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3 Movie Friday: Never been kissed

I’ve talked before about religion’s bizarre obsession with sex. This video made me laugh, but it’s not really funny.

It’s about the most thinly-veiled abstinence advocacy I’ve ever seen. It goes beyond sexual celibacy and says that even kissing is off limits. I’ve seen little kids smooch each other. It’s about as small a deal as can possibly be. Kissing is a expression of affection that seems to be universal. If you’re lucky enough to receive a kiss from someone you care about, it’s an amazing thing. Why anyone would want to deny people such a simple pleasure baffles the rational mind.

There’s also a very telling moment, where the dad says:

What kind of man do you want your husband to be? Do you want a man who saved all his love just for you? One who never even kissed another woman, so he could share that just with you?

Seems like you got some of the words wrong there, dad. Let me fix that for you:

What kind of man do you want your husband to be? Do you want a man who has no clue what the hell he’s doing? One who’s never even kissed another woman, so he has essentially zero shot of being able to gratify you sexually?

There, much more accurate. They of course don’t show the kiss between the husband and wife, since the sight of Johnny Haircut slobbering all over her face as he tries to wrap his lips around hers would be a bit too much to handle. I’ve seen bad kissers; I’ve been kissed by bad kissers. Some people need all the practice they can get.

The guy who asks Pamela out and tries to kiss her is right to smirk – she straight out runs away from him. And it wouldn’t be a heavy-handed awkward Christian morality play unless there was some girl who kissed her boyfriend… with disastrous consequences (note: consequences not shown, just vaguely alluded to). Let’s assume she had sex with her boyfriend out of a sense of obligation. The problem isn’t kissing in this case, it’s that her friend is a spineless moron. If you’re not ready to have sex, you’ve got to learn to say so. When we don’t have honest discussions about sex with our children, this is the kind of shit that happens. It’s not because we didn’t tie their chastity belts on tight enough; it’s because we didn’t give them the wherewithal to say “I’m in charge of my sexuality.”

Some guys I know are still wowie-zowie about virgins. I’m 25 years old – if I meet a girl my age who’s a virgin, I’m wondering what happened in her past to make her that way. There’s nothing inherently wrong with not having sex, but it’s definitely unusual. “Saving yourself” for marriage is basically condemning your would-be spouse to having to teach you how to fuck. Sex is fun, and when done properly, is safe. Fetishizing sex and constructing elaborate taboos about what is essentially a biological function only serves to make us more obsessed, and more likely to do something stupid and dangerous.

0 John Legend gets it EXACTLY right

I’ve said this before, it’s REALLY nice to hear my ideas coming out of the mouths of other people:

John Legend says its okay to see race (sorry, embed code was refusing to work and I don’t know enough HTML to troubleshoot it).

John Legend is a singer/songwriter who has collaborated often with the likes of Common, Mos Def and Kanye West. He’s also a really smart guy, apparently.

“…I’m black and I love being black, and I don’t want somebody to love me despite the fact that I’m black or be blind to the fact that I’m black and love me; I just want them to love me for whoever I am individually. But it’s okay that you see me as a black guy too.”

He’s absolutely right, incidentally, about how to get racist ideologies out of the public narrative: tear down the stereotypes. Not simply by saying the stereotypes are wrong, but by surrounding people with examples of how they’re wrong.

0 Movie Friday: Hurray for Cartoons!

I love cartoons. I always have. Even now that I am more grown up, I still get a thrill from watching shows like South Park, Clone High, The Simpsons, and others. Animation is a way of portraying the world without being fettered by reality.

Then again, sometimes cartoons are so racist you wish they would stick a bit closer to reality. This week’s Movie Friday is about the history of race portrayal in cartoons. In light of my previous post about the Tintin book, I thought it would be worthwhile to examine our history in North America. This post is a two-fer, but overlap a bit.

Mr. Disney’s Wild Racist Ride

Cracked.com made a great deal of hay about the contents of this specific video, and the article is worth checking out.

The second video has had embedding disabled, so you’ll just have to follow this link if you want to watch it. It’s more of the same though. Racial differences are exaggerated and lampooned for sport. It is tempting to castigate the creators of these cartoons for their racism, but I see it as being simply a reflection of the ethos of the day. There are lots of examples of racist attitudes prevailing in today’s television. As one example, there are no non-white characters on Friends, Seinfeld, or How I Met Your Mother, despite the fact that they all take place in New York City with a huge non-white population. We haven’t rid ourselves of racism; it’s simply been transformed into something less obvious.

Writer/director Spike Lee, with whom I do not always agree, created an excellent film about this phenomenon called Bamboozled. While he, of course, focused on black people in the United States, the lessons can be extracted to portrayals of any ethnic minority groups. I can’t recommend enough that everyone watch this movie. It is an eye-opening and perspective-changing view of race in media, and the phenomenon of subverted systemic racism in North America. Seriously, watch this movie.

