Vampires and Academics
I was first groomed for the AAR when I was seventeen. You see, when I was seventeen I joined an organization called the Camarilla and began playing to live-action role-playing (LARP) game Vampire: the Masquerade. Let me briefly describe the game and it will immediately make sense to anyone who has ever attended an academic conference.
The premise of the game is this: vampires (read: academics) are not human but can usually pass for human. When you become a vampire, your soul is essentially turned inside out producing a new aspect to your personality called “the beast.” The beast drives all vampires to be ruthless killing machines. Every time you give in to the beast, it becomes more powerful, until you have lost all of your humanity and are nothing but a blood-drenched animal. As such, younger vampires have retained most of their humanity while older vampires are more dominated by the beast.
Wait, it gets better.
Vampires are divided into clans. The clans more or less hate each other but have agreed to an uneasy truce in order to keep the real world from learning about vampires and exterminating them. Vampires who have no clan (read: independent scholars, i.e. me) are known as caitiff (from the Old French “a captive.”) Caitiff are basically ignored and treated like crap by vampire society.
Wait, it gets better.
Elder vampires (read: tenured professors) are engaged in petty rivalries and feuds that have gone on for hundreds of years. Of course, they would never directly attack each other. Instead, they just harbor grudges and look for subtle ways to cause pain and misery to their opponents.
But you don’t get to play an elder vampire. No, you play a recently turned “neonate” vampire (read: graduate student.) Neonates were created to be the pawns of the elders and typically stumble their way through the feuds of the elders. It is not uncommon during the game for an elder to kill a neonate simply to spite the elder who sired her. Neonates survive primarily by being very cynical, picking up on gossip quickly, and making themselves useful to the right elders.
Wait, it gets better.
Vampire: the Masquerade is a live action role-playing game. So the game typically consists of renting out a large institutional looking building (usually part of a college campus.) There is very little actual fighting, so most of the game entails wandering around the building speaking to vampires. You pretend you’re having a friendly conversation but actually your forming alliances and trying to fuck over your rivals. Outright murder is forbidden in vampire society as in human society, so a lot of time is spent spreading rumors about people, hampering other people’s projects, and so on. A skilled player can create a situation where a rival will be killed without them having to do anything.
The Anne Rice piece comes in too. Her novels feature young girls who beg the vampire to embrace them. They are rebuffed being told that vampirism is the most horrible existence imaginable. This is a speech I’ve heard probably over a hundred times during my life: “I’m an academic and, trust me, you don’t want to be an academic.”
Vampires and academics even dress similarly. There is an over representation of black and dark colors. Slightly dressy clothes are the norm but both groups have a tendency to bohemian and religious accessories. The witch at the pagan panel in her black dress and silver pentagram would have fit right in at a LARP (and probably has.) There was also the ubiquitous graduate-student-turned-crazy-homeless-man. That too, reminded me of the Vampire: the Masquerade.
I played this game when I was seventeen and for some reason I never made the connection until this weekend. But Saturday night as I was gliding around a hotel room in my black blazer, glass of merlot in hand, advancing my agenda through calculated Machiavellian conversations, it all suddenly seemed familiar. And oddly, that connection was comforting to me. I was still doing what I had been doing before, but now I was having a lot more fun. A spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down, in the most dee-light-ful way. (You know Mary Poppins is pretty goth too.)
Vampires and academia are both horrible things in real life, but as a game they’re quite fun. The difference is that when we were done being vampires, we would all go to Denny’s together. Academics never get a respite from their games. And as I’ve said before in this blog, the best way to spot an immoral institution is when someone justifies it as “just a game.”
Still, as a coping strategy and a “technology of happiness” the life as LARP perspective has much to offer. It bring me back to my favorite passage from the Hagakure (a text for samurai):
“It is a good viewpoint to see the world as a dream. When you have something like a nightmare, you will wake up and tell yourself that it was only a dream. It is said that the world we live in is not a bit different from this.”
Viva la Resistance!
Testing is the bane not only of students but of teachers. There is pretty much no other effective way to dismantle the entire American education system then the endless barrage of testing we have come to adopt. Georgia students must take three batteries of state and federal tests—first, there is the Georgia High School Graduation Test. Graduation tests began in Texas and I think has since spread to every state in the union—if there’s a state that doesn’t have it, I would seriously love to teach there. In Georgia, they plan to one day replace the High School Graduation test with End of Course Tests. You see, Georgia thinks I’m incompetent and so all of my students are required to take a test which is designed by the state and that I am not allowed to see. This test counts as 15% of their grade for my class and there is currently a plan to put their scores on their high-school transcripts. The End of Course Test is still in the experimental stages, so current students have to take both the four subjects of the graduation test and the End of Course Tests. On top of all that are the federal No Child Left Behind Tests for reading, writing, and ‘rithmatic. I have taught in three states, and I have never met a teacher—democrat or republican—who thinks No Child Left Behind is a good idea.The private schools don’t have to put up with all this bullshit. Those who can afford to go to private school are getting a better education because of, and not inspite of, government interference. I will now tell you the true, secret reason for these tests—I should have put it on this blog a year ago when I first discovered the secret: it’s simple pork barrel politics. The textbook companies bribe state and federal politicians to impose the testing. The allows corporations not only to profit by selling the tests to schools, but it allows them to produce study guides which go for $20 a pop. And since I’m not allowed to see the tests, the study guides are better than I could ever be.
Now my students are often so poor they literally don’t know when they’ll get their next meal. I once had to give a student a Powerbar after school because hunger pangs were preventing him from concentrating. Of course they are not going to pay $100 to buy five study guides for these tests. So my department did the only Christian thing to do: we made illegal photocopies of the review guides and gave them to our students. Somehow, the corporation found out and sent us a cease and desist letter. These corporations are literally holding student’s educations for ransom. Now you know. Tell the world.
In the ghetto, Hitler would incorporate Judenrat as liaisons between to the Nazis. Judenrat were responsible for a number of duties including deporting Jews to death camps. Divide and conquer. It’s an old trick used to oppress a population. As teachers and educators, we all hate the oppression of the testing: except the testing coordinators whose jobs have been created by the oppression. These are Bush’s Judenrat.
