tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-86262923044615741112024-03-15T03:34:31.028-04:00Tell me why the world is weirdEx-evangelical Christian feminist. White American living in China. I believe in resurrection.perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.comBlogger1669125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-18070717388307680242024-03-15T01:01:00.001-04:002024-03-15T01:01:12.446-04:00A Bit Suspicious That "Heavenly Tourism" Confirms Everything We Already Believe<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_wmQEfepcUylaLKVppOPFJ74UZdfXMQS0lOJikJzU-vyL7wQqrR5RbHIdmQf44JpzpjJukhVjDjwONlurm5TguEG16V2wjSYvT_2bGlAPhBw-pBqEbMO5tbcg61fOQ7w8QQVcZZz3fyBgGMsgAjLBkxmkw3y8E0p0CpbKAZdPf5U-GkSCLZtCKRWlR-eK/s550/heaven-costume-party.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="550" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_wmQEfepcUylaLKVppOPFJ74UZdfXMQS0lOJikJzU-vyL7wQqrR5RbHIdmQf44JpzpjJukhVjDjwONlurm5TguEG16V2wjSYvT_2bGlAPhBw-pBqEbMO5tbcg61fOQ7w8QQVcZZz3fyBgGMsgAjLBkxmkw3y8E0p0CpbKAZdPf5U-GkSCLZtCKRWlR-eK/s16000/heaven-costume-party.jpeg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A comic showing a man in a devil outfit at the gates of heaven. He says, "Sorry about this - I died at a costume party." <a href="https://joyreactor.com/tag/heaven">Image source.</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>Anyone remember the whole "heavenly tourism" fad?</p><p>A few years ago, some "<b>heavenly tourism</b>" stories started popping up. Books like "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Heaven-Real-Little-Astounding-Story/dp/0849946158/">Heaven Is For Real</a>" and "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Came-Back-Heaven/dp/1414336063/">The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven</a>," which were <b>(supposedly true) accounts of people who had near-death experiences, and supposedly went to heaven and then came back. </b>It was a whole thing in Christian culture, back then. (<a href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/07/the-boy-who-came-back-from-heaven-christian-book-scandal.html">Later, Alex Malarkey, the boy from "The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven" said that whole book was not true.</a>)</p><p>These stories were, basically, about <b>proving how right our religious beliefs are. Scoring points against people from other religions and/or atheists. </b>Doesn't that seem... extremely weird? If you really got to go see what heaven was like, shouldn't it be about learning incredible new otherworldly information, rather than confirming that you already were right about everything?</p><p>The "heavenly tourism" stories included elements like this: A child goes to heaven and sees Jesus, who looks basically like what Christians expect Jesus to look like. The child sees angels, who are basically what Christians expect angels to look like. The child meets some of his relatives who died a long time ago- and is able to later describe what these relatives looked like, which shouldn't be possible because the child had never met them on earth- and this matches Christians' beliefs about who is in heaven and what kind of existence they would have. And so on.</p><p>And there's usually an aspect of the story that's just there <b>to score points for "pro-life" ideology</b>: The child meets another child in heaven, who explains that she's the sister who died in their mom's belly, or something along those lines. And when the child comes back from heaven and tells his mom, the mom is so surprised, because she never told him that she had a miscarriage/abortion. (I say this "scores points" for the "pro-life" side because "pro-life" people wrongly believe that pro-choice people view a fetus as having no value/soul/life/etc <i>at any point of development</i> up until birth. So, if a dead fetus goes to heaven, that means abortion should always be illegal, or something. Uh, okay.)</p><p>And there may be a few elements of the story which at first don't seem to match what Christians believe- <b>the child says he saw something in heaven, and the good Christian adults who are listening to this story can't figure out what he's talking about. </b>But, they dig a little deeper and they find that it TOTALLY DOES match something the bible said, or whatever, just in a way they didn't expect. <b>So, see, we were right about everything.</b></p><p><b>Really? Someone goes to heaven and comes back, and all we get is more confidence that we were already right about everything? We don't, like, learn anything new? Really?</b></p><p><b>I gotta say, I believe in heaven, but I definitely think I'm wrong about a lot of aspects of it.</b> If heaven is real, probably the first thing that happens to everyone who goes there is they find out it's completely different from what they expected. It must be; <b>we have no mechanism to actually get reliable information on what heaven is like- most of our beliefs are basically folklore that has gradually built up over hundreds or thousands of years, with no way to actually fact-check any of it. A lot of it has got to be just plain wrong. And wouldn't it be awesome, to get a glimpse of what heaven really is, and find out how wrong you are?</b></p><p>Personally, my beliefs about heaven and resurrection come from two main sources:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>The world is not just. I want to believe that somehow, someday, all the wrongs will be made right. I want to believe that justice is real. <b>And so I hope that there is resurrection, that heaven is real, and I imagine what heaven would have to be like, to truly create justice.</b><br />But maybe that's just wishful thinking. Just because I want it, doesn't mean it's actually real. Which brings me to point number 2...</li><li>There is a long tradition of people believing in various religions because we want there to be more than just this world. (And, in particular, I'm a Christian, so I'm influenced by Christian beliefs about resurrection and heaven.) <b>Thousands of years of people saying the world is not just and we hope for a better world. </b>Okay, maybe that's just wishful thinking too, and there's nothing real to it. <b>But since it's so common, I kind of believe there's something there.</b> I hope there is.</li></ol><p></p><p>That's, uh, that's pretty much it. That's all the "evidence" we have that heaven exists. (I put "evidence" in scare quotes because honestly neither of those things really adds up to any evidence at all.) That's all we have to go on, as we speculate about what heaven is like. Point 1 is just our opinions on what perfect justice should look like, and point 2 is claims from religions about how maybe a few hundred years ago, God spoke to someone and gave some clues about what heaven is like. That's it. So, okay, that's the broad outlines of what heaven is, but we seriously know nothing about the details.<b> Like, you could say "I believe God will make everything right, but I don't have any idea how that will work" and that's basically it. Beyond that, any details you believe about heaven are just fan theories.</b></p><p>So, wow, how cool would it be to actually go to heaven and see what it's like, and then come back? And <b>likely the main thing that would happen is you would find out how totally wrong you are about pretty much all of it. Very cool to learn new information and find out which things we were wrong about.</b></p><p>Right?</p><p>But, apparently not. Because that's not the angle that those "heavenly tourism" stories take at all. <b>They're not about learning something new; they're used as evidence that Christians are <i>already</i> right about everything. </b>They're evidence for the beliefs we already have, something you can bring up in an argument with non-Christians (though honestly I don't think these kinds of stories are <i>at all</i> convincing to non-Christians, so good luck with that!), rather than an incredibly useful tool for examining our own beliefs and getting rid of the ones which are just wrong.</p><p>Isn't that a little... strange?</p><p>And really it's about the whole concept of certainty, about how when I was an evangelical I thought I was right about everything, because the bible gives us all the answers and that's that. But now I'm like, <b>I don't know, I hope resurrection is real, I believe in it, but I don't know, I could be wrong. I see the ways that my beliefs are based on ... like... what I *want* to be true, rather than things I actually have evidence for. </b>And... I do believe people have a conscience that comes from God, and so it does mean something that we understand this world is not the way it should be, and we want there to be a better world- so, perhaps that means there *is* a better world- so, there's that, but that's not really evidence either. (It's a fan theory.)</p><p>Winning arguments. Scoring points. Telling other people why you're right and they're wrong. Imagine you get to go to heaven- YOU GET TO GO TO HEAVEN- and that's all you get out of it.</p><p>---</p><p><i>Related:</i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2022/11/sure-of-what-we-hope-for.html">Sure Of What We Hope For</a> <br /></i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2022/09/dave-ramsey-fire-pregnant-employee.html">Someday Dave Ramsey will have to stand before God and explain why he fired a pregnant woman</a><br /></i></p><p><i>And this song, "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2F4INQFjEI">Heaven is a place on earth</a>." Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. We'll make heaven a place on earth. That's my religion.</i></p><p>
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</p><p><br /></p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-62712639498930300692024-03-13T23:16:00.001-04:002024-03-13T23:16:53.174-04:00Blogaround<p><b><span style="font-size: large;">1.</span></b> <a href="https://www.writingforlife.net/index.php/2024/03/01/how-not-to-do-autism-awareness-month/">How (Not) To Do Autism Awareness Month</a> (March 1) "I think most people know at this point that autism exists and a few basic traits, and would go 'Oh yeah, I support autistic people' in April, but months later when someone you work with is 'weird' and communicates more directly and bluntly than others, do you just go with it or do you assume they’re being rude to people and complain to someone?"</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">2.</span></b> <a href="https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/4443455">"Complete" Manhood and The Desirability of Becoming Human in Bicentennial Man (1999)</a> (March 7) "I cannot stress this enough. They had the opportunity, right here, to fashion 'Can Andrew open a bank account?' into a central plot point about the legal recognition of his personhood, and the movie just... breezes past it. Andrew gets a bank account and nobody tries to stop him and it's fine."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">3. </span></b><a href="https://wonkette.com/p/tom-hanks-mad-he-didnt-learn-about">Tom Hanks Mad He Didn't Learn About The Tulsa Massacre In School, And He's Right</a> (March 8) "And it made me mad. It made me mad that somebody had somehow made an editorial process of what was appropriate for us to learn about our own American history."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">4.</span></b> <a href="https://onlysky.media/ccassidy/farewell-onlysky/">Farewell, OnlySky</a> (March 7, <a href="https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2024/03/11/indefinite-articles-prepositions-should-be-lc-in-heds/">via</a>) Sad to hear that atheist blogging site OnlySky is shutting down.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">5.</span></b> <a href="https://presswatchers.org/2024/03/why-is-new-york-times-campaign-coverage-so-bad-because-thats-what-the-publisher-wants/">Why is New York Times campaign coverage so bad? Because that’s what the publisher wants.</a> (March 7) "Yes, but sometimes it is obvious what’s right. Defending democracy would age just fine, I assure you."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">6. </span></b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MGmZJ4C8gs">Therapist Reacts to WALL-E</a> (January 10) "I understand that on paper, that sounds ridiculous and kind of stupid. And yet, I kid you not, I think this is one of the most beautiful love stories I've ever seen on film." 29-minute video from Cinema Therapy.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">7. </span></b>This <a href="https://twitter.com/thescottbarber/status/1767740512017293512">tweet</a>:</p><p>
</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">Jesus teaching only in parabolas <a href="https://t.co/b8Yty5VTVx">pic.twitter.com/b8Yty5VTVx</a></p>— Scott Barber (@thescottbarber) <a href="https://twitter.com/thescottbarber/status/1767740512017293512?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 13, 2024</a></blockquote> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
<p><b><span style="font-size: large;">8.</span></b> And <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQedWPetjf4">this song</a>, if you're into Phil Joel/ Newsboys songs from the year 2000 (I know I am!)</p><p>
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</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">9. </span></b><a href="https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/03/13/at-least-you-quickly-know-to-not-bother-reading-the-rest/">At least you quickly know to not bother reading the rest</a> (March 13) Oh ChatGPT.</p><p></p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-85829859788449122162024-03-12T04:30:00.001-04:002024-03-12T04:30:19.884-04:00Americans Living Abroad- Time To Register To Vote!<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjloRG3D_I1d0nngHbHMNW7a1HnwsYRGlHr-FPiMumKl7fcYAoR0NqOyK-Be5Q6e4Hqr_Ri0r0Et_5iTaGN08cNHtwV-r4EdJcCvmwQ8hSNpJB0Q-jK3Q6QSNS9bECLE5-lHy8CA9l_lyZ6e34g6pENSmi0lhSTVJEX7xtcKPEg0MFXC0JGe55lpMHq9Td1/s550/american-flag-wind.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="365" data-original-width="550" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjloRG3D_I1d0nngHbHMNW7a1HnwsYRGlHr-FPiMumKl7fcYAoR0NqOyK-Be5Q6e4Hqr_Ri0r0Et_5iTaGN08cNHtwV-r4EdJcCvmwQ8hSNpJB0Q-jK3Q6QSNS9bECLE5-lHy8CA9l_lyZ6e34g6pENSmi0lhSTVJEX7xtcKPEg0MFXC0JGe55lpMHq9Td1/s16000/american-flag-wind.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">American flag. <a href="https://time.com/5675803/america-flag-threat/">Image source.</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><b>Hi all, just a reminder that if you are a US citizen living outside the US, you have the right to vote in the election.</b> You need to register though, and every state's laws are a little different, but fortunately there is a really nice website that can walk you through it: <a href="https://www.votefromabroad.org/">votefromabroad.org</a> (As far as I know, you need to register every year you vote by absentee, even if you already registered in previous years.)</p><p>Some states allow you to vote by email, and other states require fax or physically mailing your ballot back. Also, we're not anywhere close to the deadline for registering to vote in the general election, but if you want to vote in the primaries, you'll have to check the information for your state to find out deadlines for that.</p><p>The site, <a href="https://www.votefromabroad.org/">votefromabroad.org</a>, is created by Democrats Abroad, but the site itself is non-partisan. (Though if you don't want to use this site, you can google "FPCA" and find other sites which will also give you the information on how to vote.)</p><p><b>If you have any friends who are Americans living abroad, share the link with them~ <a href="https://www.votefromabroad.org/">votefromabroad.org</a> </b></p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-48732229535742840372024-03-04T03:11:00.001-05:002024-03-04T03:11:57.313-05:00Blogaround<p><b><span style="font-size: large;">1.</span></b> <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/02/23/1233468580/dragon-fossil-china-triassic">Paleontologists discover a 240-million-year-old 'dragon' fossil in full</a> (February 23, <a href="https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/4380848">via</a>) "It's a fitting discovery in the Year of the Dragon: A team of scientists has uncovered a complete fossil of an aquatic reptile that resembles a 'Chinese dragon' because of its snake-like appearance and elongated neck." Cool!</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">2.</span></b> <a href="https://www.space.com/nasa-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-mission-ends">NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity has flown its last flight after suffering rotor damage</a> (January 26, <a href="https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/4259699">via</a>) "The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) chopper was tasked with demonstrating that powered flight is indeed possible on Mars despite the planet's thin atmosphere — it promptly did so during a five-flight campaign that spring."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">3.</span></b> <a href="https://metro.co.uk/2024/02/13/im-asexual-didnt-stop-becoming-a-mum-20264872/">I didn’t fancy men or women. Then I had a baby</a> (February 13, <a href="https://asexualagenda.wordpress.com/2024/02/23/linkspam-february-23rd-2024/">via</a>) Article about an asexual woman who decided to get pregnant using a sperm donor.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">4.</span></b> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZIw08RIwiM">What TV Shows Get Wrong (and Right!) About Therapy</a> (November 15) 27-minute video from Cinema Therapy.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">5. </span></b><a href="https://relevantmagazine.com/culture/movies/a-reading-rainbow-documentary-is-coming-next-month/">A ‘Reading Rainbow’ Documentary Is Coming Next Month</a> (February 28) Cool!</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">6. </span></b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDvFeo9H5uc">When Star Trek Confronted Racism Head-On</a> (February 28) 23-minute video about a "Deep Space Nine" episode</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">7.</span></b> <a href="https://laurarbnsn.substack.com/p/if-elisabeth-elliots-marriage-advice">If Elisabeth Elliot's Marriage Advice was Supposed to Ruin Your Life, This is the First I've Heard It</a> (February 12) "The book is a frankly overheated and occasionally goofy account of two people who, like all young people, have very intense and primarily interior problems that don’t make sense to anyone over twenty-five. <i>Passion and Purity</i>, though, is told through the perspective of a much older woman who actually does seem to agree that these problems are very serious, and that the tortured process of wondering if you’re touching your boyfriend too much or if he loves you too much is actually part of preparation for marriage. How do we make sense of this?"</p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-57464896779496583942024-03-02T05:07:00.000-05:002024-03-02T05:07:06.226-05:00Here's How We Do Our Budget<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD4_xD-W-po9X04WCT1R9FkWbUIhkrOqHRNI7HugXydVmjjzJoXMLn_igMUA2uX0P5qEItabrf3MsuEB1rX-zH810bqtMNThCbWyaD8g4QkSaxaOYzoqNWO3GZalWUci0lhzGJH8asSySUOyvkOp-M9WnW1iXiUt0aAVHNGuuuy1J8U4wydzh1XH3qe4sw/s550/envelope_of_money_185792650-5bfc3797c9e77c00587a330d.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="355" data-original-width="550" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD4_xD-W-po9X04WCT1R9FkWbUIhkrOqHRNI7HugXydVmjjzJoXMLn_igMUA2uX0P5qEItabrf3MsuEB1rX-zH810bqtMNThCbWyaD8g4QkSaxaOYzoqNWO3GZalWUci0lhzGJH8asSySUOyvkOp-M9WnW1iXiUt0aAVHNGuuuy1J8U4wydzh1XH3qe4sw/s16000/envelope_of_money_185792650-5bfc3797c9e77c00587a330d.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">An envelope with US dollars in it. <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/thmb/22JkXUPTt9akUJXuwuklr5IzVrA=/1500x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/envelope_of_money_185792650-5bfc3797c9e77c00587a330d.jpg">Image source.</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>So, I had always heard people give advice that <b>"you should have a budget."</b> And I've tried to do that, using various strategies, which had a lot of flaws- until I finally found a strategy that actually makes sense for us. So in this post I basically want to write about things I've tried before, why they didn't work well, and what my husband and I do now for our budget strategy.</p><p>In the past, there were times I attempted to make a <b>"monthly budget"</b> for myself. I wrote down all the categories that I spend money in, looked at some data from the previous few months, to estimate what numbers would be reasonable for each category, and set a limit for each of the categories.<b> The intent being, in every category, I have to keep my spending under that limit every month. That's how budgets work, right?</b></p><p>There were a lot of problems with this.</p><p>For example, suppose I need to go somewhere, and I'm trying to decide if I want to take a taxi or take the subway. The taxi would be more expensive, and would mean I'm going over budget in my "transportation" category. But, if I take the subway, it takes more time and I'll be late. <b>When I'm in that situation, I feel that it's worth it to me to spend the extra money in order to not be late. But, I can't suddenly change the budget, right? Isn't the entire point of a budget that you have to stick with it, even if it's hard? Otherwise it doesn't actually help you, right?</b></p><p>Also, the previous day, I had bought myself a piece of cake, which cost more than the taxi would cost, but that was in the "eating out" category where I'm not anywhere close to going over the limit, so that was fine. Uh, doesn't something seem kind of off here? <b>Thinking about the "money to happiness" ratio, spending the money for the taxi would give me more happiness than spending the money for cake, but since they're in different categories, I can't trade them off like that. I already set the limits in each category, I can't change them- that's the whole point of having a budget, right? But something seems incredibly illogical about this.</b></p>I was giving myself more stress, over small amounts of money which didn't really matter.<p>And, here's another example, maybe there's some grocery item that I could buy in bulk- but if I do that, I would go over budget in the "grocery" category that month.<b> But, uh, but doesn't buying in bulk result in more savings over the long term? Then why is my budget system telling me that's bad? There's too much focus on each month individually- the system doesn't have any built-in connection between this month and the next month.</b> I mean, *I* can tell myself "oh actually it's a good idea to buy in bulk, even though my budget system says it's breaking a rule"- but I wasn't actually quantifying that in any way. It was just an intuition that I never gathered any data to actually evaluate, because my system wasn't designed to give me that kind of data.</p><p>Also, I was thinking about each category in <b>percentages</b>. Like, oh, I only spent 20% of the "clothes" budget this month, wow, only 20%, I'm doing such a great job, I'm saving so much money! And then in the "groceries" category of the budget, I went over by 10%, ah, well, that's not good, but at least 10% is a small-ish amount. I remember at one point I had an app which had a horizontal bar for each category, to show what percentage of that category's limit you spent each month- and every horizontal bar was the same length. This makes no sense. <b>It makes no sense to feel good about saving such a "high" percentage in a small category- because the actual dollar amount is so low it doesn't matter.</b></p><p><b>And I couldn't understand what people meant when they gave advice like "you should save 10%." </b>So... if this month I spend 90% of my salary, and save 10%, but then next month I use that 10% to buy a new computer or something... that seems like that shouldn't count as "saving 10%." <b>The only reason I'm calling it "saving" instead of "spending" is because of the arbitrariness of where one month ends and the next month begins- that seems kind of illogical.</b></p><p><b>And there was definitely no way to accumulate long-term savings. </b>Yeah, in theory, I put limits on all the categories, and the limits add up to *less than* my salary, so if I stay within the limits every month, then the extra will keep adding up every month, and that's my long-term savings. But there was no mechanism to ensure that this would actually happen. No way to tell if, when I go over budget in some category, is it fine, or am I spending all my "long-term savings" accidentally?</p><p><b>But the biggest problem with this "monthly budget" system was that it was not cumulative. Every month was treated like a completely separate event, which had no mathematical relation to any other month.</b></p><p>I remember saying at one point "every month I'm only spending 40% of my income" and someone was like "wow that's pretty good!" but it turns out what I actually meant was <b>"in a normal month I'm only spending 40% of my income, and then twice a year I spend THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS on international plane tickets."</b> Yeah, every so often the "travel" category of the budget would just be so completely overwhelmed, when I bought plane tickets which were many times higher than the monthly budget limit for "travel"- but I told myself, <b>"it's fine, it's not like I'm doing that every month." But I wasn't actually *measuring* if it was "fine" or not. </b>It was just... most months I spend very little for "travel", and then occasionally I spend A TON, so, overall that's probably fine, right? Well, uh, you don't know if it's "fine" if you don't do the math with the actual numbers.</p><p>Sometimes I would scroll back through several months of data, and observe "oh this month I went over budget in this category, in this month I was under budget in that category", etc, but there was never any sense of ... like... adding up the actual numbers to see if a several-month-long period was over or under budget. I mean, sometimes I sort of added them in my head, but the results depended on what month I used as the cutoff point (ie, am I adding up over the past 3 months? 6 months?) so I didn't feel like that was a well-defined and concrete measure.</p><p><b>Sometimes I would go over budget in some category, and I would kind of feel bad about it... like a little bit of fear that if I continue like that, I'll have financial disaster in my future.</b> Like I'm supposed to be sticking to my budget, and some months I am and some months I'm not, and ... am I deceiving myself by pretending that's fine?</p><p>It was just emotions, which didn't have concrete data to say if those emotions were reasonable or not. I was giving myself a lot of stress over small dollar amounts which didn't really matter. (Or rather, small RMB amounts, because I'm in China.)</p><p>(And maybe a lot of the emotional aspects of budgeting are my own weird quirks- this is sort of what I saw from my parents- like saying "oh maybe we spent too much money on that" or "we can't buy that because it's too expensive" but not actually having a literal budget to specify what "too much" or "too expensive" would mean, just vaguely feeling guilty about it. And also having a high enough salary that there weren't really any practical consequences from spending amounts that felt like "too much"- just guilt, never "holy crap we can't afford rent, what are we going to do?")</p><p>Eventually I came up with a new budgeting system, which doesn't have these problems. Here are the 2 key elements:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Everything is cumulative, from one month to the next </b></li><li><b>Don't break everything down into such small categories</b></li></ol><p></p><p>This happened when my husband and I moved from a 1-bedroom to a 2-bedroom apartment, just before our son was born. The reason we had to develop a new budget strategy at that time was that the rent was much higher, and <b>we had to have a way to guarantee that the money for rent would always be there and ready to be paid at the right time. In China, typically you pay rent once every 3 months- so yeah, every 3 months, it's a HUGE amount of money you suddenly need to come up with.</b> My husband is the one who handles the actual transaction, and when we were in a 1-bedroom apartment it was less money so it was less of a big deal- every 3 months he'd just ask me to transfer my half of the rent to him, and then he'd pay it. But the 2-bedroom apartment was so much more expensive- what if the time comes to pay rent, and we realize one of us doesn't actually have the money for our half?</p><p><b>We needed to both be transferring money, every month, into a dedicated savings account that my husband has access to. So that when it's time to pay rent, the money is already there, no issue.</b></p><p>So basically that was my inspiration for coming up with a new budget system for us. <b>It was about large things we needed to pay for, but not every month. So the strategy was to calculate an average cost per month, and every month we'd transfer that amount to a savings account, and then when it was time to pay it, the money would be ready.</b></p><p>This is completely different from my previous system- my previous system also had sort of an "average cost per month" for each category, but it was like, if I went over that amount in a particular month, that was "bad," and if I went under, that was "good." Judging myself on how many months I was "good" or "bad." The new system is different- <b>in the new system, every month we transfer that "average cost per month" amount to a savings account, and then if we don't spend it that month, that money is <i>still there</i>, accumulating every month so that it's ready when we need it. Each month just rolls over into the next month, in a straightforward mathematical way. Not like my old systems, where I just vaguely felt bad about sometimes going over budget, but didn't have any sense of whether it was actually a problem.</b></p><p>So we figured out what the big categories are for us, the categories where some months we spend a lot and some months very little. Or categories where both my husband and I have to contribute, so it makes sense for it to be paid out of a savings account that we both are putting money into. Here are our categories:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>rent and childcare costs</li><li>travel</li><li>health care</li><li>Christmas</li><li>child's college savings</li><li>retirement savings</li></ul><p></p><p>For each category, <b>I calculated an estimated cost per year, and then divided by 12 to get a cost per month, then decided what proportion should be paid by me and what proportion should be paid by my husband</b> (you can decide this based on factors like: whoever's salary is higher should be paying more money into the savings account, or if I bought an international health insurance plan for myself then my husband wouldn't necessarily pay for that because it's not for him, if one person is always buying the groceries then you should make sure they have more remaining money than the partner who's not buying the groceries, etc).</p><p>So every month we both transfer money to the savings account, and then when we have to pay for something that falls under one of those categories, we pay it from the savings account. </p><p>[Or rather, that's how it works theoretically but actually in practical terms it's not exactly like that. See, the way I handle this is I have a big excel spreadsheet, and it says the amount of money in the Chinese savings account and the US savings account (see we have 2 different currencies so it's complicated for us), and how much of that money is allocated to each category. And we also have categories "Perfect Number's extra money" and "Hendrix's extra money"- ie, not everything in the savings accounts is allocated to those 6 savings categories I mentioned, some of the money is actually just mine or just my husband's. And in practical terms, when I pay for something that comes from one of those savings categories, I actually just pay from my own bank account, not our savings account, and then I just adjust the numbers in the excel sheet- ie, if I spend 200 RMB on something related to vacation, I spend it from my own personal bank account, and then on the excel sheet describing the contents of our savings accounts, I subtract 200 from "travel" and add 200 to "Perfect Number's extra money"- see actually joint bank accounts aren't a thing in China, so I actually can't spend money from the savings account, I don't have access. Actually I don't transfer the full "average monthly cost" for each category into the savings account every month, because when I pay for stuff from my own account, that mathematically functions the same as a transfer. As long as I write down all the amounts in the excel sheet correctly, it doesn't matter that I didn't literally transfer the entire amount. Okay those are just some details about the practical implementation of this.]</p><p><b>One really cool thing about this system is that, whatever is left over from your salary (after you transfer money into the correct categories) is totally yours and you can do whatever you want with it.</b> You use it for whatever costs you have in your daily life- stuff like buying food, clothes, birthday gifts for family, donating to charity, etc. <b>And your spouse can't judge you for any of that spending!</b> Sometimes I feel like my husband spends money on things that he shouldn't, but, actually, <b>as long as he's paying the right amount into the savings account every month, it's fine!</b> Like mathematically it actually is fine. If I truly calculated the "average cost per month" in each category correctly, then he can do whatever he wants with his leftover money and I know it won't affect our family's financial stability. (I also spend money on things that he wouldn't...)</p><p><b>And the category that you use for your daily expenses and/or extra money isn't subdivided any further than that. </b>It really doesn't matter if I spent a lot of money on clothes one month, and no money on clothes in a different month, or if I took a taxi or bought a piece of cake or whatever- all of that is just summed into one category, for my daily expenses (or, as I referred to it earlier, "Perfect Number's extra money"). You just look at the total in that category, and as long as it's always a positive number, then you're fine. (Or, if you're also conceptualizing that category as your own personal "emergency savings" then as long as it's always higher than whatever you think you need as your "emergency savings" then you're fine. Yes, you should have an "emergency savings"- whether you make that its own category or lumped in with another category is up to you.)</p><p><b>And another really great thing about this system is that, because it's cumulative, you can make corrections for things that happened in previous months.