Reblogged from gunsncigarettes:

I love everything about this photoset

The lack of condescension in cultural sharing

The nonsexualization

The contextual foreignness of firm breasts in a society that doesn’t use bras

Study debunks notion that men and women are psychologically distinct

 

A first-of-its-kind study to be published in the February issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has dealt a devastating blow to the notion that men and women are fundamentally different when it comes to how they think and act.

“Although gender differences on average are not under dispute, the idea of consistently and inflexibly gender-typed individuals is,” Bobbi J. Carothers of Washington University in St. Louis and Harry T. Reis of the University of Rochester explained in their study. “That is, there are not two distinct genders, but instead there are linear gradations of variables associated with sex, such as masculinity or intimacy, all of which are continuous.”

Analyzing 122 different characteristics from 13,301 individuals in 13 studies, the researchers concluded that differences between men and women were best seen as dimensional rather than categorical. In other words, the differences between men and women should be viewed as a matter of degree rather than a sign of consistent differences between two distinct groups.

Numerous studies have examined gender differences between men and women. Carothers and Reis were able to find a whopping 3,370 articles on the topic in 2011 alone. The vast majority of the research examined the average differences between men and women. The research can easily be misinterpreted as finding that “Men are better at X” or “Women are worst at Y” — ignoring the fact that the studies are comparing averages and contain variance.

“The world presents us with a huge amount of information, so we often take shortcuts to help process it all (this is known as the ‘cognitive miser’),” Carothers explained to Raw Story in an email. “One of those shortcuts is a tendency to categorize things — it’s easier to think of 2 things (men are one way and women are another) than it is to think of all of the nuances of overlapping distributions, particularly if they’re not brought to our attention when we hear about an average difference.”

Many researchers, particularly those who were “evolutionarily oriented,” appeared to “favor a more categorical interpretation of gender differences,” Carothers and Reis wrote. They speculated this was because no research had actually addressed the specific question of whether gender differences were categorical or dimensional.

If men and women were psychologically distinct from one another, then their scores on psychological measures should form large clusters at either end of a spectrum with little overlap between the two groups.

This is the case for physical characteristics such as height, shoulder breadth, arm circumference, and waist-to-hip ratio. Men tend to be tall, have broad shoulders, large arm circumference, and a small waist-to-hip ratio, while the inverse is true for women. A man is extremely unlikely to be taller than a woman, yet have narrower shoulders, for instance.

Yet the same could not be said for the myriad of psychological characteristics examined by the two researchers, including fear of success, sexual attitudes, mate selection criteria, sexual behaviors, empathy, and personality. A man could be aggressive, but verbally skilled and poor at math, for example, combining stereotypical masculine and feminine traits.

“It’s not enough that men, on average, score higher than women on a scale of masculinity,” Carothers told Raw Story. “Nearly all of the men would have to score higher than nearly all of the women on nearly every item of the scale. We did not see that level of consistency with the psychological variables we had.”

– –
[Man and woman in bed with gender symbols via Shutterstock]

The Father which is not the Son which is not the Spirit which is not the Father is our God with the Son and the Spirit; the Lord is one.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is something which gets stirred within me at the professing of that Sacred Mystery, every time.

It is the same feeling I have when standing before the amazing architecture of the Library of Congress or reading Shakespeare or simply taking in a beautiful day or taking in a particularly ingenious intellectual argument.

I've always maintained, to some degree (and this is growing as time goes on), that there is very little difference between all these things; this, I would imagine, can be used to bolster an argument for absolute morality.

This has also led to the confusion some have had to how I've viewed being religious and being a secularist as being seamless.

But I don't want to discuss any of those things, things which have either been discussed in detail before here or would require detailed discussion that would escape the point I do want to address.

Rather, read the portion listed below. It'll help me make my point, in my usual round-about way of doing things (also, it contains potentially offensive concepts if you're of more restrained mind about thinking about God).

An excerpt:

Growing up outside the church, I'd drawn my ideas about the Catholic god from Fellini movies as being something like Anita Ekberg driving a red Ferrari. It had never occurred to me to ask the question "Is God fuckable?" because I never doubted the answer. It's one of the reasons I wanted to be Catholic.

