Notably, none of the new House committee chairs are women. Current House
Administration Committee Chairwoman Candice Miller (R-Mich.) remains
the only female on the roster of panel leaders, which was announced
earlier.
Is "House Administration" like housekeeping?
The Republican Party sighed a great sigh of relief after deciding that the war-against-women issues didn't seem to work in the last midterm elections. Now they can run the party the way it should be run, as an old white boys' tree-house, and ignore those pesky wimminz' issues.
All this is hilarious. Or would be hilarious if I was reporting on it from outside the country and if the Republican Party didn't vote almost 100% against everything that would make women's lives easier (family leave, equal pay, contraceptive choice etc. etc.)
But there's a technical reason for that dearth of women on the top of the Republican pyramid: There aren't that many Republican women in the Congress in the first place, so the pipeline is nearly empty (or the oven turned off).
PS. I always remind readers in these posts that the relevant way to judge "diversity" is by thinking about population percentages and how well the percentages in the Congress reflect those. From that angle Republican women are sorely under-represented.
Can you see the comments link when you read the blog? I noticed that my SeaMonkey (a backup browser) doesn't show the comments link at all. If you use SeaMonkey, do you see a door to the comments? It should be right below each post.
(This post is about sexual and physical violence.)
The background to this story is a vast and tentacled one*, about the fifteen (so far) women who have accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault at some point of his long acting career. One of those women, Joan Tarshis, was interviewed by Don Lemon about her experiences. The transcript:
LEMON: Can I ask you this, because -- and please, I don't mean to be crude, OK? TARSHIS: Yeah. LEMON: Because I know some of you -- and you said this last night, that he -- you lied to him and said "I have an infection, and if you rape me, or if you do -- if you have intercourse with me, then you will probably get it and give it to your wife." TARSHIS: Right. LEMON: And you said he made you perform oral sex. TARSHIS: Right. LEMON: You -- you know, there are ways not to perform oral sex if you didn't want to do it. TARSHIS: Oh. Um, I was kind of stoned at the time, and quite honestly, that didn't even enter my mind. Now I wish it would have. LEMON: Right. Meaning the using of the teeth, right? TARSHIS: Yes, that's what I'm thinking you're -- LEMON: As a weapon. TARSHIS: Yeah, I didn't even think of it. LEMON: Biting. So, um -- TARSHIS: Ouch. LEMON: Yes. I had to ask. I mean, it is, yeah.
TARSHIS: Yes. No, it didn't cross my mind.
On one level Lemon asks one of those questions which are commonly asked of people who come forward only a long time after an alleged sexual assault: Why didn't you go to the police then? Why didn't you resist or resist more? Why did you go out with him (or ended up alone with him) in the first place?
Some ask those questions because they wish to ascertain (from the answers) the truthfulness of the allegations or because they wish to give the person interviewed a chance to explain her or his reasons for staying silent such a long time. Some ask those questions as a form of victim-blaming, and some appear just clueless.
I think Don Lemon falls into that last category, though I'm willing to put him into all the categories if he so wishes. But it's clueless to suggest that a woman in those circumstances should bite the man's penis, perhaps to bite it off (thus causing him potentially to bleed to death).
Consider the circumstances: You are alone with a man larger and stronger than you, a man much more powerful and famous than you, and you are told to escalate the situation by biting his penis. What could possibly go wrong?
A lot could go wrong, both immediately (risk of physical violence increases, someone might die) and in the longer-run (a possible court case about excess use of force in self defense, combined with trying to prove the sexual assault in the first place (so that it is just excess force in self defense, not in an attack), a probable end to one's current career plans, stigmatization for life if the case becomes public). Indeed, the circumstances in which biting-the-penis results in a happy ending for the victim are extremely improbable.
I can't believe I actually wrote the above paragraph! But then Lemon's comments would have seemed pretty incredible a few days ago.
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*Even vaster if you set it into the framework shared by Jhian Ghomeshi, a Canadian television celebrity who has recently been accused of hitting and choking women he dated. Ghomeshi's defense is that he was acting the sadist's role in a fully consenting sado-masochistic relationship. The women who have come forward say that they were not asked for consent and did not consent.
That larger framework is about more questions: The power of the powerful, the pitfalls of power, the differences and similarities between those cases and the alleged or proven sexual and/or violent assault cases by less powerful individuals.
