Saturday, February 21, 2015
Sunday, February 15, 2015
When the Flames Stop, Will the Lemba Rise?
Notes on the Future of the South African Lemba through the Lens of Problems Past
and Present.
As
xenophobic rioting tears through Limpopo, little attention has been paid to the
plight of the Lemba people there. The Limpopo region is home to many ethnic
groups, among them the Lemba, wa-Remba or Senna depending on who names them.
The name Lemba itself may denote a status as foreigners, as it is close to a
Bantu word for foreigner. These "foreigners" came to Africa according
to their own ancient legends confirmed by modern DNA research thousands of
years ago from Israel. As the Jewish community is divided over who is really
Jewish, the status of the Lemba is an open question. Many Reconstructionists
and Reform Jews as well Kairites recognize patrilineal descent, and could
therefore claim the Lembas who maintain their traditions are brother Jews. The
Orthodox community, who only accept matrilineal Jewish descent, mostly see the
Lemba as an interesting curiosity save those who have undergone formal
conversion. Some Lemba who view themselves as Jews feel the reception by the
larger Jewish community has in the past been "Jewish apartheid." “Jewish
apartheid” were in fact the precise words the Lemba Cultural Association used to describe the situation as some years ago according to Gideon Shimona in his book, Community and
Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (2003).
The role of apartheid in shaping
the modern South African Lemba consciousness is large. One man of Lemba
descent I spoke to recently noted that many Ashkenazi Jews had fought and struggled
against apartheid. "Many of them fought and struggled, some went to
prison... these are the Jews we should be looking up to." Many such Jews are still around.
The above is a picture I took of Justice Albie Sachs and Ruth Carneson last month at the Book Lounge in Cape Town. Both of these people made tremendous sacrifices in the fight against Apartheid. If you look closely you will notice the Justice lacks one arm. It was blown off in a personal attack against him during his fight with the Apartheid regime. Jews the whole world over can be justifiably proud of such leaders and perhaps not so coincidentally members of the tribe.
Unfortunately
for the Lemba and all of us, there were also many Jews who were implicitly supportive of Apartheid. The
daughter I met of one mixed, although "white" family noted that her
mother (a non-Jew) had been scared away from conversion by the pro-Apartheid
politics of her husband's synagogue years ago. One can assume that many
Lemba had the same issues. The history of the Lemba of South Africa cannot
be divorced from that of Apartheid. This month marks the first African to be
made a Saint by Catholicism. The saint, Benedict
Daswa, was in fact a Lemba.
His story and hundreds of others tell a fascinating and sad story of the role
of Apartheid in the loss of Lemba identity. During Apartheid by and large the
only community groups supporting the education of blacks were Christian
missionaries. Lemba who wanted their children educated often had no choice but
to send them to Christian schools. Among the results of Apartheid was a slow
erasure of Lemba tradition.
Today apartheid is over, but racism
is not. During my travels in South Africa I met several Jewish
"colored" people (people of mixed heritage) who had been isolated
from Judaism through the workings of racism. One woman remarked to me that her
family had converted to Christianity after years of keeping her and her younger
sibling isolated from the larger community. This woman was the descendant of an
Ashkenazi mother and a presumably black father she had never met. The woman was
blunt in pointing out that she would not be accepted by the small community her
mother came from or even all of her mother's relatives. Ironically her mother's
family name was Schwartz (Yiddish for black). On the other hand many
"colored" and black Jewish people have slowly integrated into South
Africa's mainstream Jewish community. The numbers of "colored" Jews
in South Africa are small but their dedication is fierce. In Cape Town one
Shabbat morning I walked into a shiur in a progressive synagogue. I couldn't help
noticing that all, by which I mean exactly 100%, of the attendants were
"colored." The rabbi, Rabbi Newman who is in the midst of some
academic research on the Lemba made a comment that perhaps we had found
"the lost tribes of Israel right here!" Indeed, asking around about
familial roots to such "colored" Jewish families one finds in some
cases Lemba ancestry.
Nonetheless, the majority of South
African Lemba have taken on different identities from that of Jews. Their
plight is important for the larger Jewish community to understand. Many Jews
want their children to be Jewish, and grandchildren to be Jewish and so on. In
understanding which traditions were transmitted among the Lemba and which were
lost and why over the last thousands of years, we can gain insight into the
future plight of all Jews. We can also gain insight into where the Lemba people
are going. In all likelihood only through understanding the unfortunate aspects
of past of the Lemba can any progress and healing be made. Like all Jews the
Lemba are a people of very varied opinions. Some view their past as little more
than a historical curiosity. Other Lemba view their past as an extremely
important aspect of their identity which they view as undeniably Jewish. Some
even seek to proselytize Judaism to other Lemba in an attempt to undo what they
view as an unjust Christianizing of their people. One such Lemba is Oded Dumah,
from the Lemba Hebrew Youth. He envisions a future in which young Lemba
in South Africa are taught Hebrew and Torah. Other Lemba have different visions
of the tribe's future. To my knowledge although there is ongoing research into the Lemba, no one has undertaken a statistical ethnographic survey of such people as to their aspirations for the future. As apartheid fades into the past while democracy and global communication increase the possibilities for future Lemba exchange with broader global communities continues to increase.