When I first started going to Mass, in my thirties, I'd been studying Saint Augustine and was soaked in his language of intense longing for God. I wasn't surprised at all that in one of the first homilies I heard, the priest said he wanted Jesus to be his lover. I didn't realize this was an extraordinary thing for a priest to say. The mystics are always saying stuff like that. Sitting in the pews for a few years, I figured out that when it comes to sex, parish priests more usually offer a mix of awkward shame and romanticism right out of junior high. Mostly, though, it's just not mentioned.

Catholic religious imagery is intense, but after a while, it can become as unremarkable as a pair of slippers. You almost have to be an outsider, a newcomer, or in some sort of crisis to notice it. 

Took me a while to slip into the slippers. Once when I was supposed to lector (read out loud) at daily Mass, I glanced at the reading beforehand and saw it was something about Jerusalem offering her abundant breasts to suck and fondling you on her lap (from Isaiah 66, I think). 
The priest who was due to say Mass that day was a man I wasn't altogether at ease with, and I didn't really want to read this facing him across a small room. 
I said to the guy who set up the daily Masses that I didn't feel comfortable reading this passage. 
He looked at me, absolutely shocked. "But it's scripture," he said. 

I knew he would read it if I insisted, but I thought, OK, fine, lepers or lambs, it's all the same, people don't even hear it. So I read it and the priest stared into space and I stared into space and I could have been reading the Lord's laundry list.

The passion, the body, can get pretty drowsy and domesticated in church, like urgent desire does if you give it warm milk and don't poke it with a stick. Still, it's there if you want it, or if you need it, and if I asked most Catholics I know if God is fuckable, I think I know what they'd say. 
They'd say something like, The world is a sacrament. Take and eat.

Now, the idea of God being "fuckable" is something completely new to me. The author's assurance at how most Catholics would respond to such a question sort of makes me wonder what world they live in and where would one find it.

Yet the questions of sex and, in particular, the religious rituals toward the end do strike a cord.

While I have yet to find the strains of liberal thought I am so certain are within Catholicism (somewhere…), the openness about sex in the context of religious imagery certainly rings true within my knowledge. I once had someone try to tell me that notions of homosexuality in older texts were simply people misreading descriptions of encounters with God because such encounters can take on a seemingly sexual nature (which only serves to reinforce the sacredness of sex and its sacramental component). It's one of the many ways Catholicism seems to gray what is normally taken as strictly black-and-white concepts in religion (though never going nearly as far as some would like and always having an explanation that maintains the traditional viewpoint). It's hard to explain unless you have familiarity with such things (or, seemingly, familiarity with Catholic thought, which is funny to me given my own late blooming that I keep coming back to on this xanga).

But there's something more.

It's that last portion (which is really so beautiful, if understood in its context, that I can barely take it): "They'd say something like, The world is a sacrament. Take and eat."

Someone once told me they couldn't see themselves part of any religious branch which didn't have some notion of the sacraments. I couldn't have understood it then but I have come to. And, for those unfamiliar with the concept of the sacraments, I could give you a description but I don't think it would suffice.

Thus, for now, I shall simply address the sacrament which the passage is clearly alluding to: the Sacrament of the Altar, Holy Communion, the Eucharist (arguably, the focal point about which all of Catholicism circles; without, there is no Catholicism, no Church, no Faith).

For some, this is a concept entirely bereft of familiarity (which, for me, makes it all the more singular and significant).

To make allusion to the Eucharist (the literal embodiment of God offered to us as sustenance, both spiritual and physical) is not simply to say enjoy experience or "take the most out of life". It is to literally make this engagement a holy and spiritual act given to us, again in a spiritual context, by God.

I have continually said that I like that Catholicism takes every experience into consideration in worship: we cross ourselves to engage our touch as we simultaneously speak aloud our belief in the triune God, we use all the visual glory that candles might give a service and incense to reach our scent, etc.

This concept can go into all sorts of fascinating conversations about the state of human nature and its relation to the spiritual, etc. but I don't want to address those here. Rather, in that context, the sacraments take on a more defining conceptualization.

They become a sort of testament of sorts, helping to define the religion. In the ways of symbolism so defining for Catholicism, defining the religion around the Eucharist (for everything that it is from having to physically enact it out to the fact that is the act of eating to the spiritual concept behind its action) sets, tenfold, fundamental concepts about the religion at its very foundation.

