Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Greatest Living American

Google Bomb.

The Gay Husband Check-list

I’m not endorsing, merely quoting. From ABCNews, The McGreevey Effect: Is Your Husband Gay? a list of ways for women to detect whether or not their husband is gay by Bonnie Kaye, the author of “Is He Gay? A Checklist of Women Who Wonder:”

If your husband thinks you are a nymphomaniac or “pushy and aggressive” because you want sex twice a week.

If sexual activity steeply declines within the first few years of marriage.

You’re always more sexually aggressive than your husband.

If your husband is turned off by the thought of touching your vaginal area or performing oral sex on you.

If his best friend is gay.

If he hangs out in gay bars.

If he enjoys watching gay porn movies and surfing gay porn Web sites.

If he is excessively homophobic, mocking and imitating other gay men.

If he brags about gay men complimenting him on his looks.

In my experience of friends who have gone through this, it’s much simpler: if you suspect it, he is. The hard part is what to do about it. There I can safely say, get help!

Amity Pierce Buxton, the founder of the support group Straight Spouse Network:

“The first reaction is shock and disbelief and some relief, because it explains some unspoken problems that seem to be lurking there,” she said. “The biggest shock is not the revelation but the fact that they’ve been betrayed and deceived for so many years.”

Another way that societal acceptance of gay people would help us all, it would end this hurtful charade. 

Personal responsibility?

I’ve been meaning to post this since I heard it last fall in a podcast of the 5-part Food, Ethics and the Environment Conference at Princeton. Events this week make it more timely than ever. I will be quoting it often.

In his keynote speech, “The True Cost of Cheapness,” journalist and Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser articulates the limits of personal responsibility and how it plays into the interests of our corporate food system:

[from the podcast at 01:02:13] For the last 25 years we have been preached a gospel of personal responsibility and personal freedom. That is what has been drummed into our head for the past twenty-five years. Personal responsibility. And I believe in that. I believe in personal responsibility and personal freedom.

But I’m now worried that my own work has stressed that element too much. And this whole idea that every purchase that you make is a vote, and that every purchase that you make has a ripple effect, and that we all must be responsible and ethical consumers. Well, I agree with that, but at the same time there is a pressure on all of us to be pure, to be morally pure, to think that we’re really going to change the world by what we buy and...it gets really hard to be pure. It’s complicated. Well, should I be buying organic or local or should I… What should I do?

The pressure is on us and I think that what we buy can make a difference and that we are responsible and that we do have an obligation. But I think that changing the world by what you buy is only going to go so far. And it only works to a point. And after that point I think it is delusion that as consumers we are going to change that system fundamentally or we are going to change the world.

Missing from the discourse, missing from the dialog over the last twenty-five years have been a couple of other phrases. One of them is “corporate responsibility” and the other one is “collective responsibility.” And I stand here honestly saying that I’m not pure, my purchases are not ideal, and maybe some of you in this room are pure but it’s hard to be pure in this country in the year 2006. But ultimately the problems that...I’ve tried to outline are not due to individual faults. They’re really not. They have been caused by big systems. Systems of belief, systems of production, systems of making a profit. And without looking at them from a systemic approach there is no possibility of meaningful change...what we do as consumers isn’t going to make a profound difference. And I think we cannot allow this movement surrounding ethical eating to focus only on our personal responsibility and on consumer power.

Whose responsibility?

Last night Katie Couric reported on a congressional hearing held yesterday:

COURIC: Congress is getting serious about investigating the safety of our food supply. Families victimized by tainted spinach and peanut butter testified today, among them Michael and Elizabeth Armstrong; their daughters...got very sick last fall after eating spinach contaminated with e. coli bacteria. Mr. Armstrong said, “I can’t protect them from spinach, only you guys can.”