Friday, December 16, 2011
Friday, November 25, 2011
Video of the Day
In honor of the most wonderful time of the year.
As a service to the corporatocracy, I would like to remind you that your family won't know you love them unless you embark on a crazed, irrational buying frenzy this weekend which will cause your stress level to spike through the roof, drive your family deeper into debt, and cause serious longterm environmental degradation. Hopefully your crazed consumer frenzy started today. It really should have started yesterday, it turns out. And if you don't get on it this weekend, you're doomed. Cheers!
The lyrics:
All the garbage that you have thrown away
Is waiting somewhere a million miles away
Your condoms and your VCR
Your ziploc bags and father's car
Dark and silent it waits for you ahead
So much garbage will never ever decay
And all your garbage will outlive you one day
You should sign a fancy signature to your messy messy portraiture
Because dark and silent it waits for you ahead
Making so much garbage each and every day
We make this shit for you to throw away
In plastic rooms in factories for you to dispose of as you please
Because dark and silent it waits for you ahead
With stomachs full of oil and vinegar
Stomachs full of oil and vinegar
With stomachs full of oil and vinegar hey hey
With stomachs full of oil and vinegar
Stomachs full of oil and vinegar
With stomachs full of oil and vinegar hey hey
La la la la
La la la la la la la la
La la la la
La la la la la la la la
La la la la
La la la la la la la la
As a service to the corporatocracy, I would like to remind you that your family won't know you love them unless you embark on a crazed, irrational buying frenzy this weekend which will cause your stress level to spike through the roof, drive your family deeper into debt, and cause serious longterm environmental degradation. Hopefully your crazed consumer frenzy started today. It really should have started yesterday, it turns out. And if you don't get on it this weekend, you're doomed. Cheers!
The lyrics:
All the garbage that you have thrown away
Is waiting somewhere a million miles away
Your condoms and your VCR
Your ziploc bags and father's car
Dark and silent it waits for you ahead
So much garbage will never ever decay
And all your garbage will outlive you one day
You should sign a fancy signature to your messy messy portraiture
Because dark and silent it waits for you ahead
Making so much garbage each and every day
We make this shit for you to throw away
In plastic rooms in factories for you to dispose of as you please
Because dark and silent it waits for you ahead
With stomachs full of oil and vinegar
Stomachs full of oil and vinegar
With stomachs full of oil and vinegar hey hey
With stomachs full of oil and vinegar
Stomachs full of oil and vinegar
With stomachs full of oil and vinegar hey hey
La la la la
La la la la la la la la
La la la la
La la la la la la la la
La la la la
La la la la la la la la
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Friday, November 11, 2011
Happy Friday
In honor of the weekend, a drink recipe.
Dump a bunch of ice in a glass. Squeeze a whole lemon and dump it in.
Add 2 shots of whiskey. Not Jack Daniels. Some other decent whiskey.
Add a squirt of agave nectar and top it off with a splash of cold filtered water. Stir it all up.
Best whiskey sour ever.
Happy Friday
Dump a bunch of ice in a glass. Squeeze a whole lemon and dump it in.
Add 2 shots of whiskey. Not Jack Daniels. Some other decent whiskey.
Add a squirt of agave nectar and top it off with a splash of cold filtered water. Stir it all up.
Best whiskey sour ever.
Happy Friday
Video of the Day
The sponsors of American Idol are trying to forcibly remove this video from Youtube, so you should probably watch it and see what has them so freaked out:
via My Plastic-Free Life
via My Plastic-Free Life
Thursday, November 10, 2011
College football, the Catholic church, same difference
So, it's not really a secret that I like college football. I mean, I really like college football. And I feel conflicted about that.