It is apt to compare our school’s testing conditions to a Nazi ghetto: at least in terms of the way everyone suddenly begins to follow orders to the point of madness. For example, we have to check the ID of every student who walks in to take that test: students who don’t have picture IDs must run to find a teacher who knows them can tell the proctor that yes, this really is Tavarrus Jones and not a genius with dreads and a hooded sweat-shirt who has been hired by the real Tavarrus Jones to take a test for him. I actually saw a senior teacher tell a class that they could be arrested and taken to jail for not having and ID! (While proctoring, I am also required to escort students to the bathroom, to make sure they are not accessing hidden stashes of information to help them on the test.)
Yesterday, I had to pace around a classroom for three hours proctoring one of these fucking tests. After the test I was given half an hour for lunch which was the only break I had between 7:20 and 3:00. (Naturally, I spilled coffee on myself and spent to break in the bathroom cleaning my shirt off.) I suffered through this though, because, I had been promised that today I would have time to create lesson plans and grade papers instead of taking a test. Wrong.
I arrived to work today to find a notice in my box that I was required to proctor make-up testing for students who had evaded the tests that had been run all-week. Lesson learned: never check your mailbox. This brings me to the real inspiration for this blog entry: I hate our testing coordinator. Our Judenrat is a faded blond, Southern battle-axe who embodies all the worst attributes of any Southern woman, bureaucrat, or high-school teacher you have ever met.
As a Judenrat, she is technically outside of the student-teacher-administrator hierarchy. However, she has apparently been doing various tasks around the high-school (mostly teaching gym) for a very long time. Furthermore, she manages to intimidate teachers by invoking mysterious powers of “the state.” As in, The state ain’t gonna be happy campers if you screw this up!’
I am fairly certain the Judenrat hates me too. She has told me in front of an administrator that she thinks history is pointless and not worth studying. (This from a woman who coordinates standardized tests!) Also, she has dropped in on department meetings where she has mentioned me by name in front of my colleagues as an example of the incompetence that “the state doesn’t like.” After she left, I told my department I was going to hold a really nice retirement party for her someday.
The real reason I hate the Judenrat is that she is constantly pressuring me to kick my students out of school. For a teacher, that’s a pretty hate-able offense. You see, I have students who have been dropped by every other teacher except me. If I drop the student, not only will society have completely failed to give them an education, but their scores will not be counted towards the school’s testing averages. So the Judenrat constantly sends me e-mails urging me to drop students so that their scores can be thrown out. As if our school is EVER going to famous for its test scores! The Judenrat also assumes that these students must have violated our attendance policy but that I am too incompetent to notice. It has apparently never occurred to her that students might actually be attending my class because they LIKE it.
I spent a lot of time today pacing around a room full of testing students and thinking about the Judenrat. I realized she is tall and skinny and blond, but has spent far too many years in the Georgia sun. Then it occurred to me, she probably developed her personality while she was young and beautiful and people would tolerate any abuse she wanted to dish out. Now they tolerate it because they fear her imagined authority.
After a few hours the woman who had been assigned to me as a proctor turned to me and said, “I can’t stand this anymore. You leave and do some work for an hour. Then come back I’ll leave.” I knew the Judenrat would be angry, but I had to prepare materials for my classes. “Work” involved sneaking from my desk to the Xerox machine to make copies for my students while avoiding the patrolling testing coordinators. I stepped into a hallway carrying a stack of freshly made worksheets only to see the back of a faded blonde head. I ducked back behind a coordinator. Where I had I seen this before? Oh right, that seem in The Breakfast Club where the students are trying to sneak back into detention—except I’m a grown man with an Ivy-League education.
I am realizing that I can do very little as a teacher to change this system from within. All I can do is tell my story and try to create the political will to bring down the entire system from Bush, to his masters in the text book companies, to the little Judenrat who thinks history is worthless. Viva la resistance!
Men killed by arguing, women killed by silence–10/15/07
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/02/health/02well.html?em&ex=1192161600&en=0771aa5bc2da3b3e&ei=5087%0A
A study in Framingham has still more evidence about the consequences of married life on one’s health.
Apparently, women who kept silent about grievances were four times more likely to suffer fatal health problems. For men, keeping silent has no such penalty. As such, they make a tactical decision whether to keep the peace of voice their complaint. What shorten’s a man’s life is having a battle for control.
Married men live longer than single men. But in order to avoid further tolls on my life-span, I have to find a wife who will sleep in a separate bed, not want kids (see previous blogs), and will not draw me into battles for control of the household.
Women: can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.
Death–9/16/07
There have been no new additions to the blog in almost a month. I’ve been spread quite thin lately between being a teacher, being a student, applying to doctoral programs, taking the GRE, submitting research proposals, beating people with sticks, and trying to be the social butterfly with the most beautiful wings.
Of course all of these worldly pursuits will matter very little in about 50-70 years. Which brings me to the magic word of the day: death. (OK boys and girls, whenever anyone says “Death,” scream real loud!)
I first came across the following article about Hindu funerals:
http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WSJ/MGArticle/WSJ_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1173352669476
It shouldn’t be surprising that funeral rituals are the ones most resistant to change. However, it is easy to forget this in America where there is license to invent our own rituals as we see fit—especially funerals. Look at the tasteless display that was Anna Nicole Smith’s funeral: a pink sequined coffin and an admissions fee. Americans can also have their ashes shot out of a cannon like Hunter S Thompson, shot into orbit, or even crushed into a diamond.
I find the situation in India incredibly depressing. Obviously, it is not sustainable to cut down 50 million trees a year for funeral pyres. But this is another example of how overpopulation seems to drain all of the meaning out of life. Until even in death, it is possible to feel selfish for damaging the environment.
This is still less depressing than the state of Zoroastrian funerals. The towers of silence have now largely been abandoned because a virus has begun to wipe out the vulture population of South Asia.
As the old traditions die new traditions begin to emerge. Leave it to the Germans to come up with profoundly disturbing things to do with your corpse:
http://www.thegreatpyramid.org/wp/?page_id=7
I find this to be the most chilling funeral arrangement ever. The largest pyramid—indeed the largest structure– the world has ever seen composed of concrete and corpses. It’s horrible. It’s eschatological. It’s like something from a Black Metal album cover: a little German town in the shadow of a gigantic mountain of corpses.
The founders see this as democratic: instead of erecting a monument to house a single individual, this new pyramid will house . . . thousands? (Actually new archaeological evidence shows that poor Egyptians would try to erect small-scale pyramids. Even slaves wanted a tomb of their own.) This idea owes more to capitalism than democracy. Prior to this concept, funeral arrangements were a local business. This could herald an entire international funeral industry. In the future you may be able to decide between the German death pyramid or the Russian necropolis.
