No Doesn't Mean No?

Atrios links to two worried men's articles on the question of proving that rape has taken place.
The National Review's James Bowman pines for the old days when:

Pre-feminist common sense suggested that a woman who comes alone to a man's hotel room late at night has already consented to sex with him.

and Gregg Estabrook is similarly concerned about how to interpret women's fuzzy signals of sexual willingness or not:

Because men know this--because in the real world "no" does not always mean no--speaking the word "no" is not the ideal way to communicate to a man that what is happening has changed from persuasion, or pressure, to compulsion. Men not only want sex, the male mindset holds that overcoming the woman's "no" is part of manliness. Few men will rape if that's what they think they are doing. Many try to push past "no" and tell themselves that what they are doing is manly persuasion of the naturally hesitant female. "Had we but world enough, and time/this coyness, lady, were no crime:" Andrew Marvel, circa 1650.
There has to be a better way than the word "no" to communicate to the man that he has crossed the line, and that better way must be widely agreed upon. Here's my proposal: If the line is crossed, women should say, "This is rape!"

So in the real world "no" does not always mean no, according to these gentlemen. Where does it then? According to Bowman, this place is the courts:

No means no — even though no one else hears it, even though everyone knows that it may mean yes — because feminists want to reserve to women the right and freedom to be indiscrete (sic).

What's a guy to do (Bowman and Estabrook seem to say)? It's manly to push past the 'no', but then you get sued for rape. Those darned feminists have really spoiled the sexual games, haven't they?

My suggestion for these two: Accept the 'no' for a no. Then if she really didn't mean it, she'll be the one missing all the goodies and won't make the same mistake again. In fact, she might be the one cajoling you next time, trying to forcibly push past your nos. And you didn't rape anybody by accident.

Otherwise I quite like Bowman's idea about the prefeminist rules: Anyone entering my hotel room has consented to sex with me! Room service waiters, cleaning staff, people I've invited in for a business meeting. Yeah! Life is sweet for us goddesses....

Rara Avis, Part III (Laura Schlessinger)

I really have to make the effort to blog about somebody sane and fairly nice. But not yet! Today I want to talk about our Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the beloved radio prophet and advice giver to the right-wing female hordes as to how to keep their husbands happy, their closets clean and the gays and lesbians firmly locked away in the same closets. She's not really a curious bird, though it does boggle the mind how a doctorate in physiology makes her qualified to give psychological advice. Maybe 'physiology' sounds enough like 'psychiatry'?

She sees herself fully qualified by the fact that she has committed all the female sins she now preaches against: she divorced her first husband, engaged in premarital sex and actively sought a professional career. She still has a professional career, though, which she uses to rant against other women with professional careers.

Your average conservative talk-show star, perhaps, but there are deeper levels to Laura. For one, she's an interesting example of a female woman-hater. This is a fascinating thing to be, especially when there appears to be no lack of simultaneous self-adoration. How does she do it? And why? It probably has something to do with her unsatisfactory relationship with her mother. Still, it's bit of a stretch to seek vengeance on the whole female half of the species just because she didn't like her mother.

As evidence of her misogyny, I present Dr. Laura's new book, titled The Care and Feeding of Husbands. In it she gives women the keys to the secrets of a happy marriage. These have already been handed out in Marabel Morgan's Total Woman (1975), but just to summarize, this is what the Publishers Weekly review says about Laura's book:

...this controversial marriage and family therapist claims that every woman can achieve a deeply satisfying marriage if she adheres to certain fundamentals men require. Preparing dinner, caring for the children without complaint, greeting her husband with a kiss and engaging in sexual intimacy instead of "tearing down a husband's necessary sense of strength and importance" can result in the harmonious marriage women crave.

Dr. Laura also suggests that wives should not withhold sex. As one reader review so aptly noted:

I've read several criticisms of Dr Laura's position that it is a wife needs to meet her husband's sexual needs even when she's not in the mood. Dr Laura compares it to how irresponsible it would be for a husband to not go to work just because he's too tired or doesn't feel like it.

So now we know. Sex is wives' work!

And what do women get for following all this sage advice? Is there going to be a book titled The Care and Feeding of the Wife which men can leaf through to find the secret formula for women's happiness in marriage? No! See what happened when she was asked this very same question in an interview:

Are you going to write the book for men on the proper care and feeding of wives?

Nope. Men are born of women and between girlfriends and then a wife; men spend their entire lives in the tutelage of women. What women accept or reject is largely the guiding force for what men will and won't do. When they are treated with the Three A's, they naturally, and in gratitude and affection, give their women the attention, regard, respect, support and love they want.

The three A's referred to in this quote are affection, approval and appreciation. Nothing wrong in arguing that these are important characteristics of happy marriages. But what is odd is that women must learn to show their affection, approval and appreciation by such concrete acts as cooking, childcare and sex, while men just seem to 'know' how to show their affection, approval and appreciation. But only after women learn their lesson.

I don't buy this, and neither does Dr. Laura, really. She writes this book for women because men wouldn't buy such books. So it's all about money, as one might expect. The book won't work, and in a few years she can write another money-maker for the submarket of unhappy conservative wives. Nice work if you can get it.

Though The Care and Feeding of Husbands is a treatise based on woman-hating, there is something more to it; a tinge of contempt towards men, starting with the title which reminds me of a how-to-book in animal care. Dr. Laura may tell women how to be properly submissive, but she is telling this in the disguise of female power:

Women seem not to understand, or underestimate, the profound power they have over their husbands. Men are very emotionally dependent upon women from the day they are born to the day they expire. This book teaches women to use this power benevolently – which will definitely result in them being happier with life and love. (From the book.)

This whiff of misandry is strengthened when one learns that men are very simple creatures:

All through the book you say "men are simple" ... isn't that an insult?

Not at all! In fact, most all of the many hundreds of responses I received from men in preparing this book confirmed just that: "Men are only interested in two things: If I'm not horny, make me a sandwich," and "As a man, I can tell you our needs are simple. We want to be fed, we want our kids mothered, and we want lovin'."

Though not comparable in intensity to her misogynistic messages, I'd go as far as to say that Dr. Laura doesn't much care for men, either. In fact, it seems that Dr. Laura finds everybody quite lacking, with the possible exception of herself.

And what does she try to achieve with this book, other than the obvious increases in her stock market investments? I suspect that she seeks male approval, the comforting lap of daddy when mommy doesn't understand. Will she get it? I doubt it very much. Here's one man's comments on the book's author:

And for all her talk about the joys of domesticity and motherhood, she is principally identifiable as a psychologist, author, and talk-show hostess. How much time did she actually spent (sic) raising her family?

Besides, she's a black-belt in karate, and athletically-inclined females have terminal penis-envy. They are not bastions of pro-male sentiment.

Poor Laura, perhaps. Though not at all compared to the troubled callers in her shows and the worried readers of her books. It is they that deserve our real compassion and pity.

Getting into College: Echidne's Tips

Legacy admissions to college have been in the news again:

Blood ties to alumni, sometimes known as the other affirmative action, are the deciding factor in the admission of more than 300 white Texas A&M University freshmen annually, according to data provided by the school.
Such students -- known as "legacy admits" -- equal roughly the overall total of blacks admitted to A&M each year. Only a handful of black students a year are admitted because of legacy points.
....
A&M's program is drawing particular fire because university President Robert Gates recently announced the university, now free from a court ruling prohibiting racial preferences, won't consider race in admissions. Coleman and other black legislators cited a seeming contradiction between Gates' rhetoric that students be admitted strictly because of merit and a program they say perpetuates class distinction and white advantage.
Gates, president for 1 1/2 years, said he doesn't have a gut-level feeling about legacies, much less a thought-out one, because he inherited the program and knows little about it. He said a task force will study its future.

If Texas A&M President Robert Gates actually said that students should be admitted strictly because of merit, he is either going to revolutionize the admissions policies of American colleges or coin completely novel definitions of the term 'merit'. College admissions have never been based on strict merit. Factors such as family wealth, alumni status, geographic location and skills in playing some sport totally unrelated to the purpose of a university education have always had an effect on the applicants' chances of a place in the freshman year class. But none of these issues has provoked anywhere near the anger about lack of merit as racial preferential treatment in college admissions. It's not just fair, many seem to think. Students should be admitted on the basis of their merit, not because of their skin color. Even George W. Bush implied this in his
comments about last year's University of Michigan affirmative action case:

At the law school, some minority students are admitted to meet percentage targets while other applicants with higher grades and better scores are passed over. This means that students are being selected or rejected based primarily on the color of their skin. The motivation for such an admissions policy may be very good, but its result is discrimination and that discrimination is wrong.

