Blogaround

1. Police detain 50 after Pride march in Istanbul (June 26)

2. Zhongkao, Not Gaokao, Now the Make-or-Break Exam, Parents Say (June 26) "Part of the reason for parents’ anxiety is the zhongkao’s 50% pass rate as dictated by the Ministry of Education. Roughly half of middle school students go on to regular high schools, with the chance to take the gaokao three years later and be admitted to regular undergraduate universities, while the lower-scoring half either study in a vocational secondary school or drop out completely"

3. Will evangelicals be fooled by the ‘He Gets Us’ campaign? (June 27) Captain Cassidy found a "Christianity Today" article which turned out to be just an ad for the "He Gets Us" campaign.

4. Teach your kids about propaganda, or someone else will (June 26) "Teaching them critical thinking early on is essential. It’s like an intellectual vaccination, giving them a defense against all the toxic memes in the wilderness of the world."

5. When Did Jesus Mention Transgender, Intersex, and Asexual Folks? (June 19) and The Ethiopian Eunuch and Transgender, Intersex, & Asexual Folks (June 22) Very cool to see these posts about the biblical passages talking about God's acceptance of "eunuchs", and how there are similarities between "eunuchs" and modern-day transgender/intersex/asexual people. Obviously there are important differences too- but the point is, in the bible, there was more than just the gender binary and compulsory heterosexual marriage.

6. God Made them Male and Female…and Eunuch: Why the Biblical Case for Binary Gender Isn’t So…Biblical (2020) "Matthew’s Jesus does, however, recognize nonbinary gender in the grand finale of his teaching on divorce in a verse that conservatives routinely omit."

7. Woman Sues Anti-Abortion 'Pregnancy Center' After Her Ectopic Pregnancy Ruptured (June 26) "'Our client was forced to undergo a traumatic, dangerous, and completely avoidable emergency surgery to save her life because she was deceived into going to an anti-abortion clinic instead of an appropriate healthcare provider,' Liss-Riordan said. 'At every step of the way, she was led to believe she was receiving appropriate medical care when in fact she was subject to a campaign of misinformation and unfair and deceptive practices.'"

8. Fall Out Boy - Ghostbusters (I'm Not Afraid) (Audio) ft. Missy Elliott. Okay I'm sure I've shared this before, but here it is again. I love this cover of the Ghostbusters song SO MUCH.

"The Three-Body Problem" (a Chinese sci-fi series that's actually about science)

Book cover for "The Three-Body Problem." 

[this review does not contain spoilers, in my opinion]

Here's a sci-fi book series I recommend: The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death's End [affiliate links]. (The series of 3 books together is called "Remembrance of Earth's Past.") It's written by Chinese author Liu Cixin, and it's been translated to English. (And the English version also seems to be a bestseller.)

(Those links are Amazon links, but if you're in mainland China you can easily buy English or Chinese versions on Taobao for cheaper than the Amazon prices. The Chinese titles are "三体", "黑暗森林", and "死神永生".)

It's being made into a Netflix series too- here's the trailer.

Anyway, this post is my review of this book series.

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Science fiction that's truly based in science

These books are different from any other science fiction books/movies I've seen, because the plot truly does depend on science. Contrast this with something like Star Trek, for example- in Star Trek, they have phasers instead of guns, but phasers are just the space version of guns, and besides that they're basically the same as guns. And in Star Trek, the Enterprise is powered by crystals or something, I think? I forget the exact details, because in Star Trek it doesn't actually matter, the story just needs some sciency-sounding jargon there, but it doesn't need to make sense. The sci-fi elements are sort of an aesthetic layer put on top of a story that could happen anywhere.

The books in this series are different. The plot is very much based on the details of scientific concepts- some of them real, and some of them fictional. People who have studied physics/astronomy/relativity/etc will recognize a lot of the concepts in these books. Even the title of the first book, "The Three-Body Problem"- if you know a lot about physics, you likely know what the three-body problem is, and it's an important plot point in the book so I might even say it's a spoiler. (But not really that bad of a spoiler, because there's a lot more to it in the book- it explores a whole bunch of interesting things related to the three-body problem, and there's a whole plot.) Liu Cixin takes very real scientific concepts, and also extends them in fictitious ways.

The second book in the series is called "The Dark Forest"- and actually, "dark forest theory" is a real scientific theory that Liu Cixin significantly contributed to (though Wikipedia tells me that he didn't create it himself). I won't explain what it is here because it's kind of a spoiler- I'll just say it's related to the Fermi paradox. Actually, since reading these books, I have coincidentally come across a couple different articles on the internet that discuss dark forest theory, and they all reference Liu and his novel "The Dark Forest."

Another aspect of these books that felt truly grounded in science in a way I haven't seen in other sci-fi was the sheer hugeness of the times and distances. For example, at one point, some characters discover that something that happened in space could potentially threaten the earth. In a typical sci-fi movie, it would be like "we just discovered this potential threat, and IT'S GOING TO HAPPEN TOMORROW" - for plot reasons the time when you find out the bad thing is going to happen is extremely close to the time the bad thing happens. But no, in this series of books it's not like that. Something is discovered that could potentially threaten the earth, and it's going to happen in a few hundred years. The earth has a few hundred years to get ready. And then the book explores how society would deal with this information. The entire series of 3 books spans hundreds of years.

As for the distances- yeah, there are spaceships traveling very far, and there truly is a sense of how vast and empty and lonely space is. For example, at one point a spaceship is launched for a mission that will take 50 years, because of the incredible distance it needs to travel.

There are a lot of instances in this book where someone sends out a signal or a probe or something in space, and it takes years for it to reach its destination and take effect. The extreme degree of separation between the sender and the recipient. If you send something into space, by the time it arrives somewhere and does something, does it even matter to you any more? There are a lot of important characters in the story who never meet each other.

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References to Chinese and western history

Parts of the first book in the series are set in China during the Cultural Revolution, and the struggles and political pressures that the characters go through are important to the plot of the book. Also, there's this, which just about made me fall out of my chair laughing:

[Some background information: In this time period in China, people believed that the Chinese government represented "revolution" and that was a good thing, and western countries were "imperialist" and that was a bad thing.]

Message to Extraterrestrial Civilizations

First Draft [Complete Text]

Attention, you who have received this message! This message was sent out by a country that represents revolutionary justice on Earth! Before this, you may have already received other messages sent from the same direction. Those messages were sent by an imperialist superpower on this planet. That superpower is struggling against another superpower for world domination so that it can drag human history backwards. We hope you will not listen to their lies. Stand with justice, stand with the revolution!

[Instructions from the Central Leadership] This is utter crap! It's enough to put up big-character posters everywhere on the ground, but we should not send them into space.

["The Three-Body Problem", page 171]

(And then there's a translator's note that explains that the "big-character posters" are a thing in China. They're propaganda posters about the things that the government wants you to believe, basically.)

When I read that, I was like "wow can't believe this was published in China" and my husband was like "yeah I bet they won't put that part in the tv series." (It's being made into a Netflix series in English, and also it's been made into a Chinese tv series before.)

There are references to Chinese historical figures (like King Zhou Wen), western scientists (like Newton), famous art (like the Mona Lisa), and so on. I really like this, it's like, very aware of how these pieces of history and culture matter to society, and how they continue to shape the way people think. I like how there was a good mix of Chinese references and other culture's references. (Also, probably most of the characters are Chinese, but there's also a diverse mix of non-Chinese characters who are important too. I love Kent.)

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It was about how society works, rather than fast-paced action scenes and heroism

The way that Liu tells this story feels very unique to me, because he doesn't really focus on the emotions of individual characters. I would say that for most stories I've read/watched, it's about characters facing a challenging situation, and they make decisions out of courage and love, to save themselves and save others, and the writers really want the audience to feel the emotions of the characters, how difficult it is for them, how much they love their friends and family and would do anything to save them, etc- yeah, these books are not like that AT ALL. 

