According to librarything’s unsuggester, people who enjoyed The Joy of Gay Sex disliked the following books. It may be the most unexpected list I’ve ever seen.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (expected 29.3, found 0)
The time traveler’s wife by Audrey Niffenegger (expected 28.5, found 0)
The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini (expected 26.4, found 0)
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (expected 24.1, found 0)
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (expected 21.8, found 0)
On the road by Jack Kerouac (expected 21.4, found 0)
The golden compass by Philip Pullman (expected 20.8, found 0)
The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck (expected 19.6, found 0)
The poisonwood Bible : a novel by Barbara Kingsolver (expected 18.3, found 0)
The brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (expected 18, found 0)
The ultimate hitchhiker’s guide by Douglas Adams (expected 17.1, found 0)
The secret life of bees by Sue Monk Kidd (expected 16.9, found 0)
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (expected 16.9, found 0)
Snow crash by Neal Stephenson (expected 16.8, found 0)
The unbearable lightness of being by Milan Kundera (expected 16.7, found 0)
The subtle knife by Philip Pullman (expected 16.6, found 0)
The prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (expected 16.1, found 0)
The alchemist by Paulo Coelho (expected 16, found 0)
The historian : a novel by Elizabeth Kostova (expected 16, found 0)
Mere Christianity : a revised and amplified edition, with a new introduction, of the three books, Broadcast talks, Chris by C. S. Lewis (expected 15.8, found 0)
The amber spyglass by Philip Pullman (expected 15.8, found 0)
Persuasion by Jane Austen (expected 15.4, found 0)
Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand (expected 15.2, found 0)
High fidelity by Nick Hornby (expected 15.2, found 0)
The princess bride: S. Morgenstern’s classic tale of true love and high adventure: the “good parts” version abridged by William Goldman (expected 14.9, found 0)
Blink : the power of thinking without thinking by Malcolm Gladwell (expected 14.8, found 0)
Dubliners by James Joyce (expected 14.4, found 0)
Eragon by Christopher Paolini (expected 14.4, found 0)
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values by Robert M. Pirsig (expected 14.4, found 0)
Night. Foreword by François Mauriac. Translated from the French by Stella Rodway by Elie Wiesel (expected 14.3, found 0)
Beloved : a novel by Toni Morrison (expected 14.3, found 0)
Stardust by Neil Gaiman (expected 14.3, found 0)
The god of small things by Arundhati Roy (expected 14.3, found 0)
Atonement : a novel by Ian McEwan (expected 13.8, found 0)
The restaurant at the end of the universe by Douglas Adams (expected 13.7, found 0)
Fight Club : a novel by Chuck Palahniuk (expected 13.7, found 0)
Sophie’s world : a novel about the history of philosophy by Jostein Gaarder (expected 13.5, found 0)
The Screwtape letters by C. S. Lewis (expected 13.4, found 0)
The sound and the fury by William Faulkner (expected 13.2, found 0)
The Eyre affair by Jasper Fforde (expected 13.1, found 0)
A farewell to arms by Ernest Hemingway (expected 13.1, found 0)
Digital fortress by Dan Brown (expected 13, found 0)
The Republic of Plato by Plato (expected 12.9, found 0)
Girl with a pearl earring by Tracy Chevalier (expected 12.9, found 0)
A game of thrones by George R.R. Martin (expected 12.9, found 0)
Deception point by Dan Brown (expected 12.8, found 0)
The giver by Lois Lowry (expected 12.7, found 0)
The red tent by Anita Diamant (expected 12.7, found 0)
Gulliver’s travels by Jonathan Swift (expected 12.3, found 0)
Charlotte’s web by E. B. White (expected 12.2, found 0)
The Aeneid by Virgil (expected 12.2, found 0)
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (expected 12.1, found 0)
The trial by Franz Kafka (expected 12.1, found 0)
Coraline by Neil Gaiman (expected 12.1, found 0)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (expected 12.1, found 0)
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (expected 11.9, found 0)
The wind-up bird chronicle by Haruki Murakami (expected 11.9, found 0)
The adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (expected 11.8, found 0)
White teeth by Zadie Smith (expected 11.8, found 0)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books by Azar Nafisi (expected 11.7, found 0)
Speaker for the dead by Orson Scott Card (expected 11.7, found 0)
The horse and his boy by C. S. Lewis (expected 11.7, found 0)
Life, the universe, and everything by Douglas Adams (expected 11.6, found 0)
Jurassic Park : a novel by Michael Crichton (expected 11.6, found 0)
She’s come undone by Wally Lamb (expected 11.4, found 0)
Gone with the wind by Margaret Mitchell (expected 11.4, found 0)
The voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis (expected 11.4, found 0)
The shadow of the wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (expected 11.4, found 0)
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery (expected 11.3, found 0)
Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson (expected 11.2, found 0)
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams (expected 11.2, found 0)
Possession : a romance by A.S. Byatt (expected 11.1, found 0)
The silver chair by C. S. Lewis (expected 11, found 0)
Things fall apart by Chinua Achebe (expected 10.9, found 0)
Fear and loathing in Las Vegas : a savage journey to the heart of the American dream by Hunter S. Thompson (expected 10.9, found 0)
Really? Plato’s Republic?
