Posts authored by Gretchen
“Screw PETA”
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| “Be very, very quiet…I’m hunting squirrels.” |
Jennifer Lawrence is about to learn what it’s like to have every little comment said in passing scrutinized — yes, she’s a bona fide star. The actress was dubbed “the coolest chick in Hollywood” by Rolling Stone, and in the magazine’s latest issue she recounts her on-screen squirrel-skinning scene in the 2010 movie “Winter’s Bone.” “I should say it wasn’t real, for PETA. But screw PETA,” she told the magazine. Lawrence’s interview has been on newsstands since March 30, but the comment went unnoticed until it was picked up by a hunting magazine, which praised Lawrence for the comment. In response to the actress’s comment, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk told Gothamist, “[Lawrence] is young and the plight of animals somehow hasn’t yet touched her heart. As Henry David Thoreau said, ‘The squirrel you kill in jest, dies in earnest.’ We are told that this squirrel was hit by a car, but when people kill animals, it is the animals who are ‘screwed,’ not PETA, and one day I hope she will try to make up for any pain she might have caused any animal who did nothing but try to eke out a humble existence in nature.” Regardless, it doesn’t sound as if Lawrence is going to be a PETA spokesperson anytime soon. The actress, who spent a month in Missouri with a rural family learning to shoot rifles and chop wood in preparation for “Winter’s Bone,” and was trained by four-time Olympic archer Khatuna Lorig for her role as Katniss in “The Hunger Games,” also told Rolling Stone, that when she is done with her next movie she is “thinking about buying a house. And a big dog. And a shotgun.”
1. We could do with a lot more celebrities saying “Screw PETA,” couldn’t we? Maybe Lawrence could sit down and have a chat with these people.
2. I somehow doubt that Lawrence’s youth is the reason her heart hasn’t been touched by the plight of animals. Young female actresses and singers seem like PETA’s bread and butter, all too ready and willing to support a disingenuous and vapid group that equates broiler hens to Holocaust victims and has tarnished the cause of animal rights so much by its antics that they should get kickbacks from ConAgra and shout-outs from Ted Nugent. Young women who have not so much as seen a farm in person seem like the best candidates to view all animals as cast members from Bambi, and to think that posing nude accompanied by the slogan “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” somehow draws attention and sympathy to the pathos of minks, foxes, rabbits, etc. bound for coat-dom rather than a mixture of eye-rolling, leering, and condescending chuckles.
3. I haven’t seen “Winter’s Bone” or “The Hunger Games,” but am pretty sure that Lawrence’s role in both films has something to do with…you know, hunger. That her character is herself trying to “eke out a humble existence in nature,” and would be either an idiot or a masochist to turn down a nice bit of squirrel for dinner when it’s offered. Ever watch one of those survival shows, like Out of Alaska or Man vs. Wild? The people on those shows try to shoot, snare, or catch animals for meat first and foremost for a reason, and it isn’t because killing animals is fun or they don’t care about their “plight.” It’s because meat is the best kind of food you can have if your goal is avoiding starvation most efficiently. Now, to be fair Newkirk’s quote was reacting to Lawrence saying “Screw PETA” concerning the question of whether any animals were actually hurt in filming (at least, that’s my impression). But Newkirk did toss out an unqualified statement condemning killing animals in general, so I feel comfortable calling it absurd and mindless without qualification.
4. In case it needs to be reiterated, I am concerned about animal rights. I think causing unnecessary suffering is wrong and should be avoided, which leads to a revulsion for all sorts of very common practices in the food industry that make many animals’ lives torture from beginning to unfortunate end. But PETA is possibly the worst organization claiming to battle this suffering, and ridiculous hand-wringing over the death of any animal by Newkirk and patronizing denouncement of anyone who supports such a thing under any circumstances certainly earns the dismissal “Screw PETA.”
Timesucker: Drawception
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| “Batman changing his pants” |
Other people are currently obsessed with Draw Something, but I have neither iPhone nor iPad so I’m immune to the contagion. What has caught my interest lately (and time, and energy, but not money) is Drawception. It’s a free browser-based game that combines drawing with Telephone. Their description:
1) A player begins a game with a short phrase – for example, “A cow jumping over the moon”
2) A randomly chosen player then draws that phrase
3) Another random player describes the new drawing
4) Yet another player draws the new description
5) Steps 3 and 4 repeat until 12 unique players have participated
When completed, the participating players can view the often unexpected and hilarious results!
