I'm inclined to find Mr. du Toit more amusing than enraging. How about a review of Iron John (Bly?) is that an acceptable treatment of the same issues?

As I argued elsewhere this is very much in line with writings of the last 2500 years ( and likely before lost in whatever created the first dark age in the Eastern Med)that today's youth are going to the dogs and particularly amusing when compared with Philip Wylie's assorted rants - Generation of Vipers - on Momism describing the great decline in social values represented by the television of Wylie's period - which is here seen as the golden age of macho (cf. William Bendix as Riley). Given Mr. du Toit's personal history I myself would tread very lightly in the comparison to Huck Finn's Pap on the race issue or credit Mr. du Toit on race if not gender. As one of Mr. Heinlein's characters (and in this case I suspect the sentiments are the author's given the story of the tramp and the high button shoe) says: No one slouches at a Birkenhead drill - and there are today, as there always have been and always will be those who would stand proud, those who would slouch and those who need NCO's to keep the line dressed. A lament that folks in peacetime are not eager for the opportunity is silly; in my youth I would have welcomed an opportunity to show off for the girls by throwing myself on a grenade - today I would figure the results rather defeat the idea but I'd still do it albeit with regrets. A certain wussification is a sign of maturity I suppose but there is something to be said for the other perspective; some people may not outgrow it but immaturity is hardly evil per se?

Wow. Of all the things to lose sleep over, I can't imagine anything less worthy than the 'pussification of the western male."

Someone needs to tell him that literacy is for womenfolk and sissies and the more he types the smaller his testicles become.

Just 'cause you won't link to du Toit doesn't mean I won't: take this!

I'll try to hold myself to two comments (it's not easy!).

if it were that easy for men to turn into women, transies would be a lot more convincing than they are

I've never seen "transies." The terms I know are "trannies" and "transfolk" or "transpeople/transmen/transwomen." But I digress. My point was that the ones who are convincing are the ones you don't notice, and you might consider adding "some" to that sentence.

"Masculinity" didn92t mean 93masculinity," either, which was just as well.

It would be an act of shameless self-promotion to recommend my brand-new essay (with Richard Dutcher) in Laurie Toby Edison's new photography book, Familiar Men: A Book of Nudes which takes on this subject at significant length (no pun intended) and in significant depth.

So instead I will closely paraphrase the quote from writer and curator Jaime Cortez which is somewhere in that essay. "Masculinity is much more exquisite and fine than femininity. Women can count on the amazing flexibility they have built into femininity. Masculinity, in contrast, shatters at a touch, and leaves the fuck-up standing in the rubble, vulnerable as a pomegranate with its skin off, tender jewels exposed." (from "Sun to Sun" in Virgins, Guerrillas and Locas, book edited by and story written by Cortez).

In other words, it's ever so much easier to do all kinds of things without having your womanhood threatened than it is to do anything at all transgressive without having your manhood threatened. This is probably a consequence of the very real privileges of masculinity, but it still sucks.

You know what? Some women deserve to be single moms.

Funny, my first read of that was du Twit (er, Toit) knocking himself. I would agree that any women guilty of such a lapse in judgment deserves to be quit of his company.

I think 93transies94 might be the official nickname for Steven Den Beste92s favorite imaginary boogiemen, the transnational progressives.

applause.

I've been seeing a lot of the Child as a lifelong punishment for female transgression thing this week on various blogs.

Presumably it's a family value.

As a male, I find du Toit's ideas not laughable, but insulting. I do apologize for this long bout of preaching to the choir, but I really won't feel clean until I've said something.

I talk about guns, self-defense, politics, beautiful women, sports, warfare, hunting, and power tools -- all the things that being a man entails.

Tell me--when did you get the right to decide what being a man entails? Who appointed you arbiter of humanity? And where the hell did you come up with those criteria?

Admittedly, I do agree with a few of them.

I, too, never back down because the odds are overwhelming. If I did, I'd not bother to respond to a man with a neutronium skull, especially when he probably is incapable of hearing disagreement.

I open doors for women. Not because they can't, which is what you would have, but because it's my way of saying "Let me be nice." I open doors for everybody, in fact, and that's why.

I recognize evil when I see it, too. (You don't, incidentally; you decided that "evil" is another word for "different.") Though I don't decide that it's my God-given right to flatten that evil without care for the innocents in the way.

I think TV--the media in general--is a reliable barometer of our culture, too. But I don't read off of it and say "that's our culture," I read off of it and ask, "what does this indicate?" The 1950s, your ideal, were throwback eras. As a result of the horrors of World War II (just war, maybe; horrors were still inevitable), and the enroaching fear of Communism, America wanted a peaceful world, one where problems were all solved in half an hour and everybody ended up happy. That's not how the world was, and certainly not how it is.

And if you don't want to be a figure of fun and ridicule, here's a piece of advice: Get your head out of your ass. "We don't improve ourselves, we improve our stuff." At least I can't say you're lying; you're just plain moronic.

Deb, I'll take the respelling. What is and isn't convincing is in the eye of the beholder, and the gender line is blurrier than is commonly recognized. Some-if-not-all people who naturally fall into blurry territory will tend to dress into one or the other gender. The class of people who naturally fall into blurrily gendered territory overlaps but is not wholly congruent with the class of people who are unshakably convinced that their proper gender is not the one a quick visual inspection would suggest.

And so forth and so on. Will you settle for "there'd be fewer unconvincing transsexuals"? But no -- that implies that they intend to be a convincing specimen of their semi-reassigned gender, and I know at least one (as do you) whose claimed gender is "obvious transsexual."

Really, what offended me was the assumption that anyone who's unsuccessful at being a man will automatically turn into a woman. It's what moved me to have Patrick snap that picture.

Familiar Men is a wonderful book -- I was just browsing it at WFC -- but I have to wonder about this conception of masculinity as this dreadfully fragile flower. Perhaps they feel like their masculinity is that fragile; but if everything goes wrong and they wind up standing there amidst the debris, what gender are they then?

I'm not unsympathetic, not in theory at any rate. Thing is, I grew up hearing about the fragile male ego. If you don't let the boys win at games, if you don't let the boys run things, if you don't pretend the boys are smarter than they are, their sense of their own masculinity will be damaged. If they take out their frustrations on their wives and children, you have to understand that it's very hard to be a man, and they're doing the best they can. Et cetera. I'm not talking theory. I'm talking about sentences that actually got said to me.

Life is hard and uncertain. The further down the social ladder, the more uncertain it is. If this brittle, frangible male identity is a social construct, it's one that's a lot more dangerous for some men than for others. If it's inevitable, something that's built into men, then we have to deal with it. But short of establishing that it's genuinely innate, I have to ask whether it's a good thing at all.

adamsj, you are a wicked fellow.

The entire notion of masculine ego is bad insecurity management; not doing the work to look at whether or not you and your self image are congruent, so everyone else has to never even imply the question to avoid abuse.

Doesn't even benefit the men involved, which -- if it did -- would not excuse it.

Oddly enough I didn't take the identification of an unsuccessful male with a woman at all seriously - taken literally that is indeed logically absurd and highly objectionable. Even in Utah failure at the Priesthood is not a qualification for the Relief Society - but of course it is quite easy there to be a second class male literally. I guess there have been hits on some sore spots I don't have. I still wonder what all the fuss is about if more people care to discuss beyond ad hominum.

