Short Posts 2/7/20: Ripping Nancy Pelosi, International Day To End FGM And Funny Songs

1.  This is fun if you like making fun of song lyrics.

2.  Nancy the Ripper.  That's what I saw someone call Nancy Pelosi after she tore apart Trump's speech.  I have no idea if that ripping apart was a deliberate move or just one of those moments when the frustration boils over the edge of the political pressure-kettle.  What she said suggests the latter:

“It’s appalling the things that he says. And then you say to me: ‘Tearing up his falsehoods, isn’t that the wrong message?’ No, it isn’t,” she said, adding: “I feel very liberated. I feel that I’ve extended every possible courtesy. I’ve shown every level of respect.”

It's fascinating that some have attacked her for that move, given what Donald Trump has done to the rules of courtesy and comity:  They certainly have never been expected to apply to our Dear Leader!  But Pelosi shouldn't lower herself to his level, I hear.  That she tried the high road for such a long time makes me awed by her patience.  I would have eaten and digested someone many times during the last year, given that facts and such matter not at all.

3.   You probably didn't know that yesterday was the International Day Of Zero Tolerance For Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).  The tolerance is certainly not at zero level, though things are better than they were thirty years ago.  This article shows the three most common types of FGM:

The most extreme type, infibulation,  is getting rarer which makes me happy:

Women who have undergone infibulation – where the labia are cut and sewn together to drastically narrow the vaginal opening – have to be cut open again to enable sexual intercourse and childbirth. 

4.   I feel politically very alone.  Am I alone in this?  Heh.   

Recognizing Expertise Over Time. A Feminist Take.

I came across this picture somewhere online.  It's a joke about how the way we acknowledge expertise has changed over time:

The joke in the picture is a good one, suggesting that who qualifies as the expert on some issue has changed in undesirable ways over time.  In the 1990s the expert was a leading scientist, in the 1990s a PhD student, in the 2000s a media expert (whatever that means), and in the 2010s the expert is Karen on Facebook.

I agree on the punchline, of course I do!  Far too many people now get their news from the curated and biased smorgasbord Facebook algorithms and our friends and allies on social media offer us.  Though times were not necessarily that much greater in the past decades, it's certainly true that expertise now has much more to do with gut feelings than with actual demonstrated knowledge of a field.

But I can't avoid seeing cartoons such as the above from other angles, too.  For instance, it looks like everyone in the picture is white, though it's hard to tell with a cartoon, and of course acknowledged experts in the US mostly are white both for reasons of population numbers (whites are still the majority) and for reasons of racism (fewer people of color in the upper echelons of various fields and of those who are in the upper echelons,  fewer are seen as experts by others because of that race-tinted fog we all live in).

In fact, there are good reasons to keep all other things except for the punchline topic as constant as possible between the decades so as to drive the punchline home.  Those other things are not held constant, however.  The first three experts are clearly intended to be read as men, while the last one is intended to be read as a woman*.  If the name "Karen"** doesn't get you there, then the hairstyle should...

Would the story have been weaker if the last figure had been, say, Kevin, in a baseball cap, from Facebook?  Or is it the case that naming this Facebook friend "Karen" strengthens the case the cartoon is making?  After all, women are very rarely viewed as valid experts, even if the women in question wear lab coats and have PhDs.

This post is an example of those posts I write which are often deemed to be about nitpickery.  Or comma-fuckery, as Finns say. 

And the topic is trivial, of course, except in showing how diffuse and common those little reminders of sexist hierarchies are in our daily lives.  It also shows one of the reasons why it's so hard to get those real experts who just happen to be women the respect they deserve.


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*  We have regressed so terribly when it comes to gender norms that one's hairstyle is now immediately coded as signifying gender or biological sex.  I have learned this in those parts of the social media young people use!

Boys have short hair and play football (and when they grow up they will wear lab coats and become experts or at least media experts).  Girls, on the other hand, have long hair and wear skirts and when they grow up they will become Karens on Facebook.   And yes, I know that this is an exaggerated take, but it's not as exaggerated as it should be.

**  I can't tell if the woman in the cartoon is called Karen because of the Karen meme.  That meme, in itself, probably partly operates so strongly because women are not supposed to complain and be vocal, so those who do tend to stand out in an unpleasant manner as strident and demanding.  I see this a lot in politics. 

And of course it's the case that women, too, from all demographic groups can be difficult and bossy and nasty people.   Karen in the meme is usually interpreted as a young-to-middle-aged white woman, often an ex-wife, who took custody of the kids.  That last interpretation adds a soupcon of open anger at women into the picture.

Even more generally, our unconscious sexism contributes to the success of memes such as the Karen one.  Because the rules for deciding when someone is strident and overly demanding vary by sex, a person like Karen looks so much worse than an otherwise identically behaving but male version of Karen.  Kevin, say.  We expect the Kevins of this world to be assertive, after all, so they have to break furniture while demanding service at some store before they are deemed entitled or strident or demanding.

Short Posts 2/3/20. On Impeachment, Nursing Salaries, Child Grooming Scandals, The New Inclusiveness, And Sudden Social Change

This post is a giant cupboard full of tiny snippet thoughts and links that I have gathered but have not had the energy (yet) to work into something bigger and more meaningful. 

1.  How best to view the impeachment process:  As kabuki theater?  Or as a game between two sports teams, each with acolytes who care about nothing but winning?  Or is it the case that one side cares about nothing but winning, even if that winning means beheading the umpires and scrapping all rules, while the other one wants to win only the "holier-than-thou-races?"

And how far have I fallen when I see the whole process from such a bitter and cynical angle?

Maybe the sanest approach to watching this while trying to predict the outcome of the next presidential elections is to return to seeing the importance of the material world:

Trump won't win if the economy goes bad enough rapidly enough to be seen as bad in the immediate environs of enough voters, but he might win if this doesn't happen, or if he starts yet another unnecessary war somewhere far enough not to matter a lot in those immediate environs of most voters (rah, rah, U.S. of A).

I sometimes think that many Trump voters don't actually like Trump's ethics and morals (or the lack of both, really), and view him as  a crook.  But he is their known-and-true crook, while the Democratic alternatives look filled with uncertainty.