Is it then fair to admit students largely based on where their parents went to school? Or based on how much their parents have stashed away? Or based on the location of their homes? If this is fair, why is using skin color less fair? In all these cases it could be that some student of greater academic merit, some student who has worked better and burned the midnight oil longer, some student with the potential of finding the cure for cancer, may have been denied admission because some other student was given preferential treatment.

In my experience, this is how most opponents of racial affirmative action view its effects. Yet they are strangely silent about the other affirmative action programs, or if they comment on them, they merely point out the rationale for doing these kinds of things : of course colleges want to favor alumni children, after all, their parents are a major source of funds, of course colleges wish to attract students from all sorts of geographical locations in order to create a diverse student body. Or they point out that discrimination on the basis of these other factors: wealth, blood ties and location is not illegal, but discrimination on the basis of race is. Or they argue that the numbers involved in the other affirmative action programs are too small to really make a difference.

But of course the racial preferences in admissions also have a rationale: to create a more equal society, and the numbers of the beneficiaries from these other policies are by no means inconsiderable. As an example, in last year's freshman class at Duke University, 18% of the students entered through the program for underrepresented minorities, 12% through the alumni program, 8% were recruited as athletes and 3-5% as potential donors (i.e. rich kids). Though some students may have entered through more than one program and many of these students might have qualified for unassisted admissions, the fact remains that at Duke the other affirmative action programs cover a larger percentage of freshmen than race-based affirmative action itself. So why the furor over one and not the others, at least among those currently in government? Might it have something to do with the race of the beneficiaries? After all, most alumni children are still white and so are overwhelmingly the students with very wealthy parents? And though many student athletes are black many are not. This couldn't be the answer, could it?

Think about the following exchange of opinions by the lawyers representing the two sides in the University of Michigan case:

"What does legacy preference do to advance fairness and merit?" asks Theodore M. Shaw, a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., who represents 17 minority high-school students granted defendant status in the suit against the university. "Why is it more defensible than an attempt to include people from minority groups that have been excluded in the past and are still under-represented?"
The reply from the white students' lawyer, Michael Rosman: "Because some small percentage of white students are getting legacy preference, that doesn't mean we should disadvantage all whites" with racial preferences.

Michael Rosman appears to think that racial preferences disadvantage whites but that legacy preferences don't. But surely they do; they disadvantage all whites who are not lucky enough to have had parents, grandparents or siblings who went to the same college. Rosman appears to see the races as two competing armies, fighting a war for the same reward: a place at college, not as consisting of individuals which can indeed be harmed by preferencial treatment given to 'one of their own'.

The most fascinating and least talked about in the group of these other affirmative action programs are the potential donors. These are students with very wealthy parents. Duke University finds them as follows:

Duke's system works this way: Through its own network and names given by trustees, alumni and others, the development office identifies about 500 likely applicants with rich or powerful nonalumni parents. It offers them campus tours and admissions advice and relays the names to the admissions office.
The development office then trims the list to at least 160 high-priority applicants. Admissions readers evaluate them on merit, without regard to family wealth. About 30 to 40 are accepted, the others tentatively rejected or wait-listed. Mr. Guttentag and John Piva Jr., senior vice president for development, debate these 120 cases, weighing their family's likely contribution against their academic shortcomings. Most are admitted.
Once these children of privilege enroll, the development office enlists their parents as donors and fund raisers. A committee of more than 200 nonalumni parents provides a volunteer army for the four classes currently at Duke. Committee members usually give at least $1,000 to Duke, and the eight co-chairmen and the national chairman contribute more, sometimes six- or seven-figure sums.
Membership in the parents' committee is by invitation only and is overwhelmingly white.

Hmmm. My tips about how to get into the college of your choice if you're worried about your grades and test results not being quite up to the expected standards: 1. Get rich parents.
2. Make them attend the right universities. 3. Have them buy a house in some God-forsaken locality where nobody ever goes to college. Voila! You're in. This is a lot more likely to work than belonging to a racial minority. It's also totally unrelated to any merit attributable to the studen't own work.

Postscript 1/11/04: Texas A&M just announced that they are going to scrap legacy admissions.

Stupid Quote Of The Day

Or that's what I think:

Mike van Winkle, the spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center told the Oakland Tribune, "You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest. You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act."

From here

Monday's Dog Blogging

Hi, everybody!

How am I supposed to blog with paws as fat as tennis rackets? Anyway, I'm a dog. I like to run, chase balls and roll in stuff that smells promising. I'm not very smart, but I'm a pedigreed Lab and a real jock. I live with all these snakes which is ok except that they don't like their tails being pulled at all.

This last year was really tough. First they raised the dog tax and then they started enforcing the leash laws. But I gave them the finger! Or the paw. So that wasn't too bad. Catch me if you can!

But then this snakewoman I live with took me to the DENTIST! Just because I played with some rocks and the long bits that stick out in my mouth fell off. Let me tell you that wasn't fun at all. No sir. I tried to bite the guy but they stuck a needle in my butt and that was curtains for me. Now I have fillings which is very embarassing in the dogpark. I had to whip couple of terriers into submission. They just wouldn't stop grinning.

And then I have to live with this bitch! She's older than me, like eleven, and she's the boss.
Whenever I steal her bone she puts me down and humps my head. So I lie there thinking:"You just wait, you. I'll get you one day. When I get my karate training complete."
But somehow she can always anticipate my moves. The snakewoman says that the bitch
is the real Einstein of the dogworld and I'm the Schwartzenegger. I don't get it: Ahnuld is
a boy and I'm a girl, aren't I? (HAHHAH! Bet you thought the bitch was the snakewoman!)

I hope next year will be better. I don't care if it's the election year, after all I'm just a Canadian! (HAHHAH! Bet you thought I was going to say just a dog!)

So that's all. Got to go out to sort out the squirrels. Seeya!

Hank

Cats and Dogs

This is just for fun, for those of you who plan to stay in your PJs all Sunday long. Armed with your favorite beverage and breakfast dish, check out the blog of Barney, the First Dog. A very smart dog he is, Barney.

If this isn't enough canine humor for you, I recommend weiner dog races.

And for cat lovers, there's this. Make sure that you have the sound turned up.
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Thanks fo ms. posters for the last two.

Money for Your Lingerie? (Or Retirement)

It is ever so Out these days to raise a peep about discrimination against women. If you are so unfashionable as to complain, you are promptly labeled a whiner. Hip young post-feminists will advise you to get over your "victim psychology," Dr. Laura will tell you to pull up your socks, and the women's magazines will advise you to try sexy lingerie for your problems.

This is how Molly Ivins begins her column on the gender wage gap, and she's got a point. It IS unfashionable to complain, and it IS fashionable to ignore the wage gap. That women make, on average, only 76 cents to every dollar men make, well, who cares? It's much more fun to learn pole-dancing and to discuss what is sexxee. Besides, lots of people will start screaming at you with red faces if you as much as peep about it.

On top of that, understanding the reasons for the gender wage gap is really hard. It's something economists spend years learning to do, so thinking about the wage gap can be daunting to even the most intellectually alert individual. (If you wish to have a very good introduction to the wage gap, read Ampersand's series at the Alas, A Blog. You won't get anything of same calibre here.)

Maybe that's the reason for the current meme that it's ok to treat the wage gap as something completely debatable, from whether it even exists to what causes its current size. I don't buy that personally, but I'll be glad to show you how it's done here.

Sadly, a little bit of economics is needed before the fun can begin: Basically, there are three possible reasons for the gender wage gap (and yes, all economists out there, I know that I am oversimplifying here):

1. Women can't / Men can (performance differences)

2. Women don't want to /Men want to (preference differences, or as some prefer, choice)

3. Women are not allowed to /Men are allowed to (discrimination)

In reality, the question how much each of these contributes to the wage gap is an empirical one: it should be answered by using proper data and careful methods. But in the medialand the game is played differently: simply pick one or two of the three based on which you like the best. Then write up something emotional to support your choice.

Even Molly Ivins falls for this. Her choice is number 3: discrimination:

Of course, more women could afford sexy lingerie if we weren't still the victims of wage discrimination. Equal Pay for Equal Work is the oldest demand in the feminist repertoire, and everyone gives it lip service; even the anti-feminists assure us that they certainly believe in equal pay for equal work.

Molly, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 applies only to men and women doing exactly the same job. Unfortunately, the vast majority of men and women don't work in the same jobs. Even if every single firm obeyed the Equal Pay Act (which not every single firm does), women would still earn less, because so many work in female-dominated low-pay occupations. If discrimination is to be the culprit, you need to look much deeper into the structures of labor markets.