Unfortunately at this interesting
moment in Lemba history a new problem has arisen. Xenophobic rioting has begun
in several areas that are around the traditional homeland of the Lemba in South
Africa. One local newspaper called the current situation as of two days ago an all-out
tribal
war. After speaking to both Lemba and non-Lemba Venda from the region, I
can say the perception by most seems to be that the Lemba are not truly foreign
and will not be the specific target of violence. The Lemba will however have to live
with the aftermath of the current violence even in the best case scenario.
Many, many schools in their traditional region have been burned by rioters.
Although many Lemba do not live in these areas the school burnings will effect
some of their children, as a common pattern is for children to stay with their
grandparents while young adults leave for cities to work. Other Lemba who have
migrated from Zimbabwe are at risk of being attacked not due to their specific
tribal identity, but because of nationality. As the situation develops, the
broader Jewish community must ask itself "What is our responsibility to
these people?" Ultimately, perhaps after this tragedy, the rebuilding of
schools and education can be done by all kinds of people. We must not forget
the unfortunate symbiotic roles of mainstream South African Jewish
indifference, Christian religious missionary education and Apartheid in erasing
Lemba culture. Educations both devoid of religious character and in every
religious tradition can be made available after schools are rebuilt. We can all support a modern world, in which we can all be able to choose our identity and
that of our children.
Saturday, February 14, 2015
A Valentine's Note: What We Can All Learn from the Shidduch Crisis
I hope you had a happy Valentine's day. But if you are scanning the internet as opposed to waking up by someone then this blog entry is for you. In the mainstream press many different conflicting ideas circulate about singles. Some of the ideas circulating are culturally specific, such as the idea of leftover women in China. The Chinese press notes that women achieve educationally at the expense of marriageability. The picture is less clear in Anglo societies where there is a strong tendency for people to marry from their own social class and race. In America if you see a brilliant lawyer who also has a PhD in Physics married to a woman who is a part time nanny who barely finished high school, you start to wonder. On what planet would these two people meet? You see the reverse often- and everyone quietly chalks it up to the desperation of older women. Every society has it's own variation of the unwritten rules of love. Nonetheless miserable single people are as culturally universal as love itself.
Following the "shidduch crisis" provides some insight into the failings of singles. In highly religious Jewish communities there are a notable number of single women. These women are viewed as a problem. On deeper examination, many have noted they are a result of how successful the community is. The religious community has tons of kids. The community also has a cultural pattern like many where men tend to marry younger women. In a mathematical sense, barring lots of divorce and remarriage, this means that some women will become single permanently. A backlog of aging single women has built up. Men, realizing there will be more than equal numbers of women in the age group they seek, realize they have the upper hand. Women suffer a lot. Although Orthodox Jews are a peculiar and small community, their problems and solutions give some insight into the whole modern world, even if they disdain it. Any sub population with a high birth rate will face some variation of this problem. The extreme solution is to simply kill all the extra women. A surprisingly high number of societies do just that. Honor killings. sex selective abortions to prevent the birth of females, female genital mutilation that is really butchering the genitalia of young women so brutally a few of them outright drop dead...it usually takes a war to cause androcide, but femicide prevails even in peace. Connecting the dots between demographic growth and femicide isn't hard to do in some populations. In many Arab populations an unmarried or even divorced female is the financial responsibility of her male relatives. Eager to get rid of a financial burden some families push women to marry well above their age range. The few women who rebel risk a lot of violence. The most humane solution for "extra" people is of course to just let them be. Perhaps if everyone understood that we are not entirely independent actors, but rather individuals constrained by the rules of the societies we interact with, whether they are written down , unwritten cultural codes, or demographic realities, we could make progress. Americans are raised to believe that with hard work, anything is possible. Countless people chastise singles for not working hard enough to get married. In love as in life, the truth is that with hard work in many cases the only outcome is exhaustion.
