Peterson: Makeup in the workplace is “sexually provocative”

Jordan Peterson

So there’s this college professor from Canada (sorry, everyone, we don’t always produce winners) who’s made a name for himself by giving young men groundbreaking advice like “clean your room” and other things their moms presumably told them for years, and who those same young men now revere as some sort of philosophical luminary. I don’t see it. What I do see, nonstop, is Jordan Peterson saying dumb things that make misogynists giggle. Things like how maybe there should be a rule against women wearing makeup in the workplace because red lips are “sexually provocative”. No, really:

JORDAN PETERSON: Here’s a rule. How about no makeup in the workplace?

VICE: [incredulous] Why would that be a rule?

PETERSON: Why should you wear makeup in the workplace? Isn’t that sexually provocative?

VICE: No!

PETERSON: It’s not?

VICE: No.

PETERSON: Well, what is it then? What’s the purpose of makeup?

VICE: Some people would like to just put on makeup, just to …

PETERSON: Why? Why do you make your lips red? Because they turn red during sexual arousal. That’s why. Why do you put rouge on your cheeks? Same reason. […] How about high heels? […] They’re there to exaggerate sexual attractiveness. That’s what high heels do. They tilt your pelvis forward so your hips stick out. That’s what they do. And they tighten up your calf muscles. They’re sexual display. Now, I’m not saying people shouldn’t use sexual displays in the workplace. I’m not saying that. But I am saying that that is what they’re doing, and that is what they’re doing.

[…]

VICE: Do you feel like a serious woman who doesn’t want sexual harassment in the workplace, do you feel like if she wears makeup in the workplace, is being somewhat hypocritical?

PETERSON: Yeah. I do think that.

As a sidenote: I sought out the unedited interview to see what may have been left out of the version most people saw (and, perhaps futilely, to negate the usual cries of “out of context!”). Turns out all they’re missing is a bit of cross-talk and a lot of pseudo-philosophical meandering. I’d like to bill someone for the minutes of my life I won’t get back.

Back to Peterson. But not for very long, because everything he said is so dumb and wrong there’s only so much one can say about it. There’s certainly a conversation to be had about the origins and nature of the beauty standards society imposes upon the genders, and women especially. But trying to frame lipstick and high heels as “sexual displays” in the workplace – and additionally, the notion that they ought to be proscribed, presumably because they make poor men too horny to work – is the kind of ridiculousness you expect from bad satire, not from someone bandied around as a public intellectual. Lipstick on women is no more sexual or distracting than ties and combed hair are on men, and I have yet to learn of a workplace that’s fallen apart because its male employees spent all their time gawking at their female colleagues’ tight calf muscles.

Honestly, Ed Brayton put it better than anyone:

But let me just ask one question: Isn’t Peterson asking for it? I mean, really, during this interview, he was dressed well, wearing an expensive suit that shows off his wealth. He was wearing a tie that points directly to his penis, in a blatant sexual display. So if a gay man were to sexually harass him, he has no one to blame but himself, by his own “reasoning”[.]

If you can’t differentiate between polishing up your appearance in concordance with cultural norms and sexual signaling, there’s just no helping you. And perhaps you should stay away from women.

Daily Links #99: Black users arrested more in states with legal pot

If I publish one more links post, do I get one free?

• In states where marijuana is legal, arrests have gone down dramatically – but Black users are still arrested up to ten times more often than Whites.
  (via Dispatches From the Culture Wars)

• Prison labor is slave labor, part the n^th.
  (via Pharyngula)

• Virginia Republicans present a bill to charge Internet users $20 to watch porn and other “obscene” material. Why these puritanical numbskulls never learn from the fate of similar bills peddled around the country, I’ll never know.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• James Bond was a rapist: Eventually all our heroes become villains, and so will we.
  (via The Daily Grail)

• Finally, your headline of the day:
  (via @radleybalko)

[Source: Fox News]

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Edit (02/01/18 @ 5:03 AM ET): Typo fix.

2017 statistics debunk Trump & Sessions’s crime fear-mongering

One way Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have tried to defend their tough-on-crime posturing is by pointing to (when not lying about) a supposed massive wave of violence sweeping through America’s cities. Their evidence: Some large cities saw an abnormal increase in violent crime in 2016, ignoring every other statistic that shows the overall crime rate has been dropping for decades across the country.

Now the 2017 numbers are in, and they show that trend is still going strong:

New analysis from the Brennan Center:

All measures of crime in the 30 largest American cities — the overall crime rate, violent crime rate, and murder rate — are estimated to decline in 2017 according to a year-end analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.

Crime in 2017: Updated Analysis directly undercuts any claims of a nationwide crime wave.

Key findings from the analysis include:

• The overall crime rate in the 30 largest cities in 2017 is estimated to decline slightly from [2016], falling by 2.7 percent.

• The violent crime rate will also decrease slightly, by 1.1 percent, essentially remaining stable.

