North Korean epiphanies

What causes North Koreans to become disillusioned with the regime? Here are five examples of the little epiphanies which caused people to wonder whether after all, life might not be better across the border. They illustrate why strict control over its subjects’ movement and contact with the outside world are important for the regime.

“One North Korean soldier recalled a buddy who had been given an American-made nail clipper and was showing it off to his friends. The soldier clipped a few nails, admired the sharp, clean edges, and marveled at the mechanics of this simple item. Then he realized with a sinking heart: if North Korea couldn’t make such a fine nail clipper, how could it compete with American weapons?”

 For one North Korean student it was a photograph in the official media showing a South Korean on a picket line.

The photograph was meant to illustrate the exploitation of the worker in capitalist society; instead the student noticed that the “oppressed” worker wore a jacket with a zipper and had a ballpoint pen in his pocket, both of which were luxuries at the time.

Why it’s forbidden to listen to South Korean radio:

 A North  Korean maritime official accidentally picked up a South Korean radio broadcast--a situation comedy featuring two young women fighting over a parking space at an apartment complex.

He couldn’t grasp the concept of a place with so many cars that there was no room to park them. He had never known anyone, certainly not young women, who owned a private car.

 During the famine, a young North Korean man found himself near enough to the border to see the Chinese countryside. He noticed that in China, the cornfields weren’t guarded by armed men, and the trees still had bark.

A North Korean pediatrician, still loyal to the regime but desperate for food, swam across the river to China. She went up to the first farmhouse she saw to ask for help finding a job. As she peeked through the gate, she saw a heaping bowl of rice on the floor of the courtyard. Back home, rice had long been unavailable at any price, and people were eating flour made from ground bark and corn stalks. Why would so much precious food be left out in the courtyard? Then she heard the barking. Dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.
   
Examples are taken from Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.

Against masculinity

The list of things women are not allowed to do has gotten much shorter over the years. Although lots of good things are still coded masculine, if a woman engages in a masculine-coded activity, she is likely to be praised for it. I have often been praised for drinking whiskey, something which is neither difficult nor particularly praiseworthy. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I was criticized for acting like a stereotypical man, except for the occasional creep telling me to smile.

Partly, of course, this is because I am a bachelorette and childless. As soon as a woman starts trying to get pregnant, there are hordes of people eager to tell her what to do. Mothers (or even potential mothers) can’t drink, smoke, eat what they like, exercise, use public transportation, have careers, use formula, use childcare, or pursue their own goals in any way. And there’s no getting out of it: women who allow their children’s fathers to take custody are told they are abandoning them, and if you have a miscarriage or a child dies accidentally, you may be imprisoned. That is terrible and unjust--but I suspect that, comparing childless adult women to childless adult men, the women actually have more freedom from gender roles.

From various sources, we hear that men cannot: eat brunch, talk about feelings or relationships, drink non-whisky-based cocktails, clean up after themselves, go to plays, use certain toiletries, watch TV shows or movies with female characters, be in a committed relationship, wear colors other than black, brown, white, gray or blue, appreciate fiction or poetry, do yoga, care for children, do laundry, be interested in fashion, exercise self-control, do well in school, read between the lines of what people say, or be vegetarian. It sometimes seems like Esquire magazine is solely concerned with telling men what is and is not sufficiently masculine.

Now, different groups have different motivations for furthering this “men can’t” trope. Sellers of consumer goods have an incentive to convince us that men and women can’t possibly use the same products. Gendering clothes, shoes, bags, foods, drinks, cell phone cases, bandaids, shampoos, pens and whatever else you can think of ensures that men and women will buy different ones. Just think about how similar men’s and women’s bodies really are--and how different their clothes are. Or consider the human foot. On average, women have smaller and less hairy feet. Other than that, there is no difference. All feet work the same way. Yet how dramatically different our shoes are! Even those women who have the willpower to avoid wearing heels wear women’s flats. Either the world is sexist, or every Western man other than the ones I have dated is a foot fetishist.)

I often  hear complaints about the unflattering portrayal of men in sitcoms and other comedy. (Solution: don’t watch sitcoms. They are all bad.) But seriously, this happens for a fairly innocuous reason. You have to make fun of someone, and since we are in a weird world which is both sexist and post-feminist, few writers know how to make fun of women without being sexist. That leaves the man, ideally the straight white man, as your figure of fun.