I’ve watched an entire documentary of a Tibetan sky burial where a man dismembers his father with a machete and feeds the parts to vultures. Why is that video didn’t disturb me and this idea does?
Throughout human history, death has been a family affair. Your funeral, like weddings, should be about you and the circle of people you have cultivated during your life. This is especially pronounced in America where funeral ceremonies are highly personalized, and our graveyards represent a diversity of styles and cultures. Only soldiers have the option of committing their remains to a corporate body other than the family.
This pyramid sets a precedent to extend the state literally from “cradle to the grave.” Politicians already use the memory of the dead as leverage for propaganda. But with corporate graves, an actual corpse can now become a “technology of power.” Imagine if all of the remains of those who died at 9/11 were interred in such a pyramid. Now imagine Bush standing on top of that pyramid and giving a speech.
Of course, I doubt this would happen in America where death is seen as pornographic. It could easily happen in, say, China where the state is always looking for new forms of propaganda and where the bodies of dead prisoners are already being cannibalized for cosmetics and other resources. Imagine a war where every death on the battlefield made the nation’s corpse pyramid pile higher and higher.
To be manipulated in death is, I think, the ultimate horror. This is the plot of zombie movies especially films like White Zombie and Phantasm where corpses are literally removed from their individual graves to become slaves of a zombie-master. This was also a source of shock-value in the film 300 where the Spartans repeatedly used their enemies’ corpses against them.
What will the future be like? Apparently a treeless, smoke filled world with no vultures, where your body will be interred in some vast and grim monument. I think back to Donnie Darko and the prophetic words of Grandma Death, ‘Every living creature dies alone.” This is as it should be. I would prefer to a shallow grave on the side of the highway—something like Jimmy Hoffa—to being a stone in a giant death pyramid.
The sex-trade part IV: Nina Hartley
Forward: Since moving to WordPress, the title of this blog has earned A LOT of attention. If you are reading this, it is statistically likely that you were surfing for porn and are in search of titilation. In fact, this blog has been linked to by a site called “fleshmerchants.com.” Since you’re here, please take this opportunity to read what I have to say about flesh merchants. We all want to see naked people, but you really, really shouldn’t be paying for it.
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In this, the final installment of the blog, I will tackle the question of whether the American sex-trade can be redeemed so that consumers can enjoy their smut without contributing to the horrors of its production.
Schlosser’s book contains a brief interview with Nina Hartley. Hartley describes herself as a pro-sex feminist and is also an adult film actress. She claims being an adult film actress in genuinely fulfilling and argues that through her role as a sex-worker, she can promote the image of a strong and sexually autonomous woman. She has also attempted to unionize the adult film industry.
First of all, I want to point out that simply giving creative control to a woman in no way redeems the sex-trade. Case in point Janet Romano aka “Lizzy Borden.” Romano and her husband run the porn company Extreme Associates—which in 2003 was indicted for distributing obscenity. Extreme Associates managed to attract the attention of the federal government through films such as “Cocktails” where women drink vomit, and “Forced Entry”—where women are abducted, tortured, raped, and killed. Romano is unapologetic for these films and has compared them to the stunts performed on “Jackass.”
I think that if the sex-trade is going to be redeemed it is going to be through government regulation or a grass-roots alternative (this second option sounds weird—and it is. I will discuss it presently.) However, Hartley’s attempt to reform the sex-trade from within is doomed to failure. As long as sex remains a business, money will talk louder than sex-workers.
There was almost no interest in Hartley’s attempt to unionize the adult film industry. The porn barons did not have to loose sleep over it, because it never got off the ground. No one wanted to join the union for the reasons described in the part III: Adult film actresses just want to get rich and go home. Hartley mentioned in describing the failure of her union efforts that the majority of registered voters in the porn industry vote Republican. And like Reuban Sturman, most of the producers have no interest in sex, only money.
Furthermore, Hartley’s claims that adult film can be used to promote a new role for women is undermined by her own capitalist stake in the industry. The Nina Hartley love doll complete with vibrating vagina and anus runs for about $145. (I did some fact checking: http://www.adulttoyreviews.com/dolls/nina.html) Now honestly, is this promoting a woman’s sexual autonomy or Hartley’s bank account? Isn’t an inflatable doll with its mouth hanging open pretty much the antithesis of a sexually autonomous woman?
Finally, the sex trade is a business and as such will always have to meet the demand of the market—not the artistic vision of the performers. Hartley can only succeed, so long as her third-wave feminist agenda dovetails with the desires of the consumer.
So what kind of government regulations should be placed on the adult film industry? Well first of all, the government has always seen its role as protecting consumers and not sex-workers. This has to change. Allowing women to become sex-workers at age 18 is absolutely insane. 18 is no time to decide whether footage of you having sex will be on the internet for the rest of your life. We don’t let teenagers drink. We don’t give them a good rate on renting cars. I know in Texas, they can’t rent firearms. So why do we let them take their clothes off and drink vomit on film?
Nina Hartley and her mentor Juliet Anderson both entered the industry very late in life. (Anderson was nearly forty.) Both of these women claim to enjoy the industry and find it liberating. They received an education and did interesting things with their lives before doing porn. They are not likely to regret their decision for the rest of their lives or become drug addicts.
Raising the age to something like 25 might be able to solve some of the biggest problems in the industry. It would get rid of those horribly obnoxious Girls Gone Wild videos. It would cut the number of B-Girls thus raising salaries and giving performers more leverage. Most importantly, it would force young women to put more thought into their lives. The attitude of “I don’t need to go to high-school because in one year I can be just be a stripper” would be gone. (Instead of high-school or stripping, the choice would now be college or prostitution.)
Now the community option: Conventional wisdom states that you aren’t paying a prostitute to have sex with you, you’re paying her to leave afterwards. There are ways for consenting adults to enjoy sexual depravity without inviting the evils of capitalism. I am referring of course to things like fetish groups, munches, and swingers clubs. Although swingers may strike the average person a total sexual deviants—this practice is clearly more ethical than consumption of the sex-trade. In these communities, no one is a sex worker and everyone is there because they want to participate in . . . whatever is going on there. (One time on HBO they covered a “clown sex” party . . .)
Now here is what’s interesting: a lot of people would feel no shame about seeing a ping-pong show in Bangkok, a donkey-show in Tijuana, or an 18 year old mother stripping in America. And yet these same people would be quick to brand swingers as freakish or sick. I think this has to do with the issues laid out in part II: you can watch people from another culture do any degrading act, but seeing your own kind behaving that way somehow seems incestuous.
