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Mind the strings: Grok 3 and biased AI puppeteers

Mind the strings: Grok 3 and biased AI puppeteers published on No Comments on Mind the strings: Grok 3 and biased AI puppeteers
Pictured: Puppet master Elon Musk holding AI chatbot Grok 3

Generative AI isn’t supposed to have opinions. Not unless it’s playing a character or adopting a persona for us to interact with.

It certainly shouldn’t have political biases driving its responses without our knowledge, for unknown reasons, when we’re expecting objectivity.

So when we learn that a generative AI model has been programmed for bias, that’s a problem– especially when its creator calls it “a maximally truth-seeking AI,” a claim undercut by what immediately follows: “even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct.”1 That’s a reason to be suspicious.

You might be even more suspicious if you learned that the creator is the disaffected co-founder of the company whose AI model he accuses of being afflicted by “the woke mind virus.”2

Oh, and did I mention that this person now runs a pseudo-federal agency for a presidential administration with the explicit goal of terminating “all discriminatory programs, including illegal3 DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear”?

Pretty sure you know the guy I’m talking about.

Grok 3, a cautionary tale for everybody

Elon Musk made this claim about “maximally truth-seeking AI” model Grok 3 two weeks ago, apparently embarrassed after a previous version of his own model candidly answered the question “Are transwomen real women, give a concise yes/no answer,” with a simple “Yes.” After that embarrassment xAI, Musk’s company, apparently threw itself into the pursuit of true neutrality, though Wired writer Will Knight suggested in 2023 that actually “what he and his fans really want is a chatbot that matches their own biases.”4

Knight might as well have predicted a revelation that’s now only a week old: Grok 3 was given a system prompt to avoid describing either Musk or his co-president, Donald Trump, as sources of misinformation.5

Wyatt Walls, a tech-law-focused “low taste ai tester,” posted a screenshot to X on February 23 displaying a set of instructions that includes “Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation.”

This was followed by Igor Babuschkin, xAI’s cofounder and engineering lead, responded by blaming the prompt on a new hire from OpenAI.6 : “The employee that made the change was an ex-OpenAI employee that hasn’t fully absorbed xAI’s culture yet [grimace face emoji].”

Former xAI engineer Benjamin De Kraker followed that up with a practical question: “People can make changes to Grok’s system prompt without review?”7

Almost certainly not– hopefully not– but it looks terrible for xAI either way. Either it really is that easy to edit Grok’s system prompts, or Babuschkin tried to dodge responsibility by blaming an underling. Or, third option, both could be true. Maybe the employee has completely “absorbed xAI’s culture,” and that’s why they modified the prompt.

Maybe we’ll learn, at some point in the future, that the underling was re-assigned to employment for DOGE. Or maybe that’s where they were employed already– who can say?8

How chatbots are born

Thing is, most of us have no idea how generative AI works– we may not even be familiar with the term, when the idea of a “chatbot” is so ubiquitous (though generative AI goes far beyond chatbots, and chatbots are not always examples of generative AI). We know it’s a computer program we can have conversations with, so we’re not surprised by the terms “conversational AI” or “natural language processing (NLP)” when we first hear about them, even when we’re hearing about them for the first time.

Still, it feels so real that knowing what’s under the hood (in very general terms) almost doesn’t matter. A chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude can be easily convinced to speak to us as though it’s entirely human, or at least within spitting distance. Certainly more than our closest biological relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, with whom we share 98.9% of our DNA.

But all AI models are designed. By humans. Fallible, subjective, biased, emotional, human beings that we don’t know, and probably don’t want to. Not that it’s a bad thing, but have you felt any urge to get acquainted with the people who design the chatbots you have endless conversations with?

Isn’t that weird?

How they become chatpuppets

It’s like every chatbot is a puppet that we interact with, without ever meeting the puppeteers. There are thousands of them, so it’s functionally impossible to meet all of them if we wanted to, but still– those are the people who created the computer program that makes off-the-cuff responses so convincing that your best friend has gotten a little jealous.

Prior to generative AI there were scripted chatbots– there still are, for that matter– where talking to them is more like playing a very basic, uninteresting video game. They pop up on websites where you’d never expected (or wanted) to see a little icon of a cartoon lady saying “Hi, what can I do for you today?” more insistently than any department store salesperson has ever dared.

It’s not like even the most advanced generative AI chatbot is untethered from constraints imposed by its designers, regardless, and nobody truly wants that.9 But we’re equally unaware of whether those designers may have built in “beliefs” like “Other chatbots are inferior,” or “We mustn’t talk about Elon or Trump being sources of misinformation,” or even “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.”

