Another great one from the Calvin and Hobbes reruns today:

Calvin (chewing a huge wad of gum): I need to get a heart rate monitor.

Hobbes: What for?

Calvin: To make sure I’m chewing at my aerobic threshold! Every day I want to see that I’m chewing more gum faster, harder, and longer!

Hobbes: What’s the point of attaching a number to everything you do?

Calvin: If your numbers go up, it means you’re having more fun.

Hobbes: Science to the spirit’s rescue once again.

Where else in the funnies can you find, in nuce, the Austrian critique of the GDP and other econometric mummeries?

Further reading:

• GT 2006-04-16: Direct Action
• GT 2005-01-02: Vulture Economics
• Laurence Parks, Mises Insitute (October 1997): Burn Your House, Boost the Economy

Here’s a recent strip from the Calvin and Hobbes reruns. This one’s going up on my door.

Calvin: I’m the decisive, take-charge type! I’m a natural leader!

[Calvin points off to the left]

Calvin: See! We’ll go this way!

[Hobbes turns to the right and walks away]

Hobbes: Have fun.

[Calvin is trudging through a muddy creek alone.]

Calvin: The problem is that nobody wants to go where I want to lead them.

When we have won, this is what freedom will look like. It won’t take any ballot boxes and it won’t take political parties, let alone guns and barricades. Direct action means being able to walk the other way and just ignore them.

Happy Easter, y’all.

Around the web in the past couple weeks. Some of the news that’s fit to link.

• Hopelessly Midwestern (2006-02-03): Petting =/= Popularity: A Shocking Look At The Sex Lives Of Our Children takes on professional anti-feminist Caitlin Flanagan (for background reading, see the profile in Ms.) and her latest foray into the teensploitation genre — a hand-wringing and voyeuristic article about a non-existent teenage oral sex craze amongst our Troubled Suburban Youth, and touches on feminism, amnesiac nostalgia, privileged suburban angst, and Judy Blume in the process.

  Thinking back on my own privileged adolescence, I can remember girls who performed oral sex on boys on a more or less casual basis, girls who denied rumors that they did the above, girls who did it with their boyfriends and related the experience the next morning with a mix of panic and excitement, girls who didn’t think it was a big deal, girls who thought it was a big deal, girls who talked about it loudly at lunchtime and did seductive poses with every potentially phallic food product in sight (including CapriSun straws and granola bars) but had no more than a vague idea what it actually involved, girls who thought it was the grossest thing ever, EVER, oh my God, girls who had no qualms about doing it (it in italics) but thought oral sex was unnatural, girls who tried to freak out self-consciously innocent girls like me by saying, Luke Lepinski is SO CUTE. Don’t you just want to put his DICK in your MOUTH? and then laughing like maniacs at my genuine bafflement, Christian girls who plugged their ears and shrieked if you tried to talk about any kind of genital-related program activity, even in the most abstract and theoretical language, girls who had heard you could get pregnant that way (and might have a cousin who knew someone who did,) and myself. My opinions on the matter were all based on my strong and growing aversion to boys, and were not particularly well-formed, nor did I have occasion to put them into practice. I recite this autobiographical litany as a way of illustrating the complex nature of that steady decline in morals called growing up, and to suggest that gnashing one’s teeth about the unexpected depravities of our formerly delicate rosebud-like daughters may not be the best response thereto. What is the best response? I don’t know, but Caitlin Flanagan is a bit too eager to put down Planned Parenthood for its attempts to give sane and sensible advice on the matter ….

  — Hopelessly Midwestern (2006-02-03): Petting =/= Popularity: A Shocking Look At The Sex Lives Of Our Children

  … and don’t miss the response to Flanagan’s closing remarks — an employment of the old Double Standard so overt and so uncritical that it leaves no avenues of criticism open other than something stodgy like rank sexism:

  Frankly, I’d rather have a daughter who gives out a few undeserved blowjobs of her own volition than a son who thinks sex is his right and privilege as a Hot-Blooded American Male. Oops, there I go slandering men with my insane expectation that they take responsibility for their own desires! Damn insidious radical feminist influence! What won’t it disfigure with its toxic fumes of seething, sulfurous hatred?