Spotting a trannie is like spotting a toupee. Some are more obvious than others, but with most there's an obvious self-delusion of "people are being too polite/embarrassed to say anything" being interpreted as "Nobody can tell!" Even the most convincing tend to raise the "What's up with her?" flags, usually by dressing in a kittenish outfit that even a midwestern cheerleader would find too girly. That and the fact that most women tend to accessorize to convey their own personality/interests, plus match the occasion, whereas trannies usually accessorize to convey a message of vanilla femininity decades out of style, and usually wear fashions at least two levels too fancy for wherever they are. I'm sorry, you do not wear an evening gown to the 7-11.

I can't speak for the generations before mine, but women of my age have the privilege of wearing whatever outfit they want and having it considered normal attire, and have had that option since kindergarten--which is not the male experience at the same age.

Things like the bitchy Cheerios commercial are a backlash against Father Knows Best era of cinema, where women were often silly and flighty (cf. Olive Oyl's "If I Were President," circa 1948), and I think it's fair to say that misandry is given a pass all too often in the modern era. I remember once, in a debate, having a woman try to play the "I feel you're just being a typical assertive male" card, which I pointed out was just the flipside of "You're just a girl, so you don't have anything important to say, so nyah!"

Fact is, there are some men who are doormatts, and some women who are the same, and they both need to grow a little backbone. But it is sexist to call doormatts pussies.

scifantasy, I always open doors for people too, as well as saying excuse me and thank you in the subway.

If nothing else, it stuns people frozen until you can get by.

Perhaps they feel like their masculinity is that fragile; but if everything goes wrong and they wind up standing there amidst the debris, what gender are they then?

Eunuch, I think; the gender of being male without masculinity. And therein lies the fear, for one does not automatically become a woman if one fails to be a man; one becomes an emasculated man.

One could carry that theorizing further: a male, on being emasculated, does not become woman, because he is not female, and thus does not have the powers that come with being female -- because, of course (and amongst other powers), all anyone female has to do to get what she wants is bat her eyelashes suggestively at the men in power, and they're immediately under her thumb, right?

This, then, explains why masculinity-obsessed men fear strong women: strong women reach for the powers of masculinity, while not giving up their femaleness. They control the horizontal and the vertical, and they cannot be stopped. And so they must be undermined; they must be declared neither female nor masculine.

Or, at least, I think that's a plausible description of the matter. I may, however, be completely off base instead.

Teresa -- does that photo come under your rubric of "telling the truth for once"?

Me again, yes, it's 11:30 on a Friday night. I have no life.

I was thinking about this guy's take on masculinity and what I found particularly offensive about his phrase "pussification" It's this: masculinity and femininity can be defined so many different ways that they are nearly meaningless terms. A man can be gentle and be very masculine, a woman can be strong and feminine, or the opposite can also be true. The range within genders is far more vast than between the genders.

That said, it's ridiculous to propose that one behavior is not masculine enough, or that men are being pussfied. Nobody could get away with a remark like "the Jewification of the Western man" or "the negrofication of the Western male" yet some bonehead can say "pussification" and some people will agree with what he's saying.

We've grown as a society enough to realize that there is no African or Caucasian way of behaving, and to even suggest such a thing is preposterous. I long for the day when similiar remarks based on gender are similiarly obsolete.

Wow, so much to comment on here....

As someone who's in FAMILIAR MEN, I'm very proud to be part of that book. Some of the reactions I've heard from folks when I mention I'm in it are not particularly wonderful, but I'm still proud.

As someone who is, in TNH's telling phrase, "down on his luck" at the moment, I'm battling with the question of what's masculinity and what's humanity a lot more than I have before. Somehow, though, I don't characterize my problems as being about masculinity. Maybe it's the transgressive look of long hair and sideburns that Isaac Asimov stole from me in the Seventies, but I can't believe that who I am is really about my gender. Since masculinity is often connected with "doing well in the financial world" (remember Kissinger's comment on power being the ultimate aphrodisiac? Rich powerful guys can buy more sex than poor powerless guys, in various coins), I can definitely see, in myself, a disconnect from feeling that I'm worthy of having good sexual connections because I'm feeling powerless and unable to support myself [note -- that I'm feeling it does not mean it's true, it's just that I can see the disconnect].

Sex, gender, power. They influence each other, but they don't equal each other. And the influence is sometimes brutal, sometimes subtle. Correlation does not equal causality, which can be hard to remember when you're treading water in a septic tank (that there's shit, and that I'm here, doesn't mean I intended to end up here, just that what I did got me here and now I get to figure out how to change things). du Toit seems to believe that correlation and causality are intimately linked. And he's setting himself up for a big fall, IMO. But then, maybe all he wants is some attention, which this grandstanding is clearly getting him.

There's an addictive behavior here, says one who's intimately experiencing same. The attention is a rush, kinda like a drug or alcohol rush ("Yes, that's the feeling I was missing!"). In an ideal world, we'd ignore the petty dictators, the racists, the sexists, the folks-who-try-to-make-different-wrong; because we'd know that ignoring them was safe. But we don't have an ideal world; we need to say "This is wrong, and I won't stand for it" because too many people don't realize immediately how wrong it is. And fall for it, and blame folks outside themselves for the cesspool they're swimming in. It's easy to do -- not all the shit here is my own, and it's easier to look at what comes from others than what comes from myself. But nobody other than me can change the fact that I'm here and I'm swimming. Expecting someone to do so doesn't really work very well.

I've been lucky, and I've been unlucky. Lucky feels a lot better. I'm still trying to hold on to not blaming anyone else when I'm unlucky, since I'd rather not give someone else the credit for (all of) the lucky times.

Rambling, and not sure that I should post, but choosing to do so in part because I believe that personal ephemeral states of mind may help someone else....

Cheers,
Tom

1) adamsj, thanks, i feel soiled now. But it was a great video.

2) I know one 'transie' that's really convincing, but he's not done yet (may never be, don't want to ask, been through the whole tamale with a close high school friend of Jim's who, BTW, is a LOT happier female). I HAVE seen him reallly fuck with a local sf familiar drunk out at our Renaissance festival (after the drunk made an ass out of himself trying to ask Andrea if s(h)e'd go back home with him and Andrea said no, about 15 minutes later the drunk came back and said, "Paula, was that a man or a woman I propositioned back there?" I just smiled kindly and said, "what do you think."

3) the DuToit was just the thing to raise my blood pressure first thing in the morning (when I read it). I think so little of Bush that I'd rather not say more, he's a pussy and does not deserve respect. But DuToit uses lots of fallacies to make their 'point', and just pissed me off. Like I need it right now, at the busiest time in my season. And it was my own sweetie who told me about it. Grr. (but then again, ... oh, no, I'm not going into that, it's too personal. Jim is a Good Guy. that's all I'm going to say. We've been married 25 years and he rolls with the transigences of life just fine. And deals with people very fairly. Which is what probably pissed him off about Du Toit too (Freudian slip, I just typed that Du Tit, but it could be Du Twat, too....)

enough, peace.

