I have no idea what the lyrics of that song are because English lyrics still give me trouble. I hope they are not somehow inappropriate.
Thursday, 31 January 2013
OK. Now I'm getting worried about my mental health. I've just finished quickly skimming a study which concluded that based on data from the early 1990s those married couples with the most gender-traditional division of labor at home (she does cooking, laundry, dusting, vacuuming, he does bills and the yard and driving) had the most sex. Those married couples who had a less gender-traditional division of labor at home had a lower frequency of sex. Or rather, the larger the share of the husband in traditionally female chores, the lower the frequency.
More about the study itself in a later post, after I have read it more carefully. But after finishing skimming it I murmured to myself (as us goddesses do): "I bet your ass that almost all the popularizations are going to be about men and sex, not about couples and sex, or about women and sex, and I also bet your donkey that many of them hint that men should do fewer of those female chores because that way they will get more sex!"
And then I Google the study and start reading the popularizations and I laugh and I laugh and I laugh and then I wonder how I can find it so very funny that my predictions are 100% correct. Whatever.
First, there are 116 separate popularizations of this study, the Google machine tells me. Wow! Even important health studies rarely get to those numbers.
Second, many of them indeed seem to think that the study is about men-and-sex, not about couples-and-sex. Examples:
Fox News:
Listen up, men.
Before you listen to your wife tell you doing more chores around the house will lead to more sex, read this.
PolicyMic headline:
The Australian headline:Valentine's Day Tip For Men: Sex More Likely For Those Who Avoid House Chores
The UK Telegraph headline:For men, doing housework means less sex, say sociologists
Digital Journal headline:Husbands who only do 'manly' chores have more sex - study
And so on and so on. Can you see why I was laughing? Humans really ARE hilarious. And not the English speaking ones only:Study: More housework equals less sex for married men
Hombres: más tareas del hogar, menos relaciones sexuales
Wednesday, 30 January 2013
This piece about the dangers of leaving a child unattended in a locked car for a few minutes (when it is not hot) reminded me of an earlier similar story about a pediatrician who ran into the store to get some milk and left her children in the locked car, also for a few minutes. She was accused of child abuse, if I recall the story correctly (can't find the link now).
Yet the actual risk of anything bad happening to children being left alone for a few minutes in a locked car is very, very low. Indeed, the risk they might face by being taken inside the store is probably about equal, because both choices have very small risks attached to them : Perhaps a pedophile just then happens to pass by, happens to have a hammer with which to break the window, and then your child is gone. But perhaps there's someone inside the store going berserk with a gun. Or your child could run away from you while in the store to a candy counter, and a pedophile might grab him or her there and run out of the door. And so on. All these are extremely unlikely events.)
This risk of a stranger pedophile kidnapping a child is widely (WIDELY) publicized in the popular media, and eagerly read everywhere. The latter has to do with the utterly horrible fear that a pederast kidnaps a child, tortures the child and then kills the child. Indeed, this risk is viewed as something so unbearable that the streets and playgrounds in wealthier American cities are now empty of children playing without an adult present.
That there are real risks evident in a childhood spent up mostly indoors, with video games as a substitute for exercise, is not something that feels like a risk with the same urgency to parents. That always being under parental supervision might stunt a child's development and decrease his or her skills is not viewed as a real risk, either.
In many ways, the threat of some stranger kidnapping one's child is treated by our brains and nervous system with the same errors as the fear of an airplane crash. For those of us who have feared flying, all the statistical evidence in the world about the comparative safety of flying makes no difference. And the reason is that the fear of that kind of death ranks so large in the mind of the phobic that no information about the probability of the event (unless it can be made to equal zero) makes any real difference.
Similarly, it is the content of the thoughts that enter a parent's mind when even thinking about a child being kidnapped that overwhelm our ability to be rational. Or so I think. Because rationally speaking, the odds of a stranger kidnapping a child for heinous purposes really are very small indeed. Most child abuse is done by the relatives or family friends of the child, for instance, and the vast majority of child abductions are by the other parent after a divorce. Stranger abductions are rare.
When I was searching for information on the actual probabilities of child abductions by strangers, I came across a site which told me that the probability of a child being abducted in this manner is one in a hundred:
S T A T I S T I C S
* Every 40 seconds, in the United States alone, a child is reported missing or abducted.
* 1.5 million children are abducted each year. Can you imagine what this figure must be worldwide?
* With approximately 75 million children in the United States, every person has a 1% chance of being snatched away before surviving to adulthood to a parent (even 1% is 1% too much!)
* Of child kidnapping victims, 40% are killed, 4% are never found, with 71% being taken by a complete stranger
That is mostly hogwash. Because the site gives no sources for the numbers it's hard to know what concepts get confused in that list, but given that the most common child abductions are by the other parent (200,000 in 2010) that 1.5 million figure makes no sense. And neither does the parent who abducts the child intend to kill the child (or only extremely rarely).
A better source (from 2002) tells us this:
It's every parent's worst fear: a dangerous stranger snatches their child. However, the vast majority of missing children are not kidnapped at all. They are runaways and throwaways, kids who leave and don't come back or are told not to come back, according to a 1990 study by the U.S. Justice Department. Of the remaining cases that are considered abductions, some 350,000 each year, are committed by family members as part of a custody dispute.
In a country with some 59 million children, abductions by a stranger are perhaps the most terrifying of crimes. But they are also the rarest. There are about 114,600 such stranger abductions attempted each year, and about 3,200 to 4,600 or around 4 percent, are successful, according to the study.
Of those, an even smaller fraction, about 200 to 300, are what the FBI calls "stereotypical" kidnappings, where a child is gone overnight, transported over some distance, intended to be kept by the perpetrator or even killed. These incidents make up far less than 1 percent of the total stranger abductions.
The numbers of these cases are small and getting smaller despite the recent publicized incidents, according to FBI statistics. In 2001, agents investigated 93 cases of abduction by someone outside the family. That is a decline from the 115 cases reported in 1998, when such statistics were first kept.
If I had more time for this post I'd look for more recent data because what I found suggests that child abductions have become rarer since 2002. But you can figure the real probability of a random child being abducted by a stranger for truly heinous purposes. It is much, much smaller than one percent. Even the largest probability (applying to attempts by strangers) is only one fifth of a percent. The probability of the "stereotypical" stranger abductions is 0.0000051, and the probability of the child being killed in those is even smaller (perhaps a little more than one half, given the data in the linked article).
Let's compare all that to car accidents, the major killer (or one of the major killers) of children between the ages of two to fourteen years. In 2003:
In 2003, there were a total of 42,643 traffic fatalities in the United States. The 0-14
age group accounted for 5 percent (2,136) of those traffic fatalities.
You can figure out the rough probability of a child dying in one of those traffic fatalities by dividing the number of deaths by the number of children in the US in 2003. But perhaps a clearer comparison would be between actual numbers of death from traffic accidents and from murders by strangers who have abducted a child. The latter can only be approximated from the data I have given here but the figure was somewhere between 50 and 225 (using the data from the 2002 article on "stereotypical kidnaps": 100 to 300 cases, and assuming rates of murder between 50 and 75%).
Here is what I mean by our rationality failing: Parents do not change their child-rearing behavior in response to information about traffic fatalities, even though the worst outcome: the death of a child, is higher in those than in stranger abductions. Indeed, some of the tradeoffs people make to reduce the probability of the latter, such as chauffeuring the children more, might actually increase the likelihood that the child will die.
And the reason is that failing rationality. In some ways the contents of one death and the emotional meaning of it are so overpowering that actual probabilities do not matter very much, or one seeks for verification that the risk is not only impossible to contemplate but also very high. Hence sites like the one I linked to above.