They are indeed hilarious, and the two things that make this possible are a) the fact that it’s random, and the only thing you will see when you click “play” is the drawing or interpretation of the person before you (or a box into which you type a phrase, if you’re starting a new game) and b) it’s timed, so each player only has ten minutes to finish his or her turn. This makes the game proceed relatively quickly. It is possible to skip a turn and not participate in the game that has been handed to you, but most people don’t seem to do this. And most people by far are not skilled artists (though some are astonishingly so), so there’s no need to get caught up in how pathetic your mouse-drawn sketches are. You just read things, draw things, and have fun. Here’s a sample game in which I participated under the name Rillion. The game is still in its early beta, but has been getting all sorts of attention and new features are being added daily– your profile now includes a list of games you’ve participated in, drawings you’ve done, favorite games you’ve seen, people you’re following, and people who are following you.
Oh, and people who insist on drawing nothing but penises and poop, regardless of what the clue was? They get banned, quick-like. In addition to being able to upvote or downvote someone’s drawing/interpretation, you can report them outright for screwing up the game. It’s so much more fun to see people actually doing their best to figure out how on earth they’re supposed to depict the bizarre phrases they were given, or figure out what the hell the drawing they’re looking at is supposed to be.
T-shirts for women
I really enjoy reading everything Greta Christina has to say on her blog. Sometimes I forget to check it, which is an oversight on my part, but every time I go and read through a new entry I feel edified by the experience. The same, sadly, cannot be said of the comment section. Which is not to disparage the comments– they are usually dominated by insightful additions or reflections on the original post by readers. It’s just that the more seemingly obvious the point Greta Christina makes, the more inevitable it is that someone will show up in the comments who missed that point entirely, and wants to use the opportunity to lecture her on how wrong-headed she is.
Exhibit A: Fashion Friday: Atheist T-Shirts in Women’s Styles.
Obvious, Seemingly Non-Controversial Thesis: When skeptical/atheist organizations have a conference, it sure would be nice if they offered t-shirts which come in women’s sizes in addition to men’s. This acknowledgement that the word “unisex” really is a misnomer when it comes to t-shirts (because the typical female is shaped differently from the typical male in important ways) would go a long way toward making women feel more included, and make it much easier for these women to fulfill the intended purpose of labeled t-shirts (wearing them, and thereby spreading the message of whatever that label represents) because the shirts will look better on them, not having been made to fit men.
Trollish disagreement: You are just trying to find ways to create discord and emphasize exclusiveness rather than inclusiveness. “Standard” t-shirts really are unisex– they aren’t for men, and they don’t look any better on men. If you don’t think they look good on you, then you should just not buy one and shut up about it. Or maybe we should get rid of t-shirts altogether. It doesn’t matter because nobody wears those things anyway, and it’s been this way for a very long time so you’re just demanding something extra and special. In asking for this thing that suits you more, you have stopped fighting for equality across the board and are just pursuing your own interests.
Yes, seriously.
*facepalm*
I’m not going to go over the (obvious, shouldn’t have to be said) response to this, because it has been made by Greta Christina and others on her blog post already and you can just go read them. I’m just saying that this kind of thing is really tiring. Tiring to read, tiring to rebut, tiring to contemplate that people can say write such things presumably with a straight face.
So if or when the urge arises to dismiss the very real and necessary work involved in combating this nonsense, think again. Certain people function as bullshit lightning rods. Greta Christina’s one of them.
Thought for the day
When talking about laws impinging on freedom, laws that impinge on important freedoms matter. But laws that impinge on unimportant freedoms matter more.
Why?
Because a law that says you fundamentally may not say what you think or feel, own your own property, express a meaningful choice about your rulers and representatives, or conduct your personal relationships and interactions as you choose certainly represents an obvious threat to basic human happiness and flourishing.
But a law that constitutes a threat to a specific way or specific version of expressing one’s thoughts, the ability to own one’s own property, to vote as one sees fit, or to relate to others as one chooses, amounts to the government saying “Even this I may forbid.” Certainly a government which can prohibit the most benign and superficial expression of a freedom can find justification to prohibit the more significant. And it is these admonitions, which address particular expressions and behavior that the majority do not desire, that the majority will not rise up and defend.
PSA
Pleading for Sympathetic Acceptance: Your host blogger is in the process of moving, and has precious little time (not to mention space) to write. She should return to her regularly scheduled ranting in due time.