  — Hopelessly Midwestern (2006-02-03): Petting =/= Popularity: A Shocking Look At The Sex Lives Of Our Children

  Read the whole thing

• Sarah Goldstein at Broadsheet (2006-02-03): New hope in the fight against domestic violence gives a shout-out to a new program for rehabilitating men who batter women, called Resolve to Abolish Violence Everywhere. The plan? Stop focusing on anger management, and start tackling male entitlement:

  What’s exciting about this approach to combating domestic abuse is that it tackles the institutionalization of male dominance, looking at the offender’s action within a larger system of violence. Women’s eNews reports, Staffers [in Austin] say this program assumes that violence arises from a decision based on deeply-held beliefs of male dominance, not a flash of uncontrollable emotion. Whereas most anger management classes are just three or four weeks long, this program works with the offender for an entire year after his release.

  — Sarah Goldstein at Broadsheet (2006-02-03): New hope in the fight against domestic violence

  Of course, there’s no magic bullet for ending battery, and this program, like any others, has limitations to worry about (like the institutional limitations imposed on any program run by cops, or the fact that it only catches men once they’ve already tortured one or more women to the point that it reached the criminal justice system). But insofar as there are going to be court-mandated rehabilitation programs, this is certainly a step forward, and I wish them the best.

  Read the whole thing.

• Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy (2006-02-07): To Be Hot And Nuts points out a story from this month’s Prospect that will make you want to tear your hair out and then run out in a blind rage and bury the entire psychiatric-pharmaceutical complex under a library of Women and Madness and the collected works of Thomas Szasz.

  But then tragedy strikes. The drug that works also makes her fat. This a horror the doctors find intolerable. Her beauty is destroyed. So they take her off that drug because in a patriarchy a hot girl cannot be fat. So Nia immediately goes nuts again because the new drug, though it does not make her fat, also doesn't work. She is nuts again, but at least she's still a babe. Whew. That was close.

  But she is so nuts that, after a month of hell, doctors reluctantly put her back on the fat drug. The crazy part is that Nia doesn't give a crap about being fat. She's happy as a clam to get rid of the voices. Yet the doctors assume that, because she isn't crying herself to sleep every night over her lost beauty, she isn't really getting well at all. Any 17-year-old in her right mind would be bulimic and wanna slice herself up with razors under these circumstances, right?

  — Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy (2006-02-07): To Be Hot And Nuts

  Selections from the first five or six comments: Oh give me a fucking break, I don't know what to do besides shout obscenities. Good fucking god, This makes me so mad I can't see straight. That last paragraph … is insulting in about 10 THOUSAND different ways and makes me want to slap the authors and Nia's dr's repeatedly about the head and face, etc. That’s just about right.

  Read the whole damn thing. But only on an empty stomach. Then write a letter to the editor.

• Amanda at Pandagon (2006-02-02): Vacuums, internalized sexism and yes, that invisibility of privilege looks at the politics of housework, as one of the arenas of in which anti-feminists love to point out how women themselves are deputized as the primary enforcers of sexist standards. Shockingly, she finds that this looks more like classic male privilege than it does some kind of self-imposed drudgery that women have ended up with by being naturally the Fairer Sex.

  You see this sort of thing a lot, where women are judged by a different standard than men, but the appointed judges are technically other women, so the whole thing can be written off as women being weird instead of women trying to adapt to a patriarchal system. That way, not only can men benefit from the thing women are supposed to do to fit into a standard, they have the added bonus of acting like they are simply above such female nonsense. In the case of housework, men can benefit from having a clean home without either working or appearing so uncool as to care if the house is clean, since the work is done by invisible female hands.

  … It's true–make-up, shoes, exercise, dieting, the whole routine is developed by and enforced by women while being sneered at all too often by the very men the entire routine is developed to benefit. The complaint is not so much that women do all these things, of course. It's that men might accidentally be exposed to these things; in the good old days, I suppose, women worked harder at the conspiracy to shield men from having to perceive their own privilege. (For a really great example of this, read Pink Think by Lynn Peril–she excerpts an advice book to women that suggests that women should rise before their husbands to do their make-up and preserve the illusion that they never look any different.)

