Bad Girls Who Refuse To Wed. A Feminist Reading.

The Atlantic Monthly has gone to pot on anything about women. It started some years ago when Caitlyn (get-thee-to-the-kitchen) Flanagan was hired (by a newly hired conservative editor) to be the Soundhorn on all that is about women in the magazine. That Flanagan's hiring wasn't an isolated fluke became clear soon enough. Now the Atlantic Monthly mostly writes about the Woman Problem as the Problem With What Women Do.

That is how I interpreted the March article by Lori Gottlieb about the urgent need for women not to be so critical in their search for the ideal partner, to just "settle" and to marry the first chump who comes along and gets tangled in the romantic fishing net. I wanted to be generous, for some odd reason, and interpreted the whole article as just some silly filler, because of course we shouldn't wait for Prince Charming any more than heterosexual men should wait for some ideal human-sized version of the big-boobed Barbie doll.

But then I read a very similar article on Slate, written by their very own advice-giver, Emily Yoffe. She's the liberal version of Laura Schlessinger (Dr. Laura). Or perhaps she IS Dr. Laura, writing under a pseudonym? Not sure, but Ms. Yoffe certainly likes to boss women around. In an earlier piece of advice she told a woman who complained about her husband not chipping in with the housework that:

The reality is that you're always going to do the bulk of the inside work. As Dave Barry explains, men are essentially incapable of doing housework because they suffer from Male Genetic Dirt Blindness.

Keep that firmly in your mind while you interpret her new plea for single mothers to wed:

We still think of the archetypal unwed mother as a Jamie Lynn Spears—a dopey teenager who dropped her panties and got in over her head. A generation and more ago, that's who most unwed mothers were. But according to the most recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, teenagers account for only 23 percent of current out-of-wedlock births. That means the vast majority of unwed mothers are old enough to know what they're doing: Unwed births are surging among women ages 25 to 29.

In the last 50 years, there has been an extraordinary decoupling of marriage and procreation. In 1960 about 5 percent of births were to unwed mothers; that figure is now a record high of nearly 40 percent. Out-of-wedlock births used to be such a source of shame that families tried to hide them: Singer Bobby Darin was born to a teen mother and raised to believe she was his sister. But now out-of-wedlock births are greeted with a shrug. Some say they're an understandable response to economic realities. Others say they're a liberating change from the shotgun-wedding ethic that shackled two unsuitable people together for life.

As Slate's advice columnist, Dear Prudence, I get constant reports from the people who are creating the statistics. When I extol the importance of marriage in the advice column, my inbox fills with e-mails from readers who don't see marriage as the passage from single life to a life of commitment. To them, the marriage certificate is the first document in a paper trail that will end with a divorce decree. This doesn't mean my correspondents conclude that men and women shouldn't form unions and even live together, just that it may be wiser not to make your love life official. "Legal ties are supposed to make it somehow legit? With the divorce rate as high as it is, a live-in girlfriend is just as good," wrote one.

Readers also like to rebuke me for my preference that two decent people who are committed to each other and find themselves procreating without intending to should provide the stability of marriage for their child. "Having a child will be stressful and life altering enough. Parents need to work on their relationship on their time schedule." "I feel that a baby is its own blessing. Have that blessing before you get married." "How dare you imply that an unexpected pregnancy should lead to marriage? You are simply out of touch with modern culture."

Yoffe then quotes research on the children of single mothers by Kay Hymowitz (a Manhattan Institute wingnut who shares with Yoffe the enjoyment of yelling at women to change their behavior) and fails to quote more nuanced studies, studies which are careful about the cause-and-effect chains they study. For instance, if most of the problems of single-parent families have to do with poverty, then it's poverty that we should address and not the number of parents, especially if poor single mothers have their children with poor men. Adding more poor parents to a family might help a little, but not if the added parents are in prison or unemployed or on drugs.

I sometimes wonder how many parents we should really add to families to make them function well. If two parents are better than one parent, how about ten parents per family?

Yes, that is flippant of me, and, yes, doing all the work and parenting alone is hard for anyone. But I dislike the surface solutions so many people suggest without giving any real analysis of the reasons why some women (and some men) choose to become parents on their own or end up in that position without initially having made the choice. Yoffe also appears to suggest that shaming and shunning single mothers would be a good thing. Perhaps we should reintroduce the use of the stocks as a shaming device?

To recap, Yoffe thinks that any married woman will get saddled with all the housework, even if both partners have jobs, but single mothers should marry anyway, for the sake of children.

Now finally for the feminist reading: If you read the two articles I have quoted in this post, one after the other, you notice something very odd: Both writers are talking to women, telling them to act differently, and both writers are urging women to marry more. More!

But the societal myths we still have assume that all women really want to do is to get married! That's why they deck themselves with false breasts and high-heeled shoes and go Girls Gone Wild. According to the prevailing myth it is the single women who are looking for a husband, all the time, and it is the single men who'd prefer to buy the milk (sex) without buying the cow (wife). Women don't have similar thought about sausages and pigs, ever.

Other articles suggest that men flee commitment and don't want to get married at all these days. That, too, is the fault of women because they are acting all too feministy.

So how are we to interpret Gottlieb's and Yoffe's exhortations for young women to marry more? Aren't they already trying their damnedest to do so? And why don't these ladies write similar sermons to men, yelling at them to marry early and to stay married, even if it means that you didn't find that women with the perfect labia?

Do you know what I think? I think that the invisible elephant, the one we don't see, even when it sits smack in the middle of the living-room couch, is the fact that it is in the interest of men to have women more marriage-minded. Gottlieb's little sermon would help not-so-desirable guys to find wives and Yoffe's preachings would let them keep those wives even if the men turn out to be horrible husbands. That men might want to get married, too, is something we are not really supposed to think about.

All I Needed To Know I Learned From Whorses and Miss Bimbo, Not From Women's Studies Programs.

As if whorses aren't bad enough, there is now a new game for girls called Miss Bimbo:

CNN reports, "Users are given missions, including securing plastic surgery at the game's clinic to give their dolls bigger breasts, and they have to keep her at her target weight with diet pills, which cost 100 bimbo dollars…Breast implants sell at 11,500 bimbo dollars and net the buyer 2,000 bimbo attitudes, making her more popular on the site…And bagging a billionaire boyfriend is the most desirable way to earn the all important "mula."

I'm getting suspicious here. What is it with all these new toys and games aimed at creating shallow, materialistic and body-obsessed girls?

Wait! I know the answer! We live in a post-feminist paradise of complete equality, so it's really quite all right to train little girls to think that what matters is how thin they are, how big their boobs are and how many clothes they own.

Linked to that (though not at all well but I have so much material for today and I want to get my Important Opinions down on all of it), the blog at the U.K Guardian reports that Women's Studies are dead as a doornail over there*. The most likely reason is low enrollment rates for Women's Studies as an undergraduate major, but it's always much more interesting to speculate about the reasons for the Death of Feminism: Is it that feminism won or is it that feminism lost and are the two really at all different?

Gah. Actually, what has happened is not the death of Women's Studies Programmes. They are now called Gender Studies. If you Google for "gender studies, U.K.", you will find that there are plenty of universities which offer courses that once were called Women's Studies courses.

Clearly, such studies are very much needed even in the future. For example, one day they might do research on the harmful effects of an old computer game called Miss Bimbo and on a toy whorse.
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*I never liked the idea of sex-segregated higher education: A system where the core curriculum was about men and where women's concerns were stuffed into that little annex called Women's Studies. I know why that particular approach was adopted: it was the most pragmatic one at the time. But the problem in setting up a separate (albeit tiny and understaffed) place for anything that had to do with the role of women in the society meant that there was ultimately less pressure to build those courses into the core curricula. It also meant (and still means) that it's easy to get rid of all that pesky female stuff should one wish to do so. Obviously, the core curriculum today includes more material on women than it did forty years ago. But if I have learned anything these last ten years it is that one should never take an eye off those anti-feminists and their educational plans. They might introduce whorses into the curricula.

The Pregnant Man

This story about a female-to-male transgender man, now pregnant, stretches the ways one might define the sex and the gender of a person:

To our neighbors, my wife, Nancy, and I don't appear in the least unusual. To those in the quiet Oregon community where we live, we are viewed just as we are -- a happy couple deeply in love. Our desire to work hard, buy our first home, and start a family was nothing out of the ordinary. That is, until we decided that I would carry our child.

