Holiday Break

Dearest Readers,

Rational Riposte is taking a temporary hiatus because we’re blowing this grimy craphole for three adventurous weeks tramping around China!

I’ve been doing a happy dance around the apartment for days in anticipation and tonight, at 10:35, we’re off!

Our itinerary:

First, to Xian to see the Terracotta Warriors.

Next, another night train to Shanghai to see, well. All the cool things in Shanghai. Art museums, skyscrapers, the famed Bund and other… old things. All the while indulging in coffee, pizza, bread, cheese and all the other tasty Western treats we can’t get in Anyang.

After a week in Shanghai, we’ll bop east a couple hours to the former capital of China, Nanjing. This city is also known for the Nanjing Massacre that occurred when the Japanese invaded in 1937 and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people. I’m also told Nanjing boasts the biggest wall ever built around any city ever in the world.

Finally, we’ll train it waaaaaaaaaaaay northeast, about as far north as you can go in China, to the city of Harbin. We’ll peruse their Ice Lantern Festival and the quaint, Russian-influenced town. Perhaps we will go ice skating on the frozen river, too. Or go for a swim.

Rational Riposte will return sometime in mid-February.

Happy Travels!

map via: China Map – China Satellite Image – Physical – Political.

In China, Be Careful What You Text

A couple days ago Chris, Robert and I took four of our former students out to our favorite hot pot for a lovely dinner. These four girls are great. Smart, enthusiastic, and inquisitive. Two in particular are politically aware (which speaks volumes about a 20 year-old Chinese student) and don’t wait for outside information to get dumped into their laps. These girls regularly seek it out which, in China, is not always an easy task.

Now, the Chinese government is setting a precedent that could make it more difficult to communicate ideas. Yep, the Doodles are taking their censorship fetish a step further to control what the people can and can not text each other. According to the China Daily, the police have the authority to cancel anyone’s texting service if their messages contain any “illegal or unhealthy” content.

a delightful hot pot

Oh, Big Brother, isn’t your all-seeing eye getting strained yet? What is “unhealthy” to an old, traditional, corrupt official? Would texting about Mr. Gay China be on that list? A dirty pun? Certainly any suggestive comments texted to your significant other would be up for grabs. Naughty, kids.

One China Daily article defines these “bad messages” as involving “prostitution, violence, sex, threats or extortion.” Which, you know, that’s not all bad. I mean, I don’t want threatening texts either, but unless all one billion Chinese are violent psychotics, I fail to see how this intrusion of privacy could actually help most people. If you receive threatening texts, take those to the police and ask for help. No spying needed.

But, true to form, it seems the police have quite a leash in determining if a message is “bad” or not. Which gives further licence to spy. What’s more, you probably won’t be able to see the evidence of any “bad messages” you supposedly sent which further compromises any purported societal good that may come out of this.

Though the articles I read about this didn’t mention fining any user, the cynic in me thinks this is basically another corrupt practice that’ll wind up greasing certain officials pockets. And, of course, the intense intrusion of privacy. This practices gives officials greater control on what the people can read and talk about.

Remember those riots in China last July? They happened in the province of Xinjiang which only weeks ago got back the (censored) “full” Internet and yesterday the ability to text but only a maximum of 20 messages a day and not internationally. Hmph. Maybe the government is trying so hard to protect everyone against criminals and those uppity, syringe-wielding minorities that all should be grateful that they’re being treated like criminals, too.

So, should you send one of these nefarious messages and would like your service turned back on, there’s the rigmarole of going to the public security department and, in true Chinese fashion, you’re required to write a letter promising you won’t send any more bad messages again. A letter! What happens if you break your promise? Will you have to write “I will not send bad messages” on a black board a hundred times?

I haven’t even mentioned Google yet. But I think you’ll get the idea without me having to explain it. So. Google.

I’m waffling between the absurdity of clamping down on text messages (what’s the problem if someone wants to text their honey “u r sexy in u r purple undies”) and tired outrage at yet another intrusion of the government into the personal lives of its citizens.