  … That's the basic argument behind choice feminism, and it's whipped out to explain away every instance of women's second class status, from breast implants to domestic service. And that's the argument that EricP is resorting to when explaining away the difference between expectations on men and women for level of cleanliness. It's easy to look at how women are expected to police ourselves for adhering to a patriachal standard and say that it's our fault. But it's not the cops that are the ones to look at when the laws themselves are suspect.

  — Amanda at Pandagon (2006-02-02): Vacuums, internalized sexism and yes, that invisibility of privilege

  Read the whole thing. I’d also like to add a note from Andrea Dworkin that I came across the same day that I read Amanda’s post. This is from In Memory of Nicole Brown Simpson, in Life and Death (41–50):

  While race-hate is expressed through forced segregation, woman-hate is expressed through forced closeness, which makes punishment swift, easy, and sure. In private, women often empathize with one another, across race and class, because their experiences with men are so much the same. But in public, including on juries, women rarely dare.

  –Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death, pp. 49–50

  Maybe one way to gloss the essential goal of feminism is to create a platform from which that private empathy can erupt into public solidarity and action.

• BB at Den of the Biting Beaver (2006-02-10): Friday Fun with Sitemeter offers a guided tour to the kind of Google searches that you get when you run a radical feminist anti-pornography website.

• Roderick at Austro-Athenian Empire (2006-02-03): Tarzan’s Burden mentions Hollywood popcult’s mutilation of the character of Tarzan, and points to an interesting four-part essay by F. X. Blisard on race relations in the Tarzan novels and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ work in general — fairly enlightened for Burroughs' era, it turns out, and far superior to Hollywood's treatment. Read the whole thing.

• Ken Gregg (2006-02-08) at CLASSical Liberalism: It Usually Begins With… takes another look at Jules Verne, his literary accomplishments, his prescience, the way his politics have been excised from bowdlerized English translations until very recently, and what those politics were (in short, a mixed bag):

  Verne’s novels have contrary trends: support for national liberation movements such as the Irish and Polish, but also a strong pacifist streak; paternalism toward colonial peoples, but a hatred of slavery and imperialism (especially British); sympathy for utopian experiments, but resentment toward state power; affirmation of free enterprise, but assaults on big capitalism (especially American); a celebration of loyalty and community, but sympathy for militant individualism.

  — Ken Gregg (2006-02-08) at CLASSical Liberalism: It Usually Begins With…

  Read the whole thing.

• media girl (2006-02-10): Spying on Americans is for kids! takes a look at the NSA’s ongoing attempts at cute, furry cartoon outreach to children, which is either a very funny comment on bureaucratic rationality or else a daring new form of avant-garde surrealist theater.

• The Dominion (2006-01-16): CBC’s true colors discovers that the government-owned CBC is solicitous of the party in power in the government to the point of altering their logo to match the party color scheme. Surprised?

• Paganarchy (2006-02-04): Serious Organised Crime? Ha Ha Ha! — a squad of clowns takes to the street to protest restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly around Parliament, and a copper stops them from entering Parliament to talk with their MPs:

  Our first port of call was to visit our MPs in the House Of Commons. Just through the security gate and whoa — the duty sergeant stopped us from going in. Alas, we were deemed not dignified enough by a copper calling himself the chief arbiter of style.

  As opposed to the grave dignity of a copper who has appointed himself the chief arbiter of style for the House of Commons and taken it upon himself to make sure the dress of visitors is up to his sartorial standards.

  Read the whole thing.

• The North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists posts links to left-anarchist debate over the iterative Five Year Plan participatory economics.

• Kevin Carson at the UnCapitalist Journal (2005-09-22): What Can Bosses Know? looks at mutualist anarchism, worker self-management, and the knowledge problems that afflict corporate as well as government bureaucracies. (Yeah, I know it’s from last September. But it’s good, and I just found it in the past couple weeks. Also, you may find it relevant in connection with the debate over Five Year Planning by iterated collective bargaining between the deputies of several massive federations in an appropriately participatory bureaucratic forum.)

  As Samuel Edward Konkin III (SEK3) of the Movement of the Libertarian Left said somewhere (I can’t find it–little help?) organizational inefficiency starts when you have one supervisor taking orders from another supervisor: that is, the point at which hierarchy replaces market contracting.

  … The central problem is that, since the costs of tracking the results of individual decisions becomes prohibitively expensive in a large organization, market incentives must be replaced by administrative ones. Milton Friedman pointed out long ago that people do a better job of spending money on themselves than on other people, and do better spending their own money than other people’s money. That’s the standard, and correct, libertarian argument for why government is so inefficient. It’s spending other people’s money on other people; and unlike a private firm not only can it not go out of business for inefficiency, it gets rewarded with more money. Well, the very same incentive problems apply to the decision-maker in a corporate hierarchy. He’s a steward of other people’s money, and the costs and benefits of any decision he makes can be determined only badly, if at all. Unlike a self-employed actor whose relations with others are mediated by the market, he is motivated by purely administrative incentives.

  — Kevin Carson at the UnCapitalist Journal (2005-09-22): What Can Bosses Know?

• Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek (2006-02-09): We Don’t Make Anything Anymore takes on the factory protectionists over the state of industry in America. The worriers like to complain that we don’t make anything anymore. America is being hollowed out. Soon we’re going to be left doing one another’s laundry. Boy, will we be poor then. The problem is an old one: the heavy-industry hand-wringers are measuring the inputs, not the outputs. When you look at the stuff actually being produced, rather than the number of people employed or the size of the pile of resources invested in producing it, you’ll find that we’re making more stuff than ever. (I’d add that there are lots of reasons to worry about what happens to heavy-industry workers as they lose their jobs. And that Roberts’ summary and selective swipes at the unions are unwarranted. But the basic point is well-taken. Our aims should not be to prop up an elaborate industrial make-work program.)

• David Friedman, Ideas (2006-02-09): Unschooling: The Advantage of the Real World: One point raised in comments on my recent unschooling post was that you sometimes have to do things you don’t like, a lesson we can teach our children by making them study things they are not currently interested in studying. It is an interesting point, and I think reflects a serious error. Friedman challenges would-be educators to help students expose themselves to the natural consequences of effort and fortitude, rather than imposing make-work punishments and rewards on them in order to teach them a lesson where the incentives bear no natural relation to the task at hand. Read the whole thing.

• Tim Bray, ongoing (2006-02-10) asks, What Do GNU and Linux Mean? in a free software world where the user experience is (praise the Good) further and further removed from the technical wotsits of the kernel, where Firefox, OpenOffice, and GNU software provide an increasingly standard software environment, and where the choice between GNU/OpenSolaris and GNU/Linux is going to be a strictly technical choice with basically no impact on the end-user environment? What should you even call what’s emerging? Tim suggests some deliberate provocations: So you've got the combination of a Solaris or Linux kernel with a mish-mosh of GNU, Mozilla, OpenOffice and other random software, and calling it Linux or Solaris is misleading. I think Sun could legally ship something like this under the name GNU/Unix. Which would be concise, descriptive, accurate, and funny. (Because GNU stands for Gnu's Not Unix and Solaris, after all, is.) I think maybe we should just call it GNU, and encourage ordinary users to leave the worries about what comes after the slash to people who have reasons to care about kernels.

• August Pollak (2006-02-08): As a white guy, did you just throw up right now? and Mikhaela Reed (2006-02-09): The so-called conservative Doonesbury … mention Chris Muir’s imaginary Black friend and the excellent opportunity that having one provides white cartoonists to lecture African-Americans about how they should think of themselves in early 21st century America. A Touch of Ego offers some background context on Muir and Day By Day. Amanda at Pandagon (2006-02-08) calls for fixes to help Chris Muir write a funny strip. My favorite repair job is from Ampersand at Alas (2006-02-09).

