Religion and Child Abuse

One particular professor at my school, the type who would embrace the “militant atheist” label, steadfastly describes religion plus children as equallying child abuse. He points to cases of Jehovah’s Witness kids dying because they (or their parents) don’t allow blood products, Christian Science kids dying because their parents opt to pray them better instead of taking them to a doctor, young boys being molested by priests who can’t turn off their sexual drives no matter what God wants. He also points to the smaller things: the damage done to a young mind by parents who insist that it is good and right to hate homosexuals, who teach that science is the devil’s work and the world was intelligently created, who inflict the mental trauma and anguish of constant guilt and fear of fire and brimstone.

I don’t feel comfortable going as far as to claim that religion as a whole is child abuse, but I have seen particular manifestations that sure would qualify. I know others will say that these people would probably be bad parents regardless of religion, but I don’t know. I mean, if you don’t have the belief that god would rather have your child die than get a blood transfusion, what the hell would stop you? Seems that some bad acts really only have religious motivations.

Other things, well, as much as I hate that religious people will tell their kids that I am not even human, I kind of have this strange feeling that they ought to be allowed to. As much as I think it is wrong to hate gays, to disbelieve in evolution, to have strongly prescribed gender roles, who am I to dictate other’s values? I’m not quite a moral relativist, but I wear the uniform occasionally.

My partner, AB, is working this summer for an agricultural company. She is leading a team of twenty Mexican Mennonites and hand-weeding various canola fields. Her crew is comprised of girls and women, aged 14 to 40-something, and a few 14 year old boys who are too young to work with their dads yet. AB has a lot of fun with her crew, most of them are friendly, chatty, and good workers. The exception of course is the 14 year old boys, who, when AB talks, look at her as if she is some sort of disgusting effluvia they found on the street, but when her male co-lead talks, jump. These boys are rude to her, refuse to work, will not follow orders, sneak around, and generally act like jerks. For the male lead, though? They do whatever they can to impress him. I know, part of this is just that 14 year old boys are jerks, but a lot of it is that they have never really had to obey a woman before. No, really.

AB was asking the girls about their chores, and they all responded that on top of this job (for which their family gets at least $90 of her earnings), they have to go home, weed their family patch, cook, clean, do their brother’s laundry, and clean their brother’s rooms. Clean their brother’s rooms? Oh yeah, even their older brothers. If they are lucky, they only have a few brothers but since these families tend to have ten kids….

One of the girls asked AB if she is married. AB had decided earlier not to come out to her crew - she’ll never see them after this job and she’ll never change their mind about gay anyway. AB answered that yes, she was married. “For how long?” Nine years. “How many kids?” None.

“None?”

None.

The girl asked AB how old she was, and explained that by the time her mom was 27, she had six kids already. AB asked how many kids the girl wanted and it was like her personality turned off and a script-reading-robot turned on. “As many as the Lord will give me.” Then she went back to roguing, singing a song with the rest of the crew, a song that had a lyric (I kid you not) that said something like “We don’t believe in evolution, creation is the only truth.”

It was like all the kids had their own shiny personalities one-on-one, but that could turn off at any moment and they would turn into script-robots. Ew! Boys! I hate cleaning my brother’s room! *beep* *whirr* But a woman’s role is to be submissive to men *beep.* Babies are noisy and smelly! *clink* *boop* *beep* But my only purpose is pump out offspring until my body gives out *whirr*

I am trying to be a cultural relativist, here. They must get a great satisfaction from their religious lives, and their strict gender roles are part of those religious lives. Still, I can’t help but think that these girls are being suppressed and erased by the uniform and unchanging demands put on them. They have no chance to be or do anything else. They have no opportunity to develop interests, hobbies, selves. They’re just squashed by religion and culture, but culture that would have no reason to make these demands if not for religion.

These exchanges were enough for my partner to change her mind, to fully identify with the “religion is child abuse” side of the argument. She describes these kids as brainwashed. I want to agree, but my inner sociologist keeps coming out, saying “they are no worse than you, just different. The concept of the self is a relatively new one anyways, developed only recently in certain areas. It’s not a universal requirement for being human. And their religion is important to them, they get a sense of security and maybe even happiness from being a part of that, and a part of their culture.” Another part of me just feels so sad for all these girls, relegated to anonymous slavery and perpetual child-bearing, in the name of someone’s imaginary friend. The boys too, as privileged and arrogant as they are, only get to remain so if they fit into a pretty small definition of masculinity. Woe on the gay Mennonite, on the artist, on the musician, on the mechanically-inclined girl or the culinary-talented boy.

