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.
Monday, February 9, 2015
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!
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Cops and Blacks: Mirror Images?
"Shoter tov tzhe shoter met!שוטר טוב זה שוטר מת" said a good pale friend of mine with several degrees and full ownership of a nice apartment. He was making an angry statement about both Israeli racism and police brutality because he was playing with an unfortunate saying of racists about Arabs (Arav tov hu arav met). I used to live in Hadar, Haifa where some fairly genteel folks (along with the rest of us ) had a serious beef with the police. But as my friend went on to describe his opinion on the police he paradoxically revealed why we must search for solidarity with these people.
"I am some majority guy who is a lowlife unemployed and has no money and no hope and can not find a normal job, I have no education at all....I know I'll become a police officer. I'm good at being violent." said my friend mockingly in his broken English. He drew the obvious tie between who the police are in Israel, and who they are in the USA. Unfortunately this cruel stereotype comes from somewhere. Joining the police is one of the few ways a working class guy can make a living nowadays. And, yes, we the working class are violent. We aren't the only violent ones, but our community bleeds violence in a way wealthy ones do not. Take child abuse. Rich people can abuse their kids. Child abuse is happening in Beverly Hills and the Upper East side. But statistically, in spite of the system's underservice of the poor, we see their kids as abused children more often. Poverty leads to crises, and poor people can not cope in the ways rich people can. Destressing through a weekend at a resort-spa may not be available to the borderline homeless.
The real revolution will happen when we -those who live in ghettoes- begin to understand how difficult it is to be a good cop. When our compassion takes into account how miserable it is to interact with us. As a doctor I saw my share of prisoners, and thugs. They are not an easy crowd. To this day I talk about one gangbanger so proud to have killed multiple people that he got commemorative tatooes for each murder who complained to the hospital staff that I lacked compassionate bedside manner with him. We must understand not every cop is a killer; and they must understand not every black person is gangbanger like my whiney mass murdering patient. We must understand how the system is working to break our natural solidarity as working class people. We must honor those lawkeepers who walk into dangerous situations to protect us. We must not forget that at the scene of accidents, including shoot outs it is them that are tasked with not only catching criminals, but administering life saving CPR sometimes before any more specifically trained personel show up. The media almost never highlights the everyday heroism of law enforcers who happen to use their basic life support skills and save someone. The media seems caught in some kind of imaginary soccer match between blacks and the police. On the most illogical side is Fox news. Shortly after a recent decision they put up an article about how the police live in fear. Seriously? They are rolling into our communities with guns and now tanks; and they should be the ones afraid? What about me and my family?...we don't have any guns or tanks let alone a state legal apparatus behind us. Obviously the outpouring of protests are because people like myself, unarmed black people are both scared and fed up. Only in the distorted reality of the mainstream American media does this situation get turned on it's head. But this is a bit of a distraction from the underlying problems and questions. Why don't police come from communities they police? Why are police not trained better to diminish violence in confrontations as opposed to escalating it? How can we come to reasonable police community partnerships where law enforcement has serious buy-in from the community? How can we get out law enforcers better training? To what extent can we give communities autonomy in policing themselves and yet avoid more Zimmermans?
And finally, who will dare extend the red roses of solidarity to our brothers in blue?
"I am some majority guy who is a lowlife unemployed and has no money and no hope and can not find a normal job, I have no education at all....I know I'll become a police officer. I'm good at being violent." said my friend mockingly in his broken English. He drew the obvious tie between who the police are in Israel, and who they are in the USA. Unfortunately this cruel stereotype comes from somewhere. Joining the police is one of the few ways a working class guy can make a living nowadays. And, yes, we the working class are violent. We aren't the only violent ones, but our community bleeds violence in a way wealthy ones do not. Take child abuse. Rich people can abuse their kids. Child abuse is happening in Beverly Hills and the Upper East side. But statistically, in spite of the system's underservice of the poor, we see their kids as abused children more often. Poverty leads to crises, and poor people can not cope in the ways rich people can. Destressing through a weekend at a resort-spa may not be available to the borderline homeless.
