Ulrich Pinder’s urine wheel is a thing of beauty. Created in 1506, it describes the colors, tastes and smells of urine belonging to people in various diseased states. Image from this Nature article on “metabonomics,” the modern-day equivalent.
(Taken in March 2012.)
[Updated to include Mr. Mourdock’s clarification re: his remark.]
I’ve been thinking about Mourdock’s remark that rape is–to quote my writer-friend Stefanie Kalem–“just some kind of unfortunate wrapping paper that the gift of life comes in sometimes.” He shared his account of his personal struggle and his epiphany at the Indiana Senate debate on Tuesday:
“’I’ve struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God,’ Mourdock said at the debate, explaining his position that women who are raped should not have the right to an abortion. ‘And even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.'”
Once the rage cleared (and it took some time) I got interested. I work on the early modern period, so I’m never not steeped in the complex torsions Christian thinking requires (especially when it becomes necessary to denounce Lutheranism in favor of Zwinglianism and some aspects of Calvinism). And it seems to me that Mourdock deserves some credit for being—at first glance—internally consistent. I’m not alone. Many people have noted this, and say Mourdock’s position “makes sense,” and if you take issue with it, it’s because you disagree with his religion. The logic is right if you agree with his premises. This is nonsense, and it’s dangerous nonsense, because it gives people like Mr. Mourdock credit for being logical where they are in fact being extremely sloppy. The (theo)logic breaks down on its own terms when you do it the favor of giving it a second look:
I’ve been thinking about how shows aren’t just deep immersive experiences in their own right, they’re also fuel for the thick conversation of friendship. TV sociality: what’s behind it? Why? When I see a good show, I find I instantly want to re-watch it WITH someone. Watching alone is a thin, unrewarding experience. It’s nothing compared to the exquisite pleasure of re-watching it through someone else’s eyes. The double spectacle, it enthralls. You see them see it for the first time. And then you talk. You saw it that way? How? You walk your friend through the steps of why you saw it the way you did. Then she does the same for you, and so the two of you you walk back and forth through the show together as if it were a park, and you British and observant and commenting on the passersby. This is what really pleases, this small rehearsal of interpretations, this comparison of codes. Shows become a game and an occasion to reveal your interpretive apparatus to each other. Here is how I see the world! you say to your friend, and here is how I see art! And here is the exact distance I like between the real world and art! Here is what makes me laugh, and here is why! AND YOU? What do you think?
The flip side obtains too: never happier than when I get to watch someone watch something I’ve already seen, I’m briefly heartbroken when they don’t like it.
Ironically, I’m exactly the sort of person who doesn’t like things when they’re introduced in this particular way. It’s karma that I get my heart broken by people not loving the things I watch them watching, since I’ve spent a lifetime being an accidental Debbie Downer raining on people’s televisual loves.
It’s not annoyance, though I know plenty of people I’ve annoyed by talking up a movie too much, thereby jump-starting their assembly of reactionary hate-bricks. Annoyance with hype is probably a part of my resistance, but the bigger part is severe performance anxiety. For all that I love watching people watch shows I like, I’m horrible at being watched watching. I get anxious. I’m instantly defensive. I spend the entire time much too aware that I’m supposed to be reacting—what am I missing? Which reaction am I supposed to have and which one am I actually having and what, precisely, is the difference between the two? My brain shuts down. I don’t understand what’s going on. I sort of panic.
I’m not aware of any of this—the flurry is all just under the surface. But panicking, however unconscious it might be, is unpleasant, and I suspect the unpleasantness of feeling panicky has a lot to do with my thinking I don’t like the show when I do (or will). This happened when Danielle (Carla Fran) showed me Peep Show for the first time, and when Sandi showed me That Mitchell and Webb Look, and when Rachel showed me A Bit of Fry and Laurie. These people are all cooler than me, and so I watched, uncomprehending, suspicious of their cool, failing to trust the experience.
This is now way to live. All three of these people have incredible taste, and to say I warmed to all three shows is a massive understatement. I’ve since watched all these shows eighty times if I’ve watched them once, and that’s a conservative estimate. Yet this strain of reactionary ungraciousness remains. How do I make it stop?
That I’ve been lucky to have a few friends who put up with this insufferable quality in no way excuses the fact that I can’t seem to short-circuit it. Danielle introduced me to a myriad of wonders including the BBC Pride and Prejudice, BBC’s The Office, My So-Called Life, Green Wing, Peep Show, and Nighty-Night. Rachel introduced me to Gilmore Girls. Jane lent me Arrested Development. Kia introduced me to Once. Gina showed me Firefly, and she and Irene have been trying to get me to watch The Good Wife.