Following the "shidduch crisis" provides some insight into the failings of singles. In highly religious Jewish communities there are a notable number of single women. These women are viewed as a problem. On deeper examination, many have noted they are a result of how successful the community is. The religious community has tons of kids. The community also has a cultural pattern like many where men tend to marry younger women. In a mathematical sense, barring lots of divorce and remarriage, this means that some women will become single permanently. A backlog of aging single women has built up. Men, realizing there will be more than equal numbers of women in the age group they seek, realize they have the upper hand. Women suffer a lot. Although Orthodox Jews are a peculiar and small community, their problems and solutions give some insight into the whole modern world, even if they disdain it. Any sub population with a high birth rate will face some variation of this problem. The extreme solution is to simply kill all the extra women. A surprisingly high number of societies do just that. Honor killings. sex selective abortions to prevent the birth of females, female genital mutilation that is really butchering the genitalia of young women so brutally a few of them outright drop dead...it usually takes a war to cause androcide, but femicide prevails even in peace. Connecting the dots between demographic growth and femicide isn't hard to do in some populations. In many Arab populations an unmarried or even divorced female is the financial responsibility of her male relatives. Eager to get rid of a financial burden some families push women to marry well above their age range. The few women who rebel risk a lot of violence. The most humane solution for "extra" people is of course to just let them be. Perhaps if everyone understood that we are not entirely independent actors, but rather individuals constrained by the rules of the societies we interact with, whether they are written down , unwritten cultural codes, or demographic realities, we could make progress. Americans are raised to believe that with hard work, anything is possible. Countless people chastise singles for not working hard enough to get married. In love as in life, the truth is that with hard work in many cases the only outcome is exhaustion.
Monday, February 9, 2015
My child, my choice
Adoption for me has been a never ending struggle. The bureaucratic hurdles are huge, and I am fighting different state imposed timelines. Thank goodness I am not German. In Germany the state stops adoption when you turn 30, period. I must say if there is a force more sinister than the bureaucratic hurdles of the state, it is "well meaning" people who spew advice on subjects they understand little about. I am reminded of some of the Muslim Arab couples in Northern Israel I have seen delivering babies. When you ask the woman if she wants something for the pain, the man responds. In his mind it is his decision if he wants his wife medicated for the pain even if she has to labor and push out the baby. The truth is he knows little of the pain of childbirth; but he must think he understands; and understands so well that the decision is naturally his.
Some of the cold hard facts about adoption are as follows:
1. Even depending upon which state you live inside in the USA, South Africa or many other places it can be easier or harder.
2. Although there is no explicit age limits in some places this is largely an illusion for legal purposes. States do not want to be sued for age discrimination; this does not mean they do not actively discriminate based on age.
3. Social workers and others in the system actively look for reasons to deny non-related people adoptions.
Let me pause right there and give an interesting case I met the players in personally. A German woman I met in South Africa battled the court system for five years to adopt while she held her son in foster care. She met her son while volunteering with abandoned children. Eventually all her sons contactable relatives had died of HIV or were unreachable. Nonetheless, it took 5 years of court battles and fighting to be able to take care of her son instead of turning him over to an orphanage. Her case appeared in several local papers and even on TV. The adoption system defies logic, and everyone can see it.
4. Adoption is fairly easy for a select group of people. People with a net worth in the millions will find adoption much easier to navigate. Do you have millions of dollars? If so you are in the tiniest of minorities. Most of us do not. To claim that because adoption was easy for Madonna anyone can do it is about as logical as claiming that because Halle Berry got pregnant, or let's be real, donor egg pregnant at 46, anyone can get pregnant at any age.
5. Those actively working to accumulate the wealth adoption requires will often be precluded from adoption by their work hours. I've experienced this personally. I was condescendingly told by a social worker that an ideal single adoptive parent should not be working even what are considered full time hours. How many single women do you know who can afford to live on a 20 hour a week job? Lots, right...it's called welfare. But I suspect, although I've never been on welfare, it might look less than favorable on an adoption application.
There are many, many sad truths about the adoption system....which brings me to the real point of this post. No woman who has ever had a child has any right to judge a woman like me who has worked, and has not yet had children in what childbearing plan she has. I recently got an email from a woman who had a child before she turned 20 discouraging me from immediate adoption. I get discouraged by people all the time.
Plenty of single childless men beg me not to have a child. This is somewhat understandable. These men have made a choice not to have children; therefore they view it as the best life path possible I assume. These men are no hypocrites. They just want other people to take up their miserable lonely lifestyle. I can forgive these men for not understanding that not everyone has the goal of being an angry old bachelor. But I can not forgive women who had their own children telling other people not to. I don't know any woman who supported her child by herself. By and large the people who pay for children financially are men (husbands and taxpayers), grandparents, the community and the state. The contributions of the women I know to the financial cost of raising their own children have been on average laughable. Even the most independent women I know have not taken 100% responsibility for their children because short of being born an heiress no one can. Do you know a pair of young doctors, lawyers or other successful professionals with a baby when they are under 35? Well guess who paid for the stroller? In the modern anglo world an education costs so much money the payout comes after the childbearing years. Not only can most women not support children alone, most educated people (read student loan holders) even in couples can not shoulder the financial costs of children. They must either get into more debt, or beg the bank of mom and dad. Yes, perhaps their salaries are enough for baby food, but we are talking more housing, more clothing, and yes, more of that most costly thing we call education now for their children. Good luck to anyone trying to pay the $200,000 price tag it takes to make a modern university educated professional. Such realities make the differences between one parent and two pretty marginal, because after all most young people get divorced. Which leads me to cold hard fact number six:
6. For the last few decades most young couples have been get divorced, and are financially worse of than people who never got married for it.