</b> For example, suppose we spent more than we expected on vacation. Maybe this means the "travel" budget has a negative amount of money in it. (That is okay, temporarily, as long as it's in a bank account that is summing it up with other categories which are positive enough that the total is still positive.) So, there are a few different ways we could handle this:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>We could not make any changes, continue transferring money into the "travel" account like normal every month, and after a few months the amount will be positive. But next time we go on vacation, the amount available in the "travel" category is less than what I planned it to be, so we go on a vacation that costs less. Or wait a few extra months before taking our next vacation.</li><li>We could transfer money from a different category, into the "travel" category. For example, maybe we found that we spent less on childcare than we expected, so we move money from the "rent and childcare" category to the "travel" category.</li><li>For the next few months, we transfer more money (from our own salaries) into the "travel" category than we did before.</li></ul><p></p><p>See? When we go over budget in one category, that is reflected in the number that the excel sheet says is allocated to that category. And it will always be reflected in that number- that number is the cumulative sum of every month, and that "over budget" incident will always be reflected in the history that goes into calculating the current amount.<b> It is mathematically completely quantified in the numbers- you know exactly what it is, you don't have to vaguely feel bad about it and vaguely fear that it's going to cause problems in your future. And then you make a decision afterward about how to correct for it, and then you do that- you correct for it, and you move on. No reason to feel guilty. </b>If, for example, you spend $200 more than expected on travel, but $200 less than expected on utilities (which I also put in the "rent" category), you simply mark in the excel sheet that you're transferring $200 from "rent" to "travel", and then all is good. The problem has been solved. No need to vaguely feel bad about it, or to tell yourself "well we don't spend that much money every month, so it's okay" and wonder if you're just making excuses to fool yourself.</p><p>Anyway, like I said, I made an excel sheet myself to keep track of all this, because I didn't find a budgeting software that I liked. Our situation is, we have accounts in the US and China, and both my husband and I are paying in to the Chinese account monthly, and we have other accounts that are our own personal accounts and not related to these savings categories, and my other accounts are my own business and aren't part of the excel sheet- yeah the reason I wrote my own excel sheet is because it's complicated and I didn't find software that did exactly what I wanted. (I also have an app on my phone for all my personal accounts in China, where I record every single transaction but I don't do any higher-level budget stuff, and a different one on my computer for all my personal accounts in the US. Those apps are just very basic money tracking apps, nothing special, I just got them from the app store or wherever. I am one of those very organized people.)</p><p>But anyway, if you want to look for a budgeting software tool that does something like this, I'll tell you that <b>this is basically the envelope system.</b> Search for <b>"envelope budget"</b> or something along those lines- there are some software programs that you can get that do this.</p><p>I have also seen some banks which allow you to categorize the money in your account into different <b>"savings buckets"</b>- yeah, that's basically the same as the system I'm describing here. </p><p><b>Overall, my system is about categorizing your expenses, over the course of an average year, into a few big categories, and then making sure that you are putting enough money into those categories monthly.</b> If not, then you need to make changes to your life, like going on less expensive vacations, or living in a less expensive apartment, etc. It's about those big things- I found that there's no benefit to subdividing everything into small categories and giving myself stress about the exact amounts.</p><p><b>The main function of my system is making sure that each big category is funded enough that I don't have to worry about it, and we can have the kind of lifestyle we want to have. Now, there are other benefits to budgeting, which my system doesn't really address- for example, comparing the amount spent on different everyday things and identifying places where the amount you spend doesn't really give you as much happiness as you should be getting for that amount of money</b> (ie, if you regularly spend $X on something, but you find out that spending $X on something different brings you more happiness). My system doesn't really help with identifying those kinds of things, or small everyday things that add up to a big amount that could be reduced, etc. My system is just about the really big things, to answer big questions like "can we afford to go on an international vacation" or "can we afford to move to a more expensive apartment" etc. We are lucky to have a good enough income that we don't need to stress about the small everyday things.</p><p>(But also, you can totally use an envelope budget system for everyday things subdivided into smaller categories! Instead of updating an excel sheet once a month, and then making corrections afterward if you spent more than expected in some category, like I do, you could have an app on your phone so that in real time you can check how much you have available in a certain category, and if it's not enough for something you want to buy, then you make a decision right then about either not buying it, or transferring money from a different category <i>before</i> you buy the thing. That's also the envelope system, but being used for a different purpose than how I use it.)</p><p>Anyway, that's the overall idea we use for our family budget. I wanted to post it here on my blog because, like I said, I've tried other budget strategies in the past and they just caused me more stress without any real benefit. <b>The current system we use, which is basically the envelope system, is designed mainly to make sure my husband and I are always prepared for large expenses that we can sort of predict but they don't happen every month. I found that the most important thing I need from a budgeting system is it needs to be cumulative- ie, we allocate money to a certain category this month, and then if we don't use it, that money continues to exist in that category and simply rolls over to the next month. </b>This way, there's no need to wonder about "well sometimes we spend more and sometimes we spend less, so... I guess that's fine overall?" It's all right there in the math- you simply look at the numbers that say how much you currently have in each category. </p><p>No need to feel guilty or wonder if it's bad that sometimes you went over budget. It's all right there in the math. If the math says you're fine, then you're fine.</p><p>---</p><p><i>Readers: Do you have any useful budgeting strategies?</i></p><p>---</p><p><i>Related:</i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2024/01/donating-to-charity.html">Donating to Charity</a><br /></i></p><p><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2018/02/job-interviews.html"><i>2 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Job Interviews</i></a><br /></p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-5578016392035564622024-02-25T05:16:00.000-05:002024-02-25T05:16:41.330-05:00We Need Queer Theology<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWsdulpjfTB-WMhKcBLR5a4likQIvh7xqwidNUXYEJGk7kuUWeGUpeH1hNikDQ7pNRCLVUd4jQRG6bugH9PScr1TXnvAFEgV9s-uX5ktNMFPo0c0QMG9k41LHXPYmLte3SXmuXYY2gTdB3kQOAm7kgaWMUnV13oqn1U_chBisXJ9bKXYu6mTNY_xX44Eaq/s550/we-re-here-we-re-queer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="550" data-original-width="412" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWsdulpjfTB-WMhKcBLR5a4likQIvh7xqwidNUXYEJGk7kuUWeGUpeH1hNikDQ7pNRCLVUd4jQRG6bugH9PScr1TXnvAFEgV9s-uX5ktNMFPo0c0QMG9k41LHXPYmLte3SXmuXYY2gTdB3kQOAm7kgaWMUnV13oqn1U_chBisXJ9bKXYu6mTNY_xX44Eaq/s16000/we-re-here-we-re-queer.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A rainbow, with the text "We're here, we're queer." <a href="https://www.redbubble.com/i/greeting-card/We-re-Here-We-re-Queer-Pride-Rainbow-Badge-Sticker-Gay-Lesbian-Trans-Nonbinary-LGBT-slogan-by-ruswatkins/40294530.5MT14">Image source.</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>Last week, The Reformation Project published a post called <a href="https://reformationproject.org/affirming-theology-vs-queer-theology/">Reform vs. Revolution: Distinguishing Affirming Theology From Queer Theology</a>. A lot of queer Christians are unhappy about this; I am also unhappy about it.</p><p>Basically, it's a post (along with an embedded 1-hour youtube video of a talk by Matthew Vines) about <b>why their organization does NOT support <i>queer theology</i>, but does <i>affirming theology</i> instead.</b></p><p>And I'd like to also share this link, which is a response from Billie, a trans woman: <a href="https://billieiswriting.substack.com/p/the-reformation-project-and-queer">The Reformation Project and Queer Theology</a>. Her response is definitely worth reading.</p><p>Okay let's talk about this, starting with:</p><p>---</p><p><b>Who is Matthew Vines/ What is The Reformation Project?</b></p><p>Matthew Vines is a gay Christian. I first heard of him around 2012, when he posted a very long youtube video (which went viral) where he presents <b>a biblical argument for acceptance of same-sex marriage. </b>In 2015, he published a book called <a href="https://amzn.to/3wui9iB">God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships</a> [affiliate link]. And he started an organization called The Reformation Project, to advocate for inclusion of LGBTQ people in the church.</p><p>I haven't read "God and the Gay Christian", but I watched his viral video, back then, back when I was evangelical and trying to do the whole "hate the sin, love the sinner" thing. It influenced me a lot. <b>The approach it takes towards reading the bible is thoroughly evangelical</b>, which is how it was able to convince me. And by "thoroughly evangelical," I mean viewing the bible as the inerrant authority over our lives. We have to obey the bible, whether we like it or not, whether it makes sense or not. And therefore, <b>we need to spend a lot of time very carefully studying ancient Greek and Hebrew words,</b> to be really really sure we can figure out what the biblical writers were saying- we need to do this because we are required to follow the rules they wrote for us, those thousands of years ago.</p><p>Vines's argument, in that 2012 video, is about carefully analyzing the specific bible verses which mention homosexuality, as well as other bible verses which he also feels are relevant to this issue. Painstakingly going through different possible interpretations of Greek words, bringing in historical references about ancient Roman culture/ ancient near-eastern culture and how they viewed homosexuality, and so on, and finally arriving at the conclusion that, in our modern society, same-sex marriage <i>is </i>acceptable and blessed by God.</p><p><b>That's how you need to make the argument, if you're talking to evangelicals.</b> And back then, it was definitely what I needed to hear.</p><p>But, as I've said on my blog many times, I now view this as <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2016/03/divorce-matthew-19.html">a really weird way to read the bible</a>. <b>Like, we need to spend a lot of time studying ancient Greek words, to find out if we're allowed to treat gay people decently. Come on. You shouldn't need to do that- you should just treat people decently regardless of what the bible says. </b></p><p>Like, oh, good news everyone, we spent an incredible amount of time studying ancient Roman homosexual practices, and we've come to the conclusion that you actually ARE allowed to accept your gay friends. Phew!</p><p>Come on.</p><p>You shouldn't need to read the bible to figure that out. You should just be able to see with your own two eyes how good and life-giving it is when queer people are accepted for who they are, and how harmful it is when they are required to repress themselves.</p><p>So- and this is something I've said a lot in <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/05/blog-series-on-great-sex-rescue.html">my review of "The Great Sex Rescue"</a>- <b>I believe it can be a very helpful and valuable first step,</b> for people coming from an evangelical background, to present arguments like "The bible wasn't actually saying [oppressive teaching that evangelicals believe]. It was saying [something much more just/feminist/inclusive]." <b>It's a first step, but I hope that after that, people can move past that kind of thinking. Quit being bound by what the bible says, and trust your own God-given conscience to tell you what's loving and what's not. The bible is wrong sometimes!</b></p><p>Anyway, I haven't been following what Vines has been up to in recent years. Maybe he has moved beyond that evangelical way of reading the bible, the "same-sex marriage is okay because I studied a lot of ancient Greek words."</p><p>Oh. No. Oh. Well we can look at the statement that The Reformation Project put out, along with the embedded video where Vines gives a talk about why he opposes queer theology. Oh. Has he moved on from that evangelical way of reading the bible? Nope, he hasn't.</p><p>---</p><p><b>What The Reformation Project has to say about queer theology</b></p><p>(The <a href="https://reformationproject.org/affirming-theology-vs-queer-theology/">article</a> itself is pretty short- I'm getting most of this from the embedded video.)</p><p>Vines explains that "queer theology" doesn't just mean "queer people doing theology" or "theology that is inclusive of queer people" or something along those lines. No, it specifically means queer theory being applied to theology. And queer theory is a specific field of study which isn't simply about accepting queer people; rather, <b>it's about questioning all of society's rules about what's "normative" and what's not. </b>It's about breaking down boundaries, questioning lines that society has drawn about what kinds of behaviors are okay or not okay.</p><p>And, yes, he's right, that's what queer theology is.</p><p>He gives a lot of examples which are shocking and/or offensive. Queer theologians saying that the Trinity is like an orgy. That anonymous sex is an example of hospitality. Etc.</p><p><b>And he says, no, this is NOT what Christians believe. This is NOT what most LGBTQ Christians believe. He says The Reformation Project opposes queer theology. They do affirming theology instead.</b> (I suppose "affirming theology" is that evangelical-style "we've studied a lot of Greek words and we've concluded that same-sex marriage is okay." Yeah I'm not here for that.)</p><p>---</p><p><b>Here's what I have to say about queer theology</b></p><p>In 2018, I published a blog post reviewing the book <a href="https://amzn.to/3UTeWmH">Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology</a> by Patrick S. Cheng. My post was called <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2018/10/queer-theology.html">Queer Theology (is not about being right)</a>, because that was how I made sense of what the book was saying: It isn't about "here's the correct interpretation of the bible", but instead, "here's a loose analogy between the bible and queerness, if you feel it's meaningful then good for you, but you don't have to believe it if you don't want to."</p><p>Coming from an evangelical background, I had obviously been expecting the "here's what the bible Really Means" kind of approach. Instead, the book "Radical Love" was a bunch of extremely flimsy analogies like "the Holy Spirit is like gaydar" (???????? what on earth).</p><p><b>It's not about putting forth logical arguments to support doctrines which you then expect everyone to be convinced by. It's about questioning for the sake of questioning</b>- why would God have to be male? why would sex in marriage be more moral than sex in other contexts? what if Jesus and Lazarus were lovers? etc. <b>You don't have to agree with any of this stuff- but the act of questioning is itself valuable.</b></p><p>And yes, there were A LOT of things in the book "Radical Love" that I very much did NOT agree with. (Many of the same things that Vines mentions in his talk- he included a bunch of quotes from "Radical Love.") And I found it to be not inclusive of aces. There were parts that were very sexually explicit, there were parts that assumed that emotional intimacy is necessarily sexual, there were parts that made analogies between sex and religious concepts- and I'm way too asexual to understand what those analogies were trying to say.</p><p><b>But my takeaway was, Cheng wasn't saying that we have to agree with all those things. He's saying, for some queer people, this is a way they interact with their Christian faith, and, good for them. </b></p><p><b>And it's good that people are doing this work, questioning the things that society views as normative. It's good that queer theologians want to take things farther than just "gay people can have monogamous marriages, just like straight people" which is where The Reformation Project is.</b></p><p>---</p><p><b>Why I'm not happy with The Reformation Project's statement</b></p><p>To me, it's not a problem that The Reformation Project is taking an evangelical approach toward bible interpretation. I mean, it's a problem in the sense that it's a really bizarre way to read the bible and/or figure out morality- but hey, I understand that's how evangelicals think. Vines seems to be evangelical and thinks that way. (To clarify, I don't actually know if he identifies as evangelical. But watching his embedded video, I feel like, I actually really like him, he's the best kind of evangelical.) <b>Sure, okay. It's good to have some queer people in that space, making those kinds of arguments in ways that will matter to an evangelical audience.</b></p><p><b>As I see it, the problem is that they're putting out a statement specifically to say that queer theology is bad and they don't agree with it. Like, why? Why even bring this up? Why not just keep doing what they're doing, and let queer theologians keep doing what they're doing too?</b> Why not just accept that we're all advocating queer inclusion, and we use different strategies which enable us to reach different audiences?</p><p><b>It comes across like he's saying "don't worry, evangelicals, we're not like that."</b> Like some evangelical Christians are going to read about queer theology and then they'll think all queer Christians believe those things, and OH NO we can't have that. <b>We have to make sure evangelicals know we're the *good* gay Christians. </b>(I've seen people on twitter calling this out as being about respectability, and, yeah, it does come across like that.)</p><p>Weirdly, this comes back to what I was saying about the authors of "The Great Sex Rescue" in my post <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2024/01/what-do-we-do-with-christians-who-are.html">What do we do with Christians who are never going to accept queer people?</a>: <b>"You need to throw queer people under the bus, in order to be seen as a good evangelical." Weird, because Vines and the Christians at The Reformation Project <i>are queer</i>- but they're making this statement specifically to separate themselves from other queer people who are seen as going too far.</b></p><p>Not cool. </p><p>---</p><p><i>Related:</i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2018/10/queer-theology.html">Queer Theology (is not about being right)</a><br /></i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2024/01/what-do-we-do-with-christians-who-are.html">What do we do with Christians who are never going to accept queer people?</a> </i></p><p><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2016/03/divorce-matthew-19.html"><i>It Doesn’t Actually Matter What Jesus Said About Divorce</i></a><br /></p><p>---</p><p>And (under the "Read more") some insightful tweets responding to The Reformation Project's statement:</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p><br /></p><p>
</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">You know, in some senses I've got to applaud The Reformation Project for saying the quiet part out loud. They've always had garbage, exclusionary theology and praxis and now they are clear:<br /><br />Going on the record to *oppose* queer theology: <a href="https://t.co/SNmKAnJekL">https://t.co/SNmKAnJekL</a></p>— Brian & Shay | QueerTheology.com (@QTheology) <a href="https://twitter.com/QTheology/status/1760507120393277526?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 22, 2024</a></blockquote> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
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</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">I hate to break it to you, Matthew Vines, but throwing other queer people—and other queer Christians—under the bus is not going to save you from homophobes, but it will separate you further from the beauty of God's diverse creation.</p>— Brian & Shay | QueerTheology.com (@QTheology) <a href="https://twitter.com/QTheology/status/1760507606970294501?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 22, 2024</a></blockquote> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
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</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">like, have you learned NOTHING from history?! This "I'm not like the other gays" rhetoric is a recipe for disaster</p>— Brian & Shay | QueerTheology.com (@QTheology) <a href="https://twitter.com/QTheology/status/1760507862571168175?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 22, 2024</a></blockquote> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
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</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">Yo this is some TRASH trash. <br /><br />Misrepresents an entire academic field, chooses specific examples designed to give people the ICK out of context, throws “those queers” under the bus, adopts homophobic talking points/politics, and validates sexphobic bias over full inclusion…</p>— darinmckenna.bsky.social (@DarinMcKenna) <a href="https://twitter.com/DarinMcKenna/status/1760546335957409895?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 22, 2024</a></blockquote><p>
</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">Queer people don't need apologetics to justify their faith.<br /><br />Their faith is more valid than most in the church.</p>— Transvangelical (@transvangelical) <a href="https://twitter.com/transvangelical/status/1761011557079642564?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 23, 2024</a></blockquote> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
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</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">I gotta say putting out a statement about why you think queer theology goes a bit too far while the community you ostensibly exist to serve is in mourning over the tragic death of a non-binary 16-year-old is quite a choice</p>— Emily Joy Allison (@emilyjoypoetry) <a href="https://twitter.com/emilyjoypoetry/status/1760772181288493385?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 22, 2024</a></blockquote> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
<p>^ This tweet is referring to: <a href="https://www.them.us/story/nex-benedict-nonbinary-teen-oklahoma-died-attacked-at-school">Nonbinary Teen Nex Benedict Dies After Being Attacked By Peers in a School Bathroom</a> </p><p><br /></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">We can try to be “acceptable” to evangelicals all we want.<br /><br />But the reality is, we categorically are not acceptable. By definition. No matter how hard we try to use their theology to convince them. There is no room. <br /><br />It took me years to learn this. We need queer theology.</p>— Matthias Roberts (@matthiasroberts) <a href="https://twitter.com/matthiasroberts/status/1760712813360893966?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 22, 2024</a></blockquote> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
<p><br /></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-53900003836716812992024-02-24T01:06:00.001-05:002024-02-24T01:06:31.451-05:00Blogaround<p><b><span style="font-size: large;">1.</span></b> <a href="https://southernequality.org/styep/">Southern Trans Youth Emergency Project</a> (<a href="https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/4128629">via</a>) "In response, the Campaign for Southern Equality has launched the Southern Trans Youth Emergency Project (STYEP), a new regional effort which provides rapid response support directly to the families of youth who are impacted by anti-transgender healthcare bans in the South. Through STYEP, and in close partnership with state and local organizations, we are providing grants, patient navigation support, and accurate information to impacted families to ensure that youth can access the care they need and deserve, even in the face of oppressive laws."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">2.</span></b> <a href="https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading">At a Loss for Words</a> (2019, <a href="https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/4348738">via</a>) Wow this is WILD- apparently there is something called the "three-cueing method" for teaching kids to read, and it tells kids that when they come to an unfamiliar word, they shouldn't ACTUALLY READ THE ACTUAL WORD, they should use other incidental information to kinda guess what the word could be (picture, first letter of the word, etc). !!! WHAT!</p><p>The article is from 2019- maybe the situation is different now? Anyway the article says that instead, kids should be taught phonics. I guess that's how my school taught it when I was little- I remember spending a lot of time on how this letter makes this sound (or sometimes makes this other sound, etc) and how combinations of letters together would make a certain sound. I guess that's phonics. Mostly, though, I didn't need to use the "sounding it out" strategies, after memorizing how all the words are spelled. I just sometimes can't remember the spellings of "choose" and "chose" and so then I have to think to myself that the "oo" makes an "oo" sound and the "ose" has a silent e at the end that causes the single o to say "O".</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">3. </span></b><a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-honor-refund-policy-invented-by-airlines-chatbot/">Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot</a> (February 17, <a href="https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/4360933/">via</a>) "Air Canada 'does not explain why customers should have to double-check information found in one part of its website on another part of its website,' Rivers wrote."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">4.</span></b> <a href="https://crookedtimber.org/2024/02/19/death-lonely-death/">Death, Lonely Death</a> (February 19, <a href="https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/4370025">via</a>) "Voyager kept going for another 34 years after that photo. It’s still going. It has left the grip of the Sun’s gravity, so it’s going to fall outward forever."</p><p>And more about Voyager: <a href="https://www.space.com/nasa-voyager-spacecraft-mission-deep-space-update">NASA's interstellar Voyager 1 spacecraft isn't doing so well — here's what we know</a> (February 16)</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">5. </span></b><a href="https://freethoughtblogs.com/atrivialknot/2024/02/21/reflecting-on-interdisciplinary-journal-clubbing/">Reflecting on interdisciplinary journal clubbing</a> (February 21) "While some of the [ace] journal club participants have backgrounds in social science, more broadly, we’re experts of a different sort, in that we’ve been directly experiencing it and have been discussing it with other people who directly experience it. We can tell when an argument doesn’t ring true, or if there are additional factors that the authors ignored."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">6.</span></b> <a href="https://www.salon.com/2024/02/20/a-man-will-say-hes-afeminist-but-he-doesnt-wipe-the-counters-lyz-lenz-celebrates/">"A man will say he's a feminist but he doesn't wipe the counters": Lyz Lenz on the beauty of divorce</a> (February 20) "So who does that work when he 'forgets?' It was me, always me, coming in and being hit with the smell of rot and garbage. Sometimes it would fall, and there would be trash on the floor. We would have these fights and he would say, it's just a bag of trash, let it go. I cannot let it go. You show complete disregard for me as a person because you're not thinking about who has to do this."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">7.</span></b> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE-VJrdHMug">Supreme Court Ethics: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)</a> (February 22) 30-minute video from John Oliver.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">8. </span></b><a href="https://billieiswriting.substack.com/p/the-reformation-project-and-queer">The Reformation Project and Queer Theology</a> (February 24) "But to take revolution permanently off the table is—I don’t see how to avoid this conclusion—to chose the system over the wellbeing of individual marginalized people and that strikes me as contrary to the Way of Jesus."</p><p>Matthew Vines and The Reformation Project put out a statement that they do "affirming theology" rather than "queer theology." I am not a fan of this (and I'll probably write my own post about it). Here's a really good response from Billie, a trans woman.</p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-87083052121521902902024-02-21T01:56:00.000-05:002024-02-21T01:56:04.148-05:00The Great Sex Rescue: Obligation<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG3Yxg-eqVzTJbUT4ChPmKr1NvMjnbquxAIyOK8LPKQhdlj1wa2Ll-yMCsJAmFnyLJuseKn7688B2BqH6t_ScGs5cWBzbzzzdjUW2gKB_-QoPibki8GyFpswP7Ep9E29YqnTYafzfHyIpXL06mrCYoJQC-1F9-A9Pvuk0yMpyPG1ZnmlnOEjGMSGRq_gbH/s550/woman-doing-housework.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="343" data-original-width="550" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG3Yxg-eqVzTJbUT4ChPmKr1NvMjnbquxAIyOK8LPKQhdlj1wa2Ll-yMCsJAmFnyLJuseKn7688B2BqH6t_ScGs5cWBzbzzzdjUW2gKB_-QoPibki8GyFpswP7Ep9E29YqnTYafzfHyIpXL06mrCYoJQC-1F9-A9Pvuk0yMpyPG1ZnmlnOEjGMSGRq_gbH/s16000/woman-doing-housework.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stock photo of a woman picking up laundry from the floor while a man sits there doing nothing. <a href="https://medium.com/applied-intersectionality/why-should-women-do-most-of-the-housework-a8166127d3b2">Image source.</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><i>Links to all posts in this series can be found here: <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/05/blog-series-on-great-sex-rescue.html">Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"</a></i></p><p>---</p><p>We are now in the second part of chapter 9 of <a href="https://amzn.to/3zoRKRe">The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You've Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended</a> [affiliate link], pages 162-178. <b>This section is about obligation sex- when a wife feels that she is obligated to have sex with her husband, because "men need it," and that is more important than any of her needs or desires.</b></p><p>I'm really glad to see "The Great Sex Rescue" speaking out against "obligation sex"! It's a very bad teaching, and it's EVERYWHERE in evangelical marriage ideology.</p><p>This section starts off by talking about the authors' focus groups, where they talked to women who had been harmed by the "obligation sex" message:</p><p></p><blockquote>Almost all of them said that <i>their husbands never gave them the obligation-sex message themselves.</i> Their husbands didn't see sex as something they were owed or entitled to take, but instead as a gift for them to share together. Their husbands saw the importance of honoring their wives' <i>no</i>-- they just never knew she didn't feel free to say it! Each of these husbands empowered their wives by saying what they had been thinking all along: "You are allowed to say no, and in fact, I <i>want</i> you to say no if you're uncomfortable, because I don't want sex to be something you don't want to do."</blockquote><p></p><p>Yeah, this is very real. <b>Women are the ones being taught this "obligation sex" ideology in church, and a man might not even realize this teaching exists or how much of an impact it is having on his wife.</b></p><p>And... yes, I agree with the advice that men should <i>explicitly say</i> that they don't want their wife to feel she is forced to have sex- but I think it's more complicated than that. <b>It's very likely that a woman from an evangelical background simply <i>won't believe</i> her husband when he says that. </b>She may interpret it as "he's saying that if I can't fake like I'm enjoying it, it ruins his experience of sex- so I need to do a better job of faking my enthusiasm." Or "he actually thinks 'you're obligated to have sex with me, because of my manly needs, and if you don't do it good enough, you're not holding up your end of the deal' but he's a good person and he knows he can't say that out loud because it sounds rapey." Or "he wants to be the kind of loving partner who is okay with not forcing me into painful sex, but he underestimates the reality of his manly needs- even though he says it's okay for me to say no, he doesn't realize that that's not sustainable for him in the long term, that it's just not going to work."</p><p>Yes, evangelical women have been taught for their entire lives that "this is how men are." Then they marry a man who turns out to be a way better person than that- and it's just unbelievable. (Or, alternatively, they marry an abusive man, and they believe that's totally normal, that's how men are.)</p><p>From an asexual perspective: Yes, this is something that is debated in the ace community and/or debated by people who may or may not be supportive of aces. <b>Some people argue that "if you're ace and your partner is not, then your partner *needs* sex, so you need to 'compromise' and have sex with them." It's a very similar argument to the Christian ideology about "men need sex, and women JUST CAN'T POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND, because women don't really like sex- so a wife is obligated to have unwanted sex with her husband."