Because data on stranger abductions and related deaths has not been kept in the past we don't know if the problem has become more common. I doubt that myself. What HAS become much more common are the media reports about some cases of child abductions, and this is one of those cases where rationality can suffer from more "information." Those stories trigger our hind-brain reflexes and make it harder to look at the risks logically. Then we make choices which are not the choices we would arrive at were we able to silence those horror movies that the stories have elicited.
What to do about this all? I think the media should take a more responsible role in how it covers these kinds of stories, and some media sources have done just that. But much more remains to be done. I also think that it's good to acknowledge that no parent, however perfect, can ever keep a child completely safe, that risks are part of being human and that the most important parental task is to protect the child adequately (and first against the largest dangers) while also teaching those skills we all need to cope with the risks inherent in life.
-----
My numbers here are "on the back of the envelope" and based on very little study. They may be roughly indicative of the current situation but most likely incorrect as specific figures.
I have also ignored the fear of other types of violence which might befall children playing out unattended. In most higher income areas all those risks are quite low.
Reading most of my evolutionary psychology (ep) posts in order, one after another, is quite an accomplishment. I needed to do that for another project, but thought that you might enjoy one almost universally shared aspect of the popular media descriptions of various ep studies:
They tell us that something has either been proven to be an evolutionary adaptation or at least is suggestive of an evolutionary adaptation, when not a single one of those studies can present such a proof, given a) the complete lack of empirical evidence from some misty prehistoric era where our supposedly Stone Age (and now rigid) brains were sculpted by Mother Nature, and b) a comparable lack of actual genetic evidence.
Here are a few examples picked from my old posts (pretty much every single one of them could be added here, sadly). All the bolds are mine:
Why men prefer to marry their secretaries and not their bosses:
The findings, she says, reflect males' evolutionary need for mates who don't pose the specter of "paternal uncertainty". Men may consider subordinate women less likely to cheat on them, Brown explains, and "female infidelity is a severe reproductive threat to males in long-term relationships."Note the leap there from "paternal uncertainty" in general to the idea that men "may consider" subordinate women less likely to cheat on them. One gets these sorts of leaps when proximal explanations are ignored (such as the societal expectation based on Christianity that the man should be the head of the woman).
Why women's sexual desire diminishes in marriage while men's sexual desire remains constant:
Researchers from Germany found that four years into a relationship, less than half of 30-year-old women wanted regular sex.
Conversely, the team found a man's libido remained the same regardless of how long he had been in a relationship.
...
Dr Dietrich Klusmann, lead author of the study and a psychologist from Hamburg-Eppendorf University, believed the differences were down to human evolution.
He said: "For men, a good reason their sexual motivation to remain constant would be to guard against being cuckolded by another male."
But women, he said, have evolved to have a high sex drive when they are initially in a relationship in order to form a "pair bond" with their partner.
But, once this bond is sealed a woman's sexual appetite declines, he added.
He said animal behaviour studies suggest this could be because females may be diverting their sexual interest towards other men, in order to secure the best combinations of genetic material for their offspring.
Or, he said, this could be because limiting sex may boost their partner's interest in it.
As I mention in the linked post, it would make equal sense for the results to be reversed, from an evolutionary point of view. But then most any results could be explained by some story.
On why some men would find dumb-looking women attractive:
Ask a straight man, “How do you like your women?” and it’s unlikely he’ll answer, “Dumb and sleepy.” But according to new findings, these characteristics—and any other traits suggesting that the lady isn’t particularly alert—are precisely what the human male has evolved to look for in a one-night-stand.
This make no sense at all, as an evolutionary explanation, as I explain in the blog post I link to above. But the alternative explanation, also touched upon in that Slate article, makes excellent sense. Why then prioritize the explanation based on sexual strategies rather than the more likely one?
And here's one which blames men's sexual instinct for wars:
From football thugs clashing on the terraces to soldiers killing each other on the front line, most conflict can be blamed on the male sex drive, a study suggests.The article this popularization discusses isn't a study but a meta-analysis of literature and it doesn't prove the evolutionary origins of wars in general or the narrower hypothesis that it's somehow sexual competition between men which causes wars. The article doesn't say much anything about women, by the way. But other evolutionary psychology studies argue that women, too, have negative feelings about outsiders. My guess is that men's sexual instinct is not the best explanation for wars.
The review of psychological research concludes that men evolved to be aggressive towards towards ‘outsiders’, a tendency at the root of inter-tribal violence.
It emerged through natural selection as a result of competition for mates, territory and status, and is seen in conflicts between nations as well as clashes involving rival gangs, football fans or religious groups, say the researchers.
In contrast, they add, women evolved to resolve conflicts peacefully. They are said to have been programmed by natural selection to ‘tend and befriend’ to protect their children.
In other contexts we learn that women can't read maps because men evolved to read them through their assumed ancient hunting roles (yes, makes no sense), but then we learn that women are better navigators than men but only for high-calorie food because women are assumed to have been the gatherers of ancient times (and I guess meat from hunting is low-calorie food). And so on and so on.
None of the many studies and their popularizers I have discussed provide any evidence about our evolutionary past. Yet that assertion almost always appears in the first few paragraphs of the popularizations. Sometimes it is taken from the study or its authors, sometimes it is an enhancement by the popularizers.
Seeing all those popularizations in a long row made me realize that the final outcome looks like a giant mountain of solid evidence for the evolutionary psychology explanations, because of those common assertions (blabla evolutionary blabla) in all these popularizations.
Monday, 28 January 2013
The story about a dolphin communicating with beached whales which then followed her easily to freedom. Assuming it is a true story, it makes me dig up my old idea that dolphins and whales might communicate through ESP!
This cartoon about the dangers of studying economics. It might only be funny to another economist, however. But economics, in general, makes little sense to anyone outside the cult.
And Chapter No 345618 on whether women can perform in combat. This one has to do with carrying wounded soldiers off the field. It also has to do with the fact that women have a lower center of balance, on average, than men, which makes the differences in carrying strength much smaller than one might expect.
Finally, these color photographs of early Paris (1909-1930) are fascinating. I realized how much the black-and-white nature of old photographs had tinted my ideas about what the world looked like then. Harder to explain than for you to experience by seeing some actual color snaps.
And not just for conservative anger, by the way. I've heard from several Liberals (mostly men but not just men) who viscerally hate her. Perhaps she provokes both personality and behavior related anger and then that general anger against uppity women?
Never mind. Rush Limbaugh (slowly sailing into the sunset of historical oblivion, by the way) certainly gives us the sexist angle on Hillary Hatred: She reminds him of a third or fourth wife when mad. His own third or fourth wife? Later he compares her to an abused wife. So the framework is "wives" and how "wives" might behave. That, of course, is what makes his jokes sexist. They are only funny if you think a third or fourth wife mad is funny, as opposed to the third or fourth husband, say.
All this is sorta subtle if we can call anything coming from the guffaw-branch of anti-feminism subtle. And so is this:
CNN's Howard Kurtz finds the New York Post's Hillary Clinton coverage funny. And yeah, it's kind of funny to catch her face looking really angry and then to imply that this is why Bill Clinton is scared of her. But reverse the genders and check if you still think it's funny. Pick some male politician who shows anger and suggest that his wife is scared of him because of that angry face.
It stops being funny. Now, what does this tell us? Depends how deep you wish to dig, but essentially the idea of female anger as dominating in a marriage is viewed as funny stuff because the husband is supposed to be the top dog. Or so I think. The reason why I said this depends is that en route to that conclusion you can wade through all sorts of stuff about male victims of domestic abuse not being taken seriously, about women's rage being seen as ineffective and something to laugh at etc.