 

Carnival of Sex and Sexuality 2 - Work It

Welcome to the June 2, 2008 edition of carnival of sex and sexuality. NSFW topics and language to follow.

Sex and sexuality are work, and hard work at that. While reading through the submissions for this month’s Carnival of Sex and Sexuality, I was struck by the number of ways work is incorporated into both. There’s sex work, the obvious, but then there is work about sex, like academics who study sex or professionals who provide support on the subjects of sex and sexuality. There are the many activists who work tirelessly to get rulings like the recent one in California, giving gays and lesbians the right to marry. There are companies for whom sex is their work, like toy-makers and pornographers. There are organizations who use sex and sexuality to bring attention to their non-sex-based work. And then there is work in the sociological sense: the work people put into their sexuality performances such as the work that is required everyday to present as a gender other than the one typically associated with your sex, or the work that goes into negotiating how your relationship is viewed by outsiders. All of these meanings are explored in the submissions to this month’s Carnival. I hope you enjoy the perspectives. And please, get involved in the conversations!

Let’s talk about professional sex work first. These two links examine sex work from the point of view of the client. In the first, a college student pays a sex worker for cuddles and chat and finds out that she’s a real person with hobbies and opinions on world events. In the second, a writer describes the process and experience of visiting a professional submissive.

Jordan C. Butler wrote I Paid $100 to Cuddle With a Prostitute at The Nevada Sagebrush.

When she placed her hands back on my chest, I realized that Toni didn’t want me to leave. I came to the brothel to cuddle as a prank—and it was funny that I talked about the Democratic primary and America’s declining economy with a prostitute—but then it turned into a genuine conversation on traveling, Lake Tahoe, Harry Potter and what we wanted to do with our lives.

Greta Christina presents Buying Obedience posted at Greta Christina’s Blog. This is a four-part series: make sure you read part two, part three, and part four as well. They’re all fabulous.

I liked the idea of paying someone so I could have the session be about me me me, so I could be sexually selfish without feeling guilty. That’s a big reason I decided to hire a submissive instead of an escort or a dominant — it fit so beautifully into that fantasy. But would it really be like that?

Sex and sexuality can be work for other groups of people too, such as academics and therapists. The following articles is from a therapist interested in explaining how “It’s not easy being an academic and competing for attention, especially when you’re writing about charged topics like homosexuality,”

TherapyDoc presents Accepted posted at Everyone needs therapy? Lessons from a family therapist.

Nathan: So what did you DO in Israel?
Me: This, that and the other, also learned a lot about homosexuality.
Nathan: So you should do your dissertation in THAT!
Me: Well yeah, but I can’t wrap my head around it for research. I’m a relationship/family therapist. I wanted to do something family relationship-ish.
Nathan: So think. Think real hard here. What might a family problem be for homosexuals?
Me (no dummy): Oh, acceptance perhaps?
Nathan: So smart.

With the recent ruling in California that allows same-sex marriage, it’s important to remember all the hard work activists, organizations, and human-rights bloggers put into making these issues visible and enacting change. The following set of articles includes several on the California ruling, one explaining exactly why denying marriage to gays is bigotry and one chronicling the sad history of anti-gay oppression. It is important to remember that not everyone agrees that allowing same-sex marriage is a step forward, and if you have an article that makes this point, I’d love you to link to it in the comments. It is also important to remember that homosexuality is not the only frontier of sexual bigotry. One of the articles in this section describes the challenges mixed-race couples face when forming a life together. Finally, if you want to get involved, the last article in this part is a list of organizations you can help out.

Melissa McEwan posted California Court Overturns Gay Marriage Ban! at Shakesville.

And because California already offers domestic partnership which afford same-sex couples the same legal rights as opposite-sex married couples, it doesn’t leave opponents of this decision much wiggle-room.

Rev. Irene Monroe presents California Gay Marriage Backlash Begins at Alternet.

