Month: September 2010

A reader writes:

I went to the Table for One tumblr and was disappointed to know that it was your wonderful website that introduced it to me.  The covert, poor-quality pics of people gives it a vibe of cruelty. 

There is social stigma to eating alone, for what I feel is no reason since a simple explanation is a business man on a trip he's been sent on by himself. Take me, being one of those businessmen (in a way, I'm an environmental engineer), I eat alone often since I'm sent off for weeks at a time away from home. I'm not lonely and I'm not to be pitied when I want to get a nice meal paid for by my company. I'd much rather go out and eat alone than sit in a crappy hotel room.

When I'm home, I usually don't eat out but for fast food alone but it doesn't bother me there as well. Also, as some commenters say on a link within the blog, sometimes when you're at work you just want to get away from your co-workers, or away from your roommates at home. There's countless reasons for eating alone that are not, "OMGZ! Loogit that big fat loser eating alone. S/He must be sooooooo lonely, lolz."

Agreed. The tumblr was presented without comment, as are the photos on the site (the only commentary posted by the creator contains a link to a highly critical thread on Metafilter). And there are an array of different people and places represented, so the tumblr becomes a sort of Rorschach test.

I love eating alone with a book or newspaper myself. There is a difference between solitude and loneliness.

Awhile back Jesse Bering wrote in favor of monogamy – gay or straight – by arguing that "heartbreak is every bit as much a psychological adaptation as is the compulsion to have sex with those other than our partners, and it throws a monster of a monkey wrench into the evolutionists' otherwise practical polyamory." Christopher Ryan responds:

Where's the proof that sexual jealousy (experienced as heartbreak) is an unavoidable response to a partner's extra-pair sexual activity? If it were a genetically encoded behavioral response, there would be very few, if any exceptions to this pattern. Yet every major city (and plenty of small towns) have sex clubs where couples have sex with extra-pair partners with no discernible emotional consequences at all—at least not negative ones. These clubs exist all over the world—absent only in countries where they are illegal. Most surveys of these so-called "swingers" indicate that they are more satisfied with their marriages than couples in more conventional arrangments. Add to this the large number of men who actually find the notion of being cuckholded very appealing (described by fellow PT blogger, David Ley in his fascinating book, Insatiable Wives). Then add the societies we describe in Sex at Dawn in which a party without extra-pair sex is like breakfast without coffee, and the genetic argument starts looking very wobbly indeed.

“[Marty Peretz] doesn’t choose his friends by their ideology. Dinner at his house is like a seminar, with people arguing. He treasures argument. And that’s the value I most treasure in him,’’ – Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Me too.

Douthat argues that liberals add fuel to the culture wars:

With Christine O’Donnell, as with Sarah Palin before her, American liberals have been confronted with a politician who’s vulnerable to all sorts of possible attacks, and whose record and qualifications and positions provide plenty of fodder for either a high-minded, issues-based critique, or a more no-holds-barred assault on her honesty and integrity. And what do liberals want to talk about? Why, her decade-old comments on masturbation, of course!

I agree with Ross that the attempt to link O’Donnell’s belief that masturbation is morally wrong to “socialism” is truly a long stretch. But it is not a stretch to connect it to the illiberal theoconservative social project that now dominates the worldview of the GOP.

O’Donnell’s stance against masturbation is related to the new natural law that is central to the theoconservative project that Douthat endorses and believes in (and that is at the core of the Republican party base). It is rooted in the notion that any sex that is not self-giving in a lifelong marital bond between a man and a woman is destructive of the human soul and also of the community at large. (See “The Theoconservative Project” chapter in The Conservative Soul for a longer treatment of this.) And theocons are not classical liberals – they see all this as interwoven with society at large and central to what the Pope sees as modernity’s core sexual and spiritual problems.

They do not believe that masturbation can be a truly private act, no more than gay sex or homosexual relationships can be. The way in which jerking off divorces sex from procreation and marriage is as repugnant to them as is same-sex marriage and for the same reasons. O’Donnell, in other words, believes that masturbating has social ramifications, because it reduces sexuality to what used to be called self-abuse, and this itself corrupts society as a whole and weakens the family. This is exactly and explicitly the same rationale for the thoecon refusal to acknowledge gay relationships, their opposition to contraception and pornography, and, in part, to abortion.