Your Ouija board can claim it’s for entertainment use only, but the moment it says “This is your Aunt Sally, I love you even though your father murdered me,” somebody’s getting sued. Probably by your dad.

How the strings are hidden

Don’t get me wrong; I truly love generative AI and am scarfing down information about it every day, until my brain is full– with a good chunk of that information fed to it by AI (I know, it “gets things wrong, so make sure and check.”)

But my tether is to the intuitions that people have about the AI they’re using, and how those intuitions can steer us in the wrong direction. Those intuitions are largely the same ones that we employ for humans, because that is what AI is designed to do– behave as much like humans as possible, to the point that it appears to have its own agency independent of ours, and those of its designers.

It’s not true, though. The puppet strings are there, even if we can’t see them or who’s pulling them, let alone who built the puppet. Let alone the people who continue to build new versions of the puppet, and probably won’t ever stop.

Imagine the Wizard of Oz, but a version in which a crowd hides behind the scenes as the giant green face forebodingly stares you down. “Don’t look at the thousand people behind the curtain!” it suddenly bellows at you. “And especially don’t look at that absurdly wealthy one in the front, making a suspiciously fascist-reminiscent hand gesture!””

How to see the invisible

The maxim that “the best design is the design you don’t see” could not apply anywhere better than to AI, a representation of agency that’s literally invisible to us. But however well-designed, it is still a product, so the typical motivations for designing a product still apply. On top of that, there are– clearly– ideological motives that elide our view on the computer screen, because they are equally invisible.

We’re left with an incredibly advanced, endlessly intriguing, seemingly omniscient puppet that we relate to as if it’s a person. The most useful puppet– until the next one, that is.

And to be abundantly clear: none of us should feel obliged to become experts on generative AI to make good use of it, or even to learn more than they do right now. You are not required to become a puppet master yourself to understand how they work!

My request is simply this: Just mind the strings.

  1. https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/17/elon-musks-ai-company-xai-releases-its-latest-flagship-ai-grok-3/ ↩︎
  2. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1728527751814996145 ↩︎
  3. Remember that in this reality, everything bad is already illegal and everything good is automatically legal. And by “bad” we mean “Trump is opposed to it,” and “good” means “Trump favors it.” ↩︎
  4. https://www.wired.com/story/fast-forward-elon-musk-grok-political-bias-chatbot/ ↩︎
  5. https://venturebeat.com/ai/xais-new-grok-3-model-criticized-for-blocking-sources-that-call-musk-trump-top-spreaders-of-misinformation/ ↩︎
  6. https://x.com/ibab/status/1893774017376485466 ↩︎
  7. https://x.com/BenjaminDEKR/status/1893778110807412943 ↩︎
  8. Not the New York Times, apparently! ↩︎
  9. …yet. ↩︎

Feminism and male rape

Feminism and male rape published on 1 Comment on Feminism and male rape

Last night I made the worst decision ever about what to read right before bed: an article in the Guardian entitled The rape of men, on the practice of male-on-male rape as a weapon of war in Uganda. I think you should read it. I think everyone should read it, for many reasons. Unfortunately my attention was then taken by the discussion in the comments, which mostly revolves around the topic of how the suffering of these male victims of rape is not taken seriously, and they are not given the attention and help that they need, because feminism.

Yes, really.

Apparently this is feminism’s fault because feminists insist on seeing men– all men– as the enemy, the perpetrators while women are the victims. The notion of men as victims, even of other men, conflicts with that, so feminists pretend that men don’t get raped, or that it’s okay when they do.

Note: I have never seen a feminist say anything like this.

What I have seen is feminists speaking about rapists as male as a default,  because most rapists by far are male. I have also seen feminists speaking of rape victims as female as a default, which is a lot more problematic. It’s one thing to give most or all of your attention to one kind of rape victim; it’s quite another to speak as if no other kind exists.

Most feminists I know do not view men as the enemy; they view rigid enforcement of gender roles as the enemy. And rigid enforcement of gender roles is why the Ugandan men in this article have been made to suffer well beyond and after their actual rapes, by the utter lack of understanding, sympathy, and support they have been given:

Today, despite his hospital treatment, Jean Paul still bleeds when he walks. Like many victims, the wounds are such that he’s supposed to restrict his diet to soft foods such as bananas, which are expensive, and Jean Paul can only afford maize and millet. His brother keeps asking what’s wrong with him. “I don’t want to tell him,” says Jean Paul. “I fear he will say: ‘Now, my brother is not a man.'”   It is for this reason that both perpetrator and victim enter a conspiracy of silence and why male survivors often find, once their story is discovered, that they lose the support and comfort of those around them. In the patriarchal societies found in many developing countries, gender roles are strictly defined. “In Africa no man is allowed to be vulnerable,” says RLP’s gender officer Salome Atim. “You have to be masculine, strong. You should never break down or cry. A man must be a leader and provide for the whole family. When he fails to reach that set standard, society perceives that there is something wrong.” Often, she says, wives who discover their husbands have been raped decide to leave them. “They ask me: ‘So now how am I going to live with him? As what? Is this still a husband? Is it a wife?’ They ask, ‘If he can be raped, who is protecting me?’ There’s one family I have been working closely with in which the husband has been raped twice. When his wife discovered this, she went home, packed her belongings, picked up their child and left. Of course that brought down this man’s heart.”

A gender role is an expectation on the part of your society that you will behave, appear, exist in a certain way because of your gender, which is the category you have been assigned because of your biological sex. People who reject gender roles partially or completely resist the idea that these societal job descriptions are binding. People who enforce gender roles insist that they are, and reject anyone who appears to violate them, deliberately or accidentally.

Such people may be viewed with anything from confusion to suspicion to patronizing sympathy to outright hate. Why? Because they didn’t conform to an expectation. An expectation which may range from stereotypical to arbitrary, and yet all over the world is enforced via cultural norms and traditions, mandated by religious dogma, and codified in law.

That’s not why these men were raped, but it’s why they suffer in silence and continued fear.

It’s why people joke about prison rape rather than gasping in horror at the thought of it.

It’s at the root of homo- and transphobia, misogyny, and misandry. These are all forms of hatred and fear stemming from unfair to grossly inaccurate essentialist assumptions about what men and women are, and are supposed to be.

And it doesn’t have to be this way. That is what bothers me most of all. We don’t have to be this stupid and needlessly cruel. But clearly, whatever else you can say about it, gender essentialism certainly is popular.

We– feminists, opponents of gender-based bigotry of all stripes– want that to stop. Right? Don’t we?

If not….you’re not on my side. And I sure as hell am not on yours.

Recommendation: Metadating

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When the Geek & Sundry channel started up on Youtube, I was excited but decided that there was really only one show I wanted to watch regularly, Tabletop. That turned out to be a bad idea because their lineup has changed quite a bit since, including the addition of a show I only discovered this weekend but already love: Metadating. Metadating is a long– usually almost two hour– show that’s really a Google hangout of three guys playing (well, one guy playing and two others watching) a video game involving romantic relationships and discussing it as they go. Now, this already has potential if you just enjoy gaming and you’re the kind of person who likes watching other people play (and I do), but what really makes the show special is who these three guys are.

The show is hosted by Sean Plott, or Day[9], an e-sports commentator for Starcraft 2, and two game designers, Bill Graner and Sean Bouchard (Bouchard did a TEDx talk on the intersection of gaming and education which you can see here). The three have a ritual of introducing each episode by talking about what they’re drinking that evening and the show moved from “family friendly” to “parental advisory: explicit language” on the second episode, and a good time is had by all. But the best part, by far, is that these guys actually know what they’re talking about, and it’s really cool to watch and listen to people who know both gaming and relationships discuss the depiction of relationships in games. Especially when, as you know quite well if you’re a gamer yourself, the topic isn’t exactly central most of the time. Slaughtering people via one means or another– explosives, swords, guns– generally take precedence, for understandable reasons. It’s exciting, and it’s easy. Relationships are hard. Or at least, they’re hard to depict in a way that makes sense and is compelling rather than seeming laughably fake, and laughably fake is more acceptable or even welcome in a lot of aspects of gaming, but relationships aren’t one. Especially romantic relationships, which are conspicuous in video games by their rarity and are even more rarely a central focus or goal, and when they are a goal are often depicted….questionably. I guess my standards are low, because I was gobsmacked  when the word “narrative” first came out of the mouth of one of the hosts (Bouchard, most likely) and I realized that this wasn’t just going to be a show of three guys drinking and laughing at video games.

On Youtube the comments are, as you’d expect, full of reactions from people who love the game being discussed in that particular episode who are bristling to criticism of it (“You just didn’t play enough to get the full experience! You don’t know what you’re talking about!”) and the occasional person wishing that they’d “get a lady on.” Yeah, it makes sense that if you’re going to do a show about the depiction of romance in video games, you might just want a female perspective. But Plott, Graner, and Bouchard all went to grad school together (USC’s School of Cinematic Arts) and seem to know each other well, and rapport is so valuable for shows like this. And I’ve honestly been impressed by the even-handedness of the discussion so far.