The spunky ladies of the right-wing Independent Women's Forum choose number 2., choice, combined with the auxiliary argument that all nondiscriminatory factors should be taken into account before examining any residual discrimination:

According to the "wage gap" claim, women earn only 76 cents on the male dollar. But, this is a deliberately misleading claim that fails to account for a number of commonsense facts about women's workplace experiences. Women actually earn 98 cents on the dollar when factors such as age, education, and experience are taken into account. It is critical to compare apples to apples. For example, women often leave the work force to raise children and later return.

The claim about women earning 76 cents on the male dollar is not deliberately misleading, ladies. It's pretty much correct, subtract or add a few cents, depending on the year. What you are trying to say is that not all of the 24 cent difference can be attributed to discrimination without first controlling for variables such as education and work experience. This is true. (But age shouldn't be one of these variables to control for. It's sometimes used as a measure for work experience when the latter is not available in the data, and if you insist to include it even with work experience you are assuming that ageism is an ok thing to affect wages.)

What isn't true is all that stuff about women earning 98 cents on the dollar. This was the result from one study which compared highly-educated single, childless men and women in their first jobs. Lo and behold, the study found that the entry-level wages were almost the same for both sexes. This is a) not proof of equal wages more generally, b) not proof of lack of discrimination and c) not even new.

Economists have known for a long time that all sorts of people earn about the same starting salaries for a given set of education. This would be the case even if they were all hired by the most rabid bigot you can imagine, simply because it is against the law to discriminate in hiring (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act) and because it is against the law to pay different wages for the same job (Equal Pay Act of 1963). The rabid bigot (in my discussion a woman-hater) would have to wait a little longer before she or he could start throwing obstacles in front of the female workers. This could happen through not promoting women, through not giving them opportunities for on-the-job training , or through various forms of sexual harassment. (Though all of these are illegal, too, they are much more difficult to prove than obvious wage differences at entry level.)

I'm not saying that any of these alternatives would necessarily happen. Many women might simply opt out of promotions because of their childcare duties, as the IWF argues. But we don't actually know how much choice and discrimination affect women's earnings development over time. To imply that it's all choice ("For example, women often leave the work force to raise children and later return.") is part of the opinion-game.

My final example of the game is a real peach. It's from an article in the Mensnewsdaily:

The fact is, the "wage gap" disappears when you take into account such factors as training, years in the workforce, travel requirements, degree of physical labor, and risk to life and limb .
And truth be told, men essentially have no choice -- they are expected to be the primary breadwinner in order to support their wives and children . So they accept the high-paying, dangerous jobs that women are unwilling to accept.
In contrast, women have a broad range of options: Be a full-time mom, take on a part-time job, or do volunteer work.
So the so-called "wage gap" is really a "choices gap." And the feminist campaign to level wages really amounts to equal pay for unequal work.

Here the gentleman in question (one Carey Roberts) tells us that there is no discrimination, at least in his opinion. The wage gap totally disappears when proper attention is paid to the requirements of the job. Unfortunately, no evidence is provided for this opinion, probably because it doesn't exist. The gentleman appears to see the reasons in the wage gap mainly in number 2., choice, though including the degree of physical labor as one of the important explanations for higher wages and referring to equal pay for unequal work also smacks of an attempt to bring in number 1, performance differences.

The concept of choice is used in a very weird manner: women have all the choices but men have none. It seems more likely that if men feel constrained in their work choices, so do women. In particular, the society in the U.S. expects women to be responsible for child-care, and most economists agree that women's duties at home are one of the main determinants of the gender gap.

Some argue that these responsibilities make women 'choose' occupations which allow for flexibility in work hours and leave taking, even when this flexibility is at the cost of lost earnings and pensions. Many traditionally female occupations (the so-called pink collar jobs) do have these characteristics, though it should be noted that many high-paying jobs also have flexibility.

Do women make these sorts of choices? Many do, probably, but they are not free choices in the way a choice between chocolate and vanilla ice-cream might be. The work women do at home is valuable for the wider society; it produces the future tax-payers and soldiers and politicians, and the quality of these future citizens is of interest to everyone. At the same time, many observers would like the costs of these choices to fall totally on the women and their families. Also, even women who would not voluntarily choose to stay at home with their children may be pressured into this through societal disapproval of working mothers and life-long absorption of messages promoting a certain mothering style.

So it's not all that clear that the choices that women (or men) make are in some sense free and purely private. But it's also very difficult to prove to what extent women's earnings are affected by discrimination in the labor market.

Though discrimination clearly exists (as evidenced by court cases won by the plaintiffs and by audit studies in general), the current level of economic studies doesn't allow us to conclusively separate choice-based, performance-based and discriminatory reasons for earnings differences. What they can tell us is that once we have taken into account all the performance and choice-related aspects that we have data on, the remaining unexplained difference in men's and women's earnings could be due to discrimination. It could also be due to something else that we have inadvertently omitted.

Not a comfortable state of knowledge. But it's at least much more honest than the opinion games being played across the political spectrum. A recent, relatively well-done congressional study* shows that this unexplained difference amounts to roughly 20 cents on the dollar. (It's important to keep in mind that this study looks at men and women who work either full-time or part-time, while the gender gap in earnings as commonly discussed applies only to full-time workers. So the figures from this study are not directly comparable with the 76 cent figure in the preceding discussion.)

The raw data in this study show women earning, on average, only 44 cents for each dollar men earn, but factors such as working hours (especially in the form of women's part-time work), education, work experience and the number of small children the worker has at home explain a large portion of this difference. Still, these can only bring the women's adjusted earnings to 80 cents per each men's dollar. What causes the remaining difference is unclear. It could be caused by discrimination or possibly by women seeking jobs which allow greater flexibility. But note that some of the earlier factors could be discriminatory, too. For example, women might be working part-time due to pressures from societal gender roles rather than through free choice.

Why talk about something this boring? Well, it affects how much lingerie you can have. It also affects your old age, because retirement incomes go hand in hand with earnings. Women over 65 have an average annual income of $14,200 compared to men's $39,000.

It also affects families, as some observers have started noting. Whatever Mensnewsdaily might say, the fact is that many women and men live together in families, and the children and male partners of women also suffer when the women suffer.
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*The link to this study gives you an Adobe pdf file. If you want to download it, go here, but ignore the title of the article: it's incorrect.

Postscript: The gender wage gap I discuss here is based on comparing men and women who work full-time, though the specific study I discuss also includes part-time workers. I wish to confess that I haven't bothered checking if this year's figure is exactly 76 cents or not. But it's in the ballpark!

Leave My Snakes Alone

The news is that the longest snake ever measured has been captured in Indonesia:

Officials at the zoo in Curugsewu, central Java, told the Republika newspaper that the reticulated python is 14.85m (49ft) long and has a maximum body circumference of 85cm (almost three feet). It weighs, they say, 447kg (70 stone, 3lbs).

It was impossible to verify the claim yesterday because the only photos available were of the black and brown reptile curled up, apparently asleep.

He isn't anywhere that long. He's fat, though. His name is A''bngd, and he was always a bit of an idiot. That's how they could catch him.

They feed the poor thing brown dogs. Poor dogs, poor snake. He refuses dogs of other colors. Of course he does, he's supposed to eat deer you thickheads.

Nothing good will come of this, mark my words. And it's started already: Man bitten by snake, firefighter attacked by snake.

Sharia Law in Canada

The Toronto Star:

An informal arbitration system that has been quietly settling marital or business disputes in Ontario using Islamic law, or sharia, for several years has now become a more formal structure known as the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice — and a national Muslim women's organization is "gravely concerned" that women's rights will not be protected.

Supporters of judicial tribunals say they reduce the need to go to court, are more private, speed up resolution and keep costs low in civil disputes.

These are some of the reservations of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women:

Sharia, or more accurately Muslim law, is not divine, as argued by some. It is based on divine text, the Quran, but it was interpreted a few centuries after the death of the Prophet Mohammad, by jurists in different countries, who themselves insisted that these were only interpretations. It is a vast, complex judicial system, with many schools of thought and with adaptations to local customs.

For example, some countries where Muslim law is applied, such as Tunisia, have interpreted the law as limiting marriage to monogamy, while others, like Pakistan, allow polygamy if the first wife consents.

Also, there are some interpretations and practices which adversely affect women. For example in some schools of jurisprudence, inheritance favours males; a husband can divorce his wife without legal recourse; financial support for wives can be for a limited period of time; alimony is questionable; division of property can be against the woman; and child custody can be given to fathers , according to the age of the child. How and who will ensure that these are not the interpretations which are used by the arbiters?

They also note that although the participants in the arbitration can choose either the Canadian law or the sharia law, many religious women would feel obligated to choose the sharia interpretation, even when it is not in their best interest.
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Thanks to Mystic Bovine for the links.

And A Very Happy New Year To You!

May this coming year give you joy, peace and many wonderful memories!
May the snakes always protect you!
May you never grow tired of my blog!

