Beauty. And advertising.

OK, what can I talk about today to delay the eventual necessity of actually getting onto the subject? How about this? As you almost certainly don't know, the Cheerobics® DVD just got released, you should totally go and check it out – and not just because I know one of the people involved in making it. You can buy it here. And don’t just take my word for it. Read the review on the Amazon page I just linked which was published significantly before the actual DVD. That’s sure to be reliable*.

Right then. Now that I’ve done the obligatory ‘completely off topic’ bit out of the way, let’s move on to the bit that you actually came here for. Just think of the above as Acanthus’ equivalent of advertising (one advert every four and a half months isn’t really that bad). Actually, it’s not all that irrelevant. I’ve decided to do a bit more on being ace. Not entirely because some people think I mention it too much (although given my rather bloody-minded nature, that’s not entirely absent from by thoughts)**. Mostly it’s because there isn’t much else I can say which is really unique. Anything else I come up with, on democracy or liberalism, someone else could come up with just as well. If you want to know what feminism is, there are rather a lot of ways to find out. That’s not to say that I think they’re valueless (well.... no more than I think that everything I write is pretty valueless), or that I’ll stop writing them. It’s not as though I’ve let it being utterly pointless ever stop me doing anything before, so why start now?

So, you remember how I said that what I wrote at the beginning was irrelevant? That was what is technically known as ‘a complete lie’. Actually, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it wasn’t entirely true, either. So, four hundred or so words in, let me explain what I’m going to be talking about. Beauty. What is it? Keates would tell me that it’s truth, but I don’t like Keates very much.

So what does beauty have to do with being ace? More than you might think. You see, the big question here is whether ‘beauty’ is really a single thing. So answer this: Is Cheryl Cole, (or Brad Pitt), more beautiful than the sunset. Or is there some qualitative difference between seeing a ‘beautiful’ person and seeing a ‘beautiful’ sunset? To me? No, not really***. But from talking to people, and from the rather different reactions people tend to have to the two, I have a suspicion that most people might disagree with me on this one. So there are at least two different kinds of beauty, which I’ll call aesthetic and sexual. Actually, there’s no real reason why a human couldn’t be aesthetically beautiful – after all, several of their statues are.

Now let me deconstruct it a bit further. Which is more beautiful – Beethoven or Paradise Lost? There’s less of a qualitative difference here – you could probably tell me an answer if you had long enough to think about it. But it’s still rather difficult to compare the two****. I think we can agree that there is a difference here. So we can probably divide up aesthetic beauty by sense – they’re not necessarily entirely separate, something could cross over, but it avoids the problem of trying to compare a Cheerobics® routine to the music it’s being done to.

Now let’s look at something completely different. What makes things beautiful? If I grind the Mona Lisa down to a fine paste, in what part is the beauty? What if I remove a single flake of paint at a time? When does it stop being beautiful? What about an acanthus flower? Is the shape of the petals more or less beautiful than their colour? To put it shortly, where, exactly, is beauty?

Obviously it’s a property of the object as a whole, rather than of any individual part – a ‘ghost in the machine’, if you will, like Oxford University. To try and define and quantify beauty, even with the divisions I’ve set up here, is a fool’s errand. You can do it, but your answer is only really true for you, and tells you nothing you didn’t know already. That doesn’t mean I think my divisions are useless – there’s a difference between an unanswerable question, and a merely meaningless one – just that I’m not going to try and define ‘this is what beauty is’, and I’m certainly not going to quantify it. A dancer might be beautiful, but I’m not going to say whether ballet is inherently better than hip hop. To me, a butterfly dying, having got its wings trapped on a thorn, is tragically beautiful. To a lot of people, it’s a dead insect. To take Hume’s approach, and say that some people’s taste is inherently better than others, and that the people who find the ‘wrong’ thing beautiful are actually mistaken would be, in my opinion, the height of arrogance. And when the guy who says that democracy is bad because people are so ignorant says that you're being arrogant, you might want to examine your position.

Final thing. For those who are still wondering what this has to do with being ace: It’s effectively the postmodern theory, that people outside a particular majority social group think more about the inside of that social group, since they have to understand that part of society as well as their own^†. ‘The outsider sees most of the game’, if you will. Beauty is so inherently tied up with sexuality that it’s something that’s probably more closely examined by aces than by most sexuals, or, at least, in a different way.

*Wow. I can’t even plug something without being cynical. To explain, Jess Rossi has been doing Cheerobics® for some time now (as have others), so it’s perfectly possible to have a review of Cheerobics® from before the DVD was actually released. It’s also possible that the reviewer was using that magical thing known as a preview copy.

**To those people: I’ll stop mentioning it when it stops being brought up, and when I stop having to examine everything I say, lest it be seized upon as evidence of my ‘real’ sexuality.

