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Exploring Sex in Dystopian Fiction

The goal of my research paper is to look at the portrayal of sex across multiple dystopian novels and then to understand if they are portrayed similarly, and if so why is sex portrayed in this way. I am interested in comparing some of the books we have already read in class, as well as reading more and conducting my own analysis. I then think it would be interesting to combine my analysis with others to preform both a first hand and a Meta analysis of the literature. I am interested in the portrayal of sex because I see it as something critical to the human experience, and I am not sure if I am doing it the “right way”, or if there is a right way, but I think a lot of people are doing it in a way that produces negative consequences. Through literature I believe that I can better understand how sex, and by extension intimacy, fits into the human experience.

Before starting my preliminary research, I figured that sex in dystopian novels would be portrayed as either negative or a form of rebellion depending on the context of the novel. If the character is using sex as tool to fight against whatever force is responsible for their dystopia then it would be portrayed as positive, such as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight Four. Likewise, when sex is used as a tool to control, as seen in Margret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, it would be seen as negative. Doing a preliminary Google Scholar search yielded some interesting results. Many of the papers published centered around a feminist interpretation of popular dystopian novels, such as the Handmaid’s Tale. I should have expected such results and I might have to reorient my question to look at dystopian novels through a feminist perspective. Another common result was the portrayal of leisure, or more accurately the lack of leisure, in dystopian novels. This might also provide an interesting thesis, however I feel as though this would be getting to far away from my interests. These results have also led me to consider possibly evaluating how gender as whole is perceived instead of just sex, but here again I feel as though my interest in the subject, though great, is not as high as the portrayal of sex.

I think the area that the college databases could help me with is finding both more papers that deal with the portrayal of sex in dystopian novels and more dystopian stories that portray sex in any light. I have read few dystopian novels in my life and by reading more I think I could gain better insight of the role of sex in them. More papers on sex in dystopian novels would also be very helpful because they would help me with preforming my meta-analysis and give me a better understanding of how other is in the field have understood the role of sex in such novels. 

Bank of America

Underneath all the recent outrage of Bank of America's (BoA) newest debit card fees an even more serious problem has been brewing. Unbeknownst to the American public, Bank of America has been moving its riskiest assest from its recent Merrill Lynch acquisition to subsidiary consumer banks. By moving their toxic assets into consumer banks BoA is putting the Federal Deposit Insurance Company (FDIC) on the hook for when they all go bad. If the derivatives start to go bad, the banks will have to use their consumer deposits, the money you and I put in the bank, as collateral for the 70+ billion dollars worth of damages. Since the FDIC insures all deposits 500,000 dollars and under, they could potentially have to give BoA's subsidiary banks billions of dollars, bankrupting the FDIC. However, if this weren't bad enough because the FDIC cannot go bankrupt, it is backed by the full faith and credit of the US government, taxpayers will wind up paying yet another bailout.

Now this isn't necessarily going to happen, this is just the worst case scenario. BoA is doing this as a hedge against the European debt crises imploding. We also have no idea how exposed BoA is to direct or indirect catastrophic failure of the European banking system due to the opaque and unregulated nature of the derivatives market. However, because BoA is doing something so damn drastic and politically risky, it leading me to think that their exposure is bad.

This is exactly the kind of stuff the Glass-Steagall Act was created to prevent. This only reinforces my opinion that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act is the worst decision congress has made in the past 15 years. To matters even worse though, the Federal Reserve has recently come out in favor of the derivatives transfers, leaving the FDIC the only sane looking one in the room. In a world governed by more competent people, BoA would never be able to even think of doing this and then when their bets were called they would go into receivership and have their assets wound down by the FDIC. Thankfully, the FDIC has some power to stop this, and if they do they can take control and BoA and resolve the bank. BoA has been on a nasty downward spiral for a long time now, lets just hope we let it die without it taking us all with it.

