This is totally trivial, y’all, but I’m curious. Most of us, I think, have had the experience of being asked “What are you thinking about?” and not being able to give an answer. We might say “nothing” or we might make something up. It’s frustrating to ask and get the “nothing” response, but it’s also frustrating to be asked. What I want to know is, when that happens, what are you actually thinking? Or what’s going on in your mind that makes it impossible to answer? I realized, for me, it’s nearly always the same thing, but I’m curious what it is for other folks.

I haven’t blocked repeat voters, so if more than one of these are common for you you can vote twice! If you put “other,” of course I’d love an explanation in the comments.

I had a mini-revelation this morning while doing my daily blog read-through. Somebody — I don’t remember who or on what blog — mentioned that they’re an atheist now but grew up in a Christian home where grace was said before meals and church attendance was expected. The attitude with which they spoke about their Christian upbringing was both casual and unquestioningly distant: it was a piece of their personal history, but far, far removed from the person they were today. They talked about it the way I think about horseback riding or Girl Scouts, two activities that were hugely important in my childhood and have the occasional quirky relevance to my life today, but don’t have any real bearing on my sense of identity and purpose today. And that’s when I realized: I don’t feel that way at all about my Christian past. Although it’s been over three years since I called myself a Christian and over six years since I regularly practiced the religion in any way (prayer, Bible reading, churchgoing), that part of my history is with me every hour, every day. I publicly identify as an atheist, but in terms of my internal sense of identity, “ex-Christian” would be much more accurate.

Since this realization came upon me just this morning, I’m still sorting through exactly what it means and why it is. It’s partly how emotionally reactive I am to many things pertaining to Christianity, reactive in the way you can only be toward something that’s intimately intwined with your identity. But it’s partly the void of cultural identity that might replace Christianity. I don’t have this sense of practicing atheism, of atheism as serving a central function in my identity, the way I did with Christianity. One might say that that’s because atheism has no defining practices, and that could be part of it, but at the same time, I read a slew of atheist and skeptic blogs every day. (I almost certainly spend more hours weekly reading atheist and skeptic writing than I used to spend reading the Bible or other Christian writings.) I live with four other atheists and discuss matters of religion and skepticism with them regularly. I’m connected to a larger community of atheists and skeptics, and occasionally go to large conferences which are every bit as enriching and satisfying as the church retreats I used to go to.

So perhaps it’s nothing to do with how active and engaged I am as an atheist, and everything to do with how deeply engraved Christianity was on my heart. Perhaps it’s simply that the first 25 years of your life never get erased, never really fade into the background… or if they do, it takes longer than 3-6 years.

Whatever it is, it’s something I never feel I can adequately communicate to people who were never devout believers. Dan Fincke, whose blog I love reading partly because his experiences mirror mine so well, asked a month or so ago about differences between de-converts and never-believers, and as (I think) I replied then, this is the biggest difference I see. I feel like my personal history is broken — not in the sense of “destroyed and dysfunctional”, but in the sense of “has a giant hulking crack down the middle.”

Or like this tree. Pretty much exactly like this tree, actually. I have no idea what other people see when they look at me, but this is what I see when I look at myself: healthy and strong, but with this massive twist, this course correction that dominates the entire shape of my existence. Growing and thriving, but forever and unmistakably different from those trees that grew straight up.

And I wonder if that feeling will ever go away. If it’s just that I need more time to establish myself as a secular girl in a secular world… or if there will always be that sense of being defined by what I’ve left behind, what I’m not anymore.

Another beta-post at my new website, on biological sex differences! This is the piece I have worked the longest on and struggled the most with. I’m still not sure it does what I want it to do. I’d love feedback on it from anyone who’s got the time.

Shaun and I just got home from Women in Secularism 2, and it was a fantastic conference. Most of the internet buzz about this is already about Ron Lindsay’s opening remarks and the ensuing kerfuffle. I have a couple of thoughts on that, and I’m going to put them down right here and then move on, because I don’t want the amazingness of the conference as a whole to be overshadowed by those 15 minutes.