I have not yet watched The Good Wife. I am disinclined to watch The Good Wife. WHY, in light of all the aforementioned gifts I’ve had at the hands of all these great people, all things I came to love despite my original resistance, WON’T I WATCH The Good Wife?
There’s a reason, and it isn’t a good one.
It’s for the same reason I almost never read another book by an author whose book I particularly loved. It’s an anxiety about friendship. What if it fails to be fed by this latest show? What if it turns out the deep resonance between us was a one-off? What if what I see as high art you see as schmaltzy, cheesy, or otherwise bad? What if you think James Franco is brilliant? What if our friendship was founded on a misunderstanding? What if now we see things in different ways?
These things are never quite true, but terror lives in the possibility that they might be. Friendship love is like romantic love; the hypotheticals are where things really fall apart. Drop them instead. Dig in: DO YOU LIKE JAMES FRANCO? TELL ME ABOUT THIS LIKE! Does Daniel Desario remind you of Jordan Catalano? Or of your high-school boyfriend? Or was 127 Hours amazing? Where is his brilliance? His prose? His acting? His multiple graduate programs? What of his do you admire?
The real question is obvious: where do our perspectives reconnect? Whatever you do, and whatever I do, may we never let our likes and dislikes stand as final pronouncements. Dismissive judgment is condescension is scorn is death. “It’s just not my thing” is a refusal of friendship. Get back to first principles. If I dislike James Franco and you don’t, it’s not because I am high-brow while your brows rest mawkishly beneath your nose. I dislike him because he is greasy, and because I think he is a poor writer who wrote that shadows are shadow-like, and because I find teaching a class on yourself hubristic, and hubris troubles me since I suspect it too often gets mistaken for talent. (Particularly when men have it and perform a Rebel Without A Cause sort of masculinity that somehow makes this regrettable comportment acceptable.) His eyelids droop and make him look sleepy, and it’s rude to look above it all and sleepy all the time. (Yes: rude! Behold the schoolmarm within!) But there’s more: If a lack of effort is unpraiseworthy, and I think it is, then an effortful display of a lack of effort is contemptible. He made Anne Hathaway work harder at an awards show than any human being should ever have to emotionally work. It wasn’t just wasteful, it was mean. He did that because he thought it was the cool thing to do, and coolness drags people toward ethical emptiness. (I just said that as an absolute, but of course what I really mean is that I was never cool growing up, so cool is wrapped up with rejection, and all the self-righteous justifications rejection brings.)
I know next to nothing about James Franco, but I think he’s empty. Above are my reasons, and they aren’t so much profound as frankly (ha!) autobiographical. What matters more than my objective assessment of James Franco (I mean really, who cares?) is the subjectivity behind it. What’s yours? Can our subjectivities hang out?
None of that conversation can happen till I shake myself loose of my bad habits. I’m going to watch The Good Wife.
[This is part of a comment I wrote in response to Eric on my previous post on l’affaire Violentacrez. Reposting here because the concern over Chen “ruining lives” requires some curious erasures. UPDATED to include Michael Brutsch (Violentacrez) admitting that women have found their photographs under r/creepshots and asked for them to be taken down.]
One point many Violentacrez defenders emphasize is that his life will be ruined by Chen’s decision to expose him. By this they mean chiefly that he will likely be fired and become unemployable thanks to Google searches like the ones you describe. But it’s telling, isn’t it, that these are the terms in which they understand a life to be ruined? People whose photographs are posted online–particularly in the contexts Violentacrez encouraged–stand to have their lives ruined too. Many girls and women have undergone extraordinary suffering (with some, like Amanda Todd, committing suicide) because of these “free speech acts.” But this particular kind of ruination doesn’t count; according to the terms these defenders use, only employability is relevant.
I’d suggest that while of course men and women both value their employability (and the ways in which their names appear in Internet searches), only women stand to have their lives ruined in this other manner, which goes unnamed and unrecognized because a) it happens offline (while bad Google results are visible, it’s much more difficult to point to or describe the dissemination of your body and the consequences, b) it involves “social” as opposed to economic ruin to which men are less vulnerable (unless they’re sex offenders) and c) it only involves female “victims” who are quite easy to blame. If your uncle stumbles on a nude photo you sent an ex-lover on one of the sites he visits and forwards it to family and friends, oh well–you were the agent of your own ruination.
This kind of humiliation doesn’t count according to defenders of internet anonymity; an event only counts as damage if you get fired. Only by discounting this other sort of exposure and denying that it constitutes damage can Violentacrez’s defenders claim that he is a victim and people photographed against their will aren’t. What they don’t know can’t hurt them, and if they find out, BFD.