Paula

Well, it's official. The graphic "Making Light salutes Kim du Toit," after reading the post, caused me to guffaw a medium-sized Cheeto through my left nostril, proving it can be done in the proper circumstance. Dear Lord! And, Ouch!

That said, it's ridiculous to propose that one behavior is not masculine enough, or that men are being pussfied. Nobody could get away with a remark like "the Jewification of the Western man" or "the negrofication of the Western male" yet some bonehead can say "pussification" and some people will agree with what he's saying.

We've grown as a society enough to realize that there is no African or Caucasian way of behaving, and to even suggest such a thing is preposterous. I long for the day when similiar remarks based on gender are similiarly obsolete.

Jewification/Negrofication/Pussification are all anti-P.C. phrases designed to incense and annoy, but dismissing them from the verbiage doesn't do away with the plain and often unpleasant fact that there are subcultures, and subcultures often clash.

This is the elephant in the corner you're not supposed to mention, like you're not supposed to mention that the unconvincing trannie not only hasn't convinced you but has gotten it painfully wrong, but cultures do have differences and sometimes do not make a good fit. It's like booking the Muslim fundamentalists in the same hotel with the national cheerleading competition.

That said, it's ridiculous to propose that one behavior is not masculine enough, or that men are being pussfied. Nobody could get away with a remark like "the Jewification of the Western man" or "the negrofication of the Western male" yet some bonehead can say "pussification" and some people will agree with what he's saying.

We've grown as a society enough to realize that there is no African or Caucasian way of behaving, and to even suggest such a thing is preposterous. I long for the day when similiar remarks based on gender are similiarly obsolete.

Jewification/Negrofication/Pussification are all anti-P.C. phrases designed to incense and annoy, but dismissing them from the verbiage doesn't do away with the plain and often unpleasant fact that there are subcultures, and subcultures often clash.

This is the elephant in the corner you're not supposed to mention, like you're not supposed to mention that the unconvincing trannie not only hasn't convinced you but has gotten it painfully wrong, but cultures do have differences and sometimes do not make a good fit. It's like booking the Muslim fundamentalists in the same hotel with the national cheerleading competition.

Making Light plus Cheetos equals... something I'm really hoping is a guy thing. ;)

I still don't understand the outraged responses - don't understand why bright people if arguably idealogues like Eric S. Raymond are making so much of the essay despite an evident lack of the sort of outrage shown here.

Taken literally the essay is of course objectionable. I am no more inclined to take it literally than to fly into a rage because Mr. du Toit could be read as giving John Dean Cooper credit for the perhaps ancient Persian phrase [teach him] to ride shoot straight and speak the truth that Colonel Cooper is so fond of; Mr. du Toit can also be read as speaking of a phrase Colonel Cooper has taken and made his own if not originated.

The essay reads to me more like an attack on the sort of person discussed here exthread who seeks divorce from reality; that is who believes in the face of evidence to the contrary that meat comes prepackaged in plastic wrap and if not an actual synthetic is at most a product of the sort of semi-mechanical carniculture described in Pohl's The Space Merchants (is that really out of print these days?). Aside from a rant at the state of society what real damage seems likely to follow if half the world echoed the sentiments? Is it a call to discriminate? To strip women of the vote or otherwise to condemn women to a life of second class citizenship? If so I guess I just can't read english that well.

I think it's fair to say that misandry is given a pass all too often in the modern era

I, on the other hand, think it fair to say that the level of misandry in modern society is several orders of magnitude lower than the level of misogyny, that misandry is roundly and viciously condemned at every turn whereas misogyny is not just given a pass but institutionalised, and that even were those two points not true misandry would still not be able to make a dent in the cosy armour of privilege in which men are swaddled from birth.

(Graydon: amen. Teresa: that picture is priceless.)

clark, IIRC SPACE MERCHANTS is available through a POD printer and we have it at The Other Change of Hobbit. It's one of the Great SF Books of 1953 generally in print since that year (MORE THAN HUMAN, FARENHEIT 451 as the obvious others). As a product of 1953 myself, I am proud to be associated with them (hey, how many mainstream books from any given year are in print 50 years later?).

Cheers,
Tom Whitmore
proud to have been part of a science-fiction specialty store for more than half his life...

Pussification Guy seems to think that there are no men left willing to fight and die for freedom. I guess the hundreds of thousands of men -- and women -- in Iraq recently are there on vacation.

He seems to think that George W. Bush is a model of a proper American male role model. I guess Pussification Guy thinks it's manly to duck out of a war when it's YOUR turn to fight, and then put on the uniform and strut around from a position of safety later.

He thinks that Al Gore is a pussy. When it was Al Gore's time to fight, Gore put on the uniform and put himself in danger. I'm not saying Gore was a mudfoot infantryman -- Gore was a journalist for "Stars and Stripes" -- but he certainly did more for his country during Vietnam than Bush did.

Like Pussification Guy, I was disturbed that Clinton did NOT fight in Vietnam, but at least Clinton stood up and made a public statement that he wasn't going to fight. He didn't hide in the Air National Guard.

The Pussification Guy's view that American men are being feminized is, of course, not unusual, it pervades the pop culture and stand-up comedy. I've never been able to figure it out before, but now I think I have, and I wonder why it ever puzzled me before.

Pussification Guy's definition of masculinity and pussification is obvious.

He writes: "I talk about guns, self-defense, politics, beautiful women, sports, warfare, hunting, and power tools -- all the things that being a man entails."

Keyword: "Things." Pussification Guy defines being a man as being defined by what you own and what you talk about and how you entertain yourself. Kevin Andrew Murphy talks about transvestites and transsexuals adopting exaggerated totems of femininity in order to make themselves into women; Pussification Guy thinks he can make himself into a real man by cussin' and spittin' and fartin' and huntin' and owning lots of guns. BIG guns.

I puzzled through these issues myself when I was in my 20s, and while I was doing so I was reading the early Spenser novels by Robert B. Parker and some of Elmore Leonard's earlier novels, and I came up with my own code of manhood in the process: a man fights for what he believes in, but is not the first to use violence. A man is kind to women and children, and treats them with respect. A man speaks politely. A man does what he says he will do. A man doesn't brag on himself, indeed, a man should have a self-deprecating sense of humor. A man his honorable.

Note that none of those things have anything to do with the way you dress (although politeness does require one wear certain clothing at certain times -- for instance, a man should wear a nice suit to a wedding or funeral to show respect for the guests of honor). None of this has anything to do with whether one likes guns, or hunting, or talking about beautiful women. (I like #3, not so fond of #1 or #2, although I have no moral aversion to either of those two activities -- if you like 'em, knock yourself out) (Another, less important element of my personal code: when talking TO a beautiful woman, one should mostly look at her face. Just a random thought here.)

Note also that pretty much all of my code of manhood is, in fact, a gender-free code of adulthood.

Other points: I agree with the Pussification Guy that the bumbling sitcom Dad is dumb. I don't find it particularly offensive -- but I do find it stupid and it's one of the reasons I don't watch many sitcoms anymore.

The one sitcom I *do* watch is "Will and Grace." I'm sure the Pussification Guy would see me as part of the problem.

