Good News on Gender Issues

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those that tell physicians what to say to women about breast cancer risk and breast density, those that mandate outdated abortion treatment protocols, and those that require women to undergo ultrasounds and view the images before having an abortion.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...

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Why I Don't Write About the NSA And Other Important Topics

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.

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Men in Skirts

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.
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.

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.

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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And Yet More on The Ezekiel Gilbert Case in Texas

When I wrote my first blog post on this topic, I expressed a bit of cynicism about the idea that Texas could actually acquit someone on the shooting death of an escort,  based on the right to retrieve stolen property.  But then I got carried away with the flow of articles on the topic.

Now Bridget Dunlap at Rheality Check has written a piece about the case which clarifies some issues:

First, the defense used two arguments, one of which was the Texas law about retrieving stolen property.  The second one was the argument that the accused aimed at the tires of the car in which the victim and her driver were seated, and therefore did not intend to kill.

We cannot tell which of those arguments (if the jury chose one over the other) was used as the basis of the acquittal decision.  Thus, the outrage shouldn't have been aimed at the jurors but at that particular Texas law which the defense used.  And perhaps at the judge in this case.  Dunlap writes:

One would expect the jury to find that shooting at a car with an AK-47 is at least “reckless,” in which case he could have been convicted of manslaughter. But the prosecution didn’t charge him with manslaughter, only murder. Manslaughter is a “lesser included offense” of murder and the judge is entitled to instruct the jury if the evidence supports that charge, but it appears she did not. The jury can’t convict on a charge that isn’t before them.
I think Texas’s defense of property law is abhorrent and my gut reaction was that it was a reprehensible defense. This reaction suggests, that you should think twice before hiring me as your defense attorney, sadly. As Professor Michael W. Martin of Fordham Law’s Federal Litigation Clinic reminded me: “If the law allows the defense, the lawyer must use it, if it is viable, unless there is a good strategic reason not to. Otherwise, it is ineffective assistance of counsel. If the lawyer feels like he is ethically barred from using a legal, viable defense, he should ask to be relieved.”

I'm glad about this additional  legal information.  I feel a little less like someone suddenly waking up in an alternate reality.

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You're Doing it Rong. John Pilger Explains What Feminists Should Do.

In a Truthout piece titled "There Is a War on Ordinary People, and Feminists Are Needed at the Front."  By ordinary people Pilger means the poor and perhaps the middle class.  His argument is a class argument, though it's more than that, as I will discuss further down.

But for the time being it's enough to note that John Pilger wants feminism to be about class concerns and not about gender.  I guess the term "feminism" has so many definitions (lots of them  reviled and hated, many of them contradictory, quite a few of them unknown among the larger public) that it's no longer regarded as odd for someone to argue that feminism shouldn't be about gender.  But it's like saying that anti-racist movements shouldn't be about race.

There have been many,  many nights where I have lain awake, staring into the darkness while asking myself if I AM a feminist.

That's because of the many and very complicated debates that are ongoing within various circles interested in either explaining women's roles and economic lots in life or working to improve the status of women.  My mind runs around a squirrel wheel, going from "yes, but" to "on the other hand" and back again.

So far I think the important distinction when comparing and contrasting various groups of people in the Oppression Olympics is this:  Whatever our own activism,  we need to understand that  the underlying theories about why certain groups don't fare as well in the society are not interchangeable.  It matters to understand where misogyny comes from and it matters to understand where sexism comes from.  It matters to understand poverty and attitudes towards poverty, and it matters to understand the roots of sexism.  One single theory cannot account for all of those.

It also matters that feminists can be classist and racist, that anti-racists can be sexist and classist, and that those who fight classism issues can be at least sexist, if not racist (the latter depending on the country).

Back to John Pilger who will teach me more about what feminists are all about and what we should do.

He begins rather wonderfully, by arguing that the UK Daily Mail is a feminist publication.  It's an inauspicious opening if he wishes to persuade feminazis of my kind, because I have studied that publication intensively in the past, and here are the kinds of things the newspaper's Femail section, intended for women, gives us in the archives for searching the word "feminism":

Feminism was going to liberate both sexes, but instead it destroyed a generation of men

How feminism destroyed real men

Has feminism killed the art of home cooking?

Why I loathe feminism... and believe it will ultimately destroy the family

Feminism has turned men into second-class citizens, but have women's victories come at a price?

You've got what you want, girls, stop whining: Has feminism made women unhappy? (well THIS certainly will)

'Quit work to help your husband', says a controversial new book that has infuriated feminists


And so on and so on, for 407 references. 

Pilger goes on in his article in a way which suggests that he has been personally hurt and angered by feminist writings about gendered violence, feeling accused himself and feeling powerless to affect the debate, which he believes has been kidnapped by feminists:

This is now standard media practice. "Most weeks some lovely, caring berks tell me I am a man-hating witch," wrote Suzanne Moore recently in the Guardian, "so let's get it out there. Sometimes I am. The acceptable kind of suck-it-up feminism (I love men really!) is hard to sustain after yet more abuse stories … Do I think all men are rapists? No. Do I think all women can be raped. Yes?"
How quickly the broad brush of blame is applied to a rash of dreadful murder and kidnap cases. Throw in an abduction in Cleveland, and the arrest of "yet another TV personality," and, according to Cynthia Cockburn and Ann Oakley, this represents "the profound, extensive and costly problem of male sexual violence."
Part of the problem, another commentator insinuates, is that men don't care as much as women because they don't use Twitter enough to express their abhorrence of rape and kidnap. This all adds up to a "crisis in masculinity," requiring men to join in a "conversation" about their social and moral deficiencies on terms already decided.