Echidne of the snakes

The Glass Ceiling has Been Broken?

Or that's what the Washington Times would like us to believe. Quoting U.S. data from November 2003, the newspaper triumphantly (?) announced that women now constitute 50.6% of all workers in the occupational category that includes management, professional and related services.

What does this mean? According to the Washington Times:

"As a growing number [of women] move into upper management roles, those further down the ladder will reap the benefits by increasingly being targeted for advancement," said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

In other words, women have finally broken the glass ceiling! Yeah!

Really? Let's look at the raw data in more detail. The classification: Management, Professional and Related Services doesn't contain only managers. It also contains occupations such as librarians, educators and health care workers. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations of women in various subcategories of this overall category, and here's what I found:

-women constitute 50.6% of the overall category
-but only roughly 37% of the subcategory management

The reason women are over half of the Management, Professional and Related Services is buried deep inside the Professional and Related Services subcategory:
-women constitute 60% of workers in community and social services
-and 74% of education, training and library services
-as well as roughly 72% of health care and associated technical services

So. Has the glass ceiling been broken? Are some conservatives who worry about this so-called development suffering from valid fears? Unfortunately, the answer is no.
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Thanks for Pen-Elayne and AND THEN... for links.

Why White Men Prefer Bush

There are two good posts on this topic on the following blogs:AND THEN... and Alas, A Blog.

What's your take? And why do white women prefer Bush? (They also do, though by a much smaller margin.) I wonder. Could it be something to do with the culture of fear since 9/11? The Orange Alert? The suggestion that only the current Daddy Bush can keep us safe?

Rara Avis, Part II (Rush Limbaugh)

1. Introduction

Any human-watcher knows Rush Limbaugh: an extreme conservative talk-show host, and he's not especially rare as a type. Conservatives who dislike gays, feminists, ethnic minorities and the environment are a dime a dozen nowadays. But there was a time when Rush indeed cut an almost solitary figure against the political skies. He was a pathbreaker, a revolutionary, and his fans, the so-called dittoheads, are his revolutionary troops. This makes studying him still useful, even though he is currently flying in some turbulent winds.

I am going to pay special attention to his views on women and feminism, because this is a partly feminist blog, but also because many useful wider lessons can be concluded from such an endeavor. My main source material is roughly fifty pages of results from Google on the topics "Rush Limbaugh and women" and "Rush Limbaugh and feminists".

What I learned in general from wading through this material (other than the fact that thigh-high boots chafe and a snorkeling mask leaves a rash) is that
1. the majority (51%) of Americans dislike Rush Limbaugh (only 34% view him favorably),
and that
2. the way he has been criticized within the political left has been all wrong.

Organizations such as FAIR have taken Limbaugh to task for disseminating incorrect information on various topics. The underlying principle seems to have been that if Limbaugh can be shown to have lied his reputation would suffer. This is totally invalid. None of the dittoheads or other supporters of his shows are interested in some concept of objective truth. What they are interested in is exactly what Limbaugh's shows provide: validation of their own world view. That this validation is based on lies is beside the point.
In any case, criticizing the shows for inaccuracies is difficult when they are sold as humor. If something too outrageous is said, well, it can always be interpreted away as 'just a joke'.

2. Rush on Women

Limbaugh's views on women are crystallized in this 'Rushbite':

One of my fabulous routines concerns a San Francisco men's club which lost its battle to exclude women from membership. The courts ruled that they had to admit women on the basis that businesswomen were being unfairly denied opportunities to do business. This is specious. How much business did women think they were going to get as a result of forcing their way in?
Anyway, after one year, the female members demanded their own exercise room. They were probably tired of being ogled by a bunch of slobbering men while they pumped iron in leotards and spandex. The men offered to install the first three exercise machines in the women's new workout room. The ladies were thrilled. When they arrived on that first exciting day they found, to their stunned amazement, a washing machine, an ironing board, and a vacuum cleaner. Heh, heh, heh. (The Way Things Ought To Be, p.142-45 Jul 2, 1992)

He doesn't like women who 'force their way' into men's clubs, and he believes that women belong in the home, presumably cleaning it. He also doesn't want women in the military combat roles, partly because he believes that women are incapable of them, but also because:

I don't believe that women should be in combat roles even if they can do the job. Why? Simple. Women have a civilizing role in our society. They establish enduring values that are handed down from generation to generation. I just don't believe that we have to subject women to the horrors and rigors of war. (The Way Things Ought To Be, p.200-1 Jul 2, 1992)

Women are now put on a pedestal, but beware, the support is shaky. They are responsible for civilizing the society, while Rush does his utmost to uncivilize it. Besides, passing these female values on can also be translated as 'being responsible for child-rearing'.

In sum, Rush believes in strict, traditional gender roles. He also appears to find women less rational than men:

"Women should not be allowed on juries where the accused is a stud."

3. Rush on feminism and feminazis

I believe that Limbaugh doesn't like women very much, but that could be debated, if 'like' is used in the sense of "I like to eat cheese sandwiches." What is quite certain is that he detests and fears the feminist movement, just as I would detest and fear a liberation movement for cheese sandwiches. These two are conflated in the next famous 'Rushbite":

Let me leave you with a thought that honestly summarizes my sentiments: I love the women's movement. especially when I am walking behind it. ( The Way Things Ought To Be, p.142-45 Jul 2, 1992.)

An almost equally famous is the following one:

Feminism was established so that unattractive women could have easier access to the mainstream of society. Just look at the history of feminism if you doubt the truth.

Though trivializing the feminist movement by interpreting it as the reaction of women who have failed in their quest for a man is common, Limbaugh goes much further. In fact, he's responsible for the term 'feminazi', which has spread far beyond its original home of the dittoland:

"Femi-nazi," a word Rush Limbaugh used to equate the goals of feminism with societal devastation, has become a popular way for liberals to denote their levelheadedness (as in, "Well, I'm no femi-nazi, but"). Bill Maher, the cheeky host of TV's Politically Incorrect, has established himself as the vanguard of a sort of disaffected, Hugh Hefner liberal -- someone who doesn't care what anyone does, so long as it doesn't keep him from getting a good piece of ass.

But actually Limbaugh gets far too much credit for the coining of this term, or at least for its widespread use. This is what he actually said:

I prefer to call the most obnoxious feminists what they really are: feminazis. The term describes any female who is intolerant of any point of view that challenges militant feminism. I often use it to describe women who are obsessed with perpetuating a modern-day holocaust: abortion.
A feminazi is a woman to whom the most important thing in life is seeing to it that as many abortions as possible are performed.(The Way Things Ought To Be, p.192-93 Jul 2, 1992)

Given his definition, there are no feminazis. At least I have never met any or read about any. That the term has been so widely adopted tells us much more about the views of the people who use it than the views of those they apply it to.

4. Identification

What's behind Limbaugh's war against women or at least against feminism? I believe that it's his fear of losing his self-identity as a man. Though the following quote is a bit too extreme to may taste, it expresses the same basic idea:

The last few years of 20th-century popular culture have seen the culmination of a movement in the (supposedly) collective American male psyche. Men, it posits, are the browbeaten receptacles of a nation that refuses them any identity. Calls for justice and equality from women and gay men are now increasingly viewed as strident, misguided efforts to remove a man's ability to Be A Man. Wanton male lust, violence, and ignorance are not only healthy; they form a valid political viewpoint.
It's a mindset that originally fluttered from the chubby hands of crafty, discontented conservatives like Rush Limbaugh...

Consider also the following quotes (bolds mine):

A feminazi is a woman to whom the most important thing in life is seeing to it that as many abortions as possible are performed. Their unspoken reasoning is quite simple. Abortion is the single greatest avenue for militant women to exercise their quest for power and advance their belief that men aren't necessary. (The Way Things Ought To Be, p.192-93 Jul 2, 1992)

Ms. magazine has named its women of the year, and in doing so has illustrated : Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society. Every woman on this list has effectively flipped the bird to men.... Other candidates for W of the Y included Nancy Pelosi, who stabbed Democrat men in the back to get into power, Enron's Sharon Watkins, WorldCom's Cynthia Cooper and the FBI's Colleen Rowley. They got the award because they brought down a bunch of guys.

Rush Limbaugh fears being made unnecessary, and most likely so do his dittoheads. But how could the movements promoting equal rights for women, ethnic minorities or gays make him and dittohead men like him unnecessary?

This is only possible if the Limbaugh view of his own identity hinges crucially on being superior to others, if his view of being white or heterosexual is based on whiteness or heterosexuality being 'better', and if his view of being a man includes the idea of men as lords and masters and a strict exclusion of women from the public sphere. If ones identity is built on NOT being like the other groups, then any progress in the relative standind of these groups is going to aim directly at the foundation of ones personal well-being.

