Why Vote For Obama?

There's a meme going around about some who supported Clinton now threatening to vote for McCain rather than for Obama. I'm almost 100% convinced that the number of people who would do that is vanishingly small and that the megaphone this story is getting on the net has to do with something else altogether. Perhaps Republicans are spreading the meme? Or most likely it's those among the Democrats who just don't want to put this wonderfully bloody and bruising primary fight to bed. Either way, pursuing that avenue is not unifying, useful or healing, to either anyone who might contemplate voting for McCain for such reasons or for anyone who likes to contemplate someone doing that.

Did you notice that I wrote that whole paragraph without specifying the gender of those Clinton supporters? Have you noticed that this is not usually the case in the stories based on this meme?

The common way of approaching this topic is to imply that it is female voters who are considering this dastardly deed of no party faithfulness, not male voters. I'm not sure if research backs up that generalization? Perhaps it does.

Well, Scott Lemieux tells why women and feminists should vote for Obama:

But even when it comes to women's rights, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The enforcement of civil rights protections for women is likely to be much less in a Republican administration, for example. The global gag order will remain firmly in place. And in general, four more years of a tax-cut-supporting, massive-defense-spending GOP president will not only make any kind of serious progressive reform (much of which disproportionately benefits women even if not specifically targeted to do so) virtually impossible for four more years but will also make it more difficult in the future. A McCain presidency would be very, very bad for women even if not a single Supreme Court vacancy opens up during his tenure.

I agree with Scott. You don't want to jump out of the frying pan of these last eight years into the fire of yet another Republican Reich, so to speak. But I think his post could have been delayed a little longer.

Why? Because the Democratic Primary was truly a historic one, a sign of how far the nation has come. Dreams were being pursued in that race! And either outcome would have been spine-tinglingly exciting for many -- if not most -- Americans.

But once the winner has been declared some dreams will remain dreams and those who held the dream of seeing the first woman president of the United States must now get used to the idea that it will take a while longer, perhaps even a whole lot longer. Yes, it's possible to feel exhilarated about the nomination of Barack Obama and what it means for this country, while at the same time feeling sad about what it does not mean. Acknowledging that loss seems important, too, while also celebrating the history-changing event that Obama's nomination is.

But Scott is certainly right in his recommendations. McCain does not have women's best interest in his policy platform. Rather, women's rights are what he serves to his fundie base as exchange for votes.

Gee. What an Honor!

I think feminists are being nicely demonized in this new Maureen Dowd lunatic rant:

But even as Obama was trying to savor, Hillary was refusing to sever. Ignoring the attempts of Obama and his surrogates to graciously say how "extraordinary" she was as they showed her the exit, she and a self-pitying Bill continued to pull focus. Outside Baruch College, where she was to speak, her fierce feminist supporters screamed "Denver! Denver! Denver!"

Bolding is mine. What did you take away from that piece? That there are no fierce feminists supporting Barack Obama? Katha Pollitt doesn't count? Eve Ensler doesn't count? Barbara Ehrenreich doesn't count? Amanda Marcotte doesn't count? Ann Friedman doesn't count? All those women and men who are feminists and who have worked for Obama's campaign don't count?

Of course Maureen Dowd is not a feminist herself. Her inability to see anything wrong with this sentence shows it very clearly:

For months, Hillary has been trying to emasculate Obama with the sort of words and themes she has chosen, stirring up feminist anger by promoting the idea that the men were unfairly taking it away from the women, and covering up her own campaign mistakes with cries of sexism. Even his ability to finally clinch the historic nomination did not stop her in that pursuit. She did not bat her eyelashes at him and proclaim him Rhett Butler instead of Ashley Wilkes.

Poor, poor Maureen. Feminism is all about emasculating men, wearing those pink gelding scissors at your belt, as all fashion magazines dictate. And politics is really nothing but retelling Gone With The Wind.

Perhaps this is the pearl in Dowd's latest outcry:

Either way, by broadcasting that she's open to being Obama's running mate, she puts public pressure on him similar to the sort of pressure Walter Mondale was under from rampaging feminists when he put Geraldine Ferraro on the ticket. Mondale ended up seeming henpecked, as Obama would seem if he caved to the women who say they will write in Hillary's name or vote for anti-choice McCain before they'd vote for Obama.

Now the feminists are rampaging. Earlier they were just screaming and fierce. And then they henpecked poor Walter Mondale. The way to look manly is by locking all your women up and by not letting them ever get close enough to men with those gelding scissors. Sigh. Of course Dowd herself emasculates every single male columnist by coming across so fierce and rampaging, and her next column should really be about how she should not be allowed to do that as it will cause the sales of Viagra among pundits to skyrocket.

Why am I writing about poor and deluded Maureen Dowd? Because her thesis encapsulates much of what I read every day: a certain kind of trivialization of feminism as unimportant, as having to do with shrieking women of a particularly illogical kind. Every day I read jokes about too many women crying sexism the way we usually say that someone cries wolf. Every day I see the threshold get lowered on what is acceptable to say about sexism as just another fun move.

No doubt something similar will be done to racism in the near future, to the detriment of all of us. But I don't think people on the left think of racism as something only shrieking or rampaging people oppose, or as something that's kind of fun to crack jokes about.

Maya Lin

I'm not terribly well read in the field of sculpture, but her work strikes me as quite path-breaking, as something appealing our most human feelings, and not only because touch is encouraged. When I first visited the Vietnam War Wall I cried, and I know no-one buried there. It was that remarkable combination of monumentalism and privacy, that ability to search for one name, to copy it, to touch it, to spend time with the memory of that person, and at the same time to realize the enormity of the losses, the gigantic wall in front of you standing as a grim reminder.

I think she is a genius.

That's the prelude. Then the meat of the post: Is she being treated as a genius? Is she getting the accolades and the following geniuses usually get? Has she been declared a national treasure? Has she been invited to be a member on all the important boards, an expert in all important competitions?

Perhaps. But I suspect that she would be getting much more attention if her name wasn't Maya but Matthew Lin.

Now try to talk me out of that opinion, please.

Barack Obama, the Next President of the United States

I certainly hope that he will be and not John McCain. This country needs fixing, not further destruction, and we can all help Obama to do the necessary fixing while also reminding him of the issues that are important to us.

Is It Over?

Asks Echidne from under her bed, and the question is about the melt-down within the liberal blogosphere between those who support Obama and those who support Clinton.

It has certainly been a learning experience for me, something that has made me accept very humbly that my understanding of the human psyche is altogether deficient, that my optimism about the importance of thought and debate is vastly inflated and that human beings are excellent in seeing the mote in their neighbor's eye while ignoring the humongous beam sticking out of their own eye socket.

Or perhaps I'm just too cold and reptile-like to really appreciate what kinds of feelings have been first flared and then wounded in all the zillions of blog fights I have followed. I was never in love with any musicians, either.

Still. To have someone who you have debated with and joked with and argued with turn into a pod-person who can only scan your comments for signs of infidelity to their chosen leader is upsetting, to say the least, and to observe how blogs turned into all-Clinton or all-Obama in less than a nanosecond is really confusing.

Or maybe not. Maybe we are all offered a lesson about how battle lines are drawn, what really energizes and motivates people, and maybe we are all also going to learn how to become friends again. I hope so, anyway.

F.U. Or: A Short Essay On Fuck You.

F.U., F.U., F.U! Did that make you feel better? Oops! I forgot you're not the one writing it but the one reading it. Perhaps I should start again?

The use of foul language is common on lefty blogs, and the point of using it is ultimately political. Thers explained it best a few days ago:

Conservative bloggers have speculated that my use of "fuck" indicates that I possess an impoverished vocabulary, a thesis that I reject as pretty fucking stupid and in fact rather cromulent. Actually, I curse online as a conscious choice. Back in the early days of blogs I used to go into comments sections and try to, you know, persuade conservatives that, like, the proposed invasion of Iraq was perhaps not such a great idea. And what happened was, after a colloquy that sometimes lasted literally weeks at a time, what resulted was my interlocutor politely informing me that we would "agree to disagree" and that he (almost always "he") had quite enjoyed "breaking a lance" with me and that he fully expected me to join hands with him and sing a solemn hymn to Comity and then we'd go light a candle upon the altar of Civilized Discourse.

