Manliness: The Hegemony

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.

Occupy Patriarchy

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.  

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)

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.

Talk About Technology

 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.

Enlightened Sexism and Erotic Capital

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”. 

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

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

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.