Still, if you're looking for manly role models on TV, consider the men of "NYPD Blue," "ER," or, for that matter, Rube on "Dead Like Me." (Rube is, of course, dead. Or undead. Does that count? And speaking of undead male role models on TV: Spike.)

"Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" is just plain funny. Or was. It's kind of a one-joke show, and it's lost its lustre a bit.

Pussification Guy considers John Wayne a model of American manhood. JOhn Wayne: another guy who talked tough, but didn't fight in the war when it was his turn to fight.

But I don't mean to disrespect the Duke. I'm a fan of the Duke. "True Grit" is one of my favorite movies. Note, by the way, that in "True Grit," the Duke eventually comes to respect and love a 13-year-old girl.

Jimmy Stewart, on the other hand, served his country during wartime and then went on to play whatever roles he pleased. He didn't have anything to prove.

You can't tell how tough a guy is by how he acts when the pressure is OFF. The toughest guys I know are guys who, when the pressure is off, just act like regular guys.

Like most rants of this sort, there are a lot of elements, a few sensible (e.g., protesting overuse of Ritalin on children), not all of which add up. but by my reading of the essay, it's not so much the change in women's status that has his knickers in a twist. His most shrill anger is reserved for "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy"--that is, it's his view that other men, "girly-men," are taking over. And he doesn't know how to compete with them. Thus, by his own description, he's exactly the opposite of the sort of man he praises: He's a man who feels unable to compete with other, more powerful men. And he doesn't realize, apparently, that he's in this position. Despite his knee-jerk Clinton/Gore swipes/Bush ass-kissing, I feel some sympathy for the underlying sense of frustration he feels at having to compete with a brave new world, not of powerful women (I'm fine with that, for the most part), but of powerful metrosexual males who effortlessly understand the changing styles and mores of our time.
The guy is a dork. I doubt he will ever reach a level of self-understanding sufficient to really articulate what frightens hm so.

Teresa, you are the wind beneath my wings. :)

I think it's fair to say that misandry is given a pass all too often in the modern era

I, on the other hand, think it fair to say that the level of misandry in modern society is several orders of magnitude lower than the level of misogyny, that misandry is roundly and viciously condemned at every turn whereas misogyny is not just given a pass but institutionalised, and that even were those two points not true misandry would still not be able to make a dent in the cosy armour of privilege in which men are swaddled from birth.

On point 1, are you taking the world as a whole, American society, or your local neck of the woods? In my local neck of the woods, the SF Bay area, misogyny is generally called when it's seen. Occasionally when it's imagined.

On point 2, I've rarely seen misandry being roundly and viciously condemned, unless I'm the one doing the condemnation.

On point 3, could you possibly be more dismissive and condescending? Regardless, as for this "armor of privilege" we men get swaddled with from birth, as I understand it, privilege is the right to do things and get things. In the time and place where I was raised up, girls could wear pants in kindergarten, or dresses, their option, but boys could only wear pants. Likewise, girls were allowed to play with dolls or building blocks and toy trains, but boys couldn't play with dolls. Yes, yes, you'll dismiss these as frivolous objections, but I remember hearing the line about boys having all the privileges and it was definitely untrue when I heard it at age five in 1971. And while adult males may have had privileges, the right to be blown up in Vietnam like my uncle didn't seem like much to brag about. "Cosy armour"? Hardly.

Kevin Andrew Murphy -

That was the old rules, you know -- you get all the power and you get all the responsibility, too. Which is where the going off to being blown up comes into it. (the use of the these rules to manipulate those as don't have any of the actual power is a noteable political element of the last sixty years or so.)

It's also where what's contemptible about Mr. Du Toit's view comes into it.

The Real Man Rules have always been Get The Job Done and Don't Brag. (Bragging is a tolerable adolescent failing but unacceptable in an adult. Bragging is required by marketing, things wrong with corporate culture number LXIV.)

The changes of the 20th century to those rules have been very small -- a recognition that the aberant insistence on ancestry as defining ability to Get the Job Done was just that, aberant and foolish, on the one hand, and that A Penis is Not a Qualification, on the other.

Both recognitions that the thing which matters is the Job Done and Well Done, not how surprised anybody is by who did it, or how they managed.

Mr. Du Toit wants his penis to be a qualification; wants to live in a world where it's of course assumed that he would get the job done, if he ever had to do it.

Which is nonsense, because he's not acting like it; he's acting like he's angry that these assumptions are not being made. If he could do the job, he wouldn't be angry; he'd be certain that the people making the assumptions were wrong, and indifferent or dismissive of them.

And sure, sometimes, the job is too big, and it does you in to try.

Sometimes you have to try anyway, and you make the job a little smaller and a little easier for the next person who has to try.

If you do it wearing a skirt, no one of consequence is going to care.

Perhaps the Y chromosome shatters easily.

Seriously though, his arguments seem to be the flip side of the argument that gender is socially determined: If gender identity just a matter of who gets to play with what toys and who gets to wear skirts or pants, seen from an insanely rightwing POV, "pussification" lurks at every turn.

Of course, human biology doesn't work that way. Boys will be boys pretty much no matter what you do, and girls will be girls.

(If Kim du Toit is made so nervous about all this, I'm surprised he hasn't changed his gender-ambigous first name.)

This is not to say that there aren't issues to discuss about how our society treats boys. But -- to state the obvious --du Toit is a nut.

Debate club? I know this is not at all the main point, but I just can't get unstuck from it: debate club was supposed to be for boys? My debate coach was so thrilled when he could get any boys at all to participate. I had no idea it was ever supposed to be "a boy thing."

Wow, I don't even know where to begin.

julia, I also find that courtesy amazes people. Especially people who are abused all day long. I used to play a game where I'd try to get subway token clerks to smile; in some cases even eye contact was an accomplishment. I ALWAYS said please and thank you to them; I flatter myself that most of them noticed.

Brooks Moses, I appreciate that you're using a metaphor, but of course adult males do not become eunuchs, as such, when they lose their testes. They become sterile, of course, and need hormone replacement therapy (now deliverable transdermally) to maintain muscle mass etc, but eunuchs have never had masculinizing hormones.

I heard a recording of a castrato singer once; it was impossible to mistake for a woman's voice, or a boy's, or certainly an undamaged man's. It was astonishingly beautiful; it made me understand the motive for that terrible crime.

It is my understanding that eunuchs can enjoy sex, but don't have the driving need for it that unharmed men have. Farinelli, a great castrato opera singer, was much sought after by women. Gee, a handsome man who never needs to shave and can't get you pregnant...I can see how that might appeal, back before birth control. I'm certain he wouldn't smell right to me, as women don't (I mean to turn me on sexually).

Yahmdalla, that's horrible (and, sorry, really funny). And yep, that'd be a guy thing. I remember many years ago a friend instructing the food-run guy (late night D&D session, yea, many years ago) to get "the kind of Cheetos that are round and tubular, not the ones that are spherical and come in a can, or the ones that are sort of skinny..." he couldn't make the poor guy, no connoisseur of Cheetos (?!), understand. I said "he wants the puffy-wuffys, not the bally-wallys or the wormy-squirmys." Cheeto-guy: "No bally-wallys, no wormy-squirmys." Food-run guy got it.