And, privately, I was thinking to myself, this is fucking insane. A lot of people are going to die for no rational reason, and here we are acting like we're all hot fucking shit because we don't say "fuck."

And you know what I did next?

I started to say "fuck" quite a lot, and I began to tell the people who were deliberately fucking up my country and causing a lot of fucking pointless carnage that they were a bunch of fucking horrible sociopaths and that I fucking hated them.

And it's been clear fucking sailing ever since.

I fucking applaud that fucking explanation, I do. It's certainly very true that something is fucking wrong with our value rankings when we think saying "fuck" is worse than killing people in other countries or worse than politely suggesting stringing them all up here at home, and the latter are the types of writings I have read on some conservative blogs.

But (and none of what comes after this is intended to refer to Thers, as he's not guilty of any of it and, as I said, I totally agree with the point he was making). The extensive use of foul language also has problems.

One of the worst for me is that so much foul language consists of the liberal use of words "cunt", "bitch" and "slut", whether applied in the original meaning to hate on women or whether used in the new enlightened sense of gender-blind cuntery, bitchiness or sluttery. All your enemies can now be cunts! Even men! This means that we can use those words freely and be all for legal abortions. Yeah.

But the words still drag their old misogynistic messages with them. Nothing can be done about that, you know, and so women reading these blogs get frequent reminders of their ultimate stinkiness. It's unpleasant, like someone's claws continuously scraping at your lower back or your inner arms. Even if you go to the doctor and get told that this condition is nothing to worry about, that "cunt" doesn't mean "you" nowadays, the scraping still goes on.

Sometimes I suspect that there are bloggers and commentators who have no idea that girls might be reading political blogs, that they might in fact be reading the very words you write right at this minute! Now that is a scary thought! Can you still suggest that a politician "throws like a girl" or "bawls like a twelve-year old girl"? Aargh!

It is not just girls who read political blogs, but some in the audience are not accustomed to swearwords so liberally applied. The effect is similar to that curry which a friend of mine once made from a scribbled recipe sent by his mother. The writing was hard to interpret so all the spices ended up being multiplied by a rough factor of ten. Hot it was, and our kidneys complained loudly.

Since this post is all about bad analogies, let me finish with a perfume one. Using foul language a lot has the same risk as getting used to splashing your favorite perfume on every morning. Over time your nose grows numb and you can't smell that alluring scent unless you spritz a few more times. But then the people in the elevator with you drop like flies after a Raid attack.

That's one reason why I don't employ the fuck-family very often. Another one is that they are very powerful people and I want to save that power for the times it is really needed.

Misogyny is Funny

If you belong to the majority in this country by being female you might be just a little bit ready to kill someone when you watch what is regarded as acceptable entertainment on Fox:





What is funny is a guy who says all women are shallow, materialistic and whiners. He can smile like a wolf while doing this and because of the extreme misogyny he embodies Bill "The Falafel" O'Reilly comes across as almost reasonable. And the one poor woman brought into the conversation (where she is labeled as shallow, materialistic and a whiner) is expected to laugh at the silliness of women, too. He, he, he. How very hilarious.

We swim in it, sisters and brothers. And I'm not describing what "it" is in any great detail on this family blog.
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If you want to feel the same dizziness I did, note that I read the above Media Matters piece right after reading about the repatriation of all the children who were taken away from the polygamous sect in Texas, and the article mentioned this:

The order signed by Walther requires the parents to stay in Texas, to attend parenting classes and to allow the children to be examined as part of any ongoing child abuse investigation. It also requires that parents allow state workers to make unannounced visits to the families and that they notify the state if they plan to travel more than 100 miles from their homes.

But it does not put restrictions on the children's fathers, require that polygamy be renounced or that parents live away from the Yearning For Zion Ranch.

Perhaps some women (and men) don't whine enough. Perhaps there is something in the substance in which we swim so that girls and women are held to different standards, a lesser power, a greater silence?

And yes, thank you for asking, I'm fucking angry today.

From My Mailbag

Wouldn't it be fun if I had an actual mailbag, brought to me every morning on the back of a boa constrictor? It would have to have golden tassels with little bells in the four corners and it would always include gifts of chocolate (which I would eat right away), jewelry (which I would sell right away) and brain food.

Now I sadly only get the brain food. And attempts to infect me with malware. Such are the rewards of feminist blogging.

Speaking of my mailbag (I did mention that, didn't I? I didn't spell it malebag?), Violet Socks is having a fund drive because she needs to get new equipment for blogging purposes. Her blog, The Reclusive Leftist, is worth supporting.

A researcher wants to hear the stories of women who have had an abortion in Iowa and who had financial trouble affording it. If you can help, go here.

And a piece wonders where all the women go who start in sciences but end up...where? I wonder how much is lost in that leakage of the pipeline, too, not only by the women themselves but the whole economy.

Three things mentioned. That's good, to go by the rule of three. I have to resort to such mechanical rules because of that dratted flower which ejaculates pollen outside my window thus causing my breathing pipelines to block up. A brain full of pollen might look pretty but efficient it aint.

The Tinsley Report

Or rather, an article by Cathy Tinsley in yesterday's Washington Post says something quite interesting about women in management jobs, something that Michael Gurian's simplistic and over-generalizing theories (see Suzie's post below) completely miss: Women and men are not read the same by others:

In a series of studies involving hundreds of participants since 2005, my colleagues and I have found systematic social and financial backlash against even mildly assertive female executives. In one study, for example, people judged the behavior of a hypothetical human resources manager (alternately male or female) negotiating for a refund on unused hotel space. Female managers were judged as significantly more offensive, and less likely to receive any refund, than male managers, even though all managers engaged in exactly the same behavior. In later studies in which human resources managers asked for a refund, displaying mildly assertive behavior, the behavior was routinely judged appropriate when displayed by a man but offensive when displayed by a woman.

In another set of experiments, a finance director (again, alternately a man or a woman) had to choose between attending to a work crisis (an information technology system crash) or a family emergency (a sick child). When the finance director was female and chose to stay at work, she was seen as competent but unlikable. When the female finance director went home, she was rated as incompetent but likable. Yet the choices male finance directors made did not matter -- the men were always judged to be fairly likable and competent.

What is especially interesting is that most of this bias is wholly invisible to the judgers themselves (who express astonishment when the bias is pointed out). Also, men and women are both likely to judge the genders according to this differential scheme.

What is to be done? Note that there might be an "appropriate" way for women to act in the examples having to do with the right amount of aggression. Perhaps there is some acceptable girl-brain way of doing those tasks? We should ask Mr. Gurian.

But no such solution will help women in the example about coping with either a work crisis or a family emergency, because either choice leaves her with a negative evaluation. The solution must be a change in the way we judge others and must include making these gender schemes something we are aware of.

Perhaps Not Just Prone

That would be the position of women in al-Qaida, according to the number two seeded terrorist, Ayman Al-Zawahri. Women can also take care of the male al-Qaida members' children and houses. That's it, pretty much:

In response to a female questioner, al-Qaida No. 2 leader Ayman Al-Zawahri said in April that the terrorist group does not have women. A woman's role, he said on the Internet audio recording, is limited to caring for the homes and children of al-Qaida fighters.

His remarks have since prompted an outcry from fundamentalist women, who are fighting or pleading for the right to be terrorists. The statements have also created some confusion, because in fact suicide bombings by women seem to be on the rise, at least within the Iraq branch of al-Qaida.

A'eeda Dahsheh is a Palestinian mother of four in Lebanon who said she supports al-Zawahri and has chosen to raise children at home as her form of jihad. However, she said, she also supports any woman who chooses instead to take part in terror attacks.

Another woman signed a more than 2,000-word essay of protest online as Rabeebat al-Silah, Arabic for "Companion of Weapons."

"How many times have I wished I were a man ... When Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahri said there are no women in al-Qaida, he saddened and hurt me," wrote "Companion of Weapons," who said she listened to the speech 10 times. "I felt that my heart was about to explode in my chest...I am powerless."

