Thoughts on Gender, Adulthood, Identity, and Ritual

Kate of the blog “Kate's Musings of Late: Tales of a Sojourner” recently provided some reflections on the books Wild at Heart and Captivating on gender identity, which were (are?) rather popular in certain circles. Kate writes:

These books narrowly define men and women into categories which suggest the secret to distinct, deep longings for both sexes. [...] Men aren't the only folks who have a deep desire to be respected. We confine girls to these specific roles of waiting to be pursued and learning how to possess some kind of seduction techniques which help men be more masculine. I, as a woman, have no responsibility to help a man be more masculine. I do have a responsibility to love and respect my brother as well as my sister. I do not have a responsibility to wait around to be pursued by someone; I do have a responsibility to pursue justice, mercy, and kindness.

The trouble I find with the kind of claims about gender that seem to be in these books (caveat: I haven't read either book, myself) is that it seems rather difficult to provide any grounding for them based on scripture (or at least, I haven't come across one, yet). Sure, there may be some vaguely gendered statements in early Genesis or a couple of the epistles, but not nearly enough to found such a strong normative theory of gender identity as some Christians would like to believe. (I guess there's also that passage about the capable wife in Proverbs 31, but do we really want to say that being hardworking, shrewd, and just are only qualities for women? And interestingly, some of the verses seem almost to suggest a woman breadwinner, which does seem at odds with the traditional stereotype....)

Lately I've been reading through Robert Jordan's fantasy series The Wheel of Time. Jordan paints incredibly vivid pictures of the cultures in this alternate reality, and it's interesting to compare the fictitious world with our own. One thing I noticed was that men and women in The Wheel of Time tend to have very strong gender identities, and they each find the other incomprehensible. However, despite their apparent differences, to foreign ears (namely, mine), the two genders end up sounding more subtly alike than different: Women think men are stubborn wool-heads, and men believe it impossible to get past a woman who has taken her stand. Both want to be in charge and find that the other requires “special handling.” And no one wants to look a fool. Despite the strong gender division, social power is strikingly egalitarian in all of the nations depicted, if exercised in different ways. The similarity is driven home in book 4 when Perrin overhears Mistress al'Vere give his lady-friend Faiel some advice about how to deal with men (“Letting them have their way when it isn't important makes it easier to check them when it is”) only to have Master Cauthon give him nearly the same on how to deal with women not hours later!

I find myself a little envious of the arrangement (perhaps in the same way that I was a little jealous of the Aiel's strong national identity, having no strong conscious national identity of my own)—at least they all (think they) know where they stand. In my corner of U.S. culture, we seem to have lost all of the main mechanisms for forming gender identities (or I didn't have access to them, at least), while still holding on to the stereotypes and expectations—and the arrangement is rather less than satisfying, to put it mildly. I find the same problem with our lack of ritual to form adult identities, as well—there is no mechanism to tell youth that they have been inducted into the circle of adulthood. With increased parental support through college and delayed onset of responsibility, adolescence is taking longer than it ever has before; and with no clear end point, it's hard for young people to know when they're supposed to start doing “what adults do” (whatever that is).

Perhaps we would do well to reintroduce some developmental ritual for youth to mark the transitions from childhood to adolescence and from adolescence to adulthood. When children reach adolescence, we could bring them into the community of men or women and tell them “You are now starting your journey toward joining us as [men/women]. Here are some examples of [men/women] who are living their lives well. Notice how they love God with all of their lives and how they love their neighbors as themselves. They seek peace, resist the oppression of others, promote justice, act mercifully, and walk humbly. This is what it means to be a [man/woman].” I think this would, ideally, be paired with the formation of a close mentoring relationship. When the youth has gone through the years of adolescent training (surely not later than age 18, since that is the age of legal adulthood in the U.S.), the community of men or women would welcome the young adults as full members among them, reminding them of their training, and conferring on them the responsibility to bring up others in the same love of God and neighbor.

Each generation has its own strengths and weaknesses, and each generation responds to the generation before, who raised them. If youth now have little guidance in how to become adults, perhaps when they come to their senses and have little youth of their own, they'll try a different strategy.

