing our clothes, the more enticing our perfumes, the more men will succumb, slavering, to our control. This is, obviously, a disgusting representation of both masculinity and femininity which is harmful to both, but, as with all these conversations and for the same reason, much more destructive to women. Here’s why: while this is not a healthy representation of maleness, it is not paired with systemic discrimination against men that is so embedded it’s nearly invisible. To wit: in 2007, the top five jobs for women in the Global North were, in order, secretaries, nurses, elementary school teachers, cashiers, and retail salespeople. In the top twenty were also maids, child care workers, office clerks, and hairdressers. There is also the fact that women are hugely over-represented among the poorest classes, the least healthy, the least enfranchised members of the population. Now, either, you believe that there is something inherent in women that renders them unfit for actual power, that in the marketplace of life there is something that inheres in women that keeps them at the bottom of the chain. And if you go this route you also have to insist that there is something deficient in people of colour, be they of African, Mexican, Maori or Pacific Islands extraction, because those groups are also disproportionately represented among the poorest classes. And a woman of colour, pfft. And if you don’t want to cop to that, because that would obviously make you the worst kind of racist, sexist asshole, then you have to, therefore, acknowledge that there must be greater, more fundamental structures in place that maintain a status quo that values the constructs of Maleness and Whiteness at the expense of the multitude of Othernesses that status quo creates. If we can at least all agree on that we could maybe get somewhere productive.

So now we come to Dr. Douglas and her close reading of media, mainly TV and advertising, which shaped her twin conceptions of enlightened sexism and embedded feminism. These two ideas rely on one another for mutual reinforcement, and both require some definition, so, embedded feminism first. Because there’s no denying that feminism has made some serious inroads, that we are much closer to at least superficial equality, if not necessarily true equality, than we ever have been before, some feminist ideas are embedded in our cultural narrative. So we are presented, mainly in time slots and in tv programming geared towards women of the second-wave feminist generation, affirmation that their goals have been fulfilled, that feminism succeeded. These programs, things like Law and Order, CSI, even Grey’s Anatomy or House, portray strong, fearless women, women in positions of extraordinary power that they wield with no compunction, encountering almost no opposition based on their genders whatsoever. These women often speak like drill sergeants, they are scathing, cutting, hyper-intelligent, and frequently emotionless, and they have complete control of their underlings or residents or criminal suspects. This is embedded feminism; this presentation of women as having completely succeeded, on all fronts, in the struggle for equality. We really can have it all, now, this presentation suggests, as it rarely portrays those women struggling to balance their careers and their personal lives – quite often they do not have any at all. So on the one hand it is suggested that women can be equal to men in terms of power dynamics, but that this equality comes at a price: they are often cold, loveless, even bitchy, and so the message becomes quite mixed and confusing. Yes, you can have some real power, but if this is what it takes, do you really want it?

The answer to that question, as suggested by enlightened sexism, is a resounding NO. Sure, you could work your tail off and become a high-powered lawyer or a police chief, but you’ll have to sacrifice your personal life and people will probably think you’re a bitch. Because the gains of feminism cannot be ignored, they are instead held up as both platitude and warning: you’ve already succeeded, women already have all kinds of power and can do anything they want – and then, whispered, but you’ll have to pay for it.

Enlightened sexism relies on embedded feminism to show women how far we’ve come, how successful feminism has been – because, since we are so equal now, and women are so powerful, there’s surely no harm in resurrecting some very insulting and dangerous conceptions of femininity, as long as it’s done with a wink. It’s ok that we continue to insist, louder and louder, that women are to be judged by how thin and beautiful they are, because there’s no more struggle for women to be taken seriously. As Dr Douglas says, “enlightened sexism is meant to make the patriarchy pleasurable for women”.

From there this sort of ironic distance that’s created, whereby we the audience are meant to be in on the joke too, and the joke is that sexism is funny on tv because it obviously no longer exists in real life. This is how we end up with shows like Extreme Makeover, that one about helping a millionaire find a wife, the Bachelor, the Swan – where they actually did an enormous amount of plastic surgery on the people who participated – and a resurgence of magazines like Maxim and FHM. It may seem like those have always been there, but they are much, much more prevalent now than they were even in the 90s. Oh! It’s just like that stupid scene in Inception, which I thought was a terrible movie, just for the record – the one where Leonardo does that risky thing that involves alerting the dreamer to the fact that he’s dreaming, which is dangerous because then they know they’re dreaming, but he uses that danger to his own advantage. This is just like that – the media use the risky tactic of pointing out feminism, but they use it to further embed stereotypes of feminism and the cost it exacts while pointing the way to the cosmetics counter as a much better option.

And just like embedded feminism has its sneaky whisper that, while women are equal now, they don’t really want this kind of power, enlightened sexism too whispers that sexual power is the kind that women really want. The power of wearing beautiful and expensive clothes and jewelry is the kind of power that won’t make Men uncomfortable, that they’ll even get behind and help you achieve. And underlying that message, of course, is the insistence that real feminism is, actually, bad, that its harmful to both men and women, and that it’s much more fun and much more empowering to look great, dress well, and be thin and beautiful and sexy. So because feminism has already achieved all its goals – just look at all these accomplished, successful women! – it’s now ok again to insist that they way they look is the only aspect of women that matters, and we can talk more and more openly about women as sex objects. And anyway, it’s as sex objects that women are truly powerful, and we don’t want that other kind of power – that we’ve already got anyway – because it will make us withered and bitter and men won’t want us. How on earth are women supposed to navigate that minefield?

The Mighty Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (and how it's going to screw us)

2011-09-18T18:28:00.000-07:00

Too Fat For Our Pants airs on Radio One, 91FM Dunedin. Listen to the whole show, including music and interviews, here.

Listen to the interview with Jane Kelsey here.

The Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement is an extension of an agreement signed initially between New Zealand, Singapore, Brunei and Chile and has now grown to include eight countries, the most significant addition being, of course, the United States. The other countries are Australia, Brunei, Chile, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam, with Malaysia and Canada hanging around looking eager. Between these 8 countries there are 12 separate Free Trade Agreements already in existence, and this agreement deepens those commitments. If you are over 40 and this sounds familiar to you, it is – this is basically a a stronger, scarier, secreter version of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, which was already defeated in NZ in the 1990s.

Being a free trade deal, it is primarily about deregulation, the belief in which is predicated on a number of beliefs that have been disproven over and over again. The first, of course, is a belief in the rationality of the unhindered market, which itself rests on the article of faith that prices are inherently meaningful and accurate. They are not, obviously, they are skewed by innumerable factors, including the kinds of economic activity that are recognized by the market in the first place, the cultural narrative which informs people’s conception of what is necessary, which then impacts demand for a given commodity, and that narrative is further skewed by advertising. Further to that, we price commodities by their ‘value in trade’, as opposed to their ‘value in use’, (I don't get all my information from Wikipedia, it's just the easiest place to get that kind of specific, concise explanation.) which is inherently subject to the influence of advertising and politics, and is how we’ve arrived at a pricing model that has diamonds costing a fortune and, I don’t know, batteries costing pocket change. Of course all this is true without even talking about government subsidies, business lobbies, and trade agreements which impact market price.

Hillary Clinton openly calling the goal of this agreement “regulatory coherence” - this is a euphemism for deregulation, which is the kind of regulation with which all signatories would need to cohere. I can’t believe we don’t have enough evidence that all deregulation does is concentrate capital in a few huge multinational hands, and that those hands do not then redistribute it. There’s a great analogy in Inside Job, a documentary about the lead up and causes of the US financial crash in 2008, which describes the economy like an oil tanker: regulation are the compartment walls that keep the oil relatively evenly distributed in the holding container; when you start to remove them the oil all sloshes to one end and the tanker sinks. There’s some growing support for the notion that economic inequality is at least one significant cause of financial crises and recessions, and it makes some intuitive sense to me: The economy grows through transaction, right; economics is activity. Money you are saving does not contribute to the growth of the economy because it isn’t moving. And this is actual movement I mean, not the movement of special financial tools and mortgage packages and credit default swaps, because that kind of movement, as we should all know by now, leads to bubbles of fake money, a falsely growing economy, that will crash eventually. When so much is concentrated in the hands of so few, the kind of numbers those few are holding onto are so astronomically large that you couldn’t possibly spend it all if you dedicated your life to it. Political economist Robert Reich makes this example in his book Aftershock: Kenneth Lewis, the CEO of Bank of America, earned $100 million in one year, 2007. “To spend it all, Lewis would have had to buy $273 972.60 worth of goods and services every day that year, including weekends. If he had devoted twelve waking hours a day to the tast, he’d have had to spend $22 832 every hour, $380.52 every minute.” Of course he did not spend all that money, and that was just one year. After the first big rush of excitement and novelty, you just don’t spend all that much, as a percentage of your wealth – having a lot less money in the hands of a lot more people, people who will spend all that money regularly, would do much more to grow the economy than making sure we still have rich people. The economy is movement, and the rich compile. The poor spend.

This principle also debunks the notion that what’s good for business is good for the country, which is, from what I can tell, at the heart of New Zealand’s interest in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement – they want Fonterra to have access to US dairy markets. Besides the widespread consensus that there’s no way the states is going to open up their already flooded dairy market to foreign companies - even if they wanted to, the US dairy lobby is massively powerful - business and the country have pretty opposing interest. What’s good for business is a healthy bottom line and a lot of money tied up in those financial services that look like economic fuel, but we know unequivocally now are not. What’s good for the country is heavy economic regulation and aggressive redistribution of wealth to ensure lots of concrete transactions, which are actually what fuel the economy.

But, none of this, to me, is the most sinister part. What bothers me the most about all of this is not the continued emphasis on neoliberalism, though I do find that just baffling, it’s the fact that all these talks have taken place under such heavy guard, with such towering degrees of secrecy. I won’t be the first person to suggest that this is being done on purpose because if the people who live in New Zealand knew the details of the arrangement and what they meant, we wouldn’t stand for it. And THAT’S what we should be worried about. This is a fundamentally, inherently undemocratic situation, from the clauses in the agreements that could disallow future governments to rescind unpopular or even harmful sections to the supreme secrecy of the talks themselves. And while this shouldn’t, if you’ve been paying attention, surprise you, it should enrage you. You should be furious at the governments’ willingness to disregard democratic process and frightened of the ease with which democracy was outmaneuvered.

Given the methods with which these talks are being conducted, I’m skeptical of the kinds of democratic action I would usually advocate: there are petitions – there’s one up here right now – and there have been letters sent to the PM by dozens of high profile signatories, but as the government won’t even tell us what the talks involve it seems unlikely that our unsolicited input will be given due consideration. But the practice of democracy is as important to us as citizens as it is to the health of the democratic process – you kind of have to teach yourself how to get involved. You could get the word around all your networks, facebook pages, websites and media; ssk your MPs, local government and iwi leaders if they know what’s going on; demand the government holds an inquiry to bring the negotiations into the daylight. Make sure YOU know what’s going on – there are lots of places to go for this information, and I highly recommend reading Jane Kelsey’s book No Ordinary Deal.

However, I also agree with a number of pundits who see this whole agreement as being too ambitious and too fraught to be enacted any time in the near future. That does not mean that we’re out of the woods, here; it means that we must learn from this how fragile any democracy is, and how much citizen involvement it requires to work properly. We’ve been convinced for years that the extent of our involvement in democracy is to show up at the polls every few years and we can then be satisfied that we are participating. Of course the only entity that benefits from that narrative is a corrupt government; it certainly isn’t us, the people who live here. We have to wake up, we have to start paying better attention; I know it can be difficult and we have so many more pressing concerns, so many of us are out of work, and we think that politics is something we can’t afford to spare time or thought to. But this isn’t about politics, necessarily; politics are about ideology. This is about fairness, and justice, and taking care of one another, and a genuine desire to make sure everyone is fed, and clothed, and safe, and can make a productive living; these are issues of human rights which have been dragged into the political realm in order to make them distasteful and divisive. Don’t fall for it. We are smarter than they give us credit for; let’s make them remember that.

Urban Highways, Biodiversity, and the Velvet Worm

2011-09-11T19:32:00.000-07:00

Today's show is about the widening of the Caversham Valley Highway and what affect it will have on the velvet worm, the peripatus, in whose habitat the road will now extend. The peripatus is a very important scientific discovery: there is a great deal of international interest in the entomological community over the possibility that this creature represents a whole new phylum, and it has been suggested to be the missing link between worms and arthropods. It looks like it may have been the first creature to walk, though on the whole very little is known about these very rare and secretive little things. Whatever those debates, though, it is certain that the peripatus represents a genetic structure that has remained virtually unchanged for somewhere in the neighbourhood of 500 million years. To put that in some perspective, the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, and the Tuatara, the ‘living fossil’, has been around for 225 million years.

Many of the South Island peripatus live in a chunk of privately owned property beside the Caversham Valley Highway, which is slated for four-laning starting this year, and where I was invited to go along on friday afternoon. Dave has been managing his property for 25 years to be amenable to peripatus populations, and the result is an incredible tangle of native bush and exotic implants, and a lot of bush lawyer, which also helps house one of the most extensive bird populations on the South Island.

Ok, so let’s talk about the NZTA plan to make a two-lane road into a four-lane one, add an overpass, and increase the speed limit from 50 to 60 km/h.

First of all, widening the roads worst idea ever. Though the plan does call for cycling lanes and sidewalks as well as a wider, faster highway, the priority of the NZTA is to the speed and capacity of the roads, by their own admission, and that makes it significantly less safe or enjoyable for people who are not in cars. If you’ve ever ridden your bike in the lanes that run down the one-way south of the octagon, you know that just painting some lines on the side of an urban highway does not make a safe ride. Street must be planned and constructed to move as many people as possible, not just to move cars as fast as possible, and that means fewer cars moving more slowly, in narrower lanes, with more people on foot, bikes, and public transportation. This emphasis on speed and capacity points to this very American equation of physical mobility with economic prosperity, an assumption which has always been deeply flawed and is now becoming downright dangerous.