For most things that happen in these books, it's written like the reader is not meant to connect emotionally with the characters, but it's just showing you a thing that would inevitably happen when society is facing this kind of crisis. For example, there are several big disasters in these books, where thousands or millions of people die, and they're mainly described in broad terms, kind of a similar feeling to reading a news article. There are very very few such disasters in the books where the main characters that we care about are caught in the middle and have to decide how to face the danger.

There are a few characters whose feelings are described in enough detail that the reader would actually care about them- like Wang Miao and Luo Ji- but for most characters, and most things that happen, the way the story is told is not about caring about what the characters are going through. Instead, it's about exploring what would happen to human society when faced with a science-fiction-y crisis.

When I was reading these books, reading about various crises that different groups of characters went through, and how some of them died, I was just thinking about how if I was in a situation like that, even if I couldn't save myself, I would do anything to save my child. But we don't really see many characters thinking along those lines in these books. The human capacity for love is mentioned a few times, but it's much less important than game theory (we'll get to that). There are a few mentions of characters caring about their family members, but not many.

It makes me think about the vast opportunities for fanfic writers. The story spans hundreds of years, and a lot of things happened to a lot of people, and many of those big newsworthy events are only mentioned briefly. There's so much potential to write about ordinary people living through these events- how their lives were affected, how they felt about it. (And I'm checking Archive Of Our Own, and indeed, yes, there is a lot of fanfic there. Most of it is in Chinese. Interesting, because Archive Of Our Own is blocked in China. Also, I just did some googling and found out there's a fanfic that has actually been turned into a published novel and translated from Chinese to English by the same translator who worked on this series. Wow.)

Also, another thing that's very unique about this story is it didn't really use lucky timing as a way to increase the level of conflict in the story. Okay, I don't know if "lucky timing" is the right term (I kinda just made that up), but what I mean is this- I've seen lots of movies where the heroes are trying to figure something out, and then they finally figure it out, but by coincidence there's a group of bad guys who also figured it out at basically the same time. So the story's no longer about "can the heroes figure this out?" but it becomes "the heroes and bad guys both showed up at the place where the treasure [or whatever] is at the same time, and now they're having a shootout, and it's EXCITING because we don't know who will win." 

Yeah, these books are not like that at all. Instead, they're like, these characters are trying to figure something out, and then they have a scientific breakthrough that suddenly makes the problem extremely simple, so then when they actually go and implement their plan, the "bad guys" don't really stand a chance. So it's not "exciting" in an action-movie sense. And then later, the bad guys have their own scientific breakthrough, and so the heroes have no chance of defending themselves.

It seems that in most action movies, the heroes and the villains are pretty evenly-matched. Otherwise, there's no suspense about which side will win. (The real world is really not like that at all...) Well, in this series of books, it's not like that.

I will say, there was at least 1 event that happened in these books where the timing of it was extremely lucky and had major implications for the plot. But for the majority of the important events in these books, it wasn't about someone making a heroic split-second decision at just the right time. Instead, it was about societal trends, and scientific research making gradual progress for decades.

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Morality and game theory

There are things in these books that are very dark. There are situations where people are pushed into very extreme crises, which might not even be survivable, and basically what happens is determined by game theory. It's very survival-of-the-fittest, take-advantage-of-other-people-before-they-take-advantage-of-you, prisoner's dilemma, that sort of thing. There are mentions of cannibalism. Yeah, it's dark.

And, the terrifying thing is that these bad things don't happen because some villain decides to be evil or whatever. Instead, it's portrayed like these are the behaviors that will inevitably arise, according to game theory, when people are put into these situations. ("Game theory" basically means mathematically analyzing the benefits/costs/risks of different choices that one could make, and trying to determine the best strategy for how to interact with other people. Do you cooperate with other people, because you're in a situation where you benefit the most by being a trustworthy member of society? Or do you screw people over, because if you don't, you might not even survive?)

And there are characters in these books who are morally gray, who make decisions that many people would view as unethical, because they believe it truly will benefit humanity as a whole. For example, at one point, there is debate over what area of scientific research to invest money in, and one character believes that one of the research areas has a lot of potential to save humanity, and the other is basically a dead end. He ends up murdering some of the supporters of the rival research area. After that, because there are fewer supporters, the enthusiasm for that research area kind of dies out, and society decides to invest resources in his preferred research topic. Like... wow, that's messed-up that he murdered people- but what if it did really make the difference? What if he was right that that research area was a dead end, and the other one saves humanity?

There are also characters who could be described as naive, who have a strong sense of morality and always want to do the right thing, but their lofty ideals don't really fit the situation they're in. And Liu seems to be saying that it's not good to have that kind of perspective on morality. 

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Sexism

Unfortunately, there's a lot of sexism in these books. The way the female characters are written is not great. And something that stood out to me was the number of times a female character stood in front of some glowing thing (the setting sun, the window of a spaceship, etc) and a man admired the way her slim figure was silhouetted against it- like, that happened a weirdly high number of times, as if Liu Cixin doesn't know other ways to describe women.

In the part of the story set in the future, the book says that men in that futuristic culture are "less masculine" and that's a bad thing. Umm, what? Umm, masculinity is defined differently in every culture- it doesn't make sense to say that men in a certain culture or a certain time period are "less masculine" than a different culture or time period. Whatever the men are like, that's what masculinity is.

There's one part where a character meets people from the futuristic culture for the first time, and she incorrectly assumes the people she meets are all women, because in that culture, men look "more feminine" and that's apparently a bad thing. Like, come on. Just because an outsider isn't familiar with your society's gender norms, that doesn't mean masculinity is in decline. What on earth.

The book says the main problem with men becoming "less masculine" is that the men of that futuristic culture aren't able to courageously make those morally-questionable decisions which are necessary to ensure the survival of humanity. Uhh... ? And apparently it's taken for granted that women can't do that.

A Chinese friend told me that the translators who translated these books from Chinese to English made a lot of edits to get rid of sexist descriptions of women. Good job to the translators. (Here's an article from a Chinese news site along those lines.)

But the most glaring example of sexism, in my opinion, was this: There's a male character in these books who daydreams about an imaginary woman that he made up in his head. He's totally in love with her, or something. Then, he ends up meeting an actual real woman in the real world who fits the description of his imaginary dream woman, and he treats her like she actually is his perfect dream woman. He seems to believe her entire reason for existence is to fulfill his romantic fantasies. Like he doesn't realize that she has her own life, and she's NOT the nonexistent woman he fell in love with in his imagination.

Every thought he has about her is viewed through this lens of how amazing it is to be with her, to finally meet the woman he dreamed about for so long. He immediately takes up the role of the affectionate boyfriend who takes her on lavish romantic dates, etc. Even when she has a problem and needs help, he seems to think it's so cute, how she shivers in the cold and needs him to come and romantically bring her a coat and some hot tea and hug her.

It really reminds me of guys I knew in college, giving each other advice to take a girl on a date to a horror movie, so that when she's scared she'll snuggle against him. Very immature-teenager-who's-never-been-in-a-relationship-before. But in this book, this male character- who is an adult- seems to think he can build a whole relationship on that kind of shallow fantasy. Or rather, that he doesn't even need to build a relationship, because he already knows her- he's dreamed about her for so long!

I kept reading about their relationship, wondering "when is he going to realize she is a person?" And it never happened! They're in a long-term relationship, and the book mostly describes the beginning of the relationship, so maybe you could speculate that eventually he did figure out that she's a person but the book just didn't go into detail about that phase of their relationship... but... Like, wow, does Liu Cixin not realize that this male character totally sees this woman as a one-dimensional object, and that's a problem? 

