How To Fight Politely

Probably you kick someone in the groin and then mutter a polite "excuse me" and offer them a cucumber sandwich and some China tea?

Fighting politely on the Internet can be a real problem for us womenz because the rules are different.  If you fight nasty, then you are a horrible bitch.  If the opponent is also a woman, then it's a cat fight (Have you, by the way, ever seen a real cat fight?  It's a frightening experience.).

But if you don't fight at all you a) become inaudible and invisible and b) lose the argument.  So it goes.

Still, the question of good manners doesn't apply to just women, as this opinion  on Paul Krugman shows us:*

Bloomberg's Sara Eisen reached out to author and global thinker Niall Ferguson, who had this to say about the New York Times columnist and Princeton Nobel laureate (emphasis ours):
In my view Paul Krugman has done fundamental damage to the quality of public discourse on economics. He can be forgiven for being wrong, as he frequently is--though he never admits it. He can be forgiven for relentlessly and monotonously politicizing every issue. What is unforgivable is the total absence of civility that characterizes his writing. His inability to debate a question without insulting his opponent suggests some kind of deep insecurity perhaps the result of a childhood trauma. It is a pity that a once talented scholar should demean himself in this way.

Krugman's answer:

What a pathetic response. Notice that he is doing precisely what I never do, and making it about the person as opposed to his ideas. All I have ever done to him is point out that he seems to not know what he is talking about, and that he has been repeatedly wrong. I would never stoop to speculating about his childhood! If he can't handle professional criticism -- which is all that I have ever offered -- he should go find another profession.

Hmm.  If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.  Which is, interestingly, one of the few saws about aggressiveness that is set in a female setting.

This whole topic is quite complicated and I find myself skipping all over the place:

1.  In principle, I believe in politeness, in the idea that whoever I debate is most likely a human being (there might be demons and hence the reservation) and should be treated with that basic courtesy.

2.  But, and this is a big but:  I have learned, in the course of my long blogging career, that the fact of my femaleness elicits aggression and comments (a foaming c**t) that I would not get had I blogged under a handle such as Brawny Bob For Christ.  No amount of divine politeness completely works to rescue me from those comments or the very nasty threats.  So how to respond to all that?  Should I employ my viper tongue?  I have that gift but it's largely kept under lock-and-key.

Despite my explicit endeavors to be polite, I came across one site where my writing was described as vitriolic and vicious.  And me such a sweet and gentle and caring goddess!  The world is so unfair.

3.  The further implication of the gender difference in attacks is a troubling one.  If women are attacked more (which seems to be the case) then those attacks can have a silencing effect on women and may reduce their participation in online debates.  Or require the veil of a false handle, at least.

4.  The wider problem with politeness on the Internet is an obvious one.  We have now learned what people might say when they can say it anonymously, and much of that is truly nasty.  Read enough comments threads, and no amount of chanting "these are outliers, these are the extremists" will stop you wondering if you live in a world inhabited largely by a breed of secret bigots and misogynists.

5.  But the Ferguson-Krugman exchange is not about that.  It's about what quite famous male experts can say in public debates, and in that sense it poses an interesting question.  It also notes one of the no-nos in public debates (personal insults), followed by a possible insult about not being equipped to participate in hard give-and-take debates.

I think there is a difference in how right-wing and left-wing debaters are treated in this sense.  Think of Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh.  One can get away with real rudeness on the right, whereas the same level of rudeness from the left is pointed out.

6.  Finally, one can have the most polite debate in the whole world on some topic such as "Are people like  Echidne persons or just vacuum cleaners for penises?" and that, my friends, is the type of rudeness that mostly goes unnoticed.  Witness also the debates about race, about group differences in IQs,  about whether criminality has a racial genetic component, about whether women are essentially rather stupid and so on.  The participants in such debates are all assumed to hold the same level of politeness but the debate itself is extremely rude to only one side.  That side is not expected to take any kind of offense at all.

And it's a great principle.  If only we could apply it in reverse a bit more often, to see how well the required calmness prevails on the other side.

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*To be honest, I often speculate (silently) about the childhoods of some vociferous misogynists out there, because of the few cases I happen to know in which the basis for the hatred of a whole gender is in the mother relationship.  Sorta like taking one's revenge on the whole world.  If that's the case, by the way, the person should seek therapy.  Whatever happened in one's childhood is no justification for spreading vengeance on the innocent later on.  We all are responsible for what we decide on such questions as adults.

But that has nothing at all to do with the Ferguson-Krugman exchange, of course.  

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Funny Feminist Stuff For Tuesday

This cartoon is very funny because it is so very true.

This rant about how hard it is to be a man, these days, is also pretty funny:

For most of American history an uneducated but hardworking man could get a job that would support him, his wife and a family. He might not be rich or have the best of the best, but he could get by. Since few women were educated or able to earn a good living, their surest path to success was to find a man who could provide for them. This led to an implicit arrangement: The woman stayed home, took care of the kids and the house, and treated the man as the king of the castle. In return, he was expected to work as much as necessary to provide for his family.