Concise, effective, not at all butch.

All hearken to sennoma, who speaketh the Truth. Right on^3!

Kathryn Cramer, Kim du Toit is like a Y chromosome, which is tiny and almost inconsequential. I'm led to understand that most of the effects of the Y come from its NOT balancing genes on the X, thus making genes that appear on the X more powerful (male pattern baldness is but one example).

The Y does have some important genes; a person with one X unpaired will be female, and seriously disabled. But a person with one Y unpaired will not be male so much as dead (it's a lethal abnormality).

One other thing: Kimboy talks about 'pussification'; I want to defend a related term. One can be a "pussyboy" without being effeminate. And 'pussyboy' is not necessarily a derogatory term (in fact it most often appears as a self-description), nor is it intended to insult women. I'll just leave it at that.

Dammit, I previewed and edited, and still left a mistake in! My last paragraph: the word 'pussification' should be in double quotes. Kimboy was speaking de re, not de dicto.

I try to be so careful. [kicks self]

Kevin Andrew Murphy wrote: Spotting a trannie is like spotting a toupee. Some are more obvious than others, but with most there's an obvious self-delusion of "people are being too polite/embarrassed to say anything" being interpreted as "Nobody can tell!"

Kevin, I sat and boggled at this for a while, wondering whether I should bother or not, but have finally decided to point out the obvious -

You have no idea how many transsexuals you have met in your life who were not only "not obvious" but whom it would never occur to you to identify them as other than their claimed gender. I have met several guys whom I was later considerably startled to discover started out life as girls: I have met rather more women who I discovered with almost equal surprise (go figure: somehow it wasn't the shock it was with the f-to-m trannies) were born boys.

Sure, Kevin. Sometimes you can tell. Claiming you can always tell just makes you look, well, either ignorant or bigoted. Possibly both.

n point 2, I've rarely seen misandry being roundly and viciously condemned, unless I'm the one doing the condemnation.

Then you don't get out much. ;-) Seriously, I can think of no other explanation.

Judging from the photo Teresa included, methinks she finds this guy just a bit annoying. (Why, that's barely a third of a schuyler!)

Teresa, I don't think I ever knew before that you were on a debate team. So, umm, you and Karl Rove have something in common, then?

Teresa wrote: "Thing is, I grew up hearing about the fragile male ego. If you don't let the boys win at games, if you don't let the boys run things, if you don't pretend the boys are smarter than they are, their sense of their own masculinity will be damaged. If they take out their frustrations on their wives and children, you have to understand that it's very hard to be a man, and they're doing the best they can. Et cetera. I'm not talking theory. I'm talking about sentences that actually got said to me."

It's funny, I grew up with that same theory floating in the background, and with a famously agressively strong willed Matriarch-Grandma and a sweet sensitive easy-to-tears Grandpa. All the uncles were drunken dysfunctional losers and my aunts (and mom) were smart, strong willed, educated and had great jobs. I always thought that men had all of this power and privledge in the world because women felt sorry for their fragility, a sort of noblese oblige (sp?) of genders.

I did think growing up that I had it easier than my brother. I could be a strong aggressive outspoken girl and wear whatever I wanted, but my brother was endlessly teased for being a sweet, sensitive, pacifist boy. And because he was also very tall and big he was a favorite target of bullies with something to prove who knew my brother wouldn't fight back. But it's not that easy is it? Gender roles are more fluid since the 70s but my career, a traditionaly female career, still earns considerably less than jobs which were traditionally male. And I did grow up strong and outspoken, but I have struggled all of my life with the results of that, from bosses who found my outspoken nature threatening and limited my advances because of it, to the co-worker who told me just last week that my "feminine psyche was squashed." Media may be having fun with different views of gender, but that doesn't mean we're going to be electing a woman president any time soon. Ultimately I would like to see all people valued for their unique personality regardless of their gender, but to say that men do not still hold the upper hand in power, pay, and privledge strikes me as hopelessly naive. It's great I can wear trousers but, really, I would rather have equal pay, equity in health research, equality in professional sports, etc.

In regard to "trannies," I would say that there are two seperate issues being discussed. There are individuals who genuinely feel that they are physically a different gender who in my experience, if lucky, make themselves as close to the gender they feel they are and do their best to fit in. I suspect we all encounter such individuals and have no idea that they are not the gender they purport to be. But there are also drag kings and queens who are, I think, drawn to an exagerated form of gender identity that really dosen't resemble any kind of genuine man-ness or woman-ness that I can identify with. I think that has more to do with power and flamboyance? Frankly I don't feel comfortable with the exagerated notions of gender represented by the drag scene, but how can you be anything other than deeply sympathetic to someone who's outsides don't match their insides?

Has anyone else ever noticed that when you notice, or need a word it suddenly appears everywhere in your life? I was trying to remember "misandry" just the other day and since then I have seen it written in five or six places.

On the topic of gender-related commercials: I don't know if any of you have been suffering the head-pounding experience of constantly repeated Mercedes Benz ads, but we disempowered tennis fans watching the ATP Masters tournament on the accursed ESPN networks (superb matches screened near midnight AZ time, post-midnight East Coast)can't avoid it. It goes like this: Woman at home minding her own business is interrupted by roaring monster which tears apart bits of her house but ultimately yields to her (waving a poker at it), beaten back into the garage and under the hood of a Benz; husband busy shaving doesn't hear her cry out to him, and jauntily walks into garage just as she's got the monster(symbol of outrageous engine power) back in place, saying to her, "Oh, there you are"; she tells him he "forgot to lock the car again"; he blithely says "Sorry", hops in the vehicle, and roar/screeches away from their vast home. After seeing this between 50 and 70 times, I started thinking of alternate endings -- wife stuffs husband under hood and walks off with monster; wife crams both of them under the hood and smiles, "Dinner is served." Wife plans to blow up garage next time. The ad may be intended to show "female empowerment," but the husband is such a smug jerk, all I can think is "Macho Asshole Luxury Car, slide off the nearest cliff!"

Am I alone in these fantasies?

"They all had tough names except Ceran. Manbreaker Crag, Heave Huckle, Blast Berg, George Blood, Move Manion (when Move says "Move," you move), Trouble Trent. They were supposed to be tough, and they had taken tough names at the naming. Only Ceran kept his own97to the disgust of his commander, Manbreaker.

"Nobody can be a hero with a name like Ceran Swicegood!" Manbreaker would thunder. "Why don't you take Storm Shannon? That's good. Or Gutboy Barrelhouse or Slash Slagle or Nevel Knife? You barely glanced at the suggested list."

"I'll keep my own," Ceran always said, and this is where he made his mistake. A new name will sometimes bring out a new personality. It had done so for George Blood. Though the hair on George's chest was a graft job, yet that and his new name had turned him from a boy into a man. Had Ceran assumed the heroic name of Gutboy Barrelhouse he might have been capable of rousing endeavors and man-sized angers rather than his tittering indecisions and flouncy furies. "

- R.A. Lafferty, "Nine Hundred Grandmothers"

Yonmei,

Was Henry Higgins ignorant or bigotted for pegging people's accents, even ones they tried to change or cover up?

