Image source unknown -- found on a hard drive archive ca ~2005

While browsing my server logs I found a link from the password-only forum I participated heavily in before I started this blog back in January of 2005. Someone had looked up my profile and found the link I left there when I started posting here instead.

In the past people have asked, wondered, and downright questioned why I use "figleaf" and why I don't capitalize it. (This evidently drives some people crazy.) As luck would have it, here are the thoughts that were going through my head back on Sunday, May 13th, 2001, at around 10:52 AM Pacific Time, about two minutes after coming up with the name.

A fig leaf covers only a little bit but lets you feel comfortable showing the rest.

I don't mind people knowing about my own habits and preferences. But discussing them necessarily reveals stuff about friends and partners who might not care to be identified. Thus the pseudonym.

You can easily find out who I am. (For instance you could email me and I'll probably answer.) But I'd prefer you didn't.

In other words I thought of "figleaf" as more of a description than a name.  So at the time I didn't capitalize it then.  By the time I started this blog I was capitalizing it out of habit.

So anyway, no e.e. cummings tribute, no emulation of bell hooks either.  Just a two-second decision almost eleven years ago(!!!) when I decided to start writing about the politics, sociology, and experience of sex.

Meanwhile, though, I've been doing this for eleven years?  No wonder I've slowed down a bit! :-)

Scott Adams knocks it out of the park on tolerance, ethics, and the knee-squeezing twittery of "hipster" media.

I've been thinking about this because a new breed of media has popped up that takes evil to a new level. Today, for example, spewed across the Internet is the report that Rachel Maddow believes some members of the broadcast media who are closeted gays should come out, as she has. Gawker - ironically named after a vigorous form of self-satisfaction - helpfully lists some broadcasters that they believe should come out.

The thin cover for this evil is the notion that when a public figure reveals his or her sexual orientation it is a form of honesty that helps others by example. By Gawker's view, keeping your private life private can't be a legitimate personal decision, and it can't be the sort of image management that every human with a paying job engages in. We humans are always spring-loaded to judge most harshly any form of information concealment, no matter how victimless. How dare our public figures not disclose what sort of genitalia they prefer! Those lying bastards! How can I trust the news about Libya now?!

By my standard, the allegedly gay broadcasters in question presumably work hard and they don't hurt anyone by reporting the news, unless you count dictators and other scoundrels who try to avoid direct questions.

Source: Dilbert Blog

Yeah, he disgraced himself with sock puppetry, and his attempt to punk MRAs completely blew up in his face, but even if he doesn't always live up to his proposed secular standard for distinguishing good and bad* he's right about this.

* You're a good person if you work hard at something that is useful to society and you try to avoid hurting other people when it's practical.

Judith Levine, Writing of The American Prospect explores largely overlooked gender issues the recent TSA look-vs-touch dilemma and, by implication, the recent initiative to insist on the intrusive groping option over the intrusive voyeurism option TSA prefers.  She says that...

As a woman, I'm used to being looked at; I'm socialized to it, even turned on by it. In fact, now that I'm over 50, I admit to a certain nostalgia for the sucking noises that accompanied my every stroll down the sidewalks of New York, lo these many years ago. The advances of feminism and queer liberation notwithstanding, the feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey is still right: The gaze is masculine, the object of the gaze, feminine.

The body-scanning machine makes me slightly squeamish, but the thought of a stranger's hand exploring my nonconsenting vagina evokes downright revulsion, drawing up associations of creepy uncles, subway perverts, and worse. The perpetrator of sexual violence is almost always a man, and his victim is almost always a woman -- or a man perceived to be "womanly."

Source: The American Prospect

And of course now that she mentions it of course it makes sense.  You don't have to appreciate the way gender is constructed to appreciate that it's constructed that way.  Levine brings that particular point home just a bit further down in her post.

Watch the now-famous "Don't touch my junk" video, and you will witness a man outraged at the violation not just of his privacy but, more passionately, of his masculinity. After all, masculinity implies sexual privacy -- the privilege of moving through life unmolested. Or unnoticed. The most powerful, and to men, mostly invisible, sexual privilege of masculinity is the ability to remain unaware of oneself as a body. When the body is simply a vehicle in which to be a person, having that body seen or touched can be a neutral experience. It's far more likely that men can submit to the screenings, whether by machine or by hand, with ease.

(CoughTwo Rules of Desire #2cough)

Men might occasionally lament that it's inconceivable that they might be physically desired, but that in no way diminishes the intolerability of such a prospect. As Levine says, if, like most men, you have no conception of such corporeal scrutiny it won't occur to you that others might notice and possibly deeply envy the luxury of that oblivion.

One last point Levine makes is that very often, especially with men, the outrage expressed isn't about what happens to them. Instead it's projected outrage that such treatment might befall those who are deemed "weaker." Often it's the weakness of women and children that fuel the outrage even though a) on average women and children are just as tough and resilient as men and b) on average men are no tougher nor more resilient than women or children. (It's not that others might not in fact need support, it's that when we're privileged we sometimes project our insecurity on others. Which is a nifty way to preserve our sense of self-esteem without confronting the fact that we actually tend to want, need, and/or possibly deserve the same treatment we demand for others.)

It's a good post.  I stand by my earlier posts on the subject of TSA screening but since I began my own first post on the kerfuffle by deprecating my own discomfort it would have helped me if I'd read this first.

Via Kaili Joy Gray

Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle says that whereas we’ve been extraordinarily docile about having both our personal data appropriated by enterprises both private (Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerburg) and public (NSA wiretaps, strong-arming ISPs and phone companies for call data) we’ve finally started to collectively call bullshit when eyes and hands start reaching into our pants.

Nothing, apparently, sets us off more than some unhappy TSA worker — an increasingly unenviable job, you gotta admit — yanking you out of line and giving you the delightful option of getting your entire body X-rayed from ass to nipple, or being groped all over in case you might be carrying something explosive in your pants.

Is that not amazing, by the way? That a solitary “Christmas underwear bomber” has now changed the complexion of the entire country and inconvenienced tens of millions with a single failed attempt? Yes, all this groping is because of one guy, and he’s not even Justin Bieber. How incredible is that? Who says an individual can’t make a difference? Who says the terrorists haven’t already won?

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

I’m still feeling even more gloomy about this — despite long, long standing privacy concerns among progressives, and the fact that “nude” x-ray backscatter and 152 millimeter-wave machines have been around since at least last summer (my family and I went through one in Boston last August) the issue’s sudden “discovery” by conservative bellwether Matt Drudge and its subsequent liftoff in the media has felt a little too coordinated. (Evidently there’s a clause in the authorization bill that begins allowing both privatization and unionization of TSA beginning… oh… sometime this month.)

Still, as apologists say about venal, corrupt, and cynically hypocritical televangelists, “light will shine through any window.” The coordination of criticism really might have risen out of an initiative to privatize TSA* the issues themselves have been both well-known and bitterly criticized for years. If it takes a marketing ploy to finally get the conversation moving then… hey, maybe so. (I don’t think the privatization thing is going to get a lot of traction. Certainly not from the groping story.)

* Remember, it’s not a crime if you’re imprisoned in a shipping container by a private security firm after its employees have drugged and sexually attacked you so how could it possibly be a privacy invasion if a private security firm merely squeezes your genitals till you flinch?