On the one hand, there's my childhood experience of college football. When I was a kid, college football was a central part of the transition from summer to fall each year. Most Saturdays would find me in Husky Stadium with my dad and uncle and siblings and cousins (or getting up insanely early and driving to Eugene or Corvallis or Pullman for away games). We'd meet up late morning at my cousins' house, stuff our pockets with snacks, and head toward the stadium with the crowd of other fans heading down the Burke-Gilman trail. We would walk through the fall leaves or gray drizzle, carrying piles of umbrellas, ponchos, hats, mittens, and my dad's famous solution to the rain getting your jeans and shoes wet - a long roll of clear plastic to unroll over the whole row of laps, resulting in many admonitions from the adults to sit still already, you're knocking the plastic on the ground. Needless to say this made The Wave a little problematic. During away games that were too far to drive to, we collected at whichever house had the best football-watching tv at the time and watched the game there. Most Christmas vacations there was a bowl game to go to. We all knew the vocabulary, strategy, roster, conference politics, etc and could discuss them fluently. So yeah, a central part of my childhood that involved a lot of bonding and fond memories.
On the other hand, there's the culture of college football. And football in general. And club sports in general. Case in point: Penn State. First, you have a hierarchical structure where careers ride on wins and losses and revenue brought in. For a graduate assistant coach, being a whistle blower is a career-ending move. The very machinery that you are hitching your career wagon to will grind you up in a heartbeat if you buck the system and step outside the clear but implicit code of (mis)conduct. Then there's the reluctance of the administration to do a goddamn thing to prevent serious ethical breaches and abuses as long as the program is doing what the program is supposed to do - win games and make money. After all, involving the police and bringing charges against people is really bad PR. Better to sweep it all under the rug. What's the rape of a few 10 year-olds when $68 million a year is at stake? Collateral damage.
And so I distrust college football, because it's a patriarchal institution driven by a warped set of values, which isolates itself in order to maintain the fucked up culture that results from these values, and somehow manages to maintain its privileged status in spite of repeated instances of misconduct and abuse. And what does this all remind us of? The Catholic church, perhaps?
Right. You could take that sentence and replace "college football" with "the church" and it would perfectly capture the issue. Like this:
So I think that isolating a couple of scapegoats at Penn State and publicly excoriating them is kind of a joke. Way too little; way too late. Until we take a step back and really examine the culture and practices of the institution, we can expect to see one instance of misconduct after another. Nothing will change. Patriarchal, hierarchical institutions will always choose to sacrifice individuals and engage in self-protective behavior to preserve their own culture and practices, and maintain their privileged status. That's the way it works. That’s what it means to be a patriarchal institution. What did we expect already?
*Of course it's true that not all churches fit this description, and in fact there are some churches that make an effort to prioritize the needs of individuals over that of the institution. But I still think this is the exception rather than the rule. Generally speaking, the institutional nature of a church results in a tendency to pursue practices that are protective of the institution first, even if this comes at a cost to individual members.
On the one hand, there's my childhood experience of college football. When I was a kid, college football was a central part of the transition from summer to fall each year. Most Saturdays would find me in Husky Stadium with my dad and uncle and siblings and cousins (or getting up insanely early and driving to Eugene or Corvallis or Pullman for away games). We'd meet up late morning at my cousins' house, stuff our pockets with snacks, and head toward the stadium with the crowd of other fans heading down the Burke-Gilman trail. We would walk through the fall leaves or gray drizzle, carrying piles of umbrellas, ponchos, hats, mittens, and my dad's famous solution to the rain getting your jeans and shoes wet - a long roll of clear plastic to unroll over the whole row of laps, resulting in many admonitions from the adults to sit still already, you're knocking the plastic on the ground. Needless to say this made The Wave a little problematic. During away games that were too far to drive to, we collected at whichever house had the best football-watching tv at the time and watched the game there. Most Christmas vacations there was a bowl game to go to. We all knew the vocabulary, strategy, roster, conference politics, etc and could discuss them fluently. So yeah, a central part of my childhood that involved a lot of bonding and fond memories.