Basically I agree with everything Amanda Marcotte writes here. To me, his opening speech was ill-advised, tone deaf, and inappropriate for the context. His subsequent response to a criticism of his speech did not make things better. Both the speech and the responses are impolitic and inappropriate, and I suspect that when he’s cooled down a little he will be ashamed of himself. (Whether this shame results in critical self-examination or in increased defensiveness remains to be seen.) The only point I want to make that hasn’t been covered elsewhere is this: I could have told him exactly how his words would be received by his audience. I imagine many, many other people could as well, probably including many people who work for him. I could have predicted the response and the fallout with pretty good accuracy. And I assume that the fallout here is NOT what he would have wanted or intended, regardless of how right he thinks he is (if he knew ahead of time what the result would be, and went ahead with it, then we have a much bigger problem). This indicates to me that Ron Lindsay has not yet done enough listening. He still has a lot to learn about the perspective and concerns of many, many women in his movement, if he thought that that speech would be anything but a disaster.

Lauren Becker, who did a fantastic job keeping speakers and questions on track, had a job no one could envy: she delivered the closing address, on a day when warring blogs had been flying about Lindsay’s comments. Pretty much everybody I talked to agreed that the conference was one of the best we’d ever been to, and yet there was this undercurrent of anger that we were having to have this same conversation again, even here. Becker’s job was to close up the conference in a way that incorporated the positivity and sent us back into the world inspired and energized, and if she was going to touch on the conflict around Lindsay at all it would have to be very delicately done. Lindsay is her boss, and a majority (based on crowd response to various comments) of the audience was angry with him. That’s a no-win situation there, and if I’d been in her place I’d have probably spoken as if the controversy didn’t exist.

Becker proved why she’s in her place instead of me, because she did touch on the controversy, obliquely, delicately, and fairly; she said something important and yet something which (I think) nobody, whatever side they were on, could reasonably disagree with. She talked about how easy it is to misunderstand each other when we come from different backgrounds (using a personal story illustrating how even a word like “Think” can be misconstrued.) She talked about how we, as skeptics, value being able to admit when we are wrong. She talked about the importance of criticizing ideas rather than attacking people. Most importantly, she talked about giving each other space to change our minds: when we are in conflict with someone, we need to believe that they can and might change their mind, and we need to leave space in the conversation for that to happen. (Also, of course, we need to be continually reassessing our own position to make sure it’s not our mind that needs to change.) She could have been speaking to people on both sides of the issue… she probably was. But she wasn’t speaking to both sides in a way that demanded compromise or assumed a middle position was best… she was speaking to both sides in a way that reminded us of our shared value of self-criticism, reminded us that we’ve all been drastically wrong before and been able to change our minds, and that we should all be hoping that people we’re in conflict with do the same, rather than writing them off as lifelong enemies.

Hello all! I haven’t been writing much here lately… largely because of grad school and trying to get my sex educator career off ground. Today I’m happy to announce that a beta version of my new website, Sex in Specs, is live! (It’s been live for a few weeks, actually, but I didn’t want to talk about it until there was at least a smidgen of content.) Right now it’s an extremely bare-bones WordPress site with a couple of blog posts, and more to come… the end goal is to have it become a well-organized, easy-to-navigate static site with lots of information, advice, and resources about sexuality, all from a geeky, skeptical, science-and-analysis-loving perspective. My self-imposed deadline is midsummer’s day, although I’ll be adding content continually even after that point.

Right now the prelimary (or, as I like to think of it, larval) version of the site is there to let me start writing and posting some of the content pieces that will be part of the grown-up site. Apparently I find it very difficult to write things for an indefinite audience that might appear sometime in the future: I do much better when I’m writing something I know people will be reading immediately. So a large part of the purpose is to provide immediate incentive for me to write stuff.

Another part of the purpose is so I can hand out my business cards and there will at least be something at the web address they give.

And the third, most important part of the purpose (Reason. I should have started using “reason” back there instead of locking myself into an unwieldy phrase) is so that people can comment on what I post, and I can refine and adjust my thoughts before I integrate them into a structure that won’t allow direct commenting on articles. (Probably.) So I welcome feedback, additional thoughts and criticisms, on the posts I’ve written so far. Go check it out, and watch to see what it will become!

