Anti-Troling

    I'm going to introduce a new fun activity on the internet; a new way to mess with people with ideology-centered message boards.  I call it "anti-trolling."  Anyone who's been on the internet for awhile is probably familiar with trolling; the act of going to a message board or chat room and saying things solely for the purpose of annoying and harassing everyone there or to provoke an argument.  Anti-trolling is sort of like acting in the opposite of that, but with the same effect. 
    Basically, I got the idea when I noticed that a lot of message boards considered anyone who disagreed with the ideology of the message board to be a troll and usually banning them.  So, since it's usually so easy to get banned while disagreeing with a community, I wanted to see how easy it was to get banned by agreeing with it, fervently and aggressively.  For instance; if it's a right-wing message board, you can act like the most jingoistic, liberal-hating, belligerent conservative that you could imagine, and talk about things, like how you think that it would be a good idea to round up every member of the Democratic Party and shoot them, etc.  Then, sit back and watch while people with moderately left-leanings opinions are all banned for trolling, while you get away with idiotic post after idiotic post.  It's fun.
    There's only certain kinds of message boards that this works for, however.  First of all, it has to be a community based around an ideology (which you will aggressively embrace).  That ideology could be political ("the Iraq war needs to end now") or non-political ("Twilight is the best book series, evar").  Secondly, you'll want to pick a message board that's heavily moderated, and has a tendency to ban people for officering opinions that clash with the above-mentioned ideology. 
    For my anti-trolling experiment, I chose the previously-mentioned "I Blame the Patriarchy" message board¹.  It was great until I eventually did banned and then the message board shut down soon after.  I didn't actually end up getting banned for the wacky-ass ideas I was submitting on the board, but because they somehow found out that I wasn't who I was pretending to be.  But oh well, guess I'll just have to be more careful next time.

 

 

¹: This link is to the old message board, which I would frequent.  Iblamethepatriarchy.com links to a new(?) one, but it’s not loading for me. 

Culture Lag

   Have ever noticed that the world doesn't tend to work in the same way as it does in the media? Take high school for instance.  Based on any movie or TV show you may watch about high school life, you may be lead to believe that there's a rigid caste system for popularity, with the cheerleaders and football hotshots ruling the school with an iron fist.  You may be lead to believe that every student falls neatly into an easily identifiable clique; jocks, nerds, goths, etc, and only keeps friends within that specific group. All these perceptions about high school life, in my experience at least, are completely false.  There is no real hierarchy of popularity, no social royalty.  All the cheerleaders I knew were very nice an approachable (actually, it tended to be the geeky girls who were the most stuck up and superficial, but I digress).  There were no well-defined social groups; everyone just had their own little list of people that they were friends with.
   And yet, throughout much of my time in high school, I still tended to believe that social politics in high school functioned like they did in the movies, despite the fact that I could see for myself that this wasn't true.  This might be how high school used to be, but I was seeing it as how high school currently was.  Basically, I believed these facts about high school to be currently true, because they were previously true.  It's a phenomenon I call Culture Lag.
   Here's how I think it works: the people of one generation experience something (for example, high school) in a certain way.  They then go on to produce media which portrays things how they experienced.  The next generation then watches that media and begins to think that things work how they are portrayed in it, rather than how they actually experience it.  Thus, people are basing their perceptions of reality on other people's (previous) observations, rather than their own.

Attractiveness index

    Society tells us what to find attractive in possible partners; this is really no secret.  Society tells us that for a woman to be attractive, they must be thin, large-breasted, and feminine.  Men must be muscular, confident, and masculine.  There is, of course, nothing objectively true about these standards.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and everyone has their own opinion about what is attractive, or at least they should.
    I've noticed that over time, people's natural tastes tend to become polluted by the standards of society at large, so that their preferences start to match society's.  I have tried, at least in myself, to reverse this process as best as I could.  How, you ask? I basically try to subtract society's preferences from my own, to get a better idea of my own natural attraction.  When I find someone attractive, I ask myself how attractive I find them.  Then I consider how society's standards would view them and subtract (or divide; it's not an exact science) that from how attractive I found them.  The resulting degree of attractiveness, I call an "Attractiveness Index," and I try to use this when considering whether I'd like to date someone (with a higher index being better). 
    It sounds unnecessarily complicated and calculating, but it's actually quite simple.  If you find someone to be hot, but society would deem them to be absolutely smoking hot, then it seems that your natural attraction to them is actually pretty low, and that you find them attractive is based mostly on society's standards, so they would have a low index.  On the other hand, if you find someone attractive but society at large finds them completely unattractive, then it's pretty clear that your attraction to them comes completely from yourself, and not from society imprinting itself on you; they would have a high attractiveness index.
    I behoove you, the reader, to also adopt the practice of choosing people with high attractiveness indexes, as it will be beneficial to both you and to society at large.  You'll fin yourself to be happier in your relationships, as you will end up with people who you find attractive based on your preferences and not society's, so your attraction to them will be strong as it is more personal and runs deeper.  It will be better for society at large, because if more people begin seeking out partners based on their own innate attraction rather than society's standards, it will result in less homogeny of what people find attractive, which will mean that sought-after-ness will be more evenly distributed across all kinds of people.  The less-homogeny thing will also benefit you personally, because it will result in less competition for people that you are attracted to, if they don't meet society's standards.
    In case you're wondering about the methodology for creating this, it basically comes down to the assumption that our apparent attraction to someone (how attractive we think they are, without really thinking about it) will be an average of society's view of how attractive they would be and our own inherent attraction to them (untainted by society's views).  So, given the first two values, we can extrapolate our inherent attraction.  Here's a chart:

My own pet theory on why you see more male musicians.

Edit: Blogspot cuts off the right half of the picture; be sure to click on it for full view.

*Not based on actual data.

Types of Privilege

You hear about privilege a lot in gender, identity, and ethnicity politics. Privilege entails certain abilities, benefits, and well.. privileges that society gives specifically to various groups but not others. Describing a privilege means naming the group who benefits from it and it's specific effect (this article will focus on the latter). It's generally characterized as a bad thing, and it is a bad thing (for the most part). Pretty much every kind of privilege entails some kind of problem with society. However, that doesn't mean that the actual terms of the privilege are a negative thing. Allow me to explain:
The way I see it, there are four kinds of privilege. The first would be what I call "positive privilege." Like all kinds of privilege, this is includes some kind of benefit that's placed on only certain groups in society. The nature of the privilege though is some kind of good and positive benefit, which should really be bestowed on everyone in society. For a good example of positive privilege, travel back in time 100 years to the early 20th century, when only white men could vote. It was obviously bad that this right was restricted to a small group, but the right to vote itself was a positive thing - something that should have been extended to everyone. So, voting was a positive privilege.
The second kind of privilege would be the opposite: negative privilege. That is to say, a privilege that is only bestowed on a small group, but really no body should have it. For example, let's say a friend of yours is the child of a very influential person (say, a senator). Your friend goes out drinking one night and tries to drive home afterwards, only to be pulled over by a cop. When the cop realizes who your friend's parent is, they immediately decide to let them go without so much as a warning, despite the fact that they were clearly unfit to drive. Being able to drive while drunk (and get away with it) is a privilege that no one should have. Therefore, negative privilege.
There are some kinds of privilege that can't really be imagined as "everyone having" or "no one having." They only exist if they're restricted to a certain group. These are the third type, which I call "comparative privilege." The best example of this that I can think of is the gender wage-gap. National surveys say that, when you average out the wages for all full-time workers in America, women tend to earn about 80 cents for every dollar that men earn (or, men earn $1.25 for every dollar women earn)¹. This kind of privilege really can't exist in a way that everyone can have it or no one can have it. It would be impossible for everyone to make %25 more than everyone else, and it would also be impossible for everyone to make 20% less than everyone else, because there needs to be a separate group making a different amount of money for the gap to exist. The benefits that one receives from this kind of privilege only exist comparatively, and not absolutely.
The last category of privilege is probably a controversial-sounding one, but here me out. It's "justified privilege," and it does exist. There are some kinds of privilege, that are based on merit (rather than race, gender, class, or any other group one is born into) and also just make sense. For instance, people who don't know C# probably isn't going to be chosen for a job as a C# programmer. If you never bothered to learn Spanish, you're probably never going to be hired as a Spanish teacher. And only people who can cook are realistically going to get hired as chefs. These are all examples of groups of people receiving a certain benefit for being in that group; they're all privilege, but each one of them is a privilege that should exist. They are justified privileges. Of course, with every example of a privilege, it's completely up for debate whether it's justified or not (as is true with all these categories) It bares repeating, though: any privilege based on a group someone was born into is never going to be justified.
In addition to the types of privilege, I believe that there are also 3 levels. From most-significant to least, they are: legally-enforced, socially-enforced, and non-enforced/symbolic. The first, legally-enforced, involves any sort of privilege that is written into law. This would include, for example, any kind of restriction on who is allowed to vote.
The second level is socially-enforced, and (as the name would imply) includes privileges which are not legally put into law, but exist because of how people act and the expectations they hold. It's not (I'm fairly sure) illegal for men to wear dresses or skirts, but the expectations that they don't and the reactions that people give to men wearing them generally act as a deterrent that prevents men from dressing in that manner.
Non-enforced or symbolic privilege is a kind that doesn't really effect you in any tangible way, other than to subject you to certain ideas or stereotypes. This includes things like how people of your sex/religion/ethnicity are portrayed on TV, or gender-specific language. Granted, these kinds of privilege can create shifts in public perception that can lead to socially-enforced privilege, but they don't (in and of themselves) really effect how you live your life.
I offer up these classifications of privilege as a better way to understand and think of ways to react to it, but they do not work as perfect cut-and-dry categories; which type of privilege one is dealing with is certainly open to opinion. And there are some grey areas between the different levels of privilege as well (for instance, if the law is written in such a way that it would create equality, but courts always ignore it in favour of passing on their own biases, is that legally-enforced or socially-enforced privilege?). However, I believe that that descriptors I have given in this article provide an accurate way to mentally organize privilege, and that their scope covers all instances of privilege that I can think of (though I'm always willing to entertain suggestions that I've missed something). Here's a chart:

¹: There’s a lot of different estimations out there on exactly what the pay gap is, ranging from 70% – 98%. I’m just using 80% for simplicity’s sake.

Dworkin’s Razor

I was reading a thread on the I Blame the Patriarchy forum about men who start dating those life-sized dolls, and I noticed everyone had their own comment about why the men did this. None of them had anything to do with crippling social anxiety or anything like that They were all something along the lines of "having a woman who couldn't say 'no,'" or a way to have sex with a female body without having to deal with a female mind, or just being able to rape without ever getting in legal trouble.
They all seemed to be be explanations that were sex-based and usually involved some heavy hatred of women on the part of the men owning the dolls. It really puzzled me how these forum-goers could come to a conclusion without doing any research, be so wrong, and be so sure of themselves.
Then it dawned on me that they just have another way of thinking; it explains so much of what people said on that forum. I call it Dworkin's Razor, and it consists of the idea that: whenever there are multiple explanations for something, the explanation which implies the most hatred and discrimination against women is always the correct one.

Words for Asshole

There are many ways to call someone an asshole. If they're a guy, you can call them a dick or a douche bag. If they're a woman then you can call them a bitch or a cunt. Either way, you can still just call them an asshole (although, like many gender-neutral terms, it is more often used for guys). All these words, when used as a pejorative, have basically the same meaning: that the person in question is self-serving, cruel, callous, greedy, or just generally evil. Yet, the connotations of the words are so different.
The most obvious difference is the gender difference. Cunt and bitch are used to describe women, which makes sense because they mean "vagina" and "female dog," respectively. Dick makes sense for men because it means "penis" (or a male nickname). What about douche bag, though? It's a female hygienic product, so it's kind of a mystery that it's used to refer to men. I guess it could be to create more of a gender balance in the number of words. Dick already provides a lot of permutations, though: dickhole, dickface, dickweed. It's kind of unique amongst these words. Cuntface? Bitchweed? You just don't hear it.
Another stark difference is the level of offensiveness. Obviously, cunt is the most offensive of these. Calling someone a cunt and calling someone a dick are basically the opposite-gender equivalents of each other - they're both words for genitalia that also colloquially mean asshole - and yet the former is so much more offensive than the latter. I'm not really sure why this is; possibly just a result of the fact that it's used less-often.
I've seen lots of people try to "reclaim" the word bitch, and re-invent it as a compliment. I've even seen a positive backronym create for it: "Beautiful Intelligent Talented Cute Hot." I'm against this reclamation. If someone calls you a bitch and clearly means it as an insult but you respond as though it were a compliment, then you're just being an idiot. I'm generally against people responding to the literal wording of what someone says when it's clear that the intended meaning is different, like back in elementary school when you asked your teacher if you can go to the bathroom and she'd say "I don't know, can you?" That's kind of the same thing that someone is doing when they interpret being called a bitch as a compliment, except it makes less sense because they're not using the literal meaning; they're using some crazy, made-up one. "Bitch," unlike other words that have been reclaimed like "queer," wasn't a slur against every member of a certain group but rather an insult against someone's personality. Plus, reclaiming the word bitch wouldn't really change much. If someone wants to say that a woman is an asshole, they'd just call them an asshole. Or cunt.