Daily Show Watchers are Stoned Slackers

Bill O'Reilly told Jon Stewart that Daily Show watchers were all stoned last week. Just a quick note, Bill. In my law school, if you hadn't watched the Daily Show that day, there was someone in the study group who could give you a play-by-play, and if none of us had watched it, we would stream it on our laptops during a study break. Perhaps some of us were stoned, but there were enough of us who passed the bar and have gone on to successful careers (and still watch the Daily Show everyday), that I'd be hard pressed to call us slackers. P.S.- as a response to the complaint that Fox News is pushing an agenda, not reporting the news, the critique rings hollow. It's most reminiscent of Pee-Wee Herman's famous "I know you are but what am I" rhetorical tactic.

Formal Equality

The new face of discrimination is formal equality. The Supreme Court can hide behind formal equality when they legalize the exclusion of persons of color from colleges, or the exclusion of women from higher ranking jobs. Most recently, the courts have fallen back on on formal equality to give the rights of citizenship to corporations. They use the argument that labor unions and trial lawyers will be able to spend as much money as they want on campaigns, so it's okay that corporations are able to spend as much money as they want on political campaigns. First of all, they are implying that there are only two possible points of view, that of the labor unions and trial lawyers (which somehow is the same) and that of corporations. Just because trial lawyers support democrats, and labor unions support democrats, doesn't meant they could get along if they had to wait in the same line at Dennys. This formal equality bigotry is pervasive and unstoppable, but worse, it is entirely ungrounded in facts or reality. This February, coming off a fantastic Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I have to think that MLK didn't see this coming, and he would have been upset that the country is using his name, and his most famous words, to promote formal equality at the expense of actual equality.

The Problem With the Economy

We experimented with replacing government regulation with insurance and derivatives to create a sustainable and secure economy. It started in 1980 with Ronald Regan, and ever since then the economy has been fraught with turmoil, up and down like a manic depressive 1950's housewife. This latest crash proves, beyond all doubt, that derivatives do not secure risk, but only secure profits. It is time to bring back the Roosevelt regulations and remember that the Republicans are the banks' booty call, not populists defending the people. If we cannot be excited about Democrats, because they are all moderates, we can at least agree to be excited about marginalizing the Republicans, and none of their desperation should be considered anything more than tantrums intended to defend Wall Street, or at least the corporations that make most of their profits being traded on Wall Street.

Hidden Brain

Please don't fool yourself into believing that saying nothing about race and gender, or raising your child so-called race blind and gender-neutral will keep your child, or yourself, from making assumptions based on race or gender. Science has proved that by saying nothing, we say that the status quo is correct. Three-year-olds are already able to make assumptions based on race, and gender assumptions start in the womb. If you don't talk about it, you foster it. So I propose this challenge. Think and talk about race and gender everyday. If you work with only white people, think about why that is. If you work with people of color, think about how you interact with those people and if your "hidden brain" may be making assumptions for you. If you work with women, do the same. If you don't work with women, quit.

Okay, New Format.

I loved the MANifesto, and I finished it, but became aware that no one was reading it. Which is okay. Therefore, I'm going to try to go to a shorter format that is less dependent on reading the previous submissions. I understand that our Twitter generation is not able to grasp complex topics as often because of our wanting boil things down into shorter formats, and that is why I am eschewing complex topics, and trying to boil complicated issues into short paragraphs. This is doubly great, because our generation is extremely impulsive, and I think I can turn this blog into something way more impulsive, and hopefully, from time to time, amusing. Therefore, Right Be Done, is now equality based turrets syndrome with a hint of "fuck you." If nobody reads it, at least it will be cathartic.