When society narrowly defines marriage as the union between a man and a woman, it is not only policing the sexual behaviors of lesbian and gay people, but society is also policing the sexual behaviors of heterosexuals. Handcuffing marriage to a heterosexual paradigm merely chokes its possibility of ever flourishing and lasting, especially as we are coming to understand the fluidity of not only gender and sexual identities but also of the constant changing configuration of family units.

Seth Manapio presents On Sober Reflection, Yes posted at Whiskey Before Breakfast… the Blog.

Crack emcee asked, in the comments “Is everyone who challenges gays in defense of marriage a bigot, Seth?”

The answer to this question is “Yes, everyone who challenges gays in defense of marriage is a bigot, Crack.”

focusorganic presents 21st Century Oppression - Denial of Basic Rights For Homosexuals posted at Focus Organic.com.

Because of anti-homosexual discrimination, gay people are two to seven times more likely than heterosexual people to commit suicide. They are also more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. The fear of being alone is significant. When a young person realizes that they are homosexual, they may have nobody they can trust to talk to, and they may feel very alone and misunderstood. How can they know whom to trust when so many people feel that homosexuality is wrong?

Chris presents Mixed Relationships in Asia - a Status Quo posted at nomad4ever.

For sure the days of strange looks and talking behind someones back aren’t completely over yet. Be it in Europe, when a guy visits some friends with his Asian girlfriend or wife; sooner or later the usual stories about ‘Mail Order Brides’ will pop up. Or that he brought her home from his recent ‘Sex Bomber Trip’ from Thailand.

Amanda Moore presents 106 Organizations That Are Changing the World - Are you helping? posted at VagabondetteVA.

I fully admit that this list tilts towards my personal interests so please feel free to recommend additional groups in the comments section and I’ll add them to the list.

We’ve all heard the aphorism that sex sells, and it seems undoubtable that it does. This next section highlights two articles which talk about the intersection of sex and commerce or marketing.

Julia Cooke wrote Sex-Mex for Conde Nast Portfolio. (I know it’s not a blog, but it’s a good article.)

When the show’s owner, Mexican entrepreneur Alberto Kibrit, inaugurated the country’s first-ever sex-industry trade fair in 2004, “talking about sex was completely taboo in Mexico,” he says. “The issue and the industry were very closed.” But now, as he and other entrepreneurs are quick to point out, the adult-entertainment industry is an increasingly respectable sector for small-business owners in Mexico.

Holly Ord presents PETA Uses Girls in Bikinis to Draw Attention to Their Cause posted at Menstrual Poetry.

PETA isn’t new to using scantily clad, or even naked women as means to drive attention to their causes. For their latest demonstration, they decided that it would be a great idea if they locked some girls wearing yellow bikinis up in cages.

As a sociologist, this next section is about my favorite type of work: the work of self presentation. ABC News did a mini-experiment on the public reception of gay and straight PDAs, and found, unsurprisingly, mixed results. A blogger reports on this experiment and on the constant need for gay folk to self-edit in the following link an. Also worth a mention, the Metafilter thread on this article includes over a hundred personal comments on the experience of self-editing in public.

PortlyDyke presents Take My Arm, My Love at Shakesville.

Every single time I take my partner’s hand on the street, or toss my arm over her shoulder or around her waist, hug her goodbye or hello, I do a little, tiny “security sweep”. I notice who is around, and where I am, and what the energy feels like — before I touch her in public. It’s a tiny amount of attention, most often, but it’s there.

Finally, not every post that was submitted could be crammed into some sort of sex/sexuality and work category. In this last section we have an exploration of media representations of sex and sexuality in reference to a country where these things are not usually talked about, and an article describing how a very public murder trial is leading to the criminalizing of kink in the UK.

Renee presents Cross Dressing, And Muff Diving In The House Of Saud posted at Womanist Musings.

In my perusal of the New York Times, I came across an article that at first seemed to explode with the potential for subversion, in a country known for its strict control of its citizenry. It is entitled, “Love on Girls’ Side of the Saudi Divide“. My first thought was, finally a side of Saudi Arabia that never makes the press.

Brittany Ransom presents “Extreme” Pornography and The World’s fear of sexuality continues posted at Hellationships.

All of those “extreme” porn topics I listed above are all fantasies. I get so tired of people assuming that we as humans can’t decipher the difference between finding something arousing and needing to act it out ourselves.

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Carnival of Sex and Sexuality using our carnival submission form, or volunteer to host an upcoming edition. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Technorati tags: carnival of sex and sexuality, blog carnival.

 

Like, you know? Right?

Oh yeah, I, like, I, I’m doing these interviews for a class, right? And I, and after I interview people, I’m interviewing people on the role of religion in their lives and then I have to transcribe the interviews and I can’t, well, I can’t blog about the contents of the interviews, you know, because I didn’t get informed, informed consent for that, you know? And transcribing, [laugh], transcribing is probably my least favorite part of the research, of the research process. But it has to be done, you know?

Enough of that. Please Darwin, let it end. The truth is, though, that we speak very differently than we write. We don’t actually speak in sentences, and if we did it would seem strange and stilted. We don’t actually speak in discrete words, either. Listen to someone speaking a language you don’t understand and you’ll find yourself unable to recognize where one word ends and another begins. English is no different, we can just recognize the words because we know them, but we don’t actually say whole and complete words, rather we slur them into each other.

Moreover, we have these strange linguistic tics, my wife had a teacher once who referred to them as word whiskers. You never realize how often people say things like “You know?” or “Right?” in conversation until it falls on you to listen to these conversations and transcribe them. Everyone does it, unlike “like” which seems to be a bit of a generational thing. “You know?” and “like” have different uses, though, the latter being just another form of “um” or “uh,” to take up space while thinking of the next thing to say, while the former (along with “right?”) is almost another, less annoying version of uptalk.

Oh, uptalk. You know what I’m talking about. Listen to an amateur lecturer, like a class presentation, and there will always be someone, or more someones than not, who end speak each sentence as a question: “So, Marx wrote Capital in 1867? And in it he talks about the bourgeoisie and the proletariat? And the bourgeoisie are the rich people who own the factories and the proletariat are the workers?” This has the effect of making the speaker sound unsure and like they’re asking for approval or agreement. Women do it more than men, making women sound more and more like they don’t know what they’re talking about even if the content of their sentences is correct. So, the moral of this tangent is “Don’t Do It. Say No To Uptalk.”

Anyway, I think that “you know?” and “right?” serve some of the same purposes of uptalk (getting your listener to identify with you, letting your listener know that you aren’t done talking so please don’t cut you off, and making sure your listener is following you and still paying attention) without as much of the “I don’t know what I’m talking about so I’m going to avoid declarative sentences” vibe of uptalk. It’s more of a “This is what I believe, do you understand? I had this experience, have you?”

Of course, as the interviewer, I have my own annoying tics, primarily “Oh, that’s cool,” “Cool,” “Yeah,” and “Wow, that’s cool.” As the interviewer, though, we aren’t here to talk about me. So, what religion do you identify with? That’s cool, can you tell me more about it?

 

No Posts This Week

I have too much work to do. On the plus side, when this damn paper is done, I’ll have several posts worth of material about classical sociological theories of community. Yay!

 

Movies I Love Doing Things I Hate

There are two, well more than two really, but we’ll leave it at two for now, things that I have been seeing in movies and tv shows for years that have been really getting on my nerves. I realize that sounds awfully vague, and I am trying to find more precise words but failing. Are they themes? Tropes? Plot elements? I guess we’ll go with plot elements, although that’s hardly less vague than “things.” Regardless, these plot elements are fairly ubiquitous and really annoying. What’s worse, they show up in shows and movies that I really like. Warning: I will be taking about the plots of Sweeney Todd and Juno. Let’s start with the mildest offender:

If there are two youth of different sexes, they will automatically fall in love with each other, no exposition needed. As seen in: Sweeney Todd.

How this plays out: She is a fragile songbird confined in a gilded cage. He is a sensitive sailor roaming the streets of London. He sees her through the window. She sees him. They fall in love. She throws her house key out the window so that he can break into her house, he moons around town singing his undying love. Wait, what? They saw each other through a window and she tossed him her key? Really? I can think of lots of ways to deal with strange men ranging the street like tomcats and looking into my bedroom like another kind of tom, and giving him my housekey is not one of them. She’s a pretty young girl who sits in her window and sings, I’m sure there are lots of young men who stare back. Does she throw them each a key? Does she have a closetful of house keys so that she can toss one to every male who gives her an eye? And what about him? All he knows about her is her name, and he is convinced that this gives him the power to feel her through walls. He knows nothing about her personality, her history, her likes and dislikes. Doesn’t matter, he has genitalia set #1 and she has set #2, that’s all young love needs.