But this logic is worth chasing too: the reason your life is ruined if your boss fired you over something you did online is that you can’t make money. Your ability to pay for room and board might be compromised, and so you won’t eat, you might not have a place to sleep, etc. Your quality of life goes down in measurable, material terms. Someone psychologically devastated by having their body displayed to thousands of perverts is also quite likely (should they become depressed) to be unable to work, to eat, to sleep. If the criteria for “life ruination” is the inability to support oneself, the endpoints for both hypothetical situations are quite similar.
Two other things: Eric made the point that people in tech are likely to consider Google results more damaging than images, as likenesses can’t be easily Googled. It seems to me that tech folks are the ones most likely to know that facial recognition software is already a reality, and will become more mainstream soon. The distance between a photo and a name was never as great as it seemed, and it’s diminishing daily.
The last point concerns how the different genders are socialized to understand identity and privacy, and it occurred to me as another reason why men might invest more heavily in their name compared to their image than women. Men are socialized to see a name as unchangeable. Women aren’t, as it’s still widely expected that they will change their names when they marry. Their names were never supposed to attach to them as people; the name was a sliding marker intended to index one’s affiliation with a masculine unit. I don’t know if this is still the case, but seven years ago it was much more difficult for men to legally change their names than it was for women to do so. Women have not historically been socialized to wed their identities to their names; quite the contrary.
UPDATE: Another argument advanced by VA defenders on Reddit—with more and more frequency—is that no one has been harmed by the posted photographs. “NAME ONE INSTANCE OF HIS ACTIONS HARMING ANYONE!” they demand, as if any woman (or girl) featured on the site would take the insane step of publicly facing the community that was violating her. (As if, in such a circumstance, the conversation wouldn’t take place behind the scenes, handled by the mods.) They proceed to insist that the lack of any such evidence means that it has never happened.
Unfortunately for them, Brutsch himself, posting under mbrutsch, his clean handle, admits that it has, and admits further that there’s a standard protocol for dealing with such an eventuality because it has happened often enough that a protocol is required. His admission appears in the course of a post today in which he attempts to defend himself against Chen’s allegations. Oops.
The blue line at left highlights the section of Chen’s article Violentacrez is quoting; below that is his response:
How gently the criteria for what violates have drifted: what constitutes a violation is not that the women discovered that their images were being circulated and used in the most disgusting and dehumanizing contexts—no, that’s not violating to someone’s privacy at all. “None of these innocent women were publicly identified,” Brutsch says, in what he obviously thinks is a compelling defense.
There’s that strange divide I described in my last post: for these people, only that which involves your name counts. A bunch of misogynistic, abusive trolls masturbating to 15-year-old you? Doesn’t count as damage, even if you know about it. The point is this: Brutsch admits that women discovered that their images were being used on Reddit. Take a minute to imagine what that discovery was like. Then imagine what it must be like to write to someone named Violentacrez to ask for them to be taken down.
[This originated as a series of Tweets that are basically cut and pasted with a bit of connective tissue.]
Two things strike me about the Violentacrez business. The first is how the free speech defense—as applied to posting photos of underage girls and dead underage girls in an explicitly erotic context meant to humiliate and degrade—rests on the logic that “she posted these photos, so they’re fair game.” Posing for photos constitutes an act for which any and all retaliation and “use” is fair, no matter how private their original contexts—including ex-partners circulating erotic photos, including photos taken of women unawares, including men commenting on and masturbating to them. The implication is that posing=guilt, that owning a body and being photographed in it is an action for which reprisals are fair and should have been anticipated before the subject of the photographs did what she did. In contrast, Violentacrez’s activities are framed as passive. All he’s done is circulate existing photos, and “frame” them differently. He has “done” nothing and deserves nothing, whereas women have owned bodies and posed in them. Circulating is passive, existing is active. Chen’s piece highlights how extremely *active* Violentacrez’ practices are, & how specific the intentions. It underlines the malignant intent and removes the passive framing. This stuff takes massive effort.
The second point is the curious stance that circulating photographs of women doesn’t constitute a violation of their privacy because they’re not named. Their anonymity is preserved.
Let me repeat: these are PHOTOGRAPHS. These are the objects police use to identify criminals. These are things that explicitly and routinely constitute evidence. They are precisely the opposite of anonymous—they are vehicles of anti-anonymity. And yet many people in this community bizarrely insist that they are somehow irrelevant, and that posting them is not a violation of a person’s privacy.
Whereas connecting a username to someone’s actual name—not to their body, just to another label, another way they exist in the world—is a MASSIVE PRIVACY VIOLATION.