Atheist Meme of the Day: Atheism is not an Excuse for Immorality

Atheism does not free people to do whatever selfish or immoral acts they want. The basics of human ethics are almost certainly hard-wired into our brains from millions of years of evolution as social animals — and atheists have that wiring as much as anybody else. Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across.

*courtesy of Greta Christina’s Blog

Atheist Meme of the Day: Atheists Believe in Things

“People who believe in nothing will believe in anything” is a terrible argument against atheism. Atheists believe in things: kindness, fairness, honesty, truth, love, etc. We just don’t believe in supernatural entities that affect the physical world. And we don’t need that particular belief to be good people with strong ethics. Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across.

*courtesy of Greta Christina’s Blog

Relate: PZ Myers wrote a hilarious response to that odious Ken Ham’s impotent blusterings about the upcoming Atheist Conference in Melbourne. “Imagine” quoth he, the Creationist, “listening to a meaningless talk at a meaningless conference held on a meaningless planet in a meaningless universe! Now, that would be an uplifting conference!”

*snort*

An atheist can learn and discover more meaning from the universe’s cold, dead hand than a Creationist could in the pages of a thousands-year old book written by a bunch of hideously racist, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, violent men.

Sexifiying Your Lady Parts

What woman hasn’t looked down at herself in the shower and bemoaned the stretched, saggy, unpretty state of her vagina?

Thankfully, Female Sexual Enhancement Surgery is becoming more and more socially acceptable. Labiaplasty, Vaginoplasty surgeries and Hoodectomy (“clitoral unhooding”) are performed by especially skilled surgeons to make our lady parts as tight and fit as they were when we were sexually immature tweens.

These surgeries beautify our down theres by slicing, pulling and tightening skin, sometimes sucking out access fat. (Friggin’ awesome news: you can endure double the pain, swelling and discomfort of one surgery and get the Labiaplasty and Vaginoplasty done by certain very skilled surgeons at the same time for under $12,000. A Hoodectomy only costs $2,500).

I mean, with all these perfect-looking models and actresses and sexually permissive magazines and movies so easily available, it is only natural that we would want to sculpt ourselves to look and feel as much like a fuckable doll as possible to please our partners. We want to look good for our men. So many of us have been paralyzed with overwhelming feelings of self-consciousness about our ugly buttons, but that will fall away with these surgeries and our self-esteem will skyrocket.

After 3-4 days (6-7 for the V and L Combo) we can resume normal activity, though parts may be too sensitive yet to wear our thongs and those super-tight boyfriend jeans that all the young girls do. After six to eight weeks of recovery, we can romp in the sack and let our partner enjoy the pain and money we went through so he (and us, of course) can get so much more sexual pleasure.

And now, we can do one more thing to enhance our overall aesthetic value. Color ourselves pink.

With My New Pink Button, we can also disguise the natural process that turns the labia lips that nasty brown color back to that fresh, sexy pink. Many of us ladies didn’t even know this was such an “ick” factor, especially for the men! Well, if we’re gonna be flaunting our newly-improved super-tight tween-sized vaginas, why not give them a make-over too? Especially since it’s an affordable $29.95.

Bonus! This dye can also be used for nipples (and male genitals)! Excellent! Because who wants to look at, let a lone have sex with someone who has brown nipples? Or a brown labia? Or an asymmetrical labia? Or a stretched vagina? Or a… ?

How objectification silences women

I came to this article, How objectification silences women – the male glance as a psychological muzzle via Jezebel this morning on the awesome Science Blogs site.

A scientific study was done where a woman or a man sat in a room and talked about themselves for up to two minutes. The scientists found that women tended to silence themselves if they felt a man was staring at her body and not her face (which was judged from the angle of a video camera); there wasn’t much difference if the woman felt another woman were staring at her body and most of the men’s talking time didn’t shorten if a woman was staring at his body.

Here’s (some of) the data:

Holy crap, right?