No wonder Rush Limbaugh is so fanatic in his views. I would be, too, if I saw the world changing in ways which threaten my very cornerstone. Poor Rush. What's even sadder is the fact that it would have been a lot easier to build a healthier self-identity than to try to have the whole world stand still so that this wouldn't be necessary. Still, I shouldn't feel too sorry for him. He's made millions out of his pet neuroses and caused much pain and suffering in the process.

And he has also successfully misdirected the anger of many of the dittoheads. Working-class men in the United States have seen a considerable drop in their real earnings during the last two decades. The current Republican policies are only going to encourage this drop through their effects on exporting jobs and on clamping down on labor unionization. But instead of addressing these very real causes of discontent, what does Rush offer his dittoheads? Most recently, the mythical castrating female, in this example Hillary Clinton:

.. Limbaugh and the vast conservative talk machine are working overtime to assure the under-employed and threatened men of America that the target of their rage should not be conservative policies but, instead, castrating women. Hillary is behind the campaign to put men's testicles in a lock box, and it's those damn liberals who are responsible for all the ills that have befallen the working class.

So, how should Rush Limbaugh be classified? What can be learned from this intensive exploration of his world? That he's still an idiot, I'm afraid.

Women in 2003 According to Katha Pollitt

She's in the optimistic mode/mood, this time. For example:

Still, it's the end of the year, so let's break out the champagne for good news around the world for women in 2003--accomplishments, activism, bold deeds and grounds for hope.

1. Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize. The Iranian feminist and human rights crusader is the first Muslim woman to receive this honor. The ayatollahs are furious!

2. Hormone replacement therapy was further debunked. Instead of protecting you from Alzheimer's, it doubles your risk. The unmasking of HRT is a major triumph for the women's health movement, which has claimed for decades that its supposed benefits are drug-industry hype. You can read all about it in Barbara Seaman's devastating exposé, The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth.

3. Antiwar activism got a feminist edge. The Lysistrata Project saw 1,029 productions of Aristophanes' hilarious, bawdy comedy performed all over the world on March 3. Code Pink took on Bush--and Schwarzenegger--with nervy humor.

4. Barbara Ransby's moving and invaluable Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision illuminated a behind-the-scenes heroine of the civil rights struggle. As Ransby showed, there are other, more egalitarian ways to move forward than by playing follow the leader.

5. A Department of Education commission rejected energetic efforts to water down Title IX, the main legal vehicle promoting equality for women's athletics in schools; the Supreme Court didn't overturn affirmative action.

6. Some movies had leading female characters who were not wives, girlfriends, prostitutes or assassins: Whale Rider, Bend It Like Beckham, Sylvia, Mona Lisa Smile. Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation got raves. Older women were beautiful and sexy in Swimming Pool, starring the ever-fabulous Charlotte Rampling, and in Something's Gotta Give, where 57-year-old Diane Keaton gets to choose between grumpy-old-man Jack Nicholson and boy toy Keanu Reeves.

Read the rest here.

Some Gentle Humor For The New Year

Democrats are a gloomy bunch, I've been told. It has to do with having a bleeding heart and a conscience, some say. Others think that it's the natural consequence of the twilight world some democrats have drifted into after trying to persuade themselves of being just the same as Republicans except not. I think that it's caused by having to listen to too much Ann Coulter and Bill O'Riley and Rush Limbaugh.

So here's an antidote, a vaccination against gloominess in the forthcoming election year:

"The elephant is the perfect symbol for Republicans: they never forget, lead
each other around by the tail, and think everyone should work for peanuts."

"Republicans are good for one thing: getting elected every 30 or 40 years so
people can be reminded how terrible they are." - Bob Shrum

"The Religious Right scares the *hell* out of me." - Sen. Barry Goldwater
(R-AZ, ret.)

"If the Republicans will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop
telling the truth about them." - Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)

"The Republican Convention opened with a prayer. If the Lord can see his way
to bless the Republican Party the way it's been carrying on, the the rest of
us ought to get it without asking." - Will Rogers, 1928

Republican Health Care Plan: marry a Canadian.

The GOP: "A rising tide lifts all yachts."

"You *must* have that child...so we can starve it!" -- The GOP

More similar jokes here

The New Blogs Showcase

My vote this time goes to Chris "Lefty" Brown's Corner: What's so funny about peace, love, and higher taxes.

At least one of the other candidates is - how to say this politely? - a nutcase.

Still, it's the time of the year to be merry and optimistic, so I hope that Chris will win. He deserves it.

He Eked Hot Fanciness!

That's me in anagram. Another nice alternative is: Shake Hen Defections!
I got the idea from a blog I now can't trace.

Anagrams have an interesting history. Supposedly

The greatest users of anagrams were the Kaballahs, a group of mystics living in France and Spain during the 12th and 13th centuries....They truly believed that letters and numbers were the building blocks of the universe and that they were the powers used in the process of earth's creation. They believed that all mysteries in the universe could be derived from names, phrases and existing passages of scripture. They used their own shortcut techniques for finding anagrams and other Hidden Meanings. They believed that a person's future could be derived from anagrams of their name.

If this is true, my future definitely will be interesting; hot fanciness indeed! Here are a couple of anagrams of Rush Limbaugh (a topic for a post coming here soon):

Huh! Girls as Bum! (uses the British meaning of 'bum')

This would seem to match his future well if he indeed decides to sponsor the Lingerie Bowl.

Ugh! Shrub Mail!

This describes him pretty well, don't you think?

I also liked this one:

Humbug, Sir Hal!

To test the theory that a person's future is in the anagram of her name I also anagrammed Wendy McElroy, a recent topic on this blog. This is what I got:

Lewd Money Cry!
Mew Once, Dryly.

If you'd like to anagram your own name, the names of your friends or those of your foes, go here.

A Little Girl and Christmas Church

Mommy and daddy and brother and me are going to church. Church is god's house. You can't actually see god, daddy says. He is invisible. Maybe like fairies. Today is the birthday of baby Jesus. That's why we are going to church. I have new white boots and a white ribbon in my hair.

It is very very early. Really black outside and cold. Mommy is sneezing. She is not well because daddy's uncle and auntie came without telling us first, and mommy had to stay up late to cook and bake more. Mommy didn't want to come to church but daddy said it is just nerves. When I grow up I will have nerves, too.

The church doors are heavvy! It is dark inside, too, with candles in little cups on the walls and lots of people sitting on the benches. They don't talk. All I can hear is coughing.

We sit down at the end of the bench. It is too high and hard, like Grandma's outhouse seat. There are books with songs in them. I can't read them yet. We have to wait a long time before there is music. It is called organ music. First all the people on the little balcony sing. They are good singers. Then everybody sings. One lady sings really high and crackly, and one man sings really slow. He is still singing when everybody else stops. I think it is funny but daddy says god doesn't like little girls who giggle.

Then the minister goes to the front. He wears a dress. He does something at a table and then he starts talking. He says let us pray. Which means cross your fingers tight and close your eyes. He says in the name of the father, the son and the holy guest. God has an uncle visiting, too.

Then there is more music and singing. I really want to sing, too. I don't know the words so I make my own. I sing mom-my, dad-dy, brotherandmee. Mommy pokes me in the side. I am supposed to be quiet.

Then the minister is standing inside a barrel in the wall. I don't know why. He talks a lot. I am beginning to fall asleep. The flames in the candles look like they are dancing. He says in the name of the father and the son and the holy guest again. I think that mommy is crying. Daddy shushes her. If there is daddy god and little boy god, where are mommy god and little girl god? Have they gone visiting?

There is more singing. The candle flames are tied from both ends to the candle. They look like they are all trying to get loose from the candles. I hope that the one next to me wins.

Church is really boring. I am cold and need to pee. I want to go home.

Which Lord of the Rings character and personality problem are you? To find out,
click HERE.

I am:
Haldir and his egocentrism.

You are just too damn good for everyone, aren't you? The disdainful demeanor, the cocky drawl...everything about you seems to attest to the fact that not even the quest to destroy the One Ring is truly worthy of your esteemed hospitality. You may be Eru's gift to men, but there is such a thing as humility. Maybe you'll learn that lesson when your attempt to show off at Helm's Deep backfires.

Perfect!

Our friend Tom DeLay is helping little children! So nice of him, especially this time of the year.
Common Cause tells more about it:

In a seemingly blatant and unethical attempt to circumvent the new campaign finance laws, Representative Tom DeLay established a charity, "Celebrations for Children", to subsidize donor events at the Republican National Convention. Under the guise of charity, this group is reportedly soliciting donations of up to $500,000 and promising contributors "access" to DeLay and other leaders during the convention. And, access translates into parties in luxury suites and dinner dances on yachts!

How come I never get invited to parties in luxury suites and dinner dances on yachts? I could promise "access" to a goddess and all...