All this reminds me of that Stokely Carmichael quote about the proper position of women in SNCC:

In 1964, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson presented an indignant assault on the treatment of women civil rights workers in a paper entitled "The Position of Women in SNCC," to a SNCC staff meeting. Stokely Carmichael reputedly responded, "The only position for women in SNCC is prone."

If you can forget the extremely distasteful context of terrorism in this topic the messages are fairly similar. Even liberation organizations and terrorist organizations are boys' tree-houses and girls are not allowed. The "liberation" is somehow oddly not for women at all. Just think where the women ended after the French Revolution was over (with a worse legal position than before it) or what happened to women's position when the old Soviet bloc crumbled.

But of course most of us wouldn't have been surprised by Al-Zawahri's response at all. Isn't radical Islam really strongly invested in forcing women back into seclusion, away from paid employment and back under the rules of the Sharia law which doesn't treat women equally with men? Why would these women expect anything different from those who hold such opinions?


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Hat tip to upyernoz who wrote about this topic under a title which translates to "the mujahida (the
word mujahid, holy warrior, with a feminine ending tacked on) needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."

Michael Gurian strikes again (by Suzie)

         Search this blog if you want to read more about his expertise on gender. His latest book explains how men and women lead differently in business "so we can decide who is better at what in the business world," Forbes explains. I guess it's too hard to evaluate people as individuals.
          Gurian says men and women act differently in the workplace, not because they're socialized differently, but because their brains are different. That's why it's hard for Clinton because she has to "compete like a man." Gurian adds: "A woman right now running for office is caught."

         Here are a few suggestions for politics and business: Let's talk about the different ways people lead. But let's not assume that people can be categorized neatly, or that their differences are innate.  Otherwise, people who act against the stereotype are seen as unnatural or inauthentic.

What's obscene? (by Suzie)

          Trigger warning.
          Paul Little is on trial in Tampa for obscenity. The St. Petersburg Times explains: 

         Little, also known as Max Hardcore, and MaxWorld are charged with five counts of using a computer server to sell obscene matter and five counts of delivering obscene matter through the U.S. mail.
         Little, well-known in the pornography world, has acted in more than 130 movies, directed more than 100 and produced about 30, according to the Internet Movie Database. His films show men inflicting pain or humiliation on women. The movies have scenes that include urinating, vomiting and defecating. Adult actresses in the films are often made up to look like young girls.

          A few people have left comments that the porn sounds disgusting. But most say this is a waste of taxpayers' dollars; it's a violation of the First Amendment; it must be great fun to watch porn in a courtroom; people have different desires and we shouldn't judge them; porn (i.e., sex) is better than violent movies; the women in the film liked it, or liked being paid, or should have known what they were getting into, even if they did get hurt. (Hey, I wonder if I could devise a bingo game around porn rationalizations.)
           Someone by the name of Chuck says freedom of speech is being "raped."
           GVan: "As long as the girls claim to be 18, it should be allowed. At least no animals were harmed."
           MSmithJr: "Hey, they serving popcorn or tissues?"
           But no one says: "You know, it's just a tad creepy that there are so many people who enjoy watching men inflict pain and humiliation on young women. I wonder if this says something about our society as a whole?"

A Music Moment

A Finnish guy singing about being messed up. Not from rock-n-roll, not from booze, but from you. Love, yanno.

Father Pfleger and privilege (by Suzie)

     

        I was reading a thread over at Shakesville, and I realized: I don’t have to keep commenting. I’ve got my own blog! I’m privileged. (And I mean that. Well, I mean that about privilege, but not having my own blog. I’m an auxiliary Snake who posts at the pleasure of the Goddess.)
        I want to hone in on privilege and us-vs.-them politics. But first, let me bring up points made by Tamura Lomax, who described herself as a religious scholar, historian and feminist theorist. She wrote that others were taking the Rev. Pfleger’s comments out of context. She noted that black churches have always mixed politics and religion. This argument also has been brought up in reference to the Rev. Wright. But it ignores the fact that religion and politics have been mixed in many places and many times, not just in the African-American Christian tradition. Also, there are many whites who respond in exuberant ways, including speaking in tongues and handling snakes. (I'd be remiss not to mention that on a blog titled “Echidne of the Snakes.”)
         Lomax wrote that whites have ignored the black church tradition. Some others who defended Wright also suggested whites are ignorant about black churches. It’s true that many whites have never attended a black church service. On the other hand, the traditional preaching style and call-and-response have been represented so many times in the media, especially movies, that some whites may think all African Americans pray the same way. That would be a disservice to those who don’t, and here, I’m thinking especially of my former minister.
         Lomax wrote that she enjoyed seeing Clinton attacked for white privilege. She has written about this on her Web site, in which she goes after Clinton for floating the idea of herself as vice president. She attributes this "audacity" to the unrelenting privilege of white women.

… Clinton is a white woman and history shows that white women always have their “turn” after white men but before black men …

          I attribute Clinton’s attitude to the privilege of a candidate who has run a close race, in which Democrats have talked at length about having both candidates on the ticket. For a while, I think Clinton was sure that she was going to win, just as Obama now seems confident that he will win. To the opposite side, this can seem arrogant. But I don’t think Obama is gloating that he has beaten a woman any more than I think Clinton thought she was entitled to win because she’s white.
          As I’ve said before, there’s a danger in talking about white women as if we are all privileged in the same way and to the same degree. (The same goes for thinking that male privilege works the same for all black men.) This disappears other factors, such as age, class, ability, sexuality, etc.
         There also is the issue of leaders who set up an us-vs.-them dichotomy. The Rev. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, president of Chicago Theological Seminary and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, preached at Trinity United Church of Christ on the same day as Pfleger. (Thanks to "Aphra Behn" for posting the link.) Thistlethwaite later wrote this:

The idea that you should inflame people’s hatred of one another as a way to mobilize voters has been dominant since 1972 and very powerful. But it has produced near paralysis in Washington and disastrous foreign policy. But hate dies hard and while people want to find unity, they can easily fall back into divisive rhetoric, especially when it is disguised as humor. This is bad at a dinner party; in the pulpit it is shameful and wrong. … Apparently the way Pfleger understands race or gender is through conflict and opposition, not through unity, common ground and certainly not as “sacred”.

          Encouraging a sense of us vs. them does help to unite “us” for action, including voting. But it has the unfortunate consequence of uniting “them” as well.

          ETA: Tamura Lomax has accused me of being a liar. I did not intentionally misrepresent her. I encourage readers to see what she has written at her Web site, on Shakesville and in the comments section.

          Lomax accused Clinton of white privilege in suggesting Obama be her vice president earlier in the race. I apologize for getting that wrong. But my reasoning remains the same. I still think Clinton was speaking as a politician who thought she could win the popular vote, not as someone who thought that her whiteness entitled her to triumph over a black man.
         Lomax also says: “I wouldn't "enjoy" seeing anyone "attacked" for any reason.” 

       

"Holding commercial sex buyers accountable" by Suzie

         Equality Now has a new action aimed at the trafficking and prostitution of women in India. The action is aimed at the passage of legal amendments that would decriminalize prostitution but penalize buyers. Some people support the former, but not the latter, arguing that legalization and regulation of prostitution would increase the use of condoms and lessen the abuse of women. Equality Now argues:

In fact what happens in countries where prostitution has been legalized is that the illegal sex industry has blossomed in parallel and trafficking of women increases to meet the demand for prostitution. It would be more effective to address the HIV/AIDS crisis, as well as the life crises of girls and women ...

          Making it illegal to buy sex may be the only way to wake up a lot of men, who do not want to “get” that the women they’re buying may be enslaved or abused. In talking to male friends who’ve used prostitutes, some times I’m astounded by their ignorance. I’ve come to think that it’s important for them to ignore facts to avoid feeling guilty.
          I’m thinking of the men who told me that the women really liked them, really found them attractive, and really wanted to have sex with them. I ask, “Did she still charge you?” I’m thinking of the men who say they really treated the women well, which means they didn’t physically force them or call them names or fail to pay. It never occurred to these guys that there was any chance these women might have been trafficked from their hometowns or that the women had not freely chosen this work.
           I’m also thinking of a friend who attended the Summer Institute on Sexuality, Culture and Society in Amsterdam. She was eager to check out the women in the Red Light District. She lost her desire when she saw bruises on a woman’s wrists.
           A travel site promotes the district, “where women, of all nationalities, parade their wares.” A site on trafficking notes working conditions.
        I understand that prostitution is a hotly contested topic among feminists, many of whom consider it no more demeaning than other work. People can debate that in good faith. But if you call me an uptight prude, you’ll just make my friends laugh.