I propose that if you’re not willing put your name on a list like “Atlanta ping-pong enthusiasts,” show up at a community center, and eat potato salad with like minded people, you don’t deserve to see a ping-pong show. The best things in life are free. When you pay for the sex-trade, you are really paying to keep your sexual activities compartmentalized from the rest of your life—to pretend that you aren’t a scumbag; the sex-trade is really built on the fees are willing to pay to maintain hypocrisy.
The sex-trade part III: capitalism sauvage
In this installment of the sex-trade blog, I will look at the economics of the sex-trade. If it isn’t clear by now, I have absolutely nothing against sex or even the bizarre sexual practices I encountered in Thailand. The problem is when you combine sex with money. (Money is the root of all evil, you want to be careful where you stick it.)
Furthermore, I am primarily concerned with the damages caused by the production of the sex-trade, not its consumption. There are primarily two arguments against the consumption of the pornography: 1) that it corrupts society, and 2) that it is degrading to women. I think the evidence for both of these arguments is still inconclusive.
Opponents of the first argument—that pornography corrupts society are quick to point out that the Netherlands has a high availability of pornography and a low-rate of sex-crime. Similarly Japan, which produces a high volume of rape-fantasy porn has an extremely low rate of sex-crime. However, correlation is not necessarily causation.
It cannot be denied that sexual practices are influenced by pornography. Most heterosexual couples don’t have sex exclusively in the missionary position and most people don’t read how-to sexual manuals. So the vast array of sexual practices are being transmitted somehow, and much of that is probably through material that would be classified as pornography.
Ultimately, however, I think the argument that pornography corrupts society is a distraction. The production of pornography directly and observably destroys lives. As long as that is going on, how can you justify measuring the attitude changes of naughty suburbanites?
The second argument, espoused primarily by second-wave feminists is that pornography is degrading to women and a de facto form of sexism. After perusing the arguments going back and forth between anti-pornography and pro-sex feminists, I have decided to try to skirt this particular can of worms. I will, however, address the arguments of pro-sex feminists who are also sex-workers.
By the time I got to Phuket, I was fairly sick of Bangkok with its smog and its hustlers. Although Patong beach still boasted hookers and sex-performers, I was in a bungalow in a relatively remote and untouristed side of the island. My daily routine involved getting beat up fighting some psycho from Europe or Australia, then riding my motorcycle to the beach where I would lick my wounds and prepare to do it all again.
It was on the beach where I bought copy of Reefer Madness by muck-racker Eric Schlosser. This is a wonderful book on the dynamics of the American black market. It contains three essays that take a legal and economic perspective of marijuana, migrant farm workers, and pornography.
Adult film is estimated as a $10 billion a year industry. The economics of the entire sex-trade are difficult to measure. Schlosser shows that (until he was finally caught for tax-evasion) almost all of the pornography in the United States was part of a single, invisible empire run by one Reuben Sturman—a man most people have never heard of. Schlosser’s telling of Sturman’s rise and fall is absolutely fascinating. But most interesting of all is that Sturman was not a libertine like Larry Flynt. He seemed to have no interest in sex or the consumption of pornography. He was simply a business man who accidentally discovered a highly marketable commodity. Sturman began his career selling comic-books. He eventually discovered that more people wanted to buy ’sex-pulp novels’ than comic books.
This is the great secret of the sex-trade: it isn’t naughty, it isn’t the victim of Victorian oppression, it is simply an economic system catering to a market. And like all economic systems not regulated by the government, it has grown into a monster. The sex-trade is Wal-Mart; capitalisme sauvage.
In fact, the early days of the American pornography industry are not much different than the worst parts of the Bangkok sex-trade. Schlosser describes the production of the film Deep Throat, one of the first and most famous X-rated films. As with Sturman, this film was the product of greed, not lust. In fact, the producers all had serious ties to Cosa Nostra. Theatres showing the film were required to pay 50% of proceeds to the mob. Linda Boreman, the star-of-the-film testified that her performance was coerced at gun-point and that the entire film was essentially a rape. Granted, in previous interviews Boreman described making the film as “a liberating experience.” But the fact remains that she clearly regrets her involvement now.
Since then, pornography has emerged from the underground. This is primarily because massive hotel chains like Hilton want to show adult films and are so powerful that no one in the government feels it would be productive to oppose them.
However, this has only yielded to a different and more wide-spread type of exploitation. Schlosser explains that there has been a glut of young girls moving to Los Angeles to star in adult films. Obviously, these women have not harbored life-long dreams of being porn-stars. They usually come from working-class families and see this as a get-rich-quick scheme.
The scheme revolves around stripping. As it turns out, there is a hierarchy of American sex-workers. Strippers look down on porn-actresses who look down on prostitutes. (The pattern here seems to be how much of your sexual autonomy you have to sell to make a living.) However, there has been some upheaval in this order because to make the big-bucks as a stripper, a woman needs to first earn a reputation through adult film.
These young women are essentially starring in adult films so that they can get out of adult films: the goal is to star in a few films and then return to wherever they came from to continue stripping for a bigger salary.
This is where the economics of supply and demand comes in: with so many young women from rural America arriving in LA, salaries have plummeted. Many women become “B Girls” receiving only $150 a scene. And to even become a B girl you must be willing to do just about anything. Aspiring adult actresses are often expected to sleep with film producers in order to get parts (which, yes, they do find degrading and often refuse to do), It also helps if they are willing to dye their hair blonde and get breast-implants and, of course, if they were willing to do “nasty things.”
I imagine a similar process goes on in Thailand as young people pour out of the country-side and into the cities. It is possible that twenty years ago, a woman could move to Bangkok and work in a topless bar. Now that same women must also be willing to do a ping-pong show to find employment as a sex-worker.
The emphasis on “nasty things” is also a manifestation of the market. Schlosser describes the diversification of pornography as a perfect example of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. The days when a man like Reuban Sturman could get rich selling pulp-fiction are over. Entrepreneurs and sex-workers must now appeal to increasingly bizarre nich-markets in order to turn a profit. Schlosser points out that there are now numerous websites that revolve around women being induced to vomit.
So, with the evils of the production of the sex-trade laid out, what are the implications for the consumer? Well, if you support the sex-trade (defined as paying money for live adult entertainment, pornography, or prostitution), you should feel guilty. But you shouldn’t feel guilty the way your church wants you to feel. That’s the solipsist argument. Remember, you are already a scum-bag whether or not you choose to support the industry.
