Wisconsin And Work

Interesting news about the Ringwraith realm (with governor Scott Walker) of Wisconsin.  He ran on the topic of job creation but achieved a large amount of other stuff* instead:

New quarterly figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Thursday showed Wisconsin has dropped to 44th in the nation for creating private sector jobs, a ranking Republicans lawmakers say is deceiving and Democrats contend is the result of Gov. Walker’s failed economic strategy.
The data covered the year that ended in September, and reflected a recent steady decline. Wisconsin ranked 42nd for the year that ended in June, and 37th for the year that ended in March 2012.

The report, based on a survey of 96 percent of all public and private American non-farm employers, said other Midwestern states are performing better than Wisconsin. Indiana ranked 11th, Michigan 13th and Ohio 24th.
Walker, a Republican, promised in the 2010 campaign, and has reiterated since, that he will create 250,000 private sector jobs by the end of 2014. He was about 212,500 jobs short of meeting that target at the end of 2012.

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*I wanted to link here to my myriad of earlier posts on Scott Walker, but found out, to my horror, that my blog is suffering from linkrot in the permalinks.  Only one of the many, many Walker posts seem to have a functioning permalink right now.  Which limits me to quoting from my May 2, 2012 post here:

And he has carried his assigned tasks out extremely well!  The great state of Wisconsin has almost been demolished!  In the good news, angry drivers can now have guns in their cars, there's no longer any of that gender-equality crap in state-based equal pay laws,  and the state ranked the first in increased unemployment and job loss misery last year!  

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Tougher Skin, Please

I've been thinking of the message of that very old song recently.  The way people in various social justice movements or on blogs or elsewhere on the Internet  pick up their toys and go home after a big debate or a quarrel or a row.  And that's it.

If you hang around anywhere long enough you will witness such angry and hurt departures, and some of them seem very justified indeed.  Others, however, look to me to equal that proverbial tossing of the baby out with the bathwater.  But then all that is subjective.  Who am I to judge when such divorces are correct and when they are not?

Except that such reactions are pretty bad for any collective movement, especially when they are often based NOT on what the movement does or doesn't do, but on what one or a handful of people inside the movement might say.  In the comment-groups of blogs the quarrels are usually between very few people, but the ones who leave judge the whole blog as a hostile place and perhaps even what it represents as wrong.  Because of that quarrel, which in meat-space would have remained a private one and not linked to a whole place or all of its many participants.

I have often read comments on the net which tell me that some person (supposedly) is no longer a feminist because of what some other feminist said or did.  Those comments could be a form of trolling, but if they are not the person is throwing equal gender rights and lots of other stuff out of the window simply because of a personal disagreement.

Is it a search for perfection that motivates this?  Or a search for a comfortable ideological nest where one is completely accepted by all?  Or something else altogether?

The title I picked for this post isn't quite right.  I'm not asking people to have tougher skins, really (even scales don't cover all the sensitive bits), but to try to wait until the anger and hurt dissipates to see what it is that is really important.  To accept that most allies might be partial allies, that most people have some ideas which differ from yours.  Or at least to ask whether what gets thrown out isn't, after all, worth keeping, worth gritting one's teeth and hanging on there.

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Games People Play. With Universities And Science.

This piece talks about influence and how it might be purchased with money.  In this case the influence is ideological and attempts to change what a university does:

At Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, every student who majors in economics and finance gets a copy of Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged…FGCU now has a core group of a half dozen economists whose research supports the ideas of free-market capitalism, still an unpopular subject in most faculty lounges. They teach this material to more than 250 economics and finance students (one class is titled “The Moral Foundations of Capitalism”), organize lectures by leading thinkers, publish their research in well-respected journals and hold influential positions in groups that promote free markets.
The ideological transformation of FGCU economics began in 2009, when Allison, a famous devotee of Ayn Rand’s who was then the president of banking giant BB&T, donated $600,000 to FGCU to create the endowed “BB&T Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise.” Allison now runs the libertarian Cato Institute, a position he gained with the support of Charles and David Koch after some controversy.
The Kochs also supported Allison’s efforts at FGCU, a largely local school with about 11,000 undergradutes. A ThinkProgress review of Charles G. Koch Foundation donations from 2008-2011 found $87,000 in donations to Florida Gulf Coast University. According to an internal BB&T professorship report, the Koch money “provide[s] operational seed funding for the yearly activities and the local BB&T Charitable Foundation sponsors our premier annual event — The BB&T Free Enterprise Lecture Series.” The internal report also included metrics on the program’s operations such as “Atlas Shrugged Distribution — Number of students reached: approximately 120.”
Strange as it may seem that private ideological organizations can support academic departments, it’s not uncommon. A massive Koch donation to Florida State University’s economics program generated significant controversy in 2011 when it came to light that the donation was accompanied by de facto Koch control over some hiring decisions and the ability to review the scholarship generated. As of February 2013, 129 colleges and universities around the country were receiving Koch Family Foundations support.

The influence of corporations on universities is growing in other countries, too.  The excuse is mostly about the need to manufacture better workers for the firms but an obvious side-effect of such influence (bought with money) is that it cannot but affect some of the things which are taught, such as the question whether the role of universities is to manufacture better workers for the firms.

I wasn't born yesterday (as goddesses measure time) so I'm well aware that universities were never the austere ivory towers of myth but places where bias and power struggles also grew, where, as some have said, the battles were so fierce because the rewards were so tiny.  And us wimminfolk were for a long time excluded from those ivory towers altogether.

At the same time, there's not much point in the concept of a university if we forget the importance of critical thought.  Pushing for only one side of the issue and using a money shovel to do that does not increase the students' ability to think critically.  Handing out the books of Ayn Rand would be OK if the books of Karl Marx, say, were also handed out.

Well, somewhat OK.  It would be better to match Marx with an economist who held extreme free-market values, such as Friedrich Hayek.

These ideological pressures remind me of religions more than of the way one is supposed to do science or social science, or the way one is supposed to teach it. 

And that's what connects some of this with my frequent critiques of evolutionary psychology of a certain kind.  It's not the existence of very one-sided articles that is the wider problem; it's the difficulty of finding enough good critical pieces, because the field of evolutionary psychology, perhaps due to its immaturity, seems not to include much work that would be critical of the basic theories themselves.  That means that the critics come from outside and can be discounted on that basis.

The incentives for others to critique a neighboring field in academia are fairly low.  Thus, the more isolated a field becomes and the taller its walls against the rest of the academia, the higher the danger that what determines whether an article gets published might depend more on it conforming to the basic dogma than on how well the research in it has been carried out. 

I think I see this problem most clearly in evolutionary psychology where cross-fertilization from other fields seems rare.  But it can be a problem more generally.  For instance, economists entering the field of genetics have recently been criticized for not having learned the basic problems with genetic data samples but attempt to reinvent the wheel (and ending up with a rather bumpy and misshapen one), and that comes from working within the particular ivory walls of your discipline.

What ties these two topics (other than that I was thinking of both, in my usual lazy way) is probably in the incentives participants in the academia are given.  If you wish to thrive in your chosen career certain moves are a no-no or very poorly rewarded.  Someone sitting in the Chair of Free Markets is not going to support research into the problems of markets, just as someone whose whole research depends on a certain view of  evolution is not going to suddenly start writing papers critical of that view. 

These are issues we need to be aware of, in other words.

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Defending Marriage

This is the post I wasn't going to publish but...


The Supremes have been discussing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).  Many observers believe that it might be struck down.  That would leave the definition of marriage to the states.

What's always fascinated me about that act is the "defense of marriage" part.  What is marriage defended against here?  Marauders who want to tear it apart?  People who want to participate in this wonderful institution?  That it is the latter makes the defense very odd.  Like saying that you can't come and play with our wonderful toys.

Except that the gays and lesbians have their own toys and have no intention of taking yours, assuming that I can use such metaphors in quite a serious context.

The arguments are somewhat more serious than that, of course.  The basic one is that marriage is meant for having children, and same-sex couples cannot have children together without external assistance.  This argument also tended to state that it is best for children to be brought up with two parents of opposite sexes, preferably the biological parents.  But research doesn't quite support that, at least when it comes to the children of gay and lesbian couples who tend to do quite well, thank you.

