Monthly Archives: October 2016

I Voted

I filled out my ballot today, and I voted for Hillary Clinton.

There are lots of other decisions on the ballot, many of which will have more practical effects on my life. I urge everyone to carefully consider everything on their ballot – it’s all important.

But in this post, I’m only going to discuss my choice for President.

Above all, I voted against Donald Trump. He is not fit to serve this country in any capacity, let alone lead it, and I will waste no further (virtual) ink on him.

I also voted for Hillary Clinton. I voted for her not just because she’s the least bad option, but because I believe she will be a positive force for this country. I can’t give her my full support, but then I haven’t unreservedly supported any major politician since Ronald Reagan, when I was too young to realize that every politician is a flawed human being.

For a start, it’s important to me to vote for the first woman to become President. Progress on equality for all Americans has been excruciatingly slow since, well, ever, and I believe that President Clinton will be a voice not just for women but for everyone who wants to live up to the declaration that “all men are created equal”.

I generally support the policy positions of the Democratic party, and much of the Republican platform seems downright extreme, especially compared to moderate party I remember from my childhood. But with the exception of climate change, which needs immediate, responsible action, my vote isn’t about whose policies I prefer. Given the extreme intransigence of the Republican party, I expect very little of President Clinton’s agenda to get through Congress anyway.

I want government to work, to accomplish the myriad things large and small that keep the country functioning every day. We clearly can’t trust the Republican Party with this task – they have spent the past thirty years trying to convince us that government is always the problem, never the solution, and that’s even before considering the spectacular ignorance of the party’s current candidate. The Democratic Party’s record is far from excellent – they usually advocate more government rather than better government as the solution to a particular problem – but I do have cause for hope. Hillary Clinton has more and broader experience in federal government than anyone who has ever run for President, and I believe that experience will make her an effective manager of the executive branch. When I voted for Barak Obama eight years ago, my biggest reservation was that he would lack the skills to run the executive branch effectively. His administration has been more competent than I expected – certainly better than the Bush administration – but we can always do better. That is why I’m voting for Hillary Clinton. She may well disappoint, but I have hope.

I do have reservations about the next Clinton administration. Bill Clinton’s policies on criminal justice and welfare reform, though universally supported at the time, have had devastating effects. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy has gotten American involved in ugly, bloody conflicts across the Middle East, resulting in death and destruction across the region. Unfortunately, no public figure has been able to articulate anything better. Though broad principles apply, every situation is different in foreign policy, and right now an awful lot of those situations are going to turn out bad no matter what.

The rest of my reservations have to do with the general haze of dishonesty surrounding Clinton. The trouble is, the haze is all we can see. In all the hype about Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi! or the email server or whatever else, we’ve seen a lot of things that look vaguely shifty or shady, but no investigation has ever produced concrete proof of anything criminal or even seriously dishonest. If there were something real there, we’d have seen it by now.

Lust

A rant from the intersection of popular culture and politics.

I’ve lately been playing a little Diablo III before bed to kill some brain cells so I can sleep (doesn’t work, but that’s another topic). The game’s setting leans pretty heavily on western notions of heaven and hell. Act III focuses on Sin, and the last mini-boss is Cydaea, the Maiden of Lust. Cydaea is a creature rather like a centaur, with a spider’s body supporting a hyper-sexualized human female torso, and she speaks with a pouty, sultry voice. This got me thinking – not about the game (it’s about a millimeter deep), but about depictions of lust in our culture and history.

The personification of lust (specifically the sexual sort) is usually female. From the tortured women carved in Romanesque stone to pretty much anything on the internet these days, Lust is a woman, naked or nearly so.

This seems backwards to me. In the world where I live, lust is more of a male thing.

I’m not suggesting that women are delicate flowers, fainting at the mere thought of intimate contact with a man; quite the opposite. Women are sexual beings, just like men, fully capable of wanting, having, and enjoying sex. Women are fully capable of lust.

But both historically and in today’s culture, men tend to spend more effort in active pursuit of their sexual desires, especially the purely physical sort implied by the word lust. According to all the available data, men on average have more sexual partners than women and are more likely to cheat in their relationships. And prostitution is almost entirely about male customers seeking female prostitutes.

So why is lust depicted as female?

In part, I’d argue it’s another symptom of the double standard. Male sexual desire, even when it’s on the edge, is the norm. It’s excused. Boys will be boys, locker room talk, etc. Female sexual desire is judged by a different, harsher standard. We have a huge vocabulary to shame women who violate sexual norms – loose, easy, cheap, slut, whore, etc. – but basically nothing for men.

I think there’s more, though. The blame for male sexual misbehavior often falls at least partly on the woman. The vixen, the temptress, the painted Jezebel. That’s sometimes justified – two married people having an affair are equally culpable; a single woman is not completely blameless if she’s knowingly sleeping with a married man.

But far too often we blame women for men’s boorish (or worse) behavior even when it’s entirely out of their control. Getting catcalled on the street? It’s your fault for wearing a skirt. Creepy guy grabbed your ass on the subway? Shouldn’t have worn those tight leggings. And how many rape victims feel like they’re being violated all over again when they testify against their accusers, only to have the defense comb through their personal lives to paint them as sluts? How many never testify, for that exact reason?

It’s no accident that Cydaea’s lower body is a spider and not some other demon creature. She’s the black widow who tempts the virtuous man into her sinful embrace and then kills and eats him afterward. I don’t blame Blizzard for their sexy spider-demon; it works in the context the self-serious piece of cultural fluff that is Diablo III.

Lust isn’t always a bad thing; sometimes it’s just sexy fun. But when it’s channeled in the wrong direction, when it reduces another person to a sex object without her consent, it can be quite harmful. The background sexual harassment that women experience every day takes its toll; serious sexual assaults can ruin lives (and no, I’m not talking about Stanford swimming scholarships).

Creative people everywhere, if you want to personify Lust in all its debased glory, you can do better. Make him male, because, obviously. Make him a bloated orange grotesque. Give him a mane of ridiculous blonde fur. Give him yuuuuge genitals (because art is not reality) and tiny, tiny hands.

After all the awful stuff that’s been spewing out of the presidential race, particularly this weekend, I can think of no better avatar for the destructive, dehumanizing power of lust than Donald Trump.

Sound Effect interview on KNKX Seattle

I went to see Hello Earth’s Outdoor Trek production of Space Seed this summer on the weekend when Marc Okrand was in town. He gave a talk about how he created the Klingon Language for Star Trek III and all that followed, and after the show, a producer from KNKX, Seattle’s public radio station, approached us and chatted a bit. When he found out I lived in Seattle and actually spoke Klingon, he handed me his business card. One of their shows – Sound Effect – was doing a series called The Ties that Bind around communities bound by shared interest, and he was interested in the Klingon speaking community. A few weeks later, I got a call from another producer, and a week or so after that, I walked up to their studio in Belltown and sat down for an interview.

You can listen to it here.

I haven’t actually listened to it myself (I really don’t like the sound of my own voice – not a useful quality for a writer, but hey), but I do know the Klingon on the show is pretty good but not perfect. I was nervous.

Enjoy.