About Richard Mourdock. May Trigger.

His name should be Richard Morecock. What this worm uttered:

Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said Tuesday when a woman is impregnated during a rape, "it's something God intended."
Mourdock, who's been locked in a tight race with Democratic challenger Rep. Joe Donnelly, was asked during the final minutes of a debate whether abortion should be allowed in cases of rape or incest.

"I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And, I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happened," Mourdock said.

Did he struggle as much as he would have in the claws of a rapist?  Did his arid and theoretical ponderings ever make him feel at all guilty?  Did he ask himself why he is the person to whom God has transmitted His (and it's always He in these deranged theories) theory of  how a male god gives life, all alone?  Such as by using the penis of a rapist as the pen that writes the Word on the canvas that is the body of a frightened and suffering woman?

This is not about gods at all.  This is about who has the right to decide when a woman is to give birth.  That "who" are people who look astonishingly like Richard Mourdock.  It is those people who have decided that the penis of a rapist is God's golden pen, writing life, beautifully.  

I wish to know if God also uses the murderer's gun to write death, when needed, if every death is His intention.  If that is so, who are we to intervene in the processes of dying?  After all, cancer cells are alive.

Mourdock then clarified his disgusting assertion:

Mourdock further explained after the debate he did not believe God intended the rape, but that God is the only one who can create life.
"Are you trying to suggest somehow that God preordained rape, no I don't think that," Mourdock said. "Anyone who would suggest that is just sick and twisted. No, that's not even close to what I said."

So what does Mourdock's god do?  Cruise around, looking for convenient rapes that just happen to be happening, so that he can insert New Life into the outcome?  Isn't that worse than the suggestion that god preordained rape?  Couldn't he have prevented the rape altogether?  Or at least the conception?   Mourdock's god comes across as an opportunist here.

But that's because Mourdock is an asshole of the highest caliber.  All this is about his right to decide on the fate of women who have been raped, and he doesn't care about those women.  He cares about power over them. 

Still, Mourdock's religious background is not irrelevant here.  The three Abrahamic religions all pretend that life comes only from a male god, all by himself, and that the role of women is to be as fields under cultivation.  To be plowed and seeded, as the farmers will.

Once those religions erased the female power in procreation altogether (while making sure that women continue to do most of the actual work involved with children), it's pretty obvious that the access to abortion is  the work of the devil.  It negates the very essence of the male-god-alone-theory.

Josh Marshall refers to an earlier comment by yet another Republican politician on the question of rape.  I reproduce the comment because it ties into the general fairy tale told by fundamentalists all over this globe:

Commenting on the horror of rape, Smith said he knew how bad it was since he experienced something similar.

“I lived something similar to that with my own family,” Smith said. He then described his daughter’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy — from consensual sex. “She chose life, and I commend her for that. She knew my views but fortunately for me … she chose the way I thought. Now don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t rape.”
Smith affirmed that he believed his daughter’s pregnancy from consensual sex was similar to a rape. “Put yourself in a father’s position, yes, I mean it is similar.”

Those who make the point that Smith equates consensual sex with rape miss the godly boat.  Smith sees his daughter's vagina as his property.  Anyone using his property without his consent is guilty of a crime.  It doesn't matter whether his daughter consented or not, because it's not her vagina we are talking about here:  it's Smith's property, and he wasn't consulted.  That's the "father's position" he means and that's why he doesn't get why anyone wouldn't agree with him about the common aspects of the two cases.

That's it.  Fertility comes only from god but the fertility of women is the property of the oldest male in the family.  It's up to him to decide how those vaginas are used or not.


 

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The Topic No-One Dared To Raise in the Presidential Debates

That would be climate change.

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Casual Sex. A Post on the Meaning of Terms.

Nope.  This is not going to be about the pleasures (or otherwise) of casual sex!  The headline was just a hook to reel you in.  This post is going to be about how we interpret terms and words and how that differs depending on who we are.  You know, the kinds of terms as "freedom," "democracy," "justice."

But casual sex comes into it.  And the fact that I now live in a second language.  For some odd reason the images I get whenever someone mentions "casual sex" are these: 

A participant has a bit of sex, goes up and makes a cup of tea, stands by the window and watches the birds meditatively, goes back into the bedroom for a grope of two, remembers the bills and pays them, returns to the bedroom, gets up and pulls out extraneous body hairs, goes back to sex and so on.

This goes on at the same time as my divinely logical brain knows full well what the term really means.  And similar double images apply to many other concepts  which are tossed around flippantly.

"Freedom" is one of those.  Whenever a politician says "freedom" the audience inserts their own meanings, and those meanings can be quite different from the one the politician means.  For instance, a Mitt Romney calling for more liberty or freedom has no intention of giving it to me, ever.