Rather you should feel guilty the same way you should feel guilty when you shop at Wal-Mart. When I buy cheap Wal-Mart salmon, I know that the production of that salmon is causing environmental devastation and human rights abuses in Chile. When I throw down money at a strip-club, I am providing the financial incentive that lures young women to become strippers. (Remember, I teach teenage strippers.) That same financial incentive at the strip club is what lures young women to LA to become B girls. It also draws more inspiring entrepreneurs into the business. As these would-be Reuban Sturmans seek out increasingly bizarre sexual tastes to cater to, they create increasingly degrading roles for freshly arrived B-girls. And the cycle continues.
I had hoped to get through everything in this blog, but that has not happened. In the next, and hopefully final installment, I will look at efforts to reform and redeem the American sex-trade.
The sex trade part II: Moral Outrage–8/4/07
Searching for English television one night in my hotel room, I came across a bootlegged copy of Hostel II. The reviews are right: this film is “torture porn.” The audience is not putting down their $10 for a good plot, they are paying to watch a simulation of women being abducted, raped, and murdered. The fact that one of the intended victims escapes and kills her would-be murderer is irrelevant. In the end, the audience still has more in common with the rapists than the heroine.
I only watched the last few minutes of the film but it occurred to me that with enough money I could almost certainly pay to murder a Thai woman somewhere in Bangkok. When I had that thought, the entire sex-trade seemed to be one continuous spectrum: from strip-clubs, to ping-pong shows, to snuff.
If you read the previous blog, you have some idea of the behavior I encountered in Thailand. During my travels I sought to make sense of it all. The easiest behavior to understand was actually that of the sex-workers. For the pimps, this was simply a way of making a living. For prostitutes, their behavior was dictated by a combination of economic and criminal forces.
But what of the market for these services? I believe that most young men, if told there was a room in a far off land where dozens of women were held against their will as sex-slaves, would experience some sort of hero instinct. I mean, what greater hero fantasy could there be? Instead of rescuing one beautiful maiden, you rescue forty.
I don’t mean only good men or noble men would feel this desire—I mean all men. Even the KKK saw themselves are protecting the honor of women (white women, that is.) Kevin told me that his personal role-model was Spider-man. So why do so many people support this system when they should be attacking it?
I believe there are two interrelated answers to this question. The first has to do with group-dynamics: the women of Thailand are not “our women” and therefore farang (white) men feel no investment in their safety or their dignity. The second, is the tempting possibility that these women are there by choice.
I want to address both of these factors in order to show why support of the sex-trade is always wrong—not only in foreign countries but here in the United States. Furthermore, I want to shift the moral focus from the consumption of the sex-trade to the production of the sex-trade.
The ping-pong shows of Thailand seem to be analogous to the donkey-shows of Mexico. I don’t know if these sort of shows go on in America, but if they do, I can guarantee that no one is proud of having attended one. No one in America has ever casually asked me if I attended a ping-pong show. Yet, there is little social stigma about watching brown women in third world countries perform degrading sex acts. Even in Amsterdam, where live-sex shows are a common tourist attraction, the sex-workers perform relatively normal sexual intercourse. Is it not obvious why this is?
No healthy person would want to see a family member having sex. And we might feel squeamish paying an American woman to do some outrageous sex act. But brown women half-way around the world? We can not only watch them perform degrading acts, we can brag about watching it to our friends without feeling any moral qualms.
Like all aspects of the sex-trade, this applies as much in America as it does in the third world. In American strip clubs there is almost always a racial, class, or cultural divide between the performers and the audience. Think about the women you know who attend strip-clubs, Would any of them fail to be offended if you offered them money to take their top off? Of course not. What does this say? Are the women in the audience somehow better than the performers?
Now I can already hear the audience members going on the defensive: “I’m not an elitist, I’ve just made a different life choices than the sex-workers,”, “I’m not a racist, Thai women just choose to shoot ping-pong balls from their vaginas and American women don’t.”
This brings me to the second idea that supports the sex-trade: the possibility of choice. No one can say sex-workers choose their profession—there is only the possibility that there has been some room for choice. And for women in a third-world country full of corruption and illegal sex-trafficking, how much of a factor do you think personal choice really plays?
People choose things from a finite list of options. The longer that list, the more a person can be said to have truly made a choice. There is a Clive Barker story where a man is forced to choose between being blinded or castrated. Can we then say this man is not a victim because he chose to be a castrati? In the same way, we cannot say a sex-worker chose her profession unless she had many options to choose from. Thai farmers make something like 2000 baht a month (About $60 American.) Can we still use the illusion of choice to excuse ourselves from the degradation of a Thai sex-worker?
The choice-argument for the sex-trade is a manifestation of the psychological principal known as the “just-world theory.” No one wants to live in a world where poverty and the mafia force women to prostitute themselves and perform humiliating sex acts. That would be depressing. Instead, the mind searches for arguments that those who suffer somehow deserve their fate. Once such an argument has been found, you can stop worrying about the fate of sex workers and enjoy your vacation.
What puzzled me the most about my conversations with the consumers of the sex-trade was that they seemed more focused on their own moral standing than that of the sex-workers. Several women brought up the topic of ping-pong shows with me. What seemed to be at stake for them was that they were able to enjoy the show and therefore they were not “prudes.” In other words, the entire issue revolved around them, not the sex-workers. Similarly, Kevin seemed primarily concerned not about the plight of the sex-workers but that he was becoming “a scum-bag.” This is solipsism!
Jesus said, “Anyone who looks at a woman and wants to possess her is guilty of committing adultery with her in his heart.” -(Matt 5:28). This is good news! It means you can stop worrying about being a scumbag! Anyone who has ever felt the slightest desire to see women shoot ping-pong balls out of their vagina (and I’ll admit, I was pretty curious) is already a scumbag. The solipsistic battle is already lost. But by exercising some will-power you can still stop your support of the sex-trade.
In the next (and hopefully final) installment of this blog, I will delve into some of what I have learned about the American sex-trade. While things may not be as bad here as in Thailand, it is still essentially a system of economic exploitation that corrupts everything it touches.
The sex trade part I: Tales from Khaosan Rd–8/3/07
While I have lots of exciting travel stories to tell—I feel compelled to first write about the sex-trade. You see, while in Asia I thought about the sex-trade every single day. Why? Because as a male traveling alone I was approached by pimps and prostitutes almost every single night. During the day, I got to hear stories from other tourists about their encounters with pimps and prostitutes. Even in areas where no one spoke English, I was still served drinks in glasses painted with sexual positions or shaped like a headless, armless, naked woman. I also had the opportunity to see Hostel II (It was on in the hotel room) and to read the essay on pornography in Eric Schlosser’s Reefer Madness. Out of all of this have emerged some rather informed opinions about the sex-trade both in America and abroad. However, before I share these opinions I want to first share some stories.