This article, about an unnamed HIV/AIDS-related conference in Sydney, brings up the now old story that male circumcision reduces the risk of HIV infection among men. The article claims that circumcising men reduces their risk of HIV infection by 60%, referring to this statistic as “encouraging”. I wonder, though, how encouraging it really is (in addition, I wonder how legit the statistic really is). While having 40% the chance of uncircumcised men to become infected is certainly better odds, it is worrisome that the focus is on men performing heterosexual acts, not on women, and not on men engaging in same-sex sex, and especially (especially worrisome, but even more especially not the focus of the study) not on men who are bottoms. It is also worrisome that the focus is on men in Africa and not on Europe, or the United States. What kind of program could this statistic lead to? Forced circumcisions? Circumcision “education” in Africa? I don’t really see any other options.
The latter option is highly problematic in that education often enough does not transmit understanding even as well as it transmits information, which is unreliable enough. A 60% reduction in one’s chance of becoming infected with HIV does not guarantee that a particular man will not become infected during a particular sexual encounter. It does not affect one’s chance of becoming infected due to intravenous drug use. It does not affect one’s chance of becoming infected as the male receptive partner during guy on guy anal sex (except insofar as it could potentially reduce the number of insertive partners infected with HIV). It also does not protect women. And yet any education campaign focusing on circumcision would almost certainly have to downplay these problems in order to be effective. Which is especially troubling given that we already have a non-disfiguring technology which is much more effective, condoms.
The first option shares the problems of the second, and in addition, whether force occurs at gunpoint or at the end of economic sanctions, denies agency in a harmful way to those people it affects (and no education campaign is entirely divorced from a campaign involving force). Moreover, insofar as such a program would almost certainly be one engaged in by Americans and Europeans against Africans, Russians, or Chinese, it would necessarily be imperialist, insisting that “we” have got it right, and “they” need to change, epistemologically and physically.
My concern here, ultimately, isn’t about potential circumcision campaigns but about the way this study rose to popularity, as if we saw it and thought, “finally! Some good news!” when in fact it doesn’t make sense in application; when it doesn’t address entire populations, but only specific subsets; when it offers a sense of hope without any real possibility of change. And with how it is still uncritically being touted as “encouraging”.
Feminists, gay rights activists, and anti-globalization activists all at least claim to represent the unrepresented, those on whom power is enacted. Elsewhere too, but especially here is a situation where all three groups should carefully examine the discourse, both popular and official, which is circulating regarding HIV/AIDS, gender, sexuality, wealth, and national status. We should, together, note the groups this discourse describes, and doesn’t, the curious ways in which a lack of description in one area hides mechanisms of power and in others glosses over the health of individuals. We should, finally, note the ways in which this discourse structures certain groups as those on whom we act and other as the actors.
Filed under: Family Research Council, family, fisting, gay rights, homosexuality
What? The Gay Man’s Chorus of San Diego sang the national anthem at a Padres game? That’s so disrespectful, like burning the flag. After using it as a glove for fisting. And in front of children, who were invited, as members of families, to the event, no less!
Seriously, though, there is something that bugs me about the Family Research Council’s either taken for granted or carefully planned opposition between family and homosexuality, between “supporters of the family” and “homosexual groups”. As if they are opposed; as if “homosexual groups” threaten “the family” in some way; as if there’s one way that the family is, was, and always has been; as if “the homosexual” (who is simultaneously new and, like the family, as he [because the threatening homosexual is a man, because the sign 'homosexual' always points to anal sex, as in statements about homosexuality as a high risk group, homosexuals that "prey on children", etc.] has always been) cannot have a family, cannot be family. Perhaps more problematic is the way in which this sort of rhetoric legitimates “the family” as always good, as always already (heh) redeemed, as something-more-than-an-institution whose value is never in question. As if abusive families either cannot exist or somehow don’t count as families.