Some people are more perceptive than others. I've many times been in a social grouping where someone has revealed they used to be the other gender, but my reaction has never been shock or surprise. It might be at some time in the future, but it hasn't happened yet.

The difference is, this is another elephant in the corner. Few these days care much if you peg their accent, and if you do, will often ask you for pointers as to what tipped you off. It becomes an interesting topic of conversation. Transexuals, however, have an emotional investment in "passing" (in quotes here for clarity, not disparagement [he mentioned in passing]) and tend to get upset if anyone mentions that they're not.

Some people are more perceptive than others.

And some people are more arrogant than others. The two groups do not necessarily overlap.

I've many times been in a social grouping where someone has revealed they used to be the other gender, but my reaction has never been shock or surprise. It might be at some time in the future, but it hasn't happened yet.

And are you seriously advocating that this must mean you can spot all transsexuals?

Oh, so, so many.

Teresa: I have to wonder about this conception of masculinity as this dreadfully fragile flower. Perhaps they feel like their masculinity is that fragile; but if everything goes wrong and they wind up standing there amidst the debris, what gender are they then?

I'm not unsympathetic, not in theory at any rate. Thing is, I grew up hearing about the fragile male ego.

Ah, but I wasn't talking about the fragile male ego; I think you know how much patience I have with that. I'm talking about how difficult it is for men not to transgress the rules of masculinity. As Brooks Moses so clearly points out, not being a satisfactory male doesn't make you female, it just makes you emasculated, which is (a) worse; and (b) what is informing du Toit's panic.

What one is when one finds oneself in the debris is confused and frightened. Now that might in fact be a gender, but it's not normally constructed as one.

(Thanks for the compliment on the book!)

Kevin Murphy: What Yonmei Said. Word of warning: I know from my own experience that when I overrate my powers of observation about anything, it comes back to bite me. Too many men have wound up in bed with hookers and been astonished to find penises for me to believe that there aren't really successful passing MTF transsexuals out there. I just know that I don't know them when I see them.

Tom: I think it's both deeply painful and extremely informative that your current troubles are mixed up in your head with masculinity. Good luck in the struggles.

are you taking the world as a whole, American society, or your local neck of the woods?

I think my comments apply to the world as a whole, but I was really talking about the modern Western society against which Kim du Toit rails.

could you possibly be more dismissive and condescending?

I could, very easily, but then Teresa would disemvowel me. Are you assuming that I'm female? The nick is ambiguous, and I thought it would be interesting to leave it that way for a while in this thread. If I'm a man, is my comment still "dismissive and condescending"?

One of the first things you learn when you read Shaw is that Henry Higgins was, indeed, an asshole.

Y fckng lbrls r ll th sm. lws blmng mrc fr th wrld's prblms. Yr slf lthng dsgsts m. Wh dn't y mv t Cnd y fckng pcfst.

Damn, Raging Dave, you've convinced me!

Raging Dave, you are a very silly person. Small children point at you and laugh; we adults, more polite, attempt to control ourselves, or titter behind our hands.

Titter, titter.

My mom still mentions how bemused she was that when I saw "My Fair Lady" at about age 11 for the first time, I was hopping mad at the end that Eliza had chosen to stay with that wretched ass, Henry Higgins...

I haven't bothered to read du Toit's thing; I've seen enough blind smirking bullshit in my time. But it sounds like his trouble is that his self-worth is based on what other people think of him, how they interact with him. Sounds like his problem is not that he has no masculinity, but that he has no honor.

As for the whole "men and women have separate backgrounds/are separate groups" thing, I say bullshit; that's as artificial a separation of humanity as any other you care to name. Every trait in humanity can be found in both males and females. The percentages differ, but that's no reason to assume any specific female (or male) has to cluster with the main bump on the graph for their gender and that trait. "Oh, Madeline, you're a woman, and a Pisces, too! Here, you calm down the tantrumming child!" No, I'd rather go sand the rust off my car, thank you very much.

Madeline: Katha Pollitt's response to Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus was "Nonsense. Men are from Illinois; women are from Indiana."

Sennoma--

In answer to the last question: Yes. Condescension is condescension.

In answer to the first: No.

Yonmei--

Spotting all? It's hard to spot all of anything. But many and most will generally do for most purposes.

If I were claiming that I can identify the ingredients in a spice blend by taste, people would hardly be so upset. Of course with identifying flavors, I have occasionally been wrong, at least to the source, if not the individual flavor.

Deb--

A fair warning. If you get cocksure, you tend to make mistakes.

Adam--

Granted, Henry Higgins was an asshole. It didn't mean he was wrong in his particular expertise.

Generally people who are arrogant have something to be arrogant about. It may not be as good as they think it is, but it's usually better than average.

Mrs du Toit also has a blog. She has some, er, interesting thoughts on "Suffrage and Suffering."

Kevin, you have had some very interesting points to make, but "Generally people who are arrogant have something to be arrogant about. It may not be as good as they think it is, but it's usually better than average" ... Actually, behavioral research has shown that there is no correlation between arrogance and competence. In fact, there is more of an inverse correlation, statistically.

-l.

Kevin:

Cocksure? Well, onward anyway.

That Higgins was skilled at what he did didn't mean that he wasn't also a bigot.

Ignorant, no, he wasn't that, not exactly, but not exactly in touch with the world, either. Higgins' expertise was the very thing which kept him--or allowed him to keep--out of touch with the world.

He could accurately and precisely classify a person into a specimen, much like the BOFH who lives in a world of lusers--hilarious to read about, miserable to work or live around.

Too often the skills about which a person may be rightfully proud are the skills which, leavened with arrogance, cause others to look at that person and say, "Poor bastard," or "Get a life."

I agree that arrogant people are often above average at what they are arrogant about. One thing about above average, though--it's generally another way of saying second-rate.

Kevin, I don't wish to pick on you, but your example of Henry Higgins struck a nerve.

I have had to deal with people, mostly at parties and other chance-met occasions, questioning my accent and wanting to know, to the exclusion of any other conversation, where I am from, and being unwilling to accept a surface answer. Where I am from, for the most part, is Texas, but that's rarely enough to satisfy.

As a child I had a noticable lisp, and throughout my elementary school days I attended, every day, for an hour, speech class. I learned how to speak from the ground up, from where sound originates, what exactly I should be doing with my tongue, and I do mean exactly. Likely a single term would have sufficed to correct my problem, but once you were on the books (at least then) with a speech impediment, you were there for the duration, and so I had speech class for six years.

So, not to put to fine a point on it, I talk funny. And it's not something I really enjoy getting into when I meet people, especially in groups. "That's an odd accent, where are you from?" "I'm from Texas." "You don't sound like you're from Texas." "Well, I'm very sorry about that, but getting back to--" "No, really, where'd you pick that up?" You can see where it would get old.

Was Henry Higgins ignorant or bigotted for pegging people's accents, even ones they tried to change or cover up?

I don't know that I'd call him bigoted, but I'd certainly find him uncomfortable to be around. My point in relating this is that the range of differences which it might be all right to notice (that is, without distressing the other person) is more narrow than one might think, and transsexuals are not the only ones who might prefer their differences pass unremarked, nor is there anything exceptional in that.