The imbalance of power in the Cosby and Ghomeshi cases has received shorter shrift than it deserves. It doesn't only affect the initial settings of the alleged acts but the likely consequences of reporting the acts to the authorities.
In some ways it really began as a storm in a teacup, and I missed the ball on something important when writing my previous post, though Crissa in the comments pointed the omission out: There was no big feminist uproar about the shirt-with-the-leather-corseted-women, if by "big" we mean something written out on very large numbers of feminist blogs and/or talked about on various list-serves.
Indeed, after I checked all this, I found nothing about the shirt on those list-serves. Glenn Reynolds (newly come to his full blossoming as an MRA (Men's Rights Activist)) also tells us is that there really wasn't much of a storm in the first place. He states that two women whose jobs are linked to science commented on the shirt:
The Atlantic's Rose Eveleth tweeted, "No no women are toooootally welcome in our community, just ask the dude in this shirt." Astrophysicist Katie Mack commented: "I don't care what scientists wear. But a shirt featuring women in lingerie isn't appropriate for a broadcast if you care about women in STEM." And from there, the online feminist lynch mob took off until Taylor was forced to deliver a tearful apology on camera.
I'm not sure what this online feminist lynch mob looks like. It couldn't have been enormous, because I missed it for quite a time. But sure, there were a few blog posts on the shirt.
What Glenn Reynolds seems to have missed is the responses Rose Eveleth, for instance, received. They are not mentioned in his article so I'm going to put a few of them here:
"Mean girls" online mobbing may be fun for some, but it's not likely to appeal for long. If self-proclaimed feminists have nothing more to offer than that sort of bullying, then their obsolescence is well deserved.
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Added later: It's almost impossible to measure various "mobs" on Twitter. They could be a handful of people in some cases and a large group in other cases. So we should be careful when using words like a "Twitter mob". What can be measured, to some extent, is the number of responses individual tweeters get.
This BBC article summarizes the story, with relevant pictures. The scientist in the quote is Matt Taylor:
One of the leading scientists on the Rosetta Project gave a string of TV
interviews in a shirt emblazoned with half-dressed women. The angry
reaction online spawned two hashtags, spoof images and has now led to a
tearful apology as well.
The Story of the Shirt has indeed provoked lively debates online and possibly elsewhere, too. There are two major sides to these debates, and because I happen to be bilingual in this stuff, I'm going to give you the main messages of both sides, in terms which are clear to people on the other side! Isn't that useful and wonderful?
Let's begin:
First, the side which can be simplified into "women-in-science and women interested in those banned-word* issues":
Here we go again! An important public interview about the fun and excitement in science, a major moment in the history of space exploration, and women are present in leather corsets sticking out their butts and tits from the shirt. The broculture in action! It's their world and we can only visit it if we are willing to stick our butts and tits out the same way. If he had to wear a shirt with women on it, why not this one?
During an interview about the landing, Dr Taylor had branded the comet landing 'the sexiest mission there’s ever been.
'She’s sexy, but I never said she was easy.'
Got that? It's good to remember that Taylor's field is covered with guys, in statistical terms. All this (and the broculture) should be kept in mind when considering the above message from one world. It's also important to remember that this shit is drip-drip-drip, nonstop, even though consisting of tiny and essentially trivial jabs in one's eyeballs and ears.
Second, the defenders of Matt Taylor. This group consists of people who think Taylor is just a bit of a goofball:
Before the
emergence of #shirtgate, Dr Taylor, a father-of-two and the son of a
brick layer, praised on Twitter for being 'a proper cool scientist' and
'definitely not boring'.
One
Twitter user wrote: 'Dr Matt Taylor is what every scientist should look
like - rad shirt, sleeve tattoos. Rad,' while another said: 'Matt
Taylor causing thousands of people to choke on their cornflakes this
morning.'
And imagine if you were given this public treatment for the way you were dressed somewhere in public (I once wore a black shoe and a blue shoe)!
The scavengers have landed on the still-warm corpse of someone who offended the feminazis! Poor guy. He didn't mean anything sexist with that shirt. He was just showing us the human side of being a scientist. At the end of this idiotic debacle he had to apologize and he was in tears, and that's the real injustice, right there.
Got that? Some people made a giant mountain out of a molehill and then tried to suffocate a well-meaning but socially inept scientist under that mountain.
And what do I conclude from all this, given my divine viewpoint?
That both sides are correct in some ways. I doubt very much that Taylor tried to explicitly make women feel that they don't belong in science, and I doubt very much that he chose to see the project as a woman who must be seduced etc in order to put women in their proper place (outside science but sexually available).