That leaves us with the argument that marriage is meant for bringing up one's own biological children.   This seems to require that marriages which have not produced children should be scrutinized most carefully and perhaps dissolved, that women after menopause or men with vasectomies should not be allowed to enter a heterosexual marriage and that we should pay far more (far more!)  attention to the threats that are created by unpaid child maintenance from non-custodial divorced parents, a very large problem in this country but one which gets minimal attention from the marriage-is-for-children people.

As many have pointed out, marriage as an institution is much more at risk from heterosexuals who have tried it than from gays and lesbians.

Then there is the "slippery slope" or "open the floodgates" argument from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum.  Who are we going to let get married next if gays and lesbians are allowed to have same-sex marriage?  Can a man marry his dog?  How can we disapprove someone marrying a young child?  And what about polygamy?

The obvious answer to the first two questions is that the dog cannot be asked to consent to such marriage and neither can a small child, though the reasoning between the two cases is somewhat different, because the child will grow up to have that ability to consent or not whereas the dog will not.

The third question is more complicated. 

Notice that polygamy almost always means polygyny:  one man with more than one wife, and historically places which have allowed polygyny have also structured it so that the man has more power than all the wives put together.  What this means is that the partners in the polygynous marriage do not have equal powers.  The wives have very little power, the husband has the lion's share.

Would the American legal system give such arrangements the power of a binding marriage, especially if the wives are made to enter the arrangement inside closed subcultures where they really have few other alternatives or divorce rights?

I don't know.  On the other hand, if polygyny was legally allowed only under the equal-rights-for-all-spouses arrangement, most men might not find it that appealing.  For instance, a man's power in a heterosexual monogamous marriage would be roughly half (at least on paper), whereas his power in a group marriage with nine wives would be one tenth of the total.

All that would apply to polyandry, too.  Thus, the argument I would use to answer that third question is that it is the egalitarian laws about marriage which should be defended, not the specific form it takes between fully informed, adult and consenting parties.

This bring us neatly to religion.  Polygamy is linked to religious arguments in both Islam and Mormonism, after all.   But the supporters of DOMA are also often religious people and base their arguments on a literal reading of the Bible as being opposed to homosexuality, especially between men.  Yet a literal reading of the Bible also demands that adulterous women be stoned, that people not mix different fibers in their clothing and so on.

And of course other people's religions probably should not be used to determine what the rest of us do.  Hmm.  The Catholic Church certainly doesn't agree with that when it comes to contraceptive policies in the United States.  But still.  If the question is about marriage as a legal institution, nobody is forcing religious people to enter into same-sex marriages or the priests, ministers or mullahs to perform marriage ceremonies for gay and lesbian couples.

The proponents of DOMA probably have other arguments, too, but these three are the ones I hear about often.

I sometimes wonder about a hidden fourth argument, I do, and that is the defense of marriage as a male-dominated institution.  Having viable same-sex models for marriage could cause problems with that one, because gender could no longer be used to determine who it is who is supposed to be the head of the household or who it is who is supposed to do the vacuuming and the childcare.  Thus, believers in biological essentialist theories could support DOMA, too, though some of them might be OK with expanding legal marriage to one-man-many-women, what with that seen as "natural," too.

On some level it is the contents of marriage that are defended here, including its traditions and power relationships.  If we remove those signals of gender the hierarchies might tumble over.  Or not.  We shall see.

Then there are the legal aspects of marriage.  Extending marriage to same-sex couples wouldn't really matter very much in terms of those, because we already have the format for two adults.  But extending it to group marriages and such would cause bigger changes.  For instance, what would widows or widower's benefit look like if there are, say, five of them?

Finally, the history of marriage cannot be ignored here.  It was not initially a religious institution, at least in Europe, but was brought into the lap of the church with some reluctance from the priests.   Marriage for the wealthier was very much about property, very patrilocal,  centered on the idea of procuring sons for the next generation who would carry on the name and the lineage.  Marriage for women was the only widely available way to survive, the most common occupation, if you like.

The proponents of DOMA ignore those aspects of the traditional marriage and replace them with religious or ideological arguments.

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Good Dancing

It veers on sexee acrobatics at points but these two are really very good.

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Airbags For Bicyclists

This is a neat video about two female research students and their project:  To create an invisible bicycle helmet.   Via ReadMeGravatar at Eschaton.

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Today's Blogging Thoughts

What do you do when everything you write ends up in the do-not-post pile?  Because you don't know enough about some topic, without painstaking extra research you don't have the time or inclination for, or because you realize that what you have to say is neither novel nor interesting?  That's what happened with my post about the Supremes debating the Defense of Marriage Act.  Other people have already said everything much better and my long post was just that.  Long.

I have other such posts.  One on the concept of rape culture deserves to be resuscitated but my ideas are still stewing (slowly) on that.  Still, sometimes I look at my old drafts which never got posted and I cannot tell why I did not post them.  They are as bad or as good as the things that passed the sieve.

None of this probably has much wider relevance.  But this is my blog and I can spread my frustrations over it like bitter icing on a cake.  Have some!

On the other hand, the topic ties with our feelings of self-confidence.  My self-confidence veers from one extreme to the other, though I'm slowly leash-training it and teaching it to sit and stay.  Setting the bar too high is pointless, given the vast amounts of mediocre words on the Internet.  But making more mediocre words is probably not the best use of time.  Not everything that I blurt out is divine.

So have a nice picture instead.

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Stuff To Read on Women

Actually, this is the list of all the things I was going to write about but did not!

Remember that faux trend piece about feminism dying again?  There's more about the women interviewed in it.   And an evil but interesting parody reversal.  Content warning on the latter:  A lot of negative stereotyping of both sexes.

And Garance has written an interesting piece on the question why being more educated doesn't necessarily translate to more women on the top of corporations.   I had further ideas on it, such as the length of time required before changes in education percentages change things on top, the fact that women pick things to do in college which do not lead to the peaks of corporations or very high salaries and the pipeline leakage having to do with the agreed-upon assumptions who is going to do the childcare.

When the founder of the popular Facebook page I f***ing Love Science turned out to be a woman, many reactions were.... interesting.  There clearly is a tremendously strong basic expectation that science and women do not mix.

A letter to the editor demanding that women be silent in the churches.

A Twitter troll has been written up recently because of his racist and sexist and otherwise rather nasty comments.  There are many Twitter trolls, some of them pretty awful.  Why this one gets so much attention is because he used to be the former head of South Carolina GOP.  I wonder if the Party is proud of him or ashamed of him or doesn't care.

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Money Makes The World Go Around? In American Politics, Perhaps.

One preliminary survey suggests that this might be the case:

Over the last two years, President Obama and Congress have put the country on track to reduce projected federal budget deficits by nearly $4 trillion. Yet when that process began, in early 2011, only about 12% of Americans in Gallup polls cited federal debt as the nation's most important problem. Two to three times as many cited unemployment and jobs as the biggest challenge facing the country.
So why did policymakers focus so intently on the deficit issue? One reason may be that the small minority that saw the deficit as the nation's priority had more clout than the majority that didn't.
We recently conducted a survey of top wealth-holders (with an average net worth of $14 million) in the Chicago area, one of the first studies to systematically examine the political attitudes of wealthy Americans. Our research found that the biggest concern of this top 1% of wealth-holders was curbing budget deficits and government spending. When surveyed, they ranked those things as priorities three times as often as they did unemployment — and far more often than any other issue.
If the concerns of the wealthy carry special weight in government — as an increasing body of social scientific evidence suggests — such extreme differences between their views and those of other Americans could significantly skew policy away from what a majority of the country would prefer. Our Survey of Economically Successful Americans was an attempt to begin to shed light on both the viewpoints and the political reach of the very wealthy.

The survey is a pilot study and cannot be used to draw conclusions about the whole country.  But it might suggest one reason why certain topics (the deficit!) are pushed into greater prominence  than the "will of the voters" suggests. 

After all, the money to run for office comes disproportionately from the very wealthy, and if we compare getting the same total amount from a very large number of small donors, the wealthy retain more individual power.  What they want to receive for their support (even if only hinted at) can be very clear-cut and obvious, while what, say, a million small donors wish to receive can get quite muddled on the aggregate level.

