Men Banned From Homemaking Classes

This is our brethren at the Southern Baptist seminary. They have gotten rid of the last female professor who - gasp! - taught men. Now they are introducing classes on homemaking at the seminary. But only women can take them:

The Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary offers coursework in Greek and Hebrew, in archaeology, in the philosophy of religion and – starting this fall – in how to cook and sew.

Southwestern Baptist, one of the nation's largest Southern Baptist seminaries, is introducing a new academic program in homemaking as part of an effort to establish what its president calls biblical family and gender roles.

It will offer a bachelor of arts in humanities degree with a 23-hour concentration in homemaking. The program is only open to women.

The article presents two very fascinating rationales for these classes. There is Terry Stoval, the dean of women's programs, trying to make something else than a sow's ear out of the sow's ear she has been given. Then there is the seminary president, Paige Patterson, who is telling us the real reasons for these new programs:

Seminary President Paige Patterson, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, which has its executive committee headquarters in Nashville, said wives of seminary students asked for the homemaking courses. The program was approved by seminary trustees in the fall.

"We are moving against the tide in order to establish family and gender roles as described in God's word for the home and the family," Patterson said at the denomination's annual meeting in June. "If we do not do something to salvage the future of the home, both our denomination and our nation will be destroyed."

Wow! I need a long drink after reading that last paragraph. I also need to go out to breathe a little.

The nation itself will be destroyed if women don't stay at home studying clothing patterns and planning unusual treatments for the dining-room walls. Of course Patterson has always been of the opinion that this nation has been built on the backs of the women and if the women get off that crouching position, well, the nation will tip. That's why he has worked for the proper subjugation of women for many years:

Patterson took a leading role in the 1980s in a successful campaign to oust moderates from leadership posts in the Southern Baptist convention. While he was president of the convention from 1998 to 2000, Southern Baptists issued a statement that women should not be pastors and that wives should "graciously submit" to their husbands.

I feel as if my chest is being squeezed when I read stories like these where the plot is how to make women behave in the properly submissive way. In this particular case, my concern is not with the idea that homemaking is taught, but with the idea that it is taught only to women and in the context of a college-level degree. Someone must be paying money for those courses. Yet when reality strikes and the women who took these courses need to find a job they are not qualified for the better jobs. Patterson is trying to ensure that women go home and that they have to stay there because they have no real alternatives. How godly is this behavior?

How godly is it in general to argue that the fate of a denomination or a country depends on the brainwashing and subjugation of half of humanity? Note that when Patterson refers to his fear that the nation will be destroyed if women don't follow his behavioral rules he must have in mind a wider group of women than just the Southern Baptists. There are not enough of them to save the country by proper wifely behavior. No, Mr. Patterson wants all American women back to the kitchens full time. Let's be honest. He wants male dominance in the society. And he wants all women to stay at home and work for bread and board.

Saturday Hope Blogging

As usual, obtained by stealing Phila's Friday Hope Blogging. Enjoy.

I've Arrived!

The first time I've been called a political hack! Yeah!

Have some chocolate to celebrate. You can tell your grandchildren that you were present at this crucial point. And yes, I know that I should write about the liquidity crisis in the financial markets and the bursting of the bubble that was based on subprime mortgage lending. But us hacks don't.

Friday Family Photo Blogging

This is a picture made for an advertisement in the 1930s, although only the top half was to be used, naturally. I find it very funny. You can click on the picture to see it bigger.

Added later: Come to think of it, all sorts of comparisons crop to mind between this and the photo-touching of models' faces and bodies these days. The way myths are maintained.
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Added even later: Hint: Look at the man's feet.

Wherein Tweety Extols the Fine Neoconservative Mind of George Bush

You can watch for yourself at Think Progress. But this is the gist:

Immediately following President Bush's press conference today, MSNBC's Chris Matthews spent three unbroken minutes fawning over the president's "powerful rendition" of his "philosophy" without uttering a single critical word. "I thought in listening to the president, I was listening to one of the great neoconservative minds," gushed Matthews.

I wonder what color the sky is in Tweety's world.