</b></p><p>I basically already gave my opinion on this <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-great-sex-rescue-transaction.html">in the previous post</a>- <b>basically, my advice is DON'T have sex if it's a bad experience for you. Just totally refuse. </b>Draw the line there. If it's a positive experience, that's great. If it's a neutral experience, that's also okay- I know that's the reality that some aces are in, and it's not necessarily bad. And also, you have more options than just "have sex" or "don't have sex"- you should discuss with your partner what kinds of sexual or intimate actions you want to do together, to create a good experience for both of you. (For example, if PIV [penis-in-vagina] is painful, then don't do PIV. If you want your partner to give you a non-sexual massage, well definitely tell them that, and add that in to your "scene.")</p><p>But... <b>speaking from personal experience, I didn't actually believe "if PIV is painful, then don't do PIV" was an actual option.</b> It just didn't seem possible, that I could be in a hetero relationship, where we love each other, where we've already had sex (so there aren't any "purity" concerns), and I just refuse to ever do PIV.</p><p>And I took on the challenge of learning how to do it, how to work with my vaginismus (though I didn't know at the time that it was vaginismus), and I'm glad I did that because it led to me understanding my body better. But at the same time, one of the motivating factors was obligation- "men need it"- and I wish it hadn't been that way. Anyway, it's complicated, but that's what happened in my actual real life, and I don't have a tidy conclusion about "this is what I should have done instead."</p><p>Moving along to the next section I want to quote from "The Great Sex Rescue":</p><p></p><blockquote><p>Sex is not the only need in the marriage relationship, and sometimes other needs must take precedence.</p><p>Much current teaching, though, elevates his need for intercourse above any of her needs. ...</p><p>The message that "whatever you are feeling doesn't matter, you need to have intercourse with your spouse" erases you as a person. It says that who you are, including your wants, desires, and feelings, doesn't matter. Then sex, which is supposed to be this deep knowing, becomes something far different. It's saying, "I don't want to know you, because your needs and desires are actually unimportant to me. I only want to use you."</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Okay, yeah, <b>this is a good point.</b> Generally I don't agree with anyone saying that "sex is supposed to be" this or that, because everyone has their own life and it can mean different things to different people- so I would put this differently, but yeah.</p><p>Here's how I would put it:</p><p>When I was a teenager, and I heard about controversy about teaching sex ed in school... Well yeah, <b>basically my understanding of sex ed was "we don't want you to have sex, avoid it if possible, but if you do have sex, at least use a condom." The background assumption was that it's so easy to have sex, so obvious how to do it, and of course we all desire it, so there's no need to actually talk about any details about how to do it- we only need to talk about how to NOT do it, or how to minimize the risk of pregnancy and STDs.</b></p><p>Years later, as a feminist, I found a whole different concept of what "sex ed" is: There's so much to learn and discover. There's so much potential for pleasure. <b>Your body belongs to you, and it's good and wonderful to explore your body and understand your body. Go read about all sorts of things: orgasms, masturbation, sex toys, BDSM, etc. Maybe you'll find something you want to try. </b></p><p><b>Instead of "don't have sex, but if you do, at least use a condom," it was viewing sex as a variety of potentially-positive experiences which could enrich your life, if you have access to good information about how to do them in a way that's enjoyable and healthy. </b>(And a VERY IMPORTANT part of that is learning about CONSENT.) <b>Like a positive thing to learn about, rather than a negative thing to avoid as much as possible.</b></p><p>And, yeah I'm asexual, so I understand if some aces aren't really interested in learning about any of that. That's fine- don't let anyone pressure you into reading about stuff you don't want to read about. And, of course there's a difference between reading vs seeing images vs actually doing things. And a difference between intellectual curiosity vs fantasy vs actually desiring to do something in real life. </p><p>(I'm a sex-favorable asexual; I would be interested in hearing from sex-repulsed or sex-indifferent aces because they probably have a different perspective on this.)</p><p>Anyway. As I've said in other posts about "The Great Sex Rescue," the way I view it now is to <b>know yourself and know what you want, and communicate with your partner to invent some sequence of intimate/sexual acts which are going to be a good experience overall for both of you.</b> It should be positive and enjoyable. It should be about saying what you want, and believing that that matters.</p><p>And then I think back to how marital sex was presented in the Christian marriage books I read, years ago... how extremely negative it sounds to me now. Like "yeah you're a woman so you won't really like it, but just remember that you really love your husband, and that should give you the strength to power through this painful experience." [That's my paraphrase, not a quote from anywhere.] Like sex was this one specific thing- not something you could have your own preferences about, and customize to fit your own desires- and wives must do it even though it's not enjoyable. And that's what marriage is.</p><p>("The Great Sex Rescue" definitely talks about how sex can and should be so much better than that, but doesn't give any useful practical tips for how to get there- <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-great-sex-rescue-more-foreplay.html">only that the husband should do more foreplay</a>. They don't say women should masturbate to figure out what feels good. They don't say sex doesn't have to be PIV. They don't say you can maybe try sex toys. It's just "he needs to do foreplay" and that's it. So, I don't find that useful.)</p><p><b>Good Christian girls are taught that that's what sex is. But since I'm queer, I've found out that sex can be so much better than that</b>- when it's something that you choose, something that you make the way you want it. <b>And the farther I get from that ideology, the more I'm shocked at how extremely ****ed up it is. How bleak a picture they paint of sex</b>- even though they also say it's "a beautiful gift from God" and if you follow all the rules correctly (be straight, don't have premarital sex, etc) then your sex life will be perfect.</p><p>You know I don't like it when people say "sex is supposed to be" whatever, but: <b>sex is supposed to be a good experience that you create together with your partner. </b>Not something that some authority figure sets the parameters for, and then you're required to do it to be a "good wife", even though you won't like it. Oh it can be so much better than that.</p><p>Okay, I realize this blog series is supposed to be my asexual take on "The Great Sex Rescue," and this stuff I just said about "sex can be so much better than that" probably doesn't sound very asexual, but yeah that's how I really feel, so there it is. Obviously if you're ace and you don't want to have sex at all, I totally support that. <b>I support everyone knowing themself and figuring out what they want, and confidently believing that their feelings and desires should <i>matter</i>.</b></p><p>So, back to "The Great Sex Rescue." This section is mainly about <b>the idea that men's "sexual needs" are more important than any need that a wife may have,</b> and there are a bunch of anecdotes along those lines. I'll highlight a few things from these anecdotes:</p><p>Rebecca Lindenbach, one of the co-authors of the book, talks about how she experienced pain during sex for a long time after giving birth. Her husband supported her and gave her the time she needed to heal, and didn't pressure her into sex. When she pressured herself into sex, because of her concerns about his "needs", he said "I'm not interested in anything that causes you pain" and he didn't consent to sex then.</p><p>Here's a good line about Lindenbach's husband, Connor:</p><p></p><blockquote>In fact, as he says, he never even viewed it as "his" sexual needs that were put on hold, but "our" sexual needs.</blockquote><p></p><p>Yes, this is what men should do. If sex is painful for your partner, then don't do it that way. Find some workaround that you both can enjoy, and/or just don't have sex for a while.</p><p><b>Conservative Christian marriage ideology <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2020/04/he-just-loves-me.html">teaches that it's not possible for a man to love like that</a>.</b></p><p>Here's a section from another anecdote, also about a woman who had postpartum sexual pain:</p><p><i>[content note: her husband is coercive and doesn't care about her pain]</i></p><p></p><blockquote><p>My husband has a very fundamentalistic view of the Bible, and I think he would like me to suffer through the pain and fulfill my duty for his sake. ...</p><p>It is interesting to me that when it is my body that got injured during birth (pelvic organ prolapse) and my body that now experiences pain during intercourse-- he acts as if he is the only one hurting. I know he loves me, but I feel so objectified. The fact that my husband wants me to have sex with him despite intense pain disgusts me, and I really question who I chose to marry.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>The authors of "The Great Sex Rescue" say this about the above anecdote:</p><p></p><blockquote>How did we get to a point where the husband thinks he is biblically justified to expect her to "suffer through the pain" to "fulfill my duty for his sake"? Maybe because books have intimated exactly that when they give the obligation-sex message with no caveats.</blockquote><p></p><p>Yes, they are exactly right.<b> This is exactly what Christian marriage books teach- wives need to have sex with their husbands. Even if you don't want to, even if it's painful, men need it, so you have to.</b> <i>Of course</i> this results in horrible situations where a woman is in extreme pain and nobody cares about her, they only care about if her husband is having enough orgasms.</p><p>And even as I read these stories, I feel like... <b>I've internalized this obligation-sex ideology so much</b>, that I'm not even confident I can argue that a man's "sexual needs" are NOT more important than a wife's need to not be in pain. I ... I'm not a man, what do I know... <b>what if it *is* true that a man's need to have an orgasm is more of a big deal than women's sexual pain?</b> That's what all the good Christian role models said- how can I claim that they're wrong, since I don't have the experience of being a man? How can the authors of "The Great Sex Rescue" argue for that?</p><p>I mean, it's misogynist bullshit, is what it is, and that is really obvious... and yet... this is what I've always heard from Christians, and I've internalized it to the extent I'm like "but how do we really know it's wrong?"</p><p>Ugh.</p><p>Anyway, another anecdote from the book. This one is from <b>a woman with a high-risk pregnancy, who was ordered by her doctor to be on bed rest, but she's concerned about her poor husband's sexual needs.</b> And, yeah, the authors of "The Great Sex Rescue" point out how ridiculous it is. Everyone's first priority in this situation should be the pregnant woman's health, and the unborn baby's health. The husband's "sexual needs" don't even come close to that level of importance. But <b>women in this ideology feel like they have to put their own health at risk, and their unborn baby's health, because "men need it." It's so ****ed up.</b></p><p>Then there's a section about the "do not deprive" verses in <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+cor+7&version=NIV">1 Corinthians 7</a>, which are some of the key bible verses that are always used to argue for this "wives are required to have unwanted sex" ideology. The book already addressed these verses in <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-great-sex-rescue-wives-are-ones.html">chapter 3</a>, so I won't go into a ton of detail here, but I like this quote:</p><p></p><blockquote>Can you imagine any other area of life in which God would tell a person, "You have the right to use someone else for your own gratification, even if it causes physical or emotional pain"? Or in which he would tell a woman, "It pleases me when your husband acts selfishly toward you"?</blockquote><p></p><p>PREACH!</p><p>So, that sums up the second part of chapter 9 of "The Great Sex Rescue." <b>Basically I agree with what the authors are saying here. It's extremely messed-up that Christian marriage advice teaches that women are <i>obligated</i> to have unwanted sex because men's "needs" are SO IMPORTANT.</b></p><p>---</p><p><i>Links to all posts in this series can be found here: <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/05/blog-series-on-great-sex-rescue.html">Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"</a> </i></p><p><i>Related:</i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2019/08/wives-required-to-have-sex.html">Conservative Christians Teach That Wives Are REQUIRED To Have Sex Even When They Don't Want To. Here Are The Receipts.</a><br /></i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2020/04/he-just-loves-me.html">He Just Loves Me (a post about Sex, Pregnancy, and My "Wifely Duty")</a> <br /></i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2019/11/6-ways-purity-culture-consent.html">6 Ways Purity Culture Did NOT Teach Me About Consent</a><br /></i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2021/11/fanfic-marriage.html">Let me tell you about a fanfic that reminded me of my marriage</a><br /></i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2021/10/so-this-is-new.html">So this is new</a><br /></i></p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-30367153870173788402024-02-17T05:20:00.001-05:002024-02-17T05:20:45.469-05:00Blogaround + Happy Chinese New Year!<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzTRSXPsfptIIILJt-jXYJt5De4QGVLqCdsvHzrY01B90ro_Y7GJA9f0NjATa2pvHR-LqiLsuegw4sKJz8_22oqBBnmtsJdbfm09KQR9mARwXRDEutibvKSjugUk62GFrywyk30hdGNvSEYb0moY8IgOJkpkrEE-ZUM3gpBvtZsv9lpqnZ51d1wnJBijHg/s550/dragon-year.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="550" data-original-width="389" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzTRSXPsfptIIILJt-jXYJt5De4QGVLqCdsvHzrY01B90ro_Y7GJA9f0NjATa2pvHR-LqiLsuegw4sKJz8_22oqBBnmtsJdbfm09KQR9mARwXRDEutibvKSjugUk62GFrywyk30hdGNvSEYb0moY8IgOJkpkrEE-ZUM3gpBvtZsv9lpqnZ51d1wnJBijHg/s16000/dragon-year.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Chinese dragon, with the text "2024 Happy New Year." <a href="https://sc.chinaz.com/tupian/23092111926.htm">Image source.</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>Happy Chinese New Year! New year's eve was on February 9 this year, and February 10 is the first day of the year of the dragon. 龙年大吉!</p><p>Some links related to Chinese New Year:</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">1.</span></b> <a href="https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1014641">3 Surprising Things From This Year’s Spring Festival Gala</a> (February 10)</p><p>And here's the video of the French song mentioned in the article: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r62DDBu4wUA">法语音乐剧首登春晚!《巴黎圣母院》选段《美人》太动听 「2024央视春晚」| CCTV春晚</a></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">2.</span></b> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh6Zv4GuN2c">舞蹈《锦鲤》搭配周深的《大鱼》演绎生命的灵动与绚烂 「2024央视春晚」| CCTV春晚</a> (February 10) Video of the goldfish dance performed at the Chinese New Year gala. The dancers fly around on cables, very cool.</p><p>---</p><p>And links about everything else:</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">3.</span></b> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLAc0BWZsdQ">Psychology of a Hero: ALADDIN</a> (February 7) 25-minute video from Cinema Therapy. "Aladdin's best self is the one who helped the street urchins and who promised to set Genie free, but then out of fear of losing everything, he rescinds his promise to Genie, he lies to Jasmine, and he just keeps hurting people."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">4.</span></b> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndSJVl17heo">'Obviously Sudokus Only Use Integers'... Hold My Beer!!</a> (January 16) 1-hour-18-minute sudoku solve video. Wow, this one is amazing- it needs algebra. My favorite part is when Simon tries and fails to remember the word "epsilon"- "Oh gosh I used to be all over that stuff when I was young." So relatable. </p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">5.</span></b> <a href="https://www.grammy.com/videos/tracy-chapman-luke-combs-fast-car-2024-grammys-performance-66th-annual-grammy-awards">Tracy Chapman & Luke Combs Deliver Gripping Performance Of "Fast Car" | 2024 GRAMMYs</a> I posted about this last time, but here's the full video.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">6. </span></b><a href="https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1014582">Eyesores or Heritage? Shanghai’s Ubiquitous Laundry Racks</a> (February 13) "Walk around any corner in Shanghai and you will likely see these clothes racks, especially outside traditional lane houses and high-rise condos built in the 1990s." This is so real.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">7.</span></b> <a href="https://xkcd.com/2892/">Banana Prices</a> (February 9) xkcd comic.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">8.</span></b> <a href="https://therevealer.org/elisabeth-elliot-flawed-queen-of-purity-culture-and-her-manipulative-third-husband/">Elisabeth Elliot, Flawed Queen of Purity Culture, and Her Disturbing Third Marriage</a> (February 6) <i>[content note: abusive marriage]</i> "Domestic abuse addles the brain. A victim may begin to believe she deserves this kind of treatment, that she could perhaps stop the abuse by her own efforts—if only she were better, prettier, smarter, holier. Through this lens, I have begun to understand the complexity of this elderly woman whose livelihood depended on her teachings about marriage and whose theology shifted so that it matched her reality of suffering, obedience, and surrender. Perhaps she feared the consequences of divorce on her career or reputation."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">9.</span></b> <a href="https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/georgia-senator-vows-to-protect-girl">Georgia Senator Vows to Protect Girl, But Then Runs Away After Learning She Is Trans</a> (February 17) "That’s when Kotler spoke to Senator Summers about how she was there with her kids to 'talk to legislators about keeping her kids safe.'"</p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-61360383756985016432024-02-11T04:05:00.001-05:002024-02-11T04:05:34.042-05:00Wedding Traditions They Don't Have in China<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf7lmM62n03Ok8rACyirIsRYEQmWON7NjxuZa_y2DB8SoW3RQtCEuMlGirTKNta3l92vn0cpBoSeivAgQFDK5KrZDViNUQ7_1wtN2wu9BD_JGgrgOp-dxepeaNzJObR-nk3e1mUkov2W9v3AHMqLues92fDpbS1Cx6372w_3nKXVaD9O6P-yh80KuvSt-u/s550/maroon-5-sugar-wedding.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="309" data-original-width="550" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf7lmM62n03Ok8rACyirIsRYEQmWON7NjxuZa_y2DB8SoW3RQtCEuMlGirTKNta3l92vn0cpBoSeivAgQFDK5KrZDViNUQ7_1wtN2wu9BD_JGgrgOp-dxepeaNzJObR-nk3e1mUkov2W9v3AHMqLues92fDpbS1Cx6372w_3nKXVaD9O6P-yh80KuvSt-u/s16000/maroon-5-sugar-wedding.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Maroon 5 playing at a wedding. From the music video for "Sugar." <a href="https://www.lifeandstylemag.com/posts/remember-that-maroon-5-music-video-where-adam-levine-the-band-crashed-weddings-it-was-all-staged-49825/">Image source.</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>The topic for the <a href="https://sildarmillionjournal.wordpress.com/2024/01/18/call-for-submissions-february-2024-carnival-of-aros-the-meaning-of-romance-across-time-and-place/">February 2024 Carnival of Aros is "The Meaning of 'Romance' Across Time and Place."</a> I haven't written for the Carnival of Aros before, because I am totally the opposite of aromantic, but <b>I'm an American living in China, married to a Chinese man, so I have some things to say about this one.</b></p><p>So, as I said, I'm the opposite of aromantic. In college I used to dream about the kind of wedding I wanted to have, because I had SO MUCH romantic desire, and wanted to find one magical romantic partner I could be with forever to fulfill that romantic desire, and <b>I viewed the wedding traditions as important symbols of getting those desires fulfilled. </b></p><p>Fast forward a few years, and I got engaged to a Chinese man (Hendrix). We had our wedding in the US, so we did all the American wedding traditions that I wanted, but we live in China so I had the chance to talk to Chinese people about Chinese wedding traditions, and I've attended weddings in China, and the traditions are very different! <b>It was sort of surprising to me, how these traditions- which I viewed as big important romantic milestones that I couldn't live without- just totally DO NOT EXIST in Chinese culture. </b>They have different traditions instead.</p><p>In this post I'll list a few of the traditions that were very important to me, and how they are TOTALLY DIFFERENT in China.</p><p>---</p><p><b>Getting engaged</b></p><p>So, Hendrix proposed to me with a diamond ring and big romantic gesture, just like the American traditions say you should do. It was great! Very happy with that!</p><p>When I told my friends in the US, they were all like <b>"How did he ask???!!!" expecting to hear a grand romantic story</b>- and yes, I told them the grand romantic story. And my relatives were calling on the phone, telling him "welcome to the family!"</p><p>Then when I told friends in China, none of them were like "How did he ask?" And Hendrix's family members didn't really act like anything was different.</p><p>Nowadays in China, because of influence from western countries, people do propose to their girlfriends with a ring and romantic gesture. But this is kind of new thing; it's not at all an established tradition in Chinese culture- seems like the older generation doesn't have much of a concept of it.</p><p><b>No, in China, instead of getting engaged, I would say the sort-of equivalent thing is getting the marriage license.</b></p><p><b>See, in China, getting the marriage license (ie, getting legally married) is a completely separate thing from the wedding. What?! I was shocked when I found out about this. In the US, the wedding is the event at which you get legally married- that's the definition of a wedding. In China, this is not the case!</b></p><p>We ended up getting our marriage license in China (because of immigration reasons that made more sense than doing it in the US) and then having our wedding in the US. I was a bit worried... if my relatives knew that we were already legally married, would they think our wedding was not "real"?</p><p><b>I remember asking a Chinese friend how you define which day is your anniversary</b>- since the day you get legally married is <i>different</i> than the wedding day. She didn't seem that concerned about it. She said you can decide for yourself which one is meaningful to you. She said she felt like, getting the marriage license was about just you and your partner, and then the wedding is something you do for your family, so for her, getting the marriage license was more important.</p><p>And since I was raised in purity culture, which made a big huge deal about how you can't have sex till marriage, I was super confused about <b>"how do you know when you can have sex?" Is it when you get the marriage license, or is it after the wedding itself?</b> (Fortunately I quit believing in "purity" and decided we can just make our own decision without having our wedding be <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2017/06/we-dont-need-anyones-permission-to-love.html">the way we announce the world</a> that we're about to have sex, eww.)</p><p>And the day we got our marriage license, Hendrix's relatives took us out for a fancy dinner. See, turns out that's the "welcome to the family" moment, from a Chinese perspective. Not when you get the engagement ring. (There are also Chinese traditions about the bride and groom's family negotiating about how much money the groom's family is going to give the bride's family, but we didn't do any of that.)</p><p>I remember a Chinese friend asking me about getting engaged and what it means in US culture, and he asked, "Do some people get married without getting engaged first?" And I interpreted that to mean if a couple just goes and elopes without telling anyone- and their family and friends would probably be unhappy about not being invited to the wedding. But actually I don't think that's what he was asking. I think he wasn't aware that it's not really possible to invite people to your wedding without being engaged- like, if you're planning a wedding and sending out invitations, you ARE engaged. He was probably thinking you get the marriage license, then you plan the wedding, then you have the wedding- and getting engaged sounded like an unnecessary step before that.</p><p>---</p><p><b>The wedding dress</b></p><p>In US culture, shopping for the wedding dress is a big deal. Finding that one perfect dress- THE dress. And then there's a tradition that your partner isn't allowed to see the dress until the wedding day.</p><p>In China it's totally different.</p><p><b>First of all, at Chinese weddings, the tradition is that the bride wears a bunch of different outfits. The traditional color for weddings is red, so basically she wears a series of different red dresses- but now that China is borrowing [the appearance of] some traditions from western culture, many brides add a white dress to the mix too.</b> So there's not like a "THE dress" - you wear a bunch of dresses, and I don't really know what the romantic/emotional significance of it is.</p><p>And here's what really shocked me:<b> In China, the couple gets their "wedding photos" taken as a completely separate thing from the actual wedding itself.</b> Really, "wedding photos" is not the right translation of "婚纱照"- I would translate it as "wedding dress photos." Because these are NOT photos from the wedding, they are photos of the couple wearing wedding clothes. This is something that's done <i>before</i> the wedding.</p><p>Totally shocking to me, because, what about the tradition that your spouse can't see your wedding dress before the big day? (Yeah, not a thing in China.) And also, <b>the dress that the bride wears in the photos isn't even THE dress. You go to a photo studio and pick from the dresses they have there, and you wear that in the photos, and that has no relation at all to the dress(es) you actually wear on your wedding day.</b> (In fact, I've been to weddings in China where they show a slideshow of photos of the couple, and these "wedding dress photos" are part of the slideshow- making it really obvious that they were taken beforehand and aren't photos from the actual wedding. This is completely normal in China.)</p><p>I remember when I found out about this, it made me feel like the wedding photos in China were "fake." Because <b>it's not your actual wedding day, and that's not your actual wedding dress.</b> But it's not "fake"- it's just that they have different traditions for this.</p><p>We went and got photos taken in China when we got our marriage license. We wore the traditional red clothes that the photo studio provided. My mother-in-law also wanted me to do photos wearing a white wedding dress, but I totally refused. I can't be wearing a white wedding dress if it's not my wedding day and it's not my wedding dress- that would be a lie! The only reason I would ever do that would be maybe if I was shopping for dresses, trying on different ones, sending a photo to my sister to get her opinion- but beyond that, no, no way am I letting anyone see me in a white wedding dress if it's not my wedding day.</p><p>So we just did the photos with the red Chinese clothes, and that was fine.</p><p>---</p><p><b>Dancing</b></p><p>Dancing is my FAVORITE part of weddings. <b>But in Chinese tradition, there's no dancing at a wedding at all.</b> To some extent, for Chinese weddings that are more "westernized", they kinda-sorta add some dancing to it- the bride and groom have their first dance on stage, and the bride has the dance with her father, on stage- but it's basically just a performance on the stage, not something that you eventually get all the guests to join into. There's no dance floor, there's no hours and hours of everyone dancing.</p><p>Really surprising to me, because dancing with everybody was one of the things I looked forward to the MOST (and our wedding was in the US, we had a DJ and dance floor and everything, it was great) but in China it's just not a thing at all.</p><p>---</p><p>And there are so many other wedding traditions which are completely different in China- I just discussed these 3 here because these were the ones that were most surprising to me, because they were extremely meaningful to me but just aren't part of Chinese tradition at all.</p><p><b>I'm writing this for the Carnival of Aros because it shows how romance is so culturally constructed. </b>To some extent, there are things that will be the same in all cultures- most people have romantic feelings, most people fall in love- but the specific ways that those feelings manifest is super-dependent on the unique cultural symbols of romance, and those aren't universal at all. I spent so much time dreaming about my first dance at my wedding- there are cultures where people simply don't do that, because they don't have a first dance. They may have similar romantic feelings to me, but it doesn't cause them to dream about their first dance. It comes out in other ways.</p><p>So if you're aromantic and don't care about romantic traditions, well, whatever, billions of other people don't care about those specific traditions either. And even if you have romantic feelings, that doesn't mean you have to care about roses or diamond rings or whatever. All these things are just cultural symbols- there's no intrinsic reason they need to be viewed as "romantic."</p><p>---</p><p><i>Related:</i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2016/02/engaged-in-china.html">Getting Engaged Isn’t Exactly a Thing in China</a> <br /></i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2017/06/my-chinese-marriage-license.html">My Chinese Marriage License</a><br /></i></p><p><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2017/09/wedding-posts-round-up.html"><i>Wedding Posts Round-Up</i></a><br /></p><p>
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</p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-24462805319336401852024-02-07T03:47:00.003-05:002024-02-09T22:01:18.833-05:00Blogaround<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzUkEmSykeOdjAPuwaPws-_7Rc6dvHHOar7qP_oyQOO2nwf_3eiLeI0FABPebo_3DT-GFV-4-O9ALLWS0GkNZ5zcn6O0HdrvS89fdMVL8eGEr7prytH9yawBBmGGqyFkKM-mb2nYjq2r3DgfwZsu6vlbYiboa-iFjmeOi0wx0b_MIHJFeyl-4kfiJzauiL/s550/ash-wednesday-valentines.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="550" data-original-width="383" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzUkEmSykeOdjAPuwaPws-_7Rc6dvHHOar7qP_oyQOO2nwf_3eiLeI0FABPebo_3DT-GFV-4-O9ALLWS0GkNZ5zcn6O0HdrvS89fdMVL8eGEr7prytH9yawBBmGGqyFkKM-mb2nYjq2r3DgfwZsu6vlbYiboa-iFjmeOi0wx0b_MIHJFeyl-4kfiJzauiL/s16000/ash-wednesday-valentines.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A candy heart that says "Remember U R Dust" with caption "Ash Wednesday is on Valentine's Day. You can't spell Valentine without Lent. United Methodist Churches of Indiana." <a href="https://twitter.com/thomaslhorrocks/status/1753421249181614272">Image source.</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">1.</span></b> <a href="https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2024/01/31/differing-weights-and-differing-measures/">Differing Weights And Differing Measures</a> (January 31) "So if, for example, you’re trying to show that 'evangelical Christians' are a fearsome voting bloc that politicians are compelled to show deference to, then you want the largest, most expansive definition of 'evangelical Christians' that you can find. That’s going to include everybody you can plausibly toss into the category, including both Pentecostals and anti-Pentecostal fundamentalists, including every faith-healer and magician, snake-handler and tent-revival charlatan you can find. It’s even going to include evangelical Christians who aren’t even <i>white</i>." This is SPOT-ON.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">2.</span></b> <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4432629-rage-abortion-donations-dry-up/">‘Rage’ abortion donations dry up, leaving funds struggling to meet demand</a> (January 28, <a href="https://jessica.substack.com/p/abortion-every-day-12924">via</a>) "But now, the fund needs to spend between $1000 to $1500 just for people who need an abortion before 12 weeks’ gestation. If they are further along, the costs are significantly higher."</p><p>There's a time and place for one-off donations because you see something in the news and have feelings about it. Yes, that should be part of one's donation budget. But more important is to give <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2024/01/donating-to-charity.html">recurring donations</a>- make a rational decision about which organizations you feel it's important to support, and then set up automatic monthly payments to them. This helps the charities plan their budgets much better.</p><p>Also from The Hill: <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/4437757-the-dangers-of-spotlighting-the-perfect-abortion-patient/">The dangers of spotlighting the ‘perfect’ abortion patient</a> (January 31, <a href="https://jessica.substack.com/p/abortion-every-day-2124">via</a>) "Unfortunately, all too often only the most extreme stories with 'good' reasons for abortion — the horrific cases of sexual violence, life endangerment or fetal abnormalities — enter public discourse to highlight the 'perfect patient' whose story is easiest to sympathize with."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">3. </span></b><a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2024/01/30/florida-transgender-drivers-license-change/72409088007/">Florida barring gender changes on driver's license puts trans residents at risk, critics say</a> (January 30) This is really bad.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">4.</span></b> <a href="https://jessica.substack.com/p/study-abortion-bans-creating-obgyn">Study: Abortion Bans Creating OBGYN Crisis</a> (February 2) <i>[content note: it's about the trauma that obgyn doctors are experiencing when they're not legally allowed to give patients the healthcare they need. This is hard to read.]</i> "You have somebody hemorrhaging with an intrauterine pregnancy with a heartbeat…I [didn’t yet] have legal coverage for that, but there’s only so many times you can transfuse somebody and they’re begging for their life before you say, ‘This is unconscionable.’"</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">5.</span></b> <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/02/alabama-death-penalty-nitrogen-hypoxia-inside-kenny-smith-execution.html">“It Was the Most Violent Thing I’ve Ever Seen”</a> (February 1) <i>[content note: death penalty]</i> An interview with the Rev. Jeff Hood, spiritual advisor to Kenny Smith and other death row inmates.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">6.</span></b> <a href="https://baptistnews.com/article/who-is-alistair-begg-and-why-are-american-fundamentalists-so-upset-with-him/">Who is Alistair Begg, and why are American fundamentalists so upset with him?</a> (February 1) A detailed article about why evangelicals want to "cancel" pastor Alistair Begg for not being mean enough to queer people.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">7.</span></b> <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-health-and-wellness/millions-lgbtq-americans-religious-trauma-psychiatrists-want-help-rcna135728">Religious trauma still haunts millions of LGBTQ Americans</a> (January 29)</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">8.</span></b> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNscN0dRBuw">Outdated Jackets Get a Second Life</a> (February 5) 1-minute-37-second video. Making old down jackets into comforters in China.</p><p>Also from Sixth Tone: <a href="https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1014597">AI Game Mimicking Nosy Relatives Takes China by Storm</a> (February 5)</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">9.</span></b> <a href="https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/an-ohio-pastor-was-punished-for-opening">An Ohio pastor was punished for opening his church to the homeless. He deserves it.</a> (January 23) Okay so maybe this story is more nuanced than what I initially thought. "Imagine if there was an actual emergency in the building. A place like this would jeopardize the lives of the people inside because of these kinds of deficiencies. The Fire Chief gave Avell well over a month to fix the most serious of these problems, but follow-up checks on January 9 and 16 found '5 violations that had not been properly corrected.'"</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">10.</span></b> <a href="https://onlysky.media/alee/breaking-bread-houston-tries-to-punish-feeding-the-homeless-and-fails/">Breaking bread: Houston tries to punish feeding the homeless—and fails</a> (February 2, <a href="https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2024/02/05/the-best-burger-in-texas/">via</a>) "So far, no matter how many tickets the city writes, they can’t find a jury willing to convict anyone over it."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">11.</span></b> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7o4ZQ4v7pg">Leonard Nimoy The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins FULL VERSION best quality</a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/Billieiswriting/status/1754685724366967099">via</a>) Wow, I can't believe I never knew this existed.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">12. </span></b><a href="https://xkcd.com/2890/">Relationship Advice</a> (February 5) xkcd comic. !!!!! Oh my goodness, this is so real! I side-eye anyone who makes a big deal about "marriage is hard."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">13. </span></b><a href="https://www.christianpost.com/news/veggietales-cucumber-star-larryboy-to-get-his-own-feature-film.html">VeggieTales' cucumber star LarryBoy to get his own faith-based feature film in 2026</a> (February 6)</p><p>Here's what Phil Vischer has to say on it:</p><p>