And the bargaining power of any small donor is nonexistent, while the bargaining power of a wealthy donor is very strong indeed.  He or she can withdraw sizable support if the results don't match the implicit expectations.

The problem is ultimately in the way the American political system is financed.  But it becomes more acute when income and wealth differences increase and when what the wealthy are concerned with deviates more and more from what the rest of us are concerned with.

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What Price On A Woman's Life in North Dakota?

North Dakota is not a place that puts a high value on the lives of women:

Voters in North Dakota, where lawmakers last week approved the earliest abortion ban of any U.S. state, will decide whether to amend their constitution with a so-called personhood measure that could end the procedure entirely.
The language voters will consider in November 2014 would establish that “the inalienable right to life of every human being at any stage of development must be recognized and protected.” If approved, North Dakota would be the first state with a personhood amendment after Mississippi and Colorado voters spurned similar measures in recent years.
Members of the Republican-dominated legislature in Bismarck also passed a bill that may close the sole abortion clinic in the oil-rich state, the nation’s third-least populous.
“It’s a wonderful way for a state to display that it affirms human life,” said Senator Margaret Sitte, a Republican from Bismarck who sponsored the bill. “I’m hoping it will be a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade,” the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in 1973.
Backers say the personhood amendment will end the procedure in the state, with no exceptions for rape, incest or when a woman’s life or health is endangered. Opponents say it’s unconstitutional and could outlaw some forms of contraception and in-vitro fertilization.

I have bolded the part of the sentence which tells us that the North Dakotan Republicans believe it is better for both the fetus and the pregnant woman to die than for just the fetus to die.  Which tells us that the pregnant woman's life is given the value of zero.

This is all kabuki theater, naturally, as long as Roe v. Wade is the law of the land, or rather, a way to try to overturn Roe v. Wade.   The practical implication of the forced-birth-or-death Republicans being in power in North Dakota is that most likely the last abortion clinic in the state will close. 

But on a different level learning that explicit statement about the value of a woman's life is painful.  Very painful.

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Today's Study Popularization for Mothers! Fun.

It is about a study which finds that infants are introduced to solid foods too early if the comparison is to expert advice on when that should happen.  But forget about the topic for a while and just focus on the interesting question who it is who is being talked to here and in what tone:

Moms Serve Up Solid Food Too Soon, Study Finds

Many mothers in the U.S. start infants on solid foods -- including peanut butter, meat, and french fries -- earlier than experts recommend, and half of them do so with their doctor's support, according to new research from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The study found that 40.4 percent of U.S. mothers interviewed from 2005 to 2007 said they introduced solid foods to infants before they were 4 months old -- that represents an increase of about 29 percent from earlier studies, the researchers reported today in the journal Pediatrics.

More than half of the mothers (55 percent) cited a doctor's advice as one of the reasons for introducing solids before 4 months.
"With multiple sources of information on infant feeding and care from healthcare providers, family, friends, and media, specific information on the timing of solid food introduction may be conflicting and not necessarily sensitive to the needs of mothers," the authors said.
Among mothers who introduced solid foods earlier than 4 months, the mean age of the children at introduction was 11.8 weeks, and 9.1 percent of early introducers gave solids to infants younger than 4 weeks, they added.
The authors noted that if they factored in the American Academy of Pediatrics' (AAP) 2012 feeding recommendation to avoid giving solid foods until 6 months, 92.9 percent of their analytic sample would have been "early introducers."

The bolds are mine.

Most of the stuff that irritates me in this write-up is subtle but it is still worth noticing because it is almost universal.  First, the title tells us that "moms" serve up solid food too soon.  The "moms" is not quite defined anywhere in the summary, though reading it makes me assume that these were mothers who had infants between 2005 and 2007.

But the headline says "moms."  Because the majority of women are mothers, the headline appears to speak to the majority of women and tells them that they are doing it wrong. 

Second, I really, really doubt that feeding four-month-old babies peanut butter, meat or french fries was something the doctors supported.  Indeed, I doubt that feeding those food items to small babies was anything but very rare in the study.   I may be wrong as I haven't dug up the study yet, but honest, most people, whether mothers or not, know that babies shouldn't be eating french fries.  They don't have teeth, for one thing.

Thus, that bit was added to hint that "these" mothers are just dreadful people, where you can insert whatever your definition of a mother might be into that little word in quotation marks.

Third, comparing what mothers of infants between 2005 and 2007 did to recommendations that came out in 2012 is kinda unfair.  The relevant comparison is to recommendations that existed between 2005 and 2007, if we wish to know whether mothers of infants and their doctors follow such recommendations.

The popularization then argues that pediatricians and other relevant doctors may not have sufficient information about recommended feeding of infants which is a valid point.  But this also irritated me, apparently from the study itself:

Healthcare providers might be as equally confused about infant feeding guidelines as mothers, the authors wrote, saying some clinicians "may rely on their own infant feeding experience rather than evidence-based guidelines when counseling women."

That looks like a speculation, not something the study unearthed, and because we are told that "moms" are the ones making the feeding mistakes, the odds are that those clinicians are "moms", too.

Then there is this bit, where the numbers just don't seem to add up to 100%  however hard I try:

Among early introducers, 52.7 percent exclusively formula-fed their infants; 50.2 percent mixed formula with breastfeeding, and 24.3 percent only breastfed.

 Whatever was supposed to be in that sentence, being sloppy about supposedly important research findings isn't helpful for the reader.

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Friday Fun

This video (via Gromit) about animals shaking to get rid of water really is very relaxing.  When I was little I envied cows their ability to quickly move a small piece of skin to get rid of a fly, say.  I couldn't do it, however hard I tried.

But I got really good at waggling my ears.

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Meanwhile, in Kansas and North Dakota

Women seeking abortion must be told that it can cause breast cancer.  Except that this is not the case:

Results from major prospective studies
The largest, and probably the most reliable, study on this topic was done during the 1990s in Denmark, a country with very detailed medical records on all its citizens. In this study, all Danish women born between 1935 and 1978 (a total of 1.5 million women) were linked with the National Registry of Induced Abortions and with the Danish Cancer Registry. All of the information about their abortions and their breast cancer came from registries – it was very complete and was not influenced by recall bias.
After adjusting for known breast cancer risk factors, the researchers found that induced abortion(s) had no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer. The size of this study and the manner in which it was done provide good evidence that induced abortion does not affect a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer.
Another large, prospective study was reported on by Harvard researchers in 2007. This study included more than 100,000 women who were between the ages of 29 and 46 at the start of the study in 1993. These women were followed until 2003.
Again, because they were asked about childbirths and abortions at the start of the study, recall bias was unlikely to be a problem. After adjusting for known breast cancer risk factors, the researchers found no link between either spontaneous or induced abortions and breast cancer.
The California Teachers Study also reported on more than 100,000 women in 2008. Researchers asked the women in 1995 about past induced and spontaneous abortions. While the women were being followed in the study, more than 3,300 developed invasive breast cancer. There was no difference in breast cancer risk between the group who had either spontaneous or induced abortions and those who had not had an abortion.
What do the experts say?
In February 2003, the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) held a workshop of more than 100 of the world’s leading experts who study pregnancy and breast cancer risk. The experts reviewed human and animal studies that looked at the link between pregnancy and breast cancer risk, including studies of induced and spontaneous abortions. Some of their findings were:
    •    Breast cancer risk is increased for a short time after a full-term pregnancy (that is, a pregnancy that results in the birth of a living child).
    •    Induced abortion is not linked to an increase in breast cancer risk.
    •    Spontaneous abortion is not linked to an increase in breast cancer risk.
The level of scientific evidence for these findings was considered to be “well established” (the highest level).
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) Committee on Gynecologic Practice also reviewed the available evidence in 2003 and again in 2009. ACOG published its most recent findings in June 2009. At that time, the Committee said, “Early studies of the relationship between prior induced abortion and breast cancer risk were methodologically flawed. More rigorous recent studies demonstrate no causal relationship between induced abortion and a subsequent increase in breast cancer risk.”