I’m very thankful to Libby Anne for asking about marriage in the latest of her Forward Thinking prompts. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, and my thoughts have been steered in new directions by a few conversations and experiences I’ve had. I’d like to propose a redefinition or restructuring of the entire concept of marriage, which is both radical and extremely traditional.

The redefinition I’d love to see our society accept is this: marriage is the creation of family. (Long version: Marriage is the intentional creation of family among adults who aren’t already close relatives.) It has nothing to do, per se, with romantic and sexual bonds between people. A romantic bond is one of the strongest motivators in human life for creating a family relationship with someone new; a sexual bond may raise the possibility of children, who tend to create a lifelong connection between their parents simply by existing (although there are exceptions, and it’s obviously not always a connection based in love for each other.) For these reasons, it makes sense that marriage, the intentional creation of family, is most often practiced between lovers. But there’s no reason it has to be.

So two questions emerge: Why is family important, and why should a government have any involvement in the formation of one?

As much as we in WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) culture would like to think it, humans are actually quite dependent on other humans. We spent the first and last couple of decades of our lives being dependent, and in the interim time only some of us are able to support ourselves, resource-wise, for a majority of that time. Illness or injury, natural disasters or becoming the victim of crime, economic fluctuations or just bad luck can leave us in need of not only emotional but material help from those closest to us. Ultimately, I define family as the people who will give that help when it’s needed. Family are the people that will stand between you and homelessness. Family are the people that will rearrange their lives to care for you when you’re sick, injured, or disabled. In WEIRD culture, this kind of material dependence is usually looked on as a sign of weakness and inferiority, and possibly being a lazy “user” who takes advantage of others’ willingness to help. We don’t like to think of ourselves as being one really bad day away from dependence, reliance on those who love us the most. But we all are.

I’m talking mostly about material support here, but love is the basis and the prerequisite for giving it. (I suppose pride can stand in in some cases.) Family is not necessarily the people we enjoy the most or have the most in common with, but they are the people we love the most: the people whose pain wounds us most directly, whose achievements we take the most pride in. Familial love is deep-rooted and stable, marked by compassion more than passion. It yields, over a lifetime, the willingness to sacrifice our own resources for the people we love.

In most cultures through human history (at least since agriculture), this immediate support network consisted of blood relatives and spouses. The rise of individualism has weakened a lot of those blood ties in WEIRD culture. People move far away from their families of origin to pursue a job or an education or an interest. People choose a career, or a religion, or a lifestyle, that their parents disapprove of. In some cases this merely results in increased distance, and in some cases it creates total estrangement. On the “total estrangement” side, a lot of people begin to identify “chosen family,” the people that are long-term, stable parts of their lives, that love them and have their back.

I think individualism is great, and I also think family is really important and necessary, both emotionally and physically. Human culture has nearly always recognized the right to choose at least one person as family: a spouse. While in previous times the right to choose a spouse as family was important so that children would be born into a stable support network, today I think it’s just as important for the two adults, who may or may not have a familial relationship with their family of origin. It’s a way of reconciling individualism with the human need for interdependent, familial relationships. If the family you’re born into is oppressive, you can choose to create a new one.

And, as no one should be surprised to see, I don’t see why this should be limited to two adults. Chosen families can be big, as big as the extended aunt-uncle-cousin-grandparents families other cultures enjoy. There’s a lot of advantage to having more than two independent, resource-earning adults in a close support network. Most obviously, if one of those adults suddenly becomes dependent or stops earning resources for a time, it’s less strain on the others to pick up the slack.

To return for a minute to romantic love: one of the things romantic love does, in that first, 6-18 month flush of passion that we call NRE, or limerence, or eros, is give people a drive to provide and sacrifice for one another in the same way that long-term familial love does. That’s probably another reason marriage has been so closely linked to family-creation through human history. Romantic love can kick-start the “mutual interdependence and resource-sharing” dynamic that later is underpinned by familial love (storge, if you want to be Greek about it.) But it doesn’t need to. Even if it never becomes mainstream, I would like to see it considered more normal in WEIRD culture for people to form long-term bonds of interdependence with other adults they’re not romantically linked to.