Some of these stories are rather graphic and frankly disgusting. Sensitive readers are advised to skip to another blog.
The first man I met in Thailand was probably a pimp. The first woman I met with was possibly a prostitute. I arrived in Bangkok somewhat jet-lagged and sleep deprived. I grabbed a cab to Khaosan Road—about thirty minutes from the new airport.
“Thailand. Many beautiful women.”, said the cab-driver, smiling, “You like women?”
“Um, Yeah. Beautiful women.”
“Yeah women good! You want to see women?”
“I’m tired. Let’s go to the guest-house.”
The first guest house I stayed at was cheap and had little else to recommend it. My room was about 7′ by 5′. Backpackers had written messages to one another on the walls. When I asked for a towel, they wanted a 200 baht deposit. Horrible Euro-dance music blasted until about 1am. When that stopped, the chickens started up.
Despite being incredibly tired, I was totally unable to fall asleep. (Bangkok is exactly 12 hours ahead of the East Coast.) Finally, around 4:30 am I gave up and went downstairs to have some breakfast.
The hotel featured a restaurant which was open to the street. A young Thai woman sat a table near me.
“Sawasdee-ka!” she beamed, “We can sit together?”
She sat down next to me and ordered a Heineken.
I asked if she was getting up or if she had been up all night. Not surprisingly it was the later. She asked my nationality and I told her I was American.
“Americans, rich!” she smiled.
She told me she was a student at a university but I think she was lying. When I asked where her family lived she said Chiang Mai. For some reason I think that was a lie as well. She added, “I don’t need them anymore.”
She asked for another Heineken. She was drinking very slowly and did not seem the least bit intoxicated. At some point she told me I was handsome and experimentally brushed her hand across my arm.
“Where in America are you from?”, she asked.
She had never heard of Atlanta, but now she was staring at me very intently so I kept talking.
“Actually, some people call it hot-lanta.”, I offered, “Um, because . . . Because it’s so hot.”
“SO HANDSOME!” she exclaimed. Now she put both her hands on my arm.
I pointed out that the sun was coming up.
“I don’t like the sun.”, she stated, “I only like to be out at night. We stay in your room until it’s night?”
She added suggestively, “I like that.”
Several motives passed through my mind:
1) She is looking for an American to mooch off of for as long as possible and possibly marry.
2) She wants to go up to my room at which point she will request money for sex.
3) She wants to go up to my room, wait until I fall asleep and then rob me.
4) This woman is some sort of freaky Thai vampire.
She actually was very pretty, but there was no way in hell I was spending any time with this woman after this breakfast. Still, I wanted to find a gentle way to get rid of her. It occurred to me that it would be almost impossible to have a healthy sexual encounter with someone who didn’t speak the same language.
There actually was a large sign in the restaurant saying that you may not bring Thai guests into your room.
“I’m not going to sleep. But I’ll pay for your beer if you teach me some Thai.”
We talked for another hour or so and she eventually admitted that she wanted an American boyfriend and that this was why she stayed out all night on Khaosan road. Her goal was to become a Hollywood actress and to “be the queen.” “Being the queen” meant living a life of wealth and glamour. She said that she had visited the local temple and prayed to Buddha to make her a Hollywood actress.
I winced. Any American knows exactly what would happen to this girl if she ever made it to Hollywood. She would get $150 a scene to be in films with names like, “Bangkok boob-a-rama.”
I pointed out that the Thai cinema was getting big but she scowled at this suggestion.
In the end, the beer-for-Thai-lessons deal seemed to be a good exchange. She told me that you should take a shower before visiting a temple and that taking photos was rude (that wasn’t in any of the travel guides.)
The local monks began doing their alms-begging and she told me that donating to a monk was a good remedy if a ghost was following you.
“How do you know if a ghost is following you?”
“You just feel it.” she said.
Before I left (to take a shower and visit the temple) she made a few last efforts to get her hooks in. She asked if I had a cell-phone and then how long I would be staying at this guest-house. A few hours later I moved into a nicer guest house and never saw her again.
The next breakfast I had was with an Irish-man named Kevin. Much like the last breakfast, I had gotten up really early where as Kevin had been out all night drinking.
“I’ve got to get out of Bangkok.” Kevin lamented, “It’s turning me into a scum-bag.”
He went on to describe how he had broken up with his girlfriend last night, had no job or apartment back in Ireland, and was currently living off his credit cards.
He leaned in closer, “I’ve been here a week and and I’ve already had my cock sucked twice.”
“They have a brothel here and it’s just a big aquarium full of naked women. I mean they’re all lined up in little glass cages. And they’re all smiling and waving at you. And at the bottom of each cage is a price—cheap ones at the front and expensive ones in the back. I asked the guy why some cost more and he said ‘Because they’re fresh.’ See when they first come to Bangkok they’re expensive, but after a few months in the brothel they aren’t worth as much—only like 1500 baht.”
Kevin told this story with equal parts excitement and horror. I expressed no judgment, partly because I wanted to hear the rest of his story.
“So I got the full massage and wash. What that is, is she gives you full massage naked. Then she soaps up her pussy and rubs it all over your body. And then she sucks you and fucks you.”
The second time Kevin had his cock sucked was even more ludicrous. He described having spent the whole night drinking when “this real proper Brit guy” he had met suggested they go find some hookers.
Kevin pointed out he had only 250 baht in his wallet. The proper Brit guy told Kevin not to worry, he had lived in Bangkok for three years.
They went to an apartment. A pimp and several girls waited out front. The pimp explained it was 500 baht to go in. At this, the proper Brit removed his shirt displaying a muscular and tattooed physique.
“C’mon now, you’re going to charge 500 baht for this?”
He was allowed upstairs leaving Kevin standing in front of the apartment with the pimp.
“I pulled some moves.”, Said Kevin, “I’m not a smoothie or anything but I pulled some moves and they let me in. Had to take my shoes off before I could go in, though. Now when I get up there I see the Brit on his knees pounding away at one of the girls. And another girl has her head in between sucking HER cock.”
Much of Kevin’s story was communicated using body posture and hand-gestures. But apparently what he walked in on was a three-way consisting of the real proper Brit, a female prostitute, and a transvestite prostitute.