Douglass, Stanton and the 15th Amendment (by Suzie)

          I’ve posted recently on Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the 15th Amendment. The politics of the abolition and suffragist movements fascinate me.
          I highly recommend a NYT article on the subject by Debby Applegate, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Henry Ward Beecher. (If you read the whole article, which you should, let me note again that, when Stanton referred to the “lower orders” of men, she was talking about the poorest and least educated. Socioeconomic class became entangled with racial and ethnic bigotry.)

         ... there was no intrinsic reason both blacks and women couldn’t attain the rights of citizenship or suffrage at the same time.
        Of course, it wasn’t black men or white women who decided that there wasn’t room for them both to enter. After all, neither group could vote in the ratification process. Stanton and Douglass may have had a lot to say to each other and the press, but neither of them had any say in the wording of the amendment.
        Instead, this was decided by a coalition of Republican politicians in Washington who supported black suffrage — and thus the creation of a sure new population of black Republican voters — as a way to shore up their precarious majority in Congress. (There were nobler motives as well, but the timing of the amendment was all politics.)
         The exclusion of women was also a partisan decision, since enfranchising white women would run the risk of creating as many new Democratic voters as Republicans. The Republicans’ public line, however, was that the amendment would have no chance of ratification if it were so bold as to offer universal suffrage.
         … The 15th Amendment marked the end of the public’s commitment to major social change. Within the decade, the Republican Party had shed its progressive activism to become the party of big business and laissez-faire policy.
         …. if history offers a lesson here, it is not that Americans cannot handle too much change at one time or that we must inch our way, one by one, through the door of equality. Rather, it is that opportunities for genuine change are rare and when they occur we must kick the door off the hinges while we can. It is much harder to pry open the public mind once it has shut itself up again.

Friday critter blogging (by Suzie)

I write poetry, I've studied poetry, but the only poem I can recite from memory is:

The Purist
by Ogden Nash

I give you now Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist,
Trustees exclaimed, "He never bungles!"
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside,
One day he missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
"You mean," he said, "a crocodile."

If you don't know the difference, get educated at the Web site of the St. Augustine Alligator Farm, one of the oldest zoos in Florida. It's on the National Register of Historic Places. These photos are from 1992. Alligators like lying together in the sun. The bottom photo is of a crocodile being fed. Not just any crocodile, though. It's the late, great Gomek, 17 feet, 9 inches, the largest crocodile in the Western hemisphere. He was a saltwater crocodile from Papua New Guinea. He has been "preserved" at the zoo. 

Michelle Malkin and Dunkin Donuts

This is quite the funny story. Michelle Malkin was upset by an ad Rachael Ray did for Dunkin Donuts, this one:





Notice the scarf Ray is wearing? It looks like a kaffiyeh, a common scarf in many Arab cultures. But according to Malkin Dunkin Donuts is supporting islamofaziterrorism with this ad.

The kaffiyeh, Malkin wrote in a column posted online last Friday, "has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad. Popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos, the apparel has been mainstreamed by both ignorant (and not-so-ignorant) fashion designers, celebrities, and left-wing icons."

A statement issued Wednesday by Canton, Mass.-based Dunkin' Brands Inc., however, said the scarf had a paisley design, and was selected by a stylist for the advertising shoot.

"Absolutely no symbolism was intended," the company said.

As is clearly proper, Dunkin Donuts has withdrawn the offending ad. We all know that what we wear has a political meaning, after all.

Let's apply this to Michelle Malkin herself. Here she is shown wearing (embracing!) a leather jacket:





According to Wikipedia:

Leather jackets were also popular with the Russian Bolsheviks and were nearly a uniform for the Commissars during the Russian Civil War and later for the members of the Cheka. This practice is said to have been initiated by Sverdlov.

Oh my! Quick! Someone tell Michelle that she has been the victim of fashion designers and ignorant popularizers of a COMMUNIST piece of apparel! She must, must abstain from wearing one in the future.

If she does not, we all know whose side she is taking in the great ideological wars.

A Clusterfuck

You may have heard about that draft for an international treaty about banning the use of cluster bombs, the one which 111 nations have approved. Cluster bombs are extremely nasty creatures. The unexploded bits are later often found by playing children.

You may have also seen the list of those countries which still love them dearly:

... the United States has been joined in its outright opposition to the ban, and in its boycott of the Dublin conference, by a group of military powers that includes China, Russia, Israel, India, Pakistan and Brazil.

Now it could be that it's in the interest of the United States to hug these weapons to her/his/its chest, because all that prevents the certain deaths of mother, apple pie and good C&W music might be those demonic weapons. It could be. If you choose to forget that the U.S. spends more on weaponry than the next four highest spenders together. Or if you choose to forget the idea of the United States as the home of democracy, the leader of the free world, a mature country.

The militaristic, crabby and fearful attitude reflected in this latest saga about the United States in the Bush era is not what the rest of this world's people would look up to and admire. It's hard to pretend to lead others when at the same time you are hoarding cluster bombs behind your back so that you are ready to kill them.

I'm not naive enough to assume that just being noble and enlightened would somehow make a military force unnecessary. But the U.S. already has a gigantic military force, with nuclear bombs which can kill all of us many times over. To then try to hold on to something as nasty as cluster bombs comes across mean-spirited, selfish and stupid.

Fighting For God

It can be tricky for atheists in the U.S. military, at least according to Army Specialist Jeremy Hall:

Army Spc. Jeremy Hall did two tours in Iraq, saw his share of fire and came back in one piece. Too bad he needs a bodyguard to keep his fellow soldiers from attacking him now that he's back in the States.

Hall's problems started in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner in 2006, during his second tour. One of the men at Hall's table asked that they pray together. The soldiers joined hands — except for Hall. Most didn't know he was an atheist until that moment.

"I joined as a religious person," says the 23-year-old Hall, who is now stationed at Fort Riley. "Then I met some other people with different ideas, and I actually read the Bible. It didn't make any sense to me, so I decided for myself. It really doesn't matter anyway. You're going to die and pay taxes either way."

Hall kept those opinions to himself at the dinner. He says he declined to pray as respectfully as he could. When word got around the tables that he wouldn't pray, he was confronted by a senior-ranking staff sergeant, who demanded to know why. Hall explained that he was an atheist — then explained what an atheist was when the sergeant didn't understand.

"He basically told me to get the hell out of there and that I couldn't eat with them," Hall says. "I just sat there quietly and finished it. A Mormon girl actually stood up for me and said they shouldn't do that, because it's not just me. They give Mormons shit, too."

In July 2007, Hall decided to find out how many soldiers agreed with him. He approached his Army chaplain for permission to hold a meeting of atheists, freethinkers and any other non-Christians. He got the chaplain's blessing and posted fliers for the meeting.

"There wasn't any support for anyone like me, so I just wanted to provide it. Strength in numbers," Hall says. "I wasn't asking for domination, just that we are here, and we are real, and you've got to deal with us."

Hall's fliers were ripped up or defaced. "'Fag, God loves you, you're going to hell,' all kinds of crazy shit," Hall says of the writing on the notices. But the nonbelievers still showed up. So did Maj. Freddy Welborn, Hall says.

The meeting didn't delve into deep questions. The few who attended didn't get much further than who they were and where they were from when Welborn stood up to confront the group. According to Hall, Welborn threatened to use the meeting as justification to keep Hall from re-enlisting, as well as potential action under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Jeremy Hall has filed a federal lawsuit alleging that his right not to be coerced by the government to practice a particular religion has been violated.

It's just a little bit scary to wonder if the military might have a religious axe to grind, is it not?

"A" Is For Ambition

And "B" is for The Bitches Who Have It. This I have learned from the political pundits in the media.