Perhaps this is the best (for now) way to describe why we become so impassioned by our sacraments.

And it explains why the recitation of that Sacred Mystery at the top can be such a high to partake in. Were I more of a Protestant, I suppose it'd be the same for reciting John 3:16. Or the love of life without the Spiritual for the Secular Humanist. Or that the Summation of Life is to give Life meaning for the Existentialist.

And the reason the end of that above passage is so great is that it ties these other aspects of life into these defining concepts of the Faith as seamlessly as these definers illuminate the Faith (though the current hierarchy would protest to the fundamentalism I seem to see sex as having, even outside of matrimony).

Anyway (in spite of the difficulty to understand some of the above unless you understand what certain concepts mean and feel like), all of this was to articulate this emotion and the potential reasoning behind it.

And to say that, while I always have this religious-like experience with other religions or religious places (only part of why I was involved in interfaith activities), there is only one other religion (or religion-related to encompass when dealing with intellectualism, thus including my secularism) I have ever had a similar reaction to when encountering the whole of the religion and that is Judaism.

And I'm not really sure what to do with it.

(warning: article deals with the topic of rape, in the event that may be triggering)

Three Words I Said To The Man I Defeated In Gears Of War That I’ll Never Say Again

PATRICIA HERNANDEZ  31 MAY, 2012 1:00 PM

“I raped you.” If words could lynch someone, then this was the moment for it. The post-game scoreboard said I had technically won, so I’d shown them all, right? No, no I hadn’t. The avalanche of trash talk was one thing — you play online enough, you come to expect it — but the laughter, the laughter stripped meaning from my victory. The laughter made me feel like I was shrinking, like I was in danger of disappearing at any moment.

Again.

“I raped you.”

The words weren’t coming from them. No, they were coming from me. Me. The rape survivor. I was the one saying those words, which now hung tremulously in the air after they failed to find a target. Shaking, I got up from my seat and turned the Xbox off.

At one point, those three words were a little girl’s parroting, an attempt to puff my chest and make it seem like I was tough enough to roll with the rowdiest, nastiest of them all. I, too, was one of the boys — see?! It almost seems like the words crept up on me, really — I can’t tell when I started using them, but they quickly became a part of my daily language. I didn’t win things, no, I ‘raped’ them — raped people, too. The phrase became compulsion, knee-jerk.

How did that happen? How did I come to sling that idea, which was of the worst experiences of my life, so nonchalantly at others?

I’ve been raped a number of times, by a number of different people. It was always different, but it was always the same in one important, crucial way. Rape, in my personal experience, was the literal manifestation of a power dynamic. My aggressor was physically assaulting me, yes, but more than that, he was ‘metaphorically’ subjugating me. To rape someone, after all, is to lack respect for someone as a human being enough that consent is no longer necessary.

I know that. And yet…

That match. Something about it made me break. For them, this was just another milking match in Gears of War 3 where one poor sap — that’d be me — decided to brave the odds. My teammates had abandoned me after a lacklustre first round in an attempt to protect their precious K/D ratio. They were convinced that the other team was superior, so it didn’t make sense to waste time with a hopeless match. Might as well take the penalty for leaving a game and go find a match where we stood a chance, instead.

I couldn’t leave though.

For starters, I’m an extremely competitive person — in this ranked gametype, I was one of the top one hundred players in the world. They’d seen that to start off. That was the reason that I became a person of interest, someone to look out for just in case I posed a threat. Once the pre-game banter made it obvious that I was a woman, it was like Sam, my character, now had a bullseye painted across her forehead. A decision was taken: they were going to make an example of me.

Fine. While they were busy homing in on me, going for the kills, I’d go for the objective. This happens all the time regardless of game; while a team is too preoccupied with something stupid, I’d just stay focused, play it straight and win. Whatever.

There’s something ‘special’ about Gears of War, though. When you don’t fully kill someone, they go into a state called ‘Down But Not Out.’ This state is when a character model goes on all fours. Like teabagging in Halo, a new, unintended dynamic arose in multiplayer: players would take downed characters and pretend to rape them.

Playing games can bring the Jekyll out in many of us. Well-mannered, sometimes meek friends in an intense setting will transform into someone else, temporarily. They’ll don an entirely different demeanour, and spit disgusting, vitriolic words with passion, with gusto. The more ridiculous the string of words, the more amusing it could be when you stop to listen to yourself. I mean, most of the time, its ‘harmless’, just a natural spirit that arises from competition.