Transvesites, also known as “Lady-boys.” are remarkably common in Thailand and Cambodia. The Thais are a very accepting people and there seemed to be no stigma about transgendered people there. The other term Thais use to explain Lady-boys is “same-same but different.” Numerous tourists on Khaosan road sport t-shirts with this phrase having absolutely no understanding of what it means.
When the female prostitute had finished with the transvestite, Kevin became her next customer. (Which struck me as a great way to get any diseases the Lady-boy might be carrying on her cock.)
Afterwards, Kevin was charged 500 baht. As you will recall, he only had 250 baht.
“Oh yeah, let me get my wallet from downstairs.”
Kevin then ran downstairs to flee the scene before the pimp showed up. However, during his encounter with the prostitute, a heavy rain had started (summer is the monsoon season in Thailand). The rain had washed all of the shoes from an entire city block into a single wet pile. Kevin frantically dove into the pile trying to find his shoes before the pimp showed up. He eventually made his escape.
“I feel bad, you know, not paying her. I’m sure she’s just trying to raise money for her parents back in some village. But, it’s Bangkok. I’ve got to get out of here.”
(I ran into Kevin again almost two weeks later. He had purchased a bus ticket to Chiang Mai and then gotten drunk and missed the bus. He had still not escaped Bangkok.)
Not long after meeting Kevin, I ran into a young man from London. He had just bought a Thai suit and was going to fly home to surprise his mother on her birthday in his new suit. He seemed like a nice guy. He then began describing how he went to see a ping-pong show.
Most readers can probably imagine what a Bangkok ping-pong show entails.
Weeks later while doing Muay Thai training, I tried to explain the concept to a rather sheltered college student from the UK.
“They play ping-pong?” he asked, making a paddle-gesture with his hands.
“No, they shoot ping-pong balls into the audience.”
“Like, with guns?”
“No, with their bodies.”
The nice British guy added, “But then the ping-pong show turned into a live-sex show. That was rather unexpected.”
What really amazed me throughout my trip was the number of British women interested in ping-pong shows. They seemed absolutely fascinated, asking me if I had been to one, and even spreading their legs and miming the firing motion.
When I got to Phuket, the show had upgraded to “ping-pong and balloon show.”
I asked a Canadian who lived in Phuket what exactly they do with the balloon.
“They hang balloons up and then the women use their bodies to fire darts at them.”
Apparently, special missiles have been created which can shot from the vagina. When I asked what the range was he pointed at an object about 20-25 feet away. He said that the balloons are located ABOVE THE HEADS OF THE AUDIENCE so that the audience can get a good view of the firing mechanism. The problem is that the darts often fall short and lodge themselves in the bodies of the audience. The Canadian described audience members pulling darts out their shoulders only to find their fingers sticky with sexual fluids.
The Canadian added, “Thai women will do anything with their vaginas: they can insert a paintbrush and paint, they can smoke a cigarette, anything.”
Cambodia, being poorer than Thailand also had a large number of prostitutes. Everyone in the country seemed to desperate to sell something, including the pimps.
“Hello my friend! I hook you up! Weed! Massage! Boom-boom! Hip-Hop! Disco!”
A series of rather amusing posters had gone up that seemed to be the international sign for “child prostitution is illegal.” They featured a man with a suitcase and a Hawaian t-shirt, then the man in a hotel room with a little girl, and then the man in a jail cell.
Sadly, I think that the signs were mostly lip-service. I heard stories of tourists procuring children for sex with the help of police officers. Based on my encounters with Cambodian police, I find this easy to believe. Two police I met tried to sell me souvenirs (one of the souvenirs was a police badge!) Another cop seemed to just like hanging out in the bar and talking to tourists. He thought standing to my right and tapping my left shoulder was just hilarious.
As for prostitutes who have reached puberty—the government doesn’t seem to care about them at all. The Cambodian government will let tourists use their arsenal for US dollars. For $300 you can fire a grenade launcher at a cow. (However, there is no refund if you miss and the cow survives.)
I heard a story of a man who brought a harem of prostitutes to the military base so that he could have his picture taken holding the rocket-launcher with his penis rested on the head of one of the prostitutes. (This man also did not believe in condoms and is no doubt dying of AIDS as we speak.)
I had two great traveling companions in Cambodia: a Canadian and an American who had just gotten back from service in Iraq. When the three of us found a guest-house, they had one double and one single. We played rock-scissor-paper and I ended up with my own room.
We were in a bar when two Cambodian women asked if they could sit with us. (Does this sound familiar?) The Canadian—the most friendly of the three of us—welcomed them to sit down.
The Cambodian woman who sat next to me wore a backwards baseball cap and seemed to be going for some sort of “brat” look. The other woman was her little sister. She spoke almost no English. She asked where we were staying and the Canadian—trying to make conversation—mentioned that he and the soldier were sharing a room but that I was sleeping alone. From that moment on, I was the prime-target of the Cambodian prostitute.
She leaned over and spoke in my ear. It was hard to make it out between the loud music and her broken English but it sounded like, “We go back to your room and we have boom-boom.”
The language barrier made it difficult to refuse this offer in any sort of polite way. So I tried appealing to religion.
“Do you know who Jesus is?” I asked.
She stared at me skeptically and shook her head.
“Christian? You know Christian?”
She nodded.
“I am Christian. I cannot have boom-boom unless I’m married. Only with wife.”
“No,” she said, “Because my sister have boom-boom with American man and he had a wife.”
“You know hell? Jesus will make me go to hell if we have boom-boom.”
Her sister had since found out that we were not interested and disappeared. As for the older prostitute here is what I think she heard from me:
“I am not drunk enough to have sex with you. Continue you to bother me for several hours until my judgment is sufficiently impaired.”
The Cambodian prostitute continued to sit next to me. We had a pitcher and she would pour herself a glass of beer and then gradually empty her glass into mine. As if this was going to get me drunk.
When that didn’t work, she began poking at me. This included kicking me under the table and poking my stomach. She also tried tipping my glass when I was drinking to make me spill it and at one point pinched my cheek. I guess this boundary crossing was supposed to be enticing but really I think it was sublimated anger that we had no interest in her and were ignoring her.
The effect it did have was that for the first time in my life I felt the desire to hit a woman. I’m sure that men had hit her before. I was also sure that $20 could bribe my way past the legal ramifications of assaulting her. But I didn’t like having my mind in that place. The next time she poked me I held my hands up in a boxing posture. This was my sublimated anger. After that she stopped touching me but still refused to leave.