Electoral Politics Made Simple

By Chris Matthews, as usual. Tweety does hear a different drummer from the rest of us. He thinks that the value of politicians can be measured by how big or beefy they are:

But, you know, I do see a lot of really good second-tier candidates here, but I don't see a big, beefy alternative to Hillary Clinton -- a big guy. You know what I mean? An all -- an every-way big guy. I don't see one out there. I see a lot of slight, skinny, second- and third-rate candidates.

Wouldn't it be great if it was that easy? We could just go to the store and by three pounds of ground Evangelical fundamentalist or a nice rack of Liberal ribs. Pun intended.

Baseball and Barry Bonds

Baseball is not one of the guy sports I watch much, but I roughly know the rules and can follow a game and even admire certain stunts. On the other hand, baseball fascinates me as a parable about the American culture (including its male focus).

There is Babe Ruth and the curse he supposedly put on Red Sox and the 1920s betting scandal and its later repeats. There is the whole interesting history of racial integration as it was reflected in the integration in professional baseball, including the advantages and disadvantages of it for black players, white players and the owners in general. Then there is baseball's many equivalents of the American desire to have lone heroes, combined with the frank admission that lone heroes are nothing without the team, though even then the team is usually mythologized into one manager or a small number of players.

Professional baseball used to practice something which is quite illegal in ordinary jobs: players could be indentured and could not leave the team if they wanted to do so. The "free agent" aspect is a diluted form of this indenture. On the other hand, the owners of the teams can in some ways act as the sole seller of a product (televised games) and also as the sole buyer of the best players' services (though they still face competition from each other). This gives them some monopoly and some monopsony power. The combination of the two means that the players might at the same time look oppressed by the owners' power and also earn very large salaries.

These economic aspects are also part of the American baseball mythology. But most fans prefer the other mythological stories, the ones about individual heroes, team spirit, modesty and great achievements against all odds. And the ones about records and racial fairness and baseball as the unifying thread which weaves all Americans into one patriotic community. Or even the more scandalous stories about Ted Williams' mean temper or the larger-than-life egos of many team owners.

What I find fascinating about this all is not just the stories which are often quite good but the way baseball serves as a mirror which shows Americans as either better than they might be or sometimes much more horrible, but in either case somewhat caricaturized. Even the players' wives are caricaturized in the media, often in an almost "Stepford Wives" way. They become nothing but supportive wives, waiting.

Those long ramblings (why on earth am I writing about baseball???) are to explain how I react to Barry Bonds' recent breaking of the old home run record and to the discussions about his possible drug use, his race and the whole question whether records from different eras are comparable in any meaningful sense. I see these stories as reactions to various baseball myths, perhaps also as attempts to tug the myths to certain new directions.

But baseball may no longer be the American myth of the younger generation. Of course it never was the most applicable myth for many, many Americans.

On Breast Implants and Suicide

The correlation between the two has been in the news recently:

Women who get cosmetic breast implants are nearly three times as likely to commit suicide as other women, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.

The study, published in the Annals of Plastic Surgery, reinforces several others that have shown women who have breast enlargements have higher suicide risks.

Loren Lipworth of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee and colleagues followed up on 3,527 Swedish women who had cosmetic breast implant surgery between 1965 and 1993. They looked at death certificates to analyze causes of death among women with breast implants.

Only 24 of the women had committed suicide after an average of 19 years, but this worked out to triple the risk compared to the average population, they reported. Doctors who perform cosmetic breast surgery may want to monitor patients closely or screen them for suicide risk, Lipworth said.

Correlation is a neat little statistical measure, which reflects the extent to which two phenomena appear to move in some connected ways. We call the correlation positive if the phenomena move in the same direction. For example, when one goes up, so does the other, on average. Negative correlation means that when one phenomenon goes up the other one tends to go down.

Now, correlation doesn't necessarily mean that one phenomenon causes the other. This could be the case, but many other explanations are possible. This study is a good example of the kind of study where the correlation is unlikely to be the same as causation. Unless we find something in the implant materials that makes people more suicidal, the best guess for this correlation is that there are some women who elect to have breast surgery for psychological reasons and that these same reasons may also later contribute to suicides. Depression and low self-esteem are examples that crop to mind as such underlying psychological reasons.

The article I link to makes this point clearly, and that is good. But it's always useful to remind readers that correlation doesn't always mean causality.

