Thursday Miscellany
Abby's Queer Eye
Abby has come out strongly in favor of the gay movement. Nothing post-worthy, since I've long considered her too vapid to swim against the political current and therefore too vapid to merit much interest, but I liked this excerpt from the article:
Right now, Abby, as Phillips prefers to be called, is working on a reply to a woman who wanted to know whether she should include childhood photographs of her transgender brother-in-law in a family album. The woman is worried what she will tell her children when they see pictures of their uncle as a little girl.
Phillips' guidance to Worried Reader will be simple, she said: Include the photos, of course. Silence is the enemy. Answer any questions the kids have honestly – Uncle John was born with a body of the wrong sex, so even when he was called Jane he was really John inside.
Yeah, that's a simple answer. It won't confuse the kid at all.
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It's Always Been Leftist, Too
I've spent a bit of time the past couple of years reading about the movie industry and its history (in particular, David Thomson's oddly-written but enjoyable The Whole Equation, Daniel Fuchs' The Golden West, and Edward Jay Epstein's The Big Picture), and I've confirmed an opinion I've held for twenty years: Hollywood is dysfunctional and always has been. If you want a glimpse of it, The Atlantic Monthly has a nice article about Hollywood's "Golden Years." Excerpt:
Too important a commodity to be left to chance, stars were made, not born. They were subjected to studio-directed dentistry and surgery, and were taught how to walk, to speak, even to breathe. Then their personas were just as meticulously and methodically manufactured. A studio would cast a potential star in many small, wildly different roles, and test audience response to each. This inherently humiliating, usually fruitless, and always exhausting process–Gable made 17 movies in his first three years at MGM–ensured that novices soon became professionals on the set and in front of the camera.
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O'Doul's Religion
Women are more religious because the want to be ready for the after-life. That's been the conventional scientific explanation for years. A new study questions it. I don't care too much about the conventional inanely simplistic explanation for women's religiousness, and I don't care too much about the study, but I found this part so fascinating that I suspect it's wrong:
Researchers studied people who believed in an afterlife and people who didn't, and found not only that women who don't believe in life after death are more religious than men who don't expect an afterlife, but that the gap between the sexes was larger among those who don't anticipate an eternal reward or punishment. Women who don't believe in the afterlife are nearly twice as likely as men with similar beliefs to view the Bible as the literal word of God; women who do believe are only 1.27 times as likely to take the Bible literally.
There are religious people who don't believe in the afterlife? That dumbfounds me. I thought every religion believes in the afterlife. Even Buddhism, whose Nirvana is just annihilation, has adopted forms of an afterlife for popular worship.
Religion's cogency doesn't rest solely on the afterlife, but it's a major part. Without a soul, why bother? It'd be like drinking beer with no hope of a buzz. There are other reasons to drink beer, but if there's no chance for a buzz, I'd drink it a lot (lot) less.
