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Ann Sloan Devlin, What Americans Build and Why: Psychological Perspectives: Somewhat misleading subhead, in that the book doesn’t have a distinctively psychological or behavioral psych perspective as far as I can tell; it’s a bunch of history and economics and other thoughts on the design of cities, schools, hospitals, malls, work, etc. So the tidbits I did glean are going to be disconnected. Andres Duany, an inventor/proponent of New Urbanism, points out that money spent on roads is “highway investment” while money spent on rails is a “transit subsidy”—an unfairly negative difference in labeling. Devlin acknowledges that New Urbanism lacks universal appeal—not everyone wants to live in old-fashioned, dense neighborhoods—but argues that we still shouldn’t subsidize sprawl. Likewise, the rise of Wal-Mart wasn’t natural free-market competition, but was enabled by tax breaks, subsidies, job training credits, and other incentives over and above the way that the public subsidizes Wal-Mart wages through food stamps etc.
Other results Devlin discusses favor small, bounded communities or groups: Apparently, despite what you’d think, single rooms in hospitals can be cheaper to run than multiple-person rooms because of fewer transfers and medication errors. She likes small high schools as compared to big ones because there’s more opportunity to participate in a small school—if there’s going to be a school play, a huge fraction of the school has to participate, and so on. But large high schools offer more opportunities for advanced/specialized courses; my understanding is that the research here is pretty mixed and it’s hard to control for the other factors that affect high school size. When Devlin writes without irony that “Making the case for good design is often viewed as an uphill battle, given the lack of evidence supporting the effects of ‘good design,’” I just become more skeptical of the “good design” claims. In fact, she says, the evidence is strongest and clearest for features like good lighting and good air quality, not building configuration. People apparently don’t pay much attention to design in most circumstances unless it falls below a certain baseline in cleanliness/danger; otherwise they just go about their business, which doesn’t mean that the built environment doesn’t have powerful shaping effects on their behavior—just that they don’t notice. Meanwhile, she documents the failure of the “open office” to increase productivity—it turns out that (American) people like their privacy, and like having a door they can close on the world.
Catherine Scott, Thinking Kink: The Collision of BDSM, Feminism and Popular Culture: Free Early Reviewer book. I thought this was going to be more about Fifty Shades than it was, based on the description. Instead, this is a fleshed-out version of blog posts Scott did, mainly in the “images of BDSM in pop culture versus reality” vein. Scott argues that no form of BDSM is more or less feminist than any other sexual practice—taking a spanking is not a defeat if it’s chosen, and feminism is not about having women do the domming. She contends that the relative visibility of dommes and female subs compared to male doms and subs in popular culture is itself a manifestation of sexism: women’s sexual choices are always up for debate and criticism, whereas the male sub appears only as a somewhat laughable version of the powerful, wealthy man tired of keeping masculine control, and the male dom is basically invisible/uninterrogated insofar as he seems to be just masculinity taken to the max. As she notes, switching is also not part of popular understanding; she had to read Fifty Shades to find out that Christian used to be a sub, because the many reviews she read didn’t discuss that. She maintains that Fifty Shades, while crude in its understanding and depiction of BDSM, at least tried to give Christian a story, complicating the male dom’s invisibility. The media frenzy over Fifty Shades, moreover, is part and parcel of disproportionate scrutiny and pathologization of women’s sexuality. “[W]hile male submissives may encounter certain obstacles to having their kinks accepted, men’s submission is not generally used to make an argument that men don’t really want equality.” We’re still looking for an orgasm of our own.
She runs through the representational possibilities, mostly focusing on het pairings because that’s what she finds in pop culture: The pop culture domme is often objectified for the viewer’s pleasure, e.g., Irene Adler in BBC’s Sherlock. And “in mainstream Western culture, male sexual submission is only acceptable within extremely narrow parameters, and furthermore, is an act for which the man in question is always expected to compensate.” Contrary to this depiction, she recounts experiences with male subs who are not super-bossy and controlled outside the bedroom; often, she says, they’re quite feminist and egalitarian. What if, she suggests, some men just like sexual submission, rather than being tired of real-life power? Subbing can offer a safe space within which a man can express emotion, and there aren’t too many of those in mainstream Western culture. Even forced feminization, she argues, can be read as a rejection of sexism and a revaluation of women’s work: Anne McClintock, as quoted, says “domestic S/M stages women’s work as having both exhibition and economic value”—the male sub overvalues women’s domestic work, and men pay women to supervise their work.