So the next time you’re watching your favourite show, spend a segment looking at race portrayal with a critical eye and see if you can’t detect some race bias. It’s often subtle, but it’s definitely there.

0 Movie Friday: Dave Chappelle – Native Americans

Dave Chappelle is one of the most insightful comedians in the US. It’s sad that most people are forever going to know him only for his Rick James impression. Here’s a bit of his standup:

I see a lot of parallels between the black struggle for economic and political power in Canada and that of the First Nations. Obviously there are real differences – Native people have been here for generations and were supplanted by European settlers; black people were forcibly kidnapped and taken to North America as slave labour. There are real historical differences, but many of the after-effects are similar. Racialicious has many authors speaking from the Native perspective, and I am learning a lot. If the topic interests you at all, you should check them out.

0 Movie Friday: Eddie Izzard – Whales ‘n’ God

Today’s movie features one of my all-time favourite comedians: Eddie Izzard. Sometimes remembered as the “Lost Python” from Monty Python, you might recognize him from Ocean’s 13. At any rate, he’s a wildly funny comedian who often riffs on religion as part of his routines. It’s hard to pick just one bit to exhibit, so I picked one at random.

There’s no lesson on this one, he’s just really funny.

1 Movie Friday: Sam Harris at TED

A common defense of religious belief and practice is that without religion (and the teachings of the holy books), there would be no morality. In a historical, practical sense this is at least partially true. Morals were dictated and enforced by religious authority, and justified on religious grounds – God says not to steal, therefore we will punish stealing. However, it is important to recognize that just because something has worked in the past, that does not make it true, nor does it mean we must continue to use it when we have much better alternatives. As Brian Lychenhaun noted in his presentation that I talked about on Wednesday, not only is it possible to make moral decisions without relying on religious teachings, we do it already. I would argue (and, I think, so would Brian) that it is in fact better to make moral decisions that are informed by critical thinking and logic rather than relying on a mistranslated text written thousands of years ago that invoke, as their reasoning, an entity whose existence cannot be proven.

Author Sam Harris makes a similar argument that science can inform our moral decisions. He does so at TED, which is a lecture series given by prominent scientists, authors and thinkers. If you haven’t watched TED videos before, you should. I promise not to make every Movie Friday a TED lecture, but they will show up with regularity because they’ve got some really fantastic ideas. Anyway, check out the video:

I am with Sam most of the way. I think he fails to make a solidly coherent point – I’m sure he has one, but he seems to dance around it a bit. The central thesis seems to be that values reduce to facts, and we can examine and test the truth of those facts. Knowledge of those facts will help inform the decisions we make. I’m with him only part of the way. He uses “values” in a more colloquial way than I do. He seems to be talking about decisions and policies whereas I see values as the set of emotional and mental prescripts that underpin those decisions – being anti-abortion is not a “value”, it is a position that is driven by the underlying emotional opinion that human beings come into existence at the moment of conception. Of course, that value can be examined by science, but there needs to first be a definition of what a “human” is. However, the take-away message (or at least the one that I took away) is that we can use science and the scientific method (logic applied to agreed-upon first principles, verified by observation) to answer moral questions. We do not need religion, as religious texts are not comprehensive enough to give reliable answers in the face of novel ethical dilemmas.

I also particularly love the section where he throws away the tired liberal doctrine of “who are we to say that another culture/practice/person is wrong?” He turns it right back on its head and asks “who are we not to say?” We can establish standards for what is right and wrong, based on an agreed-upon first principle of ‘good’. We can test the value of that ‘goodness’ through logic and observation – if adherence to scripture is ‘the good’, what effect will that have? Is that a desirable effect for human survival and social stability? Harris offers “human happiness” as an idea for ‘the good’, which is the basic principle held by secular humanists. Sure it has its flaws but it is far superior (for humans, who are the ones making the decisions) to any religious exhortation to please the invisible YahwAlladdha.

I also love the lines that he goes out on:

“We can no more respect and tolerate vast differences in notions of human well-being than we can respect or tolerate vast differences in the notion of how disease spreads or the safety standards of large buildings or airplanes. We simply must converge on the answers we give to the most important questions in human life; and to do that, we have to admit these questions have answers.”

Just fantastic.

0 Movie Friday! – Dara O’Briain

It’s Friday. I like Fridays. Do you like Fridays?

In honour of this auspicious day, I’m going to do something different. Instead of my usual old-cranky-man ranting about this and that, I’m going to post movies that I find interesting or funny.

Today’s movie is making the rounds as a skeptic’s classic. The comedian is Dana O’Briain, who is one of the best standups I’ve heard in a while. He’s talking about a lot of the same issues I’ve been bringing up, but he’s a lot funnier than I am.

Happy Friday!

0 A nice summary of the danger of the forces of stupid

Sometimes it’s nice to hear this stuff coming from someone else.