The writer pines for those days when men were the rulers of their wives and then were treated as the king of the castle.  He doesn't seem to note that the system was extremely unsatisfactory for those  women he sees as essentially being bought in that implicit arrangement.  Besides, that whole argument is rubbish.  Most women have always worked, on the family firm, in factories, in the family shop and so on.

The piece also has funny stuff about violence and Ramboism and other similar essential markers of masculinity.  What's sad about it is that the system which the writer desires would offer the men on the lower rungs of the totem pole only the promise that they would be treated like the king of the castle at home, even if they were treated like serfs at work. (Hmm.  An interesting connection to pursue to explain why the right-wingers are both pro-corporations and anti-women's-rights.)

But the strongest impression I got from that piece was one of entitlement.  The writer expected to become the king of the castle one day.  I don't think I have ever assumed that I would just easily find a partner who would worship me like that, and I don't think most people have had that feeling of entitlement.  It's probably that which makes the guy so very angry about everything.  After all, he was promised!

Now he may actually have to work on how to become a better partner for a woman.  Gasp, he might even have to participate in the chores at home if he wants to find a partner.

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Divorce, Iowa-Style?

Republicans in Iowa are proposing to make divorce more difficult for people who have children under eighteen:

Republican lawmakers in Iowa's House of Representatives have proposed a bill that would make it more difficult for a married couple with children to get a divorce. A subcommittee debated the bill Monday, Radio Iowa reported.
From Radio Iowa's report:
Under the proposed legislation, parents with kids under the age of 18 could not get a no-fault divorce. Instead, they’d have to show a spouse was guilty of adultery, had been sent to prison on a felony conviction, had physically or sexually abused someone in the family, or had abandoned the family for at least a year.
According to the report, state Rep. Tedd Gassman (R) said during the debate that he is worried about the negative effects of divorce on children. Gassman said his daughter recently got a divorce.
“There’s a 16-year-old girl in this whole mix now," he said. "Guess what? What are the possibilities of her being more promiscuous? What are the possibilities of all these other things surrounding her life that a 16-year-old girl, with hormones raging, can get herself into?”

Something unsavory about the Gassman comment.  I don't think talking about his own granddaughter that way is appropriate at all, and his focus on her possible sexuality also smells off to me.  If I was the girl I'd never talk to that particular grandpa again.

Which neatly segues into my next comment:  Sometimes married partners who hate each other wage constant warfare in the house, whether the children are present or not.  To grow up under those circumstances can be somewhat similar to growing up in a war zone.   But the list of "legitimate" reasons for divorce in that list do not cover that case at all.

The problem with many of the  studies of the impact of divorce on children is this: 

The proper comparison is not to children growing up in well-functioning "intact" families.  The proper comparison is to families where the adult partners have the same problems but choose not to divorce.  Everyone agrees that children from happy families do better (or at least no worse) than children from quarreling and unhappy families.  But happy couples are not contemplating divorce in the first place.

The best approach for reducing divorce is educating the young (before they are married)  about relationships and teaching them how to choose a good match and how to solve disagreements when they crop up.  Mostly the Republican approach seems to be to assume that all families are wonderful and then to demand that people  must be locked up inside them if they are not wonderful.

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On Leaning-In And Sheryl Sandberg. Or Leaning-Away.

Sheryl Sandberg,  Facebook’s chief operating officer, has written a book about what she calls leaning-in for women who have some power at work, as opposed to dropping out or staying silent, I assume.  Assertiveness, asking for what one needs, and so on.

This book and the associated ideas are a fervent topic of debate in many feminist circles

The reason why I have not written about any of that is that I want to be contrarian is that I've heard  the book is hard to get hold of so I never actually tried to get a review copy.  Also, I'm writing my own book.   Sorta leaning away.

Those are also the reasons why I haven't participated in the debates about the book.  It's tough to be anal-retentive (and lazy) in this fast-moving world, even if you are a  goddess and don't actually eat anything but monsters.*

Anyway. Anna Holmes has written a piece about the problems created by that need to comment on everything at lightning-speed and the fact that the book isn't very available for review purposes.  Or that the time is too short to read the book if it is available, given the 24/7 news cycle. 

Or perhaps because the topic is one of those on which different feminists have opposite takes, given that the vast majority of women in the work force, just as the vast majority of men in the work force, have little power to personally lean in (though men probably have a bit more power in that direction, what with the assertive male gender norm)  and so a book about the need to lean in might offer a gourmet recipe to those who can't afford to buy food.

Or perhaps not.  The point is that what Sandberg says is in the book.  Which is essentially pre-advertised before its actual publication date.  The sales of the book probably benefit from all the debates and arguments, of course.  It's the debates and arguments themselves that get muddied by the scarcity of review copies.

This problem of speed and the resulting inaccuracy is  a topic I face daily because I'm writing on how research on women gets reported, so Anna's piece has wider relevance than just the Lean-In proposal.