As for male dom/female sub, Scott would like to reread it as a female power fantasy in which the man does all the work and the woman has all the orgasms. She says that male doms are often conflicted. The image of them as sadists “is at best an irritant, and at worst, enables genuine abusers to go undetected, as the conflating of violence against women with consensual male dom/fem sub play leaves many unable to tell the difference.” And we should recognize the bravery of female subs who actively seek out men to hurt them (and survive). It matters that female subs choose the scenes, and are aroused, and are acknowledged as people whose pleasure matters.
The BDSM community is no more free from patriarchal norms than any other part of society; among other things, Scott reports personal experience of male doms with female subs being uncomfortable with female and gay male doms, and wanting a male dom/female sub-only space. Scott also recounts other fractures within BDSM groups, such as older participants looking down on newbies for their commercialism and even their obsession with negotiation and consent. And there’s self-policing to make sure participants are “kinky enough”—all this is probably familiar to anyone in any fandom.
One thing I didn’t really know but makes perfect sense: the fact that consent is explicit and safewords are used doesn’t mean that consent issues drop out, even if everyone is behaving properly (and they don’t always). It’s possible for a sub to get so far into a scene that she forgets her safeword and really believes that there’s no way out; Scott changed her mind about the “if you don’t safeword everything is legit” approach the more she saw how subs’ senses were “compromised” by play. Even if that doesn’t happen, one still needs to train oneself to use the safeword—the cultural conditioning that says that saying no is rude or weak also applies to “red.” In Scott’s vision of healthy BDSM, the dom is attentive to the sub’s wellbeing and able to back down even when the sub hasn’t safeworded.
Scott also discusses the complexity of representing the range of BDSM practices in a larger rape culture that is eager to dismiss legitimate concerns while pathologizing some people. Although it may be the case that some people don’t find safe words/negotiation sexy, she concludes, women’s right to say no is still so much under dispute that safe words have to be central to BDSM practice.
What about the critique of Fifty Shades as an abuse narrative, especially given Christian’s stalking/controlling behavior outside of sex? There were even conservatives who claimed that the success of the story showed that women naturally want to be dominated. I wasn’t very persuaded by her response, which was: okay, maybe, but so is Wuthering Heights and A Streetcar Named Desire and they’re still considered valuable cultural artifacts. (1) The passive voice does too much work here—who’s doing the considering? (2) Even so, that doesn’t mean they model—or that fans understand them to model—healthy relationships. It’s true that there’s a big vein of that. But I’d wager that the same people who criticize Fifty Shades are likely to say that those texts may well be valuable for literary/historical reasons, but should be taught and discussed with explicit attention to the sexist, violent narratives they reinforce. Nonetheless, I’m sympathetic to the ultimate argument that, in a sexist culture, it’s a no-win situation: there is no portrayal of a woman that “works.”
I’m caught between Scott’s perfectly valid point that non-BDSM sexual cultures are also soaked through with patriarchy and the equally valid point that narratives matter—cultural scripts that say women enjoy being stalked can be used to ignore real women’s experiences. Scott argues that the extremity of BDSM can break down patriarchal constructs: “it is at least partly the tension between the way practices such as human furniture make objectification almost comically explicit, and the more subtle ways women can be objectified, which gives such play its taboo and therefore thrilling edge. The man with the woman under his feet knows he’s not actually resting on a real footstool; … but the erotic charge comes from the forbidden nature of treating another human being this way.” Maybe, or maybe sometimes. But maybe sometimes it’s just oppression. And, as Scott occasionally acknowledges, it’s not enough to say that “free choice” makes everything legitimate, especially when choices are made within a larger context.
Later chapters deal a bit with class (kink can be expensive and commercialized) and race. As for race: race play tends to make a lot of white people uncomfortable; Scott suggests that it’s the non-white players who ought to be able to define it for themselves, but never fully resolves the question of what it means to play with race/slavery in public—when one black woman finds doing so liberating, should she still have to do it in private so that other black people who feel attacked by the images don’t have to see it? Quoting Aph Ko, “The fact that black skin still reminds us of slavery—while the white, colonialist, appropriative gaze doesn’t—is part of the problem. The only thing that connects enslaved black women [in history] and sexual black women today is the violent system of white supremacy. Therefore, if we want to make this connection at all, we should center our discussion and critical analyses on the white gaze, rather than black women’s bodies and slavery.”
