Tag Archives: sociology

Burning White Men

Burning Man: the most diverse group of white people you will ever meet. – Blu

The official Burning Man blog (which is written by a volunteer) ran an interesting post about the lack of ethnic diversity among Burners. In the post and comments a number of reasons to explain the lack of ethnic minorities were put forward:

Going to Burning Man requires a cultural sense of physical and economic security that ethnic minorities have only gained in the last generation. Economic security comes not just from personal income, but from multi-generational wealth, networking and a social safety net.
Minority culture tends to be more sexually conservative.
Minorities are more family and community focused, while Burning Man is heavily individualistic. Alternately, only white people need to go to Burning Man to find community.
Minority culture grew from the civil rights movement while white counter culture grew from an individualistic movement.
Minorities don’t like camping: “the last time [my Japanese family] went camping, it was an internment camp“
All the cultural appropriation makes them uncomfortable.
“Being colorful for a week in the desert might not have the same appeal for those who feel like they are outside of the mainstream all the time.“

Although one comment argued that if you control for income and education, there is no ethnic disparity. Given that none of the census reports after 2008 have been made public, it’s difficult to have an informed discussion about this.

I think it requires a level of immersion within the capitalist system that enables one to afford the luxury of attending as well as a degree of personal consumer excess high enough that one looks forward to an escape from that excess. Maybe it also requires a bit of blindness to the waste involved in a celebration that rejects attachment to worldly possessions by burning them to the ground. That said, I already have my tickets, airline reservations and RV reserved. I suspect that people of color attend in proportion to the percentage of them that have achieved this level of hypocrisy. – Paul Williams

Women Are Crazy

This Huffington Post article has been bouncing around the blogosphere for a few months. The author, Yashar Ali, argues that telling women their emotional behaviour is “crazy” is a form of “gaslighting“: convincing someone they’re crazy by questioning their perception of reality.

I wish I could agree with him, but Ali mostly misses the mark. We live in a masculine society. Any non-masculine behaviour is defined by society as insanity. Therefore, men are correct in calling women insane when they act like women. This is basic Foucault: society (not abusive individuals) uses the label of “crazy” to assert power over dissenting behaviour.

Asking men to redefine sanity for themselves is like asking someone to see the code of the Matrix. Instead of just telling individual men not to make gaslighting speech, we need to reform society to value feminine behaviour as much as masculine behaviour.

You’re Single Because You’re Biased

This comic came up on Reddit today:

It reminded me of this Tyee article from last spring complaining that men in Vancouver don’t approach women often enough. Of course women suffer from a cognitive bias: when a “creep” tries interacting with them, it’s not counted as a case of a “man” giving them attention, it’s counted as a case of “there sure are a lot of creeps in this town”. They’re only going to count the cases when an interaction went pretty well.

Other biases that make it hard to get a clear picture of the dating scene:

We mostly hear about dating success stories. No couple ever says “we met in a bar after we both had tried online dating for 6 months”.
Only single people comment on the single scene. Nobody says “the single scene in Vancouver is great: I started sleeping with my current boyfriend before I had even broken up with the previous one”.
The most chronically single people will comment on it the most.

Even if we’re generous and don’t say “there’s one person that all your failed relationships had in common”, if peoples’ lives are randomly distributed then some of them will be outliers of shittiness. As a result, it’s impossible to get dating statistics from anecdotes.

Of course the Tyee article is actually about a researcher who has found that people complain about the single scene in every city, although it appears that perhaps people complain about different issues in each one.

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Cultural Appropriation

I was watching a white friend of mine the other day do a dance from a colonized culture. I guessed the dance had spiritual significance so I consulted Brynn, who is an expert on First Nations sociology, about whether this counted as cultural appropriation. In our discussion, I came to the realization that there were other “borrowed” practices that I had overlooked. I guess I’m not very good at recognizing cultural appropriation, so I looked for help.

A blog called Fresh Feminism recently published a Cultural Appropriation Identification Flowchart. Since the original was hand-drawn and the blog has since been taken down (I’m guessing because of negative attention flowing from the popularity of this very flowchart?), I’ve reproduced it in a phallocentric style:

I think people are going to nod along up until “I understand my privilege and work to not abuse or deny it”: just because I know about critical theory and cultural appropriation, does that make it less appropriating when I “borrow” stuff from different cultures? In other words, is ignorance a defense for the crime of cultural appropriation? And does an education in critical theory give me more license to appropriate?

