Bluebird of happiness

For some reason, gay marriage isn't controversial enough for some people, and I have read a whole bunch of pieces on polygamy in the last couple of months: two of them are here and here.

The thing that bothers me about these pieces -- really bothers me, bothers me so that it makes me boiling mad -- is that they implicitly assume that legalized polygamy would be in the form of "one man, many wives" -- and then use this as a jumping off point to say that multiple marriage is inherently hierarchical and bad for women. Well, NO SHIT, you morons, if you build sexism into a law, you will get sexist results. But why the hell do you assume that multiple marriages would necessarily be polygynous and not polyandrous? Just because polygyny has been more common throughout history? I can think of a couple of extremely obvious reasons for this that have nothing to do with women naturally preferring to share themselves with only one mate, namely: 1) in many many societies, pregnancy and childbearing have been a vital function of sex for everyone, because children represented likely-able workers and a net wealth gain, and 2) because of this, women spent most of their years of strength and vigor pregnant and therefore not in a position to bargain. But neither of these applies to most of the modern West, where we have birth control, where women have economic and political power, where children are a net wealth loss and hence must be had sparingly. I know a few poly people, and several of these are women, and they seem perfectly content to have multiple partners.

It's not the fact that these people oppose multiple marriages that bothers me. It would certainly be fairer if legal institutions existed to protect those kinds of relationships, but it would not be a simple plug-and-play into traditional heterosexual marriage, for reasons enumerated here (scroll down to Thurs. 12/29). It's the fact that they do so for reasons which imply deep, unacknowledged sexism in themselves, all the while waving the flag of equal rights. It's the feel-good liberal intolerance of the day! Let's all protect women by limiting what kind of sexual freedoms everyone can enjoy, because lord knows the women won't want to or be able to use them! Fuck off, you pseudo-feminist crusaders. I don't need your protection.

Christ. Sometimes I hate everyone.

No idea how old it is, but here's a Salon article I found on straight fairies. (I wonder if those guys are what last year's crowd liked to call "metrosexuals")

I was recently in a conversation with someone who was convinced her cousin had married a gay man. Wouldn't hear "maybe he's just a little effeminate" or other such arguments; her faith in his fruitiness was unshakeable. Me, I'm a little uncomfortable with the gender stereotyping that goes along with such surmising. I've been to a few queer events with my favorite lesbians and I do know that there's definitely a different vibe, somehow. But nevertheless I feel there's something a bit... inappropriate... about making assumptions about other people's sexuality. Part of that is because I think that people are complicated and sexuality and social roles are complicated and the labels people choose may tell you more about them than the labels you infer. Part of it is I guess that I think making public inferences about behavior that most people consider private is almost always rude. Particularly when you come at it with the attitude that you know them better than they know themselves. Even when that's true, it's never polite to say so.

Not that I've never done it myself (at least privately; I've never been in the business of gaydar self-promotion). But there have definitely been people who have surprised me, and I try to remember that.

Now here's an interesting essay: Four Reasons to be Happy about Internet Plagiarism

A lot of this article can be summed up as "our way of evaluating students sucks because it has no ecological validity, which is why we find ourselves in the plagiarism pickle in the first place." Which, that's nice and all, but the authors don't really offer alternatives. On the other hand, the analysis they provide in point 4 of the difference between undergrad citations and grownup citations is really good, and I actually feel like I learned something from reading it, or that something I maybe understood fuzzily and implicitly has become explicit. Cool.

On a side note, my aunt is taking a graduate course on student assessment, and she made some comment last weekend about how she'll never look at a test the same way again. I think maybe I need to check out the ed psych offerings...