Ordinary men themselves do a lot of the grunt work of spreading the belief that men are incapable. It’s a useful excuse for men who are behaving badly and want to continue doing so without consequences. Their strategy is to try to convince us that asking an individual man to change his behavior amounts to attacking masculinity itself. Is my wife asking me to do the dishes, talk about our relationship, or refrain from cheating on her? Probably because she hates men.

Similarly, the man who thinks men can’t control their sexual impulses is probably a harasser or rapist. The man who thinks that men can never be as good at parenting as women “naturally” are didn’t want to get up for that midnight feeding anyway. Meeting women and asking them out can be stressful, but it gets a lot easier if you can convince them that men can’t be expected to understand the body language, tones of voice, facial expressions and the other types of implicit communication which human beings are constantly engaged in. That way, whenever hard communication is necessary, it’s the woman’s job; and if she has taken too seriously the social belief that women should be passive, quiet and unselfish, she may never successfully get her message across.

These excuses are more palatable since they often come packaged in flattering-sounding essentializing descriptions of women. A woman who knows she hated breastfeeding and had to be taught how to hold a baby still enjoys being told her “maternal instinct” “naturally” makes her a better parent than her husband could ever be. And it would be tactless to question your boyfriend’s belief that women are “naturally” monogamous.

Stephanie Coontz, a scholar of marriage, agrees with me:

One thing standing in the way of further progress for many men is the same obstacle that held women back for so long: overinvestment in their gender identity instead of their individual personhood. Men are now experiencing a set of limits — externally enforced as well as self-imposed — strikingly similar to the ones Betty Friedan set out to combat in 1963, when she identified a “feminine mystique” that constrained women’s self-image and options. Although men don’t face the same discriminatory laws as women did 50 years ago, they do face an equally restrictive gender mystique...Now men need to liberate themselves from the pressure to prove their masculinity.

Maybe we should stop asking “is he gay?” every time a man bends the rules of masculinity.

Crazy Doctor Sangrado

One of the amusing episodes in Gil Blas concerns a charlatan doctor named Sangrado. When he sees a patient with gout and learns that the patient regularly eats large meals consisting mostly of meat and drinks large quantities of wine, he suggests that the patient’s diet may be aggravating his gout. He advises him to eat moderate meals consisting mostly of vegetables, legumes and baked apples, and says he should drink water instead of wine. In fact, the physician believes that everyone should follow this diet.  He doesn’t agree with the prevalent belief that wine is necessary to prevent indigestion, and he thinks people should stop eating before they are stuffed, even if they can afford to eat more.

This doctor is portrayed as a fool who kills his patients and makes Gil Blas sick through denying him wine. Isn’t it funny how medical advice which now is now so mainstream that it seems obvious was in the past seen as self-evident lunacy?

 Of course, Sangrado also says that no one really needs blood to live, and advises the patient to have himself bled as often as possible.

Graphic labels on cigarettes packages

Forcing cigarette companies to put graphic warning labels, including health warnings, pictures of diseased organs, and the 1-800-QUIT-NOW number, on cigarette packages, is a violation of the First Amendment, according to a recent and totally correct ruling by the DC Circuit (pdf).

You might wonder why this is so, since cigarette companies are already required to put warning labels on packs, while alcohol manufacturers have other warning labels, and all makers of packaged food are required to list ingredients, calories and so forth. The legal reasoning behind this regulation is that the government had a legitimate interest in making sure that consumers are accurately informed about the contents and risks of the food, beverages and cigarettes they consume.

Now, there is nothing in the Constitution restricting the ability of government agencies to campaign against smoking, taking the public stand that the risks of smoking outweigh its benefits. The libertarians among us might think that this is not a proper use of the power and money of the state, but the libertarians among us are often disappointed. However, the state still does not have the right to force any individual or company to express a certain opinion. The federal district court and DC Circuit agree that graphic labels and the QUIT NOW message go beyond informing consumers about health risks and amount to discouraging smoking. (In fact, the FDA made no secret of the fact that it hoped the labels would nudge people to quit.) This "ideological" message is one the government cannot force a company to send.

The Companies contend that, to the extent the graphic warnings go beyond the textual warnings to shame and repulse smokers and denigrate smoking as an antisocial act, the message is ideological and not informational. “[B]y effectively shouting well-understood information to consumers,” they explain, “FDA is communicating an ideological message, a point of view on how people should live their lives: that the risks from smoking outweigh the pleasure that smokers derive from it, and that smokers make bad personal decisions, and should stop smoking.”

No one doubts the government can promote smoking cessation programs; can use shock, shame, and moral opprobrium to discourage people from becoming smokers; and can use its taxing and regulatory authority to make smoking economically prohibitive and socially onerous. And the government can certainly require that consumers be fully informed about the dangers of hazardous products. But this case raises novel questions about the scope of the government’s authority to force the manufacturer of a product to go beyond making purely factual and accurate commercial disclosures and undermine its own economic interest—in this case, by making “every single pack of cigarettes in the country [a] mini billboard” for the government’s anti-smoking message.

The so-called "warning labels" are not really warning at all, the Court held, but propaganda. Some convey no relevant facts, and others might be deceptive: an image of someone smoking through a tracheotomy hole might give the inaccurate impression that a tracheotomy is a common result of smoking.

Many of the images do not convey any warning information at all, much less make an “accurate statement” about cigarettes. For example, the images of a woman crying, a small child, and the man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “I QUIT” do not offer any information about the health effects of smoking. And the “1-800-QUIT-NOW” number, when presented without any explanation about the services provided on the hotline, hardly sounds like an unbiased source of information. These inflammatory images and the provocatively-named hotline cannot rationally be viewed as pure attempts to convey information to consumers. They are unabashed attempts to evoke emotion (and perhaps embarrassment) and browbeat consumers into quitting.

I find myself saying, as often before, thank God for the First Amendment. Cigarette companies in other countries are already forced to use graphic "warning" labels. Now, if only we still had the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments...

Non-conformity is suspicious and dangerous

This seems like a point Phoebe would make/has made: encouraging people to be suspicious of strange behavior stigmatizes strange people, who are generally not terrorists. This has the effect of making social life harder for the very people for whom it is already hard! Just as so-called "behavioral analysis" at airports has the effect of making security screening harder and more traumatizing for people who are already uncomfortable and anxious about it.

The video tells viewers not to ignore their “instincts.” But do we have an instinct for detecting “sketchy” people or behavior? Given what we know about stereotyping and selective perception, the reality is that people will view behavior through their pre-existing beliefs. Their interpretations of behavior as unusual or inappropriate will be influenced by how comfortable they otherwise are with the person engaging in it, which is impacted by race/ethnicity, class, and many other social categories. A guy leaving a backpack unattended is scary if that guy has a mohawk or, you know, looks scary and stuff, but when I do it, no one bats an eye. This video basically legitimizes turning anyone who makes you at all uncomfortable in public in to the police, on the argument that you are simply following your “instinct.” When you ask every citizen to become an intelligence agent, reporting every incident they perceive as odd, the result is the increasing stigmatization and semi-criminalization of those who can’t or won’t conform to pretty narrow standards of physical appearance, dress, and behavior.

No judge and jury this time

Nothing doing. No judge and jury this time. Sometimes those trials drag on three weeks. Sometimes they even let the guy go because he’s innocent. But that isn’t going to happen this time. I’m going to get the killer, innocent or guilty, and when I do, I’m going to saw off his head, crack his ribs, jump on his neck, smash his Adam’s apple, beat in his nose, tear off his ears, pull out his hair, bend back his fingers, twist off his toenails, and shatter his kneecap. But before I do this I’m going to work him over with a rusty knife. I’m like that, Matt. I want a clean and decent America, a place where our kids can grow and sniff the good fresh air.

--Ira Wallach

Fat and class

The fact that the people at the gym are thin and the people at Walmart are fat does not show that going to the gym makes people thin or that Walmart makes people fat.

Poor people in America are fat and rich people are thin. The disgust the thin upper classes feel for the fat lower classes has nothing to do with mortality statistics, and everything to do with feelings of moral superiority engendered in thin people by the sight of fat people. Precisely because Americans are so repressed about class issues, the disgust the (relatively) poor engender in the (relatively) rich must be projected onto some other distinguishing characteristic. In 1853, an upper-class Englishman could be quite unself-conscious about the fact that the mere sight of the urban proletariat disgusted him. In 2003, any upper-class white American liberal would be horrified to imagine that the sight of, say, a lower-class Mexican-American woman going into a Walmart might somehow elicit feelings of disgust in his otherwise property sensitized soul. But the sight of a fat woman—make that an “obese” woman, better yet a “morbidly obese” woman going into Walmart, ah, that is something else again…the fact that this woman happens to be poor and non-white can be dismissed by those observers as an irrelevant coincidence.

--Paul Campos