"Family values" is a similar press-the-right-buttons term.  A few decades ago all conservative politicians were about family values.  They just never defined what they meant by "family" and "values."  The idea was for us to plug in those secondary images of our own families, love and apple pie and such.

Now think of the term "feminist."  What it means in my head is an important aspect of general equality, fairness, justice.  All those good things which are ultimately good for you.  What it means inside the head of someone like Rush Limbaugh is the end of a world where someone like he can sit in the top saddle, unchallenged.  My paradise is his nightmare. 

And when it comes to flavoring a concept with those secondary images, the Rush Limbaughs of this world are winning.  People with feminist values dare not use the term!  They might be accused of man-bashing!   Armpit hairs might be sprouting!  Ugliness would rear its head!  Besides, if you are openly feminist you get nasty e-mails.

It's social control, of a type, and it works. 

The reason why I write about this at the eve of the US presidential elections is because so many of the political soundbites apply those secondary meanings of terms.  We hook onto that part of the speech, rather than asking the important question about what the speaker truly means here.  Details are boring and require the use of the brain to absorb.  Much easier to float on the emotional stream, right?

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And More About The Republican-Women-Are-Hot Study

There's no such study, yells Echidne while hitting her head against the garage door.  Poor garage door.  It gets the anger others elicit.

As I wrote below, no study has found Republican female politicians more beautiful than Democratic female politicians.  Rinse and repeat.

But that's the interpretation which has stuck:

But this U.C.L.A. study contains measurable scientific data collected by actual professional scientists who have just basically given us the green light to go ahead and judge a book by its cover. And though the data offered no evidence as to the relative “attractiveness” of either party’s representatives (as the face-modeling software controlled for superficial markers like makeup and hairstyles), why would that stop anyone from conflating gender typicality with sex appeal? The answer is ha ha, of course it wouldn’t, but I adore your innocence.
I can’t figure out which part of this story is the most unforgivably retro. Is it the part where the Internet is flooded by a tsunami of bickering over which political party has the “prettier” members of Congress and/or prettier voters? Followed by smug accusations of sour grapes, actual sour grapes, and finally resentful grumbling by lots of women in comfort clogs, maybe even including me. (It’s none of your business but I require them for the back support. Take it easy, I have a doctor’s note.)
Or is it the part that suggests that a key factor in the electability and, dare I say, presence of a female politician on a national stage can be dependent on something as random as the placement of her eyebrows? Are there really subtle ways in which people would consider a woman suitable for office that are rooted in their visceral reaction to the width and prominence of her cheekbones? Well, probably.

"Visceral reaction about the width and prominence of her cheekbones" will determine someone's suitability for political office?  Well, if the study said anything about that it said that this might be the case in the Republican Party, not in general.

Then there's that silly suggestion that the party which has the prettier politicians (but only female ones!) is somehow the winning party.  If that's the level on which people operate, bring me dictatorship in the form of Havelock Vetinari. 

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Today's Fun Research Popularization: Conservative Women Are More Beautiful!

Yup.   The study, about the femininity or masculinity of  politicians' faces, was publicized in September.  It's not in print yet, as far as I can tell, though a very kind person sent me the manuscript.

That's the first bad trend in the way these studies are discussed:  Do the discussion before the study is available for reading and criticism.  That way nobody can tell if it makes any sense!  It's like telling who won a baseball game without letting people actually watch the game.

The second slightly odd aspect in popularizing this particular study is that its lead author, Colleen M. Carpinella,  is a UCLA graduate student in psychology.  We don't usually popularize studies by people who haven't even gotten their PhD yet.  I must stress that this is not a criticism of the study or of the researchers.  Work done by PhD students can be valuable and worth looking at, but mostly newspapers and websites don't do that.

Except for certain titillating topics, such as the idea that Republican women might be better looking than Democratic women.  Now, note that the study DOES NOT SPEAK OF THAT at all.

But the popularizations do.  Here's a representative sample of the headlines:*


The Daily Caller:

Study: Female GOP politicians are better looking than liberal politicians [SLIDESHOW]

World Net Weekly:

Hubba, Hubba!  GOP women better looking?

The Examiner:

She's beautiful...does that mean she's a Republican?


Get the idea?  This study was about beauty.

Except it was not.  That word doesn't appear in the study at all.  Or studies, because the researchers carried out two separate studies.   I'm going to discuss the studies separately because they provoke different concerns.