Subtle, I said. What I probably meant that this is one of those cases not worth fighting over. If you stop at every barking dog you never get to your destination. At the same time, it's a useful theoretical exercise in understanding how much subtle stuff in the culture IS based on certain ways of acting out one's gender and how all that subtlety sticks to evaluations of Hillary Clinton and other powerful women like a large bunch of thistle burs to a dog's coat.
Saturday, 26 January 2013
Friday, 25 January 2013
A list of some delicious things:
Sex.
Chocolate.
The velvety undersides of floppy dog ears.
The sudden shock of bright red berries against black branches and white snow.
Crunchy new words.
Music which you expect not to like but which takes you over.
The high after strenuous exercise.
The high after a migraine attack.
Lovely readers, smart readers.
The way little children's bodies smell.
Waking up and realizing that you still have an hour's worth of sleep left before having to get up.
Now tell me why that list turns me into a Hallmark card goddess? What is it that makes me cynical of delights? Being a born pessimist, always wondering what the future cost of each blissful moment might be? Or is it something similar to Tolstoy's "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" in that it's much harder to write about happiness than about unhappiness because the former has less variety, gets repeated too often and ultimately begins to sound trite?
Is there something in the Bible about Jesus wanting us all to bear arms? I've read through it a few times but can't recall anything of that sort. Perhaps the eleventh commandment, only applicable in Murka? Thou Shalt Be Armed.
The reason for those silly thoughts can be found in this article about Republican voters in the US South:
Jeri Bilbo would seem a natural supporter of the Democratic Party’s vow to protect the social safety net during the spending-cut debate in Washington.
Her husband gets disability payments and government-funded health care after leaving his dock-worker job in New Orleans because of rheumatoid arthritis. They live in a drafty farmhouse in southern Mississippi having lost their home to foreclosure.
“It will keep the rain off us, but it won’t keep the cold off,” said Bilbo, 60.
Yet Bilbo, who registered as a Republican to vote as a high school senior, said she’s stuck with the party out of tradition. She’s an example of the contrarian nature of U.S. politics, where people often vote against their economic self-interest because of family, culture or such issues as abortion and guns.
...
Poplarville and Picayune, the two largest cities in Pearl River County, are dotted with payday loan businesses and inexpensive retailers such as Family Dollar Stores.
Glenda Hebert, 74, a Poplarville resident, says she voted for Romney and has been a lifelong Republican, even with her dependence on government anti-poverty programs.
Asked why she’s a Republican, Hebert’s answer is succinct: “Because I’m a Christian.” She said she attends an Assembly of God church and blames Obama for “murdering all the babies with abortion” and worries that “pretty soon he’ll be taking the guns away.”
The question the article raises is whether people make rational decisions in politics. Because I'm tired I won't go on the usual detours of discussing all the different concepts of rationality we might apply here. Neither will I start exploring the question whether human beings ever make truly rational decisions. But it's worth pointing out that the article seems to regard "rationality" as equal to very narrowly defined financial self-interest. Or as voting your wallet.
From that angle the Southern poor Republican voters are not rational, because their home states are net recipients of federal aid, and Democratic administrations are more likely to continue such aid than Republican administrations. But the article argues that the same is true about some Democrats who vote for their own taxes to be higher:
People in the South tend to be concentrated in “donor” states, those that receive more federal tax dollars than they contribute, Heberlig said. “If you listen to the rhetoric, you’d think it’d be just the opposite,” he said.
Democrats also vote at times against their own economic interests, since the representatives they send to Congress have generally been supportive of raising taxes. Among the 20 wealthiest congressional districts in the last Congress, 12 were represented by Democrats and eight by Republicans.
That definition of rationality is too narrow, an almost claustrophobic one. For instance, I might vote for something that will increase my own tax burden even if I'm purely selfishly motivated if the proposal under consideration gives me greater overall benefits than the increase in my taxes. Depending on the valuation mechanism I choose, those benefits could be some monetary equivalent of, say, a safer society, a better educated society or more direct benefits created by large construction projects bringing money into the community.
In a similar vein, that the poor Southern Republicans vote against their own financial self-interests doesn't necessarily make them irrational. If Ms. Hebert, for instance, places a higher value for the banning of abortions and for her right to go about armed to the teeth, she may well be willing to give up the government support she lives on. In other words, the benefits, for her, may outweigh the costs, for her.
What makes her case different are the answers she gives when asked why she is a Republican. It is those answers which make me conclude that her choices are not rational. President Obama does not go around "murdering babies with abortion" and is extremely unlikely to take all the guns away. And neither of these two has much anything to do with the Christian Bible which never mentions abortion directly and most likely never says anything about the right to bear arms.
My guess is that many, many voters are not terribly rational in their choices. This is partly because our time is limited, and those who work two jobs or one job with long hours and/or have the care of many others as their lot simply do not have the time to follow politics as keenly as, say, snake goddesses and other such leeches. But sure, some people simply can't be bothered to learn much about our shared concerns. It's easier to go by tradition and by the social pressure. Not voting at all is even easier.
Still, I smell the fruits of much successful Republican propaganda in what Ms. Hebert said. It is difficult to make careful political choices if the daily news media consist of right-wing talk shows, Fox news and the like, and if the churches preach on the evils of abortion while not saying very much about something the Bible talks about a lot: The evils of greedy business people and human greed in general. The same would be true (in a reverse political sense) if vast segments of the popular media were a Stalinist retraining program. But that's not the case, whatever the conservatives say about the evil liberal media.
The question this raises in my mind is the following one: Does anyone explain to the Ms. Heberts of this world what the costs and benefits of her choices are? That were her party truly successful she might lose those government poverty benefits she relies on? My impression is that many voters do not connect those dots, and the media doesn't try to reach out to them.
Thursday, 24 January 2013
Some reactions to the announcement that the ban on women in combat roles has been removed. These are from one Eschaton thread but you should really compare them to my earlier post, to see how standard the arguments are and how much they are based on the assumption that war is unarmed hand-to-hand combat:
I hate to tell you this, Atrios, but women are generally smaller, weaker and slower than men. That's why even feminists don't bitch about sexually segregated sports tours. With rare exception, having women in combat means male soldiers will have to expend energy protecting women that they'd probably prefer using to defend themselves. What could possibly go wrong with that? Also, last I heard, combat was considered a hostile work environment.You know, Atrios, it must be so fun sanctimoniously denying reality like you do. You're really good at it. No wonder you consider so many other people to be assholes.
hieronymuslebraintree
And:
Among most mammal species, males are bigger and stronger because they fight more. Does this mean that males are better fighters and would that be a reason not to allow females to fight in armies? Does the use of military weapons such as AR-15's negate the physical advantage of males and are females just as likely as males to use those weapons to kill the males/females of the hated foreign armies? Does Atrios - or anyone - know the answer to these questions? Anyway Atrios will apparently ignore the questions.
Skeptonomist Habilis
Here's what I wrote yesterday:
The older, and still prevalent, anti-feminist arguments about women in combat are that women are naturally and inherently incapable of the aggression that is required, that women are naturally and inherently slower, weaker and smaller than men and therefore will not be of value in military combat, and that men are (perhaps also naturally and inherently) always going to be chivalrous towards women so that female soldiers are a burden-to-be-protected in combat, not an asset. The anti-feminists also don't think we can mix sexes in the military, and point out military rape as the unavoidable outcome. How that goes with the chivalry argument is usually left unexplained. Finally, the anti-feminists say that mixed-sex military troops cannot have the necessary bonding which only works among men.