I just can't get over it. Didn't she ever complain about anything? Didn't she ever get mad at him? Did she ever get sick and throw up and he needed to clean it up? All things that happen in a real relationship with a real person, but aren't very romantic.

Anyway, I just did some googling and found there are a lot of articles out there about the problems with how Liu writes female characters. Yeah. For me, it didn't affect my overall enjoyment of the books, but it made me go "well, this is a bit ridiculous" a few times.

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Summary

In summary, I recommend these books to people who like science and want to read a long fictional series. I love how the story incorporated a lot of science concepts which are real things that I learned in high-level science classes in college, and how the plot of the story is completely dependent on the science. The books also have a lot to say about how society works- how humans as a group would respond to these big space crises. And it brings up interesting ideas about morality, game theory, and how society will change in the future.

Blogaround

1. Journal Club: Trauma and Femininity in the DSM (June 21) "It doesn’t really matter what the women patients want. They’re trying to change their desires because that’s what their male partners want."

2. From Hot Pot to Milk Tea, Chinese Influencer Praised For Exposing False Advertising (June 21) "Some of his most popular videos see him and his friends using weighing scales to check whether hot pot restaurants are serving the same amount of meat as is advertised. More often than not, they find that the meat is not the advertised amount, despite promises from waiters that the meat has been weighed beforehand."

3. The Problems with Power of a Praying Wife: With Download (June 21) "Frames prayer as the key to changing a marriage, even a destructive one with alcoholism or abuse, placing the responsibility for ending a husband’s destructive behaviors on the wife."

4. We need to talk about Jessa Duggar and this "abortion" controversy… (March 4) 16-minute video from Mama Doctor Jones. Jessa Duggar had a miscarriage, and was treated with a D&C, and then people on twitter posted a lot of angry tweets about how Jessa had an abortion and this is so hypocritical because the Duggar family is very politically active in trying to deny people the right to have an abortion. Mama Doctor Jones talks about the words used- miscarriage, abortion, D&C- and how they have different definitions depending on if they're used socially, medically, or politically. And, she says, we need to have compassion for people who lose a wanted pregnancy, as well as compassion for people with an unwanted pregnancy.

5. I think it's always important to consider context and priorities when talking about strategies for advancing political goals. (June 21) "Because we really don't have to and definitely shouldn't be choosing between 'let me explain oh so politely why I deserve dignity and autonomy, or even just survival, but I'll stop if you think it's too annoying' and 'stop making me do emotional labor and Google it--everything I say is infallibly true and you should interrogate yourself if you disagree'."

6. Could You Not Stay Woke? (April 2) [content note: anti-black violence] "But folk did not stay awake. If you woke up when Tyre Nichols was chased down and hunted for sport in the street like an animal, you woke up because you were sleeping on police violence against black and brown folk when it wasn’t in the news every day. Could you not stay awake one hour? Could you not stay woke one hour?"

7. Misogyny, the SBC, and Beth Moore (June 16, via) [content note: mentions of Trump and sexual harassment] "I honestly think Beth’s fate was sealed from the moment that she disclosed she was a survivor of sexual abuse, and that women had been telling her their own stories of survivorship for decades – often for the first time. Beth did not say this to highlight the dangers of secularism, or to encourage women to stay home, or to advance any cause that patriarchy might have accepted. She said to advocate for women. To say that more care needs to be diverted towards women, that women are beings with needs and rights and things they deserve, was always an offense that Beth was going to pay for."

8. On the 11,000 virgin martyrs, iconography, and beauty standards (June 20) "This makes for some pretty incredible pictures where dozens upon dozens of completely identical women set out with St Ursula, who also looks exactly like them but has a crown."

9. Pastor walks out after Christian Reformed Church synod passes anti-LGBTQ+ resolution (June 20) "The next day, the elder Struyk walked to the podium and said, 'Because of the message we sent to many LGBTQ+ people—including my son—I will be leaving synod in protest' and, with that, he walked out the door."

2023 Reader Survey Results

A woman sitting with a laptop, with the word "BLOG" on the wall next to her. Image source.

Hi readers! Thank you to everyone who took my 2023 Reader Survey (from this post). I appreciate the feedback about what topics people are interested in, and also a lot of people gave me a lot of nice comments, so thank you!

Here's a summary of the topics that people said they liked:

Range of topics

I'll put this one first because it's meta. Yeah, I like to have a big range of topics. In my head I still think of this as "a Christian blog" more than anything else, but, uh, if you look at the most recent bunch of posts, they are about A LOT OF THINGS. And in the past year or so, I've decided to write about asexuality more, but I don't want it to just be "an ace blog", I want it to be A LOT OF THINGS.

Asexuality

Asexuality was the topic mentioned the most in the survey responses. I have a lot to say about it (and right now I'm doing the series on "The Great Sex Rescue" so you can expect a lot of ace-related opinions about that on the blog). Also, I think it's great that I've been able to connect with other ace bloggers that I found through The Asexual Agenda.

China and/or covid

A lot of people are interested in hearing about life in China. (I used to do more blog posts with photos I took at various interesting places in China- see the "travel" tag- maybe I should do more of that.) And a lot of the survey responses also mentioned my writing about covid in China. Yeah, that's something that I don't really want to write about, but I have to because people in other countries really don't have any idea what's going on here. (That was more true during zero-covid- now things are probably generally the same as in other countries, but in China people wear masks a lot more than in the US, I noticed.)

And I had to blog about the 2022 Shanghai lockdown because that was a historical event, but wowww it was bad living through that. It got to the point where it was the 2nd-worst lockdown China had had (the worst was the first Wuhan lockdown). But then, months after the Shanghai lockdown ended, some other cities had lockdowns which were even worse than Shanghai's. Sometimes I remember little things about what it was like... like when I managed to buy a huge bulk package of toilet paper, so I sold toilet paper to the neighbors for 3 rmb per roll. How did we live that way?

ANYWAY, yeah, I'd like to do more posts about traveling to interesting places in China. And maybe some about Chinese culture.

My Christianity, the bible, and bible fanfic

So, some readers are interested in the Christianity I believe in now (a different thing from the Christianity I used to believe in, which I've written about a lot). This is something I also want to write about more- and I have a few recent-ish posts like "You Weren't There, the Night Jesus Found Me" and Sure Of What We Hope For which are about that. But also, I kind of don't know what to say? Like... I just always feel this awe of God... but if I write that down, I'm going to ask myself "but what's the point of writing this?" You know, like the apostle James said, "So what if you believe God exists? Even demons believe that."

But also, some of the survey responses mentioned my posts about the bible, and yeah I can write about that, I have things to say about that. I am very interested in readings of the bible from a feminist Christian/ queer Christian perspective. (Related post: No One Can Take The Bible From Me)

And my bible fanfics! Some readers love these, and I was very happy to hear that. I am like, obsessed with the idea of bible fanfic. I have 2 fanfics I've been working on. So stay tuned for those.

And also 1 person said they want to read more about parenting as an ex-evangelical. Yes, I plan to write more about that. Because I'm a Christian and I want to introduce Christianity to my child, but wowwww a lot of the stuff I was taught as a child in church is just not healthy at all. 

I've bought a few Christian books for my son, and I plan to post reviews of them to say whether or not I'd recommend them, as an ex-evangelical Christian. Probably in the next 1-2 months I'll have a post about one of the books.

Evangelicalism, purity culture

So when I first started blogging, most of my posts were about evangelicalism and purity culture. But I am glad that I've moved past that, and I don't need to keep talking about it. Like if I saw a blog post right now that was like "I don't want to believe in hell, but... what's the point of being a Christian if there is no hell? Well I have come up with 3 answers to that question," I probably wouldn't read it. It feels like old news. But back in 2012, I needed that. I needed to read posts about that, and I needed to write posts about it.