Or, so I wanted to think. It’s easier to not feel accountable for your actions and words when everyone is doing the same thing, isn’t it?

And me, there was something about my experiences with rape that facilitated the way I acted, too — not that I was aware of it at the time. Here’s my deep dark secret: after the rapes, I felt completely worthless. What the hell did I care anymore? I had already been broken. I didn’t feel like I have a reason to push back against ‘rape culture’ because I wasn’t worth fighting for anymore. Who gives a shit?

So yeah. I “rape” things. What of it? What are you gonna do? That was my attitude. It wasn’t until a friend heard me say it that everything changed.

“I raped everyone.”

I was smiling, but when my friend looked at me like I had just murdered a small child, the smile vanished. Oh.

Oh.

Crap. She was a rape survivor, too, you see. I understood, then. Everything fell into place. Maybe I didn’t feel like I was worth anything, maybe I didn’t value myself anymore, but this friend, she was dear to me. I loved her. I needed to change what I said — if not for myself, for her sake.

Back to that match. As my friends left, it became easier and easier for the other team to gang up on me — and why wouldn’t they? Not only did they want to make me feel less than nothing, I was the only one left. The rest of my team were mindless, aimless computer-controlled AI. Ideally, the match would be entirely against AI, because that made it easier for players to boost points online — the bots are too dumb to provide any resistance. Boosting would help improve their rank, so many players try to make entire teams leave if possible. So this was their attempt to try to make me leave, too. The fact that I wouldn’t just leave made their resolve that much steelier, made them that much bolder.

So there I was, my counter steadily rising as I was winning, but I was almost perpetually surrounded by an entire team of players who decided they’d take every opportunity to pretend to rape me. At first, it didn’t phase me — the rape thing was a normal part of playing Gears online, really. Hell, even I did it (!), sometimes. It’s kind of a part of the ‘culture’, as problematic as it is to say.

Matches didn’t usually take this long, though. The other team was good, and as proficient as I was, there was only one of me. After a couple dozen grating ‘sessions’ of it, I was wearing down. And that wasn’t all; they were sending me messages, too, asking me how I liked it, egging me to leave.

I refused.

Instead of backing down, all the theatrics just made me that much more determined to win. I was going to show them. They weren’t going to get the best of me. And on the chance that they still beat me, I’d walk out feeling like the better ‘man,’ because I stuck it through instead of cutting and running like my friends.

I tried sending messages back to them, to let them know my spirit was still in it. I took every opportunity to perform ‘executions’ on them, which are lavish, indulgent QTE kill sequences. An arm ripped off here, a head golfed off there. I wanted to express my superiority in the ‘right’ way. See, I was trying to be better about the way I carried myself in games. I was in the middle of finding alternatives to the things I said online, and was trying to stop performing the pseudo-rape, too. I wanted to do right by the people I cared about.

One of those players got under my skin, though. The ring leader. Towards the end of the match, all I could feel was anger, but Gears of War can be a frustrating game on its own. It was after he sent me a message of himself cackling, that I snapped. That was it. I found him, cornered him, and, screw it all, I wanted to make it clear to him that he would not hold power over me. I downed him, and instead of mercifully killing him, my character raped his.

That unnerved me. And when I won, I was so disheveled that I wanted my words to feel like lacerations. I wanted my voice to burn them through the headset.

“I raped you. I f**kin’ raped you.”

What I said is troubling, especially because the way I was saying it, I wanted to make it clear the sentiment wasn’t figurative. I wanted them to have some vague semblance of the actual experience: that was just how upset I was. I wanted to make it clear that I had destroyed them, because that’s what rape represented in my mind. Someone destroying someone else.

But they just laughed. It didn’t mean a thing, it wasn’t something that would ‘register’ or even something that could be used against them.

The power dynamic was already set in place before the match even started, and it wasn’t in my favour. Trash talk makes it obvious that the implicit understanding of the language of dominion isn’t just sexualised. It’s gendered. That power struggle is culturally understood to be a man versus woman thing, even though rape doesn’t just happen to women. Most of the slurs of choice point toward the same thing. Someone is a bitch, they’re a faggot — feminine — and if you beat someone, then you raped them. The imagery there for most of us will be the same: a man physically assaulting a woman, not the other way around.