Isn't all that precious? By the way, I have no idea if most mammal species have bigger males than females because the males fight more. I don't know if the males are bigger than the females in most mammal species and I'm not sure how "fighting" is interpreted in this context. The predatory species don't leave the females at home when they go hunting for food, for instance, and I've read that it's the lionesses who do most of the hunting for the pride.
But if we took those arguments truly seriously, we'd only let into the military those men who are fast, big and strong. We would never allow any slow men in, for example, and we would certainly kick out all those old generals who are no longer fast and strong.
The point is, of course, that once again the selection process should be about the individual applicant, not about some large group which contains much variation inside it. The more important point is that warfare is no longer based on who is the physically strongest, fastest and largest but on the use of weaponry, tactics, strategies and financial resources.
Those comments I quoted are from the older anti-feminist arguments. I'm not strong enough today to cruise the hate sites (and I'm out of bleach and barbed-wire shower brushes), so I can't tell you what the more modern MRA side says.
Just for fun:
Wednesday, 23 January 2013
Governor Jindal:
NEW ORLEANS -- Starting Feb. 1 Louisiana will stop offering hospice care services to most patients on medicaid.
The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals is eliminating the service to families in the state due to state budget cuts.
Critics are up in arms.
The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals say the elimination of hospice care for medicaid patients will mean nearly $3.3 million in savings this year alone. In 2014, it'll mean $8.3 million in savings.
However, Burns believes the state will end up paying much more with terminally ill patients forced to turn to local hospitals.
Hospice care is the palliative care of the terminally ill. It is intended as a substitute for the kind of aggressive curative care which no longer works to keep the patient alive. Hospice care may also provide additional benefits to the patients and their families in terms of psychological support and better pain relief. The focus in hospice care is to improve the patient's quality of life in the last weeks of life.
The "critics" referred to in that quote are people who think denying palliative care to dying people is cruel and callous and people who point out that this move is unlikely to produce any savings once we figure out what the alternative sources of care cost those patients will resort to.
I spent a little time looking for studies on the cost-effectiveness of hospice care for terminally ill people. The majority of such studies show that hospice costs considerably less than the conventional care alternatives:
“Hospice is not just about managing death,” emphasizes Craig C. Earle, MD, MSc, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Boston, Massachusetts). “High-quality palliative care can be of great benefit to a patient, and that benefit accrues over time.” Hospice is beneficial in several realms, including the patient's quality of life, patient and family satisfaction, and cost effectiveness.8–12 One study even indicated that hospice significantly extended survival for patients with lung, pancreatic, or colorectal cancer compared with patients who did not receive hospice care.13
The Medicare Payment Advisory Committee (MedPAC) has also noted that the opportunity for a comprehensive palliative care program increases with longer hospice stays.4 Researchers have found that services as bereavement counseling, palliative care, and respite for caregivers was experienced by patients and families who used hospice for at least 7 to 8 weeks12 and that the maximum benefit of hospice is achieved by a stay of 80 to 90 days.8
The cost savings of hospice has been documented in several studies. A meta-analysis published in 1996 indicated that the use of hospice saved as much as 40% of health care costs during the last month of life and 17% over the last 6 months.10 In a later study, the health care costs specifically for patients with cancer were 13% to 20% lower for those who had received hospice care than for those who had not.11 Similar findings were reported in 2007: hospice use was found to significantly reduce Medicare costs during the last year of life by an average of $2,309 per hospice user.12 In addition, Medicare costs were reduced further the longer an individual was enrolled in hospice. Cost savings were more pronounced for patients with cancer than for patients with other diagnoses, especially for longer stays.12
What will those terminally ill Louisiana patients do when they are denied coverage for hospice care? Continue using the existing care framework, including expensive hospitalizations, I would think. The most likely outcome is that this move will increase the overall costs of taking care of these patients.
That's what makes Jindal penny-wise and pound-foolish. Sure, abolishing hospice care will show savings in that column but those savings must be compared with the increased costs of conventional hospital care for the terminally ill. Unless Jindal somehow plans to stop the terminally ill patients from receiving any care at all, the outcome of this proposal will be an increase in the costs of Louisiana Medicaid program.
It's not even necessary to discuss Jindal's possible callousness or cruelty here (though hospice care also has many non-monetary benefits which the proposal also ends). The proposal doesn't even save resources.
Duh. Now I read that Jindal has backed away from the plan and that hospice care will continue be funded for the Medicaid recipients in Louisiana. That's good news. But it means this post is outdated before it's even out!
I'm still going to publish it because the proposal is a perfect example of the "press-the-balloon" approaches to cost containment in health care. When you press the balloon at one end to make it smaller it just expands at the other end, and this is exactly the way many health care cost cutting programs work. As long as the costs in the two ends of the balloon fall on different parts of the system the cost cutting program might look like a great success. But once all the relevant costs are counted, the savings often turn out illusionary.
If the sources have this right, Pentagon chief Leon Panetta is removing the ban on women serving in combat. Is this progress that a feminist would want to see?
The answer depends on which feminist one asks. My own reaction is complicated. First, I would much prefer that we not have wars at all. Wars kill people, wars leave people maimed in body and in mind, wars cause suffering many generations down the line. That so many on the Internet seem to love the idea of wars as some type of Internet games or football matches makes me nauseous because the main tool of war is the ending of lives.
But if we are going to have wars anyway, should women be allowed to serve in combat? This is the second point. It's not the same as encouraging wars to continue if we let women explicitly participate in combat roles. Wars will continue whether that happens or not, and to draw a line between those in actual combat roles and those who merely assist them, as far as the guilt for the actual killings go, seems hypocritical to me.
In any case, the distinction between combat roles and other military roles has become blurred in modern warfare because the front can be everywhere at the same time. American female soldiers have died in Iraq, in combat settings, when the helicopters they steer are shot down, when a roadside bomb explodes.
Thus, I don't think that removing the ban on women serving in combat makes women much more likely to be killed in modern wars or somehow more the "real killers." The whole military machine enables the killing.
Third, advancement in the military is diminished for those who cannot serve in combat. From a purely labor market point of view, then, the ban on women participating in combat roles means that women are unable to advance as fast and as high as equally competent men, simply because of that ban.
How to judge those three points? That's where things get complicated, because the three arguments are in very different places in my brain and because they are not actual tradeoffs, i.e, we don't stop wars by banning women from the military or from the combat roles. We simply create a two-tiered system of professional killing. So.
What's much easier for me to evaluate are the anti-feminist arguments about women in the military and women in combat roles, in particular. Astonishingly, they are of two opposite types, and the Evil Enemy: Feminism, is also of two exactly opposite types!
The older, and still prevalent, anti-feminist arguments about women in combat are that women are naturally and inherently incapable of the aggression that is required, that women are naturally and inherently slower, weaker and smaller than men and therefore will not be of value in military combat, and that men are (perhaps also naturally and inherently) always going to be chivalrous towards women so that female soldiers are a burden-to-be-protected in combat, not an asset. The anti-feminists also don't think we can mix sexes in the military, and point out military rape as the unavoidable outcome. How that goes with the chivalry argument is usually left unexplained. Finally, the anti-feminists say that mixed-sex military troops cannot have the necessary bonding which only works among men.
Feminism, from this angle, is the sorely misguided attempt to force women on the military which would function much better without them. Feminists are simply blinded to biological differences.
The more recent anti-feminist arguments come from certain subgroups of Men's Rights sites, and revolve around the idea that centuries of male warfare demonstrate discrimination against men and the lower value assigned to men's lives. The logic varies somewhat, but mostly I read that feminists want to keep women out of the military, safe at home, handing men white feathers if they refuse to enlist during wartimes. From this point of view, the ban on women serving in combat roles is discrimination against men and a sign of the greater value assigned to women's bodies.