On the other hand, there's the culture of college football. And football in general. And club sports in general. Case in point: Penn State. First, you have a hierarchical structure where careers ride on wins and losses and revenue brought in. For a graduate assistant coach, being a whistle blower is a career-ending move. The very machinery that you are hitching your career wagon to will grind you up in a heartbeat if you buck the system and step outside the clear but implicit code of (mis)conduct. Then there's the reluctance of the administration to do a goddamn thing to prevent serious ethical breaches and abuses as long as the program is doing what the program is supposed to do - win games and make money. After all, involving the police and bringing charges against people is really bad PR. Better to sweep it all under the rug. What's the rape of a few 10 year-olds when $68 million a year is at stake? Collateral damage.
And so I distrust college football, because it's a patriarchal institution driven by a warped set of values, which isolates itself in order to maintain the fucked up culture that results from these values, and somehow manages to maintain its privileged status in spite of repeated instances of misconduct and abuse. And what does this all remind us of? The Catholic church, perhaps?
Right. You could take that sentence and replace "college football" with "the church" and it would perfectly capture the issue. Like this:
I distrust the church,* because it's a patriarchal institution driven by a warped set of values, which isolates itself in order to maintain the fucked up culture that results from these values, and somehow manages to maintain its privileged status in spite of repeated instances of misconduct and abuse.Note that I say "the church" here instead of "the Catholic church" because I think the abuses rampant in the Catholic church are just the most widespread and visible abuses of their kind. You might remember that the church I grew up in, which was decidedly not Catholic, was a great environment for abuse as well. Obviously the values that drive the institution and allow for the abuses are different, but the same dynamic is at play.
So I think that isolating a couple of scapegoats at Penn State and publicly excoriating them is kind of a joke. Way too little; way too late. Until we take a step back and really examine the culture and practices of the institution, we can expect to see one instance of misconduct after another. Nothing will change. Patriarchal, hierarchical institutions will always choose to sacrifice individuals and engage in self-protective behavior to preserve their own culture and practices, and maintain their privileged status. That's the way it works. That’s what it means to be a patriarchal institution. What did we expect already?
*Of course it's true that not all churches fit this description, and in fact there are some churches that make an effort to prioritize the needs of individuals over that of the institution. But I still think this is the exception rather than the rule. Generally speaking, the institutional nature of a church results in a tendency to pursue practices that are protective of the institution first, even if this comes at a cost to individual members.
Monday, November 7, 2011
Three quickies and a Monday song
One
I've always thought it's unfortunate that the culture in which abstinence and purity rhetoric dominates is also one in which sexual dysfunction is covered up or accepted as a fact of life. Of course, this is the culture I grew up in, and I can tell you that talking honestly and openly about sex is strongly discouraged. Any indication of a lack of fulfillment from sex within marriage is viewed as a sign of selfishness, or an "impure heart." I've always thought this was a recipe for disaster. First you make sex taboo, and teach young people to avoid all sexual contact, sexual behavior, and even sexual thoughts (good luck with that) until marriage. Then miraculously these two people who are completely sexually inexperienced, and most likely have some huge psychological walls built up around the very concept of sex, are supposed to magically have awesome, mutually-fulfilling sex on their wedding night, and for the next 50 years. Right. I mean, not only is there the inexperience factor, but there's also all the rhetoric about impurity, where a woman (especially) who has had premarital sex is dirty and less valuable in some way. So if sex makes you dirty before you're married, and you spend 18 years associating sexual contact with pollution and degradation, how do you magically "flip the switch" overnight and go to thinking of it as a positive, fulfilling thing?
The prohibition on discussing sexual dissatisfaction within marriage is a such a central mechanism in the purity and abstinence machinery that it's encouraging to see advice columns like this: The Monotony of Monogamy: I married my first sexual partner, and now I’m itching to cheat, where the more likely trajectory is openly discussed. Not that it will change much, but there it is.
Two
When my daughter got out of the bath the other night, she left these two sitting on the side of the tub. I've been wondering what they were talking about ever since.
Three
In a recent Science article, The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling, much of the data that has been used to support single-sex schooling is debunked, and some of the truly significant problems surrounding segregated schooling are discussed. It's totally worth a read.