Women regularly get pregnant the very first time they have sex, and they never miscarry. As seen in: Juno.

A teenage girl has sex for the very first time and, surprise! She’s pregnant. Or, a married woman cheats on her husband once. Or, a single woman has a one-night stand. As a woman who has tried to get pregnant (and ended up miscarrying), this one makes me so angry. It really isn’t all that easy.

Let’s look at some math. If you are tracking your fertility and trying to get pregnant, having sex or inseminating on the days you are ovulating, your chances of getting pregnant during a cycle are roughly 25%. If you aren’t tracking your fertility, the chances are much lower. How low? Let’s assume that you are not trying to get pregnant, and that the day you have sex is randomly chosen from among all the days you aren’t on your period (although people do have sex while menstruating). Let’s also assume that you have a regular period, 5 days out of 28.

So, in a month of 30 days, you are likely to be on your period for about 6 days. 30 minus 6 leaves us with 24 non-period days. Of those 24 days, you are likely to be fertile for about 3 or 4 days. If you randomly choose the day you will have sex on, you have a 13-17% chance of choosing a day you are fertile. If you do choose one of those days, you only have a 25% chance of conceiving. This brings us down to roughly 2-4%. That’s a 2-4% chance of getting pregnant the first time you have sex. This is, of course, assuming all my assumptions are correct, as well as assuming that both partners are physiologically able, he ejaculates inside her vagina, and no contraceptives are being used. There is an argument that women are hornier when they are ovulating, and may therefore be more likely to initiate sex, but I think that having sex for the first time as well as cheating are more about opportunity, and this could happen at any time during the month .

Other than discrepancies with reality, why does this bug me so much? It’s because pregnancy is being used in these cases as a punishment for sex. Married women don’t get pregnant so easily on tv and in movies, that’s because the sex they are having is socially acceptable and they don’t need to be punished for it. Teenagers and women who want to have sex outside of committed relationships though… they need to suffer for their crime. I hate this, the whole pregnancy as a punishment for (women’s) sexuality is an argument the pro-lifers trot out. How can we recognize it as sexist when they say it, but not recognize it when movies and tv shows constantly parade it in front of us? In Juno, this rule also works in her favour. She does have sex (once) and is punished by pregnancy, but when she decides to do “the right thing” the fact that she only had sex once means that she is able to be fully redeemed. She wasn’t a “bad girl” who was *gasp!* sexually active, she was a good girl who made one mistake and paid for it in full. That brings her back to good girl status.

It might seem like I am really overstating my argument, I mean, Juno is really a great movie. It is very female-positive, it fits the Bechdel rule, it shows both men and women as complicated beings who are not necessarily on opposing teams, and it was funny and smart. You don’t have to convince me, I fully admit that it was a good movie. I recommend it highly. I just wish it didn’t make use of the “have sex once and get pregnant” rule. The fact that it was her first time was not integral to the story, the number of times she had had sex did not even need to be an issue. They made it an issue for a point, and I think their point is the point I made above.

I also want to be clear that the two “rules” I pointed out are not just based on the two movies I cited as examples. These are just the most recent shows I have seen that have made use of the themes. Please remember this when you write you argue that I am overstating my case. It’s not just Juno who got pregnant on the first time, it is a constant rule of tv and movies, and for it to be that constant, there has to be a reason for it. A message from it. Juno is one example, if you keep your eyes open you will see more and more and more.

 

I ROCK!!!

I don’t actually write much about grad school, but that’s because by the time I get everything read/written/marked, the last thing I want to do is think about it more. Right now, though, I’m on a bit of a (natural) high. I just taught a stats lab and it was AWESOME. The fact that I was awesome probably won’t surprise many of you (I mean, really), but in this case it is a bit of a surprise. I have been teaching this particular lab all semester - that’s right, I have my own students, they are all mine - and until now I have sucked. I mean it. I’ve been boring and perfunctory, stiff and awkward. Like old married couple sex and scared teenager sex all at once, but without the sex.

