Why is it that the silly and innocuous posts get all the comments? Me no get.

I’m just going to presume I’m above my audience most of the time.

Another boring evening drinking beer. Hung out with M, made fun of Outside’s new startup mag Go. It’s a bizarre blend of GQ, Maxim, and an airline travel mag. Yes, that’s a bad thing.

Highlights include a fashion piece based on a pseudo-narrative of a couple meeting and courting in Jamaica. Two of eight full page shots include man in suit contrasted with woman in bikini; one of them meeting (he’s giving her his card, wearing a full suit and dress shoes, her barefoot in a bikini, in a market with half naked black kids holding soda bottles), the other strolling the beach. Is he picking her up while on some business junket? The ways the spread stirs the subconscious, and it does very well (no accidents here**), points towards premises with which I am not comfortable. The cover also boasts “6 Sexy Lady Sailors: South Florida’s Women Who Crew.” Judging by the short, flavorful bios provided, they interviewed attractive women at random in well-chosen parts of town, and picked the cutest half-dozen that knew port from starboard.

In short, misogyny seems to be a main theme. Is subjugation still tied to wealth in this world? Of course*. It’s just a gaudy, if needed, wakeup call to see it paraded so brazenly by something akin to an outdoor rag.

Otherwise I went climbing, and had fun for 90 minutes ripping skin off on granite. Still pretty soft and weak, but I can come close to hardish problems I did last year, and am psyched to return (with tape for that roof crack).

Dale Wiggins is an accomplished Phoenix rider, who makes stellar maps. His new Elden map is up to date and excellent, though there are a few things out west in Freidlin Prarie/Fort Valley area that he’s missed. About 200 meters from the pavement on the F.P. road a singletrack shoots off from a sideroad to a campsite on the right. It’s swoopy, fast, and very good.

KMC madness continues, with all looking very much in order. Fred found a (fortuitously minor) error in my directions, that has been corrected. Two brains are better, no matter how much proofreading.

G’nite.

*This is an effort at not leaving my broad comment sitting by itself. There’s a reason it’s in small font.

Power (as a philosophical concept and practical reality) lies in first differentiating oneself from “the other,” and then subjugating that other on the ground of difference established. One must have a grounds to claim superiority, in whatever form. Society has a number of such distinctions built in to the framework through which (via our interactions with others) we understand the world. Race, ethnicity, class, education level, and (in my view) the big one from which all others come: gender/sex. Ergo misogyny is, to simplify excessively, the root of all evil. Not necessarily the sort of evil with which we can do away, but perhaps something we can mitigate through complication.

An example is what Judith Butler calls “the girling of the girl”: when the baby is pulled from the womb and the doc say “It’s a ___!”, the game is over. What was essentially tabla rasa has already had a enormous number of important choices made for it.

**Alllright, I just wrote that and am getting warmed up. Cracked another Fat Tire and got a dill pickle. And when is a cigar just a cigar!

Here’s your scintillating photo for the day (hopefully some of you get this with coffee).

As stated above, I think it would be foolhardy to take anything for granted here. The photag’s a smart cookie.

There’s the obvious racial contrast and stereotype, invocations of power dynamics immediately (and yes, I’m talking about Foucault). Yet who is the only human wearing shoes? This vastly compounds the contrast of power and vulnerability created by the bikini versus the suit. Again, he’s out on business, she’s on a mere vacation? Gone local? Another deliberate invocation of inequity at the founding moment of the hollow narrative being created. (Rather like porn, insofar as the narrative is on the surface an absurd artifice and below a rather significant lack of coincidence) Where is she keeping her card, or for that matter going to keep his, or even more importantly her money to buy ice cream? (The location, we are told by the caption, of the meeting.)

Indeed, the eyes being the window into the soul in photography, where are the eyes? In the shadows of the children’s faces, one boy and one girl? In her large sunglasses? Or in what we are given of him, the back of his head? What are we to make of that?

Or the symmetry of the photo? The woman and girl splitting the center of the frame, with the other two males and two females arrayed out in folded pairs on either side? With each gender trio stair-stepping up in height?

In a painting this would not be coincidence.

And yet in this photo, perhaps it is. Whatever tales of power, race, class, and oppression you might find in it, the mere chance that it was arranged by happenstance tells a tale. One thing I learned in college, reading Nietzsche especially, and get to see again every day at work, is that our choices tell so much more about who we are than we can ever hope to understand in the moment. And so to this shot, whatever else it may be, is a glance in the mirror of the society to whom we all owe our existence.