</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">Apparently there's a new LarryBoy movie in development? Somewhere? By... someone? No idea who, where or how. <a href="https://t.co/62SRaYSoaL">https://t.co/62SRaYSoaL</a></p>— Phil Vischer (@philvischer) <a href="https://twitter.com/philvischer/status/1754942978756337870?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 6, 2024</a></blockquote> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
<p>Not sure what to think of this- is it even real VeggieTales if Phil Vischer is not involved?</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">14.</span></b> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-UGBzLYiKs">Tracy Chapman & Luke Combs Perform Fast Car at the Grammys</a> (February 6) </p><p>UPDATE: Here's the full video: <a href="https://www.grammy.com/videos/tracy-chapman-luke-combs-fast-car-2024-grammys-performance-66th-annual-grammy-awards">Tracy Chapman & Luke Combs Deliver Gripping Performance Of "Fast Car" | 2024 GRAMMYs</a></p><p></p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-79519241452746645482024-02-06T04:37:00.001-05:002024-02-06T04:37:49.005-05:00Top 18 Posts From 2023<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiipmlha-nuDKYVNizNJ39aYEGtFvyAkWV8aBUSiU3TtvdWLt57roIj4w78plD9DNUHWple6IPQbnx8sUG7Sf1VOdRFsgNDtERZhyZR_rsvUIEPpG8c9rLSi-7I5lJDBgF1-qjhVkQhyQGDOvI89knt_nrQmaTwCLusWN-rnafT5Y5QzF-vtuoruB2ivV9m/s500/cat-and-laptop.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiipmlha-nuDKYVNizNJ39aYEGtFvyAkWV8aBUSiU3TtvdWLt57roIj4w78plD9DNUHWple6IPQbnx8sUG7Sf1VOdRFsgNDtERZhyZR_rsvUIEPpG8c9rLSi-7I5lJDBgF1-qjhVkQhyQGDOvI89knt_nrQmaTwCLusWN-rnafT5Y5QzF-vtuoruB2ivV9m/s16000/cat-and-laptop.png" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A cat looking at a laptop computer. <a href="https://frontpagemeews.com/category/pet-news/5-best-cat-blogs-for-your-reading-pleasure/">Image source.</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>Hi readers! It's time for the yearly roundup post! Here are my top blog posts from 2023:</p><p>Top 5 posts by page views:</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">1. </span></b><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/03/this-may-be-most-wtf-christian-article.html">This May Be The Most WTF Christian Article On Sex I've Ever Read</a>: "Like, everyone gather around and marvel at how, apparently, women's orgasms are not on anyone's radar at all, over at The Gospel Coalition, even when they are talking about a man being 'generous' during sex. Like, my god, how do you miss that?"</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">2. </span></b><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/05/for-rizpah-or-post-about-human.html">For Rizpah (or, a post about human sacrifice in the bible)</a>: "So when I read this story in the bible, I always thought that since David was a 'good guy,' that meant Rizpah was a 'bad guy.'"</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">3.</span></b> <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/02/january-2023-carnival-of-aces-roundup.html">January 2023 Carnival of Aces Roundup: "The Advice You Wish You'd Had"</a>: Very cool hosting the Carnival of Aces!</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">4. </span></b><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/03/vaginismus-is-not-problem-in-and-of.html">Vaginismus Is Not A Problem, In And Of Itself</a>: "She has to go to a doctor and the doctor will tell her what she needs to do to make her body good enough for a man. She has to spend her time on yoga, because her body isn't good enough for a man. She has to endure the pain of trying to push dilators in, trying to force herself to relax, hoping she can make herself good enough for a man."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">5.</span></b> <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/05/blog-series-on-great-sex-rescue.html">Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"</a>: One of the main things on my blog this year is my series reviewing the book "The Great Sex Rescue." I have a lot to say about it! It does a very good job of pointing out how illogical and harmful purity ideology and complementarianism are, but it falls short because it doesn't acknowledge queerness- and in particular, there are many parts of the book where its advice does not work for asexuals.</p><p>---</p><p>And my other favorite 13 posts:</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">6.</span></b> <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/08/sodom-and-gomorrah-is-story-about.html">"Sodom and Gomorrah" is a story about living in a "bad neighborhood"</a>: "It's a story about stereotypes. God buys into the stereotypes too- killing the entire city just because a small and powerful group of men is terrorizing the streets. God kills them and their victims. God sees no difference."<br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">7. </span></b><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/12/that-happened-to-me-too.html">That happened to me too</a>: "If it's really true that this is a more common problem for aces, then we can imagine an alternate universe where this information is more widely known, and I could have known that I was at risk for having painful pap smears/ pelvic exams, and I could have protected myself better."<br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">8.</span></b> <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/01/on-believing-that-prayer-works.html">On believing that "prayer works"</a>: "So, it's very possible that if a white woman is missing, lots of people will see the news coverage and pray for her, but a woman of color in the exact same situation will receive little news coverage and won't have a ton of strangers praying for her. Does that mean that God will help the white woman more? Doesn't something seem wrong about this? God's actions are constrained by human society's prejudices?"</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">9.</span></b> <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/04/no-one-can-take-bible-from-me.html">No One Can Take The Bible From Me</a>: "To actually spend time caring about the victims of the bible... wow, that's something new and powerful."<br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">10.</span></b> <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/05/boundaries-with-dentists.html">Boundaries With Dentists</a>: "Yeah... being required to perform your discomfort in a way that will read as 'real' to other people. This is hard to explain, but I'm autistic and I think other autistic people know what I'm talking about."<br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">11.</span></b> <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/05/separating-vaginismus-from-asexuality.html">Separating Vaginismus From Asexuality</a>: "And I wondered, was I not 'really' asexual, and it was 'actually' 'just' vaginismus? Now that I don't have vaginismus any more, am I not asexual any more?"<br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">12.</span></b> <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/10/on-marriage-as-immigrant-in-china.html">On Marriage as an Immigrant in China</a>: "A divorce can be ugly and painful in ways that wouldn't happen in a divorce between 2 citizens. At the same time, the practical reality of being from 2 completely different cultures will frequently require the 2 spouses to trust and depend on each other in ways that citizen couples don't have to."<br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">13.</span></b> <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/03/boys-cant-stop.html">"Boys Can't Stop"</a>: "I couldn't comprehend this idea of 'he didn't want to pressure me'- because in purity culture, they said that boys are always pressuring girls, that's what you should expect from boys, they are all like that."<br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">14.</span></b> <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/03/to-glorify-god.html">"To Glorify God"</a>: "This blog would be different from all my previous writing on Christianity. This blog would be about saying what I needed to say. Asking the questions I needed to ask. Even if I wasn't sure if God was okay with me asking."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">15.</span></b> <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/07/how-to-pretend-to-welcome-trans-people.html">How to Pretend to Welcome Trans People</a>: "I can't believe I have to point this out, but that is THE OPPOSITE of welcoming trans people. Like if I had to make a list of 'how NOT to welcome trans people' those are the exact things I would put on it."<br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">16.</span></b> <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/11/i-used-to-be-young-earth-creationist.html">I used to be a young-earth creationist</a>: "Anyway, as I read more and more of Answers in Genesis's articles, I really struggled with it, because young-earth creationism just sounds so laughably ridiculous. But finally it came down to this: I knew that as a Christian, I have to believe the bible is true. And if you open the bible to Genesis 1, it's right there in black-and-white: On the first day God made light. On the second day, on the third day, etc. That's what it says, and I believe the bible, right?"<br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">17.</span></b> <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/10/men-have-no-idea-what-its-like-for.html">Men have no idea what it's like for women in complementarian churches</a>: "That's where I learned that we can just reject the whole thing. We don't have to tie ourselves in knots trying to explain how we believe wives have to submit to their husbands, but not like, in a sexist way."<br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">18.</span></b> <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-logistics-of-revival.html">The Logistics of a Revival</a>: "They had to make a decision- and it's a human decision, it's not something that happens automatically because 'God.'" (I had several posts on the Asbury Revival- here's one of them.)</p><p>So there you have it! And yes, I have tons of draft posts, and tons of ideas. Looking forward to another year of blogging~</p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-51318297204463429752024-01-31T05:27:00.001-05:002024-01-31T05:27:49.944-05:00Blogaround<p><b><span style="font-size: large;">1.</span></b> <a href="https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2024/01/18/reach-throw-row-go/">Reach, Throw, Row, Go</a> (January 18) "A lesson in 'How to Save a Drowning Person' that started with an argument for Why You Should Want To Do That would meet with a kind of puzzled <i>anger</i>." It's about this: <a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2024/01/13/henry-cuellar-texas-border-eagle-pass/">Feds demand Texas stop blocking Border Patrol agents access to border</a> </p><p>Also from The Slacktivist: <a href="https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2024/01/25/we-dont-live-in-bubbles/">We Don’t Live In ‘Bubbles’</a> (January 25) "Heck, if Chester A. Arthur had even said something so completely stupid in such an arrogant tone, then that’s all he’d be remembered for today. Historians would refer to President Arthur as 'the magnets guy' instead of just as, um, one of those guys who came between Grant and Teddy and probably won’t be on the final."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">2.</span></b> <a href="https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1014530">The Lives of China’s Hidden Workers, Through Their Own Camera Lens</a> (January 25) "Instead, it is narrated by the people Sun calls the documentary’s 'co-directors,' from truck drivers and construction workers to fishermen and rice farmers — typical users of Kuaishou, which is more popular in China’s smaller cities and countryside than rival platform Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok."</p><p>(One quibble there: Tiktok is the international version of Douyin. Not the other way around.)</p><p>Also from Sixth Tone: <a href="https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1014565">Endangered Xizang Cattle Cloned For the First Time</a> (January 30) "The latest national survey of livestock found only 19 Zhangmu cattle and 39 Apeijiaza cattle left in the country, with just one breeding bull remaining. According to Xinhua, the breeds are considered strategic resources for the country due to their ability to live on the snowy plateau at altitudes of more than 3,500 meters."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">3.</span></b> <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3249746/china-singapore-agree-visa-free-deal-travel-stays-30-days">China, Singapore agree visa-free deal for travel stays of up to 30 days</a> (January 25) China keeps adding more countries to the list! Great news for people from Singapore who want to travel to China.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">4.</span></b> <a href="https://churchleaders.com/news/467035-american-family-radio-drops-alistair-begg-following-controversial-remarks-about-lgbtq-weddings.html">American Family Radio Drops Alistair Begg Following Controversial Remarks About LGBTQ+ Weddings</a> (January 24) "After confirming that the woman’s grandson understood that she doesn’t affirm his choice to marry a trans person, Begg said, 'Well then, okay. As long as he knows that, then I suggest that you do go to the ceremony. And I suggest that you buy them a gift.'" Oh look, pastor Alistair Begg, who very much believes being trans is wrong, advises a grandma to go to her grandson's wedding to a trans person. Apparently this is not good enough for American Family Radio- what if someone thinks that attending the wedding means Grandma thinks being trans is okay? We can't have that!</p><p>Remember when I said that <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2024/01/what-do-we-do-with-christians-who-are.html">being evangelical means you have to throw queer people under the bus</a>? This is exactly what I'm talking about.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">5.</span></b> <a href="https://apnews.com/article/nitrogen-execution-death-penalty-alabama-6d66344d3199f8c58f2408baa3df0738">Alabama man shook violently on gurney during first-ever nitrogen gas execution</a> (January 27) <i>[content note: death penalty]</i></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">6.</span></b> <a href="https://baptistnews.com/article/from-scrooge-mcduck-to-zacchaeus-to-21st-century-wealth-inequality/">From Scrooge McDuck to Zacchaeus to 21st century wealth inequality</a> (January 29) "For far too long we’ve sequestered Zacchaeus inside a children’s song."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">7. </span></b><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brittany-watts-the-ohio-woman-charged-with-a-felony-after-a-miscarriage-talks-shock-of-her-arrest/">Brittany Watts, Ohio woman charged with felony after miscarriage at home, describes shock of her arrest</a> (January 26) <i>[content note: miscarriage]</i> New details about how the hospital did not give her the medical care that she needed.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">8.</span></b> <a href="https://www.space.com/uranus-neptune-similar-shades-of-blue-voyager-2-images">Uranus and Neptune are actually similar blues, 'true' color images reveal</a> (January 5) Cool!</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">9.</span></b> <a href="https://www.mprnews.org/story/2023/01/04/red-lake-considers-a-future-without-blood-quantum">Red Lake considers a future without blood quantum</a> (2023, <a href="https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/4192355">via</a>) "It's really not our traditional way. And in fact, it's a tool that was meant to divide our people to eliminate our people."</p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-80513598881638572712024-01-27T21:00:00.001-05:002024-01-27T21:00:41.000-05:00The Great Sex Rescue: Transaction<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy_61qXPKX3VJb3bAojuREhbteuSwSx93wUOWMVYwBakqybjo6AunF8zOSjiu5FA8RSXeOBtom0WX_laTaBwWeDAWPDHfNPBO66XR3bwJJ_S5zfpjQd3aarV-VL5px_qSuRP14QRiNxoiG4H3KjfitbT9nhtSj0dvu6i7qNQJ1KTiKZJgdEu0pG4BJrkKi/s500/toast-bread-while-slicing.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="444" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy_61qXPKX3VJb3bAojuREhbteuSwSx93wUOWMVYwBakqybjo6AunF8zOSjiu5FA8RSXeOBtom0WX_laTaBwWeDAWPDHfNPBO66XR3bwJJ_S5zfpjQd3aarV-VL5px_qSuRP14QRiNxoiG4H3KjfitbT9nhtSj0dvu6i7qNQJ1KTiKZJgdEu0pG4BJrkKi/s16000/toast-bread-while-slicing.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Top image shows a lightsaber-like knife with text "This toasts bread while you're slicing it." Bottom image is the "Shut up and take my money" Futurama meme. <a href="https://rocheap.esartisansguild.org/category?name=shut%20up%20and%20take%20my%20money">Image source.</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><i>Links to all posts in this series can be found here: <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/05/blog-series-on-great-sex-rescue.html">Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"</a></i></p><p>---</p><p>We are now in chapter 9 of <a href="https://amzn.to/3zoRKRe">The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You've Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended</a> [affiliate link], "Duty Sex Isn't Sexy." This post will cover the first part of chapter 9- pages 158 to 161. <b>This section is about how it's not good to view sex in transactional terms. </b>(And yes, I agree- in a loving, long-term relationship, it's not good to view sex in transactional terms.)</p><p>What does it mean to view sex as "transactional"? One example the book gives is the sitcom "WKRP in Cincinnati," where Lucille tells her husband, "Better mow the grass, Herbie, or no num-nums tonight." <b>The idea is that women don't really *want* to have sex, but a woman is willing to do it for her husband if he does something that she wants (like housework).</b></p><p>"The Great Sex Rescue" says this:</p><p></p><blockquote>Assigning a price for sex says, "I don't really want to do this. I see it as a means to an end-- a means to get what I really want, which is this behavior from you. So I will hold myself back from you until you give me what I want." This feels like a rejection-- I don't really want you; I only want what you can give me. It changes the nature of sex, and it ruins intimacy.</blockquote><p></p><p>Yes, I agree with this. (Later in this post I will talk about how this gets more complicated if one partner is ace and genuinely doesn't want sex for the sex.) <b>Typically, when people want sex, it's not just about wanting an orgasm- it's about wanting to have an intimate experience with someone they love. If their partner is going through the steps to give them an orgasm, but isn't enjoying it, well that's not really what they wanted.</b> It "feels like a rejection."</p><p>The thing is, <b>this transactional view of sex is EVERYWHERE in evangelical teaching on marriage. </b>I've heard jokes in church about how a man should "help" his wife with the housework and then he'll be rewarded for it, wink wink nudge nudge you know what I mean you know what I mean. Married Christian women are told that they need to have sex because men "need" it- and there's no mention of the possibility of a woman liking sex. Just a lot of "look at how hard your husband works, he takes care of your needs [financially, opening jars, etc], now you should take care of his needs too." And teenage girls in purity culture are given lots of warnings about how you shouldn't have sex before marriage because as soon as the boy gets what he wants, he'll disappear, he won't be committed to you- you need to lock him down in marriage first before you give him sex.<b> The girl wants a long-term commitment, and the boy wants sex, and marriage is the transaction they do to get those things. </b>And then there's the idea that marriage is the solution for lust- it's telling men "you've worked so hard to avoid lust, now that you're married you can finally have sex with your wife as a reward, and you don't have to hold yourself back anymore" with no mention of, like, making sex a good experience for your wife.</p><p><b>Yeah, the transactional view of sex is EVERYWHERE in evangelical culture. So it's good that "The Great Sex Rescue" is pointing this out.</b></p><p>"The Great Sex Rescue" points out that there <i>is</i> a little bit of truth to the "if men help with housework, their wives will be more likely to want to have sex with them" idea. But it's not about "owing" each other; it's not about keeping track of who did what and who needs to repay the other spouse. <b>It's about being a team. The kind of person who treats you as an equal, who recognizes that you both live there so you both need to do housework, who notices and cares about how much work you do- that's the kind of person that (typically) people want to have sex with.</b></p><p>Yes, I agree that if you're in a committed, loving, long-term relationship, <b>sex should be something you both enjoy, not something you do because you "owe" your partner. </b>(At the same time, though, I generally don't feel comfortable making statements about the way sex "should be." Everyone has their own priorities, and that's fine. As an example, for sex workers, sex is literally transactional, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.) But for aces, this is more complicated- I'll get to that later in the post.</p><p>One thing that I felt was a bit weird in this chapter of the book is<b> the idea that the lower-desire partner has more power in the relationship. </b>The book says, if Partner A has a higher desire for sex than Partner B, then Partner A is depending on Partner B to meet their sexual needs, and isn't allowed to get those needs met anywhere else, so Partner B has this power over Partner A, and could use it to manipulate them.</p><p>I mean, I guess that could be true? I can see how Partner A might see it that way. <b>But I think most people in the "Partner B" role don't feel like they have power over their partner; they feel like they're being pressured into sex they don't want,</b> and they can't necessarily say no because in marriage you have to have sex with your spouse, right? I don't think Partner B feels "powerful"; I think they feel vulnerable. </p><p>If Partner B really could manipulate Partner A all the time and get away with it, then you could say Partner B has the power, but in reality that's not how it works. In reality, Partner B gets constantly told that she is not a good enough wife because she is not having enough sex, and she should be worried that Partner A will cheat on her, and it will be Partner B's fault, etc.</p><p>And isn't that what most of "The Great Sex Rescue" is about? I find it odd that this one part of the book says the lower-desire partner has the power in the relationship, because most of the book is about how the lower-desire partner is mistreated by the church (or rather, how women are assumed to not want sex, and told that a key part of marriage is having unwanted sex), and how wrong that is. Chapter 10 is an entire chapter about marital rape- how marital rape is a <i>direct result </i>of evangelical teachings on marriage.</p><p>So I'm not sure what to make of this section of chapter 9 which says the lower-desire partner has the power. I *guess* the higher-desire partner might feel that way, and I *guess* in the one specific context of "your spouse is not allowed to get their sexual needs met anywhere else, it HAS to be you" then the lower-desire partner has a bargaining chip, but overall, in reality, it doesn't really work out like that. More likely that <i>both</i> of them feel unhappy and powerless.</p><p>Okay, so that's basically what this first part of chapter 9 is about. <b>Now let me tell you my asexual take on it.</b></p><p>The difficult thing here, for a relationship between an ace partner and an allosexual partner (ie, not asexual or asexual spectrum) is that the ace partner might actually not want sex. <b>It might genuinely be true that the ace partner is not interested in sex for the sake of sex, but is willing to do it for "transactional" <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/10/reasons.html">reasons</a>. Willing to do it because they feel it's a requirement for maintaining the relationship, and they are getting a lot of benefits out of the relationship, so overall it's worth it.</b></p><p>I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with having sex for other reasons besides "I really like sex." I know there are aces in this kind of situation, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. <b>It *might* be a bad thing. You should examine the specifics of your situation carefully, because it could be a bad thing, or it could be okay.</b></p><p>Here's the question that the ace partner should ask themself: <b>"When I have sex with my partner, is the experience positive, neutral, or negative for me?"</b> (I'm not talking about the categories sex-favorable/ sex-indifferent/ sex-repulsed because that's a different thing than what I'm trying to discuss here.) I mean it like this:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>positive: "I want to have sex because I enjoy the actual sex itself"</li><li>neutral: "I don't really care if we have sex or not, it's fine if we do, it's fine if we don't"</li><li>negative: "There are some parts of sex that I actively dislike"/ "There are some parts of sex which I dread and I want them to be over as fast as possible"/ "This is painful but I love my partner so it's worth it"</li></ul><p></p><p>(This "positive/neutral/negative" framing reminds me of how I don't love the concept of "enthusiastic consent"- people often define "enthusiastic consent" like it only counts as real consent if you're in the "positive" category I've made up here. This is not inclusive of aces, or anyone who consents to sex for reasons more complex than "I really want to have sex." See Siggy's post on that: <a href="https://asexualagenda.wordpress.com/2019/03/05/im-not-enthusiastic-about-enthusiastic-consent/">I’m not enthusiastic about enthusiastic consent</a>.)</p><p><b>In my experience, it can be difficult to even know one's own feelings. There was a period of time when I thought I felt neutral, but I actually felt negative. And I now see that if I had kept going on like that, it would not have been good for me long-term.</b> (Fortunately, in my case, <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2021/12/being-asexual-in-pregnancy-world.html">getting pregnant totally changed my whole entire perspective on sex</a>. When I was pregnant and I felt horribly sick all the time, that was the first time in my life that I felt I had a "good enough reason" to say no to sex. [Or rather, for most of my life I definitely knew there was no way I would ever consent to sex, because I was "protecting my purity", not because I felt like I actually had a choice- but once I stopped "protecting my purity" I moved right into the "men need it" paradigm. So I still felt I didn't have much of a choice.] <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2020/04/he-just-loves-me.html?zx=45395738f1917a8d">Pregnancy helped me get away from the "obligation" mindset.</a> And then after I gave birth, <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2021/03/pregnancy-childbirth-vaginismus.html">I no longer had vaginismus</a>, so PIV [penis-in-vagina] sex was not painful anymore and <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2021/10/so-this-is-new.html">WOW</a> THAT MAKES A BIG DIFFERENCE.)</p><p>My advice is that <b>if you feel that your experiences having sex with your partner are negative</b>- if you feel like "I don't like this but I'm still choosing to do it because I get benefits from the relationship/ because I want my partner to be happy/ because I love my partner"- <b>my advice is not to do this. My advice is to stop having bad sex. Even if you feel like "it's worth it because [whatever reason]", this is going to end up being really bad for you in the long term. </b></p><p>And about the "neutral" category: I remember<b> I talked to a married ace woman one time who said, "I don't mind having sex with my husband. It's a chore just like any other chore. It's fine."</b> So, she is saying her feelings are neutral. It may be the case that her feelings <i>truly are</i> neutral. If so, that's fine. If she continues doing that long-term, I don't think it will be harmful for her (as long as she's getting benefits from the relationship in other ways).</p><p>But for me, years ago, <b>I thought I felt neutral, but... I was <i>actually in pain</i>, from the vaginismus.</b> And I thought "it's painful but it's worth it because I love my partner, and men need sex." No, don't do this. <b>If the sex itself is <i>actually a bad experience</i> for you, then even if you are getting benefits from the relationship that outweigh that... I... no, don't do this. </b>The belief that "love" means regularly subjecting yourself to something that hurts you, and your partner is experiencing pleasure because of your pain, and your partner wants it to be about intimate, loving connection but for you it's a sacrifice that you convince yourself is worth it, and you have to pretend to be happy about it... this is just really unhealthy in the long term.</p><p>So if the experience of sex is negative, then no, don't do that. If it's neutral, then that's fine- but the difficult thing is, what if you're deceiving yourself into thinking it's neutral, when it's actually negative? And if your experience of sex is positive, if you find yourself actually looking forward to it and desiring it, well that's the best-case scenario, good for you.</p><p><b>Also, if you want to have sex with your partner, but your experience of sex is negative or neutral, I recommend making changes so that your experience can be neutral or positive. </b>Talk to your partner about what would need to be different in order to make it a better experience for you. Your partner has an obligation to care about that. Here are some examples:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>If PIV [penis-in-vagina] sex is painful because you have vaginismus, then don't do PIV sex. Do other sex things that don't involve vaginal penetration.</li><li>If you feel neutral about sex, maybe there's something you and your partner could add to it, to make it positive instead of neutral. Maybe you want to cuddle more. Maybe you want your partner to constantly tell you that you're beautiful. Add things that change it from a neutral experience to a genuinely pleasurable experience (and the pleasurable aspects don't even have to be sexual in and of themselves).</li></ul><p></p><p>(Disclaimer: I'm a sex-favorable asexual. For sex-repulsed aces, maybe this advice won't work. Please do leave a comment on this if you're sex-repulsed and have an opinion about it.)</p><p>And, I think, <b>if your experience of sex is neutral and you're more or less doing it for "transactional" reasons, the important thing is it shouldn't <i>feel like</i> "my partner did something for me, so I will respond by having sex with them."</b> Don't keep count of specific things and who owes what to whom. Instead it should be like, <b>both of you always have an attitude of caring for each other and loving each other, and you genuinely want to do things to bring happiness to your partner.