I am transgender, legally male, and legally married to Nancy. Unlike those in same-sex marriages, domestic partnerships, or civil unions, Nancy and I are afforded the more than 1,100 federal rights of marriage. Sterilization is not a requirement for sex reassignment, so I decided to have chest reconstruction and testosterone therapy but kept my reproductive rights. Wanting to have a biological child is neither a male nor female desire, but a human desire.

Ten years ago, when Nancy and I became a couple, the idea of us having a child was more dream than plan. I always wanted to have children. However, due to severe endometriosis 20 years ago, Nancy had to undergo a hysterectomy and is unable to carry a child. But after the success of our custom screen-printing business and a move from Hawaii to the Pacific Northwest two years ago, the timing finally seemed right. I stopped taking my bimonthly testosterone injections. It had been roughly eight years since I had my last menstrual cycle, so this wasn't a decision that I took lightly. My body regulated itself after about four months, and I didn't have to take any exogenous estrogen, progesterone, or fertility drugs to aid my pregnancy.

Our situation sparks legal, political, and social unknowns. We have only begun experiencing opposition from people who are upset by our situation. Doctors have discriminated against us, turning us away due to their religious beliefs. Health care professionals have refused to call me by a male pronoun or recognize Nancy as my wife. Receptionists have laughed at us. Friends and family have been unsupportive; most of Nancy's family doesn't even know I'm transgender.

I guess it all boils down to how one defines a person's gender and a person's biological sex, and whether the two have to agree or not.

There are science fiction books about imaginary societies where the number of genders is, say, seven or eight. Perhaps we are too rigid in trying to stuff everybody into two tiny boxes? What do you think?

Today's Totally Hilarious Study

I love the people who do research like this:

The fair maiden of myth appears to have a basis in scientific reality, according to new research.

Scientists looking into attractiveness in men and women suggest that men of all races are subconsciously attracted to fairer-skinned women, while women are more drawn to dark-complexioned men.

The researchers, whose study shows that across different races, lighter-skinned women are seen as the ideal, say the attraction is driven by preferences based on moral assumptions.

Men are subconsciously attracted to fairer skin because of its association with innocence, purity, modesty, virginity, vulnerability and goodness, according to researchers at the University of Toronto.

Women are attracted to men with darker complexions because these are associated with sex, virility, mystery, villainy and danger.

Ok. I'm now leaning back in my maidenly chair with great satisfaction, because I'm the palest of all goddesses. Which means that I am innocent, pure, modest, virginal, vulnerable and good. On the other hand, if I put some beige foundation on I'd be a slut. Yeah. Research is so rewarding, especially when one can draw the explanation out of one's butt.

Note that the research was based on an analysis of

...more than 2,000 advertising photographs of men and women, the researchers found that the skin of white women was 15.2 per cent lighter than the skin of white males, and the skin of black women 11.1 per cent lighter than the skin of black men.

Advertising photographs were chosen because almost invariably the models were considered to be among the most attractive people of the races and genders.

Is it now clear to you how those theories about virginal pale maidens and swarthy swashbuckling men were shown to be true? You go out and look at pictures in advertising. If women in them have lighter skin it so very clearly proves that it's all about lack of pigmentation as a symbol of innocence and vulnerability.

The study also discusses the slut factor:

When they analysed adverts featuring white women only, they found that women with the darkest complexions were more likely to be in an advanced state of undress.

They were also more likely to have a bared midriff, and only they are shown with bared feet or are implied to be totally nude.

The darkest-complexioned women in this group were also likely to be provocatively dressed, wearing a bra and underwear or similar article of clothing.

In contrast, women with the lightest complexion are more likely to be conservatively dressed and portrayed as friendly, happy and honest.

I probably should read the study in great detail, to get answers to many of the questions these findings provoke. For example, how were the photographs selected? Where they in newspapers, women's magazines, men's magazines? What products did they advertise (cars?, beer?, makeup?, detergents?) and to what group (men or women or both? older or younger consumers?)? And how did the study take into account the possibility that female models might wear a lot more makeup on their faces than male models (including those new light-reflecting concealers)?

The main point I want to make here is that even if the empirical finding about different average skin colors of male and female models in ads were true it would not have proved anything about the reasons for those differences.

Thank You

I have been cruising around on the net reading comments threads on various blogs. May I thank you, my dear readers, for being such intelligent and erudite commenters. I keep forgetting that it's not as common as it would be had I ordered this universe.

Sports Talk

Suppose that there are two baseball teams: The U.S. Eaters and The Food Industry Raiders. Suppose that they play games against each other in the same series repeatedly, and suppose that the umpire for these games is the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Can you predict which team will win most games?

All this has to do with the following piece of news:

Under pressure from the food industry, the Agriculture Department is considering a proposal not to identify retailers where tainted meat went for sale except in cases of serious health risk, The Associated Press has learned.

Had that been the rule in place last month, consumers would not have been told if their supermarkets sold meat from a Southern California slaughterhouse that triggered the biggest beef recall in U.S. history.

The plan is being considered as the USDA puts the final touches on a proposed disclosure rule. It had lingered in draft form for two years until getting pushed to the forefront in February, when 143 million pounds of beef were recalled by Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. in Chino, Calif., after undercover video by an animal-rights activist showed workers abusing crippled cows.

Agriculture Department spokesman Chris Connelly confirmed Wednesday that the agency is weighing whether to make naming the stores mandatory only for so-called "Class I" recalls, which pose the greatest health hazard. The Chino recall was categorized as "Class II" because authorities determined there was minimal risk to human health.

Of course the suppliers don't want their names released. But what should the umpires do?

The whole scenario is wrong, not only because the umpires are in the pocket of the business interests but also because the government is not supposed to referee two competing teams in this way. The government is supposed to work for the citizens.

This Is What A Feminist Looks Like

A promotional video from the Feminist Majority Foundation:





The comments to the video are the usual YouTube quality. I found this one especially interesting, for those who argue that there is no longer any need for feminism:

Feminism exists because LAWS exist to protect you. In the wild, and outside of western liberal democracies, you're MEAT and easily over-powered.

Better stop the nagging and the pettiness and self-love, gals. Better get REAL. We need you because males define themselves (generally) as the opposite of YOU. Humanity itself depends on the balance of our identities.

Show a some more dignity and UNMEDIATED humanity or else society will crumble.

Then, you're just property once more.

Dig it.

That just about defines misogyny, by allowing women two roles: as property, or as a distorting mirror of all that men don't want to be. Ladies, you can choose which of those two you'd prefer. Noice.

Women, Work and Woe

Broadsheet has two posts on women and work for you to read on this beautiful spring morning, just to get you all gloomy and irritated. One of them links to a Boston Globe opinion piece which has a most fascinating and sellable theory: that women are the reason why Americans now work longer:

IT'S ALMOST the end of National Women's Month and I have a big confession: I think we women ruined the workplace.

Ouch. I don't want to feel that way, but take a look. Once upon a time, when a woman took a professional job, she worked a 60-hour week on average. Her boss was a man and she thought she had to prove herself. She didn't make any more money than the guys who worked 45-hour weeks. She thought this was the glass ceiling, so she started working 65 hours instead. Still, she made no more money. She did, however, get promoted to head of her department. She was the lowest-paid department head in history, so she worked even harder.

...

This woman's road in life has been dour. She does not know she is insecure. She really believes she has to work nights, even though she is perpetuating a system that is terrible for her children. As she became more bitter, she made everybody work longer hours, called more staff meetings where she did all of the talking, insisted that the boss should see her department working the latest. Plus nobody in the neighborhood can stand her anymore, because she thinks that stay-at-home moms are her free babysitters. She calls the seven hours when she leaves her kids with you a "play date."

I've been Making A List of all the things uppity women (meaning feminists) can be blamed for: divorce rates, latchkey children, juvenile delinquency, female alcoholism, boy's problems at school, girls' early sexualization, the collapse of the U.S. military (both because the girls are in there stopping male bonding and because who would want to fight for uppity career women), female depression rates, male depression rates and so on. Now I can add ruining the work environment to that list.