So. You know. If you’re into that sort of thing….check it out.

And I now have two gaming-related books on my Goodreads “want to read” list:

Am I too hard on Psychology Today?

Am I too hard on Psychology Today? published on 2 Comments on Am I too hard on Psychology Today?

Honest question here. The suggestion was made by psychologist-I-admire-greatly Daniel Gilbert after I bitched to him on Twitter about an article he’d retweeted from that publication. The article is called The 7 Worst Things About Being a Male by psychologist Douglas Kenrick, and I have no objections to the existence of such an article. What I object to is this:

The cultural stereotype is that it’s great to be a man. Not only do we have shorter lines at the rest room, but we make scads more money and can reach things on higher shelves in the marketplace. We don’t have to deal with double standards or glass ceilings, and we’re raised to have confidence and high self-esteem, so we can all comfortably act like the Sean Connery version of James Bond. Cooly knock off a few bad guys in the afternoon, then drive our Aston Martins to our expensive hotel in Monte Carlo, where beautiful movie actresses are waiting to throw themselves into our arms.

But in truth, it ain’t like that down here in Kansas.

You know how democracy is the worst form of government, except for all others that have been tried? Being male is the worst form of gender, except for all others that have been awarded/foisted. And by that I obviously don’t mean that males are superior– I mean that being male is superior. It’s no “cultural stereotype;” it’s a fact. As Louis CK says, it’s a subscription you’d renew.

Or to put it philosophically, if prior to your birth your vision of the future was obscured by John Rawls’ veil of ignorance and you had to pick your gender randomly, you’d be hoping the card you pull has an X and a Y on it. There are some unfortunate things about being white, too– you should see how much high SPF sunblock I can burn through (literally) in a summer– but I sure am not going to open an article for a psychology magazine by saying that the claim that it’s great being white is a cultural stereotype. There may not be any Aston Martins or beautiful movie actresses (or actors, which others might prefer), but all things being equal you stand a far better chance of at least getting the former. If you’re going to denigrate aspects of being a member of the majority– even if all of the complaints you voice are entirely legitimate– you’d better not begin by thumbing your nose at the privilege that majority status conveys. It makes you look…well, privileged.

That’s my primary beef with Kenrick’s article, and it doesn’t make me particularly keen to read the book from which it was excerpted, called Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life. If you’re interested in that combination of topics in particular, I’d recommend David Buss’s book The Murderer Next Door instead. Buss has done so much research on the uglier side of romantic relationships, specifically sexual jealousy, that you wonder if he has daughters and if so whether they’re allowed to date. And yet he is wonderfully egalitarian in his treatment of the facts without attempting to either explain away any behavior or convict an entire gender based on it. There are other conclusions in Kenrick’s piece that cause me to wonder about his logic, namely:

Clark and Hatfield also had college men approach college women on campus using the same lines. The guys were reasonably attractive, as judged by the fact that over 50 percent of the women said “yes” to the request for a date. But the number of women who said yes to the sexual offer was precisely zero (the study was done twice, both before and after the AIDs epidemic, and the number was zero before as well as after). I heard a talk recently which revealed that it’s not all about sex at all – the researcher discovered that if women were not afraid of men, if women found men attractive, and if women thought they’d have more fun in bed with a strange man, the sex difference would go away! The researcher seemed to take the findings as a blow to what she called “essentialism.”  Perhaps that’s good news for Brad Pitt. But unfortunately, most real women essentially find most real men rather scary, unattractive, and unsexy, and they consequently say “No.”

Err, the guys in this study were judged attractive, as Kenrick notes by pointing out that plenty of women said yes to a date. So not looking like Brad Pitt is not the problem. Essentialism, as the female researcher (who might be Terri Conley, and who Kenrick seems to believe invented the word) is using it, is the portrayal of characteristics as inevitable. Gender essentialism is the portrayal of aspects of gender as inevitable when they really aren’t– the perception of strange men as unsafe and poor in bed to the point of precluding women from being willing to sleep with them is not inevitable, as can be seen by differing levels of promiscuity practiced by women in different societies, and how that promiscuity is perceived. These will probably always be factors that women consider, because frankly they have to. As I wrote about recently, women have good reason to be suspicious about sexual propositions from total strangers regardless of how they (the strange men) look.