Types of Writing

I'm tired of writing nutritionally balanced posts which taste like bran and untreated tofu; where the particles dangle like iron pills mixed into the food in the dog's bowl. I want to write deliriously delicious posts, silver spoonfuls of angel-food cake but with wicked drops of dark chocolate hidden in the fluffy cloud. I want to write a post which makes you fat and happy and post-orgasmically satiated.

Alas, it's not to be, right now.

Have a celery stick.

On Autistic Girls

The New York Times has an interesting article by Emily Bazelon on that topic. I have a few reservations about it, though. First, whenever someone has a plan to write a piece on how the sexes differ, well, the piece tends to focus on that and not on how the sexes are the same. In most cases, we are not given any information about the relative magnitudes of the differences vis-a-vis the similarities. Because nobody ever writes articles on how the sexes don't differ, we mostly go away with the idea that the differences are humongous.

Second, a very common aspect of much of the writing on sex roles and so on is the implicit assumption that the sex roles in the American society are the natural sex roles. It isn't just the Americans who do this, but because American writing in this area is predominant, a lot of the psychological and sociological research in this area has to do with American college students (because so many studies use college students as cheap subjects). I sensed this bias in the autism piece in the sense that what was assumed to be "natural" for girls is what the American culture regards as natural.

Third, the article mentions Simon Baron-Cohen as an expert on gender and autism, but fails to mention that much of his work is controversial. I have written about the problems with his test for systematizing vs. empathizing behavior earlier on this blog, and I have also written about the fairly obvious gender bias in his book The Essential Difference .

But mostly I have trouble with the basic argument of the piece which is that girls suffer more than boys from autism because social interaction is more important for girls than boys, and because autism makes social interaction so difficult. Yet, at the same time the article quotes one expert as saying that perhaps we see fewer high-functioning autistic girls because girls are better at social interaction and that this serves to hide them from the autistic label. The article tries to explain how both of these arguments could be true at the same time:

But based on their clinical experience, Lainhart and also Skuse see autism as a heterogeneous disorder. Its profile may change and expand as more is understood about girls, whose autism, they worry, often goes undiagnosed. That is partly, Skuse posits, because girls' general aptitude for communication and their social competence helps some Asperger's girls "pass" — they pick up on their difference and carefully mask it by mimicking other girls' speech and manner and dress. In a sense, their femaleness allows some girls to seem less autistic. It is as if they start off with a social advantage — Skuse sees this as a 20-point bonus on a scale of 100 — that helps counter the disorder. This idea isn't necessarily at odds with the findings that show girls to be more seriously affected by autism, Skuse says, because the girls who succeed in masking their deficit wouldn't be included in studies. And so they are missing from the picture. "There is no doubt in my mind that the way we have defined autism currently biases our assessments strongly in the direction of identifying a male stereotype," he says. The C.D.C. agrees and says that as a result the estimate for the number of girls with autism and normal intelligence may be low.

I'm not convinced. It's as if we are saying that autism hurts girls because they can't satisfy the cultural expectations of being good at social interactions, but on the other hand girls are good at social interactions which hides their autism. I guess it could be true, but shouldn't we then find the average level of autism in the girls who are diagnosed to be much, much higher than the average level in boys?

Meanwhile, in the U.S. Air Force

When you hear a story where a woman reports that she was raped and then subsequently has to go to court accused of "indecent acts", what country comes to your mind? Some place with the shariah law, probably, given that there are countries which interpret that law in the context of rape in a very narrow way: If you can't prove that you were raped then you were guilty of indecent acts and need to be punished.

I always felt that the real purpose of all this was to keep women from reporting rapes. After all, if the punishment for an unproven rape is that the victim herself will be flogged or stoned or hanged, well, that tends to have an inhibitive effect on rape reporting.

But the country I have in mind this time is not Saudi Arabia or Iran; it's the good ol' U.S. of A.. The Air Force, to be more exact. A female airman reported that she was raped but later refused to testify. Then things got surreal: She is going to be court-martialed for underage drinking and "indecent acts":

She says she was attacked in another airman's barracks room on the night of May 12-13, 2006. The charges against her allege that she performed an indecent act on one of the men she accused while the other two watched, the defense says.