The interesting ethical point here (for those of us who regard women as more than aquariums)  is that the bill Kansas House passed requires the health care provider to lie to women, presumably in the interest of the higher goal which is to reduce the number of abortions by scaring women.

What is most ironical about the actual evidence is the fact that it is a full-term pregnancy which might increase the risk of breast cancer!

The Kansas bill also argues for the rights of all egg-Americans, stating that life begins at fertilization.

What that does to all the frozen embryos in fertility clinics is unclear (of course always thinking about the time after Roe v. Wade is overturned, because until then many of the restrictions are just political maneuvers). 

But North Dakota decided to be utterly two-faced in its new draconian abortion law:

 North Dakota lawmakers who approved what would be some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the U.S. are now considering outlawing all abortions.
The "personhood" measures would ban abortions by defining human life as beginning with conception. It's drawing opposition from some doctors who say it could cause problems for infertile couples seeking to use in vitro fertilization to conceive, but supporters insist that's addressed in the legislation.
The state Senate passed two personhood measures last month, and the House could vote as soon as Tuesday. One of the bills would make the proposal a state law and another is a resolution that would put the definition into the state constitution, if passed by voters.
North Dakota is one of several states with Republican-controlled Legislatures and GOP governors that is looking at abortion restrictions, but the state is could go further than any other in challenging the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 decision that legalized abortion.
Last week, the Legislature sent Gov. Jack Dalrymple what would be two of the most restrictive abortion laws in the U.S., banning abortions as early as six weeks in a pregnancy and on the basis of genetic defects such as Down syndrome. North Dakota also would be the first to adopt a personhood law if that measure passes. Abortion-rights activists have vowed to fight the measures in court.
...

One of the key players in the anti-abortion campaign, state Sen. Margaret Sitte, a Republican from Bismarck, said she was "floored" by the assertions about limitations on in vitro fertilization. She said the proposals allow exceptions for the "screening, collecting, preparing, transferring, or cryopreserving a human being created through in vitro fertilization for the purpose of being transferred to a human uterus." Sitte said that clause was crafted with Dahl's help.

However, rape does not justify such exemptions:

North Dakota lawmakers are considering several bills this session that would restrict abortion. Dahl said that the legislation would ultimately impact medical care to women and families and allow no exceptions for rape or incest.
"A woman who has been sexually assaulted will be forced to carry a pregnancy to term, regardless of the nature of her assault," she said.
Sitte said she doesn't think women should abort pregnancies resulting from rape.
"Rape is a horrible crime. It is absolutely devastating," Sitte said. "But do we believe in capital punishment for those children?"

So it goes.

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More on the UN Commission on The Status of Women

Women's eNews reports that the head of the commission has resigned:

The 17-page document produced by the latest global gathering here on women's rights leaves open what appears to be a long-term fight between conservative and progressive factions within the Commission on the Status of Women.
"It's turning into a battle ground over women's rights and that was not the original intention of the Commission on the Status of Women," said Savi Bisnath, associate director of the Rutgers University-based Center for Women's Global Leadership, in New Jersey, in a phone interview. "It was supposed to be a forum in which we can discuss and negotiate and advance women's rights."
UN Women's Executive Director Michelle Bachelet announced her resignation as the head of the gender equality superagency on March 15, the same day 131 U.N. member nations jointly issued the outcome document.
In parting words, the former president of Chile said she was "particularly heartened" that conclusions were reached, given that in 2003, when the commission also tacked the thematic issue of violence against women, it ended without an agreement.
The rights of women are becoming more prominent and contentious at the U.N., as more agencies, offices and initiatives are expected to work together on gender equality, sexual violence in armed conflict and maternal health.
Member nations of the U.N. sit in on the Commission on the Status of Women, a policy-making body of the U.N. Economic and Social Council. They negotiate mostly as regional factions.

What is more interesting is the fight the author of this piece believes is taking place within the commission:

Shannon Kowalski is director of advocacy and policy of the New York-based International Women's Health Coalition.
"One of the biggest challenges was that the African group, which includes Egypt and a number of ultra-conservative countries, continued to work together as a group," Kowalski said. "The more progressive countries, like Kenya, Zambia and South Africa, were not able to moderate those positions in the way we would have hoped."
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood criticized a draft agreement last week, calling the document misleading, deceptive and contradictory to the principles of Islam. It listed free contraceptives for adolescent girls, equal rights for adulterous wives, equal rights for homosexuals and the right for women to file legal complaints against their husbands accusing them of sexual assault as "destructive tools meant to undermine the family as an important institution."
The Observer Permanent Mission of the Holy See also mustered strong conservative positions on sexual and reproductive health. The mission was unable to respond to an interview request to meet this publication's deadline.

I have  bolded the sentence which seems crucial in so many debates about women's rights.  There are two general arguments opposing feminism (other than the men-are-better-people-than-women argument or the women-suffer-under-equality argument), and those are the focus on some presumed ideal family which cannot survive without the oppression of women and the assumed pushmi-pullyu aspect of gender equality:  If the lot of women improves, then by definition the lot of men gets worse.  The latter usually ignores the fact that the two lots are not identical, to begin with.

These arguments come together in countries with patriarchal laws and beliefs about marriage and family.  That women's increasing equality IS a real threat for the kind of marriage where the husband has all rights is true, of course.  But that shouldn't imply that no alternative family arrangements are possible, arrangements of greater equality and ultimately greater well-being for all, and to regard this as a threat suggests that the speaker ignores the negative aspects of the patriarchal marriage or privileges the husband's role in such marriages.

What struck me about that bolded part of the quote is that it is just a somewhat more exaggerated form of much of the debate about the role of women in the society everywhere.  

What about the children?  Who is going to take care of the children (on a salary of just bed and board) if women can earn a living wage or decide to go for careers?

What about the men who are falling behind in the labor markets (well, not leading by as much as before, actually)?  The writing on these issues often implicitly argues that it would be sufficient if women did less well, not that men should objectively get more education or learn to share more in childcare or anything of that sort.  It's a pushmi-pullyu kind of argument.

Ultimately the debate really is about who is deemed valuable and in what role.  But I have never really understood the privileging of a concept, such as family, over the well-being of all the individuals in it.  Families are not living creatures but social arrangements.  It is the members of a family who should matter, and the mothers should not matter any less than other members of the family.

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Is Violence Ever The Proper Response? Thoughts About A Photograph.

I saw this picture yesterday and it haunted me.  It was taken by a Swedish photographer, Hans Runesson,  in 1985, during a march in Sweden by a small number of neo-nazis:

Everything else I was able to find about the picture is rumors.  One rumor states that the woman hitting the flag-carrying neo-nazi with her handbag is a concentration camp survivor. 

Because I don't have the names of the people in the picture, I cannot falsify or verify that or any of the other rumors, including some which suggest that the neo-nazi in the picture is currently in prison for murder.

But it is really the picture itself which haunts me, because it proposes difficult questions:  Is violence ever the proper response?  What if one is the survivor of horrible violence and others are free to celebrate that violence in public?  Does it matter that the violence in the picture is clearly more symbolic than real?

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Fun With Christina Hoff Sommers

She is best known as an anti-feminist who wrote a book attributing the world-wide phenomenon of boys doing worse at school than girls to American feminists, pretty much.  Now she has joined the Lean-In debate, centered around Sheryl Sandberg's book (which I still haven't bought).

Guess what her message might be?  It's not very hard if you know that she is an anti-feminist.

Yup.  She argues for innate differences between men and women as the cause why women don't really want to lean in.  That's a rather weird response, given that nobody is forcing women to lean in.  The approach is aimed at women who want to advance at work.  It's not some new feminazi law or anything similar.

But Hoff Sommers does have a deeper goal here, I think, and that is to argue that there is no actual need for businesses to change, because the reason women CEOs are almost as rare as hen's teeth is that women don't want to be CEOs.  And of course most women don't want to be CEOs, at least after they figure how unlikely that outcome might be.  But then that's true of most men, too,  I would guess.

Never mind.  Us girls get a separate treatment, because not giving us such a separate treatment is ignoring the fact that men are innately and immutably different.  With which I agree, of course.  Only women can give birth, for example.   The other possibly innate characteristics are much trickier to analyze.  The state of the arts right now seems to be that everyone and their aunt Agatha decides on an opinion and then believes that it is a fact.  I prefer to stay skeptical.

