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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Medium Dave
Published Letters: 5 Editor's Choice: 2
This news is truly, deeply bothersome to the anti-feminist blowhards, apparently. Most of us got over the "no girls in the treehouse" mentality around puberty... I guess I know where the ones who didn't are hanging out these days.
I'll explain what was wrong with Mr. King's comments. Basically, he packed two bad assumptions into one short phrase. The first assumption is about women being passive. His questioner asked what she could do about global warming... in other words, she asked what actions she, herself, could take. And he responded that she could "stop admiring." Which is doubly insulting, as he's asking her to stop being a passive bystander in a scenario he imagined himself.
Secondly, he's assuming that women are responsible for things that men do. Which is absurd, if one thinks about it logically: The man in his scenario made the choice to acquire and drive a Ferrari, so surely it's his reponsibility. If he did it thinking he'd impress women that way, well, that's his problem, not theirs.
No one here is denying that Sir David King has made valuable contributions to the cause of fighting global warming. And we understand that he was trying to make a point about how our society should discourage wasteful consumption rather than encouraging it. Nevertheless, he chose to make his point using sexist language which reduces women (in his mind) to being passive, and at the same time makes them (paradoxically) responsible for the behavior of men. That is unfortunate, and that is what this article is about.
Global warming is causing drought, wildfires, and catastrophic weather right now. It will cause even more misery in the future. The people affected by these conditions are more likely to be poor and live in less affluent countries, but that doesn't make them abstractions.
Take a look at the two pro-slavery quotes in this article, and you'll see that both of them consider the slaves to be abstractions. We know that this does not mean that real people weren't being harmed by slavery.
I'm sorry to see this kind of "genre snobbery" among Salon readers. The fantastic tradition in Western literature has existed as long as there has been Western literature. What is Beowulf, if not an epic fantasy? Vampires, specifically, appear in the legends of many different cultures, and they are featured in literary works that predate the modern novel. The "realist" tradition, which many people now believe is the superior one, is actually an upstart, barely two centuries old.
Alan Ball did realism brilliantly in SFU, so I'm intrigued by this foray into the fantastic. But I'll have to get my HBO back...
The Wasilla soap opera just gets weirder as Palin complains critics are "picking apart a good point guard"
The media outlet's use of Bush euphemisms sparks a much-needed debate on journalistic standards.
And so are his Fox News pals, who lambasted Sen. Al Franken's "stolen election"
An inflexible right wing is allowing the Golden State to drown in debt. But it's not alone
Thanks for sharing, Governor. Now please take a cue from Norm Coleman, and go away
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