And finally, a Monday song.
I've always thought it's unfortunate that the culture in which abstinence and purity rhetoric dominates is also one in which sexual dysfunction is covered up or accepted as a fact of life. Of course, this is the culture I grew up in, and I can tell you that talking honestly and openly about sex is strongly discouraged. Any indication of a lack of fulfillment from sex within marriage is viewed as a sign of selfishness, or an "impure heart." I've always thought this was a recipe for disaster. First you make sex taboo, and teach young people to avoid all sexual contact, sexual behavior, and even sexual thoughts (good luck with that) until marriage. Then miraculously these two people who are completely sexually inexperienced, and most likely have some huge psychological walls built up around the very concept of sex, are supposed to magically have awesome, mutually-fulfilling sex on their wedding night, and for the next 50 years. Right. I mean, not only is there the inexperience factor, but there's also all the rhetoric about impurity, where a woman (especially) who has had premarital sex is dirty and less valuable in some way. So if sex makes you dirty before you're married, and you spend 18 years associating sexual contact with pollution and degradation, how do you magically "flip the switch" overnight and go to thinking of it as a positive, fulfilling thing?
The prohibition on discussing sexual dissatisfaction within marriage is a such a central mechanism in the purity and abstinence machinery that it's encouraging to see advice columns like this: The Monotony of Monogamy: I married my first sexual partner, and now I’m itching to cheat, where the more likely trajectory is openly discussed. Not that it will change much, but there it is.
Two
When my daughter got out of the bath the other night, she left these two sitting on the side of the tub. I've been wondering what they were talking about ever since.
Three
In a recent Science article, The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling, much of the data that has been used to support single-sex schooling is debunked, and some of the truly significant problems surrounding segregated schooling are discussed. It's totally worth a read.
And finally, a Monday song.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Friday Quick Hit
First....I am still alive, just very busy, as well as being emotionally and intellectually engaged elsewhere right now. As my 3 year-old would say "I can't tell you about that right now." Which really just means "I don't want to tell you about that right now."
Second, This is definitely worth checking out: Knocked Up and Knocked Down. If there's any doubt what impact the war on reproductive choice has, this oughtta lay it to rest. As predicted, the whittling away of affordable access to reproductive health services is resulting in a higher birth rate among poorer women, which feeds into a cycle where they become poorer, and thus less likely to have access to birth control or abortion services, and therefore at higher risk of unplanned pregnancies and birth, which makes them even poorer, etc.
On the other end of the spectrum, wealthier women are having fewer kids. Perhaps because our system makes it so very very difficult for women to parent and enjoy professional success at the same time. So it turns out a larger number of them are foregoing the whole mommy-track thing altogether. Which is a totally rational ( read here as "unfeminine") thing to do. Let the conservative handwringing commence.
And I have an adorable 3 year-old, a good movie, and a margarita waiting for me. Gotta go. See ya around.
Second, This is definitely worth checking out: Knocked Up and Knocked Down. If there's any doubt what impact the war on reproductive choice has, this oughtta lay it to rest. As predicted, the whittling away of affordable access to reproductive health services is resulting in a higher birth rate among poorer women, which feeds into a cycle where they become poorer, and thus less likely to have access to birth control or abortion services, and therefore at higher risk of unplanned pregnancies and birth, which makes them even poorer, etc.
On the other end of the spectrum, wealthier women are having fewer kids. Perhaps because our system makes it so very very difficult for women to parent and enjoy professional success at the same time. So it turns out a larger number of them are foregoing the whole mommy-track thing altogether. Which is a totally rational ( read here as "unfeminine") thing to do. Let the conservative handwringing commence.
And I have an adorable 3 year-old, a good movie, and a margarita waiting for me. Gotta go. See ya around.
Friday, September 2, 2011
Friday Miscellanea
In a breathtaking display of the power of industry lobbying, Obama Administration Abandons Stricter Air-Quality Rules. Because what's a little (or a lot of) asthma in the general population compared to the money you can make when you're free to do...whatever?