In that alternative world of All-Powerful Feminists everything pretty much is our fault, because we are all-powerful. We could easily cure depression, make all children happy and safe, make work meaningful and part-time for all individuals. That we don't do that or establish world peace or cure cancer and AIDs shows how horrible we are.

Nobody else can do any of those things. No, anti-feminists can't ask for a more humane work environment. Men can't ask for a more humane work environment. They just can't. And yes, it is those horrible women who caused the very long working hours in financial occupations (the ones with the longest hours in this country), even though they are rarer than hen's teeth there. Because, you have to understand this: Feminists are all-powerful people. It might look like we have very little power, but that just shows that we can even hide our omnipotency from the eyes of mere mortals.

Clear now? I have to adjust my empress-of-the-world crown before I comment on the second Broadsheet post. That one links to an abstract of a Canadian study which finds that -- what a surprise -- female lawyers with small children bill fewer hours than other lawyers and that male lawyers with small children bill more hours than other lawyers. Also, male lawyers with small children at home are more likely to have stay-at-home partners who take care of those small children.

I cannot remember a single study that hasn't found these sorts of results, by the way. (I so wish we wouldn't have to reinvent the feminist wheel all the time.) The crucial point is one I have mentioned many times before on this blog:

As long as women are viewed as responsible for most of the unpaid labor at home, this is what we are going to find. The only solutions to it are to either make child-rearing a more gender-neutral task or to start paying a salary to those parents who stay at home. The latter might make more fathers interested in the option, and even if it did not it would help the women who take time off from the labor force. They'd have money for retraining, for example, to get those courses which allow them perhaps to be promoted one day. Or at least allow them to find a job when they return to the labor market.

The study did find something new: women without children had the highest billable hours. It is fascinating to see how that finding is fleshed out in the comments of the Broadsheet post. We have a long way to go, baby.
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A Post-Script:
Whether "billable hours" is a good measure of productivity is also debated in the Broadsheet comments. I don't really want to get into a discussion of average, marginal and total products here, but the problems with measuring real productivity in fields such as medicine or law are tremendous, because the output is difficult to quantify and to attribute to various workers in the firm.

Sorry Kids. Daddy Broke The Markets.

This quote by Larry Sabato (from Fox News' Your World With Neil Cavuto) is unintentionally funny:

NEIL CAVUTO (host): To John McCain today -- he was talking about housing, but concerned more with all the pricey government programs aimed at fixing housing. Historian Larry Sabato says it is a decidedly different tact: Democrats proposing a government solution for people in pain; the presumptive Republican nominee risking no such solution for the vast majority who are not. So, Larry, how does this fall out? I mean, one of the things in that Hillary Clinton press conference a few moments ago was this notion that maybe John McCain was pulling a Herbert Hoover. Will that register?

SABATO: Well, Neil, without insulting the American public, I'd have to say a fair proportion of the public doesn't know who Herbert Hoover was. So I don't think that will necessarily sell. Look, when you analyze parties, you need to think of them this way: The Democratic Party is the mommy party, and the Republican Party is the daddy party. Now, you and I both love both our mothers and fathers, right? But they play different roles in many families. The mother is loving and caring and takes us back in and provides the safety net. The father is the disciplinarian -- tough love. He makes us face up to hard realities, at least in many families. Well, the mommy party is the Democratic Party. The daddy party is the Republican Party. And I think if you look at the economy, you look at the housing, the mortgage crisis, a whole wide range of things, you'll find that the parties fulfill these images.

It's that old Republican framing, sure. But it comes across differently, because the Republicans have been in power for the last seven years and so the mortgage crisis, the housing problem and "a whole wide range of things" are something they created.

Who is the Daddy Disciplinarian supposed to spank here? Himself?

The Normal Breasts Gallery

I have linked to this site before on the blog, but it's time to link it to again. It shows the great natural variety in the shapes, colors and sizes of the female breast.

If we don't accept that variety, as a culture, we are going to have more of these incredibly sad stories (via Sinfonian).

Sirius To Wed XM

The Department of Justice has announced the banns for this marriage, which would result in many customers having the choice of exactly one satellite radio station:

The Justice Department gave approval on Monday to the merger of two rival radio networks, XM and Sirius, a marriage that would create a de facto monopoly in satellite services now used by more than 17 million subscribers.

The proposed $5 billion merger, which was announced more than a year ago, must still be approved by the Federal Communications Commission. The merger is opposed by consumer groups and broadcasters who say it will force up prices and reduce the programming now available from the two competing systems.

The Justice Department's antitrust division announced Monday that it approved the merger after determining that prices were not likely to rise, in part because of competition from other program sources, like high-definition radio as well as iPods and other MP3 players that can be connected to home or car audio systems. The deal, the agency said, was unlikely to hurt competition or consumers.

So let me get this straight: It would not hurt consumers if we only had one airline company, right? After all, people can take the train or the bus or drive their own cars to get from place x to place z. Ok, I guess.

And according to Mr. Barnett, who leads the Justice Department's antitrust division, this merger does not cause a monopoly! An antitrust division which doesn't see mergers as creating monopolies because there are nearby markets that consumers can go to! Wonders never cease under the Bush era. And Mr. Barnett doesn't believe that consumers react to increased prices, either:

He said the review showed that, because XM and Sirius equipment was not compatible, subscribers rarely shifted from one system to the other in their homes or cars; a switch could be expensive and time-consuming.

"Historically, once you choose one or the other of the audio services, you're not going to switch," he said. "A price switch is not going to cause you to jump to the other services."

Now this is fun. So the solution to a market where a duopoly (two firms competing only with each other) used various tricks to tie consumers to their products leads to ...what proposal by the guardians of the good markets? A merger!

It looks like FCC will approve the deal.

Note that I'm not saying there might be no good economic arguments for approving this merger and the resulting monopoly power in the satellite radio market. But the ones that have been presented here are not those good arguments. Because a monopoly always has more power to raise prices than a market with more than one firm in it.

Sniff. I Can't Grow A Beard.

What can I do when I have failed and need to retreat to my nest to lick my wounds and still feel all feminine? Get a tit job? Guys can grow a beard and that hides their fractured masculinity after a public loss of face:

In addition to MacCallum and Giordano, Democratic strategist Marissa Shorenstein offered her own theory to explain why Richardson and former Vice President Al Gore grew beards: "I will say that after Al Gore lost his election, he also grew a beard. And I think it has to do with being sort of macho and wanting to feel like a man after you've lost something."

I should do something about that warped humor of mine. What I really wanted to point out is the idea that failing in something makes men lose their masculinity, but that failing in something doesn't hurt women at all, because women are expected to take failing as a matter of course experience or to act all mature about it.

Then there is the other meaning of the word "beard", referring to the wife of a man who is secretly gay. I think secretly lesbian women can't marry men as beards. Or am I wrong?

How To Teach Children Science. The Creationist Version.

Stolen from Pharyngula who also has some good commentary on the video.





It may be picky to point out that the evolutionary side here appears to argue that humans are the end point of evolution. Especially picky, given the brainwashing the creationist tour guides practice. But I'm nothing if not picky.

Suckers

Remember the Bear Stearns bailout? It has just gotten sweeter for the owners of shares in that firm:

The Federal Reserve has been put in an awkward position by JPMorgan Chase's (JPM) decision to raise its bid for Bear Stearns (BSC) to $10 a share from $2. The sweetened bid, announced on Mar. 24, is high enough that Bear's shareholders are getting some real value for the company—while the Federal Reserve still risks suffering big losses.

The renegotiated deal is bound to cause complaints that the nation's central bank has been sucked into supporting a partial bailout.

Bound to cause complaints? What do we (we not being the owners of Bear Stearns but the suckers) have to complain about?

Isn't this how the free financial markets seem to work? First we get fleeced in the markets themselves for many a year. Then when the market collapses we get the honor of paying the people who fleeced us so that they do not suffer.

4000

The number of U.S. military who have died in Iraq reached four thousand yesterday. Phila quotes Michael O'Hanlon (a hawk) from two years ago:

As bad as things are now, and as slow as the going currently appears, things are not that bad. And as tragic as deaths and injuries to coalition military personnel, U.N. officials, and top Iraqi leaders have been, the fact also remains that total American losses in Iraq to date -- just over 300 as of this writing -- are still less than in Desert Shield/Storm in 1990-91.