</b> And see, this works exactly the same in both directions, because it's not specifically about sex. Whatever your partner enjoys, you do it for them. Maybe it's sex, maybe it's going to the library together, whatever it is, you do it for them. (Unless, like I said, it's a horrible experience for you.) Sex shouldn't be seen as more important than the things the lower-desire partner values.</p><p>There have been times in my marriage, when both me and my husband were under a lot of stress and I felt like my needs weren't being met (this was totally unrelated to sex) and that made me start to think in transactional terms, like "he's asking me to do something for him, I want to make him agree to do something for me, before I agree to this." That's a sign that there are problems in the relationship. In that situation, you have to honestly communicate with each other about how you feel and what you need, rather than playing games about who does what for whom. <b>A relationship should be like, both of you are prioritizing each other's needs and happiness, to such an extent that you don't feel it's necessary to keep track of every little detail about who did what and who owes whom for it.</b></p><p>One more thing I want to showcase, from this section of "The Great Sex Rescue." I like the definitions presented in this diagram, from page 161:</p><p></p><blockquote><p><b>Transaction, Obligation, and Coercion</b></p><p>Transaction: I did this, so you owe me.</p><p>Obligation: You owe me.</p><p>Coercion: You owe me, so I'm going to take what I want.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>The first part of chapter 9 looked at transaction, the second part (which we'll look at in a later blog post) is about obligation, and then chapter 10 is on coercion and marital rape.</p><p>In summary: This section of "The Great Sex Rescue" is about how it's not healthy to view sex in transactional terms, like it's something a wife does for her husband as a reward for good behavior, or like a husband should do more housework in order to get his wife to have sex with him. I basically agree with this, but it's complicated in a relationship between an ace partner and allosexual partner.</p><p>---</p><p><i>Links to all posts in this series can be found here: <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/05/blog-series-on-great-sex-rescue.html">Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"</a></i></p><p><i>Related:</i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/10/reasons.html">Reasons</a><br /></i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2021/12/being-asexual-in-pregnancy-world.html">Being Asexual in Pregnancy World</a> <br /></i></p><p><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/01/bucket-list-post-about-being-sex.html"><i>Bucket List (a post about being a sex-favorable asexual)</i></a></p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-76974678810622537222024-01-25T07:55:00.000-05:002024-01-25T07:55:12.604-05:00Blogaround<p><b><span style="font-size: large;">1.</span></b> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHtRyoZNW7k">The Performative Sexuality of Matt Walsh</a> (January 19) 8-minute video from Jessie Gender. "Okay, obviously on its face this is the funniest ****ing thing I've seen this man say, and I have seen this man say some really fun, dumb ****, amongst all the horrible horrific fascist nonsense that he says and [transmisic] bullshit."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">2.</span></b> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0ikMsnzAp8">This Cat Is NOT "Totally Normal"!!</a> (January 20) 1-hour-37-minute sudoku solve video. Wow, this is amazing. "It's absolute nonsense and yet you can actually find a way through this!"</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">3.</span></b> <a href="https://www.writingforlife.net/index.php/2024/01/02/7-ways-to-be-an-ally-to-autistic-people/">7 Ways to Be An Ally to Autistic People</a> (January 2) "Joking around and whatever is perfectly fine, but sometimes when I can’t figure out if people are being serious or just joking and ask for a quick clarification, they either refuse to answer or actively make my question part of the banter like it wasn’t meant to be serious. Don’t do this to people, it’s rude."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">4.</span></b> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/16/google-keeps-location-history-data-abortion-clinics-despite-delete-pledge">Google promised to delete location data on abortion clinic visits. It didn’t, study says</a> (January 17, <a href="https://jessica.substack.com/p/abortion-every-day-11824">via</a>) "A year and a half has passed since Google first pledged to delete all location data on users’ visits to abortion clinics with minimal progress. The move would have made it harder for law enforcement to use that information to investigate or prosecute people seeking abortions in states where the procedure has been banned or otherwise limited. Now, a new study shows Google still retains location history data in 50% of cases."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">5.</span></b> <a href="https://www.popsugar.com/fitness/travel-for-abortion-nancy-davis-49330698">What It's Like to Be Denied an Abortion in Your State</a> (January 18, <a href="https://jessica.substack.com/p/abortion-every-day-11824">via</a>) <i>[content note: pregnancy loss]</i> "I just could not believe it. It was already hard enough dealing with the fact that my baby wasn't going to make it. This was a wanted pregnancy; this was a planned pregnancy."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">6. </span></b><a href="https://www.wonkette.com/p/tim-scott-quoted-fannie-lou-hamer">Tim Scott Quoted Fannie Lou Hamer At A Trump Rally And Now I Want To Punch My Fist Through A Wall</a> (January 22) "At that time in Mississippi, if you registered to vote, your name and address ran in the paper for two weeks so the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists could terrorize you if you were Black."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">7.</span></b> <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ohio-pastor-charged-housing-homeless-church-sues-city-federal-lawsuit-rcna135215">Ohio pastor charged for housing the homeless in his church sues city in federal lawsuit</a> (January 24)</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">8.</span></b> <a href="https://substack.perfectunion.us/p/the-biden-administration-is-ending">The Biden Administration Is Ending Bank Overdraft Fees as We Know Them</a> (January 18) "Under the new rule, overdraft fees at large banks will be limited to the service's cost–expected to be as low as $3 per incident. Currently, the typical consumer is charged $35 for each overdraft."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">9.</span></b> <a href="https://baremarriage.com/2024/01/focus-on-the-familys-scary-stance-about-men-jailed-for-domestic-violence/">Focus on the Family's Scary Stance About Men Jailed for Domestic Violence</a> (January 22) <i>[content note: abuse, domestic violence]</i> "Why is there no testimony from a man saying, 'I learned that trying to control my wife wasn’t okay'?"</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">10.</span></b> <a href="https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1014518">Take a Hint! How Chinese Officials Are Subtly Promoting Having Children</a> (January 24) "The challenge even prompted the China Family Planning Association — formed in 1980 to help implement the one-child policy — to seek the public’s help in formulating new propaganda slogans for the three-child policy in 2021." Oh yeah that's what we need, propaganda slogans. That'll do it. [/sarcasm]</p><p>I find it a bit goofy that this article is framed like "the Chinese government is promoting these images of families with 3 children, hoping it will convince people to have more kids" [my paraphrase, not an exact quote] which is, uh, how shall I put this, obviously ridiculous. Can you imagine any parent being like "well I have 1 child, and WOW childcare is expensive, but oh look here's a statue of a family with 3 children, I should totally have more kids!!!" LOLLLLLL.</p><p>It would make a lot more sense to frame it as "Because the one-child policy was in place for 30-some years, in Chinese culture it's now seen as 'normal' to only have 1 child (for example, the typical image of a family is a mom, dad, and 1 child). Now that China has changed to a 3-child policy, the government is trying to promote more images of families with 2-3 children, to show that this should also be seen as 'normal.'" Like not with the expectation that this is going to *convince* people to have more kids (lol what on earth), but simply as a way of helping people see that there can be different sizes of families and that's all fine.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">11.</span></b> <a href="https://asexualagenda.wordpress.com/2024/01/24/journal-club-has-virginity-lost-its-virtue/">Journal Club: Has Virginity Lost Its Virtue?</a> (January 24) "Study 2 took data from a national survey to see how likely people were to consider a relationship with a virgin."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">12.</span></b> <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/01/24/1226161416/rape-caused-pregnancy-abortion-ban-states">Raped, pregnant and in an abortion ban state? Researchers gauge how often it happens</a> (January 24, <a href="https://jessica.substack.com/p/65000-rape-related-pregnancies-in">via</a>) <i>[content note: rape statistics]</i> "As an abortion provider in Montana, Dr. Samuel Dickman has seen patients routinely who tell him they became pregnant after a rape." This study estimates 64,000 pregnancies from rape in states where abortion is banned, since Roe v Wade was overturned.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">13. </span></b><a href="https://sildarmillionjournal.wordpress.com/2024/01/18/call-for-submissions-february-2024-carnival-of-aros-the-meaning-of-romance-across-time-and-place/">Call for Submissions | February 2024 Carnival of Aros | The Meaning of “Romance” Across Time and Place</a> (January 18) Good topic! I haven't written anything for the Carnival of Aros before, but I will probably write a post for this one, because I have some things to say about the differences in romantic traditions in Chinese and American culture.</p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-17072112944305023682024-01-24T08:57:00.001-05:002024-01-24T08:57:24.644-05:00Donating to Charity<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjngQzKG6gQKhVnKM9LyP9UaK2i_ypKYCQE_Q8W-lwOkeHUOzmd7L8oMCyXp_crRkDcy4-TwfJKfQcfxKbowhxJt4hW1eCQKFBbHDfCqWkvOGfAOusDE-LcWjzMlu7d7P4g03S-GmJmdYETrNoWyKBG7ufs0sTlDxp6dbK_rQu3JznGJnJiGRP62mQjttq/s500/Piggy-Bank-8.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="452" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjngQzKG6gQKhVnKM9LyP9UaK2i_ypKYCQE_Q8W-lwOkeHUOzmd7L8oMCyXp_crRkDcy4-TwfJKfQcfxKbowhxJt4hW1eCQKFBbHDfCqWkvOGfAOusDE-LcWjzMlu7d7P4g03S-GmJmdYETrNoWyKBG7ufs0sTlDxp6dbK_rQu3JznGJnJiGRP62mQjttq/s16000/Piggy-Bank-8.png" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Piggy bank. <a href="https://pngfre.com/piggy-bank-png/">Image source.</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>Hi readers! It's January, and I do this thing where every January I write a blog post about setting up recurring donations. So here it is.</p><p>I personally have a good enough income that I feel I have a responsibility to give money to help people who need it. And I think this responsibility is something I should be deliberate about; I should have a plan, a goal. Not just wander through life and then when I see some charity ad that makes me sad, then I donate to that. No, it should be intentional. <b>Figure out what your priorities are, and then donate your money in a way that reflects that. Research the actual things that different organizations are doing, and pick charities that are really making a difference.</b></p><p>And furthermore, I believe that <b>as your income increases, the amount you donate should increase. But that's not just going to magically happen unless you plan it.</b> So my suggestion is every year in January, set a goal about how much money you want to donate that year, then think about which issues are the most important to you, find charities which are working in those areas and doing good work, and set up monthly automatic donations to those charities. Automatic monthly donations are great because then you're still donating even if you don't have time to think about it.</p><p>And then the next year in January, maybe you'll be able to increase your donation amounts! If your salary has increased during the year, then you should increase your donations too.</p><p>For me personally, immigration is the issue I care most about. I am an immigrant in China, and so I want to help other immigrants and refugees. One organization I donate to is <a href="https://www.raicestexas.org/">RAICES</a>. (And there are other issues and charities I also donate to; I'm just giving 1 example here.)</p><p>So if you have a good enough income, I encourage you to do this! The more money you have, the more you should donate, but that won't happen unless you actually make a plan and then do it.</p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-79674974522079758612024-01-20T00:05:00.000-05:002024-01-20T00:05:01.322-05:00Blogaround<p><b><span style="font-size: large;">1.</span></b> <a href="https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1014462">It’s Year-end Party Season For Chinese Companies — Do Workers Like Them?</a> (January 15) Ha. Yeah, so this is a thing in China. Every company has a big party for Chinese New Year. Lots of fancy food, dance performances, "lucky draw" prizes, managers giving speeches about how great the company is, going around to everyone else's table to drink with them, it drags on and on for hours...</p><p>I remember at my first job in China, another international employee astutely asked, "Why do parties always need to have performances?" Why indeed.</p><p>At my current job, we have annual parties which are a lot more casual than that, and I really like that. Just rent a party room and hang out and eat, some people can play mah jong or do karaoke if they want, and maybe win "lucky draw" prizes, and that's it.</p><p>Also from Sixth Tone: <a href="https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1014493">For China’s Plus-Size Women, Going Out Is a Daily Struggle</a> (January 19)</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">2.</span></b> <a href="https://laurarbnsn.substack.com/p/theres-a-version-of-the-christmas">There’s A Version of A Christmas Carol Where Scrooge is an Attempted Rapist</a> (December 27) "The tremendous irony is that this adaptation adds so much darkness and evil to the Scrooge story but does not add more meaning. A worse Scrooge does not produce greater redemption – it produces less."</p><p>Also from Dr. Laura Robinson: <a href="https://laurarbnsn.substack.com/p/how-much-exodus-is-too-much-exodus">How Much Exodus is Too Much Exodus? The Prince of Egypt and The Ten Commandments</a> (December 31) It's an analysis which compares the movies "The Prince of Egypt" and "The Ten Commandments." Oh I am so here for this.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">3.</span></b> <a href="https://religionnews.com/2024/01/10/wheaton-college-restricts-employees-ability-to-state-preferred-pronouns/">Wheaton College restricts employees’ ability to state preferred pronouns</a> (January 10, <a href="https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2024/01/16/something-like-a-pipe-bomb-ready-to-blow/">via</a>) This is just ridiculous. What if your name is Alex or Sam or something? Also, using a trans person's correct name and pronouns is BARE MINIMUM level of human decency.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">4.</span></b> <a href="https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-health-watch/michigans-new-anti-poverty-effort-7500-flint-moms-no-strings-attached">Michigan’s new anti-poverty effort: $7,500 for Flint moms, no strings attached</a> (August 1) "Beginning in January, Flint moms will receive up to $7,500 to help boost their infant’s footing in the first year of life — a one-time $1,500 payment in mid-pregnancy, followed by $500 per month for the first year of a child’s life." Great news!</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">5.</span></b> <a href="https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202401/17/WS65a7dd05a3105f21a507cdb4.html">China to grant Ireland unilateral visa-free treatment</a> (January 17) and <a href="https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/swiss-travellers-to-be-allowed-to-enter-china-visa-free/49131024">Swiss travellers to be allowed to enter China visa-free</a> (January 16)</p><p>I tried to find a source from a more well-known western news outlet, but I only found this one from Bloomberg and it's paywalled: <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-18/china-has-scrapped-visa-requirements-for-11-nations-in-past-year">China Has Scrapped Visa Requirements for 11 Nations in Past Year</a> (January 18)</p><p>Very interesting! China is very intentionally trying to improve relations with other countries, and encourage tourism. This is good news, from my perspective as an immigrant in China, but also I'm American so none of these new policies actually apply to me directly.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">6.</span></b> A few articles on Biden not taking a stand against genocide in Gaza:</p><p><a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/1/10/why-is-biden-engaging-in-disinformation-on-gaza">Why is Biden engaging in disinformation on Gaza?</a> (January 10)<i> [content note: infant death]</i><br /></p><p><a href="https://theintercept.com/2024/01/17/biden-gaza-genocide-israel-aid/">Joe Biden Wants You To Believe He Is Opposed To Genocide In Gaza</a> (January 17) "But his statement, which emphasized the Israeli deaths on October 7 and the hostages who remain in Hamas’s custody, made no mention of the 10,000 dead Palestinian children and what they never should have gone through."<br /></p><p><a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us-democrats-push-biden-over-civilian-toll-israels-gaza-campaign-2024-01-19/">US Democrats push Biden administration over civilian toll in Israel's Gaza campaign</a> (January 20)<br /></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">7. </span></b><a href="https://ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics/trump-colorado-supreme-court-enforcing-the-law-is-good-actually/">Enforcing the Law to Disqualify a Violent Insurrectionist Is Good, Actually</a> (January 16) "Even if you wish really hard, Clarence Thomas is not going to recuse himself from this case; Donald Trump is not going to stop claiming everything is rigged because the liberal justices joined an unanimous opinion; and Senate Democrats are not going to betray every single warning they’ve raised about Trump being a threat to democracy for the past eight years to give him a special exemption from the Constitution’s insurrection ban. Donald Trump exists in the real world, not a law school exam hypothetical, and strategies for opposing him need to be rooted in reality."</p><p>Also on that topic: <a href="https://weeklysift.com/2024/01/08/catching-up-on-donald-trump/">Catching up on Donald Trump</a> (January 8) "But whether or not the Constitution bans him from holding office again is a question of law, not politics. The whole point of including things in the Constitution is to <i>take them out of politics</i>. If constitutional provisions are subject to politics, then all the rights the Constitution supposedly gives us are up for grabs. Your right to do any particular thing will depend not on the Constitution, but on whether your action is politically popular."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">8.</span></b> <a href="https://grist.org/energy/in-juneau-alaska-a-carbon-offset-project-thats-actually-working/">In Juneau, Alaska, a carbon offset project that’s actually working</a> (January 4) "In an effort to mitigate a portion of that CO2, some of those going whale watching or visiting the glacier are asked to pay a few dollars to counter their emissions. The money goes to the Alaska Carbon Reduction Fund, but instead of buying credits from some distant (and questionable) offset project, the nonprofit spends that cash installing heat pumps, targeting residents like Roberts who rely upon oil heating systems."</p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-15736260823748540862024-01-18T05:45:00.001-05:002024-01-18T05:45:41.245-05:00"When Helping Hurts" (I wanted to like this book but it didn't work out)<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvU7k2yefEearuP1E9Ea5Wz1g4qyqeez69OpCYC9Z6vV_By2JjyyL7LOwoBPO1efxhLFjdsz7otEhYOzCOGEhk00mDkHZ2o9uGZBKjN_7Sj91RJg4Jct5Z-y37FJu0kyH5osO0xJdpDdPItYr24yUhqlRdWfEBHWois7WRKPwC7_33M8WwrqVNwX_BQbYP/s550/when-helping-hurts.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="550" data-original-width="366" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvU7k2yefEearuP1E9Ea5Wz1g4qyqeez69OpCYC9Z6vV_By2JjyyL7LOwoBPO1efxhLFjdsz7otEhYOzCOGEhk00mDkHZ2o9uGZBKjN_7Sj91RJg4Jct5Z-y37FJu0kyH5osO0xJdpDdPItYr24yUhqlRdWfEBHWois7WRKPwC7_33M8WwrqVNwX_BQbYP/s16000/when-helping-hurts.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Book cover for "When Helping Hurts", 2014 edition. (This is not the one I have- the one I have is the 2012 edition.)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>So I started reading the book <a href="https://amzn.to/3RUp9xs">When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself</a> [affiliate link], by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert. (I have the 2012 edition.) And... <b>I read about one third of it, and decided I'm going to stop there. </b>And I want to just blog about my reaction to this book real quick.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">What I was expecting</span></b></p><p>So, I first heard about this book back when I was in college- and I was very evangelical. I knew this was an evangelical book.</p><p>Since the title is "When Helping Hurts" and it's about charity, <b>I assumed it would be anecdotes about how rich Americans sent a bunch of stuff to some overseas tsunami victims, and it was stuff the recipients didn't need, so it was all a waste and the recipients had to deal with the problem of how to dispose of it. </b>Or about how rich Americans make genuine sacrifices to do these things, and therefore there's an emotional component to it, which makes us <b>unwilling to objectively evaluate if the results were actually beneficial or not. </b>Things like that. </p><p>I feel like... <b>I don't really have a good perspective on what my approach should be for giving to charity- from an ethical standpoint, and as a Christian. </b>I mean, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+3%3A11&version=NIV">John the Baptist said that anyone who has 2 coats should give 1 away</a>. Does anybody do that? <i>Can</i> anybody do that? I really want to have a better framework for thinking about this- but also, maybe that's just impossible because no matter what I do (even moving to China), I'm complicit in the massive economic inequality in this world. But anyway, I shouldn't just be paralyzed by lack of certainty and do nothing- and so, <b>a few years ago I picked some charities and set up automatic monthly donations to them. </b>That's my current approach, and that's what I recommend to people who have a high enough income that they have a responsibility to give some of it away.</p><p>Anyway, yeah I knew this book is coming from an evangelical perspective, so there would be parts I wouldn't agree with, but I thought it would be good to see what it has to say. Especially since it's a book I had heard mentioned many times in evangelical spaces.</p><p>Okay let's get into what the book says, and my reactions to it.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">The preface</span></b></p><p>The preface of the book is good. Basically it says this book is about how to help without hurting. ie, it's not just "here's all the ways that charity can go wrong" but <b>it's about how to actually do it right.</b> Great! The authors recommend that churches use this book for small group discussions, and every chapter has discussion questions.</p><p>In the preface, there are discussion questions about how your church would go about planning a trip to Indonesia to help tsunami victims. You can discuss it in groups and write down your plans, and in a later chapter you'll revisit the plans. I mean, personally, my take on this is, maybe don't plan a trip to Indonesia? Probably not worth it to spend so much money on plane tickets to get your untrained volunteers to go there and, uh, do what exactly? Before you make any plans, you should talk to people who are actually there about what they actually need and what would actually be helpful.</p><p>I'm guessing that's the direction the book's going to go with it. But I gave up on this book 1/3 of the way through, so I guess I'll never know. But anyway, I felt like the book was off to a good start here.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">The introduction- a story about a "witch doctor"</span></b></p><p>In the "Introduction" section of the book, there's a story from one of the authors, about when he was in Uganda teaching classes for refugees about small businesses, at a church. The curriculum he used was "biblically based," ie, I guess this is about telling people they have to be Christians, and also giving them training about running a small business.</p><p><b>One person in the class, Grace, says that she is a witch doctor, but she decided to quit that and follow Jesus instead. </b>The local church leader, Elizabeth, tells Grace to bring all her witch-doctoring herbs and burn them right there in the church, and Grace does this. Later, as Grace continues attending the classes, she seems to have changed for the better since becoming a Christian (and this is a big sacrifice for her, because she was making a lot of money as a witch doctor selling questionable products to women to get their husbands to not cheat on them). But then Grace gets sick- and the author of the book talks about how he went to her home to find her, and the appalling conditions she lived in- and he saved her life by buying her penicillin. So, overall it felt like a happy ending, but later the author had some feelings about whether he had actually done more harm than good toward the refugees he was teaching in that class.</p><p>As I was reading this, I had 2 main thoughts:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Is "witch doctor" the right term here? I'm thinking it's probably not. "Witch doctor" sounds like the kind of incredibly skewed and biased term that an evangelical would use, to make this sound very negative and bad. Perhaps there's a whole religious system, with meaningful culture around it, and perhaps it serves some beneficial function in their society. <b>I personally don't know, but using the term "witch doctor" just reduces it to a one-dimensional "this is obviously bad" sort of thing.</b></li><li><b>This story assumes that it's self-evidently a good thing that Grace decides to not be a "witch doctor" anymore and be a Christian instead. </b>(Also, very manipulative of Elizabeth to tell Grace to burn up all her herbs immediately. Not cool!) Okay, well, I understand this book is coming from an evangelical perspective, I understand that evangelicals think everyone should convert to Christianity, I understand that evangelicals see that as so self-evidently true that they wouldn't even think to question it. So I'm reading this, and thinking, "well, maybe the authors just never even thought about how they have this unquestioned assumption that everyone should convert to Christianity. But as long as that's not something the book focuses on and consciously tries to argue for, I'll let it slide."</li></ol><p></p><p>(Unfortunately, later the book focused on and argued for that...)</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Chapter 1 has some very good things to say about Jesus (but also some red flags)</span></b></p><p>Chapter 1 starts out with these discussion questions:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Why did Jesus come to earth?</li><li>For what specific sin(s) was Old Testament Israel sent into captivity? Do not just say "disobedience." Be specific. For example: "The Israelites were constantly robbing banks."</li><li>What is the primary task of the church?</li></ol><p></p><p><b>Yes! Love this! These are questions that ABSOLUTELY need to be addressed when trying to talk to evangelicals about poverty. </b>I'm really happy with how the book handles this section. </p><p>See, evangelicals would answer the question "Why did Jesus come to earth?" with something like "to die for our sins so we can go to heaven." Like all the things Jesus did during his life don't matter, it's all about the crucifixion. (Also, in this ideology, the Resurrection may or may not matter- which is BONKERS.) </p><p>This is a big deal to me, because my answer to these questions has changed SO MUCH, now that I'm not evangelical. <b>I now believe Jesus came to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth- and that means <i>we</i> need to work on bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth. We need to fight for justice, for equality, for a world where everyone is able to live a flourishing life, each as a unique and amazing person created in the image of God.</b></p><p>And yes, the book agrees with me on that. It cites chapter and verse, about how Jesus came to "preach good news to the poor" and "proclaim freedom for the prisoners", and how "in him all things hold together." <b>It's not about the abstract far-away idea of going to heaven when you die; it's about renewing this world we live in <i>right now</i>.</b></p><p>Love that!</p><p>And yeah, I know a lot of evangelicals would be very resistant to this idea, because it sounds like "watering down the gospel" or it sounds "liberal" or it sounds like "putting too much emphasis on social justice instead of the gospel." <b>That's why it's SO IMPORTANT that the book makes a case for this, right here in chapter 1. This part is very well done. It's absolutely necessary to challenge this evangelical idea, that all that matters is getting people into heaven. This is definitely a very major obstacle in getting evangelicals to care about people in poverty.</b></p><p>Next, there's an anecdote about a pastor named Reverend Marsh, who lived in the South during the Civil Rights Movement. He believed the KKK was bad, and racism was bad, but he never talked about it in his sermons. (I conclude that he must be white...) Those were political questions, and he thought the church should only preach on the personal, spiritual aspects of people's lives. (The book portrays this as being very wrong.)</p><p>Instead of speaking out against <i>actual lynchings</i> that were happening, Reverend Marsh preached a sermon called "The Sorrow of Selma," which was about "the lack of personal piety and unbelief of some of the civil rights workers."</p><p>The book says this:</p><p></p><blockquote>In one sense, Reverend Marsh was right. Many of the civil rights protestors longed for the peace, justice, and righteousness of the kingdom, but they did not want to bend the knee to the King Himself, which is a prerequisite for enjoying the full benefits of the kingdom. In contrast, Reverend Marsh embraced King Jesus, but he did not understand the fullness of Christ's kingdom and its implications for the injustices in his community. Both Reverend Marsh and the civil rights workers were wrong, but in different ways. Reverend Marsh sought the King without the kingdom. The civil rights workers sought the kingdom without the King. The church needs a Christ-centered, fully orbed, kingdom perspective to correctly answer the question, "What would Jesus do?"</blockquote><p></p><p>Umm.</p><p>Uh.</p><p>Umm.</p><p>Really not comfortable with how this is framing it like both Reverend Marsh and the civil rights workers were <i>equally</i> wrong. <b>See, Reverend Marsh had the correct religious beliefs, but he didn't actually do anything about racism, and the civil rights protestors didn't have the correct religious beliefs, but they fought for justice, so, see, both had it partly right and partly wrong. Uh. Umm.</b> (Just gonna drop <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mt+25%3A31-46&version=NIV">the parable of the sheep and the goats</a> here- Jesus pretty clearly takes a side on the question of whether it's more important to have the correct religious beliefs or to do actual things that help people, and it's NOT the side that "When Helping Hurts" takes!)</p><p>But, as I was reading this, I thought, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt... maybe they didn't really mean both of these things were <i>equally</i> bad. Maybe they meant like... like if someone has different religious beliefs than I do, then of course I am of the opinion that they are wrong about those religious beliefs. It's just <i>objectively true</i> that I disagree with them. Maybe the authors just meant that they disagree with people who have different religious beliefs than they do, but they weren't necessarily saying those differences in religious beliefs are <i>important</i>.</p><p>(But, unfortunately, later the book makes it clear that those religious beliefs are dealbreakers...)</p><p>The next weird bit is when the book is talking about how the early church cared for the poor. This is in contrast with the pagan culture of the Roman Empire:</p><p></p><blockquote>[Sociologist Rodney] Stark explains that the Christian concept of self-sacrificial love of others, emanating from God's love for them, was a revolutionary concept to the pagan mind, which viewed the extension of mercy as an emotional act to be avoided by rational people. Hence, paganism provided no ethical foundation to justify caring for the sick and destitute who were being trampled by the teeming urban masses.</blockquote><p></p><p>WHAT.</p><p>What. What the what.</p><p><b>Christians were the first ones to come up with the idea of helping poor people? Really? They expect their readers to buy that?</b> "Paganism" just couldn't comprehend the idea of caring about poor people?</p><p>Seriously?</p><p>This is a very one-dimensional, oversimplified view of the pagan worldview in the Roman Empire. (Like, I don't even know anything about paganism in the Roman Empire, but I know it must be more nuanced than that.) <b>Really these authors should stop trying to make statements about other religions- they're just embarrassing themselves.</b></p><p>(Unfortunately, they did *not* stop making statements about other religions...)</p><p>Continuing on. This chapter has a lot of really good stuff to say about how evangelicals wrongly believe they don't have a responsibility to care about the world. Yes, lots of very good stuff, which evangelicals really need to hear. <b>Makes me want to say "I definitely recommend this book to evangelicals" but ... well... the Christian-supremacist stuff gets so much worse, so, I don't.