On Crime And Aging

I have written about this before, but a new crime where the sought culprit is 64 years old makes me wonder about the same thing again:  Have violent crimes committed by older men risen in numbers in the last decade?

Or have I just not been aware of them?  What I learned once was that crimes are hardly ever committed by the oldest age groups or the very youngest, and that the vast majority of violent crimes are committed by men in their twenties and thirties.  It could be that "hardly ever" in a high-crime country such as the US would amount to so many publicized cases in the last few years where the culprit is a man in his sixties.  But somehow I doubt that.

I suspect that there has been a real change.

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Writer's Block. Or The Vida Counts.

I don't really have a writer's block of the usual type,  but last week I wrote fourteen hours one day (my fingertips still hurt!) and then got food poisoning the next day (monsters really should have better hygiene if they wish to be divine food).  And the overall effect is to quiet me down.

Which means that you will be spared the long litany about the multiple causes of the lack of reviews of women's books in all sorts of serious places.  You can look at which magazines do well and which do not do terribly well here.  And here's more information about the count.  And here's an article which argues that the scarcity of women is linked to the scarcity of women in sciences and such.  And, finally, this article   is linked to in the previous one.

As I mentioned, addressing all this properly is complicated (what is the role women's "choice or preference"?  what role does the invisibility of women play?  is it OK to argue that discrimination is not a problem if it hits in earlier stages of the game?  can we even define a "good and important book" without noting that anything about war is by definition going to be important, anything about childbirth is by definition going to be of lesser universal significance, despite the fact that we are all born but we don't all experience war).  And I really should have more energy to write about it.

Instead, I steer you to a piece by one of the sites which has done much better in recent years.  This is what they say:

It really isn’t rocket science. For us, the VIDA count was a spur, a call to action. Our staff is 50/50 male-female, and we thought we were gender blind. However, the numbers didn’t bear this out.” So why not?
“We did a thorough analysis of our internal submission numbers and found that the unsolicited numbers are evenly split, while the solicited (agented, previous contributors, etc.) were 67/33 male to female. We found that women contributors and women we rejected with solicitations to resubmit were five times less likely to submit than their male counterparts. So we basically stopped asking men, because we knew they were going to submit anyway, and at the same time made a concerted effort to re-ask women to contribute. We also adjusted our Lost & Found section, which featured short pieces on under-appreciated writers or books. We had been asking 50/50 writers, but the subjects were coming back 80/20 male to female, meaning that both men and women were writing about men versus women writers. We then started asking both male and female writers if there are any women writers they would like to champion. It has been a total editorial team effort, and each editorial meeting we take a look at our upcoming issues to see where we are for balance. Again, these are all simple solutions. What I found interesting was that we had all assumed that we were gender balanced, when in fact we weren’t. Now, with a concerted effort, we know that we are.”

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Women's Role in The Selection of The New Pope

Here it is:

The cardinals locked away to choose the next pope will be served plain but wholesome food — and nothing so delicious that they will want to drag out their deliberations, an Italian newspaper reported on its website on Tuesday.
The nuns who will cook for the 115 cardinals during the papal conclave at their Casa Santa Marta residence “are already preparing meals of soup, spaghetti, small meat kebabs and boiled vegetables”, the Corriere della Sera reported.
“All of the cardinals consider these dishes as rather forgettable compared to the menus at the restaurants in Rome,” the paper added.

So it goes.

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And The Other Side Reacts to the International Women's Day

That would be Rush Limbaugh:



He takes the opportunity the day offered to discuss why he loves the term "feminazis" (which he invented) and then he tells us that feminism is the movement which made women want to dress like men, have men's jobs and grab for power just like men do.  Instead of being properly veiled and silently at home, I guess.

Rush is such a sweetheart.  I'm proud of being a feminazi.  I braid my long armpit hair into whips ready for the detesticularization of the Rush Limbaughs of this world.  That, dear Rush, is your true nightmare.  Not the fear of queen bees.

That was a joke.  I have to add an explanation because we feminazis are commonly without any sense of humor at all, so a rare exception needs to be pointed out.

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On The International Women's Day, 2013

The meaning of this day seems to be changing to something a little like Mothers' Day.  I spot people congratulating women on this day and such.  That's not the intention of the day.  It also feeds directly into the argument that having a day for women but not a special set-aside day for men is sexist.

Of course the traditional tongue-in-cheek response to that argument is that we have 364 other annual days for men, and this is true on several levels. 

Just read a few newspapers and observe what the sections cover, whose pictures they mostly publish and whose opinions they record.  The sections of a newspaper used to cover domestic and foreign politics (mostly men), the economy and the stock market (mostly men), sports (almost completely men) and then a few areas (local news, cooking, tourism) which might have had a few more women.  Start paying attention to the male-female percentages in various panel discussions on television.  Notice how the role of women in many movies were deemed covered if there was one of each necessary type (girlfriend, mother, evil slut).