Funny how it goes. The psychological progress of getting used to various figures of dead people. What number would O'Hanlon now regard as too large a price to pay for whatever mayhem Iraq has achieved?

Not sure, but I remember a woman being interviewed on television or radio before the Iraq invasion started, in one of those "ask Jane and Joe Public" pieces. She was asked what number of U.S. deaths she found an acceptable price to pay for the invasion, and she offered one hundred as the appropriate number. Wonder what she thinks of four thousand.

I also wonder what that number will climb to if the U.S. actually stays in Iraq for hundred years as McCain has been speculating.

There is something harsh and callous about the common human reaction to deaths like these, because unless they touch your own life they are just "other people's dead people", whereas the financial costs of the war will bite us all in the wallets. It is hard to imagine the grief a death causes and then to multiply that by four thousand or by hundreds of thousands if all Iraqi deaths are included. Hard to imagine. I suspect that anyone who actually succeeded in that imagining would drop dead from that inhumane overload of grief.

A Deep Thought for the Day

For politicians and political pundits:

Having a mother and a grandmother does not mean that you cannot be sexist. Even having a wife and a daughter does not mean that. Even being a woman yourself does not mean that you might not be sexist or even misogynistic, because fish swimming in the water don't think it has a taste.

And here is a freebie extra deep thought for the day:
That women are the majority of this world's people does not mean that feminists are the majority of this world's people. See above, re fishes-and-water.

Women's eNews

If you have extra money under those sofa cushions and want to help an important source of news about the world's women, consider giving to the Women's eNews. Their coverage is excellent and far-reaching, but because they can be accessed freely on the net they need other ways of making money.

Shunning

An interesting article about some conservative churches which use shunning to keep their flocks under control:

On a quiet Sunday morning in June, as worshippers settled into the pews at Allen Baptist Church in southwestern Michigan, Pastor Jason Burrick grabbed his cell phone and dialed 911. When a dispatcher answered, the preacher said a former congregant was in the sanctuary. "And we need to, um, have her out A.S.A.P."

Half an hour later, 71-year-old Karolyn Caskey, a church member for nearly 50 years who had taught Sunday school and regularly donated 10 percent of her pension, was led out by a state trooper and a county sheriff's officer. One held her purse and Bible. The other put her in handcuffs.

The charge was trespassing, but Caskey's real offense, in her pastor's view, was spiritual. Several months earlier, when she had questioned his authority, he'd charged her with spreading "a spirit of cancer and discord" and expelled her from the congregation. "I've been shunned," she said.

Her story reflects a growing movement among some conservative Protestant pastors to bring back church discipline, an ancient practice in which suspected sinners are privately confronted and then publicly castigated and excommunicated if they refuse to repent.

While many Christians find such practices outdated, pastors in large and small churches across the country are expelling members for offenses ranging from adultery and theft to gossiping, skipping service and criticizing church leaders.

I can see an immediate advantage from this practice to any corrupt pastor, say, one who has embezzled the church funds. Just accuse anyone who has spotted that of gossiping and drive the person out of the congregation.

It's not a very democratic practice. But then the conservative forms of the main monotheistic religions are as far from democracy as possible. Rather, they are the model examples I think of when I want to figure out how very authoritarian institutions function. The people on the higher rung of the ladder are not only in power but assumed to be right, to know more, to be able to touch God's toe. And the people on the lower rungs are not allowed to criticize or to question.

Betty Carter posted by Anthony McCarthy

Droppin’ Things

"Don’t Cut Down No More Trees"


That's what I meant by "jazz".

The Left Should Sit This One Out by Anthony McCarthy

You might be able to tell me because after writing this three times, from the beginning, thinking about it for the past several years, I don’t understand why the FCC banning the cable industry from using naughty words is an important issue for the left. I can’t see it being a valuable expenditure of our limited political resources. Worse than wasting our energy and time, I can see it being a useful issue for the Republicans to rally the “values voters” to come out for John McCain in November.

What does the left get from the cable industry? The cabloids? 24-hour Republican propaganda and lies, trying to kill us at the polls? What do we get from the other cable channels? The glamorization of homicidal sex killers and governmental use of torture, endless reruns of brainless sitcoms..... What is so important about the ability of people to say “fuck” on cable channels that it captures the energy and attention of so many people on the left?

The slippery slope argument, that if they can regulate dirty words we won’t be able to advocate a living wage, is funnier than anything on the Comedy Channel. They’ll be allowed say anything before they’re going to have on serious advocacy of economic justice. There is no regulation keeping them from it now. It runs counter to their corporate interests and could peel off just those same “values voters” who might come to realize that their families are at a lot more risk from bankers, insurance executives and businessman than they are from the entire population of potentially betrothed gay men and lesbians. We are effectively blacklisted by the cable industry now, we will always be in the absence of strict fairness, equal time and public service regulations. We simply have no important stake in their being able to talk dirty.

At one point I wrote a speculative paragraph about offering our support for our opposition to a ban on indecency in exchange for more of a voice on cable. But, let’s be realistic, even if there was some kind of understanding they’d play us for chumps. And the left would have to, yet again, provide our own chumps. The cable industry will never, make that NEVER! let the issues involved with justice, equality, environmental protection, etc. be discussed in such a way that they might actually have an impact on real politics. We owe them far less than nothing. We should let them fight it out with the FCC that they had such a big hand in appointing, we should let them sleep in the bed they’ve made.

While trying to write this a couple of days ago it came to mind that during the greatest period of progressive progress, the 60s, you couldn’t say the word “hell”, show a bra in a bra commercial or show a double bed in a married couples’ bedroom on TV. The absence of the word “fuck” or the equivalent of Janet Jackson’s breast on TV didn’t hamper real progress that made peoples’ lives better. And I also remembered that in the early 70s, even as many of the restrictions held, that in Boston, during Holy Week, for crying out loud, Sonia Hamlin, a pretty good local talk-show host who worked for WBZ TV, did a week long series on human sexuality. Though it would seem somewhat dated now, it was far more frank than just about anything you will hear today. As I recall it included fair and humane discussions of trans-gender issues, lesbians and gay men, various kind of heterosexual heterodoxy. The difference was that she felt an obligation to inform her audience, not to entertain and titillate them.

The closest equivalent to that level of public information on cable today, Stewart and Colbert , are pretty good but they might be even better if they had to work around restrictions. You can always find another way to say it, there is always a way to get around just about any obstacle. They made it through the writer’s strike, after all. I don’t think that a ban on dirty language would cramp their style in the least.

As for the left, we shouldn’t oppose cable regulation of that kind, neither side is our side. It isn't a matter of justice or even something genuinely important. Nor should we support it. We should allow the cable industry to fight with their dates. We didn’t force them to go steady.

Like The Cicada posted by Anthony McCarthy

Mercedes Sosa sings Como La Cigarra - Like The Cicada by María Elena Walsh. An appropriate song for the day.

So many times I've been killed,
So many times I've died
But nevertheless, here I am revived.

Note: I got called away unexpectedly yesterday morning.

Acts by Anthony McCarthy

For those who keep challenging me to account for what I believe,

This says most of it, (palabras)

This says the rest of it. (Words in sidebar at You Tube)

And this, what I was reminded of while looking for something to make a much less important point about another musician, that Mercedes Sosa is one of the greatest artists of the last half century.

Anyone know if Danilo Perez' almost equally brilliant version is available anywhere on line?

An Early Easter Present

Notes From My Unofficial Nielsen Diary by Anthony McCarthy

It wasn’t a question but the answer was if someone threw a handful of quarters into a cess pool I wouldn’t fish them out. I certainly wouldn’t pay for the privilege to try. And that was the answer to my brother-in-law’s assertion that I should get cable to watch Keith Olbermann. If it had been a game of Jeopardy the category would be Self-Defeating Mental Habits of the Left.

If you’ve never before met someone who had “become a member of the Nielsen Family” you have now. I agreed to fill out the thing for one reason only.... well other than the fact that the poor telemarketer sounded so tired yesterday, I’m going to find every single listing on all three of the public TV stations in my area for Bill Moyers Journal and claim to have watched it. Since it’s about the only TV program I’ve seen recently worth remembering after the credits start rolling, it won’t be so far from the truth.

Any others I should add a scintilla of support to?

