Monthly Archives: January 2015

The Puritanization of Youth

You’ve probably seen toxoplasmic headlines about the “sexualization” of youth. But what this really reflects, I hope to convince you, is a panic regarding society’s inability to maintain a perfect Puritanization.1 Every time I see people complain about “sexualization”, I want to scream, and I’ve been wanting to speak about this since I was a kid myself.2

bikergate

Unsafe at any speed. (LeatherUp.com)

A formative experience of my childhood – when I was seven, I think – was seeing a poster of bikini-clad women on motorcycles. It was behind a door in the bedroom of the son of a professional acquaintance of our family.3

This was a dangerous and irresponsible image – they should have been wearing proper equipment if they were going to be riding. If they were to get into an accident, there wouldn’t be much left of them.

At around the same time, I also saw prints of a few Paul Peel paintings. They made me feel like I could be beautiful and they made me want to be naked and free with other kids. At some point I learned about “nudist camps” and so I started taking my clothes off when I was by myself. I also saw something in a grocery store tabloid about a woman being allergic to clothes and I obsessed about the story and actually kind of envied her.

afterthebath

“After the Bath” (Paul Peel, via I am a Child: Children in Art History)

Taken together, it was like I had lived all my life in the desert and had never known water and here was an oasis and boy does that water taste good, but I also don’t know the terms ‘oasis’, ‘water’, or even ‘wet’. I suppose this knowledge was dangerous in a peculiar way – I had access to drinking water, at least in my imagination, but I couldn’t talk about it with anyone, and I dreaded being caught.4

Continue reading →

  1. “Victorianization” may be more accurate, but nobody will know what the hell I mean and they’ll think of Dickens instead of Kellogg. Apologies to actual Puritans.

    On how our current panic reflects the Victorian panic:
    Maggie McNeill, The Honest Courtesan – “Everything Old is New Again” ↩

  2. Excepting a flirtation with Dr. Laura-style social conservatism in my adolescent years, where in the very presence of my body screaming “SEX NOW” I dutifully went to war against myself (and others) just like many other people exposed to a no-sex-outside-marriage Christianity. ↩

  3. No, not a dentist. ↩

  4. To someone thinking, “Look, you just said it yourself, you’re living proof of the harm exposure to exposed skin causes children!” I would say, “Well, it’s kind of like the harm of getting caught with alcohol during Prohibition. Your claim of the harm of the thing would have little or nothing to do with the innate nature of the thing.” Too many things are like that these days. ↩

Review: Podcamp Halifax 2015

This past Sunday there was an unconference at the Halifax Central Library: Podcamp Halifax 2015. Here are some tidbits and reflections based on my notes.1 General thoughts at the bottom.

These are the sessions I attended:

  1. Text and Context
  2. Community Building: Dungeons and Dragons Style
  3. Painting WITH Numbers: An Intro to Data Analysis
  4. Open House, Rusty Doors
  5. High Performance JavaScript
  6. Codcamp Halifax 2015

Continue reading →

  1. I’m not going to rate the presentations on a 0-to-10 scale like I usually do with my mini reviews. The presentations aren’t supposed to be set-in-stone choreographed song-and-dances anyway. In many cases I either might sort of come to know some of these people, or I have or might form opinions about them that would make me even less objective than usual. And with such an up-close-and-personal thing, I have to consider the feelings of the presenters.

    You also really don’t want to get into saying that any particular presentation would have been better than any other. Even if it’s nigh-objectively true and would be so for 99% of attendees, the truer any superiority becomes, the unkinder it gets to point it out. ↩

Beyond Innocence and Blame

I want to talk about innocence and blame. I think both are fundamentally flawed and our belief in them compounds rather than lessens our miseries, especially in how they leave us susceptible to the politics of alienation and retribution, resulting in terrible justice policies, among other things.

People routinely say “everything happens for a reason,”1 seemingly asserting that there’s something special about this arrangement of things.2 That’s as it may be. Here I take the standpoint that “everything happens for a cause”. Hop on board the things-have-causes axiomatic train and let’s explore some of the implications for how we think about innocence and exoneration, blame and retribution.

This song played on the radio all the time when I was in Grade 9 and I thought of the girl I loved3 at the time and how after something happened to her we could lay on a grassy field and hold hands. It even got to the point where I wished something would happen to her, so this could happen. Though I’d probably be no more likely to show my feelings then than normally, so if my wish had come true because I made it, it would have been both wretched and futile.

For a while after this, being the concrete sort of thinker I was4, I wanted to think of innocence as something real. Maybe it was something I still had, but that I’d lose later.5

What is innocence? A state where you should not be blamed for something. Okay, but why not?

You couldn’t have understood.

Couldn’t have? That’s quite an assertion. How do you know that? I’ll agree that it’s more likely that a kid doesn’t understand x, but you have to test it. Saying that the kid can’t understand x is demeaning. (Okay, it’s probably not demeaning to babies to say they can’t understand nuclear physics, but you can still ‘test’ this: knowing that you haven’t seen them reading or mathing much yet, you can be nigh-absolutely confident that they can’t, or at least that all the babies you’ve ever met can’t.) Anyway, here’s the story of a Korean fellow who was solving differential equations at age seven.

Continue reading →

  1. Everything?! ↩

  2. Yes, the exact past that we had is the only way to this exact present. But what’s special about this present, aside from its being the one drawn from the Universe Machine? ↩

  3. At a distance, unfortunately. I was afraid of being outed as liking girls and I went out of my way to avoid her. ↩

  4. Or cement-head, if you’re less charitable. ↩

  5. If you mean that kind of “innocence”, much later. ↩