And opposed to many other problems I write about on this blog, this particular annoyance does have an easy solution: 

Make it a rule not to publish and advertise some study or book when it's hard to get hold of.  It's bad in the field of research (incorrect results get published and the corrections go by unnoticed because they happen too late) and it's bad in the field of opinion writing if the actual opinions cannot be scrutinized.  The discussion begins with the first mention, and there's no real time to equip oneself with the needed facts. 

Of course those who summarize research or discuss new books or studies must also do their bit and read the stuff.
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*The furious rate of the news-as-opinions business makes it really tough to be as slow as molasses in January in one's thinking.  You don't get hired to write on some well-paying (hah!) website but have to keep eating the lower quality monsters in loneliness and isolation.

Why can't I stay serious with a serious topic?  That's probably the real reason why I'm not paid humongous amounts for these words of wisdom.

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An Odd Coincidence: Mark Sandford and Empathy

The coincidence is with the just-for-fun post I wrote on Friday about the need for an empathy pill.  Ed Kilgore writes about this article on Mark Sanford, an American politician who went through a marital infidelity scandal of more than ordinary proportions.  He is now returning to politics.  The quote that matters:

Wherever possible, Sanford steered his answers toward his own difficulties. At one point, he began talking about the importance of empathy. “Unless you’ve felt pain at some level of life, whether it’s self-imposed or otherwise, I don’t think you have the same level of empathy for people who have gone through some level of suffering,” Sanford said. “I empathize with people at a level that I never did before in part because of some pain in my own life.”

Empathy is a dominant theme of Sanford’s campaign, and it came up in my own conversations with him. “I would argue, and again I’m not recommending the curriculum to my worst enemy, but if one fails publicly at something, there’s a new level of empathy toward others that could not have been there before,” he told me.

When I asked Sanford how that new empathy had changed his views on public policy—whether it had made him, for instance, more inclined to support public-assistance programs he’s long denounced as unnecessary—he said it had not. “Convictions are convictions,” he explained. His empathy is for other public figures recovering from sex scandals and personal humiliations. “I used to open the paper and think, How did this person do that? Now it’s all, But by the grace of God go I.”

That's one way of learning empathy, of course.   But it sounds fairly low-level for someone of his age.

Though I'm sure that he feels that limited type of empathy.  Which makes me think of something related:

I think there is a difference between the intellectual "feeling" of empathy and the emotional "feeling" of empathy inside our heads.  I don't really have proper words for how the difference feels but I've "felt" both types.  The closer some situation is to our own experiences, the easier the emotional empathy becomes.  But everyone should be able to figure out the intellectual "feeling."

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Just For Fun

While doing the laundry I started thinking about detergents and then naturally about anti-depressants (like a brighter, cleaner mind) and then, equally naturally, about the lack of the sort of medications (better living through chemistry!) that we really need.

Imagine if we could give Rush Limbaugh an empathy pill, for instance.  Well, don't imagine if you don't care to, but I did.  And then obviously wondered what would happen if it was on overdose.  Would he sob and sob and sob and apologize and bawl?

What if there were guilt pills and anti-guilt pills?  So that the people who have something to actually feel guilty about could be made to experience that wonderful cloggy-anger-angst-shame feeling just once?  And anti-guilt pills, those I'd consume by the handful.  I once felt guilt about having forgotten to turn the stars off.

All that is rather silly.  But so much of the emotional and mental health knowledge we have isn't that much better.  One day, I hope, this era will be regarded as the dark ages of mental and emotional medicine.

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Friday Reading

Or things I might have written about had I more energy and time:

First, heartening news from Saudi Arabia:

An influential Saudi cleric has issued a religious edict, commonly known as Fatwa, allowing women to travel without a male guardian, uncover their faces and eat alongside men.

In statements posted on Twitter, Sheikh Ahmed Bin Qassim al-Ghamdi, the former head of Mecca's Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice committee, said: “It is permissible for people to look at what is not forbidden in women like their faces and their arms.”

Of course the article later calls him a liberal cleric.  But baby steps.

Second, this survey sounds interesting, though I haven't looked at it for the signs of any possible bias:

When the Business Insider polled registered voters and asked for their preferences among three Congressional plans floated to avoid the looming "sequestration" cuts in Washington, they found that when stripped of their partisan labels, the policies most favorable to the majority were those offered by the progressive wing of the Democratic caucus.
Strikingly, the plan offered by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, called The Balancing Act and introduced in early February, is the plan that has received the least attention in the corporate media's coverage of the ongoing and latest "invented" Beltway crisis.
The poll found that in addition to beating the House Republican plan and the Senate Democrat's plan overall, "more than half of respondents supported [the Balancing Act] compared to sequestration and [only] a fifth of respondents were opposed."

Finally, this article possibly about the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is interesting.  In particular:

4.    Gender in Finnish and Hebrew


In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

One of the hardest things for me to learn about English were, a) articles (who needs them?) and b) the gendered nature of the third person singular.

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