At the same time, very few of the rants I have read suggests that women should be allowed to serve in the military at all, not to mention in combat roles. Rather, women should kowtow to men in general because other men are fighting wars or have died in wars. The function of only-male military service is to explain why all men should have a higher standing in the society than any woman.
The old, traditional take is that feminists are pushing women into the military. The new MRA take is that feminists work hard to keep women out of the military. What fun.
Because the two sets of arguments are so different, they require different counterarguments. The traditional anti-feminists ignore the character of modern warfare which is rarely unarmed combat between two individuals but an extremely technical and collaborative venture where the skills required have little to do with physical strength and body size. They also ignore the fact that women entering the military are not a random scoop from the general population but individuals who are motivated in a particular manner and who then get the training the military requires. Neither men nor women with low willingness or ability to fight are likely to enlist in a volunteer military force without gender-based combat bans. In short, the proper level of analysis is of the enlisting individuals, not of the two genders.
The rest of the traditional anti-feminist arguments are really empirical in nature, i.e., the way to answer them is to watch what happens when military units become mixed-gender, always remembering that training can help in this field, too. We already have some of that evidence, and while the military certainly has problems with sexual violence, the other concerns of traditional anti-feminists look to me to be relatively minor. Note, also, that if bonding and cooperation were only feasible in a single-sex groups then almost all civilian workplaces should have failed by now, what with the mixing of genders in them.
The counterarguments to the new MRA views are both extremely simple and totally incapable of making a single dent in the opposition.
If one points out that the reason why women have not fought in most wars is because they were not allowed to fight in them, one is told that this explicit ban is a sign of how much more women are valued than men. If one points out that this valuation of women is similar to the valuation of an antique Chinese vase who has no say in how it is handled and that, traditionally, that valuation has not stopped from women dying in giving birth (or from dying as the final round of many traditional wars), one gets...crickets...and then a repeat of the beginning argument. After several bouts of this, with variations, the truly odd argument crops up: It doesn't matter at all if laws have banned women from participating in a vast number of fields of activity. We can simply assume that all such laws somehow benefited women-as-Chinese-vases, and burdened their owners with more-than-commensurate duties to keep them safe.
This odd argument crops up, because the function of most MRA rants is to defend the traditional status quo, not to change it. These rants don't want to correct the handicaps attached to the male role. For instance, an all-male military force is fine with them. What's not fine is the loss of the privileges that comes with the male role in the traditional division of gendered tasks.
I wrote so much about the anti-feminist arguments to explain why the possible removal of the combat ban on women will be viewed as bad news in both anti-feminist camps.
Tuesday, 22 January 2013
I'm supposed to write about Roe v. Wade. Others are doing it much better, noting that the decision was divisive, that the rights of pregnant women have certainly not improved in the last twenty-or-so years, noting that access to abortion increasingly depends on where a woman lives, how much money she has and what access she has to health care in general. Because the latter correlate with race and ethnicity, access to abortion varies by income, race, ethnicity and geographical location. Weirdly, so it did before Roe v. Wade. For example, the rich women were always more able to get abortions than the rest of American women.
Then we also get musings of this sort, in the New York Times, of all places:
Somehow, motherhood had slyly changed us. We went from basking in the rights that feminism had afforded us to silently pledging never to exercise them. Nice mommies don’t talk about abortion — it is relegated to the dark and dirty corners of our conscious, only to emerge favorably in the voting booth. Yes, we believe in a woman’s right to choose. No, we don’t actually believe she should use it in the face of women choosing to have their children. This is the feminist mother’s greatest taboo.The feminist mother's greatest taboo? Based on the writer's own feelings, she makes a statistical assertion, the kind that usually requires a little bit of research. I would think.
Why do I criticize this piece? Partly because it's published as a click-magnet, but mostly because the level of analysis in it really is pretty low for an august place like the NYT. The arguments slide very close to the idea (heard even from one Justice on the Supreme Court) that women must be protected from themselves because once they become mummies they no longer want abortions. Of course the majority of women who have abortions already have children. and of course so do the two friends the writer gives out as examples to all readers. Examples of bad feminist mummies?
That's what I mean by low-level analysis. A piece which ignores facts, generalizes from a sample of one to all feminist mothers and so on, this piece gets published in the New York Times parenting blog.
Never mind. What I really wanted to write is this: I believe that Roe v. Wade started on the wrong foot by being based on privacy as the fundamental concept. I get the reason for that, but the true reason for abortion rights from a feminist point of view is that they are an essential part of the rights of a woman to control her fertility, at least until we have no-fail-automatic-and-safe birth control for all.
If women are not allowed to have that control, men and women can never be equal. Anyone who has followed the extreme US forced-birth arguments in the last year knows that those folks want to make abortion unavailable for rape victims and many of them want to make the contraceptive pill unavailable for women in general. In the kind of world the forced birthers want no woman could protect herself from an unwanted pregnancy, because rape wouldn't be a sufficient excuse for the termination of pregnancy and the list of contraceptives those folks frown upon include all the ones women control. And in that world any fertile woman would have her life plans considerably restricted and influenced by others.
Thus, Roe v. Wade should have been based on equality of the sexes. Because it is not, it can be chiseled away using arguments such as the personhood proposals for egg-Americans. Because it is not, what one woman thinks of other women's choices is regarded as a valid argument to be presented on its fortieth anniversary. And because it is not, women as actual or potential aquaria for embryos and fetuses is a valid argument in the debates about abortions and even about the kind of health care not-pregnant-but-fertile women should receive.
That's the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
What the actual powers of CEDAW are can be debated, given that the ratifiers include several countries with very bad records on the treatment of women. But not ratifying this convention still gives an interesting message about the United States of America:
The seven UN member states that have not ratified or acceded to the convention are Iran, Palau, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Tonga, and the United States. The United States and Palau have signed it, but not yet ratified it.I went looking for the reason the United States decided to agree with Iran on something!
What I found comes from The Concerned Women for America, a group which seems to consist of the Aunties of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Their arguments are, first, that the US doesn't need the CEDAW because everything is already peachy for Murkan women who can be whatever they wish as long as they also take care of The Family, and, second, that if the US ratified the CEDAW then the UN would rule over this country.
The Concerned Women for America are also worried about some uses of the CEDAW, listed without referencing their sources, including its use to kill Mother's Day. This bit in the list of worrisome rulings (bolded by me below), really does put The Concerned Women for America into weird company:
Ratifying CEDAW would lend the United States' prestige and credibility, not only to the treaty, but also to the CEDAW Committee's rulings. Here are snapshots of some of those rulings:
Told China to decriminalize prostitution.Criticized Mexico for a "lack of access … to easy and swift abortion.Criticized Ireland for the Catholic Church's influence of attitudes and state policy.
Told Libya to re-interpret the Koran in the light of CEDAW.
All the "snapshots" that are listed are viewed as bad, as far as I can tell. This suggests that the Concerned Women for America are on the side of what their brethren-on-the-right call Islamofascists, right?
I don't mind reading about any of the possibly bad CEDAW rulings but I do mind reading about them when no links to them are provided. Still, the stuff is fun to wade through and if I had a few more lives I'd fish for all the original sources. But this is the conclusion of the Aunties:
CEDAW is fundamentally flawed. No reservations could protect our laws and culture from its skewed belief that there is no difference between men and women. The United States should not give our prestige, nor subject our citizens, to CEDAW.