Rawls’ Theory of Justice would say that cultural appropriation is only just if it benefits members of the oppressed culture. Certainly those of us with privileged positions in society have an obligation to both acknowledge and neutralize that privilege. So if you don’t know about cultural appropriation, you’re probably guilty of it.

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The Victoria Singles Myth

Warning: If you’re a single woman having a bitter Valentine’s Day, this post will make you more bitter.

Everybody in Victoria knows there are way more single women than men. I’ve heard as high as 200%. Girls often tell me “it must be so easy being a single guy in Victoria – you have so many girls to choose from!” Well it doesn’t feel very easy!

I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that this statistic is over all age groups, including all the old widows (only a tiny percentage of which are GILFs). The other day the statistic came up in conversation and my friend Dan whispered, in his best Deep Throat impersonation, “check the Census”. So I did*:

Probably thanks to UVic, there are almost as many women under 25 as men, but right after graduation things get tough for men; women don’t become a majority until 40 and not a big one until men start dying of natural causes, but even then not enough to explain to myth.

I think part of the reason the myth gets repeated is that some girls in Victoria like to use it as a crutch: “it’s not my fault I can’t get a man, the statistics are against me”. Here’s the harsh truth: if you’re a woman who has had trouble getting a date in your 20s, when the numbers are on your side, it’s just going to get worse. You need to do one of ~~two~~three things:

Men, resist getting desperate and marrying the first girl you can get: dating’s going to get better every year…and then you die!

* The numbers are from a Census analysis tool that merges non-commonlaw, non-married, separated, divorced and widowed into a “historical non-married equivalent”, so they may be slightly different than if you painstakingly scrape numbers off the StatsCan site. But they’re close enough that the myth is obviously false.

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Electronic Music Has Too Many Genres

This wonderful academic paper explains the reasons why there are so many genre labels in electronic music:

Genuine Differences: Having listened to electronic music exclusively since July I can actually tell the difference between, for example, dark and morning psytrance. Electronic music only looks balkanized if you don’t know anything about it: similar distinctions are made in rock music. Most fans of both electronic and rock get by fine without ever knowing this much terminology, but it’s helpful to people like me who are trying to talk about music.
Branding: If a DJ is forced to label her style, she’ll choose a label that no one has ever used before. A recent example of this is DJ Zinc, who calls his music “crack house” because his fans reject “tech-house”. But the big example is when “Detroit house” was renamed “techno” partially because British media had overhyped the “house” label.
Fashion: In concert with the publishers and the media, producers and DJs continually shift the sound of the moment. McLeod says that this creates the appearance of authenticity by keeping producers close to to early-adopter consumers. This is similar to the economics of cool discussed in The Rebel Sell.
Cultural Appropriation: Genre names have been used by the white, heterosexual music industry to colonialize music from black and gay subcultures. The shift from “jungle” to “drum n bass” is one example as are the multitude of names used besides “instrumental hip-hop” (“trip-hop”, “glitch-hop”, etc.). The relationship between “house” and “techno” is a complex mix of race, sexual orientation and class.
Status Symbols: Understanding genre names is a way to distinguish between casual consumers and members of the electronic music subculture. If you don’t know how to read DJ copy and research DJs, you’ll be discouraged from attending shows where you have no idea what you’re going to get.

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Subcultures are just Alternative Pecking Orders

You don’t have to accept this cause…

Evolutionary psychology says that women should only mate with men who are successful in their culture. If a guy doesn’t have money nor power, it’s better to stay celibate than have children with him.

A subculture, by definition, has a different hierarchy than the dominant culture. Instead of being rich or powerful, the alphas know the most obscure bands or have pointy teeth. Presented with an alternative hierarchy of men, women who are into the subculture should be willing to mate with the men who have low status in the dominant hierarchy.

The subcultural hierarchy needs to be built on some kind of fitness test: it doesn’t work if you can just declare yourself to be the alpha. So you need barriers to entry and honest signals about how much effort you’ve put in. Women have no incentive to put in the effort and the hierarchies work better if they’re old boys clubs.

…to accept the effect:

Subcultural hierarchies tend to exclude women. Subcultures have bodies of technical skills and knowledge, including jargons, that women are less likely to be bothered to learn – because men are more inclined to geek-out and have unbalanced lives. Getting a professional positions within a subculture requires technical skill and knowledge, and professional networks are old boys clubs, so professional positions, which direct subcultural development, tend not to be held by women.

An example is dance music culture as described in articles from the Journal of Dance Music Culture. Becoming a DJ requires geeky technical skills. And being accepted as a DJ or successful as a promoter requires approval by the existing network of male DJs and promoters. Musical subgenre names and other jargon act as a divider between casual members of the subculture and party members, which according to this paper is one reason why there are so many subgenre names in electronic music. The outcome is that women are excluded and vaguely oppressed by dance music culture, which is why they tend to check out sooner or later.