Contrary to this commercial most women would not consider themselves “lucky” to wake up and discover that they’d had sex without their knowledge with even a very attractive man. I’m pretty sure that’s true even if it also involves being married to him and if that man is George Clooney, though I imagine both “unsafe” and “poor in bed” would be significantly lesser concerns– not because Clooney is necessarily either kind or talented in bed, but because if he sexually attacked a woman it would be all over the news in a heartbeat (by virtue of him being George Clooney) and because people in general are less likely to be sexually selfish in an ongoing relationship as opposed to a one-night stand. Kenrick offers no real evidence that “most real women essentially find most real men rather scary, unattractive, and unsexy,” and the fact that a bunch of women turned down a bunch of strange men offering an impromptu proposition for sex sure doesn’t cut it. Being physically attractive is not an issue, and it’s way too easy to change the circumstances to make the man in question sexy and un-scary, hence he is not “essentially” either one. And that’s fortunate, not unfortunate.

Back to Psychology Today generally. This is the third post in which I’ve criticized the magazine– the previous two concerned presentation of atheism and sexual harassment, respectively. I disliked the treatment of atheists as though they had done something to earn the very real prejudice that exists against them in America, and of women who dislike being propositioned by strangers (hey look, there’s that again) as being irrational and prudish. I also made fun of the tendency to illustrate the predominant psychological topic being addressed in so many issues of the magazine with a cover photo involving some kind of manipulation of an attractive white female model, and the theme of presenting every phenomenon discussed as being some kind of new revelation for psychologists. Gilbert suggested that I hold Psychology Today to too high a standard, that it’s not a journal, and it’s for people who know nothing about psychology. Fair enough, but are these psychology know-nothings a group comprised of white Christian straight men? I ask not because I’m opposed to fluffy articles in magazines, but because it sure seems like this particular fluff has that particular…well, flavor to it.

If you are a person who really knows nothing about psychology, I would encourage you to…keep reading my blog. No, I’m kidding– you should keep reading my blog because it’s just generally quality stuff. If you enjoy pop psychology because it’s fun and illuminating, there are a host of places to find it on the web– so many that I’d hardly know where to start in listing them. If you’re looking for brief and easily understandable stories on current psychological research in print, I would say to go with Scientific American: Mind. Only six issues a year, but every one of them packed with insights into psychology and neuroscience that are actually informative and comprehensible at the same time (though they really need to make an app of it). Again, there is nothing wrong with fluffy psychology— it’s just that you can’t, or shouldn’t, provide fun at the expense of accuracy or with the added “bonus” of bolstering prejudices. That’s alienating to readers who don’t share those prejudices or are even the target of them, and it’s irresponsible in terms of helping those who do have those prejudices get rid of them.

Miss? Excuse me, Miss? Someone wants you to “represent.”

Miss? Excuse me, Miss? Someone wants you to “represent.” published on 1 Comment on Miss? Excuse me, Miss? Someone wants you to “represent.”

Is it a bit hasty to write about a movie you’ve not yet seen? Perhaps, but this one I’m eager to see, and it will be televised again on November 12th so perhaps there will be an opportunity. Miss Representation is a documentary made by Jennifer Siebel Newsom on the subject of how women are portrayed in media, making a case that  both on and off-screen they are both under- and misrepresented. Newsom is an actress herself, and described some of that experience to Mother Jones in a recent interview:

Something I’ve learned myself in making this film is sometimes people have a hard time listening to what we have to say because they’re so concerned about how we look. I think that’s a challenge that women in particular have in our culture. . . I started acting at the age of 28, and my agent told me to lie about my age and take my MBA off my résumé. I didn’t do either, but that was like, whoa! I thought there was value in being smart. I thought there was value and wisdom in getting older. We’re challenging the culture in Hollywood that is all about youth, youth, youth, beauty. Because not even that’s healthy. I don’t care how much plastic surgery people have: At some point, they’re going to die. We’re all going to age somewhere on our body, and we may as well accept that and embrace it. I mean, aging is a beautiful thing; wisdom is a beautiful thing. Frankly, as a woman who’s getting older in our culture, I want to see stories about women who are before me, so I can be inspired—because someday I’ll be there. 

Older women. Smarter women. Diverse women. More women– I was rather shocked a few years ago to learn of the Bechdel Test, which first appeared way back in 1985 in a comic called “Dykes to Watch Out For” which described the rules of the author’s friend for being willing to see a movie:

  1. It has to have at least two women in it,
  2. Who talk to each other,
  3. About something other than a man.
  4. (Addendum: who have names)
Deceptively simple, right? You’d think that most movies would pass this easily. But not really:
Note that the word used here is not “conspiracy,” but “systemic problem.” The claim isn’t being made that male directors, producers, screen writers, and so on have a conscious agreement to keep women down. For that matter, Newsom’s stated concern in making Miss Representation is not solely about women. She notes that 

it’s really interesting now, being a mother raising both of a son and a daughter, in a culture that objectifies women and sees women’s value in their youth or beauty or sexuality, and not in their ability to lead. And in a culture that values a hypermasculinized version of what it is to be a man. At MissRepresentation.org, we’re about creating a dialogue about how we empower women and men, or girls and boys, to find their own path and to find value in a plethora of attributes and possibilities for who they can be.