In her letter, the woman said she reported the attack and was given a medical examination. The three men were charged with rape, but the charges were dropped after she refused to testify, she said.

"The pressure of the judicial process was too much for me, and I felt like no one was looking out for my interests," the woman wrote.

The men received nonjudicial punishments and have been granted immunity for their testimony in the woman's trial, according to documents the defense provided.

It sounds very odd that the men received only nonjudicial punishments. Were they not participants in at least the "indecent acts" if not a rape? Why is she going to be court-martialed, while they are given immunity? Immunity from what? Rape charges?

This will certainly make rape reporting rarer in the military. I hope that wasn't the intention, all along. But it may well be.

Mad Or Sad?

A recent study by Victoria Brescoll suggests that women in management might do better if they don't show anger. This is what she did in the study:

She conducted three tests in which men and women recruited randomly watched videos of a job interview and were asked to rate the applicant's status and assign them a salary.

The people in the job interview were either male or female but followed the same script. Each of them expressed either anger or sadness over losing an account due to a colleague being late for a meeting.






According to Brescoll, anger gave the men higher status and higher salary estimates. The reverse was true for women. It seems that it's better to be a sad CEO than a mad CEO if you are of the girly persuasion.

The usual popularized take on this study seems to be that anger helps men get ahead but keeps women back. Strictly speaking, this is not quite what the study found, as the study compared anger not to, say, general pleasantness, but to sadness as a possible reaction to one particular type of event (the loss of an account).

I couldn't get hold of the actual study which limits my ability to judge how reliable the findings are. As an example of the kind of data I'd love to see is the number of subjects who were asked to rate the videos. But supposing, for the time being, that there are no hidden bugs in the study, what do the results mean?

Brescoll herself says that angry women are seen as "out of control". This is fascinating, because the proper antonym for that in this context might not be "in control" but "under control". If anger is viewed as a legitimate reaction by someone who is entitled to dominate others (as the article from which I quote suggests), then those who are not seen as entitled to dominate others would indeed be "out of control" when expressing anger. This doesn't apply only to women who have traditionally not been allowed to show much anger, but to almost anyone in a subordinate position.

That sadness works better for women than anger fits into that framework pretty well. Besides, sadness is not directed to anyone outside the person. It is non-threatening. On the other hand, women are not supposed to be sad in public if they have power, because crying is seen as a sign of weakness. A Catch-22 indeed.

I was astonished by the salaries men and women were assigned in this study. Men were awarded much higher salaries than women (remember, the applicants were objectively identical), and the resulting differences are much larger than the actual average differences in full-time pay by gender. Both male and female reviewers assigned women lower earnings, and I have seen similar results from other studies.

One interpretation would be that the study subjects are trying to guess what a person with particular characteristics would earn in the real world, and assign sums accordingly, thus taking into account their knowledge that women, on average, earn less. Another one is that people in general are a lot more sexist than we perhaps have thought and rate and rank women lower than men on that basis.

On the Utah Mining Accident

May the six trapped miners be found soon and healthy or at least alive.

An earlier post I wrote after the Sago accident touches on some of the safety concerns which have cropped up in this case, too. Mining safety is too crucial to be left to the vagaries of the marketplace.

Blogging Advice

Jane Hamsher includes some in a recent post:

...you have to post regularly about the topics that news junkies are interested in and you have to find a way to write your issues into those. It is difficult to get people to care about pro-choice, my personal signature issue. I found a way to write it into the Alito story, the Joe Lieberman story, the NARAL story, in a way that the blogosphere got interested in because I took the time to figure out how things worked and how you could catch the wave. I also took a lot of time building relationships with other bloggers, reading what they had to say, linking back to them, going out of my way to meet them in person when I could (no matter how big or little the blog) and being in conversation with other bloggers rather than sitting there carping about how they never linked to me.

I thought about this a lot last night while brushing my fangs the required five minutes. Then I thought about it some more. The advice she gives is quite good, but I have not taken it. So I went through all those rounds in the spiral of thinking, from feeling annoyed at myself for not doing all those things that well, to feeling annoyed that such marketing acts (as I see them) are required to sell certain topics (often feminist ones) to a wider audience (consisting of what type of people?), then veering back into asking what all this means for the definition of blogging as an enterprise (a commercial one?) as compared to simple acts of writing or communication, and finally deciding that I will never arrive at some ice-clear conclusion on any of this. Better just write it all down.