Moving the Mendeley Root Directory

I use Mendeley to organize PDFs and citation information for my collection of academic articles. Mendeley is great since it will attempt to extract citation information automatically from the PDF, supplementing with information from Google Scholar, other Mendeley users, and possibly other sources. I always check over the imported information and clean it up as necessary.

In any case, I recently got a new computer and am transitioning from Mac OS X to Ubuntu. Generally, Mendeley can just download all the citation information for my library to the new computer from its server, but I wanted to maintain the links to all the article PDFs. I suppose I could have asked Mendeley to upload all the PDFs to the server and then sync them on the new computer. But, I have no idea where it would have put the PDFs, and while I've shifted to putting most articles in a big, unsorted papers directory, I have "legacy" articles (from before Mendeley) that are in project folders all over the place—and I'd prefer to keep it that way.

The simplest way to maintain all the PDF locations would be to copy the Mendeley database (with all the local PDF locations) from the old computer to the new computer. The only problem was that Mac OS X and Ubuntu name their home directories differently—it's /Users in Mac OS X and /home in Ubuntu. (I'd have a similar problem if I needed to change usernames for some reason.) If I just copied the database over, all of my PDF links would be broken.

Fortunately, Mendeley uses an SQLite backend that is rather transparent, making it quite easy to fix all the PDF locations with a simple Perl script:

 #! perl  
   
 my $db = '[email-address]@www.mendeley.com.sqlite';  
 my $oldPrefix = '/Users';  
 my $newPrefix = '/home';  
   
 use DBI;  
   
 my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:SQLite:dbname=$db", '', '',  
             { RaiseError => 1, HandleError=>\&handle_error },)  
      or die $DBI::errstr;  
   
 my $sth = $dbh->prepare("SELECT * FROM files");  
 $sth->execute();  
   
 $sth->bind_columns(\my($hash, $url));  
 while ($sth->fetchrow_arrayref())  
 {  
  $url{$hash} = $url if ($url =~ s#^file://$oldPrefix#file://$newPrefix#);  
 }  
 $sth->finish();  
   
 for $hash (keys %url)  
 {  
  $url = $url{$hash};  
  $url =~ s/'/''/g;  
  $dbh->do("UPDATE files SET localUrl='$url' WHERE hash='$hash'");  
 }  
   
 $dbh->disconnect();  
   
 sub handle_error  
 {  
  my $error = shift;  
  print "Database error: $error\n";  
  return 1;  
 }  
   

Since I also have watched folders, I needed to update the watched file locations as well:

 #! perl  
   
 my $db = 'monitor.sqlite';  
 my $oldPrefix = '/Users';  
 my $newPrefix = '/home';  
   
 use DBI;  
   
 my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:SQLite:dbname=$db", '', '',  
             { RaiseError => 1, HandleError=>\&handle_error },)  
      or die $DBI::errstr;  
   
 my $sth = $dbh->prepare("SELECT name FROM monitoredfolders");  
 $sth->execute();  
 $sth->bind_columns(\my($dir));  
 while ($sth->fetchrow_arrayref())  
 {  
  push @dirs, $dir;  
 }  
 $sth->finish();  
   
 for $old (@dirs)  
 {  
  $old =~ s/'/''/g;  
  $new = $old;  
  $dbh->do("UPDATE monitoredfolders SET name='$new' WHERE name='$old'")  
   if ($new =~ s/^$oldPrefix/$newPrefix/);  
 }  
   
 my $sth = $dbh->prepare("SELECT name, directory FROM monitoredfiles");  
 $sth->execute();  
   
 $sth->bind_columns(\my($name, $dir));  
 while ($sth->fetchrow_arrayref())  
 {  
  $dir =~ s/^$oldPrefix/$newPrefix/;  
  $new = $name;  
  $file{$name} = [$new, $dir] if ($new =~ s/^$oldPrefix/$newPrefix/);  
 }  
 $sth->finish();  
   
 for $key (keys %file)  
 {  
  ($name, $dir) = @{$file{$key}};  
  $name =~ s/'/''/g;  
  $dir =~ s/'/''/g;  
  $key =~ s/'/''/g;  
  $dbh->do("UPDATE monitoredfiles SET name='$name', directory='$dir' WHERE name='$key'");  
 }  
   
 $dbh->disconnect();  
   
 sub handle_error  
 {  
  my $error = shift;  
  print "Database error: $error\n";  
  return 1;  
 }  
   

Problem solved!