Commodities and Mega Banks

Foreign Policy came out with a spectacular article last spring and with wheat dropping and the arab spring entering into the winter I feel its more relevant than ever. This article not only highlights the dangers present in a financial industry that is too powerful, but also the role modern multinational corporations play in the world at large.

As some of you may or may not know, the revolts in Egypt this past spring were largely caused by the skyrocketing price of bread. In the Middle East bread is considered a sign of status and wealth; to feed your family and guests bread is a sign that you are a powerful person in the community. People in the region also tend to buy bags of wheat, unlike Americans who tend to buy bread. This makes the cooks of the Middle East countries particularly sensitive to price fluctuations. So, when the price of bread went up and lot of people no longer could afford to feed their families, they revolted.

Now the reason this is important to Americans, aside from the foreign policy implications, is that Goldman Sachs (GS) also uses the same process the do with wheat with something that is very important to America: oil. The very cyclical nature of crude oil prices is due to large mega banks, such as GS and Morgan Stanley, continually betting the price will go up, and since they are so powerful in the market they can then influence the price and push it higher.

I think what Gs is doing is brilliant. Evil but brilliant. Companies should not be able to say they are immune from the rules surrounding commodity trading just because they are the biggest and the most powerful. On the contrary, we should treat them with suspicion because of it.

First as a Tragedy

I found this video to be really interesting and thought maybe someone else might feel the same way. 

Occupy Wall St. Presentation

Here is the video link for the tumblr and the video I will show in class today.

Advertising in a Post Modern World

Advertising, as we know it today, is a smarter, stronger, and considerably subtler breed than what our grandparents knew. Advertising pre 1980s was a rather straightforward occupation; here is our product, and this is why it’s better than the other guys. Advertisers were in the business of selling products, concrete things that could make your life better in some measurable way. However, advertising today has left its materialistic bonds of metal and plastic for more intellectual ones. Now days when we buy a product, we are not only buying a material object, but also an idea.

            Consumers and advertisers have played a cat and mouse game as long as advertising has existed. Public Relations firms will create an ad campaign and consumers will grow resistant to it because they know someone is trying to sell them something, and so the ad agencies had to create new ways of marketing that consumers wouldn’t be resistant to. This cycle played out for a while until advertisers realized that the best way to sell a product is to not appear that they’re selling it at all. Thus Video News Reports, or VNRs, were born. VNRs were created when marketers combined selective exposer, selective perception, peripheral processing, and the hostile media phenomenon to lure consumers into trusting their local broadcasting networks. They do away with the premise of an ad entirely and so create a new reality of what the viewer sees. Not only do marketers create products such as VNRs, but they also use the same techniques to infiltrate both the government and social media. Social media is increasingly taking up more and more of the average American’s life. People trust their friends’ opinions, and advertisers realize that so they create blogs and false social media to mislead people. By giving the illusion that something is popular it instantly becomes more valuable, and social media has created a venue for companies to shout to the world that what they are hocking is indeed popular. By creating fake blog and social media profiles companies can create the false sense that what they are doing is “trending”. By creating fake grassroots campaigns, or astroturfing, large corporations can create the image in the public mind, and thus the social reality, that the policy decisions that they want are supported and fought for by the American people. This seriously impacts the way a democratic government is meant to function because it intentionally obscures the will of the people. Knowledge of the human mind is a dangerous thing when wielded improperly.

            American’s lives have become filled with advertising. We live in a world where fake news, fake friends, and fake movements tell us how to be safe, what’s cool, and what we should believe in. Its almost as if the world were becoming interconnected for a person to live their own lives anymore.

