It's not by me, and I don't know who invented it. But it's a beautiful political parable:
Americans are like mushrooms: Kept in the dark and fed with shit.
Thursday, 27 June 2013
The official mouthpiece of wingnuts, Fox News, had a chat about a girl who was banned from playing football with the boys at her private school, because, among other reasons, the boys might have impure thoughts.
The whole conversation from here, is such fun*:
Four out of five people in that chat, including all three men, are adamantly opposed to the idea of mixed football teams (one is neutral) even in childhood. The most commonly argued reason is that the girl could get hurt! She looks to me like a pretty strong and big sixth grader, and at that age boys can, in fact, be smaller than girls. But because she could get hurt at some future and unspecified date, she must stop playing immediately.
Eric Bolling somehow draws the conclusion from this case that it's all about the wussification of American men. I don't get the connection, probably because I have a brain, but the only interpretation that makes any sense is that Bolling thinks men should put their foot down firmly, preferably on women's necks, on all this equality bullshit.
As an aside, I've been astonished by the number of times I read from anti-feminists about the enormous value of getting doors opened for nothing. On some MRA sites it's a tremendous service which today's women, in their demands for equality, have relinquished. Now they can only blame themselves when nobody opens that H-E-A-V-Y door for them or, as the case may be, punches them in the face.
These folks seem to think that we once had an implicit gender contract which gave women the advantages of receiving (wholly voluntary and optional) chivalry from men and which presumably kept women from ever being molested in any way whatsoever. What women relinquished in return to these benefits is rarely spelled out in that scenario but it looks like that would be all legal equality and the right not to have a custodian.
That bargain looks to me one that no woman would have voluntarily entered, but it must appeal to MRA types because their sites are full of stuff about the tremendous value of getting doors opened for you. It's worth almost anything!
Bolling mentions those doors which he probably now slams in the face of all uppity bitches. He also mentions how he can no longer complement a woman on her dress, in case people experience that as sexual harassment.
But real men can't tell a dress from a tarpaulin, Eric! If you can assess the artistry of a dress you are a wuss. Unless the dress consists of a piece of string between her buttocks and two one-inch discs over her nipples.
Enough about Bolling. Others at Fox News chime in with agreement, stating that often-used but ultimately meaningless argument that men and women are equal but different. This means that sixth grade girls are not allowed to play in a boys' team.
The equal-but-different, as it is used by anti-feminists, is as meaningless as the old racial argument about separate-but-equal, because the assumed differences, whether real or not, are used to stop actual equality from taking place where it could.
As a nasty example, Fox News' female and male commentators are equal but different in the sense that all the women are beautiful in the Barbie-doll style, whereas the men often look like potatoes which have just been dug up from the field. Because more of us people look like potatoes than Barbie dolls (or Ken dolls), the desired difference (women are eye-candy and should be content with getting their dress praised and doors opened for them) causes inequality in the selection of men and women into this job at Fox. It's easier for men to get in (those doors are HEAVY) and they probably get paid more, what with having to open doors to the chicks, too.
Then the argument from one of the other guys, about the logical extension to this equality rubbish: Let the boys play on all girls' teams where they will then dominate everything! How do you feminists like them apples, eh?
But that's an inane argument, because this girl was on the football team solely for the reason that there wasn't a football team for girls. If a boy wanted to play a sport only available to girls at a school, he should be allowed to play with the girls. So I think.
In general, the whole conversation degenerates into pure sexism of the type where all-men-are-that-way and all-women-are-this-way and the amount of thinking behind the various blurts is close to zero. But that's not unexpected from the political party which wages a war on women on several different fronts.
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*Note, also, that the text at the bottom of the screen is incorrect. The girl didn't say that boys might have impure thoughts, the school argued that. If that's the reason the school used, by the way, the girl was excluded to protect the boys against their own thoughts. Which demonstrates an interesting value judgement.
First, American Apparel advertises its unisex shirts rather interestingly. Several photo series show women with bare bottoms. Those women must be too poor to afford panties after paying for that flannel shirt?
For the sake of fairness, I combed the site for revealing pictures of men in the unisex shirts. There were a few series where the men could afford underpants but not jeans or slacks. Still, none of them had bare bottoms.
American Apparel is a fascinating corporation. It's opposed to sweatshops but it is for extra objectification of women.
Second, Tammy Duckworth addresses someone who seems to have abused the system for claiming Veterans' disability. I hope she will never get angry with me.
Third, does Alito mock female Justices from the bench?
Fourth and finally, the NYT wrote about male victims of sexual abuse in the military. The article appeared a few days ago. Adele Stan wrote a commentary on it.
It's important to acknowledge both the fact that men are the majority of victims (because of much greater numbers of men than women in the military) and that women have a fivefold chance of becoming victims of sexual abuse. The problem, therefore, is not specifically about women in the military but the problem is larger for the women in the military.
The Governor of Texas preached to Senator Wendy Davis, who filibustered the proposed Texas abortion law which will make abortion available to only the wealthy and might also put birth control out of the reach of poor women. Because Davis used her reproductive choice one way, Perry thinks she should make sure that no other woman can do otherwise.
Perry also states:
It is just unfortunate that she hasn’t learned from her own example that every life must be given a chance to realize its full potential and that every life matters.
It looks to me like lives only matter for the Texas Republicans until they leave the uterus. After that it's tough luck. And Texas just executed a woman whose life obviously no longer mattered.
Is Governor Perry a vegan, by the way? If he is not, then he limits his concerns to human lives, at least as long as they can be viewed as not-yet-born. Egg-Americans, in short.
The Texans will get their law making reproductive choices much harder for most Texas women. That, in turn, will cause a greater number of unplanned pregnancies and possibly more abortions carried out elsewhere than within the health care system, with the associated extra health risks. None of this makes any difference to the wealthier Texans who can travel for abortions, and all of this makes a much larger difference to the poorest Texans.
I would dearly like to see one forced-birther write a long and careful treatise on the question how the rights of people-inside-people could be judged and compared in the world they wish to create.
As every fertile woman is a potential home for an egg-American, would the protection of the latter require that all fertile women be given pregnancy tests before they can go downhill skiing or before they can have a glass of wine and so on, just in case they are endangering a minor? All miscarriages should certainly result in police investigations.
The legal complications with the "human-life-begins-at-conception" are tremendous, and even if my examples sound extreme they would be relevant in the forced-birth world. Indeed, given the extremist view which would ban abortion even in the case of rape, women could be theoretically stripped of any choice over their own fertility. All that would be needed is a rapist who decides to pass his genes on and succeeds in achieving conception.
That is the sense which I get from some pro-lifers: That what they ultimately desire is to remove all control of fertility from women. It's probably not an accident that it is the female-controlled contraceptives which the pro-lifers regard as abortifacients.
Wednesday, 26 June 2013
It's bad for me. I don't get what I'm supposed to do with it, for marketing purposes, and my brain tries to fathom every single conversation that is in my Twitter feed. But the conversations are like all the books in the world cut into slivers, tossed around in a hat and then spread out in a random order.
On the other hand, the idea of really really short posts intrigues me. But they would take a lot of time for the yield. So I mostly post just information on my new blog posts and that's it.
Tell me how I could make it more fun. I have a suspicion that this is one of those areas where I lack social skills altogether...
I get its news value and I enjoy about hearing stuff I might not have otherwise learned.
Kay Hymowitz is the (right-wing) Manhattan Institute Go-To-Girl as the defender of traditional gender roles and biological gender differences. She never disappoints.
Her new article in Foreign Policy discusses working women in the US and somewhat around the world and concludes that
a) women can't have it all*
b) women don't want to have it all because of that maternity instinct
and
c) any governmental attempts to change the sexual division of labor are bound to fail.
As a corollary to those three points she also concludes that the US system, with minimal maternity leave, no real annual vacations, very spotty child-care and so on, is the best of all possible worlds for any oddball ambitious women. She gets to that conclusion by ignoring statistics from politics, say, and by focusing on statistics on women in management. When those statistics seem to show that women don't do too well in particular leading positions, well, that's because they choose not to.
OK. Let me backtrack a bit. Hymowitz doesn't discuss working women, in the sense of all women in the labor force. She mostly talks about women on high career paths. Because of that, she is able to end her article by asking:
It's possible, of course, that we simply haven't found the right tools to end gender inequality. But it's also possible that, whether for biological or cultural reasons or both, many women are less interested in absolute parity with men than they are in work that gives them plenty of time with their kids. Is that such a bad thing?If you don't really need money from a job you can make that statement. If you don't really care who it is whose retirement benefits and old-age security are most affected by their earlier role as the major caretakers of children you can make that statement. And, of course, if you don't really care about the fact that having plenty of time with the kids might mean a part-time job with few if any benefits you can make that statement.
While reading that bit I thought about the way alimony in divorce is on its way out in the US. That's not a bad thing if men and women have equal earnings power, if nobody took twenty years off to care for the children and so on. But combined with the kind of thinking Hymowitz and friends entertain, it would mean additional punishments for that traditional sexual division of labor.
I was also thinking about the circularity of right-wing ideology about women: That women earn less or end up in fewer places of power is because they choose children over careers. But women should be at home with their children because the Western civilization depends on it! (And the Afghan civilization etc., I guess).
Still, when women are absent from all sorts of important statistics having to do with talents, skills, fame and power, it's either because women are just less competent or because of that maternal instinct.
Lamentable, perhaps, but the best of all worlds, really, when it comes down to practicalities. There's no break in that circle, as far as I can tell, except for the few very unusual selfish go-getters (who write articles on women, say?).
On the deepest level Hymowitz argues that if fifty years of feminism (rather lukewarm in most countries) hasn't completely eradicated traditional gender roles lasting thousands of years, then clearly those traditional roles are permanent.
That's the platform she uses to argue that these data demonstrate failure in that respect:
In Sweden, fathers have long been encouraged to take some parental leave, but in 1995, noting how few of them were actually doing so, the government followed Norway's lead and reserved one month of total parental leave as a use-it-or-lose-it month just for fathers. The reform was at least nominally successful: The average father took off 35 days, a little more than the month offered. In 2002, the government went further, making two full "daddy months" of parental leave nontransferable to moms. Men took off an average of 47 days, still considerably less than the total available. Then in 2008, dissatisfied with the remaining large gender gap in the leave taken by dads versus moms, the government introduced yet another reform: the "gender equality bonus." Under this law, the more couples shared leave time, the more money they would get. Amazingly, the reform had no impact. According to official statistics, women still took 76 percent of leave days in 2011. The long-term effects of Sweden's parental-leave policy, in other words, have been negligible, all the more so when you consider how many women gravitate toward part-time jobs.
Her article doesn't give references so I cannot check the details of the data she gives in most cases, but in this particular case it seems natural that women would take 76% of the leave days Sweden offered in 2011. It was the women, after all, who gave birth and needed the medical recovery from that. That men took 24% of the leave days is a pretty fantastic thing against that background. A fifty-fifty split seems unrealistic.
Hymowitz' basic assumption is that enough time has passed for us to be able to judge all these "social engineering experiments." But that's an odd reading.
Social norms change very slowly. That we can see clear change in gender norms since the 1960s suggests that at least some of the gendered division of labor is based on such norms. And as many feminists have written, the second wave of feminism had some successes in the public sphere but never really got to the question of the private sphere.
Fathers now do much more hands-on care of their children than was the case fifty years ago. That this is still less than what mothers do is not necessarily evidence of us having reached some biologically determined maximal amount of gender equality. The process may be continuing at its own slow pace.
Or as someone said: Progress moves funeral by funeral.
I wish I could go through all the references Hymowitz uses in her article.** The lack of citations makes it impossible. But I note that she compares different countries without taking into account the historical dimensions (or some cultural differences, such as people living together without being formally married). To evaluate where women are today in, say, Norway, we really need to know where they were fifty years ago, how the institutions and cultures of the various countries differ and so on. Even aspects such as working for the public vs. private sector mean different things in different countries in terms of prestige, maternity leave availability and earnings.
Her section on discrimination as unimportant is interesting. For instance, she argues that we cannot deduce the level of sexism of a society from its gender gap because in some sexist countries only a few women are working and they are likely to get what comparable men do! Thus, no gender gap could mean humongous sexism.
But that's of course the reason why economic studies of discrimination control for all sorts of relevant factors, such as the level of education of men and women and so on, and that's also why international comparisons usually try to compare countries which are economically and culturally as similar as possible in all other aspects. And, finally, that's why such studies don't look at only earnings data but also at hiring, firing and promotions.
She concludes the discrimination section by stating this:
Given a choice between a woman of childbearing age, who might well take a year off in the near future, and an equally talented young man who would take maybe a month off, many executives -- male or female -- would probably hire the latter.
I laughed a bit, because what she describes in that statement IS discrimination (which she argues doesn't explain anything). It's called statistical discrimination: Treating a member of a demographic group as if that member had the average (real or assumed) characteristics of the group.
But that statement also crystallizes the problem of assuming that the care of children naturally belongs to women. That assumption has consequences, and the consequences ultimately make women poorer than men. It is closely linked to the idea that children somehow are a private responsibility of women when it comes to discussions about gender roles but that having lots of them is a public responsibility of women when it comes to race wars and other stuff Lou Dobbs recently taught us.
Ultimately Hymowitz' article is all about choice vs. constraints. Hymowitz argues that women choose their lives in a way which just happens to make them less likely to be in positions of power, that men choose their lives in a way which just happens to make them less likely to have much of a family life but lots of public sector power and so on. It's like choosing chocolate ice-cream over vanilla, and the government should stay out of it. And probably women just like chocolate better and men like vanilla better, and who are we to judge those choices?
That's the pure choice paradigm. From that point of view children are not something that are needed for the perpetuation of the species, not the future workers, caretakers, scientists and artists of the society. Because children are a private choice, like ice-cream, and because on some level we think of them as women's responsibilities, it's perfectly fine not to have maternity leaves or family benefits or whatever.
But the pure choice paradigm, paradoxically, is usually attached to the assumption that we really have no choice at all! We are programmed, hard-wired, to choose one way, depending on our sex. Now twist your brain around that and how it leads to free-markets being the king and no government intervention, not even maternity leaves.
What is missing from all that, of course, are the constraints within which we make our choices. Those are not identical for men and women, as Hymowitz' own statement about statistical discrimination demonstrates. Institutions that we still live under were created for a world in which workers were assumed to be male with a full support staff at home. Labor markets assign the whole cost of child-bearing to women, except when laws stop them from doing so.
In a wider sense, the culture constrains all of us. How boys and girls are brought up and trained for their gender roles constrains us. The popular culture tells us stories relevant for our gender roles. Our families build expectations about our gender roles (such as that women will change their names when marrying). All those effects are like the drops of a continuous rain, and create a society where you may have to swim up-stream if you disagree with your assigned role in life.
To what extent any of this is biological depends on how we interpret biological effects. On some level the cultures human beings create are naturally limited by human biology. On another level we are clearly capable of immense flexibility, of tremendous cultural changes. I think the jury cannot make a conclusion of the possible biological limits to gender equality in 2013. People might one day laugh at anyone even assuming that might be the case, just as I have laughed at reading some very old treatises on the same topic.
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*The "have-it-all" argument has become inane, by the way. I see people writing that neither men nor women can have it all but that men are realistic about that. Yet the original meaning of the term was that people should have the right to have both children and challenging careers, and that women shouldn't have to choose between the two.
**For just one example why looking at the references matter, Hymowitz states:
Indeed, the World Economic Forum (WEF) ranks the United States eighth globally on gender equality in economic participation and opportunity, ahead of Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Iceland.That's one of the four sub-indices in the overall index. On the overall index US ranks 22nd, well behind those other countries the quote lists. And the countries ahead of the US on the economic participation and opportunity sub-index?
They are Mongolia, Bahamas, Burundi, Norway, Malawi, Lesotho and Luxembourg! Whatever that sub-index measures, it seems not to measure just gender equality.
The Defense of Marriage Act was declared unconstitutional.
Justice Kennedy was the deciding vote.
And yesterday I watched the drama at the Texas Lege. Better than television any day! The victory pro-choicers received may be a short-lived one in practical terms but the popular rising and will to fight were awesome to watch!
Tuesday, 25 June 2013
The Supreme Court of the United States has struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. The 5-4 decision followed the usual lines, the conservative judges voting for the strike-down. Justice Ginsburg was in deep disagreement:
In summarizing her dissent from the bench, an unusual move and a sign of deep disagreement, Justice Ginsburg called on the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to make a different point.“The great man who led the march from Selma to Montgomery and there called for the passage of the Voting Rights Act foresaw progress, even in Alabama,” she said. “'The arc of the moral universe is long,’ he said, but ‘it bends toward justice,’ if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion.”“That commitment,” she said, “has been disserved by today’s decision.”She said the focus of the Voting Rights Act had properly changed from “first-generation barriers to ballot access” to “second-generation barriers” like racial gerrymandering and laws requiring at-large voting in places with a sizable black minority. She said Section 5 had been effective in thwarting such efforts.
The impetus for attempts to restrict voting by people of color may now be more political than purely racist. The Republicans prefer minorities not to vote because that vote is so predominantly for the Democrats, and obligatory IDs etc. serve to limit the numbers of not only minority voters but of poor voters in general.
Monday, 24 June 2013
French in the title! I'm moving up in the world...
What I mean by "being ridiculous" is that it's perfectly acceptable in the politics of, say, Texas, to know nothing about women's sexuality, the way those weird breeding bits work or what the rape kit is for in hospitals. This is de rigueur for politicians who spend their working lives trying to ban all abortions.
I find that astonishingly arrogant. Supremely so. The facts are so unimportant that the politicians don't even have to pretend to study them at all. You make your own facts to support your ideology.
The most recent example:
In the midst of all the chaos on Sunday night as the Texas legislature pushed through a series of stringent restrictions on abortion and women’s health, it was easy to miss what might have been the most inaccurate and dangerous claim of the evening: One state representative tried to argue on the State House floor that rape kits are a form of abortion.
Texas Rep. Jody Laubenberg (R) sponsored several anti-abortion measures currently making their way to the Governor’s desk. Taken together, they would shut down the vast majority of the state’s women’s health clinics and criminalize abortions after 20 weeks. But in reasoning out why she did not support an exemption for rape victims in the 20-week ban, Laubenberg betrayed a woeful lack of information on the procedures a victim of rape undergoes — namely, the “rape kit,” which is used to collect data on the assailant and in no way relates to pregnancy:
When Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston, called for an exemption for women who were victims of rape and incest, Rep. Jody Laubenberg, R-Parker, explained why she felt it was unnecessary.
“In the emergency room they have what’s called rape kits where a woman can get cleaned out,” she said, comparing the procedure to an abortion. “The woman had five months to make that decision, at this point we are looking at a baby that is very far along in its development.”
The remark about rape kits, which is not accurate, sparked widespread ridicule on social media sites. Laubenberg, who has difficulty debating bills, then simply rejected all proposed changes to her bill without speaking until the end of the debate.
Rape kits are used to collect DNA evidence from the bodies of rape victims; after a victim enters a hospital, staff collect bodily fluid, residue under the victim’s nails, and any blood or hair samples that could be relevant for an investigation. Rape kits are in no way equivalent to an abortion.
Texas is in the process of tightening its abortion laws even more. It's like tightening a plastic screw. One day the grooves are gone, and the whole thing will explode. Perhaps that day has already arrived, given that a large number of pro-choice people are protesting in Texas.
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In other news about abortion, the merger of hospitals in California means that the Catholic Church now has more say on women's access to abortions:
In a most underhanded and insidious way, women's reproductive health rights in California were dealt a significant blow last month. That was when the availability of elective abortions at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian, one of Orange County's elite medical centers, was abruptly ended.
The ban on abortions was imposed by Hoag administrators effective May 1, shortly after the hospital entered a corporate partnership with St. Joseph Health System, a Roman Catholic chain with five hospitals in Orange County. The administrators acknowledge that the change was made at least in part as a response to St. Joseph's "sensitivity" about abortion.
What's worse, doctors at Newport Beach-based Hoag say the administration lied to them about the partnership deal. They were assured from the outset there would be no changes in the services they provide to their female patients. But public documents suggest that the abortion ban was planned by Hoag and St. Joseph as long ago as last fall.
This is a fun lesson in putting together lots of data items which have very little to do with each other. It's also a story about how American men are in trouble. Or so Lou Dobbs tells us in this video:
I love the last bit about the high sales of erectile dysfunction drugs, given that they weren't around until quite recently. That men didn't take them in the past does not mean that erectile dysfunction didn't exist. Indeed, it seems to have been pretty common among men over forty.
Our Lou implies, however, that it is only now that the American men can no longer get it up, what with having become neutered and emasculated by women getting out of their proper places (kitchen, the bed, behind the vacuum cleaner).
Let's take that list more seriously. The first item is about a serious dilemma, especially among men of color in the US: Insufficient numbers attend college. But Dobbs suggests that the problem isn't in that as much as in the gender percentages being the wrong way around. I think he would be fairly comfortable with 43% of university students being women.
The second item in that list, the difference in male and female unemployment rates, shows a tiny difference
Had Dobbs been able to do his little class some time earlier, he would have found large differences in the direction he wishes them to be. But the male unemployment rate has declined quite rapidly as the recession has eased itself, and the two rates are settling back to their usual statistical position which is rough equality (second column from the right)
The point here is that Dobbs uses data which does not reflect long-term patterns to bolster a long-term argument.
The third item, about the real earnings of men not having risen much over time, is also a serious problem. It has much to do with the outsourcing and globalization that Dobbs' own political party supports, promotes and advocates.
But notice that Dobbs decides to give us the percentages of women going to college but not the female median earnings. The reason is that those are quite a bit lower than the male median earnings, even after the latter haven't grown much over time. To show that would have interfered with Dobbs' thesis, because it would have shown men doing better in something than women, on average. But omitting it biases his little lesson.
The fifth item looks at one consequence of the bad labor market of recent years: more young men living with their parents than was the case in 2000, and attributes it to some other nefarious cause than the hand of the free markets that he otherwise worships.
The fourth, sixth and seventh items on Dobbs' list are pretty odd ones, because it's hard to interpret them as reflecting men being left behind, somehow, unless one agrees with Dobbs that men should all have access to obedient wives and lots and lots of children and no threat of a divorce (from the wife) and so on. Well, in general they can only be explained if Dobbs believes in male supremacy as the only situation where men are not "left behind."
But these items: men (and women) getting married later in life or not at all, more fathers living apart from their children and lower fertility rates than the US had in the 1960s, are not something that can be argued to reflect a boycott of marriage by men or some horrible plot against men in general or other such simple conspiracy theories.
To unwind that bundle from the other end, let's start with the seventh argument: The drop in US fertility rate. HOW does that show that men are in trouble? The 1960s fertility rate of 3.7 children per woman is probably measured before the pill. Dobbs likes that fertility rate and he doesn't like the current rate of 2.07 children per woman.
I get that. But I don't see what it could possibly have to do with his thesis here, unless Dobbs thinks that men's happiness is crucially dependent on siring very large families.
Dobbs argues that the fertility rate is low not for the reason that actually prevails (worldwide fertility rates are down and that has much to do with contraception) but because of single mothers! There's no man around to make them breed more, I guess.
Duh. I can't believe I'm writing about this seriously. The sixth and seventh items are both about the evils of single mothers, really. Dobbs has very simple, though unstated, theories about why the percentage of fathers not living with their children has grown (though it's still a minority arrangement) and why men (and women) seem to be getting married later or not at all.
For instance, he assumes that the latter is because men are boycotting marriage. For that to explain the later age at first marriage, we would have to assume that at various times in history men either boycotted marriage or really went for it. We would also have to assume that women have no say in any of this. It's just men boycotting marriage, and the reason why they would do so is left to hover in the air. No economic causes at all! No changes in the cultural ideas about marriage!
And divorce and single parenthood are also quite complicated matters which social scientists study from all sorts of angles. I can't fathom how the sixth point, about a certain percentage of fathers (27%) not living with their children, fits into Dobbs' theory. Is it that those fathers have decided to boycott fatherhood, too? Or is it that they have been rejected by the mothers of their children? In any case, why are phenomena that are usually discussed from the point of view of all the people that are affected by them suddenly seen as only problems about men?*
It's a mess, that list, because all the items in it share something only if one assumes that the traditional male breadwinner with a submissive and dependent family is the alternative to men being in trouble or being left behind**. It's also a biased list, of course, because it omits anything (say, the percentage of women in the US Congress or in speaking roles in major movies) where men fare much better than women.
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*The point is this: If we regard divorce or single parenthood a problem, why is it not discussed as a general problem, for both men, women and children? Why is it a male problem?
**The first item in Dobb's list is an important one. More young men should take education seriously and consider college.
But as I have written before, the difference in college enrollment rates by gender is a global phenomenon, ranging from such countries as Saudi Arabia to the Scandinavian democracies. Indeed, it is observed wherever women are allowed to go to college. It is partially, at least, explained by the fact that the jobs women have access to without college are poorly paid, in comparison to the jobs that men have access to without college. Still, the job markets are changing and education will matter more in the future and boys should be encouraged to think of higher education more.
The third item also matters, but it is largely the fault of outsourcing and globalized production strategies by Dobbs' beloved corporations. Those have caused the death of well-paying blue-collar jobs in the US.
Friday, 21 June 2013
I used to write a lot about gardening, believe it or not. I have a piece about a garden for guys (beer can mobiles, lots of arums) and a garden for gals (Venus traps and everything pink). But for quite a few years now this blog has been my main garden.
Still, I want to write a tiny warning about the danger of native plants gardening: If you are like me and want to go native for all sorts of good reasons, don't plant something that seeds like mad and grows eight foot tall and almost as wide. The neighbors don't care for it in their lawns. And I have to go and weed it out.
1. Wisconsin isn't doing that hot in job creation. Governor Scott Walker has tried everything he can think of: stripping workers' rights, courting corporations, focusing on getting more guns out there and so on. But, alas and alack, nothing works.
2. I wrote about Greg Mankiw defending the 1% (the richest of us all) at Eschaton. If you like to spend a lovely afternoon wading through economic arguments, that post has extra links.
3. James Taranto is very unhappy with the response his "war on men" article seems to have received on Twitter and on some blogs. "Lynch mob," he calls that reception, and argues that it proves his initial argument about a war on men right. Except that there could be a "war" on James Taranto, not on all men? Just pointing that out. My take on his original piece is here.
4. I went to the dentist to get my fangs sharpened. No cavities, because of that healthy diet of chocolate mice.
Wednesday, 19 June 2013
The world of pickup-artists is one I don't visit very often. There's something sad about it all (immature? lonely? lots of misplaced anger and pain?), but mostly my lack of frequent visits is because even a short dip in those waters makes me yearn for a brisk massage with barbed iron sponges and a few years in a shower of bleach.
Why that feeling? Probably because my sex places me in an odd outsider position there. Imagine a pike reading about how people best fish for pikes, and then you get the idea.
To understand what goes on in that alternate reality, you need to accept several ideas that might sound unfamiliar, even bizarre to you:
Men can be divided into alpha males and beta males, the former being the leaders, heroes, kings and victors, while the latter are doormats or feminist allies or nice guys who never get pu**y.
Alpha males get all the beautiful women. But all men are really entitled to those beautiful women, in terms of getting them to give men sex as often as men want. The PUAs tell all the supposed beta males how to get the beautiful women, in the exact same way that a book about pike fishing would tell fishers how to tire the fish out, where it might be most easily caught, and how to prepare it for eating (fry it in butter and eat it quickly).
All this is about sex as warfare or as a hunt. The beautiful women are the prey, the object is to get them in bed, and the advice the PUAs give is all about that. The scoring is based on how many one-night stands a man can get, preferably with women who weren't that much into him in the first place. And the basic trick is male dominance. You pretend to be a dominant alpha male, and then you get all the pu**y that rightly belongs to you.
I think where my feelings of sadness come in is in the near-total absence of any fondness for women the PUA world exhibits. Women are really the enemy, or objects for reaching sexual climax. When you combine that with the apparent feeling of sexual entitlement that PUAs possess, you get the hunting, trapping or fishing games. There's an underlying anger in it all, also revealed in the frequent argument that no woman ever lacks a willing male partner, that somehow women are "withholding" sex that they should be providing to all the men who worry that they might be betas, and so on.
That world is a firmly heterosexual one, by the way.
What brought these thoughts to the surface of my thought bubbles is a book project at Kickstarter. It's a trapping and hunting guide for guys. Or a seduction guide. The author advocates that men should take charge, be the leaders in sex, be modern alpha males:
Man #3: The Modern Alpha Male
He's not "alpha" in the fist-pumping, type-A, bro-type sense. Nor is he "alpha" for picking fights and putting down others. Yet, Women find him irresistible. He has no problem attracting and keeping women. His life is abundant. He has sex often.
In more cases than not, the only difference in the development of these three men is that man #3 learned to physically escalate from a younger age. Because he embraced his sexual side early, he naturally learned how to be successful with women. He benefited from the confidence and abundance mentality this gave him. Everything else auto-corrected.
Learning and practicing physical escalation with women is one of the final keys in your development. Master this one skill and you will be that much closer to becoming the man you want to be.
The author argues that men are notoriously bad at reading women's body language, so always grab her, pull her on your lap, place your joystick in her hand, tell her where to stick it and so on and so on. He does make a quick nod on taking a REAL no for a no, but given the difficulty men have in understanding women in general, I'm not sure how that message could be clearly differentiated from the types of "nos" that mean you can just plow in!
I get that the traditional dating rules can be tough for men, because of that expectation that they make the approaches. On the other hand, waiting for someone to approach can be equally tough. And if you then get a physical escalation approach from a PUA!
Still, none of this is about dating*, the way the term is usually construed. It's about a pu**y hunt, and that explains why the advice is never about how various women actually might feel or what they might be looking for and so on. Rather, it really is based on how to get that pretty pike swallow your worm.
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*There are lots of dating guides for heterosexual women, so I guess these types of books are dating guides for heterosexual men. Imagine the cultural clashes when the readers of those sex-differentiated guides meet each other! And yes, there have been guides about how to trap men for women. They are not much better, though I don't think they objectify the catch quite as clearly.
Here's a fun video for you to watch! Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) suggests that gender roles in marriage should be taught to young girls and boys at school. The roles he would teach them are the traditional ones, apparently based on the view that what fathers do and what mothers do are mutually exclusive tasks:
Gingrey also comes out as a firm defender of traditional marriage. That means one with traditional gender roles. Because same-sex marriages would have trouble deciding which of the partners is to play the head of the household and which one the faithful and obedient helper, of course Gingrey opposes those.
What's fun about this video is how it sits within the overall field of those who defend a hierarchical gender system. The largest part of the field argues that the traditional division of labor between men and women is either biologically decreed or decreed by a divine power. But if that doesn't seem to work, then we can teach that division of labor!
When the other political side does that, Gingrey would probably call it an attempt at social engineering...
Tuesday, 18 June 2013
He works for the Wall Street Journal and represents the other main stream in anti-feminists thinking. The first one is based on guy-religions, the second one is based on the more religious type of evolutionary psychology. Taranto is within the latter camp.
Now he tells us that there is a war against men, specifically against male sexuality. That he doesn't define that concept makes it hard to say what he means by the whole thing. It has something to do with the second wave of feminism, in the 1960s and 1970s, which was all a big mistake, as far as our James is concerned. Probably because of that evolutionary stuff in his religion.
In this video Taranto discusses one sexual abuse case from the military. It's clever work. He dissects one case which we are to take as a general example of how such things go*.
At the end of the video, Taranto blames women's sexual freedom for the war on men. At least that's how I interpret his statement, and that makes my head hurt. Is he saying that if women get drunk and enter a car with a man they have only themselves to blame for what happens next? Would there be no such war on men if we had all women in burqas or locked up in their homes? But how would that stop the war on male sexuality? What does he mean by men's sexuality?
I don't intend that fuzzy paragraph as sarcasm, mostly. I just wish to point out that Taranto's arguments are unclear, that deep beneath the surface there must lurk some sort of a hidden and menacing assumption about violence and sex, entitlement to sex, our immutably biological urges and other similar stuff.
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*That's a common trick in persuasive writing of the kind which doesn't care about averages and statistics and so on. For instance, you pick either Einstein or Hitler as your specimen guy, and either Mother Theresa or Britney Spears as your specimen gal, and then you let your words fly, to prove something about whole genders.
Note that this is not meant as a statement about the case Taranto discusses. I haven't read the material to judge his arguments about Lieutenant General Helms as such. The point is that one case is not proof of the general tendencies.
The skill gap argument: That US workers no longer have the skills US firms require, is an interesting one. The argument places the blame of labor market mismatches and even unemployment squarely on the shoulders of the workers and the US school systems. But is that the only theory going? What evidence do we have of such a general skill gap?
A gap between the skills of job applicants and the demands of the job they apply for no doubt exists in individual cases, even quite often (though it could go both ways when unemployment is high), and there might even be specific jobs for which the whole market shows the same pattern.
But employers have been known to blame the skill gap for their inability to find workers in a form which doesn't make much sense. To give you an extreme example, if I'm an employer looking for a qualified engineer at ten dollars per hour, I'm going to find a biiiiig skills gap. That's because the pay rate is not right and people who have student loans to pay from their engineering degree cannot afford to take such a low-paying job.
In short, statements from employers alone shouldn't be regarded as firm evidence that general and large skill gaps exist. The wages offered in a particular labor market should reflect properly functioning market conditions, not just someone's own desires about how little to pay, and the other variables which might have changed should also be analyzed.
As an example of the latter, might it not be the case that US firms in the past were willing to train people for a specific job and that this willingness has now declined? And what is the impact of outsourcing here? Perhaps it is the wage offers for jobs which have changed more than the job applicants' qualifications for the same? The concept of a "skill gap" that is relevant to employers is not quite the same as some absolute deterioration in US worker qualifications. Indeed, those qualifications could in theory go up while the global wages for their labor would decrease, in real terms. That would look like a skill gap of a type.
I haven't studied the literature on the general skill gap argument sufficiently to make any overall divine pronouncement about it. But it certainly makes sense to look at the whole question critically and to keep in mind who benefits from which argument.
What's hilarious about this proposed bill is the political troubles it has, once again, brought the Republican Party:
As introduced, the bill provided for an exception to the ban only in cases of a physical condition that endangers the life of the mother. In the Judiciary Committee last week, Republicans rejected Democratic attempts to include rape, incest and other health problems as grounds for exceptions.Bolds are mine. The Republicans are tone-deaf about this issue, utterly so, and the reason is most likely that they truly don't see women as a group of voters they should compete for.
But Franks, during debate on the rape exception, angered Democrats and drew unwanted publicity to the bill when he stated that cases of "rape resulting in pregnancy are very low."
Franks later rephrased his remark, but GOP leaders rushed to impose damage control. A provision was inserted in the bill heading to the House floor including a rape and incest exception, and Franks, who heads the Judiciary subcommittee on the constitution and civil justice, was replaced as floor manager for the bill by Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., who is not a member of the Judiciary Committee.
Democrats had pointed out that every Republican on the Judiciary Committee that approved the anti-abortion bill was a man.
Neither are they ultimately concerned about pregnant women or even children, after they are born. Indeed, many powerful pro-lifers seem to lose all interest in being pro-life once the birth has been forced to take place. Hence my name for them: forced-birthers.
Monday, 17 June 2013
We know that this is the case, given all those Republican politicians who want to do away with the rape exemption to whatever narrowly defined rights to abortion some people might be allowed to have by stating that women really can't get pregnant from rape. Other forced-birthers, such as Lila Rose, argue that a pregnancy can never kill a woman, either, so there's really no need to allow abortions evah!
Now Rheality Check tells us that Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) knows (just knows) that boy fetuses pleasure themselves as early as at fifteen weeks of age. Which means that all those medical authorities who believe that fetuses can't feel pain until much later are wrong.
If they can feel pleasure, surely they can feel pain! Mr. Burgess has watched sonograms! And he has concluded that the fetal movements are purposeful and of the type he can relate to.
That was mean of me. But all these people, going on about how women really can't get pregnant from rape and how pregnancies really cannot kill women, ever, they get me where it hurts: Where I see women, human beings, they see fetal aquaria.
This bill is an attempt to challenge Roe v. Wade, naturally, by essentially making all abortions after the twentieth week illegal. Given that background, it's important to point out that the proposed bill, HR 1797, has no exemptions for the woman's health, only for her life, and mental illness (being suicidal, say) is no excuse at all! That's because the sluts would use that as a pretense so that they can kill their unborn babies.
But in reality it is later in the pregnancy that severe health complications and other pregnancy risks appear. And those are the cases in which the forced-birthers want abortion to become illegal first.
Let me know if you find these annoying. I'm trying to use up all the baby thoughts I get while scouring the net for things to write about.
First, this NYT article speculates about what made Obama decide to support the rebels in Syria. My personal opinion is that nothing good can come from supporting either side in that war, sadly, because the war is no longer about democracy but about religious differences and because the odds are pretty high that the winners will be either tyrants or extreme Islamists. I think UN troops to create peace might work, but that's not feasible either.
Second, this Bloomberg article talks about the ways firms get to swap data with the government. No comment on that, my NSA readers!
Third, liberals love pope Francis, we are told. I'm holding my fervent love at bay to see what he says about us uterine people and about gay and lesbian people and so on. It's great that he is concerned about poverty. But poverty interacts with gender in various ways, and to be truly concerned about the lot of poor women would mean that they be allowed to have contraceptives.
Fourth, Scott Adams (remember him?) now thinks he got fired in the 1990s for possessing a scrotum.
Fifth, this piece talks about the experiences of a fifteen-year-old girl who tells us that she was told to cover up by a TSA officer at LAX.
Why is blog spam seasonal or fluctuating? Suddenly I get ten spams a day, usually not more than one a week. Is there a Spam Central somewhere on the net where people are told which blogs to really hit? You don't see most of the spam because it doesn't filter through into the comments, but it's boring extra work for me. Attacks are seasonal like that, too, though they probably depend on what I have recently written.
The spam doesn't really matter. But it makes comment-threads look cluttered and untidy and not cared for. That's the smaller sliver of Echidne speaking, the one who is houseproud.
Friday, 14 June 2013
I love these weirdo studies, I do! Now we are told, based on computer simulations and nothing else, that human females have the menopause because "at some point" in our evolutionary history men decided to mate with younger women. So there was no point in keeping that energy-intensive fertility machine going for older women and the ones who had the menopause mutation (that part is my guesswork) took over. Here's how one of the researchers explains all this to us:
"This paper is saying that men have played the major or dominant part in choosing mates," said biologist Rama Singh, who is a professor of population genetics and evolution at McMaster University in Canada. "Somewhere along the line in our evolutionary history, males did not mate randomly but preferred young women because they are more attractive."I like that very scientific-sounding statement in that last sentence. It's a bit circular, preferring young women because they are more attractive, which is the same as preferring younger women because one prefers them.*
As the study summary states, there are many theories about why menopause exists. None of them seem to be based on anything but theoretical speculations, however.
But this one elicits a few interesting questions: We are told that men are the more selective sex. That goes straight against the usual evolutionary-psychology argument that women are the more selective sex. It also goes against the usual evolutionary-psychology argument that men can mate with thousands of women, no trouble.
So why would men not mate with older women, too?
Another problem with the study is that the researchers seem to assume nothing bad happens to sperm quality as men age. Research suggests that this is not correct. The number of mutations in the sperm grows with age, the motility of the sperm decreases as well. Ignoring all that may not matter for the arguments in this piece, but it shows a lack of knowledge of the relevant area.
Finally, chimpanzees appear to prefer older females for mating purposes. Given that we are so often told to look at our closest relatives for guidance about our biology and behavior, that difference might be worth pondering about.
I'm not excluding this theory among the many menopause theories. But the fact is that we really have no evidence about the origins of the menopause and I wish researchers expressed the usual careful academic skepticism when talking about the meaning of their own research. That tends to disappear in these kinds of studies, at least when it comes to statements made to the public.
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*There's a deeper kind of circularity in these arguments, because usually the male preference for younger females is explained as a consequence of the greater fertile period those females have ahead of them. That's a reference to menopause, not just to getting older.
Last year it was beauty:
Dental assistant Melissa Nelson was fired for being too attractive, so she sued her employer. But Iowa's Supreme Court has upheld her firing as lawful.Nelson did nothing wrong. She didn't try to seduce her employer, she acted professionally and did her job well. Her firing was declared legal because it was based on an unprotected characteristic of workers, "beauty," and not on her gender or race or age. In a weird way it was her employer who acted unprofessionally.
In general, looking good is a positive trait. Attractive people tend to get paid more and get promoted more frequently.
But the opposite was true for dental assistant Melissa Nelson. Her employer viewed her as "irresistible" and a "threat" to his marriage, so he fired her. And according to Iowa's all-male Supreme Court, that was perfectly fine, ABC News reports.
But the Iowa all-male Supreme Court's argument that this has nothing to do with Nelson's gender is a bit simplistic. It has quite a bit to do with gender roles and the fact that looks are regarded as much more important for women than for men. And it seems that at least in Iowa you can now fire someone for how they look.
The more recent case tells us that in some cases it may be acceptable to fire someone because that person is the target of a potentially violent abuser. The woman with the abusive ex-spouse, Carie Charlesworth, teaches young children and the Catholic Diocese running the school she worked in decided to have her around is too big a risk. So she was let go:
It’s a story that has domestic violence advocates outraged, fearing it will only reinforce an age-old problem where victims stay silent — but equally concerned are the school's parents, not wanting their kids in the middle of it.“Basically, we’d had a very bad weekend with him, we’d called the sheriff’s department three times on Sunday with him,” said Charlesworth, referring to an incident in January that put her leave of absence in motion.She went to her principal at Holy Trinity School in El Cajon the following morning and told the principal to be on the lookout for her ex-husband. As many domestic violence cases go, this one has a trail of restraining orders and 911 calls. When Charlesworth’s ex-husband showed up in the school parking lot, the school went into lockdown.Charlesworth and her four kids, who also attended Holy Trinity School, have not been back since the January incident. A letter was sent home to parents the following day, explaining the situation and noting Charlesworth and her children were being put "on an indefinite leave.”While Charlesworth’s husband went to jail on two felony charges, she says she felt like a criminal too.“And that’s what it felt like, the kids and I were being punished for something we didn’t even do,” she told NBC 7 San Diego.Three months later, another letter arrived in the mail delivering a crushing blow. Charlesworth was fired for good, and after 14 years in the district not allowed to teach at any other Diocesan school.
What both of these cases share is the innocence of the workers who got fired. The firings were to protect someone else. In the domestic abuse case, those are the children at the school, in the beauty case those are the dentist and his wife and their marital harmony.
Thursday, 13 June 2013
Laurie Shrage has written a blog post on the New York Times Opinionator blog on the question whether men now have fewer reproductive rights than women, especially once an "accidental" conception has happened. This is a topic on which I'm likely to write a very loooooong commentary. My apologies for that in advance.
What Shrage argues is that once the flock of happy little sperm escapes confinement and one of them (at least) ends up devoured by that omnivorous egg (or eggs), the man has been yoked to fatherhood, whether he wishes it or not, if the owner of those eggs decides on motherhood. What that involuntary fatherhood seems to mean, when viewed in minimal terms, is that the man must pay child maintenance for over a decade.
The impregnated woman (a disgusting term, I think, for some reason) has the choice of abortion (at least in a few states in the US and until the Republicans cut off that option), and she has the choice of completing the pregnancy. She even has the option of giving the child up for adoption or abandoning it legally. But Shrage thinks the man has none of those options.
I think she is mistaken about the latter two alternatives. A single father, with custody of his child, could give the child up for adoption, in the absence of the mother or any knowledge of her, and a single father could also deposit the child in one of those hospitals which allow it as a legal option. Thus, it is only the abortion alternative that men who don't want to be fathers are not allowed to enforce. And that's because the process is taking place inside the woman's body, which gives her some additional rights.
So what do I think about this question of forced fatherhood? My thoughts are complex, but I can tell right off the bat that until we invent an artificial womb and 100% effective birth control when not using it, the basic setup remains tilted because of the fact that it is the woman's body in which the process takes place.
And in that sense men do, indeed, have fewer non-reproductive and reproductive rights, in a few privileged places where both contraception and abortions are widely available. In large parts of this world men probably have better non-reproductive and reproductive rights than women do.
The basic setup would be tilted the other way round if men were like seahorses and performed the pregnancy. Then they would have extra say in what is going to happen to their bodies.
Historically speaking, a man having sex with a woman he wasn't married to mostly got away scot-free, whether she got pregnant or not. That's the background against which these developments should be judged. Getting away scot-free is not what happens with unintended pregnancies. The woman must undergo pregnancy and birth or an abortion, as a minimum, and it's not realistic to argue that the man should have zero negative consequences from having unprotected sex or a contraceptive fail.
And once the child is born, there are three individuals one must be concerned about. The rights the parents have at that time must be balanced with the rights and needs of the child. Child maintenance, for instance, is about the child, not its custodial parent. If the custodial parent cannot make it on her or his own, then the government (all of us) must chip in.
In short, the question is complicated and doesn't lend itself to easy or flippant answers of the type the pro-lifers or forced-birthers use as advice to women: If you don't want to be a parent, just keep your legs crossed. I wonder if they are going to use a related exhortation to men who don't want to become parents, either.
An extreme interpretation of Srage's arguments suggests to me something utterly impractical: The idea that a man could simply declare he didn't want to be a father and then escape all consequences of the conception, with the possible exception of paying some of the pregnancy- or abortion-related costs (as Srage proposes). If such a rule was adopted and applied across the board, the incentives for men to use contraception could be vastly reduced. And logically that should result in a lot less free-wheeling heterosexual sex in general, once the rules became generally known to all women, too, because such a rule would increase the costs of sex-for-just-fun for women. Like returning to the old historical rules, eh?
Still, I can see how the current arrangement can be rotten for men who end up becoming fathers when they don't wish that outcome. Nobody should be forced into that position, or tricked into it and so on.
That's why I wonder why there seems to be no lucrative market for a truly effective male contraceptive pill. It would solve all these problems in the simplest possible way. Couples could still use condoms for the prevention of disease but a breaking condom would not be such a calamity. And men would be in control of their own fertility and could not be forced into fatherhood that easily.
Indeed, creating pressure on a male contraceptive pill seems the obvious answer here. It would much reduce the magnitude of the problem, given comparable data from the female contraceptive pill.
This is just a delicious story abut a Maine Republican telling us that man-brains get that health care costs money, woman-brains think it's free and want it:
House Minority Leader Ken Fredette (R-ME) invoked the classic gender-stereotyping book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus to explain how he is struggling to reconcile his rational male consideration of costs with Democrats’ apparently female desire for free things.
The Maine People’s Alliance flagged the sexist speech:
As I listen to the debate today and earlier debate on this bill, I can’t help but think of a title of a book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. And it’s a book about the fact that men sort of think one way in their own brain, in their own world. And women think another way in their own brain and in their own world. And it really talks about the way that men and women can do a better job at communicating. Because if you listen to the debate today, in my mind — a man’s mind — I hear two fundamental issues. From the other side of the aisle, I hear the conversation being about: free. ‘This is free, we need to take it, and it’s free. And we need to do it now.’ And that’s the fundamental message that my brain receives. Now, my brain, being a man’s brain, sort of thinks differently, because I say, well, it’s not — if it’s free, is it really free? Because I say, in my brain, there’s a cost to this.
Bolds are in the original. I think Mr. Fredette is just a Bear of Very Little Brain. What he does isn't terribly unusual, that labeling the opposition as stupid and as not thinking very clearly. I've done that myself in some sudden rage. What's less usual is to loudly state that woman-brains don't understand money.
Wednesday, 12 June 2013
David Brooks laments the loss of all those social ties and regards Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower/leaker, as a major example of what happens when our intimate ties fray and break:
According to The Washington Post, he has not been a regular presence around his mother’s house for years. When a neighbor in Hawaii tried to introduce himself, Snowden cut him off and made it clear he wanted no neighborly relationships. He went to work for Booz Allen Hamilton and the C.I.A., but he has separated himself from them, too.I bolded the most interesting sentence in that quote. Brooks is an authoritarian, though heavily disguised. Like a lone wolf pretending to be one of the sheep, telling the sheep how good the various ties are that bind them, and lamenting the awful fate of a solitary sheep lost from the flock.
Though thoughtful, morally engaged and deeply committed to his beliefs, he appears to be a product of one of the more unfortunate trends of the age: the atomization of society, the loosening of social bonds, the apparently growing share of young men in their 20s who are living technological existences in the fuzzy land between their childhood institutions and adult family commitments.
If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world. Instead, it’s just the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state.
I'm not disagreeing with Brooks on the importance of social ties, but pointing out that he never questions the nature of those traditional ties he so adores. He offers us his alternatives: Either suffer alone or live your life in the place the "gently gradated authoritative structures" give you.
But those traditional ties are not equally protective or equally demanding for all, and many of the most powerful in the society appear not to be too bothered about the ties supposedly binding them, unless it's to a very close and small group of like-thinking and similarly positioned individuals.
This post is about a small sliver of Brooks' arguments. For a very good take on the whole of it, read Amy Davidson's take in the New Yorker.
1. This bit about some traders paying for advance government information matters quite a bit, because the economists' market models require that information be available for all for competition to work properly. Besides, the high price of getting the early warnings benefits the wealthier market players.
2. Yet another wingnut politician, Trent Franks, who knows that one cannot really get pregnant from rape. The reason for these arguments is to pave the road for banning abortion even in the case of rape. Other forced-birthers tell us that abortion is never necessary to save the pregnant woman's life, and that argument is used to pave the road for banning abortion in all cases. That's what El Salvador has, by the way...
3. Even feminists need to be hot to get their point across. Except that it doesn't work that way, because the imagined causality, among the opposing camp, assumes that a woman becomes a feminist because she is ugly. Therefore, all feminists are ugly, QED. The other crap that link mentions is much worse, of course.
4. Americans disapprove of the government surveillance programs. But there's the predictable party-based difference. The disapproval probably increases if the party you oppose is in power.
Contents: Sexual violence.
The story I link to from here is a distressing one, about child molestation and alleged rape and what the consequences of it are for a young pregnant girl:
Now, a 14-year-old in Elwood, Indiana who is eight months pregnant faces ongoing harassment simply because her neighborhood sees her as a very young pregnant girl. But a reporter at the Indianapolis Star writes that her town does not know the full story of the 17-year-old boy who physically overpowered her after she told him “no.” On Tuesday, he faces sentencing for three counts of child molestation.I don't know enough about this particular incident to tell whether the vandals are supporters of the boy who is accused of having raped the girl or whether the vandals are from the community in general. Though the latter seems more likely, given that the court case is not common knowledge in the town.
At the same time the girl has encountered vicious public shaming from her community, she and her mother Kristy Green have spoken out because they worry her assailant will walk free in juvenile court:
“I can’t walk out the door without someone calling me a whore or slut,” the girl said. “I used to have a lot of friends, or people I thought were my friends, but as soon as this happened I just isolated myself.” The repeated vandalism incidents at the family’s home — including the words “whore” and “slut” scrawled on the garage doors — were reported to police. But Green said no charges were filed because there were no witnesses to the acts.
If it is the latter, what we see here is the gatekeeper methodology in full action: Women and girls are supposed to be the goalkeepers. Men and boys are supposed to try to score. The game is cruel, as we can see, and it is also illogical, both in assigning the responsibility to stop the goals to young girls but not the power to do so, and also in its underlying assumption that the game is supposed to be adversarial, that the women and girls should not want to score at all and if they do, well, then they are sluts and whores. The cruelty is at its apex when the girl tried to keep the goal but the puck was rammed through. As seems to be the case here.
It's that game we need to change. Sex and love and so on are not a game of hockey or football. Scoring in such a game is not winning, and encouraging the game scenario is one way of creating rape cultures.
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
The Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of Virginia (Virginia is for lovers, according to tourism promoters), E. W. Jackson, has pretty unusual ideas. He has written that birth defects are caused by sin. Whether that is just general free-floating sin of all humans or specific sins of the parents of the child isn't clear to me.
E.W. Jackson has also stated that Planned Parenthood is more lethal to blacks than the KKK ever was. That's the idea of abortions as intended racial genocide. But E.W. Jackson must have forgotten about all those pap smears and breast examinations that Planned Parenthood also provides.
And in 2012 the nominee for lieutenant governor in the loving state of Virginia expressed his intense dislike of gays and lesbians, calling them bad names. He has continued telling us what is wrong with gays and lesbians as well as many other types of Americans.
Mr. Jackson is clearly running as a very fundamentalist preacher. Whether that's what the state of Virginia really wants remains to be seen.
First, this story about a letter sent fifty years ago to a female Harvard applicant is salutary reading. The world has changed for the better, at least in some countries. Much work remains to be done on the global level, however.
Second*, as a response to those who argue that girls and women just can't do science or at least don't want to do science, well, some, at least, are good at it.
Third, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologist has (finally) made a statement about all those things the forced-birther politicians require them to do:
The statement specifically denounces several types of laws, including those that tell physicians what to say to women about breast cancer risk and breast density, those that mandate outdated abortion treatment protocols, and those that require women to undergo ultrasounds and view the images before having an abortion. ACOG in the statement acknowledges that laws can promote public health and help provide for medical services, but it cautions that "laws that veer from these functions and unduly interfere with patient-physician relationships are not appropriate."
What they are supposed to say about breast cancer risks are untruths. Or lies, if you prefer a more direct word. Abortions do not increase the risk of breast cancer, based on all large studies with good data.
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*KHBuzzard in the comments noted that this is an old story, from 2011. My apologies for that. I have faced this possibility a lot in my blogging career (because people re-start a discussion about something old without mentioning that it is old), This is the first time I failed to spot that something wasn't new. As an aside, I once wrote a really neat and funny post about something and then couldn't use it because the original piece was five years old...
Monday, 10 June 2013
Blogging is a weird business (let's pretend that it IS a business), because once a blogger has developed a voice (a gruff one, a whining one), whether that voice is used or not starts to matter to the blogger if to nobody else.
It's like the empty space in paintings. That matters, too, for the totality of the experience.
Duh. What I mean is that there are zillions of topics I never write about, however important they are, because they are not within my pay grade. Others have the years of experience that properly addressing them requires, others have better sources and a better platform, others actually live a particular experience. Even us divines must specialize in something.
But I still wonder if my silence on certain topics is taken as a statement about something more than the limits of my expertise. The reality is that on many, many topics I do better as the reader than the writer.
But it's true that I pick and choose even among the topics that I know a lot about, and that I often go for the topic I enjoy writing about, though I do want to cover whatever seems very important to cover. Feeling that little engine starting to purr away inside me is a sign that one of the tiny windows to our general subconsciousness might be ajar, that I might be able to quickly snatch something of wider significance out of it, that the topic is for me, in some odd way.
On the other hand, I just like certain writing assignments and dread others. For the latter I need moolah.
Double duh.
All that is a long and self-involved prelude about topics that I think I should write more about (say, guns in the United States and how they make the society polite ("an armed society is a polite society"), if they do, by removing large numbers from it in neat and polite coffins).
One of those topics is always whatever the current public debate concerns, such as right now the question of government surveillance.
I don't have the expertise to write on the topic, just the kinds of concerns anyone in the audience might have:
The lack of safeguards, the scope of the program and the fact that someone working for a subcontractor, with just a few years of experience, appears to have had access to the data on a very high level. The question how many terrorist attacks all this surveillance has prevented, the obvious lures it has for whichever party is in power at any particular moment, the fact that once this became entrenched, under the Bush administration, no future head of the state would wish to relinquish such powers and so on.
Then there are the side-issues: How the conservatives were all for the system under Bush but now opposed to it. That political game. And the question what ordinary Americans (and people in other countries) think about this.
My own impressions match with those at Alicu blog, in the sense that I have sorta assumed all this was going on once the floodgates were opened. And it's not just the government which collects information on us. The corporations do, too.
Those beliefs of mine don't make what has been revealed any less worrisome or any less important to fix, but they dull my instant-outrage reflex.
Some of it may be similar to what happened with the airport gropings etc. Those of us who have been groped for years both for medical reasons and because of street harassment and such have a different background, more time getting accustomed to something and that, too, dampens the instant-outrage reflex. Similarly, if one has assumed that this crap is happening, then finding out that it IS happening is less shocking.
It still needs to be fixed, naturally.
This is both an interesting piece of news and an opportunity to point out how reporting changes what the reader comes away with.
The story, as it is given at the website of the Finnish public television system (yle), is that some local train services in Sweden were last year taken over by a company called Arriva. Whether that is a privatization of services which in the past were not private is unclear. But in any case Arriva gave the staff on the trains a new dress code: No shorts, only long pants or skirts. Shorts were allowed before Arriva took over.
What happened then, according to the yle site? It has been very hot in Sweden recently, and according to one train driver the temperature inside his compartment rose to over 90 degrees. More than ten men working the line have chosen to come to work in skirts. They are cooler in the heat and the dress code allows them. You can watch a video of a couple of skirt-wearing men at the site.
When I decided to write about this I tried to find an English language source. The one I found gives a slightly different story:
Male staff on Stockholm’s commuter trains have begun wearing skirts to circumvent a ban on shorts as sweltering heat hit the Swedish capital this week.It focuses on the idea that skirts are for women and trousers are for men and then goes on to explaining Swedish gender policies and so on, and it lets Hedenius imply that the men who are doing this want to wear "women's clothing" rather than something cool in the summer.
Around 15 male train drivers and other staff wore skirts this week on the suburban Roslagsbanan train service, where temperatures inside the carriages can reach 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit), transport company Arriva said on Sunday.
“Our policy is that you have to look well dressed and proper when representing Arriva, and that means trousers if you’re a man and a skirt if you’re a woman, but no shorts,” Arriva spokesman Tomas Hedenius told AFP.
“But if there’s a man who is keen to wear women’s clothing, such as a skirt, we have said that’s okay,” he added. The company could change its policy this autumn after receiving feedback from its employees.
The differences are subtle in the two interpretations, but it made me think how very easily we can be influenced by that very subtlety.
As far as I can tell, the point the men who wear skirts wanted to make is that skirts are more comfortable in the heat than long pants.
The reverse point is equally obvious but not stated: Skirts can be extremely uncomfortable during the long and cold Scandinavian winter and shouldn't be required for either sex because of that. One engine driver also mentions that the skirts are cumbersome for certain tasks which require climbing, say. If the company really requires women to wear them all the time, it may keep women out of certain jobs.
Then there's the fact that all this is about what employers can demand from their employees, that dress codes affect the comfort and even the health of the workers.
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