Look everywhere are you will see the divorce rate in the USA is 50%. Whether that is true or not really does not matter. The divorce rate that matters the most is the one of young people in their childbearing years, not the one of older people suddenly dissatisfied with their partners as dementia sets in. Geriatric divorce is probably a terrible phenomenon...but let's face facts: old people die; young people raise the next generation. Geriatric divorce is a heartbreaking problem with it's own issues: like who is going to take care of grandma now...but let's get real, how many recently divorced 75 year olds do you know? I know more people who ended up widowed than suddenly divorced at such an age. Marriage in the anglo world is and always has been about children. Going all the way back to the days of serfs and lords, the institution of marriage was a way to force local serf men into financial responsibility for his children along with the lord's bastard kids from prima nocta. Nice, eh? The local lord rapes your lady, and then you must raise the offspring. Well, things have gotten mildly better for us serfs nowadays...although only mildly. Marriage is still about kids and finances. Coincidentally this is why a woman in her thirties is much less marriageable than one in her twenties. A friend of mine put it bluntly "I would fuck a 40 year old, in fact I do...and I would date an older woman...but to marry, NO, a 40 year old is not going to bring children." Of the very few women I know of who got married after menopause, many of them got roped into supporting their husband's kids from previous marriages. Every man whining about how the modern state steals their money and screws them over ( MGTOW et all) can take heart that women after menopause are put into the same boat.
Marriage has been pushed as the financial solution for women of childbearing age especially by social conservatives. It is true that even in the case of most poor people they would be better of married. But what is also true is that especially in the case of poor people divorce often results and leaves all parties worse off both financially and emotionally than if they never got married in the first place.
We do not live in anything close to an ideal world. In my home country of the USA children and poverty go hand in hand. The single best predictor in the USA (where the state doesn't even give maternal leave after childbirth) of which women will collapse economically is having a child; not low education, not when they have the child, not family wealth, not a criminal record, and NOT marital status...just having a child. Perhaps this is the reason so many discourage it...nonetheless, people with children have no right to advise others against it. They are the moral equivalent of women who have abortions, then join pro-life rallies. Instead of advising women against what in a better society would be their right; such women should put their energy into making world in which children are not an impossible burden. After all, if everyone stopped having children there would be no one around to support their retirement...and that would be grim for all. What we actually have moved towards instead is a world where only uneducated young women have children, for which everyone but them pays ( the taxpayers are largely men and working women )...and then lord their "wisdom" over the rest of us.
Some of the cold hard facts about adoption are as follows:
1. Even depending upon which state you live inside in the USA, South Africa or many other places it can be easier or harder.
2. Although there is no explicit age limits in some places this is largely an illusion for legal purposes. States do not want to be sued for age discrimination; this does not mean they do not actively discriminate based on age.
3. Social workers and others in the system actively look for reasons to deny non-related people adoptions.
Let me pause right there and give an interesting case I met the players in personally. A German woman I met in South Africa battled the court system for five years to adopt while she held her son in foster care. She met her son while volunteering with abandoned children. Eventually all her sons contactable relatives had died of HIV or were unreachable. Nonetheless, it took 5 years of court battles and fighting to be able to take care of her son instead of turning him over to an orphanage. Her case appeared in several local papers and even on TV. The adoption system defies logic, and everyone can see it.
4. Adoption is fairly easy for a select group of people. People with a net worth in the millions will find adoption much easier to navigate. Do you have millions of dollars? If so you are in the tiniest of minorities. Most of us do not. To claim that because adoption was easy for Madonna anyone can do it is about as logical as claiming that because Halle Berry got pregnant, or let's be real, donor egg pregnant at 46, anyone can get pregnant at any age.
5. Those actively working to accumulate the wealth adoption requires will often be precluded from adoption by their work hours. I've experienced this personally. I was condescendingly told by a social worker that an ideal single adoptive parent should not be working even what are considered full time hours. How many single women do you know who can afford to live on a 20 hour a week job? Lots, right...it's called welfare. But I suspect, although I've never been on welfare, it might look less than favorable on an adoption application.
There are many, many sad truths about the adoption system....which brings me to the real point of this post. No woman who has ever had a child has any right to judge a woman like me who has worked, and has not yet had children in what childbearing plan she has. I recently got an email from a woman who had a child before she turned 20 discouraging me from immediate adoption. I get discouraged by people all the time.
Plenty of single childless men beg me not to have a child. This is somewhat understandable. These men have made a choice not to have children; therefore they view it as the best life path possible I assume. These men are no hypocrites. They just want other people to take up their miserable lonely lifestyle. I can forgive these men for not understanding that not everyone has the goal of being an angry old bachelor. But I can not forgive women who had their own children telling other people not to. I don't know any woman who supported her child by herself. By and large the people who pay for children financially are men (husbands and taxpayers), grandparents, the community and the state. The contributions of the women I know to the financial cost of raising their own children have been on average laughable. Even the most independent women I know have not taken 100% responsibility for their children because short of being born an heiress no one can. Do you know a pair of young doctors, lawyers or other successful professionals with a baby when they are under 35? Well guess who paid for the stroller? In the modern anglo world an education costs so much money the payout comes after the childbearing years. Not only can most women not support children alone, most educated people (read student loan holders) even in couples can not shoulder the financial costs of children. They must either get into more debt, or beg the bank of mom and dad. Yes, perhaps their salaries are enough for baby food, but we are talking more housing, more clothing, and yes, more of that most costly thing we call education now for their children. Good luck to anyone trying to pay the $200,000 price tag it takes to make a modern university educated professional. Such realities make the differences between one parent and two pretty marginal, because after all most young people get divorced. Which leads me to cold hard fact number six:
6. For the last few decades most young couples have been get divorced, and are financially worse of than people who never got married for it.
Look everywhere are you will see the divorce rate in the USA is 50%. Whether that is true or not really does not matter. The divorce rate that matters the most is the one of young people in their childbearing years, not the one of older people suddenly dissatisfied with their partners as dementia sets in. Geriatric divorce is probably a terrible phenomenon...but let's face facts: old people die; young people raise the next generation. Geriatric divorce is a heartbreaking problem with it's own issues: like who is going to take care of grandma now...but let's get real, how many recently divorced 75 year olds do you know? I know more people who ended up widowed than suddenly divorced at such an age. Marriage in the anglo world is and always has been about children. Going all the way back to the days of serfs and lords, the institution of marriage was a way to force local serf men into financial responsibility for his children along with the lord's bastard kids from prima nocta. Nice, eh? The local lord rapes your lady, and then you must raise the offspring. Well, things have gotten mildly better for us serfs nowadays...although only mildly. Marriage is still about kids and finances. Coincidentally this is why a woman in her thirties is much less marriageable than one in her twenties. A friend of mine put it bluntly "I would fuck a 40 year old, in fact I do...and I would date an older woman...but to marry, NO, a 40 year old is not going to bring children." Of the very few women I know of who got married after menopause, many of them got roped into supporting their husband's kids from previous marriages. Every man whining about how the modern state steals their money and screws them over ( MGTOW et all) can take heart that women after menopause are put into the same boat.
Marriage has been pushed as the financial solution for women of childbearing age especially by social conservatives. It is true that even in the case of most poor people they would be better of married. But what is also true is that especially in the case of poor people divorce often results and leaves all parties worse off both financially and emotionally than if they never got married in the first place.
We do not live in anything close to an ideal world. In my home country of the USA children and poverty go hand in hand. The single best predictor in the USA (where the state doesn't even give maternal leave after childbirth) of which women will collapse economically is having a child; not low education, not when they have the child, not family wealth, not a criminal record, and NOT marital status...just having a child. Perhaps this is the reason so many discourage it...nonetheless, people with children have no right to advise others against it. They are the moral equivalent of women who have abortions, then join pro-life rallies. Instead of advising women against what in a better society would be their right; such women should put their energy into making world in which children are not an impossible burden. After all, if everyone stopped having children there would be no one around to support their retirement...and that would be grim for all. What we actually have moved towards instead is a world where only uneducated young women have children, for which everyone but them pays ( the taxpayers are largely men and working women )...and then lord their "wisdom" over the rest of us.
Sexsurfing Strikes Again
I guess not enough people read my blog. I hardly think it is even newsworthy that an Italian cop used couchsurfing to sexually assault women. The press disagrees:
http://www.businessinsider.com/dino-maglio-allegedly-used-couchsurfing-to-rape-his-guests-2015-2
http://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/couchsurfing-host-allegedly-drugged-and-raped-australian-other-guests/story-fnizu68q-1227212844981
and so on...nothing like couchsurfing, sex, rape, drugs, 16 year old girls and the police all in one article to sell papers I guess. On the other hand anyone interested in the issue beyond sensationalistic headlines should have read my prophetic words on this matter on this very blog:
http://candiedrants.blogspot.com/2014/11/sex-and-sharing-economy-in-america.html
The issue is not only the rapist Dino Maglio, it's the entire set-up.
http://www.businessinsider.com/dino-maglio-allegedly-used-couchsurfing-to-rape-his-guests-2015-2
http://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/couchsurfing-host-allegedly-drugged-and-raped-australian-other-guests/story-fnizu68q-1227212844981
and so on...nothing like couchsurfing, sex, rape, drugs, 16 year old girls and the police all in one article to sell papers I guess. On the other hand anyone interested in the issue beyond sensationalistic headlines should have read my prophetic words on this matter on this very blog:
http://candiedrants.blogspot.com/2014/11/sex-and-sharing-economy-in-america.html
The issue is not only the rapist Dino Maglio, it's the entire set-up.
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
Feminist Misogyny
My procrastination at work strategy, reading the news, has me keeping up with the vanguard of leftist "thought." Al Jazeera leads the herd of fools last week. They simultaneously ran items on ending patriarchy, abortion and prostitution. The utopic vision of ending patriarchy seemed a bit hollow after reading an article about destigmatizing abortion. Is it really utopia when women are able to be as disgusting as men?