At the same time, that's the message he was broadcasting, if ever so slightly. And the reason for that is pretty obvious: The ways we define "a normal guy" and "just having fun" do not exclude shirts like that or statements like that unless you are well-versed in gender issues and the complaints linked to the broculture in STEM fields. Some people have the luxury of not having to be well-versed in those issues, and for that group the whole incident looks like people taking out a cannon to kill a mosquito on the poor man's forehead: Reactions utterly out of scale with the presumed crime.
Compare that to the drip-drip-drip aspect of all those little acts that are tilted by gender. Perhaps another mosquito parable would apply here: One mosquito you can swat away, but if you are always surrounded by a horde of them you do become rather sensitive to mosquito stings.
Whatever you might think about that, someone probably failed in organizing those interviews and in making sure that Taylor was appropriately dressed for the occasion.
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*That would be feminist. See Time magazine for more details.
In China employment discrimination against women sounds a bit like the US of 1960s. There may be laws against it but the cultural norms don't find that much wrong with it. Still, this article suggests that times they might be a-changing.
On the other hand, removing the one-child policy could have complicated effects on the goal of gender-equality: More women are expected to take more time off from the labor market, which makes them less desirable employees, and the valuation of daughters might go down when fewer people don't have to stop at the one daughter but can keep on trying for the sun son.
On the third hand, the linked article suggests that feminist awareness is rising among the young women in China!
About 37% of Indian women have undergone sterilization procedures, the highest rate in the world, compared with 1% of Indian men. Karat said state and local governments opt for the surgeries instead of educating women — most of whom are uneducated — about other contraceptive measures.
Can that 37% figure be right? Even if it isn't, the difference between the male and female figures probably is roughly correct. When you consider the fact that female sterilization is a more invasive procedure than male vasectomy...
Of course tainted medications could have killed patients of either sex. The point is that the risk, on average, is considerably greater for women than men when it comes to sterilization.
In El Salvador abortions are illegal for any reason. Combine that with a culture which views a pregnant unmarried woman as a slut, to be shunned, and you get this:
El Salvador's ban on abortion is driving hundreds of girls who become pregnant after being raped to commit suicide every year because they see no other option, a government official said. Teenage pregnancy is one of the leading causes of suicide in the Central American country of 6 million people. Three out of eight maternal deaths in El Salvador are the result of suicide among pregnant girls under 19, latest government figures show.
Read the linked article to spot the role of the Catholic church in all that. Then think about the fact that the extreme fringe of American forced-birthers want to copy the laws and culture of El Salvador.
The speed of change online and in the media is fascinating to watch. If you turn away for a second to get your eleventh cup of coffee, you miss something crucial. For instance, the midterm elections cured the Ebola fear epidemic! They did. Now if we could only put the reason into a new vaccine.
Sigh.
I was supposed to talk about Social Justice Warriors (SJWs). They used to be people like Gandhi or Martin Luther King or Elizabeth Cady Stanton. But now they are people who bite righteous (that's how the world is and too bad but I'm able to admit it) sexists or racists in the butt, who try to steal gamer boys' inborn right to have nekked women in the computer games, to possibly pretend-rape or pretend-kill them and so on*.
They are people who try to drown the freedom of speech, to initiate that long-gray-corridors-and-slamming-metal-doors era of government communism on the free and wild cowboy Internet! Only this time the faceless bureaucrats will have a face: It's that of a leftist feminist or a revolting-disgusting-all-powerful feminazi. And yes, Virginia, SJWs can include men. Those men are called manginas (man-vaginas, which is intended to be a slur) or white knights (men who defend women, those slutty filthy vermin),
Oh my. I've spent too long in certain places online. My apologies for that. Now Andrew Sullivan (of the why-men-are-hormonally-superior-to-women fame) has jumped in the fray, with his fears that the feminazis have captured Twitter and are now removing the accounts of anyone who hates feminism. Not just accounts which are abusive, mind you, but accounts of someone erudite-in-his-hatred and not at all threatening (such as Milo Yiannopoulos, a writer for Breitbart, and a self-identified leader of the Gamergate)!