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Saved Us from Fascism only to Doom Us to Climate Change

I’ve been reading and meditating a lot about climate change lately. The issue is usually framed in a larger context of sustainability. The question is raised: how did our society become so unsustainable?

My generation is quick to blame our parents. Baby Boomers make easy scapegoats, because the ex-hippie Boomers that we personally know are quick to apologize that their generation sold out. It’s the right-wing, aggregated Boomers we don’t know that are holding up progress on fighting climate change.

This comment by Van Isle on a Tyee health-reform fantasy piece got me to thinking:

Being an older boomer I made a comment to 90+ year old woman last year about how us baby-boomers have screwed up this world (re; pollutian, world financing ponsi schemes, etc etc). Her come-back was that we were only partly resonsible; her generation too was responsible because they let us get away with it.

But the Boomers didn’t invent the suburbs and the car lifestyle. The Boomers didn’t dismantle the train and streetcar system. The Boomers didn’t start clearcutting the forests and developing every oilfield. Their parents did.

The Boomers produce so carelessly and consume so much only because they were raised that way. It’s the “Greatest Generation” who came back from WW2 with a sense of entitlement and decided to make prosperity happen, whatever the cost.

You can argue that the GI Generation didn’t know any better. They didn’t have climate change models. But it’s pretty obvious that if you cut down all the easily-loggable trees and don’t replant any more, as happened in BC during the 60s, future generations are going to have a hard time making due.

The Baby Boomers shouldn’t have just bought in to their parents’ lifestyles, but their sin is sloth rather than greed. The vote-rich generation still has an opportunity to redeem themselves. You can hate them if they don’t put things on the mend before they hand off power. But the people who got us into this mess in the first place are currently getting seniors discounts and taking a pension out of your pay cheque.

The Game of Life is Not Linear

I just read this not-particularly-interesting New York Times article about “20-somethings” that do not act like “adults”. The article fights the timing but not the content of the incredibly old-fashioned five milestones in the transition to adulthood:

completing school

leaving home

becoming financially independent

marrying

having a child

In Erik Erikson’s 8-stage model of psychosocial development, if you don’t figure out how to make a long-term romantic commitment by 34 and raise a child by 65, you are developmentally delayed, unable to ever move on to higher stages of development. As you age, your options become constrained and you’re supposed to enjoy this forced focus of your energies.

I think it’s not that “kids today” have inserted another stage, pushing back the timeline for developmental milestones, but rather that our society is dismantling the linear progression:

School is not completed in a single sprint; the knowledge economy requires “life-long learning”.
Dwellings with a maximum of two generations are only standard in the West. Many baby boomers are spending so much time caring for their parents that we have to come up with something more convenient for the next generation.
The creative class are supposed to have a changing portfolio of income sources. Education and career changes form a continuous cycle.
Given divorce rates, choosing a marriage partner is not an item to cross off a list but a recurring project.
Nuclear families suck.

Personally, I’m trying to engineer a life that’s more dynamic than the track laid down by previous generations. That being said, the fact that I could relate to an article about “20-somethings”, when I’m at the end of my 20s made me feel a little old.

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Schmoozing and Maching

In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam uses Yiddish to distinguish between two kinds of people that build social capital:

schmoozer: “One who chats”, from the Hebrew “to report gossip”. Informal, friendly relationships; exemplified by two activities: eating dinner together and playing cards.
macher: “Big shot”, from the German “to make”. Relationships based on membership in formal groups, from churches to bowling leagues.

Both activities are correlated with education and income but Putnam says that schmoozers and machers tend to be different people. The rate of both schmoozing and maching has been declining in our society, but maching has possibly been declining faster: bowling is less popular than it used to be, but bowling in leagues especially so. This analysis of folksy politicians gets the definitions a bit wrong, but I think it’s worth considering whether there’s a cultural divide between schmoozers and machers.

The standard advice for getting more friends is to do maching: volunteer, take a class. I’ve been doing some of those things to build my social capital. But if you’re looking for friends to schmooze with, macher activities are probably the wrong way to go.

How do you foster “less organized and purposeful, more spontaneous and flexible” social activities? I’m pretty good at random dinners and drinks, although I probably don’t incite them as much as I could. Do I need to get better at entertaining at home? And what’s the contemporary equivalent of bridge – a Wii?

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MentalPolyphonics

Once again upon the mic.