In the course of writing his perfectly work-safe food-and-lifestyle blog, Daniel of blog Casual Kitchen offers thoughtful insights that are applicable not only to food and home economics but sex and relationships as well.

Consider his post responding to the criticism that he’s not consistently orthodox about frugality.

However, I’ve also written posts you’d never expect to see in a frugal food blog. Many people would make the case that articles on Kona coffee and champagne, or posts about our extended visits to Chile, Hawaii and New Zealand have absolutely no place here. Some readers have pushed back hard against these posts, saying essentially that it’s misleading, even hypocritical, to write with one hand about lentil soup at 60c a serving, and then turn around and write with the other hand about $29-a-pound coffee.

Does the world of frugality require this degree of rigid orthodoxy? And if you don’t adhere at all times to an impossibly high frugality standard, are you, like, some kind of a cheater?

Some of us even internalize this frugality standard to the point where it becomes a source of guilt. I’ve seen talented bloggers beat themselves up on their own blogs because they weren’t always following all of the frugal ideas and recommendations they offer their readers.

Winners, losers and lentils

And then there’s an exact opposite reaction I often see: people will react with inappropriately magnified revulsion to a certain frugal tip or practice, as if a certain tip, like eating lentils, psychologically pushes them over the edge into a place where they feel like a cheap loser.

Look, this is all ankle-biting. It misses the point.

So what is the point? It’s this: frugality is all about making thoughtful choices about how and where you spend your money. It’s about allocating your money to things that are most important. And when I say “most important” I mean most important to you. Not what meets some imagined and impossibly high frugality standard.

You are not on this earth to make spending choices to meet some imagined social construct. And you are most definitely not on this earth to impress your neighbors or social peers, either by what you save or by what you spend. Frugality is not some kind of a contest with winners and losers.

The right to break your own rules

Here’s the ultimate truth and the real advantage to regularly using your frugality muscles. If you make conscious and intelligent choices with how you spend the bulk of your income, you’ll have extra money around to break your frugality rules if and when you want to. You’ll have the resources available to splurge on the good stuff from time to time. That’s the real reward of a life of conscious spending decisions.

He said it here.

Note: Yes, I’m reposting nearly the whole thing, but I think it would be a mistake not to go read large parts of his blog for yourself. Especially but not only if you cook for yourself at home. But I digress…

Feel free to substitute your relationship to orthodoxy in matters of sex, gender, orientation, fidelity, kink, and so on. Unorthodoxy or inconsistency is hypocrisy if and only if you insist you adhere to standards you don’t in fact adhere to. It’s only hypocrisy when you insist that others adhere to standards you advocate but do not yourself live up to.

In other words the point of standards isn’t to be an end in themselves — a possibly-natural misunderstanding that can result in straining gnats while swallowing camels. Instead the point of standards is to create a space where everyone can generate the most possible light with the least possible heat. Except, of course, when it makes sense to generate a little heat as well.

In other words the benefits of standards are almost the opposite of the intentions of orthodoxy.

You eat lentils at sixty cents per (perhaps-surprisingly delicious!) serving precisely so you can enjoy $29.00/pound coffee… if that’s what you want to drink. You work your ass off to preserve and expand and canonize choice so that you and everyone else can have all the children they want. And even if you’re heterosexual you stand up for universal marriage, not just because it’s the “right thing” that everyone enjoy the social, legal, and financial benefits but also so you can marry whom you choose, and not just because of those social, legal, and financial advantages.

Amanda Brooks of Bound, Not Gagged posts the story of a 40-year-old business owner and mother of three who was arrested while moonlighting as an escort. One needn’t favor legalization of sex work (as I do) to appreciate either her story or the following, really fucking critical point:

When I called the police after being beaten by my first husband, they refused to protect me. In fact, they blamed me for his drinking and womanizing. Even after the doctors told the cops that I was one blow from having my skull shattered, they blamed me. When I was brutally raped on a date rape, kicking and screaming, and went to the police, they did nothing. They blamed me because I’d been drinking. And, you know, for being female. Great. So now I’m happily making money, stimulating both the economy and the gentlemen of the area, and here they are banging down my door. Like the Gestapo. They told me they were “protecting” me. From what? As an escort, I could afford condoms, blood screens, regular medical checks. Gentlemen who are willing to pay for sex are, in my experience, much more respectful than the ones who expect it for free. The ones who raped and battered me were getting free sex. The ones who paid, were kind and respectful.

She said it here.

Point #1: the police (or, more correctly, society and its instructions to and constraints on police) aren’t particularly effective at protecting women from assault, abuse, rape, or battery. Consequently anyone who argues they’re trying to “protect” the sex workers they rescue is a liar.