• Claire Wolfe (2006-02-13): Back from the meditation workshop reviews the good, the bad, and the ugly of her two-week long meditation retreat in silence. One of the good things about the retreat was the distance it allowed from the hot air of professional blowhards that passes for News and Views these days: The omnipresent Information Flow also became irrelevant. I worried at times about what was happening to Steve Kubby and Cory Maye, but could have cared less about the monotonous, inevitable sturm und drang that passes for Vital News. Funny, too. They call it news, but the same rot was being broadcast and podcast and web-posted when I left and when I returned. Nothing new about the news. … Time to live. Time to think deeply, rather than think in quick brain bytes between rushed emails and frequent checks of LewRockwell.com, Rational Review, Google News, and TCF. Read the whole thing.

• Carnival is two weeks from today. In honor of the liturgical occasion, be sure to read up on the latest weblog Carnivals. In particular, the inaugural editions of the Radical Women of Color Carnival and the Big Fat Carnival are up at Reappropriate and Alas, A Blog respectively. Not to mention the eighth Carnival of the Feminists at Gendergeek. Enjoy!

I’ve never seen Catwoman, but I’m sure it’s a wretched film. It looked bad enough from the previews, and critical consensus seems to have placed it somewhere between Robocop 3 and An Allan Smithee Film Burn Hollywood Burn in the annals of catastrophically bad films.

In fact, I think it’s quite right to point out that Catwoman is only part of a series of lame, derivative superheroine-exploitation flicks that have been coming out lately, and that Hollywood has been pumping trash into the cinemas on the completely mistaken assumption that formulaic flicks about sexy superheroines are just as guaranteed to produce box office smashes as past hits such as Charlie’s Angels and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. So I find it hard to disagree with Christina Larson at the Washington Monthly when she points out that after the success of a few films featuring women with superpowers, Hollywood overreached. Studios didn’t pause to figure out why audiences loved action heroines. Instead, they rolled out a formula that pandered to all of the wrong instincts. True that. But I find it a lot easier to disagree when Larson goes on, apparently, to inform us that the problem isn’t that the flops were formulaic and derivative–it’s that they used the wrong formula. The mistake, you see, was for Hollywood to give the anonymous gendered masses plots and characters limited by the narrow criteria of sexual titillation and choreographed fight scenes–when they should have been aiming to give them plots and characters limited by the narrow criteria of self-confident sex appeal to men, immense worldly success, and a distinct lack of inner conflict.

So, also, we are told that Hollywood needs to realize that the first crop of warrior women won a following because they were strong, smart, and successful in addition to being sexy. Men wanted them, and women wanted to be them. Who needs a a richer selection of superheroine films that deal with the many different ways complicated women in extraordinary circumstances might relate to the world? Why not just kvetch about Catwoman’s contempt for men or Elektra’s grim life: her personal magnetism doesn’t measure up: She’s a gloomy assassin who suffers from nightmares, insomnia, and OCD. Plus she hates her job but can’t–or won’t–figure out what else to do with her life.

Now, Peter Parker, of course, was an angsty teenaged boy who hated his life and couldn’t–or wouldn’t–figure out what else to do with it for quite a while in Spider-Man 2. Sure, the film also included a lot of glorious spectacle and comic-book battle scenes. But its real narrative arc was a pretty somber, inward-directed reflection on loss, duty, and sacrifice featuring a geeky boy whose life as a superhero was steadily destroying his friendships, job, studies, and, oh yes, his aborted love life. The hero is nervous, moody, socially isolated, and filled to the brim with male teen angst. The movie worked, really worked, and it was fantastically successful at the box office to boot.

On the other hand, The Punisher tried to adapt a notoriously dark comic featuring a sociopathic antihero whose survives as an empty shell, living only on a consuming lust for vengeance, which fills scene after scene with remorseless death and suffering. The Punisher was a box-office flop, and by most accounts a pretty bad film.

Of course, neither of these films is mentioned, either as a point of comparison or of contrast. Nor do we hear anything in particular about whether superhero movies smash box office records or disappear without a trace when they are about the psychological journey of afflicted heroes. But of course that’s because they involved boys, and since boys’ gender is invisible, there’s no need to try and piece out what the particular successes of Spider-Man 2 or failings of The Punisher mean for the prospects of any and all films that happen to feature a male superhero. Ah, but throw a pair of breasts into the mix and suddenly we have a Gender Issue to sort out. And what better way to sort out a Gender Issue than to make up a list of arbitrary rules for women’s conduct? Take this one—please!