The first study tries to measure the femininity vs. masculinity of the features of the politicians in the 111th US House of Representatives by feeding the photographs of all those 434 members into a program which analyzes the facial features for their sex-typicality.  Note that sex-typicality is not the same thing as beauty or handsomeness.   From the article: 

We downloaded photographs from each politician's government website and coded for sex and political party. We imported each image individually into FaceGen Modeler using the Photo Fit Tool (Blanz & Vetter, 1999), and we measured each face's sex-typicality (i.e., masculinity for men and femininity for women) using the Gender Morph tool.1 Theoretical values ranged from −40 (highly male-typed) to +40 (highly female-typed). We converted this to a common scale for men and women, reflecting the objective level of sex-typical facial cues. Thus, positive values indicated sex-typical characteristics (i.e., masculine men and feminine women); negative values indicated sex-atypical characteristics (i.e., feminine men and masculine women). 

Why did they do this?  Because the hypothesis in the article is that Republican women would be more sex-typical than Democratic women.  The Republican Party supports traditional gender roles and its supporters might require more sex-typical looks from the women who want to exert an atypical leadership role in that party.   To counteract for the latter, perhaps.

The Democratic Party is less invested in traditional gender roles and therefore can allow more sex-atypical faces on their politicians.  Because its supporters don't care about rigid definitions of masculinity and femininity and so on.

What did the first study find?  That the Republicans and Democrats overall did not differ in sex-typicality but that the Republican women were the most sex-typical of all politicians. You may already have figured out what that combination must mean about the Republican men.  Yup, they were less sex-typical than the Democratic men.

If we translated THAT into those weird popularization headlines, how would they look?  "Democratic men are Hotties!, Republicans As Ugly As Elephant's Anuses?"

I think you are getting my point here, which is that first certain studies are picked for closer examination and then they are closely examined in one direction only.

I'm not familiar with how the FaceGen Modeler works.  Does it allow for the fact that "sex-typical" facial features vary by racial and ethnic group? ** If the Democratic Party has more racial and ethnic variety, not controlling for ethnicity and race could distort the results.

The second study in the article tries to find out whether sex-typicality vs. sex-atypicality of the politicians' faces could be used to predict the political party that politician belongs to.  This study is considerably weaker in my view than the first study, because it uses a group of UCLA undergraduates (120 total, out of which 35 were men) for the prediction part.

For instance, I don't believe in the argument that American undergraduates would be so removed from day-to-day American politics that they wouldn't already know the party affiliation of quite a few people in the pictures.  And this would affect the female politicians more because they are fewer and therefore somehow more memorable.  The most memorable of all the sex-party groups would be Republican women politicians as there are not very many of them.  Who doesn't recognize the features of Michelle Bachmann, for instance?

Likewise, the way one is dressed, made-up and coiffed can affect the findings in the second study because none of these were controlled for and to my untutored eye there are pretty big differences between the Republican and Democratic women politician on those issues. The researchers point out that the first study didn't rely on those indicators which is true.  But the second party could have relied on them.

So let's recap:  A study found that Republican female politicians have the most sex-typical faces of all US members of the 111th House of Representatives.  Republican men are less sex-typical than Democratic men.  The researchers believe that the greater sex-typicality of Republican women has to do with what kinds of politicians are allowed to wield power in each party.  From the article:

We predicted that judgments of political party affiliation would rely on the sex-typicality of facial cues. Our prediction was guided by the gendered nature of the liberal-conservative continuum, in both policy advocacy and gender attitudes.
Across democratic political systems, women's historic realignment with more liberal politics (Inglehart & Norris, 2000) reflects shifts in political parties' values. In the U.S., for example, the Democratic Party is associated with socially liberal policies that aim to diminish gender disparities (e.g., women's rights, abortion rights); the Republican Party is associated with socially conservative policy issues that tend to bolster traditional sex roles (e.g., military spending, national defense; Winter, 2010). These policy platforms are manifest in each party's image. Consequently, politicians may exhibit characteristics that reflect these values.
Gender attitudes also differ reliably by political ideology. Conservatives, in particular, encourage adherence to traditional gender roles (Lye & Waldron, 1997). Thus, communal and feminine women are highly regarded. Consequently, Republican women may be uniquely prone to exhibit sex-typical characteristics.

And how was all this popularized in several places:  Republican women are hotter!



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*Science Daily's headline:  The GOP Has a Feminine Face, Study Finds, is better than the others because it's closer to truth.  The Republican women are more sex-typical, the Republican men are less sex-typical, so the overall pulls the party towards what the study calls the "feminine" end of the spectrum.  But it's tricky to use the term "feminine" without pointing out that all this is about sex-typical features, not feminine in the sense of pink-fluffy-rabbits-dancing-among-roses.

**For instance, does the study compare a Latina's facial features to the average facial features of all Latinas?  Or what?  This matters if the parties have different ethnic/racial percentages.

The study:

Colleen M. Carpinella, Kerri L. Johnson "Appearance-based politics: Sex-typed facial cues communicate political affiliation," forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

 

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What War on Women? Republicans Love Women!