***Except that humans tend to be uglier. I don’t think I’ve ever met a girl who was more beautiful than her jewellery. Boys are even worse – they don’t wear jewellery.
****This is, by the way, the exact problem of utilitarianism, except I’m talking about beauty rather than pleasure.
^†And because looking at people who are different from you, with apparently nonsensical rituals, is interesting. And amusing. That’s why anthropology was invented.

For the interested, Cheerobics® belongs to Jess Rossi, and to Cheerobics® Ltd. If either they or she mind the free advertising (and I would totally understand not wanting to be associated with me), I'll cut out the bits of this referencing them.

This is a rather blatant rant

This might come off as just a tiny bit bitter, but I mean it in the nicest possible way. Would you please just shut up. Seriously. It is really annoying. It's annoying when people drone constantly on and on about the human reproductive system - a subject which, really, isn't that interesting. You cannot imagine how annoying it is to be constantly surrounded by people who periodically break into discussion of a subject which not only are you not interested in, but which you can't even understand - which it's probably impossible for you to ever understand. Like if people periodically started speaking Ancient Swahili*. And you can't just opt out of these conversations either. People all assume you'll be as fascinated by it as they are. When you say you're not, they either stare at you like a particularly rare zoo exhibit, or flatly refuse to believe you.But that's not even the most annoying thing. I have to be constantly checking everything I'm about to say, jusst to check that it won't be accidentially giving the wrong impression. Which would be a lot easier if I had a clue what exactly it was I was trying to avoid. A lot of the time it seems like I can't even be nice to/about a female without people thinking I must be madly in love with them.

And it hurts, too. It hurts when people go on and on about how bloody brilliant sex is. It hurts when our entire culture, from music to TV, from advertising to comics, makes abundently clear that sex is the most brilliant thing ever, and anyone who doesn't experience it on a regular basis has a grey and pointless compared to everyone else's. It hurts when people say that if you don't like sex, then there must be something wrong with you. It hurts when people tell me that my feelings aren't really valid. That they know much better than I do what my own feelings are - when they say that I'm really secretly gay, when they say that I'm not really asexual becuase I'm heteroromantic. When they say that it's just a phase I'm going through. Basically when I'm told anything along the lines 'you don't really know what you're thinking, let me explain it to you'. And when I'm just told that I'm straight up lying. It's also incredibly annoying. Seriously. Don't do it***.

OK, rant over. I don't really feel that way about being ace (most of the time), and I'm certainly not asking you to stop talking about sex. I am asking you to stop trying to talk to me about sex, but that's different. Just needed to get out some of the frustration. I apologise for the high levels of italics in this post.

And if you're going to take just one thing, not just from this post, but from all of Acanthus, let it be this: In future, do try to think about things. Don't assume everyone feels the same way as you. Trust that people probably have a better grasp of what their feelings are than you****. When you think of that oh so original witty comment, consider for a second the idea that the person you're talking to may have heard it several hundred thousand times.

*I'm sure that's not what it's actually called, but you get my point.
**For the curious, the second one is the more annoying.
***To the people who think I'm talking to them: Yeah. Probably. But take comfort: it is definitely not just you.

****And that doesn't just apply to aces. It applies to gays, transexuals, and even people who just have tastes that are a little out of the ordinary. Telling people that they're wrong to have different tastes from you, saying that a male isn't allowed to like Meg Cabot or Glee - that's not very nice†.

†For the record, criticising someone for liking Twilight is completely different, since some of the messages in there are actively harmful (Also, it's objectively bad).

The (im)morality of humor.

Note: The views of the participents in this argument don’t neccesarily represent my own. Despite the fact that they share my name. Also, yes, I'm aware of the date. I would argue that if jokes about terrorism are unnacceptable today, they're always unacceptable.

Ben James:         You know it’s disgusting – all these jokes about rape.

Finn Carter:        Why? Exactly?

Ben James:         Umm... because it’s degrading? Because it belittles the suffering of rape victims everywhere?

Finn Carter:        There might be tasteless jokes, yeah, but surely there’s no difference between jokes about rape and all the other forms of dark humour. Jokes about the holocaust. Jokes about nuclear war. Jokes about cannibalism.

Ben James:         Jokes about the holocaust? You’re seriously trying to justify something by comparing it to jokes about the holocaust.

Finn Carter:        OK, possibly a bad example. Nuclear war is a better one.

Ben James:         You’re really not doing your case any good, you know.

Finn Carter:        What are you talking about? Dr. Strangelove was a brilliant movie. And it manages to make a comedy out of unimaginable horrors. What is there inherently about rape that makes it any different?

Ben James:         The thing about Strangelove – and A Modest Proposal, since I’m sure you’ll bring that up too – is that they satirise state policy. They deal with something that many people, especially those in power, thought was actually moral at the time. The reaction to Swift provides a brilliant example of that. The danger of trivialising horrors only exists when there are actually horrors to trivialise.