Look how far the Daily Show has Come

I would be interested to see what Manjoo's take on the Daily Show and the Colbert Report now days. I think there was a major shift in John Stewarts mind after he was found to be the most trusted person in news. Both programs occupy fascinating niches in the American news media because even though they are entertainment, they have more actual news people working for them. John Stewart has complete creative control over his show and he has used it to build the most popular show on Comedy Central. This has given him an astronomical budget because is CC really going to piss off its golden child? Of course not. His news team actually does more in depth research and fact checking than traditional news outlets. He also calls people on their bs, something that traditional news outlets are afraid to do because they fear some people will call them biased. If a major republican front runner came out and started talking about how vaccines cause autism major news outlets would present both sides of the story when one side is flat out wrong. John Stewart on the other hand would just say that they're crazy and they shouldn't be taken seriously instead of trying to pander to people who will take issue with what he says anyway.

WTF Kansas?

So last night Topeka, Kansas decriminalized domestic violence. The county that Topeka resides in cut the police budget by 10% and in response the police are no longer going to prosecute misdemeanors, which include domestic violence abuse. This means that any misdemeanor has to be prosecuted at the city level, something the city council though was to costly, and so they just said screw it, we might legalize domestic violence. This is completely insane. Instead of doing doing something logical, like raising taxes, to fill their budget gap the city thought it might be a good idea to just out and out legalize hitting your wife. I honestly don't undertand the mental gymnastics that would have to happen for someone to consider this a good idea. If this were to happen it would set women's civil rights back over a hundred years. This is a complete and utter failure of government to protect the rights of its citizens and hope it never comes up for a vote because I'm scared of what the result could be.

During my reading of True Enough I came across the idea of Social Reality. This is what I was trying to talk about in class. The world of hard sciences and math is dominated by objective reality, there is a right answer to how and why things happen, but when you deal with people everything becomes subjective. People only think something is art because they all agree on it. Street art is a really good example of this because while some people see it as a popular form of self expression in the public sphere, other, such as the police, see it as vandalism and the destruction of public property. The culture that we live in only continues to exist in its present form because people who participate in it think it is the best. If everyone woke up tomorrow and decided that they were unhappy with everything you could reasonably expect the culture to change.

1984: The college Years

1984: The College Years

            Many students in college read George Orwell’s 1984 and discard as simply a story about communism that holds to relation to their lives. However, 1984 has a distinct relationship with the way college students socialize. Human behavior is controlled through social facts, the norms, values, concepts, and expectations that a group imposes on an individual. 1984 is still valuable to today’s college students because Big Brother is analogous to the social norms experienced by college students. Orwell demonstrates the coercive manner of social power through Big Brother’s use of one’s coworkers, friends, and love interests to manipulate and control the people of Oceania. Social norms are powerful forces that goes unseen by those they influence.

            In college, as well as beyond the walls of campus, our peers surround us. Winston’s coworkers at the ministry of love encircle Winston, the protagonist, all of whom ensure his orthodoxy to the party. Tom Parsons is one such person. He is a man who is a “mass of imbecile enthusiasm… on whom… the stability of the party [rests]” (23). This kind of person posses a threat to Winston because he has internalized the social norms of the party to such a degree that he would gleefully turn Winston into the Thought Police at the first chance, and thank them for the opportunity. The kind of man who “puts in an appearance at the Community Center every evening for the past four years” has abdicated his ability to think to someone or something and turned himself into a fanatic (23). Parsons has absorbed to the message of the party totally, he lives and breathes to please the unfeeling father figure that is Big Brother. Big Brother has manipulated the social norms of the workplace in order to maintain control of its citizens.

Like Winston, many of today’s college students find themselves in a work environment that punishes unorthodoxy. College students crave the acceptance of their classmates and this need for social acceptance leads to fiercely upheld social norms. The strongest social norm that I have seen in the academic setting is the resistance to talk in class. When a student talks in class they are broadcasting to their classmates that they care about the topic, and caring about school is seen as something social outcasts, such as nerds and geeks, do. Participating in class discussion is met with social punishment both in and outside of the classroom. In 1984 Big Brother punishes unorthodoxy by torture, but on college campuses punishment takes the form of social ostracization. Outside the classroom, classmates will avoid interaction with students who regularly talk in class because by talking the student is demonstrating a different set of values than those who remain silent. Inside the classroom, the student’s classmates will avoid interaction as well as simply submitting to the talking student’s authority when in group projects. Both the party and a campus culture influence their citizen’s behavior through the use of social controls.