Per the blog that reported on this experiment, Not Exactly Rocket Science, Tamar Saguy, who led the study, had this to say about the data:

“When a woman believes that a man is focusing on her body, she narrows her presence… by spending less time talking.” There are a few possible reasons for this. Saguy suspects that objectification prompts women to align their behaviour with what’s expected of them – silent things devoid of other interesting traits. Treat someone like an object, and they’ll behave like one. Alternatively, worries about their appearance might simply distract them from the task at hand.

Makes you wonder how exactly women learned this behaviour anyway. Do women tend to silence themselves more than men in any kind of situation or just when they’re being gawked at?

For me, if I feel like someone’s not interested in what I’m saying, even if they’re staring at a plate of food instead of at my breasts, I tend to clam up. Even in my classes, if I sense I’m boring my students I tend to switch topics or try to find a way to make it more entertaining.

And why are the guys so much less effected? Notice they didn’t seem to care as much where anyone was looking. Makes me think of the mansplainer phenomenon where even if you’re very clearly not at all engaged with Mr. Mansplainer, he keeps going anyway and will continue to do so until he’d tired himself out, or gotten whatever it is he wanted from you. Or you tell him to shut up. Which many women wouldn’t do if she is, after all, an object devoid of interesting traits. The man is more interesting.

I’d like to see this experiment reproduced in more real life situations like in the work place or even on a date to see if there is an underlying cause at work. Seems Sanguy is on to something when she wondered if “objectification prompts women to align their behaviour with what’s expected of them,” which begs the question, what does society expect of a woman?

Gay Pride in China

Sometimes, it’s just nice to take a break from writing angry or annoyed posts along the lines of “you will not believe what stupidity is going on here!” and write about positive things that are happening in the world. Today, it’s China’s developing gay pride.

Yesterday, I came across the article “First Mr. Gay China pageant unveils contestants” on China Daily’s (China’s English-language newspaper) website and wondered if my students knew about this?

Many, but not all of them, are very… put off by the idea of two ladies and two guys being romantically involved. Whenever we talk about marriage or family, I’ll include a discussion about homosexuality and shock them with the knowledge that, yeah, there are places you can go, a few even in the U.S., if you want marry. “If I want, I can marry a lady,” I’d say and they’d giggle and go “Waaaah?”

I get the impression that they don’t think it’s abomindable and certainly not god, they just don’t get it because of  “tradition.”

*eye-roll*

Their arguments against homosexuality tend to fall along these lines: “Their family and friends won’t accept them. They will be outcasts,” my students say. It “goes against the nature” according to many. And some are woefully misinformed about AIDS. And the ever-important, “What about the next generation?”

In China, it’s seen as a social duty for each man and woman to have a child. Adoption doesn’t seem to be all that common and I think many of my students don’t understand that, yes gays can physically reproduce. It’s such that I wonder if many think it’s alright to be gay so long as you get married and have a family anyway.

A lot of the class winds up with me correcting misinformation, wondering if they’re actually taught that false info they’re repeating in class or if they just pick it up from their parents or elsewhere. I give them statistics about homosexuality, mentioning how, yeah, it is found in nature, amongst birds for example, and penguins (more “Waaaaaa?”) and telling them that, statistically, out 1 of 10 people are homosexual. To which I just get stared at like I have a slug on my face.

Considering the Yangtze-sized taboo against homosexuality, the fact that there is a Mr. Gay China pageant allowed to happen here is huge. Especially coming from a country where homosexuality was listed as a mental illness until 2001, and sodomy illegal until 1997. All is far from perfect. Many of the events hosted by this past years Gay Pride Parade in Shangahi were forced to close, and the national media didn’t provide much in the way of coverage and won’t for Mr. Gay China.

But, bit by bit this is progress and shows that ever so slowly this ancient culture that prides itself on its traditions and ancient-ness is willing to move forward and there are people willing to nudge it along.