That’s the tragic thing about rape and its surrounding culture. It’s not just that it’s so potent as an image of power dynamics, but that that potency also has the ability to pull even survivors like me into using it against others. It’s not just what I did in Gears of War. There’s plenty of other things that I’ve been guilty of in the past, before I started giving a damn — like slut shaming, like thinking that a woman could ‘ask for it’.

I can’t help but ask myself, then. Who really won that match? Me, who completed the objectives successfully? Or them, who, despite as hard as I tried, made me complicit in the rape culture that has taken so much away from me?

Mother: Jonathan, could you come here, please?
Me: Yes'm?
Mother: Did you know that your brother is having sex?
Me: Uhh…what?
Mother: Did…you know…that…your brother…is having sex?
Me: So…you found the condom in his wallet*, huh?
Mother: So you knew‽
Me: Well, Mom, you really should have seen this coming. Umm…that pun was actually unintended.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brother: So, what were you and Mom talking about on the couch when my friends were over?
Me: Oh, just discussing your sexcapades in college.
*Both I and him burst out laughing*
Brother: Well, if you don't go digging through people's stuff, you don't find out things you don't want to know.

*As discussed here, you should never put condoms in a wallet. This chafes them and wears them out.

The Weekly Sift making sense of the news one week at a time

The Distress of the Privileged
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯

In a memorable scene from the 1998 film Pleasantville (in which two 1998 teen-agers are transported into the black-and-white world of a 1950s TV show), the father of the TV-perfect Parker family returns from work and says the magic words “Honey, I’m home!”, expecting them to conjure up a smiling wife, adorable children, and dinner on the table.

This time, though, it doesn’t work. No wife, no kids, no food. Confused, he repeats the invocation, as if he must have said it wrong. After searching the house, he wanders out into the rain and plaintively questions this strangely malfunctioning Universe: “Where’s my dinner?”

Privileged distress. I’m not bringing this up just to discuss old movies. As the culture evolves, people who benefitted from the old ways invariably see themselves as victims of change. The world used to fit them like a glove, but it no longer does. Increasingly, they find themselves in unfamiliar situations that feel unfair or even unsafe. Their concerns used to take center stage, but now they must compete with the formerly invisible concerns of others.

If you are one of the newly-visible others, this all sounds whiny compared to the problems you face every day. It’s tempting to blast through such privileged resistance with anger and insult.

Tempting, but also, I think, a mistake. The privileged are still privileged enough to foment a counter-revolution, if their frustrated sense of entitlement hardens.

So I think it’s worthwhile to spend a minute or two looking at the world from George Parker’s point of view: He’s a good 1950s TV father. He never set out to be the bad guy. He never meant to stifle his wife’s humanity or enforce a dull conformity on his kids. Nobody ever asked him whether the world should be black-and-white; it just was.

George never demanded a privileged role, he just uncritically accepted the role society assigned him and played it to the best of his ability. And now suddenly that society isn’t working for the people he loves, and they’re blaming him.

It seems so unfair. He doesn’t want anybody to be unhappy. He just wants dinner.

Levels of distress. But even as we accept the reality of George’s privileged-white-male distress, we need to hold on to the understanding that the less privileged citizens of Pleasantville are distressed in an entirely different way. (Margaret Atwood is supposed to have summed up the gender power-differential like this: “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”)

George deserves compassion, but his until-recently-ideal housewife Betty Parker (and the other characters assigned subservient roles) deserves justice. George and Betty’s claims are not equivalent, and if we treat them the same way, we do Betty an injustice.

Tolerating Dan Cathy. Now let’s look at a more recent case from real life.

One of the best things to come out of July’s Chick-fil-A brouhaha was a series of posts on the Owldolatrous blog, in which a gay man (Wayne Self) did his best to wrangle the distress of the privileged.

The privileged in this case are represented by Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy, who stirred up a hornet’s nest when he denounced the “prideful, arrogant attitude” of those who support same-sex marriage, saying that they “are inviting God’s judgment on our nation”.

His comments drew attention to the millions that Chick-fil-A’s founding family has contributed to anti-gay organizations, and led to calls for a boycott of their restaurants.