Nevertheless, the reason why there are so few women in politics is that women lack ambition. This I learned from Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post:

As Hillary Clinton cracks her head against what she likes to call "the highest and hardest glass ceiling," there's no doubt that she craves the presidency as much as any man does.

But a new report from the Brookings Institution suggests an unexpected reason for the relative paucity of women elsewhere in political office and the dearth of credible female presidential candidates: an ambition gap.

"Somewhat surprisingly," write political scientists Jennifer Lawless of Brown University and Richard Fox of Loyola Marymount, women's underrepresentation "is not because of discrimination against women candidates. In fact, women perform as well as men when they do run for office. In terms of fundraising and vote totals, the consensus among researchers is the complete absence of overt gender bias."

Rather, the "fundamental reason for women's underrepresentation is that they do not run for office. There is a substantial gender gap in political ambition; men tend to have it, and women don't."

This wonderful new gender gap is called an "ambition gap." No, it's not that gap where testicles ought to be found in a politician. It's something women themselves cause. It's all in our little pretty heads:

Sometimes the hardest glass ceilings are the ones women impose, whether knowingly or unconsciously, on ourselves.

Yah?

That second quote is the way Ruth Marcus finishes her column, a column in which she writes about the many reasons why women might not enter political races as candidates, including this one: Women are held to very different standards in politics. A woman with children is viewed as primarily responsible for them. A man, not so much.

Just imagine the response if John Edwards was the one with cancer and Elizabeth Edwards had announced that she will run for the presidency, despite their two young children and an ailing husband. I think her ambition would have been viewed as very unseemly.

Yet all this is an "ambition gap" between the sexes, something that has somehow germinated and sprouted inside the female skulls without anyone at all feeding or watering that monster plant. Marcus wonders why fewer women than men regard themselves as well qualified for political office, and I wonder what planet she lives on. She wonders why more women than men worry about being inadequately thick-skinned for the political fights, and I wonder if the media on that faraway Marcusian home planet ever showed the treatment that ambitious women in American politics get. It's not exactly a level playing field of insults, you know. Female politicians get the usual insults and then they get the extra insults for being ambitious, selfish bitches whose children have probably died from hunger and loneliness because they have bad mothers, or for being ambitious, selfish bitches who never bothered to have any children at all.

This is kind of fun, isn't it?

Let's look at the definition of discrimination in that Brookings study:

"Somewhat surprisingly," write political scientists Jennifer Lawless of Brown University and Richard Fox of Loyola Marymount, women's underrepresentation "is not because of discrimination against women candidates. In fact, women perform as well as men when they do run for office. In terms of fundraising and vote totals, the consensus among researchers is the complete absence of overt gender bias."

This seems to assume that any woman can just announce tomorrow that she will run for office and that she will be supported; that there is no prior grooming of the candidates, no selection process before the actual running takes place, no networking. It's almost as if we looked at a firm with very few female employees and liked the fact that they were paid as well as the male employees for their work while ignoring the question why there were so few female employees in the first place. Or rather, not ignoring it, but deciding that the right answer was that women just didn't bother to apply in larger numbers, for whatever reason. No discussion of the corporate culture perhaps steering women away altogether, for example, no discussion in the many ways one can discourage someone from applying, by "losing" applications and so on.

My purpose here is not to argue that overt discrimination in the form of some kind of gatekeeping is the real explanation for the Brookings findings, but to point out that we can't assume the absence of this gatekeeping the way the researchers appear to have done. It's something to study, not something to assume.

Let's go back to the beginning of the alphabet: Ambition. Are women really less ambitious? Who knows. Doesn't the answer to that depend on how we define ambition? Is a mother who relentlessly drives her children to succeed not ambitious, for example? And doesn't the answer also reflect what characteristics are regarded in the "ideal woman" of this culture? Personal ambition is unlikely to be ranked very high in any list of such characteristics.

Which suggests to me that women might lie about their ambitiousness. It's truly not regarded as a good thing for girls to be. And the "ambition gap" is not a glass ceiling caused by only women themselves. That's very much like all those stories about women fretting over work-life balance, stories, which are often accompanied by a picture of a harassed-looking woman juggling a baby, a big stack of work papers and a cell phone. Note what is missing in that picture: No bosses, no husbands, no society. The woman alone, with the problems she has to solve.

Of course the real explanation is not that simple.

Digby on Chris Matthews

Hendrik Hertzberg has written a piece about what a good guy Chris Matthews is. Digby begs to differ, and so do I in one sense:

It seems to me that if we had a female version of Chris Matthews, say, Christine Matthews, with the same history but with the proper reversals we'd never hear the end of what a male-bashing feminazi she is. But somehow the fact that Chris Matthews has a severe problem in viewing women as human beings, in viewing therefore the majority of human beings as human beings -- well -- that's just a small unfortunate quirk in an otherwise honorable and gentle man.

Now that really should be astonishing. That it is not tells you lots about the society we live in.

On Sex Segregation

Bathrooms. That's probably what comes to your mind if you think about where the sexes are segregated in this country. Bathrooms and physical education classes after a certain age. But there are also sex-segregated schools and the conservatives would like to make those much more common.

The principle they would apply to justify that is "separate but equal", pretty much, according to the legal rule (Plessy v. Ferguson) which allowed for race-segregated public education in the United States until the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of the mid-fifties. That "separate" was not "equal" in that system goes without saying: the black schools were much, much poorer than the white schools, for example.

But it wasn't all the economic evidence which really made up the Court's minds to declare that intentional race-selection was not permissible: It was the stories psychologists told about how black children preferred white dolls over black dolls and how they attributed better personal characteristics to white faces than to black faces. In short, how they breathed in and drank and ate racism every day of their lives.

School integration has not stopped racism, of course, and neither are schools really integrated today. But the situation is not as horrible as it was fifty years ago when the segregation was legally required.

Where did that "separate but equal" decision come from, anyway? The Plessy v. Ferguson, had to do with the question whether trains could legally segregate their passenger compartments by race. The court thought that they could, as long as the seats were equally comfy in all carriages, as long as the conductors were equally polite, and as long as the chances of finding a vacant seat didn't differ by race. But of course all these differed in practice.

That long preamble was an attempt to explain why I don't think that sex segregated education in this country could ever be guaranteed to be an equal education for both boys and girls. Note, for one thing, that if anyone really wants to discriminate against, say, girls in this field, an absolute prerequisite for doing that successfully is to segregate girls from boys. Otherwise it's much harder to require that girls take courses in cooking and household management while boys take courses in physics. Or to spend less money on girls' education in the guise of providing for the different ways that the sexes supposedly learn best.

Segregation doesn't have to result in unequal education, but stopping it from doing exactly that requires great vigilance. In a way segregation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for sex discrimination of the extreme types.

For those types we can turn our eyes to Saudi Arabia, a country in which women live in an almost separate world from that inhabited by men. But note how very unequally the space in that world is divided: women are limited to their homes, pretty much, whereas men have all of the public space as theirs. Even the homes are ultimately men's spaces. It is the men who have the final power at home, too. There's nothing about the "equal" in that "separateness."

All this made me try to imagine what a truly "separate but equal" world would look like in terms of gender segregation, and the only answer I could come up with is that it would be a world consisting of two sovereign states: one for men and one for women. These states would trade in sperm in one direction and baby boys in the other direction. Because these two trades are not equal in effort, the guys' state would also probably have to pay the gals' state for the boys.

Does that sound like science fiction to you? Sheri Tepper has written about that very idea in The Gate To Women's Country, and her book addresses many of the dilemmas present in that solution: How to keep the women's country from being taken over by the men's country, what to do about the grief that the mothers of boys feel when they have to relinquish their sons and how to reintegrate the countries at some future date. But the point she perhaps fails to stress enough is the advantage of that two-state solution: It's the one way that women actually could have institutional power in a gender segregated world.

I should probably stress that this post is an intellectual exercise in thinking about what sex segregation means. I'm not advocating it and neither am I arguing that men on the whole would advocate it or would want to dominate women through it. But pointing out the negatives of sex segregation is a useful thing to do, especially in light of the many proposals to reintroduce it into the American public school system.