And the issue they are trying to address, the reduction of traffic and congestion, will not be solved by adding more lanes. All research points to the fact that more lanes means more traffic, that the traffic will inflate, like gas, to fill the available space. More lanes means faster moving traffic, which means greater distance between cars, which means they take up more space, which means that more lanes did not mean more space. Seattle has just completed a massive study of the phenomenon, if you’re interested in the first hand research. So basically all this will accomplish is to make a moderately uncomfortable urban road into a much faster-moving, equally congested four-lane urban highway.

Even if you don’t buy the arguments about the social damage caused by such isolation that a culture of driving imbeds, or the damage to the environment caused by ever-increasing demand for fossil fuels, or the aesthetic issues that big highways through the middle of towns are stupid and ugly, there is always the cost. It’s a completely backward financial decision to emphasize private car use over public transportation, which costs a fraction of road maintenance, especially in an economic situation like the one we find ourselves in now. We are short of funds and resources, and you’d think it would be in almost everyone’s best interests to use those remaining to us in the most significant, valuable, impactful way possible – which I would argue would be laying down lines for a national rail system and commissioning a bunch of trains built from New Zealand factories. NZTA is spending 4.5 billion over 3 years to upgrade the national highway system, and is simultaneously cutting the public transportation budget from 1.7 to .8 % of the road transport budget. Building a rail network would create jobs, at least as many jobs as does the commissioning of roadworks, and the product we’re left with is not a dangerous relic of a bygone era that we just refuse to see our way around.

For Dave Randle, this is really about the importance we assign to urban biodiversity. Dave wants the peripatus fight to be a flagship for a new discussion about local stewardship for urban conservation, and as I’m all about making things abstract, for me it raises questions about how we even begin to talk about urban biodiversity in a culture which still privileges humans over nature. Part of this fight, at least implicitly, is about debunking this outdated notion that humans and nature are two separate conversations, and more and more often, that they are opposed to one another. Cities exist in nature – reliant on and informed by the geography, climate, and biodiversity of the place they grow up. Urban conservation activists, Dave Randle among them although I don’t think he would phrase it in this way, seek to actively induce a paradigm shift away from this duality of human and nature. You hear this kind of rhetoric a lot in American politics, and increasing here as well: "My opponent cares about polar bears, I care about the people." So that conservation regulations and emissions caps are talked about as being anti-people, that they are job-killers, as though there is some kind of impermeable separation between polar bears and people, and that any concern for one must necessarily come at the expense of the other. Of course we are part of nature; we are interconnected with everything else on the planet, we eat the food that grows from the ground, we breathe the air and drink the water, and just because we also invented iphones doesn’t mean those facts become irrelevant.

I’m inclined to see this, as i’m inclined to see so many of our modern ills, as an issue of economic philosophy – Richard Heinberg mentioned that one of the more subtle and sinister aspects of modern capitalism is the conflation of nature with capital. When economics first emerged as a discipline, the market was agreed to have been made up of labour, capital, and land, indicating all natural resources. At some point around the beginning of the 20^th century, nature became subsumed under capital, so that we ceased to view natural resources as an economic pillar in their own right and began to see them as having value only as capital – that is, when they were extracted and sold. Greater attention to urban conservation and biodiversity could encourage us to revisit our place in the natural world and address our deeply flawed assignations of value at the same time.

Ecological restoration and conservation needs to be about changing the way we interact with nature – it’s not about leaving nature alone to take over the cities, which are wholly terrible and destructive things. There is no such thing as a zero-impact existence – indeed nature would not function if there were. It’s self-defeating and absolutist to talk about zero carbon, or to believe that all human interaction is inherently destructive – conservation is as much about responsible management as it is about treading lightly. Ecological sustainability does not require the removal of humans from the environment, it depends upon the restoration of our actual physical relationship with the rest of the natural world.

More people live in urban than rural areas for the first time ever in history, and urban natural areas are the way those people can still have some connection with nature. Life in concrete can be dehumanizing, having access to a place where nature thrives in the midst of all represents a way to maintain respect for the local watershed, soil conditions, agriculture – knowledge leads to respect which leads to pride, which leads to more people caring about the place they live. That can only make that place better and better to live in.

It probably comes as no surprise that I would advocate for a local, community movement of restoration and conservation of urban and semi-urban biodiversity. As with most other issues I talk about on this show, I do believe that the solution is increased interconnectedness, or at least increased awareness of it, to combat the narrative of hyper-individuality and isolation that we’ve been taught for years. We require stronger community network which, in the concise words of the San Francisco urban biodiversity group Nature in the City:

- physically stewards our natural areas and local biodiversity,

- educates the public about local nature and our interconnectedness with the global environment,

- advocates for stronger legal ecosystem protection and more comprehensive ecological restoration, and

- embodies a healthy culture of proactive, positive and restorative ecological stewardship, which becomes how we humans interact with our environment.

We learned that we were separate from nature, so that we came to see ourselves as separate from nature. It would be just as simple a process to learn that we are connected to each other, and to nature, so that we come to see the natural world as an extension of ourselves. That is how we will come to live sustainably and harmoniously, and no other way.

Agrarian Urbanism and Food Sovereignty

2011-09-04T18:45:00.000-07:00

How Food Bill 160-2 threatens New Zealand food sovereignty and Andres Duany on Agrarian Urbanism, a development model which is likewise threatened under 160-2. Click here for the petition to oppose the bill.

First, an update: For those of you who have been following the protests and arrests in Washington over the proposed Keystone XL Oil pipeline, Friday Sept 2^nd was the final day for those protests, and we now must wait for the Executive Order, which will or will not be signed by the end of the year (see here for industry information, here for sanity and not-lies). This debate is being framed mostly as a "foreign-vs-friendly" oil debate, which, in conjunction with the U.S. State Department's squeaky-clean environmental assessment, makes me think that this thing is going to go ahead. Obama has also recently come out strongly in favour of jobs, as opposed to the environment, by lifting a bunch of emissions controls and citing the need to cut regulations on businesses to encourage job growth. And if this massive, destructive, deadly energy source creates some jobs, who are we to oppose? To my mind, this is concrete proof, if it were still needed, that Obama is no more liberal than Bush, and is in fact considerably less so than Nixon and Reagan. Go team.

Anyway, today I aired an interview with Andres Duany, an American architect whose company has been developing new ways of planning and building cities to be comfortable for both the people who live in them and the environment in which they exist, and which you can listen to here. I also want to talk about something else that happened on Friday Sept 2^nd, something that affects New Zealand much more directly, if no less seriously, than the pipeline: the second reading of Food Bill 160-2. They sound disparate, an American architect and a kiwi food bill, but they are related in their connection to the same sweeping resolution: the Codex Alimentarius.

First, the Food Bill. This is a particularly frightening and constrictive piece of legislation that is virtually guaranteed to pass, as it is sprung, fully formed, from the head of the Codex Alimentarius, a FAO/WHO resolution of which New Zealand is a signatory. It is unclear to me whether we even have the option of saying no at this point, as we have already said yes.

Basically, the bill is aimed at regulating outlets of food distribution – including farm stalls, farmer’s markets, community gardens, CSA schemes, and lemonade stands. So anywhere which sells, barters, or gives away food will need to be certified and regulated, a process which is vague and expensive, and is inherently biased towards large global agribusiness and against small local farms. Small outfits will simply not be able to afford the price of admission, the registration fees, and the registration can be denied, even for cottage industries. The vagueness in wording means that the decision to certify or not is up to the discretion of the certifying agent, and as such this bill has the potential to criminalize the sale of food from anywhere but corporate-owned outlets. Further, the definition of food as any substance which “may be used for human consumption” is broad enough that it encompasses seeds, nutrients, medicine, and drinks, in some cases including water, and certainly including traditional Maori remedies and seed-saving techniques. To enforce adherence to the bill, food safety officers can enter a premises without a warrant, and those officers can be police or citizens – meaning that Monsanto employees could enter an organic food shop with a vegetable stand backed up by armed police and shut it down. In fact, there are already videos of this kind of thing happening in the states.

Even if you do not frequent the farmer’s market or participate in a community garden, legislation like this will impact your grocery bill: food prices are likely to rise as their production becomes more concentrated, both because of the price-fixing power wielded by corporate monopolies, but also because the resulting vast monocrops, we know already, are much more vulnerable. There is greatly increased risk of an entire crop failure – if only a few farms are certified to grow spinach, one bug that likes spinach is all it takes to seriously jeopardize the entire harvest. Funnily enough, this bill is meant to address issues of food safety and security – we only have to look at how dramatically it fails to do so to figure there must be something else going on.

But farmer’s stalls, lemonade stands – these are really beside the point, and are unlikely to be facing any real enforcement; it would just be too much, we don’t have the resources to go around shutting down farmer’s markets – and it’s unnecessary, in any case, because of what this bill is actually about. Seeds. Seed control is the whole point of all this. Control of food is power – this is so widely acknowledged that it is discussed openly as a military and political strategy – and control of seeds is control of food at the source. As the bill stands right now, it covers only seeds that you eat, which is a much larger array of foods that you probably recognize, including most staple foods – it’s not just that you won’t be able to sell sunflower seeds to crunch on, that’s also potatoes, kumara, garlic, onions, wheat, rice, corn, and on and on and one. But, as much of the commentary points out, it’s a fairly small step, likely one court ruling, before not-for-consumption seeds become food, in that they are “capable of being used for human consumption”. It doesn’t mean it will happen that way, but somehow it seems reasonable from where I sit now to assume that it will. Even if it does not, much of the battle is already won: the relative difficulty in enforcing this law for farmer’s markets and roadside stands ceases to be an issue, because the only seeds they can get are Monsanto’s anyway.

However, according to guerillamedia (scroll down about halfway), this bill is legally treasonous and a breach of the Treaty of Waitangi – as my Maori pronunciation borders on offensive, I’ll let you read the details for yourself on the website, but the bottom line is that as the Queen’s representative, the Governor-General has veto powers on this bill, as the Treaty of Waitangi is more binding than the Codex Alimentarius, under Crown law.

As for law – “The law is the framework within which citizens consent to be governed. Democratic theory is that having elected their lawmakers (legislators), citizens recognise the legitimacy of the laws made ontheir behalf by the lawmakers and consent to abide by those laws.” So your consent is required in order to be governed; you can revoke your consent of this bill. You can also revoke your consent to be represented by your local MP. Legislation is applicable only with the consent of individuals, but you must formally revoke it – you must inform your MP the you are no longer represented by him or her, and fill out a Claim of Right application and have it notarised. If it’s not contested, you’re out!

The not-so-rad thing is that this little detail, the ability to opt out, means that this bill is barely not-treason. Without this clause we couldn’t even be talking about this bill, so let’s make use of it. The success of this bill relies on our compliance, our apathy, our political disengagement, and it’s exactly what they’re counting on. The forces behind this bill – the WTO, agribusiness, corporate government – they believe that we are blind, and stupid, and that we will continue to allow the degradation of our civil rights, that we will, in fact, agree to it. But I do not, and if I were a resident I would have done this already. If you can, I urge you to try.

So this bill comes from a FAO/WHO resolution called the Codex Alimentarius, of which New Zealand is a signatory, and therefore must pass this bill in one form or another. Given the pockets the FAO resides in, it’s hard not to see this is a corporate push to undermine self-sufficiency and food sovereignty – this bill benefits companies like Monsanto and ConAgra almost exclusively. This is all being implemented under the guise of food safety, and as a way to reduce the spread of food-borne illnesses – though it seems obvious to me that the way to minimize the spread of illness is not to further centralize, but to disperse the points of distribution and production to many smaller and varied farms who provide food for fewer people. That means that this bill has wider implications than ceding complete control of food sources to ConAgra or Archer Daniels Midland, which is terrifying enough on its own. A restriction on the ability of people to grow and share their own food locally is also a restriction on the ability of communities to survive the catastrophes of climate change, energy depletion, and a permanently contracting economy – these are unfathomably enormous problems facing us, and the best answer we have is to get local, to grow a garden, get to know your neighbours, to cease reliance on failing systems and create your own small-scale alternatives. Under Food Bill 160-2 and the Codex Alimentarius, these practices of survival without registration are criminal. But what frightens me the most about this bill is the base of mistrust it sits on – this is another insistence that we can’t trust anyone, we can’t trust each other; and so it succeeds not only in undermining our abilities to be self-sufficient and the common pursuit of food sovereignty, it further strains our relationships with each other. And that’s the greatest harm, really – people who do not have strong personal relationships lead shorter, less healthy lives, they are less happy, and most importantly, they don’t talk to one another. They don’t share their outrage or their fear, they don’t convince one another that laws are unfair, that something should be done – they feel alone, and helpless, and docile. Now, if it is not an explicit goal of the corporate powers who engineered the Codex, it is at the very least an extremely valuable byproduct.

There is a lethal triumvirate forming here: the FOA's Codex Alimentarius, the WTO's General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and the Trade Related Intellectual Proerty Rights Agreement, which allows corporations to patent seeds. Combine those with IMF’s mandatory restructuring packages that include the privatization of arable farmland to foreign corporate interests as conditions for receipt of a loan, and they could theoretically completely wipe out any kind of small-scale agriculture. They could, and already do, cause the starvation and impoverishment of millions, including those of us lucky enough to have been born in wealthy countries. It is impossible to avoid the certainty that the eradication of small-scale farming and the consolidation of agricultural control in corporate hands is the desired result.

