It's a Turkish winter wonderland:

No, seriously:



Exodus 32 spins in its grave.

Cumhuriyet Bayramı, Ankara, Turkey October 29, 2008
(Republican Day - Turkish Independence Day)


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Sorry it's so dark. I'd redo it, but that goes against my whole laziness ethic.

September 15th backlogged vloggstravaganza:

Part 1


Part 2

This is just me singing "After You've Gone" by Bessie Smith. I figure I kinda missed out on vlogging in my youth, and so in my dotage I thought I'd give it a try.

So I saw this amazing deal at CVS over winter break. Luckily I was able to restrain myself.

So there's this word in Turkish: Berbat.

It means 'awful.'

I'm a fan of mnemonic devices, so when I see this word, I try to imagine an animal that would be a cross between a bear and a bat. And when I imagine this animal, I can't help but think, "Damn. That would be awful."

Turns out, I was right. I put 'bear bat' into google's image search, and got this:


Bearbat is definitely awful. For crime!

I'm doing research right now for a term paper for one of my classes. My intended topic addresses, among other things, that god-awful movie (from a feminist, anti-racist, disability-rights, queer rights, historical and cinematic - does EVERY SINGLE SCENE need to use that ugly gold filter? - and I could go on -perspective) 300 and how it manifests many of the findings made by those researching Terror Management theory.

This post is not about that.

Instead I wanted to share with you a quote I came across in one of the articles I am reading, called Fleeing the Body: A Terror Management Perspective on the Problem of Human Corporeality (which I definitely encourage everyone to read - there's a lot of good stuff in there). The broader argument I plan to make is that misogyny is nascent in male and female fears about the fact that we have these icky, gooey, physical bodies that are eventually going to die and decay whether we like it or not. Basically, the idea is that we fear death, and to get over that fear, we invent culture. Culture gives us meaning, and if we have higher meaning, then maybe we're not just pointless mortal meatsacks.

To get around the ever-present reminder of our pointless-meatsackery - our bodies - culture makes our bodies into symbols - man, woman, soldier, mother, worker, black, white, Korean, Southern, country-music-star, hipster, emo etc. etc. And damnit if we don't bend over backwards trying to live up to those symbols, through clothes, through make-up, through hairstyles, through speech patterns, even through painful beauty rituals and surgical solutions.

Although most of the research on the objectification of the body has focused on the negative consequences of cultural standards of beauty for women, our analysis suggests that objectification of the body also serves a
useful function: It transforms the creaturely body into a symbolic object ofbeauty and value. We certainly agree that the consequences of having a body that serves as a symbol in one's culture can be devastating (and we discuss these consequences later). However, one payof f for these negative consequences is a temporary escape from deeply rooted existential anxiety.

The pressure to turn our bodies into symbols inarguably falls disproportionately on women. The authors of this article theorize that this is because women's bodies are associated both with Mother, god-like figure that she once was to us as very young children, and with corporeality via menstruation, lactation, and childbirth, and so men, since they have more social power than women, can enforce their dislike of the idea that they're so sexually - and sex is about as corporeal and physical and animalistic as you can get - attracted to women (forgive the heternormativity), requiring that women spend a lot of money and put a lot of time and effort into being physical representations of these cultural symbols. Additionally sex has to be about True Wuv - or not about an actual woman at all:

Although romantic love is probably the most common way ofelevating animal sexuality to a uniquely human plane, it is certainly not the only way to do so.[...]In addition, contrary to popular opinion, most variations in sexuality are in the direction of being less animalistic and more symbolic than so-called normal sexual behavior. For example, sadomasochism is usually not wild and uncontrolled but rather highly ritualized, making use of scripts and props, much like the theater, thereby turning sex into an art form. Similarly, most fetishes consist of sexual arousal associated with an object that is closely associated with the body, but not the body itself, such as a shoe, leather, or silk panties. When a fetishist fixates on the body itself, a particular part of the body is objectified. By fixating on an inanimate object, or objectifying and idealizing specific body parts, the fetishist escapes the threat associated with a mortal, animal body.

This association between women's bodies and death is so strong that simply being reminded of a woman's corporeality is enough to elicit feelings of disgust and revulsion among research subjects.

In this study, a female confederate "accidentally" dropped either a tampon or hairclip out of her purse. Participants (irrespective of sex) not only evaluated her as less competent when she dropped a tampon than when she dropped a hairclip but also liked her less and physically distanced themselves by sitting farther away from her. Furthermore, subsequent to the manipulation, participants were asked to evaluate women in general using the objectification
measure developed by Noll and Fredrickson (1998) in which respondents are asked to rank in order of importance appearance- versus competence-related attributes of women's bodies. The findings revealed that, again regardless of participants' sex, being reminded of women's creatureliness led to greater value being placed on women's physical appearance.

Is it any wonder so much sexualized violence is directed our way?

Oh yea. I had fun.