Limericks

On First Flight:

Said Wilbur Wright, 'Oh, this is grand,
But, Orville, you must understand.
We've discovered all right
The secret of flight -
The question is, how do we land?'
(Frank Richards)

On Media Mergers:

Rupert Murdoch, with glee, shouted:' What
A lof of newspapers I've got!
I've just got to get
The Beekeeper's Gazette
And the War Cry and I've got the lot.'
(Frank Richards)

Interesting that the latter is over twenty years old. In general, limericks tend to leave me cold. Maybe the reason is the large number of so-called 'bawdry' limericks. As E. O. Parrott states in The Penguin Book of Limericks:

The indecent limerick... Its humour is often of the blackest. We are asked to laugh at rape, necrophilia, bestiality and buggery. A great deal of it may be seen as the humour of the Male Chauvinist Pig....
There are anti-Jewish limericks, anti-Irish limericks and, indeed, every kind of racist limerick.

This makes limericks sound like a form of primitive hard porn with racist overtones. Even against snakes! Read this one:

There was a young fellow named Fonda
Who was squeezed by a great anaconda;
Now he's only a smear,
With part of him here,
And the rest of him somewhere out yonder.
(Ogden Nash)

No self-respecting anaconda would leave smears behind!
-------
Postscript: I just realized that 'bawdry' may or may not be a word already in existence. I may have made it up. It's intended to carry the meaning of 'bawdy'+'tawdry'. Let me know if it is a real word, or if I have just enriched the English language.

My Christmas List

If I was in the habit of giving Christmas presents or any other presents suitable for this time of the year (which I am not, gods and goddesses already having everything they need and snakes not liking my taste in presents), this is what I would wrap up:

-For George W. Bush: A thinking cap. Thinking is something that can go on inside the roughly spherical object that also serves to hold the ears apart. And no, the ears won't fall off during thinking. The head is admirably suited to multi-tasking.

-For Donald Rumsfeld: A beautifully embroidered sampler for his wall with the following motto:
Macho Does Not Prove Mucho (Zsa Zsa Gabor).

-For John Ashcroft: Fifty gallons of Crisco oil. For self-anointment purposes when he hears the calling. Also a blindfold and a pair of earplugs. So he doesn't have to see naked statues of Justice or hear what just might be his conscience whispering about the consequences of the policies he pushes on the world's poor women.

-For the whole administration: A two-weeks 'no-expenses-paid' trip to Afghanistan, Iraq, Zimbabwe and so on. Live and eat like the natives! Stay in exotic places and see exotic locals die!

Lest you think me biased, please note that all this in good jest, and that I have nothing but astonished admiration towards any of the above parties. I also have a present for Bill Clinton. It has something to do with milking machines.

Today's Quote:

One thing I acknowledge about the right is that they're much better haters than liberals are. Your basic liberal--milk of human kindness flowing through every vein, and heart bleeding over everyone from the milk-shy Hottentot to the glandular obese--is pretty much a strikeout on the hatred front. Maybe further out on the left you can hit some good righteous anger, but liberals, and I am one, are generally real wusses. Guys like Rush Limbaugh figured that out a long time ago--attack a liberal and the first thing he says is, "You may have a point there."

Molly Ivins, in "Call Me a Bush-Hater"; an article well worth reading.

The Eternal Shortage of Marriageable Men

1870's: Harper's Bazar: Men could get wives "at a discount", and "eight melancholy maides" clung to the same bachelor's arm at parties. "The universal cry is 'No husbands! No husbands!'"

1890's: A marriage study concluded that only 28 percent of college-educated women could get married.

1940's: A Cornell University study said that college-educated single women had no more than a 65 percent chance of getting married.

1940's: This Week (a Sunday magazine): A college education "skyrockets your chances of becoming an old maid."

1980's: San Francisco Chronicle: "There's a terrific scramble going on now, and in two years there just isn't going to be anyone left out there. There aren't going to be all these great surplus older guys."

1980's: Newsweek: "Do you know that...forty-year-olds are more likely to be killed by a terrorist than find a husband?"

2000's: Sylvia Ann Hewlett, in Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, (2002):"Nowadays, the rule of thumb seems to be that the more successful a woman, the less likely it is she will find a husband or bear a child."

2000's: On Point (12/8/03) on WBUR: "What's your brand? If you're a single woman 35 years or older and want to get married, you'd better come up with one, and fast..."

Hmmm. Does one see a pattern? If there is a man shortage at regularly occurring intervals, why the recurring cries of impending doom? Why does this become an apocalyptic item of news at intervals, when the actual demographics have not changed for the last hundred years or so? Why is being educated a handicap for women who want to find a partner? Could it be that they might be...too uppity?

And my final question: Whom does it benefit if women are in fact scared into scrambling desperately for partners?

---------
All but the last two items are based on Susan Faludi's Backlash.

Lingerie Cup?

The Lingerie Bowl seems to be shrinking. Kelli told me about the news that Chrysler-Dodge has decided to pull out as the main promoter. Cowards as they are. Also

Proceeds from the event were originally due to benefit the American Foundation for AIDS (news - web sites) Research, but it too severed ties with the game.

I hope that they find a better event to benefit them, but I am glad that they pulled out of this one.

But this looks suspicious:

A source close to Chrysler said conservative lobbying groups had flooded the company's e-mail system with complaints about the upcoming spectacle.

Conservative lobbying groups, my divine ass! They were all echidneites, of course!

Oh no, there's more! Guess who's willing to come to the aid of the ailing Lingerie Bowl?

For the right price, we, the EIB Network, are willing to step in and sponsor the Lingerie Bowl on Super Bowl Sunday. They probably can't meet our perks, but we'll try.

The patron saint of the Irremediably Idiotic: Rush Limbaugh!
---------------------------
My original story on the Lingerie Bowl has now slipped into the December archives.

Rara Avis, Part I

It's people like Wendy McElroy that makes human-watching a rewarding hobby. If identification guides were available for this pursuit as they are for bird-watching, she'd need a whole volume just for herself. What is she exactly?

She is the mother of the modern ifeminism, though she argues that her ideas have many worthy precedents. Ifeminism has its own website, and I have just spent hours there studying and researching the habitat of this odd human. Here's the authoritative definition of ifeminism for those of you who still think it might have something to do with the internet:

Individualist feminism, or ifeminism, advocates the equal treatment of men and women as individuals under just law. The core principle of individualist feminism is that all human beings have a moral and legal claim to their own persons and property. It is sometimes called libertarian feminism.

Clear enough. So McElroy is a feminist with a libertarian slant. Just to double-check on this tentative identification I searched the ifeminist site for more direct evidence, and found it in the FAQ pages of the site:

Why call yourself a 'feminist?' Why not just call yourself an individualist?

Being a feminist is a form of specialization. In fighting for individual rights, some people focus upon injustice to women just as others focus upon injustice to gays or children.

As McElroy calls herself an ifeminist, her focus must be upon injustice to women. At this point I felt very confident about how to classify her: she is a feminist, though one with some unusual views, such as on the proper solution for sexual violence (...Abhorrent as it is, however, it has become evident that the solution to such problems is not more government intervention...), or for domestic violence (...ifeminism recognizes that governments offer little in the way of solutions to domestic violence...) or what to do instead of more government intervention to combat violence (...Firearms have been widely referred to as "the great equalizer" because they give individuals who would otherwise make attractive targets the ability to defend themselves against more powerful attackers....).

There's no logical reason to assume that the government would be any more successful in combating other types of crimes, or firearms any less useful in that chore. It seems, then, that McElroy advocates a return to the mythical Wild West, albeit with a feminist slant.

Deeper investigations into her behavior and principles taught me that she dislikes political correctness and actively hates PC feminism, which she believes is a mainstream view. She must wade in different streams from the rest of humanity...

She is also a weekly commentator for Fox News. Given their wide exposure, her columns seem a perfect source material for finding out what the ifeminists regard as the major problems facing women. I read through roughly six months worth of her columns (from June 10 to December 16 2003), a total of 28 stories, and classified them into the following scientific categories by numbers:

1. Essays advocating improved treatment of men 8 (29%)
2. Essays attacking PC feminism 5 (18%)
3. Essays that aim at both of these goals 3 (10%)
4. Essays attacking political correctness, affirmative action, 11 (40%)
government intervention, gender-based foreign policy, speech
codes and questionable legal practises
5. Essay welcoming the introduction of Christian feminism 1 ( 3%)

My tentative conclusion is that McElroy finds the most serious problem facing women to be the unfair treatment of men. (Though category 4. is more frequent in her writings, it is really a ragbag collection of many unrelated topics, none of which surfaces with the same urgency as the question of men's rights.) Another serious problem for women appears to be the politically correct mainstream feminism that McElroy believes to exist.