Oddly enough, this bill is in direct contradiction to a UN charter on which New Zealand is a also a signatory – Agenda 21, the agreement on Sustainable Development. It is defined on the website as a “comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in every area in which human impacts on the environment.” It even states explicitly that one of its goals is to “Focus on the empowerment of local and community groups through the principle of delegating authority, accountability and resources to the most appropriate level to ensure that the programme will be geographically and ecologically specific”, and insists that “it should assist the most disadvantaged groups [. . .] The groups will include poor smallholders, pastoralists, artisans, fishing communities, landless people, indigenous communities, migrants and the urban informal sector.” Perhaps not surprisingly, these are the very groups that are likely to be most harmed by forced compliance to the Codex Alimentarius.

Agenda 21 focuses on all aspects of sustainable development, which obviously includes agriculture. It also includes city planning, which is intimately related to agriculture and what my interview today is about. I talked to architect and city planner Andres Duany on Tuesday – he is one of the designers of a method of development known as New Urbanism, which James Howard Kunstler touched on briefly as well. New Urbanist development principles focus on walkability, mixed-usage – so shops with apartments on top, for example – mixed-income, robust public transit, urban gardens and green space, and complete streets – those are streets for a smaller number of cars, which includes bike lanes, bus lanes or light rail, wide sidewalks, and lots of safe pedestrian crossings. They are basically 19^th Century building principles adapted for some cars, for now, and public transit.

Duany’s latest project is Agrarian Urbanism, which focuses on building communities around the food source and emphasizing the social aspect of food production. It involves establishing or rehabilitating semi-urban villages at the transects of rural farmland, so that everyone that resides in the town is involved somehow in the production or processing of the food grown in those fields. This is precisely the kind of development model – reliant on Community Supported Agriculture, common land, food co-ops, and food-for-wages systems – which would be outlawed by Food Bill 160-2 as it is defined by the Codex Alimentarius. I didn’t know so much about this Bill when I talked to Duany, so I don’t know how he would respond to the idea – though I suspect he would point to the inalienable right of people to grow and share food, and the impossibility of enforcing these bills with any seriousness without serious social consequences – that is to say that people would likely revolt. Food, after all, is what finally sparked long-overdue revolutions all over the middle east, and it has been the cause of many revolutions in the past. Maybe this is our “let them eat cake”; perhaps this is the infringement on our civil liberties which finally galvanizes us into action. It must happen sometime, right? . I wonder if there will come a point when I am afraid to say things like that on the air; when views like mine will become actually politically dangerous and it will be dangerous to speak them. Sometimes I’m afraid that time will come, and that I won't recognize it until it's here.

Tune in next week when I’ll be talking about singularities and techno-utopianism, and speaking to Jason Benlevi about his book on the subject, Too Much Magic. Stay right here on the One, thanks for listening.

Farewell, Jack Layton.

2011-08-22T15:03:00.000-07:00

Jack Layton, the leader of Canada's Opposition New Democratic Party, one of the few politicians who I believe genuinely tried to speak truth, and our best chance of getting out from under the thumb of Stephen Harper's Conservatives, died from a long battle with cancer early this morning. This is an excerpt from his farewell letter to Canadians and the world; may his commitment, hope, and moustache be remembered.

To young Canadians: All my life I have worked to make things better. Hope and optimism have defined my political career, and I continue to be hopeful and optimistic about Canada. Young people have been a great source of inspiration for me. I have met and talked with so many of you about your dreams, your frustrations, and your ideas for change. More and more, you are engaging in politics because you want to change things for the better. Many of you have placed your trust in our party. As my time in political life draws to a close I want to share with you my belief in your power to change this country and this world. There are great challenges before you, from the overwhelming nature of climate change to the unfairness of an economy that excludes so many from our collective wealth, and the changes necessary to build a more inclusive and generous Canada. I believe in you. Your energy, your vision, your passion for justice are exactly what this country needs today. You need to be at the heart of our economy, our political life, and our plans for the present and the future.
And finally, to all Canadians: Canada is a great country, one of the hopes of the world. We can be a better one – a country of greater equality, justice, and opportunity. We can build a prosperous economy and a society that shares its benefits more fairly. We can look after our seniors. We can offer better futures for our children. We can do our part to save the world’s environment. We can restore our good name in the world. We can do all of these things because we finally have a party system at the national level where there are real choices; where your vote matters; where working for change can actually bring about change. In the months and years to come, New Democrats will put a compelling new alternative to you. My colleagues in our party are an impressive, committed team. Give them a careful hearing; consider the alternatives; and consider that we can be a better, fairer, more equal country by working together. Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done.
My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.
All my very best,
Jack Layton

J.H. Kunstler and the Long Emergency

2011-08-21T20:29:00.000-07:00

Today: a read-along! Listen to the podcast of the interview with James Howard Kunstler here, and read my commentary below.

Today on the show I aired an interview I recorded two weeks ago with James Howard Kunstler, author, social commentator, and general snark-about-town. He has quite a cult following among certain sects of society, but he is most well known for two works of non-fiction, The Geography of Nowhere, which is about the inherent problems of suburban sprawl and was, in 1993, one of the first non-geological texts talking about an impending energy crisis. The second is The Long Emergency, about the now-imminent energy crisis and what will come after it. Lately he has released two works of fiction about the immediate post-carbon future, World Made By Hand and The Witch of Hebron. He is often accused of being a bit doomy, as he tends to deal in worst-case scenarios, but the longer we wait to address the effects of energy depletion on modern civilization the more likely his scenario becomes.

It’s quite long, this interview, so rather than play the whole thing I ran it in bits, and played some songs and gave some commentary along the way. He is very well-respected in a lot of areas, but he also tends to stray outside those issues pretty regularly, and so a lot of what he has to say is not without its problems. I don’t address them all, but I do my best to offer an alternate perspective where I think one is required. Press play now!

"You look at them [the suburbs] and you see all these houses that have large lawns and places where you could theoretically grow stuff. But, ah, I think that's a schematic impression because it remains to be seen whether those places will be socially cohesive, [...] whether or not they will be orderly, lawful places."

So while that may be a valid point, I think it’s pretty clear that he’s actually not familiar with Jeff Vail’s conception of Resilient Suburbs, which surprises me – there aren’t vast amounts of writing on post-fossil fuel suburbia, and it is kind of his bag. What Vail is talking about is the idea that the suburbs can potentially help reduce economic disparity by helping to redistribute wealth, in the form of land. A quarter acre is not insignificant, and the farther flung from the city centre, the larger those plots are going to be. As the price of oil and therefore gasoline increases, many people living in those places on the outer edges of town will no longer be able to afford the mobility to hold jobs in the city, get groceries from a large supermarket, or any of the other personal-transportation-based activities that undergird modern suburbia. Gradually those suburbs will turn to slums as housing values close to the city centres rise, pushing poor people to the outer edges – but slums in which each building has enough land to sustain the family that lives within in. In this way the building pattern of suburbia, which has been nothing but destructive so far, may end up being the factor that mitigates the spread of poverty, at least to some degree. Though his point about the shoddiness of building materials is certainly relevant, and I’m not sure what Vail has to say about that. I imagine it will be a piecemeal solution to a constant problem - patch a little here, a little there, until you've rebuilt completely.

Dunedin is lucky, as far as our built environment goes: we’re about the right size, not to big not too small, and, though we’ve been getting away from this in the last couple decades, we’re constructed in the right way. Dunedin is a town with a fairly small, centrally-located population with a cohesive and distinct main street, lined with shops that come right out to the sidewalk and have apartments above them. That may not seem like it matters, but it positions us to be able to contract fairly gracefully, as opposed to a place like LA, where there isn’t even really a centre to contract around, the whole place is nothing but freeways. Auckland might be in a bit of trouble, as it, like Toronto, grew hugely in the 60s and 70s, when city planning was essentially traffic planning, and all new developments were suburban and spread for miles. I don’t know about Auckland - though this assessment doesn't bode well - but Toronto at least is doing all the wrong things and basically guaranteeing that it turns itself into Detroit. We all bought into this very American notion that equates physical mobility with prosperity, and it has been hurting Dunedin a bit to be left out of that, but it’s going to save us, in the end.

"I'm not against the idea that people should be treated well, or politically fairly, but I'm not quite sure these things are going to dispose themselves the way political idealists of our time would want it to."

He says that it’s a “baby boomer fantasy that life gets progressively more egalitarian” in response to my suggestion that our future might prove to be more meritocratic: I was suggesting that if the skills required for success in a post-carbon society will be different, more useful, more directly productive, so the definition of strength, and who qualifies as a ‘strong person’, is also likely to change – maybe to mean ‘can build a house’ or ‘can grow a garden’ or ‘can tan a hide’. That strength could come to be defined as the mastery of a productive skill, rather than as the ability to accumulate imaginary capital.

He also claims that inequality will rise. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I got home and thought about that, and realized that we’re already more unequal than we’ve ever, ever been, ever. The disparity between the poorest and the richest now is orders of magnitude bigger than the disparity between kings and serfs. Inequality is actually going to fall, quite dramatically. What he means is that poverty will rise – and in that he’s most certainly correct; we are already starting to see it with the disappearance of the middle class, the increase in child poverty – the states saw an 18% increase in child poverty last year alone, and there isn’t an OECD nation that doesn’t have corresponding statistics. And those numbers are generated by an accounting system that defines the statistical poverty line well below the actual poverty line – that is, you can be making more than the official poverty line and still not be making enough to live on, especially if you have children.

As for what he says about the coming inequality as far as race and gender goes – it’s pretty clear from statements like “women feel like they’re getting a raw deal” that he thinks of the women’s rights movement as just a bunch of whiny bitches who want to have everything their own way, who keep making demands, I mean Angela Merkel’s in charge of Germany, how unequal can it really be?

And then he goes on to dismiss the present-day fact of women’s ongoing involvement in community projects and initiatives as though it were irrelevant to either the struggle for equal rights or the growing importance of community in the absolute sense.

In fact, I think, that the way he sees our societies being constructed in the near future – higher emphasis on food production and preparation, increasing importance of community interdependency – means that in some very real ways we are looking at re-situating discursive power back into the home. So that means that roles traditionally performed by women, which still are, in very large part, performed by women, will become more highly valued as their necessity increases. And the occupations in which we situate that cultural power now – in politics, in finance, in business – will no longer occupy the same privileged position. Perhaps this is how we re-address the way we assign value, and in the process address the gender power imbalance that underlies it.

After all, culture is just a bunch of stuff that lots of people think and do, so we do have some control over what kind of society we end up with. His response – “i just don’t think it’s going to work out that way” – implies a certain amount of determinism, based on the implied belief in the basic selfishness of human nature, that we will all be fighting, and we only have the luxury of not fighting because we have so much stuff. And that may be true in part, but we are also social, communal, cooperative beings, possessed of free will, and we can choose which of those aspects we valorize, and which ones we denigrate.

This is something that’s been troubling me for a while, the usefulness of satire, and by extension the usefulness of what I’m trying to do here. And I think that I’ve come to the conclusion that satire is great and relevant, but it can also be harmful. I share his bleak sense of humour, and for sure quite often I find that I have no other response but to laugh. I’m not suggesting that there’s no place for satire, just that satire alone, without some actual serious thought about the issues being parodied, can get in our way. If we’re all just telling jokes, that can undermine our ability to critically engage with the subject matter – there’s a philosopher, Henri Bergson, who says we must have a degree of distance from the joke for us to think it’s funny, that humour relies specifically on that distance; the moment we begin to empathize, feel personally connected to the subject of the joke, the humour disappears. Like Homer Simpson falling off a cliff – it’s funny because there’s no genuine terror, and he gets up again at the bottom. It becomes horrible fairly easily, the more realistic it is. And it’s the job of comic writers to create that distance in order to make the joke funny – which for most things is fine, but it becomes problematic when the subject of the joke is something that has real effect on the lives of the people, or something that requires critical engagement, like politics, especially when that joke is all that’s being said. And Kunstler in particular uses such elaborate prose, such dramatic, fantastical imagery to skewer political and social topics, that the distance between the absurd thing that Michele Bachmann said and the real life implications of her dangerous politics is almost insurmountable.

Maybe he’s right about teaching people lessons, that people don’t want to be lectured to; I just don’t know what else to do. You’ve probably noticed that I’m not funny, so satire isn’t necessarily an option for me. What I am is frightened and outraged, and so that’s where I have to speak from. If satire’s what you’re looking for, though, Kunstler is certainly your man.

You’d be forgiven for not believing his view of the future – that is, this sort of decentralized, pastoral model in which populations are greatly reduced and we all work much harder at keeping ourselves alive, and less at minimum wage service jobs. Certainly that narrative has not made it into the mainstream, but it does seem to be at least the direction we’re most likely to go. There are varying degrees of severity being predicted by various people; for example, Mckibben hopes for the internet where Kunstler does not, some see public transit or trains still operating where Kunstler does not; he mentions that there may not be school, or books. I don’t know how likely his version is compared to some of the others – but I do know that the sooner we start talking about it openly, the more we can salvage from the civilization we have now, and the better chance we have of creating a new society that has learned from its past mistakes and that consciously values cooperation, honesty, and ability.

The Woes of a Persecuted Guy

2011-08-15T16:19:00.000-07:00

This is an email I received from a man yesterday, in response to my show about rape culture and the politics of consent. It is not intentionally hateful or vitriolic, but it does display a fairly pervasive mode of thought that concerns me. He gave his name, but out of a decency he certainly did not display to me, I'm going to leave him anonymous - in any case, his name is unimportant as I'm fairly certain he is just one of many, many people who felt this way, listening to my show and any other one that deals with feminist subject matter. Let's call him Persecuted Guy. His email and my response after the jump.