</b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Chapter 2 is about what poverty really is</span></b></p><p>I like how chapter 2 starts. The discussion question is "What is poverty? Make a list of words that come to your mind when you think of poverty." Next, it has some quotes from "Voices of the Poor," a project in the 1990s where actual poor people around the world were asked for their views on what poverty is. A lot of these quotes are about <b>feeling helpless, feeling shame, feeling inferior, being dependent on other people. It's not just about not having material things; it's about being trapped in a situation where you can't control your own life, you can't make your own choices, you can't live the life you want to live.</b></p><p>I think this is an important exercise- <b>contrasting the <i>reality</i> of poverty with what well-off Americans *think* poverty is.</b></p><p>The book says that, <b>when you want to help poor people, it's very important that you understand what their real needs are, rather than acting on what you *think* their needs are. </b>Otherwise, the "help" you give them won't help. Yes! Very much agree with this.</p><p>But I don't feel good about this example:<br /></p><p></p><blockquote>Similarly, consider the familiar case of the person who comes to your church asking for help with paying an electric bill. On the surface, it appears that this person's problem is the last row of table 2.1, a lack of material resources, and many churches respond by giving this person enough money to pay the electric bill. But what if this person's fundamental problem is not having the self-discipline to keep a stable job? Simply giving this person money is treating the symptoms rather than the underlying disease and will enable him to continue with his lack of self-discipline. In this case, the gift of money does more harm than good, and it would be better not to do anything at all than to give this handout. Really! Instead, a better-- and far more costly-- solution would be for your church to develop a relationship with this person, a relationship that says, "We are here to walk with you and to help you use your gifts and abilities to avoid being in this situation in the future. Let us into your life and let us work with you to determine the reason you are in this predicament."</blockquote><p></p><p>I'm reading this,<b> feeling really uneasy about how it veers extremely close to conservative Republican talking points about how those lazy people need to just take responsibility and get a job, and therefore we shouldn't do anything to help them.</b></p><p>But, I thought, maybe the authors don't realize that it's going to read that way to their Republican readers. Just taking this section at face value, it may indeed be true that there are some situations where a person is capable of getting a job, but they don't want to, and they need a little push to get them to actually do it. (Republican folklore says that's the situation for *most* people on welfare, and that's just NOT true- but okay, maybe it is true <i>occasionally</i>, so, okay, this example from the book isn't necessarily bad...)</p><p><b>I'm just... really really suspicious of people (evangelicals, Republicans, etc) saying "oh these people are asking for money, but actually that's not the right way to help them, the right way to help them is [some other thing that we're also not going to lift a finger to do]." It's just a way to sit around feeling superior for having the "correct" opinion about what poor people really need, without doing anything that actually helps.</b></p><p>But I thought, maybe the authors don't realize this is coming across that way. I'll just let it slide.</p><p>Then the authors lay out their "biblical framework" of what poverty is. They say that when God created the world, humans were made to have good relationships in the following 4 areas:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Relationship with God</li><li>Relationship with self</li><li>Relationship with others</li><li>Relationship with the rest of creation</li></ol><p></p><p>But, because of the Fall (Adam and Eve's sin), all 4 of these relationships are broken. <b>All of us have "poverty" in these 4 areas of life. </b>(For example, "poverty" in one's relationship with God would be something like, not believing God exists. "Poverty" in the area of relationship with self would be low self-esteem, or, alternatively, having a God-complex and feeling like you're superior to the poor people you're trying to help. And so on.)</p><p>The authors use the word "poverty" here, to describe the situation that <i>all</i> people are in- but they also say that <b>material poverty is a whole different thing. </b>Like, we all experience "poverty", so you shouldn't act like you're better than anyone else- but also, if you haven't experienced material poverty, then you don't know what it's like, it's so much worse.</p><p><b>I don't really think it's useful to define "poverty" in this way.</b> It muddies up the definition. But okay, whatever, let's keep reading.</p><p>Then there's this equation:</p><p></p><div style="text-align: center;">Material Definition of Poverty</div><div style="text-align: center;">+</div><div style="text-align: center;">God-complexes of Materially Non-Poor</div><div style="text-align: center;">+</div><div style="text-align: center;">Feelings of Inferiority of Materially Poor</div><div style="text-align: center;">=</div><div style="text-align: center;">Harm to Both Materially Poor and Non-Poor</div><p></p><p>And also a few anecdotes to show how "poverty" in the 4 different relationship types can all come together to make it more difficult for the "materially poor" to improve their lives.</p><p>Yeah, this "equation" makes sense, and I think it's useful that the book presents it like this.<b> If rich people think the problem is simply "they don't have [thing], so let's give them [thing]" then it's quite possible that the rich people don't realize how they're coming across (ie, treating poor people like they don't know anything, can't do anything for themselves, etc)- and this can do more harm than good.</b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Chapter 3 is where I noped out of this book</span></b></p><p>Chapter 3 starts out with this anecdote:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>During the 1990s, Alisa Collins and her children lived in one of America's most dangerous public housing projects in inner-city Chicago. Alisa had become pregnant at the age of sixteen, had dropped out of high school, and had started collecting welfare checks. She had five children from three different fathers, none of whom helped with child rearing. With few skills, no husband, and limited social networks, Alisa struggled to raise her family in an environment characterized by widespread substance abuse, failing schools, high rates of unemployment, rampant violence, teenage pregnancy, and an absence of role models. </p><p>From time to time, Alisa tried to get a job, but a number of obstacles prevented her from finding and keeping regular work. First, there were simply not a lot of decent-paying jobs for high school dropouts living in ghettos. Second, the welfare system penalized Alisa for earning money, taking away benefits for every dollar she earned and for every asset she acquired. Third, Alisa found government vocational training and jobs assistance programs to be confusing and staffed by condescending bureaucrats. Fourth, Alisa had child-care issues that made it difficult to keep a job. Finally, Alisa felt inferior and inadequate. When she tried to get vocational training or a job and faced some obstacle, she quickly lost confidence and rapidly retreated into her comfort zone of public housing and welfare checks. Alisa felt trapped, and she and her family often talked about how they couldn't "get out" of the ghetto.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>So, in the first paragraph, the "started collecting welfare checks" was a bit suspect to me because, again, it veers uncomfortably close to Republican mythology about how "those lazy inner-city [black] people are freeloaders living easy lives on welfare." I quoted two whole paragraphs here to show you that overall, this anecdote is not like that- I think the second paragraph is very fair, showing that getting out of poverty is much more difficult than the simplistic Republican mythology of "they need to just get a job." <b>The authors clearly show that there are a LOT of factors trapping Alisa in a system of poverty, and that churches have a responsibility to help people like her.</b></p><p>This chapter of the book also makes it clear that<b> poverty is partly about individual choices, and partly about systems that are stacked against people. It's very good that the book is talking about this!</b> Evangelicals are likely to buy into the idea that if people just worked harder and stopped being lazy, they could pull themselves up by their bootstraps, etc. Evangelicals are likely to not believe in any kind of systemic injustice, taking away people's opportunities and setting them up to fail. <b>It's very good that the book is explicitly pointing out the ways that <i>systems</i> trap people in poverty.</b></p><p>Then the authors start talking again about healing the 4 key relationships, and how, to put it bluntly, <b>you have to be a Christian or else it doesn't work:</b></p><p></p><blockquote>Ultimately, the profound reconciliation of the key relationships that comprise poverty alleviation cannot be done without people accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Yes, people can experience some degree of healing in their relationships without becoming Christians. For example, although it is typically more difficult, unbelievers can often stop drinking, become more loving spouses, and improve as employees without becoming Christians. And as these things happen for unbelievers, they are more likely to earn sufficient material things. However, none of the foundational relationships can experience fundamental and lasting change without a person becoming a new creature in Christ Jesus. Furthermore, simply having sufficient material things is not the same as "poverty alleviation" as we defined it above. We want people to fulfill their calling "to glorify God and enjoy Him forever" in their work and in all that they do. Again, this requires that people accept and experience Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.</blockquote><p></p><p>What the actual ****.</p><p>"although it is typically more difficult"- what on earth?</p><p>And then saying that <b>if people improve their lives so they are no longer poor, but they don't become Christians, it doesn't really count as "poverty alleviation"- WHAT?</b></p><p><b>This right here, this is called <i>Christian supremacy</i>. The idea that only Christians can live life the correct way, and everyone else is automatically living inferior lives because they don't know Jesus or whatever. This idea is EVERYWHERE in evangelicalism</b>- you can't have a good marriage if it's not centered on Jesus, you can't live a meaningful life without Jesus, everyone has a <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-god-shaped-hole-sounds-like.html">God-shaped hole</a> in their heart, etc. (And full disclosure, I definitely believed it when I was evangelical. I had no idea how offensive it was, because evangelicals view it as a completely normal thing to believe.) This idea is EVERYWHERE, and it's WRONG. It's WRONG. I want to be very clear here, this is WRONG.</p><p>Let me be very clear about what I believe: I am a Christian. I believe that all people are made in the image of God- our creativity, ambition, compassion, conscience, all of that comes from God. And God made this world- all of the potential this world has for good things, for growth, for enjoying your life, for finding meaning and joy, all of that is from God. <b>All of it is from God, and is accessible to people <i>regardless of whether they agree with me about it being from God</i>. Regardless of their religious beliefs (or lack thereof).</b></p><p>I believe those things are from God, but if other people don't believe that, I won't argue with them about it. <b>It's fine if people don't believe the same religious things as I do.</b> Whatever. Okay, so we disagree about it, but so what? <b>What actually matters is how you live, how you treat other people.</b></p><p>(And also, my husband is not a Christian, so this is personal. When Christians say non-Christians just can't be as good as Christians- this is personal to me.)</p><p>Okay... so... moving along with the book. <b>Basically, I want to share 3 anecdotes from chapter 3 which show how incredibly Christian-supremacist this book is, and made me decide to just quit reading it. Each of these anecdotes is about how, when you help poor people, if you're not also getting them to convert to Christianity, you're "hurting" rather than helping.</b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Anecdote 1: Pachamama and the llama fetuses</span></b></p><p></p><blockquote>A Christian relief and development agency attempted to improve crop yields for poor farmers in Bolivia's Alto Plano. Although successful in increasing output, the impact on the farmers' incomes was far less than hoped because of the farmers' deep reverence for Pachamama, the mother earth goddess who presides over planting and harvesting. Seeking Pachamama's favor, farmers purchased llama fetuses, a symbol of life and abundance, to bury in their fields before planting. At the time of the harvest, the farmers held a festival to thank Pachamama. The larger the harvest, the larger the celebration was. In fact, a large percentage of the farmers' income was being spent on the fetuses and on the harvest festival, thereby contributing to the farmers' material poverty. Furthermore, by increasing agricultural output without worldview transformation, the development agency realized it was actually adding to these farmers' idolatry, as the farmers were giving increasing levels of praise to Pachamama for her benevolence.</blockquote><p></p><p><b>Okay, this sounds to me like a case where the relief agency didn't get the results they expected because there were some key things they didn't know about the culture and society of the people they were trying to help. </b>They didn't know that even if the "science" part succeeds- ie, even if the agricultural output is increased- it doesn't necessarily cause an increase in the farmers' incomes in a straightforward way, because of these societal/religious factors about what the farmers would then spend the money on. </p><p><b>This sounds like the relief agency failed to do their research. They should have talked to someone familiar with the culture,</b> who could address questions like "What would success look like for this program? What kind of outcome would have the most meaningful impact on people's lives?" and so on.</p><p>The book is framing it like the problem is the Bolivian farmers' religious beliefs, and the relief agency should have, I don't know, manipulated them into converting to Christianity??? </p><p><b>Wait, wasn't there a whole section earlier in the book about how sometimes your perspective on people's needs and problems is actually wrong, and it will cause you to act in ways that don't really help them? And now the authors are saying what these farmers actually need is to become Christians- where are they getting that from? </b>Just because that's what evangelicals believe about EVERYONE, not because there's any practical evidence for it. Kind of sounds like a case of COMPLETELY MISJUDGING OTHER PEOPLE'S NEEDS and then DOING MORE HARM THAN GOOD.</p><p>When I read that part earlier about having misconceptions about poor people's needs,<b> I really thought what they meant was "this is why you need to actually <i>listen</i> to them, before trying to help." But maybe they meant it like... "as Christians, we KNOW what everyone's needs are- they need to have the correct beliefs about Jesus, that's the most important thing."</b></p><p>Ugh.</p><p>Also, the thing about the llama fetuses... <b>Perhaps this is a case where the local religious leaders are manipulating the farmers for their own financial gain.</b> Maybe they're jacking up the price of llama fetuses, and pressuring people to buy them. <b>This sounds like it could be an unhealthy power dynamic- and you can find this kind of unhealthy power dynamic <i>everywhere</i>. It doesn't necessarily have to have any connection to religion.</b></p><p>But also, I can very easily imagine an alternative anecdote that would go something like this:</p><p></p><blockquote>We tried to help these poor Americans, but it turns out that they are Christians, and they watch televangelists on TV, and these televangelists say "you have to give money to me, so God will bless you- the more money you give me, the more God will give you!" So even though we were able to increase people's incomes, it didn't actually help them, because they just gave the extra money to televangelists. See, this is why it's so important to get people to stop being Christians. Otherwise there's just no way you can help them.</blockquote><p></p><p>Is this not the EXACT SAME THING that the book is saying about the Bolivian farmers' religion?</p><p>Yeah, I know at this point, evangelicals would take issue with me equating "Christianity" with "donating to televangelists." Someone will argue, "Hey, I'm a Christian, and I disagree with televangelists. I DON'T think people should give money to them. The people in your anecdote don't need to stop being Christians, they just need to learn that being a Christian doesn't mean you have to give money to predatory leaders."</p><p>Oh, so you're saying Christianity is a whole diverse religion, that has some predatory leaders but also has a lot of good in it? Don't you think the same thing could be true of the Pachamama religion?</p><p>Ugh. Anyway. On to anecdote 2.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Anecdote 2: Non-Christians don't know how to not let rats eat their food</span></b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>For example, the Pokomchi Indians are some of the poorest people in Guatemala. Through the efforts of missionaries, many of the Pokomchi converted to Christianity. Unfortunately, the missionaries failed to communicate a biblical worldview concerning human stewardship over the rest of creation; hence, the Pokomchi continued in their fatalism, literally just waiting to die in order to be delivered from the horrors of this life. Over the years, a number of development organizations tried to help the Pokomchi by building schools and latrines for them, but these largely went unused.</p><p>Arturo Cuba, a pastor and community development worker, decided to confront the worldview that lay at the foundation of the Pokomchi culture. Arturo noticed that the Pokomchi failed to use adequate crop storage facilities, allowing rats to eat the harvest and contributing to widespread malnutrition. Artuo [sic] asked the Pokomchi farmers, "Who is smarter, you or the rats? Do you have dominion over the rats, or do the rats have dominion over your lives?" The farmers admitted that they were allowing the rats to get the best of them. Arturo then explained the biblical worldview that humans are created to have dominion over the rest of creation. As the Pokomchi began to embrace the biblical worldview, dramatic changes took place: better food storage facilities were created, children went to school, women learned to read, and the men adopted improved agricultural techniques.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Uh. Yeah I don't buy this.</p><p>The part about "schools and latrines" that "largely went unused" makes me think<b> this is a problem where people building these things to "help" the Pokomchi Indians didn't talk to them first to find out what would actually be helpful. Very not cool how the book is blaming it on the Pokomchi "worldview" rather than outsiders' ignorance about what their actual needs were.</b></p><p>Also, yeah it is possible that there is a really pessimistic idea that's widespread in a certain culture, which stops people from trying to do anything to improve their lives. Sure, that can happen. (I could give a lot of examples from evangelicalism! Like, let's not do anything about climate change, because the bible says Jesus is coming back soon anyway so it doesn't matter.) I very much do NOT think the answer is "they need the bible." You need to talk to someone who knows that culture, to find out what can be done about it. Probably there's some reason behind this "fatalistic" worldview- maybe the Pokomchi have tried to change things before, but it never did any good. You need to do your research and find out what kind of thing would actually be able to create change, to inspire people to believe that they can improve their lives.</p><p>(Hey readers: If any of you are non-Christians, and also you don't let rats eat your food, you are welcome to leave a comment and explain how you figured that out without using the bible. Apparently it's a real tough one!)</p><p>The book presents it like, "oh the rats are eating our food" and then some Christian comes along and says "well the bible says you can stop the rats from eating your food" and then they're like "oh my goodness we never thought of that."</p><p>Come on.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Anecdote 3: Jobs training needs Jesus</span></b></p><p></p><blockquote><p>For example, I once served on the board of an inner-city ministry that serves an African-American population. We applied for federal funds to pay for part of our jobs preparedness training program for unemployed people. As part of this program, our ministry was very committed to using a curriculum that communicated a biblical worldview concerning work, including the need for Jesus Christ to restore us to being productive workers. </p><p>The government's grant administrator, who happened to be a Christian, informed us that the law prohibited us from using the government's money to cover the costs of such an explicitly gospel-focused curriculum. He was doing his job in informing us of this law. No problem with that. However, he then said, "Brian, just remove the explicitly Christian material from the lessons. You can teach the same values that you want to teach-- responsibility, punctuality, respect, hard work, discipline, etc-- without articulating their biblical basis. These values work whether people see them as coming from God or not." [Note from Perfect Number: hey I agree with this guy!] In essence, the grant administrator was encouraging us to apply evangelical gnosticism, separating Christ from His world, encouraging us to use Christ's techniques without recognizing Him as the Creator of the techniques and without calling on Him to give people the power to employ those techniques.</p><p>We decided not to use the federal funds to pay for the curriculum. Teaching the values of a "Protestant work ethic" without teaching about the Creator of those values and about the transforming power of Jesus Christ is like giving out penicillin without ever explaining the source of the penicillin's power. [There was an earlier anecdote about how it's bad if people benefit from penicillin without being told that penicillin is from Jesus.] Yes, like penicillin, these values work. But how sad it would have been if we had ended up communicating to the program participants: "You can pull yourselves up by your own bootstraps. Become more disciplined, hardworking, and responsible, and you too can achieve the American dream of material prosperity." </p></blockquote><p></p><p><b>Wow, I have newfound sympathy for all the atheists who just want to improve their lives by going to a job training program/ addiction recovery program/ therapy, without having Jesus pushed on them all the time.</b></p><p><b>The book is like, oh wouldn't that just be terrible if we improved people's lives but they didn't become Christians. </b></p><p>NOT COOL.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Conclusion: I quit reading there</span></b></p><p>This book is called "When Helping Hurts," and I thought it was going to be about when well-meaning donors have completely wrong ideas about what poor people need, so they end up butting in with their big well-meaning charity projects which do more harm than good. But after seeing how extremely Christian-supremacist chapter 3 is, <b>I'm becoming very concerned that these authors actually think "doing more harm than good" would be if you help people but don't pressure them into changing their religious beliefs.</b></p><p><b>Where's the part about how you need to actually listen to people to find out what they need, instead of assuming you know what they need? That's what I thought this was going to be about. </b>Really, that's the whole reason that charity efforts can do more harm than good. Has the book even mentioned <i>listening</i> to people at all, up to this point? Listening to them, and <i>believing</i> them? I thought it was so obvious, and I was so sure that would be what the book said, that I've been reading it through that lens, and now I'm like, wait, maybe they actually never said that at all???</p><p>Anyway. So that's my review of "When Helping Hurts." Hey maybe I'm wrong and it gets better from here, who knows. I decided it's not worth my time to read the rest of it and find out. The Christian supremacist stuff is so bad.</p><p>---</p><p><i>Related:</i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/01/recurring-donations.html">Recurring Donations</a><br /></i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2018/12/evangelicals-agree-with-what-chau-did.html">Evangelicals Agree With What Chau Did (And It Makes Me Angry): Here Are The Receipts</a><br /></i></p><p><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2019/09/evangelism-isnt-working.html"><i>"My Evangelism Isn't Working" is a Very Creepy Thing to Say</i></a> <br /></p><p><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2015/05/nepal-earthquake-prayer-tweet.html"><i>This is so normal. We just don't usually say it in front of other people.</i></a> <br /></p><p><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2017/10/god-of-bad-snaps.html"><i>God of Bad Snaps</i></a></p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-78263178048701604842024-01-15T08:39:00.002-05:002024-01-20T00:08:06.336-05:00Blogaround<p><b><span style="font-size: large;">1.</span></b> <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkaw59/gray-asexual-sex-life">I’m a “Gray Asexual.” My Partner Isn’t.</a> (January 10, <a href="https://asexualagenda.wordpress.com/2024/01/12/linkspam-january-12-2024/">via</a>) "'Mainstream media rarely covers gray asexuality,' says Tristan Miller, director of the Ace Community Survey team. 'When they do, they rarely go beyond providing a definition—and the definition is often bad.'"</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">2.</span></b> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/05/un-warns-gaza-is-now-uninhabitable-as-war-continues">UN warns Gaza is now ‘uninhabitable’ as war continues</a> (January 5, <a href="https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/4200208">via</a>) <i>[content note: war, genocide]</i> "He said the humanitarian community is facing an 'impossible mission' – trying to help more than 2 million people while UN staff and aid workers from partner organisations are killed, communications blackouts continue, roads are damaged, truck convoys are shot at and vital commercial supplies 'are almost nonexistent'."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">3.</span></b> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH8KQrP-FMw">Republicans are torturing pregnant women with lethal diagnoses....</a> (January 2) <i>[content note: pregnancy loss, all of this is really tragic]</i> 24-minute video from Mama Doctor Jones, an obgyn who grew up in Texas. She talks about her own journey to becoming pro-choice, and about the lawsuit against the state of Texas for denying abortion care to women with medical emergencies or fetal anomalies where the baby would not survive.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">4.</span></b> OH MY GOODNESS I LOVE <a href="https://twitter.com/mattnightingale/status/1746025633455428070">THIS</a> SO MUCH:</p><p>
</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">I was not prepared for <a href="https://twitter.com/FlamyGrant?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@FlamyGrant</a> to lead a “Testify To Love” singalong. And it was perfect. <a href="https://t.co/5DybJGD5wP">pic.twitter.com/5DybJGD5wP</a></p>— Matt Nightingale (@mattnightingale) <a href="https://twitter.com/mattnightingale/status/1746025633455428070?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 13, 2024</a></blockquote> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
<p>(Some background info: Flamy Grant is a Christian drag queen, queer Christians love her, and "Testify to Love" is a Christian song from the 90s.)</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">5.</span></b> <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/a-queer-couple-rebuild-their-lives-in-safety">Help A Queer Couple Rebuild Their Lives in Safety</a>. A GoFundMe for a lesbian couple in Ethiopia. This link was sent to me by a queer friend who used to live in China and is living in Ethiopia now- she knows the organizers of this fundraiser personally. Please donate if you can!</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">6. </span></b>Yes, can confirm <a href="https://twitter.com/MoiraDonegan/status/1746676461837136321">this</a> is true:</p><p>
</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p dir="ltr" lang="en">Every time you ask a woman about pregnancy or childbirth she’ll go “Oh it wasn’t so bad, I was actually really lucky. All that happened was—“ and then tell the most terrifying story you’ve ever heard.</p>— Moira Donegan (@MoiraDonegan) <a href="https://twitter.com/MoiraDonegan/status/1746676461837136321?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 14, 2024</a></blockquote> <script async="" charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