Here's an example of exactly how much:

Mitt Romney’s campaign won’t say if the GOP presidential candidate would have signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law, but on Sunday Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) — a top campaign surrogate — disparaged the measure as a giveaway to trail lawyers.
“I think that anyone who’s working out there and making a living, if you’re the most qualified person for the job, you should be able to get paid,” Rubio said. “You should get paid as much as your male counterpart, everyone agrees with that principle”:

RUBIO: But just because they call a piece of legislation an equal pay bill doesn’t make it so. In fact, much of this legislation is in many respects nothing but an effort to help trial lawyers collect their fees and file lawsuits, which may have nothing to do whatsoever to increasing pay equity in the workplace.

Bolds are not mine, this time.

Mmm.  And trying murder cases is just a way for the defense lawyers to rake in the big bucks.  But of course I think murder is very wrong.

Enough with the joking.  The official position of the Republican Party is that "everyone agrees with the principle" that equally qualified women and men should get the same for performing the job equally well.  The principle, note.

In practice, people like Marco Rubio do not want to do anything at all to enforce that principle.  In practice, people like Marco Rubio are always on the side of the employers in these cases.   Besides,  based on the hidden Republican agenda, women should be at home and not out there taking jobs from men.

The opposition to laws against gender discrimination is an example of the wider opposition Republicans have towards any laws which might "burden" corporations.  Whenever there's a choice the Republican Justices on the Supreme Court side with corporations and against workers.

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A Guest Post by Anna: A Feminist Literary Canon, Part Eight: 1990-2000

Hillary Clinton (born 1947) is an American politician. In 1995 her speech at the 1995 UN Conference on Women, called Women’s Rights are Human Rights (1995) showed her “speaking more forcefully on human rights than any American dignitary has on Chinese soil” as the NY Times put it. It is often considered one of the landmark speeches in the global struggle for women’s rights, and condemns all abuses of women wherever they occur. It can be read in its entirety here.

Eve Ensler (born May 25, 1953) is an American playwright, performer, feminist, activist and artist, best known for her play The Vagina Monologues. This play is made up of various feminist monologues centering around women’s experiences with their vaginas, based on interviews Ensler did with various women. 

 

However, it has come in for some criticism, mostly due to the monologue "The Little Coochie Snorcher that Could", in which an underage girl (thirteen in earlier performances, sixteen in the revised version) recounts being given alcohol and then having sex with an adult woman; the incident is recalled fondly by the grown girl, who in the original version of the play calls it "a good rape." This monologue is omitted from some versions. 

 

In 1998, Ensler’s experience performing The Vagina Monologues inspired her to create V-Day, a global activist movement to stop violence against women and girls. V-Day raises funds and awareness through annual benefit productions of The Vagina Monologues, and has raised over $800,000,000 so far.

Susan Faludi (born April 18, 1959) is an American journalist and author. Faludi's 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women argues that the 1980s saw a backlash against feminism in America, especially due to the spread of negative stereotypes against career-focused women. Faludi asserts that many who argue "a woman's place is in the home, looking after the kids" are hypocrites, since they have wives who are working mothers or, as women, they are themselves working mothers. This work won her the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction in 1991.

Naomi Wolf (born 1962) is an American author and former political consultant. She is most famous for the book The Beauty Myth (1991) which argues that as women have gained increased social power and prominence, expected adherence to standards of physical beauty has grown stronger for women. that "beauty" as a normative value is entirely socially constructed, and that the patriarchy determines the content of that construction with the goal of reproducing its own hegemony.

Rebecca Walker (born November 17, 1969) is an American writer. She co-founded the Third Wave Foundation, which aims to encourage young women to get involved in activism and leadership roles. The organization now provides grants to individuals and projects that support young women. 

 

Walker is considered one of the founding leaders of third-wave feminism. She wrote an article for Ms. Magazine called Becoming the Third Wave (1991), criticizing the confirmation of Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court justice after he was accused of sexually harassing his employee Anita Hill. Using this example, Walker addresses the oppression of the female voice and introduces the concept of third-wave feminism, a term her article coined. Walker defines third wave feminism at the end of the article by saying “To be a feminist is to integrate an ideology of equality and female empowerment into the very fiber of life. It is to search for personal clarity in the midst of systemic destruction, to join in sisterhood with women when often we are divided, to understand power structures with the intention of challenging them.”

Riot Grrrl was an American underground feminist punk rock movement that originally started in Washington, D.C.; Olympia, Washington; Portland, Oregon; and the greater Pacific Northwest in the early to mid-1990s. The Riot Grrrl Manifesto (1991) criticizes male-dominated culture and encourages girls to build their own alternative. It can be read in its entirety here.

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Part Six of the feminist literary canon has been expanded to include some non-American writers. The expanded version is available here.

 

Also please note that Hélène Cixous was born in French Algeria, which I forgot to write on Feministing.

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