Shunya's Notes

Wolfe on Porn

A thought-provoking article by Naomi Wolfe on the impact of porn on men and women:

At a benefit the other night, I saw Andrea Dworkin, the anti-porn activist most famous in the eighties for her conviction that opening the floodgates of pornography would lead men to see real women in sexually debased ways. If we did not limit pornography, she argued—before Internet technology made that prospect a technical impossibility—most men would come to objectify women as they objectified porn stars, and treat them accordingly. In a kind of domino theory, she predicted, rape and other kinds of sexual mayhem would surely follow.

The feminist warrior looked gentle and almost frail. The world she had, Cassandra-like, warned us about so passionately was truly here: Porn is, as David Amsden says, the “wallpaper” of our lives now. So was she right or wrong?

More here.

Small Thrills

Cross-posted from Neutral Observer

As I grow older, I seem to get an unusual kick out of small discoveries - something I remember from my childhood. Maybe it is because I have become cynical about grand insights and world-changing ideas.

Many years ago, I had heard this song, from the Hindi film Ek Musafir Ek Hasina.  The song is  unremarkable, except for this refrain in Asha Bhonsle's voice:

zaban-e-yaar man turki, man turki namidanum

I never knew what it meant. It was clearly in some foreign language, but it nevertheless stuck in my head. Recently, I was reading a book about the history and culture of the Mughals by Annemarie Schimmel. Imagine my delight when I read that the strange sounding line was a lament first penned by Amir Khusro, the great poet, musician and scholar who lived from 1253 to 1325 CE. He lived during the first century of Turkic rule in Delhi and its environs. Though his ancestors were of Turkic origin, he himself was unfamiliar with the Turkish language as it was spoken by the Turks in India at that time. He wrote this line in Persian, the literary language of northern India from the thirteenth through the eighteenth century. Translated, I believe it means:

The tongue of my friend is Turkish, but I know no Turkish.

I have no idea why Shewan Rizvi, the lyricist, included this line in the Hindi film song. It has absolutely no connection that I can fathom with the rest of the song.

So, Amir Khusro wrote the line sometime in the 13th or early 14th century, Rizvi incorporated it into a ditty in 1962, I heard it for the first time in the 1980s, and finally discovered the meaning in 2008. Thanks to the internet, you can listen to the song (the audio is not great), read the lyrics, and speculate on the beauty of it all.

Beyond Hope and Change

Two eager contestants, tooting their horns and dissing each other. The media readying us for fireworks, sharp attacks, a "do or die" fight. Showdown in Texas is how CNN bills the live event. No, not a big boxing night, only the 19th Democratic Primary debate in Austin. Held in a giant auditorium, the event is less debate, more performance and spectacle, with snappy phrases, choreographed delivery, calculated show of charm and emotion. With millions watching and thousands cheering lustily, what matters above all is the air of authority and confidence—in voice, body language, rhetorical flourishes. The people want theatrics, verbal sparring, sticky moments. People-meters report audience sentiment in real-time. Smooth, photogenic pundits wait in the wings to offer post-debate punditry. Welcome to democracy in America.

It is no small miracle when—despite all the dubious qualities required to survive the endurance test that the primaries have become—a worthy candidate still emerges. This time, Obama holds that promise. He seems to me more decent than others and exudes a more nuanced, reflective, and principled approach to issues, though his platitudes and populism worry me ("yes we can", "turn the page", opposing Nafta, promising lavish economic stimulus packages). He'll likely be less jingoistic and less ideological than others. I'm encouraged by his years in Indonesia, which surely help him see an equal humanity in non-Americans (as should his father's Kenyan and Muslim heritage). This is hugely positive, if you pause to think about it.

But while Obama may be a fine person, will he focus on the right things and deliver results? Unless he does, he'll not make a fine president. Beyond all the voluptuous talk on hope and change, here is my list of the "right things" I want the next American president to focus on:

Coetzee on Marquez

Coetzee reviews Marquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores:

Gabriel García Márquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera ends with Florentino Ariza, at last united with the woman he has loved from afar all his life, cruising up and down the Magdalena River in a steamboat flying the yellow flag of cholera. The couple are seventy-six and seventy-two, respectively.