Today though, I really rocked. I finally decided “You know what? I know this shit! I don’t need to practice a dozen times. I don’t need detailed lecture notes. I’m going to bring a list of major things to cover, and wing the rest.” It worked. I was more comfortable, I made some jokes, I was more interesting, and my students were much more comfortable around me afterward. It probably didn’t hurt that I showed the Pacman graph, wore my Communist Party t-shirt from Threadless (which a student admitted to also owning) and made a reference to The Office. Yeah, that’s how cool I am. Suck it, suckers.

Now I have to go mark all their assignments. Shit.

 

In Which the Blogger Describes the Level of her Dorkosity

Although it isn’t what I’m working on now, my dream is to study the internet. I disagree with my supervisor that this will doom me to a lifetime of obscurity, but I understand that it will make it harder for me to get jobs and funding. However well I understand that there is something amazing going on with the internet, something that is simultaneously connected to and an integral part of “real life” (in “scare quotes” because I don’t think online life is any less real), and also so very different and new, many people don’t see it that way. When I tell someone that I am interested in the internet, online communities, and the practice of religion online, they look at me as if I said I want to do my dissertation on Smurfs. Why? Why would you want to study a bunch of nerds playing games and talking at each other? Why would you want to study something that isn’t real? What could be interesting about the internet?

If they are actually interested in an answer, I always direct people to the essay “A Rape in Cyberspace” by Julian Dibbell. This is the piece that got me interested. I have a short list of books/essays/films/music that changed my life, that BLEW MY MIND, DUDE, and this is on it. Dibbell described the impact this way:

No piece I had done before had managed to convey as vividly to readers the fact that there was something wild and different going on online, something that might profoundly alter the way they related to words and communication and culture in general.

Back in the prehistoric days of the internet, people congregated in online games/chat rooms called MUDs or MOOs. A Rape in Cyberspace happened in one of these, called LambdaMOO. Within this MOO, in the living room, a user who called himself Mr Bungle used a “voodoo doll” to attribute actions to other users. Thus, for one, he made a womans avatar sodomize herself with a knife. Although the actions happened as text on a screen, many of the people behind the avatars felt real life trauma. How does a person make sense of this? How does a community punish the offender? This story is

the story of a man named Mr. Bungle, and of the ghostly sexual violence he committed in the halls of LambdaMOO, and most importantly of the ways his violence and his victims challenged the 1500 and more residents of that surreal, magic-infested mansion to become, finally, the community so many of them already believed they were.

Yes, it is from 1993, which makes it roughly 3,000 years old in internet time. If this level of complex human emotion and community feeling could take place way back then, though, with the limited technology they had at the time, imagine what goes on now. Maybe you don’t use the internet in those ways, but many do, and not just freaks and geeks. My grandma’s cancer 25 years ago left her face deformed and her self-image shattered. She lives on a farm in the middle of Saskatchewan and has deep and intense friendships with other cancer survivors all over the world. She can freely socialize with other women her age without worrying about how she looks. These are not virtual friendships, they are real relationships, and they are what brings happiness to her life.

Julian Dibbell’s book “My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World” is available for free in PDF format on Lulu.

 

Back from Hiatus

After a seventeen-page paper, a ten-page paper, and two three-hour long presentations, I am back from my impromptu hiatus. Tomorrow I have a multi-disciplinary conference to go to, and I am not exactly looking forward to it. I know that presenting at conferences is good for me, both in the sense of good for my presentation skills and good for my cv, but for some of them I just don’t see the point. Single-discipline conferences I understand, because you will learn things that are relevant to you, but that you might not have had the chance to hear about otherwise. Multi-disciplinary but themed conferences I also understand - a lot of fascinating work all on one topic and the opportunity for some really neat cross-disciplinary collaboration. Multi-disciplinary, non-themed conferences? Sounds like a whole lot of people who will go for their session and leave for everyone else’s.

Anyway, look for a more substantive post sometime in the next few days.

 

Cough! Hack! Wheeze!