What lit the fire under Sullivan's tail this time? Probably the new cooperation between WAM and Twitter:
Sullivan’s panic was occasioned by news
that the small nonprofit Women, Action and the Media, or WAM!, is
working with Twitter to try and make it more responsive to rampant
gender-based harassment. The arrangement, contrary to Sullivan’s
headline, doesn’t give WAM! power to decide what is and isn’t allowed on
the service; it simply gives the group a direct line to Twitter to
report verified cases of abuse and monitor their outcomes. “WAM! will
escalate validated reports to Twitter and track Twitter’s responses to
different kinds of gendered harassment,” says the group’s announcement.
“At the end of the pilot test period, WAM! will analyze the data
collected and use it to work with Twitter to better understand how
gendered harassment intersects with other types of harassment, how those
attacks function on their platform, and to improve Twitter’s responses
to it.”
Michelle Goldberg, the writer of that quote, then notes that Sullivan doesn'tseem to have readanything by women on onlineharassment or anything about onlineharassment in general. I spotted the same thing. He believes everybody faces exactly the same levels of death and rape threats and that everybody would manage just fine with a skin as thick as his. Given recent stories like this one and this one, I'm not at all certain that women don't have an extra helping of hatred on their online dinner plates for just being women.
I have not studied the experiment WAM has with Twitter, and I cannot judge how it is going to work, but the whole thing smells a bit like an attempt by Twitter not to follow its own ethical guidelines but to make someone else do the work. The crucial question Sullivan asks is, of course, whether accounts could be canceled for ideological reasons and not just for threatening violence or harassing someone nonstop.
But you cannot find the answer to that by asking only the people whose accounts have been canceled, just as you cannot necessarily believe someone in court who is accused of committing a crime. Yet that's exactly what Sullivan seems to be doing:
Let me know if you’ve been suspended for ideological reasons – and not
for harassment or stalking or threats of violence. And if you know of a
Twitter account that has been rightly suspended for actual threats to
individual women, ditto.
What's this all about, then? Sullivan would say it is about the freedom of expression, and he might coin himself the First Amendment Warrior.
I think a lot of this is, deep down, about the hatred of women that waxes strong inside some Twitter users. Attempts to regulate the forms that hatred takes in public are necessary, but they are not getting to the root of the problem. For note that a woman can be guilty of as little as tweeting a joke about a sports team, and down come the hordes, ready to commit imaginary vile crimes on her, to punish her for her Twitter crime. Which is to speak, especially if it is in an area others regard as properly male.
See how Sullivan and I both ended with freedom of expression concerns? He is worried about the silencing of certain voices, I point out the silencing of different voices, and the two concepts dance together. A danse macabre?
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*There's a second definition of that term, too, having to do with some Twitter groups. Goldberg refers to it in her article.
Eleven years is an elegant number, beginning with an elegant letter and very suitable for this middle-of-the-road gateway blog to feminazism and other horrors.
It's the eleventh birthday of this blog. I'm out of my mind to do something like this for eleven years, but then you knew that already. Is there going to be cake? But of course! It's going to be made out of chocolate, with whipped cream filling, and the decorations on top will be marzipan mice and chocolate snakes chasing them.
Thank you, my erudite and kind readers for these years or whatever snippets of them we have shared.
The next week or two will contain some posts that I've thought about for a long time or researched for a long time. Anniversary posts. Some of them are like prey for those predators whose yellow eyes you see glittering under the dark online trees. Some of them are just the usual boring stuff, but I hope one or two will also be fun.
My “favorite” exit polling of this election has these percentages:
78-20-26; 43-55-74. The first is the percent of white evangelical
Christians who voted
Republican, Democratic, and their percentage of the overall electorate.
The second is the result from the rest of the electorate — in short,
Democrats carried the “everybody else” cohort by a pretty good margin.
But the overwhelming support of white evangelicals, more than
one-quarter of the electorate made all the difference for Republicans.
(The white evangelical breakdown was almost identical, by the way, in
the last several elections).
To give you an idea how impressive that 26% of the electorate is: the
entire polled cohort of “people of color” — blacks, Latinos, and Asians
(other “of color” people voted, but too small a group to sample) —
totaled 23%. The people who tell you that the Christian Right has faded
are wrong. And the Republican Party will never “moderate” (whatever that
means) as long as it gets over 40% of its vote from a group that
is deeply reactionary (both socially and economically).
The so-called culture wars will be with us for a very long time, because the money boyz will need those right-wing fundies and the fundies want the gays back in the closet and the wimminfolk back in the kitchen. That is the bloody meat they will be thrown in exchange for the wallet brigade getting lower corporate taxes, corporate Internet**, fracking and so on. That marriage, between the fundies and the corporatists, is not made in heaven but it's still unlikely to lead to a divorce.