So now, I only write about those topics when something happens that demands a response (like this: This May Be The Most WTF Christian Article On Sex I've Ever Read). Or when I see a movie and there's some aspect of it that reminds me of evangelical ideology- like Dr. Strange's Ways Are Higher Than Our Ways. Or, I write about purity culture specifically through the lens of asexuality (lol can you believe most of my best purity culture posts, I wrote before I knew I was ace?), or marriage (like my posts about "The Great Sex Rescue", which is about how purity ideology affects married women). Things that affect my life now.

(And I've been watching "Shiny Happy People", the documentary on the Duggar family, and I do plan to write a post on that.)

Autism

Recently I haven't written about autism as much as I used to. In 2023 I wrote Boundaries With Dentists and I Figured Out What The 1-10 Pain Scale Is Actually About, but you have to scroll back several years to find more of my autism posts besides those. (Okay, and actually, I think there's a connection between my autism and vaginismus, so maybe those posts count too...) For me, it is the hardest thing emotionally to write about (but also I'm glad to hear from readers who found those posts helpful). I do have an idea for at least 1 autism post in the near future.

Okay, so that sums up the main topics that people mentioned. Whenever I do these surveys, I always hope someone will ask for some very niche thing that's within the range of things I write about, like "what is it like to have a bilingual child" or "remember in 2019 you wrote about how American Christians think they're the objective observers of the world, as if they don't have their own culture, can we get more content about that?" Lol, not sure why I'm hoping for that; everyone basically lists big overall topics instead. But hey actually I should totally write a post about having a bilingual child. And the "objectivity" thing I'm still super-interested in, just haven't caught any recent examples of it.

I also asked a just-for-fun question: Where does Ryder get the money to buy all the gear for the Paw Patrol? (Because my son has watched way too much Paw Patrol.) Here are my 3 favorite answers from y'all:

I’ve never seen Paw Patrol but I’m going to go with he found DB Cooper’s lost bank robbery money and kept the stash

Civil asset forfeiture?

I’ve assumed he’s a multimillionaire heir like Batman

All very good ideas!

Also, I'm interested in my readers' religious identities. The results were about half Christian, half atheist/agnostic/none, and then a few people from other religions. I feel like this is pretty cool, and basically is what I was hoping for, because Christianity and atheism have influenced me the most.

And one more thing, I have a patreon. I post photos there occasionally. Very occasionally. Usually photos of some interesting thing I saw in China.

Okay, that sums up the survey! Thank you to everyone who filled it in ^_^

Blogaround

A drawing that shows Jesus carrying a sheep which is the colors of the trans flag. Another sheep says, "Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Hold it right there! He wasn't lost. We kicked him out!" Jesus answers, "I know. And I found her." Image source.

1. In China’s Weight Loss Camps, a Dangerous Obsession With Numbers (June 13) [content note: disordered eating, fat shaming] "Boards displaying the daily weight of each participant were prominently displayed throughout the camp, emphasizing the significance placed on weight as the primary measure of success."

2. One True Ace Pairing: Wreck-It Ralph (June 16) "Ralph and Vanellope’s relationship, which is very much a friendship, is just as well developed and well explored and given as much attention (if not more) as any romantic relationship in similar movies (including the romantic pairing in the same movie, Felix and Calhoun, whose relationship was played for laughs anyways)."

3. I Entered Mr Universe - With No Training (June 5) A video from Max Fosh, a youtuber who does all kinds of ridiculous things, bluffs his way into so many weird situations, seems to have way too much confidence for his own good. My husband and I are fans of his videos- they are also posted to his channel on the Chinese video site bilibili.

4. Direct-mail fundraiser Pat Robertson is dead (June 19) "The most successful 'radio evangelists' were/are — like 'televangelists' and like Pat Robertson — people who primarily used the platform as a tool for raising the funds needed to expand the outreach of the platform. Actual 'ministry' or 'evangelism' in this model is always, at best, a secondary concern."

And this tweet:

i don’t believe in hell but it will feel like hell for people like pat robertson when they encounter the love of god for the first time

— Mason Mennenga (@masonmennenga) June 8, 2023

5. Massachusetts town adds polyamory protections (April 6) Cool!

6. The Ones Who Walk Away from Ocabos: What #whySBC really means (June 20) "Others weep in confusion. They don’t understand that everyone knows the child is there. They think that if they can only raise awareness, force the people of Ocabos to understand, then everyone will reject whatever foul force allowed the imprisonment and abuse of that child."

7. A tale of two vessels lost at sea (June 20) "On a superficial level, these two events at sea speak to the vastly different worlds in which human beings live: some getting to pursue and even die for their dreams and passions; some driven by extreme life circumstances into cruel, anonymous deaths."

8. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is fighting a losing battle against the site's moderators (June 20) "Moderators of many of Reddit’s most popular subreddits, however, began revolting after it became clear that the company wouldn’t merely target the biggest artificial intelligence firms but also smaller developers like Apollo, which makes an alternative mobile app experience of Reddit, and third-party moderation tools they depend upon to monitor their communities."

9. First in the nation gender-affirming care ban struck down in Arkansas (June 20) "'Rather than protecting children or safeguarding medical ethics, the evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients and that, by prohibiting it, the State undermined the interests it claims to be advancing,' the ruling reads. 'The testimony of well-credentialed experts, doctors who provide gender-affirming medical care in Arkansas, and families that rely on that care directly refutes any claim by the State that the Act advances an interest in protecting children.'"

And this quote from later in the article: "The court found three of the state's witnesses had been recruited at a meeting of the Christian advocacy organization Alliance Defending Freedom held specifically to gather witnesses trained in various fields that would be willing to testify in favor of laws passed that limit transgender care." Ewww gross, how will I explain ADF to my children? (I used to support ADF- they are an offshoot of Focus on the Family. And their entire schtick is bearing false witness against queer people made in the image of God. Eww.)

10. You may have grown up evangelical in the 90's if you saw a trailer for the new Marvel movie "Secret Invasion" and then you couldn't get this song out of your head:

[content note: video shows Jesus' crucifixion]

Michael W. Smith - Secret Ambition

Donate to Formerly Incarcerated People

Clip-art image I found for prisoner reentry- it shows 2 clip-art people getting out of prison and starting to walk down a road that leads to a cute house, but there is a barrier on the road. Image source.

So, I read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness [affiliate link] (my review is here) and now the question is, what should we do about it? The book says that meaningful change can't happen through gradual steps- the entire system needs to be overturned. This is true, but, for now there must at least be some small things we can do to help.

One specific issue is helping people who have been in prison to re-enter society. And there are charities that are working in this area, so, let's donate to them.

I have to say, personally, this felt weird to me. Donating to help people who are in a bad situation because they committed crimes. Aren't there plenty of other charities I could donate to, to help people who are in need and did not commit crimes?

It's like... I seem to have this bad psychological hangup about charity, where I only want to give money to people who are "perfect victims." And I'm sure it's not just me- this must be a really common thing, because ads for charities always emphasize how innocent and helpless the starving children are- like needing to portray the recipients of charity in the most extreme ways, to try to get more money from the donors. Like they're one-dimensional people who don't have anything to do besides be sad about whatever problem the charity is meant to fix. And I feel like there's something really wrong about this... like a mismatch between donors' impressions of what giving to charity means, and the actual reality. Because in reality, recipients of charity are real people with complicated lives, who have made good and bad decisions- just like all of us. But if the donors saw that, then they wouldn't donate money. 

Or maybe it feels like there's a difference between charities that help with problems that could happen to anyone (illness, natural disaster) vs problems that are just the result of living in poverty. Like, I don't think people wonder if cancer patients "deserve" medical treatment. But if your problems come as a result of your poverty, people will ask why you didn't make better decisions with your money.