Point #2: Considering the conservative bona fides of your average anti-prostitution activist, her words about the differences between men who pay for sex and the men who expect it for free ought to resonate with Über-conservative silverback Newt Gingrich’s repeated point that humans have an astonishing tendency to abuse and neglect that which they don’t pay for. I happen to believe Gingrich is mostly batshit insane, but that shouldn’t be a problem for conservatives. The point remains, though, that in the eyes of their abusers there really doesn’t appear to be much more consideration, nor less resentment, of sex workers who charge men for money, and “ordinary” sex-partners who don’t.

Point #3: How exactly is it the case that notifying a sex worker’s employer (who, fortunately in this case, was also her daylight-business partner) “protecting” her? The common reaction for employers (all too common!) is to find cause to fire the sex worker, with the result that her odds of leaving sex work go down. And her odds of having to return to sex work go up.

Point #4: None of this implies that all sex workers are hearty, happy self-determined entrepreneurs. Many are not. Many, in fact, not only don’t enjoy their work but are trapped either by circumstance, conscription, or outright coercion! It’s not exactly clear to me, however, how making their work or even their customers illegal improves anyone’s odds of getting out or moving on. Based on conversations with individuals who’ve made poor choices in the past, it’s not clear to me at all how an arrest record, let alone a conviction record, let alone a jail record, let alone public record of one’s activities, makes any form of employment other than either marginal/minimum-wage or criminal ones possible.

Point #5: If society and/or the police really were interested in protecting sex workers they’re fucking protect sex workers instead of, well, policing them. Instead of arresting them they’d let sex workers put their numbers in speed dial. Instead of arresting them they’d establish clear relationships with sex workers and sex-worker alliances to instead police of the very-large number of people who currently get away with raping, robbing, roughing up, and murdering sex workers (and, cough, non-sex workers.)

Point #6: As I said above, you don’t have to like prostitution to see the arguably-intractable problems with current policies regarding its legality.

Although they’re from a couple of months ago these are probably the best paragraphs I read that week. They’re from Megan Carpentier of Jezebel on how she stopped calling herself a feminist and how she started again. I think it gets to the heart of why so, so many people (mostly but not always women) say “I’m not a feminist but…”

The professor was, apparently, a pro-life and pro-choice feminist, who believed that abortion was a moral wrong outweighed only by the moral wrong of sexism. And, once sexism had been conquered, the world would be perfect and abortion would no longer be necessary.

I thought she was cracked, but I was 19 and didn’t realize that “feminism” meant many different things to many different people, or that there was more than one way to be a feminist. Having been raised in a religious environment in which we were taught that there was one gospel, one Church and one way of looking at a set of issues, it didn’t occur to me that a political and social movement would or could be more multifaceted. I figured if she was a feminist, and feminists believed that about abortion, then I was obviously not a feminist.

But the March for Women’s Lives made me realize, very concretely, that there was more to it than what I’d been told: more people, more ideas, more ways of looking at the issues, more ideas of what was or was not a feminist issue. And I came back to the idea of calling myself a feminist, and what that meant, and the kinds of ideas, attitudes, disagreements and fights that the movement could both be and embrace.

Read the quote in context here.

I think this is a great example of the “I Can’t Be A Feminist Because Feminists Believe X” trope precisely because it is so rare to find dyed-in-the-wool feminists who also believe abortion should (at least eventually) be illegal. It sure beats the more common misconceptions that one somehow can’t be a feminist if, for instance, one wears lipstick or shaves one’s armpits or otherwise misses some item on an imagined mile-long checklist of requirements.

Since I still hear someone say they’re not a feminist because of this or that at least a couple of times a year I’d like to propose a good checklist item of my own: If you’ve ever felt compelled to say “I’m not a feminist but,” chances are very, very good that you actually are.

Katy of Jezebel passes along some news from UPI (and elsewhere) that now she’s in charge of the State Department Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is following up on her interest in human trafficking that goes back to her alliance with the late Senator Paul Wellstone in the 1990s.

There’s a first time for everything: the US State Department’s annual report on human trafficking has included a rating for the United States. “We believe it is important to keep the spotlight on ourselves,” explained Hillary Clinton.

She said it here.

Incidentally, what’s significant about trafficking isn’t how open-eyed victims are going into their situation. Nor is it how bad things were, or even how much worse they were before they left their homes. It’s whether and how easily they can get out of their situation. And from slaves and convicts transported to America in the 18th Century to the “owe my soul to the company store” miners and loggers of the 19th Century to the sharecroppers and “adopted” orphans of the 20th to sex workers, agricultural workers, domestic servants, and industrial laborers today the U.S. has had an ongoing history of pretending trafficking is somebody else’s problem.

Good for Sec. Clinton.

Oh yeah, and fuck all the assholes who claim it only counts if you’re trafficked for (commercial) sex. It certainly does count, of course, it’s just not the whole story. And never has been.