A book like this, taking its cues from mass culture, will have more problems than usual being all things to all people, and Scott notes that she can’t speak to/for an entire community. Of note, Scott spends essentially no time on things that are still taboo in the larger BDSM community—scat, pedophilia, bestiality, permanent body modification—or on the potential distinctions between those things, despite her earlier endorsement of consent.
Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: American political history from the fall of Nixon to the rise of Reagan (ending with his unsuccessful bid for the nomination in 1976). The more history I read, the more I think that Americans have always been just as apocalyptic, which in one way is reason for hope. There is never any last act in American politics; we always stumble from crisis to crisis. In the 1960s, many Americans thought their country and their world—emphasis “theirs” –had gone mad. In the 1970s, mainstream media made comparisons between bankrupt New York City and the Weimar Republic. One theme that emerges, though its causal relationship to the wild judderings of American politics is unclear, is that America’s political pundits are essentially always completely wrong. Reagan and the New Right were pronounced dead zillions of times; Watergate was declared a closed chapter pretty much every week. The book ends with one confident editorial explanation that Reagan was now, in 1976, too old for another presidential run. Another noticeable thing is that right-wing domestic terrorism has been around for a long time, not just racist terrorism, and few people connect the dots between classroom bombings in West Virginia, protesting “progressive” textbooks, and abortion clinic bombings.
Laura J. Snyder, Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni Van Leewenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing: Vermeer and Leewenhoek were neighbors and Leewenhoek was Vermeer’s executor, though there’s no definitive evidence they knew each other. Snyder examines their careers as representative of a time in which art and science flowed in similar paths; the lenses Leewenhoek used to examine the microscopic world could also be used in the camera obscura, which allowed painters like Vermeer to see the visible world differently and change their painting styles in response. Scientists and artists had to learn to see in these new ways; it wasn’t “natural” but nor was it an “unnatural” way of seeing. Snyder analogizes Vermeer’s repeated choice of similar subjects to a natural philosopher’s replication of an experiment under different conditions: Vermeer, she suggests, was experimenting to see the effects of different kinds of light on the emotion of a scene, and the effects of different painting strategies on perceived color.
Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction: On Easter Sunday, 1873, white Democrats massacred roughly eighty blacks at a county courthouse in Louisiana. This is a detailed story of the massacre and its aftermath, which involved white resistance to Reconstruction and slowly fading white Republican commitment thereto, despite the active efforts of some white Republicans, as well as the continued activism of black Republicans—in some cases, costing them their lives, as whites were willing to kill black witnesses who were willing to testify to their crimes. As white violence in the South escalated, President Grant proved unwilling to ramp up military commitments, and the courts struck down the key laws that Republicans had meant to guarantee black rights, destroying the attempt to prosecute the massacres’ major perpetrators. Careful, depressing read.
Other results Devlin discusses favor small, bounded communities or groups: Apparently, despite what you’d think, single rooms in hospitals can be cheaper to run than multiple-person rooms because of fewer transfers and medication errors. She likes small high schools as compared to big ones because there’s more opportunity to participate in a small school—if there’s going to be a school play, a huge fraction of the school has to participate, and so on. But large high schools offer more opportunities for advanced/specialized courses; my understanding is that the research here is pretty mixed and it’s hard to control for the other factors that affect high school size. When Devlin writes without irony that “Making the case for good design is often viewed as an uphill battle, given the lack of evidence supporting the effects of ‘good design,’” I just become more skeptical of the “good design” claims. In fact, she says, the evidence is strongest and clearest for features like good lighting and good air quality, not building configuration. People apparently don’t pay much attention to design in most circumstances unless it falls below a certain baseline in cleanliness/danger; otherwise they just go about their business, which doesn’t mean that the built environment doesn’t have powerful shaping effects on their behavior—just that they don’t notice. Meanwhile, she documents the failure of the “open office” to increase productivity—it turns out that (American) people like their privacy, and like having a door they can close on the world.
Catherine Scott, Thinking Kink: The Collision of BDSM, Feminism and Popular Culture: Free Early Reviewer book. I thought this was going to be more about Fifty Shades than it was, based on the description. Instead, this is a fleshed-out version of blog posts Scott did, mainly in the “images of BDSM in pop culture versus reality” vein. Scott argues that no form of BDSM is more or less feminist than any other sexual practice—taking a spanking is not a defeat if it’s chosen, and feminism is not about having women do the domming. She contends that the relative visibility of dommes and female subs compared to male doms and subs in popular culture is itself a manifestation of sexism: women’s sexual choices are always up for debate and criticism, whereas the male sub appears only as a somewhat laughable version of the powerful, wealthy man tired of keeping masculine control, and the male dom is basically invisible/uninterrogated insofar as he seems to be just masculinity taken to the max. As she notes, switching is also not part of popular understanding; she had to read Fifty Shades to find out that Christian used to be a sub, because the many reviews she read didn’t discuss that. She maintains that Fifty Shades, while crude in its understanding and depiction of BDSM, at least tried to give Christian a story, complicating the male dom’s invisibility. The media frenzy over Fifty Shades, moreover, is part and parcel of disproportionate scrutiny and pathologization of women’s sexuality. “[W]hile male submissives may encounter certain obstacles to having their kinks accepted, men’s submission is not generally used to make an argument that men don’t really want equality.” We’re still looking for an orgasm of our own.