In order to give unfettered attention to his beloved Fermina, Florentino has had to break off his current affair, a liaison with a fourteen-year-old ward of his, whom he has initiated into the mysteries of sex during Sunday-afternoon trysts in his bachelor apartment (she proves a quick learner). He gives her the brushoff over a sundae in an ice cream parlor. Bewildered and in despair, the girl commits unobtrusive suicide, taking her secret with her to the grave. Florentino sheds a private tear and feels intermittent pangs of grief over her loss, but that is all.

América Vicuña, the child seduced and abandoned by an older man, is a character straight out of Dostoevsky. The moral frame of Love in the Time of Cholera, a work of considerable emotional range but a comedy nonetheless, of an autumnal variety, is simply not large enough to contain her. In his determination to treat América as a minor character, one in the line of Florentino's many mistresses, and to leave unexplored the consequences for Florentino of his offense against her, García Márquez drifts into morally unsettling territory. Indeed, there are signs that he is unsure of how to handle her story.

Gandhi After Gandhi

An amusing, insightful essay on the legacy of MK Gandhi by the noted sociologist Ashis Nandy:

There are four Gandhis who have survived Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s death. Fifty years after Gandhi’s (1861-1948) assassination, it may be useful to establish their identities, as the British police might have done in the high noon of colonialism. All the four Gandhis are troublesome, but they trouble different people for different reasons and in different ways. They are also useable in contemporary public life in four distinct ways. I say this not in sorrow, but in admiration. For the ability to disturb people — or, for that matter, be useable — one hundred and thirty years after one’s birth and fifty years after one’s death is no mean achievement. Frankly, I do not care who the real Gandhi was or is. Let academics debate that momentous issue. Contemporary politics is not about ‘truths’ of history; it is about remembered pasts and the problems of fashioning a future based on collective memories. For better or for worse, Gandhi seems to have entered that memory.

More here. A more recent related essay by Nandy here.

Reza Aslan on Religion

Continuing my quest to highlight significant viewpoints on important topics, here is an Apr 2007 debate worth watching between Reza Aslan and Sam Harris. Topics include religion, Islam, terrorism, etc. Harris did little to change my view of him; Aslan is the one to watch.

How Terrorism Works

Experts on Islamic terrorism are now everywhere, spouting wisdom on countless media outlets and blogs. Most of them—including scholars, novelists, scientists—reflexively summon their gut to explain what turns Muslims into terrorists, marshaling anecdotes and selective data as evidence. The Qur'an is the underlying cause to some, sociopolitical inequities to others; virgins in paradise explain much to some, follies of US foreign policy to others; hatred of "freedom-loving" West suffices for some, dislocations of modernity to others. Rare is the attempt to understand terrorists themselves as social and moral beings (as, for instance, in the movie Paradise Now).

An insightful analyst of modern terrorism is Scott Atran (see my previous post on Sacred Conflicts). He has done pioneering field research on suicide bombers and the social dynamics of terrorist networks. Watch this remarkable lecture he gave at the Beyond Belief conference in Nov 2007 (attached below). The same material is summarized in this slideshow for the US State Department (I'm surprised they invited him and wonder how he was received). Here are ten conclusions I've selected from it:

Global Al-Qaeda is now a viral, social movement and political ideology, not a well organized operation with command and control. Young men self-radicalize in their social groups as soccer and camp buddies, neighbors and schoolmates, etc.
 

The new wave of terrorism is about "youth culture", not the Koran. It cannot be checked by military means or elders spouting niceties from the Koran, but with ideas and proposals for action that address their sense of injustice and moral outrage.
 

Prison radicalization in the USA vs. Europe differs significantly: Foreign-born Muslims, like Jews, are underrepresented in US prisons. But Muslims in European prisons are wildly over-represented (for many of the same reasons that Blacks in US prisons are over-represented). Nevertheless, prior religious education is a negative predictor of radicalization.

Globalization

Shahnaz Hussain, Fox News, reporting in her British accent on Amsterdam inspired Sexpo in Mexico City (click for video).