As for cable , if someone had a gun pointed at the head of the entire cable spectrum and was holding it to hostage to prevent advances in healthcare, environmental protection, public transportation or any of the other items in the real agenda of the real left , I’d have to say, sorry Ted you’re going to have to take the bullet. You can throw in satellite too. I’ll expand on that thought later.

Friday Critter Blogging

The first picture is of two "old-lady" lemurs, sent by our Suzie. Credits go toGreg Stamatelos at Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa.





The next picture, by Doug, is of a cactus. But it looks like an ancient desert god.





The final picture is an old one of Henrietta the Hound, the dog that rules my life. She is white in the face now, so even more beautiful than in this picture, but still equally shiny-coated.

And now a word about the bladder (by Suzie)

         Like a lot of women, I guard against urinary tract infections. My bladder got damaged during surgery and radiation, and I catheterize. Sometimes I get an infection, and sometimes I just have the symptoms.  
         Last year, while heading to the Brooklyn Museum (see below) from my Manhattan hotel, I HAD TO GO. I dashed into the Hard Rock Café but was told only the store was open. The restrooms would open in a few minutes when the restaurant did. I waited and waited and finally told a clerk that I had a disability and might urinate on his floor if he didn’t open the restroom, which he did pronto.
          The availability of restrooms is a feminist issue because women get UTIs more often than men; women often have longer waits for public restrooms; and we cannot urinate in an alley quite as easily.
          Anyway, I took some medication and scampered down into the subway. I began to feel sick to my (empty) stomach. I barely made it to the stop in Brooklyn. I got off the train and plopped down on the floor near the booth of the ticket-taker, who did not give me a second look. I figured, not only was I not the first person to get sick in the subway, but I probably wasn’t the first person to get sick that morning.
        After the nausea passed, I dragged myself into the museum, where a volunteer proffered a wheelchair. Sometimes I used it as a walker; other times I sat down and padded along with my feet. What a great invention.
        For all of us who struggle with UTIs, I recommend Megan Gogerty’s educational song “Ain’t Nothin’ Good About a Bladder Infection.” (Some of you also may enjoy her songs “Hillary” and “I Miss Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” as do I.)

Women artists & museums (by Suzie)

         As a newspaper reporter, I sat next to the art critic for a while. Once I wrote about the Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. She dismissed the idea of dedicating a museum to women, saying art should be judged on its merits, without any sort of affirmative action. That was one of many times where I thought I would leap across my desk to choke her. Apparently, there's no politics in the art world, unless it's giving recognition to women.
         The museum has a new director. The historic gem of a building is worth a visit, even if you don’t care about art. If you do, the permanent collection is solid, and the current exhibit is a retrospective of Paula Rego’s work.
         Members can go on a trip April 17 to the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “Organized in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the artist's birth, 'Frida Kahlo' is the first major Kahlo exhibition in the United States in nearly fifteen years,” the Philadelphia museum notes.
          In New York, I’m loath to enter the Museum of Modern Art without a gorilla mask. But I love the Brooklyn Museum, whose Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is celebrating its first anniversary this month.
          The museum has the first U.S. survey of art by Ghada Amer. “The Egyptian-born artist is best known for her abstract canvases embroidered with feminist motifs.” (Emphasis added to catch Echidne’s attention.)
          The “Votes for Women” exhibit “reviews women in American politics and the suffragist movement.” On March 29, the
National Women's History Project will make a stop, after a multimedia presentation on “Women’s Art and the Woman Suffrage Movement.” Also that day, Beverly Lowry will speak on Harriet Tubman.
          Other lectures include a panel discussion on “Beyond the Waves: Feminist Artists Talk Across the Generations,” March 30; and Miriam Shapiro on her work, April 26.
           The museum has an extensive collection of Egyptian art and artifacts, including alabaster goddesses and a famous Nile figure with upraised arms called “Bird Lady.” Last year, I followed curator Edward Bleiberg’s walking tour on “Pharaohs, Queens and Goddesses.”
           He explained that women were chattel in Rome and had few rights in Greece, but had many rights in Egypt. They could own property, handle business, enter into marital contracts, initiate divorce, and negotiate divorce settlements and who got custody of children. This befuddled the Greeks and Romans, who weren’t used to female rulers. For example, they saw Cleopatra as a schemer while we might understand her more as a CEO. 
           Similarly, the earlier Pharaoh Hatshepsut seemed crazy to many male historians. Bleiberg said feminists and female Egyptologists helped change her image. Her story made sense once people understood her within a context in which women could assume power as part of the “natural order.” (Maybe these experts could help us with our presidential race.)
           The museum’s Sackler Center houses Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party.” I had heard Chicago speak, and I have a poster of “The Dinner Party” autographed and framed in my dining room. (I like the irony and the reactions of people unfamiliar with it: "Um, those plates look like, well, um, I don't mean to be nasty, but, um ..."). I had never seen the work installed until last year. I roamed 'round and 'round the table, looking at it from different angles, crouching down to inspect the detailed ceramics, tapestries and embroideries.
        I attended a discussion by Maura Reilly and Linda Nochlin, curators of “Global Feminisms.” (I had studied Nochlin’s well-known book “Women, Art and Power” in college.) The moderator asked what some issues, such as transgender, had to do with feminism. Reilly snorted and said, “Let me get you a book by Judith Butler.”

           Next was a dialogue between Chicago and Sackler, who had donated the money for her namesake center. Chicago was fiery, but Sackler was pretty radical herself. They were irritated by a New York Times’ review. The headline, "They Are Artists Who Are Women; Hear Them Roar," set a dismissive tone to a story that made a little joke about bra-burning. Grrrrr.
            I wrote a letter to the editor and copied the museum. I received a thank-you from not only the museum’s director but also Sackler herself, who wrote:

The creation of the Center has been an extraordinary partnership with the Museum, Maura is a fine curator and it continues to bring in young and old from all walks and backgrounds - which is everything I had hoped.
I am glad that it is everything you would have wanted too.

The Invisible Women

This is yet another post in the series of Trivial Topics No Real Feminist Would Write About. I'm so glad I'm not a Real Feminist and can just dive straight into the trivial but very interesting topic.

Which is the way the general political discussion assumes that human beings are men, that the term "gender" means that something will be said about women (men don't have gender just as whites don't have race), that there is nothing about gender when a commenter on a political thread talks about "Republicans and their women" or wonders why we never have a "Kick the Republicans in the Balls Day", that anything about children is viewed as women's issue, as if men procreate by some type of division instead.

This topic doesn't have to do with the obvious kind of sexism at all, because quite feminist people can fall into the same trap. It has to do with the automatic assumption on the part of so many that human beings are men unless otherwise explicitly stated, and if you remind them about that other half of humanity you can see the brain gears grinding into a new position: Oops! I forgot. Yes, naturally women are to be included, too. What about that abortion thingy?

I sometimes feel like a small child pulling on the sleeve of my dad, yelling "I'm here, too!", when I read certain political conversations. And when the "dad" notices me I get some version of attention to whatever is specifically female about the issue, not the kind of inclusion I wish.

What is this all about? Is it just a residue from all that "he embraces her" and so we don't need to remember "her" at all in writing? I doubt it. It's something more fundamental than that, something to do with in-groups and out-groups, I suspect. Whatever it is, yelling that "we are here, too" seems necessary.

For the Five Year Anniversary of the Iraq Invasion and Occupation

This is a reposting of the song of the earth to all the children who have died in wars and acts of terrorism, or maybe a faint echo of it, which I wrote in 2004:


These are my children, the dead ones, the beloved: the ones covered in mud and dirt, the bloodied ones, the limbless ones, the ones who were scattered by bombs like crumbs thrown for the birds. These are my children: the burned ones, the raped ones, the starved ones, the buried ones. See how beautiful they all are, my beloved children.

I seek for them everywhere, I call for them and at nightfall I find them. I gather them to me and give them sleep. The night I turn into a silken shawl, the sky into a blue blanket. I weave cradles and nests out of my hair, and I find a place for each one of my children, however hurt and frightened.

My lap is wide enough for all of them and their pain, and I give them dreams of pine forests, of fresh streams in sunlight, of young foxes gambolling in a clearing. I give them dreams of peace and quiet, of stars and sailboats, of flowers and meadows. I give them dreams of snow and sun and sweetness. I give them what was taken away from them and when I cannot do that I give them oblivion and rest. And the wind sings a lullaby, gently, in all my tongues.