She runs through the representational possibilities, mostly focusing on het pairings because that’s what she finds in pop culture: The pop culture domme is often objectified for the viewer’s pleasure, e.g., Irene Adler in BBC’s Sherlock. And “in mainstream Western culture, male sexual submission is only acceptable within extremely narrow parameters, and furthermore, is an act for which the man in question is always expected to compensate.” Contrary to this depiction, she recounts experiences with male subs who are not super-bossy and controlled outside the bedroom; often, she says, they’re quite feminist and egalitarian. What if, she suggests, some men just like sexual submission, rather than being tired of real-life power? Subbing can offer a safe space within which a man can express emotion, and there aren’t too many of those in mainstream Western culture. Even forced feminization, she argues, can be read as a rejection of sexism and a revaluation of women’s work: Anne McClintock, as quoted, says “domestic S/M stages women’s work as having both exhibition and economic value”—the male sub overvalues women’s domestic work, and men pay women to supervise their work.
As for male dom/female sub, Scott would like to reread it as a female power fantasy in which the man does all the work and the woman has all the orgasms. She says that male doms are often conflicted. The image of them as sadists “is at best an irritant, and at worst, enables genuine abusers to go undetected, as the conflating of violence against women with consensual male dom/fem sub play leaves many unable to tell the difference.” And we should recognize the bravery of female subs who actively seek out men to hurt them (and survive). It matters that female subs choose the scenes, and are aroused, and are acknowledged as people whose pleasure matters.
The BDSM community is no more free from patriarchal norms than any other part of society; among other things, Scott reports personal experience of male doms with female subs being uncomfortable with female and gay male doms, and wanting a male dom/female sub-only space. Scott also recounts other fractures within BDSM groups, such as older participants looking down on newbies for their commercialism and even their obsession with negotiation and consent. And there’s self-policing to make sure participants are “kinky enough”—all this is probably familiar to anyone in any fandom.
One thing I didn’t really know but makes perfect sense: the fact that consent is explicit and safewords are used doesn’t mean that consent issues drop out, even if everyone is behaving properly (and they don’t always). It’s possible for a sub to get so far into a scene that she forgets her safeword and really believes that there’s no way out; Scott changed her mind about the “if you don’t safeword everything is legit” approach the more she saw how subs’ senses were “compromised” by play. Even if that doesn’t happen, one still needs to train oneself to use the safeword—the cultural conditioning that says that saying no is rude or weak also applies to “red.” In Scott’s vision of healthy BDSM, the dom is attentive to the sub’s wellbeing and able to back down even when the sub hasn’t safeworded.
Scott also discusses the complexity of representing the range of BDSM practices in a larger rape culture that is eager to dismiss legitimate concerns while pathologizing some people. Although it may be the case that some people don’t find safe words/negotiation sexy, she concludes, women’s right to say no is still so much under dispute that safe words have to be central to BDSM practice.
What about the critique of Fifty Shades as an abuse narrative, especially given Christian’s stalking/controlling behavior outside of sex? There were even conservatives who claimed that the success of the story showed that women naturally want to be dominated. I wasn’t very persuaded by her response, which was: okay, maybe, but so is Wuthering Heights and A Streetcar Named Desire and they’re still considered valuable cultural artifacts. (1) The passive voice does too much work here—who’s doing the considering? (2) Even so, that doesn’t mean they model—or that fans understand them to model—healthy relationships. It’s true that there’s a big vein of that. But I’d wager that the same people who criticize Fifty Shades are likely to say that those texts may well be valuable for literary/historical reasons, but should be taught and discussed with explicit attention to the sexist, violent narratives they reinforce. Nonetheless, I’m sympathetic to the ultimate argument that, in a sexist culture, it’s a no-win situation: there is no portrayal of a woman that “works.”