• The 2017 murder rate in the 30 largest cities is estimated to decline by 5.6 percent. Large decreases this year in Chicago [down 11.9 percent] and Detroit [down 9.8 percent], as well as small decreases in other cities, contributed to this decline. … New York City’s murder rate will also decline again, to 3.3 killings per 100,000 people.

[…]

This is all very good news. The question now is if Trump and Sessions will continue to lie about the crime rate in America, or now that they’ve been in office for a year, if they’ll try to take credit for it.

It’s disheartening, in a jaded way, how difficult it is to tell which it’ll be. In fact, the only uncertainty revolves around whether Trump and Sessions’ policies, governed by their law-and-order shtick and unconstrained by facts, may slow or even reverse this trend. Given Trump & co.’s penchant for tainting absolutely everything, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

Daily Links: 09/11/17 – America’s self-inflicted decline

[source]

Finally got my studio-quality reference speakers, so excuse the sparse blogging whilst I take ’em for a spin. (Right after I figure out how to connect everything.) Have a wall o’ links instead.

• Today is the 16th anniversary of 9/11. Here’s how it triggered the self-inflicted decline of civil liberties and freedom in the US. ^[pictured]
  (via @ggreenwald)

• Photographic evidence of the US- and UK-backed Saudi war crimes that have created the world’s largest humanitarian crisis in Yemen.
  (via @religionnews)

• Russia threatens Canada over the latter’s “underground railroad” for gays fleeing persecution and death in Chechnya, reaffirms stance against basic human rights.
  (via Dispatches From the Culture Wars)

• UC Berkeley campus cops crack down on scourge of unlicensed hot dog vendors, specifically by stealing seizing a vendor’s cash and debit card. Three silver linings: California’s recently amended asset forfeiture laws will require a conviction before police can keep the money; a GoFundMe for the vendor has already raised nearly $40,000, and a petition to fire the asshole cop now has already exceeded 18,000 signatures (both numbers as of this writing).
  (via @Popehat)

• Canadian civil liberties groups launch constitutional challenge against laws permitting extended solitary confinement.
  (via @cancivlib)

• Law professor warns Congress’s renewed anti-sex trafficking proposals would severely undermine the Internet’s free speech protections (and wouldn’t actually help sex-trafficking victims).
  (via @EFF; RT: @Popehat)

• Tesla remotely extended the range of some of their cars in Florida with a free over-the-air update. Here’s why that’s troubling.

• Canadian Muslim group blames “Jewish controlled media” for criticism of female genital mutilation.

• Finally, neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer’s game of domain hopscotch continues, now kicked out by fifth hosting company.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

If you have any story suggestions, you can leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links: 09/07/17 – Surveys, surveys and more surveys

• New religion survey: As the US grows more religiously diverse, White Christians are losing their dominance … and the nonreligious are becoming a plurality.

• Another religion survey: Only 9% of Britons believe in Creationism, as opposed to 15% of Canadians … and 38% of Americans. (That’s actually the lowest that number has dipped.)

• New crime survey: Despite what Jeff Sessions and other scaremongers would have you believe, the US crime rate is still falling and has hit a 30-year low.
  (via @radleybalko)

• New scientific review finds significant flaws in the 3% of climate-science papers that deny human-driven global warming, from cherry-picked results to bad models.
  (via @fark)

• Finally, Russia’s efforts to block “pirate” websites censors 4,000 targeted sites … and 41,000 innocent sites.

If you have any story suggestions, you can leave them in the comments or send them in.

“But what about White pride?”

Why do advocates of “White pride” and “White history month” sound like racist tools? Share this explainer with the next person you find who doesn’t get it.

Transcript

(Click to open/close:) [−]

A common and seemingly reasonable argument for white pride or white nationalism is "why can't I be proud of my culture?"

Well, you can. Always have been able to. We have Irish pride celebrations, we have German drinking festivals, we have Serbian food festivals. Any European culture you can think of has multiple organizations in North America dedicated to taking pride in their heritage and NO ONE gives them shit for it.

But, you see, when you start talking "white pride", that's not a culture. That's a skin colour. There is no white culture, never was. There is no pan-European culture, never was. Europe is a continent, not a culture or ethnicity.

Now, some of you are probably about to go "But wait! Black pride! How is that okay?" Well, easy. Go find a black person and ask them if their ancestors were slaves. When you find one who says "yes", proceed to ask them "what country in Africa were your ancestors from?" Do you know what their answer will probably be? "I don't know." This is because their culture was taken from them. It was beaten out of them. They were enslaved, Christianized, and then white washed. The one unifying feature they have as a people is that history of slavery and that history of being black. They can't have Liberian pride, or Congolese pride, or "insert African country" pride because they have no fucking idea where their ancestors came from other than the broad region of West Africa.

Meanwhile us white people can often trace our ancestors to specific cities and regions. I can trace my mother's maiden name to a single fucking village in Ireland. I know where I came from. I don't have white culture, I have Irish culture.