Webb as Obama's VP Candidate?

This has been suggested. I shiver and feel slightly nauseous when I hear that or when I read the glowing arguments supporting Webb: He's a real man's man, full of anger and testosterone, a real military guy who will kick the conservatives in the ass (or the elephant).

Never mind that only recently he was a conservative himself and that there are strong suggestions that he still is a social conservative, at least as far as women are concerned. He's not the most aware of guys in that respect, to put it in very gentle and womanly terms. If I didn't want to be gentle and womanly here I might confess to you that my "sexist pig" radar does light up when he appears on my television screen. He may not be one, of course, but he certainly was one some decades ago, and I have not read or heard anything from him that would suggest that his views on women have really altered that much.

Kathy Geier, guest-blogging for Matthew Yglesias, tends to agree. She also points out why appointing Webb as the Vice Presidential candidate might not be Obama's best political move:

Above all, though, I am very troubled by the idea that a man who has held such sexists views, and has done so much to damage the cause of gender equality in the military, would be one heartbeat away from the presidency. I do not think Webb is at all trustworthy on women's issues, and women's issues are very important to me and to millions of others besides. I think it's essential that any Democratic president or vice president have a good record on women's, civil rights, and labor issues. It's not just that women, African-Americans, and unions are the core constituencies of the Democratic party. It's that advancing the causes of racial, gender, and economic equality are the among the most important moral and political issues of our time. These are core values to me and millions of other Democrats, and elevating a man who has been so awful on one of them to the second most powerful position in the party is completely unacceptable.

Stepping away from all that high-minded rhetoric, I'll add that, in practical terms, selecting Webb would be a slap in the face to the Hillary Clinton supporters. I'm not saying that Obama has to pick Hillary as veep (and indeed, I think that would be a bad idea). I'm not even saying that he needs to pick a woman.

But Hillary was the first woman to ever have a serious shot at the presidency, and she came so close. So the Hillary supporters (of whom, to be clear, I am not one) will feel frustrated enough that their candidate didn't win. But for Obama to choose -- out of all the well-qualified candidates out there -- the one person who has a really awful record on gender issues would be like rubbing salt in the wound. It would be seen as a big "screw you" to Hillary's supporters and to feminists in general.

Indeed. That so many people don't see that suggests that women are still not seen as a meaningful group of voters to court.
-----
Added later: There's an odd sense of double layers of sexism in thinking about Webb as the possible Vice Presidential candidate for Obama. On one level, he is the embodiment of all the masculine values that the conservatives say Democratic politicians lack. He is certainly not the Breck Girl John Edwards, certainly not the wind-surfing John Kerry and certainly not female in actual fact! He could save us! He could! Because he was in the military and all that. He's as sexist as McCain!

At the same time, what does that support tell the Democratic women voters? The idea that we need a man who is not effeminate is more important than whether that man actually looks down on women in general.

Worth A Listen

This NPR story about the women in Basra, Iraq. Their freedoms have increased now that the Iraqi military is in control of the city, but most see the relief as only temporary.

I was especially struck by the accusation made against the British troops: that they didn't do anything to protect the women of Basra during their stay.

We Hates Them, Duckie

Yes, we do. We hates the woman celebrities, at least in the U.K.:

In a survey this week, by Marketing magazine the respondents' top five most loved celebrities were men - Paul McCartney, Lewis Hamilton, Gary Lineker, Simon Cowell and David Beckham. Of the five most hated, the top four were women - Heather Mills, Amy Winehouse, Victoria Beckham and Kerry Katona.

Heather Mills is probably the easiest dealt with. Many people's main gripe with celebrity is that it offers those without talents a chance to find material wealth through manipulation. For the tabloid media at least, Mills fits the bill.

But it's a bit harder to fathom the rest of the list. Why are these women seen to be so loathsome?

THE MOST HATED & MOST LOVED
1. Heather Mills - 28.3%
2. Amy Winehouse - 11.4%
3. Victoria Beckham - 10.2%
4. Kerry Katona - 10%
5. Simon Cowell - 4.6%

1. Paul McCartney - 14.9%
2. Lewis Hamilton - 11.2%
3. Gary Lineker - 11.2%
4. Simon Cowell - 9.7%
5. David Beckham - 9.4%
Source: Brands We Love and Brands We Hate, Marketing magazine

The phenomenon is to be tackled in an upcoming gathering of academics entitled Going Cheap?: Female Celebrity in the Tabloid, Reality and Scandal Genres, organised by Prof Diane Negra at the University of East Anglia on 25 June.

Why do I want to write this whole post in the Gollum voice (from the Lord of The Rings)? Perhaps because there is something Gollum-like about the way Britney Spears has been gobbled up, spat out and gobbled up so many times in the American popular media. It's as if she (and Paris Hilton) are here on earth so that other people have a legitimate object for their hatred. We loves to hate 'em, my precious, yes, we does.

A Gandalf voice would be better when trying to understand why it is mostly women who are the objects of hatred, both by men and by women, and why the married couples on that list split so oddly by gender into two different camps. But my inner Gandalf is scared of women altogether and thus would be quiet on this topic of no importance.

If he weren't such a wimp he might ask how celebrities are manufactured. What makes Heather Mills into a celebrity? She has never worked in the performing arts. She just happened to have been married to Paul McCartney, one of the Beatles. Her "celebrity" is completely situational, completely dependent on her connection to him and his celebrity. Add to that a very unpleasant divorce, and there you have it! A woman we all can hate because we love him.

I'm bringing that up as an example of the impact of the media itself on this hating and loving business. The way stories describe a celebrity surely affects how many people hate him or her, and the stories about people like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton usually offer zero compassion or empathy. Is this true of hateful stories about male celebrities? I don't know, but that topic might be worth studying.

The article I linked to above suggests that the hatred of female celebrities might still have to do with the desire for traditional gender roles:

Ms Negra thinks we do hold female celebrities to different standards than their male counterparts.

Ambitious women

"There has been a conspicuous trend in the last five years towards the production of negatively-valued women in the public sphere. People respond to the pleasures of hating these kinds of figures.

"There is incredible ambivalence in a post-feminist culture towards women in the public sphere."

In a nutshell, despite years of equal opportunities, the media - and the people who watch and read - prefer the stay-at-home mother over a woman who lives her life in public, particularly one who is overtly ambitious or successful in making money. There is great satisfaction among many people in seeing them humbled, Ms Negra suggests.

Perhaps. But Heather Mills surely is a stay-at-home mother, and she leads that list of hated women.

He Loved Horses

This is something I wrote for Paxamericana earlier. It seems appropriate for Memorial Day.



He loved horses. When the enemy approached and the village had to be evacuated it made sense that he would go with the horses. Someone had to, and most of the adult men were already fighting the war. He was fifteen, old enough to go alone. And the horses needed someone with them in the train carriages, someone they knew, someone they trusted, someone who could stroke them gently when the bombs went off, someone who could stop them from shivering. Later that time meant for him the frightened eyes of the young colt, the foam around its mouth, the long dark carriage without food for animals or for people. The sound of the engine and the song of the weapons.

He loved horses. The following year he was old enough to go to war, a man now, all of sixteen. He was good with horses, so they made him a messenger boy between the artillery units. He would ride the horses with another boy, someone he made friends with. It was almost a summer camp for them, a lark. They were heroes! They were men now! Until the day when a hand grenade exploded under what only a moment earlier had been his friend on a horse. Red. So much redness. More redness in the world than he could imagine.

After that day he grew used to the redness and the war. He did what he was told to do and he survived the war. Peace broke out, and his life was suddenly there, all open, for him to step into. Life. Light and silence or only ordinary noises. He could learn to like it. The war was over. He got a job, a wife, children. The war was over.

Then came the nightmares. They would gallop across his sleeping mind, hooves red with blood, gallop and gallop in a war that never ended. Sometimes he would drink until the galloping stopped. Sometimes he would look into the mirror and see a young man, intact, and then he would think the nightmares were just dreams. Sometimes he would look into the mirror and see himself filled with blood, all blood, ready to explode.

