Speed Blogging, Mon 9/16/2013: On Women

Note:  Not all these are from the last few days.

First, the Taliban in Afghanistan is waging a physical war against women in the public sector, by killing female police officers, by burning down girls' schools, of course, and by killing other women who have used their voices.  These moves serve deeper desires to keep women restricted to the home and to make sure that women don't vote, for example.

Second, good news about teenage pregnancy rates in the US.  They are falling, and the most likely cause seems to be an increased use of contraception.  So what is being reduced are unintended pregnancies.

Third,  a rumored death of an eight-year-old bride in Yemen has created a debate about child marriages in that country.  What makes the debate more difficult are the religious arguments:

In 2009, Yemen's parliament passed legislation raising the minimum age of marriage to 17. But conservative parliamentarians argued the bill violated Islamic law, which does not stipulate a minimum age of marriage, and the bill was never signed.

Activist groups and politicians are still trying change the law, but more than 100 leading religious clerics have said restricting the age of marriage is "un-Islamic."

Fourth, and as usual (for this debate is one we always have), Hanna Rosin argued last month that the gender gap in wages is total hogwash because men and women mostly work in different occupations and even industries and that the actual pay difference for  identical work is very small.  But one recent report suggests that the story isn't that simple.   If you want to learn more about this all, have a look at my gender gap three-part series, available here.

Fifth, and finally, this piece and the picture attached to it are hilarious.  Talking about it properly cannot be done in speed blogging, and in any case I must refresh my mascara and learn about Syria, to be a proper feminazi. 

But a quick look at the pic might be something we can fit in here:  A room full of pretty and thin young white women, one being available as a keyboard table and in the middle of it all, one lucky guy!  It has the flavor of those nineteenth century European paintings about harems. 

Nah,  I just don't care enough about the Goldberg phenomenon to take it seriously, though naturally I'm willing to contemplate posts on fashion, makeup and dating should that make me, too, very rich.

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The Language Of The Class Wars

Here's what is interesting about the newest round of battles in the American class wars:  As the haves are truly beating down the have-nots, the language the henchmen and henchwomen of the haves is strengthening, becoming cruder, more accusing, more totalizing and more objectified.

Why that would be the case beats me.  After all, they are winning, soundly, the haves.  Just look at the most recent evidence:

The top 10 percent of earners took more than half of the country’s total income in 2012, the highest level recorded since the government began collecting the relevant data a century ago, according to an updated study by the prominent economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. 

The top 1 percent took more than one-fifth of the income earned by Americans*, one of the highest levels on record since 1913, when the government instituted an income tax. 

The figures underscore that even after the recession the country remains in a new Gilded Age, with income as concentrated as it was in the years that preceded the Depression of the 1930s, if not more so.

Pay attention to that last sentence.  Incomes are now as concentrated as they were in the years preceding the Great Depression!   The top 1% of earners took in 19.3% of all household income in 2012*, the largest percentage since the Twenties, and 95% of all income gains since 2009 went to them.

So if I was the referee in these class wars I'd give the last few rounds (well, most of them) to the rich.  The rich are getting richer at a nice gallop, the poor ---   well, they are takers, and anything that might help them, such as the unions, are leeches.

That's what I hear from the conservative media.  On Labor Day, Fox News channel told us that the day was about the takers and the makers, the makers being people who have jobs, I guess, and the takers being everybody else.  But ultimately the takers are viewed as anyone not earning enough to pay federal income taxes.  That group includes retired people and students at schools and colleges and stay-at-home parents, too.

The language of takers and makers is not something we should just snort at.  It's an attempt to frame the current existing income and wealth inequality as just, perhaps not even sufficiently tilted towards the rich, because those who have more money got it due to  their good work ethic and hard work.  Those who don't have money, even if they have three jobs, made bad choices and are takers.

A few examples of how the right talks about all this.  First the Labor Day story I refer to above:



Second,  the usual brush the Fox people grab when they wish to describe the less wealthy consists of "lazy, dependent on government, deserves their fate."  For example:

Fox hosts Bill O'Reilly and Geraldo Rivera cited a U.S. census study which found that many poor Americans own appliances to paint entitlement recipients as lazy or unwilling to work. This analysis ignores the fact that 9 out of 10 Americans receiving entitlements are elderly, disabled, or were members of working households.

Third, here we are taught about labor unions, one of the few institutions which help the have-not side in the class wars:

Fox News continued its assault on the labor movement during a Cashin' In panel discussion that characterized unions as parasitic "vestigial" lobbying organizations that do nothing for their members and harm the economy. As evidence of their claims, the panel referenced a decades-long decline in union membership, but ignored the sustained political assault behind the drop as well as the empirically established economic benefits of a robust labor movement.
On the September 14 edition of Fox News' Cashin' In, host Eric Bolling introduced a segment about union membership drives and protests taking place this month, asking whether the effort was "bad for workers."
Fox regular Jonathan Hoenig explained that the membership drive was necessary, because unions are "parasites" that "need new blood."

I could go on for hours with that list of examples.  The point is that the rich are already winning. So why are the Fox talking heads so adamantly fighting for even more on their plates?  Is no amount enough?

What makes all this propaganda is not that there weren't lazy unemployed people or bad trade union representatives or no people who have worked hard and become rich.   There obviously are.  It is the totality of the slander which becomes propaganda:  Every poor person is lazy and unwilling to work, every person needing help from the government is a leech (with the exception of any viewers of Fox News who might be on Medicare and Social Security, naturally), there are no hard-working poor people in the whole wide world!

It is this propaganda which the Wallet Right needs, to get politicians who are willing to put even more in their wallets, by painting everyone but the top 10% of earners, say, as parasites, leeches and undeserving.

What makes me tear up about this is that the natural consequence of such politicians in power is to open a  chute in the floor where those 10% work, leading right down into the hell of the lazy and undeserving.  Because the more we change welfare and tax policies to benefit only the well-to-do, the greater the number of people who slip down those chutes when something bad happens in their lives.  A major illness, a bout of unemployment, a death or divorce in the family, and down slips Mr. or Ms. Smith, to join the parasites, the takers!

And once that fall ends, the bottom layer will offer no trade unions, hardly any food stamps, no Medicaid to help with the health care costs.  But there might be bankruptcy laws which treat a family losing a second home better than one of "those takers!"

I get the hind-brain feelings which Fox News flames day in and day out.  They have to do with the feeling of outrage that others get stuff for nothing when "you" work so hard, that others get food stamps and "you" have to pay the grocery store prices, that others get to stay at home with their children while "you" can't afford good daycare and so on.

But that's a hind-brain feeling, not an actual comparison between how that person's life would be if he or she was really poor, and the way to reduce the misuse of any system is by policing the misuse, not by getting scissors and gleefully ripping through the safety net which lies below all of us.

Because ultimately the safety net is there for all of us.  That the Fox News is denying this, altogether, and turning the safety net into some sort of a sticky spider web of total dependence is what they excel at.  The implication is that for people to work hard they need to dance on that tightrope without the government safety net!  To truly crash down and die, if they fail, to starve to death on the streets, to get their fair desserts.

What's hilarious about that are the Heads Which Talk on Fox News.  If you have millions in your bank accounts you already have a safety net!  You yourself are not motivated by any of the fears you wish on other people, you yourself can rear your children as lazy and unwilling to work as you wish, and they will still be AOK.   Rush Limbaugh can crack jokes about the diets of the poor, and nobody thinks that is about the funniest thing ever.

There's something nasty about the utter lack of all compassion in the new conservative class-wars language.  But even if we take the standpoint of a completely selfish person, a society with tremendous inequalities and no safety net is not a nice place to live for anyone.  If you manage not to be viewed as one of the takers, your choices of safe places to live and to work in are not many, and it's sorta unpleasant to step over dead animals or people on your way to the guarded shopping mall.  As the actual middle classes shrink downwards, it becomes tougher and tougher to find nurses, dentists, teachers, physicians and so on.  Though one can then fly abroad and get the services in those countries which decided not to view the world as consisting of the makers and the takers.

The previous paragraph is an exaggeration when it comes to the US.  What's more probable is that the political will to do anything about the growing income inequalities just will not be found, because the US democracy is so dependent on campaign financing and that is much simpler to get from the rich.  In return, the rich want certain laws passed.  As the lives of the rich and the rest of us diverge, so do the ideas of what the society might need.

Perhaps that is why the new language of class wars has become so callous.  The rich already live in a different reality.
----
*I'm not sure why the two links I give quote slightly different numbers. 

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Friday Echidne Thoughts

This blog is still the gateway drug to feminism, the bowl of dry-scientific-granola-with-a-sprinkling of cyanide and I'm still worse than a thousand Hitlers and far too much a goody-two-shoes.

Whether there's any usefulness in that I don't know.  But as long as I have some fun!

This mood is linked to one of my favorite Finnish poems, by Aaro Hellaakoski, Hauen Laulu (The Pike's Song).  It's wonderful in Finnish but not really translatable, at least by me.  The gist, in English:

From its wet home
the pike climbed the tree
to sing

When through the gray clouds
the rising sun glimmered
and on the lake woke up
the laughing wavelets, to race

Rose the pike to the top of the spruce tree
to bite on the red cone

It may have heard or smelled
or tasted the end of the cone
all dew-wet from the morning ---
such unspeakable greatness

when opening wide
its bony mouth
clicking
its giant jaw bone

such a wild-heavy a psalm it sang
that the birds went silent
as if the weight of the waters
had swept over
and the cold lap of loneliness.

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Bullying Beats Anti-Bullying Programs?

That's what I read here:

Anti-bullying initiatives have become standard at schools across the country, but a new UT Arlington study finds that students attending those schools may be more likely to be a victim of bullying than children at schools without such programs.

The findings run counter to the common perception that bullying prevention programs can help protect kids from repeated harassment or physical and emotional attacks.
"One possible reason for this is that the students who are victimizing their peers have learned the language from these anti-bullying campaigns and programs," said Seokjin Jeong, an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at UT Arlington and lead author of the study, which was published in the Journal of Criminology.

Even the title of the summary is all about that: 

Youth More Likely to Be Bullied at Schools With Anti-Bullying Programs

The writing carefully avoids mentioning explicit causality, but the impression the reader gets is that the anti-bullying programs don't work.

And that can be the case.  However, if you read through the actual study you will find a different reason:  The data the study uses is cross-sectional, meaning that all the researchers can compare are data from the same time period.  So schools with anti-bullying programs can be compared with schools which don't have them, and that's the comparison the summary talks about.

Why is that a problem?  Because we don't know if the schools with anti-bullying programs had the same levels of bullying as other schools, before the programs were introduced.  Perhaps the schools with programs introduced them explicitly because bullying was so bad?  Perhaps the levels of bullying in those schools now are lower than they were before the programs?  Or perhaps not.  The point is that we cannot tell, because the researchers didn't have data over time, only data from one harvesting of information.

Yet it makes sense that schools with or without such programs might differ in other important ways, such as the level of reported bullying.

A second (though smaller) problem is that having anti-bullying programs can make students more aware of the fact that they are being bullied, because it gives the language for expressing bullying.  It's a bit like more people reporting rape after society changes its views on rape and punishes it more severely, even if rape rates are not rising.

I should note that the study itself covers lots of ground and does point out the lack of time-series data.

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Yellen vs. Summers As A Metaphor

Atrios posted on the nomination of the next chief of Federal Reserve.  The forerunners have been defined as Lawrence Summers and Janet Yellen.  Summers looks to be the one the president prefers.

The big difference between the two is in gender.  Yellen has ladybits, Summers has talked about the ladybits in the past, wondering about the role of biology in women's lesser presence in the STEM field.  So the choice between two professionals also lends itself to all sorts other choices, a murky underground where things slither and creep and crawl, and a great opportunity for brawls about gender and such.

But that's not what Atrios wrote about (that was me).  He pointed out this:

One reason the (likely) failure to nominate Yellen as the next Fed Chief is such a disappointment is that it will miss an incredible opportunity to give the job to a woman for the first time. She has the experience. No one really denies she's qualified, except to suggest she's insufficiently bro-y. And these opportunities don't come up all the time. Due to historical extreme explicit discrimination against women, and existing barriers (including discrimination) big and small, fewer women rise up close enough to the top that getting the top job is realistic. It's reason enough to give her the job. It's an opportunity.

It is, I think, one reason for the disappointment of some Hillary Clinton supporters in 2008. While it hopefully happens more and more, at the moment the likelihood of women getting close enough to reach the top is just lower. One only has to look at the gender balance of governors and senators, the people who have a realistic shot at getting the nomination, to see this. Of course a similar issue existed for her main opponent at the time.

The way I always thought about such nominations in high places, from my feminist point of view, is that they serve to change ideas about what women (or minorities etc.) can do, that they widen the social gender norms, that they give us weapons against those who come and tell us that women (or blacks) are not good at anything to do with the command roles in the public sector and so on.  And mostly I think that approach is the correct one, given what has happened in many fields where the women were a curiosity in the past and where they now are just like the men in the fields, no better or worse.

For example, male medical school students used to fight tooth and nail against women's admittance in the nineteenth century England.   Now women can be physicians in all countries of the world, and one never hears the argument that women cannot cope in that job.  But without  being allowed to try a job, no evidence of that coping can come about.

Now juxtapose this argument with the more recent strand of feminism which suggests that women (or people of color) already close to the top of the hierarchy don't deserve any special push from feminists (or other social justice movements).  We should aim our effort at those who are truly suffering and work at the bottom rungs of the societal ladders only.

And there's truth in that, because of the relative levels of suffering.  But there's also truth in that work which tries to change societal norms, to reduce misogyny of a certain type, and sometimes that work requires paying attention to people who are already doing very well but who are treated in a  certain way because of their gender, race, sexual preference and so on.

So I'd prefer to have several arrows in my quiver, to talk and chew gum at the same time, to make a nice mess of metaphors.  One reason for that multiplicity of objectives is that the government matters and other institutions matter and that we want to have them representative of the population so that the specific concerns of different groups are fairly represented.  In my idealistic moments I think that may also help in the laws we need to work better lives for those who are poor and suffering.  In my more realistic movements I understand that those who have risen through the system to some extent must have the values of the system.

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Those Discouraged Young Men Who Live in Their Parents' Basement

Something interesting from Pew Research on the possibility that young men are now so discouraged and effeminate because of feminism that they just live at home with their parents.  Probably in their basement, watching pron and playing computer games..

If that sounds odd to you, rest assured that I 'm not making the arguments up.  They are common among the end-of-men lot and crop up pretty regularly in the media.

Imagine my great surprise, then when I read this from Pew Research:

In 2012, Millennial males (40%) were more likely to live at home than Millennial females (32%).
This 8 percentage point gap in living at home is smaller than the 11-point gap evident in 1968.
The growing gender parity in likelihood of residing at home is especially pronounced among 18- to 24-year-olds. In 1968, 59% of male 18- to 24-year-olds lived at home (very similar to 2012). In contrast, in 1968 only 42% of females in that age group lived at home. So a 17 percentage point gender gap in living at home in 1968 has narrowed to a 9 percentage point gap in 2012 among 18- to 24-year-olds.
One factor that has contributed to the growing gender parity in living at home is the rise in the share of young women who go to college. (Goldin, Katz, and Kuziemko, 2006). In 1968, only 19.5% of 18- to 24-year-old females were enrolled in college in 1968, compared with 34% of their male peers. That ratio has since flipped; as of 2011, women were 6 percentage points more likely to be enrolled in college than men among 18- to 24-year-olds.

Bolds are mine.

I missed checking this out myself!  Hangs head in shame.

What's the point?  Young people are counted as living at home even if they live in a dormitory at college.  And it seems that even in 1968 more young men than young women "lived at home,"  meaning that they were either actually living at home with their parents or that they were studying at a college or a university and counted as living at home.

And the other point is that a gender gap which has narrowed over the long-run is being sold to us as a brand new gendered difference.  Some of the recent changes may have new causes (such as the change from early marriage to cohabitation and later marriage or just cohabitation), but the important thing is that young men were more likely to live at home even before feminists did any of their nasty work!

The lesson:  Always check the data, preferably in a time series format.

And let me rush to state that I'm not making fun of the reduced work opportunities of young men or of young women.  But that's an economic problem,  not a gender-politics problem.

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Silly Stuff

Good book names:

Caressing the Hedgehog.  This would be a good name for a book about trying to be a social helper.

My Life As An Old Man.  I want to write that one, just because.

The Makers And The Takers.  This right-wing slogan can be turned around niftily.  For instance, who makes those delicious gourmet dinners at high-faluting restaurants and who eats them?  Or those yachts.  Who makes them and who sails them.   Who cleans those toilet and who uses them? 

That one could give us a whole library of books.

Ready, Steady, Fire!  The circular firing squads in politics.  Lots of short-term fun, lots of long-term suffering, those are.  But the friendly fire is a lot less frightening, for the perpetrators.

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