In a downright shocking turn of events, the vast majority of welfare recipients who were forced to undergo mandatory drug testing in Florida (thanks Tea Party!) tested clean. Now the tax payers get to pay for a whole lotta drug tests. Now there's small government for ya: Not Druggies After All: 96 Percent of Florida Welfare Applicants Pass Tea Party Governor's Drug Test. The thing is, this wasn't about small government or anything like that. It was about sending a message to those on public assistance that we think they're inferior, lazy schmucks that need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps already. Or something. And from that perspective, this testing program was a marvelous success. Well done, Tea Party.
Slate has an interesting piece about a woman who's following all the Biblical commands concerning women to the letter: A Year of Biblical Womanhood. It turns out that Rachel Held Evans' project demonstrates some facts that your more conventional (by which we mean male, of course) evangelicals don't want you to know. The scriptures that churches choose to enforce (like all that stuff about women being submissive and remaining silent in church) are carefully selected by those who will benefit from maintaining the subordinate servant class. However, all the other stuff it says that doesn't exactly benefit the dominant group just kind of falls by the wayside and gets forgotten. If the scriptures were really being adhered to in a complete and unselective way, men wouldn't get to have sex with their wives during her period or for 9 days afterward. That's like half the month, every month. Who the heck wants to enforce that kind of scriptural command?
Mother Jones ran a piece about The Teen Suicide Epidemic in Michele Bachmann's District, which has pretty much been ignored in mainstream media outlets. I would be interested in hearing what Ms. Bachmann has to say on the topic, but I doubt I'll be hearing that anytime soon.
In the New York Times Amy Schalet has an interesting piece about The Sleepover Question in which she discusses parental attitudes toward their teenaged children's sexuality.
According to the Institute for Policy Studies, CEO salaries have increased dramatically, while the taxes their corporations pay have shrunk continuously. Executive Excess 2011: The Massive CEO Rewards for Tax Dodging lays out the trend, in which the pay gap between what CEOs and average U.S. workers bring home rose from a ratio of 263-to-1 in 2009 to 325-to-1 in 2010. At the same time, CEOs don't appear to be doing anything that actually benefits shareholders (and their employees are certainly not benefiting either). In fact, the only thing they actually do seem to be accomplishing is driving down corporate taxes. Ya know, so they can get a bigger piece of the pie while everyone else's piece either stays the same or decreases. Gotta love 'em.
In a totally not surprising turn of events, Scientists Discover That Antimicrobial Wipes and Soaps May Be Making You (and Society) Sick. Yep. I think we already knew that. At least us health-nut conspiracy theorist freaks. What took y'all so long to figure that one out?
And finally, I cannot tell you how much I love this post: The Busy Bee Garden Project. It just makes me happy. What can I say?
Have a great weekend!
In a downright shocking turn of events, the vast majority of welfare recipients who were forced to undergo mandatory drug testing in Florida (thanks Tea Party!) tested clean. Now the tax payers get to pay for a whole lotta drug tests. Now there's small government for ya: Not Druggies After All: 96 Percent of Florida Welfare Applicants Pass Tea Party Governor's Drug Test. The thing is, this wasn't about small government or anything like that. It was about sending a message to those on public assistance that we think they're inferior, lazy schmucks that need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps already. Or something. And from that perspective, this testing program was a marvelous success. Well done, Tea Party.
Slate has an interesting piece about a woman who's following all the Biblical commands concerning women to the letter: A Year of Biblical Womanhood. It turns out that Rachel Held Evans' project demonstrates some facts that your more conventional (by which we mean male, of course) evangelicals don't want you to know. The scriptures that churches choose to enforce (like all that stuff about women being submissive and remaining silent in church) are carefully selected by those who will benefit from maintaining the subordinate servant class. However, all the other stuff it says that doesn't exactly benefit the dominant group just kind of falls by the wayside and gets forgotten. If the scriptures were really being adhered to in a complete and unselective way, men wouldn't get to have sex with their wives during her period or for 9 days afterward. That's like half the month, every month. Who the heck wants to enforce that kind of scriptural command?