What exactly is the big problem with stigma? Shouldn't some things be stigmatized? Or will we get to the point where we have acceptance movements for war criminality and mass murder as just another part of the human rainbow?
The sad truth the article highlighted was that one third of American women have had an abortion. Leaving aside the many women who have been raped or have medical issues that put their lives at risks this means that maybe one in three American women has no judgement, no self control, and no intelligence. Of course it isn't that simple...mostly because not every act of unprotected sex makes a fetus, and not in all cases is risking pregnancy a bad idea.
And there, I wrote it. I have zero pity for many women who get abortions in the USA. Women are free not to live as equals of men, but they do have choice, and within whatever group of choices they have, some choices are ethically better. Freedom means responsibility; and almost anyone who finds themselves getting multiple abortions is utterly irresponsible. I once saw a patient who was under 30 and had already seven abortions. The left pro-choice press loves to point out some unlikely case of a woman whose birth control failed, and didn't know she was pregnant until the 7th month...these are not at all the typical cases. In fact one thing that would shock most people is how many married people have abortions. Half of Americans need to be informed that freedom means responsibility. If you want to drive on the green, you will need to stop on the red. It's really that simple or so it should be. But somehow everyone has decided you can drive on the green and the red; and we will create a medical fiction around this idea. We will literally pull in some cases viable babies from the womb and kill them. We will fail ethically, and then congratulate ourselves as "feminists." Real feminism would empower women to control their reproductive choices before they result in medical operations whether those operations be abortions or IVF surrogacy.
An even more distorted issue is that of prostitution. Al Jazeera ran a social media discussion of sugar babies. These babies are a technology enabled version of courtesans. Yet the discussion was also around prostitution in general which is of course ludicrous. Having lived in some pretty sketchy neighborhoods I can tell you a technology enabled courtesan is not the same thing as a street corner hooker. Is a well paid civil engineer the same as a man who works the dingiest scariest mining job without a helmet? In one of my old neighborhoods if you got close enough to the prostitutes you could usually see the scars on them. Clients would do things like pushing them through windows.
Prostitution is a job like any other in many aspects, but the media seems to focus in on the supposedly tragic plight of well heeled white chicks. Other classes and colors of prostitutes hooking out in the hood or third world will not be appearing for interviews on the philosophical implications of selling their bodies for money. They will be servicing an unspeakable number of men between getting beat up by their pimps. It's not that they are too stupid to know there are better jobs for hookers. Prostitution places a very exact value in terms of earning potential on a woman. In the anglosphere that value approximates a woman's marital value. I recently got reminded of my own lack of value when I semi-accidentally interviewed to be a prostitute.
I have worked as a choreographer and performer of cabaret for many years including the years I spent finishing my medical degree. I responded to an advertisement for dancer to find myself in what was actually a whorehouse. I was told that I was not a good candidate to be a whore. I wouldn't sell enough. I was also told as a side point that wouldn't fit in anyways. Well, I suppose not. I like to think I must have seemed the man in a fancy tuxedo for the job of selling T-shirts. Unfortunately, the reality is closer to the metaphor of me showing up in a T-shirt to sell tuxedos. The best clothing in this case is white skin, blond hair and nice teeth. I have one out of three. Most local girls who have all three are highly sought after in the real marriage market (as opposed to this distorted distilled one), and well educated to boot. Therefore high end prostitution establishments bring Caucasian women from the former Soviet Union on tourist visas. But these women are hardly winners. My time slickly questioning the club owners during my interview revealed that their business strategy is towards extracting maximum profits from each hooker. These hookers essentially pay a lot of money to the establishment to work and have a few amenities (guards, beds and so on). Based on their pay rate these women seem to be doing rather well, but this is in reality a fiction, and these women can easily fall into debt to the club owners. The easiest business and survival model at that point for these women becomes theft. Thus local prostitutes have become infamous for getting foreign businessmen drunk, or even drugging them, then stealing their cash. I'm pretty sure most women would rather just get a job in construction or even cleaning than enter such a tailspin of misery. Yet AlJazeera's vision of feminism is one in which women are liberated to sell their bodies and abort the babies later. This vision of feminism is nothing but medicalized misogyny. Unfortunately this vision of feminism is projected as the vanguard of avaunt guard thought. Paradoxically mainstream feminism has become more anti-woman than middle of the road conservatism.
Feminists question why some women are uneasy with the label. Perhaps the reason is that feminism does not always mean equality in any positive sense. Any reasonable person would embrace equality, but at the edge feminism is pushing squarely against it.
What exactly is the big problem with stigma? Shouldn't some things be stigmatized? Or will we get to the point where we have acceptance movements for war criminality and mass murder as just another part of the human rainbow?