Anyway, as Michelle Alexander says in "The New Jim Crow," it's an oversimplification to say "well they shouldn't have committed a crime." The system of policing and mass incarceration is designed to set people up to fail- specifically targeting black people. And people who re-enter society after finishing their time in prison deserve to have a fresh start, but the system makes it difficult for them to get the resources and support they need. In an ideal world, we wouldn't have to donate to charities to address this problem, but here we are, it's a real problem, and they deserve help.

So anyway, I've googled a bit and rounded up these links. Please share more links in the comment section, if you know of other organizations helping people in this area.

---

Some organizations I've found by doing a quick google (I searched "charity for formerly incarcerated people"):

Legal Services for Prisoners with Children

The Fortune Society

Prison Scholar Fund

Refoundry

A New Way of Life Reentry Project 

The Lionheart Foundation

--- 

Related:

"The New Jim Crow"

Recurring Donations

The Great Sex Rescue: Down With Gender Roles!

Image text: "Dads: If I have a daughter, I'm not playing dressup. Dads after having a daughter:" and it's a picture of Thor with his hammer but his armor has turned pink and has Hello Kitty on it. Image source.

Links to all posts in this series can be found here: Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"

---

We are now in the second half of chapter 2 of The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You've Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended [affiliate link]. This section is about how you shouldn't let gender roles dictate your marriage. Just be yourselves, instead of being what a woman "should" be or what a man "should" be.

Here's an interesting finding from our research: Women who do not believe traditional gender roles are moral imperatives feel more heard and seen in their marriages. In fact, women who act out the typical breadwinner-homemaker dynamic also feel more seen if they see it as a choice and not a God-given role.

Does this mean that it's wrong to have a breadwinner and a stay-at-home spouse? Nope. All three of us writing this book specifically chose careers that would allow us to be home with our kids. But when we unquestioningly buy into traditional gender roles, we create a strange dynamic in marriage in which we view each other as categories rather than people. We are all made with unique strengths, giftings, and callings, and these do not always fit with traditional gender roles. When a couple makes decisions based on who God created them to be versus who gender roles say they should be, it allows them to live in God's plan for their lives while feeling known and valued. Trying to live up to gender roles can mean that we're not fully ourselves; we're wearing a mask, and sometimes that mask doesn't fit.

Okay, 3 things I want to say about this:

First: Yes! I agree with all of this!

Second: Wait, isn't this obvious? Why does this need to be said? The bar is on the floor. 

Third: But, sadly, yes, this DOES need to be said. For women coming from a conservative Christian background, they really have been taught that there are certain things that women have to do, and certain things that men have to do, and God said so. (This ideology is called complementarianism- the idea that men are women have different roles that "complement" each other. And therefore women can't be pastors, or something.) Yes, seriously, this is a real ideology... "biblical manhood" and "biblical womanhood" and people really do buy into it. I bought into it, because I was taught that this is what Christians have to believe/ this is what the bible says. (Later, I discovered that actually yes, there do exist Christians who believe in equality between men and women. Thank you Rachel.)

So yes, I'm glad this book says that you should be yourself, rather than trying to force yourself into a role based on your gender. Because that literally is something that the evangelical church is teaching, and it needs to be addressed.

Relatedly, this is one of the main reasons I'm glad I don't go to church anymore. Because in churches, you meet people who believe women can't be pastors, and other misogynist nonsense, and you're supposed to act like that's a perfectly fine opinion for a Christian to hold. They're just doing their best to follow the bible, and we have to be respectful of that. Oh BLAH. I am NOT HERE FOR THAT. (For more on that, see my post The Church is a Safe Place for Awful Beliefs and Samantha Field's post the pitfalls of the middle ground.)

(Also, I think that same-sex couples have an advantage here, because they don't necessarily have predefined "roles" that they are supposed to force themselves into. Though to some extent those roles do get re-created in gay culture- for example, the idea that a gay man has to be either a "top" or a "bottom" and that apparently means something about what role he has in the relationship.)

The next section of this chapter is about gender hierarchy- ie, the idea that the husband has to be the "leader." Yes, really, this is another thing that complementarian Christians teach, and back then I totally bought into it because I didn't realize I had other options. 

(Do you EVEN KNOW how much time Christian college-age girls spend parsing the finer points of "the man has to be the spiritual leader"? Debating questions like "Is it a sin if the girl is the one who makes the first move, to ask the guy out?" [The answer I heard was, maybe it's not a sin but it's a bad idea- if your relationship is going to lead to marriage, then at that point he will need to be "the leader", and if he can't even be the "leader" of the first step, then that's not a good sign.] Figuring out ways to carefully drop hints to indicate interest in dating a guy, because we're not "allowed" to just tell him directly. Asking yourself "could I submit to his leadership?" when trying to decide whether to date someone. Believing that being more devoted to Jesus makes me less able to find a compatible husband, because where am I gonna find a guy who knows the bible better than I do? Ughhh let's just stop all that and communicate honestly like healthy people. [Spoiler: I married a non-Christian and I'm SO GLAD for that.])

I believed that the wife was supposed to "submit" to the husband. I believed that a good godly husband would not abuse this power- yes, he holds the final decision-making power in the marriage, and he would be able to overrule his wife's position, but in general he shouldn't do that. That would only be in a worst-case scenario, when they've been discussing something over and over and still can't agree. In all other situations, they should make the decision together.

That's how it was explained to me, back then. And I've heard people say, that in the ideal case, complementarian marriages are functionally egalitarian. ("Egalitarian" is the "opposite" of complementarian- it means the husband and wife are equal, and don't have to force themselves to follow gender roles. [Note, however, that this is still in the context of hetero marriage- egalitarians may or may not affirm queer people.]) In other words, the couple says they believe "the husband is the leader, and the wife has to submit" but in the actual practical reality of their marriage, they always make decisions together- they never have a situation where the husband pulls rank.

So at best, complementarian marriages are egalitarian, and at worst, the husband can abuse the wife as much as he wants and the church will just tell her she needs to "submit" more. 

Anyway, yes, complementarian ideology is BAD. Gregoire and her co-authors are explicitly taking a stand against it.

Love & Respect, for instance, claims that "to set up a marriage with two equals at the head is to set it up for failure. That is one of the big reasons that people are divorcing right and left today." A common thread among all these books is that marriages without a tiebreaker are doomed to fail because relationships need someone to be in charge.

Yes, really. Popular Christian marriage resources really are teaching this. They say the idea that you can be equals and always make decisions together is just impossible, absurd, it would never work. Yes, really- and I used to believe that because they said it came from the bible, so I thought I had to believe it. (Fact check: No it does not, and no I do not.) They said there's no way a marriage can work unless the man is the leader, and I couldn't really make sense of what that would look like in reality, and it didn't seem right, but I thought "well these people are married and I am not, so I guess they know what they're talking about, and my intuition on this is wrong." 

I'm glad I quit believing that, well before I got married. And now it is so GOOD and LIFE-GIVING for me to see people on the internet (for example, Dr. Laura Robinson on twitter) talking about how ridiculous it is that these complementarian men really can't imagine a relationship working unless one person has power over the other. Like, what on earth? Doesn't this say more about them than it does about the objective nature of marriage?

Also, can I say something about power dynamics here? There should be a class in school where they teach high school kids how to avoid signing contracts which are unfair to them. You know, the things you need to know about how the real world works. If someone presents a contract for you to sign, and the contract says that this other party holds a ton of power over you, and they tell you oh don't worry, they are nice and wouldn't really do those things to you, even though the contract says they totally can- YOU RUN. That is a HUGE goddamn red flag. 