Ironically enough, the Republican Party must not "overreach" in what they offer to the white evangelical Christians. If abortion and same-sex marriage were actually made illegal the fundies would no longer have much of an incentive to vote for the Republicans.
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*I'm not sure if this is raw or adjusted exit poll data.
**Like always having the choice between an expensive but fast toll road or a free-but-slow gravel road full of potholes. What's wrong with that? Given the income inequality in the US (and the rest of the world), a lot is wrong with that. We don't usually privatize infrastructure, for fairly obvious reasons.
This will be fun! The curmudgeon goddess gets to talk! Usually it's the goddess of gloom.
First complaint: Imagine getting in your car early in the morning, ready to drive to work, and someone has changed all the dials around and the gear-stick is now on the other side of the driver's seat. You get a little message when you power on, telling you that all is now "new and improved."
That never happened to you? Well, it's happened to me three times during the last week, but not in the car. At my computer. The people who change things around never seem to put any weight on the problem I've tried to clarify with the above parable: Learning is a cost to the users, and changes in the system should take that cost into account.
Second complaint: How microwave ovens and other domestic gadgets are designed to make cleaning as impossible as possible (heh). The designers never did any cleaning? The designers have large investments in the toothpick and Q-tip industries? The designers hope that consumers buy another product when the previous one is full of gunk and goo?
Here's another (though trivial) reason why we need more women in design, not because there's anything gender-essentialist about women and cleaning, but because women are more likely to have cleaned such gadgets in the past than men and more likely to have to clean them in the future, sadly. This article gives you more reasons for getting more women in the STEM field.
I don't get why consumers don't rise up and demand gadgets which are cleanable and which last longer. Those would be better for the environment, too.
Third complaint: I don't have a third complaint today. But one needs to count to at least three to get a listicle! And listicles are the new face of online journalism. That might work as the last trivial complaint.
1. Julien Blanc, a PUA (pickup artist) is giving heterosexual men expensive seminars on how to talk to women, with the pu**y as the goal. The way you get a woman's interest is by grabbing her head and sticking it to your dick, to quote the speaker's own words. I'm not sure if you are supposed to say "hi" first or just attack the first woman that walks by you in the street. This guy crawled from under some weird rock, all slimy and tentacled (apologies to all the slimy and tentacled creatures for that comparison) and equipped with something like the Rapist's Bible, based on the messages he has left in social media. More about this charming individual:
Mr. Blanc, who describes himself as the executive coach for Real Social
Dynamics, makes a living selling men the “important investment” of his
advice in the fine art of picking up women. It’s a course he calls PIMP,
that includes techniques in “How to destroy her Bitch Shield,” by among
other things, commanding women to “Get down on your knees, call me
Master, and BEG ME to kiss you…”
His views on Japanese women are a bit like someone's views on sushi. If you get my meaning. Women are prey, and different types of prey animals are either easier or harder to catch. But the Great White Hunter does really well in Tokio! Head to dick, you know. (I watched the video).
Blanc is now facing opposition online, and one hotel in Australia has dumped his planned series of academic lectures on the fine art of seducing a woman (head to dick, head to dick). That's because the students would probably want to practice what they learn with the hotel guests, like how to break through her Bitch Shield, how to make her kneel and call him the master etc.
2. The Gamergate continues. I found this post by a man pretty interesting. He cannot take the harassment he is getting, and he's on the Gamergate side (the side which worries about ethics in game journalism and only harasses women sorta accidentally). Not surprisingly, he gets most harassment from his own side.
This YouTube spoof based on the Hitler movie which has been used for many, many similar spoofs is very funny if you have followed the Gamergate.
3. Finally, more on the street harassment video. People in New Zealand redid the experiment and the woman in that video didn't get any cat calls whatsoever. As I wrote in my earlier post on this, the phenomenon is cultural and shows great local variations. Some countries are worse than others (Italy has a long history of street harassment as men's entitlement, Cairo is very bad, based on what I have read), and even in the US cities vary in this culture.
That is good news, because cultures can be changed.
And here's Collie Myerson on the first NYC video and the question of the harassers' race and ethnicity. We need similar videos taken in different parts of cities, in different countries (I've seen one from Egypt) and with women of different race and ethnicity before there's anything like a full picture on street harassment of women.