The sad truth the article highlighted was that one third of American women have had an abortion. Leaving aside the many women who have been raped or have medical issues that put their lives at risks this means that maybe one in three American women has no judgement, no self control, and no intelligence. Of course it isn't that simple...mostly because not every act of unprotected sex makes a fetus, and not in all cases is risking pregnancy a bad idea.
And there, I wrote it. I have zero pity for many women who get abortions in the USA. Women are free not to live as equals of men, but they do have choice, and within whatever group of choices they have, some choices are ethically better. Freedom means responsibility; and almost anyone who finds themselves getting multiple abortions is utterly irresponsible. I once saw a patient who was under 30 and had already seven abortions. The left pro-choice press loves to point out some unlikely case of a woman whose birth control failed, and didn't know she was pregnant until the 7th month...these are not at all the typical cases. In fact one thing that would shock most people is how many married people have abortions. Half of Americans need to be informed that freedom means responsibility. If you want to drive on the green, you will need to stop on the red. It's really that simple or so it should be. But somehow everyone has decided you can drive on the green and the red; and we will create a medical fiction around this idea. We will literally pull in some cases viable babies from the womb and kill them. We will fail ethically, and then congratulate ourselves as "feminists." Real feminism would empower women to control their reproductive choices before they result in medical operations whether those operations be abortions or IVF surrogacy.
An even more distorted issue is that of prostitution. Al Jazeera ran a social media discussion of sugar babies. These babies are a technology enabled version of courtesans. Yet the discussion was also around prostitution in general which is of course ludicrous. Having lived in some pretty sketchy neighborhoods I can tell you a technology enabled courtesan is not the same thing as a street corner hooker. Is a well paid civil engineer the same as a man who works the dingiest scariest mining job without a helmet? In one of my old neighborhoods if you got close enough to the prostitutes you could usually see the scars on them. Clients would do things like pushing them through windows.
Prostitution is a job like any other in many aspects, but the media seems to focus in on the supposedly tragic plight of well heeled white chicks. Other classes and colors of prostitutes hooking out in the hood or third world will not be appearing for interviews on the philosophical implications of selling their bodies for money. They will be servicing an unspeakable number of men between getting beat up by their pimps. It's not that they are too stupid to know there are better jobs for hookers. Prostitution places a very exact value in terms of earning potential on a woman. In the anglosphere that value approximates a woman's marital value. I recently got reminded of my own lack of value when I semi-accidentally interviewed to be a prostitute.
I have worked as a choreographer and performer of cabaret for many years including the years I spent finishing my medical degree. I responded to an advertisement for dancer to find myself in what was actually a whorehouse. I was told that I was not a good candidate to be a whore. I wouldn't sell enough. I was also told as a side point that wouldn't fit in anyways. Well, I suppose not. I like to think I must have seemed the man in a fancy tuxedo for the job of selling T-shirts. Unfortunately, the reality is closer to the metaphor of me showing up in a T-shirt to sell tuxedos. The best clothing in this case is white skin, blond hair and nice teeth. I have one out of three. Most local girls who have all three are highly sought after in the real marriage market (as opposed to this distorted distilled one), and well educated to boot. Therefore high end prostitution establishments bring Caucasian women from the former Soviet Union on tourist visas. But these women are hardly winners. My time slickly questioning the club owners during my interview revealed that their business strategy is towards extracting maximum profits from each hooker. These hookers essentially pay a lot of money to the establishment to work and have a few amenities (guards, beds and so on). Based on their pay rate these women seem to be doing rather well, but this is in reality a fiction, and these women can easily fall into debt to the club owners. The easiest business and survival model at that point for these women becomes theft. Thus local prostitutes have become infamous for getting foreign businessmen drunk, or even drugging them, then stealing their cash. I'm pretty sure most women would rather just get a job in construction or even cleaning than enter such a tailspin of misery. Yet AlJazeera's vision of feminism is one in which women are liberated to sell their bodies and abort the babies later. This vision of feminism is nothing but medicalized misogyny. Unfortunately this vision of feminism is projected as the vanguard of avaunt guard thought. Paradoxically mainstream feminism has become more anti-woman than middle of the road conservatism.
Feminists question why some women are uneasy with the label. Perhaps the reason is that feminism does not always mean equality in any positive sense. Any reasonable person would embrace equality, but at the edge feminism is pushing squarely against it.
Monday, February 2, 2015
Fashionably Black? Not in Africa.
I have no idea why but recently I have been spending time with more and more fashion models. I never would have consciously chose this as a chubby black woman. In fact I would have imagined it the third circle of hell in Dante's schema; where I would be forever punished for my gluttony and over consumption of food by listening to vain women who eat ice all day. But Cape Town is crawling with beautiful tall skinny women of every ethnic background, and low cost locations; so it is here many global brands do photo shoots. In fact I have come to realize many brands that seem to play on a sense of Americana or Britishness actually have their brand identity produced in Africa where it is easier and cheaper. The result can make some photo shoots look pretty comical. Out of nowhere in the middle of Africa, a group of freakishly tall white women appear. Mostly blonds. One could wonder why brand producers came to Cape Town to find models who clearly look like they came from Copenhagen.