Because so much of my understanding of family in this context includes resource-sharing and other material considerations, I do think the government should be involved in it, to the extent of recognizing the bond and making certain concessions based on it. Whether those should be identical to the ones currently recognized as marriage, or whether they should be adjusted somewhat, is something to figure out once a large portion of the population get behind this entire concept of marriage. I’m not holding my breath, but to me the idea seems so useful, so obvious, and so compelling that it’s well worth the couple of perspective shifts required to get there.

This video is the best illustration I’ve seen for a while of how a majority of racism and privilege actually operate.

Two teenage boys, similarly dressed, are pretty conspicuously trying to break a bike lock at a park. The white kid gets questioned a few times within an hour, but is ultimately ignored even by those who questioned him. The black kid draws an angry crowd within a few minutes, and multiple people express their intention of going to the police.

Here are some things this social experiment shows, that might help people comprehend the way privilege and racism work in our culture.

1) It operates on a social level. None of the passersby were exposed to both the black kid and the white kid “stealing” the bike. It’s quite possible, even likely, that some of the people who ignored the white kid would have also ignored the black kid, and that some of the people who got outraged at the black kid would have also gotten outraged at the white kid. We can’t possibly pinpoint any of the individuals in the scene as “racist” or “not racist” based on their behavior. What we absolutely can do is observe that the culture of people in that park is, on the whole, racially prejudiced. (The only alternative conclusion is that the group of people passing by at a later time all happened to be much more proactive and concerned about bike theft. If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge…)

2) Related to that, none of the passersby in the scene were confronted with whatever subtle level of racial judgement underlay their behavior. Whichever among them would have responded differently to the other kid won’t ever know it. If, on another day in another place, they react differently to another kid apparently stealing a bike, it’s all too easy to rationalize the different reaction by putting it down to how the kid was dressed, or the difference in the neighborhood, or even the difference in their own mood/circumstance. (“I didn’t call the cops on the white kid in the park because I was just trying to enjoy a leisurely day off… but I did call them on the black kid down the street because I was at home and trying to defend my neighborhood.”) The only people who acknowledged that race played a factor in how they reacted were the two black women (most of the other passersby were white.) White people, myself included, are really good at convincing ourselves that we are totally not racist at all, at all. It takes sustained effort and self-examination to start spotting the subtle race-based judgements we make day to day. (This is something I’ve begun doing over the last year or two, and it’s both uncomfortable and enlightening.)

3) Whether or not particular individuals are “racist” or not doesn’t matter squat to the people on the receiving end of privilege or oppression. The white kid got away with bike theft (under the pretenses of the scene) and the black kid got photographed and would have been reported to the police. Both kids were playing guilty in this scene, even admitting when asked that the bike wasn’t theirs, but one of them would have ridden away with a shiny new bike and the other one would have been arrested. The white kid has an unfair advantage, and that’s just a reality of the world that this scenario took place in: each individual passerby could do whatever mental calculations they want to prove that they’re not racist, and it would still be a reality of their world that a white teenage boy gets way more benefit of the doubt than a black one.

4) There are exceptions, and they don’t outweigh the overall trend. Someone does finally go away intending to call the cops on the white kid. When the black kid says that yes, it’s his bike and he lost the key, a passerby helps him lift it over the post. The world is not uniformly inclined to suspicion of black teenagers and tolerance of white ones. But it’s overall inclined that way, at least in this area, so pointing out one or two exceptions and saying, “See? Racism isn’t a thing anymore!” isn’t a convincing argument.

Oh hey internet! A whole bunch more of you know about us now, and you have opinions! That’s cool, I read all your comments, replied to a few, ignored most. But there have been a few common themes as I look at comments on various web media coverage of our Our America appearance, and I wanted to answer some of them without flooding the boards over at Gawker and the like.