I love a good political or social rant, I love listening to your show
Anna but every time the "Slut walk" argument comes along I’ve got to
change channels. Honestly your sounding not a lot different than the
nut bar web sites your trying to bag. the ranting and venom of these
male lobotomy’s is more than countered by slut walking hissing and
spitting. Enough already, being white middle class male is the target
of choice for every barrow pushing “wana be” minority and yes it MUST
be all my fault. Give it a rest please!

Sic for all of the above, obviously.
My response, which can hereby be assumed as the response to all such comments:

Dear Persecuted Guy:
Thank you for listening. I am glad to know that you enjoy a good political or social 'rant', as long as it doesn't challenge the ideas you already hold. Though I don't love that word to describe what I'm trying to do, which is to feel like I'm contributing productively to necessary social change, perhaps I do rant. I admit the format isn't perfect, but I do base everything I say on facts, and I do a great deal of research for each show - contrary to prevailing social winds, objective facts do exist - and I try to keep the hyperbole to a minimum. Yesterday I possibly let my language get a little looser than I would have if I were writing an academic essay on the subject, but it is not my language with which you have an issue. It is my subject matter.

As I mentioned in my 'lecture' yesterday, deconstructing a power structure is going to be met by resistance and anger by those who benefit from that power structure - in this case, those people are men. And yes, primarily white, middle class men. That does not mean that the cultural, legal, and historical position of women as lesser beings is YOUR fault, Persecuted Guy, not YOU personally, (as I also mentioned about a dozen times in the show yesterday), but that the power structure in which our society exists was created for and by white males. Did it never occur to you why white men are the target for "wanna be minorities" (and I have no idea what you mean by "wanna be minorities"), that there might be something about the position of white men in society that would make them the target? Like, perhaps the fact that our social power systems are unbalanced, and white men are at the top of that system? Once again, if it makes you feel uncomfortable to have that pointed out to you, perhaps you should re-examine how equal you really want things to be.

Furthermore, to have SlutWalk, a very reasonable response to a culture where women are blamed for being raped, described as 'hissing and spitting' actually aligns you rather closely with those nut bar websites I was quoting from yesterday. In fact, Persecuted Guy, you are beginning to sound to me not like a man who genuinely desires gender and race equality, not like a man who is engaged in social and political issues, but like the worst kind of sycophant; the one who is already in a position of power to begin with.

So I'm going to take back what I said yesterday, just for you. If you believe that there is no value in women fighting for equal rights, or for men and women fighting together against victim-blaming, and if you see all attempts to renegotiate the power structure more equally as "barrow pushing wanna be minorities", simply trying to tear men down for cynical, self-serving reasons, then this is YOUR fault. YOU, Persecuted Guy, for upholding beliefs that oppress, for refusing to examine why you hold those beliefs or at whose expense they are enforced, and for assuming that any challenge to those beliefs must be lunatic and opportunistic.

Thanks for listening.
Ana

Rape Culture and the Politics of Consent

2011-08-14T18:04:00.000-07:00

In the last couple weeks, I’ve encountered a bunch of statements or situations that revealed a sort of frightening social truth to me: a lot of men, and a lot of women too, believe that feminism is no longer necessary because society is equal. As you’ll hear next week when I air the interview I just recorded with Jim Kunstler, he mentions that women were angered by his portrayal of women in the post-carbon future as being secondary and subjugated. And his defense was to point to women’s “failure of imagination to conceive of a society that was different from the one they had today”, implying of course that the society we have today is completely equal. He then proceeded to make some pretty condescending and dismissive remarks about how our little fights in such areas like pay equity and suffrage will not matter in a world where we have no fossil fuels. That the struggle for equality has been a luxury of this industrialized heyday, and that it will go the way of ipads and interstates in our post-carbon future.

He is not the only place I’ve encountered this attitude – the Women’s Week issue of Critic, for example, is completely riddled with assumptions like this. Like we’re all completely equal now because Pepsi has a female CEO – we’re post-gender in the same way America having a black president makes us post-racial. Patently ridiculous, obviously. If anything, having minorities in positions of power can actually increase, or at least normalize, bigotry – political dissent being culturally acceptable and even encouraged, racism and sexism simply become part of the criticism of power when that power is black or female. People can get away with speaking in those terms because the racism or sexism or classism is couched in the rhetoric of political opposition, and attempts to highlight the discriminatory basis for that opposition is attacked as censorship. For that reason racist statements about the american president or sexist ones against Helen Clark or Hillary Clinton are becoming more and more overt and acceptable – it normalizes extremism.

One of the more insidious ways that happens is through the rise of Male Rights Advocacy (the link is to wikipedia, as I was trying to be neutral; note the neutrality warning in the header of the article). Sounds innocuous enough, right? Certainly no one would argue with the fact that men have rights? I spent a good chunk of this past week reading MRA blogs and I found myself completely astounded at the amount of violence and vitriol towards women that was not only par for the course on these websites, but applauded as logical and sane. This is a particular subset of men who perceive feminism as male oppression – and I think that underlying that perception is a belief in the natural, possibly God-given hierarchy of humanity. If you believe your male privilege is not about social constructs, but is in fact something to do with inherent masculine superiority, then feminism certainly does begin to look like male oppression. By necessity, feminism is about dismantling the patriarchy which so entitles men, and men have a great deal invested in the continuation of that particular paradigm. Any attempt at restructuring power is going to elicit a backlash from the group that benefits the most from the status quo – in this particular conversation, and pretty much any other one about power, that group is men.

This is what male rights advocacy looks like: “If women weren’t so irresponsible when they got their freedom, men would not have to step in and take it away from them. Seriously, do you really believe men have “oppressed” (read: restrained) women for no reason?”

“People are scared of women. That’s the truth about it. Women can be such nasty pieces of work that no one wants to get on their bad side for fear of them becoming hysterical … the female world is an animal world which a lot of men, being human, simply don’t understand.”

(Kudos to manboobz for doing most of the dirty work in sourcing those quotes)

There are dozens of websites devoted to this topic, and many many comments on blogs devoted to feminism. While not every comment is so explicit, they do all rest on the same assumptions that these do: that women are not humans, that men allowed us to vote and drive and that just wasn’t good enough, that the ongoing subjugation of women is our own fault because we can’t handle any freedom at all. And I think that these beliefs are more commonly held than we generally acknowledge, most dangerously among young men: God, one guy quoted in Critic last week said in the same breath that feminism was going too far because it was beginning to overtake men, and that his favourite kind of porn is hardcore, a kind of porn which is particularly violent, exploitative, and degrading to women. That’s he liked to watch, that’s what got him off. The degradation of women. Yet feminism is over. That guy was not more than twenty.

A sort of companion thread to the women-as-subhuman category is a particularly virulent form of victim-blaming. There were a lot of comments on the Norwegian massacre, many expressing sympathy and understanding for his actions, pointing out that the shooter was angry at the political left and women, and therefore those are the groups at fault. In this same tone, using this same logic, many of these Male Rights Advocacy sites openly predict violence against women because we’ve gotten so uppity and we need to be put back in our place, of course abdicating responsibility for that violence and placing it on women. The oppression of women is our own fault, because look what happens when we get a little bit of freedom. One guy even blames women for fathers running out on them, because it is our job to screen the men we sleep with and if we pick the wrong guy to knock us up then we’ve got no one to blame but ourselves. This is victim-blaming in the utmost extreme.

Underlying all of this, of course, is a discussion about power relationships. What I found most striking about all those MRA blogs and websites was their almost unconscious acknowledgement of female power that manifested as a conscious resentment of women in general. That female power, of course, is sexual: we have boobs and vaginas and men like those things, but they can’t access them without our permission. These men are angry about women’s sexual agency, about our control over their means of sexual release: in the scathing tone of one commenter, imitating women, “we’ve got the sexual power, the power of consent, the gate keeper of our holy vaginal crevice.” He is unequivocally furious about a woman being the one who decides who has access to her own vagina. It seems to me that a big part of that anger stems from the perceived position of the holder of that power: that women are subordinate to men, and yet would have this particular power over them, is doubly infuriating. It is the resentment of having to ask permission of an inferior being.

(it just occurred to me that perhaps that very power is the root of patriarchal social system in the first place, that it is a way of mitigating women’s sexual power through conventions of ownership and the removal of humanity. Certainly that’s what the institution of marriage was created to do, but maybe that’s the root that subsequent power imbalance sprang from. I don’t actually know anything about that and i’m just speculating. If anyone listening can point me to any kind of anthropological study on the issue, i’m keen.)

Here’s the rub on that particular point, as far as I’m concerned – men are the ones creating the culture where women’s sexuality is the most important thing about us. Kids are exposed, on average, to 10 and a half hours a day of media, the vast majority of which is sexualized, even pornified. There is a very clear link between violence on screen and violence in life, and it seems especially prescient in a culture where most of our human interaction occurs, ironically, alone, with people on the tv or the internet. Where often kids have stronger relationships with people on screen than in real life – and those people on screen are telling us over and over and over that women are for looking at, for fucking, not for respecting as human beings. So young girls learn their worth is in their ass, and young boys learn that women’s worth is in their ability to turn them on, and it’s generally bad for the entire gender spectrum. This culture both sexualizes women and infantalizes men, and it is a way of perpetuating a patriarchal system in which women don’t respect themselves as fully-formed people, and so how could men? Of course the patriarchy hurts men too – men are taught not to access their emotions in any way, that to show any is a sign of weakness – but all that is based directly on the assignation of value to traits that are considered ‘male’ or ‘female’. Emotions are seen as weak because they are seen as feminine, and women are considered weak. If we can readdress our value judgments, all genders benefit.

This is what I mean when I say we have a ‘don’t get raped’ culture instead of a ‘don’t rape’ culture: women are legally and culturally assumed to be in a constant state of consent, a perpetual yes; the removal of that consent has to be very explicit and issued in a very particular manner for it to be recognized, either by the man or by the courts. In a patriarchy, agency is not conferred equally on all parties, that’s what makes it a patriarchy, and women are told of their perpetual consent as regularly and pervasively as men. As women are portrayed so regularly as sexualized beings, and even women in power are subjected to that paradigm, our consent is implicit. The belief in this perpetual consent manifests as coercion, persuasion, the fact that sex often finishes when the man does, come on baby i’m almost there i’m almost there, as much as in more traditional definitions of rape. I recently encountered a study in the UK which indicated that more men than women believe that consent is assumed unless it is explicitly stated otherwise. I know numbers can be a bit numbing, but these are pretty shocking. Of the cross-section of men questioned:

only 47% assume being pushed away means their partner does not want to have sex

only 57% assume their partner doesn’t want to have sex with them if they say no

only 56% said they would not pressure their partner into having sex with them – even the extraordinary numbers that WOULD – 44% - is still a conservative estimate, given that ‘coercion’ can be gentle and would not, by most, be considered pressure, and the fact that these tests are self-administered, meaning the numbers are often even less flattering than they already appear

here’s my favourite: only 37% would be put off from sex if their partner were crying.

Only 77% of men said they agreed that rape is when one partner says no and the other goes ahead anyway

only 53% of men believe that if consent is revoked but sex goes ahead anyway, that is rape

So this is the broader context in which a rape culture exists. Rape culture is a prevailing paradigm, a set of commonly held beliefs, that the way to lessen the amount of abuse and rape suffered by women is to teach them how not to be raped, rather than teaching men not to rape. Rape culture is linked directly to the cultural view of women and their worth – rape is therefore a feminist cause. These two ideas are very closely linked, because so much of a woman’s value is determined, in this particular cultural snapshot, by her sexual appeal.

So for me, the best way to talk about altering a cultural paradigm is to ask how I contribute to it, then to alter that behaviour. Culture being just a catchall term for things a lot of people think and say, we all contribute in one way or another. For example, have you ever told a rape joke? What about a pedophile priest joke? Sounds harmless enough, right? In fact, not only do jokes like that serve to undermine the seriousness of the offence, but they may actually legitimize, or even encourage, dangerous behaviour. Since I could not have put this better, I’m going to lift this paragraph from a great, great blog called shakespearessister:

I get it—you're a decent guy. I can even believe it. You've never raped anybody. You would NEVER rape anybody. You're upset that all these feminists are trying to accuse you of doing something, or connect you to doing something, that, as far as you're concerned, you've never done and would never condone. And they've told you about triggers, and PTSD, and how one in six women is a survivor, and you get it. You do. But you can't let every time someone gets all upset get in the way of you having a good time, right? Especially when it doesn't mean anything. Rape jokes have never made YOU go out and rape someone. They never would; they never could. You just don't see how it matters. I'm going to tell you how it does matter. And I tell you this because I genuinely believe you mean it when you say you don't want to hurt anybody, and that it's important to you to do your best to be a decent and good person, and that you don't see the harm. And I genuinely believe you when you say you would never associate with a rapist and you think rape really is a very bad thing.
Here is why I refuse to take rape jokes sitting down…
Because 6% of college-aged men, slightly over 1 in 20, will admit to raping someone in anonymous surveys, as long as the word "rape" isn't used in the description of the act—and that's the conservative estimate. Other sources double that number.
A lot of people accuse feminists of thinking that all men are rapists. That's not true. But do you know who think all men are rapists?
Rapists do.
They really do. In psychological study, the profiling, the studies, it comes out again and again.
Virtually all rapists genuinely believe that all men rape, and other men just keep it hushed up better. And more, these people who really are rapists are constantly reaffirmed in their belief about the rest of mankind being rapists like them by things like rape jokes, that dismiss and normalize the idea of rape. If one in twenty guys (or more) is a real and true rapist, and you have any amount of social activity with other guys like yourself, then it is almost a statistical certainty that one time hanging out with friends and their friends, playing Halo with a bunch of guys online, in a WoW guild, in a pick-up game of basketball, at a bar, or elsewhere, you were talking to a rapist. Not your fault. You can't tell a rapist apart any better than anyone else can. It's not like they announce themselves.
But, here's the thing. It's very likely that in some of these interactions with these guys, at some point or another, someone told a rape joke. You, decent guy that you are, understood that they didn't mean it, and it was just a joke. And so you laughed.
Or maybe you didn't laugh. Maybe it just wasn't a very funny joke. So maybe you just didn't say anything at all. And, decent guy who would never condone rape, who would step in and stop rape if he saw it, who understands that rape is awful and wrong and bad, when you laughed? When you were silent? That rapist who was in the group with you, that rapist thought that you were on his side. That rapist knew that you were a rapist like him. And he felt validated, and he felt he was among his comrades.
You. The rapist's comrade.
She adds:
A quick and simple rule for language and behavior if you want to be a decent person: Ask yourself, who is more likely to be made to feel comfortable around me based on whatever I'm about to say/do? Rape survivors? Or rapists?

Women and the Economy

2011-08-07T18:37:00.000-07:00

Check out the homepage of the International Association for Feminist Economics.

Read the playlist for this show at the Radio One website.

Listen to the interview with Dr. Prue Hyman of the IAFFE here!

In case you've never entertained the idea that there is such a thing as feminist economics, or the implication that mainstream economics is by definition sexist, this post is for you. To start, here's the working definition used in a collection of essays called Women and the Economy: “feminist economics is reopening questions … about value wall-being, and power. In the process of asking these larger questions, feminist economics challenges several basic disciplinary assumptions: the value of efficiency, the existence of scarcity, the omnipresence of selfishness, the independence of utility functions, and the impossibility of interpersonal utility comparisons. Indeed, feminism’s basic assumption, that the oppression of women exists and ought to be eliminated, is a fundamental challenge to the supposed impossibility of interpersonal utility comparisons.”

Of course each branch of feminist economics will answer these questions differently; there are lots of ways to re-examine economics through a feminist lens: Marxist, mainstream, separatist, and lots of others I haven’t heard of. Because of the inherent bias towards privilege in participation in the first and second waves of the feminist movement, a lot of feminist economists are as concerned with race and class imbalances as they are with gender. Much of that privilege bias is wrapped up in the rhetoric of personal empowerment and individualism, which implies a degree of freedom, particularly financial freedom, to choose to work or not work, and what kind of work is done. That insistence on personal choice ignores the socio-economic context that narrows or widens the proliferation of options available to a particular woman. A wealthy woman has the option to stay home with her children or go to work; a poor woman does not. Dita von Teese might say she feels empowered by stripping, and i’m glad of that, but many women strip because their body is the only commodity they have to trade, and one woman’s empowerment does not address the larger context of the sexual commodification of women. Feminism is not, then, simply about the ability of women to choose, but about addressing the systemic causes and supports of gender discrimination, and feminist economics is about addressing the theoretical roots of economic gender inequality at a structural level.

“Neoclassical economics defines its mission as the study of choices made under conditions of scarcity or constraint”. As I mentioned last week in regards to industrial agriculture and the availability vs. the amount of food, mainstream economics believes the human condition is defined by selfishness, scarcity, and competition, and therefore the conclusions it draws are based on a very specific hypothesis: that in times of scarce resources, people will compete selfishly with one another for the remaining resources until they all have been consumed. What is unacknowledged by this view of human existence are the other halves of those traits: cooperation, abundance, and altruism. Obviously these factors, as much as their opposites and including every emotional state between the two extremes, influence people’s actions and therefore effect their market decisions in ways that are not accounted for by mainstream economics. For example, mainstream economics does not entertain the possibility that the actors engaged in it will panic, and that panic will adversely affect the growth of the market, but of course it does. Is, in fact, right now. If economics is, as it purports to be, a discipline concerned with well-being, then these represent some fairly serious barriers to its ability to gauge that well-being.

These kind of universals applied objectively to all of humanity are part of the structure of discrimination that feminism rejects: the objectivity itself, as much as the particulars. Often this insistence on clinical objectivity is used to silence or undermine feminist or environmental critiques, consciously or unconsciously invoking the trope of rational men and emotional, and therefore irrational, women. This call to remain objective is in fact nothing more than an insistence that feminists examine only the accepted figures; that they only analyze the data that mainstream economists have collected, limiting the scope of analysis to the male, public, cash economy. To look outside mainstream econometric data is to enter the realm of the irrational, regardless of how gender-biased and limited in scope the collection of that data is. How we know what we know matters – there are not figures to analyze for things like power relations in the home, how a glass ceiling manifests in a workplace, the level of management skill required to simultaneously raise children and keep a home. Much of this has to do with the nature of the data and the difficulty in measuring it, but also because the right questions are not asked.

Altering the parameters of the market, as far as data collection and analysis goes, to acknowledge and include the whole range of human labour would improve not just the lives of unaccounted-for women and children, but the discipline of economics as a measure of well-being. A broad restructuring would be beneficial to the operation of the market as a whole, not just to those excluded from the market; not acknowledging the factors external to the market does not eliminate them, it does not remove their ability to influence the market, merely the ability of economists and econometrists to study their effects and predict market action. Mainstream economics is often forced to construct elaborate mathematical equations and ideological justifications to dismiss the market effects of phenomena the market does not acknowledge. For example, economist Robert Solow won a nobel prize for his ‘discovery’ in the 50s that the economy is constructed of labour and capital, despite the fact that when he used this model to predict the growth of GDP into the future, he ended up underestimating by almost a third. Rather than try to figure out what caused the gap, what factor was lacking in his theory to be off by so much, he gave that gap a name – the Solow Residual – and a series of complex math was invented to predict the size of the residual. Not until years later was it established that the gap was caused by the exclusion of energy from his model of the economy.

In terms of work and income, the neglect is sizable - over 50% of all the labour done in the world is unpaid labour. Dr. Prue Hyman argues that the distinction between work that is paid and work that is not is largely arbitrary, that many jobs which are paid have a counterpart in the unpaid sector: things like agriculture, childcare, teaching, nursing, elderly care, management. More than that, quite often the paid and unpaid performances happen simultaneously, next to each other, in the same place. How absurd, then, that paid work has become the basis for our estimations of prestige and status, when half of all work is unpaid. Furthermore, an emphasis on paid employment puts a great deal of pressure on single parents to be seeking only paid work – the unpaid work of raising children carries with it fewer and fewer social benefits, and those few that are available are always couched in the rhetoric of a handout, a free ride, rather than as a communal investment in a future of well-raised adults contributing productively to society.

One thing feminist economics is not is essentialist – it does not believe that there are inherent, essential differences between men and women, and that the problems of the mainstream dialogue are masculine, so in order to remedy that we must formulate a feminine dialogue instead. This is not to say that some feminists are not essentialists, merely that the goal of alternative economics is not to posit a female system to oppose a male one. The point is that the system is sexist, not that it is masculine.

Classical economics is defined by essentialism – it believes that the boundaries of human nature are so immutable, so fixed, that the economy must be organized around it, in a reflectively essentialist model. The language we use to define our parameters is important – when we speak about the economy as though it is a person, as opposed to an idea supported by people, it is inevitable that an economist would assign to it the traits he believes define humanity. The equally inevitable effect is that the prevalence of economic language would reinforce those traits of selfishness and competition until they define our culture.

So, culturally, an economic narrative of scarcity, selfishness, and competition leads people who have money to hoard it, believing that their self-interest is the way to get ahead and in fact, that they are behaving in the best possible way. A prevailing narrative like that is not going to lead us to a culture of equality, no matter how often we say and maybe even believe that equality is the ultimate goal. There are huge swaths of the population which are let down by hyper-individualist culture besides women: poor people, children, elderly people, people with disabilities, people who do or rely on volunteer work, the list represents most of society. Feminist economics seeks to encourage the broadening of economic inclusion as a means to improve women’s position, as women are disproportionately represented in the poorer demographics, but these same questions could be used on behalf of any number of disenfranchised groups. Again, more inclusive economic system would benefit everyone.

As a possible means towards the actual expansion of the scope of economics, the writing team known as J.K. Gibson-Graham has tentatively identified four ethical coordinates for alternative economics that place value in community relations and ensuring that everyone is cared for, instead of the relentless individualism of mainstream economics. Rather than selfishness, scarcity, competition, and efficiency, the suggest we examine necessity, surplus, consumption, and commons, each accompanied by a guiding question:

what are my needs and how can they be met?

What is surplus to our needs and how should it be generated, pooled, distributed, and deployed?

What resources are to be consumed and how should this consumption be distributed?

What is our commons and how should it be renewed, sustained, enlarged, and extended to others?

The process of trying to answer these questions, through which inevitably others will manifest, we can start to form the basis of alternate economies that improve everyone’s lot in life. In this way also we can avoid the pitfalls of attempting to simply assign market value to unpaid labour – often the work that is unpaid and done voluntarily fetches a very low wage in the formal economy. Think about what the market might assign as an hourly wage for a housewife – chances are it would focus on the cleaning and cooking aspect, overlooking the more abstract, and more important, management skills that are involved in the running of a household. As such, housework, on the market earns minimum wage. The market valuing of women’s unpaid work could reflect the undervaluing of women’s paid work. For this reason we must reassess the fundamental structure of the modern market, rather than simply attempt to fit all unpaid and informal labour into the existing market parameters.

Hunger and Industrial Agriculture

2011-08-01T19:56:00.000-07:00

Listen to my interview with Dr. Hugh Campbell of the University of Otago's Centre for the Study of Agriculture, Food, and the Environment (CSAFE) about his role in the ARGOS project here.

Check out the sweet jams I played during this show here.

First and foremost, one thing must be understood: all farming happens on the earth. I would have thought this to be obvious, but the rhetoric surrounding the issue indicates otherwise. As is so often the case with popular discourse these days, the conversation about industrial farming has been presented as a dichotomy – the cost-benefit analysis of biological farming versus industrial farming, which is better and why, which will be able to feed the growing population. This distinction is illusion. it’s ALL biological. The industrial farming system exists on this planet, not in a vacuum in which the laws of nature are suspended, and this planet is governed by some fairly concrete biological and physical laws. Either we work within those same principles, as with biodynamic and organic practices, or we do not, as with factory farming. Only one way will be viable for very long. Guess which one.

This doesn’t have to be a moral issue – we don’t have to talk about the happiness of the animals in a concentrated feeding operation or the human cost of attaining the fossil fuels to run the system, or whether it is right or wrong. While I think that ethics are a completely valid and important aspect of decision making, a lot have been convinced by the narrative of rationality that how we feel about something is imaginary; at the very least not to be taken into consideration. So, morality being entirely a human construct, it is therefore mutable and subjective; the intricacies of biological systems which have evolved together for millennia are not. As Michael Pollan says, “farming is not adapted to large-scale operations because of the following reason: farming is concerned with plants and animals which live, grow, and die” (Carnivore, 213-4).

Perhaps a quick rundown of the principles of industrial farming is in order: it relies on vast tracts of

land which are, by necessity, monocropped – that means one species, like say corn, for acres and acres. Monocropping is necessary precisely because of the size of the farms: over thousands of acres, you can’t weed on your hands and knees, you must use threshers and tractors and other giant machines. That means that not only does the crop have to be the same species, it also has to be uniform in height, which creates its own set of problems like access to sunlight and fruit-crowding. Having acres planted with one singular species opens the entire holding up to a host of diseases that either could have been prevented by companion planting or polycropping, so that the disease kills one crop, but you’ve got a bunch of others planted too – in an industrial farming system, the corn equivalent of dutch elm disease could eradicate a huge percentage of the global food supply, simply because of the manner in which it is farmed. Likewise due to the size, organic pest control and fertilization becomes impractical, and so the industrial farmer turns to chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Of course, all of this also is reliant on injections of cheap fossil fuels at all stages, production, distribution, processing, packaging. But there is so much else to talk about that I will just accept that we all know all that already, we’ll take it as a given.

So, ecology is nothing if not staggeringly, breathtakingly complex, I think we can all agree on at least that. What that indicates to any rational individual possessed of a modicum of critical thought is that you can’t just alter or eliminate one aspect without seriously disturbing a very delicate balance. The beauty of ecology is, of course, that everything relies on everything else being precisely what it is; species evolve over millennia to interact with one another in a particular way, and any disruption to one species is inevitably going to affect all the others. This is why our attempts to construct a self-sustaining biodome have so far failed: we simply can’t imagine all the myriad factors that contribute to the sustenance and health of a given ecology. We’ve always missed something, and that something turns out to be crucial, every time.

The advent of industrial farming practices and its application in the developing world is known as the Green Revolution. In fact, more accurately, there have been two: the first began in the 50s and 60s, when chemical pesticides and fertilizers were invented, and their use became widespread, particularly in the developing world. The second began in the last decade and a half, and is to do with genetic modification. Monsanto being the most famous of the big petrochemical-genetic-engineering-private-army-owning firms – how’s that for a terrifying confluence of descriptors – I’ll use one of their products known as RoundUp-Ready seeds. RoundUp is an extremely toxic broad-spectrum herbicide, and some seeds have been genetically engineered to withstand its effects, meaning that the farmer can simply spray everything and walk away. While there is talk about the endless possibilities of genetic engineering in terms of creating plants which require no water, or no sunlight, or no natural nutrients, in actual fact the best we’ve been able to do so far is to modify seeds to be resistant to one or another type of chemical or pest. More on the near-religious faith in the ability of technological advances to save mankind in two weeks, when I’ll talk to James Howard Kunstler about it. Techno-triumphalism, my favourite delusion.

Anyway, genetically modified seeds in an ecologically complex environment – and there is no other kind – can present all kinds of problems. Here’s an example from China, which I came across in Raj Patel’s Stuffed and Starved, probably the best coverage of the power politics of food I’ve ever come across, go read it immediately. I’m trying to get him on the show, too. In 1997, China introduced cotton seeds which had been genetically engineered to fend off the bollworm, a common cotton pest. Immediately, farmers found they were spending less on pesticides, as the bollworm pesticides had been built into the DNA of the plant. Great! But by 2004, those same farmers were spending an average of 10 times as much on pesticides as they had originally, because another pest that was unaffected by the DNA pesticides had “found a new ecological niche, now that bollworm numbers had been temporarily depressed” (Patel 138). Can’t trick nature.

The common refrain in support of industrial farming practices is that without them, we would never be able to grow enough food to feed everyone. Now, aside from a growing body of research that suggests organic farming can produce just as much food as industrial, this line of defense rests on the seemingly unassailable position that people are hungry because there is not enough food. Here's how that happens:

Mainstream economics theorizes on the assumptions of efficiency, competition, selfishness, and scarcity. As we’ll talk about next week with feminist economist Prue Hyman, each of these traits are in fact part of a duality: efficiency/complexity, competition/cooperation, selfishness/altruism, and scarcity/abundance. It is with this last one that we are concerned today: because economics only measures scarcity, the assumption is that if not everyone has some, it must be because there is not enough. Because economics does not measure abundance, any shortage in supply looks like scarcity, when more often the issue is misdistribution. This is especially true of food.

For example: in 1943 there was a famine in Bengal that led to the deaths of 3 and a half million people. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, this famine was not caused by a shortage of food, but rather by the appropriation of the grain harvest from bengali peasant farmers by the British, to fund the war effort. So we can add those 3.5 million to the total of WWII dead, and you can be damn sure that this is one example of the many I could have chosen. As another nasty side effect, the colonial impoverishment of many more millions of farmers forced them to abandon their often ancestral lands and move to the city to try to find work, as farming no longer supported them. This continuing bout of urbanization means there are more people in the cities relying on food produced in the country and shipped in, and less people in the country producing that food (Shiva 6).

But let’s for a second entertain the idea that an increase in the amount of food will cure hunger. The industry can argue that they are the only road to victory because of their claim that genetically modified seeds, in combination with their chemical pesticides and fertilizers, will dramatically increase the crop yield per acre. And under perfect, laboratory conditions, that’s true, the yield does increase, at least initially. The problem is, of course, that conditions are never perfect in practice: GM seeds require irrigation, which is a particular problem for the moment in the developing world, but will spread soon enough. It leads to greater competition for water and results in falling water table levels. In many places, due to the proximity of the ocean, irrigation led to salt deposits in the soil, rendering increasing swaths of land unusable – the upshot of that is that the farmer must move on to a new plot of land, likely created by clearing native growth, and if industrial practices are continued, destroy that new piece too (Patel 125). And so it goes.

More than all this, the yield will inevitably decrease, as the lack of organic nutrients being replaced in the soil, in combination with the constant applications of highly toxic chemical pesticides and fertilizers destroy the capacity of the soil to sustain life. Eventually the soil is not soil anymore, but just dirt; like one of those green sponges that flower arrangers use, all soaked in chemicals, and those chemicals are what feeds the plant. Paul Hawken estimates that the “combination of drought, deforestation, industrial agriculture, and climate disasters cause the loss of 250 million acres of arable land a year” (Hawken 70), and that’s counting industrial agriculture as one factor of many, instead of the direct cause of drought and deforestation. Shrimp farming is a terrible exampe of this; it’s so destructive that in the industry it’s known as “rape and run” aquaculture. Eventually the soil is so depleted that even Monsanto brand RoundUP Ready corn can’t grow in that chemical soup, and the land is left to fallow and dry out, and more land is cleared to do the same thing. Rinse repeat until the whole damn world is dead and useless, and all the farmers have committed suicide by drinking Monsanto pesticides because they are so deeply in debt to pay for these practices that they are literally worth more dead than alive.

The first Green Revolution was driven by governmental concerns about how to feed their countries the easiest way – as in, not through development of redistribution strategies or anti-hoarding legislation, but through simply increasing the absolute number of grains available for the market. Petrochemical companies merely took advantage of those governments’ willingness to open new chemical and fertilizer markets. The second Green Revolution, genetic engineering, was spearheaded by private corporations and facilitated by governments and the second, the genetically modified seed green revolution, is undertaken for the same reasons. Having reached the point a few years ago at which, for the first time in history, the number of malnourished or undernourished equalled the number of people who are overweight, at a billion each. This has opened up a new marketing avenue for businesses reliant on a continuation of Green Revolution practices, in particular genetic engineering. Enter the war on hunger, fought valiantly by corporate warriors with weapons like Golden Rice.

In Asia, somewhere between ¼ to ½ a million children a year go blind from vitamin A deficiencies; half of those die within the year. In their genuine concern for this problem, the private sector created “Golden Rice”, which has become the poster crop for the ability of genetic engineering to address the needs of the poor. It’s golden because it has added Vitamin A, taken from beta carotene, which gives carrots their orange. However, not only is rice that’s not white considered inferior in Asia, but also the amount of Vitamin A in a bowl of this rice means that the kids would have to eat fifty bowls a day to get their recommended daily allowance, which is about half a carrot. This is solely a feel-good marketing solution to battle public distaste for genetic modification, implemented in countries which have food surpluses, as indeed does most of the world, so the problem is not that there isn’t enough vitamin A foods to go around, but that the prices are too high for poor people to afford to eat. It is, again, a distribution issue rather than an issue of scarcity.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of the corporate takeover of agriculture is the strangling of high-level research, particularly in academics. That universities are gradually becoming more and more corporate should come as no surprise – particularly if you specialize in the humanities, as I do, where there’s no corporate interest and so no money and we all joke about finding a way to make the study of Waiting for Godot interesting to corporate funders. There’s an enormous agricultural university in my hometown the research at which is now funded almost exclusively by Syngenta. The professor I’m talking to today is a member of a research committee funded in part by the Agribusiness Group. Obviously these are not isolated cases, and the effect on academic research should be equally obvious. The hope of corporate money, in such a highly competitive environment, make everyone willing participants. The papers and research proposals which are useful to the company funding the department will get written and published, and those that aren’t won’t. In a publish-or-perish environment, the vast majority of researchers are going to be trying to find something useful to the industry. Simple as that.

There’s a bigger problem here than the disingenuousness of the corporations, which I think we can all take as a given at this point; the aggressive promotion of genetic modification, petrochemical fertilizers, and large-scale industrial farming as the only way to feed everyone actively restricts discussion of systemic poverty. While we are constantly being told that the problem is the number of people versus the amount of food, there is no room to discuss the actual management and distribution flaws which are the true cause of widespread hunger. I suspect that this is no accident, or mere byproduct of corporate marketing plans, but yet another way that the powerful few maintain their control over a broken system which enriches them significantly at the expense of the disenfranchised majority. In conclusion: shop at the market.

References:

Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food. London : Allen Lane, 2008.

The Omnivore's Dilemma. New York : Penguin Press, 2006.

Patel, Raj. Stuffed and Starved. Melbourne: Black, 2007.

Shiva, Vandana. Stolen Harvest. London : Zed, 2001.

Steel, Carolyn. Hungry City. London : Chatto & Windus, 2008.

Hawken, Paul. Ecology of Commerce. New York : HarperCollins, c1993.

The End of Growth

2011-07-24T18:07:00.000-07:00

Listen to the interview with Richard Heinberg here

Check out the playlist for this show here

Sign the petition to keep Radio One alive here

The thesis of this blog is that perpetual growth is impossible in a finite world. I believe this to be the fundamental problem facing humanity at this point in time: it underlies the current ongoing global financial crisis, climate change, and peak oil – indeed, peak just about everything. At heart, the drive for perpetual growth is an economic issue, and so this episode of Too Fat For Our Pants is about economics. I am not an economist, I have never formally studied economics – my knowledge of the discipline comes from having read books about it. Gasp! That means that there is a very real possibility that I have a better understanding of economic principles than many economists, not because economists are dumb and I'm smart, but because formal economic training is deeply flawed and incomplete. The good news is that if I can learn and grasp basic economic principles, then so can you: this is just another one of those things that we are encouraged not to understand, in fact we are told that it is too complicated for people to understand over and over and over again. I might go so far as to suggest that the obfuscation of economics has been deliberate: a lot of money is made on the back of people’s ignorance. Knowledge is power, as they say, so hopefully today’s show helps you to arm yourself a little better.

It seems like the idea that perpetual growth cannot exist in a finite world would be rather obvious to everyone, and indeed it should be. Thomas Malthus warned in the late-18^th Century about the inevitable conflict between arithmetic resource growth and exponential population growth. Seems pretty obvious that these two methods of growth cannot exist comfortably together; however Malthus had the misfortune of speaking out just right before the industrial revolution really found its legs, after which point of course we were able to ignore environmental limits with the help of fossil fuels, making sure that no one listened to Malthus for one second. And because that happened, and then the Green Revolution happened in the 50s and 60s – more on that little gem in another show – so far, with the right eyes, it has looked like he was wrong. Human ingenuity, in conjunction with millions of years of heat and pressure and ancient sunlight, has so far managed to stave off our reckoning with the Great Ecological Dilemma. There will not be another gift like fossil fuels, and having put off paying for so many people for so long has only made it more and more expensive. That bill is now due, just as our bank account empties.

Let us first be clear that economics is not a hard science, it is more like a branch of moral philosophy. Adam Smith did not ‘discover’ that the market is self-correcting, he hypothesized that it could, assuming a strong and tight-knit community, the social norms of which would curb the excesses built into the system. THAT is the invisible hand – the invisible hand of people having to answer to their community for how they spent their money, which would keep investment dollars inside the country. I believe this abuse of the phrase ‘invisible hand’, combined with the fact that Adam Smith recognized that eventually the ‘progressive’ or growing economy would be replaced with the ‘stationary’ economy, makes the Wealth of Nations the most misunderstood book since the Bible.

So the entire modern world exists within an economic structure that relies on debt to create money. This has been going on for an awfully long time, even in a time when profiting off a loan was called ‘usury’ and was illegal. Bankers in the Middle Ages kept gold and gave out receipts for the amounts deposited, facilitating trade, and in the process they discovered that no one really knew if they wrote receipts for more than was physically present in the vaults. Most of the time, that worked great – the only problem arose when everyone wanted to cash their chips at once, like in the Great Depression, but that happened so rarely that it became common practice for banks to loan money they didn’t posses. It’s called fractional reserve banking, and is one of the main ways that new money enters an economy. So as the production and manufacturing sectors decline in percentage of GDP, the money created by fractional reserve banking, by debt, grows in importance, and its eventual disconnection from physical material like gold or silver meant that “growth in total outstanding debt became a precondition for growth of the money supply, and therefore for economic expansion”.

So here’s the rub: implicit in an economy which relies on debt for money creation is the belief that tomorrow you will have more than today, and with the extra money you will have in the future, you will be able to pay the growing balance on your debt. Anyone with a credit card knows how this works; making minimum payments every month still sees your total debt grow; you must increase your payments every month in order to pay off principle and lower your debt balance. This is the principle on which the entire global economy now rests: tomorrow we will have more. And not only that, but also that tomorrow there will be more of us, and we will all have more. Obviously, at some point, we were bound to run into problems. The most remarkable thing is not that we find ourselves in this incredible position, but that we are so surprised by it, and so completely unprepared to deal with it.

It’s important to understand that the perpetual growth imperative is the fundamental truth underlying all mainstream economic philosophy at this point. Not that there is great variety in mainstream economic philosophy, though we are encouraged to think that there is vast ideological difference between left- and right-wing economics, as they are practiced in politics today. The collapse of the soviet union in the late-80s effectively removed communism and the far-left from popular discussion in the Global North, leaving us to choose between neo-classical laissez-faire economics and Keynesian social liberalism.

As it turns out, though, the choice between social liberalism and neoliberalism is not much of a choice. Neoliberalism, or neo-classicism, is essentially the belief that the market is some kind of quasi-deity that, if left alone, will regulate itself. By ‘left alone’ I mean a complete lack of government regulation; everything is privately owned and there is no such thing as a social service, no taxes, no free health care, no free education, no public transportation, no welfare, nothing. More importantly, no government intervention into how private businesses operate, no regulation of the market, no minimum wage. The idea is that the market will, in the same way that wild ecosystems do, find its own sustainable balance and regulate itself through competition. For this reason a neoliberal would advocate austerity measures to bust a recession, arguing that government intervention was just interfering with the efficiency of the market and eliminating that involvement would stimulate growth once again. Just ask Greece how well austerity measures work at ending a recession. Or, I guess, wait a bit and we’ll be able to ask ourselves. However, it also relies on a version of humanity known generally as homo-economicus: that all people are completely rational actors in the market, and that that rationality means we are acting exclusively in our own economic self-interest all the time. Furthermore it assumes the presence of losers, as well as winners – some people will never have enough, and the existence of that demographic is necessary for everyone else to have enough, and for some to have more than enough. Everyone being cared for is explicitly not a goal of neoliberal capitalism, though that little nugget is not brought up very often.

Social liberalism is the belief that “government has a legitimate economic role in addressing social issues such as unemployment, healthcare, and education … Their general goal was to retain the dynamism of private capital while curbing its excesses.” Though this is considered a leftist view now, it is actually very much in the centre of the public-private economic spectrum, which should highlight for you just how far rightward the conversation has moved in the last 40 years or so. The most famous advocate for social liberalism was John Maynard Keynes, who believed that government stimulus was the way to revitalize an economy in a recession – and it has worked, in the past: Roosevelt’s New Deal was basically a test-run of Keynesian social liberalism, and it is generally credited with ending the Great Depression.