So that's why white pride makes you an asshole but black pride actually makes sense.

Skin color alone isn’t anything worth being proud (or ashamed) of. “Black pride” isn’t about celebrating the physical trait of dark skin; it refers to the variety of cultures and subcultures, the dialects and traditions and fashions and historical baggage shared between various groups of Black people in the US and elsewhere. That they’ve survived the evils that Western history put them through and forged their own identity is something worth taking pride in. The same can be said about LGBTQ pride and similar sentiments from other historically oppressed minority groups who, through effort and sheer perseverance, have reached the point where they can exist without persecution and condemnation from the majority of the population. (More or less, anyway.)

Conversely, “White pride” is the reaction of people who feel threatened that their historically privileged group is no longer the only people worth paying attention to at the table. They’re like a child who protests because their parent took a tiny number of their toys and gave them to the other kids who until then had been left to play with paint chips. So their instinctive reaction is, “But what about me/my group?”

They just need to grow up and accept the fact that they don’t have the exclusive right to all the toys, and that other people deserve the chance to play with them, too. Thankfully, as the amplitude of counter-protests (both in the US and abroad) has shown, those who scream and whine because they’re no longer the only voices being heard are vastly outnumbered by more sensible people, and their number will only continue to shrink … even if there’s an occasional step back for every two steps forwards.

(via @AdrianXpression; RT: @pzmyers)

A song for some sad music news

I haven’t kept up with their music since my early teens, but today’s news means something from the Linkin Park playlist:

In memoriam: Chester Bennington (1976—2017).

Are there good reasons for infant male circumcision? (No)

Male circumcision is the archetypal religious-based practice: it’s self-evidently bizarre and gruesome to anyone who isn’t used to it (no matter how you slice it, it involves, well, slicing bits off of babies’ genitals), it’s commonly done to infants too young to understand or agree to it, it’s pointless outside of tradition, and the arguments used to defend it don’t hold up to scrutiny. The only silver lining is it doesn’t usually harm the child … except when it does.

YouTuber Stephen Woodford explains all this in his debunking of the common arguments used to support circumcision:

There’s nothing wrong (at least morally) for an adult to decide to get circumcised for whatever reason they choose. Just don’t permanently alter your baby’s body until they’re old enough to decide for themself, especially given that they can’t just grow it back if they later disagree with your choice. It’s their body, not yours.

I fail to understand how this is remotely a contentious issue.

(via Friendly Atheist)

Daily Links: 06/07/17 – Plague of FGM in England

Shiva Ayyadurai

• Today in terrible numbers: Over 5,000 new cases of female genital mutilation were reported in England in 2016. Who even knows how many weren’t reported.

• France to make childhood vaccines mandatory in 2018 in the wake of a serious (antivax-related) measles outbreak. Good. Public health trumps parental ignorance every time.

• Dull candidates, bad strategy, cringe-worthy slogans: How can the Democratic Party be so damn terrible at anything political-party related?
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• I’m with PZ Myers regarding “HanAssholeSolo”’s apology for his gleeful neo-Nazi behavior. To quote my favorite show: “Ethics are what we do when no-one else is looking.”

• And finally, the self-styled “inventor of email” (who didn’t invent email) ^[pictured] plans to challenge Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) for her seat. May he crash and burn just as hard as he hopefully will in his bogus SLAPP lawsuit against Techdirt.

If you have any story suggestions, you can leave them in the comments or send them in.

Far-Right threatens professor who explains ancient statues weren’t white

Alexander Sarcophagus (c. 320 BCE)
[source]

You know those ancient classical statues: Adonis-or-Aphrodite-like ideals of beauty, usually nude figures chiseled out of pasty-white marble. Except, as a university professor of classics explained, they weren’t always so colorless:

Earlier this month, [Sarah] Bond published an article in the online arts publication Hyperallergic saying that research shows ancient Western artifacts were painted in different colors but have, over time, faded to their base light marble color -- giving the false impression that white skin was the classical ideal.

“Modern technology has revealed an irrefutable, if unpopular, truth: many of the statues, reliefs and sarcophagi created in the ancient Western world were in fact painted,” she wrote. “Marble was a precious material for Greco-Roman artisans, but it was considered a canvas, not the finished product for sculpture. It was carefully selected and then often painted in gold, red, green, black, white and brown, among other colors.”

While today’s scholars have accepted this as fact, she said, the general public is another story.

I’m mystified that this would be in any way controversial. Sure, we all know those artifacts as white, but I have no problem imagining that they may have been clad in resplendent colors in their time. But then, I have no problem accepting that many dinosaurs had feathers, either (they’re the ancestors of birds, after all!), so maybe cultural perceptions don’t matter as much to me in general.

There are those to whom those perceptions matter a great deal, however, and Bond raised their ire when she touched on how this false idea of what ancient societies considered ideals of beauty is now used by racists to bolster their beliefs: