The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Going to be in Grand Rapids all day, eating tasty food and hobnobbing (yes! I am a skilled hobnobber!) with the wife’s side of the family. I may throw up a post when I get home, especially if something entertaining happens, but it may be a slow day around here.
Happy Easter, if you’re into that sort of thing.
On the one hand, anyone good enough at staying alive to have a 9 in any but the last digit of their age really doesn’t deserve to have me blowing shit at them. On the other hand, holy shit dudes Bob Barker is scary as hell all the sudden.
I do not actually want to live to 90– given the wild variety of aches and pains and various iniquities and inabilities that being merely 37 has inflicted upon me, I literally cannot understand how anyone over 50 is even alive. But if I do make it to 90, I’d like to think that I would terrify small children. Way to be, Bob. I’ll spay something for you.
I don’t normally link to Slate, but when I do, I do it twice in a week. This article is not typical Slate Contrarianism like the last time, it’s something far more inexplicable: apparently some study has determined that 1 in 200 pregnant women claim that they are virgins. A British medical journal– well, actually, it’s apparently called The British Medical Journal (I would have thought there’d be more than one)– apparently spent fourteen years tracking the lives of some 8,000 post-adolescent girls. During that time, just over five thousand reported a pregnancy. Of those five thousand, 45 managed to achieve pregnancy without achieving sex. While I don’t know if the survey tracked creative use of turkey basters or artificial insemination, the authors (or at least Amanda Marcotte, who wrote the article) have thus concluded that those 45 young women believe themselves to have given virgin birth. This line from the study is wonderful:
While more virgins gave birth to boys (59.8%) or may have learnt they were pregnant during Advent, these trends did not reach statistical significance.
That, right there, is quality snark, kids.
Let’s talk about virginity, just for a second, if you don’t mind. And you don’t mind, do you?
Virginity is fucking stupid.
Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not claiming that being a person who has not had sex is stupid. That’s fine with me. Glory in yo’ spunk, as BB King might say. Or, y’know, glory in being eight years old. Whatever. I don’t care if you have sex or not. You’d probably like it, if you tried, but I haven’t ever had a whiskey sour and people say good things about those too.
What’s fucking stupid is that we have a word for people who haven’t had sex, and that, worse, we perceive this state of non-fucking-ness as a thing that is lost when either your penis enters a vagina or your vagina is entered by a penis or whatever other definition you’ve constructed in your head to determine whether your sex “counts” or “doesn’t count,” which no doubt is determined mostly by how interested you are in disappointing your mother. And baby Jesus. Who hates sex, apparently.
Think about this: there is no other thing, in the English language or any other that I’m aware of, where we have a word for someone who has not done something but no word for someone who has. I’ve never killed anyone. There’s no word for me. I kill someone, I become a murderer. I’ve never lived in Paris. No word. Once I do? I become a Parisian.
What do you call someone who has had sex? Well, okay, fucker, but that’s not actually what anyone means when they say that, although maybe they should, because that word really isn’t versatile enough. Sexer? Nope. That’s someone who can tell whether a chicken is a boy or a girl. Which, by the way, is fascinating.
(Click the link do it do it DO IT YOU WILL LEARN THINGS)
(Then imagine what you might find if you GIS “chick sexers,” and then find out for yourself.)
The hell was I talking about?
Oh, right. Virgins.
(cough)
Here’s the point: these young women, if they even exist and aren’t some sort of bizarre statistical anomaly in this survey, are in need of something very badly (no NOT THAT JESUS SHUT UP YOU PERVERT): comprehensive goddamn sex education. They’ve clearly not been getting it (SHUT UP) and they need it (QUIET) and they need it now (OKAY FINE YOU WIN I GIVE UP). No one should be so pig-ignorant about how their body works that they think they got pregnant in a swimming pool or from a toilet seat, and if we’re in a world where we hope that people are lying because the alternative is scarier, we’ve still got a problem.