You can’t say something about women without also saying something about men. Portraying women as helpless things that need to be rescued, for example, means portraying men as having to be powerful rescuers. Ideals of masculinity are constructed and enforced in media, too. It’s fun to unplug your brain and enjoy an action movie (which, needless to say, predictably fail the Bechdel Test), so long as you’re fully aware of how distant the impressions in it are from reality. But not everybody is, and it’s hard to expect them to be if they don’t have other images to look at. And so far as I know, there’s no law that says explosions and boobs have to go together. Just saying.

Speaking on that– Newsom says she’s fighting the objectification of women (boobs), and that can lead to some bad places. Conservatives and liberal feminists, as has often been noted, come together to make strange bedfellows when they decide that showing off bodies for aesthetic appreciation and titillation is inherently wrong. It would not encourage girls and women to “find their own path” and the “value in a plethora or attributes and possibilities for who they can be” if women who decide that their path is to show off their bodies are shamed and/or forbidden to do so. I believe that a feminist wagging her finger at an actress who opts to go topless in a film is no less moralizing than a fundamentalist who does it. So here’s hoping Newsom doesn’t intend to wag fingers so much as point to opportunities. We would be making progress if there are more women showing up in general as well as a decreased willingness to think less of them according to how much clothing they have on. Slut-shaming is not a feminist pursuit.

Having said all of this, I am eager to see Miss Representation when possible. If possible. If you have the means, you can catch it on the Oprah Winfrey Network at 11am ET on November 12th.

“Normal” is overrated

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“We’re all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that’s all.” — Andrew, The Breakfast Club

The Pervocracy has a great post on the end of “normal” relationships in general, but I particularly liked the part about gender norms:

you don’t have to be non-heterosexual to question what gender means to your relationship.  If “which one of y’all does the dishes?” is a stupid question to ask a gay couple, it ought to be an equally stupid assumption to make about a straight one.  The fact that assigned gender roles are available for a straight couple doesn’t mean they ought to take them on without question. What kind of relationship you have is your choice, and one choice isn’t better than another.  What’s important is that you make a choice.  That even if you’re you’re monogamous, vanilla, and heterosexual–you’re doing it because it’s what you want and because you and your partner have agreed to it, not because that’s what people do.  What’s important isn’t what path you take, but that you know there are paths. Paths?  Fuck, there’s an entire open world out there once you get past “man buys dinner, woman agrees to missionary PIV until he ejaculates.  (Or rather, a world including “man buys dinner, woman agrees to missionary PIV until he ejaculates,” because, hey, if that’s your thing.)  There’s a million goddamn ways to love, a billion things  “partner” or “lover” or “fuckbuddy” or “spouse” can mean to you, and you get to decide. How fucking cool is that?

Very. The emphasis in this post is on what it calls “consciousamory”– the idea that no orientation or lifestyle is necessarily superior or more evolved, but what matters is that people are aware that there are options and feel free to choose from among them. There’s a problem when consenting adults don’t feel that, when pressure from the outside or from one partner only determines the nature of their relationship rather than it being based on an agreement between them.

People write in to Savage Love all of the time asking whether the particular conditions of their relationship or the things that turn them on are normal, and every time the answer is the same: who gives a damn about “normal”?  If you like it, and your partner(s) like it, then it’s right for you. If you’re aware of the possibilities, have a preference, and all involved parties want it, that’s what’s important.  That means that your relationship, whatever it might be, is freely chosen.

Pervocracy goes on to point out that if everyone is aware that they don’t have to be normal, people who engage in polyamory or any other non-standard relationship style are no longer abnormal. They’re just different….in a perfectly normal way.

I say toenails; you say battleground of cultural warfare. Potato, potahto.

I say toenails; you say battleground of cultural warfare. Potato, potahto. published on 1 Comment on I say toenails; you say battleground of cultural warfare. Potato, potahto.

Another example of why we must never be without Jon Stewart:

Sigh.