Nightmares cannot be stroked, cannot be made to stop shivering. But he grew used to them. He learned how to live around them, how to forget the war when he was awake. How to be on guard. He never knew what might explode, who might turn into an enemy. He had to be on guard, had to have rage, had to ride it like a horse, towards some invisible goal of safety. Had to ride roughshod sometimes, over people, not around them. Had to. Had to teach the children so that they wouldn't be shocked by the redness or the blood or the trains coming and going. Better they know when they are little. That way nothing can hurt them later, nothing. And had to teach them not to care about the horses or other living things. Too much blood. Too much to care about, too much to leave behind.

He used to love horses.

On Public Intellectuals

I once wrote a mildly funny post on this breed of celebrities. But Daniel Drezner takes them more seriously (click on the document he links to in the post):

The remaining claim is that there are no more Big Thinkers and Big Books. Jacoby repeatedly challenges critics of The Last Intellectuals to name the names of current public intellectuals in order to compare with the past. But this is not a very difficult task. Among periodicals, The New Yorker has Malcolm Gladwell, James Surowiecki and Louis Menand on their payroll; Andrew Sullivan, James Fallows, and Virginia Postrel write for The Atlantic; Harper's contributing editors include Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, and Tom Wolfe; Vanity Fair has James Wolcott and Christopher Hitchens; Newsweek employs Fareed Zakaria, Daniel Gross and George F. Will. Despite the thinning of their ranks, unaffiliated public intellectuals like Paul Berman, Michael Beschloss, Debra Dickerson, Robert D. Kaplan, John Lukacs, Joshua Micah Marshall, Rick Perlstein and Robert Wright still remain. The explosion of think tanks in the past thirty years has contributed to a rise in partisanship – but it has also provided sinecures for the intellectual likes of Robert Kagan, Joel Kotkin, Michael Lind, Brink Lindsey, Jedediah Purdy, and David Rieff.1 Within the academy, there is no shortage of public intellectuals: Eric Alterman, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Michael Bérubé, Joshua Cohen, Jared Diamond, Jean Behke Elshtain, Amitai Etzioni, Niall Ferguson, Richard Florida, Francis Fukuyama, John Lewis Gaddis, Henry Louis Gates, Jacob Hacker, Samuel Huntington, Tony Judt, Paul Kennedy, Paul Krugman, Steven Leavitt, Lawrence Lessig, John Mearsheimer, Martha Nussbaum, Steven Pinker, Richard Posner, Samantha Power, Robert Putnam, Dani Rodrik, Jeffrey Sachs, Amartya Sen, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Joseph Stiglitz, Laurence Summers, Cass Sunstein, Michael Walzer, Sean Wilentz, E.O. Wilson, and Alan Wolfe.

Note how being of the girly persuasion appears to conflict with being a public intellectual, or at least Drezner can't think of as many female foghorns as male ones. Perhaps there are indeed fewer women who are regarded as public intellectuals, but it could also be that Daniel Drezner can't see them or defines the term in ways which tends to bias it towards men.

I started wondering if we have lots and lots of private intellectuals, many of them women, talking like silent thunder (cp the next post below) and nobody hears them. Then I wondered what makes a person into "a public intellectual." Surely it is more than being an intellectual?

The list Drezner gives doesn't help very much as it seems to consist of both wheat and lots of chaff, the latter including some who blow their own horn very loudly.

Anyway, I created many tentative definitions of the term, ranging from "a shameless charlatan" to someone who is excellent in communicating difficult theoretical concepts to laypeople and who is also willing to participate in public debates. But none of them capture that odd whiff of elitism that I associate with the idea of public intellectuals: Like poet laureates (poets laureate?) that are supposed to tell the rest of us what to think. Yet many people in Drezner's list are ideologues for one field of politics or another.

Today's Koan

Silent thunder.

Media bias starts early (by Suzie)

... the Geena Davis Institute of Gender in Media ... partnered with USC's Annenberg School of Communications to undertake the largest study of live-action and animated G-rated movies ever. ... Male characters outnumbered female characters in all genres by as much as 2:1, not only in lead speaking roles, but even in crowd scenes. 

          This article explores movies and TV shows for kids. But the only comment comes from an accursed "anonymous" who complains: "Oh my god ... not THIS idiotic conversation again." After all, what's the harm if young kids hear mostly male narrators and see mostly male heroes? How could it possibly affect their view of themselves and the world?

           For a global perspective, read this post by Ammu Joseph.

Have You Had Enough?

Of the sexism that seems to be all the rage among the political pundits these days? If not, watch some more below. If you no longer need convincing about its ubiquity and want to protest right now, click on this link and sign the attached petition.

What is the petition all about?

This:

On May 23, The Women's Media Center, along with our partners at Media Matters, launched, "Sexism Sells, But We're Not Buying It," a new video and online petition campaign illustrating the pervasive nature of sexism in the media's coverage. While Hillary Clinton's campaign has cast a spotlight on the issue of sexism, this isn't a partisan issue: it's about making sure that women's voices are present and powerful in our national dialogue.

And due to popular demand, here, once again is the Political Boyz Choir on what fun sexism is. Especially among a team of just guys:

Friday Critter Blogging: More Parrot

By swampcracker





I did some standing meditation in the park the other day. Friendly dogs would come over to investigate that strange new tree, and I feared that they'd pee on my legs. So far I am from enlightenment, sadly.

But it was fun to be there between the sky and the earth, like a little metal staple holding together two sheets of paper in a gentle wind. We are all staples...

Do women count? (by Suzie)

         Anyone interested in how the media portrays women should read “Do Women Count?” by E.J. Graff, senior researcher for the Gender & Justice Project of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism. She cites studies and examines issues. She looks at who writes the news and whom they interview. Some  conclusions: 

       … in the news media, women are mainly shown as having families and feelings and sexualities and bodies and problems. Men are shown to have authority and expertise and power and knowledge and money. Next time you watch a report about an earthquake or a famine, think about which sex is speaking about the geology or weather patterns … and which sex is crying over the dead body, or is the dead body.
        ... The media help create our image of the world, our internal picture of what’s normal and true. And when the news is being written by men about men, a significant part of reality is missing from view.

If the media ignores an issue or doesn't get it right, that can affect public policy. 

The real (Sojourner) Truth by Suzie

          I keep seeing Internet posts that misconstrue Sojourner Truth’s positions.  Some praise Truth for confronting racist white suffragists in her famous 1851 speech, usually titled “Ain’t I a Woman?” The latest example is by the Rev. Valda Jean Combs.
          Frances Gage published the best-known version of Truth's speech. (You also can read her speeches at the Sojourner Truth Institute.) Truth concluded:

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

          Truth addressed her remarks to a white man who didn’t want to give women equal rights. If her speech was meant as a rebuke to white suffragists, no one seemed to notice at the time. They counted her as an ally and reproduced the speech.
          Combs makes another statement that has currency on the Web:

Sister Sojourner spoke out despite the pleas of white female suffragists who thought that demanding the vote for former slaves would doom their cause to failure.

          This is the opposite of what happened. Some people who wanted to guarantee rights for black men were afraid that extending rights to women would be too controversial. In an 1867 speech, Truth said:

There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again.

          That proved prescient, as it took until 1920 for the United States to give women the vote. By then, the KKK was reaching the height of its power, and many black men had been kept from voting. Black men and women would continue to face intimidation until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 
          Combs speaks of white women as if none worked for abolition and civil rights. In her book “Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol,” Nell Irvin Painter describes how Truth, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and many others worked against slavery and for the rights of women and blacks before the Civil War. During the war, they focused on enslaved blacks.

In 1863, Stanton and Anthony formed the National Women’s Loyal League, the first organization to petition Congress to make emancipation permanent and universal in the 13th Amendment.