<p><br /></p><p></p><p></p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-61364388084830365332024-01-14T01:30:00.002-05:002024-01-14T01:30:39.894-05:00What do we do with Christians who are never going to accept queer people?<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihB-_Nw0Nh6qnukYgQjZGHXDCSP_nZZ-CASmeHtqYLEZ_mea4Wi8dZebX0AcKItRsPNPGPIuB9HV0brcuQpQhki7hfMKzrxajvxxLSDZCqAenQm1F6JPq4o8qph2NZ-jBYSiKSnT-wAdT3Ka0GzACokoFb17O3VzTGjm7wJ__TGCZOns9RED8EA6MZtPxB/s500/rainbow-and-trans-flag.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="489" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihB-_Nw0Nh6qnukYgQjZGHXDCSP_nZZ-CASmeHtqYLEZ_mea4Wi8dZebX0AcKItRsPNPGPIuB9HV0brcuQpQhki7hfMKzrxajvxxLSDZCqAenQm1F6JPq4o8qph2NZ-jBYSiKSnT-wAdT3Ka0GzACokoFb17O3VzTGjm7wJ__TGCZOns9RED8EA6MZtPxB/s16000/rainbow-and-trans-flag.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A church with a rainbow flag and trans flag. <a href="https://opentable.lgbt/our-blog/2022/6/14/the-pride-flag-is-a-gospel-issue-in-our-churches">Image source.</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><i>Links to all posts in this series can be found here: <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/05/blog-series-on-great-sex-rescue.html">Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"</a></i></p><p>---</p><p>So, I've been doing this blog series about the book "The Great Sex Rescue," by Sheila Gregoire, Rebecca Lindenbach, and Joanna Sawatsky. These writers also have a site called <a href="https://baremarriage.com/all-the-latest-from-the-blog/">Bare Marriage, where they have a blog</a> that updates several times per week (most of the posts are from Gregoire). As I've been writing my blog series on their book, I've also been following their blog, and commenting sometimes.</p><p><b>A lot of what they're saying on their blog is very good, and the church needs to hear it. </b>They call out examples of sexism in the church, the ways that evangelical and complementarian teaching is harmful toward women, how the church covers up abuse, and so on. They're doing good work in that area.</p><p><b>But the thing that's glaringly obvious about their blog is the complete absence of queerness. Seriously, article after article after article about how purity culture is harmful, about how evangelical teachings on marriage and gender roles are harmful, and no mention of how these things are harmful toward queer people in uniquely bad ways? Yes, really, no mention at all. It's like the blog exists in a universe where everyone is cisgender and heterosexual.</b></p><p>(Or, rather, it's not true that there's *never* any mention of queerness. Sometimes, for example, they'll be discussing an academic study about marriage, and they'll say "these researchers surveyed heterosexual women"- which does imply that not all women are heterosexual, so, I guess that's something. And I also remember one post that said something like "all people desire sex, except some people who are asexual" so that was nice to have a mention there. So, very very occasionally there's a tiny mention of something that implies that maybe people might exist who are not heterosexual.)</p><p>It's just... reading their blog, it's just so obvious. So obvious that <b>if you're talking about this topic, you should bring up the fact that these church teachings are especially harmful toward queer people. But they never do.</b></p><p>Even if they specifically want to focus on cisgender, heterosexual women because that's where they have the most experience and knowledge, that would be fine with me, if they said something like "in this post we're just focusing on how xyz affects heterosexual women, but it also affects queer women in different ways, but we don't have the expertise to talk about those aspects." Or, even better, "and here are a few links to some queer writers who have things to say on this topic." Yeah, if Gregoire and her co-bloggers don't know that much about the specific ways that purity culture is bad for queer people, that's fine, nobody is required to be an expert in everything- <b>but what gets me is there's just no acknowledgement whatsoever that queer people exist in the church and are affected in uniquely bad ways by those same teachings.</b></p><p><b>I'm an ex-evangelical, and so this reads to me like Gregoire and her team are very deliberately not taking any kind of "stance" on the "issue" of queerness.</b> They're not saying "marriage must be 1 man and 1 woman" and they're not saying "we fully accept and affirm same-sex relationships." They are not taking either "side", and I very much understand this, as a strategy. If they said anything one way or the other, it would become a huge controversy on social media, and everyone would either love them or hate them based on their "stance" on queer acceptance, rather than listening to their actual message about the ways that conservative Christian marriage teachings are harmful to women. </p><p><b>I get that. The final blow that made me quit being evangelical was <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2014/03/im-not-christian-world-vision-lgbt.html">The World Vision Debacle of 2014</a>,</b> where the evangelical sections of social media totally blew up upon discovering that World Vision, a Christian charity which helps poor children around the world, employs people who are in same-sex marriages. Seriously, it was such a huge internet drama, people were so mad, people were talking about dropping their child sponsorships that they had through World Vision- and then a few days later, World Vision put out a statement that changed their policy, requiring all employees to live in accordance with "marriage is 1 man and 1 woman." World Vision threw queer people under the bus, because evangelicals just couldn't possibly be convinced to help poor children, if a gay person might also be helping those poor children. </p><p>And I've seen the same thing happen with <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/popular-christian-author-retracts-support-same-sex-marriage-n782991">Eugene Peterson</a>- he made a statement in support of same-sex marriage and then it was such a huge controversy that he reversed it a few days later. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/10/31/the-high-cost-of-popular-evangelical-jen-hatmakers-gay-marriage-comments/">Jen Hatmaker</a>- she made a statement supporting same-sex marriage, and Lifeway immediately stopped selling her books. (To her credit, she did NOT change her position because of this backlash.) <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2016/10/intervarsity-same-sex-marriage.html">InterVarsity Christian Fellowship threw queer people under the bus</a> in 2016. More recently, we saw what Christianity Today had to say about pastor Andy Stanley saying that straight Christians can learn from gay married Christians- even though Andy Stanley still believes marriage is "1 man and 1 woman", his partial acceptance of gay married Christians is just TOO MUCH for Christianity Today (I wrote about that <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/10/blogaround_25.html">here</a>).</p><p><b>You need to throw queer people under the bus, in order to be seen as a good evangelical. That's just a fact. That's just an undeniable fact. This is how it works.</b></p><p>So I read Gregoire's blog, and it's so glaringly obvious that she should be talking about queer people but she's not, and it reads to me as a very deliberate choice, because <b>she wants to avoid that controversy and instead focus on her specific message, which is about how evangelical teachings are bad for heterosexual women.</b></p><p>I get that. As a queer person, I don't like it- if evangelicals hate queer people so much, why should we play by their rules?- but I understand it as a strategy. </p><p>Anyway. So, on October 23, <b>Gregoire published a post called <a href="https://baremarriage.com/2023/10/sex-is-important-in-marriage/">Sex is Important in Marriage</a>, which says things like "Sex is a vital part of a healthy marriage." I'm mad because this post is <i>extremely hostile</i> toward asexuals. </b>What if you have a marriage where both spouses are asexual, and they never have sex- that would be fine if that's what they want. And even in my marriage, I'm asexual but I do have sex, but I don't really view it as a super-important component of a healthy marriage. I view it like, we both decided we wanted this, so, in our marriage, this is a good thing. But it totally makes sense to me that some people would choose differently.</p><p>(And she did get pushback in the comment section, not just from me, but also from people saying things like "my husband and I have a good marriage and we have sex less than once a week, and it's fine, why are you saying we have to put pressure on ourselves to do it more often?" Because there was also a section of the post that said statistically, the happiest marriages have sex once per week- and implied that if you're having sex less than that, you should try to increase your frequency to once a week. The post didn't exactly say that directly [and it's a really bad misreading of the statistics] but it said people need to make sex a higher priority.)</p><p>I read that post right around the time I was working on my blog post about <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-great-sex-rescue-chapter-where-its.html">chapter 8 of "The Great Sex Rescue"- the chapter where it's not okay to be asexual</a>. (I write these posts several weeks in advance.) And... I don't know why, but it really affected me emotionally. <b>Like, why do I bother reading her blog, reading her book, writing a blog series on it... Why am I even engaging with this, when it's so incredibly hostile to queer people? Why did I fool myself into thinking I could engage with Christians who don't accept queer people, without getting burned?</b></p><p>Here's the thing: I agree with a lot of what Gregoire says, about the way the church treats women, etc- but I'm coming at it from a different angle than she is. I'm coming from a queer perspective here, and this is how I define that: <b>"queer" means you are the only one who can know yourself. </b>Your own identity, your own feelings, your own desires, your own priorities- nobody else can waltz into your life and tell you "you feel this and that"- no, that's absolutely ridiculous. And the process of discovering your own identity and what you want, and then building that kind of life for yourself, that is a beautiful thing. <b>As a queer Christian, I also believe that this is what the image of God is about- there is so much diversity among human beings, and God Themself is complex and diverse and reflected in every little unique trait of every one of billions of people, and that's beautiful. </b>Why would you want to make rules to say "everyone has to be this way, everyone has to have these feelings, everyone has to believe that sex is an important part of marriage" etc- why would you want to limit the image of God like that? And just as God is the Creator, and delights in Their creation, we create our own lives the way we want them to be, and the happiness we get from that is a beautiful and godly thing.</p><p>(And this is why I believe that even for people who aren't queer, it can be really beneficial to learn from queer people. Being straight because you've thought about it and you know what you want is so much more wonderful and life-giving than being straight because everyone told you "you're straight and here's how straight people are supposed to live," and you just went along with it.)</p><p>But when I read "The Great Sex Rescue," and when I read Gregoire's blog, the perspective that she is coming from is more like this: The church teaches these things about what marriage is supposed to be, and what sex is supposed to be, claiming "this is what God says, this is what the bible says" but actually these teachings put men at the top, and harm women, and that's not how God wants it to be. <b>Actually, what the bible actually says is, here's what marriage is supposed to be, and here's what sex is supposed to be, it's supposed to be something which is equally good both for cisgender heterosexual monogamous men and cisgender heterosexual monogamous women.</b></p><p><b>It still feels so narrow to me. </b>Like, instead of these rules, it's supposed to be these other rules! Instead of "sex is just PIV [penis-in-vagina]" it's "<a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-great-sex-rescue-more-foreplay.html">do foreplay first</a>, so the woman can have an orgasm, and then do PIV." It's so narrow. It's not about knowing yourself and knowing what you want.</p><p>(I should clarify that there are *some* areas where Gregoire says you should make decisions based on knowing yourself- like how you divide up housework between the husband and wife. She says it shouldn't be based on rules about gender roles, it should be based on what's fair and what works for your marriage. Yes, this is absolutely right.)</p><p>So anyway, reading her blog post about why sex always has to be important in everyone's marriage, it really made it clear that she's coming at it from a perspective of "it's not these rules, it's these <i>other</i> rules" rather than "it's not these rules, it's figuring out for yourself what you want." <b>And I guess that's why it affected me so much emotionally- I can see that so many of the things she writes about are important and it's good that she's talking about them, and so I fool myself into thinking her reasons for believing those things are similar to mine, but they're not, they're really not. And... well, like I said, being evangelical means you have to throw queer people under the bus. </b>Don't lose sight of that.</p><p>I've mentioned several times throughout my blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue" that I understand that <b>my advice of "figure out what you want and then advocate for yourself" is just not workable for a lot of people coming from an evangelical background (especially women). </b>We were taught that everything we do has to be centered around Jesus, everything we do has to be about serving God, that if we want something just because we want it, that's bad and sinful and selfish. <b>To put it bluntly, growing up evangelical, you're not allowed to have desires. You're not allowed to want things- that's <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2017/09/christianity-selfishness-receipts.html">"selfish."</a></b> And so I understand that "it's not these rules, it's these other rules" can be a lifesaver, a crucial first step away from that anti-self ideology. Because if you're been taught your entire life that it's wrong to want things, then it's just not possible to get any benefit from the advice "it's not these rules, it's figuring out for yourself what you want." <b>At that point, you don't even know how to know what you want. At that point, it's unimaginable to stand up for yourself and say "this is what I want, and my feelings matter"- no, you only know how to make the argument "this is what God wants me to do."</b></p><p><b>And in my own journey toward accepting queer people, I also had to go through an "it's not these rules, it's these other rules" phase.</b> All my life I had heard "the bible is clear, same-sex relationships are sinful" but then I read some articles from gay Christians, saying "okay let's do a bunch of research on this specific Greek word, let's spend a lot of time discussing how best to translate it, let's learn about how homosexual relationships worked in ancient Roman culture, and if you do all that, then you can make an argument that actually the bible wasn't saying that same-sex relationships are sinful." <b>Very painstakingly going through the process of clarifying what exactly "the rules" are, according to the bible- rather than celebrating the image of God as we see it in a same-sex couple.</b></p><p>So yes, I understand "it's not these rules, it's these other rules" may be a necessary first step for a lot of people coming from that background. I can't fault them for being in that place right now. But I hope that people are able to move on from that. It's very <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=colossians+2%3A20-21&version=NIV">"Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!"</a> There's a whole big queer world out here, come and enjoy it.</p><p>And for myself, I'm thinking about when Jesus said to "<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mt+10%3A14-15&version=NIV">shake the dust off your feet</a>." <b>Don't keep waiting around for non-queer Christians to change their minds and accept queer people. </b></p><p>---</p><p><i>Links to all posts in this series can be found here: <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/05/blog-series-on-great-sex-rescue.html">Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"</a></i></p><p><i>Related:</i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2016/03/divorce-matthew-19.html">It Doesn’t Actually Matter What Jesus Said About Divorce</a><br /></i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2014/03/im-not-christian-world-vision-lgbt.html">Go ahead and say I'm not a Christian. I don't care anymore.</a> <br /></i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2015/03/katy-perry.html">Katy Perry's God-Given Freedom</a> <br /></i></p><p><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2018/11/josh-harris-documentary.html"><i>So I Watched Josh Harris's Documentary</i></a> <br /></p><p><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2015/11/so-ive-discovered-that-for-me-church.html"><i>So I've Discovered That (For Me) Church Culture Causes Depression</i></a><br /></p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-38068956021106500902024-01-12T10:04:00.001-05:002024-01-12T10:04:21.545-05:00Blogaround<p><b><span style="font-size: large;">1.</span></b> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtdF-ncUOS4">2024 Arrives With A Sudoku Miracle</a> (January 1) 1-hour-54-minute sudoku solve video. Wow, this ruleset is very complicated. I'm super impressed by Simon solving it.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">2.</span></b> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/05/opinion/trump-insurrections-disqualification-14th-amendment.html">If Trump Is Not an Insurrectionist, What Is He?</a> (January 5) "The unspoken assumption behind the idea that Trump should be allowed on the ballot and that the public should have the chance to choose for or against him yet again is that he will respect the voice of the electorate. But we know this isn’t true. It wasn’t true after the 2016 presidential election — when, after winning the Electoral College, he sought to delegitimize the popular vote victory of his opponent as fraud — and it was put into stark relief after the 2020 presidential election."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">3.</span></b> <a href="https://www.ijpr.org/politics-government/2023-12-31/jane-roe-is-anonymous-no-more-the-very-public-fight-against-abortion-bans-in-2023">'Jane Roe' is anonymous no more. The very public fight against abortion bans in 2023</a> (December 31) "Now, it's different. 'Women and pregnant people in this country are so angry and so shocked at the treatment that they are receiving at the hands of the state that they have been compelled to tell their stories,' she says."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">4.</span></b> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/03/alabama-kenneth-smith-death-penalty-un-experts-nitrogen-hypoxia-execution">UN experts alarmed by Alabama plan to kill prisoner using untried gas method</a> (January 3) <i>[content note: death penalty]</i> "In a joint statement released on Wednesday in Geneva, the four independent UN monitors call on the US government and Alabama to halt the execution scheduled for 25 January. They accuse the state of rushing ahead with an experimental execution technique that could inflict grave suffering on Smith in violation of the international ban on torture."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">5. </span></b><a href="https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2024/01/07/epiphany-one-of-us-2/">Epiphany: One Of Us</a> (January 7) "And then God Almighty — God who laid the foundation of the earth, who determined its measurements when the morning stars sang together, God who commands the morning and causes the dawn to know its place, God who bound the chains of the Pleiades and loosed the cords of Orion — wept."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">6.</span></b> <a href="https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240081864">WHO Guideline for complementary feeding of infants and young children 6-23 months of age</a> (October 16) New guidelines released by the World Health Organization, about how to feed babies, and WOW there are big changes here! This link has the very long report documents, I will try to see if I can find a shorter summary. But just to give you an idea of how big the changes are: They are now saying that babies can start having cow milk rather than formula at 6 months old (used to be 12 months!). Still saying breastfeeding is best, and recommending that you continue to breastfeed until the baby is 2 years old, and beyond, but wow big changes in the guidelines around formula.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">7.</span></b> <a href="https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1014434">Changing Course: Why More Chinese Students Are Eyeing Southeast Asia</a> (January 9) "For instance, in Thailand, Chinese students comprised the majority of international students in 2022, with 21,419 enrollments, a 130% increase from 9,329 in 2012."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">8.</span></b> <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2024/01/does-ohios-brittany-watts-get-to-be-a-person.html">Who Gets to Be a Person?</a> (January 4) <i>[content note: miscarriage]</i> "In pursuing the case, prosecutors deny Watts the full expression of her grief. They deny her the right to feel pain and shock at her miscarriage, to act like a traumatized human being. Even if the grand jury does not indict her, she has experienced hell."</p><p>And an update on that: <a href="https://apnews.com/article/miscarriage-prosecution-ohio-brittany-watts-68145b3044b3cc61017b71a97f7cc036">Ohio woman who miscarried at home won’t be charged with corpse abuse, grand jury decides</a> (January 12)</p><p>The main thing here is... a miscarriage at 22 weeks, that's horrible. That's devastating, to lose the baby when you're already 22 weeks into the pregnancy. Watts needs compassion and support; she needs to be allowed to grieve, because that's a terrible thing to go through. But instead she was treated like she had done something bad to her baby.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">9.</span></b> <a href="https://apnews.com/article/nasa-moon-landings-artemis-delay-23e425d490c0c9e65ae774ec2e00f090">More delays for NASA’s astronaut moonshots, with crew landing off until 2026</a> (January 10)</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">10.</span></b> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/10/pregnant-women-urgent-medical-care-us-court-texas">Do pregnant women have a right to urgent medical care? No, according to a US court</a> (January 10) This is just BONKERS. Doesn't the Texas abortion ban supposedly have an exception for "life of the mother"? So why is Texas now arguing that ERs shouldn't be required to do abortions which are necessary to save pregnant people's lives? So that whole "exception for life of the mother" thing was totally fake, then?</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">11.</span></b> <a href="https://www.wonkette.com/p/in-hottest-year-on-record-us-cut">In Hottest Year On Record, US Cut Carbon Emissions. Good Start!</a> (January 11)</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">12.</span></b> <a href="https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202401/1305216.shtml">China rolls out new measures to facilitate foreigners’ visit to country</a> (January 11) I saw this in the news, but I don't understand what it actually means in practical terms (like, I'm an immigrant in China, is this gonna benefit me?). We'll see.</p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-78987482992391609112024-01-10T09:26:00.001-05:002024-01-10T09:26:42.525-05:00I'm concerned that there's still an argument to be made for "pro-life" policies where women die<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN-CW_UbKFPLcMJbHZLPBsyEI6sKKEPA6m1_us929vkgB_dqwoer_68Gf_LRpdbvqhPJpMMseYZyxCPQ0u3Oodx42BfeSzzmPOVIe6V_8wDP9CLyEM_Xdjuu5tKfW20sygXfEw5aM7GtDQmV3jev1rXbt0IKoAlsMQAAFk2zyj_7ycG70c0aas4ZziN9Nu/s500/road-block-sign.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="281" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN-CW_UbKFPLcMJbHZLPBsyEI6sKKEPA6m1_us929vkgB_dqwoer_68Gf_LRpdbvqhPJpMMseYZyxCPQ0u3Oodx42BfeSzzmPOVIe6V_8wDP9CLyEM_Xdjuu5tKfW20sygXfEw5aM7GtDQmV3jev1rXbt0IKoAlsMQAAFk2zyj_7ycG70c0aas4ZziN9Nu/s16000/road-block-sign.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A sign that says "Road blocked." <a href="https://www.bounteous.com/insights/2016/06/27/three-roadblocks-path-leadership">Image source.</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><i>[content note: "pro-life" ideology, pregnancy loss]</i></p><p>So... a lot of news stories recently about red states where abortion is totally banned, and how these policies lead to <b>horrible situations where a woman with a wanted pregnancy needs an abortion because of some horrible health problem,</b> and her unborn baby is not able to survive, but still she's not allowed to have an abortion, and this puts her life in danger. (See: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/16/abortion-ban-lawsuits-pregnancy-complication-emergency-kate-cox">Kate Cox</a>, and <a href="https://reproductiverights.org/zurawski-v-texas-plaintiffs-stories-remarks/">Zurawski v. State of Texas</a>.)</p><p>When discussing these news stories, the first thing I want to say is that it's really sad. These are real people's lives. I know how it feels to want a baby, and feel like you would do anything for your baby. I can only imagine how devastating it would be to find out that your unborn baby is not able to survive, and then to have to weigh the risks... wanting more information so you know for sure if your baby has a chance of survival or not... And then the red tape getting in the way, if you wait and do more tests, then what if you're past the cutoff point where abortion is allowed in your state? Or if you live in Texas and abortion is totally banned... it's just the worst thing, to find out your baby will die, and then the government makes everything so much harder. These women didn't want abortions- they wanted to have a healthy baby. But, tragically, it wasn't possible, and they came to the point where they realized they needed to get an abortion- and then the law said they couldn't. <b>These women loved their unborn babies more than any Republican politician did. If there was a way to save the baby, they would have done it. And then some politicians- who don't know or care about the actual details of the actual situation- step in and get to claim that they care about "life" and these women don't. It's just so wrong.</b></p><p>And I read this post from Jessica Valenti: <a href="https://jessica.substack.com/p/of-course-they-want-us-dead">Of Course They Want Us Dead</a> (January 4), about how Republicans really do want pregnant women to die. (Click on the link; it's worth reading.)</p><p>All of this has got me thinking about how these really high-profile, emotionally-charged news stories (like Kate Cox's story) are likely to have a big effect on public opinion about abortion. <b>This is likely to get more people to come out and vote for pro-choice policies, because it's obvious that the "pro-life" laws got it so wrong in these cases.</b></p><p>And I'm pro-choice, so yes, I want to see these "pro-life" laws overturned. I want pregnant people in the US to be able to have access to abortion. (And also to have access to prenatal healthcare and other resources they need if they choose to keep the pregnancy. "Pro-life" policies have restricted obgyn doctors so much, that many doctors have left, creating "<a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/maternity-care-deserts-pregnancy-hospital-closures-provider-shortages/">maternity care deserts</a>." Not cool.)</p><p>But here's my concern: <b>I can easily imagine pro-choice people saying "well it's so obvious that these laws are bad, how could anyone possibly continue to support them?"</b> Like, expecting "pro-life" people ("pro-life" women in particular) to read about Kate Cox's situation and then immediately be convinced that Texas's laws need to change. Pro-choice people who can't possibly imagine any kind of logical argument to continue supporting these kinds of abortion bans, and concluding that "pro-life" people simply hate women and that's all there is to it.</p><p><b>I just want to say, it's more complicated than that, and unfortunately there is an argument that can be made on the "pro-life" side here. </b>This sucks, but I'm gonna walk you through it because it's not good to just believe that people who disagree with you are simply evil or something- if you want to change their minds, you have to engage with their actual arguments.</p><p>Basically it goes like this: <b>"Pro-life" people believe that the overwhelming majority of women who want to get abortions have "bad" reasons. So, they must be stopped- that's the whole point of "pro-life" policies.</b> Women who get abortions later in pregnancy due to serious health problems (ie, a "good" reason) are just a very very small number of the total number of abortions. And, one might argue, <b>it's not possible to tweak the law to really make sure that it allows people to get abortions for "good" reasons but not for "bad" reasons. </b>Even though Kate Cox had a "good" reason to get an abortion, and in a perfect world the law would definitely allow it, there's no way to actually write a law that allows it for her case but stops all the other women who are trying to have abortions for "bad" reasons.</p><p>A "pro-life" person could argue, "You only see these high-profile cases where a woman was obviously in a tragic situation and was denied an abortion. You don't see all the babies who were saved by these laws- all the women who were pregnant with healthy pregnancies that were unwanted and were forced to continue the pregnancy anyway. The number of babies who were saved, quietly, in the background, not being reported on in the news, is so much higher than the number of pregnant women who might die because of these policies."</p><p><b>So, they could argue, it's sad for women who really do have "good" reasons for having an abortion, who then might die because they can't get one, but really it's just a question of doing the math. The number of lives saved is so much greater than the number of lives lost.</b></p><p>They could argue, if the laws were changed to allow abortions in some cases- even if it's simply a small change like taking a broader interpretation of "health of the mother"- well, you're going to get lots of women who want abortions for "bad" reasons, coming up with some far-fetched excuse for why "health of the mother" is at risk, and we can't allow that.</p><p><b>I'm pro-choice, so I don't believe in any of this judgment about whose reasons for abortion are "good" and whose reasons are "bad." I can definitely think of some hypotheticals where it would be obviously immoral to have an abortion- you're 8 months pregnant with a totally healthy pregnancy and then you just decide to have an abortion for no reason- but nobody would actually do that. I trust that people can make the decision that's right for them and their own life and their own body. </b></p><p><b>Let's be real- pregnancy is grueling.</b> Pregnancy is awful. The nausea, back pain, heartburn, exhaustion... you know how people say that giving birth is the worst pain ever? Well women who are 9 months pregnant <i>want</i> that. They <i>want</i> to go through something that's "the worst pain ever" because afterward, they won't be pregnant any more. That's how awful pregnancy is. Nobody should ever have to go through that if they don't want to. Now, in my case, having kids is really important to me, so I chose to do this. And for me, it was worth it, because my son is just the most wonderful little sweetheart, really just an amazing kid, who knows a lot of facts about sharks, and really loves building things with legos. </p><p>But it should always be a choice, not something you're forced into. </p><p>So yeah, in my opinion, simply <i>not wanting to be pregnant</i> is a good enough reason to get an abortion.</p><p><b>Anyway, I think the real crux of this issue is to what extent you believe that people are having abortions for "bad" reasons.</b></p><p><b>I personally don't think people are having abortions for "bad" reasons. I think people know their own life and their own situation, and they're able to make the decision that's right for them. Therefore, I don't think the government should interfere with this at all.</b> (This is the pro-choice position.)</p><p><b>But if you think that most of the time when people have abortions, it's for "bad" reasons, then you would want the government to step in and stop them. </b>(This is the "pro-life" position.)</p><p>So in the debate over abortion rights, <b>it can't just be about hypotheticals. It can't just be asking the question in a theoretical realm, "Which reasons for abortion should be legally allowable, and which reasons should not be?"</b> Sure, we could all make lists of what we think are the "good" or "bad" reasons. Like I said, I'm pro-choice but sure I can imagine hypotheticals where someone is having an abortion for an obviously "bad" reason. I don't think there should be laws banning that "bad" reason though, because it's not something that actually would happen in real life. </p><p>This debate can't be over theoretical questions, it has to be about what is actually going on in real life. The actual reality of what it's like to be pregnant, the actual reality of who is getting abortions and why, the actual reality of how easy or hard it is to access prenatal healthcare, the actual reality of how expensive daycare is, the actual reality of women being at a higher risk for domestic violence during pregnancy, the actual reality of prenatal testing and finding out your baby is at risk but there's still uncertainty about how bad it will be and you have to make decisions anyway, the actual reality of risk to the mother's health if she has too many C-sections, and so on, and so on. <b>It doesn't do any good to sit around and imagine what might or might not be a bannable "bad" reason for abortion, especially if you're a cis man and/or have no idea about what pregnancy is really like.</b></p><p><b>For "pro-life" people, because they believe the majority of abortions are for "bad" reasons and need to be stopped, the whole thing is an exercise in how *exactly* to draw the line to make sure all the "bad" reasons are illegal and the "good" reasons are legal.</b> But the reality of pregnancy is complicated- it's impossible to draw a line that really accomplishes that. </p><p>If you want to make exceptions for rape, well, how exactly do you define rape? Is it when someone is forced to have sex because of physical violence, or does it also "count" if they are pressured into it with threats and coercion? Would a pregnant person only be allowed to get an abortion if they filed a police report? There are all sorts of reasons that people don't feel safe reporting rape... If you want to make sure those "bad" women who want to get abortions for "bad" reasons can't use the rape exception, then you have to have answers to these questions. <b>You have to judge whether a complete stranger's trauma "counts" or not.</b></p><p>If you want to allow abortion before some certain cutoff point, some number of weeks of pregnancy- well what if they wanted to get an abortion earlier but were delayed because of the financial cost, or the logistical challenges of making an appointment and taking time off work? Or what if it's a wanted pregnancy but testing shows that the baby might have a horrible health problem, but it's too early to know for sure, so the pregnant person wants to wait until they can do more testing, still holding out hope that their baby can survive?</p><p>If you want to allow exceptions for the life or health of the pregnant person, where do you draw the line for that? <b>How much of a probability of dying do they need to have, before it "counts"?</b> What if the pregnant person has a health condition that's definitely going to get worse and maybe become life-threatening if the pregnancy continues, but it hasn't gotten to that point yet? </p><p><b>For "pro-life" people, they believe that most people are having abortions for "bad" reasons and must be stopped, and so the law really does need to have answers for all these messy questions. Can't just let people figure it out for themselves- people who are <i>actually in the situation and actually know what's going on</i>- because tons of people will choose "wrong," ya know.</b></p><p>And if I believed there were lots of people aborting 8-month fetuses for no reason, or something obviously immoral like that, then I would also have to think about what policies to put in place in order to stop it. Where to draw the lines to separate the "good" reasons from the "bad" reasons. <b>Fortunately, that's not happening, and fortunately, pregnant people can be trusted to know their own situation and what's best for them, so we don't need to "stop" them.</b></p><p>So... my point in all this is that seeing emotionally-gripping news stories of women who obviously should have been able to get abortions, but couldn't, isn't necessarily going to change "pro-life" people's minds. <b>The reality of being "pro-life" is you *need* to draw the lines to judge other people's personal lives and if their reasons for abortion are "good" or "bad", and inevitably you can't draw those lines perfectly. But you have to try, you have to at least draw it somewhere- you'll save so many innocent babies, and only a few "good" pregnant women will die. </b>Do the math.</p><p>I'm very concerned about what's going on with abortion rights in the US. I'm also concerned about hospitals closing their maternity departments because these abortions restrictions make it impossible for obgyn doctors to just do their normal jobs- so pregnant people don't have the resources they need to support them with a wanted pregnancy. <b>I want everyone to be able to make their own decisions about their own personal lives- and I don't need to interfere with it or judge them, because I trust that pregnant people know their own situation and can decide what's best for themselves. In contrast, "pro-life" ideology is based on the idea that most people are having abortions for "bad" reasons and must be stopped- and when you're working from that ideology, if you really want to stop all the "bad" ones, inevitably you have to create policies where women die.</b></p><p>---</p><p><i>Related:</i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2020/07/pregnancy-taught-me-pro-choice.html">What Pregnancy Taught Me About Being Pro-Choice</a><br /></i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2022/05/lifes-work-read-this-book-and-become.html">"Life's Work" (read this book and become even more pro-choice)</a> <br /></i></p><p><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2016/08/why-i-am-pro-choice.html"><i>Why I Am Pro-Choice</i></a><br /></p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-90333675449484506332024-01-06T05:34:00.007-05:002024-01-06T21:29:25.223-05:00Blogaround<p><b><span style="font-size: large;">1. </span></b><a href="https://verdict.justia.com/2023/12/18/alabama-acknowledges-dangers-of-nitrogen-hypoxia-executions-but-wants-to-carry-one-out-anyway">Alabama Acknowledges Dangers of Nitrogen Hypoxia Executions But Wants to Carry One Out Anyway</a> (December 18) <i>[content note: death penalty]</i> "If it does so it will be the first time that this method has been used in an American execution."</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">2.