It is my milk that feeds all, and my tears that sate all thirst, and these children, my beloved, will never lack food or drink or a place to slumber in my lap or a peace that cannot be broken.

On Whorses

Remember My Little Pony? These are supposed to be the next generation of ponies for little girls to play with, supposed, because though I was able to find a link to the site which sells them I was unable to verify that Toys R Us is actually selling them.

Jezebel linked to a story about them:

These are "Strutz," new pony dolls coming to a big box discount retailer near you. Aren't they a curious combination of anorexic and cleavage-y? That is the first rule of selling toys to four year old girls: making them subtly slutty is never going to do the job. How are we supposed to get our little girls to play with Legos in the face of crap like this? Thanks to veteran State Department hairdo watcher Princess Sparkle Pony for tipping us off to this new brand of toy "whorses" young Condi's parents would have protected her from seeing. [Princess Sparkle Pony]

As I said, I am not 100% certain that these are meant to be real toys. But if they are real, they sure are scary, what with those high heels for the hooves, the make-up and the bag for all the shopping that ponies do. It's as if someone wants to train girls as both hookers and consumers of makeup and clothes. Well, those girls who don't suffocate on all the small pieces of jewelry at the age of four.

Today's Action Alert

FAIR asks: Why Are Winter Soldiers Not News?

Dozens of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars gathered in Silver Spring, Maryland last weekend for the Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan hearings (3/13/08-3/16/08), where they offered harrowing testimony about atrocities they had witnessed or participated in directly. The BBC predicted that the event, organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, "could be dominating the headlines around the world this week" (3/7/08). The hearings were covered as far afield as the U.K. (Guardian, 3/17/08), Australia (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 3/14/08), Croatia (Javno, 3/16/08), and Iran (Press TV, 3/14/08). Yet there has been an almost complete media blackout on this historic news event in the U.S. corporate media.

If you are not happy with that, click the FAIR link to find out what to do. Or you could just relax and assume that either the Pravda or the Izvestia would cover it if it mattered.

Michael O. Leavitt Cares For Pro-Life Doctors

Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt worries about the well-being of doctors who refuse to treat a woman who wants an abortion or emergency contraception. He is very worried about the fate of those doctors whose ethical qualms are such that they will not even refer the patient to another provider. Poor doctors! Surely they won't be punished for violating the rule that a medical provider with ethical qualms must refer the patient in a timely manner to someone who can help her?

Don't believe me? Here's the rule:

In November, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) issued new ethics guidelines. Members who have a moral objection to performing abortions are now required to refer their patients to another provider:

Physicians and other health care providers have the duty to refer patients in a timely manner to other providers if they do not feel they can in conscience provide the standard reproductive services that patients request. In resource-poor areas, access to safe and legal reproductive services should be maintained.

And here is what Mr. Leavitt just wrote to ACOG:

I am writing to express my strong concern over recent actions that undermine the conscience and other individual rights of health care providers. Specifically, I bring to your attention the potential interaction of the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology's (ABOG) Bulletin for 2008 Maintenance of Certification (Bulletin) with a recent report (Opinion Number 385) issued by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) Ethics Committee on November 7, 2007 entitled "The Limits of Conscience Refusal in Reproductive Medicine".

The ACOG Ethics Committee report recommends that in the context of providing abortions, "Physicians and other health care professionals have the duty to refer patients in a timely manner to other providers if they do not feel that they can in conscience provide the standard reproductive service that patients request." It appears that the interaction of the ABOG Bulletin with the ACOG ethics report would force physicians to violate their conscience by referring patients for abortions or taking other objectionable actions, or risk losing their board certification.

As you know, Congress has protected the rights of physicians and other health care professionals by passing two non-discrimination laws and annually renewing an appropriations rider that protect the rights, including conscience rights, of health care professionals in programs or facilities conducted or supported by federal funds. (See 42 U.S.C. § 238n, 42 U.S.C. § 300a-7, and the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008, Pub. L. No. 110-161, 121 Stat. 1844, § 508). Additionally, threats to withhold or revoke board certification can cause serious economic harm to good practitioners.

I am concerned that the actions taken by ACOG and ABOG could result in the denial or revocation of Board certification of a physician who -- but for his or her refusal, for example, to refer a patient for an abortion -- would be certified. These actions, in turn, could result in certain HHS-funded State and local governments, institutions, or other entities that require Board certification taking action against the physician based just on the Board's denial or revocation of certification. In particular, I am concerned that such actions by these entities would violate federal laws against discrimination.

In the hope that compliance of entities with the obligations that accompany certain federal funds will not be jeopardized, it would be helpful if you could clarify that ABOG will not rely on the ACOG Ethics Committee Report, "The Limits of Conscience Refusal in Reproductive Medicine" when making determinations of whether to grant or revoke board certifications.

Thank you very much for your assistance in this matter.


Sincerely,
Michael O. Leavitt

Get it? It's discrimination (discrimination!) to require the provider to refer the patient to someone else, even if she is, say, the victim of rape and needs emergency contraception. And it's not fair to make the provider have any consequences from such a refusal. So.

Never mind the patients. It's quite ok to discriminate against them based on nothing but the provider's conscience or political ideology or whatever.

The McCain Expertise

You may have heard that McCain made a public and simple error in the field of fighting "them terrarists", the area he is supposed to excel in. Here's the bit again:





NBC News political director Chuck Todd's reaction to this and the media's polite decision not to drag McCain over some hot coals:

"[T]his was not a one-time slip and ... had Clinton or Obama done something like this, this would have been played on a loop, over and over."

I guess it's Ok If You Are A Republican (OKIYAAR).

Let's See If It Works

By "it" I mean the classification of feminist definitions I suggested in the two-part series of "Take A Deep Breath" (Inhale and Exhale). What I'm going to apply it to is the topic of a post on feministe: a New York Times Magazine article which discusses the reasons why many Muslims want to adopt the Shariah law, either in the West for their own group only or as the major law system of an Islamic country (assuming that it's not yet the law of the land).

Now, Shariah is a legal system developed in the Middle Ages and not much changed since then. It does not treat men and women identically, and advocating such a system would not be something a feminist using the dictionary definition of feminism would use. But what about a feminist who is concerned about the happiness of women in general or the happiness of a particular group of women in particular?

Here are two quotes which would provide the foothold for arguing that Shariah might be a very good thing for some women. First, from the NYT article:

Shariah is best understood as a kind of higher law, albeit one that includes some specific, worldly commands. All Muslims would agree, for example, that it prohibits lending money at interest — though not investments in which risks and returns are shared; and the ban on Muslims drinking alcohol is an example of an unequivocal ritual prohibition, even for liberal interpreters of the faith. Some rules associated with Shariah are undoubtedly old-fashioned and harsh. Men and women are treated unequally, for example, by making it hard for women to initiate divorce without forfeiting alimony. The prohibition on sodomy, though historically often unenforced, makes recognition of same-sex relationships difficult to contemplate. But Shariah also prohibits bribery or special favors in court. It demands equal treatment for rich and poor. It condemns the vigilante-style honor killings that still occur in some Middle Eastern countries. And it protects everyone's property — including women's — from being taken from them.

Note something interesting: The good things for women are good in comparison to something undefined, not in comparison to how the law treats men. Shariah may well demand equal treatment for rich and poor men, or for rich and poor women, but not for men and women, and it may protect women's property from outright theft but it does not let daughters inherit as much as sons inherit.

The second quote is from Ann's guest post on feministe:

I first became interested in learning about Shariah courts while attending a law reform conference that included lawyers from Zanzibar (an island off the coast of Tanganyika – when the two former colonies were united they were re-named the Republic of Tanzania). While the mainland is heavily Christian, Zanzibar is over 90% Muslim. While discussing gender law with two lawyers from Zanzibar I learned that the island has Shariah courts that rule over family law issues, including divorce. According to these lawyers, Shariah courts gave women more power because a woman could initiate divorce without her husband's consent.

Being able to initiate divorce without the husband's consent is a good thing, true. But my understanding is that Shariah allows men to initiate divorce without their wife's consent, and they don't have to go to court at all to do it. When Shariah courts "gave women more power", what was the starting point like? And how much less power do women still have than men?