I’m caught between Scott’s perfectly valid point that non-BDSM sexual cultures are also soaked through with patriarchy and the equally valid point that narratives matter—cultural scripts that say women enjoy being stalked can be used to ignore real women’s experiences. Scott argues that the extremity of BDSM can break down patriarchal constructs: “it is at least partly the tension between the way practices such as human furniture make objectification almost comically explicit, and the more subtle ways women can be objectified, which gives such play its taboo and therefore thrilling edge. The man with the woman under his feet knows he’s not actually resting on a real footstool; … but the erotic charge comes from the forbidden nature of treating another human being this way.” Maybe, or maybe sometimes. But maybe sometimes it’s just oppression. And, as Scott occasionally acknowledges, it’s not enough to say that “free choice” makes everything legitimate, especially when choices are made within a larger context.
Later chapters deal a bit with class (kink can be expensive and commercialized) and race. As for race: race play tends to make a lot of white people uncomfortable; Scott suggests that it’s the non-white players who ought to be able to define it for themselves, but never fully resolves the question of what it means to play with race/slavery in public—when one black woman finds doing so liberating, should she still have to do it in private so that other black people who feel attacked by the images don’t have to see it? Quoting Aph Ko, “The fact that black skin still reminds us of slavery—while the white, colonialist, appropriative gaze doesn’t—is part of the problem. The only thing that connects enslaved black women [in history] and sexual black women today is the violent system of white supremacy. Therefore, if we want to make this connection at all, we should center our discussion and critical analyses on the white gaze, rather than black women’s bodies and slavery.”
A book like this, taking its cues from mass culture, will have more problems than usual being all things to all people, and Scott notes that she can’t speak to/for an entire community. Of note, Scott spends essentially no time on things that are still taboo in the larger BDSM community—scat, pedophilia, bestiality, permanent body modification—or on the potential distinctions between those things, despite her earlier endorsement of consent.
Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: American political history from the fall of Nixon to the rise of Reagan (ending with his unsuccessful bid for the nomination in 1976). The more history I read, the more I think that Americans have always been just as apocalyptic, which in one way is reason for hope. There is never any last act in American politics; we always stumble from crisis to crisis. In the 1960s, many Americans thought their country and their world—emphasis “theirs” –had gone mad. In the 1970s, mainstream media made comparisons between bankrupt New York City and the Weimar Republic. One theme that emerges, though its causal relationship to the wild judderings of American politics is unclear, is that America’s political pundits are essentially always completely wrong. Reagan and the New Right were pronounced dead zillions of times; Watergate was declared a closed chapter pretty much every week. The book ends with one confident editorial explanation that Reagan was now, in 1976, too old for another presidential run. Another noticeable thing is that right-wing domestic terrorism has been around for a long time, not just racist terrorism, and few people connect the dots between classroom bombings in West Virginia, protesting “progressive” textbooks, and abortion clinic bombings.
Laura J. Snyder, Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni Van Leewenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing: Vermeer and Leewenhoek were neighbors and Leewenhoek was Vermeer’s executor, though there’s no definitive evidence they knew each other. Snyder examines their careers as representative of a time in which art and science flowed in similar paths; the lenses Leewenhoek used to examine the microscopic world could also be used in the camera obscura, which allowed painters like Vermeer to see the visible world differently and change their painting styles in response. Scientists and artists had to learn to see in these new ways; it wasn’t “natural” but nor was it an “unnatural” way of seeing. Snyder analogizes Vermeer’s repeated choice of similar subjects to a natural philosopher’s replication of an experiment under different conditions: Vermeer, she suggests, was experimenting to see the effects of different kinds of light on the emotion of a scene, and the effects of different painting strategies on perceived color.
Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction: On Easter Sunday, 1873, white Democrats massacred roughly eighty blacks at a county courthouse in Louisiana. This is a detailed story of the massacre and its aftermath, which involved white resistance to Reconstruction and slowly fading white Republican commitment thereto, despite the active efforts of some white Republicans, as well as the continued activism of black Republicans—in some cases, costing them their lives, as whites were willing to kill black witnesses who were willing to testify to their crimes. As white violence in the South escalated, President Grant proved unwilling to ramp up military commitments, and the courts struck down the key laws that Republicans had meant to guarantee black rights, destroying the attempt to prosecute the massacres’ major perpetrators. Careful, depressing read.
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Oooh! This is really interesting.
I am in the experimentation stage of painting, myself, and I keep coming back to similar subject matter as part of my exploration, so I find this a very apt analogy. :)