The blood footprint
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| More animal-friendly than a vegetarian? |
There are all sorts of ways in which people can alter their diets for ethical reasons, but the presumed reason that people become vegetarians out of ethical concern is that they don’t want to cause any animals to die in order to supply their meal. Jackson Landers at Zester Daily puts forth the counter-intuitive position that sometimes not eating meat can cause more suffering and death than eating it. In A Better Choice: Deer, he compares eating hunted venison to soy burgers:
Meat is not the only food that is the byproduct of animals suffering. Other foods have what I call a “blood footprint,” but the relationship is more subtle. It is possible for a vegetarian meal to require more suffering than a carnivorous meal. A thoughtful carnivore, especially if she is a hunter, can potentially eat with a smaller blood footprint than a vegetarian. Consider the typical blood footprint of that mainstay of a vegetarian diet, the soy burger. The meal itself contains no meat. But the production of soy and tofu on an industrial scale requires quite a lot of killing. Crop depredation by deer and other animals is a huge problem for most soy growers. The majority of states will issue depredation permits to farmers who are suffering crop damage, and as a result, deer are shot in high numbers in the name of protecting soy and corn crops. Some states require that the deer shot under these permits be left to rot, and forbid any meat from being taken from the animals. Crows, starlings, blackbirds and other birds are shot, trapped and poisoned by the millions every year in North America for the sole purpose of protecting crops. Millions of mice, voles and ground squirrels are trapped, poisoned or otherwise killed for the same purpose. All of the food harvested from these fields is technically vegetarian fodder, but how many lives were lost to produce that tofu burger? How much suffering was required? You won’t find anything on the label about that. If your purpose in ordering from the vegetarian menu was to dodge cruelty, your mission failed. True, if you compare a tofu burger to a grain-fed beef burger, the tofu burger comes out ahead. Corn-fed beef involves all of the sins required to grow its food, and then the cow is slaughtered to boot. But a wild venison burger is arguably a more ethical way of putting lunch on the table. A wild deer requires no killing until the moment of harvest to produce some 40 pounds of meat, even from a smallish animal. The deer lives free of cages, electric prods, hormones or antibiotics. No other animals are trapped, poisoned or shot to bring it to maturity. The blood footprint of the venison burger may be less than that of a tub of popcorn. One life, divided among many meals. The deer lives a good life, and then has one bad day.
Obviously this is not a complete argument for ethical vegetarians to resume/begin being omnivorous. For one thing it isn’t necessary that they consume soy, though this essay addresses the importance of considering the possible suffering caused to animals in the production of whatever food you do eat, because that too is part of your blood footprint even if no actual animal flesh is part of your diet. Not eating soy doesn’t get you off the hook. For another, while it might be possible for all current vegetarians to become deer hunters and swap soy for venison, that’s a) not a very realistic thing to imagine and b) as proliferate as deer are, it wouldn’t be possible for all of us who currently eat meat with a greater blood footprint than venison to switch to that as well. America eats too much meat, period, for us all to switch to venison even if we wanted to. And plenty of us don’t.
Still, this is an excellent reminder to differentiate between ethics and sentimentality. I wrote the following on this blog two years ago, as part of a general discussion on the morality of survival:
I’m not touching so much on the “meat vs. no meat” discussion here, because I think that’s a somewhat different issue. Certainly that’s an ethical matter as well, but I think bringing the discussion of whether eating meat is inherently unethical into the general topic of how to eat ethically muddies things quite a bit. There are more and less ethical ways to eat meat, and generally speaking they coincide with the more and less healthy ways to eat meat. For example, I think that people who object to factory farming but aren’t vegetarians should be big fans of hunting, which often involves shooting a deer, putting it in the freezer, and eating from it for much of the winter. That white-tailed deer has lived in the wild all of its life, eating the plants that Odocoileus virginianus traditionally eats as opposed to dining on corn and standing in its own feces, and later is killed by a hunter to provide a family with meat that is nutritionally superior to that of a CAFO steer. And we have in this country a ton of deer, as anyone who habitually drives in the country and has to worry about accidentally hitting one can testify. Of course not everyone can hunt for their food due to constraints on both geography and population, but it’s something that meat-eaters who are concerned about the interests of animals should enthusiastically endorse.
There may be a cultural gulf between the type of people who hunt and fish and the people who shop Whole Foods for only the most humanely produced organic products, but there isn’t really an ethical one. At least, not nearly as much as one might think. And at least not regarding food.
Savage U
Long-time sex columnist, author, podcaster, advocate, and public educator Dan Savage now has a TV show. And it looks good.
Get More: Savage U, Full Episodes
I was a little concerned before watching the trailer that the show would be watered down, homogenized, and generally weaker than the typical frank, funny, pointed commentary we tend to get from Savage. And I’m still a little concerned, but not nearly as much. Savage has been doing Q&A presentations at universities and occasionally the odd appearance at stage venues in various parts of the country for years now, and it looks like the show is going to pretty much just show those appearances…along with some candid conversations with specific students about their particular concerns. But it’s MTV, so there’s still the potential for unexpected ruin. Nevertheless I’m keeping my hopes up and planning to watch. Hopefully a lot of non-collegiate teenagers will watch as well– the kind of people Savage needs to speak to directly even more, but can’t. And maybe, maybe, they will even watch with……their parents!