...

The problem with media-run "conversations" on gender is not merely the almost total absence of male participants, but the suppression of class. It is tempting to say real politics are missing, too, but bourgeois boundaries and prescriptions are real enough. Thus, gender, like race, can be presented in isolation. Class is a forbidden word, and gender subordinate to class is heresy. The Daily Mail model is built on this.

One might argue that feminists "kidnapped" this topic because it was an orphan nobody else wanted at all.

But I can understand Pilger's hurt feelings.  Generalized guilt on the basis one's sex, race or ethnicity is not a terribly productive start for solving any types of problems in the society, as we should have learned from recent discussions of Islamic extremists, just as generalized prejudices about one gender or race are bad.  Still,  Pilger may be skipping stages there, by assuming that the "crisis in masculinity" is about men as biological beings or about something that cannot be changed, rather than about socially defined norms of masculinity, especially among teenagers, athletes and other groups which build their own sub-cultures based on the approval of others in those sub-cultures.

Whatever,  Pilger is  clearly angry and clearly not on the same side with feminists.  That's what makes his argument that feminists are not on his side interesting.

His side is classism, roughly.  But here's the deeper problem about Pilger's arguments:

Feminists have, for many years now, used the lens of intersectionality to gender issues, by noting that those issues intersect with race, income, ethnicity and religion.  Likewise, there are many, many feminists organizations which work on the issues of immigrant women in the US, on the issues of race and gender, on the issues of poverty and gender, on the issues of LGBT and women, and on and on and on.  Pilger probably didn't think of using Google to  research all that.

May I now say that I think Pilger is mansplaining a bit?  Giving us a hastily written and angry first draft, rather than doing the additional research that was needed?  Hmm.

Finally, there are problems with the assertion that feminists should stop caring about violence and other issues and focus on poverty and class issues.  First, many feminists are already focusing on poverty and class issues.  Second, if feminists don't talk about the gendered aspects of violence, then nobody will, pretty much.  And third, obviously there are feminist activists who are not into class issues, just as there are class activists who equally obviously are not into gender issues.





 

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More on Ezekiel Gilbert And The Right To Use A Weapon To Retrieve Stolen Property in Texas

I wrote about this case yesterday.  A man hires an escort, expecting sex (note that this expectation was not based on a written contract, say,  given the illegality of the trade).  The escort comes into his house, is given the money but the sex doesn't happen.  She leaves, or at least goes out, and he shoots her, paralyzing and ultimately killing her.  He is sued for the act but the jury acquitted him, based on a law which gives Texans the right to use a gun to retrieve stolen property "after nightfall."

It was the money ($150) that was viewed as stolen property by the jury, which interpreted the trade the way the accused did:  He should have been given sex or his money back.  Thus, the jury regarded an illegal trade (in Texas) as one that the john had the right to enforce.

But reverse this.  Suppose an escort has sex with a client in Texas, and then the client refuses to pay.  It's after nightfall, they are in the escort's house.  Based on this acquittal, she has complete rights to kill her client dead, to retrieve her stolen property.

Based on this Vanity Fair article, my interpretation should work, because the law used in the case was all about the right to use guns.  But I very much doubt that the jury would have acquitted an escort for the reverse crime.

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Fox And The War on Women

Andrea Tantaros of Fox News gives the usual (for Fox)  alien-from-outer-space statement about the appointment of Susan Rice as National Security Advisor:






For those who cannot watch the video, Tantaros states that the Obama administration appoints women as human shields, possibly in the Republican war on women! 

Isn't that precious?  I never have so much fun with the lefties or the muddy middle.

A war on women would mean that men are used as the human shields.  Or possibly children.  But not women, because women are that enemy, see?

Whatever.  Tantaros implies that to avoid being blamed for waging war against women the Republicans cannot criticize Democratic female politicians at all.  Not at all.

I love that, and wish that rule to be immediately applied on this blog.  Nobody can criticize Echidne because then you are waging a war against a goddess.   Send chocolate or I will be thunderous.

But criticism is a requirement in politics.  We have to keep our elected and appointed servants honest and their noses to the grinding wheel, and polite but cogent criticism is the way to go.  So yes, Andrea, Republicans can criticize Democratic women in politics. 

But if they wish not be viewed as sexist asshats, that criticism should not be about the women's  looks,tits,  butts or how those women somehow in general exactly replicate the worst aspects of all those billions of people in the group: women.  Just keep your criticism on the issues and you will do fine.

Could it be that this is  a novel idea in the land of Fox News?  That distinguishing between the two types of criticisms is just beyond those folks?

More on Fox News' difficulties with that weird and awkward half of humanity can be found here.

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