FYI: Raging Dave posted the exact same comment to at least one of Ampersand's threads.

I am bemused by the whole Cheerios commercial rant. I mean, it's generally a given that commercials for food like cereal (as opposed to beer or Doritos) are targeted toward women, women being the ones who supposedly do the shopping for the household.

So what kind of tone and scenario have folx on Madison Avenue decided (and/or found) to be appealing to the kind of woman who does the grocery shopping? How about, 'You know that the health of your family is in your hands, and between us girls, it's just as well, because he lived like a lout before he met you.' That is, play up the consumer's power in/over her household, so that the consumer will feel good about her role and connect it to you. And if there's any latent resentment about the fact that she *always* has to do the shopping, or the cleaning, or whatever, well, then this commercial plays up to that too. But at no point does du Toit (or probably many men at all) directly enter into that conversation between marketer and target market.

When du Toit starts complaining about the fact that practically every bloody laundry soap commercial and floor cleaning commercial and window washing commercial etc. are targeted toward women I'll have more sympathy with his discovery that cereal is too. If anything, one could argue that the cereal commercial reinforces the man's traditional role as patriarch who doesn't need to concern himself with how or what he eats because the woman will deal with all of that.

On another note, Dagwood was portrayed as a bumbling slacker through the whole series, from the movies to the cartoon. And "Hi and Lois" has the 'honey do' list that never gets done, and anyone who can't see that Helga wears the pants in the "Hagar the Horrible" family is just flat blind. And all of these (to pull just a couple of pop references off the top of my head) were buffooning men way before the current 'declension.'

Re self-assessment of capability vs actual, I believe I probably overstated my case a bit. While there is research indicating that many people believe in their capabilities without a good reason to --

-- and while I remember reading earlier research that showed that people who doubt their abilities are no less (and often more) competent at certain tasks than their more arrogant fellows --

-- there's also research that shows that, at least in the realm of academics, people who have a high opinion of their abilities create a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy for themselves by sticking with problems longer and not giving up (I found a couple of essays that discuss this phenom, but they were either PDF or Word docs, so no links...).

Anyway, just a little info to clarify.

This is a subject I am interested in, because I have a real Jekyll and Hyde aspect, in this regard. Half the time I'm convinced I'm quite remarkable, and the other half the time I'm convinced I'm so banal and ordinary, I wonder what I really have to offer humanity.

Eventually I decide, probably about as much as most, in the grander scheme of things, and leave it at that... :)

-l.

half-off thread: Madeline, did you ever look up the source of My Fair Lady? Shaw's postscript to Pygmalion says that not only did Eliza marry Freddy but grew in determination to the point where she would get the better of Henry. Shaw had a great deal of respect for competence when it came without arrogance -- an ideal several commenters have noted here. (And he didn't care a rap for what audiences expected, where later producers did; cf Misalliance(?), in which the woman who lands in the middle of a house party publicly dissects the separate ways each of the men tried to diminish her (except for the one star-struck kid who wanted to worship her -- she wasn't interested in looking up or down at a companion. Is Du Toit's problem that he can't survive without someone to look down on?))

This is very close to irrelevant; but I just got the Looney Tunes DVD box set, and watching those 50-year-old cartoons as a 21st-century adult, the one thing I have to say is, Bugs Bunny is totally secure in his masculinity.

DuToit could learn a thing or two from Bugs Bunny.

The fetishization of George Bush's physical appearance by the "men's men" of NRO and their facehugger offspring is just creepy. Read the Corner across any given week and I'll bet you'll notice this phenomenon a good half-dozen times, at least: "Did anyone catch the president's speech last night? Didn't he look good? Doesn't it just warm your heart to have such a presidential-lookin' guy for a president? Doesn't he look like he was just poured into that suit? Growl, growl, pant, lick."

Creep-tastic.

Condescension is condescension.

But if I'm a man, my remarks apply equally to me; how can they then be condescending? It was that word which made me think you might be assuming me to be female. But perhaps that is pointless semantics, and I did not mean to be condescending or dismissive, just accurate.

And really, you have yet to make a substantive argument that men in our society (not five-year-olds in the 70s, or men serving thirty years ago in a military that in any case now allows women on the front lines) are not swaddled in privilege. Men earn more, both on average across jobs and for the same job in many cases (professional sports and acting, for example). Even when there are equal numbers of men and women in a profession, the illusion of equality disappears if you include authority in the analysis: the further up the food chain you go, the fewer women there are. Female POTUS, anyone? (Hillary in 2012: she'll get my vote, but she won't win. But I digress. Oh, and while I'm digressing, have you noticed that Dr. Rice is "Condi" to the media, whereas men get their surnames and usually their titles?) Sexual harrassment and sexual assault are overwhelmingly male aggressor/female victim. Except in known dangerous areas, few men think twice about walking anywhere at any time, but women have to think about the possibility of assault everywhere, all the time. Sexual targeting in advertising and entertainment puts females in a submissive role as toys or decorations or prizes to be won. The fashion/diet industry colludes actively in this, using sexualised images of girls and models with almost freakish physiques to degrade the self images of regular women so as to sell more crap.

That's just off the top of my head; and by comparision, I think "the cosy armour of privilege" is a relatively mild term for the advantage at which men find themselves in our society.

Two comments:

Deb -- Since I can count on the fingers of one hand the moments when I've _actually been glad I'm male_ in full consciousness, any serious personal issue is going to relate to those few moments. This is not related to unconscious assumptions of male privilege. It's very personal. And I don't expect that others actually have had the same experience, but I wouldn't be very surprised to find that others did.

Sennoma -- I'm not interested in your gender. You get to play games with it to your content. The games I play are probably more obvious. I've made a lot of condescending remarks about groups I identify with. It's easy for me to think that some of your remarks are condescending about a gender you may or may not identify with. I agree that the class of men have a huge amount of privilege. I don't think that that means any individual man has privilege over an individual woman _in all cases_. And talking in absolutes is something I find divisive.

Speak for yourself. Don't try to make it universal. In the long run, I believe that's a lot more effective.

And if it isn't, at least you know you're lying (by omission) a little bit less.

Very sincerely,
Tom

I'm a bit croggled at the comments by some of the women on this thread that they could wear pants to school. This was not true when I was in elementary school or even high school. When I was in school -- 1956-1968 -- girls definitely had to wear skirts or dresses (knee-length or slightly below). Guys couldn't wear jeans either.

As a result, I never did learn how to slide into a base, most of my ballplaying being done at recess.

This was why, when I was in fifth grade, I announced to my mom that I wanted to be a boy. She talked me out of it somewhat by reminding me that girls' clothes came in pretty colors and fabrics, using as an example the turquoise dress I'd recently been given, while boys' clothes were more plain. It didn't help my baseball skills though, or keep people from asking, when informed I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up, "Don't you mean a nurse?" (No. My sister wanted to be a nurse.)

When I was in junior high school I observed that the guys who were admired for their athletic prowess were really not that much better, and frequently worse, than some of us who were considered wimps. George W. is an example of a guy who has climbed to the top of the heap despite the lack of any significant competence.

