the individual and sexism and racism

The "individual" is the victim of sexism/racism, which is formulated, however, as being structural, systemic.  The tendency to "blame the victim" means that society blames the victim; but in a situation where two individuals are involved, the male may "take all the blame out of all sense and reason" because he is aware of the existence of systemic inequality which gets articulated at the individual level.

Is to say that the "victim" ought to claim some responsibility to "blame the victim"?  I think that the man and the woman are both victims.  At least, in the individual case I am thinking of, it was so.  

My girlfriend was probably culturally biased to keeping her own voice in check, to being acted on, like a pin-up in a magazine something passive.........I don't understand it.

According to Ebert's review of "House of Sand and Fog," the film gives a 'literary' treatment of its characters to the degree that it does not apportion blame but feels sympathy for them all.  Perhaps it is the 'literary' way of thinking, then, that differs from a systemic way of apportioning guilt and shame.  What is the moral, ethical, or political status of such a 'literary' approach to events?

Rorty

According to Rorty in "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity," it's impossible to unify responsibility-to-the-social-world and responsibility-to-one's-self-as-"individual" at the level of theory.  In English departments today, though, it's often assumed that texts have political ramifications; so, for example, J. Boone (according to R. Felski) looks for the political subversiveness in modernist works of fiction.  But Rorty himself also reads such works as doing political work: that is, they provide redescriptions that allow us to identify our cruelties and develop empathy for the Other. 

Baker's autism

Nicholson Baker could be viewed as a political writer in his early writings.  Like Mark Haddon in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, he shows an absorption in small things as sufficing.  The American male scales back, or scales down, his enthusiasms and embraces the study of the grain of wood in the table, so to speak.  This obsession with small-scale surfaces and experiences is the opposite of a war-mongering spirit--although it may (?) dovetail with consumerism.

on 'Juno'

The film exemplifies in a new light my maxim: "Friendship is a queer institution."

Song lyrics in this regard are illustrative: "You're a part-time lover and a full-time friend," and other lyrics.  Also, her dad's spiel to her about "someone who loves you for who you are."  

In "sex lies and videotape," Grahams says: "...they say a man grows to love where he desires, a woman grows to desire where she loves."  For "love," read "be in friendship with, befriend."  (To be "in love with" means to "be in like with.")  When you start with love/friendship, you aren't responding to a culturally indoctrinated search-image, what the culture tacitly tells you is the stereotype of attractiveness in a man or woman.  So you start with "ugliness" (lyric: "two ugly people loving each other") and out of that grows desire.  

I used to think: 'Friendship is the better part of love.  There's nothing out there but friendship and biology.'  For biology, read 'cultural expectations, pressures, pre-determinations.'

What is 'queer' about friendship in these terms is not just that the desire that grows out of it is for a person who is not necessarily the cultural ideal of attractive masculinity/femininity (i.e., Paulie Bleeker in the movie is androgynous, with hairless legs and no ability to grow a mustache); what is 'queer' as well is that desire DOES grow out of it; there is no drawing a line of containment and demarcation between friendship and desire.  

When Juno has the trite Hollywood moment and asks the dad the question: "I'm losing my faith in humanity...I just need to know that it's possible that two people can stay happy together forever."

For me, the question this raises is the perception that one's faith in humanity is challenged BECAUSE the only acceptable way to secure happiness (the only viable way, rather) is through coupling off.  Because you cannot rely on the world at large, the world in general, to see you off.  For the sake of self-preservation, you need to fix on one and only one person who will mean the world to you in the sense that they will protect you and you can rely on them, and vice versa, and they will not desert you to the wolves of loneliness and want.

Why is it this way.

Three things, according to my dad: the selfish gene, capitalism, and self-preservation.  The selfish gene encourages the couple formation (in the interests of colonization of the future with one's own).  Capitalism encourages looking out for number one and competition with others, not being their keepers (that would be a socialist state).  Self-preservation encourages keeping to the couple unit if that is where safety and reliability is to be reliably found.

A ramification of all this is that, if I seek emotional support from a woman who is committed to a couple, she may not give it, she may block me out.  (This is Zizek: "..in this purely formal sense, love is evil.")  (Here, the fine line between friendship and romance/sex/commitment is a bad thing because it means that she is uncomfortable giving friendship because it is too close to blurring into something sexual or romantic.  If the seedbed of friendship simply IS romance, if things are queer in this degree, then, ironically, friendship becomes more rather than less treacherous, even as love/romance/sex becomes LESS treacherous and more humane.)