I am certain that women have derived not only discriminatory treatment but also legal rights and protections from the application of the Shariah law, and that such legal protection and rights could be improved upon. Is this all enough for a feminist to support the introduction of the Shariah law if Muslim women themselves wish it?

It's a very difficult question. A feminist using the first definition of feminism (as wanting equal rights and opportunities for men and women) would certainly say that it is not enough. A feminist of the second type, one who wants to "put women first" and to improve the position of women in some country where the alternatives are even more unfair to women might argue that the small improvements suffice. But would a feminist of the latter type advocate the adoption of the Shariah rules among Muslim minorities in the West?

I would not, but then I use the dictionary definition. I wouldn't advocate religious laws of any kind, actually, because they are based on patriarchal traditions, rarely give women equal rights and are usually written in such a manner that the most misogynistic interpretation is the most obvious one.

Billie Holiday Sings The Blues

Can you taste voices? Hers tastes like hot milk chocolate with cherry brandy in it.

An Irritating Thought of the Day

I started thinking of those people who argue that any feminist critique of scientific studies (or even of silly books like that Brizandine one) means a) that no feminist understand science and b) all that is needed to understand science is to accept the anti-feminist picks from it and to allow pseudoscience to be treated equally with science.

I don't like to think about those people, because it makes me irritated. They'd quite likely argue that I feel irritated because I'm an emotional woman goddess whose brain just can't absorb science. Or they'd make up a straw-Echidne, one that would argue there are no other but genital differences between men and women, and that I'm irritated (and soon will run out of the room in tears), because my straw-beliefs have been lit on fire. Ashes, that's all that remains.

But I feel irritated for quite different reasons: First, this stupid conversation happens over and over again, starting with an extremely biased and odd popularization of a carefully selected specimen of research which is nevertheless presented as the complete and final scientific truth, showing that women are all wrong and silly, and every time I feel I have to answer. I'm tired of it. I'm tired of the expectation that I should respond with some seriousness to the ridiculous arguments of someone who has never bothered doing any of the necessary research and who appears to have developed no analytical abilities at all. It is insulting. Even though the insulting expectations come from inside me.

I'm also fucking tired of the discourse that is regarded as neutral in this culture. It goes like this: One acceptable argument is that women and men are not only different but that women are somehow less (not able to do mathematics, not able to parallel park or drive (though killing fewer people in accidents), too emotional (though starting fewer wars), good at verbal skills (but men still are the great writers), good at taking care of children (but the experts in childrearing are men) good at cooking (but the great chefs are men). This is all of course a substructure intended to prop up traditional gender roles and women's lesser societal power. Yet it is a neutral and acceptable stance in the debate, and the only neutral and acceptable response is to provide lots and lots of scientific evidence showing that the underlying assumptions are incorrect.

But when that evidence is supplied and discussed what happens? The basic setup of the debate has not shifted at all. Instead, the next round starts with the same assumption that women are irrational, bad at numbers, not to be trusted with power and so on. And all the time the people making those points don't have to come up with large amounts of evidence or careful statistical calculations.

If you get angry at all this, your anger or your angry tears or your leaving the room simply prove the point that the other side had originally made: Women are too emotional.

So I think the debate has been rigged. I don't like to play rigged games, but I don't quite see what the alternative is. All my posts on these topics take much research and reporting, require much careful parsing and nuanced analysis. And for what end? It's like farting into the wind.

Today's Dose of Science-Hating Feminists

Mark Liberman on the Languagelog is always worth reading, especially when he attends to some anti-feminist arguments floating around in the mainstream media. From Ann Bartow.

I feel guilty for not attacking the initial piece myself. But Liberman does it excellently (as long as you remember that he writes in scientese and that you have to add all those fuck-you-idiot bits), life is short and anti-feminist prey is plentiful. Another day will come for me, and my brain might then light up in a totally different configuration, given these years of rabid blogging.

Barack Obama's speech on race

You can read the transcript or watch the speech here.

There are so many different perches from which to respond to a speech like that: The purely emotional level where I was going "sing it, brother", most of the time. The political pundit level of me asking which excerpts will be drawn out to be used as THE message of the speech, to be endlessly dissected and reinterpreted and discussed until the speech indeed has become those few excerpts. The political nerd level where I was making mental lists of any actual solutions the speech contained. The wannabe campaign advisor level of me wondered if all the needed buttons had been punched, if all the focus groups liked the speech equally well. The feminist me noting the ever-so-slight tilt towards men in the speech. And so on.

But mostly I think it is a very good speech, on a topic that Americans really need to be able to discuss more openly and with more patience than has happened so far. It is a speech for adults, which is rare and refreshing in political speechifying.

The Embroidery Lesson

These (found by Phila) are quite wonderful.


Below is a picture of one of my embroideries, called "The Canary" You can click on the picture to see details somewhat better.

The Margarets

This is the most recent of Sheri Tepper's fantasy-cum-scifi books. I just finished reading it and, as usual, loved her inventive worlds and how very real most of the characters feel. But, as usual, I also think that she really needs a bigger bully for an editor. She gets away with bits that should have been cut out, such as little mini-sermons for those readers who are not smart enough to "get it" and the too concrete links to current U.S. politics. For instance, No Child Left Behind is mentioned in this book, which makes no sense at all, given that the events are supposed to take place hundreds of years into the future, and nobody then would remember any rinky-dinky educational policies of this decade.

Tepper is quite a lot like that little girl of the ditty who "when she is good she is very, very good, and when she is bad she is horrid." Which really is a pity, because some of her books are based on fascinating ideas and arguments about the human race, what makes it tick and how it might look in quite a different environment.

Still, she is one of the authors I go to when the world has decided to sit on the feminist me.

So Sorry, Honey

Thanks to Nell in the comments for this interesting reversal of the usual groveling speech by politicians who have cheated on their wives:

St. Patrick's Day

I should not celebrate it, given that rumor about him and the snakes, but most likely it is just a rumor:

Pious legend credits Patrick with banishing snakes from the island, though post-glacial Ireland never had snakes;[37] one suggestion is that snakes referred to the serpent symbolism of the Druids of that time and place, as shown for instance on coins minted in Gaul (see Carnutes), or that it could have referred to beliefs such as Pelagianism, symbolized as "serpents".

Then, of course, that other interpretation of "snakes" is what lies in the heart of this here blog, too. Figure it out yerselves, assuming that you are not out drinking green beer.

The Click?

The click is that moment when a woman (or I guess it could be a man, too) suddenly realizes, on that deep emotional and spiritual level, that the world does not treat women equally and fairly. A recent piece suggests that the discussion of Eliot Spitzer's sex life and the way blame was sought in the presumed behavior of his wife may have been such a click experience for some:

Younger women, for their part, are starting to have what Ms. Goldberg calls "the aha moment" — even if it doesn't put them in Mrs. Clinton's column, as some of the welter of commentary last week found.
"Like lots of other twentysomething women, I've been an unswerving Obama girl from the get-go," wrote Noreen Malone on The XX Factor, the Slate magazine blog written by women. "Oddly enough it's taken Spitzergate — not Hillary's tears, not her scolding — to make me less dismissive of the feminist 'obligation' to vote for a woman."
It reminded her of a depressing bit of wisdom passed on by a friend's father: "The most powerful people in the world are old white men and pretty young women."
"During my supposedly post-feminist lifetime, the women who've created the biggest stir are the young women who've ruined the careers of powerful old men," she wrote. "I'm not saying I'm for Hillary now, and I'm not saying that Hillary's history with sexual peccadilloes is uncomplicated, but it certainly makes me appreciate the fact that she's learned other ways of manipulating power."

I'm not sure if the Spitzer scandal offers an opportunity for the click (a very painful moment, by the way), but if it does for some I'm happy that the society has advanced so much that something fairly subtle in the scheme of things could make you click.

I regret that the topic of that piece is about who to vote for, because that is not the part I wanted to discuss. It was the click. Click!

The Bear Pit

Well, Bear Stearns has been sold to JPMorgan for a cup of coffee per share. The building Bear Stearns owns is alone worth about four times the purchase price. Of course JPMorgan didn't just get the company but also about 30 billion dollars in loan guarantees from us taxpayers. Neat, is it not?