On Imre Kertesz

Years ago when I read Fateless—a Holocaust novel by Imre Kertesz—I was floored by its brilliance. "Kertesz's spare, understated prose and the almost ironic perspective of Gyorgy Köves, limited both by his youth and his inability to perceive the enormity of what he is caught up in, give the novel an intensity that [makes] it difficult to forget." Kertesz won the Nobel Prize in 2002 (read his acceptance lecture) "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history":

In his writing Imre Kertész explores the possibility of continuing to live and think as an individual in an era in which the subjection of human beings to social forces has become increasingly complete. His works return unremittingly to the decisive event in his life: the period spent in Auschwitz, to which he was taken as a teenage boy during the Nazi persecution of Hungary's Jews. For him Auschwitz is not an exceptional occurrence that like an alien body subsists outside the normal history of Western Europe. It is the ultimate truth about human degradation in modern existence.

Kertész's first novel, Sorstalanság, 1975 (Fateless, 1992), deals with the young Köves, who is arrested and taken to a concentration camp but conforms and survives. The novel uses the alienating device of taking the reality of the camp completely for granted, an everyday existence like any other, admittedly with conditions that are thankless, but not without moments of happiness. Köves regards events like a child without completely understanding them and without finding them unnatural or disquieting - he lacks our ready-made answers. The shocking credibility of the description derives perhaps from this very absence of any element of the moral indignation or metaphysical protest that the subject cries out for. The reader is confronted not only with the cruelty of atrocities but just as much with the thoughtlessness that characterised their execution. Both perpetrators and victims were preoccupied with insistent practical problems, the major questions did not exist. Kertész's message is that to live is to conform. The capacity of the captives to come to terms with Auschwitz is one outcome of the same principle that finds expression in everyday human coexistence.

More here. I discovered today that a movie based on Fateless came out in 2006 when I was in India (now in my Netflix queue).

Just Not Cricket

Cross-posted from Neutral Observer

In a recent cricket match played between India and Australia in Sydney, the Indian cricketer Harbhajan Singh was accused of hurling a racist insult at Andrew Symonds, an Australian player who,  I learnt recently, is of Caribbean descent. Symonds had been the subject of insulting taunts and gestures by some spectators in the stadiums of India where the Australian team had toured a few months ago. On January 4, 2008, in the middle of a tense game situation in Sydney, there was an exchange between Symonds and Harbhajan, after which Symonds accused Harbhajan of calling him a 'monkey'. This was backed up by two of his Australian team-mates, Matthew Hayden and Michael Clarke. Harbhajan Singh denied using any racist insults. The two umpires did not hear anything and the microphones attached to the stumps did not pick up the insult either. Harbhajan's batting partner and cricketing legend Sachin Tendulkar also said later that Harbhajan had not used any racist language. The matter was reported to the umpires, who eventually brought it to the attention of the off-field match referee. A hearing was held by the referee after the match was over; he found Harbhajan guilty as accused and handed out a three-match ban.

The ban unleashed a furore in India. The TV channels were outraged. Predictably, a few effigies were burnt for the benefit of the cameras. Websites were flooded with the outbursts of Indian cricket fans. Everybody and his uncle weighed in on the matter. The Indian cricket board, by far the wealthiest and most influential of such boards in the cricket playing countries, made threatening noises about calling off the tour if the ban were not lifted. An appeals process exists in cases such as these, so an appeal was filed. The international body that manages cricket, the International Cricket Council (ICC), decided to postpone the appeal hearing till the end of the month in order to salvage the two remaining matches in the test series. On Tuesday, January 29th, the appeal was heard by a commissioner of the ICC who also happens to be a judge from New Zealand. He found that the charge was not proven. Harbhajan was however convicted of a lesser charge of using abusive language.

This bare summary hardly does justice to the story. In order to get a fuller picture, we have to recall some background. Cricket is played extensively in very few countries - all of whom were formerly part of the British empire. Introduced by the British into the colonies of the empire, it was initially meant for and played by the elites. From the start of the 20th century,  international games were run by the English and the Australians via  a body called the  ICC - the Imperial Cricket Conference. An Indian team, usually captained by a maharaja, started playing international games in 1932.  After the departure of the British, cricket steadily gained popularity in the countries of the subcontinent. Pakistan started playing international cricket soon after 1947, Sri Lanka did so in the 1980s, as did Bangladesh in the 1990s.