Finn Carter:        So we can agree that jokes where the humour comes from attitudes to rape, rather than rape itself, are permissible.

Ben James:         Like in Pratchett’s The Last Hero?

Finn Carter:        Yes, among other things.

Ben James:         I’m not sure I like it, but I’ll accept for now that they could be OK if they were done sensitively.

Finn Carter:        Great. But that’s a side point. What about jokes about terrorism? Those can’t really be said to not be trivialising horror. Are you saying movies like Four Lions and Team America shouldn’t be made?

Ben James:         We haven’t seen one of those, and the other one we hated.

Finn Carter:        I fail to see why that would be relevant.

Ben James:         And suddenly I know why you failed English. But the thing about terrorism is that the whole point – or at least a significant part of the point – is to make people fear you. That’s why it’s called terrorism. Things that make terrorism into a ridiculous joke might to some extent trivialise the horror of terrorism, but one might argue that doing so would actually be a good thing.

Finn Carter:        Would you argue that?

Ben James:         I fail to see why that would be relevant.

Finn Carter:        Fair enough. There are other jokes about murder though, for which that excuse wouldn’t work. I presume that we can agree that being murdered is worse than being raped.

Ben James:         Only on the understanding that it’s true in the same way that it’s worse to be forced to eat broken glass than to have needles pushed under your fingernails.

Finn Carter:        That’s debatable. And fairly disgusting. But OK. Let’s take the onion articles about starvation, kidnapping kidnapping and child abuse*. What’s the inherent difference between them and jokes about rape?

Ben James:         Very little. Those articles make me feel cold and alone.

Finn Carter:        What about Saint Lawrence?

Ben James:         Remind me.

Finn Carter:        Patron saint of cooks. He was burned alive.

Ben James:         You actually find this stuff funny? What is wrong with you?

Finn Carter:        Nothing. You just have no sense of humour. What about James Bond? He regularly makes jokes about murdering people. Noone finds that offensive. Or the saying among doctors ‘all bleeding stops eventually?’

Ben James:         First off, just because everyone thinks it’s OK, doesn’t mean it is. Secondly, I think there’s a difference between comedy that finds humour in something without letting it actually affect the outcome, and comedy that uses torture just for comedy. The doctors are going to do as much as they can to save the patient anyway, and they’ve probably earned the right to make jokes, if only to keep themselves sane, and Bond would kill just as many people if he wasn’t making jokes. Thirdly, everyone knows that murder is wrong. Everyone understands that it’s a tragedy when patients bleed to death. Whereas we live in a society where historically, the victim has been blamed for rape. In some parts of the world that still happens. Even here, rape isn’t taken nearly seriously enough for a crime which is, in effect, sadistic torture.

Finn Carter:        Well that probably rules out the Monty Python example I was going to use, as well as all the dead baby jokes. What other examples can I use...

Ben James:         Let’s end this discussion here, shall we. It’s depressing me.

Finn Carter:        Fair enough. What else shall we talk about?

Ben James:         How does God know that he knows what he knows.

Finn Carter:        Sorry?

Ben James:         It occurred to me that if you apply the concept of Cartesian doubt to God, the only thing that God could possibly actually know is his own existence – He has no way of knowing that he isn’t being fooled by an evil demon, any more than we do. Which means that he’s not omniscient at all. And if he does know somehow, that has fascinating theological and philosophical implications.

Finn Carter:        Ben. You do know that there is no God, don’t you?

Ben James:         You don’t know that.

Finn Carter:        Last week the president was devoured by extra dimensional horrors. There is no God.

Ben James:         That is pretty hard to explain. Maybe Cthulhu is necessary to a consistent universe. Maybe it’s a test of faith. Maybe it was actually a fallen angel. Also, I thought he was killed by a bomb.

Finn Carter:        You don’t think we’d tell people about something like that, do you? Of course, it helped that all the witnesses were driven to gibbering insanity.

*Kinda

It's actually hard to believe that someone would seriously say something this stupid.

Originally, this post was going to be a continuation of 'On Democracy'. But several people have said something to me recently which annoys me. Including two teachers, which terrifies me beyond belief. As well, a lot of people seem to assume it’s true when they're talking about the subject. So what is the statement? 'Women can't rape men.' This is a statement so complete in its idiocy and utter in its inaccuracy that it's almost beautiful. Unfortunately, it's only almost beautiful. So now you get to sit through an explanation of everything I can think of that's wrong with this statement. This is going to be a long one.