To borrow Cory Doctorow's term, the men with the most whuffie are admired and compensated far beyond any objective merit they may possess. This is a system that every male gets sucked into whether he agrees with it or not. Some of us cope by not giving much of a shit about our status in the system. Others, the Kim du Toit's of the world, fight like crazy to maintain the status quo precisely because they are not at the top of the heap but by keeping things as they are they will not fall any lower. Their cold comfort is in the fact that there are more people below them than above.

As an unemployed male ten years too young to retire I find damned little comfort in my privileged male status. The whole thing seems to me to be a ponzi scheme to keep us all in line. Du Toit doesn't seem to be bright enough to question the rules of the game and that is why he is so frantic to defend his position. I'd just as soon get off of the treadmill. I think George knows how precarious his position is too and this is why he works so hard to filter out any information that disagrees with his image of the world.

Raging Dave is also raging to defend his world view and doesn't understand that we don't need to rage to defend ours.

Laura,

You are correct that studies have shown that many people of marginal competence have an inflated sense of self worth. One of the most common mistakes is assuming that skill in one area translates into skill in another or that academic accomplishment translates into job skills. I spent the last 2 1/2 years at a well known American audio company that prides itself on its technology: "Better sound through research." They suffer from a corporate case of the delusion of competence since the majority of their products are no better than mediocre. It was amazing to find this myopic attitude deeply embedded in the culture of an entire organization.

"Except in known dangerous areas, few men think twice about walking anywhere at any time, but women have to think about the possibility of assault everywhere, all the time."

I don't. I've lived in a small college town, and now I live in a safe neighborhood in a city. I'm out fairly late sometimes on a bike, and go through some poor, black neighborhoods. Back when there were projects between my home and the interesting part of town, I'd go through them in spite of having been warned not to.

I have a perhaps irrational attitude that I live here, and get to travel freely. The worst that's happened is one attempted mugging on a well-lit sidewalk of the major street in the area.

Kevin, I am actually finding this strangely amusing. Your ability to identify "all" transsexuals means simply that you can identify some transsexuals. (Even Henry Higgins didn't claim that he could place everyone in the world: his focus was the English language and specifically London dialects.) Logic alone says that you can have no idea how often you have been in the company of a transsexual person without knowing it. ;-)

A lot of this guy's Issues could be resolved if he just changed his name to Tim du Coq.

Laura,

Right now, I'm working through a thin little book which is the basis for a two-semester course, the first semester of which I've passed and the second semester of which is the only major obstacle between me and my B.S. in math. (Let me mention in passing the great people in the math department at UA-Fayetteville for letting me finish this from Atlanta as a readings course.)

While my skills have gone downhill since I've gotten older, I just can't believe I'm incapable.

I think it's the latter which explains why my fourth try over the last few months at one fairly simple problem was finally successful--I just couldn't believe I really couldn't do it.

(That thin little book--two semesters, only eight of the eleven chapters. Damn--a masterpiece.)

Pardon me, but I seem to have picked up a stalker, who's going around and posting crap under my name and info. I've already obtained the troll's IP from this website's owner, but I would appreciate it if you would let me know what other sites the troll hit. You can contact me at wraithwulf@yahoo.com. I'm compiling a list of IP's that the troll is using. Most of them seem to be coming from an AOL server.

Thanks once again.

I would bet dollars to donuts that Kimmie DuToit considers cunnilingus to be unmanly.

BSD:

What a grudge match: Kim Jong-Il vs. Kim Du-Toit!

Just had some disconnect problem eat a post, so I'll be brief:

Sennoma--

What Tom said.

Yonmei--

Where, in anything I wrote, did I use the word "all"? Go back up topic. Reread my original post. You're either putting words in my mouth so you can make your point, or misremembering what I wrote and responding to your false memory.

Pericat--

Sympathy. I enunciate too much for a regular Californian, due to speech therapy, too many British children's books, and the fact that my mom's German and learned British English first. However, authors, actors, anthropologists and many others find speech fascinating and crucial to know, so these questions arise.

Men, women, and Cheerios? Oddly enough, while I was watching the Nova miniseries on String Theory, I got an email from my brother in Philadelphia about an interview in Modern Maturity with Art Garfunkel that mentioned the same trimverate. This poem emerged:

BLACK HOLE BIRTHDAY
-------------------
by
Jonathan Vos Post
copyright (c) 2003 by Emerald City Publishing
-------------------

At midnight, you turned 50,
alone, in your underwear,
eating a bowl of Cheerios
and wondering -- where did all your friends go?

What happened to that commune
with the famous scientists
who liked to keep you around
to remind themselves how smart they all were?

What if you had taken her up,
that reactor engineer
from the 747
who propositioned you, mid-funeral?

The years blurred past you, passing
like the billboards high above
Koreatown -- ideograms
you can't understand, don't remember.

Palm trees blaze, torches roaring,
dropping Kentucky Fried rats
into the scummy hot tub,
where you once played underwater Scrabble.

All your extra dimensions
are compactified, rolled up
too tight to be detected.
In String Theory, your strings are out of tune.

They all ran away from you,
galaxies of hangers-on,
accretion disks of neighbors.
What remained imploded to a black hole.

The light of your former world
drools down the gravity well
and, even if you got it,
you can't escape the event horizon.

1200-1230
7 Nov 2003

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Kevin A.M.: Your initial comment was: Spotting a trannie is like spotting a toupee. Some are more obvious than others, but with most there's an obvious self-delusion of "people are being too polite/embarrassed to say anything" being interpreted as "Nobody can tell!" (followed by analysis that made it clear it had never occurred to you that there are f-to-m transsexuals, too)

You're right, you didn't say you could spot all transsexuals (though the "evidence" you adduced clearly applied only to m-to-f transsexuals, and only to those who had little practice in "dressing femme"): you merely, rudely, said that "most" were clearly "self-deluded". Which is absurd. You cannot possibly know that most transsexuals you have met are self-deluding themselves that they "pass": you are merely identifying that all the transsexuals that you could identify as transsexuals were easily identifiable. Tautologous, yes?

Some people are more perceptive than others. I've many times been in a social grouping where someone has revealed they used to be the other gender, but my reaction has never been shock or surprise. It might be at some time in the future, but it hasn't happened yet.

If this isn't a claim that you can always identify transsexuals, what is it?

Yonmei,

Actually, no. I do know there are F-M transexuals. I've met some. About the only time I've been surprised on that end was when someone next to me on a panel announced they were a f-m TG, when given the feminine features, smooth skin, large breasts, plaid shirt and denim overalls, I'd taken them for a young lesbian. Given that just about every man's outfit has now become appropriate women's wear in some context, this makes the question of passing odd. If someone doesn't realize they're supposed to be seeing you as something other than your original gender, are you passing or even cross-dressing?

Regardless, "I have not yet been surprised" is not the same thing as "I will never be surprised."

For the record, I have been surprised by a toupee. I was eight, and I was shocked to see my uncle suddenly bald the day we went waterskiing.

To turn the original phrase around, "Spotting a toupee is like spotting a trannie."

Is it bigoted or ignorant to spot toupees?

Actually, no. I do know there are F-M transexuals. I've met some.

Given that you wrote: Even the most convincing tend to raise the "What's up with her?" flags, usually by dressing in a kittenish outfit that e