These concerns are also reflected in her choice of titles for her columns. For example, the June 10 column is titled The Anti-Male New York Times (Yep. Notice the absence of men in the front page news...), and the July 15 Feminists Slurping at Public Trough (Does this remind anyone of pigs?).

By now I was thoroughly confused, and had to remind myself of the definition of an ifeminist:

Why call yourself a 'feminist?' Why not just call yourself an individualist?

Being a feminist is a form of specialization. In fighting for individual rights, some people focus upon injustice to women just as others focus upon injustice to gays or children(bolds mine)

What kind of a human is McElroy? Is she a feminist or is she not? Some further digging in her column archives unearthed this gem from the May 13, 2003 essay titled Cut Men - Do not they Bleed?

Judging by the backlash, masculinists are having an impact. I know this personally because my Web site Ifeminists.com, which advances equal rights for men, has experienced a dramatic increase in harassment and hate mail from gender feminists in recent months. Every blast centers on men's rights.

The tension will only heighten. Men who claim the right to be an active part of their children's lives will not back down. Women who recognize the justice of those claims are not intimidated.
On May 24, the Independent Women's Forum (IWF) published an open "" which spoke of "countless bright young women frustrated by rigid feminist propaganda of male hatred ..." With their funding doubled, IWF announced, "We're issuing fair warning: extreme feminists, get to your foxholes because IWF is on the attack."

The gender war has shifted toward direct confrontation. Men should take heart from that fact. As Gandhi once explained: "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."(bolds mine)

This quotation is not a gem because McElroy uses 'gender war', 'direct confrontation' and Gandhi in the same paragraph, but because it allows my final identification of this rara avis:

Wendy McElroy is an imasculinist.

But why doesn't she call herself that then? I give up. Can someone send me the McElroy volume of the human-identification guide, please?

Today's Quotes

1. "Liberals are not guilty of much deep thinking....I just don't think that they are very bright people."

Source: Dick Armey, former House majority leader and outspoken conservative, in On Point radio interview, December 16, 2003.

2. "Although it may not be true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative."

Source: John Stuart Mill. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists his major works as follows:

His first great intellectual work was his System of Logic, R atiocinative and Inductive, which appeared in 1843. This was followed, in due course by his Essays on some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (1844), and Principles of Political Economy (1848). In 1859 appeared his little treatise On Liberty, and his Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform. His Considerations on Representative Government belongs to the year 1860; and in 1863 (after first appearing in magazine form) came his Utilitarianism. In the Parliament of 1865-68, he sat as Radical member for Westminister. He advocated three major things in the House of Commonswomen suffrage, the interests of the laboring classes, and land reform in Ireland. In 1865, came his Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy; in 1867, his Rectorial Inaugural Address at St. Andrews University, on the value of culture; in 1868, his pamphlet on England and Ireland; and in 1869, his treatise on The Subjection of Women. Also in 1869, his edition of his father's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind was published. Mill died at Avignon in 1873. After his death were published his Autobiography (1873) and Three Essays on Religion: Nature, the Utility of Religion, and Theism (1874), written between 1830 and 1870.

Hmmm.....Whom to believe?

A Naive Goddess Looks at: Big Spenders and Social Engineers

This is the Democrats, right? The party which Ronald Reagan successfully labeled as the Big Government meanie. The party which supported affirmative action and forced busing of children to assure racial equality in education. The party that's responsible for leaving the future generations with the bill to pay for their recklessness. Right?

I'm not sure. Consider this:

President Clinton's persistent eight-year "glidepath" to solvency was unglamorous (and virtually thankless) work. But, helped by taxes and good times, the annual budget deficit fell steadily from $290 billion in 1992 to an actual surplus in 2000.
Well, here we go again. President Bush II has twice talked Congress into tax cuts ($1.6 trillion more debt?), mainly for those who need them least (but who do contribute to political campaigns). Now there's a $450 billion annual deficit and no money left.

and this:

The federal government will spend $1.4 billion during the next six years to promote and support marriage, a move that opponents and supporters agree is an unprecedented bit of social engineering.

and this:

While the concept of a sex-ed program designed to discourage sexual activity among young people has been around since the early 1980s, they've only recently gained traction, which is to say, federal funding.

Most are the product of Title V of the 1996 federal welfare reform act, which today legitimizes abstinence programs with about $100 million worth of respect. Suddenly, school-based sex-ed programs that for 30 years had been the exclusive domain of Planned Parenthood's credo of sexual non-judgmentalism have competition.

In 1988, programs teaching abstinence as the sole means of preventing pregnancy were taught in just 2 percent of U.S. school districts. By 1999, 23 percent reported using them.

Even "traditional" sex-ed programmers - who previously had scorned and mocked the concept - started popping up with abstinence tracks. Bryan Howard proudly declares that Planned Parenthood includes abstinence as "an option." It may be the 40th option on a 40-item menu, but it's an option now. Who says money can't change minds?

The year is 2003, and the party in power is the Republicans. Maybe it's just terminology, a political war of words: what the hated other side does is 'big spending', what we do is 'wise investments'; what they advocate is 'social engineering', what we advocate is 'return to virtues and values that make sense'. Or maybe it's that social engineering and spending are good when they advance our goals, bad when they detract from them. Still, what happened to all those fervent anti tax-and-spend Republicans that were all over the place only ten years ago? Have they all been born again?

Why Women Like J.R. Tolkien Though He Didn't Care for Them

During long rainy childhood afternoons a friend of mine curled up in her grandmother's attic with her uncles' old comic books. She devoured stories about brave British and American pilots during WWII, Tarzan and anything else her uncles had saved. But she was most excited about the Robin Hood comics with their stories about outsider justice. When the rain stopped she'd go out and play Robin Hood and his merry men.

She herself was Robin, of course. It was he who had the juiciest parts in the stories.

I asked her if she ever worried about her not being of the 'right' sex to play Robin. She answered:

"I was a little girl those days. But it never occurred to me to play Maid Marian. She never DID anything. I can't remember if I was even aware of the fact that Robin Hood was male and I wasn't. If so, it didn't bother me."

Many girls probably shared this experience of identifying with the hero of a story even when the hero was a boy or a man. Boys and men don't seem to be as able to do this; they will not read stories about heroic girls or women. Perhaps this is why Harry Potter was created as a boy rather than as a girl: girls like the Harry Potter books as well as boys, so potential markets are maximized by this choice of sex. But I bet that when girls play Harry Potter stories, they are Harry.

Even adult women have this ability to identify with heroes of the opposite sex. J.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are popular among female readers. The world these books depict is one curiously devoid of women in most important aspects, probably reflecting Tolkien's own sex-segregated lifestyle and the limited, stereotypical views about women he held in accordance with his times. This doesn't appear to stop women from identifying with Tolkien's heroes.

What is it that allows female readers to identify with Robin Hood, Harry Potter or the hobbits? I doubt that it has anything to do with 'inappropriate' gender identification or admiration of all things male. It is much more likely to be caused by the fact that all these heroes are underdogs: Robin Hood is an outlaw, forced to hide in the forests and hunted by the powerful in the society. Harry Potter is an orphan, unvalued by his aunt and uncle with whom he lives, and always found less lovable than his obnoxious cousin who stands in a brother relationship to Harry. Frodo, Bilbo and the other hobbits in Tolkien's books are males but not human males. They are small, nonaggressive, peace-loving and scared of the larger and more powerful races who look down on them. In fact, they are a lot like women.

Yet all these underdogs rise in their respective worlds, and are shown to be as worthy as others, if not more so. This is a story that resonates with many women, at least on a subconscious level, and lets them see the hero as a person akin to themselves.

The underdog appeals to men, too, and women as well as men may value the tales of Robin Hood, Harry Potter and the hobbits for their other messages. But I think that if the underdog motif was removed, we'd find few female readers of such male-centered stories, and a lot more criticism about the absence of women in them. For in a very real sense these tales of the underdog who succeeds against all odds are women's tales, or at least the dreams of what women's tales could be.

This blog needs some peppy advertizing, so I'm trying to think of good slogans. This is what I've come up with so far:

"Echidne - a direct line to divinity. Now George Bush isn't the only one with it!"
"Eve listened to the snake; you can do better. You can listen to the goddess of snakes!"
"What would Echidne do?"
"Sadam Hussein was easy to find. But where in the world is Echidne?"

And very warm thanks to everybody who linked to my post in the New Blog Showcase . I really appreciate it. The competition was rigged, for otherwise a goddess would surely have won... Still, it was fun and interesting, and many of the other entries were very thought-provoking.