Now, O’Donnell is not proposing to criminalize wanking – but not because, in an ideal world, it shouldn’t be illegal. She, like Robbie George, chief theocon, only opposes criminalization of wanking because it would be absurdly impractical and unenforceable. They have only a prudential and not a principled opposition to criminalizing masturbation in modern America. So they rely on those things they can practically enforce, like preventing any public acknowledgment of same-sex marriage, or, not so long ago, arresting gay couples for private acts in their own bedrooms.

O’Donnell is an important figure not because she is a flake, as Bill Kristol says. She is important because she is as yet too guileless to lie about her real views, or to conceal the reactionary worldview that animates them. She is not an outlier. She is a very powerful way to understand what the theoconservative project is really about – and what the GOP base truly believes in.

She is the modern GOP. And maybe her emergence will help more people snap out of denial.

(Photo: Brendan Hoffman/Getty.)

A reader writes:

While Ms. Laudan's thesis and historical discussion is interesting and in some ways instructive, the conclusion you cited is unfounded.  How does my demand for hand-pressed olive oil force an Italian farmer into servitude or a backward lifestyle?  To the contrary, my (and our) increased demand for certain products presents choices to farmers.  If the Italian farmer wants to make olive oil the old fashioned way, the increased demand for such products increases the price those products will bear, and thus make it worthwhile to farm that way.  If it is not worth her time to make oil the old way, she does not have to do so.

To the extent that we have assumed the mantle of the "aristocrats of old", that has little to do with the food choices we make, and everything to do with the relative economic status of us versus the people who make our food.  Following Mw. Laudan's logic, do I oppress a Mexican laborer by valuing the hand-made tortillas he makes?  If I choose instead not to buy his tortillas, then what is his choice?  I suspect it is to go work on an assembly line at a food processing factory. The way to give that farmer more choices and consequently (hopefully) more happiness is to decrease the economic disparity between us.  One way to do that is to pay him more for the fruits of his labor rather than paying less overall to my processed food providers.

A reader writes:

Despite the reasonable idea that

straight kin are far better off in terms of their own reproductive opportunities than they would be without a homosexual dangling so magnificently on their family trees.

Back in our ancestral hunter-gatherer past, were there celebrity homosexuals and lesbians whose fame got their siblings lucky?  As the bro of a famous homo, I kinda doubt it, though I suppose the artists at Lascaux and Altimira might've been the Neolithic equivalents of Michaelangelo or Rachel Maddow. What's really interesting is the cultural reversal created by contemporary gay families.  My gay brother is a parent, but I am not – by choice and surgical intervention.  Instead, I'm the Straight Uncle (vs "confirmed bachelor" uncle of the past) who takes his pre-teen nephew to pro football games. 

I think the real evolutionary advantage of gay and lesbians, in terms of Why Would Such a Thing Contribute to a Species Survival, is that in the distant past, it provided caretakers for extended families (those hunter-gatherer tribes) who weren't competing in the intra-tribal mating game.  My favorite evidence for this is the statistical – though not determinate – correlation between the number of older male siblings and gay younger siblings (ie, a man is likelier to be gay if he has two or more older brothers).  Once a woman has added a few men to the mating pool for the tribe's younger women, something shifts gears physically (prenatal testosterone levels?) to provide caretakers who aren't competitors, who have time to contribute non-reproductively to the survival of the whole group.

And who maybe have the time and talent to decorate the cave.

Dan Savage, who has a kid, addresses Robbie George, et al:

Until you start advocating for the denial of marriage licenses to the elderly, fertility tests for the young, and the nullification of the legal marriages of straight couples who are childless-by-choice, no one should take you seriously when you argue that children define marriage because it's clear that you don't believe that either. Otherwise you would promote a "seamless garment," if I may borrow a phrase, where marriage is concerned, i.e. no marriage licenses for oldies, inferties, vasectomies, etc.

Beinart calls Palin the second coming of McGovern:

Between 2000 and 2008, George W. Bush pushed American politics sharply to the right: cutting taxes, appointing highly conservative judges, and shredding government regulation. But the Tea Partiers aren’t inclined toward gratitude. In their minds, Bush was an accomodationist, a big spender. Like the McGovernites in the Vietnam-era Democratic Party, the Tea Partiers are taking over the GOP, state by state. And in all likelihood, they will select a party nominee who runs substantially to the right of both Bush in 2000 and 2004 and John McCain in 2008.

That candidate, whether it be Palin herself or a Palin wannabe, will, I suspect, be crushed in the general election. The one major advantage today’s Republicans have over the Democrats of the early 1970s is the economy: If it is actually worse in 2012 than it is today, all bets are off. But if it improves, even modestly, Republicans are likely in for the kind of rude awakening that Democrats experienced in 1972.