So I did.

The Liberal Washington Post

Has hired Ramesh Ponnuru:

In 2006, National Review columnist Ramesh Ponnuru appeared on Fox News and claimed that the "journalistic elite was a functional ally of the party of death."

This week, Ponnuru officially joins the "party of death" himself, signing on with the "journalistic elites" at the Washington Post.

At the Post, he will lead a new Discussion Group on "the future of conservatism" entitled Right Matters. One of the issues Ponnuru will focus on is "the state's role in enforcing morality."

Where's my Discussion Group, by the way?

Doesn't that reference to "the state's role in enforcing morality" remind you of something? Like those Taliban police officers who checked that women's shoes didn't make a noise. Brothers under the skin and all that.

Where the White Boys Are

That's pretty much the summary of this Washington Post article by Jose Antonio Vargas, about the lack of diversity at the Yearly Kos conference which has just ended in Chicago. I wasn't able to make the conference this year, but the absence of one snake goddess is not what Vargas bemoans:

It's Sunday, day 4 of Yearly Kos, the major conference for progressive bloggers, and Gina Cooper, the confab's organizer-in-chief, surveys the ballroom of the massive McCormick Place Convention Center. A few hundred remaining conventioneers are having brunch, dining on eggs, bagels and sausage.

Seven of the eight Democratic presidential candidates have paid their respects this weekend, and some 200 members of the credentialed press have filed their stories. A mere curiosity just two years ago, the progressive blogosphere has gone mainstream. But Cooper sees a problem.
"It's mostly white. More male than female," says the former high school math and science teacher turned activist. "It's not very diverse."

There goes the open secret of the netroots, or those who make up the community of the Internet grass-roots movement.

For all the talk about the increasing influence of this growing group -- "We are a community . . . a movement . . . an institution," Cooper said in a speech Saturday night -- what gets scant attention is its demography. While the Huffington Post and Fire Dog Lake, both founded by women, are two of the most widely read blogs, the rock stars are mostly men, and many women bloggers complain of sexism and harassment in the blogosphere.

Walking around McCormick Place during the weekend, it became clear that only a handful of the 1,500 conventioneers -- bloggers, policy experts, party activists -- are African American, Latino or Asian. Of about 100 scheduled panels and workshops, less than a half-dozen dealt directly with women or minority issues.

Sigh. Diversity. You know, I have never really liked that term. It was snuck in at some time in the eighties or nineties to make fairness more palatable to those who don't think there is anything unfair in the good-ole-boy networks. "Diversity" sounds like face paint to me, even though I know that it's not intended that way. And somehow it's a lot easier to ignore demands for diversity than it is to point out that white guys don't always bring up exactly the same issues as black guys or brown guys or gals of all colors or that a grass-root movement of nothing but white guys isn't exactly grass-root. That would be green guys, I guess.

That's not the only reason I'm sighing here. Some of you may have read me long enough to know that the "where are the women?" topic crops up all the time in the blogosphere and I'm tired of writing the same observations each time.

So instead of doing that, let me just summarize: Those who see no problems argue that nobody on the Internet knows if you are a dog (just don't call yourself Spotty), that the system is gender-blind and color-blind and the result therefore either optimal or at least not amenable to any easy change. Those who see problems argue that "birds of a feather fly together", that guy bloggers link to guy bloggers, that certain topics are viewed as important and others as "identity politics" and divisive, and that institutional support is most likely to accrue to those whose views are seen as not being all about "identity politics." Yet for most practical purposes the lives of women and minorities might evolve around the very topics which are labeled as divisive.

Sigh, one more time. What is the solution, then, for increasing diversity at conferences such as the Yearly Kos? Note that the diversity of bloggers themselves is much greater, it seems to me, and even if it is not a real rainbow of views and individuals it is slowly turning towards that direction. The real question the article poses for me is how to get the money and support for all the different types of bloggers to attend these conferences and how to get them on the panels, too. Once there, the bloggers can speak for themselves. This problem seems quite amenable to a financial solution and some logical outreach efforts, don't you think?