The real revolution will happen when we -those who live in ghettoes- begin to understand how difficult it is to be a good cop. When our compassion takes into account how miserable it is to interact with us. As a doctor I saw my share of prisoners, and thugs. They are not an easy crowd. To this day I talk about one gangbanger so proud to have killed multiple people that he got commemorative tatooes for each murder who complained to the hospital staff that I lacked compassionate bedside manner with him. We must understand not every cop is a killer; and they must understand not every black person is gangbanger like my whiney mass murdering patient. We must understand how the system is working to break our natural solidarity as working class people. We must honor those lawkeepers who walk into dangerous situations to protect us. We must not forget that at the scene of accidents, including shoot outs it is them that are tasked with not only catching criminals, but administering life saving CPR sometimes before any more specifically trained personel show up. The media almost never highlights the everyday heroism of law enforcers who happen to use their basic life support skills and save someone. The media seems caught in some kind of imaginary soccer match between blacks and the police. On the most illogical side is Fox news. Shortly after a recent decision they put up an article about how the police live in fear. Seriously? They are rolling into our communities with guns and now tanks; and they should be the ones afraid? What about me and my family?...we don't have any guns or tanks let alone a state legal apparatus behind us. Obviously the outpouring of protests are because people like myself, unarmed black people are both scared and fed up. Only in the distorted reality of the mainstream American media does this situation get turned on it's head. But this is a bit of a distraction from the underlying problems and questions. Why don't police come from communities they police? Why are police not trained better to diminish violence in confrontations as opposed to escalating it? How can we come to reasonable police community partnerships where law enforcement has serious buy-in from the community? How can we get out law enforcers better training? To what extent can we give communities autonomy in policing themselves and yet avoid more Zimmermans?
And finally, who will dare extend the red roses of solidarity to our brothers in blue?
Thursday, January 22, 2015
Common Sense from the Ayatollah?
His Ayatollaness apparently uses social media to call for an end to my spiritual homeland...so he is no wise man; but he also famously stated "Anyone who will say that religion is separate from politics is a fool ; he does not know Islam or politics. Islam is politics or it is nothing" Touche, c'est vrai....unfortunately.
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
Abortion, AIDS and Feminism
All over the inside of third class trains in south Africa are signs and stickers for abortion. They outnumber every other kind of sign, although signs for penis enlargement are a close second. There are huge numbers of babies aborted, and babies born and abandoned. Obviously the reasons for this are complex. People generally know where babies come from in the modern world, so this probably is less about condum availability than anyone would guess. After all in South Africa you can get free condums all over the main cities. I would venture to guess that what this is partly about is the economy and how it effects genders differently.
Many men here would get a woman pregnant and run. Paradoxically, that seems to make women all the more eager to engage with them. These women want these men not because they are 'bad boys' (a pereinnial turn on for a certain percentage of the population, pun intended) but because they are even boys. The lack of decent men seems to turn some women into push-over sluts willing to do anything to accommodate one. Sadly I was reminded of African-American women. I remember years ago, in medical school, I asked my little sister an epidemiology student why black women were the new epicenter of the HIV epidemic. She replied quite simply "Less condum usage. If you wanted to get a man in those communities you would probably have to sleep with him without a condum." The idea being of course, if you would not, there is some other woman who will, and then pay for her own abortion on top of that.
Issues like this make a mockery of the idiotic debate ongoing about whether feminism is anti-male. The world would be a lot better place if we had more condum usage because it would mean less HIV , unwanted AIDS babies and abortions for starters. Even after everything my calloused eyes have seen, looking at hospital ward after hospital ward of abandoned AIDS babies in Africa was overwhelming. Is this the world either sex wants to live in? Empowering one sex or gender isn't about disempowering the other one.
Many men here would get a woman pregnant and run. Paradoxically, that seems to make women all the more eager to engage with them. These women want these men not because they are 'bad boys' (a pereinnial turn on for a certain percentage of the population, pun intended) but because they are even boys. The lack of decent men seems to turn some women into push-over sluts willing to do anything to accommodate one. Sadly I was reminded of African-American women. I remember years ago, in medical school, I asked my little sister an epidemiology student why black women were the new epicenter of the HIV epidemic. She replied quite simply "Less condum usage. If you wanted to get a man in those communities you would probably have to sleep with him without a condum." The idea being of course, if you would not, there is some other woman who will, and then pay for her own abortion on top of that.
Issues like this make a mockery of the idiotic debate ongoing about whether feminism is anti-male. The world would be a lot better place if we had more condum usage because it would mean less HIV , unwanted AIDS babies and abortions for starters. Even after everything my calloused eyes have seen, looking at hospital ward after hospital ward of abandoned AIDS babies in Africa was overwhelming. Is this the world either sex wants to live in? Empowering one sex or gender isn't about disempowering the other one.
Sunday, January 18, 2015
The African Minstrel Show: Kaapse Klopse 2015
Kaapse Klopse or Coon Carnival, as it used to be called is one of the most interesting examples of the global reach of African-American culture I have seen. The carnival's roots draw on both the performances of real African-Americans who came to the Cape, and of white folks in blackface doing minstrel shows. Truth be told I only saw colored folks doing white-face, and even white -head yesterday ; not the other way around. Whatever the case, masks seem to help people reveal hidden sides of themselves.
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