MANifesto: Part V

Dating and Marriage
Men often say, “I love women” when they are about to say something disparaging about all women. The most aggressive men often say terrible things about women and worse things about men who act like women. However, at the same time, they openly make brazen displays of desiring women and those things that women have to offer. It is true that women have a lot to offer men, as do many of the skills and jobs normally associated with feminization, but why can men earnestly say “I love women” but “women are bitches” in the same sentence without recognizing the contradiction? Because men’s feelings towards women are a tool of maintaining aggressive masculinity, men have agreed that how much a man desires a particular kind of woman gives the man points in his ever constant struggle for secure and aggressive masculinity. Below are some of the rules of the game.
Men do not desire just any women, but a particular kind of woman which is constantly changing according to cultural preferences. The feature of aggressive masculinization’s preferred mate is that they must be hyper-feminized. A group of men decide how many points each woman is worth by deciding as a group how closely the woman looks like the perfect mate. Men play this game outwardly by actually rating women on a scale of 1 to 10. Men who secure a “10” are considered the most masculine. They are respected, and envied by other men. But they are also sought after by women who want to be looked on as a “10” in their own right. Those men who can only secure a “1” or show no interest in women whatsoever are subject to the same kind of taunting as in their childhood. They are called “faggot” and told that they are not properly men. When their mates are derided, some feel as though they must resort to violence in defense of the woman they love, and also in defense of themselves. They are then under threat of the same kind of physical manifestation that brought about their original insecurities about masculinity.
The fact that groups of men decide what it means to be a woman based entirely on arbitrary preferences, leads women to starve themselves, work their bodies unhealthily, and even put themselves under the knife to appease the men they love or want to love. Also, men who do not fit the paradigm of aggressive masculinity often find themselves without a girlfriend, wife, or partner of any kind. As a result, many men are now using steroids, going on damaging diets and having surgeries themselves. Some men think this is wrong because it is too feminine and proclaim that men who diet are “pussies,” but these men miss the point. Men who mutilate themselves and use dangerous drugs to appease women, men, or anyone else are subjecting themselves to the same damaging and arbitrary objectives that have so long oppressed women. The lesson to be learned is that replacing masculinity with femininity is not necessarily applause-worthy. Hyper-gender of any kind should be eliminated before any of us will truly be free.
Sasha Grey, a porn star, recently told Rolling Stone magazine that she wants women to know that “It’s okay to be a slut.” While some find this statement empowering, it is complicated by latent hostility towards Ms. Grey herself and her own gender. She was not saying that “Slut is not a bad word” but rather, in the traditional sexual sense, she was saying “It’s okay to be bad.” Behind her words, one has the feeling that she senses that when women sleep around they are being bad feminized women, but somehow good role models for women who are liberated. One reason behind this ambivalence towards the sexually active woman is that we have pulled apart the feminine role in sex without pulling apart the male role so that only greater or lesser degrees of the male roles perpetuate. There are two problems with the survival of the traditionally masculine sex role. Sex from a traditionally masculine perspective is demeaning to women, so that empowered women must somehow love having sex but hate themselves for loving it. In a society laden with religious overtones about sex, this unhealthy dichotomy is unavoidable for women and men. But also, when women adopt a traditionally masculine role in sex there is the unsaid assumption that the masculine role is not also unhealthy and damaging.
The masculine role model for sexuality, however, has always been unhealthy. Men traditionally objectified and even bought women for their sexual labor. They denied homosexual love even existed, while punishing those who engaged in homosexual “acts” to horrible punishments. One notable case in early New York City condemned a man who was caught have sex with his fellow sailor to have his arms and legs ripped form his body before he was thrown in the sea. Additionally, instead of undermining the system of objectification, some women find empowerment in objectifying men, as though it would be equal if only Native Americans were allowed to have tiny reservations full of white people on the reservations we have left them. Instead of believing that feminine empowerment means acting masculinized on sexuality, we must find some healthy third option that is healthy and empowering to both sexes. Before we can do that, we must admit that both sexes are oppressed by traditional gender roles, otherwise we risk continuing to glorify the masculine role which simply means oppressing both genders equally.

MANifesto Part iv: The Self-Made Man

Although men’s bonds with other men are incredibly trustworthy and powerful, the masculine notion of success idealizes a man who succeeds all by himself. In a society, all people must rely on each other completely and intimately. The myth of the self-made man is false because every successful person must have employees, aids, confidants, business partners, subcontractors, customers, stockholders and numerous other people complicit in that success, including that self-made man’s domestic partner and children. However, men have much to gain from associations with masculinity in capitalist America. Our notion of masculinity includes wealth. Without wealth, we are unable to provide safety and security for those that we love most dearly. Society tells us that the people who men love are safer if men spend their days securing capital wealth and success, but at what cost?

In a capitalist society, one man’s success is often another’s failure. One man is promoted, while another is not. One man’s business succeeds, while another’s filling the same niche must fail. Because security in any society is tenuous, and more so in a capitalist society, the notion of being a self-made man is directly tied to safety. If a man feels like he is relying on anybody else, he is unsafe and less of a man. This lack of safety is not unlike the lack of safety felt in the schoolyard in our boyhoods. However, this fear is entirely false. Time and again, it has been proven that reliance on others makes us safer, not less so. The very basis of America is that all men are better equipped to rule a nation than any one individually, and after 1920, all people are better equipped than all men. Tragically, while men feel threatened by reliance on strong social groups, it is in fact self-made-ness that threatens us the most because if we attempt to provide for our families alone, then our own failure will utterly collapse our family.

Sometime in the last several centuries, people agreed upon the man’s role as the breadwinner who brings home the bacon. Men feel satisfied with the role because it is important and significant. But while one person brings home the bacon, another must cook it, and still others must enjoy it. When we put so much importance on earning money and food, we automatically undermine the traditionally feminine role of using those resources to make a healthy and stable family, and in doing so we risk the healthy and stable family by alienating the father.

Unlike the trivial and short term suffering of children in the schoolyard, the fear of a father attempting to secure the safety of his family is long term and profound. Having tied masculinity with providing for the family, such a failure becomes feminization. In such a way does femininity come to equate with joblessness, homelessness and even starvation and death. A common, and false belief, is that homeless persons just aren't willing to work hard enough. Poverty comes to equate with feminization and conversely wealth with masculinization (a myth not aided by the fact that most poverty is caused by divorce, meaning that most people thrown into poverty are women). Gangsters and mobsters can easily become the ideals of masculization because they combine physical violence with the ruthless pursuit of wealth.

Similarly, some have become so focused on the pursuit of wealth that they never seem to have enough. If these men are made masculine by making more money, working harder, and being promoted before other men, than not being promoted, making less money, and spending more time at home feminizes those who do not succeed.

The greatest success of the women’s liberation movement has been to undermine the femininized corollary to the self-made man that women are useless and only survive as the recipients of the benevolence of the man who made himself without her help. Unfortunately, some women have countered with a self-made woman myth. However, business women and women politicians are resigned to the fact that sexism pervades the self-made woman myth. That is so because the notion of being self-made cannot be separated from the worst aspects of masculinity, fear, oppression, and suffering. Sexism cannot be ended until the self-made person myth is exposed as the ridiculous fraud that it is.