Mother Jones ran a piece about The Teen Suicide Epidemic in Michele Bachmann's District, which has pretty much been ignored in mainstream media outlets. I would be interested in hearing what Ms. Bachmann has to say on the topic, but I doubt I'll be hearing that anytime soon.
In the New York Times Amy Schalet has an interesting piece about The Sleepover Question in which she discusses parental attitudes toward their teenaged children's sexuality.
According to the Institute for Policy Studies, CEO salaries have increased dramatically, while the taxes their corporations pay have shrunk continuously. Executive Excess 2011: The Massive CEO Rewards for Tax Dodging lays out the trend, in which the pay gap between what CEOs and average U.S. workers bring home rose from a ratio of 263-to-1 in 2009 to 325-to-1 in 2010. At the same time, CEOs don't appear to be doing anything that actually benefits shareholders (and their employees are certainly not benefiting either). In fact, the only thing they actually do seem to be accomplishing is driving down corporate taxes. Ya know, so they can get a bigger piece of the pie while everyone else's piece either stays the same or decreases. Gotta love 'em.
In a totally not surprising turn of events, Scientists Discover That Antimicrobial Wipes and Soaps May Be Making You (and Society) Sick. Yep. I think we already knew that. At least us health-nut conspiracy theorist freaks. What took y'all so long to figure that one out?
And finally, I cannot tell you how much I love this post: The Busy Bee Garden Project. It just makes me happy. What can I say?
Have a great weekend!
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Update
I reallyreallyreally am going to write something here soon. Really.
In the meantime there's this:
Happy Wednesday!
In the meantime there's this:
Happy Wednesday!
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Coincidence?
Over the weekend I stopped into a local convenience store to purchase some obscenely expensive propane for the grill (long story) and had the pleasure of standing in line for several minutes studying a t-shirt with this charming graphic on it:
Needless to say it was a delightful experience, all the way around.
Later in the day, in an unrelated conversation with babydaddy, the topic of suicide rates came up. We were talking about how, in Wyoming, the wind whistles through the house in a spooky, haunting way sometimes no matter how tight your house is. And some people sort of half-jokingly attribute the very high suicide rate in Wyoming to the incessant wind.
But that got me thinking. The suicide rate in Wyoming is very high among white middle-aged males. Extremely high. And for most white middle-aged men in this state, gun ownership is extremely important. Central-to-their-identity important. And, as this t-shirt demonstrates, gun culture tends to coexist with some pretty sexist attitudes and behaviors.* Those sexist attitudes and behaviors are probably really not all that conducive to establishing and maintaining meaningful, fulfilling long-term relationships with women.** And being single is a risk factor for suicide. In fact, having a string of failed romantic relationships in your past is even more of a risk factor. So it seems like maybe having this worldview in which women are just a giant pain in the ass, and an object to be used and disposed of, and inherently flawed, unpredictable creatures, etc might just lead you to be a total failure with women, which might result in a depressing and lonely life. And since your gun is your best friend, why not let it help you out with this little problem you have?
Or maybe it's just a coincidence that gun culture tends to track with both sexism and high male suicide rates.
And maybe there are other causal factors involved here. For instance, it is generally true that middle-aged white and Native American males are the two demographics that are most likely to commit suicide, and we just have a lot of those here in Wyoming, so that's going to naturally push the suicide rate up a bit. Then there's the relatively high male-to-female ratio. That probably contributes to cultural attitudes about gender and relationships, and decreases the chances that a middle-aged man will be in a relationship, or that a woman will stay in a relationship that isn't fulfilling to her. Then there's the prevalence of oil and gas jobs, and ranch work, which tend to isolate married men from their families and keep single men away from places where women tend to be. Fewer interactions with women allow these overgeneralized, stereotypical, demeaning views of women to flourish, and make it less likely that a man will be able to successfully interact with women when he does come in contact with them. So I'd venture to say that there is a bit of a feedback loop going on here, complete with self-fulfilling prophecies and preexisting attitudes that doom relationships from the start and history repeating itself and a howling wind that makes you feel more isolated and lonely than you felt to begin with.