Now that IS fun, because it's pretty much what Iran would argue, I think, though perhaps with a more explicit assertion of the rank-order the guy god(s) has given human beings.
Still, I think the Concerned Women for America have fallen into some quicksand here. What if the fundamental differences between men and women mean that women should be silent about matters such as CEDAW? Leave public matters to men? In other words, who decides what the relevant differences are?
Or if equality is only feasible when there are no differences at all between individuals, how could any distinguishable groups of human beings receive fair and equal treatment? Men, for instance, vary quite a bit in temperament and talents and many other characteristics. Should we ignore those individual differences but honor group differences? And if the latter, why focus on only gender as the determinant of the relevant group?
In any case, the assertion that CEDAW is based on no difference between men and women is a red herring. I bet you anything that CEDAW doesn't require that men becoming fathers give birth, for instance, or that women must have prostate examinations.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I'm not sure how influential CEDAW can really be. But not ratifying it sends a message.
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This post was inspired by some people suggesting that perhaps this would be a good time for the US to ratify CEDAW.
Monday, 21 January 2013
I've been traveling and haven't had time for any more careful thought than which lane to pick on the motorways/highways or how to survive on McDonald's food without eating corpses (heh, after all these years I went there, I did). So you get an old bad pome, suitable for Martin Luther King day and other events taking place today:
Declaration of Independence
These are the rules
we must abide by:
Do not ask how,
do not ask why.
This is the land
of the free and the brave
where some stay free
from cradle to grave.
And others are brave
in their freedomless state
so that those who are free
have more on their plate.
These are the rules
for which we would die.
Do not doubt how,
do not doubt why.
Friday, 18 January 2013
You may have heard that old joke about humility. Goddesses, for instance, have much to be humble about, which means that they (we) can be both arrogant and befittingly modest at the same time*.
This is harder for mere humans. Hence the need for courses on humility. David Brooks, from the New York Times columnist stable, is giving a course on humility at Yale University. Given the fact that David isn't exactly humble himself, the course has provoked the kind of friendly kidding many think it deserves. Charles Pierce, for example:
New York Times columnist David Brooks is teaching a course at Yale on "Humility."The duck may be a reference to Terry Pratchett's Diskworld books which include a street person who wears a duck on his head but is unaware of it.
...with a duck on his head.
No, not really. Do not mock this. Do not mock the fact that Brooks is going to teach about humility by assigning his own writings to a captive audience.
I feel somewhat divided about this. On the one hand, the street cred needed to teach a course in humility should perhaps include being humble in the first place. On the other hand, humble people rarely get any notice whatsoever, and are thus unlikely to be asked to give courses at Yale or write columns for the New York Times.
But then I also agree that too many people are arrogant and have inflated balloon views of their own merits. Not taking ourselves so very seriously, not hating on others so very much, those would be most excellent achievements. Or just being aware of what we all share: our humanity, and what connects us all. Or understanding that many of our talents are random happenstances, not something we have "deserved" by hard work or genetic endowment.
Here's another snag in Brooks' thoughts such as these:
"All of us have been raised in a culture that encourages us to think well of ourselves and to follow your passion and all that kind of stuff," he continued. "I don't see why it is ridiculous to spend a few months reading people who tell us not to be all that self-impressed, to suspect you aren't as smart, virtuous and aware as you think. Surely this is a potentially useful antidote for me or anybody else."
A very large number of human beings have, in fact, always been brought up to be humble or at least to pretend humility, to let others take the center stage, to become good cheerleaders and never the stars in the field. This is not just true of the way girls have traditionally been brought up but it is also true of the traditional norms applied to the Lower Classes in England and of the social norms for American blacks in the past.
Which leads to my question: Who is the target group for Brooks' lectures? Some people would mightily benefit from being taught to be more humble, others would benefit from the exact reverse. But Brooks doesn't appear to see this complexity.
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*There's a story about how I became the avatar of a snake goddess. Fighting against a very thorough humility training is part of that story.
Thursday, 17 January 2013
This story about labiaplasty may not describe a truly common new type of surgery, but that something called vaginal rejuvenation surgery exists is pretty astonishing stuff. This is cosmetic surgery, for the most part, not surgery to correct something which causes physical pain or discomfort:
While labiaplasty is increasingly popular, it remains controversial, sparking debate within the medical profession broadly, among specialists, and in wider society. The surgery is relatively unregulated and frequently botched, as indicated by the staggering number of clinics that advertise discreet revisions of bungled previous surgeries. At the same time, detractors claim that women have been manipulated by the media to believe in a mythical “perfect vagina.” Some women undergo labiaplasty for medical or practical reasons—large labia can cause irritation and pain during sex and exercise—but the vast majority elect to undergo the surgery for cosmetic purposes, anxious to achieve a more attractive genital area. The desired “look” is consistently that of a smaller, less obtruding vulva, with “neat,” even labia, and this “streamlined” ideal is becoming increasingly minimalist.
“But I kept getting patients who wanted almost all of it off. They would come in and say, I want a ‘Barbie.’ So I developed a procedure that would give them this comfortable, athletic, petite look, safely.”
Dr. Red Alinsod, a urogynecologist in Laguna Beach, California, claims that his most requested surgical procedure is the Barbie: a procedure that excises the entire labia minora. This results in a “clamshell” aesthetic: a smooth genital area, the outer labia appearing “sealed” together with no labia minora protrusion. Alinsod tells me he invented the Barbie in 2005. “I had been doing more conservative labiaplasties before then,” he says. “But I kept getting patients who wanted almost all of it off. They would come in and say, I want a ‘Barbie.’ So I developed a procedure that would give them this comfortable, athletic, petite look, safely.”
Bolds are mine, to make you read the sentences I want you to read!
First, what is this media which manipulates women into believing in a mythical "perfect vagina?" Could its name possible begin with the letter "p", continue with the letter "o" and end with the letters "r" and "n?" Duh, that is really completely obvious. For most women, relatively few people see their labia in the first place and doctors are unlikely to make comments about how they look.
When I wrote "why on earth?" in the title I meant that. Why on earth do women think that they need to have their genital area trimmed to look like that of a prepubescent girl? Because that's what the "Barbie look" implies, unless we wish to be literal and assume that women should look like a doll which doesn't have any genitals at all.
The answer cannot be in the advent of the Barbie doll herself. Barbie is pretty old and labiaplasty as a cosmetic operation is fairly recent. No, this has to do with the spread of pron views about how women ought to look. Female pron actors may have had such surgery themselves to increase camera access. Shaving the pubic area may have some of its (now shaved) roots in the same need for camera access.
It's my guess that "what is normal" in female genitals has become partly defined by pron. That actors in pron may not be "normal" in the sense of not-surgically-treated-or-enhanced can be forgotten because we don't really talk about this stuff. Pron is everywhere but consumed in privacy. Impressions from pron are not tested in discussions and debates.
Another reason to ask "why on earth" has to do with the fact that surgeries are not without risks. Thus, it's fair to ask why at least some women find those risks worth taking. What has happened in their lives? Are their vaginas and labias actually any different than the normal vaginas and labias, when defined not by beauty standards but by actual frequencies in the real world? What or who has made them want such surgery?
These are not just righteous feminazi questions, my friends. We can all be extremely vulnerable to any intimate criticisms and since women don't usually (or ever?) compare their labias with other women, no single woman can really know if criticisms of how her labia or vagina looks has any kind of validity (defined on whatever value system you wish or none). So we should really talk about it, before someone dies in that surgery, for cosmetic reasons.