Anyway, Hoff Sommers uses two pieces of evidence for her arguments.  One is the Pew survey I discussed in an earlier post. Hoff Sommers:

In a 2013 national poll on modern parenthood, the Pew Research Center asked mothers and fathers to identify their "ideal" working arrangement. Fifty percent of mothers said they would prefer to work part-time and 11 percent said they would prefer not to work at all. Fathers answered differently: 75 percent preferred full-time work. And the higher the socio-economic status of women, the more likely they were to reject full-time employment. Among women with annual family incomes of $50,000 or higher, only 25 percent identified full-time work as their ideal. Sandberg regards such attitudes as evidence of women's fear of success, double standards, gender bias, sexual harassment, and glass ceilings. But what if they are the triumph of prosperity and opportunity?

Or what if they are traditional gender role requirements?  I think*  that she makes a mistake here.  The parents were not asked what they themselves would prefer to do about work.  They were asked what they thought was in general better for mothers and fathers.  The distinction is subtle but it does make a difference, because the way the question was framed means that general gender role norms could enter the answer.  That is less likely if people were asked what they themselves wanted to do.

But the major piece of evidence Hoff Sommers uses is a 2008 international study about gender differences:

Sandberg's goal is to liberate her fellow Americans from the stereotypes of gender. But is that truly liberating? In a 2008 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a group of international researchers compared data on gender and personality across 55 nations. Throughout the world, women tend to be more nurturing, risk averse and emotionally expressive, while men are usually more competitive, risk taking, and emotionally flat. But the most fascinating finding is this: Personality differences between men and women are the largest and most robust in the more prosperous, egalitarian, and educated societies. According to the authors, "Higher levels of human development—including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth—were the main nation-level predictors of sex difference variation across cultures." New York Times science columnist John Tierney summarized the study this way: "It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India's or Zimbabwe's than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France."

Why should that be? The authors of the study hypothesize that prosperity and equality bring greater opportunities for self-actualization. Wealth, freedom, and education empower men and women to be who they are. It is conspicuously the case that gay liberation is a feature of advanced, prosperous societies: but such societies also afford heterosexuals more opportunities to embrace their gender identities. This cross-cultural research is far from conclusive, but it is intriguing and has great explanatory power. Just think: What if gender difference turns out to be a phenomenon not of oppression, but rather of social well-being?

I got the study** and skimmed it, fairly quickly.  Then I had to go back and check that my reference was correct, because the study doesn't look at nurturing, risk aversion or competitiveness.  It looks at four characteristics:  extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism, and finds that men and women differ along those dimensions, on average.

The measure of difference, the d-value, ranges overall from 0.4 for neuroticism to 0.1 for extraversion.  These are fairly small gender differences.  The d-value for the difference between the average heights of adult men and women is 2.6, for example.  A value of zero denotes no average gender difference.

The researchers argue that more egalitarian societies (which are economically more developed societies)  exhibit larger differences than traditional and more hierarchical societies.  BUT the result is completely driven by differences between men in the two types of societies,  NOT by differences between women.

So assuming that all calculations in that study are correct, what do the results tell us?  That women and men in traditional cultures are closer to each other in extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism than women in more egalitarian societies, and that this result is driven by differences in men.  How does this relate to Hoff Sommers' argument that women are freer to be what they are innately meant to be in the more egalitarian societies?

I can't think of any actual relevance of the study to her argument, unless she argues that men in more egalitarian societies are freer to assume the male breadwinner role?  But that is rubbish.  It is the hierarchical societies where men are more likely to assume that role.

Neither can I see what relevance the traits of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism have to do with women's desire to lean in (unless neuroticism makes work impossible, of course) .

In short, that particular evo-psycho study does not support Hoff Sommers' argument.  Even if the characteristics it studies were directly relevant for labor market participation rates of men and women, the average difference values are pretty small.  But I do admire the web she weaves from rather unlikely bits and pieces!

Sigh.  None of what I say here will have any influence on the debate.



------
The first footnote is added later, to clarify that point:
*I wrote "I think that Hoff Sommers made a mistake" because I couldn't match her data.  The closest I got was with the questions about what is ideal for mothers and fathers in general.  But a second search unearthed the most likely bit she refers to.  Only it doesn't apply to all  mothers but to mothers who work either part-time or full-time.  The Pew report states this:

 The recent shift toward a preference for full-time work has been more pronounced among working mothers themselves than among those who are not employed. Fully 37% of today’s working mothers say their ideal situation would be to work full time, up from 21% of working mothers in 2007. (Among non-working mothers, the increase from 16% to 22% is not statistically significant.)
Only 11% of working mothers say their ideal situation would be not to work at all, down from 19% in 2007. Part-time work remains the most appealing option for working mothers; 50% now say working part time would be ideal for them, down marginally from 60% in 2007.
Among mothers who do not work outside the home, in 2007, roughly half (48%) said not working was their ideal situation. Today only 36% of these mothers say the same. The share saying they would prefer to work either full or part time has increased slightly over the same period (from 49% in 2007 to 63% now).
For their part, fathers prefer full-time work. Fully 75% of fathers with children under age 18 say working full time is ideal for them. Some 15% say working part time would be ideal, and
10% say they would prefer not to work at all. In general, fathers’ views about what is ideal for them have not changed significantly in recent years.

**To get the pdf file, Google Why Can't A Man Be More Like A Woman. Sex Differences in Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures.

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Some News on Violence Against Women

1.  This picture, from Ms. Foundation for Women, gives quite a nice summary of the television coverage concerning the Steubenville rape sentencing:

As I wrote before, think whether such things would be reported about someone who got his wallet stolen while inebriated, or about his hypothetical young attackers.

2.  When I read about this year's meeting of the UN Commission of the Status of Women  which did, happily, end up with a document aimed at reducing violence against women, I noticed that the group of countries which opposed such a document didn't just include the usual suspects (the Vatican, Iran and some other Muslim countries) but also Russia.  In addition to that, Egypt's new government was vocal in its opposition to the document.

About the latter:

It's not just Russia, Iran and the Vatican that are alarmed at the prospect of gender equality and women living lives free of violence. They found an ally in Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, which issued one of the most odious – and telling – responses to the CSW, claiming:
"This declaration, if ratified, would lead to the complete disintegration of society."
Why? Because, according to the Brotherhood, the proposed language granted women basic sexual rights and bodily autonomy; gave wives the right to report marital rape and requires law enforcement "to deal husbands punishments similar to those prescribed for raping or sexually harassing a stranger"; required equal inheritance rights for men and women; replaced "guardianship with partnership, and full sharing of roles within the family between men and women such as: spending, child care and home chores"; recognized the rights of marginalized groups like lesbians, trans women and sex workers; and removed "the need for a husband's consent in matters like: travel, work, or use of contraception".

But it was Russia's new fervor in this camp which interested me the most.  After all, Egypt was pretty predictable, given who is in power there, but Putin has been in power in Russia (whether formally or not) for a very long time.  So how come this shift in Russia's policies?

What I found in my research is the argument that Putin doesn't like abortion or homosexuality because he wants people to have more children.  As is the custom in such cases, the government tries to pressure women (and men) into doing that or tries to make not doing that impossible.  The government (as is also the global custom in almost all such cases) refuses to try to understand why people have fewer children and what could be done to change that, if so desired:

Russia's difficulties with language on sexual, reproductive and gay rights appears to be driven by what critics have described as a bid by President Vladimir Putin to shore up support in his country's largely conservative society.
Putin has criticized gays for failing to help reverse a population decline. Putin has also drawn closer to the Russian Orthodox Church, one of the most influential institutions in Russia.