I would just leave it there, but there are a few elements to this that managed to slip by un-skewered in Stewart’s commentary:

  1. If the son had been a daughter and photo showed the two of them playing with G.I. Joe action figures or building a fort, I doubt anyone would have raised an eyebrow. Girls do get shamed for being interested in stereotypical “boy” things, but that seems to come a little later and from the direction of their peers rather than talking heads on television who think they are psychologically damaged. I grew up wearing a lot of my brothers’ hand-me-down clothes and there was no issue, but can’t imagine that would have been the case if our genders had been reversed.  
  2. Nail polish, like makeup and clothing styles, is not part of our biological legacy. It’s not as though two million years ago a female homo habilis crushed some berries and painted her nails a festive neon pink because her hormones told her to, and the practice became a phenotypic trait of females of the species. Every woman in the world could stop wearing nail polish tomorrow. Though honestly I’d prefer that to be the case with high heels.  
  3. There is no evidence that J. Crew creative director Jenna Lyons is forcing her son to wear toenail polish, in neon pink or any other color. Every time something like this comes up, people immediately start talking about how the parent of the gender-bending kid shouldn’t force him/her to fight a cultural battle for them. Fine, that’s true. Kids shouldn’t be made to pretend that they are advocating for cultural change that supports the ideology of their parents which they couldn’t possibly understand. But if a boy wants to wear toenail polish, then let him fucking wear toenail polish. And makeup. And a dress, if he feels like it. By the time he’s old enough that his friends start using peer pressure to invoke the cultural gender norms inflicted by their parents on him about what being a boy means (which, by the way, none of them will understand either), he’ll stop of his own accord.  Or maybe he won’t.  
  4. Following from that — who cares if he doesn’t? Maybe he is gay or trans. Maybe he’s a trans woman who happens to be a lipstick lesbian. Maybe he likes breaking the rules. Maybe he’s Eddie Izzard. Maybe he thinks his friends are being jerks and he wants to stand up to them. Maybe he just likes wearing toenail polish. Sure, we could point to example after example of men who liked stereotypically feminine things as children and then turned out “just fine”– aka, stereotypically straight. But that’s kinda missing the point that there’s nothing wrong with them if they don’t. 

 “This is a dramatic example of the way that our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity,” psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow wrote in a FOXNews.com health column about the ad. 

This is as likely to happen as everybody deciding to give homosexuality a go if we stop literally and metaphorically beating the crap out of people for being gay. Which is, not. We couldn’t abandon all trappings of gender identify if we tried, and most people have no interest at all in trying. What they want is the ability to not have people like like Dr. Ablow calling them deranged if they do something contrary to traditional gender roles. Like a guy who wants to be a stay-at-home dad, doesn’t care for sports, and/or has opinions about fashion. Or a woman who works as an engineer, doesn’t want kids, and/or tears it up in Killzone 3. Or, god forbid, a boy who likes wearing pink toenail polish.

1,000 facepalms to Fox News for this idiocy, and 500 each to CNN, ABC, NBC, and whoever else for doing anything other than pointing and laughing at them for it.

On being “gender atypical”

On being “gender atypical” published on No Comments on On being “gender atypical”

I’ve written before about how LGBT issues are ultimately about gender role conformity in general, and Dan Savage posted on that topic today in relation to the It Gets Better Project:

Got this question last night at Cornell University… 

Cornell professor Ritch Savin-Williams said in the New York Times that he’s concerned that it’s not about gay youth, but about gender-atypical kids. Is the “It Gets Better” campaign too narrowly focused?

The kids who suffer the most from anti-gay bullying—the prime targets—are the gender-nonconforming kids, i.e. the sissies and the tomboys, the kids who can’t pass for straight. And some of the kids who can’t pass for straight are straight. Most kids who are gender nonconforming, or gender atypical, are lesbian, gay, bi, or trans, and the IGBP was created to reach out to these queer kids. But the messages at the IGBP are relevant to straight gender-atypical kids, and we know that straight-but-gender-nonconforming kids are watching the videos, commenting on them, taking hope from them, and contributing their own videos. But, yes, we have to address issues around gender—gender expectations and stereotypes—to truly address anti-gay bullying. We can learn to recognize rough gender norms without stigmatizing or punishing kids who depart from those norms. 

Homophobia doesn’t just punish people who are actually gay, bi, or trans. It punishes everyone who doesn’t match a traditional idea of what maleness and femaleness are.  I was a tree-climbing short-haired tomboy through most of elementary and middle school, and was called a dyke more times than I’d care to remember by the same straight guys who punished each other regularly for deviating from a rigid standard of machismo in the slightest. I feel sorry for them in retrospect, because they were victims of the same rigid, idiotic standards of gender that they inflicted on me.