It's not the morning but I was up most of the night so there. The results were as predicted by historical patterns for midterms but worse than that for Democrats. At the same time several pretty progressive initiatives won. For example, raising the minimum wages got support in five states which are not exactly deeply blue states:
Voters in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota supported proposals to raise wages for their lowest-paid workers–an issue that is of particular concern for small employers, who tend to operate on thinner margins. Illinois approved a non-binding measure, which won’t immediately change the current law.
The radical “personhood” movement was dealt a significant blow on Tuesday night, when voters in North Dakota and Colorado resoundingly defeated two ballot initiatives that would have redefined life to extend legal protections to fertilized eggs.
But then there is this, from Charlie Pierce, on all the election results (read the whole thing):
I think it was contemplating the fact that both Sam Brownback and Paul
LePage both may have survived as governors that was the last straw for
me tonight. Brownback has wrecked his state. Even Kansas Republicans believe that.
LePage is a local embarrassment who became a national embarrassment in
the final days before the election. Even Maine Republicans believe that.
But Brownback will go back to wrecking his state, and LePage will go
back to embarrassing his because of an attitude that Republicans, and
the conservative movement that has powered the party, have cultivated
carefully over the last three decades.
Susan Sherman, a religious education teacher who is also a registered nurse, was recently on a mission in Kenya in eastern Africa. When she returned, St. Margaret Mary school requested she take a precautionary 21-day leave and produce a health note from her doctor, according to a statement from the Archdiocese of Louisville.
How close did Susan Sherman go to the areas of Ebola? This map gives you an idea if you remember that Kenya is on the right edge of the African continent:
Kenya is shown on this map:
I'm too lazy to figure out the distance from Kenya to the nearest country which does have people with Ebola. But it's sort of wanting to quarantine people who have been to Louisiana because Oregon had some illness.
All these reactions may be understandable, because of the hind-brain response to new and poorly understood threats. But information is the proper vaccination here, and information seems sorely lacking. And some politicians play on that fear.
Speaking of Ebola and politics, can you even imagine what would happen if the party in power during a real Ebola epidemic in the US were the one which wants to choke the public health care system to almost-death and save lots of money through privatizations? Vote. It's important.
In the US the day of the midterm elections is tomorrow. Most forecasts predict a Republican House and Senate*. That means the bus which was stopped for a few years will, once again, start careening towards the abyss.
But whatever your political views might be you should vote, rather than skip the midterm election.
You should especially vote if other people try to stop you from voting by direct actions, such as the movement trying to stop voter fraud not at the machines (where it's probably a bit more likely) but by mostly imaginary illegal voters. The impact of the movement that requires specific types of IDs in order to vote hits the poor harder, hits the elderly harder, and hits the minorities harder.
Then there are the recent statements by various right-wingers arguing that young women shouldn't vote because they are too stupid to vote. One way to respond to that is to list all the possible classes of people who might be too stupid to vote, but I won't stoop that low. The point is that the right to vote was won with great sacrifices and should be treasured by the simple act of using it as it was intended: Vote.
It takes less time than a dental cleaning** and is much more pleasurable.
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*Largely because the competitive slots are mostly in Republican-leaning areas and because midterm elections tend to favor the party which doesn't have the presidency. But general apathy also matters, and these predictions are not the same as final outcomes. Less than a thousand votes gave George Bush Jr. the presidency and all that followed from it. Thus, it's never safe to assume that your vote or its absence wouldn't matter.
**Assuming you don't belong to one of those groups which others try to stop from voting. Then it might take longer.
That can have serious consequences, because people are human, need rest and sleep, and make mistakes if they are overworked.
Most of Kaplan's examples come from hospitals, though it should be noted that treating nurses as if the nursing forests were full of dead trees in need of felling is a longer term trend*. But similar concerns apply to other "post-recovery" industries, including schools, factories, mines and stores. Overwork can kill or hurt, and the victims are not only the workers themselves.
As an aside, this aspect of working very hard is seldom addressed in the moral sermons about the need to work hard rather than to ask for help. Nobody is at their best after a twenty-hour shift in a hospital, say, and I wouldn't want someone investing my money (to give an utterly imaginary example!) after they have been working twelve to fourteen hours without a lunch break. I don't want truck drivers on the roads without adequate sleep and breaks, either.
Then there are the related concerns: Workers have families and if workers are always supposed to be working (at least always available for work), the family duties will suffer.
At least many nurses have unions. The non-unionized workers have few options when the labor markets push them into the choice of working incredibly long or tiring hours or not working at all.