To which his defenders responded: Is tolerance a one-way street? Cathy was just expressing the genuine beliefs of his faith. As an American, he has freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Why can’t gays and their supporters respect that?

“Nothing mutual about it.” Self starts his post by acknowledging Cathy’s distress, but refusing to accept it as equivalent to his own. Cathy is suffering because people are saying bad things about him and refusing to buy his sandwiches. Meanwhile, 29 states (including Self’s home state of Louisiana) let employers fire gays for being gay. There are 75 countries Self and his partner can’t safely visit, because homosexuality is illegal and (in some of them) punishable by death.

The Cathy family has given $5 million to organizations that work to maintain this state of oppression. Self comments:

This isn’t about mutual tolerance because there’s nothing mutual about it. If we agree to disagree on this issue, you walk away a full member of this society and I don’t. There is no “live and let live” on this issue because Dan Cathy is spending millions to very specifically NOT let me live. I’m not trying to do that to him.

Christian push-back. That post got over a million page views and (at last count) 1595 comments, including some push-back from conservative Christians. Self’s follow-up responded to one commenter who wrote that he supported Chick-fil-A as

[a] company with a founder who speaks for what seems to be the minority these days.

In other words, I specifically feel BASHED by the general media and liberal establishment and gay activists for simply being a Bible-believing Christian. From TV shows, movies, mainstream news and music, so much is Intolerance of my conservative beliefs. I am labeled a HOMOPHOBIC and a HATER. … I neither fear nor hate homosexuals.

Self brings in a blog post by Bristol Palin, in which she scoffs at an interviewer’s implication that she might refuse to have a gay partner on “Dancing With the Stars”.

In their simplistic minds, the fact that I’m a Christian, that I believe in God’s plan for marriage, means that I must hate gays and must hate to even be in their presence. Well, they were right about one thing: there was hate in that media room, but the hate was theirs, not mine.

… To the Left, “tolerance” means agreeing with them on, well, everything. To me, tolerance means learning to live and work with each other when we don’t agree – and won’t ever agree.

Like Bristol Palin, Self’s commenter sees himself as the victim of bigotry. He isn’t aware of hating anybody. He just wants to preserve the world he grew up in, and can’t be bothered to picture how others suffer in that world.

He wants dinner.

Aesop II. Self answers with a story: a sequel to the Aesop fable of the mouse who saves a lion.

[A story is] the only way I know to address some of these things without resorting to words that hurt or offend, or shut down discussion.

Aesop’s tale ends with the mouse and the lion as friends, but Self notes that they are still not equal: The Lion is King of the Jungle and the Mouse … is a mouse.

In Self’s sequel, the Lion hosts the Kingdom Ball, to which mice are never invited, because they disgust many of the larger animals. Nothing personal, the Lion explains to his friend, it’s just the way things are.

At this point, Self breaks out of the story to explain why (in spite of the fact that his commenter feels “BASHED by the general media and liberal establishment”) he is casting conservative Christians as the Lion and gays as the Mouse: It is not illegal to be a Christian in any state. You can’t be fired for Christianity. Christians may feel bashed by criticism, but gays get literally bashed by hate crimes. Christians may feel like people are trying to silence them, but the Tennessee legislature debated a bill making it illegal to say the word gay in public schools. (The senate passed it.)

There is a vast difference between being told you’re superstitious or old-fashioned and being told you’re an abomination that doesn’t deserve to live. There’s a vast difference between being told you’re acting hateful and being told God hates you.

I’ve been gay and Christian all my life. Trust me: Christian is easier. It’s not even close.

Leonine distress. But does the Lion have reason to be annoyed with the Mouse? Of course. The Mouse is making trouble by asking to go where he’s not wanted. The Mouse is “prideful” for expecting the rules to change to suit him. However, Self admits that the Lion probably doesn’t hate or fear the Mouse.

I don’t think you hate me. I certainly don’t think you’re afraid of me. Neither is Bristol Palin. She probably even has LGBT people she calls friends. She just disagrees with them about whether they should be invited to the party (the party, in this case, being marriage).

But here’s the problem: the basis of that disagreement is her belief that her relationships are intrinsically better than ours.

There’s a word for this type of statement: supremacist.

Ah, now we get to “words that hurt or offend”. Here’s what he means by it:

Supremacy is the habit of believing or acting as if your life, your love, your culture, your self has more intrinsic worth than those of people who differ from you.