The soldier, who had been elsewhere in the bar returned and saw that this prostitute was still with us. “”It’s time to play the asshole card,” he declared.
The soldier sat down next to her, “Look. We don’t want boom-boom now. And we don’t want boom-boom later. I don’t want you to waste your time. So why don’t you just leave?”
The asshole card failed, either because of the language barrier or sheer stubbornness. But eventually, she had to use the toilet. When she did, the soldier moved her chair and her drink to a different table and then rearranged our chairs so that there was no room for her.
When she returned she briefly hovered around our table but eventually, finally moved on.
Now that I have shared some of what I saw and heard in Asia, I can move on to my analysis of the sex-trade in part II.
Take a bite outta the GRE–7/18/07
I never thought I would have to take the GRE again. Yet somehow, five years have passed since I last took it. Now, as I prepare to take it again, I realize that the GRE embodies and integrates many of the social evils I have railed against in this blog.
The GRE is one more reason why the baby-boomers had it easy. My parents didn’t study for the GRE. I had a professor in college who admitted to falling asleep during the GRE. Now, test prep is a million dollar industry with study courses going for almost $1000 a pop. Finally, the newest version of the GRE apparently takes over four and half hours to complete. I suspect this an attempt to thwart students in China and Korea who simply memorize the entire test.
As an educator, I believe that testing is opposed to justice and that this is a moral issue. Educational Testing Services is an oxymoron. Tests do not educate, the GRE does not assess education, and ETS is not performing a real service. I am aware of the noble ideas put forward by the College Board in 1900. However, these have been dropped by the wayside.
Functionally, the GRE is a solution to the problem of surplus population. I know this because I once worked for a graduate admissions program. We had 300 applicants for five slots. About 50 were qualified so the GRE was used to “thin the herd.” I was told to compile all of the GRE scores into an Excel sheet and order them by the highest scores. As a result we took a Korean who had a perfect GRE score. As I’ve said, cheating is rampant in Korea and the student could barely speak English.
There are countless criteria for thinning the herd that would make just as much sense as the GRE and many which might even be better. Simply prioritizing older applicants over those with higher GRE scores would probably produce a higher performing student body. (It would almost certainly mean less incompletes would be taken.) Prioritizing “in-state” applicants might also work. In time, this would lead to a greater number of higher achieving schools. If universities had less ability to specialize their programs, this would open up new jobs for the academic underclass.
By the way, the baby-boomers had a much more effective means of thinning the herd: Vietnam.
Having said all of this, I did fairly well the last time I took the GRE, especially on the writing section. But since I will be applying to programs that take the test very seriously, I decided to buy a review guide. The following is from Kaplan’s “#1 best-selling GRE Guide:”
“Play the Game
Too many people think of standardized tests as cruel exercises in futility, as the oppressive instruments of a faceless societal machine. People who think this way usually don’t do very well on these tests.
They key discovery that people who ace standardized tests have made is that raging against the machine doesn’t hurt it. If that’s what you choose to do, you will just waste your energy. What these high scorers choose to do instead is to think of the test as a game–not an instrument of punishment, but an opportunity for reward. And like any game, if you play it enough times, you get really good at it.”
If I had read this when I was sixteen I think I would have quite literally set the book on fire. But since I bought this expensive book for the purposes of doing well on the GRE I am going to heed their advice:
THE GRE IS A GIANT SHIT SANDWICH AND I’M GOING TO TAKE A BITE AND SAY IT TASTES LIKE ICE CREAM!
If the Kaplan book said that people who bath in the blood of infants traditionally score higher than those who do not, well . . .
Kaplan’s advice to view the GRE as a game makes sense pragmatically. But it ONLY makes sense pragmatically. In the film “Life is Beautiful,” the protagonist convinces his son that a concentration camp is “just a game.” While this makes his son feel better, it in no way justifies the holocaust!
Our society is far too tolerant of “games.” When we call something like the GRE a “game” what we really mean is, “a tradition we know damn well is pointless and probably immoral but we are going to go on tolerating it.” Slavery was long defended as “a peculiar institution.” Note there is no claim here that slavery is right, just a suggestion to ignore it. Listen to me, dear reader: when someone says something to you like, “it’s just one of those games people play,” they are asking you to PUT YOUR CONSCIENCE TO SLEEP.
Note that Kaplan is framing the machine as the test itself. When, in fact, Kaplan is a for-profit entity making more money off the system than anyone else (Last year, they raked in $1.7 billion) Like the Princeton Review, Kaplan is a publicly traded corporation with a legal responsibility to its share-holders to maximize profits. As such Kaplan does far more to perpetuate “the machine” and to corrupt it. Kaplan doesn’t profit by closing the achievement gap, they profit by selling prep materials.
Now then, on to their claim that “raging against the machine doesn’t hurt it.” First of all, speaking out against a corrupt system probably won’t raise your GRE scores. But that does NOT make it a waste of energy! Every cause of social justice in the world has been called a waste of energy.
And what they really mean by “raging against the machine” is whining. If there ever were an act of economic sabotage on this system, it would be devastatingly effective. A system which serves little to no social function is actually very vulnerable.
Consider: a group of disgruntled graduate students begin setting fire to ETS testing centers. It wouldn’t be hard: every testing center in the country is listed publicly. Terrorist groups like ELF (The Environmental Liberation Front) have already attempted such a thing by setting fire to ski resorts, subdivisions, and SUV lots. Now why did ELF fail? Because most people WANT ski resorts, subdivisions, and SUV lots. But there is no incentive to protect an institution that provides such a useless service as the GRE.
The vaguest hint of a safety concern will allow students to write universities stating that they will not take the GRE. When universities turn them away there will inevitably be a law-suit. After a few grand are wasted on trivial law suits, universities will suddenly question why they bother requiring this test. For most programs, the convenience of “thinning the herd” will not be enough to justify a law-suit.
Those colleges and universities who have already made standardized testing optional will be able to adapt the quickest. Other institutions will have to follow suit or risk losing first choice from the applicant pool. With a few gallons of gasoline, this entire system could go up in smoke.
Now, to the FBI agents reading this blog: I AM aware that domestic terrorism is a worse social evil than standardized testing. But I figure if Sam Harris can write a book where he proposes a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the entire Middle-East, I can conjecture on the ramifications of a few arsons. Remember, FBI agents, I have that shit sandwich running down my chin (did I mention it tastes like ice-cream?) But perhaps Kaplan should be a little less smug about the strength of their machine.