First, an explanation of how the male body works, since this is apparently a subject on which people are pretty much entirely ignorant. There is no really delicate or tasteful way to say this. Erections aren't to do with desire, or even necessarily with pleasure. That's why aces (like me) can have sex, despite the fact that I, for example, given the choice between having sex and being locked in a coffin for an equivalent amount of time. I would choose the latter. Without much hesitation. And among aces, I'm by no means unique in that - or even particularly extreme. In fact, a lot of aces find out that they're ace having had sex regularly for some time (or, indeed, because of having had sex regularly for some time). All that's required for an erection is a stimulation of certain nerves. So the biological barrier that people apparently think exists? Doesn't.

Secondly, whilst we're on the topic of indelicacy, the statement reveals a startling lack of creativity. There is more than one way to rape someone. There several sex acts you could force someone to perform even if they were an eunuch, and that's without using the devices humans seem so obsessed with coming up with to make it easier. Vibrators, for example.

Similarly, there are such things as drugs. How different is forcing someone into sex through force, and forcing someone into sex by drugging them? Really? They're both rape. You can rape someone through force, through threat of force, through blackmail, through drugs, through deceit, or in a thousand other ways I haven't thought of. And the terrible thing about many of those is that the victim might actually help with their own rape - because the rapist, in a way, makes them want to be raped. Not, I hasten to add, because they want to be raped, but because they prefer it to the alternative of being beaten senseless and murdered, or whatever else the rapist is threatening. Or because they don't really know what's going on, and don't really understand that they've been raped until later.

Fourth, there seems to be an underlying assumption here that if you enjoyed it, it isn't rape. This is about as valid as the idea that it isn't rape if you yell surprise, except that noone actually believes that one*. Say you rape someone, and it actually ends up improving their lives. They achieve nirvana, and never suffer again. That makes it OK, right? No. You are still a soulless rapist**. It doesn't matter that it ended up being good for them; people have ownership of their own bodies - that's why doctors need permission for lifesaving operations. Completeness leads me to point out here that, technically, it is legal to give consent after the fact - since only the victim is allowed to prosecute someone for rape. But, just because someone enjoyed something, doesn't mean they're not going to be angry that you forced it on them. I enjoy chocolate cake, but if you hold me down and force me to eat it, even if I enjoyed the cake, I'm still going to be rather unhappy about it afterwards.

Which brings me onto my fifth point - that physical pleasure and actual enjoyment don't have to coincide. Buddhism was right all along. If I get physical pleasure from decapitating attractive women***, I might enjoy it, but it’s probably not going to be good for my long term happiness. The same is true of rape - getting physical pleasure from being raped doesn't actually mean you enjoyed it. Actually, when you think about it, that makes it worse, long term. Pain can be dealt with - I'm not belittling it, but humans are surprisingly good at dealing with pain. That's why torture is ultimately self-defeating as a means of control. But if you actually enjoyed it? That can lead to lovely results like Stockholm syndrome, self loathing, and the feeling that 'my body betrayed me'. So even if the man having an erection did indicate that he was experiencing physical pleasure, that wouldn't make it not rape.

There, is of course, another way you could look at the statement, which is to assume that men are all sex-obsessed, and that there's no way a man could be raped because they always enjoy sex. This involves ignoring everyone ace or gay, everyone with hypoactive sexual desire disorder, many of those with schizoid personality disorder, and I'm sure a lot of other people. But if we do ignore them, this explains why no man in human history has ever refused an invitation to consequence-free sex. Ever. You could also look at the statement as saying that women are clearly far too weak and pathetic to force a man into anything. Even if that were true, there are these marvellous modern inventions called guns. And drugs. And blackmail. Actual physical strength isn't a barrier. I'm not going to add these to my count of problems, because they rely on the people who say that men can't be raped believing in ridiculous sexist stereotypes, and I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Even then, however, there are actually more problems with that statement than there are words. That's never really a good sign. It's sexist, idiotic, and belittles the suffering of thousands of people. So before you say something like that, do put in a tiny bit of research. There's a statistic (here, for example) that one in six men will be raped in their lives. I'm not sure that that's entirely accurate, but the numbers are still really high. So don't make sweeping generalisations like that about subjects you know nothing about. And when talking about rape, don't assume that it's a man raping a woman. Using he and she is fine, since english doesn't have gender neutral pronouns (although refering to a rapist as it wouldn't really worry me too much), but as soon as you start to think of rape as a man forcing sex on a woman, you've gone wrong.

This post turned out rather serious, but at least I got through it without descending into inarticulate swearing. So, to counterbalance that a bit, here's a fun game for you. See if you can find the Star Trek quote in the above post. It’s from The Next Generation. Next time, unless large numbers of people say something else to me that makes me question whether they have the intelligence of a retarded herring, I'll probably go on with 'On Democracy'.

*For the sake of my sanity, I'm just going to believe that's true.
**Also, that has never actually happened.
***Which, I must point out, is an example from Sandman, not from my deranged imagination.