Self sees a supremacist attitude in the commenter’s

sense of comfort with yourself as an appropriate judge of my choices, ideas, or behaviors, … unwillingness to appreciate the inherent inequality in a debate where I have to ask you for equality … [and] unwillingness to acknowledge the stake that you have have in your feeling of superiority rather than blame it on God.

[…]Now let’s finish the fable: Uninvited, the Mouse crashes the party. The shocked guests go silent, the Lion is furious, and the ensuing argument leads to violence: The Lion chucks the Mouse out the window, ending both the party and the friendship.

The lesson: Supremacy itself isn’t hate. You may even have affection for the person you feel superior to. But supremacy contains the seeds of hate.

Supremacy turns to hate when the feeling of innate superiority is openly challenged. … Supremacy is why you and Bristol Palin have more outrage at your own inconvenience than at the legitimate oppression of others.

We can talk about the subjugation of women later, honey. Where’s my dinner?

George Parker’s choices. All his life, George has tried to be a good guy by the lights of his society. But society has changed and he hasn’t, so he isn’t seen as a good guy any more. He feels terrible about that, but what can he do?

One possibility: Maybe he could learn to be a good guy by the lights of this new society. It would be hard. He’d have to give up some of his privileges. He’d have to examine his habits to see which ones embody assumptions of supremacy. He’d have to learn how to see the world through the eyes of others, rather than just assume that they will play their designated social roles. Early on, he would probably make a lot of mistakes and his former inferiors would correct him. It would be embarrassing.

But there is an alternative: counter-revolution. George could decide that his habits, his expectations, and the society they fit are RIGHT, and this new society is WRONG. If he joined with the other fathers (and right-thinking mothers like the one in the poster) of Pleasantville, maybe they could force everyone else back into their traditional roles.

Which choice he makes will depend largely on the other characters. If they aren’t firm in their convictions, the counter-revolution may seem easy. (“There, there, honey. I know you’re upset. But be reasonable.”) But if their resentment is implacable, becoming a good guy in the new world may seem impossible.

[…]Confronting this distress is tricky, because neither acceptance nor rejection is quite right. The distress is usually very real, so rejecting it outright just marks you as closed-minded and unsympathetic. It never works to ask others for empathy without offering it back to them.

At the same time, my straight-white-male sunburn can’t be allowed to compete on equal terms with your heart attack. To me, it may seem fair to flip a coin for the first available ambulance, but it really isn’t. Don’t try to tell me my burn doesn’t hurt, but don’t consent to the coin-flip.

When I heard that the DSM-5 was coming out, I wondered if being Trans would cease being classified as a disorder. And it has!
Source: http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2012/12/03/1271431/apa-revises-manual-being-transgender-is-no-longer-a-mental-disorder/?mobile=nc

By Zack Ford on Dec 3, 2012 at 10:50 am

This Saturday, the American Psychiatric Association board of trustees approved the latest proposed revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, what will now be known as the DSM-5. This marks a historic milestone for people who are transgender and gender non-conforming, as their identities are no longer classified as a mental disorder. Homosexuality was similarly declassified as a mental disorder in 1973.

Until now, the term “gender identity disorder” has been used to diagnose people who are transgender. For conservatives, this has provided rhetorical carte blanche to describe the entire trans committee as disordered, delusional, and mentally ill. In some cases, this diagnosis has even been used to discriminate against trans people, with claims that they are unfit parents or employees, as examples. On the other hand, insurance companies have been more willing to cover the expenses associated with transition under this language, because treatment for a disorder is considered medically necessary, rather than cosmetic.

The new manual will diagnose transgender people with “Gender Dysphoria,” which communicates the emotional distress that can result from “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender.” This will allow for affirmative treatment and transition care without the stigma of disorder. Earlier this year, the APA also released new health guidelines for transgender patients, as well as a position statement affirming transgender care and civil rights. Both documents align with a new standard for respecting trans people in the medical community.

It was only after homosexuality was declassified as a mental disorder that ex-gay ministries formed, protesting the medical community’s decision to affirm non-heterosexual orientations. Some dangerous ex-trans ministries exist already and are championed by Focus on the Family, NARTH, PFOX, and other anti-LGBT organizations. It’s possible that these efforts may similarly increase in the wake of this DSM revision.