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*Caused by a complex mixture of events: Less severe patients are sent home so the average case-mix in the hospitals is sicker, even if there might be fewer patients overall, the pressures to cut costs by reducing the staff at hospitals, especially in for-profit hospitals, and the fact that defining the output of nurses is difficult and can be debated over. For instance, which tasks should be performed by nurses and which can be performed by other, less expensive staff, is something that can be manipulated.
If you celebrate it. The festival used to be for older children and pre-teens in the US. That might be the only group which isn't that keen on Halloween these days. Or so I judge on the basis of my social media surfing, where dogs, cats, adults and tiny babies wear Halloween costumes.
Speaking of social media, Twitter and the like, it might be worth confessing on this BOO! day that using logic, looking at the evidence and treating everyone with preliminary respect (as a possible human being, goddess. god, elf or whatever) is not the way to win hearts and minds in politics, be they the traditional type or sexual or gender politics. You need something different.
Chews on a piece of straw while meditating on that.
You need to appeal to emotions, you need to show only the data which supports your argument, even if it is the only study in the whole wide world which does so (looking at you, David Brooks), you need to look at only the extreme opposite ends of distributions (like compare Mother Theresa with Hitler or Einstein with Paris Hilton in gender analysis) or simplify complex evidence in weird ways (add apples to oranges, divide by lemons and get bananas), and when someone points that out to you, you need to move the focus of the argument to something quite different (you know how this is done).
Or just blow your stack (how DARE you analyze data!). That always works wonders.
The other stream of stuff I'm unhappy with is the Twitter phenomenon of talking about the way we talk about what we talk about. The circles go on forever. It's not that linguistic analysis, including linguistic power analysis, wouldn't be useful. But the infinite circles are not useful, and they never lead to any concrete resolutions or practical policies. For that we need to look at the infrastructure: health care, education, housing, jobs, utilities, clean air, voting rights, honest electoral politics, properly regulated markets and so on.
That was today's rant.
For its exact opposite (and anti-Halloween) here's Hildegard von Bingen:
Hollaback, an organization that wants to stamp out street harassment and intimidation (a.k.a. catcalls), produced a video in which it videotaped a young woman walking around Manhattan for 10 hours this past August. A hidden video camera was placed in the backpack of a man walking in front of her, catching every catcall, whistle, and even one persistent character who walked alongside the woman for five minutes. The results are startling. According to Hollaback, there were over 100 instances of verbal harassment in that 10-hour walk, not including winks and whistles. In the video, the woman remains silent. She is dressed in a T-shirt and jeans.
The responses to the video range from one extreme to the other. If you feel masochistic today, spend some time (which might feel like an eternity) reading the comments at the YouTube site (or probably the comments attached to any article about the video).
I looked in, rather quickly, about four million views ago, and found the debate raging, with all the usual fronts covered: Those who were shocked to find that this happens (including the new "of course I hate all feminists but" gang!), those who argued that the woman was rude in not responding to the compliments, those who wanted the video to be about hunger and war peace, those who stated that they were women and loved getting wolf whistles and compliments and of course large numbers of women who pointed out that this happens a lot and it gets pretty wearisome after a while.
I didn't come across the rape threats that supposedly were deleted from the YouTube site. But then YouTube comments about anything having to do with women usually have something of that sort so they may not have registered in my hardened mind.
Two responses arguing back at the video stuck to my mind. The first one was a comment in the long thread at the YouTube where someone asked how he was going to find pu**y if not by complimenting strangers who are walking to work or to school or to the dentist or to the grocery store. That one was funny. I immediately imagined that the pu**y harvesting time is now and the way to harvest it is by approaching total strangers happening to be walking somewhere.
That's a funny one because a) it assumes (rather than proves) that no woman walking alone in Victorian NYC would have been harassed (hah! middle-and-upper class women were not supposed to go out alone ever, poorer women might have told about worse than harassment), b) it offers women the choices of submission or harassment and, c) it hints at something rather nasty behind that veil of "enforced chivalry."
Then to the boring-but-necessary extra analysis:
First, street harassment does vary by city and between countries and probably by the streets in individual cities. It depends largely on local culture. So what we see in the video may not apply to other places on this earth. In some she might not have been addressed at all, in others she might have suffered much worse.
Those cultural variations suggest that we can change street harassment.