OMG, you are such a bunch of hippies! You’re probably all obsessed with reiki and shit.
If you take two seconds to look around this blog, you’ll quickly see how not true that is. We run more to the “asshole skeptic” side of things. I’ll grant that woo-loving hippies are somewhat overrepresented in the poly world, but it’s not everybody by a long shot. (Also, I have a soft spot in my heart for woo-loving hippies, although I’m not sure that’s true for the other polyskeptic contributors.)

OMG, you are such a bunch of geeks! Why do all poly people love steampunk?
This, on the other hand, I plead totally guilty to. Did you see our TARDIS door? We are huge, huge geeks. I dunno why there’s such overlap between polyamory and geekdom (also kink), except perhaps that if you’re used to being called a freak and a weirdo already, there’s less barrier to entry for doing something else that will get you called a freak and a weirdo. Also probably several of your weirdo freak friends are already doing it, so you’re more likely to give it a try. There may be more to it than that, but I don’t know.

Every poly person I’ve met is incredibly smug.
Yeah, I’ve met those people too. You have my full permission to be irritated by them. We’re also all atheists, so we’re two for two on memetic smugness. Me, I’ve met people who I find intolerably smug (even if I agree with them on whatever they’re being smug about) and I’ve also met people who are convinced they’re right about something without the smugness (also, sometimes, without the rightness). I think all of us at polyskeptic believe that it is better, all else being equal, to work past the jealousies and insecurities that make polyamory seem impossible to so many people. None of us give a shit whether, having done that, a person dates one person or four people or no people. If that’s smug to you, okay I guess.

You just want to have sex with a lot of different people.
And if we do, the problem is…? But actually, it’s a lot more complicated than that. I could definitely find a way to have sex with a lot of different people that didn’t involve also negotiating how to split the budget five ways, mass round-robin conversations about why X is mad at Y, and anxiety that one of us might get a kickass job in another state and what that would mean for everybody.

You’re such attention whores! Why should you get the spotlight and applause for your stupid “lifestyle”?
While being on the show sort of necessitates that all of us are positive or neutral to public attention — and all but one of us enjoys performing in various venues — it’s not like we petitioned documentarians until someone finally agreed to do a show on us. The Our America people reached out looking for poly families willing to be featured, and after talking it over we said we’d be up for it. We’d actually be thrilled if nobody thought our way of life was interesting or weird enough to pay attention to.

You’re so brave, I could never do that.
It came easily to some of us and with great difficulty to others. One thing all of us here believe in is personal growth, and doing shit that’s hard for you if you’ve decided it’s worth doing. That doesn’t mean that you, dear reader, need to aim your personal growth in the same direction we have, but I do hope you’re doing something in your life that challenges you, and that gets you to a place where you say, “Wow, five years ago I never would have thought I could do that!” For one reason or another, all of us were strongly motivated to work toward being comfortably, happily poly, so that’s where we’ve directed a lot of our effort.

You’re incredibly emotionally immature to need more than one lover.
I sometimes wonder about people who say stuff like this. Are relationships, to them, more take than give? Because every person who comes into my life to give me emotional support also needs as much emotional support from me. One reason I don’t mind having just one serious partner is that having a second one would be more work. I’ll do it happily if I fall in love with someone else, but it’s not all sunshine and candy.

You’re all ugly.
YOU ARE! No, seriously, I don’t give two shits whether a random internet commenter thinks I’m ugly or pretty, but if it makes you feel better to say it, knock yourself out.

Every so often, an aspect of woo finds its way into the mainstream, being taken up and mentioned by people who generally don’t keep up with or believe in the body of thinking it comes from. From my very biased sample of facebook friends, it seems that Mercury retrograde is one of them. People who never otherwise mention astrology will write “Thank goodness Mercury is coming out of retrograde, it’s been a rough week” or “Missed two buses and an essential phone call: damn you, Mercury retrograde!” And since I only rarely lecture to people on their own facebook walls, I thought I’d get out all my frustrated pedantry here.