The Power of Wikipedia

Wikipedia holds a lot of power—power for good, and power for evil. Don't get me wrong: I love Wikipedia. Whenever I need a quick orientation to a topic unfamiliar to me or to recall a general fact that I've heard but can't quite remember, I go to Wikipedia. But, Wikipedia has it's limitations, including a fair amount of unverified or simply incorrect material. This doesn't mean anything close to saying Wikipedia is terrible and should be banned from your consciousness, but it does mean Wikipedia readers need to be careful with the claims they read.

Unfortunately, many readers simply aren't critical or careful when they turn to an "authoritative" source.

I was reminded of this in a forceful way as some research led me to an intriguing connection between an image posted on Wikipedia and a current internet meme. It all started when I was skimming the headlines on Google News. As I glanced past an announcement that yet another grocery store has agreed to pull ground beef products that include lean finely textured beef, an image caught my eye. It was an image I had seen before, and it's likely you've seen it as well, if you've read much about "pink slime" or mechanically separated meat, or spend much time on Facebook. I won't copy it here—you can see it in any of the links below. It's a picture from a factory in which a smooth pink substance is serpentining down from a machine into a cardboard box. According to the meme, the image depicts mechanically separated meat (in this case, chicken), the product of an industrial food process to recover difficult-to-separate meat fragments from bone and fat.

Clicking on the image, I was directed to a WKBW 7 Eyewitness News story announcing that Kroger would be dropping products containing lean finely textured beef.  The story was accompanied by an uncredited photo cropped from the meme.  I was surprised an intrigued that an internet meme image would end up as a news photo from an established journalism agency, particularly as the source and content of the image has been questioned. So, I decided to delve into the history of the image, as recorded on the internet, to see what I could find.

Using Google Search by Image, I traced the image back to a number of blog entries in January 2009 (Between Showers, 1/2/09; XXXICANA, 1/4/09; One Day I'll Have Everything, 1/20/09).  The image was submitted to Buzzfeed, which apparently doesn't date postings, but several blog posts that source Buzzfeed suggest it was up by at least late January (Dlisted, 1/20/09; The Sectional, 1/23/09), and it kept spreading from there.

In August 2009, the image was picked up by the nutrition blog Fooducate; and then by Early Onset of Night (9/28/10), who added a snarky commentary ("Say hello to mechanically separated chicken. It's what all fast-food chicken is made from...."), which was pulled into the meme. (The source from Fooducate provided in one of the follow-up posts on "Early Onset.") This text was rebutted by Snopes shortly thereafter (suggesting quick adoption of the text), though they don't comment directly on the image.

So, where did the image come from? Well, several of the initial blog posts (TYWKIDBI, 1/16/09; Life as an Artificial Lifeform, 1/18/09; J-Walk Blog, 1/21/09; Gangster says relax, 1/21/09) credit the image to the Wikipedia article on mechanically separated meat. The article history indicates that the image was added on November 18, 2008 by "Infinitrium" (no user profile available).  The image was removed from the article on January 17, but not before unleashing a meme with currency 3 years later.  (The image was deleted from Wikipedia after a few months due to lack of source information.)

In case you missed it, here's a recap of the story:

1. Random user posts photo of unknown source on Wikipedia article.
2. Photo is removed from Wikipedia article 8 weeks later, just after the photo has gone viral in the blogosphere.
3. Image remains in circulation for 3 years, until it is picked up as the news photo by an ABC affiliate in Buffalo, NY.

All of this because a few people saw an unappetizing image attached to a Wikipedia article and didn't stop to question whether the image had any credibility. Its credibility came from simply being on Wikipedia (and later from meme status). Now, Wikipedia does have standards for article quality, mechanisms for quality control, and editorial oversight. And, these mechanisms resulted in the removal of the dubious image relatively shortly after it was posted—but apparently not soon enough. Perhaps if changes were reviewed before going live, this virus would never have been released. (Then again, perhaps that simply isn't feasible given the resources Wikipedia has available.)

But, does any of this really matter? After all, if the photo is indeed what is claimed of it (mechanically separated chicken), then what's the harm?

Well, the actual content of the photo is far from certain.  Shortly after the post on "Early Onset," the Huffington Post picked up the story on mechanically separated meat, featuring the meme image. In an addendum, they claim, 

Although the original source of the photo is unknown, there is little reason to doubt that it is not mechanically separated poultry or pork.... The chicken slurry [Jamie Oliver] made [in an episode of the TV show Food Revolution] bears an uncanny resemblance to the passed-around photo.

(Uncanny resemblance? Is that really the standard we'd like to use for verifying credible evidence?) It's true that, to the untrained eye, the pink substance in the photo does resemble the mechanically separated poultry in a product photo from Inghams, an industrial food ingredients manufacturer. But, Rumors on the Internets points out that an (admittedly unverified) Reddit commenter, who purportedly worked briefly in the meat packing industry, claims that the substance is not mechanically separated poultry. "Rumors" goes on to say,

Why are intelligent people just taking some Tumblr's word for it that this picture is what they say it is, without a single citation or any kind of backup? ... Seriously, what is supposed to be going on here [in the photo]? ... Nobody knows! ... My unverifiable source is just as good as your unverifiable source!

After all, according to Beyond the Moho, the substance in question also resembles pink pulled taffy (seems like a bit of a stretch to me), and an I Can Has Cheezburger poster says the image resembles strawberry soft serve ice cream.

Speaking of which, there is an intriguing copy of the photo at the very beginning of its internet history. A user named Olisaur posted the photo on myLot with the title "ice cream factory" and the caption "Pink ice cream in soft-form coming out of a machine for bulk packaging."  (I couldn't find any other references to the image on myLot, though there is a post in which Olisaur says she worked briefly at an "ice cream place"—was it a factory? a shop?) Unfortunately, myLot doesn't give an exact date for the posting of the image—only saying that it was posted 3 years ago, which (with rounding) could place it just before or just after the image was added to the Wikipedia article. Could this be the original source of the image—an ice cream factory, not a meat packing plant?

Battle in Haiti

Last night, I was listening to the Joseph story and came to the part where Joseph is thrown into prison after Potiphar's wife falsely accuses him of attacking her.  I was struck by the next verse: "But while Joseph was there in prison, the Lord was with him" (Gen 39:20-21).  By earthly standards, it certainly didn't seem like God was favoring Joseph---falsely accused, innocent yet imprisoned.  We might think that if God saw Joseph in his plight and cared for him, He would break him out of prison and vindicate him before his accusers.  However, Joseph remained in prison for some time longer than two years, and yet "the Lord was with him."

A few days ago, Ben (a newlywed who moved to Haiti with his wife last fall to work at a school, and who has been swept up unexpectedly into relief efforts) was asked if he thought the devil knew he was defeated in Haiti.  Ben thought, "This woman clearly has not seen enough dead bodies, food riots, looting and general devastation to know that right now evil is alive and well in Haiti."  The devil certainly does seem to be having a heyday.

I heard it said a number of years ago that Haiti was one of the darkest nations in the world, spiritually speaking.  As I was going to bed, I spent a moment praying for Haiti, and asked God that many of the relief workers flooding into the country would be Christians who would shine the light of Christ into Haiti's darkness---when suddenly I recalled the end of Joseph's story: After Jacob's death, Joseph's brothers fear he'll take vengeance for their mistreatment of him; but, Joseph tells them, "You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good" (Gen 50:20).

From a human perspective, it feels like the devil is winning in Haiti---hunger and suffering are rampant, death and destruction are at every turn, and it's possible (likely?) everything will get worse before it gets any better.  But, I wonder if from an eternal perspective things look a little different:  Could the earthquake signal the beginning of a last great battle for Haiti, as Christ (through His body, the Church) comes galloping in to unseat forever the powers of darkness that have held Haiti in their grasp?  The devil surely meant the quake for evil, but perhaps God means it for good.  And in the midst of the turmoil, we can take courage (John 16:33), for the victor is the same one who said, "And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age" (Matt 28:20).

Planning First: A Novelty?

From Al Jazeera:

The conference in the Canadian city of Montreal was not intended to bring specific aid promises but to assess immediate needs and begin charting Haiti's long-term recovery from the January 12 earthquake.

"We're trying to do this in the correct order. Sometimes people have pledging conferences and pledge money and they don't have any idea what they are going to do with it," Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, said at a closing news conference. ...

"We actually think it's a novel idea to do the needs assessment first, and then the planning, and then the pledging," Clinton said.

It certainly is a sad truth that all too often people in development act before they plan, and decide what to do before figuring out what needs to be done or thinking about the long-term implications of one strategy over another. But, really, is doing needs assessment before planning before acting really a "novel" idea?!

I hope, for the people of Haiti's sake and that of all those in regions in need of development, that the key players in Haiti's reconstruction can pull off the process of conducting needs assessment and careful planning before rushing into action in a spectacular fashion, serving as a model for all development work, particularly if they can integrate evaluation of the redevelopment's implementation and effectiveness into the plan.

Incidentally, I wonder if having a sound redevelopment plan from the outset could help alleviate donor fatigue. It might not have much effect on individual donors, but big foundations/NGOs/governments might find it easier to "stay the course" if they knew where exactly they were headed and how far they had come.

The Investor's Manifesto: Prudence Before Riches

The Investor's Manifesto: preparing for prosperity, Armageddon, and everything in between, by William Bernstein. Rating: 4/5.

A good description of basic investment strategy, written in a familiar, mildly humorous style. Bernstein's approach draws heavily on an investment version of Pascal's wager: Financial ruin in retirement if markets turn south is worse than living modestly (now and in retirement) even if markets are booming. Bernstein advocates for simple, unglamorous investing:

"The name of the game is not to get rich, but rather to avoid dying poor. In fact, if you follow the advice in this book, I can guarantee you that you will not get fabulously wealthy. Rather, I've striven to simultaneously maximize your chances of a comfortable retirement and minimize your chances of living out your final years in poverty. I know of no more laudable or more worthy investment goal." (183)

As a starting point, Bernstein cites the "age rule" for asset allocation: The percentage of bonds in your portfolio should be roughly the same as your age. This percentage should be increased or decreased up to 20 percentage points depending on your risk tolerance. Then, Bernstein recommends between 60-80% domestic stocks and 20-40% foreign stocks, and suggests that money should be placed in low-expense index or passively managed mutual funds. "Does this portfolio seem overly simplistic, even amateurish?" Bernstein asks---"Get over it. Over the next few decades, the overwhelming majority of all professional investors will not be able to beat it" (89). Investors interested in a more complex allocation could divide the stocks into small and large, value and market companies; but, Bernstein indicates that growth companies should be avoided, as they have a small dividend stream relative to stock price, and the dividend growth rate is a better predictor of future performance than growth of stock price.

Chapter 1, "A Brief History of Financial Time," gives an overview of the history of financial markets and lays down a number of important principles of how markets work that undergird Bernstein's investment philosophy. Chapter 2, "The Nature of the Beast," describes the core of the philosophy. Chapter 3, "The Nature of the Portfolio," applies Bernstein's philosophy to creation of a portfolio. Chapter 4, "The Enemy in the Mirror," presents a number of neuro-psychological effects and common mistakes that investors make that derail them from their investing goals. Chapter 5, "Muggers and Worse," warns against brokerage houses and the like. Chapter 6, "Building Your Portfolio," introduces dollar cost averaging and value averaging, and provides four example scenarios of prototypical investors. Finally, chapter 7, "The Nature of the Game," provides a summary of the principal lessons from the book, suitable for sticking to the refrigerator for frequent review.

The book is approachable for beginning investors, though some experience with investment vocabulary is helpful. Important points are placed in call-out boxes, and mathematical details are relegated to sidebars that can be skipped or skimmed without losing the overall message. Each chapter has a bullet-point summary of the most important topics for review.

Augustine on Science and the Bible

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, ... and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for a nonbeliever to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

-- Augustine (354-430), On the Literal Meaning of Genesis, I.19 (translated by John Hammond Taylor)

How true. If only this wisdom given to Augustine were not covered in centuries of dust, but were read and considered by more Christians today. How sad it is when some Christians get so caught up in testifying to their faith that they forget that how they act may be at cross-purposes with sharing that faith with others.