There is some local "talent" (to the extent that smiling in front of a camera can be called talent) in modelling. Overall in the industry these women are viewed as inferior. The one I have spent the most time with comes from another African country. She is 6 feet tall, a beautiful ebony color and has thighs about the size of my arms. Whenever she runs into people in her industry they chastise her for being too fat this season. "I'm the fattest model in Africa!" this woman has told me. By comparison I am a hippopotamus, and mind you I'm still inside what is medically considered a normal, not overweight range of BMI. Another black African model has told me that she is considered ugly, but that is good because at least it's interesting. I was fascinated by the trials and tribulations of these "ugly" models. I asked a lot of questions. Basically what I figured out pretty quickly was that any model who didn't look like an Aryan was of questionable beauty.
None of this nonsense of whites being projected onto our collective imagination as superior is particularly new or unusual except that it happens in Africa. Local tastes are pretty varied, but big girls walk with a lot of pride. I often see obviously overweight women coming down the street dressed and walking with such obvious and attractive confidence it surprises me. Africans remind me of middle Eastern people in their taste for women. There is a certain combination of nostalgia and sexual attraction for the chubby woman with black hair. I was able to do much better as a belly dancer in the middle east than I ever could have in the USA, and not because I changed in talent level.
In Africa where all kinds of beauty are appreciated one very foreign mold has come to be seen as the ultimate model in advertising. Fashion and ads are about fantasy. And who would ever fantasize of looking like me and by extension having a totally banal life? A woman who looks like me works and struggles. Theoretically a woman who is skinny and blond plays on her family estate all day ordering around darker servants.
South Africa has some kind of racial hiring quota system but it has skipped right over fashion and more broadly advertising somehow. But advertising dictates the psychological fantasies and dreams of the masses. If you walk into any local African store selling soap here you will notice lightening soap on sale, as if lightening one skin will deeply alter one's life. Perhaps it will. But it is deeply ironic that in RSA, a country ruled by those ostensibly dedicated to black empowerment in terms of economic reality, has no stance on black empowerment in terms of group psychology. The compromise seems to be that although black and brown people are now allowed to enter any profession outside of those about projecting an image; the image of whites as ideal will never be seriously challenged.
In a funny ironic note, those who work most closely with projecting images of fashionable whiteness may be the most tired of it. Several local photographers here have taken pictures of me as if I'm some sort of muse...and in ways that emphasize my 'ethnicness' and em, substantially full body...go figure!
There is some local "talent" (to the extent that smiling in front of a camera can be called talent) in modelling. Overall in the industry these women are viewed as inferior. The one I have spent the most time with comes from another African country. She is 6 feet tall, a beautiful ebony color and has thighs about the size of my arms. Whenever she runs into people in her industry they chastise her for being too fat this season. "I'm the fattest model in Africa!" this woman has told me. By comparison I am a hippopotamus, and mind you I'm still inside what is medically considered a normal, not overweight range of BMI. Another black African model has told me that she is considered ugly, but that is good because at least it's interesting. I was fascinated by the trials and tribulations of these "ugly" models. I asked a lot of questions. Basically what I figured out pretty quickly was that any model who didn't look like an Aryan was of questionable beauty.
None of this nonsense of whites being projected onto our collective imagination as superior is particularly new or unusual except that it happens in Africa. Local tastes are pretty varied, but big girls walk with a lot of pride. I often see obviously overweight women coming down the street dressed and walking with such obvious and attractive confidence it surprises me. Africans remind me of middle Eastern people in their taste for women. There is a certain combination of nostalgia and sexual attraction for the chubby woman with black hair. I was able to do much better as a belly dancer in the middle east than I ever could have in the USA, and not because I changed in talent level.
In Africa where all kinds of beauty are appreciated one very foreign mold has come to be seen as the ultimate model in advertising. Fashion and ads are about fantasy. And who would ever fantasize of looking like me and by extension having a totally banal life? A woman who looks like me works and struggles. Theoretically a woman who is skinny and blond plays on her family estate all day ordering around darker servants.
South Africa has some kind of racial hiring quota system but it has skipped right over fashion and more broadly advertising somehow. But advertising dictates the psychological fantasies and dreams of the masses. If you walk into any local African store selling soap here you will notice lightening soap on sale, as if lightening one skin will deeply alter one's life. Perhaps it will. But it is deeply ironic that in RSA, a country ruled by those ostensibly dedicated to black empowerment in terms of economic reality, has no stance on black empowerment in terms of group psychology. The compromise seems to be that although black and brown people are now allowed to enter any profession outside of those about projecting an image; the image of whites as ideal will never be seriously challenged.
In a funny ironic note, those who work most closely with projecting images of fashionable whiteness may be the most tired of it. Several local photographers here have taken pictures of me as if I'm some sort of muse...and in ways that emphasize my 'ethnicness' and em, substantially full body...go figure!
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