Things are not quite that bad in the US and Europe today but you can still easily spot the difference.  And the new VIDA counts on book reviews and book reviewers, by gender, tells us that even in an area which the evo-psychos and other essentialists argue belongs to the girls by their innate excellence, language use, it is the girls who fail to get much attention in most of those august newspapers.

In a more global sense women are still mostly in deep s**t.  The laws of many countries disadvantage them from birth and assign their ownership to their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons.  Rape and other forms of sexual violence can be ignored or even result in the punishment of the victims.  Still-living traditions having to do with the way one acquires a wife and how one treats a daughter-in-law can be monstrous.  Women in some countries cannot inherit the land when their husbands die, women in other countries need the husband's permission to go out alone.

And most significantly for me:  Women are looked down upon, despised, in far too places on this planet.  A little girl's birth is a failed experiment, something of lower value.  Because of social traditions, it can burden a poor family so much that the family chooses to kill the child or abandon her when that would not have been done to a boy baby.

I don't usually go all righteous on these topics though they cut my heart like knives most days.  But the point of the International Women's Day is to remember those horrors, to remember the injustices, to start persuading people that girls and women are human beings, too, to fix the injustices.  The point is not, as some fairly oblivious people argue, to give women their very own day when men do not have one.  That would be a reasonable argument if women and men were already treated equally  all over the world.

The problem the International Women's Day was created to solve is not that we didn't have a day like Mothers' Day for all women.  That would be silly.  Neither is the International Women's Day supposed to be there to shame the men who live today.  They are, after all, born into the same societies as the women and absorb the same rules and those who uphold the unfair structures include women.  No, those are not the intentions.  The intentions are to keep in mind one widespread injustice that we have not been able to fix yet.

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A Meta-Post On Income Inequality

Or utterly weird.  You decide.  This post is based on some pictures I have on my desktop and my desire to randomly pick two of them and write a post tying them together!  Here are the pictures:

And:

The top one is a fantastic knitting creation:  A blue tit.  The bottom picture compares the actual wealth inequality in the United States to what Americans think it is and to what they would like it to be.  That graph is based on a somewhat older study that I wrote about at the time.  It turns out that Americans (those right-wing conservative Americans!) like the wealth inequality that Sweden happens to have.

So what ties the two pictures together?

The way we are deceived.  In the charming knitted tit we initially might see a real living tit.  But that deception is fine because it doesn't matter. 

In the wealth inequality bars we see the ability of the US Powers That Be to hoodwink Americans into not seeing the real wealth inequality of this country, for selling them the idea that there is too much income redistribution towards the lower rungs already, and the whole kit and kaboodle about the Big Bad Government.

Most Americans, at least on the basis of that survey, don't realize how very unequally wealth is divided in this country, and they don't want it divided that way.  But they are offered a knitted blue tit instead of a living one.

Duh.  It sorta worked, did it not, this exercise of mine?

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Good News/Bad News On Violence Against Women

Good news:  Tunisia establishes the first public domestic violence center.
Bad news:  That it is only the first one, and this:

Resistance to confronting the problem is deeply rooted in Tunisian culture, says Badi, whose hold on her post could change as the government, which has been undergoing turmoil, restructures. “Some people,” the minister says, “are afraid to see women gain autonomy; they fear it’s going to break families.”

There's the hidden nut in almost all the discussions in any country about the evil feminism has caused:  The break-up of the families.  An observer from outer space would ask why the concept of a family must be built upon the backs of women, including those women whose backs get whipped in the process.  Why not make families more democratic institutions?  That question is rhetorical, natch.

Bad news:

Amnesty International has launched a petition calling on the Maldivian government to overturn a court ruling sentencing a 15 year-old rape victim to 100 lashes for an unrelated fornication offence.

The story of the girl from Feydhoo in Shaviyani Atoll, who was convicted of premarital sex in the Juvenile Court February 26 and sentenced to 100 lashes and eight months of house arrest, has been reported by media around the world and been widely condemned by international NGOs and embassies.

'It's so horrific that it's hard to believe it's true: a 15 year old rape survivor has been sentenced to 100 lashes for 'fornication' in the Maldives,' stated Amnesty International, which has followed the case since January.

'The traumatised girl was allegedly sexually abused by her step-father for many years. He has since been charged with sexually assaulting a minor. During the investigation however, authorities came across evidence to support separate charges of fornication against the girl for pre-marital sex,' Amnesty stated, demanding the government overturn the 'disgraceful' sentence.

Good news:  The international reaction to this and the domestic critics of the sentence in the Maldives.

Good news:  The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was reauthorized.

Bad news:  Rush Limbaugh's take on it.   VAWA addresses crimes which were not adequately addressed in earlier laws, and those crimes have predominantly female victims.  The point of  VAWA is not to argue that all women get beaten to a pulp or that women face more violence, on average, than men do.  The point of VAWA is to adequately address behaviors such as stalking which affects female victims more than male victims and which has been shown to be linked to violence, including homicide.

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