For example, when I was getting ready to move to China, I read a lot of people's stories on the internet, about how they moved to China to teach English, but their employer turned out to be shady, and the employer kept their passport "for safekeeping" and was able to exploit them, being an immigrant in China, unable to speak the language, and without access to their own passport. DO NOT let your employer keep your passport. Like, yeah I'm sure if you say you're not willing to let them keep your passport, they will be all sad about "you don't trust us" and how you're being a bad person for implying that they would abuse that power... RUN. A reasonable person will understand that you feel unsafe with that kind of power dynamic. An abuser would act like you taking common-sense steps to protect yourself is a personal attack on them.

In the same way, if someone claims that "God says" the man has to have all the power in the marriage, but don't worry, if he is a good Christian man he would never do anything bad with that power- NO, JUST NO. You should never get into a situation with this kind of power dynamic. Red flags everywhere.

So, in other words, I very much agree with what Gregoire and her co-authors are saying in this section here. It is NOT COOL that women are expected to force themselves into certain gender roles, to limit themselves- when you leave that behind and just be yourself, everything gets so much better. And, it is NOT COOL that Christian leaders teach that the husband is supposed to be the "leader" in a marriage. Gregoire says that when the husband and wife are equal, the statistics say the wife will have better sexual satisfaction than if she has to "submit" and has no guarantee that any of her opinions matter to her husband. I can't really speak to that, but yeah sure, good for them.

It's unfortunate that this needs to be said. But yes, it needs to be said.

---

Links to all posts in this series can be found here: Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"

Related:

"Desiring God" Goes Full Toxic Masculinity 

Boundaries in Dating: Definitely Not Complementarian

Boundaries in Dating: Don't submit too much

Blogaround

1. My 2023 Reader Survey will be open until June 19. Thank you to everyone who has already taken it!

2. Asexual and Aromantic People Are Often Forgotten, But God Sees Us (June 1, via) "Imagine a God who didn’t need a romantic and sexual relationship, whether in the heavens or incarnate here on earth. Imagine a God who told the church to honor singleness so that the people could be freer to serve around the known world. Imagine a God who told the church be a new kind of family that was united not by bloodlines, but by providing for and embracing the orphans, widows, the sick, the abandoned, the meek, and the 'least of these.' Imagine a God who made aromantic and asexual people fully human, imago dei, without being defined by the drive for sex and romance."

3. Yasmin Benoit is NYC Pride’s first asexual grand marshal & she’s ready to change the status quo (June 7) "So in the UK, if you did want to use asexuality as grounds for discrimination or grounds for access to something or grounds to escape something, you can’t. Because it doesn’t exist in society’s eyes. Technically, it’s pretty much a disorder over here."

4. Yeah this pretty much sums up my religion:

one of the beautiful things about the queer community is it does many of the things christianity should do

— Mason Mennenga (@masonmennenga) June 10, 2023

5. Pat Robertson, Televangelist Who Blamed Gay People for 9/11 and Hurricanes, Dies (June 8) Yes this is the correct way to write his obituary.

This one too: Pat Robertson Leaves Behind Legacy of Hatred & ‘Untold Damage’ (June 8)

6. The Myth of "Male Socialization" (May 19) "Especially those seen as white men. Trying to fill the function of a man. And as a result they get resentful. We get angry. We're doing all the right things, we're trying to be this thing that strips us of everything, and yet we still aren't doing it good enough. We don't see our purpose being fulfilled. We can't be who we're supposed to be. And we aren't even given the tools to express who we actually are. So we're just angry. Angry at everything." 1-hour-49-minute video from Jessie Gender.

7. One Of The Best (& Easiest?) Logic Puzzles Ever (June 4) 35-minute fillomino solve video.

8. Asexual Seduction in Some Like It Hot (June 10) "Some Like It Hot prominently features a subplot where a man seduces a woman by pretending that he's asexual. This gambit combines multiple different ploys to appeal to her, but a core part of it involves him presenting himself as passive, pitifully dysfunctional, and in need of sexual intervention. And the weirdest thing about that? It works. Because, like I said, this is a movie where people are attracted to people who don't want them back."

9. Taylor Swift - Delicate (2018) I like this song.

10. Male Passivity: Does the Danvers Statement See the Problem the Right Way? (June 13) "In the video, Crowder sits smoking a cigar while he orders his eight-months-pregnant-with-twins wife to give the dog its medication and accuses her of a lack of respect when she tries to suggest it might be better if he do it. He is the very picture of passivity, relaxing while others work around him, but do we see the Gospel Coalition or Desiring God or any other bastion of the Evangelical Industrial Complex decrying Crowder for his horrible behavior?  The silence is both deafening and telling."

"The New Jim Crow"

Book cover for "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" by Michelle Alexander. Image source.

I very much recommend the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness [affiliate link], by Michelle Alexander. This book was originally published in 2010; the version I read was the 10th anniversary edition, published in 2020. 

This book has had a big impact; it helped to start the Black Lives Matter movement. Personally, I think Americans- especially white Americans- should all read this. There's so much in here, so many very good points that Alexander makes, and I can't write about all of them in 1 book-review blog post. So go read the book.

In this blog post I'll mention some of the points that felt important to me- but seriously, there's SO MUCH to say. Go read the book.

---

Systems of control - from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration

So, the idea is that American society has moved from one racialized system of control to another, several times throughout history. Each time one system falls, white people come up with another one to replace it.

The key thing here, I would say, is that just because one system of control becomes outlawed, doesn't mean that society believes in equality between white and black people. And this was something I totally never *got*, when I learned about this in school- and I wrote about it when I reviewed "The Cross and the Lynching Tree", in this post: Ending Slavery Didn't Address the Real Problem. Slavery ended, but a significant percentage of white people believed it would be just wrong for black people to have equal rights, so they came up with something else to control black people- Jim Crow. And then, similarly, when Jim Crow ended, well, you weren't allowed to say racist things directly, but you could talk about being "tough on crime" and "the war on drugs" and create a new racialized system of control in that way.

The United States has never really repented of slavery and Jim Crow. We just... pretend they don't matter any more. And that's why a new racialized system of control- mass incarceration- came to exist. In the book, Alexander says we can't solve this problem with little gradual steps. It requires a total overhaul of the whole system. The United States needs to really face the reality of this, and make it right.

So, what exactly do we mean by "mass incarceration" being a "racialized system of control"? In some urban areas in the US, the majority of black men are under state control- this includes prison or probation. And it's not just about spending time in prison- the real problem is that people who have a criminal record are then excluded from participating in society. They become part of an invisible underclass, and it's perfectly legal to discriminate against them. If you have a felony conviction, it's nearly impossible to get a job. Or have access to education, or public housing, etc. In some states, people who have a felony conviction can't vote, or need to pay a paperwork fee to get their voting rights reinstated- Alexander calls this a "poll tax," like the poll taxes that black people had to pay during Jim Crow.

Also, people with a felony conviction can't participate in jury duty. I was surprised to see jury duty being mentioned so many times in the book. In my experience, Americans don't like getting summoned for jury duty, because it means you have to miss a few days of work. I often hear about people trying to come up with some excuse so they don't have to do it. But here in this book, Alexander keeps saying that this is a right that's being taken away from many black people due to their criminal record. That "a jury of their peers" is very important- and it's wrong that people who actually have experience with the problems of the legal system are excluded from being on juries.

So this is the real issue- people are being separated into an "undercaste" based on race.

---

Colorblind

Now, of course, people will ask, how is this a "racialized" system of control? The law is colorblind. Well, yes, but police have a lot of discretion in terms of how they enforce the law. Statistically, white and black Americans use illegal drugs at similar rates, but black people are arrested for it much more often, and receive harsher sentences than white people.

Also, Alexander says that, for the system to be perpetuated, it does need some black people to be successful. This racial system of control relies on the fact that people don't notice it's a racial system of control- therefore it requires that some black people are successful. (Similarly, some white people are also jailed and suffer in the same ways that black people do.) The system relies on the idea of "colorblindness."

And therefore, Alexander says we cannot achieve real justice by being "colorblind." Go read the book- she makes a lot of good points here.