Maybe you’ve noticed the real problem here. These two schools of economic thought, Keynesian social liberalism and Freidmanite neoclassicism, both “assume that perpetual growth is the rational and achievable goal of national economies.” So all the debate, being played out in such spectacular farce in Western, and particularly American, politics, is simply about how best to maintain perpetual growth – to tax or not to tax; private entity-led growth or government-led growth. At no point is anyone talking about whether or not perpetual growth is desirable or possible, merely how best to stimulate it. Even if we could manage to somehow trick the economy into growing the way it had been, it would only speed us towards the next crash faster. This is why I have no faith in parliamentary activism: I can see no point in addressing environmental or energy issues within a context which still demands perpetual growth. Parliament rests on a fundamentally unsound assumption about the way we as societies can exist in the world.

This also means that the 2008 global financial crash was much bigger than it seems at first glance – Richard Heinberg calls it a crisis of economic philosophy, not just an economic crisis. Social Liberalism, which helped drag the US out of the Great Depression, is not even an option for us now, as it relies on a continuing supply of capital, energy, and resources which are no longer available to us. And the absence of those resources is going to – has, already, probably – put an end to economic growth. While Karl Marx, Adam Smith, and Thomas Malthus all assumed that at some point that would have to happen, we have made no plans to transition to a stationary economy, and so we remain shackled to a system in which even the slightest decrease in growth manifests itself as a recession – note that that doesn’t have to mean a decrease in the economy, just a decrease in the rate of growth. So we can be in a recession and still be growing the economy – in fact, at the height of the last recession, the third and fourth quarters of 2008, Canada was still posting a 1.6% growth rate. And none of this even addresses the fact that economic growth can be stimulated by negative facticities as well as positive ones – at what point do we start manufacturing crises in order to spur growth? I think it might already be happening – Hilary Clinton talking about melting the Arctic to access the trapped fossil fuels seems a rather explicit example. Or tearing down Iraq to create whole new markets. How far will we be willing to go before we accept the limits to growth?

Local is Lovely!

2011-07-18T21:22:00.000-07:00

Listen to the podcast of my interview with Jinty MacTavish here.
Sign the petition to keep Radio One alive here.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, as we at Radio One struggle to obviate the benefits of our existence, about how much of our relevance rests on our size. We are small. By definition that also makes us local, and being small and local is very quickly becoming a necessity. Not just for radio stations, but for pretty much everything – federal politics are lost to corporate interest and increasingly hamstrung by partisan ideologies, none of which seek to overthrow the corporate hijacking of government anyway. Energy depletion means that our ability to think and operate globally will inevitably be severely curtailed; we will no longer be able to ship bananas from the Philippines or everything from China because we simply will not be able to afford the fuel. Likewise we will find avenues of travel closing to us as fuel becomes scarcer and international travel becomes a luxury of the very rich before fading out completely. Climate change means, and has already meant, increased frequency and severity of natural disasters, the survival of which will require renewed relationships with our neighbours and a tighter community structure.

What that means for Dunedin: first and foremost, we must get smaller. To say nothing of the need to disentangle ourselves from a debt-and-interest based economy which demands perpetual growth, we need to open our eyes to the problems of comparative advantage. Comparative advantage is the idea that everyone is really great at something: someone makes shoes cheaply, so they make shoes, and someone else grows great tomatoes for next to nothing so they grow tomatoes – it makes sense, on a local scale. On a global scale, however, it leads to a perpetuation of slave labour and unsustainable shipping structures, in addition to effectively devaluing currencies of countries that must trade in US dollars on the international market. As with so much else, theories that work intuitively on a small scale become destructive on a massive one. The point here is to re-localize lines of production and consumption. Re-localization, as an idea, can be met with a great deal of resistance; perhaps understandably, as it necessitates the acceptance of some frightening principles. Certainly I struggle with it myself sometimes – I do not for a minute question the necessity of turning to local communities or the fact of energy depletion and climate change, which is usually the underlying argument made by detractors. But I do lament the breaking of some unkeepable promises that were made to my generation – that I could travel the entire world for as long as I was able to, that I would be able to retire one day, that my education would be useful to society and that it would enable me to find a job where I would be able to provide for my family, that my children would have it better than I did – none of these things are true for us anymore. Change of any kind means something is gained and something is lost - while I know that there are real, tangible benefits to the new-old way of life that we must turn to now, there is a part of me that mourns.

However, Dunedin, as a city, is particularly well-positioned to survive the shift to a lower-energy future – we have a single main downtown corridor in a fairly walkable city, not a lot of suburban sprawl, a temperate climate and we are adjacent to some of the most productive farmland in the country, not to mention the ocean. By re-localizing our economy in town, we can keep a lot more of the capital generated by our abundant resources within the city itself, and not just the service jobs that tourism generates. According to a study by theNew Economics Foundation in London, a dollar spent locally generates twice as much income for the local economy. When a business is not owned locally, money leaves the community at every transaction. Bill McKibben puts that figure even higher; he cites a study that found that “10 pounds spent at a local british food business is worth 25 to the local economy, but only 14 if spent at a supermarket”. Besides which, local businesses are small enough that the owner knows their employees, which makes things like discrimination and maltreatment much more difficult, and it eliminates the economies of scale which can drive down market prices and adversely affect farmers and producers. A pretty easy way to make a huge difference in this regard is to stop shopping at the countdown or new world, as much as possible, and start shopping at the farmer’s market. That is a direct transaction where you pay the farmer for the food that he or she has grown, meaning that for pretty close to the same price you’d pay at the supermarket, the farmer gets to keep all the money. The Otago Farmer's Market just won best market in New Zealand! I buy all my food there once a week, year round, and my money goes much, much further.

But perhaps the most overt example why we should feel optimistic about Dunedin’s ability to weather the coming years with dignity is the fact that both Port Chalmers and North East Valley are registered Transition Towns. What’s a Transition Town, you ask? “Transition Town initiatives are part of a vibrant, international grassroots movement that brings people together to explore how we – as communities - can respond to the environmental, economic and social challenges arising from climate change, resource depletion and an economy based on growth. We don’t look for anyone to blame or anyone to save us, but believe our communities have within themselves the innovation and ingenuity to create positive solutions to the converging crises of our time. We believe in igniting and supporting local responses at any level and from anyone – and aim to weave them together into a coordinated action plan for change towards a lower energy lifestyle. By building local resilience, we will be able to collectively respond to whatever the future may bring in a calm, positive and creative way. And by remembering how to live within our local means, we can rediscover the spirit of community and a feeling of power, belonging and sharing in a world that is vibrant, just and truly sustainable.”

There are other places in Dunedin which are not registered Transition Towns which nonetheless operate according to the same principles – Portobello, Waitati, etc, represent methods of life and work that rely on sustainability and community. This is of course the extra-parliamentary half of the activism-dyad, and the one I believe will end up doing us the most good. I have no faith in parliamentary action, which by no means indicates that we should stop fighting for federal change. But Transition Towns share my belief that governments cannot or will not alter the path that we are on, and that it is up to us as citizens to take matters into our own hands so that when the whole structure crumbles we will not be destitute. The point is both to build relationships and to pass on knowledge – by sharing our abilities with our neighbours and teaching practical skills like gardening and cooking to children, we are creating a pool of knowledge, a sort of reclamation of tradition. To get there we treat it like writing a mystery novel: we start by identifying the world we want to see for ourselves and our children, and then work backwards from there. Pretty simple, eh? It seems incredible that this is in fact highly subversive of the dominant economic narrative, which not only disregards planning for the future, but also the idea that humans could be motivated by anything other than rational self-interest. The transition town scheme proceeds from four basic assumptions:

•That life with dramatically lower energy consumption is inevitable, and that it’s better to plan for it than to be taken by surprise.

•That our settlements and communities presently lack the resilience to enable them to weather the severe energy shocks that will accompany peak oil.

•That we have to act collectively, and we have to act now.

•That by unleashing the collective genius of those around us to creatively and proactively design our energy descent, we can build ways of living that are more connected, more enriching and that recognise the biological limits of our planet.

On the other hand, the hugeness of the Rugby World Cup has re-awakened the National government’s PR instincts, leading them to revisit the Love NZ scheme introduced by Labour and scrapped by National. In Dunedin, that means that we finally get recycling bins on sidewalks in the centre city. Installations of recycling bins began on the 28^th of june and will be completed by the end of july – putting in 56 bins in the city centre and reserving 52 for rental by events. Why they wouldn’t just put in 108 right off the bat is beyond me. While this is a good first step, it’s about 30 years too late to be taking first steps, and therefore the steps we are taking need to be proportionately larger. This is, in fact, a very small first step: my hometown, a Southern Ontario backwater called Kitchener-Waterloo, just celebrated its recycling program’s 40^th anniversary. 52 recycling bins around the centre does mean that I have to sneak around less to recycle my household waste, which is not collected because I live on George street, but it is a pretty weak entry. Why is my recycling not collected kerbside? What about the businesses and bars on George St. that are chucking bags and bags of recyclables into the landfill every day? And what happens to the recycling itself, once it’s collected? Is it recycled? Who knows? Plastic gets sold to buyers in Christchurch, which then ship to China, and inquiries into the observance of international health regulations around the handling of hazardous substances, as well as the not-so-minor question as to whether or not anything is actually being recycled, are met with assurances, but not much else.

I argue a lot for recycling, but I worry about that, as well. I accept recycling as a necessary and easy first step, the very first thing a city council can do to reduce their city’s waste – the garbage equivalent of putting in bike lanes; cheap, easy, obvious. It should not be a PR stunt, which is what this latest initiative is, all couched in terms of ‘maintaining our clean green image” rather than “having a country to live in ten years from now, instead of a giant landfill”. And I worry that, in a place like this where recycling and thinking about waste and garbage is not as bred-in-the-bone as it should be, widespread recycling will be the end of the conversation, rather than the beginning. That this could be one of those things that leads to greater consumption, like energy efficiency, when it is packaged on its own. There is a well-documented tendency to view increased efficiency or sustainability as an invitation to consume more and more. If this initiative does not come with very strong messages about the relationship between consumptive lifestyles and climate change, which it will not if it’s about the image, and not the environment, then we almost certainly are ending the discussion before it has begun. New Zealand is in the same dangerous position that Canada has been in for years – we have a small population, so our numbers in absolute terms are smaller than countries like the U.S. and China. But, per capita, we are not small consumers, and we are not small wasters, and we have been allowed to think that we, if no one else, can continue to live in this incredibly wasteful, harmful way. Mostly we have been lead to think that our consumption is somehow different than the consumption in the States or India; that we are somehow exempt from their concerns because we are clean and green. We can no longer afford to think like that; this must be a cultural shift towards active sustainability in all aspects of life in Dunedin.

Economics and the Fate of Free Media - Save Radio One!

2011-07-10T17:34:00.000-07:00

Sign the Petition to Save Radio One!

In case you have been away, which many of you have, here’s a little rundown of what’s been going on. Based on the imminence of Voluntary Student Membership, which is in fact getting less and less likely by the day, OUSA underwent a fiscal examination by an independent, private contract firm called Deloitte, to determine where expenses could be cut. Facing the potential loss of thousands and thousands of dollars should Voluntary Student Membership be implemented, this is perhaps not the most unexpected move on the part of OUSA, though I would argue that they could have done a lot more to educate students about the negatives of VSM in the first place. Anyway, Deloitte looked at all of Planet Media, which includes Radio One, Critic, and Planet Media as an advertising sales organization. Astonishingly, and without much in the way of explanation, Critic and Planet Media escaped unscathed, while Radio One landed on the chopping block. Deloitte has recommended that Radio One be sold, because there is no potential profit to be made here. The fact that our broadcast license is contingent upon our status as a charitable trust, meaning that we can legally generate no profit beyond that needed to sustain ourselves, has so far escaped everyone’s notice.

The Deloitte recommendation is not binding; OUSA has a month to decide whether or not to act on it and try to sell Radio One. I think it will prove rather difficult to sell an asset that is legally prohibited from making money to a private investor, given that assets are usually purchased to generate revenue. The ultimate fate of Radio One, should OUSA decide to sell, will depend on who buys it; I have no idea what will happen if no one wants it. Our course of action for the next month will be to convince OUSA that it is in the best interests of the school, the student population, Dunedin, and free media as a whole if Radio One stays right exactly where it is, continuing to do what we have been doing for 27 years. If you agree with us, which you probably already do if you’re listening to me right now, go to r1.co.nz and sign the petition asking OUSA to disregard the Deloitte recommendation and keep Radio One. Tell your friends, while you listen to this awesome song by Connan Mockasin, who you probably never would have heard of if Radio One did not exist.

A lot of the argument for selling the station has revolved around the insistence that 99.9% of students don’t listen to Radio One, that we’re too marginal, we’re too alternative. Aside from the fact that neither the station nor OUSA has any accurate method of measurement of listenership for any given programme, this strikes me as a fairly desperate and cynical tactic designed to further divide the student body. This rationalization wouldn’t hold up were it applied to any other aspect of OUSA, like queer support or the gym, and it doesn’t hold up here.

And I have a feeling that calling us an alternative station is misleading in the same way talking about special interest groups is misleading. I mentioned this when I spoke briefly about the need for a feminist economics – the demographics considered special interest include women, children, poor people, people of colour, religious minorities, teachers, trade unions, on and on. Taken all together, the alternative music listeners, just like the special interest groups, make up the majority of the population of music listeners. And this isn’t the 90s definition of alternative, which mostly just meant ‘grunge’: alternative, as it is applied to the musical tastes of radio one, covers everything from indie to jazz to zydeco to gospel to hip hop; almost the only thing it doesn’t cover is top 40. So who is the special interest? Who is the alternative to whom?