Yeah, probably not. But one can dream. The show premieres Tuesday, April 3.
Some actual good relationship advice on the web
I know, it’s hard to believe. But hear me out in appreciating Madame Noir for the article 8 Dynamics That Should Never Exist in a Relationship (formerly “8 Things Women Think Are Normal In A Relationship That Aren’t,” which was a wise change). Since it’s a list, each item must have a title. And each title appears so obvious upon reading it that you might wonder why anyone would need a list to inform them that these particular dynamic sshouldn’t exist in their relationships, but then it’s not the titles that matter most– it’s the descriptions and examples. Most of us tend to think we have good relationship sense, especially after we’ve had a few or a dozen, but we can also forget that that a relationship doesn’t have to be outright abusive in order to have problems that need to be addressed. The section on “royal mentality” reminded me of this. Yes, the whole thing is written for women…but men, I know you can overlook that and benefit from it anyway.
Conservative group to gather, bemoan 40 year old advance in sexual freedom
No, I’m not kidding. And no, this is not from The Onion, though it sounds like it. The Family Research Council is holding a symposium on Wednesday, March 21st, to get together and talk about a terrible moment in history. The title is 40 Years Since Eisenstadt v. Baird: A Look at the High Court’s Legal Attack on Marriage. Eisenstadt v. Baird, whose ruling was actually delivered on March 22, 1972, was when SCOTUS decided that unmarried people should have the same access to contraceptives that married people do, invalidating state laws to the contrary. Here is the FRC’s statement on the purpose of their event:
On March 22nd, 1972, the Supreme Court undermined the boundaries and benefits of marriage. In the decision Eisenstadt v. Baird, the Court struck down a Massachusetts law prohibiting the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried people, and implicitly sanctioned unmarried non-procreative sexual intimacy. While the decision may seem archaic and insignificant by modern sexual standards, Eisenstadt v. Baird dealt a decisive blow to the legal and cultural norm that marriage was the institution for the full expression of the sexual relationship between man and woman. The decision and its legal consequences affect us today. Forty years ago, the Court ruled that unmarried couples could not be denied their birth control. Today, the Federal government is forcing us to share the cost, for said contraception and some states are giving marital status to homosexual relationships. Join us on March 21st, as legal and social science experts Helen Alvaré and Pat Fagan explain why the Court’s decision matters and how anyone who cares about the family should understand the legal landscape and the social consequences of this momentous decision.
It’s telling that the final paragraph refers to “the family,” and not “families.” This is for the same reason that the organization is called the Family Research Council in the first place– to seize hold of the notion of “family” and fight with tooth and nail against it referring to any other arrangement than one biological mother and one biological father who are married and have sex only after marriage. I would say “for the purpose of procreation,” but apparently the FRC is a-okay with sanctioning married non-procreative intimacy, just not the unmarried kind.
And of course, they likewise want to grab onto the word “marriage” and insist that only one meaning of the word is appropriate– theirs. That’s the only way to describe the SCOTUS ruling as an “attack on marriage” with a straight face, when it did absolutely nothing to actually prevent people from getting married (just as, when it eventually acknowledges the right of gays to marry, it will do nothing to prevent anyone from getting married but conservatives will likewise again complain about being “attacked”). Presumably the FRC wants all children to be born to married parents, so their opposition to Eisenstadt here amounts to an objection to unmarried people being able to have sex, period. Thinking about this, bear in mind that not only did 95% of Americans have premarital sex in 2002, but that (evenly balanced as to sex) 70% had it in the 1930’s.
The people going to the FRC gathering on Wednesday should consider that their great-grandparents might well have had sex outside of marriage, and used contraceptives in the process to prevent pregnancy. Yes, I know it’s not fun to think about your ancestors having sex, period. But just for the sake of this thought experiment, it’s important. It’s important for the sake of remembering that no matter how much you want children to be born to parents joined in marriage, the solution is not to try and force unmarried people into marriage by preventing them from being able to have sex without risk of conception. For one thing, it should be obvious by now that that doesn’t work. For another, people make their own sex lives, both before and after marriage (or totally outside of it, for those of us who are not keen on marriage to begin with). It’s possible that if Eisenstadt had not turned out in the way it did, there might still be states with laws on the books preventing unmarried couples from having access to birth control. In which case we could expect to see the number of married couples skyrocket, but the demand for birth control remain the same if it doesn’t escalate. Because people who want to have sex without procreating will do so. And they are the majority, all of the time.