---

But they're criminals

I'm glad that this book addressed the "but they're criminals" argument. Yes, so... there are some innocent people who get arrested, and it's easy to get people to have sympathy for them- but the majority of black people in jail for drug-related crimes really did commit those crimes. Obviously there are arguments to be made about how it's not right to put people in jail for non-violent crimes, or how getting involved with drugs one time shouldn't mean you can never get a job ever again- but, yeah, at the end of the day, it's going to be hard to get the public to care about this, because "well they shouldn't have committed a crime."

So, yes, they shouldn't have committed a crime. But the whole system is set up to make people fail. (And it punishes black people for their failures more than white people.) That's the problem.

This is a difficult thing, and it makes it hard to get public opinion on your side. Makes me think about how the Black Lives Matter movement specifically choose the slogan "Black Lives Matter"- I remember seeing an article years ago that said we should NOT use arguments like "he was one of the good ones." Because the idea behind Black Lives Matter is, people don't deserve to get shot down on the street by police for some little minor crime. It's not about if the person is perfect/ has a criminal record/ whatever.

In our society now, people talk about "criminals" like they're a completely separate type of people, who don't deserve anything good. That's what Alexander means when she says this is an "underclass" and it is legal to discriminate against them.

---

Some outrageous things

So, there are some things about the police system that are just so outrageous they should make everyone angry.

For example, the book talks about police and "consent"- ie, courts have ruled that "a reasonable person" would know that if a police officer asks them to do something, they have the right to say no, therefore it's fine if police stop you for no reason at all and search you- as long as they kinda phrase it as a question and you kinda are too scared to say no.

There have been court cases where police searched people and found drugs, and the people who had drugs try to argue in court that this evidence should not be allowed, because the police violated their rights when they stopped them for no reason and searched them. Yeah, like I said, it's hard to get public opinion on their side here, because they really were doing illegal things and they're arguing that they shouldn't get in trouble because... the way they got caught wasn't valid??? 

But as I see it, that's not the actual issue. The issue is that police are stopping and harassing black people for made-up reasons. Most of these people were not doing anything wrong, so they don't get arrested or anything- but still, very traumatic to get harassed by police like that. It's not okay- but it's not something that's going to become a high-profile legal case. The ones that become actual legal cases in the headlines are the people who really were guilty of something. So... so that's the difficult thing, in terms of getting society to see that this is a problem. 

The issue is, if a court rules that it's fine for police to stop and search whoever they're "suspicious" of, that will lead to more innocent black people being harassed by police.

Another outrageous thing: Because of mandatory minimum sentencing, innocent people plead guilty, to avoid going to court. Yeah, so... imagine you are innocent, and then you get charged with a crime that has a mandatory minimum sentence of 5 years in prison, if it goes to court and you're found guilty. In this situation, people may decide to take a deal where, instead of going to court, they plead guilty and get a much lighter sentence, because they don't want to take the risk of going to court. (And then, because they have a criminal record, they won't be able to get a job, etc... They're permanently stuck in the "invisible undercaste.")

This is just ridiculous, and everyone should be angry that this is happening. 

Also, sometimes people plead guilty because they just don't have any resources to deal with going to court, can't take any time off work- their life circumstances force them to take the option that will get things done the fastest.

And then people lose their job, and then get evicted from their home because they have a criminal record, then lose custody of their kids because they don't have a home- and they might not even be able to stay at a relative's home because the relative could be evicted for associating with someone who has a drug conviction. It's just outrageous how something like this can totally spiral out of control and mess up everything in a person's life.

---

If you've ever applied for a job, you should know this is real

Even though this system of control is "invisible", well... Have you ever applied for a job, and the application asks if you've ever been convicted of a felony? Have you ever needed to get a "no criminal record" when you applied for a job? Then there's no excuse for not knowing that this "invisible undercaste" exists. 

In my experience, this stuff about getting a background check or getting proof of "no criminal record" is just an annoying bit of bureaucracy. It's sort of taken for granted that you don't have a criminal record, and it's just kind of tedious getting the actual document that proves it. 

But... does the average job applicant ever stop to think "but what if you do have a criminal record?" and realize that this underclass of people exists? If you do have a criminal record/ felony, then most companies (almost all companies?) would reject you just based on that.

There's a weird mismatch here... People need jobs in order to get money to live, and to feel like they are doing something important in life. But companies don't hire people for those reasons; companies hire people who fit the requirements of the specific roles that the company needs. It's weird that, in order to have enough money to live, you need to be chosen by an employer as the best candidate to do whatever task they need done. Yes, from a company's point of view, maybe it makes sense that they prefer not to hire people with a criminal record, because maybe those people will get in trouble again, and the company doesn't want to deal with that. (That's the intuition, but you'd need to find some actual statistics to find out if it's really true or not.) But then, how will those people get money so they can live? How is this supposed to work?

---

Conclusion

Like I said, this book makes a lot of very good points, and I can't cover all of them here, so you should go read the book. 

The entire system needs to change.

And, black lives matter.

---

Follow-up post: Donate to Formerly Incarcerated People

Related:

Ending Slavery Didn't Address the Real Problem 

Reading US History Inerrantly

Yes, I Want Justice (A post about white evangelicals and #BlackLivesMatter)

Shanghai is having a 2nd covid wave

COVID-19 virus. Image source.

Complete list is here: Index of Posts About the March 2022 Shanghai Covid Outbreak 

---

Hi readers! In my previous covid update, Just some thoughts about masks (May 3), I said that nobody has covid here, and I don't even think it's really necessary to wear masks. Well, a week or so after I published that, the situation changed. We started hearing about people getting covid. Someone's friend-of-a-friend got covid. Several people from my job got covid. My son's school notified us about kids at the school getting covid. This has been going on for several weeks. People getting covid, here in Shanghai.

So yeah, I said in the previous post that I don't wear a mask at work- well, for the past few weeks, I *have* been wearing a mask at work. It's a normal surgical mask, not an N95, because I don't like wearing an N95 for 8 hours a day, but the surgical mask doesn't bother me, so, whatever, I can wear that.

So far, me, my husband, and son haven't had covid. Yay. But our biggest area of risk is at his school, because the kids don't wear masks, and don't really know how to keep their germs to themselves.

Anyway, that's the whole update. Here's an article from SHINE about it: Second wave of COVID-19 sees mainly mild cases (May 19). But remember, we don't believe what SHINE says. We remember the total bullshit propaganda they were publishing during the Shanghai lockdown.

Blogaround

1. My 2023 Reader Survey is open until June 19~

2. How Mae Martin Is Reshaping the Way Trans/Non-Binary Individuals Are Viewed in Comedy (April 21) Cool!

3. The Politics of Nothing: Visualizing Wasteland and Restoration in Terra Nil (June 4) "As I wrote about in Who Gets To See The Future, arid lands have long been viewed by colonizers as 'wasteland,' and this is a view with devastating ecological implications. To see land as 'wasteland' is to see it as worthless and disposable. In practice, this means viewing it as an always-appropriate site for everything from uranium mining to nuclear detonation."

4. How Scooters Caught China’s Urban Planners Off Guard (June 6) "In 2022, there were 350 million scooters in use in China, compared to approximately 230 million private cars. Some industry insiders believe that the true number of scooters may be much higher, as smaller cities rarely bother to register the vehicles even though they are one of the main forms of local transportation in the country’s vast interior."

5. Stack Overflow Moderators Are Striking to Stop Garbage AI Content From Flooding the Site (June 5)

And also these posts, on the Stack Exchange site itself:
Moderation strike
Moderation Strike: Stack Overflow, Inc. cannot consistently ignore, mistreat, and malign its volunteers "Content posted without innate domain understanding, but written in a 'smart' way, is dangerous to the integrity of the Stack Exchange network’s goal: To be a repository of high-quality question-and-answer content."