Perhaps you agree with Logan Edgar when he says that no students listen to Radio One. Even if that were true, which it obviously isn’t, that in itself does not undermine the value of having Radio One in the city itself. This decision has the potential to affects everyone who lives here, whether or not you are a student and whether or not you listen to the station, because radio one does more than just broadcast musicians on the air. We are an active concert promoter, and the only way that bands play shows in this town. Without Radio One operating as independent media, there are no concerts to go to outside of Elton John playing the Edgar Centre or whoever eventually plays that monstrosity of a stadium. Those shows are few and far between, and too expensive for most people to afford, particularly students; not to mention the fact that very few students are spending a lot of time listening to Elton John in the first place. Bands which get played on stations like more fm are not touring regularly to dunedin: when was the last time the Rolling Stones came here? So you don’t have to listen all the time, but the fact that there is a music scene here at all is valuable, whether or not you yourself make use of it or appreciate it, rest assured you would notice and miss it if it were to disappear.

As a case in point: Coco Solid played a Radio One Presents gig at XII Below on Friday and it was one of the best shows I’ve been to in ages and ages. I danced up a storm and had this moment of completely transcendent love for Dunedin. Here’s Coco Solid:

On a broader level, Radio One represents the only media in town not owned by Mediaworks, aside from Access Otago Radio, which, while it’s important for some of the same reasons, does not perform quite the same function as Radio One. In fact, Radio One represents some of the last independent radio, not just in Dunedin, but in the entire country. New Zealand has an enormous number of radio stations, more than Canada and Australia have, and 85 % of them are owned by either MediaWorks or The Radio Network, while much of the rest is made up of National Radio and the Concert station. It gets worse; there is not even competition between MediaWorks and The Radio Network, they jointly own a research and sales firm called The Radio Bureau, which doesn’t even pretend to be anything other than an advertisment. This is from their mission statement: “The Radio Bureau represents New Zealand’s commercial radio industry at a national level. TRB conducts marketing for the radio medium, and provides a complete and comprehensive single-source of services for advertising agencies – from analysing research data and developing radio strategies to planning and booking campaigns and sales promotions. The Radio Bureau is unique in the world in that it represents nearly all of the country’s radio stations…” According to one AUT academic, “TRB sell radio time and do media planning for almost all of the commercial and semi- commercials in New Zealand and they deal only with large national corporate clients (McDonalds, Lotto etc).” Corporate media, as my partner likes to say, is an oxymoron: corporate media is a commercial.

Corporate media ownership, particularly of the monopolistic variety like what we have here in New Zealand, leads to a homogenization of presented views. As one study on New Zealand media ownership points out: “Advertisers are the real customers of a commercial media organisation, not its readers, viewers or listeners. This brings pressure to shield advertisers from views they do not like, to avoid complicated or expensive stories, and to avoid content that does not attract the maximum possible audience at any given time”. In a democratic society, which is ostensibly what we enjoy here in New Zealand, political dissent and alternative views are vital to the health of the nation, and corporate monopoly precludes the airing of any view not held by the company. Particularly now, as politics and business become so entangled as to be indivisible, the importance of heterogeneity is paramount. What’s worse, this kind of monoglossia among media outlets gives listeners and citizens the impression that the view presented is the accepted one, when it is often only the neo-liberal, business-centric view accepted by the advertisers. Since of course not everyone agrees with Milton Friedman, people tend to feel alienated and alone in their philosophy. A populace in which individuals feel isolated and separate is much easier to lie to, and much easier to control. The job of an active media is act as a link between the actions of the government and business and the consciousness of the people, and we are losing that. It is slipping away faster and faster, and radio stations like this one are fewer and fewer every day. This is a fight much bigger than radio one, but recognizing the worth of radio one and what it stands for is the first step.

Another common argument against Radio One and independent media is that since the advent of the internet, there is no further use for any of the traditional media outlets like newspapers and radio. While it’s true that you can find pretty much anything on the internet, the key is that you have find it: you must, at least initially, know generally what you are looking for. With the internet you seek out particular websites or musicians or videos, and from those selections the whole range of your taste is extrapolated. Google and you tube and facebook are all paying such close attention to the kinds of things you’re interested in that gradually you create your own internet, a space in which you are exposed only to views which you yourself already hold. In traditional media forms you do not get to choose the broadcasting, unless you come to Radio One and become a DJ, which you could do, so you are exposed to a broad variety of opinion and tastes. That’s how you learn new things, and how you test the views you already hold – homogenized information leads to narrow viewpoints, insularity and mistrust, further degrading relationships and destroying our ability to relate to people who think differently than ourselves.

More than the importance of Radio One to Dunedin, or the importance of free media to society, is our ability to see value in a non-monetary context. The axing of Radio One was based on an economic assessment, and because we don’t make money, Deloitte saw no reason to keep us around. The local musicians that started here, the broadcasters that began in student radio, the shows that are brought here by radio one, the proven satisfaction that comes from volunteering, the opportunities for people like me to just show up out of nowhere and play songs that I like for other people, none of these things are taken into account because they are unpriced on the market. So more than anything else, this is a chance for us to decide what kind of a place we want to live in, and what kind of values we believe are important – do we want to exist in a society that can only see worth in money? Or could we broaden our definitions of worth and value to build richer connections and deeper satisfaction? Saving this station could be the stand we take together, as a community, against the encroachment of an ideology that dismisses our culture and happiness as externalities. Join us in asserting our right to see things differently. Go to r1.co.nz and sign the petition to save the station if you agree.

It can be difficult to see around the economic rubric of evaluation, we have internalized it to such a degree. I hope that this can be the catalyst that leads us to reject the notion that money is the only way to measure worth. This could be our chance to make the connections between the threat of closure of Radio One and the system which led to it – maybe from here we can begin to talk openly about the things the market doesn’t register, and agree that they are valuable. Maybe we can talk about the problems that lie with the market, not with the idea of happiness, or the idea of community, and maybe we can save Radio One in the process. I hope so.

Slutwalk, Porn, and the Future of Feminism

2011-06-19T17:51:00.000-07:00

Listen to the interview with the F Word Media Collective's Meghan Murphy here.

Slutwalk started in Toronto in response to a cop saying that women should avoid dressing like sluts to not get raped. Of course this sparked outrage among the entire female community in the city, and slutwalk was the formalized reaction to the statement. The original point was to challenge the culture of victim-blaming which is still incredibly, shockingly prevalent, and I guess the idea was to highlight the fact that no matter how a woman dresses, she never deserves to be raped or assaulted. The call was for women to come out dressed however they like and show the toronto police and the rapists of the world that any woman, dressed in any manner, could be called a slut, in an attempt to remove the power of the word. So very quickly, right from the beginning, this was as much about the reclamation of the word itself as it was about addressing the notion that a woman could be asking for it. As the founders have said “we called it something controversial. Did it get attention? Damn right it did!” And maybe that’s a valid point, as there have been more conversations about this than any other motion the women’s movement has ever made. But I’m not sure that any publicity is good publicity, particularly in this case.

Jessica Valenti, the editor of Feministing, a huge feminist website, was on this talk show in the states defending slutwalk. They asked her why, if the word was going to be so divisive, they didn’t call it “empowerment walk” or something, to which she replied “do you think i’d be sitting here if we’d called it empowerment walk?” This s problematic for two reasons. It indicates that the media really got behind slutwalk primarily for the sluts, not to take a stand against victim-blaming or because they believe that women are people too. Which would make them feminists, by the way. But it’s not a surprise, is it, that the media would get a kick out of ladies dressed a certain way and fail to acknowledge the deeper issue. But the real problem is that it points to the organizers’ fear that women and girls are so uneducated about feminism and their rights as women that something called “empowerment walk” wouldn’t have had nearly the turnout as it has had, that t wouldn’t have spread to other cities and eventually other countries, and that we wouldn’t be talking about it right now. And they may have been right.

A pretty horrifying statistic has been chucked around a bunch in the critiques of Slutwalk: only 35% of women identify as feminists, and only 17% would want their daughters to identify as feminists. This is the direct result of a lack of positive education and the parodies of feminism that have been presented as fact for years: that feminists are a bunch of frigid, over-sensitive, man-hating dykes with no sense of humour. Now let’s just take a second and reflect on who might have had some stake in undermining the credibility of a movement designed to challenge the dominant power. Just let that percolate. In fact, “feminism is the radical belief that women are human beings”, deserving of equal treatment. It is not about feminine superiority. So contra to the spectrum model whereby misogynist is at one end, humanism is in the middle, and feminism is at the other end, the binary is feminist or sexist. Feminism is the opposite of sexism. You are probably a feminist, you, listening, unless you are a sexist. So which is it? But feminism has been so derided, and so degraded, that women are unwilling to label themselves in that way. Slutwalk was successful in a way that an overtly feminist march would have been because “it is sexy in a way that community activism isn’t, usually”. That’s a quote. And it’s telling: this walk makes feminism sexy. It makes it palatable, it makes it appealing, which makes it not challenge anything.

So women come out to these walks, and yes, there are greater numbers of women marching than ever before, it’s been largely grassroots and independently organized, and it has sparked a conversation which has been stifled for years. Women are angry, and women should be angry. It’s not that I’m not all over the idea, and I’m glad that people are paying attention; I just don’t think we’re paying attention to the right things. Gail Dines writes a lot about pornography’s effect on male sexuality, and she says that “protesters celebrating the word slut and dressing in risque clothing are embracing a pornified consumer sexuality”, which I agree with. Subjective arguments about whether or not we could reclaim slut aside, I don’t think this was the way to do it. Dressing like what men think of when they think “slut” and then calling yourself a slut does not, to me, do anything towards reclaiming the word or removing its power. It would have made more sense for women to be in sweatpants and muumuus and things, to indicate the unimportance of dress in matters of rape and assault. If anything , far from reclaiming the word, we have essentially created a space where it is supportive and progressive for men to call women sluts. This is the biggest problem for me, personally: photos of men with “free hugs for sluts” written on their chests, taking pictures from the sidelines, holding posters that say “we love sluts” - this is not a victory, and it is not a challenge to the status quo in any way.

The use of “slut” and the fact that women are dressing in what our mothers would have called “symbols of female oppression” only draws more attention to women as sexual beings, in fact makes this about feminine sexuality, when rape is not about sexuality at all. It is about power and dominance, not sexual arousal, the fact of which has been subsumed in the slut effort. The media focus on girls in the march dressed in this one particular way, even though there certainly are women in those marches wearing jeans and t shirts and anything else, only serves to underscore the meaning and solidify it in a popular context. A blog called “broken-arted” I think put it best: “Slutwalk is a post-feminist event. It assumes that there is no patriarchal context that slutwalk exists within”. And that’s exactly what’s happened: just saying we reclaim it, even if everyone was on board, which they aren’t, no allowances were made for the fact that we do not exist in a vaccuum, but in a larger society that has its own ideas about the word and what it means.

I do think the organizers were well-meaning, and I do think that they didn’t expect this kind of backlash or for the walk to spread so rapidly. I also think that they designed the march without really thinking about it and then when it got big they were forced to defend something they themselves are not convinced is defensible. Here’s why I think that: I’ve been following this pretty closely, and i’ve been listening to interviews and watching the agenda and things like that, and what i’ve noticed more than anything else is the removal of emphasis from female solidarity to personal empowerment. “I find it empowering to reclaim slut, I find it empowering to walk down the street dressed however I like”, and indeed you should find that empowering. I would not be one to tell another woman how she should feel about her body or her clothes or the words that are used to describe her. But what that doesn’t address is the wider cultural and social aspects in which those personal choices are made – because one thing empowers one woman, that does not mean that it addresses the dominant mode of thought or challenges the status quo, which is, ostensibly, what we’re trying to do here. It is also spoken from a position of rarified privilege; the women saying this have been almost entirely, white, middle class, conventionally attractive, well-educated, with lots of choice and opportunity spread out before them. The problem is that the vast, vast majority of women do not have choices like these, that they do not have the luxury of deciding what empowers them, and that regardless of what we in the global north find empowering, we must be working towards a more inclusive emancipation of women in general.

This is called a talking point. The response to the critiques has been very defensive, very solid: there is no give and take, no discussion, on the part of the organizers and supporters of slutwalk. When valid points are made, they are unacknowledged or struck down with the same basic talking points that answered any other question: it’s my personal choice, we’re taking the word back, and so on. Or else they are made to appear ridiculous, for example in this response to concerns that perhaps we shouldn’t be dressing in this particular way, under this particular heading, in order to gain some ground for women: “It’s not like these girls are going from this march to “girls gone wild” or anything”. As though simply because this is probably true, no critiques of the nature of the walk are justified. It’s very much, i’m sorry to say, like watching a republican presidential candidate on the campaign trail: freedom, liberty, americans want a strong economy, blah blah blah. The reason those lines are continually returned to is that they are very often defending indefensible positions, and so there cannot be honest debate. This is a way to keep the conversation at arm’s length, and it makes me not trust them. I wish we were just talking, because there is no right answer, there is only a continual conversation, and this event and the way it has been handled have ground the conversation to a halt.

I’ll leave you with one final thought experiment, for me the strongest argument against the way slutwalk addresses feminist concerns: Lots and lots of photos were taken at those slutwalks, and while of course not all women were dressed minimally, lots were, and there are therefore lots of photos of probably hot girls wearing very little and carrying signs announcing themselves as sluts. So how many men do you think have masturbated to photos from slutwalk marches? Hmm? Innumerable boners have been popped over those images. Now ask yourself, is that empowerment?

Listen to the interview with Meghan Murphy of the F Word Media Collective: http://r1.co.nz/podcasts.php