 On the positive side, the document was adopted, and:

Suffice it to say that bringing all 193 countries into consensus wasn't easy, and it didn't happen without hard work and drama. There were many member states who expressed reservations about the document, including Russia and the non-voting but permanent member, the Holy See.
Those who disagreed most vehemently with the UN's Commission on the Status of Women's document were mostly from conservative Muslim countries, which focused their ire on references to women's sexual and reproductive rights, and equality in marriage and other human rights. There were moments during the negotiations when media reports from Egypt grew inflammatory, with the Muslim Brotherhood proclaiming that adopting such a proposal would result in "the compete disintegration of Egyptian society." Well, Egyptian women would have none of that. Protests erupted in Egypt, and work at the UN continued.
The strong-willed women, girls, and men at the conference were determined to work through the many complications, cultural differences, and language nuances, and dedicated the long hours it took to tediously parse every paragraph -- word by word, to arrive at a document that could finally be adopted by all 193 countries. In the end, the only member state that apparently didn't agree to the final document was Libya, and they, gratefully, did not block adoption of the 18-page text.

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Brainless Politics. The Cyprus Example and Others

Reading about events in Cyprus reminded me once again about the weird illogical aspect of so much politics.  Stuff, where you have to put your brain away to keep going.

The list can be very long but these are the items that I could think of right away:

1.  The United States spends humongous amounts of money on its military, more than the next ten (or more) biggest spenders put together.  Yet that military spending is a Holy Cow for both parties, pretty much, whereas this country of great riches cannot afford health care for the poor or retirement for anyone below the one percent.  A related Holy Cow is that the contributions to social security must remain regressive so that the burden is mostly on those who have lower incomes.

2.  The largest funder of Islamic terrorism is Saudi Arabia.  And Saudi funding of mosques and schools and such in other countries comes with a link to an extreme form of Islam, the form which spreads the kind of thought basis from which terrorism can grow:  An extreme one.  Yet George Bush responded to the 911 attacks by attacking Iraq, pretty much, and we pretend to ignore the Saudi influence here because it's the largest oil producer.

For similar reasons, the extreme sex segregation and oppression of women in Saudi Arabia is not really addressed.  The West wants the oil, not fairness and justice without the oil.

3.  The whole financial markets sausage.  Those who prepared the poisonous sausage and served it to the rest of us really did not get punished at all.  They got bailouts and high bonuses and are largely back in the saddle.  Those who ate that poisonous sausage, not knowing any better, are punished, however.

Indeed, the remedies the government had adopted seem to be going to those who should have gotten the punishments, not more money.

4.  This whole silly "equal sacrifice" bullshit.  The sacrifice is not equal if we demand equal monetary sacrifices from the very poor and the billionaires, or larger sacrifices from those with lower incomes.  In the former case, the billionaires hardly feel the sting whereas the lives of the poor are destroyed, and in the latter case (which seems more realistic) those in power can make more money from the so-called sacrifices by gaming the system again.

Now add to this the collapse of the ethical base for the sacrifice.  In Cyprus, people who acted the way that was assumed to good and careful, by saving and by not spending, by acting responsibly rather than by gaming the market, those are the people who are now made to pay for the fun others had.  It is irrelevant if the real target of the saving taxes is the Russian savings in Cyprus.  The sacrifice demanded will be greater on the poor and it makes no difference how ethically one may have acted.

Then, of course, freezing the bank deposits in Cyprus so that the tax can be applied to all is the same as telling people in Spain, Greece and other similar countries to do a run on the banks.  Which is truly an odd thing to want to initiate.

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Feminism Is Dead. Take 4358.

These stories are as regular as a menstrual cycle, you know.  And about as exciting.  Feminism is dead so often that I wonder what kind of a zombie it must be to be able to die again and again.

Another interesting aspect of these stories is that they always focus on the upper class women,  mostly white ones and with lots of education.  Yet even such highly blessed women toss their careers into the corner!  They did so in the early 2000s, they did so in the 1990s, and now they do it in 2013.

The novel aspect of these newest death throes is that the article mentions a famous evolutionary psychologist, David Buss, who firmly believes in the innateness of sex roles.  You see, our prehistoric women suddenly don't seem to have been gatherers, after all,  who might have provided most of the calories in that gathering/hunting mix but cavewives:

All those bachelors’ vows of future bathroom cleanings, it turns out, may be no more than a contemporary mating call. “People espouse equality because they conform to the current normative values of our culture,” says University of Texas evolutionary psychologist David Buss. “Any man who did not do so would alienate many women—yes, espousing values is partly a mating tactic, and this is just one example.” At least in one area, there’s scant penalty for this bait and switch. Last year, sociologists at the University of Washington found that the less cooking, cleaning, and laundry a married man does, the more frequently he gets laid.

...

 “My sense,” says Buss, “is that younger women are more open to the idea that there might exist evolved psychological gender differences.” Among my friends, many women behave as though the evolutionary imperative extends not just to birthing and breast-­feeding but to administrative household tasks as well, as if only they can properly plan birthday parties, make doctors’ appointments, wrap presents, communicate with the teacher, buy the new school shoes. A number of those I spoke to for this article reminded me of a 2010 British study showing that men lack the same mental bandwidth for multitasking as women.

In other words, women belong in the home because of evolution.  That cannot be proved, of course, but it's enough if women believe in it, because then they will stay at home. Or will feel guilt for not doing so.

I am bored with these kinds of stories as is pretty apparent from what I wrote above.  The reason is this:

Not all women are ambitious in the job sense.  Not all women want those kinds of jobs.  But then neither do all men.  The society condones the lack of ambition in women but disapproves of it in men.  Thus, the number of men who would report a desire to be a stay-at-home-dad will probably be lower than the number of men who really would prefer to be a stay-at-home-dad, and to some extent the reverse is true for women.

The point is that we have different talents and different desires.  And the previous paragraph could equally well have been written by saying that not all women are suited to taking care of small children or wish to do that full-time, even if they love their own children more than anything in the world.  And the same applies for men.  And so on.

But the stories are not written that way.  They are written to apply to all women on one side, and all men on the other side.  Thus, all men obviously somehow wish to work in the labor force 24/7 and all women obviously get kidnapped by their maternal instincts and toss their jobs overboard if they possibly can.

Thus, the basic setup is this:  Men will work in the office or the factory or in the fields 24/7, no matter what.  If that is taken as a given, how should women behave? 

The other reason I'm utterly bored with these kinds of stories is that the way labor markets are arranged is kept as the invisible elephant in them.  Those stresses the article speaks about are arranged stresses, largely caused by impossible expectations about working hours and the absence of good childcare and proper vacation time.

Though I must admit that this story is slightly more interesting than the usual one because it hints at the idea that the ability to organize children's birthdays and the ability to cook and clean is somehow genetically wired in women but not in men.  Which is unlikely when you consider that the most famous people in those types of fields tend to be men.  Like the most famous chefs.  Even the most famous childcare experts of the past are men.

We should also see enormous catastrophies in the families of all single fathers.  If men lack the necessary hard-wiring to remember children's physician and dentist appointments, how come the studies I've seen of single-father families suggest that those fathers do a pretty good job, on average?

So I fell for this "controversial" post in the way it was intended:  Get a lot of links, create a lot of discussion, and the advertising income will flow in!  Bad Echidne.  She will get no chocolate mousse today.
----
Added later:  This is a good take on the article.

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The Rape Culture Inside CNN. We Are All Steubenville Football Players Today.

Content Warning:  Sexual Violence


This, my friends is rape culture.  I have been sitting on the fence about the general validity of the term, for various reasons, but CNN's coverage of the guilty verdict in the Steubenville rape case certainly tells us something about CNN's own rape culture.

Do watch the video at Raw Story.

Then consider how a similar story would have been reported if the two young men had been accused of, say, armed burglary or the severe beating of someone or other crimes deemed as real.

Huffington Post has more on CNN's determination to focus its sympathy on the perpetrators of this crime.

I would be the last person to argue that one shouldn't feel sorry for those who have been found guilty of crimes.  The consequences to them, when caught, are awful.  As the CNN coverage states:

Candy then asked CNN legal contributor Paul Callan what the verdict meant for “a 16 year old, sobbing in court, regardless of what big football players they are, they still sound like 16 year olds.”
“What’s the lasting effect though on two young men being found guilty juvenile court of rape essentially?” Crowley wondered.
“There’s always that moment of just — lives are destroyed,” Callan remarked. “But in terms of what happens now, the most severe thing with these young men is being labeled as registered sex offenders. That label is now placed on them by Ohio law.”
“That will haunt them for the rest of their lives.”