6. Pat Robertson, broadcaster who helped make religion central to GOP politics, dies at 93 (June 8)

7. “Love is love” (June 8) "In my experience, some of the most passionate haters of 'love is love' are aromantics. After all, all the stereotypes of loveless people are laid directly on their doorstep. 'Love is love' is used to legitimize queer love, but at the cost of tying legitimacy to love."

If I'm Asexual, Why Am I Even Reading "The Great Sex Rescue"?

An image titled "Black Box Testing" which shows a black box with an "Input" and "Output." Image source.

Links to all posts in this series can be found here: Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"

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So I've been writing some blog posts reviewing the book The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You've Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended [affiliate link], and one of my complaints has been that it presents a view on what sex is "supposed to be" which isn't compatible with my experiences as an asexual. But, it occurs to me, that maybe some people would think it doesn't make sense for me to criticize the book for that. Maybe some people would say something like this:

Perfect Number, you're asexual, so why are you even reading the book "The Great Sex Rescue"? It's right there in the title- this book is for people who want to have sex! Why would anyone expect this book to be "inclusive" of aces? It's not reasonable that you're complaining about that, because the book is literally called "The Great Sex Rescue."

This argument only makes sense if all aces feel like, "I know I'm ace, so that means I know I don't want to have sex, so I will just blissfully ignore anyone who tries to tell me about what sex is 'supposed' to be, and that works perfectly fine for me."

This is not reality though. Let me list some of the issues:

• Because of society's general lack of understanding of what asexuality means, many aces (or rather, people who would benefit from IDing as ace) don't know that they're ace
• Because society tells everyone "you want sex" and "sex is great" and so on, many aces (and people who could be ace) buy into these ideas without really being able to question them and figure out what they actually want. They've never been given the space to actually ask themselves the question, "Do I even want to have sex?"
• Some aces are sex-favorable (ie, they do want to have sex)
• Aces who have sex have a different perspective on it than the mainstream allosexual perspective, and this can lead to aces being confused about how sex is supposed to work and/or running into other problems

Basically what all of this adds up to is, there are many scenarios where someone who is ace (or would ID as ace if they knew what it was) tries to have sex, runs into difficulties, and goes looking for help- perhaps because they believe they "should" have sex and haven't considered any other option, or perhaps because they genuinely are sex-favorable. And wouldn't a book called "The Great Sex Rescue" sound like the kind of thing that could help?

When I first started having sex, my initial feeling was being very happy because I had done the one thing that purity culture says is The Worst Thing Ever and will Ruin Your Life- and it had not, in fact, ruined my life, so I was finally free from that fear. But that was all on a very abstract theoretical level, and after a while I realized, "wait, but isn't this supposed to feel good physically?" And then I went looking for answers.

Back then, I had no way to even begin to understand the landscape of what my issues were. Looking back on it now, I see that I had 3 issues:

1. Because of my purity-culture background, I had bought into the idea that sex ed is unnecessary. The less knowledge and experience I have, the better, right? I'm so pure, therefore sex will be amazing! No need to learn anything about how it works beforehand, no need to communicate with my partner about what I like or don't like, no awareness that "what I like or don't like" was even a relevant topic. (I knew I should have enough sex ed to know how to prevent pregnancy and STDs, but nothing beyond that.)
2. I had vaginismus.
3. I'm asexual, but I thought I was heterosexual.

The vaginismus was the real dealbreaker, actually. If it weren't for that, I could have just muddled along, having mediocre sex and not realizing that I didn't actually want that. But the vaginismus made it impossible.

So I asked doctors "why is sex painful?" They all said "just relax" which is not helpful at all- if I wanted to "relax" I would just give up on having sex, because it's just confusing and painful and not at all relaxing. One doctor asked me if the pain was on the outside or deep inside- that was the most explicit question any doctor asked me- and I knew so little about my body that I didn't even know how to answer. None of the doctors had a long enough discussion with me to realize I did not even know that female arousal was a thing. That would have been good information to know!

I looked for answers in a lot of places. I discussed it with friends- floating the idea that "maybe women just don't like PIV sex" but my friends seemed to be saying that women do like PIV sex, so that made me more confused. I found information about asexuality on the internet. And I bought the book "Come As You Are" which claimed it could "transform your sex life"- alas, it did not transform my sex life. 

Back then, I imagined that there was some straightforward resource that would explain sex, and this resource should be recommended to everyone, like a one-size-fits-all thing. But now I realize, each of these different books and other resources is intended to address a specific problem related to sex. There's no book that will solve everyone's sexual problems. For example, "Come As You Are" is mainly for women in long-term relationships who want to increase their sex drive in order to have more sex. (This makes me very confused- why don't they just go ahead and have more sex, why do they need to "increase their sex drive" first???) "The Great Sex Rescue" is for married heterosexual women coming from a conservative Christian background, who have been taught an ideology which says that sex is something a woman does for a man- and the woman's pleasure doesn't factor into it anywhere at all.

Yeah, it turns out, books like this, if you just read the title, it seems to be saying the book will help everyone solve their sexual problems- but that's not reality at all. Each book is for one specific kind of sexual problem. For people with that specific problem, it may be useful. For everyone else, not so much.

It turns out what I actually needed was this (and I'm sure this isn't the first time I've shared this on my blog, and it won't be the last): An Asexual’s Guide To … This is literally the best sex-ed resource I have ever read, you guys. It walks through some possible things you can try, in terms of masturbation and sex, and at every step along the way, it stops to field questions like "but why would anyone do that?"

(And, okay, I'm oversimplifying it in this blog post- my journey to finding ace resources and deciding to ID as asexual was more complicated than that, but anyway, my point is, this is the best sex-ed resource I have ever found.)

People talk about sex like it's a black box... like... fade to black because we mustn't explicitly say what's actually happening. And because of that, resources that aim to help people solve problems that come up during sex don't really seem to acknowledge that they are aimed at only one particular type of problem. Is it because people don't talk about it enough, so the authors of these resources just aren't aware of other people having sexual problems that are different than the ones they themselves had? (I mean, this must also be true about some of the blog posts I've written with advice about how to have sex... I have a tendency to assume that everyone naturally would run into the same problems I did, and needs the explanations that I eventually figured out for myself... it's important to stop and remind myself that no, everyone is different.)

But anyway. Why am I reading "The Great Sex Rescue" if I'm asexual? Because back then I really did need help, and this is the sort of book that would have appeared helpful to me- especially because it's for women who have internalized harmful ideas about sex from Christian culture. (Yep, that's me.) As I said in my intro post for this series, this is an ace issue. I really do think that aces would seek out these kinds of books, when we try to have sex and it doesn't work- either because we haven't realized we don't actually want sex, or because we do want sex but our whole approach to it is different from other people's. (Or some kind of reason that's a combination of those.) I strongly suspect that there is overlap between Gregoire's audience and people who would benefit from hearing about asexuality.

So I don't think I'm wrong to complain about this book excluding aces. And, I have a few simple suggestions: How about instead of saying "sex is supposed to be xyz because that's how God designed everyone to enjoy sex," it could say "most women prefer sex that is xyz" or "if you want sex that is xyz, then your partner should care about that- you're not being 'selfish' for expecting him to care about what you want." How about instead of framing it like there are right ways and wrong ways to have sex, we let people figure out what they want on their own? (And not wanting sex at all is also an option.) Knowing yourself, having the confidence to speak up about what you want, valuing yourself and your partner equally- those are the guidelines we should be telling people.

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Links to all posts in this series can be found here: Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"

Related:

Separating Vaginismus From Asexuality

Bucket List (a post about being a sex-favorable asexual) 

I’m Really Really REALLY Glad I Had Sex Before Marriage

And this post from Siggy: 20 narratives of aces who like sex