Further Reading:

“Year of Gay China” [China Daily]

Editor’s Note, January 16, 2010:

Just kidding. Though there are people who are willing to, who want to move Chinese culture forward, turns out the “establishment” is not ready for it.

An article on the China Daily this morning reported that Mr. Gay China was shut down an hour before it was to begin. There were “paperwork” issues, of course, say the police.

*eye roll*

If they weren’t going to allow the pageant, why bother waiting an hour before it was to begin to stop it? To crush hopes even more? Because it’s fun to watch the gays cry? Or were the Powers that Be so stupid that they didn’t know what “gay” meant until the last minute, freaked out, and this is how they “save face?”

Sigh… once again am thoroughly annoyed with this country for being so sly and backhanded.

*trying to be optimistic…*

There’s always next year.

Required Viewing Before Every Baptism

It is my firm belief that this video should be watched every time someone wants to be baptized into Christianity.  Then, afterwards, the priest can ask the person, “Still good?” and if the answer is yes, then they proceed.

Though that would mean people could only be baptized after they had reached an age of intellectual responsibility; that is, an age where they understand what is happening to them and the implications thereof.  And, no, Mormons, that is not eight years old.

Friggin’ Mormons….

Still good?

Celebrating Real Women

This constant chatter of what is a “real” woman is obnoxious. Every time I glimpse an article with a headline like, “Magazine X will now feature real women on it’s pages (yeah them!)” I wonder, so a “fake” woman is… who?

Let me be clear, I think it’s about damn time magazines incorporate women that are not Navi-like humans (minus the tails and blue) but, come on. Do the majority of women look like Crystal Renn or Lizzie Miller? Um. No. At least not how they’re presented between Vogue or Glamour’s pages.

Fakery

I, frankly, don’t see how those curvy models are anymore “real.” Sure, there body type maybe more similar to more women, but what’s presented to us in magazines isn’t what they really look like either. Photoshop junkies command get rid of blemishes! Scars! Bruises! Dark circles! You can have “curves” but not dimples or stretch marks. Whether she’s a stick insect or Bridget Jones, her body still looks perfect and beautiful. And of course she’s wearing designer duds and had professional hair and make-up experts doll her up. That is, if she’s not celebrating her “real woman-ness” by posing nude. She’s probably oiled up instead.

This young attractive woman, writing right now, for instance, wouldn’t be asked to pose for Glamour, without a growth spurt and a little effort. She is a couple inches over 5′ and has short, stumpy legs (natch). She doesn’t spend much time styling her bland, dishwater blond hair or putting on make-up. And right now, thanks to winter, has uber itchy, dry skin.

To be worthy of a fashion magazine, I’d get stuffed in some trendy clothes I’d probably never wear (or lubed up in salad dressing to pose naked), have my short hair worked on, probably colored, and layers of make-up caked on my face to cover a couple of blemishes, maybe my freckles too. All so I could awkwardly pose for the cameras looking nothing like myself. And any marks that didn’t quite get covered, or a fabric fold out of place could easily be erased in the editing process. That is not real, so please stop saying that is is.

Reality

A London arts centre, however, seems to know about “real” women.  They’re hosting a show about feminism called “Trilogy,” which is also a celebration of the “‘the difference and diversity’ of the female body.” The organizers are asking 100 women, not models, not actors or beauty queens, real women, to participate in a 10-minute performance within the show where they will be completely, wonderfully bare-ass nekkid on stage. Dancing. Jiggling flesh, dimples and dry skin bared to all. At some point, even the audience are encouraged to strip, too.

We need something like that in the U.S.  If we ever get our own “Trilogy,” I hope this real women would have the courage to participate!

Atheist Meme of the Day: Atheists Have Hope

Atheists have hope for the future as much as anyone else. We don’t have hope for life after death, but we have hopes for this life to be better — for ourselves, for others, and for the people who will be around after we die. And we’re just as willing to work to make those hopes come true as anyone. Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across

*Courtesy of Greta Christina’s Blog