</span></b> <a href="https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/">Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year Love Triangle</a> "On January 1, 2024, after almost a century of copyright protection, Mickey Mouse, or at least a version of Mickey Mouse, will enter the United States public domain." Wow! This article has details on what *exactly* that means. It doesn't mean ALL versions of Mickey Mouse are in the public domain- only the 1928 version.</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">3.</span></b> <a href="https://apnews.com/article/transgender-health-ohio-minors-veto-c615cafed4fc81d32010d47d8853efaf">Ohio’s GOP governor vetoes ban on gender-affirming care and transgender athletes in girls’ sports</a> (December 30) Good news for trans kids in Ohio.</p><p>Update: Oh no, but now there's a new set of proposed anti-trans rules in Ohio which are even worse: <a href="https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/governor-dewine-uses-anti-abortion">Governor DeWine Uses Anti-Abortion Tactic To Target Trans Adults With Defacto Ban</a> (January 7) "On Friday, Governor DeWine announced a new set of rules that would severely limit trans care at any age."</p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><b>4.</b></span> <a href="https://www.keranews.org/texas-news/2024-01-03/u-s-department-of-justice-sues-texas-over-states-immigration-enforcement-bill">U.S. Department of Justice sues Texas over state’s immigration enforcement bill</a> (January 3) </p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">5.</span></b> <a href="https://reproductiverights.org/zurawski-v-texas-plaintiffs-stories-remarks/">The Plaintiffs and Their Stories: Zurawski v. State of Texas</a> (November 14) <i>[content note: pregnancy loss, abortion]</i> "Taylor and her husband still want a child, but she fears being pregnant again in Texas."</p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-52005438508143646852024-01-01T08:53:00.001-05:002024-01-01T08:53:24.072-05:00"The Giving Manger" Recap<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_0H-TWnznnA8EwSCZ5s1olR76EhZFSHBNbj7E9fEYEB46kytpdKllgshsMByplFN-rF0Z5FmBShN87-QdKxWGmNJ4HlBdCfnuSEQPgn0_8V1mO49IMhjbkVTnPYQ0I8O1sjQ5Jyo7cQO93GE6OkMDQHbEYes1KxZcT6Baj6hsQOkaoQkpHHS7zhyphenhyphens9p8n/s500/chinese-dinner.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="333" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_0H-TWnznnA8EwSCZ5s1olR76EhZFSHBNbj7E9fEYEB46kytpdKllgshsMByplFN-rF0Z5FmBShN87-QdKxWGmNJ4HlBdCfnuSEQPgn0_8V1mO49IMhjbkVTnPYQ0I8O1sjQ5Jyo7cQO93GE6OkMDQHbEYes1KxZcT6Baj6hsQOkaoQkpHHS7zhyphenhyphens9p8n/s16000/chinese-dinner.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stock photo of a Chinese family eating dinner. <a href="https://jingyan.baidu.com/article/ff411625b24a0512e5823779.html">Image source.</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>So at the beginning of December I wrote that I was going to do this <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-giving-manger-gonna-try-this-out.html">Christmas activity with my son, called "The Giving Manger,"</a> where you can write down the good things you did to help people, and those strips of paper are the straw in the manger for Baby Jesus. Here's a follow-up post about how it went.</p><p><b>Basically it went really well!</b> In my blog post at the start of this, I said I wasn't sure about it because I don't like the idea of <b>"gamifying morality"</b>, but it didn't turn out that way. Discussing the things my son did to help people, writing them down, and telling him he did a good job- <b>these are not enough of a "reward" to incentivize him to "game the system." </b>So that was good.</p><p>It wasn't about doing good things for artificial reasons. <b>It was about spending time talking to him about what he had done each day, and helping him to identify which things he did which were good things that helped people. He already does nice things because he's a sweetheart. This activity was helpful because it made him more aware of those things, and also helped me pay more attention to them.</b></p><p>One nice thing that he does a lot is serving food to us at dinner. This is sort of a Chinese-culture thing- during a meal, people will randomly put food in your bowl. It really disturbed me when I first came to China, because I don't want people all up in my space without asking first, and I don't like when I feel like people are pressuring me to eat- but Chinese people do it to be nice, and I learned that I can just tell them "oh I already have enough, thanks" and that's fine. Anyway, my son has started doing this- like randomly scooping food into my bowl. Very cute! Though sometimes I have to tell him not to do it, if it's something I don't want to eat.</p><p>So, anyway, overall, both of us enjoyed doing "The Giving Manger," and it was basically a way of noticing the good things that we already do.</p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8626292304461574111.post-14407620802184096532023-12-30T08:55:00.005-05:002024-01-02T09:10:55.209-05:00The Great Sex Rescue: The Chapter Where It's Not Okay To Be Asexual<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha40DiEj55hEHEPbcWBXxBm76d8J81gaQouItvDE2DkN5wUaiqEm4HXqHOECQVGMV4fvZXw2LIRl95mRYKuVk-oTa40VqVohaDfq935UGfAQfU_PSI-MivVj4Y8zQZg_u_YQ8Y_vNtd6yfrdc35uw67xltHiq65SMaWJs6_2UmXc6uFIW7kLLRfMBq2AE4/s339/you-me-venn-diagram.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="222" data-original-width="339" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha40DiEj55hEHEPbcWBXxBm76d8J81gaQouItvDE2DkN5wUaiqEm4HXqHOECQVGMV4fvZXw2LIRl95mRYKuVk-oTa40VqVohaDfq935UGfAQfU_PSI-MivVj4Y8zQZg_u_YQ8Y_vNtd6yfrdc35uw67xltHiq65SMaWJs6_2UmXc6uFIW7kLLRfMBq2AE4/s16000/you-me-venn-diagram.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A venn diagram where one circle is "you," one circle is "me," and the overlap is "us." <a href="https://tnp43.wordpress.com/2021/11/06/you-me-and-venn-exploring-the-truth-of-your-relationship/">Image source.</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><i>Links to all posts in this series can be found here: <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/05/blog-series-on-great-sex-rescue.html">Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"</a></i></p><p>---</p><p>Chapter 8 of <a href="https://amzn.to/3zoRKRe">The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You've Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended</a> [affiliate link] is called "Becoming More Than Roommates," and <b>it's about how it's bad and wrong to have a sexless marriage.</b></p><p>Umm. (You will notice this is a long post, because I Have Some Opinions.)</p><p>So obviously, first thing I want to say is, <b>as an asexual I 100% disagree with that. There's nothing *inherently* wrong with having a sexless marriage. </b>Most people do want to have sex with their spouse, so of course if you're one of those people, then you would be unhappy with a sexless marriage- but that doesn't mean it's *always* bad to have a sexless marriage. (For example, what if both spouses are asexual and aren't interested in sex?)</p><p>My overall feeling about this chapter is, ugh, it's so NOT OKAY how anti-asexual this is. <b>And, it never actually explains WHY a sexless marriage is a problem. We're just supposed to know that obviously it's a problem. WHYYYY?</b></p><p>I can understand that it's a problem in the situation where one or both spouses places a very high importance on sex. But outside of that, there's no reason it would be a problem.</p><p>The authors are talking like there's something intrinsic about the nature of marriage which requires sex. And, no, I strongly disagree with that. <b>Talk to your partner! Talk about what you want, and work out something that works for both of you. It should be based on the specific needs and desires that the <i>actual real people in the relationship</i> have- not abstract concepts about how marriage is "always" supposed to be.</b></p><p>Here, a few quotes from this chapter:</p><p></p><blockquote>Sometimes marriages that are otherwise largely healthy become sexless or sex-starved. In that case, we need to challenge people to put more priority on sex.</blockquote><p></p><p>Why? Seriously, why?</p><p>Here's another one:</p><p></p><blockquote>Natasha would rather live without sex. It's not that it doesn't feel good-- it does, actually-- it's just that she'd rather watch Netflix at the end of the day than have sex. She knows her priorities are off, but frankly she just doesn't have the motivation to change.</blockquote><p></p><p>I see no problem with this.</p><p>Continuing with the next paragraph about Natasha:</p><p></p><blockquote>After she and her husband come home from work, make dinner, do the dishes, and get their toddler to bed, he wants to spend time together, and she, well, doesn't. She just wants downtime. She loves her husband-- that's not the problem. And he's tried everything: taking on more of the housework, giving her multiple nights a week off from childcare entirely, and booking romantic date nights out for the two of them in an effort to help her reengage in the marriage. But nothing seems to work because Natasha is, frankly, struggling with overcoming laziness when it comes to her marriage.</blockquote><p></p><p>Oh, okay, so it sounds like the problem is this: Natasha's husband wants to have sex, so the fact that they're not having sex is making him unhappy. The book doesn't come right out and say that though, it just says Natasha is not having sex, and then we readers are supposed to automatically understand that that's a problem. </p><p>I find it very weird that the list of things that Natasha's husband is doing to try to get her to have sex with him includes things like doing housework and planning romantic dates, <b>rather than, you know, having a honest conversation about his needs and how he feels about the lack of sex. </b>It reads to me like the husband (and the authors of "The Great Sex Rescue") are operating under a framework where if you are a good spouse, then your spouse should give you sex. This is just... very weird. It seems like the lack of sex is really affecting the husband emotionally, he seems really unhappy about it, but if he doesn't communicate that to Natasha, then how would she even know? Even if he does ask her "do you want to have sex," she might not realize how big of a deal it is to him. <b>This reads to me like a communication issue, not like a "let's blame Natasha for being lazy and selfish" issue (which is what the book says it is).</b></p><p>This chapter categorizes sexless marriages into 3 types:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>The sexless marriage due to selfishness or brokenness</li><li>The sexless marriage due to emotional protection</li><li>The sexless marriage in disguise</li></ol><p></p><p>Let's go through each of them:</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Scenario 1:</span> The sexless marriage due to selfishness or brokenness</b></p><p>Well I'm already mad about this chapter, so this evangelical jargon "brokenness" has me even more annoyed. But I'll define it, for the readers who don't speak evangelical: "brokenness" means there is something wrong with us, at a deep level, because of sin. The book doesn't specifically say which of the examples in this section would be classified under "brokenness" but I would guess it's the example where one spouse is using porn instead of having sex with their spouse (using porn is a sin, this sin makes the porn-using spouse deeply "broken" and unable to have a good sex life without doing the work of healing from it first), and the example about sexual abuse victims dealing with trauma (the abuser committed sin against the victim, and even though the victim isn't to blame, they are still "broken" as a result, ie, they have deep trauma and can't have a good sex life until they heal from it).</p><p>(For more on "brokenness": <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2018/06/broken-asexual.html">Miss me with your "we are all sexually broken" hot takes. I'm asexual.</a>)</p><p><b>Scenario 1 can be summarized like this: Partner A refuses to have sex with Partner B, and the issue is on Partner A's side. </b>The examples given are:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Partner A is lazy and selfish, like our buddy Natasha</li><li>Partner A is using porn instead of having sex with Partner B</li><li>Partner A is a victim of sexual abuse, and has trauma related to sex</li><li>Partner A has sexual dysfunction issues- ie, medical conditions like vaginismus, or being unable to get an erection</li></ul><div>(And the examples in the book show that Partner A could be the man or the woman- it doesn't present it like a specifically gendered problem.)</div><p></p><p>When I say "the issue is on Partner A's side," <b>I don't mean it's Partner A's <i>fault</i>, or that Partner A is <i>sinning</i>. </b>Some of these examples would be seen as sin, and some would not. The point is, <b>Partner A is the one who has the responsibility to <i>do something about it</i>, </b>so that the couple can get to the point where they are having sex frequently and enjoying it.</p><p>I'll come back to this section in a minute, let me just define scenarios 2 and 3 first:</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Scenario 2: </span>The sexless marriage due to emotional protection</b></p><p>In this scenario, <b>Partner A refuses to have sex with Partner B, because Partner B is not a safe person to have sex with.</b> For example, Partner B is abusive, Partner B acts like they are entitled to sex and Partner A's consent doesn't matter, Partner B has raped Partner A before, Partner B doesn't care about whether sex is painful for Partner A, etc.</p><p>So, the issue here is on Partner B's side. It does no good to treat Partner A like they're the problem, and they just need to have sex with Partner B anyway, like most evangelical marriage resources would do. <b>"The Great Sex Rescue" says that Partner A's refusal to have sex is <i>the right thing to do</i>. </b></p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Scenario 3:</span> The sexless marriage in disguise</b></p><p>In this scenario, the couple is having sex regularly, but not in a way that's good for Partner A. Maybe Partner B always has an orgasm and Partner A never does, maybe sex is painful for Partner A but they feel like they have to do it anyway because they've been reading too many Christian marriage books, etc.</p><p>Okay, I'm glad the authors of "The Great Sex Rescue" are bringing this up. (And it's similar to what they said <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-great-sex-rescue-wives-are-ones.html">in an earlier chapter about who exactly is being "deprived."</a>) <b>Even though I don't think there's anything inherently bad about a sexless marriage, this scenario definitely is bad. If you're having sex, but it's a bad experience for you, well, stop doing that! </b></p><p>I say "stop doing that" like it's easy and obvious, but in evangelical-land, it's <i>not</i> that easy or obvious. There are many Christian marriage books which <i>explicitly teach</i> that most women don't like sex, but wives have to do it anyway because men need it. <b>If sex is painful for you, and you don't like it, you would believe that's normal, that's just the way it is for women, and a very important part of being a wife is you have to have bad sex anyway. </b>(Yes, they really do explicitly teach that an important part of being a wife is having bad sex.) They talk about it like it's a sacrifice that wives have to make- your marriage is important to you, and you love your husband and want him to be happy, so it's worth a few minutes of pain several times a week. Furthermore, you shouldn't tell your husband that sex is painful and unpleasant, because that will ruin his manly confidence- you need him to believe that he is good at sex and everything is perfect.</p><p>(I'm going to point this out explicitly for the ace and/or extremely sheltered readers: When Christian leaders describe sex as "it's worth a few minutes of pain", the part where it's "a few minutes" should be a giant red flag. Most women take longer than men to get aroused, so if sex is only "a few minutes" then it's likely that the woman is not aroused, and she's being subjected to vaginal penetration when she's not even aroused, which is likely to be painful. In order to feel good for women, it's usually the case that sex needs to take <i>longer</i> than "a few minutes", to make sure that the woman is aroused and ready before doing any penetration, and also to make sure enough time is spent on foreplay that feels good for her. The fact that Christian marriage teachers are emphasizing <i>how little time it takes to have sex, as if that's a selling point</i>, is deeply ****ed-up.)</p><p><b>One of the main messages of "The Great Sex Rescue" is that this whole "women don't like sex but have to do it anyway" is WRONG. I'm glad to see them taking a stand against that.</b></p><p>So... if you're a good evangelical woman, and you get married (to a man, obviously, since you are a good evangelical woman and wouldn't dream of being queer) and then sex is painful, you wouldn't even know that was a problem. You would think that's normal, and you just have to do it anyway, because that's what it means to be a wife.</p><p>"The Great Sex Rescue" has some anecdotes in this section, where men are saying things like "after 20 years of marriage, my wife just stopped having sex with me, for no reason, completely out of the blue." The authors of "The Great Sex Rescue" say that actually, it wasn't "out of the blue"- the wife had been suffering through bad sex for 20 years, and finally decided she couldn't take it any more- and GOOD FOR HER! Furthermore, the book says that if you continue to have sex even though it's bad, it's likely your husband will have no idea there's a problem- so <b>you should speak up right away and refuse to have bad sex. Don't try to tolerate it.</b></p><p>Yes, as an asexual, I totally agree with this. Don't tolerate bad sex, because that's not sustainable, and it's not good for you.</p><p>---</p><p>Okay so those are the 3 scenarios given in the book. <b>Overall, the message is, if you're the one causing the marriage to be sexless, then you're the one who has a responsibility to work on yourself and make changes so that you can have a good sex life with your spouse. </b>Basically, the lack of sex is a problem, and whichever partner is causing the lack of sex, is the one who needs to change.</p><p>I don't think the lack of sex is a problem, in and of itself. <b>I think the problem is when there's a <i>mismatch</i> between what the two partners want. </b>And the way to resolve that mismatch is NOT "let's work on whatever issues are stopping us from having a normative ideal sex life" like the book says [this is my paraphrase, not an actual quote]. <b>The way to resolve that mismatch is to really think through what you want- specifically, which parts of sex do you like or not like? What kind of intimacy is important to you? How do you show love to your partner, and how do you want them to show love to you? Get some specific answers- more specific than "I like sex" or "I don't like sex"- because sex can be a lot of different things. </b>And then communicate with your partner, compare your lists of what you want and what you don't want, and come up with a plan that works for both of you.</p><p>There are 2 examples from "scenario 1" I want to go back and look at, and discuss how my advice of "figure out what you want, and then work something out with your partner" would play out (and how it's different than what "The Great Sex Rescue" says). First, we have this part, which mentions the writers' experiences with female sexual pain:</p><p></p><blockquote>Not wanting sex when you're dealing with sexual dysfunction is a perfectly understandable and normal response. But whatever the sexual dysfunction, if it impedes libido and makes sex difficult or impossible, it is incumbent upon that spouse to seek and follow medical treatments. All three of us writing this book have been treated for sexual pain at one time or another, so we are not telling you to do anything we have not done ourselves. Dilators, internal massages, perineal stretches, the works-- it's not fun, but it gets the job done.</blockquote><p></p><p>I'm gonna have to disagree with this.</p><p>I used to have vaginismus (a medical condition where the vagina involuntarily closes itself, making penetration very painful or impossible). <b>One of my main "hot takes" about vaginismus which I've blogged about is, <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/03/vaginismus-is-not-problem-in-and-of.html">this is not necessarily something you need to get treatment for</a>. </b>Vaginismus means you can't easily put things in your vagina- this is only a problem <i>if you want to put things in your vagina</i>. Besides that, it's not a problem at all.</p><p><b>And I'm glad that I found the asexual community- a group of people dedicated to analyzing and categorizing all of our feelings on what we really want out of sex and relationships- rather than finding a doctor who could tell me how to change my body to be good enough for a man.</b></p><p>The short version of the story is, I did a bunch of trial-and-error on my own (involving masturbating and sex toys) and eventually I did figure out a way I could manage to have PIV [penis-in-vagina] sex without pain (though it didn't always work)- and along the way, figured out some other things that worked better for me than PIV. (And it's great that I figured those things out!) And then <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2021/03/pregnancy-childbirth-vaginismus.html">when I gave birth to my baby, I guess that cured the vaginismus</a> and now it's not a problem at all any more.</p><p><b>It's really good that I was able to figure out what I actually wanted, instead of approaching it like "I need to find a doctor who can help me meet the heteronormative standards of what I'm supposed to be doing as a wife." And... well that's basically what "The Great Sex Rescue" is saying here- if you have medical reasons why you can't do PIV like you're supposed to, then you need to get treatment so you can do PIV like you're supposed to. Eww, no. Figure out what you <i>actually</i> want.</b></p><p>Sometimes I wonder if I'm being too negative about doctors, when I blog about vaginismus. <b>Let me clarify this: If you are coming at it from a place of confidently knowing what you want, then treatment from a doctor can be a very useful tool, if that's what you want. </b>But back then, I was definitely not in a position where it would have been useful for me. I was so "pure" I had never even used my hand to feel around "down there" and get a sense of the basic geometry. All I knew was I wasn't supposed to have sex or know anything about sex- and even when I rejected that belief, I still had this weird idea that "monogamy" means I shouldn't investigate my own body by myself... and then sex didn't "work"- well of course sex didn't "work", I had no idea what I was even trying to do. I assumed it would just happen "naturally." And when I asked doctors for help- because I <i>did</i> ask doctors for help, but they were all useless- they told me "just relax" and other things that very much did not help me to realize that I needed to figure out what *I* wanted. If one of them had diagnosed me with vaginismus and given me a set of dilators, I would have approached it like, "okay I still have no idea what I'm even trying to do, but if I follow the doctor's instructions about these dilators, then I can be good enough to have sex with my partner correctly." Which, no, don't do that. Instead, figure out what *you* actually want.</p><p><b>But, if you're coming at it from a place of "I've analyzed the pros and cons of being able to have PIV sex, and I think this is something that would benefit me" then yeah, go ahead and get help from a doctor. </b>Probably more efficient than the trial-and-error that I did. (And I can't speak for anyone else's situation- maybe some people's sexual medical issues can't be solved without an actual doctor's help.) But I needed to do that trial-and-error, because my only other option was just going along with what everyone was telling me I needed to do to have sex correctly.</p><p>(And if you feel it's worth it to work on the vaginismus issue so you can have PIV for your partner's sake, well, sure, if that's your decision, then that's valid- but is your partner also going to great effort to make sure you are getting the kind of intimacy that's important to you? They should! If you are literally <i>changing your body</i> for them, are they making it clear that they understand and value that? They should! Or are they treating it like, you fail to meet the bare-minimum requirements for being married, so you better get that fixed as soon as possible, and they are being a saint for putting up with your inadequacies? Oh YIKES.)</p><p><b>Anyway, "The Great Sex Rescue" doesn't see it that way. Their view is, if you're married, you need to have PIV sex, and if you aren't able to have PIV sex, then you need to get medical treatment so that you can. </b>No! <b>I have big news: Even if you're straight and married, you don't need to have PIV sex! </b>If you want to have sex, there are other ways to have sex, did you know that?</p><p>I've actually seen comments, in the comment section of the "Bare Marriage" blog (ie, the blog written by Sheila Gregoire and the other authors of "The Great Sex Rescue"), where men are saying things like "PIV sex is so painful for my wife, I can't possibly ask her to do that, so we just do other sexual things instead." I'm very happy to see men saying things like that! You don't need to do PIV, even if you're straight and married, and honestly if PIV is painful then you definitely SHOULDN'T do it- but good news, there are plenty of other sex things you can do! (Also, I think those men's wives would benefit from learning what vaginismus is- it's likely that they don't even know it's a real medical phenomenon and there are treatments for it. Once they know what it is, they can weigh the pros and cons of getting treatment, and make the decision that works for them.)</p><p>Here's another example from "The Great Sex Rescue"- an anecdote that comes from a comment on their blog or survey:</p><p></p><blockquote>My husband doesn't really care that he can't get an erection. He just shrugs it off as, "Well, I tried, but it just isn't working," and that's good enough for him. His doctor gave him blood pressure medication, and said, "It shouldn't be a problem now," and pushed us out the door. But it's still a problem, and my husband doesn't care. I'm barely forty, and we've been through a lot of stress, including the death of a child. We need this connection. Despite the fact that our sex life has never been fantastic, I'm not ready to be in a sexless marriage.</blockquote><p></p><p><b>My first thought when I was reading this was, if the lack of erection is the problem, well there are sex toys you can buy which can serve as a replacement. </b>But actually, I don't think that's the problem- <b>it seems like the actual problem is the husband isn't really interested in participating in sex at all, even though it's really important to the wife. </b>So if he's not even motivated enough to try harder to get an erection, he's likely also not motivated enough to use a sex toy to make his wife feel good.</p><p>But here's a thought experiment: Suppose you were having this problem, and I came along and said "well there are sex toys you can buy to serve as a replacement" and your reaction was "NO, absolutely NOT." First of all, okay, then don't do it, it's just a suggestion- this is all about figuring out what *you* want, and if you don't want to use a sex toy, then you shouldn't use a sex toy. And second, the fact that you are strongly rejecting my suggestion is actually a very useful thing- it gets you one step closer to figuring out what you actually want. <b>See, now we have a bit of information that we didn't have before:</b> in your opinion, there is something about using a dildo which is incredibly *different* than if it's your partner's actual body, and that difference is very important to you. Great, this is extremely useful information! <b>Now ask yourself, specifically, what about it is the key difference, for you? If you can articulate an answer to that question, you're well on your way to being able to communicate with your partner about what you actually want, and from there you can work out something that can work for both of you.</b></p><p><b>It shouldn't just be one partner saying "I want sex" and the other saying "I don't want sex" and concluding there's just nothing that can be done. (Or, concluding that the "I don't want sex" partner is the one in the wrong, like "The Great Sex Rescue" is doing in scenario 1.) "Sex" can be so many different things. Intimacy can be so many different things. There is plenty of opportunity to find overlap in your preferences, and exclude the aspects that you don't like.</b></p><p>Now, I should say here that I'm a sex-favorable asexual. Most aces are not sex-favorable- they may be sex-indifferent or sex-repulsed instead. So<b> maybe I'm portraying this too optimistically, and in reality it may be the case that sex-repulsed/ sex-indifferent aces won't be able to find a way to be compatible with a partner who wants sex. I personally don't know- feel free to leave a comment if you are sex-repulsed or sex-indifferent.</b></p><p><b>I definitely don't want anyone to take this to mean "see, aces CAN find a way to be okay with having sex" and then try to pressure someone into sex based on that. No, that's not what I said.</b> I said that if you really get into the specific details about what you do or don't like about sex, and what kind of intimacy is meaningful to you, you are likely to find some workable overlap with your partner. I didn't say that overlap is necessarily sex.</p><p><b>My view on this is influenced by what I've read from the kink/BDSM community about using checklists to find interests that you and your partner have in common, and plan your "scene" based on that.</b> It's a very logical idea- you have a list of a whole bunch of elements which may or may not be included in the actions you do with each other, and for each item on the list, you can mark yes/no/maybe. Then you compare your list with your partner's, and make a plan- anything you both marked "yes", you definitely do, and if there are some things that one person really wants, and the other person doesn't care one way or the other, then yeah sure include those too. Etc. And the things on the list can be "adventurous" sexual things, but they could also be mundane things, like, to what extent do you want to keep some of your clothes on? Do you want the lights on or off? Do you want to cuddle?</p><p>(But... for people from an evangelical background, who are taught that <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2017/09/christianity-selfishness-receipts.html">it's "sinful" to think deeply about what you want, and express those desires and expect people to care about them</a>... yeah, I know my advice here isn't possible, if you're coming from that mindset. So. That's the real problem.)</p><p>Even though I've never literally filled out such a list, or done BDSM stuff, this is basically the framework I'm using. It makes so much sense! <b>Which specific elements are important to you, and which do you want to avoid- and I don't mean just sex itself, I also mean things like, maybe there's some other kind of intimacy that's important to you, like you want your partner to read a novel out loud to you, so you can both enjoy it together. If that's important to you, then your partner should treat it as a high priority. Society expects people to treat sex as a high priority if their partner wants sex- well, how can Partner B expect sex from Partner A, while not making any effort to do the kinds of intimacy that Partner A values? Why does society treat Partner B's "need" for sex as more real?</b></p><p>Anyway, I wasn't intending to make this post "here's my advice for how to make an ace/allo relationship sexually compatible" because I think that's more complicated and difficult than what I'm presenting here. <b>I just want to give advice for some of the scenarios in "The Great Sex Rescue," where people don't seem to have even attempted to ask themselves the questions "What do I actually want from sex? Which aspects of it are important to me?"</b></p><p>"The Great Sex Rescue" is basically saying, [this is my paraphrase, not an actual quote] "If you're married, you have to have heteronormative PIV sex, and if there are issues that are stopping you from having heteronormative PIV sex, you need to work through those issues, and then you need to have heteronormative PIV sex, this is a requirement if you are married." Which, ugh, no. <b>Why on earth do you need to have sex, just because you're married? Why on earth do you need to have PIV? Why? There's no reason why it <i>has</i> to be that way. Now, if you *want* it to be that way, then yes, that would be a reason, that would make sense. So figure out what you want.</b></p><p>As I was reading this chapter, getting more and more frustrated with it, I thought to myself, "This is basically saying, 'Instead of being required to have sex because men need it, you're required to have sex because you have to as part of being married.'" And then, lo and behold, I get to the end of the chapter, where there's a little summary, and it literally says this:</p><p></p><blockquote>Instead of saying, "You need to make sex a priority because your spouse needs it," say, "Sex is vital to a healthy marriage. Make it a priority so you don't miss out on God's blessings for both of you."</blockquote><p></p><p>Oh COME ON.</p><p>Anyway. So. Well that's chapter 8 of "The Great Sex Rescue." I'd like to say, in my opinion, being queer is about figuring out your own identity and what you want. Knowing yourself. I'm so glad I'm queer.</p><p>---</p><p><i>Links to all posts in this series can be found here: <a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/05/blog-series-on-great-sex-rescue.html">Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"</a></i></p><p><i>Related:</i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/03/vaginismus-is-not-problem-in-and-of.html">Vaginismus Is Not A Problem, In And Of Itself</a><br /></i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2018/06/broken-asexual.html">Miss me with your "we are all sexually broken" hot takes. I'm asexual.</a> </i></p><p><i><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/05/separating-vaginismus-from-asexuality.html">Separating Vaginismus From Asexuality</a> <br /></i></p><p><a href="https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2023/10/reasons.html"><i>Reasons</i></a> <br /></p><p><i>And this link (<a href="https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/4153701?page=1&comment=1129938">via redbeardace</a>): <a href="https://annex.asexualactivities.com/partnered-activities/partnered-general-information/want-will-wont/">WANT/WILL/WON’T LIST</a> (specifically written for aces)</i></p>perfectnumber628http://www.blogger.com/profile/10303683510076315803noreply@blogger.com0