But note that the rape didn't somehow grab these young men or force them to act in a certain way.  They did it.  Just as young men sometimes commit burglaries or robberies.  A rape is a crime.  But the way CNN approached it was qualitatively different from how they would cover the sentencing of a teenager who, say, robbed a bank.  We would not then hear how a young life is ruined and so on.

I can see no reason for the difference except for something which must be called a rape culture.  A rape is not deemed a serious enough crime for the punishment  the two young men received, despite the fact that the actual punishment ranged from one to two years; not a terribly heavy sentence.

Indeed, underneath this treatment squirms something truly nasty:  The idea that these school athletes shouldn't have been taken to court at all, that the crime they committed cannot justify the sentence they were given.  That they should have been forgiven for the greater good.  Which does not apparently include rape victims.

I also get that CNN wants to pull all the emotional strings it can, for the sake of those viewership figures, and because the victim is unavailable those emotions must be obtained in other ways.  But something really is wrong when we are asked to extend our sympathies to those found guilty with only a fleeting comment about the victim's life, too, having been severely damaged if not ruined, and that in the hands of the two football players, not as a consequence of the crime they themselves committed.

And what about the victim and our sympathies for her?  Will she be perfectly fine tomorrow morning?  Did CNN report that her mother earlier told how her daughter stays in her room, doesn't want to go to school and cries herself to sleep, night after night?  That her daughter feels alone, except for her family, and ostracized?

There are rape victims who never quite recover, who never quite trust anyone enough to let them come close.  There are rape victims who, years later, have no feeling in the pelvic area.  There are rape victims who resort to narcotics to self-medicate or who spend years in therapy.  Whether this case is one of those is something I cannot tell, but the point CNN almost ignores is that at least one life could have been destroyed even before this case came to court at all.

This article is a good general introduction to the case.  This post  at Jezebel gives an example of the lack of support surrounding the rape and the great enjoyment at least one person present had in discussing it.  Warning, the video at Jezebel can be upsetting.  And it certainly gives one example of a rape culture.

Here is an early article about the events with more examples of what is hard to see as anything but a metaphoric further rape of the girl in social media.  Rape culture in action, that is.

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A Liberal Plant?

(Content warning:  Racism and sexism)


That was my first instinct when I viewed this recent video of an audience question at a panel of the Conservative Political Action Committee on Republican minority outreach :



But perhaps he is a real thing.  Often the "real thing" is as bad as any sarcasm I might be able to create, after all.  (For instance, just try to create a sarcastic story about the advice the American Taliban would give to the mothers of America.  I once did that and couldn't get it to differ from reality by exaggeration.)

Think Progress reports:

ThinkProgress spoke with Terry, who sported a Rick Santorum sticker and attended CPAC with a friend who wore a Confederate Flag-emblazoned t-shirt, about his views after the panel. Terry maintained that white people have been “systematically disenfranchised” by federal legislation.
When asked by ThinkProgress if he’d accept a society where African-Americans were permanently subservient to whites, he said “I’d be fine with that.” He also claimed that African-Americans “should be allowed to vote in Africa,” and that “all the Tea Parties” were concerned with the same racial problems that he was.
At one point, a woman challenged him on the Republican Party’s roots, to which Terry responded, “I didn’t know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public.”
He claimed to be a direct descendent of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Bolds are mine.

Lawyers, Guns&Money also wonders if Terry is a liberal plant.  Probably the guy is not a liberal plant, only someone who manages to make conservatives look really bad by expressing his sincere opinions in that place.  If so, he is just as extreme as sarcasm would write him.  Which is very unfair for all us writers and bloggers.

I wandered from that blog to all sorts of pretty disgusting places by following the initial references and then by digging some more.  If you choose to do that, remember the bleach and the iron brush for cleaning yourself later on. 

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The Hand That Rocks The Cradle

In the US belongs more often to the daddy than in the past.  That's the main take from a new Pew Research study on parenting opinions, or at least the optimistic take from it.  The roles of parents are becoming more similar, compared to the olden times:

Balancing Work and Family
The Pew Research survey finds that about half (53%) of all working parents with children under age 18 say it is difficult for them to balance the responsibilities of their job with the responsibilities of their family. There is no significant gap in attitudes between mothers and fathers: 56% of mothers and 50% of fathers say juggling work and family life is difficult for them. 

Feeling rushed is also a part of everyday life for today’s mothers and fathers. Among those with children under age 18, 40% of working mothers and 34% of working fathers say they always feel rushed. 

With so many demands on their time, many parents wonder whether they are spending the right amount of time with their children. Overall, 33% of parents with children under age 18 say they are not spending enough time with their children. Fathers are much more likely than mothers to feel this way. Some 46% of fathers say they are not spending enough time with their children, compared with 23% of mothers. Analysis of time use data shows that fathers devote significantly less time than mothers to child care (an average of seven hours per week for fathers, compared with 14 hours per week for mothers). Among mothers, 68% say they spend the right amount of time with their children. Only half of fathers say the same. Relatively few mothers (8%) or fathers (3%) say they spend too much time with their children. 

Mothers, Fathers and Time Use 

A lot has changed for women and men in the 50 years since Betty Friedan wrote “The Feminine Mystique.” Women have made major strides in education and employment, and the American workplace has been transformed. But with these changes have come the added pressures of balancing work and family life, for mothers and fathers alike. Trends in time use going back to 1965 clearly show how the increased participation of women in the workforce has affected the amount of time mothers devote to paid work. In 2011, mothers spent, on average, 21 hours per week on paid work, up from eight hours in 1965. Over the same period, the total amount of time mothers spend in non-paid work has gone down somewhat. 

For their part, fathers now spend more time engaged in housework and child care than they did half a century ago. And the amount of time they devote to paid work has decreased slightly over that period. Fathers have by no means caught up to mothers in terms of time spent caring for children and doing household chores, but there has been some gender convergence in the way they divide their time between work and home.

Roughly 60% of two-parent households with children under age 18 have two working parents. In those households, on average, fathers spend more time than mothers in paid work, while mothers spend more time on child care and household chores. However, when their paid work is combined with the work they do at home, fathers and mothers are carrying an almost equal workload.

What still remains unchanged is interesting, too.  Consider the public opinion question (asked of all respondents, whether they were parents with children under eighteen at home or not) about the ideal amount of work for mothers and fathers who have children (not sure of the age of those children, by the way):  Is it best for mothers to work in the labor force full-time, part-time or stay at home?  And then (kudos for Pew to ask about this) the same question about fathers.

The answers, about mothers and work:

Survey respondents were also asked what the ideal situation is for mothers and fathers with young children. Among all adults, only 12% say it’s best for mothers of young children to work full time. A 47% plurality say working part time is the ideal situation for mothers of young children, and one-third say it’s best if these mothers not work at all outside the home.

The answers, about fathers and work:

The public has much different views about what is best for fathers of young children. Fully seven-in-ten adults say the ideal situation for men with young children is to work full time. One-in-five endorse part-time work for fathers of young children, and only 4% say the ideal situation for these dads would be not to work at all.

Fathers themselves are bigger proponents than mothers of full-time work for parents with young children. Among fathers with children under age 18, 17% say the ideal situation for mothers of young children is to work full time. Only 7% of mothers agree with this. When it comes to what’s ideal for fathers, there is somewhat more agreement: 75% of fathers say the ideal situation for fathers of young children is to work full time; 66% of mothers agree.
 

The latter answer, about what is ideal for fathers,  has not changed much over the decades, whereas the former, what is ideal for mothers,  has.  In other words,  expectations about the gendered division of labor have changed when it comes to mothers but have not changed when it comes to fathers.  That creates some very obvious problems.

There are differences in the answers from demographic groups in this study:

Views on What’s Best for Children Differ by Race, Age 

Among all adults, blacks (31%) are much more likely than whites (13%) to say that the ideal situation for young children is to have a mother who works full time. Only one-in-four blacks say it’s best for young children if their mother does not work at all outside the home; this compares with 36% of whites. The gap on this issue between black men and white men is particularly large. While 40% of white men say the ideal situation for a young child is to have a mother who stays home, only 21% of black men agree. The views of Hispanics are similar to those of whites. 

There is also an age gap in views about what’s best for children. Adults under age 50 are more likely than those ages 50 and older to say having a working mother is the best thing for a young child. Some 18% of those under age 50 say having a mother who works full time is the ideal situation for a young child, and an additional 47% say having a mother who works part time is ideal. 

By contrast, among those ages 50 and older, only 13% say having a full-time working mother is ideal for children, and 37% say having a mother who works part time would be best. Fully 40% of those ages 50 and older say the ideal situation for a young child is to have a mother who doesn’t work at all outside the home. Only 28% of adults under age 50 agree. The age differences are more pronounced among men than among women.

Note that those differences are about a slightly different question than what might be best for the fathers and mothers.  It's about what might be best for the children, and on that the general public holds the views shown in the following graph when it comes to mothers:

The research report mentions in several places that the percentage of both the general public and parents which supports the single breadwinner models has declined from 2007 or from 2009.  That is probably a consequence of the recession which has demonstrated the dangers of that pattern when economic times are bad.

The wider connections this research report suggests are fairly obvious.  As long as the ideal division of labor is seen in terms like these we are going to struggle with having women in the kinds of decision-making roles which require having a history of many years of full-time work.  We are also going to struggle with the attempt to see childcare as a general problem for parents rather than as a problem women have in trying to balance family and work.

Still, I'm optimistic about the direction of the changes and also about the fact that the fathers in this study are roughly as likely as the mothers to admit struggling with their dual roles.  And many fathers would prefer to spend more time with their children than their work commitments allow them.
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The whole report (fairly long) is worth reading.  It has interesting data on the amount of leisure time mothers and fathers have.  On the whole, fathers have more leisure time than mothers, except for sole breadwinner fathers who have quite a bit less leisure time than their partners:

When paid work, child care and housework are combined, parents in dual-income households have a more equal division of labor than parents in single-earner households. In dual-income households, fathers put in, on average, 58 hours of total work time a week, compared with 59 hours for mothers. In households where the father is the sole breadwinner, his total workload exceeds that of his spouse or partner by roughly 11 hours (57 vs. 46 hours per week). In households where the mother is the sole breadwinner, her total workload exceeds that of her spouse or partner by about 25 hours (58 vs. 33 hours per week).
    •    Men spend more time than women in leisure activities (such as watching TV, playing games, socializing and exercising). The gender gap in leisure time is bigger among men and women who do not have children in the house (37 hours per week for men vs. 32 hours per week for women). Among parents with children under age 18, fathers spend, on average, 28 hours per week on leisure activities, while mothers spend 25 hours on leisure.

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Kudos To Sara Volz

This is good news:

Sara Volz of Colorado Springs won first place — and $100,000 — in an Intel Foundation science competition for her research into algae biofuels. (Courtesy of Sara Volz)
Sara Volz has lived and breathed her science project on algae biofuels since ninth grade — in fact, she has literally slept the research, in a loft bed just above her home lab lined with flasks of experimental cultures.
That self-driven dedication helped earn 17-year-old Volz, a senior at Cheyenne Mountain High School in Colorado Springs, the top honors in the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search, a national competition that features a $100,000 award.

Why is this good news for other women and girls except for  Sara Volz herself?  Because it is an entry into one kind of conversation, the kind that some misogynist sites conduct, the kind that the weird evolutionary psychologists (Satori Kanazawa and Roy Baumeister ) support, the kind which argues that women have never invented or created anything whatsoever, that, indeed, women are biologically and innately incapable of creating anything at all because it is the men who have had the need in the past to create things or otherwise they would not have gotten laid.

This particular conversation is linked to the idea that men have evolved more than women, due to sexual competition for mates and other similar poorly-studied and unscientific arguments.  The crux of that argument is that men are creative because our ancestors had to be, to get mates, but women are not creative because men f**k anything that moves.  So even quite stupid women passed their genes on but only the Einsteins among the Pleistocene men managed to pass their genes on.  And as today's evo-psychos think that smart genes (if they exist) are inherited solely from the same-sex parent, well, there you are!

It never occurred to me that publicizing creative and intellectual ventures by women could be taken in any other way than as a response to that continuous muttering I have had in my life from the beginning, the idea that Roy Baumeister summarized as men having created all of culture.  To take it in any other way seemed just utterly and totally weird.

But the same anti-women sites who tell me that women cannot as much as draw a stick figure also tell me that the tiniest, silliest little research project by women is now publicized, whereas men get no support at all. 

Which is, naturally, utter and total rubbish.  But what they really mean is that the success stories of individual men are written up as just that, success stories of individual men, not as stories about the whole gender.  The reason for doing it differently for women and girls is naturally in that misogynistic background muttering.  If some people really believe that women cannot be creative, well, then we must remind them of the facts that contradict that belief.

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The New Pope

Is Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the former archbishop of Buenos Aires, who takes the name Pope Francis.  He is the first non-European Pope (of the modern era) and the first Jesuit Pope.

He is not, however, the first female Pope or the first non-white Pope.  Neither his he anything much but very conservative:

Here's more about Pope Francis, the former Cardinal Bergoglio of Argentina: He is 76, and is considered a straight-shooter who calls things as he sees them, and a follower of the church's most conservative wing. He is a former archbishop of Buenos Aires.
He has clashed with the government of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner over his opposition to gay marriage and free distribution of contraceptives.

On the other hand, he is believed to care more about the poor than your average run-of-the-mill Pope:

Back in 2005, Bergoglio drew high marks as an accomplished intellectual, having studied theology in Germany. His leading role during the Argentine economic crisis burnished his reputation as a voice of conscience, and made him a potent symbol of the costs globalization can impose on the world's poor.
Bergoglio's reputation for personal simplicity also exercised an undeniable appeal – a Prince of the Church who chose to live in a simple apartment rather than the archbishop's palace, who gave up his chauffeured limousine in favor of taking the bus to work, and who cooked his own meals.

...

Bergoglio has supported the social justice ethos of Latin American Catholicism, including a robust defense of the poor.
"We live in the most unequal part of the world, which has grown the most yet reduced misery the least," Bergoglio said during a gathering of Latin American bishops in 2007. "The unjust distribution of goods persists, creating a situation of social sin that cries out to Heaven and limits the possibilities of a fuller life for so many of our brothers."
At the same time, he has generally tended to accent growth in personal holiness over efforts for structural reform.
Bergoglio is seen an unwaveringly orthodox on matters of sexual morality, staunchly opposing abortion, same-sex marriage, and contraception. In 2010 he asserted that gay adoption is a form of discrimination against children, earning a public rebuke from Argentina's President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
Nevertheless, he has shown deep compassion for the victims of HIV-AIDS; in 2001, he visited a hospice to kiss and wash the feet of 12 AIDS patients.

Bolds are mine.
 
On the third hand, kissing and washing feet doesn't cure AIDS and neither does expressing concern for the poor help the poor, in itself.

We shall see what we shall see, as wiser people say.

I watched some of the BBC coverage of the people waiting for the new Pope to come to the balcony.  Very nice marching by several groups of men dressed in medieval clothing, very nice music by several groups of men, too.  Then a group of men came to the balcony to open the doors and pull the curtains aside so that three men could come to the balcony, one of whom told us the new Pope's new name.  Then more men and the Pope who is a man.

None of it is very interesting or even worth pointing out, except that this large church is a church of men when it comes to its hierarchy, and it is celibate men who decide that there should be no contraception.  But probably the majority of the believers are women who do much of the grunt work for the church, in the hope of eternal life, I guess.

Even that is none of my business, being a pagan goddess, except that the tentacles of the Catholic Church (as do the tentacles of Islam and other large religions) directly and indirectly reach into  my life and the lives of all women on this earth.

In the United States the Catholic Church has a strong influence on government policies concerning women's bodies, and not being a Catholic doesn't release one from that influence.  In other countries religions that one might not belong to can influence how one must dress or whether one can go out alone (at least in the sense that the religion justifies treating a woman alone as somehow sinful and therefore a fair target) or have a job and so on.

All of it makes watching the pomp and circumstance of the papal elections a weird experience.  In one sense it is nothing to do with me.  In another, deeper sense, it is very much to do with me and people like me. 

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