            Winston must successfully navigate the terrain of his peer group to avoid the iron fist of Big Brother just as college students must tiptoe through the social scene of their campuses. Winston has to be careful with who he associates himself with so that he does not alert others to his rebellion against the Party. He has to keep away from those who “see too clearly and speak too plainly” because when they do eventually get “vaporized” they would implicate him (54).  Winston is limited to superficial relationships with his peers that arise from a needed cooperation. He must avoid giving people the sense that he has “OWNLIFE”, or “individualism and eccentricity” (82).  Thinking is hunted down and eliminated in Oceania because it poses a threat to the Party’s dominance, however, Big Brother cannot observe everything at once so they have twisted people into wanting to spy on those they are cordial with.  

            A college student’s peers also demand that he or she conform to social norms. The peer group that one joins defines one’s identity. During the first few weeks of a college student’s freshman year they are thrust into a new social setting where friendship bonds are rapidly forming. In order to not miss out on this important period of relationship development people will conform to whatever they think will gain them social acceptance. This ends up only reinforcing the present campus culture because in an attempt to fit in freshman will imitate upperclassmen in hopes of gaining their approval as well as their peers who will see them as already being acclimated to the campus culture. People will go out to drink and engage in reckless on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights because they don’t want to stand out as different from their peers, even if they don’t necessarily want to.

It is impossible to be in a romantic relationship, a relationship that is based off trust and communication, with someone when they “wince and stiffen” at their lover’s touch (67). If people were to be enjoying themselves and their partners in sex then they would see the whole government and its initiatives as “bloody rot” (134). The true value in the extreme puritanism is that it can lead to “induced hysteria, which [is] desirable because it could be transformed into war fever or leader worship” (134). One begins to live in both in the present and in the future. One wants to give the person they love everything of himself or herself and build something even more beautiful from their love. The Party has engineered a model for “romantic” relationships that both places an enemy in one’s bed and reinforced devotion to the party.

There is also a distinct lack of truly romantic relationships present on college campuses. In 1984 sex was reduced to a physical act because it was made into something repulsive, but on today’s college campuses sex is purely physical act because people perceive that everyone is doing it. There is no longer any romanticism in sex. This is reinforced by the “bro” culture that is dominant on many college campuses. This bro culture is one that emphasis hyper-masculinity and the objectification of women. This culture fosters negative attitudes towards women because males see them as commodity to be gotten rather than a person to love. The concept of dating as described by one student was “hooking up with the same person every weekend”. Even though men and women may not want to have causal sex, they still will in order to gain the acceptance of their peers. College students need to be aware of norm shifts so that they don’t have to go along with them if don’t want to. College students are having the norms of a romantic relationships redefined for them by their campus cultures.

Novels like 1984 give college students the knowledge that a social norm exist and exert power 
over our lives, and by doing so gives students the ability to either accept or possibly change the norm. Big Brother’s use of social control to change the relationship between coworkers, peers, and lovers is similar to how a college campus will resocialize its incoming students. If people ever want to change the way their college culture operates and influences people then they must understand social norms and how they impact students. 

True Enough

The truth is what everyone agrees it is. Now there are certain exceptions to this, such as math and the sciences, but for anything that involves social interaction there is no defined truth, no objective reality. This may be a controversial opinion, but I find that it holds true for the majority of the time. Social facts are decided and agreed upon constantly by all people in society. There is no rule that says I can't come to class in my robe, but if I did people would consider me weird. Conversely, if everyone wore robes to class and I showed up as I normally dress I would be weird. Truth can be defined as the most commonly held beliefe on a subject. I really like True Enough from what I've read so far. I feel like as we move farther into the book we will get a better picture of how common narratives are shaped by media echo chambers. I think what I'm really interested in is how an individual's community shapes their ideology, especially when individuals are allowed to chose their communities.