I’ve been sick for awhile, so I haven’t really had the energy to post. Well, that’s not true, since I have had the energy to waste time on videogames and Metafilter. Regardless, being a sociologist-in-training, I can’t miss an opportunity to integrate theory into my daily life. Being sick, I naturally (naturally!) thought of Talcott Parson’s “sick role” concept, which states that a sick person has the following two rights and two obligations:

Rights:

1. The sick person is exempt from normal social roles
2. The sick person is not responsible for their condition

Obligations:

1. The sick person should try to get well
2. The sick person should seek technically competent help and cooperate with the medical professional

Under this, we see that it’s not my fault that I’m sick, and I get to skip class, as long as I rest and get plenty of fluids and see a doctor if necessary. I took some time off school, stayed home and slept in, drank tons of lemon and honey, and am finally starting to feel better. If, however, I didn’t do whatever I could to get well, I could be socially sanctioned. If, hypothetically of course, I had tried to go in to work on Thursday but had no voice and coughed all over everything, I could be sent home by the sociology secretary under direct orders to get some sleep and drink plenty of fluids. She even offered to write me a “mom’s note” excusing my absence if I needed it. Aww!

I guess the sick role would be problematic in cases of mental illness, or where the patient doesn’t identify as sick. How exactly are you supposed to try to get well from, say, ADHD or depression? What if your depression keeps you from seeking medical help and following their advice? Can you be blamed for your illness then? Obviously you shouldn’t be, but depressed people are often blamed for being depressed (Cheer up! Just try to be happy!). Homosexuality used to be seen as sick, and still is by many people. The gay kid is expected to go to ex-gay camp, get therapy, and do whatever he can to “get better,” and if he doesn’t he’s accused of wanting to be sick. What if your illness is chronic? Terminal?

Wow, suddenly I’m glad I just have a cold.

And if anyone is interested, the image at the top is a giant stuffed common cold microbe, from the GIANTmicrobes site. E.coli, Flesh Eating disease, Ebola, Stomach ache, and more.

 

The Rule

What movies could you watch if you followed the Alison Bechdel rule, from her comic “Dykes to Watch Out For?” What is the rule? Well, in order to watch a movie, it must have three characteristics:

1. There must be two or more women in it
2. Who talk to each other,
3. About something other than a man.

Some variants include the stipulation that the women have names. Doesn’t sound too difficult, does it? It’s much tougher than it sounds. I don’t actually use the rule to determine what I watch (and there is a lot of worthy film-making that violates the rule), but I do think it addresses a crucial gap in the media representation of gender. Think about it. Think about the last three movies you watched, or look at the Oscar nominees from past years, or kids movies, and ask yourself if the only women in it are tokens, or exist only to talk about the male character. When you start to think about it, it really is amazing how many movies act as if women either don’t exist, or exist only as sex objects. One in a while something surprising comes along, for example Resident Evil: Extinction passed the Bechdel test, but for the most part women have just gotten used to not seeing themselves in film.

Here’s a list of every Pixar film:

Toy Story - two females (the mom and Bo Peep) never talk to each other
A Bug’s Life - three females (Dot, princess Atta, the Queen), they do talk to each other, I don’t remember what about. Edit: A reader has pointed out that they talk about things other than men. So this one passes!
Toy Story 2 - two females (Bo Peep, Jessie) They talk to each other, about the male characters
Monster’s Inc - two females (Boo and Celia), they never talk to each other
Finding Nemo - one female (Dory)
The Incredibles - three females (Helen, Violet, Edna), they do talk to each other, about something other than males (family and clothes)
Cars - two females (Sally and Flo) Do they talk to each other? I don’t know.
Ratatouille - One female (Collette)

Using the list of characters on the wikipedia pages (which includes minor characters) for these movies we come up with a male to female ratio of: 77:30. That comes out to 29% female characters in Pixar films. The worst offender is Ratatouille with a ratio of 13:1, and the best is The Incredibles with a ratio of 1:1. Not one of the 8 movies features a woman as the primary lead character (with the possible exception of The Incredibles, which features the whole family).

Let’s keep this in perspective: children’s movies have fewer than 30% female characters. These are movies which are especially made to be inoffensive and identifiable to many kids. How much worse must adult movies be? Next time you watch a movie, think about it. If you find one that follows the rules, or one that egregiously violates them, let me know!