          After the war, some people, such as Douglass, considered this the “Negro’s hour,” by which they meant “black men.” They thought women’s rights were too controversial to include in the 14th and 15th Amendments. They said black men were in greater need of rights because they were more oppressed. Some black women agreed with them, as did many white men and women.
        Anthony, Stanton and other women were outraged. They had worked all their adult lives for rights for women and blacks. They refused to support the amendments unless women were included.
       (It's not an exact match, but a modern-day equivalent might be the controversy over whether to support a bill ending employment discrimination based on sexuality if it didn't also include gender identity.)
        Stanton was furious that uneducated men, both black and white, were getting to vote before an educated woman like herself. She ripped into them, with every nasty description she could use. These days, a lot of people point to her statements as proof she was racist. But Douglass still considered her free of racial prejudice, as Painter points out. After all, Stanton wasn’t talking about an educated and eloquent man like Douglass. This was mostly a class issue.
        (The bias against ignorant people voting remains today. Many progressives say nasty things about people they consider ignorant, such as “white trash.” Look at what people have said about the West Virginia and Kentucky primaries.)
           The fight over the 14th and 15th Amendments led to a split in the suffrage movement. Although she eventually sided against Anthony and Stanton, “Truth sought to heal divisions in her community,” Painter says. In 1872 in Rochester, she, Anthony and others tried to vote in the presidential election, even though they knew it was illegal. (Anthony was arrested for voting.)
           Read Stephanie Coontz for more about the fight over the 14th and 15th Amendments.

         Combs says: “Sojourner's place was to speak when she was asked, and to sit down and shut up when her agenda diverged from that of her suffragist sisters.” I disagree, I think she contributed to the debate. Perhaps she can set an example to Democrats as they try to come together in the general election.

     ETA: I didn't mean to imply that the Voting Rights Act stopped all intimidation, only that that was its intent. Clearly, problems continue to the current day. 

On The Texas Decision

A Texas appeals court has ruled that the state of Texas had no right to seize the children of the polygamist sect, because the children represented in that suit were not in immediate danger of abuse:

Except for five girls who became pregnant between the ages of 15 and 17, "there was no evidence of any physical abuse or harm to any other child," and none of the five were among the children whose return was being sought by the mothers in the case, it said.

I agree with the decision, in the very narrow legal sense. But of course I disagree with the way abuse is defined as only physical one, and with the idea that it's perfectly acceptable to groom young girls to accept abuse until the moment of the abuse comes. I also wonder whether it really is true that the sect appeared to have an unusually small number of teenage boys, and if it is true, what happened to the missing boys. I would think abandoning them somewhere would constitute abuse.

The wider area of how to protect children against abuse and of what the role of the government, neighbors and so on is can be difficult terrain to explore. It could be argued that these children have suffered from the very act of seizing them and from being separated from their parents. On the other hand, all this, once again, depends on how abuse is defined, because returning a young girl to the people who are grooming her for marriage with a much older relative is abuse, too.

In general, I'm worried about any children who are brought up in isolation from the rest of the society. They may "stay safe" that way or "stay religious" or whatever, but their isolation also means that they cannot learn alternative ways of living and cannot get help if they indeed are abused.

From The Picture Gallery

From Shakes:





Some people in the comments asked whether it's possible to attack Hillary Clinton without using sexist slurs. Of course it is. But sexist slurs are much more fun to use. Sadly, they also reveal some deeply-hidden fears of those who apply them.

Take this cartoon, for instance. The reference to the possible racism of the Clinton campaign is a fair slur, from my point of view. It's about something that is verifiable or falsifiable, something that we can study and evaluate.

The slur about Hillary having a beard, on the other hand is not a fair one. She is not a man, doesn't actually have a beard, and the fact that the cartoon gives her one implies that she is overstepping the permissible boundaries, hunting in the fields which are reserved only for men.

That she is drawn all ugly in the cartoon is a fair slur in the sense that the tradition of painting your opponent ugly is a long one. That the writing is about her balls (testicles) is another sexist slur, based on the fact that women don't have testicles and shouldn't pretend to have them. Or rather, that people without testicles can't have power.

But the most fascinating aspect of the cartoon are all those fried balls, most of them in Hillary's bag. Here we are touching upon castration fears.

Was that enough calm and collected analysis for you, my dear readers?

Mindboggling

Has sexism played a role in the Democratic Primary?

Here to answer that question are two great and impartial experts on the topic of gender:
Pat Buchanan and Mike Barnicle.





Mindboggling indeed. Or it would be, had pundits in this country more minds to boggle. I guess the best parable would be to have a television discussion about the right for chickens to be free and safe and the two experts would be foxes. Oh my.

I'm not sure why the pundits don't see what an incredible insult this discussion is to women.

Meet John McCain

If you haven't met him already, you can get a fairly good idea from Mike Tomasky's book review. Tomasky writes about how McCain became "the maverick" rather than "the flip-flopper", and how he still is viewed as the "straight-talker" when he has pretty much relinquished all his old values and replaced them from the stock of the ueber-right.

As an example, only ten years ago McCain expressed support for Roe v. Wade. Now he is opposed to abortion even in the case of rape or incest. Or so Tomasky tells us.

On Being Funny

Everybody knows that feminist are not funny. But there's a way in which I'm especially not funny, a kind of surrealistic field of humor where I think I'm laughing all alone.

For instance, I really want to write a book called My Life As An Old Man. And I want to troll blogs under the pseudonym Olive the Omnivorous Ovary. Not a fanged vagina, just something that nips the very tip....

That's just what you would glimpse from the door of my Insane Humor Room. I'm not going to tell you the other types of things which make me laugh, except that sometimes laughter is the only real self-defense against the vicissitudes of life. Well, perhaps I could mention that I really love the idea of titles which have nothing to do with the article or the post or the book they have been glued to, and I have no idea why that is funny to me. But when I imagine a book about, say, nuclear warfare, being called "Tea And Pancakes" I howl. Howl.

So why are feminists not funny? Or rather: Why is accusing someone of not being able to take a joke a legitimate form of defense? A lot of jokes are boring or contrived or just not very funny. A lot of jokes base the laugh-line on a shared understanding that Other People are stupid. Take the Blonde Jokes, for example. Those jokes are only funny if you really think that women with fair hair are very stupid people. I might not laugh at them for a very personal reason, a reason which has nothing to do with my sick sense of humor. Or its absence. Or hair color.

Can funniness be analyzed and understood? Probably not in the sense of creating a formula that would always work, and the very work of doing so would be extremely unfunny. But all humor depends on surprise. How that surprise is delivered varies, and different folks laugh at different sources of surprise: slapstick, situational comedy, word puns, story jokes and so on.

The surprise is needed. It also needs to trigger the laughter reaction. Why feminists don't find certain surprises funny is for the same reason that you throwing a cake in my face might make me surprised in a way not conducive to laughter. You, on the other hand, might get a nice belly laugh out of that. At least until you have figured out what happens to people who throw cakes in the faces of goddesses. Burp.

On Sexism And Hillary Clinton: A Gentle Correction

Watch this from Media Matters of America:






Perhaps none of this gives you the kind of bolt of lightning AH! experience I had. Perhaps I got that one because I'm one very stupid goddess and it took me this long to see what appears to be a genuine misunderstanding among many pundits and, yes, also among many women who have blogged about this sexism/racism thing in the Democratic primaries.

The sexism is not bad, because it might hurt Hillary Clinton, just as the racism is not bad, because it might hurt Barack Obama. Not really.

That is a narrow and cramped and, dare I say it?, elitist view of what is going on, a view which revolves around the people in power and their political strategies and tactics. It is also a view which ignores the real problem altogether, this:

The sexist comments and the racist slurs are bad, because they are being washed, re-clad in Armani, presented back in high society, made to look innocent, and after all this they will be cropping up much more frequently everywhere, aimed at everyone who qualifies to be their victim. THAT's what is bad about them.

How can I make that any stronger and clearer? It can be any of us women or any person of color or both that will suffer from the new domestication of sexist and racists taunts. Any Of Us.

I have not written about the sexism in these Democratic Primaries in order to protect Hillary Clinton. She looks fairly well equipped to protect herself. I have written about it because sexism hurts all women, all little girls, all old ladies, women everywhere.

Gah. Perhaps what I'm talking about is still totally unclear. But if you read widely on this topic on blogs you will find that even many feminists have this view that the sexism is not really deplorable, because Hillary Clinton really is a monster bitch. That the dangers of the sexism really have nothing to do with Hillary Clinton should be made much more obvious. And no, voting for someone else will not save a woman voter from that sexism that is being incubated right now.