Second, those cultural variations also mean that only some men engage in these practices. That's worth pointing out. What is going on in the sub-cultures which condone or support harassing behavior and how can it be changed.
Third, what about the idea that all the woman received, ultimately, were compliments (well, what with a little bit of gentle stalking). What's so bad about getting compliments? Why couldn't the b**ch thank for them or at least smile?
Sorry, that last sentence was influenced by a few of the comments I read. More seriously, the statements in the video are a lot milder than some of the stuff I have experienced in my past. Much milder. But here's the dilemma one faces when receiving such compliments:
What to do next? The person has not asked you if you want to talk or whatever, but has simply decreed that this exchange will now take place.
And the only choice you have is how to respond. If you smile or say thank you or even nod your head, will that person accelerate the attempt at a connection? What then? If you ignore the attempt, will you get by safely or will something worse follow?
And I noticed how glum I have been on the blog during the last few months, and if not glum then overly neutral. The reason, my friends, is in the stars. *
Well, not in the stars as such, but partly in what's happening (ISIL! Ebola! Climate Change!), partly in my own battle fatigue (as in: "haven't I already written about this struggle some time during the last eleven years?", and: "did it make any f***ing difference at all?"). Yes, Virginia, sometimes I'm a pretty egoistic goddess, hoping that what I do matters more than a hill of beans in this crazy world.
To return the ball to the home plate (I'm trying to cram this post full of incomplete quotes, bad similes and so on), I can't think of anything to write about the politics of Halloween costumes that I haven't already written.
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*And also "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall" because I've been coping with some family health problems which are finally clearing.
Added later: Something completely new for Halloween
Some hardcore Gamergate supporters* gathered for a party at a strip club. Because the movement has been accused of sexism and misogyny, they made an effort to point out that ladies were present, and not just those ladies who offered lap dances or table dances for a fee, but female Gamergate supporters:
The 8channers gathered at the club moved their chairs into a ragged line
and gawked for a few obligatory minutes as a compact Asian dancer
extricated herself acrobatically from a fishnet body suit, before
forming into tight-knit clusters around small round tables. They were
overwhelmingly young white men in their early to mid 20s. An enormous
bald man named Hans, an 8channer who had flown from Texas for the party,
pointed out three women in attendance, two bona-fide female 8channers,
and one girlfriend, a model and actress with a neat Suicide Girl look
who was the only partygoer dressed more for the club than Comic Con.
“Naturally, accusations of misogyny are thrown around, but as evidenced
by the presence of women, of which there are a few, it is a diverse
group.” Hans paused, then winked. “By the way, table dances are $10 and
lap dances are $75, if you’re interested. May I recommend Ms. Rain?”
....
Suddenly Brennan zoomed into the apartment, sparking applause. Someone
wheeled in a suitcase full of cheap booze to even more applause. A
MacBook was set up to live-stream the party and Brennan posted a link
from 8chan’s official Twitter account. He read a message from an 8chan
user. “They said, ‘Where are the girls? You said there would be girls.'”
Everyone laughed, and Sarah and Brooke waved at the camera.
Fascinating. This story is a parable for the Gamergate, implicitly defining the rules for women's participation in a particular type of world. The party is at a strip club, aimed to please heterosexual men with its services. Girl gamers can be present, too! But it must feel awkward for them. A little like being an honorary chicken guest at the foxes' annual chicken dinner celebration.**
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*This post gives a short summary of the issues. Gamergaters argue that the movement is about ethics in gaming journalism, their critics argue that the movement looks to be largely about misogyny. Data tends to support the latter rather than the former argument.
Oh, and the title is because there's an Internet meme using "it's about ethics in gaming journalism" applied to all sorts of utterly unrelated things, to demonstrate how unlikely it is as an explanation.
**There's much more to that story than the parable I pulled out. We could peel the onion of ideas much deeper to try to understand why one of the gamers present felt this:
...but a skinny guy named Mike, who had flown out to California to
help Brennan with the move, became increasingly agitated. SJWs were
trying to take away one of his last bastions of freedom and he felt
personally under attack. “They think everything we have is shit, and
they want to change it!” he shouted. “This is all we’ve had — for
years!”
I wish the writer of the article had asked Mike more questions about what he would want to have, in the meatspace world, and why certain aspects of the games are so important for him. Is this about someone whom life has treated especially harshly? Or is this about someone who would like the reality to be like the most misogynistic games out there? How much is entitlement and how much is pain? And why must a game be a certain way to be exciting for him?