There are at least two separate questions about this sale: One has to do with the 60,000 dollar question whether it will have the intended effect: to staunch the bleeding in the seriously ill financial markets. I have nothing clever to say about that, because I can't read the future, sadly.

The second question is a more fundamental one, and it has to do with the old political battles between those who believe in the god of free markets and absolutely no government intervention (none!) and those who believe in something a lot more restrained and bureaucratic. I'm in the latter camp for the simple reason that the current problem has its roots in the violent resistance towards any additional regulation of the financial markets since the 1990's. The dominant view was that the markets would regulate themselves and that the innovations of the mostly unregulated markets were all Good Things.

Of course, some of those innovations are exactly what led to the collapsed mortgage markets, to the repackaging of bad loans inside large bales of loans, to be sold on, so that ultimately nobody could tell which loans were bad or even what percentage of bad loans each bale contained. Once that happened the seed was sown for what we are now reaping, and the sad thing is that we are all reaping the punishment harvest, while only some people reaped the great benefits of this scheme.

Did you spot the funny thing about all this? As long as the markets looked good the government was told to keep its filthy fingers off it, but once the troubles started the government is supposed to step in and fix them. You really can't have it both ways.

Neither can you make the argument that some risk-takers in the market have earned so much for the very reason that they assume risks if then we don't make them actually experience the downside of a risky market. In short, if the large incomes of certain individuals and firms are payment for successful risk-taking, we should see equally large losses by other individuals and firms. We shouldn't see the government stepping in and saving people. After all, they didn't bother to save people after the hurricane Katrina destroyed a city.

So much for the principles. In actual life, something needs to be done about all this, to protect those who are not at fault for the crisis. I agree with Krugman that the bailouts should be done carefully and that the major players themselves should not be bailed out. They were supposed to be the risk-takers, remember.

Bela Bartok Six Dances In Bulgarian Rhythm

Mikrokosmos Vol 6 #148-153

Two

interpretations.

These pieces are the last in the collection. Number five is the hardest. All of them are wonderful.

Wish someone would put up the rest of the pieces from Volume 6.
I went looking for From the Diary of a Fly but couldn’t find it.

On The Concerns of Joseph Weizenbaum by Anthony McCarthy

People who have endured much of my writing know that I’m interested in the moral distinction between living beings and objects. Ok, yeah. So I’m obsessed with the questions about it. Most of the time the questions about the differences are put in either quasi-mystical terms or, on the other side of the coin, would be, rational-materialist terms. I generally don’t. My interests don’t fall into those two habits of thinking, for me the public discourse on the subject is, most usefully, a matter of political ethics. The lesson I gather from reading the news and history is that first step towards creating hell on earth is to either ignore or deny that living beings are in possession of inherent rights and worth. Sentient beings are in a different realm of existence from inert matter, they should never be items of mere commerce. Non-sentient life is also not wisely treated as if it was merely inert matter. I won’t go into that here, though.

In humans, who are able to reason for themselves, those rights include the personal exercise of that vitally important faculty. It is as much a right to be able to think independently as access to adequate nutrition, clean water and those other things necessary to sustain life. In just about every case, obtaining nutrition and the other physical requirements of life depend on the right, individually and collectively, to practice reasoning.

I have no doubt, at all, that seeing living beings as things without these inherent rights will be taken as permission to allow people to act badly, as badly as they figure they can get away with for their own, selfish reasons. It is only the full acceptance that other people and living beings possess rights that prevents bad behavior. Trying to prevent harm by analyzing ethics in terms of transactions among selfish entities does nothing to prevent the problem. It just makes the basic struggle a slightly more complex race to hell.

During a session at one of the more articulate and rational of the materialist blogs, where I sometimes go to test the weakness in arguments, someone asked my opinion of Alan Turing, I assumed as the inventor of the famous Turing test. My answer was that just because a machine appeared to be thinking in the same way that human beings do didn’t mean that it really was because we don’t have a real understanding of what thinking is. We don’t even know if what we call “thinking” is one or many kinds of events or even if we might mistake one kind of these “events” for another or vice-versa.

For someone in the middle of the 20th century to assert that we could make that distinction on the basis of appearances was only slightly more unrealistic than for one to assert that in 2008. We don’t have and, I suspect, will probably never will have sufficient understanding of what thought is to consider that judgment to be something within science. Pretending that the conclusions drawn in that kind of “test” are reliable is one of the failings of much of what gets called science these days.

If it's as bad an idea to believe that a machine can think as it is to let it go as unstated that people don't have the same moral status as inert objects is not a question that can be answered with science but it is one that we are going to have to answer due to impending exigencies.

So I was a bit sad to read the obituary of Joseph Weizenbaum who was both an early pioneer in artificial intelligence and one of its early critics. There isn’t time to go into much of what he wrote on the subject but his thinking should be taken seriously by anyone interested in these issues. From what I’ve always read, one of the early things that alarmed Weizenbaum about his field was that people mistook the psychoanalytic game he invented, Eliza, to be a thinking entity. It was to his credit that he was wise enough to recognize the dangers in that kind of mistake. It’s a very rare academic who can exercise that kind of objective critical wisdom about their own work. This is a succinct statement of the scope of the problem.

"The relevant issues are neither technological nor even mathematical; they are ethical," he told the Globe in 1981. "Since we do not now have ways of making computers wise, we ought not now give computers tasks that demand wisdom." Mr. Weizenbaum advised outlawing "all projects that propose to substitute a computer system for a human function that involves interpersonal respect, understanding, and love."

By contrast, in the obituary, one of his colleagues at MIT, Patrick Winston, said "Viewed from the distance of time, much of what he worried about seems quaint today, especially his concerns about whether experience-lacking computers would make bad decisions on behalf of us experience-grounded humans,"

There is every reason to believe that as the national security apparatus buys stuff from politically connected, profit making, I.T. firms that purport their products can think in just these ways, Weizenbaum’s concerns will quickly become undeniably less quaint. Even more ominous is the prospect of profit making businesses using the same kind of stuff in its efforts to wring the last cent out of the labor of humans, dispose of those who it suspects to be insufficiently profit generating, and the pillage of the living environment. The legal fashion these days is to pretty much allow more leeway in such stuff to anyone with money and power than is safe for a decent society.

The evidence available from the real life use of psychological “science” could provide a useful model of what that could get to be like. As an example, anyone who was subjected to the use of “psychological science” * by business or the courts might have a good idea of the possible problems that will come from having computers making decisions about you. People have lost jobs, their children, their freedom and, infamously in such places as Texas, their lives on the basis of the application of what was officially, but not really, called psychological science. There is every reason to suspect that as I.T. becomes an established industry that the financial and so legal pressures for it to become officially “valid science” and to be retained as such, will be even more difficult to resist.

It is unwise to give the law and business the power to allow the automation of decisions about the freedom and rights or real humans because experience shows they do not have the wisdom to make that choice. When the word “science”, with its prestige and unthinking social respectability is injected into the discussion by those who can financially profit from the adoption of technology, judges can go all gooey in the head. And wave the prospect of a few dollars in their faces and businessmen have been known do anything. Wisdom would be to keep important decisions impinging on real people and other living beings as far away from being automated as possible. My guess is that your chances are better with a mediocre person forced to make a decision without recourse to simulated thought than a machine programmed by anyone. I have a feeling that once the habit of relying on computers to simulate thought for us is entrenched, it will be even harder to overturn them than a judicial ruling.

* In some ways this kind of psychological testing might be a good model of allowing automated “thought” to make decisions about peoples’ lives. Despite what another of my opponents at another materialist blog asserted, what might be the most absurd of them all, the Rorschach Test, is still in wide use. Commercially produced and administered psychological testing can be ordered by courts and often is in all kinds of cases. Businesses and educational institutions often use them with full legal authority in hiring and retention. Often there is little to no scientific evidence that the test reveals anything real at all. Some of the most widely used tests have either no or quite ambiguous validation. The still used Rorschach Test began as a parlor game in Vienna, for Pete’s sake. Apparently, though they would have passed into the public domain decades ago, there is still some attempt to suppress access to the images themselves.

Note: There are other citations I'd like to make but as they are contained in pdf: files and those are making my computer crash just about every time I try to open one up these days, I will not be using them here.