My Mercury Control Proposal

The Bush administration is proposing to control mercury emissions by power plants through a cap-and-trade policy. By 2010, this would cut the overall emissions of mercury by thirty percent from their current level, but would allow power plants that find cutting their emissions especially expensive to buy 'pollution points' (my term) from other plants. A sort of free market in mercury, though always under a fixed total maximum amount of emissions.

Opponents of this policy argue that earlier Clinton policies would have caused the thirty percent reduction three years earlier, in 2007 rather than 2010, and that the cap-and-trade approach may cause local 'hot spots': areas where very old and inefficient power plants find it cheaper to buy pollution points than to upgrade their systems.

Mercury has been called

"...a persistent substance that affects the nervous system and is especially dangerous for pregnant women and children. Mercury concentrations in fish have prompted at least 43 states to issue fish consumption advisories. Although 40 percent of mercury emissions come from the smokestacks of coal-burning power plants, those emissions have never been regulated as a pollutant."

A recent Boston Globe article notes that two other arms of the U.S. government, the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency are planning to launch their own mercury-control policy. This consists of telling pregnant women, nay, all women of childbearing age, to limit their intake of tuna to one 4-6 oz. portion of week, as well as to limit their total weekly consumption of fish to 12 oz.. Here we see one of the conservative values in action: take individual responsibility for your destiny, for nobody else will care.

My revolutionary and interesting proposal for mercury control is to swop these policies: limit the mercury emissions from the smokestacks of coal-burning power plants to a fixed maximum amount per week, but cap the total consumption of fish by pregnant women while letting them trade each other for extra portions. "Can I buy that tuna fish off you, Cherry? You know I can't live without the stuff." "Sure, Barb, just let me get your credit card number." So what if Barb becomes a local 'hot spot'?

Postscript: Quiz question of the day: Which U.S. state emits the largest amount of mercury into the environment? Answer here.

Lingerie Bowl

Although WUSA may have folded, those who love to watch women play ball need not despair. Women's soccer couldn't find corporate backing, but women's Lingerie Bowl has no such difficulties. What's more, their main game will be televized on the very same day, February 1, 2004, as the Super Bowl! It is, however, only available on pay-per-view television during the Super Bowl half-time. To see women play American football, you need to pay.

Women have really come a long way. Not only will a women's game be televized during prime time, but the sponsors of this event include such famous names as CNN.com, Yahoo!, MSNBC and Comedy Central. It's so heart-warming to see corporate America finally realize that women can play sports, too.

And how they play! The two teams (cleverly named Team Dream and Team Euphoria) consist of models and actresses, yet somehow the players have managed to learn the game so well that the producer of the event, Mitch Mortaza of Horizon Productions, Inc., could confidently state the game will

" garner tremendous worldwide viewership and appeal"

Wow! But wait, there's more: Everybody knows that American football is a contact sport with a large number of injuries every year. That's the reason for all the protective gear the players wear. The only protective gear the Teams Dream and Euphoria don are kneepads. No helmets, no shoulder pads, probably no mouthguards for these brave players. They are going to hit the field in nothing but their underwear (and the kneepads). Talk about some courage.

I'm beginning to believe that women really must be absolutely superior athletes and courageous to the brink of foolhardiness, too. No wonder that finally the mainstream sports establishment is giving them the credit they deserve. And who may we thank for this extravaganza? DODGE, that's who. The day when Dodge will rescue WUSA can't be far in the future.
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Thanks to Redpower for the reference to Wood Street Inc.

Today's housekeeping question:

Do you ever look at the ceiling of your microwave? Suppose you did, and suppose that you found a very ancient, nay, archeological, tomato sauce crust up there. How would you try to remove it? With dynamite?

Today's Quote:

Long ago, there was a noble word, liberal, which derives from the word free. Now, a strange thing happened to that word. A man named Hitler made it a term of abuse, a matter of suspicion, because those who were not with him were against him, and liberals had no use for Hitler. And then another man named McCarthy cast the same opprobrium on the word....We must cherish and honor the word free or it will cease to apply to us.

Eleanor Roosevelt, Tomorrow is Now (1963)

Now, this might look like crass self-promotion, but it isn't. It's pure information. There's an interesting competition for the week's best new blog post. It's at New Blog Showcase, and anyone with a blog that's registered with the TTLB Blogosphere Ecosystem can vote for their favorite new blog by linking to a specific post in the showcase between Tuesday and Sunday! As long as the link is still there on Sunday night, the vote counts.

For example, if I was interested in voting for my December 4 blog Sigh, I'd first go here to register my blog (if I hadn't done that already), and then I'd link to my favorite Echidne blog by using this on my own blog. So simple, isn't it? And of course purely hypothetical.....

If The Shoe Fits...

Would you like someone to bite chunks off you? No? Neither would I. But many people, most of them female, seem to want just that. Now it's the feet that are going to be chopped smaller or padded taller. Gardiner Harris writes about this in a New York Times article titled "If Shoe Won't Fit, Fix the Foot? Popular Surgery Raises Concern".

The reason for this surgery, according to Harris, is the desire for better 'toe cleavage' (!) or the yearning to continue wearing high heels even after the feet have decisively said no to that. The article notes:
Foot fashion and function have, of course, long been in conflict. Chinese girls' feet were bound to shorten them by bending the toes backward. High heels have been fashionable in the United States for decades, even though they can cause not only serious foot problems but knee, pelvic, back, shoulder and even jaw pain.

Walking in high heels means walking on the balls of the feet, as if tiptoeing through life. Why would anybody wish to undergo surgery for that end? The answer, according to one of the orthopedists interviewed in the article is simple:
"Take your average woman and give her heels instead of flats, and she'll suddenly get whistles on the street," Dr. Levine said. "I do everything I can to get them back into their shoes."

Take a bite off here, add a bit more over there, and suddenly, voila! you are desirable.

Or maybe just socially acceptable. Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) also consists of taking chunks off women, or rather young girls. This practise makes them more marriageworthy in the cultures that embrace FGM, but it may cause serious lifelong health problems, not to mention a permanent reduction in the woman's ability to enjoy sex. On the other hand, some types of FGM are said to enhance the man's sexual enjoyment.

Are women born with all sorts of extraneous bits that need to be cut off? The answer isn't that simple. If it was, we wouldn't be able to explain why so many women have breast enhancement surgery. It seems that the Powers That Be have just misdesigned women, and surgery is needed to put them right. Right for what?

Twenty years ago in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions Gloria Steinem used the saying: "If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?" to argue for societal changes that would better accommodate women's everyday lives. It seems that the foot is more easily altered than the shoe, after all.

Postscript:
1. There are some good news on the FGM front.
2. To avert all the criticism I can see forthcoming, here is my confession: Yes, it's true that I have no feet and have never worn shoes.
3. The comments were down on 12/8/03. My apologies.
4. After I posted this, I found several good blogs on the same topic. Check out Pen-Elayne
and Ms. musings for a start.

Bored? Try these sites:

1. The lemonade game. It will train you into a good capitalist.
2. The industrious clock. Makes you feel good about not working that hard.
3. The poop counter. Keeps things in perspective
4. The guy on the ropes. You can make him do silly things or collapse. Good for release of aggressive feelings.
5. Mr. Picassohead. For the artistically inclined. Plus you can check out the gallery for my latest work of art!
Thanks to posters on the ms. site for most of these.

Great News From the Voting Front

What an exciting year 2004 will be! I am going to vote! Yes, Echidne of the snakes, a goddess of no known domicile, is going to cast her first ever vote for the president of the United States!

This will require voter fraud, but that's doable. The United States has a long history of voter fraud. A New York City election in 1844 had 135 percent of the eligible voters turn out. One additional goddess-vote is chickenfeed compared to that.

It is also chickenfeed compared to what happened in Boone County, Indiana, where the e-vote machines counted a total of 144,000 cast votes. From around 19,000 registered voters.

So what with actual human voter fraud and all the problems I can foresee with the e-vote machines that leave no paper trail behind, nobody is going to waste time or money looking for one criminal goddess.

This is how I can become a voter: I found out that illegal aliens and permanent residents in the United States sometimes do vote, because the federal law doesn't require the voters to prove their identities, and the current practise is not to inquire after the eager voter's citizenship status. I'm very excited about this. Imagine: I'm going to experience the American democracy in person, I'm going to affect world events directly!

Well, not much, of course. One vote doesn't matter very much. But it's the principle that counts here. We should all be as involved in democracy as Walden O'Dell. Not only is he a major fundraiser for the Republican party, but he is also the CEO of Diebold, a firm that produces many of the e-mail machines that will be used in the 2004 elections. Walden has gotten a lot of undeserved flack for supposedly saying that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year."

So what do these critics want? First they complain about the inertia of the average American who rarely bothers to step into the voting booth. Then when someone throws himself whole-heartedly into voting, they don't like that either. Sheesh.

I'm with Walden on this one.