Today's Deep Thought

From a piece by Robert Dallek in the Washington Post:

Polls showing President Bush's approval ratings in the 20s and 30s and a New York Times survey last month reporting that people across the country are eager for an end to the current administration suggest that this nation has a problem it's going to have to live with for the next 17 months -- a failed presidency that won't reestablish its credibility with a national majority.

The political argument against Bush's continuing tenure is not frivolous. There are good reasons to see him as a failed president whose remaining time in office will be unproductive at best and destructive to the country's well-being at worst. But given the constitutional rules by which the presidency operates, there is no serious prospect of removing him from office.

Some Suggested Voices To Use When Reading Harry Potter Aloud.

Posted by olvlzl

Well, it’s done. I’ve read the entire series to by nieces, some of the books more than twice. If you should ever be in a position to have to read them aloud, and are living in North America without the right accents, here are a few ideas for voices that I’ve used.

Draco Malfoy: Byron York
Lucius Malfoy: Wm. F.Buckley
Snape: the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick
Prof. Lockheart: Steven Pinker
Hagrid: Onslow, you know, Hyacinth’s brother in law.
Prof. Umbridge: James Sensenbrenner
Uncle Vernon: who else, Rush Limbaugh. Though Tim Russert might do.
Petunia: Phyllis Schalfly
Dudley: Chris Matthews
Belatrix: Ann Coulter
Voldermort: George Gilder through a helium balloon.

What voices do you hear when you read them?

Diversity As A Disaster? This is something we need to start working on now.

Posted by olvlzl

In the Boston Globe’s Idea section today is an article about some seemingly disturbing and discouraging findings from extensive studies of cities with diverse and less diverse populations. The upshot is that the study done by Robert Putnam (author of “Bowling Alone”) shows that cities with greater diversity have less community involvement by individuals, more suspicion of their neighbors and even lower voting rates.

You just know that this study, done by a pretty solid liberal, is sweet to the ears of conservatives, from the near right to David Duke. Duke is already featuring the study on his website, to Putnam's distress. Before long it will be making its way into the writings of pop-social science writers and from there the call for , in effect, segregation will become mainstream in what passes as the liberal media from the NYT to The News Hour.

Some conservatives are snorting and huffing because Putnam thinks this is something that we should be looking at in terms of cause and remedy

"You're just supposed to tell your peers what you found," says John Leo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. "I don't expect academics to fret about these matters."

Conservatives apparently value civic well-being less than they do having the political issue of ethnic resentment and division. Are they are looking at how to use this study to promote the closed boarder policy that seems their great white hope in the coming election? I suspect that so. This is the "Southern strategy" with kid gloves.

Since we are a diverse country and every indication seems to show that we are going to become more so, a reputable study showing that:

"People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to 'hunker down' -- that is, to pull in like a turtle," (Putnam)

... is pretty alarming. Anyone interested in having a civil civic life should be looking for ways to promote social and community life across ethnic barriers.

Odd, in the article, that the role of TV as a possible factor in this situation isn’t mentioned. Considering Putnam’s most famous work to date, that seems doubly odd. The role of TV in setting the national attitudes about ethnicity, risk from diversity, the climate of danger and similar vectors that would certainly impinge on the habit of fearful cocooning is, I believe, more pervasive than education or personal experience. The image of non-whites on TV has certainly been studied and been found to promote negative stereotypes. The amount of time Americans watch and absorb the messages of TV has to make it one of the most influential teaching methods today. To ignore the role played by it, and, perhaps, to some extent, radio, in an article like this is a fatal flaw to understanding the full range of explanations.

TV is mentioned once but as the end of the problem, not a source of it:

"distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television."

People more interested in livable cities than promoting racial strife for political gain had better take the role of the mass media into account.

Perhaps it would be good to have some replication of Putnam’s study, though in a sample of the size he took it’s likely to be a long time coming. Until it is, possibly, discounted I’m afraid that the “disaster of diversity” is likely to be the predominant line in any discussion. The conservative-Republican bias of the media almost assures us it will remain in currency for many years to come. But anyone who is more interested in civic peace than in radio-talk show division will have to take seriously the need to pressure the electronic media to stop promoting racism through fear.