Here’s what we should call people who haven’t had sex: people. Here’s what we should call people who have had sex: older people. This entire concept that there’s purity of some vague metaphysical sort attached to a state of non-sexytimes is destructive and stupid and as a culture we should squash it dead right the hell now. Virginity is stupid, and no one should be one. Death to useless concepts!
(It’s been a long day. This is the best I can do.)
(True fact about me: my last blog was something like the #4 Google result for years if you for some godforsaken what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you reason chose to search for the phrase “duck cock.” The duck penis, also, is fascinating.)
I’m actually writing this Sunday night for Tuesday morning; I don’t think I’ll have time to get to a post until late, what with it being the first official teacher work day (hah!) and Parent Night happening and all that, and I want to make sure some sort of post happens. So have a book review, combined with some fun nostalgia.
(EDIT: Whoops! Shit, posted it immediately. Oh well. I’ll come up with something else for Tuesday, I guess.)
As many of you already know, Alternate Universe Me has a Ph.D by now and is a Hebrew Bible scholar at some terribly prestigious university with an insanely high tuition rather than a math teacher at a high-poverty public school. I managed three majors and two minors in college; two of the majors were Religious Studies and Jewish Studies and one of the minors was Near Eastern Languages and Cultures; one of my two Master’s degrees is from the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. One of my tattoos is in Hebrew. (And yes, I can read it; my cardinal rule of tattooing is that you never, ever, ever tattoo yourself in a language you can’t read– I’m looking at all of you idiots with Chinese characters that you think mean “Strength” and actually mean “Dim Sum” or “Stupid Cracker” tattooed on your arms or the small of your backs.)
I washed out when I realized that not only was a Ph.D in Religious Studies one of the longest doctoral programs known to the human race, but that I really wasn’t actually all that interested in trying to do independent research in a subject that people had been studying intensively for two and a half millennia. Dissertations in Biblical studies tend to be… slightly more specific than I’m interested in. And, I reasoned to myself, since what I was interested in was learning about this stuff, well, there wasn’t really much of a reason to keep paying beaucoup tuition for that. I can read on my own, right?
Fast forward (checks date on diploma) thirteen years, and I’ve barely read a single thing on the topic of religion since then. Maybe a half-dozen books. Something like that. So that’s how well that plan went. If you’re one of my friends who actually has a Ph.D in some branch of religious studies, keep in mind that I’ve been out of the game for over a decade, so my recollection of the bleeding edge of scholarship isn’t exactly precise. I’m reviewing this as a relatively well-informed amateur, for whatever that’s worth.
All that said: Reza Aslan is a goddamned genius. I’m of the school of thought that he knew exactly what the hell he was doing when he went on Fox News and absolutely bewildered the interviewer with the unbelievable, does-not-compute mindfuck that an honest-to-God-Moozlim actually done wrote sumpin’ ’bout Jeebus. Note that I haven’t watched the interview; I lost enough IQ points just reading about it, but if you like stupid go ahead and click. Aslan’s book may be the shortest “historical Jesus” work I’ve ever seen, actually, and doesn’t even actually spend all of its pagecount on Jesus himself– there are several chapters exploring the revolutionary/political environment he grew up in at the beginning and several chapters on Paul and James at the end, so really only about the middle 50% or so of the book is specifically about Jesus’ life. That said, he manages to pack quite a lot of stuff into those pages, and does so without lapsing into the sort of impossible specificity and detail that these sorts of books are known for. I can’t vouch for the rightness of his claims, necessarily, but I didn’t find much that I disagreed with– he certainly isn’t terribly interested in getting into details of translation very often (there is very little Greek, Aramaic, or Hebrew in the book, and everything is transliterated into Latin characters) and all of the footnotes and endnotes are in the back, not interrupting the text. This is a book for the type of people who watch Fox News or react to stupid things that happen on Fox News, not people who are already in “the biz,” so to speak.
Best thing I can say about it? It made me remember why I enjoyed being in a field that consumed most of my intellectual space for most of my twenties; it’s been a while since I regretted leaving grad school. That’s the best thing I can say about it. If you’re interested in the historical Jesus, this isn’t a bad place to start; I can move you onto other titles afterwards. Thumbs up.
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