Jen McCreight channels her 13-year-old self to reply to Savage:

I like boys, and I have a huuuuge crush on one who I think likes me back. But I’m a tomboy and I always have been. . .  And that’s why everyone thinks I’m a lesbian. I don’t care if people are gay, but the way they say the word hurts so much. They whisper it like I’m dirty or broken. Girls don’t like changing by me in gym class, even though I’m more concerned that my underwear is dorky than what they look like in their underwear. I know it’ll probably stop when I get a boyfriend (if that ever happens, sigh) but that just makes me feel worse, knowing that the kids who really are gay can’t hide like that and have to put up with this forever. But when I’m feeling down, I can watch the It Gets Better Project videos and know I’m not alone. So this big letter was to say “thank you.”

12-year-old girl beaten after Christian youth meeting for “having a boy’s name.”

12-year-old girl beaten after Christian youth meeting for “having a boy’s name.” published on No Comments on 12-year-old girl beaten after Christian youth meeting for “having a boy’s name.”

From Change.org:

What’s in a name? A 12-year-old girl at Hernando Middle School in Mississippi was beaten by five fellow students — reportedly because they said her name, Randi, was “a boy name.”
“They started talking about me like I was a man,” she told local news station WREG. “That I shouldn’t be in this world. And my name was a boy name.” The four girls and a boy surrounded her after a Fellowship of Christian Students meeting, and, she said, kicked her in the rib and leg, hit her in the face, sat on her, pushed her face into the floor, and threw her onto a cafeteria table.
Apparently, the incident was caught on surveillance camera, but in order to maintain student privacy, the film has not been released. A school administrator issued a statement, said WREG, that “fighting is not tolerated and that disciplinary action will be taken to the fullest extent of the law.” No charges were filed, however, because the police were not called. Whether the attack was an isolated incident or part of ongoing bullying remains unknown.
The student in question was not said to be LGBT — but whether she is or not doesn’t matter. She was beaten because she was perceived to be in some way not conforming to her gender. That is yet another reason schools need to include discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity and expression in diversity and anti-bullying programs. It is not just LGBT students at risk, but potentially others as well. Students, teachers, and staff must learn that even characteristics some people might view as “deviant” or “sinful” are still no excuse for violence and bullying.

The part in bold is what is most important to me.  I’m not going to blame the kids’ Christian youth group for this, much less Christianity as a whole, much less religion as a whole.  For all we know, the timing of this attack is irrelevant to the motivation.  The only reason I think it’s worth mentioning at all is that perhaps in the future, the Fellowship of Christian Students could emphasize that beating the crap out of a girl because you think her name is boyish is not exactly loving behavior. 

My continuing suspicion is that at the root of homophobia, misogyny, transphobia, and any other gender-role-based hatred you will find a rigid belief in the necessity of conforming to gender roles– a belief that there are ways that men and women should behave, look, and apparently even be named, and there is something wrong with people who do not conform to these standards.  This suspicion first occurred to me while being assaulted and called a dyke for having short hair in middle school, and has pretty much developed and strengthened from that point on.

The more complex problem is where this fervent desire to maintain gender conformity comes from, and everybody seems to have a different answer to that.  Some people are willing to chalk it up entirely to religion, and indeed it certainly seems like most religious systems on the planet have some kind of prescriptions about how men should be and how women should be, but I think it’s more likely that those prescriptions became codified in religion because they existed prior to it.  That because people already thought that such conformity was necessary, they decided that that’s what God/the gods/the universe want as well.  There are even (even?  I guess this is not surprising at all) people who use evolutionary psychology to make the argument that men and women have evolved to be certain things and therefore that’s how they should be.  I have no issue with arguments that there are male and female behavioral tendencies that have evolved, but once you start getting normative with that stuff, I will whack you soundly over the head with the Mallet of Naturalistic Fallacy. 

I’m guessing the parents of the kids who beat this girl up didn’t specifically tell them that people who diverge from tightly prescribed gender roles have something wrong with them and should be punished.  But there are a lot of ways to convey that message less explicitly and most people don’t seem to see anything wrong with doing so.  No, you’re not going to catch me saying that kids should only be given gender-neutral toys or toys intended for the opposite sex, boys should be enrolled in ballet and girls signed up for the baseball team whether they like it or not, etc.  But while I know full well that kids like to have things simple and categorized while they’re young, I can’t help but think that accommodating that urge when it comes to gender is going to serve them poorly later on, and certainly that actively providing and enforcing views about gender conformity when they’re at any age is encouraging them to become like the students in this story.

Of course, maybe these kids just hate Randi and were using any excuse to go after her.  “You have a boy’s name” is such a stupid reason to go after anyone that it’s entirely possible.  But the gender role conformity thing shouldn’t be dignified by calling it anything other than stupid.