Newt Gingrich's America

There has be a paradigm shift in the way Washington works since 1994. Newt Gingrich campaigned on a platform that promised to change the Republican party from one where it was possible to get along with democrats to one that opposed every single bill, vote, or issue that a democrat proposed. There used to be standards of conduct in Congress, such as a taboo on using the filibuster or blocking a nomination. When someone did one of these two things they were considered to be quite the tool. This code of conduct has obviously failed. Congress was designed by men who thought a gentlemanly code of conduct would persist forever, but we are now seeing a Congress inhabited by people bent on manipulating the system to for their own benefit. Nothing can get done in Congress any longer due to the vitriol being slung by both sides. This era of hyper-partisanship will probably continue until there is some monumental crises that requires cooperation and when that happens there will only be two options: cooperate or have the country fall apart.

Those Poor American Banks

Jamie Dimon has been claiming that the new regulations imposed on banks are "anti-american". The new regulations would set higher standards for the capital requirements, the ratio of equity to debt, that banks have to hold. Dimon's claim is that by forcing the banks to hold high capital requirement, in essence to make them safer, is un-american because they were set by Basel III, the international banking body that determines what the adequate levels of capital requirements are. We are coming out of a time (are we?) where it is obvious that banks had very low capital requirements and so were able to leverage themselves to up to 35 times their equity. American banks were given a chance to manage themselves with little to no government regulation, and they failed spectacularly. I think what is un-american is letting a oligarchical set of banks ruin the lives of millions of Americans. In all honesty, the new capital requirements are not nearly strict enough. The Swiss have imposed a CR (capital requirement) of nearly 20% on their banks due to the powerful place they occupy in the economy and other countries like Britain are considering similar measures. The United States has let its banking sector run wild and it needs to begin to reign it in.

The Absurd Year

I have read a lot of philosophy during my life, and almost all of it left me feeling unsatisfied, that is until I discovered a branch of philosophy called Absurdism.  Absurdism has it’s roots in the writings of the 19^th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, but it further advanced by the French philosopher Albert Camus. In Camus’ essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus examines the problem of the Absurd: that human beings look for meaning in a universe without one. The problem of the Absurd is neither present in human beings or the universe, but in there interaction.

During my most recent reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four I examined the story through the lens of absurdism. Winston is a man who is in constant rebellion against the party, a seemingly unstoppable force that will be responsible for his death. Like the absurd man who is sure of the grand finality of his death, Winston continues to rebel against the absurdity of his life even though he realizes that “[they] can’t win” (135). Winston takes a very different approach to the knowledge of certain death than his mother did. To be fair, his mother’s loss is different than Winston’s in that she had almost everything stripped from her life before her death. However, her response was to lie in bed what resembles a crushing depression. I am not criticizing her for doing this as I can only begin to imagine the terrible grief of a person in her position; I am just highlighting her behavior as an opposite to Winston’s.  In contrast, when Winston is faced with certain death his response is to extract the most life he can from the bleak world that he inhabits. The response of a person who recognizes the absurd is not to give up and despair at the hopelessness of his or her situation, it is to rejoice in the wonder and beauty that life has to offer. With the knowledge that there is nothing but what has been and what is comes a freedom from the pain and anguish of trying to live in place distinctly inhuman, a place where Party dwells. For me, and it seemed for Winston as well, living life is finding someone you love desperately and giving him or her everything of yourself because “when you have nothing else to give, you still give [them] love” (164). To love, others and yourself, is to “[stay] human” (165). The failure to rebel would mean that Winston rejects his humanity for some Rebellion means to embrace the wonder of being human without having to anesthetizing yourself to the world.

            The knowledge of the absurd never really leaves you. It is something that, once your mind’s eye fixes upon its terrifying light, you can never unsee. Winston must cling desperately to the delusion that he loves big brother because he knows that flame of his humanity still burns in the back of his mind.