The implication is that privacy resides in your name, not in your body. If you’re a man with the luxury to think this way, your body is understood as a sort of irrelevant accessory to your name, the thing that really matters. An invasion of privacy isn’t interpreted as a literal invasion. Although they plainly are, men’s bodies aren’t understood as being capable of being penetrated. People with this mentality don’t see a photograph as an invasion of privacy because they don’t experience the image of their bodies as being connected to the privacy that is capable of being violated. Of the genders, one is overwhelmingly more likely to think this way and to conclude—astonishingly—that having a username connected to an actual name is an invasion of privacy whereas a photograph of someone is not.
[Follow-up post here.]
I shouldn’t enjoy it as much as I do, but I love when I can spot a scholar’s dislike of a historical personage—it shows their humanity. Perhaps the pretense of neutrality is what makes us academics so vitriolic when writing in nonacademic settings. FINALLY WE CAN LASH OUT.
Here’s what Susan Karant-Nunn has to say about Calvin:
“Calvin’s expatiation on Christ’s suffering is almost nil. Having, we assume, read the scriptural text aloud, he then refers to it almost obliquely, as a springboard for his remarks on Christians’ moral condition, which is poor.”
It’s veiled, but it’s there–the not-quite-scholarly use of “nil,” the sarcastic rhythm, the clipped end of the second sentence.
“The emotional trajectory of these Passion sermons is then upward; the congregation is taken from the horror and depths of its corruption to, in conclusion, the possibility of reconciliation with the Heavenly Father. Perhaps the series should have ended on this note.”
So delightfully dry! Why, you ask, should it have ended on this note?
“But in the final sermon, on the Resurrection, Calvin remarks on the fact that the women who went to Christ’s tomb preceded the disciples in hearing the astonishing news. In telling about the Resurrection first to women, who are by nature weak, ignorant, and infirm, God wanted to demonstrate ‘the humbleness of our faith.’ The men, normally elevated and designated to engage in public transactions, deserved punishment, in any case, for having abandoned their master. But God accepts the service even of the weak–he is referring here to the women.”
How about this?
“Unquestionably, Calvin adheres to the doctrine of the atonement; it is central to his conception of salvation for worthless humankind. Yet, so important is it to him to impress his charges with their worthlessness that he resorts to the emotive vocabulary of shaming and condemnation. His language is extreme, and it is designed to break down any lingering sense of self-worth and self-reliance in those around him. His initial stress is upon the nullity of human self-esteem. He proffers the atonement only secondarily, after he has rhetorically (he hopes) reduced his audience to the verminous level to which he repeatedly assigns it.”
Whew. (Also, incredibly effective as a piece of persuasion; I had no particular feelings about Calvin before, but I like Calvin him a lot less after reading this.)
I have never wondered why Italians don’t do more in the way of mining for valuable metals. It’s not the sort of question anyone in this day and age would think to ask, but it reminds us that there was a time when mining wasn’t the sort of industry it is today, wherein investors can count on certain countries to happily exchange their copper for a hit of foreign investment and a song. Still, from a 1942 volume on mining called The Pirotechnia Of Vannoccio Biringuccio comes this really beautiful meditation on Italian sloth and anti-entrepeneurship:
VERY intelligent and practical investigator of minerals says that copper ore is found in various regions of the world and that among others Italy is very rich in it. But very little is mined there, perhaps because of a cowardly Italian avarice which has the power to make us lazy and indolent in carrying out those lofty and fine designs which should reasonably make us proceed swiftly, or perhaps because we are not prone to attempt extraordinary profit but only undertake those enterprises in which we are certain of a return on our investment. The reason for this might also be found in the meager possibility of success, which, since these things are not easily attempted because they are enormous undertakings of doubtful outcome, cools the spirit of men and in place of enthusiasm introduces the fear of loss, the fear of having to sacrifice not only time but also the work and money invested; then they think of the difficulty of discovery, of the impossibility of full ownership, and of the necessity of excavating the mineral marrow from the hardest bones of the mountains with the brawn and efforts of men. To this is added the fear common to many that in attempting such things they may be called fools by certain ignorant and dissolute persons, and it seems better to them to be praised for becoming rich through usury and by many other infamous and illicit methods than to lay themselves open to the danger of censure from such as these. But there are those who deserve still greater censure, particularly princes and all rich and powerful persons, and theirs is an even more useless error than that of those who refrain for the above reasons. If the occasion and means present themselves for both attempting and continuing such a profitable and laudable affair as mining ores and if they hesitate solely because of cowardice or because they give ear to the bayings of ignorant hounds, or if because of their own willfulness they wish to remain prisoners of a detestable and ugly avarice, then this is their own loss.
Every so often I visit the Canon EF 100 mm f/2.8L IS out-of-my-price-range lens and look at customer images. This one sort of a fly pooping in midair interested me, as I had never taken the trouble to imagine a fly doing such a thing:
