To Be Happy, We Must Admit Women And Men Aren't Equal

Yesterday I had the weirdest Internet day:  Venturing into places where I'm the Antichrist and mostly by accident!  Two of the sites had to do with Neo-Hitlerites (my term for racists who kinda like Hitler or think he was just misunderstood and who also hate Jews, blacks and women).  I was somewhat surprised by the fact that these guys are not only obsessed with race and the establishment of a White Homeland and all sorts of very, very nasty stuff.  They are also utterly into the oppression of women and telling us our proper role!

This makes sense, of course.  If you want to create a mega-country with only white people in it you need to get white women to start breeding to the maximum.  Women are the cannons and babies are the cannon balls and the soldiers operating the cannons must be these race-separatist men.  And cannons don't go to college or steal jobs from men.

One site told me, quite seriously, that feminism is a Jewish plot to make all non-Jews go extinct.  Its purpose is the destruction of the family which results in low birth rates, single mothers who cannot cope and so on.  The solution, it seems, is for men to man-up, grab women by the next and grind their faces into the dirt.  She likes it.  She really does, because evolution made woman interested in only two things:  pleasing the man and having as many babies as possible.  Men, on the other hand, are created Leaders by evolution!  All white men, that is. -- Don't you just love the various theories of our evolution people feel free to present, these days?

Anyway, this site told me that women should be at home caring for children because that's what evolution created women for.  Because women are so emotional, men should make all decisions except those about children.   I find it hilarious when we get a whole story how all unequal arrangements are to benefit the children and then men would leave that most precious cause for existence to be decided over by the terribly emotional women!

While scrubbing my eyes with steel wool in the shower I contemplated the fact that the story that site told about women is identical to the story extreme Islamists tell about women which is identical to the story fundamentalist Christians tell about women.  But in some ways this site seems more honest because the writer doesn't even pretend that any of this is for the benefit of women.  Cannons.

So after disinfecting myself thoroughly and repeating the mantra "only a few rotten apples", I strayed onto a very similar but smarter site from a YouTube video of this Superbowl ad, because the site sent a commando unit of misogynists to take over the comments thread.  They really do hate us!  Especially feminists because feminism stands in the way of the Dominant Alpha Wolf Getting His Way.  Which is pretty funny, given that alpha wolves don't seem to exist in the wild.   They are family guys.

Anyway, these asshats were so nasty and dehumanizing that I wanted to see who their daddy is.  He's a Nationalist, he tells us, meaning that he is not racist but just wants all races to have their own countries and besides, Hitler was badly misunderstood.  He wants to abolish the Nineteenth Amendment because he believes that women's suffrage destroyed the White Family though he admits that it most likely won't get abolished. 

He also wants to ban women from becoming physicians (I was too tired to find out why but suspect it's too high a role for women).  And he is opposed to abortion, thinks homosexuality is a disease caused by early childhood homosexual abuse and so on.  Interestingly, he seems to have joined the misogynists openly not because he would feel strongly about the perfidy of women as a sex but because his plan for a White Homeland requires taking away women's human rights.  Cannons, again.

And no, I'm not linking to either site.  And yes, I had to do the steel wool operation again.

There's something very wrong about me because the third piece I read was on the Fox News website, titled "To Be Happy, We Must Admit Women And Men Aren't "Equal.""  Suzanne Venker's piece  has snippets such as this

• It’s time to say what no one else will: Feminism didn’t result in equality between the sexes – it resulted in mass confusion. Today, men and women have no idea who’s supposed to do what.
• 
  
• Prior to the 1970s, people viewed gender roles as as equally valuable. Many would argue women had the better end of the deal! It’s hard to claim women were oppressed in a nation in which men were expected to stand up when a lady enters the room or to lay down their lives to spare women life. When the Titanic went down in 1912, its sinking took 1,450 lives. Only 103 were women. One-hundred three.
• 
  
• Compare that with last year’s wrecked cruise line, the Costa Concordia. It resulted in fewer deaths, but there was another significant difference. “There was no ‘women and children first’ policy. There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboats. It was disgusting,” said passenger Sandra Rogers, 62.
• 
  
• The captain of the ship agrees. In USA Today, Francesco Schettino was asked about his New Year’s resolution. He responded, “Bone up on the parts about ‘women and children first’ and ‘the captain goes down with his ship.’

Mmm.  Thousands of years of unequal laws were all worth it because men stood up when a woman arrived in the room and because in one shipwreck most of those who drowned were men. *

 

The idea here is that chivalry was a far-ranging social force which women received in exchange for carefully prescribed traditional gender roles and subjugation.  But if that had been the truth nobody in those golden pre-feminist years would have been raped, no woman would have been beaten, no woman would have been treated badly at her job, say.  And none of those early writers would have written these sorts of things about women if people truly valued women and men and the traditional male and female roles equally. 

I won't veer to the other extreme from Venker, however.  There were both men and women in the past who didn't criticize or dislike women but worked for more rights for women.  Still,  donning the traditional gender female role of the past certainly did not save women from being hated by some or from having less rights and respect.  Even today, many of the MRA sites criticize women in the labor force for taking away men's jobs and women at home for not working.  You really cannot win those battles, my sweet Suzanne.

But of course Suzanne isn't interested in any of that.  She's interested in selling books which she shouldn't be interested in, given her own game rules.  She should be immersed in her home and that's it.  After all, the traditional gender roles assigned all public sphere stuff to men.

What about those gulf-like gender differences which we must admit to before we can be "happy?"  Are women really from Venus and men from Mars, and if so, how can I get my return ticket to Venus?  

 

Funnily enough, I also came across this article, having to do with a study which measured various personality traits of men and women, using physical strength of the comparison:

 

Dating book authors and policymakers alike often claim that scientific research proves men and women are vastly different. But a team of researchers analyzed data from thousands of people across many different studies, and found that lots of traits we tend to think of as deeply gendered really aren't.
Study authors Bobbi Carothers and Harry Reis used both their own questionnaires and research by others to look at the characteristics of 13,301 men and women. Specifically, they wanted to find out whether traits like assertiveness broke down neatly by gender or were more evenly distributed, with some men and some women reporting high levels of assertiveness. Other traits they looked at included physical strength, caring for others, and being comfortable with casual sex.

I haven't read the study.  But with that reservation (and remembering that we are comparing this Suzanne Venker's Private Opinions), here are two graphs which show the distributions of physical strength and assertiveness of men and women in the study:

 

What those graphs demonstrate is that assertiveness is much, much more equally distributed between men and women than physical strength (probably upper-body strength).

Here's the problem with Venker's arguments:  She posits a Happy Past when it wasn't especially happy and probably less happy than the present.  She then gives two examples of male chivalry as the reward for female subjugation, and one is simply hot air, the other one the only example always given at the MRA sites about how women were better off in the past, at least if they traveled on the Titanic. 

 

Now, most of us will never experience a situation like the Titanic, which makes its mythical importance in the MRA circles so very odd.  What those men did many decades ago is supposed to justify all sorts of goodies to today's men, even if they never gave up their lives for a woman. But if we used the same logic, the gang rapes of women in Bosnia should bear equally heavily on all men living today, and they should be used as examples of the lack of chivalry on men's part.  I'm pretty sure that the Bosnian women weren't hairy feminazis so feminism cannot be blamed for those atrocities. --  But that's where we go when we start positing that all men are the same with each other and all women the same with each other, and either taking credit for our sex or blaming the other in toto.

 

That, and the assumption of innate  gulf-like gender differences between men and women is the biggest unsupported assertion Venker makes, together with the assertion (also given without any proof) that one will find happiness by following her recommendations.  

 

In some ways that last part is the bit I feel worst about because she will never be held responsible for any unhappiness her advice causes.  Yet she is engineering human relationships, without telling us that if we follow her advice the next generation will continue reading stuff about women's intellectual inferiority, about the gold-digging aspect of women at home (what do they DO all day?  And no, that's not my question but something that was common in those pre-feminist days in cartoons and such) and about the importance of letting men be men equaling letting men be the bosses.  She's making more work for the feminists of the future, and believe me that they will exist because, my sweetings, feminism is an evolutionary adaptation!  So I have decided.

 

There!  I went all shrill in this one and boy doesn't it feel good!  The reason was that I first waded in turds, then received a prettily wrapped box with a pink bow on it, opened it and found:  A turd.

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*One site on the Titanic has slightly different death figures.  It looks like her female death figures were for passengers only but the total figures were for passengers and crew.  The crew was predominantly male.  But so were the passengers in that my link shows 776 adult male passengers and 896 male staff and crew.  The adult female figures were:  412 passengers and 22 crew.  The death rates were considerably higher for men than women but they were also higher for second class passengers than first class passengers and highest all for those traveling in steerage.

The valor of many men on the Titanic is not something I debate.  The point is that if we pick one example of behavior as the justification for traditional gender roles why this particular example?

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On The Reauthorization of VAWA

For some reason reading about the Republican resistance towards reauthorizing VAWA (the Violence Against Women Act) makes me think about fairy tales.  The Big Bad Wolf and Goldilocks and The Three Bears.  

I can't decide if this is one of those truly weird things specific to me where I write a serious and sad poem and then must (just must) add "duh" to it or something equally inane, or if my mind is trying to tell me something important here.  Let's assume that it is the latter and let's ask what that something might be.

The Republicans blocking VAWA consist of a group of Big Bad Wolves, including Tim Scott:

• He helped block its renewal last year while in the U.S. House of Representatives, and Tim Scott has tried it again yesterday from his new spot in the U.S. Senate.
• As a result, not only is the Violence Against Women Act expired, but without funding options, too, and it could take even longer to be reinstated.
• Although a bipartisan panel of 85 senators openly supported it, Scott and seven other Republican senators blocked the 2013 edition of the bill from coming to the floor for debate, Huffington Post reports.
• VAWA’s provisions, which include legal aid for abused females and funding of rape crisis centers, are now halted.

• ...
•  
• Domestic violence is a prominent topic is Scott’s state of South Carolina, unfortunately. Over 36,000 women in the state are victims every year, according to the state Attorney General.
• South Carolina ranks highest in homicide committed against women by men, and one of out every eight women in the state are victims of physical abuse at least once in their lifetimes.
• The Republican senators who joined Scott in blocking VAWA from debate prior to vote were Rand Paul (Ky.), Pat Roberts (Kan.), Marco Rubio (Fla.), Mike Lee (Utah), James Risch (Idaho), Mike Johanns (Neb.) and Ted Cruz (Texas).

Is calling these men the  Big Bad Wolves unfair?  Perhaps.  But I think the link in my brain comes from the Little Red Riding-Hood who was sent out into the woods all alone,  even though her parents knew that a wolf was roaming about.  Yet it was a little girl they sent, with food and drink, to take care of the aged grandmother.

In modern terms that looks like child endangerment.  How it fits into this story is perhaps the idea that the traditional roles of women are not completely different from the role of the little Red Riding-Hood.  They are based on the view that one doesn't wash the family's dirty linen in public, that intimate partner abuse is almost a private thing and not something the society should try to change.  They are based on the view that the family is a private sphere where the law is in the hands of the head of the family.  If there's a wolf in the family, well, that's the family's business.

And yes, I know that the explicit criticisms of VAWA from those conservatives are about something different.   Hence the second fairy tale in my head, the one about  Goldilock and the three bears.    That story is all about looking and looking to find something exactly right.  There's also another  big bad wolf story having to do with pigs which conveys a related message.

In a similar vein, the conservatives are looking and looking and finding the VAWA wrong.  If it's not one thing (LGBT or Native American women shouldn't be covered)  it's something else.  For instance, one must prove that VAWA has reduced domestic violence.  Otherwise it cannot be reauthorized.  But we don't use that yardstick in determining if other laws about crime should be upheld or not.

My personal opinion is that the name of the law was probably a mistake, because VAWA covers particular kinds of crimes (domestic violence, sexual assaults, dating violence and stalking) which in the past did not get the societal attention they deserved and which also happen to affect more women than men.  Thus, it's not about all violence that women might be victimized by,  and men, too, can benefit from VAWA if they suffer from the consequences of the type of violence VAWA describes.

But the law itself is needed.  Consider this:

• Native American women living on Indian reservations are highly susceptible to violence by non-Native men because tribal courts lack jurisdiction over them, even when these crimes are committed on tribal lands. Today, federal and state law enforcement has jurisdiction over domestic violence committed on the reservation, but they often lack the means or incentive to pursue such cases, and state's attorneys repeatedly decline to take legal action. This means that under our current system, non-Native men who prey upon Native women are pretty much immune from prosecution.

 That should be unacceptable.

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Clearly, The Women Should Have Been Armed!

Another installment in the American gun news:

An attorney representing two women who were delivering newspapers when they were shot by police during a massive manhunt for an ex-LAPD officer called the incident "unacceptable," saying his clients looked nothing like the suspect.
Emma Hernandez, 71, was delivering the Los Angeles Times with her daughter, Margie Carranza, 47, in the 19500 block of Redbeam Avenue in Torrance on Thursday morning when Los Angeles police detectives apparently mistook their pickup for that of Christopher Dorner, the 33-year-old fugitive suspected of killing three people and injuring two others.
Hernandez, who attorney Glen T. Jonas said was shot twice in the back, was in stable condition late Thursday. Carranza received stitches on her finger.
PHOTOS: Manhunt for ex-LAPD officer
"The problem with the situation is it looked like the police had the goal of administering street justice and in so doing, didn't take the time to notice that these two older, small Latina women don't look like a large black man," Jonas said.

I get how horrible this declaration of asymmetric warfare is for the police.  But trigger-happy is not the way to go.

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Getting My Cross-Country Skis Ready...

Small snow flurries are being promised here.  Or the snowmageddon as some call it.   It won't probably look as impressive as the picture below (courtesy of VA) which is from northern Lapland some years ago.  But if this blog goes silent for a while it's most likely because of power cuts.

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On False Positives in Mammograms

A study about mammograms for older women has some pretty shocking findings:

The experts gathered and analyzed data from 1996 to 2006 on 2,993 older females with breast cancer and 137,949 females without breast cancer.

The data, taken from five Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium (BCSC) mammography registries in Vermont, Washington, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and California, is "the largest available screening mammography data set in the United States," Braithwaite said.

There were no differences seen in late-stage breast cancer rates between the subjects who received a mammogram annually and those screened biennially.

On the other hand, the scientists discovered that 48% of women between 66 and 74 years old who received annual screening had false positive results, while only 29% of females in the same age group who received screening every other year had false positives.

It  is that false positive rate* which is shocking.  What the study seems to be saying (haven't looked at the original) is that roughly every other woman in that age group who had a mammogram every year had a false positive finding during that ten-year-period.

Now that's not a very good test.  A false positive finding means that the test indicated a possible cancer which then later diagnoses showed was not the case.   To have that happen to half of all women screened annually means not only unnecessary anxiety but also pretty high costs in terms of those extra diagnoses which are needed, and it may be the case that some of those have a potential for negative health consequences, too.

What this suggests to me is an urgent need to develop better tests.
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*Because few tests are perfect, the results can fall into four categories.  The ones we want are the true positive findings and the true negative findings.  True positives are the cases where someone has the disease that is screened for and the test tells us so.  True negatives are the cases where someone does not have the disease that is screened for and the test tells us so.

The undesirable outcomes are false negatives and false positives.  False negatives are probably more serious than false positives, because they mean that someone has the disease but the test fails to pick it up.  False positives mean that the screened person does not have the disease but the test indicates that she or he does have it.  False positives result in further medical care which would not be carried out if we knew the true value.

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Wrecked Beauty

These pictures* about nature overtaking abandoned buildings, tunnels and so on are achingly beautiful.

Why?  I'm not sure but there's something about the lack of perfection that becomes perfection, something about them being a snapshot of life passing and ending, something about the extreme power of life in the way nature takes over, survives, even feeds on what humans once built, without any of it being violent or aggressive.

Nature, the final architect?  But this is a collaboration, a piece for two violins, a creation of a new masterpiece from an old masterpiece.  Just look at the added shades and nuances and how very right nature's additions are.

If I wanted to get a bit morbid here I'd point out that our lives are a bit like those pictures, with the nostalgia of the past, the continuous change, the understanding that we, too, shall end up back in the lap of the Mother, part of nature.  But in the meantime, what glory!
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*Link courtesy of Gromit

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Cantor Courts Girls!

That would be Eric Cantor, House Majority Leader (R-Va).  I started chuckling when reading through his recent speech to the American Enterprise Institute (which is like Santa's workshop for the capitalists).   The speech, always excepting the policy bits which are opposite, sounds like one of Obama's when his staff has harried him to talk more about women.  There's even stuff about women in the labor force which is not judgmental!  Mentioning daycare without droning on about its evils!  Cantor getting in touch with his feminine side!

And of course the Republican Party should put its open misogyny on a back-burner (like polite people do), and of course I'm glad to see Cantor try to do just that, because it's not terribly good for the party to be remembered partly as the party which worries about rapists' fatherhood rights.

Now that was mean of me.  But let's dig a little deeper into what Cantor's conversion to feminism might be all about:

In response to accusations that he is to blame for stalling the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) continued his efforts on Wednesday to soften his and the Republican party's reputation with women.
"You know, I as a gentleman care very deeply about women in the abuse situation, that we need to get them the relief that this bill offers," Cantor said on the House floor in response to a question from Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) about the status of VAWA. "That's what we want to do, that's our priority, we must move and act on this bill."

Words are cheap.

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