First, a brief explanation of what “Mercury in retrograde” even means. All celestial bodies, as observed from Earth, move from east to west in a daily arc across the sky: this apparent motion is caused by the Earth’s daily rotation on its axis. The stars all stay in the same relative position to one another, but the planets move from night to night, so that one day they’ll appear near one constellation, and the next day they’ll have moved slightly further away from it. Normally this relative motion is also eastward, but occasionally a planet goes into a phase where it’s moving westward relative to the stars. This is called retrograde motion, and yes, all of the planets do it — Mercury just does it more often. It’s caused by the relative positions of Earth and the planet in question, as they both move through their orbit.

So there’s nothing mystical about it, just a natural effect of perspective when you have two moving objects moving at different rates.

For astrologers (and mythology buffs) Mercury governs transportation and communication, and when Mercury is in retrograde you can expect to have difficulties in both of these areas. And now we begin to see why the “Mercury retrograde” meme has caught on, even among people who never notice or care when Mars or Venus is in retrograde. Transportation and communication, in our modern world, tend to be based on complex systems that are easy to mess up. And they also tend to form the bedrock of our lives: some day write down how much time per day you aren’t engaged in either transportation or communication of some sort. So breakdowns in transportation or communication tend to be frustrating and cause further problems, and they happen often. And when a human brain faces a frustrating, obstructive issue, it wants to try to make sense of it. So if you’re a fairly ordinary person who’s heard of the whole Mercury retrograde thing from your astrology-believing friends, and one day you miss your train and later you’re stuck on hold for two hours, and still later you have trouble with a project because you and your colleague interpreted the requirements differently… well then your frustrated brain is looking for answers to “Why is everything so difficult today?” And then you think to check if Mercury is in retrograde, and if it is, all sorts of little reward fireworks go off in your brain. There’s an explanation! These issues might be out of your control, but at least they are predictable and explicable, and that feels so much better, cognitively, than just having a rough day for no particular reason.

And if, perchance, Mercury isn’t in retrograde on this particular day, you probably barely notice, since you weren’t all that invested in the myth to begin with, and you go on to look for other reasons why today sucks. And if this happens multiple times over the course of a year, and you get two or three “Yes! My day sucks because of Mercury!” moments and twelve or thirteen “Nah, it must be something else” moments, you will probably start to believe a little in Mercury retrograde. Your brain is a bad statistician; it remembers things that have emotional impact, and the “Yes! Explanation found!” emotional impact is much more powerful than the “Nah, must be something else.”

And if you already believe in Mercury retrograde, you’ll start getting confirmations pretty quickly. Apart from illness, nearly everything that goes wrong for a person in an industrialized society can be, by some stretch of the imagination, connected to either communication or transportation. Check out this piece from Astrology Zone on what Mercury retrograde means for you: aside from the obvious travel, mail, and email issues, it predicts that Mercury retrograde might cause your DVD player to break or your boyfriend to fight with you. Also, just in case all the bases aren’t covered, Mercury retrograde can cause some things that were broken to fix themselves, so if you have an unexpected success in the area of transportation and communication (as broadly interpreted as possible), that counts too! If you know when Mercury is in retrograde, it would be incredibly improbable for you not to receive dozens of confirmations that it’s having an effect during that time.

What tickles me about the Mercury retrograde phenomenon is that it always reminds me of another colossal case of human bias. The apparent retrograde motion of the planets confused the hell out of ancient astronomers. The going theory for hundreds of years was that the stars were part of a rotating sphere, moving cleanly around the earth which sat at the center of the sphere. The sun, moon, and planets were thought to move on inner spheres, concentric with one another and moving at different rates. Most philosophy at the time accepted a few basic principles (drawing heavily from Aristotle): that the celestial bodies were perfect and unchanging, while the earth was subject to change and decay; that a circle was the perfect form of motion, and thus all celestial motions must be circular. The system of concentric celestial spheres worked great with this philosophy, except that the planets sometimes didn’t. What was going on with that retrograde motion? Astronomers, most notably Ptolemy, worked out huge elaborate systems to explain the irregular planetary motion in terms of the circles that Aristotelian physics demanded. When something fits most of our observations, as well as our underlying philosophy, we will often go to absurd lengths to make the few remaining inexplicable bits fit before we’ll stop and consider that maybe the entire system is wrong.