Third, why is the desired look that of a prepubescent girl? I already stated that this most likely comes from pron. But the question also links to how the question of "normality" oddly changes when women's bodies are the field. We forget what "normal" breasts look like when so many celebrities have artificial breasts. Artificial becomes the normal. If you don't happen to match that artificial new-normal norm, then you need to have surgery.
“Women wanna reduce as much as possible while still looking normal,” he says. To this end, he developed the “Alter labia contouring” procedure. Rather than simply trimming or amputating the labia, this technique removes a wedge-shaped segment of tissue from the central section of each inner lip, then sutures the upper and lower edges of the excision together, creating smaller labia from the remaining tissue. The idea is to reduce the size of the labia while preserving the normal color and contour of the labia edge.Fourth, and finally, isn't it possible that there is a reason for the labia? Something to do with health and well-being, perhaps? I have no idea if that's the case, but in general we humans are not terribly eager to cut out parts which our bodies might actually use for something.
None of this is exactly new when it comes to cutting and shaping the female body. The cutting of the clitoris and the labia, in Female Genital Mutilation is an obvious example of such unnecessary surgery, and so are the anecdotes about Victorian women trimming their lower ribs to attain narrower waists or the Chinese foot-binding. But I'm hoping that we can grow out of such practices.
If this story is correct, an enterprising worker outsourced his own job to China, paying the Chinese worker a fraction of his own salary:
A security audit of a US critical infrastructure company last year revealed that its star developer had outsourced his own job to a Chinese subcontractor and was spending all his work time playing around on the internet.
My first thought was that it must have been utterly boring to have to sit there every day, surfing the net. Why not do the work? It can't be more boring.
But what's more interesting about this example is that most people would find what "Bob" did unethical. Yet we don't think that firms which do the same are acting unethically. They are just carrying out good business practices.
The two cases differ, of course. Outsourcing firms tell us explicitly that now their t-shirts or whatever are no longer made in the home country but abroad. The firm saves money by this arrangement. Whether the consumers do is unclear. I haven't studied whether consumer prices go down after outsourcing but they don't have to. The quality of the products may, in some cases, fall. Yet none of this is regarded as exactly unethical in itself.
As a different example, think of the way mortgages are sold and resold and resold. A person or a family makes a contract with one particular bank for the financial services. Then the bank simply chooses not to be a part of the contract anymore, and the person or family is just assumed to go along with the continuous change in where to send the payments. For instance, I picked a traditional careful type of bank for the mortgage. After time has passed, the mortgage is now held by a company about which I read Very Bad Things in the news.
I would not have picked that company in the first place. But most would argue that as nothing in the initial contract has changed, why should I care? So why should Bob's employer care how he gets his job done?
Wednesday, 16 January 2013
Lynne Paltrow and Jeanne Flavin have just published a survey on the arrest rates of pregnant women since Wade v. Roe came into force:
Our study identified 413 criminal and civil cases involving the arrests, detentions, and equivalent deprivations of pregnant women’s physical liberty that occurred between 1973 (when Roe v. Wade was decided) and 2005. Because many cases are not reported publicly, we know that this is a substantial under count. Furthermore, new data collection indicates that at least 250 such interventions have taken place since 2005.
In almost all of the cases we identified, the arrests and other actions would not have happened but for the fact that the woman was pregnant at the time of the alleged violation of law. And, in almost every case we identified, the person who initiated the action had no direct legal authority for doing so. No state legislature has passed a law that holds women legally liable for the outcome of their pregnancies. No state legislature has passed a law making it a crime for a pregnant woman to continue her pregnancy to term in spite of a drug or alcohol problem. No state has passed a law exempting pregnant women from the protections of the state and federal constitution. And, under Roe v. Wade, abortion remains legal.
Yet, since 1973, many states have passed feticide measures and laws restricting access to safe abortion care that, like so-called “personhood” measures, encourage state actors to treat eggs, embryos, and fetuses as if they are legally separate from the pregnant woman. We found that these laws have been used as the basis for a disturbing range of punitive state actions in every region of the country and against women of every race, though disproportionately against women in the South, low-income women and African-American women.Emphases are mine. This treatment of pregnancy as something that removes a woman's full legal rights does not fall upon every woman evenly but affects women of color, poor women and women in the South more than other women.
Many cases are about the use of illegal drugs where the pregnant woman is viewed not as a patient needing help to quit but as a criminal procuring drugs to "minors." But not all. In one case, a woman trying to commit suicide while pregnant ended in prison accused for murder. And:
A Louisiana woman was charged with murder and spent approximately a year in jail before her counsel was able to show that what was deemed a murder of a fetus or newborn was actually a miscarriage that resulted from medication given to her by a health care provider.Do read the other examples at the link.
If the "Egg-Americans Are Full People" movement starts winning, expect more of these types of cases. They would be a logical consequence of fetal personhood measures. If the embryo is a full person from the point of conception then the pregnant woman is no longer a full person. She cannot have the same legal rights as other adults because she is now an aquarium or the outermost of those Russian dolls. Everything she does can be judged from the point of view of fetal well-being.
The Paltrow-Flavin survey found a troubling trend in all this, having to do with what apparently is a practice consisting of Other People Just Deciding What Should Be Legal and then acting on it, even if laws supporting those acts did not exist. And this trend is quite ubiquitous when it comes to pregnancy.
Thus, the current problem isn't usually a different legal treatment of pregnant women, as opposed to women who are not pregnant or men, but something nastier: A personal decision by someone else to override the legal rights of the pregnant woman because that someone else has decided that he or she knows best what should be done to protect the embryo or fetus. Swooping in like an avenging angel, filled with righteousness and laws be damned.
An example of this:
For example, last week, a Tennessee woman who had been in a car accident was tested to see if she had been driving under the influence of alcohol. According to local press, her blood alcohol content was well below the legal limit. Nevertheless, because she told a police officer that she was four months pregnant, she was arrested and taken to jail. Tennessee apparently recognizes a special crime reserved just for pregnant women: driving while not intoxicated.Of course she was arrested because the police officer decided she might be harming her fetus. The Pregnancy Police is usually not an actual police officer but a private citizen or a group of private citizens. The Pregnancy Police decides whether a pregnant woman should have a glass of wine or not. It sometimes even decides where she is allowed to be:
Michelle Lee was catching up with friends at a nightspot near her parents' home when a bouncer pulled her aside.In that 2011 example the pregnant woman, drinking only water, wasn't allowed to stay at a place for adults because she was a container for a fetus.
"Can I ask you a personal question?" Lee recalled him asking. "Are you pregnant?"
She responded yes because, at eight months along, it would have been difficult to argue otherwise, she said later.
Lee, 29, said the bouncer who was staffing the Coach House bar near Roselle didn't care that she was only drinking water.
She said he asked her to leave shortly after midnight Thursday, telling her the bar would be liable if anything happened to her. She complied, but grew angrier over the weekend, questioning whether she had been discriminated against as a pregnant woman.
"He just said, if anything happens, if a fight breaks out and you get hurt, we are responsible," Lee said. "That can happen anywhere. If I am going somewhere, I am taking responsibility."
But this is really about the fear that she might take a sip of alcohol from someone else's glass, I think. Yet it's probably quite unlikely that the occasional glass of wine or beer would harm a fetus. After all, the French, the Spanish and the Italians have drunk wine with meals for centuries, and pregnant women were not told to abstain from it. If moderate use of alcohol was really bad for a developing embryo or fetus then all citizens of those countries should have suffered from clear signs of alcohol damage.
The health warnings about alcohol are based on studies of severe alcohol use during pregnancy, such as is the case with alcoholism. That the health recommendations from such studies became recommendations to cut out all alcohol during pregnancy can perhaps be understood as a policy of choosing to minimize all risk to the fetus while noting that a short abstention from alcohol is unlikely to have any negative health consequences for the woman.
But one consequence of framing the health recommendation that way is that it has flashed a green light to all the eager Pregnancy Police Officers (whether official or amateur) out there to try to control the lives of pregnant women. Not One Sip Of Wine Will Pass Those Lips As Long As I Am Here!
In short, we, as a culture, already regard pregnant people as having fewer rights than others, including their right to privacy, and we, as a culture, already assign pregnant women our own ethical rules about how they should act. Just imagine what an increase in state level personhood measures would do to those tendencies! Pregnant women might have to start hiding at home if they don't want to be subjected to the Pregnancy Police.
Note, also, that the more the legal authorities treat medical problems as crimes (but only in the case of pregnant women), the less likely it is that women with, say, drug addiction problems will turn to those legal authorities for help. One unintended (and severe) health consequence of such policies could well be that pregnant women with problems will not contact the health care system at all. That's something we really do not want.
Tuesday, 15 January 2013
Digby writes about Pat Robertson, that old-style wingnut and patriarch:
So a kid writes a letter to Maxim Magazine:
“I’m 17 years old and I’ve noticed that there has been a change in my father’s behavior. He spends too much time at the computer playing a war game. I’ve noticed how alone my mom feels. I just want my father to spend more time with my mom. What should I do? How can I talk to my father? I feel shame for him. Please help.”
And Pat Robertson, apparently a big reader of the Lad Mags, replied to the poor boy on his show:
“The romance is obviously going out of the marriage ...You know, it may be your mom isn’t as sweet as you think she is, she may be kind of hard-nosed. And so, you say it’s my father, he’s not paying attention to mom, but you know mom…..”
Robertson then tells a joke about a woman whose husband drank because she had let herself go.
But of course Robertson knows nothing about this married couple, except for the teenager's letter. To attribute any additional cause for the possible marital problems means digging it out of Robertson's .... head. Thus, what we learn is that dear old Pat views women as the ones responsible for how well a marriage fares. Perhaps she isn't sweet enough, perhaps she has grown fat or hasn't had her hair styled. Whatever, she better shape up.
And neither do I know anything about that particular marriage. It might not even be in trouble. The letter might not be real. And so on and so on.
Still, the idea that women alone are responsible for not only marriage but sex has cropped up quite a bit recently. This responsibility is not of the type where someone, say a therapist, has actually studied a couple seeking help and has decided that the blame in that particular case lies more with the woman than with the man.
This is something much more nebulous, having to do with deeply entrenched views that relationships are women's work, that they in some way get paid for that work, even if they do not, and that they are ultimately responsible for the outcome. And sure, these views are most entrenched in older people such as our Pat who may regard marriage as women's work.
Does any of this share something with the victim-blaming in recent rape cases? I'm not sure if the two are relatives to each other or not. What do you think?
I found this Laura Nyro YouTube song recently and have been listening to it:
Until yesterday, when I checked the lyrics I heard her sing:
"I was raised on the football Jesus"
How clever, I thought! Exactly the term for those god-bothering athletes who believe that their choice of a divine power takes an interest in the outcomes of football games.
It turns out that Nyro sang "I was raised on the good book Jesus."
Monday, 14 January 2013
Which you may skip if you prefer only meaningful epistles from me. I'm writing this in case some of you think that I'm perfect, what with being a goddess and all.
I'm not perfect, sadly. I procrastinate when it comes to sending parcels by post to friends and relatives and I'm utterly addicted to high-quality chocolates.
When these two flaws collide, watch out! I've been intending to send a parcel to my sister for several weeks now. It sits on the table, with all the tools needed to finish wrapping it up and addressing it. But I wanted to let her taste some of the wonderful Vermont chocolates, so I bought four bars.
And then bought four bars again. And again.
The parcel must now go without chocolate...
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And no, nobody paid me for this post, sniff.
Jessica Valenti and Nicholas Kristof have both written worthwhile columns on this topic.
My brain is still cooking up (slow stewing) a post about the many meanings of the term "rape culture." I hope to have it done by the end of this week.
Sunday, 13 January 2013
Journalism is dying, and we all watch calmly while the death throes go on. This is a severe problem. Not so severe as the impact of climate change, but the two come together in this:
The New York Times will close its environment desk in the next few weeks and assign its seven reporters and two editors to other departments. The positions of environment editor and deputy environment editor are being eliminated.
Read the linked article for additional information. Perhaps closing the environment desk won't affect environmental coverage, after all. But that's not the reason the desk is closed. The reason is money.
Journalism is in great trouble. In the past it was mainly funded by advertising income. Today Craigslist and similar sites have stolen that thunder, and newspapers are struggling to make ends meet. Nobody has found a workable new funding mechanism.
Experienced journalists are let go all over the world and those who still have jobs are expected to work 24/7 and to have expertise in everything. Instead of carefully researched pieces, many newspapers offer space for opinion blogs which are cheap to run (I should know!) or outsource writing to a few columnists. I have even come across a paper (not in the US) which seems to consist mostly of the ravings of readers in "reader blogs", the kinds of Letters To The Editor which in the past found their way directly to the wastepaper baskets. But they are available for free! And Huffington Post, for example, uses the concept of free writing to keep its site going.
The Internet is naturally the murderer of the print media, but for several reasons Internet journalism is not able to pay the piper. Or the writers and editors. We all know how easy it is to read everything we wish on the net for free. Isn't it great? The negative side, naturally, is that one day the content will not be there because nobody is paying for it to be created and very very few people can afford to work for almost nothing (perhaps goddesses).
I have followed these developments for some time, gathering opinions on what is taking place and what the solutions might be. The ultimately problem is that the digital media has run straight into that public good aspect of information dissemination: Once the information is there, passing it on, without paying, really is very very cheap*. That creates the incentives for people not to pay.
As a slightly different example of the same problem, I've heard from writers whose books are pirated on the net, available for nothing. Those writers will soon find that they cannot afford to write full-time, what with the dropping earnings, and the outcome is that they will write fewer books, perhaps no books at all. Talent will disappear, variety will disappear, and when this is added to the much-narrowed concentration of the publishing industry on just a few "winners" we are all ultimately going to suffer.
You can all observe some of the death throes of the print media. Those desperate attempts to punch all our buttons, to get scandal and fear onto the front pages of magazines. The herd chase of The News Of The Moment. The focus on celebrities and their doings. The slimmer and slimmer print versions of newspapers. All those failed attempts to extract payment from the readers or to attract advertising to the websites.
What is truly dying is not rubbish journalism or fun journalism but the proper production of the kind of information we really need but don't that much care to pay for. The kind of information which requires a journalist in Afghanistan or in South Africa or in Timbuktoo. That's expensive journalism and there is no real substitute for it. Yes, blogs can take care of some information production but bloggers do not have the funding or the ability to send journalists to other countries or to get training in how to interpret medical studies. If they did, they would be newspapers.
I am worried about these developments. Knowing what is happening, understanding the events, getting the best, widest and most objective information possible, those are all crucial aspects of democracy. They can ultimately be crucial for survival. Given that, the relaxed attitude so many take on that show which is the demise of journalism is quite sad. What will take its place? And will whatever that might be happen fast enough so that we don't all end up in our small pseudo-information bubbles, the way those who follow Fox News do?
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*Or, in reverse, stopping that from happening is very expensive or ineffective. Taking people to court for infringing the copyright of books is expensive, and beyond the reach of most writers. Blocking the Internet piracy is nearly impossible which is another way to say that it is very expensive. Charging money for visiting websites is easily circumvented, and so on.
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