At any rate, it seems like it's probably a little more complicated than:
gun culture + sexist attitudes and behaviors = bitter and lonely single men = high suicide rate.
But it is an interesting correlation, isn't it?
*Isn't this why images of women like Palin hunting and posing with guns is such a spectacle in our culture? Like the image of a woman driving her own Harley, rather than being the bitch on the back. In subcultures that tend to be fairly sexist, or at least dismissive of women, those women who do integrate into the culture seem to be incongruous, and images of them are kind of jarring and fascinating to us.
**Leaving the plight of the "gay cowboy" out of the conversation completely for the time being. Obviously there's a whole range of other issues that come along with being gay in a heavily hetero-centric, male-centric culture, and no doubt those issues correlate with suicide rates as well.
Needless to say it was a delightful experience, all the way around.
Later in the day, in an unrelated conversation with babydaddy, the topic of suicide rates came up. We were talking about how, in Wyoming, the wind whistles through the house in a spooky, haunting way sometimes no matter how tight your house is. And some people sort of half-jokingly attribute the very high suicide rate in Wyoming to the incessant wind.
But that got me thinking. The suicide rate in Wyoming is very high among white middle-aged males. Extremely high. And for most white middle-aged men in this state, gun ownership is extremely important. Central-to-their-identity important. And, as this t-shirt demonstrates, gun culture tends to coexist with some pretty sexist attitudes and behaviors.* Those sexist attitudes and behaviors are probably really not all that conducive to establishing and maintaining meaningful, fulfilling long-term relationships with women.** And being single is a risk factor for suicide. In fact, having a string of failed romantic relationships in your past is even more of a risk factor. So it seems like maybe having this worldview in which women are just a giant pain in the ass, and an object to be used and disposed of, and inherently flawed, unpredictable creatures, etc might just lead you to be a total failure with women, which might result in a depressing and lonely life. And since your gun is your best friend, why not let it help you out with this little problem you have?
Or maybe it's just a coincidence that gun culture tends to track with both sexism and high male suicide rates.
And maybe there are other causal factors involved here. For instance, it is generally true that middle-aged white and Native American males are the two demographics that are most likely to commit suicide, and we just have a lot of those here in Wyoming, so that's going to naturally push the suicide rate up a bit. Then there's the relatively high male-to-female ratio. That probably contributes to cultural attitudes about gender and relationships, and decreases the chances that a middle-aged man will be in a relationship, or that a woman will stay in a relationship that isn't fulfilling to her. Then there's the prevalence of oil and gas jobs, and ranch work, which tend to isolate married men from their families and keep single men away from places where women tend to be. Fewer interactions with women allow these overgeneralized, stereotypical, demeaning views of women to flourish, and make it less likely that a man will be able to successfully interact with women when he does come in contact with them. So I'd venture to say that there is a bit of a feedback loop going on here, complete with self-fulfilling prophecies and preexisting attitudes that doom relationships from the start and history repeating itself and a howling wind that makes you feel more isolated and lonely than you felt to begin with.
At any rate, it seems like it's probably a little more complicated than:
gun culture + sexist attitudes and behaviors = bitter and lonely single men = high suicide rate.
But it is an interesting correlation, isn't it?
*Isn't this why images of women like Palin hunting and posing with guns is such a spectacle in our culture? Like the image of a woman driving her own Harley, rather than being the bitch on the back. In subcultures that tend to be fairly sexist, or at least dismissive of women, those women who do integrate into the culture seem to be incongruous, and images of them are kind of jarring and fascinating to us.
**Leaving the plight of the "gay cowboy" out of the conversation completely for the time being. Obviously there's a whole range of other issues that come along with being gay in a heavily hetero-centric, male-centric culture, and no doubt those issues correlate with suicide rates as well.
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