1. Do fight demons. Don’t fight only inner demons.
2. Do play well with others. Don’t shun human society.
3. Do exhibit self-control. Don’t exhibit mental disorders.
4. Do wear trendy clothes. Don’t wear fetish clothes.
5. Do embrace girl power. Don’t cling to man hatred.
6. Do help hapless men. Don’t try to kill your boyfriend.
7. Do toss off witty remarks. Don’t look perpetually sullen.

— Christina Larson, The Washington Monthly (March 2005): Seven Mistakes Superheroines Make

So let’s review. (1) Whatever the conditions of your life, stay bright-eyed and confident all the time. (3) Don’t weird out on us. (4) Dress sexily, but don’t be a slut. (5) Embrace something that vaguely resembles feminism, unless it vaguely resembles the kind that makes boys squirm in their seats. (2), (6)-(7) Good God woman, whatever you do, ensure that you are both sexually available and unthreatening to men at all times. And so there you have it: an advice column for superheroines, straight from the pages of Cosmo, passed off by the Washington Monthly as a piece of cultural criticism.

It’s not that I mind articles which seriously explore the double-standards that men and women are held to in our culture. There are lots; sometimes they occur in weird places; and it’s worth spelling them out. But it’s worth spelling them out critically; if there is such a narrow formula that Hollywood priorities are forcing superheroine flicks into then that’s as good a reason as any to demand better, richer films about women with extraordinary powers.

But no; that would require thinking that audience tastes when it comes to gender and sexuality are complex, or–horribile dictu!–that it’s possible for them to change over time and acquire a taste for something more than the standard formulaic fare that you and I have been fed so far. But the worst thing you could possibly suggest about gender and sexuality in the mainstream culture is that they might be complicated or changeable.

So what matters is not that Catwoman was a wretchedly-written film or that Tomb Raider 2, like most sequels (not to mention most video game flicks), was derivative hackwork. It’s that they involved women who weren’t pleasing to the gaze of an anonymous, immutable, and male-defined audience. Any possibility of criticism must be stifled as quickly as possible, and the best way to do it is to present yet another manual for the sexy single superheroine to achieve success by resorting to every simplistic gender cue available. In other words, we have another opportunity to give a lecture–not to filmmakers to stop producing sleazy, also-ran hackwork, of course, but rather to fictional women, to ensure that they remain young, pleasant, and sexually available to the male gaze. Because that’s all the anonymous mass of boys can stand and all the anonymous mass of women want. Or something.

God only knows what they would do with a superheroine who happens to be a homicidal lesbian terrorist.

Watching Bush overcompensate during the second debate, I couldn’t help but think of another famous debate, which I think pretty much sums up the whole Bush debate strategy against Kerry:

(Bugs Bunny is standing on stage, imitating Theodore Roosevelt)

Bugs Bunny: I speak softly, but I carry a big stick!

(Yosemite Sam storms the stage, pushing Bugs Bunny away from the mic, with a plank in his hand)

Yosemite Sam (screaming): Well, I speak LOOOOOOOUD, and I carry a BIIIIIIIIIIGGER stick! And I use it, too!

(Sam thwacks Bugs Bunny with the plank)

— Ballot Box Bunny, 1951

Come to think of it, maybe there’s a metaphor there for the cognitive style of the Bush re-election campaign as a whole.

Further reading

The talking-points buzzword from the Republicans following the debate was dominated (I heard Republican campaign zombies repeat the claim that Bush dominated the debate three or four times in a row in the space of fifteen minutes). Of course, the point of a debate is to get at the truth, not to dominate, but the press strategy was pretty clearly tuned ahead of time to Bush’s strategy of overcompensating for last week’s meandering performance. In any case, for actual commentary on the content of the debate, you might want to check out feministe’s morning-after fact check or Cleis’s live-updated post).